Out of the Lion's Mouth

December 8, 2007
Stan Moody, Ph.D.

2 Timothy 4:1-8, 16-18

The Apostle Paul is alone in a Roman prison at the dawn of Christianity. This is his second imprisonment, the first having been resolved by Caesar Nero in his release and freedom for 1-2 years. The time for his execution is approaching. Most of his Christian friends have abandoned him. Some have even testified against him at his second trial.

Paul’s perspective on his predicament is this: I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure (2 Tim 4:6).

He marvels at how the Lord has stood by his side when nobody else has done so. He revels in the strength given him so that the message of the Gospel might be fully preached and all the Gentiles might have it. …I was delivered out of the lion’s mouth (v. 17). Our text this morning is a shortened version of v. 17: But the Lord stood by my side and gave me strength…and I was delivered from the lion’s mouth.

What we see here is a movement, not bursting with success, but showing all the signs of failure. And yet, Paul seems to be satisfied that the keel has been laid and the strength to conquer every obstacle belongs to the faithful.

I want to take a minute and share with you what brought me to this topic today.

On Friday morning, I had my second interview for the chaplaincy job at the Maine State Prison in Warren. It was an interesting interview.

What impressed me, however, was the conflict in worldviews. As a Christian, I see myself, along with the Apostle Paul, as a “sinner saved by grace.” But for the grace of God, I stand in the same place as the inmates of a prison. Jesus made it clear that it is not the physical act of murder or adultery that condemns the person. It is the lustful thought that makes the person guilty of adultery; it is the emotion of hate that makes the person guilty of murder.

The difference, then, between the person who lusts and hates and the person who fulfills the lust and hate in such acts as adultery, rape and murder is in stepping over that invisible line in the sand from which there is no return. Those in prison, for the most part, have stepped over that line and are paying the price.

I kept being told by one of the interviewers, however, that there were rapists and murderers there, the implication being that they were something of inferior beings. It reminded me of the focus by the Christian Right on isolating those who violate certain select moral absolutes. As the rules are tightened, I could envision a day when many now acceptable lifestyles or actions would condemn a person to incarceration along with the rapists and murderers.

I went to my office and checked my email as soon as I got back from Warren. There was a note there from the Washington correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s largest daily newspaper. He had some questions about my take on the subpoena recently issued to 6 televangelists by Sen. Grassley of Iowa to submit their financial records.

The thrust of his questions concerned the nature of this tax-exempt status that we as churches enjoy and confusion over why Americans continue to support these megachurches that are being led by people living the life of the rich and famous on the donations of their constituents.

I explained the system of tax-exemption to him as best I could. The question as to why Americans support these high-flying preachers who use ministry funds for their own comfort and pleasure was easier because there is a little something deep down in all of us that longs for that kind of impact. They do it, I explained, because success and prosperity are the essence of the American Dream, and the American Dream is thought by millions of shallow Evangelicals in America to be the mark of God’s blessing on a faithful nation.

The Christian life, then, is less about hope and service and more about reaping its benefits now. It is all too much about living the good life on the backs of Jesus, the apostles, the early church fathers and all those martyrs down through history.

The reporter asked me if I thought it was changing, and I told him that not only did I think it was not changing but that it would be getting worse as the lines between church and state, now blurred, became more defined. He asked me if people would rebel against this kind of abuse as it was made public. My answer was “No” – that because of the persecution complex nursed by most Evangelicals, they would simply assume that their leaders were being persecuted by the government and dig in their heels. Every attempt by the state to restrict the unbridled freedom of the church even to interfere with the state is pounced on as religious persecution.

The Apostle Paul had something to say about this kind of culture in which we

find ourselves today:

…the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths (v. 3).

This is not about the pursuit of truth or the free exercise of religion. It is an abuse of privilege by large, cohesive groups of people who share a common fear of becoming irrelevant. In the safety of large groups, individual pathologies take on the semblance of normality. Privileges become rights. Worship becomes entertainment. As long as there are people who want to be entertained, there will be hired guns to entertain them and give them just enough Gospel to legitimize these lucrative but dangerous enterprises.

The sad part of this is that at the end of the day, the little church in the heartland of America will be hurt because of these abuses. Community will be hurt; witness will be hurt; faith will be hurt; freedom will be lost. As one-by-one these charlatans of the faith are unmasked, the entire Christian movement will be painted with the same brush.

The third thing that happened goes to the root of both previous two things. I received a letter from some outfit in Ireland that promised the hope to boomer Americans of retiring in the lap of luxury on the shores of some third-world country overseas:

You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry and fig trees…amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus and hollyhocks.

The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings you breakfast in bed.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle...as it would to stay in your own home!

For those of you to whom this might appeal, you can get more information by calling International House, Waterford, Ireland, 1-800-682-7698.

As for me, I live in mortal fear that Jesus will make a physical appearance while I am sitting in my house on the shores of some otherwise squalid paradise, watching some poor, struggling soul prune my bushes or carry my golf bags.

Who is this gardener, and what do I owe to him as a fellow human being? That is the question worth asking. This company has portrayed the reality of paradise now over the Christian hope of paradise yet to come. The first paradise is “real,” while the second is, by inference, unreal.

I had the thought that every minute I sat there watching one of Jesus’ disciples prune my hedge, I would be dying in “paradise,” a quarter inch at a time.

You can see where I am going with this, I hope. The megachurch now offers what is the hope of the world in which we live – paradise now instead of or in addition to paradise later. This is the very opposite of the message of the Gospel. In the words of Jesus, He who would come after me, let him take up his cross daily and follow me (Luke 9:23). He who saves his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 10:39).

These bedrock principles of the Christian faith have been lost in our insistence on living the American Dream of success and prosperity. Inasmuch as the trappings of success are considered by shallow believers to be the evidence of faithful living, there will be enough charlatans to go around for everyone. This is the best of all worlds - an anti-Christian worldview with a Christian emphasis.

In my book, I call this “Christian Atheism.”

If we look at the life and witness of the Apostle Paul, we see how life ought to be lived – directed toward and dedicated to the global picture of spreading some kind of Good News other than what we can gain for ourselves.

This Good News is a consistent theme throughout the Scriptural account of modern man. It is presented as a force rooted in love rather than in military power. It stands human logic on its head.

From the Old Testament:

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before him, for dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations (Psalm 22:27-28).

Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples. Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.” (Psalm 96:3-4).

And in the New Testament:

All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:18-20.

I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, so that I would not build on another man’s foundation; but as it is written, “They who had no news of him shall see, and they who have not heard shall understand (Romans 15:20-21).

God’s purpose in calling a people to Himself is not to build His kingdom on earth but to fill the earth with the vibrancy of hope, especially in those places where hope has not been offered.

Today, we have tens of millions of American Christians who have built for themselves little paradises on earth in the form of professional success and wildly successful ministries. They build on the groundwork laid by faithful pastors in god-forsaken areas of the world like ours and prostitute the mission of the church that calls for making disciples where none are found.

