Hard it is to feel bad when you’re singing of the goodness of God. You know what? Sometimes when the troubles and the trials come, the one of the greatest things we can do is sing to God, sing praises. I’ve shared with you before that I have a cousin that, his that’s kinda his love language to God. Right?
He sings. He loves old hymns, and he loves, songs, and he sings. Even when he was in tremendous pain after a terrible surgery that he had to have, they said you could hear him in the recovery room singing praises to god. He said that’s what got him through all of those hard times and all of that pain. And I guarantee you, it is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Faith trumps tribulations. Ain’t that wonderful? Faith trumps tribulations. We are so glad to know that, and we can stop any person and ask this question. Have you ever faced tribulation?
Just try it sometime. Walk into somebody you don’t even know. Hey. Have you ever had tribulation or trouble in your life? I guarantee you, the answer is going to be yes.
Probably the answer is yes. Even today, something happened. It’s like always something going on. There’s all kinds of things happening in our life. We face trouble everywhere.
And, you know, the crazy thing is it shocks us. Why is all this happening? Well, the scripture said, Jesus said, you will have trouble in this world. He didn’t say you might, he didn’t say you could. He said, you will have trouble in this world.
Trouble comes in all shapes and sizes. Some is little trouble, some is big trouble, some is full on tribulation that you just can’t seem to to shake. There are things that are happening in your life. We are going to have trouble in this world. Jesus told us so.
We all go through trying times and trouble. So by a show of hands, anyone who’s never been through any kind of trouble in their life, would you please raise your hand? Wow. Exactly what I expected. Nobody can raise their hand and say that.
Now I wonder, if someone was able to go through life and never have any troubles or tribulation in their life, I wonder how would they handle it when it did happen. If you went through your whole life and you never had any trouble and suddenly something happened, I wonder how they would handle that. Now I know how they would handle that as the we might say they would freak out. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had this happen before.
Young teenagers, they grow up, You know, thought about putting a block on their head and see if it it doesn’t work. They grow up, and they have to go out on their own. And you’ve done everything you can to teach them well. Right? You’ve tried to show them everything, teach them everything, all of that.
They go out on their own, and you know what happens? The first thing that happens, they make some dumb mistake. And you’re like, what are you doing? Why did you do that? Well, because they had trouble.
And they weren’t sure exactly how to handle it and they made a mistake. They didn’t handle it exactly right. Guess what? So do we. Same thing.
I don’t care if you’re 90 or if you’re 18, we don’t always handle things right. We go through troubling times, and we try to handle something, and and it turns into more than we thought. We have all kinds of problems. We all go through trying times and troubles. It’s how we get through these things and what we do with it that matters.
So we’re all gonna face it. It’s gonna happen for every one of us. We’re all gonna face it. At some point, we’re gonna have trouble. We’re gonna have trials.
We’re gonna have tribulations. All of those things are going to happen. How we get through those things and what we do with that after is what really matters. Oh, what do you mean by that? Well, you can’t just stop and not go through it.
There’s a commercial on TV. I I think it’s an insurance commercial. I’m not even sure. But there’s a commercial on TV and it shows a tornado, and it says, sometimes things knock on our door and the person opens the door, looks at the tornado and goes, no thank you. Slams the door and the tornado goes on down the street.
We can’t do that. It would be wonderful if we could. We can’t just stop and go, no, I’m not going through that. It’s kinda like being on one of those, conveyor belts in the airport, you know, people movers. If you stop, you keep moving.
Whether you’re walking or standing still, you’re gonna keep moving. In life, it’s gonna keep coming. You can’t just stop and avoid whatever it is. You have to go through it. There is no other way.
You must go through it. How we go through it and what we do with that after is what really matters. The reality is, as I said, sometimes our our teenage children go out and and become adults, and they go out in life, and we wonder why did you choose to make that decision? That wasn’t a good choice. But for them, that was a choice they had to make, and they had to go through it.
