Allen Jackson - Receive and Believe - Part 1
We’ve been working through a series under the theme of rejection, from rejection to acceptance, from rejection to freedom. I wanna continue that. It’s been a bit disjointed just because of scheduling issues. I’ll take a moment or two to recapitulate, but not a great deal of time. If you haven’t heard the previous two or three sessions, it might be beneficial to go back and listen to them at your leisure. We started with the premise and it’s really the foundational to this discussion is that you are significant to God. You matter to him.
You know, we kind of nodded that in an age of ego perhaps run wild. That conversation can be fraught with some difficulty, but the reality is the Scripture tells us that the Creator of all things, the sustainer of all things not only knows you, that he is aware of you, the details of your life. He knows when we come in and when we go out, when we sit and when we stand. He keeps a count of our hair. For some of us, a bigger challenge than others. But you matter to God. And when we talk about rejection, I think it’s important to believe that you’re of significance to God.
I could have brought, we could spend many sessions on this theme alone, but in Psalm 139, the psalmist said, «You created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I’m fearfully and wonderfully made». You’re not just a random collision of molecules. You’re not just the result of statistical possibility. That you were created by Almighty God, that he’s the author and completer of your story. You’re not random. God created you for his purposes. The question in play is, will you and I choose to cooperate with God? And it’s a question, and it’s not a one-time question. It’s a question that we have to address on a very regular basis. And what I did yesterday is doesn’t determine what I will do tomorrow.
I’ll have to choose tomorrow to honor the Lord with my life. But I choose to do so because I believe there is a God and that he can be known and that the best possible expression of a human life is in service to Almighty God. You know, Bob Dylan said you have to serve somebody. And he gave you a list of options. Well, I’m not gonna walk through all the options with you. I’m just inviting you to serve the Lord. Not simply to try to be saved, not just with the objective of going to heaven, but on a regular daily systematic routine basis to have the objective in your life.
How could I be pleasing to the Lord today? We’re not gonna earn our way to heaven. We’re not trying to score brownie points for the blessings of God. I simply believe that God exists, that he can be known, and I would like to walk uprightly before him. It’s important. And we have a revelation in the Scripture of what we can do to imagine that and we have the help of the Spirit of God within us if we’re a Christ follower. Look at 1 Peter 1 and verse 1. «Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ».
When we meet him, he’s a fisherman. He’s Peter a fisherman. Peter, a man with a lot of local knowledge about the northern end of the Sea of Galilee. There’s seven warm springs there. The best fishing in the lake is on that northern end. Peter could have told you a lot about when to fish and how to fish and how to be effective and how to build a fishing business. But when we meet him near the end of his life, he’s not talking about catching fish in Galilee. He said, «I’m an apostle of Jesus Christ». How do you identify yourself? «To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered through a lot of places».
I pronounce them, but most of us don’t know where they are, so. I like whenever I can, I like to use local Smyrna and Laverne and, never mind. «Who’ve been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance». «Chosen by God according to his foreknowledge». God knows the beginning and the ending, but he gives us a choice. What separates us from all the rest of creation is your free will. You’re not just a creature driven by instinct. You’re not a creature that’s driven by some imprint on your psyche.
You’re given a choice to choose the Lord. And the great motivation for choosing the Lord is you matter to him. You matter to him. You’re important to him. You may have been discounted by any number of persons, institutions, places, circumstances, but the Creator of heaven and earth loves you. That’s such an amazing thing. You know, when you’re having bad days or you feel alone or isolated or there’s pressure or stress, if you can take a step back and go, God, I know you care about me. It doesn’t mean every day’s easy. Doesn’t mean every decision works out the way you want or every circumstance emerges with a polite bow around it. God will lead us through shadowed valleys and he’ll ask us to stand in difficult places.
I can give you example after example after example of that. It’s a myth to think that if God loves you, you know, that every day is a perfect hair day. And you’ll never have halitosis. And your children will always respond with, «I would love to do that. Thank you for the suggestion». You know we have this mistaken notion of what it means to experience the presence of God or the blessing of God. The purposes of God often lead us through difficult places, strenuous places. Are you willing to follow the Lord that way? You matter to him. And then we acknowledge the reality that the Bible presents to us. Character after character after character who led lives, walked pathways that were filled with rejection.
I gave you any number of examples. We’ve been reading through some of the historical books in our Bible reading. We just finished 1 and 2 Samuel, I mean, Samuel’s a poster child for this. You know, he’s been a judge, a leader over the 12 tribes of Israel. And they come to him near the end of his life and say, we don’t want you to lead us anymore. We want a king, we wanna be like everybody else. You’re getting kind of old. And it’s a season. You know, at the end of his life where when Samuel makes his farewell speech, you read it if you’re doing the reading.
You know, he said, «I haven’t taken a single thing from you. I haven’t mistreated you, I haven’t stolen from you. I haven’t misrepresented you. I have served you and led you with integrity». And yet they said to him, «We don’t want you anymore». But that wasn’t the only chapter in Samuel’s life. His mother wasn’t able to conceive and she made a vow to the Lord that if he would allow her to conceive that she would give the child to serve the Lord. So when he was old enough to be weaned, she brought him and presented him to the priest, Eli, and said, «He’ll grow up with you». You’re not sophisticated enough as a child to understand your mother made a vow. You just know you’re not growing up with your birth mother. And you’ll process that as rejection.
