Good evening, welcome to Trinity Reformed Baptist Church. It's September 14th, 2014. Join us this evening as Brother Steve Martin brings us a message from the Word. Please open your Bibles once more to the New Testament. You've just read in your hearing 1 Thessalonians 5.18. We are to give thanks in all things, for this is the will of God for us in Christ Jesus. I'd like you also to turn over to Ephesians chapter 5. Turn to your left a couple of books to Ephesians chapter 5. If Romans is the greatest explanation of salvation and sanctification in the Bible, certainly Ephesians is right up there as a glorious description of God's eternal purposes for us in Christ. And Chapter 5, as he's in the practical section, verses 1 through 3 are highly doctrinal. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are the application of that doctrine. In Chapter 5, he talks about the importance of the Spirit of God to equip us, to enable us, to do what we are to do and to be as Christians. In other words, we don't just grit our teeth and say, I'm going to will myself into doing this, but we look self-consciously in dependence to the Holy Spirit. So, in chapter 5, we'll pick it up in verse 18, or verse 17 rather. So then, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, and then by inference, anything else that would be intoxicating. For that is dissipation. That's wastefulness. That's excess. But be filled with the Spirit. And that's a command. Keep on being filled with the Spirit. And it's a plural, it's not singular. He's not saying you individually, but he's saying the whole church there in Ephesus needs to keep on working at being filled with the Spirit. Now, if a church is filled with the Spirit, if an individual or a couple is filled with the Spirit, what will be the results? Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks for all things. in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the father, and I'll cut off at that semicolon. Note that he says one of the first results of being filled with the Spirit is that it's going to be seen in your attitude. You're not going to be a sour, negative, resentful, morbid, negative person, but it'll come out in just the overflow of your tongue, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're going around the house singing hymns. or praise courses, but it does mean that, as you gather as a people of God, it will be natural to sing. You'll want to sing God's praises. You're going to be having an opportunity on the Lord's Day to do in public what you do privately all week, thanking the Lord for all of his goodness to you. And verse 20 is not exactly a repeat of 1 Thessalonians 5, but comes at it from a different angle. Part of the result of being filled with the Spirit is always Not sometime, not just after a good Lord's Day, but always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father. Heavenly Father, because of what the Lord Jesus is doing in my life, thank you for X and Y and Z, which you brought to me. So then Paul goes on to talk about husband and wife relationships till the end of the chapter and then chapter six verses one through four. Our parent-child relationships, and then in verses five through nine, he talks about work relationships, slaves and masters. Now turn over to the book of Colossians, chapter three. Many New Testament students will recognize the Colossians and Ephesians are very closely related. They have a lot of the same things in common. Only the key in Colossians, Paul doesn't tell them that their need is to be filled with the Spirit and keep on being filled as a group. But in chapter 3, verse 16, he says, their need is to let the word of Christ richly dwell within you. You have the word of God. What in the world are you doing with it? Is it dwelling in you? Is it dwelling in you richly? Heed the word of God. Verse 16. Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks through him to God the Father. Well, there's a lot of overlap, isn't there? He says here that the result of having the word of God really dwelling in you, not simply that word have I hid in my notebook or on my hard drive, But that word I have hid in my heart, and the word coming through me is making me a different person. The overflow is seen in attitudes, in my speech patterns, how we speak to one another. And it says it ought to be seen in your attitude. You ought to be, of all people, a really thankful people. Now, what I'm trying to pull together here is, here's three passages of Scripture. I did a head count. There's 167 passages of Scripture dealing with thankfulness and thanksgiving. Am I a thankful person? Are we a thankful people? Are we a thankful couple? Are we a thankful church? Well, it's a command in 1 Thessalonians 5. We are to always give thanks in all things, in all circumstances. We're always to be doing that. How in the world do you do something like that? Because there's stuff that happens, you go, no way am I thanking God for this. But then in Ephesians and Colossians, he seems to say, if you really are spiritually equipped, if you are working at being filled with the Spirit, if you're careful and conscientious, and if you're working at letting the Word of Christ richly dwell within you, you're trying to be conscientious, then it's going to be seen in a thankful attitude. Even before it gets into your marriage, he goes to attitude before he goes to marriage, before he goes to parenting, before he goes to work. He says, let's talk about attitude. Let's talk about what comes out of you. When you're squeezed, what comes out of you? And he said, you ought to be thankful people. Now, here's Ephesians saying, maybe I'll do it your side. Ephesians, here's being filled with the Spirit. Here's Colossians, letting the word of Christ richly dwell within you. And the results of both are identical. Speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. Always giving thanks in all things. Husbands and wives, parents and children, employers, employees. Now, in Ephesians, Paul says that's the result of being filled with the Spirit. In Colossians, he says it's the result of letting the word of Christ richly dwell within you. What's my point? These are two sides of the same coin. Two things that are equal to the same thing and produce the same results are equal to each other. You can't be filled with the Spirit if you're not in the Word, and you can't profit from the Word unless you're filled with the Spirit. So he says to the Colossians, their particular need is