Today on Real Life Radio. People have let me down. I've let people down. But he's never let us down. In our emotions and our feelings, we've thought we've even accused them of letting us down.
But when it's all said and done, He's been faithful all the way through. God is worthy for us to put our faith into. and a pine. This is real life. Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs.
I'm David Jay, thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God's Word, the Bible. Hey everybody, we got our first time ever actually devotional. We have a 40-day devotional called Watching Waiting. 40 days of walking you through biblical passages that excite you and prepare you for the soon coming of Jesus Christ. Watching Waiting is a 40-day devotional that's all tied to biblical prophecy.
Watching Waiting. It is our featured resource for this month and it's available for a gift of any amount at jackhibbs.com/slash real radio. Jackhibbs.com/slash real radio. On today's edition of Real Life Radio. Pastor Jack continues now with his series called First Samuel.
and a message titled Faith. Jonathan vs. Saul. Samuel of the Old Testament was the last judge of Israel and the first of its prophets.
So here in chapter 14, we'll discover how real faith behaves in a crisis. You see, Saul has a son named Jonathan. And when they faced their enemy, the Philistines, unlike Saul, Jonathan didn't wait for perfect assurance. He moves forward, willing to risk failure as faith compels him to act.
So today Pastor Jack teaches that when it comes to faith, there is boldness versus hesitation. Jonathan acts boldly, stepping into danger when odds are indeed against him. Saul, however, well, he was not a worshiper. He lacked faith and, becoming burdened by the situation, chooses safety.
Now with his message called Faith, Jonathan vs. Saul. Here's Pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs. Jesus said concerning his Return. In the context, it's his second coming.
Jesus said that when he would come, Back to the earth. Would he find faith on the earth? The Bible tells us that whatever we do in this life, in this world, as believers, if it's not done in faith, It's not pleasing to God. In your life's experience, how has faith worked out? How has it panned out with you?
You know, do you struggle like I do with faith? Man. I do. I don't have much faith. I get upset at my lack of faith.
But yet, as I grow older in the Lord, I realize that He has never yet once let me down. Never. People have let me down. I've let people down, but he's never let us down. In our emotions, in our feelings, we've thought, we've even accused them of letting us down.
But when it's all said and done, He's been faithful all the way through. God is worthy for us to put our faith into. in a pun. The other day, Um Actually, it was yesterday. We took a couple of hours and we took a a visiting friend of ours from Jerusalem.
Uh Steve Benyeshai, you'll See Steve pretty soon. Those of you who were on uh what color bus was it? The yellow bus?
So you know. The which one? Gold bus. Oh, Gold Bus. We call.
Well, the other bus called you guys the Yellow Bus. Anyway, Steve was the tour guide of the Yellow Bus, and uh We took him to Disneyland yesterday for a few hours and Um You know, that's a fun place, you know. And I I gotta confess, I'm not a roller coaster kind of guy. I don't. Hey.
You know what? Anything that causes my stomach to go up in my mouth. That man has screwed onto a track. I panic at that. Why?
Because I don't trust men. That's just a little bit of a message. If that thing's got enough power to put my stomach in my throat. And some man screwed that thing onto the track? I don't want anything to do with it.
Now, call me a hypocrite or a lunatic. I'll get in an airplane and do loops and rolls and flips. There's something godly about an airplane. I don't know what it is. God Was behind the creation of airplanes.
That's fine. But roller coasters, I'm sure, are from hell itself. And I won't go on them. I'm thinking, you know, here we go, and we're going to go to Disneyland. And every time I go, my kids are going, Dad, you're such a wimp, you won't go, you won't go, and I won't go.
Well, Steve was a friend, but yesterday he became a very good friend because he too would not go on these. These demonic things. And it's funny because as Uh my family, as they were going through these Loops and rolls and stuff on this track. safely content Steve and I sat there. With all the other old men.
And began to comfort one another as we began to say, you know, it's not right that people write on those things, it's tempting the Lord thy God. And And you know, and we began to just Um You know, it strewed propaganda one upon another until we were fully confident. that um we were the ones who were Full of faith. Because we would not indulge in a roller coaster. I don't trust those things.
I have reasons. They come off the track, people fly out of the belt or whatever, and all these things go through my mind, you know. But then when it comes to God. As I've grown older, I've found it more comforting and more assuring to trust in what the Lord has done, what the Lord is doing. Yet Jesus said when he comes back in the second coming, not the rapture, but the second coming, he says, when he returns, will he find faith on the earth?
