Overcome By Fear - Rick Lee James - Episode 359

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you're here with us again this week.

Week.

As we begin this episode, just quickly, I do want to remind you that I am running a Kickstarter for a new music video called Love Our Enemies.

I could really use your help.

If we don't make the full $2,000, then we don't get to keep any of the money that we've raised, and it ends very soon. So if you're able to help out, and even if you want to come and be a part of the music video on March 28th, you can go to rickleejames.com. Right on the front page, there's a link where you can find out more. Would love to have you be a part of this, even if it's just through prayer and sharing it online so that we can get more support that way. Thank you so much, and I hope that you enjoy today's episode, which is a sermon I preached at my home church here in Springfield, Ohio, Home Road Church of the Nazarene, on Transfiguration Sunday, which is the Sunday just before Lent. It was just a couple of weeks ago, and I recorded it, and the recording turned out pretty well, and I thought, I wonder if maybe people in my podcast community would like to hear it. So here is a sermon I did a few weeks ago at my church. I hope you enjoy it and find something beneficial and that God speaks to you through it. Thanks for listening to Voices in My Head.

Sue Cartwright is going to come and share the scripture for this morning from Matthew chapter 7.

Matthew 17:1-9. After 6 days, Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John, the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes His face became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up 3 tents." 3 chapters, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and the voice from the cloud said, "This is my Son." 'Whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him.' When the disciples heard this, they fell face ground, terrified. But Jesus said, 'He came And he touched them. "Get up," he said. "Don't be afraid." When they looked up, they saw no one but Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, "Don't tell anyone." What you have seen until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.

This is the word of the Lord, and we are grateful for it this morning. Thank you, Sue. We appreciate that. Have you ever heard somebody say before, after they came out of a church service or maybe some sort of event that was Christian in nature, And I just said, "Boy, God really showed up today." It's what we're having in this passage that we're reading today. Earlier in the service, Sue read Exodus 24:12-18 to us. And in that passage, if you remember, God tells Moses, "Come up on the mountain." And Moses and his assistants go up the mountain with him. And to the Israelites that are below, they're looking up and the glory of the Lord. It looked like a consuming fire up on the mountain, and they were afraid. And on the mountain, in a cloud, Moses receives this privileged vision of God, and he stayed in the cloud for 40 days and 40 nights in order to receive the Ten Commandments. Well, it turns out he had to— if you know the story and you read on a few more chapters— he had to receive the commandments twice. Because when he came down the mountain, the people had gone into idol worship, and he destroyed the commandments, and he put them into dust and into water, and he made people drink them. It's a whole thing we're not going to get into this morning, but it's a really interesting story that goes on. So he has to go up the mountain again, and on the second time when he goes up, in chapter 34 of Exodus, verse 29, Says, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant and they were afraid to come near him. Now Christians have always tended to think about Exodus 24 and Exodus 34 when reading about the transfiguration story of Jesus. Jesus that we heard this morning from the Gospel of Matthew. Just as Moses was transformed and he descended the mountain with his face shining with heaven's glory, in Matthew chapter 17 we see Jesus as the one on the mountain who is shining like the sun in heaven's glory. Very similar passages— what happens with Moses, what happens with Jesus. And in the Gospel of Matthew, up until this point, the identity of Jesus is still a little bit in doubt, and it's still a little bit ambiguous to the disciples. They're still wondering who he is. And here in chapter 17, it's 6 days after what he told them in chapter 16, which he says to his disciples, truly I tell you, some of you who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. And in this chapter, we see that happen. Jesus is clearly seen by his disciples. There's a voice, there's a cloud, there's a vision. There's the same voice that proclaimed Jesus as God's Son at his baptism, was now proclaiming it again on the mountain. When Moses was transfigured, When he came down the mountain, the onlookers felt what? Fear. They were afraid. When Jesus was transfigured, the onlookers were afraid. Isn't that interesting? Pastor has been speaking on this series about not being afraid. But it seems like Jesus' followers, when they are in the presence of Jesus, Their immediate response is to be afraid. Peter is so afraid that he immediately wants to become a church planter. Right in that moment, it literally says, if you read it from the Greek, it says he wants to build 3 tabernacles, 3 houses of worship, one for Elijah, one for Moses, one for Jesus. And just the chapter before this, Jesus has said to Peter, upon my rock I will build this church. And I think Peter didn't know what else to do, so he said, I guess I got to start building churches now, I guess.