you need to let the Word dwell in you more richly. And to the Ephesians, you need to work as a church body to be filled with the Spirit, and it'll come out in your attitudes, your speech patterns, your marriage, your parenting, and your work environment. So, it seems like a big deal in the New Testament that we are being a thankful people. Now I have to confess something I confessed to the Lord and I want to confess to you, too, that this morning I tried to hype tonight by saying, well, tonight will be a real sanity saver. It'll really, you know, your happiness is tied up in these things. And that's true, but it's secondary. And I think it's part of our man-centeredness. What I should have said, what I should have motivated you with, is if you're a real Christian, you want to honor God and you want to glorify Him by your attitude. People will see you and they say, boy, I want to spend more time around that person. They're a God-glorifying person. They're just sweet to be around. I wouldn't call a man sweet. I wouldn't go up to you and say, you know, you're really a sweet guy. Oh, thank you. Didn't need that tooth anyway. And I don't mean that in a sappy way, but there's something about a person who has the fragrance of Christ And my first motivation should have been, say, if you want to be a man or woman who glorifies Christ, come tonight and hear about one of the most critical ways we can glorify Christ. And that's to be a person who has an overflowing attitude of thanksgiving. So forgive me for going to the human element of, well, if you want to be happy, show up. Well, that's kind of carnal and selfish. I mean, non-Christians can show up for that. So I didn't ask the Lord's forgiveness, and I wanted to ask yours, too. This is such an important subject, I'm not over-hyping it to say it's a critical area of the atmosphere of your home, how you come across to other people, what you smell like, or how others experience you at work, or in your marriage, or in just the general attitude that you have. Paul says in Ephesians, if you're really filled with the Spirit, you're going to have this kind of attitude. He says to the Colossians, if you're really having the Word of Christ spiritually dwelling in you, You're going to have this kind of attitude. Now, please note, flip back to Romans chapter one for a moment. We have a little more time in the evening. Robin said that you go till eight tonight. Is that right? So we have a little more time. But in Romans chapter one, Paul gets at the heart of what happened has happened to the human heart since the fall, since our first parents fell into sin. What has that done to the human heart, to the human attitude? Romans one beginning of verse eighteen for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. What's the difference between ungodliness and unrighteousness? Do you know the difference? I didn't know for a long time, and Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones straightened me out. Ungodliness has to do with being God-centered. Am I a God-focused person? In my BC days, I never was, never thought about God. If it came up, fine, but I never thought about God on my own. It just never came up. I was not a God-focused person. As soon as I became a Christian, boom, I became a God-focused person. But it says that unbelievers, because of the fall, they're ungodly and they're unrighteous. What does unrighteous mean? That means it has to do with God's law. I don't want to obey God. I don't want to obey the Ten Commandments. I don't want to obey the Three Commandments. I don't want to have anything to do with somebody telling me what to do. and before were Christians were full of ungodliness. God's not the focus point of my life. He's not the reference point that everything comes in factors in regard to him. And what he says in his law is not the driving issues of my life. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness in their law breaking because that which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evidence to them. All people on the planet have a knowledge of God, but they suppress it, and they end up coming up with weird things when they do think about God, which is the rest of the chapter. Verse 20, For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. People don't stand on the seashore and look at a sunset and go, isn't evolution marvelous? Their mind kind of goes to God, but they have to be careful, because if they're not careful, they may end up at places they don't want to be. If you just look at the order of nature, there's something about nature. Whitaker Chambers wrote a book in the 1950s called Witness, and it was his story of his time as a spy against the United States for Soviet Union. and how he became a theist, and then how he became a Christian, and how he gave up spying. And this is how he came out of being an atheist. He lived in an apartment in Baltimore. He was feeding his six-month-old little girl, who he just doted over, and she was sitting in her highchair, and he was feeding her stuff, and she was ultimately eating it and spreading it on the top of the highchair, as toddlers will. And he was just looking at his daughter. And he looked at her ear. and marveled at how what a beautiful thing an ear was and how well it functioned. It was perfectly fashioned and this little girl had a really cute ear. It had dawned on him. Someone made that ear. It didn't just evolve like that. Someone made that ear. And that was the end of his atheism and the beginning of him coming to Christ. Since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen through being being understood through what has been made the creation so that they are without excuse. Here's the kicker. Even though they knew God, meaning they knew God existed, they did not honor him as God or give thanks. But they became futile and their speculations and their foolish heart was dark and professing to be wise, they became fools. and exchange the glory of being made in the incorruptible God for the image of the form of corruptible men and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures and all the other things that pagan religions come up with as their gods. It's a mark of the unbeliever that he's a thankless person. Arthur Pink said, I saw the power of the Word of God when I was doing a short evangelistic stand in San Francisco and he was preaching one night. I take it back, it wasn't, it was Bible study, Bible teaching, it wasn't evangelistic. And one night he was speaking