What do you do when God doesn't make sense?
If you're not a believer in Jesus, you might be thinking,
well, I don't have to do anything.
God doesn't make sense. That's why I don't believe in
him. Problem solved.
But if that's you, I've got a challenge for you.
I want you to think of a question that in your mind
serves as kind of a defeater to belief in God.
Well, the God of the Bible can't really exist, because how could
this be the case? Whatever that question is for
you, Can you imagine ever receiving a satisfying answer to
that question? If you did, would you change
your mind and start believing in God?
But if you are a believer in Jesus, what do you do when God
doesn't make sense? It might be you're struggling to
understand something in Scripture.
You're kind of stuck on it. You just can't get it out of
your mind. It might be you're wrestling
with an evil you see in the world around you, and you're
wondering how God could let it happen.
It might be that the circumstances of your own life
are painful and overwhelming and confusing.
One or more of those factors could lead you to ask God, what
are you doing? Why are you allowing this?
Given all that I know is true of you, how could this be
happening? This morning we continue our
series in the Old Testament prophetic book of Habakkuk.
We're going to look at chapter one, verse 12 through chapter 2,
verse one. In the first sermon, which
covered verses one to four, we heard Habakkuk's anguished cry
to God. He lamented the wickedness and
injustice that he saw all around him, and he accused God of
sitting idly by and doing nothing about it.
Last week, in verses 5 to 11, we heard the Lord's answer.
He's not doing nothing about it. Instead, he's going to do
something shocking about it. He's raising up the Babylonians
as a new superpower on the world stage, and he's going to use
them to come and conquer Judah. God is going to punish his
people through this wicked empire.
He's going to use the Babylonians, greedy imperialism
to carry out his own righteous judgments.
So that's an answer to Habakkuk's prayer, but it's not
the answer he was looking for before.
Habakkuk was confused about God's inaction.
Now he's puzzled by God's action.
How can God use wicked pagans to punish his people?
Doesn't that make the cure worse than the disease?
Please follow along as I read Habakkuk chapter one verse 12 to
chapter 2 verse one. Are you not from everlasting?
Oh Lord, my God, my holy one, we shall not die.
Oh Lord, you have ordained them as a judgement, and you, O rock,
have established them for reproof.
You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look it
wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remains silent when
the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?
You make mankind like the fish of the sea, like crawling things
that have no ruler. He brings all of them up with a
hook. He drags them out with his net.
He gathers them in his dragnet. So he rejoices and is glad.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net and makes offerings to his
dragnet, for by them he lives in luxury and his food is rich.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing
nations forever? I will take my stand at my watch
post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what
he will say to me and what I will answer concerning my
complaint. In our passage, Habakkuk again
turns to lament. He again wrestles with God in
prayer. Habakkuk's honest cries and
questions to the Lord are a model for us of what we should
do when God's ways don't make sense.
Our passage is 3 sections. In verses 12 and 13, Habakkuk
confesses his faith in the Lord and renews his complaint.
In verses 14 to 17, Habakkuk expands on his complaint, crying
out to the Lord about the injustice of Babylon's
conquests. And then in verse 1 of chapter
2, Habakkuk resolves to wait for God to speak.
Here's the burden of our passage in one sentence.
When God's ways don't make sense, wrestle with him, then
wait for him. When God's ways don't make
sense, wrestle with him, then wait for him.
The sermon will have three points.
In the 1st 2, we see how Habakkuk wrestles with the Lord.
In the third, he waits for him, .1 Confess your trust and
confusion. What should you do when God's
ways don't make sense? Confess your trust and
confusion. That's what Habakkuk models in
verses 12 and 13. Look first at verse 12.
Are you not from everlasting? O Lord, my God, my holy one, we
shall not die. O Lord, You have ordained them
as a judgement, and you, O Rock, have established them for
reproof. Hear Habakkuk prays again, and
he begins his second prayer by confessing his confidence in
God's character and purposes. Habakkuk's spiritual posture
here is complex. He's perplexed, he doesn't have
answers, and he is about to ask God some very pointed questions.
But he begins by confessing what he knows is true of God.
Habakkuk first confesses that God is everlasting, just like we
read earlier in Psalm 90. Why does that bring hope or
comfort? Because if God is everlasting,
then so is his love. If God is everlasting, then so
is his commitment to do good to his people.
