Let the Shepherd Lead

Intro:

• Finishing strong is a desire we all share.
• No person starts a home improvement project, or knitting an afghan, or even supper for the family with the goal of stopping short of finishing the project.
• No team begins a season looking for a last place finish or even a middle of the pack finish.
• Even at an event as civilized as the Masters, in this morning’s Herald Journal there is a story about Rory McIlroy seeking to avoid the disaster of not finishing strong.
  • McIlroy in 2011 was leading on the back nine until he triple bogeyed the 10th hole and double bogeyed the 12th in what the paper described as an epic collapse.
  • This year, he had to rescue his ball from the azaleas on the 13th hole in order keep pace with Patrick Reed and make it into the final round.
  • He said of the strong finish today to avert disaster, “I’ve been waiting for this chance, to be honest.” Of the day in 2011, “I always have said that was a huge turning point in my career. It was the day I realized I wasn’t ready to win major championships and I needed to reflect on that and realize what I needed to do differently.”

Hook:

• There is a great deal of wisdom in McIlroy’s comment about the day that he did not finish strong in 2011.
• For him, it was a turning point. He had come to a hurtle in his life. He had to reflect, and realize what to do differently.
• No one would say that he was not a good golfer, but if he continued as he was, no one would ever say he is a great golfer.
• Let’s turn from golf to you. Do you recognize a hurtle in your life?
• A hurtle is some sort of barrier that is holding you back from the great things you desire to accomplish?
• But most importantly are you ready to change, for this realization to become a turning point?
• Today, my prayer is that you will see in the answers to the three major questions of this message how to begin living differently.

Message Points:

