-Transcript-
00:37 Thank you for joining me. Welcome to KJV Cafe. Hope you’re doing great today.
00:41 Today we are going to focus on unexplainable circumstances, things that happen that we can’t quite describe or we can’t explain. As a Christian, have you ever been asked, well, what about this thing that happened?
00:55 What about this school shooting? What about this natural disaster? What about this political scandal? What about this and this? Certainly you probably have or at least you’ve thought about it yourself.
01:09 In life there are things that we cannot explain and sometimes the hardest thing to do is to say, I don’t know.
01:17 But I think that that’s honest and God expects us to be honest. We aren’t to lie. We aren’t to fabricate his word or add to or take away from it.
01:23 Sometimes we can just say, we don’t know. The verse here today is Proverbs 3:5-6, 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.
01:39 Now this verse is very close to my heart. Proverbs 3:5- 6 is my life verse. Amen.
01:47 My mom gave me a statue of a sailboat. I looked like an award they would give somebody. And on it, it had Proverbs 3:5-6 inscribed.
01:57 And I read it and I thought, well, that’s really interesting. And at the time I hadn’t really read much of God’s word. I said, well, as a young person that makes sense.
02:06 And as I’ve gotten older and as I’ve gotten into, as God called me into the ministry, and as I turned my heart over to the Lord and I was saved, gloriously saved and regenerated in heaven, amen, as a child of God.
02:21 And my name’s written down in the Lamb’s book of life, never be blotted out, never to be erased, amen. The angels rejoiced with God over my salvation, I believe it, like every other lost sinner that’s saved, amen.
02:32 And it was a wonderful time to be saved. It was a wonderful time to renew my life, give my life to the Lord, kind of renew my commitment to Him and get right with Him and repent before Him.
02:46 Maybe about 10, 11 years ago, when I had just kind of hit a rock bottom and I had been saved, but I was living out in the world.
02:53 And I said, I’ve had enough of this dirty, sin-sick world. And I’m going to go give my life to the Lord fully and completely. And I told God, hey, this is the prayer, you guys will laugh.
03:02 But I said, Lord, at the time, I had a lot of stuff in my garage. I had a couple of businesses that hadn’t worked out. My garage was full of stuff.
03:08 I said, Lord, if you would just help me, Lord, I’ll just go ahead and give you everything in my garage. And what I meant by that is I’ll give you my whole life. I’ll give you everything I got.
03:16 Anything that’s mine is yours, please help me. And I wasn’t trying to barter with the Lord. What I was trying to say is, I surrender, I’m broken, I need help, amen.
03:22 Have you been in that position? I was, ooh, I was in deep water, amen. And I was struggling with depression and anxiety, even paranoia, all kinds of problems. I had every problem under the sun, amen.
03:38 And I gave it to the Lord. And this verse comes to mind at that time, trust in the Lord with all thine heart. That’s the idea of saying, God, you can have whatever in my garage, in my house, in my heart, in my brain, in my soul, you have it all, amen.
03:52 That’s that trust in the Lord that he’s asking from us today. Have you given the Lord that kind of trust? In spite or in light of all that is happening in the world, all the unexplainable things, all the natural disasters,
04:04 all the pandemic fever that you see around and all of the problems that we face today, all the struggles at school and at work and in our culture and in our society.
04:14 Have you said, Lord, I trust you with all my heart? Or are you hedging your bets? Are you saying, Lord, I’m going to give you half, but the other half is going to go over here to this textbook and to science and to mathematics and to reason and to logic and to philosophy.
04:29 Now, the problem with that is we can’t serve two gods, amen, because we can’t serve two masters. Because if we serve one, we’re going to hate the other. If we serve the other, we’re going to hate the other one.
04:41 You get the idea. And of course, in the Bible, that is translated, you cannot serve God and mammon or God and money or God and material things. But that also could be you cannot serve God and the world, amen,
04:50 because the world system, the world culture is set up to confuse us, to repress us to keep us in the bondage of sin that we have been freed from by the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
05:01 And so I asked you again today, have you trusted the Lord with all your heart? Because the next part of this verse is really the crux of this message. Lean not unto thine own understanding, lean not unto thine own understanding.
