"Into Your Hands"
(*Flash Presentation at conclusion of message*)
(As delivered by Dr. Dwight Garrett on Sunday - August 13, 2007 at, Friends Of Truth Christian Fellowship Church)
Sometimes Life can be difficult. Being a Christian in a non-Chrisitan world poses all kinds of problems. Wouldn’t you agree?
See:
- The world does not know Jesus. Like we know Him.
- The world does not love Him. Like we love Him.
- The world does not understand why He came. Like we understand it.
However:
- We, do know Jesus.
- We do love Him.
- And, we do understand why He came. He came to save us from our sins and to give us new life.
- He came to bring us comfort, peace and joy in the Spirit.
- He came so we can have fellowship with God. And so that we can have life everlasting – beyond this world.
These things we already know. And we also know that though we are saved from sin and filled with the Spirit of God, life in this world still is not perfect. It is still difficult.
The Christian is, in a sense, in a battle with the world. And the world is at war with the Christian -- with you and I. The world offers vices, self-fulfillment, and greed. The world wants to convert you to its paganism, to its ungodly devotion to the unholy.
And if you don’t conform, if you don’t bend your knees to its idols and sacrifices, you will be ridiculed, mocked, and attacked.
In more simpler terms the world is against those who profess Christ. Satan tries his hardest to wage war against us. And in the battle there are all sorts of struggles.
On the inside, we struggle against:
Sin – pride – lust – greed – boasting - and various wantings.
On the outside, we struggle against:
Illness – poverty - marriage problems - job difficulties - and sometimes we become unsure about our future, and more.
Maybe right now some of you are facing a serious struggle. Or maybe you’ve recently had to deal with a difficult situation that has yet to be resolved. Maybe you fear that one is coming.
As a Christian, what do you do when life is coming down on you hard, when there seems to be no way out, when your relationship with God is being affected? When you are worried or afraid? When you are anxious and in distress?
What do you do when you are facing monumental obstacles? How do your resist temptation, flee from evil, or believe beyond your ability to understand how your problems can be solved?
The answer lies in Jesus and in His Word.
Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
There are 4 simple parts to this portion of scripture I want to take a look at this morning. They are – very simply:
- Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
- Lean not on your own understanding.
- In all your ways acknowledge Him.
And in doing so:
- He will make your paths straight and bring you to a safe place and into understanding.
First there is:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
The call on the Christian is to have the sort of trust that makes us prepared to put our entire lives into God's hands.
Just like it says in Proverbs 3, Verse 5
Trust in the Lord with all your heart .
Sometimes we think: “Oh, that’s not too difficult because we believe in God – and in doing so, we have a certain trust in Him”.
But, simply believing in God is no good to us. We are to have faith, and trust is the practical outworking of our faith.
Faith in God sometimes seems easier said than done, doesn't it? It's hard to pin down exactly what it means; it's hard to know whether we really have "true trust through faith".
We can all understand trust, though, can't we?
After all we find ourselves having to trust people everyday.
- We trust whoever built our homes that it's not going to fall in on our heads.
- We trust the bank with our money.
- We trust whoever designed our vehicles that they won’t malfunction and hurt us in some way.
For those of you who fly on airplanes,
- You put your trust in the pilots and co-pilots that they will get you to your destinations safely.
- You place your trust in the maintenance crews that they did their jobs thoroughly and in the air-traffic control people that your flight will be safe and free from any and all incidences.
We exercise trust all the time, quite unthinkingly in fact.
Sometimes our trust in people is just there and we don’t even give it much thought. So we know what it means to have trust.
But, what about when it comes to God? Do we have complete and uninterrupted trust in Him? To trust Him and in Him, is also to have faith in Him.
Trust is the practical outworking of faith: it is when we trust God that we show that our faith in Him is real.
The call here is not to a piecemeal trust in God. No, it's to a complete trust in God: trusting him with our whole lives. We are not to pick and choose.
- Sometimes we trust Him with our marriages - but not with our career.
- Sometimes we trust Him with our physical health - but not our family’s well-being.
- Sometimes we trust Him with our occupations - but not with our finances.
- Sometimes we trust Him with our lives behind the safety of closed doors - but not when we venture out into the world.
- Sometimes we trust Him in part – but not totally and in full.
We are to trust him with our whole hearts and put our whole lives in his hands.
The Christian, who has put his or her faith in God has to get a right understanding of Him and trust Him ALL the time in ALL things and particularly when we face challenges in our lives. We are to trust in the Lord with all our hearts.
How can we make sure that we are trusting in God with all our hearts?
Second: Lean not on our own understanding.
