Trust God For Today, Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. And then we find out that if we put our faith and trust in Christ and His finished work on the cross, not only are our sins forgiven, but we are having bond and joint heirs with Christ. And all of these things belong to all of us. And then on Wednesday night, we sit wringing our hands about what might happen Thursday at noon.

How do you do that? We forget. That's exactly what they did.

They forgot and they began to worry. The lesson is clear. God says, look, I'm going to meet your needs daily, not annually, not monthly, not weekly, daily. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again, he shows us how God's word meets our world. Last week, while I was on vacation, I had my iPad out and I was reading a newspaper headline. And it had the international headlines of a vivid description of a war on the other side of the world. And the multitude of critics who were questioning the president's decisions, the demands of politicians for a military leader to resign and a military base in Asia was attacked. And locally, there was a 40 year old lieutenant colonel who just retired and within one week died of a heart attack. There was an article about how urban sprawl is destroying America.

And there were a host of car wrecks and drunk drivers and some even being fatal. And once again, as you just read something like that, you think, well, what a mess. You know, the whole world's a mess and our world's a mess. And for many of us, I think it seems like the logical thing to do is to sort of wring your hands and swallow a couple of antacids and jump right on the worry wagon. For many of us, I think worry and anxiety are a logical response to the world we live in. I think that for some of us, we must think in such a convoluted way that we think that, for example, we embrace worry to such an extent that we think that worry must help our health. Lose sleep, live longer. A nervous stomach is a happy stomach. I mean, we know better, don't we? Side effects of worry and anxiety.

Heart trouble, high blood pressure, ulcers, colds, thyroid malfunction, arthritis, migraines and a host of stomach disorders. So worry doesn't really help our health. How about this for some of us? Worry makes us happy. Worry puts the blue in the sky, the spring in your step.

It puts a song in your heart. This is a new year, and for some of you, you could actually start a new year schedule. Sort of like reading through the Bible in a year, except you could worry through the year. Every Monday, you could stress out over the economy and how it will affect you. Every Tuesday, you could dread next year's workload or whether you'll still have a job next year or not. On Wednesdays, you could think about all the communicable diseases that you may be exposed to in the coming year. One Thursday, you could calculate your chances of being carjacked or burglarized. One Friday, you could think about all the people who don't like you. One Saturday, you could ponder the number of terminal diseases that you could be diagnosed with in the coming year.

And then on Sunday, you could watch that show that you recorded about the possibility of a comet or a large asteroid streaking to this earth to kill all of us. We know that worry doesn't make us happy. Worry is the happiness what a Hoover vacuum is to a dust bunny. Worry sucks happiness right out of the human heart. Well, then maybe worry could solve our problems. If you could create enough anxiety and worry about it enough, maybe all of your problems will vanish or maybe go away.

No, worry has never solved problems. And by the way, the newspaper headlines and articles I were reading. Were from the 1950s. The war was the Korean War and the general was Douglas MacArthur.

And the president was Truman. Things really change, don't they? Anxiety and worry have never helped anyone's health, made anyone happy or solved anyone's problems. In fact, if you're here this morning and you've got a lot of anxiety and you're worrying about something, I want to say something to you. You have no chance of happiness. Open your Bibles to Luke Chapter 11. Luke.

Chapter 11. This is a second message in a short series that I've called What Makes You Happy? I don't mean the question, what makes you happy? I mean the statement, what makes you happy? This is the first time that happiness is a lot more about the who's in our life than the what's in our life.

It's extremely important to know that it comes down to who. And for a believer in Jesus Christ, your relationship with the Lord really becomes, in a sense, the source of your happiness. Jesus said, I have told you the truth so that your joy will be made full. In John 15, the last time I said, if you want to be happy, you need to bathe yourself in God's grace every day. Don't let yesterday's mistakes sabotage today's happiness. And every day you have to express your gratitude to God. You have to lift your eyes off the things you lack and thank God for the blessings that you have.

If you do that, you have a good chance of being happy day in and day out. In Luke 11, where I looked at this last time, I just want to look at a little bit different way this morning. Verse one, it says it happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples. And he said to them, look, when you pray, then say, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Another version of the Lord's Prayer.

