‘...And Grace Will Lead Me Home”

A Sermon Based Upon 1 Chronicles 17: 16-22

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

October 30th, 2016  (Series: 5/7, Amazing Grace)

Is God’s grace real?  

The other day, my wife and I were eating in a Statesville Restaurant, in the town where I grew up, and a lady came over to our table, whom I’ve known as long as I can remember.   She came over to our table and one of the first things she said to me, was:  “You look happy…!”  I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me before. 

You can somewhat understand her words, because that woman has known me since childhood.  She lived on the same street.  My mother took care of her only son, who was one year older than me.  We played together.  We vacationed together.  Sometimes we got in trouble together.  We spent some of the earliest most formative years of our lives together.  

The reason my mother came to take care of her son was because his father had been killed in a car accident.   It was a very unfortunate event and we were too young to understand.  But he had to live it.   We were ‘thrown’ together by that tragic event, but we were very different.   My childhood friend and his mom were nice people, but they did not go to church.   Faith was not a part of their lives.   This is what made her words grab hold of me.  She then added,  “I wish my son, could live close to you again today!”   Her son, married at girl from my graduating class, became a helicopter pilot, and is retired living near the military base.   He had accomplished much, but still, she saw some kind of ‘strange’ grace in my life she wished for her son. 

Is ‘grace’ the reason behind who we are and why we are?   I could just as easily show you a few moments from my life that I’ve felt ‘grace’ left me behind too, instead of bring me “safe, thus far”, can’t you?    This wonderful ‘line’ about ‘grace’ bringing us safety, and bringing us safely home raises many questions in the minds of modern, scientifically, materialistically minded people.   When we are so used to going after so many other things and have so many other ways to describe and interpret our own lives, can ‘grace’ be real?

When John Newton wrote his hymn, Amazing Grace, he claimed, 1 Chronicles 17: 16-22 as the primary biblical inspiration for this hymn.   This text, focusing on King David’s prayer of thanksgiving to God, reminded the pastor and hymn-writer how his own life had been ‘spared’ and how God brought him through.   But has such a ‘prayer of thanksgiving’ estranged from our lives,  or does it still point to our great need to find lasting moments of saving grace.  

Can grace,  specifically, God’s ‘grace’ still bring us all ‘safely home’?

WHO AM I, O LORD GOD?

This text begins with King David asking with sincerely and intimately: "Who am I, O LORD God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?” …You regard me as someone of high rank, O LORD God!   What more can David say to you for honoring your servant? You know your servant….(1 Chron. 17:16-18).  When I read this part of David’s prayer, I can’t help but think of the spiritual phrase that claims: “The one who knows me best, loves me most…”   David’s public life began, as being chosen to be King, because, as God told Samuel, “He’s a man after my own heart!”  (1 Sam. 13:14).  The human tendency is to “look outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).

However you approach the life, legacy, or even the spirituality of King David, the one thing you must grapple with, is that his ‘question’ about his own identity connects us with the question of our own identity, and the very reason, purpose, and belief about what it means to be human.    We live in a ‘secular age’, or at least a very distracted and fragmented time, when questions about life, human existence, and faith have been pushed to the back burner.  But what David reminds us is in our very short lives, someway, somehow we must connect ourselves with the ‘grace’ and goodness of the eternal, who is God.

In other words, life is either a ‘question’ to be lived, or it is a ‘question’ to be ignored, but life always points to this question: “Who am I?”.  This question of identity and destiny is a question only humans ask.  And if we can ‘ask’ this question, without there being some kind of ‘answer’ already present in our souls, then we, as Paul said, ‘are the people who must be pitted’ (1 Cor. 15:19).  

When a person nearly escapes death, especially on whose life was spared in an accident or in war, or reaches old age, while a friends or comrade’s did, often experiences a unique kind of ‘depression’ over their own ‘survival’.  They begin to wonder and question: “Why did I live, and they didn’t?”  “What is my life, now supposed to be about?”   Bouts of depression can become attached to moments of grief.  While this could lead to a more serious illness,  there is something normal, natural, and even necessary about people having the capacity to ‘question’ and ‘wonder’ and even feel some ‘responsibility’ for being alive, being blessed, and having the gift of life; especially in a world filled with death.  

I honestly believe that many of these strange feelings are connected with the kind of grace we also need to encounter and name.  Being alive right now and well now is a ‘gift of grace’.   This is where the ‘question’ should lead us.  Because if we lose this understanding of ‘grace’, we’ve also lose the mystical, spiritual, and moral ‘compass’ built into our hearts, calling and guiding us live our best each and every day.

