Thank you, Youth Band. I was kind of hoping there'd be another song, and I'm the one speaking, so. It was very, very, very good. I appreciate it. Turn your Bibles to 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2, verses 16 through 17. This message is titled, God's Emotional Help for Holiness. And Jason, you could put that slide up with those two verses on it, 2 Thessalonians 2, verses 16 through 17. And please stand with me as we read this text, and then we will pray together. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word. Let's pray. Lord, we pray that each one of us would hear the unique thing that we need to hear this morning. and that your Holy Spirit would personalize the message for each one, that we might leave here loving you more and honoring you more in our lives and also in our inner being and in our emotions and in our inner thought life. Lord, you want holiness and we thank you that you are the one that brings it about as we trust in you. We pray, Lord, that through this message this morning and through your word, we would trust you more for this and that our lives would reflect the light of Christ's glory. We pray in his name. Amen. You may be seated. You know, it might be I remember when I used to read the scriptures, I'd come to something like this and I would say, oh, that's just a blessing. Let's just blow by this thing and move on to the commands and some other exciting stuff like predictions of end times and things like that. And so I would just whiz by this quickly and move on to something that seemed a little bit more exciting. And I've learned that in so doing, it's like walking past treasures in order to grasp something else. And so we don't want to do that. We want to look closely at the text and learn what the Lord has for us in this, because all scripture is useful. for teaching and correcting and training in righteousness, including things that might seem like a blessing just for somebody who lived a long time ago, but maybe doesn't have any relevance in my life today. And essentially two things are being asked for in this blessing. A blessing is a form of prayer, except it's addressed to the people. And the two things that are being asked for are that God would comfort their hearts and also establish them in every good work and word. And we wanna dig into, for the most part of this message, the meaning of this blessing and its application for us and its implications for us. The reason that he's asking God to comfort them is because they were being afflicted by unbelievers from outside the church in competition with them and against them. In 2 Thessalonians 1.6, we have that. And so they were experiencing anxiety as a result of that, as you and I would be tempted to do. But in addition, from inside the church, presumably there were false teachers who were saying the day of the Lord had already come. And so they were experiencing a spiritual anxiety from that as well. And that's the context within which this blessing for comfort for their hearts is given. You know, for us today, anxiety can result from any number of circumstances. And I wonder if you have any of these right now, as I might. Health concerns, job concerns, a child or grandchild who's making poor choices, drifting from the Lord, marriage or some other relational conflict, maybe struggling with an addiction. Questions about your calling, what should I do with my life? Retirement, will I have enough to live on? Or who will our next president be? Anxiety left unchecked is toxic. Anxiety is fertile ground for sin. Potentially, although that may not be obvious to us, The Mayo Clinic online, if you read stresses impact on behavior, lists things like, and this is just from a clinical perspective, not a biblical perspective necessarily, irritability, overeating or undereating, angry outbursts, drug or alcohol abuse, isolation, and skirting social gatherings. I remember one social gathering one night that we were supposed to go to, Jill and I, and I didn't wanna go. And I was feeling anxious, which was the root of why I didn't wanna go. I was feeling irritable, and I just wanted to stay home. Anybody ever feel like that? I was feeling vulnerable to sinning in my state that I was in. And I remember Jill prompted me to go pick out my clothes, Ken, do the next thing, keep moving. And so I was standing there in my closet thinking, I don't want to go to this thing tonight. I don't want to be around people. And emotions can make you want to withdraw, which is one of the many things that emotions, emotions can not only create bad actions, but it also can cause you to withdraw, which is another form of sin in a way, because we're not loving and caring for people when we do that. And as I was working on this message last night, I had the World Series on in the background, and I heard the announcer say this, about the Cubs hitters, they're saying, under the pressure and emotion of the moment, they wanted to do so much, they were taking swings at pitches that they shouldn't have. And they were saying things like they were losing self-discipline and were swinging at bad pitches because they were trying to do too much. Because they're young players and in the heat of the emotion, they were doing what they normally wouldn't do in earlier games in the season. And so you see, even in something as potentially trivial as baseball, although for these players it's probably not that trivial, and maybe for Cubs fans it's not that trivial, or Indians fans, it's my son-in-law. You're doing things you don't want to do under the pressure of the internal emotions. And so we want to analyze this and look at this a little more closely. I know even for myself, I played basketball in high school and