Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / February 2, 2020 | Stand Strong - Losing My Faith

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February 2, 2020 | Stand Strong - Losing My Faith · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: And good morning.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I see that, and that's the abbreviated opener.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so grateful to Mariah, to the singer, for allowing us to use that for our series, which it fits so perfectly.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: During the welcome time, the announcement time, you saw that Haiti video, good little video.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the words were a little small, maybe, but that's coming up in just a few weeks, and I hope I see you there at the Thrive Bank, which can be at our building, Cab Building.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I've filled up my table.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that, I hope you'll come.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We've uh know some people down there, some of our people just got back from Haiti, and uh we're hooked uh at the heart with uh that ministry.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um I thought about people asked me all the week, are you gonna wear the newspaper actually contacted it?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna wear a chief's shirt this morning, you know, Sunday morning?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, no.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that is that on Monday I was on my computer and and there was a picture, an advertisement with Mahomes, Patrick Mahomes, holding this t-shirt with a cross on it saying, uh, all I want today is uh is a little bit of Chiefs and a lot of Jesus.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, there's a good t-shirt.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started clicking on it, but it it was out of my price range.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: 29 bucks for a t-shirt.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I'll buy it the day after the Super Bowl and wear it next year if they make the Super Bowl.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, uh I have a son back there and he's going, yeah, it's my dad.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's so cheap.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, so we are in uh fifth or sixth week, depending on how you count, of our Jeremiah series.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope you take the Jeremiah Challenge, read Jeremiah Lamentations, 52 plus five chapters by April 12th, Easter Sunday, just four chapters a week.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Each week, do the four devotionals on the four chapters this week, chapters 17, 18, 19, and 20.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: How many of you are joining me in reading through the book?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's terrific.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is anybody doing those devotionals that I labor on?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Huh?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate that.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Shame on the rest.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm kidding.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm happy, I'm happy.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just happy.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, be happy.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, um, so today's message is entitled Losing My Faith.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you about uh a famous landmark in New Hampshire in the White Mountains.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's called the Old Man of the Mountains, and uh it's one of stood there for generations, one of New Hampshire's most proud uh monuments there at Cannon Mountain, and um that 40-foot craggy profile of an old man is uh has been, I should say, uh legitimately adored, admired, revered.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, the best geologists say that it's been there longer than people have been anywhere in America, 12,000 years.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it's been there nearly forever.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: For another thing, that figure is the hero of a great literary masterpiece, Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 story, The Great Stone Face, in which he described this as an enormous giant or a titan.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: As for as long as people have lived in the northeastern part of America or lived in America at all, they have known that they could rely and depend on this monument being there when they drove up, that the great stone face would be there.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And time and again they have made that drive, they have made that journey to gaze reverently and quietly at that face and speak about it to each other with awe and wonder.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 2003, uh something devastating happened.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Devastating was the word used all across New Hampshire, because in a moment, in May of 2003, that face suddenly, despite all the money that the state and others had invested in steel rods and holding it on there, it suddenly fell, and in a moment uh the great stone face was gone.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And its collapse was like a death in the family.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: People brought flowers of all things and put it at the base of the mountain.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the newspaper up there quoted a woman as saying, I grew up thinking that someone was watching over me.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I feel a little less watched over now.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: In many ways, the loss of the great stone face is paralleled by the fall or the collapse of the God of the mountains in the lives of Christians that we know.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: He too has been around really forever, long before people were here.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: He too is the hero of a great literary work, which we call the Bible.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And for as long as people have believed in God, they have known he would be there, he could be relied on, they have made that journey when they have been in pain and suffering to go to God, to come to him and trust that he would be there.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Time and again, they have come to worship reverently and quietly, and they speak of God with awe and with wonder.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But then something has happened to some of them.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them, you know, there came a crash one day, an emotional crash, where the God that they admired and called upon let them down.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the midst of their pain, desperate for hope, they made the effort to come and look to him and plead to him for help, but when they looked up, he was not there for them.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they felt their faith tremble and crumble and come crashing down.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The fact of the matter is that happens to more people than we would like to admit.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you go online, you can find all kinds of headlines from Psychology Today and other magazines.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: The pain of losing your faith.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Am I losing my faith or just losing my mind?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Help, I'm losing my faith.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Have you lost faith in God?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Even a billboard losing faith in God.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: I feel really privileged to have been in the ministry as long as I have and to have grown up in a great family where I've known so many people in my family and at this church who've gone through the valley of the shadow and somehow endured and come out, re-emerged from that dark valley with an even stronger faith.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I had a grandmother named Alan who was really brilliant.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: She used to read the Bible every day in her German Bible, in her Greek Bible, English Bible, and even though she lived the last 25 years of her life with absolutely no money to her name, she was faithful to knit quilts for missionaries and to be a godly example.