The Promise of God's Provision and Obedience

Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 30. We've gone through this up to verse 9. This passage is a description of what salvation really is in the Bible. In the New Testament, we see the same thing reflected in God's way of dealing with people. But here, there's an emphasis over and over again on three particular issues. One is that God makes a promise to His people that He's going to take care of them. All this is a reflection of the covenant God makes with us, that I will provide for you. And God's provision comes as a result of His direction to us. So He gives us direction through the law, and then He says, when you keep the law, as I've asked you to keep, that you will find these results that come, I'll provide for you. So He emphasizes this over and over again, and the emphasis falls in this chapter all the way through. He talks about it, first of all, from the point of view that a person who comes into this covenant relationship experiences the basic fundamentals of what God's going to do. I want to read from chapter 30, verse 1. When all these blessings and curses, He's talking about what He, in chapter 28 and 9. When all these blessings and curses I've sent before you come upon you, you take them to heart, whether the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God, and obey Him with all your heart and with all your soul. So He talks about what happens when a person strays away from God. You return to the Lord by obedience to Him, but it's not obedience with regard to the law. It's obedience with regard to your passion inside. God does not simply want them to keep rules. He wants them to find a passion of servanthood toward Him, to serve Him. So He uses the language heart and soul, and in this, He uses it three times in this chapter. Three different settings. Now He's talking about whenever you've drifted away from God and come back, you must say to God, I love you more than anything in the world, and I want to do everything you tell me to do, with all your heart and with all your soul. And you do this according to everything I've commanded you today. That's God's guidance. I will guide you, but you must follow the instructions that I give you. Now what God promises is, I will restore your fortune. I will give you the provision I promised to you. That's the first thing. The second thing is, He says, I'll have compassion on you. I will give you mercy and grace. We would talk about that in New Testament language. I'll give you mercy and grace. And I'll gather you from all the nations of the earth. In other words, I'll protect you. I'll bring you back to myself so I can protect you. Now He says, this is true. Even if you have been banished in the most distant places under heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. Now the promise is, that regardless of how far away you drift from God, you're never beyond His reaching out to you. No one ever gets so far from God that He doesn't reach out to you to bring you back to Himself. He will bring you to the land He promised that belonged to your fathers, and you will take possession of it, restore you to what you've lost. He will make you more prosperous. See this word again. I'm going to restore to you what you left, and again I'll renew the covenant. I will provide the needs that you have, and you'll be even better off than your fathers, forefathers as they were receiving the blessings that I gave them. The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and your descendants so that you will love Him with all your heart and with all your soul. What He's describing here is this return of Israel to God would result in God meeting them. I will do something inside of you so that your passion for Me will be strong and powerful. The Lord your God will put all the curses on your enemies. I will protect you by cursing them who hate you and persecute you, and you again will obey the Lord and follow His commands. This obedience and following the commands He gives. Now verse 9 picks up again, and you'll see the same kind of instruction. Then the Lord your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands, in the fruit of your womb, and the young of your livestock, and the crops of your land. Prosperity. God promises prosperity. Now when you hear people on the television talk about prosperity, sometimes they're talking about driving Rolls Royces or having fabulous amounts of money, what He really promises is the things that you do will be productive. Your cattle will have babies, or calves, or I don't know what you have, you have a camel, what it has. I don't know what it has, but a baby camel I guess you'd call it. Your livestock will be productive, and they will reproduce. Your crops will be productive, and they will produce the grain that you need, and all these, the fruit of your womb, the children that you'll have, and all of this is the result of the work of your hands. What you set out to do will be productive. One of the marks of following God is He takes care of us, that what we do is productive. That is it brings to us the benefits so that we can live. That's a promise God makes. Now the opposite of that for the people of Israel was they lost their land. They were captured, taken away into a foreign place so that God took His hand away from them and the productivity was not there. There is a certain promise that God makes that if we're faithful to Him, obey what He asks us to do, He will take care of us financially. It's not that He promises we will have untold wealth, but that we will have what we need, and that our work will actually be productive. You will hear people