Answering a prophet’s complaint
APCE preacher the Rev. Royal Todd lauds God’s one-verse answer to Habakkuk’s many gripes

LOUISVILLE — Given the opportunity to preach during Friday worship at APCE’s Annual Event, the Rev. Royal Todd offered up a stem-winder on “The Prophet’s Complaint” found in Habakkuk 1:2-4, followed immediately by God’s one-verse response.

Todd is a Provost Graduate Fellow and Russell G. Hamilton Scholar at Vanderbilt University, where he’s pursuing a doctorate, while also serving children, youth and young adults at First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill in Nashville, Tennessee. Picking up on the theme of APCE’s Annual Event, Todd labeled his sermon “Wrestling is Worth It.”
“My conviction is, to be a person of faith, to speak truth, to set the captive free, one must be willing to wrestle,” Todd said. “It can be tiring — even exhausting — but wrestling is worth it.”
Like we did with Jacob, we find the prophet Habakkuk also wrestling, and his “problematic pronouncement may sound familiar to some of us,” Todd said. “Can you hear Habakkuk wrestling with the fact that sometimes believing in God is not as easy as it seems?”
“If you can’t say ‘amen,’” he told those watching online and the people gathered at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, “just say, ‘hmmm.’”
Habakkuk’s many complaints to the Almighty include crying for help but receiving no response, crying “violence” and receiving no salvation, and the law “becoming slack, and justice never prevails.”
Is wrestling “really the vocation God has called us to?” Todd asked, adding, “How can you confidently say all this wrestling is worth it?
He then answered his own question.
“It’s worth it because God wrestles with us not to beat us, but to teach us,” he said. God is “like a sparring coach wrestling with their protégé, who uses strength and technique not for the protégé to be bested, but to know where they are exposed. God is stronger than we are, but has no reason to remind us of that fact.”
Like Habakkuk did in his day, we are not the only ones seeing the troubling news reports, Todd said. “Others have the same job I do. They work in the same community I do, and they don’t feel responsible to do anything about [the injustice they see].”
“The lesson God is trying to teach Habakkuk and you and me is we cannot be called to this work and be callous,” Todd said. “We cannot be called to the faith while being resolved that every problem is someone else’s problem. … God calls us because this work requires us to care. God wrestles with us to keep us resisting complacency.”
Out of our wrestling, “souls may be saved. Communities may be impacted for the better. Families may come back together,” Todd said. “The world is in need of your wrestling.”
God answers Habakkuk’s numerous complaints in only one verse, verse 5: “Look at the nations and see! Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told.”
“Sometimes the Bible’s so good,” Todd noted, “it preaches itself.”
When we feel ourselves wrestling with God, “It’s evidence God is still working. God still works all things together for good, even if it doesn’t look good when God is working,” he said. “God is not only working on it, but God is working on us.”
“My word of encouragement to you, my friends, is Habakkuk shows us just how long it takes to wrestle with God, how long we must continue to wait on God’s reply, and just how long we have to wrestle with these principalities,” Todd said. In just one verse, “the wailing winds bow at the tenor of God’s voice. The enemies who came at you one way will be scattered seven ways. The impossible is accomplished, confusion finds clarity, and weariness finds rest.”
Habakkuk shows us “that trouble and sadness and dankness and decay” may dominate three verses, but “the God we serve needs only one,” Todd said.
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