Some of Joshua’s
final words to God’s People:
“Choose this day whom
you will serve, whether the gods
your ancestors served
in the region beyond the River
or the gods of the Amorites
in whose land you are living;
but as for me and my house,
we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua 24:15
Yesterday – as a summary of last Sunday’s sermon (per your request) – I listed a handful of things that define our modern American culture. Self-diagnose yourself. As a quick review, how many of these apply to you and your family …
· Increasing Pace and Constant Change
· Carpool Lines, Unending Busyness, and Growing Exhaustion
· Self-Medication: with mindless, mind-numbing activities like too much TV, Social Media, Computer Games, etc.
· Self-Medication: with an increasing middle-class, middle age epidemic of Drugs, Alcohol, Pornography, Promiscuity
· Self-Medication: with Materialism, Shopping Therapy, and Drowning Debt
· Too many Weekend Chores and Sunday Activities – which increasingly preclude physical rest and spiritual refreshment
· Anxiety and Fear – as a result of inflationary costs and deflating salaries.
· And the final word … Whirlwind
How many of us feel like we’re trapped in a whirlwind?
And what seems to go first? Our ability to slow down enough to listen for and hear God.
Relax. We’ve been here before. For example, the prophet Elijah – at his very lowest point in life – heard these words from God. “‘[Elijah,] go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks into pieces … but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice” – 1 Kings 19:11-13.
Where do we find God? Where do we find hope?
Here’s a more recent illustration … Commentator Rod Dreher started his book, The Benedict Option, with a story that went something like this: The weatherman said it was going to be a wet weekend – maybe four inches or rain over the next four days. Nothing that uncommon for southern Louisiana. But when the rain stopped a few days later, thirty inches of rain had fallen. Places that hadn’t seen water on their lawns in a hundred years were now drowning under twenty feet of water. Thousands and thousands of people hadn’t thought to buy flood insurance, because since the West “discovered” this continent, no one had ever seen this much water.
This was the literal Thousand-Year-Flood, said Dreher. But don’t you know that spiritually the Church in the West in undergoing a fifteen-hundred-year flood. As the pope-before-last (Pope Benedict) said in 2012, “The spiritual crisis overtaking the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman Empire.”
Or as Rod Dreher says, “American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears. [So] could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark.”
What does that mean?
Well, I will talk about practical ark-building details more in next week’s sermon, but here’s a hint of a hint of a solution … To stop fighting the flood of culture, to stop doing a split (the last two days’ image), we need to quit putting one foot in the world and one in the church. We need to “Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served [in past days] or the gods [and priorities] of [the] land [in which] you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
In Christ’s Love,
a guy who is praying …
God,
I don’t want to live a divided life,
with one foot in the church and
one foot in a broken culture.
Help me take the hard
but life-giving step of
coming home fully to you.
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