Does God Always Come Through?
Introduction
1 Corinthians 10
When God doesn't always seem from human perspective to come through, what do you do?
I. Remember The Proven Dependability Of His Love
No matter how most of the time you didn't get a sensational answer. For every one of you there has been at least a time or two that you did. Norman Venice Peal who says that the positive thinker doesn't refuse to acknowledge the negative. He merely refuses to dwell on it. You can dwell on the bad things that are happening or you can choose to dwell on the good things that are happening. This will get you through the bad times. You need to focus on those things that are good. Remember these things when things are going bad.
II. Remember The Sufficiency Of His Grace
Grace has two meanings in the Bible. One is something for nothing. Mercy you don't deserve; unmerited favor. Grace also means the ability to endure. God says, I will give you the grace to make it.
The world is being presented a character of what the Christian faith is. That is, is you are right with God and you have enough faith, you'll never get sick. You'll have a lot of money and you will have a great physical life here on earth. Jesus Christ said a lot about what we get in heaven. But He never promised you one thing on earth except these three things: If you follow me, you'll always be in trouble. You will be going straight against the current of society in a secular world that is in opposition to God. Never alone. Never at peace.
In this world you will have tribulation. The Christian faith is not an absence of divorce, and death, and cancer, and problems, and job loss.
The Christian faith is a promise of the grace to live in dignity, and the courage to win and walk through the storm. He will never allow the suffering to get higher than you can stand. It will never be greater than you can bear. You don't get the grace to suffer until you have to suffer. He also says he will give you a way of escape.
The translation on the King James is not a good translation and means a way to get out of it.
But in the Greek it doesn't mean you will get out of it. It means you go through it. Then you get out of it. It means victory through the middle. The promise is not that you will never go through the flood. The promise is that you will go through the flood. You'll still be standing on the shore when it's all over.
He promises the grace of God to endure. There is nothing that will come that you and Jesus can't handle.
III. Remember The Revelation Of His Purpose
In Romans, Chapter 8:28 means that in all things good and bad, God allows them to work together to produce good. The bad has to work together with the good to produce the best. What is the best? What is God trying to make out of your life? What is the purpose of the interacting of bad and good in your life?
God has one purpose in your life. Now, to manage God's affairs is what your job is. But God's job is to accomplish a purpose in you. What is the purpose? It is to conform us to the image of his son.
What is Jesus Christ trying to do in your life? By which He allows bad and good to interact to get accomplishment. It is to bring you to the image of his son. I believe that the Spirit and the Father adored the Son so much, that they just could not get enough of Jesus. And so they plan that Jesus, the expressed image of the Father, would make man in the image of God. He would reproduce and all of these beings that he would create would be like Jesus. Not gods, but like Christ in their character. So the Father would have billions of beings in the universe to lavish His love on like Jesus.
So from the day you are saved until the day you get to heaven, you are being made more and more in your character like Jesus. And what is the process by which that occurs? He said it is the interacting of the good with the bad. So if you don't have the bad to interact with the good, you don't become like Jesus. I believe that when we are first saved; God sees in us, in His mind's eye, like a master sculptor, a block of granite. He sees an image of what we can be come. He takes out his hammer (adversity) and his chisel (trials & suffering) and he starts to cut away. Because there is so much ungodliness, so much un-Christ-likeness about us that it takes him all of our life to chip away, knocking off the edges until he brings out the image of his Son, Jesus Christ. It is a life long process. He often starts and works the hardest with the most unlikely, un-Christ-like characteristic.
Something happened. That something was sin. Now, if sin never happened, everybody in the world that had ever been born would be like Jesus. Man is created in the image of God. Not! Man is not created in the image of God. Man is created in the image of sinful Adam. We have to be remade into the image of God.
1. State of Salvation
From the day you are saved, you are in a state of justification.
2. State of Glorification
One day you will be with Jesus in heaven – that will be a state of glorification. When in heaven you look at Jesus in the face you will see him as He is. In the glorifying state, when we are at last in heaven, we are like Jesus. So what He had in mind for the beginning is finally accomplished.
3. State of Sanctification
Living in this world? Between the day you are saved, justification and the day you are in heaven like Jesus, glorification? All of your life you go through a state called sanctification. That is from a Hebrew word, which cannot be directly translated. But it really means to holify, to make holy. Who alone is holy? Jesus!
For instance, unfaithfulness says:
I can't trust God. I can't pay my tithes. I steal God's tithe every Sunday. I just can't figure out how I can do that. If you can't trust God with all of your riches, He's good at taking it all away, so that you get down when you can't do anything but Trust God. That is why the Bible says that it is through many trials we enter the kingdom. That is why Jesus said in the world expect tribulation.
It's a process. How can I get rid of this? In the cases where suffering is bringing character in Christ likeness, maybe if you ask him he will tell you what he is trying to do. In James 1, we are reminded that through trials and testing, He brings us to maturity in Christ. If any man lacks wisdom, let him ask of God and he will tell him.
IV. Remember The Sweetness Of His Person
Learn to rejoice more in who Jesus is than what He is currently doing. We tend to blow hot and cold in our spiritual relationship because of what God is currently doing. Our love for Christ, our relationship to Him is just wonderful when He is doing something good. But it is not so wonderful when He is not doing something good. We need to focus not on what He is doing, but on who He is. One day the disciples came in and said to Jesus that the demons are subject to us. We are casting out demons. We are raising the dead. And Jesus said a strange thing, "Stop rejoicing because the demons are subject to you, rather rejoice in that your names are written in the lambs book of life." You can't blow hot and cold in your relationship with Jesus by what He is doing. It must be consistently based on who He is, because that never changes.
V. Remember The Mystery Of His Ways
There is a difference in the acts of God and the ways of God. The acts of God are what He does. The ways of God are what He is up to. There is a difference in what He does and what He is doing. It was through Moses to Israel that God revealed His acts. But it was to Moses that God revealed His ways. It was an act of God to send snakes that bit them and killed them. But it was the way of God that taught them faith. It was an act of God to put Paul in a prison where he had his head cut off. But after 3 1/2 years in that jail cell it was the way of God to bring about the theological of the New Testament. It was the act of God to put His son on the cross. But it was the way of God to bring about the salvation of the world. Always look beyond what He does and ask Him what He is doing.
VI. Remember The Promise Of His Tomorrow
God promises in Hebrew 11 to do what He says. His words are unbreakable. God is never in a hurry. He promises to do what He says and He does what He promises. But He does not say when, always. With God there is no yesterday, today or tomorrow. It is right now. God will not be bound to the limitations of time and space that He himself has created. He is their Lord, they are not His lord. They are His servants. So God transcends time. Why did the saints in Hebrew 11 suffer? The saints believed the promise of God. They did not live long enough to see the main thing they believed. What they looked forward to seeing was not perfected or completed or realized until in our lives. We did live to see what they didn't live to see. What God has promised God will do. Whether or not we ever live to see it. In God's time when it happens, first of all, it will be right now and it will be on time.
VII. Remember The Sweetness Of His Presence
The saints have said that the suffering has been worth it. Because the way it brought Jesus into their lives. I would not have missed the furnace because of the fellowship with the Son of God that I found in a way that I have never known before. Midway in the 23 Psalm everything changes. The storm clouds gather, the lighting flashes. Death is inevitable. Now David is walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Everything good is now bad. In the last half of the psalm, David is no longer talking about the Lord. Now he is talking to the Lord. The valley has brought the shepherd close to the heart of the sheep.