Whose Side Are You On?

When you attend a sporting event, you want to know where to sit. You want to sit with others cheering for your team. You can tell which side that is by the caps & clothes with your team’s logo. If you have ever been to an University of Arkansas college football game, you would see a sea of red as you enter the stadium. But over on the other side you see where the visiting team is sitting. There is no question about where to sit if you want to rout for Arkansas.

Today, it is difficult to know which side most Christians are on. God’s side or man’s side. Some profess Christ but live a worldly life.

I Kings 18:21 “Elijah came unto all the people & said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow Him, but if Baal be God follow Him.” Whose side are you on?

2 Cor. 6:2 “Behold now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation.”

Heb. 3:15 “Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

Joshua 24:15 “Chose ye this day whom ye will serve.... but as for me & my house, we will serve the Lord.” Have you decided?

What we are talking about is true obedience. True obedience to God sometimes means standing alone. It’s hard. Family may turn against you. Some lose jobs. Friends forsake you. They think you have lost your mind. People will rise up against you. Sometimes you must stand alone.

Back in 1974 when Barbara & I were first married, we started studying the Bible. Barb came from a Catholic background & I was a Methodist so we studied to find out if God had a true church. After a series of meetings Barbara decided to be baptized into the Seventh-day Adventists Church. Her family lives in Calif. & were not able to attend her baptism. So she call my parents & invited them because she was excited about her decision & wanted to share her joy with family. Neither of us was prepared for the reaction we received. Not only would they not attend, but if she insisted in going thru with it. They would never speak to us again. (That lasted 3 days because our daughter, their granddaughter was 2 months old & they couldn’t stand to be separated from her.) But on the day of her baptism, she stood alone. Soon afterwards I was baptized. Then my parents were sure we had lost our minds.

My parents were talking to us but it was to offer advice like, “When you look for a job, you have to tell them that you will be willing to work on Saturdays.” To stand for truth, we had to stand alone.

Adventist are people of the book, people of the truth. We are to share with the world the three angels messages. We need to stand with God. We need to search the Bible to make sure we know the message. There are people in the world who don’t know the message. There are some even in the Adventist church who don’t know the message. That is hard to believe but it is true.

We need to search the scriptures & accept the message. When we do accept message, How shall we live? We need to choose to follow Jesus. It is a matter of choice. If we choose to obey & follow ... we choose to witness.

What does God require of you?

Micah 6:8 the Clear Word reads, “No! The Lord has told us what is good & acceptable in His sight. What is it that the Lord requires of us? It is to be just, to show mercy and to walk humbly before our God.”

Eph 5:2 “Walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us.”

To walk with Him means to be in harmony with the Lord’s will.

We all have the same choice, am I going to walk with the Lord & be on His side or not? When we were in Little Rock, we knew a man by the name of Bill Whitson, who was totally deaf. He came to church every Sabbath even though he couldn’t hear a thing. One day HMS Richards, Jr. (who was in town preparing for some meetings) asked Bill why he came on Sabbath even when he couldn’t hear what was going on? Bill said, “I want the world to know whose side I’m on.” When the Holy Spirit reveals something to us, we need to decide to follow what was revealed to us. Then we will become spiritually minded.

Turn with me to Phil 4:8 (read). Strive to be more God like.

Then in 2 Cor 3:18 the Clear Word reads, “Now the faces of all of us are unveiled as we see clearly the glory of the Lord. We’re changed more and more into His image by the Holy Spirit working on our hearts.”

By beholding Him & By walking with Him, He takes us & molds us & changes us. The humblest Christian who constantly looks to Christ as Redeemer will reflect the story of Christ in his own life. We will be changed into His likeness. We must choose to Behold & Walk with Jesus.

I’m going to end with a story of Pastor Jim Conway, taken from his book, “Trusting God In a Family Crisis.” He shares his life in a honest & transparent way. He shares what it is really like as a pastor to go thru a family crisis.

He said. “When our daughter was 15 years of age, she began having trouble with one of her knees. For a year and a half, we saw doctors & had laboratory tests & scans & 2 extensive biopsies on the tumor they found. We waited for weeks for word from the many pathology labs, around the United States who were studying the mysterious lump. Finally one evening our physician came to our home & gave us some very distressing news. He said that Becky had a malignancy & it was necessary to amputate her leg. You can imagine how that devastated Sally & me. I refused to believe it. I determined this surgery would not take place, by praying until God promised to heal her. “You’re not going to have your leg amputated Becky” I told her. “I believe God is going to do a miracle. He said He would in times of trouble & I’m absolutely convinced that your are going to be spared this surgery.” Our church began to pray. A 24 hour vigual of fasting & prayer. Thousands of people from all over the United States & overseas were praying for Becky’s healing.

