Speaker 1: Hey, what up?
Speaker 1: It's Mark Carter.
Speaker 1: I'm the pastor of Fierce Church.
Speaker 1: Welcome to our podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm so pumped that you're able to join us today.
Speaker 1: I hope this encourages you, inspires you, strengthens you, gives you hope to keep pressing on, and it's my prayer that this sermon gives you a more expansive view of God's love for you.
Speaker 1: Enjoy the message.
Speaker 1: In 1812, napoleon was about to go into Russia.
Speaker 1: He had lots of advisors says don't do it, napoleon, don't do it.
Speaker 1: Your men don't know the harsh weather there, they don't know the terrain.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, I know you've been winning and you've just had a streak, but don't go in.
Speaker 1: But he was stubborn.
Speaker 1: He felt like ah, don't, you know who I am, I can do it.
Speaker 1: And he went in and they lost a ton of people.
Speaker 1: In fact it changed the political boundaries of Europe at the time because he was just a little bit hardheaded.
Speaker 1: Anybody been hardheaded before?
Speaker 1: We're going to come into a moment in scripture where the results of being hardheaded are very, very difficult to bear.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you the text and then we're going to walk through how they got to that place and then we're going to dive a little bit deeper.
Speaker 1: It's Jeremiah.
Speaker 1: This is a prophet and he's telling the story of the fall of Jerusalem, the people of God, how their final city fell after all these centuries.
Speaker 1: Verse 52 says Zedekiah did evil in the eyes of the Lord, just as Jehoiakim, his father, had done.
Speaker 1: It was because of the Lord's anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah and in the end he thrust them from his presence, meaning he kicked them out of the land.
Speaker 1: And Jeremiah says hey, I just want to make sure everybody understands.
Speaker 1: This is why Because these kings and their people did evil, generation after generation after generation, and finally God had had enough.
Speaker 1: And it's not that God was mean, but he can't just he can't look away as people are causing pain to others and to his own heart, year after year, generation after generation.
Speaker 1: There had been a lot of prophecy about this.
Speaker 1: Prophets had been coming for generations saying you guys, you got to stop this.
Speaker 1: Now you got to turn around.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you it's going to go bad.
Speaker 1: I know you think you're the chosen people.
Speaker 1: I know you think you're so special.
Speaker 1: God would never remove you from his presence, but he will.
Speaker 1: He will kick you out of this very land and you'll be in exile.
Speaker 1: You'll be under the rulership of others.
Speaker 1: They'll speak languages you've never heard before and you'll have to raise your kids there.
Speaker 1: And then you have a long time to think about how you betrayed your God.
Speaker 1: And while this is happening, while the Babylonians are breaking into Jerusalem, it's a siege and sieges are bad man.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is very hard times.
Speaker 1: There's no Walmart within the city.
Speaker 1: You can't replenish stuff.
Speaker 1: That's one of the tactics of the sie is we're going to cut them all off from all outside help.
Speaker 1: We're going to be breaking through their walls.
Speaker 1: We're going to have mass executions.
Speaker 1: When we get in there and do it, they're all running out of food and starving and some get so hungry they start to cook their own babies.
Speaker 1: There's no sanitation in the place, okay, so lawlessness begins to reign and then everything's just a mess everywhere, and this is how the city falls.
Speaker 1: Everything's just a mess everywhere and this is how the city falls, and the prophets had been telling them this for generations.
Speaker 1: Then, in 587 BC, it finally happens, and what they're experiencing is a promise, but it's the promise that nobody wants.
Speaker 1: See, it's the other side of the Deuteronomy 28 promise.
Speaker 1: In the book of Deuteronomy, moses is telling this is hundreds of years earlier.
Speaker 1: Moses is telling people hey, you're about to go into this land.
Speaker 1: Now, just so you know, your parents already jacked up this mission.
Speaker 1: We came out of Egypt and your parents completely betrayed God.
Speaker 1: They didn't trust him, they didn't honor his ways, and so they opted out.
Speaker 1: They did not get to go like you guys are getting to go.
Speaker 1: So when you go, new generation of Israelites, I just need you to be sober-minded man.
Speaker 1: Make sure you do what God wants you to do, because he's kind of married you now and he's got some real faithfulness particularities and he wants to make sure that you can retain the blessing that he wants to put on you.
Speaker 1: And so the blessing part was in Deuteronomy 28, 1 through 14.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to list some of the things that were part of that blessing.
Speaker 1: You're going to be blessed everywhere you go.
Speaker 1: You're going to have abundant provision.
Speaker 1: You're going to have success.
Speaker 1: You're going to have victory over your enemies.
Speaker 1: You're going to have prosperity.
Speaker 1: The nations are going to fear you.
Speaker 1: You're going to have abundance.
Speaker 1: You're going to have financial prosperity.
