Promised Believers: God's Promises of Good To Us

As Pastor Josh said, the series is about promise believers and not being promise makers, because how often we have thought of ourselves as Christians, as the people who are going to make God yet another promise that by tomorrow we will have messed up, right?

And so as we know that doesn't work, this series helps us to grasp that when God makes the promises, He carries them out.

And our responsibility in general is to see it, to know it, to believe it, and to live in the absolute certainty that the promise is true.

Because what he promises, he does.

The psalmist says our God is in the heaven.

So when God makes a promise, he's already identified that this pleases him, or he wouldn't have made it.

So we're gonna look at some ways today in which God has promised to be good to us and how his goodness changes us into people who bring him honor and glory.

We're gonna look at that from Jeremiah chapter 32, where we read this.

Jeremiah 32 · chapter mention

Hayden, can you drop this level a little bit?

It's echoey up here.

Thank you.

They will be my people and I will be their God.

I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me, and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them.

I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.

I will rejoice in doing them good, and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.

Do you hear the emotion of God in that?

I will never stop.

I will most assuredly do this.

I'm doing it with my heart and my soul.

Now, since this is an Old Testament passage, I want to make sure it's clear who God's talking to.

Who is the they in verse 38?

You see, Jeremiah is prophesying to Judah.

And Judah is the southern kingdom of Israel, and uh they're about to go into exile because they've been chasing idols for hundreds of years.

And God has repeatedly called them to repentance, they've repeatedly not done it.

And so he keeps, he's saying, look, it's it's not very far away.

God is going to punish this disobedience.

This is who God is talking to.

They've not kept God as their only God.

They were hedging their bets.

And the same unbelief that led them to add other gods to their worship led them to ignore many of God's commands for how they were to live as a nation, how they were to live among one another.

And God had already told them that the exile is going to happen, and they still didn't repent.

They still didn't amend their ways, they still didn't turn back to God and say, we have messed up.

They just kept doing what they're doing.

So the nation doesn't believe God, and they don't believe his prophet.

Yet God still makes the promise because he knows there are a few that are going to remain faithful to him, and they are going to believe, and they're going to hope in this future that God promises.

So this is who the original audience was.

Those people just about to suffer a very painful period of history.

But it's a future promise.

God notice all the words are future tense.

They will be my people.

I will be their God.

I will give them.

God is speaking about their future after the exile, after the punishment.

He's not wiping his hands of them completely.

He's saying, I'm still going to turn this around.

So there's really, as is often the case when God makes prophecies, there's really kind of two fulfillments to this prophecy.

There is a short-term one that's going to take about 70 years before God brings them back into the land.

But there's also a long-term fulfillment, and that's the major fulfillment.

That's the one that's fulfilled in Christ.

And that's going to be almost uh almost 600 years before Jesus appears on the scene from the beginning of the exile.

But because it's fulfilled in Christ, then all of us who are also living in Christ receive this promise.

That's how the they becomes us.

That's how this applies to us, because the fulfillment of this is the work of Jesus on behalf of them and on behalf of us.

So this is a promise for each of us today.

Right where you are, everything here is for you.

And God promises, I say it this way, God promises his glory and our joy will be inseparable.

That's a loot, that's a that's kind of a summary of that whole passage in Jeremiah, taking particularly these two phrases.

Therefore, he will never stop doing good to us.

We saw that phrase a couple of times, it's expressed a couple different ways, and he will ensure that we always fear him for our own good.

Those are the two main ideas in that passage.

And I drew a little picture down here to point to this inseparableness of what's going on.

Here's God's glory over here.

Here's our joy, okay?

And they're going to be inseparable because God is going to always do good toward us, and he's going to put a fear in us that causes us to always act toward him in a way that exalts his glory, in which case, more good comes our way, more glory goes his way, and it just keeps going round and round now and forever.

So he's never going to stop doing good.

So let's just look at a couple of the ways in which this is expressed in this passage.

First, he says, They will be my people, and I will be their God.

That is relationship language, isn't it?

It's connection.

But it's it's a specific kind of relationship connection.

It's a betrothal or a marriage picture.

It's covenantal love.

It's the idea of each party taking the other fully.

You know, from the traditional wedding vows, all that I am and all that I have, with all that I am and all that I have, i.e.

and thou, right?

Where we each, the the man and the woman pledge to each other everything I have belongs to my wife.

And she pledges back to me everything that she has.

That's what's happening here.

They will be my people, I will be their God.

Nobody on either side of that relationship is holding anything back.

And God says, this is what's going to happen.

I'm going to make it happen.

