There's no end to it. Even if
you know something, it doesn't mean that you don't need to know
it to learn it. We've talked a lot about God's
faithfulness, especially in the context of suffering. That's
typically the constant story of the New Testament. It's the
constant picture of the Old Testament. And in my conversations throughout
the weeks, It's interesting how people, like we are, as human
beings, we tend to take something that we know and then forget
the truth of it and then build a narrative around it. For example,
I was talking with Trey before service, that there are people
who believe that Where they are today, they could have been someplace
else in the context of God's sovereignty if they had just
made different choices. Now while, yes, different choices
bring different outcomes, we who are believers believe that
God has only one outcome. We believe that everything that
is is ordained by God, that God has purposed it, that in some
sense God has caused it. Why? Because He is good and all
things come and work together for those who love him and are
called according to his purpose to their good. Even the person of the life of
Joseph, what did Joseph endure? Hatred, murder, abandonment,
abuse, sold into slavery, then false accusation, then imprisonment,
accosting, and then ends up being the ruler of the world. so that
when his brothers, the very ones that put him into that place,
come seeking the hand of majesty for food, so that they would
not perish during the famine, the very person that they abused
was the person that would give them the food. And he lowers
himself to them, and he thanks God for the pain. He says, what
you meant for evil, God meant for good. For if you had not
sold me into slavery and abandoned me and abused me in salt to see
my death, you would surely die. But see, we mess it up. Protestantism, Catholicism, crazy-ism,
all the other isms that we can come up with throughout church
history, first century-ism, Paulinism, You put a label on it, you get
an affinity around it, it's an ism. And we could just say that that
means it's stupid, man, because there's gonna be something wrong
with it. And so we should live forever in the face of the Lord
while we study and live presently in this day and learn that where
we are and who we are and what we are and where we find ourselves
is the will of God. Now what? So that's what I'll
do today. I'll refresh our minds on how
God calls us to live by faith in response to suffering because
of his faithfulness. It's what I talked about last
week. How do we trust God and how that trust and rest transforms
our suffering in our daily life? That's going to be like an introduction
and then I'm going to spend the latter part of the three hours
in a conversation about God's love. So buckle down. Here we go. In the scripture. Verse 19 of chapter 4 says, therefore,
let us, let those who suffer according to God's will entrust
their souls to a faithful creator while doing good. It's why I
went to Psalm 90, not only that, because I heard Everlasting,
Everlasting, the song earlier, and I love that song. I love
that message that he is from everlasting to everlasting. Unchanging
so therefore his love for us did not begin because of us nor
will it end because of us it always has been And we spend
so much time in Christendom. We spend so much time in culture.
We spend so much time trying to prove and find and embrace
the love of God define it and express it and try to you know
cling to it in such a way that we can find a tether and outside
of him, but in reality the tether is him. He is the promise. He is the one who is faithful. But because we just aren't able
to rest in that, we've all come up with good devices and object
lessons and everything else and trying to explain it away rather
than just saying it is what it is and he is what he is and his
love is. And we've established throughout
this entire letter over the last year that suffering is not primarily
about our endurance, but it's about God's faithfulness. It's
about God's faithfulness being revealed. The revelation of God
that we see in the word, in the scripture, is that he is faithful,
he does not fail. That's what's last week's message.
And so everything that we worry about, we do so at the cost of
peace. Because we're not able to rest
in the fact that God cannot fail. And friends, this is something
that we deal with every day. I mean, the dozens and dozens
of men that I talk to every single week, who will be going fine,
but then something happens in their life, or something happens
in their thoughts, or something happens in their relationship,
and they come undone. After imagined hubris the day before
going, yeah, I'm free, I'm good, I'm solid. When you got 701 days
under your belt, let's talk. Because being solid does not
mean the absence of the test. Being solid means that what you
stand on is immovable. And it's a minute by minute,
by hour, by day, by month, by year experience. It's every day
realigning your mind with the mind of God. With your identity
and who you are, and as believers, whose you are. God is proving himself. Remember
last week, I think I entitled my message, God is on trial or
something weird. No, that was not last week, that
was Trey's last week, I was a week before. I don't even know what
day it is. It doesn't matter what day it
is, today is the day. So if God is the one who is on
trial, and suffering is not about our endurance, but about revealing
God's faithfulness to us, he's proving himself trustworthy in
every hardship. Then our response needs to go
beyond what we often do is just enduring. It needs to go beyond
survival. That's the minimum. You're alive,
hallelujah. People ask me all the time, you
know, hey, how's it going? Or how was your day? How is it? And I say, it's the best day
of my life. And they laugh or they look at
me like I'm weird, drugged, or insane. But it's not a posture. And some
of them come back and they retort. They go, oh, yeah, me too, man.
