Jehoshaphat

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Good morning. This summer, we have been studying people in the Old Testament that you are likely, you and I, are likely to gloss over, not spend much time on. We've been talking about Jonathan and his armor bearer. Everybody knows the story of Jonathan and his armor bearer. No, you don't. No, you don't. We've been talking about Uzzah, the priest, that you did not know about before I preached on him. You didn't, I promise. King Josiah, you might have heard of him, Zerubbabel. You may have heard of him, but you did not know how to spell Zerubbabel. These are small players. These are people that we don't pay attention to, right? These are small time parts. But all of these small time parts are caught up in a big story.

When we read about their stories, They're small stories in a small part, a really big story. This informs our real life. This helps us understand our own part in a bigger story. Because even if you are kind of a big deal, right? Even if you are, you know, if you are, let's just say you're going into sixth grade and at a Rangers game, you got to run down a third baseline and steal third base and run all the way back and your name is Heath Oster. Just in case that's you and you're a really big deal, even if you're a really big deal, the story that we are all caught up in is even bigger than that. It's bigger than a Jumbo Trond and Rangers game. It's huge. The story that we are a part of spans generations. It spans eras. Even if we are a big deal, the story that we're in is bigger. We call this series Hidden Figures. Small players, big story, real life. Small players, big story, real life.

This is what we've been all summer and this is our last sermon in this series. We're going to start a new series next week called From the Cross to the Church. And I hope that you will not miss out on that. It's going to be a quick one, a four-week series. that we're actually going to resume our series on Hebrews. We've been studying Hebrews at different parts of this whole 2022. And we did two sermon series in the spring on Hebrews and we'll do two in the fall on Hebrews. So just giving you a glimpse of what's coming. For our last sermon series, we're going to end with Jehoshaphat. And no, he's not jumping. Okay. I don't know if you've ever heard the old country boy say, Jehoshaphat. But that's Jehoshaphat. It's the same guy that he's quoting or that he's citing. So this is Jehoshaphat. He was a king in Judah. And we're going to actually pick up history in 2 Chronicles 20. 2 Chronicles verse 20. Also, where you were having your quiet

time this morning. Okay. Second Chronicles chapter 20 is where we're going to be starting in verses one and two. But a little bit of context, we're going to pick this story up where Jehoshaphat is reigning over Judah, right? Everything's kind of going fine. We don't really, there's nothing really to report before that. So everything's pretty normal, but we pick it up and Jehoshaphat is getting some bad news. So 2 Chronicles chapter 20 verses 1 and 2, and it says you can follow along here, you can follow along in your in your Bibles. There should be a Bible that is located kind of near you. 2 Chronicles 20 verses 1 and 2. After this, the Moabites and Ammonites and with them some of the Muneites came against Jehoshaphat for battle. Some men came and told Jehoshaphat, a great multitude is coming against you from Edom, from beyond the sea, and behold they

are in Hazazan Tamar, that is, in Gedi. Alright, you don't need to know the geography of Jehoshaphat's time to know that this is bad news. This is adversity. Adversity, if we're gonna define it for just a second, and I think we should, I I think we need to understand exactly what we're talking about. Adversity is something that makes everything else harder. Okay. So adversity is not just difficulty. Adversity is something that makes difficulty worse. So it's hard climbing a mountain. Adversity is doing that in a blizzard where your guide is nowhere to be found. That's adversity. Okay. Uh, it's hard. It's hard to ride in a car with a rude co-worker. Okay, that's hard. It's difficult when all they do is complain about how rude other people are, and they smell, and they have bad breath. That's adversity. It's hard when you are having a difficult conversation with your spouse.

It is adversity when that is happening at two in the morning and there's a screaming baby. Okay, that's adversity. So we need to understand the difference here. We got difficult and we got adversity. What Jehoshaphat and Judah, what they're going through, it would be hard hearing that your enemies are getting ready for war. The adversity they're in is that they are finding out that their enemies in triplicate aren't just ready for war, they're coming and they're really close. That's adversity. Not only are you going to be fought with, Not only is your whole country going to war, but they're way more ready than you, and they're advancing. And you're flat-footed. You just woke up, I mean, you're just finishing your ego, and you hear armies are coming after you. So what does he do? Verses 3 and 4.

