Night of Worship

There are times where God doesn't necessarily come through in a situation in the way that we think he should have.

And these are these these things can be very difficult on us and on our faith.

And there are these moments where, as I was saying, we want to remove these obstacles, these barriers.

There are these times where we expect God to do something, and when he doesn't do it, we feel this hurt, this pain.

And I want to propose to you tonight that many times, whenever something like this takes place, we actually have an idol in our lives that we shouldn't have.

There's something there that is stealing our worship from God.

That's taking us away from being able to go to that deeper place with God because of the experience that we see on earth.

And as I said earlier, we want to not just see God through the world's eyes.

And what happens is our experience of what the world really is begins to affect the way that we see God.

And it creeps in slowly, and eventually all of a sudden, you don't have as clear of a picture of God as you had before.

I want to tell you a story of a woman's journey, and uh, and and hopefully we can all find something to find in common with this woman.

Her name was Elizabeth Elliot, and in 1966, she was a missionary to the Augus Wyaroni tribe in South American Amazon rainforests.

And she was a missionary there, but she wrote a novel, a fictional novel called No Graven Image.

And in this novel, it's about this young woman named Margaret who dedicated her life to translating the Bible to remote tribes whose languages had not been written yet with the scriptures.

And so she would go into these very, very remote tribes, and key to her work was this man named Pedro.

He knew the unwritten language that was required to interpret the Bible into this little known language.

And one day, Margaret goes to visit Pedro in his home, and she discovers that he's suffering from a very bad infection in his leg.

And the infection has begun to turn into something really, really terrible.

And she can see that he's suffering and he's in so much pain, and he's crying out to her, Margaret, please do something.

His wife and his little children are standing by and they're just watching him suffer in pain.

And he says, Margaret, you've got to do something.

Is there anything that you can do?

And Margaret, being a missionary, she had traveled with penicillin, and she knew that penicillin can cause infections to get better and many times to go away.

And so she pulled it out and she gave him a shot of penicillin.

Little did she know, though, that he had an extreme uh uh allergic reaction, and the penicillin right there in front of her and his wife and his children, he died from a reaction to penicillin.

And in this book, she writes about how difficult it was for her to reconcile this with God.

She says that she battled in her mind what will happen to Pedro's family, what will happen to the work that God was doing with the Bible translation.

God had led Margaret to that area she believed.

She knew that God had pulled her that direction, led her to that area, and even led her to Pedro, paved the way, and now she was so disappointed in God and let down by him.

I don't know if if you're willing enough to go to that place where you could say that, but I know for me, I have been in that place.

I'll be honest with you to say I have been in a place where I've been deeply disappointed with God.

And and and and struggling to find God.

Where are you in something that's so difficult for me to go through, that's so difficult for me to reconcile, that's so difficult for us to see and to live through.

The book, this the book ends, no graven image ends with no silver lining and no redeeming factor.

It would be wonderful if it could end with saying, Pedro died, but then so many other people were led to the Lord from that work, and so often we hear a story like this, and we really want that type of ending.

We want to hear what happened out of that.

What did God do?

I know that he intends everything for good, so what happened?

And at the end of the novel, you realize that they never did receive the translation of the Bible.

It was impossible for them to find another way to find someone who knew both languages.

It was a dying language, anyways, and those people would live the rest of their lives without a translation of the Bible.

Elizabeth says that the graven image that the title of the book is named after is a God who always acted the way we thought he should.

The idol is a God who would always act the way that we think he should.

The idol is a God who always supports our plans, who thinks the way we think, and who revises history to be the way that we think it ought to go.

That would be, my friends, a God of our own creation.

The truth is, when we go to worship God, we want to get to a place where God is much bigger than that.

Where God is much bigger than our understanding.

It's difficult to understand why these things take place in life.

It's hard to understand and comprehend these things.

But the truth is we enter a new level of worship whenever we can say, I worship God all the same, even if I don't understand him.

Glenn Pacquiaum has this great quote, and he says, A God that you can explain is a God that you can contain, and therefore a God you cannot worship.