If God is everlasting, then His love for us will never run out.
That's why, Habakkuk affirms, we shall not die now.
Some people in Judah will die. God will inflict suffering and
death and exile as temporal punishments for the people's
sins. But Habakkuk has a longer
horizon in view. When he says we shall not die,
he means that it is impossible that the Lord would utterly wipe
them out. The Lord will not 'cause them to
utterly perish. He will preserve a remnant and
renew them. Why?
Because his love is as everlasting as his life.
As one commentator put it, in God's eternity lies his people's
security. God's love is as unchanging as
his eternal being. So Habakkuk concludes that the
judgement God is about to inflict will be neither total
nor final. And he rightly concludes that
this will be a judgement. That's what he says in the
second-half of verse 12. He acknowledges that the Lord is
going to use the Babylonians to carry out his judgement against
his chosen people. But notice the second way that
Habakkuk describes that judgement.
He says, And you, O rock, have established them for reproof.
What's reproof? Just a slightly archaic word for
correction. It's training that means to turn
someone from evil to good. It's discipline that aims to
change the direction of someone's life.
God will punish Judah for their sins, but His purpose is not
only to punish, it's also to purify, it's also to purge and
renew. God's judgement of His people
will aim not at their destruction, but at their
transformation and restoration. But Habakkuk still has a problem
with this coming judgement. Verse 13 You who are of purer
eyes than to see evil and cannot look it wrong, why do you idly
look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows
up the man more righteous than he?
Now here again Habakkuk starts from what he knows is true of
God. He knows God is holy.
He knows God is rightly determined to punish sin.
That's why he's going to punish his own people.
But if God is so righteous and holy, then how can he tolerate
the evil of the Babylonians? When Habakkuk says that God is
of purer eyes than to see evil, he doesn't mean it's physically
impossible for God to see evil. He means that God's holiness
compels him to act against evil. He doesn't tolerate evil.
He doesn't wink at it. God doesn't say boys will be
boys, Evil empires will be evil empires.
What are you going to do about it?
Habakkuk knows that sin is a personal affront to God.
He knows that God's holiness and human sin do not match and will
not mingle. So why is God sitting around
doing nothing about the Babylonian sin?
Why is he idle and silent about them?
Habakkuk calls the Babylonians traitors, meaning they're
treacherous, they're deceitful. And so Habakkuk is basically
saying, sure, we're really bad. That's what I was saying before.
But aren't they worse? Isn't it a problem for you to
use them to judge us? Doesn't that imbalance the
scales of justice? Doesn't that make it seem like
you approve of them or you're on their side?
No. As we continue to meditate on
verse 13, I want us to focus first on what Habakkuk knows,
then on what he doesn't know. What does Habakkuk know?
He knows that God is holy. God's holiness is hard for us to
grasp. If you're not a believer in
Jesus, you might think, what's the big deal?
Why does God get so worked up about sin?
Here's an analogy that might help just a little.
Cancer patients are often immunosuppressed.
If they're exposed to even the smallest amount of germs or some
other means of infection, they could contract an illness that
could kill them. And so some cancer treatment
centers have incredibly strict sanitation protocols.
Only a doctor or a nurse can go in, and only after they've been
totally sanitized and only wearing special gear and nobody
else is allowed in. And the room is vacuum sealed
because you don't want even the tiniest little bit of a
potential contaminant to get in there.
That's to keep out the possibility of a deadly
infection. According to Scripture, sin
itself is a deadly infection. It's toxic and it's lethal.
God is utterly opposed to sin. He cannot and will not tolerate
even the tiniest microbe of it. God's intolerance of sin is a
good thing. His intolerance of sin manifests
His goodness. God's utter opposition to all
sin is the only ultimately stable moral baseline for this
universe. It's good that God doesn't
tolerate sin, just like it's good that an oncologist doesn't
tolerate any infections that could attack their patients.
Now God's holiness impels him to eliminate sin.
One aspect of that eliminating sin is punishing sinners.
God is our creator. God is our ruler.
God is our Lord and Master. He rightly demands that we live
for Him. He rightly commands that we live
according to his ways. He designed this universe.
He wrote the owner's manual. He knows all the proper
instructions for operating it according to its design.
But sin says no thanks, I know how to do better.
