Jonah - What Happens When We Disobey God?

God Centered Theology

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Our purpose is to love and obey God and bring glory to Him. When we disobey

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God in sin, we are failing to rightfully live out that purpose either in a present moment over a period of time with continued sin, or, and this certainly would be a sad thing for any

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Christian to be in a fully blown habitual lifestyle of whatever sin or disobedience they find themselves.

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God used Jonah as one of His prophets. Now, God had used

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Jonah before the events of the book of Jonah. You can read about this in 2

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Kings 14 at a later time, but Jonah had a purpose. Our purpose encapsulates a lot of different things.

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There is the larger picture purpose. There's certainly the overarching calling of our life and the journey that's paved by God's grace plays out moment by moment, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, so on and so forth.

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There's also these moments in time where God specifically has a task or instruction for us that is part and parcel fulfilling our larger purpose, but can also have a purpose within the purpose.

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And God had a purpose for Jonah and we as Christians have a purpose as well. You can turn if you would like, you don't have to,

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I'll read it for you. But in the book of Ephesians 2, in fact, I think Travis already read one of my verses, so we're gonna re -read it here again, but starting in verse 8 of the second chapter of Ephesians, it says, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it's the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.

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For we are His workmanship. Created in Christ Jesus for good works, which

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God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Salvation is not a result of works, but one of the results of salvation is good works.

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We as Christians are the product of God's power and creation both in our physical birth, but also in our new birth, the birth, the being born again from above that Jesus so greatly described in Nicodemus in the third chapter of John, we must be born from above, we are made a new creation in Christ Jesus for the express purpose of walking in the very works that He prepared beforehand for us.

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This means that we are created in Christ Jesus for a purpose. And what this means is that there are no purposeless

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Christians. Now, Satan wants you to think that you don't have purpose. Satan wants you to think that somehow

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God may have saved you, but that's really all he wants to do with you. He's done with you. I know certainly the events of my life over the last year at times had me wondering, is my purpose over?

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Are you not going to do anything else with me? I mean, I'm doing and checking all the right boxes.

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Why is this happening or why is this happening? There is never a time, my friends, when you are without purpose.

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And it has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with God. You see, our purpose is because of God.

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Our assurance of our salvation is because of God. Our very salvation is because of God. Everything should be

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God -centered. You see, Jonah, like us, did not deserve the purpose

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God gave him. We do not deserve salvation. We do not deserve the purpose and the spiritual gifts that are given to us by God.

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But that is why it's called grace. It's unmerited.

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God is under no obligation to give us anything. Now, when you say that, it may paint a picture of God other than what

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He truly is. It may sound, well, why wouldn't He? Well, God is an eternal being that did not have to create anything.

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In a way that we can't understand because we are finite and we are sinful, God was perfectly okay in existence by Himself.

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But only He can be that way. We cannot. He's under no obligation to give us anything, and yet He does because God is grace and He demonstrates purposeful grace to Jonah and to us and how

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He not only gives us purpose, but helps us realize that purpose. And my friends, you don't have to be a preacher and you don't have to be a pastor to have

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God -honoring and God -glorifying purpose. Some of the greatest purposes in the Christian life do not occur in pulpits.

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Pulpits are very important. They're specifically designed by God for an express purpose, but the purposes of God in His people are not limited to here.

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They're not limited to worship services. All they're important. They're not limited to Christian education or those that are in front of people.

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Some of the greatest work for God occurs behind the scenes that many people will never ever know about.

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But that is when your true character is revealed. I love to preach.

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I have not gotten to preach since September 29th. I've missed it. Hopefully the rust will not show too badly.

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I love it. It's what I was put on this earth to do. But some of my sweetest moments with God occur when nobody else is in the room.

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Just me, a Bible, and my Savior. Whatever it is that you do, whatever it is that is your purpose and your calling, you have to ask yourself, what is

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God wanting you to do with your life? What works does your

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Lord and Savior Jesus want you to do? Because after all, as we have seen in Ephesians here,

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He prepared them for you beforehand. And He created you and gave you this new birth and made you this new creation in Christ Jesus for the express purpose of walking in that purpose.

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Well, in the first chapter of the book of Jonah, we read that Jonah fled. Now before you, like I often do, chuckle at Jonah, because we love to pick on Old Testament people, don't we?