Then Jehoshaphat was afraid and set his face to seek the Lord and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. And Judah assembled to seek help from the Lord from all the cities of Judah that came to seek the Lord. Adversity, and we're going to look at his response in just a second, but what adversity tends to do, adversity tends to knock us off base a little bit.

Adversity tends to throw us off a lot. We have an illustration from Job. Of course, Job is famous for or the adversity that he suffered. But if you look at Job chapter one verses nine through 11, it says this, does Job, I'm sorry, let me just give some context. This is the enemy talking to God about Job, okay? And this is the enemy's perspective. Job has it easy. And so he says, does Job fear God for no reason? He's talking to God here. Have you not put a hedge around him in his house and all that he has on every side? So aren't you protecting him? God, isn't that why He fears you? You have blessed the work of His hands and His possessions have increased in the land, but stretch out your hand and touch all that He has and He will curse you to your face. This, the enemy here is saying He's not facing adversity at all, but when He does, you're going to see His true character

and His true character is that He wants to curse you and die. Adversity has a way of sifting us, of showing us our character. Because even though he's the enemy, he's not wrong about what the adversity is going to do. It's going to reveal something. Now, he thinks it's going to reveal something else, but it's not. But adversity does sift us. It does reveal things about us. The reason why adversity is so difficult is because it combines physical, emotional, spiritual, relational pain. It compounds those things. It puts up physical barriers in front of us. It sets them on fire to intimidate us, and it yells in our face that we're never going to climb it. on every front tries to get us to not do what we are called to do, to not face what we're called to face. And when adversity comes, you and I typically choose a different route and here's why. Because in the midst of adversity we

don't focus on everything that's going on. When we are in the midst of adversity all we want to do is stop it. That's all we want to do. Stop the adversity. It's like it's like being in the middle of a tornado you just want it to end. You just want it to end. There's three ways that we try to stop it. We try to anticipate it or prevent it. If we try to anticipate it we're trying to stop it before it starts right we want to like that's why Time Machine movies are really popular. It's like reverse anticipation. It's like being able to anticipate it earlier. And anticipating it doesn't work. Prevent it doesn't work because I'm fresh out of time machines. I heard they're not invented yet. But also you can't anticipate every scenario, right? You can't you can't anticipate your way out of adversity. Sure there's things that you can do to like not be dumb, of course, but when adversity is going to come and you cannot anticipate your way

out of it. Another thing we try to do with adversity in order to stop it is to ignore it, to just kill the pain. We try to refocus, try to not think about it, I'm just not going to think about it, I'm just not going to look at it. Distraction here is really, really, really big and it's a reason that substance abuse or over-binging on entertainment, it's a reason those things are popular. to people that just killed a whole week binging on Netflix and asked them, is there anything you're avoiding? The answer is probably yeah. Yeah, there's something I don't want to think about. There's something I don't want to do. And the reason it doesn't work is because waiting on a problem usually doesn't fix it. Waiting on a problem typically makes it worse. So when we ignore adversity, it tends to just build up. It tends to come out in different ways. It tends to hit us from different sides.

