Faith Lesson 8 week 2
Mike Doyle · Apr 19, 2015
Faith, No. 15
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492651213837

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, Courtney got us through how far? Question 3. We talked about what the source of all truth is in John 14, 6. Did we read that verse? I think John 14, 6 is, I am the way, the truth, and the life. What's interesting about that verse is I think in the Greek it says, I am way. I am truth, I am life. And I am, remember when we did the diagram we talked about what an essence verb was? Faith is the substance. Jesus says I am truth. Truth is Christ. So it's an essence verb. So you can say that the things that are real, they're truth.

And guess what? They end up being a person. the Lord Jesus Christ himself. It's really cool because I have been amazed over the years how every truth that you study, every doctrine that we go through, every concept and principle that we always somehow redounds back to a person. It's never just intellectual. It's always the person. It's always the Lord Jesus Christ. And so that should trigger in our minds that God has set things up for personal intimacy with the Lord Jesus Christ growing all the time. And He is these things.

And I think if you get your arms around that, you realize that no matter what's going on, from a difficulty standpoint or what's going on when you're studying or you're reading the Bible or whatever, it's all pointing to this greater intimacy with a person.

It's important that you understand that. You can graduate from five seminaries and have all kinds of chevrons on your shoulder, If you don't understand that concept, you're just another theologian. They're like lawyers, we've got enough of them. It's really important.

The Word of God is designed for one purpose, and that's that we might behold, have intimacy with the God of the universe, the Lord Jesus Christ. It's cool that God would do it that way. Question four, are the things in Hebrews 11-1 absolutely certain? Yes. Why?

For a God who does not change, cannot lie, wants only the best for us. Sure, the things of God are absolutely certain. The things of God are reality as we've talked about. He is the only source of reality or truth. and there's no other source of reality.

So you have to conclude from that, that the things of Hebrew 11.1, if they are the things of God, then they are absolute. You can trust them. You can trust them. Alright, let's see how smart you are.

Fill in the blanks. You ready? My things have to do with My things have to do with me? I don't know. What I'm after is how reliable are your things. Very. So the word I put in there is uncertainty. My things have to do with uncertainty. I know this is going to make you a little upset. They also have to do with unreality. Is that the next blank? Yeah, unreality. I knew you were going to have different words than I was on this fill-in-the-blank show. I left it blank.

I tried that same reasoning on some of the professors in college and they laughed at me. But the things of God are certain and real. So it wasn't so tough, was it? Not after you gave us the two. It almost sounds like, it seems like to me, that what you just said prior to this like covers everything. You know, this is all just seems like Gosh, you should have saved it for the end. You know, this has been one of those, you know how sayings stick in your mind? I think this came out of Hungry Heart, where one of those guys said, if you can go over in your mind everything that God says is true of you, and you can find one thing that isn't, then the whole thing is a fraud. Just one thing. If he says it's so, that really isn't so, the whole deal is a fraud. So if you flip that pancake over, everything's of him. You can trust him, no matter what it is. And that's the whole idea of understanding what faith is about. Boy, we are speeding along. Courtney will be really happy. Alright, look at Romans 15, 13. Somebody read it. And the question is, does God offer us a benefit when we believe Him? So Romans 15, 13. Only those people that can read Ambrose, you're out.

I added some words to this a few years back. It wasn't me, it was some teacher that I had and I thought, oh, I better write that in. Anyway, so I have the in front of hope once and the in front of glory. I'm going to read it that way. Okay, read it that way. That's good. Now may the God of the hope fill you with all joy and peace in the believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So the question is, does he offer us a benefit if we believe? And just to clarify, when you have a definite article, the, in front of a word, what does it mean? We're talking about something specific. Specific. The only one. Only one. So, does he offer us a benefit? Yes. Now the God of hope The God of the hope, you could say the God of the certainty, the God of absolute certainty. What does He offer you? Peace, joy and peace and joy. Kind of cool. Kind of cool. So, question seven goes with it. What is God's purpose in this verse? He has, you know, God has a desire here. You see what the desire is? That we can rest in Him? It's even before that. Assurance. What's that? Assurance. It's before that. Salvation. No. It's before that. To encourage us. No. Intimacy? No. Love? Huh? Love? No. He wants us to, He wants to woe us to Him. What does he want you to do?

Believe. That's it. That we believe, which means that we, who said rest? Somebody said rest. That you rest. But there's no rest without believing him. You rest in the facts. Simply to rest in his certainty and his reality. God desires that we believe. And believing is simply resting in what he reveals to us of his things. Now, I don't know if you've figured out what we've been doing in the last couple of classes, but when you talk about faith, the value in faith is in the object of what you believe. It's not in the fact that you do believe. God wants you to believe. Why? Because he wants you focused in on the object of your faith, the things of God.

