Mixing Promises with Faith
“Trust in the LORD
with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways
acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths,” Proverbs 3:5-6. “They that
wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as
eagles, they shall run and not grow weary, they shall
walk and not faint,” Isaiah 40:31. “Fear
thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God; I will
strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right
hand of my righteousness,” Isaiah 41:10.
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God,
which surpasses all comprehension, shall defend your hearts and your minds in
Christ Jesus,” Philippians 4:6-7. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose
mind is stayed on thee because he trusteth in thee,” Isaiah 26:3. “The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of our God stands forever,” Hebrews 4:12.
Before we begin
we’ll have a few moments of silent prayer, which is our standard procedure. The
reason is that it is a pedagogical tool just to reinforce and teach us
important of maintaining short accounts recognizing that we have two options in
life: we either walk by the Spirit or the flesh or the sin nature. If we are
walking according to the Spirit we are in fellowship with God. We are enjoying
that fellowship with God. We are moving forward. The Holy Spirit is working in
our lives in terms of producing maturity, sanctifying us. But when we sin that
process is stopped until we recover and recovery occurs when we confess sin. We
just use this opportunity to reinforce that and warned everyone of the
importance of being in fellowship in the Christian life and we’ll have a few
moments of silent prayer and then I will open in prayer. Let’s pray.
Father, we are so
very grateful for grace in our lives that you give us in order to face and
handle all the adversity that we face, all the situations and circumstances,
whether they are tests of prosperity or of adversity. But underlying all of
these things is the issue that we are to walk by faith, by means of faith
trusting in what you have revealed to us in your Word. Now Father, as we
continue this study focusing on the faith rest drill we pray that You will help
us understand how this fits within the structure of our own Christian life that
we might be challenged to be improved and be more focused in terms of use of
your Word and use of your promises in our lives. We pray this in Christ’s Name,
amen.
We are studying in 1
Thessalonians. We are at are at the end of 1 Thessalonians 1:8 and in this
passage there is the emphasis on the reputation that had gone out from
Thessalonica, around Achaia and Macedonia on their faith toward God as Paul
states in 1 Thessalonians 1:8. The issue here is first of all faith toward God
in terms of God, which happens at the instant of salvation when we put our
faith and trust in the gospel and we believe that Jesus Christ dies on the
cross as a substitute for us and paid the penalty for our sins. Following
salvation the faith-rest drill, the term we often use that is on-going faith
and trust in Christ, and the Word of God, and the promises of God is the basic
way in which the Christian grows. It’s foundational.
We are taking some
time to sort of pause in our verse-by-verse exposition of 1 Thessalonians 1 to
look at the importance of the faith-rest drill. In 1 Thessalonians 1:8 Paul says,
“Your faith toward God has gone out, so that we do not need to say anything.”
The word that is translated “faith” here is the word PISTIS, which refers to expressing confidence.
It is the idea of believing something. It is a noun, but it is what is called a
noun of action. It expresses the act of believing in something, and as we have
studied in previous lessons, faith is accepting something as true. It is
trusting. It is expressing a confidence in that which is true, and that should
have its result and on-going expression of that confidence or truth. When we
look at it in terms of on-going truth in the Christian life it is the
foundational spiritual skill, not the bottom-line foundation but it relates to
everything in the Christian life, every spiritual skill.
This is why Paul
makes statements such as we have in Colossians 2:6 “As you therefore have
received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him.” How did we receive the Lord?
We trusted in promises of Scripture related to salvation. It wasn’t just an
abstract faith in God. It was faith directed toward specific statements in
Scripture that explain the gospel, statements that believe on the Lord Jesus
Christ. There’s an object to that faith which is expressed in those salvation
promises. That if we trust in Jesus Christ, in His death, burial, and
resurrection we have eternal life. It is not faith in a vacuum. It’s not faith
in faith. It’s faith in the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross.
Now in 2 Corinthians
5:7, “… we walk by faith, not by sight.” In other words, we walk by faith. Paul
is not using faith as a one shot word. In contrast he is talking about sight so
you look at something through empiricism and we see something, so our faith is
in our sight. So it’s faith in the Word versus faith in our empirical
observations that is ultimately being said here. So we walk by means of faith
in God’s Word. So we have to understand how important this is that this is
foundational for understanding the Christian way of life and the mechanic of
the Christian way of life. In the past I have taught the Christian way of life
in terms of ten basic skills or spiritual skills that must be mastered in any
person’s life in order to go forward. The skill emphasizes the fact that this
is something practiced over and over again. We get the same idea when we use
the word “faith-rest drill.” It’s that concept of “drill” that comes across.
If you’ve been in
any kind of athletics then you know that you went through various drills or
skills training in order to master that particular field. If you’ve been
involved in dance or music, then you had to practice technique exercises. You
had to go through various drills just to develop your skills, and you would
practice these things over and over and over again until they became second
nature to you, until it entered into muscle, to mind memory so that when you
were in certain situations this is what you would automatically do in those
situations. You wouldn’t have to stop and think about each movement and each
activity. This is why practice is so important, but it is not practice that
makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect. We have to develop
these skills. Well when we look at this in terms of the Christian life, I’ve
developed the illustration of the soul fortress. God is often referred to in
the Psalms as He is our defense. He is our rock. He is our fortress.
