Heroic: Rahab with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

All right, MetaCurch, how's everybody doing this morning?

Awesome.

Man, we're just so glad that you guys could join us for today's service.

I want to welcome everybody who's here in person, all of you watching online to week five of our heroic series.

If you're new to MetaCurch, my name's Noel, and uh I love getting the opportunity to serve all of you in a little bit different of a capacity.

Usually I bring musical worship and lead us in that, but today I'm gonna get to bring you the message, and I'm super excited to be teaching on a great hero of scripture today.

Now, in this series, we've been looking at the New Testament book of Hebrews, which is actually just a letter that was written to the Hebrew people.

And we've been looking our way through chapter 11, which is in the church world known as the Hall of Fame.

Now, I think everybody kind of knows what the Hall of Fame is, right?

Like if you were to play a professional sport and you were exceptionally good at that sport, then upon retirement you could be voted in and inducted into that sport's Hall of Fame.

But at MetaCurch, we're calling this not the Hall of Fame, but the Hall of Heroes.

Because we're going through a list of some of the greatest men and women that are found throughout scripture.

And we're looking at what set them apart from everybody else around them.

Today we're gonna be looking at a hero on this list whose life started out way differently than everybody else's life.

Her name is Rahab, and she's one of the most surprising heroes in the scriptures.

Hebrews 11 says this about Rahab.

It says, by faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after being marched around by the Israelites for seven days.

By faith, Rahab the prostitute, welcomed the spies in peace, and she didn't perish with those who disobeyed.

So we have to ask ourselves a simple question: who exactly is Rahab?

And maybe even more incredibly, how did a prostitute make it into the Bible's Hall of Fame?

So maybe you've been hearing some of these sermons in this series, and you look at the stories of the lives of the people we've been looking at, and you say, Yeah, I can see how that person was meant to be a hero.

Maybe you can even look at the world around you and see the good that some modern-day heroes are doing in this world, but you, well, you're a different story, right?

You've made up all the reasons in your head why you are disqualified from ever living a life that God could use to be a hero.

Maybe some of these reasons look something like this.

Maybe you weren't raised in a Christian environment.

You don't have the scriptural background to ever do anything meaningful for the kingdom of God.

Maybe you don't feel like you matter enough because you were raised by parents that never really valued you.

You look around at your social circle, these friends that you spend your time with, and trust me, none of them are gonna make the sainthood anytime soon, right?

And neither are you, because nobody's really like spiritual or religious in that group.

You've just made too many mistakes.

There's no way you could ever undo the harm that you've done.

You have a bad reputation and this thing follows you around everywhere, or maybe you have bad habits or addictions that you can't let go of and that are certainly not letting go of you.

Now, if any of those resonated with you, I have some good news for you today.

Rahab, the hero that we're looking at today, she had every one of those problems and more.

If you've paid attention in the series, what makes uh all these stories so amazing is just how ordinary and broken these people actually were.

And Rahab possibly demonstrates this better than anyone.

And if we're gonna look at the story of Rahab, we really need to look at the historical context, what she lived in in the time that she lived in.

And unfortunately, women during this ancient time were not valued.

In fact, they were not much more valuable than a piece of property.

They had no real earning potential outside of a trade, say like prostitution, which is exactly what Rahab ended up doing with her life for a time.

And here's what that meant for Rahab.

Women did not get to choose who they married.

There's like no bachelorette reality show, right?

There's no roe ceremony where they were picking an eligible bachelor.

They had like little to no say in their marriage.

The way marriage would work out is a man would come to a woman's father and he would pay money in order to take her as his wife.

Now, this was good news if your family was wealthy, if they had some influence, because a man would come and pay a large sum of money.

But if you were poor, if you weren't very influential, if there was something uh wrong with you, then a man would pay very little to your father, but not all hope was lost, because in this time it was a common practice for men to take multiple wives.

And so the odds of you getting married were actually pretty good.

But if no one married you, you're the outcast of all outcasts.

You were the lowest of the low.

Not only were you a woman, not only were you poor, not only were you from the wrong family, but you weren't even worthy of a man's marriage.

You'd be out on your own, and your options to survive would be incredibly limited.

So Rahab, in her desperation, began selling her body just to survive.

