Remember; the Lord never forgets you.

Sermon for Trinity 19, October 13, 2019

“Can a woman forget her nursing child and not show mercy to the son from her womb?  Even if these women could forget, I will never forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)  That was God’s promise to a straying and unfaithful Israel.  Despite the fact that His chosen people so often turned away from trusting Him to worship idols and to live in total disregard to the instructions the Lord had given for their earthly and everlasting welfare, God would not turn His back on His people.  Even when He felt it necessary to discipline and even rain down harsh punishment on them, God would not forget them.  He said, “Look, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:16)  Likewise, we should

Remember; the Lord never forgets you.

Dear sons and daughters of the Living God,

            Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.

            Pretty much every society in the history of the world has struggled with some form of two questions: “Where did we come from?” and “Why am I here?”  You and I live in a place and time in which society has by and large decided that we are here by random chance, and the only real purpose in life is to make yourself feel happy, content, or at the least, enjoy some fleeting pleasure. 

Yet, this lack of certainty about where we come from, and the determination to satisfy the self, has led to rising tides of despair, hatred, anger, and fear.  It is very similar to the time and place of our sermon text.  Israel too had fallen into the trap of satisfying self and worshipping whatever pleasure they could find, and it led them to take advantage of each other, especially the weak, and to live in fear of what neighbors or enemies, especially the enemy nations surrounding them, might do to them.

Now, our fears may not be exactly like those of Old Testament Israel.  However, it is an inescapable fact that people today are scared, and perhaps we are too.  The general public is afraid of losing the many things it has come to enjoy: jobs, money, food, material things, and the climate it thinks it has.  It is even afraid of having its opinions disagreed with and wicked behaviors curtailed.

At the same time, the general public struggles with guilt, though it is often subconscious guilt, which may be why, in one of the most prosperous societies every known, we have extremely high rates of depression, covetousness, people young and old taking extreme risks just to feel some thrill in meaningless lives, the dreadful abuse of mind-numbing drugs, and rising rates of suicide and accidental death by overdose.  We have become so prosperous that even our impoverished poor are wealthy in comparison to many other places and times in the world.  At the same time, many ordinary, relatively well-off citizens claim they have never seen prosperity.

So, how about you and me, what fears and guilty thoughts trouble us?  Do we worry about whether we will be able to harvest a crop?  Are we afraid that God will for some reason stop blessing us as richly as He has in the past?  Are we afraid of illness, crime, poverty, or loneliness?  Do we look at the sins and failings we see in ourselves and wonder how God could possibly love such a sinner as me?  Do we wonder if so many scholars and scientists could be so wrong when seemingly almost all of them reject the Bible and make claims for the origin of man that are so far removed from what God says?  It is for times just like this that we need the word of our God in our sermon text:

Isaiah 44:21-23  ²¹Remember these things, O Jacob, because you are my servant, Israel.  I am forming you to be my servant.  You, Israel, you will never be forgotten by me.  ²²I am blowing away your rebellious deeds like a cloud, and your sins like a mist.  Return to me, because I am redeeming you.  ²³Shout for joy, you heavens, because of what the Lord is doing.  Make a joyful shout, you depths of the earth.  Burst forth with shouts of joy, you mountains, you forest and every tree in it, because the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and in Israel he will display his beauty. (EHV)

The first two verses of our text should really be in quotation marks because this is God speaking to His people.  And, while we might expect words of judgment and condemnation because of the sins of Israel, God instead offers hope.  Certainly, the northern tribes of Israel, and the southern state of Judah would suffer for their sins and willful disobedience.  God would send discipline upon them in the hope of drawing them back into His loving embrace, but He didn’t want anyone to despair while they had to undergo that discipline and punishment.  The same is true for you and me.

The world we live in will have trouble.  There are times for us, too, when God sends difficult things our way as a means of encouraging us to return to Him in faith and trust, and when the general populace has wandered too far from faith, that discipline from the Lord can be quite harsh.  We know, also, that because this world is so corrupted with sin and sinners, that many bad things happen to faithful people simply because sinners do bad things.  But Remember; the Lord never forgets you.