05:12 What is our understanding when we turn on the TV, and we see innocent people dying from a tornado? What is our understanding when we see a pandemic killing people?
05:25 And what is our understanding when we see those that are most vulnerable, oftentimes are the ones that are most afflicted, where the rich seem to be the first in line for all the medical treatments, and the rich are the ones that have the maybe the tornado shelter,
05:40 if you would, and the poor don’t get to the doctor enough, and the poor are in some kind of trailer, maybe without mobile home anchors, the poor are at great risk.
05:49 And there’s times that I watch the news, and my wife will watch the news, and she’ll say, honey, what would God say about this? And I look at her, and she knows I’ve got a Bible answer for just about every question.
06:03 But sometimes I just shake my head, and I don’t know. I don’t know.
06:08 But what I do know is this verse, and I do know that this verse, which is my life verse, which is how I live, which is how I am recommending for you to live, which I believe is why God called me to the ministry to reiterate this verse, along with others, is to trust in the Lord with all thine heart and not lean on your own understanding.
06:24 The King James says, and lean not unto thine own understanding. So don’t lean on your own understanding.
06:30 You know, we cannot understand what is happening. Now, there are some verses that I thought of. One being, there’s a verse there.
06:37 I believe it’s in Job, but I’m not quite sure, because I didn’t look it up before this. I probably should have done that.
06:46 But there’s a verse that says that where God is speaking and saying something to the extent of, people don’t realize if I take someone home early, I might be sparing them much trouble.
06:57 And of course, there’s many other verses out there that tell us not to fear the first death, but the second death.
07:10 And so if someone was saved, and they had that first death, they shouldn’t be afraid, because they don’t have to fear the second death, because they’ve given their life to Christ. And so we have some of those scriptures.
07:11 Paul says, to die is gain. Amen. The idea that in heaven, everything is much better.
07:17 Jesus mentioned that John was the greatest to ever live, but that the least in heaven was greater than John. And so you can go on and on, kind of help a little bit understand what might happen when the world grieves a great death and destruction, and we don’t understand the full picture. We can go into God’s Word and get comfort.
07:34 But I think the main point is that God is making through some of these things happening in our world that can be very disturbing and heartbreaking, is that we just need to have faith, that we just need to believe that He is who He says He is,
07:47 and He’s a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. We just need to believe that we’ll be justified by faith and nothing else. No works can do anything for us.
07:55 Our righteousness is like filthy rags, the Bible says. But Abraham was justified by faith. We are justified by faith.
08:01 What does that mean? That means that when we truly believe, not that we say we believe, not that we wear a t-shirt that says we believe, not that we sit in a congregation of believers, but that we believe in our hearts, trust in the Lord with all thine heart.
08:16 The idea of trusting is giving, completely saying what I’m going to give everything I have to you because I trust you that you will do good with it. And then verse 6, in all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.
08:28 In all thy ways. So that’s the idea of, you know what, sometimes it’s okay to say we don’t know. And that we always say we trust God.
08:38 We believe in God. God is sovereign. In all our ways, we should acknowledge Him.
08:43 It doesn’t say when things are good, say that you’re blessed and give God glory. But when things are bad, just start questioning and get real antsy. No, it says in all thy ways, in all your ways, in all times, you have to acknowledge Him.
08:50 You have to acknowledge Him. In all thy ways, acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths. Now by acknowledging Him, that doesn’t mean that we have to understand His ways.
09:04 The Bible says that His ways are so much higher than our ways. It’s like the heavens or the earth. We can’t even see it.
09:10 We can’t understand it. So in all our ways, we are to acknowledge Him. That means that to acknowledge would mean to say that, okay, God is real.
09:18 He exists. And I trust Him. And I’m going to give Him my heart.
09:29 And I’m going to lean on my own understanding because I realize that I am flawed. I’m a sinner. We’ve been going over the Beatitudes in our little church.
09:34 And we had the kids and young kids and even some of the college kids draw some of the Beatitudes. And they were really funny because they were doing these drawings and they were inspired by this text which said, blessed are they that mourn.
