How Do We Find Favor with God? - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, April 11th. Every believer is uniquely blessed by God. Let's learn how to receive what he freely offers. To be favored by someone is to be able to experience their approval, maybe their encouragement, maybe some gifts that they choose to give you, or maybe it's a choice they make of you. When you have someone's favor, you have their support. And as you think about someone's favor in your life, of all the people that you know, whose favor do you desire above everyone else?

Now, the second question is this. How do you want that person to show you their favor? How do you show favor to people around you?

One thing for certain, you can't have rejection and favor from the same person at the same time. And have you ever felt God's favor in your life? Have you ever felt out of favor with God? And how do you feel when you feel out of favor with someone else?

Well, that's what I want to talk about in this message. And I want you to turn, if you will, to Exodus chapter 33, because all of us desire to be favored by someone. We certainly desire God's favor.

We certainly love to be favored by other people, people that we love and cherish. And so the question is, how do we find favor with God? And that's the title of this message. And in the 33rd chapter of Exodus, what's happening here is that Moses has come down from the mount having received the Ten Commandments and instruction about building the tabernacle. And the people are living in sin, building a golden calf.

And so finally, 3,000 of them are killed. And then the scripture moves into a little insight into Moses' personal private devotional life with the Father. And the scripture talks about this tent meeting, this tent of meeting, as he called it, where he's set up outside of the camp. So that's where Moses and others would go to worship the Lord. And the scripture says concerning that, in verse 9 of this 33rd chapter, Whenever Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. When all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would arise and worship, each at the entrance of his tent. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend.

Can you imagine that? That God so favored him that he spoke to him as a friend, that Moses and God could speak face to face? Listen to what he says. Then Moses said to the Lord, See, you say to me, bring up this people, but you yourself have not let me know whom you will send with me. And what he's referring to is taking them into the promised land. Moreover, you have said, I have known you by name, and you have found favor in my sight. Now, therefore, I pray you, if I have found favor in your sight, let me know your ways that I may know you, so that I may find favor in your sight.

Consider, too, that this nation is your people. And he said, My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest. Then he said to him, If your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here. For now then can it be known, or how then can it be known, that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people?

Is it not that by your going with us so that we, I and your people, may be distinguished from all the other people who are upon the face of the earth? The Lord said to Moses, I will also do this thing of which you've spoken, for you have found favor in my sight, and I have known you by name. Four times, Moses is concerned about the favor of God. And God says, You have found favor in my sight. Have you ever felt like you had found favor in God's eyes? That somehow you had his unusual support, his encouragement, his strength, maybe something that God had given to you, something that your heart desired, that you really and truly felt like, Well, God has really and truly favored me. Well, what we're going to talk about in this message is how to find God's favor.

It certainly is the will and the purpose and the plan of God to favor you. He says he has stored up his goodness, which would be like saying, I have stored up my favors for you. Well, we might ask the question, Well, how does God express his favor?

And I think the best way to begin with that to find out. And you remember he said here, he said, Show me your ways that I may know you. If I'm going to know how God thinks and how he operates, then the best way for me to find that out is to look to see how he operate and how he worked in the lives of people before, because that's the way he still operates. God has not changed his principles. He doesn't change his ways.

His ways are absolutely perfect. And he says his ways are not our ways nor our thoughts, his thoughts. His ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. But he is certainly willing to reveal his ways. God is willing to say to us, This is how I think. This is how I operate. And so if I want to find out how he thinks and how he operates, I look to see how he operate in other people's lives.

And so let's think for just a moment. How did he favor Moses? Well, let's begin back there when he was just a baby, because God certainly expressed his favor toward him when Pharaoh had sent out an edict to kill all the baby Hebrew boys. And Moses' mother made him a little ark, put him down in the river, and ordered to save him. Again, God favored Moses by making it possible for his own mother to raise him, because his sister was down there watching to see what would happen to that little ark with her brother in it.

And so, of course, he was raised by his own mother, then finally went to Pharaoh's household. God favored Moses also when he enabled him to escape Pharaoh's attempt to kill him when Moses had killed a Hebrew taskmaster. God certainly favored Moses when he gave him 40 years on the backside of the desert, put him into a family with a father-in-law who would ultimately be a tremendous blessing to him personally at a very critical time in his life. He favored Moses by speaking to him in a very unusual way when he met him at the burning bush. He favored Moses by calling him from leading sheep to leading a whole nation of people, the Hebrew nation, to become the nation of Israel. Look, if you will, in the 30th Psalm.

