5/12/2002

Let’s bow:

Father, we thank you that you are our Lord. Father we know that sometimes we separate out the matter of your being our Savior as if it is different from being our Lord. Some people think that we can just gain a ticket to heaven and you can save us forgetting the fact that you actually desire to be our Lord, the one who is truly the master of our lives, the one to whom we look for direction and for truth, and for instruction. Father help us to truly make you our Lord this day. In Jesus Name, Amen.

Last evening we had an interesting event happen at our house. I heard a tapping at our door, we have a sliding glass door, patio type door, out to the back deck of our house and I heard tapping on the window and I am trying to figure out why the dog would do that. He has never done that kind of sound before and so I looked over and he wasn’t there. And so I figure he is not there he is not making the noise something else must be or else he just moved off the porch. And pretty soon I heard the tapping again and so I finally got up and walked over there and looked down and there was a little orange bird there. An Oriole, I don’t know if he was from Baltimore or not but he flew in from somewhere. It was an Oriole and I have seen Oriole’s before but not for a long time, and I had not seen any around our house at all. And it was tapping at our window and trying to get in. I wondered if he would have come in if I had opened the door, but my wife said we really didn’t want a bird in the house anyway. So it is a good thing I didn’t, she wasn’t there and you know how it is, she comes home and I get in trouble for doing what I wasn’t supposed to do and so I am glad I didn’t open the door anyway. And I looked down and it was the female Oriole wanting in, it was kind of rainy out maybe that is why and the male was up in the branch of a tree right near there. This was a really neat thing to see them, I hadn’t seen any for a long time like I said. Even though I knew they were around because I had heard one of them singing a couple of days ago and I thought that was the Oriole song but I didn’t see the bird. And then at the same time here came all together four Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, if you know what they are. The are just a real beautiful black and red and white bird along with some white striped Sparrows. Just a whole bunch of really neat birds. So it was quite an interesting event, I was home all by myself, Kate was on her way from a horse ride and so I got to take pictures of them and just kind of watch them with binoculars and things and it was kind of a neat event. 

Do you thing it was an event for the birds? Why are you laughing so loudly? Actually how long did it take for them to get to my house? We don’t know do we? It took along time. They flew from somewhere, probably Baltimore. They flew from a long ways away. Oh no, Forest, Yes. Thank you, thank you, send more. So anyway we know how far that one came at least unless yours is still there. So to me what was an event, to the birds was actually a part of a trip. It was a culmination of a long process. We tend to see things as events. Is graduation an event? Yes it is. For those of us who just attend someone else’s graduation we see that as the event. To them it is the culmination of a long process that brought them there. 

Mom’s is birth an event? Yes, but it is the end of a long process isn’t it? So what we see as events quite often we see a moment in time but in reality they took a long time to get there. And so we are seeing the culmination of a process rather than just a momentary thing. Once in awhile there are momentary things but not really. When you come to service on Sunday morning, to us it is sort of an event to many of us but to those who are in the process of getting ready for the service there is a lot of preparation. People have to come in early, people here around 7 o’clock to get sound equipment ready, sermons ready even though that is the culmination of some preparation before hand, and we have sound guys that come in to work on sound, we have Bonnie Rae who comes in early, we have people come in to do special music and practice and things. So what looks like an event at 9 o’clock is actually been a week or longer preparation for each Sunday. So we tend to look at things as events but it is an event to somebody who is looking at it from the outside. Somebody who is on the inside, it is a process and culmination of the process. 

Turn to the Book of Mark and you will see a parable that illustrates and actually teaches that very same principle in terms of spiritual things. When a person comes to Christ, accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior we tend to think that is an event. Because it happens at a moment in time. We come to that decision, a person comes to the altar or pray at their dinner table or somewhere else. They pray to ask Christ to come into their lives. They accept Christ as Savior. But that actually is always a culmination of a series of events. A furthering of an understanding that brings a person to the place where they are ready to find Christ. And Jesus used the illustration of the farmer here in Mark Chapter 4 starting with verse 26, And as always much of the work that goes on in the meantime is invisible to those who are not involved in it. That is why I say a lot of what happens on a Sunday morning you don’t see. You see kind of the finished product as the worship service but much of this has gone on beforehand that you didn’t see. I didn’t see the Oriole and the Grosbeaks fly from somewhere down south. I didn’t see then in all their flights or where they stayed over the winter. I just see them when they got to my house. And so we tend to see things as the event because we weren’t involved in the process. And the danger is if we consider that a person coming to Christ is just an event; it is actually a process.

