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Harvest 2019

Our Graciousness as a response to God's Grace 

 Bible Readings:

 Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 9:6-15

Psalm 8 is to all intents and purposes a harvest hymn. Many of the commentators believe this psalm was sung during the festival of tabernacles or Sukkoth , which celebrated the autumn harvest so it is for all intents and purposes a harvest hymn. And it asks the question of where do people fit into the whole picture of God’s creation.

It’s also prophetic in that it’s used by several NT authors to point to Jesus and how Jesus would restore us to our rightful position as children (read handiwork) of God.

So what does the Psalm say:

Firstly, it’s a psalm of praise. And it places the questions that it asks in the context of worship and then uses that worship as a way of demonstrating the Lordship of God.

‘Through the praise of children and infants
    you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
    to silence the foe and the avenger.’

And then David asks the questions of who and why?

‘Who am I in relation to all this?’
 ‘Why does God care for us?’

It has been suggested that this psalm was written during David’s time in Gath of Philistia, when Saul was trying to kill him. In the beginning of the psalm, we have the phrase ‘according to the Gittith’ and you can imagine David asking these questions as he is in exile asking some deep existential questions.

And maybe that’s the important thing here. In the presence of God when we kneel in worship, what is our position and our role.? When we see ourselves in the light of God’s wonderfully glorious, beautiful creation who are we and why God does what he does for us become really important questions.

It’s interesting that David doesn’t give a direct answer to those questions. He simply describes our position as he sees it. It may be that like his son Solomon says in the book of Ecclesiastes that trying to answer these questions is futile or maybe he wants us to come to our own conclusions as a response to our experience of the God of the universe.

And how we answer those questions for ourselves will determine our response. Not only to God but also to each other.

In our 2 Corinthians passage Paul is writing to the Corinthian Church about the gift that Paul is asking the Churches to collect for the Church in Jerusalem. The Church in Judea at the time was in the grip of a severe famine. The crops in Egypt had failed and so the impact was felt throughout the area. Paul had written to the Church in Corinth previously and was writing to them to reinforce his message about generosity in response to God’s grace. He was also chasing a stingy church in comparison to others.

NT scholar Paul Barnett says that God’s grace towards us reproduces his graciousness within us. And we see this in Paul’s word to the Church. Paul writes in our Corinthians passage ‘This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.’

I mentioned to the young ladies earlier that Psalm 8 is all about our position in God’s creation and I asked them three questions:

What is the right thing they can do now?
How can we demonstrate God’s love?
What’s the one thing you can do to look after God’s creation?

I want to change the questions slightly because I believe that as we look at our response to God’s grace we need to ask ourselves some very important questions. So here are the three questions I want us to think about this week in light of God’s Grace.

1) How do I demonstrate God’s love?
2) What’s the right thing to do today to demonstrate God’s love?
3) How do we continue to care for God’s people?

I appreciate that today is Harvest and today is about celebrating the bounty that God has given us but as we worship God for his goodness let’s make sure we are reciprocating it back because it is that that we demonstrate true worship.

Amen

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