doesn't stop it though if we just ignore it. The last thing, or another thing, I'm in rejection. A lot of things we try to do, I'm just listing three. To stop adversity is that we try to solve it, try to attack it. This is often in the midst of a big decision, right? If you're in the middle of a career change, in the middle of moving cities, in the middle of even choosing schools for a kid, right? you what we believe in the middle of adversity is once I solve this problem once I have a made decision once I do that my adversity will stop we believe that I've counseled people a lot of times had some good friends and they were really on the throes of just like oh should we move here should we not should we keep the house should we renovate it what should we do with this money, which just all these options and it was a variable blank slate. Some of you getting overwhelmed even with me just describing that situation, okay. They had

a lot of decisions to make, okay. And when they came to me they were just like, hey I need to know what to, you know, we need to know what to do Drew. Help us, help us to know what to do. And my advice to them was this, even, even when you know what to do, your problem isn't going to stop. The finish line here isn't a made decision. The finish line is actually somewhere else. You think it's a made decision, but here's the reality. When you make a decision there, you know what's gonna come up like the next second? Another decision. Another big decision. Or an attending decision that deals with that decision. It doesn't stop. There's always more coming. And that's true about adversity in general. Adversity If you know anybody who's not dealing with adversity, just wait. Just wait. They'll be going through something. That's the nature of life, that we go through storms, that they are natural.

If somebody would say to me, my spiritual life has just always been up and to the right and I've never experienced a storm or anything like that, I'm running. I mean, I've recommended five other churches to them. I am not excited because that person is not dealing with reality on some level. Okay, we all go through adversity. Adversity is coming. We cannot anticipate it. We cannot ignore it. We cannot solve it. In fact, we cannot stop it. And this is why we have Jehoshaphat's story, that it illustrates for us that we can respond to adversity without stopping it. Let me say that again. We can respond to adversity without stopping it. In fact, we can use adversity to our advantage. But here's the key. We have to trust that God is the one allowing the adversity. We have to trust, and I'll say it this way, we have to trust that God is using, using actively your adversity to accomplish his purposes. God is using the thing that is

killing you, the thing that is frustrating to you, the thing that you feel like has altered your life forever, that you will never be the same. The Lord God in Heaven is using that very thing to accomplish his purposes in you. If you do not believe that you will be forced to try to stop every adversity. Every bit of adversity will be an enemy to you every single time. But if you believe, if you understand, if you have the perspective that God is using that adversity, He's allowing that adversity to accomplish His purposes, then you can begin to use adversity to your advantage. Now let me just say a word of caution here because even whenever I talk about how God is allowing, God is using adversity, we need to be careful. Because it is not as if we could know all that there is to know about our lives to suppose that God could be doing something differently.

In other words, we don't have all the options of our life kind of laid out like a buffet and go like, oh yeah, okay, my life should go like this, this, this, this, and God's just making different choices. That's really assuming too much. That's assuming that you could know what God knows. It's assuming that you could handle the weight of all of that information, what your life could possibly be. That's a lot. It is, however, another way to say that God is what he calls himself the ancient of days. He's the one who's been here forever. He knows. He understands and He is in charge of everything. The adversity that happens in your life, that does not make God gasp. He's not shocked. He's like, oh, I didn't even see it coming. He knows, He knows it's there. He's using it, He's allowing it. It's not freaking Him out like it's freaking you out. Your adversity is something that God is using

to accomplish his purposes in your life. And it includes Jehoshaphat and Judah and their adversity but it also includes us. And so as we read, we're gonna look at how God is using that adversity, how God is allowing that adversity and we are gonna begin with Jehoshaphat's prayer in verse six. Josaphat's prayer, if you listen closely, this is not a pretty prayer at all. You're warned. Verses 6 and 7. The prayer starts, Oh Lord, God of our fathers, are you not God in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations, in your hand are power and might so that none is able to withstand you. Did you not our God drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel and give it to the descendants of Abraham your friend? Translation, aren't these same invaders the ones that you drove out? you call Abraham your friend? Reading between the lines. What's the deal? Let's keep going,

because he doesn't stop. Verses 8 and 9. And they, the invaders, they have lived in it and have, excuse me, excuse me, we, sorry, they, being us, being Jehovah's, and they have lived in it and have built for you in it a sanctuary for your name, saying, if disaster comes upon us, the sword, judgment or pestilence or famine, we will stand before this house and before you." He's talking about the tabernacle. For your name, or talking about the temple, for your name is in this house and cry out to you in our affliction and you will hear and save. Translation, we have a temple here, we have put your name on it God, we put your name on this place and we have said in front of other people, No matter what happens, we're gonna cry out to you and you are gonna save us. The prayer keeps going, verse 10. "'And now behold,' telling God to look like God is somehow unaware of what's happening,

