We'll turn in your Bibles to Deuteronomy 32. We're gonna read verses 10 through 12. Here are the word of God. He found him in a desert land and in the wasteland, a howling wilderness. He encircled him, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirs up its nest, hovers over its young, spreading out its wings, taking them up, carrying them on its wings, so the Lord alone led him and there was no foreign God with him. Thank You, Father, for this Your Word, and I pray that as we dig into it that our hearts would become ever closer in our trust in You and in You alone. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. William J. Long was a naturalist who would spend weeks and weeks and weeks just laying out in the bush with his binoculars looking at eagles and studying their behavior and writing down every detail that he could come up with. And even though his fascinating book has been long out of print, it was recently reprinted as an e-book, and I downloaded it two weeks ago. And I want to read you his description of a mother eagle trying to teach her young eaglet to fly. After giving a lot of other somewhat boring background on what had been happening in the previous days, he said this. One day, when I came to the little thicket on the cliff where I used to lie and watch the nest through my glass, I found that one eaglet was gone. The other stood on the edge of the nest, looking down fearfully into the abyss, whither, no doubt, his boulder nestmate had flown, and calling disconsolately from time to time. His whole attitude showed plainly that he was hungry and cross and lonesome. Presently, the mother eagle came swiftly up from the valley and there was food in her talons. She came to the edge of the nest, hovered over at a moment so as to give the hungry eagle at a sight and smell of food, and then went slowly down to the valley, taking the food with her, telling the little one in her own way to come and he should have it. He called after her loudly from the edge of the nest and spread his wings a dozen times to follow, but the plunge was too awful. His heart failed him and he settled back in the nest and pulled his head down into his shoulders and shut his eyes and tried to forget that he was hungry. The meaning of the little comedy was plain enough. She was trying to teach him to fly, telling him that his wings were grown and the time was come to use them, but he was afraid. In a little while she came back again, this time without food, and hovered over the nest, trying every way to induce the little one to leave it. She succeeded at last when, with a desperate effort, he sprang upward and flapped to the ledge above where I had sat and watched him with old Whitehead. But after surveying the world gravely from his new place, he flapped back to the nest and turned a deaf ear to all his mother's assurances that he could fly just as easily to the treetops below, if he only would. Suddenly, as if discouraged, she rose well above him. I held my breath, for I knew what was coming. The little fellow stood on the edge of the nest, looking down at the plunge, which he dared not take. There was a sharp cry from behind, which made him alert, tense as a watch spring. The next instant, the mother eagle had swooped, striking the nest at his feet, sending his support of twigs and himself with them into the air together. He was afloat now, afloat on the blue air in spite of himself, and flapped lustily for life. Over him, under him, beside him hovered the mother in tireless wings, calling softly that she was there. But the awful fear of the depths and the lance tops of the spruces was upon the little one. His flapping grew more wild. He fell faster and faster. Suddenly, more in fright, it seemed to me, than because he had spent his strength, he lost his balance and tipped his head downward in the air. It was all over now, it seemed. He folded his wings to be dashed in pieces among the trees. Then like a flash, the old mother eagle shot under him. His despairing feet touched her broad shoulders between her wings. He righted himself, rested an instant, found his head. Then she dropped like a shot from under him, leaving him to come down on his own wings. A handful of feathers, torn out by his claws, hovered slowly down after them. It was all the work of an instant before I lost them among the trees far below, and when I found them again with my glass, the eaglet was in the top of a grape pine and the mother was feeding him. So this mother eagle brought a frightful disturbance into the young eaglet's life in order to teach it to fly, and the clear implication of Deuteronomy 32 verse 11 is that God does exactly that with us. God brings disturbances and distresses and sorrows and pain sometimes into our lives. And there are three points to this sermon that we need to, first of all, properly interpret these disturbances. Secondly, we need to properly respond to them, and then we need to continually rejoice in them. Like this mother eagle, God often brings disturbances in order to launch us out into His will for our lives. And sadly, we often misinterpret these things as if God doesn't care. Where is God? We're wondering why God would allow these things into our lives. But He does care. Israel complained because of God's dealings with her. But God said to them, I did it because I loved you. God knows we don't like these disturbances He