HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO
“May the Force Be With You”
Wouldn’t it be great to have super powers?
Wouldn’t you like to wake up one morning to find you had, in the words of the old Superman TV show… “powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men?”
To be faster than a speeding bullet…
More powerful than a locomotive…
To leap tall buildings in a single bound?
I wonder…
I wonder, if you were given the chance to acquire one super power…what would it be?
A recent poll asked this question, and gave participants the following options:
Invulnerability.
Reading minds.
Spider-sense.
The ability to fly.
X-Ray vision.
Invisibility.
Super strength.
Genie-like magic.
Great intelligence.
Incredible luck.
Look over that list and think about it for a sec.
Which of those, if you could choose only one, would be your super power of choice?
Well, if you’re like the majority of those who responded, 25% in fact of the over 9000 people polled your choice was…
The ability to fly.
Why do you suppose that is?
What is it about flying that makes it more appealing than…invisibility, for example?
I think it would be great to become invisible.
To just disappear at will for short periods of time, wouldn’t that be great?
You know, some people claim it does happen to them.
There is a group of people who claim to suffer from a syndrome they’ve labeled, HSII
Human Spontaneous Involuntary Invisibility.
I’m not making this up.
They claim that for no explained reason they have disappeared for a brief period of time.
It happens at parties, when suddenly the other guests completely ignore them.
One woman writes how her husband ran all over the house searching for her, when she was sitting on the sofa the whole time.
One woman claims she’s tempted at times to sneak into banks and steal money, since at times she becomes completely invisible. !?!?
These people claim to suffer from invisibility.
I wonder if any of them have every tried to see a doctor about this.
“Doctor, there’s a woman out here who claims she’s invisible.”
“Tell her I can’t see her right now.”
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Now I’m assuming that none of us here has ever been invisible.
Even though it was the third most popular super power in that poll.
But maybe some of us here have tried to fly at some time.
C’mon guys…fess up.
You tie that towel around your neck, and when nobody’s looking...up, up, and away!
That’s how my dad broke his arm when he was a little boy.
And just two weeks ago, a 4 year old girl in North Carolina, having watched “Harry Potter” on video, crawled up onto her kitchen counter, straddled a broomstick, and tried to take off, and it would be amusing if she didn’t then find herself in critical condition at her local hospital.
As much as we’d like to have super powers sometimes, the fact of the matter is, we’re only human.
But last week, as we started this series, we entertained a fascinating idea…
The idea that, as people who are “only human,” we are the very kind of people God is after.
We met two Davids last week…David Dunn from “Unbreakable,” an everyday guy who discovers he has a not-so-everyday calling.
And another David, who we met in the Old Testament.
A shepherd boy, an everyday guy, who is called by God to be a king.
Two ordinary people who become heroes.
Kinda like Luke Skywalker.
You remember him? A farmboy. A nobody from a distant, forgotten planet who becomes the galaxy’s greatest hero.
But his journey isn’t an easy one.
We saw that early on this morning, as Luke faced a seemingly insurmountable task.
He looked out at a situation that seemed impossible, and then believed it was.
Luke was a lot like the soldiers of Israel who found themselves with a giant taunting them.
Picture the scene: they’ve been called to defend their land against a massive army gathered to invade them and destroy them.
So here they are, getting ready for a great battle, when all of a sudden, out comes this guy about 9 feet tall to face them.
Now before you strike that off as either literary license or even plain fiction, remember that the tallest man in modern recorded history, Robert Wadlow, was 8 feet 11 inches tall.
Anyway, here comes this giant of a man, and he offers them the chance to end the battle quickly by sending out their champion to fight him.
They take one look at this behemoth of a man and they take off.
Then along comes David, young David.
And this kid puts the soldiers in their place.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “This monster insults you and God, and you just stand there? Are you just going to let him do this?”
Their response?
“Yep.”
So David decides to take matters into his own hands, and listen to how the story unfolds from 1 Samuel, chapter 17…
( Read 1 SAMUEL 17:40-50)
Last week we explored the possibility that God calls ordinary people to live extra-ordinary lives.
This week I’d like to explore the possibility that God calls ordinary people to do extra-ordinary things.
We’ve all been in situations like the one Luke Skywalker faced, or the one the Israelites faced so long ago.
You look out and all you see is hopelessness.
You look out and all you see are...
...insurmountable odds…
...unassailable heights…
...and unachievable goals.
We all face Goliath at one time or another.
Perhaps a relationship that seems broken beyond repair…
...or a financial burden that towers over us with oppressive force…
...or a nagging doubt that threatens us to question everything we hold dear.
Or maybe “Goliath” is simply that ever-present sense of despair, that question that keeps pounding away at us, asking.
“Why bother? Why keep trying? Why pretend that it’s worth getting up every morning?”
Whatever it is, we’ve all been there.
