Believe
Notes
Transcript
Last week we discussed the truth that we are all addicted to something. And we need to admit that we are powerless, that in our own power our lives are unmanageable. Until we admit this, we will keep living broken, miserable lives.
As Paul wrote:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
A few verses later, he asks the piercing question:
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
Thankfully, he continues:
Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
There is hope, there is freedom from our sin and bondage. But that hope is not in ourselves. We must see ourselves for who we are, broken, miserable sinners who cannot change our condition. And see the one who can.
If you walk into a bookstore, you will see a whole section of books on how to change a life. There is the power of positive thinking, ways of working through and coping with hurts from the past. And those things are nice, they kinda work, but they don’t break chains. They just make them more flexible and paint them pretty.
If you go to a counselor, certain ones will do more of the same, telling you that you have the power to change your life. But, that is a lie. There is only one being that has the power to change a life.
The Powerful God
The Powerful God
Thanks be to our powerful God. He has the ability to do anything within his character.
On Christmas Eve, for the candlelight services, we discussed God. Who he is.
Who is God?
He is the Supreme Being; the Creator and Ruler of all that is; the Self-existent One who is perfect in power, goodness, and wisdom.
We could talk about his nature: That he is spirit, infinite, incomparable, and unchanging. He exists everywhere, knows everything, and has all power and authority.
We could talk about his character, that he is just, loving, truthful, and holy. He shows compassion, mercy, and grace. He judges sin but also offers forgiveness.
We could talk about his work. He created the world and sustains the world. He is executing his eternal plan which involves the redemption of man from the curse of sin and death. He disciplines and judges.
God is holy and cannot have anything unholy around him.
This is our God. But I want to circle back around to the three things: God is all powerful, all knowing, and all present.
I think about Hagar. She was the servant of Sarah. Some crazy things happened. Sarah couldn’t have a child, so she gave Hagar to Abraham so that they could have a child, which they did. Sarah became jealous, and sent Hagar and the unborn baby out into the wilderness to die. God meets Hagar there and promises protection and tells Hagar to go back to Sarah and Abraham.
Hagar names God
She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”
After Hagar’s son is born and grows to be about 14, they are sent away again. They don’t have any water. They are dying of thirst.
God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”
Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.
And the boy grew up and became a great nation.
Hagar was outside the covenant. But God saw her, knew her, and provided for her.
We have a God who is powerful and able to do above and beyond anything that we could ever imagine.
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
The Lord has established his throne in heaven,
and his kingdom rules over all.
“Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.
Who can hide in secret places
so that I cannot see them?”
declares the Lord.
“Do not I fill heaven and earth?”
declares the Lord.
This is our God. The creator of the universe. The one who is everlasting, untiring, all-knowing, sovereign, all-powerful, all- present.
Why would we turn to anyone or anything else to help us? We humans are a broken, miserable mess, and God is saying “I’m here! Pick me!”
It’s like: say I’m playing a pick-up game of football. It turns out the team that is against me is made up of Ohio State football players. I’m toast. I could pick a team of elementary kids, or I could pick a team made up of the Kansas City Chiefs. I would be silly to pick the kids. No offense to them. But we wouldn’t win.
Too often, we turn to everything else except for the God who is powerful.
The Powerful God Can Restore
The Powerful God Can Restore
You see, this powerful God can restore that which is broken.
We are in the middle of winter right now. There is death all around us. Yes, I love snow, but it does bring death.
In a few long months, however, spring is coming. The snow is going to melt, and fresh grass and flowers are going to grow. Trees are going to bud. New life is coming. How do I know? Because God designed it this way. Every year, God restores creation.
I think about the beginning of time. Before there was time.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The earth was formless and empty. Darkness everywhere. It was chaos and nothingness. And what did God do to that state of matter?
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
All of a sudden, blasting into that mix of chaos and emptiness, God created light and then he brought order.
This is what God does. He is the God who brings order, who brings restoration.
I think about Noah and the flood. Chaos, destruction, death, hopelessness because of the sin of humanity.
