All right, if you'd open your
Bibles to the 51st Psalm, Psalm 51. The title of this morning's message,
or we could say the subject of it, is Faith, Knowledge or Feeling? Does faith express itself in
what a person knows or in what a person feels? Now, this message was prompted
by my thoughts regarding how faith is experienced. What is
it like to believe God? Now, we have to be careful that
we don't take our own experience of believing God and say that
everyone else must have the same experience. And the reason for
that is all of us are different one from the other. There are
certain things about every human that, yeah, we all have that
in common. Otherwise, we couldn't be classified
as human. So there are some commonalities
in our experience of anything, and that includes the experience
of true faith. Now, when I speak of faith this
morning, I'm talking about the real thing, that faith of by
which we are saved, that faith through which we are justified,
that faith which is the gift of God. But anytime we bring
up the subject of knowledge or of feelings, we enter an area
where you and I have differences. Now, feelings are otherwise known
as emotions. And emotions, probably many people
don't want to admit this or just never have heard it, but what
we experience as emotions is nothing more or less than a constellation
of particular neurotransmitters and the various hormones they
release in the body to take action on what your brain perceives
to be the reality in front of you. And people say, oh no, you know,
emotions are something of the soul. They aren't physical things. Well, I challenge you then tomorrow
morning, if you're like most people, when you wake up, you
will probably not appreciate the fact you're awake. And you
will look at the coming day, oh man. But you'll have responsibilities. You won't look positively toward
the next day. But you'll get out of bed, and
likely the first day or first thing you'll do is stumble your
way into the kitchen and make that wonderful elixir of life
called coffee. And you will wait for it to brew
with your eyes about half open. And if you have a coffee maker
like ours, you don't have to wait for the whole pot to brew.
You can pull that pot out when a cup is done, and you pour it
in, and you start drinking it, and in about 15 or 20 minutes,
the whole world looks different. And all that coffee does, or
the caffeine within it, is interject itself into the nervous system,
into the area where I read that the idea of sleepiness, or our
feelings of sleepiness, are about particular molecules that collect
around nerve endings. Now, I realize you can read stuff
on the Internet that may or may not be true, and I don't have
a medical degree. to be able to figure out, but
it was plausible, makes sense. You know what coffee does? Coffee
is evidently shaped, coffee molecules, caffeine molecules, shaped similar
to that sleepiness molecule, and it can insert itself in there
and shove the sleepy stuff out, take its place. And all at once,
to us, our perceptions, our feeling about the day changes, and we're
ready to go. So you see, emotions, for better
or worse, they are the product of our nervous system, and in
particular, the mix of chemicals that are sloshing around in there.
And that means that they are subject to being wrong. They're subject to being wrong
for various health reasons. They are subject to being wrong
for genetic reasons. They are subject to being wrong
because we have experienced various things in our life, and we responded
to them wrongly, and we've developed a pattern, and the body learns
the pattern, and therefore, under those circumstances, it recreates
the emotional experience we had at that time. Brother Martin Luther, though
he didn't understand the science about it, what he said fits perfectly
well with that psychological concept. Feelings come and feelings
go, and feelings are deceiving. Deceiving. My warrant is the
Word of God, not else is worth believing. And we say that, and
it's good. That's one of those nice things
to keep in your mind. It's a truth. Brother Martin
did, he distilled some truth from Scripture and put it in
a nice little poem, or at least whoever translated it from German
put it into a nice little English poem that we can remember. And
it's not a bad idea to keep that in your mind, and at some time
when you're feeling lost, when you're feeling cut off from God,
when you feel as though you have no faith. Remember what Brother
Luther said because he got it out of the Scriptures in his
own experiences. Feelings come, and feelings go,
and feelings are deceiving. Our warrant is the Word of God. Nothing else is worth believing. I may be more than anyone else
in this congregation, is I am subject to faulty emotional information. I can know of a certainty that
everything about my life is good, and yet feel as though I am under
a sense of doom. that something's about to land
on me and destroy me, or I know that there is no danger
present and yet I'm filled with fear. Now, I wouldn't wish that on