if I had a home game and all my friends and girls were watching, I played poorer than I did when it was an away game and there were less people there that I knew. In fact, I've told Brian Pannenberg this, my best game was against Bedford, and we figured out that he was probably on the other team at the time. So I'm sure he remembers me and all that, how great I was that night. So this blessing centers on the Thessalonians being comforted and established, all that they do and say, and this is a remarkable blessing. So today we'll explore this in greater detail. What does comfort to the heart have to do with every good work and word? My company wants to help improve employee behavior, and much like we have people in our sphere of influence that we might want to help improve their behavior as well. And so this week it just so happened that I spent a full eight hours in a training session, and a good portion of that training session was on something called emotional intelligence. How many people have heard of this, emotional intelligence? Just a few. Probably people in the business world have heard of this. It's made popular by a man by the name of Daniel Goldman, although I did find out that this was something that came up even before him. And for a few hours this week, we were taught this concept of emotional intelligence, and the definition in the training materials was this. A person's ability to recognize, understand, and manage his or her emotions and the emotions of others. To guide thinking and behavior to achieve goals. Let me say that again. A person's ability to recognize, understand, and manage his or her emotions and the emotions of others to guide thinking and behavior to achieve goals. Now why would my company spend so much money? There was a lot of money being spent on salaries sitting in a room teaching people how to manage their emotions. Why would they spend so much money doing that? Unless they realized, along with many people, that emotions affect behavior. And what they want is really behavior change. I think if everybody behaved better under anxiety, they'd probably be having a class on how to have more anxiety. but they were teaching how to manage emotions so that behavior, positive behavior change can happen. And in particular, they're talking about relationships between people. And this behavior change is something that in this text today is prayed for as part of the blessing only after they're prayed for comforting the hearts. Then it says, and establish you in every good work and word. And so this text today talks about blessing the heart as a means to, blessing the heart of comfort as a means to bringing emotions in check, Getting rid of anxiety and things that cause us to swing at pitches we shouldn't swing at, metaphorical pitches, things in our lives that we shouldn't be doing. And instead, establish our hearts in good works and word. The Bible's been teaching that emotions have an effect on behavior, just like this course did for quite some time. And on the next slide, it talks about this. Psalm 37, eight through nine, it says, refrain from anger and forsake wrath. These are emotions. Fret not yourself. That's what you do when you have anger and wrath. It tends only to evil. Do you see that? The first command is refrain from anger, forsake wrath. It's an instruction toward the emotion. Because fret not yourself, it tends only to evil. So there are emotions such as anger and wrath that tend to evil. And we need to be aware of that dynamic. And the scriptures want us to be aware of that. The warning goes on, and in verse nine of Psalm 37, there's a description of those who let this get out of control. It calls them evildoers, for the evildoers shall be cut off. And so you have anxiety and anger and wrath leading to fretting, leading to evil, leading to evildoers, leading to being cut off. And so we see that emotions and anxiety and the related elements to that in the heart, if left unchecked, can bring about horrible consequences spiritually and otherwise. The cost of not dealing with our emotions properly can be high. When we feel anxiety and fretting inside, we need to stop and pause and pray. It's like the red light that comes on in your dash. And sometimes those red lights actually on the dash don't even work. And that happens with us. As presented in the class today, or this past week, on emotional intelligence, the statistic is, and I don't know where they get these statistics, but let's just say it's even close to true, only 30% of people are aware of their emotional state. For example, I remember watching one husband interacting with his wife one time. And when that interaction was over, I said to him, wow, you were really angry. And he had no idea. And it was so obvious to me, but he had absolutely no idea that that was happening. And so if we're not aware of our own emotions, we're living with an invisible enemy, crouching, ready to pounce on us and bring about the sin that can result from that. Listen to the Lord's warning to Cain. