Allen Jackson - The Challenge of Belief - Part 1
The topic for the message is «The Challenge of Belief». You know, we live in an age where they tell us we’re in a post-Christian culture, that it’s no longer chic to be a Christ follower, that we’ve moved beyond the time when Christian values influenced our world. I think those making those pronouncements are a little too anxious to push God from the stage of human history. I think they discount the authority of the kingdom of God. They overlook the reality of the one that we call Lord. But I want to take a few minutes and invite you to a posture of belief beyond any that you’ve ever had before. I want to invite you beyond just a belief that’s personal, just about your own individual destiny but into a belief that would change the direction of a family or a community or a whole family system.
God is in the life-transformation business, and I’m going to walk with you if you’ll just follow me. We’re going to go to Matthew’s Gospel and walk with Jesus as he’s preparing his disciples for his suffering. He’s going to begin to tell them weeks and weeks ahead of time, before they ever get to Jerusalem, he’s going to tell them what’s coming. In fact, in your notes I put multiple sections from the Gospel of Matthew. There’s four there where Jesus is delivering the same message. I’m not going to belabor the point, but I didn’t want us to miss the frequency with which Jesus… and the intentionality with which he said to his disciples what was going to happen when he made this last trip to Jerusalem. They’ve been to Jerusalem with him many times, and they experienced some tension.
They’ve had to go somewhat covertly. They would slip in late if it was a season where there was a big crowd and they had to be careful. But this last time when they’re going to Jerusalem, they’re going with pomp and circumstance. They’re going with a triumphal entry. They’re going with the great attention, and Jesus begins to tell his disciples what’s going to happen. Look at Matthew 16 and verse 21. «From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life». That’s a pretty plain message. It’s not ambiguous. There’s nothing about it that is confusing. He said, «I’m going to suffer many things when we get to Jerusalem at the hands of the religious authorities, and ultimately they’ll kill me and I’ll be raised to life again».
It’s a startling message. This is the first time he said it that directly in Matthew’s Gospel. And Peter when he hears it, he takes Jesus aside and he begins to rebuke him and he said, «Never, Lord. This should never happen to you». «And Jesus turned to Peter and said, 'Get behind me, Satan. You’re a stumbling block to me. You don’t have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.'» But, you know, Peter is an all-in disciple. He’s left his business. He’s reordered his life. He’s following Jesus, and Jesus looks at him three years into this. He’s not a beginner any longer. He’s walked on the water. And Jesus said to him, «You don’t have in mind the things of God».
You know, it’s possible for you and me to be way engaged in church life and religious life and still not have the things of God in our mind. But Jesus is trying to tell his best friends, his closest associates what’s coming. Matthew 17, the very next chapter, «When they came together in Galilee, he said to them, 'The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised to life.' And the disciples were filled with grief». They heard him because they had an emotional response. They heard his message and their response was one of grief. So it isn’t that it’s gone over their head. They’re responding to him not only intellectually, they’re responding to him emotionally. That’ll be more important in just a moment.
In Matthew 20, «Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. He took the twelve disciples aside and he said to them, 'We’re going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They’ll condemn him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he’ll be raised to life.'» This is the third time Jesus has told them the very same message. Is this a slow group? Well, I mean, if you read the whole Gospel, you might think so. But it’s an unsettling message. It’s really an unimaginable message. It’s repeated again in Matthew 26. They’re in Jerusalem now. It’s the evening of the Last Supper. «When evening came, Jesus was reclining at the table with the twelve. And while they were eating, he said, 'I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me.' And they were sad and they began to ask him, 'Surely not I.' And Jesus said, 'No, it’s the one who dips your bread into the bowl with me.'»
This is just Matthew’s Gospel. This isn’t an overview of the four Gospels, so there’s no conflicting reports. It’s not multiple reports of the same scenario. In this single Gospel, multiple times Jesus has most plainly told his disciples what awaited them on this last visit to Jerusalem. His closest friends were clearly told, prepared, warned in Matthew’s Gospel alone at least four times, and I assure you there were multiple times beyond that. As Matthew was recording the Gospel, I believe he repeats that message because it left such an impact upon them that Jesus told them repeatedly over and over and over again of his passion that awaited them when they arrived in Jerusalem. The startling part is the disciples don’t seem to be able to hold the idea.
