Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC March 9, 1985
My house, I’m afraid, is a museum of unfinished masterpieces. Unfinished masterpieces. In every room of the house, in every nook and cranny you will find unfinished masterpieces.
Now that is not to say that I have found the last Rembrandt or have cornered the market on the sketches that Van Gogh never completed. These are my masterpieces, and they are not paintings; they are projects, household projects honey-dos of one kind or another. You do know what a honey do is, don’t you? Some of you nod your heads. It's “Honey, do this” and “Honey, do that” and “Honey, do something else, just for a minute.” And being a dutiful husband, properly mutually submissive acc according to the Scriptures, honey do do them. Halfway. I start, but they never quite get finished. Unfinished masterpieces.
Now maybe masterpiece is too strong a word, but I tell you, if I ever get finished, these projects will look great. I know the kitchen cabinets will look fine once I make doors for them. I'm sure the gap in the paneling where I cut to install a microwave will look fine once it's filled. I am confident that the upstairs plumbing that still leaks just a little will be all right when I can get around to finding that tiny little dribble. Unfinished, almost masterpieces.
But the truth about them, of course, is that they are unfinished. Incomplete, less than perfect, less than what they were intended to be. As much as I may suppose they are on their way to becoming masterpieces, I assure you they will not be until the holes are filled and the wires are hidden and the paint is applied and the tools are put away. Until then, all they are is – you know, what? – unfinished.
Now the Bible speaks to us about unfinished Christians, incomplete believers. It speaks to us, and often in very harsh language, about those who begin the journey of faith, who begin to build a spiritual life for themselves, but who then set it aside and leave it unfinished. They could have become spiritual masterpieces, but they stopped, they quit along the way, and now they are not masterpieces at all, they are simply spiritually – what? – unfinished.
Listen to the author of Hebrews on this point: “Let us hold on firmly to the hope we profess. Do not lose your courage.” And then the part that startles, the part that challenges us to the core: “There is no longer any sacrifice that will take away sins if we purposely go on sinning after the truth has been made known to us. Instead all that is left is to wait in fear for the coming judgment and the fierce fire which will destroy those who oppose God.” And then a little further on he says, “What then of the person who despises the son of God, who treats as a cheap thing the blood of God's covenant which purified him from sin? The Lord will judge his people. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God:”
The Lord will judge his people; it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God!
Friends, it is not easy or fun to preach a message that has anything to with judgment. It is no fun to read these passages about destruction and judgment, no one in his right mind gains any pleasure from dealing with them. And yet there they are. There are these terrifying words, there is this pronouncement of warning, and it has to do with remaining unfinished, it has to do with continuing in a lifestyle of purposeful sin even though we have made a commitment to Christ. More than that, in the interpretation of the author of Hebrews, judgment comes when we persist in denying the spirit of God access to our lives and we insist on remaining unfinished, we make the sacrifice of Christ a cheap thing, we act as though the cross didn't matter much, we discount the price of the blood of Christ paid for us. And when we do so, when we insist on remaining unfinished, we are going to discover that it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
One of the greatest of the colonial preachers was Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards lived and ministered in the New England churches in the 18th Century, and by now every schoolchild at one time or another has to read Jonathan Edwards' most famous sermon, called, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." When you read the sermon you are apt to think, this is pathological, this is a sick, sick man; where is the love of God? And you would be right, I believe. One ought never to stress the anger and the judgment of God without seeing also that even in the midst of that there is the love and the mercy of that same God. And yet, there it is, the theme of this Scripture, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.
And that terror comes to us, not only at some future time way out there some time, but right now, right here, when we choose to remain unfinished, when we opt to ignore what God has begun to do in us and decide we will settle down, right here, right now, in our sin. Then it is indeed a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
So the question for us becomes then, what do I do to be sure that I keep on growing, that I continue to become2 What do I do to insure that, as the scripture counsels, will hold on firmly to the hope we profess. What must I do to make sure that I again, in the words of Hebrews, do not lost courage? How may I see to it that the words of judgment not fall on me and that I not fall in this terrifying way into the hands of the living God?
I see two key ideas in this passage of Scripture; I see two concrete things I must do in order not to stay one of the unfinished, incomplete, immature, would-be masterpieces of the living God.
I
First of all, I must seek the counsel, the support, the strength of fellow believers. I must see to it that I am in community with other Christians in such a way that I may receive insight and strength, I may be buildup and may be confronted in a creative, redemptive way.
Here is the way Hebrews says it: “Let us be concerned for one another, to help one another to show love and to do good. Let us not give up the habit of meeting together as some are doing. Instead, let us encourage one another all the more, since you see that they Day of the Lord is coming nearer. “
If I had an hour or a day or a week to preach on this theme, it would not be sufficient. Oh, to have us understand what it is to be part of a community of encouragement! Oh, to have us know how to be church to one another, how to be priests to one another: that would be a subject worthy of all my best energies for a long time to come. This is critical, this is powerful: if you do not want to remain an unfinished project, if you do not want to persist in the kind of willful sin that brings you falling into the hands of the living God, then let others help you and you help others, Let us be concerned for one another to help one another to show love and to do good.
