Sermon Brief
Date Written: February 26, 2010
Date Preached: February 21, 2010
Where Preached: Oak Park (AM)
Sermon Details:
Sermon Series: The Great Adventure – Rediscovering the Adventure
Sermon Title: The RUT of Christianity! Part 3 of 6
Sermon Text: John 14:12, Exodus 3:1-6
Introduction:
Exodus 3:1-6 [NLT]
1 One day Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro,[a] the priest of Midian. He led the flock far into the wilderness and came to Sinai,[b] the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush. Moses stared in amazement. Though the bush was engulfed in flames, it didn’t burn up. 3 “This is amazing,” Moses said to himself. “Why isn’t that bush burning up? I must go see it.”
4 When the Lord saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush, “Moses! Moses!” “Here I am!” Moses replied. 5 “Do not come any closer,” the Lord warned. “Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground. 6 I am the God of your father[c]—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” When Moses heard this, he covered his face because he was afraid to look at God.
I can guarantee you that on this morning when Moses woke up and got ready to go out to the fields… he probably did the same things he had been doing for the past 40 yrs. He never knew or suspected God would call him to deliver the people of Israel.
Moses may have left Egypt with a sense that he had to do something to free his people. We know he had a passion about delivering the Hebrew nation because he had actually killed an Egyptian guard who was beating a Hebrew slave. But over the yrs in the wilderness, something happened to Moses, he had become distracted from that passion, caught up in the routine and responsibility of being a shepherd and husband.
So much so that Moses had not thought about going back to Egypt and was rather shaken when God told him what He wanted Moses to do. Moses had settled into a life where he had found comfortable life. He was married, he had children, he had possessions, he had responsibilities, he had SETTLED into a life where he was content.
Yes, I am sure that Moses remembered what he had seen in Egypt. I am sure that he thought about that terrible day when he tried to defend a fellow Hebrew and killed an Egyptian. I am sure he wondered how the Hebrews were doing because he knew how difficult their life was… BUT Moses had ‘moved on’, Moses had another life now, Moses was settled where he was!
But it was just then when God got Moses’ attention as we see in v.4 when God called from the burning bush to Moses and set into motion a series of events that would FOREVER change Moses’ life!
Today I want us to look at our own spiritual life and where we are in our spiritual walk… Has God called you out of your spiritual RUT to a life of adventure and excitement within the Kingdom? Have you had a ‘burning bush’ moment in your life when you knew that God had a special calling for you?
So often as believers we settle for something easy and routine instead of striving for the best of what God has to offer for our lives. So many of us, have been called by God, but we find ourselves fenced in by our own trappings that we either don’t hear God calling us, or we believe that we cannot escape this fenced in area of our lives!
What sort of fences do we build that can prevent us from heading in the direction God is calling us? What sort of trap do we set for ourselves that enslaves us to NOT serving and living as God has called us to live? I believe one of the most heinous traps we can fall into as a believer is the trap of the ROUTINE!
Over the past 2 weeks we have looked at how the Christian life is not a life of drudgery or ritual, but it is supposed to be a great adventure that we are on with Christ. Last week we learned that many times we find ourselves missing out on some great blessings and the abundant life that Jesus promised because we refuse to submit and surrender to God… and we do it all under the excuse that we have responsibility and what God is asking would makes us act Unresponsible...
We saw how God has taken many people out of their comfort zone only to prove to them that He is able and that He will guide them to do what He has called them to do…
Today I want to continue in that theme of the Christian life being an adventurous life, but I want to come to that from another perspective and that is how we can have a tendency to allow the routine of life to drag us down into a RUT that will keep us from experiencing the Adventure of what God has for us in this world!
Now, when you think about everyday routine, what is it that you think about? Well let me ask you a question, “Do you think traveling 100 mph is routine?” Well it is not routine but I am sure that some of us have done it a time or 2 in our cars… OR have we? Hmmmmm?
Preacher, 100 mph isn’t really that much out of the ordinary because most of us have flown in an airplane so you have traveled at least 400 mph. To those of you who have flown commercially, and have traveled 400 mph or faster, let me ask you this… would it be normal or routine for you to travel 1000 mph? I would say that 1000 mph is highly OUT of the routine of everyone’s life!
However I want to ask you about 10,000 mph, or more specifically what about 67,000 mph? Preacher, I believe if I had ever set foot on something going that fast I would FIRST of all remember it… and I would NOT think that it was routine… Going 67,000 mph would be a fantastic, exciting, and wonderful experience!
Well, you may not believe this, but ALL of you in here have traveled 67,000 mph, and here’s another surprise… you do it every minute of every day of your life! You see, that is the speed of the earth in its orbit around our sun... and by the end of today you will have traveled 1.3 million miles in space… Now I would say that was NOT too routine is it?
