Allen Jackson - God's Plan, God's Promises and God's People - Part 1
We had, as far as I’m concerned, a God event this week. The context is important, so before you respond, let’s process the context. But there was a ruling from the IRS this week that said churches could endorse political candidates without punishment. Not really anxious to get into that business, but the heart of that is they’re restoring a component of free speech which had been taken away from people of faith. And not all people of faith, but there had been a segment of the Christian church that had been muzzled. But it really goes back to the 1960s, which for some of you is ancient history.
But Lyndon Johnson was president, the Vietnam War was at its peak and there was a tremendous national divide, perhaps greater than the one we have today, over that war. And Johnson slipped into some legislation making its way through Congress a provision that would revoke churches exempt status if they commented on a political candidate, so it became known as the Johnson Amendment. He didn’t want churches criticizing Vietnam. And so for 60 plus years, the churches have lived with it. It’s become a part of the culture. And it is, to a great extent, because of the churches, not the politicians, folks. We serve a King.
But it’s resulted in churches being inept and inert, inactive. Because in our current environment, if we say, «Well, biblically, marriage is between a man and a woman,» somebody starts shouting at us, «You’re being political». No, I’m being biblical. Or if we talk about sexual morality and immorality from a biblical perspective, and what’s appropriate and inappropriate, somebody’s offended and they say, «Well, you’re being political», no, we’re being biblical. Or if we say that the nuclear family, a mother and a father and their biological children was God’s best intent.
Now, we live in a broken world, we don’t get that, but that’s God’s intent. Not the multiple, those are not political issues, those are biblical issues. But because our churches are so divided and our faith is so inconsistent, it’s been far more convenient just to not talk about those things, so we talk about the culture of the 1st century and the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection and the Sadducees did not. That’s why they’re sad, you see. I’ve been to those Bible studies too. And we hide completely from the issues that are shaping our lives, our families, our children, our schools. DEI is evil. Judging people by their appearance is evil. But the church has been confused, so it was a tremendous breakthrough this week when the IRS said churches, that they’ve taken down some of the prohibition against free speech.
So we’re allowed, it’s not that we’re anxious, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not that we’re anxious to jump into the political arena and start selecting candidates, but it does give us the freedom to talk about culture and current events without that persistent threat. And the skeptics, and I assure you in the weeks and the months to come, you’re gonna hear a lot of arguments around this whole spectrum on this, and many of them will be from church leaders, saying, «Well, churches shouldn’t be doing that». So I think there’s a couple of things we should understand. You know, they’ll say, «Well, if you’re gonna do that, your tax status».
Folks, schools and universities have significant tax protections, and I assure you they are very ideological in what they teach. They have a worldview that they advocate for very blatantly, very boldly, very persistently, and no one says that they shouldn’t do that. In fact, the only thing they say they shouldn’t do is if they’re boldly and blatantly Christian. And it’s been the silence of the church on this issue that has enabled all this to happen. Once again, God is intervening. You know, it took a president who many people think wasn’t morally qualified, I don’t necessarily agree, but who said marriage is between a man and a woman because the pastors didn’t have the courage to say it from the pulpits.
And now the IRS, that’s been the bully of the church for my adult life, rules that we can talk about what’s happening in the public square again. God is moving, I promise you. One of the things that’s been revealed this year is there have been hundreds of billions of dollars, tax dollars, tax dollars, going to NGOs, many of whom were tax exempt, to do the bidding of people with very significant political agendas. So God is moving in the earth, and the IRS ruling this week was a tremendous victory for freedom of speech for all of us. What that will look like and how that gets lived out will be a thing of much debate.
I can tell you that Representative Mark Harris of North Carolina and Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma have introduced a bill into Congress that would make that IRS ruling, it’s called the Free Speech Fairness Act, a part of our law, and completely reverse the Johnson Amendment. That would be a victory and it’s worth praying for. Tell you, God’s moving so fast, we don’t have time to keep up with it all. Supreme Court, the IRS…who thought God would use politicians, the Supreme Court, and the IRS to bring freedom to the church? Not me. You know, and I mean, I’m thinking, well, if you were gonna do that like we’ve done it 60 years, and shut up, Allen. I’m clearly not in charge of the clock, but the Lord is moving.
