「神はわたしたちの祈りを待つ」 十一月第四主日礼拝 宣教 2024年11月27日
詩編 Psalms 66編10〜20節 牧師 河野信一郎
Good morning. It is so early, the last Lord’s Day of November. No wonder it is getting colder. I am grateful to be able to worship with you all this morning. Finally, Advent will begin next week on the 1st. We will be decorating for Christmas today after the service. Please help us out. This Christmas, we will have a Christmas service and celebration on the morning of the 22nd, a Christmas evening service in the evening, and a Christmas concert by The Bridge in the evening. Please pray for your family and friends and invite and attend with them.
This morning’s service is being offered as a service to remember the World Baptist Week of Prayer, and prayer requests from missionary families working in Southeast Asia and Africa will be shared, as well as prayer requests from their various activities. We also hope you will look forward to the testimony of Missionary P, who has been sent from Taiwan to Japan. Testimonies are not always about sharing happy things, but also about being reminded of God’s presence, knowing His love, and encountering Jesus when we hit various obstacles, and missionary P is no exception. Let us all know how God was involved, how he met Jesus, and how he was led to Japan, and let us remember and pray for the work of P, Ss, Bs, Brs, and their families who have been sent to Japan.
Now, just the other day, I would like to introduce my message by first sharing a phrase I learned on a news program: “San Tei, San Sho” (Three Lows, Three Less). Recently, there has been a series of indiscriminate killings in China that also involve children. A boy attending a Japanese school in Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, lost his life in an attack in mid-September, and many people were killed or injured by a runaway car. The Chinese government has positioned these incidents as “retaliation against society” and analyzed them as an expression of dissatisfaction with society through violence. Common to all of these incidents is the “Three Lows and Three Less”.
I learned that the “three lows” are low income, low social status, and low social popularity. I learned that the “three less/smalls” means little social interaction, little opportunity to interact with society, and little opportunity to voice one’s dissatisfaction. In response to these incidents, the local government has instructed the police to focus on people who fit these “three low and three less/small” categories as “potential offenders”. Interestingly, the people who are believed to be responsible for these crimes include not only low-income earners, but also middle-class and wealthy people, many of whom are frustrated with the declining standard of living due to China’s economic downturn, bankruptcies, unemployment, and other problems.
What surprised me the most was a comment from a Chinese journalist living in Japan: “There is no such thing as counseling in China”. There is a lack of trustworthy relationships where people can confide their problems. There are no facilities or institutions where they can seek advice or counseling. I was really surprised, but at the same time, I felt the need for Jesus in China, and I prayed in memory of the missionaries who hope to one day return to the mission field in China to share God’s love and the gospel of Jesus. I prayed for them because Jesus Christ is the Counselor and Savior of all peoples and of us.
Chinese government authorities move quickly to monitor and detain those who might commit crimes. But God and Jesus are moving to free such people from anxiety, frustration, and despair. Those who travel to Japan are likely to be middle-class to affluent people. Those who cannot escape from China and cannot be freed from their anxieties and doubts must be freed by God’s love and the gospel of Jesus. Not only the Chinese, but also the Uyghurs, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Ukraine need to be set free from suffering. If we cannot do it, let us support those who can and support organizations that send workers.
I apologize for the lengthy preface, but I believe that this is something we should remember and pray for during this World Prayer Week. “God is waiting for us” is the series theme and I would like to share this with you this morning. Although there are many references to God’s waiting in the New Testament, I dare to use the Old Testament book of Isaiah and this morning’s Psalm 66 as texts for my message because I want you to feel God’s long-awaited presence in your life, even if just a little bit.
This morning, I would like to share from Psalm 66 that God is waiting patiently for us to pray to Him in the name of Jesus Christ, but please forgive me if I run a bit fast. Verses 1-4 were read as a call to worship this morning, and this part is a call to praise God who rescued us from a critical situation, offering thanksgiving and joyful praise to Him. Verses 5-7 are an invitation to worship, to come and see how powerful God’s deliverance of Israel was.
Verses 8 and 9 describe the mission and purpose of why we worship God. “Bless our God, O peoples; let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept our soul among the living and has not let our feet slip.” Our mission is to celebrate God and praise His name through worship.
But to those who love God with all their hearts and offer Him praise and worship, the psalmist says, God gives life to our souls in worship. In other words, God gives us the strength, comfort, encouragement, and guidance we need to love Him and live according to His will, and in worship He gives us the joy of always being at peace and kept alive by His grace, without letting our souls be shaken by anxiety, fear, or anger. He says that He protects our faith so that we do not grow weak and fall down in our daily lives. Therefore, he encourages us to cherish worship, which gives abundant grace to those who love and worship God.
Verse 10 says, “For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried.” This is not a reference to the past, but to the fact that God gives us training in the form of trials in order to transform us into people who are fit for His will and worthy of fulfilling His mission. Therefore, God has a plan for our trials, and we are to walk in trust in Him alone.
Verses 11 and 12 are the same. “You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.” God burns us with fire and washes us with water to remove impurities from us. We might say that we are baptized with the Holy Spirit and baptized with water. What is the meaning and purpose of this? It is the purpose of “putting us in a place of abundance. It can be understood as the Kingdom of God.
Verse 13 says, “I will come into your house with burnt offerings; I will perform my vows to you.” I think it is better to understand “I will come into your house with burnt offerings” as offering oneself to God, in other words, to live a life of devotion and service to God. This devotion is not something that is forced upon us by God, but rather, “I was saved by God, I know true love, and now I am being kept alive in grace. Verses 14 and 15 express a commitment to walk in obedience to God and the faith to fulfill it.
Now, the subject of Psalm 66 up to this point has been “God,” but in verses 16 through 20 the subject is switched to “I.” This “I” is the king of Israel. This last part of the psalm indicates that the God of Israel, the Lord God, is the one who is to be praised and worshipped by the people of Israel as a whole.
Verse 16 says, “Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul.” This ‘what he has done for my soul’ is translated ‘the things He has done for my soul’ in the New Revised Version of the Bible. The Lord God saves our souls.
Verse 17 says, “I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue.” which means that he prayed to God in a crisis situation. In other words, to those of us living in today’s difficult times, God says, “You can pray to God. God is waiting for you to pray to Him.
However, there are some prayers that will not be heard, verse 18 states. It says, “If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” If we have pride and pride in our hearts, God will not answer our prayers. But verse 19 says, “But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer.” God will answer prayers that are prayed with a humble and contrite heart.
What we need is to believe in God with an open heart, pray to God, surrender all that is in our hearts, and pray in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ. God does not reject the prayers of those who pray humbly in this way, but is gracious to them. Thus, verse 20, “Hallelujah! Praise God! God is waiting for us to pray. Let us walk according to the Lord’s will, seeking His will by constantly praying to Him who is waiting for our prayers.