Who's Really in Charge?

Good morning everybody. >> Good morning >> man. Thank you so much Lauren. It’s great to see you. >> We’ll go ahead and start finding your seats. Go ahead and start getting back to your seats. We’ll transition to the next part of our service where the last person standing has to come up and introduce themselves and sing a karaoke song. Last person standing might have to come. Oh, I’ve got Joe Betty wanting to do that. Okay, >> I’m going to take that privilege away from Miss Joe Betty. No, I’m not actually going to do that, but I will ask everybody to go ahead and find your seats. Go ahead and return there. We are Yeah, come into the prayer portion of our service. You know, we’ve already prayed multiple times, but we want to dedicate a portion of every Sunday morning to prayer. We don’t just want to be a church that prays. You know, there’s lots of churches that pray. We want to be a praying church, a church that is rooted and fueled by prayer. So that’s why we take a couple minutes of every Sunday morning worship service and we just pray. So if this is new to you, praying out loud, then man, I want to invite you to try something new. Just like somebody invited you to try that new restaurant and you liked it, or you tried that new shirt on and you like that, I want you to try this new thing, too. Praying out loud. If this is normal for you, then man, please help lead the room. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to just pray once one more time two more times next Sunday, but we’re continuing to pray for our one. What that means is we are all close to somebody that is far from God. That’s your one. So who is your one? It could be a classmate at school, some somebody that you play sports with or somebody that you hang out with that is far from the Lord. Man, it could be a a neighbor or a co-worker that you know that does not have a relationship with Jesus. It could even be a family member, somebody that you know of or you could be married to them. They could be your one. And we just want to spend a few moments praying that God would get a hold of them, would introduce Himself to them, and that God would captivate their hearts. So, y’all take it away. Let’s pray for a few minutes. Let’s lift up our ones to the Lord. Thank y’all. Holy Spirit, I love to listen to these prayers. I confess I I came to the pulpit at first and just ready to interrupt and get us to the next part of the service. I hear people praying. I I hear these names being lifted up, these situations that are being prayed for. And I just thought, how dare I how how dare I interrupt, Holy Spirit, what You’re doing. God, I trust that You are at work in the lives of our ones. How could You not be? We are bringing our friends, our neighbors, our classmates, our family members, our co-workers, our neighbors. We’re bringing them before the throne of God and asking the God of the universe to break into their lives and to help them have the peace and the joy and the life they crave. How could You not be at work? I know that You’re at work in their lives because we know them and we call on Your name. God, please continue Your work in our ones. I think about my one that I got to spend an hour with last week. God, thank You for that time. I’ll be I’ll be honest. I didn’t want it and he just kind of dropped it in my lap. Anyways, thank You for that, God. He says that he’s thinking about coming to church. He’s professes some sort of faith in You. But Lord, as I look at his life, God, he’s the he’s the Lord of his life, not You. I could tell. And I pray that You would just introduce Yourself to him. Introduce Yourself to these people we’ve been praying for, these folks that we love and we care for. That You love and You care for. And we know that again because You have put us in their lives. God, get a hold of all of us right now. Lord, I’ve been with You this week preparing this this message. I I trust these are the words that You have for us this morning. And I’m begging that You would supercharge this, Holy Spirit, that You Would get in this, and You would do something through this that only You can do. Please, for anybody in this room that does not know You yet as rescuer and master, as Lord and Savior, please get a hold of them. God, for all the pain that’s in this room, all the family situations, all the personal sickness, the the debt, the the frustrations, the broken dreams, the disappointments. God, get a hold of those things. Show that You are the sovereign Lord of the universe this morning. We love You. Thank You for loving us. It’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen.

We’re going to continue our study through the book of Judges. Judges chapter 9, verse 22. You go ahead and open your copy of God’s Word and find it there. It’s a crazy book. Absolutely wild. This is—it feels like HBO. If it feels like stuff you watch, you know, at 1:00 a.m. scrolling the channels. It feels like stuff you might read out of a newspaper from some crazy country around the world. But as followers of Jesus, this is actually our family history. You know, we are opening the diary of great-great-grandfather and we’re reading what he was going through. This is—this is where—this is what we come from.

