|
Making decisions is often a hard
thing to do, though sometimes they’re easy. I read about a person who
won a contest in the newspaper because he gave the best answer to this
situation. The situation was if you were in the Louvre, that’s the
museum in Paris, and it caught on fire, which of the paintings would you
choose to take out with you? The person responded, “The one nearest the
exit.” But often decisions are not that easy. So we seek God’s will to
help us. Where do we find this kind of guidance? Well there are all
kinds of guidance in the world, but where we find it is particularly in
the word of God. Today is the second in a series of sermons on
“Discovering God’s Will” and the question is “Where do we find God?”
The bible gives the answer in the bible itself. I could have read many
scriptures to you. I’m choosing just three.
First from Psalm, chapter 1 which
says “Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his
delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and
night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its
fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does
prospers.” Later on in Psalm 119, the psalmist says “Your word is a
lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”
From 2 Timothy, chapter 3, Paul
writes:
“All scripture is God breathed and is
useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Would you join me in prayer?
Father we come to you and ask that
you would touch our hearts as we listen to what you have to say about
and through your word. We ask you to guide us and touch us, give us
hope and joy, and most of all help us to experience your presence. We
pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
There are all kinds of things to
guide us in this world. Many of them are unreliable. So what I’d like
to do at first is to spend a few minutes talking about a few unreliable
sources and I have organized them in kind of 5 C’s.
The first thing that can be
unreliable for us is culture. Now culture in some sense can be
neutral, in the sense of, what is culture. It is simply that group of
values and things which a society does which kind of identifies a
society. I believe that some cultures are better than others. Even
within cultures, like ours for example, you can have periods of time
when it’s better and other periods of time when it’s not so good. I
would like to submit to you that at least our time right now our culture
is not as good as we would like. I read where in 1940 teachers were
most concerned about their students chewing gum. Now what are they
worried about. Sex and drugs and you name it. Our culture has
changed. What often happens as human beings we kind of choose the easy
way out. We choose to do what everybody else is doing. We can see that
with our kids but we did it too. When I was growing up in high school
the culture was long hair and beads and doing all kinds of different
things like that, rock n’ roll. Well that hasn’t changed as much. Now
it’s long hair or short hair, earrings, jeans down to here and all kinds
of different things, all kinds of cultural things that people do. It’s
really not the point what we wear it’s simply how we choose to do what
we do. So often we just go with the flow. In that case culture can be
bad. You know Christians are supposed to be counter cultural and that
doesn’t necessarily mean wearing long hair or having beads, it’s
whatever. But counter cultural in this sense is simply going with the
word of God versus what the culture is doing sometimes.
Another problem or unreliable source
can be circumstances. Now you know its funny how people often
choose to do what circumstances lead them to do. In a couple weeks I’m
going to talk about how sometimes circumstances can lead us to do God’s
will and they’re not all bad. But so often we just simply say “Gosh I
woke up late, I don’t need to go to church this morning.” Or “Gosh the
traffic is really bad I must not supposed to be on time” or this
circumstance leads us to do this or that or the other. Well we are
given a brain and a will to do certain things and circumstances aren’t
always the way. Matter of fact sometimes we use circumstances as an
excuse. A few years ago, many years ago, I was sort of feeling like God
was calling me away from the church I was at. I was really resistant to
it but God seemed to say that I needed to go to school to get a degree
in counseling. I remember getting the airplane ticket to go interview.
It was out in Colorado and I was in West Virginia and I was hemming and
hawing and I just didn’t want to go. I got there late and I said “Thank
you Lord I’m late. I don’t have to go now.” And just as those thoughts
got in my mind the ticket counter lady said “Oh but we got another
flight which will get you there about the same time.” God didn’t let me
get away with it. Sometimes circumstances can be an excuse.
Sometimes counsel can be an
excuse. Now again in a couple weeks I’m going to talk about how Godly
counsel can help us discover God’s will. We need togetherness. We need
each other sometimes to figure out what to do. So often we choose the
wrong counsel. I mean I sometimes wonder when I look at TV. what it
takes to become a pundit, or to have your own TV. show which has
political ramifications. Sometimes I think it must not be much given
the… You know everybody seems to have their own article in the newspaper
or their own TV. show. They have all this. There’s Dr. Ruth, there’s
Dr. Phil, there’s Dr. Laura there’s Dr. this. It seems like all you
have to do is have a “Dr.” in front of your name, whether your really
got a “Dr.” or not. If you are Dr. something you have authority. I
remember in my own life, listening to friends of mine, who as I look
back on it probably couldn’t get to the bathroom without a map, and yet
I was listening to them. Sometimes counsel can be a bad source of
guidance.
