The Story - Chapter 24

I noticed in the Olympics that there are a lot of people involved in it. When they talk to them, all of them practice a long, long time. Some of them leave their homes, go to a different country, go to a different place, and their whole regime is dedicated to the idea that they get up in the morning, they practice all day long, do the classes, whatever they need to do. But some of them never win first prize. There seems to be some kind of extra thing in the mind or the body of some people that allow them to be better at skiing or ice skating or flipping over when they, whatever they do. They just seem to do it better than the others do. It means that there's a quality inside of them that practice and training can't overcome. And it's true for a lot of things in life. You see people who are salesmen who just seem to be better at it. You see people who are cooks, you know, and they're just better at being able to do that. They just have something in their mind, in their nature, their character that causes them to be able to do something superior to other people around us. There's a temptation for us in the kingdom of God to think the same way. If you see someone who has a powerful experience as a teacher or has a great leadership skill in the church or you look at Bible characters, your tendency is to think that these people are different than I am. That they're not ordinary people like I am an ordinary person. And nothing could be further from the truth. For the Bible is a whole different picture of the spiritual world and how God works in it than in this fleshly world in which we live. For God does something different than we do. If I were to begin to try to help someone like Doug Burt, if I decided I'm going to teach Doug to sing opera and I were to train with Doug for a long time and he could stand up in front of you and belt out the most wonderful operatic song, he would say, Doyle is really some teacher of music. But now if I took someone else who is a very, very good singer and I said, I'm going to teach this person to sing and they could already sing wonderfully. They would get up and you knew that they were good, Denise, and she could already sing and she sang well and you'd say, Denise is a wonderful singer. Because you would know in advance that she had the qualities already to be a great singer. Because you might guess from what I said that maybe Doug didn't have those great qualities of a great singer innate within him. So when we look at the biblical people, we have a tendency to say, well, you know, that was Moses or that was Elijah and I'm just an ordinary person and I can't be that kind of person. Nothing could be further from the truth. If I could take Doug and make him a great operatic singer, you would say, Doyle is a wonderful teacher. God wants to show in his kingdom what he can do. So all the way through the Bible, what God does is he searches around for people, ordinary people like me, like you, and he says, come and follow me and I will make you into something extraordinary. All the way through the story of the Bible, that's what you find. God never goes into the world and finds the most prominent, powerful and influential person and says, now I will make you something great. In the beginning he called Abraham, Abraham was just a man wandering around, nobody special about him, nothing special about him. He just came to him and said, if you will do what I tell you to do, I will guide you to the place I want you to live, I will make you prosperous, I will give you protection, your enemies will be mine, and you will have a great influence on all the world and here we are today because of Abraham. God prospered him everywhere that he fought, he was able to win because God gave him the power to do those things. We come to the story of Moses, we know Moses is a great law giver in the Old Testament. We look back at him and the whole book of Deuteronomy, we've been working on that, studying on that on Wednesday nights. The whole book of Deuteronomy is one long sermon by Moses, over 30 chapters. Moses came down from the mountain, told him about the law, he was a great speaker, but when he started it wasn't exactly that way. When God came to Moses, Moses was a shepherd, he was out watching the sheep. Exodus chapter 4 tells the story of the encounter God had with Moses. Moses knew what he was, he was a shepherd. For years he'd been doing this, I mean many years he'd been doing it. He wasn't a speaker, he never stood before people and guided them. And when the Lord came to him, Exodus chapter 4 verse 10, God said to him, I want you to go and I want you to speak for me. Moses said to the Lord, O Lord, I've never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since have you spoken to your servant. I'm slow of speech and tongue. The Lord said to him, who gave man his mouth? Who makes deaf or dumb? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go. I will help you speak and teach you what to say. Then Moses said, O Lord, please send someone else to do it. Then the Lord's anger burned against Moses. Why was God mad? Because he knew that Moses didn't have these qualities and he didn't pick him because he had those qualities. You see, Moses was confused. He thought to be a great follower of God, he had to have some great ability to speak. He didn't. God said, you go, open your mouth and I'll put the words in it. Now that's a great deal. If you can get that deal, you'll succeed. God puts words in your mouth. Every time you open it, things are right. Moses became a great leader and we look back on Moses as this great prophet of God. The one who spoke the words of God to us in a way that allow us to know exactly how we ought to live and what we should do. This is just the beginning of all the people in the Bible that God chose. There's one story in the Bible about Gideon in Judges chapter 6. Gideon was a coward. He was hiding from the enemy. He thought that they would come and find him and steal his crops and so he was hiding. The wine press where his grain