Clough Faith Rest Drill Lesson 3
This morning we are going to finish the three part series on the faith rest drill and we want to, as we conclude this series, going into more depth the second step. We’ve worked through the faith rest drill and we said that when we apply the Word of God to our circumstances in life that we can visualize this as a three-step process. The first one is that we get Scripture, either by memory, by reading, by remembering some story from the Word of God, some fragment, anything, it doesn’t matter what translation it’s in, at this point when you’re in a situation where you really have to call on the Lord and you have to claim a promise, we can debate translations and other things later but right at that point that’s not the issue. The issue is getting the Word of God, getting hold of some substance from Scripture, from some story, from some point of history.
And once we do that we move to the second step which is developing a rationale. And by that we mean where we have a circumstance in life and we surround it with the Word of God so that we see not only that the Word of God is an answer but we see that the Word of God is the only answer to that situation. And once we’ve achieved that we can move on and experience peace. There are great promises in Scripture and when you read the Bible, Mike’s going to be teaching Ephesians and there are some wonderful promises in Ephesians and as he teaches that you want to see what promises stand out and grab you. Most of you know Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His purpose.” That’s an old promise but it’s a powerful one. Right after Romans 8:28, a few verses down in the text is another one that says, “God, who spared not His own Son, shall He not also with Him freely give us all things.” And that’s the argument from the greater to the lesser. If God did the most for us at the point of salvation, then He certainly can do the lesser things to sustain His work in our lives.
We’ve gone through that, we’ve gone through these steps and we’ve been concentrating on this second one and we want to come back to that second step today because that’s where most of us get hung up. That’s the point where we remember the Scripture but we can’t get it around the circumstance and we can’t really trust.
Remember the story I told about the storm in The Perfect Storm, and the man who was trained in survival, when they had to ditch the helicopter and he had to go in the water in the middle of that storm, he said when you get in a stressful situation you respond the way you were trained. And when we, as believers, get into the situations we get into in life, the way we respond to those situations tells us an awful lot about what we’ve been doing before we got in the situation. And if we’ve been filling our lives with a lot of superfluous stuff and ignoring the Word of God, then that’s the way we’re going to respond. By the time we get into a situation it’s too late, too late then to worry about the Word of God and how am I going to walk by faith and so on. We have to prepare for those times in our lives by trusting the Word of God routinely, trusting Him I the little things of life so we can trust Him in the bigger things.
When I was putting these notes together I ran across the outcome from the year 2000 study of the Barna Research Corporation and each year they do these studies, take surveys of a thousand, two thousand “born again” (quote, end quote) Christians and they go through and they ask them certain questions. And there’s some encouraging things and then there’s some discouraging things. But I thought one of the shocking results of this survey that was done just a number of months ago asking people who defined themselves as “born again” Christians, here are some of the statistics. Only 44% of adults who identify themselves are “born again” are certain of absolute truth. How do you trust the Word of God if you don’t believe it’s absolutely true? No wonder people have a problem. No wonder people fall apart; they have no idea of the fact that the Word of God is absolutely true; only 44%.
Here’s another interesting one: of the teenagers who identified themselves as “born again,” only 9% were certain of absolute truth. 9%???? By the way, notice the culture shift, adults 44%, teenagers 9%, see what’s happening? See why, when we teach the Word of God we have to teach the fact that it is the ONLY answer and expose the hot air and bologna that is being passed around as multiculturalism and everything else. And we have to come face to face with the hard things. The fact is that Christianity is exclusive. “I am the way, the truth and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me,” period! And I didn’t say that, and you didn’t say that; that’s Jesus Christ. But the point is that either Jesus Christ is right or He’s wrong; either there is absolute truth and Jesus is correct, or He’s a liar, and Jesus Christ is an imposter and a deceiver, but you can’t have it both ways. So here we have a generational thing; from 44% down to 9%.
Two-thirds of the teenagers who identified themselves as “born again” rejected the existence of Satan. Three-fifths of teenagers who identified themselves as “born again” denied the existence of the Holy Spirit. One-half of the teenagers that identified themselves as “born again” believe that the Lord Jesus Christ sinned at least once during His life. One wonders what does “born again” mean. Here’s another ripper: of the adults who identified themselves as “born again,” only one percent identified themselves with the 13 basic doctrines of the Christian faith.
