If you want to study along with our Sunday study group, and get the most from it, you will need to get the book "Overwhelmed: Winning the War Against Worry" by Perry Noble. You can get it from Amazon by clicking the title of the book link that is above or clicking on the image of the book at the end of the blog. Join us as we learn to win the war against worry.
Introduction:
Last week I told you about a Reading Plan that I was doing called Streams in the Desert. It is great for a daily devotional and much of it has application to our study. Here is one from this past week.
Isaiah 18:1-6 (HCSB)1 Ah! The land of buzzing insect wings beyond the rivers of Cush
2 sends couriers by sea, in reed vessels on the waters. Go, swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth-skinned, to a people feared far and near, a powerful nation with a strange language, whose land is divided by rivers.3 All you inhabitants of the world and you who live on the earth, when a banner is raised on the mountains, look! When a trumpet sounds, listen! 4 For, the LORD said to me: I will quietly look out from My place, like shimmering heat in sunshine, like a rain cloud in harvest heat.5 For before the harvest, when the blossoming is over and the blossom becomes a ripening grape, He will cut off the shoots with a pruning knife, and tear away and remove the branches.6 They will all be left for the birds of prey on the hills and for the wild animals of the land. The birds will spend the summer on them, and all the animals, the winter on them.
In this passage, Assyria is marching against Ethiopia, whose people are described as "tall and smooth-skinned" (Isaiah 18:2). As the army advances, God makes no effort to stop them, and it appears as though they will be allowed to do as they wish. The Lord is watching from his "dwelling place" [Isaiah 18:4] while the sun continues to shine on them, yet "before the harvest" (Isaiah 18:5) the entire proud army is defeated as easily as new growth is pruned from a vine.
Isn't this a beautiful picture of God-remaining quiet and watching? Yet his silence is not to be confused with passive agreement or consent. He is simply biding his time and will arise at the most opportune moment, just when the plans of the wicked are on the verge of success, in order to overwhelm the enemy with disaster. And as we see the evil of this world, as we watch the apparent success of wrongdoers, and as we suffer the oppression of those who hate us, let us remember those miraculous words of God-"I will remain quiet and will look on" [Isaiah 18:4].
Yes, God does have another point of view, and there is wisdom behind his words. Why did Jesus watch his disciples straining at the oars through the stormy night? Why did he, though unseen by others, watch the sequence of anguishing events unfold in Bethany as Lazarus slowly passed through the stages of his terminal illness, succumbed to death, and was finally buried in a rocky tomb? Jesus was simply waiting for the perfect moment when he could intercede most effectively.
Is the Lord being quiet with you? Nevertheless, he is attentive and still sees everything. He has his finger on your pulse and is extremely sensitive to even the slightest change. And he will come to save you when the perfect moment has arrived.
Finding and Maintaining Balance
Here's something else that I read last week that speaks to what we have been talking about when we say that the pace of our lives sometimes blocks our ability to completely trust God for and in any and everything. We've talked about that a lot during our study I read this in a blog post by a guy named Steve Graves about the balance between work and rest. The article title is Work Hard Rest Hard. This is a quick excerpt from it. You can read the entire post by clicking on this Link.
"I believe we are all designed to have a balanced rhythm of work and rest. Here are ten insights that have helped me recapture and maintain that sense of balance in my life’s journey. They’re not rocket science, but I've found their simplicity and clarity helpful:
- Although the particulars of our jobs may vary, balance in work and rest is universally crucial to a life of flourishing.
- Rest requires that we stop working for some length of time.
- To stop working means I need to pull over, shut down, and turn things off. There is an explicit action to stopping.
- A hobby is an important structure to help with the balance of work and rest.
- My job cannot be my hobby.
- Work can become an addiction. And we usually need help beating addictions.
- The concept of Sabbath and the Year of Jubilee are biblical examples of weekly and seasonal resting. These must be scheduled into our system if they are ever going to happen.
- If my work is not filtered correctly on the front side, it will never be manageable on the backside.
- Hard work helps me rest. Good rest helps me work hard.
- What the fool does in the end, the wise man does in the beginning. Build rest into the rhythm of your life, before you get to a place in your life and work where you HAVE to take a rest."
