Moving On

SERMON: 2017-05-21--ac17172--moving-on-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:40:44.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with an introduction to the sermon topic (Dr. Henry Cloud) and continues through theological exposition, concluding with a formal prayer/benediction that is integral to the speaker's message structure. 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 --- A lot of you here, I think, are familiar with Dr. Henry Cloud. We quote him often. We have, upon occasion, viewed videos from him. He's a Christian counselor, a Christian business consultant, a prolific author, and one of the books that he has written is a book called Necessary Endings. The subtitle is The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships that all of us have to give up in order to move forward. And his thesis in the book is that for any of us to move forward in life, whether that be our personal lives, our businesses, or our careers, or even our ministries, we often have to bring closure to that which we have been doing previously, and perhaps even closure to the people that we have been doing it with. Here's how he summarizes that thought in one of the paragraphs in his book. Let me read it to you. He says, "Endings are not only part of life, they are a requirement for living and thriving professionally and personally. Being alive requires that sometimes we kill off things in which we were once invested, uproot what we previously nurtured, and tear down what we built for an earlier time. Refraiding, giving up, throwing away, tearing down, hating what we once cherished, all are necessary. Endings are the reason you're not married to your prom date, nor still working in your first job. But without the ability to do endings well, we flounder, stay stuck, and fail to reach our goals and dreams. Or worse, we remain in painful and sometimes destructive situations. Endings are crucial, but we rarely like them. That's the problem. And I would add, not only do we rarely like them, rarely do we do them well. My experience has been over the years that when it comes to significant life changes such as changing relationships or changing jobs or changing ministries, we often do them on the fly and often in a reactive fashion. My friend and I, we have a fight, we stop talking, we drift apart, the issue remains unresolved. I don't like my boss, I don't like my job, I talk behind his back, and secretly I begin to look for another position, take it and all of a sudden I give my notice and I'm gone. Or I volunteer for a ministry and start off with great excitement but then it's tougher than I thought and maybe I didn't quite get the appreciation that I expected or perhaps even experienced some opposition and before you know it, my fire dies out and I disappear and that's the end of that. And of course what that does in all of life situations is it leaves other people holding the bag. What happened here? Did I do something wrong? Am I missing something? And of course what that does is it makes people cynical, it makes people close off their hearts, it makes people question relationships and motivations and before you know it, you have a society that begins to disintegrate like we're watching the American society disintegrating south of the border. How do we move on in life in a redemptive fashion and in a God-glorifying fashion as opposed to that which leaves our past path strewn with the wrecks of lives and relationships? That's what I want to talk about this morning. I want to talk about it with you on the basis of Paul's moving forward from Ephesus. Listen again to the first three verses of this passage that we read earlier. "When the uproar had ended, Paul sent for the disciples, after encouraging them, said goodbye and set out for Macedonia. He traveled through that area, speaking many words of encouragement to the people, and finally arrived in Greece where he stayed three months. Because the Jews made a plot against him, just as he was about to sail for Syria, he decided to go back through Macedonia. Paul, you need to remember, was on his third missionary journey. And on his third missionary journey, his aim was to revisit all the churches that he had founded on his first two missionary journeys. And as he traveled through Asia Minor, which is Turkey today, he decided to drop in at Ephesus. He had never been to Ephesus before. He had not previously established a church there, but you'll recall, found 12 disciples, prayed for them to receive the Holy Spirit, began to preach the gospel, had an amazing revival happening at Ephesus, and then he spent the better part of two and a half going on to three years and nurturing those new believers in the city of Ephesus. Now, finally, after all that period of time and after the riot that happened, he was prepared to move on on the rest of his missionary journey. Let me show you what that looks like, because it's rather interesting. His third missionary journey, of course, began in Antioch over here. He revisited his earlier places that he established. Then he came to Ephesus where he stayed for this length of time. And then he revisited all these churches all the way to Corinth that he had previously established. Now his plan had been to travel from Corinth in Greece back to Syria. But as the text told us, he became aware of another plot of the Jews against him. The rest of the Book of Acts is filled with their attempts at trying to kill him. So, whatever the reason, instead of traveling this way, he backtracked over the cities that he had just visited until he came to Troas, which is where the, which is where we find him in this particular passage. So he, he moved on from Ephesus and then he moved back to Troas. Troas, as the rest of the chapter goes on to point out, is the place where a young fellow by the name of Eutychus sat in the window ledge because he was trying to get some