304: Chris Atwood - Exhortation: The Formula of Faith

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:13

   Welcome to good Krysofian talks. I’m Levi. I’m Chris. I’m good, Houston. And I’m Brian, thank you for joining us this week. On this podcast, we select one talk a week to help us get the Bible in our Daily News feed. Each week we post a talk. That we previewed from suggestions sent in by listeners from around the world. Then we record a short intro beforehand as a personalized recommendation to you on why we are sharing the talk. And now let’s talk more about this week’s talk. Hello and welcome back.

2. 0:51

   For this week I’m introducing one of my own exhortations that I hope that you will enjoy. This exhortation comes from a really important time in my life. It was an exhortation I gave right after I went on Truth Core for the second time in 2009 and was given at the Simi Hills Ecclesia. I also think it’s kind of funny that Levi picked an exhort that he gave at my Ecclesia and in this time I’m giving an exhort that was given at the Simi Hills Ecclesia. So he and I sort of swap.

3. 1:19

   This was the Sunday right after Idyllwild, and this I think might be one of the most nervous times I’ve ever had in terms of giving an exhortation just because of the sheer number of people that were there, especially around here, Southern California, the Sunday after Idyllwild, there are a lot of extra visitors and people all around the place.

4. 1:36

   So I was 21 when I gave this exhort and it was definitely nerve wracking when I remember being asked to give the exhort right after Idyllwild. But I’ll also say this exhortation was probably the first exhortation that I ever recall writing where I looked at it and I was like, oh, this felt like almost like an adult exhortation.

5. 1:55

   I don’t know how a better way to describe it felt like I had kind of gone beyond what I did when I was baptized when I was 16 in some of the early exhorts that I made. So I really still connect with the past Chris that gave this exhortation. But part of what makes this exhortation particularly powerful to me is in the example at the start of my exhort, I talk about something that happened in my life that was a demonstration to me of how God was working in my life, even though I couldn’t necessarily see it at the time. Little did past Chris know that within the next couple weeks from when I gave this exhortation, things would be put in motion in my life that would lead to me being married to my wife Kristen.

6. 2:40

   Because a couple months after I gave this exhortation is when we started dating. And at this exact same date that I gave this exhortation, which was July 24th, we got engaged at Idyllwild. And then the next year in 2011 is when we got married. And all of those were things that I did not foresee coming. I remember at the time it being something that I was really worried about, not knowing who I was going to marry and what I was going to do with my life outside of the job that I talked about during the beginning of this exhort. But going back and listening to it, remembering what I was worried about at the time, what I put into the exhortation. The lessons in this exhortation are still just as relevant now, and there are now dozens of examples from the time I gave this exhortation when I was 21 to now that only reinforce what 21 year old me said in this exhort. I hope that this exhortation is encouraging to you, and that you can find similar examples in your own life to the ones that I will call out, and that you can recognize the formula of. Faith, which is the.

7. 3:42

   Title of my exhortation in your own life, either by looking back or remember that formula and the impact and the importance that it has when you’re going through something in your life now or in the future. So I hope this exhortation is encouraging to you and uplifting. And with that, I will turn it over to past Chris for my exhortation entitled The Formula of Faith.

8. 4:06

   Well, good morning my dear brothers and sisters and young people. I’m very happy to be able to be here to give you the word of exhortation, and I bring the love and greetings of the 2009 Truth Core team and the ecclesias that we have visited thus far, the San Luis Obispo Ecclesia, the Victoria Ecclesia, and the Calgary Ecclesia.

9. 4:23

   As Russ said, for my exhortation this morning, we’re going to be looking at a formula that God has in Scripture on how He works in our lives. But before we turn that up, I want to share with you a story from my life. Near the summer of last year, I had lost my job as a campus Rep for Apple Computers. And I was in the process of looking for another job. And I went and filled out an application and went through an interview process at the school district where I live for a teacher’s assistant position.

10. 4:50

    And I was going through expecting to get a call back after I’d gone through everything and found out where I placed on the list, expecting to get a call back within about a month. I never heard anything. And then I ended up making my schedule to go to school and just kind of was like, all right, well, I’ll just make it by without money for a little bit and as hard as I can be.

11. 5:10

    And while I was at school, I got my schedule all set up and while I was there, a whole bunch of my classes got totally messed up. I had classes cancelled. I had classes that for some reason I, I got dropped out of because of like some sort of error and I couldn’t get back in.