They do this with tax-free revenues, just like the greedy leaders, teachers and politicians they support.

What has happened to the Church of Jesus Christ in America is that we have lost sight of the big picture and are focused on our personal walk with God instead of the global mission. Theologian John Piper likens this to being a batboy at Yankee Stadium (or Fenway Park these days) who is so caught up in his work that he thinks that the point of the World Series is to hand the players their bats.

Can we as Christians risk rising above our own immediate concerns? Have we become so mired in the ability of God to work for the good of those who love Him that we no longer concern ourselves with the good of those who don’t love Him? Have we become so enamored with the trappings of the American Dream that we prefer to live an insular life, watching the gardener prune the hedges while we admire the view?

Those American Christians that the reporter was asking me about have become content to hire their own gardeners to prune their Christian lives so they can sit back and enjoy the ride. To some degree, we all are guilty of that, aren’t we? We don’t want to see the world the way God sees it and to accept the seriousness of our mandate.

Paul saw the big picture. Somehow, his Lord had stood beside him when nobody else would. Somehow, he was given the time and opportunity to finish the job of reaching the Gentiles with this Good News. Now, his job was about over. If they wanted to see him before he died, they would have to hurry, he tells them in v. 9. What he has learned is this: …the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion’s mouth.

Here is the summation that Paul offers about his ministry:

I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award me on that day – and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearing (vs. 7-8).

Paul views his efforts as something of a foot race with which he has kept faith. This isn’t just any old “stay the course” kind of race, however. The course had been set before him; the task had rung down through redemptive history. He picks up the baton and pushes on in a direction set, not by himself or some other disciple, but by God alone. There is no room in Paul’s life and witness for Pop-Christianity.

Many of us here are getting on toward finishing the course. Is it a course that commends itself to our souls, or is it a course that has commended itself to our comfort and our entertainment? When the Lord has stood beside us in our hour of need and has given us strength, were we delivered from the lion’s mouth, or did we just camp out in there, kick back and let somebody else worry about where we were going?

The strength that God gave to Paul was for a final burst of energy to proclaim the Gospel – to finish the job he had started in bringing Good News to those who had not heard.

We as Christians are called to be living witnesses to a faith that triumphs not only in times of success but even in times of failure. That’s why they call it “faith.” The strength given to us is to press forward not toward a preferred goal but through thick and thin. To do that is to transform the believer into a living, breathing example of hope.

That doesn’t mean that there are no comforts in this life for our enjoyment. It means that our comforts, and they are many, are incidental to the bigger picture.

John Piper tells this story of William Carey, known as the “father of modern missions,” that flies in the face of the power church:

William Carey left for India from England in 1793 and never came home. He labored 40 years without a furlough. He lost two of his three wives in death. When he had a fever they attached 110 leaches to his thigh. And on March 11,1812 – after almost 20 years of work – a fire broke out and destroyed years of irreplaceable work: The draft of the great polyglot dictionary; the Sikh and Telugu grammars; ten versions of the Bible that had been going through the press; the translation of the Ramayana that he and his partners had been working on for six years.

Carey was out of town in Calcutta. When Marshman told him, tears filled his eyes, and later he said,

In one short evening the labors of years are consumed. How unsearchable are the ways of God! I had lately brought some things to the utmost of perfection of which they seemed capable, and contemplated the missionary establishmenet with perhaps too much self-congratulations. The Lord has laid me low, that I may look more simply to him.

Carey discovered painfully that the mission of Church goes forward by looking more simply to Christ and not to some self-styled guru. In his losses, the Lord stood with him. He never forsook him.

(www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons?ByScripture/9/)

The Christian Right has become extremely skilled in anticipating the cutting edge of popular sentiment and marketing itself to the disenfranchised and powerless. You might say that their target is the shrinking Middle Class that is increasingly losing control and hope in a fragile American Dream.

The Gospel for which the Apostle Paul and William Carey gave their lives, however, is a beacon of light through the murky maze of smoke and mirrors. The lesson that we must take from both is that to touch a life – to make a disciple – is of far greater value than all the power and glory of one moment in the spotlight.

Path to Grace and Peace

Knowledge of God

2 Peter 1:1-11

My early childhood experiences with church were not very uplifting. Church was a place where we spent too much time thinking and talking about God and not enough time getting to know God. It was a place where the words of God took precedence over the Word of God.

We had a little orchestra there, and I played a portable marimba. The pastor played the trumpet. Sunday evening service was a great experience, even for a kid – lots of singing and testifying.

It was the testimonies that continue to haunt me to this day. The testimonies were about what God was doing to relieve sickness and financial problems. God was a very much-honored Gargoyle in the sky – reminiscent of Aladin’s Lamp – available to the faithful at a moment’s notice provided you followed certain rules.

What we had there was a great group of folks who were standing on the sidelines waiting for the end of the world, praising God for healing a hangnail this week. I recall one severe case of a beautiful woman with a brain tumor. She came through the surgery quite disfigured, but it was her use of lipstick and earrings that was the primary focus, as though her sinful appearance brought on the brain tumor.

There was too much emphasis on what God can do for me if I behave and not enough emphasis on getting to know God.

One of my most vivid memories of that childhood church was taking the step of what they called a Second Work of Grace – publicly committing myself to the service of God through Christ. What I did not know at that time was the cost of that step – that I would have to be broken.

You see, I know all about the sins of the flesh because I have committed most if not all of them, either in thought or in deed. I know about divorce and the futile hope that it carries that things will be better the next time around. They won’t be better; they will be different. Success the next time around will depend on whether you are better. It is not the marriage that makes the person…It is the person who makes the marriage.

One thing drives me to this day. It is that there are too many of God’s people out there wandering around aimlessly with no rudder or focus, using God as a fire extinguisher to keep them out of Hell, and that is about all there is. I have referred to these folks as the “Church in Exile.”

I cannot tell you how distressing it has become for me to stand and watch while the Church of Jesus Christ prefers snowmobiling over making their calling and election sure.

What the Apostle Peter is telling us in this passage from 2 Peter 1 is that you cannot experience grace and peace without the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ. You want grace and peace? There is only one source – increased knowledge of God and Jesus Christ.

Can you get that benefit here at the NMMH Church? It depends on a lot of things, doesn’t it? First, it depends on whether or not your pastor, as teacher, is teaching you about God or teaching you to know God. He must be teaching you obedience to the Word of God as opposed to obedience to the words of God. If he is not doing these things, you are getting short-changed.

Secondly, you cannot know God without knowing His people and growing together with them. We are in this journey together. God has called every one of us to a faith that is equally precious. There is not one of us here whose faith is any more valuable than another’s. If all Jesus is to us is a fire extinguisher while we work hard, have fun and seek the American Dream rather than the Kingdom of God, we are in for a big, big surprise. We are going to be nailed up side the head with a 2x4.

Conversely, if we have been nailed up the side of the head with a 2x4, it may well be that God is trying to get our attention.

Peter, in this 2^nd Epistle, zeroes in on what it means and what it takes to abound with grace and peace in this life.