We’ve all faced giants in our lives.
And most of the time, we’re more like Luke than David.
“I can’t…it’s too big.”
And even when friends try to encourage us, to tell us to keep fighting and beat this thing that’s got us down, we echo Luke again…
“You want the impossible.”
And like Luke, like the Israelite soldiers, we sulk off and hide…we let the giant win.
But if we’re not careful, the cost of our retreat can be extreme.
That’s what happened to a man named Charles Templeton.
Half a century ago, Templeton was thought to be a preacher even more powerful than his close friend Billy Graham.
He and Graham traveled the world and shared God’s love with countless people.
Templeton himself founded a church in Canada that grew to 1200 members in a very short span of time.
Yet he gave it all up when he began to have doubts about his Christian faith.
He found himself asking some pretty big questions…
“Can the Bible be trusted?”
“How can a loving God allow suffering?”
“How can we reconcile science with faith?”
These are good questions
...Big questions…
...Giant questions…
And in Templeton’s case, the giant won.
He abandoned his faith, and rejected Christianity altogether.
You can read about it in Lee Strobel’s fabulous book, “The Case for Faith,” which then goes on to address the questions that defeated Templeton.
Strobel shows quite clearly that as big as these questions seem, coming to grips with them in a way that is consistent with following Jesus Christ is not “impossible.”
The giant doesn’t have to win.
“But you don’t know what I’m facing,” you say,
“You don’t know what I am dealing with.”
“I can’t do it…it’s too big…it’s impossible.”
Now I don’t want you to think for a moment that what I’m advocating here this morning is some kind of “pie in the sky” Christianity.
There are too many people out there who say,
“Hey, just become a Christian and all of your problems will be sorted.”
Christianity is not some kind of spiritual “Oxy Clean.”
“Just put your faith in Jesus and watch your problems disappear…even tea stains!”
That’s not how it works.
When you put your faith in Jesus Christ, it’s not some sort of cosmic guarantee against problems and obstacles in life.
Jesus himself said this:
“In this world you are going to have trials. In this world you are going to know sorrow.”
He was speaking to to his closest friends, the ones who had abandoned everything to follow him.
And rather than give them a “get out of jail free card,” he tells them:
“You’re not exempt. You’re going to encounter pain and hardship just like everyone else because you live in a broken and fallen world.”
But he goes on to say something else.
“Don’t give up. Take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
In other words, you are going to come up against giants in your life, but the difference is this:
The giants aren’t going to win.
They can taunt you, they can scare you, they can defy you…but they can never defeat you.
But you know what?
For some reason, that doesn’t always appear to be the case.
If you’re here this morning, and you’re not a follower of Jesus Christ, I have to confess something to you:
I wouldn’t blame you if you rejected Christianity based on what you see in the lives of a lot of Christians today.
Someone once said, “If one-tenth of what you Christians believe is true, you should be ten times more joyful than you are.”
I think that’s true.
Those of us who claim to follow Jesus Christ claim to have found a life that gives us meaning and purpose,
…but so often our lives don’t reflect it one bit.
We live lives of defeat and resignation, instead of reflecting the spirit of the one who said, “Take courage! I’ve overcome the world!”
Why do you suppose that is?
Why do we let the giant win?
I think it boils down to this simple reality:
We are fighting:
The wrong battle…
For the wrong reasons…
With the wrong weapons…
We’re fighting the wrong battle…
You see, I would argue that the real battle that the Israelites faced wasn’t against Goliath, but against fear.
In purely human terms, they had absolutely no chance of defeating Goliath.
Goliath knew that The Israelites knew that, and David knew that.
The difference was that David also knew that the battle against Goliath wasn’t his to fight.
He says it plain and clear to Goliath:
“It is God’s battle…not ours. The Lord will give you to us!”
In David’s eyes, he wasn’t battling the giant, God was.
We need that same perspective in our lives today.
We need to recognize that by ourselves we don’t have what it takes to overcome the giants that come our way.
Jesus didn’t say, “Believe in me…take courage and you will overcome the world.”
He said, “Take courage…I have overcome the world.”
In other words, the power that these giants want to have over you…
the power to discourage…
the power to dishearten…
the power to defeat you…
That power has already been broken because of what Jesus has done for us.
Listen to what a follower of Jesus named Paul
wrote almost 2000 years ago:
“What can separate us from Christ’s love? Will trouble, pain, persecution, having no food or clothes, danger, or violence separate us? No! In all these things, we are more than conquerors through the one who loved us.”
Paul should know! He lived in a time when being a Christian meant persecution…torture…and death.
But he still says, “We are more than conquerors through the one who loved us.”
He knew that the real battle wasn’t against all this things that assail us, but against fear and complacency.
When giants taunt us, the temptation is to retreat,to be “terrified and deeply shaken,” as the Bible describes the Israelite soldiers.
