Allen Jackson - Establish a Legacy of Faith - Part 2
It's an honor to be with you today. We're working through a little study on leading with our faith, but in this session we're going to talk about a legacy of faith. Now, what will you be remembered for when your days under the sun are done, the wealth you accumulated, the power you managed to gather, the education you accumulated? All those things are legitimate and they're a part of the journey, but I would submit that most importantly is our legacy of faith. Will the people who know you, that have done life with you, who've shared holidays with you, will they understand the significance of the role of faith in your life and your heart? I pray so. We're going to look at that little more closely. Grab your Bible and a notepad, but most importantly, open your heart to God's invitations for you.
Okay, there's a second component of your toolkit. And I'm going to, I can't do this, just this in a single session, but I wanted to introduce it anyway. It's the opportunities for prayers with other people. How many of you have ever heard us talk about, "Let's pray"? A one-sentence prayer that you can just kind of, like, drop and run. It's kind of the equivalent of a spiritual hit and run. You have a spiritual moment with somebody and you're gone before, "What happened"? "Well, that person I didn't know just said a prayer for me, and they're gone". And yes, they are. Well, this is a little different season. You're going to gather with friends and family members, and the settings will be different and the lines of authority will be different.
If it's your home, you have some intent in that place. It's your home, it's your table, it's your invitation. You get to set the tone for that. If it isn't your home and you're a guest to somebody else, it's a little bit of a different response. But there are prayers for others that can be prayed in all of these settings. And oftentimes, we come from different backgrounds, different denominations, different churches, all sorts of things that, you know, our approach to faith is different. But the suggestion is we're going to lead with our faith in this holiday season. The opportunity before us, if we're willing to accept it, is to establish a legacy of faith that where we go we come to honor the Lord and honor his Word.
I want to be known for that. It's important to me. It's more important to me than being an advocate for a sports team. It's more important to me than being perceived as any other thing. I want to be known as a person that wanted to honor the Lord and the authority of his Word in my life. You can do that. You don't have to be a professional Christian. It's harder to do that as a professional Christian. People think I get paid to talk about Jesus. So we can pray for others. One of the simplest ways I know to do that, one of those that's more difficult to resist is to simply use the prayer that the Lord taught us to pray. Some of you know it as the Lord's Prayer. Some of you learned it as the Our Father. I don't really care the label you use. You're at least in general terms familiar with the prayer. You can use it as a blessing for the food.
You could use it as a prayer with the people with whom you gather. If it's a family holiday, it's the most appropriate prayer to pray. It's a way of letting the younger generations who gather with you hear a bit of your heart. Let them know it's important to you. I understand some of the objections. "That they've seen me do everything but pray. They don't consider my expertise to be praying". I've been in that place. It's embarrassing the first time you take that step. It is. If your reputation is built on other things, the first time that someone hears you pray they'll think, "I didn't know they had that in them".
It's happened to me. Once upon a time... I grew up in this community, and I liked to play basketball, and I really wasn't that gifted. Couldn't really run that fast or jump that high. I was just mean. That was my primary qualification for making the team. I was mean. You push me, I'd knock you down. If you were bigger than me, you'd knock me down. I'd get back up. And you knew even if you were ultimately going to win, it was going to be a long, hard fight, so it was probably easier to negotiate. And it will not get you a scholarship and it certainly will not get you to professional sports and it will leave you with scars, but I liked to play ball.
The last game I played, I went to Riverdale. Back then we used to pray before games in the locker room before we went out. I'd never prayed before a game. Somebody said I was supposed to pray. So I said a prayer. And I'll never, one of the guys that I played ball with for years, when I said amen, he started with some colorful language and then he said, "Jackson, we had no idea you knew how to pray". And I was embarrassed. They knew I'd hit them in the mouth, they knew I was stubborn, they knew I could get mad enough my whole face would turn beet red, but they didn't know I knew how to pray. Some of you, your holiday, you might have to start with that. "Well, we didn't expect you to pray".
