-Transcript-
00:38 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the cafe.
00:42 Great to have you here today. Hopefully you’re having a great day, a great week. Today we are talking about God’s love for us and why we should serve Him with gladness.
00:53 That’s what we’re talking about here today. Hopefully you’ve got some time on your hands here as we dive into God’s Word. It’s just so beautiful to read the Scriptures and discover who this God is that we serve.
01:07 This God that we call our God. The God, amen. Not just the God of the Hebrews anymore but the God of all the world that comes to Him to be saved.
01:21 All those that accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are grafted into the family, amen. And this God is a loving God and He’s wonderful. And we need to remember that we should praise God in all situations, even difficult situations.
01:33 You know, maybe you today are going through something difficult and finding it hard to praise God or to serve Him with gladness. That’s the name of the message, serve the Lord with gladness, from Psalm100:2.Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing.
01:56 And you know I’ve been, I think that, you know, we all go, I say I’ve been, but we’ve all been through hard times. And just me here, of course, everybody. If you’re an adult, I say this, because some kids, you know, you’re young, they don’t really know.
02:12 I mean they say they’ve been through hard times. Some kids have, little kids have, but usually I say like if you’re an adult or a young adult and you know you’ve been through hard times and it seems like oftentimes the more adult we become, amen,
02:22 the more we grow up, you get married, you have a family, work, and so on, the hard times just seem to come and come and come. And it can be difficult to serve God with gladness and to come before His presence with singing.
02:35 But why? You know, I was thinking about this the other day. Why? What causes the most trouble in life? I thought firstly health. You know, there’s nobody more miserable than someone that’s in a bad, healthy, a bad condition, an unhealthy state, a state of sickness.
02:56 Now yes, we are and can praise God. We are to praise God when we are sick, but it’s difficult. It can be challenging.
03:05 It may not even be actual sickness. It could be worrying about being sick. The idea of psychosomatic illness, I heard preaching on this brother Adrian Rogers, I think he was preached on this about how oftentimes we think we’re sick and we’re not sick.
03:24 And the doctor, a doctor friend of his said that many people that came to him, a large percentage, thought they were sick and they weren’t. And my wife went through some thyroid issues and I got my blood tested to make sure I didn’t have a thyroid problem and I didn’t.
03:37 And my wife’s sister got her blood tested to make sure she didn’t have a thyroid problem and she doesn’t.
03:46 But boy, our mind can play tricks on us. So health can cause issues. Wealth, right? Of course, money, finances.
03:54 So if we’re not sick, then we’re sick about, you know, how we’re gonna pay this bill, how we’re gonna, you know, make this, make ends meet, so to speak. And so again, same exact idea. It could be a literal issue with finances or it could be perceived.
04:08 You know, can’t turn on the TV, can’t turn on the news, can’t read the news without them telling you the world’s falling apart. Hey, I could have told you that, but you start reading that or watching that and it messes with you because you start seeing all of what could happen, right?
04:20 Job, relationships, co-workers, could be conflicts there, conflicts at work, conflicts on the job, and family, of course. Issues with family, worries for family, bearing their burdens, friends and family.
04:28 And it could be conflicts and so forth. And all these things cause us trouble in life and may have us not wanting to serve the Lord with gladness. And yet God calls us to do that.
04:45 And I have a few points, but today the one I want to focus on here is just the idea that God is here to help and not hurt. God is here to help and not hurt. And I want to start this idea, this point, by looking at Psalm 100.
05:03 I just want to look at the first three verses. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness.
05:09 Come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord he is God. It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.
05:23 We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. And so the first thing I want you to think about is that you are God’s, amen. If you’ve been saved, if you’ve been born again, you are now born again into the family, amen, of Christ, amen. You are co-heirs with Christ, amen. You are now God’s. You’re God’s possession.
05:39 You are a prized possession to God. You are a peculiar people. You are different.
05:43 You’re no longer the same. The old man’s passed away. Behold, all things become new.
05:48 On and on. And part of this rebirth and part of this salvation is that now we are God’s, and God’s here to help us, not hurt us. Realize that God loves us.
06:00 He sees us struggling and wants to help us with our day-to-day life. Do you believe that? You know, if you believe that, it’d be a lot easier to serve him with gladness, wouldn’t it?
06:09 You’d no longer be holding a grudge or being angry or upset or confused. You’d be saying, you know what? My God loves me and wants to help me with my day-to-day life.
06:21 You know, once we’re saved, amen, what comes next? Sanctification. The idea of getting right each and every day with God through taking up our cross, living for him, and becoming more like Christ.
06:34 Isn’t that why we’re here? To bring glory and honor to him and to be more like Christ? And that idea comes from, oftentimes, or is rooted in, life struggles.
06:45 And so we need to look at God and say, even though we struggle, he loves us and he has a plan. Romans 8:28 tells us that.
06:55 But is this the posture in which we look at God, or do we look at him angrily? We look at him not understanding.
07:01 You know, we need to realize that God loves us so much that he has a plan for us. Jeremiah 29:11. 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.
07:20 And so God loves us so much that he has peaceful thoughts towards us, not evil, to give us an expected end. And so as a Christian here today, as someone that was saved, let’s say later in life, but I was saved in my early 20s,
07:34 and I really was just living in the world until 30-something, I met my wife, I moved out here to North Carolina, and I got right with God, amen. I got in a fundamental church.
07:45 I started understanding that, you know what, God really is alive, and not only is he alive, and not only is he real, but he has a whole book for me to read and study.
07:59 And at that time, I was reading a lot of newspapers, three or four newspapers a day for work, and I just enjoyed reading. I was just curious, but I worked in marketing, PR, and all that stuff, and read the newspaper.
