Lance Sawyer First Baptist Church Muskogee, Oklahoma Sermon Transcription January 1, 2012 Unconditional Faith Daniel 3:13-18 I want to give you an update on Don and Jane Jones. Most of you know Don and Jane. Don was our associate pastor for a whole lot of years and recently left for the mission field, and for the last few months since he left our church he s been doing a lot of training enrichment, preparing to go. Well, yesterday on New Year s Eve, Don and Jane left for Africa and celebrated New Year s Eve, the 12 o clock mark, on a plane on the way to Africa, and they re in Africa this morning. And they re starting a whole new life, a new work in a new year in a new place, a new and very, very hard place. In fact, it s going to be, I suspect, the hardest place they ve ever been. It ll definitely be a harder place than Muskogee. We re difficult to deal with, but I think they re going to run into greater difficulties in Africa. And yet they re going anyway. Now, why would somebody do that? Why would anybody intentionally walk into something knowing that there is hardship waiting? I mean, they wouldn t have to go there but they re doing it. What are they thinking? I ll tell you what they re thinking. More accurately, I want to tell you what they re believing. They believe that no matter where they go or what it s like, God is going to be with them and God is able to strengthen them against whatever they face. And they re not going to Africa for what they can get out of it. If you want to get something, if you want to really get ahead in this world, Africa is not the place to go. I mean, our economy is bad but it s not that bad. They re not going there for what they can get out of it. They re going for what they can give and put into the people because of what they want to share. Really I should say, Who they want to share. That is a way of thinking that is completely different from the way a good many Christians think. For a whole lot of Christians, God, Christianity and prayer are really a way to get things, isn t it? I mean, if you re really good and you have a lot of faith, then you just ask God for what you want and He s going to feel obligated to do it. I mean, as good as you are and as much faith as you have. That s really what a whole lot of people believe. Some will actually come out and say it. Others wouldn t say it, but deep down they believe it, and the reason I know we believe it is because when it doesn t work, we get mad.
If you find yourself getting mad with God when He doesn t give you what you want or He doesn t get you out of the thing you asked Him to get you out of, it could be because something in your belief system has given you this notion that God is there to serve you. You see, there re two kinds of religion. One kind of religion -- God is there to serve you. The other kind -- you re here to serve God. Don Jones is going to Africa because of this kind of religion. I m here to serve God, not for what God s going to do for me. But this other one over here, religion is about God doing things for me. That s sometimes called the Prosperity Gospel and it s this idea that God s main interest is blessing you. First of all, financially, in your health, in your relationships, and if you hear a Prosperity Gospel sermon on New Year s Day, it s going to be mainly about how He s going to bless your socks off in 2012, and you re going to overcome all your obstacles, and all your enemies are going to be put down and all your health problems are going to be solved and you ve got to believe God for financial abundance in 2012, and it s really all about getting God to do what we want God to do. The only problem is it doesn t work. It works for a while. It works until you run up against something that won t move because you commanded it to in the name of Jesus. When you find yourself facing death, when you hear you ve got cancer -- terminal cancer as three or four ladies in our church have been told just recently, when you lose everything you ve got in this world, the Prosperity Gospel doesn t hold up and you re left with nothing. And that s when you either give up on religion all together or you open your eyes to the religion of the Bible which is not all about how God wants to get you out of the difficulties. I really wonder sometimes how anybody can get that idea after reading the New Testament. Jesus was good. I think we could all agree. Jesus had faith and Jesus got crucified. Jesus had twelve men. One of them betrayed Him. The other eleven stuck with Him, and sticking with Him meant that they got beaten and tortured, and all but one of them were killed. How in the world do you go from that to this idea that God s main interest is blessing you? I want to clarify, God loves His children. God works miracles. God gives us blessings, but God will not allow Himself to be manipulated. There s a quote that Marcy Hayes [a church member] handed me after the first service. It s from A.W. Tozer. It s just very simple, a one-line quote. Here it is. God will not be used. Do you hear that? God will not be used. And a whole lot of religion is about trying to use God to get what we want. I want to put it this way in the form of a question. What if you begin recognizing that the main reason your children wanted a relationship with you is because of 2
