Seeing and Knowing: The Truth we need to be Triumphant [43:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

James 1:22-27 [+/-]James 1:22-27 [22]But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. [23]For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. [24]For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. [25]But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. [26]If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. [27]Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (ESV)

Well, it is the goal of our great God FOR HIS GLORY ALONE to give us all that we need to experience and express victory over temptation and right in the middle of our trials and tribulations. What we too soon forget in our kind of world must never be forgotten if we are going to receive what God wants to give us so that we can experience and express this victory. God did not design this world or your life for your comfort and convenience. He is not primarily interested in your pleasure or your pursuit of your purpose. His goal is not what you gain in this world; it is not even your good except as that good advances and enhances His glory. In order for God to perfect His purpose in us, He must send us into the fire and flames, He must deliver us into the dark night of the soul, He must accompany us down avenues that from our perspective are absolutely awful, but it is always in those places that we would not choose to go that He shows us what we must see and reveals to us what we must know if we are going to experience and express that overwhelming victory that is ours through Jesus Christ our Lord. I read again this week part of the story of Steve Saint whose father was one of five missionaries killed by the Waodani of Ecuador. Steve was later called to leave behind a very successful business career to serve among the Waodani; But there was a part of his story that I did not know; he and his wife had one daughter who one day came to him complaining of a headache. She asked him to pray for her and to hold her and while he was praying and holding her, she died in his arms of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Yet, Steve Saint would say that it is the losses that God has used to show him what mattered most in life so that leaving behind success and status and all those things by which we define the “good life” had no meaning to him when he had them so letting them go was no issue. God had used his trials to shape him and to show him where he wanted him to go and what He wanted him to do. He does the same for us.

Learn more about this message by downloading the sermon notes here!

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