That's a haunting question. Listen, are you advancing in the Lord? Is your faith increasing? Let me put it to you this way. Grab your Bible, go to Daniel 11, verse 32.
Daniel 11:32, and you might say, well, Jack, the context is the tribulation period in Daniel 11. Yes, you're right, but God's truth never changes.
So let me bring you down to the latter end of the verse of Daniel 11:32, and it says, But the people who know their God, This show be strong or carry out great exploits. That's an encouraging verse. How can that be true? The people who know their God shall carry out great exploits.
Now, again, in the context, it is those in the tribulation period who will do incredible things for God. But has not God, listen, has not God done incredible things? He has. You know what's so great? As long as we're drawing breath, and as long as the church is still on the earth, he's not done doing great things.
God is going to want to do some great things. He wants to carry out great exploits. My great fear is that he might carry out a great exploit without me. I don't want to miss that. He's going to do something in the earth.
God has got a plan, He's got a vision. He's got a ministry to do, and I don't want to miss that. I don't want this church to miss that. But it's going to take faith. It's going to take seeing God bigger, listen, bigger than our excuses and our.
often minuscule view of God. We have sometimes, I think, been victimized that We see God as a very, very old. Very powerful, strong. Big. Bigger than life, man.
And it's not. He's God. He's spirit. The Bible says. He's not subject to the physical laws of this world.
You know that? You and I are. It's terrible. that we are to some degree And yet?
Some things good. We are governed by this space and this time and this realm. And yet, faith, the Word of God, demands of us that we look outside of this realm and put our faith and trust in God, who can do anything at any time.
So, listen, what is your thing? What do you want to see God do? It's not can God do it. It's Will God do it with us? What's going to happen?
And as a church, as a people, we can sit back and say, you know, God, you go. And you go do. And when it's all secured and it's all, you know, God, when all of your special forces have gone in and secured the area, then I'll come in. I don't want to live like that. I don't want us to live like that.
A great Puritan of yesteryear said, We are invincible until God calls us home. That's pretty radical talk, isn't it? It's kind of reckless. And I think if we are going to be filled with the Holy Spirit of God, we will be reckless for Jesus Christ. There's no doubt about it.
Turn in your Bibles then to 1 Samuel this evening, chapter 14. We will touch on portions of this chapter. This evening, and it's all about faith. If you remember last time on our study, we saw in chapter 13 the wrong way of worship. That Saul In his lack of waiting upon Samuel to arrive.
Saul Steps out of his place as being king, and he offers a sacrifice In the place of Samuel, because Samuel had not yet arrived. And we talked about the wrong kind of worship. There is a faithless kind of worship. Listen, when you sing, when you lift your hands, When we are worshiping, do you? C in your Heart, or are you Recognizing and realizing that when you're singing, you know, you're not singing as you lift your voice, you're not singing to the The plastic or whatever the junk is that's above our heads up there.
You're not singing to the ceiling, you're not singing to the stars. You're singing to God. And for the life of me, maybe Somebody doesn't yet know the Lord, or they're brand new at knowing the Lord, but sometimes I see people, they're standing, they get their arms lifted up, and they're looking. It's like, well, there's an air conditioning duct right there, and oh, there's a light bulb out right there, and they're looking around. It's like, what are you thinking?
And where our mouths are going, we stand in awe of you and we. You know, to, and we're singing. And if at any moment a reporter was to come up and say, What did you just say? What was that that just came out of your mouth? I don't know.
We often mouth things and we say things and sing things, and we don't even know what we're talking about. Yet, in reality, when we do worship, as Saul so terribly missed out on, we can get into a worship that in our Conscious awareness, we are not directing it to the Lord. We may be singing, and we're thinking, oh, this sounds nice. And yet, we are not realizing that when we worship, we are actually entering into the spiritual realm and we're delivering, as it were, a package at the feet of God. It's a gift.
It's a blessing to him. He loves it. You're listening to real life with Pastor Jack Hibbs. To learn more about this ministry or to catch up on some previous episodes, go to jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com.
And now, let's get back to today's message. Once again, here's Pastor Jack. When we worship, we are actually entering into the spiritual realm and we're delivering, as it were, a package at the feet of God. It's a gift. It's a blessing to him.
He loves it. Saul, we saw last time, did not do that. He worshiped wrong. And there's a wrong type of worship, which leads us. To what we see happening in chapter 14 of First Samuel.
We're going to read a couple of verses, and again, we will skip some of them because it's just a filler to the background of what is being stated here. But in this chapter, Saul goes from the wrong kind of worship to making a ridiculous. A horrible judgment call, and that will always happen when we are not spiritual worshipers of God. We'll be operating in the flesh, but watch what happens. It says in verse 1: Now it happened one day.