anybody. But it's quite possible I couldn't preach a sermon like
I'm doing now and plan to go on with if I didn't have those
experiences. Because one of the things, if
anyone else who experiences that on a regular basis, one thing
he has to learn is this, your emotions are lying, ignore them. And you have to live your life
almost by rote. You live it. by taking a very
cold and calculated assessment of what's going on and what your
situation is. And that may not change how you
feel, but you direct what you do by what you know to be true
rather than what you feel to be true. Now, everybody has to
do that some. but some more than others. Now,
in this business of faith, we know that the just shall live
by faith. And there are some who are so
worried that a man will take some credit for his salvation,
they say, we do nothing. in our salvation. There are no
conditions which we must meet in order to be saved. Now, I
know what they mean, and I agree with what they mean, but what
they said isn't true. Because Paul said, if you will
confess with your mouth Jesus to be Lord, and believe in your
heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Now in that statement, he is
not addressing the question of why anybody would confess Jesus
to be Lord, or why they would believe that Jesus Christ has
been raised from the dead. He just simply stated this. He
introduces a condition with the word if. And he issues a conclusion. you will be saved. And everything
that comes between if and you will be saved is a condition
which must be met by a person if they are going to be saved. Now, this does not overthrow
the concept of grace at all. Why? Well, a man cannot believe
and that Christ has been raised from the dead and all that that
signifies, nor can he honestly confess from his mouth Jesus
to be Lord unless God has sovereignly worked life in him. Added to that is, if God works
life in him, spiritual life, he will confess Jesus to be Lord. and believe in his heart that
God has raised Christ from the dead. He will believe those things. And so, there is a contingency,
but God sees to it that the contingency is met in his people. And by
the way, if God doesn't give you life, you will never make
that confession in honesty, that Jesus is Lord, and you will never
believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead.
So even though it is we who do the confessing and we who do
the believing, it is only because, as Paul put it, God works in
you to will and do of His good pleasure. Therefore, we can't
take credit for our confessing. We cannot take credit for our
believing. It is not something that we can say that
came from us and distinguished us from the lost. No, it came
from God. It was just done by us. So faith
is a necessity in order to be saved. But it is difficult for us to
understand just what faith looks like and acts like. And it is
in our nature to think that if we really believe something,
it will express itself emotionally, and consistently express itself
emotionally. I remember someone once saying,
This was a fella who'd made a profession of faith and then wandered off
for quite some time, and then he came back and he said, you
know, I used to know these things, but now I feel them. And I remember when I heard that,
I thought, well, what you gonna do someday when you don't feel
them? Where's your faith gonna be then? what you're going to do on that
day when you are so bowed down with trial or sorrow or a sense
of guilt over failure that, like the psalmist said, I cannot look
up, meaning he could not even generate sufficient hope with
himself to look up from his condition and seek the help of God. What
do you do then? Real, bona fide, honest to goodness
believers go through those times. How is faith expressed? Well, sometimes what we feel
is in perfect alignment with what we believe. That's one reason
I love meeting with you. Because if there's going to be
any time during the week that what I believe and what I feel
are going to match, it's in the gatherings of God's people for
worship. And I think that's why the Lord
made it such an important thing that we gather. And certainly
that applies to these circumstances, but you know it also applies
to those times when I may be just with one or two of you.
See you during the week, and we stop, we visit for a while,
and maybe we'll just talk about nonsensical stuff, but then a
spiritual matter gets brought up, and I feel more confident
of what we're talking about. and feel more assured I'm a part
of the things that we are being spoken of when I'm with other
believers than when I'm just by myself. But I imagine that every believer
here, whether or not he's willing to express it publicly, has gone
through times and maybe spends the majority of his time, her
time, feeling lost. Or, and this can sometimes be
worse, feeling nothing. Time I spoke to a fellow that
hadn't been in church for a while, went and visited to He said, I mentioned to him,
you know, I haven't seen you in church for a while. He said,
well, I'm not enjoying it. And that didn't throw me overboard.
