Bitter Sweet

Let's say the Lord's Prayer For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. Father, we come before you as a bunch of sinners.

We're not proud of our inadequacy. We're ashamed of it. So many things we should have done and didn't.

So many things we did and shouldn't have done. Forgive us, Father. Thank you for your grace, a God of all compassion, a God of all mercy.

A grace that beggars human comprehension. A love that's so lavished upon the sons of men that angels veil their eyes in astonishment. For when a contingency from their group fell, there was no rescue work.

No one went to a cross for them. But for us, the sons of Adam who bear the image of God, however fractured, you loved us to the extent you sent into this world a mission of mercy to retrieve us to yourself. We're grateful.

Forgive us our sins. And help us to forgive those who sin against us. Lord, it's not always easy to lose bitterness.

Some folk here have been exploited as children. Hard for them to forgive the person who violated them. But grant them that grace.

Some have been dealt treacherously with in relationships. Not easy to forgive. But grant them the ability so to do.

All of us come contrite before your throne. We're grateful to you for all that you've done for us. Enable us to show it in our lives.

Be with this old sin-stained world with all its need. Restraining hand we ask in Northern Ireland at this very moment. May men who march under the banner of Christ remember too the words of peace and consolation that he spoke.

Hear our prayer, O God. As we come around your holy word and follow it by coming around this table, may the one lead to the other. May it not be a mute sacrament, but rather bread and wine which speaks of the broken body and the shed blood of our Lord Jesus and the grace of one who went into the mires of bitterness and sinfulness and eventually caused a fountain of salvation to pour out from which we can all drink and be spiritually nourished and changed.

Amen. Let's have a reading together from Scripture. Let's turn to the book of Exodus, the 15th chapter.

If ever a pastor should have been pitted, Moses was that man. The authorized version describes this congregation as a gainsaying and a wayward people, which is not exactly complimentary. And he ran into difficulty after being ordained.

Quite soon he was number one in the unpopularity chart. Having been a hero, he fell in their estimate. In the 15th chapter of Exodus, you read the plight of poor old Moses.

Verse 22, Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went into the desert of Shur as part of the Sinai Peninsula. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water. When they came to Mara, they could not drink its water because it was bitter.

That is why the place is called Mara. So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, What are we to drink? Then Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.

There the Lord made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them. He said, If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord, your God, and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you. Then they came to Elim, where there were 12 springs and 70 palm trees.

They camped there near the water. More of that in a moment or two. I really delight to read Puritan theology because I think the Puritans actually had a good handle on biblical truth.

If you read some of the old books, blow the cobwebs off if you've got any bookshelves, as we seem to have cobwebs behind the curtains here. Ian White will sort the delegation out that comes to see me without public exposure of dust in the church. If you blow the cobwebs off and look at some of those old books, they can teach you a great deal, because these men and women of God, they knew a great deal about the Lord.

As I was reading earlier this morning, I came across this from the Puritans. He who understands the cross aright understands the Bible. Did you hear that? He who understands the cross aright understands the Bible.

Will you say that? He who understands the cross aright understands the Bible. If I say the word carpenter, and you're thinking in New Testament terms, immediately springs to your mind Joseph, the guardian of our Lord Jesus, and also, of course, our Savior, who was, as an artisan, a carpenter. Well, put the first one in parenthesis.

Run with the second, our Lord Jesus. And then here's a supplementary. Was there another anonymous carpenter in the Gospels? It seems to me that there must have been a carpenter from Judea, the city of the kings or the region of the kings, a carpenter from Galilee, Galilee of the nations.

Some man who took his axe and put it to the root of one of the trees, for there were many forests in Judea, and felled the tree. Maybe he got a business. Maybe he was a quisling.

That's someone who actually was a Jew, but ran with the Roman authorities because, well, it was worth a few shekels, so to do. At times, the Romans' demand for wood almost exceeded the ability of people to supply it, especially with regard to crucifixion. I mean, that's not me saying this.

Josephus will tell you that if you read his antiquities. Well, the day it must have been when a man took his axe and put it to the root of the tree, and maybe he chopped off a branch, maybe two branches and trimmed them. Maybe he made a notch in one branch, which is now, shall we say, eight feet long, two foot down.

He made the notch so that he could put a horizontal bar, sorry, a vertical bar alongside the horizontal. And along he got a crude cross. Jesus the carpenter, he made yokes.

I think we have every right to conclude that from Scripture. He made yokes which would be comfortably fitting on animals for he had a respect for animal life as well as for humans. His yoke was always easy because for an animal, an unevenly crafted yoke would be like a cross, always chafing the neck.

