Pastor Brian and Jacque Lother
Brian: Thank you, Kelly, for that. Cataline scheduled his men's dinner or night out on the anniversary, 19th anniversary of 9/11 and I think it will be a good time. It's always good to take a bad memory and replace it with a good one, isn't it? It's always good to do that. We don't want to forget of course, what happened to those who lost their lives during that tragic attack on this country, but we always like to move forward. We don't want to live in the past. We want to move forward. How are you doing today?
Jacque: I'm good. I had so much stuff to gather over here, I forgot the mic.
Brian: Did you get your makeup and everything?
Jacque: Bri…
Brian: Oh no. There are millions of people watching. You want to look your best. We've got to tell a story on Jacque.
Jacque: Oh, great [crosstalk 42:05]
Brian: She will never... When we were in the car, she has got like this suitcase of makeup that she keeps in my car.
Jacque: He is exaggerating.
Brian: Okay. I'm exaggerating. She will always put on her lipstick and touch up her makeup before we get out of the car. It's just so funny. She is snorting. She will do this, and of course, with COVID, you can't go any place now without wearing your mask. She is always putting her lipstick on and her makeup and then she puts a mask over her face. It's like, why are you doing that? And then we were going to a store the other day, just yesterday, I think it was, and she was digging in her purse to get her makeup. I said, "You are going to be putting a mask on, you know?"
Jacque: I forget.
Brian: And she keeps forgetting.
Jacque: So all my masks have a lot of lipstick on the inside.
Brian: So we know which side is the inside and which side is the outside of Jacque's masks by all the lipstick and stuff.
Jacque: Okay, can we move on?
Brian Okay, we'll move on.
Jacque: Thank you.
Brian: Last week I started a message that I called From the Inside Out and how God wants us to be transformed. He is concerned about our behavior. He is. He is concerned about how we don't value each other as we ought. Yet what we tried to do at times, especially historically in the church is we've tried to kind of coerce behavior out of people by bringing external forces to bear upon them. Even excommunication, we are going to kick you out of this church or we are going to let you take communion or things like this to coerce behavior. Yet none of those things actually get to the real heart of the issue, which is the hearts of mankind. God really wants to look at our hearts. I believe that today there is a cry coming from the hearts of people, but the difficulty is that the cries of the heart are harder to hear and discern than the cries from our mouths. When people cry with their mouths and they yell and scream, that seems to get a lot more attention than the cries that really come from the heart of a person.
The cries of the heart are actually fainter. They are more subdued, but nevertheless, they are there. It's the cries of the heart that I believe you, and I need to be attentive to. It is the same cry that the demoniac of the Gadarenes had. This is one of my favorite stories. You and I have been to that very place where this demoniac lived in these tombs and there is a church that was built there over a thousand years ago or more. Just the ruins of it are there now. When Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee and he said, "We've got go to go to the other side of the Lake", he had a purpose in going to the other side of the Lake. That purpose was this man who was demonically oppressed and just harassed and bound up. When Jesus walked into this area of the tombs, this man began to cry out and Jesus said, "What's your name?" And he said, "My name is Legion", because there were so many, thousands of... A legion was 5000. It was a term for 5000, the number 5000 and maybe 5000 demons... Can you imagine being harassed and possessed or controlled by 5000 raving demons?
This man said, “My name is Legion”. There are a lot things that are implied even in that name. That name really means that his life was very splintered. We've even had recent studies in the last, maybe 50, 60, 70 years in the realm of psychology, where the study of like split personalities have been researched. There is a lot of controversy over this, but people who have been dramatically abused early on in their lives at times create safety mechanisms on how to cope with life. They do this of course, because they don't understand the life that Jesus can give us. This demoniac from the Gadarenes, his life was splintered. It was like this broken mirror I talked about last week, where the frame is still there, but the mirror is all fragmented and that the image has become very distorted. I really believe that this demoniac longed for wholeness. I just don't believe he was like this raving lunatic that had no feelings or whatever. I really believe he longed for wholeness.
