Show Notes
Job 38-42:1
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] I was at the hospital week before last week. I was walking up the stairs and I seen this young guy at the top of the stairs and his little guy was about probably 3 years old. And this little guy was jumping and bouncing around so excited. And I thought he was a little more excited than normal. And then I walked by them and I was just going up the other side and I heard the little guy say, hi, Santa.
[00:00:31] And I leaned over the railing and looked at him. Ho, ho, ho.
[00:00:37] Oh, great fun.
[00:00:40] I had a little one, I was standing in the hallway here and a little one just the toddler was just looking at me, just staring up at me. And I was looking down and I just looked down, went ho ho ho.
[00:00:52] Eyes went big funny thing. So I hear that a lot.
[00:01:03] You know how many times it's been offered to me to go play Santa, to go do Santa? Many, many times.
[00:01:09] But I don't want to play Santa. Okay, well, the question that I want us to maybe be thinking about a little bit through this message this morning is how big is your God? You know, is he big enough to trust no matter how big the storm is in your life?
[00:01:29] Is he big enough to trust for you to say, Lord, your will be done, not mine?
[00:01:36] You know, is he big enough that you will confidently follow him and his lead wherever he would lead you?
[00:01:43] We need to ask ourselves, how big is our God?
[00:01:48] And so, Lord, we just commit this message to you and pray that you would have your way and that you would show us, Lord, how big you are and that you would just open the eyes of our understanding that we could even begin to fathom just some of it, Lord God, because it's so far beyond our human understanding. And so we commit this message to you and pray that you would speak to us and help us to hear what it is that your spirit is saying to each one of us in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:02:18] It's being called one of the greatest rescue missions in World War II. After the war, American bombers or later on in the war. Toward the end of the war, the American bombers were on a dangerous missions over southern Europe to cripple the Nazi oil supplies.
[00:02:34] Hundreds of crews of flying tin cans soared through the storms of anti aircraft gunfire and many American pilots were forced to bail from the shot up planes. And the injured airmen drifted by parachute into occupied Yugoslavia, expecting to be captured or killed.
[00:02:55] Instead, on the ground, remarkable rescue teams were already in place.
[00:03:00] Serbian peasants tracked the path of the floating flight crews. Their sole mission was to grab the flyboys and bring them to Safety before the Nazis arrived. Risking their own lives, the peasants fed and sheltered the downed soldiers. They rescued the men.
[00:03:20] The rescued men were in friendly hands, but were on enemy soil. They needed to escape. And the story of what became known as Operation Hallard builds towards a daring mission. A secret landing strip, a covert strategy designed to remove these airmen from the occupation location of in foreign territory. Back get them back to England.
[00:03:48] To travel to the evacuation site. These airmen, they had to spend weeks following the Serbian freedom fighters because they had only.
[00:03:57] They were the only ones who knew the path to the evacuation site. The direction, the pace and the destination were in the hands of the rescuers. The men had been saved from their enemy, but the journey had just begun.
[00:04:13] They still had to walk to freedom.
[00:04:15] And the story Operation Hallard sheds light on an important spiritual reality. For us to be rescued from something sets us on a path towards something. And for these airmen, it was an amazing journey of survival. For the believer and our journey to our promised land of eternal life, it's an amazing journey as well.
[00:04:39] And it is important that we remember that in this amazing journey, our leader Jesus has a plan.
[00:04:48] It's a journey that is guided by the Holy Spirit.
[00:04:52] We walk trusting in God's calculated direction for our lives.
[00:04:59] If we are following, it is where and when he wants and leads. And something that I think that we need to pay attention to as we ask ourselves every once in a while, am I allowing Jesus to lead me and to guide my life, or am I just doing my own thing? You know, Jesus, who saved us, he is calling us and he is saying, come and follow me.
[00:05:26] You know how we walk our physical walks in this life, the direction of our lives, our moral standard in thoughts, words and deeds are not optional for the believer. God has laid it out in his word how we're to live this life.
[00:05:42] Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my commands. The Lord guides us in his Word and he says in the Word, he says, this is the way, walk ye in it.
[00:05:52] There's an expectation in all of us for life to submit to Jesus. And God has given us so many incredible examples in the scriptures of lives submitted to him, resisting and then coming to the place where they fully surrender to his will and leading in their lives. And one of those amazing examples in the Old Testament is the story about Joseph.
