We stood in the smelly, destroyed former living area of their home. They were but one of the 24,000 victims of Hurricane Ivan. Broken dishes, smelly sea weed, soaked carpets, what a mess! And she said: “We just don’t know what to do, where to go, where to start!"
At various times in our life journey, most of us will sooner or later find ourselves at such a point, usually more sooner than later. Times when you are overwhelmed and just don’t know what to do next? Maybe you are there right now. If so listen up.
When every day becomes a struggle and you just don’t know which way to go. It is so hard to make a decision and every decision you make seems to be the wrong one. Should I retreat to the past, the elusive security of a day gone by? Shall I run blindly into the unknown future?
The problem is that when we come to these crossroad places in our journey, times when we have to make a choice, usually we are so tired to the point of exhaustion, confused to the point of frustration, and disappointed to the extent of depression that we do one or two things, repeat what didn’t work before or do nothing.
When you don’t know what to do, Lord knows, what do you do? When you don’t know where to go, Lord knows, where do you go? Well, the Lord does know and that is the one we must look to. We must ‘Let God Lead Us.’
The Bible tells of a number of persons who found themselves at such a juncture and their stories can inform, inspire and give help to us.
There was Moses who was minding his own business as a Shepherd until he took on the role of the Emancipator of the Egyptian slaves and one day he found himself with his back up against the Red Sea and the soldiers of the Egyptians were bearing down on him.
There was Elijah who ran for his life from the soldiers of Jezebel and came to the mountain of the Lord to ask God, What now? Which Way is forward?
And there was Jesus who went to the Garden of Gethsemane and prayed seeking direction from above.
In all of these stories, there is a way out of trouble. Moses, Elijah and Jesus sought help from above.
1. When you don’t know what to do, when you don’t know which way to go, Look to Him who is above, to God, and Let God Lead You! It worked for Moses, Elijah, Jesus, and it will work for you.
One of the most difficult and yet most powerful lessons we can learn in our life pilgrimage—is to let God lead us. He has promised to make a way for us through our pain and trials and He always shows up in very powerful ways as the great deliverer. He looks down upon us. He sees what is ahead when we cannot see the forest for the trees.
Sometimes we sing a prayer which reads
“Guide me O thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land,
I am weak, but thou art mighty,
Hold me with thy powerful hand,
Strong deliverer, strong deliverer, be thou still my strength and shield.
For Moses and the Hebrews, the waters parted and they walked on dry ground. For Elijah, he went back down from the mountain to deal with his problems and to anoint Elisha to be the prophet of Israel. For Jesus, it was the way of the cross, which became the doorway to the glorious Resurrection.
God always shows a way.
In the Scriptures read this morning, Jesus warns the disciples of a coming time of great suffering and confusion. “There will be earthquakes, famines, pestilences and other fearful events. Nation will rise against other nations. And there will be great signs from heaven and you will be persecuted. You will be brought before kings and magistrates, but do not worry about what you are to say as I will give you words. You will be betrayed by others, but not a hair of your head will perish, you will not be hurt as I will be with you.” “Trust in the Lord.”
Emory Purcell loved to camp out in the high country of the Colorado Mountains. When his first Grandson was born, he couldn’t wait till he was old enough to walk the high country trails with him. When the grandson was 11, he and Emory who was 60, went backpacking with supplies for two overnights. Sometime in the second day, they became hopelessly lost and their supplies were stretched beyond their limit as they were lost for five days. Emory recalls the experience and his prayers late one afternoon when he felt the strong urge to cross over a ridge of a mountain, and there in the valley was a park ranger on a white stallion that was looking for them. Emory, still today, says I had confidence that someone would come to us as the rangers knew the area we had entered, but I never dreamed that the deliverer would come on a white stallion.
2. God who is above will come to you in your time of great need, in your moments of despair and confusion. He will come to you! But sometimes you have to wait for him, you have to look for him, you have to listen for him.
The Psalmist writes: “Those who wait on the Lord, shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be afraid.”