This Week's Study
Last week we finished up the portion of our study where we dealt with trusting God for any and everything. We admitted that we sometimes have trouble trusting God during the times that we are overwhelmed, stressed out and anxious over various things; our health, our finances, our marriages, our relationships, etc. We trust Him with providing the air that we breath, the sunshine, the rain, our salvation, but when it comes to personal struggles our trust sometimes waivers. We talked about specific trust blockers 1) the pace or our lives, 2) disappointment, and 3) spiritual blindness. The solutions were to slow down, read, study, and meditate on God’s word to know what His promises are so that we don’t make our preferences His promises. Then when we know what God’s promises for us really are we will realize that He keeps all of His promises. Knowing that will go a very long way in relieving us of the feelings of being overwhelmed because we don’t have to be in control, because God is always in control. God is a promise maker and He’s a promise keeper.
Now that we know that we can trust God if we get rid of the trust blockers we can tackle another question that we often have.
Does God Really Love Me?
1. How do you define love?
The religious and the super spiritual folk will define love with 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (HCSB)
4 Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited,
5 does not act improperly, is not selfish, is not provoked, and does not keep a record of wrongs.
6 ⌊Love⌋ finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth.7 ⌊It⌋ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
This is the description that the Holy Spirit gave Paul. Pastor Noble gave one that I think sums it up perfectly. His description is this; “love is determined by what we’re willing to seek out and what we’re will to sacrifice for.
One of his examples was that he loves Krispy Kreme doughnuts so much that he is even willing to drive out of his way to get them (seeking out), but if when he got to Krispy Kreme the doughnuts were $500 a box he is not so much in love anymore (willingness to sacrifice).
However when it comes to his daughter he would be willing to look anywhere and pay any price even his life for her. That is love.
2. Can you list five people or five things that you really love based on that description?
God love us no matter what description we use we can use the 1 Corinthians 13, or Pastor Noble’s description. God sought you out of the world and sin and then sent His only Son to die for you and become your sacrifice for your sin. Romans 8:32 (HCSB) 32 He did not even spare His own Son but offered Him up for us all; how will He not also with Him grant us everything?
He does love us the problem is us. We have a problem accepting God’s love.
Obstacles to Accepting God’s Love
3. Why do you think we have a problem accepting and believing that God loves us?
We believe that He loves other people but we somehow have trouble believing that He loves us.
- Past Sins. Sins before we were saved and sins after we were saved. The feelings that we have when we think about them cause us to often say How could “God love me after that?” Especially sins after we are saved. When we fall then we really feel that way that "He can't love me". When you start to feel that way think about David and his adulterous affair with Bathsheba. David was calld a man after God’s own heart. Acts 13:22 (HCSB)22 After removing him, He raised up David as their king and testified about him: ‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man loyal to Me, who will carry out all My will.’ Think about Paul and his persecution of Christians. Paul became one of the most important men in the early church and he wrote what has become 13 books of the 27 books of the New Testament and that doesn’t include Hebrews which many think that he wrote also.
Also keep this in mind. Romans 8:1-2 (HCSB)1 Therefore, no condemnation now exists for those in Christ Jesus, 2 because the Spirit’s law of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
- Our Performance. Even when we don’t have a problem with past sin we still may have an obstacle blocking our acceptance of God’s love. That obstacle is our performance. When we compare ourselves to others we feel that we come up short. A lot of that is pressure to perform that we learned from the world. Pressure from our parents, pressure from school, pressure from work, you remember those performance report times. When you perform well you get rewarded and if we don’t we can get penalized. So we spend our lives in at work, in our families, with our friends, and in the church trying to keep up with others and to meet or exceed people’s expectations. We compare ourselves to others in the church. Because somebody knows more about the Bible then we do, or can pray eloquent prayers, can sing better then we can sing and gets all the solos, when other people’s prayers seem to get answered and ours don’t. We think that God must love them and not us because we are not up to par. If we were as good as they are then God would love us too.
- Our Present Circumstances. We sometimes feel overwhelmed because of the situations we are in now. We may be sick, in financial stress, mourning the death of somebody close to us, a divorce, or the end of a relationship. When we are going through those kinds of things we wonder how anybody can say that God loves you when we are going through such stress and anxiety.
We talked about this a few weeks ago when we talked about depression. The fact is, some bad things happen by chance, others because of someone else’s sin, or because of our own sin or carelessness.
Love in the Presence of Struggle
Daniel in the lion's den by Briton Riviere found on
Wikipedia.org Used with permission under Creative Commons. No
modifications made.
Wikipedia.org Used with permission under Creative Commons. No modifications made.