Maybe the other carpenter was more crude. Maybe if he'd known that that cross that he made would be used to suspend the body of Jesus, he'd have put a little bit more skill into it. I don't know.

But at Calvary, the work of one carpenter met with the body of another carpenter, one who was contracted by Rome to produce a cross, the other who was contracted by God to occupy it. I've never lost the sense of awe, the sense of awe in regard to the cross of Christ. Strange when you think it through, isn't it? An early disciple of our Lord Jesus would say in the same words, at least with the same implication as I've just asserted, that he too is mesmerized by the cross.

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Glory in the cross? I mean the cross was a torture rack. The cross was part of the procedure to rob man of life in the most painful fashion ever devised up to that point to achieve that objective.

The Archbishop of York has just hit the headlines this last couple of days because he's warning against the cult of Diana. And I guess he's got some substance, some evidence, some reason for issuing that warning. I mean it would be terrible if the people's princess becomes a sort of modern equivalent of Diana of the Ephesians whose record is in the, at least references made to her in the Acts of the Apostles.

The cult of Diana really would be a cult without substance. But there was a cult with substance that formed around the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm glad to belong to that cult.

So are you, I understand, or else the majority of you wouldn't be here this morning. Central to the cult of our Lord Jesus. The thing that attracts us to Him is that death, that awful, callous, at one level unnecessary death that He died.

You see the Puritans, they tell us, as I mentioned to you, he who understands the cross aright, understands the Bible. What makes Christianity unique is the death of Christ. Mohammed never so died.

Buddha never so died. The Islamic society react against the thought that Jesus Christ, God's own son, should die on the cross. There are at least 14 Filipinos who have been arrested in Saudi Arabia in the last few days.

And one of the reasons for their arrest is the spreading of the message of the cross of Jesus. We should pray for them, the problems that they're facing at this very moment. The cross for Christianity is not something we should apologize over.

Jesus, when He was teaching about the cross, used it as a test of discipleship. If any man would be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me. Jesus said that at least on two public occasions.

The word cross, which was offensive to the Romans, was on the mouth of the Lord Jesus, and He did not back off from using it. And when you sift the records of His life, you understand that He had an appreciation that at the end of His human life, He would finish up on the gallows. A best-selling book some years ago spoke of a lion repatriated with His fellows in the jungles of Africa, born free.

A book could be written on the Lord Jesus, born crucified, for He was born to die on the cross. Isn't it paradoxical that escaping from the cross was the test of messiahship? According to those who were around, the scene when our Lord Jesus died, if you are the Son of God, come down from the cross, and then we'll believe. They inverted the very reason why He came on earth.

He came to die. The credibility of Him being given the name Jesus, as far as heaven is concerned, is that He will die on that cross. They say, come down and we'll believe.

As heaven was saying, stay up there. And you will achieve the purposes that were scheduled to happen eons ago when the challenge came, who will go and whom shall I send? And you said, I will go. I will do what you, my Father, want me to achieve.

And so our Lord Jesus hangs on the cross. The cross becomes offensive in terms of its message in those days. It's hard for us to understand because we've seen too many ladies wearing crosses around their necks, too many men with lapels with crosses.

I've got no problem with that, incidentally. The problem with the crucifixion, I don't have a problem with the cross. But we forget its ugliness.

So when the Apostle Paul is writing to the Galatians, he talks about the offense of the cross. When he's writing to the Corinthians, he talks about the cross being a stumbling block. And he speaks of the foolishness of man and the wisdom of God.

The foolishness of man doesn't see the cross and what it means, its potential for saving. But the wisdom of God is revealed at the cross because it's the only way by which your sins and my sins will be forgiven. And throughout the whole of the Bible, the shadow of the cross falls upon it.

Interesting, isn't it, that the word cross has impregnated our dictionaries. Crossways, cross purposes, crossovers, the cross. First time I ever heard Billy Graham, thank God that you Americans gave us Billy Graham.

Well, I do believe that it was God who gave him to us, but he did come through your tribe. First time I ever heard Billy Graham at Haringey, that's one of our auditoria in London. He concluded his address, as he always did, by inviting us to sing Just As I Am.

He said, there's one place where God will meet you. There's only one place where God will meet you. And it is at the cross where Jesus was crucified.

The Apostle Peter, he probably didn't have a full understanding of the death of our Lord Jesus when he preached his first sermon, because preachers grow in their knowledge of theology. I mean, it would be nonsense to expect to have someone come here at 20, and by the time he gets to mid-50s, not to have a greater understanding for his understanding to have grown, for his theology to have deepened in some way. But the Apostle Peter does a good job on the day of Pentecost when in his preaching debut he talks about the Lord Jesus and the fact that Jesus has been nailed to a cross.

