THE FORGOTTEN SAVIOR
SW11.28.04am
Psalm 106:13-31
INTRO: Friday was the first shopping day after Thanksgiving and is know as “Black Friday”.
1. I’ll confess that I did go shopping yesterday in one store, a book store.
(1. It was crowded but I was able to buy a bargain - If you bought two reduced price books you got a third one free.
2. Actually the bookstore shoppers were a little calmer than you probably found in most stores.
(1. When I checked out the clerk asked if I had a penny - I didn’t have one but the guy behind me immediately offered one of his.
3. Things were a little wilder across the country with stores opening as early as 5am and many in line for the opening long before that.
(1. Because, stores/retailers were offering some incentives and bargains for the shoppers.
4. Erik Gordon, marketing professor at Johns Hopkins University says, "Stores are as desperate as ever to get people in the door. But it’s another holiday season without compelling stuff."
5. ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, AP Business Writer, writes, Shoppers swarmed the nation’s malls and stores on Friday, even before the sun rose, to grab early bird deals on hot items like flat-screen TVs and DVD players as the holiday shopping season officially began. Despite freezing temperatures in some places, and huge crowds everywhere, shoppers came armed with lists, credit cards and game plans with almost military precision. They created shortages already in some popular gadget gifts.
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6. C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, based in Charleston,S.C. said, "Every retailer knows that if they are going to win the holiday season, they must win this weekend to keep the momentum going.”
7. By the time a Wal-Mart store in the Buffalo, N.Y. suburb of Hamburg opened at 6 a.m., one thousand people had formed a lined that reached across the entire store front, in spite of the temperature being only 31 degrees.
8. One of the shoppers, Ruth Pompeo, was up at 3am and in line at 4:30am with her 11-year-old niece said, "It’s our tradition. I don’t know what I’m here to grab, actually," she paused and then said, "Whatever I can."
9. At a Wal-Mart store in Alpharetta, Ga., just north of Atlanta, a supply of discounted Hasbro Video Now personal video players sold out in only 12 minutes.
10. Karen Dawkins, of Cayce, S.C who was at a Toys R Us store very early Friday morning shared that, "The deals are better this early in the morning."
(1. She was almost done with her shopping just a little after 6 a.m. because her family had a plan.
(2. Karen went on to say, "I have my mother at Circuit City and my sister at Target...so we have people stationed at other stores." "We all got together after Thanksgiving dinner and got the ads and made a list."
11. Just after 6am in a Plano, Tex., Best Buy store, Martin Clouser and his wife Teri were carrying out their attack plan.
(1. Martin stood watch over a shopping cart overflowing with a printer, television set, a $14 DVD player and a voucher for a desktop computer.
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(2. Martin’s wife, Teri, was hunting the aisles for more bargains for Christmas gifts.
12. Martin Clouser shared, "It’s like a war plan, she runs in ahead of me, and I get the cart. She picks out all the good bargains and carries as much as she can, then throws it in the cart and moves to the next station."
13. Why would they need to be so organized and aggressive in their shopping?
(1. When they arrived at 4am they found that there were already several hundred people in a line that reached around the store and down the block.
I. As I said prior to Thanksgiving - it appears that Thanksgiving is becoming a forgotten holiday.
1. Oh, everyone enjoys the time off - but the Christmas decorations and the shopping starts long before Thanksgiving.
2. Thanksgiving is a purely Christian holiday with no pagan claims at all - It ought to be that way at Christmas but it really isn’t.
3. What is the first thing that people think about when they think of Christmas?
(1. It would appear that they think about shopping for Christmas gifts.
4. I would submit to you that long before Thanksgiving was becoming a forgotten holiday that the true meaning of Christmas had been forgotten.
5. If we return to our Scripture in Psalm 106 for a moment we will see that this is exactly what had happened to the Hebrews after their miraculous escape from captivity in Egypt.
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6. What does that ancient history have to do with us and Christmas shopping? Exactly!
7. We who are Christians have been miraculously delivered from captivity just as the Hebrews were.
8. We were in slavery to the world, the flesh and the devil - the chains of sin had us bound and we were forced to work for the wages of sin which is “death (Romans 6:23a)”.
9. What happened, what occurred to bring about the freedom of the Hebrews? What happened was that God sent a Savior, Moses, who led his people to freedom.
10. What happened, what occurred to bring about our freedom? Romans 6:23 God sent us a Savior who at the cost of His own life bought, paid for our release from bondage.