I have a habit of skipping by the salutary parts of the first chapter of any Epistle. I tend to look at that part as incidental and having no meat. Big mistake! There is a wealth of good, practical theology in the first 3 verses of 2 Peter 1.

He begins, “I, Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ...” He tells us who he is. That he is an apostle carries with it authority. He has been chosen; appointed; sent out to preach the Gospel by none other that the Author of the Gospel, Jesus Christ. Peter has been given permission to speak for the living Christ and to do it boldly as His ambassador.

Contrary to the actions of many self-proclaimed apostles of Jesus Christ today, Peter is careful not to flaunt this authority. “Apostle” comes second in his credentials. It is preceded by “servant,” or slave.

On the surface, there would appear to be a great difference in status between ambassador and slave – two opposite ends of the spectrum. Peter does not think so, however. He sees them as much the same thing. If Jesus could first become a servant and live among us, setting aside His power and glory, our point of identification with Christ is as a slave.

Peter had taken seriously the teaching of Jesus as written in Luke 22:

The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you must be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.

Peter was the greatest among the apostles: “Upon this rock, I will build my church!” Jesus makes it clear, however, that the greatest must be like the one who serves. So Peter defines himself first as a servant. Can you imagine the power that the church of Jesus Christ would have in this world today if it were to place service as the first of its definitions?

Peter continues: “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours.”

He is identifying his audience – those to whom he is writing directly and those who will read and consider his writings for centuries to come. His readers have obtained a faith of equal standing to his. Peter has leveled the playing field within the church.

I have never forgotten a panel discussion of religion many years ago on TV. The televangelists of that time were all there. Jerry Falwell was speaking for the group when he said. “We are the leaders of the Christian church in America.” I submit that that is where the church has gotten off course – too many leaders and not enough servants.

In Peter’s worldview, we who believe stand on an equal footing of faith. Notice, however, that there seems to be no human accomplishment involved here. Peter is helping us understand how futile it would be to be boastful about our faith. Faith is something he and we have received!

It is a great mistake to look at somebody else’s life and say, “Boy, I wish I had as much faith as he does or she does!” You do! Develop it! Use it! Stop limiting God because of your own compromises with the world system. What gives our faith value and distinction is not our righteousness. It is Christ’s righteousness. Therefore, we cannot boast in either our faith or the faith of someone else.

What we do with that faith, however, is what Peter wants to get to next.

He begins by stating in v. 2 that grace and peace in abundance can be ours. He makes it clear that grace and peace are not ours by nature. They come to us from outside ourselves. Peter is telling us that we can have as much or as little of grace and peace in this life as we want, and that it is God who can and will make grace and peace abundant. We may have grace and peace abundant when things are going well, and we may have grace and peace abundant when things are going into the dumper?

How do we get that grace and peace? It is ours, Peter tells us, through the knowledge of God. In other words, where the knowledge of God is dormant, grace does not flow. Where folks think they can treat Jesus as a fire extinguisher, grace does not flow, and the abundant life is not theirs. We miss out on the abundant life that God intends for us when we decide that we will pursue it through our pleasures or our money or our power.

The channel from God’s infinite reservoir of grace in our lives is the knowledge of God. Peter pushes this theme in v. 3: “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”

As Peter goes on through this Epistle, he shows great concern for how some in the church are living corrupt lives. He sees a very close connection between godliness and eternal life. In Chapter 2, vs. 19, 20, he tells about false teachers who are very popular with the people:

They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity – for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.

The way of godliness is abundant life – grace and peace in abundance, all available through an increasing knowledge of God. The more we know God, the more abundant life we have. On the other hand, if the way of godliness is rejected, so is the way of eternal life. Peter is telling us that to turn our lives into an insurance policy for escaping Hell while we remain unchanged is an indicator of unbelief. Hope and godliness stand or fall together. That is why the world makes fun of the church today – too many people claiming change but living the same old way.

In that 3^rd verse, Peter makes it very clear that we have all that we need for life and godliness. “His divine power has given us everything we need.” Insisting that we are incapable of living in the power of Christ is a cop out. Bragging on somebody else’s faith is a cop out. We have everything we need through our knowledge of Him. And what is more, God does not take a passive role in our development. He not only opens His riches to us, He has called us by His own glory and goodness.

The Christian faith is not a set of doctrines to be accepted. It is a power to be experienced and shared with God’s people and with the world outside the church. It begins with the power over sin and death and extends to the power to live the victorious life. The mark of adoption by God is godliness. That means that we are to have a love of the things of God and desire to walk in His ways.

V. 4 tells us how to increase our knowledge of God: “Through God’s glory and goodness, He has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires."

Is there any more to ask in this life than to be in a position of participating in the divine nature of God and escaping the corruption of our evil desires? I am going to say something very familiar to you. Sin attacks us by holding out promises for relief or happiness – short term or long term. That is why we lust after sex, money and power. We think they will bring us happiness.

If we lie on our tax return – just a little bit, we will have more money and be happier. If we divorce our spouse whom we were getting rather tired of anyway, we think we will be happier. Sin will always win the battle unless we can have the hope of God’s promises clearly in front of us. Principal among those promises is grace and peace in abundance and the hope of life eternal. If you have grace and peace in abundance, the downside risk of sin will restrain you back from repeating it. We repeat our sins because we have not built up the defenses against them through the knowledge of God.

We tend to think we can summon up the goodness to overcome our favorite peccadilloes by sheer willpower. On the other hand, the power to overcome is right at our fingertips. It is a case of where we choose to direct our energies. Peter is telling us that we need to direct our energies toward increasing our knowledge of God.

It takes effort, however. V. 5 – “Make every effort to add to your faith goodness, and to goodness knowledge, and to knowledge self-control, etc. If you have these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive… Want to be effective and productive? Direct your energies away from being a nice guy with less visible sin than the guy next door and toward them toward increasing your knowledge of God.

Finally, Peter pleads with us to be “…all the more eager to make your calling and election sure, for if you do these things you will never fall…”

Putting your relationship with God through Jesus Christ on the shelf while you depend on your own ability to please yourself and solve your own problems will not feed the bulldog – will not make your calling and election by God a certainty in your life.

We need each other. More than that, we need the kind of honesty and humility that Peter displays in his writings. We need to serve each other; we need to view each other as being of equal measure of faith; we need to grow in the knowledge of God – all of us; we need to experience victory in order to press onward to higher ground.

The Kingdom of God as the Promised Land

The Mystery Priest

Genesis 14:17-28

Hebrews 7:1-3, 14-17, 23-28

For the past ten years, we here at the NMMH Church have been studying the Kingdom of God as a dynamic, growing and victorious kingdom. It is Isaiah’s “highway of the redeemed” (Isaiah 35) that stands not only against the drift of our culture toward every type of distracting pleasure; it is the living evidence that we are not alone in our walk of faith.

