NBCA International, Inc Worship • July 16, 2020, Dr. Joel Gregory

16:02 Have we not been blessed by this praise? Surely God inhabits the praises of his people. I've been lifted up by the praise that we've shared here this evening. I do bring you greetings, as I always do, from Baylor's George W. Truitt Theological Seminary, where it is my privilege to seek to hone the skills of those who already been gifted to God for ministry. Anywhere I stand, I stand also as part of that institution, and we're so pleased to claim your pastor as one of our own. Worldwide. a terrific trifecta I have a twin text this evening twin from two passages in the Old Testament one from that prophet who shows us the heart and holiness of God Hosea deep in his prophecy in the 8th chapter as he's speaking of the irremediable apostasy of God's own people.

17:19 We read in chapter 8 and verse 7 these resonant words. For they sow the word and they shall reap the whereaway. The standing grain has no heads. It shall yield no meal. If it were to yield, foreigners would devour it. They sow the worm and they'll reap the whirlwind. Sometime, time immemorial in the past, that man who may have been a consort with the patriarchs, we know little about him, Job. In the 38th chapter, after Job's complaints and his friend's bad counsel. Finally, God speaks, and there's a word from the sponsor.

18:14 The Lord God answered Job out of the whirlwind. Hosea, they've sown the wind and they reap the whirlwind. Job, the Lord God, spoke out of the whirlwind. This is the word of God for the people of God. I would have not known what a trifecta is other than a friend of mine, former college president Bill Crouch of the Georgetown Baptist College near Lexington, invited my wife Joanne and I to go to the Kentucky Derby. I was amazed to see nearly 200,000 people there, but I really didn't know the language of what took place there. someone said that they were betting a trifecta.

19:12 I wasn't sure what a trifecta was so I was encouraged by someone who explained that is the most unlikely of all bets to win because you bet on the horse that is first, second, and third and that horse must come in in that place. A few years ago, if you bet $2 on the trifecta, you won $133,000 if the horses came first, second, and third. Now, Pastor, they told me about that. I didn't do it.

19:54 I was tempted for a moment, but I restrained myself. in the living of these days, we have faced a terrific trifecta. win place and now show A pandemic that has blanketed this planet and circled this globe, unlike anything in more than 100 years. Hard on the heels of that isolating event, an economic catastrophe that has not yet yielded its QED or come to its bottom line. And while that was taking place, a nation closed in looking at its television, witnessed an event that has not only shaken this nation, but shaken the planets of the earth. The murder of George Floyd by a renegade policeman in Minneapolis.

21:06 When I reflected on that, my mind went back to 2006. I'd gone to Ghana with a Truett student, a native Ghanaian, Vincent Asamoah.

21:27 I was to teach preaching in Accra and in Kamasi to hundreds if not a thousand preachers. But first, they took me to Cape Coast, to what they call the Slave Castle. It had been built by Portuguese colonialists. The Slave Castle was where those men and women of color were herded into tiny rooms like sardines in a can and held there until they went through a narrow crevice in the wall, down a gangplank, in the despair of the sheriffs, never to see their native land and much of their family again. I've traveled all over the world, but no scene I've ever seen, not Buchenwald or concentration camps, not pagan temples burning incense to ancestral gods.

22:31 Nothing ever shook me like going to the slave castle. But the reason was more than that. Right on top of those holding rooms was a Portuguese church. and Sunday by Sunday with a psalm inscribed over its door,

22:56 the slave trading colonialists prayed as their prayers ricocheted off the roof to a God who could not conceivably have been the God of biblical revelation, while beneath their feet were the cries and groans of the imprisoned. And there was a church right on top. Here we are, 400 plus years later. And in the United States... this country has watched the malicious murder of George Floyd, and virtually everyone in this country could raise a white hand, a black hand, a brown hand, and say, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, because millions of people witnessed it.

