Allen Jackson - How to Flourish In the Midst of Confusion - Part 1

I think most of you know Kathy and I were supposed to be coming home from Israel along with a couple a hundred people on Friday. And when my schedule’s like that, I have to think about those sermons a little bit ahead of time, they’ll land the plane on Friday after 18 or 20 hours of travel and 12 to 11 or 12 days of touring with several busloads of people. It helps to have a little advanced preparation so I kind of worked on what I thought I wanted to do. And I was getting ready for that, then the Lord seemed to have a different idea.

So, whichever of you had seen the outline and didn’t like it, I forgive you. But the title for this session is, «How to Flourish». I really started with «How to Flourish» and I just, that was my intended conversation, but in all honesty, I think it’s about «How to Flourish in the Midst of a lot of Confusion». World seems a little confusing this day, this season. We had a remarkable week in so many ways. Peace in the Middle East, at least on a temporary basis, but thank God we don’t have additional troops headed there. Some at least temporary relief for Israel from the threat from Iran. That is a gift from God. Our Supreme Court engaged in some remarkable ways with some rulings that I think will protect our children.

But you know, as I was reading through some of those rulings and trying to understand them a little better, on more than one occasion I thought, «Well, you know, the Supreme Court is ruling to protect what for a long time was considered common sense». But because of that, I thought that this whole notion of…how is it that common sense has become so uncommon? How is it that the theater of the absurd seems to occupy conventional wisdom and mainstream media and loud voices in Hollywood and too many pulpits? It’s not, I mean, truthfully I’ve been walking around going, «God, how could that be»? And I felt like I was given an answer and it’s very simple.

There’s nothing I don’t think in what I wanna share with you tonight that would be brand new to us. But I wanna start with this idea of there’s great significance of the fear of the Lord. And when I talk about the fear of God, I don’t mean that we cower in dread, like you hide behind the sofa. You know, I got two brothers and from time to time when we were young my parents would be off somewhere. And we finally begged them to quit getting babysitters. So, you leave three boys at home. And then one time I decided to see if I could scare my brothers and I remember they were in the house and I was outside. I was rattling the windows in the house, effectively enough that when I came in the house, they were behind the sofa.

Well, when I talk about the fear of the Lord, that’s not what I’m trying to suggest, is that you wanna live with an attitude of God, if you think he’s close, you’re gonna go get behind the sofa. Biblically, the fear of the Lord is about respect or reverence. My favorite imagination and there’s room for all of these in technical language, but it’s really in awe for God. That you recognize he’s not like us. It’s not like God’s a really smart version of us. It’s not like he just has better emotional control. He’s not like us. It’s okay, healthy babies make noise. God is different from us. And for all the ways we try to bring him down to make him accessible, and I don’t know that all that’s inappropriate, but sometimes I don’t think it’s overly helpful. He created the Earth and everything that’s in it. He knows us while we’re still being knit together in our mother’s wombs. He’s the author and the completer of our stories.

So, we talk about a fear of God, a respect for God, a reverence of God, an awe for God. It carries with it the idea that we would yield to him, we would submit to him. We would give him a priority. Now, we’re a race of rebels and so that’s a fundamental problem because we don’t wanna submit to anyone or anything. We’re all hardwired with me do it. And we carry that with us through adulthood and we find all sorts of reasons. And now we have all sorts of cultural voices telling us why we’re victims. All of us based on our biological sex, or our age, or our height, or our hair color, or our skin color, or our IQ, or where we were born, or where we went to school, or we didn’t go to school, there’s an innumerable number of voices to tell us that we’re victims and therefore we should never yield. We’re entitled.

The Bible gives us a little different perspective. And I wanna invite you to that with me for a minute. We’re gonna, there’s a lot of scriptures on your sheets. You probably looked ahead and thought, «He’ll never finish». We’re gonna cover some of these pretty quickly. I have hopes of finishing. But I always have hopes of finishing, so. But in Job 28:28, Job is typically imagined by scholars to be the oldest book of the Bible. And then in Job it says that, «God said to man, 'The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.'» It’s a theme throughout Psalms. I brought you a sample, Psalm 11, verse 10 says, «The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise».

