Lance Sawyer First Baptist Church Muskogee, Oklahoma Sermon Transcription July 22, 2012 Till the Storm Passes By Luke 24:26 You know, I don t think I ve ever felt as humble giving a sermon as I do today. I was thinking as I was sitting over there that I ve come to the pulpit in a whole lot of different ways. I ve come in on a donkey down that aisle, and I ve come in on a mini-bike, and at the Civic Center I came in on a zip line. At Falls Creek I was able to come in on a rappel line, and today I just walked up here very carefully [referring to his recent rib injuries]. Before the service I had to get Josh Branan to bring my chair up in case I needed it. That s a bad feeling for a man. I don t like that at all. I told Melina yesterday, I said, When I came here eight years ago, I was strong, and right now, physically, I think I m at the weakest point of my life and it is a bad feeling, I m going to tell you. But I know that all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to His purpose, and I know that there s something God is going to do through this, and also -- the key word is through. This is a process for me. It s not a permanent situation. I think God has given me a little taste right now of what it s going to be like to get old, and maybe if I can learn to deal with it right now and then move on past this, when old age comes, I ll be in better shape to handle it. But I also have to tell you about some stuff that I really am not comfortable telling you, and yet I think I ve got to. My daddy always taught me, Don t go around talking about your health problems. Nobody wants to hear about that. You know these people that you have to be careful when you ask how they re doing, because they ll tell you. They ll tell you what this doctor said and what that doctor said, and this report and that report. Man, I don t want to do that. I ve got to do something a little bit close to that though because here s the thing. Everybody I meet in the hall asks me the exact same questions and I m answering them over and over and over. So I might as well just tell it once, and then you won t have to ask me anymore and we can just talk about something else, because I really want to talk about something other than broken ribs and collapsed lungs and all that kind of stuff.
I do want to tell you what happened specifically. It was on the Fourth of July. Many of you will remember that my family had been gone for three weeks. They d been out touring national parks with Melina s side of the family, so I d not really seen them, and that was our first day all together, the Fourth of July. Late that afternoon my little boy, Luke, wanted me to go for a ride on his fourwheeler with him. I said, Well I can do that. It s not something I ve ever done much. I don t know much about four-wheelers. I now know a whole lot more about them than I did on the morning of July 4 th. I said, Let s go. Let s just take it real slow, because I got this back deal that s really frustrating me. I don t want to do anything to mess that up. Let s just go real slow. So, we slowly drove down to the railroad track which is east of our house and we were riding along the side there, along beside of the rails. We were trying to get to this trestle where the railroad bridge goes over the bayou, and we just wanted to get out there and sit and dangle our legs and visit. It s kind of an angle when you re riding along a railroad track, you re kind of sideways a little bit already, but we were doing okay with that. But we came to this one place where it was very narrow and it was extra steep, and there was a drop-off down below, and my son said, We can t make that, Daddy, and I said, Oh, yeah we can. He was just being too cautious, so I said, Go ahead, and what I m going to do is lean on this side and that ll compensate so we don t flip over. Well, I leaned over on that side and what that did is helped to throw me even farther whenever we starting rolling, when we started slipping. It just happened so fast zoom! -- down this steep hill sideways and we came to the bottom, bam! and it flipped over and it slung me into this crosstie that was on the ground. It slung Luke too, but I hit on it in such a way that it broke five of my ribs, and man, I knew I had messed something up. So I ve just had a really tough time since then. I had to go into the hospital a couple of times because it wound up making my lung collapse a couple of times, but I think I ve got that behind me. It s going to take a while, and the good thing about broken ribs is they do heal. It s not a longterm thing, so it just gives me a little taste of what it s like to be helpless. I think that may be a clue as to what this is all about. When I was a little bitty boy I heard this song that says, They are weak but He is strong, but I didn t really think of myself as weak. But I guess what I ve learned is all of us are only one fall away from being weak. All of us are only one accident away from being in a pretty helpless position. So far I can gather that much, but I can t tell you as much about the lessons learned as I would like to. You know, I ve often told you stories about things that happened that looked bad at the time, and then now that I m looking back on them I can see how God was working it for good. God has always taken whatever situation we have and finding ways to bring good out of it. He s a master at that. Sometimes you see that sooner than others. 2
