Take Courage, You Must Also_________________
1 Samuel 23:7-18 Acts 16:6-10
Have you ever did something you felt led by the Lord to do and you believed you had a good motive for doing so, and it still seemed to blow up in your face? David had been running for his life trying to get away from King Saul. I can imagine David had been thinking, “what can I do to show Saul that I’m still wanting to be on his side?”
The Philistines, who were Saul’s enemy were destroying the city of Keilah. David asks the Lord, “should I go and help the city of Keilah, and the Lord says yes go up.” David is thinking this is a win-win situation. Saul will see that I’m fighting against his enemies, and let go of his anger toward me, and the people of Keilah will welcome me with open arms and surround me with appreciation.
David’s men didn’t want to go so he inquired of the Lord and second time and God said. “ go, I will surely give them over to you.” David does so and the Lord is true to his word. He defeats the Philistines and liberate the city, but then nothing follows the Script that David had in mind.
Saul sees David’s action not as an olive branch to be reunited, but as serious military blunder in that he is inside a walled city that could easily be taken. The people of Keilah appreciated what David had done, but not enough to have his back against Saul. They will turn on David in a minute if it meant a chance to save themselves.
David watched his future plans fall apart, and he became greatly discouraged. It was Jonathan, Saul’s son, who came and helped David to find his strength in God. He told David, “don’t be afraid, eventually we all know that one day you’re going to be King.” But that’s not what David was feeling inside. Doing God’s will in God’s timing was very frustrating for him.
Paul and Silas and a few other fellows, were just eager to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were going to light a blazing torch for Jesus through the province of Asia with church planting, only to discover the Holy Spirit would not allow them to preach there. They figured out then, let’s bring the good news of the gospel to all the lost souls in Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to go there.
I mean, what’s up with this, hadn’t Jesus told them to go into all the world and preach the gospel. Then Paul received a vision of a man from Macedonia and decided, this is where God wants us to preach the gospel in power and plant a few churches. Little did they know a severe beating and jail time was waiting for them there in Macedonia.
One morning, I got to church about 5:45 in the winter, and there was a homeless woman on the porch sleeping under some covers. I woke her up and told her she could warm up inside if she liked. She came in and went to sleep in the classroom. The following Sunday the woman was there again sleeping.
I shared this with the staff and with Session and we felt the Lord was calling us to start some type of homeless ministry for people overnight. We went to the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless to see what the need was as they saw it. They told us what was really needed was a warm space from 7am to 6pm when the women and children had to leave the shelter on Saturdays.
The response from the church to serve during those hours was overwhelming. We scheduled people and activities and meals were all organized. The Northeast Ohio Coalition told us to expect 25 to 50 people as they let others know about our overflow backup option. We were so glad to be able to move for God in this way. The first week, the shelters sent us 0 people. The next week 0 people. The next week 0 people. We concluded, maybe the Lord hadn’t called us to this ministry. We had wanted to go in this area, but somehow the Spirit of Jesus didn’t allow it.
When you read chapters 20 and 21 of Acts, you get this picture that Paul has a burning desire to get to Jerusalem by the day of Pentecost. We don’t know what Paul was wanting to happen when he got there, but it must have been something big, because nothing could stop him. Prayers and prophecies of warnings of being chained up were brushed off, with Paul saying “I am ready to die in Jerusalem if that’s what it takes.”
Well Paul does get there, it doesn’t go quite as he had planned. First he had to lie low for a while to let the Jews know he hadn’t rejected the Mosaic Law outright. He and some others under went a 7 day ritual process that ended in disaster. His first public speech caught him by surprise in that it was done with no advertising. Some Jews accused Paul of defiling the temple by bringing in some Greeks, and the next thing Paul, knows he’s being punched, kicked, and beaten by an angry mob. He’s rescued by soldiers, put in chains and about to be hauled away as a criminal before giving his sermon.
The message started out great, but at the end of it, the people were not shouting amen, but rather, away with the man from the face of the earth. He’s not even fit to live. He would have been flogged after that message except for the fact he claimed Roman Citizenship. His next message caused a split between the Pharisees and Sadducees that become so violent the commander thought the group was going to tear Paul into pieces.
After that night, the “Lord stood near to Paul and said, “Take Courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome. I think, if I would have been Paul, “I would have said, Thank You Jesus. Finally I can get on with my life serving you. I would have been thinking, “ Lysias, the commander will see through these false charges and let me go first thing in the morning. I can do all that I was thinking when I first planned to get to Jerusalem.”
Only the next morning instead of hearing about his release, Paul is informed of a new assassination attempt on his life. Paul doesn’t know it, but Rome is still several years away with a few years of imprisonment, a shipwreck, and chains arriving in Rome in between.
