Southpaw Savior

Welcome Summit Church at our campus locations in Raleigh-Durham. Happy Valentine's Day weekend. If you are in a relationship and you are just now realizing that for the first time, you are in deep trouble.

But I hope that you have had a good one. Just out of curiosity at all of our campuses, how many lefties do we have? How many Southpaws? Raise your left hand, that's the right one.

At all campuses, there we go. If, let's see, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, or Barack Obama had been in the audience, they would have had their hand raised at this point. Several of our pastors got into a big discussion the other day as to whether it is, in general, an advantage or disadvantage to be left-handed. One guy on our team, who is himself a lefty, says the disadvantages are pretty obvious. He said we live in a right-hand world, there's just no way around that. He said, as a kid, when I had to learn to write, it was always smearing ink across the page.

Most scissors felt really awkward in my hand and still do. And he said, good luck finding a golf club that works. He said, there are things that you right-handed people just take for granted, you never think about. He said, like when I hold my playing cards, I can't see the numbers on the edge of the playing cards because they're made for people holding them in the right hand.

Or a loaf of bread, when you're trying to cut a loaf of bread, you never think about it, but you're cutting it from the right. He said, we have to cross our hands, a multiple choice test, I cover up the answers as I'm trying to check what multiple choice I want to choose. He said, or zippers, you've never thought about this, righty? He said, when you zip your pants every morning, there's a little flap that makes it nearly impossible for a left-handed person to zip up their pants without it being awkward.

He got so animated about it, I said, I think you're a little bitter, I think we need to do some counseling. The advantages are not as obvious, but they are there. Lefties are more likely statistically to be geniuses. You have a greater chance of having an IQ over 140 if you are a lefty.

What is the correlation? No one has any idea, but it is true. In most sports, opponents are not used to the movements that a southpaw brings, so it introduces an element of surprise.

This is what made Rocky Balboa great as he was. Seeing underwater, not kidding, I have no idea why, but left-handers can see much better underwater than right-handed people. So if you're going to play underwater hide and seek, choose a left-handed person to be on your team. Throughout history, it's pretty undeniable that left-handedness has been considered to be a weakness.

How people have treated this has ranged from the comical to the cruel. The Latin word for left is sinister, which also means evil. The French word for left is gauche, which means awkward. Even the English word left comes from an old English derivation that means weak. When I lived in Southeast Asia, when parents there would have a kid that was left-handed, whenever they'd use their left hand, they'd always smack their hand and say, which means don't use your left hand. Now to us, that seems absurd. It seems like that's, again, from the comical to the cruel. So you look back through history and you see that at various times, left-handedness has been seen to be a weakness.

Obviously, that's not true. But believe it or not, that concept of left-handedness plays an important role in teaching us how God works in the world. One of Israel's first judges was a Southpaw. The story that we're going to look at today is about a man named Ahud. Do you have a Bible? Judges chapter three contains his story, so begin to open it there. As you're opening, before I really jump into his story, I want to show you a little phrase that the author of Judges uses to set up these stories because it shows you how God wants you to interpret these stories and how they apply to your life. So he introduces the stories of the judges like this in Judges chapter three, verse one.

Watch very closely. Now these are the nations that the Lord left to test Israel by them. That is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars of Canaan. Remember, Israel had come in and there was all these Canaanites there and God had promised to give them the land. And when Joshua died, there were still some left. Verse two, It was in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before. What is the answer to the question of why God had left all these pockets of Canaanites in the land? Well, in one sense, the answer was that first generation of Israelites had not believed God enough to drive them out, right?

That's what we saw last week. But did you see in those verses a couple of other reasons why he did? Verse one, do you see that?

He left the nations there to test them. Verse two, It was in order that new generations might learn to fight wars in God's strength. Imagine that you were an Israelite child and you'd just gotten back from Sunday school, or I guess Sabbath school. And so you asked your dad, you said, Dad, today we learned that God had promised to give the Canaanite land to us. And your dad says that is correct, but Dad, there are all these pockets of Canaanites still in our land, why are they still there? And your dad says, well that first generation, Grandma and Grandpa and Great Grandma and Great Grandpa, they didn't believe God enough to drive them out, that's why they're there. And so you, as the inquisitive child, responds, you say, but Dad, that's not our fault. Their sin is not our sin, so after our great grandparents or grandparents died, why didn't God just drive them out for us?

You know, like through swarms of tracker jackers or hurt a wild billy goat or something like that. And the answer, if the dad knew Judges 3.1 would be, he did that to test us, to see if we would choose God, to see if we would learn to trust him to fight for us. Let me ask you, do you ever wonder why God doesn't just cure us from sin the moment that we are saved? I know some people that when they become Christians, it's like whatever they were addicted to, bam, just gets turned off.

