How to live today without knowing tomorrow

Genesis 1-11  •  Sermon  •  Submitted
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Introduction

For months Shannon and I have been saying that we almost wish we could just go ahead and get sick with COVID so that the uncertainty would be over. Then, we thought, we would know what it’s like and wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. If we could go ahead and get it, we’ll probably have at least some immunity to it. If we could go ahead and get the virus, we would be able to relate better to people who’ve had it.
It was a classic illustrations of the saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” Because as many of you know, the Lord saw fit to grant us that wish. Thankfully we both had mild cases of the virus. But that doesn’t mean it was fun. There were a couple of days when I felt just awful. It isn’t something to take lightly.
But definitely the worst part of having COVID, for me, was the uncertainty. When I went to urgent care to get tested three Fridays ago, the doctor told me mostly everyone they had seen had mild cases that really were just like having a cold. But then you hear about people who get very, very sick and wind up in the hospital.
And probably what frightened me the most was hearing the health department nurse who called to check on me say “You’re not out of the woods yet. You still could get pneumonia. You need to watch out for sudden shortness of breath, be on the lookout for a sudden high fever. If that happens, get yourself straight to the ER.” That doesn’t happen to most people, but the thing is, it can. You just don’t know how your illness is going to progress. So all you can do is wait and pray and trust.
That was really hard for me when I was sick. Because when you say things like that to someone like me, who struggles with anxiety, you’re not helping them. When you tell me to watch out for certain symptoms because it could mean you’re crashing, what do you think someone like me is going to do? You’re going to start imagining you have chest tightness. You’re going to feel hot and flushed because you’re feeling panicky. I felt both of those things over and over again during the last five days of my quarantine. You want to know when those symptoms stopped? They stopped when I went to urgent care and they did a chest X-ray. The doctor came in afterward and said, “Look, your chest X-ray was perfectly clear. There’s nothing wrong with you. Your chest tightness has to be your anxiety.” Funny thing - I never had chest tightness again. The tiredness, the body aches, the headache, the cough - all of that paled in comparison to what was for me the psychological torture of waiting to see if you’re going to be alright.
The title of the sermon this morning is “How to Live Today Without Knowing Tomorrow.” If there has ever been a time when we needed to hear this message, it’s now. What do these election results mean for our country? Will COVID ever end? Will life ever return to anything close to what it was like in March? Will our church ever be the same? Will we ever be able to have Sunday Morning Bible Study again? What about Young at Heart?
And the answer to those questions is that we just don’t know. We don’t know what tomorrow holds. But we do know some things about the One who already sees what tomorrow holds. And from our text this morning we learn four tools for living with uncertainty. Four tools that will equip us to live well and faithfully today despite our lack of knowledge about tomorrow. Four strategies: Rest, wait, obey, and worship.
The first tool is rest. Rest in the Lord’s faithfulness.

#1: Rest in the Lord’s faithfulness (Gen 8:1)

