Confessions of a Stiff-Necked, Godly Backslider

In the middle of the year, I was here, and not many of you would have been, it was a special event, and introducing the Kings at Gateway, which has now begun.

But I was here as the founder and chancellor of the King's University.

The uh campus we're now developing here as well at Gateway of the School is an exciting thing.

And I was here for that, and I had just fallen down.

I've uh fallen flat on my face.

And some of you are aware of the fact, and I'll make reference to it because it relates to the message today.

I had a really severe surgery a year and a half ago in the recovery process, exceedingly long, and uh with a lot of uncomfortable features and in it.

I don't want to go there because I'm gonna say more later.

But the reason for mentioning it right now is that uh when I was here last time, I was at that time using a cane, not because of my legs, but because of my balance.

I had adequate strength, but I was having difficulty.

A full year after the surgery, distill the residue of a person at my age, in my 77th year at the time of the surgery, 78 now, that at the time of the surgery, a seven-hour surgery on a person that age, there will be residual impact of the anesthetic for up to two years.

And uh it's surgery, just one of the things was my balance for a season of time, and that's virtually fully recovered.

Uh but uh I had a cane, and uh at that time, well, about the same time Anna and I were at a conference.

In fact, I served, as many of you know, as president of the Forest Court Church for five years, sometime back, and uh we're known throughout that fellowship of churches, and we were at the convention uh last in Phoenix last uh June, and Anna and I were both walking, she'd had knee replacement surgery, and we're both walking down the hallways at all the conferences with these walking with canes.

It looked like the maimed, the halt, and the blind coming to Jesus, you know, because you're the the the two of us.

It was really rather humorous to imagine.

Somebody came up to Anna and they said to her, she said, uh, they said, Anna, I noticed you and Pastor Jack walking around with the canes.

What's the deal?

She said, Well, I had knee replacement surgery.

I said, Well, what about Pastor Jack?

She said, He's old.

Well, we both are and have never tried to hide our age.

We're uh we've been married 58 years, and then we're both 78, got married when we were 20, and there was uh this year on our Christmas card, we put a picture of us on the back of the card uh for the last many years, and uh have a pretty large Christmas card list and uh the ministry features where it goes to.

And we got a dog this year.

We have a uh short-haired golden retriever who's uh just we just love him.

He's a great dog, and his name is Mac, M-A-K, not M-A-C.

And there's a story behind that, and you'll hear that sometime in the future if I keep being brought back here.

You may not hear it after today, however, I'm taking too long right now to talk before I get to what I'm supposed to be doing.

When Robert sees this, he'll say, Nick's the future, you know.

But uh in any case, the uh uh oh, and with this we uh Mac was in the picture this year.

He's there in front of us, is uh the picture of Anna and me.

And I I said uh I said honey, when we fix the card, because we and I wrote down underneath it, Merry Christmas from uh Jack, uh Pastor Jack and Anna and Mac.

And then I put a small print, it says, Ages of the pictured above, 78, 78, and 2.

And we got quite a few comments on that.

I want to talk to you uh about a title that when I shared it with Pastor Robert uh about uh oh five days ago.

Put that title up over here, will you?

Confessions of a stiff-necked, godly backslider.

I said, Robert, you still want me to come?

And here I am, so apparently he's not nervous about uh what the implications of the confessions are.

By the time I get done, I want to talk to you about a heart-searching moment that I had on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, just the other day.

I I start to choke up even thinking of it now.

I'm not going to describe to you a revelation of some great insight I had other than into myself.

A very moving moment.

I I would say humbling, but I I don't feel ashamed in the sense of humbling, but humbled that so loving a God is so patient with us in our unperceived weaknesses, and yet so expectant that when he speaks and reveals to us where our weaknesses are, he expects response.

And it's not because he snaps a whip.

It's because he's a loving father that knows what is potential to every single one of us because he put that potentiality in us.

We're here all the time.

God has a plan for your life, he knows what you're about.

Before you were conceived in your mother's womb, you were conceived in his mind.

And in the face of that reality, he has great potentiality that he will bring forth in us, but it only can be realized on terms of partnering with the Creator and obedience to his word.

