If you were to listen to the
more popular forms of the Christian religion, you might go away with
the idea that the life of a believer is a life without trouble. At
least it is if he believes enough or behaves well enough or sends
enough money to the guy on the TV who's telling them that their
life can be good. And you know, everybody wants
a trouble-free life. I want one. There's nothing wrong
with wanting one. Expecting one is going to lead
you to disappointment, but wanting one, we don't desire trouble. Trouble does not have any intrinsic
value. Yes, God works all things together
for good to them who love God and are called according to his
purpose. We understand that. But that doesn't mean that the
unpleasant times we go through have an intrinsic value. They
have what's called an instrumental value. They are accomplishing
something for us. We may never know what it was,
You know, the Lord, it says in the Lord, he gives no accounting
of his deeds. He doesn't explain to us why
he chooses the path he chose for us. He just says, trust me,
walk it. I'm going to make it end right. But people want a trouble free
life, so they are willing to to great lengths to follow whatever
pattern they've been told will bring them the trouble-free life. And yet, here we have the words of our
Lord Jesus, who though he was God, he was a man as well. Unexplainable, but nonetheless
true. And as a man, it's said of him, he was tempted in every
point just like we are, yet without sin. He experienced all that it means
to be a human being in this God-cursed world. He felt the heat of the sun.
He knew what it was to be hungry. to be thirsty, to be weary. He knew what it was to be hated
by those who should have loved him. He knows what it was like
to be misunderstood by those who should have understood him.
He knows what it was like to be rejected by those who should
have welcomed him. He suffered all that you and
I suffer and more. He led a troubled life, a life
full of trouble. And yet never did a man behave
better than the Lord Jesus Christ, nor was there anyone who ever
believed more completely and purely than did the Lord Jesus. You say, how does God believe
God? Well, there's just one of those
things that we can't explain, but I know that while he was
God, he lived his life here as a man, he experienced entirely
as a man. And it says, the writer of Hebrews
puts these words in the mouth of the Lord, I have put my trust
in him. Our brother just read to us from
Psalm 22, and it says, my hope was in you, Upon my mother's
breast I was cast upon you from the womb. Actually he's the only
one probably could ever say that. Only the Lord Jesus Christ could
have believed God at a time when most of us didn't know our own
names. He was the perfect believer.
He was the perfect human being. And yet he experienced more trouble
in this world than anybody else has ever experienced. And his disciples were troubled.
These were the men whom he had chosen. Now one of them was a
devil. The Lord knew it from the beginning.
He knew it when he chose him. He chose him to fulfill his destiny. And he did. But there were 11 out of those
12 who truly did believe him, though they had only little faith,
and they were prone to troubling thoughts. Often they were frightened. Sometimes they were frightened
when they saw him do great and marvelous things. On one occasion, when Peter was
fishing and couldn't catch anything, And the Lord called out to him
and said, put your net on the other side. And they did so,
and he got a bunch of fish. And Peter comes running to the
shore, and he fell down and says, go away. I'm an unclean man. He was so stricken by the power
of the Lord Jesus Christ that he was afraid of him. They marveled at him. and they were fearful on the
night of crucifixion. It is written, all his disciples
forsook him and fled. And the only reason that you
and I did not forsake him and flee is because we weren't there. We might like to think we would
be bold. We would be if God gave us boldness, but I imagine it's more likely
we would act just like the disciples did. But they were troubled,
and they were very troubled. If you read in verse 39, excuse
me, verse 38 of the previous chapter, Jesus talking to Peter,
he says, will you really lay down your life for me? I tell
you the truth before the rooster crows, you will disown me three
times. And the next words are, do not let your hearts be troubled. Now we get troubled by a lot
of things. Job said, my heart is troubled. His life was full
of trouble and that filled his heart with trouble. The Psalms
are full of testimonies of the troubles that the psalmist went
through. David wrote a good many of the
Psalms, but not all of them. I think one reason that most
people like the Psalms as much as they do is because they can
identify with the troubles that the psalmist experienced. Don't
you like to hear from someone who knows what it's like to be
going through what you're going through? You know, when people go through
illnesses, I do what I can. But there's only so much sympathy
you can give someone when they're experiencing something you yourself
never experienced. Some things, to know them, you
simply have to go through them. And so, we have these troubles, all kinds of them. We have the natural, normal,
everyday troubles of life. I imagine everybody here, at
one time or another, had been troubled about how you're going
to make ends meet. Someone says, I've got too much
month for my money. Run out of money before the end
of the month. We spend a whole lot of effort
And it's right that we work. I mean, we're supposed to be,
as long as we can, we're supposed to be useful. But we are so concerned about
money, normally speaking, and the things that it will gain
for us, that we work very hard and try to save up, try to make
sure that we've got a big cushion in the bank in case hard times
come. I'm not saying that that's wrong, I'm just saying that shows
us just how much anxiety we have over what's going to happen tomorrow.