For example, some of y all remember me telling you several years ago about my horse Geronimo, and how I loved that horse so much, and I got tricked whenever I sold him. I thought he was going to a good home, and some dealers bought him, and he was lost, and for about a month-and-a-half there I just thought God had not answered my prayer, and then a big surprise came that God had answered it in a way I had not even expected it. You can go back and listen to the Geronimo sermon. I m not going to tell you all that whole thing right now. But when I told you that, it was 10 years behind me. The best, the most clear-cut lessons that we learn in life, the things that God teaches us most clearly, most powerfully, we usually don t see until much later. Once it s over and we ve moved on, we look back and we see what we ve learned through it, and we see what God accomplished through it. But what I m talking about today is not something 10 years ago that s already over. It s something that s going on right now, and so I ve got a different perspective. I think that He wants me to talk with you today about how to trust Him when you do not yet see the reason, how to hold on to Him and to keep your faith strong when everything else is weak, and it s like you ve gone into a tunnel far enough that you can t see the light from the entrance, but you also can t see the light of the exit. I know that there are some of you who are in places like that. You re in the middle of a dark place. You ve not yet passed through it, you don t have the benefit of hindsight to be able to say, Aw, now I see what God was doing. Sort of like Joseph and his brothers -- Joseph s brothers betrayed him, they sold him into slavery, he spent years as a slave and then years in prison, and finally God who works all things together for good arranged it that He lifted Joseph up, put him in a high position. He brought his brothers back before him, and Joseph said, Now I can look back on this and see though you intended it for evil, God used it for good. But there again, that s once it s all done. I wonder what Joseph was thinking while he was in prison, while he was a slave, before there was any sign this was going to resolve itself. I want to say to you, that s where you find out what you really believe. That s the place where your faith is truly tested, and testing -- what is testing? Testing is just an exposure of what you have. It s an evaluation process. It s something that forces you to see what you really are, what you re really made of, how much faith you ve really got, and those places of testing are the places like this. It s the kind of place that the disciples were in just after the crucifixion, but before the resurrection. Something sure enough horrible had happened. It wasn t funny and it wasn t just like broken ribs and a lung problem. It was, that was going to resolve itself. Jesus was dead! I mean, He was totally dead. It was over and they d watched Him die and there was nothing they could do about it. Jesus had seemed so strong. He was able to do anything but He wasn t able 3
to come down off that cross. At least that s the way it looked, and the disciples were devastated the day, two days after this had happened, and they were walking along a road, talking back and forth about how hopeless this looked and trying to make sense of it, but all they were really doing was going over and over and over the bad stuff. That s what you ve got to watch for when you find yourself in a dark place, analyzing your problems over and over and over, talking about them over and over and over, dwelling on them, ruminating over them, and the longer you do that the bigger they get in your mind. They can actually get bigger than they really are. They were doing that walking along the road when a stranger popped up and he said, What s this you re talking about? And they began to tell him how awful it was, Jesus had been killed. And of course they didn t even realize it was Jesus Himself, and Jesus made this statement to them, a statement from the book of Luke 24:26. It s actually a question. He said, Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter His glory? Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter?, emphasis on the word then. There were some things the Christ had to go through, then He could enter His glory. Some translations say, Don t you see it was necessary? Well, the truth was they couldn t see why it was necessary. They were going to see that later. In fact, they d spend the rest of their lives preaching about the cross and how it was actually a place of victory. At first it looked like it was going to be a place of defeat and weakness, but it turned into something strong, something powerful, something that transformed them and turned the world upside down. They saw that in time, but it took them a while. There s no need to look down on those disciples and say, Well, they should have just had more faith. We just need to look in the mirror when we say that and recognize that we too have bad things happen to us, and we are very quick to conclude that I don t know what I m going to do. Hopeless thoughts start coming in, but as long as there s a God there is going to be a second chapter to your story. As long as God is there, then no matter what happens on Friday, you can know that Sunday is coming and you can know that no matter what has to die, God has the power to raise it up again. I really believe that the way we learn how to die as Christians is to learn to die a little bit all along the road of life. Do you remember Paul said, I die daily? For so many years I could not understand what he was talking about. I die daily. But I m starting to get it. Every day, Paul found himself up against something he couldn t handle. Paul found something being taken from him that he wanted to hang on to, but couldn t, and he had no choice but to let it go. Having to turn loose of things like our pride, our sense of self-sufficiency -- those feel a little like death. It gives you a little taste of death. Life is full of little deaths, but here s what a Christian has to learn. Every one of those little deaths 4
is always going to be followed by a resurrection. Every time God takes something away, He always brings it back in another form. That s what He did with the crucifixion of Christ. He took Jesus away from them, the only Jesus they knew, but then He gave them back Christ in a form that they could never lose -- a form -- a resurrected form that could never be taken from them. That s the way God operates and that s why God doesn t get upset and worried and distressed about the things that we do. God has an advantage on us. He s got a different vantage point. All we can see is what s right in front of us and right around us. God sees the end and He sees the beginning, and everything that s in between all at once. God has the perspective of seeing the end from the beginning because He wrote the beginning and the end. But we don t have that, and that s why we have to learn to trust, and the only way we learn to trust is by walking through those places where we don t see what