So often we take for granted so many things… we consider things like our orbit around the sun as being routine and mundane, but it is really a miracle of God! God placed our planet just far enough away to NOT burn up and just close enough to the sun for life to be sustained. And every second of the day God keeps the orbit of our planet JUST right! Now I don’t know about you but that simple scientific fact is something I find FAR from routine! But how often do you think about it?
Do you ever go to bed at night worried that the earth would make its daily rotation and that we would see the sun again? Of course not, although if it is out of sync or falters in any way, we are doomed as a planet! But yet, we still find ourselves taking it for granted each and every day.
So I ask the question, “Why is it that that we can trust God to take care of these HUGE things in our universe, but we cannot seem to trust God in the little things within our lives?
In doing the research for this sermon I read where there is a term that psychologists used and it is called ‘inattentional blindness’. What that means is that our minds are wired so that when we are introduced to something new… it stands out in our mind and we are intensely aware of it!
However, over time as we adapt to it, that awareness fades to where that stimulus can be almost invisible to our senses. Take for example living beside a train track. When you first move in, those trains rumble past your house and shake the very foundation of your house and the noise is almost deafening!
But after some time that sensation begins to fade and there comes a time when you don’t even notice the trains when they come by… That happened to us when we lived beside the AF base where jets were taking off every hour of the day… at first it was very hard on us, but eventually we didn’t even know they were there.
What I am getting at is that we so often overlook some very wonderful and tremendously exciting things in our lives that are right in front of our faces! Some of these things are vital to our very lives, and I can also see this in our spiritual walk as well!
This principle of NOT “seeing” what God has for us… or what God has done for us… or what God has delivered us from… is what I would term ‘spiritual intentional blindness’ and I am here to tell you that it is NOT a new syndrome for the modern day Christian, but it is one we deal with a great deal and need to overcome if we are going to live out the Great Adventure of serving God!
I find it rather amusing from time to time to see where God chooses to raise up in a person’s life and remind them that He is there. He sends a burning bush into our lives to snap us out of the RUT we have allowed ourselves to fall into! Sort of like what happened to Moses in our verses this morning.
Here Moses was, happy in his life; all of the memories of Egypt were behind him and then BAM… God shows up and gives him this great and exciting assignment. But Moses, like so many other people today, did not want this assignment and tried to get God to give it to other people.
How about you today? Has God called you to a Great Adventure for Him and you are stammering about like Moses, complaining that you aren’t qualified or that you are NOT the guy or gal for the job, or whatever reason you want to give to God… You just don’t want to get out of the spiritual comfort zone that you are in…
First let’s look at what a spiritual comfort zone is…
A spiritual comfort zone is a state of spiritual behavior within which a believer seeks to live out their Christian life without the presence of any spiritual anxiety or conflict. They adopt a spiritually neutral condition by limiting their spiritual behavior to deliver a nondescript level of performance, usually without any sense of spiritual adventure!
How many of us fall into that category as believers? I would dare say that MOST believers today, whether they want to admit it or not, fall into this category! I say this NOT to be depressing, but out of a stark sense of reality and how the church has slipped into a evangelistic coma over the past 50 years.
We are called to be WITNESSES for Him and to GO THEREFORE… to be proactive and ever vigilant in our sense of duty to our Lord…but what I have seen from believers over the years, and I point the finger squarely at myself when I say this… I find that we are NOT about GOING but we are all about setting up shop, and waving to the world… hey ‘ya’ll come now… ya heah!’
We have fallen into a malaise of spiritual mediocrity that wallows in the RUTs of life and we allow ourselves to stay there, and we go thru the motions of serving God without any risk or sense of adventure! When believers fall into this spiritual ‘comfort zone’ they simply cannot experience the abundant life that Christ has promised and there is absolutely NO way that they can fulfill what Christ declared in our series theme verse in John 14:12 where Jesus promises that we can do great things as believers!
12 "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do…”
As we dissect this dilemma that we know as a spiritual comfort zone, I want us to look at the dangers of dwelling in such a place and then if we find ourselves dwelling there… what we can do to escape such a terrible place in our walk with God!
The Dangers of a Spiritual Comfort Zone:
In previewing Scripture we can find many examples of those who were willing to move out of their comfort zones to serve God. Some were willing right away, such as Isaiah when he said, “Here am I Lord, send me!”
Others were not so willing, in fact they resisted and ran away from God, like Jonah, when he fled to Tarsus to board a boat to get away from the calling God had on his life! Ultimately, we know that Jonah came around, but we find that he was still a resistant servant, even when God delivered on His promise!
When we look at a spiritual comfort zone, what dangers lurk there for the believer? What should we look for in our own lives when it comes to a spiritual rut?
A spiritual comfort zone results when a believer’s perception about their walk with Christ, and the actual reality of their walk with Christ, are incompatible to each other.
