Allen Jackson - Heroes Emerging
The only way that our nation can flourish is to remember that we're a nation under God. That's the truth. If we imagine we're a nation under a political party or a political leader, I'm not opposed to those things, they're a part of our process, but the form of government we have is a representative form which means Washington DC is like looking in a mirror. That's the awkward reality of where we are. You see, Washington DC is not going to be more godly, righteous, holy, until we are. And you know that's true with just a little bit of thought, you know the struggle we have to maintain or even try to establish godliness and righteousness in the little community where we live.
And we're not exactly at the crossroads of the world. We have trouble keeping pornography out of our schools. We have trouble keeping drag shows being celebrated to something appropriate for children in our own community. I mean, we're having trouble with those fundamental issues where we live here and until we can see progress made in those arenas where in the communities we say those things are not acceptable. We won't endorse that or support that or support people who do endorse that and support that. That's not about parties or politics, that's about families and godliness and common sense and what's good for our children.
And so we have the courage to say that in the community where we live, it's inappropriate to ask somebody to have the courage to go to Washington DC and say that. If you won't say it in your neighborhood, then you won't say it with your friends and you won't say it to your family and you won't say it where you work, why in the world do you imagine somebody should take a large platform and say that. Amen, Pastor. One nation under God, under God's authority. You see the blessings of God come from being under the authority of God. If we're under rebellion to God and we're living rebellious lives to God and casting off his principles and his boundaries, we'll come under God's judgment, not his blessings.
So it's very important. The church has a role to play in this. I know you understand that but I wanna encourage you while our governor is taking a month to encourage us to fast and pray that you'll take, I'm gonna invite the whole church starting this weekend. We're gonna take Wednesdays to fast and pray corporately. You can take as many days as you would like, but since we're together on Wednesdays, we're gonna fast and pray. But I would submit to you, I have been suggesting to you that we need a new generation of heroes. My recent flights kind of reminded me of this. You know, those in flight, if you got an 11 hour flight, you're looking for something and I spent more time trying to find something to watch than watching something.
So many of the movies were hero movies and I'm not opposed to that, but I don't think a spandex suit and a cape is really gonna fix us. And I think we have the wrong imagination of heroes. I'm grateful for sports stars that can sign contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm not opposed to that, but I don't believe they should be our heroes. I don't believe that should be what we're dreaming that our children become. The people that have those athletic gifts began with a gift from God and then added to it the self-discipline to maximize those gifts. But I believe that the real heroes are the expression of character that's formed within us and that comes from submitting ourselves to the authority of God.
I don't believe our great heroes are our celebrities are our most talented musicians. In fact, I think we idolize people that are very ungodly and we line up and take our selfies with all sorts of ways around their concerts and their images. And I don't know that that's wicked, but I certainly think we're planting seeds in the hearts of our children and our young people and our teenagers that they should aspire towards a set of things that will bring judgment and destruction to them. I think our heroes need to be men and women of faith, people of integrity and character. I think we should celebrate having character more than being a character. What a thought.
So in this particular session, I wanna talk to you a little bit about this notion that there's heroes emerging. I believe that. We were watching a season of great opposites. Jesus told a parable about the end of the age. He talked about a farmer who had a field that was sown. And when the crop came in, there was a liberal sprinkling of weeds in the midst of the intended crop and those responsible for the crop were very distressed. They understood the failure that it represented. And so they went to their master and they said, "Do you want us to pull up all the weeds"? And he said, "No, we'll do that at harvest time".
Well, the disciples asked for a private explanation of that parable. You all know the story I hope. And Jesus said that it's about a parable of the end of the age that the field was the world and the weeds were those things sown by Satan. That the angels would be the harvesters, and that at the end of the age, God would separate the weeds from the intended crop. It's worth noting that the same climate that lets the wheat ripen, lets the weeds ripen. They're going to ripen simultaneously. And we see that. We see so many expressions of ungodliness and of evil of the failures of the church and apostasy and a turning away from biblical values. We see celebrations of ungodliness. I mean, it doesn't take any discernment at all to recognize that we're on the precipice of something.
