24 Feb When The Word Of God Is Not Enough

Luke Ch. 7 verse 19 reads: ” Art thou he that should come? or look we for another? This question was posed to Jesus by John the Baptist who at the time has been thrown in prison by King Herod.

He sends two of his friends and followers to Jesus to ask him, and to receive affirmation that he is indeed the Messiah. John the Baptist has been thrown in prison for speaking out against the immorality of King Herod, because he took his brother’s wife and made her his bride.

The time we question our faith the most, is in times of fear and uncertainty. The kind of fear that stops your faith and increases your anxiety. I am not one percent faithful in all things I do. So I can fully understand John. Often times we read our Bibles and think we would have reacted differently if put in the same situation as others we read about.

I believe I would have acted in the same manner if not WORSE! We look at Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, only to see Israel fallen back into idol worship. We shake our heads in disbelief as Moses was only gone for a short while. Why couldn’t they hold on until he got back? He left Aaron in charge to make sure they didn’t get out of hand.

But even Aaron was sucked in by their complaining and bickering. After seeing firsthand all the acts of power, why did the children of Israel turn to golden images of useless symbols? The answer to this question, is the thing that’s been plaguing us since the fall of Adam and Eve.

As much as we love God, as much as we want to love God, somewhere inside of each of us, is an inherent desire to be like God. We want to make our lives the way we want it to be. We want to make our circumstances the way we want them to be. We want to live our lives the way we want them to be, and if we’re honest, we’d like to run the lives of others as well, to make our lives that much easier.

God gives us the power to make our own decisions, but he doesn’t give us the power over the results. That is in the realm of where he resides only. He does not share this with anybody. There is no other person or being who can control the outcome of a person’s decision. Only God can do that.

This is one of the biggest things God has kept for himself and denied man of. The power to control the results. So John the Baptist is sitting in prison.

He feels his death is near. He is worried. He is anxious. Fear and doubt sets in. He cannot control his fate. He cannot distinguish his emotions either. Lack of control for your one’s own fate equals fear, uncertainty, and anxiety.

John is plague with all three. Seeing Jesus and seeing the miracles matter not at this point. There’s a difference between knowing Jesus through scripture and knowing Jesus through life experience. Your life experiences. I always said and believed, knowing what God did for others, will never compare to the experiences of what God did for you.

It’s great he rescued Daniel from the Lions; Abednego, Meshach, Shadrack from the fiery furnace; Joseph from the pit and slavery; Jonah from the whale; Abraham and Sarah from barrenness; David from Saul; Elijah from Jezebel; Job from the destruction and calamity; but until he shows up and does these things in your life, their just stories.

These life stories when stacked up against your personal life’s tragedies will always fail in comparison. They will become just that, stories, of how God once healed this person, and restored this person, and brought this person back to life. While you may be traveling back and forth the Doctors getting chemo treatments, trying to find that God in midst of your very own personal circumstances.

When you’ve prayed so much you’ve exhausted the English dictionary trying to find the words, any combination of words to get his attention. The most powerful word is help! That word says it all. I can’t think of a more urgent call. Help! I need you! I’m drowning here. I don’t have a life jacket. Both of my lungs are full. I only have enough here for one word. Help. Help me Lord.

WHERE ARE YOU!

John is in Prison. He knows he’s going to die. King Herod’s wife hates him. John knows he’s in the greatest of dangers. He’s preached everywhere he’s landed that Jesus is the Messiah. And his reward at this moment is a prison cell. That’s how we think. After all we’ve done for God, prison is what I get in the end. How about Cancer? What about Poverty? What about divorce?  Loss of a home? Loss of a loved one?

Tell me that I haven’t lost everything over a phony. Go to him and tell him I’m in prison, and ask him if he’s the one, or should I look for another. I’m in prison now so this is serious. If you are not him let me know. My time is limited now. I need to find him and make amends if you’re not it.

Jesus at that moment understands the humanity in John. He doesn’t tell John to read the scriptures. He doesn’t direct John to read “The Law”. He proceeds to heal all who come to him amongst the multitudes. The sick, the disabled, the possessed, the dead raised.

And he said to the men John sent, ” Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me”.

John’s life is hanging in the balance. He has nothing left to hang his hat on. His faith has run low. He tries to make sense out of the course of events in his life. I’ve done what was asked of me. I’ve preached the coming of the Messiah. I Baptized many men. I even Baptized the Lord himself. Yet look at where I am? I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed, but no chains have been broken, and I haven’t found one friend in the Palace who will set me free. Have I made a mistake? Why has my life ended this way?