What did they learn from that? Well, perhaps they learned that wasn’t a good choice, and next time I’m not doing that, if I face that again. Maybe they learned that you know what? I should’ve trusted someone else. Maybe they should’ve learned something to go along with that.
For all of us, when things happen, how do we learn things? What do we do? Well, let’s look at Romans chapter 5 verses 1 through 5. Romans chapter 5 verses 1 through 5. You have your bible, go ahead and turn there.
And, if not, the scripture will be on the screen for you. Romans chapter 5 verses 1 through 5. This is what it says. It says, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with god through our lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we exalt in the hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also exalt in our tribulations, Knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance, and perseverance proven character, and proven character, hope.
And hope does not disappoint because the love of god has been poured out within our hearts through the holy spirit who was given to us. Having been justified, that particular verse didn’t say justified, but that’s what it’s talking about. Having been justified. Each and every one of us, if you know Jesus Christ as lord and savior, you’ve been justified. You see, we understand.
Hopefully, you remember. I’ve talked about it many times. The process is justification, sanctification, and glorification. That’s the process we go through. Justified means that because you chose to give your life to Christ, he justified you with his own blood, and therefore, you became one of his.
So having been justified, if you know Jesus Christ as lord and savior, you have been justified. And then the rest of your life, you spend being sanctified, learning, and being trained in the way that you should go, making you better all along. You’re never perfect. You keep working. It keeps getting better, keeps getting better, and they keep going and going and going.
In the military, we have, we get into a place and we get into a fighting position, and we set it all up hastily as quick as we can. And then over the time that we spend in those positions, we spend making it better, making it better, making it better every single day. Eventually, we leave that location. It was never perfect, but we kept making it better every day. For life, that’s what happens after you’re justified, then you’re sanctified, and we keep on working that.
But having been justified, if you are justified, you know Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. He has justified you. If you are in that place, then that is just the first step. This is when Jesus says, you are worth it, and he died for you. And we accept him.
How do we accept him? By faith. We accept him by faith. Well, yeah. We’ve heard that.
I understand. We accept Jesus by faith. I I understand. Well, this is how we accept that justification is through faith. We trust Jesus and believe in him even though we’ve never actually laid eyes on him in person.
If we’ve known Jesus for any length of time, that just okay. It’s just an easy statement. But if someone who doesn’t know him and you say that to them, they’re like, I don’t understand. How can you do that? How can you do that?
How can you have faith in someone you’ve never seen? How can you have faith in someone you’ve never actually laid eyes on? You’ve never actually heard their physical voice. You’ve never touched them, shook hands, gave them a hug. You’ve never done any of that.
How can you have faith in someone that’s not even a physical presence that you can see? How is that possible that you can have faith in that? Well, here’s how. We have faith in God because of the evidence of the things that we have seen. We haven’t seen him, but we see the evidence.
We know what he has done. Somebody says, well, I just don’t believe in anything I can’t see. My first question is, do you believe there’s such thing as the wind? Well, yeah. But I can see the wind.
Really. No one’s ever seen it. You can see what it does. You can see the trees and the leaves rattle. You can see the limbs blow down.
You can feel it on your face, but you can’t actually see the wind. It’s not you’re not able to physically see it. Do you believe in oxygen? Well, yeah. You gotta have oxygen to breathe.
Well, you can’t physically see that oxygen. You can see a tank of it, but you let it out of the air. You can’t see that. But you believe that you’re getting oxygen, otherwise, your body wouldn’t breathe. Faith, you believe in Jesus because of the things he’s done.
The things that you see, not only in your life, but in other people’s lives. You see the things that have happened, and so by faith, we trust in him. We come to know that he has justified us because he said he would, and the scripture says very clear that he died on the cross for your sin and mine. That’s justification. He’s justified you before the father.