Sin says, no thanks, I'll put myself in charge around here.
Sin says no, actually, God, you know what I know better than you
that deserves punishment. That's rebellion.
That's not the kind of thing that God should just sweep under
the rug. And so God is, as Habakkuk
confesses, of purer eyes than to see evil.
The ultimate expression of that aspect of God's holiness will be
that he will punish forever in hell all those who persist in
unrepentance, all those who refuse to turn from sin and
trust in Jesus. That will be the sad and scary
fate for everyone who refuses His mercy and grace in Christ.
But that's not the end of the story.
God is holy. God is also merciful.
God is righteous. God is also loving.
And He sent his Son into the world to pay the price on the
cross for the sins of all those who had turned from sin and
trust in him. He sent his Son into the world
to bear the full weight of his wrath against sin, so that the
whole burden of sin could be eliminated on Christ and there
wouldn't be anything left to pay, anything left to suffer,
anything left to do for all those who turn from sin and
trust in Him. And he rose Jesus from the dead
on the third day, proving the effectiveness of that payment,
that offering, that sacrifice, that sin elimination, that
wrath, exhaustion. Now Jesus reigns in heaven, and
He commands all people everywhere to turn from sin and
trust in Him. If you do not yet believe in
Jesus, begin now. If you've not yet turned from
sin and trusted in Christ, refuse to live for yourself any
longer and give up yourself fully to Him.
Looking back over verses 12 and 13, what does Habakkuk know?
He knows that God is holy. He knows that God is eternal.
He knows that God is the covenant Lord of his people, and
he confesses all that to God. So there's a lesson here for
those of us who believe when God's ways don't make sense, go
to him in prayer and start with what you know.
Start with what you know is true of Him.
Tell God the truth about God as a way of driving that truth
deeper into your own heart. Separate what you know from what
you don't know. Leave what you don't know over
here for just a minute and confess the truth of God.
Now, what is a bat? Kick not know.
What does he not know? He doesn't know how God's
holiness can square with his use of the Babylonians as an
instrument of judgement. He doesn't know how God can
sinlessly use the sinful to punish sin.
It doesn't make sense. And so he asks God these sharp,
pointed questions. Why do you idly look at traitors
and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more
righteous than he? Now, in one sense this is an
accusation. It is a complaint.
It finds some fault with God's ways.
But it's crucial to recognize that Habakkuk is not expressing
A settled conviction. Habakkuk is not stating A
verdict. He is not pronouncing judgement
on God. Instead, what's he doing?
He's asking a question. Habakkuk here is not asking a
gotcha question. He's asking a genuine question.
We all know the difference. Sometimes you ask a question to
try to trap someone or expose them or kind of show that you're
in the right and you've got their number.
That's not what Habakkuk's doing.
He's asking a real question when you direct them at God.
Gotcha questions come from unbelief.
Genuine questions come from faith.
It's not that God forbids you from asking questions.
Instead, genuine questions lead from struggling faith to deeper
faith, whereas gotcha questions lead from unbelief to hardening
in your unbelief, notice that Habakkuk doesn't let what he
doesn't know swallow up what he does know.
He doesn't say, if you're so holy, how could you do this?
Instead he says, I know you're holy, so how could you do this?
How can you remind yourself of what you know is true of God
when what you don't know is overwhelming?
One way to do that by hard times is simply by listening.
Listen to an audio book of scripture.
Listen to an audio recording of the Psalms.
The ESV app for free has several different people who have read
through the whole Bible. You can just pick whichever
reader you like best. Put it on in your car.
Put it on in your office. Listen to Scripture.
You can also listen to hymns or other edifying music to refresh
your mind and soul when sorrow threatens to overwhelm you.
How can you get reminders of the truth you know filtering into
your soul when you're struggling to believe that God is good?
In verse 13, Habakkuk is asking the Lord genuine questions.
And as we're as we'll see, he's going to prove that his
questions are genuine by patiently waiting for an answer.
The English pastor David Pryor powerfully summarizes Habakkuk's
attitude toward God in these verses.
Habakkuk is not a drowning man about to go under for the last
time. Paradoxically, his very strong
inner security as a person beloved by and belonging to God
releases him to batter the gates of heaven and berate the living
God. There has always been this
important distinction between bitter cynicism and believing.
