Recount the
Gracious Deeds
(Isaiah 63:7-9) J G White
10:45 am, Sun, Dec 29, 2013 Glad Tidings Worship Centre, Windsor
It's
been Christmastime... memories of Christmas past come to mind. We've looked back to the stories of Jesus to
tell and re-tell them, in lots of ways.
(I even had to wear lipstick for a play about the beginnings of
Christmas!) New Year's is just a few days away; we get ready for 2014 by
reviewing 2013. Yesterday, Windsor
Baptist hosted a funeral for a woman in her 80s; two people who took part in
the service, of course, told stories of her life.
And we,
just a few minutes ago, received the cardboard testimonies of people in our own
fellowship here. In so many ways we
remember and we recount the past. We
tell it.
Isaiah
63 exclaims: Recount the gracious deeds of the Lord, the praiseworthy acts, the
great favour. Those three long verses we
read here are really the beginning of a longer section, that is really a psalm
of communal lament, as we find in the book of Psalms. The lyric starts with recounting the gracious
deeds of the Lord, yes, but this is done in the midst of a very hard time.
These
are the words of a people who feel far from the Living God, who wonder why the
Lord had their hearts hardened against them, who remember their sinful
failures, who remember longingly how special they were to God who led them out
of slavery hundreds of year before, and who cry out to the Lord to save them
again: 'Rend the heavens and come down!” (64:1, 3) “When You did awesome deeds that we did not
expect...” Finally, the song looks for mercy with the familiar image: “Yet, O
Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all
the work of Your hands.” (64:8)
When a
community of faith recounts the things of God, it tells the whole story. The Bible is powerful and compelling in it's
honesty about the whole story. It does
not sugar-coat the followers of God: it tells their many failures and the hurts
they inflicted. Through it all, the Lord
watches, waits, loves and acts. Perhaps
in these days, before your congregation will see great revival, your
congregation – and mine – needs to discover how to confess our own sin, recount
it together, and call on God for mercy.
I don't mean have every individual person confess and repent – though
this is vital – I mean Windsor Baptist discover and face the sin we have
committed as a body, and Glad Tidings know this too, and Oasis, and Windsor
Church of the Nazarene, and so forth.
Read through the Old and New Testaments: you will see that people of God
so often sin as one and must find forgiveness as one. How seldom we do this today! It's always about your sin and my sin and
hers and his. We never see and admit our
sin. The Lord needs to teach us to
recount our shared failures. And we will
see the outpouring of the Lord's blessing, and be able to recount that
powerfully.
To
'recount' is to count again, to retell, to rediscover, to reevaluate... to re-count.
Many of you know the old song, Count Your Blessings by Johnson
Oatman, Jr. (1897) The chorus sings:
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God has done;
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your many blessings, see what God has done.
Here is
another example; from my childhood, really.
Count and Cookie Monster cooperating...
I like
that scene because it includes a couple good things. There is counting, of course; the Count counts. Also, he and Cookie Monster, though they
differ in their approach to the plate of cookies, come together and discover a
plan that works for them. The cooperate. That is what we are doing today, dear
churches; we have come together, to cooperate, to recount the goodness of the
Lord that we all know and share.
There
are many things for us to do. To
rephrase a line by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How do I count Thee? Let me love the ways.”
How do
we recount the gracious deeds of the Lord?
-
Cardboard testimony, and other forms of
testimony.
-
Sunday worship together. “I love to tell the
story;/ For those who know it best/ Seem hungering and thirsting/ To hear it
like the rest.” (Catherine Hankey)
-
The Lord's Supper: “Every time you eat of this
bread and drink of this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death, 'til He come
again.”
-
“The way the Church tells time” - Christmas,
Good Friday, Easter, etc. Even New
Year's. A year of telling the Jesus
story – again.
-
Bible life – be in the Word... get to know the story.
It is full of the gracious deeds of the Lord.
-
Daily prayer and devotional life: inner
gratitude.
-
Being in Christian community, fellowship. We
remember more than I can remember and tell on my own. This togetherness is a great thing. And our fellowship and ministry throughout
the year is valuable. Chatting with a
fellow yesterday about being a Baptist Christian in his early years, and now
has served the Lord as an Anglican Christian for many years. Good things he learned at Windsor Baptist he
carries into his Anglican fellowship.
-
Tell and learn our history – from New Testament
days until now. Church history is
important history. We learn from the
ways God has acted through the centuries, even as we enter this new time that
is so different from the past. When, in
Isaiah 63, we read of “recounting the gracious deeds of the LORD,” we are
seeing but one example of many where God's people told their story. Their story – our story, is centuries
old.
We have stories to tell. I'm more and more fascinated just by the history of Windsor Baptist, as one
example, 194 years old. What was God
doing in 1819 to start my congregation?
Why did the Spirit revive things in the 1860s? How did the leadership inspire the
congregation after the great Windsor fire of 1897? How did the people press on when their pastor
dropped dead in 1965? The Lord can use
our history to bless us today.
“How do I count Thee? Let me love the ways.”
Just a
couple years ago, Matt Redman and Jonas Myrin composed the song 10,000 Reasons
(2011). It came together very quickly,
inspired by Psalm 103. Redman
acknowledges that the “10,000 years” phrase was a nod to Amazing Grace,
and like that old song, this new one is an extremely popular expression of how
important and powerful, even life-changing it is to recount to gracious deeds
of the Lord.
You're rich in love and You're slow to anger,
Your name is great and Your heart is kind;
For all Your goodness I will keep on singing:
Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find.
