August, 1974, Fort Dix, New Jersey …
That’s where I did my basic training for the U.S. Army. The Vietnam was almost over … but not quite. It would end six months after I joined. So, the Army was still training us as if we were going to the jungles of ‘Nam.
All of my drill sergeants were tough combat veterans. So was our company commander. About 5 feet, 6 inches tall … all muscle … not an ounce of fat on him … never smiled … never saw his eyes because he always wore a spotless chrome helmet liner pulled down over his forehead … always taunt … never relaxed … jaws always clenched. He was one hard-core due, let me tell you. The man made such an impression on me that I still remember his name … his full name … Captain Larry F. Decker (not his real name … but he really did exist … I promise … exactly as I described him!).
Twice a week … usually before some grueling physical training exercise … he would climb up on the reviewing stand and give the same basic speech over and over again. His topic was always about “second effort.”
“Second effort” … Keep going when you feel like giving up. Dig deep into your guts. Go to that deep, deep reservoir of hidden strength that you never knew you had. And he would pepper his speech with gruesome, detailed examples from his combat experiences of men who had been shot or blown up and still kept fighting. Larry … eh, I mean “Captain Larry F. Decker” would have loved the Apostle Paul …
[Read 2nd Corinthians 11:23-27]
“Endurance” … from the Latin word “durus” … which means “to harden … to make lasting.” The prefix “en” means “in.” Put them together … “en durus” … and it literally means “inner-strength” or “inner-lasting.” It’s what Captain Larry F. Decker was talking about … that deep down inner-strength that we don’t know we have until circumstances force us to reach deep, deep down into our guts, or hearts, our souls to that hidden reservoir of strength that keeps us going even when every cell in our body seems to be screaming at us to just lie down and quit.
There are two kinds of endurance. When athletes are in training, the rule is: Heavy weights, lifted fewer times in succession, produces “durus” … “strength.” Lighter weights, lifted with more repetitions, produces “durus” … “lasting.”
I find Paul’s list of trials that we just read fascinating because it masterfully encompasses the full scope of the word “endurance.” Any one of these events or trials is a demonstration of what Captain Larry F. Decker would call “second effort” … amazing feats of both physical and inner-strength, amen? Each of these is literally a near death experience … not just for Paul but for anyone who was forced to endure them.
Not once but five times Paul “received from the Jews” … not from the Romans or gentiles but from his own countrymen … “the forty lashes minus one” (v. 24). The Jewish “scourge” or whip consisted of two thongs made of calf or donkey skin passed through a hole in a wooden handle. Thirteen blows were inflicted on the breast, 13 on the right shoulder, and 13 on the left shoulder. The law in Deuteronomy 25:3 permitted 40 lashes … and not one more. Only 39 lashes were given to avoid a miscount. God forbid that the person doing the whipping should break a law and be guilty of a sin themselves by beating the prisoner 41 times, amen? The sad irony of breaking the law by one stroke of the lash for whipping someone else who broke the law. What a difference a stroke makes, amen? In fact, the law exonerated the executioner if the prisoner died from the beating … which means that sometimes the prisoner or guilty party didn’t survive the 39 lashes. These beatings took place in the synagogue and served as a public warning to the public and to the person being beaten: “If you break the law, you might find yourself in this man’s place and if this man breaks the law again, he just might get 40 lashes next time and he may not survive the beating.” Paul went through this experience, not once, not twice, not three times but FIVE times!
“Three times,” says Paul, “ I was beaten with rods.” Rome considered beating someone with rods so brutal and so inhuman that it was against the law to punish one of its citizens in this manner. And yet Paul, a Roman citizen, was beaten with rods three times … and survived the experience. I can’t imagine what his back and chest looked like … well, I can but I don’t want to.
“Once I was stoned to death” (v. 25). Notice he didn’t say I survived a stoning. He said he was stoned to death … he died. Stoning was a death sentence … capital punishment. You didn’t just stone a person a little bit and then send them home. Paul was stoned to death. They tied a rope around his ankles and dragged him through the city and then dumped his body in the city’s garbage heap outside the city walls. The Disciples surrounded Paul’s body and prayed and that crazy Apostle rose from the dead, got up off that garbage pile, walked back into town, and began preaching again! Now that’s endurance, am I right my brothers and sisters … Captain Larry F. Decker would have loved this man!
