Sermon - 12-03-06

Yesterday, Jason preached because Mike contracted the nasty stomach bug that was going around his family. I actually saw him on Friday - we were supposed to meet because I needed some help preparing a sermon for the 17th. Anyway, I went to their place and he seriously looked like he was going to pass out. What he should have done was tell me that he couldn't meet when I had talked to him 30 minutes earlier, but he still helped me out, God bless his soul.

Anyway, Jason kind of pulled together some stuff that he had preached over the summer at a youth camp, and basically used the book of Habakkuk as a launching pad to encourage us to basically have faith that God works for the good of those who love Him, even when it doesn't look like it. Easy to say, but very hard to do.

One passage he touched on from Habakkuk, though, was the beautiful verse 2 from chapter 3:

2 LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

There's that old Brian Doerksen song called Remember Mercy that's based on this verse. Anyway, as a hopeful songwriter, I like to look at lyrics a lot, particularly poetic lyrics, and very particularly, poetic lyrics that are deep. By deep, I guess I just mean either something that is remarkably true (even sometimes painfully so), like in "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell - well, pretty much the whole song is deep, but the tag line of each chorus "It's cloud's (love's, life's) illusions I recall - I really don't know clouds at all," or maybe not that it's true per se, but something that just makes me think a lot about the implication of the line.

I guess all this is to say that there isn't anything that can out-do the Bible. I love that last line of verse 2 - "in wrath remember mercy." Wow. That's like a sledgehammer of reality coming down right there. It isn't really like a statement of truth, because this is more like a prayer request to God, but it contains all these nuggets of truth in it. You can just keep pondering it, all of the implications of that request, for so long. I love how that Doerksen song uses these words, and mixed with the melody, the result is so beautiful. The Bible is so awesome!