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his face fell. Negative emotions. The Lord sees this, and what does the Lord say to him? The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? Verse seven of Genesis four, sin is crouching at the door. And so when we feel these emotions of anger and anxiety and fretting, we need to realize sin is crouching at the door. And that word crouching, it's like a predator that's hiding, ready to come and pounce. That word is purposeful there. So there are scriptural admonitions then to have high emotional intelligence, being aware of our own emotions, being able to then properly deal with them so that sin does not result, but positive behavior results instead. And that's how I was feeling that one night in my closet as I was trying to pick out my clothes, I was realizing that sin was crouching at the door for me. And to go and be with a whole bunch of people in a state like that is dangerous. What was I to do? In Ephesians 4, the other verse up there, it says, be angry, it's not a sin to be angry, be angry and do not sin. Again, warning us about that connection. What is a sin is to be angry for too long because the next verse says, do not let the sun go down on your anger. That's why it's gotta be time limited. And then what happens if we don't? The next verse says, and give no opportunity to the devil. And Ephesians 4, 31 through 32, before it says in verse 32, be kind to one another, tend to hearted, forgiving one another as God and Christ forgave you, before it talks about the positive behavior that you need to present, it says this in verse 31, let all bitterness and wrath and anger addresses the inner heart emotions first. and slander, words, be put away from you along with all malice, which is words and actions. And so the scriptures combine addressing the emotions prior to addressing the actions here in Ephesians 4. In the same way, we have the same order here in 2 Thessalonians 2, 16 and 17. And so while we receive training at work to be emotionally intelligent, that is aware of and exercise control over our emotions, as they would put it, there were two things absent from this training. One is that emotions are just one aspect of determining behavior. The focus was mostly on emotions, and that's rightfully so, because it is a powerful determinant of behavior. But the other thing as you can imagine that was absent from as it relates to influencing behavior is God and prayer. And so that's what we wanna look at today because the scripture actually has God and the Lord Jesus in this in terms of influencing both our emotions and our actions. And God completely understands our emotions. and our anxieties and so forth. He invented the idea of emotions. And he created us and we experienced them. He completely understands. And so we'll look at that now, the role of God in this. And while we're focusing on this with the focus of our training, training talked about managing not only our emotions, but the emotions of others. God has high emotional intelligence because we will see in this text that God has the ability to manage the emotions of others, namely us, believers. And we must believe that or else we won't be able to apply this text today to our lives. And we'll be in deep trouble actually, I believe. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word. And notice here that it is the Lord Jesus himself and God our Father who is comforting hearts and establishing them in every good work and word. And it's verses like this that once again illustrate the deity of Jesus. For someone to have power over a human heart in order to bring comfort and in order to produce good works and word, someone must have a keen understanding of the heart with which it is influencing and have the ability to do that. And only God has that ability. The scriptures say, we don't even know our own hearts. let alone the hearts of others. And so here is a text that clearly to me shows that the Lord Jesus himself and God our Father are both persons of the Godhead. Jeremiah 17, nine, speaking of the heart, the heart is deceitful above things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? Meaning no person can even understand their own heart. And so this is why we need God and we need his help. You can't heal something you don't know what's wrong. And that's why doctors try so hard to get a diagnosis. That word gnosis is to know. And who can know the heart, the sick heart? Only God can give an accurate diagnosis of our hearts. Solomon in his prayers in the dedication of the temple says, you render to each whose heart you know according to all his ways. For you, you only know or diagnose the hearts of all children of mankind that they may fear you all the days that they live. 1 Kings 8, 39 through 40. And so when Jesus healed physical limbs on earth, that was one thing. But when the Bible calls the heart desperately sick, a healing of the heart to produce positive and good emotions that are appropriate for a Christian to have and the associated behavior is a bigger miracle than healing a particular limb or broken finger. We will come back to this phrase, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace. And we're gonna go straight to what the Lord Jesus himself and God the Father is able to do. And it should blow our minds as we meditate on this. The two things, comfort our hearts and establish them in every good work and word. And from this, we see that our hearts can be comforted, but they also determine actions and words. from our heart, we should see this, from our hearts, actions and words flow from them. And so what we need to do is explore this concept of the heart in the Bible. And what we will see is an amazing thing. On the next slide, here are all of the elements that describe the heart in the scriptures. And my goal in presenting this is that we would never see the word heart in scripture in any sort of narrow sense again. When God talks about replacing a heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh in the new covenant, this is nothing short of a complete and extreme makeover. In the Bible, our hearts include emotions, the will, reason, thought, knowing, positive and negative affections, desires, and purposes. Sometimes when we think of heart, we just think of maybe emotions. The heart in scripture is all of these things. We're gonna go around the pie, starting at first with emotions. Hannah weeps because her