Deuteronomy 10:14-15 “The heavens, indeed the highest heavens, belong to the Lord your God, as does the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them–he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today.”

We are easily impressed by people who have a lot. I once watched a documentary about people who owned extraordinary houseboats. Most of them had more square footage than my own house. A two thousand square foot boat (most of them were more like barges) is an interesting thing, interesting enough that someone made a show about them. But in the end, it’s just people living on a big boat. You can find similar shows about extravagant houses, impressive car collections, and other luxuries beyond the reach of ordinary people.

People who can afford such things have choices the rest of us don’t. They don’t have to settle for “just-barely-good-enough-to-get-by.” For some, almost nothing is beyond their reach. The food they eat, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive are all of the highest quality. Such people don’t hang around with just anyone. The friends they make, even the people they marry, come from an elite class of people who don’t associate with the rest of us.

The Lord God makes all these celebrities and rich folk look like beggars. Moses mentions God’s ownership of the entire universe in which we live, not to make him interesting to us, nor to suggest that he is aloof and distant and unapproachable to little people like you or me. He does it to magnify God’s grace, his undeserved love, in choosing us to be his people. “Yet the Lord had his heart set on your fathers and loved them. He chose their descendants after them–he chose you out of all the peoples, as it is today.”

The Lord could have chosen any people he wanted. Israel had nothing to make them especially attractive to the Lord. From the time of their father Abraham they were nomadic shepherds, not great rulers and conquerors. The families from which they had come had been quite dysfunctional. Many times the family history read like a soap opera: adultery, playing favorites, pathological lying, unhealthy rivalries, domestic violence. As they grew into a nation, they proved to be stubborn, whiny, and ungrateful.

Still, the Lord set his heart on them and loved them. He didn’t overlook their shortcomings. He was well aware of them all. But he forgave them nonetheless. His standard for choosing them, for having them wasn’t based on their gifts, accomplishments, or goodness. It was all based on his grace. He is a seeking God who does not claim the best. He rescues the worst. He turns sinners into sons and daughters, the people he has made his very own.

Today, we are that people. In his first letter Peter writes to New Testament Christians, “You are a chosen people.” “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (2:9,10). There’s that standard again: mercy, grace. We have not impressed God with our credentials. We have been saved by the life and death of Jesus Christ, cleansed by his blood, and gathered by faith as the people who are his very own.            

That’s impressive.

Deuteronomy 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul? Keep the Lord’s commands and statutes I am giving you today, for your own good.”

Alongside fear, proper respect and awe for God, Moses reminds us “to love him and to worship him with all your heart and all your soul.” In talking about Christian love, biblical love, we often say that is more than a warm feeling. It doesn’t seek for itself but it gives, and gives unconditionally. Moses words reflect this, too, when he says we are to worship the Lord, which in the Hebrew is more generally to serve him, with all our heart and soul.

So love is more than warm feelings, sentimental gush. It goes to work. It acts to serve God or help others. But it isn’t less than a genuine, heartfelt affection, either. We can’t claim to love God if don’t really care about him. Would that work in my marriage? If I was faithful to my wedding vows; if I did my share of the work at home or even more; if I always deferred to my wife and we did the things that she wants to do, but I didn’t really have any feelings or care about her, would she be pleased? Would you? Should that kind of relationship make God happy with us? “They are behaving themselves but couldn’t care less whether I were alive or dead. Oh, goody!”

We know how we love our friends, our spouses, our children, our parents. We have experienced the emotional component and how it affects the way we treat them. Does any of that carry over to the way we relate to our God?

This is a problem that runs in two directions. I once sat in the home of a man who professed his great love for God while he defended his decision to defy God’s will for his marriage. What kind of love is that? “I love you, but your will for my life means nothing to me.” Well then, thanks for caring.

I have also known the cheerless, joyless, bitter Christians who slave away at living right as though they were whipped to it. At times, I have been both these kinds of people myself. “Love the Lord your God” is easy enough to understand as a standard for serving him. In practice we struggle.

