Good morning.
It is a pleasure to hear yourself with a speaker behind you. At our meeting house, the speakers are in front of you, so you do not even know if you are miked or not. It is a different experience.
It is a real treat to be here from Pennsylvania, to come down. My heart is still down here in Richmond, ever since I was in medical school. My wife and I cannot wait for the chances we get to come down here and share. It is really a treat to be able to share a word of encouragement.
Pray for me. My heart is to encourage you. I am encouraged today as we gather, but we do need God’s grace.
Lord, as we come to Your Word, I think of that woman at the well who was surprised by You when You asked for a drink of water.
And then You said, “If you knew the gift of God, you would ask Him, and He would give you living water.”
Lord, we are asking. We have touched the gift of God. We know something of the gift of God, but we need to know a whole lot more.
Lord, if there is anybody today who is tied in knots—anybody with weariness, a heavy heart, confusion, who feels bound up and is struggling—I pray that You will put laughter in their souls, fill them with joy, and open their eyes to see Your love.
Oh, Lord, we need to see You so clearly. We need You to touch us. Amen.
Let us open by turning to Psalm 40. We will read a few verses from Psalm 40 and then from Psalm 73.
I waited patiently for the Lord;
And He inclined unto me, and heard my cry.
He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay;
And He set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.
And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God:
Many shall see it, and fear,
And shall trust in the Lord.Blessed is the man that maketh the Lord his trust,
And respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.
Many, O Lord my God, are the wonderful works which Thou hast done,
And Thy thoughts which are to us-ward:
They cannot be set in order unto Thee;
If I would declare and speak of them,
They are more than can be numbered.Sacrifice and offering Thou hast no delight in;
Mine ears hast Thou opened:
Burnt offering and sin offering hast Thou not required.
Then said I, Lo, I am come;
In the roll of the book it is written of me:
I delight to do Thy will, O my God;
Yea, Thy law is within my heart.I have proclaimed glad tidings of righteousness in the great assembly;
Lo, I have not refrained my lips,
O Lord, Thou knowest.
I have not hid Thy righteousness within my heart;
I have declared Thy faithfulness and Thy salvation;
I have not concealed Thy lovingkindness and Thy truth from the great assembly.Thou, O Lord, wilt not withhold Thy tender mercies from me.
When my heart was grieved,
And I was pricked in my reins,
So brutish was I, and ignorant;
I was as a beast before Thee.
Nevertheless I am continually with Thee:
Thou hast holden my right hand.
Thou wilt guide me with Thy counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.Whom have I in heaven but Thee?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee.
My flesh and my heart faileth;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.
For, lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish:
Thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from Thee.
But it is good for me to draw near unto God:
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
That I may tell of all Thy works.
I have really struggled with this matter. I actually wanted to go in a different direction, and the Lord keeps bringing me back here. Please have grace with me as I try to get my hands around this thing—what is on my heart. I am kind of trying to grab it.
If you do not get anything I say, see the Lord and be touched by Him.
I have been so helped by this little word in John 4. We have been studying John together in a teen Bible study, and this little word arrested me. Jesus says to that woman, “If you knew the gift of God, and Who it is that says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would ask Him.”
If you knew Who it was you were talking to, you would ask Him, and He would give you living water.
Has anybody here ever been in a funk?
Now, a funk is not quite depression. Some of us are really depressed—clinically depressed—and you need to come see me, and I will give you some medicine. But sometimes we are not. It is sort of like we are sleepwalking. No one would notice, but we are just not really on. We are just going through the motions.
It reminds me of that song from my youth, Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender”: “Get up and do it again.” Remember that song? You just get up and go through those motions.
I know there is no Christian who is ever a pretender, though, right? Except for this one.
Sometimes we get in a funk, and we just kind of get up and do it again. We get up, we go through life, and we go through our motions.
What I am interested in is this: How do we get out of a funk?
The Lord took me out of a funk recently, and I want to share how He did it. I do not actually know how He did it, but I will tell you what happened.
