Habakkul Part 5 (feat. Dr. Mike Plunket)

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as we come to the conclusion of our study of the book of Habakkuk.

Want to talk about how Habakkuk teaches us to handle evil times?

And one of the things that I, I want to frame today is that we don't rejoice for our suffering.

We learn how to rejoice in our suffering.

And in a sense we're going to talk about the discipline of joy because the joy of the Lord is our strength.

So I'm gonna read a few passages from Habakkuk chapter three, his last chapter there.

I'm going to just highlight certain verses, although we'll be looking at the whole chapter in verse two.

Habakkuk says, Oh Lord, I have heard the report of you and your work.

A Lord.

Do I fear in the midst of the years, revive it in the midst of the years, make it known in wrath.

Remember mercy.

And then we jumped down a little further.

And Habakkuk is expressing his own emotional and his physical or chemical response to the troubles that not only he but that the whole of of the people of God are about to face.

And he says, I hear and my body trembles, my lips quiver at the sound.

Rottenness enters into my bones, my legs tremble beneath me.

Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble to come upon people who invade us.

And then his conclusion, though the fig tree should not blossom nor fruit be on the vines.

The produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food.

The flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls.

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord.

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

God, the Lord is my strength.

He makes my feet like the deers.

He makes me tread on my high places.

So this was a book about how to handle some of the most evil times that the people of God I've ever faced.

A very evil empire.

The Babylonian empire is about to crush Habakkuk's beloved country.

He loves Judah.

He loves God's people and he is a bit, he is seeing what's going to happen.

They're not going to have any food cause when invading came in, they destroyed anything of value.

They took anything of value.

They left nothing for the people who remained.

So there'll be no food, there'll be no livestock.

It will be an absolute social and economic disaster.

This is one of the reasons why I wanted us to study this book together because this is a book about reality.

It's a book about hard times in which there is the possibility.

Nothing will be left, no order to the society, no sense of security, not even food to eat and no resources to rely upon and yet here is Habakkuk.

At the end of his assessment, which is a realistic assessment of what the Babylonian army is about to do to Judah.

He still ends it with joy and he ends it rejoicing.

He knows that he's facing complete devastation.

And yet you see in him a poise, an inner equilibrium that DOE all around him.

There is no Shalom inside him.

There is the true Shalom of God.

And so as we look at this together, as we learn what he learned, I think we can find a way for that same poise and that same inner equilibrium to dominate our own encounters with evil times.

No matter how long they take.

There's a, there's a, a story of a missionary, an English missionary by the name of Alan Gardner, and he was shipwrecked, um, along with, uh, all of these other shipmates on a desert Island in a, in a remote area where no one could reach them.

Everybody on the ship who had gotten to the Island was now dead.

He's the last one left and they found his journal.

And in his journal he had one last entry, his last entry and he wrote this.

Psalm 34 10 the young lions suffer, want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

He has no food.

There was no water.

He's dying and his last words were, I am overwhelmed with the sense of the goodness of God.

See what he, what he's challenging us.

What Habakkuk challenges us is to ask the question, what do you use?

How do you come to the conclusion that God is good for Alan Gardner?

For Habakkuk, they are concluding that is good even though they are facing insurmountable circumstances, inevitable devastation, and he has both Habakkuk and Allen Gardner is saying, I am overwhelmed with the sense of the goodness of God.

You see, most of us, we tend to decide that God is good, inferring it from good circumstances.

We tend to conclude that he's good.

If our life is good, if I relationships are good, if our our health is good, you see, if you have concluded that God is good by inference, what happens when life starts to say life is not good, life is not fair.

Things don't go the way you want them to go.

See, most of us will lose that overwhelming sense of the goodness of God if we're simply concluding it from the goodness of life or from the circumstances or the people in our lives especially, I've come to believe that we've, we really want a lot of control.

We want to feel like we're not helpless, like we're not powerless.

Look at what happens when people have a sense of powerlessness.

They get angry, they get filled with rage, they feel anxious.

Sometimes you just conclude that it's hopeless and you become depressed.

See, all of those power sources, anger, anxiety, worry, fear, depression.