How am I going to eat? What am I going to wear? Where
am I going to live? We're fearful of those things.
Anybody that's got children knows what a troubled heart is. And it doesn't matter how sweet
and good your child was, you worry about him. After my mother
had my oldest sister, she, I guess shortly after dad had some leave
and they went back to West Virginia and they were visiting his dad
there in Johnson's Holler. And evidently, my Granny Murch's mother was
there. Now, I never met my grandmother. She passed away before I was
born, but her mother was at the house. And so there's mom with
a brand new baby. And of course, my sister Debbie
would cry once in a while, and mom would get up and be busy
about it. But that woman, my great-grandmother, told my mother,
from the time you hear your baby's first cry, your heart never rests. And there's a measure of truth
in that. You're troubled. What shall become
of them? Will they do well? Will they
get sick? How will their children do? We've
got those troubles, don't we, as believers? That's natural
trouble. We care about our children, our
children's children. We have Troubles, and I think
this is one of the big ones, when something totally unexpected,
completely unplanned for, turns our lives upside down. These watershed moments in our
lives when suddenly everything is forced into a different direction,
We saw clear sailing, and we got blindsided by an awful storm. In fact, those things happen
to us, and if we have a situation like that afterwards, we're always
a little frightful that another one of those storms is coming,
but oh, to be in the midst of them. When you're on a storm-tossed
sea, and you've lost the rudder, You've lost control of everything.
Water's coming in over the sides. And you're like the disciples
who said to the Lord, do you not care that we perish? Oh, now, a believer would never
accuse the Lord of that. Oh, yes, they would. They did.
In fact, you read in Psalm 77, I believe it is, the psalmist
there, he gives out six questions and I tell you every one of them
is so full of unbelief and doubting upon God that you'd wonder how
someone who believed God could ever think them, much less say
them, much less write them down so that other people could read
them. And one of them was this, has his mercy, is his mercy clean
gone forever? Has he forgotten how to answer
prayer? Now that's a troubled heart.
And I say these things so that if you are a troubled believer,
you won't let the devil say to you, you know, if you're a believer,
this wouldn't bother you. If you trusted God, you wouldn't
feel like this. I'm so glad God moved that psalmist
to write that psalm down. Because I've asked all those
questions. I'm glad to know that 3,000 years ago, or however long
ago it was, there was another believer who felt the same way. Trouble. And here's another thing that
gives us trouble. It adds trouble upon our troubles. A very big
three-letter word. Why? God sends some ill wind our way,
some difficult providence, some horrible trial, and we think,
why? And we try to figure it out. If you are of a conscience like
mine, the first question is, well, what did I do? How'd I
mess up that I brought this on myself? I immediately think that
it's the hand of God's disfavor upon me. But we try to plumb the depths
of divine wisdom and come up with a reason why he has ordained
the providence that he has. You know, life has sense. Life has meaning. But you and
I don't know what it is. I was listening to a fellow on
the radio, this was probably 20 years ago or more. I don't
listen to many preachers on the radio. I know exactly where I
was when I was coming out of the road between the post office
and the florist shop. I was heading east and I was
turning north. And a guy was talking about the
book of Job. And he said, you know, most people,
when they read the book of Job, it says that, you know, it's
there to show up, to give us comfort, you know, and all this
kind. He said, that's not what the
book of Job is about. He said, the basic message of the book
of Job is this. Job said, why? And God said,
none of your business. None of your business. You know, you and I, when we
read the book of Job, we find at least part of the reason for
Job's suffering, but Job didn't have that book to read. He didn't know about the devil
going up there in the presence of God and say, hey, no wonder
Job worships you. You've put a hedge around him,
I can't touch him. He didn't realize that God was glorifying
himself in demonstrating to the devil that not even the devil
could pull Job away from him. All Job knew was is that everything
was going fine and then everything fell apart. That's all he knew.