So if the justification has come and by faith you believe in that and then you walk with him, then we need to hold on to that faith. This is how we accept the justification. We have seen his work in us. And because we have seen that work in us, we stand in grace. We stand in grace.
Okay. We’ll use a lot of words today, man. We use justification, faith, grace. That’s a lot of stuff. It sounds like church words.
We use them in church, but trust me, those are not just church words. Those are powerful words. Without justification, we would have no hope. If we didn’t have the faith to accept that, we would have no hope. Without God’s grace, we definitely would have no hope.
We stand in grace. If it were not for grace, we would have no hope. What do you mean by that? Okay. Speed limit out here in front of this road right here.
What is that speed limit? Anybody know? No. You don’t know because nobody drives it. Trust me.
If you think people drive it, stand out there and watch. Zoom. Cars go right by. 35 miles an hour, it’s a residential zone. Supposed to be 35 miles an hour.
Most of y’all go, woah. I’ve been going to drive faster than that. Most of us have been driving faster than that. We don’t even know what the speed limit is. So here’s the thing, speed limit 35.
I’ve been driving 50. All of a sudden, this crazy thing happens and some dude behind me turns on blue lights. Blue lights come on. He pulls up beside me. He says, hey, sir.
Do you know how fast you were going? And, of course, I’m going, I’m probably around 35, I guess. You know? Truly, I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at the speedometer.
Well, this little radar gun here says you’re doing 50. Speed limit is 35. But I tell you what, you probably knew that and you probably didn’t pay any attention. And by law, I should give you a ticket, but today, I’m gonna give you a little grace. And I’m not gonna write you a ticket, I’m gonna let you go this time.
Even though you’re guilty, you’re a 100% guilty, but I’m gonna not write you a ticket today. That’s grace. That’s minimal. Scripture says that the wages of sin is death. If we stop there, we’d have no hope.
Because right before that, it says we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So if the wages of sin is death and there’s nothing after that, we’re all in trouble because we’ve all sinned. And that death doesn’t mean we’re gonna die because it is appointed under man who wants to die. It means it’s the separation from God eternally. Then we would spend an eternity in a devil’s hell.
But it goes on to say, but, that’s a big word, but the free gift of God is eternal life. If we accept it, then we stand in grace forgiven even though we have sinned, even though we deserve to be punished, even though we deserve to spend an eternity in hell. Because of justification of Jesus Christ, we can stand in grace forgiven for those things that he has done. That’s a major thing for us to stop and realize that even though we all deserve to spend an eternity separated from God, he’s given us grace. So if it were not for grace, we would have no hope.
Because no matter what we did, no matter how good we were, no matter how much money we donated, or how many good deeds we did, we would never be good enough to get into heaven. But because of God’s grace, we can. So we stand in grace according to what that scripture says. Grace for all our failures is a super powerful thing. Grace for all our failures.
Because here’s the thing, you know, that police officer said, you know, I’m out and give you a ticket today. So don’t do that again. Okay? I’m not giving you a ticket. But the next time I went down that road, guess about what speed of doing what I was doing?
Probably running about the same. This is all fictitious. This never happened. Okay? I want you to understand that.
Not that it couldn’t. But the police officer then pulls me over a second time. Didn’t I just give you grace the last time and let you go without giving you a ticket? Yeah. Well, why are you doing it again?
I don’t know. We learned that as children. Why did you do that? I don’t know. No answer, but we say it.
I don’t know. The real answer is, well, I was I didn’t plan in enough time and I gotta be somewhere and the only way I can get there is drive faster. I don’t know. I don’t know why I did that. Probably, he’s gonna go, well, this time is gonna cost you.
Have a nice day. Right? But God says, I’m gonna give you grace again. I’m gonna keep giving you grace. That grace is so powerful that even though we’ve been forgiven, we’ve received the grace, we still mess up and God keeps giving us grace.
