Bridging the Spiritual and Natural: The Power of Faith and Overcoming Life's Obstacles

We'd like today to have a very special guest.

While Randy is away at our marriage retreat weekend, we're delighted to have James Pope coming to preach with us, so let's give him a warm Somerville Baptist welcome as he comes to lead us.

Can I begin with a confession?

I started preaching in 1974.

As a matter of fact, the day I surrendered to preach was the day that Richard Nixon resigned to presidency.

I guess he saw what was coming and he thought he just needed to go in and move out.

So I've been.

August celebrated 49 years of preaching for me, but I can tell you, preaching at my home church, the Somerville Baptist church, is intimidating to me, for whatever reason, and it could be because I spent a lot of years.

I planted a church in 1993 in Maryland and we reached an unchurched group of people.

Some of them had never been in church in their lives.

I gave them and lived on the dark side, and so I had fellowship and interaction with them, and so it's like I couldn't get it wrong for them.

You're not that crowd.

As a matter of fact, I sort of speak to the issue.

About three weeks ago it was when Pastor Randy approached me and said would you be willing to supply for me while Sherry and I go to the marriage retreat that weekend?

And I said certainly.

And he said and here's what I would like to do.

We're doing this series called Mountain Men and apparently he's a fan of the reality TV show.

Any of the rest of you do that?

My DVR records that every week we have our favorites and it's a series about six weeks long about people who had some sort of spiritual experience on a mountaintop.

It's pretty simple, mountain Men.

And he said so I'm supposed to be preaching.

I was planning to preach on Genesis, chapter 22, verses one through 19, about Abraham taking Isaac up on the mountain to offer him.

Genesis 22 · chapter mention

And he said and I've created an outline for you if you would like to use it.

So use as little or as much of my outline as you would like.

So here's my agreement with you this morning.

That is, if the sermon is bad, it's because he left me really bad notes.

If the sermon is good, then he left me good notes, but if the sermon is great, I discarded his notes altogether.

I really am honored.

You know, one of the challenges as we move into this is the language that we use in this environment and other environments.

It needs context, it needs a dictionary, it needs a thesaurus, it needs something, because we all don't mean the same thing by the same words that we use.

It's like you can't use the word Christian anymore and really understand what that means, because all kinds of people call themselves Christians, wouldn't you agree?

I love the fact that here people refer to as Christ followers an entirely different animal there, because that says something about the relationship with God, and so when we come to the concept of faith, that's another one of those words that we'll be looking at today within this context.

And so I want to set up today's message by talking about a man by the name of David Ring.

He will be a familiar name to some of you if you've been in Baptist circles very long.

David Ring was a preacher's kid.

He was born on October the 28th, 1953.

He's essentially six months older than what I am, but he was dead when he was born and it took 18 minutes before the doctors could revive him, and as a result of that experience, he has grown up with cerebral palsy, which affects how he walks and how he moves and how he talks.

His dad, who was a preacher, contracted cancer and died when David was 11 years old devastating, I think, about these little kids down here on this front row.

Last time I preached here there were five fifth graders sitting down here.

I was sweating bullets the whole time during that service trying to keep their attention.

So at 11, his dad died and his mom was his world and his life.

He was the baby and she babied him.

But when he was 15, his mom died with cancer as well.

He admits that he was emotionally devastated and from that time for the next few years he actually was suicidal, wanted to take his own life.

He had a sister that sort of loved him and took him in and he eventually had an encounter with Christ and he put his faith in Jesus Christ.

Now I want you to hear the rest of the story.

This is a brief clip from one of his testimonies that sort of sets up today's message for us.

So listen to this brief from David Ring 1971, God called me to preach.

I was laying in bed.

When I'm under my own business, You've been there, you do, huh?

And God said David, I want you to preach.

I said, ooh me, Lord, I can preach.

Lord, I talk fun and Lord, people can understand me.

Come on now, Lord, I have to read the parts.

See, or are you sure you want me to preach?

Take a second look and then call me.

He took that second look and I highly knew he'd still call me to preach and I got out my bag, got my backpack.

Then he opened the Philippian 413, which said I can do all things through quite rich story with me.

