-Transcript-
00:24 Amen, glory to God. Welcome to the program. Welcome to the cafe, Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe.
00:33 So excited that you’re joining me here today. I have a big mug full of very dark coffee from Sumatra. Oh, it’s delicious, robust coffee.
00:45 Just what I need. A little eye-opener here this morning. Just so glad you’re here joining me.
00:52 Hopefully you’re in a cafe type of mood, ready to relax, get into God’s Word, and study up on what thus saith the Word of God. Today we have an awesome message.
01:04 This is the first in a two-part series on God’s faithfulness, God’s love, and God’s plans for you.
01:13 In other words, when you look at your life and the problems you have, ask this question, what is too hard for God? What is too hard for God? What’s too much for God?
01:25 At what point is God not able to help you? And I’m going to help, I believe, Lord willing, by the work of the Holy Spirit, point out some things that maybe connects a disconnect. You know, we’ve been there. I’ve been there in church.
01:46 You sit in the pew and you’re the preacher, preaching about how good God is and how God will do this and God will do that. And you wonder, looking at your circumstances, what’s wrong and what you’re missing.
01:57 And I’m going to help kind of touch on that because I’m all about practicality, I’d say, simplicity.
02:04 I don’t know. I don’t want to get too big here with the words, but I’m all about just trying to help you here today. I need help.
02:12 You need help. We need help. We get it from God’s word.
02:16 And that’s my prayer to the Lord, is help me to help you, amen. And in the process of helping you, I’m helped and blessed for serving God and learning these truths myself.
02:28 So what’s too hard for God? As we struggle along, as we struggle along in life, we can become very weary, can we not? We can become disenchanted.
02:34 We can become depressed. And I know that word depressed is used a lot, but not maybe in a clinical sense, but just we can become downtrodden, you know. And I know a lot of good God-fearing folks that have heavy burdens on their shoulders.
02:54 There’s a great little camp. If you’re ever looking for a church camp, look up South Mountain Church Camp, amen, South Mountain Church Camp. And it is fantastic.
03:05 It’s beautiful up there in South Mountain. It’s not too far from where we live. And we were driving around one time, and I called this brother up to go tour the camp.
03:16 We have a very small congregation, and that year, I think it was right around COVID time, it didn’t quite work out, so we weren’t able to go. But man, we were able to at least view the camp, and I got to talk to the brother there, and it was just fantastic. It’s called South Mountain Family Camp.
03:30 That’s what it’s called, South Mountain Family Camp, and what a beautiful campground. And as we were there at South Mountain Family Camp, and as we were talking to the individual running it, amen,
03:39 the one that’s in charge of everything, he told me that they have a special program at South Mountain Family Camp for pastors that have just been so burdened down by the ministry, have been so just everything laid on them. The brother’s name is Birk.
04:00 I was looking that up, B-I-R-K, Brother Birk, at South Mountain Family Camp. They have a program. They welcome those pastors in.
04:10 They put those pastors up, and it’s just as beautiful. I mean, you got the mountains in the background, you got a little creek or stream down there, you got walking paths. It’s just gorgeous.
04:15 And Brother Birk was saying that this individual was there, there was just such a heavy burden on him, amen. And look, if it happens to those that are serving God, would it not happen to those just living in the world? Yes, amen. In fact, it happened to Jesus.
04:30 Jesus suffered greatly in this life, and did he not say that the servant is not greater than his master? So if Jesus suffered, we’re gonna suffer. So where do we find our strength?
04:43 Do we find it in a almighty, all-powerful God, or are we looking for strength other places? Are we looking for strength in a self-help book? Are we looking for strength in another person?
04:54 Are we looking for strength in drugs and alcohol or something bad? Where are we trying to find our strength? You know, our strength comes from the Lord, amen. And at the end of our journey, there is peace and joy.
05:07 And that’s what I’d like to express here today to you, that there is peace and joy at the end of our journey. And so while we struggle along, we need to keep the end in mind. And that’s our text verse here, Jeremiah 29:11-13.