And that's where the rest is. So, when we do, there's a benefit. And the benefit in this passage tells us we get joy and peace. Oh, by the way, as soon as I ask the question, you're going to get it. Whose joy is it? It's his. Yeah. It's all his. All back to the person. That's right. And whose peace is it? His. Yeah.

So if it's his joy and it's his peace, then it can't be interrupted. You understand what I'm saying? Circumstances can't touch it. You can't If it's his joy and his peace, is there anything in the universe that could be done to disrupt the joy or disrupt the peace? The answer is no. And it's probably then not a feeling, it's a knowing. Let's talk about that for a minute. That's really good. I don't think you can divorce feelings out of all of this.

But what's the principle? The principle is, the focus is on the things of God. And as we've said a hundred times so far, how you feel about the things of God is irrelevant to whether they're real or not, or they're true. But when you respond to God's desire that you believe, there's a benefit. And the benefit is joy and peace. Is there feeling involved in that? Absolutely there is. But the joy and the rest is in the object, not inside your warm fuzziness. You understand? It's such a subtle trick that if I feel good about something then it must be real.

No. It must be a thing of God and the benefit offered to me by believing Him is joy and peace. I don't want to get the peace and joy in front of the believing. Do you see that? I don't want to go for the warm fuzzy before I understand the things of God and rest my faith in them. Is there an emotional response? Yes, there is. But if you have an emotional response to something and you're not quite sure, you ought to go in the Word and check it out. Because we can easily be fooled by our emotions. During the course of my life, I've met several Christians in that period of time. And people would say about them, they're so heavenly minded, they're no earthly good. And the heavenly minded person is the only one who is any earthly good. Right.

So, it may sound, maybe cold, but it's not. If it's the Lord Jesus' joy, if it's God's peace, and it's what's keeping your heart at rest, and you're manifesting his life, then there's no coldness involved at all. There's no separation. It seems like when you're searching for something and you find it, then you have the joy and peace of resting because you're not searching anymore.

But sometimes we still take things for granted. Like you have a kid, and you know you have the joy and peace of having the kid, but sometimes you're not always happy that you have the kid. You know what I mean? It comes with suffering, and it comes with other things, but you have the joy and peace of knowing that you have that relationship. It's hysterical. I had an experience this week with my son. When he was in high school, I was the dumbest person on the planet. Can you believe that? I didn't know anything.

So the phone rings on Thursday. He says, Dad, I need your help. And I'm thinking, all right. He says, my next door neighbor is going to get married on Saturday, and I've been invited to the wedding. And my buddy's girlfriend is, again, at Texas A&M University, when you're a senior you get a ring. And it's a ceremonial thing. I've been invited to that.

And he said, I've got to get dressed up and I don't know what to wear. I said, well, first of all, clean your boots. That's the first thing. So we spent ten minutes talking about, we're going shopping, And we're going to buy slacks, and we're going to buy a shirt, and we're going to buy a tie and all that.

And he said, oh, thanks, Dad. And so then he puts a picture on Facebook. He bought the most God-awful-looking tie. So I sent him a little thing. I said, hey, I like the tie. He said, yeah, what do you think? I said, can I borrow it sometimes? Oh, never mind. So it comes back. It comes back around, you know. Dad, what should I wear? He asks the guy who has red pants and a yellow shirt. And doesn't need to wear a tie. Yeah, who's telling a guy who lives in Texas what he ought to wear. He does trust you. So anyway.

When we were talking earlier about being too heavily minded, I think there are Christians who have a totally works-based and sin-sniffing kind of looking down on other people kind of thing. I think when a Christian lives with that works mentality, someone looking on them, you know, they kind of have their nose up in the air. I think there is the real truth. If you have it in mind, that's wonderful, but if you're just like haughty and looking down at all these sinners. Well, think about this. If the focus is on anything other than Christ himself, you are going to be haughty.

So when 2 Corinthians 3.18 says, Beholding as in a mirror, the mirror is the word of God, the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Think about what that's saying. I am looking at the Word of God, but I'm really beholding Him.

Where is He? He's in heavenlies. That's what it means to be heavenly minded. What happens? There's a result of doing that. That I am, with unveiled face, that I am transformed into His very image. So as His life is beginning to be manifested to me, And through me, it's his life. It's not haughty. It can't be.