I pondered this recently and I thought to myself, I wonder how many tears, this demoniac of the Gadarenes shed when he was in solitude. I wonder how many weeping nights he had alone by himself. There is a cry today from the hearts of so many people who are virtually in the same place of this demoniac of the Gadarenes. Maybe they don't have the same level of exterior expression of the demonic realm that he did, but in their hearts, they are crying out for something authentic. They are crying out for something to fix their distortion, their brokenness, their pain.
Jacque: Everybody longs for peace.
Brian: They want peace. Even your message you gave back on mother's day about some of the women of the Bible and how like Mary Magdalene longed for that and how Jesus brought that to her. The cries that I hear today are cries to see something authentic, something real. I believe there is a weariness growing in our world, a weariness of medicating with comedians and cocaine. There are two kinds of ways that people can medicate. It's either through trying to just laugh a lot. We have the comedian channels and we love to watch comedies, but when the laughter is over, we still have a crying heart. There are others who of course, turn to the other end of the spectrum and use substances. Yet the hope that is needed, I believe in their lives is actually believe it or not, a hope for holiness, a hope for right living, but not an external coercion of behavior on their lives, but an internal transformation of their heart, an internal transformation to their heart.
We find an interesting story that I believe actually relates to this. It's not really what the original story was about, but we see it in Exodus chapter 4, verses 6 and 7. Let me just give you a little background here. Moses is now being called by God to lead Israel out of slavery from Egypt. His encounter with God is fairly recent at the burning bush. God has to teach Moses and Aaron and the people of Israel, how to trust in him, how to believe in him. He tries to do that with us too, doesn't he? One of the ways that God started to get people to believe in him was to do obviously miraculous signs, miracles, supernatural things. We see this story where Moses said well, how are the people going to know that I'm the guy that's supposed to lead and whatever. Jesus tells him, or God tells him to do this very strange thing. We see it in Exodus 4, 6 and 7.
Jacque: Then the Lord said, put your hand inside your cloak, so Moses put his hand into his cloak.
Brian: Now, what hand do you think he did that with? I think he did it with his right hand. When he put it inside of his cloak, where was his hand going to be?
Jacque: By his heart.
Brian: By his heart. Okay.
Jacque: And when he took it out, the skin was leprous.
Brian: Now, can you imagine Moses here? There is like a million stiff neck complaining Israelites that he has got to lead. He stutters and God says, "No, I'm going to show you that I'm with you, put your hand in your cloak." He takes it out and he has got leprosy. I mean, how's that for a beginning? How's that first start? But he doesn't stop there. Aren't you thankful for that?
Jacque: And when he took it out, the skin was leprous. It had become as white as snow. "Now, put it back into your cloak", he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his flesh.
Brian: I think God was saying a lot of things in this story. He is trying to get him to trust him, of course. I think one thing that he must've been saying was this, that there is a connection between the heart and what the hand does. There is a connection between what the hands do and the heart. That's what God is after. What I do with my hands will never very long out distance what is in my heart. Eventually what's in my heart will come out. We can try to resolve to do the right thing, but if that's not what's in our heart, then eventually what's in our heart is going to come out. Out of the abundance of the heart, what?
Brian: The mouth speaks.
Jacque: The mouth speaks, right. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. What I do with my hands will never outdistance what is actually in my heart. If our hearts have not changed, then sooner or later, sin will surface. Won't it if our hearts have not changed? In fact, sometimes it not just kind of bubbles to the surface, but what happens? It erupts. It erupts out of us into some kind of action, but on the other hand, a pure heart, like we were thought about that song last week; a pure heart, that's what I long for, a heart that longth after thee. A pure heart will sooner or later actually begin to change the outward behavior of people. That's why one of the things that I've been really convinced about is that God has the ability to change every heart of every person that has ever been born and ever lived. If we will commit ourselves to loving people and being like Jesus to people, I believe their hearts will be opened to receive the love of Christ, where their hearts can be transformed.
I do not have the power to change a person's heart. I have the power to love someone, but I do not have the power to change a person's heart. The work of the Holy Spirit is to make broken and fragmented lives whole. That's one of the joys the Holy Spirit gets. Sometimes we forget that God has emotions, don't we? When we think of God having emotions, most of the time, we think he is what?
Jacque: Angry.