Now, the Lord has not granted me the ability to prophesy our immediate future.  I can’t tell you what the weather will be like in the coming weeks, what the markets will do, or what will happen in politics and the public realm.  I do know that Jesus told us:

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.…Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.…they will hand you over to be persecuted, and they will put you to death.  You will be hated by all nations because of my name.  Then many will fall away from faith. They will betray each other and hate each other.  Many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.  Because lawlessness will increase, the love of many will grow cold. (Matthew 24:6-12)

Lots of bad stuff will come our way simply because we live in the end times.  Society has been breaking down since Jesus ascended to heaven.  Modern man thinks we are getting better, yet, other than having fancier toys and technology, society is as bad or worse than at other times in history.

Terrifying as that sometimes is, we have no reason to despair.  Furthermore, our worries, fears, and despair are sin.  It is the evidence of a lack of faith in the God who created us and has been sustaining the world since He created it—all of us included.  Because that is the truth, God has been taking care of us every step of the way, and we truly have no reason to doubt that He always will.  But sometimes we do.

For those times, we read the word again, “Remember these things, O Jacob, because you are my servant, Israel.  I am forming you to be my servant.  You, Israel, you will never be forgotten by me.  I am blowing away your rebellious deeds like a cloud, and your sins like a mist.  Return to me, because I am redeeming you.”  God made us to serve Him, but not as slavish, fearful wretches.  Rather, as His servants, we are God’s family, His dearly loved people.  He created us to serve as a child might gladly serve a beloved parent.  And, God has the answer for all those times we fail to understand that.

Our translation puts the “redeeming” in the present tense; however, the original text has the verb in the perfect case.  What that means is that when God spoke these words to Israel, He was declaring the redemption Christ Jesus would accomplish as an already completed fact.  You see, God works outside of time as well as in it.  Therefore, everyone who has believed His promises has enjoyed the same benefit of His redemption—salvation unto life everlasting in heaven.

You have heard me say many times, previously, that Jesus came into this world to save sinners.  I am not the first to tell you that.  In fact, St. Paul wrote, “This saying is trustworthy and worthy of full acceptance: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,’ of whom I am the worst.  But I was shown mercy for this reason: that in me, the worst sinner, Christ Jesus might demonstrate his unlimited patience as an example for those who are going to believe in him, resulting in eternal life.” (I Timothy 1:15-16) 

God’s own dear Son came into this world to redeem you and me, to buy us back to God at the price of His own life and death, and it is by this purchase price that God blew your sins away like the clouds after a storm.  Our rebellious deeds, our wicked fears and worries, all of our guilt has been removed from God’s eyes.  Even though we still feel these effects of sin, God doesn’t see it or remember it any longer, because Jesus took the punishment for the guilt of the world.  And, that was a good as done already twenty-seven hundred years ago when Isaiah relayed God’s message to the tribes of Israel.

In response to God’s amazing grace, Isaiah cried out to the people, “Shout for joy, you heavens, because of what the Lord is doing.  Make a joyful shout, you depths of the earth.  Burst forth with shouts of joy, you mountains, you forest and every tree in it, because the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and in Israel he will display his beauty.” 

My friends, make a joyful noise to the Lord all you people, not because God has commanded it, but because He has redeemed you, cleansed you or every and all sin, and brought you back out of rebellion and everlasting death into life in His kingdom and household.  By the washing of your baptism, God marked you as His own dear child, servant, and friend.  There too, He drowned your sinful, fearful, wandering nature.  And, implanting in you a new heart of living faith, He raised you up alive and fully acceptable to our Creator.

Furthermore, God doesn’t want you to forget what He has done for you, so Jesus offers His own precious body and blood to be put on your lips and tongues as the certain assurance of His loving sacrifice on your behalf, and more than that to strengthen you and increase your trust in His promises.  Each time you come to the altar, Christ is again refreshing in you the forgiveness He won for all by His life and death.  God’s mercy and forgiveness comes to you from a never-ending fountain of grace, flowing from the side of His own dear Lamb sacrificed on the altar of the cross.

Dear friends, Jesus told His disciples, “In this world you are going to have trouble.  But be courageous!  I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)  Jesus overcame everything that would have kept you separated from God.  When He took that burden on Himself, Jesus did it out of love for you, and if He loved you so much He was willing to suffer and die for you, even enduring the pains of hell on your behalf, don’t ever imagine He will forget you now, for as St. Paul reminds us, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also graciously give us all things along with him?” (Romans 8:32)  Our Lord will take care of you now, and give you peace forever.  Therefore, Remember; the Lord never forgets you.  Amen.

Blessed be the LORD God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds.  Blessed be His glorious name forever.  May the whole earth be filled with His glory.  Amen.