But more people I know continue to struggle, sometimes for the rest of their lives, against these same temptations. Why does God do that? Why doesn't God make us immediately pain free?

Why not go ahead and take us to heaven? According to Judges 3.1 and 2, it is to teach us to rely on his grace, to teach us to fight in his strength. The Apostle Paul said that God leaves trials and weaknesses in our lives to keep us humble. Sometimes, listen to this, God will allow you to struggle with a lesser sin, like anger or lust, in order to keep you from a greater sin, maybe the greatest sin, and that is pride. Because if God suddenly cured all of your sinful tendencies in one kind of fell swoop the moment you got saved, you would probably get really proud and think that you just dripped with spiritual awesomesauce and that you were really something that people ought to admire. So God allows you to continue to struggle because he wants you to learn throughout your life that you are not saved because you became morally perfect.

You are saved as a gift of grace and God will allow these things to continue to plague you so that you will grow ever more dependent on grace because that's what spiritual growth means. John Newton, the writer of Amazing Grace, wrote a letter to a friend 300 or so years ago. He was in his mid 80s when he wrote the letter and what he said to his friend was, he said, now in my mid 80s I always thought that by this point in my life I would have been much farther past these sinful temptations that I dealt with in my 20s and 30s. But I look at my life now in my 80s and these temptations, many of them have gotten worse, not better. He said if spiritual progress is measured by you being free from temptations, he says I'm actually spiritually regressed, not spiritually progressed. He said but I realize now that what real spiritual growth is, is growing with an ever greater sense of wonder at the grace that God has used to save you. And I know that God has allowed these temptations to continue in my life and I would till my dying breath know that I am saved by amazing grace.

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Do you understand that about your life? Do you understand that's what spiritual growth is?

It's continuing to learn that God's grace is what you are crediting the victory to and that God allows you to struggle that way? Sometimes one of our pastors, Pastor Rick Langston at the North Durham campus, he's in his mid 50s, we were talking this week and he said I was cleaning out one of my attics and he said I came across a thing of journals that I'd written when I was in my 30s. He said and I started to read back through them and remembered why I quit journaling. He said I quit journaling because every year I just rewrote the same struggles over and over again so my last entry is see previous year for the future. He said you ever feel like that?

You ever feel like it just continues to cycle? That's because God is wanting to humble you and teach you what it means to fight in his strength and rely on his grace. I've told you before that our first years, I told you last week, our first couple of years of marriage there were some rough spots to say the least in my marriage and I couldn't figure out why that was happening because I thought well hey I know God, I love God, she loves God, we should just have a perfect marriage and from this point now I realize looking back that one of the things God was doing is he was humbling us, humbling me because he knew that one day when I would talk to some of you in marriage problems he didn't want me standing up here on stage thinking well you just don't know enough of the Bible and you're not awesome like me and that's why you struggle. He wanted me to know that my sinful flesh is the same thing as your sinful flesh and that what I really needed is God's grace and to boast in his grace and not in my strength. So God allows us to go through these chapters so that the glory will be his and not ours.

That's what sets up the story in chapter 3. So if you look down in verse 12 you'll see the story of Ehud. Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and because they did this evil they gave Eglon king of Moab power over Israel. Now Eglon was a bad man, his name just sounds bad doesn't it?

Eglon, that just sounds evil to me. For 18 years he raped, pillaged and murdered the Israelites. Again the Israelites cried out to the Lord and he gave them a deliverer, Ehud, a left handed man. Literally it says in Hebrew he could not use his right hand which means he was probably disabled. His right hand maybe had been crushed or was just born withered.

Now this was a society even more cruel to disabled people than our own. So to have a guy whose right hand was useless would have meant that he was thought of as useless. Yet Ehud, Ehud was brave and he was a man of faith. He volunteered to deliver a tribute payment of gold to Eglon. So he loads up his wagon with all this tax money and tribute money and extortion and then he heads off to Eglon but he packs a little surprise. Verse 16, Now Ehud had made a double edged sword about a cubit long, 18 inches or so, which he strapped to his right thigh under his clothing.

This was a concealed carry knife. He presented the tribute to Eglon who was a very fat man. Now that seems like an irrelevant detail doesn't it? A gratuitous insult?

Actually it's not. Verse 18, After Ehud had presented the tribute he said, Your Majesty, I have a secret message just for you. And Eglon was like, ooh, a message, a secret message.

This is like a hidden map on the back of the Declaration of Independence written in invisible ink. He was excited about it. So the king said to his attendants, leave us. And they all left. Maybe he was hoping that Ehud had brought him a snack and he didn't want to share it.

