CATM Sermon - September 12, 2021 - Isaiah 46:9; Hebrews 12:1-2, Philippians 3:10-14
This is the day the Lord has made; let’s be glad and rejoice in it, and may our hearts be open to hearing from God’s Word as we worship today.
2021 is the 125th anniversary of the Yonge Street Mission. And today we will spend some time reflecting on God’s faithfulness over those years up to this moment, through the lens of Scripture.
Here’s another passage that we will be looking at quite closely.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. Hebrews 12:1-2
This passage talks about the cloud of witnesses that surround us. That passage follows Hebrews 11 where a great many faithful followers of God are celebrated for their faith, yes, but also for being willing receivers of the grace and goodness of God, who made the choice to serve the living God.
I’ll just mention some of the names listed in Hebrews 11. Abel who gave an offering of worship to God from the heart, though it aroused the jealousy of his brother Cain.
Enoch who was commended as one who pleased God with his life.
Noah, who against common sense but in alignment with God’s command, built an ark, saved his family and was commended by God.
Abraham who was called out of the place he lived and made a place in a foreign country and became the father, is a sense, of all who believe (Rom 4:16). Romans 4 says that.
Many others are listed whose names might be familiar to us - Moses, who led the people of Israel out from their bondage in Egypt to the promised land. Isaac, Jacob, Joseph.
The prostitute Rahab gets a shout out in Hebrews 11 because she assisted the people of God.
And there were many more in this cloud of witnesses, including King David.
These are the cloud of witnesses that the author of the Book of Hebrews is referring to. They are sometimes called the “heroes of the faith”, and yet when you read their stories in the Old Testament, you get a very clear sense of their humanity and flaws, sometimes huge flaws.
The truth is God has never used perfect people, because we all have flaws. God doesn’t need perfect people. He just needs people who will be faithful followers who, despite our flaws, continue to seek God, to pursue Him with all our hearts, and who seek to be His hands and feet while we still have breath in our lungs on this earth.
And at the Yonge Street Mission we also have a great cloud of witnesses that have gone before us, responding to the call of God to worship Him by serving the community, to join hearts with His heart, by caring for the people He cares about.
For us it begins with John Collidge Davis, known as Hallelujah Davis, because God’s praises were always on and never far from his lips. Hal Davis was a businessman who became a Christian.
He listened to a message by DL Moody in Chicago about the need for followers of Jesus to care for people, to care for the poor and needy.
That moved him and began in him a stirring that led to him eventually running a “gospel wagon” in the downtown area of Toronto. From that wagon food and clothing were given to people, and from that wagon Hallelujah Davis began preaching the gospel.
That led to the creation of the mission on the main street of Toronto, Yonge Street, from which we get our name. At first the mission ran out of a leased building down near Dundas and Yonge Street.
In 1904 the building at 381 Yonge Street was purchased by an anonymous donor. From that location tens of thousands of people received love, practical support and heard the gospel of Jesus Christ preached almost daily for a great many years.
When Hallelujah Davis passed away, the leadership of the mission fell to his wife, Henrietta Davis, who led the mission for 4 years, with the same heart for loving people and loving God that her husband had had.
After her a number of others led the mission, including Andrew Chisolm, and Wilma Watson. The Davis Centre was originally called the Andrew Chisholm Memorial Centre. The main room beside reception at the Davis Centre at 270 Gerrard is named after Wilma Watson, who served as staff and as a volunteer at the mission for a total of 42 years.
These were just the leaders, charged with sustaining and growing the ministry of the Yonge Street Mission. Serving alongside them were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers and multiple dozens of staff over the years.
They are our cloud of witness, the cloud of witnesses to God's faithfulness and love, who served at the Yonge Street Mission.
In more modern times, Glen Taylor was our president. Glen hired Rick Tobias who came here from New Brunswick, kind of against his own better judgement, to serve at the mission.
