When your heart turns toward him, God is giddy with joy.

Zephaniah 3:11-17

November 1, 2009

Ten fleeting reasons

As a pastor, I hear a lot of reasons people come to church.  I have noticed that church attendance is something that can be as consistent as fan loyalty to the Carolina Panthers.  I have concluded that the reasons most people go to church most of the time are not very durable.  Here are ten reasons for coming to church that won’t last.

I like the building.  I know a lot of people who love this space, and they come to church at Christmas and Easter to make sure we haven’t changed anything.

I like the pastor.  Pastors are like everyone else – good points and bad.  If you put one on a pedestal he’ll just lose his balance.

I like the sermons.  While I may sometimes have something significant to say, I’ll be the first to admit that sermons do well to connect as often as Jake Delhomme’s pass (60%) connects with a teammate or Alex Rodriguez’s swing (30%) gets him on base.

I like the music.  It’s amazing to me how varied people’s tastes are in music, and we deliberately incorporate a wide variety even within one service.  If you like the music this week, come back next week and it might be completely different.

My kids like it here.  Talk about a reason to come to church that won’t last!  Not only can kids be fickle, they grow up.  Will you keep coming then?

People are nice.  I like to say that the biggest problem with churches is that they’re full of sinners.   If you’ve only run into the nice ones so far, hang around.  We’ve got all kinds, and we should.  That’s what churches are for.

They don’t ask for money.  Haha.  You just came on a Sunday we didn’t.  Churches need you to give, but more importantly, you need to give.  So if a church doesn’t ask you to give, it ought to be shot.

Everything’s well organized.  Several years ago, Chris Cerrito compared the church to an embroidered rose.  On the front side everything is a nice pattern.  But the more you get to know it, the more it looks like the back side.

This church is right. If you come here often, you’ve heard me say that the main reason we choose churches is that we all think we’re right about what we believe and do, so we look for a church that’s as right as we are.  But sooner or later you’ll see us as wrong on something that’s important to you.

I’m comfortable here.  All I can say is, if you’re comfortable every week, I’m not doing my job.  At least once in a while, coming to church out to be like sitting on a pin cushion.

My favorite prophet

We come this week to the ninth of twelve minor prophets – little booklets at the back of the Old Testament that are often ignored, perhaps because they are not comfortable.  I have to tell you as we open Zephaniah, it is my favorite.

If for no other reason, Zephaniah would be my favorite because of one verse, 3:17.  I first learned it in a little chorus based on the King James Version of the Bible:  “The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”  I will say more about that verse in a moment, but it’s worth reading all three chapters just to come across that gem of blessing.

Zephaniah is also my favorite because he and I have something in common.  We’re both descended from royalty.  I have to go back a bit further than he did – my royal ancestor was the infamous 13^th century Edward Longshanks of England.  Zephaniah opens his book by telling us that he is the great great grandson of the legendary godly king Hezekiah.  Hezekiah’s faithfulness and faith spared the southern kingdom from the Assyrian invasion by Sennacherib.

But by the time Zephaniah’s distant cousin, Josiah, came to the throne at the age of eight, Judah had fallen back into disobedience for more than half a century.  It was Zephaniah’s job to warn the people that Babylon would be their destroyer.

More to the point of this sermon, Zephaniah is my favorite minor prophet because he gives us great reasons to go to church - reasons that don’t rise and fall like a president’s popularity poll.  I strongly suspect that those of you who come to church week after week, year after year, come because of these reasons.

We come to church for boundaries (1:4-6)

I’m using the word “church” in a rather narrow sense here – the common meaning of the Sunday morning worship service.  Most Christians are in church only one hour a week, or one hour out of every 168.  

But what an important “one” it is!  Just by walking in the door, we are reminded that what happens “out there” the other 167 hours needs some boundaries.  What I mean is that without worship it’s easy to hold on to some false assumptions, like…

·         It doesn’t matter how I treat people.  I can lie, cheat, steal, bully, exclude, hate, manipulate, whatever – and as long as I don’t get caught, it’s OK.