In other words, when our walk doesn’t match our talk, we are in a spiritual comfort zone… otherwise known as a RUT!
So much church dissention has been stirred up about the music that we listen to, the music that we play and the songs that we sing. Many of us find ourselves on one side or the other of this issue… some of us love the old hymns and their doctrinally sound lyrics… others love the newer choruses that express the heart of a fully submitted and surrendered believer.
Churches have been split over this one issue, but here is my point. Whichever side of the issue you fall into… it matters NOT! For this crux of the matter is NOT the style of music, or how old the songs are, or how traditional or contemporary they sound. The issue of the matter is WORSHIP!
True WORSHIP of God knows absolutely NO bounds! If you don’t believe me read the Psalms and see how David expresses himself in so many ways, so much so that others mocked him and attempted to shame him for his unorthodox worship… but it was David that God said about, “This is a man after My own heart!”
Our worship of God should not be settled in one certain theme or structure, but should be focused on the object of our worship and that is God Himself. Those who advocate the contemporary style of worship are wrong to say that a more traditional style of worship has lost touch with today’s society!
And for those traditional worshipers who believe that the contemporary style of worship is not of God and that God does not listen to them… you are wrong as well! That is because God is not focused on the style of our worship as much as He is on the substance of that worship! God is looking for submitted and surrendered hearts… not tradition or words!
I want to go on record as saying that I believe BOTH sides of this discussion have missed the point, and that because of this stubborn attentiveness to style OVER substance in our worship we find ourselves in a spiritual rut… a spiritual comfort zone where we seek to live without challenge or any sense of spiritual movement!
In the book of Exodus we find Moses in the wilderness. He was tending sheep and doing what he thought he needed to do to be a good man and husband, but what we find is that God had plans for Moses and Moses was in a spiritual rut!
God calls Moses to go into the land of Egypt and lead out the people of Israel. God promises Moses that He will lead him, guide him and tell him what to do and what to say, but Moses who is stuck in this comfort zone on the plains of Midian… stammers and stutters and offers NOTHING but excuses!
I have found that there are many believers today like Moses on the plains of Midian. They are satisfied where they are and do not want God rocking their spiritual boat. God calls them, but they stammer, stutter and make any excuse for NOT doing what He has called them to do…
The danger of the spiritual comfort zone is that when we refuse to leave that comfort zone… when we refuse to get out of that RUT, it is going to inhibit our service to God! When we refuse to submit to God’s calling, we become nothing more than bystanders in the battle for the souls of this world. However, Scripture tells us that we are MORE than conquerors for Christ… we have been called to be warriors for Christ!
But when we wallow in our spiritual ruts and when we continue to live in the spiritual comfort zones of our own making, there is GREAT danger that we will NEVER be the warrior God wants us to become!
Instead, we become spiritual conscientious objectors who refuse to go to battle for our Lord because it takes us outside of our own set boundaries and limitations. The danger of being in a spiritual comfort zone is that we become spiritually ineffective for God’s Kingdom, and when that happens what use does God have for us? Without a purpose, we are of NO use to God’s kingdom! I know that NO one here today wants to be USELESS to God!
But I can also see another danger! When we stay in our RUTs… when we refuse to leave our spiritual comfort zone, we limit ourselves and our service to God! When the way we live our lives tell God that OUR boundaries are as far as we will go… then our witness is shattered and we turn those who do not know God away from His love, mercy, grace and salvation!
We may be able to talk a really good game! We may be able to preach and teach about a loving God who accepts ALL who come to Him, who forgives ALL sin and will not turn away anyone. But when we place limits on how to walk the walk… when we stifle the calling of God in our lives simply because they stretch our own boundaries… we turn others away from God! If we are not passionate about living for Him, why would anyone listen to us when we share about His salvation?
When believers choose to live in their spiritual comfort zones… when we settle for living in a spiritual RUT, we are in danger of becoming spiritually INEFFECTIVE and turning the lost away from the God we proclaim as loving and forgiving!
When we live in a spiritual RUT, we go against the Great Commission and Commandment where Jesus tells us to Go therefore into the world preaching, teaching and making disciples! Jesus tells us to love God above ALL other things and love people as we love ourselves! When we box ourselves in a spiritual comfort zone, we cannot do what God has called us to do!
So preacher, what can I do? How can I avoid a spiritual rut in my life? Do I have to LOVE those new-fangled choruses? Do I have to go to Africa on missions? Do I have to start a prison ministry? What do I have to do to avoid a spiritual comfort zone?
My answer to that is that asking those types of questions are missing the point altogether! Listen to the focus of those questions… What do I… the focus is on ME! But service to God is NEVER about ME but it is all about Him!
When we focus on ourselves we destroy our ability to hear and follow God! But when we remove ourselves from the equation and allow God to speak, lead and guide us… THEN and only then can we serve Him as we should!