Brian: Angry. That's the emotion that most of us think God has and he is kind of like that all the time, right? It's like I said last week, God is in another twit. But God, as Pastor Jeff was saying just moments ago, that he loves for us to lift up our hands and he can pick us up and look into our hearts.
Jacque: The scripture says long in patience. Oh, I love that.
Brian: Yes, isn't that great? The Holy Spirit wants to take broken and fragmented lives and make them whole, and even wholeness, wouldn't you agree as a process? Wholeness is a process. That process starts with the heart being touched by the love of God and submitting to this wonderful savior we know to be Jesus Christ who sings these love songs over us. There is a great story I want to share with you today from Greek mythology, and don't get all blown out of the water by that. This story relates to how God actually works. It's interesting. See, this story was written actually before the birth of Christ. Greek mythology, the country of Greece virtually as a nation, by the time Jesus was born, had virtually lost all of its power. The Roman government had now taken over that part of the world at that time.
Prior to the birth of Jesus, 300/400 years before the birth of Christ, the country of Greece was the prominent power in the Mediterranean area. A Greek mythology was obviously something that was very much a part of their culture. But it's interesting to me, I believe that God, even though cultures can be pagan, God is still trying to work his way into all those cultures. I think in this story, there is a great revelation about how God wants to be with us and also transform us and not allow the sins and the pull and the temptation of this world to affect us.
This is the story of the island of the sirens. I don't know if you remember the story, but the sirens were dangerous, dangerous creatures who would lure sailors with their enchanting music and their singing voices. Sailors would be sailing along and they would hear this music coming from the sirens and the sailors would steer their ship towards the music because they were completely captivated by this music. As they got closer to the island, these ships would crash upon the rocks and they would drown in the sea.
In a sense, there is pleasure in sin for a season, isn't there? There is an attractiveness there. There is a longing at times that we have in our hearts for that and there is an allurement of it that is very destructive in the end. At times there were sailors who knew that they were going to crash upon the rocks, but they couldn't resist the siren call of these creatures. The final outcome, they knew what was going to be, yet this mysterious pull and tug on their hearts was so strong, they couldn't resist it. This siren call would lay hold of virtually every ship that would pass this island.
There are two captains that I want to draw our attention to in this Greek mythology story. There are two captains that actually brought their crews and their ships safely past the island of the sirens. The first one name is Odysseus. What the Odysseus did was, and I think I'm saying that name right, but I'm not Greek, so I'm not quite sure. What Odysseus did was he actually poured wax in all of the sailors’ ears. He also then bound them with chains, their hands and feet, and then he bound himself to the mast of the ship and screamed at the top of his lungs so that there wouldn't be this temptation or ability to hear the siren call and they made it past the island.
Jacque: That sounds very painful.
Brian: Now, that's just the whole idea. It sounds very painful. So what would be painful about that to you?
Jacque: I got kind of stuck at the wax in the ear.
Brian: The wax in the ear. Yeah.
Jacque: And being chained up.
Brian: Being chained up.
Jacque: No freedom.
Brian: Yeah, in the bow of the ship, down in the bow of the ship. I think the picture of what some would call safe passage is one of being bound and joyless. Where was the joy in that safe passage? Putting your fingers in your ears and screaming at the top of your lungs. I think this is hardly a picture of a tranquil, rather peaceful transformed life. Is that a picture of a tranquil, peaceful, transform life, fingers in your ears, screaming at the top of your lungs, tied to the mast of a ship in chains and in the bow of the ship? Wouldn't you agree that that is not a very good picture of a tranquil, peaceful life?
The other captain, his name was Jason. Jason on the other hand, was this fabled Argonaut who also escaped death on the rocks of the sirens, but he achieved success in a much different way. I really believe, you don't have to agree with me on this, but I really believe that when the writers of this story and this mythology were happening, I believe God was speaking to them in this. He escaped the rocks, but he escaped these rocks in a much different way. What he did was, Jason hired a magic lute player whose name was Mesmer, which is where we get the word mesmerize from. He hired Mesmer to travel with the Argonauts. This supernatural musician, Mesmer had the ability to spell bind his listeners, maybe like the same way Van Cliburn did to me when I was five years old. I remember putting my ear up to the stereo and just listening to Van play Rachmaninoff, third piano concerto. And then he had an album called My Favorite Chopin and he would play this incredible music. I would just sit there for hours mesmerized by this incredible playing.
