Hindsight
…and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.  
I Corinthians 15:14

Do you ever have doubt?  My interest in doubt has grown since I read John Ortberg’s book, “Faith and Doubt: What if the most important word is the one in the middle?” Pastor Ortberg believes that the very nature of faith demands that uncertainty or doubt be present or faith is not faith!  Faith AND Doubt.  I find that idea very helpful. 

Hebrews 11:6 says, “And without faith it is impossible to please Him (God)…”  I find that verse very helpful!  It tells me that God will give me enough evidence to believe but never enough evidence to eliminate faith.  For some mysterious reason faith is a very important thing to God. 

My problem is facts are more important to me than faith.  I have to admit I am uncomfortable with the fact that God won’t resolve my doubts and make my faith into concrete reality right now.  I really wish He’d write scripture verses in the sky with clouds in Helvetica font so that I and all the unbelievers of the world would be absolutely convinced!  But He won’t or at least hasn’t done that yet.  Everyone I mention that to thinks it’s an awesome idea and are going to submit it to Him in prayer.  I have searched and searched for Biblical scripture that would explain God’s reasons for why faith is so important but I really haven’t come up with any that truly satisfy my soul.

Another interesting thing to me is how this difficulty of “Faith AND Doubt” is dealt with by different people.  Dr. Bart Ehrman, who has written a couple of New York Times Best Sellers concerning Christianity, is the professor of New Testament at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an agnostic.  How does an agnostic become a New Testament professor of anything, anywhere?  I don’t know.  But Dr. Ehrman says when he was a Christian he experienced some pain and suffering and it caused him to go down the unbelief road of agnosticism.  He gave up on the resurrection and called it vain.  His “Doubt overwhelmed his Faith.”  For him it’s no longer faith AND doubt, it’s just doubt.

I believe the resurrection happened, I’m a card carrying unionized follower of Jesus.  But I think when I die I’ll go through that long tunnel of bright colorful lights, like the one you see in movies, get beamed into the presence of St. Peter like Scottie on a segment of Star Trek and say, “Wow, this stuff is really true!”  I think I’ll be surprised.  I truly do believe, but I still think I’ll be shocked.  The wonder and bewilderment might be because of the majesty of heaven but I think it’ll mostly be because something in which I placed as much faith as I could muster up, actually happened.  My face will have that startled, stunned, astounded look, like when I asked my wife to marry me and she said, “Yes,” and I’ll be totally thrown off my guard with the abrupt sudden new reality.

I hope you have doubts too.  Without doubts the shock and awe of arriving in heaven’s reality would seem somehow, to me, to be diminished. 

The key is to let God know about your doubts.  I think He sits up in heaven and says to the angels, “Boy is that guy going to be surprised!”  I think it makes Him smile.

I don’t know why faith is so important to Him but I know the resurrection is true and I know my faith is not in vain, because of fulfilled prophecy, eyewitness accounts, it’s impact on the Christian church, day and book,  and especially because of changed lives.  (see sermon 4/22/2012 on the GateWay web site if you want to delve into that more)  Agnosticism and atheism have never changed someone so profoundly that an they went out and started a church, hospital, orphanage, crisis pregnancy center, mission, food pantry, or giveaway center.  Yet, thousands of believers in Jesus have started hundreds of thousands of those places.  To serve others while they waited for heaven.

I’ll go with faith.  I’ll keep my “Faith AND my Doubt!”  

Hindsight

The authors of scripture picked their words carefully!  When they record a location, a time, a road, or a person, there is always a reason for it.  They aren’t giving a travel log like some of us do when we want to communicate a story.  Some of us say things like, “Last Tuesday at 7:40, no, no, it was 7:20, because I remember Jeopardy was still on.”  That’s how we tend to tell stories. 

Not the authors of the Old and New Testaments.  There are no throw away lines or travel log details that aren’t important to the story.  The details are important. 

As we talked about Matthew 22:41-45 in last Sunday’s sermon, I hope you remember the very first line of that story.

“While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them…”(vs. 41) 

That line is very important.  Matthew 21:23 says that the whole religious leadership of Israel came to Jesus and asked, “By what authority are you doing these things?”  Jesus answered only in parables. 

They didn’t like that, especially when He was telling parables critical of their leadership. 

Matthew 22:15 says, “Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words…”  Matthew 22:23 says, “That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question…”  Matthew 22:34 says, “Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him…”  Soooooooo…

“While they were gathered together, Jesus asked them, ‘What do you think…”

Why is this so important to the development of Matthew's story?  The religious leaders are constantly coming at Jesus with aggressive, combative, debate style Rabbinic questions and in perfect Rabbinic form He is deflecting their questions with His own far more insightful questions. 

Jesus cuts to the core of their beliefs and confronts them with their legalistic rituals.  He challenges them to accept a relationship with God through Himself as the Messiah of Israel--and they’ll have none of it.  They continue to regroup, rethink, and strategize, “How do we trap Him?”  The fact that they might be wrong never enters their minds!

