Intro to Promise Believers Series

Let's look at a verse here, two verses.

So if you have your Bible, turn to Hebrews 13, 5 and 6.

It'll be on the screen as well.

Hebrews 13, 5 and 6.

You've heard this already.

Isn't it fun how like the Holy Spirit kind of gives us as we're doing church without you knowing?

Like Yvonne didn't consult me.

Norman didn't call me and say, hey, what verse should I share when I have share time?

Nor did Yvonne.

It's just this cool thing about when you become a Christian, God gives us the same Spirit.

So the same Holy Spirit that lives in me lives in Yvonne and Norman and all of us, right?

And so this is um was already in the notes before we started church this morning, uh, these two verses.

Here's what it says in Hebrews 13.

Keep your life free from the love of money, be satisfied with what you have, for he himself has said, I will never leave you or abandon you.

Therefore, we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.

What can man do to me?

I wanted to start with that verse because this is, as we go through this series called Promised Believers, it fits within kind of a vision that I have for preaching, where sometimes we will do sermons where we talk about how to how to do Christianity.

Like, what does it mean on a day-to-day basis to be a Christian?

Like, what does that look like?

So, so this series called Promised Believers is more for us as Christians.

And my hope is to talk about how do we integrate this idea of faith and the Bible and being a follower of Jesus into situations like I've got cancer, or I can't find housing, you know, or I've got different things going on in my life, or I'm running a work crew, you know, or I'm a student, or, you know, I'm cleaning up my house and volunteering in the compassion center, or, you know, you're out there and your knee gets messed up, you know, and or we're parents, you know.

I'm I want to talk about like what does it look like for us to live out our faith and take what we find in Scripture and have it like be something that we experience.

Don't you want to experience God not just on Sunday morning, but Monday, like in the middle of Monday at 2:30 in the afternoon, it's like, whoa, this is God.

I'm experiencing God in the midst of not, and you it's not that you had to go and like step out of your normal life to experience God, but you're literally you're experiencing God in the normal life that you live.

And you have a set of relationships and people that God's put you around, and it's like you don't have to go to a building or step out of that context to experience God, but you are there experiencing God.

So, this my hope and my prayer for this series is that we will be a people who are more and more integrating our faith and experiencing God within that context.

Hey guys, come on in.

So, this is an example, okay?

Hebrews 13, 5 and 6 is an example of a promise that God made.

God made a promise.

What's the promise in verse 5?

I will never leave you or abandon you.

That's right.

This is a promise that God made in Deuteronomy 31, 8.

Okay?

God makes a promise.

Who wrote Deuteronomy?

Moses.

Moses, yeah.

Paul wasn't on the scene yet.

Okay, his first five books of the Bible.

You've got Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

Moses oversaw the composition of those books.

Some of its oral tradition put into writing.

So God's speaking through Moses, his messenger, as he's leading the children of Israel through the wilderness, and Deuteronomy is specifically written to the group of people that are gonna go into the promised land under Joshua's leadership.

Moses is gonna die.

And so God is promising to those people, I will be with you.

I'm never gonna leave you or forsake you, or I'm not gonna abandon you, right?

So that's spoken.

But then this is who's writing the book of Hebrews?

Where is the book of Hebrews?

Old or New Testament?

New Testament, right?

Okay, so we're reading a New Testament book that's quoting an Old Testament book and a conversation that God has with a Old Testament group of people, the Jews, right?

And so the writer of Hebrews, which we actually don't know, is it Paul?

Is it Titus?

We don't know who wrote Hebrews, but it's a New Testament book.

This writer is saying, look what happened.

Look what happened.

God spoke to the children of Israel in the wilderness and said, I'm never going to leave you or forsake you.

Then he goes to Psalm 118, and it says, Therefore, we may boldly say, and he quotes where it starts, the Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.

What can man do to me?

That's another quote from a thousand years later, out of Psalm 118.

So do you see that God is speaking, he's promising something, he's promising to give his presence.

And what is man's response?

Man's response is, therefore we can boldly say, The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.

