Allen Jackson - A God Designed Future - Part 1
You know, we get some goofy notions at church sometimes. I mean, I love God’s people, I really do. But you know, like, we imagine that the only prayer that matters is the prayer we pray at the end of the service. If you’ll help me, we’ll change that. You know, I believe God’s listening when you arrive on campus. I mean, spoiler alert, he’s listening if you’re at home. But he listens more closely to those of us on campus. But you know, let’s change our imagination. When you come into service and there’s somebody near you, introduce yourself, «Is there anything I can pray for you for today»? And don’t stand up and, you know, wind up and quote 11 Scriptures, just take one sentence and invite God into their life.
It’s one of the benefits in changing where you sit, right? I mean, I understand you have an angle that is holy. And from that angle, God ministers to you and from another angle, maybe the Holy Spirit won’t know you’re here and you won’t get credit because he won’t take attendance and, you know, we’re like junior high kids. They won’t come to camp unless we promise they can be in a group with their friends, come on. You know, we come to church, it’s the same church we were in last week and it’s the same church we’re coming back to next week, but if we can’t sit with our friends…
So here’s an idea, I’ll take all this off my preaching time, I promise. Don’t get anxious. But here’s an idea, when you come into service, come in with the intent of inviting God into your life, into the lives of the people around you. Don’t have to be weird about it. Say, «You know, I don’t like to meet people». I’m not asking you to exchange life stories. «Hey, my name’s Allen. I’m gonna say a little prayer for you. 'God, bless my new friend, amen.'» You can even say your name’s Allen if it makes it easier, I don’t care, okay? But I mean, what if we turned worship into an invitation from God into one another’s lives? You don’t have to touch them, I don’t want people I don’t know touching me.
Again, you know, it doesn’t make you spiritual, it just makes you weird. But let’s get, we gotta climb past the pretense, «Well, I’m here,» you know, «I got here. Are you happy now»? No, not really. We want to invite God into our midst. If there’s nothing to it, if there’s nothing substantive about it, if there’s no outcome connected to it, if it is false and it’s pretentious and it’s empty, let’s not do it. But if there is a living God, and he can be known, and he moves in the midst of his people and he does respond to our prayers, and he changes us from the inside out and can completely change our world and our life experience, then by all means, let’s be proactive in inviting him in, amen?
You know, God has been doing some remarkable, remarkable things in recent weeks, reversing laws that have restricted, I think, the purposes of God in many ways, but this week, there was another significant step forward, could have been missed if you don’t live in nonprofit world. But the IRS issued a ruling that churches would no longer be forbidden to talk about candidates. Well, I want to put it into context because I think it’s a far more significant ruling than talking about political candidates. I truly understand it to be, they’ve taken down one of the significant prohibitions against free speech. Because what we’ve recognized is that under that general notion of you can’t talk about candidates, there was a great deal of pressure to not talk about culture.
So that if we said marriage was between a man and a woman, there were people that were saying you’re being political. I wasn’t trying to be political at all, it’s a biblical value. When we talk about the sanctity of human life and why we’re pro-life, it’s not a political discussion, it’s a biblical discussion. We talk about moral and immoral, again, it’s not a political conversation, those are all biblical worldview conversations. But because of the threat and the bullying, quite honestly, of the IRS, it’s been in place for over 60 years, the churches have been deafening in their silence. And so now the legal prohibition from that has been removed, so the question will become more about our courage.
The reason we’ve been quiet is in the church, there’s been tremendous division, we haven’t really been biblically-oriented. And so there is an opportunity for this. It really goes back, that ruling has been in place, it’s called the Johnson Amendment, since the 1960s. Now, I’m much too young to remember the '60s, but I’m a student of history. In the '60s, when Lyndon Johnson was president, was really at the height of the Vietnam War and our nation was being torn apart, more divided than we are today, with a great deal of protest against the war in Vietnam. And Johnson didn’t want the churches to speak against the war because the church had a very significant influence in the culture at that point, and if you could control the messaging of the church, you could control the culture.