[00:06:21] After many years, he was abandoned by his brothers and he was sold into slavery. And it was for a period of 13 years. And the suffering that he experienced because of the jealousy of his brothers could have built Such a resentment. And if you read the story, there was a lot of locked up emotion in Joseph. And when he met his brothers and he recognized them and they were at the table and they were eating the meal with him, he left the room and they could all hear him wailing because of this hurt from them selling him as a slave as a young boy. And after many years of this, he still preferred to do God's will. And it says that he instructed his brothers to return to Canaan after he had revealed who he was and go get his families and bring them to Goshen because he had a plan to care for them and ensure their survival. Because there was such a strong famine going on in the land that they would not have survived apart from Joseph's help.
[00:07:22] So over a period of 13 years, God was working out his plan in Joseph's life. Joseph, he couldn't imagine, he couldn't see the plan that God was working in him. In the midst of his storm of life. He was in the prison cell for the last couple years of his life and he had no idea how long he was going to be down in this prison.
[00:07:43] But God delivered him from that. And you know, we not going to always enjoy material abundance, but God desires that we will enjoy spiritual abundance and victory always in our lives. God is working behind the scenes to provide for our needs. And we all have this subconscious thoughts in our minds or just imprinted in our minds of what life is supposed to look like in the different stages that we go through in seasons in our lives. And things may not be going in the direction that you've ever imagined. Maybe they're going in quite a different direction than you thought they would.
[00:08:30] But like Joseph in the Old Testament, here we have to trust that God is working a greater plan in each one of our lives.
[00:08:38] We must be willing to trust the wisdom of God and follow his guidance. He's laid it out for us in his scriptures and he also speaks to us by the Spirit within us. You know, we can be encouraged by scriptures such as 3723 where it says that the Lord directs the steps of the Godly. He delights in every detail of their lives.
[00:09:05] And the call from Jesus is the same for all of us. Come, follow me.
[00:09:11] We are to daily deny ourselves and take up a cross and follow him. Take up our cross. We have a cross to bear.
[00:09:19] Speaking to the believer here this morning, we must understand that we have been snatched from spiritual death and that we are on a journey and that there's all kinds of obstacles on this journey and we don't get saved and experience this amazing awakening of truth in our souls and then just go back living the way that we used to live before.
[00:09:41] Change should be taking place in our lives continually.
[00:09:46] And you can be assured that these changes, sometimes they don't come very easy.
[00:09:52] The Christian life is an adventure. And what adventure it is when you think about that we are walking in a relationship with our Creator, the universe, who created everything. We walk in relationship with Him. How could that be boring? How could that be dull? I just want to say to you, if you find your Christian life boring, come and see me, because I've got things for you to do because you're obviously not busy enough.
[00:10:17] But it's more than about being busy, it's relationship. And he wants to have that with every one of us, an intimate relationship with each one of us.
[00:10:26] Christ rescues us, and then he points us to the narrow path of following him by the way, which few find.
[00:10:36] Matthew 7:13 says that you can enter God's kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad and its gate is wide for the many who choose to go that way.
[00:10:51] And Matthew 7:14 says, but the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it. You know, I don't know about you, but this verse really makes me sit up and take notice and really think, lord, you know, like, man, oh man, search my heart. Help me, Lord, to know you know. And the question has to be asked, have you found that narrow path? Are you on that narrow path? This morning, the apostle Paul, he describes this active view of Christian life in his letter to the Ephesians, when he's urging them to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which they have been called. He says, therefore, I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling. For you have been called by God.
[00:11:47] You know, if you're hearing what I'm saying, if you're understanding what I'm saying, I want to challenge you that it's not of your own doing. It's because God. God has opened your ears to hear it, and he's speaking to you, and he expects a response. He's opening you up and calling you to himself, and he wants a response.
[00:12:06] You know, it is God who has seen your heart, and he's opened your heart so that you could hear. And it's not long when you say, okay, Lord, be Lord of my life. And it doesn't take long after that. Before we learn that our ways are not God's ways and his thoughts are not ours. And that's what it talks about, says being transformed by the renewing of our minds because our thoughts are not his thoughts. Isaiah 55, 8, 9. He says, My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says the Lord. And my ways are far beyond anything you can imagine.
[00:12:46] For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, your ways and my thoughts, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. You know, our humanistic or our worldly thinking has to change.
