Allen Jackson - Understanding and Revelations - Part 1
I wanna pick up a topic for, I don’t know, two or three sessions anyway. Title is the hardest part of this whole thing for me. But I called it «Ideas, Understanding, and Revelations». And I’ll tell you what it means to me is from time to time, and people that have worked with me and my poor wife, you know, I’ll say, «I have an idea,» and everybody cringes. Which, when I have an idea, it means it hadn’t been tested by experience, you know, I don’t have a lot of facts to back it up. I’ve just got a thought. And that’s not always a blessing. Understanding is something different. Understanding are those ideas that have been backed up by experience. Where you’ve had an idea and you implemented enough that there’s actually some life experience to go with it and from that you gain some understanding. Sometimes good and sometimes bad.
You know, one of the things I think that comes with the internet and social media and all those things is we all have a lot of opinions about things we don’t have a lot of experience with. You know, we’re all bold typing on a keyboard in the dark. But, you know, I always, for me, the difference is people say they love horses, and I say, «oh, really? Have you ever been locked in a 10 by 10 stall with a 1000 pound animal that’s mad»? Until you’ve had that experience, don’t tell me how sweet they are. And I like horses, but they’re intimidating. And then revelations. Those are those places where God provides an awareness. It’s not the result of a study. It’s not something that you worked out through diligence and hard work and commitment. God simply brings an awareness to you.
What I have come to realize, at least in my life and with the people that I’ve made the journey with so far, I think my comment on those revelations is that when they’re given or provided that they’re directed towards an assignment. It’s not some theoretical insight so you can boast about what you know. When God gives you understanding or insight, sometimes you read a passage of Scripture that you’ve read 1000 times and all of a sudden it’s like, oh. Well, when the insight comes, when that revelation comes, it’s because there’s an assignment that goes with it. You know, Paul had a revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus and it changed the entire direction of his life.
When Jesus walked along the shores of Galilee and said to select few, «Follow me, I’ll make you fishers of men,» their lives were stretched in a way and they never returned to their former shape. Jesus is still doing that. He’s still doing that. So what I wanna do is just walk through a handful of things that in our journey together, I would put in that kind of made this progression from ideas to understanding. Sometimes they’re revelations, not always and see if we can kind of build a foundation of things that could become a part of our own spiritual portfolios. And some of them will seem very simple and very familiar and some perhaps less so, some more engaged in the culture.
There’s this spiritual battle taking place and a big portion of that if it’s confusing to you, if you take a step back, oftentimes you can understand that there’s an attempts to displace the fundamental principles of Scripture and the ideas that are introduced to us there. And there’s tremendous cultural pressure to support that. And we have to be familiar enough with what God is doing to understand what we can hold and what we can negotiate. So I wanna start with the first one, with the inexhaustible resource that God has made available to us. Fancy word, but the reality of it it’s the Scripture. You know, one of the big surprises of my life is the transformation that comes when we read our Bible.
I grew up for the most part in a Christian home. I’ve been a Christ follower in my adult life. I have read my Bible consistently for more than a bit. And I am still amazed at the transformation that comes when a person will take time on a regular basis to engage with the Word of God. You know, I’ve read the statistics and there’s measurable outcomes that are associated with that. I’m not gonna quote you a lot of statistics. What I would like to do is just kind of walk, I think just the awareness. And I’ll tell you where I started with this is imagine how different our lives would be if we didn’t have a Bible. Imagine the deficit that that would present in our lives. The Word of God changes everything.
You know, it’s through the Scripture that we learned that God created the heavens and the earth. It’s an introduction to our Creator. If we didn’t have the Bible, we’d just be left for everybody had an opinion. To know that there’s a creator and that he values humanity, that he established us as the authority over all of creation, that we’re the image bearers of Almighty God, we could not know that apart from Scripture. I mean, God can be revealed in his creation, you can understand there’s a creator, but there’s something that comes with that. We learned that humanity holds a unique place in God’s economy. That we’re his image bearers. It’s from Scripture we learn that God heals.
