Jesus: The King and His Kingdom

Sermon by John Turner

August 23, 2009

Matthew 6:19-34

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."

The Praise and Worship Movement

Slowly in the 1960’s, then rapidly in the 1970’s and following, came one of the greatest outbreaks of Christian musical creativity in history, the praise and worship movement. Its early phase was marked by simple choruses. The great strength of praise and worship choruses is that the good ones have the power to encapsulate simple, but profound truths that can get inside our souls and change our lives, and then give us a language, often the language of Scripture itself, for expressing our devotion to God.

Karen Lafferty

Karen Lafferty, from New Mexico, with a music education degree from New Mexico State, was first runner-up in the Miss New Mexico pageant, which set aside scholarship money that she could use for continuing education at an accredited university. She was eager to work on her career as a professional singer and so let the prize money sit for a time. She was a believer all her life, but while she was earning her living singing in a New Orleans night club, a Christian friend challenged her that she was not taking a Christian lifestyle seriously. Karen moved to California, still singing in clubs, but now trying to witness to customers. She began to attend the founding Calvary Chapel congregation in Cosa Mesa. Calvary Chapel was an outreach mission to Jesus People, fresh converts from the false spiritualities and other sins of the day who were in need of grounding in the word. By the time Karen arrived, Calvary Chapel was drawing crowds from around the world. Soon, Karen called her mother and told her that she had quit her club job to pursue ministry. After a pause,

Mom: This does mean that your church is paying you, doesn’t it?
Karen: Well, no, I’m sort of living by faith.
Longer pause. Karen: Mom, I thought you would be happy for me.
Mom: “You do remember that I co-signed your car loan, don’t you?”

Karen wasn’t earning much money teaching guitar lessons. Without the clubs, she could not see where the rent money or car money was going to come from. Karen had already learned an important truth. Say it after me: “When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.” The text at church was the one I read at the beginning of this sermon. The part that struck Karen’s heart was, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” She decided to seek God’s full will for her life and to trust his provision. She went back to her apartment and began to play on her guitar a melody that was coming into her head. She suddenly recognized that the meter of the melody exactly fit the text she had just heard. She added an Alleluia refrain and descant and recorded it.

For the moment the chorus simply reinforced that she had decided to seek God’s will and to trust God’s provision.

The first step in provision was that a few days later she received a letter from the Miss New Mexico pageant. For some time she had been pleading with them to let her use her scholarship money on non-accredited training for missions and ministry. The letter said that they were making their first exception to their policy, that she could pursue her non-accredited training, and that the money could also be used for her living expenses while she did so.

The second step in provision was that “Seek Ye First” made her career. Karen soon had a job helping produce records for Calvary Chapel’s spin-off Maranatha! Music, the most influential force in introducing praise and worship music to the world. Her song went on their first Praise and Worship album. “Seek Ye First” still provides for about forty per cent of Karen’s living and missions expenses.

Karen began to see the worldwide evangelistic potential of praise and worship music. She trained with Youth with a Mission (Y-WAM) in their Amsterdam center and founded Musicians for Missions International as a ministry of that center. Calling herself a “musicianary,” she seeks and trains musicians in other countries who can help evangelize their own people. In 1995, she moved her headquarters to Santa Fe, but she continues to travel the world in her work. Karen remembers a time in Europe when she was discouraged, lonely, and homesick. A group of nuns passed her, singing in French “Seek Ye First.” She knew then that her work was not fruitless, nor was she ever really alone anywhere in the world. “When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.”

Leona Von Brethorst

Most of us have seen David Bell enthusiastically urging us to clap to the chorus “He Has Made Me Glad.” This praise and worship chorus was not written by a young person. Leona Von Brethorst was born in 1923 in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee and was raised in abject poverty, going to school without shoes and walking three miles to church.

Von Brethorst's childhood faith faded as she took a job in the World War II defense plants of Detroit, then marrying and giving birth to two children. When her toddler became critically ill with polio-related seizures, she cried out to God, "If You don't let him die, I'll give the rest of my life to You." God did heal the child, and doctors confirmed the miracle that awakened Leona’s hibernating faith. Her husband laid down an ultimatum: “Choose between me and Jesus.” Leona chose Jesus. As a single mom, battling exhaustion and clinical depression, she worked odd jobs and raised her children to know the Lord.

As worship leader in her church, she wrote dozens of praise songs. She says, "I don't know a note of music or how to play any instrument, but God gives me the melodies!" "He Has Made Me Glad" sprang out of one last trial, the loneliness of an empty nest. She put into song her learning that we can enter God’s presence with thanksgiving in our hearts even when we are lonely and sad. When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.

Leonard “Lenny” Smith, Jr.

Leonard “Lenny” Smith, Jr., was an English teacher in the public schools, where, among other things, he taught the Bible as literature, but he could not confine himself to the official neutral approach to the material. He kept taking students to the river to baptize them. He lost three teaching jobs in three years and became unemployable as a public school teacher. He ended up painting houses, but was not patching an adequate living together for his growing family.

Discouraged, he read his Bible, happening on Isaiah 52:7, which, abbreviated, says, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news that our God reigns.” Encouraged, Lenny turned the passage into the chorus, “Our God Reigns.” A few years later, he added four verses relating the passage to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The song took off.

In fact, it is so widely known that it became one of the favorite hymns of Pope John Paul II. Lenny enjoyed processing requests from the Vatican to use it on the Pope’s trips.

