Walking with God in Days of Pandemic

Ephesians 4:1 – ... with God in Days of Pandemic
Fifth Sunday in Lent – March 29, 2020 (am)
   

Good morning, Grace Church. Unfortunately I’m beginning to get used to saying that without being able to see your faces! Who would have even conceived of such a thing even only a few weeks ago? But here we are, in a place where the institution called the church, called out ones, gathered ones, is now scattered for our own good and the good of our community, as an even greater expression of love for our neighbor than gathering would be right now—just one more way of describing the palpable strangeness of these days!

This was supposed to be Ray-tirement Sunday, AM and PM. But we have enacted a little known GCD Policy that doesn’t allow retirement if the overall wellbeing of the Church is compromised by that! So, no Ray-tirement today!

We seem to have a series of messages developing among us addressing the uniqueness of our times—two weeks ago Loving God in Days of Pandemic, last week Trusting God in Days of Pandemic, now today Walking with God in Days of Pandemic. And we have a bit of an odd passage to read to introduce our topic this morning.

By the end of Exo.5, we’ve been seen that Israel continued to live in the land of Egypt after Joseph died (1:6), and that a king arose who did not know Joseph (1:8). He was fearful of Israel’s growing numbers so he pressed them into forced labor (1:9-10) which, over time, developed into cruel slavery (1:11-14).

But the Lord miraculously preserved and raised up a deliverer for His people. His name was Moses and, by God’s providence, he was raised by the king’s own daughter (2:10).

We don’t need to rehearse the whole story but, by the end of Exo.5, God had spoken to Moses (c.3), empowered him for his task (4:1-17), and sent him back to Egypt to speak to the king (4:18-31). But that just made Israel’s experience even worse. And they blamed it all on Moses and his brother Aaron (5:1-21).

So, this people, Israel, who were supposedly blessed by God, found themselves in slavery in a foreign land. And even though God raised up a deliverer for them, their situation grew worse! Our text begins as they just laid all this on Moses and Aaron.

Exodus 5:22-6:13(nlt): Then Moses went back to the LORD and protested, “Why have you brought all this trouble on your own people, Lord? Why did you send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh as your spokesman, he has been even more brutal to your people. And you have done nothing to rescue them!”
  Then the LORD told Moses, “Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh. When he feels the force of my strong hand, he will let the people go. In fact, he will force them to leave his land!”
  And God said to Moses, “I am Yahweh—‘the LORD.’ I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El-Shaddai—‘God Almighty’—but I did not reveal my name, Yahweh, to them. And I reaffirmed my covenant with them. Under its terms, I promised to give them the land of Canaan, where they were living as foreigners. You can be sure that I have heard the groans of the people of Israel, who are now slaves to the Egyptians. And I am well aware of my covenant with them.
  “Therefore, say to the people of Israel: ‘I am the LORD. I will free you from your oppression and will rescue you from your slavery in Egypt. I will redeem you with a powerful arm and great acts of judgment. I will claim you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God who has freed you from your oppression in Egypt. I will bring you into the land I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I will give it to you as your very own possession. I am the LORD!’”
  So Moses told the people of Israel what the LORD had said, but they refused to listen anymore. They had become too discouraged by the brutality of their slavery.
  Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go back to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and tell him to let the people of Israel leave his country.”
  “But LORD!” Moses objected. “My own people won’t listen to me anymore. How can I expect Pharaoh to listen? I’m such a clumsy speaker!”
  But the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron and gave them orders for the Israelites and for Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. The LORD commanded Moses and Aaron to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt.

So, why are we reading this story today? Sometimes we can find it hard to comprehend when those—like Israel, like the church, like us today—who are told that we’re blessed by God, still suffer hard times, feel anything but blessed, still endure seasons (like now) when our very name, gathered ones, doesn’t match our experience. Where is the blessing of God?

As the story of Israel, and then the story of Scripture, the story of God’s outpouring of His blessing upon His chosen people, progresses, we see that the truth of the whole just cannot be seen at every single step along the way. But we can also see, looking back as we do here on Israel’s experience in Egypt, that even those hard stages were the context in which God’s people began to see, and then to trust, and then to anticipate His faithfulness to them, His great power and great love—the very qualities that are often pitted against one another to disprove the existence of God in the face of the immense suffering we see and so often feel in this fallen world.