Do you know what this tells me? This tells me that we have a lot of hoopla going on in so-called Christian circles. We have this, we have that, we have something else, we have music, we have all kinds of… not that music is bad, but if it’s not accompanied by the teaching of the Word of God it’s just hot air. Any unbeliever can have a music group and any unbelieving group can have a social club. And every group of unbelievers can have a sports team. That’s not what identifies us as believers. What identifies us is the Word of God; what identifies us are the ordinances of the Word of God, such as communion. This is pathetic, 1% of born again adults concur with the thirteen basic beliefs of the Christian faith. Not only that, but he found that large portions of lay leaders in Christian churches hold to a range of unbiblical religious views regarding the holiness of Christ, the reality of Satan, the reality of the resurrection, and the means of salvation. So obviously the term “born again” has totally lost any identifying function in our English language. It doesn’t mean anything any more.
So what we want to do is move to how we believe, and obviously in the light of this if we are talking to someone who identifies themselves as born again we have to really kind of think, this person, has he really believed in the Lord Jesus Christ; he might have had a religious experience but has he personally trusted in Jesus Christ.
We want to, before we get into the nitty-gritty of what I consider to be the number one difficult test, the ability to trust the Lord in the middle of adversity or the middle of a suffering situation, there are two points that I want to make before we get into that.
I want to review a point that I mentioned a week or two ago and this flies flat into everything you pick up from the culture but I want to raise it because this is something that will cut across most people’s belief.
Faith is not weak knowledge. Faith is not a second class thing and we use
that in our every day language, don’t we?
We say, well I know that’s true but I believe that’s true. And just the way we use that verb forces us
unconsciously to think that faith is weak knowledge. Now let’s think about Scripture and how the
Scripture views faith. In Job
Think of the fact of Shadrach, Meshach and
Abed-nego, when they faced a death sentence.
Here are these soldiers, ready to throw them into a furnace, and they
have to confront Nebuchadnezzar and his bureaucracy. That’s like confronting somebody that is high
up in our country, or
Let’s think about what Luke says; in fact it will be useful to turn to the New Testament to see this because we really need about this because it’s so easy, so so easy to slip and think of faith as weak knowledge. That is not Biblical; the Bible doesn’t call faith weak knowledge. Luke 1:1-4, the whole reason for composing the two volume set of books called Luke-Acts, by a medical doctor who did a thorough research…you can tell Luke did his homework. Do you know how we can tell that Luke did his homework? Of the four Gospels which one talks about the pregnancies of the women? Luke, because Luke had interest in that; here we are claiming virgin birth, well wait a minute, I’m a doctor, I want to go talk to the woman involved in this so-called virgin birth. So Luke went and talked to her and all the intimate thoughts and feelings of this woman, both Elisabeth and Mary by the way, all their intimate feelings during pregnancy are recorded in the Gospel of Luke. Why? Because he’s a doctor; he’s checking the evidence.
And he says in Luke 1:1-4, “Inasmuch as many have taken to compile an account of the things accomplished, [2] Just as though as though as from the beginning were eyewitnesses, have handed them down to us, [3] It seemed fitting for me,” notice what he says in verse 3, “having investigated everything carefully from the beginning,” now this guy is a medical student; these people were trained to think and to dig into the evidences; this is Luke’s digging. And he says I want you, verse 4, purpose clause, I’ve done all this research, I’ve put this Gospel together so that you might now what? “So that you might know the exact truth,” [That thou might know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed], you see, the whole point and thrust of Scriptures is that you reason in faith, it’s not reason or faith.
We find the same thing in Acts 17 when Paul
goes before the philosophical interrogation committee in
In Colossians 2, Colossians is a book that is written toward trends in thinking that later became very dangerous philosophies that almost destroyed the Christian faith. And in Colossians 2 there are two critical sections where Paul makes claims that if we were to make these claims today most people, including the “born again” Christians that can only identify 99%, they don’t know Biblical truth, would react to this sort of thing in a negative way. Observe the text in Colossians 2.
