Sunday Sermon
Rev. Tony Lantz
Friday, February 29, 2008
Life Church
All of our hearts go out to those who have recently lost jobs in this community. My wife, the other pastors, leaders and people of Life Church have definitely made it a matter of prayer as to what our part is in helping families in this community over the several months ahead of us.
One thing is certain ... hard times don’t play favorites! Everyone has their share of hard times at one time or another in life. What can we do? How can we deal with these crises? Well, that’s up to us. We can stay calm and maintain our confidence and courage, regardless of what happens, or we can let the storms of life get the best of us.
One particular story about the storms of life is in Acts 27:9-12. God had put Paul, as a prisoner, on board a ship that was heading for Rome. And while Paul was on board, God told Paul to tell the crew not to leave the harbor because there was going to be a great big storm out in the Mediterranean. However, the sailors ignored what God had said through Paul, and most of the reason was their impatience.
Impatience can get us into trouble. When we get impatient we are more likely to run right into a storm. We are impatient to get married, impatient to get a new job, or impatient to move to another town. But the end result is we get ourselves into trouble because we didn’t check things out with God and we end up in a storm.
In talking with people over the last few weeks, it’s hard to take our eyes off of the storm and put our eyes onto God. And typically, as human nature would have it, we tend to do 3 things when caught in a crisis—the same 3 things that these sailors did in the story.
First, we tend to drift. “The ship was caught by the storm and could not head into the wind, so we gave way to it and we were driven along” (v 15). Later in this story the sailors “let the ship be driven along” (v 17). Storms tend to cause us to drift. We let go of our dreams and goals. We tend to forget where we’re heading, putting values to the side, and we just start drifting. I mean, what do you do when you don’t have a compass and you can’t see the stars because of the storm? The waves just beat you back and forth and you go wherever you go. Your problems end up bigger than life and you feel like saying, “Why even try? What’s the use? Why even try fighting this storm? I’m just going to roll with the waves.”
The second thing we tend to do when caught in a crisis is we start throwing out certain things in our lives. With these sailors it was their cargo (v 18-19). Then it was their tackle and grain (v 38), and then they started wanting to throw themselves overboard (v 43-44). The point is simply this: many times when we get in a crisis we are tempted to throw out things that are important to us. Things that we held onto in good times are now thrown out with everything else because we are stressed and upset. We give up on our dreams in our impulsiveness. We run out on relationships. We throw away values that we learned earlier in life, all in the name of stress and pressure.
There’s a third thing we tend to do when caught in a crises. And that is simply this ... we lose hope. The sailors in (v 20) did the same. “When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days and the storm continued raging, we finally gave up all hope of being saved.”
Now check this out. These sailors were fourteen days in mostly darkness, in a small ship in the Big Mediterranean, and they have been bashed back and forth by the storm until they felt like quitting. Perhaps you feel like that now. You’ve been going through a problem and you are so tired of this problem you feel like all hope is lost. This situation feels impossible to you.
Let me encourage you today. If you are feeling this way, remember the sailors. The only reason they had given up hope was because they had forgotten that God was in control. They had forgotten that God had a great big plan and could bring hope into any absolutely hopeless situation. And it’s the same for you and me today. God promises to never leave us or forsake us. He is there if we’ll just call on Him.
F “Sunday Sermon” is a forum for Emporia area ministers to share their sermons, thoughts and observations. This week’s sermon is from the Rev. Tony Lantz, lead pastor at Life Church in Emporia.