Nor can we complain that the Lord’s standards somehow work to his advantage and against our own. “Keep the Lord’s commands and statutes I am giving you today, for your own good.” For your own good. When our parents made rules for us, they were simply looking out for us. Eat your vegetables. Be in bed by eight or nine. Don’t play in the street. Don’t talk to strangers. Life works better this way. We are healthier, stronger, and we don’t get hurt.

We don’t have time to cover the entirety of God’s law now, but it works the same away. In many ways, it is the operating manual for the world he created. Live out the implications of fearing and loving the Lord your God, and life works better. His standard for serving him is for our own good.            

Is that hard to believe? Doesn’t his grace convince us it must be so? We know better than the people of Moses’ day the sacrifice our Lord was willing to make to save us. He submitted himself to torture and death to save us from sin and death. That was all “for our own good.” We can trust that his commands are for our good just the same.

Deuteronomy 10:12 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul?”

Have you ever seen someone with special skills make something hard look easy? A friend of mine let me try his trumpet once. He could make it sing. I blew into it and no sound came out at all. My dad had a knack for carpentry. He cut out pieces of wood, and they just seemed to fit together. I tried it and the lines were not straight and the angles were not square. There is more to this than meets the eye.

Moses makes God’s standards of behavior sound kind of easy at first. “This isn’t rocket science,” he seems to say. It boils down to something quite simple. Knowing what God wants isn’t that hard to understand.

Knowing it and doing it are two different things, though. There is more to this than meets the eye. “Fearing the Lord your God” isn’t primarily a matter of being afraid of him. It is about acknowledgment. It is about recognizing God as God. He, and no one or nothing else, stands above us with power over every feature of our existence. He blesses or withholds blessing. He makes things work out for good or harm. Our survival, our livelihood, depend on him–not on our environment, not on our government, not on our employment, not on our investments, not on our friendships, not on our families, not on our own cleverness and ingenuity.

There are many things that compete to be the “big thing” running our lives. In this sense we may “fear” people, possessions, relationships. We stand in awe of them as though they have god-like power over us. We compromise our morals and principles to keep them happy and keep us safe. We lie for the boss to protect our jobs and stay on his good side. We bite our tongue around family members to keep the peace even though the situation is crying for someone who has the guts to call someone out for his nonsense.

If there were an x-ray that let us peer into our souls, they would look like one of those homes on Hoarders, cluttered and choked with things we can’t let go of because we are terrified we can’t survive without them. As these things grow in importance and influence on our hearts, God himself shrinks in our view. He seems more and more irrelevant. We imagine he doesn’t make that much difference.            

That is a spiritually fatal mistake. The Lord is the “big thing” running our lives, whether we acknowledge this or not. Any attempt to replace him or ignore him will end in us beating our heads against the wall. “Fear the Lord your God, by walking in all his ways,” Moses commands. It’s not hard to understand why he deserves such a place of respect in our hearts and minds. Look at how great and powerful he is. Look at how gracious he has been, forgiving our sins and redeeming our souls. But this standard for serving him is hard to put into practice, which is why Moses has to repeat it here.

1 John 5:14-15 “This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of him.”

“This is the confidence we have before him,” John says. And this is not just any kind of confidence. Some confidence is little more than swagger, a self-confidence that doesn’t bother to take into account whom you are dealing with.

Our confidence before God to ask him things does not grow out of disrespect for who he is. We are fully aware of his awesome power and holiness. But we still come to him and speak with a kind of freedom. We pour our hearts out to him with sort of reckless abandon, because in Jesus we know just how much he loves us.

One of the reasons Jesus taught us to call on God as our Father is because he wanted such parental love to influence our prayers. Or, as Martin Luther said it, “With these words God tenderly invites us to believe that he is our true Father, and we are his true children, so that we may pray to him as boldly and confidently as dear children ask their dear fathers.”