What can man do to me?

Who's initiating the conversation?

The Lord is.

The Lord is extending himself in promise to his people saying, I'm never going to leave you or forsake you.

But then the react, the result is a response of, well, if God said that, then I can do this.

And here in this setting, it's the Lord's my helper, I will not be afraid.

What can man do to me?

This is the idea.

Okay, this is the big idea of the whole Bible.

Because the God of the Bible is the God who is extending himself in promise.

He's giving himself to humans as the God who says, Here's what I will do, here's who I am, here's how I am going to work.

And we as followers of God are called to respond.

But how many of you in your own relationship with God or your understanding of Christians, how many of you are think of your relationship with God where it's like, okay, God, I prayed that prayer.

I'm now a follower of you, and I'm gonna prove to you how good I am, and I just promise that I'm gonna try my best this week, right?

You come to church, you get energized, the worship touches your heart, and you're like, this week I'm not gonna mess up.

God, I promise this one's gonna be a good one, right?

I'm gonna be nice to the people around me.

But then you get to like Monday, five minutes into waking up, and it's like, oh, I failed my promise, you know?

It's like I couldn't keep my promise.

This is the reality.

The reality of the Christian life is that we are not meant to be promise keepers or the promise makers, as much as we're to be the promise believers.

We're just we're in this position where we're responding to what God has promised to us.

And so the plan for the next couple of weeks is to consider this idea.

God is not looking for you and I to make a promise to Him, He is looking for us to respond.

I'm gonna make the case that our faith is a response to the promises of God.

We hear a lot about how, oh, we need to live by faith.

What does that mean?

What does it mean to be a people that this week, not like what does it specifically mean?

Like laser focus.

What does it mean to be a people that live by faith?

Exactly, right?

That's the that is exactly a response to the promise of God, right?

You know the promise.

I'm never gonna leave you or forsake you, right?

And so the faith, our faith has something to grab a hold on.

It's just like rock climbing.

It's like, where do you put your hand next when you're rock climbing?

It's those promises of God that I'm gonna put my hand on that one and I'm gonna claim it.

Or like the old hymn says, we're gonna standing, standing on the promises of God, right?

That's the first thing.

Our faith is a response to the promise of God.

Second, Jesus gave us legal access to the promises of God.

Legal access.

This is not just some, and what I mean by this is that this the promises of God work themselves out and are communicated within a legal framework.

This isn't just like some wheelie-neely, like, hey, God's just kind of like throwing out promises here and there.

No, there is a basis.

There's a basis that's called covenant.

God covenants with himself, and so he is able to, because of the work of Jesus, give himself to us in promise.

And then the third thing is that many Christians live impoverished life because they're unaware of the promises of God.

They don't understand how this dynamic works itself out on a daily basis.

So we are going to look at some specific promises, but I want to do more than just going through the promises of God, because there's actually 30,000.

Some have said as many as 30,000 promises in the Bible.

I want to emphasize the dynamic role that the promises of God are supposed to play in our lives.

In other words, how does this work itself out in a practical way on a daily basis when you're driving around town or you're at work or you're parenting or you're worried about your money, all of those kinds of things.

The promises of God are a part of God's economic system.

You will hear me use a lot of financial illustrations as we go through this study.

We can barely exist.

Think about money.

This last week, right?

We can barely exist without our life intersecting money in some way or another.

Either you don't have enough money or you have you're using money to do life.

Being a functional human in society means some type of relationship with money.

If, look, it's hard to do life without money.

Some of you know this better than others, right?

But even if you have a lot of money, your relationship with money isn't not a necessarily a lack as much as it is a uh relationship where it's stewardship, right?

You're not being a human adult, functional human adult, without relating to money.

Marvin, while you're up, is there any way you could turn down the AC?

I mean, turn it up so I'm not free.

I don't know if you guys are freezing, but it's like blowing.

I always stand right under the vent.

It's like freezing.

It's like in the and then in the winter, it's like this is the heat, and it's like so hot.

Um, but yeah, I don't think we need any more AC right now.