The Deliverance FROM a Spiritual Comfort Zone:
When believers make the effort and decision to step out of their spiritual comfort zones, it will NOT be an easy decision or action on their part! When we step out of our comfort zone in any part of our lives it increases the anxiety level in our lives and that brings about a stressful response!
Let’s look at our passage from this morning one more time: Exodus 3:1-5[NLT]
Here we find God speaking to Moses and all throughout chapter 3 Moses finds excuse after excuse, but ultimately Moses relents to go back to Egypt and trusts that God will lead and protect him.
Preacher, what if I have doubts, does that mean I cannot be used by God? Well when we look at our passage we see that Moses had MANY doubts and tried to use them to persuade God to find someone else. But I am here to tell you that if God has called you to do something for Him, He is NOT going to stop until you surrender!
I can remember over the 10 yrs I ran from God… all the times in prayer and Bible study when God would come to me and remind me of His calling on my life. I was like Moses and gave God excuse after excuse after excuse…but God would NOT leave me alone!
In fact my spiritual life became a miserable existence! I would do what I wanted… hoping that God would bless it and leave me alone! But God would NOT accept what I wanted… He had a calling for me and constantly convicted me of that calling!
I can imagine that Moses felt somewhat like this, but what I ran from for 10 yrs, Moses submitted to in one day! I can only imagine what my life would have been like had I surrendered to Him when He first called me…
But preacher, doesn’t the questions that Moses had… don’t they prove that he did not have faith! Absolutely NOT, Moses had faith, but his faith was not matured enough to see what God was doing! Moses knew God was real, Moses knew that the task was needed, but Moses had to take that step of faith to see God work it out!
Now we know that Moses ran into a lot of resistance and trouble in Egypt, and even when he led the children of Israel out of Egypt, he still experienced resistance from those he had rescued.
I have to believe that there must have been times when Moses wondered if what he was doing was worth it… but when Moses stood on the mountain with God… when Moses sat in the tent of meeting and fellowshipped with God… when Moses saw miracle after miracle where God provided and delivered… he realized it was worth it!
For the believer to avoid the dangers of the spiritual comfort zone… for the Follower of Christ to wrangle themselves free of the spiritual RUTs of our own making… WE must be willing to fully submit and surrender to God. Jesus put it best when He said in Mark 8:34 [NLT]
34 Then, calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me.”
There are many of you sitting here today and just the mere thought of stepping out of what you are used to, turns your stomach and makes you want to go running and screaming in the other direction!
I believe this is why believers fight so hard to keep things the way they are… they simply hate the fact that God may be calling them to something outside of their comfort zone!
These believers don’t want to surrender their selfish ways, they don’t want to take up the cross/task that Christ has for them, and so it is impossible for them to fully follow Christ and serve Him as they should!
However when it comes to our own personal comfort zones, studies have shown that those people who are willing to take that first step outside of their own preconceived and self-made comfort zones… the results are that they experience a focus and concentration on the task at hand in far greater ways than they ever could stuck in their own RUT…
When believers make the choice to step outside of their own self made spiritual comfort zones and are willing to get up out of the spiritual RUTs they find themselves in… Those are the believers who are going to experience eye opening and heart transforming experiences with God!
Those are the believers who are going to live the Great Adventure with Christ… they are going to experience that MORE abundant life that Jesus promised!
Those believers will find that when they are willing to trust God and step OUT of their spiritual comfort zones, that their focus and concentration on their walk with Christ is extremely enhanced and magnified by their faith and trust in God.
This is what some social scientists would call, “the Optimal Performance Zone” This is a zone in where the performance of a person can be enhanced and in which their skills can be optimized.
Spiritually speaking this is called being in the center of God’s will. Things are sharper and more pronounced. God’s voice is crystal clear and the direction of our walk in Christ is not in doubt, but God provides a path for us to travel, and the more we trust Him, the more He reveals to us!
Conclusion:
So the question is where are you this morning? Are you stuck in a rut of spiritual malaise that you can’t get out of… either because you don’t want to OR you are scared to do anything different! Are you a warrior of the faith or conscientious objector that refuses to battle for the lost souls of this world?
Tell me, are you satisfied with living your Christian life inside a spiritual comfort zone that destroys your witness and turns others away from the Gospel? If you are… I want to call you to come… I want to invite you down to this altar of prayer and confession! Come and allow Christ to cleanse you and give you a NEW focus and desire in life!
Today you may be here without Jesus as Savior… you may be here and don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus… if that is the case, if there is someone here that is seeking something other than what the world has to offer… I bid you to come! Come and stop living in the boundaries of your own making, and submit to the boundaries that God Himself has created! Come as Bro Steven comes to lead us in our hymn of invitation!