I know what that is. I've gone to church. I've gone
to church and no one, And knowing, as a matter of fact, as I listened
to the preacher, I am hearing a great gospel message. But you
might as well preach it to a rock as preach it to me. So far as
my emotional response to it, I wasn't, quote, moved by it. And because of my own experiences,
I knew why. So I asked this fellow, I said,
do you enjoy anything? He said, no. I said, your problem's
not spiritual. Your problem's psychological.
You're depressed. He said, ignore it. It is irrelevant
to the truth of the gospel whether or not you have any feelings
about it. And even if you feel you are not being benefited by
what you hear, you are. Just come back and sit there,
and when the Lord figures that it's time for this particular
trial to be over, it'll be over. And while I didn't say these
words, this was what was backing it up. React according to what
you know, not according to what you feel. That's really in essence,
so far as whatever exhortation you can draw from this scripture.
I say to you, in whatever condition you're in emotionally, whether
you're up on a high or down in a valley or somewhere in between,
if you're excited or in despair or just blah, whatever, don't
react to what you feel about these things, react to what you
know about them. And I have here And this is what
I have to do, quite frankly. I have to do this for me. And it's helpful. And I figure
if I need to do it for me, you probably need to do it for you.
Maybe not as much as I do, but you're going to need it someday.
And then as much as it helps me, I figure it'll help you too. There are some things I know.
I know them because I have faith. They are things that, for the
most part, the natural mind cannot know, because they are things
which cannot be properly understood by the natural senses. I think
it's good for us to, at least by way of illustration, understand
that God-given faith It makes it as though we have a sixth
sense. Paul says, we live by faith,
not by sight. But what he means is we live
by faith, not by natural sight. Because faith sees things that
unbelief cannot. Faith sees things that these
eyes cannot. It is written of Abraham, he
saw him who is invisible. How in the world do you do that?
That's a contradiction in terms. I mean, what does invisible mean?
It means you can't see it. Can't be seen. He saw that which
cannot be seen. Why? Because he had another sense,
as it were, a spiritual sense that is capable of seeing or
detecting spiritual things. Now, I'm not talking about a
mystical thing, like believers will walk around and we see this
shimmery thing there. Oh, I can see God. He can't.
No. Because when it says we see spiritual
things, it's not anything that your eyes, ears, nose, tongue,
or hands would be able to detect its presence. We see things. But this seeing
brings us knowledge. And here's one of the things.
I got a list, one, two, three, four, five, six things that I
know. Regardless of how I feel, I know
these things. First of all, I know my sin. And I feel it pretty good, too. But there's some times I don't. There's some times that, well,
you know, I tell you, yeah, I'm a sinner, but I don't feel particularly
guilty. Don't feel all that bad. Don't
feel any sense of condemning guilt. And it's not that I don't
feel these things because, you know, the principles of the gospel
are so much guiding my mind, it's simply that Emotions go
up and down, and sometimes I am more sensitive to the reality
of my sin than I am at other times. But here's one thing.
I always know my sin. Listen to David. Verse 3, Psalm
51. I know my transgressions, and
my sin is always before me. Now, unbelievers, they develop
ways in which to excuse their transgression. And when you're
excusing transgression, you aren't knowing your sin. You may know
the fact of them. You may know, well, yes, technically
speaking, I broke this law of God, but, and they've always
got an excuse that removes the guilt of their sin. They don't
know their sin. Believers do. I know it. I'm not saying that
I know the fullness of it. I don't think I could keep what
little bit of sanity I have if I were ever able to see just
what I look like in the sight of God apart from Christ. But
I do know that I am a sinner against God. He says, for I know my transgression,
my sin is always before me. Here's something I know about
it. Against you and you only have I sinned and done what is
evil in your sight. I know that. Now I've done plenty
of things that offended other people, plenty of things that
wronged other people. I've said things that hurt them.
