FBC Daily Devotional – November 16, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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How was your weekend? How was your weekend? Did you stay dry? I hope so. Was Lord's Day a blessing?

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I trust so as well. Always good to gather with God's people.

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If you weren't able to do that and had to resort to watching worship service online, it's not the same, is it?

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But I hope it was nevertheless a blessing. You were encouraged by God's Word. Well, here we are starting a new week, and we're just a little over a week from Thanksgiving, a week from tomorrow evening,

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Lord willing. We're planning a Thanksgiving praise service, usually about an hour long of a service.

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We just share testimonies of Thanksgiving and praise and have a devotional related to Thanksgiving, sing a few

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Thanksgiving hymns, but we're looking forward to that time of Thanksgiving. But, you know,

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I'm thinking about that and this coming holiday, and particularly this year, which has been a really, really difficult year for a number of people, a lot of people, and struggled in many ways.

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It may not feel like much of a time where you want to give thanks, you want to be thankful and celebrate a

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Thanksgiving holiday. I'm reminded of a story I read several years ago now,

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I think it was like almost nine years ago. I read this story about a person wrote in to Dear Abby and was concerned about their neighbor.

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Their neighbors had a daughter who was born on September 11th, 2001, was born on the day that the

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Twin Towers were attacked, our nation was attacked by the terrorists, and so forth. She was born that day, and a day of great carnage and death and destruction.

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And so, consequently, the family never celebrated the girl's birthday.

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Never. I mean, it's not like they just put it off a few days. No, they just didn't celebrate it.

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They decided it was too sad of a thing, too sad of an occasion. The whole event of that day was so bad that they didn't want to celebrate.

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Well, that girl would now be, you know, almost 20 years old, 19 anyway, and I wonder if that ever changed.

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I mean, the first 10 years of her life, the family was so overwhelmed with sadness about the day of the girl's birth that they wouldn't celebrate her birthday?

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I don't know. That's a little extreme for me. But a lot of people can feel that way when, you know, we're coming to Thanksgiving.

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You get into November and Thanksgiving holiday's coming, and you know you're supposed to be thankful. But, you know, sometimes the circumstances of life can leave us a bit hopeless and therefore unthankful.

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We see this in the book of Lamentations. Lamentations was written by Jeremiah following the destruction of Jerusalem, and it's a series of laments, hence the name

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Lamentation. And over and over again, Jeremiah is lamenting the state of things in Jerusalem, and the state of God's people, and so forth.

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And he says in chapter 3, verses 18 through 20, he writes this.

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He says, My endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord. Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall.

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My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

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Wow, do you hear what he's saying? He's saying that the circumstances of life have left him with such a sense of hopelessness.

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You don't hear him saying much, expressing much in terms of Thanksgiving, do you?

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And so I suppose there's probably some who could be listening to my voice right now who say, yeah,

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I understand that. I'm suffering like Jeremiah did from some spiritual maladies that have afflicted me.

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As he says in chapter 3, verse 18, my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the

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Lord. His joy is gone. My strength, he says, is perished.

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Now remember, Nehemiah declared that the joy of the

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Lord is your strength. It's joy from the Lord that gives you endurance.

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And that joy, what is that joy that we're talking about? It's not that giddy, you know, da -da -da -da. The joy, the biblical joy that we're talking about is that calm assurance that the

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Lord is sovereignly working good in all of my circumstances. And so I can have joy even in difficult circumstances, troubling circumstances, painful circumstances, if I have that calm assurance in my soul that the

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Lord is sovereignly working good in those circumstances. But am

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I the only one that's ever been in times of difficulty when my knowledge of the sovereignty of God was merely an intellectual idea?

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I mean, I knew it up in my head, but emotionally, it's like my emotions have lost confidence in the sovereignty of God.

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And therefore, I've lost hope. And not only lost confidence in his sovereignty, but confidence in his goodness to me.

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Not confidence in God's goodness. I'm confident that God is good. He is good. But to me, you see.

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I hope you haven't experienced those times, but it wouldn't be surprised.

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Jeremiah did. Jeremiah, the prophet of the Lord, experienced such a thing as that.

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His joy is gone. And when your joy is gone, your hope perishes as well. He says, my hope is perished from the

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Lord. There's a sense that my circumstances are not going to change.

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They're not going to turn around. This heartache, this misery that I'm experiencing and going through right now, this suffering, it isn't going to change.

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It's not going to be relieved. So I can be suffering from some spiritual maladies that are really quite serious.

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Or, as he says in verse 19, you know, you can be suffering from some physical maladies.

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He says, remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. The physical pain here is real and it's powerful.

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He describes it as affliction and misery. I'm not going to take the time to do it.

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I would encourage you grab a copy of your Bible, a copy of Scripture, and turn to Lamentations 3 and read the first seventeen verses and notice the expressions of physical suffering where he's just hemmed in with misery.

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He's expressed being torn in pieces and humiliated and impoverished even.

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And that emotional impact from the physical suffering is deep.

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He speaks of it as wormwood and gall. Now, maybe you don't know what that is.

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It's not something we understand. We don't taste wormwood.

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We don't taste gall. But it's stuff that would leave a very, very bitter taste in your mouth.

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Have you ever, I remember as a kid, I remember wormwood and gall when I was a kid. Get a toothache, a little sore in the mouth, and my mom would get out the powdered alum.

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You ever put powdered alum in your mouth on a sore? It is the awfulest stuff.

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Awful stuff. Or how about castor oil? Oh, oh my goodness.

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That was worse than powdered alum. This is what he's talking about. The affliction, the physical affliction has made such a deep emotional impact on him.

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It's like having to swallow castor oil or put powdered alum on a sore tooth.

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Scars are deep. The wounds hurt. And he's also suffering from what seems to be inescapable maladies.

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He says in verse 20, my soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.

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I can't escape the memories. I can't escape the memories. No matter how hard I try, they keep coming back.

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No matter what I do, here's something to prod my membrane, to make me remember what

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I'm going through, what I'm dealing with. I can't escape the malady. Well, I hope this isn't your situation today.

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And I hate, I hate to leave a devotional on such a seemingly negative note.

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But I want us to do, I wanted today to just deal honestly with where we can be sometimes in a time when we're supposed to be expressing thanks and be filled with hope and joy and all the rest of that kind of thing that a holiday like what's coming up is supposed to evince.

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But here we are. If this is reality, it's reality. But it doesn't have to stay there.

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So come back and join with me tomorrow and let's see the remedy to this sense of hopelessness.

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And that remedy will then enable us to find reasons for joy and thanksgiving.

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So let's pray and ask God to encourage us even if we don't feel like giving thanks and feel a little bit hopeless today.

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Our Father and our God, I trust and pray that nobody in the sound of my voice is experiencing what

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Jeremiah has expressed. And yet, maybe there is someone like that today.

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I pray that your word would be an encouragement to them. Maybe even just honestly expressing the way things are and how we can sometimes feel because of the circumstances of life.

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But Lord, please don't leave any of us in that place. May we come back to this passage and find hope and joy and thanksgiving.

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This we pray in Jesus name and for his sake, amen. Alright, well have a good rest of your day today and I do hope

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I do hope you'll come back tomorrow and we'll get out of the the miserable circumstances that Jeremiah finds himself in and find reasons for joy.