One problem is that we sometimes think we know better than God. All of us are tempted in the manner of verse 7, "do not be wise in your own eyes"
We think we know better than God, but the reality is that, like Adam and Eve in the beginning, our wisdom and understanding is weak, crooked and unreliable. Like a worm-riddled walking-stick, if we lean on it. It will surely snap and break and we're going to fall over.
Nonetheless, we persist in trying to do things our own way, believing somehow that our ways are better than God's ways. That we know better than Him.
We try to meet Him halfway and we try to live our lives half His way – and half our way – and it doesn’t work – and we wonder why.
We are sometimes skeptical of putting our lives totally into His Hands. We believe in our own understanding of life’s circumstances – and how to meet challenges face to face, and that it is better our way than it is God’s way.
I’ve even had people tell me that God simply doesn’t understand what their circumstances and challenges are like – and that if He did – He wouldn’t have ever left things happen to begin with.
But nothing can be furtherest from the truth than that way of thinking.
But that's what we try to do all the time. We believe we know better how to run our lives than God; we try to lean on our own understanding.
We would do well to let Solomon who wrote these very words we're looking at be an example to us of the dangers of leaning on our own understanding.
He started off brilliantly as king, by asking God for wisdom and then building the temple for Him.
At first Solomon pleased God and was obedient to him, but then he began to think he knew better than God. He acquired an army for himself and imported horses from Egypt; he accumulated vast amounts of silver and gold and built himself a palace even more opulent than the temple he'd just built.
He had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He began to opress the people.
All of this was in direct contravention of the laws for kings laid down in Deuteronomy 17 of which Solomon was well aware. He simply thought he knew better than God.
He leaned on his own understanding and the eventual result was the split in the kingdom of Israel and effectively the end of God's people as a whole nation.
In the same way, if we persist in leaning on our own understanding rather than trusting in God with all our hearts then our lives will also end in ruin.
What is the alternative to leaning on our own understanding?
It is to lean instead on God's truth. God's ways are not our ways, so we need to learn them from somewhere.
All we need to do is look back a little to Proverbs chapter 2 verse 6 where it says,
“the Lord gives wisdom and from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding.”
This is solid, reliable understanding that we can lean on, that we can build our lives upon. It is the understanding written for us in the Bible: words from God's Mouth.
Lean not on your own understanding. Lean instead on the wisdom of God's Word. As we daily read and understand His Word we will be learning to think His thoughts after Him.
And that will help us as we seek to trust in him with all our hearts.
Third: In all your ways acknowledge Him.
The emphasis in this particular portion of our text is not so much on simply acknowledging God, which is pretty much taken for granted, but on the all your ways part. In all your ways acknowledge him.
Running right through the lives of many, many people in churches today is a dividing wall between what they see as their Christian lives and what they see as their non-Christian lives. This is the so-called sacred–secular divide.
The sacred–secular divide is the assumption that “God cares about”
- What we do on Sunday morning in church - but not on Monday morning in our homes and our places of work.
- It is the assumption that God cares about whom we give our money to - but not how we earn that money in the first place.
- It is the assumption that God cares which church we attend - but not which house we live in.
- It is the assumption that God cares about our Bible reading time - but not about our television viewing.
- It is the assumption that God cares about our sins - but not about our toothache or headache.
We all make these kind of assumptions at one time or another in our lives: our lives are divided up into the secular and the sacred and we build our own version of the Berlin Wall that keeps us separated from God.
And sadly this often-times suits us. There are parts of our lives that sometimes we just don't want God interfering with – and that is a dangerous place in which to venture.
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan speaking to the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, near the Berlin wall, cried out to then Soviet President Gorbachev - "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" – and this morning I call out to everyone in this room and to Christians around the world to – “Tear down this wall” and to let God help you tear it down.
God passionately wants to break down that dividing wall and to be God of our whole lives: for us to trust in him with all our hearts.
And in this verse he tells us how to do that:
"in ALL ways acknoweldge Him"
The call is to take every part of our lives, every minute of every day and to acknowledge that all of it is part of our journey with God.
Not one part of the Christian's life should be secular:
- God is there with us in the office or work place;
- He is there with us as we drive our cars;
- He is there with us as we pick the kids up from school.
- He is watching television with us;
- He is with us all the time – everyday.
All of this is sacred, not just for church time, home group time or quiet-time bits.
Let's acknowledge him in all our ways.
We can get an indication of how well we are acknowledging God in all our ways by looking at what we pray for, what we are thankful for and what we worry about.
Once while talking with a friend of mine - he was moaning and complaining about his work. He didn’t seem to be going anywhere with his occupation – seemingly a dead-end job:
I asked him: "Do you pray for your work?" --- “Do you pray for change and for the opportunity to advance?”
and my friend told me: “No I don’t”.
So I encouraged him to begin praying about it, and to begin relying on God to take him further up the corporate ladder – and to put it in the Hands of God. And he agreed to give it an honest try.