Joseph continues, "'Now behold, the men of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir, whom you would not let Israel invade when they came from the land of Egypt and whom they avoided and did not destroy. Translation, these very people are the people that you, God, protected during the Exodus, during the most famous deliverance moment of our history. This is your fault. God, I want you to hear that. That's what he's praying. Let's end it with verses 11 and 12. Behold, they reward us by coming to drive us out. They reward us. Don't miss that sarcasm, right? They reward, I mean, reward, okay, sorry. It's here, it's just thick. Behold, they reward us by coming to drive us out of your possession, which you have given us to inherit. Oh, our God, will you not execute judgment on them? For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.

Jehoshaphat responds to adversity with ugly prayer. Ugly prayer, that prayer was ugly. That prayer was, you can call it by a different name, you can say it was a mad prayer, you can say it was an honest prayer, You can say raw prayer, candid prayer, blunt prayer, whatever you would call it. It was not flowery. It's not something that I'm gonna recite as a benediction ever, okay? Like that's not, it doesn't make that, it's not poetry here.

It has a great ending though, it says, "'We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.'" If you and I would pray that way, If we would pray like this to God at the end, when we said amen, we would feel a little uneasy. It would feel a little weird. It would feel slightly irreverent. Because it seems like Jehoshaphat here is speaking out of turn. It seems like what Jehoshaphat is doing in his prayer is taking God to task and saying, wait a second, why is this happening? Because you said all this. What's going on? This doesn't add up.

And I don't think you need to read into it too much to sense a little bit of frustration in Jehoshaphat's prayer. And yet, and yet, this prayer receives no rebuke at all. Not even a little, not even a, not even a, okay, Jehoshaphat, you shouldn't have prayed like that, but like nothing. There's no rebuke on it at all. And in fact, what you see all over the Bible, not just here in 2 Chronicles 20. You see it all over the Bible, particularly in the Psalms. You see these kinds of prayers happen. And I wanna just read some prayers, dude, they're not coming down the screen. I just want you to listen to them. I just want you to kinda, this is Psalm 22, verses one and two. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning? Oh my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. Psalm 13, one and two.

How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul, have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? It's not just in the Psalms, it's also in the prophets. I'm gonna read Habakkuk chapter one, verses three and four. Why, why do you make me see iniquity? And why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me. Strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed. And justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous. So justice goes forth perverted. These are ugly prayers. These don't make a Hallmark card, or Dayspring, or whoever is making the Christian cards these days. It doesn't fit. If you cross stitch that on a little placard and gave it to your grandma, it would be weird. That's not the kind of prayer that you are gonna pray all the time.

But these ugly prayers that are prayed throughout scripture, I just, I mean, I can just kind of throw a rock and hit four, but I mean, there's tons. In the Old Testament and in the New, actually. Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane comes to mind for an ugly prayer. These ugly prayers, what they do though, what their strength is, and what we need to kind of admire here is that they take God at his word. They treat God like he meant what he said, which is candid and refreshing. And they're seeking an answer. Oftentimes they're seeking a timely answer. They want to know. In other words, they're not just kind of like, oh, I don't know, maybe this question kind of, God will answer this question today. No, it's like there's enemies coming for us And I need this answer. Joseph at here is being open and honest before God. He's not trying to seem pious. Now, when we pray, when you and I sit down and pray,

particularly when we pray in public, but even if we're praying in private, the thought can overtake us. And it can change the way we talk. The thought can overtake us that we believe that we owe God our best selves. And on the surface, that seems like a really good thing. Of course we wanna bring our best to the Lord. Yes, yes, yes, amen to that. What I'm saying though is that there's a point at which that turns into sounding like you're okay when you pray to God.

