There was once a man who loved to fish. As a matter of fact, he fished so much that he became an expert at fishing. It was not long before other people began asking him to teach them to fish also, which he did.
The word spread and pretty soon a sporting goods company hired him to teach their customers how to fish. He was a huge success and many people learned to fish. But the downside to all this was that the more time he spent teaching other people how to fish, the less time he had to go fish.
The bottom line was he taught others how to do something, but he ended up doing none of it himself.
Many churches are following the same pattern today. We sit inside our walls and satisfy ourselves that we are teaching others in the church how to be fishermen, but we are not going out into the community to do any fishing ourselves. There is a saying I have heard since I was a kid that explains what we do. We are “all talk and no action.”
A lot of Christians go to church and expect the church to do everything for them. They believe if they go to church once a week, they have fulfilled their duty as Christians. They need to realize that they have the same job duties to reach others as the church does. All of us need to back up and reassess what we are doing for the Lord.
In GENESIS 17:1, did God tell Abraham,
‘Stay where you are and be blameless?’
No, God told Abraham to ‘walk before me and be blameless.’ God knew that, for Abraham to receive His promised blessings, he had to go forth for the Lord to do the Lord’s work.
In GENESIS 26:3, God tells Isaac:
‘Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you.’
Isaac stayed in Gerar and God blessed him 100-fold. But notice that God told him to stay in that land ‘for a while.’
Reading on in GENESIS 26, we see where Isaac moved on from there and ended up in Beersheba, where God blessed him mightily. We see that when Isaac moved on for God, God blessed Isaac.
There is an old physics saying, ‘For every action, there is a reaction.’ How many of you know that ‘where there is no action, there can be no reaction?’
What am I getting at? You want to blessed by God, you’d better try working to bless Him first. He has given us a set of instructions but too many of us ignore them to the point where we are not even aware of what those instructions are. And if we are unaware of what they are, or that they even exist in the first place, we cannot obey God by following them.
Paul knew this very well.
In PHILIPPIANS 3:13 he said,
‘Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me Heavenward in Christ Jesus.’
Paul knew that the only way to get closer to the Lord was by walking toward him. Walking away from Jesus was no option, and neither was staying where he was.
Remember when the Israelites left Egypt and were being pursued by the Pharaoh and his army? Where were they? They were standing on the shore, with the army in front of them and the sea in back of them. They seemed to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. So what did they do? They started crying out to God to save them. What did God do?
In GENESIS 14:15 God said,
‘Why are you crying out to Me? Tell the Israelites to move on!’
God told them to do something! Go! Stop talking and start walking!’ He had already delivered them from their evil oppressors and the plan was for them to go to the land He had promised them. But when they came to the Red Sea, they stopped.
They could not go to the left or right because there was nothing but steep mountains. They could not go back because the soldiers would kill them. And they saw no way of going forward. But what we see is that as soon as they began to go, God made a way for them to do so. Scripture does not say God made a way for them to escape later on, but He made the way right then - when they needed it. But they had to initiate God’s actions by stepping out in faith first.
And that is where many of us falter yet today. We are willing to do things when we see a way to do them, but when we see no way to proceed, too often we just quit. And then what do we do? We cry out to the Lord to help us out. I think the answer we should hear back is this: “I quit only after you quit. If you start again, so will I.”
In JOSHUA 3, Israel came to another obstacle. They found themselves at the brink of the water on the Jordan river. What did God tell them to do? Go forward! And once again, God divided the waters so they could obey His command to ‘GO.’
God allowed many obstacles to come before the Israelites, yet He continued to demand that they move forward. And every time they stepped out in faith, to do the impossible, God provided the way for them to do it.
We can learn so much from them. As Christians, there are two things we will always find:
1) We will always find obstacles in our spiritual paths, and
2) We will always find resistance from the world in our Godly walk
But if we are diligent and keep focused on Jesus, we will find something else, too.
3) We will find that the Lord will always provide a way for us – as long as we are willing to step out in faith and move forward for His glory.
