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description. Now let's dive into today's
message. So have any of you ever been in
a season of life where very little is making sense, where
you know things are going wrong, where you seem to be wheel
spinning, You're trying as much as you you can to put things
right. You're making every effort, but
it's just it's just not working out.
I mean, even your sometimes your prayers seem like they're just
hitting a ceiling. You know, nothing seems to be
kind of working and you might even feel, you know, when we
look around the city we're in, we look around our nation, we
look around at different circumstances that man, there's
a lot of injustice, there's a lot of suffering, there's a lot
of pain and it seems like evil is winning.
Seems like man, good is not back foot and evil seems to be
winning. I've had an amazing year
actually, but I've I've still, there's certain areas and
certain struggles. And I think when you're in a, a
church community, you feel other people's pain.
And I think we can all relate to this thing that man sometimes
evil seems to be getting more traction and we can relate.
And we're in the middle of this series going through Habakkuk.
We've done the first two chapters.
We're going to go into chapter 3 today.
But the the great thing as we're going through this book is you
see, Habakkuk is someone that can really relate to that sense
of man. What's happening?
The world is crumbling. Why is there all this struggle?
Why is there all this pain? Things are not going well and
Habakkuk, amazingly, we, we can watch his life.
We can see that he he teaches us that faith isn't just pretending
everything is going fine. You know, just keep going, keep
a stiff upper lip, just be resilient and, and keep going.
No, Habakkuk shows us something quite different.
He shows us that that faith is trusting in God even when things
are not going our way, when we seem to be going backwards and
when life is incredibly tough and when things don't seem to be
making sense. But before I go into chapter 3,
I have to do a quick reminder of what happened in the 1st 2
chapters and maybe joining us for the first time today.
So a quick scan of those first two chapters will help.
So in chapter 1, we see we see the prophets confusion.
The great thing about Habakkuk is he's not a prophet where he
comes and he's like, thus says the Lord, you know, and this and
he gives this whole message that people have to receive.
Now we see this conversation between Habakkuk and God, God,
it's like this Q&A and this back and forth and even his name
actually means to struggle, but not a struggle in like it's it's
like an embrace also means to embrace.
And we see Habakkuk, he really struggles with God.
He's honest and he comes with this first cry, his first
complaint and he says how long Lord in verse 1 of chapter 1,
how long Lord, must I call for help?
But you do not listen or cry out to you violence, but you do not
save. Why do you make me look at
injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
You see this cry of his heart, Maybe you can relate.
Is how long? How long, O Lord?
How long how? How long must we wait?
How long is this going to go on for?
And why? You are good, Holy God, why do
you tolerate wrong? Why don't you bring your justice
Now he, he looks at the injustice, the, the violence,
the corruption, the oppression, and he asks God, where are you?
And by the way, when he's, when I talk about violence,
oppression, all these things, actually this was, he's talking
not about the world out there, but he's talking about his own
people, about God's own covenant people.
There's wicked leaders, there's corruption, the righteous of
being crushed in a nation that should have known better.
It's a complete mess. And you can imagine for for a
prophet, this would be a huge problem.
And then God answers the answer to God.
What's going on here? What?
What's when are you going to bring your justice?
God answers him. I'm raising up the Babylonians.
This is terrifying. This is a wicked, evil nation
that's going to come and oppress them.
This is, this is not good news. A wicked nation is going to come
and is going to judge Judah and is the, the covenant people of
God are going to be oppressed by this other nation.
God's going to use another nation to do this.
And Habakkuk is, is really stunned And it, it, it creates
his second complaint. He says to God, how can you use
that wicked nation for your purposes?
I mean, this is this is getting worse.
It's getting worse for Habakkuk. He asks God that question and
then in chapter 2, he goes to the Watchtower to wait for God's
explanation. And the answer that God gives
him is the righteous shall live by faith.
Eric unpacked this for us last week.
And I think again, this is a little bit a little bit of an
unexpected answer because in that context, you might have
expected God to say the righteous will live by the laws
of God, or the righteous will live by right living, or the
righteous will live by doing good works to other people and
treating other people how they expect to be.
You'd expect something a little bit more like that.
But God says, no, the righteous shall live by faith.
Habakkuk wants, he wants moral reform, He wants justice, He
wants punishment of the wicked. But God says to him, this, this
dividing line between life and death, it's it's not
performance, it's about trust. God's essentially saying that to
Habakkuk that the world will not be divided into good people and
to bad people, but into proud people and to humble people.
And the people that live that are humble are those that live
by faith. The righteous shall live by
faith. And this tiny sentence, it's a,
it's a, it's a, it's a seed of the gospel message.