A man of such a life deserves a happy ending. That is the ending he would get if we had our way. Such men deserve such things. That is the way we see it.

And if given the authority, John would have gotten such an ending. Because God is in control, we never know the ending will end up with. That in and of itself can be nerve racking. Especially when we see men like John and Moses getting a less than ideal ending to their lives.

John needed to hear eyewitness accounts from men he trusted, to relive the fear and uncertainty he was facing at that moment in that prison. Have you ever been to prison? Me neither. But imagine being put there for a righteous cause, and somewhere along the line you start to doubt that cause, because there’s no parade of people lined up to argue your innocence or to bust you out of there.

It’s just you. Alone. In a cold dark cell. Left to go over your life, and too much time to analyze the results. I started this Ministry not because I wanted to make people happy, but because I wanted to help people “get through”. Get through whatever it is they were facing. Whatever it is they were up against.

I wanted to help people stop blaming themselves for the trials, tribulations, and misfortunes that fell upon them while simply going about their lives in a manner pleasing to God.  Or if you weren’t at some point and now you are, that’s why I started this Ministry. If the books in the Bible were enough by themselves, Jesus would not have sent the men John sent back to tell John to believe in the works and the miracles that those two men saw him do.

Until Jesus becomes real in your life, these stories just read like legend and folklore. Something that makes you feel good and keeps your hope going. But when calamity hits you where it hurts most, in your own personal life, you will find yourself searching for truth, just as John did.

Whatever it is you are going through, I pray that God becomes the solution in your life. God cannot be a healer unless he heals you from something. Doesn’t have to be physical. Can be an addiction of some sort. A vice you’ve been struggling with since you were a Teenager, a child even.

How can you see him as a provider he provides? How can you see him as a deliverer unless he delivers you from ruin? Look for him in your lives to do these things. Don’t rely on what he did for others. Those stories are there to teach and to display his attributes. In the Bible he displays that he’s all these things. Look for him to show you he’s these things in your own personal life.

Until he delivers you out of your “pit”, the story of Joseph will not resonate with you in a real way. Do you remember what Jesus said when he first met Nathaniel? “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” In which Jesus replied: “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”

Nathaniel did not believe Phillips’ account that a person from Nazareth could be the Messiah. Phillip told him to come and see for himself. And he did. And he believed. Knowing God can do something, and seeing him do it is two different things.

I pray that he shows you. I pray that God shows me. It will make you a greater believer. You will never be the same after he does something like that in your life. I don’t want you to take this as a call, to only believe in what you can see. No, I want you to look for the evidence in your own life, of the things we read about and study and were not able to see.

It’s these personal things that God does in a person’s life, that makes them the type of disciple they need to be for the work that God calls them to do. Paul could not have accomplished all that he did if it were not for the Lord knocking down from this horse and blinding him on his way to Damascus.

Abraham would not have been the believer that he was if not for God giving him and Sarah a Son at the impossible age they were at. He would not be the believer if it were not for him witnessing the delivering of Lot from Sodom and Gomorrah.

God will use personal events in your life to prepare you for the task he’s called you to do. The greater the events, the greater the task. Whatever pit, or prison, or whale of a circumstance(s) you find yourself in, you can’t control the outcome. I know you wish you could. I wish at times I can control mine.

Try to do the thing that we all have the hardest time doing. And that’s trusting Jesus. I know it’s hard. I don’t know what your ending looks like. I don’t mind either. Let’s trust together, and believe he’s smarter, wiser, and more informative.

Call a couple friends if you have them, and ask them what God has done for their lives personally. From people who trust and love you. Sometimes that’s what we need to get moving forward. As a body this is the time we need to be accessible. We can’t leave everything up to Jesus. We can be his hands. We can be mouth. We can be his ears. When we can be his feet.

We need more hands and feet then we need mouths. Let’s be quicker to help and slower to speak. Quicker to give, and slower to investigate. Part of Job’s friends’ problems is they were trying to detect why Job was in suffering vs. just being his friend and his brother. When people are hurting, they need someone to listen, love, and uplift.

Leave the rest to God. They were almost completely wrong and totally didn’t understand. It’s not those who do bad that only suffer. John was thrown in prison and later beheaded. Jesus was nailed to the cross. The righteous suffer too.