All right, you should have an outline. I get to do the part I prepared for. I want to start, at least, a brief series under the theme of «God’s Plan». How many of you know God has a plan for your life? If you’re not living on purpose, you’re missing out. God has a plan for every life. He’s the author and the completer of your story. God has a promise that he’s made to you. In fact, he has a whole collection of promises that he’s made to you. Many of them, if not all of them, are conditional, and if you don’t meet the conditions, you won’t be able to enjoy the promise. And then we have all this false garbage in the church, «Well, Pastor, you know, I don’t wanna be presumptuous, I just want to go to heaven».
Well, bless your heart. Let me make a suggestion. If God created you for a purpose and you don’t have the faith and the courage and the strength to appropriate his promises, I’m gonna submit to you you’ve got a little chance of fulfilling your purpose. So what in essence we’ve said to God is, «I don’t really care what you created me for, I wanna live life my way and then go to heaven when I’m done». That’s patently offensive. So we’re gonna look at God’s plan for our lives, God’s promises to us, and what it means to be God’s people. We’re not gonna do all of that in this session, but we’re gonna open the doorway. If you’re doing the Bible reading with us, and I pray that you are, if you’re not, join us, we’re reading a fun book right now. We started the book of Judges. I’m telling you, Judges, it’s like superheroes. They’re strong people and gifted people and crazy enemies. Judges is drama.
Leviticus is something else, but Judges has got some drama. But we just finished the book of Deuteronomy. If you haven’t joined us, come on, it’s a great time. Fifteen minutes a day or so, you can read through the Bible in a year, it’ll change your life. But at this point in the narrative, what we’re learning from our Bible reading is that God fulfills his promises to his people. And in the book of Judges, he’s fulfilling a promise he made in earlier generations. It wasn’t a promise he made originally to Joshua and Joshua’s contemporaries, it’s a promise that was made way back in the book of Genesis to Abraham, and then to Isaac, and then to Jacob. It was reiterated to Moses.
We’re just reading the fulfillment of that promise, God’s bringing them into a Promised Land. In fact, the Exodus generation, the people who saw the plagues on Egypt and walked through the Red Sea with the water walled up on either side, they didn’t make the cut, they didn’t make it into the Promised Land. It didn’t diminish God’s promise. Their lack of faithfulness, their unbelief, their stubbornness, and their rebellion, it didn’t diminish God’s commitment to his promise. Joshua led the next generation, they struggled with obedience over and over. We just finished the book of Joshua, Lord help them. The Judges followed. And what we’re gonna read in the book of Judges is that generation after generation fumbled the opportunity that God gave them.
I give you that kind of brief introduction because God is still fulfilling his promises to his people in the earth. But the lesson from the book of Judges is similar to the lesson in the book of Joshua, which is very similar to the book, the lessons in the book of Deuteronomy, is that every generation has to choose to follow the Lord. The fact that Abraham chose to leave his home and follow the Lord didn’t help Moses, Moses had to decide to respond at the burning bush. And Moses' obedience didn’t carry the day for Joshua, Joshua had to say he was willing to lead the people into the Promised Land. And Abraham and Moses and Joshua didn’t help Gideon a bit when the Midianites were raiding the country, other than to give him some points to plot a trajectory along.
Gideon has to decide to be faithful. Every generation has to choose the Lord. You and I stand up on the shoulders of those who preceded us, but we have to occupy our inheritance for ourselves. We do. A failure to seek the Lord and to fully serve the Lord will result in a forfeiture of his blessing. We have been taught a diminished gospel. There’s been a heavy emphasis on conversion and the new birth. And I believe in those things, but the purpose of those things is to give us access to the kingdom of God to fulfill our purpose with our journey through time. Which means that you and I have to decide that we will believe God for ourselves and our families for something more than just going to heaven when we die.
