Trusting God, Part 2

Could it be that there's some people here with mountains that won't move, because God can't get us to move? Dr. Tony Evans talks about the path to a mountain-moving faith. Don't go after more faith.

Go after more God. This is the alternative broadcast featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans. Just as a light bulb without a power source is useless, faith in an untrustworthy object is meaningless. In the message we'll hear today, Dr. Evans talked about making sure our faith is based on God, and how trust in Him can turn our impossible situations around. Let's listen in. I want to talk to you for a few moments about what it means to trust God at the base of a mountain. That is, you're in an insurmountable situation. The context for this statement about mountains really goes back a few verses to verses 12 through 14.

Let's look at it. On the next day when they had left Bethany, Jesus became hungry. Seeing at a distance a fig tree in leaf, He went to see it.

Perhaps He would find anything on it. And when He came to it, He found nothing but leaves. For it was not the season for figs.

He said to it, May no one ever eat fruit from you again. And His disciples were listening. So they hear Jesus pronounce this negative judgment on the fig tree.

That is what leads us to our story. Because in verse 20, when they were passing by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots up. Being reminded, Peter said to him, Rabbi, look, the fig tree which you cursed has withered. He's overwhelmed because in less than 24 hours, the morning of the next day, what Jesus Christ declared had come true. In other words, what's shocking Peter and the rest of the disciples is how quick the change occurred. One of the most powerful lessons that you will ever learn as a Christian, and that is trusting God to turn things around on a dime, watch this, even if they're mountainous.

Because this is going to lead to a discussion about mountains. An impossible situation. What they were saying about the tree is, that's impossible. How could that happen so quick?

How do we go from healthy and well to dead and withered in less than 24 hours? How do we go there? Jesus answers, have faith in God. Because what you need to know about God is he can turn things on a dime. Faith as a word dangling by itself is a meaningless concept. To just hang the word faith out there, you haven't said a thing. The word faith only has meaning predicated on the object that you're having faith in.

In other words, is the object worthy of the faith I'm dangling in front of it? If you say you have faith in an untrustworthy person, then the untrustworthy person nullifies the significance of faith. What many people try to do is get more faith. More faith is usually not your problem.

Or my problem. Our problem is the object into which faith is being placed. That's why he doesn't simply say have faith. He says have faith in God. Faith is confidence in the integrity of God based on his word. It is believing something not seen as though it already were true because the object is worthy of your confidence. The reason why Jesus never worried about anything is because he had confidence in his own word.

Because of course his word was always congruent with God's word. He uses that now, have faith in God, and applies it to a mountainous scenario. Truly I say unto you, whoever says to this mountain, to this impossible situation, a whole mountain, be taken up and be cast into the sea.

So the question on the floor is how many folks here is the mountain talking to you instead of you talking to the mountain? How many here are the circumstances dictating the agenda? The circumstances dictating the action?

The circumstances dictating the emotion? The circumstances dictating how you're gonna flow rather than you doing the talking? Jesus says if you have faith in God then you get to do the talking. Faith in God means that what you are having faith for is what God himself believes. If it's not what God himself believes, it's not faith in God. It's faith in what you think about God, what you feel about God. It may be faith in you. It may be faith in faith. But it's not faith in God. In other words, for it to be faith in God, God has to be the definer of what you should be believing.

If God is not the definer of what you should be believing, then you are not believing in God. So many of the mountains we speak to don't move because they're saying, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

Why? Because there's no God backup to the faith we're exercising. You have to have faith in God to deal with, here it is, the impossible situations in your life.

Now here it is, here it is. If it is impossible for you, it is most probable that God wants it to be that way, which means that God himself will block your attempts to move the mountain on your own. Because God allows impossible situations to let you see there is nothing impossible with God. That's growing your faith. You want more faith? Don't go after more faith, go after more God. When you go after more God and you see God work, you get more faith.

When God gives you confidence about what he wants, you then can have confidence about what you speak. He gives you objective confidence by his word. He gives you subjective validation by his spirit.

Those are the only two. All the way through the Bible, it all boils down to those two things. What he objectively gives you through his word, what he says, but a lot of times that's general and not technically specific to your situation. And he knows that, so he's given every believer an antenna to pick up on a signal.

Now here's the key. God will not give you a private audience with his spirit if you do not take seriously the objective revelation of his word. See, a lot of us want this private guidance when we're not willing to seek his objective directive. If you ignore his revealed word, he will never tell you his secret word. He says, therefore, verse 24, I say to you, all things for which you pray.