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But then when she hit 90, this uh brilliant woman began losing her mind and her body, and for those last years she struggled.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: She could no longer read as she used to, she could no longer read good books.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: She was not the woman she had been, but she, to the very last day of her life, she kept a faith and endurance.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Her daughter-in-law, my mother, Gwendolyn, I watched her as she lost in a tragic accident a two-year-old little boy named Dougie in our home, in her home.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And she blamed herself for his tragic death.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yet she took her pain in trust to the Lord time and again and re-emerged from the deepest, darkest valley she'd ever been in, with an even stronger faith.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I as I think of people here in the church, I think of people who I so admire, who've been through horrible pain and suffering, and kept their faith even in the valley of the shadow.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, what about those other people?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them just as good saints, some of them just as godly, some of them, frankly, almost like Jeremiah.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: For we find when we read Jeremiah chapter 15 that Jeremiah himself nearly lost his faith.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: The first verse we want to look at, if you have a Bible, turn to Jeremiah 15.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look at verses 10 through 21.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: He begins by saying, Woe is me, mother, that you ever bore me.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's a significant statement, not because he's actually addressing his mother.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is a rhetorical, it's like a metaphor, like David saying after the death of Absalom, speaking to Absalom, oh Absalom, Absalom.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: His mother may not even have been living, but his point is that, Woe is me, my mother, that you ever gave birth to me.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not so much that he wishes he'd never been born, but he's thinking back, I think, to chapter 1 and verse 5, where God said, I called you from your mother's womb.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: He's declaring that there's a breach between him and his God here, that he wishes that God had never called him in his mother's womb.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's rejecting the mission that God gave him.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see already, we're going to get to a worse loss of faith than this.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: But even at the start, it's like, you know what, I reject the calling of God on my life.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: He calls himself a man of lawsuit and strife for the whole land.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to figure out whether he's referring to the fact that throughout this book, God said, I want you to lodge a case, a trial, a lawsuit against these people, or whether he's saying they're attacking him with conflict and strife.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect it's both of them.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: But he's confessing that life is really tough for him.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that e and that either, even though he's never borrowed money and owed somebody and made them mad, or lent money and not been paid back and had conflict, neither a borrower or lender be, we were told, yet everyone hates him.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone holds him in contempt, literally.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone curses him.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, the first reason that we find in this text that Jeremiah is losing his faith is he says, I'm being treated unfairly and disliked.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Back in the 1930s, when a guy named Hoey, Clyde Hoey, was governor of North Carolina.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: He took a trip west to the Blue Mountains that he told about later to the country folk out there, ran into a country parson, a pastor, and he said to him, How many members are there in your church?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the pastor said, 50.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: The governor was a church-going man, and he knew that the number of members in your church was not indicative of the strength of the church, and said, So he said to him, uh, but how many members are active?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: To his surprise, the pastor said, All 50.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Governor said, You must be quite a pastor.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: He said, No, not really.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: 25 of them are for me, active for me, and 25 of them are active against me.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was funny.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm a pastor.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: But Jeremiah saying, you know what, all 50 are against me.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's against me.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you know what it's like to be a social leper or to be rejected or to be unpopular.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Back in 1975, Janice Ian sang a song at 17.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you remember those lines because you identified with them to those of us who knew the pain of Valentines that never came, and those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember that song?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes when you hear the younger person is losing their faith or they're slipping away from God, sometimes when you look at them, you suspect a lot of it has to do with the fact that they're unpopular and that they're unhappy in life and they're depressed because no one likes them.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I actually pray for young people.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: I say, Lord, please give them friends, make them more popular, simply so that they won't find a reason to leave you.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how Jeremiah felt, according to verse 10 and verse 15.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: He says, and this is from the New Living Translation, God, you know what's happening to me, Lord.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Please step in and help me.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Consider how I have borne disgrace on your account.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons he's losing his faith in God is that he knows that this God, who is silent, sees the pain he's in.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: He knows that God's omniscient.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he wants to say, God, I'm struggling here.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, the reason I'm struggling is because I'm obedient.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not because I'm disobedient.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he says it's not always been bad.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm I'm one of your best people.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: He says, your words were found.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Famous verse here, and I ate them.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And your word became for me a delight to me and the joy of my heart.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I bear your name because I bear your name, Lord God of hosts.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is a significant verse for a couple of reasons.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: This phrase is sort of lifted out of a story in 2 Kings 22.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: The first 20 years of his ministry, Jeremiah labored under a godly king.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Josiah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Josiah was trying to unravel the 52 years of paganism of his father, Manasseh.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so he cleaned out the temple.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: He sent some people to clean out, get all the idols, false idols out of the temple and clean it up.