I don't know.

We don't know a lot of the mind of Peter at this point, but his reaction to fear is, let's, let's build this, I guess. Now, if you had one human emotion that best describes to you what it means to be with Jesus, and then you had to name your church after that emotion, what do you think you would name your church? I was, I was looking on a website. I just wanted to look at names of churches in our areas and, and why they named them. A lot of times we have churches like, you know, Quest Church or First Love Church or things like that, and it's very popular to like not brand a church a name of a denomination, even if it is a part of a denomination anymore. And there's a lot of churches that have different names from different backgrounds all around us. Around this area there's Victory Baptist Church, there's Abundant Life Church, there's Fellowship Christian Church, there's Cornerstone Church, there's Mount Zion Church, there's New Covenant Church, New Life, Good Shepherd, Bread of Life, Grace. But think about that question I asked you before: if you had to describe with one emotion what it means to be in the presence of Jesus and you had to name your church after that, What do you think you'd name your church? If the Transfiguration story of Jesus informs our decision on that matter at all, we might call ourselves, and just put it on the side, Terrified Church of the Nazarene. Scared to Death Church of the Nazarene. On Home Road, we're the ones that tremble. Church of the Heebie-Jeebies, maybe. Or as it says in the scripture of the disciples overcome by fear, Church of the Nazarene. Doesn't sound like we'd have a lot of people come, does it? But in the Bible, when people encounter Jesus again and again, their predominant emotion is what?

It's fear.

The people who are reported to us as being the most afraid of encountering Jesus are his disciples. When Jesus assists his disciples with this miraculous catch of fish after a night of failure at fishing, they feel fear. He's made their nets full, they can barely reel them in, and their response is to be afraid. Jesus saves the disciples, they're in the boat, and he calms the wind and the waves. And their response is not, "Thank God we lived through that." Their response is fear. They're scared. This man just calmed a storm. When the women come out of the tomb on Easter morning after finding the tomb empty, especially if you read the Gospel of Mark and the original ending that's there, they don't go off and tell anybody that Jesus is risen. They don't go and do anything. It just says they went away and they were terrified. Imagine a gospel ending that way. Time and again, Jesus tells his disciples, "Don't be afraid." He wouldn't have to tell them that so much, though, if they weren't afraid all the time. Something about being with Jesus scared the disciples witless. Now let me ask you a question. 'Cause you might have to think about it for just a minute. Have you ever been really afraid? And I don't mean just like somebody jumps out and scares you, but like, I mean really fear that overtook you and you were just really scared. Most of the time in life for most of us, thankfully, it doesn't happen that often. But there are times. Jill, we just passed another anniversary for Reese. And when he had that accident and almost died, Would you say overcome by fear was probably what really hit you? Probably understated. Understated, yeah. You know, when Alex, our son, you know, he's 7 years old now, a little bit 8 as he might tell you. When he was almost 1, he was terribly sick. And when they're that age, they can't talk, they can't tell you what's hurting. He had a terrible cold or something was working on him. He could barely breathe. His fever elevated. And one Sunday night, I'm sitting at home with him in my chair and I'm just trying to help him. We're doing the vaporizer and everything else we can think of. And still to this day, I think it was the most terrifying thing. He, in my arms, his breathing was labored and then he just stopped breathing and he turned blue and he and he was gone. And I'm calling Jen, she had walked out of the room for a minute. I said, "Jen, he's not breathing, he's not breathing." And you want to talk about fear overcoming. I remember laying him on the floor and I'm trying to get my mind together to call 911. And thank God the fire department is right next to where we live almost. And it maybe was a minute that he had stopped breathing. And he came back to us, thank the Lord. But I still get a little trembly, you know, when I think about that. How many of you can remember— some of you aren't old enough to remember— but can you remember after September 11th, 2001? I received my plane ticket to come to this church and interview on September 11th, 2001. You think I was excited to get on an airplane? We had people all over the country scurrying into our churches that had not been there maybe ever before or in a very long time. And if you can remember the wide-eyed looks and the kind of nervous laughter and people not knowing quite what to do with themselves. And it was en masse, wasn't it? Especially when we're watching it on the news and we're watching the towers fall And I think it's safe to say we were overcome by fear. Not sure of what was gonna happen. When a doctor comes into a room, some of us have experienced this, and he says, "We found something on the X-ray and we're gonna need to run some more tests." What do you feel in that moment? It's fear. And even if the doctor tries to reassure you with, "Oh, there's nothing to worry about yet." It's that "yet" that's just a little bit of like, Ah, there's a pit of my stomach feeling. I don't feel good about this. When a foreign and unexpected reality enters into our life, doesn't really matter what that is, it disrupts things and takes away our sense of control. When we lose that feeling that we're in control, you know what we usually start to feel?