12. 5:24

    So I’d start with my classes all kind of spread out all over the entire day. And I ended up with all of my classes in the evening. And I had all this time in the morning and I was kind of like, what am I going to do? This going to be all this time, you know, and I, I live about 1/2 an hour away from my school. So it’s like, great, I’ll just have to drive a lot more. And then what happened was right after I went to one of my classes, I came back and there’s a phone call from the school district and they’re saying that we have a job opening. Would you be interested in applying? And it was at a school called Schroeder Elementary, which is the school that I went to when I was in elementary school. And I’ve been volunteering there since my senior year of high school because my sister went there, much to her chagrin. I was volunteering in her classroom for many years. And they called me up and said, we have an opening there. Would you be interested in interviewing? I was like, absolutely.

13. 6:11

    So I went in for the interview and I got the job and it’s a permanent position and I feel incredibly blessed. And I want to have you guys remember that story while we look through God’s formula because I can see in that story in my life that formerly being put into place. So we’re going to start in Romans chapter 5.

14. 6:31

    This is going to be kind of the focus of my expectation this morning and we’ll kind of jump around and look at some other verses. The formula that God has laid out for us is and verses three and four Russ read the 1st 2 verses, so we’ll read those again we’ll just for the context and says therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

15. 6:57

    And not only so, but we glory in tribulation, knowing that tribulation worketh patience and patience, experience and experience hope, and hope maketh not ashamed because of the love of God is shed abroad unto our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us. We’re going to look at each of these different things. We have trials, we have patience, we have experience, and we have hope.

16. 7:17

    We’re going to look through those four things and see how God works in our lives, using each of these different aspects to make us into better servants. So the first one on the list is trials. And often times and many of the classes this past week at Idyllwild, we’re sort of covering the same thing as to why we should rejoice in trials.

17. 7:33

    And any good point bears repeating. So we’ll go over to Proverbs chapter 3 and reading from verse 12 and said whom the Lord loveth, he correcteth even as a father, the Son in whom he delighteth. That’s the reason why we need to rejoice in trials. God only puts trials in our lives and the people of the lives that he cares about to try to mold them, to try to build them. And he cares for us all.

18. 7:58

    Everyone of us here God cares about. He wants to make us to be better servants for Him. And often times we won’t face the aspects of our lives that are the difficult aspects unless something is put there to force us to face it. A dear brother of mine once said that we all have our little cherished corners of darkness that we all like to hide and pretend aren’t there.

19. 8:17

    But God puts trials in our lives to force us to face those trials, to bring those little bits in the darkness into the light and actually look at them because it’s often those things are the things that are holding us back from being the best servants we can for God. So for each of these ones, I’m also going to look through at an example in Scripture of someone who was in this stage of their life.

20. 8:36

    So for trials, whenever I think of someone who went through tremendous trials, I think of Joe. So we’ll turn over to Job chapter 42. So, and we all know the story of Job, how the, the tremendous trials that he went through in his life, he lost all of his possessions, his children, his health, even his own wife was asking him, telling him to curse God so he could die.

21. 8:55

    But because he remained faithful at the end of his life, he was rewarded for his faithfulness. So we go over when we read at the end of chapter 42 and it says, so the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning for he had 14,000 sheep, 6000 cabals, 1000 Yokovacs and 1000 Shias’s.

22. 9:14

    He also had seven sons and three daughters. And then skipping down to verse 16 after this lived Job 140 years and saw his sons and his sons, sons even 4 generations. So Job died being old and full of years. And when we go back and we look at the letter that James wrote in chapter 511, he says that Job was then known for his patience because he was patient through the trials that God put in his lives. So before we connect over to the next one in the sequence, we’re going to turn over and read from James reading from verses two and three and says, my brethren, count it all joy when you fall into diverse temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience when these trials are put into our lives and we’ve all have different sorts of trials that we face that forces to look at our aspects of our lives that we may not be able to look at on our own. We have to wait often for these trials to be resolved in God’s time.

23. 10:12

    Often times when something difficult has been into our lives, and I know for myself especially, there’s a problem. As a guy, I want to fix it right away. And often times that’s not what God wants us to do. The trials and the things that we endure in our lives may take weeks, months, or even years to resolve, but there’s something that we have to patiently work with and wait for God to work in our lives. In fact, if we turn over to Hebrews chapter 12, we see that if we choose not to wait and not to let God work in our lives in the way that he sees fit, He can have actually the opposite effect of patiently waiting.

24. 10:44

    So starting at verse seven says if you endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons, for what son is he whom the Father chasten us not? But if ye be without chasement, then ye are not partakers and wherefore you are partakers and you’re bastards and not sons. The trials that God puts in our lives are not something that we should reject.

25. 11:03

    It’s something we should accept, that we should embrace. In fact, if we turn just one chapter over to Hebrews 11, when we look at an example of someone who was patient, tremendously patient for what he was going through, we think of the story of a life of Abraham. So at reading in verse 17 of Chapter 11, it says by faith Abraham when he was tried offered up Isaac and he that received the promises offered up his only begotten Son, of whom it was said that in Isaac shall thy seed be called accounting, that God was able to raise him up even from the dead, from whence also he received him a figure. So we see that Abraham never received the promises that God had promised to him.