And his friends didn't know any better. They came up and said,
well, you must have done something wrong because, you know, God
doesn't treat the righteous like this. And then Job tried to justify
himself, and then God sent another friend
with more of the truth, and then God showed up himself, and he
spoke. And he said, basically, who do
you think you are to call on me to justify what
I do? He says, where were you when
I made the worlds? Where were you when I stored
the snow in the northern regions and on the mountain tops? Where
were you? All of which is to say, when it comes down to it,
who are you? Who are you? Now that may sound
harsh, but it's really not. The Lord blessed Job with those
words. You know why? One of the reasons
we get so upset with God's providence is that we have such expectations
of how good we deserve things to be. And when they don't get
to be that way, we get upset about it. But when God, by showing us His
greatness, causes us to feel our smallness, it puts things
in perspective. Job said, after God had spoken,
he said, I've heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now
mine eye seeth thee, and I abhor myself and repent in sackcloth
and ashes. So long as Job was seeing Job,
he was saying, this shouldn't happen to me. I behaved, I did
what was right. These things shouldn't happen
to me. Then he saw God. A man doesn't come to understand
his sin or know his sin by looking at himself. He learns his sin
when by the grace of God he's given a glimpse of the greatness
and glory and holiness of God. Happened to Isaiah. Happened
to all of God's people to a greater or lesser degree. But we're troubled
when we ask this question, why? It involves us in trying to discover
things that God has not revealed. In fact, the book of Ecclesiastes
said that he has set in our hearts, he set the vanishing point in
our hearts. You know, if you stand on a set
of railroad tracks and you look down, you see the vanishing point. Eventually the two rails, it
looks like they come together. You know they don't, but that's
what it looks like. And you can only see so far down
the tracks that way. You look back, you can only see
so far that way. And you and I, We can look to
the past a little bit. I mean, let's face it, our lives
on this world are just a little blip on the screen when you look
at the grand scheme of things. So we can't see too much of the
past. And what we see of the future is really just our dreams. But it says, and this is in chapter
3 of Ecclesiastes, he says, he has set this vanishing point
in our hearts so that we won't know what he's doing. We can't
figure it out. You say, where's this going?
I don't know. I mean, I know the ultimate end. I know the ultimate end of everything
that's happening. And the ultimate end and purpose
for everything that's happened is the glorifying of God through
His Son, Jesus Christ, through the salvation of God's chosen
people. That's what this universe is
for. But I'll be honest with you, I can't see, I don't have
the wisdom to look at all that goes on in my life and all that
goes on in your life and say, OK, now this is how it's going
to fit into that picture. I don't know. And God doesn't intend that we
know. Rather, we are simply to trust
him, that he knows, and to trust his word of promise. Now, he
says, do not let your hearts be troubled. I've entitled this
message, Comfort for Troubled Hearts. I haven't got the comfort
part yet. Still talking a little bit about
the trouble. One more trouble I want to mention, and I think
that every one of you, I know all you believers are going to
identify with this, and it's our troubled heart over our failures. Our failures as believers in
the Lord Jesus Christ. Our troubled hearts that we don't
love him more than we do. Our troubled hearts that we can
be so in love with the world, and yet know that the world hates
our Savior. Our troubled hearts, a continuing,
persistent sin. Or our troubled hearts, such
as Peter must have had when the Lord said, before the rooster
crows, you will disown me three times. does ever trouble your heart that someday you might disown
the Lord or have that in the in the time of testing as it
were when when you were standing there and someone said something
evil about the Lord Jesus when I say evil I'm not saying that
they cursed at him or something it might have been some point
of false doctrine It might have been them presenting a false
gospel and you didn't say anything. You might have been around some
worldlings that mocked him. And you didn't stand up and say,
now hold on a minute. It's a free country, you can
believe whatever you want. But understand this, the Lord
Jesus Christ is exactly who the scriptures say he is. I know
him. And when you mock him, you mock
me. I know this, if we were standing
there and somebody said something about our mom or dad, we'd speak
up, wouldn't we? We'd say, now, just a minute.
