May 30, 2010 Sermon Notes: The Church Without Walls, Houston: “Can We Change?’
Brookhollow Baptist Church/The Church Without Walls, Houston, Texas. Rev. Ralph Douglas West, founder/senior pastor
Sermon Series: The Discovery of Forgotten Photographs
Scripture: 2 Kings 5:1-19
“Can We Change?”
I know it all – is the deepest threat to the human life
The story of Naaman is the embodiment of what a hopeless life looks like.
He was a famous biblical character. He was a man of esteem and honor. He was rich, famous and strong, but with all of that he was a leper.
Everyone has a demon inside of us that we can’t overcome without God.
But then a slave girl came into his home and said she wished Naaman had hoped he met her prophet.
She is so important that if she wasn’t mentioned, we would never have heard of Naaman. She was a nameless little girl who surrendered herself to the hand of God.
God then uses unlikely processes. Naaman went to look for a hidden prophet.
In an unlikely place and an unlikely preacher, God can save anyone. (See the story of how Charles Spurgeon was saved).
Barbara Brown Taylor has a great devotional reading. She also got to Jesus in a strange way.
God can catch up with you even if you are not serious. Some of us may be playing church and God has a way of catching up with us.
Naaman questioned where he should take a bath. That’s like taking a bath in the muddy and dirty Buffalo Bayou in Houston when you have access to the pristine blue waters of the Caribbean.
But God requires Naaman and us to have a degree of humility. It took one of his servants to tell him not to be arrogant. He said had he asked you to do something hard, you would have done it. Now you have something where you take where it’s nothing about you but is all about God and you are bothered by it.
In essence, Naaman was going to miss on his deliverance because he didn’t like the way of the message.
When you humble yourself God will lift you up! Naaman had to humble himself.
After Naaman was cleansed, he made a tremendous confession. See verse 15
All of life, good or bad, up or down, is for God to bring us around for us to say, “There is one God.”
Naaman then tried to pay Elisha a second time.
Then he wanted to take some mud from the Jordan to build an altar to serve as a reminder of how God cleansed him.
