Transcript: God's Purposes for Suffering: 7 Steps Part 2 with Randy Bell

Thank you. Let me give you a third example, a common one that we talk about in church, probably maybe some churches too much, but I want to make sure you see the example. What about if you see in your life you have endless financial troubles? You have constant problems in your finances no matter what you do, no matter how much money you make, it's never enough, you're always in trouble, you're always struggling, you're always just seem like you're collapsing and failing. You can ask the question, Have I robbed God? Now, why would you ask that question? Because again, out of the Bible, Malachi, it gives the answer. Notice how God uses the prophet to speak this. Will a man rob or defraud God? It says, yet you rob and defraud me. But you say, in what way do we rob or defraud you, Lord? And it says, you have withheld your tithes and your offerings. You are cursed with the curse. For you are robbing me, even this whole nation. God at this point is condemning all of Israel for robbing him. And he's telling them in days of Malachi, you're robbing me as a whole country. Then he says, bring all the tithes, and that means the whole tenth of your income, into the storehouse, which is the temple, that there may be food in my house, and prove me now by it, says the Lord of hosts. if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it. Notice how careful this is. Now, I want you to understand something. A lot of times we get to church and we go, tithing is an Old Testament. We're a New Testament. We don't have to tithe anymore. Now, first of all, that's not in the law. The law doesn't say you should tithe. Tithing comes back before the law. The person who established it was a guy named Abraham? The father of faith. Not the law. The law happened years later with Moses. Before Moses, the precept of tithing was given. Abraham tithed, it says, and trusted God. And it says, in faith, it was an action evidence of true faith with God that no one was commanded, but it established it for all biblical times. So by the time the last book of the Old Testament, he's talking about it, that God's saying directly to people, you rob me if you do not trust me by doing the simple thing I want you to do. I want you to put your money where your mouth is. I call to you to put your tithe into my storehouse. If you do not do it, you rob me. So that makes you a thief, right? That's what robbers are. That's a huge development here. So if we look at this as what it says, it says that you will find yourself, in fact as it goes through the rest of the scripture which I didn't go through at all he says that but at least you can see what he's saying here you're cursed with a curse and then down further in the text it says that I will stop the devourer from chewing up all your profits and there's a couple other examples of what he says of why you are suffering financially by not doing this now when we were young and poor we already established in our faith walk with God that we gave him our first 10%. Even though some weeks I only made 50 bucks, which is not enough. I didn't live in the 1800s where 50 bucks was a lot. This was back in the 70s and 80s where 50 bucks was not a whole lot. And I had a couple kids already at that point, if not three, and $50 wasn't enough to survive. And yet we'd get $50. God proved himself true here. No matter what it was, we gave him first our 10%, even if it was only five bucks, leaving us 45. In spite of those things, God did to me what it says here. He said, I will open the heavens and pour out to you blessing that you can't count. In that time, we learned that God gave us a house, free cars, free clothes, free food. I can't think of much more I needed after all that. And literally, people would come to my door and knock on my door without asking for help from anybody. They'd say, I think you can use some clothes. I have 10 pairs of pants that I can't wear. Of all things, they were my exact size. perfect fit yes i needed pants clothing food we never went hungry our bills were always paid yet i can't figure out how it came out of 45 or 100 to make it happen we house was given to us we rented it for three years and the people turned the paperwork over and gave us the house for free i rented it for three years didn't pay for it i just rented it for three years literally God gave me so many cars now I can't even remember how many there are we would get phone calls during that period of time in fact I remember very clearly because I was a youth pastor we would layer in our back seat about eight to ten kids they were just killing themselves sitting in my back seat trying to to do ministry and I had a lady call me up from the church and say by chance could you use a suburban you know how big they are for your your work and I said, yeah. I was like, yeah, but I mean, why are you calling me? I haven't ever talked to you before. I sense that God's saying that this is what you should have. So when I moved to Florida, we drove a Suburban here as we moved here. Because as I finished my ministry there, I had a Suburban, and we lived and used it here for a number of years before it finally wore out. That God gave us no strings attached, no money, not a nickel given to me. I know that this is true. Do you know it true Do you know it true If you don this is where you can be tested He says here to try me Didn he Test me. And he wants you to understand that these kind of situations do bring consequence if you don't hear it. Now, I've given you three simple examples. Really, we could go on and on with examples. But I want you to understand how examination works. Look at your life and see what's going on. Are there things that are causing you heartache? Are there things that are overwhelming to you? Are you having trials you cannot stand? You