The Rock And The Hard Place Part 7 Series

The Rock And The Hard Place Part 7

Is God Waiting On You

Scriptures: Exodus 13:3, 14, 16; 6:28-30; 7:17-20; 8:5-6, 13, 16-17, 28-31; 9:8-10, 18-24, 29;

10:3-6, 12-14 18-19, 21-23; 11:4-6, 10; 14:10-16, 21-22

Introduction:

Two weeks ago in part six of this series, “The Rock and the Hard Place”, I talked about failure. I told you that if you are between a rock and a hard place right now and your faith begins to waver that we often view that as a failure. That if we are always struggling and never seems to get ahead in life according to the world’s standard, for many that is considered failure. We define failure as things that go wrong in our lives; as loss opportunities. We recognize failure when we see it because we have been trained to do so. So many of us have allowed the world to determine what it means to be successful as a son and daughter of God versus allowing God to do it. Because we allow the world to decide, there are times when we fall down (fail) and never fully recover. Remember when I demonstrated how we will lie on the pier watching people walking around us versus getting up and continuing to walk towards the boat? As I told you two weeks ago, it is okay to truly examine where you are in your faith walk and recognize where you have failed; those times when you fell down; when you missed the mark. However, when you consider your failures, ask yourself if you got back up. We fall down but we get back up and our goal should be to fall down less and less as we grow in our faith.

As I told you I would, this morning in part seven, my question to you is “Is God waiting on you?” Think about the analogy of the pier and the boat. If you’ve fallen down on the pier and you need to get to the boat, is God waiting on you to get up and start walking again? Or, are you just lying there waiting on God to come and pick you up and take you to the boat? Is God waiting on you to get up? Is He waiting on you to make a critical decision about your life? Is God waiting on you to decide if you really believe what you have read and are ready to stop giving Him lip service? What is God waiting on you to do? Previously I asked the question, “Are you satisfied with your faith?” I hope that after hearing that message your answer was a resounding “no” and you made the commitment to do something about it. You see, if we ever get to the place where we’re satisfied in our walk with God, in our level of faith regardless of the level, then the devil has us right where he wants us – neutralized. We will not be a threat to him or his kingdom because we are happy right where we are. We stop striving for growth. In this situation we will not be living the life our Heavenly Father has called for us to live – one of victory over Satan.

If you’re satisfied with you faith when you fall down you may not get up as falling down is acceptable, especially if you're just a sinner saved by grace! Since you are satisfied with your faith you accept failure as being outside of your control, meaning that it would have happened regardless of what you did or did not do. God is waiting on all of us to recognize that our failures do not have to be. We have such a hunger for God and yet we are so far from knowing and understanding who He truly is to us. And this is how Satan has deceived us – we truly think and believe we know our Heavenly Father. But when we speak about Him and about what He does or doesn’t do, we show Satan that he has accomplished his goal. He doesn’t want us to know our Father and he doesn’t want us to know who we are because of our father.

This morning we’re going to examine the plagues God brought upon Egypt as recorded in the book of Exodus. In those passages we’re going to see a lot of repetition and it’s not by accident. When the Lord repeats something over and over in a short period of time, in this case four chapters, He’s really trying to get us to see an important spiritual principle. Our minds filter what we receive from our born again spirits and hinders our ability to respond to God and move as He desires us to move. That’s why He often repeats things so that our minds can understand what He’s really after and stop filtering what it receives from our born again spirits. Let me put it to you this way: we talk ourselves out of the blessings of God because our minds have difficulty accepting them as truth. I know that’s not what you want to hear this morning but it’s true. God is not withholding His blessings. We are blocking them from manifesting in our lives.