Speaker 1: But then he goes on to say now, just so you time, but I'm turning it up to 11 on you.
Speaker 1: But if you turn against me, if you go the other way, like the surrounding nations around you, and you begin to worship their gods and you do some of the stuff they do for their gods, which is like have giant orgies and put kids to death and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: If you do that as a form of worship, it's going to go bad and here's the curses for disobedience.
Speaker 1: It's the other side of the promise.
Speaker 1: You're going to have failure in all your endeavors.
Speaker 1: You're going to be filled with panic and fever.
Speaker 1: You're going to go mad.
Speaker 1: You're going to go into captivity.
Speaker 1: Oppression, robbery, family separation, lack, desperation, destruction and scattering among the nations and constant fear and uncertainty Wow, it's bad for the nation that turns against their God.
Speaker 1: He said now everybody experiences hardship, but I'm going to turn it up to 11.
Speaker 1: If you walk away from all this blessing that I give you generation after generation after generation, so the prophets tell him it's coming, and then it does and the judgment finally falls.
Speaker 1: Not only is Israel gone, now Judah and Jerusalem now they're gone.
Speaker 1: And the book of Lamentations?
Speaker 1: I've never preached on the book of Lamentations.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit kind of a sequel to Jeremiah, who's telling the people this is going to happen.
Speaker 1: Lamentations is a collection of five poems.
Speaker 1: Some scholars think Jeremiah wrote them, others think he collected them and put them together.
Speaker 1: Some he wrote, some he didn't.
Speaker 1: Doesn't really matter, because the Spirit of God has specific things he wanted to communicate to whomever.
Speaker 1: And however they put it together, the first of the five poems is just kind of.
Speaker 1: It's like the poet is freaking out and it's coming to us through the personality it's personified Lady Jerusalem.
Speaker 1: It's like Jerusalem itself is talking while this siege has just happened and it is not going well for her and she's beginning to realize oh God was serious.
Speaker 1: Oh God was serious.
Speaker 1: She's beginning to realize and you're going to see it as we go through the message, it's slowly dawning on her oh, I have some fault in this.
Speaker 1: This isn't just randomly bad things happening to me.
Speaker 1: It's not just turned up to 11 because everybody gets 11.
Speaker 1: It's happening to me because of what God promised in the past.
Speaker 1: Now we are notorious, just like some of the people in the Bible.
Speaker 1: We're notorious for realizing we're going through hardship and not always understanding that in part we're causing some of the hardship.
Speaker 1: Okay, so everybody goes through hardship.
Speaker 1: That's nothing new.
Speaker 1: That's part of being on the fallen planet.
Speaker 1: But when we're contributing to our hardship.
Speaker 1: We don't always discern that very quickly.
Speaker 1: Think about that in the Bible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people like Samson, okay, remember the really strong guy?
Speaker 1: Well, he spends his whole life Essentially he's got this great call from God.
Speaker 1: He spends his whole life essentially just running after his lust instead of running after the will of God.
Speaker 1: And by the end of his life we find him.
Speaker 1: He's lost all his strength and he's blind.
Speaker 1: And we're looking at you.
Speaker 1: If you're reading that, you're like Samson, you kind of did this to yourself.
Speaker 1: Man Like God's not mad at you, you did this.
Speaker 1: And then you see kings like King Saul.
Speaker 1: He starts out kind of a stand-up guy but then he gives over to jealousy against David, which turns into hate, which turns into murder, and by the end he's consulting a witch right before he dies.
Speaker 1: And we're looking at Saul like dude, like you had everything.
Speaker 1: You kind of did this.
Speaker 1: I know you're feeling sorry for yourself, but you kind of did this.
Speaker 1: And even King David I mean, we could go on and on about all the great things David did, but he was still kind of a terrible father, he was a terrible husband and in a lot of ways he was a terrible friend to people like Uriah the Hittite.
Speaker 1: Whatever kind of strategy he could rock as a military leader, he majorly contributed to his own downfall.
Speaker 1: And just sometimes I'm not saying all the time, I'm just saying sometimes sometimes we're a little bit blind and clueless to how we are participating in our own pain.
Speaker 1: And that's what I want to talk to you about today.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about how God is faithful to restore, even in the midst of our pain, even when we're broken, when we're at the bottom.
Speaker 1: And, guys, you know this, there really is, there's low, and then there's low, low, low, low is the harder parts of life, where it's like is this ever going to get better?
Speaker 1: Low, low is the time when, okay, it seems like not only is everyone else getting ahead in business, you're falling increasingly behind and you're very disappointed about this and you're becoming super depressed and inward.
Speaker 1: It might be that you lost somebody very close to you and you're wondering.
Speaker 1: Now you're asking the question can life ever be good again?
Speaker 1: And you're grieving like everybody else, but other people seem to be moving on and you're unable to move on.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you had some friends that you thought these are my chums forever, like we're going to grow old together.