What does it say in Colossians 2:3 about knowledge? Let’s think about this; this is not religious… don’t read this religiously, read this like it’s normally meant, knowledge, math, science, biology, physics, history, cooking, sports, knowledge of every area. What does it say in verse 3? It says, “In Christ are hidden ALL the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Now what does that mean? It means that out from Jesus Christ, revealed in Scripture, and who is Jesus Christ but God and man, that He is the One who structured the cosmos; He is the one that structured cause/effect; “in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
Now in verse 8 he says, and he warns the Colossian Christians because they were in danger of blending in with the culture of the time, he said “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, and not according to Christ. Now if you study the original languages the word translated in English “elementary principles” is a technical Greek term. Do you know what it means? It’s the word called stoicheia, and if you did a dictionary study and you looked that word up and said Paul, what do you mean by stoicheia, how do you use that word, you would find that stoicheia, is the key word that the Greek philosophers used when the spoke of the elementary principles of the universe. Anybody remember in mythology and in ancient history, what did they think were the elementary principles? Fire, water, air, and earth; if you think about it what they’re trying to say is solid, liquid and gas. So here we have the elementary things.
Now look what he says in Colossians 2:8 and think about this, what is the implication of verse 8. He’s says, “Don’t be deceived through philosophy that is built according to stoicheia,” don’t believe that those categories, the earth, the fire, the basic physics are really the basic things of the universe. You can’t build your house of belief on those concepts, he says; the only safe place to build what you know to be true is to be built on the Lord Jesus Christ. He opposes in this verse, that’s the grammar of verse 8, it’s not my interpretation, it’s the grammar of the verse. On the one hand he says these are the elementary ideas according to the world, here is Jesus Christ as God-man-Creator-Redeemer, who spoke the universe into existence, here’s where you start. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
So I want to make these two points; one is faith is not weak knowledge. Number two: what is faith positively; if it’s not weak knowledge, if it’s the same thing as knowledge it’s got to be different in some sense because there’s two words here, faith and knowledge? So what’s the difference between them? What’s the difference between saying “I believe that Jesus Christ is God,” and “I know that Jesus Christ is God?” What does it mean to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Faith, positively is submission to the authority of our God. It’s an ethical thing, it’s not a, what philosophers call an epistemological problem. It is me saying this fundamental thing: God has the authority to tell me how to think. There are wrong ways to think and there are right ways to think and God decides which is right. God’s directive, He has the right to tell you how to think. He has the right to tell me how to think. That’s what faith means. I accept that authority; it doesn’t mean I turn my mind off, it means that I submit my mind to how He tells me to use it. Who built this? Who built yours? It wasn’t Sony. The idea here is that God, who created your brain and mine, is the One who has the instruction manual and in faith we submit to the instruction manual. When you get a computer and you read the book, that’s why we have so much trouble with the computer because it’s never in there; do we turn the computer off and read the book? No, we read the book in order to turn the computer on. So what do we read the Scriptures for? To turn this on, that’s what it’s for. The Scriptures are the on switch, they tell us how to think, and faith is simply this. Let’s not make a big deal out of it, faith is simply bowing the knee to God in the area of the intellect. It’s saying that He has the right and authority to do this.
Now why is it a battle? Because there’s a notion abroad since the fall of man, Eve got infected with this first, passed it on to her husband, that when I get something from God and I get something from the thoughts that drift all over the place that I can take this thought from God and I can take this thought that drifts into my soul from God knows where, and then I decide whether this thought is better than this thought. In other words, I have the standards of judgment with which I determine whether or not God meets my standards intellectually. That’s the notion of the autonomous sinner; that’s the notion of Adam and Eve, and that’s the opposite of faith. That is rebellion, that is an act of defiance against God; it is an illusion and a deception that I myself have divine authority, that I have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and I continue to eat thereof.
So faith, number one, is not weak knowledge, but it is submission to the “Instructor” on how to think properly. Having said all that, remember last time we said that when you look at Scripture the thing that you always want to do at the point of faith is examine the opposite. You’ve got to confront unbelief. We had the diagram of evil that I’ve shown again and again. And remember what we said in that diagram, that you’ve got to take one of the two positions. There’s not three, there’s not five, there’s not fifty-seven varieties here, there are only two. Either we accept the fact that God created and that we have a situation where there’s creation, there’s the fall, between the fall and the judgment we have good and evil mixed together and after that there’s an eternal separation. That’s the Christian worldview, and the evil and the suffering and why babies die horrible deaths and why there’s earthquakes and why 10,000 people die and are buried alive all of that is in between the fall and the judgment. But you know what? It wasn’t originally there.
