Sermon: "Amazing Things"

2nd in the "Consecrate Yourselves" series.
Delivered January 14, 2007 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3

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Sermon Notes are at the end.

Gracious God we thank you for your word. We thank you for your word in our prayers, for your word in our songs and now for your word as we read it, and as we hear it in the message today. In all of this Lord speak to us even as we respond to you with praise, with confession, with our prayer, and so we commit this time to you asking for blessing because we expect blessing because of your goodness to us in Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

I would like to read to a passage from the book of Joshua. It's Chapter three. You will find that in your Bibles around page 153 and I am going to begin with Verse 5 and then I am going to jump to Verse 9 and read Verses 9 to 17. Verse 5 is our theme verse for the year.

"Joshua told the people, "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you."

Then Verse 9:

"Joshua said to the Israelites, "Come here and listen to the words of the Lord your God. This is how you will know that the living God is among you and that he will certainly drive out before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites. See, the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth will go into the Jordan ahead of you. Now then, choose twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. And as soon as the priests who carry the ark of the Lord -the Lord of all the earth-set foot in the Jordan, its waters flowing downstream will be cut off and stand up in a heap."

So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant went ahead of them. Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water's edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (the Salt Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground."

This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Well, we have been looking at this issue of consecration. Starting off a new year aware that we need to set ourselves apart for God, to purify ourselves, to make ourselves ready and the promise that's in this verse is that the Lord will do amazing things among us. Now that's not a usual ideaof Christianity, because everybody knows that Christianity is boring, at least that's what all kinds of people believe; maybe some people who are in this room right now. The images of church services on Sunday when we should be outside playing sports or at least watching them. In the church service we sing songs that I don't know. We make prayers to an invisible God and then there is a long talk by the preacher talking about Hivites and Amorites and Jebusites and all the things that we are not supposed to be doing. It's boring and fact is sometimes when I am preaching I am watching your eyes close. It is boring.

I have been bored at times in church, but inevitably these pictures we carry around Christianity being boring have a lot to do with religion and very little to do with God, the God who created, the God who speaks, the God who dwells with his people, the God who does amazing things. It's a parody of Christianity. It's Christianity all under human control, human sized, you know Christianity of a worship service and three committee meetings a month and no surprises please, because we are playing church. God sized Christianity is different. In God sized Christianity God is in control, not us. The issues that we have to face are bigger than we are and the focus is not on our meetings and programs, but on people, on changed lives that lead to a changed world. When God touches our lives, when God does something amazing life might scare us, it might demand more from us, but it won't be boring for long and today's passage is one of those places.

Today's passage captures one of those moments in the life of the Israelites when life ceased to be boring for them. After all those years in the wilderness it was not routine anymore. They certainly weren't in control. They are on the edge of the Promised Land. The river is at flood stage. It will drown them all. There is no way of getting in and God does something miraculous; the ark, this special box that they carried that was a symbol of God's presence among them, when that ark went into the water on the shoulders of the priests. Upstream the water stopped. Now, this happens sometimes in some of the rivers and sometimes in the Jordan River when there would be a landslide or something else, we don't know exactly how God did it, but the water stops and all the water downstream drains out and they walk across on dry land. Right at the right moment, right for God's people when God wanted it to happen. It's an amazing moment, but it has nothing to do with us. That happened thousands of years ago. We write if off in our minds because that's now how God works now. We think to ourselves there are no rivers parting now. There are no amazing things. Nowadays, God would rather just watch us come here on Sundays playing church and maybe God hopes that we will pray sometime in between. We carry this sort of truncated view around with us sometimes, but the fact is God is doing amazing things all the time. There are amazing answers to prayer.

In the 1970s, Jim ? who is pastor of the Brooklenland Tabernacle, he had a 2 1/2 year period where his daughter was in total rebellion against him, against God. They couldn't even talk civilly to one another and Jim felt a distinct leading from God that there was nothing he could do in counseling his daughter, but he had to pray, and Jim prayed. One day at a church prayer meeting someone stopped the prayer meeting and said, "Jim we have to stop what we are praying about now and just pray for your daughter." And so, this whole prayer meeting started to pray just for Jim's daughter and the way Jim describes it there was a period of time when there were moans and screams and cries out to God as they prayed. He said it was like a woman being in labor. It was even a little bit scary.

