This morning I want to begin a short series on Christianity for Dummies. Now what inspired this was not what you might think.
I recently inherited a dog, a beautiful Golden Retriever. Those of you that know me, know that I am not a hunter and may wonder why I have a Retriever, there is really no logic behind it other than I think they are really pretty dogs and they are good natured and fun to play with.
I came about the dog because the previous owner didn’t have enough time and energy or the right place to raise a dog like this. Dogs like this one that is 16 months old have a lot of energy and can be a nuisance if not properly trained. Now I am no dog trainer, but I like to think of myself as one.
If you come to my house right now “Buddy” will jump on you, slobber on you and probably put a dirty paw print on your shirt or pants. We have had Buddy just two weeks and he has punctured two air mattresses and torn up one of my T-shirts and chewed up a completely good pool testing kit. Other than that he is absolutely great! lol
I tell you this, “and by the way don’t anyone get offended by today’s message title “Christianity for Dummies” because when it comes to living the Christian life, all of us fall short.
Now back to my dog. He is 16 months old and a juvenile delinquent dog. So one of the first purchases I made was this book called “Dog Training For Dummies.”
I really don’t know that much about training a dog to stay down, to get in the kennel, or to heel, so I bought the book. And the more I read the book the more the Lord began to teach me about myself and my faith. I felt that the Lord was really saying to me “You Need More Training Craig.”
THE FIRST THING I LEARNED ABOUT TRAINING THE DOG WAS, I WAS NOT TRAINING THE DOG. I WAS TRAINING MYSELF TO GET THE DOG TO DO WHAT I WANTED IT TO DO.
Remember I was the one reading the book “Dog Training for Dummies”. If I were to have taken that book to the back yard and opened it up for Buddy, he would drooled on it shredded it with his teeth and probably marked it with a little pee, because he likes doing that, but he would have never learned anything.
And so as Christians a lot of times we come into the faith and there we are trying our best to follow God, yet we have no training. We have no real obedience to God, we are in many ways juvenile delinquent Christians. Juvenile in that we haven’t grown up and delinquent in that we aren’t very obedient many times to the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
Folks God’s word is a word of promises, it is a book of hope, it is a book of direction, it represents and contains His love story about how much He loves us, but it is also a training book.
When we come to the Lord and are saved we are bright eyed and bushy tailed and then someone throws a Bible at us and says, “Hey read that.” We drool on it a lot because we fall asleep reading it and we may even chew it a little bit as we think on it. But really we rarely find use for it and application to our life, because we are focused on the promises, and never look at the requirements that precede the promises. There are always boundaries involved in training. That is where the training is.
People like to say: “The Bible says, “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be given to you.” They forget that it says right before that, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you,” John 15:7-8
It’s in the remaining and having His words remaining in us that we never get. That’s where the training takes place. Get into God, stay and remain with Him. Remain comes from the Greek word men’o and it means to stay in relation to and with expectancy, it means to endure.
In other words, when things don’t go your way, you don’t quit, run off, stop going to church, get mad at God, Blame God. The difference between the juvenile Christian and the Trained Christian is where they are when bad things happen. The juvenile runs away, the trained stays under the shadow of God and remains and endures.
Do you know why today we are having so many problems with young people in our world. TRAINING.
Proverbs 22:6 Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. (NIV)
Parents if you want your children to follow God it doesn’t happen by accident, it wont happen because you even took them to Vacation Bible School, it happens over a span of time and training and retraining. It doesn’t happen only because you prayed, yet that has to be done, it takes place because you train them.
Your children need training in Faith. They need training to listen and be obedient not only to your voice commands, but more importantly to the voice and commands of their heavenly Father.
You see we are not deaf to the Spirit, because I believe the spirit speaks to us to do many things, we just don’t obey the Spirit. You see there are men and women that are deaf at birth in their natural ears, but that spirit man can always hear what God is saying so long as the spirit man is listening. But some in our world have turned a spiritual deaf ear to God.
The prophet Jeremiah said, “Hear this you foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear. (NIV) Jeremiah was talking to a nation, the nation of Israel that had not placed their ears to listen to God and with their spirit.
My dog is not deaf, he just doesn’t know what to do when I give him a command, because he hasn’t been taught. So you know what we do? We yell at the dog, because he must not have heard us….. God isn’t going to yell at you, He speaks in the still small voices as you pray and seek Him. He will repeat Himself though.
So what are you to do if your are an adult Christian. You have to learn to also train yourself. You have to ask others a lot of questions, you have to read a lot, and not only the Bible but books that can teach you about your faith. You have to talk with your pastor, and pastor’s wife. You have to read some books that will guide you and help your learn about how to train yourself.
Down here on North West Expressway is a K-9 training school and they do everything from basic training for dogs to advance training. I have never yet seen a school for training adults, but the church is probably the closest thing to it. Every Sunday and Wednesday we do our best to train Christians and teach God’s word. We teach first faith in Jesus, Second to walk according to the Word, and to trust God will save our live not only on this planet, but also for eternity.
