The Sovereignty of God
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The Sovereignty of God
Good morning, HBC. Every summer I come up here, there are more people out there, which is a blessing. God's providing the growth. I'm Todd Jacobs, one of the elders here. If you've not met me, I'd love to do so afterward. If you've never seen me, you've either never been here before or you're looking downward. So I'm batting ninth in our summer series on God's attributes. Baseball fans, what kind of hitter do you put ninth? In the National League - in the old National League, it was the pitcher. The worst one! Your greatest hope for the ninth hitter is he gets hit by a pitch. So one of my all time favorite baseball players... who is that? Randy Johnson - did not love his mullet, but I love him because he's my height; he's about my age, and he was one of baseball's all time greatest pitchers, but he was a lousy hitter. Huge strike zone. 125 batting average. I'm just setting expectations for the rest of this hour. All right, let's take Randy down, enough of him. Today's message is God is sovereign…not a joking matter. My main goal today is for you to come away more confident than ever that God is absolutely sovereign over everything.
Let me pray again. Heavenly father, we need your help. We need your help to understand, to embrace your sovereignty, to rejoice over it, and to be comforted by it, not crushed. We thank you that you are a loving Savior and a sovereign Lord whom we can trust. Help us to do so now. In Jesus' name, Amen. So God's sovereignty is seen throughout the Bible, and it's already come up this summer because you cannot completely separate God's attributes from one another. They are distinguishable, but not completely divisible. God isn't made of Legos. You don't take some holiness bricks and some righteousness bricks and sovereign bricks. And let's bury those wrath bricks down deep under a whole bunch of love and grace bricks. He's not like that. God's attributes aren't like features on your smartphone that you toggle on and off. God is completely all of his attributes, completely all the time. God's sovereignty is inseparable from his entire being and from all the other attributes you've already heard this summer. God's sovereignty is a lofty truth. We can't out-loft God's actual loftiness in our minds. So I wonder how lofty is your view of God's sovereignty? But it's also a practical truth. It's Bunyan's impregnable rock to which we cling, and Spurgeon's soft pillow for anxious heads. Don't we often reverse that? Clinging to that flimsy pillow of our circumstances and laying our heads down at night on the hard rock of our worry? Lots of other things do seem to be in control, don't they? They loom large in our lives. Death. Disease. Politicians. Technology. Money. What's really in charge? Is it a toxic cocktail of human free will, the devil, physics and chance? Are any of those comforting thoughts? More importantly, are any of them true? No. There is only one sovereign. Isaiah 44:6 says, Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first, and I am the last; besides me there is no God. It is good for us to know that God is good, that he's loving, and he's a merciful father, that he does draw near to his brokenhearted children. It's also good to know that God is righteous and holy and a sovereign king, and we are his subjects. He is a loving king. He is a gracious king. He's a righteous king. The common link - he is king. I have three points today. First is sovereignty defined. Second is sovereignty declared. Third is sovereignty depended on.
First sovereignty defined. What is sovereignty? I have a slide for the first textbook definition, the short one. It’s a short one from one theologian. "God's sovereignty is his exercise of power and rule over his creation as its king." Straightforward. I've got a longer one. You do not or should not even try to write this down, but I think it's going to put all the cards on the table about what we mean by God's sovereignty. So bear with us here. "Whereas omnipotence tells us how much and which powers God has, sovereignty clarifies the extent to which God uses those powers. Divine sovereignty is God's power of absolute self-determination. God does his own actions and they are in accord with his choices. God's choices are determined only by his own nature and purposes. To say that God's sovereignty is absolute also means that his choices and control cover all things. God is the ultimate, final, and complete authority over everything and everyone." Wow. Now that is sovereignty. So I wanted to make an effort to blend those two into something that is both simple and yet as complete as I can make it. So one more slide. This is the eminent theologian Todd Jacobs, so take it with a grain of salt, but here it is. "God's sovereignty is his rightful and constant exercise of absolute rule and control as the unchallenged King over his creation, which is the entire universe, all things seen and unseen." All things seen...That's all the earth. That's all the stuff that's out there in space that we keep discovering. That's all living creatures. It's all space. It's all matter. It's the entire universe. All things unseen...Subatomic particles, all forces, energies, laws of physics, the spiritual realm. God is king over angels, Satan, demons, and all human souls, all of which he created. God rules over time as a property of his creation. Time is not an eternally self-existent thing to which God is subject. When God created space, time came with it. That's the only reference to the theory of relativity you'll ever hear from me from the pulpit, but that's where that comes from. And it's true. Prior to Genesis 1:1, there was no prior to. God is not subject to time. God doesn't wait to see what will happen before making his plan, as if he's dependent on our actions. To worship a god who only reacts to our actions, subject to our wills and decisions, is to worship an idol made out of moldable clay. That's Gumby, not Yahweh. God delegates authority in a sense, right? He delegates authority to governments, parents, husbands, church leaders, employers, and even to the devil who Jesus called the ruler of this world. But these are all always under God's ultimate authority. Next slide...R.C. Sproul, I have to quote R.C. and get in his name, because my favorite Pittsburgher of all time is in Cuba today. So one of my other top favorite Pittsburghers said, "If God is not sovereign, then God is not God." A longer quote from Sproul..."God's sovereignty prevails in every instance. Some have said God's sovereignty ends where human freedom begins, but it is blasphemy. And a moment's thought will reveal it to be so. The sovereignty of God is not in any way limited by, conditioned on, or dependent on man's authority. Our freedom is a gift from God. It is real. We exercise and enjoy freedom, but it is everywhere limited by God's sovereignty. That is what we mean by sovereignty. God is sovereign. We are not." If you like it really simple, here it is, the end of sovereignty defined. God made all; God rules all, no exceptions. That's sovereignty defined. I wish all three of my points were that short. But you're not in such luck today.
