You Have to See This to Believe It

Vladimir Putin is destroying countless lives with his unprovoked attack on Ukraine, and there is much anxiety around the world concerning just how bad things will get.

There's another war, but not just another war, but this is a war that is involving our arch -rival, the

Russians. There's fear about whether Europe is going to be embroiled in another world war and whether or not that's going to include us and whether or not people will unleash nuclear weapons if that does happen.

And so, again, there is this fear and anxiety. And countless

Ukrainians, including many Ukrainian Christians, are currently living in fear of their lives because of Putin's act of war.

You may not know it, but in many ways Ukraine is considered the Bible Belt of Europe. Many, many

Christians there. And now they're under attack, huddling underground, hoping to survive another barrage of bombing.

And so there's that anxiety for them. How should we as Christians respond to this kind of evil in the world?

To Putin's heartless attack that is even targeting Ukrainian civilians?

We certainly do not just ignore it and say everything is okay.

So the question that I want to answer today is what do we do with fear and anxiety?

What do we do with fear and anxiety? First of all, let me tell you what we don't do. What we don't do is live like those fake

Christians who act like everything is always all right. If you can't say amen, you ought to say ouch, right?

We do not want to live like that. Having the worst day of your life, you get up, you have to wipe tears away from your eyes and, you know, and fix your face and you go outside and you run into somebody and they say, how are you doing?

And you smile and say, blessed and highly favored. Liar. When we consider the thousands of years elapsed between God promising a savior in Genesis chapter 3 and Jesus actually arriving, we realize that God's timeline is not always the timeline that we would choose ourselves.

Often it's not God's will or plan to deliver people from evil immediately.

And after this Putin crisis is over, there will be more crises in the future, perhaps even worse.

So keep that in mind because what I'm not talking about here is dealing with our fear and our anxiety by believing that tomorrow it's going to be gone.

I'm talking about dealing with it in spite of the fact that tomorrow, unless you go be with the

Lord, it won't be gone. It'll still be here. After this crisis, there will be another one.

Oftentimes, it may seem that God is not in control. God is not dealing with the evil in the world.

Wait a minute. Russia really did invade. Wait a minute. They're talking about war in Europe.

Wait a minute. We're part of NATO. Wait a minute. What does that mean? So verse 23 is there in the horizontal.

Look at it again. During those many days, the King of Egypt died and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.

Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. But that's all.

All they know is we're slaves, we're being oppressed and we're crying out for God to save us, but they're not experiencing that salvation right now.

It is incredibly important to keep that in mind. However, no matter how bad things appear to us here on earth, we need to remember that God is still in control and that God is working out all things for his glory and for the good of his people.

That's what's happening in the horizontal. However, there's something else happening in the vertical that they are not aware of and it's always happening and we're not aware of what's happening.

You know, God's providence is an amazing thing and what's amazing about God's providence from our perspective is that we only see it in hindsight.

Do you follow that? I can't see God's providence looking from here to tomorrow.

I see God's providence looking from here to yesterday because right now I have no idea how

God is working all things together for good. I don't know that. All I know is what

I'm experiencing, what I'm walking through, what I'm dealing with, what I'm suffering. Hey, this is

Michael. Yeah, the real Michael. If you like these videos, would you consider subscribing? It helps

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God certainly hears his people who are suffering and crying out to him, even when it seems he is not doing anything about it.

And then there are those words in verse 24, God heard their groanings. God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God saw the people of Israel and God knew. And those four words are the key to us being able to endure in the midst of our fear and anxiety.

First, God hears your groaning. Amen. And that's good news. God hears your groaning.

Having been in pastoral ministry for many decades now, the one thing that I've heard over and over again from people in the midst of their darkest days is, it seems like God's not listening.

Ever been there? I can tell by some of your nods. It's like, no, not been there, brother. Am there, right?

It seems like God's not listening. Well, you need to be reminded that God hears your groaning.

The natural tendency of suffering saints is to assume that God doesn't hear.

So we doubt his care for us. Because God cares for his people.

He will certainly judge Putin for the evil he is committing against the people of Ukraine, unless he repents and turns to Christ.

At the same time, we need to recognize that God does not owe any person deliverance from suffering because we all deserve to suffer

God's wrath for our rebellion and sin against God. God didn't remember

Israel because they were the good guys. Amen. And oftentimes, that's the next thing that we go to in the midst of our anxiety and our fear.

The first thing that we go to is, well, God is not hearing me. God's not listening to me.

And then the second thing that we go to is, God's not hearing me and he's not listening to me because I must have done something to anger him.