When we are
surrounded by the spiritual skills, then they enable us to continue to walk by
means of the Spirit. But when we fail to use these skills, when we are faced
with certain situations, when we don’t practice these skills, then we default
over to the sin nature and start walking according to the flesh. We’re trying
to solve the problems in our own energy, our own power, and our own effort,
which always fails. So we start with the first skill, for example the first
skill is confession. This is our recovery mechanism. We confess or admit or
acknowledge our sins to God. We are immediately forgiven of those sins and
cleansed from all unrighteousness. Automatically as a result of that we are
restored to a position where we enjoy our fellowship, our dependence on God the
Holy Spirit, which is described by different terms, the filling of the Holy
Spirit, Ephesians 5:18; walking by the Spirit in Galatians 5:16; and it
emphasizes this on-going moment by moment dependence on God the Holy Spirit and
the Word of God.
The Christian way of
life is a spiritually empowered way of life. It is a supernatural way of life.
It is not in any way dependent upon our own efforts or own skills. The
Christian way of life is not simply a life of morality. It is a life of
spiritual dependence. It is energized by God the Holy Spirit. There’re many
people who can live moral lives, but that is not the same thing as living a
Christian life, which is a walk by the Holy Spirit. How do we energize
that? We understand the principles of 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, God
is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” We believe that that is true. So
this is the beginning of the faith-rest drill. We are looking at that passage
of Scripture and we believe that it is true with the result that we confess our
sin believing that this is the reality that God immediately forgives us and
cleanses us. So the faith-rest drill in essence is even part of or foundation
of that first spiritual skill of confession of skill. Its part of the second
spiritual skill to walk by the Spirit because we walk by the Spirit by means of
faith, faith in what the Word of God says.
The third spiritual
skill that we talk about is the faith-rest drill and how that develops and how
that’s manifested; and that is going to be the focus of the next several
lessons. The faith-rest drill is also foundation in grace orientation. Grace
orientation basically means to orient our thinking in life towards God’s grace;
God’s grace in terms of His provision of everything for us at the instant of
salvation; that we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies.
God has given us everything necessary for life in godliness and we take our
minds and we understand what is stated in those verses and we embrace that by
faith. We mix our faith with those statements and we live on the basis that. We
are going to operate on the basis of grace orientation and that is an ongoing process
that works along with the next stage is doctrinal orientation. The key verse
for both of these is 2 Peter 3:18 that we “grow in the grace and knowledge of
our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In doctrinal
orientation the emphasis is on knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge of
Scripture. This comes about thorough the reading of Scripture, through the
personal study of Scripture and meditation on Scripture. It comes about by
going to Bible study, by listening on video, through various media, studying
the notes, reading books, these kinds of things that focus our attention upon
the Word of God and help us to think more deeply and more profoundly about what
God has revealed to us. As we focus our thinking around the divine viewpoint of
Scripture then this impacts our perception of reality, that our perception of
reality is now aligned into what God has built into the universe as Creator and
so as we align our thinking to the truth of God’s Word, we are walking as 3
John says, we are walking according to truth and as we are walking according to
truth we are walking in the realm of reality. If you are not walking according
to the will of God then you are divorced from reality. To the degree that you
deny what Scripture says you are living in a fantasy world. You are living in a
world of your own construction that has nothing to do with reality. The more we
get divorced from the Word of God the more we get divorced from reality.
This leads us to the
next stage in our spiritual life. As we master these foundational skills:
faith-rest drill, grace orientation and doctrinal orientation, God the Holy
Spirit uses this biblical truth that is in our soul to produce maturity as we
apply that to our circumstances in life. This leads us out of spiritual infancy
into spiritual adulthood, where we begin to focus on God’s destiny for us, what
we call our personal sense of eternal destiny. That God is training us today
for an eternity of serving Him that begins in the millennial kingdom when we
will be ruling and reigning with the Lord Jesus Christ and then that goes on
into eternity. The next spiritual skills are all related to love. It is all
related to this focus toward God, a personal love for God, as we come to
understand all that God did for us we come to focus on His magnificent love for
us, and that creates a response in our soul toward Him that our love for Him
grows and expands. A young child expresses a child’s love toward his parents
and often it is just a modicum or small percentage of what an adult’s love can
be because it doesn’t have a lot of knowledge and there is not a lot of
integrity behind it. It is a love that is more related to trust and
appreciation for being taken care of and being loved. So as an infant believer
we do have a love for God, but as we grow this love for God expands and matures
and changes just as a love that a one year old has for his parents is quite
different from the love that a thirty, forty, fifty year old has for parents.
