Knowing the Promises - Part 2
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Review
Prior to last week we looked at some of God’s promises taking what we’ve learned about the promises of God in general. But last week that all changed when we started to actually take a look at the promises that God has made to us.
We looked at three promises in particular.
The Promise of the Holy Spirit
The promise of a Certain Kind of Life
The Promise of the Peace of God
This week we continue as we explore 3 more of the promises of God, and they are:
The promises:
The knowledge of God
The presence of God
The Joy of God
Why these?
Why these?
Why not the good stuff, health and finances? Or kids and love? Why these lofty and somewhat vague promises that when I’m going through a crisis don’t seem to speak to me the way I want at that moment in time? We because as we will see, just as we need to have our salvation and infilling with the Holy Spirit taken care of before we can experience the knowledge, presence, joy, peace, of God, we need the promises that we learned about last week along with those we are learning this week to be manifest in our lives before we can claim the other promises.
So let’s get started.
The Knowledge of God
The Knowledge of God
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
Here is another example as to why we learned about the promises before we started taking a look at what they were. Here is a promise for Israel about one of our foundational promises, had we not looked at the fact that the promises of God united Jew and Gentile in the promise, we could very well think this didn’t apply to us, but in fact, He’s speaking about the church age here. Listen to what Jesus says:
O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”
Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane, lamenting the fact that the world has not known Him, but didn’t Jeremiah say that “they shall all know me?” But what was the purpose of His prayer? Look just a few verses earlier.
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.
It sounds an awful lot to me like Jesus was praying that people would know Him, and that they would even “be one with Him” and know that the Father had sent Him. He talks about the understanding that He is giving the disciples. What was He talking about there? Well the Apostle John gives us a clue here.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.
THAT WE MAY KNOW HIM! That is quite the promise!
The next promise is:
The Presence of God
The Presence of God
To know God is one thing. I mean, I know my wife. I love my wife, and each day I kiss my wife goodbye as she goes off to work, and I go into my office and get to work. I continue to know my wife, but she is not with me all day, and that makes me a bit sad, because I love to be near her. I know her, but I don’t have her presence. I get the occasional text from her, but it is not the same as when she is with me and I can hug her an talk to her face to face. But Jesus promises His presence. Think about it, it’s one thing to know about God, but it’s quite a different thing when we are worshipping together and we are led into the very presence of God.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
You shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’
“If you take away the yoke from your midst,
The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
There’s a promise with its corresponding requirement. The promise is that God will answer, He will say. “Here I am!”. But we have to take away the yoke - in other words, take away the bondage to expectations or standards that are not of Him, and further stop judging and accusing people for failing to meet those same standards. This is however, the flip side of that same coin from Matthew 28:20
teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
So rather than judging people because they are not able to keep up with your standards (the yoke of false expectations) He says that we are to teach people to lie according to Christ’s standard, and when we do that, we get the promise of His presence. See how that works? There’s more, because that type of setting expectations for somebody is really a form of envy. Look at some of the other conditions He puts on experiencing His presence.
Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Be content. Church there is a sin that steals from us the joy of having the presence of God in our lives, and that sin is called discontent, and discontent is what spawns envy. You can’t have the presence of God in your life if you are full of envy, and are treating people out of spite rather than out of love. And that brings us to our final promise for this week.
Joy in God
Joy in God
You will show me the path of life;
In Your presence is fullness of joy;
At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
See how having Joy in the Lord has its dependency upon something else? In this case the joy is dependent upon His presence. And that joy comes from His salvation.
I will also clothe her priests with salvation,
And her saints shall shout aloud for joy.
Saints, yesterday marked the second anniversary of the night I was told that I was almost certainly going to die. I bring that up because it leads us to our next passage of scripture about Joy.
Most assuredly, I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you.
“And in that day you will ask Me nothing. Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you. Until now you have asked nothing in My name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.
We are going to experience pain and suffering in this world, but God has assured us that when the pain and suffering is over, when we’ve gone through the trial, and at times even in the midst of it, we will have Joy. But what is the requirement for the Joy of the Lord? Ask for it! Notice what He’s saying. He’s saying that were going to go through it, just like anybody else. We’re going to have trials and suffering, but what makes us unique is that all we have to do is ask God for His joy, and we get it. He doesn’t say ask Him to deliver you from your trials “that your joy may be full”.\.
Putting it All Together
Putting it All Together
We have successfully discovered the basic promises of God that contribute to an eternity of peace and joy. If we had these promises and no others we would be truly blessed, for while these are the most basic of God’s promises, they also happen to be the most powerful ones.
Next week we begin to look at the promises that require that we be walking in THESE promises in order to obtain the others.
Homework
Homework
From our original list of six, identify the basic promises you still feel you’re lacking
Talk about how receiving these promises in your life can help you be more fruitful about obtaining the other promises of God.
The Basic Promises.
The Basic Promises.
Salvation (eternal life, abundant life)
Receiving the Holy Spirit
The Peace of God
The Knowledge of God
The Joy of God
The Presence of God