Do You Have God's Best

Do You Have God?s Best

Jeremiah 29:11-14

Introduction: Our God is a good, kind, and loving God. The Psalmist declared "O taste and see that the LORD is good" (Psalm 34:8). God wants to give us His best. In fact, in many cases God is more anxious to bestow His blessings on us than we are to receive them. I don’t know about you but I want God’s best in my life. But the question is "Are we receiving God’s best?" Are we experiencing the full blessings of God in our lives? I am not talking about a "prosperity gospel" here. I am not talking about getting materially rich, being free of all illness, or achieving some measure of greatness. What I am talking about is receiving everything that God wants to give us, accomplish in us, and do through us, realizing that He wants more for us than we ask or think. In order for God to give us His best, we must be in a position where He can bestow His blessings on us.

I. Keep Yourself Pure

A. Jeremiah 5:25 "Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have withholden good things from you."

B. Thomas A Kempis (C. 1380-1471) - "The Lord gives his blessing when he finds the vessel empty."

C. God cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There’s no bargaining with Him.

D. Several years ago, an advertising banner proclaimed the virtues of a certain grade of motor oil: "A Clean Engine Always Delivers Power."

E. Jeremiah 18:9-10 "And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; [10] If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them."

F. We are living in a day when adult entertainment, sexual perversion of every kind, guttural language, pornography, nudity or near nudity, gross lasciviousness, alcohol and drug abuse, and divorce are accepted as normal. We are living in a day of moral decadence. Much of this acceptance has been brought on by mass media, primarily television, sexualizing our culture. By the time a child completes high school he will have watched twenty thousand hours of TV; and, ninety seven percent of our homes have television sets. Through this medium, our children are fed a daily diet of sexual suggestiveness in music, drama and talk shows. Our society has glamorized influential personalities for twisted life styles while mocking biblical virtues and marriage. The church, through taking a softer line, capitulating silence, passivity, neglect and tolerance, has contributed to this surrender to debauchery. Through compromise many have embraced the heresy of theologians like Joseph Fletcher and his Situation Ethics who teaches "whether any form of sex (heterosexual, homosexual, auto-sexual) is good or evil, depends on whether love is fully served." If we desire the blessings of God as a church or as individual believers, we must not be influenced by the decadent world in which we live. Paul in Romans 12:2 tells us that we are not to be conformed to the world. James states that we are not to be a friend of the world (James 4:4) and are to keep ourselves unspotted from the world (James 1:27). In Corinthians we learn that we are to come out from the decadence of the world and to be totally separate (2 Corinthians 6:17,18). John says that we are not to love the world - to be enthralled by its culture (1 John 2:15-17). We are to be pure in heart

(Matthew 5:8), in speech (Ephesians 4:29), in dress (1 Timothy 2:9) and in conduct and morals (Galatians 5:19-21). The Lord gave himself to purify unto Himself a peculiar people (Titus 2:14) that He could bestow His blessings upon and use to be world changers not world conformers. [adapted]

G. Proverbs 28:10 "Whoso causeth the righteous to go astray in an evil way, he shall fall himself into his own pit: but the upright shall have good things in possession."

H. Keep out of your life all that will keep Christ out of your mind.

II. Seek God

A. 2 Chronicles 26:5 "And he sought God in the days of Zechariah, who had understanding in the visions of God: and as long as he sought the LORD, God made him to prosper."

B. Ezra 8:22 "For I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers and horsemen to help us against the enemy in the way: because we had spoken unto the king, saying, The hand of our God is upon all them for good that seek him; but his power and his wrath is against all them that forsake him"