Not letting God into the fact you're having a really junky day, or that you're really frustrated with something, or that you thought your life would turn out differently. Those aren't things that we often talk to God about. There's a point, it just becomes fake. It's not really what you're experiencing. It's not really what you're feeling, and you feel like you need to come to God and be like, oh, holy God, and you're praying in the King James Version, and you're doing what you're you're supposed to do, right? But you don't need to do that. And I think that we can look at Jehoshaphat's prayer and understand it in our bones. The Lord, God in heaven, first of all, knows everything going on in your heart in the first place. So I don't know what you're doing pretending like anything. But, but the Lord,

the Lord wants our honesty. The Lord wants kind of that raw emotion. God is not put off by this prayer. Part of the reason that God allows adversity in your life is for you to develop an honest, raw, open relationship. Part of the reason that God allows, uses adversity in your life is because he wants you to be real with him. He wants you not to just pray in these endows only, like he wants you to just come before him and say, I don't know, what would you pray if your prayers were uglier? Would you talk about your doubts? Would you talk about your major frustrations? you talk about how, you know, you, you, you know, maybe, maybe you're in high school and you're like, I, I really like this other person, but they don't see me and that really frustrates me. Do you think that, do you think that God actually wants to hear that? He does. He does. He wants to know what's going on with us. And, you know, sometimes when I take

showers, I, I have really, I, I don't know, I just get real clear thinking for some reason. I don't know why. Once upon a time, many moons ago, I was going through just the season of doubt. I was really torn up by it. And I was praying about it and I was in the shower and I didn't want to say that I doubted God. I didn't want to say it because I felt like if I said it, it would make it more real. the Lord spoke to me in the head shower, not audibly, and he said, like, what? Are you afraid you're gonna hurt my feelings? Are you afraid you're gonna break me? Are you afraid that I'm not gonna be real here if you tell me that you're doubting me? And it was just such a watershed moment for me of me saying, okay, I don't need to be afraid of telling God that I doubt His goodness right this second. I don't need to be afraid that I am freaking out about something over here.

I don't need to somehow hide and pretend to be pious whenever I don't feel that way. And I don't need to, I'm not saying we should disrespect God in our prayer, but I am saying that we should come before Him and be honest with what's going on because He knows it anyway. Let me encourage you, don't wait for adversity to begin praying honestly before God. I mean, you can wait until adversity and then you kind of have to pray, honestly, at that point, because you're kind of under the gun. But you don't have to wait. You can begin praying ugly now. Okay? So if somebody asks you what you learned in church today, you can say, I'll learn to pray ugly. Everybody say pray ugly. Yes. Okay, good. God in heaven desires a relationship with you without pretense. Truly. He wants you. He wants to reel you without makeup on, right? At your worst day. He wants you then.

He wants you when you don't deserve it, which is all the time, but there's times we feel like we don't deserve it more. God wants us then. Psalm 51 says the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. What a promise. What a promise. Our life groups, we have life groups here at South Burleson. And man, my hope is that they're full of ugly prayers. They're full of just candid conversation, praying for people, just praying in the trenches, as it were.

That within a church, if you're waiting for this to kind of happen on a Sunday morning, it's not always gonna do that. This isn't always the space for that. But in our life groups, we do want to make space for that. So in verse, in those previous verses, we see Jehoshaphat's prayer. It's starting in verse 15, we see God responding to Jehoshaphat's prayer through a prophet. And this is what the Lord said through the prophet, starting in verse 15. He said, listen, all Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem and King Jehoshaphat, thus says the Lord to you, Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed at this great horde, for the battle is not yours, but God's."