As we come to love
God that impacts our loves for others. Love for God becomes the prime motivator
in our love for others. We are to love others as ourselves Scripture teaches
that we are to love one another as Christ has loves us. We call this an
impersonal love for all mankind. Not that it is somehow mechanical, not because
it is depersonalized, but because we don’t need to have a personal relationship
with the person we’re loving in order to love them. We can express this toward
a person on the freeway who is driving erratically or who has cut us off. We
can express this toward the person at the checkout counter. We can express this
toward the person on the customer service line. All of these are examples of
situations where the sin nature wants to take over and we want to treat that
person in a less than honorable way in anger, resentment or disrespect because
we don’t know them. But when we do have a personal relationship with somebody
we often won’t say or do the things we do if we don’t know them or if we won’t
see them again, but this impacts those situations where we don’t have a
personal relationship or a personal relationship is not required.
Occupation with
Christ is our focus on Christ. He is the author and concluder of our faith
according to Hebrews 12:1. And we fix our eyes upon Him. He is the focus of our
concentration and as we come to understand the Word of God itself as it focuses
us on Christ, who is our High priest and we are in Him, then we understand the
importance of that relationship that we develop because we are in Christ, our
close identity with Him. The end result of this is that we have a joy in our
soul that is inexpressible. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t distressed with
circumstances and situations in life. When our Lord Jesus Christ was to go to
the cross, the night before He went to the cross, when He is in the Garden of
Gethsemane, Matthew in his gospel, uses three different words to describe the
state of our Lord’s soul: He is anguished; He is distressed; and He is very
upset. He is emotionally upset, but He doesn’t sin. Having those emotions
doesn’t mean you sin. Having those emotions doesn’t mean you sin. Having those
emotions is part of the emotional make-up that God has given us. It’s what we
do with them when we are in situations where we are expressing anxiety,
anguish, distress that should drive us to trusting in God.
This is part of our
occupation with Christ. We understand how He implemented the faith-rest drill
the night before He went to the cross. He implemented the faith-rest drill
through prayer. A lot of people say, well when you see these ten spiritual
skills, these ten, I call them stress busters and problem-solving devices, and
prayer is not there. That is because prayer is simply a tool or way in which we
express some of these toward God. That is what our Lord did the night before He
went to the cross as He is facing the greatest test that He would ever face,
when He would be identified with our sin. Yet at the same time He had maximum
joy and happiness in His soul. He was stable, but He was facing a stressing
situation and we can do the same thing. By applying these skills we are abiding
in Christ, continuing in our dependence upon Him, John 14:1-5, and we are also
walking in the light, as John describes it in 1 John, and this is all dependent
upon our volition to exercise the skills God has given us.
Right now we just
want to focus on the faith-rest drill and think about that and how we implement
that in our lives. The first phase of the faith-rest drill is simply to claim a
promise. I emphasize this over and over again because a lot of people come and
they understand broad principles of Scripture, but they are somehow divorced or
cut free of Scripture. We kneed to know Scripture, whether we’ve memorized
verses, whole verses, whether we’ve just memorized short phrases. When we look
at a verse we need to claim that. We in essences are saying, God, this is
something you have promised. I am relying upon that. I’m depending upon your
faithfulness behind this promise to fulfill your obligation as stated in this
particular promise.
A second step is
that as we think through that promise, as we reflect upon it, we recognized
that there is an underlying structure of reasoning behind that verse. It is a
rationale behind that verse. For example, in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our
sins, God is faithful and just.” There is a conditional clause at the beginning
stating that there is something that we are to do and that if we do that God in
turn will do something else. The statement about what God will do in terms of
forgiving us and cleansing us of all unrighteousness is conditioned upon our
confession. And so we think that through and we reach certain conclusions as a
result of that. The conclusion that we arrive at as we think through 1 John 1:9
is that I have sinned and I need to admit or acknowledge that sin to God the
Father and He will therefore forgive me and cleanse me and I am right with Him
again. I may not be right with some of the people I offended. I may not be
right with the law, and I may have to be answerable for criminal activity if I
committed crimes, but I am right with God. That is the starting point of
becoming right with others. This is basically a summary of the procedure that
should go through our minds when we are trusting in the Lord.
Now what I want to do
in this little mini series is to talk about some promises and help us go
through this three step process as we look at these promises coming to
understand how we can improve and develop our own skill in the faith-rest
drill. This is an important lesson for all of us no matter how seasoned we are
as believers. I find that we have that we have to go back through these lessons
again and again. I find that even as a pastor just going back through these
lessons and developing them it just does wonders to up lift my own soul when we
realize we live in such a nasty world. The cosmic system around us just seems
to get worse and worse all the time. We all face personal
problems, challenges and adversities in life. Plus we live in a world
that is unfortunately not always pleasant anymore. We see the rise of
criminality in urban environments. We see problems in the broad spectrum of the
economic system. We worry and many people are concerned about the future of the
economy.
We now have been
living in a time where we have allegedly come out of a recession, but it is the
weakest recovery in history and there are some people who think it hasn’t been
any recovery at all, and because of some of the ways this has been manipulated
there are many people who expect another crash and possibly another massive
crash. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I know that we all hear these
kinds of things and read these kinds of predictions and these do weigh upon us.