A woman who is already degraded by her society was giving up the last piece of dignity she had, the last piece of self-worth that she had to stay alive.

At Metachurch, we say this quite often that we believe you were created on purpose.

Like, we don't think it's an accident that you're alive today, and we don't believe it's an accident that you're in this room today.

And not only do we believe that you're created on purpose, but we believe that you are created with purpose.

That's just another way for us to say that we believe you were created to live a heroic life.

And if you've ever doubted whether God can use you, if you've ever felt like you're simply just not enough, I want you to hear this that Rahab is not only in the Bible as Hall of Heroes, but Rahab gives us the last piece of our series, heroic template.

If you've been joining us, we've been taking the word heroic, and we've made an acrostic out of it, and each letter is a different attribute or characteristic that we believe the Bible is showing us how to live a heroic life.

And so we've learned that heroic lives have faith.

We learn that they escape temptation, that they rely on God, that they're open to change, and that they invest in eternity.

But today from Rahab, we're going to learn that heroic lives can actually change the world.

So again, who is Rahab?

We read the full story of Rahab in the Old Testament book of Joshua.

It's in the second chapter, verse one, it says, Joshua, son of Nun, secretly sent two men as spies from the Acacia grove, saying, Go and scout the land, especially Jericho.

And so these two spies, they left and they came to the house of a prostitute named Rahab, and they stayed there.

Now, at this point in the Jews' history, uh, Moses has passed away.

Joshua is now the leader of the Israelite people.

They've crossed over the Jordan, they finally made it into this promised land that they've been making their way to for the last 40 years.

And on their way, after the Jordan, they start taking out everything and everyone to so they can claim their land, but they came to a problem pretty quickly, and that problem presented itself in the fortified city of Jericho.

Jericho not only had very tall walls, but Jericho had very thick walls, and so Joshua, being the commander he is of this army, sends two spies into Jericho so that they can find the weaknesses, so they can find the weak points so they can take over Jericho and defeat them.

So these two spies go into Jericho, and the first place they go to is a prostitute's house.

Like, this is a little bit strange, right?

Like, why did these guys go straight to a house of prostitution?

It was like best Western Jericho completely booked up.

They walk into Jericho and they see the no vacancy sign, and they're like, oh darn, I guess we gotta go to this prostitute's house instead.

Or maybe their Airbnb had canceled on them.

It's suspicious, right?

To say the least, that this is the first place that they would go, but no matter what their intentions were, this was meant to be a divine appointment.

Not only a divine appointment for the Jewish people, but also a divine appointment for Rahab as well.

So what exactly did Rahab do that made her a hero?

We pick up her story in verse 3.

It says, The king of Jericho sent word to Rahab and said, Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, for they came to investigate the entire land.

But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them.

So she said, Yes, the men did come to me, but I didn't know where they were from.

And at nightfall, when the city gate was about to close, the men went out, and I don't know where they were going.

Chase after them quickly, and I bet you can catch up with them.

But she, Rahab, had taken them up to the roof and hidden them among the stalks of flax that she had arranged on the roof.

It's important to point out how just insanely courageous this was of Rahab.

Here's this woman already holding a low place in society, but now she's gone even lower because she's the local prostitute.

And the very king of her land sends word and says, Send me the two men that I know for a fact have come to your house.

And instead of giving these two men up, she protects them and she hides them.

If she had been found out that she had been lying, this would have been an act of treason.

She would have been drugged out, she would have been tortured, she would have been killed, there would have been no questions asked.

So, what caused this extraordinary act of courage?

What gave her this willingness to take such a risk?

How was Rahab able to act so heroically?

Verse 8, it says, Before the men fell asleep, she went up on the roof, and she said to them, I know that the Lord has given you this land, and that the terror of you has fallen on us, and everyone who lives in the land is panicking because of you.

For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sion and Og, the two Amorite kings, you completely destroyed across the Jordan.

The power and might of God's reputation have preceded the Israelites.

They already knew that they had been taking out kings on their way to Jericho.

They already knew that God had dried up the Red Sea so that they could come across safely, and that happened 40 years earlier.

So they were very well aware of what was heading their way.

It's one thing to hear about God's power, but it's another thing entirely to believe in that power.

She says in verse 11, when we heard this, we lost heart, and everyone's courage fell because of you.

For the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below.

And there it is.