And so he managed to slip into a bill that was making its way through Congress, this amendment that kept churches from talking. They called it political speech, but it was really talking about current events. And so it’s been in place for those more than 60 years, and I believe the silence of the church, the deafening silence of the church, has resulted in a great deal of the immorality and the lawlessness and the things that we see as pervasive problems in our culture. So it’s a tremendously encouraging step that the IRS chose to clarify that ruling and to restore a bit of free speech to the church, amen.
We’re watching miracles of biblical proportion. I mean, we had the president of the United States not long ago say that marriage is between a man and a woman. We had the president of the United States say there’s only two biological sexes. And now we’ve had the IRS say the church should tell the truth. My preference would have been all those initiatives would have been led by the people of God. We’ve been a little ambivalent. It’s a nice word. But I’m grateful that God has raised up voices, unexpected voices, to stand up for the truth. It brings freedom to us, but especially gives an opportunity to our children and grandchildren. There is a bill that has been proposed in Congress, it’s sponsored by Representative Mark Harris of North Carolina and Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. It’s called the Free Speech Fairness Act, that would reverse the Johnson Amendment and make it a matter of formal law, not just opinion from the IRS.
So it’s worth praying that that bill be passed expeditiously. All right, I just don’t, you know, we come to church to talk about what God’s doing, and everything he’s doing isn’t inside our building, hallelujah. All right, you got an outline. You should have received one when you came in. If you didn’t, maybe your neighbor will share. If they won’t, stand up and point at them. You can download those same outlines if you’re joining us. We started a series that I wanna continue talking about, «God’s Plan, God’s Promises, God’s People».
In this session, we’re gonna talk specifically about «A God-Designed Future». I believe God has a future for your life and mine. I believe God has a plan for every person. He’s the author and the completer, we’re told, of our stories. He knows us when we’re being knit together in our mother’s womb. He’s known us from the foundation of the world. You’re not an accident. You’re not some cosmic hiccup. You’re not a random collision of cells. You’re the result of an intentional design just as certainly as our Earth is orbiting the sun. God has a plan for your life, and he’s made promises and made them known to us in his Word, that enable us to imagine that plan. But in order for those promises to define us, we have to be willing to be identified as God’s people. You can’t reject God and imagine you should get the benefit of his promises.
So we’re doing this series to try to understand a bit better God’s promises for our lives and in this session, as I said, there’s a God-designed future for you and for me. And I’m gonna, we’ve been reading through beginning with the Old Testament, we’ve finished the book of Joshua and we’re into Judges. Big picture, that’s the story of God’s people. He promised them a land that flowed with milk and honey. It goes all the way back to Genesis, promises that existed. Abraham didn’t understand that fully. He understood the promise, but he didn’t see it in the same way that Joshua did. Moses understood that promise was the reason they were being delivered from Egyptian slavery, but Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land.
In fact, that entire Exodus generation died in the wilderness. Not because God wasn’t willing, because they chose not to. So the issue isn’t entirely focused upon God’s promises, it has to do with our responses. And it should be noted that all along the narrative, from the book of Genesis to the book of Revelation, there is opposition to the purposes of God. I don’t like that. I think it would be better if you could plant a garden that didn’t have weeds.
I think it’d be better if you could plant tomato plants in Tennessee in the summertime and the bugs would not like them. I’d like to be able to go outside in Tennessee in the summertime, with all the heat and the humidity and the wonder that it brings, and have no mosquitoes and no flies. But that’s not the world I live in, so I hoe the weeds and I spray for the bugs, and I look forward to the cooler temperatures of the fall. And we live in a world where there is opposition to the purposes of God. Now having established that, let’s decide what to do about it.
