“A Fresh Start” Part One

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 919 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text

-- Brother Phil Enlow: Praise God! It’s good to see everybody today. The Lord is good, isn’t He? Well I’d like to, if the Lord can help me to go to several very familiar scriptures…passages, things that happened in the life of Jesus and share some very simple truths that affect every one of us. There’s nothing revolutionary in anything that I expect to say this morning, but I need it. So if you don’t mind listening in, that would be all right.

Let’s begin in John chapter 4. I don’t know how many of these passages we’ll get to, but let’s just see what the Lord does. In John chapter 4 we know this is the passage where Jesus was leaving Jerusalem and traveling back to His own home territory in Galilee, and in between was Samaria. And so they arrive hungry, thirsty, the middle of the day, Jesus and the disciples, and they leave Jesus by the town well. The disciples go into town to buy food. They’re taking care of some of the practical needs. So all of this takes place, and I’ll just largely refer to what happened.

Of course we know that there was a woman who came out to draw water. Now, let’s step back into history just for a moment and see what led to all of this. You look back into the history of Israel, following Solomon’s reign, they reached a great zenith of power and control and influence. Solomon was the greatest king on the planet in his day. Everybody knew about Solomon. But after Solomon died the kingdom split. There was a rebellion. There was a revolt, and ten of the tribes became known from that point on as Israel. They lived in the North. They established a capital in a city called Samaria. The Southern kingdom was known as Judah, and they continued on for a number of centuries that way.

But the Northern Kingdom of Israel never ever served God. They had kings like Ahab. They had prophets like Elijah, but in spite of everything from the moment they established their kingdom, they established a separate center of worship. They embraced many of the heathen gods, and things just went downhill. I believe…I didn’t check the exact chronology, but it’s something like a couple of hundred years before the Babylonian captivity, is the one we think of so much, that came and destroyed Jerusalem, God finally had had enough of the Northern Kingdom, and He allowed the Assyrian Empire to come in and basically do some business there and destroy the kingdom.

Assyria was a great empire that ruled the earth, the known area of the earth before Babylon came on. What the man did, the ruler of Assyria…actually fulfilled the very prophesies, the things that God had warned them. He says if you don’t serve Me, if you go after the heathen gods, I’m going to scatter you to the ends of the earth. Well, that’s exactly what happened. And in order to control the population and in order to rule, what he did…they uprooted, if not all, at least a substantial portion of the population of Israel and sent them to, scattered them throughout his kingdom.

In fact, it’s very interesting, I was recalling something some of you may have seen in the news sometime in the last few years. There was a population, a small group of people from India who kept applying to the nation of Israel and saying, we’re Jews. We want to come home. They actually finally convinced the Israeli government that, yes, they were and…I forget what tribe they had, but their tradition was they were part of a certain tribe, and it was one of those tribes. So here’s a group over in India that goes all the way back to that history of that emperor scattering these people. That’s one reason you find Jews just about everywhere throughout that region of the world. They were transplanted.

Well, what happened was now you’ve got empty towns, and so what he did was to bring people from Babylon, from many other places in his empire and resettle the land. So now you have foreign peoples. You probably had some Jews that remained, some of the poorer ones. We don’t know for sure. But, one of the interesting things that happened was that as soon as they got there, lions started eating them. One of the ideas that virtually all the peoples of the earth had was that there were gods who ruled certain territories. So if you went to a certain place you better know about that god and what you need to do in the way of rituals and observances to get along with him all right, otherwise disaster is gonna come upon you.

I believe you can see the Lord’s hand in this to actually kind of get their attention a little bit. So they called the emperor and said hey, we’re getting eaten of lions. We don’t know how to appease the god of this land. Send us a teacher. So he got a hold of a Levite who came and taught them about Jehovah. But what they wound up doing was kind of having a mixture. They sort of worshiped God, but they worshiped their heathen gods too, the ones the brought with them from their native countries. Later on they actually turned away somewhat from their idolatry, and they had their own little tradition, their religion that was built on the religion of Moses.

So you find this woman coming and saying to Jesus, you Jews say Jerusalem is where you ought to worship, and our fathers worshiped on this mountain. Which is the way it is, or which is it? You can see where that tradition comes from if you go back through the history. So here’s this woman. Her people had been brought from the far ends of the earth, settled in this land. But I’ll tell you, there was a God who was looking down the path of time and saw a woman who was going to be in need.