God’s government has always had associated with it a system of priests. Under the Covenant of the Law, these priests followed a human ancestry back to Aaron, the brother of Moses. Since Aaron was descended from the tribe of Levi, you had to be a Levite in order to be a priest. If you could not prove your lineage, you were disqualified from the priesthood. It was as simple as that.

In that old order of things, human ancestry prevailed. It was done that way to make it clear to us that the human system of trying to earn your own salvation was doomed to failure. Not only did the people drift away from God because of the deadness of the law; the priesthood itself became corrupt because it was based not on a calling from God but on the family tree.

The priest, Eli, was brought up short because his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were using their inherited privilege to engage in temple prostitution. God used the child Samuel to tell Eli that he would be die in disgrace because of the corruption of his family. Ironically, Samuel’s sons also became corrupt, which gave rise to the first king of Israel.

When Samuel, awakened in the night, gave God’s verdict to Eli, Eli’s response was, “He is the Lord; let him do what is good in his eyes.” Eli was a man of faith despite his weaknesses as a father.

What the writer of the Book of Hebrews tells us about Abraham in the 11^th chapter is very important to understand, I think. Abram’s faith was not about a consistent obedience to some moral code. His faith was about his willingness to get up and go, not knowing where he was going. That is the ground of our faith as well. Abraham was told, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.”

Faith demands that we leave behind something important to us. Otherwise it is not faith; it is accommodation. “Rise up and go, and I will bless you.”

We live today in a world in which the Church of Jesus Christ does not want to rise up and go. Instead, it wants to be accepted by the world – wants to be legitimized, accepted and a respected force in our culture. That is why it has been so political over the years.

That kind of life is not one of living by faith. It is a refusal to leave the political machinations up to God and, instead, is a statement of getting tired of waiting for God and deciding to take matters into our own hands. Living by faith is not made evident by success in securing the American Dream of power and wealth.

We all want to know where we are going. That is natural. We want to make the best of the brief time we are here with a minimum of stumbling. If you don’t know where you are going or have no plan for getting there, you are going to stumble along the way. That’s the price of faith. All the patriarchs stumbled. People of faith stumble because faith requires that we plow new ground.

The Scriptures make it very clear that God hates valuing the seen above the unseen. What is seen is temporary, the Apostle Paul tells us. But what is unseen is eternal. Two examples of this are the lives of Esau and King Saul, the first king of Israel. Esau despised his birthright. He found it to be of less value to him than a good meal after coming home from a hunting trip, so he sold it to his twin brother, Jacob. We are told that God hated Esau for that very reason – he valued the immediate over the potential. He sold out the unknown for certainty now.

King Saul had everything that was needed to be a great king. Instead, when the Prophet Samuel was late arriving at Gilgal to plead at the altar for God’s deliverance of Israel against the invading Philistines, Saul cut the waiting short and offered the sacrifice on the altar himself. Saul exalted himself to the office of priest because it was expedient, and his men were panicking. He incurred the wrath and the ultimate rejection of God.

Saul later went to the Witch of Endor to find out what was going to happen to him in another battle with the Philistines and because God had rejected him. He valued the immediate answer over the sovereign grace of God. He and his entire family were eventually wiped off the face of the earth, not because it was a bad family in human terms, but because it was a blight on the eternal plan of God to inaugurate His spiritual Kingdom.

I hope to encourage you to understand that “going” is not “doing.” “Doing” has already been done by our appointed High Priest. “Going” is the decision that everyone here in this church this morning has made – to stumble into the uncertainty of life hoping and praying that God is good on His promises. Esau and Saul refused to stumble into the uncertainty of life and, instead, took what they could grab today over what good things God intended for them tomorrow. It was a choice.

My recent trip to the Holy Land has done much to broaden my thinking on the Kingdom of God. What is going on over there is a fight over who really is entitled to the land. At our conference in the second weekend in October, I am going to address that very topic.

If you want to find an ethnic or racial heritage for the Promised Land, you won’t find it in the history of the Middle East. Nobody on record held the land for more than 400 years at any one time. The history of the land in Palestine is a lawyer’s nightmare. And yet, we live in a world today in which there are many American Christians who think they know exactly to whom the land belongs.

Jesus made it very clear that what you want or need will come only by first seeking the Kingdom of God through Christ. That comes first – not a deed to real estate.

Abraham rose up and went, leaving much of his life behind. He started off, however, with a huge mistake. God had made it clear that he should leave his father’s household behind. Instead, Abraham took along his favorite nephew Lot. Lot was a person of the world. God had not promised an inheritance to Lot. He had promised it to Abraham.

Lot never quite understood what it meant to live by faith in God. Instead, he lived by faith in Abraham. He would not have understood that the land that was promised to Abraham had little to do with the nation-state of Israel and much to do with the Kingdom of God completed in Jesus Christ. Lot had the spirit of Esau and King Saul.

Along comes this fellow Melchizedek, the mystery priest. Abraham had to go to Lot’s rescue when Lot was kidnapped and carried off into captivity. Abraham not only got him back in what is referred to as the “conquering of the kings”, he restored the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, a feat that turned out later to be rather dubious. God was not done yet with Sodom and Gomorrah nor with Lot.

Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt because she valued a wistful look back at her burning home over a spiritual hope in the unknown. To rise up and go means not to look back and long for what was. That was the very sin of Israel from the time they crossed the Red Sea to the time of the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. They were forever looking back and grumbling.

Melchizedek appeared out of nowhere and blessed Abraham, who was returning from conquering the kings and rescuing Lot. Abraham gives 10% of the bounty to Melchizedek, who had no human ancestry to identify him as a priest. Melchizedek was a priest, not appointed by man, but appointed by God alone. By giving Melchizedek a tithe of 10%, Abraham demonstrated that God’s appointment is superior to that of man’s – that spiritual anointing is superior to physical ordination.

In the church today, we like to think that God calls and man ordains. That works imperfectly in some instances and doesn’t work very well at all in most, I think. Politics raises its ugly head in all of our human endeavors, even in the church, and we make mistakes in judgment. The message given to Abraham is the same message given to us – “Set aside your attachment to what defines you and go to the kingdom that I will show you.”

For us, it does not mean that we are to sell our homes and take off, leaving everyone behind. It simply means that we are to put our physical worlds into proper perspective. They identify where we live, rather than who we are.

Melchizedek has thrown the proverbial monkey wrench into the human search for goodness apart from God. The land, our heritage and our genealogy, while fun and interesting, are not worth anything in Kingdom terms because they are temporary and not eternal. Abraham, referred to in the Bible as the “friend of God” came from what is known today as Iraq and settled into today’s Palestinian Territory. So what? What is important is that he rose up and went, knowing not where he was going or why. That’s faith.

Yet, this man who was called the friend of God gave his tithe to a priest of unknown parentage and credentials – a type of the Christ to come. Abraham, as the promised father of God’s people, had every right to require that Melchizedek give him a tithe. Abraham honored Melchizedek for one reason only – that God had appointed Melchizedek priest and king – period. Melchizedek was a man like Abraham – having no authority other than God’s.