I got up this morning. I'm like, really? Is getting
out of the bed the moniker, the measure of the best day of your
life? Well, I got breath in my lungs. It's a good day. That doesn't make the day a good
day. Just because your heart is beating
doesn't mean that it's the best day of your life. That's the
base minimum. There are a lot of people who
are living dead. There are a lot of people who get up every day
and can't face the very heartbreak that they live in, the very physical
pain that they live in, the very emotional senselessness that
they don't think will ever leave. Financial, there are people right
now that are wet because they have nowhere to stay. They woke up. Does that make
it the best day of their life? No. We've got to go beyond survival.
in our response to God's faithfulness. He proves himself. He's never
not proven himself. He's never failed. So there's
more than just going, oh, there it is. This ho-hum, cynical attitude,
or this stoic attitude, or this mindlessness we call mindfulness. Yeah, I just accept it as it
is. Accepting as it is is like being asleep. It's baseline. Let's do more. Let's respond
to God's faithfulness, not just exist in it. That's why he says,
entrusting their souls to a faithful creator. Yes, rest in that, sleep
away, while doing good. See, sometimes we do good because
we're trying to motivate ourselves to feel good. Sometimes we do
good to try to prove to ourselves that we are good. Sometimes we
do good because it's the expectation of the world we live in around
us that tells us that this is what good is. But the Bible says
we do good because we're at rest. As long as it is today, Paul
says in the Hebrews, to the Hebrews, encourage one another toward
love and good deeds. These are things that we do beyond
just, I woke up, beyond I took out the trash, beyond I cut the
grass. I was reading my journal this
morning. The thunder woke me up a little
earlier than I wanted to get up. I was gonna lose that hour.
I'm like, oh. I didn't recognize that it was
the hour lost until almost midnight. Big mistake. It's okay. And I'm
reading in a journal from about 18 months ago, and it's just,
I don't even wanna say all this stuff, but the ultimate reality
is it's funny how our minds go in certain directions based on
what we're programmed to think. And I remember reading in that,
today, I cut the grass and I did this and I did that and I did
this and I did that and now I'm exhausted. And all I want is
this. See, this is normal life. And when we're not seeing more,
it's because we're not seeing truth. If God is faithful when we're
cutting the grass, if God is faithful when our house burns
down, if God is faithful when we get terminal news, if God
is faithful when those around us die or change, then God is
faithful. living our lives in that faithfulness
is not to just sit and accept it, it's to embrace it and do
more because of it. Because this God of ours is faithful
and his love is unending, there is more to life than this, so
let's go and have an impact. Not so that we become somebody
because we are somebody. Many of us understand that God
is faithful in theory, but we struggle to live from that reality
in practice. So the question cannot be, is
God faithful? Scripture already says that.
Evidence already proves that. There's not one piece of evidence
that he's not. The real question, the real question
is, how does trusting God's faithfulness change the way I live? How does
trusting God's faithfulness change the way I suffer? How does trusting
God's faithfulness change the way I engage with my life and
myself and the world? God's faithfulness transforms
our mind. And the mind changed and the mind renewed has impact
in the world. And all we have to do is sort
of learn what God's asking of us. It's not burdensome. So let's talk about a few of
these things before I get into the end of the sermon as introduction.
Faith in God's faithfulness, the perspective in suffering.
This is review. We trust God's faithfulness.
This means that we do not fear the future. There is nothing
to fear. Fear not, for I am with you.
