Confidence in Our Relationship with God

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Transcript:

If you would turn with me to Galatians chapter 4 this morning. Galatians chapter 4 and also you might mark spot at Romans chapter 8. We’re going to look at both of those places this morning.

Galatians chapter 4 and Romans chapter 8. You probably all experienced at some point or another a strained relationship. Sometimes it can be because there’s a misunderstanding and you just can’t get it ironed out maybe with a friend or a loved one.

Sometimes there can be miscommunication. Sometimes somebody can actually do something to hurt the other one, and it puts a strain on the relationship. It can be something as bleak as somebody doing something horrible, somebody mistreating a friend.

It can be something as simple as, I’ll tell you, there’s a friend of mine that, you know, we have text messaging now. I’d rather do that than talk on the phone. I’m hopelessly awkward when it comes to phone conversations.

But we have this text messaging now, and I had a friend a year ago or so who sent a text message to me, and I didn’t get to answer it that night, forgot about it the next day. And the next day, by the time I remember to respond, it was a week later, and I just felt too awkward. What do I say at that point?

Never responded. It was six months later, got another text message. Hey, you never, yeah, it was because I, it put a strain on the relationship because there’s this feeling of awkwardness.

So it can be something as serious as a major breach of trust or transgression. It can be something as simple as an awkward feeling or a guilty feeling about, well, I haven’t already responded to your message, whatever it is. But we’ve all experienced, I think, at some point, a relationship that was strained, either because I’ve done something wrong or they’ve done something wrong or I feel guilty or there’s a miscommunication.

Whatever it is, there’s a hindrance in the relationship, and we can feel it. And one of the hardest places is when that hindrance comes in the relationship between a parent and a child. And just to give you an example, my four-year-old has started complaining.

Now, I think this is part of the sin nature, because nobody sat him down and taught him how to complain. He just came by it naturally. Oh, I wanted ice in my water.

Well, you didn’t ask for ice in your water. Oh, I didn’t want that to drink. Oh, I didn’t want that to eat.

Oh, I didn’t want to take my nap there. I didn’t want to do that. And the complaining just, you know, I’ve been on him about the complaining.

Stop complaining. Stop it. You know you’re not supposed to do that.

We all complain a little bit, but some people raise it to an art form, don’t they? And so he’s been in trouble about the complaining. And, you know, you may remember back to when you had kids or when you were a kid, When you’re in trouble, there’s sort of a hindrance in the relationship.

Especially when you’re just defiant and you know your parent is upset with you. Daddy’s mad at me because I got ugly. Sometimes I’ll get on to him about the complaining and then he’ll argue back.

And then we’re talking time out. Maybe we’re talking spanking. Maybe we’re talking about taking Kitty away.

You know, all sorts of consequences. But there is, he knows I’m upset with him and I know he’s upset with me. And we’re just not talking a whole lot.

Now, when I say not talking a whole lot, this lasts about 10 minutes, okay? It’s not like he’s a teenager and it’s going on for weeks. It goes on for about 10 minutes.

But that’s not a fun 10 minutes to have that hindrance in the relationship. I love my kids. I love when my son will just come climb up in my lap and hug all over me, and we’ll sit there and we’ll watch cartoons together, or we’ll play in nights last night.

Anyway, I just, I love spending time with my kids. I love that relationship. And when it’s hindered, no matter how small the hindrance is, it bothers me.

And no matter how short a time it lasts, it bothers me because there’s something in between us. But it doesn’t mean that he’s no longer my child, does it? The bond between a parent and a child is supposed to, it’s designed by God to be something that is always there.

You can walk away from friends. You can quit a job and leave your co-workers behind and no longer have that relationship. I hate to say it, but in this day and age, you can divorce your spouse.

But you shouldn’t be able to sever the parent-child relationship. And so, folks, it’s not by accident that God describes Himself so many times in His Word as a father, and us as believers as His children. And I’ve said many times before that even though I know no human being fully understands God, I feel like I understand more about God now that I have children than I did ever before.

Because the way he describes himself as a father, finally that makes sense to me. Okay, it makes a little more sense why God does the things he does and reacts the way he does. So we’ve got this relationship that God has described between believers and himself as being the relationship between a child and the father, a child and a parent.

But sometimes we let things come in the middle of that relationship. Sometimes we let things hinder that relationship. And I love the example, I know I’ve given it here before, of the older couple riding in the truck and back when they used to have, what were they, bench seats?

Is that what they were called instead of captain seats? Now, there wasn’t a console or whatever in between. Used to, you could just sit in the middle of the trunk seat.

Maybe in some of them you still can. And evidently in this story, it’s not a real story. Somebody might have had this conversation.

