Allen Jackson - Unfamiliar Paths - Part 1
I want to start a new discussion, a new series. It’s a familiar title, but we didn’t exhaust it and it’s been a bit. I wanna talk about «Angels, Demons, and You». It’s the «And You» part that really makes the difference. We could do seminars on angels and demons and nauseam. When you roll the «And You» part and all of a sudden it gets personal. We can’t afford to have this as a theoretical discussion. And we could say, «Yeah, we’re all in favor of making America healthy again». But if we say now, «We want to make you healthy again,» it’s like, «Wait a minute».
And the transformational part of this is recognizing the spiritual forces and influences that impact us. And for the church, it’s been very fashionable to have these studies and read books and have discussions and we act as if they don’t influence us or they don’t impact us. That somehow because we made a profession of faith in Jesus and we imagine that our name is written in the Lamb’s book of life and that we read our Bibles from time to time that we’re above the fray. Well Jesus was not above the fray. The young men that he recruited and the women that followed him, they were not above the fray. The leaders of the church throughout the history of the church have not been above the fray.
I would submit to you that it’s really a perversion of the truth to imagine that those spiritual forces don’t influence us. And so, we’re gonna see what we can learn about this for the next few weeks. In this session I wanna talk about some unfamiliar paths, paths we’re not as familiar with, not as comfortable with perhaps even. If you haven’t thought about it, I would submit to you that spiritual forces influence your life today. Today. You know, the question is about our awareness and how intentional we were and was it purposeful or accidental? Was it random? Do we count on the Lord to protect us, or is there assignments we have? Do we have responsibilities for our spiritual health?
It seems to me when it comes to this topic, the church is either willfully ignorant, uninformed. There’s just a lot of ways we can describe it. We prefer not to think about it. But if I had to describe our response, I think to a significant degree, we’re just spiritually blind. And I don’t mean that as an attack. I just think we lack the perception. Did you ever buy something? Did you ever want something, you kind of longed for it, you saved for it, you made a sacrifice to get it and you thought you had something really unique? Maybe a car, maybe some piece of clothing, maybe something. And after you made the purchase on the way home from the car lot, you see 12 more.
You know, it’s as if your awareness went way up. Well my goal as we walk through these sessions together is to see if we can raise our awareness of spiritual forces so that we might be far more intentional in how we navigate our days. We have a plan for the weather. When the weather has been like it has been this week, we have some plan to mitigate the impact of the rainfall. We need to have a plan for the spiritual forces that are a part of our journey. So, I wanna start in Isaiah 42. The prophet said, «I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I’ll turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them. But those who trust in idols, who say to images, 'You are our gods, ' will be turned back in utter shame».
I don’t believe Isaiah is talking about people who are physically blind. He’s talking about spiritual blindness and he’s writing to the covenant people of God, the people who keep kosher rules, they keep the right holidays, they pay tithes that they’re checking all sorts of religious boxes. They have a covenant with God that defines their lives, but God’s message to them is, «You’re blind». But there’s a promise in there if you heard it. God said, «I will lead the blind in ways they have not known. Along unfamiliar paths, I will guide them». That’s a wonderful promise. «I will help you walk paths you’re not familiar with. I’ll turn the darkness into light before them, and I’ll make the rough places smooth».
As I’ve been preparing this little study, I’ve begun to say that over my life. God, I thank you that you will lead me along unfamiliar paths. I thank you that you’ll turn darkness into light before me, that you’ll make rough places smooth. That I’ll be able to traverse places and accomplish things, see and understand things that previously have been either unattainable to me, have been invisible to me that I could not perceive. I believe God is doing that today. It’s really difficult to avoid the Lord is doing that.
In 1 Corinthians 12, and verse 1, there’s a New Testament comment that’s similar to this. It’s right in the middle of this lengthy discussion about the involvement of the spirit of God in the lives of his people. And Paul makes this statement to the church at Corinth. He said, «About spiritual gifts, I don’t want you to be ignorant». It isn’t clear in English, but the word gifts is actually included by the editors. The word in Greek is just spiritual and it’s a noun. It says, «About spirituals, I don’t want you to be ignorant,» but that doesn’t make sense in English. We don’t have the equivalent.
