Power of the Parables
Pastor Ryan Akers
Part 1- The Glory of the Story
James 3:4-6
(Read The Foot Book)
How many of you remember being read to as children?
(Story time in 2nd grade in Mrs. Imgarten’s class reading Where the Red Fern Grows)
Some of my most vivid memories or a time in my life where I was impacted the most was when I heard a story that really touched me. I always laugh when someone comes up to me after the service or even 3 years later and people will say how they loved that story I told. Where can they get a copy of that story, or “I remember 3 years ago you spoke and you told a story that really spoke to me?”
Stories are a big part of our culture. We are consumed with wanting to hear more stories whether real or fictional. We love it because it allows us to enter into a fantasy world where for a short time we can pretend to be a part of someone else’s life. We can feel their joy and struggle and hurts and successes. We can relate to stories that are similar to what we are going through in our lives or have experienced in our past. So from books, movies, magazine, television we are consumed with stories. I believe that the stories we hear or have heard in the past whether you know it or not have had and will have an impact on your life and how you live.
Stories are incredible at speaking to our emotions.
I will talk more about that in a little bit. What I want to look at today is the fact that without one key ingredient to a story there would be no story. This ingredient makes the story come alive. It is what fills you with the emotion. That ingredient is the word. Without words there is no story only a blank page.
Our words not only impact us but they impact everyone around else.
Now I want you to hang with me hear. We take it for granted that the words we speak is such an incredible gift from God. The ability to communicate with each other is probably bigger than anything that has ever been invented. The word is so simple yet so incredibly complex. Words can mend relationships and start wars. Words can express love and bring laughter or words can cause tears and anger. So the question I want to ask is…
What is in a word?
Power
Our words are powerful. They carry weight that can bring people to their knees or make people feel like they are flying on cloud 9. And it is an incredible gift that God has given but it is also an incredible burden. Because we have to constantly be watching ourselves to make sure we use wise words.
Words basically have the power to do 3 things in yours and others around you lives and you have to choose which of these you will use in your life.
Words have the power to…
1. Heal
What do I mean healed? Do I mean that when I pray over someone and say, “In the name of Jesus you are healed?” that they become healed. No my words cannot bring that kind of healing. Now my faith in God’s ability to heal and God’s Holy Spirit moving through that sick person is how someone is healed. Our words without God’s moving cannot bring healing. The type of healing I am talking about is an emotional and spiritual healing. Christ was a physical healer. Christ was actually all three physical, spiritual and emotional but a lot of what we read in the scripture and what people always demanded to see was more healings like it was a magic trick or something.
But Christ because he was God had the ability to heal on command and later God working through the disciples were able to do the same thing. But along with physical healing Christ through his words brought emotional and spiritual healing. Through people toughest times Christ forgave them.
Luke 7: 36-39, 44-50
Through our words we can bring healing to people’s lives. We can comfort them in their time of need. We can encourage them to keep fighting the fight and running the race. We can stand up for them when others put them down. We can let them know that everything will be okay.
Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. Proverbs 12: 18
Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. Prov. 16:24
Pleasant words bring healing. We can pray with them, uniting with them in faith that God will bring them through. We can share how in our lives we have gone through the same thing and bring comfort to them knowing that things will get better.
(Parents divorcing was extremely difficult, but the fact that I had a friend who had experienced the same thing and understood where I was coming from was awesome in help begin to bring healing in my life)
Words have the power to heal; they also have the power to…
2. Help
Of course you could look at how words heal and think that healing and helping would be the same thing. But when I speak about using our words to help I mean using the wisdom God gives us to help others make right decisions.
I want to ask you another question that has to do with how words help us. How many of you have someone that is your go to person in a time of need? When you are desperate and you need advise how many of you have someone that just seems to always know what to do? It doesn’t have to be right now but just sometime in your life you have had someone like that. Someone that always knew what to do.
Pastor Gary is that person for me. From the time I was 10 to today (16 years) Pastor Gary has been my rock in the wisdom department. I will be the first to admit I have no idea what I am doing or why God would allow me to be in the leadership position I am in right now. But I am thankful for the chance but I know that I need help. I don’t have all the answers and I have to be humble enough in my life to take time to seek wisdom and guidance from those that have much more experience than myself. Now I also know Pastor Gary does not know everything as well, but I know that he is such a man of God that if I ask his advice and he doesn’t know the answer that he will spend a great deal of prayer seeking the wisdom of God to find the answer that will help me.
I talk to him at least once a week to seek counsel and encouragement. I am sure most if not all of us have had someone like that. If you don’t then there is probably one of 2 things wrong with you. Either you are to arrogant to seek counsel and guidance from others or you haven’t looked hard enough which could also be arrogance. Now I don’t mean to be hard here, but in the short time I have been a believer compared to many of you I have learned quickly that we cannot do this God thing on our own.
We must have people that have been down the road we are currently traveling in our lives helping us get over the speed bumps. God’s wisdom can be found in the counsel of another’s person’s words and those words will help us overcome any obstacle we will face.
So my encouragement to you today is to find someone that can help hold you accountable that has overcome much in their life that can help give you guidance and wisdom and help you move forward in your relationship with Christ. How can you find that person? Get out of your comfort bubble and meet people. The best place to meet someone is in an Impact Group where smaller groups of people can really get to know each other in a way that a setting like we are in now could never do.
But the greatest and most important place to discover true wisdom. The best place you could possibly go to find words that help is in God’s love letter to us.
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Deut 11:18
God’s word contains all the wisdom you need to overcome any obstacle that the enemy throws at you.
Words have the power to heal, to help and third words have the power to…
3. Hurt
James 3:4-6 says, “A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it! It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell.
This is where so many of us struggle. You know it is so much easier to tear someone down that to build someone up. It feels good to get back at someone when they are mean to us, but our words, if we are not careful, can destroy relationships in a heartbeat.