They will be my people, I will be their God.

I like to define grace, because that is clearly God's grace.

I like to define grace this way.

Grace is God's giving of Himself in relationship.

Because no matter what kind of grace God is pouring out on you, it is always an invitation to a deeper connection to Him, a deeper relationship.

He doesn't just pour out stuff just because he wants to pour it, He's pouring it out in the hopes that it will draw us in deeper because He loves us so much and wants that relationship to look like this.

Neither us nor Him holding anything back.

Alice and I were in Canada a few weeks back, a little anniversary celebration.

And it happened to be the week that Queen Elizabeth in England died.

And as we got to Vancouver and Victoria, way over on the West Coast, there was in front of their parliament building there, people were bringing flowers in tribute to the Queen, right, who had passed.

And we were having this little conversation on the street about the difference between the Queen and the Canadians saying, you know, they will be my people and um and I will be their queen, or you know, she will be our queen.

And we were, I was just commenting on, I wonder if, you know, when the queen makes decisions, not that the queens make too many decisions in England, I understand it doesn't work that way much anymore, but but you know, when the queen makes decisions, she's considering all of her people, right?

The people in England, the people in Scotland, the people in all of the places where England rules, and that includes Canada.

They are her people.

She would say that, you know, just as a matter of course, that just the way she's going to think about it.

However, I was wondering, do Canadians, who are, you know, 8,000 miles removed from where the Queen is, and whose decisions don't necessarily affect their lives, do they think she's our queen?

I mean, some people did, they were laying flowers there.

But you know, you can you can be on the other side of that relationship and think, okay, but it doesn't affect my life from day to day, right?

Uh I yeah, I know I'm a citizen of, you know, the Queen or this and that, but it's not really that important, maybe.

God says, it's gonna be important.

I'm gonna see to it that it becomes important to my people.

They will be my people.

I will be their God.

They will they will embrace me as their God and their only God.

Because remember, the context here is y'all have been chasing other gods.

Y'all have been running around because you didn't think I was good enough, sufficient, or otherwise.

The next thing he says to them is this I will give them singleness of heart and action.

First, it's a gift, isn't it?

You ever try to get single-hearted toward God, wholehearted?

This is wholehearted devotion.

You ever try to work that up in yourself?

I have for many years.

And every time I find there's some limit as to how much of wholeheartedness I can achieve.

It usually lasts, I don't know, until the next squirrel runs by, right?

And, you know, my mind is someplace else, and wholeheartedness isn't at the top of the list.

God says, I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna give them a gift that will produce wholeheartedness in them.

Notice he did not say, I will demand wholeheartedness.

The whole picture of Israel is he has demanded wholeheartedness, and they've always proved they can't do it.

So he isn't saying I'm gonna send you back there and let you try yet one more time.

He says, We're gonna do something entirely different.

Because the core problem of us as humans is we're constantly searching for greener pastures, aren't we?

That is where our hearts go.

Idolatry is built into the fallenness of who we are.

We're gonna, what was it, Bob Dylan saying, you're gonna have to serve somebody?

We we're gonna look for yet another thing that will fill some little niche that we don't think God is filling in our life.

But God is promising to be the source of what we lack in this area.

Because this gift of God is gonna affect our hearts and our actions.

We're gonna live out what's changing inside of us.

Now, from my own experience, I'll tell you this is a work in progress, okay?

This is not a moment in time necessarily, although perhaps for some people it is, but it's been my experience that this is something God does gradually.

As we draw close to Him, we find ourselves more and more committed to Him, but it it's still His work, it's still His gift.

It's a gradual fulfillment of this promise.

But as it grows, we can recognize that it's growing, and hope can grow in us.

And hope is the place where our faith operates.

Then he says this.

I'll give them this singleness of heart for a reason, so that they will always fear me.

Uh-oh.

There's a word we don't like to hear.

God wants me to fear him.

Let's make clear what God is asking for.

Okay.

We're going to come back to this because it's going to keep appearing.

Okay?

But he's not talking about terrified in the way that we run away.

He's talking about reverential awe in the way that we run toward.

That's what this word is communicating to us.

So we'll come back to that in a minute.

He says, I want them to fear me, and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them.

So God gives this gift of wholeheartedness and then honors that gift in us as it works itself out in our lives.

You see that?

It's his gift, but we're benefiting because we become the kind of people that he's been after, and as a result, he promises that it's going to go well, that God is going to continue to pour good upon us.

Even for their children after them.

This is a multi-generational impact from this gift of God.

Think about it.

It's not just you.

