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I don’t know if you’ve ever had someone you thought you would absolutely love to be like, someone you looked up to so much, that It would be everything to be like them. I did, his name was Alistair, well, still is. I was in high school, year 11 and I was so confused about who I wanted to be. I’d been walking away from God, while remaining a Church goer. I don’t know if you can relate to that, but it left me utterly confused.
The fun life promised by my friends at high school was losing its shine, but I still wasn’t sure I wanted to embrace Christianity, this faith that promised fulfilment. But then I met Alistair, he had just moved down from Townsville in Queensland with the other members of his rock band, you guys see where this is going, right! Well he moved down and came to church one night, I met him and couldn’t believe that a guy as cool as he was, who had his own band, would come to church on Sunday night.
Well over the next couple of years, the band took me in, let me hang out with them. I went to every show I could, I hung out with them every chance I got, and I watched every single thing they did, especially Alistair. I eventually came back to Christ in a big way, and he was a large influence on that decision. We had become close friends and we eventually became accountability partners. Helping each other grow in our faith. We were aiming for something, to know God better, to get closer to him than we could possibly get, by ourselves.
Alistair was someone I really wanted to be like, but he did something awesome for me. He pointed me to another person and challenged me to be just like him. But, now, as I continue to grow in Christ, I know that I come closer and closer to this major battle going on beyond this physical terrain. As I grow in Christ, I know that I enter lion country, and that’s a scary place to be!
And this is what I want to speak to, in this passage,
Philippians 3:7-14.
Read verses 7-10
This relates a lot to what we were talking about at Wattle Park doesn’t it? Not worrying about earthly things cos we can trust God to provide for us. Well here we see what Paul thinks of all that stuff we constantly worry about - Its a loss compared to knowing Jesus, its all rubbish, all refuse to him! He would rather throw all that away
than lose an opportunity to know Christ!
I know that most here this morning are Christians, but have we ever discipled our faith to the point we could make the same claim Paul does? A W. Tozer says in his book, I Talk Back to the Devil, that ‘God isn’t honoured by our arrested development. The New Testament teaches that we should go on to full maturity, that mediocrity is not the highest that Jesus offers.’ No Jesus offers so much more, and Paul here wants to take him up on it, ‘I want to know Christ the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death…forgetting what’s behind, straining toward what’s ahead. I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me!’ The prize for which God has called us isn’t an arrested development, a surrender to doing the bear minimum!
The Author of Hebrews echoes this sentiment,
Read Heb. 5:13 – 6:1
Tozer says that Satan ‘is committed to keeping God’s children shut up in a little cage, their wings clipped so they can never fly!’ Can we relate to this image? Are we submitting to him by not rising up to the challenge to let our faith fly, cos that’s what God wants us to do!
Well in thinking about all of this, I think there are 3 key ways we submit to the devil in this area: The first is laziness. Accepting our arrested development and preferring the soft milk of infants to the hard food that the children of God eat when they’re pressing on to the goal, the prize that God has for them. We once felt an urge to be spent for Christ, to live as near to his perfection as we could, but instead we began to ask questions, ‘What will it cost me?’ We hesitate for fear of what the decision will cost in time, money, effort, even the cost of friendships. How easy this is when we wonder how we’ll be thought of at work and around the office. How easy is it to be infected by this attitude when we know we’ll get teased at school, looked down on, or at the very least, thought of as different…We choose to hold onto what we have now rather than adopt Paul’s attitude saying, ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me!’
The second is intimidation. I’m sure that its not glorifying to God that Christians are so intimidated and silenced today. There Jesus sits, at God’s right hand, a living man! Believing this we ought to be the most fearless, the most relaxed, the happiest and most assured people in the world! But Satan the old dragon, the angry, prowling lion says to Christians, ‘I defy you!’
And many of us have experienced this haven’t we? We’ve found that the Word of God puts us in dangerous and uncomfortable situations rather than in secure and warm places, and our trust begins to waver. Its sad to think that many Christians who have been intimidated in this way, have known a time in the past when their faith was stronger, their love warmer, the desire to pray was greater, God’s voice heard in their lives more regularly. But now are caught in arrested development again, shut in a cage with our wings clipped.
