Allen Jackson - A Change of Heart - Part 2
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. I mean, after all, Peter, James, and John just spent three years with Jesus. They were in the boat when he walked on the lake. They fed the multitude with that little boy's Happy Meal. They were at the wedding when he made wine.
Peter, James, and John were on the mountain when Jesus was transfigured and he hung out and had a little chat with Mo. I mean, they had front-row seats for the whole thing. And they're the ones that have to change. They're not goin' back to their fishing businesses. They're not goin' back to their routines. They're not going back often to the synagogue in Capernaum. They're gonna be reviled, mocked, and rejected and experience the presence of God and the power of God and learn new things, and you'll watch 'em scramble to figure it out. They're gonna argue amongst themselves and go, "I don't know if we can do that. We've never done that, but the Lord sent me there. I had a vision. Three times I had a vision. Then they're knockin' at the door, and so I went, but I didn't know what to expect. And then God poured out his Spirit on them like he did on us, and we don't even like them".
You know, God's gonna move in the lives of some people that you don't like. And there's people that you've been praying he would touch 'cause they're such good people, and they're just not gonna respond. And you'll be going, "You know, there's some really ungodly people doin' some godly things". Verse 22, "But the fruit of the Spirit," this is the contrast. "The fruit of the Spirit," and there's nine things listed: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against these things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions".
God will not crucify your old nature. You're praying for God to take it away from you, you're ignoring the council of scripture. He said you have to execute it. You have to say, "No". You have to stand against it. "I will not yield to you. I will not give you first place". "But I want to". Okay, duly noted. Shut up. I can't say shut up at church. That'll bring my mom back. Oh, it could be bad. There are rules, did you know that? You can't say, "Shut up". Don't say that. That's true. We have to crucify that old nature with its passions and desires.
You say, "But that's what I want, I think, I feel". Okay. I agree, you have feelings and you have thoughts and you have desires. That does not mean they're all godly. It doesn't mean they're all generated by the Holy Spirit. "You can't tell me my feelings aren't real". You're right, I can't. They're real. But they could be real ungodly. There's probably a country song in there if you just got somebody to help you craft those words just right. "Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit". To keep in step, you'd have to pay attention to how the Spirit is moving, where he's going.
That's what the book of Acts is about. "I need you to go here, not there. Oh, there's pressure in Jerusalem, so we're gonna have to leave for a while". It's not an easy thing. "Let us not become conceited in provoking and envying each other". Again, if it's warning us not to be conceited and not to provoke one another, I assure you we have a tendency towards arrogance and provocation. 'Cause when you're arrogant, you start telling everybody else how they're not enough. I mean, not you, but somebody you know.
In that same book, Galatians chapter 6, in verse 14, I thought it's a bit of a summary of statement of all that Paul has been saying. He said, "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world". Do you know, in order for Paul to accept the assignment that God had for him, he had to walk away from a lifetime of training and professional momentum? He had to completely realign his friends. He had to establish new associates, and the new friends he needed didn't want to have anything to do with him because he had such a bad reputation.
I mean, there's nothing about that that's easy. Most of us think, "Oh, I'd love to have a fruitful life for the Lord". But read about the people that have fruitful lives for the Lord. Again, I'm suggesting to you that we have to have a change of heart. And for too long, you know, we said a change of heart is, "I'm gonna stop saying profanity". We haven't had a very high bar for serving the Lord. We really haven't, folks. I mean, if we really get up amongst it. If we read the story in the book of Acts and we pay attention to our friends, there's a total realignment of their lives, and they're already following Jesus. They've already walked away from businesses and friends and family. They've been willing to be identified. And now they've done it in a rather haphazard, halting way.
When they arrested him, they couldn't find much courage, but they found it when they needed it not long after. This false gospel, false church thing, it's not a new problem. And we need this in order to put a little bit more stiffness in our spines. 'Cause we wanna act like it's the end of the age, and because of that, there's some new ferocity and some new intensity, and so our cowardice is kind of excusable. I brought you a couple of passages. 2 Corinthians chapter 11. Paul writing to, again, a church that he's been very instrumental in his formation. He said, "I'm afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ".
If Paul thought the churches he were coaching could be led away from devotion to Christ, I think it would be in our best interest to imagine that we could be led away. "For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough". This is the same Paul that wrote to Timothy, and he said, "They're gonna have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof. Have nothing to do with them".
And now he's saying to the church in Corinth, he said, "You're tolerant of some things you shouldn't be tolerant of. You're inclusive of some things that you should not be including". A different Jesus, a different spirit, a different gospel. It's not just the Corinthians. In Galatians chapter 1, he said, "I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and you're turning to a different gospel, it's really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and trying to pervert the gospel of Christ".
This is not a 21st-century occurrence that's unique to us. It's as old as the church because the adversary of the church is the same. The adversary has been trying to get the people of God to kill their children for as long as we've been recording the story. We used to call it Molech. Then they'd offer their children as sacrifices to him so their crops would be better. Imagine that, sacrificing children for an economic opportunity. That couldn't happen in the 21st century. We have a whole variety of new gospels that are flourishing in contemporary Christiandom. We have a gospel without consequences.
