What To Do With Your Mess (3)

How To Live When Life Is A Mess

Today we will continue in our study that we are doing in Psalm 37 : How To Live When Life Is A Mess.In case you have missed the first two it is real simple.There will be many times that life becomes a mess for many different reasons and maybe completely out of your control.That just life.When David was old he wrote a Psalm of instruction to teach us what he learned during a time that his life was a mess due to evil people causing him problems.The first thing he taught was to Fret Not Yourself, meaning don’t let the mess control you.You don’t have to let it “Make” you miserable or anything else.We have a choice.He taught us that choice is to:1. Trust God during the mess. Don’t attach anything to what you are trusting Him to do just trust God.2. Do good - keep living the way you know you should be living and live in a way that pleases God.3. Dwell in the land - This means keep living. Don’t put your life on hold because of the mess, keep living.Make plans, set goals, plant your garden, just keep going.Then last week our main point was to do what verse 4 taught, Delight yourself in the Lord.Basically this means enjoy God. Let God be the one who is your satisfaction because of who He is not because of what He does.If we do this then God becomes what we desire.When we desire God for who He is then He becomes the desire of our hearts and we are satisfied.Now you are up to date.So here is what I think.My guess is many of you understand this.I know many of you are trying this because you have told me this over the last two weeks.BUT you are thinking I still have the mess.What do I do with that?Any of you there?You say I am trusting God, I am trying to live and I am focused on God.BUT there is still the mess.I have to run my business and just barely making it.I have to pay school fees in August and just don’t see how that is possible.I need food, I am sick and can’t afford treatment or medicine.Some are just scared because of uncertainty.Which by the way about ???? of people are like that.You may ask is this passage trying to tell me not to think about the mess or just ignore it?That is not what this teaches in any way.That is what we will learn today.The last two weeks were to teach us how to live so that the mess doesn’t control us.This week we will learn - what do we do with Our Mess?Read

Psalm 37:5–7 ESV

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices!

1 Peter 1:6 ESV

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials,

6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials,

This shows that you can rejoice and grieve or be hurting while you are in a mess.And so to think that the whole goal of what David is teaching us is to get to a place where we don’t feel anything because of Our Mess is not the goal.Nor is the goal to try and just ignore the mess.Never.Look at David, from the very first verse David points out the mess.Evil Doers and Wrongdoers were His mess.Which is where we start today.Identify your mess. Name it.Here is what I mean.Don’t pretend the mess isn’t there or that it isn’t affecting you.Identify what it is.See if you don’t do that you just say I’m miserable, I’m frustrated, I’m discouraged or Life is the pits.That makes you start to Fret meaning getting anxious and angry.Then the mess is controlling you.So identify your mess or name it.For instance think of your mess like this sack here.And put a name on it.Take a quick second and answer what is your mess.“Maybe whisper to the person next to you.”Is it school fees, is it money, food just put a name on it.That is what David did. Evil doers and wrongdoers.Let me explain what most believe David’s mess was.If you have read much about King David, he was a man that had a great relationship with the Lord but still had many trials during his life.My guess was the biggest one was a rebellion from his son Absolom.What happened was his son tried to steal the kingdom away from David.He turned the people against David by saying that the king was neglecting them and he went and started to say I am here to help.When David found out about this it was a mess.David felt the best thing he could do was to leave Jerusalem and get away before he was killed.A very big mess.Just like that, his son turned against him and all the people.That kind of a mess is enough to destroy anyone.So David left.But as he left the mess didn’t own Him and I want to read a bit just to show you.

2 Samuel 15:25–30 NCV

The king said to Zadok, “Take the Ark of God back into the city. If the Lord is pleased with me, he will bring me back and will let me see both it and Jerusalem again. But if the Lord says he is not pleased with me, I am ready. He can do what he wants with me.” The king also said to Zadok the priest, “Aren’t you a seer? Go back to the city in peace and take your son Ahimaaz and Abiathar’s son Jonathan with you. I will wait near the crossings into the desert until I hear from you.” So Zadok and Abiathar took the Ark of God back to Jerusalem and stayed there. David went up the Mount of Olives, crying as he went. He covered his head and went barefoot. All the people with David covered their heads also and cried as they went.

