Gifts, Anyone? - Thoughts on the Paris Shootings

Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8

In ancient Israel, there were many people who were satisfied with their lives. Most of the people understood what their lives were about, and they were mostly satisfied with those lives.

I’m not saying that their lives were satisfactory by our standards, for they worked hard and mostly lived short lives full of very hard work. The average lifespan was between 30 and 40 years, with many children dying before their 5th birthday.

But there is a certain adaptability to the human race. We are very, very good at taking the hands we are dealt and making the best of it. If we find ourselves struggling to survive on an acre of dry land, we will struggle. If we find that we have been born with a silver spoon in our mouth, we will learn to deal with it. Most people can easily become satisfied however they live unless they listen carefully to what the Word of God tells them and the Holy Spirit, who want us to be afflicted and convicted of this life and grow closer to God – something which can be very upsetting.

Afflicted and convicted by God? Afflicted means you feel like someone is poking you with a sharp stick. Convicted by God means you’ve listened to the Holy Spirit and you’ve realized that you are lacking something. And so God offers us gifts from time to time – Gifts of affliction and conviction, gifts to receive which mean we often must stand up from our soft padded couches, lift up, and laboriously unwrap heavy, tough wrapping paper in order to receive their full benefits.

Friday evening, God gave us a gift of affliction and conviction – but it is only a gift if we have the courage to unwrap the gift. This gift cost the lives of over 129 people – it was a warning gift which, if we unwrap the gift properly, will change our lives, the lives of our loved ones, and the lives of millions of other people. But if we do not unwrap the gift, or unwrap it in the wrong way, we will never see it as a gift of God, but only as just another massacre in a foreign land where two groups of people fight who we don’t care anything about.

You wonder that I call it a gift? God knows how to take the most evil plots of Satan and use them for good in this world. And as we learn also to do the same, as we learn not to fall in despair and fear from Satan's plots, as we learn to imitate Christ in faith and hope, we also can see and create good out of anything Satan tosses toward us. It is our attitude and willingness to learn that allows one person's evil to be converted into a good gift...a gift of affliction that, properly unwrapped, ultimately foils Satan as we learn lessons for our good.

Friday evening, as we now know, 8 Islamic state assassins, wearing suicide vests and carrying automatic weapons attacked major sites around Paris, France. Some of the assassins appear to be from Syria and Egypt, but others were from Belgium and France, home-grown. They were not soldiers attacking other soldiers – they were radical, intense, armed men attacking and killing as many civilians as possible. Not only did they target civilians, they intentionally shot men and women in wheelchairs.

And one thing we know – if statistics hold true, then of those 129 or so people who were killed Friday evening, only 3 or 4 were believers in Jesus Christ, for modern France – and especially Paris, is no longer the center of Catholic Christianity that it once was, but it is a land filled with people who either do not believe in God, or are simply “spiritual” but not Christian. France is simply 30 years ahead of America in its loss of believers – in 30 years, America will be where France is today unless we do something about it. And so we untie the bow on the gift and the first question comes to us – will we be afflicted by this gift and wake up?

The assassins’ purpose was to generate fear, because fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger, and anger leads to suffering. And the killers believed that this was a good outcome – fear, hate, anger, and suffering. And as these emotion spread, more violence will develop against Moslems, and this will create fear, hate, anger, and suffering which will recruit more Moslems to ISIS. I call people who do this evil, for none of those are good ideas. And the people who do this are doing the work of Satan, the prince of evil.

But God is more powerful than Satan and can always use Satan’s works for good. And so, as I lay awake after midnight Friday night, I began to look at what has been happening in my life around here as a pastor. And I did not like what I saw.