He speaks of what the Jews, the Jewish authorities, did to the Lord Jesus in the brutal fashion in which they manhandled him. Men of Israel, listen to this. Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.

This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. Peter, why did he die? There seems, if I dare suggest this, because it's not incompatible with an understanding of the full doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, there seems to be a growth in Peter's grasp of the significance of the cross.

Because later on, when you get to further chapters in the Acts of the Apostles and into the book that bears Peter's name, you'll find that when Peter refers to the cross, he refers to it as a tree. He was nailed to a tree. Tree, tree, tree, tree.

Peter's subsequent sermons in the Acts, check me this afternoon when you've got time, check me in the letters that he wrote. He uses the word tree, not cross. Why? Well, I don't think it's just pure technicality.

I mean, it's reasonable in any case, isn't it? Because the cross was from a tree, as I demonstrated. Some carpenter, some axeman chopped the tree down, and it was crafted. It was made into a crude cross.

But why does Peter the Jew use the word tree? Because way back in the book of Deuteronomy, you get Moses speaking of how a criminal is to be dispatched. Cursed is every man who hangs on a tree. Now, put two and two together and allow for the fact that theological reasoning grows in the passing of the years, even for the apostles.

The tree. Jesus on the tree. Jesus accursed.

He doesn't deserve to die. No, says Peter, that there was nothing in him that we could use as evidence to suggest that there was any mark of imperfection at all. He is the impeccable Christ, and why does he die? He dies for the sins that I had done.

He dies for the sins of the world. So you see, the reason for bringing the old Puritans to you, he who understands the cross aright understands the Bible. The cross fascinates me, not in a melancholic sense, but in the sense that old Isaac Watts, you know, he was one of our hymn writers.

He lived just down the road, proverbially speaking, in Southampton. He wrote that lovely hymn, When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died. I want to tell you, whether you come from the United Kingdom, from America, from Holland, or wherever you've been gathered to this service this morning, not one of you surveys the cross sufficiently often.

So you survey the cross not in terms of gawping at some public spectacle, as sometimes when there's some catastrophe, some stupid people will go to the scene of the catastrophe just to have a look. We have floods in England. One of the problems the police have is keeping the gawping crowds away.

How crazy can you get? No, you survey the cross in the sense of its depth, its height, its length, its breadth. Understanding or trying with some feeble brain to allow to sink into you the fact that this great God sent His Son and allowed Him to go to a cross, allowed Him to be nailed to a tree for you. He becomes a curse for you.

Some years ago when I was talking to Mother Teresa, we spoke of Malcolm Muggeridge. Whose son was at my college. And about his shift from atheistic socialism, certainly agnostic socialism, into the confession of the Lordship of Jesus.

Muggeridge is my favorite writer. He handles the English language better than anyone I know or have read of modern writers. And later on as a sort of testimony for his carelessness in days gone by, he pens this with his usual eloquence.

Speaking of his years as a young man, I would catch a glimpse of a cross, not necessarily a crucifix, maybe two pieces of wood accidentally nailed together on a telegraph pole, for instance. And suddenly my heart would stand still in an instinctive, intuitive way. I understood that something more important, more tumultuous, more passionate was at issue than our good social causes, however admirable they may be.

It was, I know, an obsessive interest. I might fasten bits of wood together myself or doodle it. The symbol which was considered to be derisory in my home was yet also the focus of inconceivable hopes and desires.

As I remember this, a sense of my own failure lies leadenly upon me. Here's an old man having wasted his life. For he calls his diary of his own events chronicles of wasted time.

I should have worn it over my heart, carried it as a precious standard, never to be wrested out of my hands, even though I fell, still borne it aloft. It should have been my cult, my uniform, my language, my life. I shall have no excuse.

I can't say I didn't know. I knew from the beginning and turned away. Well, he did come back.

But the point is made that the cross should be the center of our passion. The cross should be the focal point of our worship. Some of us who are open to a charismatic expression, if you do that at the expense of not surveying the cross frequently enough, you have exchanged a bowl of precious soup for something that is more inferior.

Well, how do you understand this cross? For that's what the Puritans were saying. He who understands the cross of Christ understands the Bible. I knew an American preacher by the name of Ray Steadman, a very wonderful man.

He had a church in Palo Alto down in the southern part of California. And he once came here and preached from the town, preached out of the town. Unfortunately, I couldn't get him more than once because he was a very sought-after preacher in the States.

