WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN GOD IS GOOD?
Selected Passages
What do you do when God is good- when God blesses? He truth is that God blesses us all the time. Many blessings we do not see with our eyes- many that we do see.
How do you respond to a particularly wonderful blessing from God?
• Some hardly notice
• Some fail to acknowledge God
• Some act as if it something that was "owed" to them
• Others respond the right way
The Bible is filled with stories of great blessings and right responses to those blessings. God is good. God blesses. We should respond.
I. Watch For The Blessings Of God
A. Do you watch for the blessings of God? Do you expect to see God do amazing things in your life?
B. The children of Israel were about to move into the promised land. They were about to cross the Jordan River to enter the land. Joshua 3:5 Joshua told the people, "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you." There were to expect amazing things. God was going to do something. The people did not know what they just knew He was going to do something!
C. We should go each day looking for God to do amazing things. We don’t know what He is going to do but we should know that He is going to do something.
II. When God Blesses- Remember His Blessings
A. God blessed the people of Israel. They crossed the Jordan River in flood stage on dry ground. God stopped the river for the people to cross. What an amazing sight. Just as God has parted the Red Sea, God now parted the Jordan. The people saw an indescribable miracle!
B. The next part of this great event was remembering what God had done. The leaders were instructed to remove a rock from the bed of the Jordan River.
1. Josh 4:4-7 4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe,
5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites,
6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ’What do these stones mean?’
7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever."
2. The stones were to help the people remember. God did a great work and He wanted the people to remember it.
C. We God works in our lives we are to pause and remember it. We are to remember it in the future.
D. We must find a way to remember God’s blessings Why?
1.
2. Reminder of God’s power
3. Reminder of God’s provision
4. Stimulates faith for the next situation
III. When God Blesses- Keep Moving Toward The Next Blessing
A. This is a mile post that reminds us that God is with us. We must remember how good God has been but we must also keep moving toward the next blessing.
B. God was not finished with the children of Israel. This was only one part of the journey that God was leading them on.
C. Joshua 4:19 is a surprisingly important verse for this message, On the tenth day of the first month the people went up from the Jordan and camped at Gilgal on the eastern border of Jericho.
D. We should stop to remember the blessings but we must be willing to move on toward what God has for us next.
1. The fault is that we stop and savor the blessings and not move forward to the next.
2. We tend to live backward rather than forward
3. God has blessings for us ahead of us.
E. Allow the victories and blessings of the past serve as FAITH BUILDERS for the future.