And for there to be a positive outcome will take the sovereign intervention of Almighty God, nothing less will be sufficient. And yet there's a tremendous momentum in the church and inertia within the church. Do you know the word inertia says that a body or an object will remain at rest unless it's acted upon by an outside force. And once it is, it'll continue in that direction until it's acted upon by another force. It'll just continue to move with perfect inertia. I could take a tennis ball and throw it towards Nashville and it would go all the way. But gravity acts upon it and pulls it down.
Well, it seems almost like we're in this mind numbing drill that we just go sit in church and recite a prayer and then go act like the world while we capitulate to ungodliness. And I believe God is calling forth an emerging generation of heroes, men and women who will stand for a biblical set of values, a biblical world view, a Judeo Christian world view who will acknowledge Jesus is Lord, who will turn to say no to ungodliness and yes to godliness. I don't think they're gonna arrive from the traditional places that we would anticipate, but I'm meeting more and more of them and I'm hearing reports of them.
It's an exciting time. I wanna be a part of it. I intend to be a part of it if the Lord allows me. I'd rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than dwell in the tents of the wicked, to borrow the line from the psalmist. There's heroes emerging. There's two passages we've used as text for this little series, Hebrews 11:32 and 33. I could go on and on, but I've run out of time. Hebrews 11 is this listing of the great men and women of faith and the author is much like me. He said, look, my time's gone and I have outline left. So now he just kind of dumps a bunch of names into the end of the outline. And he said, there's so many more Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jeptha and David and Samuel and the prophets.
I can't tell you their stories, but I would remind you that they were there. And then he gives us this little summary set of summary statements that through acts of faith, they toppled kingdoms. Did you know that faith in God can bring ungodly kingdoms down? Hallelujah. Through faith, they made justice where justice doesn't come from governments. Governments aren't just. Have you read Animal farm? All animals are equal but pigs are more equal. If you haven't read it, that's homework. They took the promises for themselves. I like that phrase. See, the promises of God are much like the Promised Land. We're not promised a piece of terra firma. We're not promised as Abraham's descendants were a particular plot of ground in the earth.
But the new covenant means that we're a people whose lives are expressed or defined by the promises of God. And in the same way that the former slaves of Egypt had to occupy, conquer the Promised Land, you and I have to take the promises of God and make them our own. We have been coached towards this passive Christianity. We say things like, "Well, you know, I want everything God has for me. Just anything God has for me, I'm open to it. Whatever he might want me to do". And we say it so smugly and so piously having absolutely no intent of reordering our lives for God.
Did you know that you could make your journey your entire journey through time, step out of time into eternity and spend eternity in hell parroting that statement every day. Because unless you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe it in your heart and offer yourself as a living sacrifice to him, you will miss the redemptive power of God expressed for you through Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection. You don't receive it passively. You receive it intentionally. And in my journey so far, the majority of the promises of God have to be believed for appropriated, applied, pursued, sought, desired, an intentional part of your life.
I used to think skinny people just had better metabolism than me. They used to annoy me because they don't really tell the truth. You know, why are you skinny? I don't know. So, I got up one morning really early, went to the gym 5 o'clock. You know, who's there? Bunch of skinny people. Go to the doughnut shop about 9:30 you know, who's there? Well, besides us, a lot of people are not quite so skinny. And you listen to the way we process our faith, you know, well, how often do I need to go to church? Do I have to go to church? Can I watch online? And that Bible reading?
You know, I did that Bible reading thing. Last year I did it for like almost six months. How do I... you want me to do it again? You know, pray. No, I don't pray. I mean, we act as if it's intrusive, burdensome, limiting. We're gonna have to take the promises and make them ours. We're gonna have to begin to stand up and say, in the name of Jesus, righteousness will prevail in this generation. In the name of Jesus, our schools will welcome biblical principles back into the classrooms of our public schools. That our college campuses will once again train young people in righteousness and holiness. They'll begin to tell them the best parts of our national history and not the worst.