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We read like, I would never, oh wait, actually I do that. So before you chuckle, before you cast your high eyebrows and say, look at Jonah fleeing, think about your life.

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We've all done it at some point. But we see Jonah fleeing from the instruction of God. He fled from His purpose.

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Now, whatever your purpose, whatever your calling, whatever Christ is wanting you to do in His power and for His glory, don't run from the purposeful grace of God.

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Don't run from it. Let's consider what He told Jonah to do here. He says in verse two,

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I want you to arise, go, call out or cry out against.

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Notice it says, now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out or cry out against it, for their evil has come up before me.

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That's what he was told to do. But what did Jonah do? Jonah rose up, he fled, he went down to Joppa, he finds a ship, he pays the fare, he went down to the boat, and then he went away to Tarshish.

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That's so much more than what God told him to do. God had three instructions. Jonah did seven things.

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So just by pure math, God's instruction was much easier. Why? Well, it's not the sermon for the day and it would take too much time to get into the nuts and bolts of why and this, that, and the other.

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But very long story short, there was a lot of issues with his view of these people at Nineveh. He didn't want them to repent.

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He had very evil intentions and sin in his heart about them. There's probably a whole host of other reasons possibly that are not even recorded for us in Scripture.

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But for whatever reason, he flees. And what I want to understand and the question that naturally comes to my mind is if God has this purpose for us and if God has this purpose for Jonah, because it says the word of the

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Lord came to Jonah. Jonah didn't go to God. The word of the

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Lord came to Jonah. I'm a sinful creature. I had to be saved.

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I had to be put and given this purpose. I had to be called into gospel ministry. God comes to us.

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He comes to us with this purpose. So if this is the case, why would

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God allow Jonah to sin in this way? Obviously he wanted

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Jonah to go. He had purpose for Jonah in going. We know what happens when

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Jonah finally does go. The whole city repents. Obviously this is what God wanted to occur.

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So why would he let him go? Why not just force Jonah to go there the first time?

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Why does he allow us to sin in the way that we do? I mean, after all,

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Jonah had so many good reasons for not going. I mean, you know, God just didn't understand.

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That's what it was. He just doesn't understand. Now don't y 'all even start.

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I see some looks on your face. You're looking like, I don't know what he's talking about. I've never done that. Yes, you have. Don't lie in church.

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We've all done it. We explain all of our reasons, all of our circumstances to God. And we say, this is why

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I can't do this. I've got this. You may even pull out your date book ladies and say, I've got this on this day.

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And there's no way this is going to work. Us guys were like, man, you know, I got to be out in the field hunting. I've got to go to work.

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I've got some, look, there's some really good TV coming on. Some good football coming on today. I've got stuff to do, okay?

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You just don't understand. I can even see and be like, God, these people are evil.

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These Ninevites, they're evil. They have sinned greatly. There's no

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Bojangles there. These people deserve your righteous judgment.

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God rained down fire blazed boberries on them and call it a day. Be done with them.

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That's what he wanted. I mean, Jonah, even fast forwarding, he gets pouting and gets mad when the whole city repents.

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I can speak, I know for myself and Jay and Jim and the other preachers in the room, if we could preach and a whole city repents,

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I would sign up for that really quickly. Wouldn't y 'all? I would say, man, put me at the first of that line.

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That would be really cool. Jonah's like, nah, he didn't want to because the sin that was in his heart is because he didn't want him to.

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Jonah wasn't God -centered. Jonah was man -centered. He was only thinking about himself.

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You see, the reason God did what he did is because of his purposeful grace, which was not just about the task of sending

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Jonah to Nineveh to preach. It was so much more than that. God wants us to be sanctified, word meaning set apart as holy.

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He wants us to be God -centered in everything that we do and everything that we are.

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Because after all, everything that we have and everything that we are is by the grace of God. Jonah was about to learn far more about God than he realized, and so this is where your outline comes into play.

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So let's ask the question, what happens when we disobey God? What do we learn? Well, number one, we learn that we love something more than God.

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You say, come on, Andy. You couldn't, I mean, we're Christians. We love God supremely, right?