They thought… “We can’t defeat this guy,” and they were right.
So they gave into their fear.
But David knew that he didn’t have to defeat Goliath…that the battle was God’s, not his…and so he didn’t let fear get the best of him.
I would argue that the second he stepped out and
faced up to Goliath, the battle was already
won.
In the same way, we need to step out and face up to our giants, not because we can defeat them, but because God can.
Our fight is the fight against fear.
We’re fighting the wrong battle.
And we’re fighting it for the wrong reasons.
When Goliath challenged the Israelites, you know what the king did?
He offered a huge reward to the soldier who killed Goliath.
What he was saying, in effect, was “Fight the giant, and I’ll make your life a lot easier.”
You and I find ourselves struggling with the same motivations.
We want to defeat the giants in our lives because we want our lives to be easier.
We want to be free from hardship and difficulty, but as we’ve already seen, that just isn’t the case.
So we fight and we fight, and maybe sometimes we have a small victory, but then something else comes along, and we fight some more…
…and life never gets easier.
So we get discouraged, we get tired, and sometimes we give up.
But David understood something we don’t.
He understood the right reason for facing up to the giant.
He went out onto that battlefield, not to get a big reward, but to give glory to God.
In other words, his goal wasn’t to get to a place where people said, “Wow…look what David did!”
His goal was to get to a place where people said, “Wow…look what God did!”
“Today the Lord will conquer you…and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel!”
Friends, you and I want an easy life, but we’re not called to an easy life.
We’re called to a faithful life.
A life that’s more concerned with reflecting God than receiving reward.
That may not make a lot of sense to those of you who wouldn’t consider yourself Christians.
Maybe you’ve run across Christians who love to brag about the victories in their life…
“I overcame addiction.”
“I defeated depression.”
“I did this…I did that.”
I…I…I…I…I
They make it sound like living the Christian life is all about how their life got easier.
That’s not what it’s about.
It’s not about showing what we can do…it’s about showing what God can do.
We’re fighting the wrong battle…for the wrong reasons.
And we’re doing it with the wrong weapons.
Reading the story, you might be tempted to think that the weapons David used were stones.
Think again.
“You come to me with sword, spear, and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD Almighty.”
David may have used stones, but his real weapon was the name of the LORD.
It’s not a phrase we use much anymore, but to come “in the name of someone” meant that you had all the power and authority that person had…it had been conferred to you completely.
If someone was sent to a distant land “in the name of the King,” they were given all the respect and deference due to the king. They were given the power and authority of the king himself.
And here’s David saying, “I come in the name of the LORD.”
He knew he had authority because God had given it to him.
And that was his weapon.
Last week I suggested that as we examine the life of David over the summer, you may want to climb into his mind and heart a bit by reading some of the book of Psalms, much of which is really his own personal journal.
Listen to what he writes in a song recorded in Psalm 20:
“Some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.”
In other words, we’re not going to look to any earthly source for our victory, but we’re going to trust in God’s ability, power, and authority.
We’ve lost sight of that.
Somewhere along the line, those of us who claim to follow Christ have forgotten that we have been given authority.
Jesus said, “I have given you authority to trample over all the powers that seek to destroy you.”
In other words, we don’t have to live like this.
You don’t have to live like this.
But we keep on fighting, whacking away at our giants with weapons that don’t accomplish a thing.
You know…
If we just find the right plan
The right self-help programme
The right diet
The right relationship
The right job
If we just work at it hard enough, the victory will come.
But what Jesus is saying is, “I’ve done all the work for you…what you need to do now is understand the authority you’ve been given as someone who comes in my name.”
Again, that doesn’t mean that everything suddenly becomes a piece of cake.
It means that we start to understand who we are and what resources we’ve been given.
We haven’t been just plopped down into the battlefield and told, “You’re on your own.”
We’ve been given everything we need.
We just don’t know how to use it.
But the good news is, it doesn’t have to be that
way.
Each of us this morning can walk away from here with a greater understanding of who we were created to be and the life we were created to live.
A victorious life.
A life that knows we live in an imperfect world, where giants assail us every day,
But a life that also knows how to fight
the right battle
for the right reasons
with the right weapons.
A life that looks at everything the world wants to throw at us, and says
“Bring it on.”
All we need to do is ask.
Ask God for a greater understanding of the giants in our lives and the victory he wants us to have over them.
If you’re not a Christian, maybe that giant this morning is simply the understanding that you need God in your life.
You know you’ve been fighting for so long, and there’s got to be more to life than this.
There is.
There’s a God who loves you and wants to show you the life you were always meant to live.
Ask him to show you.
Maybe you are a Christian, but you’ve got other giants that have you feeling completely defeated.
You need to see them the way God sees them.
Ask him to show you. Right here. Right now.
(PRAY)