That’s pretty powerful. That’s an amazing thing that we can stand in that. We stand knowing that we won’t pay the price for our sin. That ought to make you hallelujah. We won’t pay the price for our sin if we have accepted Jesus Christ as lord and savior.
You know why? He already did. He already paid that price on Calvary. He already died. He was buried and resurrected on the 3rd day because God raised him from the dead.
That price that he paid, that death, that blood that he shed is the price that it cost you, but he paid the price. He paid it. So we will never pay the price for our sin if we know him. Now I want you to think about this. How much can we celebrate knowing that?
I know that I’ve given my life to Jesus Christ, and I know that even though I make mistakes every day, God looks at me and what he sees is the blood of Christ covering my sin. And therefore, I can stand in grace knowing I have been redeemed. My price has been paid. I have that assurance, and I know that I’m gonna get there. So I can celebrate in hope.
I can celebrate in hope. Now I want you to understand, that word hope isn’t, you know, like what we think about as like a wish. It’s because of grace that we have hope. Because God gave us grace, we can have hope. That hope means our sins are forgiven and we have salvation.
That’s the hope. That’s the hope that we can hold on to. In fact, hope has a name. His name is Jesus. Hope’s name is Jesus.
We can celebrate a hope. Hope is not a wish. I hope I go to heaven. No. I can be in hope knowing that that grace that he gave me is sufficient and discovered my sins.
And because that I have the hope of knowing that at the end of this life, whether it’s I quit breathing because of a heart attack or or got hit by a car or Jesus comes back, I am going to be in heaven. So I have that true hope. It’s not a wish, it’s done deal. So I can have that. That grace means I can celebrate in hope.
It means that Jesus is my hope. It’s not a wish, but it’s an assurance of things. So think about that. If you’re standing in grace, then you can celebrate in hope. Because you know that God has said this is what’s going to happen.
Now there comes the hard part of that verse. The hard part of that verse says, we are to celebrate in our tribulations. Hold up. Now I can be all behind celebrating that grace and salvation. Man, I can throw a party about that.
Right? I’m excited about all that, but now you’re telling me I’m supposed to celebrate in my tribulations? We just talked about tribulations, they’re hard. We talked about trouble in this world, it’s hard. Sometimes our tribulations are health problems.
Sometimes our tribulations are financial problems. Sometimes our tribulations are are something’s tearing up in the house, and how are we gonna fix it? Sometimes our tribulations, the boss comes in and says, yep, your job is over. There’s all kinds of things that happen and we go through these tribulations, and most of the time, a real tribulation means something happened and we don’t know what to do next. I was in a position where everything was fine.
I’m all of a sudden my boss walked in one afternoon and said, hey, yeah. We want you to resign because, we’re doing away with this position, and so we’re giving you opportunity to resign. I said, wait a minute. What if I don’t resign? They said, we’ll fire you.
So you can resign and, you know, draw your severance and all that stuff or we can just fire you and send you out the door. Blindsided. I was supposed to go on vacation the next Monday. What am I gonna do now? Completely just everything are just like all of a sudden the wall started closing in.
It’s tribulation. As I thought of all of that, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna call my wife and tell her that I just lost my job? Without that paycheck, how are we gonna pay bills? We’re supposed to be going on vacation and we’re gonna lose that money.
There’s where are we gonna all these things are clouding my mind. And in all of that process, from the time that I was told that information and the time I left the building on the way to the parking lot, a peace came over me. And I began to think about, you know what? God’s got this. It didn’t take him by surprise.
I’ve been asking God if this job is not the one that you want me to have, will you show me? That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean for you to take it away, but he showed me. And right all I could hear is you said to show you if this job is not right. Now trust me to take care of the rest of it.
We have to celebrate in our tribulations. It was it was great because if it hadn’t happened to me, I guarantee you I would have stayed in that job much longer than I should have, and I wouldn’t be where I am today. God would not I would not have followed where God wanted me to go. Maybe you have similar stories. Maybe you think about it and there are things that happened and you wondered how are we going to get through this?
