Patience In The Battle

Let’s open this evening with Hebrews 10:35, the foundational verse for this message. It says, “For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.”

I was raised in a small country church in Tennessee in the 1960s and 1970s. When I say small, I’d say about 60 or so folks attended each Sunday. Most of the adults were related, and if they weren’t, they had known each other all their lives, so they might as well have been related.

The adults in that little country, from what I could see as a child and teenager, lived out their Christian values. The people we saw on Sunday in terms of their speech and behavior, we saw throughout the week. Being true to their faith was important. They did their best to live holy before the Lord and they held the Bible in the highest regard.

The Church that we see today bears little resemblance to that little country church. It is a lot more selfish and the beliefs and values that were once held sacred and indisputable are slowly being erased in the Church.

It’s like the scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly and his siblings begin to disappear from a photograph. First his older brother, then his older sister, and then himself. The erasing began when Marty interrupted his father and mother’s first date. Marty almost changed their history, and his. His parents eventually went on their first date, danced, and kissed, and as a result, Marty and his siblings were back in the picture. 😊

Here’s my point: when Marty McFly went back in time to 1955, he almost changed the outcome of his parents’ first meeting and having teenage children in 1985 – 30 years later.

The genesis of what we are witnessing today in the Church began sixty-one years ago in 1962 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Engel v. Vitale, that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Establishment Clause – we know it as the separation of church and state.

Ever since that time, our country has been in a downward spiral of more and more sin, wickedness, and depravity. Ever since that time, the Church has also been on a downward spiral of an increasing willingness to tolerate ungodliness and, in many cases, participate in more and more ungodliness.

And the interesting thing about the Supreme Court’s ruling to take prayer out of schools – the matter was brought before them by two men of Jewish descent, an atheist and a person who practices Unitarianism.

It’s interesting to me that you have two Jewish people joining forces with an atheist and with a person whose standard for living is neither the Bible nor the Torah. Ladies and gentlemen, Satan brought together an unholy alliance and he’s still doing that today.

The decision removed All prayer from public schools. The student or teacher who wanted to pray privately was in violation of the law if they did so. A year later, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court ruled that school-sponsored Bible reading was also unconstitutional.

It took Satan sixty-one years to virtually erase a consciousness of God and the Bible in our country, but primarily in the Church.

Satan knows that, given enough time, he can influence the thought patterns of people who don’t know God and the people who are lukewarm in their relationship with God. And if he has his way, he will doom them to an eternity in the lake of fire with him.

And he is patient, especially with the Church. He doesn’t care how long it takes to convince the Church that agreeing with the world rather than God is in its best interest. He will literally wait decades to fully implement his plans. Sixty-one years and you see where we are.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that patiently influencing the thoughts of the Church over a period of years was a lesson that Satan learned after witnessing the impact of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt on the region many years later.

You know the story. It’s found in the second chapter of the book of Joshua.

Joshua had sent two Israelites to secretly spy out the land that included the fortified city of Jericho. Word gets back to the king that they had been spotted at several locations and were lodged in the house of a harlot named Rahab.

The king’s soldiers demand that Rahab turn the spies over to them. Before they arrived, Rehab had hidden the spies in separate places on her roof among the drying flax stalks. She told the soldiers the men were gone and should be found before the city gates closed that night.