Now please notice the connection. He's now connected the mountains in your life that you're supposed to believe God about to pray. All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them and they will be granted to you. He introduces the subject of prayer. Now the truth would be told for many of us, prayer is the most boring thing in the world. Tell the truth and shame the devil.

I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand because some of you gonna lie and not raise them. Prayer is the very last thing you want to do. It seems like there's a blank, there's a stare, there's empty space, it's repeating the same thing over and over again, it's doing the religious Christian thing without any oomph to it, without any pop to it.

Snap, crackle, and pop have gone and you are fulfilling the religious routine. Primarily that is because we do not understand it. Prayer is relational communication with God whereby he executes his will in history. Or as it's been stated before, prayer is giving earthly permission for heavenly interference. It is giving earthly permission for heavenly interference. In other words, prayer is the verbal or heart mechanism by which we communicate with God and give him the right to intervene in history based on his will. That's what prayer is. It is the execution of the invisible will of God in our visible physical realm.

It is the specific communication means that God is given whereby the believer can tap into the purposes of God and his powerful ability to carry them out. We'll hear more on how prayer links us with God when we continue our lesson in just a moment. First though, today's message is the final installment from Dr. Evans' timeless sermon series, Freedom Through Forgiveness. Through the lessons in this collection, Tony has not only discussed the power of placing our trust in the Lord, but the incredible role God's forgiveness plays in our lives and how we can pass that same kind of forgiveness on to others, as well as the importance of doing so. We'd like to send you a copy of this series as our gift when you make a donation to help support the work of The Urban Alternative. Reach out today and we'll include a special bonus, the companion book for this series, Thirty Days to Victory Through Forgiveness.

In it, you'll discover that the person who benefits most from your forgiving heart is you. Visit us today at tonyevans.org for details or call our resource center at 1-800-800-3222. Once again, 1-800-800-3222. I'll have that contact information for you again after the second part of today's lesson.

Let's return to it now. Prayer is your link. It's where you ask, he says, pray and ask God to intervene in this mountain, but it's also where he speaks to your heart about whether that is what in fact he wants to do today. Because prayer for most people, even most Christians, is not relational communication with God, it's talk.

It's rarely ever listening. Prayer is relational communication with God. It's not where you talking, okay, bless my day, take away this problem, get rid of this, get rid of this, in Jesus name, amen. I'm gone. That's a monologue.

That's you talking. Prayer is also God talking. That means that you must carve out time to hear, which is why one of the main ways you pray is with your Bible open, so that he can lift his truth off the page and what the Bible calls in the new covenant write it on your heart. God does not need raw material to make something. Now this is important for faith. The reason that it is important for faith is you must understand that you don't have to see where the solution is coming from.

You don't have to have a script how this gonna work. The mere fact that it's a mountain means there is no script. The mere fact that it's a mountain means there is no visible, verifiable, validatable, preconceived solution in sight that you can get your hands on.

It's a mountain. It's an impossible situation. When you see God handling a whole mountain of violence, you're not gonna have a faith problem. In fact, look at his language here. He says, when you pray, believe you have received them. Now you would have thought he would have said, believe you will receive them. Come on, man.

Wouldn't that be the normal way? I'm asking for something. If I'm asking for something today, I believe I'm gonna get it tomorrow. I believe that. He said, oh no, no, no.

No, no, no, no, no, no. He says, when you get this faith thing right and when you understand who I am, once you've heard from me, you already have it. You just don't see it yet. You say, well, that was good in the Gospels. Jesus was physically here.

Uh-uh, no. If you read 1 John chapter 5, 1 John says, we have this confidence and we know we have received. It is knowledge that's already existing about something that isn't. That isn't visibly existing yet. I'm standing on the mountain. I'm looking at the mountain.

I'm feeling the mountain. It's an impossible situation. He says, but when you have faith in God and you let me be God, you let me set the terms, then you can know in advance that you have already received it.

You're just waiting for the unveiling. Now, finally, there is a condition for God to be free to move a mountain. An impossible situation. You must believe on God's terms. You must pray, communicate with God, two-way street, so he can speak to you at the deepest level of where you live.

But to move a mountain, he says, there is a condition. Verses 25 and 26. Whenever you stand praying, forgive if you have anything against anyone so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive your transgressions. But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive your transgressions.

Now, what has that got to do with the price of tomatoes? We've gone now to a subject of forgiveness. Have we left the subject?

Uh-uh. When you stand to pray. Well, the previous verse was talking about praying. He hasn't changed his subject.