This is not a passive way of waiting. Sitting around waiting for a check to be mailed, like most of us are doing in regards to our insurance companies. To wait on the Lord is to be actively pursuing his ways. One of the ways we “wait on the Lord” is through our religious practices. Daily we pray, weekly we worship, we give our tithe for the work of the Lord, and thus we acknowledge our dependence on God. We are wired to be dependent on him. Before we were ever born he had plans for us. It is He who created us and not we ourselves. “Trust in the Lord and lean not unto your own understanding, but trust in Him and he will direct thy paths.”
Just as we were dependent on Gulf Power to re-run the power lines to our homes so also we are dependent on someone outside of ourselves to lead us out of trouble. God is a source of power, beyond us. Our task is to actively wait on him and to do his blessed will daily, weekly, monthly, year after passing year.
One approach reflects a popular definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing again but expecting different results. If you have done everything you know to do without success, trying again with your limited knowledge and strength is not the answer.
The second common response to a hopeless situation is to stop trying altogether. These people just give up, believing nothing will ever work. Those who do nothing about an intolerable situation will find themselves stumped, stymied, stuck. When you try to get through life on your own limited strength, knowledge and resources leads ultimately to futility and a loss of hope and in time to death.
3. When you don’t know what to do about something, look to God above and actively wait on Him to provide a way, and thirdly, embrace your problems as gifts from God. When we embrace our problems as gifts from God, opposition becomes an opportunity for you to be sure that you are being led by God or your own selfish desires. If it is of God, the gates of hell will not prevail against you. If it is not of God, all the kings horses and all the kings men cannot put humpty dumpy together again.
I love the story of Winston Churchill who after his leadership as Prime Minister of England in World War II, was voted out of office. His wife trying to cheer him up, told him that this was a disguised gift from God, and Winston said: “My dear Winnie, if it is a disguised gift from God, it is very well disguised.”
You may feel much the same way, but I today encourage you to embrace your problems as gifts from God and challenging situations will provide opportunities for you to know for sure God’s divine will and direction. That being said, this Hurricane will probably improve some of us.
I don’t want to make light of the problems we are facing, I only want to encourage you to:
Look to God above
Wait on him with confidence, practicing the spiritual disciplines.
Embrace your problems knowing that God will accomplish something good through difficulty.
God led Moses, Elijah, and Jesus and if he did it for them, He will do it for you.
Finally, If you “love God with all you are and all you have,” as Jesus said we should, you will begin to see good things happening in your lives.
When you are in a bad situation and don’t know what to do, don’t pull away from God, draw closer! Love him more knowing he will get you out of this mess. Through your thoughts and actions, through what you believe and how you act, draw closer to him.
When you love God with every part of your life, your mind, your money, your feelings, your actions, there comes a wholeness and unity to your fragmented life. Like a well trained orchestra, every element of who you are can be used by God for a beautiful outcome. God will lead you—if you will allow Him!
With the coming of this week, the fall breezes blow and the emotions of gratitude arise from deep within our being. The Bible teaches that all times there are opportunities to give thanks to God, but our tendency is to limit Thanksgiving to a season, or a day, or at most few days; while the rest of the year we push on.
The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians: “Give thanks to God in all things”.
The Psalmist (92:1) says “It is good to give thanks to God”.
In Deuteronomy 26, as the Hebrews entered into the promised land they were reminded by Moses to remember their plight in slavery, their deliverance through the waters of the Red Sea and the trackless desert and to give the first fruits as a thanks offering to God.
So the season of Thanksgiving arrives and finds many of us having had a hard year.
Certainly, This Thanksgiving it will be no more difficult for us than it was for the first pilgrims in 1611 who lived on these shores and ate with the Indians. They had suffered harsh weather with the poorest of housing as shelter, Some 13 of 24 heads of families had died. Food was scarce, the work never-ending. And yet, under Gov. Bradford’s instruction, a “Solemn Day” for public thanksgiving was set aside to thank God for their survival, for the food they had, for the Indians who had befriended them. In hard times, they gave thanks to God.
A strange thing about hard times, when it is over, we will discover that healthy emotions will have entered our conscious whereas before, we were oblivious or neglectful of the blessings which we assumed as a birthright. Especially from hard times will arise deep feelings of thanksgiving.