fresh air, fell asleep and, you know, came to the ground, picked up dead. Paul was able to rejuvenate him. And great story about preachers who preach too long, just so you know, because Paul preached until sun, till sun up in that situation. It shows how hungry God's people were for the wisdom that he had to impart. But here's the question then. How did Paul know that it was time to move on from Ephesus? And what can we learn together from the move that Paul made as he resumed his missionary journeys? And the time that we have, I want to give you, if we can, three factors that I believe played a significant role in his decision. Three factors that if we understand them, apply them to our own situation, can help us to know at what point in life we need to move on beyond a relationship, beyond a job, beyond a situation, into a new situation and do it redemptively. First of all, for Paul there was the leading of the Holy Spirit, the leading of the Holy Spirit. Now you don't know that from the verses that we have read together. But he makes that very plain a little bit later on in verse 22 and 23. He is now on his way back to Syria, has stopped by Meletus, which is close to Ephesus, and is speaking to the Ephesian elders. And this is what he says, "Compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem not knowing what will happen to me there." And then verse 23, "I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me." The Holy Spirit is directing him to move forward with an aim of going to Jerusalem. And the reason for that, of course, is that as an apostle, he is called to bring the Gospel to the political leaders of his day. And even though he doesn't fully understand what's going to happen, we know from the rest of the book of Acts, this sets the stage that eventually he ends up in Rome testifying to the Emperor about the Kingdom of God. But what's significant for us at this moment is that we have a principle here. And that principle is this, sometimes you know that it's time to move on because the Holy Spirit is leading you to move on from where you are to where you need to be. The Bible is filled with examples of where the Lord comes along by his Spirit or through one of his angels, tells his people what the next phase of life ought to be. There is the call of Abraham way back in the Old Testament. There are many other callings throughout scripture where God appears to people and he says, "This is what I want you to do." And sometimes in your life and in my life, as we walk with the Lord, minding our own business, trying to figure out what it is that we want to do and where it is that we want to go, sometimes there's just a check in our spirit that says don't or a check in our spirit that says yes. And afterwards we often understand that to be the prompting of the Holy Spirit leading us to go forward. Give you a quick example. One of the most enjoyable years of my life, and there have been many, but one of the most enjoyable years of my life was my second year in college when I inherited the leadership of our college radio station. Now, it wasn't much of a radio station. It was a carrier current station, which means that we fed our signal into the electric circuits on campus and anybody that was close to an electrical outlet could pick up our signal. It was quite an operation. I remember one time we borrowed somebody's truck and went all the way to Xenia, Ohio, to pick up this huge transmitter that we lugged back and we had our engineer plug it into the electric circuit to electrify the whole campus. It was a riot. But it was very enjoyable because we managed to triple our budget that first year. We had 40 kids on staff, went to 24/7 broadcasting. We had a captive audience. People might not want to listen to us in the dorm, but they had to listen to us in the dining hall. We had a United Press International teletype for the news and we even managed to finagle, if you can believe it, a live NBC radio network feed. We were sophisticated. I want you to know this. I cannot tell you how much fun it was. I mean, really. How we ever got through school and ever got grades doing this, beyond me, but it was a riot. I was enjoying it. You might be able to tell that I was enjoying it just a little bit. But all of a sudden along comes the Lord, and I remember it so clearly because I was not very happy about it. He said that I had to quit and leave the position and go on to somebody else, and you know how that goes. You argue and you debate and you hope that it's just your own imagination, but sometimes you just can't outrun the Lord and you just have to listen to what he is saying. A lot of you know the story of how I came here back in 1985 and how in 1978 already when I was pastoring my first church, there was a moment of revelation. It doesn't happen to me very often. There was a moment where the Lord came along and said that one day I would get a call from this congregation, and that didn't happen for another six years, but sometimes the Lord leads his people. And most of us, if we're walking with the Lord even remotely, and if we have open eyes to see and ears to hear, often in retrospect we can recognize that was the Lord's prompting. And sometimes the Lord just prompts us to start new things, to stop old things, and to move into new things. And it's important for us as members of the body of Christ to be sensitive to the leading of the Lord and to have whatever confirmation that we might need to know that it is the Lord because you don't always know, you don't always know, "Am I hearing this right?" And so one of the things that I'm really committed to is to judge the leading of the Lord in the context of community because often other people around me can confirm or not that what I'm hearing isn't just my own imagination, it is in fact the leading of the Lord. And I found it interesting that in the verse that we quoted from Paul's conversation