When All I Have is Oh

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

Preaching the Friday night of the Impact youth conference at The Rock Church in Fort Myers, Jacob Phillips takes the shortest verse in the Bible as his text — John 11:35, "Jesus wept" — and builds a sermon about prayer that has run out of words. He opens on the oneness and incomparability of God (Isaiah 43:11: beside me there is no saviour) and on a God who loves to be proved but despises being challenged: Lucifer, Eve, Nimrod's builders, Korah, and Ananias and Sapphira all challenged God and fell. Yet some men speak to God in ways that sound like challenges and are not struck down — David in Psalm 35, Abraham bargaining over Sodom, Jacob wrestling till daybreak. The difference, Phillips argues, is the approach. His central case is Moses in Exodus 33, who had seen the staff become a serpent, the sea part, water from the rock, and bread from heaven, and still wanted more: show me thy glory. Behind the English "I beseech thee," Phillips hears the one-word Hebrew cry — "Oh" — uttered with the same force as the shouted Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4. Moses had reached the place where words failed and only a groan was left, and God answered it.

That "Oh" becomes the sermon's name for travail: the prayer of a person who has prayed everything they know, felt nothing, and stayed anyway. Phillips walks the tabernacle as the pattern of approach — brazen altar, laver, lampstand, table of showbread, altar of incense — insisting that no one reaches the holy of holies by skipping the sacrifice, the washing, the Spirit, the Word, and worship born of sacrifice on the way in. He testifies of a five-hour prayer meeting with his wife in which, after four hours of feeling nothing and praying for everything under the sun, the groan finally came. The point lands hard on the young people in front of him: a generation worried about image, makeup, cheer squads, and Instagram likes has replaced the "Oh" with popularity, and has to be prayed through at every conference because it never learned to pray itself through at home.

Jesus Himself, the sermon argues, prayed this way. He wept two ways: wailing over Jerusalem in Luke 19, the city that missed its moment — a weeping Phillips pairs with Abraham's intercession over Sodom and with the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21, whose construction, he suggests, began in that travail — and silently at Lazarus's grave in John 11, where the verse before the text says His spirit groaned. Lazarus did not come forth because Jesus shouted, but because He first travailed; the sweat like blood in Gethsemane is the same pattern. Phillips twice stops preaching to lead the room into that kind of prayer, calling elders to the front pews and later challenging everyone under thirty to the altar. He closes with the second "O" of Scripture, the delivered person's: Psalm 34, written after David's escape from Gath — O magnify the LORD with me; O taste and see that the LORD is good. The "Oh" of travail, in the sermon's end, becomes the "O" of praise.

Scripture index: John 11:35; Isaiah 43:11; Psalm 35; Exodus 33; Deuteronomy 6:4; Luke 19; Revelation 21; John 11:33; Psalm 34:1-3; Psalm 34:8.