In the Hebrew, it was programmed by God. God had a day planned. that Jonathan the son of Saul, said to the young man who bore his armour, so his armour bearer, Listen to what Jonathan says. Come, let us go over to the Philistine garrison. Remember what the Philistines are a type of, everybody?
Type of the flesh. That is on the other side. But he did not tell his father. Jonathan didn't tell Saul his dad. And Saul was sitting in the outskirts of Gieah under a pomegranate tree.
That's pretty pathetic because a pomegranate tree is extremely small and dinky. That's quite a sad picture. And it says the people who were with him. were about 600 men. And it lists some of these players that are before us.
Look at verse 6. Then Jonathan said to the young man who bore his armor, Come, let us go over to the garrison. Of these, what does he say? Uncircumcised. It may be that the Lord will work for us.
For nothing restrains the Lord from saving by many or by few. Verse 7.
So his armor-bearers said to him, Do all that is in your heart. Go then. Here I am with you according to your heart. Then Jonathan said, Very well, let us cross over to these men and we will show ourselves to them. You guys, we learned last time there are tens of thousands of them encamped.
Jonathan, have you flipped? Catch the scene. There's the 600 men of Saul which That's not very many guys. But Jonathan, instead of hiding underneath a pomegranate tree, Jonathan looks to his armor bearer and says, Hey, you know what? And is this not a great act of faith?
Is this not a huge exploit? What's it to God if He's going to deliver the enemy into our hands if He uses a lot of soldiers or just a few? You guys, that's huge faith. And his armor bearer says, you know what? Whatever you want to do, let's do it.
What a tremendous assistant that is. I tell you, that's the kind of assistant you want to have. Whatever's in your heart to do, go for it. Why? Why could not assistants to Saul say the same thing about Saul?
Why is this assistant saying it to Jonathan? Jonathan is moving now out from his father's poor example to live his life in faith. And when you live a life in faith, you will not stand there and look at how high the walls are or how broad the river is or how deep that sea might be. Listen, faith, I believe, when it's practiced the way God would have it, seems ridiculous. And it will be criticized, it will be made fun of.
Have you ever expressed an act of faith that the Lord may be laying upon your heart? And you might tell somebody, you know what, we're going to go do this, or I'm going to go launch out in that area, and people will put that down. They say, oh, you're crazy. Boy, you better go pray about that. I have prayed about it.
I'm going to be doing this thing. Whoa, whoa. I believe that people who act in faith often will be misunderstood by even those that claim to be on. Your sign. Wonderful, God-loving Christians will.
Sometimes be your worst enemy when it comes to an exercise of faith. And Jonathan says, Look, armor bearer, what's the deal? I've got a feeling about this. Let's go over, and God may want To deliver the whole slew of these guys into our hands. What's it to God if he uses a whole army or just two guys?
Listen, I think if Jonathan's armor bearer would have said, forget you, I think Jonathan would have won himself. And so Jonathan says, come on, let's go show ourselves. to these guys. It's hilarious. They're encamped on a mountaintop.
So they're going to come to the base of the mountaintop while the army of the enemy is up above. Looking down on them? Verse 8 says, Come, let's go show ourselves to them. Verse 9: If they say, Thus to us Here's the little fleece that Jonathan lays out. If they say, wait until we come to you, then we will stand still in our place and not go up to them.
But if they say to us, come up here, come to us, then we will go up, for the Lord has delivered them into our hand, and this will be a sign to us. You see, Jake, this guy's crazy. Yeah, listen, he may look like he's crazy, but you know what?
Somehow, a thought, Jonathan, I believe, just didn't have a suicide wish. His father is hiding underneath a pomegranate tree with 600 men. If you've seen a pomegranate tree, you can get maybe two guys under it at best.
So you've got. 600 guys standing around a pomegranate tree that Saul sitting underneath it, and they're removed from the battle scene altogether. What are they going to do? Yeah. What are they doing?
They need to act in faith. But see, Saul was not a worshiper, so he could never advance to the exploits of chapter 14. He was not a worshipper, thus he was not one to walk in faith. You see the connection? Jonathan apparently is a lover of God.
He says, hey, what's the deal to God? And listen, church, it's no big deal to God. to do whatever he wants to do at any time. Can he do it with one or a hundred thousand? Yeah, it doesn't matter.
In fact, he may even do it without us. He can get Balaam's donkey to do it. We've learned that one. God's going to move. He's going to do.