But in the story, the older woman says to her husband, I just feel like we’re not as close as we used to be. And he looks at her and says, I’m not the one who moved. The driver is not the one who moved.

If they started out the relationship with her sitting in the middle seat right next to him and him at the wheel, he’s not the one who moved. we let this hindrance come in between our relationship with God in between us he’s not the one who moved we are the ones who separate ourselves from him we are the ones who who throw up roadblocks we are the ones who let other things get in the way but folks ultimately we’ve got to remember that according to his word it does not stop us from being his child we may feel like God doesn’t love me anymore. We may feel like I don’t even know him anymore.

We may feel like he doesn’t accept me. I’m not his child. We may feel any number of these things where we feel like the relationship is just no longer there.

Folks, but he describes it as a parent-child relationship because that’s one that is not supposed to be broken. And he describes our relationship to him as believers as something that cannot, hear me on this, cannot be severed. Now we’ve been talking for the last few weeks about this idea of confidence.

Confidence. That God’s word wants us as believers to have confidence. Now again, and especially if you’re just joining us for the first time in this series, that idea of confidence that the Bible gives us where it says I have confidence this or be confident that.

It’s not talking about the same kind of confidence that we think of in our 21st century American context. Where we think of somebody confident, I’m going to tell you, I think of confidence, I think of Donald Trump. You can say a lot of things about Donald Trump, and I have said a lot of things about Donald Trump, but one thing you cannot say is that the man lacks confidence.

He is not lacking for confidence. You hear him interviewed, and I don’t know if he really believes this or if it’s just the persona, but what he puts out there is, I’m the best there ever was, and things will happen just because I say they will, because I’m the best, and I’m the best at doing things. And we think that’s what confidence means.

Folks, confidence that the Bible teaches is not confidence that says I’m the best, or I’m the best at doing something, or I’m better than you as a person, or I’m better than you at doing this. Confidence says I know certain things to be true, and because of that I will have the courage to act on it. I know that certain things are true.

And the example I gave you the first Sunday that we talked about this, if you’ll remember all the way back all those weeks ago, the example I gave you, the better example of confidence, were the people who were part of the White Rose gang or organization. I don’t know what. They just called themselves the White Rose.

The group of students at the University of Munich, who in 1942 and 1943 wrote and passed out pamphlets opposing the Nazi government and encouraging the people of Germany to put a stop to the aggressive war and to the Holocaust and just to the abuses of the Hitler government. And their motivation in that was their faith in Christ. The leadership of that group, this group of students in their early 20s, the leadership of this group were born-again Christians. They were well-versed in the scriptures, And knowing that Germany had a Christian history, now obviously they were not living up to it at the time, but knowing that the German people had a Christian history, their writings were filled with appeals to the scriptures.

See, they knew they were facing certain death, and they eventually would be beheaded for what they did. But even facing certain death, they knew that some things were absolutely true. It’s not just where some people in America say, I believe the Bible, sure, I think it’s true, I believe it.

We believe it because that’s what we’ve been taught. We believe it because we don’t know what else to believe. They said, I’m absolutely convinced that this is the truth.

I am so convinced that this is the truth that I’m more afraid to not do something than I am to do something. Folks, that’s confidence. To say, I don’t care what it costs me to act on my belief.

I’m so firmly convinced that it’s true that it has to change the way I live. That’s biblical confidence. Not confidence that I’m great, I’m wonderful, I’m skilled, I’m talented.

But folks, being absolutely firmly convinced that what we believe is actually true. A few weeks ago I talked to you about being convinced that the gospel is true. The idea that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried and rose again, and that he offers forgiveness of sins just on the basis of God’s grace, if we’ll receive it by faith.

Folks, that gospel is not just wishful thinking. It’s not just we believe it because it’s convenient. We believe it because it’s rooted in the evidence.

It’s rooted in God’s word. It’s rooted in eyewitness evidence. It’s rooted in prophecy.

All these things that make it, folks, a lot harder for me to believe that it’s false than for me to believe it’s true. I love the title of that book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. I really don’t. I really don’t have that much faith to believe all these skeptical alternative ideas about what happened.

Folks, we can have confidence that the gospel is true. Last week, I talked to you about confidence in God’s ability to change us and transform us. And we can go through life and we just see a snapshot here and there and say, well, I don’t feel any different than I did yesterday.

Maybe God’s really not working in me at all because I’m still dealing with the same sins that got me 20 years ago. When in reality, it’s a certainty that God is at work in our lives. It may not happen as quickly as we would like it to.

But then again, perfection is not possible for us in our fallen human condition. But Paul said, I’m confident of this very thing. He was absolutely convinced when he prayed for the church at Philippi.