Fear.

So we do things. We buy more locks, you know, for our doors. We get alarm systems. The church has an alarm system. We sometimes will go buy more guns when we get afraid. We build bigger walls. We rip babies from their mothers and we put them in cages. All because of fear. It's a fearful world that we live in, but that's not the kind of fear that Jesus brings. You know, building a church as Peter wanted to do, I actually think that's a pretty good response. You know, maybe let's not build a bigger wall, let's build a church. Yes, I'm scared, and this is a scary part of the world, But maybe this time instead of sending missiles, let's send missionaries. Interesting call to discipleship, isn't it? Following Jesus is a fearful thing. But the fear that Jesus brings, it does something different than the fear that the world brings. Fear of Jesus evokes worship somehow. It's a New Testament kind of fear that we only experience when we experience the true risen Christ. You know, we claim that we want to hear God speak, and we claim that we want to see a vision of God, and we'll sing songs like "Open My Eyes" or "Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord, I Want to See You." And we say we want to see proof of God's reality. Well, at the Transfiguration, Jesus and the disciples, they got these things. They got proof of his reality. There's a strange mystical cloud that comes down, and they see the face of Jesus shining in all of God's glory, and they hear a voice from heaven, and they are overcome with fear. And the three disciples, they saw Jesus for who he really was in a bright, shining, scary moment. Jesus, fully God and fully man, speaking to Moses and Elijah, the two greatest figures of the Hebrew faith. And then when they open their eyes— because they get so scared they shut their eyes in the passage— when they open up their eyes again, they see Jesus alone, greater than Moses, greater than Elijah. They see the kingdom come before them. And not long before the Transfiguration, Jesus predicts his death. And he tells his disciples that he's going to be suffering and he's going to be killed. And they could not conceive of this. They couldn't conceive of a crucified Messiah. My friend who is the rabbi down at Temple Shalom, he still cannot conceive of a Messiah that would be crucified. Because when the Messiah comes, he's gonna change everything. He's not gonna die, he's gonna conquer. And then Jesus tells them this: if you want to follow me, you must take up your— what? You must take up your cross and follow me. That wasn't just a metaphor, that was a real cross. They were used to seeing people executed on crosses all the time. So when Jesus says, "Come stand before the firing squad with me," "Come be executed with me" is what he's saying. Pretty great invitation. Imagine if we put that on the digital billboard out front. Church of the Heebie-Jeebies, come die with us. This isn't what they signed up for. It's not what most of us signed up for either. We want spiritual enlightenment on the journey toward the Divine, but Jesus says that to follow him is to suffer and die with him. Not to take up your weapons against the enemy and fight back and defend yourself, but rather take up your cross, lay down your life, and suffer and die. When we come face to face with God, whose name is Jesus, we see what he demands of us, the clearly narrow way that he calls us to walk, and we are overcome with— what's the word? Fear. You know, false gods aren't scary because they don't require anything of us, really. But scripture says it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. When we see what he expects of us, the peril on the journey that lies ahead when we follow him, that's what we fear. It might cost us our jobs. It might cost us our families. It might cost us our friends. It might even cost us our lives to follow Jesus where he goes. But on the mountaintop, Jesus demands but his disciples follow him. They fall to the ground in fear. It's no wonder Jesus has to say to them, "Do not be afraid." Please don't be afraid. You ever ask the question, "Why aren't there more people in church today? Where are all the people that were here after September 11th? Why did they fall off?" We might think, "Well, maybe they don't understand what our God is all really about." But it might be because maybe they understand all too well. It costs something to follow Jesus, doesn't it? Church is about a life-changing encounter with the true living God. Following Jesus is