Habakkuk Part 2 (feat. Dr. Mike Plunket)

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The prophet had a backer, lived in a season, lived in a time of crisis.

The Kings who had followed King Josiah, his sons and his grandsons were wicked Kings.

The nation was corrupt, the government was corrupt, the people were corrupt.

And here was Habakkuk, a man of God, a prophet of God, and it was intolerable for him to live among those who were the people of God with such wickedness and corruption and unrighteousness.

And in the midst of this crisis, he calls out to God.

And even though God answers him after his first prayer, the back doesn't like the answer.

Actually, he doesn't really understand the answer, which is exactly what God said.

He said, even if I tell you what I'm doing, you won't believe it.

You won't understand it.

So Baca cries out a second time and he gets even more forceful.

He gets even more provocative with God.

Last week we, we, we watched Habakkuk station himself to get an answer from God.

And the word that is used there is that he, he waited on the Lord, but he wasn't passively waiting.

He was actively waiting.

He was patiently waiting.

He, even though he didn't understand what was going on, and even though he didn't like it, he was humbling himself before the Lord to wait upon God.

And the in between time of this crisis and this waiting was answered.

But even the answer that we're going to read today is not an easy answer.

So here's what the Lord says to Bacak in his posture of waiting.

He says, write the vision, make it plain on tablets.

So he may run, who reads it for still, the vision awaits its appointed time.

It hastens to the end.

It will not lie.

If it seems slow, wait for it will surely come.

It will not delay.

Behold, his soul is puffed up.

It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

So we see as Habakkuk has put himself in a patient waiting on the Lord and humble, waiting on the Lord, actively waiting on the Lord.

God answers him and he says, wait some more.

It's waiting for the appointed time.

The answer is coming.

You got to wait for it.

It may seem slow but wait for it.

So he began to see in Habakkuk asks a revelation here from God is that you and I don't get to decide when the waiting is over and so what a Bacak is teaching us here is that whatever you fix your eyes on during your waiting time is what's going to speak to you.

If you're fixing your eyes on the problems, on the crisis and the situation, then your heart is going to be filled with anger and confusion and your heart is going to be filled with worry and fear.

But if you fix your eyes as the Lord spoke to Habakkuk said, wait for it.

Wait for it, wait on it.

It will come, but wait for it.

It's worth waiting for.

Then what, what the expectation is here is that the spirit of the Lord is going to bring to you supernatural, uh, communication.

And he could bring dreams, he can bring visions, but your heart has to be open to hearing from God.

He was a backpack, was actually looking for a vision.

He was looking for the vision as he prayed.

So he had opened the eyes of his heart and he was looking not just at the world as his eyes could see, but the heart, his heart was open.

So the eyes of his heart could see what the spirit had to say and was doing it and what the spirit wanted to show him.

Well, what does that mean for you and me?

It means that if you're going to wait on the Lord, effectively, you have to center yourself on God.

There's a, a God-centeredness or a Jesus centerdness to effective wedding.

And what does that mean?

It means you're not just waiting for the blessing.

You're not just waiting for the answers.

You're actually waiting on the Lord himself.

So a backup is one of those books that's almost exactly like Joe.

It's actually called at times a many job.

And if you can remember what job is about here, here's the simple kind of, um, issue in joke.

Okay?

So God's says to Satan, have you considered my servant job?

And the answer comes back.

And it's a very, it is, it's a test of God, not a test of job, but a test of God that Satan gives.

And he says, does JoVE love you for you?

Or does Joe Love you for your blessings, for answered prayers?

Does he love you?

Because he understands what's going on in his life.

And, and God says in all, you know, clarity and directness to Satan, he loves me for me, not for my blessings or not for my blessings only.

And so then Satan says, well, if that's true, then let me take away all his blessings.

And what we see in chapter one and chapter two of Jew of job in a utterly dramatic and traumatic way, everything job has, is taken away even as health.

And so saying this certain, that job has a price at which he will no longer love God and he will curse God for what God has done to him.

You see, that story is repeated throughout the Bible, but it's also a story that's repeated in the, in between times of your life and the question that is that is being tested in the, in between times or in the crisis times is do you love God for God or do you love God for his blessings?

In a way, what God is doing here with a backup is he is, he's really saying, do you only love me?

Do you only trust me?

Will you only wait on me when you understand what's going on and you're convinced of the rewards that will come or the do you do you only love me when you know all of my resources and you're experiencing all of my connections or do you love me for me?

And you think about it.

If you know that someone in your life says that they love you but you know they only love you for the resources that you provide for them or they only love you because they want to get into your network of friends or connections or whatever it might be.

