Eternal Love

Transcript

Alright, thank you very much, and hello again dear radio friends. How in the world are you? Everything going Alright at your house? I certainly trust so, bless your heart. Then come with me now to Psalm 116, we’re going through this Psalm for sort of a little breather, in between our book study from one book of the Bible to another, and this psalm deals with reasons why we love God and results of loving God. And we’ve gotten now into the results. He starts by saying in verse nine, “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living”, that means to say I will do everything I do, and say everything I say with the knowledge that God is, looking over my shoulder, so to speak. Eternal divine surveillance of my mortal life makes a difference, “Thou God’s seest me”, said Hagar in the wilderness. “We are all things”, Paul says, “are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him, with whom we have to do”. Jesus said, “Whatsoever ye have said and whispered in the air and causes shall be a shouted on the housetops”. You don’t keep any secrets from God and as a matter of fact, you don’t keep very many from people. We tell on ourselves, don’t we? Folk whom I have never met before will come up to me and say, “I know you, you’re Charlie Cook’s boy”, and they’ll tell me some different things about my life that I have recounted in the process of 23 or 4 years of radio broadcasting continuously in this area. And, you know, we give ourselves away don’t we? Well, that’s alright. Just be sure that what you give away is a good thing. Anyhow, he says, “I walk before the Lord. God is looking at me and I have to deal with Him. There will come a time when all the secrets of men are opened at the judgment and all world will the universe will know the kind of person you and I have been”. Well then, “What manner people ought you to be in all holiness of life”, says Peter, “we ought to be holy people filled with the spirit of God living every minute for our Lord”. Then in verse 10, he said, “I believe therefore have I spoken”.

The basis for Christian witness is the spillover of a full heart. The reason that many people have nothing to say of the Lord, is that they have really never had an experience with Him, they don’t know the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit of God, and they have never really spent enough time with God to get acquainted with Him. So, if you want a good, vigorous, effective testimony, spend some time with your Lord, get acquainted with Him, let the Spirit of God fill your life. You’ll find that you have plenty to say. Now, he turns and changes the subject just a little bit in the 10 th verse, and we come to the second half of that 10th verse where he says, “I was greatly afflicted and said in my haste all men are liars”. Now, why bring that up? Simply because the faithfulness of God, the faithfulness of God, has to turn out to be greater than all of the faithlessness of people.

Couple thoughts here that may be helpful to you as we go along. Number one, be careful of what you say and do and decide when you’re under pressure. Decisions that are made under pressure or in an emotional rebound, are almost always incorrect decisions. We speak of someone who got married on the rebound. His girl dumped him or her fellow dumped her as the case may be, and before you know it within a very few weeks or months there was a marriage and people say, well they got married on the rebound. One do they mean? They mean that, under the stress and pressure of heartache that came from that broken romance, a decision was made and somebody said, “Well I’ll show him or I’ll show her that she’s not the only pebble on the beach”, and so that there was a hasty and oftentimes, regretted, marriage. We call that marrying on the rebound. Well, it’s an illustration of what people do when they decide something under emotional pressure. I was greatly afflicted and said in my haste, be careful of what you say and do and decide, when you’re upset, when you’re emotionally under pressure. The best thing to do at that point is to seek your Lord. Let Him calm your spirit. Let Him open your eyes to what the real facts of the situation are.

I must say that oftentimes I’ve been upset about something when after having prayed about it and let the Lord speak to my heart, I realize that the facts were far different from that to which I was reacting. Want to take time to let the Lord open your eyes and give you His perspective. He sees things differently from the way you and I see them. He says, “My ways are not your ways, My thoughts are not your thoughts”, and most certainly His timing is not our timing. Wait on the Lord. “Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him”, says the psalmist. So he said, “I was greatly afflicted and set in my haste”, be careful of what you say and do and decide when you’re under pressure. Now, another thought that comes here is that generalizations, when you make them under pressure especially, are apt to be wrong. He said, “I said in my haste all men are liars. Who can you trust?” I’ve heard that a number of times during my lifetime in ministry, where someone’s wedding or marriage had disintegrated, and it happens on both sides of the matrimonial fence as you know. The dear lady will decide that she’s had it and that’s enough and she’s leaving, or the man will decide that he just never was in love and all that foolishness. I, you know, it always gets me, when after 20 years some man will say to his wife, well I never did really love you. How come you’ve got six children? And all that, you know, I just I can’t stand that, but anyhow, I threw that in free – I won’t charge for that. But, people who have gone through that terrible trauma and heartbreak, have often said in my hearing, I don’t know, who can you trust? Is it one person betrayed him or her and then comes the generalization, you can’t trust anybody. Well, yes you can. There a lot of good people in the world whom you can trust. The fact is however, that you ran across one that you couldn’t.

