My Expectation Is From the Lord - Part 1 — Joshua Daniel

Welcome to the Lord's Challenge with Joshua Daniel. The Layman's Evangelical Fellowship International is a ministry reaching people from all walks of life since 1935. After a life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ at the age of 16, Joshua Daniel has been declaring the marvellous deliverance from sin, which is freely given to all those who turn to the loving Saviour.

Wherever this message has gone out, broken relationships have been restored, sickness healed, ill-gotten money returned and thieves turned into givers. We now invite you to watch and receive the invaluable blessing that God has for you.

Now dear friends, you know,.

Expecting God to Do Great Things

Being a very exclusive group of people tonight, don't misunderstand me. A little one shall be a thousand and a small one a strong nation. So says the promise of God. Now I was thinking of what would be the expectation of each one as they come to this retreat.

What is our expectation? You know, if you go to a grocery and ask any man, what is your expectation in coming here? You'd say, what an absurd question you ask me, huh? Makes no sense. I have come to get my groceries.

You know, my larder is empty and I can't go hungry. That's why I'm here. All right. You go to a person who is lined up for an interview for, let us say, a computer job or some such job. His heart is going bumpity bumpity.

Says, am I going to be selected or am I going to be shown the door? Oh, here are people with such high qualifications and I appear to be have none compared to these people. What shall I do? I'll do the best I can because I'm here with the expectation that I will land this job.

I need it. I can't do without it. I, so I'll do my very best to secure this position. Okay. If you asked some of those fellows who were playing soccer recently in the World Cup, well, I'm sure many of them would have said, oh, we'll make it.

We'll win the game. So they did expect to do so. And after all, only one person won, won the gold or the cup. But when we come to the Lord, somehow, you know, you go to a beggar and you say to a beggar, hey, can you loan me a buck?

Well, the beggar will tell you, hey, can't you see that I'm panhandling here and you're asking me to loan you a buck? Okay. And you know, the story of Rockefeller, one of the Rockefellers, he found that his quarter, after he had attempted to make that phone call, did not give him the line.

And so he said, hey, I lost my quarter. So he called up the operator, said, look, your machine here is out of order. I've just lost my quarter. You must give it back to me. Okay, sir. Maybe we have your name and address.

Of course, the poor man, he said, no, no, no, that's okay. All right. He did not want to give away his name because that would have been very ridiculous for such a wealthy person to be fighting for a quarter.

Anyway, he expected that his quarter would give him a clear line. So when we come to the living God, just think of the way we insult him. We don't expect a clear line. We don't expect anything big to come out of it.

Biblical Faith Beyond Low Expectations

Lend me a buck. Well, is he listening? You know, my dear friends, there's something wrong with our whole system today. What we call faith is certainly not the faith which the Bible speaks now unto him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that you ask or think.

You know, we don't allow our thoughts to travel along the realms of eternal things. So I say, what are we really doing? We're just playing around. Are we really going to the living God and getting those answers that transform the destiny of nations?

See, I'm very troubled about it. See, I'm not trying to throw the blame on someone else. I want to take it. When I see the scripture, I see these men, simple men, standing before rulers and emperors. They had a message for the whole nation.

And today, the nation can say we can do without days of prayer or prayer breakfast, not even these nominal get-togethers, lest we should offend those that worship some desert spirits. What rubbish! I wonder what the pilgrim fathers would say, or that church that relocated in Plymouth years ago, what they would say, that here is a situation, we left our country and came over to secure our right and the freedom to take hold of God.

And that is dismissed out of court as being unfit for the times. My dear friends, when we have gone a whole circle, we must examine ourselves. Now in the 62nd Psalm, you have this kind of confidence, which we see the psalmist expressing.

Giving God First Place in a Distracted Age

The fifth verse, My soul, wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from him. My, you know, with our mobile phones of today, they seem to ring at odd hours. You see, in the former days, we had the office hours.

You went to the office, did your work, received your official phone calls, and you came home. You did not bring your office with you back home. But today, people have no time for anybody. And I'm afraid that the very limited time that people gave to prayer in the past is further weakened.

I wonder how many of you had the courage to say, Hey, I'm at prayer. I'll call you back. Or let the phone ring if they want to so badly to get hold of you. They will call again. How many of us have given precedence to God in that manner?

No. Oh, this might be a big job opportunity or this might bring me some advantage. This could be a very important communication. So I can't let it go. Our expectation today is purely mundane. It is so low that it simply does not fit into the Bible.

And with every invention, if every new invention and gadget is going to take away a part of my time and a part of my heart, so that I cannot devote that time any longer to the Lord. Well, what is the place of God really?

Faithfulness in Marriage and the Reality of Religion

Would you like to be in such a place yourself? You see, I'll give my attention to everybody else, every caller, everything else. Money will have my full attention. But you wife, you know, okay, you can have your little part, but you can't impose anything upon me.

So if you're going to treat your wife in that manner, as though everything she does is imposing or thrusting some unwanted kind of stuff upon you, I would like to know which self-respecting woman would want to occupy that place.

Of course, when one has promised God at the altar that he or she would be faithful until death do them part, that word of promise and covenant should not be broken. But if a wife is treated in that manner, her whole status is worse than that of a servant.

Well, you come along only when I want you. You know, many years ago, here in Ohio, a woman came to me and said, I have only been a bedfellow to my husband. And when he slammed my voice against the wall, I had to protect him.

And he would turn upon me. You know, people have become very savage. Why? Our religion has become pretty formal and meaningless. The reality is gone. The form remains. Who wants such a thing? I don't.

Consecration Beyond Religious Performance

You know, when I played my games years ago, I gave all my heart to those games. Now I say, this is not a game. I am dealing with the souls of eternal people. Eternity is the issue. Eternal conquests or eternal failure can come out of these efforts.

This is no game. And if I gave my heart to games, I am going to give a thousand times more of my attention and concentration and consecration to God. I can't help but fault myself severely on this account.

It seems like a game. It seems like an organization. It seems like another way by which to make easy money. Is that all that I have asked of God? How shocking. Now here we see in the 62nd chapter of Psalms, my soul wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from him.

David's Expectation in God Alone

What? A warrior king? Is his expectation not from the might of his arms? Or is his expectation not from the sovereignty of his reign over a large kingdom? Now I wonder if one of you or one of us here is suddenly called the emperor of America.

Nobody has been called the emperor of America as far as I know. But suppose suddenly there comes an official communication. You are selected to be the emperor of the greatest nation. Well, my dear friends, I wonder what you would say.

You would say in that case, my expectation comes from Washington, D .C. My expectation comes from my credentials, my official credentials. But here is King David, notwithstanding all the victories which he had won, saying, Lord, my expectation is from you.

Prayer for Genuine Faith and Spiritual Reality

Let us pray. Oh, we want you, Lord Jesus, thou who art the answer of God to every one of our needs and problems. Oh, thou who in your immeasurable wisdom and love gave us Jesus, come to us. Give us faith which is anchored in Jesus.

Please, Lord, not just this kind of thing that is a kind of shop window religion, the showy, noisy, demonstrative stuff that does not even produce holiness and integrity in one's life. Father, we pray and ask you, give us the real thing.

What you gave Peter, what you gave Paul, give us the real thing we beseech. Hear our humble prayer and let us ask ourselves very plainly, what is my expectation? What shall I do with my life? Is my faith unshakably anchored in Jesus?

So help us, we pray, and make us real and make us true. Make us to be of a broken spirit.

We ask in Jesus' holy name, amen. This program is brought to you by the Layman's Evangelical.

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Until we meet again next week, may God bless you.