Allen Jackson - Against All Odds - Part 1
I wanna pick up a theme I began this past Wednesday, talking about faith mountains. I took a little detour last night. Our reading plan... I hope you're doing the Bible reading with us. If you're not, you're really missing out on an important part of spiritual formation. Nothing that I know of will protect you from deception more than the habit of a daily Bible reading in a systematic way through your Bible. And if you haven't ever joined us for that, I would invite you to do that. About 10 or 15 minute commitment a day, you can read through the Bible from the table of contents to the maps over the course of a year. And we're getting ready to begin the book of Leviticus, which is not really the emotional highlight of scripture.
So, last evening, the session was really an invitation into the book of Leviticus and why I think it is so valuable. But in this session, I wanna go back to something we began on Wednesday night, talking about faith mountains and we're gonna talk about "Against all Odds" because, I wanna be candid, I think we're facing a set of circumstances that is gonna require a commitment that exceeds the commitment over the previous years of our spiritual lives. The battle that has been covert and has been undercover and we've talked about the sleeping giant of God's people, this silent majority. I've traversed this country for the last couple of years and quite honestly, I don't know that that giant exists.
If it exists, I think it is on life support. Doesn't frighten me. God doesn't need a majority. There is an authority in his truth, but I want us to understand business as usual is not going to change the tide that is cascading over us. If we don't find our voice and stand up, our educational system will plummet into the abyss. It is teetering on the brink right now. And you shouldn't imagine that because your child attends a Christian university or some label that what they're receiving has been scripted from a biblical worldview. Tragically, that just is not the case in the majority of our institutions any longer. And if we can't educate our children in the fundamentals of civics, in our history, and a biblical worldview, we're not preparing them to protect the liberties and freedoms that have brought the best things to our lives.
So, it's gonna take, rather than be angry at somebody else, I don't feel that, I feel a great concern that you and I be awakened to the opportunities of the season. And while the odds may not seem like they're in our favor, God is and you and God are a majority. In fact, God, all by himself is a majority. But if you'll help him, the outcome will be better for you. And so that's where I'd like to begin. Mountains on planet Earth, they're barriers across the Earth. They separate nations, peoples, tribes, you know this, if you've learned any geography. To complete a significant journey almost always requires negotiating the mountains.
And the truth is, some of the most celebrated places on planet Earth are the passes through the mountains. Those places you can traverse the heights without having to climb the summit. In Tennessee, we understand this. We know it as the Cumberland Gap. In the Middle East, it's the Jezreel Valley. It's the one place along the Rift Valley that goes from Central Turkey into Africa where you can cross from one side to the other without having to climb the mountains. The Jezreel Valley has been the busiest battlefield in the history of civilization. It's where the battle of Armageddon will take place. Armageddon is a bit of a corruption.
There's an ancient city in the midst of that valley, protecting the descent into the valley at the midpoint from the mountains of Samaria, and the town was called Megiddo. It was one of Solomon's chariot cities, which means it was an occupied place of military strategic significance, 1,000 BC. Well, in Hebrew, the word for mountain or hill is har. So, some person saw Har Megiddo, and we got Armageddon, and the battle of Armageddon will take place in the Jezreel Valley, that vast plane that has seen more battles than any other. The knowledge of these places where you can traverse the heights enables a traveler to achieve a destination with less risk, less effort, and less time.
There are important things to know. I tell you that because we have some hills to climb, not physical hills, but spiritual ones. We have lost much of our awareness of what has contributed to our freedom and liberty. We have set aside far too much of our past ideas like free speech, citizens who self govern, sacrifices for the common good, the value of citizenship in a unique experiment that is our nation. To maintain this, these, we have to remember the contributions of our predecessors, on battlefields, as leaders in schools and universities, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, there's a long list of persons we could recite. Unfortunately, their achievements and their sacrifices are no longer common amongst us.
We have to understand the contribution of the Christian faith to our opportunities. It is not irrelevant or secondary. It is not irrelevant or secondary. It has been at the forefront of the liberties and freedoms that have defined us as a people. And if we continue to relegate it to some tertiary, some place at the back of the closet, we will live in an increasingly authoritarian state. It is at the heart of who we are. So we're going to talk about climbing some spiritual mountains even against difficult odds. I'll start in 2 Samuel 22. It's in your notes, two verses. This is a part of David's expression of worship when he had secured victory against all his enemies. The Bible says David was "a man after God's own heart". In the New testament, God says of David, "He would do anything I asked him to do".
God said to David from you, from your lineage, I will bring a Messiah. It's safe to say David was a celebrated character. Is that fair? God sent the prophet Samuel to David's house when he's a teenager to anoint him to be king in front of his brothers. That's awkward. There was one slight problem, Israel already had a king, his name was Saul, and he didn't intend to abdicate the throne. And yet God sends the prophet to say to David, "I've chosen you to be king of my people".