Second, sovereignty declared. What does the Bible say about God's sovereignty? Psalm 115:3 says, Our God is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases. God himself says in Isaiah 43:13, There is none who can deliver from my hand; I work, and who can turn it back? Our sovereign God is the almighty King of the universe all the time. He knows all. He rules all. What he wants, he wills, and what he wills is what happens. Now, the word sovereign itself is rare in most English Bibles, but from beginning to end, the Bible declares, demonstrates, and outright assumes the rightful sovereignty of God as the creator of all things. What you do see repeatedly in the Bible, directly related to God, are these words: King, kingdom, throne, rule, dominion, reign, and most of all, Lord. Here's a short Bible survey. There are many scriptures, and you probably have a favorite or two that I'm going to leave out. But here we go. Let's begin at the beginning. Genesis 1:1, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There was a beginning to time, space, matter, to everything except God himself. It all began exactly when and how and because God alone decided it would. As creator he has the absolute right and power to rule over everything. First Chronicles 29:10-11 David prays, Blessed are you, O Lord, the God of Israel, our father, for ever and ever. Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. Both riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might, and in your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all. Daniel 4:34-35, At the end of the days, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will, among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand, or say to him, what have you done? In Luke 1:32-33, the angel announces to Mary Jesus's coming birth and says he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. Jesus is proclaimed as King to the Old Testament prophets, to the Gospels, and all the way through to Revelation. In the Bible's last chapter, that glorious, wonderful vision of our eternal future. Revelation 22:3 says, No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. Amen.
We could do this all day, but you get the point. God is the sovereign King of creation from beginning to end. We see the fullness of God's sovereignty expressed in his other attributes. You've already heard that this summer. So let's look at that in Scripture. Adam started us off with eternality. God's eternality is a sovereign eternality. Exodus 15:18 says, The Lord will reign forever and ever. Psalm 10:16 says, The Lord is King forever and ever. Lamentations 5:19 says, But you, O Lord, reign forever; your throne endures to all generations. Last week we heard from Kurtis about grace, and earlier from Chris about mercy. God's grace and mercy are sovereign grace and mercy. Kurtis taught last week on Exodus 33:19. God said to Moses, I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name, the Lord. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. Kurtis also taught about sovereign grace from Ephesians 2:8-9 and Romans 9, so I won't repeat those today. David taught us about God's wisdom. God's wisdom is sovereign wisdom. Job 12:13-15 says, With God our wisdom and might; he has counsel and understanding. If he tears down, none can rebuild; if he shuts a man in, none can open. If he withholds the waters, they dry up; if he sends them out, they overwhelm the land. Proverbs 19:21 says, Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. Lorin taught on holiness. God's holiness is sovereign holiness. God says in Isaiah 43:15, I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King. And most well known, perhaps of all, is Isaiah 6, the first five verses...In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory! And the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts! Scott taught on love. God's love is sovereign love. Romans 8:38-39, For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. In John 10, Jesus declares that nobody can snatch his sheep from his hand or the Father's hand. Christian, nothing can separate those of us who are in Christ from the love of God. Nothing. That's not because we're so lovable. It's because God's sovereign grasp on you is unbreakable. He alone decides on whom to set his steadfast, covenantal, faithful, sovereign love. And when he does, it's unshakable. He chose to love us by his will. First, John 4:19 says it as plainly as possible. We love because he first loved us. We haven't had the attribute of wrath, but God's wrath is sovereign wrath. Jeremiah 10:10 says, But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting king. At his wrath the earth shakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation. At the final judgment... Revelation 19:15-16 says this of the returning Jesus Christ, From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords. God is not just a king. He is the just king. He is the king. We might not sense or trust in God's sovereignty all the time, but our feelings don't change the truth that God is now and forever the sovereign ruler of the universe. He is the King whose throne will never end and never be moved. To summarize point two...The Bible declares that God is sovereign over everything. Period.