brings into our lives, but He knows that they are in our best interest. And the question is, do we see these disturbances as God's loving lessons in our lives? Do we try to learn from them? Do we try to ask, Lord, what are you teaching me through this? Are we actually benefiting from His lessons? Job reflected on the lesson of disturbance that God had brought to him and realized that before all of that came, he had been thinking, and this is a quote of his thoughts that he had had way previous to all of the pain. This is Job 29, verse 18. He said, and multiply my days as the sand. My root is spread out to the waters, and the dew lies all night on my branch. My glory is fresh within me, and my bow is renewed in my hand." He had become very comfortable in his nest. God had blessed him, and he thought he had it made. Life could not be better. And he uses these illustrations to describe that. He wanted to stay in his nest right where he was for the rest of his lives. He says, I will die in my nest. But God kicked him out. As it were, He, you know, destroyed his nest and forced him to begin to stretch his wings of faith. He had something much better for Job. And it was the same with Israel. Let me give you a little bit of historical background. God was in this chapter describing some of the difficulties that he had sovereignly brought into Israel's life to motivate them to leave Egypt. People of Israel may have complained plenty about their slavery in Egypt, but they would not have left. and not without God forcing them to leave. They feared the responsibilities and the risks and the dangers of freedom way too much to leave. That's what really happens with people who are present-oriented, who have a slave mentality. They don't want to. leave that nest. And I want to read to you from Exodus 6, verse 1. It says, That's a very interesting verse of how God was going to use the Pharaoh himself to force Israel out of their nest. The verse says God had to drive them out of their nest, kick them out of their nest. And I would like to ask ourselves three questions in this connection. First of all, are we convinced that leaving the nest and following God's promptings is a necessary thing. I mean, we recognize with eagles, if you know anything about eagles, obviously that young eagle has to leave the nest eventually, right? Has to be able to do that. But we many times approach our own times when God is calling us to do a new challenge, to get out of our comfort zone, we respond in much the same way. Why was the young eaglet nervous? The old home was all that the eaglet had ever known, and we can easily have that problem as well. We can get comfortable in our old ways of doing things, and to find God's call of obedience to just be a little bit too stressful. I think for most people, the status quo is where we would like to stay. It's easier than launching out into the new. Or it may be that the eaglet was afraid of trying untried territory because it felt insecure. How often are we kept from God's best for us? Because though we make efforts at flapping our wings and fluttering around the edge of the nest, we never have the courage to take the plunge. And if you are one of those who does not like to change, you're insecure, I can relate to you. I have all my life tended to be insecure. If you're afraid of change, then you need to be convinced of the absolute necessity of following the coaxings of God that He gives to us through His Scriptures to make changes into our lives. God would not ask us to make those changes if it was not necessary. And it was hard for Israel to see the need of leaving their nest unless God had brought that slavery and the cruelty of the Pharaoh to be harder and harder to bear. If they had been quick learners, they would not have had to go through so much. And it's the same with us. And so the first question that I'm asking in your outlines is, do we see the necessity for God's lessons of disturbance? Those disturbances He brings into our lives could be disease. could be financial stress, pain of other people's treatment of us. There are many, many things that he could do. And even though those things, if you look back on your life and you look at those painful events and you say, wow, I'd never want to go through that again, but I can see that it was important that I went through that. I'm glad that God took me through that. I look back through my life, I see a lot of those kinds of situations. The second question is, do we understand the methods God uses to stir up the nest? The naturalist showed a number of different ways that the mother eagle tried to get the young one to jump out. There was coaxing, there was coaxing with food, there was pushing, there was prodding, there was trying to, within the nest, stir it up, and then finally knocking the eaglet off of its perch. A. A. McLaren, the famous Scottish preacher, said, And to stir up the nest means to make a man uncomfortable where he is. Now at the beginning of the year, I showed you what my life map looked like, and a number of you have seen copies of at least portions of that, but the mentor who took me through that, he said, I want you to highlight, back then it was with a highlighter, I've got it underlined now, but he says, I want you to highlight all of the painful events in your life. And there was a whole group of us that were going through this, and every