Living By Faith - [Habakkuk 3:16-19]

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Let's open our Bibles to the book of Habakkuk. If you don't know where Habakkuk is, just turn to Nahum.
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And if you don't know where Nahum is, you can try Zephaniah and go back one. Actually, sometimes it's just easier to use the index with these little guys.
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In my Bible, it only takes up one page. But Habakkuk is a marvelous book.
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If it's been a while since you have read Habakkuk, I would suggest you spend 10 minutes, 15 minutes, maybe 30 if you really want to mull it over and read
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Habakkuk. Part of my sermon tonight will actually give a rough overview of the book and hopefully help you in your understanding of it.
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Before we read God's Word and hear it preached, let's pray and ask for His blessing on our time together.
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Great God and Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your grace and mercy to us in Jesus Christ.
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We are reminded once again, every time as we should be, that You do not treat us as our sins deserve.
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That Father, if You should mark out our iniquities, who could stand? But it's only because of Christ.
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It's only because of Your great Son, our friend, our brother, and His righteousness that stands in our place.
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Father, that we have this hope, this confidence, this assurance that when we have put our trust in You, that You will hear us, that You will minister to us.
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Indeed, Father, that You cannot and will not let us go for the sake of Your own name and the glory of Your Son, Jesus.
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And so, Father, as we come tonight to this small book of Habakkuk, when we consider its truth, when we consider what it has to teach us,
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Father, we pray that You would help us, that we might be conformed more and more into the image of our
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Savior, Jesus Christ, that You would help us to put off sin and to move and practice more and more the ways of righteousness.
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Above all, Father, we pray that You would receive glory and honor, that Your name would be praised, that Your Word would just be marvelous in our sight, leading to comfort where needed, conviction if needed.
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But above all, Father, again, Your glory we pray. We ask this in Jesus' name.
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Amen. Why don't we go ahead and stand for the reading of God's Word from the book of Habakkuk, chapter 3, verses 16 to the end of the chapter.
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When I heard, my body trembled.
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My lips quivered at the voice. Rottenness entered my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble.
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When He comes up to the people, He will invade them with His troops.
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Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit beyond the vines, though the labor of the olive may fail, though the fields yield no food, though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the
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Lord. I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength.
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He will make my feet like deer's feet, and He will make me walk on my high hills to the chief musician with my stringed instruments.
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Amen. May God bless us by His Word this evening. You may be seated. Well, the book of Habakkuk is a marvelous little book, and it's a very interesting one, because it doesn't follow necessarily the typical pattern that you sometimes see in the prophetic literature.
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In some ways, it reminds me almost a little bit more like Jonah. You know, Jonah stands out. It's more of a story, more of an application through what happens to the prophet.
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Well, Habakkuk has some similar traits to that. Yes, there is a message here from the
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Lord that the prophet faithfully relays to the people of God, but it's a message that is lived out in Habakkuk's own experience.
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In fact, he initiates this prophecy, you could say, by his prayer.
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Turn with me to the beginning of Habakkuk, and we'll see how this book comes into its existence.
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You see, the prophet has a probing question to ask of the Lord, and it's right there in chapter 1, verse 2.
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How long, O Lord, shall I cry, and you will not hear? And even cry out to you violence, and you will not save?
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Why do you show me iniquity and cause me to see trouble? For plundering and violence are before me.
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There is strife, and contention arises. Therefore the law is powerless, and justice never goes forth.
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For the wicked surround the righteous. Therefore perverse judgment proceeds.
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And so Habakkuk's question is a good one, really. He's going about his business.
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He's walking around town, if it's Jerusalem that he lives in. He's observing the things that are going on in his city, in his culture.
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And what he sees is not good. He sees wickedness. He sees unrighteousness.
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He sees the law is being overturned, it's being perverted. And so he has a question, a very serious and a very good question.
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Lord, how long is this going to go on? Let's be clear here.
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Habakkuk isn't asking about all those other nations around Jerusalem.
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He's not concerned with what's going on in Egypt, or what's going on in Philistia, or what's going on in Babylon.
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He's talking about his own house, you could say, his own people. And what he sees is not good.
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And it concerns him. And so he goes to the Lord. He goes and he asks
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Him, how long will I cry out? How long will I say to You, violence?
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How long will this just keep going on? Now this question actually is not unique to Habakkuk.
