Long Branch Baptist Church
Halfway, Virginia; est. 1786
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Enter to Worship
Prelude David Witt
Meditation & Invocation Psalm 8
*Opening Hymn #182
“For the Beauty of the Earth”
Welcome & Announcements
Morning Prayer [See Insert]
*Hymn #622
“Humble Thyself”
*Responsive Lesson [See Right]
*Hymn #633
“Open our Eyes, Lord”
Offertory Mr. Witt
*Doxology
Praise God from whom all blessings flow / Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise him above, ye heavenly host / Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
*Scripture Romans 12:3; James 4:10
Sermon
“Bringing Home the Beacon”
Invitation Hymn #147
“How Great Thou Art”
*Benediction
*Congregational Response
May the grace of Christ our Savior / And the Father’s boundless love
With the Holy Spirit’s favor / Rest upon us from above. Amen.
* Congregation, please stand.
Depart To Serve
RESPONSIVE LESSON
Because of the privilege and authority God has given me, I give each of you this warning: Don’t think you are better than you really are.
Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us.
Pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.
Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall. Pride ends in humiliation, while humility brings honor.
The Lord mocks the mockers but is gracious to the humble.
I will boast only in the Lord; let all who are helpless take heart.
You rescue the humble, but your eyes watch the proud and humiliate them.
Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.
So humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.
Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus:
who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Ro 12:3;Pr 11:2;16:18;29:23;3:34;1 Pe 5:6;
Ps 34:2;2 Sa 22:28;2 Ch 7:14;Php 2:3-11;
ANNOUNCEMENTS
THE NEXT FEW SUNDAYS WE’LL BE TREATED TO SOME GREAT GUEST PREACHERS:
4/29 MIDDLEBURG HOSTS FMR PASTOR, REV. CHAN GARRETT
5/6 REV. JOE ANDERSON
5/13 OUR OWN BILL MATLACK
I WILL BE HERE 5/6, BUT WILL BE OUT OF TOWN FRI 5/11 – SUN 5/13. IF NEEDED, YOU CAN REACH ME N MY CELL PHONE (703) 307-0065.
5/20, 7PM, IS OUR SONG SERVICE. MARSHALL AND MIDDLEBURG BAPTIST CHOIRS WILL BE HERE, AND A COLLECTION WILL BE TAKEN FOR COREY KEELEY.
PRAYER LIST
Long Branch Church
Cory Keely; Andy Phelps
Debbie Grigsby; Susan Schulz
Warren Lee; Martha Puryear
Irene Griffith
Steve, Jeff, Zane, Bruce
and other missionaries in Central Asia
JAMES 4:6, 10
6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. … 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Title: Bringing Home the Beacon
Text: James 4:10 (Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up)
MP: Confidence is good, Arrogance is bad, and the grace of humility is needed to see which is which.
Outline:
1. Story of Henry Winstanley
2. Confidence is Good
a. Confidence can get things done
b. Self-Esteem can be overrated
c. But to denigrate God’s workmanship isn’t right either (Rom 12:3)
3. Arrogance is Bad
a. Lighthouse joke – it’s all about perspective
b. Arrogance is blindness
4. Humility lets us see which is which
a. Humility comes from the word ‘humus’ (earth)
b. C.S. Lewis definition of humility (the cathedral)
5. See the power – God lifts up, not us. He’s better at it anyway
Henry Winstanley never for lacked for confidence. Becoming a man as England was becoming the mercantile juggernaut in the late 1600s, Henry Winstanley was a man who knew how to make a name for himself. He made his money as a showman, and then invested it in ships. A proud man, he knew that confidence was key to success. He knew what it meant to bet it all on a good hunch.
But shipping and showmanship could both be a dangerous game. First he lost one ship, and then a second on the Eddystone Reef. Fourteen miles off Cornwall, in the middle of the western end of the English Channel, the Eddystone rocks were a hazard to all ships too foolhardy or too unaware to steer clear. But Henry knew what he needed to do. He was going to build a lighthouse – a beacon to all who would pass, warning them not to come to close, for upon these rocks lay destruction: Just a few feet above the surface, and yet enough to send the mightiest ship to a watery grave.
This lighthouse would not be an easy task. Fourteen miles out in the ocean, workers spent four months digging just twelve holes. In the second year out on the rocks, the French navy – at war with England took Winstanley and his men prisoner. Only a confident audience before the enemy king bought back his freedom.
Three years and most of his fortune in, the lighthouse was finally complete. Perched amongst the rocks, the eighty foot tower was a marvel to behold. Standing proud against the waves, it was Winstanley’s monument to his own vision. Lives were saved because Henry knew what it meant to believe in himself. He never lost faith in his ability to build that tower. He never lost faith in his vision to save ships, to save lives.
But manning this beacon proved to be a difficult task. Out in the middle of the ocean, the tower would move and creek. Eighty foot waves had been known to crest as high as the balustrade just beneath the light. Lesser men less cocky than he were afraid to stand against the sea in Henry’s beacon.
Seeking to find a man who believed in his own engineering, Winstanley proudly published his wish that he “could be in that lighthouse in the midst of the greatest storm that ever was.” And, on November 26, 1703, he got his wish. A great nor’easter – a North Atlantic hurricane – reached the Eddystone Rocks. When the storm had blown past, nearly 8000 people perished. The first among them was Henry Winstanley. Henry’s monument had been laid low by the Great Storm. With just one wave, eighty feet of iron, wood and masonry, were knocked off their precarious perch on the Eddystone reef. Henry and the poor, drunken light keeper he had managed to convince with his bravado were never seen again.