on the importance of giving thanks in all things. And the secretary to the Roman Catholic Cardinal, a man who was a personal secretary to the Roman Catholic Cardinal for San Francisco, saw the tent Oh, these little fundamentalists are having one of these little cute revivals. I'm going to go sit in the back and listen. So he did. And as he listened, he came under tremendous conviction. And what an unthankful man he was. How can I profess to know the God who sent Jesus Christ, the God of the Bible, and be so persistently unthankful as I am? He said, I'm a sour, negative, unthankful person. That marks me out, according to the word of God, as an unsaved man. And he became a Christian that night, through just hearing about thankfulness as a mark of a Christian and unthankfulness as a mark of a non-Christian. So I know that if you're a real believer tonight, you want to honor Jesus Christ. You want to honor him with your life, your attitudes, your actions, your words, everything about you. But giving thanks in all things, isn't that a pretty big order? I don't know most of you very well, very deeply, but I know enough of human nature in the Bible to know that we've all had some major hits in our lives and life didn't come out the way we thought we might draw it up. Ron Dunn, who gave me the idea for this series, told the story of a man called him up and said, I need to come in and talk to you. And the husband and wife came in and their daughter had run away from home at 16, was hooked on drugs and living in another city in fornication. The man came to Pastor Dunn in the hopes that Ron could do something. The parents didn't even know how to contact their daughter, and she had long since rejected any counsel they might give her. What would Ron Dunn tell them? After sitting in silence, listening to the man and praying, Pastor Dunn asked the father if he had thanked God for this whole mess. The man looked at him like he would have gone crazy and quietly said, He had not done that. Pastor Dunn told him that he did not think that God would work in a situation until the father and the mother who profess to be Christians, trusted God and thanked him by faith that God was in control of this whole situation. When I was on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, there was a couple that I only knew from a distance. I didn't know them personally, but I heard about their story. She and her husband had been married in Atlanta. They were driving south on I-75 down around Forsyth on their way to Florida for their honeymoon when a drunk driver going north crossed the grassy median, struck their car and demolished it. She woke up in the hospital two days later, but her new husband was dead. He died at the scene. In fact, later she wrote a book. At least we were married. Six months later, she came to California to the headquarters of Campus Crusade and met with Dr. Bill Bright. She had not been able to sleep without a sedative since the accident. She was miserable and depressed. He carefully listened to her story and asked her if she had thanked God for the accident and her husband's death. She was incredulous and said almost indignantly, no. He asked her if she believed the Bible to be the word of God. She said yes. He asked her if she believed that Romans 828 and 1 Thessalonians 518, and then he recited them to her, and if she believed them, and she said, yes. But you don't expect me to. I mean, in this situation, God doesn't expect me to thank him, does he? Dr. Bright told her that he did. He got down on his knees in the middle of the room. When Dr. Bright would pray with you, he would always get down on his knees in the room. He wouldn't sit or lay down. Get down on his knees right there. And he asked her to join him. He prayed and then she prayed. And she poured out her heart to God, but declared her desire to honor him with her tiny faith. And she thanked him for the terrible accident and the death of her new husband. Eight weeks later, she came to see Dr. Bright and said she no longer needed sleeping pills to sleep. She had come out of her depression and funk. And then she later wrote the book, At Least We Were Married. It didn't change the situation, but it began to change her attitude. She was no longer held captive by the situation. As I've said in this whole series of God's Strange Ministers, you don't have to be a Christian a long time before you go, boom, something happens. You go, I'd like to see the fine print of my Christian contract, because I do not remember signing up for something like this. This is awful. And I wonder, what is God doing? I was standing in line at a conference in Arrowhead Springs, Campus Crusades headquarters in Southern California in the mountains, and we were getting ready to hear one of the first Christian, it wasn't exactly a rock group, kind of a folk group, but they were going to be playing, and several hundred students were there, and I was waiting in line to go inside. And I had been dating a girl in Texas. And a girl who was on staff at her campus came up to me and we're talking about she said, So Steve, so what did you think about Judy getting engaged? Let's see, I've been dating Judy and was trying to make this thing work out. And I had not heard anything about this. So it's like you come up to me in line, punch me in the gut, and then walk away. And she could tell by the look on my face, I had no idea what she was talking about. She goes, Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that she ran off like, Thank you very much. So, I don't remember anything that the group did during the performance, but I did know that I was to have eight students up in our room that we shared together and we would have discussions at the end of the day and try to apply the lessons of the day and the messages to our lives. And so, I knew that I'd have to lead a discussion group, like our home groups, up in my room, you know, about ten minutes after the concert was over. And I had really been sucker punched. If you've ever had the wind knocked out of you, you know what the feeling's like. So I kind of go gasping up to my room. I'm sitting there, but nobody's there yet. Lord, I believe Romans 8, 28 is true. I have no idea how this is good for me. But by sure faith, I trust you. Thank you. I don't know what's going on here. Thank you. Amen. Guys, pile in. So that was around Christmas of 1970. In that spring of 1971, I was headed back to the Midwest and was stopping in a city in Texas where this girl lived