Allen Jackson - A Change of Heart - Part 1
I wanna start a series of talks under the general theme of a change of heart. I am convinced that our best future is dependent upon a change of heart in the midst of the people of God. I think it's far more important than economic cycles or election cycles. I'm not saying that those things aren't important. I'm just telling you, without a change of heart, we won't hold any gains that are made. And it has to begin with us. I'll start with this notion of storms and earthquakes and great turbulence because I believe that's a pretty accurate description of what we're walking through and what is before us.
I think it'll be more intense before it's not. That's not frightening to me. I like storms. Kind of. But I thought we'd start in Acts chapter 2. It's the day of Pentecost. The end of Acts chapter 1, some of you will remember, Jesus ascended back to heaven, and the crew is left alone in his absence, the first time they've had that experience since they were recruited on the shores of Galilee. And in Acts chapter 2, the Holy Spirit is poured out, and a large crowd gathers in Jerusalem. And Peter stands up to address the crowd, and he quotes from the prophet Joel. And I'll read you that.
It says, "In the last days, God says, I'll pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I'll pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I'll show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, and blood and fire and billows of smoke. And the sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved".
Now, Peter, as I said, is quoting the prophet Joel, giving application to that in Jerusalem, the middle of the first century. I believe it's equally relevant today. And just from a high-level view, he's describing a time of some disruption. He said in the earth, there's gonna be signs and earthquakes and floods and billows of smoke. Tumultuous things happen. Now, that is going to be true of the journey that Peter is going to make and the rest of his friends and fellow travelers that are a part of that team on the day of Pentecost.
And I believe it's gonna be a part of our journey. Maybe you would have wished for something else, but God chooses the times and seasons when we're born. He chooses our place in the unfolding story of history. And our assignment is to be faithful in that time where he places us. So complaining about it and grumbling about it is not fruitful. Wringing your hands about it isn't helpful. Let's find out everything we can about what God has said about the season in which we live and then do our best to be faithful to that. Thank you for that enthusiasm. I'm good with that, too.
I would submit to you that the book of Acts is a description of one of the most remarkable seasons of the moving of the Spirit of God that we have access to across the history of not only the church, but of God's dealing with people. I think it rivals the Exodus generation. That group of people that started as slaves in Egypt and found themselves in the Promised Land a generation later. We start in the book of Acts with that first chapter, and there's still anxiety over the political future of Israel. And Jesus descends back to heaven, and the Holy Spirit's poured out, and then the things that Jesus had been doing begin to emerge in the lives of his closest friends and followers.
But just a few weeks into the journey, they begin to be arrested and threatened. And then it escalates, and they're physically punished, they're beaten. And before many months pass, there are martyrs and there are greater threats. And finally, they're scattered. And then God recruits one of their violent oppressors, Saul of Tarsus, to join them, and he adds his voice and his training and his expertise. And the gospel makes it all the way around the Roman world, and in city after city, there are riots. There are arrests. There's physical suffering. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is going forth.
What Peter said on the day of Pentecost is played out in the remaining chapters of the book of Acts, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. And I wanna suggest you, this is, we've got to say this more frequently and more loudly and with greater intentionality. The only hope that we have is more and more people yielding their hearts and their lives to the lordship of Jesus of Nazareth. It changes everything. Yes, I think we should vote. Yes, I think we should participate in the processes. Yes, I think we have to pray and intercede for our schools. I mean, all the thing, I believe in that.
But all of that is predicated upon the transformation that comes when we call upon the name of the Lord and say, "I'm a sinner, and I need a Savior". And if the book of Acts is a template, a pattern for us, and I believe it is, the message, it seems to me, is very clear. There's going to be resistance. There'll be spiritual resistance. There'll be physical resistance. There'll be political resistance. There'll be internal struggles. There'll be betrayal. All of that's a part of the narrative.
See, I mistakenly thought, and I'm not sure anyone said it to me, but for a long time, my imagination was that when the Spirit of God began to move, it would be like this wonderful parade. That everybody would cheer. They would throw candy to the observers. It'd just be wonderful. And when you got done with the parade, you'd all go have food toge, I mean, it was just this wonderful. Now, it wasn't biblical, but it was my imagination. Now, the weakness with that is when there was pressure and it was more difficult, or there was resistance, or they were routing out threats, and it required courage.
And I thought, "Well, that couldn't be God. That's not how the Spirit of God moves". But I would submit to you, it very much is. It was just a casual awareness of what's happening in our world. We have the privilege, we have the tools, the capability, the accessibility of what is needed to preach the gospel throughout the earth in a way that no generation in human history has ever had. On any given weekend around here, what we do together in these rooms on our campuses are shared with multiplied tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people across our nation and around the globe from a little church in Middle Tennessee.
It's the most improbable scenario. It wasn't very many years ago that would have been totally impossible. If the technology existed, it wasn't affordable. There was no way it could have been implemented or deployed. And today, people on their phones around the globe can sit and have church with you. That's a good thing, 'cause they do it across our community, too. Make the drive to campus. It's okay. On the other hand, there's expressions of evil and wickedness and darkness and ungodliness that are staggering in how brazen they are. It's difficult to process. It's unsettling. And both of those things are happening simultaneously. You don't have to pay a great deal of attention. We're celebrating the Olympics right now, or some are.
