Sermons

Summary: Appreciation to God

“Who is better than our Father in Heaven?”

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." Helen Keller.

The issues of life do not seize because your tired, in life there is a commodity called time and time can be your best friend or your worst enemy, no matter what side of the fence you’re on you will have to learn how to navigate through the challenges that will eventually try to consume you. This is a reality that many will strive to ignore some will try to make light of but will not be able to deny, trials, hurts, pains, disappointments, etc.

Many people today live in a fantasy land of lies. Many believe in their minds and in their hearts that they can start life all over again, that they can bypass the responsibilities of life by allowing time to pass without any form of action. Today we live in a generation of joyful slackers. These people have no substance, no foundation, no urgency no sense of responsibility and yet they believe that they can develop, they can grow, they can mature by letting time just pass them by.

Grace is God drawing sinners closer and closer to him. How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the work, the flesh, and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstance, not yet by shielding us from troubles created by our own temperament and psychology, but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely.

This is the ultimate reason, from our standpoint, why God fills our lives with troubles and perplexities of one sort and another -- it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold him fast. The reason why the Bible spends so much of its time reiterating that God is a strong rock, a firm defense, and a sure refuge and help for the weak is that God spends so much of his time showing us that we are weak, both mentally and morally, and dare not trust ourselves to find or follow the right road. When we walk along a clear road feeling fine, and someone takes our arm to help us, likely we would impatiently shake him off; but when we are caught in rough country in the dark, with a storm brewing and our strength spent, and someone takes our arm to help us, we would thankfully lean on him. And God wants us to feel that our way through life is rough and perplexing, so that we may learn to lean on him thankfully. Therefore, he takes steps to drive us out of self-confidence to trust in himself, to -- in the classic scriptural phrase for the secret of the godly man's life -- "wait on the Lord."

Proverbs 3:5

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding;

1st Point “Trusting God”

One of the hardest things to do as a Christian is to trust. Meaning of trust is: firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Here we have a very well-known scripture that is not well practiced. In times of trouble in times of travail the last thing we do if we are honest is be still and trust and yet this is exactly what the bible tells us to do.

Psalm 46:10

Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!

And so we are faced with this reality this truth that in trusting God it is going to take the action of being still. In other words beloved before you take action to fix whatever issue is at hand you would find yourself waiting for clear direction from God. In our scripture it says to Trust in the Lord and in addition our next scripture tells us to be still and know that He is God. Trust takes place over time, trust is formed through relationship, through a pattern of struggles that were overcome by someone that has helped you and someone that has been by your side, by someone who has not deceived you. Be still and know that He is God.

The heart is a deceitful and wicked thing, many tell me that they know their hearts and I just look at them and not really comment on their statement but just kinda look at let them reveal to themselves that the bible is truth.

Jeremiah 17:9

“The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?

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