So, the editors have to put in a word there and in this particular translation, they chose the word gifts, but I like it better, for this instance, without that. «About spiritual things, don’t be ignorant». We can’t afford to be. We can understand physical health, and we’ve learned a little bit about how to maintain our health. COVID awakened us all to the significance of washing our hands. It wasn’t like we didn’t know. We just didn’t pay much attention to how viruses were transmitted and what we need to do to keep ourselves safe.
Well, we’ve been woefully unprepared for spiritual influences and how we open our lives, both to positive influences and negative influences because both exist. We’re going to look at a number of places in scripture, not all in this session, mercifully. But my goal is to help awaken you to the reality of the spiritual forces that are shaping your destiny more than your physical health. There are spiritual forces that are shaping your destiny more than political influences, more than the influences of nation states. I assure you it’s a fundamental principle of scripture from the opening chapters to the concluding verses. And we have relegated it to a secondary place. It’s not unique to us. It has to do something with the larger world in which we’re living.
Modernity, let me describe our current culture with that label if you’ll allow me for a moment. Modern thinking, modernity, has given us a shift in consciousness from the supernatural to the secular. That the forces that shape our lives are economic, they’re political, they’re ideological. And then really for most of human history, we had a much broader understanding of that. It would be absurd to think that pre-modern people were always praying or were really fundamentally different from us. I promise you, they had to cook dinner, they had to dispose of their trash, they lived lives just like we do. You know, I’ve studied in some… had the privilege of studying in some very celebrated theological places, and the ones that don’t embrace the authority of scripture, they will explain it away this way.
Let’s say, well, the first century audience was just far more captivated by spiritual things, but now that we’re more enlightened and better educated, we’re not nearly as motivated. And I hear that and I think, «Well, the problem with that is that Jesus believed in them». I don’t think we’re prepared to say that Jesus was first century and ignorant. Is that fair? So, that post-modern idea that they used to be so much less enlightened, that science has solved all of our problems. Oh, really? You know, the decision, the final step for me to be able to say I would serve the Lord with my life was in a science class where we were processing the history of science and all the different breakthroughs that had come through the centuries.
And I realized that science is a method of understanding our world and that we’re constantly learning and growing, that our knowledge is incomplete, it’s inadequate. There are many things that we don’t know today. I’ve been to the hospital many, many times with brilliantly educated people, people who’ve made tremendous sacrifices to study and learn and gather information and understand human anatomy and the things that impact us and I’ve been in the rooms with them on so many occasions when they would say, «We don’t know. We don’t know what causes this. We don’t know how to resolve this. We can’t really tell you why it started. We can help you understand where you are, but we don’t know».
And I was in that class and I was listening to the professor go through this history of science, and I thought, «Why would I give my life and sell out completely to something that 100 years from now, a third grader would look at and laugh». You know, it wasn’t too long ago, doctors didn’t wash their hands between patients because we didn’t understand germ theory. It wasn’t too long ago we believed in spontaneous generation, that decaying meat just gave rise to flies. We didn’t know they laid eggs in the meat. And the list goes on and on. So, do we have the humility to say we don’t know everything and we will allow the authority of scripture to inform our understanding of the world, or will we cling to the arrogant that say, «We have it all figured out.»?
Among the many differences between their worldviews and ours, one was that for them the unseen was not unreal. The seen was only part of the world, whereas for us, the unseen is generally unreal and largely irrelevant. It’s discounted. You stand in the public square and say you believe that unseen forces shape our future, people think you haven’t been educated. Advanced modernity tends to make people lose an entire dimension of reality in the name of realism. It reinforces the naturalistic worldview of scientism and the secularist, and it renders meaningless the supernatural worldview of the Christian.
The result of that is we live in a world without windows. We think we define reality by our understanding. Jesus came to demonstrate the kingdom of God to us, not in words, but in power with authority. He said, «The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach the good news to the captives, to heal the broken hearted». He spoke to the wind and the waves, he danced on the lake, he turned water into wine, he raised the dead back to life again. He demonstrated something we don’t understand. It requires us to believe in spiritual authority, spiritual power. That’s not chic anymore. It’s going to be again.
