Treasures of Darkness

SERMON: 2015-01-04--ny15--treasures-of-darkness SOURCE DURATION: 00:34:33.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: All candidates represent the concluding pastoral application and call to action of the sermon. Candidate 15 is the final spoken word segment before a likely transition into music or other non-sermon material. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, a good many years ago, before I was actually ordained to the ministry, there was a season in my life where the Lord seemed to direct me to a number of very specific Bible passages that came across to me as promises for my life and for my ministry. It's hard to sort of describe how that happened. I would just be reading the Bible and all of a sudden it was like there would be this verse or that verse that sort of popped out, and it would pop out with such power that back then I actually took the time to write down the verses and ponder their meaning before the Lord. Up until that point, that had never happened to me before, and after that point, it only happened very sparingly maybe on one or two occasions. And truth be known, I've always been kind of suspicious of those kinds of subjective interpretations of the Bible. And perhaps you have heard the story of the young Christian who subscribed to what is known as the open Bible finger down method of finding guidance. You've heard of it undoubtedly. It's the method where you open scripture at random with your eyes shut, and you put your finger down, and where it falls is the Lord's direction for your life. Kind of a dangerous exercise, as this particular young man discovered, because he opened the Bible in the first place that his finger landed was Matthew 27 verse 5, where the Bible says concerning Judas, he went out and he hanged himself. Obviously that couldn't be the word of the Lord to this particular individual, so he prayed again, closed his Bible, opened it, put his finger down. The second time his finger hit Luke 10 verse 37, and there it says, "Go and do thou likewise." Well, by now he was beginning to sweat a little bit, so another fervent prayer, closed Bible, opened Bible finger down method, and this time he hit John 13 verse 27 where Jesus says to Judas at the Last Supper, "What you are about to do, do quickly." I think that was probably the end of his open Bible finger down method. I first heard that story, I said to myself, "He should have been smart enough to open it in the Old Testament and stay away from the gospels, but who knows where his finger might have landed back then." Be that as it may, as I said, there was that season where these verses just sort of popped out, and of those verses that I received back during that phase of my life, a number of the verses came from the Book of Isaiah, and a couple of them stood out particularly in the Book of Isaiah. The first one is a verse that you might well remember too from Isaiah chapter 30, the verses 20 and 21, and that reads as follows, "Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity in the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more. With your own eyes you will see them, whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, 'This is the way, walk in it.'" And as perhaps you can appreciate over the succeeding years, that verse has been a tremendous comfort to me in good times and in bad times to know God's promise that he would direct and he would guide and he would show me and other people associated with me the direction that we ought to be following. Other passage then from Isaiah that was powerfully real to me in those days, and as I said, this goes back many, many years, but I have never forgotten it, are the verses two and three of Isaiah 45 that we read together a moment ago. Let me read them again, and here the Lord says, "I will go before you and will level the mountains, I will break down gates of bronze, cut through bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name." And I recall how confusing I found that passage back then because it occurs in scripture in a very particular historical and literal context, of course. It applies to Cyrus. Cyrus was the king of Persia, and Isaiah with the eyes of the prophetic looks hundreds and hundreds of years down the road, and he says God is going to raise up a man called Cyrus. By the way, this is why a lot of Old Testament critics do not believe that Isaiah wrote the last part of the book of Isaiah, because how could he have known Cyrus by name? But if you believe in God's ability to have prophetic insight, that's absolutely no issue at all. So Isaiah sees the day when God will raise up Cyrus, and he's going to invade Babylon, and he is going to rob them of their literal treasures, and we know from history that's exactly what happened in 539 BC. The story is found also in the book of Daniel where the Medes and the Persians enter into Babylon and they despoil it, and they rob it of its treasures. The emphasis on Daniel lies on Darius, and people have done a lot of scholarly study to try to discern the relationship between Cyrus and Darius, and most likely what happened is that Cyrus was the emperor over the overall empire, but Darius was placed in charge of Babylon. At any rate, historically, that is the context of this particular passage, and so years back as I was pondering this, I didn't know what to do with it, and what do you do when you don't know what a Bible passage means? Well, if you're smart, you put it on the shelf, because there's a lot of things we don't understand, and there's a lot of things that only become clear with the passing of time. And so I put it on the shelf, periodically I take it down and say, "Lord, what is it that you were trying to say?" And as I did that over the years and as I watched how the Lord led my life and led my ministry, because that's how I felt it applied, I began to understand something that I had missed the first time around, and that is this. Many prophetic declarations in the Old Testament have a multiple level of fulfillment. That is to say, they find a fulfillment in their own literal time historically, and they have a subsequent fulfillment or