What does the Bible say when God finished making the universe? He looked around as a craftsman who carefully crafted something, He looked and what was His self-evaluation of His own craftsmanship? It is very good. Was there death there? Was there sorrow there? Were there earthquakes there? No there wasn’t. You can disbelieve that, but don’t read your view into the Scriptures. That’s what the Scriptures say; there was a universe created that was free from all death, all suffering and all sin. Now the question comes up, in the Christian position who bears responsibility for the origin, then, of earthquakes, sorrow, sickness and death? Does God bear the responsibility or does man bear the responsibility? Man bears the responsibility.
And it just amazes me today, where we have all these people worried about the environment, we’ve got one state in the union almost crippled because of these greenies, where we can’t generate any electrical power, you know we have enough nuclear power to generate everybody’s bulb and everybody’s computers for the next 150 years, but everybody’s afraid of nuclear power like it’s some boogie man or something. So we use coal burning so everybody dies of black lung disease. So here’s this group of people so worried about our environment. Now we ought to be concerned about the environment, for Christian reasons. But the point is, here we live in a day when you can’t open your newspaper, you can’t watch a TV program but somebody’s worried about the environment.
One of the things we have in government are these hazardous material statements; companies, you know, you can’t have a box of soap on your company shelf because your employees might eat it, so therefore you have to have a little hazardous materials statement on it. Well, I decided I wanted to see how stupid this got and so I went down to the safety office and I pulled out some of the manuals. You have to laugh after a while, it gets so stupid you’d freak out if you didn’t, you’ve got to have a sense of humor in all this. So I went through the safety manual and I got to a page and I couldn’t believe this. Do you know that they have hazardous materials statement for water? And I went to the safety person and I said what are we worried about water, for crying out loud, look at this, this is 80% here, you and I are water balloons, what are we hazardous. And this guy said, he said oh, that’s in there because somebody could put their face in it and asphyxiate. So now the secretary has whiteout, that’s a hazardous material, we’ve got water that’s a hazardous material, and God knows what will come up next week, there’ll be another edition of this thing out and we’ll see what other goodies they have for us.
Well here we are, living in this bizarre universe, everybody worried about the environment, and what does the Christian faith say about the environment? Do you want to be responsible, let’s stop worrying about water and whiteout, and worrying about somebody eating soap and let’s talk about the real environmental problem. Who started this mess? We did. And we share with Adam and Eve, the fact every time you see a disaster, oh how did God let this happen, what did He tell Adam and Eve. In the day that you eat you are going to die, and the ground will rebel against you. I told you about that and you just want to do your own thing so hey, enjoy the world, you created it. That’s the way to think about these things, that’s the Christian Biblical way to think about the environment; yes, we are responsible for the environment in a way that most people don’t want to think about that. This is not whiteout and soap; this is everything around us in the environment.
But the good news is that God is going to do something about it. But then when people hear about the fact He’s going to clean it up, oh, we don’t want to do that? Well why? Because He’s going to get rid of the garbage. Well, I want to be part of the garbage; I don’t want to believe in Jesus Christ. Well, tough. The point is that He’s going to call it quits one day, so evil is bracketed inside the Christian worldview. Name me another one where it is? Got another philosophy that bounds evil? Every other position holds to the fact that good and evil go on and on and on and on and on and on and on. And this is why in the Orient they talk about obliteration, not reincarnation. It’s only American college students that don’t understand what’s going on that like reincarnation. The people who really understand reincarnation hate it. Do you know why? This is what they know enough about their beliefs to know that if I’m reincarnated and I come back as a bug and you squash me and then I’m reincarnated as a cow or a dog or a cat and you eat me, and I’m reincarnated as another person, what keeps happening every time I’m reincarnated? I come back for another visit, I can’t get enough of this fallen, stinking messed up world, I have to be reincarnated a thousand times in it. So that’s why in the Orient they want to go to nirvana, and they believe the only way you can escape this cycle is to commit, not physical suicide but suicide of the soul, where you don’t even exist any more, you’re like a drop that goes into the ocean. And people say oh, how can they believe that? Because they’re smart enough to realize that if you don’t have a fall and a judgment you’re left with an eternal mess. And who wants to repeat this thing again and again and again. That’s the background.
