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“AND THEIR SHOUTS PREVAILED” #5
SLOGANS AND CIGARETTES
My friend Morris Venden confesses in one of his books that early on in his career as a minister he was floundering spiritually. He was getting up in the pulpit week by week; he was giving Bible studies; he was baptizing people. He was saying and doing all the right things, and the picture of him in the Yellow Pages ad for such-and-such church was very, very nice. You wouldn’t know by looking that here was a man who was essentially clueless about the fundamentals of the faith.
And one day, with a group of fellow pastors, he decided to ask for help. But he didn’t want to give away that he was in the deep weeds himself, so he did like most of us do: he disguised the scenario. “Tell me,” he asked, as the preachers dug into a pizza or whatever, “what you would say to a person who just feels like he’s going through the motions. I . . . uh . . . have a new man attending my church, and he doesn’t know really how to get started in his walk of faith.”
And the answers began to come. “Well, Morrie, tell him that he must be born again.”
Okay. “Well, how should he do that?”
“Oh, he must ‘fall on the rock and be broken.’”
“Er, what does that mean?”
“That means he must surrender his life to the Lord.”
“But how do I . . . I mean, how does he do that?”
“Well, he must sorrow for sins and turn away from them.”
“I, uh, that is, he says he tried that already, and it doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Well, then, he must look with the eye of faith and be saved.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
Well, it went like that for quite some time. The clichés were flowing faster than water out of the rock at Horeb (to add one more!) But Morrie Venden came away from that pizza session thinking to himself, “Great! I’m armed with a million Christian sound bites, and I still don’t know what to DO!”
I want to make sure, friend, that we don’t end up this Friday session with the same dilemma. Because we’ve lamented this week that so often we do like Pontius Pilate on that Friday morning. The Bible says, “And their shouts prevailed.” Lucifer and his forces just plain and simple beat Pilate into submission.
And so we’ve spent four days saying things like: “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Which is true, but HOW? Or: “True victory comes, not from challenging Satan in your own power, but from surrendering to the power of Christ.” Well, that sounds like a fine evangelistic exhortation, but what are we talking about THERE? Try this one on: “Give up on SELF. You must lay ‘self’ on the altar of sacrifice.” And you reply: “Pastor Lonnie, I am ready to do that, but what exactly and specifically and tangibly do I do first?”
Let’s try to put a very practical and proven Friday formula on the blackboard today, borrowed from Winning Over Sinning, by a writer named Patricia Maxwell. She tells about a lady named Mrs. Morrow. This poor warrior had been fighting a losing battle against Lucifer for years in just one area: smoking. Now, you may remonstrate that there’s not a verse in the Bible which says smoking is a sin. I’ll grant you that. But poor Mrs. Morrow was so addicted, her cigarettes absolutely were going to kill her one day – and soon. So that put her on the wrong side of Commandment #6. Her smoking habit had such a death grip on her, they were the ultimate “god” in her life. That’s #1. I have no doubt she would have been desperate enough to break the Eighth Commandment by stealing from a 7-Eleven if she had to, in order to get more cigarettes. Well, you get the idea. Plus we all know that the Bible describes our bodies as a temple for the living God – that’s in I Corinthians 6. And in Mrs. Morrow’s case, the crystal cathedral was being held together by tar, nicotine, and various other carcinogens. It was not a good situation.
What’s more, this brave but beaten woman had tried for years to quit. Every platitude and slogan you can think of. She had chewed the gum, plastered her body with patches, tried hypnosis, acupuncture, exorcism for the tobacco demon (almost). Nothing had worked. For sure, New Year’s resolutions had failed her; she hadn’t been able to get through the Rose Parade without lighting up another coffin nail.
Finally, here’s what Mrs. Morrow did. The next time a cigarette craving came along, she did just one thing. She got out a Bible, sat down at the kitchen table, and begin to dig for verses. And she didn’t just find verses and read them, but did two things more. First of all, she looked specifically for promises. Places in God’s Word where it said heaven was ready to help her. By the way, did you know – and thanks to author Patricia Maxwell for this stat – there are something like 7,487 promises running from Genesis over to Revelation? That’s right. Almost 8,000 places where a desperate Christian can go and know that an interested God is saying: “I’m here. This is real. Let Me help.”
So she would find those verses. Even with the nicotine cravings tearing at her soul and nerve endings, she could hold off Lucifer at least that long. But point number two: she would actually write them down. She had a big sheaf of papers on that table, and when she found one that really “rang her bell,” she would quickly copy it down.
Maybe she found gems like our favorite – Philippians 4:13:
“I can do everything through Him who gives me strength.”
Or maybe Isaiah 43:2:
“When you go through deep waters and great trouble, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown!”
For Mrs. Morrow, it was a drowning in cravings and the shrieks of a long-established habit, but you get the point. Listen, these dust-covered promises from the wilderness can still work for us here in our high-tech, Internet-drenched 21st-century, can’t they?
Well, what happened? In just a few days, that kitchen table was piled high with stacks of paper and scribblings of assurance. I don’t know if she slipped and fell a few times, and so what if she did? God is still a forgiving God, and this woman was still His child. A lost skirmish isn’t a concluded war; no way. And the upshot is this:
“Mrs. Morrow’s cigarette addiction weakened,” Pat Maxwell writes, “then abandoned her completely, and she triumphantly led visitors to the dining room table and showed them the open Bible that gave her the victory over a habit that had gripped her for years.”
Isn’t that a marvelous story? No slogans. No pious platitudes. Just this incredible diagnosis: Get out the Bible during times of need . . . and read. Claim promises. Write them down. Get them in your brain. Call on God and tell Him you want, and claim, and possess what it says there in Romans, or Philippians, or any of the 66 love letters He’s sent you. It’s no wonder Patricia Maxwell concludes:
“The Word of God is a power pack for winning Christians.”
Maybe you’ve been plagued by a temptation to worry and fret, to focus on your problems, to not have faith in God’s protective power. Maybe you tend to fondle thoughts of resentment and anger. No matter what you’ve tried, you can’t get that certain enemy out of your mind. How in the world can Mrs. Morrow’s cigarette victory translate over to your battlefield?
Ironically, you might actually have an edge! Did you know that? We were happily chugging through Rick Warren’s recent monster bestseller, The Purpose-Driven Life, and Chapter 11 is entitled “Becoming Best Friends With God.” And Pastor Warren gives the exact same prescription we just discovered: getting the Bible’s promises into our heads. And if you protest: “No, no, no. That’s no good. Tried it already. Too hard, too boring, too challenging, too King Jamesy,” he’s ready with an answer. Listen to this:
“When you think about a problem over and over in your mind, that’s called worry. When you think about God’s Word over and over in your mind, that’s meditation. If you know how to worry, you already know how to meditate! You just need to switch your attention from your problems to Bible verses. The more you meditate on God’s Word, the less you will have to worry about.”
And there you have it, friend. You know, it’s ironic that Christians have fretted for centuries about “defending” God’s Word. Are atheists trying to drive God out of our lives, attacking the Bible, getting rid of prayer in our schools? Oh no! Reformer Martin Luther had an answer for that worry five centuries ago.
“The Bible is like a lion,” he wrote. “You don’t have to defend it; just let it loose. It will defend itself.”
And as a happily smoke-free, praising-the-Lord, Scripture-scribbling Mrs. Morrow can attest, it’s not too shabby at defending US either.
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