We have let ourselves become focused upon the trivial and the meaningless instead of the important things:

Over the last month, while people have been dying around the world and in this town without knowing Jesus Christ, I have spent my time in meetings discussing whether or not we can live with tiles that are slightly different colors in the kitchen and the fellowship hall. I have been involved in planning events in the church and deciding which event is in which room and will there be enough room? I have heard repeatedly that one of our big problems is that the shrubs stick out too far over the sidewalk, and there have been great questions about what the photo on the cover of our new directory should be. I have spent a fair amount of time trying to get the right power board for the carillon bell system so the bells will play again, and been involved in discussions about the precise starting and stopping times of our Wednesday evening events, and whether or not we should risk damage to the tiles by starting up Wednesday evenings again the night before they are waxed. We have become focused upon the meaningless and the trivial and ignored the important things of life.

Folks, I am ashamed of this. You can tell something about a man or a woman by the things that they spend their time on, by the things that make them upset. Do we let ourselves get upset more by the timing of our bells and what they play – or by people dying without God?

Every hour I spent on these discussions is another hour where people could have been hearing about Christ. Every hour we spent arbitrating these questions is an hour we could have spent speaking to friends about Christ. Every hour we spent with these ultimately trivial questions is an hour where we could each be talking to someone who is lost about the only way to avoid dying the real death, the only way to have eternal life with God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life – Jesus Christ. We have lost our way and I have let us do this.

And so I say it is time for us to turn back to the purpose of this church, the reason it was founded in the first place. This church was not planted here to be a place for social events and baked steak dinners. This church was not planted here to be a place where we spend endless time discussing wallpaper colors and our favorite styles of music. This church was planted here to provide a place for people to learn about God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, to worship that Trinity, and to learn how to lead other people to the saving grace of Jesus Christ!

And so if we are to have a social event, let it glorify God. If we are to have a baked steak dinner, let it lead to discussions of Christ. If we are to discuss wallpaper and music styles, let us put aside our personal preferences and concentrate instead on what will reach out, inspire, and passionately bring to Christ the people who are NOT here today, the people who will die and march into Satan’s land unless we do something!

As I’ve mentioned, in Atlanta we made many Moslem friends. Most of them were wonderful, peace-loving people. But ISIS Moslems are not ordinary Moslems. If we do not do something, I fear that the number of people with no relationship to God will continue to grow around here. And gradually, gradually, we are seeing that people with no faith are more likely to adopt any faith where they are welcomed – including radical Islam. I do not look forward to a day when there is an ISIS group meeting every Friday night in Clarksburg – do you?

For I do not want to hear that one evening there were bombs set off outside Mountaineer Stadium. I do not want to hear that gunmen using AK-47’s attacked Oliverio’s and the FOP and the Parkette. I do not want to hear that three men using automatic weapons and grenades entered a concert at RCB and held hundreds of people hostage and then began shooting them, one by one, starting with those who were in wheelchairs. And the key to stopping this is when all the people – not a quarter, not a half, not most – but all of the people are solid followers of Jesus Christ, who said to love your neighbor as yourself.

And now I’ve unwrapped the gift, the gift that is a blaring alarm clock waking us up, But perhaps you think I’m going a bit too far. Perhaps you think that I’m a bit too focused upon what we each should be doing for our neighbors. Perhaps you think that God really doesn’t care all that much what each of us does, and would never use you – or even pay attention to you. Let’s talk about an ordinary man, born 300 years ago and 3000 miles away, and what God did through him.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was born in the small town of Epworth, England in 1703 in a white plaster walled and thatch-roofed parsonage. God gave John a pair of gifts known as parents. John’s father Samuel was a pastor, and his mother Susanna was the daughter of a pastor. And so, when John was born – the 15th child of 19 – John received another gift as Susanna soon taught John to read and write, including Latin and Greek, and he began to memorize large sections of the Bible because…Mother expected it – and she could be a wonderful instrument of God’s affliction! Young John may not have thought that unwrapping this gift was fun – who wants to study Latin and Greek at age 5?

After John had been reading for a while, there was a fire in the parsonage and five-year-old John was stuck on the 2nd floor. With the stairs on fire and the roof ready to collapse, one congregation member stood on another’s shoulders and lifted John through the second-story window. This great gift from God – explained by John’s mother to him - convinced John that God had something important for him to do in his life.