So now when we deal with adversity we have to come, and this is where the notes are in the back of the bulletin, we want to look at how we handle and how we manage this issue of suffering in our lives, because that’s the problem that frustrates us and if we get frustrated we get bitter, and when we’re bitter at God we cannot trust Him, and there becomes a personal antagonism between us and what God happens to be doing in our lives. We get bent out of shape about this, so let’s confront the first thing.
The first thing is, how do we deal with the conflict between the fact that He is…let’s look at God’s attributes. Here God is sovereign… [tape turns] … every day thing, you’ve all heard it, you’ve probably said this yourself, haven’t you: How can he allow this to happen to me and still claim He loves me? Ever felt hat way? How can He let this thing happen to my life and then turn around and say He loves me? I don’t see how a God who is sovereign, who is omnipotent, can still claim to be one who loves me while this mess is going on. Now the non-Christian will argue that there is the central difficulty of the Christian faith; at its very heart the Christian faith has a conflict, an internal serious conflict right at the core in the character and nature of God. But is it a conflict? Or is it that we can’t resolve it? We don’t know how it works, we don’t know exactly how the pieces fit together, but we can use an analogy.
In the Old Testament, if you turn to Psalm 143, I want to take you to a verse that’s used several times in the New Testament; Paul used this verse a lot when he was arguing when he was arguing about salvation by faith. A lot you will find in the New Testament is not new; it’s new because we don’t know the Old Testament. Psalm 143:2, here is the dilemma of the Old Testament saints. Now let’s project ourselves back in time; we live in the time of David, we go to the temple, we see we have to buy a lamb or a sheep and slit the throat, let the thing bleed all over the place, big mess, and we do that because of our sin. I mean, the temple was a slaughter house; you’ve heard the term slaughter house religion. That’s what the temple was, gallons of blood and gore all over the place. Can you imagine, I mean, people had feelings toward animals, and here were all these animals loosing their lives for some reason and this God says He’s so holy out here, and I know I’m sinful.
Well in Psalm 143:2 look at the plea; what is the plea of the Old Testament saint? “Do not enter into judgment with Thy servant; for in Thy sight no man living is righteous.” So the Old Testament saint knew, in this case he didn’t have a problem with sovereign omnipotence, in this case he had a problem with the fact of God’s holiness. Now he had a conflict between love and holiness, didn’t he? How can Jehovah God, who is perfectly holy, I mean, you know, Uzziah touches the ark and he became leprous. Well, this God kills priests, you know, you had to put a rope on the priest so in case he dropped dead inside the Holy of Holies, you didn’t go in because you’d get blasted too, so you took this little safety measure to pull the guy back behind the curtain. That’s the kind of holiness that God wants. Now here we are saying yeah, but He’s gracious. Really? How does a holy God deal with me if I’m a sinner and I violate His holiness? If He’s going to arbitrarily forgive me, what happens to holiness? It’s compromised. In the Old Testament there is no resolution to this conflict. They, like us, had a tremendous problem here, a tremendous problem of believing that God was loving, if they were convinced that He was holy, if they believed He was loving they couldn’t be convinced that He was holy and holding them responsible.
So let’s turn to the New Testament and
we’ll see an amazing thing, Romans 3, where this is resolved. In Romans 3:26, here down through the
corridors of time, centuries later…here’s David, 1000 BC, here is 30 AD, here
down for ten centuries nobody could solve the problem. Critics go ha-ha, you’ve got a conflict in
your system, you’ve got a conflict at the core of your faith, and all the Old
Testament saints say is this: I know my God is holy, I know He loves me and how
He can do both I do not know. That’s all
an Old Testament saint could say, but that was sufficient; that was sufficient
because finally in Romans
Now when we in our day come and we have a problem, God is sovereign, He is omnipotent, why does He let this happen to me and how can He says He loves me, we do the same thing the Old Testament saint did: I know God loves me, I know He is sovereign, I know He is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that I ask or think. So since I know all these things I can get them together, I trust Him. Is there something irrational about this? There’s nothing irrational, show me where the logical conflict is. There’s no logical conflict here. What it is, though, that’s offending is not the logic; logic isn’t the offending principle here, the offending principle is that I have to bow my knee to Him. That’s what’s offensive, but it always comes across like it’s an intellectual problem. It’s not an intellectual problem at all. It’s the same thing as the Old Testament; God one day will resolve this and we will praise His name and say how stupid we were sitting down all through those centuries of time, every time we had a disaster, questioning Your integrity, questioning whether You loved us, when You were doing this, this, this, and that, and now I see clearly.