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And as they were doing it, they found the word of God.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: They found what was called the Book of the Covenant.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Most people think it was Deuteronomy.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2 Kings 22, it says the word of God was found.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I take it that Jeremiah is referring to this event in 622 BC.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Josiah then read this book, this book of the Bible, in front of the entire country, we're told.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah was there.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what he's saying is, you know what?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: When that was read, other people just listened, but I took in your word.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: I ingested it like a good stake.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I made it part of myself, and your word became for me a delight and the joy of my heart, for I bear your name, Lord God of hosts.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I see something else highly significant here.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I see in here that he's using words that are used twice in Jeremiah and once in the Song of Solomon for brides and bridegrooms and weddings.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the heart grabber about this is that Jeremiah was told by God that he couldn't marry.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: He was probably the only celibate, the only single male that he knew of marriageable age in all of Israel.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because they didn't even have a word for bachelor in the ancient Hebrew.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: No young man ever remained unmarried.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not exactly like that today, but even in Arab countries today, it's considered Hashuma, terrible shame not to be married in all of Saudi Arabia.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's only two million men who are unmarried.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah had been told by God that because his life was to mirror his message, that he couldn't enjoy joy and delight with a wife.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way weddings are described.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Brides and grooms are they're full of delight and they're full of joy.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what Jeremiah is saying, and you know what?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they bear each other's, right?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: She bears his name.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: These are phrases used of a wedding.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I hear Jeremiah saying, you know what, God, I so love you and I so love your word that it's become the substitute for me for what you've denied me, which is the happiness and the joy of being married, but I love your word that much.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that amazing that he would say that?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Just to let you know, there's a famous uh in Jewish circles, it's sort of their Super Bowl celebration, but it lasts all day.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: In October, it's called Semchat Torah.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's after Rosh Hashanah, and they celebrate a whole day of loving the Torah, loving the Word of God.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: They get around, they dance, they eat loads of food, and by the way, this Simchat word is the word delight in our very verse.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's just a little more, you know, Jewish knowledge for you.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the that's the thing he's saying.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's saying, Lord, you know how much I love your word.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: I love your word that much.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: So why?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 17, he gets back, he says, you know what?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've never sat with a band of revelers at a wedding or funeral or parties, couldn't go to the Super Bowl party, and I didn't celebrate with him because your hand was on me.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I sat alone, for you filled me with indignation.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: God had said, you can't go to weddings because there's no joy, should be no joy in Mudville.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Babylonians are about to kill everybody.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't even go to funerals.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Don't go to a funeral because there's a burial and there's mourning and there's all this nice stuff when just a couple of years there's gonna be so many bodies, there won't be funerals anymore.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want you going to funerals.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine in his little town of Anathoth, where they go, Well, Jeremiah's sister's getting married.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Where's Jeremiah?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, Oh, he won't come to these things.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: How disgusting is that?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: They'd say there's a funeral.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is Jeremiah's uncle, where is he?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, he he he won't come.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: They go, what a disgusting person he is.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so you know what he's saying?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because of you, Lord, I'm a loner, I'm a social leper.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes when people lose their faith, it has a lot to do with being socially separated and an outcast.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so he says in verse 18, he cries out to God, why is my pain become unending, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand why you don't do anything.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand why I cry out to you and the heavens are silent.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then he gets to the very bottom.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: He gets to that point where his faith is so slipped away that no, he's not denying that God exists, but he is feeling as though God's not good.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: God's not kind, God's not what he promised to be.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Truly, he says, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that have not proved trustworthy.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: He says, He says, I've been thirsty, I've been going through the desert, I've been going through the south, and I've I've just been parched and I've been almost to die, and then I've been remembering there's a brook over that next hill.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've been told that brook is a good brook.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's got fresh water.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then I crest the hill and I look down, and all I see is dry sand.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wadi, they call it in Israel today.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's a dry wadi.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you're that way for me, God.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I I've told people, I've I've I've I've stood before people and I've told people what you told me to stay.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: My people have abandoned me, the fountain of living water.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've promised them that if they would return to you, they would find a waterfall or a fountain of living water, a spring.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to me, you've not been there for me.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: You haven't been water for me.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: You've been dry, you've been a deceitful brook.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I read that verse.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I recollected how similar this was to an experience that tore apart C.