Untitled Sermon

Hey guys, I hope y’all have been enjoying your summer so far. It’s almost the end of June, which is actually crazy. Summer always goes by quickly but this year feels a lot faster for some reason. But you’ve decided to spend one of your summer evenings with us so I’m really happy you’re here. 

We’re currently in a series studying the book of Habakkuk. And if you weren’t here or maybe just don’t remember because it’s been a few weeks, Habakkuk is a minor prophet. Not minor because the message is lesser but because the book is smaller. Most prophets were bringing messages from God to people, but the book of Habakkuk actually shows him having a conversation with God for and about people. 

Tonight we're gonna look at the beginning of chapter 2, but I wanna pause and recap chapter one first because I know it’s been a minute. The prophet Habakkuk is looking at the world around him and is seeing evil and corruption, and it didn’t seem like God was doing much about it. Often, we find ourselves in similar places, right? Maybe you’re looking at the world around you or your current circumstances and you just see a lot of pain, sin, evil, etc. And you’re wondering why you feel like you’re not seeing God do anything about it. Most of us are in a very similar place to Habakkuk: we’re waiting on God to move. So Habakkuk prays to God, but then God responds. He tells Habakkuk that He's doing things that Habakkuk won’t even be able to believe. God is raising up the Chaldeans, aka the Babylonians, to discipline the evil surrounding him. Now this is not what Habakkuk was wanting to happen. Maybe he was wanting God to come down in the flesh, or to snap His fingers and change everything, I don’t know, the Bible doesn’t tell us. But we know that God’s plan wasn’t Habakkuk’s plan. But God is telling him that he needs to have a worldview that includes more than just himself. That the Creator of the universe can do so much more than we can imagine. And just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean it's “wrong” or “bad”; we just can’t comprehend the greatness of God and all that He can do. But then Habakkuk responds, and he doesn’t understand what God is doing. He knows God’s character, that He’s a Holy and powerful God, and that’s what’s confusing him more. Why isn’t God moving faster? Why would He use a Gentile nation known for oppressing others? 

And this is where we pick up in chapter 2. So what do we do when God’s plans look different than ours? We’re fighting this battle of anxiety and frustration because things aren’t going like we planned it. I think the first 5 verses of Habakkuk shows us what we do.

Let’s look at verse 1:

Habakkuk 2:1- I will stand at my guard post and station myself on the lookout tower. I will watch to see what he will say to me and what I should reply about my complaint.

In verse 1, we see Habakkuk’s posture in the midst of his frustrations. He’s simply waiting on God. But we can see 2 things from verse 1 about waiting.

First we see that, 

Waiting in obedience looks like patience.

Habakkuk 2:1a- I will stand at my guard post and station myself on the lookout tower.

I picture things in my mind as I read. So when I think of this image, I think of Habakkuk standing on this tall tower overlooking all the people, all the land, maybe there’s some like mountains in the background, I don’t know. But I see him all by himself. And this is well before phones and fidget toys existed, so he’s just sitting there with his own thoughts. Which is literally my worst fear. But here’s Habakkuk, waiting. Patiently.

Romans 8:25- Now if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with patience.

I really struggle with patience. Ask any of my friends, and they will attest to this. I hate lines, if I’m ready to leave before everyone else then like let’s go. Sometimes I go to McDonalds and they tell me to go park in spot 3 or something to wait for my food and that just about sends me over the edge. So patience is really hard for me. But here Habakkuk is, waiting patiently.

I wanna emphasize that waiting patiently is us responding to God in obedience. Because often we wait, but it’s not patiently. Because like it or not, you’re still going to be waiting. You can’t force God to move. So now it's about your heart posture in the waiting. Are you waiting bitterly? Are you complaining the whole way? Or are you patient?

Patience is defined as the capacity to accept or tolerate delays, hardships, or provocation without becoming annoyed, upset, or anxious. We wait on God with joy, knowing that His plans are great and are beyond what we could even believe.

So waiting in obedience looks like patience, but what else does verse 1 show us.

Habakkuk 2:1b- I will watch to see what he will say to me and what I should reply about 

my complaint.

This shows us that:

Waiting in obedience looks like listening.

Habakkuk is waiting to hear God’s response. We say that we’re waiting to hear from God but we’re not actively listening for His response.