I don't know. By the way, I can't help it but when I depict this scene in my mind, I depict this right here. Right, you get this picture? Luke Skywalker in front of Jabba the Hutt. Verse 20, As the king rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Now Eglon literally did not see this coming. Remember Ehud had a withered right hand so Eglon would not have seen him as a threat. If he had seen him as a threat, he would never have let him in his presence unattended. But this is a disabled guy. He doesn't even have a strong right hand.

So he's no threat. Verse 22, Even the handle sank in after the blade and his bowels discharged. Now the NIV is actually being, the NIV that I'm reading from is actually being a little bit polite there. Literally in Hebrew it says, and the dung came out. That's pretty disgusting, right? It gets even better. Ehud did not pull the sword out and the fat closed in over it. Mmm, meditate on that verse.

Make that your scripture memory verse for the week. I don't even want to imagine what that was like. There was this loud sucking sound and then the blade disappeared. Then Ehud went out to the porch. He shut the doors of the upper room behind him and then he locked them.

After he had gone, the servants came and found the doors of the upper room locked. And they said he must be relieving himself in the inner room of the palace because that's what it smelled like, right? See, previous verse. Verse 25, They waited to the point of embarrassment. At first they, you know, made a few jokes.

Hey, you guys hear any movement in there? No one, you know, but then it got weird. Then it got weird. You can take the boy out of a job a youth pastor, you will never take youth pastor out of the boy, okay? So when he did not open the doors of the room, they took a key and unlocked them. And there they saw their Lord fall into the floor dead. Well, by now Ehud is safely away from the palace and he rallies all the tribes of Israel who amass their armies. They rise up as one against Moab. And Moab in verse 30, A Moab was made subject to Israel and the land had peace for 80 years. Well, again, believe it or not, some of the most essential keys for spiritual victory are found in this rather colorful, slightly off color, somewhat disgusting story. Let me start with the most important.

I have five of them. Number one, this story teaches us that God's savior would come in weakness. God's savior would come in weakness with Ehud. A very important trajectory has just been established in the book of Judges.

And it is a completely unexpected one. The book of Judges, you see, is preceded by the book of Joshua. Joshua had been a mighty general. He led a strong Israelite army. He is exactly what you would think of when you think the ultimate warrior leader.

If I were going to choose someone to play him in a movie, I would choose Russell Crowe from Gladiator. Yet even after a leader in success like that, Israel is still not faithful to God. So just a couple chapters into Judges, the first major story of a judge that we come to after Joshua is Ehud, a left-handed, crippled leader. And at first, he doesn't even fight with an army. He kills Eglon all by himself.

It's only later that the army joins him to fight. If I were casting for Ehud, I would probably use Nicolas Cage. The next judge is going to be Deborah. Deborah is obviously a woman. She is a story that we're going to get to in a couple of weeks. She partners up with a somewhat cowardly man named Barak.

For this, I would choose Meryl Streep and Ben Affleck. This story is fascinating in how it elevates women, which I'm going to show you, but it shattered. I mean, at the very least, we see it shatters common Israelite conceptions of strength. That's what they're not thinking of is the replacement for Joshua. And whereas Joshua and Ehud lead all the tribes into battle, you're going to see that Debbie and Barak only lead two tribes.

Ten of them stay at home and only two go. After that, we come to Gideon, who is a rather timid leader at first and has to be persuaded by God continually to actually go do it. And then after he does, he takes an army of 32,000 and God says, I'm going to whittle that army down from 32,000 to 300.

And with 300, he defeats the entire army of Midianites. For Gideon, I would choose Bradley Cooper. Then we have Samson, who fights all by himself. He is morally a scumbag. And then when it comes time to fight, it's just him, and he whips an entire Philistine army with the jawbone of a donkey.

For him, I would recast Nicolas Cage because that man is a national treasure. After the book of Judges, we come to David. And David, when we're introduced to him, is a scrawny shepherd boy who writes poetry and sings songs and plays a harp and defeats a giant with a slingshot.

Of course, for that, we would choose Justin Bieber. Do you see the trajectory going from Joshua to Judges to 1 Samuel? It's a very clear one. We're going from strength to weakness. We're going from Israel winning battles under the direction of a great warrior leader and to the strength of their army to God using a small, weak shepherd boy who defeats the enemy by himself while Israel stands on the sidelines and watches. And this points the way for the most unexpected and the most left-handed, if you will, of all persons, Jesus Christ. Jesus was an unlikely savior. Isaiah, the prophet, said that there was nothing in his appearance that would have attracted us to him. He was despised, in fact, and rejected by men. You would never have looked at Jesus and thought, there, there is the savior of the world.

