There’s an old, old story about the time a crowd had gathered to watch a stunt man perform at Niagara Falls. It seems that the fellow had rigged up a wire from shore to shore, right across the falls, and was wowing the crowd by riding a bicycle along that wire. Back and forth he went, several times, and so, to make it more exciting, he asked the crowd if they believed he could make it across while carrying various things. First, he held up a suitcase and an umbrella, and asked, “Do you believe I can make it across the falls carrying these?” Since people had seen what he could do without anything in his hands, and it was pretty impressive, most of them shouted, “Yes, yes, we believe.” Sure enough, he got all the way across and back with no trouble. Next he picked up a violin and a bow, and asked the crowd, “Now do you believe I can ride my bike on this thin wire, across these falls, while I play my fiddle?” Again, they had seen incredible things, and so they shouted out again, “Yes, yes, we believe.” It was just astonishing to listen to a string of bluegrass fiddlin’ wafting out over the roaring waters of Niagara. He did it!
Finally the stunt man picked up a chair, and said, “Now I have just one more question. Do you believe I can put somebody in this chair and balance them on my bike and ride across the falls? Do you believe I can do this?” Well, the crowd went wild. They cheered and they whistled. They stomped and they shouted. “Sure. Yes. Go for it. We believe. We believe.”
“All right,” said he. “If you believe, I now need for one believer to step forward and sit in the chair.” How many do you think stepped forward?.
Which just means that there is often a tremendous gap between what we say we believe and what we really believe. A disconnect between our ideas and our commitment. A very large gap.
Did you know that when God invites us to do something, it will always lead to a crisis of belief? What we think we believe will go into tension with what God asks us to do, and there will be a crisis. When the moment of truth comes, and God invites us to sit in the chair going over the falls, then we will find ourselves in crisis.
I am sure you have heard before, that the Chinese character translated into English as “crisis” means, at its root, “dangerous opportunity.” A crisis is a dangerous opportunity; it is scary, but it holds out something wonderful at the same time..
When the earliest Christians met the new convert Saul of Tarsus, it was not easy. It caused a crisis. This man Saul had been the most zealous persecutor of Christians. He had gone to great lengths to make sure they were stamped out. But Saul had met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus one day, and everything changed. Saul became Paul; the enemy of the church became its newest son. The preacher of death became the proclaimer of new life. Can you just imagine the folks in the Jerusalem church? “Do you know who’s coming to preach here today? I’m afraid to show up at church this week!” Crisis!
Well, then the crisis got worse. It got worse because as this persecutor turned preacher got going, he began to say some things that were new. He began to think about Jesus Christ in some different ways. Paul said, if salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus, then doesn’t that mean that keeping the Jewish Law is not the way to salvation?. And then he went on to argue, and if keeping the Jewish Law is not the way to salvation, then why are we still insisting that only Jews are to be saved? Why can’t we preach the gospel to everyone? Paul reminded people that Jesus Himself had commanded that they go into all the world and bring the good news to every person and every nation.
All right. The Christians could follow that logic. But then Paul tore it. Then he went too far. Well, said Paul, if anyone can be saved; and if it isn’t possible to be saved by keeping the Law, why do we ask these Greeks and Romans and Parthians and everybody ... why do we ask them to submit to Jewish ritual? Why do we ask their men to be circumcised and why do we ask them all to keep the Sabbath rules? Why don’t we just receive these people into the church, openly and freely, because that’s the way God receives them?
Wow! Nobody had ever looked at it that way before. Nobody had ever thought of the Christian faith in such an open way before. Paul had a new idea. Paul saw God’s invitation, God’s leadership. But it brought about a crisis. The early church went into conflict over this.
Remember, whenever God invites us to do something, that invitation will lead to a crisis of belief. Let’s find out more about that.
I
First, I want you to see that when God invites us into some new truth, the first crisis of belief will come even before we have to do anything. The first crisis of belief will be within ourselves. It will be within our own hearts and minds. We will struggle with God’s invitation on our own for a while, before we ever bring it out where others can shoot at it. God’s invitation will lead to a crisis of belief, our own personal beliefs, our own personal faith, long before we are called to do anything concrete.
And that can feel pretty scary. That can feel like riding the bike over Niagara Falls, and the tight-wire isn’t even tight! When something happens to reach down into your very core and make you change who you are and what you are about, that is awesome! That’s a crisis; that’s dangerous. But it is a dangerous opportunity. Because, tough as it is, there is nothing more powerful than your own story. Your own truth. Truth that you possess because it has been worked out from within. Truth that you have hammered out for yourself. That’s powerful.