was and he was in there threshing the grain so he'd have it. He was afraid that they would come and get him. The Lord comes to him and speaks to him in chapter 6 of the book of Judges. The Lord turned to Gideon and said to him, go in strength and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you? But Lord Gideon said, how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh. I'm the least of my family. The people around in my tribe are not known for being warriors. I'm not a warrior and I can't stand up and do these things. When God addressed him, he came in the place where he was threshing his grain and he said, mighty warrior and that's his response. I'm not a mighty warrior. My whole tribe is weak and I'm the weakest one in my whole tribe. You talk about the runt, I'm it. You go and you do what I've asked you to do. Moses or Gideon didn't believe in the power that he had and didn't see how he could do the very things that God wanted him to do. The Lord answered, I will be with you and you will strike down Midianites as if they were but one man. And so Gideon went. He gathered a whole army of Israelites around him and he went out to battle and God said, you got too many. You ever hear of a general say that? You got too many for ordinary warfare. You don't have too many for ordinary warfare, but you have too many for what I'm going to do. If you have too many soldiers, you're going to think you won this on your own. But I want you to take a few and so he eliminated all but 300 men, went into battle against this huge tribe of Midianites and won the battle. When it was over, they said, our army did not do this. The Lord God Almighty did this. God wants to show in the world the great power that he has and he shows it through the people who belong to him. All the way through the scripture, God chooses ordinary people like me and like you through whom he does marvelous and wonderful things beyond any of our imagination. We look at the people in the Old Testament, ordinary prophets, and they did marvelous things. Elijah, one of the prophets, spoke what God said to him. Tell them there's not going to be a rain for a long time. And he said that and it quit raining. Tell them it's going to start raining and it started raining. An ordinary man saying that. Elijah also took oil and he was running away, thought he was going to be killed, and he went to this woman's house. She had only enough for one meal. He said, fix the meal. We'll eat it. Every day, as long as he stayed there, there was enough meal and enough oil for the food that day. Multiplied that, the power he had. He raised a child from the dead, came to the river one time and parted it, walked across on dry ground. Elijah, his successor, also raised a child from the dead, multiplied oil. A lady came, she said, my husband died and I'm in debt. I don't know what to do. He said, take every pot in your house, fill it with water. She did and it turned to oil. She sold it and made a profit, had enough to pay off her debt and to live happily the rest of her life. The miracles these people performed by the power of God. Just ordinary people who did the things that God asked them to do. We're inclined to think that in the Bible story, I could be a person who would be that way if I was just different. If I had great ability, if I had great wisdom, I could be one of those characters in Scripture. There's a tendency for us to excuse ourselves. Well, I mean, after all, Elisha was a great prophet. After all, Elijah was a great prophet. Gideon was a great man and Jesus, of course, was a very different person. The fact is that Jesus was a person like you. That's the truth. He was born as a baby, dirtied his pants, wet his diaper, tried to walk and fell on his face, had to learn his ABCs just like you did, had to learn to talk, went through all the difficulties of growing up that any human being in the world ever had. He was an ordinary human being. In fact, when the Bible talks about who Jesus is going to be, Isaiah in chapter 53 describes Jesus not as an extraordinarily wonderful person, but he really is described as someone who's very, very unappealing to us. Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot. We're talking about Jesus now, the Messiah. He grew up before him like a tender shoot, vulnerable, like a root out of dry ground. You take a plant, you pull it up by the roots, you let it sit in the sun, it's not even life bringing. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised, rejected of men, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, like one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed him not. You didn't talk about Jesus as a great hero. You didn't talk about Jesus as an extraordinarily talented man. You didn't talk about Jesus as someone above and beyond the normal people around us. He talks of Jesus as someone lesser. Not when you saw him, you say, that's some handsome guy, he's going to be a leader somewhere. He's the kind of person you look at him and you say, oh no, hide your face. It's not what we think about Jesus, is it? What is there that made this man extraordinary? Same thing that made Elijah extraordinary and Elisha extraordinary. Same thing that made Gideon extraordinary. Same thing that made Moses extraordinary. The secret of their success was not some inborn ability that they had, but the fact that they were willing to believe God. They were willing to trust God. They were willing to know the difference between what God was saying to them and what they were thinking. The difference between what God might say to them and Satan might say to them. They recognized, they were able to recognize the voice of God talking to them, speaking to them that they might understand what he wanted from them. And then like Abraham and all this long string of people, they said, okay God, I will do it. Jesus had an extraordinary life. You know all these stories about Elijah and Elisha. Jesus didn't do very many things miraculously that other people in the Old Testament didn't do before him. You read the