subsequent fulfillments. That's part of the confusion when you read Old Testament prophecies. Let me give you a quick example you all know, Isaiah 7 verse 14. Isaiah 7, 14 has these words, "The Lord Himself will give you a sign, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." That verse, according to the book of Isaiah, found a literal fulfillment in the days of Isaiah when a son was born and all of the promises that were made in connection with that son were fulfilled then. But you know as well as I do that that's not the only application of this particular promise, because when you get to the New Testament, what happens? Well, you have Matthew using this to demonstrate the legitimacy of Jesus in that he is born of a virgin. So Matthew 1, 23 quotes this passage, "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel, God with us." So you have this multiple fulfillment of Old Testament promises. And so it began to dawn on me that yes, in the Old Testament you have Cyrus who is being raised up of God to destroy the power of Babylon, lay bare his literal treasure so that the captive Israelites could go back home because if you know the story, it was Cyrus who set in motion the return from exile so that Israel could be reestablished in the land. But that's not the only fulfillment of this particular promise because even as Cyrus was a deliverer, there would one day come a greater deliverer. And you and I know him, of course, by the name of Jesus. Ultimately, it is Jesus who levels the mountains, who breaks down the gates of bronze, cuts through the bars of iron, and who uncovers the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places so that we may all know that God is the Lord and that the God of Israel has summoned him by name. Now stick with me because if this promise finds its fulfillment in Jesus and you and I are the body of Jesus, are you following me here? Then the promise is also fulfilled in your life and in my life. In other words, the Lord wants to use us to level mountains, he wants to use us to break down the gates of bronze, cut through the bars of iron, and he wants us to have the privilege of discovering the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places. He wants to use us in setting captives free. Now let me explain it this way. What's treasure? Well, treasure is something upon which you place an incredibly high value. It may be a monetary value, a very expensive heirloom, a huge pile of gold or cash or stocks or bonds. It can also be of sentimental value. It might be worth nothing to anybody else, but to you, it has tons and tons of memories attached to it. Whatever the case, if you treasure it, you value it greatly. And what do you do with the treasure? All you hide it. And the more valuable it is, the better you hide it because there will be the temptation for a thief to come along and steal it. That's why, you know, you don't go out in public flashing, unless you're really stupid, a big wad of bills because somebody will trip you up when you're not looking and they'll take it from you. You don't go bragging about the possessions that you have in a way that somebody else becomes jealous and wants to rob you. So treasures are hidden out of sight in deep, deep places where nobody can take it and every so often you'll go in there and you'll take it out and you look at it and you shine it up and you're proud of your treasure, but you're careful and you guard it and you guard it really carefully. Now here's the question, what do you suppose is your and mine biggest treasure? Some of you may say, well, my possessions or little more Christian, maybe my relationships and yes, possessions, relationships and a lot of other things are very valuable and we do well to treasure them. But I'm pretty sure that if we really were to push it, our biggest treasure would be what lives in our hearts, wouldn't that be true? because our hearts in biblical language is the seat of personality. It's the place of our passion. It's the place of our desire. It's the place of our dreams. It's the place of our hopes. It's what fuels us. That's what that verse in Proverbs means that we quote so often, guard your heart carefully for out of it flow the issues of life. What that means is that what your heart loves is going to direct your life. What your heart believes is going to decide how you act. And what your heart is loyal to is going to determine very much the course of your life. Guard your heart for out of it flow the issues of life. Now remember, God's original design was that we should live with our hearts wide open. That is to say wholeheartedly. You know one of the old hymns we sing taken from the Psalms, wholehearted thanksgiving to thee I will bring. And of course Jesus when he was asked by the teachers of the law what is the greatest commandment? What did he say? Love the Lord your God with what? All your heart, all your soul, with all your mind and your neighbor as you love yourself. God wants us to live fully with hearts wide open so that he can demonstrate the fullness of his character through your life and my life. Now here's a very practical question. What happens when you try living that way? Doesn't take you very long before you discover the world is a mean place and depending on you know a whole number of factors you discover that it's almost impossible to live wholeheartedly. And the reason for that is twofold. Number one your heart and my heart by nature is permeated by sin. And so while we may think we are King Tut and something really very special the rest of the world recognizes how selfish, how rotten, how miserable we can be and there are times when you show your true self that people around you are very anxious to either shut you up or to get away from you because you're just a miserable old cuss. And that's true for the meanest and the best because we are shot through with sin. But not only that even in the places where our behavior is not governed or marked by sin but rather governed and marked by who we authentically are before God and places that God wants us to live we discover the world's a pretty hostile place. Because not everybody wants to hear my opinion. Not