Okay, let me just give you an example of how this works, okay?

In terms of promise.

The gospel message itself.

When you became a Christian, you believed a promise.

The gospel message it describes our brokenness in relationship to God and our human condition uh in our alienation from God, but then it goes on to promise, it promises forgiveness, it forgive, it promises a restoration of our relationship with God, the work of God's spirit in our lives, and then eternal life as a friend of God.

So the very beginning of your relationship with God is based on believing a promise.

We use the term gospel, but the gospel is a package of promises that God makes, and he says, This is my promise for you.

And then how did you take advantage of that gospel message?

What is your response to it?

How did you become a Christian?

To believe, right?

You responded by saying, Yes, I want that.

I want to be a follower of you now, right?

If somebody comes to you this week and goes, hey, I I like, I'm I've been feel stirred up.

I want to be a Christian, what are you gonna tell them to do?

That they need to believe the promises of God.

In the gospel, right?

Believe what God has said about his son Jesus Christ.

Place your faith in Jesus Christ.

So the gospel is a promise, it's heavenly potential, sitting in God's bank account, ready to be distributed to anyone who decides to respond in faith.

But the Bible doesn't just explain how people can be reconciled back to God.

The Bible explains a victorious life where the Christian is overflowing with love, hope, and peace.

They're making wise decisions and navigating difficulty in a way that is inspiring to an observing world.

Okay?

So the message of Christianity is not just, hey, I'm gonna rescue you from hell and give you nice warm, fuzzy feelings, but it is a proposition of I want to give you life abundantly.

That God wants us, like the idea of being a disciple, which is what Christians were first called, right?

They weren't called Christians first, they were called disciples.

Go through the first 12 chapters of of Acts over and over again.

You don't see the word Christian.

What word do you see?

You see disciples.

The disciples were gathered, the disciples were in their house, the disciples were spreading out, the disciples were persecuted, their name was disciple.

The idea of a disciple is hey, we're doing, we're being followers of Jesus, and we're doing a lifestyle.

So the promises of God come to us through scripture.

The Spirit of God is at work in our lives to intersect our thinking and our emotions with these promises.

And when we say the promises of God, we're not only talking about the places where the Bible says, where God says, Look, I promise to do this.

It doesn't work to just do like a study and where you just kind of do a word search of the word promise throughout scripture, although that's a good start.

Instead, we're looking on a broader scale where there are these declarative statements where God is saying, I will.

There's usually a future tense, a verb, and God's personal pronoun.

That's that is the recipe for promise.

It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a promise for you.

God's oftentimes like when people are doing the wrong thing.

God says, I'm gonna do this, and that's a promise.

That's not necessarily one you want to promise you want to apply to your life.

When God says to Noah, I'm gonna wipe out the earth.

I don't know, that's not the you don't want to place your faith in that one to like transform your life.

There's a lesson to be learned from that promise.

But God is, I think the the base, the basic thing to understand is that God is a God who is extending himself to humanity in promise.

He's doing it from the very beginning.

Just a couple of, just like when you look at Genesis chapter 2, look at he says, if you eat from the tree, the the tr tree of the knowledge of good and bad, if you eat from it, which I don't want you to do, don't eat it, but if you do eat it, in the day you eat it, you'll certainly die.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

He's promising this is what will happen.

In chap in the next verse, verse 18, uh, he says, It's not good for man to be alone.

I will make a helper corresponding to him.

God's declaring in advance what he's about to do.

Now, just moments later, he takes action and he fulfills what he's promising.

But do you see, just in this little verse that we kind of take for granted, do you see how God is working?

He's saying before he does it what he's gonna do.

And that's like super simple, but you can base your life on that dynamic.

The question to tomorrow morning when you get up is like, have you listened to what God's already said about the day?

That's why, that's why I changed up our format here.

And we may go back to this format where we're kind of all facing the other direction.

I don't know what we're, you know.

But for right now, the idea of this format for our seating is this I want us in a posture where we're listening for like, Lord, what are you gonna say?