But also, when David asks, “Who am I”, he not only askes this due to ‘blessings’ and ‘privileges’ he has experienced, but he becomes aware of these ‘blessings’ in spite of his own character flaws and his moral failures (2 Sam. 11:3ff).   His asking “What is my house?” means that David is amazed that God has regarded him ‘as someone of high rank’ and this still humbles him.   Even in his great success, David hasn’t forgotten where he came from, nor will he cease to give glory to God now that he has been so successful.   David recognizes that this success is not by David alone, nor is it about David alone, being only ‘your servants sake’ (v. 17), but he prays, Lord, ‘according to your own heart, you have done all these great deeds making known all these things’ (v.19). 

By blessing David, just as God blessed Abraham, God called David to understand this blessing was not just about ‘David’, but it was a blessing intended to ‘make known’ God’s grace to the whole world.    By acknowledging and recognizing grace in his own life, David was pointing to a ‘grace’ that should be ‘known’ and understood by the whole world.

A GOD LIKE NO OTHER?

There’s a certain ‘grace’ even in just learning to ask right questions, isn’t there?  But we must also try somehow, someway to ‘answer’ the question an experience of grace causes us to ask.   Discovering that your life is a “gift” should also make you reflect upon the ‘who’—the source of this gift of grace we call life.

May years ago, an English Philosopher, William Paley, who was at the height of his career when Flat Rock was established,  wrote that he believed that ‘life’ and ‘nature’ intelligently and intentionally points us toward the God the Bible ‘reveals’ to us in Jesus Christ.  He gave the analogy that if you were walking on the beach and you find a ‘watch’ washed up on the shore, that has been either discarded or lost, you must assume that there is some ‘watch-maker’ behind the watch.  A watch does not just come together by chance, and neither could the order of this universe, with it’s orderly sunrises, sunsets, it’s seasons, nor the planets or stars with their regimented orbits come together without some kind of ‘maker’.  

What Paley pointed to, still resonates among those who would seriously consider ‘why’ there is life here, and it seems uniquely here, in all the vast, infinite, expanding space, we call universe.  Of course, some could use ‘logic’ or their own ‘negative experiences’ of disorder and randomness to argue otherwise, and they do.  But when you’ve somehow come to experience a moment of grace, beauty, or blessing, it becomes harder and harder not to be thankful or feel a need to be thankful and grateful to someone.   In other words, who does an ‘atheist’ thank for the blessings, privilege, or this mysterious urge to give thanks?  David’s own experience of grace was very specific:  “There is no one like you, O LORD, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears (1 Chron. 17:19-20).

Now, David has moved from, what we may call ‘preaching to meddling’.   He moves from general feelings of wonder, mystery, and grace; to becoming very specific, particular, and focused, perhaps even suggesting that is own individual experience of grace, should be ‘universal’ for all.    Isn’t this the problem many fear, when a religion begins to move from the particular feelings and emotions someone has, and to claim this is how it should be for everyone?   How can we dare claim, in a world that has become more complicated, very pluralistic and increasingly global, that ‘there is no God besides’ (v.20)…Israel’s God (v.24)?

Isn’t this taking ‘grace’ more than a little too far?

We can’t get into the specifics of how, who or what defines the true God, or why we should believe, as Israel believed, that ‘the LORD OUR GOD IS ONE’, implying this God is ‘the one’ (Deut. 6:4).    There is, however, something we must clearly point out.  It is the greatly mistaken idea at ‘all religions’ or all ‘gods’ are the same.  In this day, as increasing threats caused by distorted religious passion and religious ideology from the Middle East and beyond, we are constantly reminded just how ‘different’ and ‘dangerous’ religious claims can be when they are misused.   All religions are not the same, neither are all expressions useful and good, even when the religion is ‘true’. 

Our own faith in Jesus Christ is rooted in Israel’s faith, which is categorized as a ‘revealed’ religion.  In fact, Isalm, Judaism, and Christianity, all share as their foundation, God’s revelation to ancient Israel.   They acknowledge that humans could not and would not know any truth about this ‘one true God’, without God revealing himself.   When you understand the true nature of our ‘revealed’ faith, we should also understand that we cannot force our faith on others.  Since our faith is a ‘gift’, only revealed by God himself, it is the experience of ‘grace’ that finds us, we do not find grace.

What this experience of grace also means is that ‘grace’ not only finds us,  but when it does it should also define us, or it isn’t true faith, is it?   The answer to which religion is the true religion or which god is the true God, because of the nature of revealed truth, is a prerogative that forever belongs to God, not us.  Truth does not rest on our opinions, our whims, our interpretations, our politics, nor to our own theological definitions.  This was Israel’s experience of God from the beginning—faith is a revelation of God’s grace, mercy and love, was always and only God’s choice, never Israel’s.  

