Sermons & Poems
From time to time people have requested that I publish sermons and poems,
and so I decided to publish them on my website for others to read.
Poems
”IT’S NOT ABOUT ME” (REVISED 7/5/2006)
© 2006 Robert E. Baxter
It’s not about ME, and it’s not about YOU;
It’s all about Jesus and what He can do.
It’s not about money or our having fun.
It's all about Jesus and what He has done.
His Crucifixion and His Resurrection;
It’s His perfect Life and His Ascension.
The mighty works of God are what we tell.
We celebrate His grace and thank Him well.
It’s about what God wrought in history.
It’s the KERYGMA; it’s God’s own story.
It’s not about YOU; it’s not about ME;
It's all about God and for His glory.
“Psalm 38:18” (Revised 7/5/2006)
© 2006 Robert E. Baxter
I'm not copyrighting the Bible verse, of course;
just the poem about the verse. ;-)
In Psalm thirty-eight and at verse eighteen,
King David confessed that he was unclean.
He looked up tearfully into God’s face,
And took a shower in God’s cleansing GRACE!
“For I will declare mine iniquity,”
Said David in repentant honesty.
He said, “I will be sorry for my sin.”
And God forgave him and cleansed him within.
We also need to confess our own lust,
How selfish we are and so covetous.
Our love of money, our envy and greed,
As God’s forgiveness, we sincerely plead.
Our love of popularity, our pride,
Our anger and laziness, hard to hide.
Our sinful condition with which we’re cursed,
Born with the nature demanding “ME-first”!
I need to pray in humble honesty:
“For I will declare my iniquity;
I will also be sorry for my sin,"
And seek God's mercy to cleanse me within.
Like Psalm thirty-eight and at verse eighteen,
I also confess that I am unclean.
I will look up into God’s loving face,
Cleansed in the shower of HIS perfect GRACE!
“THE SKINK”
© 2005 Robert E. Baxter
(I wrote this poem after seeing a skink in the screened-in porch at a home where I was making a pastoral visit. The lady was not particularly proud of the uninvited guest, but she tolerated it as one of God's useful creatures. I mean the skink, not me. A skink is a large black lizard of the Scincidae family.)
When you get to heaven, don't look around and wink
If you see a skink and think that it might stink.
When you get to heaven, don't look around and scowl
If you see rare creatures there like the spotted owl.
Common or unique, God made them all, you know,
We may be surprised how wide his grace may flow.
If God could transform us, as wicked as we be,
There may be creatures there we didn't expect to see.
Billy Graham wrote a poem of similar nature about God's grace to us.
"When you get to Heaven, you will doubtless view
Many whose presence there will be a shock to you.
Do not look around; do not even stare.
Doubtless there'll be many surprised to see you there." 1
-----
1Billy Graham, Hope For The Troubled Heart
(Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991, pp. 218-219).
"TAKING TURNS"
© 2005 Robert E. Baxter
Oh, why do I have to depart
So soon after I made my start?
I have lived long enough to learn
That by now I have had my turn.
So take the stage, it’s your turn now,
And time for me to take a bow.
I’d love to stay and play and pray
To live at least another day.
But I shall live forever there
Where Christ my Lord went to prepare
A place to be with Him above,
The life of perfect joy and love.
“I’ll Praise God Anyway!”
© 1972 Robert E. Baxter
When everything goes wrong, Praise God Who makes you strong;
When everything goes right, Praise God Who gives the light.
But when it’s dark, just say, “I’ll praise God anyway!”
When everything goes wrong, This will still be my song:
I’ll praise god anyway, I’ll praise God anyway.
Though good or bad the day, I’ll praise God anyway!
However dark the night, However dim the light;
No matter what they say, I’ll praise God anyway!”
When everything goes well, My pride is apt to swell,
When everything goes bust, It takes more faith to trust,
So when I’m hurt, I’ll say, “I’ll praise God anyway!”
When everything goes wrong, This will still be my song:
I’ll praise God anyway, I’ll praise God anyway.
