Knowing a Faithful God (Pt. 2)

When it feels as though life is spiraling out of control, that when its important to remember that God is still—and always—in control. Dr. David Jeremiah points out that often the best way to see God’s faithfulness is to look behind you at all the times He was by your side in times of trial.

You know, according to the Bible, God is unsearchable yet he is not unknowable.
Some say, the greatest question in life is, does God exist?
But I say the greatest question is, do I know the God who does exist?
Not just do I know about Him? But do I know Him personally?
And the way you get to know God is through His word?
And in the word, when you study his attributes, you discover what a wonderful God we have.
How wonderful is the Almighty? We’ve learned He is holy.
Today, we’re going to finish a two part discussion of His faithfulness.
And then next week, we’re going to talk about his changeless and his power and his goodness.
All of these things about God, the more you know about Him, the more you love him and the more you love Him, the more you want to worship Him in just a moment, we’ll take another look at the faithfulness of God.
But before we do that, I just want to remind you again that you can get a copy of the book from which this series originates.
The book is called the God.
You may not know it’s 12 chapters to help you develop an intimacy with God as you learn about his character and attributes.
This 272 page hardcover book is available to anyone who will send a gift of any size to turning point during this month and simply ask for the book.
It will be our privilege to send it to you.
We want to add value to your life as you walk with the Lord.
And we wanna thank you for your support of turning point worldwide.
Now, here’s part two of knowing a faithful God.
God’s faithfulness precludes worry, God’s faithfulness, promises answers because God is faithful.
We have confidence. When we pray through prayer, we can touch him immediately.
Psalm 143 1 says, Lord hear my prayer, listen to my cry for mercy in your faithfulness and righteousness.
Come to my relief. How can I know that God hears my prayers because it’s the nature of God to be faithful, to be constant and consistent and to come to our relief.
Jeremiah says it this way. Call to me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.
Jason Meyer was taking studies in the doctoral program and he was working very hard, not getting much sleep.
One day, he was driving home very early around 4 30 in the morning and falling asleep at the wheel and he tried everything to stay awake.
He turned up the radio, he tried to sing real loud. He even slapped himself in the face.
And the next thing he knew he woke up in his driveway more than a little shaken because he had no idea how he got there as he walked into the house.
Now eerily awake, he entered his bedroom and noticed the strangest thing. His wife was wide awake.
She would normally be asleep. But instead she was sitting up in bed waiting for him.
She said, hi, honey, how was your drive?
Myers said, it’s funny you should ask, I really struggle to stay awake on the drive home.
In fact, I don’t know how I got here.
Yeah, I figured she said, what do you mean? You figured?
Well, she said, I woke at 4 30 very suddenly and felt this intense prompting to pray.
So I figured you must be struggling on the road since that’s around the time you normally come home.
So I prayed for you. Looking back on this event, Meyer concludes, I think I’m still alive today because my wife obeyed the spirit’s prompting to pray.
I hope this story gives you a greater sense of what’s at stake in prayer.
Every time you awake to pray, don’t go back to sleep, whatever it is you’re supposed to pray for, pray for it.
Because God woke you up to pray and God woke her up to pray and heard her prayer.
God’s faithfulness protects us from evil God is faithful in keeping us from evil and from the evil one, we often underestimate the spiritual danger.
That’s all around us. Jesus told us to request protection.
He said, do not lead us into a temptation but deliver us from the evil one.
Till I began working on this message.
I had never connected the attribute of God’s faithfulness with my protection.
And then I read second Thessalonians chapter three and verse three, the Lord is faithful who will establish you and guard you from the evil one.
Paul wrote that in second Thessalonians chapter three and it had an impact on me the next morning after I read that, I heard myself saying, I don’t know what’s going to happen in my life today, but God’s protecting me.
God’s got a hedge around me. He’s guarding me. Let me ask you a question.
When you think of the faithfulness of God, what comes to your mind first?
I bet if we could all be honest, we’d probably say, I think of how unfaithful I’ve been when I think of how faithful he’s been.
It makes me feel kind of bad because I know I’ve not always been faithful to him, but I got some good news for you today that maybe you haven’t heard before.