To this the Psalmist cries out, ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear, the Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?’ (Ps. 27:1)
And God says to Israel through Isaiah, ‘So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’ (Is. 41:10)
And the third thing the Devil often does is dredge up our sinful past, and the lives we are ashamed of. Many of us have an Achilles heal which is continually targeted and we fall over and over again in that sin and the memory of it echoes in our minds, disheartening us and leaving us discouraged. To this Tozer remarks, ‘the devil knows that sin is a terrible thing, so he follows us around and as long as we will permit it, he will taunt us about our past sins…As for myself I have learned to talk back to him on this score. I say, ‘Yes, devil, sin is terrible but I remind you that I got it from you! And I remind you, devil, that everything good forgiveness and cleansing and blessing, everything that is good, I have freely received from Jesus Christ!’ Everything that is bad and is against me, I got from the devil, so why should he have the effrontery and the brass to argue with me about it? Yet he will do it…’
And we pray as David did, ‘Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from wilful sins, may they not rule over me.’ (Ps. 19:12-13) Paul says, ‘One thing I do, (the ONE thing I do) forgetting what is behind, straining towards what is ahead, I press on…’
Will we press on? Will we talk back to the devil as Tozer does, as Paul does and as the inspiring faithful of the past have? Pressing on towards the goal, the prize for which God has called us heavenward? Or will we submit to arrested development, surrendering to the devil our faith and all that we could accomplish with it by being birds with clipped wings, shut in little cages?
Alistair challenged me to look to Christ. Christ challenged me to imitate him, and Paul encourages us to strive for Christ with all that we are. And if we choose to do so we will enter into lion country,that wilderness where Satan prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for those he can devour. And we will often be caught by him, we will often fall, that is the way of things. But we must be encouraged and strengthened by the knowledge, that out there, in that wilderness of pursuing after God, is another lion, a greater lion, the great lion of Judah, Jesus himself
In C S. Lewis’ most famous work, The Chronicles of Narnia, in the book, The Silver Chair, a haughty girl named Jill Poll lands in Narnia with a boy, Eustace Scrubb. Jill gets into a fight with Eustace at a cliffs edge and Eustace falls, but as he falls, Aslan rushes up and blows a huge stream of breath to catch him, and blows him far, far away to safety…Aslan then turns and to Jill’s relief walks into the forest. She soon gets thirsty though, and can hear the sound of a stream in the woods, so she hesitantly walks in. And there is Aslan, huge and golden, sitting beside the water. Jill wrestles with her thoughts, hoping that Aslan will go away, but he doesn’t and he finally speaks, ‘If you are thirsty, you may drink.’
Jill is startled by this and stays back. ‘Are you not thirsty?’ Aslan asks. ‘I’m dying of thirst’ says Jill. ‘Then drink’ says the lion…’
'Will you promise not to do anything to me if I come?’ ‘I make no promises.’ Said the Lion. ‘Do you eat girls?’ Jill asks. ‘I’ve swallowed up girls and boys, men and women, kings and emperors, cities and realms.’ The lion didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, it just said it. Well I’d better go find another stream.’ Says Jill. ‘There is no other stream’ the Lion replies.
Can we do this? Live with the lion who, without apology, without anger, without boasting swallows up girls and boys, men and women, kings and emperors, cities and realms? There is no other stream; He gives us no options, either we drink from this stream or we die.
Can we trust this God, can we trust in Jesus so much that we can let go of our laziness, let go of our fear, let go of our past, and give it all to him? Can we trust in the prize that Jesus calls us too? Do we love him enough to let go of everything else and in this way talk back to the devil? These are hard questions, but we have no other options. Either we will talk back to the devil, or we will submit to him. There is no other stream.
We must draw near to him and Jesus is the same towards all those who seek him, who reach out for him and strive for his prize. He will draw near to us and through the Holy Spirit he has given to us, transforming us and making us more and more like him!
Amen.