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Men, how many times have your wives, and mine's not here, they're fighting off some sickness, and if she's watching, she'll probably be laughing and thinking, why is he bringing me up?

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But she has told me too, so I know this isn't just limited to my household, have they said, I love it when you tell me you love me, but boy,

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I wish you would show me. How do you come back from that? It's like, what do you want me to do?

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I'll do it, I'll do anything you want right now. Please don't be mad at me. Please don't make me sleep on the couch.

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Please don't cancel my TV, whatever it takes. Now, why is that so important to our ladies?

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Because they have insight. Look, let's just, like it is, they're far more intelligent than we ever can hope to be.

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They have insight into things that we don't have, and so what they understand that we have to get through our hard heads is that so much of love has nothing to do with what you say.

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It has a lot more to do with what you do. Same thing with God. How many people will stand before God one day and say,

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Lord, Lord, did I not claim to love you? But what does your life look like?

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Does it turn into action? If I'm coming up in the dark and someone tells me that three steps ahead of me is a cliff that's gonna fall to certain doom, if I truly believe that,

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I'm not gonna go forward three more steps. Belief turns into action.

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That's the whole point about saving faith is it results in good works. It's not the results or the result of good works.

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Mark 12, 28 -30 is when we're told, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

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Our heart being the inner self where decisions are made, our intentions. The soul, it's the immaterial self.

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It's who you are. It's the seed of our affections and our will. The mind being all of our thoughts, our understanding, our conclusions.

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Think about our friend Jonah here. Did he conclude, go to Nineveh?

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Nah, I'm not going there. He concluded that something else was better.

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What he was showing is that he was not as God -centered as he needed to be and he didn't love the Lord God supremely.

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Because if we say we love our wives' men, we're gonna act towards them in a certain way.

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Now aren't we? Now this could go both ways, ladies. If you love your husbands, it should show up in your actions as well. I just like to pick on our men.

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But with God, if we claim to love Him supremely, if we claim to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and it does not show up in your actions,

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I'm gonna call on you to do the same. I'm gonna call you a liar. I might say it a little nicer. But then when

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I get done with that, I'm just gonna call you a liar. Because you're lying. You can't claim to love

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God and never live for Him. If you're always putting something else ahead of Him and then justifying it.

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I am really good at that. Oh, here's why. Surely you understand.

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Do you love me? Do you love me? Our strength, meaning our full effort, our might, our ability.

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None of your abilities, none of your talents, none of who you are can ever be carved out and say, well,

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I'll give God all of this, but this little bitty piece of me,

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I'm gonna hold over here for me. This is my domain. This is my little piece of the pie.

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This is the part that makes me money or brings me joy or brings satisfaction to my flesh or whatever it is.

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Look, I'm giving God 95%. Who's gonna argue with that? I mean, come on, that's an overwhelming majority.

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I'm just keeping 5%. Surely he understands, right? Does it say love the

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Lord your God with 90 % of your heart, soul, mind and strength? No.

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It says love the Lord your God with all of your heart, your soul, your mind and your strength.

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It's all -inclusive, all -encompassing. If you wanted to see the churches of America, we won't even bother with the rest of the world.

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I know that's very not gospel -y, so forgive me for a second. We got enough to worry about at the moment. Just let's narrow it down even further.

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If you wanna see the churches in Fuquay and Wake County set on fire, just have the

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Christians love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. The rest will take care of itself.

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Imagine how different our world, if you do bring the whole world into it, would be if God's people just simply loved

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Him in that fashion. The Bible never comes down and says, man, you know what, them sinners and those reprobates and those unregenerate, they better get their act together.

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What is He always doing? If my people do such and such, the standard is on us because of whose we are and who we follow.

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He found out he loved something more than God. Number two, he found out, and this is, he said, we trust something more than God.

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So we love something more than God, but we also trust something more than God. When we sin and we disobey and we run from our purpose and decide we wanna have it our way right away at Bird King now.

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But yeah, I do a lot of food references. It's just, I'm hungry. Proverbs chapter three, verse five and six says, this is very familiar scripture.

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Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. This word translated lean on means to be supported by or held up by.

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It's the idea if we had a wall here that I could visually lean on and put my full weight on to where I'm no longer holding myself up.

