Faith, Hope, Love #5 The Route Out
Today we are going to finish up our series on Faith, hope and love.
Faith is trust and confidence that moves us to action.
Hope is power to proceed.
Love is the fuel of life.
And it all rises and falls on relationships.
With faith, hope and love, you live your life to the fullest.
With faith, hope and love, you dare to dream,
to risk, to become the person God created you to be.
1 Corinthians 13:11-13 (NLT)
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
When you receive God’s gift of reconciliation through Christ,
The Holy Spirit births faith, hope and love in your heart.
Faith, hope and love begin to transform you into the very image of
God.
Through faith, hope and love, you bring the Kingdom
with you to every one you meet.
Through faith, hope and love you are salt and light in this world.
Is it no wonder Satan desires to ruin your faith with doubt,
Crush your hope with despair,
Choke your love with shame.
You have an enemy set on a relentless attack to destroy your faith, hope and love.
To get out of a desert of doubt you will have to continually be doing three things.
You will have to continually be Embracing the pain,
You will have to be continually remembering God’s redemption story.
And you will have to be continually forgiving your betrayer.
To get out of a desert of despair you will have to continually be doing three things
Grieving your loss
Admitting discontent,
And Taking risks to lean into the future.
The path out of a desert of shame is receiving and giving the grace of acceptance.
Traveling these paths will get you out of the deep desert.
As you travel you find little oasis of faith hope and love.
But you’ll still be in the desert.
Showers of blessings,
And wells of living water spring up from within
Are still a long way off.
There is one more thing you will have to do to travel the route out of the desert.
To the wager of faith,
To the dream of hope
To the dance of love
You must engage. (Allender)
You must engage with God’s calling on your life.
Engage is what we need to talk about today.
You must engage if you want out of the desert.
You know the desert this world can be.
A desert filled with users and abusers.
Con-artist that steal a piece of your soul.
Injustice, depravation, atrocity.
You’ve been hurt, afflicted, rejected, and ridiculed.
Those that were supposed to love you didn’t.
Those that were to stand by you fled.
Stress and tedium, and boredom have sucked the passion out of your life.
Obstacles and challenges have blocked your turning dreams into
reality.
You hurt in secret.
You cover up your pain,
Put on a good face,
And take your place in the human rat race,
Where what little you have is being taken away
from you.
This is not the place you were meant to be.
Genesis 2:8-9 (NLT)
Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made. The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit. In the middle of the garden he placed the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Eden,
The place of right relationship,
The place of harmony.
The place of shalom.
The place where you live your life to the full.
We get glimpses of it from time to time.
A belly laugh with a friend,
A joyful celebration with family
The intimacy of a spouse
A great meal.
Winning.
These are glimpses of Eden.
The smile of a baby,
The satisfaction of knowing you’ve done a good job.
The first kiss of true love
The delight in the eyes of your recipient.
These are glimpses of Eden.
Righting a wrong.
Being the difference for someone else.
Receiving a gift of love
Creating or building or fixing or rescuing
These are glimpses of Eden
When I lived in Washington State,
A clear day revealing the beauty of the snow caped mountains in every
direction was a glimpse of Eden.
This summer, Sunset at the Barren Islands was a glimpse of
Eden.
Scuba diving in Hawaii,
Catamaraning in the Caymens,
Skydiving in San Diego
Rafting the American River
These are glimpses of Eden.
Eden
How things should be.
Where every belly is full,
Where every one is safe.
Where no one is sick.
Where no one dies.
Where there is no war.
The scripture tells us God created Eden for human beings to dwell.
And scripture tells us God will one day make the earth an Eden again.
Revelation 21:2-5 (MSG)
I saw Holy Jerusalem, new-created, descending resplendent out of Heaven, as ready for God as a bride for her husband. I heard a voice thunder from the Throne: "Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! They're his people, he's their God. He'll wipe every tear from their eyes. Death is gone for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all the first order of things gone." The Enthroned continued, "Look! I'm making everything new
Between now and then we live in the in between time.
Jesus inaugurated the kingdom.
We wait for Jesus to consummate the kingdom.
Mark 13:32 (NIV)
No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.
1 Thessalonians 5:1-2 (NCV)
Now, brothers and sisters, we do not need to write you about times and dates. You know very well that the day the Lord comes again will be a surprise, like a thief that comes in the night.
So we wait.
The wait is not inactive, not a do nothing but bide the time, sort of wait.
It is a wait of anticipation.
A wait of preparation.
A wait with some urgency to make a deadline
During the wait for the great day of the Lord,
We are to become more like Jesus
to live in the Kingdom,
And bring the Kingdom to others.
All with a sense of urgency.
God has given to you the ability to touch others with glimpses of Eden.
To bring the kingdom,
God has given you the ability to put feet to the prayer:
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done.
This is God’s call upon your life.
When you first became a believer,
With your confession of faith in Jesus,
The Father forgave you of your sins,
Gave you a full pardon,
And made you spiritually alive by putting Himself,
God the Holy Spirit in you.
2 Corinthians 5:17-19 (NIV)
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
God reconciled you to Himself,
Adopting you as His son or His Daughter,
Making you a co-heir with Jesus,
A prince or princess in the Kingdom.
These great a precious blessings come with a responsibility.
That responsibility is to bring this ministry of reconciliation to others.
To become more and more like Jesus
To bring the kingdom.
