Decibels of Deity Part III

Confirm the elders will be gathered here on my right, your left, under the alpha banner. You can come and pray with them. And if you were healed today, and you know you were touched, just come and tell someone so we can share that report. Susie, come here real quickly. Just want to say before you get off. I didn't get to see last week, but I heard the musical was terrific. Was that true? And I, I didn't, I don't know that it was really known, but Susie was really the person that helped enable those kids. I mean, they did the work, and they, they were the creative powerhouses behind it. But I want to thank you for all your work to make it happen. It was a great job. Okay, thanks. And I'm getting the video. It's getting reproduced, and I'm anxious to see it. And I'm really sorry I missed it. But I love it. Believe me, I love it when I go away and people say, man, you ought to go away more often. That's, it works. Because time's limited today, I'm not going to read, and if you've been reading the Victory Plan, Psalm 30, I'm sorry, Exodus 32 and 3 and 4, we were in that this week. And God made this so alive to me. And it has to do with understanding how we hear His voice through experience. Now, when was the last time you had an experience that was different than your expectation? Huh? Maybe last Sunday was a good illustration of that. You came, oh, the kids' musical, well, I guess that'll be, you know, I wish it was regular. And then, wow, was that true for some of you? I heard that, that some of you came kind of mumbled a little bit, and then the kids blew you away with that. And it can be an everyday kind of experience. I mean, you can be driving down, I was driving down McKnight Road a while back, and I was going to turn left there into Arcadia Court where those doctor's offices are, and a car, somebody was just tuned out and went right through a red light. Just right through the light. And if I hadn't been looking, I'd have just been broadside. I couldn't, you know, I, for whatever reason, I just looked before I turned, which I guess is a good idea. And the person, right through the light. I mean, a simple little drive to the doctor's office became like an experience. I mean, the Lord really just spoke into my life about His protection in my life. Well, see, those kinds of things, friends. I want to talk for just a little bit about God, hearing God in experience. We've been in a series, The Decibels of Deity. How do we hear from God? And we talked about Scripture being the most authoritative piece. Now, that's on your notes. That's the first thing in your outline. Ready? Write quickly. Scripture is still the most authoritative mouthpiece of God. Those of you who are concerned about that, I mean, you usually sit in the back three rows. You're waiting, you're checking out, is this place, are we going to violate the Bible? No. The Bible is the Word of God. But it is not the only way that God speaks. And if all you ever do is hear God because you read the Bible, you're going to limit what God can do in your life. Your life's going to dry up because God's so creative, friends. He has so many ways to speak to you. And our experiences are designed to help us hear what God has to say. How do I know that? Because I look in the lives of the people in the Bible. They heard God through experience, rule number one. God speaks through experience in Scripture. The best illustration of that is Moses. I mean, to start out, I just picked Moses because I knew it was a character that you could see in your mind's eye. He looks like Charlton Heston, right? And Moses heard God many different times in all kinds of experiences. God spoke to him in the burning bush. He spoke to him as he was preparing to lead the people. He spoke to him about his staff becoming a serpent. He spoke to him about parting the Red Sea. But you know, a lot of the things that he spoke to him, you don't know about because the movie ended too early. And some of the most powerful things that God spoke to Moses that happened a little later on in the book is he told him exactly how to build the tabernacle and what to put in it. And he spoke to him the Ten Commandments, and he spoke to him about the people and their rebellion, all those kinds of things. And I just want to say that one of the things I've discovered about God speaking in experience, I learned by looking at Moses and Gideon and many others, is that it just seems that God isn't real sensitive about the timing of his speaking to us. I mean, he doesn't necessarily speak to you when you're ready to hear it. In fact, more often than not, he seems to speak when you are at the very end of your rope, when you're kind of stressed out and stretched out and overextended, when you're feeling like, I can't do another thing, it's boom, then when God seems to speak to you. You know, Moses had, I mean, he'd done the whole thing of wandering in the desert, then finally, that was his rest period, then God said, now it's time to go to work. And he had to confront Pharaoh for all those plagues and all that, and then he had to mobilize the people, and then they marched out, and then they had the Red Sea thing, you know, and then they complained and murmured, and he had all this stuff, and he had Jethro, and putting them all into groups, and he did all that stuff. Then he had the 40 days of prayer and fasting on the mountain. How many people had that? At the end of all that, he was one tired little Jew. I mean, he was whooped. He had had all this experience, and it was then that God said, you know what, now I want to say something very profound to you. Listen, I have found that God most often speaks to me at uncomfortable, awkward