The first word is “remember”. This such an important word. Notice some things with me that will help us understand why it is so important. Notice with me first the subject of the word. Who is it that is doing the remembering? It’s God.
And because it is God who is doing the remembering, this means that when it says God remembered Noah it can’t possibly mean God had forgotten Noah. God has infinitely perfect knowledge of everything. Every sparrow, Jesus told us, is the special object of God’s care, so how much more God’s righteous servant Noah? No, God had not forgotten Noah. It must mean something more. It means not merely that God is calling Noah to mind; it means more than that. It means that God is calling Noah to mind in order to act on His behalf.
We find this throughout the Bible. God remembered Israel slaving away in Egypt. God remembered Lot and his wife. God remembered Rachel. The thief on the cross asked Jesus to remember him when he came into his kingdom. And in each of these cases the person God remembered is the person God redeems, delivers, rescues. One author I read this past week in studying this said that “God’s remembering always implies his movement toward the object…because of a previous commitment” (Childs quoted in Ross, Creation & Blessing, p197). God remembering Noah is a reminder that He has not forgotten, that He remembers His promises and is about to fulfill them, that He has regard for His covenant and is about to establish - in short, that He loves His people and is about to rescue them, deliver them, forgive them, show mercy to them, etc.
And if that’s what it means for God to remember Noah, then we would expect to see Noah delivered. And that is exactly what we see. Look with me at the second half of verse 1 and verse 2: “And God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided.” The word for “wind” in Hebrew is the same word for “spirit” in Hebrew. This reminds us of Genesis 1:2, “the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters” (NASB).
The author of Genesis wants us to make the connection. The God who made order out of chaos in Genesis 1 in the first creation is about tp bring order out of chaos again. He promised to preserve Noah and his family through the flood, in the ark, and bring them safely through the storm, and because He remembers Noah, he fulfills that promise, because He is a faithful God. And so what comes next is a reversal of what happened in chapter 7. The fountains of the deep from chapter 7, verse 2 says, are closed, along with the floodgates of heaven from chapter 7; the rain that began in chapter 7 stops in chapter 8. In chapter 7 the flood covered the mountains; now the mountains are visible again. And over the course of the next five months, or 150 days, the water will continually recede, until the ground is dry and Noah’s family can safely exit the ark.
It’s not just Noah that God is said to remember, though. Look carefully at verse 1: God remembered not only Noah but also, according to verse 1, “all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark.” God cares about the animals in the ark. We see this throughout the Bible, too. God rebukes the prophet Jonah because he doesn’t care about the city of Nineveh which has 120,000 people, God says, “and also much cattle.” The point is not that God loves animals just as much as He loves humans. The point is that if God cares for the animals as He does, how much more does He care for us!
Matthew 6:26 NASB95PARA
Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
This is our God, church. The faithful God who makes promises and keeps them. The consistent God who is always faithful to care for His people. Everyone who belongs to Christ is the object of God’s remembrance. God remembers you, friends. And that is something we can rest in.
Now maybe you don’t feel God’s presence. Maybe you haven’t seen evidence of His faithfulness - at least not the kind you would like to see. Maybe He hasn’t come through for you in the way you expected Him to. I understand. It is hard to walk by faith when you can’t see. But there’s always some light even on cloudy days. We have God’s word, the Bible, where God will always speak to us clearly and without our own thoughts getting in the way. We have the church, we have each other. Sometimes we need others to believe for us when we can’t believe ourselves. All of these things help us when not knowing what’ll happen tomorrow clouds our vision of God today. But just because the sun is hidden by the clouds doesn’t mean the sun isn’t there.
300 Quotations for Preachers from the Puritans God Loves Us Just as Well When We Do Not See

The sun shines as clearly in the darkest day as it does in the brightest. The difference is not in the sun, but in some clouds that hinder the manifestation of the light thereof. So God loves us as well when he does not shine in the brightness of his countenance upon us as when he does.

So that’s strategy number one: rest. Rest in the faithfulness of God. Strategy number two: Wait. Wait on the Lord’s timing.

#2: Wait on the Lord’s timing (Gen. 8:2-12)

Do you think Noah got discouraged and wondered how long it would be before they got off the ark? There’s an old Gordon Lightfoot song called “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Towards the end of the song there’s a line that says, “Does anyone know // where the love of God goes // when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” There had to be moments during the storm when Noah wondered that same things, especially as the ark soared up on the crest of the waves and then plummeted into the troughs, as waves crashed and rolled over the boat and threatened time and again to bury it or capsize it. But even when the storm was over, that doesn’t mean Noah’s trial was over. In fact, now that the storm had stopped, that’s when the real waiting began.
Why do I say that? Look at the time references in chapter 8. And count with me how long in total Noah and his family and his animals were in the ark.

and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days the water decreased. 4 In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat. 5 The water decreased steadily until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains became visible.

So it was a total of 150 days, five months, before the water even began to recede enough for the ark to rest on the mountains of Ararat. It’s sometimes said that the ark landed on a specific mountain, but really the Hebrew original here refers to a series of mountains. The ark came to rest in a place called “the mountains of Ararat”. We know where this is today generally, even if we can’t pinpoint specifics. It’s a place surrounded by Kurdistan on the south, Armenia on the north, Turkey on the west and Iran on the right. On the screen is a picture of a mountain in that area that might the mountain range. That mountain is more than 15,000 feet tall, so just because the ark came to rest on the mountain doesn’t mean the flood was over - not even close. It would be three months later - three additional months - until the tops of those mountains could even be seen by Noah.
Then Noah seems to have waited an additional 40 days before he starts trying to see if there’s any dry land anywhere.

6 Then it came about at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made; 7 and he sent out a raven, and it flew here and there until the water was dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove from him, to see if the water was abated from the face of the land; 9 but the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot, so she returned to him into the ark, for the water was on the surface of all the earth. Then he put out his hand and took her, and brought her into the ark to himself. 10 So he waited yet another seven days; and again he sent out the dove from the ark. 11 The dove came to him toward evening, and behold, in her beak was a freshly picked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the water was abated from the earth. 12 Then he waited yet another seven days, and sent out the dove; but she did not return to him again.