To reveal glimpses of Eden.
With so great a salvation comes a calling.
Its by engaging in your calling that a disciple of Jesus waits for the Day of
the Lord.
You know the paths out of the deep desert.
You know how to deal with doubt, despair and shame.
You know the route out,
But to leave the desert,
You must wait upon the Lord.
You must engage in the work of God’s calling on
your life.
To engage, God has equipped you with gifts, talents and skills to do the job, Again, that job, is to become more like Jesus,
to bring the kingdom,
to reveal a glimpses of Eden to others. (Allender, p 207)
A gift is a supernatural empowerment
given to you to use to reveal God to others.
A talent is a physical endowment
given to you to use to bring the Kingdom to others.
A skill is a learned procedure you use to give glimpses of Eden to others.
(Allender, p 207)
God has already given you gifts and talents,
To become skillful you must partner with God and learn.
It’s by using these gifts, talents and skills
That you will become more and more like Jesus
That you will bring the kingdom.
That you will reveal glimpses of Eden.
Gifts, talents and skills coupled with a burden will define your specific calling,
For me I first heard God’s calling in the desert.
When things are going great,
The noise of the good times,
Masks over the whisper of God’s voice.
Now I try to make times of quiet in my life so that I can hear God’s direction so I
can skip those desert vacations.
I need to stop right here and travel a little side street.
Last week I told you that God loves you just the way you are,
But loves you too much to allow you to stay that way.
To get you to become more like Jesus,
There is the path of discipline,
And there is the path of pain.
Discipline is tough enough.
The path of pain leads into the deep deserts.
You get to choose which path you want.
The path of discipline is chosen by getting serious about
your responsibility to God.
The path of pain is chosen by doing nothing.
A word for the wise.
Times in the deep desert sharpen our senses and we can hear the call of God.
That calling of God on our lives often comes in the form of a burden.
Burden is an interesting word,
It most often means something heavy that we must carry.
It can also mean something that you are deeply concerned about.
Something the breaks you out of your apathy,
And self-absorption.
Something that you cancel a party in order to take care of.
Something that matters to you,
Something that breaks your heart
Something that moves you to action.
A burden is a passion that typically rises out of your desert story.
(Allender, p. 207)
God calls us from the core of burdens to
specific arenas of service. (Allender, p. 207)
And by service I mean ministry,
And by ministry I mean love,
And by love I mean meeting the needs of others at
the cost of a personal sacrifice.
It’s these gifts, talents and skills
Focused by your burden,
That form your calling,
It is by engaging in your calling,
Your unique ministry of reconciliation
That you leave the desert behind.
Far too many Christians stay in the desert because they do not engage their calling.
They busy themselves with the cares of this world that just entangle them.
They grow content with the spiritual meagerness of desert life.
They don’t even know about the green and fertile land on the other side.
Those glimpses of Eden are to get you to hunger and thirst for what
you do not have yet.
A believer content in their comfort zone hovel will not engage their calling,
and get on that route out of a spiritual desert
They say—I’m beat up, wounded, scared.
I don’t have anything to offer, anything to give.
They say—I’m busy, my schedule is full, I’m stretched too thin, I’m tired
I don’t have time,
They say—I work hard so I play hard. As long as there is health in my body,
clothes on my back, food on the table and
money for a decent vacation,
I don’t need to be get all fanatical about my faith.
There are a thousand things that will justify inaction, delayed obedience, compromises with Satan, the World and egoism.
You may feel like you are safe in the little oasis of faith, hope and
love that you found.
But here’s the danger
Hosea 13:6-8 (NIV)
When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me. So I will come upon them like a lion, like a leopard I will lurk by the path. Like a bear robbed of her cubs, I will attack them and rip them open. Like a lion I will devour them; a wild animal will tear them apart.
You rest up in an oasis,
You heal your wounds in an oasis
You refresh your soul in an oasis
But you dare not stay too long.
There is a calling on your life.
You must engage it.
Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome
Romans 8:28-29 (NLT)
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
All that suffering in the deep deserts,
And your struggle to journey out of the desert—
Those are tough times,
I’ve often wondered what good can come out of that situation.
I’ve come to realize that the good that can come out the deep desert is a story of
God’s redemption.
God can redeem the pain and suffering in them to work a greater good by
you making those stories known to others.
Gifts, talents, skills, burdens and the story of the deep desert,
Your story, tells everyone the story of God.
He has given you your unique set of stories to make something known
about himself (Allender, pp 205-6),
Your story, that helped you become more like Jesus needs to be told by
engaging your calling.
Your story, brings the kingdom to others by engaging your calling.
Your story, reveals glimpses of Eden, by engaging your calling.
You engage your calling, by telling your story both in the things you do
and the words you speak.
It’s by engaging your calling you leave the desert behind.
And enter into the land of promise.
Deuteronomy 1:25 & Exodus 3:8 & Deuteronomy 8:7-9 & Nehemiah 9:25
"It is a good land that the LORD our God is giving us."…a land flowing with milk and honey…--a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills…. filled with all kinds of good things, wells already dug, vineyards, olive groves and fruit trees in abundance.
You can choose to leave the deep desert of doubt, despair and shame,
You can choose to travel from oasis to oasis in the desert.
You can choose to take the route out of the spiritual desert into
The Land of Promise.
You choose.