05:21 Very familiar verse. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
05:34 Then shall you call upon me, and you shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you, and you shall seek me and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart.
05:39 Well, that’s a beautiful verse there, passage of scripture, actually three verses. And it’s interesting here, we see the word heart. We’ve been talking a lot about the heart lately.
05:49 I recently preached a message on how the heart kind of shows forth who we are. And so if we’ve got bitterness and hatred in our heart, it comes out of our mouth. If we have a love in our heart, it comes out of our mouth.
06:03 So our words kind of, they root in the heart. And God’s telling us here that he has good thoughts towards us to give us a peaceful and expected end, to give us good things, to shape us
06:16 and mold us into who he wants us to be, and that we should simply call upon him, pray unto him, listen to him, seek him when we search with all of our heart, we’ll find him. And so that is what the Lord is telling us through Jeremiah 29: 11.
06:30 And that in the context of struggling along in this life should help us to understand that God knows our struggles. Look, the Bible tells us that there’s no temptation that’s found that’s not common to man.
06:43 There’s nothing that we’re going through that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, didn’t go through as well.
06:48 I think one of the many purposes in God’s earthly ministry was for us to understand that our God actually has gone through a harder, more torturous life than we’ll ever know.
07:01 So that when we say, oh Lord, you don’t know how it is, God says, oh, I know how it is. And I know how it could be worse than it is, amen.
07:06 The Bible tells us that no one ever suffered like Jesus suffered on the cross, that he was unrecognizable. That’s God in the flesh dying for our sins, dying for you, dying for me.
07:15 And so we see a loving Lord and a loving Savior that would give himself, give his only begotten Jesus to die on the cross.
07:23 The Bible tells us in the book of Isaiah that it pleased God that Jesus would suffer for us and die for us and be resurrected from the grave. And so that’s how much God loves us. The Bible also tells us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
07:38 So it pleased God to go to the cross at Calvary for us while we were living in sin. And we know that sin is an abomination to a holy God. A holy God cannot stand sin.
07:47 A holy God will not refuse, will refuse to be around sin, will not tolerate sin. The whole reason Christ had to die on the cross for us was so that we could be forgiven of our sin,
07:59 that we cannot pay that sin debt on our own, but only by what Christ did at Calvary. That’s the atonement, the substitutionary death.
08:05 And so what we need to understand is that in our journey, God knows what we’re going through and he’s telling us through Jeremiah 29:11-13, I’ve got great plans for you.
08:21 You know, look at the end, think about this in heaven, have a heavenly point of view. Not so much that you’re no earthly good, but have a heavenly point of view so that you can be earthly good, right?
08:35 If you say, okay, I’m going to be in heaven for an eternity with peace and joy and no suffering and no pain.
08:37 And you could put that within the context of who you are and how you’re living, the things that you’re afflicted with, right? You can remove all those afflictions and then you can add in all the joy and peace that will be in heaven.
08:45 I mean, the Bible tells us that eye hasn’t seen or ear ever heard what awaits us in heaven. Those that love the Lord, those that have been saved.
08:53 I can’t imagine how good it’s going to be, but we don’t think about heaven, do we? When we’re upset and when we’re grumbling and mumbling and when we’re angry and when we’re frustrated, we don’t think a lot about heaven.
09:04 We think about our current circumstance. So firstly here, we need to understand that God is not like us, so we shouldn’t expect a human-like plan or effort from God.
09:16 Isaiah 55:8-9, another very familiar verse, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
09:31 So we see a great distance between how God thinks and acts, his thoughts and his ways, and how we think and we act.
09:40 And so why is this important to think about? Because we don’t want to limit God. You know, we may look at a situation and say, that’s impossible to resolve.
09:49 You know, we may be, think about this, maybe you’re in a marriage, you’re in a relationship and you say, I cannot ever imagine this thing getting worked out because it is so difficult with the individual.