what they wanted you to give them? And what if your grown children got mad and wouldn t have anything else to do with you when you didn t give them what they want? Or you didn t bail them out of the mess they were in? What if your children treated you like that and you recognize they re really interested in you for what they can get out of you? Do you know how long they ll stay interested? They ll only stay interested as long as you re giving them what they want. And anybody who s got that kind of religion will only stay interested in God as long as He s giving what they want, as long as He s getting them out of this and getting them into something else that they re asking for. And when that stops, they ll find somebody else who will do that for them or somebody else who promises to do that for them. Now here is how that ties in with the Scripture we re about to read. The Scripture we re about to read from Daniel 3 describes what may well have been a new year s celebration, not on January 1, but the Jewish New Year. The Jewish New Year was celebrated with the blaring of trumpets, music, which is common most anywhere that you have a new year s celebration of any kind. In Times Square last night there were lights, there was music. In neighborhoods around Muskogee there were fireworks and shotguns that went off and there was music. At the Hard Rock Café in Tulsa, I m told last night there were balloons that came out of the ceiling. Raise your hand if you were there and caught a balloon. Alright! There was music. There was music at the Jewish New Year and it was a time when they were dedicating themselves to God for the new year, but something happened that messed up everybody s new year s plans. It totally ruined the celebration. King Nebuchadnezzar decided that he was going to be god this year. King Nebuchadnezzar decided to put up a statue, a golden statue that probably represented him, and it was nine feet wide. It was 90 feet tall and everybody, every race, every tongue was commanded to fall down and worship this beast when the music played. And it wasn t just any old music. I want to point out that there were several different instruments. Daniel 3:5 says, When you hear the sound of the horn, the flute, the zither, the lyre, harp, pipes and other musical instruments, bow to the ground to worship the gold statue that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. All these instruments, some Bible scholars say, were intended to drown out the sound of the Jewish trumpets, but I ve got a hunch that there weren t any trumpets playing, because all the Jews except for three weren t playing trumpets and singing. They were bowing. Listen to this. This will tell you why. Anyone who refuses to obey will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace. Suddenly their religion was about to cost them something. And I m not going to be so arrogant as to say or guarantee that I would ve done any better. I know that any of us who have the prosperity-type religion would not have done well at all at that new year s 3
celebration, because when religion, this religion that we ve been looking to give us things, is now suddenly going to cost us something. Our life? Hmm, that s when we re done. And listen to the description of what happened. At the sound of the musical instruments, verse 7, all the people, whatever their race or nation or language, bowed to the ground and worshiped the gold statue that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. All the people, even the Jews, who d been taught from the time they were little bitty boys and girls that to bow down to any other god is idolatry. To bow down to any other god is to reject the true God. It was the one thing you didn t do. To bow down to a golden statue of King Nebuchadnezzar, that meant they were abandoning their faith. Do you know why they abandoned it? Because they didn t have a religion that was good in the hard times. They didn t have a religion that would stand up under pressure. They didn t have a faith that could take them through the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. The vast majority did not, but the Bible says three men did have the faith, a faith that whether God rescues me or not, whether I burn up or not, I will not bow. You see, here s what I want to make very clear. If your religion is about what you can get and you discover that God s not going to give it to you, you will find yourself bowing to whoever will give it to you. You ll do whatever you ve got to do and say whatever you ve got to say to get the right promotion, the right position, the right person, the right arrangement. You ll find yourself bowing to whoever does offer whatever it is you re looking for. But there were three men who didn t do that. Their names are famous. You ve heard them your whole lives. I love the way they roll off the lips. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Listen to their story. This is going to be verse 13 through verse 18. We re going to read the whole thing together. Nebuchadnezzar got word that three men had not bowed down. Then Nebuchadnezzar flew into a rage and ordered Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to be brought before him. When they were brought in, Nebuchadnezzar said to them, Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, that you refused to serve my gods or to worship the gold statue I ve set up? I will give you one more chance to bow down and worship the statue I ve made when you hear the sound of the musical instruments, but if you refuse you will be thrown immediately into the burning furnace, and then, listen to this, then what god will be able to rescue you from my power? Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied, O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you. If we re thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, your majesty. But even if He doesn t, we want to make it clear to you, your majesty, that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you ve set up. 4
