The Rock And The Hard Place – Part 6
When We Fall – Get Back Up
Scripture: Matthew 17:14-21; Romans 12:3
Introduction:
In my message last week I told you that we have all had times when we have failed in our faith. We have all experienced situations where we “thought” we had everything under control as it related to our faith only to find out that our faith was not where we thought it was. How we respond to those situations determines if our faith will grow or if we will stay where we are currently. I told you in that message that if we default to “It’s someone else’s faith that failed, it was on them” or “God’s in control and it must have been His will” then we do not recognize failure as it relates to our faith. We must understand that this is a subtle attack of Satan. He wants us to think and then believe that where we “believe” we are in our faith walk is where we are. That is pride talking! I know I am pushing hard on this one, but we have got to do better in recognizing where we are in our faith walk.
This morning I want to offer all of us some encouragement. You see, I know that the first five parts of this series have been difficult to hear, but we all needed to hear it. Believe me when I tell you that since I had to prepare it, review it, and re-review it before it was delivered to you, I have heard them several times and each time it stung. Maybe for some of you my words have gone in one ear and out the other and you are choosing to stay on the path you are currently on with your faith. Maybe for others of you it has energized you to begin evaluating your faith walk and you are now building on what you previously had and are getting stronger. Regardless of where you are in how you are receiving this series, you are still a child of God and answers only to Him. You are not responsible to me for where you are with your faith walk – it’s personal between you and God. As I have told you many times before, my job is to deliver the truth as best as I can and what you do with it is your decision. That has not changed. You are accountable to God for what you have heard. If you’re not taking these messages seriously then I truly pray that you will after today. Believe me when I tell you – God is taking this very seriously!
When my brother and I started this series (yes my brother Barry has played a great role in this series) it came from the awareness that we (he and I and others in the Body of Christ) are all missing the boat at times with our understanding of faith – I will discuss this in more depth shortly. The focus of this series is to help us get us to a point where we land in the boat more often than not as it relates to our faith. To accomplish this requires that we have some serious, hard, and loving discussions with one another. These discussions are for our growth, not our destruction.
Let me paint a mental picture for you so you can visualize what I will reference from this point forward as it relates the boat and the pier. I have never been on a cruise where you travel for several days by choice. I have been on several dinner cruises that last a few hours. Most recently Nikki and I went on one while we were on vacation. As we arrived at the pier, there all sizes of small to medium size ships docked along the pier. There was this long walkway that took you out over the water to take you where the ships were docked. Nikki and I walked along this pier looking at the ships while we waited to board ours. Although the pier was probably ten to fifteen feet wide I had this strange feeling that I needed to walk down the middle so that I would not fall into the water. I knew that I would not fall in, but it was just something in my head about walking down a sidewalk of wooden planks with water on both sides of you – deep water! Can you see this pier?
If you have never boarded a ship off a pier, think of what you may have seen in a movie or on television. Think of the pier as your current situation. It’s where you are right now. It’s what you’re dealing with. Think of the boat as your destination - where you desire to be. This is where you are going. Can you see this? Let’s put this another way. Think of the pier as your current relationship with God. As your relationship grows with God - getting closer and closer to the boat – your faith grows. See the analogy? The more our faith grows the closer we get to where God wants us to be in our relationship with Him just as the more steps we take along a pier brings us closer to the boat that we hope to board.
Now think of your steps which will take you from the pier to the boat as your faith. Every step you take represents your faith walk until you step off the pier and into the boat. This transition from the pier to the boat might take place with a ramp that connects the two (the small faith) or it might be a situation where you have to literally jump into the boat from the pier in order to get into the boat. Because there will be a short period of time when you are in the air touching nothing, this represents that great faith. This is where we often miss the boat and fall into the water. We are standing on the pier trying to decide how to get into a boat that is rocking back and forth with the waves and there is no ramp. Trying to make the “decision” to jump instead of just doing it is doubt. It is doubt because we’re not sure if we will make it in if we step/jump off the pier. Remember, doubt exists where there are options. However, confidence overrules doubt so our secure faith will override the doubt. Consider this: if you’re having doubts on your faith walk it’s not necessarily a bad thing unless the doubt stops you from walking. You can experience doubt (and we all do) and still grow in your faith walk. I experience doubt but it does not stop me from continuing to walk. I know my faith is increasing in an area when my doubt decreases. This is one of the ways that I track my own personal faith growth. When we have to jump in order to get into the boat versus just walking up a ramp, it increases our chances of failure which results in us falling into the water. When we fall, there is a high likelihood that we will need some help to get into the boat. This is the point that I want to focus on this morning: how we may fall into the water but we do not stay in the water.