But somehow God provided a way. I have stories, and I have friends that have stories where finances were in such a disarray. They didn’t know what was going to happen, how they were gonna pay bills, and suddenly go out to the mailbox and find a refund check from your insurance company for an amount that was exactly what you needed. Or suddenly, someone handed you cash for no apparent reason and it was just what you had to have, or someone invites you over to to give you a meal and then you didn’t know how you were gonna get a meal without that. All these things have happened.
Why? Because faith is greater than tribulation. We’re to celebrate our tribulations. Why do we celebrate them? Why is it that we’re going to celebrate them?
We are supposed to celebrate the hard times that knock us down. We’re when we’re faced with heartbreak and trauma, we’re supposed to celebrate that? Yes. But why? Because god is going to use it in your life.
God will see you through. He said he will never leave you and forsake you. Never. He said I will never leave you. I will see you through.
Can you get through on your own strength? No. But here’s a here’s a news flash. You never could. The scripture says apart from me, you can do nothing according to what the bible tells us.
We have in our mind that we do it all on our own. Guess what? You’re not doing it anyway. So when these tribulations come and these hard times come, I don’t know how I’m gonna get through it. Without god, you won’t.
But god god is going to see us through. He will never leave us or forsake us. He’s going to bring us through. Celebrate because god is going to show you something in this. How are we gonna get through this?
I don’t know, but I know that god’s gonna use it. We could take testimony today and go around the room, and I guarantee you there’ll be people that could say, because of this tribulation that I went through, god used it for this reason. I have people that I talked to that say, I went through something. I didn’t understand it. It was terrible.
It was horrible in my life. I didn’t know how I was gonna make it through, but somehow I made it through on the other end. And then I found out down the road that because of that happening in my life, this person came to know Jesus as lord and savior. Amen? I went through this, and I found out when I got to the other side.
You know what? I have not been trusting god in my life. I’ve been trying to do it all on my own, and it took him knocking me down on my knees before I realized I gotta give it all to him. I can’t just give him part of it. I gotta give him all of it.
And so we go through these hard things. Scripture says celebrate those things, because God’s showing you something. He’s gonna do something amazing in your life. What’s he gonna do? I don’t know.
Will we always know what it was? No. No. We won’t always know, but he’s going to bring us through. Celebrate all of these things.
Look at verse 3 and 4 again. Verse 34, It says this, therefore there we go. Get to it. And not only this, but we also exalt in our tribulations knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance. And perseverance proven character, and proven character, hope.
All of these things. It brings about perseverance. Perseverance brings forth, proven character. All of these things happen. And so when we look at all this, tribulation brings perseverance, which brings character, which brings hope.
It’s a process. Anybody ever play football? Couple of you. Alright. Looks like just me and you, about it.
Okay. Play football. Right? I go out for practice at football in the beginning of the year. It’s a 172 degrees on the field and the coach says, we’re gonna run wind sprints.
Why are we gonna run wind sprints? We run and we run until we just feel like we’re going to die. Back then, you didn’t get water breaks. You had to earn them. That’s why people fell out on the ground.
We didn’t, you know, we didn’t understand that. We had to run, run, and tongue hanging out. We’re dying. What are we learning from this? Why are we doing this?
Guess what? When season finally started and we’re 40 minutes into a 60 minute game and we still have stamina to complete the game. If we hadn’t been doing all that, we’d have been passed out on the side, not been able to do it. It was tough going through the things we went through, but we used it in the long run. That persevere that tribulation brought perseverance, and the perseverance then brought proven character, and that proven character brings hope.
So as we go through these things in our life, God used them as building blocks in our life to make us into what he wants us to be. If we never had that, how long would our real trust in God last? If we don’t think that we need him, how long will it last? I talked to someone about it one time. They said, I don’t really need God.
