Grace Thoughts

Tim Kelley: Up until the invention of gunpowder in about the 16th century at some point, probably the most common stable source of warfare was the bow and arrow. Weaponry was the bow and arrow. It was a staple. They always had some type. They had it where they would blanket the sky, they had sniper archers, and stuff. They even developed different arrows with different tips to pierce certain armor and things like that.

The thing about an arrow was it wasn't always a deadly weapon. It could be if you hit somebody just right and in a perfect place, but oftentimes, it would simply wound the other fighter or disable the other fighter. Probably more times than not, if somebody was hit with an arrow, they were wounded and they were disabled, and they could no longer really fight in that particular battle.

That was the purpose of it because if you killed them, then I guess that was the purpose too. But normally that wouldn't be enough to take somebody out unless you hit them right in a perfect place or whatever. They actually developed armor and they developed armor-piercing arrows. It's pretty interesting, hundreds of years ago, they were already rethinking those things.

When I was a kid, some of you might remember this, who remembers Karate Kid? Some of you. Well, that's good. You guys aren't old at all, but you remember Karate Kid. In the 1980s, I can do that movie now, but I won't. And who remembers Kung Fu? Grasshopper. Yeah. You guys who remember Kung Fu, you're either watched a lot of reruns or you're older.

Kung Fu was in the '70s. You know, he had the big cauldron, and he burned the things in his arm, picked it up, and David Carradine was Kung Fu. Me and my brother used to love that show. We would always watch it, and one of the parts we always liked in the beginning of that show is when they shoot arrows at him, he'd deflect them like that. He could do that. He was Kung Fu. He could do that. It wasn't even a Hollywood stunt. Well, yes it was.

Anyway, we had some longbows, me and my brother, and we decided that we could do that. We could deflect the arrows. We could do that. So my brother, actually, this was my friend Brian. He came over and said, "Let's go out back in the power lines." We had this open area. "And I want you to shoot an arrow at me, so I want to see if I can catch it out of midair."

I don't know where my parents were. I certainly hope and dread the thought that my kids would even remotely do the things that I did. I would faint if I thought they were doing that. So anyway, I got he went, I'm guessing I wasn't being too brave, he got 100 yards away maybe further. It was just a big longwood, wasn't one of the kids', it was a real bow but it wasn't like a compound bow or anything like that.

So I got my Kung Fu face, my shape, and I was ready and I'm not exaggerating one bit. He said, "Okay, shoot!" and I was ready to catch it or deflect it or try to knock it away. So he shoots the arrow at me and it was just... I didn't even blink and the thing was by me. I didn't flinch, I didn't move. That thing was 100 yards downfield and went by my head at a rate so fast I never even went bip.

If that thing had hit me, somebody else would be preaching this morning or I'd have one eye or something missing. Something would have been missing, slurred my speech. I don't know. I tell you that story because I forgot why I told you that story. I forgot why I told you that, but I just let's get back to what I said in the beginning.

An arrow was meant to obviously kill, but its overall purpose was found in wounding, in disabling people. We want to talk this series, Arrow series, on things that disable us, things that wound us. We're going to talk about four different things over the next four weeks that I've watched through the years and maybe you have seen as it takes people out of the race or it puts a limp in people's walk, which they have a very difficult time overcoming sometimes.

So let me start with some questions and we'll get into today's arrow. Have you ever had a life dream that you worked hard to achieve only to see it not come to pass? Whatever that dream is. Talked to somebody recently who had a dream about being a doctor, and they got married young and they could never really go to medical school. They could never go through the process, and now they're older in life and beyond the age where they could practice or get the education needed to practice medicine. It's been a life dream of theirs. They are intrigued with the field, they love the field, but they made certain decisions, not bad ones, just certain ones in their early years which stopped them from ever achieving that dream. There's a level of disillusionment and disenchantment there.

Have you ever had a concept of how your life would play out, only to face events, twists, and turns that threw your script that you wrote for your life in the trash? I always, growing up, wanted to play for the Red Sox. The only thing I lacked was talent. If I had just a little bit more talent, I'd be retired from baseball and preaching right now. Have you ever had misplaced hopes? Something you placed a hope in, maybe a person, maybe a job, a career that all of a sudden just changed?

A company that you've been with 30 years and they get sold or they downsize and you find yourself without a job after 30 years of your life, 20 years of your life. Have you ever had people who you thought would always be part of your life? You thought you could trust them, then all of a sudden, one of them deeply hurts you and then they leave? Not necessarily talking about marriage, we'll talk about that a little bit later.

Have you ever lost your health unexpectedly? You didn't grow up thinking, "When I grow up I want to be sick. When I grow up I want to be in a wheelchair. When I grow up I want to have diabetes. When I grow up I want to have cancer in my 40s." You never really think of that. All of a sudden the normal course of your life is dramatically detoured and you have to come to grips with a life that you never thought you'd ever have to come to grips with.