Confrontation 1 is a denial that refuses to believe the other, a
belief that refuses to deny. One makes assertions and will
not stay for an answer. The other makes assertions and
will not move until there is an answer.
When God's ways don't make sense, wrestle with Him.
Confess your trust and confusion.
Don't just Mull over your questions in your mind.
Don't just talk to others, talk to God.
Bring God your questions and wait for an answer.
Some problems and questions and sorrows are so big that they're
like mountains. Let's say your faith is like a
railroad and you're trying to lay out tract, keep going in the
Christian life, but you come up against a mountain, a mountain
of pain, a mountain of sorrow, a mountain of confusion, a
mountain of doubt. What do you do?
Well, can't go around, it's too far.
Don't want to quit. The only way around is through
prayers like the one Habakkuk is praying.
Prayers of lament are like dynamite that explode away
through the mountain so that your faith can keep going.
Lament is how your faith finds a way through the mountain of pain
and suffering. As we saw two sermons ago,
lament is prayer in pain that leads to trust.
It's four steps or stages are turn, complain, ask, trust, turn
to God, start praying, complain, let him know what's wrong, ask,
make a petition, make your request, what do you need from
Him and trust resolve to wait patiently.
Here in verses 12 and 13, we see back and clearly do those first
two turn complain. This time his complaint takes
the form of a question. It's what's bothering him, so he
gets it off his chest by asking God.
Do any of God's ways not make sense to you right now?
Is there any sorrow or suffering in your life that's so big that
it makes it hard for your faith to reach past it and keep
clinging to God? If that's even remotely the
case, what you need to do is wrestle with God.
Confess your trust and confusion, and in order to do
that, you need to carve out time for unhurried prayer.
You need to give yourself time before the Lord to gather the
broken pieces of your soul together and present them to
Him. You need to take time to pour
out your heart to God in prayer. You can't do that if you're not
praying at all, and it's really hard to do that in two rush
minutes just before you're getting out the door and
starting the work. Set aside time to wrestle with
God in prayer. There's all the difference in
the world between a question rattling around your head and a
question you utter to God. There's all the difference in
the world between pain that keeps tearing you apart inside
and pain you pour out to God. Questions that only rattle
around your head will eventually harm you.
Questions that you pour out to God will eventually help you.
When God's ways don't make sense, confess your trust and
confusion. And it helps to name the sources
of your confusion as specifically as you can.
Which brings us to .2. Lament the evils you see.
When God's ways don't make sense, lament the evils you see.
That's what Habakkuk does in verses 14 to 17.
Here's verse 14. You make mankind like the fish
of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler.
Here Habakkuk takes God at his word.
The Lord says he's raising up the Babylonians to trample down
other kingdoms of the earth and come take Judah captive.
And what are the Babylonians doing?
They're they're hauling in captives like fish in a net.
They're turning humanity into an undifferentiated mass of
victims. Like you would just take a huge
catch of fish and dump them all out on the seashore.
This is a reversal of the created order.
According to Genesis 126 and 27. God created the human race and
appointed us rulers over, among other things, the fish of the
sea and the animals that creep or crawl on the ground.
But the Babylonians demote and degrade human beings so that we
become like the creatures we should be ruling over.
How can God preside over this reversal of creation?
How can God ordain and tolerate this degradation of humanity?
In verses 15 to 17, Habakkuk goes into more detail about the
Babylonians injustice and idolatry.
Verse 15, he brings all of them up with a hook.
He drags them out with his net. He gathers them in his dragnet.
So he rejoices and is glad Habakkuk continues to use
fishing as a metaphor for Babylon's military conquests.
But it isn't only a metaphor. One particularly cruel practice
the ancient Babylonians had was that when they captured people
in war, they would sometimes stick a fishhook through their
lower lip and then string them together and lead them back to
Babylon. Single file.
The three actions mentioned in verse 15 are an escalating
series. First fishing with a lion and
hook, then a net like what a couple of people might throw out
of a boat. And then a dragnet which is
hundreds of feet wide and you would use it to trawl along the
the floor of a river or an ocean and just gather up every single
living creature that got in the way of the net.
That's what the Babylonians terrifying military conquests
were like. Nothing could escape from their
net. Sin dehumanizes its victims.
It refuses to treat them with the dignity they deserve.