I want you to know that when we come to face God’s faithfulness and contrast it with our own, we don’t have to worry because second Timothy 2 13 is in the Bible.
And this is what it says. If we are faithless, he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself.
Ladies and gentlemen, aren’t you glad that God’s faithfulness to you is not conditioned upon your faithfulness to Him?
Oh, my goodness. That sends horror through your mind, doesn’t it?
But the Bible says it is God who is faithful.
He cannot be unfaithful to us because we’re unfaithful to Him because He is never unfaithful.
So even when we fail, even when we look back and we come to the Lord and we say, Lord, it’s me again.
It’s the same thing we talked about yesterday. He never stops being faithful to us.
If you’re a Jesus follower and you feel defeated by your failures, join the club.
But let me remind you of something God’s faithfulness to you is not conditioned by your faithfulness to Him.
He is faithful to you no matter what.
And then here’s something all of us who love music resonate with God’s faithfulness promotes praise.
The writer of Psalm 89 said it this way, I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever with my mouth while I make known your faithfulness to all generations and the heavens will praise your wonders.
Oh Lord, your faithfulness also in the assembly of the saints.
Oh Lord, God of hose, who is mighty like you?
Oh Lord, your faithfulness also surrounds you because God is faithful. We can’t help but praise Him.
We want to praise Him. We hear a message like this.
We read scriptures like this and we want to stand up with our hands up high and say, Lord, thank you for being so faithful to me.
Psalm 71 22 says with the loot, I will praise you and your faithfulness.
Oh my God to you, I will sing with the harp. Oh Holy one of Israel.
Let me tell you what I know until we praise God. We have not truly enjoyed God.
Until we learn how to worship God. We are leaving a lot of the blessings of God on the table.
If you know how faithful He is, my friend, you cannot help but praise Him.
It is a good thing to give thanks to the Lord and to sing praises to your name almost high to declare your loving kindness in the morning and your faithfulness every night.
Isn’t it interesting that we declare His loving kindness in the morning?
And then we go through the day and when we get through the day, we look back and we declare His faithfulness because His loving kindness was faithful all day long.
God’s faithfulness precludes worry, his faithfulness promises, answers.
His faithfulness protects us from evil and his faithfulness promotes praise.
But there’s one more God’s faithfulness provides encouragement.
The reality of God’s faithfulness kept the prophet Jeremiah from collapsing in despair.
I’ve never truly understood Jeremiah nor how he survived. Because when the Lord called him to preach.
He told him in the calling that nobody was going to listen to him.
I think I would have quit the first day. Jeremiah.
I want you to go and talk to these people, but they’re not ever going to listen to you.
Can you imagine Jeremiah witnessed the collapsing of everything around him.
He wrote two books in the Bible.
The book that bears his name and a shorter book that follows that like a postscript.
The book of Lamentations and the Book of Lamentations is the saddest book. In the Bible.
The word lamentation means to lament, to mourn deeply to be swallowed up in grief because of lamentations, we sometimes call Jeremiah.
The weeping prophet people have called me that because of my last name, Jeremiah had a reason for his laments.
He served the Lord during the final tragic days of Judah and Jerusalem.
Every king during that time was worse than the one before.
And the godlessness of the age accelerated like a runaway train.
Despite Jeremiah’s earnest preaching and pleading, nobody listened to him. He was persecuted and abused and threatened with death.
He was beaten and thrown into a Myer pit.
And when the Babylonians laid siege to the city of Jerusalem, Jeremiah faced a prolonged nightmare of food and water deprivation and thousands of people starving and disease rampant everywhere.
And as he watched the Babylonians breached the walls of the city and massacred the citizens and imprisoned the nobles and destroyed the city and burned the temple of the Lord to the ground.
And according to tradition, somehow Jeremiah survived all of that.
And he went to the mount of olives and sat there looking over the city in traumatized condition in rags and watched the city burn.
And if you read the book of Lamentations, it opens with these words, how lonely sits the city that was full of people.
How like a widow is she who was great among the nations?
The princess among the provinces has become a slave. She weeps bitterly in the night.
Her tears are on her cheeks. Among all her lovers, she has none to comfort her.
All her friends have dealt treacherously with her. They have become her enemies.