and didn't contact her, didn't want to try to fan whatever sparks might be like, you know, guys kind of carry a torch. If she sees me one more time, she'll get the idea of what she really missed. You know how that goes. So that's probably why she went to the guy, the guy in the first place. But anyway. She heard that I was in town, and she called me up the last night. About supper time, I asked if she could go over and talk to me for a few minutes after supper, and I said, sure. It was dark. She pulls up in her little blue Volkswagen Bug. We stand outside and talk for about 20 minutes, and she confesses to me that this last year has been a shambles. She was finishing her senior year in college. She had gotten engaged to this fellow who was in med school. She said, I got confused, I forgot who I was, I just lived like a tramp. She was very attractive and jet set guys would fly into town in their private jets and pick her up and then fly to Mexico or Cancun for the weekend. And she said, I feel terrible, I've dishonored Christ, I've dishonored my fiance. This has been so terrible. Please pray for me. I said, sure I would. She got in her little blue Volkswagen and I watched the taillights go off into the darkness. As the taillights went off in the darkness, I said, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I had a hard enough time coping with things on the front end, I don't know how well I would have coped with those things on the back end. It is the will of God that you and I thank Him for everything that happens in our life. To do so is to obey the Word of God. to disobey the Word of God. So the Lord puts us in a situation that's confusing, troubling, grievous, heartbreaking, stressful. You can put in the adjective. But he expects us to trust him and he expects us to trust him by being honest enough to say, Lord, I don't know what's going on. But I believe you. I don't know what's going on with what I can see, but I believe you who I can't see. And by simple faith, I thank you. I believe your word is true. Though I have no idea how this is going to work out for my good and your glory. Did you know that Thanksgiving is the highest form of faith? It's like faith on steroids. It's to trust God and to say, I can't see the solution. You know, we can be good at thanking God after he works it out and we all live happily ever after. But when it's still in the mess, it's still in the maelstrom, it's still in the tornado and objects are flying around and you go, what in the world is going on? And the question comes up, can I thank God that he is in control, that he's working this out for my good and his glory, and that by faith, not by feelings, by faith, I can thank him that he's working it out. That's what God wants us to do. To thank God for what you don't understand, what you don't like, what you don't want, and what you can't escape is the highest form of faith. When Job told God on his bed crying, weeping, after everything had been taken away, Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him. You've been bereft of everything, but you still tell the Lord, I trust you. I love you. When disaster comes into my life, when tragedy comes into my life, when a situation comes into my life, bringing misery and heartache. Do you mean to tell me, Pastor Martin, that God expects me to thank him for everything? Yes. A question that came up after my last message, not this morning, but the last time I preached was, Pastor, are you saying that everything is good? Or that everything works together for good. Everything is not good. We're not Pollyannas. We're not naive. The scriptures say all things work together for good. Not that the thing in and of itself is good. What did Joseph tell his brothers? You did mean it as evil to me. You weren't sending me on a cruise when you gave me to the Amalekites and they packed me off to Egypt. It wasn't Club Med when I was in the prison there. No, you had evil motives, but our God is greater than you, and he had pure motives and holy motives and good motives, and he chose to bless me through your evil motives. How in the world can we be expected to do this? I think there's a couple of things we can do to grow in thanking God in all things. First of all, to fix clearly in our mind that God controls every circumstance that comes into our lives. If nothing else in this series, I hope you become more well acquainted with Romans 8.28 and verses like that. which definitely show that God's in control of every molecule, every person, everything that happens. The Bible says no sparrow falls to the ground without God's notice and permission. If you drive that south on Interstate 75 and get off at one of the Perry exits and then drive east for about an hour and a half and you're out in some of the lumbering counties of Georgia and you find a gravel road and turn down that gravel road and there's pine trees everywhere. There is not a pine needle that falls in those pine forests that it didn't fall at the appointed time by our Heavenly Father. Not a hair of your head falls to the ground without God's notice and permission, Jesus said. The devil can't lay a finger on you without God's permission. The devil can't do a thing to you without asking God's permission first. He's got to show up in the office and say, can I have your permission to go and afflict so-and-so? And if it's not serving God's purposes, it's not going to happen. The book of Job told us that. Human beings can't do anything to us without God's permission. Genesis taught us that. Joseph's brothers. Human beings can't do anything to us without God permitting it, without God's permission. There's not a single molecule, not a single cell of your body that can do anything apart from the will of God. There's not one cell that can start rapidly multiplying all out of proportion and become what we call cancer without God first permitting it or allowing it to happen. There's not a single galaxy or bit of cosmic dust that does anything apart from the will of our Father. And if I can come to really grasp that and to live with that, it is a means of mental health, but it's also a way that I can be a man or woman who glorifies God, because I believe it. And so I can say, not to resentful, clenched teeth, thanks God for nothing, but I can say with a joyful heart, Lord, thank you that you have appointed this for me. In Isaiah chapter 45, the Israelites are complaining and murmuring, they're second-guessing God. How can you raise up this guy who's not even born