Benefits Of Trusting God Series

i. It is the LAW of the spirit that sets us free.

ii. A law only needs to operate to have effect.

iii. Our flesh interferes with that law’s operation.

c. This is why trust is a key ingredient to the Christian life.

i. God doesn’t need our help. He doesn’t need our efforts. He doesn’t need our ability…but rather, our availability to trust Him.

ii. Are you afraid that God is not big enough to deliver you from a temptation?

iii. God is able to make you victorious without the help of your resolutions.

iv. This LAW IN US of the Spirit will deliver us from the Law of sin.

v. It is an act of trust, of REST that permits us to experience this Law.

1. Not activity but rest. Trust is rest. It is not resistance, but rest.

d. Our failure or success is not important. Our trusting in Jesus is!

e.

d. Temptation’s purpose: (to arouse the flesh to take control)

i. When temptation comes it purpose isn’t really entice us to sin. (bet you thought it was…as if failure would separate you from the love of God?)

a. Temptation’s purpose is to cause you to act on your own (strength).

b. The goal of temptation is not to get us to sin, but to get the old, crucified, dead, carnal flesh to act.

c. Temptation’s purpose is to get the old man (flesh) to resist temptation.

i. Notice, I didn’t say “get the old man to give into temptation” but “resist it.”

ii. That is what happens when we make our flesh our strength.

iii. The bible says our old man is crucified and dead.

iv. Temptation wants it to act, to resist on our behalf so as to remain in control and for us to depend upon something already DEAD!

d. There is no greater impediment to the advancement of the kingdom of God than the fleshly efforts of Christians.

1.

e. Christians are to resist temptation not by in refusing to move toward it or by moving away, but instead by an act of trust, by looking to Jesus.

2. We must learn to look up, not to do something.

a. 3 choices when faced with temptation knocking at our door:

i. Answer it (give into it)

ii. Don’t answer it (resist temptation)

iii. Ask Jesus to handle it (trust in Christ who dwells in us)

b. Yes, oversimplified, but nonetheless, boils it down to flesh (1st two) or spirit (last choice).

c. Defeat is not caused by too little work on our part, but by too much of our own efforts.

4. . 6 "For he will be like a bush in the desert And will not see when prosperity comes, But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, A land of salt without inhabitant.

a. This will be the result of living and acting and working in the strength of our flesh:

i. “He shall be like the (dead) bush in the desert”

1. Heb. “kearar”; a blasted tree, without moisture, parched and withered.

2. If we trust in man, rather than God, we can end up like that.

a. We put all our energy into survival, so we cannot spare any to give fruit.

b. We cannot have those qualities in our lives that bless others.

c. We become dry, with nothing to give.

d. We live only to try to survive.

e. That is not God’s plan for His children!

ii. And will not see when prosperity comes – which describes the dead tree will not come back to life when water is given because it is incapable of life now that it is dead.