Nebuchadnezzar asked, What god do you think can deliver you from my power? That whole scene reminds me of something from the crucifixion of Christ. The Bible says in Mark that as Christ hung on the cross that His enemies walked by wagging their heads, mocking, saying Come down, come down if you re the Son of God. And on the cross Jesus only looked down and said, Father, forgive them. He didn t say, God, destroy them. There was no lightning bolt from Heaven that killed all the wicked people standing around and at that scene where Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were being tied up and pushed up to the edge of that fiery furnace, there was no sign that God was even around. No sign that He was going to do anything. Even Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego did not know what was about to happen. Now I suspect you know because you are on the other side of the whole thing. You know how it turns out, and once you re past something and you look back on it, it s easy to stay calm. You know that it s all going to work out. Whether it s looking back on your own life and the fire you went through, you look back and remember how afraid you were and then you notice, that is if you stuck with Him, you notice that He stuck with you all the way through. You see that as you look back, but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego weren t looking back. They were looking straight into the flames where they were about to be thrown. And yet they had this faith to look the most powerful man in the world in the eyes and say, Your Majesty, no offense but we won t serve your god. We ve already got one and our God is able to deliver us, but even if He doesn t Do you hear that? What are they doing right there? Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, they re balancing two very important truths and we don t ever need to lose either one. You ve got to have them both. One truth is, your God is able to deliver you from anything, but the other side of that scale is that doesn t automatically mean He will. And just telling Him that s what He needs to do doesn t guarantee that He will. How did A.W. Tozer put it? God will not be used. There are people that will tell you Just have enough faith, He ll make it all go away, that ll He ll zap you out of it every time. He didn t zap Jesus out of it. He didn t zap His disciples out of it. What you have here in Daniel 3 is a genuine miracle, and one of the reasons it was such a big deal, one of the reasons it was so amazing that it got recorded in the Bible, that this is really not what normally happens. This is the exception to the rule. They were thrown in the fire and they walked out and their clothes did not even smell like smoke, even the hair on their heads. Their clothes were not singed. God totally delivered them, but if you know your Bible, you know that doesn t always happen. No, no! It can happen, but ultimately the decision as to whether or not it does is God s. 5
In the book of Hebrews 11, there s a description of people who had great faith. It s all about people with great faith and the great things they accomplished through faith, because faith often has the power to change things around you. It can change things that are coming against you but it ll always change you. The Bible says that some women had their loved ones back again from death. It s happened. It can happen but that s not what always happens. Listen to this, a description of those who had faith. Others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. Some died from stoning. Some were sawed in half. Others were killed with a sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute, oppressed and mistreated. And I guarantee you that every one of those that did all of that were not doing it for the Prosperity Gospel because it was not happening. You know there s a saying, if you want to tell a lie and get by with it, tell a really big one and let it be a lie people want to hear, and tell it with great enthusiasm. And a common lie that you can hear in the Christian world today is be good, have faith, nothing s going to ever touch you, nothing harmful, and if it is touching you and you are sick and you re not getting well, it s because you don t have enough faith. I think Jesus had faith on the cross. I think the disciples had faith. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had faith. They also had something that you will definitely have. This is the part of the story that I can promise you. As for whether or not God will deliver you from your furnace, I don t know. I mean, I could stand here and promise that God was going to heal everybody in 2012, but the truth is all of us are going to leave this world some way or another. And that means we re eventually going to have to get sick and we re eventually going to have to die. I m not going to play that game with you or promise you something that won t hold up, but I will promise you this, because I know it holds up. I know it from personal experience. If you develop a relationship with God that s based on just knowing Him, you want to know Him, it s not about what He can give you or what He can get you out of. It s about knowing Him, you will have faith and you will have a relationship with God that goes with you into every furnace. And that s exactly what happened with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. The Bible says, The strongest men of Nebuchadnezzar tossed them in. Fire flew out and killed the men who threw them in and everybody sat back to watch them cook. But after a few minutes, Nebuchadnezzar did a double-take and said, Oh, what is this I see? Did we not throw three men into the flames and yet I see four men walking and the fourth is likened to the Son of God. Come out, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. And out came Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, We told you so. But have you ever thought of this? Where d the fourth man go? The fourth man actually 6
went in with them and He came out with them because He was within them and when they were in the flames as the flames were licking their feet He manifested Himself and they were able to know that He was with them. If you develop a faith in God, a relationship with God that s based on knowing Him, it s all about knowing Him, just for the sake of knowing Him, not for any kind of favor you re hoping He s going to give you, but knowing Him, you ll find that fourth man with you in darkness, in despair, in pain, sorrow and even in death. And I ll tell you this, if your religion is no good when you re dying, get rid of it now and get a different one. Do you remember the old song, Give Me That Old Time Religion? One verse says, It was good for the Hebrew children. It was good for the Hebrew children. It s talking about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and it s good enough for me. And the next verse says, It ll be good when I am dying. It ll be good when I am dying. It ll be good when I m dying. It s good enough for me. The real thing is good when you re dying. Prosperity Religion will fall flat on its face. I once talked with a man who was facing death and found that his religion wasn t working. Now I m not going to tell you he had a lot of religion. The religion he had was basically call on God when you re in trouble. He was not a man who had ever sought God. He was in his 70s. Never really read the Bible or gone to church much, never really had much interest in God until the doctors told him he had terminal cancer and he had only a few weeks to live, and he asked if I d come and talk with him. So I went, and I was assuming that what he wanted to talk about was his soul and getting ready to meet God, and so that s what I went to talk about, but he wasn t quite so interested in that. He went along with it but he really wanted to get to the main point, and that is, I want to be healed. Now he s in his 70s -- he wants to be healed. And, he wanted me to pray that God would heal him. And so do you know what I did? I prayed that God would heal him, but I also told him the truth. You re going to die and if you don t die from this in a few weeks, you re going to die from something else in a few years, and the most important thing you need to do is get to know God. And then we began to talk about how to develop a relationship with God. And we talked a lot about developing a prayer life and how he could grow in his faith between now and the time that he dies so that he d be ready. And as we talked about prayer, he got this baffled look on his face and he said, So you re telling me that I may not get healed and yet you want me to pray? And here s the question he asked me. Well, if God s not going to heal me, what could possibly be the point of praying? If God s not going to heal me, what would I even pray about? Now he wasn t saying that sarcastically. That was an honest question from his heart. In his mind, the only 7
point of prayer would be to get God to do what I m desperately wanting Him to do and if He s not going to do that, what would we talk about? Now I want you to freeze-frame that right there. That kind of faith s not any good at all when you re dying. It s not even good when you re sick. And I want you to compare that to a different kind of faith, a faith that s already been through the fire, a faith of someone most of you know. Most of you know Catherine Jones. You know the way she loves the Lord. You know the way she serves the Lord. Her devotion to her Bible study class and its members. You also know that Catherine has been through a lot of sickness the last few years and she s endured a whole lot of pain. Catherine had an experience recently that she s given me permission to share with you. A couple of weeks ago Catherine found herself facing this very difficult painful procedure that she really did not want to have done. She d been through it before, and it s just a miserable experience. And her prayer was, God, please spare me from having to go through this. It was almost like Jesus