-Transcript-
00:24 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:29 Welcome to the cafe. Welcome to KJV Cafe. My name is Pastor Clark Covington from Heartland Community Church, right at Kings Mountain, North Carolina.
00:35 Just a small little fellowship here. I’m so glad that you joined me today on the radio, amen. We are talking about God’s goodness and forgiveness.
00:44 I’m so excited about that. We’re talking about not being worried about things. I’m so excited about that.
00:50 We’re talking about God’s plan for us. I’m so excited about that. I hope you are too here today, amen.
00:57 It is nasty outside. It’s cold and rainy and we don’t know what. It’s North Carolina foothills weather in January and man, I mean, with the kids this morning reading about the beach, I was like, ooh, I’m ready, Lord.
01:09 This is some ugly weather, but I know the rain is good. We need that, I guess, for the plants or agriculture or something. I know we need the rain, so we thank God for it, but yeah, it is a, ooh, this weather is something else.
01:21 And you know what? In this kind of dark, dreary weather, I could see somebody thinking, oh, you know, I’m someone that likes sunlight. I’m someone that likes, I love the light, amen. I’m a natural light person.
01:36 We got a lot of windows in our house. I love the light. And when it’s dark and dreary like this, and I praise God, I don’t have that today going on, but it’s easy to get down and it’s easy to worry.
01:45 And I know that God knows that you worry and he doesn’t want you to worry. But you know, God knows all things. By the way, God made all things.
01:56 He made you. And have you thought about this? He made your emotions. This includes the emotion of worrying.
02:05 And if you go into John 1:1, you know, it tells us very clearly that Jesus Christ himself made all things and without him, nothing was made. And so we see that Jesus Christ made worrying, you’re like, why would God make worrying?
02:17 And you know, this is a deep issue. And some people will be like, well, God made man and sin entered the picture.
02:24 And then man became corrupt and the sin curse happened. And that’s all true. But again, if God made all things, then he made worrying.
02:33 And I believe the reason why he made worrying is so that we would turn to him and then not worry and see how effective that is, that, you know, it’s kind of like if you, you know, you want to, sometimes you want to love on your children a little bit to the point where they realize going to mom and dad is not a bad thing,
02:52 you know, and that’s, that’s a delicate balance. But, you know, with a teenager, I think that that’s very important. You know, sometimes you just kind of need to love on them a little bit and, you know,
03:03 because the teenage years are so mystifying, I might say, having a teenager in the house, you sometimes got to just love on them.
03:14 So it’s like, yeah, they’re still going to go to mom and dad. It’s not like mom and dad are the enemy, right?
03:16 And when we worry and we turn to God, we realize how good God is and that we realize, you know, I think everybody on earth will, you know, if they were honest, would admit they’re created, you know, by an intelligent creator. They’re honest to limit that clearly.
03:32 Our kids, we’re talking about the cow and the tree, and we’re talking about all things that come from a cow, butter, milk, et cetera, et cetera. And what comes from a tree, paper houses, furniture, you know, air to breathe, all that.
03:47 And we said, look, you know, how can that be without God? OK, that’s God.
03:50 Amen. So, you know, people will say, oh, I don’t believe the Bible says the fool, you know, says in their heart, there’s no God.
03:56 They believe I mean, if they they may not believe, but they they’re willfully ignorant.
04:01 The Bible would say, I believe so. Everybody can admit, OK, they’re intelligently designed, I believe, if they really were honest, forthright. And I think everyone would, you know, really have no problem admitting that they all worry and that’s an emotion.
04:15 But where a lot of people stop is having faith in a true and living creator, God, that can cure them of that worrying and to give you the end at the beginning here, so to speak, God can cure your worrying.
04:29 God can eliminate your worrying. Jesus Christ himself can help you not to worry.
04:34 Our text verse, Matthew 6:25 Therefore, I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor yet for your body. What you shall put on is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment or clothing.
04:50 OK, and then the context here is to be attitudes in the book of Matthew. Jesus Christ addressing the disciples and potentially the multitudes there is telling them, look, there’s more to life than worrying about your basic needs. And he’s challenging them.
05:10 They are also with very advanced points about blessing of the poor in spirit and loving your enemy and not to look upon a woman with lust.