This brings us not only to our text this morning from the 7^th chapter of Hebrews but to a new understanding as to what we are saved from.

The 25^th verse of the 7^th chapter of Hebrews says this: “Therefore, he (Jesus) is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” This is one of the most overlooked and remarkable verses in the entire Bible, and it is packed with incredible truths that we as Christians need to grasp.

The picture that is painted by the writer of the Book of Hebrews is Christ’s superior priestly standing to that of the OT priests of the tribe of Levi – direct descendents of Abraham. It was that very claim that caused the religious establishment, proud of its elitist human traditions, to crucify our Lord.

The verse begins with the word “Therefore.” Therefore what? Therefore what the rest of this verse says is the great truth – the summation – of all this business about Melchizedek.

We need someone greater than Abraham and greater than Levi in order to be safe. We need a new and greater priest because there can be no perfection through the Human priesthood. All the OT priesthood could offer us was to point toward the coming Messiah. The lesser covenant was intended to bless the greater covenant.

Jesus, like Melchizedek, came out of nowhere. He was not of the tribe of Levi but of the tribe of Judah, disqualifying Him for priesthood. Like Melchizedek, his parentage is a mystery – how can the HS impregnate a virgin without violating her? Melchizedek comes as king of an obscure country – Salem, later to be conquered by King David and named Jerusalem, the physical center of redemptive history. Similarly, Jesus came as king of the New Jerusalem – the spiritual Jerusalem, now rather meaningless to us but evolving into the center of redemptive history.

There are three themes from v. 25:

1. Jesus is able to save completely and forever…

2. Jesus always lives to make intercession for us.

3. This eternal salvation is for those who draw near to God through Christ – those who rise up and go to where Jesus is.

All of this has little meaning until we grapple with what it is that we are saved from and what is this matter of intercession.

The major problems in the world, characterized by the Christian Right as abortion and homosexuality and our poor parenting and our financial pressures and the degeneration of our culture, are not what we are saved from. We want to know how to be reconciled to God so that we escape His terrifying wrath at the judgment. That has nothing to do with the law and how well or how poorly we are able to keep it. God is not impressed with our morality. What impresses God is our willingness to be Abrahams – to “rise up and go.”

God’s wrath never changes. It burns red hot. Our only hope is to have a faithful High Priest who will intercede for us forever. Our High Priest is Christ, who is a wall of asbestos between us and the wrath of God.

We need a king of righteousness; we need a king of peace; we need someone without a tainted human history; we need someone with an indestructible life who will never die and require replacement. We need someone greater than Abraham and greater than Levi – someone like Melchizedek, who blessed Abraham and who received tithes from Abraham. We need a superior priest over the Levitical system – a priest after the order of Melchizedek, who had no official order other than the anointing by God.

It is not as though Jesus as Priest loves us and God as Father hates us. God the Father has set up the system of priesthood for our salvation. It is His idea. He sends the priests, and He sends His own Son. The priests die, and they can no longer advocate for us. All this is designed so that God’s wrath can be appeased and we can be rescued – not from our peccadilloes, but from God’s own wrath.

Contrary a common evangelical assumption that all you have to do is say the magic words and you are instantly and forever saved, our present and future salvation does not depend on what we do or on when. It depends on the active, ongoing work of Christ at the Cross and onward from there – past, present and future.

Christ’s deity has secured for us His priesthood. Because He is our priest, appointed by God, His continual intercessory prayer for us secures our ongoing salvation. We are saved from the time we rise up and go to the time we depart this world because Jesus is praying for us eternally.

In addition, what this 25^th verse tells us is that Jesus is able to save completely those who “draw near to God through Him.”

Hebrews 13:21 says this: “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, in whom be glory for ever and ever, Amen.

That’s it, isn’t it? It’s ongoing; dynamic; changing; growing; improving. God is equipping us with everything good for doing his will. What is His will for us? That we keep on drawing near to him forever and ever, seeking His Kingdom. It is God who is giving us the need and the urge to draw near to Him. And He is doing it through Jesus Christ.

The writer is telling us that God is not leaving us alone to our own devices in drawing near to Him. Rather, we draw near because our High Priest is asking the Father to put within us the urge and the need to draw near, thus ensuring our eternal salvation.

Is that not a burst of hope this morning? Our eternal standing with God does not depend on our ability to stand firm or stay the course. Our eternal standing with God depends on God’s own ability, through Christ our Priest, to keep us drawing near.

The evidence of your standing with God, then, is not what you did 100 years ago. The evidence of your standing with God is that you live in desire to draw near to Him.

That is your eternal security.

Knowing the Unknowable

2 Chronicles 6:12-21
Ephesians 3:10-21

I get tired, sometimes, shoveling sand against the tide. But when I read these two passages of Scripture that we shared this morning – one about Solomon’s dedication of the temple and the other about Paul’s dedication of the Church of Jesus Christ, I am encouraged. Here are two high-profile leaders consumed by the drift of the church toward legalism and the urgent fear that the non-essentials of worship would condemn the worshipper.

Very soon after the death of his father, David, the newly-crowned King Solomon was worshipping at the Tent of Meeting, where we are told he was offering a thousand burnt offerings. We don’t know how – maybe in a vision – God appeared to Solomon and invited him ask for whatever he wanted from God. Here was Solomon’s answer:

You have shown great kindness to David my father and have made me king in his place. Now, Lord God, let your promise to my father David be confirmed, for you have made me king over a people who are as numerous as the dust of the earth. Give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may lead this people, for who is able to govern this great people of yours?

This is an affirmation by Solomon of the sovereignty of God – an acknowledgement that only God could enable him to lead this people. Listen to God’s answer to Solomon:

Since you have not asked for wealth, riches or honor, nor for the death of your enemies, and since you have not asked for a long life but for wisdom and knowledge to govern my people over whom I have made you king, therefore wisdom and knowledge will be give you. And I will also give you wealth, riches and honor, such as no king who was before you ever had and none after you will have.

Despite his good intentions, however, and despite God’s granting him wisdom and knowledge, he was not wise enough to overcome the lusts of his flesh. We are told that he had some 900 concubines. He permitted idols to be worshipped by his pagan concubines and their offspring.

Solomon had everything anyone would want in this life. And yet, he could not see God’s sovereignty clearly enough to keep from retaining some sovereignty over his own life. If he couldn’t do it, how on earth can you and I do it? We may imagine the extent of God’s hand in the universe, but we are incapable of believing it enough to conduct our lives as though God sees and knows everything we do. We sin; therefore we are!

It may have been the riches and honor that corrupted Solomon. Had God given him poverty, it probably would have been poverty that would have corrupted him. Solomon is historical proof that human wisdom and human knowledge are not enough to defeat the human desire for power over our own lives.

Our belief in the sovereignty of God is a matter of degree. The more we believe, the easier it is to discipline our lives, but whatever discipline we may exercise is way short of holiness. What is tragic is to see the Church of Jesus Christ letting it all go in favor of manipulating world events according to our own dictates.