And but then look at me, I'm not gonna let that sweep of parts in my head, but it's slowing down for bragging on Jesus.

I have sweep of parts in.

What's your problem?

That's just not fair, is it?

If you've, how many of you have heard him before Seen him?

That's familiar.

Yeah, you need to look up on YouTube and find his whole testimony, because a great many of the times he would end his sermon by singing have a box of Kleenexes, you'll need it to watch him.

A man who was thought less than a man because of his condition, and yet he was willing to put his trust in God's calling on his life.

I was first exposed to him back in the 80s, when he first emerged on the scene and began to share his testimony and made the circuit.

So I got to wonder, because I hadn't seen him in a long time and, a matter of fact, this is a clip from some time in the 90s.

I thought I wonder what David looks like these days, and so I found this picture of him, put this up.

This was last month.

It's happened to the rest of us too.

He got old.

He shared in this event preaching at a church about his call to ministry, and he said I have preached in over 8,000 churches in my time of ministry.

Not many preachers can actually say that.

I want you to look at today's text.

This is taken out of Genesis, chapter 22, verses 1 through 3.

Genesis 22:1–3

We're just going to simply set up this whole passage with these words.

Now, it came about after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him Abraham, and he said here I am.

He said, take now your son, your only son whom you love, isaac, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey and took two of his young men with him and Isaac, his son, and he split wood from the burnt offering and arose and went to the place that God had told him.

In all fairness, I have a younger brother that's also a preacher.

He's been at his church now 30 some odd years.

So between the two of us we almost have 100 years of preaching in us, and we will admit to each other that when we listen to somebody else preach, our mind is constructing a sermon in that moment.

And if we're asked on the spot, can you bring a word?

We already have three points of point and an outline in our mind.

It's not hard anymore.

I remember being told that by my spiritual mentor all those years ago and he was correct.

And so when Randy asked me three weeks ago to share this passage, I've had three more weeks to stuff stuff into my brain and into my heart that I didn't need to start with.

And so my challenge is how do we do justice to this mountain man, abraham, in this scene and this scenario, which is one that, frankly, you and I just can't relate to?

God telling Abraham take this promised son, and taking up on a mountain and sacrifice him there?

A week ago, friday, I got to play golf with our pastor and with James Lawson and with another local pastor, and I was hoping to gain a little inspiration from them in preparation for today's message.

But their golf wasn't inspiring to anything, and so I was sort of like.

But I asked a question.

I said what do you do with this passage?

And my wiring through all these years of preaching is that I want a text to really answer a question that somebody's asking, because if you're asking the question and we're speaking to your question, you're likely to pay attention because you want to know what the answer is.

But I realized in talking to Randy and James and the other pastor that their brains didn't work that way, because when I said what's the question that this answers, it's like, well, that's not how I do this.

They said what is the question?

I said, well, that's the question, what is the question?

And the other pastor said the question is why would a man be willing to offer his son?

And I'm thinking, well, that is a question, but I'm not sure that's this question.

And so I step back and I look at this and it says what do we do with this In Somerville in September, the 17th 2023, that speaks to where we are and who we are and what we're supposed to be about.

Because in this room there's this spectrum of humanity, different ages, you know, looking, I was on this road down here with all these kids thinking would I want to be that age again?

Anybody here want to be that age?

No, not on your life.

I'm glad to be the old man sitting at the end with them, but I know that some of you, some of you actually grew up here.

This is like your home church.

You were born into a family that were believers, christ's followers.

You grew up in Sunday school and vacation Bible school and you went to revival meetings back when the church did those kind of things.

And you've been here, you've sat through Sunday school, week by week.

You love your pastor, you love your staff.

You love and that's been your life, because that's how you're wired and that's how you think and that's how you feel and that's how you process the life that we're in.

But then, with this many people in a room this size, there are some of you that that is not your story.

You didn't grow up in that context.

Matter of fact, you probably grew up in this dysfunctional home, if not a single parent home.

Some of you, back during the 70s, don't remember the 70s for conspicuous reasons.

No testimonials here.

This is okay.

We're all about grace, and somewhere along the way you had a spiritual encounter and you met Jesus.

Or, for some of you, there may actually be somebody here that hasn't had that encounter yet.