Now sovereignty, like his other attributes, should not be a dry fact for our chin scratching. We can get that way. It's a glorious truth for worship. If you rightly see God's sovereignty, you will be awed. And if you fully believe it, you will be comforted. When Jesus was born, Herod feared him as a coming king. Most of the Jews of Jesus's time rejected him as their king, even using his claim of kingship as a reason to have him crucified. Pilate and the Roman soldiers mocked him as a supposed king. But guess what? He is king. One day he's going to come back and make that undeniably true to everyone who rejected or believed in him. For now, Colossians 1:13-14 says that God the Father has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Are you in that kingdom? Have you bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ? Philippians 2:9-11 says, Therefore God has highly exalted him, and put on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Amen. Every knee in all creation will bow to King Jesus in one of two ways...As his willing, adoring subject or as his doomed enemy. There is no second chance after you die. Purgatory, prayers for the dead…they're myths. They do nothing to alter your eternal destiny when you die. There is no second chance. The Lord Jesus calls you today to trust in him, and bow the adoring knee to him as King.
Before going on to point three I want to address some questions. If God is completely sovereign and he is…why are we morally accountable for our sins? Do our actions matter? Why evangelize? Pray? Worship? Why do anything? Why is there evil? And isn't he responsible for it if he's sovereign, good and all powerful? If you've asked any of those questions...Congratulations! You rightly understand what's been said about God's sovereignty. If you think you have simple, completely satisfying answers to those, you've probably distorted or neglected some biblical truths. We have centuries of the best Christian thinking, if you need those for help. There's also been a lot of not so best thinking; pat answers about human free will, the devil and creation's curse might look good on X or TikTok, but they don't ultimately answer our deepest questions. And they don't always square with Scripture. Here are some brief thoughts… I think all of these are biblical, even though we don't have time to exposit all of them. Number one, we do have God given wills and minds, and we do make real choices. And we are each morally responsible for our choices because the Bible says so. Paul, after writing about God's sovereign mercy and election, wrote in Romans 9:19-21, You will say to me then, why does he (God) still find fault? For who can resist his will? Paul says, But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to the molder, why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? Did you notice Paul doesn't answer his own rhetorical questions? He just warns us to stay humble. So as you ask God your questions and search scripture, be careful how far you go. Don't doubt him. Trust him. Second, God as Sovereign commands many actions that include prayer, sharing the gospel, worship, and many others. Using his sovereignty as an excuse not to do them makes no sense. We do them because he's our king, and we listen to him. He has also ordained those as our responsibility and his means to his ends. I don't know exactly how prayer changes things or affects God when he already knows everything and has already ordained everything, and that his will is not subject to mine. But I know prayer does change things. We are to pray. We are to evangelize, to worship and do many other things. And all of those things do make a difference. Third, God is not responsible for evil. Despite the difficulties this raises when viewed in light of his sovereignty and his power and his goodness, the responsibility for evil always rests with the creature who committed it as a moral agent. God is neither the author nor the approver of sin. God himself does not tempt us. I don't know how to fully reconcile the existence of evil with God's sovereignty over all things. I don't ultimately know why God allowed, ordained, willed, decreed (choose your favorite verb) the fall of Satan and of man, and the entrance of evil into this world. I don't believe God-given free will by itself totally resolves the problem, and sometimes might unintentionally deny God's absolute sovereignty if it's overemphasized. I believe this question calls for faith and humility. God willed and controlled all the events that led to the greatest injustice in world history. Peter said of Christ's crucifixion in Acts 2:23, This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. One author writes about this verse, I have this on a slide. I love this quote. "Here, too, is the mystery of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Those parallel lines, to our finite minds, never meet. Those who try to make them meet succeed only in distorting both. It is possible, but by no means certain, that in heaven the parallel lines in question will be seen from a different perspective. In this life, they must not be tampered with. They are both true and that is enough." I think that's a good place to leave things. Divine sovereignty and human responsibility are both true, and that's enough.