The more we think we know about what God is doing, the less we believe in His sovereignty. Those who have nailed down the plan of God tend to be the very ones who use power and influence to make sure that God’s plan is being carried out. In our day, they are the theocrats who want to throw away the Constitution and replace it with the Bible.

The more you have doubts about what God is doing and when He is going to do it, the more likely you are to trust His sovereign power to work things out. The more sure you are of what He is doing, the more likely you are to decide to become God’s little robot on earth – using your sales abilities, crashing through other peoples’ boundaries and imposing your worldview on those who are seeking.

It is possible that Solomon might have been better served had he asked for average intelligence but a seeking heart. As it was, his reign was so awful that the kingdom was divided after his death.

We shared together the riveting testimony of Bryan Gallant, whose two children were killed in an automobile accident when the family was headed home from church. After years of recovering from grief, what Bryan had to tell us was that God’s purpose in that accident was to break him in order that he might yield to the sovereignty of God. God was breaking Bryan from his self-sufficiency – from his zeal for doing God’s business under his own power. His message to us was a simple one that tears at the core of who we want to be: “Stop doing things for God, and let God love you in order that He might do things through you.”

That is the struggle of the Christian. Most of us here this morning have been broken by something – divorce or death of a loved one or failure or rejection. Some of us have been broken by all four. What that means is that God needs to hit harder for some than for others in order to get the message across. Still, as I look back over my life, what I see is a constant battle between what I want to do and what God wants to do through me. Letting God love me is a very difficult thing for a type-A personality like myself. So we churn away and push against God’s patience because our view of His sovereignty is too small.

I want to see God at work here in this little church in a big way, don’t you? But if it takes a charismatic leader to make that happen, what that tells me is that God is not big enough and needs a used-car salesman to do the job – preferably one from the South. Because we don’t have that kind of talent here, thank God, if something is going to happen it will have to happen from within despite ourselves. That is going to require of us a different kind of faith, is it not? It will require of us a vision that is beyond the power of any of us to make it happen.

When you hear about these megachurches, you often don’t hear about God or Jesus. What you hear about is the pastor: “You should hear what so-and-so is doing with his church. They have 5,000 people on Sunday morning.” Who gets the glory – God or so-and-so? Because of our rebellion against God, we want to do it ourselves in our timing.

Paul, apparently, was a lousy speaker. And yet, he knew something of the sovereignty of God in full operation even though his converts kept drifting toward charismatic speakers. God hit him over the head with a two-by-four, blinding him so that he would listen. Paul then threw his credentials on the dung heap because they were not worth anything to the Kingdom. While many of us here have been broken, we have not been stopped in our tracks like Paul.

We are going to take a look this morning at Solomon’s and Paul’s sense of the expanse, or the bigness of God.

Solomon is dedicating the temple in Jerusalem. He stands on a bronze platform before what is called the “whole assembly of Israel.” Obviously, the millions of people could not be present, but somehow it was a representation of all the people.

The first thing he does is kneel down before the whole assembly and lift his hands to heaven. This is more than a gesture. It is a physical acknowledgement of the vastness of God and the relative insignificance of even the King of what was probably the most powerful nation on earth at that time. He bows to God’s sovereignty with these words: “O Lord God, there is no God like you in heaven or on earth – you who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way.”

Therein lies the secret to being led by the Spirit of God – continuing wholeheartedly in His way. Solomon is not testifying to the power and greatness of Israel or himself. He is testifying to the power and greatness of God, knowing that to continue wholeheartedly in that frame of mind is to be assured that God will keep His covenant of love with us, his servants.

That is the lesson that we must learn and apply not only to our individuals lives but to the Church of Jesus Christ. God will bless His church and His people if they continue wholeheartedly in His way. The thing to remember is the word “wholeheartedly.” Not half a heart; not half our time and attention; not half a theology, but wholeheartedly – a whole heart! The KJV is even more specific on this point: “O Lord, there is no God like thee in heaven and in earth; which keepest covenant and shewest mercy unto thy servants, that walk before thee with all their hearts.

There is nothing there that indicates that we have to be right in our theology or even the direction of our walk. We walk according to what we know. Solomon makes it very clear that whatever we know is only a tiny fraction of God. He has this to say:

The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built! Yet give attention to your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy, O Lord. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence…Hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.

Solomon is acknowledging before God that the temple made with hands is a reflection only of the foolishness of man and the accommodation by the Creator of man. It is a mere symbol that cannot possibly contain the living God. Yet, it is a very important symbol provided the people are wholeheartedly continuing, not in the worship, but in the way of the Lord. The temple is the place of meeting God for those who wholeheartedly seek His face.

To Solomon, even though he has just built one of the wonders of the world, God is so sovereign that He has to be invited to attend worship there and will do so only if hearts are wholeheartedly seeking after Him.

This little temple is not enough, is it? God requires of us that we be insecure in our sense of His vastness – so insecure that we are always looking for new glimpses of Him. That is the spirit of revival and the key to the presence of God here in this place. The great Solomon is on his knees, feeling very inadequate to dedicate this monument to human architecture, knowing that it means nothing outside a trembling spirit that seeks after God.

Whatever wisdom and knowledge God had given him, it was not enough to make him secure. In fact, it was his glimpse into the glory and majesty of God made him even more insecure, which is exactly where God wants us to be.

Solomon’s temple was leveled in 584 BC, rebuilt and leveled again in 165 BC, rebuilt in the First Century by King Herod, leveled again in 70 AD and replaced with two Moslem mosques so that it cannot be rebuilt. But Solomon’s God continued to reign over nations and over the hearts and lives of the humble – those with a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart. David, you will remember, was always crying out to God for forgiveness or deliverance. That was because he continued wholeheartedly in God’s way, even though he sinned grievously. God called David a “Man after my own heart” because David was always after the heart of God.

Would the Church of Jesus Christ not be a light in the darkness if it remained in a state of seeking after God instead of pretending to speak for God?

The Apostle Paul continues in the same pursuit of God that plagued Solomon all his life. He writes from prison. You would not blame him if he said, “I’ve had enough of worrying about other peoples’ Christian lives.” You wouldn’t blame him if he just tired out. But no; Paul is worried that they will worry about him: “I ask you not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory!”

What he wants for the Christians at Ephesus is to know the unsearchable riches of Christ and the love of Christ that exceeds or surpasses all knowledge. Paul longs for us to know the unknowable. That is what it means to always be searching after God – to wholeheartedly continue in Him. Since we cannot know Him, we are always seeking to know Him. It is a matter of reaching for the unreachable – it is in the search that we realize how needy we are. When we stop searching; when we think we have everything pinned down, that is when we begin to tell others what they should be doing. That is when we find ourselves operating under our own power – trying to do things for God that He is patiently waiting to do through us.

It is a denial of the sovereignty of God.

Even from a prison cell, the most pressing prayer that Paul had was not for his own release or comfort. It was that we might know God, who is unknowable. The more we know about God, the more unsure of ourselves we become. The more unsure of ourselves we become, the more power and sovereignty we release to the Sovereign Lord.