Proverbs 1, «The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline». Ecclesiastes, a book written from the perspective of King Solomon. This is the conclusion of the book of Solomon and his wisdom. It’s his review of his life. He’s nearing the end of his life and he’s filled with a great deal of despair. And this is his summation. «All has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it’s good or evil».

And we can pause there for a moment. There’s a theme through all of those. Certainly it’s the fear of the Lord. But it’s more than that, they’re all suggesting something similar. Slightly different perspectives, but very similar. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. To fear God and keep his commandments, that’s the assignment. So, what we’re being told is foundational to our lives is this fear or respect or reverence or awe for God. And that absent the fear of God, if there is no fear of God, if there is no respect for God, if there is no respect for his commandments, if there is no reverence for him, if there’s no sense of awe in God, there is no wisdom, none.

Now, that’s gonna require some recalibration. Because we attribute wisdom to other things: degrees earned, the status of the universities or the schools where you study to earn your degrees. Success in the marketplace, your ability to rise through an org chart. Your ability to commandeer either power or resources or great physical abilities that give you a platform or a stage or an audience that you’re highly compensated for. And in the current trend that’s very quickly coming down to elementary students. That was a snarky remark, but it’s okay. And none of those things require the fear of the Lord.

So, culturally, professionally, academically, you can be celebrated, lauded, can be given positions of great authority, you can gain a position on the Supreme Court of the United States of America and be unwilling to give a definition of a woman. And there’s no need, the only reason that’s possible is there’s multiplied hundreds of thousands of people that think that’s most appropriate. So, we have disconnected a biblical perspective on wisdom from the world in which we live, and tragically that’s true in the church as well. Our churches by and large across the nation have tremendous amount of division.

There’s a great reluctance to talk about cultural issues because we understand the people who are gathering in our churches are not really united under this notion of a fear or respect or reverence or an awe of God. It’s not like we’ve rejected God completely, we just haven’t really given him first place. We don’t really fear God. I wanna go back to those verses again. I want you to listen for a moment. Job, «The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom». Psalm 1:11, «The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom». If you don’t fear God, you haven’t begun. I’ve had many, many, many conversations with highly educated people that some of you know. «Pastor, it’s very difficult for me with my academic training to accept the Word of God». Well, it’s a good day to begin.

The Bible begins with, «In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth». If you’ll accept that invitation, that propositional invitation at the beginning of the Bible, the rest of the book will open up to you. If you reject God as the creator of heaven and earth, the rest of the book is nonsense. If God doesn’t have the power to create heaven and earth, why would you trust him for eternity? If he does have the power to create heaven and earth, it might be in our best interest to cooperate with the rules and regulations that he gives us in the owner’s manual. We have lost or misplaced the fear of God.

We had a reminder a couple of weeks ago. Tim Barton was here reminding us a bit of the Christian heritage in our nation, never a uniquely Christian nation. There’ve always been a diversity of beliefs or people who didn’t believe. But the principles that formed us: our government, our academic institutions, our legal system, they were all founded upon the principles of the Word of God. And that wisdom in our nation has given us an opportunity not only to prosper and to survive but to continue to overcome the expressions of our carnal nature that let evil take root amongst us. And somewhere along the way we imagined that we no longer needed the biblical principles of wisdom and truth in order to overcome the baser parts of our personality, so we set God aside. We didn’t wanna pray in our schools.

We didn’t want the Ten Commandments posted in public places. I’m grateful that many of those laws are being examined and even pushed back. We have the courage, but now we’re being told, «Well, if you do those things, even though they’re legal, they’re gonna face legal challenges». Oh, so we should just go sit in the corner. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. How many of you are parents or grandparents, would like to see your children be considered wise or your grandchildren wise? The cornerstone of that is not the school they attend, public or private, Christian or pagan. It’s not how celebrated the university they’re given an opportunity to study at is. The cornerstone of that is their understanding of the reverence of God, a respect for God, and engagement with his Word. «So, you know, pastor, you get paid to tell us that». No, they couldn’t pay me enough to tell you something I didn’t believe.