Lenny says, “[The real message of this song is not just that] God reigns over great events, but also that he reigns over the details of what we call accidents and coincidences. His permissive will is his perfect will, too, and it’s all for the good.” When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.

Laurie Klein

In 1974, Laurie Klein was a young wife and mother living in an isolated trailer house in the Oregon high desert. Her husband was a full-time college student, and the couple was surviving on $400.00 a month. They had not found a home church, had no close friends in the area, and Laurie did not drive. Even the cost of a long distance phone call could have meant that they did not have necessary food and supplies for their toddler.

Laurie says that she was hopeless and depressed. “I felt the poverty of my own life keenly at that point, both emotionally and physically. That morning I was so empty [that as I went to the Lord] I knew I didn't have anything to offer Him. I asked if He would like to hear me sing...if He would just give me something He would be in the mood to hear.” I sang two phrases and put the chords with it with no effort [I love You Lord and I lift my voice to worship You. O my soul, rejoice!]. She stopped long enough to get a pen and write those phrases down. When she continued, the last two phrases came just as easily [Take joy, my King in what you hear. May it be a sweet, sweet sound in Your ear].

Laurie's husband, Bill, recognized the simple beauty of the song and encouraged her to play it for a local pastor and some visiting musicians who carried it to a national convention and, from there, it went across the country. The influential Church on the Way sang it, Annie Herring of the Second Chapter of Acts heard it and put it on a children’s album, and Maranatha! Music published it on the fourth album of their influential Praise and Worship series. From there, it took off. When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.

Henry Smith

As a teenager, Henry Smith played in a secular band, but while in college, he had a spiritual awakening. He headed off to a mainline Presbyterian seminary planning to become a pastor. He was disturbed by what he was taught in seminary. Furthermore, after he graduated, he had to take odd jobs because his degenerative eye problem was limiting his career options. He began to attend a vital church.

One Sunday his pastor quoted 2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” Henry decided to write a song expressing what the text spoke to his heart. “Give thanks with a grateful heart; give thanks to the Holy One, Give thanks because He’s given Jesus Christ His Son. And now, let the weak say, “I am strong” Let the poor say “I am rich.” Because of what the Lord has done for us.” He might as well have said, “Let the blind say I can see.” He was soon blind, but he still saw the important truths.

Henry’s song got away from him. It was making its way around the world, and he had no knowledge of the fact that it was becoming a hit song until Integrity Music published it eight years later with the disclaimer “author unknown.” Someone called it to Henry’s attention, and he called Integrity who expressed delight at finding him so that he could receive his royalties.

Today, Henry operates a recording studio in Virginia, serves as worship leader at his church, and continues to write Christian songs. Someone once asked Henry how to promote a song so that it became a hit. He answered that he had no idea; his one hit went worldwide before he even knew anyone was singing it. "It’s a God thing," he says. When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.

Eddie Espinosa

Sometimes the problems that confront us are hidden. Eddie Espinosa was the worship leader for John Wimber’s founding Anaheim congregation of Vineyard Christian Fellowship, sort of the next decade’s Calvary Chapel. No one could tell anything was wrong in Espinosa’s life. But he says, “Sin and attitudes of the heart were suddenly glaring me in the face. I realized that in order for me to walk uprightly before the Lord, I needed a heart transplant. I desperately needed for God to change my heart in order to love the things that He loves and to hate the things that He hates. I also was aware that only He could change my heart. I began to sing without paying attention to the melody, it just flowed from the depths of my being.” The chorus, “Change My Heart, O God” was born. When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.

Marty Nystrom

Marty Nystrom was a 24-year-old music teacher who had made plans to attend a summer training session in Dallas. I am telling part of his story as I remember hearing him tell it some years ago at a worship conference, so that part is only as accurate as my memory (ahem). His motivation was that the love of his heart was going to be there, and he planned to ask her to marry him. There was an airline strike, but, undeterred he spent three days of torture riding a bus so as not to miss this moment. When he arrived, his true love announced to him her engagement to marry another. The campus was unattractive, the summer weather was sweltering, and Marty was crushed. Furthermore, he was in a spiritual crisis. He recognized that he did not really want more of God in his life; he just wanted more human approval.

A roommate convinced him that he needed to fast, so his sole source of nourishment was Dallas tapwater…that, and the Bible and the Holy Spirit. As he was reading the Psalms, he noticed that he could pray Psalm 42 with sincerity. “As the Deer,” his resulting song written to worship God, has spoken to many hearts through the years. But most of all it indicates something that was more important than the love of that young woman, God’s love for him and his own love for God.

He had gone to Dallas to establish a life covoenat with his true love, and in an odd way he did. He now knows that closeness to God is far more important than any human approval.

Nystrom has since written and co-written many successful praise and worship songs. He also worked for some years for the influential Integrity Music, helping to select the songs to which they would give success. He says that, when he met the woman who became his wife, he was glad that things had not worked out for his earlier infatuation. When we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.

From World Changers to Life Nudgers

The kinds of praise and worship choruses we are considering today served as midwives in Judy’s and my awakenings from sterile religion to vital faith. I know that we cannot recreate that era, but the best of those choruses will serve ongoing roles in the worship repertoire of the church. They may never again move the world as they once did, but they will continue to nudge hearts awake. Especially, they may remind us that, “when we have problems/we do not run from God/we run to God.”