32 And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment.
Introduction
You and I happen to share this planet and have been called on to minister for Christ in the most explosive time in the history of the world. Powerful tides are surging across much of our world today, creating a new, often bizarre environment in which to work, play, marry, raise children, or retire. Value systems are splintering and crashing while the lifeboats of family, church, and faith are hurled madly about.
If we are to serve Christ effectively in today’s world, then we must understand our times so that we will know what we ought to do. This has always been a prerequisite for an effective service. The Bible gives us an example of this in 1 Chronicles 12:32. It says of the men of Issachar that they “had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.”
This statement is from the list of brave men of Israel who attached themselves to David at Hebron and made him king during the waning days of King Saul’s reign. The men of Issachar are given special mention because of their practical statesmanship. They made the right estimation of their times and helped to raise David to the throne. Because they understood their times they knew what action needed to be taken by the people of God.
And we today need to understand our times so that we will know what we ought to do as the people of God. We are in what some people call “the information society.” America began as an agricultural society. The agricultural society had its beginning in about 10,000 BC and continued into the 1700s—an era of almost 12 thousand years.
Then in the early 1700s the industrial society was born. Great factories sprang up and people starting moving from rural areas into the cities; from farming to manufacturing. The industrial era continued until the 1950s. But today, less than nine percent of the laboring force in America is engaged in the manufacturing of goods. We have now moved into the information society and almost everyone who is added to today’s labor force is involved in some way in the collection, assimilation, and distribution of information. Our age is characterized by computers, satellites, cable television, and the internet. It is a society where things are changing so rapidly that we can hardly keep up with them.
This is a time of instant global communication. An event can happen in one place in the world and in a matter of just a few minutes it can be known and even seen in every other place in the world.
When President Lincoln was shot, the word was communicating by telegraph to most part of the United States but because we had no links with England, five days passed before London heard of the event. When President Regan was shot, journalist Henry Fairlie, working at his typewriter within a block of the shooting, got word of it by telephone from his editor at the Spectator in London, who had seen a rerun of the assassination attempt on television shortly after it occurred.
This is a time of tremendous speed and travel. In 1927, when Charles Lindberg made the first solo flight across the Atlantic, he traveled at the fantastic speed of one hundred miles per hour. He made the flight from New York to Paris in 33 hours and 20 minutes. In 1974 a U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft made essentially the same flight in one hour and 54 minutes—traveling at an average speed of more than 1,800 miles per hour. That’s more than twice as fast as a 30.06 shell is traveling when it leaves the barrel of a rifle.
Recently I had to fly to El Paso. So I asked the ticket agent at the DFW airport what time my flight left. He said, “At 12:05.” Then I asked, “What time does the flight arrive in El Paso?” He said, “12:09.” I had forgotten that El Paso is in a different time zone from Dallas and that there is a one-hour time difference between them. I asked, “It leaves at 12:05 and arrives at 12:09?” He said, “That’s right.” As I stood there with a puzzled look on my face, he asked, “Sir, would you like to have a boarding pass?” I said, “No thank you, but if you don’t mind I’d like to stand here and watch that thing take off.”
This is a time of shift from national to world interests. The world economy, for example, is becoming more important than the national economy. We wear clothes made in Hong Kong; we watch televisions made in Japan; we build buildings out of steel manufactured in Korea; we drive cars made in Germany; and we tell time by watches made in Switzerland. The next generation will be forced more and more to think globally instead of locally.
This is a time of multiple options. We are shifting from an either/or to a multiple option society that John Naisbitt calls the “Baskin-Robbins society.” When I was a boy we had only three flavors of ice cream—chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. But Baskin-Robbins gives you a choice of 31 flavors. If you want to buy a car, there are more than 200 models of automobiles for sale in America today and that doesn’t include all the various color options. And a store in New York City sells 2,500 different kinds of light bulbs. Life used to be so simple. If you wanted a Coke there was only one size and one kind. Today there are multiple sizes and many kinds. You can buy regular cokes, sugar- free cokes, or caffeine-free cokes. If the manufacturers take any other ingredients out of cokes, pretty soon all you will be buying is the can.
It used to be that when if you wanted to watch television, you watched either ABC, or CBS, or NBC. But today there all-news networks, all-sports networks, all-Spanish networks, all-religious networks, all-music networks, all-black networks, and all-children networks.
This is a do-it-yourself society. We have self-service gas stations, machines so you can check your own blood pressure, self-pregnancy tests, and electronic banking.
And all of these social, political, and economic changes are mirrored in personal disintegration. Marriage and the home are fighting for their life. Almost half of our marriages now end in divorce.
For years the traditional family in America was thought of as a working husband, a housekeeping wife, and two children. But only seven percent of American families fit into that category today. Many people are choosing to live solo. There are more and more one-parent families and many couples are simply choosing to live together without marriage at all. Everything in society seems to be conspiring to destroy marriage. If you watch primetime television for two hours tonight, chances are you will see a man and woman sleeping together and they won’t be husband and wife. Hollywood never shows husbands and wives sleeping together. It always pictures people who aren’t married.