Do not be dismayed, for I am your God and I will strengthen
you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous
right hand, Isaiah 41 10. The steadfast love of the Lord
never ceases. His mercies never come to an
end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. I
read this verse two weeks ago, Lamentations 3, 22 and 23. What then shall we say to these
things, Paul asks about our present sufferings? If God is for us,
who can be against us? He who did not spare his own
son, but gave him up for us. How will he not also with him
graciously give us all things? See, worry and anxiety is a sign
that we are looking at circumstances and we're trying to pan out the
fixing of the future through decisions today rather more than
we are trusting and resting in God. We work as if not working.
We trust knowing that what we do today, while it may be the
right path, is the only path because ultimately the outcome
is God's. Because the other side is like,
well, I'll do nothing. That's not the way it works either,
is it? We are to create. We are to do good. We are to
build. We are to be. We trust God's faithfulness,
and this means that we do not measure his love by our circumstances.
And I'm going to spend a whole lot of time on that. This is
in just a minute, but I've got two or three more points to talk
about. When life is tough, believers
often say, well, does God love me? What have I done? What have
I done to lose His love? But God's faithfulness is not
measured by our comfort. God's love is not measured by
our comfort. It's measured by His character and His ultimate
sovereign purpose. Job, we were talking about Job
this morning, how the majority of that entire narrative is an
expose of what's wrong with the world and the people in it. It's not proof text of how we
should view ourselves. It's proof text of how we should
not listen to the knuckleheads in our life who always have an
answer other than God's love is faithful and it endures forever. When people's lives are on fire,
we don't say, well, you shoulda done this. Is that, could it be true? Yeah,
it could be true. But what is that? That's not
found in the Bible. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Oh,
there it is. The book of blames, the very back of the Bible. The book of blames, yeah, the
epistle of blames. Told you so, that's chapter one.
Wag the finger, chapter two. Well, should have done different. We could go on. Somebody needs
to do a spoof album on that, the praises of blame. Now we
sing those in our mind every day already. It's already been
done. Moving right along. He knows
the way that I take. When he has tried me, I shall
come out as gold. When's the last time you read
that? It's not a fortune cookie, that's
Job 2310. But he knows the way that I take. And when he has tried me, When
he has filtered me, when he has purified me, I shall come out
as gold. In this you rejoice, though now
for a little while, if necessary, you've been grieved by various
trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, which is more
precious than gold that perishes when it is tested by fire, may
be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation
of Jesus Christ. Hmm. And we know that for those
who love God, all things work together for good. The question
is what God are we being taught to love? The God of fear, the
God of doom, the God of desperation, or the God of delight? The God
who is the lover of our souls. The God who gave his son up for
us. This is the language of God's
revelation to us. This isn't emphasizing the wrong
thing, it's quoting the very word of God himself. But tell
me, how much theological mire have we built around the idea
that God does it for himself? Yes, we see that. God reminding
us that he is faithful. Why does he do that? Because
we need to rest in his faithfulness. That even when it seems like
the world is upside down and we have screwed up royally and
can never get to the finish line, God says, well, remember, though
I do it for your sake, I will also always do it for my sake
because I can't lie. Trusting in God's faithfulness
means we can rejoice then in the midst of hardship. Many are the afflictions of the
righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of all of them. Peter commands believers to continue
to rejoice. Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice. I
just about got there. In this you rejoice. When? In the suffering. Not because
the suffering is good. All this love is like cake and
ice cream on Saturday. Yeah, if cake and ice cream was
filled with bugs and was on fire and burned when it came out. Suffering is not always good,
but because God is working through it, we can rejoice. Though the fig tree should not
blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive
fail, and the fields yield no food. The flock be cut off from
the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls. Yet I will rejoice
in the Lord. I will take joy in the God of
my salvation. God the Lord is my strength.
Habakkuk three. Count it all joy, my brothers,
James one. when you meet trials of various
kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces
steadfastness. Rejoice insofar as you share
Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad
when his glory is revealed. Friends, I need to say this about
the previous point. We need to reject the lie that
if God loved me, this wouldn't happen to me. We need to understand that God's
faithfulness is not about preventing trials, but showing himself powerful
through them. And joy is not a denial of the
pain. It's not. It's not childish in
the sense of naivety, it's childish in the sense of faith and hope.
And understanding. Joy is not a denial of the pain,
it's a trust in God's ultimate purpose. So we have to shift,
we have to reframe our focus from suffering to sovereignty. Faith in God's faithfulness.