Even when I didn't intend to, I've done that. And I've snapped
at people. There have been times I've said
things for the specific reason of making them feel bad. But even in those times, it was
not against them that I was sinning. It was against God. I know that. Whether or not I
feel it. Whether or not I am overwhelmed
with what a great sinner I am, I still know it. It's a fact. It's a reality. Now, let's look over at Job chapter
19. I know my sin. And I ask you, just consider
these things. And if you can remember them,
kind of keep them in your pocket So that at times when you cannot
confirm your faith by the way you feel about things, just drop
back and say, well, I'm not feeling them now, but I do know them.
I know they're so. He says in verse 23 of Job chapter
19, and this is Job speaking, oh, that my words were recorded. that they were written on a scroll,
that they were inscribed on an iron tool, on lead or engraved
in rock forever. He took a long way of saying
basically, inscribe this on my tombstone. I know that my Redeemer lives. Oh, what a blessed comfort this
can bring to the soul in the midst of doubts, in the midst
of emotions contrary to what we claim to believe. To be able
to ponder on this reality, I know my Redeemer lives. Now, Joe Bright
at this point was so covered up with grief. Many of you all have gone through
some really serious grief. But Job had lost his entire family,
10 children. He had lost all he had, and he
had been covered with painful boils. And his friends had come
to comfort him, and instead of comforting him, They heaped guilt
upon him and tried to make it as though his feelings at that
present moment were justified because he'd been such a bad
guy. And Job's answer was not, well,
I feel that my Redeemer lives. He didn't feel that his Redeemer
lives. It looked like there wasn't a Redeemer. Or if there was one,
it wasn't his Redeemer. But he knew that his Redeemer
lived. And look what else he goes on
to say. He says, I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the
end, he will stand upon the earth. All right, right now, it looks
like everything's a mess. I've lost everything that gave
me earthly comfort. All that God left me of my family
was a wife who told me to curse God and die. And he gave me a bunch of friends
who are heaping judgment on me and making me feel worse. But in this deep, dark hole I'm
in, I know this, my Redeemer lives. And in the end, he's the
one that's going to be still standing. He's a redeemer. He is a rescuer. And my hope and the assurance
of my redemption, my salvation, has nothing to do with how I
feel at the present moment or the circumstances which describe
my present moment. It's all wrapped up in something
I know. My Redeemer does live. And when all of this falls out
and all, you know, the dust has settled and once again I can
see I'll see Him. Verse 26, and after my skin has
been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see Him with my
own eyes, I and not another. how my heart yearns within me. Yearns for what that day? You know, one of the things that
trials of faith are sent to accomplish is to remove from us our inappropriate
joy in the blessings of this life. and the tendency that such
blessings can work in us to cast our gaze from that which is truly
our hope and our joy, which is Christ. We all want the blessings of
this life, and there's nothing wrong with that. I want always have plenty of
money and never have to be concerned about how I'm going to pay next
month's bills, or for that matter, next week. I hope that my children,
every one of them, outlives me in good health, and that when
I leave this world, I am not saddled with the grief that one
of my children has gone. All of my children profess to
be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I hope when I die
they still are, and that not one of them has proven to be
unfaithful. I hope my grandchildren receive
the same faith that I've experienced. But you know something? If none
of that came to pass, It does not change. I know that my Redeemer
lives. And I will see Him. And I'll
see Him with my own eyes. I'll not just be getting the
report of someone else who saw Him with their own eyes. I will
see Him. And in that knowledge, even as
I feel like I'm about to fall into the pit of hell itself.