talk once in a while about the fact that no matter how hard they work or what they do, nothing seems to be, they can't get ahead. That shouldn't be true for the follower of Christ. For the promise God makes to us is your hands when you do your work will make something productive for you financially, economically. It's not that we want to shy away from the promise that God makes about financial provision, but it is made in the sense of taking care of us so we have what we need to be able to live. That's God's promise to us. Then he said, the Lord will again delight in you and make you prosperous. Again that word is used, the word prosperous, prosperity. The Lord delights in you and the result of His delighting in you is to bless you. So that our faithfulness to God has a consequence in God's eyes. Why would this matter to God? Well it's the covenant He makes with us. This is my promise to you. If you will place your life in my hands and you will surrender your will to me and live in obedience to the way I want you to live, I promise to take care of you. The law was given as a guide so they had the guidance there. You will follow that guidance. You will do what I have told you to do. I will respond to that by taking care of you. I will provide your physical needs, your material needs. In the New Testament we see the promise of the spiritual needs being provided. Here he reflects to that. Our obedience results in God being pleased with us. The relationship between ourselves and God is enhanced because He sees our faithfulness to do what He has asked us to do. So God will delight in you and make you prosperous again. Three times in this passage, in this paragraph, in this first section of chapter 30, he emphasizes that. Four times he emphasizes following God or obeying God. See actually five, six of them. Obedience is the key ingredient, verse 2, 7, 6, and where he talks about circumcising your heart. It is giving an attitude of submission and obedience to God and then following God and obeying Him. The emphasis in this chapter is our obedience to God and surrendering to His will. All of the consequences come from this. Now he sets it apart from legalism because he says all of this submission is from the heart and soul of a person. The passion of a person to serve and love God and the passion to be obedient to Him. God looks not for the person who can keep the most rules, but a person who loves Him with all of the inside of themselves. Many people can keep rules and laws without loving God. They're trying to get God to do something good for them. They're trying to make sure that God blesses them. What God is looking for is our respect and trust in Him. Our willingness to place Him in the position of supreme authority in our lives. Now all of this will come about, he says, if you obey the Lord your God and keep His commands and decrees, those that are written in the book of the law, and turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. What God is setting them up for is to understand exactly what it means to be a follower of Christ. The same thing is true. What God wants is not for us to believe that God exists, but what He wants us to do is to render our lives as submitted to His authority so that we love God and want to do what He tells us. We trust God and act in obedience to what He says is the right things. Here's where the hard part comes. What God asks us to do is contrary sometimes to what appears to us to be proper and correct, that is, in our human nature, or even possible. Sometimes it seems impossible because God asks us to take steps of trust. I'm asking you to do this even though it looks like to you it will be dangerous, I want you to do it. I've asked you to do it. Dangerous in the sense of sometimes God asks people to go on missionary trips that their lives are really in danger. Many of our missionaries serve in places where their names can't even be known because they're in danger if people knew they were missionaries. Sometimes He asks us to do things that simply risk our reputation. Will people think I'm a nut if I talk about God? Will people think there's something weird about me if I tell them I trust God about the things of my life? All of the life of journey with Christ cannot come without risks. And what He asks us to do is to believe that the commands and instructions He gives us are reliable, that is, if we do them, we will find the benefits that He said will come. The other side of this is God does not give those benefits apart from our faith. You say I trust you God, but you don't make those choices and decisions consistent with what He wants. And the response from Him does not come to us. There is a great benefit of living your life submitting to the authority of God, and that's what Moses is trying to give to the people. He gives it in this sense, you're going to turn away from God, but if you return you're going to find God responds to you with grace and mercy, as long as it's out of your heart. No matter how far you've gone and drifted away from God, He will find you if you trust Him and He'll bring you back. And when He brings you back, your obedience and submission to Him will result in the fact He blesses you more than you would have been blessed even before you turned away from Him. What He's looking for is to love Him with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. That's a New Testament language. Old Testament, it's obey me with all your heart and with all your soul. Now when you do that, then all of the elements of the covenant come to pass. If you find out in your life that you're not having enough provision to be able to make your life work right, stop and