But Paul doesn’t want us to just know that power; he wants us to use that power: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Paul does not undertake this prayer lightly. Like Solomon, he kneels before the Father, knowing that it is only through the sovereign grace of God that we can know anything. What he wants for you and me is to live up to the level of our knowledge. We must use what we know, or what we know is does us no good.

This is it very simply. If we live by what we know, we will be able to experience a sense of the power and presence of God, at which point, we will know a little bit more.

Martin Luther did not always have it right. But he lived by what he knew, when everyone around him was going along in order to get along. The story is told of his good friend and assistant, Freidrich Myconius, who became ill and was expected to die shortly. He wrote a farewell letter to Luther on his deathbed. Luther read the message and sent this reply:

I command you in the name of God to live because I still have need of you in the work of reforming the church…The Lord will never let me hear that you are dead, but will permit you to survive me. For this I am praying, this is my will, and may my will be done, because I seek only to glorify the name of God.

Myconius, who had already lost the ability to speak when Luther’s reply came, soon recovered, lived six more years and finally died two months after Luther.

Paul wants us to be strengthened in the inner being so that we can live what we know. The inner being is the seat of influence in our lives. The strength that we need is a strength beyond human power and ability. Only through God’s power can we live up to our knowledge of Him.

Whatever you give your life to is where your heart dwells. All around us people are dedicating their lives to something other than truth – technology, building, oil, bananas, whatever. Life is too short to give it away to bananas!

Paul leaves us with a benediction of sorts. “Now unto Him (not us) who is able to do immeasurably more than all that we ask or imagine, according to the power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, forever and ever Amen.

He describes God as able,,,

Able

Able to do,,,

Able to do beyond what we ask…

Able to do beyond what we think…

Able to do beyond all that we ask or think…

Able to do immeasurably beyond all that we ask or think…

What are your highest thoughts concerning this ministry here at the NMMH Church? Are we playing it safe? God is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or think. I challenge you this morning to begin praying your highest hopes for this ministry in the spirit that Paul prays – wanting for each one of us to know the unknowable.

This is a testing ground for my own faith, and it ought to be for yours as well. Pray that God will do immeasurably more than we ask or think so that we may know more of His power and glory and may increase in our thirst for the knowledge of the love of Christ.

Stirring Things Up!

Habakkuk 2:9 – 3:2
2 Timothy 1:3-12

Paul writes to Timothy from prison in Rome, his second imprisonment under Caesar Nero and just prior to his execution. He writes to remind Timothy to “…fan into flame (or, stir up) the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline” (v. 6).

The thousand or so years from the time of Solomon through the First Century AD were marked by the slaughter of the prophets and preachers of God. There was little spirit of timidity in those times. God seemed to call certain people not only to preach a very unpopular word but to be ready to die for doing so.

Time after time we read of the prophets being killed – even hacked to death at the altar for their courage in bringing a prophecy of doom to the children of Israel. It would seem to be an easy thing for the people, when warned of God’s wrath, to repent and change their ways, but it never was. The best way to get rid of the message was to kill the messenger. That long history of killing the messenger was a harbinger of what would happen to Jesus as He preached the Gospel of peace.

What nation would not want peace? And yet, the only account we have of a nation willing to repent is the pagan city of Nineveh.

The one thing that seems consistently to stand against repentance is prosperity. Every time Israel became prosperous as the result of God’s blessing on them, they turned to worshipping the objects of their prosperity – their toys, so to speak. To become prosperous is to be able to afford to isolate ourselves from others and surround ourselves with a wall – a physical wall, an emotional wall and a spiritual wall.

We in America cannot ignore this very important lesson from history – that prosperity keeps nations and people from repenting. The culture of prosperity is a culture that builds walls around people and nations with a sign, “Keep Out!.” “Don’t tread on me!”

Building walls around ourselves carries over to churches as well. Last week we talked about legalism – the use of Bible verses strung together to form theologies that fail to honor the spirit of the Scriptures. That is a very common form of wall in Christian culture today. Once you have strung verses of Scripture together to form your theology, you have built an impregnable fortress against criticism. You can be confident of your position because you are a worshipper of the words of the Bible rather than the Word of God. Anyone who disagrees with you can be dismissed as a heathen.

Another way that we build walls against truth is to claim to have heard from God – “God told me.” Does God tell people things? In subtle ways, He tells all of us things that we are able to interpret in hindsight. But the best way to close off debate is to say that God told you something. I once was in a Bible study when a young man said that God had told him something that seemed to me to be contrary to the message of the Scriptures. I called him on it; his answer was, “Ask Him; don’t ask me!” Walls!

In ancient Jerusalem, walls were a means not only of keeping out pagan influences but of reminding the Jews that they were set apart from the world. With the coming of the Messiah, however, the walls were torn down – physically and spiritually. In Jesus, there was one people of both Jews and Gentiles, of both male and female, of both rich and poor. The wall of injustice to race, gender and class were to disappear.

The Prophet Habakkuk knew about walls. He wrote at the time when Babylon was becoming the dominant world power. The Ten Tribes of Israel had already been carried away into captivity by King Nebachudnezar. What spared Jerusalem was that it was self-contained, surrounded by a wall. The people of Judah thought that they were safe. But they were dying, and it was the mission of Habakkuk to cry out to that dying world. He was a man of many deep questions: “Why is there evil in the world? Why do the wicked seem to be winning?”

The cry of Habakkuk’s heart is summed up in Chapter 3, v. 2: “Lord I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy.”

God begins to speak to Habakkuk to answer his complaints. It may seem as though the wicked are winning, He tells him, but they will be judged. Habakkuk has heard from God, and he rejoices: “Yet, I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights” (3:18, 19).

Habakkuk is prophesying the destruction of Israel by Babylon. Yet, he waits patiently now for the day of calamity to come on Babylon. “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord.”

Prophets of our day are predicting calamity everywhere. I read yesterday that all the woes on America are because of our celebration of lesbian sex. Let’s assume for a moment that that is true. Can we see the destruction of America and still rejoice in the Lord as did Habakkuk? Or are we consumed with the attitude that we have to get “them” before they get “us?”

There is a place for stirring up God’s people. We can be accused here at the NMMH Church of not doing enough stirring up. I’m not certain whether that is my fault or the fact that you may be too comfortable where you sit and we share the blame.

Habakkuk hits us where we live. The charge that is laid on us is that what entangles men is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Those are the entangling snares that hold us captive.

Habakkuk talks a lot about wealth and land. “Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin.” He is talking about nations that place their destinies in the acquiring of more land. Woe to those who are bent on increasing their own possessions by invading their neighbor’s rights. All they accomplish is to burden themselves with more responsibility.

What he condemns applies not only to nations but to people. He speaks to us by reminding us that the American Dream is not about acquiring wealth or land. We can’t even take care of what we now have. The American Dream is about freedom to think and to act according to conscience and to allow our neighbor to do the same.