If God were truly all-loving, they say, then He wouldn’t want us to suffer. And if He were truly all-powerful, then He would prevent our suffering. So, either God is not all-powerful or He’s not all-loving. But either way, He’s not the God that Christians say He is. That’s how the argument goes.

But Scripture testifies very differently, and not only in the big picture I just mentioned, but down to the particular situations of life. We’ve appreciated the reminder of Joseph’s experience in Egypt in the title of Jeff Cisowski’s biography of Elmer Reu: God Meant It for Good. Israel’s time in Egypt had begun when Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. He was later imprisoned there. But this was still his bottom-line assessment on his whole experience in Egypt: You meant it for evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today (Gen.50:20).

Joseph, Moses, David, the Apostle Paul, and so many others had similar experiences—tremendous hardships as the backdrop to magnify the blessing and deliverance of God. And yet, in one particularly earthshaking trial David affirmed in Psa.62:11 Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, 12 and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love. … The very two qualities of God that cause skeptics to doubt His existence because of our trials, David claims are actually displayed in God character right in the midst of his trials! God’s power and His love are undeniable!

So, this was Israel’s experience in Egypt. And it’s an experience we can grasp some understanding of today.

And Israel’s call as they came out of Egypt and journeyed through the wilderness was essentially the same as ours today: You shall love the Lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Deu.6:5). And you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Lev.19:18).

And the church would add, then, the Great Commission, which essentially tells us: [you shall introduce your two loves to one another, then teach your neighbor to walk with me as you do] (Mat.28:19-20).

This was hard to do while Israel was crossing the dessert.
As we’ve seen in our study of Deuteronomy, it proved just as difficult once they were entering the land.

And even though the church is born again of the Spirit and empowered by Him toward obedience, it’s still hard work for us!

It’s challenging to walk in faithful fellowship with God even when we’re moving along in our familiar rhythms and patterns of life with relatively few interruptions. How much different is it when everything around us is mixed up?

In our Google Hangout with the Preaching Team earlier this week I mentioned that everything I do, I’m doing differently than normal—meetings, shepherding, preaching (to empty rooms!), and even sermon preparation. The types and structure and even the preparation method of my sermons are entirely different during these days. Nothing is familiar!

So, I must ask you the same question I’m pressing in my own heart: how is your walk with the Lord going these days? Are you still getting time in the Word and in prayer? Are you still enjoying regular fellowship with God’s people, as we talked about last week?

Earlier this week a NYT health reporter made an interesting statement: If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt. We’re doing our best to honor something very close to this advice but, first, it’s very hard to do, isn’t it? And, second, doing this does seem to stand square in the path of meaningful Christian fellowship!

On this subject, I’d refer you to last Sunday’s message where we gave some practical input on how to do this.

But I want to move on to the next subject at hand. We looked first at loving God in days of pandemic, a love that shows itself by its attentiveness to the world around us, the good Samaritan.

Then we looked at trusting God in days of pandemic, a trust that shows itself in love for one another in the body of Christ that just reflects God’s love for us, love that is showered upon us in Christ.

Now we’re looking at walking with God in days of pandemic, [walking] in a manner worthy of the calling to which [we’ve] been called, as Paul put it in our passage today (Eph.4:1)—walking by faith in God in a way that Israel was never able to do, and trusting in His Spirit to enable that walk within us by faith in Christ.

It won’t look like it always does because our circumstances are not what they always are. In normal life and normal times here in DuPage county, fears are mostly just hypotheticals. They’re possibilities. We could always use a little more money to accomplish our priorities. We could always use a little more time to increase the quality of our work. We could always use a little more peace in our relationships with our children, our family, our colleagues and bosses so that our quality of life in each of these areas becomes a little more satisfying.

And lacking any of these things—money, time, peace in our relationships—can produce emotions that we call fears. But we could wish we’d never used that word before when we first hear a diagnosis of cancer, for ourselves or a close family member. We could wish we’d never called anything fear when we’re in a public building and begin to hear gunfire. And we could have very similar feelings when we’re watching everyday activities shut down to war against an untamed virus—schools, restaurants, businesses, government offices.