Speaker 1: We're going to be doing all this barbecuing later on, taking trips to whoever, wherever, and yet they're not around.
Speaker 1: Something went different and it's very disappointing.
Speaker 1: And now you're wondering I don't even know that we could be reconciled.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you're one of the ones who, like all of us, who went through COVID.
Speaker 1: But you got used to being alone and you really that became easier and easier to isolate, and then it became harder and harder to get out of the house and scarier and scarier, and so, as the rest of the world kind of started to wake up, you stayed back and stayed safe.
Speaker 1: But now things aren't going so well with that plan, because now you don't even know how to interact with people sometimes.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you're so afraid that you're not participating in life, and not only are you not around to love people, but you're also not around people to be loved.
Speaker 1: And you're feeling pretty low about that decision at this point.
Speaker 1: And we get to this bottom place of failure where it feels like we're handcuffed to a ship that is sinking and we don't know how to get out, or like you're trying to get away from a thunderstorm.
Speaker 1: But every direction you look, the storm is in every direction.
Speaker 1: I can't outrun this thing.
Speaker 1: How am I possibly going to get away from this?
Speaker 1: Anybody know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: Anybody felt this before and for some folks, maybe some of the religious crowd, maybe you've got to such a place that you're like I know that God is supposed to love me or whatever, but I don't know that that's really true.
Speaker 1: I think maybe that's a has to love, true.
Speaker 1: I think maybe that's a has to love.
Speaker 1: Whatever he does, however he feels about me, I'm pretty positive.
Speaker 1: His purposes for my life are over.
Speaker 1: See, I've disqualified myself so bad, or I had such a bad run of things.
Speaker 1: There's no way that God could ever, would ever, want to use me again.
Speaker 1: So my purpose is done and I'm kind of depressed because I'm just finding other things to try to fill that purpose thirst.
Speaker 1: But it's not really working.
Speaker 1: Here's some good news, and it's strange that it's the good news of the book of Lamentations, because Lamentations is so like.
Speaker 1: It's a giant mourning grief.
Speaker 1: It is a lament, it is.
Speaker 1: The world is horrible and I'm talking to God about it Half the time.
Speaker 1: I'm really angry at him and I'm also starting to get angry at myself.
Speaker 1: And here's the message of it it's that, amidst tremendous suffering, take heart because the God that is faithful to judge his people will also ultimately restore those who pray and wait.
Speaker 1: Take heart because God will ultimately restore those who pray and wait.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the first one to pull this idea apart Amidst tremendous suffering, tremendous suffering is what is happening.
Speaker 1: Remember to Lady Jerusalem.
Speaker 1: She's the one who's kind of like the voice in the first poem in chapter one.
Speaker 1: Remember to Lady Jerusalem.
Speaker 1: She's the one who's kind of like the voice in the first poem in chapter one and she's talking about this siege that has happened to the community.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to list for you some of the things that are happening in chapter one before I read a little bit.
Speaker 1: She's saying I was once great among the nations.
Speaker 1: She's saying all my friends have dealt treacherously with me, all my adversaries have become my master.
Speaker 1: The Lord has caused my grief because the multitude of my transgressions.
Speaker 1: I've got affliction.
Speaker 1: I've got homelessness.
Speaker 1: I am mocked.
Speaker 1: My enemies see my nakedness.
Speaker 1: I did not consider my future and there is no one to comfort me.
Speaker 1: Verse 18, that's where we're going to pick it up.
Speaker 1: She says the Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against his command, and she begins to wail.
Speaker 1: Just imagine this is the rant to God and the rant to everybody else, saying do you see this?
Speaker 1: Do you see the destruction that has happened to the chosen people's city?
Speaker 1: She's saying hear now, all peoples, and behold my pain.
Speaker 1: My virgins and my young men have gone into captivity.
Speaker 1: What is she saying there?
Speaker 1: She's saying there's no one left to have any babies.
Speaker 1: We're all just going to die out.
Speaker 1: They all got carted off to Babylon.
Speaker 1: We're just going to slowly dissipate and disappear.
Speaker 1: We're going to get dusted.
Speaker 1: My priests, my elders perished in the city while they sought food to restore their strength themselves.
Speaker 1: My leaders are gone.
Speaker 1: There's no one here to lead us.
Speaker 1: No one has an idea, no one has any clue how to deliver us of this.
Speaker 1: See, lord, for I am in distress.
Speaker 1: My spirit is greatly troubled, my heart is overturned within me, for I have been very rebellious in the street.
Speaker 1: The sword slays In the house.
Speaker 1: It's like death and I want you to hear, because we might have missed it, because it doesn't happen before this.
Speaker 1: This is the first time it actually happens.
Speaker 1: In verse 18, the Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against his command.
Speaker 1: I have been very rebellious.
Speaker 1: This is the first time.