So living in the midst of a world that is not dependable, and trust me, even
when we thought it was it wasn’t. That was just an illusion. So it is really
good to recognize how unstable the world is because our hope is really as the
hymn says, “Built on nothing less than Jesus Christ and His righteousness.” So
we just need to focus on the Word.
The first promise I
want us to look at is in Isaiah 40:31. It is the one I sight many times before
Bible class. The reason I sight those verses over and over and over again is
because I know that there are many people who just don’t have the time or the
discipline to memorize Scripture. If you listen to a Bible class for very long
and you are here, at least you should be able to remember the promises I cite
week after week after week. In fact, I can usually see most of the congregation
lip sinking through those promises each and every Sunday. I got started doing
that some years ago. I remember hearing Charlie Clough tell a story that an Air
Force pilot told him, when he was pastoring in Lubbock. This was a pilot that
was flying one of the first bombing missions in North Vietnam. This pilot had a
background where he had come out of Berachah Church as Charlie had; and back in
the 1950s and 1960s when I was a kid growing up in Berachah, Pastor Thieme
would stand up in the pulpit and he would quote verses over and over much like
I do. He didn’t do that so much later on, but in his early years he did.
This pilot related
the story that when he was flying in formation going in on these first bombing
runs into North Vietnam that they would immediately start taking anti-aircraft
fire. The strategy or tactics of the bombing mission all of your B-52 bombers
would be in formation and stay in formation. The idea was to stay there that no
matter what happened you keep your position in formation. Each plane could then
exercise defense for the other planes around them. The entire formation was set
to provide protection for the entire formation. If you started moving nobody
would know which way everybody else was going and you would end up having
accidents and problems and other things would interfere. You can’t dip and dive
and try to maneuver your way out of the anti-aircraft fire, but that is exactly
what you wanted to do.
This pilot related
that as soon as all of the shells began to burst around them their instinct was
to start dodging and to start moving. It took everything from your training and
discipline to not start trying to dodge the anti-aircraft fire. He remembered
just seconds into receiving the anti-aircraft fire that he heard in his mind
the voice of Pastor Thieme reciting these promises of God and how that just had
an effect of stabilizing him, calming him; he returned to a position of
discipline and focus and executed his mission. So that is why I repeat these promises
over and over again. I believe in the basic pedagogical principle not to teach
things so that you can remember them but to teach them so that you can’t forget
them, so in worse case scenarios these verses at least will be locked in your
soul.
Isaiah 40:31 states,
“But those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings
like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
This is an important verse. It has a context. Whenever we look at a promise one
of the tings you ought to think through when you memorize Scripture is to stop
and think about the surrounding verses. When we look at these surrounding
verses, if we go back just a little bit to Isaiah 40:28. Isaiah says, “Have you
not known? Have you not heard?” He is addressing people who are getting ready
to go through some real crises in terms of military attack. And he says, “Have
you not known? Have you not heard?” He is taking their mind back to Scripture.
He says, “The everlasting God, the LORD Yahweh, The God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, Who created the ends of the earth, neither faiths nor is weary. His
understanding is unsearchable.” So right away he is putting our focus on the
character of God, Who it is that we are trusting. Then he talks about what God
has done, Isaiah 40:29, “He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no
might He increases strength.”
Isaiah 40:30 he
says, “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall
utterly fail. But those who wait upon the LORD. Isaiah 40:31 is a contrast to
what he has stated in Isaiah 40:30. On the one hand you have young people who
are full of vigor, strength, and power. It seems like the youth can do anything
and especially those who have grown into their later years just yearn for that
power and ability when they were young, but even that fails. So in contrast to
the greatest illustration of strength we might be able to come up with, we have
the fact that God gives even a greater strength and that is the thrust of Isaiah
40:31. So what we do as we approach this we are going to learn to claim a
promise. We take our mind and we either claim the promise or recite the
promise. It is not just reciting it once, but over and over again until it
starts to begin to calm us down and we start to focus more on God and His Word
than on the circumstances and the problem.
We have to focus on
this. We have to grab a promise a fragment of Scripture, a verse that we’ve
memorized. It is something like that. It is not just a matter of believing
principles. When Jesus is facing the temptation of Satan in the wilderness He
doesn’t respond by saying, well let’s look at a doctrinal principle here and
talk about the theology of supralapsarianism. No. He quotes Scripture each and
every time. He countered the temptation by quoting a specific scripture that
was targeted to that particular attack. In Christianity it is not an abstract
philosophical system that you have in many of these self-help type programs. It
is a specific way of thinking based upon what God has revealed to us and what
we are doing is capturing what God has said and using God’s very words as the
foundation for what we are thinking and what we are going to do.
It is not simply believing
the abstract principle, but it is believing Scripture. It is not faith in
faith; it is faith in Scripture. Something I will reiterate many, many times.
