Do Not Fight What God Is Doing

The morning service opened with the pastor's testimony about the church's season of unexpected moves. No one knew a few months ago that the church would have to leave its building, and no one knew a month ago that it would move again. Yet God had a plan. His charge to the church set the table for the message: you can either fight what God is doing or yield to it, and the more we yield, the more fruit we find. Fighting God costs a believer joy, desire, and boldness of faith. He then welcomed his dear friend Pastor Bruce Robinson of Stockton Baptist Church to preach, sharing how thankful he was that God had placed this visit on the calendar in a season when he was worn dry.

Pastor Robinson began by commending the church for its patience through the upheaval, assuring them that Stockton Baptist Church and many others stand behind them in prayer. When trials like this hit, they can shake even a pastor's heart with the question, Lord, what are you doing? He noted, remarkably, that he had not known the church's pastor was already preaching through Deuteronomy when God laid Deuteronomy 8 on his own heart.

Remember The Way The Lord Led Thee

Reading Deuteronomy 8:1-9, Pastor Robinson showed that the wilderness journey had more to it than Israel thought. God led them forty years in the wilderness to humble them, to prove them, and to know what was in their heart, because the future he had for them was far bigger than what they were passing through. God does allow his people to suffer, and the purpose of the suffering is so that we do not fall back on the flesh. In suffering we discover whether we will turn to him or to something else. Israel did not know there was another kind of food until God fed them with manna they knew not, teaching them that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. God commands his people to remember the way he has led them so that his past faithfulness will produce present obedience and future confidence. As Romans 5 teaches, tribulation works patience, patience experience, and experience hope.

Love Is The Motive For Obedience

Turning to Deuteronomy 6:4-5, Pastor Robinson showed the true motive for obedience: hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, and might. The gospel principle is present here. We could not keep the commandments, so Jesus stepped up, and we love him because he first loved us. He pressed the point through marriage. Husbands are commanded to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and Ephesians defines the extent: when we were dead in trespasses and sins, at our ugliest, Christ loved us. A husband who sets conditions on his love has missed the standard, and a husband who loves as Christ loved finds his wife responding to that love. Nothing can separate the believer from the love of Christ, and the greatest motive for obedience is love.

From Deuteronomy 6:6-12 he showed why God stresses teaching his words diligently to our children: beware lest thou forget the Lord which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt. If God's people do not stay in the word, they forget where God brought them from. Deuteronomy means second law, the law interpreted and applied after thirty-eight years of wilderness experience. The coming danger for Israel was that in a land of brooks, wheat, barley, figs, and bread without scarceness, they would enjoy the gifts and forget the giver.

Consider Him

Pastor Robinson circled the word consider in verse 5, thou shalt also consider in thine heart, and carried it to Hebrews 12:1-3. Surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, believers are to lay aside every weight and run with patience, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. When you think circumstances are unfair, when you are tired of moving, when you do not understand what your husband is doing or why your children have taken a wrong turn, that is when you consider him. We quit in the heart before we quit anywhere else, and a believer who does not walk with God and consider Christ in the tough times will quit.

He closed with the testimony of a newly saved man in his church who confessed that he takes friends hiking, though he does not like hiking, just so he can show them Jesus. That is the heart of one who is considering Christ, one beggar showing another beggar where the bread is. The message ended looking forward to the evening service, where Pastor Robinson would preach the three points of Remember Therefore, and the invitation saw hands raised across the room as the church came to an old-fashioned altar.