Every sin against another human being is ultimately a failure to
recognize the image of God in them all.
Sin against another person, in one way or another, treats its
victim as less than human. In what ways are you ever
tempted to use or degrade other people to get what you want?
Verse 15 says that this dehumanizing, greedy plunder
made the Babylonians happy. They rejoiced in it.
They rejoiced in their cruelty, and they also rejoiced in what
it got them. Verse 16 Therefore he sacrifices
to his Nets and makes offerings to his dragnets.
For by them he lives in luxury and his food is rich.
So this is this is picturing the Babylonians offering religious
worship to their implements of war.
It's a metaphor. It's a parody.
Their military net and dragnet effectively became their gods.
They were their means of plundering helpless peoples.
As we saw last week in verse 11, they worshiped their own
military strength. They worshiped.
We gave them victory and wealth. Their gods supplied their
appetites, and so their victories hardened them in their
idolatry. Hey, look, these gods are great.
They keep coming in clutch for us, keep getting us what we
want. They worshipped what gave them
prosperity and pleasure. As we see in verses 15 and 16,
idolatry and injustice always go hand in hand.
Here. The Chaldeans, the Babylonians,
express the very essence of idolatry.
As Paul says in Romans 125, they worshipped and served the
creature rather than the Creator.
They don't just dehumanize others, there's slavery to their
passions, and their worship of idols dehumanize themselves.
Habakkuk clearly sees this is all wrong.
Does God see it too? He must.
He has to. He's God.
But then why doesn't he do something about it?
Why does he let it keep happening?
That's a backwards question in verse 17.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing
nations forever? Rinse, wash, repeat.
Is Babylon just going to keep getting away with it?
Here again, we see Habakkuk's mixture of trust and confusion.
It's not that his faith is weak, but that it's desperate.
Habakkuk is perplexed, but he's not driven to despair.
The fact that Habakkuk asked God a question reveals that he's
still at a loss. But the fact that Habakkuk asks
God a question shows that he hasn't given up.
He isn't walking away. He refuses to release his grip
on God. Instead, amid all of his
confusion, he clings even tighter.
Habakkuk's question is itself a way for him to cling to God
instead of falling away. Habakkuk's question is a way of
saying, like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, I will not let
you go until you bless me. Habakkuk believes that God is
good. He believes that God is
sovereign. He believes that God is holy.
He just can't square that with what God is doing.
And so he asks, he asks the sovereign Lord of the universe
how long he's going to let evil people get away with it.
Do you see the pressure built up in Habakkuk's soul?
He's crushed between strong opposing forces.
On the one hand is God's holiness, God's sovereignty,
God's goodness. On the other hand is the evil of
the Babylonians, their wickedness, their idolatry.
They just keep getting away with it.
And Habakkuk is crushed between. The pressure is intense.
It's unbearable. What opposing forces are causing
pressure in your soul to build up?
What suffering and confusion are squeezing you and causing
spiritual pain? Remember, lament is a divinely
provided release valve for your soul.
Lament is godly venting. Mulling on your own thoughts
won't release the pressure. Telling another person might
help some, but it won't do the whole trick.
The only way to relieve that dangerous buildup of conflicting
forces in your own soul is to let it all out to God.
If you struggle to pray, and especially if you struggle to
pray in a more personal way like this, like Habakkuk's doing,
here's my advice. The easiest way I can think of
to start praying more and to pray more earnestly is to find
the pressure points in your soul and release them through lament.
Go where the pressure has built up and turn on the vent.
When you go to a doctor with some acute pain, what are the
first two questions they ask? Where does it hurt and how much?
Find the places in your soul that hurt the most and tell God.
Tell them where it hurts. Tell them how much.
Tell them why. Then what do you do?
Once you've wrestled with God like that, once you've confessed
your trust and confusion and you've lamented the evils you
see, what do you do? There's only one thing to do.
Point #3 wait for God's answer. That's what Habakkuk does in
chapter 2, verse 1. And that's what we all need to
do. Wait for God's answer.
Here's chapter 2, verse one. I will take my stand at my watch
post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what
He will say to me and what I will answer concerning my
complaint in the book so far. Habakkuk prayed and the Lord
answered. The Lord's answer was troubling,
so Habakkuk prayed again. What do you do when you've
committed the burden of your heart to the Lord in prayer?