It would be impossible to worship a God that fits so nicely and squarely into our own minds.

But the truth is he is much, much bigger than that.

One line in the last chapter of the book and talking about the death of Pedro says, God, if he was merely my accomplice, had betrayed me.

If on the other hand, he was God, he had freed me.

What she realizes in this time is that if God, if he was merely there to help me do the work that I want to do here on the earth, then he had betrayed me, and that part is true.

But if he was really God, then he had freed me from an image that I projected onto him.

We want to get to that place where we can be free of this.

And in short, suffering had pointed her to a glorious God.

It had taught her to treat him as such.

And when she did so, it freed her from the desperate, doomed, exhausting effort to seek control of all the circumstances of her life and those that she loved.

This was, of course, a fictional novel that she wrote, and so it had the Christian world uh angry in a lot of ways.

There's a pastor who made it his life's mission and single-handedly bragged that because of his work against this book, that he kept it off the bestseller's list.

And he said, We don't know a God like that, so we don't want to hear that.

And he said, What's worse is this is a fictional book.

Nothing like this would ever actually take place.

I'm here to tell you that Elizabeth's real life is far more tragic than the book that she wrote.

Her novel was a mirror to the missionary work that she herself had done to the Wawroni tribe in the Amazon rainforest.

She was working in South America, she had the only man left that could speak both Spanish and a language called Colorado in the entire earth, and he was senselessly murdered.

All the translation work that she had dedicated most of her life to came to a grinding halt, and those people never did receive the Bible translation in their own language.

Later, a flood and a theft took all of their remaining card files and that they had invested years of work into.

Natural disaster wiped them out yet again.

While living there, she married a man named Jim Elliott, and he was a missionary as well.

And one night they sat around a campfire and sang a song that says, We rest on thee, our shield and our defender.

And ironically and tragically, he was gunned down and killed the very next day.

Elizabeth's life was tragic in every way that you could possibly imagine.

And throughout her career of being a missionary, as faithful as she was, everything that she tried to accomplish for God was thwarted over and over and over again.

And it would be easy to say, well, that's just the enemy, but the truth is that's the world that we live in.

She warns in her in one of her other books that we shouldn't look for a silver lining in these events.

We need not search for something that could justify these horrible events.

She says, We know that time and again in the history of Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed.

We are tempted to assume that a simple equation exists here.

Five men died, this will mean X number of Walroni Christians.

Perhaps so, perhaps not.

God is God.

I dethrone him in my heart if I demand that he acts in ways that satisfy my idea of justice.

It's the same spirit that taunted, If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.

There is unbelief, there is even rebellion in the attitude that says, God has no right to do this for five men unless he redeems it.

It is that same spirit that we want to remove from ourselves, that same spirit that says, if you really are God, come down from the cross.

What that would translate into our lives is, God, if you really are God, then solve my problem that I'm facing right now.

Solve the struggles and the difficulty and the pain that I'm going through right now.

Timothy Keller says about this book and about this woman that wrote that, it says, the theme that runs through all of Eliot's work is that to trust God when we do not understand him is to treat him as God and not another human being.

It is to treat him as glorious, infinitely beyond us in his goodness and wisdom.

But as Jesus says, the hour at which God's glory was most brilliantly revealed was on the cross.

His glory is most brilliantly revealed to us in suffering as well.

Not all of life will be suffering, and certainly we are thankful for the times that we experience blessing and abundance, and certainly we celebrate those times, but the truth is that every one of us will go through some level, some amount of suffering.

And the trick is, can I go into that moment and still praise God?

It's not a challenge to worship God when everything is going great.

The question of faith is, can you worship God even through suffering?

The question tonight is, is comfort an idol in your life?

Because the truth is, the gospel is about hope.

It genuinely is.

The question is, are we hoping for comfort or are we hoping for God?

Are we hoping that comfort will come into our lives and help us?

Or are we genuinely hoping for God no matter what he looks like and no matter how he shows up?

Worshiping in the midst of disappointment dethrones that idol and places God back on the throne of your heart and your desires.

In modern church today, very, very few times are we given an opportunity to take our wounds and our hurts and our suffering to God.

