Psalm 67:6-7 “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.”

It’s the harvest time of year. Pumpkins and squash have appeared in the grocery stores. Apples and pears come from this year’s crop. Cotton fields are white and corn is coming in.

The harvest, the reason we go through all the work of planting and tilling, is the one part of the process we don’t directly control. We can choose good seed. We can plant at the proper time. We can water and weed and fertilize. But after that we wait. Like Jesus said in the parable, “A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain–first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

Of course, Jesus wasn’t interested in farming so much, and neither is this psalm. Our harvest is a harvest of souls. We can plant the message of God’s grace in people’s minds and hearts. We can pray for God’s grace to give them faith. After that it is up to God to give the harvest.

But just because we don’t control the harvest doesn’t mean that we don’t expect one. Notice how this part of the prayer reads: “Then the land will yield its harvest.” More souls saved, a bigger family of faith, more and more children of the heavenly Father is God’s will for our mission work, not just ours. When the Lord himself teaches us to pray for something, we expect him to give us what we ask.

Those souls, those family members in faith, are the reward for our mission work. This is the content of the promise that “God, our God, will bless us.” My sins were forgiven, and heaven became my own, over a half a century ago when God claimed me as a child by faith through baptism. That was a settled issue long before I ever thought to tell anyone else about the Jesus who has done so much for me.

Since that time, through the preaching of God’s grace, the Lord has given a harvest. He has grown the family of faith around me. I am pretty sure that my house doesn’t love me, especially the way it treats me. In the twelve years I have lived there, the garage door has fallen apart, the toilets have leaked, the dishwasher stopped working, door knobs and hinges have broken, I replaced the roof twice. The demand for maintenance is constant. Something always needs to be repaired.

When I get old, and weak, and move into a nursing home, I don’t think that my cars will care enough to call me and see how I am doing. They will just sit in the driveway and ignore me, or worse yet, abandon me to drive someone else around town.

But the people, the people who have become my brothers and sisters by faith, show their love for me every day by supporting my ministry. They work alongside me in God’s mission. They are my friends in the ups and downs of everyday life.

Someday they, and other members of the family I have never met, may care enough about me to come and see me when I am sick, or old and weak. And all of us are going to share an eternal home with Jesus where we will love each other perfectly without end. We are God’s harvest. We are God’s blessing to each other. Pray that he will increase this harvest.

Psalm 67:3-4 “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the people’s justly and guide the nations of the earth.”

God’s ways and salvation becoming known among all the nations has clear implications for his praise and worship. Why should all the peoples praise this God? You don’t praise God for something you don’t believe in. You don’t praise a God whom you don’t believe in. Praying for the peoples to praise God assumes that the message of grace has given them a living faith.

Faith and praise are the responses that fit God’s saving grace. I suppose that it is possible to force words of praise from people without faith, but is that really praise at all? Do you remember the character Max from the movie The Sound of Music, the family friend who helped the Von Trapp family escape the Nazis? After Austria falls to Germany, the whole nation is expected to take up the greeting “Heil Hitler.” The true converts do it with gusto, but not Max. He weakly raises his hand to say it, and the words barely stumble out of his mouth. He has no real praise for his new dictator.

Jesus does not conquer the nations with a military machine. He does not force the peoples into subjection. He wins them with his grace. He overwhelms them with his love. Every word of praise, then, oozes with sincerity and joy. “May the nations be glad and sing for joy.” “Singing for joy” pictures a response something like the cheering we see at a sporting event. The home team gets closer and closer, and finally it scores. The fans are ecstatic. They stand on their seats. They shout and cheer. They sing the school song. They are glad and they sing for joy.

            With Jesus, why shouldn’t the nations be glad and sing for joy? Why shouldn’t their praises be sincere and come straight from a heart of faith? “…for you rule the people’s justly and guide the nations of the earth.” Jesus’ brand of justice has no hint of graft or corruption. We sometimes call our elected officials “public servants.” Then we wonder if any of them has any clue what this means. But Jesus truly is. He rules and leads as the one who made himself our servant. Everything he does is about us–our forgiveness, our salvation, our life, our eternity.

We pray that all the peoples will see God’s gracious justice and rule. Then God’s praises will come from the nations.

Psalm 67:1-2 “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.”