Finally, point three, sovereignty depended on. I have three final reflections for application. Because God is our sovereign King, we can suffer faithfully. We can wait hopefully, and we can obey lovingly. Suffer faithfully, wait hopefully and obey lovingly. First, suffering faithfully. Many of you are suffering or know someone who is. One of the privileges the elders have is to know and share in many of your sufferings, to pray for them. So I want to take some time here. Spoiler alert: doctrine is sometimes hard,
suffering is always hard. My desire today is to provide comfort to the sufferers. But I also want to be truthful about suffering. The Bible teaches all of the following... Number one, some suffering is a direct consequence of our personal sins. Our response to that should be repentance, realizing that God can and often does sometimes let sin's consequences persist. Second, some suffering is God's loving discipline of his children. Our response should again be repentance and spiritual growth. Some suffering is from persecution for following Christ. Our response to that should be to rejoice, glorify God and look ahead to our great reward. And finally, the big category that I think we face, some suffering is from evil actions of humans or demons, or simply from the cursed physical creation since Adam and Eve sinned. How should we respond to those? Each Sunday, including today, we sing about our King, our Lord reigning on his throne. We sang those very words this morning. In other words, sovereignty doesn't show up in the songs because, hey, that's hard to rhyme with. So we'll say throne, rule, reign, King. All of those refer to his sovereignty. But let's be honest, singing about that in here, in this comfortable room with our beloved church family, is a lot easier and not the same as trusting in it when we feel alone and we're suffering. It doesn't always seem as if our loving father is in control. We might doubt, forget, or outright reject his sovereignty. We'd probably never say that with our lips, but we can act as if that's true. We might restrict our belief in God's sovereignty to the good things, how he's blessing us, and then respond to suffering with anger, despair, and doubt. It's easy to leave God out of our suffering, except when we ask him to please remove it. That's not wrong to do. It's easy to act as if it's entirely up to us to overcome our suffering, as if it's something outside his will. Is God just watching the sin stained world and creation's curse unfold? Does he sit back and wait for suffering to happen, and then decide if he'll relieve it if we pray enough? Is God's sovereignty that passive? Is the devil or the world ultimately sovereign over our suffering? The Bible, as we've said, says that God is absolutely sovereign. He is holy. He is pure. He is sinless. We dare not charge him with any guilt for sin or evil, but evil, sin, disaster, disease, death, and suffering are all very real. Is God in control of all of that? In Isaiah 45:7 God says, I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord who does all these things. Amos 3:6 says, Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it? Lamentations 3:37-38, Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come? Again, God was sovereign over every detail of Christ's betrayal, suffering, and death. Jesus repeatedly prophesied this. Luke 22:22, Jesus said at the Last Supper, For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined. And then in Acts 4, praying to the sovereign Lord, believers prayed to this...That's how they address their prayer, Sovereign Lord. In this city, they were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. It was God who cursed creation in Genesis 3, not the devil. Romans 8:20-22 teach that God Himself has subjected creation to futility. Even those things that make us groan are under God's sovereignty. How many of you memorize Romans 8:28? I bet a bunch of you. We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. I would encourage all of you who love that verse and have memorized it to now memorize verse 29 right after it, and to never separate the two. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be what? Be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. Brothers and sisters, one of God's great purposes through suffering is to conform you into the image of Christ. Our sinless Lord, who needed no sanctification, suffered greatly. Should we be spared? James 1:2-4 says, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. James isn't saying yay, cancer! Yay, pain! Woo hoo! I lost my job. He's not saying to cheer those things. Those are real sorrows. But what he is saying is that we should be joyful about passing the test of faith, about the steadfastness that comes from passing it and going through it, and the righteousness that comes at the other side. Another of God's purposes for our suffering is for us to learn to trust His Word. Psalm 119:71 says, It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. Four verses later, 75 - I know, O Lord, that your rules are righteous, and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. Who afflicted the psalmist? Who was it? God afflicted him. Although we cannot always know God's specific purposes, suffering is always an opportunity to grow in our trust in him, our dependence on him, to examine, to see if our hope and joy are truly in him and not in some temporary thing. However you are suffering, remember God is sovereign. He is wise. He is loving. He has good purposes, even in our suffering, including when we can't see them, and we often can't. There are times when we need to steer someone back from suffering, despair, or bitterness, but remember to be gentle. Let compassion and service to the sufferer be your first instincts. We don't mourn and weep without hope. But we do mourn and we do weep. And we suffer together. 1 Corinthians 12:26 says this, talking about the church, If one member suffers, all suffer together. One of God's purposes for someone else's suffering might be for you to grow in compassion and service to the sufferer, ministering to suffering. This is my only rant about social media and smartphones here, and then I'll stop. Ministering to suffering requires in-person, face to face, hands-on ministry to one another. Texting, emails, social media posts are not a substitute. Not saying those are always bad. They're not inherently evil. They are not a substitute for the face to face ministry to suffering people. Suffering is one of many reasons why we need a real church. You need to be part of a church, not just an invisible member of the “church universal”. And don't hide your suffering from your church. You might be withholding a God-given opportunity for someone else to learn how to minister.