It's a major truth that Paul kind of latches onto and he
quotes it in Romans and Galatians.
It's, it's hard to actually imagine a lot of the New
Testament without this sentence. And Paul uses a sentence to show
that the right, that righteousness is not achieved by
the law, by the following of the law, but righteousness is
received by faith in Christ. Habakkuk sees something dimly, A
righteousness that comes from God, not a righteousness that
comes from us. And this becomes the blazing
centre of the New Testament and the and the doctrine of
justification by faith. If you're not familiar with this
term, justification, if English isn't your first language, even
if it is your first language, it's, it's not a word we hear
every day. But I love the simple analogy.
Your clothes are dirty from head to toe.
You cannot wash them. In fact, the more you wash them,
the dirtier you make them, the more of a mess you make.
You're stuck. There's no ways you can clean
your clothes. And then Jesus takes off your
dirty clothes, dirty clothes, and he gives you perfect clean
white clothes, spotless. And now when God looks at you,
he doesn't see there's no dirt. He just sees the perfect clean
clothes of Jesus. This is justification.
Jesus takes your place and you receive his righteousness.
And so God sees you as clean, forgiven, right with him, not
because you perfect, not because of what you've done, but because
Jesus took your place. This is simple, but it's a, such
a relief for me. I mean, I, I make a mess of it
if I try and sort out my own life.
I've spent years trying and I just love this beautiful truth.
And so when God says to Habakkuk, the righteous shall
live by faith, he is essentially saying, Habakkuk, you will not
understand exactly how I'm working, but you can trust me.
You can trust who is working. You can put faith in me.
So let's get into chapter 3 and amazingly, after this back and
forth, this conversation between the prophet and God, Habakkuk,
you'll see his whole tone and everything has changed.
It's no longer one of like confusion and complaint.
He doesn't have all the answers. I'm sure he's still processing a
lot, but something has shifted. His Q&A is over.
And chapter 3 is actually what we're going to read today is a
very passionate. It's a prayer, It's a, it's this
powerful poem. It's actually a worship song in
the middle of the chaos. And Habakkuk, he's learned
something in this, in this, in this interaction with God that
gives birth to this very, very passionate song, this the Psalm.
And he's learned that even when we don't understand God's ways
and when we don't understand God's timing, we can still trust
the character of God, which is unchanging.
So if you want to turn in your Bibles to have a chapter 3, are
they already? It's a hard one to find.
And before we go into that, I just want to remind you that
nothing's actually changed in the circumstances of Habakkuk.
Judah is still a complete mess. The Babylonians are still
coming. God hasn't burst in and, you
know, saved the day. Everything is still the same,
but something has changed in Habakkuk's understanding about
God and he's able to write this amazing song.
Lord, I've heard of your fame. I stand in awe of your deeds, O
Lord. Renew them in our day, in our
time. Make them known in wrath.
Remember mercy. God came from Timon, the Holy
One, from Mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens
and his prey to fill the earth. His splendor was like the
sunrise. Rays flashed from his hand where
his power was hidden. Plague went before him.
Pestilence followed his steps. He stood and shook the earth.
He looked and made the nations tremble.
The ancient mountains crumbled and the age-old hill collapsed
are eternal. I saw the tents of Cushion in
distress, and the dwellings of Midian in anguish.
Were you angry with the rivers, O Lord?
Was your wrath against the streams?
Did you Rage Against the sea when you rode with your horses
and your victorious Chariots? You uncovered your bow, you
called for many arrows, You split the earth with rivers.
The mountains saw you and writhed.
Torrents of water swept by. And deep, broad and lifted
sorry. And the deep broad and lifted
its waves on high sun and moon stood in the head, stood still
in the heavens. And the glints of your flying
arrows at the lightning of your flashing spear.
In Roth. You rode through the earth And
in anger you threshed the nations.
You came out to deliver your people to save your anointed 1.
You crushed the leader of the land of wickedness.
You stripped him from head to foot with his own spear.
You pierced his head when his warriors stormed out to scatter
us, gloating as though they were about to devour the wretched who
you who were in hiding. That's why it's quite AI think.
It's quite an interesting response actually, from
Habakkuk, and I'll tell you. I'll tell you why.
The first thing is that Habakkuk prays.
It's a very honest and humble beginning.
He says, Lord, I've heard of your fame.
I stand in awe of your deeds, God, Habakkuk.
God said something to him on that watchtower and it's kind of
jolted Habakkuk to remembering who exactly this God is.
He might he might have forgotten his theology might have gone a
little bit dim. He might have been focusing too
much on the injustice and all the things that are going wrong.