The Bible is a book of promises. It is a book of promises. I brought you just a sample set in your notes. In John 16 and verse 7, Jesus is speaking. He said, «If I go,» he’s telling his best friends, «If I go,» if I leave you, «I will send the Holy Spirit to you». It’s a promise, promise made, a promise kept. John 7, Jesus again, «If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink». Matthew 6:14, Jesus again, «If you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you». That’s a big rock. You can be forgiven by the Creator of all things. John 14, «If I go and prepare a place for you, I’ll come back and take you to be with me».
If you believe that Jesus has been to the earth, the incarnate Son of God, then I would invite you to believe the promise that he’s coming back for his people. That really is a significant promise. He came the first time as a suffering servant, the Lamb of God, to take the sins of the world. He’s coming back the second time with a very different role, he’s coming back as a conquering King and the Judge of all the earth. You want to be prepared to meet the King. Every one of those promises begins with that annoying little preposition, if. They’re all conditional. If you’ll forgive men their sin, God said he’ll forgive you.
You can’t harbor unforgiveness and bitterness and resentment and hatred and imagine that God will forgive you. You’ll never make an argument so convincing to God that he’ll agree with you in your bitterness and your hatred, because he’s chosen to forgive us in all of our rebellion. God’s promises are invitations in our lives. I like to think of them as little micro grants of permission. When you find a promise of God, you realize you’ve been given permission to walk into a life experience.
See, we stand apart from our Bibles too often, I wanna invite you into the pages of the narrative. God’s promises enable us to live a God-designed life. Our lives, our lives are defined by promises made, promises believed, and promises kept. I assure you that is the truth. The quality of our lives, our level of contentment, our own self-worth is tied to our ability to maintain our promises. It’s true for parents, it’s true in marriages. It’s true in our government. It’s true in our friendships, it’s true with employers and employees. Our lives are defined by our ability to make and keep and honor and believe promises. We’re living in a great deal of crisis and turmoil because we’ve been forced to recognize that our government doesn’t keep its promises.
And that’s not about a political party, that’s about the system. Sadly, many churches have broken faith with the Scripture. But out of all the confusion and the chaos that is swirling, tremendous opportunities have emerged to share the truth because people are hungry for truth. And if you will give them truth, it is attractive to people, they respond to it. So the question on the table that I want to spend a bit of time with is how do we experience God’s promises? How do we make them a part of our journey? Is this reasonable? Or do we just have a message that says, «Well, there’s a way to avoid hell, but between here and the end of time, you’re on your own»? Because many in the Christian community think it’s presumptive to invite God into the day to day. That there’s an arrogance in it or a haughtiness in it or something that’s inappropriate, «I don’t wanna bother God».
Folks, God’s big enough. I don’t think my pleadings are so significant that they bother God. You know, we adopt some funny ideas. And I’m an advocate for order and all those things, but sometimes, you know, I’ll encourage us all to quietly thank the Lord together. And somebody will say to me, «You know, I just can’t do that, it’s so chaotic. God couldn’t even understand what we were saying».
And again, I do appreciate, I have a great deal of respect for order and discipline. But I promise you that there’s more people praying right now in the earth than all of us represented in this space, and the switchboard in heaven can handle the volume. You know, we’re used to finite structures, we can break the Internet. You know, we can overload traffic flow on a highway, we see that on a regular basis. But God’s not a part of our finite structures, he has capacities and abilities beyond anything that we know or understand. And his promises are just little doorways, they’re little windows into what he said, «You couldn’t imagine this, but I could do this with you. I can make this possible for you,» and then our willingness to believe that.
So experiencing the promises of God require us to have an awareness of the legal component involved and the experiential component. Knowing that something is a fact is not the same as having the experience. And the reality is we can have legal authority but not realize the benefit. Legal authority is about capacity, capability. Experience is about utilization. I think we all understand this. My computer, I’m quite certain, has many capabilities which I don’t utilize. For me, it’s pretty much a fancy typewriter, right? I mean, I used to have one of those old school typewriters, you know, where the carriage moved back and forth. I can remember even having to hit the, yeah, bells, the whole thing. My computer has abilities that I don’t use, they’re not a part of me.