Sometimes also counterfeits.
You know that seems like it is easy to know that if something is false
we shouldn’t listen to it. There are all kinds of false things out
there. In the religious side there are cults, politics, you name it.
There are all kinds of false things out there. Our problem in our
culture is that we have a problem saying something’s right or
something’s wrong. It’s almost like if we do, we are not being
sensitive. We’re not being sensitive when we say “Oh well that’s wrong”
or “This is better than that.” We have a cultural moral equivalence.
This may sound political, I don’t mean for it to do that, but I really
have a hard time when people say, “Well the Israelis are just as bad as
the Palestinian terrorists.” Well the Israelis are not lily white but
there is no equivalence between the two. You have a democracy, a
country that’s trying to do the right thing, and you have people who are
killing women and children just for the heck of it. There is not a
moral equivalence there. Or we have a hard time saying, as I said a
couple weeks ago, that being a Christian is better, than say being a
Muslim. I didn’t say I was better. That’s a distinction we all have to
make. We are all sinners here. We don’t need to go around saying “I’m
better.” But Jesus is. I know that goes against the culture but it
really is true. Part of what we need to do in a loving way is to say
“Jesus, come to Jesus.”
A fifth thing can be our
conscience or our feelings. Again so often we do things because of
feelings. “I just felt a peace about that.” Actually God does use our
feelings to guide us and I will talk about that in a couple weeks. So
often our feelings as I have said many times has to do with what we
ate. Sometimes our conscience can’t be our guide because we are
sinners. Yes feelings can guide us but that is the lowest level of
guidance; it’s the lowest level of guidance. Where is the place we look
for guidance?
Well it’s none other than the word of
God. God’s will is found in God’s word. I have found that even
Christians in some ways because of the way we were educated, the way we
were raised, distrust the bible. I’m not against secular education,
believe me, I have plenty of it. It can be a very good thing. But we
distrust the bible because we say “Oh well it was written, it is full of
myth” and it’s this, that or the other. When I first became a Christian
I was kind of a pest. I went around asking everybody if they wanted to
know about Jesus. I wish I had that zeal now, as much as I had then. I
remember going to one guy, I was about three days old in the Lord, and
he says “I can’t trust the scriptures because it’s been changed by
everybody, written by all these people and that sort of thing.” That’s
the attitude very often people think that the bible has been changed and
that sort of thing. I want to say to you, you may not believe the bible
but it really has been handed down in tact. I will give you an
example. For a long time, many hundred of years, until about 1945 the
only copy of, say, the Old Testament we had was about 1100 A.D. We
didn’t have anything before that. In the mid 1940’s a cave was
discovered, called Qumran, and all these clay pots in which all kinds of
copies of the bible, bits and pieces of the bible, were found and they
dated back to 100 B.C. So you had 1100 years. People were going “Wow!
We can see what the differences are.” And guess what, there weren’t
many. Now people didn’t have typewriters or Xerox machines; so
everybody had to sit and copy by hand all these thousands of letters.
Occasionally there were mistakes, but were substantially the same. The
same thing with the New Testament. We only have three or four copies of
Aristotle. We have 500 or more of the New Testament. The bible was
handed down, well. It wasn’t just changed because people had whims to
do so. It could be trusted. I can say a lot more about that but I do
want to say to you that God’s will is found in God’s word. Now I admit
that’s an act of faith but I think it can be best made on good evidence
that the bible is reliable, and that’s were it’s found.
God’s will also doesn’t contradict
God’s word. I will admit that many people, parts of the bible are hard
to understand, and a lot of people don’t agree, very legitimately, on
different interpretations of the bible. So often I hear “Oh you can
make the bible say any thing you want it to say” and they use that to
say “Well we might as well not read it because it can say anything.”
There is some truth to that. People will interpret the bible in all
kinds of weird ways. I was just talking to Buck about his class on
Jonathon and there are people out there who want to say that Jonathon
and David were gay because they were friends. Now that’s the strangest
thing I’ve ever heard. But there are people out there that believe it.
It doesn’t mean they’re right. There is a right and wrong way of
interpreting the bible.