We're gonna have to believe it can happen. We're gonna have to be willing to say I'm an advocate for that. I'm invested in that. I'll give myself to that. We're gonna say God, I'm sorry, I've been distracted. I've been more intent on pursuing my hobby or what I wanted or what I felt like doing than taking a stand for Godliness on the behalf of people that weren't willing or understood how to take that stand. A whole new generation of heroes emerging.
Ephesians 3:20. This is from the Message. It says, "God can do anything, you know, far more than you could ever imagine or guess a request in your wildest dreams. He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us". God can do anything, you know. I'm so passed, you know, we've done Bible studies on whether or not God still does miracles. There's a whole school of theology. I mean, there is an entire block of study with seminary courses and universities and hold denominations committed to the concept that miracles ceased and we get puffed up about it. We'll argue about it.
I'm not arguing with you. I'm just gonna go over here and live with the miracles. Go have your seminar. But it doesn't mean life is not difficult. The truth is, it's more challenging than I would like it to be most of the time. That's the reality. But it doesn't mean God has abandoned us. He can do anything, you know, and he doesn't do it by bullying us and intimidating us. He does it by sending his spirit to gently, quietly, persistently invite us towards him and we have to be willing and open and interested enough to say yes.
Well, for those heroes to emerge, we're gonna just walk through some really practical components of that for the next few minutes. One, is we're going to have to be willing to face both adversaries and adversities. If you're not willing to do difficult things and understand there's going to be opponents and opposition and they're gonna call you names and you'll get canceled. If you think this is about a parade and everybody's gonna applaud, Christianity isn't for you. And that's not a negative confession. Somebody's confession meter just was going whoop, whoop, whoop.
That's an acknowledgement of the reality. Heroes dare to be different. They're willing to step out of the crowd to have a different set of metrics by which they're gonna measure success. There should be a fundamental difference in what we're aspiring to become and the aspirations we have for our children than the secular culture has. If there's no difference, what is it that we imagine makes us Christ followers? A location for a few minutes on the weekend? I think not. David when he was a shepherd boy and several 1000 Israelite soldiers heard Goliath bellow a challenge. The soldiers including the king went to their tents and David went to battle. In Babylon, there were several 1000 Israelite captive slaves who worshiped Nebuchadnezzar's golden statue. When the music played, they planted their faces in the ground. But Shadrach and his friends stood up.
I saw a quote from Corrie ten Boom. I'll share it with you. Do you know who Corrie ten Boom is? If you've never read the book, "The Hiding Place" or seen the movie, I would highly recommend them to you. She was the daughter of a Dutch watchmaker. She and her family hid Jews in their homes during World War II. They were betrayed by a neighbor, a Christian neighbor and Corey's father and sister died in concentration camps. She was released by a clerical error. She said this, "Memories are the key not to the past but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives when we let God use them become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work he will give us to do".
That's spoken from someone who faced a great deal of evil in their life. And she recognized that in the midst of that, God was preparing her. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, those three Hebrew young men, most likely teenagers, faced a very difficult scenario. They're exiles in a foreign land and yet they stood up in the face of the king. A very intimidating-there was a great deal of inequity in the power structures that they held and the king held. He's an absolute monarch in the ancient near east. He can have your head separated from your shoulders and there's no court of appeal. And these three slaves stood before him and rather brazenly said, "We cannot bow to your statue, our God will deliver us".