everybody is going to bless my every dream, hope or ambition. And not everybody is going to encourage me along life's way. And so depending on who you are, the circumstances and the situations in which you find yourself you go through life and you discover pretty quickly there are parts of you that are not acceptable and you discover that you've got to shut them down and you hide them. How many people don't you know who will never speak their mind in a group setting because they are afraid that other people are not going to like what they have to say? Or how many people say things that they ought not to be saying because they are not sensitive to the situation or to the environment in which they are but they have decided they are just going to flop it all out regardless of the damage that it does to other people. Isn't that true? How many of us have learned that if you live with your heart wide open and you are trying to pursue your dreams the reality will bring you crashing down to the ground and what are the differences between adult generation and a younger generation is that we often look askance at the hopes and the dreams of young people and we say to ourselves well just you wait until you grow up and you'll discover life is not what you think it's going to be. And half the time that's true and the other half of the time it's also true. And so that's the reality of what life is. So we go under I cannot tell you how many people I have encountered over the years of many decades of ministry now whose deepest dreams, fondest hopes and expectations, whole aspects of their personality they've had to deny to themselves and to other people because they were too much. They were misunderstood, they were misrepresented and so they constantly had to make the choice of how do I belong to this group of people and what do I have to do in order to belong to this group of people and how do I remain true to what I really feel on the inside. And we live in a society that is in constant tension because we live in a day and age where people are so much encouraged to be themselves even their rotten miserable selves at the cost of how to do relationships. And so we get into a whole world where we don't know how to do life and we don't know how to do relationships because see when you hide the deep places of your heart and when you don't show what God has placed inside you to other people around you, well it goes dormant because the universe operates on the principle of use it or lose it. And so if I don't know, if I stop giving you my opinion, pretty soon I have no opinion. If I hide my emotions from you because you cannot handle my emotions, then pretty soon I have no emotions left to show you. I go numb. I start sliding into addictions because a whole part of my life is not leaving. Do you understand what I'm saying? How much of this you understand will depend a lot on the kind of environment situation in which you were raised. I tell you we don't understand the needs of the world around us today unless we understand that multiple hundreds of thousands of people have had to go underground to hide who they really are. And the result of that is an incredible loss to the kingdom. If you're married to that kind of a person, then you know that you've got to do all the work in order to engage and to have relationships. And if you're ever in conflict with that kind of a person, you discover that you can never win the argument because it's never their fault. It's always your fault because it is shrouded in a place of shame. And the more the world gets broken and the more one generation builds on another broken generation, the more we get people who just don't know how to do life, don't know how to do relationships. And it's tragic because it multiplies until a whole society bogs down in the brokenness of life. The treasures of darkness, I believe, and you may agree or disagree, the treasures of darkness, I believe, are those valuable places in our hearts where lies our gifting, where lies our passion, where lies our ability to do life. And even as God raised up Cyrus years ago to literally despoil the treasures of Babylon, so subsequently the Lord Jesus has been raised up by God the Father to reveal the strongholds of the enemy, to set captives free in those places and to uncover the treasures of darkness so that people can actually learn to live before the face of God. Now just to show you what that looks like in the real world, I'm gonna read you a story. It's not a Christian story, it's secular, but it illustrates the point. And then I wanna put it just briefly in the context of the gospel because if this is possible in the world, it is that much more possible in the context of Jesus Christ who in fact came to level the mountains and to break the bars and to release captives. This is a story that is introduced with a little quote from Irma Bombeck. Any of you remember Irma? She's long gone now. I used to write columns as I recall in newspapers. Here's how it's introduced. There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course. I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look at it. And yep, it's still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line to hold them up and to say, "How good or bad am I?" That's where courage comes in. That's the introduction. Now here follows the story told by a woman by the name of Hellas Bridges. On a park bench, 200 feet above the roaring Pacific Ocean, I sat quietly, relaxing and breathing in the rays of the sun. The day was clear, calm, sweet, sunset was only an hour away. I noticed that on a bench only 50 feet further along the path was an older woman. She was frail and bent over from the weight of her shoulders. She had a large, witch-like beak nose. Not very complimentary, I thought. At her appearance, something about this woman drew me to her. I walked to where she was seated and as I sat beside her, I kept my focus on the ocean. For a very long time, I didn't say anything. Without thinking, I spontaneously turned to this old woman and quietly asked, "If we never saw each other again, what would you really like me to know about who you really are?" There