The Babylonian invasion and the exile of the survivors of Judah didn’t simply represent the fall of a great nation.
It seemed to call into question God’s entire plan for humanity.
The Lord had promised Abraham a great nation on a designated stretch of land and out of that nation would come a messiah who would solve all of the earth’s problems and reign supreme from Jerusalem.
And now there was no more Jerusalem. David’s throne was toppled and all hope seemed gone.
Jeremiah was in anguish. He said, is it nothing to you all you who pass by me behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which has been brought on me, which the Lord has inflicted in the day of his fierce anger for these things.
I weep my eye, my eye overflows with water.
Zion spreads out her hands and no one comforts her to Jeremiah.
God’s judgment did not simply fall on Jerusalem and Judah it fell on him.
He personalized the destruction of Jerusalem.
He said, I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.
He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light. Surely.
He has turned his hand against me time and time throughout the day, God has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones.
He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and woe.
He has hedged me in so that I cannot get out and he has made my chain heavy.
Even when I cry and shout, he shuts out my prayer.
The more he wrote in the book of Lamentations, the more agitated he got is he saw the world around him crumble.
He said, he has broken my teeth with gravel. He has covered me with ashes.
Lord, you have moved my soul far from peace. I have forgotten prosperity.
And I said, my strength and my hope have perished from the Lord, but not quite one thought breaks out like a bolt of lightning in the dark sky.
There is one attribute of God that falls like the morning dew on Jeremiah’s tortured brow.
He writes this, I recall to my mind.
Therefore, I have hope through the Lord’s mercies.
We are not consumed because his compassion fail not. They are new every morning. Great. Is your faithfulness?
That great song that we sang didn’t come on a mountain top experience when all was well, it came in the midst of the darkest night of Jeremiah’s soul.
And when you read Lamentations three, you wonder if there are some missing verses because what happens is all of a sudden you get to verse 21.
Jeremiah seems to switch from pain to praise on a dime.
Did someone find this manuscript and cut out some verses? No, I don’t think that’s what happened.
Jeremiah did what every believer must do if we’re going to have to encourage ourselves in times of difficulty, we stop listening to ourselves and we start talking to ourselves.
This, I recall he said this. I recall to my mind.
We have to learn even in the midst of life’s most painful situations to bring something to mind.
We have to remind ourselves of God’s unchanging, overarching, undergirding, faithfulness.
We have to remember God’s continual compassion, which are new every morning.
Now, I love this hymn based on this passage, great as thy faithfulness.
But the author of the hymn Thomas Chisholm made one slight mistake.
The hymn says morning by morning, New Mercies. I see. But that’s not what Jeremiah said.
Jeremiah did not see any visible morning mercies when he wrote Lamentations three at that moment.
He had no visible evidence of God’s mercy at all.
Morning by morning brought nothing but horror and pain and dread.
But Jeremiah said in effect, even if I don’t see any tangible blessings right now, that does not alter God’s mercy.
God’s compassion, God’s faithfulness, whether I can see them or not, God’s mercy is continual. He is my portion.
Therefore, I hope in Him, my friend.
If the only time we declare the faithfulness of God is when we feel everything is in order in our lives, we may not say it very often.
God is not faithful because we understand what He’s doing.
God is not faithful because our day started off.
Well, God is faithful because He is God and it is his nature to be faithful.
God’s providence and God’s faithfulness are like reading Hebrew.
When I went to seminary, I had to learn how to read Hebrew.
The first thing I discovered was none of the letters were like anything I had ever seen.
And the second thing which was most difficult for me was to learn that Hebrew reads from the right to the left and not from the left to the right, from the back to the front and not from the front to the back.
The providence of God is like reading Hebrew, you have to read it backwards, you have to stand and look back and say, oh great is thy faithfulness.
And all of us have those moments that we look back over and we see that God was faithful to us during a time of great stress and that he’s been faithful to us even in times when we forgot who he was and we weren’t faithful to him.
He’s been faithful to us when we didn’t go to church.
And when we didn’t name the name of the Lord because we are his Children.
Even when we walked away, God never let go of us and he always faithfully took care of us.
We’re living today in days that were similar to Jeremiah’s days where moral foundations are crumbling and where people are no longer true to their word.