As I said, each one of these trials represents “durus” … inner-strength. But his list also represents “durus” … “long-lasting.” When Paul gets flogged in the synagogue, he doesn’t quit. He goes on to the next town and starts preaching in the synagogue there. When they beat him with rods, he heals and then goes on. When he gets robbed, he keeps going. Thieves can’t stop him. Shipwrecks can’t stop him. Raging rivers can’t stop him. The elements can’t stop him. Hunger can’t stop him. Poverty can’t stop him. The gentiles can’t stop him. The Jews can’t stop him. The Romans can’t stop him. The only way they could stop him was to literally cut off his head.
As Leo Tolstoy said in his novel “War and Peace,” a man on a thousand mile walk has to say to himself every morning: “I’m going to cover 25 miles and then rest up and sleep” … and then do that 39 more times. Paul would work in the morning, making and mending tents. Then he would teach and preach all afternoon and into the evening. Sometimes he’d preach all night … hummm, that gives me a thought. When he wasn’t doing all these things, he was writing. He is the author of almost half of the New Testament … and these are only the letters that we have or that have survived the ravages of time. Who knows how many more he may have written.
Paul walked over 15,000 miles … about three and half times across the American continent. He visited the cities of Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Galatia, Colossae, Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Athens, Syracuse, Iconium Antioch, and Rome … starting around 20 churches … maybe more. I doubt that Paul would have much sympathy for a minister whining about the struggles of a pastor serving a two-point charge, do you? [I serve as pastor to two churches, hence the joke.]
When it come to life … my life … I can lift a heavy weight if I only have to do it a few times. Major problems that come and then go away quickly may be painful but they are the ones that give me “durus” … “strength.” But there are also the day-to-day problems, the ones that keep coming back … the ones that can pile up … that can make me a “basket” case.
How many of you have ever reached a point in your life where you felt like you were about to lose it? I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that we’ve all reached that point at some time or other, am I right? We’ve all had seasons in our lives where life just keeps coming at us. Sometimes it’s something big. Sometimes it’s a series of big things. Usually, however, it’s an unrelenting series of little things that push us to the breaking point … the point where we’ve tried everything but nothing seems to work. I’m talking about a day where everything seems to be going wrong, where you’re scared to cry out, “What else can go wrong” because you’re afraid of what’s gonna happen next, amen?
The car breaks down … you burn dinner … you get a call from the preschool that your child is sick and you have come pick them up … the telephone keeps ringing … the internet goes down … the roof leaks … your check bounces … your prescription runs out … you drop your cell phone in the toilet (my favorite) … your computer crashes … you lose your debit card … your favorite TV show is canceled … you bath water is cold … the vacuum cleaner is broken … the baby won’t stop crying … your spouse won’t stop whining about their day and all the problems their having …
Oh, yeah. Ever have a day like that? Days where you’re at your wit’s end. Days when your head is about to explode … your last ounce of patience is about gone … and you feel like running outside to scream and tear your hair out … only you’re afraid that your neighbors will see you outside screaming in the rain and pulling out your hair and rightfully think you are a basket case, amen?
For those of you who may be feeling like a basket case today, God has a word of encouragement for you: “Don’t worry, I’m still in control.” How many of you can testify that the God whom we serve specializes in all kinds of cases … yes, even basket cases like you.
As Christians we know that life is not going to be a perpetual bed of roses or a bowl of cherries, right? In fact, temptations, troubles, heartaches, and pain are waiting just around the corner. But we cannot lose hope. We cannot live in fear because when it appears as the devil is about to put our head in a basket, God will show up every time and He will make everything work out. How many of you believe that today?
We just heard Paul’s laundry list of woes. He shared his troubles and his victory over them for the benefit of those who were overwhelmed and frustrated. I mean, if anyone had a reason to be burnt out, frustrated, or ready to throw in the towel, it would have been Paul, am I right? Imagine how the people listening to his letter and all the things that Paul had been through would have felt. I imagine they were thinking … as you are now … that “we don’t have it so bad after all.” As the saying goes: “Despite what you’re going through, someone else would love to be in your shoes.”
Paul may seem pretty calm, cool, and collected writing about these horrors but I can assure you that he was anything but calm, cool, and collected when it was all going on. IN fact, verses 32 and 33 describe a time when was literally a “basket” case.
“In Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me. But I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped from his hands.”