24:12 And it has unleashed in our time nothing less than the wrath of God on this nation. Now, I wish that I could have come by tonight, Pastor, and smile and say something good's going to happen to you. I wish I might come by and say you can live your best life now, but that's not the message on my heart. nothing less than the wrath of God.

24:49 You see, there's a sense particularly in which white evangelicalism, and I am an evangelical but not in a political sense, has considered that Jesus is the special buddy of upper class white evangelicals. Oh no. He's the son of Jehovah God whose chief occupation in Hosea's day was judgment. We have developed an anemic American Christianity that is now being injected with the iron of the wrath of God. And we're witnessing it play out right before our day. He's the Lord of history and yes, the Lord of judgment. You say, oh, well, would you please sit down by Brother Amos or Brother Jeremiah?

25:48 In Amos, God is led out of the sanctuary. He is down in the marketplace. He's in the streets. He's looking at people who are selling bad wheat in baskets with false bottoms using gerrymandered weights and God is right there in the midst of life. Jeremiah was so blunt in what he said to the same nation that for 20 years he preached and nobody came down the aisle God is a God of rare and we are witnessing it now rare that does not mean that just God got mad as humans get mad because the neighbor's dog is barking When we speak the wrath of God, don't talk about pulling God down to human wrath. That is a metaphor.

26:46 It is a way of speaking that is as close to anything we mere finite earthbound terrestrial humans can imagine. The wrath of God doesn't mean that he's an old man frothing at the mouth of man. I could almost wish that it were only that when we look at what it really is. No. God's wrath occurs when he lets go and let things take their course when he doesn't restrain them. Could I say that again? You know, Pastor, I talk about the big idea of the sermon. the sermon in a sentence. Here it is. God's wrath is when he lets go and lets events take their own course without his restraining presence.

27:47 I'd like to stay there for a moment this evening. 400 years of slavery, and then Jim Crow, and then special kinds of terrorism,

28:08 characterized what Southerners called the, quote, peculiar institution. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great British preacher was an abolitionist and a rabid outspoken abolitionist when he heard that the south called slavery the peculiar institution Spurgeon said yes and hell is a peculiarly hot place and the devil is a peculiarly mean devil and he prohibited the running of his sermons and papers in the south because they edited out his abolitionist statement. And he said man owning is the same as man killing. He was speaking the wrath of God. Several years ago I was preaching at Blytheville, Arkansas. Blytheville is up in the northeastern corner of Arkansas. You land in Memphis and you drive up there if you're preaching.

29:07 there's a huge loop in the Mississippi River that has left the richest alluvial soil in the south. There were more bales of cotton per acre there than anywhere else in the country one year. But the reason I was there to preach, the preacher took me down to see the Mississippi at flood stage. I had never seen that. It was flooding. It had overrun its banks. It had come up the county road and was eating up farmland like a kid with a $20 bill eating up candy in the candy store. To look at the Mississippi at flood stage is to be overwhelmed with the sheer power of that mighty river eating up farmland. I thought about that. What if there were a frail little man there with a seven foot long dinghy, a little boat, rotting in the water and he's holding a frayed rope, holding that boat, hugging the bank.

30:16 But little by little, his hands lose their grip. And finally the little boat is torn away and careening off the banks on both sides of the Mississippi, disappears in the wrath of the raging order. God is not some fragile little man holding a dinghy. He's the God of history. The God who has loosened his grip on the ropes. He'd been loosening it for a long time. There was a nation whose hallowed constitution counted that people of color were three-fifths of a person. And he started to relax his grip.

31:17 And then that nation dared to use those people of color to build the White House. And he loosened his grip. And then that nation's entire history up to the mid to the 19th century was dealing with the demons that had been set loose. And he loosened his grip. I think about our own state, Texas, that joined the Union. 1845. This is little known. It's an asterisk in history. Sam Houston wished that Texas would join the nation as a free state. Look it up. But the racist forces so opposed him that they overwhelmed him. And as an old man, Houston died saddened because he lost that battle but God loosened his grip.