But I want him to do it with us. And so the scripture says there that they came and they presented themselves. Verse 11, so both of them show themselves. And the Philistines said, look! The Hebrews are coming out of their holes that they have been hiding in.
Sounds like something we'd say about Osama. Then the garrison called to And listen, Jonathan and his armor bearer said, come up here. Come up to us, we'll show you a thing or two.
So Jonathan said, and wouldn't you love to have seen their face? He says to the armor bearer, they probably look at one another and went, all right, man, here we go. Think that's God's in it?
Now, I don't know about you, but my little faith, I think I would have made a more elaborate fleece to lay out before the Lord. Like, God, if you want us to fight these guys and win, turn the sky orange.
Something. But I mean it's like fifty fifty here Think about it. I mean this guy's guts in. He's trusting in the Lord. You know, have them come down wearing clown suits or, you know, something radical, a crazy thing.
Well, now we'll know it's God. Pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs, here on Real Life Radio. and his message called Faith, Jonathan versus Saul. We're glad you took the time to be with us today. You know, this message is part of Pastor Jack's series called 1 Samuel.
It's a series that highlights the prophet Samuel, who was called by God during one of Israel's darkest ages, to bring the people back to a heart of true worship. and will continue. on the next edition of Real Life Radio. I've got Pastor Jack in the studio with me, which is always a thrill. Hey, Pastor Jack, you've got a new devotional out, and it's called Watching, Waiting.
Give me a little rundown of what's going on with that. Yeah, we're very excited. It's the first time ever I've put out a devotional, to be honest with you. It's just. Didn't think about it until you look around at the world that you and I are living in.
And I think everybody needs a little bit of infusion, a little bit of a booster shot when it comes to getting excited and being. becoming really biblically focused again on all of us are called to be watching And to be waiting. For the Lord's coming, and so yeah, it's a 40-day devotional, and we think people are going to like it because it's filled with hope, it's filled with encouragement. And by the way, you know what? Think about it: the more we see the world coming undone, the more it's indicating that we're going to see Christ soon.
So, what does, I mean, what does waiting look like for a believer today? Yeah, waiting for the believer. Great question, Davey. Waiting for the believer is a very active waiting. It's not like twiddling your thumbs and sitting back.
For the believer, waiting for the Lord and watching for the Lord is a very active thing, meaning that we're living out our faith, we are getting involved in the culture, no matter where we're deployed, so to speak, by Jesus, right? If it's on the construction site or in the public school system or wherever you're at, that you and I are to be living our lives actively, boldly for Jesus. And that is all, that's how we actually wait. How do we stay expectant, if you will, without getting discouraged or distracted in the meantime? You know what?
I. How? I would argue with you, Davey, that that's one of the hardest things to do as a believer. Because if you think about it, If you love someone, you You can't wait to see them at the close of of Any given day, right? Or if you love someone, you can't wait to meet up with them again.
Well, if we love the Lord, we're looking for him, and we are commanded to be looking for him daily. But we've got to keep that fire burning. And to do that, we've got to stay in the word and be encouraged with Bible verses that tell us about his near return. Why would you pick 40 days? Why wouldn't you pick 35 or 30 days?
Well, you know, listen, 40 days, Moses was on the Mount of Sinai with God for 40 days. Jesus was fasting in the wilderness, confronting Satan for 40 days. And the number 40, even though there's, you know, it's more than what days there are in a month, 40 days just seemed right.
Okay, so if somebody's doing a devotion, they might be, you know, focusing on, you know, resetting their faith, getting all fired up in the Lord. Is that kind of a close description? I think that when we... pause long enough to consider the scriptures that reinforce that he's coming back and we're supposed to be watching for him, that really guards us and protects us. I'd like to put it this way.
It kind of galvanizes us against the The increased rhetoric that is going to come, people are going to start mocking the return of Jesus more than ever. Even quote theologians, right, are going to start saying he's not really coming back. All these things were revealed to us in scripture in advance, anticipating that very attitude. And so this devotion is going to... Really, I think, help that a lot.
I mean, it's cute. Don't get me wrong. It's a cute book. It's a handsome cover. It looks great and it's 40 days.
But don't let that disarm you. It is action-packed with biblical truth to get you and to keep you excited about the near return of Christ. Watching, waiting. It is our featured resource for this month, and it's available for a gift of any amount at jackhibbs.com/slash real radio. Jackhibbs.com/slash real radio.
This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you, our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in His Word. We'll see you next time here on Real Life Radio.