Church, if it is church, is a confronting community, it is a group of folks who care enough about one another to exercise a degree of critical judgment and to challenge one another to grow. Now that's not easy to do, that takes courage, that means you have to know and trust one another, that means that many of us have to set the tone by the way in which, always speaking the truth in love, but nevertheless speaking the truth, we confront one another. That’s church. And to put yourself into that is to say, “I don’t want to stay unfinished, I need help. I need for others to help me grow.”
I belong to a support group; this support group is five persons, all of them, as it happens, Baptist ministers. That sounds like a den of iniquity already, doesn't it? But we meet together every few weeks and we confront, we share with one another our spiritual and personal journeys, we open up to one another the ethical decisions we are having to make, we struggle out loud with the brokenness we feel inside. But most of all, as a team we confront one another. We encourage one another. We tell the truth as we see it to one another. And we may evoke a tear or two, we may call forth some anger from time to time, but that's all right. That's all right, because we trust each other, we know there is no doubt that each of us cares for the other. We are not competing against one another, there is no need to look better or sound better or smell better than the next person; we are church to one another. We do in our own way what this Scripture counsels: let us be concerned for one another, to help one another to show love and to do good.
You see, what is happening in my support group, what I pray will be happening for you in your church is the principle of accountability. Accountability. To whom are you accountable for your spiritual growth? Who holds you accountable to mature in Christ? If you’re a student, your teachers hold you accountable to learn the material, they give you tests on it. If you are a worker, your boss holds you accountable to get your work done, to get it done right and on time, and if that doesn't happen, well, I guess we could say, it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a livid boss! Accountability: it's a fact of human life.
But we forget about it too often in our spiritual lives. We say, hey, that's private. That's between me and the Lord. That's nobody's business. Well, if you take Hebrews seriously, that's not so, not so at all. We are in church to be concerned for one another, to help one another to show love and to do good. Let us not give up the habit of meeting together. And when we meet, let's find ways to confront, to challenge, to push one another along.
Frankly, I thirst for the day when in our churches we may have some kinds of face-to-face groups, some sort of interaction that pushes us in this redemptive way. You see, if you know anything about groups like AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, this is the very principle they use: accountability. If you are there it is because you are unfinished, incomplete, and they will confront one another, every member knowing that he or she is in the same fix, until they have helped each other to grow. Encourage and help one another, and then none will have to fall into judgment in the hands of the living God.
II
And there is another key, there is another way in which we may assure our continued growth, another way to avoid the sentence of judgment pronounced by the letter to the Hebrews. And that is that we may remember our victories. We may remember and remind ourselves of our victories, we may go back and recover that sense of excitement that first took hold of us when we first knew the Lord.
Here's how Hebrews says it: “Remember how it was with you in the past.” Remember how it was with you in the past. “In those days, after God's light had shone on you, you suffered many things, yet were not defeated by the struggle. You endured your loss gladly, because you knew that you still possessed something much better, which would last forever.” Remember. Remember your first love, that's the way the Book of Revelation puts it. Remember.
When I do marriage counseling, working with people who have been married for a while but who find their marriage in some difficulty, one of the things I ask them to do is to remember what they saw in one another in the first place. I take them back two years, ten years, thirty years, whatever it is, and get them to recall how they became attracted in the first place, And we spend some time remembering what their goals were, just bringing back that old dream. What did we want to accomplish? What did we expect to bring into being as a couple? Remembering sometimes works miracles; remembering where we've been, remembering our victories, our dreams, our hopes, all that helps to rekindle in us the fires that have gone out in our relationships.
And so that's at its heart what I hear this Scripture saying to us about our relationship with Christ. Remember. Remember how it was with you in the past; you suffered many things, but with all that zeal, with all that enthusiasm, with the zip and the zing of a new Christian, you were not defeated by the struggles. Listen to your heart, Christian, listen to the heart of your memory and see if the fire has never gone out; it has only been banked and it can be stirred again. Remember.
And above all, remember not just what you felt when you began your Christian walk. Remember too what Christ has done for you. Remember His pain, remember His love, and think again about His sacrifice for you. Remember, and then see if that does not push you to go on and to complete what you have begun.
Yes, Hebrews is right, the prospect of judgment is a dreadful one. It is indeed a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But something else I tell you: the hands of that living God, the hands of that awesome one as I see them are very special hands. In those hands, I see the rough, red prints of nails driven in by cruel men. In those hands, the hands of the God who hates and judges sin, I also see stretched out and open to receive me. Strangely, marvelously, gloriously, that God who would have to judge me as sinner because I have so often and so terribly violated his will, that same God takes to himself the judgment that belongs to me. Those hands which might crush me, which might snuff out my very life, those hands are the hands of mercy, the hands of tenderness which cradle me and nurture me.
Jonathan Edwards may have preached on the theme, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God;” but I tell you that at Calvary what my eyes can see is a God in the hands of angry sinners. And there they did him in, Lord and maker of all things though he was; and great God, he let them do it. He let them do it to him, out of his great love for us. He has begun something in us; and we dare not despise the Son of God.
He has started us on our way; and we must not treat as a cheap thing the blood of God's covenant.
Indeed, to remain unfinished would be a terrible sin, and it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. All that I know is that the hands of the living God are as well the nail-scarred hands.