Now don’t make a generalization about all of the human race based on your own experience on any given Thursday. I said in my haste, all men are liars. Why bring this in, in discussing reasons for loving God? Well simply, as I said a moment ago, God’s faithfulness has to be greater than your experience of people’s faithlessness. If you pin your faith to people, you’re going to be disappointed. A man said to me, “Everybody I ever had as an idol disappointed me”, well it was probably a good thing though I didn’t say that to him. But, there it is you know, you put your faith in people, in human beings and they’ll turn out to be human beings, with their faults and failings. But you can always trust the Lord, “When we believe not yet He provided faithful. Great is thy faithfulness”, says Jeremiah. Paul said, “If we run out of faith”, that phrase if we believe not that you find in 2 Timothy, means if you run out of it like you run out of sugar have to go borrow a cup from a neighbor, if you run out of faith, and you haven’t anymore left, no strength to pray, no faith to strengthen that prayer if you could pray. You’re at the end of the line says yet he abideth faithful. You can depend upon the faithfulness of Almighty God. Oh, I’m so glad that’s so, aren’t you? Have you learned that lesson yet beloved, are we just talking about it? You know when it comes down to this the knocks and the bruises and the abrasions and contusions and lacerations of life, oh how you need to know, really know, that your Heavenly Father is faithful, and He won’t let you down. Paul said, “At my first hearing”, he was in Rome and had a hearing about his charges, he was being tried for treason, he said, “At my first hearing, no man stood with me, but all men forsook me”. There wasn’t anybody in that courtroom that would own up to knowing of the apostle Paul, they all had previous engagements, but he said, “The Lord stood with me and strengthened me.” You can depend on God’s faithfulness. Somebody that is listening to me this minute, who is in the middle of a bitter situation and you’re just about either to give up or blow up, and you’re saying to yourself you can’t trust anybody, everybody’s against me, and you’re just so down in spirit beloved, listen, listen, listen. You may have been hurt by people. I don’t doubt it, so have I from time to time. You may have been hurt by people. But, God is faithful. He hasn’t gone off the throne, He hasn’t lost sight of you, His precious child. He knows what He’s doing, He said, “I know the thoughts that I think toward you, thoughts of good and not of evil, to give you a desired end”. “Delight thyself”, said the psalmist, “Delight thyself in the Lord and He shall give thee, the desires of thine heart.
Oh, turn to God today, hurting friend. Don’t lash out with some senseless generalization, that accuses the whole human race of being no good, instead turn to your Heavenly Father and ask Him to heal this particular hurt, and then to make you a blessing to other people as you go along. Want to do that?

Now we come to verse 12, “What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits toward me”, there has to come a point in my life where I say, “God, I want to do something that says thank you to you”. God’s quarrel with the heathen, is not that their heathen, but that they didn’t give Him His place as God. He said in Romans 1, “Because that when they knew God they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful”, they became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. Oh, one of the results of truly loving God is that you want somehow to show that love, what shall I render toward the Lord for all His benefits toward me. The next time we get together we’re going to be talking about some ways that you can show that you really love God. You want to think about that in advance, to see what your own heart says about it. Might be very helpful, what shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me? How can I show that I love Him? We’ll get at that the next time we get together.

Dear Father today, help us to show that we love Thee, by the way we live and by what we do. In Jesus’ name, I pray this. Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!