Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, March 7. Everyone loves a dramatic rescue story. Examine what God is up to in your most desperate situations. As today's program asks, can you trust God, even when His instructions seem strange?
Life oftentimes confronts us with those unexpected and sometimes very undesirable circumstances, which leaves us oftentimes in a state of discouragement, despair, despondency, fear, anxiety, frustration. And then we begin to question the whole idea. That is, does God really and truly love me? Does God really care about me?
If He did, why would He allow these things to happen in my life? And we begin to question whether God can do anything about our life or not. And so then we have to deal with this question, can we really and truly trust God? Well, that is the title of this message, Can You Trust God? And I want you to turn, if you will, to Romans chapter four.
And what I would like to do in this message is this. I want to give you the three absolute essential truths about God that you and I must believe if we're to trust Him. Trust Him in difficult times. Trust Him when times are delightful. Trust Him in times of adversity. And trust Him in times when things are all right.
That is, can we trust God? Well, let's begin reading in the 16th verse. And what this is about, it's about Abraham being the father of the nation of Israel, but also symbolized here as the father of faith. And he says, beginning in verse 16, this fourth chapter, But this reason it is by faith, that it might be in accordance with grace, in order that the promise may be certain to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of all. That is, when God says that we're saved by faith, that is, the Jew is saved by faith, and also the Gentile is saved by faith. As it is written, A father of many nations have I made you, in the sight of him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist. In hope against hope he that is Abraham believed, in order that he might become a father of many nations, according to that which had been spoken, so shall your descendants be.
And without becoming weak in faith, he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah's womb. Yet with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief, but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what he had promised, he was able also to perform. Do you believe God is able to perform every single thing He's promised?
Do you believe that He not only is able, do you believe that He will perform, that He will complete, that He will fulfill every single promise that He's made? Now, there are three essential truths about God, three essential truths about God that are absolutely essential, absolutely necessary for you and myself to be able to trust God in those difficult trying times when I don't understand, I don't like my circumstance, I want to change it, I can't fix it, I can't fathom how God would allow such a thing to happen, and yet there is a basis upon which I am to trust Almighty God. And no matter what you believe and what you think and how strong you think your faith is, here is the bottom line. Here are the three basic essential truths necessary for you and me to be able to believe God, not only when things are going well, but when things are going at their very worst. I want to give them to you in three short phrases, and then I want to give you a sentence that sort of explains it, and then I want us to discuss each one of these, and the first one is this, and that is, God is perfect in His love.
Write it down. God is perfect in His love, which simply means this, that God in love always does what is best for us. That God in His love always does what is best for us, not sometimes, not most of the time, but sometimes.
God in His love always does what is best for us. If you and I doubt the love of God, we will not trust Him. If we doubt that He loves us, we will not trust Him. We will reason, we will figure out some way to rationalize our doubt in God.
Well, Lord, if you'd have done so and so, if you'd have done this, but if you and I love Him, genuinely love Him, and you and I recognize His love for us, if we really believe that His love is perfect, we will indeed trust Him in the most difficult times. Now, I certainly believe that Abraham realized that God loved him because he reached down out of nowhere and chose him. He separated him from a very sophisticated pagan society there in Mesopotamia, and he sent him to a land where he could sort of get him to himself, into a land that would become the spot in the world upon which most of the media would focus its attention upon throughout history. No matter what's going on in other parts of the world, the nation of Israel is usually on the front page or somewhere in the media almost every single day of our life. God sent him to Canaan, and He said to him, He said, I'm going to make you a great nation.
I'm going to bless all the nations of the earth through you. He made him wealthy. He made him an outstanding person of his day, and He made him a very successful person. It is through Abraham that the Lord Jesus Christ came. If you read, for example, the book of Matthew and of Luke, you find the two genealogies of Jesus' birth. Matthew wrote to the Jews. Luke wrote to the Gentiles. Matthew begins with Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and on down through unto the birth of Jesus.
Luke starts with Adam because he's tracing it for the Gentiles. So as you look at this, it is very evident that Abraham believed and knew that God loved him in a very special way. The truth is God loves you and me just as much as He loved Abraham. His love for us does not take a second place to anybody in the Bible. He may have used them a certain way, but He does not love them any more than He loves us. God's love toward us is absolutely perfect, which means He always does what is best for us.
