Rick Warren - Why Is Life in This World So Hard — Part Two

Today on Daily Hope with Pastor Rick Warren, we continue

in our riveting journey through the series The Invisible War.

In it will explore the unseen world of good and

evil and see how it impacts our day to day existence.

Join us for eye opening biblical insights into the spiritual

dimensions that influence our lives in ways we never imagined.

Right now, here's Pastor Rick Warren with part two of

a message called why is life in this world so hard?

Number two? The second damage that it's done is physical

decay and death. Physical decay and death. Now, there was

no death on this planet until Sin entered the world.

There was no decay on this planet. Until Sin entered

the world. It was perfect, it was paradise. But now

because Sin is ented the world, there is decay and death.

And Ecclesiastes chapter eight says no one can control the

wind or stop his own death. Now we know that

death is inevitable, but we sure try to stop it,

and we go to great links to postpone the decay too,

oil of olay, lotions and potions and makeup and botox

and surgeries. What are we trying to do to delay

the decay? That's what we're trying to do delay the decay.

Now you're gonna die one day. I'm sorry you're going

to But actually i'll tell you in a minute why

that's good news, because you don't want to live on

an imperfect planet. But in the meantime, I hate tell

you this. You are declining. Okay, you are declining. It's

called aging. The Bible says on two Corinthians, chapter four,

our physical body is becoming older and weaker. Would any

of you like to give a testimony on this verse

a personal life experience? The fact is, you know, over time,

parts of your body start the sag. Many of us men,

we get furniture problems, Our chest drops into our drawers.

Many of you. Your teeth shine like stars, they come

out at night. Okay, Now here's how you know if

you're aging, if you're getting older. When you have to

bend over to pick something up, you go, is there

anything else I can do while I'm down here? You

don't want to waste the effort? Okay, Okay. The truth

is we all are aging. By the way, guys, just

give you a little tip as a husband. When a

woman tells you her age, always always act surprised. Okay,

just a little tip, give you a little good help.

And by the way, for you guys, when you men,

don't tell people you're over the hill, say I'm playing

the back nine. Okay, that's what you're doing. I'm just

playing the back nine. All right, that's what I'm doing. Now.

Solomon is so brutally honest about decay and death and

how we are all aging. It's actually comical. Let me

read you this passage out of Ecclesiastes. Here on the screen,

he's defining aging. He says, your limbs will tremble with age,

and your strong legs will grow weak. Your teeth will

be too few to do their work, and you'll be

blind too. And when your teeth are gone, keep your

lips tightly closed when you eat. Just let advice for

those of you living in rest homes. All right, okay, Now,

even the chirping of birds will wake you up. It

just it all irritates you. You're so sensitive, and you

know you can't get to sleep. But you yourself will

be death and tuneless with a quavering voice. And then

it says you'll be white haired and withered, dragging along

without any sexual desire. You'll be standing at death's door,

and as you near your everlasting home, the mourners will

walk along the streets. Thank you everybody. That's the end

of my sermon today. God bless you. Glad you came, Hope,

that was a real inspiration. Really cheered you up for

the week. Okay, really gave you a lot of input.

And you feel good, Go home, God bless you. No, now,

why is all that happening? Because sin broke everything, including

your DNA. You know, I read this weekend in the newspaper.

It was a big article. It said, scientists have now

concluded that the the universe had a beginning and will

have an end. Duh. Actually, did you know that for

about one hundred and fifty years, we didn't believe that.

You know, science is often wrong, and for one hundred

and fifty years, scientists actually thought the universe was eternal,

that it had always existed, and that the universe will

always exist in the future. We now know, from Einstein's

theories and you know he equals MC squared and all

these other things, that the universe had a beginning and

we'll definitely have an end. Well, anybody reads the Bible

knows that I mean, they call it the big Bang.

But wherever you've got a big bang, you've got a

big banger. Okay, nobody, no scientist believes in spontaneous generation.

The stuff just happens out of nothing, that we're just

sitting here. In a million years, all of a sudden,

the watch is going to show up. I mean, Sture

exploded that myth in eighteen sixty five and proved that

spontaneous generation does not happen. That things just don't happen

out of nothing. There is a cause behind that. Now,

in physics, this is called the law of entropy. Let

me show you a phrase. Here, an equation here on

the screen. Everybody's heard. It equals mc squared. You know

what this is. Delta S equals q slash t. You know,

q being heat heat absorbed in t being the temperature

of the surrounding. Any engineer note this is a very

famous equation. This is the second law of thermodynamics. It

is not a theory, It is a law. And the

second law of thermodynamics is the law of entropy that

explains that everything in the universe is irreversibly declaying, decaying

into disorder. That energy seeks its simplest state. It always does.