What is your faith in?  There’s nothing wrong with a certain amount of action, production and trust in your family, career, investments, and building the life that the book of Proverbs describes.  “Look to the ant, how he toils in summer… that he might enjoy the winter.” (Proverbs 6:1-11) Nothing’s wrong with hard work, industriousness and planning for a rainy day.  In fact, those things are very commendable. 

But the religious leaders refused to break out of their plans and get on the same page with the plans of God.  This is evidenced in Matthew by the way they continually try to trap Jesus in His own words, and their refusal to admit He must be the Messiah.  It is evident that they are frustrated because they can’t confound Him. 

These men are the best and the brightest of Israel.  Isn’t it interesting that they never say, “This guy is smarter than we are!  And we’re brilliant!  Maybe He is the Messiah!”  But instead of that conclusion, they simply beat their heads against the wall arguing with God!

Have you ever argued with God?  I have.  I lost. 

I wanted to be a college diving coach.  I dove for Ronnie O’Brien the US Olympic coach for years and years.  All my diving partners are now coaching at major universities all across the country.  I had to give that dream up.

When I went through the major crisis of my wife being in ICU for nine weeks, I was teaching at Sierra Jr. College part-time. I went back to school to complete a master degree in Exercise Physiology at Sacramento State so I could teach full time at Sierra Jr. College.  I felt burnt out and emotionally crippled because of the intense psychological stress of my wife’s illness.  So I wanted to get out of church ministry for a awhile and try to recoup. But Jesus got me on the phone with two different churches asking me to, either go to Honolulu and take over a church with a small Bible College or, go to San Jose and plant a church.  I went to San Jose and planted a church. I pastored that church for eight years and that church now runs over 2,000 per Sunday.

“While they were together, Jesus asked them a question…” 

What question is Jesus asking you?  Think about this seriously; there are no throw away lines in the Bible.  Is Jesus asking you to make a decision?  Be baptized?  Read scripture every day?  Pray?  Tithe?  Teach Sunday School?  Drive the golf cart?  Love your wife as Christ loves the church?  Consider weaknesses in your parenting?

Jesus asked them a question that would have changed their whole mindset.  They would have accepted Jesus as their Savior and believed in Him as the Messiah of Israel.  Instead they squandered and wasted their lives clinging to their plans.  In 70 A.D. their plans became a smoldering trash heap of a city that was once Jerusalem.

The Apostles were allowed to set in motion an organization that is still conquering the world!  Whose plan would you really rather follow?

3-09-12

Hindsight

It’s Easter Monday morning and the staff is DESERVEDLY taking today off.  The offices are empty and I’m sitting at my desk writing.  My wife is at work so I thought I’d take some time to catch up!  I’m reflecting back over what a great day GateWay enjoyed yesterday, Easter.  It’s really not about the number of people that came.  It’s not about the number of decisions that were made. It’s not about the new people with whom we connected.  Those things are important but they’re not vital.  What is vital is honoring the name of Jesus and celebrating his resurrection and victory over the grave.

An old story that I cut from my sermon yesterday goes like this:

A father was driving his pickup slowly down a country road on a warm spring morning with his young son buckled into the seat beside him. Because of the heavy rain the thin two-lane road was overgrown by the tall wild flowers.  Since the road had no shoulder the flowers grew right to the edge and even brushed against the side of the truck.  The boy could reach out and touch them if he so chose.  He didn’t because he’d had a severe allergic reaction to a bee sting last year so he kept his hands safely inside the pickup.

But as fate would have it, a bee flew in the driver’s window.  The boy was on the verge of panic when the quick-handed father nabbed the bee in mid flight.  The boy had just started to relax when the father then opened his hand and released the bee in the truck.  “Don’t worry!” Dad said, “Look at my hand, the stinger is right here.”  For the boy the bee was now just a harmless insect like all the others.

What changed the disciples as they gathered locked and barricaded in that room on Easter morning?  The appearance of Jesus, they were OVERJOYED!  What gave them courage to speak to multitudes in his name?  Fear of death no longer held them in it’s grip.  Jesus had been there and successfully returned. 

Paul writes, “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?” I Corinthians 15:54-55

I hope Easter impresses on your heart what it impressed on the heart of the Apostle Paul.  We mortals will, as Jesus did, take on immortality one day.  We need not fear death.

I hope it wasn’t the music, the preaching, the fun or the people who impressed you yesterday.  I hope you were impressed by the fact that Jesus Christ conquered the grave and he deserves every ounce of honor and adoration that our feeble hearts and souls can pour out to him.  He really, really IS risen…He really, really IS risen indeed!

God bless you all,

GateWay

Reach Wide – Teach Deep – Unleash Community Impact

I have a good friend whose first son got married
so they paid for a first class honeymoon suite at
a luxurious hotel. The newly weds arrived really
late in the evening after their wedding.