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That wall is what's supporting me and holding me up. That's the picture here in the proverb.

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Do not lean on, be supported by or held up by your own understanding.

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Why? Well, let's do a thought project. Are we all knowing? Are we the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end?

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Do we see it all? Or do we experience things in time? Moment by moment, so on and so forth.

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Does anybody know what's gonna happen in the games today? I know what's gonna happen tomorrow.

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Nothing wrong with goals, vision, plans, thinking, preparing. We don't know.

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We have no idea. And whether we wanna admit it or not, we trust

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God for tomorrow a lot more than we let on and pretend to sometimes, don't we? I don't have it in my notes, but there's a psalm

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I was reading, I believe it was Psalm 3, where David talked about how he had many foes and enemies around him.

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And he lays down and sleeps and gets up the next day. He says, because the Lord sustained me. So if you ever want, I believe it's actually,

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I think it is Psalm 3, 5, somewhere there. Somebody can check and tell me later. But so if you ever wanted to know, so he said his cliches about how the

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Lord gives us each day. Well, it's actually, it's very scriptural. So if you wake up tomorrow morning, guess what the first thing you should do?

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Thank you, Lord. I was talking with someone before the service, talking about it was their birthday and they were thankful for another year and another day.

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And like, that's the right attitude. Not, oh, man, I got this to do and that.

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I've done it. That's why I'm so good at the mannerisms, because we've all done it. We've all done it.

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No, we don't trust in your own understanding. Don't trust in what you think is gonna happen.

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Your life can change in an instant, both for good and bad. You never know what's gonna happen.

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Tell your loved ones that you love them. Show them. Live for God every day because you may not have a tomorrow.

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And don't trust in your own understanding. I do this all the time. Well, you know, there's no churches available.

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There's no jobs. There's no this, there's this, this. All these reasons. Of all my reasons why it won't work out.

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Well, Andy, why do you keep moving forward then? Because the God I serve knows me.

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And He knows my purpose because He gave it to me. And whether I think it will or not, no matter what the world throws at you or throws at me, whatever

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God has designed for you will occur because He's God. He's God and you're not. He's God and they're not.

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Someone said very famously one time, he says, you can't die before the day you're supposed to die. So go ahead and get on living.

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Why should we fear anything? It says don't lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge

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Him. He'll make your path straight. Everything that you do, acknowledge God. Obey God. Don't run from God.

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Don't come up with all your reasons why. Man, Nineveh, I ain't going that way. I'm going this way. No, trust

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Him. Be God -centered. You know,

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Jonah even reveals for us what was in his heart in chapter four, verse two, if you want to look at it later in Jonah, he says,

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I knew this was going to happen. I knew that if I went to Nineveh and preached this message, they would repent and you would forgive them because that's who you are.

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Y 'all help me with something for us with this. How could a guy who knows

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God in this way disobey Him in the same way that He did? Like I said, sign me up for that.

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A whole city repents? Man, that'd be really cool. But he reveals it.

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He shows where his heart was at. Acknowledge Him as supreme. Love Him and trust

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Him as supreme. He'll make your path straight. Lastly, this morning, we not only love something more than God, trust something more than God, but we also, and this one,

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I don't know that you could really rank these, but for me, this one's just so vitally important. We glorify something more than God.

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You see, a God -centered life will be focused on bringing glory to God and God alone.

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One of the five souls of the Reformation is soli deo gloria, all glory to God alone.

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Isaiah writes in the 43rd chapter in verse seven, God says, everyone who is called by my name, meaning every single person who professes faith in Christ, has repented of their sin and put their full faith and trust in Jesus Christ, everyone who is called by my name, who has experienced this new birth,

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I created them for my glory. It is not just that we avoid sin, although that is important.

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You don't want to be those Roman six Christians, like, hey man, grace abounds even more. I'll just go ahead and sin.

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I'll just live it up because after all, I got my get out of jail free card, right? Yeah, spoiler alert, that's not what salvation is.

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Yes, it's a free gift, but it's not as that describes it. So it's not just about avoiding sin, although it's vitally important, it's about that.

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But we must be actively pursuing holiness.

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Think about it. Is there a difference if I live a life where all

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I'm doing is trying to just avoid sin, right? I'm gonna say a word and it's gonna start ringing a bell.