About 32 hours later he was coming home from work and his wife says, "Honey, you have got to go downstairs because our daughter is here and she wants to talk to you." He goes down into the basement of the house where he finds his daughter crying out, weeping, asking for God's forgiveness and she said, "Dad, just a day or two ago who was it that was praying for me?" She said because 1 1/2 days ago I had a vision of just how my life was going in to an empty abyss and that I was lost and far from God. "Who prayed for me?" God still gives amazing answers to prayer. God still makes amazing connections where he pulls together people in the most unlikely ways in order to get his will done. I am not going to talk about that, because that's in the News and Views, the cover page, read it, because we are part of God making amazing connections in the world. God offers amazing protection even today.

I have a friend of mine, Dayton (?). He's gone on to be with the Lord, but Dayton was pastor of a church in urban New Orleans. He is walking along the street when two guys come up to him and say, "Your money or your life" and if you knew Dayton you would understand how he could really answer this way; Dayton looked back at them and said, "You know, you can take my life, but you can't hurt me." Take a step back, "What do you mean?" "You can take my life, but you can't hurt me. I am not going to give you the money." And they noticed a cross he was wearing and they said, "Are you one of those preacher types?" And he said, "Yeah" and so Dayton started to share the gospel with them and, in fact, took them to like a soda fountain, sat them down at a table, and shared the gospel with them and they came to Christ. Amazing protection.

Amazing provision. It's 1995 in January, about this time of the month when the earthquake happens in Kobe and for the next two months one of our biggest struggles is not just the devastation of the city because of the earthquake, but the fact that the exchange rate went against the dollar and so now all of a sudden the same of dollars that we were getting paid every month, once it was translated in to yen, bought $1,200 less in food and items in one month. Then the next month it dropped another $800, so that it was a total of $2,000 less in two months time. Now towards the end of that two month period we get a check in the mail from First Presbyterian Church of Baton Rouge; First Presbyterian normally sent that check in to the mission board to be part of our general support, but for some reason they were all angry and bent out of shape and they weren't going to send it to the mission board that year, so they sent it directly to us. We got a check for $2,400 at a moment when we had lost $2,000. God gives amazing provisions.

God gives us amazing impact. Kay Warren at Saddleback Church; it's a huge church. Her husband Rick Warren is pastor there. God gave Kay Warren a concern about the issue of AIDS maybe years after we should have had concern about it, but gave her that concern and then she started to use her influence to impact other churches and discover that God had given this vision all kinds of places and God gives an impact now the way churches are networking together in all kinds of new ways in order to address world issues like AIDS. Unexpected impact.

So why don't we see more amazing things? Why don't we expect more? Many times it seems like we have a track record of seeing nothing happen for years. Well the problem is not with God. The problem is with us. It's not that God has retired. The problem is that we carry around an inadequate view of God. Sure God's real. Sure God is involved in my life, but sort of like a spectator, not someone who is going to rock my world and change everything. In other words, it's easy to live without a whole lot of faith and faith is an option in the Christian life.

Now, there is all kinds of things that stand in the way of us living on the very edge of our seats waiting for God to do amazing things and I would like to cover three of them. The first has to do with our agenda. Whose agenda is driving our lives? In this passage that we just looked at Israel is on the edge of a promised land at a time in history that God picked sovereignly. God calls them out of Egypt. God provides his own leaders to them. They are in the wilderness for 40 years and then God on a certain day at a certain time, the cloud moves them to this place and leads them to the very edge of the promised land, the rivers at flood stage. There is no way across. God chose that time. God chose that place. He didn't ask Israel a thing. He didn't say, "Is this a good time? Do you feel up to going in to this land? Let's take a vote." It didn't happen. It was God's agenda. In fact, when Joshua asked an angel, "Are you for me, are you for us, are you for Jericho, for them?" And the angel answers, "For neither. I am for the Lord, the heart of hosts. You join us."

One of the reasons we don't see God's amazing things either in the church or in our personal lives is because we are constantly trying to get God to do amazing things in our agenda. We set the directions. We set the goals. We tell God what's needed. We tell God when it's needed and then God like the good God is supposed to be, does it for us. Well let me tell you it doesn't work. I've tried it. You've tried it. It doesn't work. God's amazing things are done for his purposes, in his timing and in his way and we need to follow. We believe that God longs to do amazing things right here at Central for his purposes, no games, no plain church. God wants to change this world one life at a time and that means that we need to be connected in with God's purposes, his agenda. And so, that means that we as leaders, and you as individuals, whether you view yourself as a leader or not, we need to be checking constantly. How do we know that we are at least trying to be close to God's agenda? Let me give you a few ways, and I am just going to list them off. I am not going to talk about them much.