yet, a Persian named Cyrus who's going to become king, and you're going to use him to accomplish your holy will for Israel? We don't think so. God says, I use pagans who aren't even born. I give them their name ahead of time. This is what they're going to do. Read it. Follow history and see. In Jeremiah chapter 18, God says, I'm the potter, you're the clay, I put you on my wheel, I fasten you, I add a little more water here, a little bit more grit there, you become like the person I created you to be. I'm in charge of your life. Habakkuk chapter 1, God tells the Israelites, and particularly Habakkuk, My nation's going down the drain, God. Our nation has become corrupt. We need a revival. We need you to come back and create a revival in the land. And God says, well, I've heard your prayer, and I'm bringing the Chaldeans, and they're going to come, and they're going to wipe your nation off the map. Let's rewind this prayer request, Lord. I didn't ask you to come and wipe the nation off the map. I asked you to bring a revival. He said, I heard you really well. And I'm going to still accomplish my holy purposes, even though you can't imagine how in the short term this can ever end up for good. But it will. That's when the Lord rebuked me. He said, you know, I have a sovereign plan and it's working out. And you're included. But this plan is not about you. You're in the plan, but you're not the star of the plan. I am. This plan is not about you. It's about me. In Genesis 45, God is sovereign over the details of Joseph's life. It starts when he's fourteen, he's thirty-one when finally things pan out. Seventeen years of all kinds of emotions, happenings, doings, threats, near misses, terrible times, some good times. Seventeen years. Does God know what he's doing? Number two, God uses every hand-picked circumstance to accomplish his will in our lives. Everything that happens to us is hand-picked. From a hangnail to a car accident, it's hand-picked. God has a plan to make you and me like Christ, and he will work that plan, and he will accomplish its purposes. Romans 8, 28 and 29. What does Romans 8, 28 and 29 say? For all things work together for the good of those who love God. That is, those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son, that he, Christ, might be the firstborn among many brethren. I purposed to save you, and I sent my Son to save you, and we sent the Spirit to make it happen, because we want to make you like Christ. We're going to inhabit eternity with little Christ Christians, and you're one of them. And everything that happens is going to be for your good and my glory. Philippians 1.6. He who began a good work in you shall continue to perform it until the day of Christ Jesus. Christ began a good work in our lives. Does he get distracted with other things? Does he get super busy with other things and forget some of the priorities in our lives? No. He who began a good work in your life shall continue to perform it until the day of Christ. Ephesians 2.10. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. I prepared your life for certain good works, and I'm going to accomplish my good purposes in your life." God uses special tools to accomplish his special purposes. These special tools are power tools. It's not simply that he has a cold steel chisel and a hammer. He can use a jackhammer. and the power tools he uses are hard circumstances, difficult people, and the devil. In Genesis 50, again, verse 20, Joseph says, You did mean it for me for evil. God meant it for good. It overrules, trumps everything else these guys had in their mind. You can look the devil in the eye and say to him, you brought evil into my life, you attacked me, you brought failure into my life, you brought weakness, you brought disaster, but my God is infinitely greater than you and he is using it for my good and his glory and I trust him. He can even tell Jeremiah in Jeremiah chapter 29, I have appointed seventy years that the nation is going to go into captivity. two generations. Your grandchildren are speaking Babylonian. Two generations, seventy years in Babylon, I've appointed to give you a future and a hope. And when those seventy years have accomplished their purposes, I will bring you back. I will settle you in the land and I will bless you. I have a purpose, a good purpose for you. He can even use a national disaster on that scale, being deported Living in a culture where you're living in a little isolated ghetto and your kids grow up speaking the language of the host culture and everything's different. He says, I can still use that. Every circumstance in our life is a hand-picked circumstance to make us like Christ. And third, a question that comes up is, should we try to change circumstances or to get out of them to make things easier? Well, yes and no, and I'm not trying to be clever, but You know, Paul has a thorn in the flesh. Paul didn't say, well, kay, surah, surah, I've got the thorn in the flesh. That's what God's appointed. He prayed three times and it wasn't, let it go, let it go, let it go. But he prayed, he had three different times of special prayer, probably prayer and fasting. God, I can't endure this. All I can see is it's going to ruin my life and my ministry. Please take this out of my life. And three times God says, no. So, no, it's not wrong if you can. If you come down and say, well, Pastor Martin said we're supposed to thank the Lord for these things, so I'm not going to the doctor. I'm just going to stay home and thank the Lord. Well, thank the Lord you're sick and go to the doctor, too. It's not necessarily either or. Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by the devil. Forty days and nights after the Holy Spirit came upon him at his baptism As he's filled with the Spirit, remember this morning we talked about, can you be tempted? Christ just had this anointing as no one else in human history has had. The Holy Spirit without measure in his humanity. And so he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness where the devil was going to deal with him one-on-one. Should Christ have taken matters into his own hands and said, man, I'm really hungry, and these little brown rocks, they look like Wonder Bread. You know, I could kind of make some Wonder Bread here myself, just use my supernatural powers and short-circuit this whole thing. Or should he trust his father? Should I trust my father in all circumstances, or should I take things into my own hands and stop that which is uncomfortable or painful? If he had done that, he would have sinned and lost the opportunity to be the Messiah, the Savior. We cannot disobey God's express word to make our life easier or to remove a heartache. Now, I have friends who doctors around here couldn't find out what was wrong with them. They went to the Mayo Clinic up in Minnesota. Some of those people got help, some didn't. After a certain point, if you see three doctors, is that wrong? No. If you're still seeing people and you're on your 100th doctor, you might want to call time out and say, maybe we just need to look to the Lord. I just need to submit to him and say, nobody can find out what this is until future notice. We're just going to trust him. I'm not telling you not to go to the doctor. If your air conditioning is broken in your home, I'm not saying, well, don't get the air conditioner fixed. Be spiritual and thank the Lord that your house is hot and humid. I'm not saying that. We'll have a little sanctified common sense here. But there are times and events in our life when sometimes we just kind of go off the deep end and we cannot live with this. We say, well, God must want me to get rid of it somehow. I'll move heaven and hell, heaven and earth, certainly, to see if I can get rid of this thing. And Paul said, I couldn't get rid of this thing. God will not abandon his plan to make you like Christ if you're a real Christian. And if you throw aside this opportunity to grow from a painful circumstance, the Lord can bring it back around, as you're going around Sinai another time, and give you another opportunity to deal with this hard thing. I have to learn to submit to hard things in my life. Or as I spent eight years doing, the Lord said, OK, I want you to bend over the bed, and I'm going to paddle you, and I don't want you to put your hand back there, and I don't want you to yell and scream. I want you to take it with a good attitude. Can you do that? You're not going to put your hand back there, you're going to get your fingers broken when you put your hand back there. There's the Board of Education swatting your bottom. And to learn to accept God's hard providences with the right attitude is not easy. I'm not pretending it is. But God gets the glory when we trust Him and believe in Him. Let me explain how this happens. Think of your tongue. That's my third major point here. Your tongue, my tongue, is the overflow valve of our hearts and releases our heart attitude for everybody to see and hear. Your tongue is the overflow valve of your heart. Whatever is inside your heart, your mouth will eventually let us know. The sad thing is, it's indiscriminate. When bad things are going on in our heart, we run our mouth. Hopefully when good things go on in our heart, we run our mouth. But certainly we run our mouth when bad things are going on, and other people can tell that things aren't right. For example, unbelief is a great sin. It's the cardinal sin. You cannot have unbelief and be saved. At the end, you can't have unbelief and be saved. But unbelief can be expressed through complaining, murmuring, bitter words, self-pitying words, sour words, critical words, cynical words, and mocking words. Unbelief doesn't believe that God is sovereign, doesn't believe he's good, doesn't believe he's wise and knows what he's doing, doesn't believe he's holy, and doesn't believe he's loving. Unbelief doesn't trust the promises of God revealed in the Bible. Unbelief doesn't trust the character of God revealed in the Bible. Unbelief does not believe that or trust that the giving of Christ is the highest expression of God's love. Romans 8.32 says, follow my logic. Paul says, if he gave his son for you when you're a filthy, rebellious sinner, and now he's made you his own, is he going to treat you worse or better? Think about it. He who did not spare his own son. You can have anything in heaven, you can have anything in here, anything, but I will not give you my son. No, this God says, I'll give my very best thing in heaven. I've had an eternal, loving, intimate relationship with my son, and I'll give my son for you. If he'll give his son for us, well, we don't deserve anything but hell. Can't we expect him to treat us well now that we're his blood-bought children? That's Paul's logic. But unbelief makes man the measure, makes man the judge of what's good and acceptable and perfect. Me, my ability to understand, my ability to grasp all that's happening becomes the basis for whether or not this is good and acceptable. Unbelief puts God on trial, demands that God answer my human questions, jump through my hoops. You tell me what in the damn hell you're doing in this situation, because I don't get it. And I just don't see good things coming out of this. Job is a great man. He was the greatest man of his time, but he was not without some faults. At the end of the book of Job, where things come down to the nitty-gritty, there's a passage I can remember when I got to it one day and I just kind of like, I was watching a hatchet kind of wedge itself between your eyes. In the book of Job, chapter 40, verses 1 through 8, This is what God says to Job. Will the fault finder contend with the Almighty? Let him who reproves God answer it. Then Job answered the Lord and said, Behold, I am insignificant. What can I reply to you? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken and I will not answer. Even twice and I will add nothing more. Then the Lord answered Job out of the storm and said, Now gird up your loins like a man. In other words, stand up and we're going to have a talk. Oops. I will ask you and you will instruct me, Mr. Big Shot, you know everything, you're second guessing me, my motives, who I am, so you can instruct me. Will you really annul my judgment? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Sure, we do it all the time. Job is taking God's task in his heart, and sometimes in his comments to his friends, that he's not been treated really well. And God asks the question, will you annul, put to the side, make nothing my estimate of the situation, and will you condemn me that you can look good, that you can feel right? And the sad answer is, we do it all the time. That's a very sobering thing, but it's a reality, and I'm not honoring the Lord when I'm in that modus operandi, when I'm in that mood, when I'm in that attitude. Jesus said that out of the fullness of a man's heart, so he or she speaks. And so what I talk about, how I talk around the house, how I talk to the children, how I talk to my spouse, how I talk to people at work, my co-workers, how I talk to people at church, really is expressive of what's going on in my heart. People with dirty minds end up saying dirty things. They say things with dirt around the edges. People with unbelieving hearts say bitter, unbelieving things. People who do not trust God in their hearts say sour or cynical or self-pitying things. You can know what's going on in my heart to some degree, and I can know what's going on in your heart by being around you and just listening to how you and I speak. In Hebrews it says, without faith it's impossible to believe God. If I don't trust Him, if I'm not believing who He is and what He says, I can't please Him. Murmuring is a terrible expression of unbelief. Murmuring is a cardinal sin of the children of Israel. Murmuring is running your mouth, so to speak, behind God's back to your friends. It angers Him. Bitterness, and I say that specifically, bitterness You can usually cut it with a knife as an expression of unbelief and doesn't please God. I had a friend who grew up in a Christian home. His dad was a pastor. He was going to a Christian high school, went to a Christian college. He was a very bitter young man. He had a very bad complexion, a really bad complexion, a lot of pitting and scarring and he would get up in the morning and get dressed and he would brush his teeth and he looked in the mirror and he'll tell you this and he'd say, thanks God for nothing and then he'd go to school. It was very bitter because it's not cool to have a bad complexion in high school. One day, his mom noted after an episode of church, she said, you know Dawson, Your bad complexion makes you look like a hard guy. I mean, he looked like he was in the Hell's Angels or something like that. He just looked like a hard guy. And hard guys were attracted to him because they thought he was a hard guy. But he wasn't. He's just a pastor's kid. She said, you know, you have an instant rapport with hard guys who normally other people can't reach. You might consider the fact that God lets you have this bad complexion that you might have a ministry to hard guys. Never dream that in a million years. Dawson McAllister is still on the radio on Saturday nights, has a nationwide radio ministry to teenagers, and he's always had a special niche ministry with hard guys because he looks like he's been a hard guy. He's not. He grew up in a very nice home. But his difficult complexion made it appear that he must have lived a hard life. And he doesn't have the bitterness anymore. He doesn't say through clenched teeth, thanks God for nothing. But rather, God chose to do something that I wouldn't have picked, but he gave me an instant ministry to tens of thousands of young men around the country. Cynicism is an expression of unbelief and doesn't please God. Cynicism is, nah, nothing's ever what it seems to be. You're being nice to me. What do you want? You've got your hand in my pocket. What do you want? Something from me? Nothing's ever good or nothing's ever like it seems. There's always some evil motive lurking or hidden. Everything is, nothing's really good. If you read a book called The Hiding Place, it's the story of a woman growing up in the suburbs of Amsterdam, Holland. It begins in 1938, or 1939, when the Nazis take over Holland. She's 51 years old. She's unmarried. She works for her father in his clock shop. Not every girl's dream is to be 51 and living in your home with your parents and working in the clock shop. That's what God's providence was. And they had a false area in their home that they discovered. And you know what? We can put a special door here and we can hide Jews from the Nazis. And that special area was called the hiding place. And it became a book and it became a movie. Now, if you read the book and watch the movie, which is excellent, The hero is not Corrie ten Boom, because through the whole thing, she is a cynic. She is so mad and so angry and so she's like spitting through half the movie. She is so angry and disgusted at the Nazis, at God and everything. But her sister Betsy is a saint. And there's one episode when they're in the concentration camp for hiding Jews, and Corrie's running her mouth that, you know, this place is full of lice, it's full of fleas, it's a terrible place. We can't even have a place of our own without lice and fleas. And Betsy says, Corrie, don't you get it? What's the one place in this whole camp the guards will not set one finger inside that It's this, why? The fleas and the lice. They're God's fleas. They're God's lice. They keep the guards out. We can pray. We can have Bible studies. We can talk to one another. They never come in here. Why? They hate those things which God has said to protect us. These are God's lice and God's fleas, and let's thank him for it. That hadn't been Cory's attitude. Betsy's trusting Christ. Betsy's thanking the Lord. Cory's, eh, kill them all. Let God sort it out. Well, Bessie contracts pneumonia and dies. Prior to her death, she and Corey had made a pact that either of us ever gets out of here. We're going to have to go all over the world telling people, no matter how deep a hellhole you're in, Christ is deeper still. He can be with you in this awful place like Buchenwald or Ravensbrück, where she was. The next day, a typist in the German office, Nazi typist, mistyped one letter. And it came up, and that was her number and letter. And she was released. They said, get your stuff, you've been released. Nobody quite figured out why, but somebody typed it up that way, you know, bureaucratic things. It says right here, okay. She's released. The next day, they gas every woman her age. They're all dead, except her. She was released on a typist error. My sister and I made a pact that no matter what happened to us, we'd go all over the world telling anybody who would listen that no matter whatever, Christ is deeper still. And her life that we know of began after World War II, where she went all over Europe and then came to the States and Great Britain and Africa and all over the world until she died in her 80s, telling people, I've been to hell and back and Christ can be with you and Christ is precious. Well, she didn't end up a cynic. Last is self-pity. Self-pity is an expression of unbelief. Did you know that a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin showed that both of them, at the end of their lives, were controlled by a sense of self-pity for how poorly they had been treated? And