They're all conclusions that God is not good enough, that you need the power.

You need the control.

What happens then if like Habakkuk or Alan Gardner, you find out you don't have control.

Will you then be overwhelmed with the sense of God's goodness or will you be overwhelmed with anger, with anxiety, with depression, fear.

So here as I look at both Habakkuk and I look at this incredible missionary, these men found a way to contact the goodness of God in the hardest of times they had direct contact with the goodness of God.

They weren't inferring that God was good because they had favorable circumstances, but they were rejoicing in the goodness of God in the midst of their sufferings.

And one of the things I think that Habakkuk teaches me is I, I, I'm not called to rejoice for my sufferings.

I don't think we ever are called to say a bad thing is a good thing and evil thing is a valuable thing.

I think we're called to tell it like it is.

If it's evil, it's evil.

If it's bad, it's bad.

If it's unjust or unfair, it is those things you will not see.

God anoint your, your, your lies are your coping mechanisms.

But what he is calling us to be able to do is to learn to rejoice in our sufferings.

And Rebecca gives us some, some clues of this.

And I know what I'm about to unpack with you is, is somewhat complicated and somewhat deep, but I tell you it is, it is really the resource of spiritual men and women to understand that suffering is inevitable.

But how you react to that suffering is a choice.

And it is either a spiritually positive choice or a spiritually negative choice.

And what Habakkuk says is this in verse 19, he says, God, in the midst of my suffering, makes my feet like the feet of the deer and causes me to be able to have, have a security and, and to have a power and skill on the mountain in the high place.

Now think about this with me.

The high place, the mountain, and to climb a mountain is, is, is incredibly dangerous.

And, but to live on the high ground is where your security is the most formidable.

It's been interesting to me as I've traveled, particularly through central and South America where the Spaniards and even the indigenous, uh, national people all, all put their settlements on the highest ground possible so that they could look out from the highest places.

It would be hard to attack them because they were secure.

They had the best sight of their enemies, and they always put themselves in the most advantageous place to defend from the, the attack.

But every time I ascend to those places, I go, how did they get the materials up here to do this?

How did they have the skill to put this, this cathedral up here or this Fort up here, whatever it might be.

You see, it was hard to get there.

It was never easy to ascend to the Heights.

But once you had established that place in the Heights and you can live there, secure, safe, and with the most peaceful, what is, what is Habakkuk saying?

He's saying that God is giving you pressure right here, right now.

He's pushing you and the suffering that you go through and the, the times of feeling powerless or helpless, those times that you go through, they're either going to ascend you to the Heights, they're going to take you up or they're going to take you down.

And you see this with people.

Some people, when they suffer, they become stronger.

They become more loving, they become more patient, they become more peaceful.

I can never forget both before Lisa's surgery, as my wife was for the first time, realizing that she had a tumor, that she had cancer and as we were preparing for her surgery, and then as she went through this, you know, this monumental surgery that the doctor called her greatest, like her greatest work ever.

And Lisa was recovering and she was not fully herself and she was not in, in, in her strength.

And yet I watched her every day from the beginning of hearing about the cancer to recovering from the cancer.

I watched the sweetness of my wife get even sweeter.

I saw her strength get even stronger.

There were, there were times where these nurses who were working on the ward would just come in and not leave because they wanted to be in her presence because of how sweet and how patient and how loving she was.

Sometimes I was like, what'd you get out of here?

She's tired.

She doesn't need to hear your life story and yet Lisa would would pray for them and pray with them.

You see, suffering either pushes you up or suffering pushes you down and some people get more sour, they get short tempered, they get impatient, they're agitated, they can't stand even.

One more thing, I love you.

What does that saying?

I'm down to my last nerve or whatever it might be.

I can't handle any more on my plate sort of thing.

So suffering Habakkuk is teaching either pushes you up to the Heights, not easy to get there, but it's a place of safety and security that you begin to walk like one who was made to walk up there and the high places or it pushes you down in a way.

What, what Habakkuk is saying is either pushes you to the Heights or destroys you.

See, the high places in the scripture are really these designated divine strongholds that God has for you, divine strongholds that he has for your destiny.