I’m convinced, I’m confident of this very thing that he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. I’m paraphrasing just a little bit. but he’ll be faithful to complete it.

And then he prayed for them in all these things, their love, their knowledge, their discernment, all of these things that we talked about last week, and knew that God, he prayed that God would grow them in those things, already knowing, already knowing with certainty that God was doing those things. Today, I want to talk to you about that kind of confidence in our relationship with God. Confidence in our relationship with God.

That this morning, if you are a believer, what do I mean by that? you’ve heard the gospel. You’ve heard that Jesus Christ died for our sins because we’d sinned against God and needed a Savior.

That he died to pay for our sins, was the only one who could do so. Rose again, proving that he had the power to do so. And that God now, not because of any good that we can do or anything that we can earn or deserve, but just because he’s good and merciful, God offers salvation as a free gift and that we take access of that just by believing that it’s true and asking God to forgive us of our sins.

That’s the gospel. And if you are someone who has truly believed that, if you’re someone who truly has asked God’s forgiveness of your sins, not because of any good that you could do, not because you could earn it or make peace with God by yourself, but just because Jesus Christ died for you. If you know that and believe that and you’ve asked God to forgive you for Christ’s sake, and you know that He’s done that, then you’re a believer.

And you need to know that you can have confidence in your relationship with God. You can have confidence that as a believer, you were his child at the moment of conversion. You are no less his child today and that you will be his child from now on.

You can have confidence in this relationship with God. You know, he says in Romans chapter 8, where I asked you to mark earlier, starting in verse 37, he says, Today in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This morning you may feel like God doesn’t love me anymore. How could God love me anymore? Do you know what I did preacher?

I don’t know what you did. probably a good thing I don’t know what you may or may not have done but I know the promises of God’s word are true and you can feel like God doesn’t love me anymore you can feel like I’m not his child anymore you can feel any number of things that make you think well the relationship just isn’t there folks the relationship may not be what it ought to be but it doesn’t go away just because we’ve messed up and by the way in this guilt is one of the big things that gets in between us and God in our relationship. You know what?

It can be guilt that we deserve because we’ve done something wrong. You know what? Then go to God and confess it and get it behind you.

He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. If we will confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1.

9 says, Confess it. Tell him you’re sorry and get it behind you. You know what?

When my children come and tell me they’re sorry, I ask them what for, first of all. Because I don’t want I’m sorry just to be a catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card. I want to know that they’ve really thought about what they’ve done and that they really are sorry.

So I’ll ask, what are you sorry for? And usually, there’ll be a couple things. Some things I didn’t even know about.

What are you sorry for? And then I always tell them, I forgive you. And then we’re done.

Now, there may still be consequences. It doesn’t mean you’re getting out of time out immediately. But it means we’re okay.

Folks, sometimes that guilt gets in between us and God and it makes us feel like we’re separated because we’ve done something wrong. Confess it. He’ll forgive you.

Now that doesn’t mean do whatever you want because He’ll forgive you anyway. If that’s our motivation, we need to check and make sure we really believe what we profess we believe. But if you’re a believer and you feel that guilt because you’ve sinned, talk to Him.

Confess it. Sometimes though we let guilt get in the way that has nothing to do with anything we’ve done. I don’t know if any of you ever feel this way.

Sometimes I just feel like, I am just so unworthy. I am nobody. I may be the only one that ever feels that way.

Sometimes I just get kind of down on myself. And it’s not because I’ve done anything in particular, just other than be me, which sometimes is enough. But I just feel like, how could God really love somebody like me?

Folks, like I told you last week, your feelings will lie to you every time. We may feel like, ah, he doesn’t love me. We may feel like, how could he love me?

We may feel like, he’s not really my father. We may feel like, well, the relationship is distant. You know what?

I don’t care what my feelings say or what your feelings say. I care what the promises of God’s word are. And you need to know this morning.

You need to know if you are a believer, if you are somebody who has heard the gospel and responded to it and been born again, that there is a relationship that you have with God He is your father and you are his child and he loves you regardless of what you’ve done and the times that you’ve messed up. And there’s nothing that you or anybody else can do about it. You need to understand that.

He says there is nothing. He goes through this list, neither death nor life, angels, principalities, powers, things present nor things to come, height, depth, any other creature, none of it, he says, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. You know what?

If you’re a believer this morning, you’re part of that us. And as you read through this, in verse 39, you could very easily put your name in there for us. You could do it.

None of these things shall be able to separate Mary from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. None of these things will be able to separate Sandy from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you’re a believer this morning, you can put your name there and be assured that you’re part of that us.