05:15 And it’s it’s it’s a very New Testament philosophy because the Israelites were put under the law in the Old Testament and they were thinking a lot about just obeying the law and that would make them righteous.
05:28 And now Jesus is saying, no, no, no.
05:28 You’re really going to have to behave yourself on a level that you don’t think is possible. I remember myself in modern days reading that scripture years ago and being very convicted of how sinful I was living at the time.
05:41 I was like, wow, this is very again, read the Beatitudes, read Matthew six and onwards and you’ll be very convicted by what the Lord is saying.
05:50 And amidst all of this, he’s telling us to take no thought for your food, you know, take no thought to the birds. They’re not doing anything and they’re being fed. Is God not going to provide for you?
06:00 And the idea is that God, the father, when we’re saved, God becomes our heavenly father.
06:05 The idea is that God, the father, will not will not be a vacant father. He will not be a absentee father. He will be present.
06:14 He will provide for his children, him being holy and loving and kind. Amen. We see that in the very first bit of creation in the book of Genesis when Adam and Eve sin clearly that would get the ire of God like no other because sin entered the picture and all of these problems.
06:30 And what does God do? Yes, he expels them from the garden. Yes, he gives them consequences for their sin. The women’s pregnancy is going to be horrible and hard and the man is going to work and work and work the sweat of his brow.
06:43 But he clothed them with animal skins. And so we see here in part two of this three part series, we’re in part two here today. Take no thought for your clothing.
06:49 Don’t worry about your clothing. Matthew 6:28-30, Jesus speaking. And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
07:03 They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothed the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
07:19 And so we see here Jesus telling us a great truth that, you know what? Look at the lilies.
07:29 You know, think of a lily, an Easter lily or these lilies. We have some lilies that grow near our house. They’re beautiful.
07:32 I mean, they’re absolutely stunning. The colors. I love pastel colors.
07:35 That’s why one reason why I like going to the beach. I have pastel colors painted on houses and so forth. But those pastel colors do no justice to the colors.
07:43 The purples and the yellows. My grandma or excuse my grandma, my mother-in-law is an excellent gardener and she’ll plant.
07:53 I don’t know if they’re lilies or not, but there’s something that looks like a lily in our front yard.
07:57 She’ll come over and plant those things kind of near our doorstep. And they are stunning when I take pictures of them. And maybe we’ll be lucky enough to get a hummingbird to come up close.
08:04 Man, it’s awesome to see those lilies grow and how beautiful they are. And God made those even more beautiful than King Solomon, the wisest man to ever live.
08:12 I mean, think about Solomon being arraigned in all his glory and his robes and his garments.
08:18 And the Bible says that the rich had all the best clothes and he was, you know, very, very rich. Well, guess what?
08:25 They lilies aren’t even more beautiful, Jesus says, than Solomon. They are more beautiful than Solomon.
08:31 And they’re, for lack of a better word, disposable. They’re there one day and they’re in the oven the next. And so if they are that beautiful, if God has dressed them in that light and they are temporal and you having a never dying soul, an eternal soul, would God not clothe you?
08:49 And then the rebuke, O ye of little faith, as in you don’t have enough faith, you don’t really believe Father God is who he says he is and a rewarder of them that diligently seek him, as Hebrews 11:6 tells us.
09:02 And you say, well, Brother Clark, I haven’t really worried about clothing. Well, I bet you you have. I mean, people, if you think about clothing, it’s it’s critical, you know, there is there is another scripture here that I just thought of just as I was preaching, you know, your basic needs, clothing and food right in the Bible.
09:23 And that’s another example of the Bible addressing, you know, your basic needs. I’ve got to look it up. And I looked it up.
09:29 It’s 1 Timothy 6:8, Paul writes to Timothy and having food and raiment, let us be there with content. OK, perfect. So succinctly, Paul is saying, just be content if you just have food and clothes.
09:47 OK, so God, God, I think there’s so much to that. There’s a ton to that that, you know, the importance of it, the fundamentals of it. I’ve thought of that a lot.
09:52 I’ve thought of that verse, those verses a lot in my occupation, the work type of work I’ve done. Oftentimes I’ve worked either with food or clothing in the business sense, you know, and selling it or wholesaling or whatever it was. And so that’s that’s biblical.