Very few times are we even allowed or feel like we are able to take our disappointments to God.

And so we live our lives going, no, I need to put on the Christian smile, I need to be happy, I need to deal with this.

And I've spoken on this subject even here in the church several times.

And the reason is, I don't like to dwell on suffering, but the reason is I've experienced such breakthrough in my life in this area that my worship has increased in this time.

And there are many of us who have pushed it down further and further and further, just like I had done, and never really allowed ourselves to ask God the difficult questions and to move forward.

To take a moment and say, God, I need to know where were you in this time of suffering?

I've told you before about the trials that we have been through with my wife's health and seizures and different things like that.

We've gone through that time and we've struggled with those questions and said, God, where are you in this moment?

I've studied so much in this subject because I really needed to know if God never came through for us in her healing, could I still worship him?

I've come to a place where I can worship him in an even greater way because I've removed that idol from my life.

And that's our goal in this time is that we want to remove that idol from our life so that we can enter into a deeper place of worship.

And even as I'm saying this, there are some of you who have been through extreme difficulty in your life.

Stories that would put mine to shame in every way.

And maybe no one has ever given you permission to take those things to God and say, God, I'm angry with you.

God, I'm upset with you.

God, I'm disappointed in you.

Let me tell you something.

I promise you, he can handle that.

I promise you, he is a good enough God that you can go to him and say, God, I'm extremely disappointed in you.

And he will come to you and he will meet you in that place.

I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes with me if you will.

And we're going to take just a moment.

And I want you to recall those things in your heart and in your mind of places, times that you've been disappointed in God.

I want to ask you to be brutally honest with yourself and with God in this moment.

As difficult as it is to go back to those places, I want you in this time to ask the Holy Spirit, God, will you reveal to me any time that I have been disappointed in you?

God, will you bring those to my memory, the times that I've been disappointed with you, the times that I've allowed my own image of what you should be in my life?

Will you bring those things to my attention so that I can deal with them?

And then I want you to ask a very simple question.

God, in my suffering, where were you?

I'm going to bring up a few situations as you keep your eyes closed and your head bowed.

And my prayer going into this night was that God would speak through some very specific situations that I'm going to bring up.

And so I've prayed and I have asked God to give me the words right now.

And if you find yourself in any of these moments, then I want you to go to that place.

I want you to ask God, where were you in this time?

Ask God, where were you whenever I didn't get the promotion at work that I expected?

God, where were you whenever the thing that we had prayed for for so long didn't come through for us?

God, where were you whenever I was lying sick in the hospital bed?

God, where were you whenever my spouse passed away of cancer?

God, where were you whenever my spouse cheated on me?

Where were you when my spouse asked for a divorce?

Where were you in my most broken times of life?

God, where were you whenever my child passed away?

God, where were you when I was a child and bullies would taunt me and make fun of me and beat me up?

God, where were you when I was hit by my father?

Where were you when I was molested as a child?

God, where were you whenever I was helpless?

And someone took advantage.

Our pastoral staff is going to be here at the front.

If at any point this becomes too great for you, I want to ask you to come forward during this next song.

And let us pray with you.

If at any point it becomes too much for you or you need prayer, we want to be here for you.

Whatever it is that the Holy Spirit is recalling to your memory, we want to be here for you.

Maybe you need to just stay at your seat, maybe you don't need to talk to anyone.

That's okay too.

You stay at your seat and you process through this time.

I want you to know this room is yours.

If you need to get out, if you need to move, if you need to kneel at the altar, we will get out of your way.

Just say, I just need to kneel at the altar.

I need to put God back on his throne.

I need to worship him for just who he is instead of who I wish he had been.

If you need that space, then that's fine.

We want you to have that.

We're going to continue in this moment and just allow God to speak to you.

Be an open vessel in this time and say, God, I'm here to hear whatever it is that you have to tell me in this moment.

And then be brave enough in this time to say, God, what are you speaking to me through this?

And where were you in my time of suffering?

And if you need prayer, you can come forward and we'll be here to pray with you.