I asked the question, how should we live differently? Well, here
we go. We can, and this is review, we can pray boldly. knowing that
God will be faithful to his promises. See, if we doubt God's faithfulness,
our prayers are weak, hesitant, filled with doubt. I mean, in our own relationships,
in life, in marriage, with kids, friends, co-workers, brothers
and sisters in the faith, creative people, things that we do all
over the place, we still somewhat are fearful for saying what we
need and want. Because we don't want rejection. We don't want
somebody to go, oh, I don't want to play that. I mean, even our
kids. Mommy, Daddy, so-and-so don't want to play this game
with me. Well, what do they want? They wanted to play this game.
Oh, they didn't want to play with you. They didn't want to
play your stupid game. I meant that game. You see? So we're even fearful
to ask of each other and say what we need to each other because
we don't like that tension. And then we've carried that over
into God, but we think God's going to react. Why are you asking
for that? What's wrong with you? Didn't
I just give you something to eat? Because we read John six
in light of thinking that that's how Jesus reacts. He says, don't come to me. You're
not coming to me because you want life. You're coming to me
because you want to get fed again. You gotta understand the context.
They were there for the meal, the Passover. They were there
to sow, to seek out God's face and to understand what the living
water and the bread of life and all of that was about, and they
were coming to get a place at the table under the thumb of
the Pharisaical ideology of self-righteousness. And they wanted Jesus to just
sort of give them a little more. But Jesus was gonna give them
everything. We can pray boldly. We can pray expectantly, with
great anticipation. I'm gonna ask God for this to
be done in my life, and it's going to happen according to
his will. Not according to my plan, but
according to his will. It will take place. See why trusting and resting
is necessary. Let us hold fast to the confession
of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10. And this is the confidence that
we have toward him, 1 John 5, that if we ask anything according
to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears
us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the request that
we have asked of him. Jesus gives this object lesson,
sort of, in Luke's gospel. If you then who are evil know
how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will
the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?
So we have to stop praying as if we're unsure if God will answer.
We have to pray confidently in his faithfulness. How do I know?
Because he cannot lie. And we let God's provision of
the past fuel our present prayers. You can reflect, you can remember
when God was faithful, can't you? And if you forget, read
of his faithfulness. And then we can walk in obedience.
We can walk in obedience to such a way that we have no fear of
failure. I'm gonna say that slower. We
can walk in obedience in such a way that we have no fear of
failing God. Why? Some people hesitate in
working, in doing, in being, in trying, in amplifying their
lives and shining like a light because they don't think they're
good enough, or they don't think they're going to succeed, or
they measure themselves against someone else, or they have unrealistic
expectations, or they've been told for so long throughout their
life that the only way that they're
worth anything is to be perfect in everything. So then they do nothing. But God's faithfulness guarantees
that our obedience is never wasted. And I'm sure of this. Paul says
to the Church of Philippi chapter one verse six that he who began
a good work and you will bring it to completion of the day of
Christ. Therefore, Paul says to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians
15, my beloved siblings, be steadfast, be immovable, always abounding
in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is
not in vain. I like to be sort of tongue in cheek and funny.
I tell people I'm the unbroken, the immovable, the unshakable.