And the Lord Jesus, I'll put it another way, God understood that there was no fixing up of the old man. He understood that. So what did he do? He didn't institute a system called Christianity that is behavior modification. He did not do that. He replaced us with Christ. He separated us from the haughtiness of Adam, the sinfulness and evilness of Adam, and replaced that life with the resurrected life of the Lord Jesus. That's what he tells us he did.

Romans 6, Galatians 2.20. And we grow in him all the time, in this conformity. So the resulting behavior that comes out of us is what? It's Him. It's Him. And what are we learning here?

You can trust Him. You can trust His things that have to do with the life that comes out of you. You can trust Him. So where's your focus? Heavenly. It's on Him. Do you need to be worrying about what it's going to look like down here? No, you don't. You don't.

Because if He's manifesting His life to you and through you, it's Him. Is he trustworthy to live his life through you in a manner that's consistent with who he is? Absolutely he is. That's the whole point. See that? I don't have to keep checking all the time. How's it going? As soon as you start doing that, you're under law. Well, you're looking at yourself.

Yeah, you know the vine and the branches and the grape thing? The vine is over here. The branch is here and the fruit is over here. We are to be focused on the vine, right? The problem with us is we keep doing this at the fruit. And then we are looking at other people's fruit too, right? What's that? We look at other people's fruit too. Yeah, and you know it's okay to do that as long as you are not judgmental. But it's okay to judge. Because we're as meek as a lamb, but as wise as a serpent. We know what's going on, but we're not judgmental about it.

Those of you who've been on Wednesday night, we've spent a lot of time last year talking about strong believer and weak believer, right? And when you get a room full of people like everybody in this room thinks that they're a strong believer, right? Don't they? Don't we all? But what do you do when you have a strong believer sitting here and a weak believer sitting there? What does the Word of God say that the strong believer's responsibility is to the weak believer?

What is it? To lift him up. To teach him. To teach him. And encourage him. Show him the things of God. What's the weaker believer's responsibility to the strong believer? Not to be judgmental. Like I said, all you are really strong believers. You get in a room full of weak believers, what's your job? Teaching them. Which means you better know your stuff.

Mike, I actually think it would be the exact opposite. I think we come here as weak believers, wanting to grow in the grace and knowledge of who he is. If we were strong believers, We sit there and know that the Lord is going to provide and dwell us with what we need to know. So I approach it as a weak believer. That's good. We've got one honest guy in the whole room. I don't know about that. I don't know.

I was taking a step over and I looked at Romans 5.1. You know, it says, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Is that positional? Because what I've read is that that's a peace like we're no longer at enmity with Him. There are two issues here. Is this peace we're talking a positional peace? Initially it is. But there are two aspects of peace. There's a peace with God, and then there's a peace of God. Which one is this? It's his peace.

Romans 5.1 talks about because we've been justified, we've been saved, we've been declared righteous, we have peace with God and there's nothing between us anymore, especially from his side. So then the very next part of that verse says that because of that we have access into the grace in which we stand. Those two verses, we've been studying them on Wednesday, they're just amazing. Three verses, there's eight benefits.

But later on, you find out that not only do I have peace with God, but I have His very peace. Because of what Christ did on the cross, He's at rest about the sin issue. And He's certainly at rest about us who are in Christ. And that's what we need to rest in, right?

That's his stuff. Yeah. Whenever we start looking at the fruit. Yeah, you start looking at fruit or looking at yourself, guess what? He has a purpose in us resting, just resting in the God of the hope, in who he is, and the purpose is defined in the text that we may abound that we may be absolutely furnished so that you abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Purpose clause. And what a purpose clause is, here's the purpose of what we're saying, that you may abound.

You may abound. It doesn't mean you just sort of exist, but abounding. What's abounding mean? A lot. Good. Abundantly furnished in hope and there's a definite article in front of the hope. It's His hope. So it's not a matter of just having this sort of dribble out. This is abounding. Everything that God does is abounding. Everything. So we've already answered question eight.

Whose hope is it? And the contrast is very interesting. What hope? Our hope, our certainty. No, it can't be that. It's His hope and it's the hope, the very hope that comes from God and through the power of the Holy Spirit, so it's His hope. His absolute certainty that we are to rest in. The God of hope.

Now, along with that question, take a quick look at Philippians 4.7.

Philippians 4.7 says, and the peace of God, there's the of, not with, which surpasses all comprehension will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So it's very interesting. I can have peace with God and I can understand what it is and that I can rest in the fact that God has nothing against me because of my faith in the personal work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But if we're going to start talking about the peace of God, look what it does. Number one, it surpasses all comprehension. Well, I read that and I think, well, that sort of leaves me out of the loop.

