Preached December 12, 1993, morning service First Baptist Church Garrett, Indiana
Dr. Arthur G. Ferry, Jr., Pastor
James Thurber once told of a thin and lanky prophet who went around his boyhood hometown crying, "Get ready! Get ready! The world is coming to an end!" The community called him the Get-Ready Man.
That tag could have been applied to John the Baptist. He was a get-ready man if there ever was one. "A voice crying in the wilderness, `Prepare the way of the Lord....'"
This is the season of getting ready. That is the purpose of the Advent. It is a time to get ready for the celebration of the Lord's birth.
Norm Lawson tells of 2 friends who were visiting over coffee. One of them was very harried. Frazzled, in fact. It was just a few days before Christmas, and she wasn't ready...hadn't gotten the cards out; hadn't gotten any presents yet: didn't have a tree yet. In fact, the friend was complaining that Christmas was a terrible time because she was never ready! "But, my dear," her friend commented, (in all sincerity and friendship) "didn't you know it was coming?" Advent gives us the opportunity to get ready for the celebration of the Lord's birth.
Advent also urges us to get ready for an even more important event. That is that climactic victory of God over the forces of death and decay. The writer of our Epistle says, "the day of the Lord will come like a thief...." Even the angels do not know when God will bring down the curtain on human history. We can only wait, and watch, and get ready.
THE MESSAGE TO GET READY--TO PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD--IS
ONE WE COULD ALL TAKE TO HEART. FOR ONE THING, WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS.
Could you have predicted the sequence of world events over the past 18 months--the end of the Cold War, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the turmoil in the Mideast? It has been an amazing year. One surprise after another. We simply do not know what tomorrow may bring. The best we can do is be prepared.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor at the start of WW II, Harry Brown, an Air Force pilot had just returned from a late-night celebration. In an attempt to defend against the attack, he raced to the flight line and took off in a P-36 (airplane)--still wearing his tuxedo trousers and a pajama top. He obviously had not planned to go flying that night! He was caught off guard. Life has a way of catching us like that. We never know. The older we get the more aware we are of life's uncertainty. Some people use that uncertainty to spread fear.
Back in 1831, William Miller--a Baptist farmer from Low Hampton, New York--preached widely that the Lord's Second Coming would occur in 1843-44. Thousands of people followed him (and became known as "Millerites"). There have been other noted prophets of the end-time.
Dr. Cumming, a minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church in London, was always prophesying the imminent end of the world. His predictions were obviously wrong. The dates slipped by uneventfully. He finally fixed on a date in 1867 for the Great Catastrophe. His influence with his flock rather diminished, however, when it was found that he had renewed the lease on his house for 21 years, only 2 months before. People are still getting rich playing Chicken Little--"the sky is falling, the sky is falling." Religious leaders are not the only ones to exploit such fears.
Sunday evening, Oct. 30, 1938, between the hours of 8 & 9 o'clock, millions of Americans were tuned to the CBS radio network.
They heard an announcer's voice breaking into the music of an orchestra:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News." Then, during the next hour, the audience was stunned to hear a series of increasingly hysterical voices narrating an invasion of Martian monsters, landing 1st on a New Jersey farm, then unleashing poisonous gases over New York City.
The broken, anguished voice of an announcer continued: "Avoid bridges to Long Island--hopelessly jammed. All communication with Jersey shore closed.....No more defenses. Our army wiped out...artillery, air force, everything wiped out. This may be the last broadcast."
Later they learned that they had been listening to the Orson Welles-Mercury Theatre production of War of the Worlds. It has been estimated that, of the 6 million people who heard the broadcast, no fewer than one million experienced serious levels of distress. Thousands were thrown into absolute panic. Their panic is understandable. The future is uncertain. We simply do not know what lies ahead--what might happen next.
FOR ANOTHER THING, LIFE IS FRAGILE.
The furor over the greenhouse effect is most disturbing. There are some scientists who are warning of the possibility of a major catastrophe from global warning in as little as 20 years. The scary thing is that if this catastrophe occurs, there may be no turning back. Chances are these scientists are overly pessimistic.
I was encouraged to read that last December a conference on Global Warming was cancelled in Washington, D.C. due to a record-breaking cold wave. Still it is sobering to realize how dependent we are on a thin layer of atmosphere over our heads and a thin layer of soil beneath our feet.
We live in a fragile universe. You may have seen the bumper sticker: Life is short; eat dessert first.