You know, we take this stuff, you know, we have debates and seminars and, you know, whether God healed or he still heals, but if we didn’t have the Word of God, we’d be just left without any perspective. It’s frightening to me. It’s through Scripture that we learn about angels and demons. We wouldn’t have a way with the understanding and insight we have about the spiritual forces that both assist us and resist us comes to us from Scripture. Think how different like your life would be if you didn’t have any of that information. You know, we’re told to follow the science and I’m very happy to do that. I have no problem with the science. Science is really a method, it’s not a thing, it’s not a conclusion. But imagine if we didn’t have any spiritual guidance. It would be a devastating, we would be so much, it would be a tremendous deficit.
It’s about in Scripture that we learn about seed time and harvest. Those are spiritual principles that are manifest in our physical world. Certainly as we know that with the springtime and the longer days and the sunshine that life is going to return and growth is coming back. Those principles of spiritual growth, of seed time and harvest, our spiritual lives aren’t on a single continuum. There’s an ebb and a flow, there’s a time for growth and a time for pruning. There’s a time of dormancy. Doesn’t mean you backslide or you retreat. We learn those things from Scripture. We learn how to have a relationship with Almighty God. If we’re interested in that, the Scripture shows us how we might do that. We learn the value of work in Scripture.
Apart from Scripture, we wouldn’t understand it. We learn about God’s provision for our lives. We learn about how to flourish in our journey through time. Simple stuff. Imagine if you didn’t have the coaching of Scripture. Says, «For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother». It’s a biblical idea. Think of the deficit in your life. If you had no knowledge of Scripture, no access to it, I remember a woman my parents helped years ago. Our whole family got involved, but my parents initiated it. She was Vietnamese and she’d come to this nation. She’d married an American military officer and when they got back to the states, the whole family rejected her and she was left alone.
So she didn’t have a Christian background. She didn’t have a Christian heritage, she hadn’t gone to church, she never read a Bible. And our family got a bit involved with her. But I remember she had all kinds of questions, you know, why does Jesus say adultery is wrong? It’s like a new idea to her. 'Cause in Vietnam with the American military there, there was a set of opportunities that came with that. And I think our lives are so different because we’ve had access to the Word of God, the privilege of reading it. We learn about boundaries to protect us from evil and self-destructive behaviors from Scripture.
Look at Hebrews 4: «The Word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart». It’s hard to know your heart. We’re selfish. A lot of factors filter into that and the Word of God while you read it, it reads you. What a gift. What an amazing, amazing gift. In Luke 16, Jesus said, «It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law». You know, we get so heated up, «God, I don’t wanna read the Old Testament. I like the New Testament. God’s so chill in the New Testament». Oh really? He said none of it’s going away. He’s gonna fulfill it all.
1 Peter 1, I enjoy, I like the epistles, 1 and 2 Peter, the fisherman that you meet in the gospels that’s brash and kind of uncurried and his mouth always seems to engage a few seconds before his brain. I mean, when you get to 1 and 2 Peter, he’s tempered by years of experience and he’s led through the church and led through the oppression. He’s been arrested and he’s, I mean, he bears the physical scars of his faith. And his counsel is so prudent, he said, «You’ve been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable». He said there’s something in you that’s alive that isn’t subject to time. «Through the living and enduring word of God». He said, «All men are like grass».
There’s a sharp distinction there between the enduring eternal Word of God and our lives that are like the grass. You know, if it’s raining and the sun’s out, we flourish. If the temperature’s too cold or there’s not enough precipitation, we don’t do well. But the Word of God in us. I don’t know what your relationship is with the Scripture. I don’t know the time you make for that. I know it’s different. Some of us like to read. Some of us don’t like to read. A lot of different factors, but I wanna encourage you to on a regular systematic basis to spend time reading your Bible. You can listen to it. The apps will read it to you if you’re following our Bible reading plan. You know, I understand that when I tell you for ten minutes a day, you can read through your Bible in a year.
For most of us apparently it takes more than ten minutes. I repent. But a twenty-minute investment in your Bible a day is not an inordinate amount of time. It’s transformational. You’ll come to understand the character of God, the purposes of God. You’ll begin to imagine possibilities of God in your life. You see, we’ve done something that’s tragic. I don’t think it’s helpful at all. As much as I value church and community and life and learning together and all of those things, there’s something that’s crept into American Christendom and it’s that we imagine God, we equate God to our worships or what we believe comes from the group of people with whom we sit. That’s tragic.