at the cross, Father, please take this cup from me, take this, please, if it be Thy will take this cup from me. And one night Catherine asked me to pray with her and anoint her with oil, and the ministers all prayed for her on another occasion. And I know her class was praying for her. Everyone was praying that Catherine would get well before Wednesday when that test was scheduled. Well, Catherine didn t get well before Wednesday and Catherine had to have that test done. How does someone like Catherine deal with that? Well I want to read part of what she sent me the other day. Even as we prayed, the night I prayed with her before she had the painful procedure done she was talking about, I want to be healed but part of what God s been putting on my mind is that I want to know Him in the fellowship of His suffering. That s a phrase from Paul who talks about knowing Christ in the fellowship of His suffering, that through our suffering we can get a taste of Christ s suffering and actually be drawn closer to Him through our suffering than any other way possible, something to that affect. She d read about it and she wanted it. Listen to this. She did not get delivered from the flames. Remember, our God is able to deliver us, O King, but even if He does not, we ll stick with Him. Listen to this. She d been praying, I want, she said this, I wanted to know the fellowship of His suffering in practice and not just principle. Do you hear that? She wants to experience it, not just talk about it. Doesn t want that to just be a word she tosses around. I want to know the fellowship of His suffering in practice, not just principle. I have looked at my pain much differently this time and I have cherished the intimacy I ve had with the Lord. As I ve gotten better, which by now she s better and she s here today. As I ve gotten better. I ve been tempted to cry out, No, leave the sickness for it makes me better to know You. 8
Now then, I want you to look at this picture of faith, the fellowship of His suffering. That s good when you re dying, that s good when you re sick, and I want you to compare it to this business of, If God s not going to heal me, what would I even pray about? Do you see the drastic difference? One is real and one s not. One is good when you re dying. What kind of religion do you have? Do you have the kind that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had? You know, there s another ancient Jewish text that gives a few additional details about the story of the fiery furnace. It says that Abednego was singing hymns to God as he walked into the furnace, as he walked through the doors. Do you hear that? He was singing and while he was singing, he didn t yet know he was going to be rescued, but he was already singing. You know what it came down to? He had a faith that was good in the fire. And he had this relationship with God that was so important to him that he d rather die with God than have to live without Him. Now that s the real thing right there. When you d rather die with God than to have to live without Him. Every other Jewish person we know of in Babylon chose to live. They bowed and they lived, but what kind of life did they have? Living without Him. No! Choose the faith, live the faith, practice the faith where it s good even when you re dying. I ve got to tell you about one other man, a 20 th- Century martyr. You ve heard his name, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was arrested and implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested, his whole family was arrested, spent most of World War II in a Nazi prison, and just before the end of the war when Hitler committed suicide, Bonhoeffer was executed. And he wrote from prison, just as Paul wrote often from prison, and what he wrote about as he described his faith, a faith that was facing death. What he wrote about that demonstrates a man who d rather die with God than to live without Him. And as he describes the way God prepared him, here s what he said. He said, I had to get to where I knew for certain that I was in God s hand, not men s. Do you hear that? I mean, he couldn t see God. He could see the Nazi guards. And yet he had to get where, I had to get to where I could believe and know for certain that I m in God s hands, not men s. Then everything became easy. Something about that -- suddenly everything became easy. The hardest thing in the world suddenly became easy when I knew deep inside that I was in God s hands, not men s. You know, here s the thing about genuine faith. It not only makes you good, it makes you strong. And so, this new year I imagine there re a whole lot of things you want to improve on and there are important things, diets and exercises and relationships to work on, all that is good, but none of those things are going to 9
last. There s one thing you can work on this year that ll be good when you re dying. It ll be good when you go through the furnace, and that is a relationship with God. Some of us need to start that relationship today, and then the rest of us need to get serious about it because it s the one thing you can build that ll never be destroyed. It s the one thing that you can invest in that ll never let you down, because no matter where, what furnace you find yourself in in 2012, you re going to get there and discover than fourth man is there too. 10