I kind of got it. I’m good. I said, yeah. Right now. Wait till tomorrow when something else happens.
Wait till when something else goes on, then what are you gonna say? 911 happened and our churches were packed out. All of a sudden, they decided they needed god. Didn’t need him before. Now we need god.
Why? Tribulation came. God uses those things. There are things that we cannot learn except through tribulation. There are things we cannot learn except through tribulation.
You say, wait a minute. Now I think God could teach me these things without it being a hard time in my life. You know, I think that I could learn some things. I don’t have to go through all that. You know why we can’t learn them?
Because we avoid them. We avoid it. If that’s more difficult than this, we’ll avoid it. Anybody use GPS when you’re traveling. Right?
You bring up your GPS and it says, there’s an accident on this road. But if you go this way, even though it’s 40 miles further, there’s no accident, and you’ll get there quicker. We avoid that accident. We go off the road and go somewhere else. We know there’s something going on and we don’t want to go through it, we avoid that.
We’ll go way out of our way to avoid something rather than going through it. The quickest way from my house to my in laws is to go through Atlanta. I’ve never gone through Atlanta. Don’t plan on ever going through Atlanta. I can avoid it.
I might go through it one time and learn, oh, this isn’t as bad as I thought. I probably will never find out. We cannot learn certain things except going through the tribulation. It’s at that point when god shows us the things that we need to see. It’s been said that in the military, the guys are trained and they’re trained, and the ones that you see sometimes that you think are the the greatest military men go into battle and become the greatest cowards.
And the ones that you never thought much of become the ones that are standing tall in the situation. God shows them things. He teaches them things. He learn they learn things through all that they do. For every single one of us, everything we go through, God will teach us things that we go through, and some things we cannot learn because we avoid them.
Understand this, the most beautiful gems are diamonds. Right? Diamonds. You know how diamonds are made? Heat and pressure.
Heat and pressure. With enough heat and enough pressure, that old chunk of coal becomes a diamond. But you gotta have the heat and the pressure. Nothing else you can do to make it be that way. It has to have the right amount of heat and the right amount of pressure.
And with those two things together, it becomes something beautiful. For those of us in our walk with God, sometimes it takes the heat and the pressure to get rid of the old stuff that we don’t need. Sometimes it’s a tribulation that chops off the things that we’ve been holding on to that we don’t need. Sometimes it’s what we go through that causes us to be fashioned into the very thing that God wants us to be. It takes tribulation to get our impurities out.
For a diamond, it takes heat and pressure to get all those impurities out. For us, sometimes I think it takes heat and pressure too. Sometimes it’s the tribulation that gets everything out. We can get through the worst tribulations with faith. With faith, we can get through the worst tribulations.
We have to have faith to believe that god can see us through anything. You have to have the faith to believe that. If you don’t believe that god can see you through anything, then how can you go through that tribulation trusting him? You have to have that faith. We have to have faith that god has a plan even if we don’t understand it.
Most of the time, we want to make the plan. We don’t want god to make the plan for us. God has a plan. God has a plan for your life. He has a plan for my life.
He has a plan for all of us. God has a plan. And it’s because of that that we can trust him. It’s because of that that we can get through. It’s because of that that we can get through the worst things in our life.
Faith that god will use this, whatever it is, to make us better. God’s gonna use it to make us better. I don’t see how this is going to make me better. I don’t see how I could go from being a a a sorry sinner to being a child of the king, but God did. He saw a way that it could happen.
Incredible. Tribulation and troubles are painful. They’re painful. It’s as simple as that. They’re painful.
But it is that pain that sometimes strengthens us. It is that pain that causes us to grow. Sometimes it’s the pain that drives us to our knees. You can’t get stronger any way better than being on your knees. When it drives you to your knees and you say, god, I can’t do it.
I have to give it to you. God says, it’s about time you realize that. Now let me help you up. Let me show you how I can get you through this. Now that you have finally understood that you are not strong enough, but I am.