See, we’ve wandered a long way away from this. We’ve had a faith that’s been centered around personal salvation. I believe in that, but our attitude has been, you know, really all you need to do is get saved. I mean, that’s really, we just do that. Then we can get on with stuff. We can get on with success, we can get on with prosperity, we can get on with achievement, we can get on with opportunity. We can get on with whatever it is your heart has been given to. See, we haven’t had enough respect for God, enough reverence for God, enough awe for God that we’d really give him our hearts. We need to change. We need a change in the midst of the people of God. The absence of a reverence for God has some very startling consequences.

In your notes, Psalm 36, and verse 1, it says, «An oracle is within my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before his eyes. For in his own eyes he flatters himself too much to detect or hate sin». So, there’s a message in my heart concerning the sinfulness of wickedness. And then he gives us a diagnosis. He said, «There’s no fear of God before their eyes. Because in their own eyes, they flatter themselves too much to detect or to hate sin». That’s a startling, it’s like the curtain has been pulled back on our heart condition. He said, «If there’s no fear of God before our eyes, if we’re not conscious of our reverence for God, our respect for God, our awe for God, then our self evaluation has no godly standards, we’ll measure ourselves by all sorts of other markers».

We can run fast or jump high or earn a lot or we have a great IQ and we can, we do really well in academia, or we’re good with our hands and we can produce things, we’ll evaluate ourselves by a whole host of other standards that have little to do with the God perspective. And we’ll have no awareness, no sensitivity to God’s imagination of what’s ungodly. And he said, «That leads us towards pride». He said, «We’ll be unable to identify sin or identify ungodliness. And because of that, we won’t reject it. We won’t reject ungodliness». Gee, that sounds a lot like the world we’re living in. We don’t reject sin, we don’t reject ungodliness, and if you dare to say that with your voice, you’re kind of judgy. «Well, who appointed you»?

Nobody appointed me. I’m simply telling you the designer said there are some things that are good for us and there are some things that aren’t good for us. And then it’s a struggle in my own heart and I suspect it may have been a struggle in yours, but the struggle’s worth it. We wanna overcome ungodliness. But if we set aside the respect for God… see, we’ve done this in the church. We don’t have to look outside the walls of the church, we’ll fight one another over a seat. We’ll get indignant if we can’t bring our pets to all the places we wanna bring them. We’re reading the books of Moses right now. Would you like to approach Moses and ask him if you could take in your pets to the tabernacle? Another day, another day.

Proverbs 26:12, «Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There’s more hope for a fool than him». This is an interesting categorization, to be wise in your own eyes. See, absent God’s perspective. «I don’t care what God thinks about me. I’m not interested in that. I don’t respect him enough to take his counsel. Well, I mean, I read my Bible, when I’m done reading it I’ll say, 'You know, I know what God says, but let me tell you what I think. Yeah, yeah, I know, I read it, but that’s in the Old Testament. Yeah, I mean, I know it’s in the Bible, but that’s the first century, and cultures are different, and they believed in spiritual things, and we don’t believe in spiritual things so much so let me tell you how I think the world works.'»

And maybe you don’t have enough confidence to do it in yourself, so you go borrow people that have platforms or celebrity or degrees or imagined to be wise, and we set aside the counsel of God. «Do you see a man wise in his own eyes»? I want you to see that next phrase. He said, «There’s more hope for a fool». If you’re wise in your own eyes, you’re worse than a fool. Now that’s sobering language. Proverbs 3:7 says, «Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil». Now this is not complicated, plain English. There’s no word studies that are gonna help us out of this. You know, there’s no Hebrew word that, you know, I could say, «Don’t be wise in your own eyes» means eat more chocolate 'cause I looked.

«Don’t be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil». What does it mean when the Bible says, «Do not»? Stop it! See, it wouldn’t say, «Do not do it,» if it weren’t a problem. It’s one of the principles I learned way back in the day in school. They said, «If there’s a prohibition against something in the Bible, it’s because it was a problem. If there’s a direction, what to do when your ox gores your neighbor, it’s because somebody’s ox kept goring the neighbor. And it made it into the book».