But you see these, these demonic strongholds, these areas of of devastating habits or these where where you will not ascend.

They have to be completely undone in your life and you just can't teach on these strongholds and have them undone.

You have to see why they have to be disassembled.

You have to see why they have to be taken down block by block because the lies that hold a strong hold in place are not easily or not easily revealed, and they're not easily taken out.

And so what?

What Habakkuk is showing us and what God wants us to learn is he wants to set your feet on high places, but in order to do that, he has to destroy the low places.

He has to destroy where you have built fortresses in your mind to defend yourself, protect yourself, keep yourself comfortable.

You'll never get to your potential taking your comfort zone with you.

You'll only get there if you're willing to destroy the old strongholds so that he can take you to the high places.

And here's the thing, and this is truthfully, this only happens in Christianity.

It only happens as you are leaning into the direction and the leading of the Holy spirit that you can both experience sorrow and joy at the same time.

You see, we get to be honest about what makes us sorrowful.

We get to be honest about what grieves us, but we also know that the circumstances in the present are not the source of our joy.

So we can acknowledge the source of grief in this moment.

We can acknowledge that this isn't the way I planned it.

This is what I want it to happen.

Habakkuk spent spent the whole first chapter complaining to the Lord, so he was utterly and completely honest.

So he had sorrow, he had grief, but at the same time he did not say, my source is from my circumstances.

He says, my strength is in the Lord.

So you can be a fully realized Christian experiencing the reality of loss and sorrow and grief with complete honesty and yet at the same time you have a an undeniable and indestructable strength that comes because your joy is in the Lord, not in your circumstances.

Look in verse 16 he says, I hear in my body trembles.

Here's what he's saying is what's going to happen and what's going on is making my insides boil up signs about his intestines.

He's talking about his bowels that he is affected physically.

Then he says, my lips quiver, which is a Hebrew way of he's crying uncontrollably, but then he says, but yet I wait quietly.

You see, he, he's not disengaged.

He's not hardened his heart from what's happened.

He's not numb.

His body's not even numb, but his heart is steadied.

His heart is on the high place.

His heart is in a place where he's safe, where he's at peace while even his body is not in a safe place.

See what Habakkuk is showing us here is, is God has a pattern that God loves to teach us how to set our feet on high places in the midst of devastating circumstances.

You see, the way that that Baca follows God's pattern for success in a hard time as he he, he understands the value of repetition.

He understands the value of rejoicing and he understands that these things will give him perspective.

So the first thing I want you to understand about scripture and about the way God does things, God repeats things over and over again and he repeats them a little differently and a little deeper, but, but backup follows this pattern and this verse that we have, it says, you know, I will rejoice and then he says a little bit more intensely, I will take joy.

And then he says, the Lord is my strength.

You see, those are all repetitions, but each one a little bit different, a little bit deeper because you see, as you repeat it, it's getting a little more intense.

It's getting a little deeper.

His spirit is resonating, his spirit is sensitized and his spirit is starting to resonate as he preaches to his own soul.

And we see this throughout the scriptures that God, our master teacher is always repeating himself.

Think about this.

We have four gospels.

Why do we need four?

Well, we need the repetition.

Even Jesus, he didn't just feed 5,000 he fed, he fed 4,000 we have two feedings.

It's interesting, one of the biblical scholars, Michael Woolcock said in Psalm 62 11 he says, we see a pattern here.

God speaks once, but I have to hear it twice.

So there's a sense in what you see.

Repetition is essential because you and I don't get it the first time we hear it.

We see how it relates to what we already know, but we miss a whole lot of it while we're trying to connect it to what we already know.

The second time we hear it, now we've got something of a framework.

It goes a little deeper.

It's a little more intense.

Often by the third time we hear something,

yeah,

finally begins to Dawn on us.

I missed about 75% of that the first time I heard it.

God is saying things once, but it takes us more than once to actually let it go deep within our souls and become marinaded and integrated.

Look at all the times in the Psalms where even, uh,

the Psalmist had to preach to his own soul.

Psalm 42, why are you cast down?