If you allow me to give a bit of a diagnostic opinion from a couple thousand years removed, it seems to me that they are spiritually hearing impaired. They hear the words, they can process the information, they even have emotional responses, but they’re very limited in their ability to hear and to understand, and these are the best of the best. This is Peter and James and John. He’s going to entrust John with the book of Revelation. He’s going to entrust Peter with the leadership in the church in Jerusalem in those early months and years after his ascension back to heaven. They’re his hand-chosen, selected recruits. These aren’t some disinterested… This isn’t the angry mob or the belligerent religious leaders. These are his best friends, and they’re having a great deal of trouble processing what he’s saying to them.
So I have a question for you. Do you think there’s any possibility that you and I might have trouble processing the plain presentation of Scripture? It seems to me there’s a high degree of probability that if Peter, James, and John, in person with Jesus, had trouble processing what he was saying to them about what was ahead, that you and I should be careful because it’ll be easy to discount what we’re told in Scripture. I didn’t put it in your notes, but I pulled together a very quick summary of some things that we’ve been told about this season, information that’s given to us. Jesus said very clearly he would return to the earth as a conquering King and a judge of all. He’s coming back, folks. He is coming back. Just as certainly as he was born in a stable in Bethlehem, Jesus of Nazareth is returning to planet Earth. In fact, he said he’s coming back in the same way he left. He left from the Mount of Olives just beside the city of Jerusalem. He’ll return there. He’s coming back with a different assignment.
He came the first time to seek and to save those which were lost as the the Lamb of God in the most innocent of packages, born as a baby in a stable in Bethlehem, overlooked by the powerful, ignored by the religious leaders. The only people really that attended were the shepherds, the lowest social rung on the social spectrum. But when he comes back the second time, it says the whole world will know, that every eye will behold him, that he’s coming with the glory of heaven and his powerful angels. He’s coming as a conquering King. He will rule and reign on planet Earth. That’s the plain counsel of Scripture. The second thing we’re told is there’s a reward for those who will serve him. I’m not too clever, but if the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords says he’ll reward you if you sign up, I’m in. Sometimes we get these, you know, mis, «Well, do I have to»? No, you don’t have to. It’s a choice. You’ve got a free will, but you can. You’ve been foretold. You’ve been told of the opportunity, that it will be rewarded and that nothing could diminish the reward.
I would submit to you that’s a worthwhile investment. Another thing Jesus told us is that before he returns, that the earth will be very similar to the days of Noah and of Lot. Now, they lived in very different time periods separated by hundreds of years. We meet Noah in the early chapters of Genesis. Darkness, evil had proliferated in the earth to the point that God said he had to bring judgment, but he prepared Noah and his family, and they built an ark. I know you know the story. You can be marginally acquainted with the Bible and know the story of Noah. And he says just as it was in the days of Noah and Lot, and then Jesus lists a half a dozen activities that were prevalent. He said people were marrying and giving in marriage, buying and selling, planting and reaping.
What’s most noticeable is those aren’t wicked things. He didn’t point out the wickedness of Noah’s generation or of Lot’s generation. He pointed out very routine human behaviors. But the similarity between Noah and Lot is that both of those groups of people were totally unaware of the impending intervention of God, completely unprepared. Noah built a boat in the middle of a field, not floating on a local lake. He’s a preacher of righteousness and nobody wanted to hear his sermons. Lot was totally unprepared for the angels that arrived to lead him out of the city, and one of the overriding characteristics in the earth before the second coming of the Lord will be the majority of the people will be unaware. Don’t be in that group. Don’t be in that group.
You see, the invitation to be a Christ follower is an invitation to a minority position, to a bit of a different value orientation of your life, a different way to spend your time and your energy and your effort and your resources. It’s not about just going along with the crowd. This Easter is the 45th anniversary for this congregation. Easter 1980 was our first worship service as a community of faith. There were 29 people there, and I promise you not one of those 29 imagined you. And God is moving in the earth in the most remarkable ways these days, but the invitation to yield your life to the authority of Jesus of Nazareth will put you in a minority position. It’s worth the… Jesus told us some things about that. He said there’s a broad path and a wide gate that leads to destruction and it’ll be heavily traveled, but he said there’s a narrow path and a narrow gate and it will not be heavily traveled and that leads to life.