Paul tells us in the Galatian letter about his story. He speaks about what life used to be like for him. Think about what he walked away from when he became a Christian.
He walked away from his old purpose. You may not like his old purpose, but at least he had one. Wrong as it was, he was better off than lots of folks who just drift from moment to moment, with no purpose in life. Paul had had a purpose. But he walked away from it.
“You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.”
The Paul walked away from a good reputation. He had been thought of as a wonder boy. His career as a rabbi was on an upward trajectory. Keep this up, and he would have had it made!
“I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.”
Paul had a great career in front of him. But no more. That was behind him. He walked away from that too.
So when God sought Paul out and Paul converted to Christ, not only did he walk away from all those props and supports, but he also had to learn a new way of thinking. He had to turn around in the road, change the direction he was going, and learn a whole new pattern of thought. Now that’s scary! That’s a crisis! That’s tough!
How did he do it? How did he work through this crisis? He spent time praying through, thinking through the meaning of what was happening. The first thing he did was to give time to the Holy Spirit to teach him and shape him. Paul says that instead of just barging in with his new ideas, he stopped and he waited, to make sure he was doing the right thing. He took time to pray and think it through.
“But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem ..”
Paul recognized that when you are in a crisis, you have to spend some time in reflection, in thinking, and in prayer. I like the reversal somebody put on the old saying. You can’t just rush out and do. You have to make the truth your own truth.
A few years ago Gail Sheehy made popular the term, “mid-life crisis.” The idea of the mid-life crisis is that at some time in a person’s adult years, maybe after their families and careers seem well on their way, they just feel like changing. They just want something different. Maybe a different job or even a different career. Maybe, sadly, a different spouse or a different family or no family at all. But the point is, you can come to a crisis moment when, if you listen to your heart, you hear change wanting to take place. You feel something new struggling to be born. That’s a crisis. The first task is to pray, to listen, to discern. To what is God inviting me? Is there something new I need to be for him? Three years in Arabia and Damascus. Some sort of quiet time to listen to the Spirit. Time well spent, when your life is in crisis.
II
But the day came when Paul had to do something with these convictions. The time came when the personal crisis had to be taken into the public arena. This thing of making people become Jews before they could be Christians had gone on long enough, in Paul’s mind. And so he got up on his hind legs and marched out to see the leaders of the church, taking along a young Greek convert named Titus, just so they could see the evidence. So they could experience what he was feeling.
And something very interesting happened. It tells us a lot about how, when God invites us to do something for Him, that invitation leads to a crisis of belief. It tells us that when we get into crisis times, the crisis will always be the tension between what has been and what is to be. Between the old established pattern and what is about to be born. But here’s the good part. When you take your crisis public, and do something about it, genuinely spiritual people will go with it, if it brings Kingdom growth. Inauthentic people, sham believers, all they really want is for nothing to change. When there is a crisis, and somebody has the courage to hang in there and work it through, the truly spiritual will change for Kingdom growth. The unreal people will refuse to change.
Look again at the story.
“Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. ... Then I laid before them ... the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, ... But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us-- we did not submit to them even for a moment, ... when James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles ....”
Some of the Christian leaders were false. They were there only to embarrass Paul and oppose him. Their motives were nothing more than to maintain the status quo. But the real Christians, the genuinely spiritual, Peter, James, and John, the ones who had known the Lord’s heart .. when they really listened to Paul, when they saw the product of his work in the young Greek Titus ... well, they changed. They saw the new truth and they changed. Why? They changed because it meant Kingdom growth. They dropped their resistance, because the new way was bringing Kingdom growth. More believers, more Christians, more Kingdom growth.
Friends, we are going to be asking you, in the weeks to come, whether you will be among those who, like these Paul mentions, want to keep things as they are, or whether you will be like Peter and James and John, willing to let the crisis resolve into change for Kingdom growth. I speak about crisis in our church. I cannot say more right now, because some decisions are still being debated in committees. But this much I can and must say: we must invest in Kingdom growth. Not in just maintaining what we have. Not in just keeping up what we are now doing. But in more. In more. In new ministries, new outreach, new efforts. We must invest in God’s future. Nothing else is worthy His love. Nothing else will resolve the crisis rightly.