Speaker 1: Lady Jerusalem and all these generations and saying you know what I deserve this?
Speaker 1: This is what the prophets were talking about.
Speaker 1: I kept telling them no, that can never happen to us.
Speaker 1: No, that's not how.
Speaker 1: Hey, just shut up, man, get out of here.
Speaker 1: We're doing our stuff, this is fine, god is fine with this, this is okay.
Speaker 1: And now she finally says she agrees.
Speaker 1: She agrees with what has happened and says this was wrong.
Speaker 1: God was right to do what he's doing.
Speaker 1: It's the realization that she has caused her own pain and it is blowing her mind.
Speaker 1: And she's realizing it was because I was stubborn.
Speaker 1: God kept telling us, he kept warning us, and yet I was stubborn.
Speaker 1: I want to read he kept warning us and yet I was stubborn.
Speaker 1: I want to read you some definitions.
Speaker 1: I wrote down a bunch of definitions of stubbornness.
Speaker 1: I think it'll help us today.
Speaker 1: Stubbornness is proud and disobedient resistance to God's will and rejection of his commands.
Speaker 1: It's being tenaciously unwilling to yield.
Speaker 1: It's resolute adherence to your own ideas.
Speaker 1: It's the desire to disregard the overwhelming evidence against you.
Speaker 1: It's your way or no way.
Speaker 1: It is an unyielding resistance to learn the lessons that other people are trying to help you learn, and yet you won't learn them.
Speaker 1: It's determination which we might say is good, but it's determination taken too far to our own destruction.
Speaker 1: Aristotle said we need to distinguish between different kinds of stubbornness.
Speaker 1: There's good stubbornness, which is I'm so stubborn about I'm not going to give myself to evil, and then there's bad stubbornness that, no matter what the evidence, no matter what you tell me, I will not admit that I am wrong.
Speaker 1: Guys, we got to be very careful when we start to think well, it can't be me, that's wrong.
Speaker 1: Yikes, if you ever have that thought it can't be me, that's wrong, that means the noose is around your neck right now.
Speaker 1: It can always be you that's wrong.
Speaker 1: The doy, it can always be you that's wrong.
Speaker 1: It's a stubborn, prideful heart that would ever dare to think that I can't be wrong.
Speaker 1: Have you met you?
Speaker 1: Of course you can be wrong.
Speaker 1: Think about all your worst decisions in life.
Speaker 1: That was you being wrong, and you didn't think about it then, and so you can be wrong again.
Speaker 1: We all got these issues, man.
Speaker 1: Here's one little caution.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we can be thinking about our own lives like this.
Speaker 1: Like man, I'm kind of like lady jerusalem, like I was stubborn, I ignored all the signs, and that's why I'm in some of this pain and then we can look at somebody else's life and we can want to point it out to them.
Speaker 1: Well, I know what's wrong with you.
Speaker 1: You're rebellious and stubborn and that's why you're in all this hardship.
Speaker 1: And, my friends, that's a dumb way to be a friend, because the truth is, the Bible teaches we can't know that about somebody else.
Speaker 1: We can have the gift of revelation given to ourselves.
Speaker 1: But think about Job's friends.
Speaker 1: They come around, they're giving him all this advice about how much he jacks stuff up and really all they were supposed to do was just sit there and be with him and say man, people suffer and I don't always know why people suffer, and that's true.
Speaker 1: Not all of our suffering is because God is disciplining us in some way, like directly.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just because we're in the vicinity of other sinners and their sin hurts us amidst tremendous suffering.
Speaker 1: Which is what is happening.
Speaker 1: The God who is faithful to judge his people?
Speaker 1: The perspective changes.
Speaker 1: Now it's not Lady Jerusalem talking, we're in chapter two, and now it is a narrator, or it's the one who's watching all this.
Speaker 1: He's watching all this unfold.
Speaker 1: Verse 17 says the Lord has done what he purposed.
Speaker 1: He accomplished his word which he commanded from days of old.
Speaker 1: And then we flip back in the Bible all the way back to Deuteronomy 28,.
Speaker 1: Verse 63 says just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you.
Speaker 1: You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.
Speaker 1: Then the Lord will scatter you among the nations, from one end of the earth to the other.
Speaker 1: I want to clarify it's not that the Lord is enjoying that.
Speaker 1: It says it pleases him to ruin and destroy you.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean he delights in the fact that they're suffering.
Speaker 1: In fact, we'll see later in the text he says the very opposite of that.
Speaker 1: What he's delighting in is finally there is justice.
Speaker 1: Finally justice is being answered.
Speaker 1: Let's consider an idea.
Speaker 1: Let's say you're aware of a wife that is being brutally beaten every day by her husband and you're pleading with her.
Speaker 1: Why don't you go to the police?
Speaker 1: Why don't you get this to stop?
Speaker 1: And she's like well, because I love him.