[00:13:04] God has given us His Word and he's gotten a way that he wants us to think the way that Scripture thinks, because Scripture thinks differently than we do.
[00:13:19] This becomes very real when we are facing our mortality, you know, when we know that our days are numbered. And, you know, as I felt like quite a while ago that God was going to want me to share this message, I really sort of cringed at it because of all the things that so many of us have gone through and the loss of loved ones we experienced in our congregation. Past couple of years, three years.
[00:13:48] But I really felt quite confident this is what God was wanting me to share.
[00:13:53] And I talked to one of our brothers, one of our elders, Nick Robichaud, about what I was going to be sharing. And he just said, go for it. Speak it.
[00:14:09] They're going through this season in their life. We're praying and believing for healing for Trish, and they're such good examples for us. You know, we all go through these seasons in our lives that are getting. They get extremely difficult. They can be so hard. And it's times like these that it is so good for us to have a biblical worldview, having it settled in our mind that we think the way the scriptures think, living and seeing life through the eyes of Jesus.
[00:14:41] This is all well and said, yet even when we see something coming, you know, like we can know that there's something happening in our lives and there's something coming, and we're going to have to face something, and we can brace ourselves and try to prepare for it and think that we're set, but then it can throw us for a loop, you know, an example of this sort of in a natural way was one time I was driving through an intersection on a nice wintry day and. And I looked to my right and there was this great big old Lincoln Continental with its wheels turned and it was sliding right towards me, and I just closed my eyes and I grabbed ahold of that steering wheel and I just Gripped it, thinking I'd be able to hang on, expecting a little bump. That thing hit me so hard, it threw me against the passenger door and it pulled that steering wheel out of my hand like it was nothing.
[00:15:30] And that's how life can go for us sometimes. You know, we can just be moving along and things can happen and change can happen in our lives and just send us right around.
[00:15:41] I've got an example here of this is a Stephen Ministry diagram. This is our life, and it's stable, and we've got good footing underneath us and take a lot to turn and flip that triangle. But some things do hit us hard enough to flip that triangle upside down. And then our equilibrium is just sort of shaken. And we're thinking, you know, it's tough. The scary thing is we don't know where we're going to land when we're shaken like this. But these are extremely tough times, and they're scary times in our lives. And it boils down to Jesus and the Word, you know, and if Jesus and his Word are a major or the center part of our lives, we'll always have some place to land, someplace to stand. Like it says that when the winds blow, the rains came. You know, the house that's built on the rock will stand. And that's what it is when these things come. And we can be so encouraged by the scriptures, like Psalm 34, 17, 19. The Lord hears his people when they call to him for help. He rescues them from all their troubles. He rescues those whose spirits are crushed.
[00:16:56] The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to rescue each time. You know, God, he's given us so many stories in the Scriptures to help us walk out this life. And it's good for us to just recognize there's going to be difficulties along the way. But one story that he's given us in the Scriptures that is just an incredible story is the Book of Job.
[00:17:21] And we're going to go through a few of these verses with Job's life and Job going through what he went through. And he had questions for God, and who wouldn't have questions for God?
[00:17:32] But let's just read through this and we'll talk about it once we get through here. It says there was once a man named Job who lived in the land of Uz. He was blameless, a man of complete integrity. He feared God, and he stayed away from evil.
[00:17:50] He had seven sons and three daughters. He owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 team of oxen, 500 female donkeys.
[00:18:01] He Also had many servants. He was, in fact, the richest person in that entire area.
[00:18:07] Job's sons would take turns preparing feasts in their homes. And they would also invite their three sisters and celebrate with them when these celebrations ended, sometimes after several days. Talk about party animals. Hey, that's a second generation of rich parents. They just get to live off the fat of the land and just have fun living.
[00:18:32] And then Job would purify his children. It says he would get up early in the morning and he'd offer a burnt offering for each of them. That's a lot of work. For Job said to himself. Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. This was Job's regular practice. He loved his kids.
[00:18:51] One day, when Job's sons and daughters were feasting the oldest brother's house, a messenger arrived in Job's home with the news. Your oxen were plowing with the donkeys feeding beside them.
[00:19:03] And when the Sabians raided us, they stole all the animals, killed the farmhands, and I'm the only one who escaped to tell you. No response. He's a little bit shocked. While he was still speaking, another messenger arrived with this news. The fire of God has fallen from heaven and burned up your sheep and all your shepherds. I am the only one who escaped to tell you. And while he was still speaking, a third messenger arrived with this news. Three bands of Chaldean raiders have stolen your camels and killed your servants. And I'm the only one who escaped it tell you.
