-Transcript-
00:36 Okay, good to be back here today. Welcome to the cafe. It’s what a wonderful day here to preach God’s Word, amen, to preach God’s Word, to get into God’s Word.
00:47 We’re so happy to do it. I’m so happy to do it here today. I hope that you are too.
00:52 You know, in the holiday season people can be a little bit worn thin, so to speak, amen. I know I am. I’m sure you are as well.
01:00 And so we just thank God for the rejuvenation that comes from His Word. Oh, how we need it here today. And you know what, if we could, let’s start with a prayer.
01:07 Dear Lord, help us here. Help those that are listening tune in to your Word and help the preacher to preach what you’d have me to preach here today by the working of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus’ name, amen.
01:20 Well, that’s a good thing to do. I oftentimes will pray off-air, but never hurts, I think, to say a quick prayer on air as well, amen. Today we are in the book of the Psalms, amen, the Psalms.
01:32 We are in Psalm 34:19. Psalm 34:19.Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.
01:49 Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. Wow. So why is it that the righteous are afflicted? Why don’t we start there?
01:58 You know, it’s difficult sometimes to think about or really to think of or comprehend why living right is often so hard.
02:07 We see people that are living in sin that are living quite well. I recently preached on Lazarus and there was, of course, that one that was raised from the dead.
02:16 There was that other Lazarus that didn’t give the beggar outside the gate even the crumbs from his table.
02:21 The Bible said that he fared or he ate sumptuously. He lived sumptuously. He lived so well.
02:28 We see many in this world that are doing great, that have what would be your dream house, your dream car, your dream job, your dream spouse, you name it.
02:37 You see them doing so good and you’re over here just kind of getting along to get along, just surviving on less and less and not knowing what to do and praying to God and staying true to God the best you can.
02:51 But the more you think about it, the more it seems like it’d be easier some days to walk away from the faith and just to give up than to put yourself through these things.
03:00 Why is it that the afflictions of the righteous are many? It’s difficult to understand. Psalm 34:19, many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.
03:15 And just before we get to that but, let’s focus a little more on the different types of afflictions the righteous face.
03:23 You know when you are living righteously, that means that you are living for God. That means that you have a point of view, a worldview, and a behavior that matches up with how God has called you to live.
03:35 That would mean that you are trying your very best to abstain from sin.
03:41 In a world full of sin, in a world that celebrates sin, it can be very difficult to abstain from it, to not take part in it. Think of the guy that’s at the job place and all the other guys are telling dirty jokes at lunch.
03:55 What do you do? You want to be the oddball that just goes sits in your car by yourself while they’re all telling dirty jokes? Because if you’re over there with them, you’re partaking in that crude and rude behavior.
04:07 Let’s say you’re the lady at the job place and everyone’s gossiping about so-and-so, and you know through God’s Word that we are not to gossip and we aren’t to say things about others like that without them present.
04:18 Amen. What are you to do? Are you to go and hide under your cubicle, under your desk, or go to your car to eat lunch, or whatever it is? And are you to just put on your headphones all the time?
04:28 We live in a world full of sin, a world full of distraction, a world full of problems from our Christian walk that are designed, I believe, to throw, the Bible word would be snare, to throw a snare in our path.
04:47 Oh how the trap and the snare, how we get caught up in it. In the book of Proverbs, which is what we study at our house in the evening time, that’s our version of family altar.
04:53 What we’ll do is we’ll get the kids around and the kids will sing a song.
04:59 Dad will give announcements. Mom might chime in with any other announcements. And they could be not just church announcements or Christian announcements per se.
05:14 It could just be stuff that our family needs to get done. See how God allows us through getting together to study His Word to bring us closer as a family to do things maybe we wouldn’t normally do to be able to communicate in a way we wouldn’t normally communicate.
05:28 It’s just a blessing of serving God, but that’s a sidebar there.
05:32 In Proverbs, oftentimes we study this idea of snares, of being trapped. You think of a cage. How do they catch, what is it, a bear? And I’m kind of making this up.
05:42 What do they have a bear trap? They’ll get a big jar of honey and they’ll have a massive little hoof on there with a big spike on it.
05:51 Of course, I’m sure that’s not exactly how a bear trap works, but the bear comes to get into the honey and boom, the spike gets them, or the mouse with the cheese, or you just take your pick on how you’re going to catch these critters.
06:03 And it is something sweet or something tempting that leads to destruction.
06:08 The devil does the same thing to you and I every day. There’ll be temptations. As a matter of fact, I was reading in the book of Luke,
06:17 late in the book of Luke, right before it concludes, Jesus mentions something to the extent of he must live out the temptations, or they’re called to be part of these temptations that he is living.
06:27 And I’ve never seen that in the book of Luke before. And it is the idea that we live in a world full of temptations. You know that the devil’s described himself as masquerading as an angel of light.
06:42 The idea that our heart is deceitful beyond measure. There is so much out there that we think is good that God may want us to have nothing to do with. And what happens?
06:52 That creates a friction which leads to affliction.
06:57 That friction leads to affliction. And so how are we to navigate this tough and difficult world? We are to turn to the one that can deliver us from it. Look at the second part of this verse here in Psalm 34:19.
07:11 Many are the afflictions of the righteous. And there’s that but, that beautiful, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. Out of them all.
07:20 Not some, not a few, out of them all. The Lord delivers us out of all afflictions. So the key word, or operative word here, if you want God to deliver you out of all your afflictions, is many are the afflictions of the righteous.
07:37 Righteousness does not come by our works, does not come by who we are or what we do, does not come by what’s in our bank account or what’s on our resume or what kind of grades we get or what we did for somebody else.
