Who are we and what are we doing here? 5
People who care about the world

So Brian is taking off to Haiti tomorrow. In a nation that has been hammered by hurricanes and torn apart by political violence he is going to work on cleaning up a hospital kitchen and do a few other things. What difference will it make?

When Marilyn and I used to do deputation (that is going around churches asking them to support our work in mission) we put together a slide show that went with a song called, “A little bit of love and a helping hand.” There’s a line in that song that sums it all up. It runs,

“It’s a drop in the bucket, I hear you say,

But the bucket gets wetter, day by day.”

It is very easy to dismiss small efforts and look to the big organisations like the UN to spend their millions on helping places like Haiti. But we have a responsibility before God to share what he has given us. In fact Psalm 67 says that is why God blesses us.

May God be gracious to us and bless us

and make his face shine upon us,

that your ways may be known on earth,

your salvation among all nations.

The Psalms were the hymns and prayers of Israel, and have been the hymn book and prayer book of the church for much of its history. That trend is returning with scripture songs making up a large part of the new worship. We can use this Psalm too, as a prayer to pray.

A prayer to pray

A prayer for blessing on God’s people

We can pray to be blessed. There's nothing wrong with praying to be blessed. Though some people can get carried away with that, thinking that all Christianity is about is, “bless me, bless me, bless me”. But there's a place for praying for blessing.

[At one point I was really out of balance on this. I got really upset by all the stuff on television, which all seemed to be focused on getting stuff from God rather than serving God. I thought that it was wrong just to have stuff. How could you be a Christian and be rich?

God had to embarrass me with his goodness; jobs, a house, a car, schooling, before I began to see that it’s OK to be blessed. Because, of course, we couldn’t have spent 12 years on the mission field without people sharing their material blessings with us so we could have a house and food to eat and everything else.]

It’s OK to pray for blessing but we need to pray not just for ourselves but for God’s people. The psalm asks that God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us. That means that we’re praying, not just for ourselves but for God’s people; here in Hamilton, in Canada and around the world, including Haiti.

A prayer that God’s salvation would touch the world

That “that” at the beginning of verse two is really important. The focus of this prayer is that God would bless his people so that his ways may be known on earth, his salvation among all nations.

[A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a young girl at Kids Klub. She’s a really angry kid. Really disruptive, saying all kinds of stuff against God. I had said something about God being good and in the midst of the torrent of abuse came the line, “If God is so good, then why is my Mom always so sick?” I told her about my own Mom and just for a moment we seemed to connect.

All of her experience has taught her to be angry at life, and angry at God. How is she going to know that God is good unless she sees it in the lives of God’s people? How is she going to know God’s salvation unless we share our blessings with her?]

We pray for blessing as a means, not an end. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we looked at God’s call to Abraham. He was blessed to be a blessing, and so are we.

[If you have your Bible open to Ps 67, take a look at the way it’s laid out. It’s symmetrical. Two verses, then three verses, then two more verses. The last two verses echo the first two verses. Verse 5 is word for word the same as verse 3.

Now, if you remember your English composition classes from high school, you teacher probably told you that when you write something you should start by telling the readers what you’re going to say, that’s your topic sentence, then write your essay, then tell them again at the end what it was you said, that’s the conclusion. “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them.”

That’s not the way Hebrew poetry works. It works with symmetrical ideas or structures. There’s a fancy word for this kind of symmetry in Hebrew poetry. It’s called “chiasm”. You don’t need to remember that, but it’s good to know when you read the Psalms that they often work in from both ends towards the middle.]

So in Psalm 67 the focus of the poem isn’t in the first line or the last line. It’s right in the middle.

May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth.

A vision to catch

A vision of a world touched by the gospel

This is the focus of this prayer, and it’s a vision of the future that we need to catch. A vision of a world that has been reached by the gospel. It’s a vision of a world in which people are glad and sing for joy because they know God and as a result they are freer, healthier and happier than they were before. People often accuse Christians of trying to impose their will on others. But this isn’t about expanding our control of other countries. It is about giving people everywhere access to the God’s kingdom of justice and goodness.

Let me quote something written recently by Brian Stewart, senior correspondent with CBC’s “The National”.

For many years I've been struck by the rather blithe notion … that … Christianity has been reduced to a musty, dimly lit backwater of contemporary life, a fading force. Well, I'm here to tell you from what I've seen from my “ring-side seat” at events over decades that there is nothing that is further from the truth. That notion is a serious distortion of reality. I’ve found there is NO movement, or force, closer to the raw truth of war, famines, crises, and the vast human predicament, than organized Christianity in Action. And there is no alliance more determined and dogged in action than church workers, ordained and lay members, when mobilized for a common good. It is these Christians who are right "On the Front Lines" of committed humanity today and when I want to find that Front, I follow their trail.