Now everything…we’ve mentioned this before, everything about this situation was, if you’d gone by the traditions and the ways of the people of that region, this would never have happened. Now in the first place, Jews did not have dealings with Samaritans. They were considered foreigners. They were, at best, half-breeds. Their religion was a corruption of what they believed to be true, and so they just didn’t have any dealings with Samaritans.

Well on top of that, she was a woman. Now even if she had been a Jewish woman, it would not have been normal for a high religious teacher to be talking…stooping to talk to a woman. I’m sorry about that, ladies. That’s the way it was.

( laughter ).

That’s not the way is supposed to be, but that is the way it was. On top of that, this lady was an outcast in her own people. Why was she coming alone in the middle of the day? This was not the time when people came to draw water. Why didn’t it say they all came out, and He just happened to talk to one? No. There was one lady who came out by herself. Why? This lady had a past. She was…as it came out in the story, she was living with somebody, and she had had five husbands. Jesus said the one you’re living with now is not your husband. All of this background tumbled out of her past.

And yet we see the Lord of glory coming down and talking with this woman and actually opening His heart to her, revealing who He was to her, giving her a sense of hope. And the obvious message was that her past was not an impediment to God working in her life and receiving her and loving her. It’s amazing, and you’ll see this over and over again in the encounters people had with Jesus, that all they had to do was encounter Him.

Number one, it made them very conscience of what they were. There was no hiding. They knew they could not say, I am righteous. I’m this. I’m that. Now the Pharisees tried to do that, but, I mean, the common people who really sensed His Spirit…there was something about Him that made their sins…made them very self conscience of their sin, of their past, of all that was wrong. And yet--and yet in the very presence of such a convicting presence of God there was a sense of love. There was a sense that I love you anyway. There is hope going forward. You’re past does not stop Me. You can begin again today.

And so, she was excited. She ran back into her village, and she told the people, come and see someone who’s told me everything I ever did. Is this not the Christ? Right there, that lets you know how much they had embraced of the Old Testament and its traditions. Even though they had kind of a garbled view of it, they still believed in the coming of a Messiah. Don’t you see the hand of God transplanting people from the ends of the earth, bringing them there, giving them a certain amount of knowledge, preparing them? And we know from the record of the New Testament that even though Jesus was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, here he is in a Samaritan village going against every tradition of the time, and reaching out with a heart of love to give people hope.

The people responded by saying, please stay with us, talk to us, teach us. It says he stayed there two days and talked with them. The end result was, they said to the woman we don’t just believe because of what you said, we’ve heard with our own ears and we believe, and they became believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. What a lesson that is for anybody who has a past. Is there anybody here who does not have a past? You kind of see how that fits every one of us?

Now she had one that was particularly bad. It even brought her into disrepute with everybody that she had to live with, and she couldn’t even lift her eyes. She had to go out to the well…sneak out to the well by herself. But here was the very Son of God. The Father sent Him that way to reach out in a heart of love to that woman. You know, I think it says…I turned to the passage, and I’m not reading any of it. I’m just talking about it. But it does say, I believe, that the disciples came back…I’m trying to find this while I’m saying…but I have all ideas that the disciples wondered, what in the world is going on here? They were affected by the way the culture of their day looked at things, and they’re sitting there…why is He talking to this Samaritan woman? At that point they probably didn’t even know about her past, but if they had known that I can imagine what they would have thought. God, help us to see things the way God does.

( congregational amens ).

Now this wasn’t a woman who was gonna go on living the same way. This was somebody that God had just reached out to with a heart of love and said, My salvation is for you. There is hope for you. You can be rescued out of your past. Your past does not stop Me from loving you or giving you a hope and a future. Praise God! That’s something that I see everywhere, and boy I need that.

( congregational amens ).

I don’t care how long you live with the Lord, we all have a past. We have a past, some of us since yesterday. And I need hope that I can leave yesterday behind, that He will love me and not turn His back upon me because of all my yesterdays. The more we know God and the more conscious we are of what we are, the more shame…the more potential there is for shame and consciousness of all of our weakness and all our limitations. But oh, I praise God, the One that we were singing about…’How Great Is Our God’ that none of this stops Him from reaching out in love and in mercy to every one of us.

( congregational amens ).

