Speaker: Ferdy Tjahjadi
Always Disabled
The Exit Condition
- (John 14:23-24) Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.
- Jesus tells us that if we love Him, we will obey His word.
- This becomes the evidence we love Him.
- Here, Jesus makes an if-then statement. There can never be a case of somebody truly loving Him without then obeying His word.
- If we don’t obey His word, there is no use in saying that we love Him. What use is loving God without being a part of His will for us?
- (Deuteronomy 11:1) Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always.
- We love God and keep his laws – not one or the other. God is telling us here to keep his laws always.
- We often sugar-coat the always.
- Always means at all times. Always means there is never a case where it would be appropriate for us to stop.
- There is no exit condition.
- Inconsistency often plagues the daily life of a Christian – we sometimes live by the Word and sometimes do not. We create double standards as to which laws to follow and at what times to follow them.
- Are we always behaving the way God has called us to?
- There are two separate problems that exist:
- Not consistently following all of God’s word. i.e. living certain laws all the time
- Not consistently living by God’s word. i.e. living all the laws some of the time
- We create exit conditions in which we may abandon His word – around certain people, at certain places, in certain moods.
- Are we compartmentalizing our practice of our faith?
Not By Your Strength
- When Israel was brought out of Egypt, twelve men were sent to scout out the Canaan land promised to Israel.
- Ten men reported that Israel could not enter the promised land, as its inhabitants were giants – easily outranking the Israelites.
- (Numbers 13:31-32) But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size.
- Only two of the twelve, Joshua and Caleb, believed Israel could enter into the land. They trusted that God had given them the Land, and trusted God’s word over their own strength.
- The reason the ten men provided a poor report was because they were judging the circumstances through Israel’s ability, not God’s.
- Both the ten and the two knew that the Canaanites were stronger than the Israelites.
- However, the ten did not have faith because they were planning to rely on their own strength.
- We cannot have faith in God’s promises if we were planning to use our own ability to claim them.
- We will see that our own ability will fail us, and lose hope.
- When we see other people succeeding, we will feel tempted to compromise. Can we continue to stand on His word and His word alone, or will we turn to our own wisdom and ability?
- This is the root of the exit condition. We find cases where we think our own ability supersedes the need for God’s promise.
- We think we can find the right romantic partner faster than God.
- We think we be more successful using our own intelligence.
- (Deuteronomy 8:2) Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.
- Like the Israelites, God will put us against Canaanites that we can see are stronger than us.
- If we flee, God knows we have judged based on our strength.
- If we fight, God knows we are relying on His promise.
- (Deuteronomy 8:12-14) Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
- (Deuteronomy 8:17) You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.”
- God condemns those who attribute their success to their ability.
- We must repent even when this pride emerges as a passing thought.
- Without pride in ourselves, we will not abandon His word.
- If we see ourselves as abled, we will never see how much God has done for us. We will not be able to trust that God’s promises are possible.
- When we fear, we suffer the same sin as the ten. When we fear, it is because we’re thinking of our own ability.
- When we worry, it is because we’re relying on what we can control.
- By being disabled, we are actually being enabled to do so much more.
- Because Joshua and Caleb had no trust in Israel, they had trust in God. They were able to claim God’s promise.
- If we trust ourselves, we can’t do anything more than what we can do. If we trust God, we can do even the impossible.