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Sensing the Breath of God
A sermon preached by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, January 23, 2005
on the day when First Graders were presented their Bibles
I want you to hear an ancient story. It is from India and
it is about a lion cub, a little baby lion that lost its mother and it was
adopted by a family of goats. Now the goats raised the lion and the lion began
to grow and they taught the lion how to be a good goat. They taught the lion
what to eat and they taught the lion goat language. They taught the lion how to
fit in. And so the lion, when the goats drifted here and walked there, the lion
went with them. One day, when the lion cub had grown to be a young lion, a lion
king came and all of the goats ran away (I would too, wouldn’t you?) and they
ran, but the young lion didn’t run. Why should he run? He just stood there and
the lion king came up to him and said, “What are you doing here?” And the only
way he could answer was in goat language, so he bleated and ate grass and the
lion king looked at him and said, “Come with me.” And he found a pool of water
that was absolutely still so that when you looked down into it you could see
your face. It was like a mirror. It was like a glass and the lion king looked
into it and the young lion looked into it. The young lion wasn’t sure what he
was looking at, so the lion king was very patient and finally with a paw he
pointed out, that’s who I am and with a paw he pointed out, that’s who you are
and all of the sudden, the young lion saw and understood. He understood who he
was supposed to be and his great, huge paws began to paw the earth and then he
put his back up and his head up and he roared. That’s lion language! And all
of the trees began to clap their hands and all of the hills began to sing
because the little lion cub had found out who he was supposed to be. He wasn’t
supposed to be a goat.
When we come to meeting God and in what we call as big
folks spiritual things, we are all like lion cubs and we have been adopted by a
world of goats out there. We use a long word, we call it secular and it means
to organize your life as if God doesn’t exist and we grow up fitting in. We
grow up thinking like they think. We grow up drifting like they drift, acting
like they act, feeling like they feel; we even talk like they talk and most of
all, most of all, when we get to be young lions and lionesses, we want to fit
in. We want everybody to like us and then one day Jesus Christ walks in. He
shows up. He’s the one the Bible calls ‘The Lion of the Tribe of Judah,’ and He
takes us to a pool of water so we can look at ourselves and say, “That’s what I
am and that’s what I’m supposed to be,” and you know what that pool of water
is? It’s your Bible. Now I know it’s not water, but it’s just like a pool of
water you can see yourself in and that’s why we give you a Bible, boys and
girls, because you see, you have to have something to look at yourself and to
say this is what I’m supposed to be. Otherwise, you’re going to spend all of
your life being a goat and drifting with the crowd.
Now where are we going to find this? We’re going to find
it in the Bible and let me talk about it by talking about how God breathes on
us; now let’s practice breathing. We did it last week, let’s do it again. Are
you ready? You don’t have to do anything except sit and breathe and you can do
that because you’ve already been doing that, but let’s do it all together.
Breathe in – hold it, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out; there you go! Now
this time, breathe in God and when you breathe out say, “Thank you Lord!” Do it
again – breathe in God and say “Thank you Lord!” Now this time we’re going to
do it all together when we breathe in we’ll be silent, but when we breathe out
all together let’s say “Thank you Lord!” Okay, here we go, breathe in. Breathe
out, “Thank you Lord!” That’s a good way to get God in your head and quit being
a goat!
Now there are three times in which it is said God breathes
and I want you boys and girls and mamas and daddies and grandmama’s and
granddaddy’s to turn please to the very first time and that’s in Genesis. This
is the first time that the Bible speaks of God breathing, “And the Lord God
formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life and the man became a living being.” Other translations say, “He
became a living soul.” Now, every time the Bible says, “God breathed,”
something new happens, something added, a new possibility exists. You see, when
God breathed into Adam, Adam ceased to be simply like an animal or like a bird
or like a fish. Now birds and animals and fish are very important and we need
to be sure we don’t destroy them, but there’s a difference between an animal, a
bird, and a fish and you. Obviously! Have you ever heard a little animal
saying, “I better put my coat on! My mama said on the way to school I’ll need
it!” No! Because animals, although they may be taught by their parents don’t go
to school. When the robins migrate south to where it’s warm, they got cool this
year didn’t they? When they fly south and they are together in a group, one of
them doesn’t say, hey this year guys lets go to the Bahamas. No! There’s a
difference between us and the animals.
Now let’s go to the second time and that’s a long ways into
the Bible and it’s the gospel of John chapter 20. You see what’s happening here
is that Jesus has been raised from the dead and we celebrate that on Easter and
then He comes to His disciples and in verse 22 of chapter 20, “After He said
this, He showed them His hands and His side (that’s verse 20), and then Jesus
said (in verse 21) peace be with you as the Father has sent me, I am sending
you. And with that, He breathed on them and He said, receive the Holy Spirit.”
Now you see boys and girls and mamas and daddy’s, when we receive Jesus into our
hearts, we receive His living spirit, which we call the Holy Spirit and that
Holy Spirit comes to live within us from then on.