Well how practically can we apply this? In your bulletin I have listed nine suggestions that summarize, I think, if somebody else can come up with another one I’m open to it, but I think I’ve summarized in these nine suggestions tools that the Scripture gives us to resolve suffering and adversity in our lives. And I’ve categorized them into two classes. If you notice, the first class we call—directly caused suffering. This is suffering that we have brought into existence ourselves, and that’s the kind of hard stuff to do because it’s very hard to acknowledge mistakes. This is our direct fruit; it’s number one, Genesis 2:17, the fall. What did God say? “In the day that you eat you will die.” Cause/effect, you eat and guess what? You die. So don’t argue with it, I didn’t eat it, you ate it, and I told you before hand that the day you eat you’re going to die; cause/effect. So is that hard to understand? I don’t think it’s hard to understand, there’s not an intellectual problem here. There’s no logical problem, just you do this, you step on the third rail you get fried, hey, that’s just cause/effect. God runs His universe in an orderly way.
Another way, point number two, if that wasn’t enough we can continue our rebellious attitudes and of course Galatians 6:7, “whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” Anybody have a logical problem with that? We go out in the spring, we plant tomatoes, we don’t get carrots. We plant and we sow, we reap what we sow. Now how do we respond to this? In the battle for the soul, when we’re in this second stage of the faith rest drill, we’ve claimed a promise and now we’re coping with it and we go through this prayer meeting in the soul, it may take 30 seconds, it may take 30 days but we have to work it through until we can trust in Him.
Here’s a suggested way of thinking about it. When we come across suffering in our life that we can trace back to our own stupidity, our own foolish acts, God is not interested in making an issue out of this to torture you with. All He wants you to acknowledge is that He’s Lord, that this is the way He’s created the universe, He didn’t ask for our consult, He didn’t ask for a vote, He chose to work the universe this way. And you can pray something like: Lord, I acknowledge my choices are my choices; I live I Your world, not my world, I acknowledge that. Just that act in the heart, that quiet acknowledgement, Lord, I acknowledge that my choices were my choices inside the world run by your rule; magnificent help straightening out the soul here, getting rid of the kinks, getting rid of the turmoil, that’s where it begins, acknowledgement of personal responsibility. You can go out here and you try to walk on your knees, that’d make holes in your pants, I mean, this is the cause effect; you eat at the grease burger you’re going to get coronary arteries clogged up, don’t blame God for the coronary arteries, change your diet. So this is the cause/effect, “Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” Well, I don’t think that’s fair; well, that’s the way God made the universe.
I had to laugh, one of the news reporters this week was… he is a guy who has come into the White House a number of times over the last decade, and he noticed there was a change last week, and this reporter went on and he said you know what, he says gone are the twenties and pony tails and in are the thirty and forty something’s in business suits. And you know what, meetings are run on time. He says, his concluding statement: the adults have arrived. And this is the way God has run the universe; He’s built it for adult creatures and that’s what we’re talking about here. “Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”
A third reason, and this gets scary because
of families and nations. In Acts
17:26-27 God says that national entities have a certain period of time in
history; He raises up nations and He takes them down, and in Acts 17, I’ve
taken many history courses, I’ve never had one historian point me to this text
and it’s so silly because Acts 17:26-27, that’s where it tells you why history
is the way it is. Why does
Now horrifying even more is Matthew 25:41 and since no one believes in hell today let’s turn to Matthew 25. In verse 41 we have this sobering passage. At the judgment, Second Advent, Jesus Christ, this is Jesus Christ now, not the Father; this is the Son, Jesus Christ, “He will say to those on His left hand, Depart from Me, ye cursed ones, into eternal fire, which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.” What did we say about how God was going to clean up the mess and when He cleaned up the mess the good and the evil would be parted forever and ever. That’s what this is all about. Now question: if you read verse 41, why is it that the people on the left hand go into eternal fire? God’s fault? Have they been living in His universe, have they been exposed to His revelation? Does Romans 1 say that all men know of God? Of course. Well then they have turned from God and we are eternally responsible. This last category of directly caused suffering is an affirmation of the tremendous responsibility we have as human beings; every human being is responsible before God for his eternal destiny. See, everybody wants freedom, freedom to do this, freedom to go out and raise hell, freedom to do drugs, freedom to do whatever it is that you do these days, the latest variety to hit the street, whatever it is. But you know, isn’t it interesting, if you were to say to this group of people, oh, I’ve got the freedom to do this, I’ve got the freedom to do that, what do you suppose would happen in the room if you looked them in the eye and said and you also have the freedom to go to hell in your own way. Do you suppose that would get a response? Do you want that kind of freedom? Well, no. Well think about that one, now we’re going to just engage this lust for freedom. Well no, God says you’re free to go to hell. Go to Him, go to hell, it’s your choice. So these are serious things, but this is the rationale that we use to handle the worst that life can deal us.