Our individual lives are as fragile as the world we inhabit. Who was not shocked a few months back by the death of that wonderfully creative man, Jim Henson, master-mind behind the Muppets? A minor infection--or so he thought. It was a weekend. He didn't want to bother his doctor. By the time the seriousness of his condition was apparent, it was too late. Still a young man. The world at his feet. Suddenly gone.
Life is fragile. In fact, everything we own is fleeting! You may have read in the papers a few months ago about a Spring Valley, Illinois man who had his wife's diamonds and rubies mounted in a ring for her birthday. He decided on one final touch. He tied a birthday card and a balloon to the ring and put the whole thing in his car. Arriving at his house, he opened a car door to take out the present. Helium balloon and birthday ring headed for the clouds.
Most of us won't lose our possessions to a helium balloon, but they still are no less fleeting than that ring! That's the way life is. We never know. None of us. Life is fragile.
AND ALL OF US HAVE THINGS IN OUR LIVES THAT NEED TO BE SET RIGHT.
At dinner, a lad told his parents there was to be a small P.T.A. meeting at school the next day.
"Well, if it's a small one, do you think we ought to go?" his mother asked.
"I think so," the boy said in a low voice, "It's just you, me, and the principal." All of us have things in our life that need to be set right.
A Sunday School teacher asked a little girl: "What are the sins of omission?"
Thoughtfully, the little girl answered: "They're the sins we ought to have committed but haven't thought of."
Most of us have sins of omission and commission. There is a dark side to our character we can hide from everyone but God.
I was reading recently about how fish get caught in some parts of the world. Somebody lowers a wooden cage into the sea and leaves it so fish can swim freely through its slatted rails to feed. The cage remains for days or even weeks, until full and satisfied fish grow too wide to work their way out again.
That is the way sin works in our lives. It sneaks up on us. No one ever sets out to be an addict or an adulterer. No one sets out deliberately to be cruel and uncaring. Like the proverbial frog in the pan of lukewarm water, we are lulled into a false sense of security as the temperature rises. Soon we are in hot water indeed!
An old limerick comes to mind:
There was a young lady from Niger
Who rode, with a smile, on a tiger.
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
That is the way sin comes into our lives. Our intent is that we be loving, disciplined people fashioned in the image of Jesus. But we are not Jesus and the words of John the Baptist calling us to repentance are words we need to hear. We don't know what the future may bring. Life is fragile. All of us have preparations to make. One final word.
THE MESSAGE TO GET READY IS A MESSAGE OF HOPE.
I have labored this morning on the uncertainty of life. We need to face that uncertainty. No follower of Jesus Christ, though, can ultimately be a pessimist. He is in control. He is Immanuel, God with us.
In a recent issue of The Christian Ministry (Nov/Dec 1988) R. Benjamin Garrison tells about a computerized chess game his wife gave him for Christmas. One night, he found himself shouting at this amazing scientific toy, "All right, you idiot, if you're going to cheat, I won't play with you any longer." But the computerized chess game had not cheated. It had simply made a decisive and game-challenging move several minutes before, a move Garrison had not caught. It let him go on making his moves, some rather good, other quite bad, all the while edging toward its own inevitable victory.
Garrison goes on to write: "This is quite like what God had done in the serious game of life and salvation. Sometime back- -nearly 20 centuries ago--God made the decisive but mostly unnoticed move, in sending Christ into the world. That move secured the future. That move guaranteed the outcome. Meanwhile, we are free to go on making our moves on the chess-board of life, some rather good, others unbelievably bad.
Yet all the while God is edging us toward the inevitable triumph- -not over us, but in us."That is the message of Advent and Christmas. God has not forgotten His people. In this uncertain and fragile world, there is one thing we can be certain of. God is still in charge of His universe and He is nearer than any of us can imagine.
In 1854 a cavalry officer named J.E.B. Stuart graduated from West Point and was sent to his first assignment, in Texas. He boarded a steamboat in New Orleans and immediately found himself in the middle of a storm on the Gulf of Mexico. Stuart was violently seasick and lay helplessly in a bunk while the ship pitched and rolled.
When Stuart finally managed to raise his head from his bunk, he discovered that the boat was docked and had been for some time at Galveston, Texas. While Stuart thought he was about to die from his seasickness, he could have walked a few feet to land at any time during the previous 12 hours. That, likewise, is how close God's help is, whether we take advantage of it or not!
Listen to the words of the get-ready man: "Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Repent and believe the Gospel." The future is uncertain. Life is fragile. All of us have preparations we need to make. But do not be afraid. The God of the Bethlehem star, of the angels singing of Peace on Earth, goodwill to men, the God of the humble shepherds and the child born in a stable is still in control of this universe. Get ready.
