Faith and Trust in God's Guidance

I want to ask this morning special recognition to those in our congregation, those men who are fathers. And I want to ask, if you would, just to stand for a moment, all the guys that are fathers, would you stand please for just a moment? I want you to look around, a lot of guys here today because they're faithful in God's service and their worship. And I'd like you to give them a hand please. Now I'd like you to look at one of them, you may or may not know who they are, and I want you to ask this week that you pray for them. Would you do that? Pick one of them out, just pray for them. And you can say to God, it was the tall one, I don't know his name, or the big one, or the little one, however you want to do it, God knows the names of all of them. We're thankful guys for you being here, we're thankful for your commitment to Christ and your willingness to stand for him and be a part of his kingdom. It's an important ingredient to have leaders, and not only women who lead, but also men who lead. God gives us people as strong to be able to be examples and models. I guess early in my life as I was in a church, my dad never went to church, and the men and the church were examples to me about what it meant to follow God. They called them juniors in those days, little kids that come to church, and we'd have prayer meetings for our revival meetings, and sit in those meetings with men and hear them pray. It was a powerful shaping of my life. So you may not know the influence you have on other people. Some of them in those meetings, I didn't know, can't remember now, but I knew they were godly people and were models for me. It's important. I want to use a passage from Numbers, you used it in your lesson this morning in our Sunday school of small group time. Chapter 21, I want to begin a reading at verse 4. The emphasis on, in our small groups, has been on atonement. I don't know if you've noticed or not, but the word atonement is very seldom used in the New Testament. In fact, if you have an NIV Bible and you were to look it up, there are three times that it's used in the New Testament, only three, 99 times in the Old Testament. And the three that it is used in, normally the word that's translated atonement is translated reconcile or reconciliation. So there really isn't a word in the New Testament that's translated in our Bibles from the Greek that's really the word atonement. If you look in the King James Version, there's only one place that the word atonement is used in the New Testament. And again, it's the word that normally is translated to reconcile or reconciliation. The difference between those two is atonement is what God does inside of himself to forgive sin. Am I going to erase your sin or are you going to pay a debt so that I can forget it? It's all about God. Atonement is kind of a speculation about God. What's really important to us is how do you come to find a close relationship to God? Every one of us come to the same place. We do something and we know we've done something God doesn't want us to do. It may be just thoughts in our head, it may be words that we say, it may be actions that we have. But everyone who lives on the face of the earth at some time or other does something that offends God. And we feel kind of a wall between us and God. We know that there's disapproval on his part, disapproval of us. We know he doesn't approve of what we've said or done or say. That feeling of isolation from him comes to us. Sometimes we feel it so thick that we can never get through it. The Bible doesn't speculate a lot about what God does that enables him to forgive sin. But it is very clear for us that God has provided a means whereby we can restore that relationship or to be reconciled with God. This reconciliation comes as a pattern all through the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, the same principles are there. How is it that God deals with us? Now the difficulties that come to us are a part of God's plan for the world. If you want to ask God to give you a life free from trials and difficulties, you're praying the wrong prayer. Because every trial and difficulty that comes to you has a purpose in God's mind for your life. He's shaping and building you in ways to prepare you to be more like himself. And it's the trials and difficulties and the mistakes we make and the sins that we commit that allow God to come to us and change what we're doing. These things are a necessary and essential part. When you read through the story of the Bible, there is one problem after another. One disaster after another. In every one of these, God is at work. He is at work more in these times of disaster than in the good times. He comes to us in those moments to say, let me show you what I can do that you cannot do. The people of Israel at this time had tried, God had led them out of Egypt with miraculous things. He'd showed them he had the power to be able to change circumstances and events. Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, said, I don't want to let these people go. They thought for a while it would never happen. But finally they were ready to go. Even their neighbors and friends came and brought them gold and special clothes and all kinds of gifts to get them to get out of the country after the final act of God came. They were free to go. A miracle occurred that no one ever imagined would take place. God wanted to instill in them a conviction, I have greater power than anyone in the world. Even the most powerful king in the world cannot stand in resistance to me. How much do we need this confidence? Because we run into trouble all the time and we think of people who are smarter than we are. We think of circumstances in the courts where we feel like we're going to lose our edge and we don't have an opportunity to get justice. All kinds of things come up to us and they can make our lives miserable unless we have one conviction. God is more powerful than anything that might happen to me and anyone that might come to hurt me. But the people in the Bible are a lot like we are. They didn't learn from one thing. They came to the Red Sea. Pharaoh behind them, the Red Sea in front of them, God opened it up. No one's ever done that before. No one's done it since. God wanted to tell them, it doesn't matter what obstacles are in front of you, I can remove them. You think of the obstacles in your own life, the things that you're trying to accomplish. Sometimes they seem overwhelming. I want you to believe that there's not one thing in this world that I can't change. They walked across on dry ground. When they got without food, He made something called manna come every morning. They would have bread in their yards. When they came to the place where the water was bad for them, God purified it. No purification, He just did it. When they came to the time whenever they didn't have any meat, He caused quail to come with such numbers that they were sick of eating meat before it was all over. Every single situation was life-threatening. The water, life-threatening. The absence of food, life-threatening. He wanted them to understand that the essential nature of life was in His hands so that they would have confidence to be able to do whatever He asked them to do. He got them to the edge of the land of promise and He said, I want you to go in and take this land now. I've given it to you. And in spite of all that God did, they said, we're afraid. They're bigger than we are. Their cities are fortified. They lost confidence in the power of God to do what He said He would do. Moses told the people then that God was going to punish them, but all that generation that had no faith, even though they'd seen all these things, would have to die. And a new generation would have to be raised. How's He going to raise a new generation with faith? He has to take them through the same kind of things they did before. And so you'll see when you read through the story of the people of Israel that they seem to keep running into the same kind of problems. They have no water. Last week you were talking about that. Miraculously, water came out. They have no food. Now they're in trouble. In this story, the people of Israel have been led from the very edge of Israel where they were to go in and take the land in the opposite direction back toward Egypt. Now when you're on a trip and you're going somewhere, it's sort of foolish to turn around in the middle of your trip and go back where you started from, if your goal is really that goal where you're going. So the people of Israel responded to this in a way that you might expect. They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way. They spoke against God and against Moses. It's a very common theme in what happens. We start out living for God, doing what he wants us to do. He tells us, you bring me, you give me your life and I'll guide you and I'll provide for you, I'll protect you. And so we start living, expecting all these things just to fall in place just like that. And then we get into a situation where we can't see the end of it. And we think, well, God promised me he was going to provide for me, but I don't see how he can. Look at all the problems that are in front of me. And we look at every single one of those and we can't imagine a way in which that's going to work out to our benefit for our provision. And what we do is we start complaining, grumbling, God, I don't know why you haven't answered this prayer for me. I don't know why I'm in this problem. I can't see any way to get out of it. You see, what they were doing was saying to God, we don't trust you. All the nations around Israel had kings. All of them had contracts with their kings. The kings would say, this is what I promise you. I will take care of you and I'll provide for your country, protect you. I will make sure that everything I can do to make this a prosperous nation. What I ask is you do every single thing I would tell you. The same contract God had with his people. On Mount Sinai, he asked them over and over again, are you willing to do everything I ask you to do? With one voice, all the nation, million people shout, we will do it. The contract made. Now he leads them up to Israel to get in the land of promise and says, now, go take it. And they said, we can't do that. They're too big. The problem's too big. We can't handle it. We don't think it's right. We'll be all slain. And so they leave. What they were afraid of was that they would all die there. And what happened to them is they all died outside there. No solution to that at all except they lost everything God wanted to give them. Whenever you face the following Christ, he leads you in circumstances often that are far beyond your capacity and ability to do them. What he wants to do is teach you that he is trustworthy. And every time you face something like that and you don't have any idea how it's going to work out or what you're going to do, and then it works out. Don't forget to stop and remember how impossible that situation looked before God solved it. For in those experiences, you are building in your life a sense of confidence. If you say you're lucky, then the next difficult circumstance you get into, you're going to have to depend on your luck. If you say, boy, that was