Her profession of faith, the Lord your God is the God in heaven, and he is the God of earth.

Before the spies showed up, before Israel came into town, before Jericho was even within their line of sight, Rahab had come to believe in the one true God.

Now, these two spies, they had no idea that they would encounter a believer in this pagan, sacrilegious nation.

And no one knew that Rahab was in Jericho.

And they certainly didn't know that she was just sitting and waiting for her opportunity to change the world.

You know, who knows where the power of God is hiding in our cities?

Who knows where he's at work in our nation or in the furthest reaches of the globe?

Who knows what God's doing in this room right now?

There's rehabs all around us with messed up life circumstances that God is calling out of this world.

And if that's true for them, and it is, then why can't it be true for you?

The next great evangelist may be watching their life fall apart right now as their spouse, who they committed their life to and they committed their life to them, is leaving them for another person.

The next great missionary may be desperately seeking to get sober right now.

The next great charity could be started by a person that's serving out a prison sentence.

God's at work everywhere, and he's at work at all times.

God's at work in the back alleys where the drug deals are happening.

He's at work in the strip clubs, he's at work in the houses of prostitution, he's at work in the midst of brokenness and poverty.

And no matter how hard your life has been, and we do know that everybody has hard lives at some level.

No matter how desperate your situation has become, God is wanting to show you how to live a heroic life.

Annie Lowbert was born in 1967 in Minnesota.

Her first memories were like most of our first memories of her parents, specifically her father, a man that should have loved her and cherished her and protected her, but instead, her first memories of her dad were of an abusive nature.

Annie had a rough life.

She grew up in an abusive home.

By the time she got into high school, she had matured into a beautiful woman, and she was desperately seeking to find her way.

She started getting the attention of young men in high school.

And by her own admission, she said, Any guy that would show any interest in me, I would give myself to.

Because she was trying to substitute the love she never got from her father for the love she thought she was getting from this young men, but these young men, they wanted very little to do with her other than a casual hookup.

So after high school, still desperately sensing for a sense of worth, Annie moved out of her house and she began trying to find her Prince Charming.

She was gonna find this guy that was gonna make everything right because she knew she could find the right guy.

She knew she could find the right person to love her, that she would finally feel fulfilled.

Maybe he would even be able to provide for her.

As the years went on, Annie's life became more difficult.

She didn't find her Prince Charming.

Instead, she had a friend who began stripping and prostituting herself.

Annie was so surprised at the amount of money that her friend was bringing in.

If she couldn't find Prince Charming, at least Annie could make some money, and that would make her feel a little bit better.

And so she followed her friend's lead.

She began taking on clients.

And pretty soon one of these clients grew very fond of her.

And he told her one night that he was in love with her.

Love is what Annie had been looking for all this time.

It's what she didn't get from her father, and it's what she did not get from these high school boys or these clients that she had taken on.

She had finally found her Prince Charming.

She left everything.

She picked up and she moved to Las Vegas for the promise of love and for the promise of security with this man, but she quickly found out she had been deceived.

There was no love in this man's heart for her.

There's only betrayal.

This man was actually a sex trafficker.

And he put Annie to work right away.

Annie had been fooled into a nightmare that would last for the next 10 years of her life.

Every scent that she made, selling herself to multiple people, went straight back to this man that she thought was gonna save her from her life circumstance.

A few years into living in Las Vegas and being used by this man, Annie developed cancer.

And she had to go through chemo.

And not only was she dealing with a life-threatening disease, not only was she undergoing a treatment that completely decimates the body's immune system, she was forced to still work.

She had to put on a wig and go out and serve her clients so that she could make her abuser more and more money.

Annie figured out a way to cope with all the pain in her life, all the hurt that she had experienced.

Amy began using drugs, and just like anybody who starts becoming addicted to something, once one drug wasn't quite enough to make her feel okay, she went to a harder drug.

And once that wasn't enough, it was another hard drug and a harder drug.

And once there were no more hard drugs to take, she began taking more in quantity.

Until finally, completely depressed from her life circumstance, Annie decided that she would take her own life.

She swallowed as many pills as she could.

And as her life light began to fade, as her life was coming close to an end, Annie cried out to the one man she had never cried out to before.

She cried out the name of Jesus, and then everything went black.