And he says this phrase then. Give us each day our daily bread. Give us each day our daily bread. Literally, what that says is our needed bread. Give us day by day. Our needed bread.

Give us day by day. You see, if you want to be happy, that's what Jesus is going to say here. If you want to be happy, you have to trust God for today. If you want to be happy, you have to trust God for today.

Notice, give us each day, he says, our daily bread. You see, what happens with worry? Worry never really focuses on now.

Worry is always focused on the future. What's going to happen in a few minutes? What's going to happen in a few hours? What's going to happen in a few days? What could happen in a few weeks? What about a few months?

What about a few years? And you fixate on something in the future and then you worry about it. Our Lord says each day.

This is really important to get. God thought it was so important that he gave us an illustration of it that will last forever. Go with me now back to Exodus chapter 16, Exodus chapter 16. One thing good, if you're in Exodus, you know, it's all about the Exodus and they're out of the land and they're out of Egypt. And they're already heading to the promised land and they're in the wilderness area. That's what he tells us where exactly they're at in Sinai in the first two verses.

And then we find something. Remember, there's a large group of people here, as many as two and a half million. That's a lot of people wandering around in a desert. People who've been slaves for 400 years. It says the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. It says the sons of Israel said to them, would that we had died by the Lord's hand in the land of Egypt. When we sat by the pots of meat and we ate bread to the fool.

For you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Now, let me read a couple of things in there. One of the things is it shows you that when you begin to worry and by the way. If you're really, really hungry, do you begin to worry about where your next meal is coming from? Yes, that's what's got the grumbling going. By the way, on a whole, warriors are grumblers. You see, because they're always worried about something is going to happen in the future and then they're going to grumble about it in the present.

And it's kind of an interesting thing here that it even worry, even skews your sense of reality. Notice what they said it was like being a slave in Egypt. We had so much meat, we didn't know what to do with it.

We had pots full of food. I mean, it was just like a banquet every day. Now, you can read the history of slavery from day one until today, and that's not really the case with slaves. That's not the way slaves are treated.

But notice how deluded they are. And then the Lord said to Moses, behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. Says the people should go out and gather a day's portion every day that I may test them whether or not they will walk in my instruction. Let me say that a different way.

Whether or not they'll trust me. You see what God could have done right here. You can see what's coming. God could have said, look, I'm going to bring a caravan in and this caravan is going to have so much food in it that they won't be able to eat it the next 10 years. I'm going to have barges come up from Egypt and just dump the food on there. I'm going to do. God says, no, I'm not doing any of that. I'm going to provide for them. One day at a time. In order to test them.

To see if they will trust me. You see, that's how this works. And it says it will come about on the sixth day when they prepare what what he says they bring in.

It will be twice as much as they gather daily. Well, that was interesting. Down to verse eight. Moses said this will happen when the Lord gives you meat in the evening and bread in full in the morning. He says, for the Lord hears the grumblings, which you grumble against him. And what are we? He says your grumblings, he said, are not against us, but against the Lord.

So God says, I'm going to have a deal. I'll provide what you need every morning and also provide what you need every night. So in a sense, they get complex carbohydrates in the morning. They get protein at night because the quill come in at night, but they get everything they need.

Now, you know what happens with this. The first thing you heard is that verse 13. So it came about in the evening that the quills came up and covered the camp. And in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. And when the layer of dew evaporated, behold, on the surface of the wilderness, there was a fine flake like thing, finest frost on the ground. And when the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, what is it or manna? And it says, for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, it is the bread for which the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded. Gathered every man as much as he should eat. And he said, you should take an omer apiece according to the number of persons each of you have in your tent.

And that's exactly what they did. And it turned out, by the way, it said that what it ended up tasting like, the manna was sort of what we would call crackers or wafers covered with honey. Now, what's interesting in their world, you see, in their world, that's king cake. You see, in their world, that's a hot fudge sundae in their world. That's the best thing you can taste. They didn't have refined sugar. Honey is as good as it gets. Now, imagine two and a half million people getting wafers with honey every day. And quail every night. And even to this day, quail are considered.