You wait for Him. You wait for Him to answer.
If you've given the problem to the Lord, then waiting on Him is
how you leave the problem with Him.
You don't try to take it back. Don't start worrying again.
Instead of worrying, wait. When Patrick says he's going to
stand at his watch post and wait on his tower, he's using
metaphorical language. He's not necessarily referring
to some architectural feature of ancient Jerusalem that was like
the watchtower part set aside for profits or something like
that. Instead, he's saying,
spiritually speaking, he's going to get into a posture where he
can watch and wait. He's going to get into a posture
where he can prepare for God to speak to him, where he can see
clearly far off, so that he can receive whatever the Lord will
reveal. That's what he's looking out
for. As the second-half of the verse
tells us, Habakkuk is not going to watch for troop movements.
Instead, he will watch for what he will say to me.
How will God answer him? Not only that, but in the very
last phrase Habakkuk tells us, he's preparing for how he will
answer once God answers. When Habakkuk says what I will
answer concerning my complaint, he's thinking 2 steps ahead in
the conversation. He's confident God will answer
his complaint, and so he's preparing his soul to be able to
answer appropriately once God answers him.
Do you know anything of this kind of intimate back and forth
with God himself? It's a worn out cliche, but it's
still true. At the heart of Christianity is
a personal relationship with God.
Does your relationship to God include pouring out your heart
to him and waiting for him to answer?
The Bible takes for granted that this kind of personal
interaction with God is a basic part of what it means to be one
of his people. Habakkuk's resolve to wait for
God's answer shows that his questions were genuine.
Habakkuk's posture of waiting shows his humility.
It shows his teachability. It shows that he wasn't
pronouncing judgement on God, but pouring out his broken heart
and broken head to God. Now Habakkuk was waiting for the
Lord to speak to him audibly in the form of a message he could
pass on to Judah because that was his role as a prophet.
Now, we're not prophets, so we don't expect God to speak to us
in precisely the same way. But here are three ways that God
can answer your waiting. Here are three potential answers
from God to wait for, and the third that's clean up.
So if the first two don't get hit, the third will.
First, He can illumine your understanding.
So keep praying and waiting. Keep studying scripture.
Keep asking God to instruct you. If your problem is in any way an
intellectual one, trust that God Himself, by his Spirit within
you, can give you understanding. Pray for that illumination.
Secondly, God can answer your prayers.
He can heal the illness that's wearing you down.
He can repair the broken relationship that's breaking
your heart. He can remove the evil or
affliction that's weighing on you so heavily.
And even if He doesn't, He can support you and bear you up in
the midst of it. He can enable you to bear up
with His strength when your own strength has run clean out.
God might answer your prayer by removing the thorn in the flesh.
He might answer your prayer by making His grace sufficient for
you. Each one is an answer to prayer.
Each one is from God. Each one is to be received with
thanks. Third.
Finally, one day God will eternally shine the light of
glory into your mind and heart and drive out all darkness.
One day Christ will return. One day the dead will be raised.
One day creation itself will be set free from its groaning.
And when the glory of God that fills all of the new creation
fills your mind and heart, all questioning and struggling will
be done. All questions will either be
answered or simply disappear into irrelevance in the light of
God's face. That perspective from the light
of glory looking back is what we sang in our preparation.
Music in the sands of time are sinking.
How will all this waiting look when it's over?
It would look like the blink of an eye.
It will have been more than worth it.
As we sang in verse four. With mercy and with judgment.
My web of time he wove, and a the dews of sorrow were lustred
with his love. I'll bless the hand that guided,
I'll bless the heart that planned when throned, where
glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land.
What are you waiting for? You're waiting for illumination.
You're waiting for an answer. You're waiting for glory.
One way or another, God will drive out the darkness.
But how do you wait? Our fallen nature finds it hard
to wait for anything, and our culture's obsession with instant
gratification only makes waiting for anything harder.
We often wrongly think of waiting as simply being passive,
not doing anything at all. But that's not what the Bible
means by waiting. Instead of waiting, according to
Scripture, is active. It's steadfast.
It's patiently hoping in God's promises.
Here's how Mark Frogop defines waiting in his book.