Also God expects us to obey His
word. That’s the rub. Often we read it and we just don’t want to obey
it. There is a lot of the bible that’s hard to understand but a lot of
His will is very, very clear. As an example of that, I just want to go
through a few things. Just to give you a few examples of what it says
very clearly, this is God’s Will, and they’re not rocket science. First
it says that it is God’s will that we have eternal life. That may seem
pretty easy, and yet, here’s what the scripture says. “My Father’s will
is that every one who looks to the Son and believes in him shall
have eternal life.” This is controversy right away, isn’t it? It never
ceases to amaze me that there seems to be a never ending supply of young
men who want to strap a bomb on themselves and go blow people up. A lot
of people interpret this as economics, they’ve been oppressed so they
want to make a terrorist’ statement; but it’s really theology. You see,
in the Islamic religion, Allah doesn’t really say you’re going to heaven
or hell, he kind of makes up his mind at the end. But if you’re a
Jihadist and you go die as a martyr, you’re in. That’s theology. Again
it comes down, is that the way to salvation, or is Jesus the way of
salvation? It is God’s will that every one who looks to the Son
and believes in him shall have eternal life. It’s not really about
being good, it’s not about going to church, it’s not about being
baptized. Just because we baptized a child is no guarantee. The
parents have a job to do to bring that child up in the faith.
It’s also God’s will that we be
filled with the Spirit. Paul says, “Understand what the Lord’s will
is. Do not get drunk on wine instead be filled with the Spirit.” Now
that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? He’s not saying it’s bad to have
a beer, by the way. He is using this as an example; alcohol can have an
influence on us. Being filled with the Spirit is just that, coming
under God’s influence and control. As a Christian whether you like it
or not, God has moved into your life through the Holy Spirit. I say
whether you like it or not because when God moves in He then wants to be
in control. That’s where the rub is; often we don’t want God to be in
control. We want Him to be in control of a little part of our lives.
What Paul is simply saying is let God be the Director.
Another piece is that it is God’s
will that we belong to others in Christ. It says “They gave themselves
first to the Lord and then to us.” That’s Paul speaking in keeping with
God’s will. You need two things to grow in life. You need the word
and you need one another; and again, our culture is fond of saying “Oh I
can be a Christian without belonging to a church.” Yeah, you can, but
you can’t really grow without going to church and being part of a body.
One of the problems in being in any kind of a relationship is that it’s
messy. It’s just plain messy. You get married and you’re married for a
long time, you find out how messy it is. If we really want to know what
sin is, we get into a family, don’t we? After all, how many of you
really look forward to Christmas with all the family together? Some of
us don’t because all of the family’s there. Relationships are messy.
Churches are messy. Now there are some churches that are better than
others. When you come into a relationship with a bunch of people, it’s
messy. But God has placed us in the mess, because this is the place
where we grow. We don’t grow by everything just being happy; we grow
because we learned how to love people who are not necessarily lovable.
All you have to do is look from side-to-side to see some of them, or
look in the mirror. Learning to love and grow is about being in a
relationship.
It’s also God’s will that we live
holy lives. Paul says “Don’t be involved in sexual immorality.” Again
in our culture it’s become standard fare for people to live together.
I’ve said this a couple weeks ago. It’s almost like if you don’t do
that you’re being dumb; then, the bible is so old fashioned when it says
you shouldn’t do it. It is almost like God is trying to keep us from
having fun or being wise. You know I said a couple weeks ago when I
mentioned that people who live together have a higher incidence of
divorce but it is also true that people who live together have a three
times higher incidence of abuse. Three times. This is all fact. It’s
almost like God is saying “If you want to be happy, do this.” But we
say “No. No. We don’t want to do that. We need to try it out first.”
I love John Wayne and, I’m in the Army, and so I watch some of the John
Wayne army movies. There is one in which, I think it’s “The Longest
Day”, he plays a lieutenant colonel. He gets up and says something like
this, and I say it mostly to myself, he says, “Life is hard but it’s
harder if you’re stupid.” I only say that because I like to read it for
myself. You know God is not out to make us unhappy and if we don’t
follow the rules we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. Life’s hard
enough without disregarding the word.
There are so many other things I
could say about this. Again and again the bible talks about what God’s
will is. If you aren’t reading the scripture and seeking God’s will
there you’re making life hard on yourself. I just want to encourage
you. Read the scriptures. Study it. There are a lot of parts that are
hard to understand, I admit that. I always say to people, “If you get
to a paragraph you don’t understand, skip it and go to the next one. It
might be easier, until you can study it and maybe understand that one.”
It takes a little while. It takes a lifetime. How do we get guidance?
We learn the word that God has given us in the scriptures. In the name
of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen
|