I hate to burst your bubble, but he probably didn't look like Jim Caviezel. He was poor. He was probably not tall, not great looking, didn't have a commanding presence, and he achieved the victory all alone just like David did on behalf of his people who did not lift a finger to help him. He crushed his people's enemies through his own weakness like Ahud crushed Eglon. Just as Ahud's victory was a surprise to Eglon, so Jesus' victory came as a complete surprise to the forces of evil. They literally didn't see it coming. The Roman political leaders and the Jewish religious leaders thought that they had killed him, thought they were done with him.

He was no longer a threat, but when they closed the door on him in death, he pulled out the dagger of resurrection and stabbed the powers of death in the heart. The book of Judges shows you that God is going to send salvation in a way that nobody is expecting and a lot of people are going to miss. The way that Paul said this in the book of 1 Corinthians is Jesus was a stumbling block, is a stumbling block to both the Jews and the Greeks because neither of them saw him coming. You think stumbling block. It's something that's in your path.

You don't see and you trip over it. He said that's what Jesus was. They didn't see him. He was there, but they didn't see him because when the Jews thought about salvation, they were looking for a mighty warrior king who would rise up like Joshua. That's what his name, Jesus and Joshua had the same name, by the way, in Hebrew. He was going to rise up and pull together the armies and overthrow all the Roman oppression.

Greeks were looking for a philosopher king who would educate and enlighten the world and dazzle them through his ability to come up with pithy statements and insight. Nobody expected a savior who would not even own a home and be executed as a criminal in shame. Today, people miss him because we're looking for a different kind of savior. I heard Bart Ehrman who is the skeptic over at UNC Chapel Hill who teaches New Testament. Someone asked him in a debate one time, what would it take to get you to believe in Jesus?

His response? Had he ended all suffering. Had he ended all suffering, I would believe in him. In other words, Jesus is too politically weak to be a real savior from God.

But here's the question. What if Jesus had a different way of defeating evil, a surprising way? Because what if our main problem was not suffering on earth? What if our main problem was separation from God? What if the real tragedy was not that we suffer with cancer, but that we die in the first place? And what if Jesus saved us by removing that curse by suffering that curse in our place on the cross and then stabbing death in the heart with his resurrection so it would never have power over us again? And we would look at the grave and we would say, Death, where is your victory?

Grave, where is your sting? Because the sting of death is sin and the curse of sin is the law and Jesus has abolished them both. Listen, church, the entire Bible points to Jesus, the whole thing, every single story. When people ask me why I believe and trust in the Bible, a lot of times what we point to is prophecy. Prophecy means things in the Old Testament that were written about Jesus before we ever got here. Now there are two kinds of prophecy that are really convincing to me.

The first kind is what you traditionally think of with prophecy. That's where you get these exact details about Jesus coming. Things like the fact that he would die on a cross and he'd be buried with rich people, Isaiah 53. The fact that he would come into Jerusalem riding on the fall of a donkey, Zechariah chapter 9. That he would be betrayed by 30 priests of silver, Zechariah chapter 11. That he would be born of the tribe of Judah, Genesis 49.

That he would be born in the city of Bethlehem, Micah 5-2. And like 290 some others that are really impressive when you put them all together. They are very convincing. I heard one mathematician say the odds of all 300 prophecies just kind of randomly coalescing on one guy is one in 10 to the 20-something power. He said to put that in perspective, he said cover the entire states, the land area of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia in silver dollars, six feet high. And paint one of them randomly red, and just out of all the millions that are in there, billions, trillions.

He said then take a blind man and kind of catapult him in there from somewhere in Maryland and let him choose one of the dollars, silver dollars. The chances of him choosing the one red silver dollar are the same as the chances of all 300 of these prophecies just kind of randomly occurring on Jesus Christ. So yes, it is very impressive when you see the specificity of prophecies. But even more impressive to me, to be honest, is this kind of prophecy where you see that every page of the Bible is telling the same story, one that is completely unique among religions. And that is that our salvation isn't going to come through strength.

It's going to come through weakness and surprise and substitution, not strength and conquest. That is completely unique among religions and it is told on every page of the Bible and fulfilled to the letter in Jesus Christ. He tells us, this story tells us that God's Savior would come in weakness. Number two, this story tells us that God saves us now through the weakness of faith. God saves us now through the weakness of faith. To get this point, you've got to understand that in our lives we're all trying to save ourselves.

Israel in captivity, under the subjugation of cruel forces, gives us a picture of every human being, whether you're religious or not. We all know that we need some kind of salvation that in the promised land of our lives, there are things that aren't right. Now, there are both religious and irreligious ways to seek salvation. Both religious and irreligious people are seeking salvation just in different ways. Religious people try to earn salvation from God by being good enough. If morally they're strong enough, then God will reward them with his blessing.