Though good or bad the day, I’ll praise God anyway!
However dark the night, However dim the light;
No matter what they say, I’ll praise God anyway!
(I wrote the above poem the day after I bumped my head on a wooden book shelf I was building in my son's room. I was in the habit of thanking God in all circumstances, so I immediately thought, "Thanks, God. I suppose I needed that." But that sounded sarcastic, and I didn't want to be sarcastic to the Lord. So I thought about it a moment and prayed, "I really do thank you, Lord, for giving us such hard heads to protect our brains." Some folks think the bump on the head may explain my poem and the quality of all of my poetry. ;-)
DANIEL AND THE LIARS' DEN
© 1986 Robert E. Baxter
An unwanted baby they thought he would be,
Unwanted by THEM, but not by ME;
Our grandson Daniel has a STORY to tell,
EXPOSING the lie that comes from hell.
His life endangered by threat of ABORTION
Was SAVED from death by timely ADOPTION
He wasn't cast into a den of LIONS;
The threat to his life was from the LIARS.
No, it WASN'T a LIONS' den this time,
Nor even a Persian king;
But just a bunch of HUMANISTS,
Trying to do their thing.
Daniel in the LIARS' den--
The liars had to wait;
They PLANNED to take away his life,
Before it was too late.
"Kill him quick BEFORE he's born,
ABORTION is the way!"
But God looked down and said, "Oh no,
I'll put him on display."
Plucked from the jaws of death, he was,
Saved from the killer's knife;
ADOPTION was the means God used,
To save this baby's life,
God shut the liars' mouths, who say,
That murder is "pro‑choice,"
Now when folks see this LIVING CHILD,
The liars LOSE their voice!
SAVED from the liars' den, was he,
Saved from the abortionist's KNIFE,
Our Daniel lives to join the fight,
The fight for RIGHT TO LIFE.
(I wrote this poem about my grandson who was rescued from abortion and adopted by my son and his wife.)
"FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY"
© 1986 Robert E. Baxter
SOME FOLKS WHEN SURROUNDED BY TROUBLE WILL PRAY,
BUT REGULAR PRAYER IS NOT PART OF THEIR DAY,
LIKE A FAMILY OF SKUNKS THAT WAS HELD AT BAY
SURROUNDED BY HOWLING COYOTES ONE DAY,
AND WHAT DID THE MOTHER OF THAT FAMILY SAY?
SHE SAID, "O MY CHILDREN, LET US SPRAY!"
SERMONS
"DISCOVERED TREASURE"
TEXT: "The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field." (Matthew 13:44a)
SCRIPTURE: Matthew 13:31-36, 44-46
Some of you have companion pictures in your home. In southern homes I have seen the portrait of that southern hero, Stonewall Jackson, and sharing the same wall with him a picture of Robert E. Lee. They are companion pictures. They are a pair.
Jesus also liked to present His parables in pairs. The stories we consider tonight are obviously twins. They present the same truth in different ways.
Tonight I am beginning a short summer series entitled, "THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD"
We must not separate the WORK and the WORDS of Jesus. Even his miracles were parables and were called SIGNS.
The Lord works through His Word. Jesus taught with illustrations. He employed the dramatic method of story-telling. It was His key method of preaching, and the Gospel record testifies both in Matthew 13:34 and Mark 4:34, that "without a parable spake He not unto them."
Herman Lockyer, in his book, ALL THE PARABLES OF THE BIBLE, found over 250 parables, many of them in the Old Testament. My summer series will not last that long! 250 would put us almost to the year 2010! I am limiting myself to just a few of the Parables of Jesus for the summer.
Tonight’s parable is recorded in Matthew 13. Like many of the Lord’s stories, this one comes as a pair of stories. These are the twin parables of the hidden treasure and the expensive pearl, which the KJV calls "the pearl of great price."