one of us had this grouping of painful things in our lives right before a transition into the next stage of our lives. And he said he's taken over a thousand people through that, and he has seen the same pattern that the Lord has brought. because we tend to just like the status quo, and God has to motivate us and move us into the change. Now, he did point out that some people need a lot more pain than others because they're much more resistant. We need to be like that first eaglet and just jump right away. George Whitefield once said, whenever I'm tempted to settle down, God puts a thorn in my nest. And he can do it by means of illness, sorrow, pressure, pain, betrayal by friends, disappointment, distress, misery, calamities, one thing or another. I talked to a man one time who actually said that that was blasphemy. You cannot accuse God of causing death or disease or any of these other things. He said, God has no part in that. Only Satan was involved in that. And somehow God's hands were tied. But is it not much more comforting to believe with faithful Hannah, and let me quote her, the Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to the grave and brings up. The Lord makes poor and makes rich. He brings low and lifts up. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the beggar from the ashy. I think it's It brings no comfort whatsoever to think that God is not in control of the painful events in our lives. Because then we're going to begin to think if it's just a chance event, then it's meaningless. It's irrational. It has no purpose. There's nothing loving. It's just a hopeless event. We cannot get comfort by saying that God does not control these things. I think it's much better to believe the comfort of the Scripture in Romans 8 where God says that He works all things together for the good of those who love Him. And that includes the difficult things. God can use any event in your life that makes you uncomfortable to stir you out of your nest to trust Him for great things. And if we do not have a reckless trust in the Lord and abandon ourselves to His clearly revealed will in the Scripture, if we do not jump out of the nest ourselves, God might have to keep heating up the disturbances He brings into our lives until we are ready to do so. It's much better to jump like the first eaglet. But some people are slow learners, and I think I'm one of those. I've liked the status quo. And if I look at my life mapping, I say, wow, why did God have to bring so many, especially early in my Christian life, so many of those painful events to move me to doing the right thing? And we'll get into some of the specifics a little bit later. But another question that is worth asking is, do I realize that God always has a purpose for everything that He brings into our life? You could think of that purpose as teaching us to fly. God does not want us to be a baby and immature all of our lives. He doesn't want us just walking around in the nest. He wants us to mature, to fly, to soar to ever greater heights of spiritual service. God is never arbitrary when He allows difficulties into our lives. Let me repeat that. God is never arbitrary when He allows difficulties into our lives. He brings those to mature us in Christ Jesus. And so we've looked at three questions under point number one, interpreting God's disturbances in our lives. Second main point is properly responding to God's lessons of disturbance. Now, I've already hinted that responding, but in order to properly respond, we need to have three things in our life. First, we need to utterly abandon ourselves to God's will. And I think that Queen Esther is a good example of abandoning yourself. Even if it meant her death, she was willing to do so. If God wanted her to jump out of her nest and to go to King Xerxes, even if it meant her death, she was willing to do so. Now, her uncle had told her that God had providentially brought her here to glorify him, to help his people, and he said, Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" And she agreed, and her classic statement was, if I perish, I perish. Okay, Lord, if it's my time to go, I'll go. I'm going to do what I know you're calling me to do, even if it means further pain. So it's an utter abandonment to God's will. We are all called to that. Second, we need to replace doubts with complete confidence in God. These verses throughout the chapter, and I'm not gonna take the time to go through them, but they're just telling of the perfection of God's providence. There is nothing imperfect about His providences in our lives. And so this is not just a confidence in God's existence, but it's a confidence God knows what He's doing, He is faithful in everything, He loves us, and we don't doubt that. We need that confidence if we're to offer up our bodies as a living sacrifice to God, and when we do so, Romans 12 verse 2 says, we will discover what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. We need to believe that good, acceptable, perfect will of God for us individually. Having confidence that that is true will enable us to learn lessons from our disturbances rather than complaining about them. Walking by faith rather than by sight is much like the young eaglet learning to fly. And we have all the guidance we need in the Scriptures to do our duty, but until we launch out in faith, put God to the test, we're not going