But then if you look at verse 14, we see how long it had been in total from the day they entered the ark until the day it was all over. The flood started in the second month of Noah’s 600th year on the 27th day, and it ended in the second month of Noah’s 601st year, on the 17th day of the month. They were on the ark for just under 12 months.
Think of how monotonous those days and weeks and months must’ve been. Forty days of rain. Five months of flood with no dry ground in sight. Forty more days of waiting. Noah sends out a raven. Then a dove. The dove comes back. After seven days, Noah sends it out again. It comes back. Noah waits seven more days. On top of this, there’s no record that God spoke to Noah again once they were on the ark until the flood was over. You know they had to wonder if they would ever get off. You know they had to wonder whether God had forgotten about them, or whether He would in fact keep His promise. Noah was a man of great faith, we know this. But even men of great faith have times when temptation and doubt assail them.
Ill. I can remember vividly the day Gov. Cooper called off school statewide when COVID first started. It was Saturday, March 14. We were visiting some dear friends of ours in South Carolina for the day when we heard the announcement. At first it was just a two-week closure. I don’t know about you, but I actually believed all this would be over by the end of April. Then we had to adjust our expectations again. Maybe we’ll be back to normal by June. That didn’t happen. Cases started to drop in August and September but now are soaring to levels we didn’t see even during the first wave. Right now, nationally, the U.S. is recording about 94,000 cases per day. That’s right at double the amount of new cases per day this past summer. We were told to expect a second wave, and we were warned it could be worse because it would happen during the cold and flu season.
Ill2. Now we wonder, How long will this last? Who in the world knows? It’s now been eight months. Sometimes when I’m here by myself during the week I get up and take a break and just walk around the building. I look in the empty classrooms and realize that it’s like walking into a time capsule - most of them haven’t been touched and are just as they were the last time we had Sunday Morning Bible Study, which was March 15.
Ill3. I have to be careful that I don’t get discouraged when I see the empty classrooms, when I remember how long it’s been since anyone sat in those chairs, and when I wonder how long much longer it’ll be before Sunday Morning Bible Study is held in those rooms again.
Not since the second world war have God’s people been given such an opportunity to learn patience. Not in more than 80 years has the church in America had this kind of a chance to learn how to wait upon the Lord.
Of course, the difficulty with waiting on God’s timing is pretty much the same as it is with waiting on anyone or anything else - whether its the timing of the traffic or the timing of our food coming to our table at the restaurant. Because in both the problem is that we are at someone else’s mercy. We are not in control. Our idea of what is timely is often not theirs - and more often not God’s.
And we certainly won’t learn about patience and waiting on the Lord with the gadgets we hold in our hands. Our smartphones are incredible resources and we ought to thank God for them. At the tap of the finger, all the accumulated knowledge and expertise in the world is immediately available to us. Information is more plentiful than ever, and yet we are more restless than ever before and more angry than ever before. Clearly, what we need is not more information. What we need the most are things our smartphones and laptops can’t give us. What we need is to grow in wisdom, in patience, in the fear of the Lord, in waiting upon the Lord.
What we don’t need is the division and polarization that we’re seeing right now. Families and churches are split and arguing and refusing to talk to each other over stupid things like whether to wear a mask or not or whether you voted for Trump or Biden or whether you support Cooper or Forest. Who cares? Politics is not ultimate; Jesus is ultimate. Donald Trump is not our Savior; He never was. Joe Biden will not be our Savior. He can’t be. That job isn’t open. Christ is on the throne, and He’s the only One who really matters. So if we’re going to divide over our allegiances, let’s divide over Him. How dare we hold a politician so high that we prioritize him over our family and friends or church members?
I like what one of the early church leaders said about this. This was written by Ignatius of Antioch in the first century during a time of persecution. Notice his emphasis on fighting together, as the people of God.

Labor together with one another, compete together, run together, suffer together, die together, rise up together, as God’s managers and assistants and servants. Please the one whom you serve as a soldier, from whom you also receive wages. Let none of you be found a deserter. Keep your baptism as weaponry, your faith as a helmet, your love as a spear, your endurance as a full set of armor. Let your works be your war-time deposits, so that you may receive your deserved savings. Be patient, therefore, with one another, in gentleness, as God is with you.

