Fret Not

ret not!”  Page 653 in your Bible if you got one like mine. If you don’t, the book of Psalms.  Psalms—the number, an individual Psalm, 37.  Now when God says something more than once—He’s got enough to say.  There are a lot of people they have to say something more than once because that’s all they got to say—but when God repeats Himself pay attention.  It must have importance.  Psalm 37, Verse 1, “Fret not;” Verse 7, “Fret not;” Verse 8, “Fret not.”  And everybody that has never fretted can leave.  Wouldn’t let those that came to see the ‘Whore’ leave but if you have never fretted and don’t know anything about that experience, I don’t have anything to say to you today.

Now this is a particular kind of message.  I preach messages like a shotgun shot with a pellet for whomever it hits.  I preach messages that are rifle shots.  Most of the time here we are displaying God’s control over history with a goal to produce Faith because Paul said, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” and you don’t need to work it up.  If you can be exposed to God’s performance long enough you’ll learn to trust Him.  This message I preach annually for myself and you can listen in if you’re a fretter.

And for anyone else who ever has had to fret, this message is designed to lead us step by step into a focused way of living that, more often than I can count, has taken me through some awful troubled times.  The gray hair’s not age, it’s mileage.  And this is a message, if I can get people to just tune in and turn loose in your experience, will carry you through 1988 or any other year.  

Now God never asks you to do something that you can’t do.  And any preacher who tells you that is one of those superspiritual nuts that Bon Bowman used to describe to me, the Pastor who influenced me the most, in Detroit.  He said, “I used to have evangelists come by and they’re always telling my people ‘there’s something out there.’  And they get them straining and straining to try to have this strange spiritual experience that nobody can have.”  If there’s any one central truth to Christianity, it is in that New Testament simple doctrine from which all the other creeds grew out of: God was in Christ.  And the Incarnation teaches that God—John’s words are ‘striking a tent’—God struck a tent in human flesh, moved into that tent of human flesh called Jesus of Nazareth, and brought God out of the invisible and put Him on display and into the streets of ordinary life.  John says, “No man hath seen God, but Christ hath declared Him.”  The word in the Greek is the root and the basis of our word ‘exegesis’ which means ‘to lead from behind a curtain,’ to lead from behind a curtain, ‘put on display.’  God was hidden.  The Incarnation teaches Christ was the ‘exegesis’ of God.  He led Him out from behind the curtain, put Him on display, brought Him into the streets of ordinary life.

And all you need to know about God, He put it on display where ordinary people live. They supposedly teach you in Bible college to do Scriptural exegesis, which is to lead the meaning of the verse from behind a curtain and put it on display.  How many have had the experience I’ve had?  You come to Church thinking you know something and when the preacher’s finished it’s put the Word and you behind the curtain, or flat out!  God intended to be understood or He would not have moved into that tent of human flesh.  And God’s