Since the storm in September, there have been a number of individuals present in our worship services whom we have not seen before. I have noticed this has happened before especially at a time of national or community crisis. For example the numbers in worship increased after the War began in Kuwait, again on September 11, 2001, again when the war began in Iraq. You name it, at times of National or Community Crisis, there is a hunger or great need to be in the presence of God. Part of what happens is that we realize we cannot face life’s confusing circumstances alone. But the other thing that happens is that we realize how fragile life is and we want to give thanks that we are alive.
One fellow came to church recently whom I had never seen before and during the service seemed to be very attentive. After the service he came up to me and said to me, “I’ve been through the waters”. I didn’t understand and said as much to him. He explained that he had never heard the story of Moses and the early Hebrews who were caught between the soldiers of the Egyptians and the waters of the Red Sea, but the waters parted and they went through the waters on dry ground and toward the promised land and their freedom. My new friend’s story was that in the night of Hurricane Ivan, he had to vacate his house in the middle of the night, swim out to higher ground with trees snapping and falling all about him. Said he “The trees fell away from me and I reached high ground. Yes sir, I have been through the waters”.
In some ways, this year, we have all been through the waters: storms, accidents, misfortunes, broken relationships, disease. And yet, here you are! We have been through the waters! And there is this deep need to say “Thank You” to someone.
I suggest that we give thanks to God:
Let us give thanks for simple things daily accepted but seldom acknowledged.
Let us give thanks for special gifts which have met specific needs.
Let us give thanks for the supreme gift of God in the superior person of Jesus Christ.
1. Every day comes the simple things, daily accepted but seldom acknowledged!
Fresh water, electric lights, the photo ability of the human eye, and…do this for me…Our heart beats 70-80 times a minute, 4000 times an hour, over a 115,000 beats each day. By the time you are One year old, your heart has beaten over 42 million times. When you are 10 years old, 420 million times—don’t stop, when you are 40, it has beaten 1 billion, 683 million times. And when you are 80 it has beaten 3 billion 336 million times.
I challenge you to come up with 10 things you have done to earn your heart. How about 52? You have never received a bill for services rendered. You can do some things to keep it healthy, but you did absolutely nothing to deserve or earn it and its continuous beat. Give thanks for simple things, daily accepted and depended on, but seldom acknowledged.
2. And this year there have been special gifts which have come our way.
There have been American Red Cross workers, C-130 military aircrafts flying into our closed airport bringing food and water for us. We have learned a new term for the Government for which we give Thanks, and that term is FEMA. There have been strangers from all over the United States who have come and helped us in restoring electrical power, telephone and TV services, roofing our homes and cleaning the debris from our streets. We have received shipments of supplies through UMCOR and other sources such as the Food for the Needy Foundation in Atlanta, and we have distributed 2300 boxes of food to that many families, 600 flood buckets filled with cleaning supplies, 16 volunteer teams from out of state have come to sleep in The Wright Place and to help us. We have received $18,000.00 to assist the church in our hurricane relief ministry from friends and strangers outside of Pensacola to say nothing about what you have continued to give to keep the church alive and vibrant during these challenging days. One check came from Miami saying “I do not know you but I have heard of your good work, please use my check in your church’s ministry.”
3. And let us not forget to give thanks for God’s supreme gift in the superior person of Jesus Christ. In Christ we discover how to live in such a way that our lives are abundantly blessed and that we have the inner assurance of eternal life. You want to get your life together, then commit your life to Jesus Christ and watch what happens. I won’t have to worry about you doing something stupid, like drugs, or drinking and driving, or stealing something, or being ugly and gossiping or doing hurtful things to someone else. When you live in Jesus Christ, you don’t do these things. I won’t worry about you violating a sacred trust, if you are in Jesus Christ. You want to live a superior life, then accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. Do this and one day, you can say: “I have been through the water.”
Summary: Well there is much to thank God for today. Your list will be different from mine as all of us have a personal list, but now is a time to thank God. My new friend realized that by the grace of God “He had been through the water” and that’s why he came to church, to say thank you! Every day, in every Way, God blesses our lives. Feel your pulse beat…thank you, thank you, thank you.
There is in the heart of all human beings, a universal longing or yearning for peace. This basic need is identifiable most clearly for Americans at least around the significant holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas. We sing of “Peace, goodwill for all” but live in a world at war. In our worship we capture this longing with the use of our Advent vocabulary words like: Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy, but we live in a world that knows of violence, hate, despair and sadness.