So that’s the second strategy for living today without knowing tomorrow. Wait. Wait upon God’s timing. And this is something we can learn to do. This is something God wants to teach us. This is something He will teach us if we will humble ourselves and submit to His timing. Rest in the Lord’s faithfulness, wait on His timing and, third, obey the Lord’s instructions.

#3: Obey the Lord’s instructions (vv. 13-19)

While we wait, we often don’t hear from God. That does happen. For reasons known only to Him, God does at times withdraw His felt presence from our lives. Not His actual presence, but our awareness of His presence. Even the psalmist could say, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1 ESV). But we should be waiting and ready to hear His voice, because when He speaks, we’re called to obey. And so we read beginning in Gen. 8:13 that when everything was finally dry and all creation was renewed, God finally pierced the silence and spoke.

Now it came about in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first of the month, the water was dried up from the earth. Then Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the surface of the ground was dried up. 14 In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. 15 Then God spoke to Noah, saying, 16 “Go out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. 17 Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you, birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, that they may abreed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.

Noah is the new Adam, called to unquestioning obedience to God. Only time will tell whether Noah will succeed where Adam failed. All throughout chapter 7 as Noah was building the ark, however, the author highlighted Noah’s nearly perfect obedience. Here too Noah is obedient.

So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him. 19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by their families from the ark.

Our natural tendency is not to move toward God. It’s to move away from God. That’s why God is continually drawing us back to Himself. And that’s especially true during trials and suffering.
Ill. Before Shannon and I got sick with COVID, we were doing really well with some good healthy habits as a family. I don’t say that to brag, because it took us a long time to become consistent. Before we got sick, though, we were having family Bible studies every morning, Shannon and I were praying together every morning. I’m ashamed to say that when COVID hit, all that went out the window. Now we’re finding it extremely difficult to restart those habits, even though it was only two weeks. It’s much better for us to keep obeying, keep being faithful, even when things are hard and you don’t feel good. It’s much better to keep those habits solid and strong during the trial than to stop and then have to start again.
COVID has changed a lot of things for all of us whether you’ve actually been sick with it or not. And the fact is that it is going to be for very hard some of us to get back in these habits once we’ve been out of them for so long. Noah was ready to obey God when the flood was over and God spoke once again. You and I should have that same readiness.
That’s our third strategy for living today without knowing tomorrow: obey the Lord’s instructions. It’s called walking by faith. It’s a muscle, and when we obey we strengthen that muscle. So rest, wait, obey and, finally, worship. Worship the Lord for His faithfulness.

#4: Worship the Lord for His faithfulness (vv. 20-22)

Worship was Noah’s highest priority, his deepest instinct, and his first thought when it was safe to exit the ark. And what does it mean to worship? It means to offer yourself. You can’t do anything for God that He can’t do for Himself. You can’t give God anything that He doesn’t already have. “Who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again?”, the apostle Paul asks (Rom. 11:35 NASB). What you can give God is yourself. Your life. Your obedience. Your passions. Your gifts. Your talent. Your emotions. Your mind. God desires all of you and all of me.
Verse 20 tells us that Noah offered a burnt offering. One of every clean animal that was on the ark and one of every clean bird. His sacrifice first points us to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ offered Himself as a sacrifice for our sins on the cross. He eternally and forever satisfied the justice of God and secured our forgiveness of sins. He opened the pathway to heaven and the door to a relationship with the Father. Now we’re called to offer up ourselves, which is what the burnt offering symbolized. The burnt offering was the only offering that was burned in its entirety. The other offerings were burned partially and offered, and partially eaten by the priest sand the worshipers. But the burnt offering was burned and offered in its entirety. When the burnt offering was offered, you were offering your entire self to God.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Now that Christ has come and offered Himself as the final sacrifice, we no longer offer animas. We offer what the animal symbolized, which is everything that we have and everything that we are. That’s what Noah’s doing here.
And notice how the Lord responds.

21 The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.

22 “While the earth remains,

Seedtime and harvest,

And cold and heat,

And summer and winter,

And day and night

Shall not cease.”

