Faithfulness You Can Believe In!

Faithfulness You Can Believe In

Intro:

I am really excited about kicking off the year with a focus on prayer. Prayer anchors us in what God can do rather than simply what man can do. Please be praying for these times together in prayer and for these messages that God will meet us in a powerful way in 2010.

Well, once again we are just a few days away from the end of one year and the beginning of another. I thought about doing a kind of “Resolutions for the New Year” message and I even had a title for it: Hope and Change You Can Believe In! Not original, but I liked it.

But the older I get the more I am convinced that most of the progress we make in life doesn’t happen through NY resolutions. Maybe it’s because we don’t keep them! I felt the Lord had something for us this morning that I think will be of more lasting benefit than optimistic NY resolutions in preparing us for the New Year, and also to help us interpret the past year, especially the hard parts that may be following us into the New Year. So let’s turn to a simple but profound passage many of us are probably familiar with.

Prov. 3:5-6 Title: Faithfulness You Can Believe In (Pray)

A Conditional Promise

This is a conditional promise. There are a lot of them in the Bible. God says, if you do this, I will do that. The passage that we’ll be looking at next month is a conditional promise:

If My people…seek My face…I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Serious conditional promise given to Israel in Deuteronomy 30:

If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you today, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land ... 17But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, 18I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish…Deut. 30:16-18

Both sides of the coin are promises. If you do this you will live, but if you do that, I declare to you (promise) that you will perish. Not a happy promise, but it’s a promise from God. To turn away from God and follow other gods will lead to death. Promise.

One of the most powerful conditional promises: Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household. (Acts 16:31)

Prov 3 contains a conditional promise. If we do three things, God promises to make our paths straight.

The meaning of “our path” in Proverbs

In Proverbs our path is a metaphor for all of our life – what we will do, what will happen to us, where will we go, what doors open for us, what doors close to us. The most important aspect of our path is where it’s going –our direction and our destination. Where is life taking us in the long run? We tend to be pretty short-sighted. I want results…now. I want relief…now. I want my wants filled…now. Well, that’s not always the best for us in the long run. We can choose to do things that make things easier today, make us feel better today, but have long term bad side-effects. Proverbs reminds us of the destination of our paths and warns us, choose carefully.

Proverbs contrasts the righteous path with the evil path; the wise path with the foolish path, the path that leads to life with path leads to death.

Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil. Proverbs 4:14

The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. 4:18

Whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who rejects reproof leads others astray. 10:17

So there is a path that leads to death and a path that leads to life and in the NT we see that the path to life is Jesus – He is the Way, the Truth, the Life. He is the Door. He is the Narrow Way. For the person whose faith is in Jesus Christ their final destination has been settled. God, by His amazing grace and mercy, gives eternal life to anyone who truly believes in Christ. Nothing can take that away – the final destination is settled forever.

But what will our life as believers look like on the road to that eternal dwelling? Will our lives be filled with years wandering in the wilderness? Drifting? Wasting precious time, precious opportunities, not making the difference in the lives of others that God intended. Looking back with deep regrets.

Let’s bring it home to 2010: what will it look like? What paths will our lives travel? What direction will our hearts go in? What choices will we make? Where will we be at the end of it? God says, “Trust in Me and I will lead you in a straight line to life”. This is more than just a fast track to heaven – means a life that is on track. A life that is experiencing the abundant life that Jesus said he came to give. A life that is fruitful for the kingdom of God. A life that isn’t wandering or drifting, but is fulfilling the purposes that God meant for our lives to fulfill. It will not be a life free from trials or pain or suffering. But in those dark times, rather than regret, we will see redemptive purposes even for them. A straight line to life.

1. Trust in the Lord with all your heart

Whether we believe it or not God is perfectly faithful and trustworthy. God has never broken a single promise in all of eternity and He never will. God never makes a mistake – you’ll never hear God say, “My bad…” God’s will is never overruled by anyone –no one has veto power over God’s vote. He is God and beside Him there is no other.

That’s great theology and it’s absolutely true but God is inviting us to do more than think this is true – He’s inviting us to trust that it is true. He is inviting us to trust Him in everything and with everything we have. This is talking about a heart that has trust in the Lord interwoven to the deepest parts. Trust in God cuts deep channels in our heart and changes how we see life and how we interpret life. Trusting in the Lord with all our hearts replaces other stuff in our hearts like anxiety and fear and bitterness and regrets and anger and control-freak attitudes. Something is going to cut deep in heart – God says, let it be trust.

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all others thoughts are drained. ~ Arthur Somers Roche.

That is so true, and if you are one who struggles with anxiety you know what that is like. Maybe you remember when it was a thin stream of fear, but now it has cut such deep channels in your thoughts that few other thoughts ever seem not to be drained into the channel of anxiety.

