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If God is in Control, Why is My Life Such a Mess?, Part 3

Leading the Way / Michael Youssef
The Truth Network Radio
November 27, 2024 12:00 am

If God is in Control, Why is My Life Such a Mess?, Part 3

Leading the Way / Michael Youssef

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November 27, 2024 12:00 am

In this series, Dr. Youssef takes the time to answer some of your most practical questions about God's sovereignty. Join him as he draws from his own life story. . .and the life stories of biblical greats Elijah and Queen Esther. Let Dr. Youssef show you how God really is in control. . .even when it looks like He's not!

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Dr. Michael Yousef helps you understand those times when you feel stuck in a corner, hidden and unusable by God.

Next, on Leading the Way. Often God hides us in order to humble us, but he also hides us for another reason. He hides us so he can provide for us. He hides us so that he can protect us from the enemies. I know you and I know that often we resent God's hiding places.

And yet, it's only in those hiding places that God works His purposes out in us. Thank you for taking the time to join Pastor and International Bible Teacher Dr. Michael Yousef for Leading the Way Audio. Ever have one of those days? You know, the moment you wake up, you can't help but declare, praise the Lord.

And then boom, life happens and you feel blindsided, even abandoned. Well, today on Leading the Way, Dr. Yousef takes you to a moment in the life of Elijah, when the prophet fell on his face looking around wondering where God was. This is part three of Dr. Yousef's teaching at the Billy Graham Conference Center.

It's called If God is in Control. There was a beautiful cathedral in Europe some years ago where one of those kind of rare storms came across and blew away a magnificent stained glass window that has adorned the top of the altar there. And as the storm blew the stained glass to pieces, literally to the window, the custodian looked at the pieces and he was devastated and people came from all over the world to see that beautiful stained glass window. So he kind of took it upon himself to gather the pieces and put them, all the fragments together in a big box and store it in the basement of the cathedral. A well-known artist a few years later came by and he petitioned the trustees of the cathedral, when he heard that all the pieces are together in a box down in the basement and he said, can I have that box please? And the trustees decided that he can have and two years later he invited the church trustees into his own studio where he had unveiled a major work that he has done. And to their absolute astonishment, he restored the window and it looked more beautiful than the first one.

More beautiful than the original one. And I know that if you had any experiences like mine in life, that you probably have experiences that probably are shattering just like that stained glass window. That at some point you've experienced probably the blessings of God but then you experience also the storms of life, the blasting of life. And I often say that whenever the blessings come there's always a blasting.

And the two somehow seem to follow each other on the heels of each other. And if you have not experienced the restoration of God, if you're going through a tough time right now, a shattering time right now, a blasting time, and yet you have not seen the work of the restoration of our wonderful master artist, the Lord Jesus Christ, work hard he will. You absolutely will. You have God's word on it. Because God specializes in restoring fragments in life into magnificent, beautiful, and more meaningful life. God specializes in remaking beauty out of ashes. You have God's word on it.

In life, I think the blasting and the blessing often either go hand in hand or follow on the heels of each other. In fact, this is precisely where we're going to see Elijah in his life and in his walk. As we're studying this life of this great man in reality what we're really studying is the way God works in the life of one man.

How God works is the focus of seeing him working in the life of one man. First we saw God hiding Elijah in the brook of Cherith. And often God hides us in order to humble us. But he also hides us for another reason. He hides us so he can provide for us. He hides us so that he can protect us from the enemies.

I know you and I know that often we resent God's hiding places. And yet it's only in those hiding places that God works his purposes out in us. Without those hiding places we're too busy. Without those hiding places we are running around. Without those two hiding places we are scattered in a million different directions.

And so God has to bring us to those hiding places in order to say, okay now I got your attention. I remember when we started the Church of the Apostles. We began on Mother's Day on our first service in 1987.

And I was running haggard. The church began to grow. We started on the 28th. The next Sunday we had 60.

We doubled just in one week. And we moved out of the hotel into a private school and we were there for six years. And the church began to grow and I'm the only pastor there. And people were calling and I was really working hard.