Did any of y’all ever do Friday Freeday in PE? Well if you didn’t, Friday Freeday meant that every Friday in PE we could do what we wanted. So instead of having some kind of scheduled activity, the PE teacher would just leave out all the game and activity things and we could do whatever we wanted. This plays an important role in this story I promise. So it’s not a Friday but it is PE. My class is sitting in our spots listening to instructions about the activity we are about to do. Then our teacher says something like, “the right row get up and grab the ping pong paddles”. Well I was sitting on the left side, but I also wasn’t really listening, I was probably off in a day dream, so all I heard was the “get up” portion. So I got up. Quickly I realized that I was the only person in my row that was up, and so did the PE teacher. And he tells me to sit on the wall. Do yall know what sitting on the wall means? If you don’t, lucky you, but I do. Sitting on the wall is the worst thing that can happen to someone. You had to walk over to the wall of the gym and sit down facing it. One of the most embarrassing things ever. And I really struggle with FOMO. Even at the age of 7, I was in the trenches. So this was a very difficult experience for me. Now it’s Friday Freeday, I told you this is important. And if you had to sit on the wall at any point during the week, you also had to for the first part of Friday Freeday while everyone else had a silly goose time. Once again, another awful experience for me. But all of this could’ve been avoided if I was actually listening.

The purpose of me sharing this traumatic event is to show that there’s a difference between just waiting and actively listening.

Are you actively listening for God to respond to you? We like to fill our lives with noise. But this noise can keep us from hearing what God is saying to us.

Psalm 37:7- Be silent before the Lord and wait expectantly for him; do not be agitated by one who prospers in his way, by the person who carries out evil plans.

Be silent before the Lord. Wait in silence. Maybe God seems silent because you’re not being silent. You’re not taking the time to sit before God and see what He has for you. You’ve filled your schedule with a million things, whether because you want to or because you’re trying to drown out the noise of your anxieties and frustrations. But all the while, you’re also drowning out God. 

So verse 1 shows us Habakkuk’s posture in the waiting. But then God responds to Him. Let’s look at the next 2 verses:

Habakkuk 2:2-3- The Lord answered me: Write down this vision; clearly inscribe it on tablets so one may easily read it. For the vision is yet for the appointed time; it testifies about the end and will not lie. Though it delays, wait for it, since it will certainly come and not be late.

God listens to Habakkuk’s prayer and sees him waiting and says, “I know you’re anxious but keep waiting because my timing is perfect.” We all have our own time tables and we want everything to be on our timeline. But these verses show us that:

God works according to His timing, not our schedule.

We’re used to an instant reality. Almost everything now is quick or instant: fast food, instant meals, communication, etc. We’re not good at taking things slow. We’re so fast paced that we’re ready to move onto the next thing before we finish the first. A company called Wellbeing did a study on our ability to stay on one idea or task. Their studies showed that over the last 20 years, the average time a person spends focusing on a single screen or task has plummeted from about 2.5 minutes to just 47 seconds. That’s less than a minute. 

We need to slow down. We’re running around and frustrated that God hasn’t answered your prayer yet. It’s really inconvenient to your schedule and your life. Here’s Habakkuk, with the same train of thought, frustrated that God isn’t doing what he wants Him to do when he wants Him to. All the while, God is moving and doing things. It’s just dependent on God’s timing and not Habakkuk’s. The same thing goes for us. God is moving. God is actively in our midst. But He’s acting according to His perfect timing.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-11- There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven: a time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to tear down and a time to build; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to avoid embracing; a time to search and a time to count as lost; a time to keep and a time to throw away; a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace. What does the worker gain from his struggles? I have seen the task that God has given the children of Adam to keep them occupied. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end.

He has made everything appropriate in its time.

God has been faithful time and time again in our lives. I look back at every circumstance in my life and I see God’s faithfulness through it all. I also see that His plan was so much better than mine. So why shouldn’t I trust that God will be faithful again? That’s what God is saying to Habakkuk in verses 2 and 3. 

Habakkuk 2:3b- Though it delays, wait for it, since it will certainly come and not be late.

He reassures Habakkuk that He will move, He will act, the evil and sin he sees around him will be judged and will be addressed. But in His timing. He just needs to wait patiently, and trust in what God is doing.

This leads into verse 4 which is a very popular verse in this book.

Habakkuk 2:4- Look, his ego is inflated; he is without integrity. But the righteous will live by his faith.

“The righteous will live by faith” is a very popular verse and phrase that I hear a lot. But what does it mean?

Well lets start by looking at how we become righteous?

2 Corinthians 5:21- He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This doesn’t say that if we go to church enough, read our Bibles enough, pray enough, then we become the righteousness of God. But because of Jesus' sacrifice, we might become the righteousness of God. There’s nothing we can do to make ourselves righteous, it’s only through Jesus that we become righteous. But how do we live by faith?

