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Gerry Gutierrez' Update
Father and son standing for Jesus.
Dear Friends,
This letter comes to you with an introduction. Last Sunday my son, The Reverend Nathaniel Gutierrez, preached a sermon in Tacoma Faith PCA that has inspired me to write the following letter. Below you will find links to Nathaniel's sermon. I as a proud father take the liberty to share it with you for your encouragement.
Link to the sermon video on YouTube:
Understanding yourself and Abraham!
Abraham as “the friend of God” cannot be understood apart from Hagar and Ishmael. God did not spare his friends or his own Son from the path of humility and meekness.
“Be Holy because I am holy” says the Lord.
Holiness in a sinful world is the testimony of the reality of God in the life of a friend of God.
“Jesus in me is the hope of glory.”
Do not fear the memory of past sins friend of God because all is under the blood of Jesus.
There was a man known as “the man after the heart of God” and his name was David. David as Abraham made mistakes that kept him humble the rest of his life. God did not spare David but used him to write Psalm 23 and Psalm 5 to expose his heart before God and before men.
Paul was a cruel violent man, a blasphemer, a persecuted and an ignorant man in unbelief, but for that very reason God chose him as an example for those who would believe. God did not spare Paul from suffering thereby making out of his friends true enemies and making out of his enemies true friends.
“Go! This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I WILL SHOW HIM HOW MUCH HE MUST SUFFER FOR MY NAME.”
My dear “wild branches” engrafted to God in Jesus ... think not of suffering as a sign of God’s displeasure...if God did not spare his own Son from suffering ... Why should he spare you as if you were already a finished product?
We are on the planet to be a witness of a sovereign God and to testify about his love, wisdom and grace.
Your present time is built on your past to remind you of where you come from and how the height of your future life is built on nothing but Jesus and his righteousness which is imputed to us whereby the past is but a preamble. If there is one thing that has contributed the most in our sanctification it is the past failures.
As the American Indian proverb would say, “Good judgments come from experience and experience comes from bad judgments.”
My writings to you would have the weight of a feather if it were not for my past failures. I have been “there” where Abraham was as a pagan man from Ur of the Chaldean,. I have known Hagar and Sarah and the past as punishment of the present.
I have come to know closely “The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat.” I know the pain of losing loved ones to death and friends to rejection. I have knocked on doors that refused to open. I know bullies who draw first blood. I have pushed the rock back to the mouth of the volcano in my toilsome journey of “unlearning” what the world so generously taught me in the dark.
But today and particularly this morning at the crack of dawn I stand before you as a free man to speak freely even though to some I have become “radioactive.” It is good for a man to make a memory of his feet of clay less he might come to believe more of himself than what he ought to.
Abraham as the friend and lover of God will never be understood apart from the agony within his own house.
While the world sees the past as failure, the Lord our God sees our past as the clay over which he lays the rocky foundation that is Jesus, the hope of glory.
“He has set my feet on a rock and established my goings.”
Thank God for the past failures that as sandbags in the Hot Air Balloon of our lives keep us from going out of control to imminent death.
This was the “amateur friend of God” on duty.
Gerry Gutierrez.
Photo: Gerry and Nathaniel.
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