Sunday Sermon

I was blessed to bring the message to my church family this morning.  As I was taking a shower, I got the thought that it was a message based mostly on the Old Testament, so I thought it would be wonderful if my church family joined me in proclaiming the Name above all names, so we started the sermon with the congregation on their feet, and at the count of three we shouted in praise, "JESUS!

They indulge me a lot, but it was a great moment to hear those in attendance invoking the name of our Lord to start off the sermon!

The title of the message is:  "Everything You Need to Get Through This".  If you know someone who would benefit from reading it, please feel free to share a link to the blog.

Thanks for reading.  I hope it blesses you.

I wonder sometimes if we aren’t our own worst enemies.  That thought came to me as I started writing this message.  It was the lead thought of paragraph two. Paragraph one kind of became unimportant after I saw that thought written down.  I think sometimes we get in our own way, trying to fight life’s battles our way instead of God’s way.

I’ve been fighting a battle for the last four years.  Sometimes I get tired. I certainly get tired of losing it.  Skirmish after skirmish leaves me in the same place, and each time it saps my strength a little bit more.  I didn’t realize this until a few weeks ago when I sat down and watched the movie “War Room”. It’s a great movie by the way and it emphasizes the power of prayer and relationship with God and how He can move to change and grow relationships.

It doesn’t always work out in real life like it does on TV or in the movies, though.  But I can tell you from my own experience that God does reconcile relationships, but not always to what they once were.

There is a scene in the movie when the wife says out loud, “I’m tired of losing the same old battles.”  I wonder how many of us do that; fight the same fight the same way, only to have the same result without even realizing it.  I didn’t until I heard those words. I was certain i was doing what God wanted me to with my life. I’m still certain of it. But what I wasn’t doing is letting God do His part.  I just guessed that He was by providing opportunity after opportunity to try and change the thing I so desperately want to change.

What God was after, as I would discover, was not necessarily changig my circumstances, but changing the way I thought.  Notice, I didn’t say He wanted me to change the way I thought about my circumstances. He wanted to cause that transformation of how my mind thinks and processes information.

That process started with this thought:  All you need to get through this is in Psalm 37.

With the time left this morning, I’d like to share with you some of the verses I underlined from this Psalm.

Psalm 37 opens with these words:  Do not fret becaue of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong.  

Do not fret.  Do you fret? Sometimes I fret.  Yet the first thing we’re told is not to fret.  For me, I become fretful sometimes because of the things I don’t know or are out of my control, yet the Psalmist tells us that the first thing we want to do sometimes is something we shouldn’t do at all.  If you drop down to the next verse, David explains why. They’ll soon wither away and die. We’re told not to fret over things that are temporary.

The next instruction we get is to trust in the Lord and do good.  How are you with the trusting the Lord thing? For me sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do because trusting involves waiting on an outcome that I can’t see, let alone have any guarantee of.  David tells us though that trusting when we can’t see is exactly what we should be doing and it’s pretty much the opposite of being fretful. God tells us time and time again He’s trustworthy and faithful but it’s sometimes hard to trust God when we do and things don’t go like we planned.  

Ever been there?  How do we trust God when things aren’t going well?  I think that a good help in those times is to look around you and see what God is doing in other people’s lives.  God is always at work. Sometimes we’re blessed to see it in our lives and sometimes we’re blessed to see it in the lives of people we know during those times when what He’s doing in our life is working behind the scenes.  Trusting God involves letting go of the need to control our own lives. If we’re in control, that means God can’t be. Perhaps that’s why David told us not to fret at the beginning of the Psalm. Fretting is saying we’re not trusting God’s control over our circumstances.

I’m skipping over verse four, although it’s underlined in my Bible.  Not because it’s unimportant. I think it’s a huge thing to delight in the Lord, but I think too that this verse can, and sometimes is, taken out of the context of what it’s meant for, and if I started on this verse, the rest of the message still couldn’t do it justice.  My take on its meaning is that if we delight in God, the desires of our hearts come into alignment with what He wants to give us.

Verse 7:  Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.  Do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.  Here’s where the wait part comes in. Be still and wait. If you’re good at this, can you get with me after the service for about an hour?   I need some mentoring in this area. In fact, as I wrote this Tuesday morning, I had to ask God to help me do this very thing well today. I’m not so good at being still, which in my battle, is the very thing that’s required of me right now.  Sometimes in your battle, you get to the end of you and all you can do is wait for God to be God.

It occurs to me that we do this a lot: We wait, we get impatient for God to be God, so we try to do it for Him.  And then, although meaning well, we make things worse. Waiting on God is tough. We need to wait well.

So how do we wait well?  Worship is a great place to start.  How about before we start fretting about something, we start worshipping God?   We startt by praising Him for who He is. We can then think about all the times He’s showed up and thank HIm for what He’s done in the past.  We can, with grateful hearts, thank Him for what we have, and then we can try to lean in close and look at things from His perspective. Graham Cooke posted a video on Facebook a couple of weeks ago that taught me some of these principles.  It was a game changer for me, because I started to notice that what was changing in the battles I’ve been losing, was me.