4. When faced with the obstacles in the way of our accepting God’s love what do we need to do?
Pastor Noble returns to the book of Daniel to talk about what happens when we know without a doubt that God loves us. He takes us to the time that Daniel is put in the lions den because he continued to pray to God and not to the king of Babylon as required by a new law. The law not only said that he must pray to the king but it said that he must pray to only the king. This was really unusual in Babylon because they were polytheists which means they worshiped multiple gods. The punishment was to be thrown into a den of lions. The story is in Daniel chapter 6.
Daniel defied the law and prayed as, he usually, did three times a day toward Jerusalem. As we have gone through this study we know that Daniel knew that the God who loved him was bigger than any of his circumstances. We can’t say, because we weren't there and the Bible doesn't say that Daniel was never afraid. He may well have been, and he may even wavered a little bit in feeling that maybe God didn't love him. But the next morning after being thrown in the lions den here’s what he said to the king. Daniel 6:22 (HCSB)22 My God sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths. They haven’t hurt me, for I was found innocent before Him. Also, I have not committed a crime against you my king.” (emphasis mine).
Daniel was not more precious to God than you or me so we can know, for certain, that when we face difficult and overwhelming circumstances God’s love for us is just like the love that He had for Daniel. The kind of love that kept the lions' mouths shut. The kind of love that caused the fourth man to be in the furnace with the the Hebrew boys. The kind of love that caused God to send his only Son to die on the cross as the sacrifice to atone for our sins That kind of love is greater than anything we can encounter.
We know that God knows the end from the beginning so He knows what we are going through just like He knew what Daniel was going through. So in essence He allowed Daniel to be put in the lions den and He is allowing what is happening to you to happen. But we need to remember as Pastor Noble says “God has never brought anyone to a situation that was greater than His love for them”
The One Jesus Loved
We have talked about our struggle to accept God’s love because of things we have done in the past, our performance, or our present circumstances. Chapters 27-30 of our book is about the one Jesus loved, who we know, because he said it himself, was the apostle John. Yes John called himself the one Jesus loved, Jesus never called him that so far as we know. John is really an example of someone who was not particularly lovable but who despite all his shortcomings was loved by Jesus. He can be an example to us when we are overwhelmed and feeling unlovable. If Jesus can love John then He can love us.
5. Before even knowing John’s personal issues what about him would have not made him a candidate for being part of a group starting a brand new way of presenting the true intent of God’s law which, is love, not the strict adherence to the law as interpreted by the Pharisees?
He was an uneducated fisherman not one of the elite. Not someone taught in the scriptures by the Rabbis. The educated people in Jesus’ day in Palestine were the men and boys who were selected for religious studies. If you couldn't cut it there you had to go learn your father’s trade. John and three others, James, John’s brother, and Peter and his brother Andrew were the first three people called by Jesus to follow Him. . The four of them were uneducated fishermen. The rest of his twelve man inner circle weren't an all star cast either and neither are most of us. Yet Jesus called them and he calls us because he’s not looking for perfect people but willing people, and He loves willing people. Because Jesus has called us we know that God loves us. Iif He didn't He wouldn't have sent Jesus to sacrifice Himself for us.
On top of being an uneducated common fisherman John had some other issues.
Self-Righteousness
6. What is self-righteousness?
Definition from Merriam-Webster Dictionary
: convinced of one's own righteousness especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others
: narrow-mindedly moralistic
Here is the Urban Dictionary definition :
A self-righteous person acts superior to his peers because he believes his moral standards are perfect. This "moral smugness" is condescending by nature and is usually found offensive by others.
Self-righteousness is a way unintelligent and non athletic people can retain a sense of superiority. Various cults and religions promote self-righteousness in an attempt to convert the average person, who feels immoral by comparison.
7. Anybody you know? How about you?
We church folk can easily become self-righteous because of the messiness of our own pasts. We get saved then we start to, or try to start doing all the right things. Going to church and bible study, reading our Bible everyday, doing what some preachers are always saying “clean yourself up”. Well following all the rules religiously and pointing it out when others aren't following them is religion. Religion is a method Christianity is a relationship, and anyway following all the rules doesn't clean us up because we can’t clean ourselves, Jesus does the clean up.
Self-righteous people are always pointing to themselves as the good guys.
8. Can you think of any examples in scripture of a self-righteous person?
An example that Pastor Noble gives is the one where John got upset because somebody other than those in the inner circle was doing what they were doing. Luke 9:49-50 (HCSB)49 John responded, “Master, we saw someone driving out demons in Your name, and we tried to stop him because he does not follow us.”50 “Don’t stop him,” Jesus told him, “because whoever is not against you is for you.”
