What a day! From stories of people seeking status and seeing their need for Christ to someone being concerned if they go back to their home country people would eat them, we heard God’s great work of salvation in people’s lives. We’re so grateful for the way God works in our lives and in the church for our good and His glory!
If you have been in church for any period of time, you’ve heard a lot of great stuff about prayer.
You probably could even say alot of great stuff about prayer yourself.
But I wonder if some of us, we’ve got this thought that’s way at the back of our minds that we wouldn’t tell anyone else, a nagging doubt, that actually has a whole lot more influence in our lives than all the nice things we can say about prayer.
To paraphrase John Calvin,
Doesn’t God already know what I need?
In other words, why pray? Why have prayer meetings? Doesn’t God know what I need and if He wants it for me, why ask?
We know that God’s a giving God and that He says Himself says He answers those who pray, but why? It’s not like He is sleeping and we have to somehow wake Him up by the sound of our voice.
Why has God designed it that we need to pray and ask specifically in order to experience so many of the blessings He has promised us?
I don’t know how you might answer that question.
I’ll give you John Calvin’s.
He says the very question is confused.
It makes it sound like the reason God has us pray is for His sake when really the reason God has us pray is for our sake. God wants us to pay Him honor by praying but even that payment is designed to benefit us. The command to pray is an act of grace.
For one thing, the absolute best place for us to be spiritually is humbly seeking, loving and desiring Jesus and by making it so that we need to go to him in prayer to receive the benefits He has promised us, God helps keep us in the most spiritually profitable position for us.
For another, the process makes us check what we really want. If we make a habit of depending on God for everything through prayer, we can learn to check our desires and evaluate whether or not we really are wanting the right kinds of things in the first place.
Still further, when we pray for something and receive it, it makes it obvious that we received it from God and that in turns helps us become a more thankful people.
What’s more, when we have a need, pray and receive an answer to pray, it makes us want to pray even more.
Beyond all that, this is one of the ways that God continually reminds us of His concern with our lives and His control over what is happening in our lives. We all know the difference between understanding something intellectually and then understanding it experientially. When it comes to God’s sovereignty and His concern over our lives, we know that’s true from Scripture but when we are in a difficult situation, pray and see God answer that prayer, we often know that truth in a whole knew way.
Plus, it keeps us from depending on our own abilities and methods instead of God’s. I know for myself even when I pray and God answers, I still can try to take the credit. Imagine how much easier it would be for me to be deceived by pride, if God hadn’t made it so that I need to pray.
1. He listens to me repeat myself.
2. He knows all of my failures and still forgives me.
3. When I repent, I often don’t even repent as well as I should, He knows my sin better than me, and yet He still forgives me.
4. I often take for granted all the amazing things He is doing for me every day and focus on the one thing I want that I am not getting which He already knows wouldn’t be best for me and even though I complain about that, He is still for me.
5. He is so much smarter and more powerful and better than me and yet He is willing to use me.
6. He knows the million different ways I could do something better than I sometimes choose to do it, and yet He still is willing to use me.
Africa needs biblical teaching! This video exposes some of the terrible teaching that is overtaking Africa.
“We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: Whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God.”
John Calvin
Love God.
Love people.
Two of our friends share a place to stay with another couple. The place is probably about the size of a kitchen. Unfortunately, the husband of the other couple is often drunk, so drunk that he ends up vomiting on the floor on a regular basis.
That is obviously not a great situation for a newly married couple and so they have been praying about finding another place to stay. We especially were thinking and praying about it on Sunday and then the next morning we woke up to find out somehow had donated enough money for them to rent a nice apartment for a year. It looks like they’ll be moving into it in November!
God works.
Seven.
God has proven to you that He is able to use mistreatment and injustice to accomplish your good and His glory.
He hasn’t just told you and shown you how to respond. He’s given you proof that He’s worthy of your trust.
This is not pie in the sky stuff.
Where you just have to sit there and hope that maybe this is something that can work out for good. WE HAVE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST PROOF THAT GOD IS ABLE TO TAKE INJUSTICE AND USE IT FOR GOOD.
And that’s obviously what happened with Jesus on the cross.