You could even do it covertly and recruit somebody else, but you'd be doing it under your authority. But I would encourage you go ahead and take the step. "Before we start our meal, before we unwrap packages, before we do whatever we've gathered here to do, I wonder if we could say a prayer together". And you can give them the Lord's Prayer. It's in your notes. Why don't we just read it together? We'll practice. This is practice for your debut. And if somebody makes fun of you, when you have your prayer debut, you just get in line with me. I've gotten a little better at public praying, but I still get frightened. Let's just say it together:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.
Now, when you say amen, just keep going. Don't wait for them to tell you how meaningful it was. You've already got a little adrenaline mump, you're anxious. They've never heard you pray before. "What will they think about me"? You can do it if it's with a group of co-workers. You know, we spend our days together and we work on projects together and we do our best to succeed in a whole host of things together. While we're gathering for the holiday, I just like to take a minute with all of you to invite God into the midst of our lives because I know we all need his help. I'm not a great prayer. Maybe we could just say the Lord's Prayer together.
There's a number of ways you could introduce that. I'll give you one other way to pray for others. We could work on this list, and we may come back and work on it some more. But one way, if it's a family gathering or it's a family where the families are gathering, where the families are together and there's kids that are there, pray for the kids. Pray for them. Say, "Well, I've never done that". I know. We haven't led with our faith, folks. We've been sitting on our good intentions thinking the next election was going to change us or an economic upturn would make things better. We've thought this was going to happen apart from us. We are the people of God. We're light and salt. And if the light is dim and the salt is absent, it's on us.
They are mutilating our kids and putting pornography in the libraries. And we're so addled we don't know what to say. Let's just perhaps, when we have a holiday gathering, what if we prayed for the kids? Just what if? You can pray for them as a group. You can pray for them individually. You can do it covertly and just quietly have a little prayer with them through the day. I'm not telling you there's a single formula. I'm telling you go on purpose. "I'm not leaving till I've prayed for these kids". And if you really, I'll tell you how to practice. Start to pray for them before you get there. And here's just a wild notion. This is really bizarre, I know. It's biblical. It's in your notes.
It's Matthew 19. The little children were brought to Jesus for him to give them a package. No, he placed his hands on them and he prayed for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Can you imagine? There's people bringing kids to Jesus, and here's the disciples: Peter, James, John, the heavy hitters, the spiritual ones, the apostles, "Will you stop bringing those kids around? What are you doing? Get those kids away from here".
Can you see Jesus's face? It's not recorded, but it had to be one of those times when he said, "Are you really that dull"? I mean, he says it to them a lot. Says he rebuked them. "Let the kids come. I'd like to pray for them". You want to lead with your faith? They're not waiting for us to make a speech in congress or open some political convention. That's more about show and lights anyway. How about a legacy of faith? "I don't ever remember being with that person without them having a prayer for me. I don't know what it was about them, but I always enjoyed the opportunity to be with them at a holiday season".
How about that being your legacy? Whatever you leave them, they'll spend. Whatever you give them, they'll think it should have been more. The gifts you sacrifice to give them, they'll enjoy them, but they'll move on to the next one. It's the nature of life. It doesn't mean they're inherently wrong. I'm telling you, we've leaned the ladder against the wrong wall. We haven't given our hearts and ourselves to a legacy of faith in the way that we could. I didn't come to make you feel guilty or to add to the shame in our lives. The enemy does that well enough. I came to turn a light switch on a hallway that we could walk that would enable us to lead a legacy of faith.
I'll give you a third piece for your toolkit. The degree of difficulty on this one is a little higher. You could have communion. Not only driving to the church building and have communion in the sanctuary, you could have communion wherever you gather. I'll give you the components 'cause this is really, ultimately, doable. How many of have ever had communion? About two-thirds of you. Well, you should come more often, we do it quite frequently here, and we will help you. But almost every one of us has had communion probably hundreds of times and in different settings, in different formats. And so we understand there's not, like, a singular way to do that, but the essence of it. And I'll give you this as a bit of a pattern. I would read the Scripture. And just to be helpful, I brought you a Scripture.