I. We Fall Down
I have shared with you from the beginning that I am not satisfied with my faith. As of matter of fact, I have failed more times that I care to admit. Let me say one quick thing about failure. There’s nothing wrong with failing because that means you are trying to do what you need to do as you’re building your faith. Failure becomes a problem when we begin to make excuses as to why we failed. Listen to me on this: God will walk through hell with us as long as we are not making excuses for our failure! I have run along the pier towards my ship. I have enjoyed the moments when there was a ramp and all I had to do was continue my run up the ramp and safely onto the ship. There have been times when I ran towards my ship thinking there was a safety ramp, only to get to the end and realize that I had to jump to get into the boat. Unfortunately I was not prepared to jump and ran right off the pier into the water. Please understand I am talking about my faith walk, not a literal pier. The worse times were when I was in the water and there was no one else in the boat to give me a hand out of the water. It was just me in the water waiting on God. How many of you know what happens to your body when you stay in the water too long? Remember when you were a child and you stayed in the bath for a longs period of time and your hands started wrinkling? Imagine, if you will, that those wrinkles are the evidence that you were in the water for a long period of time without God or someone else pulling you out. Imagine the wrinkles as doubt. The longer you’re in the water without anyone helping you out the doubt begins to set in. Questions begin to come. You start to wonder the “what ifs.” We fail. We are in the water because we failed to make the leap. We failed in our understanding of what it would take to get into the boat. Over and over and over again do we replay the jump trying to determine how we missed the boat. The bottom line is our calculations were off.
Now here is the real question: If the pier is our faith walk and we fall, who should we expect to help us? Spouses? Children? God? Who has the responsibility for getting me back onto the pier?
There is a song that says “We fall down, but we get up, a saint is just a sinner who fell down, and got up.” While I do not agree on principle that a saint is just a sinner who keeps falling down and getting back up, I do agree that we have times when we fail and we must get back up. No one in the natural when they fall down does not attempt to get back up on their feet, it just does not happen. If you were in the water and the boat that you were trying to jump into was nearby, would you not try and get to that boat and climb in? You would not just wait for someone to come along and save you - you would do something on your own to get out of the water. Well the same applies to us when we fail in our faith. We have got to do something on our own to build our faith up to where it should be now that we know there is a weak area. Many people have fallen down in their faith and are waiting for someone else’s faith to pick them back up.
II. The Disciples Faith Failure
In part three of this series I shared with you the story about the disciples and how they were unable to cast a demon out of a man’s son. By now you should be very familiar with this story, but let’s re-read it again just to refresh your memory. Turn to Matthew 17:14-21.
Matthew 17:14-21 reads: “When they came to the crowd, a man came up to Jesus, falling on his knees before Him and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and is very ill; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. ‘I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him.’ And Jesus answered and said, ‘You unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.’ And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured at once. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not drive it out?’ And He said to them, ‘Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”
As I told you before, after Jesus casts out the demonic spirit, the disciples ask Him why they couldn’t cast it out since they had done it before. So let’s think about this story in a little more detail. The Scripture says that the man brought his son to the disciples (plural) and “they” could not cast it out. What we know is that the man knew his son was possessed by a demon and knew that he (the father) could not cast it out. So at this point it was not about the father’s faith because he had been living with his son in this condition and could do nothing about it. It was not about the son’s faith because in many cases the person who is possessed does not recognize that they are because the term possession means that the demonic spirit comes to the forefront and takes over and the person being possessed sometimes has no memory of what transpired while they were under the influence of the demon. So neither the father nor the son could have gotten this demonic spirit out of the boy. It was not about their faith. The father now chooses to bring his son to the disciples. What possibly could have influenced him to do that?