This one is very prevalent in American evangelicalism: a gospel that really doesn't have any consequences. Sin has been rendered irrelevant. Grace has become all-encompassing. God's grace is the triumphant message so that whatever sin you can imagine, dabble with it, engage in it, pursue it. Because when you decide it's not the right path to walk any longer, you can kinda glibly say, "Oh, I'm sorry," and the grace of God will cover everything, and there's no consequences. It's a false gospel. I believe in the redemptive power of God and the redemptive work of the cross, and I believe in a God of forgiveness, but if you imagine there's no consequence to sin, you haven't paid attention.
We forget a generation who dined on manna every day and drank water from a rock and then died in the wilderness because they didn't want to continue to walk with the Spirit of God. We often forget about Moses, recruited at a burning bush and spent the remainder of his life serving the people of God, but God said, "Because of your disobedience, you will not enter the Promised Land. You will not". "But I parted the Red Sea". "You're not goin' in the Promised Land". "But I went up on the mountain and got those ten things for me. My face glowed". "You're not going into the Promise Land".
We forget about David, a man after God's own heart. So many things to celebrate about his life, and God said, "You cannot build a temple for me. You disqualified yourself". We forget about people like Ananias and Sapphira who forfeited their lives because they chose selfish ambition. Folks, the Bible resonates with the consequences of sin. Now, there is forgiveness provided. I believe in that. I'm a poster child for that. But we have to tell the truth: there's a consequence for sin. We have to have a change of heart.
See, we don't grieve. We watch our children walk into ungodliness, and we kind of wink at it, nod at it, and go, "Well, they're gonna sow a few wild oats". No, they're gonna forfeit things. We have a social gospel. This one's very prevalent. We gather in our churches. They're like civic clubs except we have a little music. We may throw in a few more prayers, but we're really gathered to do good things. We wanna show benevolence and kindness and help those less fortunate, and all of those things are worthy things to do. I'm grateful that civic clubs do them.
The church holds a message of a gospel of transformation. That we are sinners, and we need a Savior. That there is objective truth. There's right and wrong. Civic clubs don't often have to grapple with that. They just see needs and try to resolve them. The church has a higher calling. And we can be embraced more broadly by the culture if we'll leave the calling out and the uniqueness of Jesus out and we'll just serve needs. We can be celebrated, and we kind of like the applause, so sometimes we just wanna turn down the volume on Jesus a little bit.
It's a false gospel. We have a happy gospel. God wants you to be happy above all else. He will be happy. I'm not opposed to happiness, but I prefer to be pleasing to the Lord. We have others. This one's flourished, and it's taken several decades. This one's entrenched in our theological schools. It's a socialist gospel. Got a lot of momentum from South American liberation theology. And then feminist theology kinda got interwoven along with it. And we focused more on injustices and how we're gonna level the playing field.
And then we find words like "equity". Not equality, not that the ground at the cross is level so that everybody can approach and acknowledge their sin, equity. That somehow we should all get equal outcomes. Even God, that's not biblical. When he handed out talents, he didn't give the same number of talents to everybody. Every one of us is different. We're created uniquely in God's sight. We have different gifts and abilities, the scripture says. God, because he's just, will hold us accountable for the gifts and the abilities we've been given. Equity is a godless construct used to manipulate human beings. Don't teach it to your children, and don't tolerate anyone else teaching it to your children.
We have a universalist gospel. It says Jesus is not essential. God's revealed in nature and in the majesty of creation and all the things that are around us. Again, these are not new things. Look at Revelation chapter 3. The book of Revelation is written to seven churches today in modern-day Turkey, but seven churches. And to every one of the churches, the pattern is similar. God said, "I know what's going on with you. There's some good things to be celebrated, but there's some corrections you need to make".
Again, a change of heart. We've lost this notion. We think the pagans need to change. We think the immoral or the... we need, think, "Somebody else does". For the book of Acts to unfold, Peter, James, and John, and the crew they rolled with, they had to change. "To the angel of the church of Laodicea write: These are the words of the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God's creation. I know your deeds". That's a very... do you know God knows our deeds? He knows our deeds. Spiritual forces shape history. I'm about out of time.
Look at Isaiah. I pulled more than one 'cause the perspectives change. I think we have undervalued the significance of spiritual forces. It's one of the reasons we don't pray like we might. We tend to trivialize 'em. We'll talk about maybe they can change our eternity. We can be born again, and our eternity would be completely different. But beyond that, we don't think much about spiritual forces impacting us. And I assure you, they do. What we're watching unfold in the earth is more about a spiritual conflict than it is about nation states or geopolitical realignment or economic forces. It has more to do with than a group of people in Davos who think they're gonna run the world.