It says in Verse 26, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the ground; and goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts up and grows-how, he himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head. But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” So to the farmer it is like I put the seed in, I go away and leave it alone, later on when it is ready for harvest I come back and another event takes place. There is an event at the beginning where the seed is planted, there is an event at the end where the grain in harvested, but in the meantime there is a lot of unseen growth that takes place. So the soil produces and he doesn’t know how it happens. He is not watching, he is not checking all the time to see what is happening. He can from the outside see that there is growth taking place, he can see the blade and he can see the stalk and the leaf and things like that. He can see that the head is maturing, but he is not part of that process. He is just observing that process. At some point, of course, as we know in modern day farming, even then, there are some things you can do to help a plant to produce better or to fertilize or things like that to cultivate the ground, but in reality the growth part of it is not his doing. He started the process with a seed, he will finish it with a harvest but in the meantime, it is a work that is aside from him. He just sees it happening and it is not his doing. 
The same thing takes place in spiritual terms. We come from a place here where there is little or no spiritual understanding to a place where there is another event where we actually come to a place where we are ready to accept Christ as our Savior. In the middle of that, between the first understanding of God at all to the place where we are ready to accept Christ is actually a long process. Long in terms of a number of things have to happen, not long in terms of time sometimes. And it depends greatly on the soil, like it says here the soil is the things that helps the plant to grow. And it you grew up in good soil, I grew up in a family that my Dad was a Pastor and his Dad was a Pastor and so I grew up in a wonderful Christian home where many of the truths of scripture where ingrained in me from birth. I knew the stories and songs and things every since I was a little kid. Our dinner table prayer was, ‘Thank you Jesus for this food, for life and health and every good. Be with us now as we partake and bless us all for Jesus sake. Amen.’ We said that almost every meal as a family, held hands, and said that. That taught us that God was our provider, that taught us that we were in his hands. These truths were part of me and so a lot of the process we are talking about here was already there because I had a soil, an environment, that really produced that kind of understanding in me. Some of you grew up in homes that had no interest. (Turn tape)

Slowly and accelerate sometimes it is in a hurry, sometimes it is almost momentary. The process can take a little or a long time. But there is kind of an interesting process we all go through. Some of it is age related, in my case it was age related, because the soil was really good, I just had to come to understandings. But to some of you without that good surrounding people may have to give you some good answers and some incite and things like that to get you to understand more and more, to help you understand. But there are people who actually who have put the thing in kind of a process so we can understand how we move from place to place and step to step. But understanding about Christ comes as a process, not just a one day event. First of all we start way back here, where we really don’t have much knowledge or understanding of God at all. And little children don’t and that is why, in fact, when we teach children we don’t try to teach them deep theological thoughts, we try to teach them that God is love. ‘Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.’ Simple truths about God so they come to an understanding that there is a God and that God cares for them and that God is interested in their lives. Those are elementary in terms of basic truths we all have to understand. So first of all we go with no knowledge of God’s nature or character to a kind of vague awareness, kind of a undefined understanding that there is a God out there, to a consequence realization that there is truly God and then we have to answer the questions, what kind of God is he? We have to get some help with that sometimes because if we come up with our own solutions we come up with all kinds of definitions of God. By the way we look for places to find these things out sometimes. And if we don’t know that the Scripture’s are the best source for those things or people who know the scriptures our able to give good answers, sometimes we will search in all the wrong places. 