32:21 He loosened his grip in lynchings. He loosened his grip when white slave owners forced black girls. He loosened his grip when Southern Baptist deacons locked arm in my lifetime to keep people of color from walking into the first Baptist churches with their tall steeples. And he loosened his grip.

32:44 And what we're seeing now is having sawn the wearing. We're reaping the whirlwind. Now people say, well now, did God cause everything that happened? God is God, and no mere preacher has to explain him. And I want to, can I stay here a minute? None of us today are biblical prophets. My name is Joel, but that doesn't have anything to do with the Hebrew Joel.

33:23 Amos and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel were biblical prophets. They were oracles of God. When God spoke through them, it was as if he was speaking through their mouth, his very oracles. when they said God did it, God did it. But I'm a mere, finite, mortal, human, fragile preacher and I don't have the insight of Amos and Jeremiah. But I do have this insight that God is turning loose of the ropes. and the frail craft of this nation could be hanging by a thread.

34:08 You see, when God turns loose of the ropes, you sow the wind, and you reap the whirlwind. Now, did God cause everything that's happened in the streets of America since Memorial Day weekend? No, but when God let's go the ropes things get very complicated because he has stopped restraining us the wrath of God means we've sown the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind and I know that doesn't sound a whole lot like the gospel does it that's why I wanted to pair this with another verse about the whirlwind.

34:57 Job 38, verse 1. The Lord God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind. You're familiar with the book of Job. You know what happened to him. He had his own trifecta. lost his stuff, lost his family, then lost his own health.

35:23 If you read the book, his three friends supposed that it was Job's fault. Job kept on saying, it's not my fault. Then Eliphaz showed up and tried to tell all of them what it was about. One of his friends was Bildad the Shuhite. One of my friends called him the shortest man in the Bible. Bildad gave him bad counsel as did the others but finally God intervened and said shh and God spoke to Job how the world went and I want to come by tonight with the bad news we're witnessing the wrath of God but with one piece of good news what God may not cause he can use Thank you. The Lord God spoke to Job. Out of the world, man.

36:24 we have in these days as a nation as churches and as individuals to sit down and to ask God what he is saying out of the whirlwind and I'm trying to do that I'm trying to understand I'm a type A personality always overachiever In fact, oftentimes in my life, instead of saying, ready, aim, fire, I've said, ready, fire, aim. And I've even made some headlines doing that. But first of all, we need to ask, what is God saying? Out of the whirlwind. I have a certainty that one thing God is saying is that what I don't cause, I can use.

37:22 God didn't cause a corrupt white cop to put his white knee on the black neck of George Floyd. To me, that's out of the pit of hell. But what God didn't cause, he can use. Now that the whirlwind is unleashed, God didn't cause everything that happened in every street and every storefront and every place a broken window in America, but God can use what he didn't cause. And that's our hope.

38:05 You remember Star Trek? Not the new one, the real beginning one, you know, with the real Captain Kirk, the real Spock. If you're a Trekkie, you might remember that Spock and Kirk played chess with a three-level chess set. In fact, not right now, but you can Google it, and you can get a Star Trek chess set. It was incredibly hard because it was not only played vertically, it was played horizontally. The emphasis was on the genius of the two men playing. I want to come by tonight to say God can play chess on three levels. what he's doing on this level can affect what he's doing on that level that can affect what he's doing on the other level and we don't have a clue what he's doing I have to believe because I believe the gospel that God can speak out of the whirlwind and that no finite mortal person can guess what's going to come out of all of this when God has finished playing.

39:34 Talking about chess, Pastor, I always wanted to be a good chess player. I tried so hard. It's kind of like me and golf. You know how terrible, you know I can't play golf. He can witness to that. But I tried to play. You know, when I moved my pawn, somebody else would move a pawn. I'd move a knight, somebody would move it. After the third move, I couldn't keep up with what was going on. Someone told me that a chess master, when you make your first move, is able to see every move all the way to checkmate at the end of the game. Now come close to me, wherever you're listening to this. if a mere human chess master can see 30 moves ahead, how many moves ahead can God see?