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's soul.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So many of you are familiar with C.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, the uh Oxford professor, the Christian apologist, the well-known writer who uh lived a number of years ago.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Many of you have been deeply influenced by this man who passed away uh in 1963 on the very same day that John F.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy was shot.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you're probably, if you know him, you're probably also aware that he wrote a little book called A Grief Observe.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you do not know, but when that book was first published, it was published under a pseudonym.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: It did not have his name on it because Lewis, who had inspired faith in the lives of so many, was afraid that if people knew he had written that book, their faith might be destroyed.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it wasn't until after his death that he was known to be the author of that book.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis wrote this book after the death of his wife, whose name was Joy Davidson.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: They'd had a short marriage.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, really, Joy was Joy Davidson was the very last person you would ever expect, the author of the Narnia Tales, to have married.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: She grew up in America, he was British, she grew up a Jewish American, New York City, went to Columbia University, a fervent atheist, the daughter of an atheist, and a member of the Communist Party.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: But in reading C.S.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's writings, she came to faith.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And she shocked her friends by coming to faith.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: She was an award-winning Yale Award, Yale University Award-winning, written books of poetry.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And because of his profound influence on her, Joy took her two teenage sons from a previous marriage and moved to Oxford, England to be near him.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And for a short while she served as kind of a secretary and a gopher for him, and they became friends and intellectual sparring partners because she was brilliant.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: But then Joy came down with an incurable cancer.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually breast cancer that had metastasized into her bones.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And she was headed for death then.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: She was lying in the hospital bed.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Her one worry, she would tell her friend C.S.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, her one worry was who was going to take care of her teenage sons.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Lewis, amazingly nobly, brought in an Anglican priest, and they performed a wedding ceremony right there to assure her that after her death he would take care of her boys.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just remarkable.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was really clear.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's evident that at the time it was not a marriage of romance.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he explained it to his friends as a marriage of friendship and expediency were the two words that he used.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: But as God would have it, there was a sudden remission.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: In her cancer, and shortly after that sort of technical wedding, she got out of bed and went home.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Lewis was overjoyed.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then he married her in a public Church of England ceremony, which shocked a lot of his friends.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: She at the time, by the way, was in her young 40s and he was in his upper 50s.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: But they enjoyed three wonderful romantic years of marriage together.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then, all of a sudden, as quickly as the disease had stopped, it started again in force, and within a few weeks his beloved wife was gone, and C.S.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis was utterly inconsolable.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: He tried to come to grips with his pain, and the only way he knew, which was to write about it, and that became a grief observed.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when you read that book, you realize that this man who had who had wrestled on an intellectual level with the problem of pain was now facing it on a personal level.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And his early chapters in that book are shrill and they are harsh.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's evident that this famous defender of the Christian faith was very much in danger of losing his own faith.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: But what he does in this book is he begins by trying to explain first or convey how he feels, the grief he's feeling.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: He begins the book with the words, no one ever told me, that grief felt so much like fear.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not afraid, but the sensations like being afraid, the same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: I keep on swallowing.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he says a little later, he says, you know, I feel sort of like a person feels when they're a little drunk or has a concussion.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, her absence, speaking of joy, her absence is like the sky spread over everything.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you feel his grief, and you say to yourself, this is a man who's on a first name basis with pain.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then he moves from there in this short little book to describing how it has damaged almost irrevocably his relationship with God.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: How he feels that God isn't close anymore, but is far away.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: He says, when I lay these questions before God, I get no answer.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a man who had written a book on two books on prayer.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: But he's begun thinking of God in a whole different way.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Not as though he doesn't believe he exists, but he just doesn't believe that he's good and kind.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he puts it that way.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: He says, not that I am, I think, in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about him.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: The conclusion I dread is not so there's no God after all, but so this is what God is really like after all.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Deceive yourself no longer.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: That word deceive, the same word that Jeremiah would use in verse 18 of chapter 15, right?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Truly you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that have not proved trustworthy.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah still believes in God, but he's losing his faith, isn't he, in a God that is good and kind and reliable and not deceitful, a God who will be there for you in the desert and not just be dry sand?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: I believe in you, Jeremiah's saying, but I don't trust you anymore.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I'm losing my faith.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how does God deal with a person who's losing their faith?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll share that and share with you how similar the end of Lewis's book of Grief observed is.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because God addresses this person who's losing his faith in God, call 83 for truth.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: God addresses him in verses 19 through 21, the last three verses of this chapter, and he addresses them in a way that doesn't sound at all like your local compassionate therapist.