Welcome to the In Touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Friday, October 16th. How often do you find yourself struggling with God's plan when life doesn't unfold the way you expect? Today's message addresses that inner conflict we experience when God allows the unexpected. I believe that prayer is the greatest defense. And the most powerful offensive weapon when you and I are facing conflict and persecution, and all of us are going to face it.
I also believe it is the avenue by which you and I can walk through difficult, troublesome, trying times in our life, and in spite of everything going on around us, have a perfect peace that even we cannot understand. And is that not what Paul said when he said? That we are not to be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving to let our requests be made known to Him, and He says the peace of God will just garrison us around and guard us and keep us, no matter what's happening about us. But likewise, I believe that prayer turns our persecution into the most profitable preparation for future blessing and future ministry.
So that God always uses our troublesome, trying heartaches and persecution for something that is good, and whatever we're going through today, God will use as preparation for our service and our ministry for Him in the future. I'm sure that some of you are hurting today for different reasons. Maybe some need in your life or something in your family. Maybe in your church where you're pastoring, those folks don't think you give them enough time. And you have the struggle of being in school and being a pastor and meeting their needs and meeting your family's needs and all the things that you have to face.
So the question is, how are you going to respond? Are you going to run? Are you going to fight back? Are you going to use the most powerful weapon you can use? When I came to Atlanta, I came as an associate pastor.
The pastor had been there for about sixteen years. And I came as an associate pastor to sort of help with the young people. I was there a year, and the pastor left. Immediately, those folks who had called me began to talk about me being the pastor. But there was one man in that group of seven men who said, "Over my dead body!" Will he be the pastor?
That man convinced all of these others that I absolutely should not be the pastor. And so they set out by November of that year, and the pastor left in September to get rid of me.
So it immediately drove me to my knees. I thought, God, how am I to respond to this? And then, as the weeks and the months went on, all kinds of things happened. And one of the most difficult things I had to get over was this. People that I had seen stand up in the in the in the sanctuary and say, "I've learned more about God's words since Charles Stanley's been here than I have all of my life." Who would hug me one Sunday, and this is literally truth, and the next Sunday would walk by me at the altar and refuse to speak—that I could not understand.
Men that I had great confidence in. Whom I felt betrayed me. One man whom I thought, if I ever saw a fellow that I would like to be my dad, since my father passed away when I was seven months of age, he was the kind of man who betrayed me in the most difficult situation. And so I found myself facing something I'd never faced before. And the only thing I knew to do is what I'd always done, is to retreat to God.
Lord, what shall I do? And so for about a year, I just lived on my face, day after day, because I did not ever know what was going to happen next. And these folks would put me in situations that were absolutely indescribable. They would take me to lunch and try to trick me. Take me to lunch and make me offers.
And on one occasion, when one of these fellows that I love so dearly said to me, "If you will go away on vacation in July and not come back, here's what we will do," and he gave me this long list of things he would do, my first response was to be angry. My second response was to weep, and the reason my response was to weep is what I would weep over was the fact that he thought that I was that type of person that thousands of dollars and knew this and knew that could buy off my obedience to God when He is the man. Who pushed me above all the rest to be the associate pastor because he believed in what I stood for? I want to tell you, you're going to get hurt. You're going to get disappointed by people, whom you have great confidence in.
I want to tell you that up front. You can't avoid it. It's what you do with it that really matters. And so God just kept driving me back to my knees. And so I had to wrestle with some really difficult things, and I found out that the place you battle your battles is not in the pulpit, not on the church floor of a business meeting, but on your face before God, by yourself in the prayer room.
That's where you win the battle. And I want to tell you something: in persecution, you learn some things about God, and you learn some things about yourself. And I learned some things about myself I didn't like, and I knew that when it was all over, no matter what, that more than likely God was going to use all of that to begin to deal with me, to do some things in my life that probably He may not have ever been able to do without surfacing some attitudes and feelings that I'd had probably lying dormant all of my life.
