July 13, 2013

Turn to the Lord Your God!

8th Sunday after Pentecost, 7/14/13
Deuteronomy 30:9-14


Turn to the Lord Your God!
I. That presupposes we have turned away from him.
II. That’s something God does through his word.


Independence. Taking care of yourself. Making it on your own. There’s a lot to be said for people who have attained those admirable qualities. By definition, they don’t depend on others for their survival, their daily living, their success. And that quality usually serves them well when times get tough. They’re likely going to make it through. Just as they have done in the past, they’re going to find a way to make it through this latest difficulty.

Even more admirable, they’re often the people who are best suited to help those who need it. They realize they have the ability to help, and they’re willing to share what they know and what they have in a particular situation.

Independence. It’s a fine personal goal.

Unless you think you can become independent of your God. But there are those who attempt it. They think they can strike out on their own and leave God behind. They think they can make it on their own without their God. They think they can avoid God and things will turn out well for them.

I’m here to tell you this morning that has never happened and it never will. Not even momentarily. And definitely not eternally.

That’s why we begin these services with a confession of sins. We come to grips with our sins. There are little sinful corners of my life and my heart that I don’t want Jesus barging into. How about you?

It’s always been that way for God’s people and always will be until Jesus returns. It was certainly true of God’s Old Testament people, the Israelites. And thus God used his servant, Moses, the leader of those people, to offer them the most helpful advice that God can give to any sinner. In this morning’s sermon text—some of Moses’ final words to the Israelites after leading them for 40 years—Moses tells the people, “Turn to the Lord your God.” I can’t think of anything more important for us to do. Certainly this is one of the fruits of a true faith—our worship theme today. Turn to the Lord your God! Let’s see what that’s all about.

Part I.

I’m sure you’re familiar with cases of self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re a young lady, enrolled as a freshmen this fall at a large university. For some reason, you expect your roommate, whom you’ve never met before and won’t meet until your first day on campus, to be shy. When you arrive and meet her, you don’t make any effort to have a conversation with her, to get to know her much at all. And so she doesn’t speak with you. And you conclude that she’s shy.

Because our text begins in the middle of a paragraph, you need to know what Moses had spoken just prior to this to understand him properly. He’s warning the Children of Israel what will happen if they abandon the covenant they had made with the Lord. At Mt. Sinai God promised to be their God and they promised to be God’s special people by obeying all the laws that God gave them. He warned them against worshipping idols, about turning away from the Lord. And if you know the history of these people, that’s exactly what happened. Read through the Book of Judges sometime. The things God’s special people did were deplorable. It started with idol worship and resulted in every gross sin imaginable.

So, was this self-fulfilling prophecy? Not at all.

It was the Israelites acting in their own sinful independence. They thought life would better without the Lord in their lives. They thought they could be happy and prosperous without him. They thought they could be blessed even though they ignored what God said.

And they were wrong. All sorts of hardships resulted, some of which lasted for decades. At one point things got so bad almost an entire tribe of the Jews was wiped out. Hundreds of years later—after the time of King David—they again forgot this lesson. Ten of the tribes thought they could worship a golden calf which they named the Lord and trusted it to bless them. But they were wrong. They were wiped out, never to be heard from again. And the rest of the Jews? They didn’t learn either. A little more than a hundred years later they had completely forsaken the Lord. So the Lord allowed the Babylonians to destroy them.

And then the Lord got the response he was looking for. They repented. They did what Moses urged them here in our text. Moses said, “The LORD will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers, if you obey the LORD your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” They changed their minds about their sinful ways and returned to the Lord with hearts that were sorry for their sins and with lives that reflected that change of heart. That’s a fruit of true faith.
And when Christians live their faith, then they receive God’s blessings. Moses specifically mentioned agricultural prosperity. He could do so because that’s what God had specifically promised his Old Testament people. When we live our lives of faith, God doesn’t give us such a specific promise, but a general one. He promises to bless us as he sees fit and as he knows is best for us.

Turn to the Lord your God! That presupposes we have turned away from him.

As much as we don’t like to hear it, that’s the story of our lives. Maybe our story isn’t exactly like the Israelites’ story. I’m confident that you aren’t tempted to turn away from the Lord to worship idols of wood and stone and precious metals. But each and every sin is really a violation of the First Commandment which forbids us from having any other gods. The other gods that surround us are materialism, self-centeredness, money, pleasure, immorality, fame, cold-heartedness towards those who need our help. We want to do our own thing. We want God to ignore us for awhile. But our God isn’t going anywhere. He sees; he knows; and he forbids it and condemns it. Turn to him! And when we do, we hear not condemnation, but absolution. “I forgive you because of what Jesus, your Savior, has done. I accept his perfect life for your sinful life and his death as the payment for your sins.” That’s the sweetest thing any person can hear. God wants to speak those words to us every day of our lives. Turn to the Lord your God!

Part II.

In our modern world distance doesn’t mean much anymore. The other side of the world is still half a world away, but in a couple of cell phone seconds I can be connected with someone living there. With a few clicks of a computer mouse and I can see exactly what the other side of the world looks like. Even outer space isn’t that far away. There are humans circling our globe in space as we speak.

But imagine what an obstacle distance was to the people first hearing these words of Moses. Physically getting off the earth to go anywhere was impossible then. I can be 500 miles from here in just a couple hours. That same journey would take them weeks.

So, if traveling from one point to another on this earth either takes incredible human effort or incredible modern modes of transportation, how difficult is it to make the journey to our God? Is such a thing even possible? Worse yet, when our sins get in the way of our relationship with the holy God, when our own ways and desires put a mountain-sized barrier between us and God, is it possible to turn to him?

Let’s listen to Moses answer those questions, “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.” Your God loves you so much that he doesn’t make himself inaccessible. He isn’t a hidden, unapproachable God. He’s not so far away that he can’t be found. When he calls for us to turn to him, he’s right by our side.

Even better than that, he accomplishes in us the transformation he desires for us. He has called us to turn from sin, to repent, to trust him for forgiveness. That can seem humanly impossible. But with God, all things are possible. He accomplishes our forgiveness through his word of forgiveness, through the good news of Jesus. That good news, that gospel, has transformed us. It has made the devil’s darlings into God’s children. It has made stone-cold dead hearts alive with faith in Jesus and love for God. It has taken hell-bent sinners and turned them into heaven-bound saints. And now we live each day to the glory of the God who has saved us. And when we fail—and that happens daily—we turn to him and hear again his promise that our sins have all been forgiven.

Turn to the Lord your God! Yes, that presupposes we have turned away from him. But what good news to hear and believe that God turns us to him through his word! Stake your life on that word. God won’t disappoint you. He’ll bless you. Eternally. Amen.