How does it feel to you if you find out that they only love you for what you have for what you can do for them but they don't love you, for you, what a backup is learning and what Baca is teaching us in this waiting in the, in between time.

What he's teaching us is that these are the only chances that you have to really grow in unconditional or genuine or authentic love for God to, to demonstrate that you don't just love God when you understand God or you don't just love God when he's doing what you want him to do, but you love God for God, that he, your view of him, your love for him is bigger than the circumstances you're facing.

Darkness loss, confusing times happen to all of us in the course of our lives.

And the question then is, do I serve God for God or are do I believe that he's supposed to be serving me or is there this rock solid commitment that says, I'm in this with you, God, I'm in this waiting on you.

No matter how long it takes and I'm with you because you're my God.

And acts two 25 Peter refers to King David's statement because this is, this is how we get through.

This is how we overcome.

He said, I saw the Lord always in my presence for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken.

Now in the original Psalm, it isn't just that he's experiencing a supernatural visitation of the presence of God, and so therefore he trust God because of the vision he sees.

No, he's not really saying that at all.

What he's saying is, I have set, I have, I have fixed my mind.

I have placed my mind on the Lord continually being before me.

This is the promise of God.

I'll never leave you.

I'll never forsake you.

I'm with you.

Jesus said always even to the end of the of the of the world so you're not, you're not making it happen, but your faith, your trust is embracing and your mind is set on the fact that he is ever before me like David because he says he as he is at my right hand, even in the in between times I will not be shaken.

You see, if you are shaking, if you are are twisting in the wind, if you are losing it are you are getting so worried or angry or depressed, whatever it is.

The issue here David says, is you've not set the Lord.

You've not sat him continually before you.

You have decided to set your problems continually before you and you are seeing the Lord through your problems.

Instead of seeing your problems through the Lord.

It's for David.

The Lord was always with him and he had determined in his spirit, he had, he had set this truth before his the very eyes of his heart and he went through life going, I will not be shaken because the Lord is ever before me.

So the waiting has to be God centered.

It has to be about the fact that you love for God.

You don't just love God or serve God when it is convenient for you.

But there's a, there's a whole element that takes place in this passage that begins to unpack why we can wait and we can actually, this may seem strange, but we can learn to wait joyfully.

That seems like a strange thing, except when you know that the joy of the Lord is your strength and that your joy and the source of your joy doesn't come from your circumstances, that you have a source of joy that is outside of any crisis that you face.

See, a lot of people can wait, but what they wait is they wait fatalistically so they say, well, this is inevitable.

So I have no choice but to go through it.

That's not waiting joyfully.

That's not waiting expectantly.

That's waiting.

Just being a fatalist.

I've been in countries where it's dominated by fatalism and the things that happen when people are dominated by fatalism is they, they go into a bondage of not even making good choices.

I remember seeing, uh, one of those piggyback tractor trailer trucks and this one fatalistic nation that I was in.

And instead of having all, all his tires, he had many, many of his tires missing on a road that was not very safe to begin with.

And I asked him, I said, sir, do you, do you feel okay about driving on this really rough road with so few tires?

And he says, well, if I lie a wills, I will die today.

If he doesn't, I will live today.

So he, he wouldn't even take care of his tires and his truck or make sure that he was making good choices because he was so fatalistic.

Now, in some ways you could say he was waiting on his God, but really what he was doing is he was, he was waiting passively and deciding not even to make choices.

Well, I can tell you what, we let him get way in front of us, uh, because we could see how he was gonna.

He was gonna be a danger not only to himself but to the rest of us.

And there's some who choose not to wait joyfully, but they choose to wait.

Stoically and what I mean by that is they like to pretend that nothing disturbs them.

They like to act like it's not a problem.

They have no feelings.

Again, I would say to you, the Bible is against stoicism.

Anytime that you are defending yourself by pretending or lying or deceiving yourself, then you're not free.

Habakkuk struggled with God's silence.

Habakkuk struggled with what he felt was God's inactivity and what Habakkuk does, inspired by the Holy spirit, recorded for as he complains, he gets upset.

He was no way a stoic.

So you cannot have faults.

Joy be your strength.

It has to be genuine joy and it doesn't originate with you and it doesn't originate from your problems.

It's a joy that is received

and this becomes the whole, this becomes the whole way of waiting that Habakkuk reveals to us.

Because he says this incredible phrase that then gets unpacked

for us

because I want you to understand the phrase, the righteous shall live by faith.

Habakkuk didn't even have a clue what all this would mean.

It would have to be fulfilled by the Lord Jesus Christ.