It just seems as though there should be a rule that when you do the right things for God, blessings should come your way. If you take a stand for God, God is going to cause you to prosper.
For most of us, back in the day when we were in the PCUSA, we felt this chain trying to pull us in a direction we did not want to go. Surely it sought to keep us from the blessing that God had for us. I think on the inside many of us felt that if we could just snap that chain we would begin to see God move in some mighty ways in our churches.
In some of the moments of the battle with presbyteries, we could feel God saying, “Take Encourage, You Must Also Appear Before____________ and testify of me.” For each of our 15 churches, that blank has meant something slightly different, but God is saying it to us all nevertheless.
I think like the Apostle Paul, we think the time period between the words Take Courage and You Must Also Appear Before____________ is shorter than what God has in mind. Somehow as a congregation, we just knew that once we left the PCUSA to join ECO we would take off with sensational growth for the Lord. I can remember how refreshing it was to attend the first ECO presbytery meeting and be among like minded saints with not only the praise and worship, but with the theological discussions as well. It almost seemed as though we were crossing into the promised land.
But now that we have crossed, there are still battles to be fought. We have not seen the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. Yet our reality has been a reduction in the staff, a departure of covenant partners, and the loss of several people in death. For the first time in 36 years of ministry, I have seen a significant decline in the attendance of our main service over a two year period. This comes at a time when we are more engaged in our community than ever and we have tried all different kinds of worship experiences. It would appear that our vision of what we would be in ECO is not matching our reality.
Yet the strange things is, I believe we are where God is calling us to be. There are two things that can cause us to become discouraged. The first is having an unfulfilled expectation. We think, in order to become what God wants us to be, we must be at this Mark or at that target goal. I’m not saying not to set goals, just to remember that God moves at a different pace than we do. We do so many things to get people to come to our church, and yet many of the visitors that come to our church tell me, I was passing by your church and just felt something said to stop and go in. That tells me the Holy Spirit is at work sending people into our midst.
We can see where we are as a church, but we don’t know why we are where we are. Remember Paul and the others wanted to make a difference in Asia and Bithynia, but obviously Jesus saw something there that would harm them more than it would help them. I think that maybe God is seeing if he can trust us where we are before moving us to somewhere else. We forget that it is an awesome privilege to be called and used by God, wherever God places us. Jesus was as comfortable serving God whether he was doing single work of God as in talking to the rich young ruler who walked away from him as he was in feeding the 5,000.
The other thing that causes us to get discouraged is envy or jealousy of what seems to be happening somewhere else. We almost want to scream, “God don’t you see how faithful we are trying to be, and yet look at them. Why are they being so blessed.” What we really means is why are they being so successful according to our measures of success. God’s view of success on Sunday morning is to love everyone in the building as Christ has loved us.
I hate to admit it but our view of success is to have a certain number of people sitting in the pews on Sunday so long as there is no open fighting with each other. Somehow I lose sight of the verse, by this will all know that you are my disciples, if you fill at least ¾ of the seats in the building. No---by how much you love one another.
The longer I am a Christian, the more I appreciate being saved by God’s grace and God’s grace alone. I find it harder and harder to do anything with just a simple pure motive to love God. I can remember Brother Lawrence in “The Practice of the Presence Of God, talking about washing dishes simply to the praise of God.
I find myself caught in the trap of connecting almost all that I do to the growth of the church and not simply to the glory of God. I pray God would deliver me from this chain of guilt. I really don’t think God is going to ask me about the attendance numbers at the church. He probably will ask me about how much I loved the people in the church
God has given us the unique honor and privilege of loving the people who are in our congregation right now, in this time and in this place. We can look so forward to what God is going to do, that we miss what God is doing right now.
Some of the people in our church have less than a year to live. Some of the people in our church have less than a year before they go off to school. Some of them have less than a year, before they move away. Some of them less than a year before they leave the church altogether. Are we touching their lives for Jesus Christ in the way God wants us to do today? Are we equipping them with the power of the Holy Spirit to face what is about to come.
Are we taking the time to love them or are we becoming discouraged because the vision is not unfolding in the way we had imagined. It is my prayer that God will grant us our visions. But remember God’s word to Paul, “Take Courage.” Paul had a vision to ultimately get to Rome with the Gospel message and God never took it from him. He arrived, but he didn’t get there in the way he had planned.
God is at work in your life and in the churches you represent. But never forget that our God is Sovereign, and though God’s ways are not always the ones that we would choose, God loves us and knows what’s most needed. As Paul told a church that was having a rough time with a battle outside the church and inside the church, “He who began a good work in you, shall be faithful to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.