This is a different kind of favoring here. 30th Psalm, I want you to notice something here. Here the Bible gives us a promise of God's favor, and listen to what he says in this fifth verse.

Now watch this. Verse 5 of the 30th Psalm. For his anger, that is God's anger, is but for a moment, his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.

What is he saying? That God favors us, listen, God favors us by limiting the season of time for hurt and pain and suffering that we experience in life. People go through all kinds of pain and suffering. And what happens? It doesn't last for a lifetime.

It lasts for a season of time. God favors us by putting a limit on the season of time which we suffer or which we feel the hurt over the same situation or circumstance in our life. Then look, if you will, in Luke chapter 1. Luke chapter 1, another way that God favors us is this. He certainly was expressing favor here in this first chapter.

Because in this first chapter of Luke, in the 30th verse, the Bible says, the angels said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. How does God express his favor toward us? By, listen, watch this, by sometimes giving us very unusual opportunities and privileges in life that could only come from him. And certainly by saying to Mary, he chose in his sovereign will to favor this young girl, this young virgin, by giving her the privilege of carrying in her womb the very God Son himself, Jesus Christ the Lord.

Now, these are just some of the ways that I wanted to just bring from the Scripture. But I think about other ways in which you and I have been favored by God. Every single one of us has been favored by God in some ways. For example, one of the ways he's favored us is by giving us Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, to be our Savior. One of the ways he's favored us, he's favored us by forgiving us of our sins. He's favored us by giving us the Holy Spirit to live on the inside of us, to enable us to face every single day of our life.

No matter what we face, no matter how difficult or how easy it may be, we have him living within us to enable us and to strengthen us. He has certainly favored us by providing our needs. He has favored us by giving us the things in life that our heart desires. He has certainly favored us by giving us friends, surrounding us with good people who love God and who will be supportive oftentimes and who will be praying for us. He certainly has favored us by understanding us. He certainly is one who understands you never have to come to God and say, God, why don't you understand? We can share our heart with other people who do not understand why we feel what we feel, why we hurt the way we hurt.

You never have to come to God and wonder if he understands. He has favored us by giving us his understanding heart. He favors us by answering our prayers. He favors us by listening to us. He favors us by speaking to us. He favors us by encouraging us. He favors us by oftentimes granting us wonderful, awesome privileges, as we said a few moments ago, that we would never even begin to think about. He certainly has favored us by giving us his plan, his will for our life. He's favored us by making a plan for our life. He's favored us by giving us the awesome promise, absent from the body, present with the Lord. We have the favor of God that we do not have to be buried in somebody's casket or tomb and lie there for hundreds of thousands of years, unconscious and one of these days rise up, no, absent from the body, present with the Lord. He has certainly favored us, listen, with his promise, his divine promise that he's gone to heaven to prepare a place for us.

When we die, we're going to spend eternity with him because we have a mansion, he says, or a house or a home in heaven. There are thousands of ways that God has favored you and me that we will never even think about. And we get so many of his favors that we don't even stop to think about them. And so all of us are favored by God in lots of ways. We take it for granted.

We don't see the good things that come our way as expressions of God's favor. His goodness, what is he doing? Providing for us.

What is he doing? Encouraging us. And he gives gifts. These are favors of Almighty God. Now, with that being said, what we have to ask is simply this, and that is, how do we find favor with God? Now, I want you to listen carefully because I'm going to make a statement that might be a little tough for you to accept for just a moment. But how do we find favor with God?

Is there something weird to do? That is, is God's favor simply based on God simply saying, I'm going to favor him and her and this one and that one and these and these and these? Or is there something that God looks for in order to favor us? Well, certainly, his grace, as we think about the grace of God, is his unmerited favor toward us.

It is his undeserved gifts. And the truth is, none of us deserve any good thing that comes our way. But the truth is, the Bible says that every good thing that comes our way is from God. Now, that being the case, and we think about how God favors us and why, I want us to look at some scriptures again. Let's go back for a moment to back to Genesis chapter 6. And let's look at this verse again, this eighth and ninth verses, because I want you to see something that's very, very crystal clear to me in the scriptures as to how I can find favor with God.

Now, listen, I'm going to say two or three things three or four times. Number one, we're not talking about the favor of salvation. We're talking about the grace of God. There is grace of God in which he saves us by his grace.

Nothing to do with us. It happens what happens on the cross. That's where that grace comes from. There is the goodness of God, the favor of God that's just his character.