heart is sad in 1 Samuel 1.8. Notice her actions flow from the condition of her heart. She's weeping because she's sad. We don't always weep when we're sad, but it doesn't mean people don't notice. Nehemiah 2.2, the king said to me, why is your face sad? This is nothing but sadness of heart. In our training this week, it was pointed out that 55% of communication is body language. which we see here in the king being able to see Nehemiah. Nehemiah didn't come up and say, I'm sad. He could see it. 38% is vocal tone and only 7% is what we actually say. And so there's a saying that he or she wears his heart on her sleeve, his or her sleeve. And with 93% of our communication being nonverbal, this is much easier to do than we think. Only the best actors can hide this and even then not forever and never can they hide it from God. And so we must not think just because I've got this negative attitude towards someone or something that I'm not saying any bad things to them, that I'm not communicating bad things to them. if 93% of our communication is non-verbal in some way or another. That's why it's so important to deal with issues of the heart, because with 93% of our communication, we will be saying, I hate you, when we don't really know. We know that we shouldn't say that, and we don't say that, and we think we're doing well, because we're not saying that, and we're proud of our self-control, only to realize, I'm already communicating that anyway. In the heart is will and purpose. 1 Corinthians 7.37 says that, talks about someone determining something in their heart. And Proverbs 25 says the purpose in a man's heart is like deep water. We don't think of our hearts as thinking thoughts, but it says when Jesus perceived their thoughts in Luke 5.22, he says, why do you question in your hearts, not in your minds? Take care in Deuteronomy 15.9, take care lest there be any unworthy thought in your heart. Matthew 9.4, Jesus knowing their thoughts, why do you think evil in your hearts? And so when we see talking about establishing your heart in this text, we're not just talking about emotions, we're talking about thoughts too. Only God can establish our thoughts. Jesus is God, right? He's part of this. Our knowing comes from our heart. Knowing then in your heart as a man disciplines his son, the Lord disciplines you, Deuteronomy 8, 5. And positive and negative affections come from the heart. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, positive affection, Deuteronomy 13 three. Leviticus 19, you shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor lest you incur sin because of him. There again is the warning if you hate your brother in your heart, sin is right crouching at the door after the fact. Verse 18 of that same chapter, Leviticus 19, you shall not take vengeance or bear grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And again, vengeance can be any form of communication, verbal or nonverbal. And I believe that if we have it in our hearts, it comes out. And we're not loving the other person. We must deal with it in our hearts, in the biblical way. Our desires come from the heart. Do not desire her beauty in your heart and do not let her capture you, Proverbs 6, 25. So when the scriptures say the heart is desperately sick, we're not talking about some minor internal thing, are we? Every aspect of our inner being is sick. Our wills are sick, our reasonings and our thoughts are sick. What we know is wrong. our affections are misguided, our desires are for the wrong things, and our purposes are aimed in the wrong place. And this two-fold blessing, calling on the Lord Jesus and God the Father to comfort the emotional and inner part of our being, is so important because our emotions impact behavior, but it's also a prayer to establish all these other aspects of our lives inside so that they can be healed. Emotions, will, purpose, reasons, thoughts, knowledge, affections, desires. All of these things ultimately determine what we treasure. And no wonder Jesus says in Matthew 6, 21, where your treasure is, there will be your heart, which is everything in that list. You will treasure him or it, whatever it is, in your mind, in your purposes, in your will, in your desires, in all of this. And so God, by fulfilling this ministry of this blessing, is doing nothing less than making him our treasure for his glory. And to break our tendency to go toward broken cisterns of relief for our emotions, cisterns of addictions, that we might have. This blessing is to deal with our broken emotions and thoughts and everything else on the inner side. And so on the next slide, we have our heart in context with God influencing it and works and words resulting. I was driving down the road and I saw a sign on a church and the sign said, happiness doesn't come to you, but from you. I didn't like it. I started thinking about it. When you look at this diagram, happiness doesn't come to you, but from you. And I quoted it to a friend who I feel has a deep understanding of spiritual humility and need for grace, and his response was this. That's crushing. I chuckled. at that and I realized he's right. Essentially the sign is saying what some secular emotional intelligence advocates say, successful management of your emotions like those that accompany happiness are from you and not from something other than you. That puts a lot of pressure on an individual, and this is why it's crushing, to feel comfort, to feel joy, to feel peace, because the message is all this is from you. And you can muster up your own happiness by fixing these other things that are inhibitors to it. But to the humble who know in their hearts that we can do nothing, especially control emotions, like we control the heat on the