Psychotherapists and gurus are flourishing as people wander aimlessly from cults to fads, convinced that reality is absurd, insane, and meaningless.
Our churches are feeling the effects of all of this also. In the last 20 years six of our mainline denominations, including the United Methodists, the United Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Lutheran Church of America, the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ have lost a combined membership of more than four million people.
Yet studies have shown that half of the nation’s population that doesn’t belong to a church consider themselves as potentially responsive to the church if they could find an institution seriously concerned about working for a better society, could find good preaching, and could discover a religious education program for their children.
What should we do to reach all these people for Christ—as well as keep those we already have? What can we do to stem the decline that is all around us? In the light of our times, what ought the people of God to be doing?
I offer four suggestions: we should hold up hope; we should build communities; we should reach out in ministry; and we should yield to the Holy Spirit.
1. We need to hold up hope.
We are living in a time of great anxiety. Gloom and doom is heard on every hand. The newspapers, the televisions, the politicians all present a despairing picture of today’s world.
Our role is not to echo the despair and anxiety in secular society around us but to hold up hope. We must tell people about the grace of God that offers to them the possibility of a new life. Their sins can be forgiven. They can have victory over sin and habits and circumstances. They can have divine guidance in the making of their decisions. And they can have the assurance of heaven when they die. That is the hope that people need and seek.
The New Testament is a book of hope based on resurrection theology. This is not Pollyannaish. It is based on the conviction that our ultimate destiny is in the hands of God. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available and operative in our lives today.
But many of our churches mirror the despair of the age. I was driving down the highway the other day and saw a sign with an arrow pointing down a country road that said, “Little Hope Baptist Church.” I thought to myself, “My soul, I’m glad I’m not the pastor of that church.” If I were the first thing I would do is start a movement to change its name. I would get them to call it the “Big Hope Baptist Church” or the “New Hope Baptist Church” or the “Living Hope Baptist Church” or the “Coming Hope Baptist Church” or the “Everlasting Hope Baptist Church” or the “Glorious Hope Baptist Church” or the “Flaming Hope Baptist Church”—anything but the “Little Hope Baptist Church.”
The only name worse than the “Little Hope Baptist Church” would be the “No Hope Baptist Church.” That’s exactly what many of our churches are presenting to the world today—little or no hope.
People need faith and courage and assurance for the difficult task of living in today’s world. If we can give that to them with radiance and joy, backed up by lives that display real hope, our despairing world can be reached.
2. We should build communities.
The second thing we need to emphasize is community. There are three basic needs that every person has. Everyone needs meaning, structure, and community. People are not content just to exist—they must have purpose, a cause beyond themselves and greater than themselves to live for.
People also need structure, discipline, and guidelines for their lives. But most of all we need community. We need a sense of belonging, of being a part of a group where we are known and loved.
In our society loneliness looms like an iceberg, chilling the waters of life all around us. Never before in the history have people lived so close together and yet felt so far apart. We travel down crowded highways, rush through crowded airports, shop in crowded malls, live in crowded apartment complexes, but still we are lonely. People yearn for a personal touch, a sense of belonging.
Loneliness is not he absence of people; it is the absence of meaningful relationships. It is the feeling that you are unknown, unloved, and unimportant.
Jean Nidetch, who founded Weight Watchers, gave insight into her onetime obesity when she said, “I always feel as if I’m just on the fringe of understanding why I got to fat. People are hungry for one another; maybe that’s why I ate. I wanted to feel the void. I keep telling my daughter-in-law, ‘Hug that little baby of yours, kiss her, hold her close. Don’t let her be hungry for love.’ We are all looking for something, maybe religion, maybe a guy. I don’t know. But it sure isn’t a hunk of chocolate cake.”
Who can better provide a caring and sharing fellowship, a community where people are loved and accepted than the local church? The electronic church can’t. The electronic church may provide better music and better preaching than the local church but it cannot offer the one thing the human spirit most hungers for and that is human touch.
It is this need for community that is the secret to the success of the cults. It is loosely estimated today that some three million Americans belong to more than one thousand religious cults. Why do so many thousands of apparently intelligent, seemingly successful people allow themselves to be sucked into the myriad of cults sprouting today?
What accounts for the total control that a Jim Jones was able to exercise over the lives of his followers? Just why is it that such groups can command almost total dedication and obedience from their members? The secret is simple. They understand the need for community, structure, and meaning. For these are what all the cults peddle.
The cults offer meaning to people’s lives. Each has its own single-minded version of reality—religious, political, or cultural. The cult believes that it possesses the sole truth. The “meaning” delivered by the cult may be absurd to the outsider but that doesn’t matter. It provides meaning to the person on the inside.
