Deuteronomy 33:26 “There is no one like the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens to help you and on the clouds in his majesty.”

Our God is no pipsqueak. Moses pictures him riding on the heavens. He is not a creature of this world, a product of the earth, like the gods of Greek and Roman mythology. He stands far above it all. Think of how small you look from an airplane, from the moon, from the distant stars. By contrast God stands far above all these things, looking down on them from the outside, big enough to straddle this universe that seems so vast to you and me.

He is so big and so powerful that some people go looking for smaller gods to follow. A feature from a magazine for recovering addicts in a 12-step program included descriptions that some people gave of their “Higher Power.” For one person it was the group of fellow addicts. For another it was whatever good he found in each day. For still another it was her sense of unity with the universe. For one it was even her dog. But will fellow friends, good feelings, or canines really be enough for all the help we need?

We are not above turning to lesser gods, either. How often don’t we think our problems could be solved if only we had more money? How often don’t we think that we could win our struggles if only we had more control, and then we go about scheming up ways to take control for ourselves? In effect, we are looking to ourselves as god. I make a mighty tiny little god for myself. The problem is not only that I fail to inspire any courage for the struggles and battles I face. I’m not able to be much real help, and then I have separated myself from the God who is.

Real help is part of what is so unique about the power of our God. He “rides on the heavens to help you.” All God’s power and size would just be scary if we were not convinced he loves us and wants to help us. But we know that this God does love us because of the help he has given us in the past. He has helped us with our sins by sending his Son to take them away from us at the cross. He has helped us with death by making Jesus’ death our own, and his resurrection the promise we will rise, too. He has helped us out of hell by making heaven a free gift of his grace. He has helped us out of our unbelief by revealing his love and sending us his Holy Spirit to give us faith.

Do you notice that in each case, God’s “help” is not just a little assistance, a little nudge to get us going again? He takes the whole project over and gets it done for us. He comes to us and says, “Let me do that for you.”

Despite all his power and majesty, that is just the kind of God he is. Most religions think that God is mainly interested in what we can do for him. Sometimes even Christians begin to think that way. But that is not where God puts the emphasis. There is no one else like him, because he rides on the heavens to help you, not just with salvation, but with every other struggle life will bring. His unique power gives us courage for all the fights we face.

2 Samuel 11:26-27 “When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the Lord.”

Why was Uriah dead? Because sexual sin, like all sin, has consequences. In the case of David and Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, there was an unplanned pregnancy, damage to the reputation of a man the Lord once described as “a man after my own heart,” hurt and heartache for Bathsheba’s family, a bad public example for the nation’s young people, an ever-spreading web of deceit and betrayal that finally ended in murder to try to cover it all up.

Who was the victim of this little indulgence between two consenting adults? The better question is: “Who was not?” Uriah died. David lived through months of spiritual agony. The seeds of jealousy, envy, rivalry, and self-interest were sown in David’s mixed-up family. Other soldiers died alongside Uriah, innocent bystanders in David’s attempted cover-up. High-ranking members of the military were made party to the crime. David and Bathsheba got away with nothing at all.

The consequences of David’s sin fell like dominoes throughout his family, his leadership, and his nation. In our time sexual sin runs like an epidemic through our society. The people of God’s church are not immune. Surveys about adultery, divorce, premarital sex, and pornography suggest Christian behavior doesn’t differ much from our unbelieving friends. The Centers for Disease Control claims that only one out of every 10 Americans waits for marriage. Other studies suggest that between 30 and 60 percent of Americans fail to remain faithful during their marriage. We have our own weaknesses where David did.

You can’t live that way and expect there to be no consequences. Four out of every ten children born in our country are born to people who are unmarried. Half of their mothers will be forced to live on welfare, and even more will live below the poverty line. It will cost taxpayers 2.2 billion dollars every year to support them. Those children will be far less likely to grow up and do well in school. They will be far more likely to grow up and end up in jail.

That’s when the children are fortunate enough to be born. Of the nearly one million American children who die by abortion each year, by far the majority are conceived by people who are not married to each other.

