Sermon Title- Sing The Lord’s Song!
Sermon Subject- How to sing God’s song in a hostile world

Scripture- Lamentations 1:1-6, Psalm 137:1-4, 2 Timothy 1:1-14 and Luke 17:5-10

Date- 07 October, 2001
In our reading from Lamentations Jeremiah begins his grieving for the fate of Judah and its capitol, Jerusalem. Because of hundreds of years of apostasy, the worship of idols and other Gods, because they turned deaf ears to God’s Word and His prophets the God of Creation has used the nation of Babylon as his instrument of punishment. The city is destroyed, the temple burned and leveled to the ground, the king is gone and the people are in captivity as slaves. And our psalmist in Psalm 137 laments. “How are we to sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?”
Part of the problem for the Jews of this day was that they had put God in a box. They had come to believe that true worship was only possible in the Temple because that was where God lived in the Holy of Holies. Without the Temple where could they find God and how were they to worship God? God used this time in exile to teach His people that He is the God of all nations and that he can be found anywhere and everywhere. God taught them that true worship can take place anywhere because true worship of God takes place in the human heart and human spirit, not in a building. So the Jews learned to sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land. And to insure that God’s punishment for their unfaithfulness and the lessons God taught them while in exile in Babylon are not forgotten the Book Of Lamentations is read during worship once every year to this day.
The question for us is, “What can we learn from this experience of the Jews in exile that applies to our lives today?” For the Jews of Lamentations the foreign land was Babylon, but it could have been any other place away from their center of worship where fellow believers did not surround them. Our center of worship is the church, the body of Christ, where fellow believers surround us. In this setting is it not easy to sing the songs of the Lord? Is it not easy to pray, to praise God and to speak of our love for Jesus? Then where are our foreign lands?
For many of us the foreign land is the place where we work. For some of us it may be where we go to school and for others places where we volunteer or where we shop frequently. For a few it may even be in our family. The central theme in these places is that we are separated from our center of worship and fellow believers do not surround us. So how do we sing the songs of the Lord in these places?
In our reading from Luke Jesus partially answers this question. Start with a small amount of faith, as small as a mustard seed, and allow it to grow with God’s help. Paul advises Timothy in the verses that we read to cling to the faith and his love for Christ. In the body of Christ with the help of God’s Holy Spirit and fellow Christians we grow our faith and then we can go into the foreign land and sing the songs of the Lord. We do this first of all with the melodies of how we live. If the melodies of how we live, what our priorities are and how we treat other people resonate with the person of Jesus Christ, we are singing the songs of the Lord. St. Francis of Assisi many hundreds of years ago expressed this beautifully when he advised Christians to do the following, “Preach the Gospel at all times, and sometimes use words.” When how we live our lives consistently reflect Jesus Christ, our words then take on life changing power for the hearer. In the foreign land we may be separated from the physical center of worship and from other Christians, but we are never separated from God and the power of His Spirit. If we will just make the first hesitant, squeaky, trembling notes of His song, God’s Spirit will give us pure notes to continue. In the past 6 weeks I have had the incredible joy of listening to 3 members of our Charge describe their first attempt to witness for Christ, to sing the songs of the Lord. Each had a common experience. Once they started it became easier and one exclaimed, “I didn’t know I knew that much to tell about Jesus!” My friends, like the Jews of Babylon you and I can learn to sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land because no land is foreign to the God who created that land. Where ever we find ourselves, God is there waiting for us and His Spirit will lead our song. Amen