There is a whole world view contained in that sentence. Asking God to be gracious to us is more than a request for God to be kind to us, to do something nice for us. If you ever listen to radio personality Dave Ramsey greet his callers, when they ask him “how are you?” his stock answer is “better than I deserve.” Better than I deserve. That’s God being gracious.

A Christian doesn’t approach God and say, “Just give me what I’ve got coming to me.” That would be insane. What I’ve got coming to me is really, really hot, and really, really uncomfortable, and lasts forever and ever. I have offended God with my life, and with my attitudes, not the least of which is the idea that somehow, I deserve better than I’ve been getting. Asking God to be gracious is a way of saying, “I get it. I haven’t been banking all kinds of favors that you owe me, and now I am calling some of them in. It’s a blessing that you haven’t decided to squish me yet, because every day I am giving you more reasons to.”

But there is a more important part of this world view behind our prayer for God to be gracious. It is our complete confidence that he is! We don’t approach him in utter terror. We don’t come to him as a last resort because we are just that desperate. This is the God whose every dealing with us is always, only love.

He doesn’t just send us a Savior. He comes here himself to rescue us. He doesn’t just put up a stiff fight to deliver us from our sins, and dig deep into his pockets to finance the operation. He dies in our place, he lays down his life as the payment that sets us free from all our sins deserved.

Maybe you heard of an evangelical movie series around the theme, “God is not dead.” A college student clashes with his atheist professor about the existence of God. It’s true that he is not dead, but at the cross he was dead when Jesus breathed his last, dead until Easter morning, all because God is gracious, all because God is so intent on loving me and saving me that there is no price too high for him to pay. In Christianity, everything begins with grace, like this prayer, which understands from the very first words just where we stand with God.

There is a very specific application of God’s grace the psalmist is seeking when he asks God to be gracious to us: “that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.” Some food companies claim a “secret ingredient” makes their products taste so good. Colonel Sanders had his secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Coca Cola has carefully guarded the recipe for their soft drinks for over a hundred years. McDonald’s had the special sauce on their Big Macs. You may remember the movie Fried Green Tomatoes which coined the phrase “The secret’s in the sauce” to describe a very disturbing barbecue in the story.

Here we are, blessed with special powers to cope with life now and the promise of an exceptional life to come, because we have this “secret ingredient:” the gracious God who loves and saves us. Can we keep this secret to ourselves? We aren’t in a competition with the rest of humanity. Letting them in on the secret takes nothing away from us. How can we let them be lost?

So we pray for missions and mission work. We pray for God’s grace and blessing so that his ways–his loving, saving way of dealing with us– can be known everywhere, among all nations. We pray for God’s grace because this task is bigger than us. There are billions of people to reach, and we seem so few. We get distracted by all the other things we think are important. But is anything more important than the eternal fate of souls Jesus purchased with his own blood? Pray for God’s grace to reach all the nations.

Luke 17:7-10 “Which one of you having a servant tending sheep or plowing will say to him when he comes in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down to eat’? Instead, will he not tell him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat, get ready, and serve me while I eat and drink; later you can eat and drink?’ Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? In the same way, when you have done all that you were commanded, you should say, ‘We are unworthy servants, we’ve only done our duty.’”

Before we dig into this parable too far, understand who it is about. It is about us, not God. It is about the way that we relate to him. It is not intended to describe the way that he treats you or me.

Earlier in his ministry, Jesus painted a very different picture of the way the Lord treats his servants, practically the opposite: “Blessed will be those servants the master finds alert when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will get ready, have them recline at the table, then come and serve them” (Luke 12:37-38). That’s how Jesus lived his own ministry to us, isn’t it. “For even the Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many,” he told the disciples (Mark 10:45). The night before he went to the cross he washed the disciples’ feet as though he were the lowest slave. Here he is teaching us to imitate that kind of humility, not suggesting the Lord will treat us with some kind of cruelty or disrespect.

And the picture Jesus paints is not unfamiliar to us, is it. You have played both roles. You have gone out to eat on a busy night, and the waiter or waitress was overwhelmed. But they came to take your order quickly, and your food came out on time, and the meal was decent. You paid and didn’t say a word because the wait staff did what they were supposed to do. But if they were slow to come to the table, and got the order wrong, maybe you make the extra effort to complain and give them a bad rating online. Sometimes we give praise when things go right, sometimes we don’t, because that’s what they’re supposed to do. But when the experience is bad, we speak up.