Jacque: As a little boy.
Brian: As a little boy, yes.
Jacque: Amazing.
Brian: I'm strange. I'm a strange fellow.
Jacque: That's what you are supposed to do.
Brian: That's maybe what God made me to do. This Mesmer could spell bind people with his playing, his listeners and no listener could break free as long as he was playing and as long as they would listen. When Jason's ship came near the Island of the sirens, what he did was he assembled his crew on deck. He assembled the crew on deck and Mesmer began to play his magic lute, not the magic flute of Mozart, but the magic lute of Mesmer. As Mesmer began to play his captivating melodies, it was interesting, the sirens who were now doing their music and their songs realized they weren't having any effect on this ship, because the crew was listening to something different and they quit singing and quit playing and they started to listen to what Mesmer was doing. In listening, they turned to stone, never to have effect on anybody else ever in the future, never again, to lure somebody into death and destruction.
In this story, I see believers in both camps, in both stories here. Some believers like Odysseus seemed to be strapped to the mast, wax in their ears, screaming to drown out the siren song of temptation. I guess that's a victory of sorts. I guess that's a victory of sorts, but I also think that's a very sad picture of holiness. I think it's a very sad picture of holiness. To me, that's a self-achieved holiness. It's a grit your teeth, I'm just going to do it kind of holiness. I don't believe God's plan for followers of Jesus, I don't believe his plan is for us to be prisoners of passion, prisoners of temptation, chained and bound to a master of either doctrine or coercion, hoping on an eventual escape to heaven. I don't believe that that's God's plan for us. It's a dreary holiness that spends all of its energy just resisting sin. To me, that's a very dreary holiness. Where is the joy in that?
Jacque: No joy.
Brian: No Joy. Where is the joy? Resisting sin, but the real joy of holiness belongs to the heart who has been captured by a sweeter song, a mesmerizing song. Holiness should not be thought of as a burden. Holiness should be thought of as a delight. I think to have a steadfast determination to scream right on past the island of the sirens is admirable. I think it's admirable that I'm not going to give in to this temptation. I mean, it's admirable, but I also believe we are living in a time where Holy Spirit is issuing a much sweeter summons to all of us. Here's what he is saying, "All hands on deck to hear the lute player and his name is Jesus. All hands on deck to hear the magic lute of Jesus."
Life with Christ was always meant to be a conversation between friends. It was never to be a slave obeying his master. That is not what Jesus came to buy, that we are on the slave block and he is just buying slaves. Yes, we were on the slave block, but he came to free us from slavery, not to change who the master was in terms of slavery, not a master that would be obeyed because of a whip. That was never what Jesus wanted. God is not interested in having prisoners. God is not interested in having prisoners. Oh, we might be a prisoner of love, but he is not interested in slavery. Love was always meant to exist within relationships. That is what God desires from us, relationship. I remember you talked about this, even from the time you were very young. You had a love for God.
Jacque: I did. I just had a love for God, and my heart just wanted to please him.
Brian: Yeah. And even though you had misunderstandings about how God was, and that has been a life transformation.
Jacque: It has been life journey.
Brian: Life journey for you, but your heart at a young age was captured by who Jesus was.
Jacque: Yes, it was.
Brian: I think that's one reason why you are as kind and loving a person as you are.
Jacque: I just need to keep filling myself with him.
Brian: Well, we all do.
Jacque: Or I'm not kind and loving.
Brian: We all do. We all do, but love was always meant to exist within the framework of relationship. That's what God desires from us. You know what? Religion has way too much work, wouldn't you agree?
Jacque: It is.