something unusual, the next time you get there, you're going to have to depend on something unusual happening. If you're convinced that God has his hand on your life and he's guiding you, he's removing the obstacles, he's solving the problems, and you stop and say, God has answered my prayer. God has provided. The more you say that, the more you're convinced of it, the more confident you are to face the future. They started back toward Egypt. They were grumbling. Why are we going back where we came from? Why is this happening? They were doubting God's judgment. He was leading them. The cloud by day, the fire by night, he was leading them. They lost confidence in him. It's really easy to do that. A lot of times when people come to commit their lives to Christ and they start this journey, they make it as far as the first really big problem. Even though they say Jesus Christ died on the cross, the buried is raised from the dead, they look at that problem and it looks too big for them, and they lose confidence in God. It's easy to do that. The people of Israel were facing difficulties because God was training a new generation. He wanted this younger generation growing up to have the same kind of faith in him that he wanted their fathers to have, who failed him. So he was leading them through all the same circumstances they faced before. Here they were, going in a direction that they thought was wrong. God was going to show them why he was going to do it later on, but they were complaining. They thought God was not reliable to follow. Now I know when you look back at this story in the Bible, you say, well, how could they believe that? I see people every day that think that. They read something in the Bible and they say, well, you know, that was written a long time ago. I'm not sure that God still wants that, or I'm not sure that God's going to do that in our time. We have limitations that we place on God, not because they're limiting to him, but because we limit him. They lost confidence. What happened here was treason. Here is the leader of our nation. We don't trust him. Here is the leader of our nation. He's leading us the wrong way. We're not going to follow him. Here he is feeding us nothing, no water, no food. They were rebelling against God, claiming that he was not competent to do his job. This is the very first of the Ten Commandments. You're to have no other gods before me. If you're driving your car and you have a passenger with you, and you're making turns to get to where you're going to go, and the passenger begins to say, that's the wrong turn, you shouldn't go that way. Every time you turn, after a while, you get irritated, because what they've proven to you is they don't trust your judgment. That's what they were doing to God. How can I follow God if I don't trust his judgment? Now this rebellion against God, I'm smarter than you, I know more than you, this rebellion against God causes God to react immediately, because when we rebel against God and reject his authority, we become his enemies. A wall is built between us and him. That's exactly what happened in this situation. God looked at these people who were supposed to be followers of his and faithful, and found them to be his enemies. They detested the food that they were eating. They were mad because there was no bread and no water. And the fact that it was no bread, no water, and they didn't like the food that they had, they were saying to God, your provision for us is not enough. A lot of the difficulties we get into is we want more than God gives us. Our greed, our desire to satisfy ourselves, causes us to see God as inadequate in our lives. I want you to notice what happened. In this situation, God responded and reacted. We don't know how long it took for the complaining to take hold. It may have been days or weeks or hours or months. We don't know. But what we know is the inevitable result from God is plain. The Lord sent venomous snakes among them. They bit the people, and many Israelites died. I think sometimes we take our resistance to God and our rebellion to him for granted. We fasten on to this idea in the Bible that God loves us, and we think that that means he's also going to indulge us. It's not true. There are lines that God draws in which you step over that line in which he has no reason to protect you. The people who are complaining were encouraging other people in the congregation to look at God and doubt his capacity and abilities. And when everybody begins to doubt God and he tells them what they ought to do, then he can't count on all of them doing it. He needs to have people who are convinced and committed that God is trustworthy and he will take care of them no matter what he asks them to do. So God has to eliminate from his congregation the people who doubt his ability and do not have trust and faith in him. So the snakes come. They begin to bite them. People begin to die. The congregation is aware that what's happened to them is the result of what they've done. Now in your own life you will find at different times trials come to you. Sometimes if you say to God, why is this here, he might point you back to things in your own life that you've done that have caused this to happen to you. You know that this action, whatever you've done, has resulted in this action facing you. That's God talking to you. I want you to know that what you've done has created this situation. Many of the trials and difficulties that I find people having are the direct result of sinful behavior in their life. They're making choices that are bad and when they get disastrous, then they stop and say to God, I've made a whole