And when he says nothing, and he goes through that list of all the things that there are, there really is nothing that can separate you as his child from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. He loves you, and you can’t do a stinking thing about it. And neither can anybody else.

So this morning, four reasons we can know. Four reasons that he’s given us. That we can know for sure that this relationship really is there.

It’s real. and it’s everlasting no matter how we feel. Yes, again, we sometimes feel like it’s not what it ought to be. That’s absolutely true.

The relationship can still be there, just like between an earthly parent and child, can still be there and not be what it ought to be until there’s reconciliation. Understandable, if it’s not what it needs to be, talk to God and get right, get rid of the guilt, confess the sin, He’ll forgive it. But it doesn’t mean the relationship stops being there.

Four reasons we can know that that relationship is there, it’s eternal, and that we can walk confidently because of it. First of all, we know that this relationship is real. We know that it’s not going anywhere because God purchased it. Hear me in this.

God purchased it with His own blood. I know we don’t think about God and His own blood. Jesus Christ is God.

That’s just the short, sweet statement of it. Jesus Christ is God. Oh, He’s a good teacher.

He never claimed to be God. Are you kidding me? That’s part of the reason why they killed him.

Part of the reason why they put him to death. You read the book of John. Read the book of John.

He says so many things in there where he was identifying himself with the God of the universe. When he told them before Abraham was, I am. He’s not just confused about verb tenses there.

To say I am, he’s identifying with the God of the Old Testament. Think back to when Moses was standing before the burning bush and God was telling him to go and speak to his people. And Moses said, who shall I say sent me?

He said, you tell them I am. He was identifying himself with God. There’s any number of times throughout the Gospels.

The book of John is clearest on this. And some people have said, well, that’s because the myth of him being God got built up later and John was the last one written. No, because it’s in the others also.

But what the other three Gospels talk about, what the other three Gospels allude to, John shouts about. Doesn’t mean John made it up. It’s in the other three also.

He claimed to be God, ladies and gentlemen. That’s why the Jews hated him. So even though we’re talking about this father-child relationship with God the Father, God the Son purchased the relationship with his blood.

I don’t think there’s a return policy on that. I mean, I could be wrong here. But I don’t know that there’s a return policy on that.

He didn’t buy us with something that expires. He didn’t buy us with gold or silver or money that falls apart. He didn’t barter goods for us.

Folks, he bought us with the most precious substance in the universe. He shed his own blood. God in human flesh shed his blood to purchase you and me.

And it says in Galatians chapter 4, we haven’t looked at that yet. Galatians chapter 4, starting in verse 4. It says, but when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law that we might receive the adoption of sons.

That’s what we need to recognize there, to redeem them that were under the law. He came to purchase us. God the Son came to earth to buy us back.

We were enslaved to sin. We were enslaved to death and to hell, and he came to buy us back. I don’t remember names or places at this point, but I remember being in school and hearing stories about the Underground Railroad and those who would work in the days of slavery to escape.

And I remember hearing the story of one man in particular who escaped and went north to Canada and worked and worked and worked for years and saved every penny that he could so that He could go back and buy His own freedom and the freedom of His family that He had to leave behind. You know what? Jesus Christ didn’t have to buy His own freedom.

But He sure came back and bought ours. He bought us out of the slavery and the bondage that we were in. He bought us.

He paid for us. We belong to Him now. And when He bought us, He bought us with His own blood.

1 Peter says, For as much as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold your vain conversation received by a tradition from your fathers. What he’s saying there, you weren’t bought with gold, you weren’t bought with silver, and he says the vain tradition, you weren’t even bought by your good works that were passed down to you and your religion and your rituals and your rules that you follow. He says, but with the precious blood of Christ, we were bought with a price, and that price was the blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.

Folks, he bought us by shedding his blood and laying down his life. And if there’s something so valuable to you that you’re willing to die for it, if there was something so valuable to him that the God of the universe was willing to lay down his life to purchase it, I can’t imagine that he’s going to give it up all that easily. So that should give us some indication about how God feels about us and the strength of the relationship.

That even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we were unlovable, God didn’t look at us and say, Look how nice they all are to each other. No.

The Bible paints a pretty bleak picture of us in our lost condition. And while we were unlovable and ungodly and sinning, still God chose to love us and die for us in that condition. You can’t get much more caring concern than that.

So you can know. You can know. You can be convinced that your relationship with God is eternal and real and not going anywhere, first of all, because He purchased you with His own blood.

Second of all, you can be convinced that this relationship is real and not going anywhere because He adopted you as His child. We go on to the second part of this verse, verse 5 in Galatians chapter 4. It said He did all this to redeem them that were under the law that we might receive the adoption of sons.