10:01 And there, you know, it’s like oil and water and these two individuals, they’re not mixing and there’s always a problem. Guess what? God can fix it. He’s not thinking like you’re thinking and his way is not like your way.
10:11 He can fix it, amen. His ways are beyond our understanding. And whether it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a job that the Lord has put you in, maybe it’s in the ministry, maybe it’s in school, maybe it’s in parenting with a wayward child, maybe it’s all the above, maybe it’s none of it, but something else.
10:29 Whatever it may be, the Lord Jesus Christ is more than able to resolve the issue if and when he decides so. But we often assign limits to God. We look at God through our minimal kind of point of view, our mind frame, our earthly carnal mind.
10:46 We look at God and we say, well, what could God do? But what we need to do is look at God and say, his ways are unbelievable. And you know, honestly, we talk about as Christians, and this is a whole other message really, the value of hindsight.
11:00 Well, I think one value of hindsight as a Christian, one way to look at your testimony, your journey, whatever you want to say, is to see the marvelous things that God did in such unusual ways, how he may have prepared you for a trial, how he may have delivered you from a trial, how he may have prospered you in the midst of affliction, whatever it is.
11:18 When we look back on it, we say, huh, you know, that’s pretty interesting, right? But at the time, we don’t always see it that clearly. And I could give so many examples, you know, praying and praying and seeking the Lord and being led to do this or that and not understanding why,
11:34 or seeing a situation happen, unfold in front of me that I have no control over and thinking at the time it was bad and realizing it was very good. It was for my good.
11:42 And so whatever it may be, we have to trust God and not put a human-like plan on him. We can’t put God in a box. God is not weak, amen.
11:53 Why do we assign weak thoughts or actions to Almighty God? You know, you may say, I could never climb up this mountain.
12:03 I saw a video once and there was cabins at the top of this mountain, I forget where. And these individuals had to climb all day to get to the top of the mountain to these beautiful cabins at the summit, right?
12:16 And I said to myself, that’d be really hard to do, right? Well, that’d be hard for me to do if I wasn’t in hiking shape, amen. I’d like to think I could do it, but I have asthma and stuff. I get dizzy and lightheaded down here, you know, in the foothills.
12:26 I can’t imagine being up in the mountain. But guess what? God can do it. And if God so chose to, he could supply me with what I needed to go do it.
12:37 Does that make sense? Whatever we limit ourselves with, and I know it’s a simple example, but it is a mountaintop experience that God is going to give us.
12:49 And it’s a situation where we are in the valley and we do have to ask ourselves, what is too hard for God? Where is his arm shortened, right? I was reading in Isaiah this morning, devotional time, about how God is saying, look, my arm is not shortened. My ear can still hear.
12:59 I can do these things. If you’ll listen to me, if you’ll hearken to me, if you turn to me, you know, God was speaking through the prophet Isaiah to the people of Israel, the Jewish people.
13:07 But we’re his group as well, amen. Those that have been saved, the Gentiles, we’ve been grafted in, so we’re part of that as well.
13:13 And so what we need to think about here today is what is too hard for God. And then you may ask yourself, and I’m just going to tease this a little bit in the few minutes we have left, what can we do to believe this?
13:26 Because it all sounds good, but then you go and you have a real-life situation happen. You say, what am I going to do? And you’re right back where you’re usually at, and it’s difficult.
13:39 We need to have faith. That connector between the biblical truth and the truth in our actions in our life is faith. We activate that by spending time in prayer with God.
13:47 The Bible tells us in Romans 10:17, so then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So we need to study God’s word, we need to saturate ourselves in God’s word, and we will have a greater faith.
13:59 And as our faith increases, we will more so believe that God is really willing and able to do above all that we can expect or imagine.
14:07 And so faith is the key, and faith is what’s often lacking between hearing this or reading it and seeing it in your life is often a matter of faith. And so I compel you to seek the Lord here today to grow your faith.
14:17 I wish I had more time, but tune in next time as we go to part two of this message on what God is doing through us in our weakness.
14:28 Thank you for listening. Take care. God bless. Amen.