Looking forward to their first night as a married
couple in a very expensive King sized bed they
found themselves in a room with a sofa, a chair
and a coffee table! The sofa had a hide-a-bed, so
they pulled it out and spent a miserable night on
a very uncomfortable lumpy double sized mattress.

The next morning the groom unloaded verbally
on the hotel clerk at the front desk. The clerk said,
“I don’t understand, didn’t you open the door to
the bedroom?!” The groom sheepishly went back
up to the room and opened the door he mistakenly
thought led to a closet and found…a king-sized bed
covered in fruit baskets, boxes of chocolate and
a dozen red roses! True story.

The moral to the story, “TRY EVERY DOOR AVAILABLE!”
There are people in the Visalia region that have never
tried a door leading to the interior of a church. Use this
line, “If you don’t have a church to go to on Easter, I’d
like to invite you to GateWay.” It’s a known fact that the
world goes to church on Easter. There will be hundreds
of people at GateWay this Easter morning. I hope you sit
and say, “I’m so glad I invited…”

 God Bless,
Pastor Ed

GateWay Easter Weekend Schedule

Good Thurs. / Friday Communion Service
 6:45pm 12:15pm

Kids Free Egg Hunt Saturday, 10am

Easter Sunday
8:00am - 9:30am - 11:00am

Hindsight

God provided prophecy in the Bible so we could understand that Jesus’ fulfillment of prophecy was an enormous pre-arranged set-up by God so we could confidently place our faith in Him.

In the Bible there are more books that fall under the heading, “Prophets,” than any other heading in the Bible.  In the Old Testament there are 4 major (important and longer messages) prophets and 12 minor (important but shorter messages) prophets.  In the New Testament we have the Revelation. 

Webster’s dictionary explains that the word prophecy or prophet is about predicting and foretelling the future.  But a Prophet in the Old Testament was an agent of God who was more concerned with forthtelling already known information about God than foretelling something that had not yet happened. 

For example, when Jonah goes to Ninevah, he acts as a prophet telling the people to repent or God will soon destroy them and their city.  When they repent--God’s relents and Jonah’s foretelling becomes forthtelling.

Here are 3 facts about prophets from the Bible:

#1.  The Prophets were, in a sense, code enforcement officers.  Just as a city has officers that make sure handicap codes are enforced so that the parking slots are in the right place and clearly marked for usage, God gave Israel covenants and laws that they had agreed to live by.  In the same way that we call marriage a covenant, and are to live within that covenantal agreement with our spouses, Israel was to live within its covenantal agreement with God.  Unfortunately, Israel wasn’t very good at it.  So God would often call a Prophet to speak to the people about their lack of compliance, motivation and heart attitude. 

#2.  As God’s representatives, the Prophets were to deliver God’s message, not their own.  The Hebrew word Nabi (prophet) comes from the verb, “to call.”  God drafted the prophets and then drafted the message He wanted shared.  The only prophet I can think of that “volunteered” was Isaiah (Isaiah 6), the rest of the prophets were “voluntold,” or called, by God!

#3.  The Prophet’s messages were repetitive.  God rarely gave prophets new information, more frequently He directed them to repackage what He’d already told his people.  Without demeaning or minimizing the Word of God, think of it as “marketing.”  The prophet Hosea 4:2 says, “There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery.”  In this short verse Hosea has summarized 5 of the 10 Commandments in one word statements, much like Jesus did in Luke 18:20.  So: 3^rd commandment = cursing, 9^th commandment = lying, 6^th commandment = murder, 8^th commandment = stealing, 7^th commandment = adultery.  This is Hosea’s way of saying, “You’ve broken the 10 commandments!”  He wanted to make sure that the ancient message of the 10 commandments was understood in their contemporary community.

But when we look at the New Testament we find the Apostles all appealing to prophecy in order to understand who Jesus is--why?  Because Jesus is God the Son in human flesh Who called the prophets and drafted their messages and is now going to add a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34).  Animal sacrifice was always required between the two parties in order to ratify a covenant.  Jesus Himself eliminated animal sacrifice and was the once for all sacrifice of the New Covenant. So we see the Apostles all appeal to prophecy as the confirmation and credentials of Jesus and His sacrifice. 

Deuteronomy 18:18 says, “I(God) will raise up for them(Israel) a prophet like you(Moses) from among their brothers. I will put my words in His mouth, and He will tell them everything I command Him.”  That’s why Jesus said, “For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me commandment, what to say, and what to speak. And I know that His commandment is eternal life; therefore the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told Me.” John 12:49-50

Jesus is the agent of God who was concerned with forthtelling already known information for God rather than simply foretelling something that had not yet happened (although He also did that at times as well).  The Apostles were concerned that we understand Jesus was the author and fulfillment of the message of the Prophets.  Jesus fulfillment of prophecy was designed to become a major source of confirmation for our faith in Him.