Speaker 1: I love him and it just causes me to have all this extra grace and extra mercy.
Speaker 1: And there would come a point when she finally goes to the police and presses charges.
Speaker 1: There's part of you.
Speaker 1: That would be like I don't want him to go get the punishment that is coming to him.
Speaker 1: And yet I do.
Speaker 1: I want the justice.
Speaker 1: She deserves justice for what has been done to her.
Speaker 1: That's what God is saying.
Speaker 1: He's delighting that justice is finally done.
Speaker 1: When they finally are carted off to Babylon, justice is done in one sense.
Speaker 1: And God is saying, yeah, you betrayed me generation after generation after generation and you hurt one another.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, I don't delight in your pain, but I delight that finally justice comes.
Speaker 1: But the point is God was just fulfilling his word.
Speaker 1: He already told them about that long, long ago.
Speaker 1: And what is he doing?
Speaker 1: He's being a father.
Speaker 1: He's being a good father, he's not.
Speaker 1: He's not enjoying the fact that they're hurting.
Speaker 1: But he says I believe in you so much I am willing to allow a little bit of pain to come into your life to get you back to the way you should go.
Speaker 1: I once heard somebody say the one thing more frightening than the discipline of God is who you would be without it.
Speaker 1: See, god sees what's coming.
Speaker 1: God knows every one of our futures, every potentiality, and he says I love them so much I'm going to give them a little bit of pressure.
Speaker 1: You're going to feel a little bit of pressure.
Speaker 1: God's going to give you a little bit of pressure.
Speaker 1: You're going to feel a little bit of pressure.
Speaker 1: God's going to give you a little bit of pressure and you're going to feel it, but it's going to cause you to stop and think and reconsider and reconsider that stubbornness, he's being who he said he would be.
Speaker 1: So many of you know that I was sick in my early twenties for four and a half years.
Speaker 1: It was a whole deal.
Speaker 1: You can hear about it in other sermons.
Speaker 1: But I was on about year three and I'm walking down the hall and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and my body's emaciated and I'm you know, I'm just looking, you know skeletal and I'm looking at myself in the mirror.
Speaker 1: Now, in the first two years, if you would have asked me and I was going to answer honestly I would say something like man, I don't know why God is doing this and I don't like it.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to trust him, but I don't know why I have to be sick like this.
Speaker 1: But for some reason, on year three, something clicked over and, as I caught a picture of myself in the mirror, the thing that came out of my spirit and I really believe it was the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1: It's not that I'm very godly.
Speaker 1: The thing that came out of my spirit was wow, he must really love me so much that he's willing to put me through this to get what he's after in my heart.
Speaker 1: That's not even a common thing, like that's too safe for me to think.
Speaker 1: Okay, and yet that's what was going through my mind.
Speaker 1: Wow, he must really love me.
Speaker 1: He loves me so much he will allow me to experience this temporary pain in order to protect me from whoever I would have become without this.
Speaker 1: And why?
Speaker 1: Because he's a good father.
Speaker 1: The narrator goes on.
Speaker 1: Their heart cried out to the Lord oh, what wall of daughter of Zion.
Speaker 1: Let your tears run down like a river day and night.
Speaker 1: Give yourself no relief.
Speaker 1: Now, check it out.
Speaker 1: Check it out, because Lady Jerusalem is getting distracted.
Speaker 1: Now she's like man, it's so bad.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, but it's so bad.
Speaker 1: But listen, it's bad.
Speaker 1: Hey, it's almost slipping away.
Speaker 1: And the narrator comes.
Speaker 1: Let your tears run down like a river day and night.
Speaker 1: Give yourself no relief.
Speaker 1: Let your eyes have no rest, arise.
Speaker 1: Cry aloud in the night, at the beginning of the night.
Speaker 1: Watch as you pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord.
Speaker 1: Lift up your hands to him for the life of your little ones who are faint because of hunger.
Speaker 1: And at the head of every street, he's saying no, no, no, ladies, it's time to pray.
Speaker 1: Don't give up now.
Speaker 1: Don't resign yourself to this.
Speaker 1: It's time to pray now.
Speaker 1: You have real needs right now.
Speaker 1: Pray about those now.
Speaker 1: And you have stuff that you can even see coming.
Speaker 1: Pray about that now.
Speaker 1: Don't just give over.
Speaker 1: Don't just give in.
Speaker 1: Look, god is a God of his word.
Speaker 1: Get on it now.
Speaker 1: Get on your knees.
Speaker 1: Get that stuff.
Speaker 1: You're aware of what you need Now.
Speaker 1: Pray for it.
Speaker 1: Don't stop.
Speaker 1: Start, start to pray for what it is you're going to need.
Speaker 1: And there are things.
Speaker 1: There are things you know.
Speaker 1: When you're in that trial, when you're in that difficult, pinched place, you're like I'll tell you what would be nice, this, this and this.
