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…

Reunion at Pentecost

Reunion at Pentecost

Genesis 11:1-9
Acts 2:1-13

The history of Pentecost goes back to the time of the Exodus when God’s servant, Moses, led the Israelites out of Egypt. It was at that point that certain holy days began to be required as part of their worship regimen.

The first holy day was the commemoration of the night before they left Egypt. They were to observe annually the Feast of the Passover to remember how the Angel of Death passed over those with the blood of a lamb sprinkled on their doorframes.

One of the blessings of the Christian church is that we share in the Eucharist together. By remembering together the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are bound by tradition, as were the children of Israel.

Fifty days into their journey across the Red Sea and into the wilderness, they arrived at Mount Sinai. There God gave them the law through Moses. They were then commanded to observe this pivotal event every 50^th day after the Feast of the Passover as God’s stamp of covenantal blessing on the children of Israel.

The new feast was called “Feast of Pentecost,” which in the Greek actually means “50^th day.”

Following the Resurrection of Jesus, the disciples had scattered. Jesus had to round them up more than once. He had to impress upon them that, while His mission had been completed, theirs was just beginning. He appeared to several of them through a locked door. He called to them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat and prepared a meal of fish for them on the shore.

We read in the first chapter of the Book of Acts that the disciples were assembled together with Jesus on the Mount of Olives. They were perhaps wondering what was going to happen from there. They were perhaps concerned that the security they had felt just a few days before the crucifixion when Jesus was triumphantly received in Jerusalem had evaporated. Now, Jesus is telling them that they are not to leave Jerusalem but are to wait for the gift the Father had promised – the baptism of the HS.

Having not the slightest clue as to the identity and mission of the HS, they were interested only in the fulfillment of what they had been taught. So they are again caught asking Jesus the same old question that they had asked days before His crucifixion, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

That was a question that, despite the fact that Jesus had been raised from the dead, His disciples seemed unable to leave behind. The things of the Kingdom of God were still not revealed to them. They were still stuck in the teachings of the church. They could not seem to break away from the idea of a physical kingdom in Jerusalem.

Never did it occur to the disciples that in a few short days three-thousand Jews would believe in Christ. In fact, there are many Evangelicals today who seem to have missed the message that the first converts to the Christian faith were Jews – lots of them. Millions more have become Christians in the two thousand years since.

Jesus answered their question in this way: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the HS comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus was not confirming whether or not their expectations would be realized. He tells them, instead, that they will receive power through the HS. When that power came upon them, they immediately began teaching about the spiritual Kingdom of God. All thoughts of an earthly kingdom vanished when they witnessed the miraculous conversion of thousands of Jews.

Jesus had been taken up before their eyes and into a cloud that is commonly referred to as a “Shekinah” cloud – a cloud of glory, similar to the cloud that marked the presence of God with the children of Israel through their wilderness wanderings. This cloud was the affirmation of the godhead of Christ. He was received into God’s glory under the eyes of the faithful. And they were caught gazing up into the heavens, wondering what was going to happen next.

This king – this Messiah – to whom they had looked to sit on a throne in Jerusalem, was out of there. Instead, 2 men in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand there looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

They then did what they had been told to do – went back to Jerusalem, joined in constant prayer and waited.

They didn’t have long to wait. The Ascension of Jesus had taken place forty days from Passover. The Feast of the Pentecost would take place in ten days. It is very certain that the disciples did not make the connection between the coming of the Holy Spirit and the Feast of Pentecost. But there is a definite connection.

First, note that Jesus was crucified during the Feast of the Passover – or just before. Jesus, the unspotted lamb of God, was sacrificed as the final Passover lamb. Those who had His blood sprinkled over the doorposts of their hearts – those who believed – were spared the fate of death from their sin.

While Jews from every nation, tribe and tongue were descending on Jerusalem to celebrate deliverance from bondage in Egypt, the real sacrifice was happening outside the city gate and beyond their awareness. Passover had left Jerusalem and was being re-enacted at the city dump. Those who celebrated Passover at the temple were to witness a strange event. The temple veil that shielded the people from the Holy of Holies was torn in two.

Jesus’ death, then, was to begin a new, fulfilled Passover. Fifty days later, there would be a new celebration of Pentecost as the day that believers in Jesus Christ as Lord were to receive a new law written not on tablets of stone but on their hearts.

In this transition, we move from the cold, hard, unforgiving master of a written code to the love of God spread abroad through our hearts by His Holy Spirit. The new Passover in Christ was the beginning of perfection through His work of those who acknowledge that they could not please God.

You can see, then, how dangerous it is for modern Christians to treat the Bible as though it were a written code of conduct. The written law of God was composed of words that go no further than the page and do not enter the heart.