He did, and today my friend is Vice President in charge of operations with his company, and he is making more money than he ever dreamed he could make. And it is all because he acknowledged God – and left God handle all the details. And it is because my friend put his trust in our Lord and Saviour – not partially – but in full.
Thanking God is another way of acknowledging him in all our ways. So we make a point as a family of saying grace before all our meals, not just as a ritual, and not just thanking him for our food, but for all our blessings that day whatever they might be. It helps us to acknowledge God in all our ways.
Another indicator is:
Are the things we worry about different from those we pray about?
They often are for me: Which is more clear evidence of the sacred–secular divide. I worry about money, but sometimes I fail to pray about it. Now how strange is that? Here I am talking to you about trusting in God for all things, and to pray about our concerns and to put it all into God’s Hands and yet I fail in some areas.
It is because we ALL do it. All of us – including myself – need to “Tear down that wall”.
The apostle Paul was keen to break down this sacred–secular divide to his listeners when he wrote these words in Philippians chapter 4 verses 4-7 which some of us know well,
Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.
Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.
Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.
And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
In all your ways acknowledge him.
The danger of persisting in the sacred–secular divide is that we will be half in God’s Hands, and half out. Frankly that's not going to be very comfortable, and there is always the possibility that we might fall completely.
Fourth and finally but not leastly:
He will make your paths straight.
On the face of it this looks like an encouraging promise, and it is.
It's a promise that with God's help as we trust in Him we will eventually reach the destination that He has in mind for us.
An eternity of joy in his presence.
But it is also a little bit of a warning. It reminds us that our path in life is God's path, and His way may not be the way we would have chosen for ourselves.
As Jesus said, in Matthew 7:14
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
God's path is not the path we would naturally take, and God's idea of a straight path is not necessarily our idea of a straight path.
So the final element of learning to trust in God with all our hearts is being prepared to go wherever he is taking us. It may not seem like the path of least resistance at the time, but looking back we will always see that it was the straight path after all.
Sometimes there will seem to be insurmountable obstacles in our way, and we will begin to doubt that this is the straight path that God is leading us on.
But this is all part of learning to trust in the Lord with all our hearts. Removing the obstacles is his job! He will make your paths straight.
We often read about these things in the biographies of great Christians of times past. They try to follow where they believe God is leading but huge obstacles loom up in their way. Humanly speaking the situation seems impossible, but this is God's way of teaching us to trust Him with all our hearts. We need to trust His promise to clear the path before us.
He will make your paths straight too if you trust in Him with all your heart. So be prepared to go where God is taking you to, and be prepared to trust in him to make the path straight.
When we put our lives in His Hands, we go where God wants to take us.
And we will arrive safe and sound and we will be in a much better place in our lives.
In Conclusion:
I just want to recap as we finish.
- Trust in the Lord with all your heart: in other words, put your life in His Hands!
- Lean not on your own understanding: in other words, don't reach out to Him with one Hand and try to embrace yourself and your struggles with the other. God wants to take hold of both of your hands and He reaches out with both of His.
- In all your ways acknowledge him: in other words make sure you are fully in tune with Him, and not in some ways – some of the time – but in all ways – all of the time.
- He will make your paths straight: in other words, be prepared to go where God wants to take you. And trust him to make the way clear.
When crossing a busy street or a parking lot, my little girls instinctively reach out and take hold of my hands. They have faith and they have trust that daddy will lead them safely to the other side and they rely on the fact that daddy will make sure the pathway is clear and that no harm will come to them.
In much the same way we too need to have a solid trust in our Lord and Saviour that He too will lead us onto the right pathway and that the way will be clear and that no harm will come to us.
Into His Hands we need to surrender all our hopes – all our dreams – all our fears – sorrows – pleasures and joys.
The Hands that took the nails upon that rugged tree – are strong enough to shelter – shield – and carry me (us).
It is my prayer this morning that everyone within the sound of my voice will commit all that they are into His Hands and that you will find comfort and peace, and rest wherever your future may lead.
Jesus is reaching out to you this morning – not with just one Hand – but with both Hands.
He beacons you to trust Him and to take hold of His loving Hands and He wants to lead you – guide you – and protect you in and through all areas of you life.
- Won’t you give Him your all this morning?
- Won’t you trust Him today?
- Won’t you let Him take you safely to places you have never been before? Places beyond all of your hopes and dreams.
Today is the day we need to begin to trust all of our all to Jesus.
If you have never trusted Jesus before, and in the quietness of your heart, won’t you accept His invitation today – and commit all of who you are:
“Into Your (His) Hands”.
The flash video presentation below says so much – please watch it and listen as Jesus speaks to your heart.
God Bless!