So, I've ducked the hard one. What are we to make of the Book of Job? In Job's first two chapters, God gives Satan permission to severely afflict Job. After great financial loss, and the deaths of his children, Job said in 1:21, The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Then the book says, In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. After Job was further afflicted with sores from head to feet, in verse 2:10, Job said, Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? In all this Job did not sin with his lips. And then at the end of the book, Job 42:11, it says that after God restored Job's health and prosperity, his family and friends rallied around him and consoled him and comforted him for all the adversities that the Lord had brought on him. It does not say that Satan had brought on him, though that is true. Both Satan's activity and God's sovereignty over Satan were instrumental in Job's suffering. Friends, be careful that you don't restrict your view of God's sovereignty in an unbiblical way that undermines your faith and suffering while you're suffering. Don't restrict your view of suffering to the here and now, and forget that God always has eternal purposes. Is it comforting to think that Satan, or any other physical or spiritual power, could cause something outside of God's will? Is that comforting? How then, could we really trust God? How then, could we really believe his promises? Are we to fight on our own against suffering as something outside of his will? I am not saying you should be totally passive. You can avail yourself of modern medicine. You can take a new job if your job is miserable. You can flee abuse. You can take any number of wise and sinless actions to seek relief from suffering. The Bible shows God's servants praying and acting often when they are facing hard times, all the while trusting God. There is no comfort in divorcing God's sovereignty from our suffering. That only leads to doubt and despair. There is nothing...nothing outside God's sovereignty, including our sufferings' causes and results. And this ought to comfort us. About this tension, one theologian gives this summary. I think it's my last slide. "So in the end, infinitely wise, all knowing permission is the same thing as bringing something about. And oh, how good it is to know that the permissive will of God and the more direct will of God are always wise and always pursuing the highest good for those who trust in him." Suffering is never easy. I skipped from Job 2 to Job 42. The vast bulk of the Book of Job shows him and his counselors struggling to make sense of this, and they don't always do it that well. Always go to God. Always go to God. His love and compassion for you are real and so is his sovereignty. I don't know why you suffer. I don't always know when I suffer, why it is. But we can always trust God with our suffering. There will be mystery. There will be wonder. There will be human limits that call for faith. You can trust him when you don't understand. We do not worship a God that we can fully understand. So what current suffering is calling for you to trust in God and His sovereign purposes. Take some time. Write it down. Share it. If you need more help in dealing with suffering, I have two book recommendations. There's one many of you I hope have read, Trusting God by Jerry Bridges, and also one I read this summer simply called Suffering by Paul David Tripp.
Many of you know, um, for half the summer, about seven weeks, I was suffering with this outbreak of painful sores in my mouth. I felt like yellowjackets were stinging me. They would come and they would go and get worse and heal, then new ones would come and no one could figure it out. Three trips to the dentist, two to my doctor, multiple texts, finally into an ENTs office. And, um, it was hard to talk. It was hard to eat and it was hard to sleep, and those are three of my favorite things. The sleeping one was really the hardest. Um, and, uh, it was tough. It was tough on Andrea to watch me go through it. And, um, so many of you have suffered so much worse, I hesitate to even bring it up, but it's fresh. And reading that book on suffering was so encouraging to remind me of much that I have folded into this message. Um, people ask me, I was supposed to preach July 6th and I had to punt it to now because I just couldn't talk back then. And God is good, it's all gone now. And, um, I've been asked many times by many of you here who have been praying for me, what finally caused them to go away? How should I answer that? Was it the medicines at the end? The final ones? Was it time? My body's own immune response? Was it your prayers and mine? Was it simply God acting? Yes. Yes. I hope that helps.