Unfaithfulness is everywhere. The statistics are totally depressing, but I have good news for you.
God is faithful. He’s faithful in his creation. He’s faithful in his revelation.
Not one of his promises can fail. His faithfulness frees us from the grip of worry.
It assures us of answered prayer. It protects us from evil. It triggers our praise.
It ensures our tomorrow and we worship a faithful God. That’s why one of our greatest joys is to sing.
Greatest thy faithfulness. Oh God, my father, there is no shadow of turning with thee. Thou changes not thy compassion.
They fail not as thou has been. Thou forever will be.
There was once a young man from Chicago who went down to the bluegrass regions of Kentucky where he met and wooed a young woman who ultimately came back to Chicago as his bride.
They enjoyed three lovely years of marriage.
And then one day in the midst of a sickness and in a seizure of pain, this young woman lost her mind when she was at her best.
She was a bit demented at her worst. She would scream.
So the neighbors complained the young businessman didn’t know what to do.
But ultimately, he left his home in the middle of Chicago, went out to one of the western suburbs and built a house determined that there he would do everything within his power to nurse his wife back to health and sanity.
One day, the family physician suggested if he were to take his wife back to Kentucky to her original home, that may be something in that familiar surrounding would help to restore her sanity.
And so they went back to the old homestead hand in hand.
They walked through the old house where memories hung on every corner.
They went down to the garden and they walked down by the riverside where the violets were in bloom.
But after several days, nothing seemed to be happening. So defeated and discouraged.
The young man put his wife back in the car and they headed back to Chicago.
When they got close to the house, he looked over and discovered that his wife was asleep.
It was the first time he had seen her deep, restfully sleeping in many weeks when he got to the house, she was still asleep and he lifted her from the car, took her inside, placed her on the bed, realized she wanted to sleep some more.
So he placed a cover over her and then just sat by her side and watched her through the midnight hour, watched her until the first rays of the sun reached through the curtain and touched her face.
The young woman awoke and she saw her husband seated by her side and she said, I seem to have been on a long journey.
Where have you been? And that man speaking out of days and weeks and months of patient, waiting and watching said, my sweetheart, I’ve been right here waiting for you all the time.
And that is the faithfulness of God, no matter where you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done.
He’s right here.
He’s always been here waiting for you to respond with love, to love, waiting for you to respond with trust, to promise, waiting for you to cast yourself with a reckless abandon upon the grace of God and waiting for you to discover that God is faithful.
Some of you today are thinking about your own life in light of what you’ve heard.
Let me just tell you how much God loves you, how faithful He has been waiting for you to get it right.
You know what I’m talking about to get it right?
And some of you are not Christians, you have never accepted Christ as your savior.
And maybe you don’t think there’s a place for you.
I’m here to tell you there is a place for you.
God is faithful and he gave everything so that you could spend eternity with Him.
If you do not know the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior, why would you not accept him and grab hold of his faithfulness in your life?
And if you’re a Christian and you’ve gotten out a fellowship with God, God doesn’t have to do anything different.
It’s you that have to make the move. God hasn’t gone anywhere.
He’s been right there all the time and he’s just waiting for you.
Could I use the metaphor to wake up just waiting for you to wake up?
Amen. Amen.
Well, did you know we’re almost uh to Easter just a couple of days and so we’re gonna take Friday and uh walk away from this series for one day and talk about the emptiness of Easter from the Easter story in John’s Gospel.
No, Miss Tomorrow, as we set our faces to Easter and remember uh how the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so impacted all of our lives as Christians.
It will be a good reminder and a good preparation for your own celebration of Easter on Sunday.
We’ll be back again with this series on Monday, but tomorrow, it’s the emptiness of Easter.
Hey, we’re going to Alaska in July and I’m advertising it now during this month perhaps for the last time, I pretty sure that by the time we get through April, the cruise will be sold out.
So, if you’re planning to go with us, I hope you will make your reservation.
Simply go to David Jeremiah dot org and you will have all that you need to follow through on getting a reservation for the cruise to Alaska.
It’s a wonderful time of fellowship and ministry and we hope you will come and be with us.
We’ll see you next time right here on turning point. Our message today originated from.