If you're gonna talk bad about them, you're gonna have to talk
someplace else. I was talking to Todd when we
were talking back and forth. I actually let him say a few
things. But in our talk, we both expressed these very things. How can we be men called to preach
and be the kind of men we are? How can we find fault with anybody
else, knowing how faulty we are? How could we have ever spoken
of this or that brother, as we did. And yet the Lord, in the very face of his prediction
of what Peter was going to do, disowned him three times. And
remember, when John wrote this, he didn't have chapters and verses.
So forget chapter 14, that big 14 written right there. You will
disown me three times, do not let your heart be troubled. Oh, how merciful the Lord Jesus
Christ. He knew what was coming. He knew that one of them would
betray him, the rest would forsake him, that the leaders would call
for his crucifixion, that Rome would relent to it, He knew all of this. He knew
that Peter, this wouldn't be the only time he caused trouble.
He showed himself the coward that night, and later he caused some trouble
in the church at Antioch. Don't ever get the idea that
the apostles were perfect men. They weren't. The Lord knew all of this and
he said to Peter, actually all of them, don't let your hearts
be troubled. How can we, living in a world
like we live in, going through the things we go through, knowing
ourselves to be the kind of people we are, how can our hearts not
be troubled? Well, notice what the Lord says
next. Trust in God. Trust also in me. Now, the way
this is written in the Greek, it could be the first part of
it would be you trust in God. Trust also in me. Now, he'd been telling them he
was going to go away. They were upset about that. He told them
Told Peter he's going to deny him three times. These are troubling
things. They realize that their lives
are about to get turned upside down. Because the one to whom
they devoted themselves and had followed for three and a half
years, he says he's leaving. And he says there's no need for
you to be troubled about this. You believe God. And they did,
much as they could. And then he says this, believe
me, trust me as well. Now, what is he saying here? He's saying you can trust me
just like you trust God. And you can trust me like you
trust God, because I am God. Now, friends, might say as a
figure of speech that we use in English, believe me when I
say, but quite frankly I don't want you to believe me. I really
don't want you to believe me. I want you to believe God. Abraham
believed God, and righteousness was credited to him. Paul said we were glad, we gave
thanks that you accepted our word not as the word of men but
as it actually is, the word of God. Believing me won't get you
anywhere. I want you to believe God. To trust Him. And that means
to trust the Lord Jesus Christ. For He is God. and all the confidence that we
would put in a being such as God, as much as we can understand
what kind of being He is. I mean, He's infinite, and we
can't get our heads wrapped around infinite, can we? But as much as we can, we know
that with God, all things are possible. We may therefore say,
with Christ, all things are possible. God said to the people in the
Old Testament, he says, is there anything too hard for me? And we can say, is there anything
too hard for the Lord Jesus Christ? What is it that's troubling you
now? Do you think that it's bigger
than the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you think that he has sent
you a trouble that he can't manage? As I pointed out before, when
our Lord calmed the sea, He spoke. He rebuked the wind. And in rebuking
the wind, it stopped and that made the wave stop. Do you know why He could do that?
Because He's the one that made the wind blow in the first place.
That wasn't the first time the wind heard His voice. You say, well, God doesn't cause
the storm. Yes, He does. He says, I kill and I make alive.