God is using this moment of adversity to teach them some deep wisdom. He's using this moment of adversity to teach them deep wisdom. He's saying, don't fear because it's not your battle, battle, it's mine. Look, he could have said that to them a week before and it would not have made the same impression. Do you get me? God uses the adversity, the moment, the crisis, the crunch, he uses that to just pile drive deep lessons into your soul so that they make a mark, so that you never forget it, because they will remember forever when the battle was at their doorstep and the Lord God and have been said it's not your battle it's mine he does it again verse 17 says you will not need to fight in this battle stand firm hold your position and see the salvation of the Lord on your behalf Oh Judah and Jerusalem do not be afraid do not be dismayed. Tomorrow go out against them and the Lord will be with you." He is

teaching them. He is making a mark on their collective souls. Salvation is from the Lord and salvation is on your behalf. You aren't going to save yourselves. There are so many times in my own life, and I'm sure there's some in yours, where I need somebody who's close to me, who loves me, tell me with all sincerity, you can't fix your life right now. You can't save yourself from this adversity. You can't stop the adversity from coming. Salvation is from the Lord and it is on our behalf. It is fine to memorize 2 Chronicles 20 verse 17. You want to memorize that? Knock yourself out. That's great. But it is different when you are trusting in deep wisdom in a moment of crisis. When you are fighting for your children's future, when you are fighting off temptation, when you are helping another person fight off temptation, when you are fighting against insecurity and depression, when you are fighting against those things. It is a

timely word to remember. 2 Chronicles 20 verse 17, I guarantee you that's not on a bookmark in a Christian bookstore. I guarantee you nobody's putting that up. But it is a timely word because the battle does not belong to you. You cannot save yourself. When you fight, it's always asking for someone to fight on your behalf. You are asking for salvation to come from the Lord. God allows adversity in your life and this really comes out, this deep wisdom comes out in two big things. First, he teaches you how things actually work, right? How life actually work. We get distracted by how we think life should work. We get distracted by what we believe is fair or how we thought things should have turned out. Deep wisdom peels all that stuff away and it teaches us sometimes some very painful truth about how life actually is, how the Lord God set up things to actually work. And the second thing he teaches us in that deep wisdom is that

He shows us who He actually is. We get distracted by how we think God should be. We get distracted by some quality that we think God should have in spades over a different quality that we really don't like about God. Or we get distracted by some theological system that we think is 100% accurate. Your theological system, I don't care how cool you think it is, it's incomplete. It can't, it actually can't house the beauty and greatness of God. It just can't. It can explain maybe even some difficult things. But don't get distracted by that because the Lord wants to use adversity to teach you who He actually is. wisdom actually begins with who God is. And the Proverbs that begin verse 7, chapter 1 verse 7 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord to know God is the beginning of wisdom. For Jehoshaphat and all Judah, God is revealing himself and his ways and how life actually works in an extremely

timely fashion so that it will be impressed upon them. And let me just say this before I go on. I don't mean to give you the impression that adversity always ends well. Particularly when we try to stop it or control it, it actually usually makes the adversity much much worse when we try to meddle. And adversity when it's not going well when we're resisting it, it just beats us down. And adversity not ending well is us missing that wisdom. It's us missing our moment to pray honestly. It is missing what God is actually doing. We think that that our problem is going to be solved with this made decision over here, but what the Lord God in heaven is calling us to do is to seek Him in a totally different way, but all we can see is the decision that needs to be finished over here. And it's just we're just staring over here and God's saying it's over here. Look

over here and always know God just finished just just end this thing for me. Just fix it. Just do something to stop the pain. Do it. God can't stand it anymore. Don't don't. It's all over here. That thing is for this thing. It's not for that thing. God is using that adversity in your life to do things in you that wouldn't be possible without it. In adversity, God is showing us who he is, how it works, how life works, and it's very sobering. But those lessons aren't anywhere else. You want God to teach you without all the pain and it doesn't work. It doesn't make the impression. Let's look at one last way that God God uses adversity in our life and it's going to start in verse 18, verse 18 and 19, 2 Chronicles chapter 20. It says, then Joseph had bowed his head and his face to the ground and all Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem fell down before the Lord, worshiping the Lord and Levites and