Irreligious people try to find salvation outside of God, but they use the same approach. They try to be strong enough to obtain meaning and purpose and fulfillment for themselves. So they think, for example, if I'm rich enough, if I'm strong enough financially, if I make enough money, then I'll be safe and happy and fulfilled. So I've got to work all the time so that I can get enough money so I can be there and I can be saved. If I'm a good mother or a good spouse, I'll know that my life has meaning and that I'm worth something because I'll know that people highly regard me, so I'm going to work at that. If I set myself apart, if I distinguish myself above my classmates or my friends or in my career and I just rule them at the top, then I'll know that my life has purpose.

I don't know if you saw it this week, but Madonna is back in the news with some ridiculous outfit that she has worn to some awards thing. When I saw the story, I thought of something I read in Vogue Magazine years ago, which I know raises its own questions for you, but nonetheless, just accept it. Here's what she said. My drive in life comes from a fear of being mediocre. That's what's always pushing me. I push past one spell of it, and I discover myself to be a special human being. But then I feel like I'm still mediocre and uninteresting unless I do something else. Because even though I have become somebody or everybody tells me I've become somebody, I still feel the need to prove that I am somebody. My struggle has never ended, and I guess it never will. Now, regardless of what you think about Madonna, that is a very insightful statement, and it explains why she does ridiculous things like she did the last couple of weeks.

It's not that far from how you and I live. Other people think that if they can just find the right person to love, the myth in their life will have meaning, and then that void will be filled. I remember seeing an interview with Drake a couple of years ago after he'd been nominated for a couple of Grammys. And he said, you know, he said, I sleep with a different woman almost every single night. He says, and I've realized that I'm doing this as a way to try to fill this void. He says, but he says, his words, not mine. The first 15 or 20 seconds after I've had sex are the realest moment that I have in my life because I know it's not working. He said, the next day I'll convince myself that it's gonna work that night.

He said, but that 15 or 20 seconds, he said, is where I know that it's just not working. These are all ways of trying to find salvation, freedom from the bondage of futility and dissatisfaction, the Canaanites of meaninglessness and pain. What the story of Ehud shows you is that God's salvation would come in a different way. It wasn't gonna come through religious strength. It wasn't gonna come through career strength. It wasn't gonna come through beauty. It wasn't gonna come through money.

It was gonna come as a gift. So in Philippians three, Paul starts talking about how he tried to find salvation in both religious and irreligious ways. I'll summarize what he said in Philippians three, but Paul said, first, I tried to find salvation religiously. I thought if I could just be more moral than everybody that I knew, then God would accept me and I would have his blessing. Then I tried to save myself in irreligious ways.

I thought if I could distinguish myself, if I would become the head of my career, top of my class, then I would have meaning and purpose and satisfaction. He says, now though, now what I realize is that all those things that I gave myself to pursue, they're all worthless. They're all, as Greek word, skubala, which literally means dung. Dung has come up a lot in this sermon and I apologize, but it's just what the Bible says.

Those things are all worthless. The right hand of my moral strength, the right hand of my academic strength, it's worthless with God, righteousness, acceptance with God, fulfillment, blessing, all these things I was seeking. He said, they're given as a gift through faith, the weakness of faith.

You just receive it as a gift of mercy. So in first Corinthians, he says that Jews and Greeks stumble over salvation because it looks foolish to them. It's for the weak.

It just looks too easy. The Jews wanna earn it through moral superiority. The Greeks wanted to earn it through mental superiority.

The Romans wanted to earn it through political superiority. But God's righteousness, Paul says, God's wisdom, God's blessing, it's all a gift that you can only receive through the weakness of faith. For God chose what is foolish in the world, Paul says, to shame the wise. What was foolish in the world? Christ was foolish in the world. God used that to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world, Christ, to shame the strong.

God chose what is low and despised in the world, Christ, to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God, that none of us would say, I got here because I was smarter. I was more moral. I was stronger. That we would all say, no, my right hand of strength was wizard. All that I had was my left hand of receiving the promise. Christ Jesus, he says, became to us wisdom from God.

I didn't get this because I ascended the heights of philosophy and figured it out. Jesus Christ gave it to me as a gift. It was righteousness and sanctification. Christ Jesus became righteousness.

I didn't morally work it up. He became sanctification, which means that I'm not even living the Christian life now because of my strength. He's living it through me. He became for me redemption. He gave me all this as a gift so that it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.