When I was about eight years old, I was a cub scout. My dad would take me over to my cousins house and he and I would then walk to the den meetings. After the den meeting, we would walk back to my cousins home and then I would walk the other two blocks to my home.
But just around the corner from our house, I had to walk by a yard that had a big dog in it, and that dog would bark at me like it hadn’t eaten in a week. All I could focus on was the fact that there was only a flimsy wire fence between me and that dog. I was always scared when I passed by that dog. But I knew the only way to get past the problem was to keep walking and not stop.
In 2 KINGS 7, we read about four men who had leprosy, and these men sat at the city gate. These men would slowly die of starvation if they just kept sitting there because there was a terrible famine due to the city being under siege.
So, they decided to go to the camp of the Armenians and surrender. They figured they might be killed, but they would die anyway where they were, and if they were not killed, at least they would be fed. So they went into the enemy camp.
I have been talking about how we need to step out in faith and when we do, God will provide a way. Too many Christians do not get up and go, because the world scares them. They are afraid they will upset someone if they are avid Christians, and they surely don’t want anyone saying awful things about them.
If those lepers had just been content to sit at the gates, they would have died. But they got up and went to the camp of the enemy. Can you imagine how scary that would have been, to walk into an enemy’s camp, knowing that they might kill you?
These men walked in faith, and what did they find? The camp was empty! The Lord let them hear the sounds of mighty chariots and the Armenians thought that several armies were on the attack. This caused them to flee on foot, leaving everything they had behind, including their horses, their gold, and all their food.
These lepers could not change their situation, but they knew something had to change for them to survive, so they changed their location. They moved forward. And when they did, they found themselves surrounded with an abundance of treasures and all the food they could eat.
And that is what God will do for us. When we stop being content with where we are, or with what we are doing, and get up and GO, stepping out in faith, God will provide His abundance and peace in giving us the things we need to continue. I have read the Bible several times and I have yet to find a place where God let somebody down or failed to help them when they were dong all they could for Him.
We must move from having a religion about God to having a relationship with God. We must move from having an obligation to God, to having a dedication to Him. And it is time to move from having a membership in a church, to having a ministry for Christ.
There is a scene in the movie “Unbreakable” where one character discovers he has a special gift, but he doesn’t know how to use it yet. He asks a friend what to do and his friend says, ‘go where the people are and you will know what to do.’
As Christians, we have a special gift to offer, and God’s advice for us today is "Go and then you will then know what to do."
And why do we go for the Lord?
1 THESSALONIANS 5:2-3 explains it very well.
‘… for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.’
And what is it you hear from the world around you? People are stepping all over everyone else, trying to find peace and safety. But in all of their scrambling, you see very few people doing anything to find true peace or be safe in the Lord.
This is our last service in this building. God has blessed us by making this building available to us to plant a church. Because of that, we have gone forward to touch more people for Jesus. Because of that, God has blessed us with growth. And because of that growth, God has blessed us with a new location that is much larger than this one is.
And we are going to continue to go forth – for God’s ultimate glory. We shall not be content to stay where we are, doing what we have been doing. There is an old saying: ‘If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.’ We shall not be content to just teach others how to grow God’s kingdom, but will always strive to also reach out and be doers of His word, too.’ But to do this, we must be obedient, and to be obedient, we must always be moving in His direction.
There is a story of how a high school janitor had many keys on the same key ring. He was a nice man who truly loved kids. It broke his heart when he had to turn a kid in to be punished, so when he noticed some high school kids doing something they shouldn’t be doing, he would make a point of jingling his keys loudly so they would hear him coming and straighten up before he got there.
Jesus loves us and it breaks His heart when we do things that will lead to our punishment. So I believe he is jingling the keys to Heaven to get our attention. He wants us to straighten up before He sees us. He wants us to stop going with the world and start going with Him.
CrossRoads is moving forward for the Lord. We hear the jingling of the keys. We want to be sure we are doing all we are supposed to be doing for Jesus. As we go into our time of invitation, I want to ask if you are doing everything you should be doing for Him, too? Or, do you hear the sound of keys jingling?
INVITATION
