6/2/13 - Faith & Reconciling The Extremes Of Life
10AM at Irving - somehow I've been getting up early enough.
Pastor Chrishan J from Hillsong Australia is on deck!
Pastor Chrishan calls home to talk to his mom. What has changed over the last 10 years is that he doesn't speak with a Sri Lankan accent anymore. You change your accent when you go to different parts of the world. His friends would hear him change his accent and they'd ask, "What just happened? Who are you?"
So he asks for his mom and his dad says, "She's working on being around." Did his dad just insult his wife? So he was still trying to figure things out and he was blessed to hear his dad crack that joke. When you hear people in good spirits, it makes all the difference to you.
But then his dad collapsed in the shower one day and they all went to the hospital and the doctors didn't know which way it would pan out, and they came back the next day.
The doctors said that the worst had happened, that he had a stroke, that he's paralyzed and the machines are doing the breathing for him. So the best they could hope for was that his dad would be a vegetable for the rest of his life, and they thought that realistically his dad wouldn't make it.
A year earlier they had arrived at Hillsong and had faith and believed that God worked miracles today. So they hit this crisis as a family and they believed that God would heal his dad. But then God responded and Chrishan would watch miraculous healings of his dad. As the weeks passed, his dad started to get better.
They'd call his dad the miracle man because his dad wasn't supposed to walk. Within a few months, his dad was back to work, then a few months later he was driving his car. Complete, total healing.
God still works miracles today. He still transforms lives today. He still intervenes in the course of our lives in miraculous days. Chrishan was talking with a friend whose family was going through some serious health challenges.
Chrishan asked his friend about his faith in the midst of this challenge, what God was speaking to him about, and his friend said: "To be honest, I haven't spent much time with God and I haven't read my Bible. I know God is able, and if he is able but hasn't done anything yet, I don't want to be around him. I don't want to relate with him because it's too painful - he's too powerful and all able but nothing's changed."
And Chrishan started thinking about it. In our Western mind, we try to reconcile everything, we try to reconcile two opposite extremes that don't complement each other. Psalm 107:1 says that God's love endures forever and he is good. Yet in the midst of our circumstances, we're faced with all sorts of other challenges, realities and facts.
In Western thinking, we're taught to resolve things that are at opposite extremes. If God is able and all powerful, then either I'm bad and fallen out of favor or I don't have enough faith, or maybe God isn't good at all. We try to resolve it so it all fits neatly.
Hebrew thinking was very different. They would take extremes and just live with both truths. They were open ended.
Think about the nature of light. They ran some tests that made light look like a wave. Then there were other tests that showed life was a particle. And then Einstein, who was Jewish by background and therefore had no problem with living with unreconcilable extremes, said that light was both light and a particle.
The kingdom is now and yet the kingdom is not yet. It's extremes. They're both true at the same time. That we're perfected but we're still in the process of being sanctified still. Extremes, but they're both true at the same time.
Extreme faith looks like having faith in the midst of the extremes. And regardless of the circumstances, we're going to put our faith in God and that he is good and his love endures forever.
GK Chesterton said, "Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious." In Job 36:8-10, Elihu is one of Job's friends who is talking to him in the midst of his challenge.
Job is tested and loses everything. Everything. As he's in the midst of having lost everything, his friends are trying to comfort him. Elihu says that if you do bad, you get bad. The only reason you're in a bad spot is that you're a bad person, and God is giving you what you deserve. That's one way people like to process the extremes.
It was the same in Jesus' day. In John 9, Jesus' disciples came to him with a man who was blind and asked who sinned to cause the man's blindness: the man or the man's parents? They thought that bad causes bad.
But the answer from God is usually not one of the options we have provided. Jesus says neither the man or the parents caused it and said, "You don't even know enough to ask the right questions!" Often we ask God, "Is it this or that?" and he says, neither, no, and his thinking is so beyond ours. It makes no sense when we limit God to yes or no.
Then after Elihu talks to Job, God says this to Job in Job 38:4: Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations? Surely you know. Who measured the Earth? Do you know? Who was there when God made the Earth and all creation? Have you ever commanded the morning or shown the dawn its place? And God keeps questioning Job like this for verse after verse, and then Job regrets even opening his mouth.
Then God keeps asking Job more questions. Isaiah 55:9 says that God's ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. His thinking is so much bigger than ours.
There was a Sunday school song that said, "My God is so big, so strong and so mighty. There's nothing God can't do." We think God is big, so much bigger than I am and my reality and so much able and powerful.
We don't think that our strength will compete with God's strength but when it comes to God's thoughts, we start to think that our thoughts can understand his thoughts.