I must not have been good enough, right enough, perfect enough. Because we know that that's how

God operates. He watches us and he sees like if we're being good enough and if we're good enough and if we're right enough and we're perfect enough, then he says, yes, here,

I'll give you this. No, because here's the reality. There is none righteous. No, not one.

You have never in your life, nor will you ever be good enough to earn good from God.

If God ever gives you what you earn, you'll wake up in hell. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

God doesn't deliver his people because his people deserve deliverance because no people have ever deserved deliverance.

And that's good news because what he remembers is not my sin, but his covenant.

Activists like Ibram X. Kendi argue for something called liberation theology, where God is always on the side of the oppressed.

I think one of the ways we can distinguish it is one being liberation theology. In other words, Jesus was a revolutionary.

And the job of the Christian is to revolutionize society. That the job of the

Christian is to liberate society from the powers on earth that are oppressing humanity.

Everybody understand that? However, the Bible teaches that God sometimes actually chooses to use oppressors to judge sin.

Look at Jeremiah 29, right? And I know what you're thinking, right? I say, Jeremiah 29, you're like, yeah,

Jeremiah 29, 11. Nope, not verse 11. Not verse 11. We love that though, don't we?

Plans that I have for you, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, to give you a hope and a future.

It's like, yes. No, I don't want you to look at verse 11.

I want you to look at verse four. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the

God of Israel to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.

How about that? God says the boot of the oppressor is on your neck and I put it there.

So much for this woke ideology, this liberation ideology that says that God is always on the side of the oppressed.

Nope, sometimes God is using the oppressor to oppress the oppressed because of sin.

There is no always. Amen, somebody. There is no always. So when we try to understand how we can trust in God's faithfulness in the midst of this kind of evil in the world, we need to have a biblical perspective that both recognizes our own sin and the way

God chooses to work in the world. God remembers and is faithful to his covenant with his people, even when he is sovereign over such evils as Putin killing civilians.

We know that God will judge Putin, but our hope is not that God will stop

Putin according to the timeline we want. Our hope is always that God will be faithful to the promise he has made to save all who repent and have faith in Jesus.

But when it comes to his covenant people, he remembers his covenant.

And we need to be reminded of that in the midst of our worst days. We cry out to God and we remind ourselves that he hears us and that even in our worst days, we're in communion with the holy

God of the universe, the God who created the world and everything in it, and that he remembers his covenant.

And that if we have come to him by faith and through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, then we are part of his covenant people.

And God remembers his covenant. He never forgets his covenant.

He never forsakes his covenant. God doesn't just see what Putin is doing.

Putin is a mere pawn in God's sovereign plan for the world, which is higher and wiser than anything we could plan ourselves.

As Christians, we have confidence that catastrophes like Putin and COVID are all completely within God's control.

When COVID came, none of the angels had to run up to God and say, oh my, you, you might want to check this out.

That's not how it happened. When COVID came, if anybody was calling anybody, God was calling the angels and he was going to watch this.

Three, two, one, COVID. When you lost your loved one, God wasn't absent.

When you got your heart broken, God didn't miss that. If your parents got divorced, that wasn't because God was being negligent.

Why should it comfort us to know that God is completely sovereign, even over this evil war that Putin has waged against Ukraine?

Well, we should have hope and confidence even in the midst of this, because we know that God works out all things, both for his glory and for the good of his people.

We may think we know what's best for the world and for us, but we don't.

But God knows. Well, number one, God knows which circumstances will maximize his glory.

Amen. God knows which circumstances will maximize his glory. And in case you're wondering, that's more important than your comfort.

God knows what you really need far better than you ever will. When we finally arrive in heaven, we will look back and be able to see that God orchestrated everything in history.

Even Putin's invasion of Ukraine for his good and perfect purposes and for the ultimate good of his people.

And again, it's providence so we only see it when we look back. And the longer we live, the more we look back and say,

I can't believe that I was asking God for that and was upset when I didn't get that because I didn't know that that would have been a hindrance to this.

God knows what you can bear. You don't. You think you do until you bear what you thought you couldn't bear.

And then you learn that you can bear more than you thought you could bear. And most importantly, we know that Jesus has already won the final victory against evil, which means that no matter how much evil

Putin is unleashing in this world, that evil has absolutely no power against the victory that Christians have through faith in Jesus.

And if God can raise Christ from the dead because of and in order to demonstrate his commitment to the redemption of his people, then he can bring you through whatever it is that's causing you this fear and this anxiety.

Because God always rescues his people, sometimes from, sometimes through, but always for his glory and for our good.