26. 11:43

    He had to wait, he had to be patient. And as a result through that the trials that he went through in his life, the things that God asked of him, he grew and became a more faithful person. And it is a countenant to him for righteousness because of the faith that he had.

27. 11:57

    The next stage in the formula that God works in our lives is experience. Because after when we go endure trials and we endure those trials patiently, we grow and we learn more. Experience can come from many different ways. It can come from working out the trial in God’s time. It can come from observing someone else go through a trial. Sometimes trials are put into our lives not necessarily for our benefit that we will grow from it, but also for the benefit of those around us and they when they watch and see how we endure those trials.

28. 12:30

    For my example of someone who had to be patient and through it gained experience, I thought of David. So if we go over to first Samuel chapter 26.

29. 12:43

    So we all know about David, he was anointed king while he was still a relative youth while Saul was still ruling over the Kingdom of Israel. However, instead of scrambling to take what he could have seen is rightfully his seeing that he was the the next king and wanting to accelerate that and take take what was his right away, he decided to wait to serve the king that he’d swore to serve to honor his commitment. So if you look over at verse 7 of 26 and first Samuel, it says so David and Abhishai came to the people by night and behold, Saul lay sleeping within the trench and his spear stuck in the ground at his bolster.

30. 13:17

    But Abner and the people lay around about him. Then said to Abhishai to David, God hath delivered that enemy into thine hand this day. Now therefore let me smite him, I pray thee with the spear even to the earth once and I will not smite him a second time. And David said to Abhishai, destroy him not, for who can stretch forth his hand against Lord’s anointing and be guiltless?

31. 13:35

    David said, Furthermore, as the Lord liveth, the Lord shall smite him, or as day shall come to die where he shall perish, or he shall descend into battle and perish. The Lord forbid that I should stretch forth my hand against the Lord’s anointed. But I pray thee, take now the spear that is at his bolster, and the cruise of water, and let us go. So David took the spear and the cruise of water from Saul’s bolster, and they got them away, and no man saw it, nor did they know it, because a deep sleep of the Lord had fallen upon them. David had.

32. 14:01

    And this is the second opportunity that David was given where he could have killed Saul and almost no one would have known about it except for him and the men that were with him, and he could have instantaneously been ascended into king. But he decided not to. He waited. And as a result, because of it, the people respected him. Because he had served Saul faithfully, he had gained more experience in knowing how to rule the nation of Israel as God’s representative.

33. 14:27

    And so when we get this experience, we go through the trials that we go in our life, we patiently let God work in our lives in the manner that He sees fit, and we gain experience through it. From that experience, we get an amazing hope. Whenever I look back on my life, and I’m sure you all have circumstances where you can do that too. You can look back and at the time you just had something difficult going on in your life and you couldn’t make sense of why it was happening.

34. 14:50

    But then after the fact, you could look back and you could see with that eye of faith that God had been working in our lives. When I try to think of something that I could see as a tremendous way to build hope, I can think nothing better than Bible prophecy. So we’re going to look at a couple different things that I’ve noticed recently that we can look at and see prophecy being fulfilled as a way of building the hope, just in the same way that we can see God working our lives to build up our faith. So if we go over to the first one, go over to Matthew 24 starting at verse 32.

35. 15:24

    Jesus was talking to his disciples when he said, now learn a parable of the fig tree when his branch is yet tender and put us forth leaves. You know that summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you see all these things, know that it is near even at the doors. So this was talking about Israel being a nation, being reformed as a nation.

36. 15:41

    And we were able to see that. Well, I wasn’t able to, I wasn’t alive, but some of the people here were able to see that happen. And we’re able to see the nation of Israel continue to thrive to this day, continuing to go strong even despite the fact that they’re surrounded on all sides. In fact, they’re surrounded on all sides by nations that want to destroy them so much that if we go over to Ezekiel, I saw an article that was talking about Israel trying to build up the wall in the West Bank to try to separate themselves from the people that are attending suicide bombers, trying to destroy their people.

37. 16:11

    And in a way this was prophesied in Ezekiel chapter 38. Starting at verse 11, it says thou shalt say I will go up into the land of unwalled villages. I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, neither having bars nor gates. Then we jump down to verse 14, says therefore, Son of man, prophecy and Santa go thus saith the Lord God. And that day when my people of Israel dwell safely, shall they not?