to experience the exhilaration of being lifted up on eagles' wings. We've got to have that confidence in faith. Paul calls it, I think it was Paul, the obedience of faith. The third response is absolute love for God. The rest of Deuteronomy 32 goes on to relate how despite God's good provisions for Israel, they were not grateful. The best thing that a parent could hope for when there is discipline is that the child would grow up to love and appreciate all that the parent has done for them. Now, if we learn our lesson of disturbance in the same way, we will thank God and express our love for Him for the disturbance itself. I don't want to be in that nest all my life. Thank you, you know, for kicking me out of the nest. He does what is best, which brings us to the last point. The third main point that I want to draw from this verse is, am I perpetually rejoicing in God's lessons of disturbance? Now, the chapter from which this verse is taken is actually a long song of praise by Moses. Moses had learned to rejoice in all of these things, but he gave the song to Israel so that Israel would learn to rejoice. So that's where I get the idea we need to learn to rejoice in even the calamities that God brings into our lives. And how do we do this? Three more sub-points. We do this by realizing that God has a personal plan, has a powerful presence, and has a skillful protection. Those three things are what are going to enable us to treat these disturbances in our lives more like a roller coaster ride rather than falling off a cliff, okay? Roller coaster ride, you know you're going to get through it, but your adrenaline's pumping. It's not like, it's not stressful. At least I get stressed when I'm in a roller coaster, but I love it. I know I'm going to get to the end, okay? And these three points, I think, enable us to see it that way. First, God has a personal plan. His personal plan for us can be seen in a similar verse dealing with the eagle in Exodus 19, verse 4, where God says this. You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to me above all people, for all the earth is mine. So in God's covenant, His plans for the extension of His vast kingdom, we're not lost in a crowd. He says, I bore you on eagle's wings, brought you to myself. So God's plan is personal. We're not just dealing with a large computer that ignores our emotions and our interests and our needs and our aspirations. God's plan is person to person in a way that shows love and care. Now, the mother eagle would not be caring, would not be—you can't really, I guess, attribute love to an eagle—but would not be caring for that young if it just left that eaglet in the nest to fend for itself. How much more so God, who is greater and who loves us far more? Second, think of His powerful presence on our behalf. God not only cares for us, He has the power to make sure that His personal plans for each of us are fully and beautifully carried out. The mother eagle did not throw the eaglet out and make it fend for itself. The mother ministered perfectly to the eaglet's needs in such a way it guaranteed that the eaglet would learn to fly. Now, since God is the maker of all things and the governor of all things, he's got far greater power to ensure that this training will indeed be carried out. He will not ask you to do something in which he does not also give you the grace to triumph through it. His grace and power accompany his requests that we step out of the nest. Third, his skillful protection. God not only has the loving personal relationship with us and his plans for us and the power to enable us to live out those plans, but he also protects us from spiritual destruction. My teacher at Bible School, T.S. Rendell, once quoted Colonel F.J. Miles as saying this, The mother eagle, diving beneath, catches the eaglet on her broad back and, bearing it beneath her pinions, carries it to the safety and shelter of the ledge. And so the game goes on until the eaglet learns to fly. Never, never once in the whole world's history has it been placed on record that a little eaglet learning to fly has been permitted to fall to its destruction by the parent bird. Never. And we can say with far greater confidence, God will never allow us to crash to the ground and to die spiritually. Paul said, being confident of this very thing, that he who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ, Philippians 1.6. And you read the last verses of Romans 8, and he makes much the same statement, that there is absolutely nothing in this entire universe that can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And so if you're one of those who's prone to always feel like the bottom's falling out from under me on everything, hold on to this truth. that there is a God who is swift as an eagle to bear you up on His wings in an instant, and He wants you to learn to fly and to not be distressed by the heights. You don't need to be emotionally distressed. You can rest with confidence in His promises to you. So don't Don't concentrate on the ground that's rushing up at you at amazing speed. Focus on the promises of a God who cannot lie, and seek to be obedient to His Word. Even if doing so seems like an impossibility, if you step out in faith, He will not let you down. And you know what He's calling you to do. I don't need to spell it out for you. His Spirit will teach you. Actually, the verse right