(The video of this sermon can be seen by going to ... www.cowetanazarene.org/videos.html)
More than anything else, God wants His creation of mankind to be all it can be! That includes our being joyful, blessed, knowledgeable and in love; in love with Him. The last thing He wants is for us to be bogged down with troubles and fear. Throughout the Bible, we see where He is active in helping us, rescuing us, and reaching out to us in every possible way.
And even though He will sometimes allow negative things to happen to people, it is never He who causes them. All negatives come from Satan.
Armed with that knowledge, I entitled today’s message, “the Broken and Hurting”.
Christians are like everyone else in that we experience bad times and times of absolute distress in our lives. In order to get through these devastating times, we need to know there is help available to us, how we can access that help, and it also helps us to know where our troubles come from.
And so, without delay, let us go right into the Word of God and see what He says about all this.
JOHN 10:10 tells us,
“The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.”
In the above passage, the first thing our LORD tells us is that our troubles originate from Satan. Satan hates God and therefore, he hates everything God created, including we humans. And Satan does not want us so he can have the pleasure of spending eternity with us. His only desire for us is to rip something away from God and then to torture it forever.
There are two types of people, spiritually speaking. There are those who have rejected Jesus, and there are those who have accepted Jesus. Satan can easily capture those who have rejected Jesus because apart from Jesus, there is no protection or harbor of safety for us. That leaves us vulnerable and allows Satan the ability to take us.
On the other hand, we have Christians. How can Satan sneak in and destroy us if we are with Jesus? The answer is …. he can’t, but the rest of the answer is …. as long as we are with Jesus.
Jesus promised us that nobody can snatch us out of His hand, or that nobody can force us to leave Him. That is true. However, we have been given a very special gift of God that is called Free Will. We have the ability to make our own decisions based on our own desires.
Mind you, I did not say we will always make the best possible decisions – and we will not always make good decisions. More often than not, we humans make decisions based on nothing more than what we want for the moment, nothing more. And those are the decisions that allow Satan to come in and steal our joy, kill our chances of salvation, and destroy our lives.
Though nobody can force us to walk away from Jesus, we do have the right to choose to do whatever we want at the moment, even if that causes us to walk away on our own volition.
The basic message of the Bible is that even though we do not deserve it, God protects us and His desire is to give us all good blessings. But to get those blessings, we are held responsible for doing what is necessary to get them; or simply put, to obey God’s commands.
We, however, like doing things based on what we want, not on what God wants for us. And that causes us to not always follow God; and because we fail to follow Him, we often experience some very hard times in life.
And what do we do when a major problems comes up? Generally, the first thing we do is try to figure out how we can get rid of it, isn’t it? We jump on the problem and try everything we know to fix that problem, only to find out that there is nothing we can do to make the problem go away. And the last thing we do, after all else fails, is to go to God and ask Him to help us. Wouldn’t it be so much better for us if we were to train ourselves to go to God FIRST?
I said ever bad thing in this world comes from Satan, but not every problem we have is because Satan has thrust it upon us. He puts temptations and sin in front of us all the time, but we must remember he cannot force us to take them. So what do we do? We take our minds off God (we take the armor of God off) and we look at the temptation or sin in front of us and we begin to entertain the idea of enjoying it. Once it is in our minds, it only takes but a moment to drop down into our hearts. And then it becomes very easy to act on our will rather than in God’s will.
And in so doing, we become the major reason we have problems in our lives – because of the choices we make. First, we choose to take our eyes off God. Secondly, we choose to have fun rather than joy. (The world is full of temporary fun. God is full of eternal joy.)
In Jesus’ day, the prevailing thought was that if you had something wrong with you, it was directly because either you or your parents had sinned. We know today that is not always the case, don’t we? There is a story of a blind man in JOHN 9. And Jesus addresses the belief that either he or his parents sinned.
JOHN 9:1-3 reads,
“1- As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. 2- And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
God did not cause this man’s blindness, but He did allow it. And He allowed it so that the affliction could be used to show God’s power and love to others. You might ask how power and love could be shown in allowing someone to be blind.
It was shown when Jesus healed the man’s blindness. That showed the mighty power of God at work, and it showed the mighty love of God at work.