Yet I know he lives, and he will not let me perish. All right, turn over to Romans
chapter 10. beginning in verse 1, Romans
chapter 10. Brothers, my heart's desire and
prayer to God for Israelites is that they may be saved, for
I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but
their zeal is not based on knowledge. They don't have knowledge of
something that we must have knowledge of. Since they did not know the righteousness
that comes from God and sought to establish their own, meaning
they sought to render a righteousness to present to God. They did not submit to God's
righteousness. Now, in this one we're going
to have to make a statement in contrast to what's written. He
says, they did not know the righteousness
that comes from God. I do. I'm not saying that to
brag. The only reason I know it is
because God revealed it through the preaching of the gospel.
But I do. I understand that concept. I realize, beginning with I know
my sin, there is no way for me to produce a righteousness which
I could then present to God and say, Lord, look how good I've
been, bless me. But I also know that the gracious
God, whose love and grace and mercy, we can't get our heads
wrapped around it. It's so great. He has freely
given righteousness to His people through Jesus Christ. I know
that. Oh, I get, I think of my sin
and, you know, can't help it, just the way my brain works.
And it's kind of like, you know, particularly the ones we consider
more notable sins, it's like As it's going through my thoughts,
they're like the dust particles that get caught in the filter
in your furnace, and they just stay there. I can't get rid of
them. I look to my past. Do you know
what I remember? I remember everything I've done
wrong. I remember the ways I've hurt
people. I've remembered the kinds of
sins I'm not going to tell anybody about. I remember stupid things
I did. That's what I remember. Thank God I know the righteousness
that comes from God, because the righteousness that comes
from God as a gift is greater than the mass of all my sin. Now you say, oh, preacher, you
don't know how big my sin is. Well, God's righteousness is
every bit as big as God. the righteousness that He gives,
it's given by grace and it follows the same mathematical formula
as grace does. Where sin abounds, grace abounds
all the more. I know that. And when I feel
the oppressive weight of guilt, I don't poll my feelings because
I feel guilty. I feel condemned. What do I do? I return to what I know. His
righteousness has been given to me through the work of the
Lord Jesus Christ. Horrible as these sins are and
as regrettable as they are, and there's nothing wrong with tears
of sorrow, but I tell you, pile them up as high as your mind
can think of, the pile of God's righteousness given to us freely
in Christ Jesus covers them up as though they were not there
at all. I know. All right, look at 2
Timothy 2, verse 12. Excuse me, 2 Timothy chapter
1, verse 12. We read this a few minutes ago. That is why I am suffering as I am, yet I am not ashamed
because I know whom I have believed. Does it mean I have the full
doctrinal knowledge of this person? That's impossible, because you'd
have to have the full doctrinal knowledge of God, and He's a
little big to fit inside our brains. He said, but I know Him. He's not a feeling to me, He's
a reality. I know who He is. He is God in
human flesh. I know what He has done. He has
borne my sins in His body on the tree. I know that. I know
where He is. He is at the right hand of the
Father. And I know what's the next thing
on His agenda, to return and receive me unto His self, that
where He is, there I may be also. I know Him. I know His faithfulness. I know His love. I know His promises. I know His determination. So it doesn't matter how I feel
about any of these things. These are the things I know. And in the knowledge of these
things, I can direct what I do. and how I respond to circumstances,
and how I respond to emotions that won't back any of this stuff
up, maybe even emotions that are arguing against all these
truths, I know how to respond to them. Ignore them. Call them
the lying things that they are. And say, I feel like I'm going
to drop into hell, but I tell you what, I know the one I believe,
and he's not going to let that happen. Brethren, that's what
faith is. People think that if you believe
God, your emotions are going to be like just this ever-bubbling,
you know, like an artesian well, and all's going to be well, and
no doubt will ever cross your mind. That is a faith that's
not being tried. Faith is tried in the furnace
of doubts that arise in our minds because of horrible circumstances. Horrible failures. It's in that
crucible that it is found whether or not we truly believe, and
here's how a real believer acts in the midst of those things.