There are residual effects on the children from parents living wholeheartedly toward God.

What a blessing.

They get to be recipients of the same goodness.

And then God says again.

Well, He says, I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

I will never stop doing good to them.

And I will inspire them to fear me so they never turn away from me.

And again, I'll rejoice in doing good.

Twice God has promised to put that fear in us.

Because on our own, like Israel, we can't produce the necessary respect for him that would earn us any kind of favor.

We are always going to astray.

God defends us from us.

What a blessing.

Right?

He knows, he's let Israel demonstrate for hundreds of years what your heart and my heart is actually like.

And we can look back and say, those people were so stupid.

Couldn't they remember the Red Sea?

Well, Steve is so stupid.

Couldn't he remember what God did for him yesterday?

You know, when he feels like just ignoring God today.

Waywardness in us, God is going to defend us from that by doing something in us that causes us to have a deeper and deeper respect and awe and reverence for him so that we don't stray.

The realization of this caused me to call Pastor Josh a month and a half ago, whenever it was, and say, I I just feel like God wants me to share this.

Because I looked back at my own life and realized how many places this gift had been at work in me and I didn't know it.

A gift that caused me to honor the Lord when I would have strayed.

A gift that caused me to come back to him when I had strayed.

A gift from him that if he hadn't told me that he was doing it, I would just assume I happened to wake up a good guy that Tuesday and decided to get back with Jesus.

You know?

And that's that's not what's going on.

He's that's how he's at work in you and in me.

I told you we'd come back to this, Marvin.

We had this conversation Tuesday night in our fellowship group.

That sense of what is it that draws us back?

Well, we would say, well, we know it's the Spirit of God, but it's specifically the Spirit of God putting a reverence and an awe of God in us so that we want to be back in that deep relationship when we sense that we've wandered from it.

Now, in order to understand this kind of fear, um, I think, first of all, and why it's important to God, I want to look at another related word group from the scriptures, the words holy and profane.

And they're not there.

Oh, there they are.

So these two words appear in in most translations.

Some change them a little bit, and you'll get different, slightly different words.

But the idea of holy, that's who God is, right?

God says, I'm holy, right?

Be holy as I am holy.

Okay.

Holy is the idea of being sanctified or set apart.

So in the temple, they would take the dishes and the plates and all of the stuff that they would use, and they would they would pray over him, anoint him with oil.

They did some stuff that basically said, We've now set this apart from any other, it has no other use except this one use that we've dedicated it to.

Whereas the word profane means to be defiled, to be contaminated.

It means to be unholy.

Okay?

So the word holy has all those ideas in it that it's saying it's about being sanctified or set apart, about being sacred, uncommon.

See, the scripture uses profane a lot for the concept of common.

Something is just ordinary.

It's just like all the others.

In fact, it's indistinguishable from all the others because there's so many things like it.

There's nothing special.

When God says you've profaned my name, he's saying, You have made me nothing special.

You've treated me like every one of these wooden gods that these other guys are carving.

You've treated me like I am not distinct, like I am not in a class by myself.

You have communicated to the world that I have rivals and I have no rival.

There's nothing else in this category.

I am completely other than anything else in existence.

So Israel is said to profane his name, which means they didn't believe God was unique, they didn't believe he was sufficient, they didn't believe he was already doing them good.

They didn't believe he would punish them.

So they ignored his commands, they chased other gods.

But God's holiness is his glory, his complete separation from every other thing, his complete otherness to any other thing we can imagine.

This is the glory of God.

It's being holy and utterly different than any other thing.

And we are called to treat him that way, to never put him in the same category with any other thing in this universe.

Certainly not in the same category with ourselves.

When we make God like ourselves, we profane his name because we have said he's less than he is.

There's an episode in uh in Numbers 20 where uh Moses is standing at the rock.

Um this is the second time this event occurs, and God says, Go out and um and speak to the rock, and I'll bring water out of the rock, and the people will have something to drink.

Because the people were complaining in the wilderness, they had no water.

Well, Moses goes out to the rock, and what did he do?

Some of you know what he did.

He what?

He hit the rock, he struck the rock with the staff, right?

He didn't speak to it like God told him, he smacked it with the staff.

Now, why did he do that?

Because the last time God told him to bring water out of a rock, he said, strike it with the staff.

This time God said, just talk to it.

Moses said, That worked last time.

Boom, boom.

And the water came out, but God pronounced this on Moses.

He said, Because you did not treat me as holy, you're banned from the promised land, Moses.

You're not going in.

It was that serious.

He said, You didn't treat me as holy in the front of the people that you lead.