Last week was a truly wild story where you’ve got this guy named Abimelech. He’s the son of a great man named Gideon. Gideon lived a mostly great life but tailed off at the end and had his own doubts and his own questions and his own issues and failures. And he’s got 70 sons. 70 sons by a bunch of wives and even a concubine. And the son by the concubine, his name is Abimelech. Abimelech, he’s pretty hungry for power and influence and control. So he leads all the people to help him murder his 70 brothers for him to take the throne so that he could become the king of his people based in this town called Shechem.

Well, it’s been three years since Abimelech took control of Israel. It’s been three years since Abimelech’s youngest brother, Jotham, who escaped the slaughter of his brothers and stood up on a mountain and called to God’s people and said, “Are you really doing this? Is this what you want?” Jotham confronts Abimelech. He confronts all the people of Shechem and he calls them to repentance. It’s been three years. Humanly speaking, it seems like Abimelech is in charge. But what we’re going to see this morning is that Abimelech is not the real boss. Abimelech is not really in charge.

When I was studying this past week, it reminded me of the TV show. I—we don’t watch a whole lot of TV in our home, but there is something I can always be talked into watching. It’s the show Undercover Boss. What’s the laughter about? Y’all have seen the TV show, right? This is where they take some high-ranking executive and they put him in some menial task at, you know, some far-flung franchise of his or her company and see, you know, what’s it really like on the front lines of our company.

I remember as a kid watching this one episode, in fact, and this is not related to the sermon whatsoever except for this: there is a particular Moe’s restaurant, you know, the Southwest chain. There’s a particular Moe’s location in Colombia where I’m from that my family and I would go to sometimes, and that was the location for Undercover Boss at one point. So there we go. That doesn’t matter for today, but that’s just there.

There’s this one episode with with a truly great guy. This was Modell’s Sports Equipment. Modell Sports Equipment. It’s based up in New York City. It is like a hundred-year-old, family-run, multi-generation chain of sporting equipment. So the fourth generation, his—this guy named Mitch Modell, Mitchell Modell, that’s him on the left. They dress him up as Joey Quick, a former pizza shop owner whose pizza shop closed down six months ago. And man, he’s just restocking shelves at the Connecticut branch of Modell’s sports gym equipment, you know, whatever it is.

The fun thing about Undercover Boss, aside from watching someone who normally is making like million-dollar decisions having to now scrub the toilets, like that’s gratifying always. But one of the best things about the TV show is that the CEO always has these heartwarming moments with the guy that’s just trying to make a good life. And that was the case in Mitch Modell’s situation. He interacts with one of his employees who had formerly been incarcerated, got out, got a job, and is just doing right, working hard, Making a good name for himself, earning a living. And through that personal connection, that employee who had earned it and had made made the mistakes but owned those mistakes and is coming out of it now, through that connection, that employee was able to get into some upward mobility and get some more job training. It’s a great story.

The other side of Undercover Boss, though, is when you see the CEO watching employees do things that are either against the rules or against the law. Like one time at Subway where the founder of Subway, you know the guy that used to be on the commercials, I forget his name right now, he is standing in a location making sandwiches and he looks over at the cash register where he’s watching one of his employees pulling cash out the register, putting it in his pocket. Show over. Rips the stuff off, introduces himself, and says, “You are fired right now, man. Undercover Boss. It’s got everything you want. It’s got the drama, the intrigue, the heartwarming moments. This show, Undercover Boss, is great because the real boss is right there. Whether the employees and the customers know it, he’s right there.

Like in that TV show right now, right now, I want to offer you something. God, the real boss is right here. He is near. He sees everything. He has the power to reward and the power to punish. And that’s the reality that we are going to look at this morning out of Judges chapter 9. Who’s the real boss? It’s not AMC. It’s not your boss. God.

There’s one thing I want you to take away from this morning. Really, it’s this. God is in charge. God is in charge. In fact, just say it with me because we need to remind ourselves and there’s somebody else in the room that needs to hear you say this. 3, 2, 1. God is in charge. God is in charge.