need to examine yourself by looking at Scripture and finding where the situation is clearly outlined where God dealt with other people or clearly states it in the Bible. That's the place you need to look at and say, man, I need to listen to God. The pastor might have mentioned it, but I disagreed with his opinion. Now how do we get it in these days? Well, that's his opinion. That's not my opinion. Everybody has a right to have their own opinion about their interpretation of the Bible and so forth. Well, that's fine. But find in your life whether God's interpretation is matching yours. It doesn't matter what my interpretation is. It's what God says. And if your situation in your life is bringing pressures to bear upon you that you can't handle, then maybe you need to look and rethink about what you're saying and find in Scripture. Look and search to find the answer by examining. Remember Hebrews 12, which is our text. Strive to live in peace with everybody and pursue that consecration and holiness. God says that your focus on this area of your life is to not strive for riches, which most people in America do. But it says strive instead, first of all, to live at peace with the people around you. So relationships are more important than stuff. Relationships are more important than what you stick in your driveway. That's what you need to pursue with all your might to make sure that you have a right relationship with people around you. Secondly, it says pursue holiness. And it says, without the holiness, no one will ever see the Lord. That means you cannot go to heaven without holiness. And holiness comes in reality if you're truly born again. Because that's what grace does. Causing you to desire and have the strength to obey God. So holiness is the evidence of salvation. Because holiness is the power of God working in you. And it says in verse 15, exercise foresight and be on the watch to look after one another. There's church. Notice that. That's what church is all about. It's not to come for show. It's to come for relationship. You're here so that you can watch out for one another. You're to help each other to walk with God. You're to help each other to learn what it means to have peace with one another and have a good relationships. And secondly, to walk in holiness. That's why we gather together as church. Exercise foresight. Watch out for each other to see that no one falls back from or fails to secure God's grace. I have a clip that I wanted you to see where people basically, one of them explained how they get angry. On the street they ask people, what makes you angry? And they said things like, oh, supposed to be my friend, but they stabbed me in the back. Oh, I hate it when people lie to me. That makes me angry more than anything else. And they'd go on and on with different examples, people cutting in on them in traffic, some of the things you can think of, what makes you angry. And they listed probably 10, 15 examples of the things that made them angry. Every one of them has to do with people offending you or doing something against you that you don't like. One guy said he was angry because he couldn't get enough money to make sure he had what he wanted. Another guy got angry because of something about he couldn't control his circumstances. You know, you want to control your world to make it do what you want. Can't control that. That made him angry. Well, if you think about that, all those illustrations are what bring bitterness to people. Just what we're saying here. Because if the grace of God brings you consequences for doing evil, you don't like that. If somebody lies to you, that hurts your feelings or whatever. If somebody treats you and stabs you in the back, that's unkind. But if you want to understand the truth of this, the whole point of God's grace is, how can you forgive like Jesus does unless you're offended? It's easy to talk, but you'll never forgive anybody and have the true forgiveness of Christ until you are stabbed in the back, till you're lied to, until you are treated wrongly, and then you honestly forgive. You don't have the honest care to be like Jesus. You know what I'm saying? It won't be real. If you understand them, basically, all these situations are God's secret agents. You're suffering, friends, to bring you to a place of obedience. You will not treat them properly. Instead of saying, thank you, Lord, for bringing these circumstances to make me like Christ, you'll say, I hate you. You stab me in the back. I never want to be your friend again. Right? Isn't that how we act? Isn't that how we do it with people? You say, hey, I'm never going to talk to that person again. They disrespected me, or they were unfair to me, or different situation, whatever you're saying here. But the issue is, those are God's secret agents. That's what it's talking about here. Do not fall back and not secure the grace of God in order that no root of resentment or bitterness shoots forth and causes trouble and bitter torment and the many become contaminated and defiled by it. Literally, you make your own defilement by expressing the wrong response to God's grace. Every situation of suffering is trying to teach you to do what? the suffering brought to bear upon you is to cause you to be like Christ. Jesus was crucified severely and with great hatred, wasn't He? They spit in His face. They beat on Him with rods They stuck those thorns in His head and beat them into his head They did everything possible in their hardness and hatred to him Now what would be your response if they were doing that to you when you did nothing wrong? I'm innocent. I'm innocent. You bunch of hypocrites and wicked. What are you doing? I didn't do anything wrong. What was Jesus' response? he said nothing and then he when he talked to god he said father forgive them because they don't even know what