So, when the Bible says, «Do not be wise in your own eyes», what’s the challenge? We feel pretty good about our handle on life and how to do it. I know how to do it. And one of the awkward parts about reading your Bible, it’s not what you don’t understand, the words you can’t pronounce, the cities where you don’t know where they are. The really difficult part about reading your Bible is the part you do understand. You think, «Well, surely there’s some cultural something I’m missing 'cause that plain language is uncomfortable». «The wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God». «Well, I don’t know what that means, but it can’t mean that the wicked won’t inherit the kingdom of God». «Do not be wise in your own eyes».

Look at Proverbs 8:13, «To fear the Lord is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech». So, to fear the Lord is to hate evil. We’ve been coached for a long, long time now. Under the umbrella of Christianese and Christian language and Christian books we’re supposed to tolerate evil, accommodate evil, excuse evil, make friends with evil, build bridges to evil. But there’s no language issue here. «The fear of the Lord is to hate evil». See, to tolerate evil, accommodate evil, excuse evil is to reject the fear of the Lord. It’s to reject a reverence for God, it’s to reject a respect for God. «I don’t think God meant it. I don’t think he was being serious. I don’t think it’s that big a deal. There’s extenuating circumstances».

The Bible introduces to us some categories. They’re really simple. They’re all through the New Testament. I’ve been using some Old Testament verses, but we’re going to the New Testament. I don’t wanna leave anybody out. It introduces these ideas of being wise and being foolish. Which one do you think you’d rather be when you see the Lord? If he’s gonna give you a name tag and it’s not gonna have your name, it’s just gonna say, wise or foolish, which one do you want? Well, I’ll say, «Yeah, me too». It’ll have your name, but it’ll have how many hairs are in your head too. Matthew 7, verse 24, it’s a very familiar parable. I didn’t give you the whole thing, but you’ll recognize it. It’s the parable of two people building homes. Said, «Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock».

And then he describes the storm. And then verse 28, «Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is a foolish man who built his house on the sand». Again, this is Jesus’s words, very simple. Two options, there’s no third option. There’s no gray area. You’re either wise or foolish. You either hear the Word of God and put it into practice. And he says, «That’s wise, that’s a respect for God. That’s a reverence for God». Or you hear the Word of God and you don’t put it into practice.

This is not written for pagans. Jesus isn’t talking to the ungodly, the people without a covenant. If we put it in contemporary language, he’s talking to church people. He said, «The wise ones amongst you—when you hear the Word of God, will practice it. The foolish ones amongst you won’t». And he said, «Disaster is coming to the fools». That’s sobering language. How have we lost the fear of God to the point that perversion and ungodliness and what seems to be completely unhitched from sanity in any way is so often now the prevailing thought of the day?

Folks, don’t rage against the darkness, let’s turn up the light. Let’s decide to begin to reverence God and respect God in new ways. The good news in that is God will respond to his people. Look at Luke 12. This is Jesus again. He told them this parable and I’m sure it’s familiar to many of you. «The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I’ve got no place to store my crops.' And he said, 'This is what I’ll do, I’ll tear down my barns, I’ll build bigger ones. I’ll store my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, 'You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.' And God said to him, 'Will you manage my investments? '» No, God said, «You’re a fool! You’re a fool! Because tonight your life will be demanded of you. And who will get what you prepared? '»

And then verse 21 is the punch line. This is Jesus. «This is how it will be for anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich towards God». I don’t think it’s a prohibition or a warning against success. This is a very plain spoken story. This is a smart guy, he’s successful. And he’s not like a one-hit wonder, he can just time the market and get a window or he did really good, and was clever enough to capitalize on it, and then not do something foolish. He seemed to be able to adapt and change so that year after year, in spite of all the vagaries in an agricultural setting, he still managed to flourish when there was enough rain and when there wasn’t. And bumper crop, after bumper crop, after bumper crop. He’s the leading business person of the year more than one year. Until finally he said, «I got more than I could ever need. I’m tired of the rat race. I’ll just expand my potential to hold on to what I’ve got and I’m gonna eat, drink, and be merry».