So we went on with this ballot, got worse and worse, and they sent a couple of trial lawyers to me to try to break me down. And my response was always the same: God sent me here. When God tells me to leave, I'll be happy to leave. And so things got tougher and tougher and hotter and hotter. And I would come home in the day, and my family—they would want to know what happened today, Dad.
You know how kids are. They were like. Andy was about eleven years of age, and Beck was eight, and they couldn't wait to suffer because they wanted to know what was the next round and who did I think was winning? You know how kids are. And so, I would always share with them what was going on, and we'd always pray about it, so that every night, you know, that was what was on their heart, and.
That was the thing they were concerned about. Naturally, they didn't like me being hurt, and so naturally, also they watched my response. And sometimes we think, well, you know, these things just destroy families. They could, if you don't include them, if you don't involve them, and if you don't pray together. And my kids grew up watching all this happen, and they learned something.
That you obey God, no matter what the consequences, and when you do, God will always honor that.
Now they could have fired me, but here's what the Lord showed me: You win either way, because the issue is not whether you be the pastor or not. The issue between you and me is whether you obey me or not. That's the issue. Whether you win or whether you lose, if you obey me, you still win. And if you can just remember that, if you obey God, you always win.
You never lose. It doesn't make any difference what happens. You always win when you humbled yourself before Him. You don't fight back. You don't defend yourself.
You retreat to prayer, and God will show you step by step what you to say, what you not to say. And you say, "Well, suppose you had gotten fired.
So what? If I'm in the center of God's will, that is the only safe place in the world to be. Not in the security of a pastorate." Not in the security of some denomination, but in the security of the will of God. That's the only place to be. As a result of all of that, after all that, God began to work in my life, and He began to peel back some things in my life and to show me some areas of my life that were not all they should have been.
Things that I grew up with, attitudes. Opinions, and so it's like when God took me through all of that, I knew that somehow He was going to bless me, and He was going to prosper me as a result of taking me through it. I didn't know how, and I certainly would not have guessed the way in which He did it.
So as the years went by, the church began to grow, and I had no complaints and. And everything has just moved right along, and I saw how God has worked so beautifully. It's like then, sort of, God turned it all on me.
Well, it's time for us to examine you. And as the years went by, God began to peel off layer after layer of old Charles Stanley. And I want to share a simple illustration. And the reason I want to share it with you is because it's very important that you and I are emotionally healthy. As pastors, we'll take out our frustrations and our anxieties, and the things that are deep down inside of us that God wants to deal with.
We'll take them out on other people if we don't deal with them with God.
So all through these years, God was dealing with me, and He was blessing me. Everything on the outside was so good. Internally, I knew that he was heading in some direction, peeling off layers of my life, and showing me areas that I need to deal with—not necessarily sins in my life, but things that I grew up with. Terrible sense of rejection when my stepfather came upon the scene. I was number three in the family, and naturally, all of this stuff that went on at First Baptist was wholesale rejection for me.
And God knew that I had to deal with that.
So I was preaching in a conservative Baptist, a pastors' conference out in Oregon, and these fellas were so hungry. I'd finished the message one night, and I'd preached about an hour. They said, "No, don't quit now. We got plenty of time. All we're going to do is go to bed.
Just keep talking." So. Think that night I'd preached about an hour and forty-five minutes, and we were having a wonderful fellowship. I'd go back to my room, and I was miserable. And I knew that my hunger was for God, to know the Lord Jesus Christ, and to be obedient to Him. And I couldn't put my finger on any single thing in my life that I could say, "There, that's it." It frustrated me.
I stayed in the Word. I cried. I fasted. I prayed. I did everything I knew to do.
It's like it just kept hanging in there.
So that week, I came home after being out there with those men, a wonderful spirit. Friday night, when I got home, I thought, God, I've got to find out what this is.
So I called four of my friends whom I had a lot of confidence in. They live in all. All of them live in four different parts of this country. I explained to them the frustration that I had. That God was blessing me.
I couldn't put my finger on anything, but I knew that God was bringing me to a critical point in my life that I could not define.