He's established his condition. There's probably rarely a person in this room who has not had to struggle with forgiving or being forgiven. In order to see God move a mountain, you must be on good terms with him. Which means there must have been forgiveness. Let me talk about the two kinds of forgiveness. One type of forgiveness is judicial forgiveness, legal forgiveness. Every person who has come to Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins has experienced judicial forgiveness. That is, forgiveness for the offense of your sin against a holy God. Your judicial forgiveness is eternal in nature, which is why, as was stated earlier, no true Christian can lose their salvation. The reason why you can't lose your salvation is that the judgment bar has declared you not guilty. Now, you guilty of sin, but you've been declared, I've been declared not guilty because of the work of Christ. And the Bible calls that justification. That is judicial forgiveness.

And never, a billion years from now, will your eternal status ever be raised by a holy God because you have been judicially declared righteous. But that's not the only kind of forgiveness. The other kind of forgiveness is relational forgiveness. This has to do with our fellowship with God. That's what the book of 1st John is all about. This has to be without closeness with God. This has to do without walk with God. God says, I have judicially forgiven you, and if you've trusted my son, I've exchanged your sin for his righteousness. However, in our day-to-day living together, you need to maintain good fellowship with me, like it's possible to be legally married and relationally miserable. Can anybody testify?

It's possible to be legally married but relationally unhappy. Well, it's possible to be saved and on your way to heaven but a unhappy saint because the fellowship is not intact, and that involves forgiveness. That's why 1st John says we confess our sins. He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Confession of sins, but he's talking to believers.

He's talking about maintaining our relationship with them. Now here's the point. You've got a mountain in your life. You want God to supernaturally turn it on a dime.

Flip that thing. He says there's a condition. When you stand praying, you're talking to me, if you have anything against anyone so that your Father in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions. In other words, refusal to forgive another person blocks God's ability to forgive you in terms of human relationship, not in terms of heaven, in terms of, not judicially, but relationally. But if God can't forgive you, then that means there is no longer any fellowship.

But if there's no longer any fellowship, then guess what? He's not hearing your prayers. And if he's not hearing your prayers, he's not moving your mountains. And he's not moving your mountains because you really don't have faith in him. Because if you have faith in him, you're due to forgiving so he can remove your mountains. So the proof you don't have faith is the refusal to forgive so that he doesn't move your mountains. Because what you're saying is, God, you give to me what I am unwilling to give to somebody else.

So now I got to answer this question. What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a beautiful word till you have to give it. It's a beautiful word when somebody's giving it to you. But it ain't that nice a word when you got to be to give her, right? Because that means somebody that messed over you.

Now follow this. You have to understand, whatever you have to forgive somebody else for, whoever that is, it is a whole lot less than what God has to forgive you for. So let's get this straight. Whatever you got to forgive somebody for is way less than what God has to give you. Less in amount and less in regularity. Somebody did one thing to you 10 years ago. Here, you're ticking God off every other second.

So it is much less. What is forgiveness then? Forgiveness is the choice. On the line choice, you can decide to forgive. It is the choice to release another person from the obligation or the debt from the wrong they committed to you.

It's no longer calling for payment. I had one person tell me about an offense against them. This person is going to have to pay for the rest of their lives. Now what they were saying in essence was there will be no forgiveness. What they didn't understand was in saying that and feeling that and acting that out, they were canceling God's ability to remove a mountain out of their life.

So could it be that there's some people here with mountains that won't move because God can't get us to move? It is the decision to release a person from the obligation or the debt. That's why it says forgive our debts in the Lord's Prayer as we forgive those who are indebted to us.

It means to no longer demand payment. Dr. Tony Evans as he wrapped up this enduring message on the power of forgiveness. Now don't forget you can get the full length version of all six messages in this classic sermon series Freedom Through Forgiveness bundled along with a copy of 30 Days to Victory Through Forgiveness. As I mentioned earlier this is the final lesson we'll be presenting from this series and if you contact us right away we'll send the forgiveness messages and book to you as our gift when you make a donation toward the ministry of the alternative broadcast. Visit us today at tonyevans.org to make the arrangements. Again that's tonyevans.org or call our 24-hour resource center at 1-800-800-3222 and let a friendly team member help you. The number again 1-800-800-3222. When your only options are bad ones and there doesn't seem to be any way out of the circumstances you're facing that could be exactly where God wants you. Why? We'll find out tomorrow on the alternative broadcast. Be sure to join us.