• The book of Judges records the life of Samson.
  • Judges begins at the death of Joshua with a victorious Israel eagerly serving God as seek to possess the land He had promised them.
  • To do so, they had to continue to drive out the Canaanite people of the land and build a life for themselves upon the ashes of this former civilization.
    • While this violence may seem distasteful, don’t forget that the Canaanite people and the other nations surrounding Israel, like every person all over the world had sinned against God.
    • Though they might not have heard the 10 Commandments as Israel had; the possessed the inward conscience that the Lord placed in every human.
    • The conscience told them what was wrong, and to seek a true and living God.
  • By the end of the book, just a few chapters after those recounting the life and times of Samson, the nation finds itself embroiled in a civil war.
  • Throughout, the Israelites struggled with completing the mission of God.
  • Not only could they not keep themselves separate from the people of the land; but they could not drive them out of the Promised Land.
  • In fact, the Israelites began to join in with the nations around them in their sin against God.
  • We read the words “the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord” appear many times in the book of Judges.
  • Choosing to do anything other than what is right in the Lord’s eyes is a hurdle in the path of those who follow God – either ancient Israelite or Morningsider.
• Our mission today is to learn from the mistakes of the Israelites. Our 1st question is “What types of hurdles do God’s people face?”.
• Listen to Judges 13:1, “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.”
• You might quickly pass over this verse       to read the rest of Samson’s story, but since we have not journeyed through Judges together, let’s review the types of hurtles that Judges explores.
  • A hurdle again is any time that we choose to do what is evil in the eyes of the Lord.
    • This can be blatant personal sin, or our response to current suffering.
    • In other words we are just as responsible to God for our sin if we angrily attack someone out of meanness as we are if we lash out because we are in chronic pain.
    • When we choose to do evil in God’s eyes, no matter what the reason, we are responsible to God for our actions.
  • So what sort of hurdles do we face? First we have Hurdle 1: Doing what others think is right (2:11-13, 3:6, 3:12).
    • Judges begins with the people of the land joining in with the nations around them in the worship of their agricultural deities at festivals.
      • By making an blood offering to the Baals who had claim over certain fields and lands or by joining into the sexually charged parties for Ashtoreth; the Israelites thought they were securing a good harvest.
      • After all, these practices had worked for years in the land, why not give them a try?
    • Such thinking is a hurtle we must overcome!
      • There are churches that would abandon God and the gospel message He has revealed in the Bible thinking that will attract more people.
      • These “affirming congregations” say they want to make the service more comfortable for those who might be living in sin.
      • But friends, affirming sin is not the gospel.
      • The gospel message says that all sinners can have a right relationship with God!
      • Only by turning from sin and self to faith in Jesus Christ we can have a relationship with God.
      • Without that message what do we have to offer to anyone?
  • Then there is Hurdle 2: Not knowing what is right  (4:1, 6:1, 10:6)
    • By the mid-point of Judges the people have forgotten what is right and wrong. This certainly is a hurtle that our culture exhibits.
    • In Judges 4-5 Barak relies on the personality of Deborah to tell him what is right and wrong.
      • There are many who will follow a particular church leader or pastor in order to know what is right.
      • Leaders fail. Just this month the President of the Executive Committee of the SBC retired because he had some kind of inappropriate relationship.
      • When we can know what is right and wrong directly from God’s Word, why take someone else’s word for it?
    • In Judges 6-8 Gideon has to pray and ask God to prove himself to him a number of times because he does not know right from wrong.
      • There are those who might know what God’s Word says but beg him for a sign.
      • While this sounds spiritual, there are some things that we do not need a sign to follow.
      • If God says “thou shalt not” then don’t. If God says “go and make disciples” then go and make disciples.
      • If God doesn’t speak to your issue, for instance, what should I order off the menu at a restaurant, then eat what you like within your diet and budget.
    • In Judges 10-12 Israel has degenerated to the point where they do not even know which way to turn.
      • In 10:6 we read that they serve every god of the land and forsake the God they know.
      • That is the condition of many in the church. We will follow anything, so long as it does not mean that we must open our Bibles and pray for ourselves.
      • We want someone else like the preacher or Sunday school teacher to have the relationship with God for us.
  • That brings us to the 3rd Hurdle in Judges: Doing what is right in our eyes  (13:1, 14:3 & 7,  17:6, 21:25)
    • In Samson’s day this was just beginning, but we see him certainly facing this hurdle in 14:3 and 7.
    • If you are a church or a Christian ruled by your own standard of right or wrong, I am not sure what you mean by the words church or Christian.
    • The Bible tells us that we must deny ourselves and follow Christ in Luke 9:23. That means Jesus should be in charge of what we believe is right and wrong.
    • By chapters 17 and 21 seemingly all of Israel is doing what is right in their own eyes. Some argue this is the authors way of arguing for a Israelite monarchy. To the contrary I believe this is the author’s reminder that the Lord was to be the King of the people.
    • The Lord on the throne of every human heart is the sort of thinking the founders of this nation understood.
    • John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
    • In other words, our freedom in Christ is only possible if we will allow God to control or discipline our lives.
• This leads us to our second question – “How does God use hurdles in our lives?” The simple answer is to discipline us. No book of the Bible better describes this than Romans. Turn with me to Romans 1.
  • There, plainly in verse 18 we see that God’s wrath is revealed against godlessness and wickedness, but people suppress that truth.
    • Through his revelation of himself in nature, the conscience, and supremely in His Word, God coaches us to be aware of sin’s current and eternal consequences (Romans 1:18).