One of the wrong places to look is on the bookshelf of your neighborhood grocery store. I saw this the other day, in fact. Conversations with God for teens. Don’t buy it. Ok, do not give it to your teens, do not give it to anybody. If you see them, if you want to spend the money buy it and burn it. It is actually aimed at Christian young people so that their ideas of God are reshaped into understanding that is false and contrary to scripture. Here are a couple of questions, it is kind of a question and answer type of format. Here is one of the questions: Some of the kids are cheating in class and on tests, they want me to join them but I know that cheating is wrong. Here is God’s response, There is no such thing as right and wrong. As we discussed earlier. There is only what works and what doesn’t work given what you are trying to do. Ok. Another question, How can we change our schools? God suggests abolishing tests and scores. I kind of like this one actually, Tests and scores and marks and measurers letting the joy in each child be the measure. Actually we are trying to move that way in many areas but another question is. Why am I a lesbian? God’s reply, Go now out into the world and celebrate who you are. These are conversations with God for teens. Ok, so if a teen is saying I don’t know much about God, I know there is a God but I am kind of curious at to who he is, what he thinks about things, and so here is a book that will help me understand God. They certainly wouldn’t understand God from those answers or from that book. You need to find from somebody who knows the scriptures, through your own study, scholars call it our own original study means you do your own reading. But also go to people to confirm what you understand to be true with Christians who really do understand the nature of God. Probably the most important thing we can do in life is to gain a proper definition of God’s character. A proper definition of God’s character. If we misunderstand God we misunderstand everything he says. We don’t understand why things happen, we have answers for most everything when we understand God’s true character. Because he speaks out of his own character. He does things out of his own character.

I remember Louella Birdsall years ago at the event of Jennie Walters death, afterwards she said, ‘If we knew all that God knows, we would do all that God does.’ That is true if we have God’s character. If you have the same character as God because we would have better understanding if we knew everything that God knows. All the events and all the reasons and all these things. If we knew them we would have understanding and be able to do what God does with that understanding. But we don’t, but we don’t, so we have to understand God’s character. Once we understand God’s character then we understand much more of what he does. So first of all we get to an understanding that there is a God, what kind of God is he when we get proper answers to those it kind of moves us then of course when God begins to instruct us the first thing he instructs us about is his son, Jesus. So now we hear the term. We understand that there is a person named Jesus, it is not just a swear word. There is actually a person. It is amazing, by the way, how many young people do not know that Jesus is more than a swear word. That he is a real person. 

A few years ago, probably seven or eight years ago, at Easter time I was called into a family that I had known for a number of years, not a church family, but I had known them through business associations and stopped into visit because the mother was close to death. And so it was right near Easter time and I sat down with the family, her, her husband, and the granddaughter and a couple of friends of their’s ranging from about nineteen years of age to sixty-five years of age. The granddaughter was young, the two friends were in their thirties and forties, the husband was around sixty and she was about sixty-five. And so ranging from twenty to sixty-five, five people in the room. Plus a couple of great granddaughters who were little ones and I sat down with them and I wanted to make sure there was a real clear understanding of the gospel message and as I sat down I said, ‘Now I would like to talk to you about the things that Easter really does mean to us’ Because Easter was just the weekend before. And I said, ‘Now you understand what the events of Easter where. You understand Good Friday, and the resurrection and things like that and everybody but one said, “No, we don’t know what Easter was about.” I said, “What, you don’t know who Jesus is? No. You don’t know that he died on the cross and he rose again? No.’ Didn’t know that. I thought everybody knows that. But they didn’t know that, only one in the whole family, the gentleman, knew of the events of Easter. Nobody else knew what Easter was about. So I had to start from scratch. So I started with Adam and Eve and said here is what God’s intent was. And here is what happened. Sin came into the world and so the remedy for sin was Jesus death on the cross and so I started from the very beginning, tried to give understanding. I could not believe that people who had grown up in this country that many years did not know what Jesus had done. Whether they accepted him or not was not even an issue, they didn’t even know what he had done. And so there is an understanding to some degree of God then we have to understand about Christ. We have to understand who Jesus is, what he did and the fact and the significance of what he did. That there is something, not just a historical event but it really means something to my eternal destiny. So yes we understand about God, he teaches about Christ, the scripture teaches about Christ becoming an understanding.

