Breaking Down the Faith Barrier - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, February 28th. Today we kick off a series of programs that can help you grow strong in faith. The first obstacle to growth? Breaking down the faith barrier.

Here's today's podcast. If I don't care, if I don't want His best, I'll try to figure out something that I think is better for me than what He's figured. And I think all of us know that that would be very unwise, and yet that is exactly what most people choose to do.

They decide they know better than God. Now, if He designs a plan for our life, then He also will equip us and enable us and gift us with whatever is necessary for our lives. Then He also will equip us and enable us and gift us with whatever is necessary in order to make that plan a reality or make it possible. It wouldn't even be in keeping with the character of God to say, this is what I want you to do with your life.

This is how I want you to live your life and then not equip us or gift us to do it. So that when I think about how people fail in their life and how they fail to accomplish or achieve the things that God has set for them, the goals that God has set for them, then I have to ask myself the question, why does that happen? Well, it certainly can't be that they're not equipped because it would be inconsistent with the nature of God. Therefore, it must be that it has something to do with their belief that they can or cannot, that they are capable or they're not capable.

Something that has to do with their whole faith system. And I believe that when a person has a barrier in their faith, a barrier to their faith, that somehow they'll never be able to achieve, never be able to accomplish what God has set for them. The title of this message is Breaking Down the Faith Barrier. And I want you to turn, if you will, to Exodus chapter three, because what I would like to do, I would like to illustrate this whole principle in the life of Moses. One of the wonderful things about the Word of God is this.

It does not give us these beautiful pictures of perfect men and women, but men and women who struggle with the same things you and I struggle with. And I think all of us would have to admit that there are times when we face challenges in our life, tasks in our life, goals in our life that God has set for us, that oftentimes our faith wavers. That is, we are not sure we're going to be able to accomplish this.

Not quite certainly going to be able to achieve this. Well, God knows how all of us waver. And so he did not give us a group of men and women in the scripture who had perfect faith, but men and women whose faith waver just like ours.

And what we have to ask is, what is it that keeps us from being able to believe God when it is so absolutely necessary and so essential to achieve those things that he wants us to achieve in life? So I want us to give us a little background here in the life of Moses, because the very same things that you and I have to deal with with no exception. He dealt with them. He failed the same way we fail. And yet God was able to bring him through it just like he is us.

And here is a tremendous lesson for all of us. Beginning in Chapter three, verse one. Now, Moses was pastoring the flock of Jethro, his father in law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush. And he looked and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up. When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here I am.

Then he said, Do not come near here. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you're standing is holy ground. He said also, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I'm aware of their suffering. So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians and to bring them up from the land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. And now behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to me that furthermore, I have seen the oppression of which the Egyptians are pressing them.

Therefore, come now and I will send you to Pharaoh so that you may bring my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt. Well, that's when things turned a little dim for Moses because he was not excited about that last part. Here he was kneeling or probably lying prostrate before the presence of Almighty God, listening to God reveal himself. And then all of a sudden he finds himself the object of the call of God to a task of which, of course, he absolutely was not excited about whatsoever.

And so in this call of Moses, a man who was called to a great work, a great adventure, a great ministry, a great blessing and a great place in human history. His response was the kind of response that oftentimes God gets from the most committed believers. When we face something we are not quite sure we know how to handle or some kind of contest in life that we're not sure we're going to get through in the way that we would like to. So what is a faith barrier? A faith barrier is an attitude or combination of attitudes that short circuit our faith, thus hindering us or hindering the flow of the power of God in our life, which would keep us from becoming the person God wants us to be or accomplishing the thing God wants us to accomplish. So we say this is what a faith barrier is. It is an attitude that short circuits, listen, short circuits our faith, thus hindering us by shutting down the power of God. And therefore, we fail to become the person God wants us to be and to do the things that God wants us to do. Now, I'm talking about attitudes and patterns of thinking that you and I have adopted over the years.

Sometimes their patterns or attitudes that we were given as children. But no matter how you were programmed and no matter what somebody said about you and what they told you that you would amount to or maybe nothing or never achieve or never be anything. They told you you were ugly.

They told you a lot of things about yourself that that you've had to live with, things that were damaging to your sense of self-esteem. You remember this, what they think about you and what God thinks about you is not the same. God doesn't make any junkie anything. He doesn't make failures.

