Stir Up Sunday Sermon 2025

 
Wherby He shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.
(Jeremiah xxiii. 6)
 
Today is Stir Up Sunday, and on it we prepare for a holy Advent that makes us ready for Christ’s coming to us on Christmas. Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people. (Collect, Stir Up Sunday) Advent is coming, a purple season, in which we repent and prepare for Christ’s coming to us again at Christmas time. Advent will call us to look within, that the Lord may stir up our self-honesty, confession, contrition, and compunction for our sins. Repentance will then enable us to know our need for the Birth of Jesus Christ in the world once again.

But we cannot be stirred up spiritually until we refresh our memories with a few practical details about the condition of our spiritual lives. We must remember that God has made us for Himself, and that humanity’s chief calling is the good of the soul and its reconciliation with God. Yet, we must acknowledge that our vocation is handicapped by sin. Reason and free will are distracted and discouraged. We are made to be stirred up in mind and heart, to discover, know, love, and obey God. But we tend to be stirred up over earthly and mundane, worldly and profane ends. We know God, we claim to follow Jesus, we want the Holy Spirit, and yet, if truth be told, we keep God in a box. What I mean is that the God we worship is but one small compartment in our lives. We pull Him out on Sunday, for roughly an hour, and then back He goes into the box until next week. Or, if we are pressed with trials or tribulations, we might pull him out occasionally, though this has become far less common than it used to be. God in a box tends to be an occasional occupation at best.
Of course, this is nothing new. Man’s history is replete with the habit of unholiness, being in love with this present world, neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm. And it isn’t helped that today’s churches seem bent on accommodating the world. The Pope of Rome blesses a giant ice cube at the Vatican to endorse Climate Change. The first official statement of the newly chosen female Archbishop of Canterbury insists that we must baptize illegal migrants. The Patriarch of the East gives new meaning to the notion that all is mystery and unknown. Non-denominational Protestants continue to sell the Prosperity Gospel. And the mass of men, if they notice, are not much interested.  

So, it is not small wonder that the theme of being stirred up spiritually on this Sunday Next before Advent largely falls on deaf ears. The world is always being stirred up by earthly demons who distract us with false gods to worship. The devices and desires of our own hearts seem to begin and end with earthly riches. Creaturely comfort, financial security, the future of our nation, and so forth, claim too much of our attention. Numbskulls wonder how they will be remembered when they are gone. Salvation is never mentioned because we don’t fear damnation. Heaven isn’t thought of because we’ve forgotten the fact that most men go to Hell.

But it must not be so for us. And we are helped in our determination to be stirred up today by Jeremiah the Prophet, the son of Hilkiah. He lived some six hundred years before the birth of Christ in a nation whose spirit had given way to unbelief, treachery, and despair. As a result of Judah’s spiritual decay and disintegration, the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzars conquered Israel and Judah from the east with little resistance. Israel and Judah’s spiritual corruption had yielded a moral vacuum. Idolatry made both nations vulnerable to foreign conquest from without. Because they loved the world more than God, their spiritual lives were decayed and dead. Because they neglected their first call and vocation, God gave them up both to the Babylonians and Satan.

And yet, Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah had not forgotten his first love. He was moved and stirred up by the ever-present Word of God. The Lord stirred him up to remember that he came from God and was made to return to Him. The Word of the Lord had said to him, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. (Jer. i. 5) Jeremiah was stirred up to remember that the God of Judah and Israel, the Creator and Redeemer of the world, knew him and blessed him in the womb, and had called him to remind the Jews of their eternal calling and destiny. God stirred up Jeremiah to remind the Chosen People that they were specially called by God to future redemption and salvation.

BEHOLD, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. (Jer. 23.5)
 
Jeremiah was stirred up to remind the Jews that God would save His people through the promise of a coming King. Jeremiah would stir up the Jews to believe that God would raise up a righteous branch from His Chosen People. He would prophesy the coming of a Jewish King who would bring judgment and justice to the earth. This King would judge them with mercy and righteousness. This King would enable man once again to know and love God for salvation.

On this Stir Up Sunday, you and I are called to remember that we come from God and were made for God. Like Jeremiah and the people in today’s Gospel, we ought to discover that we can never be made right with God until we feed from His Heavenly Hand. When Jesus then lifted up his eyes, and saw a great company come unto him, he saith unto Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat? (St. John vi. 5)  Jesus, the Jewish King, prophesied by Jerimiah, has come down from Heaven to reconcile us with God. He knows that as God’s Word made flesh, He alone can satisfy man’s inmost hunger and thirst for that lasting nutriment that strengthens man for God. Earthly and worldly things can never satisfy man’s spiritual hunger for true freedom and deliverance from sin. Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little. (St. John vi. 7)

To be stirred up to hunger and thirst for what is more than the earth can give, we must seek out Heaven’s King and submit to His rule in all our lives. William Law says this.

True Christianity is nothing but the continual dependence upon God through Christ for all life, light, and virtue; and the false religion of Satan is to seek that goodness from any other source.
(William Law, The Power of the Spirit)
 
Our hearts must be stirred up to know that if our goodness comes from any source other than God in Christ, we are destined for Hell. Our life comes from God. Our light, truth, comes from God. Virtue, or goodness, to have any value, comes from God.  With Jeremiah, we must see how our sins have made a barren and desolate wasteland of death, darkness, and vice. Only Jesus Christ, God’s chosen heir, the Image and Likeness of God the Father, born of a woman by the Holy Ghost, can be that King who brings divine goodness and Heaven within our reach once again.

To be stirred up this day, we must, first, with the prophet Jeremiah, prepare for the coming of the Lord our righteousness with repentance. We must be determined to take a moral inventory, to confess our sins, and to admit that we have been stirred up in the pursuit of false gods. We must remember that we are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God. (2 Cor. iii. 5) We must remember that if we do not confess our sins, we shall have no excuses when it is too late to change, when time for salvation has run out. Second, we must remember what the Lord our Righteousness, Jesus Christ, has done for us already. The facts of Christ’s most holy life – from the Cratch to the Cross, from Bethlehem to Calvary and beyond – must claim our attention with deepest thanksgiving. Christ has done for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Through His most holy Incarnation, Christ has won our salvation. Third, and finally, in earnest, we must prepare to welcome Christ once again in our hearts and souls. The Christ of history intends to come alive in all ages, but most especially in our hearts and souls now for our salvation. Christ doesn’t want us to keep God in a box. Christ wants all of us for God. If our souls are stirred up to welcome Him, we shall remember that all of life is like Advent leading to Christmas, a coming that leads to Christ’s holy birth. Christ has come into history. Christ comes to us now. And Christ will come in the end times to judge both the quick and the dead. Let us pray to have faith in His Grace that our wills being stirred up to plenteously bring forth the fruit of good works, we might be plenteously rewarded not for the time being but forever because Christ has been born in us.   

Amen.
©wjsmartin