The first is God's word. God's word dictates our agenda. We can't do something that's against God's word. God's place and time. There are sovereign things that happen to us and those are moments that whether it's suffering, whether it's opportunity, whether it's stretching us in service or faith, we need to be sensitive to God's time and place and respond to it. God's people; God sovereignly puts together people of different gifts and common vision at a certain place, at certain time and makes connections between them and we need to honor what God is doing there. God's action. Part of joining God's agenda is joining what's already happening around us that God is already doing rather than trying to steer God in to doing something else that impresses us more, and finally God's provision. God's purposes if they are done in God's way are going to receive God's supply.

So the first obstacle to faith is our agenda. Now, the second obstacle is our ability, our own ability is actually an obstacle sometimes to faith, because we only end up being willing to do what we know we can do. We stay inside of our comfort zone. We are motivated and self confident but we are careful to set limits and so our Christianity becomes human sized, bland and boring, a toy-sized version of the real thing.

Now Debbie and I have given two wonderful cars to our son Jonathan. The first was a Mercedes and the second was a Mini. The Mercedes was about this big. It was made out of cast metal and the Mini was actually cardboard. We found it in a magazine and folded it and gave it to him. He was thankful, but ... toy-sized Christianity, playing games with God. God does amazing things precisely because we are powerless. We will never see some of God's amazing things until we hear God's challenge, see his agenda, step in to the gap even though we know we can't fill the need and yet we are still committed to action. A reality-sized Christianity is going to have God-sized challenges.

The third thing that stands in the way of our faith is our anxiety. God's agenda usually gets scary at some point. At this stage where we see Israel at the Jordan River it's scary. They don't know where they are going. They don't know what's going to happen. They don't know how God is going to do it. There was a certain routine to being lost in the wilderness and now all of that is going to change. God miraculously provides, but we will never see that provision unless we have stepped out, overcome our fears and taken a step and then we see his provision. Think about all of the people whose first chance to really see God's sovereign provision is when they make a decision to go on a summer mission project. They are used to making their normal salary and everything and now they are doing something that is too big for them to handle. They make the decision to go. They share it with their friends. They pray about it and God provides. What a moment of faith.

One of the images that I carry around that several times in my spiritual life has meant something to me. It's an image where I am standing on the edge of a cliff, a high one and I look down and I know that if I step off the edge, if God doesn't catch me, I will hit the bottom and it will ruin me and will ruin those that I love. Now there have been a few points in my Christian life where I have been brought to that cliff and I said those words, "God if you don't catch us, this will ruin us" and I have stepped off. It doesn't happen often. It's too scary to happen often, but sometimes God calls us to moments like that. We've got to face those fears. We may see an amazing action of God right here, right where we live, work and play, but the fact is we are going to have to face our fears if we are going to see God's miracles. If we insist on constantly living in our own comfort zone, we are likely to live on the boring side of Christianity. Long sermon, superficial prayers, playing church.

So what's next for us as a congregation? And what's next for you personally? What are the amazing things that God might want to do among us? If we are seriously going to dream those dreams, pray those prayers, we are going to have to set aside any dreams that just make us great or make us comfortable and safe. We need to put aside expectations that are just our size and that are totally manageable. We need to put aside fears that are reality-sized Christianity is going to demand too much from us. It can't be our agenda. It can't be limited by our ability and we are safe. God is going to do amazing things among us. But what will he do? That's for God to answer, but I believe he is going to provide that answer not just through the session and through the staff and through the pastor leadership. Sure, we will have a role in shaping that and giving it direction, but I believe that part of discerning that lies in your hands as you pray, as you reflect personally where you live, work and play and as you serve within the life of this church. What amazing thing might God want to do?

Later in this service we are going to make our offering to God, but in these few moments before we sing our hymn of response, I would like to spend a moment in silence as we begin to wrestle with God with what God might want to do, what amazing thing God might want to do right around us.

So let's pray. God, quiet our hearts for a moment and help us now to think in new ways about what you are able to do and what might be on your heart in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our business, in our city, in our church. Help us to think deeply and help us to think with eyes of faith. So be with us now these few moments. Lord, we've only begun to think, we've only begun to pray, but we pray that you will lead us and will give us greater clarity so that we might respond to you with faith and watch you as you honor the name of Jesus Christ right where we live and we ask this in his mighty name. Amen.

Sermon Outline Notes:

Obstacles to Faith:

• Our Agenda - How can we know its God's agenda?
  • God's Word
  • God's place
  • God's people
  • God's action
  • God's provision
• Our Ability
• Our Anxiety

© 2007, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org