And the understanding that notwithstanding our fears, our weaknesses, even our failures, and sins, which he forgives not in a cavalier way of saying, well, it doesn't make any difference because sin does make a difference.

But that he will wipe out the record, will set in motion some degree of neutralizing what can still be neutralized of ruin and bring us under realization of what will be the most fulfilling thing that any of us could ever know.

And so often seems the most frightening thing, or for us the most dubious thing, or the thing that we may even find ourselves in our own incipient rebellion, resistant to.

Moses is the person speaking or writing.

Then the Lord said to me, Arise, begin your journey before the people, that they may go in and possess the land which I swore to their fathers to give them.

And now, Israel, Moses continues, what does the Lord your God require of you but to fear the Lord, that is, to reverence him, to reverence the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes, which I command you today for your good.

Indeed, heaven and the highest heavens belong to the Lord your God, also earth and all that's in it.

The Lord delighted only in your fathers to love them, and he chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples, as of this day.

Therefore, circumcise the foreskin of your heart and be still stiff-necked no longer.

The Lord delighted in your fathers to love them and chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples.

So therefore, circumcise the foreskin of your heart and be stiff-necked no longer.

When Moses makes reference to the people, the Lord delighted in your fathers.

He's speaking to people, every one of whom of whose parents had died in the preceding 40 years, in a wilderness rather than in a place of promise that God had designed for them.

And that's why he's referencing it.

When he says, be circumcised of heart and be stiff-nooked no longer, he's saying it in the context of the preceding chapter where over and over he is saying to the people now that have grown up in that wilderness journey and know this, he said, when we came to this place, and he'll cite a sight.

And it has to do with what goes on in earlier chapters.

You rebelled there.

When you came here, you rebelled there.

And he talks about the times he needed to go before the Lord and intercede for them, other times when there was invoked judgment that came upon them, such as the serpents that came on the one occasion, went through the camp.

And he's saying, God delighted in your fathers, and all that happened to them because they didn't move forward.

They recurrently rebelled.

And he said, Now we've come to the boundary of the land.

That's where they were at this juncture.

They had come to the boundary of Canaan, the land of promise.

And he recites briefly things that took place the preceding 40 years under the influence of another generation who would not go there.

Listen, please.

In every one of us, there is another generation of me.

I don't mean I exist at another time.

I mean there's a time when the generation when I was born of my own will and my own flesh, and there is a generation when I open to the new birth of life in Jesus Christ.

And the Lord says, and so don't rebel, don't go back.

If you've never come to the place of birth in a newborn, regenerative work that makes you into the generation of the redeemed, no achievement of ours.

We all invite you, not as your superior.

We are partners in human failure who need a redeemer.

Every one of us in the room are the same.

We're sinners that need a savior.

And Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior, who, without recitation, it's enough to say he died for our sins, mine, yours, and rose from the dead.

And that cannot be in any wise successfully contradicted.

You can only go into a closet of human darkness of the mind and say it never happened.

That the sun never rose and live in the dark.

As though the S-U-N never did, but the S-O-N has.

And he's alive.

And we open the gospel to you with that invitation.

But I'm speaking today to people who like me have walked with him, whether it's been for a week or if it's been, well, it's for me, it's since I was ten years old, and I'm 78.

And the joy of finding that all that Moses says in these words, now, Israel, what does the Lord require of you?

To reverence him, walk in his laws, love him, serve him with all your heart, with all your soul.

Keep the commandments and his statutes, for they are for your good.

There are so many that are testimonies to that.

I've learned, verified the text over and over in the New Testament where the Bible says, all his commandments are not grievous.

They're prosperous, they're blessed.

The last thing God will ever do with his ways and his laws in your life is turn you into a religious freak.

He'll bring us unto not only a recovered and restored, but a really fruitful, meaningful, fulfilled human being.

God likes human beings, but human beings have a great capacity for muddling it up by trying to figure it out on our own.

Or to press it when we even know it's not the right thing, to say, well, I think I'm going to try and make it work anyway.

And it doesn't.