John entered the great university of Oxford when he was 17, and later became an instructor at the college.

Another gift awaited John. John’s younger brother Charles had also come to Oxford; they began a Christian club with about a half-dozen friends. These men, college boys sent together by God to be gifts to each other, became extraordinarily close, and focused themselves on God. Their club was rather intense – they met every evening from 6 to 9 pm reading scripture in Greek, discussing scripture, and praying together. Every waking hour they would stop for a few minutes and pray. They attended church services every week – at a time when the church suggested attending 3 times a year. They fasted every Wednesday, and on Fridays until 3 pm. They visited prisoners weekly and particularly helped those who were in prison for debts, and they cared for the sick. Not bad for a group of college boys, eh?

In return, the other college boys afflicted them by called them the “Holy Club”. Some said they were so enamored of their methodical practices that they called them “Methodies”. It was a time of affliction for John, ridiculed by his peers, but this special name was a gift from God. Convicted, John Wesley wrote a letter where he proudly took up the name “The Oxford Methodists”.

As time went on, John developed an even more detailed plan, where he wrote down how devoted he was every hour of every day on a scale of 1-9. John was focused upon doing the right things for God. But John felt convicted, for he often did the easy and ordinary actions instead of what God asked.

After about five years with the Oxford Methodists, John and Charles boarded a ship for Savannah, Georgia to become missionaries. But on the way across the Atlantic, God gave John another gift of affliction. A storm came up that broke the mast of the ship. While John and Charles panicked and worried about their impending doom, a group of Moravian missionaries on board calmly prayed and sang hymns. John was convicted as he realized that his Christianity was an outer Christianity – despite all of his hard work to stay holy, the Moravians, who were at peace in the storm, had something John did not have. It deeply affected John. Have you ever seen other Christians have a faith you did not have?

When John arrived in Savannah, he was deeply disappointed that Native Americans were not coming to visit the town in large numbers, and where he had thought his mission would be to the natives, his mission turned out to be to the group of criminals, debtors, and roughnecks that formed the new town of Savannah.

Yet, although the people of Savannah thought Wesley’s ways were those of the big city and the big church, attendance slowly grew at the church and several small groups were formed both in Savannah and further down the coast. Most people think that Wesley was a failure in Georgia – John thought he was a failure in Georgia – but that was only in contrast to the great events of his later life. John and Charles truly started Georgia on the way to becoming a solidly Christian part of the Bible Belt.

But John also fell in love in Savannah. Another gift from God arrived, although John only saw the affliction at the time. The girl in question chose to marry a different man, John denied her communion, and in the resulting church fight he had to flee the city for England.

Upon his arrival in England, John Wesley was 34 years old, single, lonely, depressed, afflicted and beaten. Charles soon joined him and they met a Moravian missionary, who they had several long talks with. The man invited John to a meeting on Aldersgate street. John reluctantly agreed to go. Have you ever been reluctant to go to a bible study? That evening, a man read from a commentary, and suddenly, the words and the Holy Spirit combined to give John another great gift. John wrote about the event later that evening in his journal:

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

It was an important day in John’s life. He wrote a few weeks later to his mother:

"By a Christian, I mean one who so believes in Christ, as that sin hath no more dominion over him: And in the obvious sense of the word, I was not a Christian till May the 24th last past. For till then sin had dominion over me, although I fought with it continually; but surely, then, from that time to this it hath not; — such is the free grace of God in Christ.”

It was at Aldersgate that John Wesley finally understood Jesus Christ and the great gift of Christ. It was from this point onward that his sermons changed, his effectiveness in ministry grew ten-fold, and his life became filled with joy. Will today at Quiet Dell be the day everything changes for you?

You see, up until this point, everything that John Wesley did was because he was filled with a dreadful fear of God – and the prospect of hell and damnation. John Wesley was filled with a sense of duty – he read the Bible repeatedly, had memorized most of it, he was consumed with imitating Jesus Christ and the saints. Anyone who met Wesley found him to be outwardly humble, considerate, giving, loving, always ready to give you money if you needed it, a good man, most would say a most holy and kind man.