·         What I do with my time and money is my business.

·         There are lots of legitimate ways to “do religion.”  It’s all personal preference or how you were raised.

·         God doesn’t really care if I ignore him most of the time or add other loyalties alongside him.

Zephaniah says, “Uh-uh.”  Boundaries are needed – boundaries for what you believe and how you live.

See if you can identify three specific areas of boundary in 1:4-6 as I read those verses –

“I will stretch out my hand against Judah
       and against all who live in Jerusalem.
       I will cut off from this place every remnant of Baal,
       the names of the pagan and the idolatrous priests-

 those who bow down on the roofs
       to worship the starry host,
       those who bow down and swear by the LORD
       and who also swear by Molech, ^[a]

 those who turn back from following the LORD
       and neither seek the LORD nor inquire of him.

The first is idolatry.  Zephaniah complains that the people worship Baal and Molech.  Baal was the supreme god of the Canaanite people, and was believed to control wind, rain, and fertility.  He was worshiped by erecting pillars, by going to rooftops and mountains to pray, by cutting and slashing one’s body.

The god Molech, also a Canaanite deity, was depicted with a hollow bronze body in the form of a man and an ox’s head.  Molech supposedly demanded the sacrifice of children, who might be given up as temple prostitutes or thrown into a fire or placed inside the idol and burned while the beating of drums drowned out their cries.

Those acts of worship are abhorrent to us, but if everybody is doing it and that’s the god you believe in, it kind of makes sense.  Don’t you want to make your god happy?  Slash your back.  Give up your child. 

Zephaniah says, “I don’t care if everyone else is doing it.  Don’t you do it.  It’s idolatry.  You shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol.”

Fortunately, we’re off the hook with that one, right?  Nobody carves wooden pillars any more or turns a hollow bronze statue into a crematory for live babies. 

New York pastor Timothy Keller has just released a book titled Counterfeit Gods that is well worth your time.  He says your idol is anything you love, trust, and obey.  It could be power, prosperity, or progress.  It could be success or happiness.  It could be pleasure, sex, or entertainment.  It could be your spouse or your children or your friends.  It could be money or the things money buys.  Whatever you prioritize – you think about it all the time, your identity is built around it, you are happy if it you have it and somewhere between miserable and angry if you don’t – that’s your god, your idol.

And it’s not OK.  Where else do you hear that except at church?  The other 167 hours of the week the message is that you should be happy, and that you should pursue whatever fulfills you.  Church is the place where you come to be reminded that it’s not OK to chase whatever god “works for you.”

Nor is it OK to “cover your bases” and worship God and your idols.  That’s verse 5.  The technical name is “syncretism.”  Some of the people in Zephaniah’s day wanted to worship Yahweh and Molech.  Why choose between the two?

Nor is it OK to give up faith all together.  That’s verse 6.   Maybe they feel torn and don’t want to offend either god.  So they become indifferent.

It’s so easy to rationalize idolatry, syncretism, and indifference when you fly solo in matters of faith.  Television, movies, newspapers – they all say it doesn’t matter whether you choose Christ or Buddha or some combination or no religion at all.  It’s up to you.  So we tend to choose a form of religion that validates our behaviors and helps us feel better about ourselves. 

We come to church to hear the Word of God strongly object.  To put boundaries around what we believe and how we live.

We come to church for accountability (1:14; 3:2)

Second, Zephaniah reminds us that we come to church for accountability.  In 1:14 he says, “The great day of the LORD is near – near and coming quickly.  Listen! The cry on the day of the LORD will be bitter, the shouting of the warrior there.”

It is a consistent message of the Bible, Old and New Testament, that a day of judgment is coming.  Every week in the creed we say we believe in Jesus Christ, who “sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.”