Now, the third time is Second Timothy 3:16. You see, when
Adam got the breath of God he became a human being. When the disciples received
the breath of God as the Holy Spirit they became Christians. They became
followers of Jesus and they were different. They weren’t goats anymore. The
third one is about the Bible and it says in 3:16, “All scripture is God breathed
and it is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in
righteousness.” I’m going to read it again, “All scripture is God breathed and
is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”
Please notice that each one of these has something added. If you’ve never
received Christ as your personal Savior you can take Adam’s breath, but not the
disciples breath and if you’re a disciple and follower of Jesus Christ, but
you’ve never taken reading the scripture seriously, you’re not there yet, which
is what this sermon is all about. You see, we’ve been talking about spiritual
fitness and you can’t be spiritually fit without the breath of God continually
nurturing and filling your spiritual life.
Now Paul gives us four words that scripture does for us and
the first one is ‘it teaches us.’ Those who sense the breath of God are
teachable and as you read the Bible it isn’t how much you read, it is how much
you listen. As you read the Bible it’s not how much you grasp, it’s how much
the Bible grasps you. As you read the Bible, it’s not only how much you know,
but in humility to discover how much you don’t know. Jesus said to the students
of scripture in His day, “You search the scriptures and you think in them you
have eternal life, but you don’t listen to the scriptures because if you
listened to the scripture you would discover me and if discover me, you discover
the words of life.”
The second word is the word ‘rebuke or correction.’ Those
who sense the breath of God are willing to be corrected by the spirit of God.
It is a frightening thing to face yourself and realize that the problem is not
your spouse, your job, your boss, it isn’t your culture, it’s you! Strong
spiritual people have lived in virtually every situation and become overcomers.
How? Because they have realized that the real answer was within. When they and
God got together, Martin Luther used to spend hours in the confessional and his
fellow monks asked him what he was doing all of that time spent and it’s a good
question. After all, he was in a monastery. What are you going to confess?
That you sang off key during the hymn? That you got to breakfast late? But you
see, Martin Luther really believed with all of his heart that he ought to love
God with all of his heart, mind, strength and soul and his neighbor as himself
and he knew he didn’t do it for five minutes a day. Being able to listen and to
be corrected, please understand that’s part of the Bible’s function in your
life. The Bible is a coach on fitness.
The third word is to let the breath of God straighten us
out. You see, the word here means, its translated ‘correction,’ but the word is
to straighten up. It is the picture of somebody who has a heavy load on his
back. There’s a heavy load on his back and its getting heavier all the time and
that heavy load is made up of pride, its made up of judgmentalism, made up of
just being all about us and what this says is the Bible can show you how to get
rid of that ugly weight on our back to where you can stand straight like the
lion did and finally know who you’re supposed to be.
The final word that is used is the word ‘training.’ Have
you noticed, mamas and daddy’s that in Paul’s four words teaching is at one
bookend and training is at the other bookend. The Bible is the great teacher if
we’ll listen and the great equipper if we’ll pay attention but in between, in
order to get to the bookends we have to take seriously what is in our hearts.
My sister, who now wrestles with breast cancer as many of
you know and some of you have already had that challenge, her name is Verva.
It’s a strange name; you’ve never heard it before, have you? Neither have I
except with her. You say, where did she get that name? I don’t know and I
know. I don’t know where it comes from originally – V-E-R-V-A, not Verna, but
Verva, but I do know where she got it for my sister. You see, my mother became
a Christian when she was a young adult, right before she met my father she
became a Christian and her Sunday school teacher was the most important person
in her life. Her Sunday school teacher led her to the Lord, said to her you can
be something for the Lord if you’ll let yourself and introduced her to my
father. When my mother was privileged to have a little daughter, she wanted to
name her daughter after the most important person in her life and it was her
Sunday school teacher. Isn’t that a marvelous witness? I wish I had met that
woman, but of course she was gone when I came along and grew up and was old
enough to meet her.
Our Lord still breathes upon people and makes them teachers
and these teachers make all the difference in our lives. Let’s see what the
Lord said through the scripture. He said that the Bible is to be our teacher,
our corrector, the one that straightens us out, and the one who trains us for
what we can do. I want to ask you a very personal question. How often do you
open the Bible and let God breathe on you? It still happens you know.
Her name was Elaine. She was upset that her daughter came
home and said, “Somebody talked to me about God today. Now Elaine was not in
good shape. Her life was in many ways a shambles, but she did not want and with
gritted said, “I don’t want any words about God being spoken in this house.”
But on a night desperate she got up, found an old family Bible and sitting down
in the middle of the living room she began to read and she noticed there was an
old part and a new part and she said to herself, the new part must be the
updated part and I’ll start reading there. By the way, that’s not a bad way to
look at it – that the New Testament is the updated part! And as the New
Testament begins with Matthew, that’s where she began and she read until 3 in
the morning. When she came then to the middle of the gospel of John and as she
confessed later, I became completely attracted to the character of this person
called Jesus. And in the middle of that morning hour at 3 o’clock in the
morning she prayed, “I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know if you’re a God
out there, but I know you are what I want if you’re like Jesus was.”
You see what happens? God breathed through her, through
the Bible and brought her to where she found Jesus as her personal Savior.
Amazing! Yes, but no!, because that could happen to you every day of your
life. To open this book and let God breathe upon you through His word.
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