New Testament. If you are not familiar with the Old, you get the feeling Jesus was this extraordinary miracle worker. He didn't do very many more things than people in the Old Testament did. He raised the dead. They did too. They didn't walk on water, but they made an axe head float to the surface of the water. What was different about those people than the rest of us? Well, Jesus describes for us exactly what was going on in his own life. In Luke chapter 4, Jesus was describing what happened to him when he went home to his first sermon in his hometown. He stood up before the people to be able to speak and in Luke chapter 4 verse 24, it describes what took place. We think of Jesus as a very precocious person. If you thought of Jesus growing up, you'd say, well, he probably read his Bible all the time. He was probably the most spiritual kid in the community. Everybody would say whenever he got off and he was making these great speeches, say, well, I knew it. Whenever I saw him as a kid growing up, he was the most wonderful spiritual kid you ever knew. You know, when you hear someone talk about someone winning a gold medal in the Olympics, they go back to their high school and they say, yeah, he was always one of the great athletes. He always was on the first team. He played all the sports. He had that unique ability. Jesus came home to preach in his home church. Now, you get a picture. In those days, people didn't travel around. They were born in a town. They lived in a town. They died in the same town. They all knew who Jesus was. They knew who his dad was. They knew his mother. They knew his brothers and sisters. Jesus came to speak. Jesus stood before them and he opened the scripture and he read from the book of Isaiah. The spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendants, sat down. Everyone's eyes on the synagogue were fastened on him. Then he said to them, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. I am the answer to this prophecy in Isaiah. How audacious could you get? That's what he said. Now, they didn't say, we always knew it. He had that special touch, what they said to him, and all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. They said, isn't this Joseph's son, they asked. Jesus said to them, surely you will quote a proverb to me, physician, heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what you heard that you did in Capernaum. I tell you the truth, he continued, no prophets accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there are many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. There are many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed, only Naaman the Syrian. All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up and drove him out of town, took him to the brow on the hill where the town was built in order to throw him down the cliff. His hometown people thought of Jesus as just Joseph and Mary's son, an ordinary kid, but when he stood to preach, he had an extraordinary word. It didn't convince them, but he had authority. What happened to Jesus? Thirty years he was just an ordinary person in that community, fixing people's houses, working on different contracts, and all of a sudden one day everything changed. What happened to Jesus was the Father said to him, now is the time for you to begin to do the work that I have sent you here to do. He put down his tools of construction and went out and started doing exactly what the Father asked him to do. That's the story of Jesus. How is it that Jesus could do such extraordinary things? John chapter 5, Jesus describes what took place in his life. Verse 19 and 20, Jesus answered them, I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. Get this, the Son can do nothing by himself. He can do only what he sees his Father doing. Because whatever the Father does, the Son does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, to your amazement, he will show him even greater things than this. Jesus tells us the secret. It's not my ability or wisdom that causes me to be the person that I am, but I've learned how to listen to the Father, and the Father tells me what he's doing, and I simply do what the Father tells me to do. I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned. He is crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, the time is coming and now comes when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. Verse 30, by myself I can do nothing. I only judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself, but him who sent me. What Jesus is declaring to us is the secret of all the strength of his life. He says very plainly, this is not my ability to do these things. It's God who works in me. Here in John chapter 14 when Jesus was talking to his disciples, if you love me, he said you will obey my commandments. Verse 14 beginning with verse 10, don't you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather it is the Father living in me who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. In other words, if there are miracles coming out of my life, it's not me, I'm a human being. This is God doing these things. I tell you the truth. Do you notice how many times he said in here, I tell you the truth? He wants us to believe this. Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these because I'm going to the Father and I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the Son will bring glory to the Father. You may ask anything in my name and I will do it. Jesus was an extraordinary man. Not because of his innate spiritual abilities, not because he was more spiritual than anybody in the world, but because he gave himself completely to the experience of submission to God. He said to the Father, whatever you want, I'll do it. So he left his job, his family, everything behind and he went out to do the mission God gave him. He faced all kinds of trials and difficulties, never backed down for one moment. He said, I listen to what I hear the Father doing and I join him in that. I don't initiate that. He didn't go outside and say, okay, I'm going to heal ten people today. He got up every day and said, Father, what do you want me to do? When he walked down to the Pool of Siloam, there were a lot of sick people there. The Father said, there's one man I want you to heal. He did that and that was the end of it. Jesus was so surrendered and submitted to the authority of the Father that everything he asked, he did it. Now let me tell you something for yourself. God desires this for you. He would love to live in your life so that everything he told you to do, you would immediately do it. Everything he told you to stop doing, you would immediately stop it. And he could pour into your life the very power that Elijah had, the very power Elisha had, the very power Moses had, the very power Jesus had. So that your life might be a glowing testimony to the power of God. Often times you hear people say, well, I would teach but I can't, I would witness but I can't. So what? If you know you're supposed to do that and you start and God gives you the ability that's above and beyond your own, it will testify to the fact that God has power. That's what he wants to show. You look back on Jesus' life and you say, man, he must have been really some great, wonderful person. No, he was a servant of the Father completely and totally. Because he was so usable by the Father, the Father could do anything through his life he wanted. The power of God is available. Jesus said, now you've gone through this, you've seen what I've done, I'll tell you, you've got an advantage. I'm going to heaven and you can ask me anything that you want and I guarantee you when you're doing what I've asked you to do, the power of God will make it possible for you to do it. Anything you need. I should maybe go and help with that class but I don't have training, I don't know what to do, my schedule's messed up. If God wants you there, you do it. Everything you need will come to you. God puts in your mind that you should give so much money to the mission cause. You look at your budget and all these things, you're tempted to say, well, God's asking more than I think I should give. What should I do? Say, God, well, you've asked me this, I'm going to do what you ask, I'm going to trust you for the rest. You discover the power of God. Most of us live weak and powerless in the face of life because we do not allow God to control us. The story of this scripture is just the story of people like me and like you except for one thing. Some of these people said, God, there is not one thing that you can ask of me that I will not give you or that I will not do. And when they started, these ordinary people became extraordinary people. You can live your life two ways within the kingdom of God. You can get in the door so that you don't go to hell and you can live an empty and powerless life or you can live a life of power and influence and consequence. When you say to God, everything you ask, I will do. Could you bow your heads for a moment? I want to ask you to think, clear your mind of everything, I just want you to say to God, what is it that you've been telling me to do that I refuse to do? Now what comes to your mind is God telling you the limits you've placed on him in your life. If you want to live this powerless life, keep on saying no. But if you want to have something extraordinary in your life, you have to say, okay God, it looks stupid to me, I don't see how this is going to work, but I will do it. The story of the Bible is the story of one person after another who believed God in such a radical nature that they were prepared to do whatever God asked. What do you want with your life? Jesus gives us the secret, I listen to the Father and whatever he tells me, that's what I say. Whatever he tells me to do, that's what I do. And when we look at his life, we say, this is unbelievable. And Jesus said, now I'm leaving, and not only do you have everything I had when I was here, but now you have me. And anything that I ask you to do, you just say to me, here are the things that I need to be able to do this, and it will be given to you. And my power will be demonstrated in you. People shake their heads and say, I didn't know Doyle could do that, and they're right. God can do all. What is it today, in your life, that you've come to and said, this is all I'm going to give God? Then be satisfied with less than an extraordinary life. But if you want to experience all that there is, I ask you today to say to God, there is not anything in my life that I will withhold from you. I will do what you want. I will say what you tell me to say. I will be yours with no limits. If you've never said that to God, I invite you today to experience the transformation from an ordinary person to an extraordinary person. The person God made you and called you to be. If you know what it is God's asking of you, and you're ready today to say yes to him, I encourage you to do that right now. I'm going to ask the instrument to play, and I ask you to say to God, I know now what you want, and I'll do it. If you want me to pray with you or someone else, you come to the front, and we'll pray a prayer of dedication of your life to this extraordinary life to which God has called you. Would you stand, please, for a moment of prayer together. Remember if a thought comes to your mind of something you should do for the Lord, something you should say for the Lord, it's your opportunity to step into the extraordinary world. Father, make us conscious that you're guiding us day by day. The thoughts that come to our mind to do your will and do your work are not our own, they're from you. And they're the open door to this extraordinary life of tremendous power and purpose. So we pray that you'd make us conscious day by day and submissive moment by moment. In the name of our Lord Jesus, we give thanks and pray to you, amen. Oh God, you are my God, and I will ever praise you. Oh God, you are my God, and I will ever praise you. I will seek you in the morning, and I will learn to walk in your ways, and step by step you'll lead me.