[00:19:38] And while he's still speaking, another messenger arrived with this news. Your sons and daughters were feasting in their oldest brother's home. Suddenly, a powerful wind was swept in from the wilderness and hit the house on all sides. The house collapsed and all your children were dead. And I'm the only one who escaped to tell you. Notice there's no. Really no response. I think he's just sort of shocked at what's going on as these guys are coming one after the other to give this bad news. But the response after this one, it says that Job stood up, tore his robe in grief, then he shaved his head and he fell to the ground and worshipped.
[00:20:17] I came naked from my mother's womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord.
[00:20:28] In all of this, Job did not sin by blaming God.
[00:20:35] Only a believer can do that, you know. And that's why it's so important that we, when times are good, we build up that discipline in our lives of a devoted life with God, getting to know him, having a relationship with him, so that when crisis comes in our lives, we can just say, praise the name of the Lord, because only a believer can do that.
[00:21:00] Yet as time goes on, Job is persisting and seeking an audience with God. He wants to talk to God about this, all this stuff. He has questions and he's wanting answers about what has taken place. He's wanting to know why God would allow this to happen to him, especially when he's been living such an honest life.
[00:21:19] But God wasn't responding to Job.
[00:21:22] As a matter of fact, there was a long period of silence that I believe that Job got very frustrated with this, that God wouldn't come to him. He wanted an audience with God. And after a long period of silence, God finally does show up in a whirlwind to Job, and he speaks to him. But he does not have the answers that Job was looking for.
[00:21:47] Look at God's response here. He says, who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words? This word, ignorant, Uninformed, no understanding whatsoever. He had no idea what God was up to in the big picture. And God's challenging him. You know, you don't have a clue what you're talking about. And he says, brace yourself like a man, because I have some questions for you and you must answer them. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you know so much.
[00:22:19] Who determined the dimensions and stretched out the survey line?
[00:22:24] What supports its foundations? And who laid the cornerstone? As the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy, God continues to question Job in the following chapters in the book of Job. And Job is humble and realizes that he cannot answer a single one of God's questions.
[00:22:46] Job discovers God's presence brings great humility and a reverence that does not resemble anything understood among men.
[00:22:57] Job is finding himself on a journey that is taking him into an understanding of his Creator that could never be otherwise experienced.
[00:23:07] It is a journey of life and fulfillment to the soul that is only found in the midst of the storms.
[00:23:16] It is so important that we recognize that our understanding is limited and not all things can be understood by the human mind.
[00:23:27] Because we don't understand does not make it false.
[00:23:33] I love that line, you know, one, we're not going to understand everything.
[00:23:38] And then two, because we don't understand doesn't mean it's false. That's an amazing thing. It just was. Epiphany to me, it said, that's Right.
[00:23:47] You know, but like, in our world, like, you can see it, like, you know, we all watch that YouTube and there's so many stuff on there, but you see this stuff. If they can't explain it, it's not true. That's secular thinking. You know, lean not on your own understanding, but trust in the Lord and do good.
[00:24:07] Although we, as we might not always have the full picture of what's going on, we can always be encouraged by God and His Word, the Spirit within us, and the confirmation of His Word when He says this. And we know this one, and we all know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. And God is telling us that he's going to make our righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of our cause like the noonday sun, you know? This verse conveys a message of divine assurance and hope. It's a supernatural assurance that you know that you know inside. A divine assurance and hope. It emphasizes that God sees our struggles and our pursuit for justice. God loves that. He loves to see that we desire justice. That's not a bad thing. When we trust in him and commit our ways to Him. He promises that he will vindicate us and bring our righteousness to light, much like the bright midday sun that illuminates everything around it. We must let God be God in our lives.
[00:25:22] Throughout the Book of Job, Job longed for God to speak. And what God is finally saying to Job was not what he expected.
[00:25:32] It was not expected by Job. It wasn't expected by his friends. And it's not what we would expect to see as we read the stories, but instead, God's talking. Instead of God talking in his authority, justice, and sovereignty, and seeming to completely ignore Job's case, He blitzes him with a myriad of questions about God's created order.
[00:25:57] And this, you know, might seem offensive to us and to some, but we have to understand that God is not subject to human timetables or reason.