And so I'm thinking about in this challenge this morning how do we speak a word?

What is the question for the person who's been in this their whole lives and the person who's still just looking for the answers to the question, and they don't really understand that question.

So I'm going to give you a series of images, because this is based on observation, studying the scripture for all these years, preaching it, building relationships, sharing the gospel with people that I'm convinced that all of us, you know.

This is about faith choices.

That's the reason we entitled it faith choices, because, whether you know it or not, every decision that you make in life is a faith choice.

Whether you think it's spiritual or not, it is a faith choice, and so we need a framework to understand how this is supposed to work.

So here's a series of images to help us understand raffle minds around this whole concept.

The first of these is we have these two circles I created All right, put these up here and the one on the left.

I put that in gray and I used the letter in for the natural man.

I borrow from St Paul's language.

There's the natural man.

That is the person we're born, as that's how we come into this world.

We come in it without a relationship with God.

We're the natural man, we're five senses and then learning and growing from life and taking those in and processing those, and that's how we come into life.

On the other side is the spiritual man, and you notice I used the Somerville Baptist Church logo for the spiritual man.

Y'all good with that.

Let's hope it's accurate.

We're born where these two are not connected.

They're actually disconnected, and this is how everybody starts their lives.

Now, depending on how you have you've been raised and the life you've lived, as to whether you were made, even made aware of the other one, because for a lot of people, this is how it still exists, whether they're 20 years old or 80 years old, that the two never are in contact with each other.

From the extreme, on one end, that says there is no such thing as the supernatural, there is no such thing as God, there is no such thing as eternity, there is no such thing, and so for them, it's simply an idea.

That's a foolish idea.

Now I watch and I read a lot of atheists, because I have people in my life and my family that claim not to be people of faith, and I want to understand them, I want to know how to communicate with them, I want to know how they think and how they process life, and, in all honestly, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

You probably don't either, because what it requires you to believe in the absence of belief in God, and so this is entirely separate until something happens, and now there are a lot of people that aren't atheists that this is how their lives live is because the two they're in proximity to each other but they're never in contact, they never share a common space.

So that's the first one how we start life.

The second one is where we have a slight overlap.

Give us a second image there.

That's where the spiritual and the natural man just sort of overlap just a little bit and that's where the natural man is at least aware of something spiritual and at some point it touches their lives but is a very minor part of life.

And so when we talk about, when we use the word faith or trust or believe in God, they're aware of it, but it's not a controlling influence in their lives.

I'm not really sure whether this is that category where we can say this is somebody that has too much religion to ignore it and too little to enjoy it, but it's there.

It could be that person that you've been made aware of, some spiritual truths and you have moments in life when you have that you know the demon on one shoulder and the angel on the other and you're not sure what to do.

It's present but it's not dominant and it's not controlling and you never get to have the full benefit of it.

You've at least been exposed to it, and there may be somebody in the room that this represents this whole thing of Christianity, being Christ follower maybe a new and novel idea to you.

And yet you've been around long enough that you get bits and pieces but you don't get the big picture.

You're certainly not a place where you say I'm willing to trust God with my everything.

But I'm aware of people talking about that.

I'm not sure I completely understand their language, of their meetings.

The third image let's put this one up there.

This is probably representative of more people and that's where this is an overlap.

It's like 50-50.

And I'm thinking, you know I probably have met more people who claim to be Christ followers that are represented by this overlap, because it's half and half and any given moment they can be in this side and the next moment they can be in this side.

They easily move back and forth between the two.

I can remember in back in I guess it was middle school that a group of boys and these boys would start talking, and you know what middle school boys are like.

They're all mouth and it wouldn't be spiritual stuff.

Until somebody said, hey, I'm a member of this church over here and just like that man, they could flip it over.

And they were church people too.

Now we know it's not just true of middle schoolers, it's true of adults In the workplace.

I would say the average Christ follower is not conspicuous in the workplace for whatever reason.

Now, if push comes to shove, when I was in college I worked at a savings alone, and I went to work there right before the end of the year.

So when the Christmas season rolled around, I hadn't been there a month yet, and so they locked the doors early on that evening and they had a big