When Jesus had previously sent the disciples out, He gave them power over demonic spirits and they had cast out demons before. They did not do this under their own power of authority they had received the authority from Jesus to do this. (Understand, we cannot cast out a demon nor do anything else without the power of Jesus working within and through us. We have to be born again and thus have the power delegated to us as a child of God.) This man probably heard about some of the people whom the disciples had cured and chose to bring his son to them. So as he approaches the disciples, they see this as another opportunity to do good, especially since there was a crowd of witnesses gathered around. Remember, the disciples were still young in their faith walk so a little praise from the people would not have been a bad thing.
Now consider this, at this moment, there were twelve disciples. They would not have tried to cast this demon out as a group with everyone talking at once, they would have taken turns (this is my opinion.) Imagine if you will Peter being the first one since he was always ready to be out front. He goes through his routine for casting out demons and nothing happens – the demon says “No!” Everyone is now looking at Peter and Peter is now shamed faced because he could not do it. Now Andrew, Peter’s brother, steps up and pushes his brother aside and takes his turn and receives the same response. Then the brothers James and John looks at Peter and Andrew with a look that says “lightweights” and they take their turn. Again, the demon refuses to come out. Can you see the remaining eight disciples saying, “I’m not even going to try because if Peter, Andrew, James and John couldn’t do it, then I KNOW I can’t!” You see, the failure of the first four could have led to the failure of the remaining eight. Sometimes we measure our faith against people we respect. Most of the time it causes us to feel less than who we are as sons and daughters of God. The Bible says in Romans 12:3 that God gave each of us the measure of faith we would need to do what He asks us to do. It reads “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” My measure is not the same as your measure. So don’t compare where you are in your faith walk with anyone – not me, Pastors Cynthia and Anthony, no one! What God think is the only question that matters when it comes to our faith. Also, as I said previously, the measure we were given is the starting point, not the end point. We should be “increasing” our faith as we interact more and more with God. In reality, what we do know for certain is that they all, as a group, failed to cast this demonic spirit out of the man’s son. They’d fail. When they asked Jesus why they failed He told them it was because they did not have enough faith. Again, it was not about the father’s or son’s faith, it was about the faith of each and every one of the disciples. But this was not the end. In the end (when you read the rest of the New Testament) you find that they went on to do great things and died for their Lord and Savior. Their greatest demonstration of their faith was their decision to die for what they believed in. Regardless of the number of times they failed, and they did fail throughout their time in the ministry, when they had to take a stance, they did. Their faith testimony was their willingness to die for what they believed in. We are not here as a Body of Christ today. Few would be willing to die for their beliefs if given the choice and that my friends is a sad day for Christians.
Conclusion
If you are between a rock and a hard place and your faith begins to waver, we often view that as a failure. If we totally lose hope and begin to justify our bad situations as being out of our control that can be viewed as a failure. (This I would say is definitely a failure because we are refusing to take responsibility for our lack of faith!) If we are always struggling and never seems to get ahead in life, for many that would be considered failure. We define failure as things that go wrong in our lives. We define failure as loss opportunities. We recognize failure when we see it because we have been trained to do so. If a sports team loses a championship game they failed because they did not win. If I am negotiating a contract and do not win the bid, I failed to win the contract. If our children do not do what we tell them, they are told that they failed to meet our expectation. In reality, what we have to determine is who is setting the standard for success and failure. Is it the world or is it God’s word? So many of us have allowed the world to determine what it means to be successful as a son and daughter of God. Shouldn’t we let God do that? And where does it start? It starts with us doing everything we can to continue walking our “faith pier.”
We define failure by things that do not work out as well as we would have hoped. We live with failure, day in and day out, in the natural, but we do not spend much time thinking about failure with our faith. What I want you to know this morning that it is okay to truly examine where you are in your faith walk and recognize where you have failed; those times when you fell down; when you missed the mark. We fall down but we get back up and our goal should be to fall down less and less so that we are striving towards not falling down at all. To get there we must recognize when we fall. Regardless of where you are in your faith walk right now, the fact that you are here means that you got back up. You may have been counted out by everyone, but you got back up. My question to you this morning is what are you going to do now that you are up?
In two weeks in part seven of this series we will look at the question, “Is God waiting on you?” Please take some time and think about the analogy of the pier and the boat. If you’ve fallen down on the pier and you need to get to the boat, is God waiting on you to get up and start walking again? Or, are you just lying there waiting on God to come and pick you up and take you to the boat?
Until next time, “The Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His countenance on you and give you peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26)