He doesn't make people to fail. God loves us just the way we are. And if he allowed us to be made a certain way, he had something in mind. God doesn't just throw something in the air and a design falls out. God has purpose to design your life and my life a certain way.

And that design is the best that he could come up with. And he has something good in mind every single time. So when we look at that and we think about what is it that short-circuits these things in our life, what I would like to do is to lay out just these five excuses that Moses gave because each one of these is like a building block that builds a barrier in my faith that I cannot trust God. I cannot believe him to be what he says and what he promises to do.

So let's begin with the first one of those building blocks and that is the poor self-image. I want you to look, if you will, in verse 10. Because when God said to Moses, Come now and I will send you to Pharaoh so that you may bring my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt. What is the first thing Moses said? Moses said to God, Who am I? Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt? Who am I? Moses' answer to his own question was, I am a nobody.

I am a Midianite shepherd, run out of Egypt, a Hebrew slave, and certainly I am not welcome back in that nation from which I had to escape for my life. So if he looked at himself, he'd have good reason to say, Well, who am I? You've got the wrong person.

There are a lot of other people you could send down there besides me. Now, I think many people struggle with a poor self-image. They struggle because of what they've heard. Now, what's the root of all that?

Well, I think the root of that, probably you and I could find it in several things. And I think one of those things that you and I could look back and see how people develop a poor self-image is by comparison. Now, any one of us can find somebody that we know can do better than what we do.

But here's the issue. God doesn't choose men and women who always can do better than to do his work for him. He chooses people on the basis, he says, of his good intention, of his goodwill.

He may choose you to do something, to accomplish something in life, and he certainly has chosen you to be something in life, very important. And so what we do is we compare ourselves with other people. We say, Well, you know, there must be a better person who could do this.

Well, that probably is. But that's not the issue. The issue is this, that God tells you to do it. And if God told you to do it, then you and I don't have anything that we can do except be obedient to God or rebel against God.

Therefore, a lot of people, they look at themselves, they compare themselves with others, and they say, Well, God, you need to choose somebody else because there's a lot of folks who can do this better than I can. Don't you think God knows that? He doesn't need any of that kind of information. He knows exactly who can do it best. He also, listen, he also knows who has a spirit that is humble enough to say, God, if you don't do this through me, it'll never be done. He isn't looking for mighty people. He's not looking for the most intelligent. He's not looking for the best looking. He's not looking for the most eloquent. He's looking for men and women who are willing to surrender themselves to God and say, Lord, whatever you want to do with my life, the answer is yes. That's the kind of person he's looking for. Now, the next time somebody says, Well, who do you think you are?

Most of the time. Has anybody ever said that to you? Sure. Who do you think you are? Let me ask you a question. What did you say? Well, here's what you could have said.

You could have said something like this. You could have said, Well, who do I think I am? I'll tell you who I am. I'm a forgiven child of God. I am a sealed saint, sealed forever eternally for him. I am a gifted follower of Jesus. He has gifted me to do whatever he wants me to do. I am a faithful servant of God.

Now, how do you like that? You don't know who I am. So when somebody says, Well, who do you think you are?

You know what you should do? You shouldn't bow your head and say, Well, you know, you should say I'll tell you exactly who I am. Tell them who God says you are.

That's what matters. Not what they think you are, not what the world thinks you are. Who does God think you are? God sees us as his children. God sees us as his servants. God sees us as the object of his divine unconditional love. God sees us as gifted with his forgiveness. God sees us as those children who are going to live with him for all eternity. God sees us as his servants who are going to serve him for all eternity.

God sees us as the object of unconditional, eternal, fathomless, indescribable, immeasurable love. That's who we are. And we should be able to say to people, This is who I am. It isn't just your name. It's who you are. It's what you are. It's what God has made you and what he's in the process of making you.

And so when God said to Moses, I want you to go and this is my call to you. He said, Who am I? I'm a nobody. There's no such thing as a nobody. Everybody is a somebody. And those of us who know Jesus Christ as their savior, we are really somebody. You say, Well, why do you think you're so somebody?

You know what I can do? I can tell you this is how valuable you and I are. Look at the cross and I'll tell you how valuable every single person is. That Jesus thinks you're so important. He went to the cross and died for your sin and mine in order that you and I could be made the children of God and live forever in the eyes of God and before him. So one of those barriers that we have to deal with is the poor self-image.