Underlying this we have the importance of developing Scripture memory: have a
plan, set a goal. Perhaps it’s every week memorize two verses; that is not
hard. Sometimes it is helpful to memorize a set of verses. For example, I just
had Isaiah 40:28-31 on the screen. Memorize all four verses then you have a
thought flow. There is a logical progression there. Some people find it easier
to memorize a group of verses than just one verse. There are also people who
like to memorize whole chapters. They memorize John 3:1-18 or they memorize
Romans 8, or they memorize Ephesians 2:1-10, things of that nature. They
memorize a lot of Scripture that gets into their soul and then of course you
have to review and review and review; otherwise they tend to drop out through
those little holes in the colander of our minds. So we have a plan. If you are
a family, you can do this around the dinner table or the breakfast tale or at
some time make a game out of it with your kids. Have a system of rewards. There
is nothing wrong with rewards. The Lord used that at the judgment seat of
Christ.
You can write verses
down again and again and again, just by the act of repeating that it helps to
memorize it. You can write them on 3×5 cards and tape them up on the dashboard
so you can review them while you are going to work. There are a lot of
different ways in which you can do this. I always like the way the Navigators
taught this. The Navigators emphasize Bible memory. That was part of the thing
that they were known for when they first started back in the 1940s. They were a
parent church camp ministry but their emphasis was on Scripture memory. They
had a little system. You can still buy it from their website. It is called the Topical
Memory System and it was a basic set of 64 verses that were
categorized according to topics, prayer, salvation, confession, trust, essence
of God, all of these different categories, and they come in a little packet.
You can get a little verse pack and carry that with you in your pocket and review
wherever you go. That is a great tool and you can get them in all kinds of
different translations now, so that is always helpful.
The Navigators’
technique was that you would learn the verse according to its topic. So you
might say “prayer” and then you would repeat the address of the verse. Every
verse has an address, like a street address. So you would say “prayer” 1
Thessalonians 5:18, “Pray without ceasing.” Then you would close by repeating
it, “1 Thessalonians 5:18, prayer.” And every time you memorize it you not only
cite the verse, but you cite its reference and the category and that gets
imbedded in your minds so that you are memorizing these verses according to
these categories. That is a simple verse to memorize and anybody can do that real
quickly, just “1 Thess. 5:18, pray without ceasing, 1 Thess. 5:18.” You’ve got
it down. Just say that over and over and over again and after a week then
you’ve got that down and you can add one or two other verses to that.
You can set that as
your goal to memorize some Scripture and to claim those. It also has a lot of
benefits. It trains your mind. It develops concentration. Who knows? It may
even have long-term consequences for offsetting or delaying the onset of
Alzheimer’s or other forms of senility. There are a lot of great promises that
we can go through in Scripture that remind us about God and what He has
provided for us. For example, in terms of the faithfulness of God, in Psalm
119:89–90 we read, “Forever, O LORD, Thy Word is settled in heaven. Thy
faithfulness continues throughout all generations; Thou didst establish the
earth, and it stands.” Notice, there is a rational there that if God
established the earth and continues to keep it going, and is faithful in that,
then He can be faithful in His promises to us.
In Numbers 23:19 we
are told that “God is not a man that He should lie,
nor a son of man, that He should repent; has He said, and will He not do it? Or
has He spoken, and will He not make it good?” We also have passages dealing
with enemies and how to handle enemies, like Hebrews 13:6 we can confidently
say, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What shall man do to me?”
[Psalm 118:6].
Now you may have all
kinds of enemies, they may be people at work who are out to wipeout your
reputation or to get your job or to take away your reputation. This is a
promise you can claim for something like that. We go back to Psalm 118. We read
through Psalm 118 to get the original context as you are working through
memorization.
Psalm 60:12 “Through
God we shall do valiantly, and it is He who will tread down our adversaries.”
This is just another way of expressing the same thought that David expressed in
facing Goliath, that “The battle is the LORD’S.” He is the One who is going to
give us victory. That doesn’t mean that David just sat up on the hillside
looking at Goliath. He went down; he collected his five small round stones that
were probably about the size of a large marble, and he was able with his sling
to throw them at a high rate of speed and that is how he was able to knock out
Goliath. We have examples from archeology of the kind of stones that were
thrown by the slingers in the various armies. They would be about (size given
by hand symbol about the size of a quarter) up to about the size of a golf
ball. And so these could be extremely deadly and the aim of the slingers was
extremely deadly. David still had to get up, go down, find the rocks; he still
had to go through the motions of whirling it around his head and letting it go,
and yet he was trusting God that God would guide the stone directly to its
target. David would do his best on his end and let God take over and deal with
the results and consequences.
We trust in God and we
are not going to be afraid of circumstances of what people can do to us or who
our enemies are no matter how powerful they are. Our focus is on the LORD. We
have other promises that help us when we fill down or discouraged or depressed.
Psalm 37:28 “For the LORD loves justice, and does not forsake His godly ones.”