check to see if you're obeying Christ. If you find yourself living in constant fear of the world around you, stop and check to see if you're trusting Christ. For the promises God makes to us come out of that ingredient, trust in Him and living in obedience to what He asks. Now what Moses is going to do to the people of Israel is set before them a challenge. Verse 11, now that I'm commanding you, now what I'm commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. I think there's a sort of a thought in our mind, many of us, that the Old Testament law was impossible to keep. The Pharisees in the New Testament made it such a difficult thing to do that the Pharisee who was really keeping the law couldn't really have a job because it was a 24-hour-a-day job to keep all the laws and the details of the laws. So it makes us look back on this and think, all these things are impossible. But when you look at the law that is given in the Old Testament, it's really pretty simple. If you find a neighbor's horse or camel in the ditch, you don't pass on by, you go and tell the guy his horse is in the ditch. Nothing hard about that. When you read the law, the Lord says, I haven't given you something that is beyond your reach or ability to do. Now when we look at the life of Jesus and we see that He lived a life of perfect submission and obedience, and you challenge someone to say, why don't you live a life of submission and obedience like Jesus, what's the first thing they say to you? Why? I'm not God. Do you hear people say that? I can't live like Jesus because I'm not God. The Bible doesn't define the requirements of God as beyond our capabilities to do it. When the Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, it doesn't mean because we have to. It's really telling us that all of us have chosen to do so. The words of the Lord are, I have not asked something that's impossible for you to do. Now it will be hard and you may need my help to be able to do it, but it's not impossible for you. We sometimes allow ourselves to see our own sin and our failure to obey as if it was beyond the possibility for us to do anything differently. The Lord doesn't do that. Now what I'm commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It's not up to the heavens so that you have to ask who will ascend to heaven and get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it. The law is not something that is way off separated physically from us. It's right here in our hands. We have it and we can do it. Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it. The law is not far geographically from us. It's not spiritually removed from us. It's available to us. Verse 14, No, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it. Does that phrase sound familiar? You've ever heard that before? The word is very near you. It's in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it. That's a New Testament language. God is very near us. Now in the Old Testament, he's talking about the physical books. You can find a book, the scroll, it's very near you and you can read it. You can have it in your hand. It's not beyond you. You can touch it. In the New Testament, he talks about it in terms of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is very near you. It's in your own mind. It's possible for you to be able to enter the kingdom of heaven now. It is present among us. What the Bible is trying to get away from is the idea that there is a spiritual world somewhere remotely away from us. And there is a physical world down here. One of the things that the story emphasizes is the fact that there is an upper story and a lower story. And one might get the implication sometimes that these two are far apart. It's not really the case. All that really is trying to get at is God has a plan. That's what he calls the upper story. God has a plan. There's something he's trying to work out. Now when he talks about the lower story, he's simply saying in the human level, we're trying to put the plan of God into practice. So when we're living the plan of God, the upper story, to use his language, and the lower story are joined together. They're all one. They're not separated from you. The world of God, or what he talks about in the story, the upper story, that world is not separated from us. When you give your life to Christ, the Holy Spirit enters you. And the upper story has come to live inside of you. And as you ask God to guide the choices you make, the choices you're making in this world are the upper story actually being lived out. So there's just one story in the life of the follower of Christ. For his will comes into our lives and directs us, the Holy Spirit gives us the wisdom to make choices, helps us to make those choices regardless of how difficult they might seem. And he does for us the very same things he's talking about here. He provides for us so that we have what we need. He protects us from the things that would destroy us. He shows us how our lives can be lived out so that they're a blessing to the world around us. So that what happens in us is Christ is incarnate in us. And he's come to live in us as the Holy Spirit came to live in Christ and directed his life so he comes to live in us. We see in Jesus' life the perfection of what it's like for God with his great plan to come and live in a human being. And as Jesus lived in his own life, this control of the Spirit inside of him, all the things you see in this promise in the Old Testament came true. The Lord provided for him at every turn in his life. Now he asked something different of him than he asked for us. He asked Jesus to leave his profession and to go out to be a teacher