Because God works in a way where he speaks in advance, and and it is important, it's on us to listen, but God's nature, God's way that he works from the very beginning of scripture is he's saying, Here's what I'm gonna do.

If you go to the next next chapter, chapter three, so then the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you've done this, you're cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal, you will move on your belly and eat the dust of all uh for all the days of your life.

Um so he's he's telling, he's telling the serpent what is going to happen.

I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.

You see, again, here God's saying, here's what will happen.

He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.

This is the first promise of the Messiah, right?

God is breaking into human history at the very beginning, saying, Here is what this relationship will look like between the serpent, the serpent, and the um the future offspring of the woman.

He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.

He said to the woman, I will intensify your labor pains, you will bear children with painful labor, your desire will be for your husband, and yet he will rule over you.

So God's speaking in advance into um history, giving um all of these declarative statements.

This is a quote.

Kind of sit on this for a second, go through this.

This is from a book called Um Theology of Hope.

A promise is a declaration which announces the coming of a reality that does not yet exist.

Thus, promises set man's heart on a future history in which the fulfilling of the promise is to be expected.

Do you see that a promise set it engages us because it sets our hearts on a future history in which a fulfilling of the promise is to be expected.

It is a case of divine promise.

It is a case of a divine promise, then, that indicates that the expected future does not have to develop within the framework of the possibilities inherent in the present, but arises from that which is possible to the God of the promise.

In other words, it doesn't, what is being promised doesn't have to happen with what you would expect.

It isn't necessarily inherent in the present.

Like you can look at what is present and you can project out what will happen next, but the promises of God are not necessarily inherent to what you see, but they arise from that which is possible to God, to the God of the promise.

This can also be something which by this by the standard of the present experience appears impossible.

One of the things that God loves to do, and we see it all throughout the Bible, is that God loves to make promises that would seem impossible.

Come on, you guys know the Bible.

What does he say?

He says, look, yeah, you're surrounded by the army, but tomorrow morning you're gonna wake up and they're all gonna be dead.

Is that possible?

No.

Is that inherent in the in the natural circumstance?

No.

No, that's not inherent.

That's not what you would expect.

And yet God loves to say, I'm gonna give you a promise.

It's gonna break in, it's something that you can set your heart on, and it's gonna break in.

And yes, it's totally impossible, but possible with me.

What did God say to Mary?

He said, You're gonna have a baby, you're gonna have a child, right?

Was it possible?

Had she been with Joseph yet?

No.

No, but but a part of that language there in Luke 1 and 2 is like, what's impossible with man is possible with God.

Remember that word dynamic?

Like I want to I want us to explore this because I want us to consider the dynamic of how life works with as followers of God.

Part of that is to recognize that God gets kicks, or we call it glory, right?

He gets a kick and has fun with breaking the rules of what's possible.

He allows, it's we've talked about how God sets up life sometimes, puts us in impossible situations.

Whether, and you can relate to Lazarus in the grave, and it's like, this is impossible.

I don't know how this is going to work itself.

Out.

And yet God makes promises in advance because He wants us to be a people of faith.

We're a people that are trusting in the promises of God.

Now there's all kinds of objections that come up.

I'm going to walk through some of these.

For one of them, there's four here that I kind of wrote out.

One is, Josh, I'm already a Christian.

Are there really any useful promises in the Bible for me?

Does the Bible really speak to the specifics of my life?

In other words, the parts, the Bible is vague and distant.

It doesn't relate to daily life.

Some may object to this idea of the promises of God in that way.

And this person who would say that, maybe, maybe you can relate to that statement, doesn't understand the specificity and the clarity of Scripture.

That God's word applies to so many different situations, but to make it even more applicable, the Spirit of God is given to us and then leads us.

Basically, there's an intersection between our life, the Spirit of God, and God's Word, right?

And so the Bible is incredibly relevant, and there are promises.

And I guarantee you, there are things.

If you're coming and looking at your week ahead and you're like, I don't know what promises of God are for me, it's not because the Bible's bankrupt of promises for you.