with the Ephesian elders, that same kind of thing is actually happening because he says in verse 23, listen to it again, "I only know," he says, "I don't know what's going to happen. I have to go to Jerusalem. And all I know," he says, "is that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me." Now here's the question. How does he know, how does the Holy Spirit speak to him in every city that he is visiting? Well, it's through the other believers. If you read on in Acts chapter 21, you know, he's now back in Syria and you get this prophet coming down from Jerusalem. The guy's name is Agabus. So what does Agabus say to him? "Coming over to us, he took Paul's belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, 'The Holy Spirit says in this way the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.'" The Lord often uses community to make sure that what we're hearing is the Lord because usually when the Lord tells you what's going to happen or what he wants you to do, it means that he wants to encourage you not only to obey but you know you're going to get into trouble. And if you're going to get into trouble, you have to be very, very sure, very, very clear that you are in the Lord's wheel and that he will carry you through because otherwise you will bail when things get tough and things will sometimes get real tough, as we all know. So there's the leading of the Holy Spirit. And the second factor that we need to consider or that Paul considered is that his task in Ephesus was completed. Now it's true, he leaves after the riot, and I'll talk about that in a moment or two, but his plan to leave preceded the riot. Because if you go back to chapter 19 verse 21, after all this had happened, Paul decided to go to Jerusalem, passing through Macedonia and Achaia, that's Greece. After I've been there, he said, "I must visit Rome also." After all this had happened, if you go back to that chapter, refers to the revival in Ephesus when so many people came to faith that five million dollars worth of sorcery books were thrown in the fire. You know God's grace is at work, lives have been transformed when they give up their pagan ways at great expense to themselves. And so Paul knew then that the gospel was established and he was ready to move forward. And again, there is an important principle here because his task in Ephesus was completed. He had established the church, he didn't just abandon the babies, he organized the church, he appointed elders for two and a half years, he taught them day and night, every day in the hall of Taranis. This community was solidly founded and he could go forward with the rest of his missionary trap. And again, the principle here then is this, sometimes it's time to move on in life because our task is finished and our work has been done. Let me elaborate on that just a little bit because all of us, if we're in Christ, have a unique calling. And with that calling comes a unique level of gifting. That gifting varies from individual to individual and it varies in size. Jesus in the parable of the talents talks about a man who receives one talent, talks about a man who receives two talents, talks about a man who receives five talents. Regardless of the size of our talent, eventually we come to a place where we have finished what we have been called to do and we can no longer take anybody further along and be fruitful in the doing. Think of parents raising their children. You pour yourself into your children when they're young only to wave them goodbye. I always say just by the time they get to be of some use to you and your household, they go off on their own and they pour all their energy into somebody else. Think of, you know, contract work. You have certain gifts that you bring to the table. An employer recognizes those gifts and you have a fixed time period or a fixed task to complete and once that task is completed the job is done. Same thing in ministry situations. You join a ministry, you give yourself for a season, you go as far as you can go and then you know that you cannot go any further. And one of the ways in which we can usually tell that in life is we get restless on the inside, we start looking at other job opportunities, we start looking at other relationships, we wonder what's next in my life and how can I move into that. And one of the ways in which we can tell that it's time to move on is that we have done in a given situation as much as we can do given what we bring to the table. Somebody else may be able to take that further, but we can only take it as far as we're taking it because we've reached our ceiling. Does that make sense? But let me sound and note a warning here because there are two ceilings in life that we have to be able to separate. The first is the natural ceiling of our giftedness. I said some of us are one talent, some are two talent, some are five talent. It varies from person to person and it varies from situation to situation. There are two things that are extremely frustrating for people in life. One is if your gifts exceed the job that you have and you get totally bored out of your mind. And the other is when the demands on the job exceed what you're bringing to the table. And now you're extremely frustrated and anxious because demands are being made on you that you're not able to deliver. The Bible says, and I love this verse, you've often heard me quoted Romans chapter 12 verse 3, "But the grace given me," says Paul, "I say to every one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment." It is extremely healthy to know our God-given limitations. Accept God-given limitations. Don't envy what somebody else has got. Recognize that God gives you what you are suited for. If God had given to the one talented person in the parable of Jesus what he gave to the five talented person and vice versa, both would have been extremely frustrating. You've got to operate with where you find