So I said to them, "Would you be willing to meet me and let me just share my whole life, and maybe God can identify something that I can't put my finger on?" And so we met, and I said to them, "I said now, what I'd like to do is this. I'd like to tell you my life story from the first thing I remember, which is sitting up in the bed with an earache, a kerosene lantern, boarded walls. That's my first remembrance in life, and I want to take you up to this moment. And whatever you tell me to do, I'm going to do it." They said, "Okay." We talked till late. We had a quick dinner.
We came back. We talked. I did the talking. They listened till eleven o'clock. I woke up all during the night.
I wrote seventeen pages, legal size, sleeping and waking up and sleeping and waking up till we started again the next morning, and I talked till about eleven thirty. And then I said, "That's it." So one of these fellows said to me, he asked me a couple of questions about something and. We talked on for about probably no longer than ten minutes. The man that I knew the least said to me, "Charles, put your head on the table and close your eyes." So I totally submitted myself to these four guys. I was older than some of them.
Most of them, in fact, all of them. Come to think of it, he said, "Put your head on the table and close your eyes." So I did. Here's what he said. He said, "Charles, your father. Remember, they died when I was seven months of age.
Your father just picked you up in his arms and hugged you. What do you feel? It's like the dam broke. Without even thinking, I just, I just burst out crying, and I wept." Bitterly for thirty minutes, I couldn't stop. I just couldn't stop.
And finally, somehow, when I got control of myself, he said to me again, "What did you feel?" I said, "I felt loved, warm, and secure." And I broke out crying again. And I cried and I cried until finally, one of them said to me. Why do you think you cried so much? And then it dawned on me what happened. Between God and me was not sin, but something I'd never felt and had never experienced in all of my life.
I could believe Him for big things. I could trust Him for great things. I would be willing to obey Him in anything. But there's one thing I had never been able to do, and never realized it. There was this emptiness between God and me, and when He said, "Your father just picked you up in His arms and hugged you," and I felt loved and warmth and accepted, all of a sudden it hit me.
For the first time in my whole life, I emotionally felt God really loved me. I'd been performing for Him all those years, trying to measure up to what I thought He expected of me, trying to be good and better and the best, all to no avail. And the reason there was the gap is because it wasn't something that I had done wrong. Until he asked me that question, it had never dawned on me that I had never experienced the love of God, nor had I ever been able to accept the fact that God loved me just the way I was, no matter what. My life never been the same since.
When I was able to accept God's acceptance of me.
Something happened about my relationship to everybody else. Criticism, persecution, heartache, troubles, trials. God gave me such a security in my relationship to Him that my walk with Him has been so joyful, so exciting, beyond my comprehension. But I want to tell you, I lived most of my life. Without ever experiencing God's intimate, personal love for me and His acceptance of me, now I say that to you for two reasons.
Some of you had a bad relationship with your father. You'll take it out on your congregation if you don't get it right. You'll fight all authority in your church if you don't get it right. You'll develop a rebellious spirit in your church if you don't get it right. You'll have to control them in order to feel secure.
And only when you get things right, a thing's going to be right. And then there may be somebody here, and you know in your heart, you've been trying to perform too. You've been trying to measure up to God's love and His His great expectations of you. He doesn't have any. And when you realize that, you get free.
You see, it's the security of knowing that we're accepted by Him just the way we are, and that He loves us absolutely and unconditionally. That makes it possible for us to walk through circumstances with great triumph. Great confidence, great assurance, and then the prayer takes on a whole different perspective. If God has surfaced something in your heart this week or this morning that you've never dealt with, never even thought about dealing with, I want to encourage you: don't go to sleep tonight without at least beginning to deal with it. Because I can tell you that your future effectiveness for God is dependent upon it.
If God has surfaced anything in your life this week and He said to you, "You need to deal with that," listen to me carefully. If He's surfaced something in your life and He said you need to deal with that, the power of the Holy Spirit. The unction and the anointing of God will not flow through your life to the maximum of its potential until you deal with it. You can get by, but I want to ask you one last question: Do you want to spend your ministry getting by, or do you want God's very? Very best.
Then make obedience the bottom line of all your decisions. Thank you for listening to part two of prayer and conflict. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our online twenty four seven station. And if you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or Intouch Ministries, stop by intouch dot org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