What we know of God and what we believe about God should begin with his Word. And then it should be amplified and illustrated and highlighted by the Spirit of God within us and then we watch for it to be lived out in the community of people where we are. I talked to a man this morning. He’s from another city. So you don’t have to figure it out. I didn’t know him. He came up to me and we were talking a bit and he works for a pro-life organization, advocating on behalf of unborn children. And he said, «You know, I go to a church and they just won’t say anything about it». He said, «They won’t talk about it». And I said, «Leave». To which he responded, «Well, they do a lot of good things». I said, «They can’t do enough good things to compensate for the fact that they won’t stand up on behalf of the 3000 children that’ll be murdered today, leave». You see, we can fall into this mindset where, «Well, you know, that’s just how we believe. That’s the group I belong to. That’s us. You know, we don’t believe like that».
I’m okay. I understand that. You know, I get the notion of we like home cooking and we like routine and familiarity. That’s not evil, but you need the Word of God to set the boundaries for your life. To open your heart and your mind, it will change everything. The people of God in the earth are intended to be different, to have a perspective and a set of values and a set of hopes and a set of passions and a set of dreams. To give expression to a power and authority that’s not available to people who are not included in the kingdom of God. But you won’t know those things if you’ve never read your Bible, if you just think you’re churched, or you’re kind, or you’re good, or you’re moral, or you’re generous, there will be kind, good moral, generous people, not in the kingdom of God. And I’m grateful for all of those attributes. They’re noteworthy, but we want to understand the nature of God and that begins with his Word. It’s such a gift.
Whatever challenge you have in your life, whatever deficits you recognize today, it can be a family systemist you, it can be an issue of evil that’s touched you, it can be a physical deficit. It can be an emotional scar, it could be a financial need. There is a provision for it in the Word of God. You say, «Well, show it to me». That’s not how it works. You have to care enough. You have to invest a bit. It’s like trying to hire somebody to exercise for you. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You know, I would love to lose about 10 pounds.
So I’m looking for somebody that will do cardio for me. And in fact, if you’ll do cardio for me, I’m looking for somebody else that would eat healthy on my behalf. Me, I like cake and ice cream, but if you’d be willing to eat broccoli and seeds for me. 'Cause the doctor told me I needed like to be a little healthier and so I’ve found somebody to do cardio for me and somebody to eat healthy for me. We laugh, we have a little bit of that attitude towards our faith. Well, I don’t read my Bible, that’s what you’re for. Well, I didn’t learn to pray. That’s why you’re here. And in reality, God has invited every one of us. Isn’t that amazing?
Now I wanna pick up another idea that if you’ll combine it with what the Scripture says can become understanding and it’s a part of the cultural battle that’s in play in our world. I wanna take the balance of our time and walk through the biblical perspective on this notion of men and husbands and fathers. And for the clarity’s sake this isn’t just for men. We’re in desperate need within the body of Christ for women to support biblical perspectives and to help cultivate them in our families. We have allowed a secular culture for far too long to speak into what a family should be and what our roles in families should be until we’ve arrived at a place that is so absurd. That it really is bizarre.
And we wonder how we’ve arrived here and my answer is really pretty simple and I don’t think it’s an oversimplification. I think it reflects a tremendous failure on the part of the people of God. How we arrived at a place where gender dysphoria is considered acceptable in the midst of our culture. A district judge not long ago ruled that the military has to accept people with gender dysphoria and provide transitionary care for them. And the logic behind that was they said, well, if you care for people in the military who have PTSD, I read a portion of the ruling. If you care for people in the military who have PTSD, you should care for people who have gender dysphoria. Well, you don’t come into the military with PTSD.
That’s an outcome of what you were exposed to so there’s some sense of responsibility that comes with that. Gender dysphoria is very different. We’ve arrived at a place in our culture we have people on our Supreme Court that are unwilling to define what a woman is. We have people who present themselves as intellectuals and they lead in some of our most celebrated academic institutions and powerful positions in the legal community and the medical community and they’ll say things foolishly like a man can nurse a child. How did we arrive at a place that’s just bizarre? Well, I think fundamentally it’s because the church has been unwilling and that we’ve avoided the discussions about gender and biology from Scripture.