How tempting it is to build our nest up high so that we can raise our families out of reach of the danger and power of evil. Habakkuk condemns this kind of thinking because it works to the ruin of others. Once we begin to acquire, we can’t seem to stop. We may feel safe, but we never feel safe enough. The world keeps barging in.

He tells us that we should not feel smug and secure that nobody has condemned us for our isolation. The stones of the walls that we have built and the beams of the fortresses we have built will cry out against us.

The answer the prophet brings to us is very simple. Whatever calamity we think we are facing in the future, rejoice in the Lord. “The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer…”

God is not going to remove any wall that we have erected to insulate ourselves from others until we recognize that we have to begin tearing down those walls ourselves. That is what it means for a people of God to be stirring themselves. Do we need these walls? Do I have all I need, or am I angling for more? Because, at the end of the day, our walls may keep out the outside world, but they cannot keep out death. Take a look in the mirror if you don’t believe me.

We have to stir ourselves with regard to this church here in North Manchester that it not become a fortress against the world, but that it become a beacon of light. If we are going to minister to others, we have to be willing to tear down those walls. Stir things up inside this church, and the problem of how to get more people will take care of itself. I need to stir you up; you need to stir each other up. Those walls that protect us against the discomfort of being a Christian need to be torn down.

Paul seems to be making a point in his letter to Timothy that calls us to action. Timothy has a sincere faith in Christ that has been passed down through his mother’s family. That is not enough. He has the Holy Spirit living in him. That, also, is not enough. He has been called of God to ministry. Not enough! It is enough to get him into Heaven, but it does not go to the root of following Christ.

Paul has laid his hands on Timothy to receive the Holy Spirit. Now something is required of Timothy. He has to go all the way – to fan into flame (to stir) the gift of the Holy Spirit. Paul makes his point very clearly. Serving God with a spirit of timidity is not going to cut it. Timothy is called to stir up the spirit that God has implanted in him and in all His children – a spirit of power, love and self-discipline.

He goes on to tell Timothy that part of this business of stirring ourselves is to join Christ in his sufferings because we have been called to a holy life. Death has been destroyed; we need not fear death nor anything short of death. Paul describes himself, not as a believer, but as a herald – one who shouts the message from the rooftops, so to speak. It is because he is a herald that he, like the Old Testament prophets before him, is suffering.

The message is clear. The Christian life without suffering for Christ and others is belief only – not service. The Christian life without a willingness to share it with others is not living the life of faith.

If we don’t stir thing up – move people to action, we have failed in the ministry of this church. People don’t like to be shaken up. They would rather sit still. They would rather come to church on Sunday morning, be entertained or just listen for an hour, walk out the door, go home, eat dinner and dive into the next week until next Sunday morning.

God calls us to stir people. Around us are dead, lifeless, struggling churches that need to be awakened, moved and stirred into action. They have become walls to keep our a dying world.

The problem is that we have become too satisfied with the building, the budget and the program. We are on a journey that is being held back by decay. We cannot be content just to be good Christians. We must be asking God all the time, “What should I be doing? What can I do?”

We ought to be stirred by sin within and outside the church. We have so many distractions that it takes all our time to keep up with them. Radio, TV, books, magazines, the Internet, snowmobiles, ATV’s – these are all things that are keeping God’s people away from Him and from the journey of faith. Our mission is to keep the church unspotted from the world, not through a long list of activities, but through pushing the envelope of faith.

We ought to constantly be stirred to repentance. We ought to repent for failing to care for the souls of others. Instead, most of us are wrapped up in thoughts of our money, our possessions, our health and our buildings.

“Let this mind be in you, which is also in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes. It is a mind that is focused on the will of the Father. We Christians ought to be confessing the coldness of our hearts, our critical spirits, our lazy, lukewarm attitudes – the sins of commission and the sins of omission.

There is another prayer that is vital to our growth in Christ – one that I preach about all the time. It is the prayer that God will stir our hearts to the basics of the Christian life. We need to return to the Word of God, reading it and considering it and obeying it and following it. We need to return to the altar of daily prayer. We need to search the Scriptures for core, Christian beliefs.

We need to live in an attitude of expectation – expectation that God is doing something wonderful in each of us and that a new experience with Him is right around the corner.

We need to be ready to give an answer when anyone questions us about the hope that lies within us, and to give that answer in humility and respect.

America needs to get back to church if it is going to make sense out of this corrupt world – not just a comfortable church, but a church where the Gospel of hope is preached, where the people are learning to love each other and where our neighbors are being prayed for, not because they are sick in the hospital, but because they are without hope. We have had several presidents and presidential candidates who claim to be Christians, but they don’t go to church. What kind of example is that? That is worship of the god who can help me lose weight – not the God who can redeem America.

We have churches that pray that God will revive the other guy. But that is not how revival works. Revival begins with the individual and spreads to the church and on into the community. A revival can be going on without the rest of the world noticing it until it hits them over the head.

We can use a revival of our faith in this church, can we not? A revival excites! A revival ignites! A revival unites! Grudges are forgotten; church people get right with each other; pastor and people come together. Guess what! It becomes an epidemic that catches on like a grassfire.

Sometimes I feel that I have been spending too much time on doctrine and not enough on action. We can have all the doctrine in the world, but until it propels us to action, it is useless. Until we begin to care enough to pray for that poor neighbor who seems to have it all together but no Christ and no hope, the doctrine hasn’t helped, has it? We’re all guilty of that, and we all need to be stirred to the purpose for the church.

We live in a world where some pretty rough characters have ruined the beauty of a call to the altar in repentance. I have never had an altar call here because it has been so abused over the years that it is meaningless anymore. But we don’t need altar calls. We need prayer warriors – people who will pray that God will lead the pastor; people who will pray that God will lead us to those who need us; people who will pray that God will give them courage to give straight answers to those in need.

I plead with you this morning to think about how you can help me stir this church to make full use of the Holy Spirit that has been given us. I plead with you this morning to pick one person or two people who need prayer and don’t let up. I am one of those people who need prayer.

I plead with you this morning to repent of the things that are wrong in your lives; the things that are doubtful about your faith; thse things that hinder you and me from living the dynamic Christian life. Begin with this little prayer: “Lord, send a revival to the NMMH Church, and let it begin in me.”

By this time Monday, I will be in one of the most religious parts of the world but also one of the darkest. I am going there to find the little conclaves of faith that I suspect are there but flying beneath the radar. I am going there so that I can get a first-hand education as to what the church in America can do to help before these people blow the world sky-high.

What is happening there is that the kind of action to which they have been stirred is not to live out their faith in love and compassion. It is to fight with each other over land, pretending it is God’s land or Allah’s land. God and Allah are fighting with each other over land! How ridiculous is that?

We can take a lesson from that kind of belief system. And that lesson is this. The Church of Jesus Christ is headed down the same path of acquiring money, property and power, and it needs to stop and repent. It can begin here in this little old church.

Only then will the prayer of Habakkuk be answered:

Lord, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds.
Renew them in our day,
In our time make them known…