It's because you don't know the Bible well enough, or I don't know the Bible well enough.

It's on us to know our Bibles and to let the Holy Spirit take and use, you know, the Holy Spirit highlighter to help us remember, like, oh, that's a promise that I can believe in the Lord for this week.

The second objection that some might have is Josh, aren't the promises of God just meant to be chicken soup for the soul or material for sympathy cards and coffee mugs?

I'm more grounded and practical than that.

I don't need those warm fuzzies to get along with the Christian life.

That might be the person who feels like they they engage the Bible, or that the parts of the Bible that engage the emotional life are not safe or useful.

That's how some people feel.

It's like I don't want to give myself to the Bible.

Think about like what makes you feel safe.

What makes you feel safe is the things that you can control, right?

When you start saying, God, I'm gonna trust something that you're saying about the future, it seems impossible, and I can't see how it's gonna come to pass.

That is a very dangerous uh way to live, and you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

And so there are those who want to kind of relegate the promises of God to the emotional people, the emotional Christians.

Because it's not there's those who are like they want to just engage it for as wisdom, like, oh, there's good principles, it's practical, you know, it'll teach me kind of how to do life, but I don't really want to trust the promises of God, because what if it doesn't work out?

So that may you may feel yourself kind of objecting to the promises of God for that reason.

A third objection is this the promises of God are for good Christians.

You don't know how badly I've messed up.

I don't dare look into the promises of God because that would be greedy.

I'm just happy to get into heaven by the skin of my teeth.

This would be the person who doesn't understand the finished work of Christ on the cross.

There's this whole, there's this phrase throughout the New Testament.

It's just two words the word in and the word Christ.

If you're in Christ, then you are made wealthy.

There's no anemia to the Christian life that's um God-given.

It's a choice of not taking advantage or accessing all the wealth that Jesus purchased for you on the cross.

And Jesus died on the cross so that you can be wealthy and access all of these things that that the Bible speaks of, not so that you can get into heaven by the skin of your teeth.

And so Satan will beat you up.

You'll mess up this week.

I don't know what it's gonna be, but you'll mess up.

And Satan's happy to preach a sermon to you at that moment about how you failed.

And you just need to know that the promises of God are not made null and void by your failure because of the what Jesus did on the cross.

The fourth objection may be this Josh, aren't the promises of Scripture intended for Israel or the original audience?

I don't want to take the Bible out of context.

When we read the Bible, we are just spectators of how God worked with other people.

It isn't really for us, it doesn't really apply to me.

And I appreciate this one because I want to be a part of a church where we're carefully handling God's word, that we're interpreting it and understanding that what we are given in God's word is a message that was spoken to an original audience.

And yet we can take this kind of argument or objection as kind of the fine print or the small print on the bottom of a contract, and basically read ourselves out of the program of God because we think, well, it doesn't really apply to me.

That was for Israel, or that was for the disciples, right?

I've often heard, you know, when one of the promises that we'll spend some time looking at is the promises that uh Jesus makes to the to the disciples about prayer.

If you ask anything in my name, I'll do it.

What kind of promise is that?

That's a tough one.

How do we handle that promise?

And I've heard some people who are like, well, you know, that was just for the first 12 apostles.

They could they could get that promise, but that's not really for us.

Try to read in there a little bit of fine print so that we can loosen up the the um absolute language of these promises.

All right, in closing, here's what 2 Peter says.

It says, his divine power, his divine power, God's divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness.

How?

How has he given us everything required for life and godliness?

Well, it's through the knowledge of him who called us.

By knowing God, we have everything that we need for life and godliness.

For life and godliness.

Him who called us, he in who who called us?

Um, or what what is the knowledge um of him?

It's the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

Okay, so the logic here, this is totally Peter, and it's difficult to follow along, but look at the next verse, verse four.

By these, okay, the by these connects back up to the knowledge of him in the previous verse, the knowledge of him who called us.

It's by these he has given us very great and precious promises.

Very great and precious promises, so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world because of evil desires.