thermostat, this message is crushing. And this is on the side of a church. We don't understand the role of God and the role of man in the production of our own joy and happiness and behaviors and words. But the sign that was on this church isn't the message of the Bible. God is the one being called upon to comfort our hearts. In Philippians 4, the secret to contentment is not something that comes from me, but it says the secret to contentment is I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And that strength comes from Christ. That sentence on the sign is the exact opposite of the Bible. Oh, I hope you don't go. If you ever were to leave this church and go to another church, I hope it's not one like that. And if you came from a church like I did, that people didn't bring their Bibles, if you don't bring your Bible, you don't know your Bible, the sign's out on the side, oh, what a nice saying. I can, I'm the master of my own happiness. I guess I like that. Essentially, the church is erasing God from this diagram that we have behind us and replacing it with self. And do you know what happens when we do that? Addictions happen when we do that. Addictions are things that happen when we have emotions swirling, we need relief, and so we don't want to wait on the Lord to minister to us, or we don't know how, or that's never happened before, we can't imagine how could some invisible being actually fix what's going on inside here. I need to fix it now, and you go rush to the thing that will bring you relief. And that's how addictions start. And that's how they continue. And then we get a counterfeit comfort for a temporary time. And then the payback from that begins to affect every other area of the heart. We can go right around the circle. We get positive influence in our emotions, and then we can begin to desire it, which is another piece of the heart pie. And then we can begin to reason it's okay, and we come up with justification for it. And then we can purpose to pursue it. And then we can set our affection upon it. And then pretty soon, the whole heart is captured by this addiction that started with an emotion of anxiety that I need to get rid of. Addictions to something, whether a substance or pornography or food or smartphones, produce a temporary payback that's counterfeit comfort to the sick and wounded emotions that we all have. And that payback begins to affect every other area of our hearts and our lives and our actions. I mention this because it's on my mind because Jill and I have lost a total of three people who were close to us to addictions. And they can be devastating. And we have a remedy in the text today. Comfort from God, I believe, is a prerequisite to consistent holiness. Because the substitute addictions are man's attempt to manage emotions. We will try to do something to manage those emotions one way or another. And we'll either go to God, the fountain, or we will build broken cisterns that can hold no water that will ultimately satisfy us. And breaking free from addictions, I believe, it requires God's grace of comfort to the heart, and we must believe that God can actually do this. And I'm speaking as one who have watched myself go from one addiction to another addiction to another addiction, and they might be more refined. Actually, when I was an unbeliever, they weren't as refined. But as you become a Christian, they get a little bit more refined, but it's still a substitute for God. And it can be even something so deceptively subtle as an extreme busyness in ministry. that I'm really just doing to dull the ache and the emotional stress and anxiety that I've got in my heart, but it really isn't something that I'm doing from the Lord necessarily. It's a coping mechanism. Even ministry can have some level of addiction and unhealthy aspect to it. So no one's immune from this. No one is immune from this, except the one who met every temptation to sin, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is empathetic and sympathetic with our weaknesses and can help us in our time of need. And so what we need to do is get to the place where we're, like the psalmist who says, my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart. Emotions, will, reason, thought, knowing, positive and negative affections, desires, and purposes. God is the strength of all of those things and my portion forever, Psalm 73, 26. And in order for our hearts to be established, they first need to be comforted. How is this supposed to work if God is invisible and we're down here? There are lots of different ways. The scripture says in 2 Thessalonians 3, now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. It's not just one way, there's lots of ways. It can be a change of circumstances, like when a youth who had died in Acts 20 was made alive again, and it says they were not a little comforted by that. It can be a change of circumstances. It can be peace to the emotions that comes without a change in circumstances. I remember one time when Jill had a health crisis, and we were just completely overwhelmed by our own anxiety, and I knew that was a problem. And all I could do is just lay on the couch and pray and ask God to give me peace in my heart. I have no good thoughts right now. I just need peace in my heart. And I waited on the Lord. And within minutes, it just flooded my heart. And so that's another way that peace can come. Just directly, without any change in circumstances. Or it can come as part of a devotional. a verse at just the right time, just what you needed, and you know in your heart of hearts that that came from God himself. Both of these kinds of calming answers that God can give us is what gives us the capacity to forsake the dysfunctions the Mayo Clinic