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Just Do It
A sermon
preached by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, April 10, 2005
I invite your attention
to Matthew the 6th chapter. I will be reading various of the verses,
just kind of skip along with me. The Sermon on the Mount begins with chapter 5,
concludes at the end of chapter 7. At the beginning of chapter 6, “Be careful
not to do your acts of righteousness before men to be seen of them; if you do,
no reward in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce with
trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets.” Verse 3,
“When you give to the needy do not let your left hand know what your right hand
is doing.” Sounds like my golf swing. “So that your giving may be in secret,
then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you
pray, do not be like the hypocrites. They love to pray standing in the
synagogues and on the street corners.” Verse 6, “When you pray, go into your
room, or your closet. Close the door, pray to your Father who is unseen and
then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.” Then you
will notice the Lord’s Prayer is in the middle of that. Come now to 16, “When
you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their
faces. Verse 18, “Don’t let it be obvious that you are fasting. Only to your
Father who is unseen and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward
you.” This is the word of the Lord.
Gladys and Myrtle were
two who lived in a retirement center and they decided they would go to the store
– they needed some supplies. As they were walking to where the cars were
parked, Myrtle said to Gladys, “I’ll drive today.” Gladys was delighted. She
didn’t like to drive much anymore. So they got in the car. When they got to
the first intersection, Myrtle ran the red light and Gladys got big eyed. When
they got to the second intersection, Myrtle ran the red light. When they got to
the third intersection, Myrtle ran the red light and Gladys said, “Myrtle, you
have run through three red lights! And Myrtle said, you mean I’m driving!”
Hold that in your mind when do you mean I’m driving?
We’ve all been moved by
the grief shown throughout the world at the passing of Pope John Paul II. The
media has been absolutely transfixed by it all. A hundred nations have sent
representatives. In our own nations case, you’re aware, that President and Mrs.
Bush have gone as well as President Clinton and the first President Bush plus
Senators and the like. I expect that this is probably the largest, single,
religious media exposure in all of history. People have been glued to the
television sets. They have looked in newspapers. They have listened on the
radio. We gather with our Christian brothers and sisters who are Roman
Catholics in the grief that they feel. I have to just be grateful that for once
the media of all of the world was not centered in a war or a scandal or a
wedding taking place in Britain or the Master’s golf tournament. It was
centered; it was centered on the passing of a genuine Christian pastor. But I
miss some things. I miss the fact that there were no layman and you see, in the
New Testament there is no difference between clergy and layman – they are all on
the same level and besides that, I really, truly believe we’re living in the age
of the layperson. And I miss the fact that there were no women. To be sure,
there were some in the congregation and some who were commentators on
television, but participating there were none. There were a few non-white
faces, but not many and I miss that. I love the fact that our church is open to
all races and all colors and it doesn’t matter where you were born. And you
see, all of the statistics are telling us that by the year 2010, certainly by
the year 2020, the majority of Christians will live south of the equator.
But I guess what I miss
most was the fact that it was priest-driven. Since the Protestant Reformation,
and we Baptists were part of that, it has been part of the absolute foundation
of our response to the Lord Christ that every Christian is his or her own
priest. You’re in the driver’s seat. You’re behind the wheel when it comes to
priesting. Not only do you not need to go through your pastor, through your
deacons, through your friends; you must take seriously you are your own priest
before the Lord Christ.
Simon Peter for whom the
Basilica is named; Simon Peter wrote in his first letter to those who were the
earliest Christians and he said to them and these are lower economic class
people, most of whom had no education and he wrote, “You are a royal
priesthood.” No gender. It is a good time for me to say to you, have you
lately taken seriously this gift that the Lord Jesus has given to you that you
can go immediately to the Lord God, not through anybody and you can as you
approach the Lord God walk as the Hebrew says, “Boldly before the throne of
grace,” and therefore receive His strength, His honor and His forgiveness?
As you look at your own
life, I ask during these subsequent weeks to realize that of all of the
wonderful titles that have been given, the title they most gave Jesus was
‘teacher.’ Now if you’re going to be your own priest before God the Father and
made possible through Jesus Christ our Lord, how do you do that? How do you
learn to be your own priest? How do you gain boldness to walk before the throne
of grace? Well, I think that’s what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 6,
because in Matthew 6, He talks about the three pillars of first century religion
and although we might want to change a little bit of the framework in which we
would say them, they are the same for us; praying, giving, and fasting. If you
will take seriously this morning the possibility that being your own priest
means you ask three questions, how do I connect with God? Praying. What do I
need to give up? Fasting. How am I going to help? Giving. Just as relevant
today when it was when the Great Teacher taught. He was the teacher with that
unique mixture – Son of Man, Son of God. Because He knew what it was to be
human, He could address our inmost needs. Because He came from heaven itself,
He could sprinkle; weave in that which was of the wisdom of eternity; Son of
Man, Son of God, the Great Teacher.
Let’s look at the three,
praying. Jesus says, when you pray go into your secret place; your closet that
you’ve shut the door. There are for all of us two ways in which we pray outside
of the church. The first one is you pick a place; maybe early morning, maybe
late night, maybe mid-day, but you pick a place and you say, this is my place.
Other people may use it, but this is my place and when I sit here and I open the
scripture and I read the scripture for the day and I lift my heart up to the
Lord God, it is as if I’ve closed everything else out. Praying. Closet space.