When Moses requested to see God’s face, God would not allow it, but only allowed Moses to see the ‘backside’ of  God’s presence.   The ‘mystery’ revealed to him was that the ‘true’ God would only be known at God’s own initiative, as he was revealing himself to be gracious by his own choice.  As Exodus 33: 19 attests:  “And THE LORD said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, 'The LORD'; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy (Ex. 33: 19-20).  Most ‘impatient’, demanding, know-it-all types, like most of us, have difficulty surrendering to only true God, because only God ultimately determines which ‘form’ of ‘revelation’ is true.  But the point we must not miss is that however, whenever, and to whomever God reveals himself, God’s revealed priority is to be ‘gracious’ and to show mercy.’   The experience of ‘grace’ and ‘mercy’ is the right way and the only way to discover and receive the ‘truth’ of Israel’s God, as the ‘one true God.   

Through the experience of beauty, goodness, and grace, you and I have been given the revelatory ‘key’ that unlocks the ‘truth’ of God in the world.   Isn’t this what Jesus meant when he said in the Beattitudes, “Blessed are the merciful, who find mercy, and ‘blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5: 7-8)?    Only those who are ‘pure’ in their intentions to receive and to show mercy and grace in the world are the ones who are teaching, showing, and revealing the ‘truth about God.’   You can’t get any closer to the ‘heart’ of God, than to actively move in actions and deeds, toward God’s heart forgiving mercy and grace.  Surely, we can’t choose or force who will receive this ‘grace’, and we must also remember that God is also judge,  but judgment belongs to God, not us.   This is why we can only participate in God’s grace, not His judgment.   Only by receiving and revealing God’s grace, can we point to or prove the divine presence. 

Here, I recall my missionary work in very atheistic eastern Germany, right after the Fall of the Berlin Wall.  I was working with a wonderful, passionate, and compassionate young man, who had been falsely ‘trained’ by atheism that God was a part of the belief of the past that should be past.  This young man was very concerned about the needs of the world, but he did not see faith in Jesus as part of the solution, but as part of past that got us in trouble.   When he was leaving our group of seekers to go off to the university, I knew that his heart was pure, so I challenged him.  “Christoph,” I said.  “I know that you have no room for Christ in your heart.  But I also know that you have a wonderful ‘heart’ for others.  My prayer for you is that someday, when you have exhausted all of your efforts to make the world better, and it still isn’t, or if your find yourself feeling all alone and helpless somewhere, that it is then that will come to know that Jesus Christ still has ‘room’ for you. “    I knew I could not ‘force’ him, nor ‘prove’ faith to him, but I could pray that he would remain ‘open’ to God’s grace.

When it comes to having faith in God or having a life-changing experience of God’s grace,  we can’t control it or force it, but we must ‘trust’ God to reveal himself.  This is what makes divine revelation, well, for a better word, ‘divine’.  It belongs to God alone.  He chooses us, we can’t ever ‘choose’ God until we know he has ‘first loved’ and ‘revealed’ himself to us.  It is most often the mysterious, unexplainable, but very real and tangible experience of ‘grace’ that freely gives that reveals ‘who’ is the true God.  For most of us, it has been the ‘grace of Jesus Christ’ that has, in some form or fashion, become ‘real’ to us.  And this ‘grace’ has often comes to us in some very specific ways; coming through an accident, an illness, or a time of distress or confusion.   Like the young preacher who came to Dr. Frank Campbell, once pastor of First Baptist, Statesville, who told Dr. Campbell that he just couldn’t preach the faith exactly as he was taught it as a child.  Dr. Campbell then asked the young man,  then what is ‘true’ to you; is love still true to you,  is grace still ‘true’ to you,  is knowing God’s presence in other ways, still ‘true’ to you?   Try to go back to your congregation and preach how God’s ‘grace’ has been revealed as ‘true’ to you, and try not to become ‘bogged down’ with those things you don’t and can’t know anymore.”   In other words, ‘focus on God’s grace, and this ‘grace’ will lead you home.   Can we do that too?   Can we focus on the ‘grace’ in our own experience and then try to take that message of mercy, hope, faith, and love to others.   This is our true task.   It is not a ‘task’ of forcing ‘truth’ on others, but it is a task of sharing ‘what we have known’ or ‘experienced’ with others, and letting God do the rest.

A PEOPLE FOREVER?

Before we conclude this message, urging us all to focus on the ‘grace’ and ‘goodness’ we can all focus upon, which we all need,  we come to one other part of David’s prayer, that is still very controversial; not only Israel’s God, but Israel herself.   As David concludes his prayer, he sounds very self-centered and narrow to suggests that this ‘grace’ that God chooses to give, has been uniquely given to Israel.  He prays: “ Who is like your people Israel, one nation on the earth whom God went to redeem to be his people, making for yourself a name for great and terrible things, in driving out nations before your people whom you redeemed from Egypt?  And you made your people Israel to be your people forever; and you, O LORD, became their God. “  (1 Chr. 17:16-22 NRS).