before this, verse 10, says much the same. He said, He found him in a desert land and in a wasteland, a howling wilderness. He encircled him. He instructed him. He kept him as the apple of His eye. Now, we're very protective of anything getting into our eyes. And for God to compare you to the apple of His eye, the pupil of His eye, is an astounding statement. It's just amazing. The whole verse speaks of His skillful protection of us. Now I should probably close with one caution. Don't step out of the nest when God has not called you to step out of the nest. Some open doors that people go through, it's an open door, must be the Lord's leading, might lead to an elevator shaft. So we got to use wisdom. We're not talking about presumption here. We're talking about following the clear voice of God as revealed in the infallible Bible. Eaglets actually have been known, I just found a couple of examples a week ago, two weeks ago I guess it was, of eaglets that had jumped out of the nest when the mother was not there and had died. OK, and so we cannot be presumptuous on this. We are obeying the Lord as he reveals himself in the scripture. And so verse 10 says that God instructed Israel. Verse 12 says he led Israel. And there is plenty enough of the Bible that's scary to follow without inventing your own scariness, right? It's the scariness, though, of a roller coaster, because it's God calling us to jump, not just our imagination. I'll just give you some examples. God calls us to tithe in Malachi 3, and in our fear of the financial difficulties of tithing, you know, I'm so short on funds, we just flutter around the edge of the nest, and we're scared we maybe try to tithe 2% or 3%, and God says, no, bring all the tithes into the storehouse and prove me now in this, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it. And we see others flying financially, and they're soaring, they're enjoying life, and we want to do so, but the fear of financial height seems too much for us. Let me tell you, brothers and sisters, if you continue to disobey God's coaxing to tithe, the mother eagle, God, is going to knock your financial security completely out from under you so that He can teach you to trust Him financially. It's easier to do so right away. So don't be a slow learner that forces God to knock the financial nest out from under your feet. So we're talking about jumping out of the nest, not on some mystical calling. We're talking about the roller coaster of following the Scripture's clear commands. Those are scary enough, okay? Another example, God calls each of us to be witnesses to His grace, to confess with our mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we're fearful of talking to people. When the opportunity comes up, we might start to flutter and then just back away and say, I can't talk to people. I'm a shy person, and we excuse. And we excuse our disobedience to the clear Word of God that those who are saved will testify with their mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord. And we say nothing. Okay? Take God at His Word, and you're going to discover that the more times you jump out of the nest, the greater will be the ease with which you can fly. God will come through for you. He will help you to witness. Another example, let's say that you've stolen something from a company and you have asked God for forgiveness for that, but you're just afraid. If I take the next step and I give restitution, I admit to the company that I stole from them. My whole life is going to be destroyed. I won't be able. I'll be fired. I won't be able to provide for my family. Nobody else is going to hire me. No. All what you need to do is follow what the scripture says. You pay restitution. And since you're doing the confession on your own, it's not double, it's 125%, so you pay what you owe plus 25% more, and you go and you ask forgiveness of the person, and you just trust, God will come through on my behalf. I mean, these are the kinds of scary things that we're talking about are jumping out of the nest. And we got, many times we got to jump out of the nest during our lives. You could multiply hundreds of examples of God's commands, which are very hard for us to carry through. We want to do it. We flutter around the nest making half-hearted attempts at obeying God. But if we do not boldly jump into the air in faithful obedience to the mother eagle coaxing us from the edge of the nest, then God will bring a greater disturbance into our lives to teach us to walk by faith and not by sight. And hopefully we'll be quick learners of his providential lessons so that he doesn't have to repeat them over and over again. So it's my prayer each one of us would learn to be trusting of the perfect teacher, our mother eagle, so to speak, God himself. Let's pray. Father, I thank you that you don't leave us in the nest, even when we are asking, begging to be left in the nest. We want to grow in you. We want to mature. And I pray that each one here would respond quickly to the promptings that you give and that we would realize and have an absolute faith and confidence you do all things well. There's never a time that You bring difficulty into our lives that is not for our good, for Your glory, for the advancement of Your kingdom. Help us to respond in faith. And I pray that each one here would grow up into You in all things, in Jesus' name, amen.