I bring peace and I create disaster. People act as though bad things,
they call them bad things, they mean by that unpleasant things,
act as though they are not the works of God. I tell you, whatever's
going on is the work of God. Whatever it is. And even though
you and I can't make sense out of it, can't figure out how this
is going to honor Him or glorify Him, it is, it will. Whether it's a cure or a disease,
it's from the Lord. Whether it's happiness or sorrow,
it's from the Lord. And He can manage both quite
easily. Your trouble, whatever it is
right now, understand this, If you're one of his children, whatever
trouble, whatever troubles your heart right now, God sent it. You say, why? I don't know. I
just know that it's so. And since he's the one that sent
it, you can be sure it's not bigger than him. He can manage
it. He can stop it if he wants. He can make it worse. can make
it a little better, he can do whatever he wants with it. So the Lord's saying to his disciples,
you trust God? Trust me, I know what I'm doing,
I have the power to do it, and your failures are not going to
result in my failure. You see, that's one reason that
people get so worried about their Spiritual success. Let's just
put it that way. I don't know how else to express
it, but they think there's times when they're doing well and then
times when they're doing not so well. And when they're not
doing so well, they wonder whether or not they're saved or, you
know, have I met the standard. When you realize, brethren, never
for a single moment have you and I ever even come close to
meeting the standard. Never. that our best days merit
us an everlasting hell. When you realize that your salvation
really has nothing to do with you or what you do, it's all
together wrapped up, as my friend says, in the doing and the dying
of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you can lay hold of that,
your heart doesn't have to be troubled about it anymore. You don't have to think to yourself,
I have done that so many times and now I've done it again. Surely
the Lord has run out of patience now. Well, you would run out
of patience. He won't. You know what? Your sin may surprise
you, but it never surprises God. Now you think about it a minute.
You have never caught God off guard with your sin. Adam and Eve didn't. When he
said, Adam, where are you? It's not because he didn't know. And he didn't say to them, boy,
I didn't expect this. Y'all caught me off guard. Let
me see if I can think of something to do. God has never lost control of
anything. He hadn't lost control of you. and there's nothing that you
have done or even can do that is going to be a surprise to
him. He knew it when he chose you. He knew it when Christ died
for you. He knew it when the Spirit called
you. You're the only one that's just finding out. You think on
that a minute. He's God, brethren. He can handle
it. And here's another reason that
we can be free of trouble. I say can,
we'll be free of trouble only to the degree that we can lay
hold of these truths. Verse two, in my father's house
are many rooms, dwelling places. If it were not so, I would have
told you, I'm going there to prepare a place for you. I don't know what my path will be between
here and now and when I'm with him. I don't
know what that path is. But this I know, I know where
it ends. It ends in my father's house. It ends in a place prepared
for me by the one who is touched with the feelings of my infirmities,
but was never made infirm by them. Who knows the troubles
of my heart, but is not troubled by them. who has everything well in hand,
he has gone to prepare a place. And if he's preparing my place
or has prepared it, I think that he can be certain
that I'll get there. I remember back in the religion
of my youth, they would act like there's going to be empty rooms
in heaven. All these people that Jesus went
and prepared a place for them, but they just wouldn't accept
Him. Well, friends, if He prepared
a place for each individual, well, there's going to be a lot
of echoes in the halls, because let's face it, percentage-wise,
at least looking at the grown-up population, percentage-wise,
not that many people in the world honestly trust the Lord Jesus
Christ according to the gospel that's written here. Most of
the rooms are going to be empty if that's what he did. But as
Brother Mahan used to say, and I love this statement, he'd say,
in heaven, there's plenty of room, but no vacancies. Our Lord
Jesus said, of all that you have given to me, I have lost none. This is the will of him that
sent me. Of all that he has given me, I would lose none, but raise
it up in the last day. And brother, we can trust him
to do that. We can trust that, like Job said, I know that my
Redeemer lives. And even though this body, this
flesh, and he was, you know, it's a little gross, but then
it's looking at things as they are. It says, worms shall destroy
my flesh. He said, yet in my flesh, I will
see God. And not with the eyes of another,
with my own eyes I will see him. Why? I know that my Redeemer lives. And friends, so long as He lives,
everything's fine. Some things are sad, but everything's
fine. He's prepared a place, and I
like the fact that he put the word many in there. Some seem
to take a lot of glory and act as though there's only going
to be a half a dozen or more in heaven, and of course they're one of
them. I've seen people, you know, they get a little bit of light,
get a little bit of knowledge of the scriptures, Suddenly everybody
doesn't see what they see is lost and they get a little more