No matter how down we feel sometime; no matter how much we feel like God must
be concerned about the war in Afghanistan and taking care of soldiers over
there, He has just forgotten about me. God never does. He is omnipresent an
omniscient. He never leaves us or forsakes us. “The LORD does not forsake His
godly ones; they are preserved forever but the descendants of the wicked will
be cut off.”
Isaiah 40:29 the
very passage we are talking about reminds us that God “gives strength to the
weary and to him who lacks might He increases power.” He is our protector.
Psalm 18:2 “The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, My God, my
rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my
stronghold.” Look at all the metaphors that are used there to define how God
protects us: rock, fortress, deliverer, shield, horn of salvation, stronghold.
You have six different ones that are used there. He is the One who gives us
comfort, Psalm 22:24 “For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of
the afflicted;” He understands the trouble that we are going through, “neither
has He hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.”
God hears our prayers.
We also have Psalms
that talk about safety. God provides security for us. No matter what happens we
may not have all that we wish we have, but our security is in the LORD.
Proverbs 1:33, “But he who listens to me shall live securely,” this is wisdom
talking of a personification of God. “He listens to me” that is to wisdom he
lives “securely and shall be at ease from the dread of evil.” God helps us,
Psalm 42:11, “Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become
disturbed within me? Hope in God.” That is going to be a key word we look at in
many of these promises. “Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him, the help of
my countenance and my God.” People are often overwhelmed by guilt, failure in
past actions and we need to be reminded that God wipes out our transgressions,
Isaiah 43:25 “I, even I, am the One who wipes out your transgressions for My
own sake; and I will not remember your sins.”
Psalm 103:12, “As
far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from
us.” This means that no matter what our failure might be if we are still alive
God still has a plan for our life and we can go forward and the past sin is no
longer an issue. There may be consequences we have to deal with, but God is
going to give us the strength and the ability to face those consequences in the
power of God the Holy Spirit and in the strength of God’s Word.
When we face many
circumstances we are fearful and anxious. These may be health crises, financial
crises; they may be related to our health, our homes, our friends, but
Scripture says don’t be fearful. Isaiah 41:10 is a
favorite promise not too far from the one we are studying in Isaiah 40. Isaiah
41:10, “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I
am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, surely I will
uphold you with My righteous right hand.” I think I
learned that when I was about seven years old. One of my
favorite promises in the Word. Also we see Isaiah 40:31, the one that
we’re talking about in terms of our study tonight.
Other passages
dealing with fear and anxiety are: Philippians 4:6–7, “Be anxious for
nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let
your request be made known unto God and the peace of God, which passes all
comprehension, shall defend your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”
We have these
promises that we embrace in our mind. We wrap our mental arm around these and
hold onto these. We are in effect saying, God, I am holding you to this
particular promise. So the promise that we are looking at here is in Isaiah
40:31, talking about how God will strengthen and embolden those who wait upon
Him.
Now what we should
do whenever we are claiming a promise is what the Scripture calls “meditate” on
that promise. Meditation has been compared to what a cow does in chewing the
cud. He chews it and chews it and chews it. He swallows it and it comes back up
and he chews it and chews it and chews it; he gets everything out of it, all
the nourishment and nutrition out of it that he possibly can and this is the
idea of meditating on Scripture. We think about it, we think about it. Get a
notebook out while you are memorizing, keep writing the verse down. As you do
questions will come: well what does this mean? What is the Hebrew word here?
What is the Greek word here? How is this line connected to the previous line?
Is this a contrast? Is this something in addition to something else? Is this
expressing a condition or is it somehow expressing a conclusion telling me
something to do? We work through some of those details as we memorize the
Scripture and it helps us to get into the thinking of the writer so we
understand the thought that lies behind the promise.
Often as we do so it
will drive us back to Bible study. This is why taking the Bible Study
Methods course is helpful. Learn some basic skills to look up
key words. We will see some of that with what we are doing with this passage in
this lesson. We look up certain key words and that connects us to other
passages that express similar or identical principles. So that is also very,
very helpful. There are a couple of things that I want to point out as we go
through this.
First of all, the
verse begins with a contrast. It begins with the word “But”. This shows that it
is contrasting with that which comes before it. What comes in the verse before
it, in fact, you ought to have your Bibles open to Isaiah 40:31 because this
will help us think through this particular passage a little more clearly. If
you look at the verse immediately preceding it Isaiah is gives this
illustration of the youths, “even the youths shall be faint and faint weary.”
So you are facing
overwhelming circumstances and physical strength and stamina. Even the positive
optimism of the youth is not enough. It is such an overwhelming situation described
here that physical strength, the mental strength that even a young person has
is not going to be enough. He is contrasting with youths and young men compared
to an illustration of their strength; that even they will fail; they will faint
weary and utterly fall. There is a progression of thought there, a development
of thought indicating that natural strength, and human viewpoint is not
adequate. It’s not enough. He draws this contrast out that these young men in
their bloom of life succumb to the effects of this disaster. They have run out
their strength and there is nothing more that they can do and any kind of
obstacle will cause them to fail. They will feel overwhelmed and defeated
immediately.
This often happens
to us in life. We hit certain things in life that we feel are insurmountable.