And for many long years, David had to live as a fugitive, hunted by the king, living in desert places, hiding in caves, living as a refugee. It was a very difficult existence. Sometimes he would even have to flee the country and feign insanity when he was amongst peoples in other places, just to save his life. When all of those things had been set aside and David had secured his authority over the nation that God called him to lead, please process that. God called him to an assignment and it was extraordinarily difficult. Stop thinking if God asks you to do it, it will be easy. "Well, I didn't know that, like, serving the Lord would be hard".
We don't forget assignments. We talk about reading our Bible, people say, "Well, you know, Pastor, I just don't like to read". Let me help. Rather than say this, some of us boast, "I haven't read a book since I graduated from high school". Let me help with that. It'd be far more straightforward to say, "I really like to be ignorant". Now, for some reading is easier than others, I understand that. But today, with audio books and technology, the information is amazingly available to us. If you're not taking the time to read your Bible, you don't care. We do things we don't like all the time. I don't like paying taxes, but I like paying taxes better than sitting in prison, so. God calls us to do things that are not simple, but you can't have an assignment until you begin the maintenance plan.
You see, you can't be entrusted with something of significance if you won't submit to the discipline of just daily obedience. And for the most part, we've been wrestling with this. We're looking for license. We think of spiritual discipline kind of like the minimum daily requirement of vegetables. We don't want to eat them. So, there's some clown on TV, selling us red and green bottles of some kind of powder. So we can eat cheese puffs but have a powder. We can get the benefit of the, the vegetables without eating them. And I think that's a pretty good characterization of really what's in our heart around serving the Lord. It just doesn't really seem that desirable to us.
Folks, the church, we've got to become something different. I love you, you're in the church on a holiday. I got it. I'm with the choir. But your voices are important, your influence is important. We're not super-achievers. We're not overachievers. The fact that you attend a worship service does not make you, like, some super saint. That's, like, minimal daily requirements. And we all have friends that we care about, people we love, who just don't wanna be bothered. And you hear the lies, "Will I have to go to church to be a Christian". No, you don't, you don't have to go home to be married either, but it'll work out better.
2 Samuel 22:33, "It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect". God is our strength, that is so important to know. Allen's strength is so limited, my intellect, my ability, I am filled with limits. And you know many of mine, and you are much more familiar with your own. But God is our strength, God is our strength. And then David makes the most remarkable statement. He said, "God makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He enables me to stand on the heights". That's what we're asking God to help us do, to scale the mountains, to scale the mountains. Not because we've got great strength. Not because we've trained at altitude, that in spite of us, God can give us the feet to scale the heights. That's where we're headed. I'm gonna start with a suggestion that we wanna grow up a little bit.
You know, I remember as a child, having this passionate desire to read. I'd watch other people read and I'd think, "I wanna be able to read". It's frustrating to me that they would delay it. There wasn't anybody that was particularly anxious to help me. And if they were, I wasn't clever enough to understand it. It just seemed like something that I wanted to be able to do. But that's about the last time I remember when there was a point of maturity that I was excited about. After that, the rest of them seemed rather burdensome to me. I didn't wanna be responsible. I didn't wanna mature. I was good being immature.
Do you wanna put the gas in my car and pay for my insurance? Help yourself! I thought all of those thresholds seemed a little intrusive to me. And I think we have a little bit about that spiritually. It's not enough to know about Jesus. We have to determine to grow up and mature in our faith. And the church has been woefully inadequate at presenting this invitation. We've got a tremendous focus on conversion and salvation, the new birth. I believe in those things absolutely and totally. But folks, the point of that is to enable us to grow up in the Lord. In John 2 in verse 11, Jesus's first miracle, his first public miracle at a wedding in Cana, he revealed his glory. And it says, "His disciples put their faith in him".
That's really the issue of growing up in the Lord. You learn to trust Jesus more fully. You understand, it is fundamentally offensive to say to the one who gave his life for you and I to be a part of his kingdom, "Listen, I don't really care about trusting in you. I want to go to heaven. I don't wanna go to hell, but I don't really want, like, you messing with my social life. I don't wanna have to deal with you evaluating what's appropriate and inappropriate. I don't wanna know you that way". And while we don't typically say it that blatantly, we live it just that blatantly. "How dare you intrude on my calendar? How dare you suggest my time should be yielded to you? Who do you think you are to intrude on my financial plan and how I accumulate resources and what I do with them after I've worked hard to get them"?
Well, in answer to those questions, the answer would be he's the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords. And one day you will bow your knee before him, and with your own mouth, acknowledge him as Lord. So, suggestion, be an early adopter. Walk through that difficulty that wants to demand, "my way," and say, "Lord, I would like to learn to submit to you, to put my faith in you. It's not gonna be a perfect journey. We won't get it right every time". In John 20, it's Resurrection Day. The tomb is empty. The women got there early. The men couldn't be bothered. The men get the message. Peter and John start for the tomb. It's a sprint. John reached the tomb first, he went inside. He saw and believed, but then John put in parenthesis, he's writing, now, this is a bit autobiographical. He outran Peter to the tomb and they said, he said, "I went inside and I believed".