Doesn't it? Have you ever noticed that when the Spirit of God shows you a truth, and when you first see it, it's pretty exciting, and you just are awed by it, but the minute you try to take it for yourself, you lose it? Have you ever had that experience? I guess I shouldn't talk about that. What do you mean by take it to yourself?

I try to use it for me. In other words, my sin nature tries to grab hold of it and use it as an asset, rather than just resting my faith in the peace of God. I try to grab it and use it, but it says here it's incomprehensible by me. I can't comprehend what it is, but I know I have it. And it's designed to do what? It's to guard my heart and my mind.

Okay. So when, you know, I'm walking down the street with somebody and they, like with Wanda, they fall down. Yeah. As you grow spiritually, what happens? You trust God with that circumstance. But it's still, it's still totally, you know, She's my closest friend. She's your buddy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

So, but anyway, I'm just glad that I come to a church where I can... Don't you find it interesting... Because I live alone, so if I come and say these things, it's because I need to. Don't you find it interesting that God set it up so that you were there when it happened? He could have done it when you weren't there. I thought about if it happened in her condo and she was there by herself.

So here you are. So God is working on Mary and He's working on you at the same time. Pretty cool how He does things. So there wasn't any slip-up here. There wasn't any... Oh gee, I was out of town that day, but I wasn't paying attention. Did I somehow love you less?

No. All the things we prayed about this morning, every one of them is of the Lord. Every single one of them. And we can trust Him. Debbie's mom, all of that. Jane, taking a test, slipping and falling. Circumstance in your family. Every one of those things. God works all things together for good. All of them.

So why did he get a kidney stone? Because he's a bad guy. It's kind of hard though. Sometimes it's hard to think. I don't know why with him, but I can tell you from, give you some anecdotal evidence, I can be cruising along and not thinking about the Lord and here comes something like a kidney stone and what does it do? I've got to go to him about it. If that didn't happen, I wouldn't have to go to him.

God's greatest tool. Every once in a while, Dad comes up with something useful. Are you listening? This whole thing, one of the reasons which I love is God never says oops. You know what God's greatest tool is in all of our lives? Need. He creates a need. Kidney stone. I don't care. Mary falling down. He creates a need. Why? So that he can fix it. And you can grow. That's why he does it.

If he didn't do that, we'd all be downstairs with the 12 year olds. Some of you would be So it's not our peace, but it's His peace, and this is the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace. Fruit of the Spirit. And that verse, you know, the fruit of the Spirit, notice it's singular. It's not fruits of the Spirit. You know why? Package deal. What's that? It's a package deal. That's right.

Christ does all of those things all the time. So, don't pray for patience, pray for Christ, because He is all of those things. The very life of the Lord Jesus, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy and peace. This is talking about several aspects of the fruit of the Spirit.

The great thing about a class like this so that we can really get an understanding about faith is to get us focused in on the things of God. And look what they are. Lesson 9 that I handed out for next time. Look on the back of the sheet. And those are just a few of the things that are true of Christ that are also true of you. Already true of you. Not going to be. Already are.

Okay, look at 1 Corinthians 2.9. Who has prepared the things mentioned?

1 Corinthians 2.9.

But just as it is written, the things which the eye has not seen, nor the ear has not heard, and which have not entered into the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him. Most Christians stop at the end of verse 9. They think, oh, this awesome stuff that someday God is going to show me a few things. But verse 10 says, for to us God has revealed them. Has, aorist tense, fact, already done.

Through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. So, what are we looking at here? If faith is the substance or the reality of the things hoped for, the things of God which are absolutely certain, how do we know that? How do you know that fact?

That the things of God, that the things that are talked about in Hebrews 11.1 are the things of God and that they are absolutely certain? How do you know that?

The Holy Spirit shares with us, that's true. So it's true. Okay, there you go. There's this little thing in the Bible study that's called correlation. You know what correlation is? It means you can go find some other verses that corroborate the verse you're looking at. And it's important to go do that, rather than just take one verse and make a whole religion out of one verse.

But let's just tear this apart. Notice one thing. Man's eye has not seen the things of God, right? nor have his ears heard the things of God, which were already made for us. And God has prepared these things to and for the ones who love him." Hopefully I can make this point before the buzzer goes off.