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If you're a student of the psalms, if you read the psalms, this is a familiar kind of refrain.
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When you read the psalms, don't time and time again, you come to these places where, whether it's David or some other psalmist, whether it's the sons of Korah, whoever it might be, they have this question that comes out.
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Lord, what are you doing? Lord, how long is this going to be this way?
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Lord, why does it have to be like this? And Habakkuk, being a good student of Scripture, and indeed a follower of the
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Lord, he goes to the Lord and asks, how long? And the Lord sees fit to answer him.
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Look in verse 5. The Lord replies, Look among the nations and watch.
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Be utterly astounded. For I will work a work in your days which you will not believe, though it were told to you.
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Indeed, I am raising up the Chaldeans, a bitter and hasty nation, which march through the breadth of the earth to possess dwelling places that are not theirs.
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They are terrible and dreadful. And he goes on over the next few verses to describe even more about how terrible and dreadful those people are.
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So, Habakkuk's question, Lord, how long are you going to allow your people, this nation of Israel, these people who are called by your name, how long are you going to allow them to continue this pattern of violence and dishonesty and perversion of your truth?
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And the answer that he receives is, judgment is coming. Judgment's coming.
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And it's coming in the form of the Chaldeans, or as we might be more familiar with, the Babylonians.
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It's just another name for the Babylonians. That nation is going to come and bring judgment.
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And you might think, on the one hand, that this makes really good and perfect sense.
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In fact, it matches quite deliberately the pattern which God had established in His covenant relations with His people.
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You go back to the book of Deuteronomy, and God had drawn His people out of Egypt, and He's gathering them together, and He is setting
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His name upon them. And Moses, right before they go into the Promised Land, He sets before them the way of life and the way of death.
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If you heed Me, if you will listen to Me, if you will do as My Word commands, then you have life and blessing and help.
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And if you do not, then you have judgment. And in the list of those judgments, not only is there famine, not only is there difficulty, not only is there hardship, sort of the ultimate judgment is the invasion of an outside peoples.
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And what God is telling Habakkuk is basically the covenant cursings are coming.
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The covenant cursings are coming. And on the one hand, then you can almost picture that this would be the end of the matter.
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Right? Habakkuk has asked the question, Lord, how long are
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Your people going to continue violently? God has answered. Judgment is coming.
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The covenant cursings are going to be brought about. The end. That's it.
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But Habakkuk does something that's almost a little startling. He continues his line of questioning.
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If you follow in chapter 1 still, in verse 12, he has another question for the
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Lord. Are you not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One?
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We shall not die. O Lord, You have appointed them for judgment. O Rock, You have marked them for correction.
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You are of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look on wickedness.
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Why do You look on those who deal treacherously and hold Your tongue when the wicked devours a person more righteous than he?
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Why do You make men like fish of the sea, like creeping things that have no ruler over them?
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There's a little bit of a complaint here, isn't there? If the first question, the one from verse 2, is sort of an outpouring of his heart, a real curiosity and a wonder at how long
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God was going to persist with His people, then this second question has sort of a note of, really,
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Lord, this is the way it's going to go? Really, this is how it's going to happen?
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And notice in particular what Habakkuk is curious to see is, God, You are righteous, and certainly
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Your people are not really in a good place right now, but how is it possible that You, Lord, can be content to send a people that's worse than they are to come and destroy
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Your own people on whom You have set Your own name? It's really a good question, isn't it?
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And perhaps in some way, shape, or form, it's a question that we have asked ourselves in one form or another, maybe not in the particulars of this context, but you, perhaps, one time or another, have had the question, why is this the way it is,
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Lord? Why is this what You are doing? Why is this what
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Your will is allowing to happen in this world, in my life, in my country, in my churches?
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Lord, why is it this way? And that's a hard question sometimes even to utter before the
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Lord, because we don't want to cross that line where we go from the place of faith and trust to go to the place of where we're sort of shaking our fist at God.
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But isn't it interesting how often the Scriptures come very close to that place where the difficulties, the heartaches, the hurts, and the wonder of what is going on in specific circumstances or situations are brought and laid directly at the feet of the
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Lord God Almighty, the only one who is able to do anything about it.
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Go back to those psalms, right? Go back to those places where the psalmist started out with sort of this question of why
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God? Why God? Why God? And where do those psalms often end?
