Prescribe And Teach These Things #3

So this is going to be our third and final week studying this passage in 1 Timothy, chapter 4. The first week we saw how Paul described a pastor's job. What is a pastor supposed to do? Well, if he's to be a good servant of Jesus Christ, he's to point out God's truth to the flock, realizing that not all of God's truth is popular, that we're quick to forget it, and with what we don't forget, we often can be less enthusiastic about it than we should be. And so a pastor's job, if he's to serve God well, is to point those things out to us, to remind us, to call us to love and to faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, a pastor is supposed to lead by example and to call his people to live fruitful lives for God. They're supposed to be growing in godliness. That's the goal. Last week, we looked at what it meant to actually lead a fruitful life. What does it look like? We saw the ways that we can redefine godliness.

to accommodate our current preferences or circumstances, how we can waste a lot of our time and a lot of our energy pursuing our own desires instead of spending our time and our energy pursuing godliness. This week, we're going to take our time in looking and seeing what a life, a godly life, actually produces in us. But before I read our passage, I want to dispel a lie that I think we may be quick to believe about godliness and what it actually produces in our lives. The lie is that if you lead a godly life, this is what we're inclined to believe, if I lead a godly life, my life won't have any trouble in it. It won't be hard. And it is true that in our lives, a lot of the trouble that we have to face is the result of us not leading a godly life. And yet, we have to bear in mind that leading a godly life does not remove trouble from us. If it did,

I would ask you, show me in Scripture where you see people who lead godly lives, the cream of the crop, those who lead the best and say, they did it right. They were those godly ones and therefore they had peace all the days of their life. In fact, I think what you'll find is that even in the most godly, save Jesus, who was perfectly godly, right? That the more godly they were, the more trouble they faced, the harder their lives were. It's good that we desire to live peaceful and quiet lives. Scripture teaches us to pray for this. But scripture also teaches us that God scourges or disciplines every son that he receives. And also that all who desire to live godly lives in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. And so we have to dispel from our minds this idea that if I was just godly, all my troubles would go away. I don't want you coming into this sermon or this text thinking, that's the answer, that's the solution. If I was just...

more obedient, I wouldn't have troubles in my life. Actually, what you'll find is the more that you serve God, it actually stirs up trouble in some ways. It's not trouble that we should be going out and looking for, but it does end up being the fruit, the outworking of the tension between a Christian living his life in a fallen world. To live a godly life in our time and among our neighbors is no different than it has been at any other time in history. There's a divide. There's a division. There are two things going on. Christians are going one way and unbelievers are going another way. And that difference of direction creates problems. And so we shouldn't be surprised when we see those sorts of things happening in our lives. We shouldn't be disappointed when we go, I thought if I did the right thing, I would never have that hardship. This is not the case. If you've ever thought, man, if I become a Christian, one of the things in evangelism or talking to people who aren't believers, you think, man, your life's a mess.

Look at all these problems, look at all these troubles, look at all these toils. It's very tempting to say, if you become a Christian, all that's going to go away and your life's going to be so much better. But to say that, to say nothing more to an unbeliever is to lie to them. Because you're not calling them to count the cost of what it means to be a Christian, what godliness actually produces, would produce in their life. It is true that some of the problems in their lives will go away, that the troubles that they're experiencing as a result of their sin can be resolved.

But in another sense, they're trading those sorts of troubles that they should want to get rid of for another set of burdens and trials that beset Christians in this life. And so this morning we're going to be addressing this reality. The Christian life is one that's filled with strife and trials. And our souls depend on God's mercy to bear us through every storm we face. He's faithful. He's promised that he will never leave us or forsake us or abandon us in our trials. And yet he hasn't promised that he will shield us from them, but that he'll bear us through them. This is the fruit of a godly life. This is what we're going to be studying this morning. Our passage is 1 Timothy 4, verses 6-11. Would you please stand for the reading of God's word? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith.

and of the sound doctrine which you have been following, but have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness, for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance, for it is for this we labor and strive. Because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers. Prescribe and teach these things. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As we've worked our way through this passage, we've come to verse 10. We're going to be spending our time at verse 10 and 11 today. And so I want to start at the very beginning of verse 10. For it is...