US News and World Report wrote an article about marriage that helped try to discover what causes a marriage to collapse. “In order to uncover the processes that destroy unions, marital researchers study couples over the course of years, and even decades, and retrace the star-crossed steps of those who have split up back to their wedding day. What they are discovering is unsettling. None of the factors one would guess might predict a couple’s durability actually does: not how in love a newlywed couple say they are; how much affection they exchange; how much they fight or what they fight about. In fact, couples who will endure and those who won’t look remarkably similar in the beginning of the marriage
Psychologists Cliff Notarius of Catholic University and Howard Markman of the University of Denver studied newlyweds over the first decade of marriage; they found a very subtle but telling difference at the beginning of the relationships. Among couples who would ultimately stay together, 5 out of every 100 comments made about each other were putdowns. Among couples who would later split, 10 of every 100 comments were insults. That gap magnified over the following decade, until couples heading downhill were flinging five times as many cruel and invalidating comments at each other as happy couples. "Hostile putdowns act as cancerous cells that, if unchecked, erode the relationship over time. In the end, relentless unremitting negativity takes control and the couple can’t get through a week without major blowups."
Our words can destroy relationships, friendships. When we allow our emotions to dictate what comes out of our mouth then we will only go down a path that will cause destruction for you and the other person.
When someone has hurt us instead of giving that situation over to God or having the maturity to go to that person and tell them how they hurt us we instead go behind their back and talk about them. We say, “Can you believe what she said to me.” Can you believe what he did?” And when we do that we are not bringing healing to the situation. Instead we are allowing what probably was a small simple situation or misunderstanding to fester and grow and eventually become an infection that is beyond treatable.
I Corinthians 13:11 says, “When I was a child, I talked like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”
What that is basically saying is that as children there is an immaturity that we do not understand. We act childish. How do children act? Children are selfish; children can be cruel to other children. Children kick and fight and scream and whine.
When we grow up we are supposed to put those ways behind us. We are supposed to mature and grow and out grow those selfish tendencies especially as Christians, God calls us to greater levels than gossip, anger and cruel words. (start whining about dumb stuff, they sat in my pew, they didn’t make my coffee right, my favorite donuts are all gone, the pastor preached too long, this guy cut me off in traffic, he stole my stapler) there might be some of us that still as middle aged adults are acting like 6 year olds. And I want to apologize to the 6 year olds because I know some that are more mature than some of the adults I’ve met.
Those are only a sign of spiritual immaturity. And if you have been a Christian for 30 years and still struggle with those things than there needs to be some soul searching happen in life. We have to ask why this stuff still bothers me. Why do I let myself be negative? Why do I allow my emotions to dictate what I say and hurt people?
How do you use your words in your everyday life? Do you use words that heal? Do you use words that help and give advice and encouragement and help lift a life or do you use words that hurt and tear down? The simple common sense truth is what goes into your mind is going to come out of your mouth. If you put negativity in your mind, harsh words, anger, bitterness, annoyances, pet peeves, if you let those things consume your mind than that is all that will come out of your mouth. And we will only perpetuate the problem by feeding people negative junk. Words are powerful.
I went through all of that only to come back to where I began. Words are powerful and when combined to form a positive story can be used to impact and transform our lives.
And this is what I want to focus on over the coming weeks. We want to look at how stories do 3 things in our lives…
1. Challenge us
2. Charge us (excite)
3. Change us
What story in your life has challenged you? Whose testimony, or what book, or what movie plot or newspaper article challenged you to examine your life to cause you to think about whom you are and where you want to go and why you do what you do and if you are going down the right path.
When we are challenged by a story then what happens is we get charged (excited). Part of that excitement is emotionally driven but depending on the situation a challenging story that is God driven will charge us, excite us to try something radically different and when we are challenged and charged than that will cause a change to happen in us. The trick is to keep that change in our lives. To not go back to the way we used to be. If the challenge, the charge and the change is God driven than you be assured that the change will have a better chance of lasting longer than a world challenge.
What do I mean by a world challenge? A world challenge would be something like a movie that does all three of these things. There are powerful words that form a story that effect our emotions that by the end we are challenged by the message, we are charged to do something about it and we decide to work to change something in our lives.
An example would be for me Remember the Titans. Remember the titans is about a school in the south that integrates blacks and whites. It is about breaking through racial barriers and these men come together on the football field to win the state championship. It is a powerful emotionally driven movie that challenges us to think about humanity and how we treat and still treat or deal with racism in America, it charges you to get involved or to learn more about racism and how to overcome it and it causes you to change your perspective on how you think and act towards a different color.
But ultimately it is just a story that deals with your emotions and most people when they are done watching it are simply going to love it for the football not the deeper message. There is no Holy Spirit behind it that implants a desire and personal conviction. In the end it will only be seen as entertainment, not a life changing message.
But God driven stories have a message that will not only impact your life but thousands or even millions of lives. The parables of Christ are those types of stories. Christ told parables in order to get a point across in a way that you and I could understand it. These stories challenged, charged, and changed the people of Christ time and they are still being told today. They are Holy Spirit driven stories that have been told for the last 2000 years.
Over the next weeks we are going to dig deep into a few of these stories and see why Christ told the story. What was the point he was trying to make by telling the story and how did and does this story challenge, charge, and change the people then and still change us today.
All of us have a life changing story. Your testimony whether you think it is boring or not is the most powerful sermon that can ever be preached. It is a powerful God driven message that will challenge, charge and change even the hardest hearts. Simply put…
Our stories show God working in ordinary people in extraordinary ways.
When people see God moving in incredible ways through the most ordinary of people you can guarantee you will see life change in those around you.
VIDEO- TEAM HOYT