light. They think it's light They get a little more light
and then they up the bar and boy if you haven't seen that
you're lost and before long They're standing there all alone Because
they've cast everybody else out My lord said this there are many
dwelling places in his father's house I'm glad of that I'm glad that there's gonna be
a bunch of brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ to live
with forever. And then here's another reason
not to be troubled, verse three. And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that
you also may be where I am. It bothered them that he was
leaving. They said, don't worry. I'm going, I'm leaving for a
good reason. I'm leaving to prepare you a place. And if I prepare
you a place, I'm going to come back and get you. You know, here's
a real strong statement of the
sovereignty of God's grace. Now most of what is called Christianity
believes that God wants to save everybody and that Jesus Christ
came here in a sincere attempt to save every individual in the
world. But here our Lord says this,
if I prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you
to be with me. You catch the significance of
that? Everybody for whom our Lord prepared
a room, and where did he prepare that room? He prepared it on
the cross. That's where it got prepared. That's where that construction
project went on. He said, if I prepare a place
for you, I'm coming back to get you. The love of our Lord Jesus Christ
is not such that he'd lay down his life for someone and then
not even bother to see to it that they are collected and saved. Now, most people put this as
a reference to the second coming, and certainly that's true. He
is coming back someday. And at that moment he will gather
to himself all the believers on the earth and so shall they
and all who were asleep in him at that time be raised from the
dead and all believers way back to at least as far back as able
until the last believer, every one of them, will forever always
be with the Lord. But I don't think that's all
that he means here. He says, if I go to prepare a place for
you, I will come back and take you to be with me. First of all,
he came back in the person of the Holy Spirit, in other places
called the Spirit of Christ, and he called his people to himself,
and he's still doing that. But you know what else he means
here? Yes, at the end, he'll call whosoever's left, but one
by one, he's coming to this world. And he says, it's time to come
home now. You're done. You have finished your course.
You've kept the faith. Now you can come home. Your room's waiting for you.
We got this death thing all wrong. You know that? We resist it with every fiber
of our being. And it's only natural that we
do. And I'm not going to stand up here and pretend that if I
went to the doctor tomorrow and got some horrible diagnosis that
I wouldn't say, well, give it all you got. I got insurance. I'm not worried about the bill.
Do everything you can to keep me alive. Brethren, the death of a believer
is not some jump into the dark. It's the
Lord Jesus fulfilling his promise. He said, I prepared a place for
you. Now it's time you come and occupy it. The older I get, the more I like
scriptures like this. Now, what's the way there to this
place? Well, the one who prepared it's
the way there. Verse six, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No man comes to the Father but by me. The Bible club my mother
used to teach called it Good News Club. They had a lot of
songs to sing that were based on traffic signs. And they had,
you know, they had one, Stop and let me tell you what the
Lord has done for me. And the words were printed on an eight-sided
thing, you know, and she'd stop, you know, it looked like a stop
sign, and let me tell you what the Lord has done for me. And
another one, there was a green sign, it said, Go and tell the
story of the Christ of Calvary. And there was another one called
One Way. One way, God said, to get to heaven. Jesus is the only
way. And I used to sing that. Well,
I remember it, you know. And it still goes through my
head. But you know something? Jesus didn't say he was the way to
heaven. You know that? He said, no man comes to the
Father but by me. You see how the Lord worded things
such that it pulls the legs out from under fleshly religion?
Everybody wants to go to heaven. Eternal vacation? Who wouldn't
want that? Not everybody's interested in going to the Father. And almost no one's interested
in going to the Father by way of the Son. They don't mind the
Son showing them the way, but they want at least a little something
to do with getting there. You who believe, you are at the
present time on the Christ way. And in one sense, we might say
we're walking it, but actually we're being carried on it. Like that Good Samaritan story.
It says that he, the Good Samaritan, found that fella in the ditch,
and he bound him up, fixed him up, and put him on his own donkey,
and took him well, to what we call a motel. And our Lord Jesus Christ came
to us in the ditch. He didn't stand up on the road
and say, well, now if you want me to help you, you're going
to have to come up here, because I'm not getting down there. He
came right down here in the ditch with us. And he poured in the oil and
the wine, the wine of his blood, the oil of the anointing of his
spirit to give us life. And he carries us. And the time will come when we'll
say, all right, you're here. And we'll say, well, I am. Why was I so troubled? Why was
I so worried? Let not your heart be troubled.
You believe God. Believe Him. He's got it all
taken care of.