Jesus is the ONLY way

That is some good scripture…and I am going to use this scripture, and some other scripture for the next few weeks to tell try to teach you about some of the foundations of our beliefs and why we believe them… is that okay? This morning for instance we are going to talk about salvation… next week we will talk about sanctification… I know you people are getting excited...

This scripture is the most interesting because in the greek this is one long sentence… there is no punctuation at all, and its as if Paul is trying to tell Timothy exactly what he believes and he is so excited that he can’t even take a breath, what he has to say is just so important that he can’t stop saying it… Let me read this scripture like I can imagine Paul was transcribing it...

2 Timothy 1:9–14 NIV

9 He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, 10 but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. 11 And of this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher. 12 That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet this is no cause for shame, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day. 13 What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. 14 Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

and listen you and I both could very easily tell people how important God is to us when we are feeling blessed, I mean, if we are truly feeling like God has done something amazing in our lives we don’t always do it, but we could easily talk about God’s greatness during the times that we have seen his hand at work… For instance… Charis healed… a loved one healed…God comes through…thats easy!

But here, we find Paul writing to Timothy from a Jail Cell… like he’s in jail and he’s writing timothy and I don’t know about you, but I don’t know that if I had be imprisoned for my beliefs if I would still be able to talk so adequately about the greatness of God, but this is exactly what Paul is doing here… and get this, this is his second time that he has been imprisoned for the Gospel… and this time he is in like a maximum security prison… chained up and not even able to have visitors or anything… thats bad...

Its amazing when we get to the place that we have to put our faith to work…when we come to that place in life and we realize that all the stuff that we have read is real. We talked a little bit about this Wednesday evening… there will come a time when we have to put all of our faith in our faith… when what we believe is really called to the mat… and some of that I felt over the past few weeks… was god going to come through… Like we know that he is, the question is am I going to have enough faith to believe through all of the valleys.... and when we get to a place where what we are seeing and what we believe don’t seem to align the question becomes what will you do with that.

There is some stuff that you think about God… what he will and won’t allow… what he will do and won’t do… and as you live life and as you see things happen and you see people that die way too early… and you don’t have all the answers and you are still trying to tell them that God is good, and you know how crazy it sounds to people when they are in the times of sorrow… but we try to speak a message of hope, not because of what we are seeing and the life we are living, but because of the hope we have in Jesus.

Isn’t it crazy how the older we get the more we realize we don’t know… like when I was younger I knew the answer to every question… You could ask me and I had it down I knew everything that was going to happen I knew how to get there.. I knew it all… and as we get older we really we don’t know as much as we thought we did…and then we learn there are times when we can be right, but there is a cost for being right, so we have to decide if the battle we are fighting or going to fight, is really worth fighting.

And as I have been thinking about transitions, and having conversations with people I care about, it has caused me to look back on my life, and to be honest it might be that I am having this mid life crisis and thinking about my life, but lets pretend thats not the case, but I look back on my life and the time that I spent at Asbury, that I wouldn’t change for the world, but as I think back on my time there, I realize something… but I realize that when you are going to school to be a pastor, they teach you the bible, and theology and you have so much head knowledge, and I remember while I was there that I had this thought that maybe I could be a pastor and a theologian… I could write these books on the bible and the study of God… but when you are in bible college, they teach you all of this theology in a manner that its like if anything were to come up in life that you have all the answers because you are so well versed in the Bible and theology… like they truly believe that if you go to school and do what they want you to do that you will have all the answers that you will ever need in life… but what I realize is that all of that theology, and what you see in the world don’t always add up...

How do I tell a family that God is good when they lost their two year old son? How do you explain that or speak it away… how do you do that? Or when someone has lost a loved one way too early… God is good… or when someone has cancer and Doctors tell them there is no overcoming it… God is good… but we are supposed to have all the answers… but what do you do when what you believe and life don’t add up...

And Listen, when we were first married Jennifer and I were taught a very interesting way to share our faith… in a class called ambassador training… I actually have this right here… check this out… very formulated… but what do you do when people go off script...

So from all those experiences… and like many of you I am sure that we think that getting closer to God means getting to know more facts about him… its about knowing what you believe… but then when something happens that doesn’t line up you don’t know what to say about that thing...

A baby is still born and I believe God is good, but what I am seeing isn’t good… or a earthquake hits… and kills thousands of people in Nepal… and we believe God is Good… but how do we deal with that… people are discriminated against… something happens that is exactly against what you have planned… and we are trying to reconcile how a god is good when you have been as faithful as you know how to be… and we see with these things that we need a faith that works not just when we know the answer… but a faith that says yes to the ways of God when the answer is very unclear…

So what if it is possible to have complete faith in God when we don't even understand the answer...

And Paul explains it so clearly in this passage… and he’s the man, because if it weren’t for him we’d not understand half of the things that we do about God… he can explain things in a way that it seems most people couldn’t… and this is Paul, and he knew what he believed… and so much so that he knew even when his circumstances went against his beliefs that he still knew what he held on to...

He knew he was an apostle… He said, I’m in prison, and I still know what I believe… I’m ready to die for what I believe… how do we get so much confidence that we can get there… that even when our circumstances say one thing…and god’s character says another… that instead of interpreting god’s character through our circumstances we start interpreting our circumstances through Gods character… thats what Paul had the ability to do and listen thats a huge difference...

