Utterly Amazed

Call to Worship

To all who are weary and in need of rest

To all who are mourning and longing for comfort

To all who fail and desire strength

To all who sin and need a Savior

We, Moraga Valley Presbyterian Church, open wide our arms

With a welcome from Jesus Christ.

He is the ally to the guilty and failing

He is the comfort to those who are mourning

He is the joy of our hearts

And He is the friend of sinners

So Come, worship Him with us.

Service Challenge

We talked several weeks ago and said that today we would take a few minutes in our service for you to tell the brief story of “who and how” you’ve witnessed as they’re serving! It’s your job to catch somebody in the act, and then to encourage the body of Christ.

I think this morning, as followers of we Jesus we live between the tension of "not letting our right hand know what our left hand is doing," and "letting our light shine before others."

Scripture Reading & Reader

Scripture Reader: Brandon Morrow

Habakkuk 1:1–11 NIV

The prophecy that Habakkuk the prophet received. How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted. “Look at the nations and watch— and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told. I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwellings not their own. They are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves and promote their own honor. Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong; their horsemen come from afar. They fly like an eagle swooping to devour; they all come intent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind and gather prisoners like sand. They mock kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities; by building earthen ramps they capture them. Then they sweep past like the wind and go on— guilty people, whose own strength is their god.”

Post-Scripture Prayer

Pray.

Body of Sermon

Good morning! Glad you’re with us this morning! My name is Brandon Morrow, I get to serve as the Lead Pastor, and one of the pastors on our Preaching Team. Before we jump into something new this morning, I wanted to remind us of our updated logo this morning for those who might have missed it.

SHOW LOGO

We recently changed our logo as a church to help refresh the story that God is writing in our community. You’ll probably notice that the most prominent feature of our old logo, the Cross and the Upper Part of our building aren’t there — any maybe you might be wondering, why?

Any time we talk about a logo, we talk about a story that is being told. In this next season, we’ve felt as if God is calling us to think beyond our campus, and to hills and the community that surrounds us. We think the layered approach center us on the story that God wants to write through this church in our community. A new logo does not mean that we’re removing the cross off of our campus, it just means that we have a new of reminding us of what God is calling us to as a church. If you’d like to see a short video about it, it’s available on our YouTube page.

This morning we’re going to start a short summer study through the book of Habakkuk. We’re calling this book, The Art of Grappling with God.

Habakkuk is one man’s conversation with God about how he’s struggling with his faith. Habakkuk is looking at the world around him and notices all of the injustices, and he does what any believing person should do: he prays about it and asks for God’s help.

God responds, and Habakkuk is completely lost. He doesn’t know why God responded this way. He can’t see the forest through the trees.

This sermon series is for anyone who has ever wrestled with, or wondered through, why does God bring about His justice in the most mysterious of ways? This series is for anyone who has ever tried to figure out God, and occasionally gets caught up on how God does things. It’s for anyone who has had a crisis of faith.

Let’s jump into Habakkuk 1 this morning and we’ll start to piece together what’s going on for Habakkuk, why He is praying these prayers, and how God responds to him.

Verse 1 tells us that this is a prophetic word, a set of future events that will take place, that Habakkuk receives from God.

While I think prophecy in the New Testament is less about foretelling something in the future, and more about, forthtelling the truth of God — the same base principle is at work: that God wants to commune with us, and as we experience communion with God, we should expect to experience His presence, and as we experience His presence, we should cultivate the voice of God in our lives. God longs to communicate with you — and the inverse expectation is that we communicate with God.

So much of what happens in communication with God, what we call prayer, is that we end up talking about God, and not talking to God.

Sometimes prayer is an internal, or external, monologue, where we complain about God — and we forget that God is someone we can complain to.

This is Habakkuk’s starting place. He takes his complaint to the only one who can deal with the source of pain that he’s carrying around. This is the beginning of his prayer in verse 2:

“How long, Lord,” — and this is the opening of so many prayers. How long, Lord, do I have to endure this season of poor health? How long, Lord, do I have to walk through this time of estrangement from someone I miss and love? How much longer until I finally have a day when everything goes my way?

For Habakkuk, he surveys his nation, the nation of Judah, the southern Kingdom of what we think of as Israel — he looks out at them and here’s what he see’s, verses 2-4:

Habakkuk 1:2–4 (NIV)

How long, Lord, must I call for help,

but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.