Can you see why I say this is a crisis time for us? The details will come out in time. But we are really going to have to see if we are ready to commit our time and our wallets boldly for Kingdom growth, or whether we will fall timidly behind. When the authentically spiritual people saw what Paul was getting done, winning new people, these Greeks, they said, “You have our blessing and you have our resources. Go and do it.” Others fell behind and disappeared from the stage of history. When God invites us to do something for Him, His invitation leads to a crisis of belief. That crisis calls us to choose for or against Kingdom growth.
III
All right. Let’s review what we now know about crisis. First, when God invites you to do something, there will be a crisis in your own heart and mind before you actually have to do it. And you can resolve that crisis through a time of prayer, reflection, and study. The crisis before you get involved offers a chance for spiritual maturing.
Then there will be a crisis as you get into action. When you are out there trying to do something with your beliefs, there is going to be tension. And some will never accept what you are doing. Some will never even see it. But others, the spiritually discerning, will accept it and support it if it is for Kingdom growth. That’s the crisis while you are involved.
But the most interesting of all is the crisis that comes after you think you have won the battle! The crisis that comes after you think you have gotten everything worked out! Because the problem is that old habits die hard, and just because something new has been started, that doesn’t mean that it catches hold permanently. You can have your most important dangerous opportunity after you think you have finished the fight.
Paul left Jerusalem thinking he had everything clear about the place of non-Jews in the church. He thought everybody now understood that Gentiles were to be welcomed on the same basis as Jews. How disappointed he was to learn, then, that Peter, of all people, had stopped sharing meals with Gentiles. That Peter was afraid of what people might say, and so Peter had separated himself from the Greek believers. Paul was furious! Paul was upset. But he also did something about it, because Paul knew that when God invites you to do something for Him, that invitation will lead to a crisis of belief, and that human beings leave the greatest of gaps between what they say they believe and what they will do. So Paul moved swiftly to correct the situation:
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?"
Paul called on Peter and the others to live in a way that was consistent with their beliefs, and not to fall back. Paul knew that when we get caught up in trying to win a popularity contest, we are going to break faith with what we have professed to believe. We get complacent and the thing we treasure the most is getting along, so we drop the cutting edge and we fall back into old habits. We get fat and lazy and we quit growing. All out of the fear of being different. All out of a need to be accepted and popular. Thank God for a Paul, who would make a crisis out of that! For a Paul, who would call to task even Peter the prince of the church, and put him into crisis! When a cause is no longer popular, we fall backwards, and that’s a crisis time.
There are a hundred illustrations. Lots of us took up the cause of racial justice when it was the thing to do, but now we don’t work at making our church truly multiracial. Some Paul needs to take us to task on this.
Lots of us believe in helping the poor, the lonely, the sick, and the vulnerable. We believe in that. But if it costs us more than a few dollars in the needy fund or if it claims our time to tutor kids in the after-school program or if it requires us to drive out to the nursing home to hold somebody’s hand, well, that’s too much! Oh, some Paul needs to meet us face to face on this.
We stand in this room and sing, “I love Thy kingdom, Lord, the house of Thine abode, the church our blessed Redeemer bought, with His own precious blood.” Sounds fine when we sing it. But, oh my soul, if we are actually going to have to pay off a debt and hire new staff and serve on a committee and shoulder a load ... we need is Paul to stand up to us face to face, now!
How many times have we sung it? “Oh for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise.” A thousand tongues? Let’s use the one we have now! And be consistent with what we believe! “I love to tell the story of unseen things above, of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love.” We love to tell the story? To whom have we told it lately? Where are the results of our story-telling? Oh, great God, we need a Paul to create a crisis among us, now that we are complacent and satisfied. We need a Paul to shout out the awful truth, that we are afraid, we are hypocritical, we are inconsistent with the truth of the gospel.
This is a crisis time! Church crisis? Yes. Staffing crisis, financial crisis? Better, spiritual crisis. Mission crisis. Kingdom growth crisis. Consistency crisis. Standing for something crisis. A dangerous, wonderful, terrible, awesome, agonizing, glorious opportunity. To be the church God invites us to be. Knowing, all the while, that God’s invitation leads to a crisis of belief.
But do not be afraid. Do not fear the crisis. It may be dangerous, but it is an opportunity. And hear the best of news, the greatest of news. When we obey and follow Him,
“..it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