We have been very busy. Our life is just a windstorm. We go from morning to night. My wife is busier than I am, and we are doing this and doing that and everything else. Mostly, it is because of my mismanagement of our life. I will just say that. Okay, honey? You are happy? Okay.
I have the kind of personality that likes to get into everything. “We can do it. I can handle it.” Usually, we do handle it, but it means that we are running around hither and yon.
There is one brother in our fellowship whom I love dearly. He loves the Lord, the Lord is working in his life, and he is full of joy. His life is simple. He works as a maintenance man for the county, his hours are set, and he gives himself to the Lord.
He is an ex-drunk and freely shares that. He spent time at AA and witnesses to everybody, pulling people off the side of the street. He is there early. He fixes everything at the meeting house.
When I walk in, I am running late. We have stuff to do, and I am looking around: “The chairs are not right. We have to get the brothers to pray. We have to get this going and get this done.”
Then Mike says, “Bobby, how are you? How is the Lord doing in your life? Praise God! What can I do? Give me a hug. Let us worship the Lord.”
And I am thinking, “Mike, I have got chairs to fix. I do not have time to worship the Lord.”
Then we go in, and the brothers pray. I am thinking, “Okay, now let us get started. Does anyone have something for the opening?” I know some of you have never been in a brothers’ meeting, but it is not as holy as you think.
We gather together, and Mike is looking at the clock. It is time to get started, but he says, “Lord, we love You so much, and it is just so wonderful.” Ten minutes later, he is still going on: “Praise You for the things You have done in our lives.”
And I am thinking, “Michael, stop worshiping. We have things to do.”
Who has the problem here?
You might listen to you.
I was in a funk, and a little irritable. I was on this stupid diet, and it was 10:30 at night. Nancy sent me out to get some mayonnaise so she could make deviled eggs for me—two thousand of them.
I was in such a funk, driving to the grocery store. I passed one grocery store, passed another grocery store, and finally thought, “Oh, here is one. I have to pull in here.” So I pulled into the third grocery store down our street.
I got out of the car, and this lady came walking up to me. Her name was Cookie.
Cookie looked like she belonged in the Bowery in New York. Her hair was all disheveled. She looked crazed.
She came up to me and said, “Do you have a quarter?”
I did not have that look that said, “Come ask me.” She said, “I need to make a phone call. I have a flat tire. My trunk keys are at home. Can you help?”
I said, “Here is my cell phone. What is the phone number? Let us call.”
Cookie called this guy, and I listened to the conversation. It was something along these lines: “You are the only person I can talk to. I have nobody I can call.”
He responded, “Why are you bothering me?”
She said, “You are the only one. I just need you to come pick me up so we can get to my house, so I can get the key and change my flat tire.”
I thought I had discharged my duty. This guy was going to come get her, so I got in my car. I was still a little suspicious of the whole story anyway.
By the way, the store was closed. I got to the door, and they had just locked it. They saw me coming and said, “No, you cannot come in.”
As I was driving away, I had that little sense: “Stop that.”
So I pulled around to see whether there really was something going on. I drove around the parking lot, and there was this crazed lady standing by a car with a flat tire.
I pulled up and said, “Is that guy going to come?”
She said, “Well, he said maybe, but all the time…”
I asked, “Where do you live? What is his number? Let me call him.”
I called and finally got this guy on the phone. He said, “I do not have time for this.”
I said, “Were you going to come here?”
He said, “I do not know when I am going to get there.”
Now it was 11:00 at night. I said, “Get in the car. I will take you home.”
Cookie said, “This has been the worst day of my life.”
You know, sometimes, being from New York, you do not really want to get to know too many things. But I said, “Why is it such a bad day? Why is this the worst day of your life?”
She said, “I lived with my father and mother. Six months ago, my mother died, and my father married somebody else. She has since had my father put in a nursing home, stolen fifty thousand dollars, had us evicted from the house, and padlocked the house. We have just moved to this other place.”