Don't you stand on this stage and talk to people about how awesome you are and how much strength you have. It's a gift. Your right hand was withered. Your left hand was available. God took the left hand of faith and he put his strength and power into it. God's blessing, God's victory, God's acceptance can only be received as a gift. Can you abandon your salvation efforts and receive God's blessings, his acceptance, his strength?

Can you receive all that just as a gift? What keeps us from the power of God, what keeps us from the righteousness of God is not the left hand of our weakness. What keeps us from that is the right hand of our strength.

Number three. From the story of Ehud, we see that God mocks those who oppose him. A biblical scholar named Dale Ralph Davis said that most commentators miss the humor of the story and having read several commentators in preparation for this, I would definitely agree with him. Commentators tend to be a stuffy bunch and they don't realize that the story was told with giggles. It's not that it wasn't true. It's just that as they told it, they were mocking Eglon. They would have told it with laughter.

That's why there's all those bizarre details in there. I see two implications for us in that. The first is point number three and that is that we can be assured that God will mock those who oppose him. Charles Spurgeon said to his congregation in 1856, listen to this, he who would place himself in front of a fast-moving train car will be crushed and will be no more foolish than you who are opposing the gospel. If the gospel is true and truth is mighty, then truth must prevail. Who are you to attempt to stand against it? You will be crushed.

But let me tell you, when the railway car, when the train car runs over you, the will will not be raised even an inch by your size. For what are you? A tiny gnat, a creeping worm, which that will will crush to less than nothing and not leave you even a name as having ever been an opponent of the gospel. Let everyone in the world know assuredly that the gospel will win its way. Whatever they may do, poor creatures, their efforts to oppose the gospel are not even worthy of our notice.

And we need not fear they can stop the truth. They're like a gnat who thinks he can quench the sun. Go tiny insect and do it if you can. You will only burn your wings and die. Likewise, there may be a fly who thinks it could drink the ocean dry. Drink the ocean if you can, old fly.

More likely you will sink in it and it will drink you. I'm pretty sure that doesn't really need any explanations. Those who stand against God have a day where they look like they're in charge. They have a day where their taunts seem, seem threatening. But God is working history so that his agenda will be accomplished. His name will be glorified. And those who stood against him, all the eglons of the world will seem like a gnat who stood on a train track and tried to defy a train.

Let me ask you a question. Do you get angry when people mock Christianity? If you saw people who are mocking the progress of what God is doing in the world, if you saw them in that image that Spurgeon used, a blind man on the train track with the train coming at him at full speed, him mocking and taunting the train and saying the train does not exist, does that make you angry if you're on the train? No, it breaks your heart. Because you don't want to say, I don't need to jump out and defend the train.

I need you to open your eyes and I need you to get on board and not stand in the way. When we are angry at people who mock us, all we do is demonstrate that we're not really confident of our place on the train. That's why we feel like we gotta justify ourselves.

That's why we get angry. You ever, you know, your work and you start watching YouTube and like an hour and a half later I watch 58 YouTube videos. Shame on you, that never happens to me. This week, this week it started and an hour and a half later I'd watch 58 Bill Maher YouTube clips.

Or give or take a few, but you know, it was a lot. And at the end I was so mad because I just want to go on there and I want to be like, we're not all dumb. We're not all dumb.

We're not all knuckle dragon Neanderthals. I can give you an intelligent answer to that question. And I realized that what was making me mad is that it's like there's an insecurity. If I see Bill Maher and Eglon and the other people in the world like that as really what they are and that is someone like a gnat trying to oppose the progress of a train, I don't feel anger. What I feel is deep compassion and I think, God, would you open their eyes?

Anger toward others who oppose you is a sign of insecurity in your faith. Here's the other lesson I learned from the rather humorous way this story is told. Number four, one day we will retell the stories of our suffering with laughter and joy. You realize the oppression they felt for those 18 years was real. It was bitter. It was painful. But here, they tell it with laughter. They look back on that painful chapter and they retell it.

They recast it in the colors of joy. Your pain and your oppression is real. I don't want to take away from that one bit, but I'm just telling you one day you will look back on those chapters, that 18 years of oppression, and one day you will tell those stories without tears. The joy that so enshrouds you will not take away the fact that the pain happened. It'll just so envelop it with tears, envelop it with joy that you won't tell it with the tear of pain.

You'll tell it with the laughter of triumph. God's resolution to our pain makes the oppression almost seem trivial. I'm not saying it is trivial. Your pain is real. But I'm saying the joy you find there will make it seem trivial.

I love C.S. Lewis imagery and mere Christianity. He said our suffering on earth from the perspective of eternity will seem like a bad night in a cheap hotel. You ever had a bad night in a cheap hotel?