yourself. And part of growing up in the Lord is that we lay aside childish notions of who we are and how great and wonderful. You know, one of the problems in this day and age is we have so many insecure parents that don't believe in helping their children live in a realistic world, and so you have all these little kids growing up in this day and age being told that they can be anything. And you can have whatever your heart desires, especially if you're a little girl. That's part of the culture of today. And we think we're doing kids a favor. Well, let me tell you what's going to happen when those kids hit the workforce and their boss fires them because they haven't learned discipline, they haven't learned how to work, and they are not the kind of princes or princesses that everybody has told them to be. With sober judgment, help our children to think with sober judgment about the gifts that God has given them. That's one ceiling. That's a natural ceiling that we need to respect and honor, and we can help each other discover what those ceilings are and function to the optimum in the place where God has put us. But there's another ceiling, and that's the ceiling that is caused by brokenness. Sometimes we bring brokenness to the table, and our brokenness causes us to sabotage the calling that God has upon our lives. Think of the young man who grows up with an authoritarian father, hates his father, has been treated cruelly by father, has an attitude towards authority, now gets his first job. And guess what happens? He bristles every time when his boss tells him to do something, no matter how nicely he might tell him. And if he's not cooperating, the boss isn't going to be telling him very nicely, and there's going to be a lot of friction. And so in disgust and in frustration, he quits his job. Why? Not because he has reached the limit of his capability, might in fact be a very capable person, because his character cannot sustain the demands that are being made on. He is projecting his anger towards his father, towards his boss, and he's going to have difficulty all of his life unless he deals with that. Do you understand what I'm saying? Many other examples like that you can think of. Let's suppose that you grow up and you feel unwanted, and you just don't believe, you have a spirit of slavery like we sang earlier, not a spirit of sonship, a spirit of slavery. You haven't bonded with your mother, you don't believe that you're wanted, you're always looking for other people to help you become something that you are not. Now you're living in the adult world and you're trying to live in community and you're always getting hurt by everybody else because they're not giving you the kind of love and the kind of attention that you think you need, but it's a bottomless pit and so people quit giving it to you, isn't that true? There are people that are fun to be with because they're givers of life. And then there are people who suck the life out of you and you feel that, boy, this is just not going to work. And so if you're that kind of a person, you're constantly falling out of favor, you never feel like you belong at a job, you never feel like you belong in a church community and it's always everybody's fault and every your own. Making sense? Those are places of brokenness. And when we reach those ceilings, as we will because the Lord is determined to flush them out, then we have a choice to make. Are we going to let our own brokenness determine our ceiling or are we going to submit ourselves to the Lord to help us push through that place of brokenness so that we can actually fulfill the destiny that God has for us? The bravest people that I know and the people that I admire and respect the most are people who choose not to take the easy path, who choose not to blame all the rest of the world always for their problems, but who say, "Lord God, do in me what needs to be done so that I can bear the kind of fruit that you want me to bear." Jesus put it this way. It's a verse I often quote in relationships with people. John chapter 15, if we can put that verse up, "I am the true vine. My father is the gardener." Other versions have the vine dresser. "I am the true vine. My father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit. While every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." A lot of you know that I earned my first dollar in this country when I came over as a young 10-year-old immigrant pruning a farmer's orchard. And I so remember feeling sorry for the trees after they were pruned in the spring because all that stuck out was a bunch of spindly branches and they just looked naked and forlorn. But we all know from the field of agriculture that pruning is absolutely necessary if that tree is going to bear not only fruit, but quality fruit. Because the very act of pruning stimulates the growth of the tree. And the object isn't just more fruit, the object is more quality fruit. And Jesus says, "Every branch of mine that bears fruit, he prunes so that it may bear more fruit." And what that means is that when the Lord spots in you and me those self-imposed ceilings that stop us from fulfilling our destiny in Christ, he's going to put us into situations where pruning is going to happen, where our issues get flushed to the surface and where we have to make a choice, "I will let the Lord do what he needs to do in order to bring me into the fullness of my inheritance." And I've noted over the years there's a very fine line between opportunity and temptation. Years ago, Stephen and Deborah here had just come alive in the Lord and had really become part of this church community. And guess what's the first thing that happens? And I've seen this happen so many times. He got a job opportunity way back in Georgia at the headquarters of the company that he works for. And I remember our conversation together. Is this opportunity or is this temptation? Well, I've