By the way, to some of you it is like I knew all that stuff, well that is good that you knew all that stuff, but others don’t know all that stuff and kind of come through a process of understanding and all of us do. To some of us it is more compressed than others. But then we begin to understand, and say Ok there is a man named Jesus, and I need to know a little more. What did he do? When we understand what he did then we understand the significance of what he did in terms of me. At some point we need better answers to our questions. We need somebody who knows. And that is where we who have been there a little ahead of others can give answers. And say this is who Jesus is, this is what he did on the cross, this is where the scripture talks about being born again. This is the reason he came, this is why our works don’t get us into heaven. This is why we have to be saved. And so good Christians need to be able to explain to non Christian friends the story of Christ so they can make an informed decision about Christ.

So when we learn about God, we learn about Christ, we finally come to the understanding of the significance of what Jesus did, which leads us to the understanding that an event needs to take place. There is a process that is going on but there has to be an event where we make a clear decision to follow Christ. To many of us we think that is becoming a Christian. No becoming a Christian is all the process where we go through either from birth all the way up through or from adulthood where we come to an understanding of God, his true nature, about what Jesus did and finally come to the place where we say, ‘I need to repent of my sins and trust Jesus Christ as my Savior.’ That begins another set of processes, of course. But we tend to see that as the event. And it is, it is a moment in time but the decisions to come to that decision have been a process. Like the stops along the way to get the Oriole to my house last night. I don’t know about, I don’t know when he came to understand that he needed to turn right on Mullet Avenue. I don’t know when he came up Old 27 and turned left on Hatton and turned North. I don’t know how he got there. But he got there. So I see the event, he knows the process. And you know the process of your own thinking. Where are you? Are at a basic understanding of God? Are you at an understanding about Christ? Are you to the place where you say Ok I am beginning to really understand that I need to make a decision here. And the decision needs to be for Christ. Many people get stuck at that point because they tend to think that I can make a decision as to which way I want to get to heaven. I can earn my way or I can follow Christ. Either one gets you there. No, that is not true. The full understanding is that we can not get there any other way than Christ. And to make no decision is to continue to make the wrong decision. It is like sitting on the railroad tracks with a train coming. To make no decision is a decision isn’t it? You are not deciding whether I am going to move or not move you are deciding if I stay put I am in big trouble. So I need to decide to move. And so therefore the decision to follow Christ becomes a real. So we have an understanding about God, we get a true understanding of God through somebody who are Christians or somebody we can teach us through maybe literature. There is some really good literature out there like the Bible. There are places that we can learn about the character of God. We learn about Christ, we find out that he is more than just a word, he is a person. And a person who did something significant in history. But the historical significance given is not enough. That significance must take place in my life where I trust him for my salvation. Then we make that decision. It is an event. At a moment in time, we didn’t come there easily or shortly or quickly. We came there over time. Like I say for me, I had that environment early. So the decision was early in my chronological life but I still went through the same process. And you may be a little older and you may have come through the process as an adult. We all go through it though. We all come to a basic understanding of it all, we come to a basic understanding of Christ, we come to the place where we say Ok the scriptures teach that I need to be born again. When are you going to make that decision? Or when did you? We don’t want to get to the end of our chronological life without having made that decision.