I have. I had one a couple years ago when my family was driving down to Florida to see some of our college students serving on one of the mission projects there, and a couple other pastors went with us, and one of them was Pastor Rick, who is already featured in this sermon. I asked Pastor Rick if he would arrange a night for us to stay halfway down. So he chose a hotel in Florence, South Carolina that was the worst hotel in the United States of America. It was, it smelled, it was dark, and the hallway smelled like urine.

At night, when my youngest child was still in his pack and play, whenever we had him in a closet, and when they flushed the toilet, water came through the ceiling and dropped on his head. This was our entire night. We got hardly any sleep. I was angry.

I was tired. I was like, Rick, I realize we're not high rollers. I get that, but is this what we've come to?

Are we paupers? Couldn't we have just stayed in the car, in the van? That would have been better. I was, my wife and I, we were not happy about it. Now we tell it as a big joke. I laughed about it with Rick this week.

Why? Because it's one bad night in a cheap hotel and hardly worth remembering. It's more funny to us now than it was irritating. I'm not saying your pain is not real, and I'm not saying we should just laugh about it.

What I'm saying is that there is a joy that is coming that will make you look back and tell even the dark chapters of your pain through the laughter of triumph. Here's the last lesson that Ehud's story teaches us, number five, in God's kingdom. Ehud shows you that availability is more important than ability.

I think you would agree that Ehud was a very unlikely candidate for a hero. He didn't even have a strong right hand. Yet he was willing to yield himself to be used by the Spirit of God. God's kingdom in the world today does not advance through our ability, through the right hand of our strength, it advances through availability.

Jesus taught his disciples in numerous places and numerous ways that it was not about their strength to win the world, it was about them yielding themselves to him. Maybe one of the clearest of that is to me, John chapter six, the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus stood before a crowd of 5,000 men.

Scholars say probably a total of around 15 to 20,000 people. And Jesus, you know the story. If you've been in church, Jesus says to his disciples, man, these guys are hungry. They've been with them for three days. Why don't you give them something to eat? And Philip, one of the disciples, says rather sarcastically, give them something to eat. Jesus, we could all go out and get jobs for eight months, combine our money. We might be able to buy them a doughnut hole and a cup of coffee.

What do you mean give them something to eat? You know the story. Jesus takes the little boy's Hebrew Lunchable, is what we call it, the Hebrew Happy Meal, and he takes it and he divides and he spreads it out so that not only are all 15,000 fully satisfied, they have 12 baskets left over. That is the only miracle that's recorded in all four gospels.

You want to know why I think that is? Because it made such an impression on the disciples because Jesus was teaching them how his work would go forward in the world because one day they weren't going to stand in front of 15,000 hungry bellies. They were going to stand in front of millions of unreached people starving for the gospel. And Jesus wanted them to know that it wasn't about their ability to strategize and fundraise and figure that out. It was simply about them yielding themselves to him because Jesus could do more to end world hunger in 10 minutes with a boy's five loaves and two fish than Bill Gates could do in 10 lifetimes with all of his vast riches.

It is not about your ability. It is simply you saying, Jesus, use me. Jesus, here I am. Why don't you put your spirit in me and why don't you use me in the assignments that you've given to me? You see another example of this in Acts 8. This time, Philip, a different Philip, but also named Philip, is preaching in a city called Samaria.

In Samaria, there's lots of people getting saved, hundreds, maybe thousands of people are coming to Christ. And the spirit of God says to Philip, I want you to leave here where the ministry is hot and I want you to go 150 miles away out to a dusty dirt road and I want you just to stand there and wait. Philip is confused.

He's like, what are you talking about? I'm having an awesome ministry here. Lots of people are getting saved and the spirit of God says, don't argue, just do it. So Philip goes up there, he stands there in this dusty road and after a few minutes in the distance comes a chariot and it now holds in it what we now call the Ethiopian eunuch. And Philip shares Christ with the Ethiopian eunuch, the Ethiopian eunuch trusts Christ, goes back to Africa and Eusebius, the third century historian in the church, says that that Ethiopian eunuch founded the church in Africa, a church that is still alive today. What is the writer of Acts trying to show you? He is trying to show you that God can do more through one act of obedience than all the apostles could do in a hundred lifetimes or a thousand mission trips. What God needs is He just wants you to obey. It is not about you changing the world or your friends through the right hand of strength. It is about you yielding yourself to Him.

It's all about obedience. On Friday, I received the most extraordinary note from someone at our Cary campus. At our Cary campus, here's what it says. The girl says, on the way home from Bible study on Thursday night, we were driving up Lake Wheeler Road and an older Muslim woman was standing next to a stopped car. And as we pulled our car under the shoulder, she started running up to our car. She'd run out of gas. Much to my protest, Bobby, the guy that she was with, who is also part of the Cary campus, Bobby stayed with her.