I. First, the pair of stories
A man finds a treasure buried in a field. We are not told his name, because he could be any man. It was not uncommon in those days to find buried treasure, because putting your treasure where you alone knew its location was safer than putting it in such banks as they had, and their accounts certainly were not insured up to a $100,000 by the FDIC. When a person died, the secret of where his treasure was buried died with him unless he had heirs whom he had told and if they could remember. What if your father told you where he had buried $100,000 worth of silver and gold coins, and then you got Alzheimer’s by the time he died and you couldn’t remember where it was buried? Some men in those days made a living by hunting for hidden treasure.
We'll give the man in the story a name. Let's call him Asher, a good Hebrew name that means "FORTUNATE." We might call him "Lucky," but we Calvinists have an aversion to that word. There is, in the New Testament, a man named Fortunatus, which means the same thing in the Greek as Asher does in Hebrew. But the fellow in Jesus' story was not likely Greek, but Hebrew. So we'll just call him Asher.
We are not told how he found the treasure. Asher was plowing the same old field, same old furrows; same old oxen; same old plough! Up and down, round and round; life was drab and monotonous. Running his plow through the hard, dry dirt was dusty work, and it was hot.
Suddenly the plow jolts him by hitting an irresistible object. The perspiration almost leaps from his face when he is stopped so suddenly. Asher probably thought at first that he had hit a really big rock.
There are so many stones in the soil in Palestine that there's a legend about it. According to the legend God gave an angel two sacks of stones to cover the whole earth, and when the angel was flying over Palestine one sack broke! Palestine got the whole sack of stones!
Asher was used to hitting stones, but this time it wasn't a stone after all. The shock jangles his nerves and almost gives him a headache, but the frown on his face turns to wide-eyed curiosity when he sees the glint and glitter of gold under his plow! The soft brown sods are all sprinkled with gleaming gold! He stoops and finds that there is more and more and more!
Asher automatically looks around to see if anyone is watching. He falls to his knees and digs away the dirt with his own fingernails, and spies a cracked earthen urn. The plow has broken the neck of the clay urn, and his eyes pop when he sees the glint of gold and shine of silver coins in that urn.
Everything changes in that moment for Asher. Someone buried treasure there! How many years has it been there? Probably the owner had died, and the land had eroded or the box worked its way upward until this moment when Asher's plow discovered it for him. Buried treasure belongs to the person who owns the land, and Asher will need some help to get it out and carried away.
Looking furtively around again, he covers it up the coins even more quickly than he uncovered them. He stands up so fast, his head begins to swim, and he grabs the plow handle to steady himself. His head is swimming anyway with thoughts of owning that treasure for himself. It will be perfectly legal, if he buys that field. He found it. He's entitled to it, IF he buys the land. THAT becomes his chief thought now. But he must not call attention to his find, not yet. He must make himself continue to plow that field in the hot sun as if nothing unusual had happened. He goads the ox, and the plow continues down the furrow.
The rest of the day he works with greater joy. The hot sun doesn't bother him now. His heart beats faster than usual, and he is more eager than usual for the day's work to end, because he has plans. He tells his employer that he won't be back to work tomorrow. Perhaps his employer tells him, "Then, young man, you needn't come back at all. You're fired."
Asher goes home but does not sleep much that night. First thing in the morning he goes and sells everything he has. He raises all the cash he can. He even sells his sports car. No, I'll try to avoid anachronisms when retelling these 20-century old parables. But he does sell whatever he has and raises the money as quickly as he can, then goes and surprises the owner of the field by offering to buy it. He makes an offer the owner can’t refuse.
The owner is surprised and excited to think that the young man would pay that much for his field, and wonders he could take the young man for even a little more. Shrewdly he asks a bit more, which Asher had anticipated, for bargaining never was an activity for which Jews lacked ability. They arrived at a price and the field became Asher's.