38. 16:35

    Shall thou not know it? And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north part, thou and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company in a mighty army. And thou shalt come up against my people Israel as a cloud cover the land. And it shall be in the latter days that I will bring thee against my land, and that he didn’t know me when I shall be sanctified in the O Gog before their eyes, Israel is trying to figure out a way to have safety. And when I saw the article, when they were talking about trying to build up a wall, and their idea was to try to separate themselves from the people that were trying to destroy them, I could think right now each house in there has their own little individual fortifications that they build up to secure themselves.

39. 17:13

    But if they try to make some sort of secure border control, they wouldn’t need necessarily all those individual fortifications. So you could come to this point where each individual town is no longer fortified, but instead it’s the border. So that was one thing that I saw the other one. And this is something that’s really interesting. If you turn over to Psalms chapter 83, starting at verse one.

40. 17:38

    Keep not thou silence, O God, Hold not thy peace. Be not still, O God, for LO, thy enemies make a tumult, and they hate thee that lift up their head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people and consulted against thy hidden one. They have said come let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more, for they have consulted together with one consent. They are confederate against it.

41. 17:59

    I wanted to read you a few quotes that I found from different Islamic groups when it comes to referring to to Israel. In 1968 a man by the name of Hassan Albana of the Muslim Brotherhood said if the Jewish state becomes a fact, the Arabs will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.

42. 18:15

    The charter of Hamas, the terrorist group, states that their their aim is to liberate Palestine from Jordan to the sea and that Israel will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it. Another spiritual leader in them named Hassan Naral says there is no solution to the Arab Israeli conflict except the disappearance of Israel.

43. 18:35

    And then one of the prayers that this same man made, he said, O Allah, destroy America that is controlled by Zionist Jews. Allah will avenge in the name of the Prophet the colonious settlers who are the descendants of monkeys and pigs. So we can see in the statements of the people surround the nation surrounding Israel are making a fulfillment of what was being said in Psalm 83. The nations around Israel are joining together because they want to wipe Israel out.

44. 19:00

    They want them to be completely eliminated. The ultimate prophecy that we all want to see fulfilled is over. In Revelation 21 and reading the 1st 7 verses, it says I saw a new heaven and a new earth, For the 1st heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, Tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them and be their God.

45. 19:33

    And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, right, For these words are faithful and true.

46. 19:48

    And he said unto me, it is done. I am the alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end I will give unto him that is a thirst fountain of the water of life freely. He that overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. So ultimately that’s that’s the prophecy that we all wanted to see fulfilled.

47. 20:05

    And we can see through the different things that are happening in the world, signs that that prophecy is coming closer to being fulfilled. It’s with the hope, with that eye of faith that we gain through the patiently waiting through the trials and the experience we gain from those trials that were able to see God’s hand in the world around us. We’re able to see different prophecies being fulfilled, see the signs that the Kingdom is going to come soon, that He could come at this very moment.

48. 20:31

    We can all look forward to that wonderful time when that’s going to be established. We should remember the words that were said when Paul wrote to the Romans in chapter 8 says we know that all things work together for the good of them that love God to them who are called according to his purpose.

49. 20:50

    We need to remember that everything that we go through, whether it be wonderful or painful or sorrowful, isn’t just put there for happenstance. It isn’t just something that God kind of throws it out there just to have something happened to us so we have something going on. He’s molding us. He’s trying to make us better. He’s trying to make us to be faithful followers. And so instead of seeing these as trials, they’re like, oh, these are so difficult.

50. 21:14

    Instead, we should see these as little tweaks that God is making in us so that we can be better servants for him, so that we can be more capable to serve him, to fill the earth with his glory, to take away all the falseness, all the lying, all the sin, to be able to eliminate that. So ultimately, that’s the reason why every Sunday we gather here together to partake of the bread and the wine, to renew the promise we made when we were baptized. We come here to ask God for the strength to face the trials that are in our lives.

51. 21:44

    We are here to ask God for the patience to have these trials resolved in His time. We’re here to reflect on the experience of enduring those trials that we’ve received. To be able to see when God is working our lives, to be able to gain the hope that we were able to gain from that experience and being able to see God’s hand in the world around us until the time does come. And I pray that it comes soon that we were all able to sing and dance and and be in Jerusalem together with our Lord Jesus Christ.

52. 22:13

    That I pray that God will be with you in your trials, that he will grant you the patience to endure the trials that we all face. That it will gift you the experience from your patience. And that he will bless you with renewed hope and faith until the words written at the end of Revelation by John are fulfilled.

53. 22:28

    Which reads, he which testifieth these things saith, surely I come quickly, Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. Thank you for listening to the good Chris Adelphian Talks podcast. We hope this talk helped you in your walk. And brightened your day. If you would like to hear more, please subscribe for new episodes.

54. 23:02

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55. 23:32

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