He just desires to love us and be good to us because he's our Heavenly Father. Now, there are some things that I can do that you can do that make a difference whether God favors us or not. Now, look at this about Noah. The scripture says in verse 8, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time, Noah walked with God. It's very evident to me that one of the ways that you and I can have God's favor is to walk with him.

What does that mean? To walk daily trusting him, obeying him, seeking him, loving him, worshipping him, serving him. You walk with God, here's what's going to happen. You walk with God, you're certainly going to obey him. You walk with God, you will love him. You walk with God, you'll trust him. You walk with God, you'll worship him. You walk with God, you'll serve him. And so in the life of Noah, God certainly favored him and he certainly chose him for a very specific reason, but it's very evident here that God saw something in him. He saw his righteousness, his blamelessness, and certainly his walk with the Father. God had already accepted him, but he sees this kind of relationship with him. Then I want you to turn, if you will, to Proverbs chapter 3. I want you to notice what he says beginning in chapter 3 verse 1. He says, My son, do not forget my teaching. Let your heart keep my commandments. For length of days and years of life and peace they'll add to you. Do not let kindness and truth leave you.

Buy them around your neck and write them on the tablet of your heart so you will find favor and a good report. One of the ways that you and I can find favor with God is the right relationship with him, walking with God. A second way that you and I can find favor with God, according to what he says in this passage, look at this. He says, Let your heart keep my commandments. We want to find favor with God, then listen. We feed upon the Word of God. We get God's truth into our heart, because what that does, that enables us to think the way God thinks. And we know how to respond to circumstances and situations because we see how God operates.

The only way to learn the ways of God is to feast upon the Word of God, put those principles in practice and then watch what God does in your life. And so, certainly here, he says, Let your heart keep my commandments. But there's a third thing I want you to notice, and the second thing in this passage. He says, Don't let kindness and truth leave you.

What is he saying? He's saying that you and I should treat others with what? With truthfulness and kindness. He said, Bind truthfulness about your neck. Get them up here above your heart. That is, he said, Let that be such a part of you. That's your lifestyle.

That's what people know about you. Truthfulness and kindness. He said, You want my favor?

Truthfulness and kindness. And then there's one other thing that I want you to notice here. Let's look in Proverbs 12. I got another verse I want to show you. He says, first verse says, Whoever loves discipline, loves knowledge. Then he says, But he who hates reproof is stupid.

Now watch. A good man will obtain favor from the Lord. What does that mean? What are you talking about a good man? He's not talking about someone's righteousness that gets them saved. He's talking about this.

A good man or a woman is a person whose heart is bent toward God. Now you think about this. When we are raising children these days, the parents bend the spirit of those children one way or the other. If those children are neglected and they're cursed at, and if they are told that they'll never amount to anything, get out of their house. We don't want you.

You're no good. You know what that parent's done? They've bent their heart away from things that are good and righteous.

They've bent their heart away from good self-esteem. A parent who says to their children buried in life, God loves you. God has a plan for your life. God has a will for your life. God has the best for your life. And I want to help you understand who God is. I want to teach you the Word of God is your father or is your mother. And I want to help you understand how much God loves you. And I want you to understand that the wisest thing you can do is to invest your life in something that has eternal consequences.

You know what that parent's done? They've bent the heart of that child toward God. A good man and a good woman, they are those whose hearts are bent toward God.

They want to do the things. You see, a heart bent toward God desires to be obedient to God, desires to walk in the ways of God, desires, listen, to serve God, desires to worship God, desires to please and to favor God. Then I want you to turn all the way over to 1 Peter chapter 2 for a moment. I want you to notice in this second chapter of 1 Peter and about the 19th verse there, 19th verse, listen to what he says.

1 Peter chapter 2, 19. He says, For this finds favor. What finds favor with God?

This finds favor. If for the sake of conscience toward God a person bears up under sorrows when suffering unjustly. For what credit is there if when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it, you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God. He says, One of the ways that will evoke God's favor for us is when you and I go through difficulty and hardship and pain and suffering and instead of grumbling and moaning and groaning and trying to find somebody to blame and complain about it, what do we do? He says, When you for the conscience' sake toward God, a person you bear up under sorrow when suffering unjustly. You bear up under it. You don't blame. You're not trying to take vengeance. You endure it.

He says, Not all that. When you do what is right and you suffer for it, you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God. Twice here these two verses. He says, The way we find favor with God is when you and I go through great, difficult times in our life. And we endure that patiently trusting God to see us through it. Thank you for listening to part one of How Do We Find Favor With God? 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.