And he felt that this pulpit was adequately served. I'm not too sure that that was a good evaluation, but that was his thought. Steadman taught me this.

The best way to illustrate the Bible is from the Bible. And he taught me that in the Old Testament cameos, the Old Testament illustrations, you sometimes get locked up within them New Testament truth. Now, Augustine had worked this out way before Steadman.

Steadman's day. But here in Exodus, the passage to which I referred you earlier, you've got the exposition in illustrative form of the theology of the cross. You see, here are these Israelites.

They've come from Egypt, the land of bondage. They've gone through the Red Sea, which has opened miraculously. And now they've got murder in their hearts as they come to Moses and says, hey, it's three days since we had a drink and we're thirsty.

What are you going to do about it? A wretched thing to be thirsty. Some of you who have been missionaries in the Middle East will know the experience when your body's dehydrated and you're desperate for some water and even Pepsi Cola is no substitute. And here is poor old Moses.

The people have come to him and they're blaming him and there's possibly murderous intent. Certainly later on there's murderous intent as they plague their pastor and say that he's responsible. And what you find is this, that Moses, who's always an intelligent man and a spiritual man, he brings his burden to the Lord.

Verse 25 of Exodus 15, then Moses cried out to the Lord and divine illumination. The Lord showed him a piece of wood, Moses and God, God the tutor, Moses the taught. He's in difficulty and God shows him a piece of wood.

The waters of Mara, as the name implies, are bitter. They are unpalatable. Therefore the people react against Moses' leadership that he should have brought them there.

And Moses, in his dilemma, in his distress, not knowing what to do with the society in his day, he comes to the Lord and the Lord says, Behold, a piece of wood. And in one sense, that has been my message down 27 years. Behold the cross.

The provision of God in the midst of the bitterness of your circumstances, in the midst of your sinfulness, in the midst of circumstances that you have brought yourself to and sometimes found yourself in as a result of forces outside of your control. But whether you're in difficulty because of your own sinfulness or simply because of the way the lines have fallen out in your life, the message of the Lord to you, if you want to turn bitterness to sweetness, is the same as the message to Moses. Behold a piece of wood.

Here is the apostle Peter. He never goes to theological seminary. He never studies the books apart from perhaps the Old Testament scrolls.

He's an untutored man. What is his message to Israel? What is his message to the world? Behold the piece of wood. Behold the cross.

If we take our eyes off that, we lose our credibility. This pulpit remains strong when men and women proclaim the death of Jesus Christ as the only way whereby our sins are forgiven. For the cross is the place where God meets with you and me.

That piece of wood was broken from some tree. And a tree does not grow overnight. In California, there are trees that you can date back 2,000 years.

Great lofty trees in Northern California. In the Garden of Olives in Palestine, in Israel, there are also trees that are dated back 2,000 years or more. And when you see the Lord Jesus on the tree, the apostle Peter, who has grown in his theology, makes comment on this in one of his letters.

And he speaks of Jesus as a lamb. And he says that on that cross, on that tree, is a lamb slain before the foundation of the world. In other words, what happened at the cross was something that came about not capriciously, but it was the worked-out purpose of God which he had conceived before the world ever was.

Behold the cross. And Moses, well, Moses is the one who sees the significance of the cross. When others, unfortunately, seem to be unaware of the reason why it points out the significance of the tree, when others are unaware of its significance.

There's an old hymn that encapsulates that point. It speaks about the Lord Jesus and his death on the cross, on a hill far away stood an old rotted cross, the emblem of suffering and shame. And I love that old cross, where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.

And then it goes on in the second verse. And here the author is so perceptive, George Bernard. All the old rugged cross, so despised by the world, has a wondrous attraction for me.

You see, others don't appreciate it, do they? Some of you come from mixed marriages, mixed in the terms of your husband. Your wife is not a Christian and you're praying for that and God grant your prayer. Some of you come from mixed family circles.

You're a Christian, maybe one or two of you, but not the rest. Some of you will come and you'll be held spellbound by a message like this. I don't speak of my own ministry in a sort of congratulatory fashion.

Don't misunderstand me. But others of you, you can hear the same address and it won't move you one little bit. All the old rugged cross, so despised by the world, has a wondrous attraction for me.

Moses, there's a piece of wood and Moses appreciates the significance increasingly so. Man, woman, there's a piece of wood, there's a tree outside Jerusalem's walls near the golden gate and on that tree hangs none other than Jesus Christ, God's own Son. And you hear about that message, the old rugged cross stained with blood so divine, a wondrous beauty I see for to us on that old cross Jesus suffered and died to pardon and sanctify me so I'll cherish the old rugged cross till my trophies at last I'll lay down, cling to the old rugged cross, exchange it someday for a crown.