Where there is no pregnancy, there may still be disease. One out of five Americans is said to carry a sexually transmitted disease. We have ways of preventing pregnancy and disease, but they don’t work perfectly. Even where there is no pregnancy or disease, that does not mean no consequence. This kind of sin changes us. It changes the way we treat the opposite gender, and never for the better. It feeds our inborn selfishness. It erodes our patience, discipline, and self-control. It makes us shallow. We become less the servant to others, more the consumer and user of other people. In one way or another the consequences expose such behavior for what it really is: sin.

The sin in this story is clear to see. “But where is there any trace of grace?” you might ask. The story doesn’t end here. God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David. He led David to confess, “I have sinned against the Lord.” To that Nathan promised, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.” So swiftly God took David’s adultery, lies and murder; so swiftly God takes our lust and ruined relationships, and removes them from our records. Seven little words, “The Lord has taken away your sin,” and that part of the story is done.

How can he do that? This grace is related to another consequence of David and Bathsheba’s union. In no way did the Lord approve either their adultery or their marriage. But that does not mean he will not turn such things and use them to his advantage. The second child born to David and Bathsheba is Solomon. God used him to continue the bloodline of the Savior and the promise of salvation for the sins of the world. David’s condemnation and judgment fell 28 generations and 980 years later on his greatest grandchild, Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah.

God’s grace still overcomes our sins. Though he never approves of them, he still cleanses us from them through the blood of Jesus Christ his Son. His grace still leads him to take everything we do and turn it to serve his penitent people. Maybe he uses it as a wake-up call, or a warning for others about the dangerous path they are pursuing. Maybe seeing the depth of our sin helps us to see the heights of his love more clearly.

Whatever God does, in all things he works for the good of those who love him, even when working with the consequences of our sin.

1 John 4:16-18 “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.

When John speaks of love being “made complete” among us, he is not suggesting that God’s love itself was ever missing anything. Remember that God’s unconditional love for us is more than a feeling. It is love that always moves him to action. It is a love that gives: gives us life, gives us his Son, gives us faith, gives us his Spirit, gives us forgiveness, gives us strength for the day. His love is “made complete” when it reaches its goal of giving us all his gifts.

God’s love hasn’t given us everything it wants to give us until it has made us confident Judgment Day means only life and heaven for us. In this way love is made complete among us. Then God’s love has given us every gift that it has to give. Then we are confident the only things we will hear from him in the end are words like, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”

But how can we be so sure? John says, “…because in this world, we are like him.” We are like him? Are you or I really much like Jesus in this world? How much time did Jesus spend trying to make his life comfortable in this world? I don’t recall anything in the gospels about Jesus saving up to buy himself something he just had to have or spending hours deciding how he was going to decorate the living room, not that these things are wrong in and of themselves. But for Jesus, there didn’t seem to be much time for that. I don’t see Jesus getting angry about the lack of decent service at one of the inns in which he ate or slept. Honestly, can you see him complaining about the food? I don’t see Jesus debating whether or not he should stop to help someone, neglecting prayer because he was too busy or too tired, holding grudges and refusing to try to get along with irritating people. If our confidence on Judgment Day is based upon our lives looking like Jesus’ life, then the only thing we could be confident of is hell.

If that is our fear, then we have missed John’s point when he says, “Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in him.” Living in God’s love means that God’s love is our home. We live under its shelter. We look like Jesus to God in this world not because we have improved to the point of perfection. Our perfection is this: for Jesus’ sake God has forgiven all our sins. He has graciously given us credit for the kind and loving way Jesus treated others. In this way, Jesus’ life of love is our own life of love. This is how John can say, “…in this world we are like him.” By faith Jesus’ life and death have become our own.

God’s love is beautiful place to live, and a sure promise for the life to come.

Luke 8:8, 15 “Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown….The seed on the good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.”

God’s word is a seed with the power to give me a new and noble heart. God once promised his people through the prophet Ezekiel, “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” Through his contemporary Jeremiah he said, “Is not my word like a fire, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”

But the process through which the Lord goes to work transplanting a good and noble heart into our chests involves the gentle message of his grace. On my concrete driveway there is a crack into which the grass keeps creeping. The grass is relatively soft and pliable. I can tear it with my hands. But it has the power to keep extending and widening that crack in the concrete.