It's 1 Corinthians 11. Paul's writing to the church at Corinth to help them, get this, celebrate communion. "What I received from the Lord I passed on to you: that the Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed took bread, and when he'd given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, 'The cup is a new covenant in my blood. Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me.'" So if I were going to have communion with a group of people outside of a church setting, I might read that Scripture. You don't have to preach. In fact, you don't have to say anything else. It's probably better if you don't. And then you've got the juice, the bread, and the cup.
Now, we have those little, handy-dandy, portable communion packs at church, which actually are available to you in the bookstore. It's not a for-a-profit motive. I'm sure it's a loss leader. But if you'd like to look like you're professional, you could take those. You can use a cup of grape juice and a saltine cracker. You can use a glass of water and a piece of cornbread broken up. I don't mean to be disrespectful. Don't confuse the expression of this with the meaning behind it. It's an acknowledgement of the redemptive work of Jesus. And what you're saying to anyone who would share the Lord's Table with you is, "This is of extraordinary importance to me".
It's really intended to be for believers. And if you're gathering with friends and family and you have questions about whether there are people in your family that are believers or not, that would become a matter for prayer. "God, I don't want anybody that knows me to spend holidays with me or have celebratory times with me, and I never made any effort to share my faith with them". At the very least you want to talk about how much you appreciate the Lord, the good things he's done in your life, why you're excited about him. Communion. You can have a group of co-workers who are Christ followers.
Maybe you do it before you... if you're having some sort of holiday gathering and there's three or four of you that work together that are Christians, maybe you have communion together and pray for your workplace. Maybe you have a group of friends over during the holidays. And those celebrations have not typically been faith-centered. And before you begin all the other activities, you took communion together and said, "I just wanted you all to know my faith is really important to me. That I pray for you". Maybe if it's a family, and maybe the whole family is not on board, but you gather with whatever members of the family are available before the larger groups arrives and say, "We're going to minister to the rest of these folks today. And I wanted us to begin by inviting God into the midst of our holiday".
Maybe your holiday is not populated with lots of people. Maybe you'll face the holiday and you'll be alone. That's a wonderful time to get out communion and say, "Lord, you said you would never leave me nor forsake me. That my holiday doesn't look like a Norman Rockwell painting, but I know that the creator of heaven and earth is with me today, and I want to thank you for what you've done for me". We have a culture that tries to convince us we are mistreated. I'm so weary with the voices that try to divide us with anger and resentment and bitterness, that we deserve what someone else has and that whatever. Don't succumb to that.
Here's the reality. There's no perfect life and there's no perfect life season. If you think someone else has a perfect life, you just don't know enough about them. And there's no perfect time in your life. You're too young or you're too old or you're somewhere in between. That's the truth. Communion is a wonderful way to invite the Lord into a gathering of people. You can do that. "What if I do it wrong? What if I do it wrong"? If you serve communion with the intent of honoring the Lord, it isn't about us. We're not pretending, we didn't offer ourselves as a sacrifice to save anybody. What I want is anybody that knows me to know that what Jesus did for me is so important that before I celebrate or have a party or gather with people, "That this is really a deal. I don't want you to miss it. This matters to me". "Where did this come from? What if I do it wrong"?
You mean if you stumble over the verse or you read it from the wrong translation? Take a picture and put it in your phone. Communion. I even brought you a prayer you can pray. After you've taken the bread and the cup and like, if praying out loud is not your deal, you can just read that prayer. You can let them read it with you. If you got it on your phone, you can share it with them all. They can have a prayer when they leave. Now, you're really getting weird. There's a fourth piece. I got a couple of minutes. I'm going to give it to you. Oh, I got two more. I don't have enough time for that. We used to, years ago we did Easter services at Murphy Center, MTSU. And one of my dear friends brought his mother. She'd never been to church before. She lived on the other side of Nashville. And I'll never forget. He brought her up to me. It was kind of a intense thing. She was a little intense. She said, "Preacher, I got a ham in the oven. Don't you burn it".