It doesn't get more complex energy. He always looks for

the simplest state. So that means matter is always degrading

and that energy is always dispersing. Chemicals do not naturally

become more complex. Chemicals, by their nature, tend to break

down into smaller and smaller elements. Energy, by its nature,

does not tend to become more complex. Energy, by its nature,

tends to fizzle out and seek its lowest. We know

that all of the stars are burning out. We know

that the sun is burning out. This is the law

of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics that things do

not improve, they are decaying. Things do not get more complex,

they get simpler. It is not a theory, it is

a law. Every physicist knows the law of the second

law of thermodynamics. Now there's one problem with it. You

can't believe in the law of thermodynamics and believe in evolution,

because evolution says the exact opposite. Evolution says that chemicals

naturally left on their own, will become more complex, and

that energy on its own will become more complex. When

everything in the universe says the exact opposite, energy is

declining matter is decaying. That's not a theory, that's a law.

That's the equation I just put on the descript and

every physicists know that. And so you really have to

live with a dual alignment to believe in the second

law of thermodynamics and be an evolutionist, because they do

not match. They are self contradictory. Now, I wish I

had time to get into that, but I won't. One

Corinthians fifteen twenty two says this, everyone dies because all

of us are related to Adam the first man. Now

that's the bad news. But actually there's some good news

in this. I'm glad I'm not going to live forever

on this planet, because to live on this planet, have

to live on this planet forever with rape and molestation

and corruption and sin and sorrow and sadness and grief

and power plays and people misusing each other and abusing

each other. That to me would be hell. And God

doesn't want you to live forever on this planet. He

wants you to live forever, but he wants you to

live forever in a perfect place, not on a planet

that has been broken by sin. If you lived here,

you're going to have sorrow and sadness the rest of

your life and disappointment. So he says, yeah, I want

you to live forever. I just don't want you to

living on that place forever. I want you to live

with me in heaven forever. Here's what the Bible says.

Here's the good news one Corinthians fifteen. On the screen.

Our earthly bodies, which die and decay, are different from

the bodies will have in heaven, but they'll never die now.

The bodies we have now embarrass us. For some of us,

we're very embarrassed by the bodies we have now, for

they become sick and they die, but they will be

full of glory when we come back to life again. Yes,

they're weak dying bodies now, but when we live again,

they will be full of strength. That's the good news.

Number three. The third damage. There's natural disasters and deformities,

physical decay and death. The third damage is the area

of your emotions and sin causes emotional distress and disappointment.

Emotional distress and disappointment. Solomon writes a lot about this

in Ecclesiastes, said, you know, I tried everything, nothing worked.

It's all meaningless it's all one big disappointment. Ecclesiastes one,

fourteen and fifteen. Everything under the sun is meaningless. It's

a big disappointment. It's unfulfilling, like chasing the wind. What

is wrong cannot be righted, and what is missing cannot

be recovered. What is he saying in this verse? He's

saying that as a human being, it seems a little

pointless because I cannot change the path, and I cannot

control the future. What's past is past. All the stuff

that I've done that was wrong, I can't undo it.

I can't unscramble an egg. All the stuff that was

done wrong to me, I can undo that. I can't

unscramble an egg. It's pointless. Can't change the past, and

I cannot control the future. You cannot control the things

that are going to happen to you. There's going to

happen a lot that's going to happen to you in

your life that you have zero control over. In fact,

most of the important things in your life you had

no control over, like where you would be born, who

you were born to, what your natural gifts were, where

you live, you know where you were born to live,

when you were born where you're gonna when you die.

You don't know all of that. Those are things that

are out of your control. And God is saying to you,

you could control some things, but you can't control most

of the things in your life. And he says that

the world cannot be fixed by human effort alone. Now,

can we go out and do good in the world? Yes?

Should we? Yes? Should we relieve pain? Of course, that's

why we do the peace Plan. But when we send

people out on peace plants like to relief, like when

we do relief in the tsunami or the katrina, or

the Pakistan earthquake or Japan earthquake, we send people to

that now Norway, all these different disasters and things. We

often send them in t shirts that says we came

to serve, not to solve, because we can't solve all

the world's problems. It's irreparably broken. What we do is

go to relieve hurt, to heal people, to help them

make it through. But we're not kidding ourselves. We're not

going to bring the Kingdom in on earth. This is

not Heaven. Heaven is there and we are here, and

our ultimate job is to get people into the perfect place.