Whatever technicalities were required in those days to close the sale, when they were completed, Asher lost no time in taking his digging equipment to the field and locating the spot he had so carefully memorized. There's the old Juniper tree on the north boundary, and Asher paces across the field until he reaches the spot midway between that tree on his right and a large bolder on his left and in a straight line toward the house. "This should be the place," he says to himself. He starts digging, becoming a little more worried when he doesn't find it the first time. A little to the left, then a little to the right, and clink! Asher has become a rich man. He could almost AFFORD a sports car now, even in the first century!
He found the treasure, then covered it up; then in joy went and sold all he had to buy that field. Jesus followed that story immediately with another one like it. Each story presents the same truth.
To understand the connection of the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the VALUABLE PEARL, we need to know something of the custom from which they grew. In those days a rich man would usually divide his wealth into three parts. It was the customary diversification. The first part he hid in a safe place, so that if he lost the other parts, he would still have a safe third. With the second part he bought diamonds or pearls, so that, if he were suddenly driven from his home, his possessions would be easily portable. The third part of his fortune he invested. The first and second portions of wealth explain this pair of parables. The merchant in the second parable is a connoisseur of pearls. He finds one that is more beautiful and more valuable than any he has ever seen before. In our day, diamonds are to us what pearls were to them. Pearls were a girl’s best friend in those days!
The merchant sees this perfect pearl sitting supremely on a cushion of black velvet. He must have it. He sells his whole collection of lesser pearls and buys that peerless pearl. It’s the same lesson, but what is that lesson? That’s next. That’s my second point.
II. Secondly, the Meaning of the Stories.
The stories show us what the kingdom of heaven is like. It is a joyful discovery for which you would trade everything you have to secure it, the way Asher did to secure his hidden treasure, and the way the merchant did to buy his cherished pearl. That is what the kingdom of heaven is like. It is incomparably valuable.
The main thing every student of parables knows is that a parable is not an allegory, and it is a mistake to break it apart and look for lessons in every detail. A parable usually has one main lesson. Whether it would be probable today, or ethical, to do what the discoverer of the treasure did in the parable, is entirely beside the point. Jesus was not teaching us what we should do if we find some treasure buried in a field. He was teaching us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.
Today if you found such treasure, you would probably need to call the police. An actual discovery of treasure took place in my life time when a farm worker was harrowing a field at Docking, Norfolk, England, and found a hoard of 300 Roman coins dating from A.D. 100. The coins, of silvered bronze, were in an earthenware urn, which was broken by the harrow. That was on May 12, 1942. You can imagine the value of that treasure! According to the London Evening News, the coins were handed over at once to the police. Well, that's the way it may work in our day. But this story that Jesus told is not FROM our day, though it is FOR our day.
Its message is "The Kingdom of heaven is LIKE unto treasure hid in a field...." and so forth. The story Jesus told may have been based on an actual incident in the Jerusalem Evening News, so to speak. The people understood, for it was an event they could relate to, and it was a story that would certainly captivate their attention. The finder of the treasure wants it above everything else. The discoverer of the pearl similarly buys it with no sense of sacrifice but with a great rejoicing in its possession. "It's worth it!" he exclaims.
Is that how you feel about your faith in Christ, and your service in His Kingdom? A staid Methodist Bishop by the name of Gerald Kennedy wrote a book on the Parables, and concerning this one he points out that there used to be more enthusiasm about the Gospel. He wrote, "There was an undercurrent of hallelujah and shouting.... A man was expected to feel happy when he was found by God in Christ. We have lost much of this spirit and it is a serious loss, for the world needs something to shout about." Is the entrance into the kingdom of God like gritting your teeth and resolving to do your duty even if it kills you? Or is it like a man finding a treasure in a field or like a merchant finding a pearl of great price and jumping up and clicking his heals together and saying, "YIPPIE!"
Our Lord ought to know which it is; it's HIS Kingdom He's talking about! Entering the Kingdom of God is a matter of yielding your life to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is acknowledging Him as King. It is having Him reign over your life. It is a joyful relationship. Christianity is not merely a philosophy, a system of intellectual ideas, a code of ethics, or way of making ourselves acceptable to God. Christianity is a living relationship with a Person, and that Person is JESUS.