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's not soothing.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: God says, therefore, this is what the Lord says.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you turn back, what?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: You, if you turn back, singular, he's talking to Jeremiah, then the same words Jeremiah, he's had Jeremiah use these words, the exact words to Israel a number of times, you need to turn back.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now God's speaking to Jeremiah.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you turn back, I'll take you back.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: You will stand in my presence.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know what God's saying is for whatever reason, yes, I in other, we know from other books of the Bible, God understands your pain.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: God understands why your faith might be slipping.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: He is compassionate.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: But to Jeremiah, a leader, he's really blunt.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: He just says, you know what?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're slip, slip, slipping away from me, and I'm not going to permit it.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Faith is defiantly turning to God, not away from him in your pain.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you love the word of God like Jeremiah, if you love the person of God, if you've been a Christian for some years and you feel your faith slipping away, your faith in a God that is good, God may not be as kind to you as you'd like him to be.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: He may not say, oh, that's fine, just wander away for a while.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, he says, true faith is defiantly turning to me, not away from me in your pain.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then he goes on, God does, to say, if you speak noble words rather than worthless ones, you will be my spokesman.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let other people come over to you.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you look like you're going over to where everybody else is.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Faithless, not believing in me, wandering away from me.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, let them come over to you.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you go over to them.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, faith is standing strong.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Trust in me means standing strong, even in my silence.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then he says, I'll make you a fortified wall of bronze to this people.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: They'll fight against you.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I can promise you, they're gonna come after you like an army, but they won't overcome you, for I am with you to save you and rescue you.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Lord's declaration.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: I am, faith is believing that God is with me even when he's silent.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, both of you.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the last verse, Jeremiah 15, 21, he uses four great words for save and rescue.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: I am with you to save you and rescue you.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: I will rescue from the power of evil people, and I'll redeem you from the clutch of the Rusalas.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: What he's saying is, listen, Jeremiah, faith is waiting for his deliverance.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wait for it.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Wait for it.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Count on it, it will come.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, it seems to me, worked his way from his experience of grief, then to his distance from God, right?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And as he worked through it, as he thought through what he was going through, it's as though in the valley of the shadow he began looking around and realizing that there were rays from heaven, that there was light from heaven, that God was there.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so as he works through it, you find him moving to a place where his valley is lit up by the hope and the promises of God, even though they're still huge dark pockets of pain and depression, yet he ends that book the way God tells Jeremiah to end.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why I'm so glad we have this book with his name on it.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because he says three things as he's closing the book that have incredible application to you and to me.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, he says, listen, you need to realize you can't see anything properly when your eyes are blurred with tears.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: What a great line.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I realized that my eyes were blurred with tears and I was not seeing God and reality clearly.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: The lesson would be don't doubt in the dark what God has promised you in the light.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then C.S.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis says very famously, I learned that God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's an obvious lesson there.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: When you're crushed by pain is the worst time to abandon God because that's when God speaks to you the loudest.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's when he shouts.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's when you can have a life change because God comes to you in unique ways and transforms you.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, he says, Lewis says, you never really know how much you believe anything until it's truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when death comes knocking, when fear comes knocking, when doubt comes knocking, let faith answer the door.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad that we have a church that accepts people who sense they are losing their faith.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: I look out at this group of people.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know people here, people across the street.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And probably at every step in my 40 years, I have known people in our church.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hank has known people in our church who are slip, slip, slipping away from God because of pain and because of suffering, because of uh someone unfairly divorcing them or ambushing them or stealing from them or something, and their faith is slipping away, and we pray for them and we hang on to them and we tell them that God loves them and that God understands, but God would say there's more there.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: I not only understand, but I'm telling you that your faith must be a kind of faith that turns to me, not away from me.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: A faith that doesn't abandon me right when I want to shout to you about truths that'll transform your life.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: A faith that hangs firm and trusts me, waiting for my deliverance and rescue.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bow with me in a word of prayer.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: On the cross, Heavenly Father, we remember that your son came to the end of himself and cried out in that horrible shriek, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And yet in that moment, that sense of abandonment, he did his greatest work.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: You did your greatest work and you brought us salvation.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in the next few moments, we'll honor that and celebrate that and look at him on the cross, because that was the moment of our salvation.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: A salvation that came through his body and through his blood.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as we eat the bread and drink the cup, Father, please bless us, us who suffer, us who long for you, us who sometimes feel so, so lonely, those of us who are waiting for your day of redemption.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.