-Transcript-
00:36 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the cafe today.
00:40 Great to have you here. Pastor Clark Covington from Heartland Community Baptist Church in Lincolnton, North Carolina. Here today at the cafe to get into God’s Word in a way that we can both better understand who God is and better understand His role, His immense, incredible role in our lives.
01:00 I’m so thankful for the opportunity to be here today and I’m very thankful for you taking the time out of your busy day to listen to me. Even if you’re driving in the car and you don’t have anything else to do, I’m sure it’s easy to switch the channel. So I thank you so much.
01:18 I don’t take it for granted. I’m very blessed. This is, I believe, my ministry.
01:23 My life’s ministry is the radio and I’m so thankful for what the Lord’s called me to do and for you here today. And I want to talk about God’s never-ending love for us because I was thinking, you know, I’m grateful for you and I’m grateful for this opportunity and there’s love involved in that. But man’s love is futile and it’s fickle, if I could use another f-word, it’s fickle.
01:49 Man’s love is shallow sometimes, right? And yet God’s love is never-ending. It’s never-ending. And we see here in Lamentations 3: 22- 24 a very clear picture of God’s great love.
02:10 And I’m gonna read this scripture, but I want you to think after I read this about the context in which it was written in. Lamentations 3: 22- 24, it’s of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning.
02:28 Great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul. Therefore will I hope in Him.
02:36 These are beautiful scriptures that we often hear. I mean, how often do we hear, great is thy faithfulness? How often do we hear about the Lord’s mercies being new every morning? How often do we hear about His compassions failing not? And yet when was this written, or who was written by? It was written by Jeremiah, right? Let’s start there. Who was Jeremiah? He was a prophet of God.
03:00 When was Jeremiah a prophet of God? During the time of the captivity of the Israelites. And so the Israelites thought they were high and mighty. They had overcome the promised land, you know, they got into the promised land.
03:17 They were a big power, you could say a global power at the time, and they thought nothing bad will happen to them. And God, speaking through Jeremiah the prophet, tells them that they’re going to be judged, and they’re going to be judged harshly for their sin, and for their turning away from God, for their worshiping of false gods, for their idolatry, and for their covetousness, and all the same things we see here today in our lives and in our culture. And they didn’t like Jeremiah too much.
03:42 The Israelites didn’t. In fact, they hated him. Jeremiah was thrown into a pit.
03:47 He was thrown into a hole. They want to kill him. You know, if I say something bad, I might get a rude comment, or a thumbs down on YouTube or something.
03:58 But that’s not too bad. Jeremiah, literally, they wanted to kill him for speaking God’s truth. And so he was miserable.
04:06 You know, they call Jeremiah the weeping prophet, because here God is having him tell all these spiritual truths to the Israelites, and they don’t want to hear it. God’s chosen people, they don’t want to hear it. And so Jeremiah is upset because he is the bearer of bad news, and yet it is true.
04:21 And if he thinks on it, he’s seeing that God’s chosen people will not repent, and they’re rejecting this message, and they hate him for it. And in the midst of that agony, and that struggle, and that weeping, that identifying with God that, hey, you know what? God’s people, they have gone astray. And God is correct.
04:39 And oh, how we need to turn back to God. You know, that identification really softens your heart to the ways of God. And then what happens? People hate him for speaking the truth.
04:49 And in that, he is lamenting. So what does it mean to lament? To express great grief and frustration. And he is lamenting.
05:01 And in the midst of that, in Lamentations 3, here he says, it’s of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed. So out of that hardship and troublesome time, Jeremiah was actually able to speak poetically about God’s love. Realizing that, you know what? Nobody won favor with God with their behavior here, and yet God has not consumed them.
05:26 That’s the Lord’s mercies. See, when you put it in that context, all of a sudden it’s not something on a paper calendar or an app, and you’re saying, oh yes, it’s the Lord’s mercies. We are not consumed.
05:37 It’s despite our sinfulness. You think of the passage in Romans that God commendeth his love toward us while we were yet sinners. And yet while we were sinners, while we were sinners, God commendeth his love toward us.
05:52 See, so while we were living in sin, God’s great love abounded so much and existed so much and still does today. It’s of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed because his compassions fail not. And so we see here that God has a never-dying love for us, an everlasting love for us that will not let us go because he has a compassion for us.
06:19 And I want you to think here about this idea that, you know, it’s one thing to say I’m compassionate for the people of Alaska and their struggle, okay, especially in the winter, but I’ve never been to Alaska. I don’t know those people any better than I know somebody in Africa or in Minnesota. I just don’t know.
06:41 I haven’t been to these places. And so I have compassion for them, but it’s kind of from a distance, right? I can’t really relate to them other than just on the normal human level. And oftentimes people might look at God in that way and say, well, we’re God’s creation, but he’s not down here with us.
06:58 And it’s, wait a minute, he is here with us. If you’ve been saved, you have the Holy Spirit living within you. And so God actually is living within you.
07:07 And what does that mean? That means that when you feel pain, God also feels that pain. You know, the Bible tells us in Isaiah 53:3, he is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid as it were our faces from him.