times. Why? Because He wants me to know that what He's about to say to me isn't dependent upon whether or not I can pull it off. And you need to learn that. You need to learn that God will often speak to you when you're not really ready to jump up and take on the world, because He wants you to know it's not dependent upon your strength, but upon His power. You can say amen to that, because I think it's very true. It's very important that you understand that. In fact, some of you are in recovery. That's a very popular word these last years. You're in recovery. Well, here's something I want to just deposit into your thinking. If you're in recovery, go ahead now, get ready for discovery. If you're in a time of recovery, don't think that that has to end before you can discover some things about God. In fact, if you're in the process of being healed or in the process of recovering a relationship or whatever, get ready for some discovery. Many times God will use those moments when you feel kind of spent to speak to you. And I just want to submit that some of you today are ready to hear from God through experience, because you're at the end. You can't do one more thing. You say, I am so busy, I am so full, I can't go to one more soccer practice or one more band concert. And God said, you know what? I want you to get to the end, because then I have your full attention. Then you'll know that it's me if it happens. The second thing I learned in the last weeks over and over again, and I'm sure that many of you would affirm this with me, is that God speaks through trials and pain. How many wish that God would stop speaking that way to you, huh? Had enough of the trials and pains. What am I supposed to be learning here? Well, friends, one of the reasons some of us go through more trials than others is because we are not listening. Now, I don't mean that, that's not a blanket thing. Some of us, you know, unfortunately, some of us are one-minute Madox Christians. As soon as something happens, we want the instant fix. You know, drop Chinese, Lord, fix this problem, because I've got to get on with my life. And you know what? That shouldn't be the first thing. The first thing you should say to God is, Lord, what do you want to say to me right now? Why am I going through this? Why is this so difficult? Why am I feeling this pain? Why have I gone through this loss? What is this struggle about? If you're not willing to do that, there can be a long period of time before you will find the trial is lifted, because God is trying to speak. It was C.S. Lewis who said, you know, that God, He speaks to us. And I gave this quote to someone after the first service. Let me see if I put it here, yeah. It says, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, excuse me, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He's rousing our hearts. He wants us to hear Him when the pain is great in our life. You know, I've been processing for over a week now just what God said to me through the pain that I felt in the nation of India. And I want to say I have great respect for the people. They're wonderful people. And if you're here today and that's your native land, what I'm about to say isn't disparaging of you or of your country. It's just my observation of the situation. Because I can't really begin. I'm with Jeff. I can't put words to some of the things. I've been to India one other time, but that trip really, it was a little bit more insulated than this one. And this trip, you know, we got to know the people and their hearts, and we got to see what their daily lives were like. And friends, there aren't words to describe what their lives were like. What it means to subsist. You know, there's a billion people. Nearly a billion. 968 million at the latest census, and there'll be a billion before the year 2000. A billion people. It's growing faster. It'll surpass China within five years as the most populated nation in the world. And people, I know that video did not, that was one little village. I mean, I can't tell you. It was like, see, you think it's crowded at Ross Park Ball on Christmas, okay? I mean, that's like the daily marketplace in India. And there's something that happened to me. There was a disconnect in me. Theologically, those of you who may be a little bit more seasoned, there's just a difficult process of understanding how that many people can be so lost. And I have had a lot of pain with that, I have to tell you. It's not just the trash and the garbage. It's not just the dirt every place. It's not just the insanity of the way things are run, the noise, the pollution, the water that you can't drink, the food that you can't eat. But a few days into this, my census, as Jeff said, I got overloaded with it, too. And I'll have to confess to you, I just wanted to leave. I just wanted to get out. I said, I want four days. I'm out of here. And I was so embarrassed by that. And I thought, you know, we had prayer lines in a lot of the churches we visited. We had prayer lines. And these people would come up, these frail Indian women, many of them under five feet tall, and they would come up with back pains and shoulder pains and stomach problems and all these things because their lives were so difficult and they had no relief from it. But they came up for prayer because they knew that the Lord cared about their needs. And I just was bearing under that and I was saying, Lord, what is it? Why are we here? Why are you sitting here in your comfortable shirt and your clothes and a well-fed stomach and healthy and getting ready to go out and enjoy your relatively nice February afternoon? And why are they consigned to that life? Is it because they chose to worship a false god? I don't