the Coethites and the Korahites stood up to praise the Lord, the God of Israel with a very loud voice. Let me tell you two things. First, at this point, right, they have the plan and they know where they're going. another thing you need to know about the original language, this is written in Hebrew, the word very is very rare. When it says with a very loud voice, usually it's just going to say with a loud voice, but it says very there. When the Hebrew takes the time to use the word very, it usually means it. For example, it said that Bathsheba was very beautiful. So it means she was out of this world view. When it talks about a very loud voice here, you can just imagine if all of us were singing like at the top of our lungs, and there's a good echo in here, right? How loud that would be. What a beautiful picture we get of Jehoshaphat and Judah, and they're all singing with a very loud voice.

It comes time whenever they're going to go into battle. And so in verses 21 and 22, we get what happens in that battle. It says, and when they had taken counsel, when he, Joseph, had taken counsel with the people, with the people, he appointed those who were to sing to the Lord and praise him in holy attire as they went before the army and say, give thanks to the Lord for his steadfast love endures forever. 22, and when they began to sing and praise the Lord set an ambush against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah so that they were routed. Let me just paint the picture for you in verse 21, they're getting ready for battle, but who's in front? The singers, the singers dressed in holy attire, singing with a very loud voice probably, right? And what are they singing? They're not singing like, we like God a lot, or they're not singing

like God is love. They're not singing that. What are they singing? They're declaring His praise. I was in a discussion with Bob and Frieda a couple of weeks ago about praise music. We were sitting and having lunch and it just it just made an impression on me. It was a timely word that made an impression. How in the end it's not really about musical preferences, rather regardless of the musical style, When we consider the kinds of songs that we should sing,

we should ask a few, maybe a few critical questions of those songs, no matter what they are. Those questions would be, what does this song make our hearts declare? What are ours declaring with this song? How do we feel the worth of Jesus when we sing this song? Are we in singing? Are we submitted to the one who made us? Does this song help us worship our Creator? So instead of asking about preferences or styles, there would be kind of these deeper questions. More important than the fact that they were singing, or even the fact that they were singing loudly, more important than that is what they were singing about. At the end of verse 21, we can see that they were singing, give thanks to the Lord for his steadfast love endures forever. It's not based on how they feel, it's based on a fact that God is faithful. God uses the adversity in our lives so that we can wait on his promises.

And I want to be really clear with what his promises are. And so to do that, I'm going to give you something that sounds like a promise versus the actual promise. Okay. And you get to pick which one is which. It's like a quiz. I'm just kidding. I'll do the real one first and then I'll do a fake one. God says to us, I will never leave you or forsake you versus you will never feel alone. God never promises that you're not going to feel alone. He does promise to never leave you or forsake you though. God promises, I will work things out in your life for the blessing of many.

What he does not say is that you will never suffer permanent consequences. That's a tough one. Sometimes we do things that are really stupid and we have permanent consequences for those things. I have permanent consequences in my own life. Pretty sure everybody in this room does. It's hard. It's hard to admit those things. hard to walk in them. We're not promised the absence of permanent consequences. I will lead you, God's promise, I will lead you into peace that passes understanding versus you will never have to endure unjust hardship. God never promises that things won't be fair or that things will always be fair. That's not God makes no such promise. You are going to deal with unfair things in your life on a daily basis. You're going to deal with things, you're going to deal with people smearing your name, you're going to deal with people that are behaving badly and being rewarded for it.