…Now this is something the media and government officials rarely acknowledge, for religion confuses many, and anyway, we all like to blow our own horns. So Front Line efforts of Christianity do not usually produce headlines, and unfortunately this feeds the myth that the Church just follows along, to do its modest bit. Let me repeat, I've never reached a war zone, or famine group or crisis anywhere where some Church organization was not there long before me...sturdy, remarkable souls usually too kind to ask "what took you so long".

…Once, flying to a disaster story, our twin-engine plane had to make an emergency refueling stop at a nearly deserted landing strip in the dense jungle in central Africa. We stepped out into the middle of absolutely nowhere it seemed, only to be greeting by a cheerful Dutch Reform Minister offering tea. My veteran cameraman Mike Sweeny later sighed in exasperation "Do you think you could ever get us to a story, somewhere, anywhere where those Christians aren't there first!!!"… I was never able to.

Or there is my lovely wife travelling up to Kabul the day after the city had fallen to the Taliban. Thousands were fleeing the city. The only people on the road into Kabul that day were the BBC, CNN, other news organisations, and a small team, of which Marilyn was a part, who were going up to pray for the city in its time of need.

In the end, political solutions are only partial solutions. They change the structures but they don’t change the people. Only the gospel can do that. The gospel came to earth in the first place in the shape of a human being and that is still how it travels the world, incarnated in the lives of men and women who love God and love their neighbours.

And God will receive the praise

Just in case we get carried away with the task of binding up the broken hearted and setting the captives free, this verse is bracketed by, May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you.

We don’t serve people first and foremost for their sakes. We serve them for God’s sake. Trust me, part of the reason why you find so many Christians in these kinds of places is because they have something to sustain them that the secular workers don’t have.

I have the highest regard for the UN, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the many other agencies that serve around the world. I’ve worked with them as colleagues in Asia and partnered with them on various projects. But, in the final analysis, it is the Christian workers who stay for the long haul and who come back, even after they have been attacked or had their colleagues killed. That’s because we don’t do it to get thanks from the people we help, although that’s nice. We do it because Jesus died for those people and our goal is that, “The Lamb that was slain might see the reward of his suffering” as the Moravian missionaries used to say in the 1700s.

That’s the vision that calls people to serve in tough places. The vision of the wounds of the world healed in Jesus’ name and the peoples of the earth responding in praise, to Him, not us.

And I’ll let you in on a secret. It will happen. It says so at the back of the book. Rev 7:9,10 says,

After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

A promise to claim

So, with that perspective, we come to verses 6 and 7, which take us back to the theme of the opening verses, only with a slightly different twist. Then the land will yield its harvest, and God, our God, will bless us. God will bless us, and all the ends of the earth will fear him.

Verses 1 and 2 are a prayer for God’s blessing, in order that the world might see his goodness. Verses 6 and 7 are more of a promise to claim. By this point in the Psalm we understand what the point of all this is, that, the nations be glad and sing for joy, for God rules the peoples justly and guides the nations of the earth.

And that as a result, the peoples praise God;

A promise of material blessing

And so we can move from praying for blessing to claiming a promise of blessing. Then the land will yield its harvest, and God, our God, will bless us. But it’s only because we understand the priorities. It’s only when we put God’s priorities first that we can be trusted with God’s blessings.

[World Vision was founded by a man by the name of Dr. Bob Pierce. His prayer was that his heart would be broken by the things that break the heart of God. He travelled around the world handing out millions of dollars to help people in need. The school that Marilyn and I attended in the Netherlands had a full professional kitchen because Dr. Bob had come to speak and seen the state of the original kitchen. He said, “The heart of any community is the kitchen” and paid to have a new one installed.

Someone once said of him that he had “the sanctity of a relaxed grasp”. It didn’t matter how many millions passed through his hands, none of it ever touched his heart. God could trust him with his blessings because he had the right priorities.]

And this has nothing to do with your bank balance. I’ve known refugees with nothing but a mud house who were as much in bondage to money as the richest CEO on Bay street. A change in attitude doesn’t necessarily release more stuff to us, but it may release us from more of our stuff. It’s a principle of the kingdom, that God only releases resources to those he can trust to bless others with them.

A promise of worldwide spiritual blessing

And the final result of all this is that, all the ends of the earth will fear him.

This is a promise of world-wide spiritual blessing. That’s what it means to fear God. Proverbs says that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It does mean being afraid of God so much as putting him in his rightful place in your life. That’s the wisest thing anyone can do, it is the beginning of wisdom and it is the path to blessing, both material and spiritual.

Conclusion

God calls us to be people who care about the world, about the people in the world, because it is his and we are his. It’s only as we reach out to those around us; in our families, our neighbourhoods, and further away in places like Haiti, that people will see what God is really like, and once we see what God is really like it’s hard not to love him and serve him.

My prayer

– that we will catch this vision of a world touched by the gospel

– that we will pray this prayer for God’s blessing

– that we will claim this promise and devote ourselves to serving others in Jesus’ name