Which, of course, for anybody who stands in front of a crowd and speaks about God's truth, is a sobering thought.

He looked, he heard what God said.

God said, You didn't believe me.

You just figured we were going to do it the same way we did it before.

God said, You profaned my name.

You made me common, you made me like you thought I should be, one who would answer when you smack the rock.

God preserving his holiness and the sanctity of his name is biblically, when you look at the scripture, all of scripture, that's like the number one priority.

Everything in scripture revolves around God honoring his own name and calling people to honor it as well.

And he called Israel to do it by following the commandments, and they wouldn't do it.

He calls us to do it by honoring Jesus, whom he sent.

And then he gave us all these gifts to help us to do what they could never have done, so that we would not be ones who walked around the earth profaning the name of God by treating him badly or commonly.

Or not exalting who he is.

See, there's another aspect to that.

Let's see, I think I passed it.

Yeah.

Now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and observe the Lord's commands and decrees that I'm giving you today for your own good.

And that's not the one I was looking for.

But that's a good one.

Because he connects the idea of fearing God and walking in obedience and loving and serving.

All those words are wrapped up together because they result in the same thing.

An honoring of who God is, even when it doesn't feel like it to us, even when we just don't have the energy today.

God's too bad.

This is how great I am.

This is how I intend to be treated.

Well, uh oh, there it is.

Here's the one I was looking for.

The Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he promised you on oath, if you keep the commands of the Lord your God, walk in obedience to him.

Then all the peoples of the earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will fear you.

Now, he said to Israel, You're going to be known by my name.

Consequently, if you mess up, I look bad.

So, body of believing Christians who bear the name of Christ, do you hear it?

How can we possibly translate that to a new covenant and say, God, your son is so worthy of our honor.

And yet it's really hard, if not impossible, you know, to do it all right.

I'm glad you asked.

Because God said, Look, I'm going to tell you how we're going to do this.

He says, I'm going to stop all this punishment stuff.

And here in Ezekiel 36, if you know Ezekiel 36, you know that in the middle of this passage we're going to see what the new covenant is described as.

But I really want you to see the context about this whole holy and profane thing, about how when the people messed up, God had to act to preserve his own name, because they were known by his name.

He said, So I poured out my wrath on them.

This is talking about historically, because they had shed blood in the land, they defiled it with their idols.

I dispersed them among the nations, they were scattered through the countries.

I judged them according to their conduct, and wherever they went among the nations, they profaned my holy name.

Why?

Because it was said of them, these are the Lord's people.

And yet they had to leave his land.

Do you hear what the other nations were saying?

How can these be God's people?

Their God wasn't even strong enough to keep them in the land.

And they assumed that the people were ejected from the land because of the foreign powers that came in.

And God was saying, No, no, I sent those guys to get you out.

But it looks like I'm the guy who doesn't have the power, and it looks like the other gods have more power.

That's what they were saying.

Our gods are superior because they drove you guys out of God's land.

God said, I had concern for my holy name, which the people of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone.

So say to the Israelites, this is what the sovereign Lord says: it's not for your sake, people of Israel, that I'm going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you've profaned basically everywhere you've gone.

I'll take you out of the nations, I'll gather you.

Basically he said, I'm going to bring you all back.

And here's the covenant promise.

I'll sprinkle clean water on you, you'll be clean.

I'll cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.

God's going to do this.

I'll give you a new heart.

I'll put a new spirit in you.

God's going to do this.

I'll remove from you your heart of stone, give you a new heart.

God's going to do this.

I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and keep my laws.

God's going to do this.

And then you'll get to live in the land that I gave your ancestors.

And you'll be my people and I'll be your God.

God said, Look, we're going to have a whole new way of doing things.

And it's not going to depend on y'all.

How in the world is God going to pull that out?

He hadn't even told him that part.

He just said, When the time comes, I'm going to put my own spirit in you, and that's going to cause you to live differently than you do now.

Because when his spirit's in us, that fear of God begins to grow.

We want to be obedient.

We may not be, we may have trouble being obedient, but we want to be.

It's the wanting to be that's the evidence of the Spirit of God in you.

Because if you were like these Israelites, if you were like you were before you came to Christ, you didn't want to be, you didn't care.

God's just another name out there.

But when Jesus Christ becomes real to us, the Holy Spirit comes in and we want to be what God calls us to be.

We want Him to receive honor and glory from our lives, and we will mess it up.

Yep.

And God says, guess what?

I don't have to exile you and send you out of where you are and punish you in some drastic way.

God says, I don't do that.

He said the whole point of Jesus was to remove that piece of it.