There’s nothing we can do. We feel completely defeated, depressed, discouraged,
maybe even suicidal simply because we don’t see a way around it and God does.
God is our ever-present help and source of strength. Isaiah 40:30 is emphasizing not only the limitation of human ability, but
the inadequacy of human ability. What Isaiah is basically saying is that even
though this may happen, even though you may be overwhelmed, it is different for
those who wait upon Yahweh, those who have their trust in Him.
When we come to the
word for “wait” here it is the Hebrew word qwh, which means basically, it is translated
“to wait” but it’s more than just sort of sitting there twiddling your thumbs.
It’s emboldened by a future orientation of expectation. A second way in which
it is used and translated is the idea of “hope” because you are waiting
expectantly for something. You are not just waiting, stopping, hoping, and if
you watch every five minutes something is going to happen, but it is waiting
for something positive to happen. There is a tone of expectation and confidence
that is part of the waiting process. So it has that idea of waiting
expectantly, of having confident expectation.
Now you may have
read in some books, older books that talk about the faith-rest drill, that have
explained this word as having a background in weaving. That is completely and
totally erroneous. Some of that work and most anything written before the early
90s probably go back to that because that idea came out of a Hebrew lexicon
known by those of us who used it forever and ever, as BDB, which is the
abbreviation of the authors-editors Brown, Drivers, and Briggs. The BDB lexicon
came out in 1918 or 1919. I think there was an earlier 1916 edition that went
into public domain. So if you use a computer program, if you use a concordance,
you use LOGOS, you use word search, some of these other programs, Bible Works,
they will have that 1916-1917 edition of BDB and you can also get the upgraded
version.
BDB was written
right before this explosion of discovery of ancient near eastern languages.
Ugaritic was discovered in the 20s; Arcadian was discovered in the early 29th
century, and with the study of these related Semitic languages to Hebrew. The positive
thing was that it corrected the understanding of a lot of words in Hebrew. The
idea that was taught that waiting is the idea of weaving a rope that you lay in
one thread and then another thread and then another thread, and as you weave it
together it produces something of strength. That is completely erroneous, has
nothing to do with the history of the background of the word. The key tool that
is used for lexical work now in Hebrew is called HAL or HALOT, which stands for
the Hebrew-Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (OT). This was a multi-volume
work that came out in the early 90s and is also available in most of your
lexicons.
One of the problems
that you get with BDB also just as sort of an aside is that when the New
American Standard Bible was translated the default position of the translators
was to take the meaning that BDB assigned to the Hebrew word and they took that
without question, without any further analysis, and by the late 60s when New
American Standard was translated there was a lot of new lexical data that had
come out since the 20s. So it is important to understand the sense of these
words and in HALOT the basic meaning of the word qwh is to wait expectantly for
something, to hope confidently for something, and has nothing to do with the
literal meaning of weaving something together. No matter how helpful that
illustration was it is erroneous and has nothing to do with the background of
the word.
It is very similar
to the Greek word ELPIS, which has that idea in the Greek as well, as a
confident expectation. The word qwh is used several places. You can take out
your Bible concordance, Strong’s Concordance, Young’s Concordance, some of the
better concordances. You can usually search this somehow with some different
computer programs, and you can find other places in the OT where this Hebrew
word is used. In doing that you can discover some other tremendous passages and
promises. Isaiah 25:9 states, “And it will be said in that day.” This refers to
a future time. “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him and He will
save us. This is the LORD.” Whenever you see that uppercase LORD it translates
the Tetragrammaton, the personal Name of God in the OT, YHWH. “This is YHWH. We
have waited for Him.” See, there is our word. We have waited expectantly for
Him. The conclusion, “We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”
Isaiah 33:2 states,
“O LORD, be gracious to us; we have waited for You. Be
their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble.” This is a
prayer, a cry for God to rescue them in times of trouble based upon the fact
that we are waiting expectantly for the deliverance. Psalm 25:5 states, “Lead
me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; on You I
wait (confidently, expectantly) all the day.” Psalm 27:14 reads, “Wait on the
LORD;” this is a command. We are to wait expectantly on the LORD. “Be of good
courage, and He shall strengthen your heart;” what a great verse to claim when
we feel overwhelmed by the details of life. God will strengthen our heart. He
will strengthen our soul, our mind, from His Word. God is not just going to zap
you and make you feel better, but you are going to focus on His Word and that
is going to get strength to your soul. “Wait, I say, on the LORD!”
Then we have a
connection to hope in these two verses: Psalm 39:7 and Psalm 130:5. Psalm 39:7
states, “And now, Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in You.” So we have the
connection of the word “wait,” which is qwh with this other Hebrew word yehl, which also is a synonym meaning to
wait or to hope confidently for God. Psalm 130:5 says, “I wait, qwh, for the
LORD, my soul waits.” Twice qwh is used there, and in conclusion, “And in His Word I do hope.”
See, the focus is in His Word and what He has revealed. It gives us a confident
expectation of the future. So the verse starts off “Those who wait upon the
LORD [YHWH] shall renew their strength.”