In short, we can wish we’d never used that word fear when we’re facing a situation that threatens our lives. We can see fear on the faces of some of the people we pass when we’re out for an afternoon walk. We can see it on the empty shelves that many of us have snapped pictures of in stores. We can see it in the predictions we read in our daily news sources that tell us we’re not over the hump yet in this war we’re fighting with a microscopic little organism that we’ve never met before.

But, my friends, that fear is rooted in an understanding of this life that is not real! It’s not true, no matter how real and true it seems! This fallen world is full of fears, even if our affluent, western life has been insulated against most of them, and well-armed against many more. Our fears will not be alleviated by developing an inoculation for COVID-19. It won’t even be alleviated by discovering a cure for cancer. Ultimately, our fears will only be alleviated—truly removed—by stepping into the presence of God for all eternity—into that place we were made to enjoy, that place where we will finally be free from every one of our life-threatening enemies!

Until then, we walk by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, through this wilderness of a fallen world, entrusting our fears to Him all along the way—casting all [our] anxieties on him, because he cares for [us] (1Pe.5:7).

That is how we walk with God in days of pandemic: deeply aware of our vulnerability, our need, entrusting our fears to Him all along the way, and casting… [our] anxieties on him, [knowing] he cares for [us]. I quoted C. S. Lewis two weeks ago, and I do again today. In his address, Learning in Wartime—and war is another experience that brings people face-to-face with their fears—Lewis reassures us that anything which reminds us we are finite, anything which reminds us that death awaits us all, anything which reminds us that this world is not our truest home, is actually doing us a favor! It is helping us walk with God in these undeniably troubled times. Think of war, here, as referring to this fallen world with all its fears (Woodruff) and as the place where we’re striving to walk with God.

… [W]ar does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us all the time is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it was good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centred in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can [comprehend this]. Now the stupidest of us know. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and we must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of [discipleship], humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still (in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 62-63).

In other words, we are so much better off, so much better prepared and enabled to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, when we’re living in present awareness of our finitude, in full understanding of the complete inevitability of our death! That may not sound like a happy thought. But until we grasp it, we will surely not have entered into the full joy of the gospel, or into the faithful exercise of walking in a manner worthy of it.

The humility that is born of our awareness that our time on earth is limited—very limited, here today and gone tomorrow—actually helps us to treat this life as the exceedingly special gift that it is.

And further, as we recognize that the hard seasons we face, like this one perhaps, are friends to us believers in the Lord Jesus Christ because they are present reminders that this is not the life we were made for! They can keep us from falling under the spell of this world that makes so many who live within it actually believe that they’re living their best life now!

God help them! And God help us all to embrace by faith the immeasurable love Him to Whom Paul is praying at the end of Eph.3, and then to walk in a manner worthy of Him by His saving grace as Paul calls us to do at the beginning of Eph.4.

And please know that this not just a matter of spending more time in the Word and in prayer day to day. That is the foundation, yes, but we were made by God to engage life in this world. And that is uniquely difficult right now.

I read a helpful article this week written by Scott Kelly, a retired astronaut. He spent a year on the international space station so he understands a bit about living in isolation. He assembled an annotated list of things to do to help us survive these days. I won’t comment on each one, but I do want to give you the list because I believe it is really helpful regarding how to build on our foundation.

·      Follow a schedule (we all know the importance of that)…

·      … but pace yourself (makes sure you have down time).

·      Go outside (it refreshes you even more than you know).

·      Take up a hobby (we all need enjoyable diversions).

·      Keep a journal (it’ll help you process what’s happening).

·      Take time to connect (we were created for community).

·      Listen to the experts (hard as that is sometimes).

Finally, if you’re struggling with this time not only our Elders and pastoral staff would be glad to offer help, but so would our biblical counseling team—GBCM. You can contact them through our website; just look at the dropdown menu under Ministries on our homepage. And once again, if you’re struggling financially during this time, please contact our Deacons, again through the website. We have a Benevolence Fund that can help.