We go now to five other rationales; now these happen and I think whenever catastrophe strikes or adversity strikes in our lives you really won’t find just one of these. You know, if you’ve looked at the way God works in your life, He always works in your life in fifty-five different ways, He’ll work to bless you, He’ll work to bless somebody else around you, He’ll work to bring the gospel to somebody and you didn’t even know that. I mean, if we know what God was doing in our life we could take one of those appointment books for the year and we could fill up the whole appointment book from one day what He’s doing. But He doesn’t tell us all that, and we don’t have to know all that. All we have to know is what do You want me to trust You for today Lord.
So number one, these are indirectly caused sufferings; these are cases where adversity comes about and it is not related to your decision, it is not related to something you have done. This is related because God is doing something in you and those around you. So point one is that it can be an evangelistic wakeup call. Now we’re fat, dumb and happy as unbelievers walking around and, you know, no problem, and God calls to us. Now we don’t go looking for Him, He agitates us, He nudges us, He does something, many of you can give testimony to how God called you to Himself and faith in Jesus Christ. Were you looking for Him? No, He came into your life and did that thing; so was it related to something you did? No. Acts 16 is a case in point, there was a jailor, famous passage, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” What was the background? This guy was in charge of all the prisoners; earthquake comes, all the guys are loose, and he takes his sword and is going to kill himself because he knows if he doesn’t kill himself he’s going to get killed because he let all these guys loose. So a personal crisis came into this man’s life, he may have been the best jailor in Philippi, I mean he could have had the finest chains, the best run jail in all the Roman Empire. Now what’s this, you know I try to be a good guy, try to be a great jailor, get promotions, do my business, compassion on my prisoners, and then God calls an earthquake, that’s not nice. Well yes it was, because that’s how he became a Christian, and he came out and he was perfectly open; adversity opened the heart to the gospel.
Number two, another reason that is unrelated to our past decisions why suffering comes into our lives. Psalm 119:71, “It is good that You have afflicted me, that I may learn of Your statue.” This is a nudging for spiritual growth. We get comfortable in the Christian life and boom, here comes something else. I just had everything cool, under control and organized, now what, what’s the latest? And the latest is a little assignment—grow!
Number three, a third reason for adversity in the life, witness to unbelievers. Turn to 1 Timothy 1, I don’t mean to take this lightly when I’m sarcastic up here, I’ve just learned it keeps people awake. 1 Timothy 1:16, Paul gives a reason for things that happened in his life…, “I found mercy, in order in me as the foremost Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience.” How did Jesus Christ maintain His perfect patience with Paul? What was Paul doing before he became a Christian? Killing people, you know, let’s see, I go three of them today, good day. This is Paul before he became a Christian. God allowed him to suffer and suffer a lot; what Paul says, “…in His perfect patience, as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.” Have you ever thought that the way you handle adversity or I handle adversity, we don’t know who’s looking; you never really know who’s observing your life. It may be your children, it may be somebody that you work with, whoever, somebody may be watching and what this says is that we are an example for them who are going to believe.
2 Corinthians 1:4, here is a fourth reason, unrelated to what happened yesterday, this can come right in as a surprise. All these five rationales are designed to give us comfort from the Scripture in how to handle unanticipated surprise attacks where these things just drop into our life. “Who comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted of God.” You know it makes a lot more effective person…would you like to go to somebody, if you’re suffering from some kind of thing would you like to go to somebody who is a knowledgeable Christian who had been through that before or would you like to go to somebody who’s never even heard of the problem before? I think I’d like to go to somebody who’s had to work through the problem. And that’s what this verse is saying. Oftentimes God puts stress, strain and adversity in our life to graduate us through that core so later He has this person, this person, this person, this person, they’re going to come to us, they’re going to want help, and it enables us to be ministers to other believers.