Under Rick the mission grew exponentially with the strengthening of Evergreen through the creation of Church on the Street, which was the forerunner to Church at the Mission. Under Rick, employment training began with Hallelujah’s Coffee and Muffin Emporium, led by Gail Meats.
YSM Housing, Double Take and the Martin Centre at 306 Gerrard also all came to life under Rick’s leadership. Again, Rick led the mission, but dozens, hundreds of staff and volunteers served alongside him. Bill Ryan, who served at the mission for 35 years, also led the mission during an interim period between 2011 and 2013.
These most recent ones that I’ve mentioned are still with us, still on this side of eternity and continuing to serve God either elsewhere or in retirement. And each one was used by God in their season, to love people, to minister to the needs of people, to support our community.
Recently an outside group worked with mission staff to help create a “living time capsule”, that now resides inside 306 Gerrard. They asked us a bunch of questions that were trying to get to the heart of what makes Yonge Street Mission so special.
One of the key things that they learned is that some that’s unique about the mission, in about the mission’s connection with the community it serves is what they summed up as “reciprocity’.
Reciprocity means give and take. It means mutual respect. It means journeying together, co-labouring together. It also means that the mission receives as much as it gives to the community. That’s something unique, I would say, to a Christian mission, because that is the very nature of the church.
We journey together, we walk arm in arm with those who choose to walk with us. We encourage each other’s gifts and each other’s service. I just thought that was a great insight that an outside group helped to identify about the mission.
Those of us who serve at the mission know this, of course, because of the community we are a part of. But it was helpful to hear an outside, objective perspective that so strongly identified reciprocity as a key part of how we are.
The Hebrews passage again is this: Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, 2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. Hebrews 12:1-2
Here we are called to remember - to remember with gratitude those who have gone before us. For us, as the church of the Yonge Street Mission, that means firstly we are to remember the cloud of witnesses that we discussed from the Old Testament. I hope you read the Old Testament, because it is absolutely fascinating and contains so many brilliant accounts of some awesome, flawed people.
And then for us, in the 125th year of the life of the Yonge Street Mission, for us who identify with the mission, even if it’s only through Church at the Mission, for us it’s to remember that we’re here because of a great many that have gone before us who were faithful to the call of God.
And if you look at the passage, we’re called to remember this cloud of witnesses for a reason. A very important reason. God cares about you now. He cares about your now and your tomorrow. He cares about your now, your tomorrow and your eternity.
And so this passage calls us to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles”. Notice it says “throw off”. The original Greek means just that, as well as to ‘cast off’. That means to reject, to walk away from, to heave out every thing that gets in our way; everything that gets in the way of our faithful walking with Jesus.
That’s quite a command. You might think: ‘hang on, you think it’s easy to do that?’. But the passage continues that we should, AND can by the power of the Holy Spirit, throw off, reject everything that hinders AND that so easily entangles us.
To be entangled means to be stuck. To be stuck means to be unable to move, unable to progress, unable to grow beyond where we are because we’re caught up in something that’s super unhealthy and damaging for us.
The prophet Micah says:
God has thrown our sins into the depths of the sea. No fishing allowed! He calls us to forget those things. He calls us to dwell on His goodness, and not to dwell on our past.
He wants us to learn from our mistakes. We all have trip hazards. Trip hazards - the weaknesses we have, the addictions we’re drawn to, the areas of our lives where we’re vulnerable and inclined to enter into sin when we’re feeling weak and our resolve is poor.
When you walk down the street and see a trip hazard, you exercise special caution.
You don’t walk headlong into a known hazard. Spiritually, we need to take care so that we don’t keep doing things that sabotage God’s good work of healing and redemption in our lives. Amen?
So this call to remember the cloud of witnesses and how they persevered despite being flawed humans, it’s a call for us to, despite being flawed humans, to live unentangled lives. Lives that soar.
And the beauty of that is that not one of us has to figure out what that means or how to do that on our own. You might think: I’ve been trying for years to get unstuck and it’s 3 steps forward and 2 steps back at best.