The second one is ignorance. Now look at this. Here's what happens. So he says to him in verse 12, and he said, Certainly, I will be with you. And this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. And when you've brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain.

Look, every single time you're going to find him making a promise. He says, Now I'm sending you. And he said, Not only that, he says, I'll be with you.

I'm going with you. And secondly, you're going to bring them out. And he says, And besides that, you will worship with those you bring out of this very mountain. Now listen to what he says, Then Moses said to God, Behold, I'm going to the sons of Israel. I shall say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they're going to say to me, What's his name?

Now, one of the barriers to our faith is ignorance. And so Moses said to God, Well, wait a minute. You're going to send me to my people back in Egypt.

What are they going to say? Well, who do you think you are coming out of the mountains over here? A shepherd. And you're telling us that God sent you? Well, thank you very much.

No thanks. The last time we saw you, you got us all in trouble. So why should we think God sent you? He said, Now what am I going to tell them?

Now, this is a major problem. Now listen to me carefully. You will not put your faith in a God you do not know.

You will not do it. One of the primary reasons people will not believe God and trust them is they don't know him. Now they know him by the name God and Jehovah and a few other names, but they don't know him personally in a personal relationship. God knew that Moses needed to understand who is this that's calling him to this impossible task. First of all, how is a man with a stick that is with a shepherd's staff going to walk into mighty Egypt to what they would think would be omnipotent Pharaoh and say, You let my people go.

He'd be the laughing stock of Egypt. God said to him, Listen, I want to I want to be sure you understand who is is doing the talking. I am is doing the talking. I remember my promise to your forefathers. And not only that, I will take care of the Egyptians.

You simply obey me. Now, listen, the reason I've asked people to bring a Bible to church and the reason I say to you who listen week after week, you want to open your Bible, take notes, write down what God is saying to you, because you see what this is all about is discovering who God is. Most people do not know who God is. They have an image of God that is absolutely distorted. You will not trust the God whom you do not know. Those people who say, Well, I've got to have a miracle to believe God. You can just forget that. The Pharisees and the Sadducees watched Jesus heal people, raise the dead, renew the strength in the in the limbs, give sight to blind and hearing the deaf.

And what do they do? They crucified him. No matter how many miracles he performed, they always had some human explanation for what he did. And when they couldn't explain it, they thought, then they just said, Well, we don't believe that. Let's get rid of this man.

In other words, if you can't explain it, kill him. Listen, the person who wants to live on miracles, I want to go to church where there's miracles. Hallelujah.

Praise God. I tell you what, every time somebody gets saved, the most important miracle that can happen on the face of this earth happens at that moment. That is the most important miracle that can happen when a person who's living in sin turns their life over to Jesus Christ and becomes a child of God. The name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life. God forgives them of their sin, which is something that nobody on the face of this earth can possibly do.

They're forever a child of God to live eternally with him. Name me something more miraculous than that. And remember this, that the primary purpose for the miracles of Jesus was to convince those of his day that he was the Messiah. Not trying to convince them that he had all power. He was the Messiah and that his power was the evidence of who he was.

They refused to accept who he was. Now, when you and I doubt, what we have to ask is, what's the basis of our doubt? You see, sometimes you need to talk to yourself. You say, well, if I get to talk to myself, what's somebody going to think doesn't make any difference what they think? You need to talk to yourself.

Now, here's what you need to ask yourself. The next time God tells you to do something and you doubt it, ask yourself this question. What evidence do I have? Having been a Christian this long, what evidence do I have that God is not going to do what he says? There's no evidence that God has ever failed to keep a promise.

The Almighty God who says I am is the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, all loving, merciful, just and righteous God who cannot lie, who will not lie and who is everything he says he is and more because our finite minds cannot comprehend the awesome reality of who God is. We have no reason to doubt. We have feelings that cause us to doubt. We have things that we think give us reason to doubt.

But the truth is they're not there in reality. My friend, don't let yourself miss out on God's best because these building blocks that you've allowed to bury your faith, to cheat you out of life's very best, God has the best for those who are willing to trust him. Trusting him means that I'm willing to believe this statement, that God assumes full responsibility for the life, the consequences of the life totally committed to him. You'll never lose obeying God. Thank you for listening to part one of Breaking Down the Faith Barrier. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.