It would have to be explained by Paul and Romans and by Paul and Galatians for us to even understand the fullness

of what the righteous live by faith means.

In other words, there is a source of your waiting.

There's a source of your loving there.

Oh God.

There's a source that can only be received by faith.

Now, once you start to get this,

this idea that, okay, if I'm really going to be unshaken in this crisis, if I'm really gonna overcome in any crisis

my life, then I've got to understand what it means to be righteous living by faith.

And Paul, I want to jump over to Romans chapter one because Paul's the one who makes this so clear, and he sang that this phrase, the righteous shall live by faith, is a part of the good news or is essential to the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And here's what he says in Romans one I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

For it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.

How am I going to wait joyfully on the Lord?

Well, I'm going to have to understand this phrase.

The righteous shall live by faith and and I love history.

So I want to show you how God in history has used this phrase, not only to transform individuals, but to change entire cultures.

Martin Luther was a monk, a German monk.

He lived in the middle of the 15 hundreds and he died in 1546

before he died in 1545 he had written a number of commentaries on the new Testament in Latin, and he was about to do a collection of all this

works

and he was looking back over his career as a monk, as a priest.

Sure.

As a leader, it was about 25 years worth of his leadership of the reformation.

He had had a price on his head.

He had had all kinds of exciting things happen for the gospel, and as he begins to Penn, he begins to write the preface to this collection and he looks back over those 25 or 26 years, he starts to reflect and he meditates on what he calls the most extraordinary discovery.

Now, he had been

committed to a religious order as a monk.

He was a professor of theology.

He lectured

Bible, but he said there was this one expression

25 years earlier.

There was this one and expression of the Bible, and he said there was this one text that caused him so much difficulty, and it was this text in Romans one you see it in this text and essential to the gospel.

Paul says, the righteousness, or in Luther's Latin translation, the justice of God is revealed.

See all his life through trying to be a monk trying to be ahead of his brethren.

Matter of fact, some people said he was going to be a candidate for Canada's nation and the Roman Catholic church.

He had outstripped all his contemporaries and his zealousness for righteousness and his zealousness for religion.

But he said, no matter how hard he tried this text of scripture,

he hated it.

He called it an abomination

because he hated the idea of the justice of God.

He hated the idea of the righteousness of God, and he said, I can't understand how there's any message of the gospel about divine righteousness.

He said, he actually looked at that first and he immediately felt condemned.

He said he felt damn to hell

whenever he read that verse and then,

and one of these historic moments in a moment where the spirit of Christ illuminated this scripture, it dawned on Luther for the first time after years of religious

rigor, it dawned on him that the righteousness of which Paul speaks here is not the righteousness by which God condemn centers, but it's the righteousness by which God saves sinners.

He said

he felt like a man who had broken out of a prison cell.

He said, the Gates of paradise flew open.

I myself

felt born again

and his mind raced through all the other texts of scriptures that he had studied in all his life and all the Bible study they'd done a started to understand that once this passage of the righteous shall live by faith and God provides the righteousness for us to live, once that passage was illuminated, then the whole of the Bible became real to him and he discovered the power of God and he began to recognize the salvation that God had given to him, and from that moment on, he was unashamed of the gospel.

You see for the longest time he kept thinking, it's a righteousness I have to provide to be right with God instead of realizing like he did in that moment, it is a righteousness that God provides so that I can be right with him.

And as as Paul is explaining this to the Roman Christians, he sets it out about this whole thing of living by the gospel.

He sets it out in this way.

He says, the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

So I want to quickly just go over the elements that Paul says

here

are true of the gospel.

The first thing that he says and why you and I can wait on the Lord.

Trust the Lord, love the Lord for himself is he says that the gospel is the saving power of God.

Listen, the crisis that Paul lived in and yet was on a shamed of the gospel and would boast in the power of the gospel.

The world he lived in was corrupted by the Roman government, was corrupted by Roman oppression.

I mean, this is a world in which eventually Paul becomes so dangerous that the emperor has to silence him and not only throws him in prison, but beheads him as well.

And yet here is the apostle Paul faced with the most powerful government and military in the world.

And he says, that's nothing compared to the power which dominates and generates hope and joy and love and peace in my life.

He says, the power of the gospel has an enormous effect to save both men and women and boys and girls for all eternity.

Now, Rome, he said, can subjugate nations, but the gospel can set nations and people free for all eternity.

Aye.

I don't know about you.

I don't know if you're making these drawing these parallels, but we know the Corona virus is powerful.

I mean, we're looking at friends and and workers in the health system overwhelmed by the power of this, of this

covert 19 I remember when I was sick with it three weeks ago, my body has never ached or hurt that much.