11. What is the Psalmist remembering had happened long ago after the Hebrews had been given their freedom?
(1. What is happening right now with us who have been granted our freedom?
12. The Psalmist tells us very plainly what has happened and what is wrong at the same time. These are sad words that we find in verses 21 and 22 of Psalm 106 where the Psalmist says, “They forgot God their Savior, Who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, awesome things by the Red Sea.”
13. Isn’t that what has happened in our country? We’ve forgotten what Christmas is supposed to be about. We’ve forgotten that Christmas is about the birth of our Savior.
(1. About God intervening in history to give us at great cost a Savior - God’s own Son.
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14. We ought to be remembering that it was God Himself in the form of Jesus, fully God, yet fully man, who came down from the glories of Heaven to suffer and die in our place.
(1. He became the perfect sacrifice because He was tempted at all points and unlike us did not sin.
(2. The Bible tells us in Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
(3. All but Jesus have sinned, come short, missed the mark. Only Jesus has walked on this earth as a human being and resisted sin and lived in perfection.
15. We ought to be remembering the One who suffered and died in our place because we couldn’t do it.
(1. We can’t save ourselves Ephesians 2:8-9 We can never do enough good works, good things to earn our salvation.
(2. We still need a Savior and that is what Christmas is really all about.
(3. That’s why we need to keep the Christ in Christmas.
II. The Hebrews were doing the same things that we are doing. They were not celebrating the awesome miraculous intervention of God that gave them their freedom.
1. No, the Hebrews were looking for ways to make themselves feel good - they were not looking to or remembering God.
2. What is it that the Hebrews were doing? The Psalmist tells us, verse 14, “But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tested God in the desert.”
3. What were they doing? They were whining and complaining about not having any meat to eat.
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4. In response, God sent them so many quail to eat that they were sick of eating the meat.
(1. God gave them what they wanted.
5. The Hebrews also returned to worshipping the pagan ways, pagan gods and the Psalmist tells us in verse 19 and 20, “They made a calf in Horeb, and worshiped the molded image. Thus they changed their glory into the image of an ox that eats grass.”
(1. And in verse 28, “They joined themselves also to Baal of Peor, and ate sacrifices made to the dead.”
6. In verses 24 and 25 the Psalmist tells us that the Hebrews despised their freedom when he writes, “Then they despised the pleasant land; they did not believe His word, but complained in their tents, and did not heed the voice of the LORD.”
7. Does it sound a little too familiar? It ought too. It appears that we are worshipping the created ie in the fanatic Christmas shopping.
(1. It seems that we despise not only the land that we live in but the One who has given it to us.
8. What am I saying? Exactly what the Psalmist said applies to us.
(1. How? After the election did you know that the number of people inquiring about citizenship in Canada from our country rose from 10,000 per day to hundreds of thousand per day?
9. 22% of the people said that moral values was the number one thing that influenced the way that they voted.
(1. Apparently it wasn’t what influenced hundreds of thousands of people whose causes did not win in the past election
(2. And who now so despise this land that God has given them as to want to become a citizen of another country.
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III. Let’s look again at the story of the Hebrews to find wisdom for our lives today.
1. When the Hebrews asked for meat and tested God in the wilderness, God gave them what they asked for - but He gave them something else as well.
(1. Actually it was a consequence of turning away from God.
2. What was this consequence? What was it that God gave to the Hebrews in addition to what they wanted?
3. Look at verse 15, “And He gave them their request,
but sent leanness into their soul.”
(1. He “sent leanness into their soul.”
4. What does that mean? I think it means what we think it means - it’s a bad thing.
5. In our current Christian terminology we speak of growing as a Christian or child of God. The opposite of growing is shrinking, or dying, or the old term was “backsliding”.
6. That’s what “leanness” of the soul means. When we focus, concentrate, desire what the world, the flesh and the devil wants we may acquire/gain it.
(1. At the same time something else is happening. When we gain the world we are losing God.
(2. The quantity of God in our lives is growing leaner with every bit of worldliness we add. It is in direct proportion.
7. We sin and we become leaner in our relationship to God. We give up service to God, coming to church, fellowship with other Christians so that we can have more of something the world has to offer -
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(1. And what happens? We grow leaner. The God quantity in our soul shrinks and shrivels.
