Understanding Signs and Promises in Our Spiritual Life

Verse 45, "...all of these curses will come upon you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed. Because you did not obey the Lord your God and observed the commands and decrees that He gave you, they will be a sign and a wonder." Now catch that. These things will be a sign and a wonder to you. What does a sign mean? If you come to a place in the highway where there's a red sign, and it has STOP on it, what does it mean? Stop. A sign tells you something, a warning. One with an arrow, you're going to go around a curve. One with numbers on them will tell you the speed you should go. Signs are an indication of some reality out there. Some reality that warns you to be prepared for it. What he's saying to the followers of God, if these things start happening to you, they are a sign to you. You are not keeping the promises you've made to God. So he's not saying that every one of them are going to happen to them all the time. But he's saying over the course of all human history, you should be aware of the circumstances around you. And when you see some of these things happening, you should stop and say, am I keeping the promise I made to God? Now there are two levels to all these things. Every one of these things that he talks about has a physical dimension. You have a boil. It's a physical thing. Can you get medical treatment for boils? Of course you can. If you have animals or seeds that don't germinate, can you have a human solution to that? In agriculture, buy different seeds. Plant them more correctly. There's an answer to that. But there's also a spiritual dimension to life, and that's what he's getting at. If you stopped obeying me, no matter how hard you try when these things come, it's not going to work for you. And so you have people out there who've made a promise to God and said, I'm going to live exactly the way you tell me in the Bible I should live. And they try. I can't tell you how many people I meet who are really having a terrible time in their life, and they say to me, but I'm praying every day and I'm reading the Bible every day. But their lifestyle is so far from God that you can tell that they're really not living in obedience to what the Scripture says. I can't think of maybe but one or two people in my whole lifetime in ministry who has had an absolute collapse in their life and everything's caved in on them. But when you sit down and look at their life, you can see choice after choice they made that was not under God's control. See, whenever you make a promise to God, He expects you to keep it. It's not that you can keep a few of them and ignore the rest that you don't want to keep. It's not that you can start out keeping and then say, I don't want to do this anymore. Once you've made a contract, it's like buying a car. You can't just pay five payments and say, well, this is too much trouble. I'm not going to make any more. You can't get a job and go in and say, okay, I'm going to work, and after eight days you say, you know, getting up in the morning is just terribly difficult for me. I'm not going to do that anymore. And expect a paycheck. A contract that you make with someone requires fulfilling the contract to have on the other side the results of the contract come to you. God promised all the way in chapter 27 and part of chapter 28, every one of these things we've read that the opposite would come true for someone who keeps the promise and covenant they've made with God. He promised that that would happen. Now he's saying, whenever the curses begin to come, stop and say, is there something in my life, God, that needs to change? Now I'll tell you, not every bad thing that happens to you is a result of God's curse on your life. Part of it is we live in a world where there are diseases and we just get them. Part of the curse of the world is we live in a place where sometimes it doesn't rain. So sometimes they are signs for us. But we are to look at all of these signs to say, is there something I should be doing differently? Now, he's not simply saying, correcting a little behavior. He's saying, say to me, I am making this promise to you. I'm going to live by what you say as the guide for my life. And when you do, then if I am involved in bringing these curses to you, I'll stop. And they'll go away. You see, you can make great decisions financially. You can make great decisions financially and still have your financial world collapse on you. We saw in 2007 and 8, 9, a lot of people who made good choices come to bankruptcy. Bad times just catch everyone. But what God is saying is, sometimes you can do all the things you want to. Say, I'm going to get married, I'm going to build a house, I'm going to do these things. You've done everything you can, but no matter how hard you work, it seems like everything slips through your fingers. It's time to stop and say, maybe God is talking to me. And listen and look inside of yourself to see what's there. What God says is, there's two dimensions to this world. One of them is the physical world in which you can go to people and they say, I'll tell you what your problem is, go to the doctor. The other one is the spiritual world in which you say, God, what do you have to say? And he says, humble yourself before me. I'm trying to do something in your life. So you listen, he said, because these will be signs to you that the curses are coming. There'll be a wonder to you. What the Bible means by that is, you'll say, man, I can't figure this out. It's amazing to me. One thing after another keeps happening to me. It's just not right. It means you say, I wonder what's happening to me. You ever had that happen to you, two or three things in a row, and you'll stop and say, whoa, I wonder what's going on here in my life. These curses are a wonder and a sign that we just stop and say, these things are signs that I'm not serving God because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the times of prosperity. Therefore, hunger and thirst and nakedness and desire and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies of the Lord's sins against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you. You may remember in the New Testament, it says, the yoke of God is light and is easy and his burden is light. The yoke that he uses is a symbol that they've taken off the yoke of Lord's covenant and put on themselves the yoke of flesh. They're serving human flesh instead of serving God, doing what they want to do and what seems right to them instead of what God says is the right thing to do. That's what brings this curse. The removing of God's protection, no longer is he giving you wisdom to make good choices. You're still making the best choices you can, but he's not helping you. He doesn't give you the ability to provide for yourself, and so you keep working, working, working, and it just seems like the more you work, the more that runs away from you. You're trying real hard to be able to protect yourself, but it seems like no matter what you do, it slips away. And no matter how hard you work, your life just seems like it's miserable and worthless. All these are signs for us, signs that God gives us to say, Stop, wait, listen, and listen to what I tell you. Now, be careful for yourself and look back in your life. Have I ever made a promise to God, say, I'd live in obedience to you? Keep that promise. If you don't, you will find some of these things that make your life miserable coming to pass in you. Now, when you talk to God, he may say, well, I don't have anything to correct you with. And then you say, okay, this is just something the Lord is going to teach me through this event, something about trusting him. So sometimes he's come to us to teach us how to trust him more. Sometimes these curses come to us to tell us that we failed to keep our promises. But in every one of them, there is a spiritual dimension for those who follow God. Let's pray. We're thankful that you haven't left us in this world without some sign of guidance. You tell us that there are things that we can do to find an appropriate in our lives, your guidance, your wisdom, your strength, and the ability to do what we need. We know we live in a world where there are all kinds of things that happen to us, some that Satan causes, some that people around us controlled by Satan cause, some things that we just have no idea what causes them. But we know through all of these things, you tell us you'll give us the strength to face them when they're not things that are brought on by our behavior. And you tell us if they are brought on by our behavior, you will tell us what we need to do so that we will have both your power and your wisdom to overcome them. We have confidence that in everything that happens to us, you plan for us, your children, your people, to be victorious. And we claim that victory in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.