You may be in a situation right now where it does not seem like God is in charge. That bad diagnosis may feel to be in charge. Your crippling debt and the phone calls from the bank that might feel like it’s in charge. The painful personal loss you went through that might feel to be in charge. The cold loneliness you feel at night by yourself that you might feel like that’s in charge. But know this, God is in charge. Even if God seems absent or disengaged or even powerless, please trust me. God is in charge. He sees you. He is with you. He’s the real boss.

Let’s look at how that plays out in Judges chapter 9. Read verses 22-24 with me. When Abimelech had ruled over Israel for three years, God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem. They treated Abimelech deceitfully so that the crime against the 70 sons of Jerubbaal, that’s Gideon’s other name, might come to justice and their blood would be avenged on their brother Abimelech who killed them, and on the citizens of Shechem. Who helped Abimelech kill his brothers?

The first notes you might write down this morning are this. God is in charge even over demons. Man, we had a spirited conversation this morning in Sunday school where in the young adults class, we just look at the passage that’s about to be preached and we just kind of go through it and prime ourselves on it. And we spent most of this morning looking at just this. What in the world is going on? Through what I understand, through what I read, and through what other Bible scholars have said, the best way I know how to put this is that God is in charge even over demons.

But before we even get to the whole evil spirit thing of verse 23, there’s something in verse 22 that I want to draw your attention to. You know, we are reading the Bible in black and white. What I mean is we are watching a black and white TV with just a normal stereo system. But whenever you get to read some of the original languages, that’s when you’re reading the Bible in color with the surround sound speaker.

The word in verse 22 for ruled. Abimelech had ruled. It’s not the word king. It’s not the word led with an iron fist. The word ruled there is manage, officer. Abimelech, according to the Bible, is just managing. He’s just officering. Abimelech looks like he’s in charge. He looks like he’s the boss. The entire situation going on looks like Abimelech has his thumb on the situation. The Bible says, “Nuh-uh. That man’s just managing. Not really in charge.

charge. We see God is in charge because verse 23 it happens. God sends an evil spirit between Aimilec and the people he is managing. You see, here’s the deal. God is the sovereign creator of everything. Mountains, doves, oceans, wild flowers, and even spirits. And because God is in charge, He has the right to use anything He wants to accomplish whatever He wants, including demons, to overthrow a desperate. Here’s the deal, though. God is not evil. Don’t get it twisted. God is not evil, nor is He the author of evil. Yet, He is sovereign, which means He’s in charge. And His sovereignty even extends to the spiritual realm and over evil spirits. And that’s incredibly good news for us. God is in charge of the evil spirits. And they submit to Him and to His purposes.

Here in this passage, God is sending actively sending an evil spirit to divide Aimilec from the people of Sheckchham so that God can avenge the death that Aimilec brought onto his 70 brothers and so that God will bring justice to the city of Sheckchum for helping Aimilec. Elsewhere in the Bible, we see God send evil spirits to do His bidding. Like later with King Saul and a young boy named David or even in the book of Job where Satan himself must submit to God’s plans and God’s sovereignty and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Look at Him. Look in the New Testament and you will see this time and time again. Jesus had authority over demons. Jesus would cast demons out of people and the demons would beg Him for mercy. The ultimate example of evil submitting to God’s purpose was in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The worst evil ever committed the murder of the Son of God was completely under the sovereign sway of our master God Himself. And it was indeed the means of our salvation. Because on the cross where Satan was laughing and mocking Jesus, when Satan had thought that he won by putting Jesus Christ on the cross for Jesus to die for us, God, the real boss who was there the whole time watching the whole thing, knew the whole truth. God knew that Jesus was not just going to suffer for our or sorry God knew that Jesus wasn’t just going to suffer as a sinner. God knew Jesus was going to suffer for us sinners where Jesus took the judgment we deserve so that God would see us and see us through the perfected work of Jesus Christ.

