Ray Charles was a pianist, singer, and composer featured in the award-winning biographical film Ray. The film reveals how Ray compensated for his blindness by learning to hear what others could not—a skill that would contribute to his musical talent.
Scene: As a 10-year-old boy, Ray enters his home and trips over a rocking chair. He falls, cries out in pain, and calls to his mother for help. His mother instinctively steps forward, but then stops herself, quietly steps back, and returns to her work. Ray, lying on the floor, continues to cry for his mother’s help.
Believing he is alone, Ray is forced to listen more carefully for help. First he hears men chattering outside and a hen clucking. He stops crying, turns his head, and slowly gets up. He hears more people talking, a cow mooing, and metal clanking. He turns his head in the direction of a kettle of boiling water.
Stretching out his arms, he walks toward a crackling fireplace and feels its heat, pulling back his hand when it comes too close. His mother watches him carefully, concerned with his every move. Ray listens intently as a horse and carriage go by.
He then hears a cheeping grasshopper close by and walks toward it. He bends down and, fumbling a bit, encloses his hands around the grasshopper. Smiling, he picks it up and puts it to his ear. His mother is taken aback and gives a low gasp.
"I hear you, Mama. You’re right there," Ray says.
His mother now has tears streaming down her face. She tells him, "Yes, yes, I am." She kneels in front of Ray and embraces him. (Graham Best, Coquitlam, British Columbia) (Ray Rated PG-13, (Anvil Films & Bristol Bay Productions, 2004. Scene begins at 01:09:27 (DVD ch. 13 Length: 02:35)
Sometimes it seems that God is silent or even absent when we cry out to him from our pain. But let’s not mistake God’s silence for his absence. Ray’s mother revealed her love for him by not responding to his cries for help. She wanted him to grow and learn through his struggle, not simply find comfort.
God can use the painful circumstances of our lives to teach us and to form us, and sometimes the best instruction and guidance comes through silence. But God is always with us, watching our discoveries the growth of our understanding.
The OT prophet Habakkuk lived in a time back in the 7th century B.C. when everything seemed to be falling apart in his world. All around him he observed sin, violence, and injustice. And it seemed that God wasn’t doing anything about it. But we learn that God had his watchful eye on things all the time. In fact, God was planning to use the ungodly nation of Babylon to punish God’s people who had been disobedient to Him.
As Sue said in her sermon last week, Habakkuk took his questions to God. He had to wait for an answer, but God did not ignore him. God’s response was that He was about to unleash judgment on an unprecedented scale, but that the righteous would live by faith. Wealth, violence, and trickery would not save the righteous. They would live only by their faith. It’s a message we need to hear today.
Habakkuk is left shaking in his boots as he contemplates what God is about to do to the country of Judah through the conquests of Babylon. Today, in our second and last message from Habakkuk, we see the prophet’s response in Ch. 3.
If you have your Bibles open, you see that the very first words of Ch. 3 are “a prayer.” This chapter is Habakkuk’s prayer. With all that the prophet heard from God, it would have been easy for him to respond with cynicism, as though “What’s the use?”
I’m sure some of you have felt that way. Everything you touch seems to turn sour. Several people have told us recently that nothing they try seems to work. They lose a job. Their car quits working or they get sick. They get behind in their rent. “I’m beat,” one told us last week. A friend from another church said Friday he tells God, “Lord, I can’t take it anymore.” And I know that some of you have felt like just giving up. But then you remember, “I can’t give up. I want to provide for my family. God wants me to continue.” So you keep trying.
Habakkuk heard God speak and instead of becoming cynical, he enters into worship, and he ends this book with a prayer.
Other passages in the Bible describe difficult times. The writer of Ps. 73 found himself struggling with the circumstances around him until he went into the sanctuary of God to worship. In vv. 16-17, he says, “When I thought about this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went in to the sanctuary of God…” As we read in the article on the back of the bulletin, “Worshiping together helps us keep the challenges of our lives in eternal perspective.” Let’s take a look at Habakkuk’s prayer.
Remember in Ch. 2, God promised Habakkuk a vision, a vision of God’s power and purpose being accomplished in the whole earth. We get a sense of all that this vision included as we read Habakkuk’s prayer. We can’t unpack all the images in this prayer, but let’s note a few:
In 3:3 we see a reference to God as the Holy One, at Mount Paran, another name for Sinai, where God gave the ten commandments. Why did God give the commandments? Because God is holy. And he desires his people to be holy – separate from all the evil that is around them. And God still expects holiness from his people today. Hebrews 12:14 says to pursue holiness “without which no one will see the Lord.”
v. 4 God’s power radiated from the face of Moses when he came down off that mountain. Moses wasn’t aware of it, but his face was radiant. “The brightness was like the sun.” I’ve only seen that happen once, when my dad was instructing a new believer. I opened the door and looked into the room and his face was shining with such a glow, I knew God was there.
v. 5 God used the plagues to persuade the Egyptian rulers who were resisting his power. God was great enough even to overcome them.
v. 6 God’s power over the nations was so overwhelming the nations were frightened and the whole earth trembled. And we read in Titus 2:13 that God will manifest himself in glory when Jesus comes again.
v. 7 God used the Midianites to punish Israel at the time of Gideon, but even they were vulnerable before God.