In the gospel our Lord professes a love for us that far exceeds any other love we have known. He sacrificed his Son to save us. He forgives us all day every day. No matter how repulsive we might have made ourselves with our sin, his only desire is to have us back for himself, and there is no price he would not pay, he did not pay, to make it happen.

This soft and gentle message creeps into our hearts, breaks up the stony unbelief, and replaces it with a beating heart of faith. This is the heart that holds onto the word for dear life, because it is life. This is the heart that overflows with acts of Christian love, and words of Christian witness, because “out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” This is the heart that is fruitful in the faithful, but God’s word is still the seed whose power makes it happen.

So plant a seed. Hear God’s word and plant it in your own heart. Share God’s word and plant it someone else. Then let the seed do what seeds do, and watch it grow.

Luke 8:7, 14 “Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants….The seed that fell among the thorns stand for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches, and pleasures, and they do not mature.”

Nobody I know makes it their goal in life to live in poverty. But historically God’s people have not handled prosperity very well. It tends to corrupt more than it blesses. That is Jesus’ picture here.

The problem is that “prosperity” too easily transforms into “worldliness.” If we could accept that the material world in which we live is all headed for the ash heap–there is no saving anything here, only applying a few band aids and fixes to keep it going a little longer; if we could be content with what we have been given and stop obsessing about having more; if we could see things mostly as tools to serve people and share the gospel with them; if we could trust God’s promise to take care of every need; if we cared more about a real heaven to come than an artificial one we try to build on earth; then prosperity would present no particular temptation.

Then we would worry less about who gets elected, and how my retirement funds are doing, and where the unemployment rate stands today, and whether the polar ice cap is melting, and whether they are coming to take away my guns, and which news is fake and which news is real, and whether I am getting my fair share. And we would go and live our faith. We would go to work and do our job faithfully. We would love our neighbor, no matter how he looks or thinks. We would be good stewards of the things God has given us to manage. We would speak up for those who need someone to speak up for them. We would raise our families to know that Jesus is the best thing there is, and we would tell our friends, and we would dig deep so that people all over the world could know it, too. We wouldn’t worry. We wouldn’t obsess. We wouldn’t hoard. We would believe. And then we would go and live.

But as powerful as God’s word is, faith is “choked by life’s worries, riches, and pleasures,” and if we will not let these things go, we will not mature. For all our scurrying around trying to build our little utopia right here on earth, we will be of little use to God or man. We can only pray that the worldly distractions do not strangle our faith all the way to death.

Years ago I remember reading about a diet pill that expanded in your stomach to give you the feeling of being full. The idea was that then you would not eat so much, and you could lose weight. Life’s “worries, riches, and pleasures” fill up our lives, and our souls, so that we feel full, and there is not so much room for the thing we really need: God’s word of grace. If you ate today, and have a roof over your head and clothes on your back, you have enough. “You are worried and upset about many things,” Jesus once told his friend Martha, “but only one thing is needed.” That one thing is listening to what Jesus says. Hear about how much he loves you, how he forgives all yours sins, how he died to save you, how he will raise you to life someday, over and over again. Then the good crop of Christian faith and life can crowd out the world’s distractions again, and we will live.

Luke 8:6, 13 “Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture….Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away.”

You heard Jesus right. These are people who believe for a while (we are people who have believed for a while) but in a time of testing they fall away. Matthew’s gospel defines this testing a little further as trouble or persecution that comes because of God’s word. This is suffering because of what we believe. Others oppose our Christian faith.

This kind of testing is a universal Christian experience. In some places the testing is severe. You remember about four years ago when about 275 Christian girls were kidnapped from their school in northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, a Muslim terrorist group that opposes educating girls because it prevents them from adopting Islamic teaching as a way of life. All the girls were pressured to convert. Many were forced to marry. According to Boko Haram, as many as 90 have been martyred, and another 100 have converted to Islam.