He told us very directly, very plainly not simply to follow conventional wisdom. Don’t fully engage in groupthink. Be willing to allow Almighty God to direct your life on a path that will bring some uniqueness to you. We’re going to talk more about it. There’s another thing he told us. He said we would be hated and persecuted because of our affiliation with Jesus. Well, you know, I don’t like that. If I could choose, I’d rather have applause than rotten tomatoes. When people say, you know, «I don’t care what people think,» oh, stop it. We would all rather be accepted than rejected. But Jesus said that if we identify with him, if we’re willing to take his name and begin to walk in obedience to him, that there will be resistance and there’ll even be hatred and it will be frequent and widespread. That is the pattern of Scripture. I’m telling you up front, being a Christ follower is not easy. It’s not simple. I’m not talking about sitting in church on the weekend.
Folks, you can sit in church every week and have very little to do with Jesus of Nazareth. I got a membership at a gym. That doesn’t make me a world-class athlete. Like, I can tell you how many hundred feet past the gym the donut shop is. There’ll be persecution, Jesus said. And then he told us very clearly that the best possible position you could be in when he returns to the earth is that you would be doing his Word. Be obedient to the truth that you know. You don’t have to be a Hebrew scholar or a Greek scholar or have read the original whatevers. You have to be obedient to the truth that you know. We’ve had too much sloppy Christianity for too long. We’ve imagined that we can reinvent God in our own image and we could look at the boundaries that God gives us in the Ten Commandments and it’s like a smorgasbord. We could pick one, three, and seven. We don’t get to design our faith. We submit ourselves to the authority of God.
Not Allen’s opinion, folks. I’m not the judge, and there should be some great relief in that. That we’ve been asked to submit ourselves to the authority of Jesus, and when he returns, we want to be busy about his business. Now, I want to look at Jesus’s friends when they finally got to that period in Jerusalem when Jesus is arrested and betrayed and crucified. He’s told them plainly. We’ve read it together. He couldn’t have been more clear. I don’t believe they heard him because they’ve responded with some significant emotion. John chapter 20 records for us Resurrection Day. Jesus has been arrested. He’s been beaten. He’s been tortured completely to death, so disfigured he’s barely recognizable, and now on Resurrection Day.
It says, «Early on the first day of the week,» it’s John 20 and verse 1, «while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciples, the one Jesus loved, and she said, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him.' So Peter and the other disciples started for the tomb. They were both running». John outran Peter and reached the tomb first, and he bent over and went in and looked. Did you hear it? Mary went to the tomb early on Resurrection Day and she said, «Somebody has taken the body. Where’s he at»? Well, if you’re reading the Gospels for the first time and you can read at a 3rd grade level, you’re reading along going, «He’s alive».
But Mary can’t process it, and she goes back and tells the rest of the disciples and Peter and John don’t believe her. It doesn’t spark a memory in them. It doesn’t trigger something, and they go running to the tomb for their own inspection. And they bend over and they go inside and Jesus isn’t there, and there’s this question that’s percolating through the text. It’s recorded in all the Gospels. «What have they done with him? Where have they hidden him? Tell us where you’ve put him». And, again, if you’re reading this with just marginal comprehension, you’re going, «Weren’t you listening»? Same chapter, it’s John 20, «The disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. And as she wept, she bent over to look in the tomb and she saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’s body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. And they asked her, 'Woman, why are you crying? ' 'They’ve taken my Lord away, ' she said, 'and I don’t know where they’ve put him.'»
Maybe Jesus recruited from the slow group. I don’t know. «And at this, she turned around and she saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t realize that it was Jesus. 'Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for? '» She thought he was the gardener. «'Sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put him, and I will get him.' And Jesus said to her, 'Mary…'» Something’s happening here. The disciples aren’t stupid. They’re not marginally interested in Jesus. They’ve reoriented their lives completely to follow him, and he’s told them in the plainest of terms precisely what they have been witnesses to, and yet in the midst of all of that, they are unable to process what they’re experiencing. His words of preparation have been lost in the emotions and the challenges of the moment. The activity is so unsettling, it’s addled them to the point that they can’t process the facts. They can’t bring alignment to what Jesus, their best friend, has told them and the experiences that they’re walking through in real time.