08:11 And one day, yeah, I felt like I was reading the same stories over and over again, a lot of these papers. I won’t name them by name, but the big national papers that we could get delivered to our house.
08:20 You know, I actually, you know, yes, they do like e- delivery, but I actually wanted to read it, you know, with my hands, right? I’d like to go through it, even cut out articles, share them, whatever it be.
08:33 One day, I realized I was kind of reading the same article over and over again, and at the same time, I really wasn’t spending a lot of time in the Bible. And so I stopped. I canceled all those subscriptions, and I committed to spending my reading time in God’s Word.
08:42 And it took time to develop a routine and so forth, but it’s the greatest, one of the greatest decisions the Lord’s allowed me to make, because I was able to start understanding His character towards me, that He loves me,
08:56 that He cares about me, that He’s not gonna leave me or forsake me, that He has a plan for me. And as I studied His Word, I was able to serve Him better, and pray to Him better, and do everything better, because I was spending time in His Word.
09:15 And so if you find it hard to serve the Lord with gladness, the first step is to understand who He is, and we do that, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
09:26 We do that by getting into the Scriptures. And when we get into the Scriptures, we learn in a book like Jeremiah 29:11, that He thinks peaceful thoughts of us, not evil, and to give us an expected end.
09:37 I mean, think of Psalm 100, that’s written by David, as far as I understand, and David has gone through a lot of hardships, amen, and yet he’s saying, serve the Lord with gladness, because you are God’s.
09:47 How about Psalm 147. Praise ye the Lord, for it is good to sing praises unto our God, for it is pleasant, and praise is comely. The Lord doth build up Jerusalem, He gathers together the outcasts of Israel, He healeth thebroken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.
10:01 So we see that God not only has a plan for us, but God is the one doing the healing.
10:07 God is the one binding up our wounds, and God is not going to be far from those that are His, that are struggling, and that are brokenhearted. And so if we understand that He wants to help us, we have to ask ourselves,
10:27 what’s getting in the way of us being able to serve Him with gladness? Could it be sin? Could it be the idea that we can’t draw close to Him because we have sin in our life?
10:43 The book of James, I believe, says cleanse your hands, you filthy sinners, draw nigh to Him, He’ll draw nigh to you, something to that extent. The idea is that we need to get right with Him, cleansing our hands.
10:48 We need to repent before God. We need to realize what sin is. We need to identify that it is an abomination to God.
10:54 We need to look in our hearts and say, this should be an abomination to us, and we don’t want to have anything to do with it. If you feel like God’s so far off from you, if you feel like you can’t serve Him with gladness, it could be that sin has snuck in there.
11:05 You know, the little g-god of this world, the devil, will come and bring about all kinds of confusion, and has created a culture that exalts sin, that lifts sin up, that makes sin totally acceptable, that has sin sending messages on your phone, sending you emails, knocking on your door, knocking on your car window, everywhere, every place, sin is present.
11:26 And if we allow that sin, that temptation, to get to us, and if we give in to that temptation, and we live sinful lives, we are grieving the Holy Spirit, and we cannot be near a holy God.
11:38 And that’s why we need to get right with Him. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Jesus Christ alone.
11:44 So our salvation doesn’t deal with whether we fall into sin or not. If we’ve been saved, once saved, always saved. It’s the idea of eternal security.
11:53 Christ died one time for all mankind, for all time. But once we’re saved, we need to still realize we’re in the flesh, amen.
12:02 And one example of understanding we’re in the flesh, as you get older, your bones are creaky, you’re tired, whatever else, okay? You’re getting older. You’re in the flesh.
12:10 This body will pass away. But if you’ve been saved, your spirit will never pass away, amen? You will be with God for an eternity. And so as you understand these things, and you get right with God, you repent before God, you realize that God’s not there to hurt you, He’s there to help you.
12:20 That God doesn’t want to ruin the fun, He wants to give you fun. That God’s not there to deny you peace, He’s to give you peace. And that He cares about you.
12:32 But you have to realize His program won’t change. And His program starts with getting right with Him, being saved, accepting Jesus as your Savior, and then repenting of your sin every single day.
12:44 I, I’m a preacher, every single day I try to repent of my sin before God and ask Him specifically, by the working of the Holy Spirit, to point it out to me, because I don’t want anything to separate me from God.
12:54 That is our attitude that we should have towards the Lord. And then, when we have that attitude towards the Lord, it’ll be much easier to serve Him with gladness, because we won’t have anything standing in the way between us and God. We will be near to God.
13:06 We’ll be, you know, at peace with Him, reconciled to God in that sense. The Bible says a natural man’s enmity to God, or warfare to God, and we won’t be at war with God.
13:20 We’ll be on the same team, amen. And so when we go to serve Him, we’ll have that peace of the Lord with us.
13:23 And by the way, if you go through the exercise that I’ve pointed out, of just simply working to get right with God and draw close to Him, to study your Bible, to improve your faith, spend time with Him, to pray, to repent of your sins, if you do those things, then service to God will just blossom out of that.
13:38 That will be a byproduct of doing those things, amen? Great ministries are born out of just seeking the Lord, amen. Let me say that again. Great ministries are born out of seeking the Lord.
13:44 You seek God, and He’ll put on your heart what He wants you to do, and He’ll open doors where He wants to open them, but the first step is to get right with Him and to seek Him, and to be patient and wait,
13:59 if you haven’t heard from Him yet, to continue to seek Him, and He will deliver you, and He will help you serve Him with gladness. It is God that helps us serve Him. God loves us, and I thank you so much for listening today.
14:09 Tune in next time as we get to the second part of this three-part message. Take care, God bless, and amen.