You can't touch this. And I mean it. I mean it. And I think I'm posturing
some physical prowess or something, like I'm this strong guy that
can't be pushed over on the ground, but the ground doesn't move. Think of the decades you live
walking in sand, being washed away by floods, and thinking
you're standing on something solid. And when you finally do,
it's unshakable. People don't believe it. People can't receive it because
they can't experience it through you. But you can be there. You can show them the foundation,
not in cliches, but in steadfastness and obedience, doing that which
we want to do because it's what we love. Not doing what we have
to do because it's what's required. That's awful. I will do nothing in my life
I don't want to do. And I will suffer the consequence
of that. But when we stand knowing who
we are, what we want to do is what we're supposed to do. Don't let fear keep you from
stepping in to obedience and stepping out by faith to live
a life that actually has influence in the world. And don't model
that obedience with the nonsense of what we've seen in church
history and Christian culture. Don't model that obedience in
the nonsense of what we call evangelism. Just be you. Be quirky, weird, odd, whatever. Be fun. I was once a kid that loved to
run and play. And a boy who enjoyed imagining
things. And a youth who had dreams and
ambition. And when I became a man, something
happened to all that. It just disappeared. Because someone
told me to put away childish things. And so what I thought
that meant was to put away my mind. to put away the dream,
and to put away the imagination, to put away the flow, to put
away the intuition, and to just do the work, the mundane, just,
why you gotta be involved in so much stuff? That's a really
good question for people to ask me today. Because I'll turn Rock
around and say, all you do is brush your teeth, wash your clothes, Everybody does that and every part of the world that's
not life It's okay to still have drive
it's okay to still walk into places that seem absurd to other
people and And it's okay to fail because there's no such thing
as failure in the midst of God's economy of grace. If we truly believe that God
cannot deny himself, then our lives should reflect that. If
God has called you to do something, go. Do it. But what has he already
called us to? Rejoice. be light and salt, to
not be anxious, to rejoice in trials, to have a good conscience,
to be free, to live authentically. This is a command of our God,
to live authentically as ourselves in Christ. Not to care that our lives are
modeled by the, oh, the Homeowners Association of
Christianity. We might get a ticket by the
Theological Watchdogs or the Moral Police Department. Trey said it best. If you wanna know what true,
intimate correction and life together looks like in the context
of church discipline, listen to his message from last week. It's freedom. And that's really the whole point,
right? We're supposed to live free of things and from things,
but most importantly, we're to live free for things. What are you living free in order
to do today? Our lives should reflect in the
fact that we can trust Him instead of fearing the future. measure
his love by his character, not our circumstances. We can rejoice
in suffering knowing he's working and out for our good. We can
pray boldly knowing that he's faithful to answer and we can
walk in obedience trusting he will finish what he started.
The problem is sometimes we struggle to trust in this faithfulness. Let me ask it this way. What
would you change in your life right now if you absolutely believed
with every part of you that he would never fail you? What would
you do differently? Let God's faithfulness be the
foundation of your faith and your prayers, your endurance,
your joy. He has never failed and he never will. But here's
what I found for myself. I'm trying not to laugh, it's
just so joyous. What I found for myself is that
it boiled down to the fact that I didn't believe God's love. Because I didn't love me the way God loves me. I know it was point two of five
or whatever it was today that how many did I just read those
off one, two, three, four, five about the love of God. But I
want to I want to spend the rest of our time together just unpacking
that. I probably won't finish it all,
but we'll pick it up next week. We can trust in God's faithfulness
and doing so means that we do not measure his love by our circumstances. Remember that? When we do measure God's love
by our experiences, we feel abandoned, we feel forgotten, we feel alone.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is a distorted view of the
love of God and his faithfulness. Friends, if we measure God's
love by these things, our faith will be unstable. The question
we must answer is, do we believe that God's love is constant,
even when life feels chaotic? The truth is, God's love is rooted
in his faithfulness. It's unchanging. Malachi 3, for
I, the Lord, do not change, therefore you, O children of Jacob, are
not consumed. Every good gift, James says,
and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father
of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to
change. Give thanks to the Lord for he
is good and his love will endure forever, Psalm 136. God's love
does not fluctuate like our emotions. God does not have emotions that
drive him. And let me tell you something,
beloved. He's given us the power and the spirit to live in the
same way. We can experience emotion, we
can witness emotion, but we do not have to be driven by it.
Trials and hardships do not mean that God has withdrawn his love.
Some people say, well, you know, I mentioned this. God must be
angry. God must be avoiding me. God must just be letting things
unplay. What have I done wrong? If I'd done this back 10 years
ago, then this wouldn't be happening. No. Where are you right now? God's love is with you now and
God's love is with you then. Trials are not a sign of abandonment.
They're a sign of God's refinement. Jesus Christ himself suffered
every way. that any person, man or woman,
will or have ever suffered and yet he never changed. Who shall separate us from the
love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or
famine or nakedness or danger or sword or people who think
they know better than we do and they tell us why we're in such
trouble or the friends of Job No, in all these things we are
more than conquerors. Through him who loves us, for
I am sure, I am certain, I am convinced that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else
in all of creation shall be able to separate us from the love
of God which is ours in Jesus Christ our Lord. For the Lord
disciplines, corrects, trains, purifies, grows the ones he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives. When you pass through
the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they
shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire,
you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you,
Isaiah 43 to. There's a positive side of drowning.