Now, you and I have a reason sometime, we think, to question that when our circumstances aren't what we think they ought to be. And when they aren't, what is it that Satan whispers in our ear? Well, if God really loves you, He wouldn't have allowed that to be happening in your life.
And think about this. What is it that Satan attacks the most? He doesn't attack the sovereignty of God that He's in absolute control nearly as much as he attacks the idea that God loves us. Because when things get tough and we get under adversity and God begins to discipline us and we begin to feel the sting of His discipline, then we question, well, God, do you love me? And if you did, why do you let this happen?
And on and on we go. The truth is, according to Hebrews chapter 12, the very fact that God would discipline us is an indication that He loves us. Because, you see, He says He disciplines those whom He loves. Usually we have the idea that a good token of God's love is happiness and joy and peace and things going our way. The Bible says that a token of God's love is discipline, difficulty, hardship and trial that oftentimes God allows because He loves us so much He won't let us stay where we are. He loves us so much He's going to transform us in the likeness of His Son.
He loves us so much He's not going to let His plan for our life be incomplete. So what we think is a token of God's love oftentimes is, but sometimes what we think is not a token of His love certainly is a token of His love. Now, under this first point of God's perfect love, I want to give you three irrefutable reasons for believing that God loves you. It doesn't make any difference what's going on in your life, what somebody says, what they accuse you of or what it may be going on. You know that God loves you. There are three, three reasons I want to give you here.
The first one is this, and that is character love. It is the very nature and character of God to love. That is God is a God of holiness, absolutely perfect.
He can do no wrong. He is a God of love, which means that His love is complete, and it's perfect, and that He will always do what is good and loving in your life and mine. It is absolutely impossible by His very nature that God would ever do anything in your life and my life that is not good. He may allow some things to happen to us that we think are not good. He may allow all kinds of difficulty and hardship and abuse and troubles and trials.
But you know what? Because He is an absolute sovereign God that He is. He is by nature a good God.
And though I don't understand some things He allows, though I can't figure them out, that does not mean that He is not a good God. And so when the Bible says that He is a God of goodness and loving kindness and all these things we've described here, it is a very essential part of His nature. So character, that is character love. It's His very nature to love. It is His attribute, absolute perfect love. That love cannot be tampered with.
It is unconditional, cannot be changed. It is an irrefutable attribute of Almighty God. Character love. The second love is Calvary love. What am I talking about?
I'm talking about this. I'm talking about the love that God has demonstrated to mankind at the cross. When God the Father sent His only begotten Son Jesus into the world, He sent Him into the world to die on the cross. Why did He die? He died to meet a need.
No one can meet for themselves and no one can meet for someone else. Our need was that we needed to be forgiven. We needed to be snatched from the penalty of our sin. The Bible says we were dead in trespasses and sin. The Bible says that we were in a dominion of darkness. The Bible says like in Ezekiel that we were like dry bones in the valley. There was no life. When Jesus Christ came into your life and mine, He came because of His work at Calvary.
Now think about this. Calvary is the absolute irrefutable evidence of God's unconditioned love for mankind. There's not anything God could ever have done to more greatly demonstrate His love for you and me than that. He says He came into the world that you and I might not be condemned but that we might be saved. He would have saved any one of us. He can save everyone.
And He would have come if there had been only one person. He came to save the entire world, every single human being on the face of this earth. That is, He came as an expression of the awesome, listen, fathomless, immeasurable, infinite love of Almighty God, Calvary love.
Now think about this. If God the Father loved us so much that He would save us from our sins by giving His Son Jesus at Calvary. Listen, you will never ask God for anything that will demand even anywhere close to as much love as He has already expressed to you in the cross of Calvary. When He has expressed that kind of love, sacrificial love, the gift of His own Son, you and I can't even think about anything that would require of God a greater expression of His love than what He did at Calvary.
Therefore, if He has already given me His very best, anything else that I ask for, anything else that comes my way is less than that. How could I ever doubt the love of God? How could I question the kind of love that comes from a Father who is willing to give His only begotten Son to die at Calvary? And remember that Jesus Christ was not only God, but He was God man. He suffered like any other man would suffer, only worse than they would suffer because He knew what it meant to be separated from the Father and to bear the weight of all the sin of the world upon Him at Calvary. If you question God's love, look at the cross.
Now reason it this way. If He has given His best, if He has demonstrated His awesome love at Calvary, can I not expect Him to take care of other little things in my life? Is He not expressing His love in the little things if He would express it in something so great and grand as that? Turn, if you will, to a passage here that I think will probably express that as much as anything. Turn to Romans 8, 32 for a moment, because this is exactly what Paul says in his own words. 32nd verse says, He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us what?