Praise God! Praise God! So there is hope for anybody today. God does not look upon what we are. That’s exactly who He came to save. You can go through the Gospels and see many accounts. Look in John chapter 8. We’ve got the well-known story about how the Pharisees were just looking for some way to trip Jesus up. They felt threatened, and of course they were. Their religious domination and influence over the people was certainly threatened by all that Jesus stood for, because they were hypocrites. They sat in Moses’ seat, but they had no conception of what God had intended when He revealed the law to Moses. So here is Jesus standing there in the courts. It says…well it’s interesting, at the end of the day, the previous day it says, “Then each went to his own home. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.” (NIV). I wonder what He did while He was there.

( congregational response ).

He did a lot of praying, didn’t He? That tells me He needed the same help that we need. He reached out to His Father. But I’ll tell you, God was preparing Him…His Father was preparing Him for what was about to happen. It says, “At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them.”

Well, of course, this didn’t make the Pharisees very happy. So it says, “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap in order to have a basis for accusing Him.

Well obviously they didn’t care two hoots about this woman. And where was the man? You got to wonder if he wasn’t one of them…whether he went out and kind of set this situation up. Who knows? These people were so hell-bent on discrediting Jesus in the eyes of the people, they were willing to do anything and take this poor woman and humiliate her out in public. They didn’t care anything about righteousness, or mercy, or justice, or anything. They had no sense of what God was after in the earth. All they saw was condemnation and a threat to their religious way of life. My God, what wickedness! But oh I’ll tell you what, God gave His Son some wisdom on that occasion, didn’t He?

( congregational response ).

There’re all kinds of speculation on what in the world He was doing. He bent down and started writing on the ground. Some will say, well, He was writing out the sins of all the people standing around. I don’t know. It doesn’t say. He might have been doodling for all I know.

( laughter ).

But I’m sure He was doing some praying and looking to His Father. Then God gave Him wisdom, didn’t He? God gave Him wisdom. He says, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Oh, what wisdom, what mercy, what a way to put the situation in perspective. Who did these self-righteous people think they were to come down and just to humiliate a woman in order to accomplish some religious goal?

But anyway that’s what He said, and so He just went back to doodling and just waiting. He wasn’t even looking around. He looked up, and what happened? Everybody was gone. They were all convicted. So finally only Jesus was left with a woman still standing there. Of course the crowds are all looking on at this. The accusers are the ones that were gone. The crowds were still watching and wondering what’s gonna happen here.

“Jesus straightened up and asked her, Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? No one, sir, she said.” Can you just imagine what was going on in this poor woman’s mind? Put yourself in her place. I mean this woman obviously has a past. This wasn’t an isolated incident in her life. I’m sure they singled out somebody who had a problem in this area. She was a sinful woman with a past. So they picked on her. They didn’t care about her. They just humiliated her for their purposes. But listen to what Jesus said as we well know, “Then neither do I condemn you, Jesus declared. Go now and leave you life of sin.” I tell you that’s a divine answer.

( congregational amens ).

I tell you that’s God’s answer to everyone in every kind of situation. It’s so incomprehensible to us when we feel the weight of our own weaknesses and our failures, and if we’ve got a past that people know about. God, help us to be able to come to a place where we just believe the Word of God, we come to Him as we are. In neither case was there any kind of hiding or pretending, was there? It was out there for everybody to see. Everybody knew what the real deal was. These weren’t pretending to be righteous people. These were sinners with nowhere to hide. There was an utter honesty about the situation in both cases. It was exposed. There was no hiding.

There was no going back to a life of sin. I’m just going to take this forgiveness. I’m going to go on and live my life. There wasn’t any of that. There was a…this was a turning point. This was an absolute turning point in both lives where someone was rescued from their past. Their past was blotted out, cast into the sea of God’s forgetfulness, and they were given a fresh start in life. Boy, I need that every day, don’t you?

( congregational amens ).

Praise God! What divine wisdom, what grace, what a revelation of God’s character and God’s heart. And yet you can see the contrast in the way men react, to way God reacts. I pray that God will give us the ability to see His heart in these things, first of all with respect to us. My God, don’t we need to be able to go forward in our lives without carrying the weight of our past with us? That’s a horrible burden. How easy is it to just cling to it and just not be able to quite believe God means what He says that He’s able to cleanse us from all sin? Oh I’ll tell you what, God wants to set people free. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed. Praise God!

( congregational amens ).