Fighting our battles often requires us waiting on the Lord to show up.  There was a moment in time when the prophet Elisha wa surrounded by an army.  HIs servant Gehasi was fretful and afraid that he and Elisha would be killed. He couldn’t see what Elisha could, and when Elisha prayed to God to open Gehasi’s eyes, he could see the invisible army of the living God who would defeat the enemy.  When we’re fighting battles, we’re never fighting alone. God is there. This story in Scripture reminds us to wait on HIm, and to trust Him. Especially when we can’t see.

Prayer opened Gehasi’s eyes.  Prayer is a huge part of waiting.   This is from my Discovery House prayer journal, which I read Saturday  morning: We need to be like the persistent widow in Luke Chapter 18: in Verse 1 Jesus told the disciples that we should always pray and not give up.  Prayer isn’t coercing God to give us what we want. It’s a process of recognizing His power and plan for our lives. In prayer, we yield our lives and circumstances to the Lord and trust HIm to act in His time and His way.

Another tenet of fighting a battle alongside God is to not get angry and turn from wrath.  Huh? I’m fighting a battle here, man….what do you mean anger and wrath aren’t motivation to fight?  Righteous indignation is a good thing, but anger and wrath lead to evil. Not my words, but God’s word to us.  Revenge isn’t a motivation for a Christian. Those things are best left to the One whose Judgments are true. I have a story I’ve told a lot about how a woman in Colorado taught me how important it is to speak truth with love.  You can’t do that if you’re angry.

And don’t worry about what the other guy is doing.  If someone, a rival, an opponent, seems to have the upper hand, it’s only temporary.  I used to tell people even before I was a believer that you didn’t need to get even with someone, you just had to live long enough.  Life, I though, had a way of getting even for you. I now understand it’s a Kingdom principle: You reap what you sow.

The Lord makes firm the Steps of the one that delights in HIm.  Though he may stumble, he will not fall for the Lord upholds him with his hand.  This is what verses 23 & 24 say. In the battles we fight, sometimes we’re going to slip.  We can mean well and have things completely blow up at us. Here’s what I mean. We as a church try to do well by our neighbors and are generous people but we choose purposely how to show that generosity.  I’ve seen us offer people what we can out of our generosity only to have them get extremely angry because we wouldn’t give them what they wanted. I had one guy say something along the lines of “I thought you people were supposed to be Christians, but you wouldn’t give me the money I needed.”  He was genuinely mad about it. We offered what we had to share, but it wasn’t what he thought he was entitled to from us and he was genuinely angry about it. It was not ha-ha funny, but funny to me that everything was fine with us, right up until he didn’t get what he wanted. It happens. But we need to respond in love.  

We can mean well in our faith walk, and try to “help” God’s plan along too, and that can get us into a bit of trouble as well.  I’ve been guilty of this and I think it’s why I get frustrated in fighting battles. I can’t win the battle. I try to win the battle.  I don’t win the battle. I have to fight the battle again. Wash, dry, repeat. The biggest thing in that cycle is this: I can’t win the battle.  It’s not mine to win. It’s mine to fight, for certain, but the whole lesson for me which is why I decided to share this particular message with you is that I was fighting the battle the wrong way. Everything I need to fight this battle is in this psalm.  That’s what i mean about learning to think differently. I was fighting it the wrong way and this Psalm instructs me about the right way to go about it.

Don’t fret.  Trust Godt. Delight in God.  Wait on God. Don’t get angry.  Watch what we say. Turn from evil and do good.  Hope in the Lord. Keep His way. Not anywhere in this psalm does it say that we should trust in what we want to do and that God will bless it.  It tells me that the fights we fight aren’t ours to win. They’re God’s victories. For His glory and our best good. And when we don’t succeed, we learn.  Either way, God’s using those battles to shape and form us to be more like Jesus. They serve a purpose. They serve God’s purpose, not our own. And as a byproduct, they draw us closer and deeper into relationship with Him.

David throughout the psalm reminds us of the fate of the wicked.  It’s not a pretty picture. Their fate is far from that God promises His children.  It’s not a guarantee that we’re going to win every skirmish. It’s just a good reminder that becaue of Jesus, what He did for us on the cross, that we’ve already won the war.  We still have to fight the battles, though.

Ephesians 6 tells us how to put on the Armor of God, Psalm 37 helps us lay out the battle plan.  The outcome: Well, that’s up to the One who decided that long before we were. He knew us before He formed us, and He did it anyway.  Psalm 138:8 in the NLT of the Bible reminds us that the outcome isn’t up to us. It says that the Lord will work out His plans for our lives.  It doesn’t say that we will work out God’s plan for our lives or work out our plans for our lives with the expectation that God will bless them.    It says that the Lord will work out HIs plans for our lives. That means His way, and in His time. Sometimes the battle we fight is with that last truth.  

Absolutely everything we need to fight the battles of life is found in the pages of this book.  It’s God’s word. It’s full of stories of what happens when man gets it right, when man gets it wrong, and stories of encouragement of what God is doing behind the scenes when we can’t see what He’s doing.  It also gives us instruction on how to live, how to love, and how to fight our battles. It’s full of promises for those who believe on Jesus as Savior. It’s also full of warning for what will happen to those that don’t.  

For whatever you’re facing this week, if you have one of these and faith in Christ, you have absolutely everything you need to get through it….

the message was, "Everything You Need to Get Through This", and you can read it below.

Thanks for reading the blog.  If you know someone who could benefit from the message, please share it.