FBC Morning Light – March 18, 2022

Well, a good Friday morning to you. Here we are at the end of another workweek and looking forward to the weekend. I trust God is going to bless us this weekend as we gather together on Sunday to hear from Him, to serve Him with our hymns of praise, worship, attention, focus, reading of His Word, hearing of the message of God's Word and responding to it.

I trust that this Lord's Day will be truly a day of refreshment for you and rest. I know it can be challenging sometimes getting up, getting ready, and getting out the door to get to church on time, but maybe get a few things done Saturday night.

Get your clothes laid out or whatever, get your meal planned, whatever you need to do to just make the Lord's Day a calmer day. Then you can come to God's house with a better frame of mind and be ready for what God has for us this coming Lord's Day.

I hope you can make it. How are you feeling these days about the decisions, courses of action that are being taken by President Biden, or here in Illinois by Governor Pritzker? How do you feel about the courses of action taken by Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping?

I think I know the answer to those questions for the most part. I think most of us are not very happy with these decisions, these courses of action that are taken. Certainly in our own country, there have been all kinds of decisions that have been made that have really caused people an awful lot of pain.

That's nothing compared to what some people are suffering under the aggression of Vladimir Putin in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and so forth. We have no idea where all this is going to end. What further decisions will be made?

What kind of elevation of adversity will take place? We just don't know. I ask those questions because of this important verse to give us perspective in times when those who are in leadership—kings, rulers, presidents, authorities—when they make decisions that we don't like and that are harmful.

Chapter 21 of the book of Proverbs, the first verse, says this, The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord. Like the rivers of water, he turns it wherever he wishes. That's a great verse to like and appreciate when the king is making all kinds of decisions that we appreciate, that we like.

We say, The Lord is good. Look at what he's doing. Look at how the Lord is using that king to bless us, and to bless our country, and to encourage prosperity, and so on and so forth. The Lord is behind this guy.

But it's an altogether different thing when the king is a Vladimir Putin or President Xi of China. These men are evil, and they have no love for God, they have no appreciation of him, and no willingness to bow the knee to him whatsoever.

To think that their actions are under the control of our sovereign God is really challenging to wrap our heads around, isn't it? There is more to what goes on in this world than we understand, and we don't really know why God has turned the heart of Putin to attack Ukraine.

We've got the political reasons that have been analyzed, and suggested, and so on and so forth, but we don't know God's reason for it. Why didn't Putin just leave the Ukrainians alone? Why didn't he just leave them alone?

And why doesn't Xi just leave the Uyghurs alone, and quit rattling his saber against Taiwan, and so forth? What's God doing here? We don't always know, and we may never know for certainty from our perspective.

That's where our faith comes into play. Our faith has to acknowledge what the Scripture says, and then submit ourselves to that revelation. We see examples in the Bible of this very truth carried out.

God told Moses, for example, before he ever stepped foot in Pharaoh's palace, he's not going to let you go. You're going to go, and you're going to tell him to let my people go, but he's not going to do it.

Not until I bring my glory to bear. How did God do that? How did God bring his glory to bear, to reveal his glory, and cause people to end up worshiping him? Well, Pharaoh kept hardening his heart. The Lord hardened his heart, and the result was a lot of misery, a lot of anguish, and a lot of heartache, a lot of death, and disease, and destruction.

But it ended up bringing glory to God, and it ended up resulting in the redemption of his people, redeemed out of Egypt. You also see the same thing in a positive way with Cyrus. We've seen this in our morning light studies in recent weeks, where Cyrus, the king of the Medo-Persians, he was God's servant, but he was a pagan.

He was a pagan. But God turned his heart toward the people of God, and issued the decree so that they could go back to Jerusalem and build the temple. Several years later, he did the same thing with Darius, the Persian king.

Darius acted in a way, because God turned his heart in a way, that favored God's people. We like the stories of Cyrus and Darius, but the Pharaoh thing is a little more difficult for us to understand.

We can understand it better, because it's all revealed for us. It's revealed to us. The whole story is revealed to us. But what we see today, in the actions and the behavior of the kings of this world today, we don't see the bigger picture.

We don't understand the bigger picture. Faith is a substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. We accept by faith what God has revealed to us in his word about himself and his relationship to the kings of the earth.

What does he tell us? Their heart is in his hand, and he turns that heart where he wills, for his purposes. I hope that encourages us a little bit when we watch the news and helps us to wrestle with some very challenging things.

I hope that in the end, it brings us to a sense of peace and resolution in our hearts and minds. Although there's a lot of anxiety causing stuff going on in our world, the believer in Christ, who knows the God of heaven, can rest in his sovereign purposes.

May we do so. Father, help us to rest, we pray, to rest in you, to trust in you, because indeed, you are the God who is in control of all things. Help us to believe that with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we pray, in Jesus' name.

All right, we'll have a good rest of your Friday and a wonderful weekend, and hopefully, Lord willing, we'll see you on the Lord's Day, if God brings you our way. Good day.