If you want to read more about Paul’s experience of being lowered through a window in a basket, it can be found in Acts 9:23-25.
And yet, even when Paul became a basket case, God would give him “en durus” … strength and long-lasting. Each time that Paul was faced with defeat, God would pick him up and sweep him away to safety and victory. And God wants you to know that you can count on Him to do the same thing for you that He did for Paul. The same God who delivered Paul back then is right here today to deliver you and me. When trouble pokes its ugly head into our lives, we are all going to naturally become frustrated … overwhelmed … because we’re all human … we all have a breaking point, amen? But the Word of God tells us what to do and Whom to turn to when troubles arise. We dig deep ... we make the effort … sometimes the “second effort” … that it takes to get down on our knees and call upon and rely on the source of our “durus” … our strength and our long-lasting.
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” David asks in Psalm 27. “When the wicked came against me to eat up my flesh, my enemies and foes, they stumbled and fell. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war may rise against me, in this I will be confident” (v. 1-3). So don’t wait until trouble is over to get yourself together because you need to be together in order to deal with your troubles, amen? Before life turns you into a basket case, you need to steal away to your quiet place and spend some time talking with Jesus, amen?
While my definition of a basket case points to a person who may be on the verge of losing control, another definition of a basket case points to a person who is about to be touched by the strong and providential hand of God. In the early days of Greek theater, the characters would wear masks on stage. One mask represented tragedy and the other comedy. This would cue the audience in on what the condition of the character was or the direction that their life was moving in. But there often an “unseen” character … unseen by the characters but seen by the audience. This actor was not on the stage but above the stage looking down on the drama below. Can you guess who this character was? The actor wore a mask of one of the Greek gods. When the character couldn’t find a way out of his problem, the stage hands knew that it was time to lower the god, who was in? A basket! Once on stage, the god in the basket would save the character from impending tragedy.
Well … every now and then life’s troubles will get to where you can’t handle them by yourself. That’s when you need a basket … a basket with God in it!
Moses was a basket case, remember? Pharaoh had given the command that that all the little Hebrew boys were to be killed the moment they were born. What was Jochobed, Moses’ mother. doing to do? Talk about a bad day or being overwhelmed … the thought of losing one of your children … in a cruel way. I mean, how long could she hide her son from the neighbors? How long before one of them squealed? How long before Pharaoh’s soldiers came to kill her child? “Lord, what can I do?” she prays. “My son, Moses, is going to be slain by Pharaoh’s soldiers. I’m about to love my mind. Tell me what to do!”
And God heard her.
“Sounds like you’re a basket case, Jochobed, and I know just what you need … a basket.”
“A what, Lord?”
“A basket. And then I want you to put Moses in that basket and I want you to send that basket … baby and all … down the Nile. Don’t worry about the current. Don’t worry about the crocodiles. Don’t worry about your baby drowning because I’ve got your precious little baby Moses in my hand.”
What about the 5,000 people who didn’t have food to eat? The Disciples panicked. They turned into basket cases … until a little boy showed up with … common, say it with me … a basket! Jesus took that basket and blessed it and not only fed 5,000 people with that lunch basket but had baskets of leftovers as well, amen?
Paul said he was attacked on every side. He was whipped by the Jews five different times. Beaten with rods three different times. He was stoned and left for dead. He was a real basket case. How did Paul survive all this? For many of you basket cases this morning, this is an important question. You’re struggling with challenges and problems on every front. Your problems are coming at you faster than you can count them. Maybe you feel like you’re being beaten with rods and whips. Maybe it feels like your life has been shipwrecked or that you’re floating, lost at sea without a compass. Maybe you’re not in prison but it sure feels like it. If you’re a basket case, then lift your eyes unto the hills from where your help will come and the Lord who made the heavens and the earth will get in His basket and come to you. We serve a God who specializes in basket cases. He specializes in mending the broken hearted … building up the torn down … restoring what has been thrown away … renewing what has been worn out. He specializes in drying the tear-stained eyes of basket cases like you and me.
My brothers and sisters, hear me loud and clear: God loves you! God cares about you! He cares for us so much that He gave His only begotten Son who paid the ransom for our salvation. He cared enough to come into this sinful world and die like a common criminal on that a cruel, blood-stained cross. He cared enough to die for the sins of the world … for basket cases like us. Amen?