He smelled the aroma. That’s the author describing God in human terms. It means He was pleased with Noah’s worship. God is pleased with our worship, church. It doesn’t have to be perfect. We’ll never be able to worship perfectly this side of heaven. But when we worship God sincerely, even if imperfectly, God is pleased with it. He is pleased with you. And when you’re struggling to worship, when you’re heart’s not right, and you know it, and you tell him that, and you ask for his help, that itself is an act of worship. Because you’re saying “I am not right, I am not perfect, Lord, but you are, and you can help me, you can fix me.” That is worship that pleases God.
Ill. I want you to imagine something with me. Two people both are diagnosed with incurable cancer. Both are called the long and uncertain path of cancer treatment. Both have access to the same treatments, the same doctors, the same therapies. But both of them share the same emotions: fears, unanswered, questions, what-ifs. In the end, both have the same outcomes: they both reach full remission.
Ill2. There’s one more thing that these two people have in common. They are both extremely grateful. Wouldn’t you be? They were told there was a 20% chance they would live five years. Now ten years later, both are alive and well. And they are incredibly thankful.
Ill3. Here’s where they differ. One is an atheist, and the other a Christian. The Christian knows what to do with her feelings of gratitude. She worships. Every time she remembers what God has done for her, her heart soars with joy and thankfulness. When she goes to church and worships with her church family, the inhibitions she once had in worship are gone. Now she sings at the top of her lungs and raises her hands toward the sky.
Ill4. The atheist, however, doesn’t quite know what to do with his gratitude. His instinct, his impulse, is to thank someone. He thanks his doctors. He’s grateful to those who developed the treatments who cured him. But somehow that doesn’t feel like it’s enough. It doesn’t seem to go far enough or reach deep enough. His impulse to praise, to thank, to worship, isn’t satisfied with limiting his thankfulness to human beings. And yet, he doesn’t really know to whom it should be directed. So there’s a restlessness in his heart, a space unfilled. Why is this? It’s because we are made to worship.
This doesn’t mean just go to church and sing. It’s one thing to sing. It’s another thing to sing and worship. Charles Spurgeon said, “My friends, it is one thing to go to church or chapel; it is quite another thing to go to God.”
Noah went to God. And not just any god. Noah wasn’t worshiping just whoever happens to be out there. No, his worship had specific content. Verse 20 tells us that “Noah built an altar to the Lord” - the Lord, the covenant keeping God, Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of creation, the God of Israel, the God who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the God who is the Judge of all the earth, the God who is called the Father of mercies and the God of all comforts, the almighty God - the God of the Bible Noah worships here. And it is that God who made us, and it is that God who made us to worship, it is that God who made us to worship Himself.
St. Augustine famously said “Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee”. It’s true. God who made us in such a way that if we are not living lives that make much of Him, we will feel it - something will be off - something will be missing. Why? Because worship is as natural to human beings as water is to a fish. Worship is especially natural to us after God has delivered us from something as He did for Noah. And worship is one of the best ways to deal with living with uncertainty, because in a way that nothing else does, it gets our focus off of ourselves and on to the one who actually is in control of what happens tomorrow.
Remembering this will help us live today with uncertainty about tomorrow. Trust, wait, obey, and worship. Worship the Lord for His faithfulness.
Speaking of God’s faithfulness, that’s how chapter 8 ends. God makes a promise. In response to Noah’s offering He says, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done” - why? “For the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth” - in other words, the Lord is promising to be lenient with us. He knows how sinful we are. He would be right and well within His prerogative to flood the earth again and again, but His promise is that He will never again do such a thing. Psalm 103:13-14 tells us why:

Just as a father has compassion on his children,

So the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him.

14 For He Himself knows our frame;

He is mindful that we are but dust.

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And so, to make His promise more memorable for future generations and to make it more vivid, He repeats it again, only this time in poetic language. In verse 22 we read, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (NASB). The changing of the seasons each year is a reminder of the faithfulness of God and the mercy of God, that He will never again destroy everyone on this planet. It does not mean there won’t be a judgment day. It does not mean our actions won’t have consequences. But it does mean that until the return of Christ what happened in Genesis 6-7 will never happen again.
Church, how are you doing this morning with living in an uncertain world? We finally got the election results last night. How are you doing with that? We may not know exactly what tomorrow holds, but what we do know is that the most valuable treasure we have cannot be taken away from us no matter who’s in the White House. “If God is for us”, the apostle Paul asks, “who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31 NASB). And we also know that nothing that happens in Washington can ever stop the church of Jesus Christ and the mission of God from moving forward. “Upon this rock”, Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Matt. 16:18 NASB).
If hell itself can’t stop the church and the mission of God, then certainly what happens in our nation’s capital can’t stop the church and the mission of God. These things are certain. But exactly what tomorrow will look like, we don’t know. May God teach us to trust in Him, to wait on Him, to obey Him, and to worship Him, as we live today without the knowledge of tomorrow.
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