The beauty of this passage of scripture is that in reflecting on what they'd been through, and you have to read the larger context and what is being said now, it brings us to a place where I want to move a great deal into a testimony here of, well, uh most of the rest of the message is telling you what happened to me.

Last week Anna and I were at our getaway place.

We have a place about two hours away from LA.

It's in a beautiful valley, there's rolling hills around, and in the distance you can see the mountains which have had snow on them recently.

And it's just such a delightful place for rest.

The many years of leadership and service uh we've always had need to get away for writing and for rest.

And as I as we went up there right after Christmas, incredible Christmas, I'm tempted to digress and talk about two of our great-grandchildren we had with us for the first time.

It was the noisiest Christmas we ever had.

And it was fun.

It was fun, fun, fun.

And those little grandkids, it's just they open a package and scream.

And there's a time, uh you I don't know if I'm just getting old, and it's patience has come to the place because you figure you're not going to win anyway.

But uh but they just scream in excitement and bouncing around the room.

And uh it was just it was so thrilling.

And we were now up at our getaway place, and I had taken Mac out for a walk one day, and uh he enjoys it because there's a place we can go there that's not when we walk in the city, always needs to be on a leash.

And I walk him almost every day, but uh we were out where I took the leash off because we got through the place where there's dwellings for our place is and then went on out up on a hillside.

It was really neat.

There's one place where uh we had a very kind of a nice view anyway, but if you had there was a rise that if you went up on top of that, another 20 feet perhaps elevation, just rolling, it wasn't steep or dangerous, but uh I thought I want to go up there so we can just have the as good a view as you can possibly get from here.

And so I took a step, and to start up at that point, apparently there had been the impact of a recent rain, had been a little more drastic there, and there was there were more leaves had piled up there along with that.

And I took one step and I and I couldn't I couldn't get footing.

I walked through a little of this coming to where we were.

There'd been some rises along the way, but when I got there, it was I thought, well, I want to I want to make a try, so I I'll take another step.

And I I took about three or four steps, and it was I could just feel that there was no way I was gonna get enough traction to get up there easily.

And I'm careful because of that fall that I had last year, and uh I just uh was still some levels of recovering my sense of not equilibrium so much as strength and all from this ordeal that is, you know, I'm not trying to solicit your sympathies, although well, go ahead.

There you are.

There is a team over here.

I'll meet all of you afterwards.

And I got to a place where I was just taking one more step, and I could feel I'm I'm not gonna go any further here, I don't think.

And in standing position, nothing drastic happened just because of the leaves.

I just standing just like this, I'm sliding backwards.

I'm not walking, I'm just sliding slowly.

Went about four or five feet, and then it stopped, and I was faggotted, leveled out, although I know I'm not gonna make it up here and went ahead.

And there's no dramatic ending of this brief vignette, but it was simply a single minute of backsliding.

I don't know if the word backslide at all resonates with everyone in the room by any means.

Some of us grew up in church when you heard a whole lot more uh warning about backsliding than you do today, but it was a time when almost anything was backsliding.

I mean, if you woke up one morning and your hair wasn't parted right when you woke up, it was uh you may have violated the law of God.

You know, it was a little heavy-handed religion, and uh that's a mild exaggeration, but the point is that you, I'm not altogether sure we don't hear too little about backsliding today.

Not because I think it's a positive thing to spend a lot of time on, but I know that the Lord, at that moment I'm sliding back.

I I it there wasn't a word, but there was an impression.

You've been backsliding.

Inside me, it didn't have to do with this, it had to do with the Holy Spirit.

I didn't feel condemned, I felt focused.

Because my plan was, anyway, when we got home from that walk, I had said about three o'clock in the afternoon on New Year's Eve I was going to spend some time with the Lord and uh just wait on him.

And I thought I need to, when I get to the house, just find out what God's doing with me.

We finished the walk, and when I got home I went to prayer.

I want to, before I go on to the next thing, be sure that we see in this text, verse 11, Moses saying, The Lord said to me, Arise, begin your journey before the people.

All of us have begun a journey into a new year.

And when the Lord gave me this word and this witness to my own frustrating failure, I felt like that the issue of the stiff-neckedness and the circumcised heart were the point.