For you and me, the testing has been more subtle. But the pressure is unrelenting. It is so much a part of the atmosphere in which we live that at times we may not even notice it. While canvassing one day, a woman in the neighborhood asked me what we believed. I wanted to talk about our need for repentance and Jesus’ redeeming work on the cross. She wanted to talk about same-sex marriage and paths to heaven outside of Christianity. She had grown up a Christian. But the spirit of the age in which we live had its way with her heart. She gave up not only a few isolated Christian doctrines. She gave up on Christianity altogether. And though she was polite, she made it clear there was something wrong with me for not “moving on” and letting go of what the Bible teaches.

Jesus never said that following him would be easy. He said, “Take up your cross.” It is easy to be a Christian when you are living in the joy of knowing God loves and forgives you, and when you are surrounded by people who share that faith and support it. That is God’s good seed at work in us. And we don’t have to lose that joy or surrender our faith when it comes under fire.

But we need roots in God’s word to go down deep, because Jesus did not come to bring peace but a sword, and he warns that in this world we will have much trouble, and that we must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God. God’s word is a powerful seed, but we know it will be opposed by others.

Luke 8:5, 11-12 “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up….The seed is the word of God. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.”

During archaeological excavations of Herod the Great’s palace on Masada in the mid-1960’s, a cache of Judean date palm seeds was discovered. The Judean date palm tree became extinct 800 years ago. For forty years this cache of seeds was stored at an Israeli university. In 2005 three of the seeds were planted, and one of them has grown into a tree that has been nicknamed “Methuselah.” The hope is that by the early 2020’s this tree can be crossbred with its nearest contemporary relative to produce fruit. After 2000 years this dry, hard, apparently lifeless piece of plant material has produced new life.

Seeds are little miracles of creation. Something that looks so simple, just a little ball of ordinary material to the naked eye, possesses the power to transform itself into a living thing thousands of times its size, complex in shape, beauty, and function. Seeds make a fitting picture for the word of God in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower. Something that looks ordinary and small–just some words, a simple message–has the power transform itself into a new heart, a changed man, a life that never ends. But it doesn’t always turn out that way…

The first time the devil appears in the Bible, the first words out of his mouth are, “Did God really say…?” Since that time attacking God’s word has been central to his business. It’s no surprise, then, when Jesus explains the first part of his parable this way: “The seed is the word of God. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.” The devil has ways of hardening the heart and snatching the word away before it can do any “damage.” He makes the word sound unreasonable. I mean, miracles and magic are fine for fairy tales. Prince Charming can kiss the princess and bring her back to life. But the dead leaving their graves and rejoining the living? Maybe in a horror flick. Grown ups don’t put stock in that kind of thing, do they?

Or, he pits the word against our personal experience. “Honor your father and mother.” Yeah right. Maybe in some 1950’s Leave-It-to-Beaver family. Dad was a workaholic, and mom was an alcoholic, and neither cared about anyone but themselves. “He will command his angels concerning you to keep you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” So where were they when the car accident left me with chronic back pain, or robbed me of 80 percent use of my right hand?

Or he makes the word seem foolish and unappealing. “Blessed are the poor…those who mourn…the meek.” “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

By stirring up false human reasoning, flattering shallow human goodness, appealing to selfish ideas about “fairness,” inflating the idea that “I’m a good person–I deserve better,” the devil hardens human hearts and snatches God’s word away. He goes over the heart like a steam roller, making it hard to the idea that I am a sinner who needs God’s grace; or that there is such a thing as God; or that God is loving, forgiving, good, and kind. In this way the greatest gift ever given, Jesus’ selfless sacrifice on the cross, sits like seed on a concrete slab. It might be heard, but it won’t be considered or believed. Satan has effectively snatched the seed away.

This isn’t so much a description of you or me. If you are reading this, chances are you are a believer with a heart opened by God’s grace to what his word says. But next time you find your sharing of God’s word bouncing off someone’s heart and falling to the floor, remember Jesus’ picture.

Then remember that there is more to this story…

Daniel 9:19 “O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act! For your sake, O my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your name.”

Listening is an important part of our relationship with God, and there is nothing more important for us than to listen to him speak to us in his word. One thing he promises us there is that he will always listen to us. The Lord is the best listener there is! And when Daniel speaks to him, Daniel shows that he has learned to speak the Lord’s language: to pray about the things that especially concern the Lord.