I didn't have the courage to say, "Well, I hope you've got it on about 25 degrees". But I didn't. I'm not going to burn the hams today, I promise, but I do want to give you one more tool for the toolkit 'cause the holidays are starting, and it has to do with this heritage of faith idea. You know, there's a lot of people with whom you'll gather that you may not have the privilege of attending church together, but you want them to know that faith is an important part of your life. You want them to know that you pray for them. You want them to know that faith in Jesus has changed your life. And maybe the most important thing you can share with them isn't investment advice or holiday recipes. I could submit to you that the most important thing you could share with them is your belief in Jesus of Nazareth.
So I'm going to give you a little activity that would help with that, and I borrowed this when I heard the other man share that he and his wife had made it a part of their gatherings with their family because he wanted his grandchildren to know what he believed. And he said they lived in different cities and different places in the world. And while they've been close as a family, he said, "When I'm no longer with them at the holidays," he said, "I wanted them to know what I believed". And one of the best ways that he knew to do that was to share the Apostles' Creed with them.
Now, some of you grew up saying that as a part of your worship, some of you didn't. It doesn't change the validity of it if the tradition in which you worshiped didn't use it. It's one of the oldest creedal statements in the Christian church. Some scholars have suggested it could have been the baptism creed for the church in Jerusalem in those early years. I don't know. Their social media account has been deleted. Apparently, somebody in California thought it was misinformation, so they took it down. I repent. Don't send me a letter. But as I thought about what he shared, there's a lot of ways you could do that. It'll be more impactful if everybody has a copy.
You can do it digitally. You can share it with them that way. You could print it out and give them a paper copy to read. You could write it in your longhand and sign it and give it to them. You do it in a way that suits you and your circumstance. But we're talking about a heritage of faith. Not a heritage of perfection, not a heritage that you've never lost your temper, not a heritage that every decision you've made has been good, but a heritage that they know the things that truly matter to you in all the brokenness that you represent. See, we haven't cared about this very much. The only thing we've really been coached for is the need to say the sinner's prayer. And then if they live like the devil, it's okay 'cause God's a God of grace. Folks, that is a false gospel.
So the Apostles' Creed. If you've never said it, I brought you a copy. I thought we might say it together. In fact, why don't we stand together? We can close with this. It's a series of statements about what I believe. It begins with a statement about God: I believe in God the Father Almighty. And then there's a whole paragraph there of statements about Jesus, who he is and what he did for us. If you don't believe those things, be certain of this, it isn't Christianity. You can't reject that set of statements and imagine that you're a Christian, at least in the orthodox meaning of that. In a world where we're changing definitions, I suppose you could find space in there. From a biblical perspective, that set of statements about Jesus are essential.
And then that final paragraph or stanza has to do with some statements about the people of God and the Spirit of God. And I would submit that we all want to believe those things. And perhaps as we read the Apostles' Creed together this morning, we do it as a declaration before God and all the angels of heaven that our intent is to leave a legacy of faith. I really can't think of anything more valuable. Oh, we can learn, we can get better at it. We'll have to practice a little bit. We'll stumble some. Somebody will snicker. They made fun of Jesus. They criticized Jesus. The apostles, after Jesus left, they were constantly in trouble. You said the wrong thing in the wrong place. They were threatened by the political leaders. They were criticized by the religious leaders.
I mean, it wasn't like it was seamless. Paul calls Peter out and says, "You're a hypocrite. And I got to go back to Jerusalem and duke it out". And we shouldn't think that leading with our faith is going to be seamless and easy and fun, there's times you'll feel awkward, but it's worth it. Not everybody will cheer. It's okay. They didn't all cheer Jesus. Folks, we have to have a change. And God is the change agent. And far more than he responds to elections, he responds to the hearts of his people. Let's decide to be a people that will elicit a response of goodness from God, amen. Have you found your Apostles' Creed? Let's read it together:
I believe in God the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into Hades. The third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and He sits on the right hand of God. From thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, amen.