mentions on their website, to stress and anxiety, and replace them with an inner strength to produce good words and good works. In Philippians 4, 6, and 7, it says, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, go to God for the fix of anxiety. And then it says, and the peace of God will guard your heart, don't think just emotions, will guard all aspects of your heart that we mentioned before. Which means to have anxiety means that your heart is exposed to spiritual hackers. Acts 5.3, Ananias' heart was exposed to spiritual hacker because apparently he was anxious about money. And so Peter says, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart? To lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land. And then he says to him, why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? And notice the heart is placed where we contrive deeds. Not being comforted by God is costly. And so if it's so costly, what keeps us going to God for comfort? What blocks this? Number one, I would say this, poor theology. We think because we're responsible for our words and actions, and we are, that they must then come from us in order for us to be responsible, and not from something outside of us, like God's influence. This is not Bible truth, this is just logic that we're applying when we think that. We are responsible for our words and actions, but the fix isn't with us, it's with God, and this is part of that tension that we don't fully understand how all this works. We must leave it that way. But I think there's other even more subtle things. Sometimes we get these unbiblical but popular phrases that we hear, like, we need to get out of our comfort zone. The wording of that is poor. It implies having a comforted heart is not holy. And being in a state of lack of comfort is holy. And what I'm arguing today is that when God is the strength and comfort of our hearts, He is our fountain and our desire and our will and our purpose and our greatest affection, and out of that will flow words and actions that God has ordained for us, and that is holiness, and that is God's comfort zone for us. But to the new Christian, when you say things like, we need to get out of our comfort zone, do they really understand what you're saying? Or are they thinking, oh, it's more holy for me to be in some sort of state of anxiousness? You just need to be careful. Romans 14, 17, the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That's a comfort zone of sorts, is it not? Peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And listen to this, from that base of emotional base, verse 18, whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. That's the actions and the words. So this blessing starts with comfort to our hearts, which I believe includes emotional relief and comforting thoughts, which in turn settles us down and then brings us to the place where we have a capacity to love others and we're not tied down by the negative emotions. And so we have now, on the next slide there, Jason, a description of the new covenant. And you may recall the new covenant is a promise to give us a new heart. What does that mean? Remember the pie? It's not just this little thing inside this new heart. I get a new heart. It's everything. inside us that determines our behavior and our actions. It's God's promise to give us a new heart, replace our heart of stone, which cannot respond and replace it with a heart of flesh, which can respond to the influences of grace. This comes to us by trusting in Jesus' death on the cross for us on our behalf, not only to forgive our sins, that we've committed in the midst of our emotions and the sins we didn't even know we were committing because 93% of our communication is nonverbal, but also day to day to remove sin's power and that this blessing is just a blessing of pronouncing what God has already promised in the new covenant. He will make us perfect forever, those who are being made holy by giving a new heart, by producing all of these things inside of us. The blessing here is consistent with the belief that the new covenant not only provides forgiveness of sins, but also a promise of grace to the heart to affect emotions, behavior, and speech. Listen to this verse, how this verse connects our peace with our works and God's role. Isaiah 26, 12. Oh Lord, you will obtain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works. All of this is possible only because Jesus died on the cross for our sins, paid the penalty for our sins so that we can have a relationship with God that works this way. And all of this is rooted in God's love for us, which is the final phrase that we want to look at on the last slide in 2 Thessalonians 2, 16 through 17. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word. Here we have the past, the present, and the future covered from the one who it was and is and is to come. He loved us, past tense, and gave us eternal comfort. That was in the cross. With the cross, we have a form of eternal comfort. When we die, it'll be eternal and never end. Now, we know that it's coming, and we have experiences of comfort in the midst of the difficulties of life. and good hope through grace, hope that we are and will be and am saved all at the same time because of what Christ did for us on the cross. And what this does is it gives us a baseline that says, God loved us, he gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace. Because we have eternal comfort, we can rely on future comfort when we are feeling anxious. through grace, unmerited favor. There's two words that show that this is just something that we don't earn. It is something we receive freely. One is the word grace and the other is word gave. If someone says to you, how'd