For God! I wasn't doing anything bad. I was at breakfast, lunch and dinner. And there were appointments all in between. And I was running around for two years until one day I had double pneumonia and I was right on my back. I remember I was so sick I couldn't even move. And I have been through a lot. I had typhoid. I had yellow fever.

I mean I've been through a lot. But this time somehow it hit me so hard. And I was on my back for two weeks.

And I had nowhere to look but up. And this one the Lord says, good now I got your attention. And the Lord basically ministered to me at that time in a way that he could not have ministered to me. Running around, serving him.

I wasn't doing anything bad. I was serving the Lord. And here's what the Lord said to me back in this 1989. Two years after we started the church and the Lord said, you cannot minister to anybody without my power, without my strength. And furthermore, you cannot really minister effectively to anyone until you first have ministered to me. And I said, the Lord, well how do I minister to you? How can I minister to the Lord? And the Lord took me through a training program of how to minister to him in the early hours of every morning in praise and adoration. And I wrote the book empowered by praise that came out of that experience of learning how to minister to the Lord before I can minister to people.

You can say, well, you know, it was not terrible that you, you know, laid on your back with vast amounts of antibiotics and all that kind of stuff. Yes, but it was a great time because God ministered to me in that hiding place. Then we saw in the last message how God led Elijah to the land of Baal worshipping Zarephath, a stinking city, a stinking village, town. Zarephath, the Phoenician city is where God gave Elijah an opportunity to exercise risking faith, not just for himself, but also for his host. And there God is about to move Elijah from passive testing to active testing.

And it's a big one. There you're going to see him, how the blessings of the increased flour and the increased oil begins to give way to blasting of life. Calamity and death. Turn with me if you don't have already in 1 Kings 17 and follow with me as we go through the word of God. In fact, verses 17, 17, 17 of 1 Kings, Elijah, the Phoenician woman and her son, all three of them were experiencing daily miracle. Isn't that great? They're just kind of holding hands around the campfire and singing Kumbaya.

That's great. When we all love that life to be like that every day, just great blessing. Every morning, new blessings coming, a new flour, a new oil, and God keeps blessing them as life was going and progressing with experiencing this daily blessing, this daily miracle, this daily provision. It goes immediately after that and says, now the son of the Phoenician widow, this widow who risked in faith at the challenge of the man of God, her son becomes ill and dies. And the Hebrew word here is for that his soul basically left him, which leaves us in no doubt that the boy was dead. It wasn't fainting.

Some people would have us believe. It wasn't just a coma. It was death. Verse 16, you read about the blessing and immediately you go to verse 17 and you read of this tragic life, tragic blasting. Blessing, blasting, all at the same time. And the woman cries out in verse 18 and you know what?

Her cry is very natural. We all face God's blessings in life, but we also face life's blasting. And there are times in life when the highest of our dreams get shattered. There are times in life when the best of hopes get dashed. There are times in life when we find ourselves hanging upside down. And in those times, the natural question is why? Just like the widow in Zarephath.

You know, many of us I think understand the paradox of this woman, and if you don't, I sure do. While she knew God's blessings in one area, she experienced life's blasting in another. I remember in my own life, in March 4th, 1964, I gave my life to the Lord. It was the greatest news my mother has ever heard because you see when I was a teenager and I was in my rebellion years, my mother got a little confused. She said, what in the world have I done? I risked my life to have this boy and look at his life of rebellion. And I remember one time, she absolutely was so frustrated at her wit's end, she laid hand on me and she said, Lord, if he is not going to turn out the way I thought he was going to turn out, take him home now.

I mean, that's scary, man. That put the fear of God in my life. She's a great prayer warrior, too.

I thought, God might listen to her. And here I am on March 4th, 1964, I committed my life to Christ, which brought enormous joy to her heart, and yet in July of that year, she went to be with the Lord. God's blessings and life's blasting. Back in 1990, we were experienced great blessings of God and growth in the church. Things were really happening and God is moving in our midst and we could experience, the whole city came to see it and realize it. Within two weeks, I had our eldest daughter in intensive care unit fighting for her life and within two weeks, my wife went into another hospital right next door almost with a very serious operation. God's blessings and life's blasting.