Speaker 1: Pray that.
Speaker 1: Say God, I'm going to give you no rest until you begin to restore these things.
Speaker 1: But then I can even see a little bit down the road and I'll tell you what I'd like to happen.
Speaker 1: And when I was sick, this is what I would do.
Speaker 1: I just sit there and dream, god.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're ever going to heal me.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is ever going to go away, but if you do, here's some things that I want.
Speaker 1: Here's some things I want to be able to do for you and Lord, I just ask you, make it a little bit sweet, why?
Speaker 1: Because this was hard and I had lists and lists and notebooks and notebooks of.
Speaker 1: I want you to do all this, god.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you will, but it's time to pray now.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to wait and see if you deliver me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to believe you're delivering me and I'm going to pray what I want.
Speaker 1: To be true, then, and they're beginning to believe it amidst tremendous suffering the god, who is faithful to judge his people, he will ultimately restore those who pray and wait.
Speaker 1: And so here she goes.
Speaker 1: Verse you're gonna love this.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, oh, you're gonna love it.
Speaker 1: Chapter three, chapter three in the midst of lamentations, in the midst of thisations, in the midst of this heartbreak, in the midst of this crying and anguish, she's getting a little sidetracked again.
Speaker 1: Verse 19,.
Speaker 1: Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and the bitterness.
Speaker 1: Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me.
Speaker 1: Uh-oh, ding, light bulb goes on.
Speaker 1: This I recall to my mind this.
Speaker 1: I recall to my mind.
Speaker 1: Therefore, I have hope.
Speaker 1: Now listen to this, because you've seen these scriptures on plaques, you've seen them on pictures, you've seen them in somebody's bathroom.
Speaker 1: You're like that's a nice verse.
Speaker 1: Oh, it makes me feel so pretty and good.
Speaker 1: And here's where it is, in the middle, in the very middle of the middle chapter of Lamentations.
Speaker 1: It is the bullseye, it is the thing that the prophet, the poet, is circling and saying this.
Speaker 1: This is what this is about.
Speaker 1: And he's saying the Lord's loving kindnesses, indeed, never cease.
Speaker 1: His compassions never fail.
Speaker 1: They are new every morning.
Speaker 1: Great is your faithfulness.
Speaker 1: The Lord is my portion, says the Lord.
Speaker 1: Therefore, I will have hope in him.
Speaker 1: And this is deep, my friends, this is deeply theological.
Speaker 1: This is the Lord saying.
Speaker 1: I put it in Holy Scripture that in the most pain that I'm aware of, even when you're blaming me, there is a message of in the midst of that remember who I am, remember that I am the God whose compassions fail not and I love verse 24.
Speaker 1: This is what she says.
Speaker 1: The Lord is my portion, says my soul.
Speaker 1: Because what did she think before.
Speaker 1: The stuff was my portion.
Speaker 1: This is my portion and that is my portion, and this dream is my portion.
Speaker 1: The stuff was my portion.
Speaker 1: This is my portion and that is my portion, and this dream is my portion.
Speaker 1: And these relationships are my portion and this is my portion.
Speaker 1: And this nice stuff is my portion, and none of that is her portion and none of it is our portion.
Speaker 1: The Lord himself is my portion.
Speaker 1: You can take everything away, but I still have my portion.
Speaker 1: My portion is Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what I lose, and that's part of the purpose of the discipline.
Speaker 1: Let's take away all these crutches, all these things that you think you need.
Speaker 1: You don't need them at all.
Speaker 1: The Lord himself, he gave himself to you in marriage.
Speaker 1: He is still your God.
Speaker 1: He might take away the stuff, but he ain't gonna take away him.
Speaker 1: And if he's the one who gave you all the stuff to begin with, come on somebody.
Speaker 1: He's the one who can give anything he wants to back and better For those who will wait on the Lord.
Speaker 1: And so that's exactly what she says.
Speaker 1: The Lord is good verse 25, to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him, it is good that he waits silently for the Lord.
Speaker 1: This waiting thing, man, this waiting thing is hard, but waiting has a tremendous effect on our motives.
Speaker 1: See, when we have to wait, you know that sometimes you've been in a lot of pain, maybe you've gotten a shot and it really hurt, and someone just says, okay, try to relax, try to relax, just relax, just absorb the fact that you are in pain right now and try to relax and slow down.
Speaker 1: And once we're finally relaxed, you know what happens.
Speaker 1: Now we can learn, once I'm stopped arguing with it, once I'm wow, it probably means this or I'm figuring out this way no be, still be, still Wait, and then wait again, and then wait longer and wait so you can finally shut your mouth and listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit, because his lessons come slow and quiet.
Speaker 1: That's the lessons that he teaches when we're waiting.
Speaker 1: That means I trust God is going to act when it's time to act.