And I knew about this reference, but I didn't know that that verse that we concluded with is directly related to Moses saying about beginning the journey.

And I thought, Lord, that's just like you.

It is so appropriate to what we're talking about today.

We're beginning a journey, and it is a time, such a significant point.

An opportunity that is humanistically, we tear off a page or get a new calendar, and here we go, and we make resolutions and so forth and so on, or think, well, here's a fresh beginning.

And while we know that there's not a magic in a new day or a new calendar, there's something about it that gives us a fresh sense of, you know, this something different can happen.

That always is the case when we come in response to God saying, and he maybe doesn't speak it to you, but you know it in yourself.

And that knowing it in yourself really has to do with him saying it to you, but he doesn't say it all the same way to the way he deals with us.

Something needs to change.

And the fact is, we usually know exactly what it is.

And there are things that are more than simply we need to get exercise and we need to lose weight, or something like that.

Not trivializing those things for our physical well-being, but we know spiritually.

We know things.

I'm persuaded God speaks to every human being.

Also persuaded most people would never admit it because they don't want to be accountable.

They don't want to be accountable to saying God said something to me.

In fact, sometimes people don't even s acknowledge it to themselves.

I shouldn't, I don't, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say that's God, but we know.

We know.

And I'm not suggesting today that there's anybody on a deadbeat path necessarily here today.

There's all of us are prone toward unfruitful ones or reduced fruit, or reducedful.

Fulfillment by reason of that, or a blurred purpose, or of dullness.

Not dull because we're bored, something fascinating hasn't happened, run off and see the next exciting movie coming down the pike or something.

But talking about that dullness inside where the tang of life isn't there, it doesn't snap.

It's just not there.

When he says to Moses, arise and begin your journey before the people, that's what I'm doing.

I'm beginning a fresh journey before the people, but I'm, as he was speaking to the people, I'm speaking to you and say, Oh, obey the Lord your God.

Love the Lord, reverence the Lord, obey his commandments, find these ways.

There are times in all the years of pastoral leadership, and I'm in the 58th year, 56th year of that.

In all the years of pastoral, how many times I wish you could find a button somewhere?

People's chest, reach up and punch a button.

And the button that suddenly they would say, Oh, I didn't realize all the things God calls me to, and they're really not that many, that all the things that he calls of us are, it says it right here, are for your good.

And it's for when God says good, he doesn't just mean so you'll be good boys and girls in a religious pattern.

But so that the richness and the fullness of life, as he's designed it for you, could be realized.

All of these things are for you.

One of the things that are fundamental to the life of a person that walks with the Lord is that they pray for people.

And when I got home that day and got on my knees and just began to say, Lord, as I move toward this new year, come to a time of freshness having gone through this long surgery that I had had to do with the upper neck, and uh I had a neck brace on for three months afterwards.

And there was a residue also to the anesthetic, which has lingered longer than that, but all of it's coming out in the wash.

And it's all worth it because when they discovered I needed the surgery, the MRI showed that even as I drove over to the doctor's office, the neurosurgeon who was going to analyze the MRI, when I went over there, that he said when we were showing me the MRI, he said, on your way over here, if you'd have had a mild rear end, or he says, this is what would have happened right here.

He said, I don't mean whiplash level.

I mean just enough to snap your head.

Just a bit.

He said, you would probably, today, by now, before you got here, have been paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of your life.

And a discovery like that's made, and you feel like God's not only protected you for that, but he has more ears for you with meaning.

And he identified something.

Well, the surgery's pretty complicated, and uh the outcome with that neck brace was that I ended up with a stiff neck.

Really stiff.

I'd like to bring a whole message sometime just on things you learn from being stiff-necked.

Let me just say one right now.

Because it relates to the spiritual implications to it, but there's many.

And I've jotted them down for another time and possibly here, who knows where the place will be.

If Robert really loves me, he'll invite me back before next year.

Seriously.

The stiff neck, it's harder to bow your head.

It hurts.

It's even harder than that to lift your head.

I don't think I need to say a whole lot about the significance of those two postures.

Bowing in dependency on the Lord and then looking up and worship to him.