It is still this kind of specific, particular, special revelation that makes people most wary of any kind of claim of ‘ultimate’ truth.   I recall a lady who once came up to me and said,  “I understand and believer there is a God, but this ‘Jesus thing’ is what I will never understand or except.”   I found that response very interesting, because most of the time I encounter the opposite.  Most people, at least in our western world, do have deep regards for the earthly Jesus, but it is still belief in a particular God that troubles the thinking world of today   To be ‘disturbed’ and to have your life ‘disrupted’ by Jesus, however, is closer to what this ‘good news’ of grace is about.  And this ‘Jesus thing’ is rooted right next to this ‘Israel thing’, so that if you ‘uproot’ one, you are in great danger of ‘uprooting’ the other.  

The point I’m making is that ‘this Israel thing’ is precisely what David prays in this text----that God particularly choose for himself a people from all the peoples of the world whom he named and whom we still call “Israel”.   According to the apostle Paul, we, anyone, who comes to God in repentance, humility and faith should now be called “Israel.” “All Israelites are not Israel” (Rm. 9:6), he told the Romans.   This naming of who is “Israel” really is, of course, still the ‘scandal’ of all scandals---the scandal of peculiarity and particularity which still disturbs and disrupts, as we come to name Jesus as Lord, or name Israel as God’s chosen people.   How do we dare still say that this ‘grace’ has been and could still be realized in such unique historical, ‘particular’ and ‘peculiar’ experiences of grace, still pointing us toward the reality of grace all of us can know as ‘true’?  

Well, the truth is, just like you can’t know Israel’s God is the ‘one true God’ unless God reveals it, we also can’t know Jesus is Lord or who God’s Israel is today, until we open ourselves fully and freely to God’s redeeming, saving grace.   This means, that we cannot ‘force’ our faith on others because ‘grace’ is God’s work, nor can we assume grace is or isn’t in other (including in geographic, political Israel) unless there is a positive response of God’s grace.   When God’s grace is at work,  I will not avoid my witness the grace that is in me, nor can the grace that is in me become license or allowance for me to force my faith upon you.   What’s we do witness to, when we know God’s grace, is God’s grace is the marvelous, matchless, saving and redeeming grace that belongs to God, and what my response should be, is to keep passing it along.  

Isn’t this where God’s revelation of grace, God’s choice of Israel, and God’s saving work in Jesus, has been taking us all along?   Just as Abraham was ‘blessed’ by God and called to become ‘a blessing’ (Genesis 12:2); and just as Moses (Ex. 19; 6;) pointed out that Israel was to be ‘kingdom of priests’ (Ex. 19:6, 33;16) and the prophets predicted God’s people would become a ‘light to the nations’ (Isa. 42:6, 49:6; 60:3, Rev. 21:24), or as the apostles fully preached Jesus to be the Savior of the ‘world’ (Mat. 5:14; Jn. 3:16, 4:42)--- only when we come to see God’s grace in these very particular moments of history, can we begin to grasp how that very same knowledge of ‘grace’ is what God intends to be ‘known’ ‘forever’ (1 Chron. 17:19, 22), to be reveal to ‘all’, going all the way back to when God ‘created’ the world and called it ‘good’ (Gen 1:4).   The ‘good’ that God intends is of course, to ‘be gracious’ and to ‘show mercy upon whom ‘he will show mercy’ (Ex. 33.19).   

What we know from Israel, through Jesus, and through the grace that was extended to the apostle Paul, and now to us in the world, is that to extend GRACE IS GOD’S NATURE, because ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16).  God’s grace has always been a ‘grace’ that keeps on enlarging, keeps on including, and keeps on growing and expanding, as the world continues to grow and enlarge.  With every new person, every new experience, and even with every new heartbreak, God’s heart, which is a ‘heart of grace’ grows larger too.  So do our own ‘hearts’ grow larger when we receive grace.  

So, when we sing, with John Newton, that ‘tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home’, it is the continual experience of goodness, mercy, and grace in this world that defines God and defines God’s revelation to us.   This is why Paul put ‘grace and peace’ as his signature on the very first Christian letters.   God’s grace has defined where everything came from, what life means, and this ‘grace’ ultimately defines our destiny too.   It is either all ‘grace’ or it is all ‘nothing’.    You don’t define grace, but you must allow grace to define you.   And you let grace ‘define’ you, when you decide freely and fully to trust in His Amazing Grace.  This is how the soul finds it’s true ‘home’.    Amen.