But it’s also true of all the other stuff that can grip our hearts. To the bitter person all thoughts are drained into their bitterness. To the angry person – there is always something to be angry about and eventually everyone gets pulled into their anger. To the critical person there is always something to criticize and nothing is safe from their critical eye for long. To the person eaten up by regrets, even happy moments are painful reminders of past regrets. Whatever we give our heart to will eventually draw everything else into it.

God invites us to trust in Him with all our hearts. Let trust in God cut the deepest channels in our hearts and let everything else drain into that. So all of life is seen through grid of trust – God is my God and I will trust Him. Our choices, our responses, our decisions, are all made out of a trust in God and His faithfulness. And as we trust Him, we see that He is faithful and that cuts a deeper channel in our hearts and trust goes deeper.

Pastoral application

If anxiety and worry and fear mark your life, as we enter this New Year commit yourself to fight the channels of fear by cutting channels of trust in your heart – trust in the Lord. It’s not easy and it won’t be instant, in fact it will probably be a real fight. I know the fight too. But the Lord promises are true and the Lord is faithful, and trusting in Him will cut channels that make it easier to trust Him in the next thing.

2. Do not lean on your own understanding

Notice that he doesn’t say we shouldn’t use our understanding, we just shouldn’t lean on our understanding. The ability to understand life, interpret life, make decisions about life, these are gifts from God. Proverbs 2 says that we should seek understanding more than silver or treasure and incline our heart to understanding and that understanding comes from the mouth of the Lord.

We are to seek understanding and use our understanding. But we aren’t to lean on our understanding. What we lean on is what we trust – we can’t trust the Lord with all our hearts AND trust our own understanding. This cuts at our pride cause we really tend to trust our own understanding but this is fatally flawed because we are born with defective understanding. The Bible says our minds have been darkened by sin which means that we just can’t see clearly on our own but our pride tells us we see everything very clearly.

Vertigo

There is a strange phenomenon called vertigo that can happen to airplane pilots where they lose perception of their direction. A pilot can swear he is ascending or banking even though his instruments tell him he is flying level. I have read accounts and it is a powerful sensation that has to be overcome simply by trusting their instruments. Some pilots have been killed because they trusted their feelings over their instruments.

Sin has given us vertigo of the understanding – we can be way off and feel like we’re so right on. We need to trust in God’s word and not our own understanding no matter how powerfully we feel our perception is accurate. Do not lean on your own understanding – trust the Lord even when His way seems off kilter. Don’t grab the controls and start steering away from the Lord’s revealed will. Trust in the Lord with all your heart.

3. In all your ways acknowledge Him

In all your ways – In other words in all you do – the actions you take, the choices you make, the steps you take. Trusting the Lord doesn’t mean we stop taking action or stop making decisions– it doesn’t mean we are paralyzed while we wait for a “word from the Lord” about whether we should take this job or go to that school or marry this person or buy this home or do this or do that.

God guides us in those actions, but He doesn’t have this secret plan for our lives (or whatever specific decision or action we’re considering) that we need to decode from God. Nowhere in the Bible does it call God’s people to be afraid to take action or make decisions because they might miss “God’s will”.

What the Bible does call us to is to “acknowledge him” in all our ways – this is more than “Hey God, I know You’re there!” It’s to honor God and make His glory and pleasure our chief desire. If something we do is dishonoring to God we don’t pray about doing it – we acknowledge God by turning from it. If something isn’t dishonoring we do it as unto the Lord.

When we come to a decision that is difficult or has far-reaching ramifications we acknowledge God by asking Him for guidance, and then by committing our decision to Him.

A lot of “ways” in 2010

We are going to have a lot of “ways” in 2010 – a lot of actions, a lot of decisions, a lot of choices, a lot of activities, a lot of words, a lot of reactions, a lot of ways in 2010. Some of those “ways” could have far reaching effects on your life and your family’s life.

Beyond that, 2010 is shrouded in uncertainty – as the future always is. Things will happen we don’t expect. Some unexpected blessing might be speeding its way to you right now. Or some unexpected trial might be speeding its way to you. God may want to use you in ways you cannot imagine. Or He may hide you in His quiver for reasons you don’t know. The plans you make may take off like you never dreamed they could. Or the plans you make may come crashing down in a heap.

Someone you’ve been praying for and witnessing to may come to Christ this year. Someone you love may die this year. I know we don’t like thinking these thoughts – as Matt Chandler is fond of saying, we all like to be “chipper” – happy thoughts, chipper thoughts. But life isn’t meant to always be “chipper” – it wouldn’t be best for us if it always was.

We just don’t know what 2010 holds. And God doesn’t call us to know. He calls us to trust in Him and His faithfulness.

Let’s stand and pray – not only for the year to come, but for the year that’s passed. For the seeds that have been sown. People we have witnessed to. Investments we have made. Dreams only half built. Relationships strained but not beyond God’s healing touch.

Let’s pray.