they rationalized everything they did out of self-pity. Millions of people died. Between those two men, 125 million people died. And they could justify it all because we were treated badly. Well, if you went to college, I don't know how many of you went to college, you may have heard of the name of Josh McDowell. And in the 60s and 70s and 80s, there was no bigger speaker on the college campus than Josh McDowell. He was the Billy Graham of the college campus. He's a little bit older than myself now. His son is the speaker. But Josh McDowell had a couple of dark secrets that he really struggled with. And he was full of self-pity. Number one, the small town he grew up in Michigan, his dad was the town drunk. Not a drunk, the town drunk. The kind of person, everybody knows who he is. They see him staggering down the street. He's famous for being the town drunk in their small town. And he was just really consumed with that. He said, I used to take my dad out in the barn and tie him to a post when I had friends coming over so he wouldn't embarrass me. I would urinate in his whiskey bottles to try to poison him. Nothing helped. He said, when I went off to college, I became a Christian. That helped a lot. But I can still think, why in the world did I have to get stuck with a dad like that? Ironically, he shared the gospel with his father. His father became a Christian, never drank again. He was on a plane from Chicago to Los Angeles, and he was reading a Time magazine article. It talked about how many millions of children of alcoholics there were in the country, and how difficult their lives were. There were millions of people who were children of alcoholics, something like six to ten million. Wow. And it dawned on him, he had a ready-made ministry, because people aren't going to listen to you a lot of times unless you walk a mile in their shoes. I walked 20 miles in the shoes of a son of an alcoholic, and now I can relate to these people. And Josh had a tremendous ministry. Later on, when it became something to talk about in the culture, he divulged that he had been sexually abused by one of his relatives for years. Now, how many people in this culture have been abused, and how much of a ready-made ministry is that? He said, I lost my self-pity, and I saw the purposes of God much later in my life, but I saw the purposes of God. Thanksgiving is the best way for you and me to express our faith in God. Even if it's through tears, even if it's through pain, say, Father, I believe you. I believe your character. I believe your promises. I believe your word. I believe what you've done for us and your son. Thank you. I was up late one night watching a show that was on briefly, and it was real footage from emergency rooms in major hospitals around the United States. And I was surprised they were able to show some of those things. And this particular night, there was a man who was terribly hurt in a car accident, repenting to his parents that he had been a drunk for so long. And now he was in this hospital because he'd been a drunk and smashed his car. And he was telling his parents he wanted to repent. It's very sweet, very emotional. But the one that really got me was a five-year-old boy had been injured. And they needed to extract something from him. But they needed to hold him down and ask his dad to hold him down while they pull this thing out of him. And the boy is screaming at the top of his lungs. Daddy, I thought you loved me. I thought it was your job to protect me. Why are you letting these men hurt me? Why aren't you protecting me? Wow. But he just didn't understand. It had to come out. His dad was the best person, the most loving person to hold him. But he didn't understand. Do you and I ever have things where the Lord has to hold us down? We're screaming at the top of our lungs. I thought you loved me. I thought it was your job to take care of me. It is. I do love you. I have an assignment for you as you go home tonight. Number one, if you've been convicted that you're a murmuring, complaining, bitter, cynical, self-pitying person. I'd like you to confess that some of the Lord and call it sin. Number two, I'd like you to submit yourself afresh to the sovereign will of God. I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice acceptable unto him. And third, list everything in your life that you're unhappy about You know, teenagers say, you know, I wish my ears didn't look like this. Or I wish they weren't both on the same side of my head. Or I wish my nose wasn't like this. Or I wish my feet weren't like this. Or I wish these circumstances... And you can multiply all the things in your life that you just don't like. Fine. Write them down. Stuff that you gripe about. Write it down. Write it all down. And then I want you to tell God that you believe Him. and that you don't understand all that he's doing, but you understand his word and you understand his character and you're thanking him. Even if your heart's breaking and you're crying while writing and doing it. Thanksgiving is the highest form of submission and trust that we can express to God. Even if you kill me, I'll still help you. May God give us grace to glorify him. and thank him and all the things that come. There's lots of easy things to thank him for, but there's some really hard ones, too, and he's glorified when we do. And yes, when we do that, our mental health is salvaged, too. Let's pray. O Holy Father, best of fathers, what a great father you are to your children. We would be like children who want to play all summer, eat candy and ice cream all day, never go to bed, never have a tummy ache, play all day long. And sometimes we think we've outgrown that, but it's sometimes painfully easy when we see that we still are a child who wants to play and live in Disney World and eat cotton candy and ice cream. And you want us to grow up to be men and women of God and not be boys and girls of God. And so in your sovereign wisdom and holiness and love, you appoint things for our lives that we would never have chosen in ten years or a million years. You've chosen them for us. And we want to express our trust in you as our father, our belief in your goodness and wisdom and sovereignty and holiness. I want to simply say thank you. Your purposes are best. Your choices are best. If there had been a better plan for our lives, you would have had us on that plan. But you didn't. You had us on this plan. Thank you. Thank you. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.