And then, Noah and his family walk off the ark and God makes a covenant with them.
Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
God gives them new laws to order society and places his rainbow in the sky as a sign of the covenant, an archer’s bow drawn and pointing at himself.
This is what God does. He is the God who brings order, who brings restoration.
This is why he sent Jesus to earth. We are sinners, unable to change ourselves. And Jesus came for the express purpose of dying for our sins.
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
Jesus’s death, by paying the penalty for our sins, restores us back into a relationship with God, so that we can have peace with him.
Paul wrote to the Colossians:
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
He restores. Not just humanity, but all of creation.
For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
One day, when Jesus comes again that restoration will happen.
How do we know all this is possible? Because Jesus rose from the grave. His own life was restored!
The Powerful God can restore
The Powerful God Can Restore Fully
The Powerful God Can Restore Fully
And he can do it fully!
Listen to the words of the prophet Isaiah:
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
When Jesus died on the cross for our sins, he died for all of them, past, present, and future. Our redemption is complete.
So, in the words of Paul:
Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.
God has the ability to break the chains of sin and death in our life. He is all-powerful.
He can do it. Paul writes from experience. He was a man who murdered Christians, making other’s lives miserable in the name of zealousness for God. And, then he met Jesus, and his life completely changed.
He writes to the Ephesians:
That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
God restores. He takes our old sinful flesh and says that it has no power over us anymore. Instead, he gives us a new attitude, new desires, new way of life, defined by him and his goodness. We don’t have to continue in our addictions, our sins. Though often, we willingly choose to remain in our addictions and sins.
We are not able to change ourselves. We are powerless. But, our God has power to restore fully.
Do We Believe It?
Do We Believe It?
Such an amazing truth! But do we believe it?
If we want to be free from the power of our sins and our addictions, we must believe something. We must believe that God is the one whose power can fully restore us.
But, what does it mean to believe something?
Belief and action go hand in hand. Think about a snow storm. If a blizzard is going on, piling snow upon a layer of ice, most of us will not go out on the roads. We believe that the roads are unsafe, so we follow our belief.
If the roads are clear, we will jump in our car and head to the store, because we believe that we will be safe. We believe that the car will not break down. We believe that the weather will hold. We believe that we will be a proficient driver. We believe that the other drivers will be adequate in their skills. So, we act based upon our belief.
So, belief is more than knowing the facts about something and agreeing those facts. Actions reflect what we truly believe.
You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
Belief in God does not necessarily mean that we are a friend of God. Enemies of God react because of their belief, in fact they shudder and they are lost going to hell.
In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
Faith without action is not true conviction, it is dead faith.
Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
True faith includes knowledge, agreement, and trust.
If we know God truly, agree with God, and trust God, our actions will align with his will. When our actions do not align with God’s will, it is often because we do not know the truth of God, or we disagree with God, or we doubt God.
The result of this is that we put our trust in something other than God. Actions, rather than what we claim to “believe” can be a better indication of where our faith rests.
So, do we believe that God is the one whose power can fully restore us?
What is the sin that we are struggling with? What is the addiction? Because all of us are addicted to something.
Do we believe that God is the one whose power can fully restore us?
Do we believe what the Psalmist writes?
Praise the Lord, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
God has the power to fully restore us. This is the truth. Do we agree with it? Do we trust that God can and will? If that is the case, our actions better align with this truth.
If we believe it, our actions will line up with our beliefs. If they do not, no matter what we say we believe, we don’t actually believe.
If we believe that we are powerless to change ourselves but God is the only one who has the power to make that change, we will pursue a relationship with him. We will spend time with him through prayer and Bible study and the other spiritual disciplines. We will spend time with his people, knowing that he works through them to enact change.
However, if we say that we are too busy to spend time with God and his people, telling ourselves that we can just muscle through our problems and sins, even though we might say that we believe that God is the one with power to change, we actually don’t believe it. Our actions show that.
What do you believe?
Do you believe that God is the one whose power can fully restore us? How can I tell?