He ignores what his emotions are telling him in the midst
of all that, and goes by what he knows. All right, look at John chapter
9. Well, you're going to have to
give me a second to find the right verse, because I wrote
the wrong one down. Here we go, 25. John 9, 25. This is the story
of that man that the Lord healed him from his blindness. I believe
a man born blind, and the Lord healed him from his blindness.
And, of course, the Pharisees were all up in arms about this,
and so they found him. They wanted him to confess or
profess that Jesus was a sinner. Because, you know, that's what
they wanted everybody to think. Because they didn't want anybody
following Jesus. And he said, they said, we know this man is
a sinner. That's the end of verse 24. He
replied, whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. Now this
man, he's speaking from his experience that has happened to him in the
last few minutes. He had not become a theologian.
He had not been trained in all the intricate doctrines that
have developed over the centuries since these events happened. One thing I do know, I was blind
and now I see. I know that. Do you think there was ever a
time when this guy doubted whether Jesus was the Messiah? Do you think there was ever a
time that the devil was able to whisper to him. He was impressive, but he's not
God in human flesh. You know how he could answer
every doubt that entered his mind? I know this. I was blind. Now I see. Every last one of us here was
born blind. Can you see now? Can you see the gospel? Spiritually
speaking, can you understand it? When you read it, does it make
perfect sense to you? I'm a sinner. No way I can present
to God what He requires. But He sent His Son into the
world to do for me what I could never do for myself. And the
Father has accepted His work and exalted Him to His right
hand, and He's coming back for me. And while there are many,
many times I do not feel the power of that truth, I know it's
true. I was blind, but not anymore.
I can see. Here's the interesting thing.
There are those who say, I can see. I know I can see. Here's the thing. They don't
say, I was blind, but now I see. They think they've seen all the
time. And they're kind of like that
woman that came up to Donny Bell and says, I've loved God all
my life. He said, that's too long. It's
too long, because you didn't come into this world loving God.
You didn't come into this world seeing. There was a time, if
you are a believer, there was a time when God opened your heart,
your mind, to see things you had not seen before. I've listened
to some of you as you gave testimony of when the Lord was pleased
to open your eyes. And I mean, you know, it's like,
you know, Eureka! Boy, I've been listening to preaching.
I've been listening to good preaching. And I knew the doctrines they
were saying. I understood all of that. But there was a day,
wow, I see how I understand. Have you ever been blind? The
only person who knows what it really means to be blind is someone
who is blind but now sees. The blind, you know, we feel
sorry for them, and I, there's nothing wrong with that, because
we're looking at their blindness from the perspective of someone
who can see. But if you never had it, you know, it's not like
you miss it, so to speak. But the one who is blind and
that was given sight, he knows what it is to be blind. and he
knows what it is to see. One last thing, 1 Corinthians
13, verse 12. Well, if I'll go to 1 Corinthians
instead of 2 Corinthians, I'll find what I want. 1 Corinthians 13, 12, now we see
but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall
know fully. even as I am fully known. I know that I know only in part. All these things I mentioned,
I know them, but not completely. Our knowledge of anything is
only partial. I know whom I have believed,
but not like I'll know him when I see him. I know my sin, Not
like I'll know my sin when I see Him who is perfect righteousness. And you can apply that to all
those things I mentioned that we know. And because we know
only in part, it should not surprise us that our emotions can have
such strong or produce such strong convictions in us contrary to
what we know. We will not be perfect in faith
until we're perfect in knowledge. But we have sufficient knowledge
to undergird sufficient faith to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ
to the saving of our souls. So when your feelings Don't match
what you believe. Forget what you feel. Go with what you know. You're
a sinner. Christ is a good Savior. We know all things work together
for good to them who love God. We know things, and that's what
faith lives on. honor his work.