As the body of Christ we are in this together, becoming unentangled as we grow in our relationship to God, as we serve and love one another. As we listen deeply, as we pray and pray and pray for each other to receive and to respond to the grace of God that is poured out abundantly in our lives as children of God, saved and redeemed by Jesus Christ.
The Bible is realistic about this. Our passage from Philippians today encourages us to not look backward, to not wallow in regret for our past failings. The Apostle Paul, who wrote this passage, had plenty in his past that could have seriously dragged him down and derailed him. He could have easily wallowed in regret.
He had after all been the chief persecuter of the church, responsible for the imprisonment and death of many believers before he converted to Jesus.
10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. 12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
And the end point of all this remembering is so that we run with perseverance the race that is marked out for us, MOST IMPORTANTLY, that we keep our eyes fixed on who? On those who have gone before us? On some political leader? On some church leader? No.
So that we fix our eyes upon Jesus. The One who loves us. The one who saved us by His sacrifice on the cross. We are healthiest when our hearts of focussed on the living God, the Incarnate God. We are at our best when we are worshipping God.
It is a new season.God is doing a new thing in your life. He is doing a new thing among us. He is doing a new thing at The Yonge Street Mission. And the new thing is not a superficial thing.
It is not a bandaid fix on a deep problem. It’s not a solution that doesn’t understand the deepest level of the problem or challenge that we face. It’s God’s solution, not man’s.
And God wants us to know that He is up to something. He wants us to discern, to observe, to listen, to anticipate, to behold that God is moving.
And so…we remember God’s faithful love and actions in the past - both to His people whose life stories are recorded in the Bible, and in our own local situation God’s faithfulness to the Yonge Street Mission and to us, Church at the Mission, the worshipping community of the mission.
We must choose to not dwell on where we have dropped the ball; we must seek forgiveness for where we have fallen short; we must pray that God empowers us by His Spirit to live the holy life, the set-apart, free life that He wants us to live.
And then we are ready to see the new thing that God is doing. He is making a way in the wilderness.
So among other passages we’ve been reflecting on Hebrews 11 and 12, which talks about the heroes of the faith.
Of course as Christians we also would likely add the Apostles Paul and Peter and a number of others. People who are remembered, if we were to sum it up simply, people who are remembered because their lives brought praise and glory to God.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if our lives were remembered for bringing praise and glory to God? That's what I want to be true for me. How about you? [Pause]
Wouldn’t it be superb if people found the courage to draw nearer to God, or to come outright to Jesus Christ as a result of the fact that you are alive? That you have chosen to love and serve God? That you prayed for them. That you served them. That you shared your faith when the opportunity to do so arose?
The fact that you choose to always remember God’s goodness, that you live the life of a person forgiven by God, free of condemnation? That you see what God is doing and that you enter into it, not withholding yourself from a deep and full engagement in God’s purpose of blessing the nations?
May this be true of us. May our lives be a light on a hill, a voice in the desert crying out: “I have found water...the spring of eternal life! I have found bread! Jesus Christ, the bread of heaven sent down to earth!
May we speak it, may we proclaim God’s praises, and so show ourselves for what we are: a people, chosen by God, formed for His glory, a people made alive spiritually through the new birth by faith in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
May we remember - God’s faithfulness and beauty. May we be encouraged as we recall or consider for the first time perhaps, the beautiful outcomes of the lives of people who have been committed to loving God and serving people.
May we see the glorious things that God is doing in our lives and that He intends to do through us.
And may we proclaim the praises of the One who came to deliver us, and to bring us into communion with the living God. Amen
In honour of the 125th anniversary of the Yonge Street Mission...I was charged with writing and producing that would somehow capture the heart of the mission. I want to thank the lyric-writing team made up of mostly mission staff that was put together for inspiration for the lyrics. Rob will now play the song. Be encouraged as you listen. https://youtu.be/eZf0NZejIZE