The church is a training ground and a haven for lost, scared and the endangered. That is why you are here today. That is why I am here today. If you are in training like the rest of us, you make mistakes and there is disobedience and because of disobedience there is remediation, and then there is great grace applied to our disobedience and then there is redemption. Because I know I have a trainer, that if I will give my all to Him, he will protect me, provide for me, watch over me, and give me everything I need. HE IS GOD! And because He is God, He is good.
There are some basic commands for dogs. Here they are: Heel, Sit, and Stay.
There are some basics of Christianity that can parallel these: God will tell us to come to Him – and He desires us to draw close to Him. He wants us not just to come close and then leave, but also to come close to Him and remain there. And when we remain close to Him he will put us in places and in positions that may at times even be uncomfortable, but we stay because He is our shepherd.
Do you know that the most uncomfortable position for a dog to be in is? It is the sitting position. Yet if you train them to sit and stay next to you, it can save them from getting run over by a car or getting in trouble and taken to the pound.
God will put you and I in some uncomfortable positions, but the are positions of safety, and we won’t necessarily understand why, but it is for our own benefit.
I think of Paul, one of the greatest men in the Bible. He started the movement of leading gentiles to Jesus. Do you realize that if there wasn’t a Paul then we gentiles would have never had the Good News preached to us.
But Paul said this:
2 Corinthians 12:7-9
7 To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
(from New International Version)
God has placed you where you are not to hurt you be placed you there to show how powerful his grace is. For many things God said, “yes may salvation and goodness will cover their sins, yes I will redeem them from this or that, but Paul shows us something here , that some of the things that we go through are things that God says, “No, that’s where my grace will abound!”
THE SECOND THING I LEARNED ABOUT TRAINING IS THIS: TRAINING IS IMPORTANT:
The other night the kids and I went to eat at a buffet. Buffets are great, but can you imagine what you would do if some family bust through the doors of the restaurant and ran to the buffet and just put there face in the noodles and just started eating.
And what if there 12 year old boy just took his hands and dipped into the banana pudding and gobbled it up with his hands and then moved on to the jelly. First I would be totally grossed out, and then I would never eat at a buffet again. Thankfully people have trained there kids and you can go to the buffet without that happening.
Training ourselves is important. Training ourselves to trust Jesus, to follow God, to love and obey God’s word is important for us.
1 Timothy 4:7 Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. 8 For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. (NIV)
I love this scripture, because we need to hear it in today’s church. One of the things that concerns me so is the lack of godly training in the church. I see a lot of sport camps in the church, and those are good and needed, I see a lot of fellowship in the church, and that is needed, but what we really need it godly training. We start godly training with ourselves. What do you do on a regular basis to train yourself in godliness?
Paul was writing to Timothy and saying if you will train yourself in godliness it will add value to your life everyday and it will take your through to eternity.
Training yourself is the most difficult thing to do. Perhaps that’s why many military personnel come out of the services and succeed so many times because the have discovered the gift of self discipline.
Do you know why when I was in high school I was 190 to 200 pounds, because I had a coach that would put his big foot in my rear- end if I didn’t show up for practice, and when I showed up for practice he would encourage me with persuasive language to run and lift and jump and run some more, and I would just keep running.
Now most of us don’t have a coach like that anymore. So who is going to keep you in shape? Your personal trainer if you can afford that, but most can’t. Your husband or wife, if they do it you are probably heading for a divorce. Who then? You!
A great book to read: “Celebration of Discipline” It talks about not despising self disciplines of study of the word, prayer, and church attendance, but celebrating the discipline of Christianity and enjoying what God is doing in helping us while we pursue Him and serve Him.
THE THIRD THING I LEARNED ABOUT TRAINING IS THERE ARE BASICS TO CHRISTIANITY; PRAY, STUDY, LISTEN, OBEY.
What good is an untrained Christian? They don’t know how to witness, they don’t know how to pray, they don’t know how to be faithful in church, they can’t seem to grasp tithing?
An untrained Christian is a Christian that is going to go to heaven, but miss the whole point of why Jesus came to save them, and that is so they could help someone else.
It’s amazing isn’t it what they have trained dogs to do. They can sniff out drugs inside of cars, they can smell in the rubble of a earthquake where a human is trapped underneath buildings. They can lead a blind person across a cross walk so that they don’t get hit by a car.
Friends you much, much greater than a dog. You are a child of God and God has some things that He wants you to do. For some this morning its starts with training yourself, with others you have been trained and now it’s time to take those things that you know and use them to help someone else, to save someone else.
An untrained dog is a nuisance, they are unruly, they eat things off of the table, and they are never allowed off of the leash, nobody wants to take them on a walk. They jump on all of your guest, and lick them.
An untrained child of God, warms a pew, never knows how to deal with problems, always complains to God and others, people avoid them because they will jump on them and complain.
Untrained Christians are interested in one thing and one thing only: WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME RIGHT NOW?
Folks quit asking that question, instead the church needs to get busy doing the business of God. Reaching others on a daily basis, praying for the lost because we are working with a sense of urgency, more concerned with what God’s word is saying than the TV Guide listings. Upset because of the moral decay of our
society, praying for worldwide revival, and living out our faith with conviction instead of out of convenience.
Lets give ourselves wholeheartedly to the Master this morning.