And this is in Aorist tense, which means it's a fact. These are facts. These are not things that are going to happen or might happen if you're good enough. This is fact. Which means that it's already happened. You could say this is a done deal. It's over with. He has prepared these things. They're already prepared. There's nothing more to do to prepare them. He's done it all and he's made them ready right now in your life and in my life. There they are. They're there. So that leads to question 10.

Why can't man know the things of God mentioned by seeing, observing, hearing, or reasoning? Why can't he know them? It's an inside job. What's that? It's an inside job. What do you mean by that? It's the Holy Spirit. That's right. Is that the first bell? Yes. So the Holy Spirit is the one that God has prepared him.

But why can't Albert Einstein sit down and reason to the things of God. He was Jewish. He is Jewish. Sorry. They are spiritually praised. Say that again. They are spiritual. Because they are spiritual things. Stay with me. They are spiritual things. So the mind of man can't get his arms around them. He can't reason to them. He can't go into Eccles' lab and run a bunch of experiments and come up with spiritual reality. He can't do it.

Because we would mess it up. He's got to have a system so that we can't do that, so we can't mess it up. Because we would. That's why all the religions of the world mess it up. Because that's what they're trying to do. They don't rely on the spirit of God. And I must say that in our society, you know, we've tried to interject the empirical method. We go to seminary and we study in logic and we're supposed to arrive at a spiritual understanding. No, it doesn't happen that way. It does not go that way.

That's why the least of us can be the most spiritual. What we're saying is that you cannot know the things of God by experience. But you can by reading the Bible. Yeah, but now stay with me. Good thing your dad isn't here because he'd be giving me this song and dance about diving on a reef. You cannot know the things of God by observation.

You can know that he's God and that he's powerful and that he's a creator, and he likes pretty things, but spiritual things are different. Is the creation of a reef a spiritual thing? No, it's a material thing. We can't know them by any sort of empirical method, and by empirical method is we get out the test tubes and we try to come to a conclusion of a spiritual reality. You cannot do that with the things of God.

It seems like working backwards, like, okay, that would mean that everybody who went to a coral reef would have a spiritual experience. They would say they did. Right. But, I mean, if it really truly was that that was a spiritual experience, then always, you know, it would be experienced that way. Then, but I think there's also that the Holy Spirit can use God's creation to sort of give you a spiritual understanding of His creation, if you're already a believer. Does that make sense? Yes, if you're already a believer.

And you marvel at His creation, but it's the least of the things, because even your rationalism doesn't work. You can't rationalize your way to seeing or understanding the things of God. Because he says, neither has it entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared.

Wow. So all of the things that God has prepared, you know, we even try to describe heaven in earthly terms. You know, we had this guy on Tuesday for years that he couldn't wait to go to heaven because he could play golf every day. And I said, well, what... I don't like golf. I'm not going. Well, I said to him, I said, every morning you get up and you go play golf and you shoot 18, big deal. It stops being a challenge.

But if we were capable of knowing that from our standpoint as a human being, then the Jews and the Muslims would also be right, and Gentiles, because they often acknowledge that there is a God. So isn't it interesting that Islam and Buddhism and all of that other kind of thing, they want to be catalogued into the same category as Christianity.

They can't be. because the things of God are only spiritually discerned. They can't be. So they have to define what they're doing in earthly rational terms. They cannot define it by spiritual terms. So how can we know, I'm going to do this last question, how can we know the things of God? But God has revealed them unto us by his Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things yea the deep things of God.

I and Ralph can understand each other whether we are Christians or not. Why? Because we both have the spirit of a man and his spirit is like my spirit. I understand him and he understands me. Now there may be differences and nuances but he is a man and I understand what he is about and he looks at me and I understand what you are about.

Well how do you understand what God is about? You've got to have the same spirit and you've got to have the Holy Spirit who searches out the things of God and reveals them to you. Other than that, you don't know them. You see that? I know it's tough because it makes you dependent. So you get to know after Christ has been crucified? Because that's when you get filled with the Holy Spirit if you believe? I think you're involved by the Holy Spirit. And I think being filled with the Holy Spirit is another issue. But yeah, every believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

And the primary job that he has is this job. That he searches out the things of God for what purpose? So he can show you what they are. And they're already done. They're already in place. The object of your faith. You see that? I was going to show you, I really had a cool drawing of the Grace Circle, you'll have to wait until next week. That's close.

Dear Father, how we thank you. How we thank you for the fact that you've already prepared your things for us to know. You recreated us in Christ, made us spiritually alive, and your Holy Spirit searches out your things just so he can show them to us. Father, how thankful we are, and we pray in the name of your dear Son, the Lord Jesus. Amen.