know. One of my most profound experiences came with a man on a train. Let me tell you about that. The train. Oh, when I left India, Abraham gave me this T-shirt. He said, I just want you to remember India. And so he gave me this T-shirt. It says this. And I wanted to put a big circle knot, but this helps in a way. It's sort of a visual. Madras is over here. That's a major city where we landed, the Singapore and all that. That's the Pacific. And then Kerala is over here. I don't know if we mentioned, Scott, it was like 90 to 95 degrees every day. It was very hot. And we flew over on an airplane. I was so exhausted. I slept that hour flying over, and I didn't hear anything until the reverse thrusters of the jets kicked in to where... And when I woke up, both Charlie and Jeff were white. I mean, their faces were white. I said, what's wrong? And they said, the plane was doing this all the way down. And he said, was I glad to get off that plane. So going back, we had to take a train because there's only one flight back across. And every once in a while, that flight got canceled. That flight was two days. All of our connections would have been messed up. So we took a 14-hour train ride. And when we heard the news, 14-hour train ride, well, I said, 14-hour train ride. Oh, man. And of course, Charlie, I don't know if you remember, but Charlie, before he became full-time in ministry position and director of Priority 2, he was a railroad engineer and worked. And so train ride, oh, man, this is exciting. He got pumped up about the train ride. And I'm saying, Charlie, he said, no, the trains in Asia, they're different than the trains in America. I mean, these are really trains. So we go down to this really trained train station. And you pick your way through piles of stuff and animals that are laying around and stuff that's laying around. And we're waiting for the train to come. And we can tell, I can see the train comes up, it's about 30 cars long, and they're this dark, dirty, muddy brown color. And I don't, if you've seen movies of like those box cars that they carried people to Auschwitz in, that's what this was like. I mean, with bars in the windows and arms hanging out the side. I'm thinking, yeah, Charlie, there's a great-looking train. 14 hours in there. Well, so anyway, we have the air-conditioned comfort sleeper car. We're not going to have to go in there. I said, well, I guess that's a blessing. That car, there was one car in the train that was the air-conditioned sleeper car. The windows were so dirty, you couldn't see out to really distinguish anything. Got in and it was, well, let's see, if this was the train car going this way, you walked in a little highway here and there was two berths here and then you turn sideways and there was a six by six cubicle with four berths in it. So each bed was two feet wide and there was a foot in between. Four people slept here and two here. And so there was three Indian gentlemen and, by the way, these were professionals. If you had the money to ride in the sleeper air-conditioned car, you had box. And we had a very, all three of these men spoke English. One of them was a computer sales rep guy and I took the liberty. I said, please don't be offended by my question, but could you tell me, help me understand why this nation is struggling with this. I mean, why is the rest of the world progressing and you seem to be just, I have seen so little difference in the seven years since I was here before. He said to me, he thought very pensively about it. He said, you know, two things. He said, first of all, it's just the sheer numbers. He said, there's a billion people here. We just can't deal with our problems. They're overwhelming us. People are just, and folks, you think about it, it's one third the land mass of the United States and there's a billion people, four times the population. He said, but the second thing is more important. He said, it's the factionalism. He said, everywhere you look, people are broken down in different kinds of groups. Politically, there's all these factions. There's 15 different languages and hundreds of different dialects in the country. Economically, there's all these different factions. He said, socially, there's all these castes. If you're born into a particular caste that drives the rickshaws, that's what you do your whole life. If it's the street sweeper caste, that's what you do. If it's the vegetable growers caste, that's what you do. And then he thought a little longer and he said, you know, he said, really what it comes down to, he said, is I guess it all has its roots in religion. Because the Hindu religion, you see, basically consigns you to a certain level of life and that's where you stay. He said, yeah, it's kind of religious in nature. And he said, on top of that, then the Muslims fight with us because he himself was Buddhist. He said, now the Christians, they don't fight that much. He didn't know we were Christians. He didn't know why we were there. But he made the observation, he said, Christians don't fight that much. He said, but that's a real problem. He said, and it was at that moment, he said, factionalism was the main, the Lord spoke to me right then. That was a defining moment in my life and I want to talk to you about that as I close here in a moment. In the midst of that trial, God spoke to me. And by the way, sometimes a trial, by the way, just as a trial, it just happens and there's no message, you know, sometimes you just have a bad day. I had that, that night I had one of those experiences in that train. When it came time to finally go to bed, we'd traveled four hours and we kind of shifted around and made things go and then they had to, they brought in a