Not try to make the world a perfect place. Relieve pain, yes,

make it better, yes, expect it to be perfect. No,

because he said it can't be done. It isn't going

to happen. And the damage is too deep for repair. Now,

because that damage is so deep, you get stressed out.

You get stressed out because things don't work right in

your life and you don't have enough time to get

everything done you need to do, and things get in

your way, and all of a sudden you have delays

and difficulties and dead ends and all these things. And

not only that, you have disappointments. You ever plan for

a big event and you just thought, man, this is

going to be so great, and then after the event

you go that was it, and you were really disappointed.

You have been to concerts like that, you have been

to things that were built up. That's life. The Bible

says in job they are distressed because they've been confident,

but when they arrived only to be disappointed. And you

felt that the anticipation of Christmas is always better than Christmas. Yeah,

that's it nowhere presence, It's just that way. You plan

a great vacation and in your mind you're thinking about

what you're going to do out there in South Pacific,

and you just dream how great it is going to be,

and then you get there and they got mosquitoes, okay,

or you play. I know people who spend an entire

year planning for a wedding and then it's over in

an hour. They go, that's it. I planned a year

and the wedding is over in an hour. I know

some girls who've spent their lives dreaming their entire lives

of their wedding day. It is inevitable they're going to

be disappointed because you cannot compete with your imagination in

real life. And the fact is, human beings have an

amazing ability to overestimate how happy we're going to be

with a person with an event or with a possession.

We always overestimate how happy it's going to make us.

If I could just get that car, I'm going to

be happy the rest of my life. And then you

get it and you're happy for a while, But in

a while you're not happy anymore. Why because it's the

same old car. And you think, if I could just

get that dress, if I could just get that piece

of art, then I would be so happy. And when

you get it, you are so happy for a while,

but then after a while you're not happy anymore. You

know why, because people change and thinks don't. Things don't change,

so we get bored with them. That's why you have

to do a thing called redecoration, because you get bored

and pretty soon you're disappointed with that which you thought

was so cool in the first place. We always overestimate.

I mean, I just wonder. I'm not going to ask

you to raise your hands. How many unrealistically thought that

if when you got married, it was going to make

you supremely happy for the rest of your life. Now,

if you think, man, if I could just get married,

I will really, really, really be happy. You just need

to talk to somebody who's married. Okay. Now, when you

expect your wife or your husband to meet needs that

only God can meet in your life, you're not only

setting yourself up for major disappointment, you were setting them

self up for failure. It's not fair. It's not fair

for you to expect your husband to meet all your needs.

He can't. It's not fair for you to expect your

wife to meet all your needs she can't. God never

meant it that way, you have needs in your life

that only God can meet, and you're going to be

severely disappointed if you think your boyfriend is going to

make you happy the rest of your life, or if

you're a girlfriend or anybody else. The truth is, if

we're honest, we're not just disappointed with events that happen

in our lives, and we're not just disappointed with people

in our lives, and we're not just disappointed with possessions

in our lives. But if the truth were known, we're

disappointed with ourselves because we think. You know, I thought

by this time in life, i'd be better. I didn't

think i'd still be struggling with these particular sins. I

thought by this point in life, i'd be a lot

more financially secure. I thought by this point in life,

I'd have my career on track. I thought by this

point in life we'd have kids. I thought by this

point in life, i'd be married. I thought by And

you're actually disappointed in yourself. Why? Because this is not heaven.

Everything on the planet is broken, nothing works perfectly.

You're listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. We're so happy

you've chosen to study along with us today. Here's Pastor

Rick with a letter from one of our listeners.

Everybody today, I want to share a letter from Edam,

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he writes. The Daily Hope ministry has helped me greatly

in shifting the lens through which I see life. I

know now that I was created for God to fulfill

his purpose. I understand that every trial or every situation

I face in life is a test of my character

and is preparing me for Heaven. I started listening to

the Daily Hope at the time when I was confused

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I didn't have a job. I always thought a profession

to find who I was. But Daily Hope shifted my

perspective on life and my purpose, and I soon started

to experience peace in my heart when I least expected it.

Even though I landed a great job, I understand that

it doesn't define who I am or my purpose. I

was created by God and for God, and I want

to surrender fully to his will. So I want to

say thanks to you and to the entire Daily Hope

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What an incredible testimony of how God's working through Daily

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