This is while David is on the run from his son and from his kingdom.He did good - V25 take the Ark back to the city - it was the right thing to do.V26 He trusted - in that If the Lord is pleased he can do what He wants with me.David did not insist what God needed to do, He did not trust God for a specific outcome he trusted God.And verse 30 He wept. While trusting He hurt.With this background to the story I think we can learn a lot from the next part of our study.You have named your mess. Right?What do you do with this?

Psalm 37:5 ESV

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.

5  Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.

Commit your mess to the Lord.Once you are doing everything else this is what you do with your mess and once again you have a choice.What are you going to do with your mess?1 - most will try and pick this up and carry it around while they are trying to trust God, do good, keep living and delight in Him.The messes that try and control us are heavy like this.What is going to happen if you try and carry this? Get hurt, tired, mad, bitter, anxious.There is a picture here.Commit. The word actually means to roll your way to the Lord.In our study roll your mess to the Lord.Why would you have to roll something? Any guess?It’s because it’s too heavy. Big mess - Too heavyI can’t carry this but I can roll it.that’s the picture. David’s mess couldn’t be handled on his own.Neither can most of ours at the moment.But you can roll it to God. Push it to Him.God I can’t carry this. It’s too much. I want to give this to you.This is where step two comes in.TRUST IN HIM AND HE WILL ACT.Notice again. You roll your trouble to Him and now you trust IN Him to and He will act.This does not say trust Him to do what you want Him to do but to trust IN Him. Let Him do what He wants to do with your mess.If you start telling God what He should do with your mess then you really haven’t rolled it to Him. You are still carrying it.This is what David did.Look at what David said.

2 Samuel 15:26 NCV

But if the Lord says he is not pleased with me, I am ready. He can do what he wants with me.”

If the Lord is not pleased and this is of Him I am ready. He decides.He can do what He wants with me.That is what trusting Him looks like.Here God please take this, you decide what must happen.That is trust.When you trust like that you have given it to Him.He will act, next week we will see more of this.The trust is to let Him do what He wants.Let me tell you what this looks like.One of the messes Tammy and I have had right now is her egg project to help school kids.She finds sponsors to help feed children in the poor schools. Actually 100s every day.But there is no money here right now and so every tray of eggs that has been sold has been break even or even a loss for a bit.So she put a little commercial together to raise money and it went to a few thousand people.Do you know how much money came in? ZERO.We were shocked.How can all our friends and family see this, they sent it to others and asked for help and not 1 dollar or even 1 bond came in.That is stress. That is a mess.The weird thing about chickens is you can’t tell them to just stop laying and stop eating.It’s a big mess. Our named mess is Need Money and Need it now.We rolled this mess to the Lord and said help.Tammy felt God say that He would provide but in a way He had not done before.Off to American we go.Before we left I got in touch with a friend I had not seen since we moved here that had been sick for a while.We have been friends with him and his family since I was 13 years old. We go to lunch and just about when we were finished he gets a phone call.It was his mom. He said you will never believe who I am having lunch with, Jeff Scorziell.I had not seen her in 40 years. 40 years!!!!!She said is he still doing that African thing?He said yes. She said I want to help, I am sending him a check.Can you believe it. It was just enough to do what we needed.How does God do that?What I learned again from that is God knows the mess.He cares about the mess.We were starting to Fret about the mess but prayed, to the best of our ability we rolled our mess to Him.We had both said this is too big a mess for us to carry we need God.At first we thought we had a great idea. Nothing happened.When we left it to Him, He acted just like David taught.That is what we need to learn.See we named our mess, we did our best to not let it control us, we prayed and trusted, we kept doing good, we kept going, we found delight in God, and rolled it to Him and He came through the way He wanted to.Again today you have a choice.It’s not to pretend the mess isn’t here or isn’t bothering you.It’s not a mess if it doesn’t.So Name your mess. What is it.Choice is do you want to carry it or roll it?Then pray and trust Him to do what He wants.He will come through. Maybe not what you want but in a way He is glorified.