Because the dross and the layers and the faults and the fake and
the dead man that Christ crucified comes off. And you don't need the oxygen
of this material world to live. You need the fire of the spirit
to breathe. Suffering. It's not evidence
that God has stopped loving you. It's the greatest proof of his
love in the presence that he is in the midst of our suffering.
Comfort in any relationship is not a sign of love. Peace is. And so these this world that
we live in when people continue to do things that destroy peace,
they don't love us. God gives peace in the midst
of chaos. God's love then is also understood
and displayed most clearly in Christ Jesus, not in the temporary
blessings of life. If we think about earthly prosperity,
success, or comfort, we've misunderstood. And we're going to have an unstable
faith. We're going to be shaken. But if we base it on what Christ
has done, we will be unshaken. But God shows his love for us
in this, that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. For God loved
the world in this way, that he gave the only son that he had,
that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal
life. In this, the love of God was made manifest among you that
God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through
him. In this is love, not that we
have loved God, but that he has loved us and sent his son to
be the propitiation, the satisfaction, the answer to the wrath, the
payment for our sins. The ultimate proof of God's love
is not an easy life. It is the cross of Jesus Christ.
No matter what happens, the gospel guarantees that God loves fully,
eternally, and unconditionally. And I'm so compelled to go into
John 4 right now and talk about the woman of Sychar, but without
going there, understand this. Is that until we see this, we
will always want to fill our lives with something or someone
else or produce something that will make us feel loved, seen,
understood, validated, accepted. And until we rest in and of ourselves
in our Heavenly Father, we will never, ever, ever experience
it. And when we understand this love,
We stop interpreting God's love through our emotions, our feelings,
our unreliable indicators of truth. God's love is an objective reality,
it's not a fluctuation. Why are you cast down? Oh, my
soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I
shall again praise him, my salvation, Psalm 42, five. And like I just mentioned about
chasing, these temporary proofs of love and life, these temporary
validations of acceptance. We don't have to do that with
God. And we should not do it with
others. We have to get people to change
in order to feel loved by them, then maybe these people aren't
people who can love us. We shouldn't look for external
signs of love. We should understand that when
Paul talks about the pain that he experienced in ministry, when
he says, so do not lose heart, we do not lose heart. Though
our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed
day by day for this light momentary affliction is preparing us for
an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison as we look to
the things that are unseen, well, he says it this way, as we look
not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.
And in the midst of God's love, we find joy in God's presence,
not in changing our circumstances. Joy is found in the faith, in
knowing that God is unchanging. Like I quoted out of Habakkuk,
I will rejoice in the Lord, even though everything I have is rotting. But how do we solidify that type
of certainty? I mean, what do we do? I've already said them all. I'll
repeat them. First, we preach the gospel to
ourself every single day. We renew our mind. We talk to
ourself in a way that breeds life. We stop the lies that run through
our head when we hear the accusations. Some people think the accusations
of their worth are just part of the sin nature,
part of the reality of why blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so
on. No. They're lies of the enemy. He
is the accuser of the brethren, not the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit doesn't convict of sin by saying, you piece of trash,
you failed, what's wrong with you? Why aren't you good enough? God doesn't say that to his people. He says, you are my beloved.
I call you children. I love you with an everlasting
love. I'm the beginning and the end. Rest in me. Come unto me,
all who labor, and I will give you rest. The other is evil. This is God's voice. So instead
of saying, oh, I'm just a piece of trash, help me, Lord, no. I am the righteousness of God. I am the beloved. God is the lover of my soul. It feels uncomfortable, doesn't
it? Yeah, because we've been programmed
to hear it wrongly. So we preach the gospel. He who
did not spare his own son but gave him up for me. This life
I live is not my own. It's been bought with a price.
I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself
for me. That's why I know we've lost
the gospel in every corner of culture. Because we like the
isms. We like the affinity because
in that we find connection with something that's not real rather
than being connected by the spirit that's within all of us. You know the beauty of shining
as a light as believers? Nobody's shining any broader
than the other. We don't cancel each other out.