There's a spiritual conflict in Isaiah 4. "The Lord said will wash away the filth of the women of Zion; he will cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem by a spirit of judgment and fire". I've been saying that little prayer for a bit. "God pour out your Spirit in a way of judgment and fire. Cleanse us. Purify us". Judgment doesn't have to mean it's something that's against you. Judgment can be for you. Did you watch "The People's Court"? Long before "Judge Judy" was a thing, Judge Wapner was a deal. They never rule against anyone. They always pronounce judgment for someone.
You want God's judgment for you. It may bring realignment. "A spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire". It's a prayer worth praying. It feels, to me, its language is very reminiscent of that wilderness generation led by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. Reminder of both protection. But the power of God. In Isaiah 19, there's a different spirit that is prevalent. It says, "Where are your wise men now? Let them show you and make known what the Lord Almighty has planned against Egypt. The officials have become fools, the leaders of Memphis are deceived; the cornerstones of her people have led Egypt astray".
Gee, that sort of thing sounds kind of familiar to me. And what's happening? What's the motivation for it? What's the power or the authority behind it? It says, "The Lord has poured into them a spirit of dizziness; they make Egypt stagger in all that she does, as a drunkard staggers around in his vomit. And there's nothing they can do". You see, we're seeing symptoms of a spiritual problem. And we have hope for resolutions that aren't spiritual, and we're the church! I believe God would bring to us a change of heart.
And then Isaiah 61. I'm out of time. We'll look at that at a later session. But that's the passage, the prophetic passage Jesus quoted when he went to the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. He stood up and said, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me. He's anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. You sent me to heal the brokenhearted". And it says he closed the scroll, and he looked around, and he said, "Today, the scripture is fulfilled in your ears". And they tried to kill him. Can you imagine, I don't know which words you prefer, how hurtful that would be? How disconcerting that would be? How painful that would be? He knew those people by name, not because of some supernatural revelation.
As a kid, he played with the young people. His peer group, he knew their parents. He knew the story of the community. He read them from the book of Isaiah. And he extended to them an opportunity, and they were so angry at him they wanted to kill him. I promise not everybody you share the good news of the gospel with will embrace it. There'll even be times it will be awkward and uncomfortable that people you would imagine would accept it may choose not to. But Jesus said we've gotta go to all the towns and villages. We've gotta go wherever there's an open door.
Folks, we need a change of heart. The good news is, God is helping us. He called us to this most remarkable season. Don't be angry at the darkness. Don't rage against the darkness. We're just gonna turn up the light a little bit. I've said it to you many times before, and I'm gonna continue to say it: we're the 21st-century edition of the book of Acts. There's no conclusion to that book 'cause it's not finished yet. We're still living it out.
We're the current generation of disciples of Jesus, and we're learning and growing. And if we will cooperate with his Spirit, if we'll try to keep in step with the Spirit, if we'll say "no" to our old carnal, earthly, Adamic nature and its passions, if we'll stop excusing our sin, God will move in the most remarkable ways. One day we will gather with those people that we've read about in this book. We've spent much time reading their stories and thinking about what they've done and wondering how they could have been so stupid in some occasions. But it's gonna be a little awkward when they get to ask us, "What were you thinking? We were in that great cloud of witnesses, and we saw you makin' that choice, and we were all lookin' at one another, goin', 'What are they thinking?'"
I brought you a prayer. I borrowed, actually, a prayer from David. Psalm 51 is David's prayer of repentance when the prophet came to him and said, "Your sin of adultery and murder has not really been hidden". God knows. For people that think that the gospel shouldn't engage culture, what do you say to the prophet that has to go tell the king, "You're a murderous, adulterous wretch"? There's just not very many people that would like that assignment. But David chose to repent, and I brought you a portion of that prayer.
I think it's appropriate for us. I think one of the keys to... and we're gonna look at some things that enable that change of heart in us to gain momentum. But spoiler alert: one of them will be a willingness of us to acknowledge our need to change. And so, I think David's prayer of repentance is appropriate for us as we begin this little journey. Let's stand together. We can read it together.
When you have a prayer, please don't just leave it at church. Take it with you. Make it a part of your daily devotional for a while. You'll know when you're done with it. You'll feel the release. Pray it morning and evening. There'll be prayers the Lord quickens to you, and you think, "That prayer just feels valuable to me". While it feels valuable, you keep praying it.
See, we've gotta learn to follow the Lord in a new way. We're gonna have to have a desire to hear and listen and understand beyond what we've had in the past. We have to recognize that the season demands it of us. There's storms. It isn't clear skies and easy sailing. It's tumultuous, crazy expressions of ungodliness. They mock our Lord on a global scale. We haven't seen that in that way before. They're trying to confuse us about things that aren't even confusing. Telling us we should be confused. I'm like, "Nope, that's just not confusing". We've got to learn to follow the Lord in some new ways. It starts with a desire.
So you think, "Well, Lord, I've never been much of a prayer, but I'm gonna take that one and pray it". Let's read it. Psalm 51:
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all of my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you, amen.