Stiff-neckedness, of course, that the Bible's talking about isn't a physical condition.

It's a term that describes something like I just said, and it has to do with how much of my turning to the Lord for correction and understanding and how much I truly open to him.

I was delighted to see that a pastor starting a series on worship love expressed beginning this coming week.

How nice it would be here to hear it.

Worship, which is the transforming encounter of our lives.

Not an exercise in tradition.

In your presence is fullness of joy.

And we with open face behold as in a glass.

The beauty of the Lord are being transformed from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

Worship changes you.

In fact, the Bible says praise is becoming to the upright.

Praise will make you better looking.

Turn the person next to you and just tell them.

Now you do this, do it kindly.

Say, you look to me like you must worship God quite a bit.

Go ahead.

Tell him right now.

As I knelt there less than a week ago, all of a sudden the Lord began.

To say break my heart is not only sounds melodramatic, but it's it sounds as though it were some shattering experience.

When I say a godly backslider, I'm not pretentious about some high level of spiritual achievement.

I just mean that my heart is after God.

But I was he was talking to me about backsliding and he was dealing with it with regard to my prayer life.

The irony of that is that I pray every day and have, I don't know, for a long time, a lot of years.

I have never been disposed toward any tendency to let myself become locked in a pattern of how I did what I did in my life and my walk with God.

Certain things that provide guidelines and patterns, but for they become habits.

There's a difference between a pattern and a habit.

Perhaps you could say there's a pattern for some of you ladies have beautiful dresses, and well, as far as that do all of our clothes have, but uh the patterns.

And the pattern you can always go back to the dress may become soiled, it may need to be make a whole new dress, but there's a pattern.

And the Lord has times he wants to renew things in us that are they have a pattern, but there's a refreshing.

I didn't realize how desperately I needed one.

Not a refreshing to bring joy bells, but a refreshing that brought me to brokenness, tears before the Lord, because it had to do with the Lord walking me back through how I had come to my prayer habits.

I don't know when it started.

I know what happened in the aftermath of the surgery.

I know that the difficulty of some features of life all the way, to a very small degree now, it's nearly all gone, even under the present.

But for a long time, just managing.

Other people that have gone through times of physical affliction or limitation for a duration of period understand this very, very well.

And I have a greater sympathy for that than I've ever had before.

Not that I think I've felt hard-hearted toward people in the past.

But I came to realize how disorienting things can be, uh how frustrating.

And yet I would I would pray, but I I really wasn't.

I really wasn't praying anymore.

I was making recitations.

And the Lord showed me that afternoon of New Year's Eve.

And you say, Jack, is this what the backsliding was?

This doesn't seem all that bad.

You were still praying.

Wait a minute.

You know, when you mature and walk with the Lord, more and more of the things He'll deal with you about will be things that so many people would say, Well, what?

What's the big deal about that?

But, dear one, listen to me.

When I talk to you about what happened in my prayer life, there may be people here that are struggling with a habit or an addiction or something that you feel awkward or embarrassed about or even ashamed of, or before God, you wonder what can make, you say, and you're gonna talk to me about that you weren't praying sincerely as you were praying, but not sincerely, and that's some big deal.

Listen, when you've walked with the Lord for as many years as I have, when he makes a correction of you, it does not have to do with measuring against the standard of anybody else's life or what is their limitation.

It has to do with what he is dealing with you about.

And he is never a hard taskmaster to bring those things.

God is not nitpicky, he's adjusting us for the purpose of advancement and fruitfulness.

And that confrontation brought me to tears.

And I don't say that to underscore something of nobility on my part, or unusual righteousness in anybody's eyes, because in my mind it has nothing to do with relative comparison of who is cleaner than others.

It has to do with where you are on the place that God has called you to become as a person, and you're accountable to what He's called you to be.

And I've been a big boy with the Lord for a long time, and I don't mean anything of human importance.

I mean where you are in the place you've grown to now.

And I wept.

I wept, for example, because when I named Kyle and Teresa and their four kids, one of our second grandchild of the twelve, and Kyle and Teresa are just gone in the last few months down to Puerto Villarto, Mexico, where they're establishing a work.