The Old Testament, the Old Testament pattern is this.

If there is no Savior, the people will always stray and they'll always be punished.

And the New Testament pattern is if there's a Savior, even when we find ourselves weak and unable to do what Israel was called to do, yet we don't find ourselves punished.

Why?

There's no condemnation in Christ Jesus, Paul said, right?

God said, I've taken that away.

And when you and I go out and live our lives, and our lives don't reflect the glory of God the way He would like it to, He doesn't come back and say, Man, I'm sorry.

I, you know, I gotta put you, I gotta put you under my thumb for a while, I gotta squash you for a little bit.

He just is not like that.

He's good.

I will never stop doing good to you.

If in your Christian life you are imagining, excuse me, if you are imagining that there are circumstances in your life in which God is punishing you because of something you did, you're thinking like an Israelite.

You're not thinking like a follower of Christ.

You haven't yet understood what God's doing.

He's filled you with his spirit, he's drawn you to a new place.

And so the problems of life, the you know, the variations in health and finance and family relation and all that stuff, all those messes that we have in our lives, they do not constitute the punishment of God in your life.

That's been settled.

And so, even though we're talking about this massive idea of God's name being profaned in the world through the people who carry his name, he says, Yeah, when that happens, we look to Jesus.

And anybody who says, Oh, look, their God wasn't powerful enough to keep them from sinning against him.

God says, Oh, yes, I was.

Because I solved the wrath problem and I put my spirit in them, and I know what the end is going to be, and the accuser doesn't, right?

The end is gonna be that my people will walk more and more wholeheartedly toward me.

They will fear me more and more over the course of their lives, they will love me more and more because I'm at work in them, not because they're sitting, you know, in a corner saying, Oh, if I could just do this better, if I could just No, he says, just come to me, draw on me, let me show you my heart.

And as Pastor Josh said, the promises of God are the revelation of who he is.

He is a God who wants to do this, a God who has said, we're not gonna have this pattern for the next million years of people who say they want to be my people and then just can't pull it off.

We're gonna have a new covenant, we're gonna have a new relationship.

And now we can give him everything we've got, even though it's by any standard that we might think about seems inadequate.

God says, it's all I'm looking for.

I'm filling up the rest with who I am, and you're gonna be my people.

And I'm gonna be your God, and you're gonna love it that way.

See, Israel never really loved it that way, generally, right?

That's the evidence anyway.

Except for that small group of people who got it.

We are the people in the new covenant who get it.

We've heard the word of Jesus in our lives.

We've said to him, Come in, I want that.

I recognize that I'm a mess, and I'm probably not gonna get better on my own.

And God says, I know.

I have done it all.

That's the glory of the promises.

When Pastor Josh started at Abraham and traced the promises through, you know, sometimes we get confused and we think that promise where God said, I'm gonna do it all to Abraham, we think, oh, well, but by the time I got to Moses, it suddenly changed, and God said, Nah, from now on, you guys got to do a bunch of it.

That's not what happened.

There was a promise to Abraham that still carries on, right up to Jesus and all this other stuff.

You got to do it this way, all that law stuff.

God says, I'm just showing you that no matter what standard I set out there, you're not gonna make it.

You're just not gonna, your hearts are incapable of it.

You don't understand how bad the problem is.

And if we understood how bad the problem is, we would cling to Jesus with everything in us.

So cling to Jesus.

That's what he's there for.

God has said, I will never stop doing good to you.

And when you wonder if it's true, keep looking at Jesus.

He died for you.

He was raised so that he could pour his spirit into you.

He makes us holy.

Think about this.

He makes us holy.

That whole conference, that whole thing, that chart about being set apart and separate.

Do you realize this?

When you walk into a room, you are different fundamentally than every non-Christian type person in the room.

Because God has made you different.

You're holy.

You may say, I don't feel holy, but God has made it set you apart for his own purposes, and that's what makes you holy, not your behavior and your performance.

Praise God, saints.

God is good to us, he has done all of this so that his name might be lifted up and that we can look and say, as we sing these songs about how good God is.

Remember, it's not because of who we are or what we think we've achieved or become.

It's simply because he said, I love them.

I'm just gonna do this.

I'm gonna show the world that I'm the kind of God that not only can set a bunch of rules, I'm gonna make people who can actually do it.

Not by beating them into submission, but by myself taking all the punishment and giving them all of the blessings that they need to live the life that he's called us to.

So let's this week live that life honor Christ.

Peter said set apart or sanctify Christ in your hearts, right?

Treat Christ as holy and remember that God is doing you good.