07:52 It has nothing to do with any of that. Our righteousness is derived from Jesus Christ alone.
07:57 It’s by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone that we’re saved. And so to have righteousness, as I read this verse, many are the afflictions of the righteous.
08:03 To have righteousness, we have to be living for Christ.
08:07 We have to be living for Christ. And that’s when we get the beauty and the glory of this reward that the Lord delivereth him out of them all. Now yes, we all fall short.
08:19 That’s the idea of repentance, the idea of sanctification, the idea of purification, the idea that our works don’t save us but without works our faith is dead. So we have to live for God. We have to be convicted to live for God.
08:28 If you know somebody that willfully sins and says, hey, I’m saved and I got a pass to do this, and they have no conviction over their sin, you need to question that. They need to question that.
08:35 The Bible says to work your salvation out with fear and trembling.
08:43 And those that are saved should be terribly convicted over their sin. They should be bothered by their sin. I’m your preacher here today.
08:52 I am bothered by my sin. I go to God and ask him to point it out. And I’ll give you a straight answer here.
09:00 Sometimes it’s not always pretty what the Lord will point out in my life. Sometimes it’s not right away, but it’ll just kind of come to me here or there in the night season. And I’ll notice, you know what? He’s right.
09:10 I’m not good at this. Or he’s right. I’ve been bad over here.
09:16 Well look, if that’s somebody that’s in the Bible literally every day preparing messages to preach all the time, if that is somebody on that level, can you imagine somebody that just casually is seeking the Lord?
09:24 Somebody that just maybe goes to church once a week, maybe on a big week twice a week. Hey, there are things that we need to get right with God, not because our actions save us, but because we love the Lord and we’re saved, we want to be close to him.
09:41 And when we have that relationship with God, that idea in the previous verse here in Psalm 34 of having that broken contrite heart, the idea of mourning for our sin, of our spiritual poverty, the idea of it not being about us or our happiness, but about our holiness.
10:00 And that’s a whole other message there that I hope to preach soon. When we understand that, then we have the Lord, he’s going to deliver us out of all of these afflictions.
10:08 And you say, Brother Clark, how can you say that? How can you say confidently that he will deliver us out of all our afflictions? Well, I can say that because number one, it’s in the Bible and that should be enough.
10:19 And then number two, as I’ve just gone through here for the last five or ten minutes, we recognize these afflictions.
10:27 So someone that’s living in sin, let’s say they’re saved but they’re living in sin, they’re backslid, right? They are not recognizing these afflictions.
10:37 They wouldn’t even know that God’s delivering them out of those afflictions because they don’t think they’re being afflicted because they’re living in sin.
10:46 So in order to be delivered out of the affliction, you first need to recognize that you are afflicted, which typically means that you are living for God and you’re living for God in an unholy, wicked world that wants nothing to do with God.
11:00 Now they will say they are Christian or they’ll say they love religion or this or that. Everybody loves that, but not everybody loves what God calls them to do.
11:04 There’s a great passage of Scripture, John 6:66. See, I often forget the verse number, title, and so forth, but I remember this one, John 6, 6, 6, where there are many that are following Jesus, right?
11:20 Even being called disciples and they’re following him, right? And he explains after they’ve seen many healings and miracles that in order to really follow him, they need to take up their cross, as in it’s going to be kind of painful, as in it’s going to pinch, as it’s going to be difficult.
11:36 I preached a message many years ago at a youth camp and the kids, you know, I’m trying to get into their vernacular, what they might find interesting or compelling to explain Bible truth to them.
11:47 We talked about the idea of a boxing match and how sometimes in a boxing match you’re throwing a punch, but oftentimes you’re getting hit. And in this world, you’re going to be afflicted, you’re going to be hit.
11:58 And you know what? In John 6, 6, 6, you can look it up, many walked away and no longer followed Jesus after they heard about this cost, the price.
12:05 Of course, there’s also that Scripture there in the Bible about anybody that’s going to build will add up before they build. I was talking to my wife about a construction project idea that we have and what are we doing in this phase?
12:22 Nothing, nothing. I’m laughing because we’re, you know, we don’t have maybe all the money to do anything in this phase.
12:29 Maybe you can relate to that. You got some ideas, but you don’t have the money to do it. But we sat there and we counted the cost.
12:35 Oh, what would it cost to put a barn over here to feed the old pig or the old goats? And what would it cost to have this thing over there? And what would it cost? And we counted the cost.
12:44 And the Bible says to count the cost of following Christ. And so when we count that cost, when we understand our affliction, when we earnestly go to God knowing that our works, our deeds can’t save us,
12:58 so we can’t like work our way into his favor, but that we have to accept what Christ did for us on the cross and just be still and know that he is God and repent before him and ask him to help us to change.
13:08 Ask him by the working of the Holy Spirit to deliver us from these afflictions. I believe that God, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, is faithful and just to deliver us from all of those afflictions.
13:12 As the Psalm says, Psalm 34:19, many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.
13:27 I love that so much because that’s assurance that there’s not one affliction that will overcome us, but that he will deliver us individually, those that are living for him, those that understand our spiritual need, he will deliver us out of all of our afflictions, out of all of our problems.
13:45 And we know that in this world we’ll have many, but we know that one day we’ll be with Jesus Christ himself and we will have truly no more problems. We will have no more pain, no more suffering, no more heartache.
14:02 It will all be resolved all by Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. What a wonderful God we serve. What a wonderful God that is in your Bible here today.
14:08 Please seek him out in his word. Get close to God. Praise him today.
14:13 He is worthy. Thank you so much. Take care. Amen.