My skin felt like it better not be touched because it was going to break that Paul is saying, it doesn't matter what you're facing.

It could be the Roman government or Habakkuk's facing a corrupt, uh, Judy and government, or you could be facing a virus, whatever it is.

Paul says, wait, I'm not ashamed of the gospel in the face of anything because it's the power of God.

Other things may look powerful, but they're temporary.

They are here, but they will be here no more.

But the gospel is the power of God to save you forever.

And the awesome thing to hear is you start to see that the gospel is for every,

every person.

Listen, when he says it's the salvation to everyone who believes

yes,

and he, and he goes in and he says to the Jew first and also to the Gentiles, to the Greeks, it's an all inclusive gospel to every nation, every tribe, every ethnicity, every language.

This was one of Paul's great passions and it's so awesome when you see a guy who had lived in an exclusive religion who had, had tried to make himself the exclusive teacher of the law of God, who now says, having been illuminated by the righteousness of God through Christ, he now says, this is for everybody.

This was the intent of God from the beginning to save not just the religious but the irreligious.

I love this.

This is so powerful, and Paul, who was the one of the greatest rabbis that ever lived, left all that

behind to take the gospel to the Gentiles and to be the apostle to the Gentiles.

It's not just the power of God for certain individuals.

It's the power of God for every nation, every people, even Peter who struggled with this truth

set on the day of Pentecost, the promise of God is to you and to your children, but it's also to those who are far off wherever the Holy spirit works

really gospel and calls men and women to faith in Jesus Christ.

Basically what Paul is saying, what Peter is saying

is that the power of this gospel is that there is nobody who is outside the scope of being brought to the gospel.

Doesn't matter.

Religious background, ethnic background, social background.

No.

Paul is saying the gospel is to go to all and it may be received by all and Christ himself

might be received by all who come to him and say, look,

as we were looking at this together, I to ask you a question,

I want you to think through this.

I'm not just asking, do you love God for God?

I'm not just asking where you wait joyfully and expectantly on God here.

Here's the real question on what basis are you able to walk your life to live your life before God with transparency and without hiding on what basis?

If it's on the basis you say, well, I'm religious or it's the basis, you know I'm moral, I behave well, then you're a fool because what you're really doing is you're hiding and you're lying.

You're deceiving.

You're using religion as a veil or a mask to actually mask the reality that you cannot walk before God without lying, without deceiving even yourself.

Well, Paul is talking about here and he's talking about it for every race, every gender for every age, for every person is that there is a way to live before God, without shame, to live before God, without hiding, to live in utter transparency.

And the gospel is the only way that you can do that.

And so what we, what we see as Paul explains the righteous shall live by faith.

He says it's the righteousness of God.

Now what Luther rustled with you see is his eyes were never drawn to the word faith, but it was drawn to the word righteous.

And he kept thinking, well, it's those who are already righteous, who will live by faith.

And so he hated that word, righteous.

You see?

But once, once he began to focus on the faith part, he began to realize it was God providing the righteousness.

Now, righteousness is an old word, and I want to spend just a moment unpacking that for you.

Every one of us has an inner instinct to be right to be acceptable.

I was reading this week of a movie producer who has won many awards and yet this movie producer said, I cannot watch the finished product and said, because if I do watch it, I will see all the flaws.

I'll see the mistakes and I'll start saying, if I just had time, I could have changed that.

If I had just had another chance, I could make that better.

You see, there is within all of us this need to do things right to be acceptable and yet even when we produce the best that we can, we look at it and we say, that's still not right.

It's still not good enough.

Or we lie to ourselves.

We say something like, well that's the best I could do.

And we just sort of, we sort of become stoic or we become just sort of, okay, I'm not going to care about that anymore.

But you see you can't get right by not caring and you can't get acceptable by being a perfectionist.

And so what the, what the scripture is saying here is that the only way you can live before God with utter transparency is if God provides the rightness, if God provides the acceptableness.

So that you see, what Luther began to realize is that the righteousness that was being offered here comes by a gift from God, and it's when he recognized that, that he said he broke through and even the Gates of paradise open, you see, God cannot be true to himself and just excuse you and just pardon you.

God has to be true to himself.

He is absolutely consistent with his own character.

God is not the sum of his parts.

God is whole.

There is no, you know this, I will be just here and I'll be loving there.

God is always just, and he's always loving and in his relationship with us, he doesn't have this kind of loose relationship.

He has a covenantal relationship with us, which means he's committed to us.

And in any place where you have a covenantal relationship, there are boundaries

and those boundaries represent near-miss and intimacy,

oneness.