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It's amazing, actually. Many of them, they end praising God for who
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He is, for how He has faithfully, continually cared for and provided for His people.
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It's no surprise then that this is exactly the pattern at which the
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Lord directs Habakkuk. Notice what He does in chapter 2 when He responds to this complaint of Habakkuk.
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In chapter 2, verse 2, The Lord answered me, and He said, Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.
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For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it will speak and it will not lie.
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Though it tarries, wait for it, because it will surely come. It will not tarry. Behold the proud.
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His soul is not upright in Him, but the just shall live by faith.
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And He goes on throughout the rest of the chapter to explain how in the specifics of this circumstance, which
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Habakkuk is asking about, that the Babylonians will too get theirs in the end.
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The Babylonians will get theirs in the end, and they too will be destroyed. But how does this relate then to what
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Habakkuk responds with at the very end of chapter 3? If you recognize the pattern, or at least the progression that's taking place in this back and forth between Habakkuk and the
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Lord, this hymn, this poem, and we know it is because at the very last line it was set to music, right?
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To the chief musician with my stringed instruments. What is the purpose then of these last verses?
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It's to tell us and to remind us and to teach us that Habakkuk's faith in these circumstances are really worth us all remembering and us all putting into practice.
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Let's walk through these four verses bit by bit, shall we? I began with verse 16, the section for this evening, where Habakkuk says,
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When I heard my body trembled, my lips quivered at the voice, rottenness entered my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble.
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When he comes up to the people, he will invade them with his troops. And the first thing
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I want you to recognize here is that Habakkuk, and we'll definitely see this from the latter verses, he's most obviously a man of faith.
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He's entrusting himself to the Lord, right? And we'll see how he expresses that in these other verses.
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But notice, that trust doesn't absolve him from feeling the difficulty and the hurt and the pain of what his circumstances bring him to.
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Notice how he says, I heard my body trembled, my lips quivered, rottenness entered my bones.
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When we deal with difficult news, we often use almost this sort of bodily language, right?
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There was a pit in my stomach. I felt weak. I couldn't even stand.
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If you've suddenly been confronted with some great difficulty, it can make it so you can't sleep.
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You feel sick. It's almost like sometimes you have the flu. If you've really had a really serious bout of news, it affects you bodily.
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We are interesting creatures, aren't we? The fact that God has made us such that, yes, he's made us mind, soul, and body, and yet all of them are related to one another.
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At least they impact each other in strange and wonderful and sometimes not so wonderful ways, right? And here
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Habakkuk, having been confronted with the news that God's judgment is coming, he feels it.
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And the reason why I want to bring this to your attention is because there is this strain of Christian thinking which matches more closely the teaching and the ideals of Stoicism than it matches
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Christian biblical doctrine. I remember learning about the
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Stoics when I was in middle school. Maybe you remember as well. What was so noteworthy about the
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Stoics? They were the type of people who they didn't want to be affected by anything. They strove for being as in control of themselves as possible, right?
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So that they didn't get too high and they didn't get too low. And that's where we come with the phrase, he was so Stoic. Putting on a good face.
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I think sometimes there is this strain of teaching or of thought within the church which says, because I'm a
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Christian, because I say I believe in Jesus Christ, because I say
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I'm a person of the Bible, that I can't let people see how things affect me.
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Brothers and sisters, that has no place in Scripture. The Apostle Paul, he goes so far as to say, you weep with those who weep.
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You rejoice with those who rejoice. If you look on the life of Jesus our
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Lord, He was for all of His perfection, yet He was also a man of emotion.
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He gets angry. There are things within there that also
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I think show that He is a person just like everything else. He has joys and pains and sorrows and hurts and angers just like you and I, but yet without sin.
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And I think for us, we know our sinfulness. And so sometimes it feels like that our emotions are to be distrusted.
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Yes, certainly. But God is yet the God who gave us our emotions. And so we must learn to use them righteously.
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Habakkuk here, he says, when I heard He trembled, His lips quivered, rottenness enters my bones.
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And how does He deal with the implications of this news that He has received?
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This, in some ways, most difficult and horrible news. He says that I might rest in the day of trouble.
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He wants to find rest. He wants to find hope. He wants to find comfort.
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He wants to be led in a way that if the day comes while He is still alive, we don't know the timing of these events, whether Habakkuk was alive when
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Babylon came and destroyed his nation. But yet,
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He wants to be at such a place where He will have rest and peace and hope in the midst of that great conflict and turmoil.