And what I’m suggesting to you is that we want to change the nature of the experiences we have with God. We want to experience his truth. There’s a lot of barriers to that, there’s things that hinder us. I think we understand them. Not an inclusive list, but our lack of knowledge, our ignorance, if you don’t know, you don’t even know you can ask. You don’t even know it’s a possibility. Fear can keep us from experiencing God, unbelief. A lack of desire. Sometimes we don’t want to cooperate with God, we’re not interested. Sin, our own choices for ungodliness. Not only are we neutral, «I don’t want to participate,» we are actively ungodly. We’re aware that that is not a godly path. We understand that in God’s equation it’s not right and we choose wrong.
All of those things would separate us from the promises of God. You can’t choose ungodliness and then turn around and demand his promises be fulfilled. For instance, if we use the passage about forgiveness, he said, you know, if we’ll forgive others, he’ll forgive us. You cannot harbor hatred and bitterness and resentment and expect to be forgiven. I mean, you can expect it, but you won’t experience it. It’s illogical. There’s some actions that release God’s impact in our lives. The line I’ve often used, and it bears repeating, is that truth divorced from experience must always remain a theory, remain in the realm of a doubt. You have to combine truth with experience, and when you do that, then your experience portfolio grows.
James 2 and verse 26 says, «The body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead». Our faith is not a theoretical conversation. It’s not a series of Bible studies, it’s a series of life experiences evaluated against the truth of Scripture. And then we course correct so that the promises of Scripture begin to fulfill our experiences. And if we’re not getting the outcomes defined in Scripture, there are course adjustments to be made. There’s a God and he’s not us. For instance, you can believe that marriage exists. We can agree it’s an institution, it’s recognized by the civil authorities, it’s a biblical concept. All of those things we could agree on, but until you choose to involve yourself, it’s just an idea.
There’s a huge gap between the concept and the experience, I promise. You may believe that exercise is good for you. You could spout data, show me studies, site experts, PhDs, physicians, all sorts of scientific fact, but until your behavior matches your understanding, you get no benefit. I studied in multiple academic settings with some people who had spent their entire lives studying Scripture, but didn’t believe it to be true. And the benefit in there, they were scholars of the first order, but the benefits did not come to them. Actions in our lives release the impact of God’s promises. In fact, the outcome is disproportionate, typically, to our investment. Forgiving someone else for the minor offenses against me do not equate the forgiveness that God extends to me, he welcomes me into his eternal kingdom. And I’m just mad because somebody cut me off in traffic, on campus.
Now, to experience the promises of God, the Bible tells us that there is a double trigger, that we have to have dual authentication. They’ve introduced that little jewel in my world. If you’re trying to access something on our IT system, we have to have dual authentication. I’m thinking if I say, «This is Allen,» that should get me access, but au contraire mon ami, there is more required. And I’m sure it’s intended to grow patience in my life, and faith and patience are the two things that God says are required of you and me. I don’t like that, I’m on the record with you. It’s not my idea. I’m not making the news, I’m just reporting it. If you’re going to receive God’s promises, you and I will have to decide to cultivate faith and patience. I can give you examples, I can support it from Scripture.
Look at Hebrews 6, says, «We don’t want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised». How do you inherit the promise? How do you make the promise as a part of your experience? What are the necessary components? Faith, faith is believing there is a God, and then ordering your life to respond to him as if that reality is a truth. We will change our behaviors based on the belief that there is a God. Faith is about activity, it’s about action, it’s about behavior, it’s about thoughts. And it’s says they inherited the promises by faith, by acting like there’s a God, and by patience. See, I can have faith for ten seconds, I believe. But I didn’t get my answer, and then I start to question.
Look at 2 Timothy 3, Paul’s writing to Timothy, a young man he’s mentoring. And he said, «You know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, my faith, my patience, love, and endurance». If you and I are going to allow the promises of God to shape our future, we’re going to have to decide to cultivate, to cooperate with the formation of faith and patience. Isn’t that good news? And I thank you for that overwhelming response.