He see’s a people engaged in violence, who live their lives in unrighteous ways, who are hellbent on destruction, and everybody is fighting about God only knows what. He see’s a nation, his own nation, covered in the filth of sin — and he’s distraught.

I think what Habakkuk conveys to us, is that God doesn’t have a ceiling for what we can bring to Him.

Sometimes we don’t go to God in prayer, in frustration, in confusion, in desperation, because we think we have to have a qualifier on it.

Unless we speak in Elizabethan English, or unless we have some amount of togetherness, then He won’t be able to hear us. I think we have a terribly low view of God if that’s what we believe. This is why in scripture we have the full range of prayers, things that were actually said to God. You can read them in the Psalms, they range from Psalms of Ascent, which are songs of joy and thanks; and they are Psalms of Lament and Imprecatory Psalms, where people prayed prayers of loss and where people actually prayed against their enemies.

I think the prayer that God is looking for, as we’re in relationship with Him, is honest prayer. He can handle it. You don’t need to qualify it, “Dear God, you know what I really mean…” Of course He knows what you really mean, He’s God!

What is so interesting about Habakkuk’s plea to God in prayer, is that Habakkuk has been praying these prayers for a long time.

Look with me at verse 4, these are Habakkuk’s comments, “justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.”

Here’s the idea of this… at one point, Habakkuk prayed and believed there was a fighting chance that the people of Judah wouldn’t be overwhelmed by state of their affairs.

Over a period of time, the sin nature of the people of Judah went from, “it’s not that bad,” to, “we’ve never seen anything like this, before.”

This is a kind of prayer that a lot of us have prayed before. “When is enough going to be enough?”

And the reason why Habakkuk prays this, is because God is not a God who forgets His promises. About 12 years before this, a King named Josiah had renewed a promise with God.

God has always set apart for Himself a people, and there are so many times that we’ve strayed from Him, but He never falters on His side of the promise. He has said many times in scripture, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

God is a covenant keeping God, or a promise keeping God… and 12 years before this a King named Josiah acknowledged that he was living in a time that the people forgot how to be a people of God.

King Josiah consecrated all of Judah. He removed idol worship, removed false teachers, stopped false worship. He was on the war path for God’s people to come around to their end of the promise. Here’s how 2 Kings 23:24-25 describes it:

2 Kings 23:24–25 (NIV)

Furthermore, Josiah got rid of the mediums and spiritists, the household gods, the idols and all the other detestable things seen in Judah and Jerusalem. This he did to fulfill the requirements of the law written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the temple of the Lord. Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.

When Habakkuk prays these prayers, it’s as if He is pointing out to God, “How long are you gonna let them be liars and let them forget what they promised?”

Habakkuk is calling us to live between the tension of honest prayer and why some of our honest prayers feel like they go unanswered.

This is one of those questions that seems like it’s the perennial gotcha question for people who have problems with faith and the church… we ask questions like, “why do bad things happen to good people?” Or we ask the inverse, “why do good things happen to bad people?” Or, we live on the other side of something real that happened in our life where we feel, or we felt, particularly abandoned by God.

Can I say something about that?

God has no plans of abandoning you.

I think that’s the enduring promise. Pain, difficulty, dry seasons where we feel so distant from God — yes! He isn’t going to leave you, though. He isn’t going to depart His presence from you.

I think what Habakkuk is calling us into is a deeper season of trust… where, even though we don’t see it, we don’t feel it, we have no evidence of where or when it will come — He keeps His end of the bargain. He is the promise keeping God.

My experience is that God does show up.

Maybe you feel like you don’t have that same luxury, and you still hold a bitterness inside of you… but I have experienced God in the pain, in the silence, in the moments of unbelievable joy… I think there have even been moments where, years later, I felt like God finally responded to something I asked of Him a long time ago.

I think the majority of our Christian experience is that God often answers our complaints and prayers in ways that we couldn’t have imagined or dreamt of.

I want you to look with me in verse 5 because that’s what God says He will do in response to Habakkuk’s prayer.

In verse 5, the Lord responds to Him, and uses three little phrases that I’ve just had to underline:

Look

Watch

Be Utterly Amazed

God’s response to Habakkuk is an invitation for Habakkuk to witness how God will plan to bring about justice, how He’ll push His people towards right living. In verse 5, God says: Habakkuk 1:5

Habakkuk 1:5 NIV

“Look at the nations and watch— and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.