Maybe you've lost somebody before their time. You said goodbye to somebody before their time, before you were ready to say goodbye to them, before they should have you should have had to say goodbye to them. You've probably been pierced with the arrow of disillusionment. Disillusionment is the condition of fact of being disenchanted. Disenchantment is probably a synonym.

Having a faith that is naive, that was a Webster's Dictionary definition, having a faith that is naive. In other words, you have a faith and a belief in something that's naive because you think it's going to go this way. You have a hope here, you have a plan here, but then it goes totally different than you ever thought. I want to talk about four types of disillusionment here. The first is, I actually three, is Cosmic Disillusionment.

I know that sounds pretty fancy, it's actually pretty simple. It's very broad-based and can play itself different in all of our lives. But the Cosmos, it's simply this, it's the word world in your English Bible. It is translated numerous different ways. The most primary way that it's translated is the word Cosmos, which talks about an order, a system. It's really not talking about an individual, it's a system.

But we know by studying the Cosmos scripturally that the Cosmos in 2 Corinthians 4:4, he's the god of this world, Cosmos. Talking about Satan. We know in Galatians 1:4 that the whole world lies in wickedness. The whole Cosmos lies in infectious wickedness. Paul calls it a present evil age. Cosmos, Aion, synonyms. A present evil age. We know in John 12:31 that Satan is the prince of this age.

So who runs and programs the Cosmos? The devil. It's a world system. He's at the head of it. It's a world system, but it's an anti-God system. I'm going to give you a definition of it in a moment, but I want to just spend on this a little bit more time because we need to understand this. The Cosmos, my friends, is going to be different here than someplace else in the world. Civilized country, European countries, America, it may be very similar.

I talked to many people after 2008, their IRAs got devastated. Everything they'd saved, the years in the company, the money they'd put away, it was like it's gone! Or it's deeply cut into or whatever. But if you go to the Sudan, if you go to Bangladesh, which has their own world system there, do you think they really care about the IRA? They don't even know what one is. They worry about eating, they worry about survival, they worry about living.

So the world system and what they face over there in some places is much different than the world system that we face here. So with that understanding, I'm going to just focus on here because this is where we live. This is where we breathe. This is where we do life. The Cosmos, Lewis Sperry Chafer, his quote from the systematic theology, he's the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary.

The Cosmos is a vast order or system that Satan has promoted which conforms to his ideals, his aims, and methods. It is civilization now functioning apart from God, a civilization in which none of its promoters really expect God to share, who assign to God no consideration in respect to their projects, nor do they ascribe any causality to him. In other words, God doesn't do anything, God's not even in their formula, God's not on their radar screen, God's a non-player, God's non-existent. That's the Cosmos.

This system embraces its godless governments, its conflicts, armaments, jealousies, its education, culture, which is so different from place to place, its culture, religions of morality and pride. Religions of morality, we would call that churchianity. To the uncounted multitude of the world, it's all they ever know so long as they live on Earth. That's this is their normal.

It is properly styled the Satanic system, which phrase is in many instances a justified interpretation of the so meaningful word Cosmos. It is literally a Cosmic diabolicus, a Satanic, diabolical, evil world system. It could be a career advancement, it could be logistical security or accomplishment in any arena. But my friends, that's all the unsaved have.

If that's all they have, then it has to take care of them. If it doesn't, it's usually followed by hopelessness. The pursuit of the things in the Cosmos, especially in our great nation, can occupy our frames of reference for years. Attainment often is anti-climactic. We attain a degree in school. I know a dear girl that very bright girl and she went and got her master's degree, then then another master's degree, then another master's degree, and became a professional student for a couple decades.

After a bunch of her degrees, she realized there were still unresolved issues going on in here. Very educated unresolved issues, but unresolved issues. Talked to another man that had a goal to have a certain amount of financial stability by a certain age in his life. That was his goal and he worked it and he saved and he worked his plan. And you know he achieved it. In his 40s, he achieved it.

But he got to that goal then he realized, "Okay, what do I do now?" He could retire. "What do I do now? Well, I probably I might need more." So he went back and achieved that goal, then he achieved his next goal. That's the thing with these Cosmic goals, they're anti-climactic. They never fulfill you. You achieve them, but they still leave you groping. "Okay, if I have done that, I must do more of that."

And if you don't pursue that, my friends, if you if you hit the highest goal, your highest pursuit, then you come up saying, "Is this all there is? Is this all there is?" That's where suicide happens or suicidal thoughts happen because at that point, you're just hopeless. You've reached everything you could reach, there's nothing more to pursue.

But sometimes, I say more times than not, we pursue it, we pursue it, we pursue it, and we never do attain it. So we keep chasing it, we keep chasing it, we keep chasing it. We never catch it and then we die. What a bummer. So we hit we we live a whole life seeking something that we could never catch how we were trying to catch it.