Expectancy

Lk 1:8-11    Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.  Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense.
   
There is a strange thing about life, which we all know but rarely think about. It is that we don’t know what is coming next. Yes, we may have a job which requires us to be in the same place doing the same thing for five out of every seven days, we may plan in business to achieve certain goals, we may have to attend exams or whatever, and so a lot of life is actually very predictable. However there are things that come along in life that we just didn’t foresee; things like illnesses or accidents, redundancies, rising interest rates that change your financial status. Then there are chance encounters, opportunities that come from nowhere. So yes, there are in fact, lots of things that come unexpectedly into our lives. In fact they are even more unexpected because, as we noted, there are lots of things in life that just keep on happening and which make us think that life will just go on the same for ever. There’s a danger in church life that we fall into that mentality as well.
   
In Zechariah’s case it was probably the same. Whatever he did as a priest he probably did week in, week out. It has been suggested that because of the numbers of priests though, the opportunity to go into the inner part and burn incense before the Lord only came once in a lifetime. In King David’s reign they had appointed twenty four divisions of priests (1 Chron 24:1-19). After the exile only four had returned (Ezra 2:36-39) but had been re-divided into twenty four and given the old names. Now in Zechariah’s time each division served for one week, twice a year. In other words there would only be 14 men out of his division each year that would be chosen to go in and offer the incense. Our verses in Luke tell us that they were chosen by lot and on this particular day the lot fell to Zechariah.
    
Now we need to realise two things about this. First, it was a great privilege that was given to the priest only once in his lifetime, so yes, this is a very special occasion. The trouble with special occasions is that they tend to be very formal. The priest would have been instructed exactly how to go about offering the incense. He would be concerned as to ensure that he did it exactly right – because he was only going to do this once! It’s a bit like people setting up a special service for national leaders say, where everything has got to be just right. Perhaps some of us have this sort of feel about our Sunday services – they have got to be ‘performed’ in just the right way. So here he is, excited to be doing this thing that he’d never had the opportunity to do before, and would never do again. Wonderful!
    
But there is a second thing to be considered, and this is that in all probability he was not expecting anything more than to go in, perform the ceremony, have a great feeling about it, and then go out. He was certainly not expecting God to turn up in any way. After all God had not spoken to Israel for over four hundred years. This would be the equivalent for us of saying that God had last spoken back in the sixteenth century! Just imagine it, year after year of silence from heaven. Eventually you give up any expectation of God speaking. “Oh it was something He used to do, but we have no need of that today.” Does that sound familiar? Isn’t that exactly what parts of the church say about the activity of the Holy Spirit? Oh, He stopped speaking once the canon of Scripture was completed. This virtually pushes us into the position of deists who say that God started the world off but doesn’t intervene in it now. The Christian deists say, “Well, yes, Jesus died for our sins and the Spirit started the church off, but He doesn’t speak or move in our lives today.” How absurd! The very thing about the age we live in, is that it is the age of the Spirit and God has never stopped speaking or acting by His Spirit since the day of Pentecost.
   
Can we check our belief system? Are we like Zechariah, performing our rituals, week in, week out? Have we no expectation of God speaking? I have to constantly remind our worship leaders, “Give God space to speak and move each week when we gather. Don’t just plough on with six songs. Let God speak through people, let Him do what He wants to do.” Thus we find He often speaks through a word of revelation to bless, encourage or direct, He often prompts people to pray, to testify or to ask for prayer. Our coming together is not to be dead ritual, performed the same way every week. It is to be an opportunity for the people of God to encounter the living God who speaks and moves among His people and is thus glorified.
    
Let’s shake off that deadly way of thinking that says that God doesn’t speak and move today. He does! Let’s cast off that attitude of non-expectation and instead come together every Sunday with an anticipation of meeting with the living Lord. Let’s open our ears and our hearts and our services to Him that He may be glorified. Hallelujah!

  

History

Matt 1:1     A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham
   
We all have history; it’s what makes us what we are. If we’re seventy years old we’ve got seventy years of history plus the family life that went before that made our parents what they were. In the past decade or so, finding out your genealogy has become a big thing for many people. History has become, not merely what we learnt in ‘History’ at school or college, but it’s the flow of what went in the life of my family – my parents, my grand parents, my great grand parents and so on.
     
Matthew, when he starts writing his Gospel, has a real sense about Jesus: he is linked to history. John records Jesus as saying he had come from his Father in heaven (Jn 6:32 -58 – read it and see how many times Jesus said it!), but Matthew wanted to touch base with his fellow Jews, and Jews were very conscious that they had history. Matthew is seriously into working out genealogies and he’s worked out that if Jesus was Joseph’s son, then you could trace him right back to Abraham, so the sixteen verses following this one do just that (possibly they don’t include every single father going back, but simply show the line with key figures). This first verse is a summary verse. Jesus, he says, is part of the royal family of King David, and of course he went back to Abraham, who the Jews considered to be the father of their race. That’s how Matthew sees it.
   
But how did God see it? Why did God inspire Matthew to dig out this genealogy? What was God wanting to say to us through it? Well, a variety of things, but as far as this first opening verse is concerned, God is saying that His Son is not ashamed to be identified with this people.
  
Now that is amazing really, because when you carefully read the Old Testament, the thing that stands out most about this people, is the way they kept on getting it wrong! The Old Testament is almost like looking through a microscope. When you do that you focus on one tiny thing and see it in detail. The whole human race is too big to observe so God gives us the nation of Israel to look at. What’s more they have had the benefit of God’s blessing and God’s help, and still they get it wrong. Oh no, if we had any high ideas about the human race, looking at this special nation would have shattered that illusion.
  
Now here’s the wonderful thing: this nation epitomizes the sinfulness and folly of human nature, but Jesus is not ashamed of identifying himself with them. There is a sense that because he was born into this nation at that particular point of history that, humanly speaking at least, he is very closely associated with them, but that’s not the key issue here.
   
When you get to know people from all walks of life, you increasingly see people who do not feel they are good enough for God. God wouldn’t want to know me because I’m not religious, I’m not good. Exactly! That is the point of this verse. We see it later in Jesus’ ministry again and again, Jesus coming across a group of people who, the religious people describe as ‘sinners’, and he settles down with them, loves them and accepts them as they are, and shares his Father’s love with them. That’s what this verse is all about! It’s saying Jesus came and associated himself completely with the human race. God in human form, yes, but this verse is like Jesus saying, ‘Hey, I’m with you guys. I’m part of your family. Abraham was a man of faith, but he often blew it! David was a man after God’s own heart, but he often blew it. This is my family. I’m not ashamed of them. I’ve come to be part of this family and love you. That’s what this is all about!