Again, He says, “Look, Watch, Be Utterly Amazed,” because what I’m going to do, is something you would have never imagined in all of your life.

Habakkuk’s prayer is a plea to God, “What are you going to do to get these people to wake up and pay attention?”

In verse 6, God says, “I am raising up the Babylonians,” I am raising up a foreign army that will reign down terror on these people like they’ve never seen before.

And verses 6-11 is this incredibly vivid description of how awful the Babylonians are. In verse 6, they are ruthless; verse 7, they follow no law but their own; verse 8, they possess a power and speed unknown to any other army; verse 9, they will surround you like wind and sand; verse 10, they mock anyone who stands in their way; and verse 11, they believe they are their own god.

Can you imagine Habakkuk right now? He’s got to be so confused. He asked God to help and save, in verse 2, not to crush these people.

I think what I want to do this morning is to try and give you a bigger picture of God… and God says this Himself, “what He’ll do will be an utter amazement to Habakkuk,” that Habakkuk will look back and go, “never in a thousand years would I have ever drawn it up that way!”

I think this morning Habakkuk is calling us to Look, Watch, and Be Utterly Amazed at how God wants to move in our lives and in our circumstances — and the way that He responds to us will be unlike anything we’ve ever imagined.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but God does respond to Habakkuk in a more than favorable way. It requires, though, Habakkuk’s complete surrender. Habakkuk will go all the way from being distraught and desperate to Him saying these words at the end of Habakkuk 3:18-19:

Habakkuk 3:18–19 (NIV)

yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

he enables me to tread on the heights.

Habakkuk ends this complaint with penning a song of praise to the God will help Him and Save Him, who has not forgotten about Him, who will not let His promises go unanswered.

And to every power and every force that forces us to go to the Lord in honest seasons of prayer, they don’t have the power they think they do.

This is what God gives us a peek into in verse 11. Even the most powerful forces at work against us, “whose strength is their god,” can become fruitful in the hands of God. Even the most powerful empires in the world will find themselves to be powerless and without influence as far as God is concerned.

In the end, it’s going to be a surprise to everyone… that Babylon, in the grand scheme of human existence, had a relatively short lived military campaign… it will be a surprise that God’s people will endure the scourge that is Babylon.

God is not immune to surprising us with how He brings about His plan of redeeming the people He loves. Listen to this from Pastor Ray Ortlund in Nashville.

What does God's work in the past teach us? Not how we can box him in, but how we've got to stay open because He does things we're not looking for.

He never acts out of character. He never violates His own word. He is always true to himself, but He is never at a loss for new breakthroughs. Think about it all through the Bible.

Israel was cornered at the Red Sea. The Egyptian army was bearing down on them and what happened? The sea opened up. Nobody was expecting that. The whole world was stumbling in darkness. With no way forward. What happened? The Savior of the world was born in a barn. Nobody was expecting that.

We were condemned in our inexcusable guilt without a word of defense. What happened? Our judge endured our penalty on the cross. Nobody was expecting that He was dead and buried — all the hopeful expectations He'd created were dead and buried. What happened? He rose from the grave, ascended to the Father, began pouring out His Spirit to make His murderers into His friends. Nobody was expecting that. And He is still full of surprises.”

Honest prayer in the hands of a God who does not falter in keeping His promises should surprise us, should leave us utterly amazed.

What God will do with Babylon will be amazing, and it was for Habakkuk; but what God did through His Son, Jesus, is an opportunity for amazement — not only for us, but for everyone else — and the thing we find with Jesus, is that when we experience something so profound, so unusual, like grace, that our response is a lot like the Lord said it would be, “He did something in our day that we wouldn’t believe, even if somebody told us.”

I want to give us a framework for honest prayer, using the words we got from verse 5.

I think that if we:

Look Honestly

Watch Expectantly

then we can Be Utterly Amazed

by what the Lord will do.

This week, take some dedicated time to look honestly at an area where you're struggling - maybe injustice, unanswered prayer, or a situation that has shaken your faith. Write it out fully if you need to. Don't hold back or censor yourself as you pour out your heart to God.

Then watch expectantly. Scripture says God's ways are higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth. So watch attentively for how He may be responding, even if it doesn't make sense at first. Keep your spiritual eyes and ears open through prayer, Bible reading, and staying attuned to His still small voice.

And when you see God's hand amazingly at work, worship Him! Don't try to fit it into your small boxes. Be utterly amazed that the God who keeps His promises would move in such a wild, redemptive way.