IV. Leanness of the soul is bad enough but something else happens as well - something we don’t like to talk about or even thing about.
1. When the servant of God, Moses, was envied or you could say that they tried to minimize him the Psalmist tells us what happened in verses 16, 17, and 18, “When they envied Moses in the camp, And Aaron the saint of the LORD, the earth opened up and swallowed Dathan, and covered the faction of Abiram. A fire was kindled in their company; the flame burned up the wicked.”
(1. It doesn’t sound like the blessing of God does it? Instead it sounds like the cursing of God, the judgment of God upon them.
2. When they forgot about God, when they made the calf, when the despised the pleasant land, when they complained in their tents, when they did not heed the Voice of God - What did God say?
3. The Psalmist says in verses 26 and 27, “Therefore He raised His hand in an oath against them, to overthrow them in the wilderness, to overthrow their descendants among the nations, and to scatter them in the lands.”
4. God would have simply obliterated them from the face of the earth if not for what? The intercession of Moses. Verse 23, “Therefore He said that He would destroy them, had not Moses His chosen one stood before Him in the breach, to turn away His wrath, lest He destroy them.”
(1. But God didn’t bless them for what they had done. Of course not! And He won’t bless us either.
5. When the people persisted in their sins worshipping the false god of baal and offering sacrifices to the dead - God rendered judgment upon them.
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(1. Verse 29, “Thus they provoked Him to anger with their deeds, and the plague broke out among them.”
6. That plague would have destroyed them all but for what? What happened was that someone stood up for God, stood up for what was right. Verse 30, “Then Phinehas stood up and intervened,
And the plague was stopped.”
7. The Hebrew nation would have been destroyed outright if not for the intercession of their Savior, Moses.
(1. The Hebrew nation would have been destroyed if not for one other man, Phinehas, who stood up for what was right and as a result the plague of judgment was stopped.
V. If you look at our nation honestly you will have to admit there is great leanness of soul among the people.
1. You may say but look at all the other people across the world who do not even know God?
2. It was the same way with the Hebrew nation but even worse at that time because they were the only ones in the entire world that knew the One true God.
3. We have leanness of the soul in this country and it is very obvious that we do.
(1. In addition we have plagues which are not as obvious but still we have them.
(2. Many people are living longer but they are not living as long as they could.
(3. Many of my ancestors lived into their nineties but I doubt that I will.
4. New diseases, viruses, cancers, disorders seem to be discovered on an almost daily basis.
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5. What is it that we need? We need a Savior! We need to put Christ back into Christmas!
6. And we need godly men and women and boys and girls to rise up, to stand up for what is right and good - to resist the tide of darkness and evil rolling across our land.
7. Let put aside the leanness and instead grow in our Lord and as we do we will discover that we open the doors to God’s blessing upon our lives instead of judgment.
VI. We have been blessed as a church and individually and I don’t believe that we really realize by how much.
1. I attended church last Sunday at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Weatherford, Texas. It is a church just slightly larger than ours.
2. They did have a good offering of around $2,000. They are, it appeared, having to do some repairs to their church facility. As we know that can be expensive.
3. Sadly their pastor, James Hastings, discussed their having to reduce their Lottie Moon Christmas offering goal from $2,500 last year to $2,000 this year.
4. He proposed several things to reach their goal including not eating out during the month of December and to use the money saved for the offering.
5. Another church I’ve heard about recently is a church where I was saved and baptized in Oklahoma City. They had contacted our son Clark about being their pastor.
6. The church had total offerings last year of nearly a half million dollars and undesignated offerings of $340,000. But Clark was told that the church has been in serious financial trouble for 18 months.
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7. They do have a large facility, and around 220 in Sunday School, and several paid staff members including three secretaries.
(1. Another church in Oklahoma City is helping them through this financially troubled time.
8. We have been blessed here in this church not only with financial blessings but also with wisdom among our leaders in how to use those blessings. We should praise God for that! Thank Him for it!
VII. CONCLUSION - Christmas is about much more than shopping, and eating, and all of the glitz that we are constantly bombarded with by the world.
1. Christmas is about a Savior! And we like Phinehas need to rise up, stand up during this season more so than any other for what is right.
2. Last year we gave more to the Lottie Moon Christmas offering than we ever had before. Let us do so again.
3. But most of all let us be in the flow of God’s blessings and fullness instead of leanness and judgment.
4. Let us choose to honor God this Christmas with our lives.