Does that feel like what you’re reading? Feels a lot like what’s in the pages of Joshua, and I’m certain it’s what’s in the pages of Judges. It’s in the pages of our New Testament as we’ll see in a few minutes. People following God’s plan, have you noticed that there’s persistent adversaries? Have you noticed that there’s obstructions, that there’s resistance? God says to Moses in a burning bush in Exodus 3, «I want you to go back to Egypt to get my people and lead them out».
Moses is a little reluctant, but he goes back. But there’s a problem, Pharaoh didn’t wanna let them go. Maybe Moses knew that, maybe it was intuitive, but if I’m taking the commission, it would have been better for me if God had said, «And Pharaoh is going to be really, really difficult to deal with». And then I would have really preferred that God said to me, «And those people that you’re gonna lead out, stiff-necked bunch. They’re gonna grumble and complain and mutter their way across the desert». And there’s similar challenges for Joshua. There’s similar challenges in the book of Judges. There’s similar challenges throughout the story of Scripture. Spoiler alert, news flash, breaking news, there is resistance to the purposes of God in the 21st century.
People following God’s plan. I wanna start in Deuteronomy 6. It’s a little longer than I would normally read. I just want to point you at the language, the language in this passage is very intense. And it’s Moses talking to the covenant people of God, describing for them a people who follow the Lord, okay?
Deuteronomy 6: «These are the commands, the decrees and the laws,» they’re not the suggestions, the hints, and the nudges, «the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land, you’re crossing the Jordan to possess it…be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you…Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength…Impress them on your children…be careful that you don’t forget the LORD…Fear the LORD your God, serve him only…Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; a jealous God and his anger will burn against you, and he will destroy you from the face of the land…Do what is right, do what is good in the LORD’S sight, you may go in and take over the good land that the LORD promised…thrusting out all of your enemies before you, as the LORD said…But he brought us out from here to bring us in and to give us the land that he promised…The LORD commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the LORD our God…And if we are careful to obey…»
Did you get the tone of the language? Did you hear the words? Commands, decrees, laws, possessed, be careful, with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, impress it upon your children. Be careful not to forget, fear the Lord, serve him only, don’t follow other gods. He’s a jealous God, he will destroy you. Do what is right and good, take over the good land, thrust out all of your enemies, wow! I thought we were supposed to assimilate. In the Old Testament, the covenant people of God were told that their inheritance was a Promised Land, a little strip of land at the very end of the Mediterranean that the world is still arguing about. And I assure you that in the halls of heaven, they could care less about the United Nations and the Security Council.
Doesn’t mean that the Jewish people are always right or everything that they do is right, but God promised to that group of people, that piece of land, that’s their inheritance. Your life will go better if you’ll make peace with that. The New Testament and the new covenant is a little different, we haven’t been promised a particular place on planet Earth. We don’t have a little strip of terra firma that’s ours. What we are promised under the new covenant is the kingdom, a different realm of authority that supersedes anything in this current world order.
Now, what we learn from Scripture is that both the Promised Land and our space in that kingdom have to be occupied. God said that land belonged to the Jewish people, to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And we’ve been reading through the book of Joshua the battles that took place, the warfare that took place, the conflict that took place, the weariness that came with that. That victory, it was only possible when they were living in obedience to God. Did you read all that stuff? I mean, the big picture portions of that, that’s what the story is about. And now in the book of Judges, you won’t stay in the land if you don’t decide to serve the Lord. The land has to be occupied.
Well, in the Old Testament, the Promised Land required conquest. It requires that today, the Jewish people will not survive in that land if they don’t give attention to it. In the New Testament, the new covenant, it also requires a conquest, not of physical territory but of spiritual. I can easily substantiate this for you in the Scripture, and we will, to an extent, but bear with me just a moment. Because we have lived with such stability, such prosperity and a culture with a biblical worldview that really hasn’t required us to rely upon God until there was some personal crisis, a family crisis, a health crisis, some natural disaster that would bring some unwanted thing to us, and then we would press in on the Lord a bit to cry out to him. Maybe he is a healer, maybe he is a deliverer, maybe he is a restorer, but we really haven’t had to live that way because we’ve had such abundance, so many freedoms, and so many liberties.
