Made For A Mission Don't Panic Series

Made For A Mission-Don’t Panic

2/10/08 2 Samuel 11:1-5 1 John 1:5-10 Text 2 Samuel 11:1-12:1

Have you ever been in a situation in which you had to make a decision and for some reason you just panicked. Instead of running you stood still. Instead of hitting the brakes you hit the gas pedal. Instead of acing the test, your mind just went blank. You opened your mouth and nothing came out.

Sometimes when we are scared or confused or surprised by something we panic. The best thing to do in a panic, is to turn toward God. But often times when we panic, we become, afraid and fear leads us to make some very bad choices.

To bring you up to date from last week’s message, we found two people who were in situations they ought not to have been in. Through a series of willful choices, they came together. David the king, had sent for Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his most dedicated warriors to come to the palace so that they could have sex together. Although they both loved the Lord, they made the willful decision to please themselves rather than please God. They had a one night affair, and felt guilty about it. They repented before she left with the idea they would never see each other again. They thought they had put that night behind them, but things did not go along to their plan.

There is one thing about sin we should never forget. Although the choice to sin is ours, we never get to say what the final consequences are going to be no matter how well we try to plan things out in advance. When we choose to sin, we always give somebody else some control and influence over our lives that they did not have before. Sin is a kind of voluntary enslavement.

When we talk about Jesus setting us free, we’re talking about Jesus keeping us from making ourselves slaves to others. We saw that our mission in life is to do the will of God. The choice we have to make is between pleasing ourselves and pleasing Christ. That’s the issue we face everyday. Am I living for me or am I living for Christ? Living for Christ is going to mean a lot of tough decisions on our part.

Bathsheba comes to the realization, that even though she had repented and asked forgiveness, she is now pregnant, therefore what should she do. She is terrified at her future. Her husband was away at war, and he might not come back until she was well along in her pregnancy and starting to show. If that were the case, she could lose her life, because the penalty for adultery was death by stoning.

What would she say when her husband asked her who was the father? Would he believe her saying it was the king’s child? Would anyone believe her, after all at this point David is a very popular and beloved king in the heart of the people? Would people accuse her of making this story up just to try to save her skin?

Many women, Christian and not have found themselves and are finding themselves in the place of Bathsheba. They got involved with someone, allowed sin to become part of the relationship, and now they are pregnant. This is a major inconvenience and problem for their lives. If Bathsheba were alive today, if her first thought was not God, how are we going to make it through this, then very quickly the idea of an abortion would seem to be the solution to solve this problem.

The only problem is that it is not a problem, it is a human life that we are talking about. Let me ask you something, “When did God start loving you?” Was it when you got saved or before you were saved? God loved us all long before we were saved. How many of you believed God knew a 100 years ago that you were coming? How many of you knew that God loved you even then?

It does not matter how you try to define abortion or how you try to frame the debate on abortion, it still boils down to the killing of a life, and in this case the killing of human life. If we had to look at the aftermath of an abortion and saw a little hand cut off from a little arm which is cut off from a body we would turn away in sorrow and horror.

If we had to watch a late term abortion of a child that was ready to start crying and loving and opening his eyes, we would not claim that this is God’s will for us as a nation or a gift for us as believers to get ourselves out of problem that we willfully created. Again though, we did not create a problem, we created a child.