“My husband is at work. He works all night long, and we are just trying…”
I drove her home, and I just felt the Lord’s compassion for this lady. I asked if I could pray with her. It was a little thing I could do.
I just felt Him loving her.
And I just wanted mayonnaise.
I entered into the sanctuary.
The psalm we read starts with a man in a funk about everybody doing well. The rich people are doing well, the evil people are rich, and they seem to live forever. Then he comes into the sanctuary. That is Psalm 73.
It took me right out of my hole. I saw the love of the Lord—His love. I was still busy, but it set me free.
You know what set me free? I have just been praying for this lady. I cannot wait to get back and stop in to find out how she is doing.
It changed me the next day. I went to the hospital. We had patients stacked up and all this kind of stuff. I got a consult to the psychiatric floor, and I met a lady who had just had the worst day of her life.
Her story was worse than Cookie’s, but she needed someone who knew the Lord.
God did not really care if I was in a funk or not. I was so blessed to be able to pray with her.
“Are you taking patients?” she said.
The Lord just showed me His thoughts toward us—His compassion toward us. So awesome.
When we look and behold Him, that sets us free.
That woman at the well had five husbands. She had all sorts of issues about where you are supposed to worship, what church you go to, theology, and all these things. But she just needed living water.
She needed to know Who the gift of God was. It did not have to be too complicated.
But we get ourselves in funks. I was thinking about this: there are lots of different kinds of funks that I have noticed.
Here is my definition of a funk. I am a Mac guy. I have a Macintosh. I do not know what happens on a PC computer, but if you do something on a Mac and it cannot figure it out, there is this little spinning wheel that goes around. It is the eternal spinning wheel. It just goes like this unless you do something. It gets stuck.
Sometimes we are stuck. We have gotten ourselves stuck somehow, and we need to get unstuck. What you do is turn off the program and restart. You have got to restart.
One of the ways we get stuck is that we take ourselves entirely too seriously, and we over-spiritualize.
Christians love to do that. We make everything a black-and-white issue: “It is the Lord,” or, “It is not the Lord.” We speak in those terms, draw all sorts of lines, and then we cannot cross them or take them back. We get stuck.
We over-spiritualize it. In this connection, I have always pondered these verses in Ecclesiastes:
Be not righteous overmuch;
Neither make thyself overwise:
Why shouldest thou destroy thyself?
Be not overmuch wicked,
Neither be thou foolish:
Why shouldest thou die before thy time?
It is good that thou shouldest take hold of this;
Yea, also from that withdraw not thine hand.
What does it mean, “Do not be too righteous”? It means do not be too righteous. Do not be too smart. Do not think you have it all figured out.
I know a dear brother back on Long Island who got ostracized. There was a power issue, a power struggle, but then someone said, “Well, it says you have got the devil.”
Why not just say, “Get off my back. I do not like you.” Okay? That is not over-spiritualizing it. “I do not like you. You do not like me. Let us just get away from each other for a while.”
Instead, we say, “You have got the devil. That is not the Lord.” We are all proclaiming the Lord. To me, that is taking the Lord’s name in vain. We use the name of the Lord and bring Him into things too often.
Can we not just say, “I feel like this. Here it is. I am concerned. It bothers me”? That is not too spiritual.
Be careful when you name the name of the Lord, because you can get yourself into one of these spinning wheels and not know how to get off.
Sometimes we make decisions in life, and they are bad decisions, but we thought we heard the Lord.
Who says that we have a corner on the market of hearing the Lord? Sometimes people are so surprised that maybe they got it wrong.
Do not take yourself so seriously.
I bought some stock one time. This was when I was young and foolish. Now I am old and foolish.
A guy from Massachusetts called me and said, “Listen, this is a great stock. It is going to come out with a generic Xanax. It is going to be a hot seller. You should get in on it.”
I put a couple thousand dollars into it. It was at twenty-three when I bought it. The next month, it was at six.
I held on to it because it was going to come back. For the next five years, it stayed at six or seven.