And Kyle has a real anointing on his life and a real vision, what God's called him to do there.

And I tell you it will happen.

But I'm going to tell you one thing, I don't think it'll happen without.

It won't be without the prayers of people who care.

It'll require certainly a whole lot of Kyle and Teresa.

But I know grandpa and grandma care, and I know that grandpa was making recitations.

Lord, I ask you to bless Kyle and Teresa now.

When what I needed to do is be saying, Lord, give me discernment now.

Just take time holding Kyle and Teresa before the Lord.

When you take our whole family now, we Anna and I have become, through those that have married into the family, children that have been born, and in the next generation, ones that are being born, married and born.

And this we have become 39 people, the two of us.

I understand when you when you hit 40, you qualify as a tribe.

And uh so we're right on the brink.

In fact, uh number 40 is is in the womb as we speak.

I hope that's not an offense to some uh someone by any means, but you understand that I mean only in loving jest.

There is assignment.

I name the kids all before the Lord and the grandkids.

I have most days as the families begin to accumulate, reaching back to when we just had one child of our own and then had four.

Total of four.

And there's and I was naming the people.

In the front yard at my house, there are 11 pillars, and they all represent issues that I know are a part of the oversight of my life.

The first one is the church that is still our home church, the church on the way.

We still pray for the church regularly.

The last one, number 11, is the city of Los Angeles.

I was not only born in the city, but lived there most of my life.

But for many years earlier in my life, was our family lived elsewhere, and then Anna and I pastored in the East for a while.

And uh between there are a whole lot of other issues, subjects, people includes the university, includes uh facets of ministry, it includes praying for the United States of America, it includes praying for a number of ministries we're related to and we care very much for.

I heard Ron Luces here this morning in the service overseas Teen Mania, great, great leader, great impact.

Ron is among those that we often carry before the Lord's presence in prayer.

There is an accountability that I have to not just recite these names, but to seek God.

Say, Lord, what do I need to pray for with them now?

How do I need to think?

I'm not suggesting that I can do all those, I've given you 50 numbers, 39 in the family, and 11 pillars, all of which have come.

But there's a way to approach your life of prayer, if you understand the power of it and lived in it for a long time in your life, that you don't make recitations.

And I've given you what I became a formal Christian doing and found that a fact, God says, what's going to happen to you is you're backsliding from the cutting edge of effectiveness.

But now as you come into this new year, I'm calling you to come to a freshness and let your heart be circumcised.

Circumcision basically is when the Lord cuts, if you take the physiological picture of circumcision and the spiritual implications that were in the Bible that relate to Abraham's circumcision, after which the circumcision that he had was when the promised child Isaac was born.

It didn't have to do with the surgery affecting it, it had to do with the life-giving capacity that came into him in the late years of his life by reason of his humility before God, by coming to cut off the foreskin or cut away flesh from the most private part of his body, but in a very real sense, the most significant in terms of productivity or multiplying what you are about.

Circumcision of the heart has to do with cutting away flesh from what would inhibit the maximizing release of what you're about.

And don't be stiff-necked anymore.

Where you, by reason of discomfort, by reason of impatience, by willing reason of not just won't take the time.

But I just don't bow enough.

And I don't look up enough.

And this message is just about done right now.

But it really is not an ending, it's a moment of beginning, of a new year.

And of a call by the Spirit of God to us to come and to say, Lord, let your beauty be revealed.

All the wonder of what you have.

And I want to spread my hands over this congregation and just passing them this way, say, may God bless every one of you with a heart that would say, Lord, I will not.

I'm not saying this to be facetious, but I want us to catch a sense that Abraham did not say, Oh no, Lord.

No.

No, too painful, too private.

Where in the private of your own heart and mind has God spoken and he says, I want to, I want to remove what would obstruct fruitfulness.

And it'll cost perhaps a moment's pain.

Usually not physical so much as it is surrender.

And that's a pain to our will.

But he calls us there.

Let's pray.

Father, as I've spread my hands over this congregation and I pray by your Spirit, come move among us, and let there be the beauty of your purpose released.

And every one of these precious people in this house for your glory.