But there was something missing. And John had known it, but he didn’t know what was missing. Repeatedly John had been convicted that there was something missing in his relationship with God. And this meant he was constantly afflicted while he was trying to follow God’s will at first in traditional ways – going to church, praying, reading the Bible – and then in less traditional ways – helping the poor, giving charity, and fasting.

To John Wesley before Aldersgate, God was a distant, powerful king, a ruler who might just listen to your prayers if you were careful and persistent in those prayers. Perhaps this is the way you look at God. Wesley understood that God ruled the world, and Wesley understood the importance of following the ways of Christ. John Wesley understood that Jesus Christ was divine, God walking upon this earth. John had all this knowledge of God – perhaps you do too. But John Wesley had never understood the humanity of Jesus Christ. Do you?

John Wesley had never felt beloved of God, for John Wesley had always worked hard and been successful and done many things, and that was what was important in the world, that you work hard and that you be successful and never, never ask another for help if you could possibly do it yourself. He was like many of us, wasn’t he?

And then, that night in Aldersgate, he heard that God does not ask that you work at all for God’s love. John heard that before he was born, before you were born, God loved you so much that God decided to die for you and remove all memory of your sins – as soon as you accepted that gift of forgiveness.

It was like a white-painted plaster living room wall in the house where you grew up, where you had written terrible things with indelible ink. And then you regretted them and worked and worked to wipe off and erase those terrible marks before your father came home from work, for every mark and every word could not have been written by anyone except you, for you HAD wrote them, they were there on that nice white-painted sin wall in your handwriting, and the ink had soaked deep into the plaster. Terrible, ugly things, and you madly worked to erase everything before the key turned in the door and doom walked into your life.

But what you didn’t realize was that the minute you asked for help from your elder brother, and ran for cover under your bed, hiding from your sure, certain punishment, the minute you told your elder brother “I did it, can you PLEASE help me?” – your elder brother Jesus took out a wonderful spray can of grace and where ever that spray hit on that wall the entire wall turned a beautiful clean white once again, a sparkling, wonderfully clean white that was so slick nothing could ever stick to it again.

And what you really didn’t realize was that your Father had talked with your elder brother days earlier, that your Father had given Jesus the spray can, and that the two of them together had planned that as soon as you asked for help, Jesus and Father would wipe all those ugly stains off the wall. But they needed you to admit that you needed help, for only then could they actually help you in your need.

That is the great gift of conviction that John Wesley received at Aldersgate Street that night, when he actually came to realize that the only thing keeping him from being right with God the Father was gone when he realized that Jesus had made his personal wall clean for ever.

As the writer of Hebrew wrote:

19 Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
But there is a bit more.

Most of us know that John Wesley went forth from that night in Aldersgate to preach tremendous sermons to crowds of hundreds and thousands of people in cemetaries, in open fields, by the mine shafts, in the city streets – almost anywhere except in big churches, because the big churches would not invite these poor, struggling, dirty people to their social events and dinners and services.

And by their hundreds and thousands ordinary people came to salvation, to understand that their personal walls were now cleaned by Jesus Christ, that Christianity was not about big churches and fancy robes and organs and choirs and social events and dinners and even praise bands, but it was about the peace that people had in their own hearts when they met God and their hearts were “strangely warmed” by God’s love and assurance.

And many of those people chose to help one another by joining small groups of people just like themselves whom they could trust to tell them when they were putting graffiti on their sin walls again like I sometimes do here, people they could trust to afflict them in a positive way so that the Holy Spirit could convict them, people they could trust to help each other to love other people and do good deeds, and people they could trust to encourage them as the Day of Judgment approached – and their day of death approached. For they followed what the writer of the Book of Hebrews had written:

24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Who will you spur on toward love and good deeds?