Oh my soul.

And then he gives himself an ascertation hoping God, he's reminding himself in Psalm one Oh three, do not forget all his benefits.

Bless the Lord Oh my soul, and do not forget all of his benefits.

Who's he speaking to?

Not God.

He speaking to himself.

Think about how Jesus and Luke and the storm, when Jesus sees his disciples, he's already see he's already calmed the storm, but he looks at him and he says to them, where is your faith?

He,

he didn't say, you need to have more faith.

Yeah,

he's saying that in the moment of the storm, their faith was absent and it was absent because they weren't remembering to connect their heart to who Jesus is.

They weren't remembering to connect who Jesus is to the storm and so you see, he didn't say, Hey, you guys need to develop faith.

He's saying, your faith is absent because you're not remembering who I am.

You're not remembering who you are and you are thinking the storm is bigger than both of us.

That happens to all of us a lot.

You see, he's not saying, Hey, you need a little more faith.

He's saying, you need to remember who I am.

You need to remember who you are and you need to connect that in relationship to the storm.

That's what faith is.

Faith is remembering, reminding yourself, repeating to yourself so that you get perspective.

You see, the storm is not so big.

If Jesus is who Jesus is, if the one who conquered death and defeated sin is connected to you, then no storm is as big as he is and actually no storm is as big as you are because you are in Christ and Christ is in you.

Are you tracking with me in this?

It's so important.

Understand

we have to do this over and over again.

Habakkuk three times says, rejoice, have joy, take strength in.

He's not, he's not doing it, you know, uh, because it's poetically beautiful.

He's doing it because it's a pattern that works.

Reminding, remembering, repeating.

And then he says, I rejoice.

Now it's clear from this that this isn't simply a feeling.

I've been around people who fake it till they make it and they, they play like they're rejoicing and I really have trouble with the counterfeit form because often what's happening is they're denying the reality of how bad something is so they can play like they're okay.

That's in authentic.

It is not what Jesus anoints.

Jesus anoint reality.

Jesus anoints truth.

When you are lying and deceiving and denying and numbing yourself, he will not anoint that.

He will not resource that.

You know?

Think about what Paul says.

Habakkuk is basically doing what Paul says.

Paul says, rejoice always.

I remember when I first heard this, I was like, wow, how do you do that?

And one of the things you start to realize is there a certain emotions you can't command other people to have.

You can't tell somebody be happy.

And it makes, and they make themselves happy.

And yet at the same time, there's no way that you could talk about rejoicing and be stoic, be a person that nothing affects you.

Rejoicing is, is a res, you know, it's, it's something that comes forth because you're affected positively.

And so really what, what the Bible teaches about rejoicing, what Paul teaches.

And I believe what Habakkuk is doing here is you rejoice in what you treasure.

You rejoice in what you saver.

You see whatever you have savored, whatever you have treasured is something that you love, just turning over and over again in your mind.

And the more that you turn it over and you review it and you rehearse it and you see it again and you see it again, the more joy that you have because you're savoring either an experience or a person.

I remember this even as a little kid.

I loved baseball.

Baseball was my favorite sport.

And I remember particularly in my last year of little league, um, I would replay the games over and over in my mind.

My, my brother, who I, I roomed with would say he couldn't sleep on those nights because even as I was dreaming, I was savoring those baseball games.

And he would say, you know, shut up Mike.

I can't sleep because you know, you're talking about this pitch or this hit or this catch or this throw.

You see when, when you love something, when you treasure it, you savor it and you turn it over and over in your mind.

So when we come to situations that are as devastating as Habakkuk was dealing with, you have to ask yourself the question, can't just merely react.

You have to ask yourself the question, how should I deal with this?

How should I feel about this?

What?

What is it that I need to see?

What is it that I need to do in the midst of this situation to find a place of strength?

And Habakkuk?

And Paul says, that place is that place of rejoicing.

So here's, here's the perspective that comes from repetition, reminding yourself and rejoicing.

Habakkuk began to repeat to himself his own message, his own, his own sermon to his own soul.

And what he did, I had never seen I'd never seen before.

Till this week.