09:44 Not exactly the type of thing that people would want to draw about as a little child.
09:49 But we were able to say that, blessed are they that mourn over their sin. Amen. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
09:55 Those that realize that they can’t do it on their own, that they’re poor, that they’re bankrupt in spirit, that they need Jesus Christ, that they need that Holy Spirit.
10:03 Blessed are those people. And so when we acknowledge God and we acknowledge our sinful state and God gives us so much in His Word, I mean, we realize that the heart is deceitful.
10:13 We realize that man can do nothing on their own. They can’t bear anything, any good fruit without Jesus. We realize all these things as we get into His Word,
10:22 that He is the light, that He is the truth, that He illuminates our path, that He is the one that walks with us through this valley of the shadow of death, that it is all about Him.
10:30 So if we acknowledge Him, He shall direct our paths. And so what we need to do, this verse is all about ceasing over control to God. This verse is all about having faith.
10:44 I was going to say always about, you could say that too, having faith, ceasing control, having faith, and then watching what God does. You know, it’s so good. You know, we cannot tell the future, right?
10:55 But we can look back and see what God’s done and give Him credit for it.
11:00 How great is it to do that? To say, you know what, God, thank you for what you did here and here and here. That helps me trust you so much more tomorrow. Amen.
11:06 And the pandemic, for example, when that thing first came on, it was like, okay, is this the end of the world? What’s going on? One of my buddies as a preacher said it was the biggest altar call he’s ever seen.
11:20 But when you look back on it, you say, wow, you know, everyone was stuck at home. Everyone was with their family.
11:25 Everyone was really reflecting on what’s important to them. And you start realizing, seeing what God might’ve been doing globally. And then you look within your own household.
11:34 During the pandemic, did you get closer to God or further away? Well, hopefully you got closer to Him. I know our family did, amen. As a church family, we got closer to God and we went through it, amen.
11:43 We went through some tough times as many churches did, but it drew us closer to Him. And we see Him working in these ways and in these things that at the start we didn’t or we didn’t know, amen, down to even the building God had us in.
11:59 I could give Him so much glory here today and testify to the building that He had us in was a small building and it was a temporary two or three day a week rent.
12:11 And so when everything got shut down, we were not left holding a big church bill. That may sound like a small thing to some people, but that was a huge thing to our church in a time when I was personally pretty much laid off from work from my day job, amen.
12:18 God had already handled it and He had already done things.
12:24 And so during that time, it might’ve looked a little crazy, but looking back on it, I can testify and say, God is good, amen. God is great, amen. And so when we go through hard times in life, when we look at the news and can’t explain it, when people ask us, where’s your God right now?
12:36 What I want you to do is tell them Proverbs 3:5-6, trust in the Lord with all thine heart, that’s the first step.
12:43 Lean not unto thine own understanding, that’s the second step. In all thy ways acknowledge Him, that’s the third step. And then here’s the result, and He shall direct thy paths.
12:49 He will direct thy paths. And I believe He’ll open up heavens and He’ll bless you and He’ll show you and He’ll guide you and He’ll do things with you that you couldn’t believe that He could do if you just trust Him here today, if you just give your whole heart to Him here today.
13:06 I thank you so much for tuning in and listening to understand, to learn about His word, because God is so good.
13:14 And we have such a short period of time, like a vapor. We’re here and then we’re gone, amen. And while we’re here, let’s praise God in the midst of the storm, in the midst of the trial.
13:21 Let’s give Him the glory and let’s not forget that He is sovereign and He is in full control and anything that happens, He’s allowed it. And as Romans 8:28 says, and we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.
13:39 Let’s take hold of that today, that God has a plan, that He’s still on the throne, that there’s no panic in heaven, that He is fully sovereign and that everything will work out as He has planned it.
13:50 And that we will be blessed for simply having faith in Him and not trusting in our own understanding, but acknowledging Him in all our ways, trusting Him with our whole heart and watching as He guides our path.
14:02 Thank you so much for listening. Take care. God bless. Amen.