Our God Don't Play

I would like to summarize Francis Chan’s great sermon, When God Doesn’t Listen.  Here’s praying you get as much out of it as I did. 

He starts off saying, “God is a lot more serious about sin than I am. But I don’t want to be in a middle ground between God and where the worldly culture is; I want to stand where He is.  I want to warn people, ‘This is where He is.’ I want all that boldness.”

When you read I John, you can see the seriousness. God says, “I don’t care if you say you know Me…if you don’t obey my commands, you’re a liar….You can’t love the things of the world, and also have the love of the Father in you….You can’t say you love God if you hate your brother whom you can see…you can’t keep going on sinning if you’re really a believer…you’re not a real believer.”  Wow, really? Evidently I’ve had a lazy view of God; this is so radically different, let’s just start all over.  Every sentence Jesus says, let’s take it literally.  All these churchgoers say, “Well, He didn’t really mean that.”  But read the book of Luke, fresh, and say, “If He really means this, what would my life look like if I took this literally?”  In our church culture, we soften things to our liking.  But God is not that way.

When I look at church in America, let’s face it, there are so many of you who will participate if everything is just right.  You got to have the right speaker, the right music, the right programs; and on Sunday, it has to be the right time of day, it can’t be too long, and there better be something good going on for the kids.  And I want the people to be exactly like me, whose personalities I enjoy.  But are we playing a game here? God is more intense than games; when Scripture says ‘fear God,’ it really means fearing God.  When people advise us to pray, they say to just talk to Him, say whatever you want to say.  But I don’t see that in Scripture.  Ecclesiastes tells us to “guard yourselves as you approach God.”  Don’t make hasty vows; God’s going to hold you to them and deal with you not fulfilling them. 

Truth is, sometimes talking to God is a waste of time--God isn’t listening to you.  God is actually disgusted by some of the prayers. 

I had this guy who says his wife and he weren’t getting along; he had another job opportunity, so he was going to leave his wife and family—so he asks me, would you pray with me that I would just have a great new start?  And I go, “you gotta be kidding me right now, I’m not going to pray for you.”  Look at I Peter 3:7:

Husbands, likewise, live with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.

Husbands, you treat her as a precious vessel, you protect her, you love her, you honor her…so that your prayers won’t be hindered.  God is saying, “That’s My daughter right there, so you better treat her the right way, or I’m not going to listen to you.” 

One time we asked for prayer for healing, and a guy approached us for that. Later he said, “I’m living with this girl.”  So you claim to be a Christian and yet you’re sleeping around with this woman?  Let me ask you this:  If you were doing this with one of my daughters, would you have the nerve to come up to me and ask me for a favor?  No.  And you want me to join you in prayer? No; you should repent.   He is an awesome God, and will forgive. God’s not going to listen to you for your prayers now.  Consider James 4:3:

You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.

This life is not all about us.  We’re a created being; we were created for Him.   We should ask God, “What do You want me to do?”  Look at James 1:6-8:

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. ⁷ For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; ⁸ he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

If you, having unconfessed sin, and doubt that God might be listening, that He might be disapproving, you will not receive anything—He is not listening.  Such a person is double-minded. One eye on God, one on the world’s sin.

Is there anything better than answered prayer?--when you ask for something specific, and it actually happens!  And it couldn’t have been just circumstance, it was supernatural.  Isn’t that an awesome feeling?  “I actually talked to God—and He heard me from heaven, He did it!” 

But people have strange ways of doing things.  In Isaiah 58:5-9, people were fasting and praying, wearing sackcloth and ashes, so they could feel like asking God for favor.  His response was:

Is it a fast that I have chosen, A day for a man to afflict his soul?
Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, And to spread out sackcloth and ashes?  Would you call this a fast, And an acceptable day to the Lord?

⁶ “(But here is) the fast that I choose: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke?  ⁷ Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; When you see the naked, that you cover him, And not hide yourself from your own flesh? 8Then your light shall break forth like the morning, Your healing shall spring forth speedily, And your righteousness shall go before you; The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. ⁹ Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; You shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.