For the moment, let us in spite of the world around us, consider the universal longing for peace. The Hebrew Word Shalom carries the double focus of this longing in that it communicates the fullness of God within the inner being of each human being and the cessation of hostility and warfare between peoples. The Eighth Century Prophet, Isaiah envisioned a coming age in which there would be peace within and between the nations of the world. It would be a time when swords would be beaten into plowshares, when the Lion would lay down with the lamb.
One of the many wonderful promises of God is that of this coming age of peace. Peace will surely come, but it is not yet. We are a long way from the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision which occurred some 2800 years ago. In Isaiah’s day, the Hebrew were restless as the Assyrian Government was capturing land and controlling life in the Middle East, and had their eye on the small nations of Israel and Judah. The Modest was a mess of confused relationships and cutthroat politics. The Southern Kingdom of Judah faced attack by Israel and Syria. Assyria overcame Syria and Israel and threatened Judah which looked toward Egypt for help. Not much has changed except the names since the 8th century before the birth of the Prince of Peace.
Someone asked me over the Thanksgiving holidays what I would be preaching about on Sunday and I mistranslated Isaiah 2, saying “I am preaching on the scripture: “And they will beat their plowshares into swords.” We both laughed about my mistake. There we were laughing about what was no laughing matter.
I had hoped that over the last 60 years since the war that was to end all wars, that mankind would have made more progress in achieving a more peaceful means of settling disputes, but not so. There is far to much violence on video screens and on the streets and in the homes of the human family. We have far too many pistols and assault rifles, tanks and bombs to make any of us very comfortable. Consequently we have far too many courtrooms and jails to handle our problems and everyday we live on the eve of the next terrorist tragedy.
In an age when we have witnessed the downfall of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, and destruction of the Berlin Wall, what does Israel do? but build a monstrous fence to separate themselves from the Palestine. The Holy Land of today is as divided as it was 2800 years ago in Isaiah’s day. And don’t think for one minute that this has anything to do with religion. The fact that Israel is Jewish and Palestian are Muslin and a small minority Christian has nothing to do with religion but is about politics and economics, nasty politics and greedy economics. The same is true historically with the separation in Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants, and the United States and Iraq/Afghanistan.
We have not come a long way at all, but continue to frustrate the vision of Isaiah and the longing in the heart of every human for peace.
A group of historians studying history have indicated that over the last say 5000 years, since 3600 BC, the world has known only 292 years of peace! During this period, there have been 14,351 wars large and small, in which 3.64 billion people have been killed. One life is too many. Since our entrance into the nation of Iraq, there have been 1200 American Soldiers lost, 30,000 injured and more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians who have lost their lives. We tend to date history by the wars. It was before World War II. It was after the Korean Conflict. It was during the Vietnam Era. It was before we invaded Kuwait, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Many a child will remember the Thanksgiving-Advent season of 2004 as the Christmas that Daddy Died.
One wonders where will all of this idiocy end. The nations of Africa which are in the majority regarded as “the developing nations” or Third World Nations, have seen their rivers run red with the blood of innocent. Today Islamic terrorists in the Sudan are practicing genocide among the black tribes of the country. Estimates now indicate that more than a million men, women, and children have been killed. This is not the will of God and Isaiah speaks of a coming Messiah who when he is crowned King of Kings and Lord of Lords, you will see nations “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and they shall not learn of war any more.”
Am I only dreaming? Naive hopes in the midst of a sinful humanity. If I am only dreaming, may I die clutching tightly to my dream of a day when war will be no more.
In the meantime, in the now, I invite you to share the dream of Isaiah of a coming age of peace with me, by:
Praying for peace Psalm 122:6.
Live each day as though the promise will be fulfilled today
And finally by working for peace.
In the early days of the Christian movement, when Peter and Silas and others led the growing church of the first Century, there was a lot of talk about “The Way”. It referred to a distinctive and distinguishable way of living and relating to others. The first Christians were even called “Followers of The Way”. This was but reflective of Isaiah’s vision now 2800 years ago when he said: “Let us walk in the Ways of the Lord.”