Second, wait hopefully. Don't freak out. These last two are really quick. Suffering was the big one. These are going to be 3 to 4 minutes each. I'm glad that the clock is broken, so I don't even know how long I've been talking. Thank you in the back. Kurtis set the bar at 56 minutes last week, I'm trying not to go over that. I'm not Kurtis, obviously. Um. Here we go, wait hopefully. Number two, wait hopefully. So, worry is rampant today. It's rampant here in this church, it's rampant in our culture and it crosses generations. Worry is a type of self-inflicted suffering. When things don't go our way, when we can't control the outcome, we worry. Now, maybe especially for the men in the room that often comes out as anger. But the root is the same. When you think through the big messy wad of your worry or your anger, what is that root? I want to suggest that it's this: you aren't sovereign. You aren't omniscient, and you aren't omnipotent. In other words, you aren't God. Our worry says in our hearts, no matter what else we pray, not your will, Lord, but mine be done. I have good news for you. There is someone who is omniscient and omnipotent and sovereign, and he's way wiser than you, and he's way better than you. He knows the best who, what, where, when, and how, and he always chooses it, whether we like it or not. You can trust him while you wait. Look at New Testament passages about worry. Not now, but write these down. Look at Matthew 6:25-33. Look at Philippians 4:4-9. Look at the Old Testament when God's choicest servants were most distressed; Abraham, Moses, Jacob, David, Job, Paul. God usually does not answer their worry with why this is, he answers with who I am. Is there
a lesson for us? I think there is. God is not going to always give us the why, but he has promised us who he is. Like Romans 4:28, many of you memorize Philippians 4:6-7. Be anxious for nothing. Do you know the four short words that immediately precede it? The Lord is near. The Lord is near. That is not a reminder from Paul for our heads to embrace God's omnipresence. That is a balm for our hearts. Do you know where Paul was when he wrote those words? Was he in a cozy chair with his Bible, journal and fresh coffee? He was in prison. He was in prison when he wrote those words. When things look bad or uncertain, God gives us the promise of his sovereign character to break us out of our worry. His sovereign character, all that he is is promised, and ultimately, Christian, what are we waiting for? What are we waiting for? That day, which will be here soon for some of you, maybe for all of us if he comes back, that day when we see Jesus Christ face to face. He will be our King. Brothers and sisters, is that worth waiting for? Yes. While you wait, you can believe in and rejoice that God is totally sovereign. He will sustain you. So what are you worried about? What are you worried about? How can submitting to God's sovereignty help you through that worry while you wait? Write it down. Think about it. Pray about it. Take it to scripture. Share. Our sovereign God's will and timing are always perfect. If you want more help for worry, I recommend this book, Consider the Lilies by Jonny Ardavanis.
Finally, in a couple of minutes, because God is our sovereign king, we can obey lovingly. Many earthly kings and dictators have been evil. And I get it, there is biblical warrant for civil disobedience when obeying would clearly be sin against God. But guess what? The King, God, is perfect. He is wise and he is just. He is full of compassion and mercy, but he is the King. There's no defense for disobedience to this King. He is the King of kings. All earthly kings are mere subjects that do his will. Proverbs 21:1 says, The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will. God has given us commands to obey as a sovereign lord ought, and his commands are right, and they are good. On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus said repeatedly in John 14 and 15, what? If you love me - what will you do? You'll keep his commandments. He said it four times in those two chapters. 1 John 5:3 says, For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. Friends, love for God and obedience to God are inseparable. That's not legalism. That's saving faith. That's what it looks like. And it befits the sovereign king of the universe. Who else are you going to obey? It's a joy to obey him because our Father always knows best. God's sovereignty can never be an excuse for us to sin. Hey, he's sovereign. He's going to figure it out. And we certainly can't neglect loving one another because of it. If you have been saved by faith in Jesus Christ, then you do love to obey him because he's your King. So how specifically should you repent from your disobedience and lovingly obey him today? God, and I mean God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit is the sovereign King of the universe. We believers are his willing subjects, redeemed by his sovereign grace and secure in his sovereign love. We love him; we obey him even while we suffer, even while we wait, according to his sovereign plan.
Pray with me. Heavenly Father, your sovereignty is...hard to grasp sometimes and hard to trust in sometimes, when we suffer, when things don't go the way we would want them to go. Help us to trust you then, especially, Lord. Help us to know that you are the sovereign King whose plans cannot be thwarted. And your plan is to have us with you forever in sinless heaven. Help us to wait with great joy and patience for that day. In Jesus name, Amen.