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And that gets us then to how He responds in verses 17 and 18.
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Now, I think on the face of it, these verses are verses that come from a place of someone who has great faith.
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Notice, He's making a very deliberate, a very complete statement.
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There's a sense of repetition to these verses. He's not just saying, Lord, if there's nothing available, well,
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I'll still worship You. He piles it on. If the fig tree may not blossom, nor the fruit be on the vines, nor the labor of the olive may fail, though the fields yield no food, though the flog be cut off from the field, though there be no herd in the stalls.
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In one way, He could have just said, if there's no food, Lord, I'll still worship You. But He's not content. He wants to thoroughly expose to us and to the
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Lord the thoroughness of His devotion. And this is just at its face value,
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I think, is a statement of great faith. But when you think about what it is in response to, this is no ordinary trial that Habakkuk is going to face.
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This is no ordinary situation which he finds himself knowing is going to come.
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He is in a place where the very people who are around him, the very cities that he loves, the very nation which the
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Lord His God has set His name upon is going to be completely and utterly changed in a dramatic and drastic way with the coming judgment of the
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Lord. I don't know whether this is a fitting analogy, but take it for what it's worth.
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The only thing that I can think of that might be similar to this is, can you imagine a time or a place where, say, the
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Chinese or the Russians came and invaded Washington, D .C.
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and came and brought our whole country under great duress? Can you imagine such a thing?
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I, for one, I can't even begin to fathom such a thing. But not only if you think about a moment for the political upheaval that that would cause us, the strain, maybe the hunger, the starvation, our whole lives changed.
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But then think about it. It's not only those things, but it also means that God's covenant,
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His people have broken it. It's like saying there is no church, there is no worship, there is no altar, there is no temple.
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Everything that you know has now been changed and for the most part destroyed.
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It's not just a statement of great political cataclysm brought upon them.
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It's a statement of great spiritual cataclysm that is falling upon them.
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And knowing that, seeing it coming down the line,
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Habakkuk responds with faith. I think it forces us to really consider what does it mean to live by faith?
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That is what God had called him to do back in chapter 2, verse 4. And it's no wonder, of course, that this particular verse is repeated in the
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New Testament as sort of one of the stepping stones or the foundation stones of the
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Gospel. What does it mean to live before an almighty and holy God as a sinner?
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What does it mean to be made right with God? The just shall live by faith.
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Indeed, the Apostle Paul throughout the whole book of Romans, you could say, he's unfolding and he's expounding on that one maybe not so simple phrase that the righteous shall live by faith.
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You see, faith is both a simple thing and a profound thing, isn't it?
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On the one hand, God in His Word calls us to set aside our wisdom, to set aside our righteousness, to set aside whatever spirituality we might think we have on our own, to set aside our wealth, to set aside our privilege, to set aside whatever it might be, and He says, you, in order to be made right with Me, must trust
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Me and put your faith in Me and particularly in My Son, Jesus Christ.
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And that principle of being justified by faith then becomes the very seed which compels every person who lives according to being under Jesus Christ.
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It becomes the mantra, the theme, the particular part of what it means to live in Christ is to live by faith.
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The Apostle Paul says that I live by faith and not by sight. Peter says, although you do not see
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Him, yet you love Him. Brothers and sisters, this principle of living by faith is a challenging one because we are creatures of sight.
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Perhaps that's stating the obvious. But having been a father, and I am a father of four boys, it's astonishing to me how often this principle is brought home again and again and again and again.
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I see in my boys, the oldest is nine. It goes nine, seven, four, and two. And how do they live?
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What is the principle that controls their desires? What do
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I see? My brother has this. I want that. My brother has had this longer than he should have had it, so I want it longer than he has it.
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And it's easy to see it within children, right? Because we're adults now.
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But when I'm really honest with myself, that is the same principle which guides me more often than it should.
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Those areas in which there are bitterness within me, those areas in which there is conflict within me or conflict with my spouse, where do those areas come from?
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They come from the place where I'm living by sight and not by faith.
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Let's think about some particular applications of this point because it's too important to let slip by.
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Habakkuk is living by faith according to the word of God even though judgment is coming. We don't, in one sense, we don't have the privilege of Habakkuk in this.
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He knows what the future holds. We have no idea what tomorrow brings us, do we? But let's think about yesterday.