We met with our stock advisor, and I said, “Well, we paid all this. We have all this loss.”
He said, “Bob, the stock does not care what you paid for it.”
It is either a good thing to hold onto or a bad thing. It either has prospects or it does not. It does not matter what you bought it at. It does not matter what you invested in it. It is either cut or hang. It is either a good deal or a bad deal now.
In statistics, if you are playing roulette—and I know this because my father thought he could make some money doing this—you intuitively think that if it came up black six times in a row, it is more likely to be red now.
But if it came up black a hundred times in a row, it is still fifty-fifty whether the next one will be black or red. That roulette wheel does not care what happened before.
In life, we sometimes get stuck because we made a decision. We made a decision about how we would raise our kids, what job we would work, where we would live, or the great house we were going to fix up.
But right now, is it a good deal or a bad deal? Does it have prospects, or is it going to put a noose around you?
Take the grace of God and cut it. Get it out of your life if it is time. Forget about what happened behind. Press on to what is ahead. Get out of the funk. Turn that program off.
People who get into the most severe depressions are usually in double-bind situations. You know what a double-bind situation is? That is when, if you do something, you lose; and if you do not do anything, you lose. You cannot go forward, and you cannot stay where you are.
We know a sister recently who found out her husband had been fooling around on her for seven years. She cannot really afford to leave, and she cannot stand to stay. She is in a double bind—squeezed, under pressure.
Another reason people get in a funk is because they blame other people for their emotions.
Nobody is to blame for your feelings but you.
“But so-and-so made me feel this way. So-and-so did this. So-and-so did that.” It is true; they may have done all those things. But how you react to it is up to you.
Until you take responsibility for your own heart, you are going to be spinning on the spinning wheel.
How do you do that? How do you live with a man—or not live with a man? How do you face the fact that your family is falling apart and all these different things?
You have to take a look at the Savior. You have to have Him, like Cookie, reach out and touch you. You have got to see Him. You have got to climb up on the mountain. You need Him.
You need the eternal view.
The Lord knows how to get us out of the spinning wheel. A good example is the man who had been sick for thirty-eight years, or however long it was. He was at the pool, at the portico of Solomon, whatever that was.
Jesus came up and said, “Do you want to get well?” He had been that way a long time.
There is a decision. There it is. The Lord breaks through.
For me, I got out of my funk because the Lord touched me. It had nothing to do with me. All of a sudden, I was touched. I got close to Him. I saw the eternal view.
I saw how much He loves her and how much He loves me, and how silly all these things I am worrying about are. So what if I have to work hard? Just get it going. It does not really matter all that much.
These things we worry about—we get such a little view, a difficult view. We are seeing things like this. If we could just climb up above and get a bigger breath of air.
Even about our fellowships, we are so worried: “Are we really a testimony? Are we not?” I do not know. It is the Lord’s problem. Be faithful.
“What about the leadership of this and that?” I do not know. I am in leadership, and I certainly do not know.
You be faithful.
Is that not what happened when they were talking about John? They said to Jesus, “What about this guy?” Jesus said, “You do not worry about him. If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou Me.”
It is none of your business.
The church is not your business. The Lord is your business. Know the Lord.
Then you are going to be like Mike. You are going to drive everyone crazy because you are filled with life.
Because life annoys the funk.
Whose life is it anyway? Whose church is it anyway?
When Christ, Who is our life, shall be manifested,
Then shall ye also with Him be manifested in glory.
If you knew the gift of God, and Who it is that says to you, “Give Me a drink”—and Jesus does say, “Give Cookie a drink. Give her a ride”—you would ask Him, and He would give you living water.
Lord Jesus, I want to give You praise and thanks for Cookie. Lord, we have all these people. As we all stand together, we ask You to break through in her life, that she will have a testimony, that she can praise You, that she can say, “I was in a miry pit, and I was lost, and the Lord set my feet on firm ground.”
Then I think about Him. I think about His thoughts toward us and how wonderful they are. I cannot stop praising Him, talking about how wonderful He is.