God Can't Abandon You Series

5 Things God Can’t Do – 3) God Can’t Abandon you. Ps 22

Gladstone Baptist Church – 16/1/05 pm

(Adapted from “When you Feel Abandoned” – By David Elvery)

We are at the halfway mark of a series looking at 5 things that God Can’t do. We’ve looked at the fact that God can’t lie. It is against his nature. He is truth and if He is to be God, then he has to be truth and tell the truth. He can’t lie because if He did, He wouldn’t be God. Last week we looked at the fact that God can’t want your worst. He is like a perfect Father who wants the very best for you even when you are a spoilt selfish kid who grieves Him and hurts Him time after time after time.

Tonight, I want you to grasp a hold of the third thing God can’t do. He can’t abandon you.

Have any of you ever felt abandoned? When I was growing up, I don’t ever really recall being abandoned as such. But I do recall several times being left places by my parents – by mistake!!! Often this occurred at church when they had driven separate cars and each thought that I was in the other car going home. I don’t think there was any sinister intent in me being left behind – but you never know. It may have just crossed their mind that if I spent more time at church, maybe somehow I’d be a better boy. Maybe they were hoping that I would be adopted into someone else’s family. Thinking back on it, it did happen a little too frequently!!!!

Have you ever watched as your lift drove off down the street? What did you feel – desperation, panic, abandonment. What are you going to do now????

Rejection or abandonment by people is a fairly common experience. Friends leave us, family have feuds, even marriages break down. Those feelings of abandonment often cut deep, cut hard and cut long.

As if that isn’t bad enough, what about being abandoned by God? Have you ever felt that God has left you? You know what I mean – you are in desperate need and he seems to have just abandoned you. It may have been that you were ill or maybe had a friend or a parent or child that was desperately ill and you were crying out to God, asking him for help. Maybe it was a situation at work or school that was just too hard to take - maybe you were in a new school with no friends and just hated it; maybe there is conflict at work and you can not cope and you were praying to God that he would deliver you from that situation, but you heard nothing. You were desperate for an answer and prayed day and night, but to no avail.

What do you do in these situations when God is silent? When you are suffering and he just doesn’t seem to care. He just seems to be on holidays or avoiding you or worse still - maybe he is just a figment of our imagination. Do you ever feel like that?

It doesn’t seem fair does it. I mean Think back to the Old Testament and the people of Israel. God was with them. He delivered them and they praised God for it. They only had to cry out to him and he came running to save them. They only had to trust him and he delivered them. Its all well and good for them, but what about me?

Have you ever thought like this? You feel like you are not even worth enough to worry about. You must be one of the lowest of all people for God not to care for you – you must be scorned and despised. No come to think of it, that is even too important, it is as though you were a worm – not even a human being – not even that important.

How do you feel when this sort of thing happens? Does it shake your faith? It is difficult, because here I am a Christian who trusts in God. I have faith, but what a witness I am turning out to be. … my friends all look at me and laugh - All they see is a person who believes in something that can’t be seen or proven – a person whose prayers are not answered, whose “loving” and “caring” God seems to have abandoned them. They only see me continuing to suffer and snicker at my misplaced trust.

A pre-kindergarten teacher found an exciting new thing for the Sunday School class. The teacher wrote a song about popcorn, taught it to the children, and had them crouch down on the floor to sing it. At appropriate points in the song, all the children would "pop up." The teacher soon had them "popping" all over the classroom.