All things. Paul says, look, listen, he says, you don't have to worry about your needs. You don't have to worry about your provision, your protection. You don't have to worry about anything in life. Look what He's already done.
If He gave His only begotten Son, if He's already done that, you don't have to worry about what else He's going to do, because everything else He will do will require less of Almighty God than that. So first of all, we said the first reason for believing His love is what? Character love. Now say that out loud so I can hear it. Say it. Character love.
It's His nature to do so. The second one is what? Calvary love. The work of Christ at the cross.
The third one is covenant love. And that is, if you'll turn to the eighth chapter of Hebrews for a moment. In the eighth chapter of Hebrews He describes here what He's done for us. And by covenant love I mean that He's covenant to make us His children. And that's why He says, My little children, these things I write unto you that you sin not. And He talks about us being children of God.
We're in the family of God. And the eighth chapter of Hebrews in the tenth verse says, For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. In those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws into their minds. I will write them upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And so all of us know that once we trusted Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, we became children of God. And we are looked upon as children, and that's why He is patient and loving and kind to us for the simple reason that He knows that you and I are children living, learning to live in this life. So when you think about the fact that God loves us perfectly, and that His love is not only perfect, but His love, listen, every single thing He does in your life allows in my life, all of these things are expressions of His love. I don't understand what you said.
I'm coming to that. But they're expressions of His love. And we say He expresses His love in three irrefutable ways. The first one is His what? His character love. The second one, what? Calvary love. And the third one is what?
Covenant love. These are three absolutes you cannot question. You can't question His character. You can't question what happened at Calvary. And you can't question the fact that He's made us His children.
And any person who under who questions that does not understand even the simplest things of the Word of God. So one of those basic essential truths, if I'm going to trust Him in adversity and difficulty and hardship, I've got to believe with all of my heart, my God loves me. It is His nature to love me. He's proven His love at Calvary. He's made me a child of God. I'm in a covenant with Him. And He says, I am saved eternally at one of His children. Now, the second thing I want you to notice is this. We said, first of all, God is perfect in His love.
Second, I want you to jot it down. God is infinite in His wisdom. That is, in His wisdom, He always knows what is best for us. In His infinite wisdom, He always knows what is best for us. You see, if God loves me, and He's only going to do the right thing, then He must know what the right thing is every time. He is infinite in His wisdom. That is, God makes judgments that are absolutely perfect.
They're never imperfect, but always perfect. And if you'll think about it, God doesn't have to ask anybody. There's no committee.
There's no council. There's no question. He determines every single thing by His absolute, total, perfect, infinite wisdom. God always knows. Listen, He always knows what is best for us in every circumstance. Now, when I think about the fact that He makes these choices in our life, and sometimes the ones I don't understand, I know that because of His very nature, He is infinitely wise, He can't make a mistake. You see, it is absolutely impossible for God to make a mistake. Infinitely wise. Always does and always knows what is the best thing and the right thing in every decision.
This is why. So often the Bible says, and in Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, probably the two verses of Scripture that I call the anchor of my life, He says, Trust in the Lord. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not to your own understanding because we don't have all the facts. Lean not to your own understanding.
In all your ways, acknowledge Him. Look to Him, seek Him, listen to Him, and He will direct your path. Now, God is willing to give us direction. And you see, when God gives you direction, you must abide by what the Lord says. Now, here's what happens. When we ask the Lord to show us something, and the Lord gives us some sense of direction, and then because we don't understand it, and because we can't quite figure it out, we oftentimes want to choose to do something that appears to be the better, it's always wrong. It is always wrong.
You can't improve on the infinite wisdom of God. Somebody says, Well, now wait a minute now. There's some things I need to know why. No, you don't. You say, Well, how can I have peace if I don't know why? Here's the way you have peace when you don't know why.
You listening? Real simple. You trust Him. That's the way you have peace when you don't know why. You trust Him. When I understand who He is, I don't have to worry about what He does. When I understand who He is, I don't have to worry about what I'm going to have because I know that this God who is all perfectly loved, who is infinite in His wisdom and absolute in His power, He loves me enough to give me what He knows is good for me. He loves me enough to give me what He knows is wise for me, and He has the power to do it all in His own perfect timing. Thank you for listening to Can You Trust God? If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
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