I think the first 3 verses of chapter 2 show us how we live by faith:

Living by faith is trusting God to move.

We’ve talked a lot about what this looks like so far so I won’t linger on this point too much. But are you trusting God to move or are you taking it into your own hands? We have to give up control of our lives and trust that God has it. Because the more we try to control, the more we move away from what God has for us.

If you didn't know, I am a proud aunt. My niece is about 1 year and a half old now and she’s the cutest thing ever. Here’s a few pictures. SHOW PICTURES. That’s Landri. She’s literally the cutest. I should have a video of her. SHOW VIDEO. 

It’s been so cool watching my sister become a mom. Landri completely depends on her for just about everything, because she’s a baby. She can’t just get up and do life in the same way that we can. We hear this phrase used called “childlike faith”. I’ve watched my sister care and love for Landri, and I’ve watched Landri depend on my sister. And that’s a good picture of what childlike faith looks like. And maybe you’re thinking, “Paisley, I’m not a baby though, what do you mean I’m supposed to depend on God like a child?” And my answer to that is we should depend on God in every moment of our lives. We need to depend and trust that God will move just as a child depends on their parent to take care of them. 

So living by faith is trusting God to move. But the beginning of verse 4 shows us something about living by faith:

Habakkuk 2:4- Look, his ego is inflated; he is without integrity. 

God is talking about the Chaldeans here. He’s saying “look at the world around you and how prideful they are.” Then, He contrasts this by saying the righteous live by faith.

So,

Living by faith is living humbly.

If we’re full of pride, we take things in our own hands. That’s what the world was doing. They weren’t trusting God to move, they were looking at themselves and all they could do. 

Galatians chapter 2 gives us a great picture of what living humbly looks like.

Galatians 2:20-I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Our life is not our own. Living humbly is living for Christ. Because when we look at what Christ has done and who He is, we see that we will never measure up to Him. We see that we desperately need Him. 

Our pride will cause us to look like the world. This is what verse 5 shows us.

Habakkuk 2:5- Moreover, wine betrays; an arrogant man is never at rest. He enlarges his appetite like Sheol, and like Death he is never satisfied. He gathers all the nations to himself; he collects all the peoples for himself.

God is telling Habakkuk to live by faith and not to live like the rest of the world.

In the midst of our frustrations of why God’s plans aren’t ours, it’s really easy to be tempted to look like the world. But:

Reflecting the world pulls us away from God.

We’re frustrated, we’re anxious, we’re angry, and we want some control. And temptation comes with the offer of what looks like control. 

But we just want control. We really like to wrestle with God sometimes. We want Him to move, give us an answer, do what we want Him to do; so we wrestle with Him. The name Habakkuk actually means “wrestler”. We see Habakkuk going back and forth with God throughout this book. And God keeps reminding Habakkuk that He’s got it. He’s saying, look at the world, look at the Chaldeans, they’re prideful and relying on themselves. Don’t wrestle for control, just let me have it. A lot of us can be like the Chaldeans. We become prideful and just want control. We so desperately want control of our lives that we wrestle with God for it. And we start to reflect the world.

And just like the Chaldeans in this passage, we go to worldly things to satisfy us. But the world will never satisfy us. 

I love the book of Ecclesiastes. It was written by Solomon, who is known as the wisest man to ever exist. But what’s interesting about Solomon’s story is that even though God had gifted him with wisdom, he still chose to do whatever he desired. And that’s where the book of Ecclesiastes is. Solomon is looking at his life after living in sin and realizing the world doesn’t compare to what God has for him.

Ecclesiastes 2:10-11- All that my eyes desired, I did not deny them. I did not refuse myself any pleasure, for I took pleasure in all my struggles. This was my reward for all my struggles. When I considered all that I had accomplished and what I had labored to achieve, I found everything to be futile and a pursuit of the wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun.

The world didn’t satisfy Solomon, and it won’t satisfy you either. Only God can truly satisfy our souls.

So we don’t need to reflect the world, we need to reflect Jesus. We’ve read about how reflecting Jesus pulls us closer to Him. But as I close, I don’t want to skip over an important point:

When we reflect Jesus, we point others to the Father.

We have such an opportunity to reflect Jesus in the waiting. We’re waiting for God to move, His plan doesn’t match ours and we’re frustrated and confused. But in the midst of all of that, if we keep reflecting Jesus, others will notice. You can plant a seed right there. We don’t only share the gospel by our words but we share them by our actions. And being obedient in the waiting reflects Jesus to others.

There’s a bigger picture here, a bigger story. A story of redemption and salvation. And God wants to use you.