At your own job, you have often worked without much recognition. You showed up on time. You did the work you were assigned. You got the project done. Not much was said. It’s nice to get some acknowledgment, but you didn’t storm off and quit, because you were doing what you were supposed to do.

God has told us, “Here is how I want you to live. This is what you can do to serve me. You can give me the praise and worship I deserve. You can love and help the people around you.  You can share the gospel with as many as you can. You can practice a little self-control and not indulge every urge you feel, as though you are some kind of animal. You can do this even though the people around you might not appreciate it very much. In fact, they might hate and ridicule you for it. Don’t be surprised. It’s the way they treated me, too, when I came and lived with you. And I died to save them.”            

Let’s be honest. None of us does this the way God demands. Even if we did, God wouldn’t owe us anything special. “In the same way, when you have done all that you were commanded, you should say, ‘We are unworthy servants, we’ve only done our duty.’” We have every reason to serve with humility when we do what any decent Christian should do. We have no right to think he owes us something. God doesn’t deal with us on some kind of merit system. In his grace he does treat us better than we deserve, infinitely better, because he loves us and forgives us.

Luke17:6 “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,” the Lord said, “you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.”

There are those who don’t think that faith makes a significant difference in our lives, at least not a positive one. You may be aware of the criticism that “thoughts and prayers” has come under in some circles. A tragedy takes place, like a deadly storm or a mass shooting. Celebrities, politicians, and ordinary concerned citizens express their concern by offering their thoughts and prayers for those who have been affected. But some condemn that faith-based response. “It doesn’t help,” they claim. It’s a form of inaction. It prevents people from taking the tragedy seriously, the claim.

Our own devaluing of faith may be more subtle, but it can be just as real. Do we feel secure because we have a healthy bank account, sound investments, and a steady job? Or is it because God has promised to give us our daily bread? Do we feel safe because we live in a good neighborhood, we have installed a security system, or we carry a firearm? Or are we comforted in knowing that the Lord will give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways?

Jesus promises that faith enables some powerful things to happen. But let’s not misunderstand the source of that power. He does not say, “Your faith will uproot this mulberry tree and plant it in the sea.” It won’t. That’s not how faith works. Faith is a receiving thing, in many ways a passive thing. It looks away from ourselves to someone else’s power. And in this case, that power is God’s.

Let me illustrate with an incident from my son’s life. When he was ten, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. We took him to child cancer specialists. They proposed a treatment plan involving chemotherapy. We trusted their expertise. It wasn’t our faith in the doctors that ate up the cancer and healed my son’s body. Frankly, that faith was a wobbly thing, full of uncertainties and fears.

No, the power that destroyed the cancer was in the medicines injected into his body (at least humanly speaking. I don’t deny a divine role in all of this as well). If we hadn’t trusted the doctors, we would not have accepted their medicine. But that’s where the power was. We didn’t need to be convinced they were the greatest doctors who ever lived. We didn’t need to be 100 percent certain their plan was going to work. We needed to trust them just enough to let them do their work, a little mustard seed faith, if you will.

Faith clearly works this way for our salvation. It is not our own act of believing that cleanses the sin from our souls. The human attitude of trust is not the spiritual soap that washed the guilt away. “It is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast,” Paul writes the Ephesians. Faith turns to Jesus, and he comes in with the perfect life he lived and the payment he made for sin on the cross. He scrubs and cleanses our guilty record until not a spot remains.

Now Jesus wants us to know that faith has access to the same love and power of God for just about anything we might truly need. Uprooting a tree is a bigger job than I could ever do. I once spent a couple of days with a spade trying to dig out some shrubs at our first home. That was back-breaking work. No one I ever knew who wanted to get rid of a tree uprooted the thing. They sawed it off and ground out the stump. Uproot an adult tree? Good luck! Unless God is involved with his power. Then it’s like pulling onions or carrots out of a sandy-soiled garden.            

Just don’t think Jesus is suggesting that faith makes God our personal genie with unlimited “Your wish is my command” privileges. There has to be a clear and urgent need for trees to be uprooted before they move. And the Lord himself is the one who judges that need. Former major league pitcher Dave Dravecky developed cancer on a bone in his throwing arm. He had the cancer removed, rehabbed the arm, and made it back to the pitching mound. In his first game back the bone snapped in two. His arm had to be amputated. In looking back at his experience, this was one of the things he learned: “In our culture,” he said, “we ask for God to take the problem away. In other cultures they ask God to make them stronger to bear their burdens.” That’s a gift for which our faith can trust God: strength to bear our burdens.