Brian: Religion is way too much work. And God doesn't want slaves. He wants friends and family to share his life with. That's what he wants. We live in a world that has a legacy of brokenness; a legacy of brokenness that goes all the way back to Adam. Every generation has been broken all the way back to Adam. And so much of what happens in our world is the work of evil, isn't it? It is the work of brokenness. It is the work of lostness and darkness. The plain truth is this; no one in our world is completely immune from it. No Christian is completely immune from it. No apostle, pastor, evangelist, teacher, none of them are immune from the pain of this world. There is no promise in this world of a life that will be pain free. There is no promise of that in the scriptures. Yet what is so incredible is that God can work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies. God can work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies. I reflect back on Ivy, your story, when you told your stories of hope and your sister over at the Philippines and just three and four year old and seven year old girls, homeless, sleeping under a bench
Jacque: You have to go back to an evening gathering and look in the stories of hope and find Ivy's story.
Brian: It's an incredible story.
Jacque: It's beautiful.
Brian: What a tragic beginning, but God was able to bring good into her life out of it. God is never the author of evil. God is never the author of these things, but God can take any circumstance of an unspeakable tragedy and bring good out of it.
Jacque: Every time she shares her story, we are inspired.
Brian: That's right.
Jacque: I am so inspired just seeing you.
Brian: That's right. That's right. And you know what? Life always works better when we listen to Jesus playing the lute. Life always works so much better when we listened to his song. His song can capture our hearts. His song can mesmerize our hearts, transform the way we think. You know what? God will always be on deck, right in the middle of everything that we perceive to be a mess. He will be right there. He can be right on deck in the battle of midway, if you know what I mean by that. What a mess, but working for our good, working for our good, that is what God does. I want to read one more portion of scripture. We find it in Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read verses 26 to 28 in the message Bible, and then we'll read just another portion in the NIV, but go ahead
Jacque: Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting...
Brian: Anybody tired in your waiting? It feels like I've been waiting for some things for 20 years. And I feel tired at times, but anybody tired in the waiting well, that should get all of our attention. That means something is coming for us.
Jacque: Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting God's spirit is right alongside helping us along.
Brian: His spirit is right there.
Jacque: Right next to us. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter; he does our praying in and for us.
Brian: Are you ever at a loss at how to pray? It doesn't matter, because God doesn't answer our prayers based on the level of vocabulary we use.
Jacque: Or the perfect word.
Brian: The perfect words, at all. His heart is inclined to hear us and listen to us and reach down. All he wants is for us to just kind of look at him. I remember when our boys were first born, and I would look in their crib and I said, "I think they are looking at me." That's God, I think they are looking at me.
Jacque: Just look my way.
Brian: Look my way. Yep.
Jacque: He does our praying in, and for us making prayer out of our wordless sighs.
Brian: Sometimes all we have are groans, isn't it?
Jacque: Our aching groans.
Brian: Sometimes all we can do is, aww, God. And then he will take over, starting to pray. That's what he would do.
Jacque: I love to say God, help.
Brian: Yeah, help.
Jacque: You can even just say, help.
Brian: Yeah. Yeah. I know. He is so good.
Jacque: He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
Brian: He will always keep you and I present before God. Just think of that. He will always... Another scripture says he liveth to make intercession for us, but I like how Eugene Peterson says this, he takes you and I, and brings us in a sense into the very presence of God. He is doing that continually and we know...
Jacque: And then in the NIV, this is the familiar verse- And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him.
Brian: We know that God works for the good of those who love him. You know, when all that we see is our pain and all that we see is our loss and all that we see is our disappointment, we can lose sight of God.
Jacque: Like that's all we are focusing on.
Brian: That's what we are focused on. We can just lose sight of God. In the same way that birds were created to fly, you and I were created to be loved. We were made by God to be loved first, by him and then by each other. When we don't know and experience God's love like so many people in the world today, they've not experienced, they don't know the love of God. When we don't know and experience God's love and we've experienced rejection and abuse by others, it's like a bird having its wings clipped. We can lose sight of what we were created for, just like if you clip a bird's wings, it will start being accustomed to just walking on the ground, no longer try to fly. When we aren't loved by God and experience the love of God and when have experienced rejection and abuse and hardships and loss from others, it's so easy for us to forget what we were created for. But the good news is Jesus is on the flight deck, ready to give us flying lesson.