was no answer. Silence lingered in the air for what seemed like an hour. Suddenly tears rolled down her cheeks. "No one has ever cared that much about me," she sobbed. I placed my hand lightly on her shoulder to comfort her and said, "I care." After introducing herself as Isabel, she whimpered, "Ever since I was a little girl, I have always wanted to be a ballerina, but my mother told me I was too clumsy. I was never given the chance to learn how to dance, but I have a secret. I have never told anyone this before." "You see, ever since I've been four years old, I have been practicing my dance. I used to hide in my closet and practice so my mother wouldn't see me." "Isabel," I urged, "show me your dance." Isabel looked at me in surprise. "You want to see me dance?" "Absolutely," I insisted. That's when I saw the miracle. Isabel's face seemed to shed years of pain. Her face softened. She stood up proud, head erect, shoulders back. Then she stood up, turned, and faced me. It was as if the world stood still for her. This was the stage she had been waiting for all her life. I could see it in her face. She wanted to dance. She wanted to dance for me. Isabel stood before me, took a long, deep breath, and relaxed. Only moments before, her brown eyes were sunk deep into her skull. Now they were bright and alive. Elegantly, she pointed her toe forward while gracefully stretching out her hand. The move was masterful. She took my breath away. I was witnessing a miracle before my eyes. One minute she was an ugly, old, miserable woman, the next she was Cinderella wearing glass slippers. Her dance took a lifetime to learn and only a moment to do, but she had fulfilled her life's dream. She had danced. Isabel began to laugh and cry almost at the same time. In my presence, she had become human again. We continued to speak about math and science and all the things that Isabel loved. I listened and hung on to her every word. "You're a very great dancer, Isabel. I am proud to have met you." And I really meant it. I never saw Isabel after that. I still remember smiling and waving goodbye to her since that day. I've taken the time to stop and acknowledge people everywhere. I've asked them what their dreams are. I have rooted them on, and each time I do this, I witness a miracle. Like Isabel, people stand taller, smile, and somehow begin to believe again. I'll give you, the Lord said to Isaiah, for Cyrus, but also for you and me through faith in Christ, I will give you the treasures of darkness. I believe with all my heart, and you know this, but I believe with all my heart that God has called us, not just individually, but collectively as a church community, to set captives free. I believe that over the years, the Lord has given us some very keen insights as to what it is that keeps people locked up in these deep places of their hearts. Why it is that they cannot love God with all of their heart. Why it is that they cannot love their neighbor as they love themselves. Why they cannot do community. Why they cannot flourish in the things of God. And we've become equally convinced that the Lord Jesus, by His death and by His resurrection, His ascension, and by the outsporing of the Holy Spirit, has done everything that needs to be done in order to release those deep, deep places where we are so sadly and so badly stuck. And when I see somebody coming out of those dark places, and like Isabelle, they learn to step into their dream and they learn to exercise their gifting, it is like heaven on earth has come down, because if you know me at all, then you know that that's my passion. It's not an easy business. It caused Jesus to make it happen, and it's only Jesus who can bring about the transformation. But you and I can be the hands and the feet of Jesus. We can create a community where it is safe for people to feel what they need to feel, what they need to experience, and to be walked through into the liberty and the freedom that Jesus Christ has come to bring. And I tell you, there are smiles in heaven when the Isabelles of life begin to dance. Isn't that true? And after everything has been said and done, your life and my life has significance and meaning if God sees fit, even in a small way, to make us part of that journey. If he can raise up the pagan Cyrus, doesn't know God, doesn't acknowledge God, doesn't care about the purposes of God, how much more can he use you and me to accomplish his purposes in our generation? All we have to do is make ourselves available, ask him to open our eyes to where people do the real living, give us wisdom and grace to speak truth in love into people's lives, stand in faith and expectation that God can do far more abundantly than all that we can ask or think. And I for one believe that in the year to come, we're going to see increasing measures of the outpouring of God's Holy Spirit to revive hearts that are broken, to restore hearts that have been wounded, to level the mountains, to cut through bars of iron, to cut through bars of bronze and to declare the good news of Jesus Christ that he's come to set the captives free so that we can live for the praise of his glory. And every little victory that we experience together will give us more hope and courage that the work that God has begun to do, he will bring to completion. My invitation to you this first day of 2015 is number one, do you believe the message of the gospel? Do you believe with all your heart, regardless of your own experience, that Jesus is who he says that he is? And if so, will you lay hold of that not only for your own life, let him do what needs to be done to break down the strongholds that keep us from living alive, but will you commit yourself to being part of a community that can encourage the Isabels of life, can draw them out, and can enable and allow them to live for the glory of God? That's what God's about, and I don't know about you, but that's what I want to be about in 2015. [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:34:29.720; remove through 00:34:33.000] And I would ask you to join the journey, amen? [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:34:33.000; resume after this marked segment]