We just resonate together. unity of mind, of soul, of heart. How is that manifested? Love.
It's about doing the act of love. Love is a decisive act of the
will to put other people as a priority in your life and to love them
as deeply as you love yourself. In the same way that you love
yourself, in the same care that you care for yourself. So that's preaching the gospel
to yourself every day. And then reject the lies that
you hear about God's love. Stop thinking that hardship is
something that has gone wrong. I said this a few weeks ago even.
But it's not wrong. It's part of the beauty of the
Christian life. And then you replace feelings
with faith in God's promises. Well, I feel this, but I know
this. See, when doubts arise, we go
to the word of God. If we cannot remember it and
we get to hear. We get to hear the psalmist cry,
trusting him in all things at all times. Oh, people, pour out
your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. You cannot
hide from him anyway, so say what is on your mind, profane
or not. The greatest prayer I've ever
prayed in my life was two years ago on March the 4th. when I curse God
to his face, audibly. And then on my phone is read
Psalm 40. It's the best prayer I've ever
prayed. Why? Because it was the most authentic I'd ever been
with my heavenly father. And he didn't even put me through
the Job. He just asked my boy, There he is, he's finally becoming
free. Give it to me. He can take it.
He can take it. Curse him. If that's what's in your heart.
You don't think David's a whiny little loser? Read the Psalms. What happens when you do that?
Instantaneously, the spirit of God gives you attention. And
you are drawn into his presence. You are embraced in such a way
that you cannot explain it. It is not anything but supernatural
and divine. It is sublime. It is the most
empowering experience you've ever had. It will turn you from
stodgy Baptist to Pentecostal in a half a second. Because you
will know, you will know that your God loves you. Live then with confidence, knowing
his love is secure. God's love never changes so we
can walk in boldness and peace. I love this line out of the clothes
of Job, this doxology. Now to him who is able to keep
you from stumbling. and to present you blameless
before the presence of his glory with great joy to the only God,
our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty,
dominion and authority before all time and now and forevermore. It is so, so be it. See, when we experience this
confidence, we don't have to We don't have to hide. We don't
have to hide from the doubt. We don't have to hide from the
swarms. We just go, look at that. If
that lands on my head, I'm gonna get an opportunity to rejoice.
That which used to fear, that I used to fear, is fuel. That which used to trigger is
a treasure. Let me have it, like a Skittle.
It's a good flavor. Let's go. I know it sounds all
weird because it's not of the flesh. It's not of the flesh. We have to be irrationally rational
and understand that God is the one who in chaos shows us order. And that order is not the discipline
of the law. That order is the blood of Christ.
and the spirit that he gives like a whirlwind as he wishes. We live in the spirit, by the
spirit at all times while we walk in the flesh. Friends, we
have truly boxed God in. And that's why we're in chaos. Where in life are we still measuring
God's love by our circumstances? instead of his character. We have to trust the love of
God that was proven on the cross and secured forever for us in
Christ. And when we take this table,
when we taste these things, this is a reminder of what God has
done in love for us. So stop letting the lies rule
and live in the truth. Let's pray. We thank you, Father,
for the beauty of your gospel, for the glory of your name, for
the love that you've given us, Lord, that so many Christians
don't understand because we've been so abused by our fellow
brothers and sisters. We've been so hurt by the context
of our culture. We've been so maligned because
all we want is love and to be seen and to be known and yet
this purity mindset brings us into a place of obscurity But
it brings us to a place of control and we can't even live as you've
called us to live. Lord, free us from these bondage,
from these shackles, from the worry and the fear of tomorrow,
from the regret or the rumination of yesterday. But help us to
reflect on that which we are and who we are and let us live.
We will not fail you. And when we step outside of what
is best for us, you will bring us back in, not with a switch
and a whip, but Father, with a guiding, loving embrace. Father, help us to live like
that in the world, to be available to the people in this world that
we don't have to counsel each other, but Lord, we can just
be. And that the life that is in us can
live in the lives of those around us, Lord, that we would truly
be life givers. As Jesus said, greater things
than these that we would do. So Lord, I thank you. I thank
you that you are faithful and that your love is never ending. Help us to never forget it. In Jesus name, amen.