walking along the road without any source of income. So when Jesus came to the place where he needed to pay his taxes, God provided in a very unusual way for him. But it was because God had asked him to do something that put him in a position for that need. What you will find if you follow Christ is when you come to a place where one of those promises that God has made to you does not look like it's going to come to pass, you will find something extraordinary taking place. God will act in a way that is above and beyond even human experience. That's his promise to us. What I'm asking of you is something you can do because I've made it possible for humans to do it. You don't have to say, well if I could go to heaven I could live this way or if I could go across the ocean and get someone smarter than me. This word of God is very near you. It's in your mouth and in your heart. Now what's left for you is to do what it says. See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. God gives a choice to us. We could say God sets before us trusting him or not trusting him, but here's what he talks about. I'm setting before you the consequences of trusting me and the consequences of not trusting me. The Christian life lived out has consequences. The failure to live that life has consequences. I think in our culture we don't identify the evidence of God's work in a person's life very easily. We hesitate even as followers to think that the things God does for us are the result of our submission and obedience to him. But the Old Testament and the New Testament are very clear that our life of faith has physical consequences, material consequences and lifelong consequences. What God is promising his people is he's promising them a life in this world where the needs that they have are met and their life is secure and the direction of their life will in turn be a blessing to all the world around them. And that's what God promises to us. These things come as a result of us believing that the words of God are true and choosing to put them into practice regardless of the cost. That's what the Bible talks about by being saved. I'm afraid that people have gotten the idea that when you make a pledge of your life to Christ you're spiritually saved but the rest of your life you have to manage on your own. That's reverse of what God talks about. When you place your life in my hand, I take your life as it is, I bless your life and a consequence to that is eternally the same thing that I'm giving you in this world multiplied over and over again, far greater than this. For all God promises us in heaven is to provide for us, to protect us and to give us a life that is wonderful and productive. That's God's promise. So what we have here in this world is exactly what God wants to give us without the limitations of our human life in this world. So we begin to enter the kingdom of heaven here and we experience the kingdom of heaven and as we live in this world in that kingdom then at death this world is left behind and the fullness of the kingdom comes into play. That's why you'll find in the Bible salvation used in three different terms. Sometimes you'll find them talking about salvation as something that happened to them in a moment. I was saved in this moment. Like someone fell in the water and you pulled them out and they're saved. Sometimes you'll hear the Bible use the word salvation in terms of an ongoing experience. I have been doing these exercises and it has really helped my back. I'm being saved in an ongoing process in my life. Sometimes the Bible uses it that way. We are being saved. It means by that that daily as we make the choices we're supposed to make God is working out his redemptive work in our lives. Taking care of us, providing for us, protecting us, guiding us. All those things are the process of what's taking place and the Bible uses this in a future tense saying, and the time is going to come when the fullness of everything you've hoped for takes place. That's what happens when we leave this world and then go to the place God has prepared for us. So salvation starts with the promise that you make to God and you're saved. It continues as you live your life out in obedience to him, which is what Moses is talking to them about, and you find in the process of this you are being saved because God provides for you, protects you, he guides you. And when that time comes and this life is over, the fullness of everything God has for us then will become a reality. It's a journey, has a beginning, a life, and an end, which is another beginning for life forever. All of God's plan stops in one place. Do you believe me? And are you willing to do what I ask of you with all your heart and with all your soul? I will take care of the rest. Would you bow your heads please for a moment? I want to ask you to reflect on a part of your life that you find is not satisfying to you. I'd like you to ask God if there's anything he wants you to do differently about this part of your life. Now I want you to keep asking him that. Every day when you think of this part of your life, I want you to ask him, is there anything that you want me to do differently about this? Standing before God, a part of our life that doesn't match the promise he makes, allows us to see that there is some remedy that God has for that. And when it's revealed to us, he asks us to trust him enough to do exactly what he tells us. You've promised to take care of us, but what you ask is that we believe your words and with all of our heart and soul to obey what you've asked of us. Help us to understand that these are the words of life. In the name of Christ we ask this. Amen.