And when those boundaries are violated, when those boundaries are not observed,

you have now excluded yourself from the relationship.

Our God is consistent, our God is loving and just our God gives promise.

And he also gives law.

You see, you and I can not be rightly related to the covenantal God unless someone else takes the punishment for our violation of the boundaries.

And that's why you see this beauty of the righteousness of God comes in and the gospel, none of us by nature are rightly related to God.

And when Paul is talking about us in the rest of Romans, he says in thera none.

There's none of us righteous.

No not one.

So the glorious thing that Paul is bringing out in this whole thing of the righteous shall live by faith, is that the Holy righteous God in a Holy righteous way provides a perfect righteousness for centers.

And all we have to do

is receiving leave it.

But it won't make any difference to you until you face the fact that you're not right with God, that you're not accepted

to God,

and that you can't live before God

in a transparent way.

It's might not be something that's easy to think about,

but

can I just say it this way?

If we're honest, we're not even acceptable to ourselves.

We S we experience guilt, we experience shame, fear, hiding, withdrawing.

We try to control people and circumstances.

All of these things make us feel less than acceptable.

And so Paul says in this gospel, in this good news, the righteousness of God is revealed.

The gift of God's righteousness in Christ is revealed from faith for faith.

So that you begin to say, I can receive this by faith.

I was telling the story earlier.

If I were to tell you I have$10,000 for you and and I, and I give you, I give you an a sense two ways to get the$10,000 so the one is, I promise you$10,000 all you have to do is believe I have the$10,000 and then come to me and receive the$10,000 or I could also say to you, I have$10,000 but I need you to do this work on my house.

You need to paint it.

I need you to fix this.

I need you to do that.

See, in both of those forms, in both of those forms, the reward is the same$10,000 but one you received by faith in the promise I'm making to you and you believe that I have the money and you believe I will give it.

And because you believe you will receive it, and the other you're looking at it and saying, well, I have to decide, is it worth doing all this work on the house, painting the house, doing all that?

It's a conditional$10,000 it's not a gift.

It's a salary.

And so what's happened with a lot of people is they think, okay, God is offering relationship with him.

God is offering eternity, God.

And so they go into the religious law and they try to do it by works of the law.

But the problem is no matter how hard they work and how much they do, it's never acceptable.

And they know it's not acceptable because it's not even acceptable to them.

And Paul is saying, God has offered you a perfect righteousness that conforms in every way to his perfect righteousness that will make you perfectly righteous.

But the only way to receive it is as a gift you received by faith.

So this little phrase, the righteous shall live by faith is the key to the whole of your life.

Whether you're in crisis or not.

This is the key.

Will you by faith, receive the promise of his righteousness that he has provided through the cross of Jesus Christ?

Will you accept that you are in him, acceptable to him so that you're not going to add anything else other than that you will live by faith in the son of God who loved you and gave himself for you.

This is the summary really of Habakkuk's book, how to become that righteous man, that righteous woman, that righteous child who in God's sight now lives day by day from beginning to end by faith.

If that's true of you, you see the nothing can overcome you.

There's therefore now no condemnation.

He who is in you is greater than he was in the world.

If God before us, who can be against us?

Does it matter if it seems like any crisis against you, if God before you who can be against you and you see if you have received his righteous righteousness, then you are righteous by faith.

Can we pray on this together, Lord?

Sometimes it takes a crisis for us to realize that we're not enough in ourselves.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for us to realize that we're depending

on, yeah,

on getting the blessings from you.

We're depending on getting answers to the questions we have and that we really don't have faith in you alone, that we have not narrowed down our faith to having this kind of laser focused, that the righteous shall live by faith.

It's not that this sickness doesn't matter.

Of course it matters.

It's not that the economy and the things that are going on don't matter.

It's not that.

It's just in comparison to what has been offered to us by you.

This is just a momentary disturbance.

If it is more than that, it's because we haven't gotten to that place that we recognize what you have given to us, what we have in you.

Every one of us who has received Jesus has received the gift of the righteousness of God.

Even if we're messing up, even if we're screwing up, you have taken the pressure off.

We can no longer be accused and it has an effect.

We can no longer be punished.

We can no longer be condemned because he has done everything to make us successful.

And so now by faith we live walking before you and utter transparency, walking before you and not having to hide.

What a blessing.

What,

what a transference.

What an exchange.

My guilt, my shame, my failures, my mistakes, my rebellion, all exchanged for the perfect righteousness

of God given to me, received by me by faith.

May it be so that every one of us who are hearing my voice in this will be known as people who live by faith.

The righteous

shall live by their faith.

In Jesus name.

Amen.