That makes us certain that when we ask, God hears us. Even more, John says, “If we know that he hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what have asked of him.” Could that be true? Is that possible? Can we be certain not only that God is listening to our prayers, but that we actually have the things we are asking for? Aren’t we venturing into TV preacher, prosperity gospel, wild-unsubstantiated-promise territory here?

The key to understanding this promise is in the qualifier, “If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” “Oh,” we might think, “that sort of spoils the excitement. We have to ask in line with God’s will.” But not so fast. Isn’t that how Christians want all their prayers to be, or at least they should?

Several years ago a book on prayer was published titled On Giving Advice to God. It intends to be a remedy for the kind of prayer life that seems intent on telling God how he should run our world, as though he wasn’t doing a very good job already and needed us to help him figure things out. If our prayers seem to start with the assumption that so far the Lord has it wrong, those aren’t very useful, or even sensible, prayers. God forbid that we should get anything that goes against his will. That can’t end well. We should even try to avoid asking for such things.

But if we are asking according to his will, how can we fail to get it? He’s God, and he loves us! Sometimes we may not know whether something is his will, so we acknowledge this in our prayers. We qualify our request: “If it is your will…”, at least in our hearts if not in the words we say.

But there are many things he has promised to do for us. Let’s pray about those things more! The whole Lord’s Prayer is an example. Let’s pray it with sincerity and full attention. James says, “Pray for wisdom,” and God will give it. Jesus teaches us to pray for more workers in God’s harvest, to ask for the Holy Spirit, to ask for protection from the devil and temptation.

Let’s search the Scriptures to know God’s will better, and then be certain, by faith, that we have what we pray for.

1 John 5:13 “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

John isn’t writing these words to some special class of Super Christians. This is true for the simple, ordinary Christians “who believe in the name of the Son of God.” We don’t have to blow ourselves up in an attack on the enemies of our faith to have such certainty, like the followers of Radical Islam. We don’t have to wander through endless repeating lifetimes pursuing perfect behavior, each time in a new body, like so many of the Eastern religions. We don’t have to do anything at all. Jesus has completed the whole project, satisfied every requirement for us. We turn to him. That is what it means to “believe in the name of the Son of God.” Let me explain.

“The name of the Son of God” is not merely one of the ways we address him, whether Jesus, the name his parents gave him; or “Son of Man,” a title he often used to refer to himself; or “Immanuel,” a kind of nickname from the prophet Isaiah and picked up by Matthew the gospel writer; or “Christ” which is less of a “name” as we think of it, and more of a job title, like “doctor,” or “general,” or “officer.”

Like your own “good name,” his name encompasses his whole life’s work and the reputation that has achieved. By believing in his name our faith embraces Jesus perfect obedience to the Ten Commandments, his unmatched love and compassion for everyone he met, the death he died to satisfy the whole sentence God passed on our sins, his resurrection to life promising new life to all who believe in him. This is our way through the door from death to eternal life. This is our access to life on the other side.

It works a little like this. In my previous congregation we had a member who played in back up bands for a number of entertainers. When singer Frankie Valli came to Dallas, he hired him to play for his show. This member of our church got us tickets to the show and invited us backstage afterwards. It was his name, his work, and his connections that got us through the backstage door after the concert. I couldn’t play one of the instruments in the band to save my life. I had no personal connections to Mr. Valli. My way through the door to meet the band and Mr. Valli was all my friend. His name got us in.

Our way through death’s door to meet God face to face and live eternally with him is all Jesus, “the name of the Son of God.” If it depended in some way on our own reputation, our own achievements, our own moral record, we would have every reason to doubt our access. We would be met at the door with, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

When we begin to question our salvation, inevitably this is the problem. We are thinking about our own qualifications, or lack thereof. That is looking in the wrong place. John says, “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God…” That faith is looking in the right place. If Jesus is God’s Son, how can he fail to get us through the door? Faith in Jesus makes us certain, certain that we have eternal life.

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.