On the morning of the surgery, I said to our physician, Scott, “As you go into the operating room, please verify before you take her leg off that the cancer has been healed because I know God has healed her. I know God is going to come thru. I have no doubt.” He left & did not immediately return. 45 min went by. Sally, my 2 daughters & I sat in the waiting room. A hour passed & then 2 hr.. I began to realize that a lengthily medical procedure must be taking place. Then the doctor came out & told me, he had amputated Becky’s leg. I was absolutely shattered. I was crushed. I lost God. In anger I was beating on the walls of the hospital & saying, “Where are you God? Where are you?” I was in a state of shock & wandered down to the morgue in the basement of the hospital. That’s where I belonged surrounded by death.

I was dealing with more than Becky’s surgery. As terrible as that was, I had a struggle with the theological implications of what had happened. I could not understand why God permitted this to happen. You see if I was a plumber instead of a pastor, I could have gone & fixed pipes the next day & my spiritual confusion would not have affected my work. But my job required me to stand before people & teach them the principles of the Bible.

What could I tell them now, if I had been a liberal pastor, who didn’t believe the Bible was literally true. I could have survived by doing book reviews & talking about irrelevant things. But I pastored a Bible church & my style of teaching was expositions of the word, reviewing its verse by verse & drawing out it’s meaning. How could I go back & tell my people God had let my daughter lose her leg. It was the most terrible moment in my life.

He writes how outside the morgue that day, several colleagues came to see him & how they cried & prayed with him. Finally one pastor said, “I’m not worried about Becky. I’m worried about you. There are thousands in your church who are hanging on for you & you are going to get thru this.”

Then they worked with me, one would take a break & then another would take over. They kept me talking, spilling out the frustration & the anger. They didn’t condemn me, even though I was so angry at God. At one point I said, I think God was so busy finding a little old lady a parking space that He didn’t have the time to save Becky’s leg. My pastor friends would say, “Is there anything else you need to say?” I didn’t worry that if I said anything, that they would doubt God. I didn’t worry that they would give up on me, either.

I dealt with my pain. Some people don’t know how to respond. They say, “I’ll pray for you”’ which may mean, I’m no longer really listening to you & that becomes a way of ending one’s responsibility to shoulder the load. In fact when it comes to bearing one another burdens the secular world sometimes does that job better than we do. They know the importance of letting anger & resentment spill out where Christians feel they have to hold it inside. Scriptures tells us, “The righteous cry out & the Lord hears them. He delivers them from all their troubles.” Ps. 34:17.

This reflects on what people said to encourage me. They offered simplistic explanations & flippin comments to cheer me up. It was irritating when they quoted Rom. 8:28, “All thing work together for good.” When they had not earned the right to brush off my pain. I wanted to say, “Tell me about it, Charlie, when your 16 year old daughter’s leg is amputated. Come back when you have gone thru something like this & we’ll sit down & talk it over.” Sometimes we get so used to the cheer-up mode in Christianity that we become unreal.

I could almost hear people say “Shhh. God might hear you.” But God knew what I was thinking, struggling with already. He understood my passion.

My love for Becky had originated with Him in the 1st place. One day a church member said, “Jim, I think God has allowed this to happen because it has brought a spiritual revival into our church.” I replied, “So what’s God going to do for another revival when this one is over cut off Becky’s other leg?”

Then another friend said, “God loves us too much to exempt us from all the trials of life. God doesn’t allow trials for the sake of causing us pain, for the sake of pain.” James 1:2 consider it pure joy... whenever you face trials of any kind.

Now we would call someone who finds joy in pain, a sadist. But notice He doesn’t say enjoy it when you have trials of many kinds. No, He says what? Consider it pure joy. When you consider it pure joy, that doesn’t necessarily mean you like it. It is an attitude. There’s a choice that you have to make. You can choose to consider it pure joy or you can choose to allow it to become a cancer of bitterness in your lives. Consider it pure joy because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. And perseverance must finish it’s work so you may be mature & complete, not lacking anything.

The Bible says, “If any of lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault & it will be given to him.”

We need to pray when we have trials, so we can count it or consider it pure joy & allow God’s will to be worked out in our lives.