Ministering To The Indecently Exposed

In our text we are introduced to the reality that sometimes good people can face moments of indecent exposure. This is the case in the life of a man named Noah. Noah was a righteous man. He was a follower of God left on the earth. The Bible says he was blameless among the people of his time. It also says he walked with God. Living in a society saturated with sin and rebellion against God, Noah was a man who pleased God. Noah is a follower of God remaining in his generation. As an architectural engineer and shipbuilder, he put together an amazing structure called an ark, the likes of which had never before been built. During a time where there was no rain and the people reminded him of his foolishness for investing time and energy in an assignment that made no sense, Noah stayed faithful and obedient to God until God sent the rain. He was willing to risk his reputation just to follow what God told him to do. Noah was a great man, faithful to God and had a love for God’s people.

Because of Noah’s obedience in a time when it seemed more rational not to obey God, God gave Noah a new assignment. Noah has become elevated from a herdsman to a church planter under the auspices of the Founder named God. He has been ordained and appointed to be Senior Pastor of the New Beginnings Church of God. With any pastoral appointment there is a charge. God charged Noah and his sons with these instructions and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. As we can see, God honored Noah for Noah’s obedience to God and for him honoring God with his life.

However, one day Noah did something that caused him to become indecently exposed. The bible said that Noah, a man of the soil, who was the first to plant a vineyard, drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent. The developer of the new human race, who has been faithful to God, now finds himself drunk and uncovered. This good man with a testimony is tipsy. He has a once in a lifetime moment where the worker became wasted. He is righteous, faithful, upright and just but in this period of his life he has perused the parameters of corn liquor, became well acquainted with Jack Daniels, experimented with gin and juice, mixed cranberry and vodka, indulged himself in Crown Royal and perhaps finished with Sangria. He is anointed but became an alcoholic; he is righteous but wreaks whisky and sold out for God but becomes intoxicated.

The text does not tell us why he was drunk. There is no reason given for his state of drunkenness. I know from my experiences in life that some situations will make you want to take a taste. I know some of us are trying to be phony and super religious. However, some things will make us want to throw our heads back not to say Hallelujah but BOTTOMS UP!!!!! Through pure speculation, maybe he was drunk because he was wrestling with the assignment given to him by the Divine and realized that it was too much for him to handle. It is a possibility that he became drunk because Sister Noah had a hard time understanding her husband’s call causing her to beat him up instead of lifting him up. Perhaps Noah became intoxicated because he had to deal with some crazy members of the human race who nick picked about everything Noah did that they didn’t like in his new pastorate. I don’t know why he became drunk but he did.

I want to stick a pin right there and note parenthetically that we never know why people do what they do. It is crazy that we believe we can analyze somebody else’s life based upon what we heard and we were not there because we don’t have a clue about the reason for it occurring. This is why I have learned how to stay out of other people’s business and mind my own. I have enough stuff going on in my own life that I don’t have time to be mingling in your. Often times we hurt people in church because we look at them and make conclusions about them based upon our own interpretation of their presentation. However, sometimes speculation will lead to humiliation as result of a misinterpretation. If you don’t know the full situation then you have no right for perpetual participation. Look at your neighbor and say, “BUTT OUT!!!!” If we are not careful, we will make ourselves look dumb because we jumped the gun on some things without grasping an understanding of the situation. Then we will discover that some things are not for us to understand but to leave alone. I may not understand it but I know God’s got it!