In the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of sin, and the power of evil. The evil one met their match. You see, Jesus is the Father’s greatest gift to humanity, and the spirit of Jesus is the greatest gift of Jesus to his followers and the essential requirement for living his way of life and fulfilling his great commission. So, if you’ll simply begin to quietly say, «Father, I would like to learn. Holy Spirit, help me». We’re gonna spend a few sessions walking through the pages of scripture, considering the impact of angels and demons on our lives. The spiritual forces that are for us and the spiritual forces that are arrayed against us. I’m not suggesting they’re equal, but they’re all prevalent. And our understanding of that would make a difference.
In Psalm 1:1, there’s a prayer that I’m gonna share with you. We’re gonna pray more than once in this session. It doesn’t mean you can stay out of church for weeks. The Psalm says, «Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the council of the wicked or stand in the way of the sinners or sit in the seat of mockers». It’s a downward progression. You walk in the way of the wicked, you stand in the way of sinners, and ultimately you sit with the mockers. I don’t wanna do that. I don’t want to mock God. I don’t want to stand with those people who resist him. To the best of my ability, I will not. I won’t call it missions. I won’t call it expressions of the grace of God. I think we need to repent of our skepticism, our stubborn reluctance to believe. The desire we hold to be convinced.
Look, I don’t want God to have to shout at me. I want to learn to respond to a whisper. I wanna be able to catch the slightest hint of a direction, of a prompt, of an invitation, and I want to be prepared to respond. I think we’ve kind of sat in that seat of the skeptic and we’ve been proud of it. «You know, you almost had me. Just almost». We kind of boast about it or we’ll talk about generationally. «You know, that’s just not how my people are. It’s the way my granddad believed and the way my dad believed it. That’s how I believe». And I’m all for generational momentum towards the Lord, but there are very few of us could flourish in today’s world with the life skills that our grandfathers were immersed in. We’ve had to learn and grow and adapt and change. And we’ve got to continue to learn about the Lord. We’ve had this deficient mentality.
«All I really need to know is how to go to heaven». No, you really need to know how to grow up in the Lord. We really do. So, I brought you a very short prayer there from Psalm one. Can we say this together? You’ve got it. It’s in bold in your notes, I think. And my technical genius, I deleted my outline after I prepared it. I’ll be giving classes on how to do that if you’d like to enroll. Let’s say this together, «I choose not to walk in the council of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, amen».
I’ll give you a hint. Your words have spiritual authority. Now you can misuse that the same way you can misuse food or your automobile, but it doesn’t diminish the truth that food is necessary and your automobile is an improvement on transportation. And we need to understand the authority of our words and begin to say what God’s Word says about us. Not to manipulate God, that’s foolish. If you think you will manipulate God with his Word, you are as immature as a child crying, trying to get their way. But your words have authority. Matthew 15, Jesus is with his disciples. He’s been giving a public message about their misunderstanding of the kosher rules of their diet. And the essence of it, he’s saying, that what you eat isn’t what makes you spiritually unclean. And he’s offended his audience because they believe they eat better than everybody else. Self-righteousness is a unique malady of religious people. You know we do that, right?
We get in our little church groups and we look through the windows and think we’re better than them because we read the right translation or we use the right kind of communion juice or our worship songs are better than their worship songs or whatever. Folks, it’s the redemptive work of Jesus through the cross that transforms our lives. And so, Jesus has offended this large group of people and the disciples come to him. It’s Matthew 15:12, «The disciples came and said, 'Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this? '» Always makes me smile. Can you feel the tension in the disciples? Jesus is speaking and the crowd’s getting agitated and the disciples are going, «Oh, somebody get his attention. Pull it back». It happens around here a few times. You can feel the room get really still. «Oh, he’s done it again. He’s gone there».
Well, the disciples have a little of that anxiety. «'Do you know the Pharisees were offended? ' And Jesus replied, 'Every plant that my heavenly Father is not planted will be pulled up by the roots.'» He’s not helping. Leave them; they are blind guides. «'If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit.' And Peter said, 'Explain the parable to us.'» You know why Peter said that? Because what he said is so uncomfortable, what Jesus has said to them is so uncomfortable. It’s not that it lacks clarity. It’s not wrapped in confusion. It’s very straightforward. It’s very simple. They’re blind guides, leave them. Don’t follow them. Don’t listen to them. Exit. Again, there’s nothing culturally that makes this more confusing, but it’s so awkward, it’s so transformational. It’s such a different direction.