[00:26:10] He says, like, remember this Isaiah 58, 9, when he says, my thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says the Lord, and my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
[00:26:24] For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.
[00:26:34] How many times have we demanded God to change our uncomfortable circumstances?
[00:26:42] You know, theologian Konkel, he says Job had challenged God concerning the created order. Things were just not fair.
[00:26:51] And we have to ask ourselves, who's in charge?
[00:26:57] Who is it that needs to be transformed by the renewing of their minds.
[00:27:03] Job had shown that there was something wrong with God's justice, especially in his own personal experience here. And the problem with Job's argument was that the assumption that justice must be answered by means of reason to a finite mind.
[00:27:19] How many times do we come to God with prayers that are dictating how God is going to accomplish certain tasks?
[00:27:27] How often do we pray prayers that are really assuming that God is going to move in a particular way simply because it is being proclaimed by faith?
[00:27:40] We cannot come to God with our minds made up, and we cannot assume to know how God is going to answer prayer or act because of how we pray or how we believe, as it depends totally on us.
[00:27:56] The Almighty God is sufficient in strength and wisdom to govern every aspect of this majestic, mysterious universe justly and equitably.
[00:28:08] By the time God was finished with Job, Job could only hang his head and acknowledge that he agreed with God and that he was guilty as charged.
[00:28:20] Like Job, we have no idea what God is up to in the big picture of life, around us and in us and through us.
[00:28:30] And Job had spoken out of ignorance of things that were beyond his ability to understand.
[00:28:36] It is a charge that would indict us all.
[00:28:40] He confessed that in addition to hearing, he had also now seen God. And when Isaiah saw God the king, Lord Almighty, he cried out, woe is me. I'm a man of unclean lips.
[00:28:56] And Job's response in the next verse is less dramatic, but equally as sincere and profound. When he says, you know, he says, I take back everything I said and sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.
[00:29:18] This was an outward demonstration of his inward repentance and the death of his own opinions.
[00:29:26] He deeply regretted the presumption of his foolish words.
[00:29:31] His confrontation with the Lord brought about a change of mind and a deepening of his knowledge of God.
[00:29:38] And so in the end, we see that God's response satisfied Job and it should satisfy every suffering believer.
[00:29:49] You know, I'm not making light of all the things that are going on in the suffering that many of us have experienced these last few years.
[00:29:59] We all go through seasons that are not comfortable and that take place in all of our lives. But it's so important that we know him in the good times so that we have some place to fall in the good times, in the bad times, when things get tough. It is by spending time talking to him, spending time thinking about his Word, that we grow in our knowledge of who God is.
[00:30:23] This is what Jesus means when he says, apart from Me, you can do nothing.
[00:30:29] And that is his plan for all of us in this life while we're here on this planet at this time, to grow in our knowledge of Him.
[00:30:40] If we don't know him, we will never understand him enough to be able to trust Him.
[00:30:51] And if you are not sure on how to do this, how to trust, how to grow in him, you know, I want to challenge you to pick up one of those care cards and even take it home with you and think about it. But on those care cards, there's things to check off where we have ministries like the discipleship ministry, you know, that people will come alongside you and they will walk along and you guys can do devotions, like an hour a week or whatever the two of you would decide.
[00:31:17] And you can grow in your relationship with him, grow in how do you pray and how do you know that God is speaking to you? All of these things are in our little booklets that we've made up for discipleship. And I'd encourage you to pick those up, think about them. If you have any questions about ministries or things you could do or anything like that, that's what those cards are for, communication cards. And I would encourage you to fill those out. And I want to. I'm going to close with this story and this is a true story. It happened 1973. This is Bishop Festo's account of 1973 execution by firing squad of three men from his district.
[00:31:58] February 10th began as a sad day for us in Cabal.
[00:32:03] People were commanded to come to the stadium to witness this execution. Death permeated the atmosphere. A silent crowd of about 3,000 were there to watch.
[00:32:15] And I had a permission from the authorities to speak to these men before they died. And two of my fellow ministers were with me. They brought the men in at a truck and they unloaded them. They were handcuffed and their feet were in shackles. The firing squad stood ready, and as we walked to the center of the stadium, I wondered what was I going to say to these guys?
[00:32:38] How do I speak the Gospel to doomed men who are probably seething with rage?
