Colonel Floyd J. Thompson, the longest-serving American prisoner of war in any conflict died July 16, 2002, at age 69. His obituary reported that for nine years he "endured cold cells, jungle cages, and torture in Vietnam.” The citation that accompanied his Distinguished Service Medal said "Jimmy" Thompson had endured "unfathomable deprivation and hardship" in the service of his country.
Perhaps the most arresting paragraph in the obituary was this: "’Dying is easy,’ an enemy camp commander told him. ’Living is the difficult thing.’" And the obituary revealed just how true that had become. Col. Thompson after returning home was divorced twice, battled alcoholism and depression, and in 1981, he suffered a stroke that put him in a coma for six months and left him partly paralyzed.
That enemy commander was right. It may be that your life is every bit as difficult as Thompson’s was. You may be trying to live through the results of abuse or addiction. The consequences of others or yourself may have left you scarred and broken. Perhaps your life doesn’t come close to the pain of this soldier but just because it’s not as traumatic doesn’t make it any less painful and hard.
Understand that those who follow Jesus—who are “Christians”, do not escape the difficulties of life. Divorce and death affect Christian homes just like it does those who don’t believe. The consequences of sin impact our lives like it does the most blatant pagans. But the difference is followers of Jesus have the presence of Jesus with them and that is a powerful positive force in our life when the hard times come up against us.
Yet if this is true, and it is, why is it that sometimes the Christians we know don’t deal with disappointments any better or differently than the non-churched pagan down the street? Let me offer a guess. When there is no difference the reason is not because of the lack of Jesus’ power. The problem comes from the follower who hasn’t take the opportunity to become familiar with the owner manual for our lives—the Bible.
The Power of God’s Word to Change Lives:
Steve Auterburn reports how a Wycliffe Bible translator in a remote village in Papua New Guinea reported the power of God’s word. He wrote, “When the opening chapters of Genesis were first translated into the native language, the attitude toward women in the tribe changed overnight. They had not realized or understood that the woman had been specially formed out of the side of the man. Without even hearing this concept developed, these people immediately grasped the ideas of equality between the sexes and began adjusting their behavior. The people heard. They believed. They obeyed. They changed. Just like that.”
They weren’t taken in by the statistics that you may have read on the screen before worship, that 80% of Americans believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God. The percentage who believes there is no one set of values that is right: 48. As Auterburn said, “The people heard, They believed. They obeyed.”
If God’s word has such power why don’t more of us live like it? One reason is that God’s word doesn’t promise us what we want. We want happiness. God’s word promises joy. We want to be important. God’s word promises us we’ll be last. We want to be safe and secure. God’s word promises us persecution and hardship. We want a good life. God’s word says no one is good except God.
Another reason we don’t put God’s word to use is because we don’t read it. We complain it’s too hard to understand but we don’t even try one of the easier Bibles that make it much simpler. Another complaint is that in this day and age we just don’t have time to read the Bible. But we’ve got time to turn on a sports show or the latest reality show, to play the latest video game.
Cutting to the Chase:
Let me ask you a difficult question before we go on in this sermon. Are you satisfied with life? Are you content with the emotional state of your life? Are you content with the depth of the relationships you enjoy with your family and friends? Is your work, school and recreational time giving you a sense of purpose and meaning that fuels your life for days on end? Are you okay with your responses to the frustrations, set backs, health questions and disappointments you are facing? As you grow older do you find yourself happy with the prospect of facing Christ face-to-face or dwelling in the past with all the things you’ve missed?
If you are content, happy and okay with all what I’ve just said then you can safely ignore God’s word. But the fact is that the answers to such situations and others of life questions are found in God’s word. And if you wait for a sermon to give you the answer to your problem then you’re probably waiting in vain because this is just one way in which we are suppose to be exposed to God’s word.
Without God’s Word Life becomes a mess. I may be oversimplifying but it seems that when we run into problems we tend to either blame others, blame situations or blame ourselves.