Notice the continuity between the two dispensations – law and grace. The age of Grace does not replace the law; it is the confirmation of the law – its fulfillment in Christ. “What do I want with your sacrifices and your rituals?” God asks of His people. The day of sacrifices and rituals ended with an overlap of fifty days. For the Christian, the final sacrifice had been made.

What the written law does for us is convict us. There seems to be an innate sense of God’s judgment hanging over the heads of human beings: “If I do not obey God’s commandments, He will punish me, casting me into Hell.” Our natures are conscious of obeying God unwillingly and against our desires. Those who live by the written law, however, soon become enemies of God because of the weight of their sin and their inability to stand before God and be acceptable to Him. Unaided by the Holy Spirit, we just give up and become hardened against God’s judgment – a form of inner rebellion.

You might imagine these disciples, ten days after their Lord had left them, getting ready to celebrate Pentecost as the day that the God’s people had received the tablets of stone from Mt. Sinai. You might imagine that they had not yet begun the ceremonies but were on their way to the temple as were the Jews from every nation tribe and tongue.

Something was going to happen that had failed to happen at Passover. God was about to put His seal on the new covenant in the presence of the celebration of the old covenant. The Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem was about to re-enacted as a triumphant entry into the Kingdom of God.

It was 9:00 in the morning. We are told that there was a sound like the blowing of a hurricane that filled the whole house where they were staying. Tongues of fire came and sat upon the heads of these disciples of the crucified, risen Lord. They began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them – the tongues of thousands of Jews from all over the world.

We will go back, for a moment, to the scene at the Tower of Babel, where another failure of the written law had exacted its price.

It is after the flood. The descendents of Noah had begun to populate the earth, and some of them decided to build a city with a monument. They wanted to make a name for themselves, and one of the best ways of making a name for yourself is to have the tallest tower in the world. Call it the Empire State Building, if you wish – or the World Trade Center. They wanted to be the center of commerce and tourism so they would not have to wander from place to place. The outside world would come to them.

This city was to be located in the Tigris/Euphrates river valley, near where the Garden of Eden had been located and in modern Iraq.

We are told that everyone on the earth spoke the same language. They had in mind becoming the cultural center of the world. You would have thought that speaking the same language would have made it easier to live together, but apparently it simply made it easier to get into mischief.

God didn’t like this tower idea because it was done with the intent of celebrating human accomplishment. It reminds me of the tower that the Italian government tried to build for Mussolini. It was to be the tallest building in the world, and Mussolini would have his office at the top, suggesting that he would be a god. That tower ended in disaster as well.

What is key to this story is the Lord’s reaction to what was going on. “If with one language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” So God confused their language so that they would be in conflict with each other.

Fast forward to the Feast of Pentecost. What God did that day though the Holy Spirit was to reverse what He had done at Babel. Here you have Jews from every known nation on earth listening to the apostles in their own tongues. From that day to this, even though Christians speak other languages, the one thing they share is the common language of faith. The only way that could happen would be through the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit that was poured out on the apostles that day.

The Spirit came pouring into their hearts, making them different people from what they were up to that point. Instead of thinking about what God was going to do next, they became loving men and women and willingly obeyed God. God became their tower of strength. The written law that had been so important to them 5 minutes before, suddenly came to life translated into spiritual law.

The Holy Spirit descends and fills the hearts of these disciples who are gathered together scared and full of sorrow, not knowing what was going to happen next if anything. He descends on them in tongues of fire and imparts to these poor, uneducated followers from Galilee the power and boldness to preach Christ fearlessly.

It was not the role of the Holy Spirit to write books and put laws into place. His role was to write God’s law and love on the hearts of men, creating new hearts so that we might be glad before God and desire to serve Him gladly.

It is not enough that Christ is preached throughout the world. The Word that is preached must be believed. The Holy Spirit must impress that preaching on the hearts of those listening.

What changes is this: the heart that believes has confidence in God’s love and does not fear being thrown into Hell for some infraction because of His wrath. The Holy Spirit has made the heart aware of God’s good will and graciousness toward us. The result is a desire to serve and please Him.

I will hasten to say that not all is accomplished at once. None of us is entirely perfect; this is a progressive process of being liberated from sin and terror. We are all affected by what disturbs others who may be so steeped in their sins as to be indifferent. The Holy Spirit is present within the believer to console us and strengthen us until His work is fully accomplished, which it never is.

The power of living the Christ life is to contend with the sins that we perceive that are in us as well as those that are not perceived. We are like sick persons in the hands of the Great Physician of our souls, never able to be free of weakness and faults.

Therein lies the hope. The Holy Spirit is given only to the anxious and distressed heart. The gift is too precious and noble for God to throw it away heedlessly. If you have the struggle with sin in your heart, it is because you have the Holy Spirit.

It is time to rejoice. You have passed over from death to life, even in the midst of your conflicts and doubts.