Speaker 1: And then the next day I say the same thing.
Speaker 1: I trust today again, that God's going to act when it's time to act.
Speaker 1: And then the next day and the next week and the next month, and sometimes the next year, I'm trusting and believing God is going to act when it's time.
Speaker 1: I'm waiting on him.
Speaker 1: He has all the files.
Speaker 1: They're on his desk.
Speaker 1: He will do it when it's time.
Speaker 1: That's what happens to those who wait on the Lord Verse 27,.
Speaker 1: It is good that a man should bear the yoke in his youth.
Speaker 1: Let him sit alone and be silent.
Speaker 1: Since he has laid it, god has laid it on him.
Speaker 1: Let him put his mouth in the dust.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there's hope.
Speaker 1: This idea of yoke many of you know what this is.
Speaker 1: This is a piece of farm equipment that they would put on two oxen One was older and one was younger.
Speaker 1: And they were put on together so they couldn't get away from one another.
Speaker 1: So the young one would learn hey, this is how we lead this thing, this is how we move the cart that is behind us, whatever it is we're carrying.
Speaker 1: I'm teaching you this is how we carry it.
Speaker 1: Younger ox.
Speaker 1: But you know, jesus also has a yoke.
Speaker 1: He says come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Speaker 1: Take my yoke upon you, for I am gentle and humble of heart and I will give you rest for your souls, for my yoke.
Speaker 1: It's a yoke, but it's easy.
Speaker 1: My burden is light.
Speaker 1: It's good to bear the yoke of hardship and discipline and wait on the Lord and submit to it If Jesus is the other one in the yoke with you, because he'll teach you the right way.
Speaker 1: What's he trying to do?
Speaker 1: Well, like the oxen, he's trying to straighten some stuff out.
Speaker 1: That's what he's trying to do.
Speaker 1: He says all the yokes the world gives you, they're all way heavy compared to what I give you.
Speaker 1: My friends.
Speaker 1: I remember thinking this when I was sick.
Speaker 1: All those years I remember thinking you know, jesus, your word says it is good for a man to bear the yoke when he is young, in his youth.
Speaker 1: And I was like I'm in my twenties.
Speaker 1: So, lord, if it really is good, here's what I'm asking you to do.
Speaker 1: If it's good that I do this when I'm young, then I want some decades when this pays off.
Speaker 1: I want to bear the yoke when I'm young.
Speaker 1: So I am trained, so I don't need this lesson 17 more times before I'm 52.
Speaker 1: I don't want the lesson again and again and again.
Speaker 1: Let me just get it now, wherever you are, whatever age you are.
Speaker 1: How about we just get it now?
Speaker 1: Let's just do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, you missed the young part.
Speaker 1: Well, you're still kind of young.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it now.
Speaker 1: Hey, by faith, your youth is renewed, but like the eagle, so you're young in that sense too.
Speaker 1: Let's just do it now.
Speaker 1: Let's just submit now.
Speaker 1: Quit going around the mountain, quit trying to get away from it and just get under the yoke with Jesus and let him do his savior thing.
Speaker 1: Well, we're still going, jesus, oh my.
Speaker 1: And trust his heart.
Speaker 1: We're gonna end this is the ending part soon.
Speaker 1: And trust his heart.
Speaker 1: Let him give his cheek to the smiter, let him be filled with reproach, for the Lord will not reject forever, for he causes grief.
Speaker 1: If he causes grief, then you also have compassion, according to his abundant loving kindness.
Speaker 1: Check this out here.
Speaker 1: It is here's God's heart.
Speaker 1: He does not afflict, willingly or grieve the sons of men, but he does allow them to reap the fruits of their own choices and the choices of others, and he intends to use them.
Speaker 1: If they just yoke up with Jesus, he intends to use them.
Speaker 1: I've got a friend named Perry.
Speaker 1: He's a mega church pastor and in 2016, he was fired from his church of 40,000 people for alcoholism.
Speaker 1: He'd been kind of secretly living this alcoholic life and he went into rehab.
Speaker 1: He's been here before.
Speaker 1: Some of you met him.
Speaker 1: He went into rehab and once he got out he knew, because he had a lot of followers and folks and stuff.
Speaker 1: And there were some that were just mad at the church for firing him.
Speaker 1: They're like I can't believe they did this to you.
Speaker 1: What are they doing?
Speaker 1: I had so much respect for him because he came online and he said hey guys, look, don't be mad at the church, don't be mad at who did this, because I was the one pouring the drinks every day.
Speaker 1: Right away, he had the spiritual fortitude to say I did it.
Speaker 1: Look, yeah, other things happened and I could blame everything else.
Speaker 1: I could blame other people.
Speaker 1: That may be a part of that equation in some strange way, but I was the one pouring the drinks and that is part of where God wants to get us to say God, I'm sick of defending myself, I'm sick of trying to find reasons why I should be okay in some way.