Now the last one, the fifth one, this is really a strange one, and this is going to really stress you, if you’re in one of the kind of groups that has problems with the thirteen basic Bible doctrines you’re going to freak out when you hit this one. This is Ephesians 3, and this one I have no idea what goes on, I just know that it’s in the text of Scripture. This involves things about this business of Christ in the heavenlies. But in Ephesians 3:10, things happen to us in order that eyes that you and I can’t see will learn about God. “In order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known,” notice it passive voice, the verb is harping back to the subject, the subject is that this wisdom of God might become known to whom, to “the rulers and authorities in heavenly places,” this is to angels. Now don’t get spooky but this is saying that angelic powers are here right now watching what we’re doing; probably having a good laugh. But the point is they are watching our lives and they’re not worried about our personalities, their concerned with bigger things. They see things about our lives that we don’t see. They see, God was gracious to so and so, you know, I know the background, we’ve watched that person, we’ve watched that person commit 10,857 sins, we’ve got it right here in our palm pilot. And all of a sudden God redeems this person, this person is saved, you know we never get saved; God never saved angels, how come He saved that thing, what’s the deal here? And the angels start to learn about the grace of God here, watching us.
So we have these rationales, nine different approaches, make up your own, I’m just giving you nine suggestions, and these are ways of thinking, looking to Him who tells us how to think in times of crisis and adversity. And He’s already revealed at least nine different things He can be doing in your life and mine when these things hit.
I want to conclude by making one closing point, the Lord Jesus Christ as a model. Turn to Hebrews 4, there’s a passage in there that’s meant to help you and help me when we’re struggling through these rationales, struggling to trust Him. We need a model, and most of all we need a sympathetic God. Now here is why the Christian faith, the Christian faith, not some other faith, the Christian faith has a truth in a very heart of doctrine here that is crucial for our accessibility with God. Hebrews 4:14, “We have a high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession.”
Look at verse 15, there’s a section in
verse 15 that I want you to observe, take it into your soul, chew on it, munch
on it, absorb it. “We do not have a high
priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses,” now can God sympathize with
our weakness in this sense? No, Jesus
Christ is God and man; in the council of Chalcedon they made this statement
about Jesus Christ, it took 400 years to get this sentence together but they
got it together. Here’s what they said
about Jesus Christ, a good sentence to remember: Jesus Christ is undiminished
deity, united without division, with true humanity in one person forever. Why did they go through all that? Theological gobbledygook? Not at all.
They said Jesus was true humanity.
Do you know what our tendency is?
To be heretical in the area of Christology, well, Jesus, I mean, you
know, He was having it tough but He could just call on His omnipotence. Absolutely not! The Lord Jesus Christ said that He humbled
Himself and became obedient…do you know what that means? It’s kenosis; theologians call it the
doctrine of kenosis. And that doctrine
tells us that when Jesus Christ encountered adversity in His humanity He could
not cheat and pull in His divine attributes and beat it. Jesus Christ could use His divine attributes
as the Father gave Him the signal, in most cases in the Gospel the Father gave
Him the signal just to manifest, just to show people who He was, but when it
came to adversity with Satan, in Matthew 4, how did Jesus meet adversity? Do you know how He met it? He went to the Word of God and He trusted,
and He trusted, and He trusted. When
Jesus Christ was in the
Turn to Hebrews 5:8 and you’ll see proof of
that. How did Jesus Christ learn? Can deity learn? No, this is talking about His humanity,
“Though He was a Son,” deity, “He learned obedience,” humanity, “from the
things which He suffered.” Now look on
the list of suffering, do you see that one, nudging for spiritual growth? Jesus Christ went through them all. That’s why, when we rationalize and we work
through this Scripturally we have a sympathetic high priest. Allah isn’t sympathetic. Did Allah ever come to earth and get dirt
under his fingernails, splinters from a carpenter shop, calluses on his feet;
did Allah ever hunger and thirst? Jesus
Christ did. So what’s so great about
this is that we can come to the throne of God Himself and know that on that
throne… [tape runs out]