And something has jolted him. The way he opens up the song,
he's he remembers who God is. He starts to remember what God
has done. He says, God, I stand in awe of
your deeds, Lord. And he remembers that this the
God that I'm serving as a God that is always shown up for his
people. He starts to look at God's
amazing track record and he says, repeat them in our day.
The awesome things you've done, may they happen again in our
time. Make them known in wrath.
Remember mercy. This is a it's a prayer of
someone who's who's who knows and is understanding that God.
I may not understand, but I know you and I trust you enough to
act again. And I think when life for us
today, when life makes no sense, when things we can't explain
them, when we're struggling for the answers, we, we have to
remember who God is and what his track record is and we have to
say, God, I don't understand. That doesn't make sense to me.
But I trust you enough and I know that you will act again.
You've done it time and time again.
If we read this book, that's what we see over and over and
over. He intervenes and he does it
again, and he does it his way and in his timing.
There's that saying that I love this quote.
When you don't know what tomorrow holds, remember who
holds tomorrow. This is a quote by an American
Southern gospel writer, Iris Stanfill.
When you don't know what tomorrow holds, remember who
holds tomorrow. That gives us a lot of
confidence, and that's exactly what Habakkuk is doing.
He knows who God is. He knows his track record of
coming through, and it's giving him the confidence that he needs
for now, for now, and for tomorrow.
The second point I want to drag Art pull out of this song is
that God shows up in glory and power.
Verse 3 says God came from Timon the Holy one from Mount Paran.
When I first read that, I didn't get the references.
You know, it's one. Sometimes you read your Bible
and you're like, no, that must be just be what's actually
happening here is Habakkuk is remembering the Exodus.
These locations point back to Egypt.
They point back to the Exodus, the moment that God stepped into
history, when he split the steam, when he shattered
Pharaoh's power and rescued his people.
And, and, and Habakkuk has to use these, these great deeds,
these things that God has done, he starts to use them as an
anchor for his faith. And for us, thousands of years
later, we we can do the same. But for us, there's an anchor
that Habakkuk didn't see, maybe saw a glimmer of it.
But for us, so many years later, we can look back to a greater
anchor and that's Christ crucified on the cross.
And actually everything that Habakkuk describes here,
thousands of years ago, light, glory, God breaking into
history, all this dramatic, all these things that are happening,
all of this points to an ultimate fulfilment of of Jesus,
the one who is according to Hebrews one verse 3, the
radiance of God's glory, and John one verse 5, the light that
shines in the darkness when God shows up.
That's the title of my message today.
We serve a God that shows up more than any other God.
We serve a God that came in the flesh.
This is not just a figurative idea.
You know, the God who shows up, the God who comes.
No, God literally showed up in flesh and bone to show his
commitment to us and to make a way.
And not not to free us from Pharaoh like the Exodus, but to
free us from sin and death. The Exodus was God showing up
for his people, and the Incarnation is God showing up as
our Saviour, the one, the one we needed.
Point #3 God fights for his people.
We can see amazing pictures in Habakkuk riding on Chariots of
salvation, splitting the earth with rivers, crushing mountains,
drawing out his bow, shattering nations.
The God we serve is is not a weak God.
We serve a God that is not as super powerful, omnipotent.
He has all the power. So this is a God that fights for
his people. And he's not weak, he's not
passive. He doesn't stay on the
sidelines. He's not like a maybe I'll give
you the strategy and you can do the work.
No, this is a God who fights for his people.
This is a God who steps into the battle on behalf of his people.
And again, you could look at the cross.
The cross is the ultimate expression of that.
It's it's, it's God stepping in. It's his ultimate commitment to
us as humanity. And I think maybe just a little
application there is, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how
much it looks like evil is winning, we have to remember
that God doesn't just observe the battle, He enters the
battle. And not only that, but he's
already secured the victory point #4 it mentions in verse 13
to 15 that God saves his anointed and crushes evil.
And this is kind of the, the mountaintop, like the, the real
peak of the song could be the chorus.
It would be the, it's the, it's the high point, verse 13, as you
came out to deliver your people to save your anointed one.
When it's talking about Habakkuk's probably talking
about the Davidic king, you know, God's chosen leader for
that time. But the scale of the salvation
in the song, what what he's talking about is, is far bigger
than than than any earthly king has ever achieved.
And on top of that, all the earthly kings, all these kings
that were supposed to lead Israel to glory, they've all
failed. They've all failed miserably.
This text, when it talks about the anointed one, it's talking
about someone far greater. Again, it's pointing to Jesus,
the anointed one, the the king, every other king failed to be.