And you think about their story, Jerusalem, their home city where the temple of God dwelt has been destroyed. The heartache of that, they've been exiled, they've been enslaved, they fasted, they made an attempt to seek God. They've been forced into idolatry at the point of a spear. Their choice is non compliance. They're threatened. They make a declaration of faith. God doesn't intervene. They're thrown into a furnace. You see, my preference is God would intervene before the furnace. Like when the king is trying to pronounce judgment that his tongue would stick to the roof of his mouth and he couldn't get the words out. But he did get the judgment out and the furnace is heated up and now they have every imagination that their life is at an end and they're tossed into the furnace and somehow they are fireproof.
It's an amazing story. It's an amazing story. But I don't believe it's just a story, I think it's a pattern. I think it's given to us. The scripture, the New Testament says, it's been written down for us as examples that we might know how to live. And we're afraid to put a Jesus is Lord sticker on our car. I mean, we have been so timid for so long. We've lost an imagination. We don't have to be arrogant or belligerent or condemning or critical. But why are we reluctant to say that the biblical definition of marriage includes a man and a woman? I mean, it does. Wow! See, I think what we ask for matters. I brought you a sample. I'm not sure we're gonna look at all of them, but I'll touch 'em.
James 4 and verse 2 says, "You don't have because you don't ask. And when you do ask, you don't receive because you ask with wrong motives". See the condition of your heart matters. Most of us have been reluctant to ask, well, you know, I don't pray much or I don't wanna bother God or I don't wanna be presumptive and you finally kinda get oriented enough that you ask for God, and then God says, well, actually your heart condition matters. We're going, "Well, I didn't know that". "You ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get just on your pleasures".
We're not the first generation that wants to treat God like some sort of a heavenly vending machine. God, if I go to church three weeks in a row, can I pray for good weather on the fourth weekend so I could go to the lake and the weather would be perfect? We all bargain with God. You've all been guilty of that. It's like kids, we bargain with that. You know, how many green beans do I have to eat before I can have ice cream? And they, you know, the kids think they can wear you down and sometimes they can't, but we're not gonna wear God down.
In Daniel chapter 3, I've told you a bit of the story. Nebuchadnezzar said, "Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego". This is after they survived the flames. "Who sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and denied the king's command and they were willing to give up their lives rather than to serve or worship any God except their own God". Wow! Their adversary said, these men had a courage that amazes me. A new generation of heroes. A new generation of heroes.
You see, we still struggle beneath the shame. We've lost 60 million children in our watch in the last 40 years or so. We really haven't found our voices. We haven't. That's just the awkward reality of it. Forget the collapse of the church in Europe in the run up to World War II. We can talk about the collapse of the church in North America in our lifetime. And these three young men with all the reasons they had to have been angry at God or resentful or embittered. They said, "No, we're not bowing, sir".
I know most of our peer group is bowing. Can't speak for them, but we're not going to. You know, our God could deliver us and he's well able and we think he might. But we want you to know even if he doesn't, no chance. Wow! I hear all the ways we find loopholes. Well, you know, if I stood up, there could be some consequences and then my children would suffer and I don't want my children to suffer. Therefore, I'm gonna capitulate. I have partners and if I told the truth, there could be some sort of reprisal and my partners would suffer and they're not the ones that are making the decision, I'm making the decision. Therefore, I'm going to capitulate and on and on and on.
What are you asking for? Some of you know the little book, "The prayer of Jabez". I brought you the prayers in 1 Chronicles, 4. "His mother named him Jabez, saying, 'I gave birth to him in pain.' But Jabez cried out to the God of Israel. 'Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.'" Look at that next little phrase, "God granted his request". Why would we not say, "God pour out your spirit in this generation. Awaken our churches. Fill our pulpits with people who will speak the truth. Put faculty members in our universities and teachers in our schools and people at the head of industry that fear the name of God. Fill our military with young people who will honor God with their lives". Why would we not begin to ask for that?
I wanna pray with you before we go.
Heavenly Father, I thank you for every person that I've had this time with today. And I pray that in the name of Jesus, you would give us the will to persevere the determination to overcome that we may be reminded that greater is the spirit within us than any challenge we face in this world. In Jesus's name, amen.