God’s in charge of everything. And God can even use evil spirits to do good stuff. Where we get it twisted is our inability to do the same and our inability to understand what in the world is happening here. Man, there are times when we come to the Bible and we just have to take our understanding and we just submit it to what is plainly said and we just say, you know what, I can’t wrap my head around this. I’m not going to tear it apart. I’m just going to rest in that and trust that the God who is big enough to create everything has wisdom that’s higher than mine and His ways are higher than mine. This is one of those moments. God is in charge of everything. If God’s truly in charge over everything, if God’s truly in charge over evil spirits and demons, then man, as believers in Jesus, that means we are secure in Jesus. Let’s say it again. If God’s truly in charge of everything, including evil spirits, then believers are secure in Jesus. Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord. Neither height nor depth, nor princes, nor principalities, nor heaven, nor earth, nor anything to come, nor anything that’s ever happened to you. Nothing in the past, nothing in your future. Nothing can separate you from the love of God that’s in Christ Jesus, not even Satan Himself.

But that is not true for those who have not placed their faith in Jesus. The book of Ephesians we looked at last year says that Satan is the prince of the power of the air who currently rules the world in the same way that Aimilec was ruling Sheckchum managing officering. I’m not trying to scare anybody into heaven or anything, but what I do want to say is that if you have not placed your faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, then man, you are open to the sway and the attack and the influence of Satan in your life. Man, as a believer in Jesus, that gives me a whole lot of reason to share the Hope of the gospel because I don’t want to see people under the sway of demons. I don’t want to see people living in darkness. And I know you don’t either, man. For believers in the room, we don’t just evangelize and share the gospel because it might be a good thing for us to do, man. We we do that because we love people. And there are folks trapped in darkness and bondage. And we have the key to free them from that prison. And it is the the word of hope that Jesus Christ came and lived a perfect life in their place and died a sacrifice on their behalf and didn’t just die for them but also rose from the grave fully defeating Satan.

For the person in the room this morning who has yet to place your faith in Jesus Christ. Man, make today the day that you give your life to him and you shut the door to Satan. Make it today. God’s in charge. He’s in charge over everything. He’s even in charge of evil spirits.

As we continue in Judges chapter nine, remember like in the show Undercover Boss, the owner, the CEO, was always in charge even when she was hidden. The same is true here. Write this down if you’re taking notes. God is in charge even when He seems absent. God is in charge even when He seems absent. Over the next 31 verses, God won’t be mentioned once. But if we read those verses remembering what was just said, then we will recognize the hidden hand of God moving the game pieces along according to what He wants to do.

Look at verses 25-29 specifically with me. I’m going to read them. They’ll be on the screen. The citizens of Shechem, remember there’s an evil spirit now between Abimelech and Shechem. The citizens of Shechem rebelled against Abimelech by putting men in ambush on the tops of the mountains. They robbed everyone who was passing by them on the road. So this was reported to Abimelech. Gaal the son of Ebed came with his brothers and crossed into Shechem. And the citizens of Shechem trusted him. So they went out to the countryside and harvested grapes from their vineyards. They trampled the grapes and held a celebration. Then they went to the house of their god. That’s a false god. That’s an idol. And as they ate and drank, they cursed Abimelech. Gaal the son of Ebed said, “Who is Abimelech? And who is Shechem that we should serve him? Isn’t he the son of Jerubbaal? Isn’t Zebul his officer? You are to serve the men of Hamor, the father of Shechem. Why should we serve Abimelech? If only these people were in my power, I would remove Abimelech.” So he said to Abimelech, just gather your army. Come out.

Man, this seems ridiculous. But you see this this evil spirit creating this division between Abimelech and the people of Shechem, part parting them away. In verse 25, it says that the citizens of Shechem rebelled against him. You see what they’re doing is what they want. They want to make Abimelech’s wallet hurt. So they are setting an ambush in the trade route along the road that would run by Shechem. And they’re they’re ambushing all these traders and all those folks. What that’s going to do eventually, it’s going to make your city a bad place to do business. Who really cares about that? Abimelech. Because he’s trying to make money off the city. So they’re rebelling against Abimelech by hurting themselves.