When we blame others we run a very real risk of falling into a life of bigotry—in which we label everyone in some group with an untrue label. We also fall into a life of bitterness in which we can actually grow to hate those people we see as being at the root of our problem. It was such blame, bigotry and bitterness that led to the “INNA” signs in factories in the 1890’s.
Blaming the circumstances and situations we face causes us to either become fatalistic and believe that it doesn’t matter what happens because que sera sera. We can become hostile toward God by thinking that God never does anything we want him to do. Or we come to believe that we just have bad luck and sometime it will have to change.
Blaming ourselves becomes evident in our lives when we start to live in self-destructive ways. Because then we are saying to the world I don’t deserve anything but the short-end-of-the-stick. And it’s very easy to assume we’re no good and that God thinks the same thing.
As you might imagine these get pretty well mixed up from time to time. It’s easy for the bitterness at others and situations to become inseparable and likewise we can end up lumping our view of our own worth with our view of others and become angry over what’s happening.
The answer to this is to realize that when we over lay God’s word on our life instead of a mess, life becomes an adventure. Because God’s word teaches us to lean that in life we are here to bless others, to give thanks in all situations and that we are valuable to God.
When we decide to live under the teaching of God’s word we discover that those who are different aren’t worse or better than us but just different. We develop a genuine interest in others people because of who they are and what God is doing in their lives. In a few weeks we’ll celebrate World Communion Sunday and as we’ve done in the past I hope we have bread from other nations for the Lord’s Supper. Do we do that because it’s a cute idea or a nice “hook”? No we do that because we need to remember that most of the Christians in the world do not live in Europe and the Americas and do not speak English. Most of our sisters and brothers in Christ live in Asia, Africa and South America.
God’s word also tells us to give thanks in all circumstances. How hard is that? Read the Book of Job and tell me. It is purposefully voiced as a command because it isn’t easy to do. Jesus told his disciples, “In the world you will have many troubles.” If that was all he’d said then we would have every right to blame life’s situations but Jesus goes on and says, “But take heart! For I have overcome the world.”
A Biblical view of life’s circumstances reminds us that God is in charge not some fatalistic, chance roll of the cosmic dice. One of my favorite scenes in Terminator 2 is where Linda Hamilton carves on the picnic table, “No Fate.” When asked about it John Conner says it’s part of a message from his father, “There is no fate but what we make but what we make for ourselves.” It reminds me that God has given us free will and the fatalistic view of life is NOT the same thing as living life trusting that God is in charge of things.
Life’s circumstances vary more with the issue of our obedience or disobedience than it does with random events. Someone may think that it’s just the way things are that the company they worked for laid them off and they may blame the economy, the congress or the foreign nation to which the jobs went. Another way to look at it is that the sin of a corporate executive that wants bigger and bigger profits drove the situation or likewise the greed of the stock holders or the laziness of current employees all may have contributed to and led to the downsizing and the shipping overseas the jobs. A Biblical view says, no matter whose fault or why the fact is that God is still the Lord of the situation and I’ll trust him as I seek His will.
A Biblical view of self has to begin with a recognition that we are valued by God and that God loves us. Most of us know John 3:16 but another verse I love just as much is “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Not only is our future secure eternally but even here and now Jesus is with us.
How do I know all of this? It’s in the word. Many of you have heard about how when I was in Hawthorne Nevada a junior high student came to me and wanted help reading. He was testing at least a year or more behind where he should be. I told him to meet me at the church office the next afternoon and we’d start. When he showed up I gave him a bunch of my Hardy Boys Books and told him to go in the parlor and read for two hours. He started to complain and I said if he wanted my help just do what I asked. Later when we would work on other things and he’d ask me a question I’d force him to look up the answer. You see the problem wasn’t that he couldn’t read but that he’d become lazy and had lost the edge and the muscle tone that comes with reading regularly.
Let me challenge you that if there are places in your life in which you need answers, help and a sense of future then start to read that book that has the answers for you.