And the way one of the tools that’s been used to push us in this direction has been a manipulation of language. You know, language is very, very important. I didn’t appreciate that. English was not my favorite subject in school. It just seemed like a necessary evil. In fact, I never really learned English until I had to learn another language. In order to learn another language, you need to know English and so I was really behind the curve. I didn’t know what a participle was, let alone they could dangle until I had to learn another language. But language is being manipulated these days. For instance, redefining marriage. We act as if that’s a thing. If you expand the definition or we change the definition of racism or, you know, definitions are being manipulated and if you’re not paying careful attention, it’s confusing it’s addling 'cause words it’s like, you know, they show you a picture of an elephant and they say it can fly and build a nest.
And you go, wow, I’ve never seen one of those big gray things do that except in «Dumbo». Well, technically, and I understand language has changed, but before this push of recent years, gender was a linguistic term. Gender referred in language to a nouns that were masculine or feminine or neuter. So when we talked about gender, we really were talking about a linguistic concept. Sex was about biology. And the reason that had to be muddied and definitions have had to be muddied and it’s had to be confused, is biology is really not confusing. It’s observable. That’s the nature of science. It’s observable, it can be repeated. And so to arrive at a place where we institutionalize this and we try to push it into a culture to the point that we want to teach our youngest children about it in public education. Language has been adjusted to fit our current social fashions and we need the grounding that comes from the Word of God.
So this notion of men, husbands, and fathers, I’m gonna tell you just are all expressions of your faith. As men, understanding how to be a godly man is a primary assignment of your life. From that comes the opportunity to be a godly husband and perhaps to be a godly father. But they’re three of the greatest opportunities presented to any man. That’s not said to the diminishment of women. Mother’s Day is coming, I promise we’ll walk through the whole thing. We’ve got this bizarre competition that’s been set up. So if something said that is encouraging or affirming or presents opportunities to men, there’s significant voices within the women’s community that says that’s wrong. We’ve got to stop. It’s not competitive. But men and moms, we have to understand the necessity of godly men, godly husbands, and godly fathers. Most if not all of you know my father was a veterinarian.
So my brothers and I grew up in that world. We all got to help in the practice. It was a small business, so we all, whether we wanted to or not, we were in. And I carry some memories from that. Some of them are good. One of the good ones is they used to have a little bulletin board by the door where clients came in and out of the office and there was a cartoon that lived on that bulletin board for years. It was a drawing of a car that was in the backseat of the car and the window was down and his head was out of the car and the owners were in the front apparently driving and there’s a car that wasn’t making the trip… there’s a dog wasn’t making the trip that was standing beside the car. And a little bubble below it the dog in the car is looking at his friend that’s not traveling and he’s kind of taunting him. He said, «Ha ha, I’m going to the vet to get tutored».
Well, having grown up in a veterinarian’s home, I can tell you that animals are neutered for two primary reasons. One, to try to stop reproduction. And secondly, to diminish their aggressiveness. And if you’ll allow me, if you ask me for a snapshot of the contemporary American church, it would seem we’ve been tutored. And that’s not just an opinion. If I looked at the spiritual condition of the church, I would have to say our ability to reproduce seems to have been dramatically impeded. We have the smallest participation numbers in history.
Our influence on our culture has diminished year over year throughout my lifetime. And I’ll put that right alongside. The other observation is that our aggressiveness, our assertiveness in the context of our faith by multiple measurable variables is tremendously diminished. They said, «Stop praying in schools» and we did. You understand we’ve said prayers in our schools from the beginning of our nation. You understand they used to use the Bible as a part of the curriculum, as a part of the books presented to children in public education. And now we hear that we go that’s reprehensible, the separation of church no, it hasn’t always been.
We lost our will to say, «That’s an important part of training of the children. They don’t have to be Christians, but they need to be exposed to the authority of Scripture and the principles of the Word of God». We lost our assertiveness. We’ve been tutored. They said, «Don’t bring your faith to work anymore. Don’t put a Christian symbol on your clothing. Don’t put a Bible on your desk». And we said, «Oh okay, well I wanna do that». And then they’ll pick up ungodly worldviews and push them right through corporate culture into the heart of America. And if you’d have the audacity to raise your hand and say, «I don’t agree,» you’d be shamed or castigated or terminated. What has happened to us church?