Dr. Kennedy, to whom I referred, tells of a Norweigan resistance fighter who was captured and condemned to death during the Nazi occupation of Norway. A Lutheran Chaplain found the young man depressed and unresponsive, but the Chaplain left a New Testament with him. The next day as the young man was led out to be shot, he said to the chaplain: "Last night I read the Book. Out of its pages came a Man. I'll meet you in heaven." He had found the treasure. He had the pearl of great price in his hand! He was able to die, for he had found real LIFE in Jesus.
III. Third, the Application of the Stories
We ought to notice that Jesus told these stories to his own disciples in the house. Not to the multitudes, for we read that he "sent the multitude away." But within the house, to his own disciples, he told the twin stories of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great value. Both the treasure and the pearl are costly, and both bring great delight to the purchaser.
What is it like to become a part of that kingdom, whose King is Christ, whose headquarters is the Heavenly Jerusalem, and whose citizenry includes every elect person who ever lived or ever will live? Most people think of religion as something that is not much fun, sometimes rather difficult, and falling on our scale of desirabilities considerably above going to the dentist but considerably below going to a movie. Jesus gives us quite a different idea about truly entering the kingdom of heaven. The Kingdom of God is treasure.
On the mission field, some people have had to give up family to follow Christ. When a Muslim converts to Christianity, he is disinherited. But it is worth it, to have Christ. Some, maybe some of you, have had to give up jobs in order to follow Christ completely. Some have had to make other sacrifices, but it is all worth it for the sake of the Kingdom.
I read about a broken-hearted young woman who received a letter from her boy-friend telling her in essence, "Get lost!" But a few months later, he wrote to her and in gentle tones. He said, "I am sorry for the way I treated you, and I have been thinking it over. I would sure like to see you again.
P.S. Congratulations on your winning the 5-million dollar lottery!"
It’s all a matter of priorities, what we value most! I have said that we must not press every detail of the story when we seek to squeeze the essential meaning from a parable. There is something about this treasure that is unlike the treasure hidden in the field and unlike the pearl of great price. The Kingdom of heaven was purchased at great price, but not by us. It was purchased by Christ’s death on the Cross. We can have it free, as a gift from Him. It is ours by His free grace. But it was costly for Christ.
It is well known that unlike a diamond or sapphire or ruby, or any other precious stone, a pearl is formed by suffering— the suffering of a living organism. The oyster surrounds the tormenting irritation with a pearly luster, and out of its suffering comes the object of pure gleaming-white beauty.
Of course, if we know that, our Lord Jesus surely knew it also when he chose that illustration. Out of His suffering came the Kingdom of Heaven for us. And he can take our torments and irritations, yes and ourselves as gritty sand, and cover us with His grace so as to transform us. Herbert Lockyer says it well: "As the little grain of sand is ultimately clothed with a beauty not its own, so we are covered with a comeliness of Him who suffered on our behalf."
I close with this. When my daughter-in-law gave birth to our grand-daughter Kathleen, she had to have the baby by Caesarian surgery. The doctor didn't LOOK Italian and Kathleen is NOT Italian, but she was a Caesarian baby. After the baby’s delivery, Janet had the post-surgical pain.
I went into her hospital room and asked her a question. Grandma was rocking in the chair holding the little baby, Kathleen, who was sleeping. I asked Janet softly and slowly to convey the seriousness of the question: "Considering all you went through, and looking at this little baby Kathleen, was it worth it?" She replied without hesitation, as I knew she would. She didn't have to pause and say, "Well, let me think about that. It was pretty hard...." No, immediately she replied, "Yes, she is worth it all."
If you could look up to Jesus and ask Him, "Considering how you suffered on the Cross for me, was it worth it?" Out of his great love, He would say, "Yes, my child, it was worth it all, to redeem you, that where I am, there you may be also."
You are the pearl, and the treasure for JESUS,
and HE is the pearl and the treasure of YOUR life.
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