Proverbs says that pride goes before a fall. That pride had built that lighthouse against all odds, but that same pride blinded Winstanley to full fury of the forces that nature fomented against him. Only 59 years old, his pride was his destruction.
As we turn our attention to the sixth of the seven deadly sins, we have to admit: pride is hard to peg. On the one hand, pride gives us the confidence to do things that can seem impossible. But pride can also make us arrogant – blind to the realities around us. If we are to ever navigate the fine balance between them, we must throw ourselves completely on the God-given grace of humility. If like Henry we lift ourselves up, we are merely setting ourselves up for a fall. When we humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord, he will lift us up.
Confidence
Pride is hard thing. On the one hand, we know it’s the deadliest of the deadly sins. Pride was Satan’s problem. In Isaiah 14, we get a sense of that pride – the Accuser saying “I will ascend into heaven, I will raise my throne above the star of God, I will be like the most high.” And we know those words are prelude to being brought down to the Pit.
Pride makes it possible to do great things. We know that. We talk about “good pride” and “bad pride.” But I don’t like those words. I want to suggest two other words this morning that I think can clarify the issue. Consider, if you will instead of “Pride” or “Esteem” these: Confidence and Arrogance. Confidence is clearly good – it is faith that God is working through us. Arrogance is clearly bad – it is blindness to the reality that we are not God. Confidence and arrogance can clearly run into each other, but they aren’t the same thing either. And, when we think in terms of confidence and arrogance, we can see the remedy right away: Humility lets us see clearly.
We are made in the image of God. That alone should give us confidence to boldly approach the throne. We can do all things – not because of who we are but because of how God made us.
I think too often we’re prone to go the other way. Oh, I’m a worm, I can’t do anything. But you know what? There’s an arrogance in that kind of thinking too. It says, “Your self-worth should be based on your own actions.” You aren’t important because of how you feel – you are important because of the truth that you are His.
You are made in God’s image, we are his creation. To denigrate that creation without cause is to denigrate its Maker. It says to God, “You made junk.” I don’t believe that.
You want self-esteem? See the good things that you have been privileged to participate in. But remember that it is God working through you that enables you to do that.
Benjamin Franklin recorded his self-improvement plan. He made a list of vices he wished to no longer have hold on him. Anger, Sloth, Greed – these were things he could control. Ah, but then, he said, pride would creep in. Our actions can be good – but absent the glory of Christ, they become sin.
Arrogance
The story goes that the admiral, looking out from his command post on the deck looked out and saw lights in the distance, clearly heading straight for him. He radioed the message ahead: “Turn aside, 10 degrees starboard.” The radio beeped back – “Negative. Advise you turn aside 10 degrees starboard.” Furious, the admiral radioed back: “No, you turn aside. I am an admiral! I am in command of a battleship!” The message was returned: “I am a private. And I am in charge of this lighthouse!”
There’s nothing wrong with commanding a great ship – the only problem is when we become blind to what our actions really are. It becomes arrogance when we think we can move mountains.
God puts rocks in our way to keep us clear on the simplest fact: God is God, we are not.
Humility
So, if we have this tension – this battle between confidence and arrogance, how do we keep it together? One word: humility.
Humility comes from the word ‘humus.’ If you drop by the garden supply store you’ll see it. You can buy bags of humus – earth. To be humble is as simple as being well grounded – earthed if you will, in the knowledge of who and what we are.
It is proper perspective that simply says, “God made me.” I am in the image of God, yes, but I am not God. God is the ultimate creative actor. He makes things good. We can make things good, too: But not because we are so fabulous – rather because he allows us to participate in this project of continual creation. It is he that has made us, and not we ourselves.
C.S. Lewis understood that confidence and arrogance were components of pride, too, and that humility was what kept them in balance. There was no simpering, sniveling, “I can’t do anything,” in what he did, but neither was there the pride that says “It’s all me.” He suggested a definition that I certainly can’t argue with.
He says “Humility is the ability to be the greatest architect in the world, to build the most beautiful cathedral that ever existed so that people who saw it would weep tears of joy. And then,” he adds, “humility is the ability to be equally as happy if it was my neighbor who built it.”
If we would live lives pleasing to our God, they must be lived in humility. We are nothing “special” in regards to him – because we are all special to him. He has given us all gifts and all things. But he gave them.
That perspective is a lighthouse warning us where the rocks be. When God has the honor, it’s smooth sailing. When we are so shallow as to think it’s us, we’re on dangerous ground.
But God be praised, he gave us Jesus who modeled what it meant to truly be humbled. That word lifted up – it’s the same word that early Christians used of the crucifixion. It was the ultimate in being humbled. But he is exalted for it too. For by his actions, we are saved.
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I kept hearing words like “self-esteem,” and well, I esteemed them not. I get really testy around people who I know are just trying to make me “feel confident.” I’ll tell you, I still think that there’s no better way to get self-esteem than to do something well.
Now, that doesn’t mean you’re worthless. You’re a child of God. I hear people say a lot of things about Prince William and Prince Harry these days – but worthless isn’t usually one of them. If the sons of the Prince of Wales are important by virtue of the fact that one day they may be the figurehead a small island, how much more important are you, whom the Bible says are going to judge the world. As a joint heir of Christ, you are his creation.
At the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, God makes an interesting statement about the power of man. He isn’t afraid, but he is concerned. He sees that “Nothing will be impossible for them” and so confuses their language. He knows that, being made in the image of God, he has given them great power. But lacking the wisdom of God, they put it to bad ends. Building a tower to ascend into the heavens? As Jack Nicklaus might say, “The couldn’t handle that truth!”
Clearly at Babel there was confidence, they created a great thing. But absent the purpose of God it was bound to turn out bad.