I did not realize the value of this.

I had not understood this.

What Habakkuk did was he began to expand his perspective.

You see

what happens in suffering, what happens when life doesn't go the way you want to do.

The tendency is to zoom in,

okay?

And to zoom in on only the problem or zoom in on the pain or zoom in on the feelings that that circumstance produces.

So use zoom in with intensity.

You focus on that.

And while you're doing that, you see

you're forgetting everything else that's gone before it.

Everything else that will happen after it.

And so the perspective becomes incredibly narrow and narrow in his focus.

And when you look at it like that, what you will say is, is exactly what backing said in the first chapter.

God, why aren't you doing anything about this?

Why are you silent?

Why should I trust you?

Why should I believe in your goodness?

Because I'm zoomed in on this circumstance.

And what happens when you repeat?

When you'd remind yourself,

when you rejoice, you allow the lens to open up.

You allow the perspective to go from zoom

to a giant background, a big, huge framework, and you began to realize, I'm only looking at this moment, but God has spoken throughout the ages to me.

God has worked everything and all things for my good,

and so instead of being zoomed in and complaining and accusing God, now the scope of his faithfulness begins to speak to the suffering of the moment.

Okay,

here's what Habakkuk did, and you see it.

If you read chapter three, it's pretty lengthy, but he details the entire Exodus from Egypt.

You understand?

He's about to be taken captive by the Babylonians.

They're about to devastate his country, and if he only zooms in on that, it's all over.

There's no hope.

There's no goodness in God,

okay?

But you see what he does is he expands not only to the faithfulness of God in his lifetime.

He expands to the faithfulness of God, which had brought him to that moment.

They were no longer in Egypt.

They were set free from slavery.

They were led into the promised land and the promised land was God's doing not their doing.

Yeah.

And so Rebecca could look and say, we once were enslaved in Egypt, now we'll be enslaved in Babylon, but God will be faithful in this end.

Slavery, this slavery just as he was in the other and he will redeem his people.

So instead of only looking at the moment, he's looking at what God has done

in similar circumstances, the Exodus and how God redeemed his people and how his people were set upon a high place.

Now the people themselves didn't handle that high place very well.

All you have to do is read the old Testament, but back cook is not looking at the unfaithfulness of the people.

He's looking at the faithfulness of God and in that broad view, in that wide zoo wide lens.

Now he can say, I rejoice in the Lord.

I take joy in God, my savior, because he saved me in the past.

That's who he is.

And he'll save me in this present.

The Lord is my strength.

Well, how do you do this?

Well, this is where it gets even better.

If you asked me, you have a better Exodus that have backer cat, you have a far greater story than Habakkuk ever had.

He did not know what you know.

When I was studying this, one of the, one of the preachers on this said something that struck me.

Jesus had a conversation with Moses when Jesus went on the Mount, which we call the Mount of transfiguration, and he met with Moses and the glory of God, and he was unveiled as the son of God and he speaking with Moses.

The gospel writer says they spoke of the Exodus.

Now let me tell you what that means.

They weren't speaking of the deliverance from Egypt.

They were speaking of the Exodus that Jesus was about to lead the, they were speaking of how on the cross of Calvary, Jesus was not only gonna set the people of Judah free, he was going to set the whole world free and Moses was glorying and not how he had saved the people, but how Jesus would save the people.

You see, when you zoom in, you forget the cross.

When you zoom in, you forget the resurrection.

When you zoom in, you forget that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the father.

You forget the promises of the wide lens that says even this, he's going to work together for your good, but think about what it costs him to be the one who led our Exodus.

Moses risked his life.

There's no doubt about it.

There was no greater leader in the old Testament than Moses.

You risked his life to save his people from Egypt, but you know what?

He couldn't get Egypt out of his people.

He could get the people out of Egypt, but he couldn't get Egypt out of his people and he couldn't even get Egypt out of himself.

He himself screwed up and was unable to go into the land of promise even after you led God's people out of Egypt.

Only Jesus.

Only Jesus can get.