You know, once upon a time, the Olympics were presented as a celebration of human achievement and global cooperation and intended to bring healing. You know, all the words, all the language, the high-sounding language and the noble impacts and the drama of human athletic, whatever. Until it wasn't. And the Olympics was used as an expression of mockery for the two billion or so people who identify as Christians. Unthinkable. But now we're watching the Olympics be used to promote violence against women. We spent our adult lives being told that any expression of physical violence towards a woman is inappropriate.
There's no justification for that. We've heard it over and over and over again. Appropriately. There's just no justification for that. Don't do that. It's wrong. But now you can get a gold medal for it. So I suppose if you identify as female today, it's okay to engage. It's absurd. Every cell in our body. Every cell in our body identifies whether we're male or female. This is not complicated. I find oftentimes when we're trying to find reasons to excuse our sin, we delve into complicated things. This is not about testosterone levels. We've lost our balance. But you can pick up about any category you want, one of the leading, the leading candidate at the time for president of the United States was offered up to an assassin's bullet.
That's just a simple read on what we watched. There's been little, if any, transparency regarding the details. And now we have further collapse in another institution in which it's necessary to have trust, but they don't behave in a trustworthy fashion. We're told on a daily basis right now, this is front and center among amongst us all, and this is very much a church issue, that abortion rights is the leading issue in securing political power in America. They say it every day. It's the path to securing power. Unfettered access to abortion.
It's a calculated decision that the opportunity to kill our children will garner widespread support. Wars throughout the earth, we're involved in them. In the Middle East, in Ukraine. I learned this week that the United States gives $50 million a week to the Taliban in Afghanistan. A week. It's unimaginable. Iran has been enriched and emboldened, enabling them to finance and encourage and motivate Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel has been marginalized. Our own Congress doesn't want to sit when the Prime Minister comes to address them. It's unimaginable. We're $35 trillion in debt and counting. Did you know that 75% of your personal income taxes now are required to pay the interest on our national debt?
Again, you can pick up just about any topic, the expressions of ungodliness, the level of absurdity that is being demonstrated around us. And tragically, the church is struggling just as greatly. We are most frequently unwilling to engage our culture. We'd rather talk about the culture of the 1st century than the 21st century. We prefer to discuss blessings rather than grapple with the demands of holiness. Contemporary American evangelicalism tends to be a champion of a distorted grace which obscures the necessity of the cross. We're advocates, in too many cases, for a false gospel. We wanna talk about justice without submitting to God's righteousness. There's no such thing. DEI and CRT will not lead us to a more just place. Only Almighty God will do that.
And perhaps, even more tragically, we are just frequently unaware. We prefer a condition of some sort of blissful ignorance regarding the fact that the barbarians are at the gate and that they may very well be instruments of God's judgment, which we richly deserve. Folks, it seems to me very much like the opening chapters of the book of Acts. Occupied territory, a priceless message, a significant amount of personal experience with the Lord. We have some stories to tell. We've got a little bit of a resume with the Lord, but we're facing uncharted territory. The threats feel more personal. The challenges feel more real. It doesn't feel as secure as perhaps it has in the past.
I wanna start with that, with the reality of this notion: it's a part of the landscape today. As uncomfortable as it is, I believe we have to be willing to say it so that we can prepare to respond for the prevalence of a false gospel, false prophets, and a false church. Again, we've been warned clearly, repetitively through scripture. In 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul is writing to Timothy, and he says, "Mark this: there will be terrible times in the last days". Literally, it says, "They'll be exceedingly fierce". Isn't that a happy thought?
The last days, he said, are gonna be really difficult. And what's surprising is then he lists 18 aspects of the human character which will deteriorate. In this passage, he's not talking about wars and violence. He's not talking about failures of governments. He's talking about the deterioration of human character. You see, we lament the cratering of trust we have in so many institutions that we have held up as being trustworthy. What we're really lamenting is the deterioration of our character.
And Paul lists it. He says, "People will be lovers of themselves and lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to our parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous". It's the last sentence that captures my attention. In verse 5, he said, "They'll have a form of godliness but deny its power. Have nothing to do with them". When he gives that list, he said what's gonna make those last days exceedingly fierce isn't the rise of wickedness or immorality or ungodliness.
It's going to be the unraveling of the character of the people who imagine themselves to be God's people. They're gonna have a form of godliness. They'll gather for religious services in buildings that have religious architecture, and they'll use religious language and go through all of the symbols of religion, but they'll deny the power of God. Seems pretty accurate to me. But then he says something that I think we've ignored. He says, "Have nothing to do with it". Don't sit there. Don't perpetuate that. Don't be a part of that. Move. That's uncomfortable. Separate yourself from the deception.
In Galatians, Paul's writing to a church, a regional church that has started with tremendous momentum and enthusiasm for the Lord, but they're derailed. They lose their momentum. And he writes to them about that. In fact, he says they're behaving as fools. That's pretty, how would you like to make the book being called a fool for the way you're serving the Lord. I mean, Paul is talking in some very plain language to the Galatian church, and it poses some questions to us. Before we read the passage, which spirit exactly is it we're trying to please with our lives? Are we trying to please the spirit of the world, the spirit of this age, or are we trying to please the Spirit of God?