they're doing when you can be like jesus and somebody offends you lies about you back bites you uh disrespects you and if you can say father forgive them they don't they're doing because i know what you're doing what you're trying to do is they're they're your secret agents to bring about grace in my life so I'm like Jesus because isn't what they did to bring salvation to mankind through Christ? Was that their motive? When they killed Jesus? Their motive wasn't they wanted to get saved of their sins. Their motive was they hated him. The religious leaders were trying to shut him up and get him out of their country. They hated what he said. They hated what he did. They didn't want him around. And everybody wanted to do everything but silence him. And since he wouldn't be quiet, they forcibly silenced him, they thought. Everything about their motive was wrong. Everything about their actions were wrong. And yet God used it for good to bring us eternal life. Correct? Isn't that right? And therefore, the same example here, Jesus Christ brings trouble your way. He brings suffering your way. He brings financial crisis your way. He brings relational problems your way. He causes your neighbors to hate you without cause. He causes people to hate you without cause. He causes issues to come your way that you don't have solutions for. He allows things in your life because He's trying to develop your character to be like Jesus. You'll never learn to be like Jesus without suffering. You'll never learn to be like Jesus without hard times. You'll never learn to ever be like Jesus until you have to forgive somebody who is evil and deserves to be punished for it. You'll never learn to be like Christ without the suffering hand of God. That's what Hebrews teaches, correct? Isn't that a popular message today? Isn't that what you really want to come here to hear today? If you want the grace of God, it is. Because only then can you understand how different you will become under the mighty hand of God. So let's look at this in a review type. Number one, God's hand of suffering causes character change. It literally, according to Hebrews, causes you to do what's right. And remember what we said, it's just like a child being spanked. The reason a parent spanks a child cannot be because they just hate them. It's because they're trying to change their opinion about what they did wrong. They're trying to give them grace, the desire to do what's right, and a new strength of their will to do it. So when the kid gets spanked X amount of times for beating up their little brother and they keep getting punished for it, they start having a new desire to not beat up their brother and they have a new strength saying, I'd rather not get spanked by my dad every time, so I think I'm going to hold myself back from beating up my little brother. See, that's grace. It's a physical issue, but it's great. That's what grace is, influencing you to do what's right. God uses all kinds of forms of things in your life, including the suffering, to pressure you to do what's right. Drives you to do what's right. He'll bring incredible situations to break you and to remove you from your selfish sin and move you to a place of true righteousness. He loves you that much that He will just not let you go. He'll rag on you and rag on you and rag on you until he brings it about. Number two, remember, grace is the divine hand of God chastening you to change you from your old habits to consistent righteous behavior. And that consistency is the issue with character, isn't it? That's what character is. There's one thing to know right from wrong and know that you shouldn't lie, but you only lie once a month now or before you used to lie every day. That's great, but that's not character yet. It's getting there, but character development is when it's so pressed upon you that you just, even if you're afraid to do it anymore because the consequences are so much, that's where your character begins to be developed in you. And that's why suffering is such a thing. That leaves such an impression upon you. You're thinking, now, if I do this, it's going to cost me severely. Now, do I really want to do that? You get a new desire not to do it even once at all because the consequence is so large. That's what God's suffering will bring upon you. Such a memory of how costly that was that you don't even want to exercise it anymore at all. It leaves you a bad taste in your mouth. You remember the point of it, it's no fun any longer. And besides that, it only brings suffering to me and those I love. It's not worth it. And that brings a harder, harder, harder edge upon your heart. That you're saying, I'm not going to do this anymore. It's just not worth it. But at first it seemed like it was worth it. And you remember the good old days. I mean, even Israel when they went out of Egypt into God's will and toward the promised land, they kept saying, I remember we had onions. What's this stupid manna stuff? We used to have all the good stuff and spices and good well-balanced meals and all we eat every day now is this junk we get off the ground. What is it? It's no fun. I like the old meals. I like the culture we had. I like the ethnic foods we had. Those were tasty. What's this junk? And they struggled and fought not wanting to obey God because it was too hard to obey Him. So what did it take? 40 long years of setting out there until they finally got it out of their system. Wow. You don't understand why this is such a long phase of Christianity? I don't think most Christians get out of phase two the more I study the Word. Most Christians sit there and suffer under the consequences of their wrongdoing for so long, they never get to phase three. They stay their older lives and die and meet God in phase two, not getting past this terrible terrible time This should be nothing more