And at the cross, he shows up and he, he stands on the
battlefield alone on our behalf, and he takes the full weight of
sin, Satan, and death. And he crushes the serpent's
head once and all for us when he is resurrected on the third day.
So the main point of my message today is that when life does not
make sense, when evil looks like it might be winning, when you,
when you lost sight of God's plan, it's, it's in that moment
that we need to trust the God, the God who shows up time and
time again. He showed up for Israel.
He showed up for Habakkuk on that watchtower, He showed up in
Bethlehem, He showed up on Calvary.
He showed up not in the tomb but by rising from it.
He showed up at Pentecost with power.
And one day he will show up again in glory, and he's going
to return to make all things new.
God may seem slow, but he's never late.
That's the proverb I was thinking of earlier.
God may seem slow, but he's never late.
So how do we how do we trust when when we waiting?
How do we trust when we just don't understand just A5 very
quick points. The first thing is we we must
remember what God has done. We tend we tend to consume
ourselves in the problem. We tend to go into solving mode.
You know, who can I speak to? What's ChatGPT saying, You know,
we, we, we need a handle often when we, when we, when we don't
understand things, but we, the, the, what Habakkuk did is we
need to remember what God has done in verse 2.
We need to look back at God's faithfulness in Scripture and in
our own life. We forget we're very forgetful.
We need to look back and and thank God for what he's done in
our lives and remind us that he can do it again.
Then we need to like Habakkuk, we need to pray that God will do
it again, that God will act again, even if we still don't
know the answers, even if we still a bit confused.
I want to suggest to you that confused faith, having a faith
that's sounds like, you know, these words don't go together,
but having a faith that doesn't know all the answers being but
is still trusting is much, much better than silent unbelief.
You know, sometimes when things are not going right, we, we tend
to go silent and our hearts go cold and we kind of, we start to
drift away from God. No, it's much better to be
honest with God. Like Habakkuk to wrestle, it
means to wrestle and but to embrace God even if we don't
understand everything. Confused faith is better than
silent unbelief. Thirdly, we need to see God as
he truly is. We don't actually need big
faith. No, we just need a little bit of
faith in a big God. Just the just the mustard seed
of faith that we can place in a God who's big.
The object of our faith is much more important than the size of
our faith. And God will grow our faith.
But we need to have faith in a big God.
We need to remember exactly who He is.
We need to look to Christ. We need to see what he has done.
He, he didn't abandoned us at the cross.
That means he won't abandoned us.
Now if ever there was a time, if ever that that he could have,
and maybe I mean I would have, but if ever there was a time
when he could have abandoned us, it was before going to the
cross. He didn't abandoned us.
He endured the cross for us. He didn't abandoned us then, he
won't abandoned us now and then. The fifth point is worship while
you wait. Even before the breakthrough,
nothing's changed. He's still in the same
situation. Babylon's coming.
The people around him are a mess.
He's a prophet. Hard to work with these people.
You know where there's so much evil.
But no, he worships while he waits, before Babylon falls,
before the fig tree blossoms, which is a beautiful analogy
we'll see in in next week's text.
A very vivid 1. And so in concluding Just to
Remember, Habakkuk begins with confusion and complaints.
But in chapter 3, we see him moving into confidence.
He starts by saying, I, I don't understand.
But his new posture Now in chapter 3, the the thing behind
this whole song is I will trust. I will trust God.
I will trust him. He remembered who God is and
what he's done. And he's understanding what it
means to live by faith. And the God who showed up for
Habakkuk, Habakkuk will show up for you.
He'll show up for you if you trust him, if you live by faith
and not by sight. He's there.
He's there in your crisis. He's there in your confusion.
He's there in your darkest night.
He's there when the world feels unfair.
He's there when the waiting feels endless.
He's there when all hope seems lost.
He, he, he, he. He probably won't show up in the
way you expect, but he'll show up in the way that you need.
And I think the the greatest proof of this is Jesus Christ
God. God didn't send him a message,
just send a message. He didn't just send a miracle.
God sent himself. He showed up.
He showed up in Bethlehem, He showed up in Gethsemane, He
showed up on the cross. He showed up in power when he
walked out of that tune. And one day he will show up
again in glory. So yeah, that's my
encouragement. When life doesn't make sense,
when it looks like evil is winning, when you can't trace
his hand. Trust the God who always shows
up. We can trust Him, He is
faithful. Thank you for listening to
today's message. We hope you are encouraged and
challenged in your faith. If you're in the Southern
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Until next time, stay clear and keep shining your light.