If I can borrow a contemporary phrase, I think it’s the spiritual equivalent of shock and awe. It’s left Jesus’s friends bewildered and inactive. I’m going to give you some action points in a moment, but I think the parallel has some very real parallels for us. We’re living in a season when the church is struggling. Church with a capital C, not a single congregation. There’s amazing churches and remarkable churches, I did an interview recently with one of the leading statisticians on evangelicalism in North America, and the statistics are very, very unsettling: the diminishment of biblical worldview, the engagement in formal gatherings like this. I mean, the church is struggling. We’re a bit addled. It feels pretty biblical to me. I think current events have left us in stunned silence. The things that are being said in public, the things that we are watching, they’re hard to process.
And we step into our churches and we read our passages from the Scriptures and we look through the windows of our churches and what’s happening out there is so dramatically different than what we’re reading and what we’ve imagined, it’s hard to assimilate it. I could pick almost any aspect of our culture and we could talk about it. We’re being overwhelmed currently with illegal activity and we’ve been a nation founded upon the rule of law. I mean, from our inception until today, the laws haven’t always been godly. There have been some seasons that were very ungodly, but those principles have bound us together, and in recent years… and I don’t mean the last 2 or 3 or 4, but in a broader period, they’ve been put in a shredder, things that were foundational to our well-being, simple things like the boundaries of a nation.
I’ve had the privilege of traveling a good bit. I’ve got a little blue passport. It’s necessary for me to enter other countries, and it’s necessary for me to re-enter this country. I’ve been in times and places with people who lost their passports. It’s a problem. I’ve had to go stand in line at consulates to help people get papers to come into the country. I’ve had to find alternative forms. It’s not a simple thing. And in recent years, and it’s more than a single administration whichever side of the political you, spectrum you stand on, just take a deep breath for a moment. This isn’t politics, this is the reality of the world we live in. We took our borders down. We will lose our freedoms and liberties without that.
That’s not an expression of hatred any more than locking the doors on your home or not leaving the keys in your car is an expression of hatred, and most unsettling, it was facilitated by the people with authority over us, and they were telling us it was our imagination. We’re a nation of immigrants. We’ve been built upon policies of immigration from the nations of the world. And it will inform and define our future, but we can do it in an orderly process and a legal process. Counseling millions of people to do something illegally as a means of joining us is a very bad precedent to establish. Another thing that’s not normal that we’ve been watching for some years now is this censorship, the diminishment of free speech. You’ll be deplatformed. You’ll be shut down. If somebody disagrees with you, they can say, «Well, what you said was hateful and you don’t have a right to say that».
That is not what has brought strength to us as a people. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. Recently, they’ve been uncovering hundreds of billions of dollars, our tax dollars that have been stolen, fraudulently directed, wasted while those in authority have been demanding more. That’s unsettling. You think, «Oh, that can’t be true». They wouldn’t be paying Social Security benefits to hundreds of people that are more than 120 years old. They wouldn’t be paying unemployment benefits to people not born yet. Nobody would do that. It’s disorienting. You think, «Well, somebody’s making that up». And then there’s data. Then we get mad at the messenger. «Why would you tell us that? It’s uncomfortable».
Our justice system has been weaponized. We’ve had bad seasons of justice in this nation when it was perverted. We’ve worked very diligently to overcome that. We’ve watched something happening in recent years that’s very uncomfortable. It’s not left to those arena. Our churches, our denominations, our Christian schools and universities have stepped away from biblical authority. They are boldly, brazenly, frequently, determinedly advocating for false gospels inserting things like DEI and CRT. It’s disorienting. You think, «Well, they’ve being… that’s the tradition I grew up in. I’ve got a heritage there». Just about any arena we pick up.
You know, I really dislike the idea of a religious lecture. I believe the point of ministry or opening the Word of God is to be transformed by it. So before we go, I want to give you two invitations. One’s a prayer I’m going to pray with you, but the other is our offer this month. The book is «The Lord is my Shepherd» by my friend Rob Morgan. It’s an important word in this season to understand God’s direction, his abiding presence, his protection. We all need that. It’ll be a blessing in your life. It’s something I think you’ll want to share with some friends. But I want to pray with you before we go, that we’ll know we’re not alone:
Heavenly Father, I thank you for the resources you give us, for the voices that you provide in our lives, that in a world of turmoil and confusion and, honestly, great fear, that your calm, assuring voice guides us, and I thank you for it today. Thank you for your faithfulness. In Jesus’s name, amen.