But there’s another way and all of us have done this. We make a closet deep in
our hearts. We may be driving down a road. Please don’t close your eyes, just
keep them wide open but start praying and just invite the Lord into your heart.
Invite the Lord and talk to Him about what you’re thinking about; it doesn’t
matter what you’re thinking about, He knows it anyway. If it’s something
embarrassing, He knows it anyway – go ahead and share it with Him. Most of all,
we go to Him with our needs, don’t we, and our fears and our anxieties and it is
an incredible gift if you can seize it to just walk into His presence at any
time, at any place with any thing and share it with him. You see, you have the
great gift of being your own priest and imagining your own altar.
Now there are some of
you who would say, you know, I’ve tried praying. I just can’t do it. My mind
wanders all over the place. Well, shake hands with the human race. Everybody’s
mind wanders all over the place – that’s true of our minds. We are multi-tasked
and we have things going through our mind in all directions. Let me tell you
how to pray. When your mind wanders to something say, “Oh, that’s what I ought
to be praying about.” It’s usually a worry or an anxiety or a fear or a concern
– POW! Go right over there and start praying about it and every time your mind
wanders, you see you’ve got this idea this is what I ought to be praying about
and your mind keeps doing…and your going through red lights over here when God’s
trying to get you to pay attention to green lights over here. Pray what your
mind goes to and share it with the Lord.
The second of these is
giving. In that day and time they made a big show out of how much they gave and
the way they did that, they had some brass, they called them trumpets. They
were kind of round things that went around and if you put your coin and
everything was coins in those days because they didn’t have any paper money, put
the coin in the top if it was a heavy coin lots of noise on the way down; if you
are addicted to attention that’s a good way to get it. If you’re feeling that
you’ve just been overlooked that’s a good way to get it, but Jesus said, “When
you pray or when you give do it in secret.” And then He gives you a bonus –
they’re not too many bonuses you get for being secret, but this one is. If you
go to the Lord in secret, the promise is He will reward you openly. But there
are a lot of ways to give other than money. You can give time. You can give
your gift, your talent. Not only that, you can give your attention, your
encouragement, your pat on the back, your smile in the office that you work; you
see, a priest not only is a priest to himself or herself, but a priest dispenses
grace. Are you a dispenser or grace? That’s how you give if you’re your own
priest. You are a receiver of grace and a dispenser of grace; a receiver of
forgiveness and a dispenser of forgiveness and so on.
And the third one of
these…fasting. I saw where Virginia is one of the states that leads the nation
in being overweight. Didn’t that strike you as funny when you read it in the
newspaper? Fasting; if I say fasting to you, you immediately think food,
carbohydrates, and calories. Look at it this way. Fasting is not doing
something that is corroding your spiritual self.
A man by the name of
Pennington, who wrote a book called ‘Centering Prayer,’ has in the middle of
that a chapter that is intriguing because of the book. I mean the book is on
centering prayer, but he has this chapter in which he tries to get you to spell
out what you are having as a goal in life. What do you want to happen? What
are your desires and dreams to happen? The second question is – what from your
experience is going to keep you from letting it happen? Now there you’re with
something that is worthy of fasting. Fast from that which is keeping you from
your relationship to God, your relationship to your dreams, your relationship to
what God wants out of your life.
Let me tell you a little
bit about some experiences that I have in fasting. Jesus says, don’t share it
and I honor that, but maybe He will forgive me if I share how not to do it. One
of my pet ways of praying is to find myself worrying about the future and what
I’m doing in that is I’m forsaking the instructions of the Lord God and our Lord
Jesus. This is the day that the Lord has made, rejoice and be glad in it. The
wonderful prayer, O God, our future is in your hands, help us to give ourselves
to the duty of the present moment. To be able to say to the Lord God, God, I’m
not going to try to manage what I’m going to give to you, which is my tendency.
I go to the Lord and say, now Lord, you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but this
is how, if I were you, I’d handle it this way. How about fasting from that and
letting the Lord have the future? Exercising your trust muscles and your heart
that reaches out to trust.
Look at the three
questions again – how do I connect with God? Prayer. Anybody here who could
say I pray enough? As your own priest, pray. What do I need to give up?
Fasting. What am I going to do to help? I’m going to give of myself, giving.
You say to me, oh my goodness sakes alive, all of that is wonderful, but I’ve
tried it and it doesn’t work for me. I’m bruised, I’m beaten, or…somehow or
another I can’t get to it.
Have you ever heard of
the island of Crakatoa near Java – 1883, July, the volcano on the island started
to tremble and in August it exploded. The ash went five miles high. The south
pacific was covered with a dark ash for many months and the island was virtually
destroyed. The volcano created a tsunami and thousands of people lost their
lives. For five years nobody visited that island and then came the rumor –
would you send some scientists out there? We think we see birds flying over and
we think we see some greenery. They sent the scientists and sure enough, the
birds were flying over and everywhere they looked there were little budding
green plants that had somehow risen through all of the ashes. It reminds me of
the Song of Solomon which says, “Behold the winter has past. The singing of the
birds has come and flowers appear on the face of the earth.”
Listen to me, whatever’s
happened to you, God can do something with it and grow something new. On this
day do you need to say yes to the Lord for the very first time? Do you need a
church home? Just do it! Most of all, if you’re a Christian already and you’ve
walked with the Lord for some months or years, what does the Lord want out of
you in the area of praying or giving or fasting? Just do it!
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