Season of Crisis

Sermon • Submitted a year ago • Presented a year ago

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Slide 63

For this session, we are going to talk about seasons when we find ourselves in crisis—where everything seems to be falling apart.

The wheels are coming off the wagon. It may no fault of our own, or it may be the result of a long series of poor decisions.

But either way, we enter into a period of crisis—be it financial, relational, medical, spiritual, psychological, or whatever the nature may be.

Generally, this happens more than once. This is not just a one-time thing in our life. It may be a sudden crisis impossible to foresee, or it may come at the end of a long buildup. Either way, it’s difficult to navigate in the midst of it.

How do men react to a crisis?

Slide 64

How do we respond to a crisis? What are some of the reactions that we, as men, typically have during a time of crisis in our lives?

Call out some answers

During a season of crisis, most men tend toward one or more of these five reactions:

Slide 65

DENIAL – “I’m fine.”

BLAME – “It’s not my fault.”

ANGER – “It’s not fair.”

WORRY – “I’m going to die.”

WITHDRAWAL - <silence>

It may be a mixture of two or more. Anger and blame often coincide, for example. Or denial and withdrawal. What might that look like?

Someone comes up to you and asks, “How are you doing?” What do you say? “I’m doing great.” Right? Really, you don’t know if you’ll have a job next week, or your kids are experiencing some terrible problem, or your wife and you are considering separating, but what do you say? “I am just doing great.” It’s denial.

Why do we put on our game face?

We put up this facade because it is just too painful to enter into that reality with others sometimes.

It is easier for us to withdraw. And honestly, sometimes people don’t really want to hear it. When people ask, “How are you?” you know that they don’t really want to know how you are doing. So we end up isolated at the worst possible time.

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So two worldly ways to respond our self-reliance and withdrawal. They both result in isolation.

Instead, we can choose a better way when we face a crisis.

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These are two biblical ways we can respond: dependence and involvement.

Engagement.

Isolation vs. Engagement

How do we in a crisis then hold onto what we need to hold onto? How do we survive a crisis in a way that allows us to grow in our faith?

How do we avoid the tendency to withdraw and worry? Or to react out of anger, bitterness, and self-reliance?

How do we instead engage with other men so that we can get the support and strength that we need to make it through whatever crisis that we find ourselves in?

In a time of crisis, many times there are multiple things that seem like they are out of control. All of a sudden, these things start going out of whack and the alarms start going off. We start scrambling, trying to figure out, how can I handle this? And how can I handle this? What we need to do is focus in on the one thing that is really important in a time of crisis.

Slide 68

THE BIG IDEA for this session IS this: In a time of crisis, we need to hold on to the one who won’t let us go.

Why? Because we know that He is the only thing that is truly unshakable. Everything else—our relationships, our jobs, our safety and security, our reputation, our health—everything else is shakable and can be removed.

Slide 69

Hebrews 12:26–29 CSB

His voice shook the earth at that time, but now he has promised, Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens. This expression, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what is not shaken might remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful. By it, we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

We WILL face a season of crisis. Most of us will face several. Every aspect of our lives can be shaken, because they are things that have been made. But God and his kingdom cannot be shaken.

We need to hold on him during a crisis—in worship and in awe. He won’t let us go.

Holding On to Christ and Others

Slide 70

In John 6:66-69, the disciples faced a crisis. Jesus had just given a hard teaching and so many of the people had left. He turns to His disciples and says, “Are you guys going to leave too?” And listen to what Peter says,

I think what Peter is saying is, “Listen, I don’t really understand everything you just said. It sounded kind of weird to me, too, but where else am I going to go? There is nowhere else to go. You have the words of eternal life. You are the Son of God. You are the only thing we can hold onto in the midst of this storm.” And that is the kind of confession that we need to make in our hearts as well.

It’s a biblical way of responding to a crisis: dependence. Dependence on Him.

Slide 71 (two clicks)

Listen to what Jesus calls the great and first commandment in Matthew 22: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind.” Dependence.

I asked you, how do men react to crisis? Self-reliance, closing ranks, I can handle it. Right?

But those responses are a denial of our love for God. They are a denial of our dependence on Him. But here, in the greatest commandment, we see where we can focus in a time of crisis—loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He also goes on to give a second commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Involvement with others is the other biblical way of responding to crisis.

We tend to withdraw from others instead. But the very thing that we need to be doing is loving our neighbor as ourselves.

We need to involve ourselves with other men. We need to open ourselves up to them so that we can gain the strength, the energy, and power that comes through those relationships when we need it most.

Whenever we have a crisis in our lives, we have a choice.

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A crisis can either make us bitter or it can make us better. What determines that outcome is what we let go of and what we hold on to.

But we have to know what to let go of and what to hold onto. In a time of crisis, we need to hold onto loving Christ and we need to hold onto loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Promote the Six-Week Follow-Up Groups

What I would like us to do now is to spend some time in our small groups discussing the questions related to the season of crisis on the bottom of page 15. But before we do that, I want to give you the opportunity to be involved in the six-week follow-up to this event using The Playbook: A Game Plan for Every Season workbook.

Slide 73

This is the thing we prepared intentionally so you’d have a chance to think more deeply about and discuss the issues that we talk about at this event. The reality is that when it comes to the various seasons we go through in life, we are barely touching the surface on these issues and these ideas. That’s just how it is. This is really more to raise as many questions as it is to provide answers. The answers have to come as we are living our daily lives. It’s one thing for us to sit here and talk about how we’re going to build into our families and honor God in our work. But what happens next week when you’ve just had an argument with your wife, and the kids are disobeying, and you know that you are about to go to work where you are going to have to talk about that project with your boss and you and he disagree about the way you need to be doing it. That’s where the rubber meets the road.

So what we want to do is give you an opportunity to think more deeply about all of this in the context of your everyday life and past experiences. And we want to give you an opportunity to do it alongside other men so you can strengthen each other.