Just a little faith receives great things. Jesus promises.

Luke 17:3-5 “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”

Do you remember Solomon’s prayer at Gibeon? His father, King David, had died. He had been sorting through officials in the past royal administration, the “deep state” if you will, trying to figure out who was loyal to him and who had other agendas. Some had to be banished. Others executed. Even within his own family there were attempts to undermine the legitimacy of his administration. He had recently married, and he went to Gibeon to offer God a thousand sacrifices.

There the Lord appeared to him and offered him a blank check. Ask for anything. “What should I give you?” It was an open-ended offer.

Solomon didn’t do the normal thing. He didn’t make the kind of request we might expect. He didn’t ask God to make his life easier–more money, less enemies. He asked God to change his heart, to give him one that paid close attention, that could judge fairly and distinguish right from wrong. He didn’t want to be free from the challenge ahead. He wanted to be able to meet it. It was one of those rare occasions when God’s children get the question right.

We have a similar example with the apostles in Luke 17. Jesus had been teaching his disciples about the danger of Christian leaders doing things that undermine the faith of the people they serve. They can’t be soft on sin. They certainly can’t embrace it for themselves. They have to confront it.

But then they can’t be stingy with grace, either. They have to be generous with “I forgive you.” Doing either one can be hard. Doing both with consistency and love tests our human limits.

So the disciples ask for help. But they don’t seek the easy path. “Well then, Lord, don’t put us in those kinds of situations. Surround us with good people who don’t commit many sins.” Or, “Give us pliable people who are easily led and are happy to take their licks when the time comes.” Or, “Then give us something easier to do. Duties with less stress and better pay would be nice.”

No, they ask God to change them. “Increase our faith,” they pray. They see that the solution does not begin with easier lives. It begins when God’s grace changes their hearts.  

That’s where we need to start, too, every day. Increase our faith.

Hebrews 13:5-6 “Keep your life free from the love of money. Be satisfied with what you have, for he himself has said, ‘I will never leave you or abandon you.’ Therefore we may boldly say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me.’”

Money is God’s gift, his tool. It is not your Maker, what makes you, you. It is not your Savior, the one place you can always turn to for help. It’s not meant to boost your ego, or satisfy all your desires, or become the purpose of your existence, the reason you get up in the morning. It makes a useful servant. It becomes a miserable master.

To help us keep it in its place, keep it from becoming our love, keep it under control, the Lord sets up a little conversation with him here, a dialogue between God and his people. He gives his promise, “I will never leave you or abandon you.” That’s an old, old promise, as old as the Bible itself, some of the last words the Lord had Moses write before he died. Think for a moment about how all-encompassing these promises really are. When God first spoke these words, the children of Israel were about to enter the promised land. He was assuring them that even though war and bloodshed were staring them in the face, he would never leave or forsake them. They could trust him when their very lives and the lives of those they loved were in such danger.

Here this promise is applied to our daily needs. Even when it looks like we have come to the end of our resources, the cupboard is bare, the well is dry, the purse is empty, God promises to provide.  His resources never run out. We can trust him for our daily bread.

That’s so different than money, isn’t it? Spend your money, and it’s gone. It can’t help but abandon you when you use it. The more you spend, the more it disappears. But depend on God all day every day, and you will never use him up or have any less of him than when you started. People may steal your money. There are a hundred ways you can lose it. If the stock market crashes and the banks fail, it could instantly disappear. None of those things will ever happen to God. “I will never leave you or abandon you.”

  Then, in case it isn’t obvious, the Lord rehearses us in the proper response: “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” This is essentially the position of faith, isn’t it? The Lord, not money, is the helper I trust. He can feed me without money if he chooses, like he fed Israel manna in the desert. He can heal me without money, whether by miracles like Jesus performed, or the natural healing properties he built in to my body. He has redeemed, “a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sin, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with his holy precious blood, and his innocent sufferings and death.”

As long as we remember this, we will love him, not money, and be satisfied with what we have.

Hebrews 13:4 “Marriage is to be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled, because God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.”