They come to all of us and they can come together or they can come in succession. And I hate to tell you how I prayed during those days, during those tough times. You don't want to know how I talked to the Lord.

It's not very edifying. And I pounded on the doors of heaven. God's blessings and life's blasting. You know in verse 12, when there was a famine in the land, the woman was ready to accept the fact that she's only got a little bit of flour and a little bit of oil. She's going to bake a cake. She's going to eat it and she's going to die. They both were going to die. And she surrendered to that fact. She resigned herself to that fact. But here in verse 18, she attacks Elijah, the guy who saved her life and saved her son's life.

She attacks him with anger and accusations. Our emotions are incredible, aren't they? They really are. They're unpredictable.

We cannot trust them. They're like a barometric pressure. The woman's anger was actually directed at God because she associated God with Baal. And therefore, God is invisible. But the man of God is very visible. And the man of God really got the brunt of it. I can tell you something that I've learned through the years, even before I became a pastor, is that when people are angry with God, they're going to take it out on a godly person. It's going to take it out on the pastor. It's going to take it out on Christian leaders. They're going to take it out on somebody. Because God is not visible, but the godly are visible. When a family member or a friend gets mad at God, it's going to take it on the godliest person in the household.

It's just natural. Because like this woman, this type of anger is often accompanied with guilt. There's guilt below that anger, below the surface of that anger. I want you to see this in verse 18.

It's very clear. She said, did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son? For some reason I have discovered death brings guilt to the surface.

I've seen people grieve in funerals not only for loved ones, but also for their own sense of guilt, for their own sense of failure in the face of the inevitability of death. But I want to help you understand the way God works as we see it in the life of this man. This Baal worshiping woman did not know Yahweh as she should. She tied Yahweh with the same brush as Baal.

And that's mistake number one. Because Baal was a vindictive god. Because Baal was a god of the tit-for-tat.

Because Baal was the god of a blow-for-blow. She thought that her dead son died because of her sin. What is she thinking? What is she thinking? She's suffering from enormous guilt. There's a sin in her life that she did not deal with.

Now I want you, I really want to get away quickly from this woman's anger and guilt. And I love to see the god of man's reaction to that calamity. It's wonderful.

It is a classic. If anybody wants to write a case of how to react to calamity and disaster and how to react to unfair criticism, how you react to unfair attack, personal attack, look at Elijah's reaction. What did this man of God do? He performed the very first resurrection recorded in the word of God. This is very significant. It's the first resurrection ever recorded in the scripture. And there are several principles here that I want to share with you.

Write them down. First, verse 19, Elijah did not defend himself. He said four words, give me your son. And he had just been attacked. He had just been assaulted. He had just been reviled. And yet, he knew that this was pain talking. He knew that this was hurt talking. He knew that this was guilt talking. You know there are many times when we are in a pit of pain and we lash out at those who are innocent often, those who really are the dearest and nearest to us. But then there's a second principle I want to share with you here.

Very important. Elijah saved his questioning of God until he was alone with God. Look at verse 20. When Elijah carried the boy upstairs, he said to God, oh Lord God, why? He didn't want to do that in front of her.

Here's that why again. But I don't want you to miss this point. Elijah did not ask that question downstairs. He asked it upstairs. Not in front of the unbelieving woman. Not in front of the struggling woman. But when he was alone with God. In fact, I want to tell you, verse 20, I want to tell you Elijah's prayer over there, that's not a good prayer. It's not a very good prayer at all. It's a bad prayer. It is not an example or role model for prayer. There are a lot of good prayers in the Bible.

This is not one of them. In fact, I can tell you categorically it was a bad prayer. It was Elijah the man of God who prayed it. But nonetheless, it was a bad prayer. Elijah was just as wrong as the widow was. But he was perplexed. He was anguished. He was agitated.