Jesus is on the flight deck, ready to give us flying lessons and he also knows the pain inside of us can devour us, robbing us of joy, crippling us of our ability to love. That's why God, our father has sent the breath of heaven. He sent the breath of heaven. He sent it to us to put wind in our sails, to carry us through the tumultuous sea, but we can't let ourselves be bound or shackled with wax in our ears, because if we put wax in our ears and we are bound into the bow of the boat, we will never hear the mesmerizing song of Jesus. We need all hands on deck. That's what we need. We need all hands on deck to listen to the music of Jesus.
It doesn't matter what we are going through. It really doesn't. He can make good out of it. We just have to listen to the song of Jesus. We never ever have to do it alone. Never, ever have to do it alone. He is committed to changing our hearts. So let's not just have this tenacious resolve just to do what is right, but rather let's listen to the song of Jesus and let's fall in love with Jesus and let him change our hearts, so that out of our hearts comes this transformation, this victory over those sins that so easily beset us. We never have to do it alone. He is on deck singing his song to us. He is committed to changing us from the inside out, from the inside out. We will be changed when we listen to his mesmerizing song of love. We will be changed.
Jacque: I have a new way to do my daily task list. There are three things on it- Love God, love people, do stuff.
Brian: Yeah, that's good.
Jacque: And then I just put a couple of things down there.
Brian: Love God.
Jacque: Love God.
Brian: Love people.
Jacque: Love people,
Brian: And then just do stuff.
Jacque: Then do stuff. Yeah, but starting out at that place of loving God and then letting him love me.
Brian: It's really good.
Jacque: Just in the moment, it takes just a moment in his presence, just a moment in his presence.
Brian: So father, I thank you for what this candle represents today, your presence, your presence that will never leave us or forsake us. It's so easy when something goes wrong, when we've experienced a loss, a disappointment, a tragedy, it's so easy to think, where were you? Where were you, God? Help us to understand that Lord, you allow a lot of things that bring pain to your heart and yes, also pain to ours, but you will always be there for us to take our tragedy into glorious victory, where we become more like you and our hearts are transformed in your presence.
Help us to listen to the sweet music of Jesus. Help us to listen to the sweet song of our savior. May we all get on deck and may we listen for the music of our Lord, because it's in listening to your heart’s songs and your love songs that our hearts are transformed. Knowing your love is greater than any failures in my past. You are always asking me to look at you just like Peter when he got out of the boat and walked on the water, he actually walked on the water, but the minute he began to look at the wind and the sea and the waves around him, and he took his eyes off of you and he started to look at his circumstance, that's when he began to sink. May we keep our eyes on you. May we keep our eyes on you.
Elisha was promised a double portion if he would keep eyes on Elijah. There was this wind and there is this fire and all of these things to distract him from keeping his eyes on Elijah, but he fixed his eyes on Elijah. In spite of all of this tumultuous stuff going on around him, he kept his eyes on Elijah and he got a double portion. I pray that today, we would keep our eyes, Jesus, on you. You are the author and finisher of our faith. We did not begin our faith. You began our faith and you will finish our faith. We simply have to listen to your song, your love song, and fall in love with you more deeply, have our hearts become more transformed and more like you and more into the image of Jesus. As we do, as we do, the things of this world, the siren call that is so alluring will begin to fade away and eventually, they will become stone with no effect whatsoever on our lives any longer.
So I pray in the name of Jesus that our ears would not have wax in them. We would not put our fingers in our ears and scream at the top of our lungs to overcome the temptations that come our way, but rather we would listen to the sweet melodies of Jesus to come capture our hearts, Lord. Capture our hearts so that all that matters to us is loving you. This, we pray Jesus in your name and for your sake, let's raise our hands together. Now may the Lord bless you and may the Lord keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you and may the Lord turn his face toward you all and give you his peace. This, we pray in the wonderful name of the father, son and Holy Spirit. Amen
God bless you. Thanks for being here today. Thank you for watching. We will have a zoom chat with any of you who want to call in after we are done here today. God bless you. Pass this on to one of your friends that you might think might need to hear this message today. God bless you. Have a wonderful vacation day tomorrow and a wonderful week. Take care. Bye-bye.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 9-6-20. If you would like to watch the full service, click one of the links below.