Have you ever had anything wrong that caused you great problems, or that other people knew about? Can you remember God correcting the situation? Think back about how you felt afterwards, and what others around you felt? Can you start to see how your affliction was actually used to show God’s mighty power and love?
Likewise, God did not create our financial woes, mental anguish or even physical illness. but what God did create was help for us when we experienced those things, even if it might have been ourselves who caused them by the decisions we made at the time.
God is our Delight. He is our Healer. He is our Great Physician, and He is also the Lover of our souls. He covers us with His love and protection. But we cannot possibly receive that unless we do so with a broken spirit; a spirit that willingly yields to Him and a spirit that comes from a humbled heart.
PSALMS 51:17 shows the psalmist talking to God.
“The sacrifice You desire is a broken spirit. You will not reject a broken and repentant
heart, O God.”
The world around us tells us there is no God, or that any old god will do. But I tell you this morning that there is a God, and there is only one God. He knows our names and He controls the universe. He is good all the time and all the time He is good.
PSALMS 147:3-4 reiterates that.
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.”
Will we ever realize that God soothes our hearts and heals our wounds? Sure, it is the doctor who might have to put the stitches in, but it is God who heals the skin.
God is the creator of the stars. In Galileo’s day, scientists said they had proven there were 1076 stars. A few centuries later, they revised that to just under 2000 stars. Today, we know that the universe is filled with so many stars we cannot number them. And God made them all and He is the One who knows their names and who hung them to stand on nothing!
In ISAIAH, we read where we are healed by the striped Jesus took upon his back. He took all the punishment upon Himself so that …. we would not have to carry it upon our backs. And that includes the physical as well as the emotional and the spiritual.
As Jesus hung there dying that day, He completed the steps that would give us healing in all sorts of ways. The only thing left to see that completed is our being willing to accept that gift. I feel that the only reason we have not accepted them is because we do not fully believe in them. And I blame that on two reasons. The church for not properly teaching it, and us because we have focused too long on our comfort rather than on our salvation.
We were made to lean on God and depend on Him, but in our sinful nature, we stand tall and proud and claim we can take care of ourselves. We say we do not need God.
When we get hungry, we can go down to the local supermarket and buy something to eat – as long as we have the money or the card. If we get sick, all we have to do is go down to our local Walgreens and get medicine to cure ourselves – again, as long as we have the money or the card.
What we do not realize is God allowed the food to grow that we buy, and He allowed the scientists to develop our medicines. And what’s more … God allowed us to have the funds to purchase them. So, in reality, it was all God and not at all us.
No matter how bad things get in your life, it will never be too late for God to fix them or turn them around. The thief on the cross found his redemption in the last moments of his life. Manasseh found his redemption after killing thousands of innocent people and even after he threw his only baby into the fire to appease a false god. In the last period of his life, Manasseh turn towards God and surrendered the authority over his life to the LORD.
The point is this: Even when it is too late for us to correct anything, it is never too late for God to do it. All we have to do is ask Him and be serious enough to have a humble heart when asking.
To get God’s wonderful and loving blessings, we need to know three things. The first of which is what causes our brokenness and failings. Earlier, I said we cause much of it. And we do so by trying to live life on our terms rather than living it on God’s terms. The Bible is full of examples of what happens when we try to control our lives instead of letting God do it.
Abraham was called by God to be the father of the Jewish nation, yet he continued to live by his terms for many years. He went to Egypt, but was afraid people might kill him so they could take his beautiful wife as their own. So what did he do? Instead of depending on God to protect them, Abraham told people that she was really his sister.
Soon, King Abimelech did take her as his own. He took her back to his palace and bad things immediately began to happen! When he found out who Sarah really was, he took her back to Abraham and Abraham confessed as to why he lied. Abraham did not depend on God, he depended on himself, and when we depend on ourselves, we find that hell will soon await.
Abraham did not learn how to fully depend on God until he was old and broken down. But God still loved him even during those years. And we do not fully depend on God until we get broken, too. And then, when we finally go to God, we find that even though we did not fully depend on Him, He still loved us.
I know we pray about our problems, but when we pray about them, do we really surrender them to God. Don’t we have a habit of asking for God’s help, and then as soon as we say “Amen”, don’t we jump up and start seeing how “we” can handle the problem instead of leaving them with God and letting Him do the work for us?