s around the next corner. We just have to trust that God does see, that God does know, and whatever s there He s going to see us through it. So what are some things we can do when we find ourselves in a tunnel and we don t yet see the light at the end. What are some things you can do, what are some of the things I ve done? I ll just share that with you. Well, one thing is, it helps to remember other times in your life where you were up against something you didn t know how to handle, either something bad or maybe just something big. Think back to those times and remember how God brought you through it and that can give you the confidence to keep moving ahead. Now that s what happened with David when he went to fight with the giant, Goliath. John Bunyan described it this way. He said, He remembered also the lion and the bear when he went to fight with the giant of Gath. He remembered the lion and the bear when he went to fight with the giant. Remember the ways God has helped you in the past, and that s something I ve had to do lately. I ve got to remember how I came to this place eight years ago and in some ways I was much stronger than I am now. But in other ways I was much weaker. There were a whole lot of things I didn t know how to handle yet, things I was destined to handle poorly. There were a whole lot of tools, there was a whole lot of experience that I didn t have. I sort of felt like David coming to a giant church and I didn t have the stuff that I was supposed to have in order to do the job, and all I had was my sling and my stone and my stories, and I had a faith that God s going to work and God s going to do this, and God did. So I m seeing now that we never get to a place in life where we don t need God. A lot of the things I did not have, a lot of the experience, a lot of the skills that I did not have eight years ago, I do have now. I m stronger in some ways but I m weaker in some ways. There s no place in life where you will ever get to a place in life where you don t need God, and if you think you re there, you need to know that 5
you re just one slip away from a helpless position. You re one fall away, you re one accident away. It really is true. We are weak and He is strong. But remember the past. Also remember the promises of God, and I had some godly people send me some promises of Scripture this week, a whole lot of cards, and one of them is Jeremiah 15:20 that says, I am with you to save and deliver you. There s Jeremiah 30:11, I will restore health to you and heal your wounds. I like that one. I will restore health to you and heal your wounds. I really do believe that. I don t know how it s going to happen, I don t know when it s going to happen, but I really do believe it. It helps to remember the promises of God. It also helps to remember things that you ve forgotten. Whenever we get in a dark place, we sometimes have trouble remembering the truths that we knew when we were out in the daylight, and God reminded me of a truth I d forgotten just this week through a card I received. This came from Lyndia McMillan in our prayer room. There s a picture of a butterfly on the front, a butterfly painted by Marcy Hayes, and on the inside is a quotation that has to do with butterflies and cocoons, and guess whose quote it is? It s something I said in a sermon three years ago, and Marcy Hayes wrote it down and she puts it in these cards. It s a strange feeling to get a card with your own quotation in it. Here s how it goes. When we trust God in the circumstances of our life, in that cocoon, see that cocoon as the place where you re sort of helpless, you re wrapped in by things you can t bust out of, you can t crawl to places, you can t even crawl to the places you used to and you don t know what s happening. You don t know if you ll be there forever or what, but if you trust God in that cocoon a breakthrough eventually comes and when the breakthrough comes you find that you ve suddenly got wings you never had before. So when we trust God in that cocoon He gives us wings, and then we soar over the things that we once thought impossible. I believed those words when I spoke them, three years ago. Now I don t just believe them -- I know them. I m real excited about the breakthrough because I know it s coming, and I m real excited about all the lessons I ll be able to share with you once the breakthrough comes, but for now it s enough to tell you what s happening now. There s a song that I learned when I was a boy. I learned the words when I was a boy, but just in the last year since I ve had all this crazy health problems -- my back surgery, and then this, and I ve learned the meaning of those words. Do you know what I m talking about? I knew the words but I didn t know what the words meant. This is an old, old song called, Till the Storm Passes By, and I ve got JoAnn and Sonny [Stephens] helping me, and it might help you to know the significance of Sonny being with us today. Sonny is awaiting some test results on Monday about his lymph nodes. He doesn t know what the outcome is going to be. Do you see what I mean? God already knows, but God is the only person 6
in this place that does know yet. Sonny doesn t know right now. I don t know. None of us knows what tomorrow holds. We just know the One who holds it, and that s what this song is about and here s how it goes [singing, accompanied by JoAnn on the piano and Sonny on the guitar]. In the dark of the midnight have I oft hid my face While the storm howls above me and there s no hiding place. Mid the crash of the thunder, precious Lord, hear my cry, Keep me safe till the storm passes by. Till the storm passes over, till the thunder comes no more, Till the clouds roll forever, from the sky. Hold me fast, let me stand in the hollow of Thy hand. Keep me safe till the storm passes by. I know about this next part. Many times Satan whispers, There is no need to try, For there s no end of sorrow, there s no hope bye and bye. But I know Thou art with me and tomorrow I rise Where the clouds never darken the sky. Till the storm passes over, till the thunder comes no more, Till the clouds roll forever, from the sky. Hold me fast, let me stand in the hollow of Thy hand. Keep me safe till the storm passes by. Hold me close while the storm passes by. 7