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Starts with an L and it sounds a lot like legalism because that's what it is. If all your life is full of do's and don'ts and I can't do this and I can do that,

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I better avoid this. Legalism at its core is preaching for or against something, but it's man centered.

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It's flesh centered. It has no care for God. It cares about whoever they can control and dominate.

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Just avoiding sin is not what we're called to do. Yes, avoiding sin and not sinning is part of the journey, but our ultimate goal is the pursuit of holiness because we wanna be like our

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Savior. We wanna be Christ -like. It's pursuing holiness and the good works that bring

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God glory. This was Jonah's issue. He fled from God's purpose.

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Thus, he was fleeing from the purpose or the pursuit of bringing God glory. Psalm 115 touches on this as well.

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Psalm 115, obviously, we're not gonna, I encourage you to go back and read the whole Psalm later, but at the very beginning, it says, "'Not to us,

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O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory.'" That needs to be like our theme.

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It needs to be our life song. It needs to be, I almost wanna say we should encourage each other for the next month to wake up every morning.

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The first thing that comes out of our lips, whatever happens today, not to me, not to me, but to your name

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I wanna give glory. The Psalm goes on to talk about idols and how they are made with human hands out of created materials, having mouths, but do not speak, ears can't hear, so on and so forth.

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And then it says a very interesting thing here in verse eight. It says, "'Those who make them,' referring to idols, "'become like them.

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So do all who trusted them.'" The Bible paints such a contrast between the people that fully trust in God and the people that trust in the idols.

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And here's the thing about idols. You have to create them with created materials that you did not create.

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And they're created by a being that did not create him or herself. And then we wanna fall down and worship those things.

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It says, "'Those that create them become like them.'" That's the whole point, not just about voiding sin, pursuing

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Christlikeness, pursuing holiness, because we're supposed to be growing in Christlikeness. If we have idols in our life, if we have anything we're bringing glory to other than Christ, we're gonna become like whatever that is.

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Because after all, idols are created by us. Which means they come from our imagination.

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They come from our intellect and our mind. They're devices of our own imagination.

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And what are we supposed to be doing with our heart, soul, mind, and strength? Loving the

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Lord. Instead of becoming more

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Christlike. If you're not actively pursuing, bringing glory to Him, Him alone, you'll become like the idols you create.

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We place our love and our devotion, our trust, and we bring glory to things made by human hands. They're not our help and our shield, as Psalm 115 goes on to say about the

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Lord. So let's wrap this up. Do you love

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God with all that you are and all that you do? Do you trust

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God with all that you are and all that you do? Do you actively pursue bringing glory to God in all that you are and all that you do?

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I have to ask myself these questions almost on a daily basis. Being a preacher doesn't give you some kind of special powers.

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We're sinners. That's why we need each other. Every single last

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Christian is equally as vitally important. There are no

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Christians that don't matter. Every single one of you matter.

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And whether you know it or not, you matter to someone else in this room. That's why you need to tell each other.

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It's a good thing to do. But ask yourself those questions. Now I want to end with just a quick description of something that happened over the last couple of days.

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Something that truly convicted me in light of what we talked about. Dr. James White was at the

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G3 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, which occurred on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning. And I really wanted to go.

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I thought I had something worked out and it just didn't work out. So, real life situation, instead of getting all mad and fussy,

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I had to say, sometimes things don't work out. God is good all the time, and all the time God is good. I'm still working on my sanctification on that, but I think

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I'm over it. Anyway, so this occurred, it was really good, and the whole theme of the conference was on worship.

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And this guy said something. I was just like, whoa. Rewind, listen to it again.

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And I was like, ooh, ow, that one hurt. So, Dr.

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White was speaking. He asked, and this is slightly paraphrased, I don't have the exact quote, something to the effect of, he asked, he said, when you go away from a worship service, like what we're sitting in right now, are you focused on God, or focused on self?

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Is your worship, whether it's singing, whether it's being in a pew, whether it's preaching, teaching

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Sunday school, whatever it is that you do, is it God -centered or man -centered?

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We have been created by God for His glory. We are to love, trust, and glorify

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God in everything that we have, in everything that we are. Because everything that we have, in everything that we are, is by the grace of God.