bunch of really bad choices that you didn't want me to make and now I have a disaster. Would you come with a miracle? He doesn't always do that. Sometimes he lets us collapse under the weight of our own rebellion against him. That's what happened here. People died as a result of what happened. Others in the congregation said, wait a minute, we know what we've done and they rushed to Moses. They didn't have the Holy Spirit like we do so they could go directly to God. So they went to Moses, said Moses pray for us, tell God that we're sorry for what we've done and we want to make this right with him. Here's the beginning of a very important lesson. We don't have to be taught how to rebel against God. Our nature teaches us that. But when you have this awareness that your rebellion against God is really ruining your life, your family, your home, your business, whatever it is, and you know the connection, it's the result of the Holy Spirit saying to you, you are here because of what you've done. Change. Turn around. Do something different. They came to Moses. We go directly to God. We say to God, I see what I've done and the consequence of it. I have no defense except to say I did this and I was wrong. Rebellion with God always begins when you recognize your sin. It becomes conscious to you and you know you've done it. You say to God, I have sinned. I've done exactly what I should not have done. This beginning and accepting of the responsibility in your life for what you've done begins opening it up. A lot of people, when they pray to God, they want him to remove the trouble they're in, get them through the trouble they're in without accepting responsibility for their behavior. God will never allow you to avoid responsibility for what you've done. He's trying to teach us, as he did them, you bring into your life your own problems. The problems that you have caused until you come face to face with yourself and you measure yourself against what I've asked of you, until you do that, I can't help you. It's like if somebody's driving down the road and they're lost and they come up and say to somebody, I want to tell you, I want to ask you where I can get to this town. And if you don't listen to the instructions of the person, you can't get there. But first of all, you have to admit, I need help. If you don't come to God with that, he won't help you. Because it does no good to give directions to a person who thinks they already know everything to do. So reconciliation with God begins with the recognition inside of ourselves of what we need and what we've done wrong. Now Moses then was to pray to God like you would talk to God. God, here's my problem, I'm willing to make the changes you want me to make. Whatever it is you want me to do, I'll do it. That's what Moses asked. God's response was immediate. He said to Moses, now what I want you to do is take some metal, bronze, and put it on a stick and put it up so everybody can look at it. I don't know how they thought about that, but I've never been bitten by a snake. I don't plan to be. And if I had an opportunity, I would avoid it at all costs. But I think if I'd been bitten by a snake and almost died, I would be more afraid of snakes than I am now. They were asked to look at the snake on a pole in the sky. The very enemy that they wanted to avoid became the object through which God was going to forgive them. Now I'll tell you, looking at that thing on the pole did not bring magic to them. It wasn't like a magic potion. What God asked them to do was to say, do you trust me for my remedy? You know what happens a lot of times when God asks us to do something we want him to do, that he wants us to do? We look at his remedy for our problem, and it doesn't make sense to us, and so we won't do it. There's a story in the Bible about Naaman, who had leprosy, and he came to be healed and a prophet, he thought, would come out and lay his hands on him and pray for him to be healed. But he told him to go dunk himself in the river ten times, and he said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. That won't help me. We've got better rivers back where I came from. It wasn't the water that would heal him. It was obedience to the instructions of God that healed him. It wasn't the snake in the sky that healed him. It was that God said, if you do this thing, you will be healed, and their trust in God was what changed everything. I don't understand it. I don't think it will work in any way that I see, but I know you've asked me to do it, so I will do it. That simple act of faith reconciled them with God. Now you believe me. You know what they asked for? They asked for the snakes to be gone, but God didn't take the snakes away. They were still there, and they were still biting people. He wanted them to understand that he wasn't removing all the danger. He was simply providing a way for a remedy for the danger they faced. So when you ask God to help you, sometimes you ask God to remove the problem. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he says no. I want you to trust me and do the things I tell you, even though the problem continues. Trust me that in the end, I will deliver you. What was God doing? He's trying to teach this new generation of people that even under the most impossible circumstances, even the possibility of death, doing simply what God tells you is always redemptive, powerful, and healing, and the victory comes. They were going to face a lot of circumstances in which it looked like they would die, but God told them to go on, and they would win. In the circumstances that face you in your life, God is trying in every single one of them to see the limit of your faith. A lady told me one time, she said, you know, I've tried to have faith in God, and when things come up, I try to have faith in God, and it was so hard, and I trusted him, I trust him, and it worked out, and I'd think, whew, now I'm grown up here, I'm a strong Christian, and then no sooner does that get settled, then a bigger problem comes up. She said, I'm tired of this. It's like a first grader saying, every time I learn my math, they give me harder math. Every time I learn to do division, they give me algebra. You do that because you can't be educated until you learn, and you can't learn unless you're faced with more and more things that you don't know and don't understand. If you've pledged your life to God, and you're trying to live for him, every trial and trouble that comes to you is an opportunity God has given you to grow in your trust in him. You have two choices when they come, to look at your problem and get overwhelmed and mad at God, or look at your God and say, I'm going to keep doing what he told me, and no matter what it looks like, and then you will discover the power of God. The Bible is concerned about our relationship with God. He wants us to feel that he's close to us, and that we're close to him, and there's no wall between us, but there's not a one of us in which that happens all the time. Sometime, if it hasn't happened already this day, it will this week, you'll become aware that you've done or thought something that God does not approve of. In those moments, what he's wanting you to do is to learn, to acknowledge your sin, your rebellion, your resistance, to ask God to show you what he wants you to do, and to do it. And in that simple pattern, you will become stronger spiritually. You'll become more dependable spiritually. Your life will begin to reach the goal that God has for you. Believing with God must be an act of every believer, every day, all of their lives. And God gives us a clear picture. Recognize what you've done wrong. Freely admit it. Be willing to do whatever I ask you. And don't expect just because you've done that, that it's going to be easy. There'll still be snakes. And some of them will bite you. And the poison will be in your body. Imagine this. You're the people there looking at the snake, and the snake bites them. Lord, I was looking at that thing, and I thought it would make me free from that. No, you still have the bite. The venom is still in you. It could still kill you. But you just keep looking at that brass snake, and my promise to you is, you will live. Why? Because you're my child. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? I want to ask you, to simply ask God right now, Is there anything in my life that's rebellious to you? Before I finish that sentence, some of you may have heard God say, Well, you know what it is, because he's been telling you a long time. What are you going to do? Keep doing it? Stop and let God deal with this? Admit what you've done wrong? Do what you should do, no matter how dangerous and difficult it might be? That's your choice. If it isn't already deadly, I can promise you, before long it will become that way. For if you continue on the source of rebellion, God will bring judgment, powerful judgment. So you decide. If you are ready to make that change, you acknowledge it, and you say to God whatever you want. If you've never given your life to him, that's what he wants first. He wants you then to surrender yourself in obedience to him day by day, reading the Bible, asking him about all the decisions you need to make, becoming a part of a church family, working and serving him in any way that he asks you to. And in that lifestyle of obedience to God, whatever issues you have, he will take care of. Father, speak to us. We're open to hear anything you have to say to us. Give us a spirit of submission to you that we might be reconciled and at one with you. While you're listening to God and thinking, I'm going to ask the pianist to play. If God has talked to you about what he wants you to do, I want you to go through the process of reconciliation with him. If there's something that you know he wants you to do, and you want somebody to pray for you, you simply come to the front, I'll be here, Rusty will be here. We can pray with you. If God's been talking to you about baptism or joining the church or making a commitment to him, you do that, or they'll hang over you the uncertainty of your obedience to him. So this is a time that God talks to you. God bless you. God bless you. Would you stand please for a moment to pray. Father, I promised the people that if they listened to you, confessed their failure and rebellion, and asked for you to control their life, and they did what you asked them to do, they would find peace with you. You heard in our minds, every one of us, as we listened to you, how we responded. For those that have done that, I ask that your peace would come in a powerful way. For those who are afraid to trust you, I ask that you give them increasing confidence that your way is the only way of life. For those, Father, who are reaping the consequences of all the bad choices they've made in their lives, I ask that you give them hope. The serpent's bitten them. They need the cure. Give them the promise that you make of complete healing and a change of life. That they might not live in fear of disaster, but in confidence of the future. I ask this in the name of Jesus, our Redeemer, our powerful Lord. Amen. God Almighty, Lord of glory, you have called me friend. I am a friend of God. I am a friend of God. I am a friend of God. He calls me friend. Have a great week.