Here's the thing Peter's saying, look, the promises of God connect us with the divine nature.

They're precious, they're powerful, they're everything, they're a part of this supply, the sufficiency of God on our behalf.

One more verse.

Hebrews 8:6.

Hebrews 8:6

Hebrews 8.6 says this.

But Jesus has now obtained a superior ministry.

And to that degree, he is the mediator of a better covenant.

This is all around the priesthood of Jesus, how Jesus is our high priest.

But look what it says.

Jesus has obtained, he's a mediator of a better covenant, and he's established that's been established on better promises.

Better promises.

In a second, we're going to take communion together.

And when we drink the cup, I'll oftentimes say, this is the cup of the new covenant.

That new covenant is the covenant that's spoken of here that Jesus mediated in his blood, and it's established on better promises.

So when we hold up that cup and we consider the work that Jesus did, one of the things you can remember and reflect on is that this new covenant has some better promises than the covenant that was made with Israel.

Better than the covenant that was made with David and his household.

It is a better covenant.

What we have inherited as followers of Jesus, we live at a great time in history as followers of God, as people of God.

We have better promises than people who have lived before us.

We see with greater clarity.

And so let me give you some points of application for this week.

The first is this please read, study, meditate, and pray the Bible this week.

Do you see?

It's not just read the Bible, read it, study it, meditate it, and pray it.

I used to have those four things written in the back of my Bible.

Because sometimes you need a reminder that reading the Bible is different from studying the Bible, and meditating on the Bible is different from studying the Bible.

Praying the Bible is different from meditating on the Bible.

Those are four things that we need to do.

If God has revealed Himself as the God of promise and the promises are in the Bible, then we ought to be doing these four things.

Second, use the Bible Project app.

I put it in the email this morning.

Okay?

It'll be in the text message link that went out next week when we send that out.

Use the Bible Project app.

If you don't understand, if you're like, hey, I don't understand the Bible, use the Bible Project app to read, look at the book overviews, book summaries.

It will help you understand the Bible better.

Use a journal, paper or digital, to organize your thoughts, right?

And fourth, use the Dwell app, the Bible audio app.

If you struggle with reading, if you struggle with like, or you're in a hurry, you're like, I don't have time, I'm driving all over, I'm doing all these things.

Listen to the Bible on audio.

The bottom line is as we go through this study, like we're gonna talk about the promises of God.

I'm gonna teach you this dynamic idea of like doing life based off of the promises of God.

But at the end of the day, like if you wake up tomorrow morning and all you've got is just a little bit of Sunday morning for 30 minutes of me preaching, the Holy Spirit does not have much material to work with in your life to remind you of promises, right?

And it's there, it's in the Bible, but you haven't engaged it.

You gotta engage your Bibles, you gotta be Bible readers, you gotta put it in to your schedule.

I don't know how it works for you, whether it's in the morning or at night or while you're driving, but somehow you gotta be ingesting the word of God into your life.

I need it, you need it.

We all need it.

Amen.

Amen.

All right, let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

We are grateful that you have revealed yourself to us through your word.

We don't want to be a people.

There's only a few of us in here, but we do not want to be the people where you look at and you're like, y'all are acting like you're so poor when you've made us rich.

We don't want to live impoverished lives.

We want the dynamic, the power of God to be upon our lives.

We want to trust in you.

We want to get that hint, that heads up on how you want to work.

We don't want to take for granted and just do this week on our own.

We we want to do it in cooperation with you.

So, Lord, I pray that you bless our Bible reading this week.

Lord, you know how busy we are.

You know, the things that kind of get in the way of us regularly reading the Bible.

And uh, Lord, we ask that you would just help us to ingest more scripture, help us to understand what we're reading, help us to meditate on it, memorize it, remember it.

Lord, that you'll you have something that your spirit can bring to memory as we're doing our life this week.

Lord, as we go into this time of communion, we pray that you would meet us, that we would remember just the work you did on the cross um this morning.

Thank you, Jesus.

We pray this in your name.

Amen.