been around long enough to know by now that when you're just starting on your Christian journey and getting established and becoming part of a community and something comes along that wants to take you away from that, that is almost never. I'm not saying never never, but I'll say almost never, the Lord leading you away. It is a temptation from Satan to keep you from doing the stuff that you need to do in order to grow up in the Lord. And how much loss, not only Stephen and Deborah would have suffered, but how much loss we would have suffered as a community if they had bailed on us back then and gone on to other callings. Isn't that true? Sometimes our work is done and it's time to move on, but we need to discern if the ceiling that we're hitting is a God given ceiling or if it is a ceiling of our own making. I think I'll introduce the third thing and then we'll probably just leave it at that for this morning. But there's still a third factor that goes into Paul's decision to move on. And that is that he could no longer work effectively in Ephesus. I said earlier, he had planned to leave before the riot because he figured his work was done. But after the riot, he absolutely had to leave for the very simple reason why. He could no longer work effectively in Ephesus. The place was poisonous. It was toxic. They were out for his life. He barely escaped by the skin of his teeth and it was time to move on. And that's the second time in Ephesus that this has happened for the apostle Paul. Who could remember the first time this happened? Do you know the story well enough? It was with reference to the synagogue and his teaching there. Paul had a habit, the gospel always goes to the Jews first. So every community Paul visited, he would go to the synagogue and he would preach Jesus. And as he preached Jesus, those folks had the opportunity to either respond to the gospel or to reject it. And so when he first comes to Ephesus, that's what he does. He goes to the synagogue and he preaches Jesus and then this is what we read in Acts chapter 19. The verses 8 and 9, Paul entered the synagogue, spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God, but some of them became obstinate. They refused to believe and publicly, take note of that, publicly maligned or spoke against the way, the way being the gospel of Jesus. So what did Paul do? He left them. He took the disciples with him and had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Taranis. We don't know a thing about Taranis. The suspicion is that he was a teacher of philosophy. He clearly had a lecture hall and when it became apparent that the Jews in the synagogue were no longer interested in listening to what Paul had to say, he walked away, took the disciples with him and he started the church effectively in the hall of Taranis. And here is another principle that we need to understand. Sometimes it's time to move on because you could no longer work effectively in a given situation. And when we come back to this, we can talk about what that looks like in the workplace. We can talk about what that looks like in friendship relationships. We can look at what that looks like with reference to ministry type situations because time and time again when the gospel has its work, there's going to be a clash of cultures and when that clash of cultures happens, we will be restricted in terms of what we can do. And without giving all of that away, we live in North America today in a day and age in my judgment where the secular forces opposing the gospel of Jesus Christ are rapidly taking over, making it virtually increasingly impossible for God's people to be the kind of salt and the kind of light that they need to be. And we need a great deal of wisdom in how to respond to that. How do you be in the world but not of the world? What does moving on look like when your friend doesn't want to follow Jesus? What does moving on look like when the gospel is no longer accepted by society at large? Lord willing, we'll come back to that. Let's leave it at that for now. Stand with me and we'll close in prayer. We're so grateful, Father, that you are a living God. And that one by faith we're joined to Jesus, we become members of his body. And because we're members of his body, you communicate to us your agenda, your plan and your purpose and what our part might be in the time and place that we occupy in history. And sometimes, Lord, you speak to your word and by your spirit and we are just very clear. Sometimes we just struggle, make the best decisions that we know how to make. And only in retrospect do we see you know that your hand was guiding us. And sometimes, Lord, we just know that we're in a given situation and we become restless and we no longer feel effective or fruitful. And then you have to help us work out whether that's because it's time for us to step into something new that is more challenging with greater opportunities, or if that's just because we're hitting a spot in our own lives that is a sabotage that you want to heal and restore so that we can fully step into the fullness of what you have for us. And then, Lord, there are those times when being faithful to you puts us in a situation where the forces of Antichrist come out against us and we can no longer be effective in a given situation. And then we need to know what moving on looks like and even how we can figure out what the timing of that is and what that looks like. So thank you, Lord, for your word. Thank you for community. Thank you that together we can learn from you and from each other and from your word. And thank you most of all that you're a God who leads us faithfully until the final day when we stand before your [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:40:36.440; remove through 00:40:44.000] face. Thank you for hearing us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:40:44.000; resume after this marked segment]