10:06 OK, and Jesus is saying, so Paul’s saying this is important and Jesus is saying, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Lilies, they’re temporal.
10:15 They’re beautiful. They’re gorgeous. God clothed them.
10:18 God is going to clothe you. Right. And so we aren’t to worry about it.
10:27 Amen. But, but people again may downplay it, you know, and say, oh, I haven’t worried about it. Well, how about going to a new job? You know, maybe they have a dress code and at that job, you may not get paid for three or four weeks and they want you to buy scrubs or still toe shoes or a suit or whatever.
10:39 You know, I think of the Crossroads Rescue Mission and I think of this idea of God providing clothing for those in need. You know, the Crossroads Rescue Mission is close to my heart. It’s in Shelby, North Carolina.
10:53 They minister to men there that are dealing with addiction and oftentimes it’s dire addiction. They’re living on at the facility. It is a very intense program.
11:04 They are working. They’re going through. They have, I think, chapel every single night.
11:11 The Lord allowed me to preach there for several years with Brother Mike Rowe. We used to go on Thursday nights. Amen.
11:17 And it was a wonderful opportunity before we went to plant our church. When I was at the last church, that’s where we would go. And it was just tremendous to see those men because they were living proof of God’s mercy and love.
11:33 And you go there and you have an addiction that statistically you will not recover from or you’ll be very, very unlikely to recover from, you know, opiates or alcoholism.
11:44 And again, the worst kinds. I mean, you’re literally living like in an old school building out in the middle of nowhere.
11:50 And it’s a big challenge to be there. And yet you’re putting yourself through that because you’ve heard the stories and you’ve known people that have gone there and they’ve been able to overcome these demons.
12:01 Why and how? By the power of Jesus Christ himself.
12:05 Amen. I had a family member go there that had a very serious addiction and he got saved there. And he overcame that addiction or Jesus Christ overcame that addiction in him.
12:11 And he has a family and he’s recovered. And it’s an absolute testimony. It’s absolutely unbelievable what what that addiction, where that was headed and how bad that was.
12:22 And to see where he is today, that’s only by God’s grace and mercy. And the point I’m getting about Crossroads is they have a thrift store and they have tons of clothing there and they get tons of donations and they have a warehouse.
12:32 And those men are allowed to go get clothing there to go wear to church because they have church.
12:38 They go to church on Sunday at Faith Baptist, Brother Barry Goodman. Amen. They also go out on the mission field and they present their work and their ministry and they sing in a choir.
12:48 They visit other churches. You’re going to need church clothing. You are literally an addict.
12:53 I mean, if you were an addict and you’re in a program, you probably don’t have a whole lot of church clothing. Amen. That’s just being honest.
12:59 Well, guess what? Crossroads has it and they give it to you in abundance. And how do they have it? God gave it to them. Amen.
13:04 And I always look at the thrift store as a way to provide for the ministry. But lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about, no, you know what? That’s God’s love. He is, he is saving their souls inside.
13:14 He is working on the inside and that’s going to manifest on the outside eventually. As that manifests on the outside, he’s providing for them, their every need. And Jesus Christ here in the new Testament is saying, don’t worry about your clothing.
13:28 And so whether you are literally like, you know, at the end of your life, so to speak, and you’re, you’re in a last resort and you’re praying to God to save you from addiction, you still don’t have to worry about your clothing.
13:37 Does that make sense? That God has provided for it. But the key is that we are seeking him.
13:42 Amen. The example I gave was men that were seeking the Lord. Uh, you know what? We have to have faith in the Lord.
13:48 And Jesus rebukes those, uh, in the scripture saying, oh ye of little faith, because many people don’t believe that God will provide. So the question for you today is, do you believe that God will provide?
13:58 If you believe that God will provide, then don’t worry about your clothing. Instead, seek him and put your mind on him and his kingdom, who he is.
14:06 And you just set forth to seek him and live for him and, and trust him. He’s going to take care of your every need, including your clothing, including your food. He’s going to cover those essential needs like a good father will.
14:20 He may not give you everything you want, but he will give you everything you need. So let’s praise him for that today. Tune in next time for the conclusion of this three part message.
14:28 I thank you so much for listening. Take care of God. Bless and amen.