The cult offers much-needed structure. Cults impose tight constraints on behavior. They demand and create an enormous discipline in their followers. Our society is so free and permissive, and people have so many options to choose from that they cannot make their own decisions effectively. They want others to make their decisions for them and thus they will follow them.
But most of all the cults offer lonely people community. In the beginning the newcomer is surrounded by people offering friendship and beaming approval. So powerful and rewarding is this sudden warmth and attention that cult members are often willing to give up everything and everyone for it.
But no one has the potential for community like the church. We have been brought together by the Spirit of God to do the will of God, and to be the family of God. If we offer to the world genuine brotherly love we can reach people today.
A lady recently joined our church who had been a member of another denomination for 47 years. She told me that when her husband left her it was as if a big “A” (that stands for anathema) had been stamped on her forehead. Even though the divorce was not her fault, she was ostracized and left out of everything.
Through the invitation of a friend she came to our church. There she found love, warmth, and acceptance. She became active in Sunday school. She said they cared so much about her that she could hardly be out of church for a Sunday without someone calling to check up on her.
She found in our church a caring and sharing fellowship and that’s why she became one of us.
We live in a cold world but people are still drawn by the warmth of love and fellowship. It is the responsibility of all of us to reach out to those in our neighborhoods and apartment complexes, and especially those who walk through the doors of our church, and make them feel welcome in the family.
3. We should reach out in ministry.
The church is not only the family of God, it is also the body of Jesus Christ on earth today. We are to busy ourselves then in doing what he did in the days of his flesh. What did Jesus do? Scriptures say that he went about doing good (Acts 10:38). We must therefore not be content just to go about. We must reach out to alcoholics, to distraught parents, to the unemployed, to the brokenhearted, to the oppressed, and to the imprisoned, and do all we can in the name of Christ to help them.
Doing the Gospel is not only our most powerful witness, it is the hope of bringing back a sense of community that modern technology has all but stripped away from us. We Christians must exercise the power of forming personal relationships with social outcasts from every walk of life. The basis of our ministry begins with God’s love for humanity.
We must go to them because they are men and women who need to know Christ’s love for them. But the only way that they will ever know that love is if we demonstrate it by going to them as God commanded us to do. We are God’s people and we care because he cared. The object of life is not the pursuit of gain, the fulfillment of self, but the service of Christ.
When John the Baptist was imprisoned by Herod, he began to have doubts about Jesus’ Messiahship. John, you remember, was the first bold witness for Christ. He had declared, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). But sometime later he had doubts. So he sent two of his disciples to ask, “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?”(Matthew 11:3).
Jesus’ response was “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached” (Luke 7:22).
The essence of Jesus’ answer to John was this: “Tell John about my ministry, and when he knows what I am doing, he will know who I am.” As it was with Jesus, so it should be with us. Our ministry should mark us as the Master’s men and women.
The Lord Jesus met people as they were, not as they ought to have been. Angry young men, blind beggars, proud politicians, loose-living street walkers, dirty and naked victims of demonism, and grieving parents got equal time. The hungry, the sick, the outcasts, and the despairing all came to know the grace of God in Christ, came to know God in Christ’s cross, and came to believe God in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
As Christ was among men ministering so we must be among them. Everywhere people are hurting, everywhere marriages are falling apart, everywhere men are in the grips of alcohol, everywhere young people are discouraged with life, everywhere parents are distraught. In such a world we must be busy ministering as Jesus did. That is the only way to win our world to Christ.
4. We should yield to the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of power, of love, of truth, and of life. Wherever the spirit of God moves and works, there will be life and power.
Years ago John Henry Giles wanted to preach a sermon on “The Winds Blows Where It Will.” So he went down to the docks and asked an old sailor friend, a seasoned salt with a weather-beaten face, to tell him about the wind.
He wanted to know where the wind came from, how the wind worked, and how to control the wind.
His old sailor friend said, “Oh, preacher, I don’t know the answers to those questions. I don’t know where the wind comes from. I don’t know how the wind works. And I sure don’t know how to control the wind.”
The preacher said, “You mean to tell me that you have sailed the seven seas, you have spent your life living by the wind, and you don’t know those things?”
The old sailor said, “No, preacher, I don’t know how the winds works. But I know one thing. I know how to hoist my sails to catch the wind and when I do, it takes me wherever I need to go.”
The movement of the Holy Spirit in the world is like the unpredictable and uncontrollable wind moving across the surface of time. Our task is not to control the Holy Spirit’s work, but to ride the winds of his power when we encounter them.
We don’t know a lot about the Holy Spirit. We don’t understand how he works and we sure don’t have any control over him. It is true, “The winds bloweth where it will.”
But we can work in harmony with him, allowing him to control, to direct, and to empower our lives and our churches.
It is only by doing that that we can win our world to Christ. In our day, as in the days of David, we need people like the men of Issachar who have an understanding of the times, to know what the people of God ought to do. The more I know about our times, the more I sense the need to hold up hope, to build community, to reach out in ministry, and to yield to the Holy Spirit.