But I’m sure you’ve noticed our world is rapidly changing, and I believe we’re gonna have to grow up in our faith and our responses to God. But we shouldn’t act like this is something about just the end of the age, this isn’t about just a rapidly approaching Rapture. That may be, I’m not saying it isn’t, but that’s not exactly, I believe, the best way to understand. I would submit to you that what we’re experiencing is the challenge to the kingdom of God. I put a list of bullets in your note, I’m not gonna… notes, I’m not gonna take the time to read all the Scriptures. I think you’ll recognize the narrative.
You see, the New Testament narrative is about our King, remember his name? He’s Jesus, the one that came from Nazareth. There were many Jesus, this is the Nazareth one. Our King was falsely accused, he became the object of irrational hatred. I mean, he fed multitudes, he made wine out of water, he healed the sick, he raised the dead. You wouldn’t imagine that that would elicit great hatred and murderous rage, but it did. It was illogical and irrational and ultimately, he was tortured to death. And under the pressure of an angry mob and brutal Roman soldiers, his closest friends and followers abandoned him because they recognized the imminent personal threat.
«Too much pressure to be identified with Jesus, we’ll go hide». And then, in spite of Jesus telling them it would happen, much to the surprise of his closest friends and followers, God raised Jesus back to life. You may or may not have noticed that Jesus only appeared after the Resurrection to his followers. He only spent time with his friends, those who had believed in him prior to his Crucifixion. His enemies, they imagined they’d had a great victory. Oh, they celebrated.
The last image that’s presented to the non-believers is Jesus on the cross, naked, hungry, and thirsty, in want of all things, suffocating to death. And then we read that the Spirit of God is poured out upon Jesus’s friends and there’s some transformation that takes place. It’s difficult to explain. The ones who have been like «Keystone Cops» and Cowardly Lions and bumbling, they have a new purpose, a new authority, a new boldness, a new clarity, and they begin to tell their personal stories of knowing Jesus. And there are tremendous responses that begin to emerge, there are miracles, crowds of people gather. Growing pains, the systems for interacting with one another are stretched because of the new people coming, what used to be counted in handfuls are counted in thousands.
And there’s a very predictable response to that, the same people that hated Jesus now hate Jesus’s friends, they’re jealous of them. And the same hatred pointed at Jesus is pointed at them, they’re arrested, they’re threatened. Violence in Jerusalem begins again, murders of Jesus’s friends in Jerusalem again. The persecution intensifies to the point that Jesus’s friends are scattered, they can’t stay in a centralized place anymore to survive. I don’t like that. To be completely candid, that part of the narrative always makes me uncomfortable.
How about a line of angels around Jesus’s friend and the first person or the 'pirst ferson', whichever works, the first person to touch one of the angels just melts, next. But that’s not what God did. He sends angels to get Peter out of a prison. And he goes where there’s a group of people praying through the night, and he said, «I’m okay, but tell the brothers I’m leaving for a while,» ah!
It’s an amazing narrative, persecution results in dispersion. There are remarkable results. All over the Roman Empire, people are accepting the Jesus story. There’s miracles, extraordinary miracles, healings, deliverance. And everywhere the message goes, there’s hatred and accusations and arrest and violence and riots. From a prison cell in Rome, Paul writes letters to churches that he helped bring into existence, that he helped birth in Ephesus and Colossae. I gave you just a sampling of the tone of the New Testament.
Folks, we’ve missed this. Just listen to the tone, Romans 8:35: «Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword»? What’s being implied is that trouble and hardship and persecution and famine and nakedness for the sake of the gospel is a part of the package. And the answer in verse 37: «No, in all of these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us».
What does it mean to be more than a conqueror? That’s an interesting phrase to me. I mean, I’m pretty happy, you know, just being a conqueror is not bad. We came, we saw, we conquered. I’m all right with that little paradigm. What’s it mean to be more than a conqueror? Obviously there’s some opinion in this, but it seems to me that it means after you’ve conquered, then you plunder. And you’re not only victorious, you leave with all the spoils.