Do you think you’re going to suit up and bow before me, and think, “Ooh, what a humble guy I am.” Verse 6 shows what God really wants them to fast about.  That they would share their stuff with people in need. Then He would say, when you cry out, “Here I am.”  Then He would listen—and satisfy your needs. But it’s conditional. As James 5:16b says:

The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.

A righteous man.

Getting back to God’s seriousness, turn to Joshua 7.God had commanded Israel to destroy everything when they conquer the Amorites, but one man, Achan, didn’t—he kept some of the “accursed things.”  What’s interesting in Scripture is, “the anger of the Lord burned against the children of Israel.”  That means He was angry with All of them—over the sin of one man.  God allowed them to lose 36 men in a lost battle by retracting His favor. What does God say when Joshua asks Him,”Why!?”  Verses 10-13, in part:

¹⁰ So the Lord said to Joshua: “Get up! Why do you lie thus on your face? ¹¹ Israel has sinned… Neither will I be with you anymore, unless you destroy the accursed from among you.

So God allowed 36 men to die because of the sin of another man; and He even swore to abandon His people.  We find in verse 20ff that Achan did admit to his sin, keeping spoils of a piece of clothing and silver and gold, but he and his children were stoned to death!  Only then was God willing to “turn from the fierceness of His anger.”  As Chan tells it, “Now you’re thinking, “that’s not fair”….but I turn to God and go, ‘I’m not as serious about this as You are, God.’  You wanted a purity among Your people, so much so that You would go that far…and the moment the sin was outside the camp, Your blessing returned to it.” 

How serious are we about the purity of the church today?  Remember Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira?  They spoke a pretense, a lie, that they gave all the money to the church on a sale of land, when in fact they had kept back some (Ed: so the sin was lying, not that they didn’t give every penny to the church). But God struck both of them dead!  They just collapsed.  Scripture says in v.11,

…great fear came upon all the church and upon all who heard these things.

My God don’t play. 

Many of you have a problem here; “He can’t have such a high standard.” You also have a problem with Hell, with Him flooding the earth, for what these things say about God’s seriousness about purity, and how sometimes He won’t listen. God gave us His Spirit so if we call on Him, we can indeed live up to that standard.  But we have to call for help.  You can’t be unrepentant.  We have a part we have to play in sanctification.  Just as He asked Joshua to help remove the sinner, He today asks His church to purge the unrepentant sinner from our gatherings. See Matthew 18:15 and other verses (see my blog on this progression).

There is a particular sentiment expressed by Mr. Chan that I would like to emphasize.  We’ll pick it up with I Corinthians 5:9-13:

 I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. ¹⁰ Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. ¹¹ But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person. ¹² For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? ¹³ But those who are outside God judges. Therefore “put away from yourselves the evil person.”

Mr. Chan makes a good point when he says, many of us were taught wrong on this.  We ARE supposed to judge…those who are inside the church.  We are not supposed to judge those who don’t call themselves Christians.  “The church has got it backwards.  We keep judging, Ooh, the evil world out there, the evil world…God says ‘Stop that! I asked you to look in your own midst, and get serious about the purity of the church, and get those defiant people out of there. I don’t want someone who is taking the name of Christ, and living that way…and you shouldn’t want that either.”  Look at Titus 3:10-11a:

Reject (have nothing more to do with) a divisive man after the first and second admonition, ¹¹ knowing that such a person is warped and sinning, being self-condemned.

Confront him in love. Say, “It’s not just about you…you hurt us….When you got baptized, you joined the family here. My sin can have an impact on your life; and your sin impacts me—and sin could impact our prayer.” What’s the first word of the Lord’s Prayer? Our. Prayer is about us. There ought to be family love. In today’s world, “unity,” staying and doing things together, is ‘weird.’  Why not let the world see something different?  Today, everyone ditches each other if someone bugs them.  They’re gone, they’re out of there. But family stays together.  You’re living double lives if we hold something back from someone you profess to love. 

So Mr. Chan holds a strong view on discipline within the church.  Praise God.  God is more serious than letting us let these things slide.  Our God Don’t Play.