You're going to deal with people that are just, they might be 45 years old, but they have the conflict resolution skills of a three year old and they're your boss. How frustrating is that? That's super frustrating. That person, that three-year-old in the midst of conflict is determining your salary. That's not fair. But it is the reality. God doesn't promise that we can escape those situations. He does promise, though, to be in those situations with us. God's promises to us are not fast food orders either. They take time. They take time to get there. And that's not by mistake. God's promises are slow on purpose. They take time because they're doing their work in you. The adversity is not done. We did talk about like how God uses that adversity and how God allows it or why God allows it. But what I really want to kind of end by pointing you to something. that adversity that you are dealing with is pointing you, it's sharpening you

towards something, and that is that Jesus wants people, his people, his family to seek his face genuinely. Jesus wants true worshipers, people that will worship him in spirit and in truth. And when we talk about God using the adversity in your life to accomplish His purposes. The next question would be, what are His purposes? And His purposes involve blessing you eternally and that blessing going out to a lot of other people. Those are God's purposes. That is what He's using that adversity for. And so I just want to leave you with this encouragement. If you want to see your spiritual life grow, then ask the Lord to help you embrace the adversity that you are currently ignoring or that you are currently trying to solve. I'm not saying lay down and take whatever. I'm saying understand that the adversity that you are going through has a purpose and the purpose is over here. Your mode of

discovering that purpose is way over here. The adversity is way over here. If all you're doing is focusing on that adversity, you will miss, you will miss the blessing, you will miss the opportunity to understand what the Lord is using that in your life for. If you want to cut temptation off at the knees, then use that as a reminder to pray, to take joy, take joy in Jesus, to ask for help, to text your life group, whatever you need to do when you are, when you are tempted, let it be a reminder for that. Use the force of the adversity like spiritual jujitsu or judo, use the force of that adversity against itself, right? If it hits you, then let it push you to what the Lord is calling you to do. It's like using the force of wind whenever you are sailing. Wind can toss you around if you're not using it right. Use the force of the win to sail in the right direction.

Seek the Lord's face, genuinely pray ugly, seek the Lord, sing his praises. Remember what he's done. Recount his goodness. Be grateful for what he has done in your life. When you do that adversity won't stop you in your tracks. When you do that, when you know, when you believe in your bones, that the Lord God in heaven is using that adversity to propel you to whatever that next step is, then your attitude will have a little bit more of a, well then bring it on. You have a little bit more pep in yourself, a little more confidence. When you see something coming at you, you'll get, okay, Lord I see it, bring it on, because I know you have something for me in it. Let's pray. Jesus thank you for adversity. What strange prayer, but we do thank you for it. Lord, thank you that you are using that to make us more like you. Thank you that you are using it to help us be

honest and open and genuine before you. Lord, we know that you are in control. We know that you are the ancient days. You are in heaven. Nothing surprises you. Help us to walk in that same manner. And that's your name that we pray. Amen. Before we stand and sing our last song, I just want to invite you, if you are in the throes of something like that, if you need help, if you're in the midst of adversity, if you, maybe you're in adversity and you're just trying to stop it, maybe you've been trying to stop it your whole life, and maybe using it and understanding that God is using it in your life is a new thing for you. If that's true and you want some help and you want some prayer, I'm going to be right up here, just standing there and you can just come up and ask for prayer. If you want to make a different kind of decision, if you want to join our church, if you want to be baptized,

if you know you need to take an X-Up, but you don't even know what that is, that's fine too. You can come up and you can pray with me. I'll be right here as we sing our last song. Let's stand. When peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea-billows roam, Whatever my life, Thou hast taught me to say It is well, it is well with my soul It is well, it is well with my soul It is well, it is well with my soul Though Satan should buffet, though trial should come, Let this blessed assurance control, That Christ has regarded my helpless estate, And has shed his own blood for my soul. is well with my soul it is well it is well with my soul my sin know the bliss of this glorious thought my sin not in part but the hope is nailed to the cross and I I bear it no more. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. It is well with my soul. With my soul. It is well. It is well with my soul.

The day when the faith shall be sight the clouds we roll back a scroll Shall we sound Shall descend Even so It is well my soul. With my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul. Before you sit, before we are dismissed, I want to read a little bit of Habakkuk to you to send us out. It says, I will take my stand at my watch post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what he the Lord God will say to me and what I will answer concerning my I complain. And the Lord answered me, write the vision, make it plain on tablets so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its appointed time. It hastens to the end. It will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not dismay. You're dismissed.