Here are some others:
Luke 18:9-12 (HCSB)9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and looked down on everyone else: 10 “Two men went up to the temple complex to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee took his stand and was praying like this: ‘God, I thank You that I’m not like other people—greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I get.’
Matthew 23:23 (HCSB)23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. These things should have been done without neglecting the others.
Luke 16:15 (HCSB)15 And He told them: “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly admired by people is revolting in God’s sight.
9. What can any of us do to impress God?
Absolutely nothing. But that doesn't keep us from trying does it? We always think we have to outdo the next person in showing our love for Christ. We just talked about that earlier when we talked about our performance being an obstacle of our accepting God’s love.
Selfishness
10 Has there ever been a time when you were selfish? When you've gotten angry with someone because they wouldn't give you something that you u wanted or shared something with you that you thought they should, or do what you wanted them to do?
Pastor Noble says that John, the one Jesus loved, was selfish.
11. What examples did he use?
Luke 9:51-54 (HCSB)51 When the days were coming to a close for Him to be taken up, He determined to journey to Jerusalem.52 He sent messengers ahead of Him, and on the way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make preparations for Him.53 But they did not welcome Him, because He determined to journey to Jerusalem.54 When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?”
John and his brother James wanted to kill the people in the village because they didn't want Jesus and his followers in town.
The other was after the intimacy of the Last Supper and the shocking revelation by Jesus that one of the twelve people closest to Him was going to betray Him. The disciples were very confused wondering who would betray Jesus. Luke 22:23 (HCSB) 23 So they began to argue among themselves which of them it could be who was going to do this thing.
One of the reasons that it is so important to read and study the Bible and to pay attention to people that God has called to preach, teach, and write commentaries, and books and other resources is that you will always get new insight. And I got one in preparing for this study today. I have read the account of the Lord’s Supper and what happens after it I don’t know how many times. I never noticed what Perry Noble pointed out until I read the chapter on Selfishness, and then went back to the Bible and read it again.
Just after this intimate Passover meal and the disciples wondering about who would betray Jesus, the very next verse, the very next one, Luke 22:24 (HCSB)24 Then a dispute also arose among them about who should be considered the greatest.
While the Bible doesn't say specifically that John was in the middle of that dispute, Pastor Noble’s suggests that since John was right by Jesus that he was in the middle of the dispute. John 13:23-25 (HCSB)23 One of His disciples, the one Jesus loved, was reclining close beside Jesus.24 Simon Peter motioned to him to find out who it was He was talking about. 25 So he leaned back against Jesus and asked Him, “Lord, who is it?”
Here’s another one perhaps the worst example of John's selfishness. Mark 10:35-41 (HCSB)35 Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approached Him and said, “Teacher, we want You to do something for us if we ask You.”36 “What do you want Me to do for you?” He asked them. 37 They answered Him, “Allow us to sit at Your right and at Your left in Your glory.” 38 But Jesus said to them, “You don’t know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup I drink or to be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” 39 “We are able,” they told Him. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink, and you will be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with. 40 But to sit at My right or left is not Mine to give; instead, it is for those it has been prepared for.” 41 When the ⌊other⌋ 10 ⌊disciples⌋ heard this, they began to be indignant with James and John.
Like John we have often done things out of selfishness. We have made life decisions, that have affected others out of selfishness. Those decisions and the knowledge of how selfish we have been can cause a great deal of stress and anxiety and cause us to think "how can God love me as selfish as I am or as self-righteous as I've been".
Look at John. We have just proved that he was self-righteous and selfish yet he is called the one that Jesus loved. Jesus’ love has nothing to do with you or what you do. John was selfish and he was self-righteous. Many of us are selfish and self-righteous but Jesus still loves us.
12 Then what do we need to do?
Repent.
13. What did we say repentance was?
A change of mind that results in a change of behavior.
Let me leave you with this same thought that Pastor Noble closed the chapters on John with. I'm going to paraphrase a little because he was only talking about John’s selfishness when he wrote what he did, but I’m going to include his self-righteousness: If Jesus could love John through his selfishness, and self-righteousness He can love us through ours. Being unselfish and loving not judging means disciplining ourselves to say yes to the Lord even when we want to tell Him no. Because remember we are not in control but He is in control.
Next week read Chapters 30-33.
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