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What are the areas in which you need to live by faith and not by sight? Do you have children, parents, who are not walking with the
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Lord? Are you living by faith? Are you living by sight?
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Are you entrusting them to the Lord God Almighty? Are you trusting in your ability to parent them perfectly?
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Or even parent them halfway decently? That's kind of where I am. Or perhaps in your marriage.
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Do you have conflict with your spouse? Are you dealing with difficulties of one kind or another? Are you living by faith and trusting yourself and your whole reason for what you say and do according to the principles of God's Word?
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Are you living by sight? Young people, what are your hopes?
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What are your dreams? What are you going to do if those hopes and dreams don't come to fruition?
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And I'm not talking about sort of the obviously sinful things like I'm going to have a $100 ,000 sports car and make lots of money and do whatever
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I want and drink this or smoke that or do whatever. I'm not talking about those things. I'm talking about things that we would even typically call good and righteous.
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What if you're a young man or a young woman and you want to be married and you're not? Or if you're newly married and you want a child and you're barren?
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Or you're a hard worker and you faithfully have tried to pursue what's right and good and you have no job and no money and no prospects?
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What does it mean to live by faith when the things that you expect do not occur in the way in which you expect them?
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Brothers and sisters, I think one of the principles which we can pull out of Habakkuk's response here is that when we have come to Christ, when we have said that we have trusted in the
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Lord, it is an all or nothing affair. We cannot say, as was popular a few decades ago,
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I'm not sure if this is still popular, but there was a time where people would say things like, I've trusted in Jesus as my
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Savior, but I don't trust in Him as my Lord. I think that heresy has been squashed sufficiently.
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But sometimes we live like that. We may not be so bold as to put it out there, but we live as if God has no care and no concern for the pain and the difficulty which
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I face. And He can't help me through it and He can't make it right and He can't deal with that stubborn relative who just keeps trying to get me in trouble or that co -worker at work who is just completely obnoxious and makes my life harder than it really has to be.
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Is your God that small? Or maybe I should say, is your faith that small?
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You see, the pattern of the Psalms, the pattern of Habakkuk is to go back to think about what it is that God has done.
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And who is He really? And that's why. It's the exact reason why after that statement, even if there's no fruit on the vine, if there's no olives on the tree, if there's no flocks out in the field, that's why.
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What does He go back to? Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will joy in the
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God of my salvation. Now, brothers and sisters, it's not by chance that He chooses that attribute which to bring before us now.
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That attribute of joy in the God of my salvation. If you think about it,
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He could have said any number of different things there. I will rejoice in the God who is faithful. I will rejoice in the
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God who is covenantal. Kind of the same thing as faithful. I will rejoice in the God who is powerful.
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I will rejoice in the God who is loving. You know, you could think about all these different qualities and attributes of God that would be worth praising at that moment.
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But the marvelous thing is they all come together in the consideration of God's salvation.
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It's said that on the cross, we see both God's love and His justice. It's in salvation that we see
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God's love, His justice, His mercy, His kindness, His compassion,
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His faithfulness. We see His hatred of sin. And Habakkuk comes to this place where everything which he has known up to this point, he recognizes it is going to be taken away and made utterly incomprehensible.
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He says, yet I will go to God of my salvation. When you think for a moment of all the acts of redemptive history of God, say the rescuing of the people out of Egypt, but this comes to the most clear light in the cross, doesn't it?
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You know, Habakkuk doesn't know the name of Jesus Christ as a man who will come in generations after him, but he knows enough to know of his
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God that if there is salvation to be found, it is to be found by trusting in God's mercy and in His provision.
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It is in the fact that God, for whatever reason, will not treat him as his sins deserve.
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That God has cared for him enough even up to this point, that even if he is in Jerusalem when the
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Babylonian army is gathered round its walls, the siege works are being built up, people are starving, that he will say,
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I will trust in the Lord. Brothers and sisters,
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I don't say that to then say, as perhaps it's tempting to say, well, see, the stuff you're dealing with, it's really not all that big of a deal.
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I don't believe that at all. And in fact, I would suggest that one of the takeaways from these verses is we need to be very careful how we treat the brother or sister who is under great duress.
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I always think of Psalm 88. That's another one to read if you haven't read it lately.