[00:32:44] We approached them from behind, and as they turned around and looked at us, what a sight. Their faces were alit with an unmistakable glow and radiance. Before we could say anything, one of them burst out. Bishop, thank you for coming. I wanted to tell you the day that I was arrested in my prison cell, I asked Jesus to come into my life and be Lord of my life. And Jesus came into My heart, heaven is now open, and there is nothing between me and God.
[00:33:15] And please tell my wife and my children that I'm going to be with Jesus.
[00:33:20] Ask them to accept him as I did into their lives. The other two men told similar stories, excitedly raising their hands and rattling their chains. I felt that what I needed to do was to talk to the soldiers, not to the condemned. So I translated what the men had said into the language the soldiers would understand. The military men were standing there with their guns drawn and bewilderment on their faces. They were so dumbfounded that they forgot to put the hoods over the men's faces and the three of them faced the firing squad. Standing close together, they looked up towards the people and began to wave, handcuffs and all. And the people waved back and shots were fired. And the three were with Jesus.
[00:34:05] You know, we stood in front of them with our hearts beating with joy mingled with tears.
[00:34:11] It was a day never to be forgotten.
[00:34:15] Though dead, the men spoke loudly to all that there was an upsurge of life in Christ which challenges death and defeats it.
[00:34:25] The next Sunday, I was preaching to a huge crowd in a hometown of one of these men who was executed.
[00:34:31] And again, the feeling of death was over the congregation.
[00:34:35] But when I gave the testimony of their man and how he died, there erupted a great song of praise to Jesus. And many turned to Christ that day.
[00:34:47] There was life in the storm for these men. There was life in the storm for Job, and there's life in the storm for all of us.
[00:34:58] We need to know the Lord so that we can trust Him.
[00:35:02] Knowing that this planet is not our home, the believer has the ability to face death and see it as a day of great victory.
[00:35:12] Job discovered this as he humbled himself before the Lord and repented in dust and ashes.
[00:35:19] Job needed a visible manifestation of God to remind him of the fact that God was God of the universe and creator of all creatures greater, grander, higher and wiser than a mortal can imagine, much less challenge.
[00:35:37] How big is your God this morning?
[00:35:40] Is he big enough that no matter how big the storm you're going through, you can lean on him?
[00:35:48] Is it big enough that you'll say in your life, Lord, your will be done? In my life, not mine.
[00:35:58] You know, if we could really get our mind set on the greatness of God, you know, like, I had such a picture as I was finishing this up of the planet. Like, we get such great pictures of our solar system now, and I had a picture of the Earth, you know, it just looked like a Little beach ball and, you know, the light blue atmosphere around it. But I looking at it and thinking of all of the problems and the stress and the difficulties that we put ourselves through, and then I look around and see the vastness of the universe. And God cares about us. You know, we have no idea what God is doing in our lives and through our lives and the people that we're affecting.
[00:36:41] And it's so important that we say, okay, Lord, your will be done in my life and walk out every day as if it's our last. Because it might be. You never know.
[00:36:52] For some it is. And you know, I just want to encourage you that God is a big God. We don't understand and it might not seem fair and it might not go the way that you plan on it going, but that's okay.
[00:37:06] Because praise the name of the Lord. You know, Job says, though he slay me, yet I'll still praise him. That's quite a statement. And so with that, let's stand and just close in prayer. And Lord, I just pray that you'd help us to know you, Lord God, to walk hand in hand. We can walk hand in hand with you, Lord God, creator of this universe, in relationship with you. You want to guide our footsteps, Father God, help us to accept, Lord, the path that you take us on. To accept the fact that the path to life is narrow and it's difficult, Father. Help us to get our heads around that, that it's okay, that difficult things happen in life and that they come our way. That's okay. Because we're not here for a long time.
[00:37:54] And so, Lord, we commit ourselves to you. Pray, Lord, come into our lives and be Lord of our lives.
[00:38:01] Help us to serve you with our whole heart, Lord God, help us to be this light that you say will shine like the noonday sun. Father God, in our communities, in our workplaces, with our kids, with our parents, Lord, help us to be these people. And Lord God, help us to know your word. I pray that everybody in your church, Lord, as we open up your scriptures, Father God, let it come off the pages at us. Help us. Give us a heart that's having a hard time, time stopping reading, Lord, because it is so good for us and our soul, Lord, go with us and help us, Lord God, to walk the walk that you've laid out before us in Jesus name. Amen. God bless you as you go.
