Faith

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Lamentations 3:20-26 (LB), “I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.
21-Yet, I will DARE TO HOPE when I remember this:
22-The unfailing love of the Lord never ends! By His mercies we have been kept from complete destruction.
23-Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each day.
24-I say to myself, The Lord is my inheritance; therefore I will hope in Him!
25-The Lord is wonderfully good to those who wait for Him and seek Him.
26-So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.”

SALVATION---deliverance, healing, wholeness, peace, prosperity.

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life" (Proverbs 13:12).

Psalm 71:1, “In You, O Lord, do I put my trust and confidently (trust brings confidence) take refuge; let me never be put to shame or confusion!”

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MAKE SURE WHERE YOU PUT YOUR TRUST:
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Taking a closer look at what David was saying in this verse is ‘key’ to the rest of the chapter.

David said, “In You, O Lord, do I put my trust...”

This is important because many times we can put trust in things that can’t sustain us, hold us up, encourage us, provide for us, redeem us or protect us. Putting your trust in anything else other than God is misplaced trust and it will fail and let you down everytime. And the worst place of all to put your trust is in yourself because you can’t really trust yourself. The reason is, you will tend to be biased.

You may spend countless hours trying to reason things out in your mind. You’re trying to come up with solutions because you only trust yourself to have the right answer and surely God must have be wrong. The devil thought God was wrong and he was right when he decided that he should be god sitting on the throne of ultimate control. We know who came out right and who came out wrong in that deal. Jehovah God is still on His throne and the devil received a destiny of the “Lake of Fire.” Praise God Who reigns forevermore!

But if you don’t choose like David did to put your hope and trust in God alone, you’ll look to self and continue to run from truth. When you’ve been disobedient over something God has told you to do, you’ll try to redeem yourself through ‘good works.’ Unless your heart motive is right, you haven’t done any good works of faith because faith works by love, not by the flesh (the old carnal nature). The deeds were done to appease your conscience not to please God.

You can’t redeem yourself from any sin. Only the blood of Jesus has the power to redeem you from sin and He’s already done that and will continue to do that when you confess sin and ask His forgiveness (1 John 1:9). There’s nothing else that you, yourself can add to it. Jesus said, “It is finished.” That means, “I took care of it ALL. Now trust me that it’s done and receive the provision of salvation by faith.” That's all we have to do.

David said, “In YOU, O Lord...” You can’t put your trust in your bank account. You can’t put your trust in your job because somebody who’s a little more skilled than you are can come along and take your job out from under you. Your bank account can also run out of money if you’re not able to keep making deposits to cover debits of withdrawels.

Not only that but if you put your trust in the bank itself, it can always fold up and some crook from inside can run off with all your money. It’s been known to happen before when several years ago a lot of SL’s folded and went out of business. Many people had put their trust in these banks only to be hit one day with a rude awakening that what they had trusted in had suddenly disappeared. No doubt, their hope folded also because what they had expected to continue for as long as they lived was now gone.

It’s not wrong to put money in the bank as long as you know in your heart that God is truly your source. Your true source is not your job, your savings or checking account or any other account you may have. God does instruct us to be good stewards of the money that HE provides for us. And to be good stewards, you have to first realize that ’it is God who gives us the power to get wealth.’ It will take the wisdom of the Lord, not our earthly wisdom to help us make the right choices for the Kingdom of God with the money entrusted to our hands.

So, like David, we have to make a decision of our will to hope in God alone. To put our trust in Him as our source for everything. Even the sustaining of our very life because we “move and breath and have our being in Him.” We have to decide to hope in God even when things around us are falling apart and everything is going wrong, right in the midst of chaos. If you only have an ounce of strength---a mustard seed of faith, you’ve got to use it to say, “In You, O Lord, do I put my trust (my hope, my earnest expectation)...”

Like Jeremiah said, you have to dare to hope (earnestly expect) again, even if you do so with your teeth chattering and your knees knocking together. Do it anyway. Abraham “hoped against hope and said, I’ll not consider my own body now dead but I’ll look to the promise of my God.” (paraphrase). And how about David? He had been through tremendous persecution from Saul who sought to kill him. He had run for his life and hid in caves, always on the move to stay one step ahead of his adversary. He dared to hope in God and say, in You O Lord will I trust...”

He didn’t deny the reality of the situation he was in, that Saul was tryying to kill him, but he didn’t consider it either. He didn’t meditate on it and continue to rehearse it in his mind constantly. He encouraged himself in the Lord (Psalm 103). He meditated on the things of God. He meditated on the Lord while lying in his bed at night. He prayed to God for deliverance, for protection, for provision and God answered Him.

Somebody says, ‘thats because he was anointed of God.’ God is no respector of persons and you are anointed as well with the indwelling presence of Jesus by His Holy Spirit. You have the anointing abiding in you at all times, if you’re a born again child of God (2 John 2:27). Just as it was for David, God’s delivering power, His protection and His provision is there for you today as well, no matter what the situation is you find yourself in.

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FOCUS ON THE GOODNESS OF GOD:
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Jeremiah said, (paraphrase), “It’s a reality that Israel has been taken into exile and all seems to be lost as I look at this but yet, I will dare to hope when I remember this about God more than I remember what has happened to all of Israel." Jeremiah made a decision of his will and said, things are terrible, they couldn’t get any worse because Israel has gone into exile but yet, as bad as things look on the outside, I will dare to hope in God. And he set his focus on the goodness of God instead of focusing on the problems at hand, though he didn’t deny the problems.

We don’t deny reality but even greater than the reality of problems is the truth that God is a merciful God who’s love for you is unfailing. Even Jeremiah could see something good in the devasation of his people, he said, ‘by His mercies, we’ve not been completely destroyed...’ That meant there was still hope for things to turn around for good.

Like David did several times in the Psalms when he spoke to himself and said, “soul, why are you cast down? bless the Lord and forget not all His benefits...” Then, David would speak to himself about God’s goodness and the manifested benefits of His goodness. Jeremiah did the same thing in Lamentations chapter 3 when he said in verse 24, “I say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance; therefore I will hope in Him.”

You see, sometimes, you’ve got to get hold of you and say, “Soul, why are you cast down within me? Why are you discouraged? You're not hopeless. Be encouraged soul and think about and consider God’s goodness to you. Think about His benefits of forgiveness for iniquities, healing of all diseases, deliverance from destruction. Think about The way he crowns you with loving-kindness and tender mercies, and how He satisfies your mouth with good things and renews your youth like the eagles, etc.”

You’ve got to make the decision to use whatever strength you have left and say to yourself, “Get up from this ash heap of self pity and think about God’s goodness to you.” You’ve got to say to yourself, “The Lord is my inheritance, therefore I will hope in Him. I will earnestly and intensely expect God’s goodness to prevail over anything bad the devil has tried to destroy me with.”

When you make this kind of decision of your will and you mean it sincerely, then God’s grace will come to undergird you to give you the strength to walk out the decision. You don’t have to walk it out alone. All you have to do is make the decision and then trust in Him, hope in Him that He’ll take you on through to victory.
(to continue)


Plain As Day Ministries

Shirley Williams
4-28-03

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