Speaker 1: Hey, if those are real, then they'll be shown, but our job is to get under the yoke, and getting under the yoke, says Jesus.
Speaker 1: I think maybe I'm responsible for a little bit more of this than I've been taking credit for and I wanna ask, in your mercy, that you now straighten it out and let's do it ASAP.
Speaker 1: We all experience loss and failure.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's because we're stubborn and we know it.
Speaker 1: Other times it's because we're stubborn and we don't know it.
Speaker 1: But for those who will be patient and wait and pray and let their heart break and cry out like Lady Jerusalem and say God, now's the time.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm grieving here.
Speaker 1: My grief is real and these circumstances are real, but they're not the final word over my life.
Speaker 1: This is not the last chapter and, my friends, there's a spiritual discipline of optimism, of imagining.
Speaker 1: There is a version of my life.
Speaker 1: This is not the last chapter and, my friends, there's a spiritual discipline of optimism, of imagining.
Speaker 1: There is a version of my life.
Speaker 1: For many of us, there's a version of my life that is much different than this version.
Speaker 1: It's way different.
Speaker 1: There's still time on the clock.
Speaker 1: If God gives me grace, there's still time on the clock, and who knows what he'll do later, and some of you guys know this.
Speaker 1: I should just say it as an asterisk Some of it it doesn't really get redeemed until heaven.
Speaker 1: You won't really understand what that was about until later You're close enough.
Speaker 1: There's really no time to do the dream version of redemption that you have in your heart.
Speaker 1: But you don't know how God's gonna use that later.
Speaker 1: You don't know how, down through your posterity, god that might help somebody.
Speaker 1: You don't know how even the video you made about it helps somebody in the future.
Speaker 1: You don't know what can you do.
Speaker 1: You can trust him.
Speaker 1: You can wait believingly, even right through death.
Speaker 1: Believe that God is good and the same God that promised that if I strayed he would bring appropriate loving fatherly discipline.
Speaker 1: He's the same God.
Speaker 1: If I can trust him for the bad, I can trust him for the good.
Speaker 1: Are we hearing this today?
Speaker 1: The final word over your life has not been spoken, at least not in your head.
Speaker 1: It's up to Jesus.
Speaker 1: I want to challenge us today.
Speaker 1: I want to do some business with God.
Speaker 1: I want to come to him and ask for strength for some of us that we would be able to press through that trying time, that lamentations type time For some of us.
Speaker 1: I want to pray for discernment.
Speaker 1: I want to pray that maybe there's some stubbornness that everybody else knows about in you but you and that that would come to light, because the sooner the better, and I want to pray for a light on in your heart, faith that God can make life way different if you'll trust him and get under that yoke with Jesus.
Speaker 1: I don't know what he's gonna do, but here's what I know.
Speaker 1: I know it's good and it's better than you and I can imagine.
Speaker 1: Let's bow our heads.
Speaker 1: Wow, god, you are the same yesterday, today and forever.
Speaker 1: And we know, jesus, you are so tender and you are so gentle and you took all the consequences of our sin on yourself.
Speaker 1: And yet here on earth, as we're experiencing, sometimes the fruit of our own choices, we ask in your mercy, lord, that you turn our hearts back again to you.
Speaker 1: Show us any stubbornness, show us any places.
Speaker 1: Yes, other people were involved, but it was our choices that contributed a lot to it too.
Speaker 1: God, help us to come under the yoke with Jesus.
Speaker 1: And finally, oh my gosh, I'm so tired of defending myself.
Speaker 1: Help me finally find rest for my soul in Christ and Lord for everyone, in the sound of my voice, I'm asking you to redeem Maybe not give them back exactly what they lost, but redeem it Somehow, work it for good in a way that say God be praised.
Speaker 1: I can't believe he used that bad thing in that good way.
Speaker 1: We trust you.
Speaker 1: You are a good God.
Speaker 1: We believed you that you would send the good things.
Speaker 1: We trust you now in the bad things and we believe good things are on the way, in Christ's name, amen.
Speaker 1: Hey, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 1: If you don't have a home church and you're looking for a Bible preaching community that has its heart set on passionately knowing Jesus and being his witness in our generation, check out Fierce Church.
Speaker 1: We'd love for you to join us, either digitally or in person.
Speaker 1: Also, if you're looking for leadership development related content, don't forget to check out the Fierce Leadership Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts from.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to those of you who give generously to support this ministry.
Speaker 1: It's because of you that this is possible.
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Speaker 1: Whatever challenges you're facing, I know you can make it.
Speaker 1: Don't give up.
Speaker 1: Hang on to Jesus.
Speaker 1: He won't let go of you.
Speaker 1: Jesus loves you so much and we love you.
Speaker 1: I hope someday we get to meet in person.
Speaker 1: Thanks again for listening.