“O Lord, forgive!” Daniel pleads. Does anything strike you as strange about that request? Other than Jesus, Daniel is one of the few characters in the Bible about whom we never hear anything negative. He was about as upright and godly a man as this earth has known. And yet, when you read this prayer in its entirety, and here as he concludes it, Daniel begs for God’s forgiveness again and again. In fact, the majority of his prayer is made of confession of sin and pleas for forgiveness.

Do you see why this is such a basic part of our life of prayer? It has been said that we live for the forgiveness of sins. As believers in Jesus, our relationship with God is not based upon our obedience to him. If it were, we would all be in trouble. Our whole relationship with God is based upon his forgiveness of our sins. If Jesus had not given his life on the cross in payment for our every sin, we would have no access to God. It is only that sacrifice that makes our relationship with God possible. Based on that forgiveness alone are any of our prayers are ever heard. God does forgive every sin for Jesus’ sake. He promises to do so. And thus forgiveness is the doorway through which we pass to bring every other request we make in prayer.

“O Lord, hear and act!” Daniel asks. Daniel understood what gives prayer its power. The words we speak do not have mystical, magical power of their own. We aren’t witches casting a spell. Rather, prayer invites God himself to take up our cause and to solve our problems or provide what we need. Sometimes, the Lord has been waiting for just such an invitation, even though he may have intended to help us all along. He is waiting for us to remember how much we need him before he himself gets involved.

And nothing in which he gets involved gives him greater pleasure than that which affects his own name and reputation. “For your sake, O Lord my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your name.” Daniel was an old man now. When the rest of his people returned to Jerusalem, he would not be making the trip. But since God had promised to bring his people home, and since God’s promise of a Savior relied upon God’s people getting back to the promised land, God’s own reputation was at stake. Daniel’s prayer wasn’t selfish. It was a prayer for the glory of God.

What do we pray about? We can pray about all our needs, but learning God’s language in prayer also involves learning to pray for God’s glory like Daniel did. In teaching us to pray this way, our heavenly Father is teaching us to better understand what it means to be members of his family. Then we will have something truly worth saying.

Daniel 9:4 “I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed, ‘O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands…’”

Daniel refers to the God to whom he was praying as the LORD. If you check in your Bible, this is spelled in all capital letters. This is the name by which God revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush: the “I Am” God, “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” if taken letter by letter from the Hebrew.

This name was important for a couple of reasons. It was this name especially by which God distinguished himself from all the false gods. The God of the Bible has always insisted that he is the only God there is. Praying to any other god is a complete waste of time.

We might compare it to praying in Jesus’ name in our day. Since Jesus has come, we know that it is only through him that we know the true God. We even have his promise to give us what we ask in his name. When we pray to or through Jesus, we are praying to the only God there really is.

Now not every prayer has to include the letters J-E-S-U-S out loud to be “in his name.” But prayers which purposely exclude Jesus to avoid offense, or because they are offered by non-Christians, go nowhere. Offered to any other god, they are a complete waste of time.

Getting the object of our prayers, the true God, right was important for another reason. By his name the LORD God revealed some very important truths about what kind of a God he is. To put it in his own words, he is “The LORD, the LORD, the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.” Knowing that he is a God of grace, compassion, forgiveness, and love, encourages us to come to him in prayer often.

So do Daniel’s descriptions of him. “O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands…” When we believe in God and go to him for help, we need to know that we are praying to more than some little sprite like the tooth fairy, who isn’t good for much more than a couple of quarters under the pillow. He is the great and awesome God who fills all things and holds all power. We can share the confidence of our children who have learned to sing, “My God is so great, so strong, and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do.”

Then we can be sure that he is the God who “keeps his covenant of love,” the God who keeps all his promises. That was a special comfort for Daniel here. He was praying about the seemingly impossible return of his people to their homeland. Who was Israel now but a defeated little ethnic group without a country of their own? What favors could they expect from the great Persian Empire? But Daniel knew that God had promised through Jeremiah this would all end in 70 years. Daniel knew that our God keeps his promises.

Doesn’t that help to inspire our prayers? And doesn’t that encourage us to get to know more and more about the God to whom we pray, so that we can know his promises and be sure of his blessings?