you get that? Oh, she gave it to me. You wouldn't think you earned that then. You see the word gave, it's clear. This is just given to us. But just because it says the Bible has given us, or God has given us eternal comfort doesn't mean our hearts don't need refreshing experiences of that past love that was given to us at the cross. We need it every day. I feel anxious, anxiety every single day. I feel anxious when there's nothing to feel anxious about because I'm afraid it's gonna end my peace. My heart is an anxiety factory. if I let it. But I've learned that God does, the only way I've learned this is because I was forced. God brought situations into my life that there was no way out of this anxiety. No news I could get could change the fact that I had just been told 95% chance my wife was probably gonna die. And you won't find out until those test results come in a week from now. What am I gonna do for a week with this? In my heart, what am I gonna do with it? I was forced to go to God for comfort, apart from any change in circumstance, and he gave it. So what does an emotionally intelligent heart look like? It's a trusting heart. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind has stayed on you because he trusts in you. When I feel anxiety, that means my mind has not stayed on Christ. I've gotta get my mind fixed. Listen to this, he's not afraid of bad news. His heart is firm, trusting in the Lord. Cast your anxieties on him, he cares for you. The basis for peace is him, not us. Church sign notwithstanding. We cannot establish our own hearts. We don't have anything to work with in and of ourselves. That word establish, that he may establish every good work and word, that word establish means to set firm, to firmly put in place. But what about emotional intelligence and the ability for us to manage the emotions of others? When the corporate culture talks about that, they're talking about not doing things that push other people's buttons. Don't do that. Refrain from that and do things that you know that are gonna come across in such a way that your relationship will be stronger after this interaction instead of weaker. That's what they mean by managing the emotions of others. But as Christians, how do we manage the emotions of others? That's one way, but what's Paul doing here? He's praying a blessing over them that God would comfort their hearts. That's how the Christian is emotionally intelligent in terms of managing the emotions of others. We pray for comfort to other people's hearts. When people in your sphere of influence, whoever that is, their behaviors and actions frustrate you to no end. Why can't they just see? Why can't they just change differently? Do you complain about it and fret about it more than you pray for comfort to their hearts from God so that their hearts can be established from God so that their actions and words will change? And I think that's the big application here is to see what Paul is doing for them instead of just saying, what are you fretting about? He's blessing them with the new, giving a prayer blessing of the new covenant. To pray for behavior change or holiness in yourself or others is to pray for God's comfort to your emotions, not just for new behavior, because emotions affect behavior. And the question we have to ask is, do you believe God has influence over human emotions and words and works? Is he that sovereign? Does your theology allow you to believe that? Because if it's murky in your mind, you won't be praying these things for other people, you'll be complaining about them instead, as I'm tempted to do. We have to see that God is sovereign over the human heart in order to apply this text today. And if we don't, all we're left with is the world's definition of emotional intelligence. and signs on churches that don't believe the Bible. Self-regulating emotions. You should be able to do better. Those kinds of thoughts. And so as I was standing in my closet, anxious and wanting to skirt that night's social gathering, my phone buzzed from a text that I had received. And I pulled it out of my pocket and it said this. After you have suffered a little while, The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and same word, establish you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Just at the right time, that text come in. I went to the person and I said, why did you send me that text right then? He said, I had a rare day. where I was alone and I had an hour quiet time that day. And someone had sent me that text. And I thought, I felt like the Lord was leading me to go get my phone and look at that text. And when I looked at it, I read that and I thought, I bet Ken would like to see this. And he forwarded it to me. And my heart was established at that moment by the promise of it being established. And then I could come to the social gathering, and I trust that my communication of love was not just 7% that day, but that my joy in the Lord showed forth to others. Because God is the one who puts us in his comfort zone, and that feels right, and it produces holiness out of a heart of flesh that he put there by the new covenant. Let's pray. Father, we thank you. for grace. We thank you for the things you give us. Because we have nothing to work with when it comes with our emotions and our thoughts that are spinning out of control. We need you. And Lord, the remedy is not to run to fix it with our own self-made cisterns, but to wait, to pray, and to wait on you. Wait on you. Wait on you. Be still before the Lord. Be still and know that I am God. Lord, we thank you. Thank you that you are sovereign over every aspect of our being. It gives us hope for the future. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.