He obviously had fondness for the boy. But his prayer was wrong because in accusing God of bringing tragedy and causing the son of the widow to die. That was the wrong accusation of God.

And here is what I want you to hear me and hear me well. God is an awesomely good God. And he turns all bad situations, for those who love him, and bring good out of them.

I'm not saying they are good, they are bad, but he can take bad situations, bring good out of them. And because God is awesomely merciful God, because God is awesomely good God, he allows us to say some sorry prayers sometimes. And I'm going to tell you, I've done my fair share of some sorry praying through the years when we are confused and agitated. When we get frustrated, we pray the wrong way. But you know what?

Here's what you need to remember. When you pray the wrong way, when I pray the wrong way, simply because of the circumstances, God doesn't get dizzy and fall off his throne. Because of our bad prayer. And imagine God in heaven looking down saying, I'm not going to take this anymore. This is bad prayer. No, I'm not going to listen to you. No, God is a wonderfully merciful God.

The third principle is this. Your intense and persistent praying according to the will of God makes a difference. It really makes a difference. I don't mean that you are going to be able to pull off a resurrection. I don't mean that. But when you have nothing left except God, when you have stripped yourself of everything except God, when you have taken hold of the horns on the altar in persistent prayer, your prayers will make a difference.

I want to move quickly to the fourth principle. And that was Elijah went to the place where he had learned to go every day. Elijah went to the prophet's chamber where he communed with God on a daily basis. This was not a strange place for him. Elijah went upstairs, the place that he had already been sanctified by hours of prayer, by hours of kneeling on the promises of God, by hours of communing with God, by hours of intimacy with God. So when calamity came, he took the calamity to the prayer closet where he had learned to meet with God. I want to ask you this. Now I hope that you will answer that question to yourself. Do you have a place where you meet God on a daily basis?

If you don't, have one. A reminder from Dr. Michael Youssef that persistent prayer makes a difference. And if you need prayer or someone just to bounce off your life questions, may I suggest speaking to a leading the way pastor or counselor.

You can begin that confidential conversation by filling out a short contact form at ltw.org slash Jesus. In times of trouble, where do you run? When bad things happen, where do you find comfort and assurance?

In times of national uncertainty, personal crisis, or devastating news, how can we manage our fears for the future? Whenever we're frazzled, whenever we're frustrated, whenever we're flustered, the only safe place to return to is where we have housed the Word of God. In his newest book, My Refuge, My Strength, Dr. Michael Youssef takes you on a 60-day journey towards a deeper understanding of the peace God offers us through Christ. One hundred ninety-two pages full of encouraging devotions that explore powerful biblical examples and life-changing truths about our faithful God. For a limited time, for your gift of any amount, Leading the Way will send you your very own hardcover copy of My Refuge, My Strength.

Take advantage of Dr. Youssef's special offer for his book today. Call a ministry representative at 866-626-4356 or visit ltw.org. Everyone who comes to Christ in repentance and faith will receive eternal life. Dr. Youssef is using this teaching to penetrate the world through 190-plus nations in 28 languages, and we just think that's part of our ministry as a couple, is to be participants in that. As a Christian, you still need to hear the gospel again and again. It was very, very convicting. It's not local.

It's worldwide. It gives you further strength in your faith. I have listened to Dr. Youssef over the years, and I knew that if he was coming to Macon, Georgia, that there was a move of God that was coming with him.

It was really indeed a life-changing moment. The greatest gift is to love Jesus and to make him known through Leading the Way. The gospel is preached throughout the world to millions of hearts. It gives me hope that the Great Commission can be fulfilled in our generation. God has equipped Dr. Michael Youssef to reach my generation with a passion for the truth. This dear friend has been one of the most effective proclaimers of the gospel I've ever heard. His ministry has been a blessing to people across the globe. If you'd like to read what God has done in the past year, we've prepared an annual report for you to download. Just go to ltw.org, ltw.org. This program is furnished by Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Youssef, passionately proclaiming uncompromising truth around the world.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-11-29 03:15:28 / 2024-11-29 03:24:07 / 9

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