See, we've been coached, and it's unfortunate because it's an incomplete training. We've been coached towards the new birth, and I believe in that, but the purpose of that entrance into the kingdom of God is that we could serve the Lord. So in a very conscious, purposeful, intentional way, day by day, we wanna think about what it would be like to please the Lord, to cooperate with the Spirit of God and how we do business and the relationships we conduct and the language we use and how we spend our time and our money and our treasure.
What's the difference in the choices we're making and the people who don't imagine they're doing that? We should be distinctive. Which spirit is it that we're really trying to please? What's the evidence of spiritual authority over your life? Because be certain of this: there is an authority over your life. And sitting in church doesn't mean it's the Spirit of God that's the authority over you. Showing me your baptismal certificate does not guarantee that the spiritual authority over your life is the Spirit of God. What authority are you striving to please?
Galatians 5, verse 16. Paul said, "I say, live by the Spirit, and you'll not gratify the desires of the sinful nature". Now, if he's writing this to a church, we can be certain of one thing: there's a tremendous inclination towards gratifying the desires of our sinful nature. When you were born again, the Bible says you become a new creation. A totally new creation. Your Spirit is made alive to God, but you and I are left with an earth suit. Thank God. But it is hardwired towards ungodliness. Many, many expressions of that. We do all sorts of class work and coaching and courses all through our educational processes in business training to talk about integrity.
We don't have to do courses on how to lie more effectively. That just rolls right out of us. Right? Little people. Do you see a two-year-old? I talk to him in the lobby almost every week. They're just, they have that little radiant. They got so much energy, they just bounce while you talk to 'em. They don't walk anywhere. They skip or they jump or they run. I mean, they're precious. Until you hear their mother say, "Come here". And they look over that shoulder and they grin, then they go there... Right? That doesn't have to be coached in us.
That's instinctive, and that's exactly what Paul is writing about. He said if we live by the spirit, you'll not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. You and I have desires that lead us towards ungodliness. And we live in a culture that expresses tremendous permission. "For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you don't do what you want". Can I get an amen? "But if you're led by the Spirit, you're not under the law. The acts of the sinful nature are obvious".
And then he lists them. And some of them seem more obvious than others 'cause we tend to categorize these things and rate them. Not saying it's appropriate, but we do it intuitively. "Sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery". Debauchery just means excess. We have that, folks. We have so much stuff, we have to rent places to put it. We have so much food, there's too much of us. "Idolatry, witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy; drunkenness, orgies. I warn you, as I did before, those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God".
He's writing to a church. What's the initiation? What's the launch point for that list of things? It's those that choose to gratify that old carnal nature. Folks, we've been to church and sing our choruses, but we've been too indulgent of that old carnal nature. We know the world needs to be different, but we're born again and baptized and we have Bibles. And we couldn't imagine it means we would have to be different.
Let me ask you a question: in the book of Acts, if we start in Acts chapter 1 and we run it all the way through to the end when Paul lands in Rome, which group of people do you imagine experienced the most change? On a scale of magnitude. I mean, we're introduced to city after city and community after community, where they're introduced to the new birth and conversion and spirit baptism and maybe water baptism. On an occasion or two, there's a deliverance from an unclean spirit. But the group of people that are really processing the most remarkable change were Jesus's closest friends. Isn't that true?
They're being asked to do things they've never done before. Peter addresses a group of people in the streets of Jerusalem, where a few weeks earlier, they'd shouted, "Crucify Jesus"! And he said, "You killed the Son of God". That's not an easy message to deliver. And it says the people were cut to the heart and said, "What should we do"? And he said, "Repent, every one of you, and be baptized in the name of Jesus". He's declaring the one they shouted "crucify" as Lord of all and their only pathway into the kingdom of God. Before we get to the end of the book of Acts, he's arrested, he's beaten, he goes into the home of Gentiles in Caesarea, a pagan city, into the home of a Roman centurion.
And the Holy Spirit is poured out like he was poured out on Jesus's best friends in Jerusalem, and it blew his mind. Almost got him tossed out of the church in Jerusalem. He's called to pray for a young woman who's dead, and she's raised to life. I'm telling you, the disciples have more change than any of the people they take the message of the gospel to. If we want to be participants in this moving of the Spirit of God that we say we're so anxious for, we're gonna have to be the ones willing to embrace change. We're gonna have to have a change of heart. We're gonna have to move out of that kind of petrified place where we're pretty certain we know all the important stuff.
Jesus's closest friends, even while close to him, doing their best to be obedient and to walk in an upright way, they struggled to believe. It was hard to process everything they were watching and seeing. I suspect that could be true for you and me as well. Let's pray:
Father, we wanna follow you. We wanna be obedient. I pray you'll give us understanding hearts and listening ears and the courage to say "yes". That we won't be turned aside by fear or discouragement or threat, but that we will be faithful with the season you've called us to. In Jesus's name, amen.