40:28 He sees all the way to the end of the game. I want you to believe tonight that God can speak out of the whirlwind. For somebody sitting there wherever you are,

40:49 in your study, in your kitchen, on a divan, outside in a comfortable place looking at a screen God wants to speak to you out of the whirlwind. Here's where I wish I could come over to your place and sit down with a cup of coffee and talk and pray about what is God saying to you. out of the world with it.

41:22 I've visited the Louvre a number of times, that great art museum in Paris. Outside the room where the Mona Lisa is, down the hall, there's a painting by the Italian artist Rabellini called Job at the Foot of the Cross. It's an anachronistic painting because you have Jesus on the cross with Mary and John, but like this on the ground, looking up is Job. It's anachronism because he had been on this planet for a thousand years, but there he is, looking up. Rebellini was trying to say this is God's ultimate answer out of the whirlwind.

42:16 Old Job said if a man die shall he live again? And the one on the cross said I am of the resurrection and the life. Old Job said man is born to trouble. As sparks fly upward. And the one on the cross said, In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. The Lord's wrath is pouring out on our nation. But it's the Lord who's speaking out of that whirlwind. And I'd like to take Job's place at the foot of the cross. and say, what are you going to say to me? God bless you in the whirlwind.

43:09 Let's stand together here in the sanctuary, and wherever you are, whatever attitude of prayer best expresses your heart. Some standing, some hands folded, some kneeling, and yes, some prostrate on the ground. whatever puts you in an attitude of prayer. Let's pray. eternal God and our heavenly Father We confess you not only as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but the God and Lord of all history. We come tonight before you to praise your holy name that you're the God of justice and mercy, the God of might and the God of right and the God who can make things right.

44:20 Now Lord, our lives are in your hands. We pray that across this nation, this very week of the laying to rest of George Floyd, from the high-rise tenements of New York, the waves of the Pacific and Santa Monica, from border to border and ocean to ocean.

44:55 Speak, Lord, to this nation. we plead with you hold on to the rope until we hear you clearly Lord in our own lives so often having done what we ought not and fail to do what we ought Lord hold on to the rope and we pray that out of the living of these shaking and sad days there might be born both in this nation and in our own hearts sunrise of a new day we pray that most of all that might be expressed in a new turning to the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ as our only hope We pray that in ways we cannot conceive or imagine, in tiny villages and in hamlets and in great cities and in cathedrals and in clapboard churches, there might be a turning back.

46:14 Lord God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Help us in these days to be still and know that you are God. In the midst of the terrific turmoil, help us distill our hearts, help me distill mine. so that we hear as Elijah did that still small voice that we recognize as your voice.

46:47 And Lord, we can't stay on our knees. We have to get up and face the rest of this evening and tomorrow. may we be like the Lord Jesus who not only would seek and save those that were lost but would go about doing good.

47:09 Wherever we find ourselves this evening, tomorrow, help us in simple words to go about doing good so that this weary world and might see our good works and glorify you, our Father, in heaven.

47:31 As darkness steals over the earth, so many of us in these days are having problems with sleep, insomnia, attacks of panic. Lord, I pray stillness will come over the members of this congregation. and when cankering care comes into their heart tonight I pray that they'll know you've not given them a spirit of fear, but of love and power and a sound mind.

48:06 And may they turn every care into prayer. The person who doesn't know where the rent will come from, may that care be turned into prayer. That person who fears for help, may that care be turned to prayer. May we realize that nothing in our lives is too small for your care and nothing is too great for your power.

48:35 So whether it's the tiny thing or the tremendous thing of our life, we put it in your hand right now. Bless us through the night and may our first waking thought.