I.
How important is the Soundtrack?
In a movie or TV drama, the Soundtrack, what you hear, is as important as what you see. You often don’t even notice it, but it keeps the story moving, and it connects the story in the movie. It draws you into the story. Often a song or a variation of it will be used in the opening credits, or in an introductory scene to be used again at the climax and the end. The Soundtrack can be as important as the dialogue.
Today movies are one of our most common ways of telling a story. In fact when a good story gets written and spreads in popularity, it is not long before they are trying to make a movie of it because that is how many people experience story now a days.
We have been talking about our story, and I want us to consider this morning: “What is our Soundtrack?” and “Does the God Story have a Soundtrack? And if so, what is it?”
In The God Story, we have talked about the greatest story ever told: the story of God and God’s people. This story is found in our Bible, but what is the connection between these books of the Bible—thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament, with many different authors. The liturgist or the pastor gets up in church and reads out of a book called Zephaniah, and you wonder, “What in the world does that have to do with the rest of the story? And what does it have to do with me?”
We have discussed threads that run through the whole story. There are unique and individual stories in the Bible but also some incredible glue that holds them all together. There are threads that run throughout.
Beginning in Genesis we saw Thread #1: God speaks because God desires relationship. The laughable dream of Abraham showed us Thread #2: If God makes a promise, God keeps it. As we watched the wandering people of God get frustrated in the wilderness, we found Thread #3: God will provide all you need for the journey. Then last week with David, who we often think of as great, we saw that he started out the least likely candidate to carry on the lineage of Christ. That was Thread #4: God calls the unlikely and gives them a better story.
II.
And so David becomes king and then from his lineage there was king after king after king. Here is what was said about most of them. “He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Kings 21:2). The people who were once called Israel split into two nations, so then they had two kings, and then they faced oppression, even destruction, and eventual subjugation and dispersion from other larger, more powerful nations. This king experiment had gone bad.
During this time God raised up certain people to be prophets. In the Old Testament, sixteen books contain the story or the words of these prophets. The word prophet derives from a Greek word that means “foresee”; that is what we usually think about with the term prophet, someone who sees the future. But that is not all. And if we stop there with prophet, we truly miss what they were sent by God to do.
The prophets’ true task was to speak on behalf of God to the people, and to speak on behalf of the people to God. God speaks because God desires relationship (Thread #1), and most of the time what the prophet spoke was a message of God’s continued desire. The prophet says God still remembers God’s promises.
And certainly, the prophets’ voices took into account our thread of betrayal and deceit; they didn’t sugar coat that or wash over it.
The prophets’ voice is the Soundtrack to the faith experience of the Hebrew people. As they went along on their way, God would raise up prophet after prophet who spoke of the promises of God to draw people into the story.
We have the option to just live life paying no attention to the greater story. You can pay the bills, punch the clock, drive kids all over kingdom come, and mark time until it is all over. All of these things are a part of our life, important parts. But you have an important role to play in the God Story, and the prophets’ Soundtrack is a reminder of this.
III.
Zephaniah was one such reminding prophet. We don’t know the exact details of the situation of the nation of Judah, but it was likely under fire from surrounding empires. It would only be a couple of decades before the nation was completely taken over: the kings of the line of David were killed, Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Temple leveled.
The people desperately needed to hear from God.
So we know Zephaniah’s word would have been an urgent word. And he is telling them God is going to do something!
Zephaniah 3:17 says:
The Lord your God is in your midst,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.
The Soundtrack for our lives, the re-occurring theme song, is God’s love song ringing in our ears.
Wait a minute! The Soundtrack for our lives, the re-occurring theme song, is the love song of our God ringing in our ears?
It’s hard to take in. This isn’t just somebody romanticizing and getting all touchy feely about God. Zephaniah is not a romantic book. Zephaniah’s book is a hard book that exposes the depth of betrayal of the people, how far they have turned from God, and the devastating consequences of such choices. So when you hear this word about God delighting, quieting, and singing over us, don’t take it lightly, take it to heart.
Zephaniah is introducing us to Thread #5 in our story.
IV.
Thread #5: God’s Love Is Re-occurring and Relentless.
God’s love will keep on coming; it will not let up; it will not go away. God is saying, “I love you. Yeah you’ve messed up; I see that; I see that better than you, but your messing up is not more powerful than my love.”
And he calls out to his people over and over again, so he can sing to us over and over again.
When one of our kids is hurting, cranky, or is scared after having a bad dream, D’Anna and I want to calm their minds and soothe their spirits. To do so, we sing songs to them. “Jesus Loves Me” is always a winner. Michael liked for us to sing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and “ABCs”. For Marissa and Meredith, it’s “El Shaddai” by Amy Grant. And we don’t just sing it once.
With kids sometimes you have to repeat things over and over again, so they will get it, or at least we hope so. The prophetic voice is the voice of God over and over again, saying, “It’s ok; I’m with you; I’m a warrior who is mighty to save; I delight in you; I want to comfort you. I love you.”
The prophets’ song is the Soundtrack to remind us that God loves us, fights for us, and will never let us go. And that’s the Gospel!
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