I didn't want to because I just don't trust people. And so she gave him money to get gas and he went to buy a container and fill up a tank for her and bring it back. When he got back, he was trying to give her money back.

She didn't speak English well. Bobby told her to keep the tank of gas and her money and told her the reason is he had just come from a small group where he had been reflecting on how much God had blessed him over the last few years, how much he'd learned about the gospel, how much she'd grown, how much God had done in his life, and he felt like in light of how generous God had been to him, he didn't want to keep her money. He wanted to give. At this point, as they were trying to communicate, another Muslim woman got out of the car and thanked him profusely and said that he was a godsend and it meant so much to her because her son had just been murdered in Chapel Hill. Bobby told her that we had just left small group and had prayed for them there. We had literally just left small group where the last thing we did was pray over this family and the loved ones of those murdered in Chapel Hill two days ago.

I think it is amazing in a time where Muslims in America feel so persecuted that Bobby could be a light in a difficult situation tonight and perhaps that he could be a tiny witness of God's love to them. You may not feel like you have much to offer. God doesn't need the much that you have to offer. All God needs is availability. God can use you. You say, but I don't have much talent. I don't have a right hand of strength.

It's never been about the right hand of strength, not with Ehud, not with the apostles, not with you. I remember being at a pastor's conference where an old Southern Baptist preacher named Adrian Rogers looked at this group of pastors, thousands of pastors. He said, how many of you were valedictorian? Stand up. There was a handful of people in the audience stood up and some people started to clap.

He said, no, don't clap yet. He said, how many of you, he said, remain standing. How many of you went to school, college on an academic scholarship, an athletic scholarship? How many of you were on the homecoming court? How many of you, you know, I just went through all these honorifics.

How many of you were in these categories? And at the end, there was about 30% of the audience standing up. He said, well, there they are. Those standing are the who's who.

These are the ones that have something to brag about. He looks at that group standing up and he says this. He said, I've got good news and bad news for those of you that are standing up. He said, the good news is that God can use you too.

The bad news is that you're not his first choice. His first choice are those that are seated beside you because God chooses the weak to shame the strong. And God wants to do things in the world in a way that the glory will not go to the strength of the man or the speed of the horse, but will go to God who fights to the left hand of weakness.

God doesn't need your ability. He just wants your availability. Where has God told you to act that you're not obeying him? Maybe there is a ministry vision he's put on your heart that you have yet to pursue. Maybe he has told you to start doing something that you're not doing it. Maybe he's told you about a person that you need to reach out to, but every time you're like, God, they're going to ask me questions I don't know.

They might mock me. I don't want to be in that situation. And what you're saying is, God, my arm's not strong enough. And God's like, I don't need, oh, you don't have all the answers.

I don't need your arm. All I need is for you to obey me and when I tell you to stop the car, I want you to stop. God does his work in the world through ordinary people obeying him in ordinary ways. Mothers faithfully serving their children, you faithfully sharing Christ with a friend, faithfully loving your neighbors, faithfully serving in our kids' ministry, faithfully stopping to buy a tank of gas for a Muslim neighbor when the spirit of God says stop. And God takes those weak acts of obedience and infuses them with his power so that you in your life can say like Ehud and like Philip and like the little boy, it is Zachariah. It is not by might or by my power. It is by your spirit. And this is what the Lord has said. Have you discovered the secret of Christianity?

Have you discovered it? The secret of Christianity is that you don't save yourself by your strength. God gives it as a gift. Christ purchased it in your place and offered it to you. You don't serve God in your strength. Just as you didn't save yourself by your strength, you don't serve him in your strength. You say, Lord, here I am. I'm ready to follow and obey. You use me and you work in me.

Have you discovered that and are you living in it? Why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses? If you've never received Christ, it's a gift. You reach out, metaphorically speaking, with the left hand of your weakness and you lay hold of the righteousness of Christ. Get rid of your right hand.

It'd be better if it was withered. The right hand of strength. Get rid of it and say, God, it's not by my righteousness, it's a gift.

Are you operating now in his strength? Have you just said, yes, Lord Jesus, you show me and where you command my left hand, I'll follow you. What's the Holy Spirit telling you to do that you're not doing? Is there a gift, an offering he's told you to make?

Is there a person he's told you to share with? Is there a ministry he's told you to pursue? Father, we don't want to be a people who are mighty in finance, mighty in talent, mighty in reputation. We want to be a people who are mighty in obedience and mighty in faith so that we can be mighty in the power of the Spirit. We pray in Jesus' name.