    • God wants us to ultimately and eternally know that those who suppress the truth and continue in sin will not clear the hurdle of His wrath. Judgement Day is coming, and there will be the eternal consequence of hell for sin.
    • But God also wants us to know that there are all sorts of current consequences to human actions.
      • The concept God revealing his consequences from heaven means that he is actively either ordaining or allowing the everyday events of our lives.
      • Current consequences are events God allows to occur. For instance: An addict can do irreparable damage to his brain and his body. Sexual promiscuity can lead to all sorts of disease.
      • Even for those who are innocent bystanders we can suffer consequences due to the sin of others. A baby that results from sexual promiscuity is innocent, but must live with the decisions of         his or her parents. The drunk driver who crashes into a church van on the way back from a mission trip would injures those serving God as well as himself.
  • You may ask, how do you know that God allows these things?
    • Look with me at verse 24, “it says God gave them over in their sinful desires of their hearts.” The word heart in the Bible involves the inner person. This is the motivations or attitudes of a person. Thus God allows people to ignore our conscience, and take the field of life with the clear intention to sin.
    • Verse 26 says, ” God gave them over to shameful lusts”. This is more of a primal sort of physiological response of our bodies. It is the effect of euphoria our bodies naturally exhibit when desires are met.
      • As Johnny Hunt says in the book we are reading in our Men’s Bible Study, these are brain ruts. In speaking about pornography he says, “your addiction to pornography has created a chemical dependence in your brain, which in turn triggers a neurological reward system that goes off automatically, almost without noticing.” (Hunt, Unspoken, 64)
      • God does not prohibit any of our bodies from responding naturally to gratification, even when it is sinful. Thus God allows people to make our own choices.
    • Verse 28 finally says, “God gave them over to a depraved mind” which means that we no longer have an intellectual objection to sin.
      • God seeks to righteously influence every person in ways that do not coerce by force the person’s hand.
      • In other words, God gives them the intellectual option to choose to follow Him.
      • Even so, God allows us to choose what we clearly know is opposed to Him and face the consequences.
    • Thus, because God did not want mindless robots to follow him, He allows people to take the field, make choices, and face current consequences (Romans 1:24, 26, 28).
  • Ultimately though, God uses hurdles to train people to turn from sin to Him (Romans 6:11).
    • If Romans ended after chapter 1 we would hate that book, but it does continue.
    • Romans 6:11 says that in the same way that Christ died to sin and was raised to life, you too should “count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
    • The hurdles we face in life, whether from our personal sin or from the suffering put into our path are allowed by God not for our hurt, but so that we will reckon or count sin and suffering as something deathly.
    • Further, the hurdles are to train us to look to what Christ says and the hope that is in him as the only path to life.
• This leads us to consider our final question and the Hebrews passage this morning – Why does God discipline His people?
  • Again, the simple answer is for our good.
    • The reason Samson’s story begins with the explanation the God’s was disciplining the Israelites is so that we will know God has a good purpose in spite of their pain.
    • The life of Samson as tragic as it is stands in Scripture so that we will begin to see that God allows pain and suffering into our lives not to hurt us, but to give us the opportunity to turn towards God in all His goodness.
  • All discipline or training is painful, not pleasant.
    • We are not supposed to enjoy the hurdles of life. In fact, we are supposed to dislike them as was shown above.
    • That said, God’s training of us “produces a harvest of righteousness and peace”.
    • God knows overcoming current hurdles leads to future blessings (Hebrews 13:11).
    • If we can just learn to trust Christ and turn to him in our sin and suffering, He can heal so much pain and broken relationships.
  • Since, sin and suffering has a way of beating us down we may not think that God would ever want to deal with our brokenness.
    • The imagery of verse 12 is that of a defeated and dilapidated person. They have no strength to raise their arms or stand.
    • Verse 13 relays a pathway that has been allowed to become overgrown. It becomes patchy. There are potholes in places, piles of leaves in others, and mounds of grass growing in other places.
    • A broken person on a broken road is not the life that God intended but nothing would please God more than for a broken person to turn to Him for healing and help.
      • How tragic is it be for a person to settle from a broken life, when God offers us a new beginning in Jesus Christ no matter what we may have done, or has been done against us.
      • No one must walk or tolerate a broken road. By God’s grace that path has been scraped clean, resurfaced by Christ, and ready to have travelers again.
    • God desires that none of us settle for less than His best (Hebrews 13:12-13).
      • Are you settling today?
      • Are you choosing to live in your sin or situation of suffering because you do not think God wants to help you?
      • Are you hoping to clean yourself up before you come to God?
      • FRIEND do not continue to settle for less that God’s best!
      • To heal your brokenness means turning away from your way of living and turning to Christ for life day by day and moment by moment.

Conclusion:

• Let me remind you of Rory MkIlroy’s words again, “It was the day I realized I wasn’t ready to win major championships and I needed to reflect on that and realize what I needed to do differently.”
• Today, I hope and pray this message has helped us to do what MkIlroy said his hurdle did for him.
  • I pray that we realize the hurdles we face. When we respond to life in any way that is evil in God’s eyes we have come to a hurdle in life. Perhaps that hurdle has been in your mind all throughout this message.
  • I pray that we reflect on the reason God has allowed this hurdle into our life. Whether it is sin or suffering, God wants to train us to turn to Him. In just a moment at the invitation, we will have the public opportunity to turn to Christ.
  • I also pray that we will choose a different direction for our life – a direction that trusts that God will give us His best, even if we can only offer Him our mess.
  • That is the decision today. Will you I turn to God with my mess, believing that He will give me His best?