Waiting isn't a waste. Waiting on God is living on what
I know to be true about God when I don't know what's true about
my life. That is exactly what Habakkuk's
doing in verse one. It's exactly what Habakkuk's
doing throughout our passage. Some of you may know that the
only sport I have any talent in whatsoever is surfing, if that's
even a sport. Surfing is 90% waiting.
You're out there trying to catch a wave and the ocean has to send
them to you. There is so much sitting and
waiting and surfing, but the waiting is very active.
You're always scanning the horizon to see swells coming in
from afar. You're always tracking how those
swells are shaping up as they get closer.
You're you're paddling around to try to get into the exact right
position so that you can be exactly where you need to be
when the wave comes. Or you're looking at the the
weather, the wind, the tide, the crowds.
You're always scanning, always watching.
It's so much waiting, but it's a very active waiting.
The Christian life, too, is 90% waiting.
Watching and waiting so that you're prepared to respond.
Watching and waiting so that you can act well when God answers.
Watching and waiting prepares you to receive God's answer and
reorder your life accordingly when it comes.
Kids in the congregation, what are you waiting for?
A birthday? The end of school?
The trip to the zoo? Waiting can be hard, especially
for little ones among us. But kids, you can be very good
examples of active waiting. Have you ever counted down the
days till Christmas? Have you ever made a paper chain
to prepare for the last day of school before summer?
Have you ever walked around telling everybody you see that
it's only 18 days until my birthday?
Kids, you wait very actively and it Let's say you're a believer.
Let's say you keep walking with the Lord.
Let's say you get to be. 20253035404550 The longer you
walk with the Lord, the more you'll see how much of the
Christian life is waiting and that waiting should be eager, it
should be expectant. It should be watching to see how
the Lord will work in response to our laments.
If you quit waiting on the Lord, if you decide that He won't be
answering and so you can't keep believing anymore in a hidden
God, what will you gain? Will your suffering go away?
Will you draw comfort from thinking that your suffering has
no purpose? Will you be consoled by the
conviction that there is no one out there who can finally fix
what's wrong in your life? Brothers and sisters, how can we
wait faithfully on the Lord to watch and wait as Scripture
teaches us to? We have to stop paying attention
to our own constantly spinning thoughts.
You have to stop listening to certain voices in your head.
You have to refuse to game out certain scenarios over and over
and over again. Swayed on God means to trust him
with your problem. You have committed it to Him.
You've handed it over. It's in his care.
He's got the ball. He's calling the next play.
Your job is to be ready when he does, as Martyn Lloyd Jones put
it. Now here's one of the most
important principles in the psychology of the Christian
life, or the understanding of how to fight in the spiritual
conflict. Once we have taken a problem to
God, we should cease to concern ourselves with it.
We should turn our backs upon it and center our gaze upon God.
If you take the problem to God, leave it with God.
One of the reasons God acts in such strange and mysterious ways
is to wean us off our own reason and humble us before Him.
To wait for the Lord is to quit demanding that His ways answer
to the bar of your reason. To wait for the Lord is to rise
above all your circumstances and to gaze down on them from the
perspective of heaven. What problem do you need to
bring to the Lord and leave with Him?
What are you waiting on Him for? How can you wait for him?
Well, those would be good questions to discuss with
another church member, even over lunch at our potluck or during
the week. Good questions to meditate on as
you think about. How can I encourage A fellow
member? What might they be so burdened
with that it's even hard for them to give it over to the
Lord? How can I wait patiently with
them and for them, and help them keep waiting on the Lord?
What should you do when God's ways don't make sense?
Wrestle with him. Then wait for him.
Wrestle with God because he is both sovereign and loving.
He rules this universe, and He delights to answer our prayers.
Why should you wait for God? Because He always keeps His
promises. In the Lord's Supper that we're
about to celebrate, we commemorate all the promises
that God fulfilled in the death of Christ, and we look forward
to the fulfillment of His promise to bring us into His
presence so that we can feast with Him.
We look forward to celebrating with Him when all are waiting is
over. And in that confidence, until
then we can cry out. I will wait for you, surely.
Wait for you till my soul is satisfied.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You
for being such a gracious, merciful, patient Father that we
can pour out our cries to You, we can sharply question you, and
we know that we can wait for You.
Father, we pray that you would grant us to commit our souls to
you, to entrust our burdens to You, and to wait and watch you
work in Jesus name, Amen.