than elementary school through high school if you think in human development It should only last a long period but not a whole huge period of time And as you get older in your faith, it should be left behind as you get to a place where you're walking consistently in obedience to the Lord Jesus. And God knows you don't get there by getting a wand hit on your head. And I mentioned last week, and if you weren't with me last week, There's no sense you keep praying, God, give me strength. Or God, give me patience. He's not going to put a wand on your head and give you strength or patience. Here in Hebrews, what we read, it says, strengthen yourself. It said, get your arms up and strengthen yourself. That means straighten up in your mind. Understand that what I'm doing for you, even though you don't like it, it's not joyous. It's chastening and scourging and it's no fun. Get excited about it and get strong because I'm making you a different person. So you strengthen yourself. You get focused and you get busy to obey me. And guess what? This phase will be over. You won't have to get spanked all the time. You won't suffer all the time when you truly choose to make His will above your will. But most Americans want their will over God. I like this. I want that. And God bless me. Instead of, God, it's your will. I don't care about it any longer. Whatever you choose, I'll follow you. What do you want me to do? A whole different way of life. but it has to be taken through a hard course of discipline by God. Last remembrance then, bitterness is the one way to defile yourself from God. Bitterness is a poison that will ruin your relationship with God and ruin you physically, ruin you spiritually, and ruin your soul. You literally will have a rough time in life by ruining your soul. that means your emotional life, your mental life will be ruined when you allow the poison of bitterness control you rather than accept the mighty hand of God's discipline upon your life. If you continue to focus on... Think of Jesus. If He spent all this time hating those people that crucified Him, it would have ruined it. We would have not got salvation because it would have been sin. Right? Instead, His perspective was, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. Bitterness poisons. Surrender says, God, I don't have an answer why you're doing this in the moment, but I trust you. Like Job said, I came in the world with nothing. I leave with nothing. Then it's okay. Blessed be the name of God. I don't understand it, but I'm trusting my God because he will bring about good toward me. That's what you have to come to. That's a place of truly coming to a place of character development. God's hand of suffering causes character change. Bitterness occurs when we are hurt by someone and do not forgive them. Most will not admit bitterness, but repeat that they were hurt, disappointed, or offended by someone. The hardest repentance is admitting that you're the sinner, not the person who offended you. Right? You justify. I didn't do anything wrong. There's no reason that person stabbed me in the back or spoke to me in that way or treated me that way. They are evil. Therefore, they deserve punishment. And I'm going to make sure they get it. And here's really the bitterness words. Bitterness in the Greek basically means entrenched animosity. In fact, the Greek word has a primary root that means to make fast or to fix or to fasten together or to build by fastening together. In other words, basically, you build a case against someone. This person should be rubbed off the face of the earth as far as I'm concerned. They should be out of my neighborhood for the way they treated me. I did nothing wrong, and therefore, you build in your mind a strong case that they should be punished for what they did. And you'll even help God by punishing them if God will let you. You build the case. See, it doesn't mean you have to feel anger. It doesn't mean you have to feel something. It's the choice of action against that person. Therefore, bitterness is building a case. Forgiveness cleans the record. You choose to erase that record. And the only way you'll do that is to be betrayed. I trade this for that. Jesus traded their hatred to give them and the world salvation. You've got to look at the people in the face and know they're evil. And you say, that's okay. I trade what you did because God has given me patience and love and forgiveness like Jesus. I'm willing to trade the way you act so that I can be like Jesus. Until you in your mind choose to trade that, you'll never be free from bitterness. You will still hold that bitterness and you will continue to be broken by bitterness. Last thoughts then. That no one may become guilty of sexual vice or become a profane, in other words, a godless person as Esau did, who sold his own birthright for a single meal. For you understand that later on when he wanted to be forgiven. In other words, for he could find no opportunity to repair by repentance what he had done wrong. It was too late when he allowed bitterness to destroy his life. His life, if you read the record of his life, was ruined by what he did. You cannot let bitterness soak in. You must choose to forgive by an act of your will. I don't care if you don't feel like it. I don't care if your emotions do not agree with you. By an act of your will, you can simply say, I choose to forgive that person. God, help me get the feelings that come later. You know what I'm saying? Your emotions come and go. You can watch a movie and your emotions come and go. And that's not even real sometimes. It's a fake story. So your emotions don't matter, but your will does. Don't worry about your feeling. Choose by an act to be like Jesus and to forgive your enemies and choose to love them because that's what Jesus did and that's what He told us to do. Thank you.