What could I have done? What should I have done? How could I have been different? Why would they do that? I grew up with Eli? He couldn’t even raise his own kids with integrity. But it isn’t just with Samuel. We looked at Joseph, we looked at Joseph’s life. I mean, his brother sold him into slavery because they were so jealous of him, but they were suffering from the rejection their father favored Joseph in such a brazen way that they couldn’t overcome their own hurt and so they reacted out of hatred and sold their brother into slavery. I mean, it goes on and on through the narrative Scripture, Moses, David, Daniel, Jesus. The apostle Paul, city after city after city.
When he would come and present the gospel, there’d be riots, they would beat him within an inch of his life quite literally. We can roll that up into all sorts of other things, but if you’re experiencing it, it feels a great deal like rejection. I mean, Moses’s parents put him in a basket and turned it loose in the river. You’ll go to prison if you do that today. So this isn’t some obscure theme. And one of the things that I think we have to grasp is not just, you know, there’s a vulnerability that we face in our early years, our developmental years that sometimes causes those impacts to be formative in our character and we need the help of the Holy Spirit to overcome them, but it would be a mistake to think that those challenges of rejection only come with our childhood.
Samuel was no child when the people said, we don’t want you anymore. David was no child when Saul was trying to kill him. Moses was no child on the other side of the Red Sea after all the plagues and the Red Sea parts and the Egyptian armies drowned in Exodus 15 when they get to Mara and the people go, «You’re a lousy leader». He’s like, «Yeah, I didn’t wanna do this with you either». Jesus was no child when he stood on the judgment steps in Jerusalem and the crowd shouted, «Give us Barabbas». Paul was no child when he took 39 lashes, when they stoned him to death or tried. You see, this is a part of our journey, and we need a tool kit to understand what to do with it or we’ll be sidelined, we’ll be diminished. And we’ll respond in ways that will cause us to forfeit what God has for us.
And the first step in overcoming rejection, we said is to recognize the problem. And the goal of our study in this little series is to move from rejection to acceptance. You have been and you will be rejected. But it doesn’t have the power to define your life or your future, if we will allow the Spirit of God to help us. We looked a little bit at some causes of rejection. We talked about some of those that begin in childhood. A pregnancy that’s not wanted. So we have the imagination that an infant in the mother’s womb can be affected physically by the mother’s behaviors, don’t we?
By what they choose to eat or don’t or drink or don’t. That that child’s physical health and well-being could be affected. Well, if it’s true physically, why would you not believe that spiritually? You know, maybe it’s a time when there’s great stress in the home or maybe there’s tension between them. The mother and the husband or there’s already more work to be done or the budget’s too thin. There’s a lot of reasons why a pregnancy could be unwanted. If you can imagine biological damage, you have to imagine their spiritual impact. Sometimes parents aren’t able to communicate their love for a child. Sometimes because of their own emotional circumstances, sometimes because of physical circumstances.
See, the other component in this is evil exists. And he’s an accuser. One of the titles given to Satan is he’s the accuser of the brethren. And he accuses us, and he doesn’t wait until you’re old and emotionally fully formed to accuse you. That’s why he’s evil. Christians are incredibly naive. I’m still a bit stunned at our reluctance to acknowledge the existence of evil and it will exploit any vulnerability to diminish and ultimately to destroy. Jesus said in John 10:10, «The thief comes to steal, to kill and destroy». He didn’t come to cause you to have a bad day. He came to destroy you. That’s why Peter said to resist him standing firm in the faith. Understand your brothers and sisters throughout the world undergo similar stresses.
Broken marriages, they’re common enough. They have an enormous impact not just on the adults that are involved, but on the children who are involved. They process those things. Children are left bitter towards one parent or another often. Unless the parents are remarkably godly, they’ll use the children to gain emotional leverage over the hurt they have. And the outcome often causes the children to feel like they should have been able to do something, if they could have been better, if they’d have been less trouble. If they’d have just known what to say. Absentee fathers is a significant issue in our nation. We would not have had more than 60 million abortions if fathers had been present and engaged and involved.
I know it’s processed in the secular culture as a women’s rights issue, but it’s far more than that. We’ve been very casual about some things and we have sown the wind and we’ve reaped the whirlwind. If you have siblings and there’s a perception, whether it’s real or not, in Joseph’s case, it wasn’t a perception. It was real. His father didn’t treat them fairly. And his brothers hated him for it. Hated him for it enough to murder him. It may not be that extreme, but if there’s perceived unequal treatment from a parent sometimes it’s just because of a birth order somebody has to be responsible and the older one oftentimes is tasked to do that… or maybe you’re the youngest one and you’re overlooked.