Rehab after surgery hurts, but if you do it properly by the end of it, you’re much better off than you were before you had the surgery. God can take care of that. The pain sometimes changes the way that we do things. Sometimes the way that we were doing things was causing us the pain. But when we change it because of God, it’s better.
Sometimes that is the point. You need to change how you’re doing things. Almost every one of us think that whatever we do, we do it in the best way possible. We do this the best. Whatever it is.
Pick anything. How I get from here to there is the best way. Why is it the best way? Well, I mean, I’ve, you know, I looked at the different routes and I figured this out and I think this is absolutely the best way. But is it?
Are you certain? Do you know? Because this person always goes that way. Why do they always go that way and you always go this way? Is the other way better than your way?
Well, absolutely not. I know my way is the best. Really, it’s just habit. I went that way one time. I’ve been going that way ever since.
I need to change. I need to get out of that habit. I need to get out of those things in my life that are not glorifying god and get back to doing the things that are glorifying him. Sometimes it takes those things for me to see that. Sometimes it takes the things that you go through to see that you need to change your route.
You need to change what you’re doing. You need to change, and God wants to show you that. Sometimes the pain that we go through causes the change, and that’s the point. Faith trumps tribulation. The hardest things that we may face in this world can be accomplished with faith.
They can’t be accomplished without it. Tribulation brings hope and hope is the greatest thing. Look at verse 5. Therefore sorry. Hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
Hope does not disappoint. Hope does not disappoint. Hope is poured out through God’s love. God loves us. And because of that, it always trumps tribulation.
Faith beats tribulation because God loves you. And if God loves you, then he’s going to take care of you. How’s he going to take care of you? He’s gonna see you through the good times and the bad, through the hard times and the easy times. He’s gonna see you through every bit of that.
Does it mean that we will never see tribulation? No. It doesn’t. We will see trouble in this world. Does it mean that we can get through it?
Yes. We can get through it. Well, preacher, you’re saying that, but I know people who’ve had terrible diseases and things that have happened, and they trusted God was gonna take care of them and heal them, but they passed away. Guess what? They passed away, but through that they were healed.
Sometimes the the way that God gets us through the tribulation is take us out of this world. We’re not promised tomorrow. We’re not promised another minute. Faith trumps tribulation. No matter how that works, it’s going to be better than tribulation every time when we trust God as he brings us through.
So the question is this, are you trying to go through these things without faith today? Are you trying to go through all of this on your own? Are you trying to be the one that gets yourself through that? Is it all about you and what you can do? Is it about you and your bank account?
Is it about you and your health? Is it about you and your job? Is it what is it about? Is everything you go through, you think you’ve got it? And therefore, you don’t need God?
God’s gonna show you you don’t have it. You need him. Are you trying to go through these things without faith today? If you don’t know him, scripture says you have no hope. So the question then is this, have you ever given your life to him?
Have you ever done that? Has there ever been a time where you realized, I can’t do this alone? I need God and you gave your life to him. Has there ever been a time that that’s happened in your life? If it has never happened, then according to what the scripture says, apart from me, you can do nothing.
The hope that we have is the hope in Christ. If we don’t know him, we don’t have that hope. That means if we don’t know him, that verse that says, the wages of sin is death. That’s all you got. You don’t have the free gift of God, because you’ve never accepted it.
The tribulations that you go through are all on your own, but God. God will see you through. Have you ever given your life to him? If not, listen. You’re still breathing today.
Right? Everybody take a deep breath. Let it out. You’re still breathing? Okay.
Then you still have time. You still have time. Just a moment, we’ll have a time of invitation. If you need to come up here and talk to me about how you give your life to Christ, I would love to talk with you about it. If you know him, are you trusting him?
Or are you trying to handle it all on your own? Listen. Give it to God. He will see you through and your faith will beat the tribulation every single time.