For this, that we labor and strive. For us to understand this statement, first we have to understand what is the this in this statement. For it is for this we labor and strive. The this refers to the promise that was mentioned in verse 8. You could say it this way if we were to conflate those two verses. We labor and strive in pursuit of godliness because it holds promise for this life and the one to come. As we saw last week, godliness is not something that occurs in our life or grows in our life on accident. Any more than a tomato plant grows in your backyard by accident. Perhaps it grows in your garden if you had tomatoes planted there last year. But that's just a testimony of your previous work in planting a tomato plant. Wouldn't it be a thing if we could go and buy a new house? A lot of you are buying new houses. You could go and you could discover next spring. Look!

Look at all the tomato plants that nobody planted coming up in our yard. And yet those tomato plants or those vegetables will never be there unless somebody takes the time to plant them. And the same is true with godliness. It doesn't come by accident. It doesn't come by the passing of time. Men don't become less foolish as they get older. Their sins and their desires and their temptations just change. And so godliness can only be achieved by labor, by hard work. And without intense effort, we won't have any of it. And so Paul calls us to labor and to strive. And as I was reading this, I thought, you know, labor and strive are not the kind of things that, I don't think that those two words draw out of us or communicate to us what's really being said here. Not on the face of it. If we say you're supposed to labor for something, what's it mean? You say to work hard, to work, to work hard, right? How? Part of the reason I think that this doesn't...

naturally communicate to us the way it would have originally is that we don't have the same types of work and jobs that we used to. Okay? If you would think of saying this to a bunch of people who farmed for a living, like not hobby farmed, but like farmed like their lives depended on it. If you said you have to labor for godliness, they would understand something different than we do because they would understand my life and the lives of those that depend on me. hangs in the balance of how hard I work and how much effort I put in. That's what Paul's telling us to do when he says we're to labor. We're to labor, we're to work hard, we're to use our bodies and all of our strength. Now, I want to give you a comparison. First, I want to tell you something Dan said one time, and then I want to give you a comparison. Those of you who know Dan know that Dan thinks going to the gym is just silly, right? He just thinks men that go to the gym are silly.

Now, why does Dan think that men that go to the gym is just a waste of time? Well, if you know Dan, it's because he works with his hands and his men work with their hands all day. And his basic assumption is that you should be tired by the end of the day. And the idea of going expending more energy at the end of the day doesn't make any sense, right? He expects the men that work for him to labor, to work hard, to push through, to give themselves. And if he has men that come and just go through the motions of work, yeah, okay, what do you want me to do next? Okay. And Dan says, that's supposed to be a 45-minute job, and they come back at 90 minutes. One of the things Dan will conclude about those men is what? Perhaps they're lazy. They didn't work hard. Unless something happened that was unforeseen, he'll say, they didn't work hard. They are capable of doing this job in this amount of time. They didn't push themselves to get it done. They didn't labor.

I think part of the reason labor, this idea of working hard with our bodies to the point of exhaustion, to the point where you want to go to bed at night, you don't want to go do some other physical thing, is lost on us because so much of our work today doesn't require that same level of exertion. It just doesn't. And so consequently, a lot of men end up going to the gym now. Why? Because they don't do that kind of work all day. And I don't want you to learn the wrong thing about what I'm saying. I'm not saying anything about whether you go to the gym or whether you do. If you do, don't be vain. Don't stare in the mirrors. That's not the point. If you need exercise because God's called you to work that doesn't wear you out at the end of the day, go get your exercise. Go do what you need to do. But the sort of labor that's being called to here is not the kind of labor that just does what's easy and what's comfortable to us. Think of it this way. Here's my comparison.

What is the difference between a game of pickup basketball and a game of a real basketball, a real competition against another team? You can chalk up most of the difference to the level of exertion and preparation and pain that goes into it. Everyone knows in a game of pickup basketball, who's going to win? The most intense team, what did you say? The most aggressive, and why? I'll tell you why. Because nobody plays defense in pickup games. If you can get by, I mean, he'll stand there and act like he's guarding you, but if you just get half a step past him, he's like, oh, well. It's just a pickup game. When we get the ball, I'll do the same thing to him. And whoever can do that the most consistently, well, they're going to win. And my contention is in a pickup game, nobody's working that hard. No one's being pushed. Those who want to run a little more and try a little harder are welcome to, and they end up scoring all the points.