07:28 He was despised and we esteemed him not. You know, in Isaiah 53:3 is describing Jesus Christ through prophecy here, because before Jesus had come in his earthly ministry, and he’s saying that Jesus was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and was acquainted with grief. And so we don’t have a God that doesn’t understand what we’re going through, or doesn’t understand what it means to have grief and sorrow.
07:50 We have a God. We’re saved. We accept Jesus Christ as Savior, realizing our own need for salvation and accepting Jesus Christ as the only way to be saved.
08:01 The Bible clearly says that there’s no way to the Father but by Jesus. Amen. He is the way, the truth, and the life.
08:11 Amen. John 14:6, Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.
08:23 So we see that our access to God the Father is only through Jesus Christ, and that’s John 14:6 in the New Testament. And then flipping back to the Old Testament, we see in Isaiah 53:3 that Jesus was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. He was despised.
08:49 He was not esteemed. Think about this. Christ is the way to the Father, right? And the Father has a plan for you and I, right? And that plan is to be saved through Christ.
08:58 And then when we’re saved through Christ, it’s God’s mercy that the one that saves us can relate to us so deeply. The one that saved us feels our pain, has an intimate relationship with us, understands that when we are saved by the blood of Jesus, we are born again, we are bought with a price, we are now his. And so as we go through these trials and these pains and these tests and these stares and problems and issues, we have a Savior, we have a God that knows exactly what we’re going through.
09:37 Well, why am I harping on this point? Because it shows us the depths of God’s love and it shows us that no matter where we are, God loves us so much that he’s going to be right there with us. He’s going to be in the midst, amen? And it shows us that he will not only see us through those hardships, but that as he sees us through those hardships, he is very present. The Bible says that the Lord is a very present help in times of trouble, Amen Psalm 46, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
10:05 That’s Psalm 46:1, Amen I got all the verses out here today. I know a lot of times on the program, I paraphrase and I’ll throw verses out there without citing always the book and verse, but today I’m very prepared. And so why is this important? Because God is our refuge and our strength.
10:24 And we realize that we’re going to a refuge, we’re going to a strong, strong fortress of God that can relate to what we’ve been through because he, in His mercy and love, made himself vulnerable, made Himself humble down to meek and lowly man. The Bible said that Jesus was of no report, no good report. There was nothing special about Him.
10:50 If I was God and I came to earth, I’d make myself Superman, right? I’d come in on a chariot with a hundred horses and some weapons made out of fire, and you know, I wouldn’t come in as the lowly meek carpenter’s son from Nazareth. I think it was Nathanael that said in the Bible, oh what has anything ever good come from Nazareth? Apparently it wasn’t a great town. We see so much humility and meekness in Christ through that season there of his earthly ministry, because later on, remember, Jesus Christ becomes the judge and the jury and he’s got the eyes with fire and everything.
11:23 You get into Revelation, you realize that the meek and lowly Jesus is for that season and he came here so that he could relate to us in such an intimate way, so that we know that his love is so deep and long-lasting, and that he can relate to what we’re going through. And what that means is that you have somebody that cares about you enough that put himself through everything and more than you’ll ever go through, you know. And that’s very, very deep because honestly, when we go through hard times, really what do we want? We want somebody to hear us out.
11:59 We want somebody to identify with us. We want somebody to stay by our side. That’s God.
12:04 Amen. That is God to a T. He’ll hear us through our prayers. Amen.
12:09 He’ll identify with our afflictions because he’s been there. Amen. And he will never leave us nor forsake us.
12:14 That’s in the Bible. And so we realize this never-ending love, this steadfast love, is so deep. I mean, think about it.
12:21 I just took one little trait, the idea that God feels our pain and was able to give you so many scriptures and biblical accounts on that one little trait. Now you can take all the traits of a deep and unbelievable love and you can trace those through the veins of the Bible, all the different stories, true historical stories in the Bible, all God’s promises, and you can link them all up and say, wow, God’s love is tremendous. It’s beyond our ability to truly fathom.
12:53 Amen. And it’s hard to put into words, but we try. I try.
12:59 Amen. And I know that you do too. If you’re in the ministry, you try to tell people, hey, God loves you because he does love you.
13:06 He loves you so much that he came in the person of Jesus Christ to die for your sins and for my sins. And when we accept that free gift of salvation, and it is a free gift, all we have to do is accept it, we are born again. We are changed forever.
13:18 And here is the last thing I want to leave you with today. Because we are changed forever, we have a hope. And so while we suffer and we realize that God can identify with our suffering and what we go through, we also have hope that there is a brighter day coming, that there is that blessed moment coming when the Lord will return.
13:40 Amen. And the trumpet will sound and we will be with him, meet him in the air. Amen.
13:47 The Bible describes the rapture and we will be with him in heaven for an eternity, where there is no pain, and there is no suffering, and there is no sin, and there’s nothing bad there at all. It is amazing and incredible. There’s a lot of details about heaven in the Bible, and every detail is just jaw-dropping and exciting.
14:05 And that’s our hope, is to be with Christ in glory forever. So no matter where you are today, you have that hope and you have a Savior that can identify with you and will never leave you. Thank you for listening.
14:16 Take care. God bless. Amen