Moses, take that piece of wood and put it in the water and see what happens. And he does. And the people come to the water which was brackish before, unpalatable before, and now they drink so greedily they gulp it down.

The bitterness has been turned into sweetness. And don't you see, my friends, do I need Stedman here or Augustine here to make this point more clear? That when you come to the Lord Jesus, when you come to the man on the cross and you confess your sins, he who has taken upon himself the pollution of your guilt, from that old rugged cross he opens a fountain, streams of living water at which you can come and drink, where you can find cleansing and hope and nourishment and energy and go forward into an endless future. This is the message of the cross.

Surrender that. I'd rather surrender my life. This is the message of the cross for which the martyrs have died.

This is the message of the cross for which 14 Filipinos are in jail right now and God knows what will happen to them and to God's grace we commend them in Saudi Arabia, a country which has the effrontery to ask for a liberty for its own Islamic community in other areas that it will not grant by one percent in its own territories to those of other faiths. Strong language, but it's about time people stood up and spoke against the injustice and the breach of United Nations Charters of Freedom. So we come back to the thought of the cross of Christ.

I should have, I should have, says Magrish, carried it as a precious standard, never to be wrested out of my hands even though I fell, still born aloft. It should have been my cult, my uniform, my language, my life. I can't say.

I didn't know. He who understands the cross understands the Bible. The two carpenters they never met, at least I doubt it.

The man from Nazareth commissioned by God to occupy a cross, the unknown carpenter in Jerusalem, commissioned by Caesar to make it. Perhaps in God's grace he did come to an understanding, I don't know, of what happened that day that that cross was occupied. All I do know is that what happened was the most remarkable event in history.

Alas, and did my Sovereign die? Alas, and did my Savior bleed and did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I? Was it for crimes that he had done he hung upon the tree? Nay, it was his own undying love and grace beyond degree. Well might the sun in darkness hide and shut its glories in. When God the mighty Maker died for man, the creature sinned.

Thus might I hide my blushing face as his dear cross appears, dissolve my heart in thankfulness and melt mine eyes with tears. But drops of grief can ne'er repay the debt of love I owe. Here, Lord, I give myself away.

Tis all that I can do. Brothers and sisters, be proud of the cross, of our Lord Jesus Christ, where the sourness of your sin is turned into the sweetness of salvation. I'm asking Ruth if she'll just come and lead us and we'll remain seated in some songs that are relative to us coming around this table.

As we sing together, our brothers will bring to you bread and wine, which we ask you to take and just to hold on to for a little while. This table is open for all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. You don't need to be a member of the tab, God forbid, to bring you with qualification to this table.

The only qualification is to know Him as your Savior. How can I be free from sin? Lead me to the cross of Jesus From the guilt, the pain Lead me to the cross of Jesus There's no other way No price that I could pay Simply to the cross I cling This is all I need This is all I plead That His blood was shed for me How can I know peace within? Lead me to the cross of Jesus Sing a song of joy again Lead me to the cross of Jesus Flowing from above Oh, forgiving love From the Father's heart to me What a gift of grace His own righteousness Clothing me in purity How can I live day by day? Lead me to the cross of Jesus Following His narrow way Lead me to the cross of Jesus So with bowed heads and awe in our hearts Continue to stand there before the cross I sometimes think about the cross and close my eyes and try to see The print of nails, the cruel thorns Jesus crucified for me He who understands the cross Understands the Bible Let's follow the prayers of our brothers As we think about the tearing of the body of Jesus Christ Our Father God As we have been thinking this morning of the piece of wood that you showed to Moses to make the bitter water sweet And as we come now to this moment We remember with thankful hearts that other piece of wood, the old rugged cross On which Jesus was lifted high To destroy the bitter legacy of sin in our lives And to exchange it for the sweetness and blessedness of sins forgiven We praise and thank you for your faithfulness to your covenant promise in sending Jesus And Lord Jesus we thank you for your amazing love For doing for us what no one else could, there was no other good enough For us you were made sin Oh help us take this in Lord Jesus as we in our minds eye gaze upon your broken body We cannot begin to know what it cost you But we can thank you and we do so now Will you help us to respond to your love by giving up ourselves to your service And by walking before you in holiness and righteousness All our days let this be our thanks for the bread Brothers and sisters the bread which we break is it not our communion in the body of Christ Then let's eat it with thankfulness of heart