Monday Morning Pastor: What I could or should have said, or what I left out from yesterday's sermon

I am preaching a sermon series called: "What Christ Is Saying to the Church" based on the letters to the seven churches in Revelation chapters 2-3. The series came out of some time with the Lord in 2020 about what our church needed to hear regarding our witness in 2021. These chapters are Christ's words to His churches in any year and any generation and, therefore, it was laid on my heart to preach these chapters are statements from Christ. Each sermon can be found on our church app which can be downloaded in the app or play-store by searching The Bridge Fellowship Miami.

Any pastor will tell you that they do not tell the whole of what they have learned in their preparation. This is due, in part, to the amount of material they mine in study, the move of the Holy Spirit during preaching and simply missing some details here or there in the moment. On every Monday pastors, like NFL quarterbacks, ponder or kick themselves for what they could and should have done (said) differently on Sunday. I have decided to not kick myself, as I normally do, but, rather to use a different outlet to "finish" the message. Hence, The Monday Morning Pastor post is born.

Yesterday's message (January 24th, 2021) was on the church at Pergamum (Rev. 2:12-17) with the Lord saying to the church: "Withstand the Compromising Assaults of the Enemy in the Wilderness." Here is a point that I wanted to make but did not make lest the sermon be longer than it already was:

"Some people never get out of their individual wilderness because they fail to learn from their

sinful compromise."

Israel wandered in the wilderness, about eight miles outside of the promised land, not because they loved it, but because they failed to learn the lesson from the sin (compromise) that put them in the wilderness. Think about that. For forty years they lived in the mess of their own making because they refused to learn what the Lord was seeking to teach them from the wilderness. This is true for many of us as well.

The church at Pergamum has compromised and became comfortable in the wilderness. They had become more like the citizens of Pergamum than the citizens of heaven. Jesus calls them and us to repent of our actions that created the wilderness and our affections to love for it. When we consider our lives and those nagging circumstances that we long to be over or different, we must ask ourselves this penetration question of self-analysis: Am I still in this wilderness because I have not learned the (my) lesson?

I have found that I have more Israel in me that I would like to think because I share the same sin of humanity. The truth is that I compromise because I have not or am not learning from my sin. I truly hate the wilderness, but it seems that I hate my wilderness more than the sin and compromise that created it. This is the reason why we stay in places of emptiness, despair and isolation. It is not the design of the Lord. It is the deception of compromise.

When I don't learn my lesson in my wilderness there is, really, only one thing that happens: I keep making the same self-destructive decisions. When I do this I not only broaden my current wilderness, but I create multiple and newer wildernesses! This is what happened with Israel. They could not get out of their own way to see the love and honor of God because they kept making foolish choices and then wondering why their wilderness would not go away but multiplied (1 Corinthians 10:1-12)!

Satan temps and tricks us to compromise in the wilderness because he knows that the wilderness only has the power we give to it by our sinful actions and affections. The devil knows that when Jesus was in the wilderness He killed Satan's power by overcoming every temptation (Matthew 4:1-11). The enemy knows that sometimes we forget that he can make the wilderness to appear to be fashionable and delightful as he did in tempting Eve to see what was forbidden as to be desired. Thus, we choose the wilderness believing the deception.

Jesus is saying to the church in 2021 that He has had enough with our compromising. We have gone to bed with politics and power. We have made friends with illicit sex and financial success all because we bought the lie that these are to be desired as equal to or, sadly, above the Lord. Until the Lord comes home we are in the wilderness of this world and if we do not learn to withstand the many assaults of the enemy to compromise when we see the Lord, we will not be glad but afraid.

As I said yesterday, Jesus calls us repent and hear Him now when He comes in His word so we won’t be afraid later. In other words, Christ is saying: See Me now in mercy because you don't want to see me later in wrath. Or, as the Winans put it in song that our “tomorrow very well might be today!"