about seeing God's way in the world and either having to say yes or no to walking that path with him. Knowing a God like this, knowing what he is calling us to do can be a very scary thing. So I asked you at the beginning, did you ever hear anyone say, "Boy, God really showed up in our service this Sunday." Now you can ask them, "How do you know? Was everybody scared to death?" Because that's what happens when Jesus shows up in Scripture. Everybody gets scared. You know, this Wednesday we begin the season of Lent. When we journey with Jesus on the road to the cross. I wonder if we'll challenge ourselves and be courageous enough to walk the road with him this year. Some of us give up things and we fast from different things as a way to kind of do without and acknowledge that these things that we have in our lives are not God. So we think, if we can go 6 weeks without them, then maybe that means they don't rule our lives, you know. But it takes true faith to say, "Yes, Jesus, I'll die with you," trusting that he is telling us the truth when he says, "Do not fear." You know, when I went skating with my son— Pastor Missy alluded to it already— but I went skating with Alex last week at the skating rink. It was his first time ever skating, and I am not a good skater, but I have a lot more experience. I've done it a lot. I've fallen a lot more than he has already. I've been there many times skating. I used to do rollerblading and all kinds of stuff. But it's been years, but I got there and it didn't take me too long to kind of acclimate to the roller skates. So I at least had some reference and some experience. He had none. I somehow managed to make it the whole 2 hours and I didn't fall down once. I'm sure I came close a couple times. But I'm thankful I didn't. He did the whole 2 hours mostly falling the whole time, you know. And, and, you know, I'm not big and I'm not strong and I'm not like super experienced, but I am bigger and I am stronger and I am more experienced than he is at this point. If I wanted to, I could have left him in the dust and knocked him on the ground and laughed at him and made fun of him. And skated rings around him and go, "Ah, ah, you're no good at this," belittled him. But I'm not going to do that, I'm his dad, right? So what I did was I held his hand, and he fell a lot, and I caught him a lot. Sometimes I couldn't catch him. I picked him back up a lot, and I tried to encourage him a lot, and I got him some water, and I took him to the bathroom, and we did all the things that you do, you know. And he spent a good bit of the night on the carpet, but by the end of the night, he actually, like, on the carpet was— if you remember when you're learning skating and your first time, that carpet is a lifesaver, you know. And you start to like, oh, I can do this, and I can wheel a little bit. And we had, you know, he would just keep making his way, and he started kind of making a path because he loves video games. So he kept making his path from Pac-Man back to the seat, from Pac-Man back to the seat, you You know, and he'd kind of go back and forth to it. And by the end of the night, even though he fell a lot, his bottom was hurting, he hurt his wrist at some point, and I thought he's never going to want to come back again. But on the way out the door, he said, "Daddy, can we come back tomorrow?" And we didn't have school on Monday, so we stayed out a little later, just he and I, and we had a daddy-son night. And I took him over to Big Boy and we got you know, that good hot fudge cake ice cream stuff. And we shared one of those, and we looked at one of his Mario books, and he was telling me different things about Mario, and we're sharing it and reading it. And then when we got home, I thought, well, he's just gonna want to lay with Mommy probably and do storytime as he goes to sleep, because he usually does that. But this night was special. We got home and he asked if it could just be me and him. That night. So you know what we did after we did our Bible verse, because we do a Bible verse every night, we read Shazam comic books while he fell asleep. If I would have lorded over him on that skating rink, or even in my regular life, how much bigger than I am, and how much stronger than I am, and how great I was compared to him, I doubt things like that would happen where he'd say, "Can you come read with me tonight?" "Can we stay out just a little bit later and get some ice cream?" or things like that. None of that good stuff probably would have happened