Praise God! There’re so many accounts in the Gospels that we know. Turn to one that every Sunday School child knows in Luke 19. Luke chapter 19, and we have our friend Zacchaeus. Now who knows what Zacchaeus’ profession was? He was a tax collector, wasn’t he? They were some of the most popular people in the whole town.

( laughter ).

The Romans would hire these people, and they would go out and say I want you to collect so much. They’d go out and collect this much, and then they’d go out and collect this much, and get rich. And everybody knew they were crooks, but there’s nothing they could do about it. And so they were just despised. They were sinners. They were absolutely despised.

In fact, if you go back and look at one of the disciples, Matthew, Levi…that was what he was. And when Jesus called him, Jesus went and ate at his house with a whole bunch of his tax collector friends, and boy did the religious crowd have a field day with that. This man’s gone to eat with a bunch of tax collectors and sinners. What kind of a prophet is this?

Well you have sort of the same thing here. “Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a…” not just a tax collector, “…he was a chief tax collector.” This was a guy who went over some other…was over some others, and man, this was his opportunity to be wealthy and to be rich and live the high life. I don’t care what people think of me, I’m gonna be rich. That was his attitude toward life evidently. “He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd.” So he…I was gonna say something about Steve, but I won’t.

( laughter ).

I won’t say that. I appreciate Brother Steve. He’s just…he’s more concentrated. He’s got more of the good stuff in a smaller package.

( laughter ).

Praise God! We will leave out the levity here in a minute. Anyway, so this is a short man, and so because of the crowd he can’t see. “So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today. So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.”

Now, let’s see what everybody else thought about this. “All the people saw this and began to mutter…” We better watch our muttering. God, help us to see through His eyes and His purposes.

( congregational amens ).

“…And began to mutter, He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.” Boy I’ll tell you what, Jesus didn’t go there to partake of their sin. He went to reach out to the sinner. God, give us that kind of a heart.

( congregational amens ).

“But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, Look Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” This is not somebody who’s going on with his life as it has been. This man has reached a turning point. He has been confronted by the Son of God. Conviction has fallen upon his soul, and he is a changed man.

But here he is received and loved by the Son of God in the face of the religious crowd. You see the heart of God that says it’s time for a new start, and you don’t come into my kingdom as a second class citizen. You are welcomed in. Your past is blotted out. What you have been does not weigh against your future. Your future is not determined by your past. Boy I don’t want my future determined by my past, do you? Praise God!

And so anyway, “Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”

That’s interesting. If you kind of follow that idea through, you’ll find out Jesus in John chapter 8 was talking to a whole crowd of people who thought they were children of Abraham, and they weren’t…not according to Jesus. Jesus was sent to people, to the true sons of Abraham, God’s elect remnant among the people. Most of the people were not really children of Abraham in God’s eyes. This man was, in spite of what he was doing, in spite of his terrible past, God saw somebody that He could touch their hearts and they would respond to the Gospel call. And so he calls him a son of Abraham.

I’ll tell you there’s a lot of people who are outside the house muttering who were not sons of Abraham, and it became evident in their reaction to Jesus. Oh Praise God! Have you got a past today? You want a fresh start? Yeah. I do too. I don’t know, there’re so many accounts here. You could go right on through.

Turn to Luke 7, I think there’s one …that we know very well. This begins in verse 36. Well actually, let’s go back a little bit. I’d forgotten about some of this. Jesus is talking about John the Baptist. In verse 29 it says, “All the people, even the tax collectors…” Here you’ve got tax collectors again, “All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus’ words…” talking about John the Baptist, “…acknowledged that God’s way was right, because they had been baptized by John.” There was a work of God through John to get people’s hearts ready to receive Jesus when He came.

But, there’s a contrast. “But the Pharisees and experts in the law…” That’s interesting. I wonder how many theologians today that spend their whole life delving into the scriptures and trying to decipher it all, haven’t got a clue. They’re experts. They can tell you all about the Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic and everything about the culture and the history, and they can dissect every word, every phrase, and they’ve got it all…their minds are grappling with stuff. I’ve met people like this, and they don’t have a spiritual clue. I tell you, I’d rather be like a child and say, Lord, I don’t know. You’re gonna have to show me. I’m pretty simple here. I need you to show me real Truth. And yes, it’ll be anchored in this Word, but I need spiritual enlightenment if I’m to understand anything.

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