Fine dining. God says, yeah, I'll do that and I'll do it every day. But you've got to go that way. Now, notice how important this is to God down to verse 32. And then Moses said, this is what the Lord has commanded. Let an omer full of it be kept throughout your generations, that they may see the bread that I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt. That's amazing. God says you need to put some aside. Why? He said, I want everyone who ever follows you to understand this principle.

And what's the principle? God will provide for you each and every day. You see, you need to trust God today.

That is the test. I need to trust God today. Worry lives where? In the future.

And the idea is that I need to trust God for today. And you know what they did. They they messed it all up and then they complained about it. But the thing you see is why did they start worrying in the first place?

The same reason you do. They forgot. They forgot what had already happened to them.

They forgot. Now, from your point of view, my point of view, does that seem ridiculous? How would you be a slave in Egypt and generation after generation, generation of slaves? Then a guy named Moses who was raised in Pharaoh's house comes and he said he's going to deliver his people. And then all of a sudden, all of these plagues start hitting the nation. And you see one after the other, after the other, every one of them completely miraculous. You see things happen.

They're unimaginable. And then you see Moses lead you out. And you see yourself coming to the Red Sea and you see the Egyptian army coming to kill you. And you're complaining to Moses. And he says, stand back and watch God work. And you see the entire army of Pharaoh.

You saw it all. Now, if God did that for you. Don't you think in his foresight God might have thought, I need to feed these people? I mean, just for a moment. Before we judge them too harshly, isn't that exactly what you do?

Isn't that exactly what you do? You have an enormous gap between you and God. It's a gap of sin. The wages of sin is death. Eternal separation from God. God made a provision. God said, I can change that.

And I will. And so he sends his son. Christ loves you so much. You don't even know him.

He knows you. And he dies on the cross on your behalf. And then we find out that if we put our faith and trust in Christ and his finished work on the cross, not only are our sins forgiven, but we are heaven bond and joint heirs with Christ. And all of these things belong to all of us. And then on Wednesday night, we sit wringing our hands about what might happen Thursday at noon.

How do you do that? We forget. That's exactly what they did. They forgot and they begin to worry. The lesson is clear. God says, look, I'm going to meet your needs daily. Not annually. Not monthly. Not weekly.

Daily. You see, he had resources that they never envisioned. Can you imagine how many of them walked around saying, how are you going to wear a desert? We have two and a half million people in the desert. By the way, the other thing that he provided that I didn't mention in that story, water. How do you get water in a desert? Well, God says, I'm just going to have a big rock roll around behind you.

And that rock will give you water the whole time you're there. What? Yes. God's provisions.

You see how this works now. With that in mind, let's go to Matthew six in the words of the Lord. Matthew Chapter six.

And go from the time of the exodus to the time of Christ. And by the way, you still have people in this day worrying about the same thing they worried about an exodus that we often never worry about. And that is the very staples of life.

Food, water and shelter, clothing, those kinds of things. Jesus says in verse twenty five of Matthew six, for this reason, I say to you, do not be worried about your life. There's the generalization. That's pretty general, isn't it? See, if you said that Jesus, Jesus, let me just ask you one thing.

What am I entitled? To worry about. And he'd say anything that has nothing to do with your life. You see, do not worry about your life. What a statement. Do not worry about your life.

And then he goes on explains it, he says, as to what you will eat or what you will drink for your body as to what you will put on is not like more than food in the body, more than clothing. Do not worry. That's an interesting word, by the way. That word worry is Merim Na'o. It's a verb.

That's a verb form. It comes from Merizo. Merizo means the divide.

And Na'o is a form of the word nous, which is your mind. So what did Jesus say? Worry is it divides your mind. That's what worry does. And the implication from what Jesus is saying this worry cleaves your thinking. Between the reality of now and some dreaded event down the road. That's what worry does. It just cleaves that off. That's why, by the way, you can never be you cannot be worrisome and content. You just cannot because contentment is a present state.

Worry lives in the future. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts, or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

At that website, you will find not only today's broadcast, but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one-time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website, fbcnola.org.

That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for, or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online, or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.