Only Jesus can get the Egypt, the sin nature, the sinfulness out of his people, only Jesus by coming into our lives and and leading us to the cross, leading us to the resurrection, leading us to the right hand of the father only by becoming born again transformed, regenerated, becoming a new person.

Paul says it this way.

If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.

Old things are passed away.

Behold, all things have become new.

When you think about our Exodus story, it's greater than even the deliverance from Egypt.

When you think of the leader who led us out of our bondage, it's the perfect righteous substitute.

The Lord Jesus Christ.

Moses friends had no righteousness that he could put to the account of his people.

He was as unrighteous and as in need of a savior as you and I are in need of a savior.

But the Lord Jesus, our perfect sacrifice, our perfect substitute takes his righteousness and he applies it to your account so that even when you're in the midst of a powerless moment, even when you're in the midst of a moment that seems like it's out of control, you never lose your right standing and intimacy with God and you never lose the promise that he who began this good work in you is going to bring it through to completion.

I want to close this up in this way.

One of the people that I read, one of the people that I've studied since I was a kid is Jonathan Edwards.

Jonathan Edwards was used very powerfully of God to be a part of the great awakening here in, in, in North America, back, um, in the 17 hundreds.

And he started preaching when he was 18 years old.

And I've seen this a few times, but I thought, I thought it might apply very powerfully today.

So he's 18 years old.

He preaches his first sermon.

And he, he makes these statements or ask these questions in a way.

He says, he says, Christian should be happy, and then he said, why should Christians be happy?

He said, I answered this question in three ways.

Point one are bad things will turn out for good 0.2 are good.

Things are treasured.

Things are savored.

Things can never be taken away from us.

And 0.3, the best things are yet to come.

You see when when you zoom in and you only see the suffering, you can't even hear or feel or experience these three points.

But when you zoom out and you let the wide lens of the accidents of your life and the accidents of your soul and the Jesus who not just risked his life but gave his life and then gave you his righteousness and gave you a new, a new self and a new start, you became a new person.

Then you can take hold in the midst of whatever suffering you're going through.

Even though this is a bad thing, my Jesus will turn it for good.

This is his promise and even even the things that are the best things, the treasured things, the things that are worth me savoring in my life.

These can never be taken away from me.

And even if those other two points don't get to you, the the last one is always true.

Whatever you're going through right now, the best things are yet to come.

Another great old writer was John Newton and John Newton is the one who wrote amazing grace and he says, this is that the very things of God, the things that are waiting for you in glory make even the best times lievable and the worst times bearable.

I hope you'll hear me today.

I know that many times I have wasted my own sorrows.

I have wasted my suffering because all I did was zoom in and say, God, why won't you answer me?

God, why aren't you doing anything?

But when I have zoomed out and when I have taken the wide lens of the faithfulness of God, I have seen that in everything from finances to health, from everything, from career and job, everything from, from whatever unexpected circumstances I've faced.

When I look at it from the wide lens, I see this truth.

Even my bad things turned out to be good.

The good things can never be taken away and I live every day in the joy that the best things are yet to come.

Will you pray with me?

Okay

more?

These are, these are not hard patterns to understand that I need to preach to my own soul to repeat what you have spoken once.

I need to hear it twice, that I need to remind myself that faith needs to show up in my suffering and connect Jesus to my heart and connect whatever storm I'm facing and to give it its proper perspective that I have been called to be a person who knows how to rejoice, not for my suffering but in my suffering.

And that will only happen if my perspective has a wide lens.

Every time I zoom in, it looks so hopeless.

It looks like nothing good could ever come from this, but every time I zoom out, every time I'd take the wide lens, not only of my own life, but going all the way back to the cross of Calvary, where something that looks so bad, so helpless, was actually the thing that turned the world upside down.

Lord, please let these words go deep into our hearts.

Let us be people who know that the Lord is my strength, who know that rejoicing always isn't just a feeling.

It's cultivated by perspective, and yet we will be those who say, my joy is in the Lord, and may people see it.

May there be a difference.

Lord, everybody's having to go through this and people are reacting in such diverse ways, but may they see the rejoicing in us, the joy in the Lord and us and the Lord who is our strength in us.

In Jesus' name, amen.