He was so solid in his faith that he didn’t care who you were he would stand up in public and debate wherever he was and tell you that you were wrong… He’d stand up in places that people were worshipping pagan Gods and be like “You guys got the right idea… but you’re worshipping the wrong God… the God you’re worshipping sucks, you need to worship the right one."

Paul starts telling timothy…Don’t worry about me brother… I’m still ready to do what I set out to do… I haven’t lost my nerve.. I know why I am suffering… I am suffering because I stand for the one that suffered for me and I will never suffer as much as he suffered… he said I don’t care what I see.. I walk by faith not by sight, I know what I believe...

Let’s look at verse 12 again… its one thing to be thrown in prison for breaking the law.. .but he is in prison for standing up for the word of god…and he is saying I am not afraid because I know what I believe…

2 Timothy 1:12 ESV

12 which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me.

When it came time for him to stake his confidence… he didn’t talk about WHAT he believed… and really thats the way our minds process religion… we’re looking for some type of system that is clear cut and easy to use… and we want to be able to have irrefutable evidence and solid systems to help us get to the place that we need to be… and listen… Paul went to heaven one time and saw a vision and it was so crazy that he says he can’t even speak of it…. and can I stop right here… some of you God has given vision to… he has showed you some stuff about your life and its okay to know that he is showing you stuff… now that doesn’t mean that dream you had of being a millionaire was a vision from God, it could be… but some of you have been given visions and you KNOW that you were communing with God, and you refuse to believe that God would give you a vision because you’re not nearly as worthy as the people that you read about in the Bible… you gotta remember Paul called himself the chief of sinners.. the CHIEF… and he had visions… so I want you to know that God can give you visions too… now back to the sermon…but Paul says not I know what I believe… because what he believed was not a thing… it was not a principal… he says I am not ashamed because I know WHOM I have believed…. even when I don’t know what God is doing I know WHO he is… and my confidence is not in my circumstance or my understanding of God…but my confidence is in who he is… and he is right here in this cell with me… and right here in this sickness with me… and right here in this situation with me and I will not fear because I know who he is….an i know who I have believed in...

Revelation is not something you measure… its someone you meet… Paul said I know WHOM… not WHAT…because thats being challenged right now…. but nothing has changed about the one that I have put my faith in….

How different would our world be if we stopped believing in truth as a proposition and started believing in God as a person...

Jesus is the only begotten of the father… full of grace and truth…when you know the one that you are believing in you can have confidence even when you don’t have certainty…

I don’t know whats going to happen with this downsizing… with this house on the market… with my father that is complicated… but instead of investing all my energy in a faith that I can figure out… I want a faith that can hold me fast even when I can;t figure out what I am facing… I know whom I believe...

Talk about Company… you believe in it… No.. I know the CEO… I don’t care what he’s selling… I believe in him…

And the sad thing is we try to do christianity without the person of Jesus…and we say God will always… or God will never… but what if he does or what if he doesn’t THEN what do you believe…

I suggest to you that it is possible to have the kind of faith in Jesus that says even when I come to things in my life that don’t make sense… or even when I come to things in the bible that don’t make sense and even when I can’t explain the way faith works… you can’t argue with my experience because I am not believing in something… I am trusting in someone I know… whom I have believed...

See this is so much better than knocking on the door, because I don’t have all the answers… and I don’t need to know them all… when you know who you are coming to you don’t have to worry about what he is doing because you know his character...

You ever been to the doctor? You don’t ask him what he is doing… you trust in what they are doing… leave me awake… let me watch… are you sure you are doing the right thing….

It isn’t an issue of the thing we are trying to believe…. its a fact that we don’t have a dynamic relationship with the ONE that we believe… so we get in a tight spot and we try to figure it all out on our own… so its not the thing we need to believe but we need to get a revelation of the one who can handle it all...

Let me read you a parable that Jesus told.. he is basically saying let me give you an analogy for the way faith works… Luke 6:47-48

Luke 6:47–48 NIV

47 As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. 48 They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.

I always thought this was a great contrast of how if you build your life on the word of God your house will stand but if you don’t your house will fall apart, but what you probably never noticed… is that the greatest contrast of the two men had nothing to do with the materials or where they built it…. but if you look you will see the difference is the first man comes to jesus….and it doesn’t say anything about the second man coming to him at all… so jesus is saying if you come to a religious system… it won’t last…if you try to figure it all out and wrap me all up where people can understand me… it won’t work out… but… but if you come to ME and put your faith not in something… and thats why we get so broken so often… we put our fight in SOMETHING that god would provide.. some THING we thought someone else would do…but its not a THING we are supposed to be trusting in… its ME and I want to carry you through all these things...

IF your faith is in a THING… it will puff you up… because you think you got it all together...

What did Paul do? When he looked to something that he didn’t understand that was ahead he held his anchor to something he already knew… he said

9He has saved us now I don’t know if I am getting out of prison and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, 10but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus,and I know whom I have believed… and I know his credentials because he has already who has destroyed death even if i die… I am not dead… no matter what happens I still have a person and he can’t be taken away from me...

One thing you can’t explain about trials… but you can realize if you let God he will through your pain let you share with others how to walk through theres...