if I was someone that was abusive to him. And I was thinking about this passage as I was thinking about that, and it's really not God's fault that we fear him. He is always reaching out, trying to tell us these words: Don't be afraid. Please fear not. Please stop being so scared. He wants a relationship to walk through those scary journeys with us. And there are plenty of reasons to be afraid of Jesus. I mean, he's the Son of God. He's God in flesh, as we've been singing this morning. The Messiah, the Holy One. The all-powerful, the roaring Lion of Judah. But know this: in the Bible, the Lamb who was slain is not revealed later as the roaring Lion. In the Bible, we see that the roaring Lion is actually revealed in the Lamb who was slain. That this roaring Lion brings himself low and comes to where we are, to our suffering, and indeed bears our suffering. Who God is, because he is so holy and he is so powerful, the natural human response to this God is fear. If we really would encounter him the way that Moses did, the way the disciples did on the mountain, I think we would be just as afraid afraid in that moment. But thank God, his first words to us in that moment is, "Don't be afraid." I don't want to push you down on the skating rink. I want to help you back up. I'm not here to punish you. I'm here to rescue you. That big scary monster turned out not to be a big scary monster at all. It became the Redeemer. You know? And gazing upon him, it may cause us fear at first, but not because of what he does. It's just who he is. What he does calms the fear. What he does calms the storm. What he does heals the lepers. What he does is makes the blind to see. What he does raises the dead to life again, what he does is give and give and give again. As we enter the season of Lent and this journey to the cross, I wonder if we can find the courage to gaze upon the transfigured Christ who is beginning this journey to the cross, and he's calling us, "Come, follow me." So this morning we're going to end in the way that we kind of started this message. I encourage you, if you can, stay just a couple minutes longer this morning. We're going to sing that song "Behold Him" again because it's Transfiguration Sunday, and we just want to take some time to be still and behold him this morning. So I'm going to ask you to stand, and Sue is going to come back one more time. And she's going to read from Matthew 17 again. And I just want to ask all of us this morning, as we hear the Word of God, let's open our hearts to him. And whatever that response is that we need to hear this morning, if you want to come spend some time being still at the altar, we'd love to have you do that. This isn't like some churches where there's shame attached to this altar. This is a church where we believe this is a place of refuge. So if you want to come and join us at the altar, feel free to do that. If you want to stand and sing, that's fine. If you want to sit in quiet, I guess that's okay too. I just want you to open yourself to hear this morning and to see and to behold him. Respond as God would have you respond this morning. Please read for us, Cindy.

After 6 days, Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John, the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun. His clothes became as white As the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses, Elijah, talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him. When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. "Get up," he said. "Don't be afraid." When they looked up, They saw no one except Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, "Don't tell anyone what you have seen until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." was drawn to wake as a child.

He became like the least of us.

Behold him, Jesus, Son of God, Messiah, the Lamb of glory, Messiah. Holy Spirit, He who chose a criminal's death, paid with blood to stamp out the death. Carried dead as he rose to life. He rose again. Jesus, Son of God, Messiah, the Lamb, the glory lion. Holy still. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Worthy, worthy, worthy to receive all praise. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Worthy, worthy, worthy to receive all praise. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Worthy, worthy, worthy to receive all praise. Holy, holy, holy is Jesus, how the devil made a God who lives and saves. Oh, be still and behold him.

Behold Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.