But that also makes a new process begin. Which is the process that God requires of us, that once we have accepted Christ we are baptized. We become obedient to him, we become a disciple of Christ. We become a minister because a minister doesn’t mean pastor it means somebody who is serving God in whatever capacity that God calls you. So we begin at our decision for Christ and it begins a new process. Of maturity, of growing in Christ, of ministering for Christ, and finally the graduation occurs when we finally get to spend eternity with him. Whether he comes and gets us or whether we leave this life through the natural process of death. One of those times we leave. But there are processes and events, processes and events. Well, we come through a process and say Ok God has said I need to follow Christ, what is your decision. Jesus says the farmer puts the seed in when nobody is looking this growth takes place. Nobody really knows what part of the process you are in or how you came through that process. You can tell us, you can say well it started when a friend of mine started telling me about Christ and I began to ask questions and I was curious about it and I started reading and I had some questions I needed to have answered, they gave good answers and God began to work in my life and I came to a decision for Christ. That is God’s prevening grace, he works us to the process. But it is invisible to the naked eye and in fact most people from the outside can’t see what is going on. We might see some evidence, but maybe not. That is why he says the farmer walks away and he doesn’t know that God’s doing this. He doesn’t know how he is doing it. He is just confident that growth will occur. 

I think that needs to give us some encouragement. Because I know many times I have talked to people about Christ at one point I am not sure what they understand but as time has gone along God has done a work, God has given incite, God has given friends who have answered questions. In fact almost every time, that I have ever ask a person if they are ready to make a decision for Christ and they do, I ask them has somebody been talking to you about this before? Every time they say, “Yes, back when I was a kid my Grandma told me this, my wife or husband, or friend of mine in college or somebody else has been and I come to an understanding that I need to find Christ. Campus Crusader for Christ years ago, or Campus Crusade said that it is not unusual for a person to have heard bits and pieces of the gospel twenty five times before they come to a decision for Christ. Elmer Towns called it the law of three hearings. We have to have something explained to us three times before we really begin to catch it. And so I would like to think a person on the very first hearing understands everything. Well, I don’t and if you are like me it takes a while to sink in. But the Lord sinks it in. He gets us to understand a little more, he helps us to understand a little more, but we finally come to a place where we have to say ok I need to make a decision. What is the decision? To not make one is the wrong one.

Let’s pray. Father we thank you that you have sent Jesus Christ that we might not have life in ourselves because we die, we can’t do anything about it. But I just heard again this morning about a fellow 51 years of age just a few weeks ago found out about an illness he had that had not been there before, or at least hadn’t been discovered, it was hidden to human eyes and then a few weeks later now he has passed away. Just my age. Father we don’t know how long we live. We don’t know what events will take place in our life that would make us so we are unable to make that decision for you. Father I don’t know where people are in their thinking, I am sure there are some this morning who are just kind of saying, ‘I am still questioning about the existence of God.’ Wondering what kind of a God he is. How can God allow evil to take place? And how can God do this or how can God allow that? Father we need to be able to give sound answers from the scriptures about your character and your doings. Father another person may be at the place where they are saying, ‘Yes, I have heard about Christ, I am getting a better understanding, I need to know more.’ Father help us to gain good understanding about Jesus Christ. And there are others Father who may be at that place where they are saying, ‘Yep, I understand and I am beginning to realize that I need to make a decision.’ Today would be a great time to make that decision. Or tomorrow, I don’t need to be there, nobody needs to be there. The growth of the plant is hidden from eyes of humans in terms of how it works, so God is doing a work in your heart that you need to acknowledge. Say God you are working in my life and I know that. Today would be a great time to say, ‘Lord it is time for me.’ Another person it may be tomorrow, maybe next week, but definitely can not put it off for long because we need to make that decision for Christ. Father I pray this morning that you would impress that upon our hearts. If there is a person here, two people or three or four or five who are at the place where they are understanding that decision needs to be made for Jesus Christ. Father help them to make it right now. It doesn’t need to be something that everybody can see, it doesn’t need to be visible, or public, it can be because it is a process that has been hidden. It is one of those things that will become evident because if a person truly finds Christ their life will change. People begin to say something is different about you. We need to be able to say. ‘Yes it is because I trusted Jesus Christ as my Savior and the Holy Spirit is now changing my life.’ So I pray that would take place this day in some hearts, tomorrow in some others, Tuesday or Wednesday or soon in others. But others who need questions answered, Father, I pray that you would give us places to do that, times to do that when we can sit down and just be able to explain the reason for the hope that lies within us. Father don’t let us go from here without trusting Jesus Christ as our Savior. In Jesus Name we ask it, Amen.

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