Peter doesn’t know what to say. «It can’t mean what he said. It couldn’t be that». So he says, «Could you explain the parable to us»? And Jesus said, «Are you really that dull»? What’s the answer? Yeah. Jesus is leading a tremendous paradigm shift. I make fun of it a little bit, but it’s a dramatic shift in how they understand their lives, their behavior. You visit Jerusalem today, the kitchens are kosher. The rabbis come and do inspections. They have to have separate pots to cook in. If it’s meat or dairy, separate plates to present on. It’s an enormous amount of effort to keep the rules, and it’s a holdover from those mosaic laws, the dietary rules. And Jesus is addressing this paradigm shifted and that they can’t get their brains around. I go, «No, I don’t know what do you… can you explain»?
It’s offensive. I mean, the essence of what Jesus says is not complicated. What goes into your mouth doesn’t make you unclean. It might make you unhealthy, but it doesn’t make you spiritually filthy. And they can’t get their heads around it. We struggle with that. We have all sorts of language. «Well, that’s not how we do it. We’ve never done that before».
Let me tell you what I think. Those are all off ramps for obedience, but I think the Lord would say this, «Are you really that dull»? No, but we’re really that uncomfortable with this discussion. It has implications for us. The disciples are struggling. It’s not just the audience that’s listening, the disciples are struggling. Jesus is counseling a new choice for leadership. He said, «Stop following them». «But they’re the leaders. They’re the ones we’ve trusted. They explain the scriptures to us». We have a crisis in contemporary American Christendom. Major sections of the church are denying the authority of scripture. It’s a crisis because we’ve trusted the institutions, we’ve trusted the process, we’ve trusted the training of our religious leaders, and now we’re standing in this place where these big chunks of American Christiandom are denying the uniqueness of Jesus, the redemptive work of Jesus, and it’s awkward.
What do we do? Our families have been invested in this, it’s it’s shaped us for generations. It’s difficult to say what we see. It’s awkward to watch some of the things that are being pushed into the public square. There’s truth that is being presented that you just think, «Oh, I’d rather not think of it». People say to me, «I just, I quit watching the news. It’s too uncomfortable».
Imagine the pilot of the plane. We were flying through a storm that was so bad it frightened me, so I just quit looking. You know, what will be will be. Not on my plane. Not if I’m traveling with you. Pay attention, navigate, adjust. Please. So, they want all those people up there. The flight attendants will take care of us. You fly the plane. And Christians, Jesus is leading this. He’s not recommending a reform of current standards. He said to them, «Leave them. They’re blind guys». He didn’t say, «Hang in there and pray for them». Lead a renewal movement. That’s awkward. The disciples are struggling. Then Jesus questioned to Peter, «Are you really that dull»? The harshest languages for those closest to him.
Look at Ecclesiastes 10. It just made me smile. «If the ax is dull and it’s edges unsharpened, more strength is needed». Sharpen the ax. I don’t wanna stay dull. I know there’s things I’m dull about, but I don’t wanna stay there. There’s things I don’t know. There’s things I don’t understand, but I’m trying to cultivate this habit of saying, «Lord, I’d like to know. I’d like to see. I’m willing to walk unfamiliar paths. I wanna respond to you in new ways». We need new outcomes. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. Everything around us is deteriorating, and I want somebody to make it better and I don’t want it to be me that has to change. «I’m sorry, Lord, I’m willing to change».
We’re gonna pray before we go, but at the beginning of this year, we want to be certain that we’ve invited God into the midst of our lives. You know, we’re still living in the midst of a lot of confusion and frustration and turmoil. The messages are more than just mixed. They reverse almost 180 degrees, it seems, from one week to the next. And sources of trust are difficult to find, but God hasn’t changed, his perspective hasn’t changed. He is trustworthy and steadfast and faithful in the way he watches over our lives, and we can trust him with this year no matter what happens around us, God will bring us through. Let’s pray:
Father, I thank you for your abiding presence. That you are a rock and a strong tower, that you are the stability of our lives and that you secure our futures, not the US government or Wall Street or the strength of the dollar or the Federal Reserve, but Almighty God himself is watching over us. And we trust you with this day, with this week, and this year in Jesus’s name, amen.