meal in this little tin tray and they ate this little meal. They eat with their hands and they just put everything together and eat with their hands. We couldn't eat the food there. Got off the train, stretched a little bit, stepped in a few things, got back on the train. They got time to go to bed and remember, here's the car this way. Well, Charlie's birth was here and Jeff's birth was here. And Charlie just, I mean, literally spit, he put his thing down and he pulled his curtain and he was out. You know, I guess he just, someone with experience in trains, you know, just out he went. I think he can fall asleep standing up in a snowstorm if he had to. He just, he's a seasoned traveler that way. And Jeff wasn't doing that well. I could tell he was shuffling around but he was trying to get comfortable. These things weren't two feet wide so you had to go on your side and it was, I got into my little berth over here with the other three Indian guys and kind of got settled on my side and said, well, my legs hung over the edge because the beds weren't five, ten, five, eleven, and I'm a little longer than that so my legs are hanging out through the curtain and I tried to start going to sleep and I said, what's that noise? I mean, what is that? And remember, I'm laying this way now and right next to me in the same level is this, the same articulate Indian guy and this guy, he has a snore going that was so bad that I said, no one will believe it. So, I pulled my dictaphone out and this guy, this, this guy, for nine hours, this is what I heard. Nine hours of this. This is the train that Charlie said, you're going to love this train ride. It'll be the best day of the whole part of the trip. Nine hours of this. And there was, I mean, I pushed the guy, the guy underneath was bumping, he was just oblivious. I said, okay Lord, what are you saying? What's the message? No message. I mean, it was just, it was nine hours of that. Okay, well, you know, so sometimes God just lets you go through it and you have to say, I don't get it, but that was the way it was. But if you are going through it, be a trial, friends. Open to the Lord and let Him speak to you. Just let me mention number three. God speaks through planned experiences. All I want to say there is if you're reading through in Exodus 33, verses 7 through 11, talks about the tent of meeting where God planned to meet with Moses. Listen, listen, please, wake up. Listen. God wants you to hear Him at specific moments in the week. Sunday morning, small group time, Bible study moments. Plan to meet with God. Plan to hear Him speak. Plan for the experiences. If you show up here like, okay, I guess I'll, you know what? You'll be bored and or, you know, sound asleep. You won't hear anything. If you come and you say, you know, Lord, I'm expecting you to meet me today. Something will minister to you. It may not be the sermon. It might be the prayer that someone offers. It might be the song someone sings. It might be the person next to you who just somehow reaches out to you. You've come for those planned moments. Very powerful things. But the fourth way that I just want to close with and touch on is this. God speaks through defining moments of experience. You know, Moses and I, if I had time today to develop this, the end of chapter 33, Moses boldly says, you know, Lord, I want to see your glory. And this is the part that's not in the movie, by the way. Moses says, you know, Lord, I just can't go on. And the Lord says, my presence will go with you, verse 14, and I will give you rest, Moses. And he has a defining experience with him. When God met him in such a way that Moses would never be the same. And friends, when I had that conversation with that man in the train, and I had those eight hours in that little sleeper berth to think about it while this guy was, you know, doing this. Here's what the Lord spoke to me. The factionalism. The very thing, listen, the very thing that's paralyzing the church in America today is that problem. We are not united. The church as a whole is divided into denominations and subgroups and this emphasis and that emphasis and this look and that look and this, and all these different things that separate us. You see, the great value in our culture in America is to be independent, isn't it? To be wealthy so that we can be independent. To answer to as few people as possible. To be self-employed if at all possible. To be situated so that you can be your own boss. Isn't that, I mean, and frankly, listen, I think it affects some of us far more than we want to admit. That attitude carries over far more than we'd like to confess today. But you know what? It even comes into the church where we don't want someone to tell us what group we should be in or what we should do to try to promote our own spiritual growth. We don't even like the idea of submitting to leadership because, wait a minute, that's not really American. And God really began to just, to break my heart open with the need that we have to become unified. The very reason why some of us here today refuse to join a group or to share in a ministry or even enter into worship on a Sunday morning is because we want to be independent. And Jesus today reaches out and he says, let's put independence aside and let's learn to become interdependent. Let's learn what it means to need one another because that's the nature of the body of Christ. When we discover the truth of how powerful we can become together, friends, we can change the world around us in ways we can't imagine. The psalmist said it this way in Psalm 133. If you'll put that up, please, Donna. Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in what? In unity. For there the Lord commanded the blessing. You see, when there's unity, God says, bring blessing. I want to say that again. When there's unity, God says, bring blessing. When there's unity, God is then speaking to that group of people and saying, I'm going to bring blessing there. I'm going to bring favor. I'm going to bring grace upon them. All I know is this. Following my discussion with that man, I thought about what can I do? I can't change India. Are you kidding? I wanted to get out of India. But we, on the other hand, have made an enormous difference already. Your $10,000 gift that I delivered is going to support 100 churches in their ministry. Probably in the neighborhood of 8 or 9,000 people will be supported by that gift. And here's what I believe. Number one, the best thing that we can do for the believers of India or China or Malaysia or anywhere, Guatemala, you name it, South America, even here in Pittsburgh, the best thing we can do is to be strong and united in the things that we hold together. And I'm going to ask us to focus on just three things in the next weeks to bring unity. Number one, write these down as you're concluding, please. Number one, embrace the vision of our church. Listen, don't play games with yourself or with the Lord or with the church. If you're a part of this church, then embrace the vision. Get connected into a group. We do everything we can to help you get connected. There's a new discovery class starting in two weeks. You should go to that class and just go through four weeks of how to fit in to the vision of the church. If you're not in a small group or a cell group, friend, what are you waiting for? The perfect group that will just meet your exact schedule, then God help you. Well, I tried a group and it wasn't a very good experience. Well, so what? Try another one. Well, I can't. There's no one in this church of 2,500 people I can get along with. Well, then you've got a major problem. Embrace the vision. The vision is to raise up disciples of Jesus who are loved, nurtured, and equipped to minister to God one another at the loss of the will and power of the Holy Spirit. And we do that through small groups. That's how we do it. Well, that's not my generation. It isn't a generational thing. The church met together in the book of Acts. House to house and all together. I'm calling you to embrace the vision. Number two, to be a people of prayer. All I want to say about this right now is in the next week, I'll fill this in. We're going to look at a 40-day period, the period of Lent prior to Easter, where we're going to pray and we're going to fast more intensely than we have in a long time. Because I believe that prayer is the thing that opens up that funnel of blessing to your life. This is for your life, not just the church. But this is what opens the blessing of God in our lives. And friends, we need to pray more fervently and more consistently. I know that many of you are diligent, but some of us really have let this slip and we're going to address that next week. I'm going to talk about that just a little bit. And all through the month of March, we're going to be praying in the mornings and some evening meetings. We're going to pray and we're going to seek God wholeheartedly. And number three, I'm going to ask you, as an act of unity, to embrace SOR2000. Prayerfully open. Just listen to the message. It has to do with stewardship because stewardship is what releases resource into ministry. Read the material. Talk to people about it. Go to the evenings of support. Listen to the people who call you and say, you know, I've got to listen to this because I want to be part of unity. I don't want to be a factionalized, disunified person. I want to have the liberty of choosing what God is saying because I know what the facts are. You know, in the end, it's all about the Lord Jesus interpreting our experiences. In the end, Jesus is the ultimate interpreter of Scripture and of our experience because He keeps His promises. If I had a moment, I guess, that touched me the most, after that plane ride, we got off of the plane. I was the last person off the aircraft because I had put my video camera in the front and exited off the back. And so I had to wait. You know, it was kind of one of those dumb things. But I got into the little airport terminal and Jeff and Charlie had already gotten in there and Molly Pothen was there. Abraham was out with the car. Molly and their two young children, one 10, one 6. And Molly, she's a native Indian, got very bright, has an earned master's degree and halfway to her PhD. Had this beautiful, warm smile and her white teeth and tears in her eyes and she said this, she said, Pastor Jay, you finally come. You kept your promise. And I'll tell you what, I could have gone right back then and just given her a hug and said, you made it worthwhile because we were touching each other's souls. And friends, the Lord that we serve touches our soul. He keeps his promises to us. He's going to come again. And I want to be able to say we've done everything we can do as a church so that others are redeemed. We can make a difference. Would you stand with me? Let's prepare our hearts for communion right now. Lord, I want to just set apart these moments to give you the focus of our thoughts. Thank you for your table that you set, Lord. Thank you for the bread and thank you for the cup. And Lord, as we receive these elements right now, we do so with the awareness that they are a fulfillment of your promise to us, Lord. Help us in that, Lord, to receive according to that which you've given to us. In the name of Jesus. With heads bowed. You know, I'm aware today in this service that there might be some of you who are about to take communion.