And in that situation in steps a new challenger, Gaal Gaal, the son of Ebed. We don’t know anything about him. He doesn’t appear at any other point in the Bible, but what he what we know is that he’s the son of a guy named Ebed. And he claims to be a descendant of a man named Hamor. Verse 28, that’s what I was reading. You are to serve the men of Hamor, the father of Shechem. You see, Shechem has existed as a city for hundreds of years at this point. It was founded by a man named Hamor. So, what Gaal is doing is he’s looking at the people and he’s saying, “Who are you going to serve? Are you going to serve one of your own countrymen? One of the sons of Hamor, me, Gaal, or are you going to serve Abimelech, the son of Jerubbaal?” You see, he’s making an ethnic distinction between himself and Jerubbaal or sorry, Abimelech. Gaal’s strategy is to lean onto this ethnic difference to win the hearts of the Shechemites. And if you’re putting your thinking cap on, you would remember that’s exactly what Abimelech did last week. Abimelech looks at all the people of Shechem and says, “Why would you serve the full-blooded descendants of Gideon? I was born here. My mom is from here. I might only be half-blooded, but serve me. I’m at least bone of your bone. I flesh of your flesh. Serve me.” But his half-blooded resume didn’t cut it against Gaal who was full-blooded. That’s what Gaal is doing. Let me summarize the next few verses for us. This dissension is starting to grow and it’s reached the ears of a guy named Zebul. Zebul is the one that’s actually managing the city on behalf of Abimelech. Zebul hears about this and he knows that his boss is about to be kicked out of the office. So he’s trying to protect himself. He says, “Hey, Abimelech, you need to know that this is going on.” So he tells Abimelech what to do. Gather all the soldiers that are still loyal to you and come and attack the city of Shechem. We got to put down this uprising as soon as possible. Abimelech takes this advice, gathers all of his troops. He stations them outside of the city and starts to move in on the appointed day. When the moment comes, Zebul is looking out at the fields. Beside him is none other than Gaal. Gaal was just saying, “Who’s Abimelech? Who are his soldiers? I would kick them all out.” So Zebul tricks Gaal into going into battle against an enemy that Zebul knows Gaal can’t defeat. You see what’s going on? The drama, the intrigue. Okay, Gaal takes the bait and he leads the uprising citizens to battle against Abimelech, their leader, and his soldiers. That goes terribly for Gaal and the rebels here in Shechem. Abimelech does to them what he did to his brothers. Kills them, slaughters them. Bodies everywhere. The battle ends that day. Then the next day, the survivors are coming out of the city. Whether to plunder the dead or to harvest crops, we don’t know. And Abimelech brings the second wave. He keeps slaughtering the people he once convinced to make him the king. People who helped him murder his 70 brothers so that he could take the throne. And Abimelech smells blood in the water. The next attack and he sees how he can finally put down the rebellion. Pick it back up in verses 46-49. When all the citizens of the tower of Shechem heard, think about that as like a central military fortification in the heart of the city of Shechem. When all the citizens of the tower of Shechem heard, they entered the inner chamber, sorry, of the temple of El-berith, their false god. It was reported to Abimelech that all the citizens of the tower of Shechem had gathered in the temple. So Abimelech and all the troops who went with him went up to Mount Zalmon. Abimelech takes his axe. He cuts a branch from the trees. He pick put wow. He picks up the branch, puts it on his shoulder and says to the troops who are with him, “Hurry and do what you have seen me do.” Each of the troops also cut their own branch and they followed Abimelech. They put the branches against the inner chamber and they set it on fire. About a thousand men and women die including all the men of the Tower of Shechem and yet or still God has not shown up or it seems that way. Donna, where’s God in this? He’s right there. May God seems absent. He seems silent, but according to His wisdom and His ways, which are higher than mine, He is the unseen mover advancing this story along. Let me bring it personally because some of us aren’t going through military battles, but we are going through battles truly. Man, where’s God in your cancer? Where’s God in your divorce, your broken dreams, your broken body? I’ll tell you where. Right there with you. God is right there with you. And He is working something out in you that’s better and more lasting than anything this world could ever provide. Man, God is not after a healthy body primarily. God is not after a long marriage primarily. God is not after a fulfilling job primarily. Now I do believe that God is good and He wants good things for you like healthy bodies and good marriages and good jobs. I do believe that. But what I know God is ultimately after is helping you love Him and becoming the person that He wants you to be. To help you truly thrive in this life and the next, no matter what your circumstances are.