With each passing year, our world seems to get a little more confused on this topic. All my years growing up there was a movement that tried to claim marriage was not very important. “Free love” they called it. Marriage was just an outdated institution, a worthless piece of paper, even a way of oppressing women. People should be free to set up house keeping and sleep with whomever they chose, for as long they chose. Books and music, movies and television, were all used to push this view.

Then a few years ago marriage became so important that we had to stretch and redefine it to include combinations of people that practically no one else in all of recorded history had ever considered part of the institution. Both of these things dishonor marriage.

Brotherly love is not the same thing as the romantic love we usually associate with marriage. But it does have something to say about honoring it. The world is going to do what it wants. But the members of Jesus’ family realize that sex and marriage are not our play things. These are not a kind of hobby or recreation we can shape and change to suit our own happiness or pleasure.

Like all God’s gifts, they are tools for loving our neighbor, and not just in the sense of providing physical pleasure. They serve others. They serve God’s purpose. They create a stable home where husbands and wives can develop the deepest of loving bonds, and children can live and grow in security. They create the children themselves. A peaceful society, a successful civilization, depends on these things. This is no place for human beings to tinker.

So we honor marriage by approaching it God’s way and keeping the marriage bed undefiled. Only one man and one woman publicly committed to each other for life belong there. Sexual activity before, outside of, or after marriage dishonors God’s purpose.

Where we Christians have failed–and let’s be honest, my old professor was right when he said, “No one I know has a spiritual track record free of sexual stumbling”– we turn to Jesus for forgiveness and restoration. And then we honor him by honoring marriage in the way asks us to do so.

Hebrews 13:2-3 “Don’t neglect to show hospitality, for by doing this some have welcomed angels as guests without knowing it. Remember those in prison, as though you were in prison with them, and the mistreated as though you yourselves were suffering bodily.”

Hospitality is a somewhat forgotten virtue. At a time in which we build bigger houses with more square footage and less people inside, when we enjoy greater prosperity than most generations before us, we have isolated ourselves in our homes more than ever. I like watching the house-search and renovation shows on HGTV. Everyone seems to want an “open floor plan” with good space for “entertaining.” But who does this entertaining? Since at least the 1980’s more and more people have been “cocooning,” locking themselves in their homes with their recliners and electronics to escape the world.

The idea of “showing hospitality” here is more than having a few friends over for dinner. The Greek word suggests opening up to welcome and receive strangers. That may not mean just anyone off the street, absolute strangers with no connection whatsoever. But it goes beyond close family and friends. In the early church, you may know, traveling missionaries often stayed in the homes of Christian families on the way to their destination. In times of persecution or other disasters, displaced Christians were taken in by other believers who didn’t necessarily know them previously.

In other words, “showing hospitality” isn’t just about “entertaining.” It’s about serving your neighbor and serving God’s kingdom. It is about a life lived unselfishly, opening up our home and our family to embrace more people.

The next two instructions also require a couple of comments to understand. “Remember those in prison” was not a call for prison ministry as many churches do today. The prisoners these people knew weren’t guilty of violent or antisocial behavior. Their “crime” was living their faith, making them prisoners of conscience.

Maybe you have heard of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman falsely accused of blaspheming Islam. She spent eight years on death row before finally being released and escaping to Canada. Two government officials who spoke in her defense were assassinated before she was released. Their fate illustrates the danger of “remembering those in prison.” It can be dangerous to be associated with believers in such a climate of persecution.

The same is true for “remembering…the mistreated as though you yourselves were suffering bodily.” Reach out to help such people, and you may end up actually “suffering bodily” as well.

All these examples of Christian love involve personal risk, sacrifice of time and money, a certain degree of inconvenience. It’s more comfortable to keep to ourselves, to stay inside our safe little world. But is that love? You remember the words Jesus will say to the condemned on Judgment Day, “I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you have me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in…I was sick and in prison, and you did not look after me” (Matthew 25:42-43).

Go back to the earlier chapters of Hebrews. Jesus did not let personal risk, sacrifice, or inconvenience stand in the way of associating with us. He embraced them to save us. “Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers… Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death–that is the devil–and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death… For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people” (2:11,14,17). He got involved and came to our rescue. Now he invites us, the free, forgiven members of his family, to love like he did, even if that comes with a cost.