We find ourselves baffled by headline news accounts of political corruption in the office of a former governor, or substance abuse by retired tennis star, or unconscionable wealth accumulated by a non-profit executive.  But where outside of church do you hear the message, “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23)?

You may say, “Well, some of those people do go to church regularly.”  True.  Going to church doesn’t make you moral any more than going to the gym makes you fit.  But at least you’re reminded on a regular basis that a day of reckoning is ahead.  What you do with the message is up to you.

Accountability, of course, is horizontal as well as vertical.  Zephaniah plays the role of calling to account the nations surround Judah in chapter two, and then moves to Jerusalem in chapter three.  In condemning his own countrymen, Zephaniah says in 3:2, “She obeys no one, she accepts no correction.”

I can’t speak for all preachers; only for myself.  But the point is not even that you need to agree with everything I believe is true or right.  But I hope by coming to church on a regular basis you are reminded that God is real, that he will see that justice happens in the end, and that he sends prophets (preachers, messengers, teachers) to guide and correct.  I may be the one who needs correction from you.  It’s reciprocal, this accountability. 

But if I don’t come to church, who confronts me with whether I live what I say I believe?

We come to church for hope (3:17)

Yet another reason I love Zephaniah is his message is so balanced.  Some prophets condemn only Israel or Judah; others only their neighbors.  Zephaniah does both.

Some prophets focus only on good news; others on bad news.  Most of them on bad news.  Zephaniah does both.  He ends his little book with hope.  

It’s been said the job of the preacher is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.  Zephaniah spends his first two and a half chapters afflicting the comfortable, but he closes comforting the afflicted. 

You come to church for hope.  You lead a toilsome life of burdens and pains and guilt and grief and conflict.  Zephaniah has three messages for you tucked in that powerful little verse, 3:17 –

You are not alone.  “The LORD your God is with you.”  It feels at time like heaven is silent and God doesn’t know or care.  All of us come to church at times feeling like that.  May I be honest enough to tell you that I sometimes come to church feeling like that?  Sometimes God is very real.  Other times it’s like there’s a lead barrier between the Almighty and me.  I’m just going through the motions.  I can’t pull myself out of it.

Then we come here to rub shoulders with others who sing the songs and pray the prayers and hear the words and faith is real again.  Just by coming to church.

He saves.  Zephaniah phrases it, “mighty to save.”  The two words used here are both military words – “mighty” is a strong warrior.  “Save” is a deliverer.  Picture a trapped battalion of soldiers in an Afghanistan cave, with the enemy surrounding the opening.  Air support arrives to overpower the attackers.  “Mighty to save.”

You may think your life is too far gone for God to turn into anything productive or useful.  Your sins are too great; your addictions too strong; your idolatries too entrenched. You don’t have to live there, Zephaniah says.  Your God is mighty to save.

You make God happy.  How about that for good news?  “He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”  This passage is picked up in various other places in the Bible, like the joy expressed over the lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son when they are found in Jesus’ parables (Luke 15), but I’m not sure anywhere in the Bible says it as eloquently as Zephaniah 3:17.

When your heart is turned toward him, God gets giddy with joy.  He sings a new song of love, of pleasure, of ecstasy.  You make him happy.

Where else but church do you find that kind of hope?

Three squares

So those are three durable reasons for coming to church – for boundaries, for accountability, for hope.  You may say, “I thought we came to church to worship, to learn, to serve.”  True enough.  All good reasons.  But they are the means God uses to remind you that he is God alone who deserves all of you.  And he’s worth it.

A man wrote a letter to editor of his local paper in which he said, “I’ve been going to church for sixty years and heard 3000 sermons.  I’m wondering now what good it did, because I can’t remember a single one of them.  Pastors are wasting their time.”

Among the many responses was one from a grateful husband who said, “I’ve been married for thirty years and my wife has prepared all my meals.  That adds up to over 32,000 meals.  I don’t remember the full menu for a single one of those meals.  But they nourished and strengthened me, and kept me alive.”

Going to church is kind of like that.  Amen.