We might receive the adoption of sons. Now, that doesn’t just mean the men here. Let’s be clear on that.

We are adopted as his children. The day you trusted Christ as your Savior, you were adopted into his child. You didn’t just become a subject in his kingdom, although that would have been incredible enough.

You became his child. You were adopted. And folks, the relationship in adoption is just like the relationship of having a child naturally, in that it is supposed to not end.

It doesn’t end just because the parent gets tired of the child. A few years ago, I started doing, I heard a program on either family talk or focus on the family. It’s hard to remember which because James Dobson was on both of them at one point.

Where they were talking about the difficulties, just the sheer numbers of orphaned children in the former Soviet Union. And the numbers of them that were going into for either the boys, the gang life, or the girls’ prostitution, how many of them weren’t even living until their 18th birthday? I remember very clearly hearing this on the radio.

I was living in Arkansas at the time, and I was between appointments, and couldn’t even merge onto the highway because I was tearing up so bad hearing this story. started doing research on adoption. Because I thought, well, maybe I sort of started feeling like the Lord was leading me, that this was something to consider.

And I still feel like that may be something to consider in the future. But started doing research on adoption from countries like Russia and Ukraine. And what I found out was at that time, Russia was starting to take steps to make sure Americans could not adopt Russian children.

And they have since passed that law. But one of the reasons was they said that Russian children were coming here and being mistreated. And they gave the example, and this is a terrible example, they gave the example of a woman in Tennessee who adopted a little boy from Russia and decided she didn’t want him anymore.

She didn’t want to deal with him. I mean, it wasn’t just he’s over here and she’s doing foster care. They’d gone through all the steps of adoption.

She is his mother. And she just decides he’s too much trouble, didn’t want him anymore, stuck him on a plane to Russia just assuming that Russia would, I don’t know if she thought the government or the people or what, I’m just going to send him to Russia and they’ll take care of him. Try to send your children to Oklahoma.

Well, who in Oklahoma? I don’t know, just Oklahoma. They’re just, Oklahoma will take care of him.

We wouldn’t do that. We’d say, well, who? Where are they going?

She just put him on a plane and sent him back to Russia. And that was such a huge deal. That was such a huge problem because that’s not how adoption works. I think we all instinctively understand that.

You adopted him. He’s your child. You can’t just decide you don’t want him to be your child anymore.

Because adoption means I’m your father. I’m your mother. The same as if I’d given birth to you.

You’re mine now and you’re mine from now on. And so when the Bible says that God adopted us as his children, That’s not a relationship that stops. That’s I have chosen to be your father.

And I have chosen to love you. And I have chosen to be your father from now on. He’s adopted us.

He’s gone through the process. And when I started looking into this, particularly Ukraine, the process is a nightmare. For here, too, the process is a nightmare to go through adopting kids.

We’re talking thousands of dollars. I could buy a really nice house for what it would cost to adopt a child. And the paperwork and the bureaucratic red tape and everything.

And people to go through and adopt a child, you’ve got to really want it. I mean, to want to adopt. It’s got to be something you’re committed to or you’re not going to finish.

You’re not going to follow through with all of that. I can guarantee you that what God went through to adopt us is nothing. I mean, excuse me, I’ve got that backwards.

The red tape we go through to adopt here on earth is nothing compared to what God went through to adopt us. You talk about a commitment. I got that backwards, but I think I got it straightened out.

That’s not a relationship he lets go of. We are his children. He’s adopted us.

He’s gone through all of the headache. And he says, you’re mine now. Third of all, we look at verse 6.

And because you are sons, God had sent forth the spirit of his son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Now that word Abba in the Aramaic means daddy. It’s a term of endearment.

I think I’ve told you before about my irritation when people who are not my children refer to me by that because that’s an intimate name. Only certain people get to use that. When you take your kids to the photographer, okay, dad, have them.

. . No.

I know what you’re doing. I have a name and you don’t get to call me that one. Or strangers, oh, dad, you’ve got such beautiful children.

Why are you calling me that? That is not my name. It creeps me out.

You don’t get to call me that unless you are my child, unless we are close that way. So for him to let us call him daddy, the closeness that that word indicates, the love and the intimacy that’s indicated by that word is something that tells us a lot about how he cares for us. But the Bible says because we’re his sons, God sent forth the spirit of his son.

God sent forth the Holy Spirit into us, crying, I the Father. And the Holy Spirit there is the one teaching us to love Christ, to follow Christ, to call out to God. He’s given us His Holy Spirit.

Now that’s the third reason why you can be convinced today that that relationship is not going anywhere. Because God has given us His Holy