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The psalmist is in just darkness and despair. And most of the psalms, they follow this pattern where they start out, there's a problem, and then there's a remembrance of God's faithfulness and goodness, and at the end, it closes with some kind of praise or honoring
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God for who he is or what he's done. Psalm 88 ends with, darkness is my closest friend.
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Brothers and sisters, when you're in the darkness, and I'm not just talking about clinical depression or spiritual depression.
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This is not to sort of divide up or say this for that or that for that. Just when brothers and sisters are struggling, just be kind and patient and point them to the work of God.
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Point them to what Christ has done. Point them to the faithfulness of God in the midst of circumstance that's far beyond our comprehension.
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Because for whatever reason, God has seen fit to put them in that time through that difficulty.
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And he says, I will rejoice in the Lord. Notice that? It's not just I will testify to the
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Lord's salvation. I will bear witness to the salvation. This is exuberance.
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I will rejoice in who my God is. I will praise
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Him for who He is. I will not, even in the midst of horror,
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I will not forget my great, good, wonderful God of salvation.
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And then he reminds us in verse 19 about strength.
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The Lord God is my strength. He will make my feet like deer's feet.
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He will make me to walk on my high hills. Why? Why is this note here?
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Because of course, if our strength, if our trust, if our hope, if our assurance is in the wrong places, we are surely, to use the phrase of Jesus, we have surely built our house on sinking sand.
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And Habakkuk is telling us, look, if this is going to be what the Lord's providence,
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His judgment, His will is going to bring, if this is what life has for both me and my people, maybe even
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His relatives whom He loves, yet He is going to reflect on the fact my hope is not in my family.
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My hope is not in my bank account. My hope is not in my belly. My hope is not in my job.
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My hope is not in my nation. My hope is not in my church. My hope is built on the
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Lord. He is my only strength. All those things are good things, right?
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It's good to have a family. It's good to have a church, a faithful church. It's good to have a job. It's good to have money in the bank account.
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There's nothing wrong with those things implicitly, is there? But when they, even for a moment, become the thing in which we place our trust and hope, then what are they?
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They just are idols. They just are idols.
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Remember when the people were in the wilderness and they were being struck by the serpents? God had Moses build a bronze serpent and the people who looked to the serpent, they were healed and they were saved.
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And then generations later, that same figure, that same serpent, had to be destroyed by one of the kings of Judah because it had become an idol.
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And people were worshiping it and sacrificing it. That good thing, that instrument which
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God had used for salvation, people had made into something which drew them away from the
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Lord. It's always easy to pick on the Israelites, isn't it? You are just like them.
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You're just like them. I'm just like them. Our hearts are hard.
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Our necks are stiff. And but for the grace of God, we too would follow right after them in their sins.
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He closes with this word to the chief musician with my stringed instruments.
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It might be tempting actually to pass over this and think not much of it. But it actually,
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I think, is important to remember that such was the import of these words that not only were they to be set down to Scripture, but they were to be set down to music for Habakkuk's contemporaries and those afrim to sing to.
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And I think that there's a very important reason for that. The same reason that the Psalms are actually also musical.
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What is the thing that happens to us more often than not when we're in the midst of that trial?
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When we're in the midst of that wondering of, Lord God, what is it that You are doing and why are
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You doing it this way? We forget, don't we?
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We can be in church on Sunday. We can hear the sermon. We can amen to death the Word. We can have our
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Bibles open before us every morning. We can bow our knee in prayer. But when the rubber meets the road and the fire comes, there are times in which we forget just who is
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God. What is it that He has done for me in Jesus Christ? And we're to sing.
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We're to sing. One of the powers of music is how it ingrains itself into the fabric of who we are.
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And it particularly ingrains itself in our memory, right? How many times have you been in the car, you turn on the radio, and you hear the first few notes of a song, and it may be a song that you haven't heard in 15 years, but it goes back to a time when you were a teenager and you sang that song all summer long, and you instantly know every single word of it from start to finish.
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Brothers and sisters, singing is so important. We sing the
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Word of God, not just as a part of the tradition of what we do in the church.
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It is a vital part of our worship. Because when it all goes to pot, we can sing.
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And God's Word will be there with us to help us, to remind us, to comfort us.
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Let me just draw this passage to a close and give you some,
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I think, some other things to think about this evening and hopefully throughout your week. And one of the things is this.
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Don't forget, just because you are a Christian, just how feeble and frail you still are.