In some ways we try to set ourselves so that we compete with God's thoughts. But just as his strength is so beyond ours, so his thoughts are so beyond our own. God's strengths are omnipotent - all powerful - but he's also omniscient. He's all knowing, and it's so far beyond our own knowing.
1 Cor 1:22-25 Paul say that the Jews want miraculous signs and Greeks wants wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified - a stumbling block. A scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles but to those who God has called, Christ is the wisdom and power of God.
The Greeks had the best schools and teachers and here comes Jesus, a carpenter, who tells stories so simple that everyone can understand and the everyday people could understand. Foolishness to the Greeks.
To the Jews, they wanted someone to wage war and cast out the Romans. Political victory. Power. They were looking for their messiah so Christ crucified was a stumbling block and didn't fit their image of a conqueror.
What came in the form of Jesus made no sense and yet Jesus Christ is the power of God. And despite what your circumstances are today, he is goood and his love endures forever.
A reaction to challenge is to pull back from God. That's natural. But in the midst of a challenge, let's do what Hebrews 12:1-3 says. Hebrews 11 talks about the heroes of the faith like Abraham and David and Samuel.
Then after it's talked about all these heroes, verse 36 says some faced jeers and flogging, others were imprisoned. They were ill-treated. The world was not worthy of them and they were all commended for their faith yet none of them received what had been promised.
These people who saw God move mightly, they chose to believe that God is good and his love endures forever regardless of whatever was happening to them. Extreme faith is faith in the extremes of our lives.
There's a show called Master Chef in Australia, and you watch a bunch of people cook and you can't taste the food but you get drawn in. And Krushan would get emotionally invested in these competitors. You know what they've overcome in life just to get to that point and we see what they've given up and sacrificed to get there.
And he was invited to this show as a guest for the final episode. And they were hanging out outside the studio, the soundstage where they filmed the show. There were these massive double doors and then at the start of the show, every contestant walks through these huge doors. In the midst of the finale with the 3 finalists cooking off, they had all the guests walk through the double door.
And not only are the 3 finalists in the midst of cooking, everyone who's been on the show that whole season were all standing on the balcony. And as the guests walked in, they started to cheer and applaud like they were somebody! These people who had competed whom we had watched were applauding us.
Hebrews 12:1 says that we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses. All those heroes mentioned in Hebrews 11, all of those people stand in the heavens and applaud us as we take center stage to see the gospel and the kingdom move forward. An encouragement to anyone living in this time is that the balcony is full of heroes who are looking on and applauding us.
Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let's run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let's fix our eyes on Jesus.
In the midst of challenge, where everyone wants to pull us away from prayer and Jesus, the encouragement is that we instead fix our eyes on Jesus. Because when we fix our eyes on Jesus, we realize that he endured the cross on our behalf for the joy set before him.
Even in the midst of challenge, God is good and his endures forever. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He was good on the cross, he is good today and tomorrow. He hasn't changed.
Brian Houston has always said, "Let's never let our faith be reduced to the level of our experience. Let's always pray that our experience matches the level of our faith!"
Chrishan's got daughters and they were praying for one of them on her birthday. They live in a 2 bedroom apartment in Sydney and were having a birthday party in this park. Everything in the forecast predicted rain. It was meant to be torrential rain through the entire weekend. They had no plan B.
So they got to the Friday night before the party and they prayed because they figured God's got to listen to the 4 year old with the birthday party tomorrow. So they prayed for good weather and they walked out of the room.
The party started at 10AM and Chrishan wanted to see the weather report. So his wife pulled up the weather report and just so you know, 10AM was sunshine! Everything else was rain.
So they had a great time and got to the end of it, and Krushan's father hadn't been at the party because he wasn't able to get out. They say 15-20 years after a stroke you can have all sorts of health challenges, so his dad had micro-seizures and that put him in the hospital for a little bit. It's a cycle. You end up in the hospital and lose your mobility and muscles lose definition and it's a vicious cycle.
His dad is in the midst of that challenge now. He'd never missed his grandkids birthday party before and that just was not good. So they thought about praying for grandpa.
And then Chrishan thought, "What if they pray for him and the worst happens?" As a Dad, you want to show them that God can and does the impossible but you don't know.
So Chrishan said that they needed to pray regardless of what happened. They didn't want their faith to drop to the level of their experience. So they decided to pray that God would heal his father and the girls started praying, that grandpa wouldn't fall over.
And Chrishan became aware, at some point in Christian faith and having kids, that maybe the thing they prayed for was answered in a way that wasn't expected.
Chrishan decided as a dad that he'd want to take his kids on a journey of faith regardless of what the circumstances might say, that God is good and his love endures forever.
So they're praying for his dad, but regardless of the outcome, God is still good and he is on the throne and he is still willing. He is good and his love endures forever.