We need to give up the control over our lives that we think we have and give it to God because he is the One who actually has the control.
Another thing we need to do is have a proper attitude in life. Most of us have good attitudes on occasion, but tend to wallow in the negatives of “what if” most of the time. It will be our attitude in great part
In 1925, a woman by the name of Fay Lanphier was crowned Miss America. Miss Lanphier was not the most beautiful woman to run, nor was she the most shapely. She was not the most educated, nor was she the most dignified. She enjoyed hearty laughs and had the habit of slapping people on the back when laughing with them.
What she did have, though, was a very positive attitude. Everyone, including her own opponents, genuinely liked her. There is nothing more powerful than a positive attitude in life, especially when that attitude is also Godly. Miss Lanphier was a devout Christian.
PHILIPPEANS 4:13 is quick to point out, that we –
“ … can do all things through Christ Jesus who give me strength.”
Again, when we depend on God, we receive His benefits; and one of those wonderfully powerful benefits is our attitude in life.
Okay, so when everything seems to be going down the drain in your life and you don’t see anywhere to turn to, what do you do? How do you get or keep a positive attitude in bad times? You simply remind yourself “whose” you are – who you belong to. And then start believing in His power over you.
You are truly loved by the Most High God. You are a joint heir with Jesus to the glory of Heaven. You are His kid! And if that is not enough to give you a positive attitude, nothing is.
God shows His mighty power over us by taking what the devil throws at us and turning it around so it ends up helping us.
And so we have a dire need, and that need is to start praising God with every breath we take. We praise Him because He is our Jehovah Jirah, our provider of all our needs. He gives us every spiritual blessing in Heaven through Christ Jesus our Savior.
But no matter what information we might have, it all comes back down to a personal decision. We might want what God has available for us, but do we honestly want them badly enough to do the things necessary to get them? We cannot live life as we have always done and then start getting all of God’s blessings. To get them, we must elect to change our hearts.
This reluctance to change is called pride. Pride makes us think only about ourselves. It puts all the focus on us, and it ends up destroying our ability to make proper decisions. Surrendering our self-pride to the authority of God over us must take place before any future with God can expected.
We like to deny our sins, or blame them on other people. That is called hiding from the truth. Remember Adam when he told God that he sinned and said it was because of the woman God had given him? No, in reality, Adam sinned because he made a choice as to what he wanted at the moment, and he forgot all about what God wanted for him.
Life without feeling the need to ask God to take your sins away is like riding a merry-go-round. It might keep you moving, but you only move in circles and never go anywhere new. Pride is one definition of insanity.
In closing, may I share a story with you? It is a true story. A tribe in New Guinea depends on what they find in the jungle for their basic food source. One of their favorite foods is monkey. And they have developed a rather unique way of capturing monkeys.
They know that monkeys love fruit, so they take a coconut and cut it in half. After cleaning the insides out, they put fruit in the coconut and then tie the two halves back together again. They cut a round hole in one side that is just barely large enough for a monkey to put its open hand in. And then they tie it up in a tree very securely.
Before long, a monkey will smell the fruit in the coconut and come to get it. The monkey forces his hand through the hole in the coconut and grabs a big fistful of fruit. But with all that fruit in his hand, he cannot get his hand back out of the coconut hole.
It does not dawn on the monkey to let go of the fruit so he can retrieve his hand, so he just sits there holding on to the precious fruit while he is being held captive, unaware that death is quickly approaching.
Do you realize that we humans are doing the same thing with the sin in our lives? We enjoy the sin and we grab on to it with both hands. We refuse to let go of it, all the while being unaware that by holding on to it, our spiritual death is quickly approaching.
Are you experiencing rough times in your life? Does your walk with Christ seem to be powerless instead of powerful? Maybe you are focusing on the wrong things and God is allowing those bad things in your life for no other reason than to get your attention.
God loves you enough to have given you Free Will. He will never force you to make any decision, even if that means letting you make the worst possible decisions. You are to love Him enough to rely on Him and ask Him which decision He wants you to make.
The moral of today’s message is simply that Satan hates God and he hates all of God’s creation, including humans. And since he has that hatred, he wants to destroy us. Our intent should be that we keep aware of that and then do all we can to keep it from happening.
Let us bow our heads in closing prayer.