I mean, there’s a whole, you can pick your spot because we have an adversary that will cause us to believe we have been mistreated. And with our old earthly carnal nature, it’s pretty easy to accept that. Maybe your parents wanted a boy and you weren’t or they wanted a girl and you weren’t. A lot of reasons you can feel rejection early in your life. A piece that I think is very important to pick up, particularly for this session because we’re gonna deal with some of the spiritual consequences of this is that it may begin from a relational thing or an emotional thing, but there is spiritual support for every negative attack on your life. That not every spiritual influence is positive.
We talk a lot about the Holy Spirit and cooperating with him and the Spirit of God and his direction and his leading and his power to heal and restore and deliver. But there are unhealthy spirits and unholy spirits. And they diminish and accuse and they will enslave and put you in bondage and limit your life. And our response typically is the rather naive, you know, I don’t believe in that. Well, that’s a wonderful declaration. It just doesn’t help. Be like me saying, you know, I don’t really believe in diet in my fat. I don’t believe fat in my diet. Or I don’t believe sugar will cause me to gain weight. I think of sugar as a vitamin. I can say it all I want, but it won’t make me healthy.
And Christian, we have this remarkably naive, «Well, you know, I don’t know how I feel about that». Well, Jesus believed in unclean spirits. So if you call him Lord, you got to process that. I know how they do it in seminary. I’ll say, well, you know, the first century culture had a far more spiritual dynamic. They weren’t as sophisticated. Their scientific thought hadn’t developed to the point that we have at this point in the unfolding story of human history. And so they brought a lot of causation to spiritual things. And then that argument might hold together if Jesus weren’t standing in the middle of it. But I’m pretty sure that the Creator of all things had more than a 1st century perspective on the world in which he lived.
So when we talk about rejection and the influences and the impact of it, we have to understand there’s a spiritual component. Every negative emotion, every negative attitude, every reaction or behavior have associated with them a corresponding spirit. Behind jealousy there’s a spirit of jealousy. It doesn’t mean that every time you respond with a jealous response that there’s a demon active in that. But if you indulge yourself in the unguarded expression of emotions, you open your life to spiritual support for them. Behind anger, there’s a spirit of anger. Behind fear, there’s a spirit of fear. Not everybody who’s afraid has a spirit of fear.
But if you don’t practice some degree of self-control and you habitually give in to fear or maybe when you’re young or you’re not emotionally developed, you have some terrifying experience or even as an adult, we open our lives to a spirit of fear. See, emotional liberty is dangerous, just as dangerous as dietary liberty. You can kill yourself with a fork. The Bible talks more about gluttony than it does drunkenness. I mean, we wouldn’t dream, most of us come into church like buzzed. But we’ll call them fluffy.
Ephesians 6, it’s in your notes. Says, «Our struggle is not against flesh and blood». The struggle of our lives, the great struggle of our lives is not people-centered. The greatest battles of our life are not with individuals or family systems or institutions or governments. Not my opinion. It’s Scripture. «Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms».
We had better have a game plan for overcoming spiritual forces of evil against the powers of this dark world. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m not asking you to imagine some demonic cause that you can’t get a parking place on the square. I’ve told you weird doesn’t make you spiritual, it makes you weird. And I’ve given you multiple examples from my own journey when I would, as a younger person, I would attach cause to something spiritual and a man would look at me and say, it’s not a spiritual issue. You didn’t plan well. Thank you. You know, you can’t blame the devil when you’re lazy. Well, you can, it’s just not helpful. But we are engaged in a spiritual conflict. And not with the seminars on spiritual conflict.
Let’s get on with engaging. Let’s learn to pray. Let’s learn to understand our authority in Scripture. Let’s understand the significance of repentance and renouncing and releasing. Let’s begin to act like we believe the Scriptures too. How long will we talk about it before we begin to practice it? And you can’t close your eyes. You can, but it doesn’t eliminate your accountability. The Bible says in Ezekiel that we’re watchmen on the wall and if you see evil coming and you don’t say anything, you will bear the penalty for the evil. It’s got my attention.
So when people say, «Well, you shouldn’t talk about current events,» I’m like, «Well, maybe you don’t, but I’m gonna use my voice». 'Cause I don’t intend to be caught with the consequences of that. They should stop mutilating teenagers. And I’m grateful for a president or an administration that will do something to turn that back that said gender really isn’t confusing and men shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports, but it would have been, it would have been a different kind of victory if those messages had led from the church. We were cowards. Stop pointing at the pastors. Pastors will find the courage. Yeah, I’m doing a thing on rejection.
Ephesians 6:12. I wanna get to this next segment. How do we apply the remedy? If there’s spiritual forces, you know, it certainly affects our emotions, it affects our thoughts. And we have to learn to discipline our thoughts, to take every thought captive to recognize not to give ourselves emotional liberty. There’s some very destructive permissions unleashed in our culture. That if you have a feeling it’s legitimate and you should legitimize every feeling.
No, you shouldn’t. I mean, my driving. If I legitimized every feeling while I’m behind the wheel of the car, I would not be a blessing. If you cut me off, I’ll just ram you. Then I want a little paddle I can hold up that says Jesus loves you, get out of my way. I’m working on it, but you can’t afford to give license to every emotion. Well, I can’t deny how I feel. I’m not asking you to deny it. I’m telling you not to give expression to it. Every feeling you have isn’t helpful.