Some of those men who had worked in the mines and on the farms and in the early factories began to lead small groups. In fact, the leader of a group was often called the steward. And some were so convicted that they began to study hard and as the movement grew to several thousand people, then ten thousand, then twenty thousand people, and in America grew to more than a hundred thousand, many of those small group leaders began to preach and some of those men – and women, for there were also women involved – some of those illiterate men learned how to read in the small group meetings and eventually some of them led major revivals and churches of their own as God gave them gifts, just as God had given John Wesley gifts, and before John Wesley, God had given the writer of the Book of Hebrews gifts.

For you see, God is still in the business of giving people gifts.

In 1984, I gave my first sales presentation. It flopped. I’m not exaggerating when I say that over half of the audience dozed off. We did not get the contract. But that was a gift, for I did not resist when my boss suggested I take a sales training course. I taught that course five years later as Marketing and Sales Manager of another company, and then in still another company my planning and training was able to quadruple sales in three years.

But I grew arrogant. I thought I could do all sorts of things, whatever I wanted to do. And so God gave me a gift.

In 1996, my right hand received third degree burns when I made a wiring mistake. My upper arm had first degree burns, my hair on my head was crispy, a tiny piece of molten metal hit the center of one of my eyeglasses, there were blisters on my forearm and wrist and my hand looked like elephant hide. Talk about affliction! You heard and seen how a serious burn pulls the skin together and hurts your ability to move. God gave me a gift – shall I play the piano for you?

Yes, God gives us wonderful gifts.

And so I now turn to you.

What is your life about? Are you satisfied with your life? Are you living your dream? Have you decided that you are simply going to continue to work for a human employer, going about the motions until you retire, and then play with the grandchildren when you can and keep the house fixed up when the grandkids aren’t around? Are you satisfied? Or is God giving you the gifts of affliction and conviction, jabbing you from time to time with that sharp stick when you’d love to just sit on your comfortable couch? Would you like to see what God can do with your life if you gave God a chance?

What is the purpose of life, anyway? What is the purpose of YOUR life?

I suspect you haven’t found the answer. I haven’t found the full purpose of my life, yet, because God has only shown me a little bit of it, but I do know this: When you decide to work for God’s purposes, God gives you gifts – more and more every day. Those gifts aren’t always pleasant, but they are always good if we unwrap them properly.

Most of us grew up with people telling you – don’t try for too much, you’ll be disappointed, look at how bad it is for the wealthy, the famous, the successful. We were told that God favors those who try to live a quiet life. And this is largely true. But there is one thing most of our parents forgot to tell us – God wants people who will follow His Son boldly. God wants to take average people and use them to do great things – that way God gets the credit.

Most of the good Christian football players realize this – how come they are the only Christians that point their finger to the sky when great things happen? How come the football players talk more about God than we do? Why don’t we believe that God can do great things – different things, but great things – through us. Why do we believe that great things only happen in big city churches? Do we need to wait for Pittsburgh and Charleston to get a revival before we do?

But our revival has already started. Most charges have 1 or 2 lay servants. Our charge is blessed with 11 people who have stepped forward and become lay servants.

In most churches, people are afraid to talk to someone about God. In the last month, how many of you have talked about God to someone outside the church? A quarter of you? Look at how many of you have! That is how we change the world, people! It is up to us, the Christians of the world, to take the gifts God has given us and go to change the world. It is up to each of us. Do you believe God can change things working through us? Of course God can!

Just this past month in this town, after great prayers were said for him, I have seen a man come back from a stopped heart three times. And each time I see him, he is better than he was before. I think it is because God has a great purpose for Fred – It may be in the people Fred talks to – or it may be in the people you tell Fred’s story to. God is working here in this church today.

Have you recognized just how great is the basic gift of the clean, white wall that your Father and Jesus Christ have given you? What are you going to do with that gift?

What are you going to do with your Father’s gift of love and cleanliness? How many more massacres will it take before you understand that helping people come into a close relationship with Jesus Christ is a matter of eternal life and death and is the ONLY thing that matters?