My question for you right now is, how do you respond when God seems absent? When God seems hidden, what do you do? I think we’re all tempted to recoil from other Christians. We’re tempted to stop praying. We put the Bible down and close it up. And this morning, God wants us to stop those things. May He wants us to be with other Christians. He wants us to pray. He wants us to take up our Bible, to lean into Him. Man, when God seems hidden, He wants you to search for Him. When God seems absent, He wants you to draw near to Him. When He seems quiet, man, He He wants you to put yourself in a place where you can hear His voice.

That that’s why for me, Sunday school is really important. I’m not the teacher. I’m just a member of Sunday school. I go there so that I can hear my brothers and sisters in Christ talk about how God’s word is meeting them in their lives, and I can share how I need them to keep me accountable. I don’t lead my experiencing God group to make me feel better. I lead my experiencing God group so that I can pray with some other men who know what’s going on in my life.

Man, I’m not sure why you are here this morning, but I’m so glad you’re here. And my encouragement, my offer to you is to develop habits in your life of drawing near to God and hearing from Him so that when He seems absent and quiet, you can take those lies and you can put them out recognizing that God is in charge and He is with you.

As we come back to this passage, God is about to bring Abimelech’s evil bloodthirst to an end. Let’s finish it off. Verses 50-57. Remember, He has just destroyed the city of Shechem. He’s killed everybody that would rebel against Him.

Verse 50, Abimelech, Abimelech went to Thebez, camped against it, and captured it. Thebez is about 10 miles to the north of Shechem. What would drive him to march 10 miles after this? I’m not sure what, but there’s a strong tower inside the city of Thebez. And all the men, women, and citizens of the city fled to that tower. They locked themselves in and they went up to the roof of the tower.

When Abimelech came to attack the tower, he approached its entrance to set it on fire. But a woman threw the upper portion of a millstone onto Abimelech’s head and fractured his skull. Let’s go. He quickly calls his armor bearer and said to him, “Draw your sword and kill me, or they’ll say about me, a woman has killed him.” So his armor bearer ran him through and he died.

When the Israelites saw that Abimelech was dead, they all went home. And in this way, God brought back Abimelech’s evil, the evil that Abimelech had done to his father when he killed his 70 brothers. God also brought back to the men of Shechem all their evil. So the curse of Jotham from last week came upon them.

Write this down. God is in charge even over life and death. God is in charge even over life and death. I’m not sure how that statement hits everybody. I trust for some of us we bristle and others of us we can just God’s in charge of even of her life and death. He uses an unnamed inglorious woman to kill this man Abimelech. She takes a millstone and drops it from a window.

Let me explain what that is. All right. So, you go to the store and you buy your loaf of bread and it’s just already come. Everything’s great. But bread doesn’t grow on trees, but wheat and barley do grow in the in the fields. All right. So, what you have to do, you take these wheat and barley berries. That’s right, babe. Okay. All right. It doesn’t look like a berry to me. Looks more like a seed, but you know, I don’t get to name it.

So you take that and you put it in a mill and you have to grind up the wheat and the barley from a seed into flour and you would use a millstone to do that. This is a modern example. The one on the right is a big one. That’s like an industrial millstone. The one on the left that would be a personal one. You might be able to see there’s a lady on the left and she’s holding a rod which has been put into an upper circular stone. What she’s going to do is She’s going to take that rod and she’s going to just churn it in a circle and it’s going to take the seeds between those two stones and grind them up against each other so that the flour will follow the contour of those little rivets on the bottom side of that big one you see and it produces flour. So what she does in this passage that we just read is there’s a woman who whether out of fear she carted her mill with her up the stairs of the tower or she has just found one. She’s got this piece of stone 15 pounds dense hard. She’s looking at Abimelech over the window and just does that. Abimelech too arrogant to see what’s going on is just saying look at me I’m the king of the world and dude just gets with this stone hard enough it fractures his head not so hard that in his dying breath laying on the ground he looks at his armor bearer and says kill me or the disgrace of having been killed by a woman is going to come upon me and just like that Abimelech is dead.