Yes, nations would crumble, but through his prayer and his worship, Habakkuk was reminded again that the God who would come in judgment would also come in deliverance and salvation as He had done often before. And though the political powers around him would weaken and shatter, he knew that, above all, his citizenship was in a kingdom that could not be shaken.
v. 11 God made the sun stand still for Joshua.
v. 12. God wasn’t angry with the rivers or the seas. He was angry with the nations who disregarded his holiness and his justice.
v. 13 God’s purpose was to deliver his people.
v. 14,15. It may appear that the evil powers have the upper hand and that no one can defeat them, but at the last day God will triumph. Just as God had made it possible for the Israelites to cross the Red Sea, to enter the promised land through the Jordan River, to win the battle on Joshua’s long day, and defeat the Midianites when Gideon was leader, so God would act in his final day of salvation. These were the facts. These were God’s acts. This was history because it was His story.
Habakkuk’s vision is rooted in the history of Israel. And our faith as Christians is based on facts. As Paul says in I Cor. 15, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, worthless.” It is God who truly lives.
v. 16 We come to the last part of his prayer. If we outline the parts of Habakkuk’s prayer, we see that this whole, long, first section recounts all of the ways God has been faithful, how God created the world and acted on behalf of his people. He lists all the wonderful things God has done. And as I thought about this, I thought about my own prayers and how quickly I skip over the part about who God is and get to the part I want. I realize I don’t spend enough time reminding myself of the ways God has acted on behalf of his people and on my behalf. Instead, I go to the part about me, what I think I need, what I want. Habakkuk’s prayer is instructive. First he reflects on who God is and what God has done. Then he brings his own fears before God. It’s like Tommy Pitts said yesterday. First, figure out who God is. Then you will understand who you are.
“I hear, and I tremble within,” Habakkuk says, as he contemplates not only what God has done, but what he will do. His renewed understanding of God has left him trembling, teeth chattering, and bones so brittle they are ready to break. It reminds me of a Methodist pastor I talked with on Friday. That pastor told me he once thought that he had made it to the ideal church where they had lots of people, lots of money, and lots of property. But one day he was struck with a sense that God was speaking to him. He broke into tears. He went to the altar to pray. And this went on for several days. He couldn’t figure it out, but he sensed that God was saying something to him. He told his wife that he thought God wanted them to go some where else. “But where?” she asked. They didn’t know. A few days later they got a phone call from a small church in KS, with only 3 people, where he had once served a short interim, that had been praying for a leader and this man’s name kept coming to mind. “Would you consider coming?” they asked. And he and his wife went and had a fruitful ministry. When God speaks, it can affect us spiritually, emotionally, and even physically.
When we worship we don’t just set aside our fears and tremblings. We bring them to God. When those troubles come, we don’t just stuff them and hope they go away. We take them to God. We can voice our fears to God in the confidence that He will hear. But our worship and our prayers don’t end there. Habakkuk now faces a tragedy of great proportions because his own nation will be destroyed.. What confidence will take him through those calamities? It is not enough to say “Keep a stiff upper lip.”
Note what he is up against in v17. What would cause those conditions? Why wouldn’t the fig tree blossom or the stalls for cattle be empty? Maybe it is because of the invasion of the Babylonians, but “ultimately the reason can be traced to the failure of the people to maintain their covenantal relationship with the Lord.” (Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. The Preacher’s Commentary, 197.) We don’t have time to trace this thought through the Bible, but Scripture makes a connection between the spiritual health of people and the health of the land they occupy.
Some of you know about the discussion among Evangelicals right now regarding global and atmospheric warming. Some don’t believe it is happening. Others don’t believe we should do anything about it even if it is. Others say that God expects us to act as good stewards of this earth, conserving resources, taking good care of all that God has provided. Some of the catastrophes our earth is experiencing these days are clearly the result of poor stewardship of the earth we live on. We all know that pollution in the streams contaminates the fish and affects the food chain in negative ways. Using up all the trees encourages erosion and we lose topsoil and whole areas of the world experience famine. And I could go on.
Habakkuk understood. But it was now too late to call for repentance. Their opportunities had been squandered.
Does that mean that Habakkuk’s faith doesn’t matter, that there is nothing he can do? No. And here we get to his confident statement of faith. Hear 17 & 18 again. “Yet I will rejoice in the Lord.”
Note that it is in God himself that he rejoices. Habakkuk might be deprived of all his material blessings. He might not have enough food. He might be on the verge of starving, but His strength would come from God alone. He could rejoice because of his faith in God.
He had the confidence that God would guide, that God would provide. When we were ready to leave Japan in 1981 after 15 years there, a lot of things were unclear. We wrote letters, we prayed, we did everything we could to get things in order, but we just didn’t know where we would end up. One night I had a dream and when I woke up, the only words I could remember were the words, “We have confidence in God.” I have never forgotten those words.
Habakkuk realized where his confidence was. Habakkuk’s faith in God could stand the test of loss and starvation. When the bottom fell out, God was still in charge. He is the Lord.
His words remind me of the words Paul wrote in Romans 8:35-37.
On Wednesday we enter the period we call Lent. Jesus went through terrible suffering, but Hebrews says he endured the cross for the joy that was set before him. And because he went on, we can go on. We go on because we live by faith, joyfully in Him.
BENEDICTION
As you leave this place of worship and gathering,
Remember that the righteous live by their faith.
Though temptations and calamities come your way,
Remember to rejoice in the Lord.
Rejoice in the Lord always,
Again I say, Rejoice.
