Sermon –
Reverend Jack Arnold - Time and Action
Church of the Faithful Centurion -
Descanso, California
Today’s sermon brought
the Collect, Epistle and Gospel together and is partly contained in the
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The
Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
The
Collect.
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O
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LORD, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that
through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those
sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father,
for the sake of Jesus Christ, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.
Consider these words from the
Collect, … absolve thy people from their offences; that
through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those
sins, which by our frailty we have committed. …
The Collect asks God to pardon
our offences, that is our wrongs, failures and failures to act as we should,
where we have “erred and stray from His Way like lost sheep”, through His great
mercy. Note, through the
mercy of God, not because we have been good, but because we cannot be good
without Him in the form of the Holy Ghost. Without His Light, we are darkness. We need Him to deliver us from the
multitudes of sins, by which our frail nature of ungodliness, we have committed. Each day we find new ways to sin, or at
least we think that until we find in fact there is no new thing under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
Truly there is nothing new. The
human heart is always as dark and depraved without the shining light of the
Holy Spirit as it ever has been. People are always seeking ways to get around
God and His Laws, but they truly cannot. Our only hope is to be in Him and be
reborn in the Spirit. As Abraham Lincoln said in the famous Gettysburg address
“That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Only under God, can be reborn a new,
and as he said, our freedom will be reborn again. However, we first have to ask for our sins to be pardoned
and be delivered from our sins by Jesus Christ Our Lord and Our Heavenly
Father.
Through a sense of godliness, we
obtain that “new birth” of freedom. If everybody in this country followed that
simple advice, just think of how great our country would be. Look at Abraham
Lincoln for an example of a Godly man, one of the greatest Presidents ever
elected, who by following God and His Word, helped preserve the Union of this
wonderful nation, albeit at a great cost to our freedom and with a huge
expansion of government[1].
In the Epistle, St. Paul tells
the Colossians if we are to be reborn through Christ into a “new birth of
freedom”, as Lincoln said, we must place our hope not on Earth, but in Our
Heavenly Father and his abode above. Unlike earth where moth and rust corrupts
and thieves break through and steal, in heaven, we shall encounter none of
that. It is truly going to be a wonderful place to be. We must always set our
sights on our destination of heaven. If we do this, the truth shall shine forth through in our
work, at home, in our daily lives and people shall see Christ working through
us for His purposes. If we follow what God asks, which is a very common theme
in the Bible, as it is in my sermons, we prosper and do well.
Which brings us to the point of
the Gospel, in which Christ heals a woman, who has such supreme faith in Christ
healing her, that if she but touches his cloak, she knows she will be healed. The woman did not have a single doubt
about Christ’s power to heal her, her faith was solid. She was not depending on the talisman
of the cloak, but the power of Christ with which she hoped to connect. Christ was impressed by the woman’s
faith. If we had the faith of this
woman in Christ, imagine how we could impact the world around us. And, I might
add, what is stopping us? The
ruler whose daughter had died also shared this amazing faith in Christ. He had zero doubt whatsoever Christ
would do these things. The most
important thing of all which was to raise his daughter from the dead. Christ
also recognizes this man’s faith and rewards with the girl’s resurrection. Quite a surprise for those who had just
laughed and scorned him, basically telling him “That is impossible, you can’t
raise the girl from the dead.”
He proved them wrong. He gave a very practical demonstration
that much is denied men, but though God all things are possible. But, we need the faith of the woman, the
faith of the ruler and the faith of the centurion. We must follow Him and the plan that he lays out for us. We
have to be willing to listen and be ready to follow Him. In time, we shall too have an amazing
reward, through our faith and we shall be in a “new birth of freedom” from otherwise
certain death. Like the Marines who proved many skeptics wrong in World War II
in the grueling jungle battles against the Japanese Army, seen by some as the
elite army of Asia at the time, we too can do things thought impossible, if we
put our trust in Him, as I have aforementioned. Works must follow faith
however. We cannot have a full faith, unless we act to demonstrate the faith.
Faith is demonstrated through our actions, and our Lord set this in His Example
for us to follow.
Jesus’s miracles were all about
actions, not just in word, but in deed. He did both, as we must also. If we
only talk the talk, but do not walk our talk, then our words mean nothing. But
if we walk the walk also, then our words have more weight, more meaning, as we
become men and women of the Word. I say of the Word and not like the old
saying, he is a man of his word. For we want to become a Man/Woman of His Word,
not our word! If we go by His Word, then we can never go wrong. We always seem
to go on our word and that is where we get into trouble.
Following this theme of words and
action, on this past Veteran’s Day, I realized God has used godly men to our
prayers for our freedom to be kept, by laying down their lives for ours. No
greater love could be found in the world, then those men who died in the
American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War,
the Spanish American War, World War I, the Pacific and the European theatres of
World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Desert 1 and 2, Afghanistan and
countless dirty little wars where the freedom of our country and that others
was threatened.
Through a sense of godliness,
these men went to battle on our behalf, as Christ battled Satan on our
behalf. These men did not just go
into battle with the godliness, they prayed hard for them, they prayed for each
minute just to stay alive, especially in the hellholes of the Pacific. The danger they faced were far more
perilous than the ones we face today.
We overcame the enemy, not only because of our superior tactics, but we
had men ready and willing to take the enemy on and do our best to prevail, and
that followed God.
The Collect, Epistle and Gospel
tie together, laying out, detailing and reinforcing the same message,
ultimately. We have to have faith
in Christ and God, and be willing to accept the Holy Ghost into us, that
through Him, we may do good works on Earth and that we will receive our just
reward for doing what is right in the end.
Heaven is at the end of an
uphill trail. The easy downhill
trail does not lead to the summit.
The time is now, not tomorrow. The time has come, indeed. How will you ACT?
It is by our actions we are known.
Be of God - Live of God - Act of God
[1]
The American Civil War
was fought not over slavery, but over States Rights. Make no mistake, the right being disputed at the time was
slavery. Many will say the wrong
side won, including the noted thinker Thomas Sowell. Slavery was an institution whose time was long passed, it
did not serve anyone, master or slave.
It was counter to the Word and should never have existed here. Truly it was an instrument of the Devil
and was used to harm our country.
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