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Now, the reason why I say that is maybe you've met this kind of person.
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Maybe you are this kind of person. The kind of person who is completely and illogically upbeat all the time.
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The person who, you know, their mother or their father may have just died. And you ask them how they're doing.
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They're like, I'm fine. And you just want to sort of take that person aside and say, no, you're not.
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Because I know you're a person. And either you have lived such a pattern of life that you're completely out of touch with the circumstances and the hardships that life brings on you, but you're not fine.
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So please stop pretending that you are. Brothers and sisters, there are people in our congregations.
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They're going through stuff. And let us not make them feel that when they come into your presence and you ask them how they're doing, that they have to say,
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I'm fine. That is no church. That is no fellowship of the
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Spirit. Now, some people do it to themselves. But let it not be upon us to be unwilling or unprepared to deal with the burdens of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
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The other thing I will say is this. Do we sometimes forget that God orders not just the events of our lives, but the events of all the entire world?
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Do you remember this? And I hope you will amen it with me. That there is not one thing that takes place in this world at any moment, at any fraction of a second, apart from the will of the
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Almighty Sovereign God Who rules everything. Amen.
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Thank you. But yet, sometimes, when the world seems to be going crazy and it seems to be going further and further from the way in which we want it to go,
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I'll offer you the perfect example. Our country continues to slide further and further away from what could even be remotely called biblical principles.
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Do you know that it does so because God allows it to do so? Do you know that whatever
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God has in store for this country, for this world,
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He has planned it from before its foundations. And I understand the angst.
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And I hate abortion. And I look at the way things are going politically and socially and morally and it makes me wonder.
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But I know that Christ is in heaven. And I know that whatever it would be, whether real, and I'm talking about real
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Christian persecution comes, such that we can't be in this building at this time.
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And we can't say that this is the Word of God and it bears authority on our lives.
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If that time comes, I hope you will say with me, yet I will rejoice in the
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God of my salvation. And the reason why I bring it up is because sometimes
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I feel like that the angst at which we feel more closely mirrors a life of unbelief than it mirrors a life of faith.
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This world is my God's. And I will trust Him. And I will live based on that truth again and again.
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So when you're about to post whatever that angry tirade is on Facebook, or when you're at that dinner party with that cousin of yours who just knows how to get in with you, do you remember, can you remember for a moment that this world is
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Christ's? And I'm not saying don't speak, but speak in a manner that shows your trust is in something other than the right person getting into the right office or the right bill going through the right
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Congress. Your trust is in Jesus Christ. And finally,
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I want to say this, because all these benefits come to us because of what our
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Father has done for us in Jesus. Sometimes, you know, preaching from the
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Old Testament or preaching sort of on a passage that speaks a very high level the sovereignty of God and our responses to it.
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Brothers and sisters, we have none of these things if it were not for Christ. If God hadn't seen fit to place our sins on that Man, our
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Savior, we would know none of these things. And have pity on the person who doesn't know
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Christ. Just think about how hard the world is for you, even knowing the sovereignty of God, even knowing the blessing of living under Christ.
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Now think of the life of the unbeliever who knows no certainty, has no confidence, has no hope, has no eternity, as far as many of them are aware.
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And it's no wonder there's so much self -medicating, whether it's alcohol or pot or prescription drugs or just self -worship.
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It's because they don't know Christ. And rather, have a pity and think about what they live with and how much they need the
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Savior that you have. And be encouraged to share it with them.
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There is only hope in Jesus Christ. God's care covers over each and every one of us.
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And by His grace, according to His mercy, it may cover over them as well.
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What a great Gospel we have. Let's pray. Great God and Heavenly Father, we thank
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You that Your Word is true. While this flesh fails and our hearts are weak and our faith may be feeble, yet,
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Father, we thank You for this truth that if we are Yours, that there is nothing and no one that can tear us asunder from You.
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We thank You for the words from the Gospel that there is not one of us that can be let go out of Christ's hand.
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O Father, we thank You for this small and very interesting book of Habakkuk.
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We pray that it will help us to be more confident to live not according to what we see, but according to who
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You are and what You have promised and what You will do. O Father, for what we know, judgment may come.
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Heartache, hardship, cataclysmic events may come. But, O Father, we worship
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You, the God of our salvation. And we rejoice in You.
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And we pray for Your good grace and mercy to lead us through. We pray this in Christ's name,