That was the greatest injustice in the world. There’s nothing like it in the history of the universe because while there’s been a lot of bad things that have happened to people, there’s never been another person who was completely perfect.
But Jesus was.
He committed no sin.
And yet He was crucified.
By the very people He created.
Talk about injustice.
And yet we can count the good that happened as a result of that.
In the passage we have considered, for one thing, through that injustice God was able to give us an example of how He wants us to respond.
Verse 21ff.
Not just that though, He used Jesus’ death to provide forgiveness for us.
Verse 24.
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.”
To keep going, He used it to change us at a fundamental level.
Verse 24 again.
“That we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”
And you know, another effect.
It restored us.
Or Peter’s words.
“By his wounds you have been healed.”
I picture two people standing side by side. One hunched over, wracked with disease. The other the picture of strength. As the person who is strong is whipped and beaten, the person with disease becomes healthier and healthier. That’s just a little picture of what happened with us spiritually because of Christ’s work on the cross.
Best of all, God used this injustice to bring us back to Him.
Verse 25.
“For you were straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”
While we may not understand injustice, the cross proves God is able to take it and use it.
Which is a pretty amazing thing.
It’s such a privilege to be a believer.
Because you know everybody in the world has to deal with injustice. You need to know that. Everybody has to deal with suffering in this world. I hope you understand that. Sometimes people use suffering as an objection to God, they are like how can there be a God if there is so much injustice in this world? And when we are hurting, we can begin to think like that.
But the thing is, people who say things like that, they really have a problem too because you have to ask them how can there be injustice if there is no God in the world. The fact that their heart cries out against injustice is a problem for them because there is no such thing as injustice at the zoo, if we are only animals and there is no God.
While we as Christians don’t have all the answers to injustice and pain and all of that, we don’t have to deny what our hearts are telling us, that there is such a thing as injustice, there is and we don’t have to give up and totally lose hope because while God has not told us every reason bad things happen to us in this world, He has through Christ given us proof that He is concerned about the injustice He sees in this world, He is not far removed, just telling us what to do, He has suffered and what’s more He has through Christ given us proof that in His infinite wisdom He can take all the injustice that we see in the world all around us and use it accomplish untold good.
I know some of you here, you are in very difficult relationships.
Others will be.
That’s just the way it is.
And you know it’s not easy, being mistreated.
Especially for a long period of time.
Especially for doing the right thing.
There’s hardly anything worse in this life than a difficult relationship, hardly anything can bring you that much pain. It’s so difficult it can be tempting to just let go and give up. Especially, if you are not careful about the way you think.
Which is why I want to encourage those of you are believers, to think like believers.
Remember:
1. You are not the first
2. God’s going to bring himself glory
3. He’s going to accomplish real good
4. not just about you and that person but about you and the Lord
5. God’s given you a unique opportunity to please
6. He’s given you an example and the resources
7. and given you real proof, he can take this situation and use it to accomplish amazing good.
“Like nothing else could ever do, the gospel instills in me a heart for the downcast, the poverty-stricken, and those in need of physical mercies, especially when such persons are of the household of faith.
When I see persons who are materially poor, I instantly feel a kinship with them, for they are physically what I was spiritually when my heart was closed to Christ. Perhaps some of them are in their condition because of sin, but so was I. Perhaps they are unkind when I try to help them; but I, too, have been spiteful to God when He has sought to help me. Perhaps they are thankless and even abuse the kindness I show them, but how many times have I been thankless and used what God has given me to serve selfish ends?
Perhaps a poverty-stricken person will be blessed and changed as a result of some kindness I show him. If so, God be praised for His grace through me. But if the person walks away unchanged by my kindness, then I still rejoice over the opportunity to love as God loves. Perhaps the person will repent in time; but for now, my heart is chastened and made wiser by the tangible depiction of what I myself have done to God on numerous occasions.
The gospel reminds me daily of the spiritual poverty into which I was born and also of the staggering generosity of Christ towards me. Such reminders instill in me both a felt connection to the poor and a desire to show them the same generosity that has been lavished on me. When ministering to the poor with these motivations, I not only preach the gospel to them through word and deed, but I reenact the gospel to my own benefit as well.”
- Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians
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