What did he believe? Well, he believed the tomb was empty. He believed Jesus wasn't there. He believed the women had told the truth. But then he put in parenthesis, "We still didn't understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. I knew the body wasn't there, but I didn't understand he was alive". So it pulls back the curtain. You can be fully in on following Jesus. You could have walked away from a business, you can be all in. You could have had separation amongst friends and acquaintances because certainly John and Peter had done all of those things. They've been personally coached by Jesus. They had front row seats for Lazarus being raised from the dead and blind eyes being open. They were in the boat when he walked on the water. They know Jesus is extraordinary. But they're still right at the periphery of what's conceivable.
"We watched him crucified, we watched him tortured to death and we know this is where they buried him and the body is gone". But they didn't have anybody else on their contact list that had resurrection in their resume. So, they're struggling to believe. Peter ran to the tomb that day. We get a little different perspective from him later in his life. His hair is gray now, and his strength has begun to diminish. 1 Peter 2, he said, "Rid yourselves of all malice and deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander of every kind, rid yourselves".
You see, God won't rid you of those things. You'll have to decide I want nothing to do with being deceptive, envious. I'm not gonna slander people no matter, I'm not gonna do that. And then he said, "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk so that you may grow up in your salvation. Now that you've tasted that the Lord is good". Once you've tasted the goodness of God, Peter says, "Let's grow up a little bit". It's my invitation. Here's the good news and the bad news. You cannot grow without change. You can change and not grow, but you can't grow without changing. Please understand this. The invitation to grow, to change, is not a criticism or a condemnation of your previous positions, ideas, or perspectives. This is a challenge for us because most of us have grown up in a nation that was predominantly Christian.
So, the majority of us have some sort of a Christian heritage and it's typically aligned with some tradition denomination and there's some groupthink in any group, that's why we call it groupthink. If you think the University of Tennessee is the finest athletic program in the Southeastern Conference, I'm good with you. No problem. You know, they're the only one in the Southeastern Conference that operates with integrity and uprightness? All of their athletes are truly student athletes. There'd be no inappropriate behavior towards any of them. Most of them sing in the choirs of churches because this is our athletic program. I got that. You understand groupthink. Well, we have that religiously as well.
Here's the challenge. When invitations to grow begin to come, often, God will grow us beyond the group because no group has a just a complete hammer lock on absolute knowledge. And we imagine it somehow to be perceived as critical or condemning or some of our previous positions and perspectives were incomplete. Think of it this way, when a baby grows and becomes a toddler, it's not a condemnation of babies, it's simply another level of development. I did not call your denomination a baby or a toddler. The circumstances of my life have been such that I've been involved with a very broad spectrum of Christians, and I have found wisdom and learning amongst all those different groups. And I find a great temptation to wanna say, "it's like home cooking. My group is the best".
We can't grow unless we can say to the Lord, "I wanna learn, I will change". I wanna take an aspect of Jesus's ministry for the balance of our time together. Jesus when he began his public ministry moved to Capernaum, his little fishing village on the northern end of the sea of Galilee. The northern end of the lake has the best fishing. There's warm springs there. There's a word in Arabic and Aramaic, "tabqa," which means, "the place of seven springs".
And it's a place that's associated, at least by tradition, it's very near Capernaum, with a number of Jesus's remarkable miracles. It was that area where Jesus called his disciples. It was in that area where Jesus did the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, where he fed a whole multitude, 5,000 people, with a happy meal, Living Bible. Or, if you prefer, with a few Chick-Fil-A mini biscuits. It was the place where he restored Peter after Peter denied the Lord in such a blatant way. He met Peter and the disciples there after his Resurrection.
So, I wanna take those three ideas, and see if we can understand from them some ways that you and I can navigate some of the spiritual heights that are in our lives. We have some mountains to negotiate all of us. Folks, nobody gets through life without difficulty. Life is not fair. We live in a broken world. Sin exists. Evil touches our lives. Sometimes evil impacts our lives in very profound ways, directly or indirectly. And when that happens, the only real solution is the power of God. You can live past it. You can overcome. There's many things, there's many coping mechanisms and I'm grateful for all of those, but there is a power from almighty God to help us not just survive but to triumph. And the church needs to hold that message. But it begins in our own hearts and our own lives.
It will take determined faith to see a change in our generation. It's gonna take more than more faithful church attendance or a change in how you like to worship. It's gonna take a real determination to seek the Lord. I'd like to pray for you today that God would anoint us with a new anointing from him. A new boldness and a new courage to say, yes to the Lord, so that it would please God to make a change in our generation. You up for that? Let's pray:
Father, I thank you for your church. Lord Jesus, you said you would build your church and hell itself wouldn't prevail over it. And I ask you now, Father, to stir our hearts, move in us so that it will please you to move in the earth in a new way. I thank you for what you will do, in Jesus's name, amen.