God’s in charge. God is in charge even over life and death. God is in charge of when you were born and God is in charge of when you will die. And that’s actually comforting for us because that means that God gets to determine when you take your final breath. So you don’t have to anxiously fret over every single decision you make in life. Yes. Let’s use wisdom and eat well. Let’s use wisdom and not be jerks in traffic. Let’s use wisdom and take care of our lives. But we can use the greatest wisdom in trusting God with the unknown mysteries of life, such as when ours on earth will end. And in that, if God is in charge of life and death, then we can trust Him to lead us wherever He wants to. We don’t have to anxiously wonder, God, how is this going to go for me? Because we can say the God that’s really in charge is in charge of everything. He’s in charge of evil spirits. He’s in charge even when He seems absent. And He is in charge of my days.

When God sees fit, He will bring Jeremy Simmons home. I’m not home. And that’s not because my mom’s in Lexington. It’s because this place is not our home. We are pilgrims passing through. Man, we get so tied to this place and we think the worst thing in the world will be to leave here. So, we try to hold on to the details of our life with these white knuckles cuz man, God not going to take this away from me. And God’s like, “Dude, you’re a pilgrim. Just have enough to carry on your back to take you to the next day. One day, God’s going to bring me home to Him when He decides that my life on earth is over. As a believer in Christ, death is just the doorway for me. It’s not the end, it’s the beginning. God is sovereign. God is in charge. God’s sovereignty over this situation decisively ends both the evil of Abimelech while holding the people of Shechem responsible. And in this the curse of Jotham comes upon them.

Man, if God’s in charge over life and death, then you don’t have to be anxious over your next appointment. You don’t have to hoard all your money. You don’t have to live for a bucket list. Instead, we can live to serve. We can use the resources we want to play with to bless other people. And we can live with a freedom knowing that God’s in charge, not us. In that TV show Undercover Boss, the reveal always comes. You know, when you sit down to watch an episode that at the end, there’s going to be a heartwarming moment, there’s going to be an okay moment, there’s going to be a confrontation, whatever. In Judges chapter nine, the reveal also comes. The difference is when God reveals Himself, it’s not just an emotional reveal. These are eternal consequences. And one day, God is really going to reveal Himself in your life. One day, you’re going to get to the end of your episode and you will learn who’s really been in charge the whole time. And it’s not you.

I want to ask you just be vulnerable with yourself or with the Lord. What’s going on in your life where you’re not sure God’s really in charge? What’s happening for you that feels out of God’s control? Or what are you going through and you’re questioning if God Even cares? In fact, I got a question on the screen. If you got a pen and paper, I want you to I want you to write the answer to this on your bulletin, on your journal. God, You’re in charge even over blank. God, You’re in charge. What is it for you? Might be a medical situation. Could be a financial one, some relationship you’ve got where it’s just broken and you’re like, “God, do You even see this?” Could be a job or a lack of a job, something personal going on. God, You’re in charge even over blank.

In a few moments during this final I’m going to be up front. I’m gonna invite Becca to be up front with me. Al and Beth, the four of us will be up here, man. If you just want you just want some prayer, I just need to know that God’s in charge, may you just grab one of the four of us. We’d love to pray for you. Love to pray with you right here. I’m invite Michael to come up. Let me pray. Just please close your eyes.

God. God, You’re in charge. You are the real boss. God, not my anxiety, not my need to prove myself. God, You’re in charge. Not my financial situation, not that broken relationship. God, You’re in charge. not whatever it is. Holy Spirit, I pray that You would You would help us to be vulnerable with one another. You would let this body of Christians take care of itself. You would bring somebody forward that needs prayer because they they really aren’t sure that You’re actually in charge. I pray You would do that during this final song. Thank You, Lord.