Now
this is another interesting and important word to see here for “renew”. It is
the Hebrew word chlf.
It is a rough guttural ‘ch’. It is in the hiphil, which is causative, which
gives it more of an intensified meaning, and it means not just renew in the
sense of getting something new or in addition to the strength we already have.
It is a word that talks about exchanging one thing for something else. We are
taking our strength and it is irrelevant, it fails, and we are replacing our
strength with God’s strength. It is not that God just comes along and sort of
reinforces us a little bit. The emphasis here is that it is really going to
strengthen us with an exchange of His strength for our strength.
What
we see here, to bring up a little summary, “Those who wait upon the LORD.” This
is a wait that has a confident expectation. It is not a waiting that is some
sort of psychological gimmick or tool, which we often see in a lot of
motivational speakers today, where they are really talking about faith in
faith. You hear people say, well, just trust. Trust in what? Or just believe;
things will get better. It is sort of this believe in an impersonal universe
that somehow something is going to align itself in the stars and somehow things
will straighten out. Some trust in some impersonal cosmic deity; that somehow
the universe will right itself and everything will end up being okay.
You
often hear Christians say that, but the key is “trust” in the Word of God;
“trust” in God’s promises. Focus upon Him. The Text is saying that they wait on
Yahweh. They wait upon the person of God and a Jew that would be a reminder. Using
that Name Yahweh is associated with God’s covenant with Israel and it would be
a reminder to them that they are to trust in that Person Who has guaranteed the
destiny of Israel by virtue of His own character in the Covenant. They trust in
the Person of God because of how He has revealed Himself. It is not just an act
of believing in belief.
Then
it says, “those who wait” will do something. They will have an exchange of
strength as a result of waiting upon the LORD. Now this word chlf is used
in a fascinating passage over in Job. Job 14:14 states, “If a man dies, will he
live again? All the days of my struggle I will wait, until my change comes.” So
it connects that change with waiting. He is not looking for some burst of new
energy that God is going to somehow going to give him a little more of what he
already has. It is also a context, if you look at Job 14; it is a context that
involves despair on Job’s part as he looks around at the environment around
him. We look at the opening verses and we read, “Man who is born of woman is a
few days and full of trouble.” Doesn’t that just lift up your soul? Don’t you
feel better now? You are born of a woman and your days are full of adversity.
That is not a positive thought. “He comes forth like a flower and fades away.
He flees like a shadow and does not continue.” Life is short and ephemeral and
really doesn’t have any long-term value. You are here today and you’re gone
tomorrow. He is very negative at this point.
He
says in Job 14:3, “Do you open your eyes on such a one and bring me to judgment
with yourself?” He is responding to his critics at this particular point. Then
we will move forward to Job 14:7. In his argument he (Job) says, “There is hope
for a tree if it is cut down that it will sprout again.” If you chop down a
tree it is going to come back. Maybe there will be a new shoot and it will
still develop and tender “shoots will not cease. Though its root may grow old
in the earth and its stump may die in the ground.” There is still some kind of
hope. In Job 14:10 he goes back to this note of futility and he says, “But man
dies and is laid away, indeed he breathes his last and where is he? As water
disappears from the sea and a river becomes parched and dries up, so man lies
down and does not rise till the heavens are no more they will not awake or be
aroused from their sleep.” This is a very depressing time.
But
then when we come to Job 14:14 he’s shifting his thinking away from the human
viewpoint focus on circumstances to divine viewpoint. He says, “If a man dies,
will he live again? All the days of my struggle (hard service) I will wait,
until my change comes.” So this is talking about something that is completely
new: a picture of a change from one thing (his mortal body) to something else.
Notice it is based on waiting. It is a change that takes place over time. It is
not immediate. We can apply this to the principle of waiting;
that we wait and it goes on and on and on. We may not see the fulfillment of
that for many, many years; and we may not see the victory over our enemies
until the Lord returns, but it will happen.
Job
goes on to say in Job 14:15-17 giving a great promise. He says, “You shall
call, and I will answer you; you shall desire the work of your hands; for now
you number my steps, but do not watch over my sin; my transgression is sealed
up in a bag, and You cover my iniquity.” Here he is expressing his hope in God
and the background for this, the main reason we looked at it, is this idea
change is the exchange of one thing for something else, and it comes over time
and involves waiting. We’re waiting upon the Lord.
Next
time I am going to come back and we’ll have a brief review and then we are
going to go forward into talking about some other ways to claim promises and
going to the next stage, which is understanding the underlying rationale.
Father,
we thank You for this opportunity to study these things today, to be reminded
of Your faithfulness of Your Word and we pray that You will help us to
understand these things and to implement them into our lives that we might be
challenges to memorize Scripture, to make it part of our soul so that as we go
through life we can react to situations claiming promises, focusing on Your
Word, ultimately leading our attention, our concentration to Who You are, Your
love for us, Your care for us, and Your provision for us in Your Word. We pray
this in Christ’s Name, Amen.