1. Please
pray with me. May the words of my mouth
and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock,
and our Redeemer. The message from God’s
Word this Ash Wednesday is taken from Psalm 103:13-14, it’s entitled, “Remember Dust,” dear brothers and
sisters in Christ.
2. What’s the first thing that comes
to your mind when you hear “Ash Wednesday”?
Ashes, right! We do (will) have them on our foreheads (hands). Ashes are black.
They remind us of the blackness of sin. What’s the next thing that comes to
your mind when you hear “Ash Wednesday”?
Lent? Lent starts tonight, a season of repentance from the blackness of sin. Hopefully by the end of this sermon you won’t
be confused like the little girl who was going to her first Ash Wednesday
service. At the service the minister
began his sermon with, ‘Dear Lord’,
with arms extended toward heaven and a rapturous look on his upturned face. ‘Without you, we are but dust…’ He would have continued but at that moment
one very obedient daughter who was listening leaned over to her mother and
asked quite audibly in her shrill little four-year-old girl voice, ‘Mom, what is butt dust?’
3. This
year, the theme of our midweek services is “A
Lent to Remember.” The key word will be remember.
Each week, we’ll focus on something God remembers or something God causes us to
remember. There’s a big difference between God’s remembering and our remembering.
When we remember something, too often it’s like one person saying, “You forgot my birthday” and another
replying, “No. I remembered your
birthday. I just didn’t do anything about it.” When God remembers, he does
something about it. God remembers and acts graciously toward us. When God
causes us to remember something, he also causes us to do something. He causes
us to believe. He causes us to receive, by faith, his gifts. By the time this
Lenten season is over, my prayer is that the power of God’s Word will cause us
to remember the way God remembers, with action.
4. In
the Bible text for tonight, the psalmist writes, God “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (v 14). When ashes
are applied on Ash Wednesday, these words are traditionally spoken: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you
shall return.” We don’t always remember that we are dust. So, we can’t or
don’t do anything about it. But God remembers and does something about it. Our
text says, “As a father shows compassion
to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him” (v
13). God
Remembers That People Are Dust So That He Shows Compassion.
5. God
“knows our frame.” God knows how we’re
made because God made us. God crafted human life by hand. Everything else was
created by God saying, “let there be”
and the power of his Word brought the thing he said into existence. But the
crown of God’s creation—the creation of human life—was different. In Gen 2:7, “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the
ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a
living creature.” At the end of that day, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen
1:31). Being made from dust wasn’t a bad thing. It was “very good.”
6. But
sin came. It changed everything. Sin ruined everything. Even from that ruined
condition, however, Ps 139:14 urges praise to God because people are still “fearfully and wonderfully made.” When
you think of those two things, “dust”
and “wonderfully made,” try to
picture in your mind the works of art made by Andrew Clemens of McGregor, Iowa.
They aren’t made of dust, but they’re close to that. They’re made of sand. They
are so wonderfully detailed that they look like a picture painted on the
outside of a bottle. But they’re made of differently colored grains of sand
placed one grain at a time through the neck of the bottle! I can’t imagine how
difficult that would be. One of these pieces of sand art took over two years to
make. Faces and designs were almost as clear as a photograph. Some of these
works of sand were appraised at up to $50,000! Handle that sand very gently!
Don’t shake that bottle!
7. With
that picture in mind, remember that people are like sand . . . like dust. But
people are dust that God has arranged and appraised at high value. Sometimes
God’s people forgot that their value came from God, from his creating hand,
from his wonderful design. They tried to live without God, separate from him.
They even turned to other “gods,” idols they formed with their own hands. They’d
come a long way, from being handmade by their God to making their gods by hand.
But, they couldn’t escape the fact that they were dust, because even that
wonderfully made dust would go back to dust. The bottle would be shaken! Gen
3:19 says: “for you are dust, and to dust
you shall return.” But even in death, God
Remembers That People Are Dust So That He Shows Compassion.
8. What
about us? Do we tend to forget that we are dust? Do we remember how “fearfully and wonderfully” God made us?
Do we praise him for it? Or do we think that we are wonderful on our own,
without God? We find it offensive when we’re told that over millions of years
we evolved from some lower form of animal. That is offensive because it’s not
true. The truth, however, isn’t very flattering either. You came from dust . .
. even more common and lower than the evolutionists would put you! Even though
we allowed a little of it to be put on our foreheads (hands) on Ash Wednesday, do
we really believe that we’re dust and ashes? Or do we think the word of God in
Gal 6:3 applies only to someone else? “For
if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.”
We can deceive ourselves for a long time, but at some point, this dust will
return to dust. But even in death, and maybe especially at that time of
greatest need, when even the strongest person can do nothing at all, God Remembers That People Are Dust So That
He Shows Compassion.
9. God
remembered that people were dust. But they were his dust, his people, his
children. So God dealt with his people with compassion, as a father deals with
his child. God remembers that his people are dust and very fragile dust at
that. So, he doesn’t shake them up, pour them out, and start over again. First,
God moved his people to realize their nature—that they were dust and helpless
apart from him. Listen to how God led Abraham to pray: “I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes”
(Gen 18:27). When the whole country “broke
faith” with God and were defeated in battle, “they put dust on their heads” (Josh 7:6). When Job had all his
troubles, his friends “tore their robes
and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven” (Job 2:12). When trouble
comes, God remembers that people are dust, and he has ways to make his people
remember that too. When God caused the people to remember that they were dust,
he caused them to do something. God caused them to repent. When God remembered,
he also did something. He had compassion. God forgave his people who looked to
him . . . who repented in dust and ashes. Ps 113:7 says, “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash
heap.”
10.
We see God’s compassion best in
Jesus. In Mt 9:36, “When he [Jesus] saw
the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and
helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” In Mt 14:14, “When he went ashore he saw a great crowd,
and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” Jesus remembered that
people were dust, felt sorry for them because of their need, and did something
about that need. His compassion took him all the way to the cross and to death. God
Remembers That People Are Dust So That He Shows Compassion.
11.
God also has ways of working in our
lives to cause us to remember that we are dust. When times of trouble and great
need come, God uses that trouble and need to turn us around so that we think
and pray like Abraham, “I have undertaken
to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes” (Gen 18:27). Then we ask
God to be gracious toward us and have compassion on us, because even though we
are sinful, we are still the wonderful and valuable crown of God’s creation!
God remembers that we are dust, but he handles his dust very carefully! When
things shake and threaten God’s work of dust art, he handles us with compassion.
12.
In one way, we are still dust
creatures like Adam, but in another way, we are heavenly creatures like Jesus.
St. Paul makes this connection in 1 Cor 15:47–48: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from
heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as
is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.” God remembers
that we are dust, but God sees us through Jesus, and that makes us very special
dust . . . heavenly dust. Not on our own, but in Christ, we are a new creation.
God gently arranges us so that we “are of
heaven” even while we are here on earth.
God Remembers That People Are Dust
So That He Shows Compassion.
13.
A 1977 song by a group named Kansas
called people “dust in the wind.”
True: we are dust. But we are God’s dust. It’s also true that money can’t buy
life. But the precious blood of Christ has bought us eternity. Tonight, we see
dust and ashes. God’s Word leads us to repent and receive forgiveness. What a
change takes place! In Christ, the Scripture is fulfilled, and we now have “a beautiful headdress instead of ashes”
(Is 61:3). Amen. The peace of God that passes all human understanding guard your heart
and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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