Annie woke up in the hospital, and they said there were so many drugs in her system that the doctor attending to her said, You're lucky to be alive.

God must be with you.

When she was released, Annie began reading her Bible.

She even began attending a local church.

And soon this woman who had no reason to ever trust another human being in the world put her faith and her trust in Jesus.

And it's at this point that she says she began to heal.

She began to have her confidence be built.

And Jesus showed her that she had incredible worth and value.

And for the first time in her whole life, Annie felt true love.

And she felt true love from her one true father.

It wasn't long before she felt God calling her to go back to the very streets that she had experienced so much pain on the streets that she had sold herself on, but this time she wasn't selling herself.

Instead, she was finding prostitutes and she would take them into her car and she would give them a simple message that God loves you.

And it was a simple prompting and her obedience to the prompting that transformed this ministry that she had started into an international ministry.

And they even have a network of safe houses to find people in the sex trade, rescue them, and help them find healing in Jesus.

Annie Lobert was a prostitute.

But Annie Lobert now is living a heroic life.

Just an ordinary broken person making an extraordinary impact on the world.

That's what Rahab did.

She helped change the world, and I don't mean that as an exaggeration.

Rahab experienced uh survived the battle of Jericho.

The Israelites came in and they completely destroyed the city.

Everybody was killed except for Rahab and her family.

They were allowed to live because of what she had done.

But her journey wasn't done there.

She actually shows up again thousands of years later in scripture.

And we see it in the Gospel of Matthew, the first chapter.

It starts by saying an account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Rahab, the prostitute, not only became a part of God's people, but a direct ancestor of Jesus himself.

She was married to a godly man.

Her son is one of the main characters in the Old Testament story of Ruth.

Her great-great-grandson is actually King David, a man after God's own heart.

We read about this genealogy starting in verse 2, it says, Abraham fathered Isaac, Isaac fathered Jacob, Jacob fathered Judah and his brothers.

Judah fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar, Perez fathered Hezron, Hezron fathered Aram, Aram fathered Aminadab, Aminadab fathered Nashan, Nashan fathered Salmon, Salmon fathered Boaz by Rahab, Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth, Obed fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered King David.

And you can follow this genealogy through all the generations, and it leads directly to the savior of the world.

Annie Lover was living this hell on earth, right?

But she found Jesus and she became a hero.

Now she's having this extraordinary impact on the world.

Rahab was born in a godless country.

She didn't even have access to the scriptures that existed.

She was raised by pagans.

She had been abandoned by society, and she was only known as a local prostitute.

But Rahab, she heard of the one true God.

She believed in him and she acted on her faith.

And now she's in the line of the savior of the world.

So maybe today's the day that you stop counting yourself out of the life that God has called you to live.

Maybe today's the day that you flip that script in your mind, the one that says that you're not good enough, that you don't have what it takes to be a hero, and say that I can live a heroic life, not in spite of all the things that have happened to me, but in light of them.

Just like Pastor Clayton has said so many times, our pain will drive us to our purpose.

We don't want to act as if nothing happened.

We want to act in light of it.

And so we're gonna take just a minute.

As Celeste leads us through another song.

And this isn't a worship moment.

This is not uh for you to sing with Celeste, this is for you to contemplate where you are in life.

How did you get to where you are?

What are the things that were done to you that you had no control over?

The things that hurt you, the things that have made you feel like you're disqualified from living a purposeful life?

What are the things that you've done?

What are those things that you can't believe you did?

That you regret so much, that you think you're never gonna be worthy of redemption or love in your life because it was such a terrible thing.

And then I want you to turn to God in prayer and ask God, how can I turn this around with your help?

I'm not enough on my own, but God with you, I can do anything.

Teach me, God, how to use the pain of my past to live out my purpose as a hero in this world.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, it's what we all want.

There's not a person in here who's good enough for you.

But God, you love us, you cherish us, you've given us a way out of our sin, you've given us a way out of our circumstance through Jesus.

God, it's something that says nothing about who we are, but everything about who you are.

So, God, I pray for everyone in this room.

Father, I pray through your spirit that you would speak to us, that you would begin showing us the steps that we can take to live heroic lives because, Father, we want to be powerful instruments of redemption and love in this broken world.

We love you, Jesus.

And it's in your name that we pray all these things.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.