Because nobody else is interested in pushing themselves. Now, if we were to compare that with, say, going to two-a-day football practices, like I used to do when I was in high school, and you go to two three-hour practices in this kind of heat outside with full pads on, it was absolutely miserable. After the first day, you didn't feel like you could walk, like you could move. And then you just had to go. And that's the only group of kids in the whole school that we're looking forward to the first day of class. Because when the first day of class came, it meant that they didn't have to go to two-a-days anymore. They just had to go to one practice a day. Now, why is that so different than a game of pickup basketball? Well, it's different because you've got coaches that are expecting you to work hard. And they're not going to accept you mailing it in.

going through the motions, shuffling instead of running. They expect real labor. And the result of it was that every person who was at that practice could feel that expectation in their bones when they went home at night, and especially when they woke up the next morning. If you haven't done this, I'll tell you what I did one year, my senior year of football, in response so that I wouldn't have the sort of miserable two weeks. My friend and I went biking to get into practice. And our habit was to bike about 40 miles a day. We rode a long, long way through many towns and then back down the Fox River. We rode up to St. Charles and back from Aurora every day. Because we knew what was coming when football practice came. And we wanted to do well. This is the sort of labor that Paul is calling us to. And so when he says, for it is for this that we labor, I think we go, oh yeah, this is like the direction we...

kind of meander and wander. We pursue godliness. We know it's over there, so we go that way. No, that's not at all what's being said. When he says we labor, he's talking to people who've built up blisters and calluses under their blisters and calluses because they've been working so hard. He says, you know how you do that to feed yourself? That's what you do for godliness. Nothing less is going to produce any profit. And so whether you've got first-hand experience with the sort of physical demands that I've talked about, You understand how Paul is describing a Christian's pursuit of godliness. In another place, in Hebrews 12, chapter 4, we read, you've not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin. What kind of effort has to be put forth to shed blood in your striving against sin? How committed do you have to be to, no, I'm not going to do it, to shed blood? How much labor, how much hard work?

Scripture is full of exhortations and examples of laboring for the sake of godliness. Not only are we to labor, though, we're to strive. When I was in track, sports are the easiest way I know to describe this to you guys. When I was in track, people want to run track, and all these kids come out. And you've got small kids and big kids and muscular kids and fat kids and all kinds of kids. In track, you have to figure out where you fit. And so generally, if I showed up to a track practice, where do I fit? I belong over throwing the heavy weights, the shot put and the discus. That's what I did. I don't belong on the track running. That's not where I belong. That's not what I'm made for. That's not what I'm built for. And I want to ask you, if I had to run, which occasionally they did have what they called a weight man's relay. We were called weight men, okay?

And we had to run a relay race. And I think it was just for the entertainment of everybody else. They made us run. Could we labor very hard as we ran? Oh, yes. And yet, it was nothing compared to the people who actually knew how to run. We all competed against all the other fat kids on the team. And if we had to run against the runners, it just would have been hopeless, right? To see these big guys running against these runners. And no matter how hard we worked and no matter how much effort we put in, I was never going to run with the sprinters. I could work and work and work and labor as hard as I wanted to. I was never going to make it. Paul tells us here that we're not only supposed to labor, work hard, give of ourselves, but we're to strive. What does it mean by strive? Well, it means that you ought to struggle. You ought to try to win. You ought to fight. Now I ask you,

If I had to race a runner, do you think that I would strive? No. I might run, but I'm not going to strive. And the reason I wouldn't strive is because I know that there's no chance of me winning. I can't run with them. And so when Paul tells us here that we're to strive, he says you're supposed to do your work in such a way as that you would win. You're not supposed to just show up and run. You're supposed to run in such a way, as Paul says in another place, as though you might win, as though you might obtain the prize. And so we're not supposed to go through the motions of pursuing godliness. We're supposed to struggle to obtain it. I remember in sports, again, when I was a junior in high school playing football, the position that I was playing for, there was a senior that also played that position. I was bigger and stronger than he was. I think I was a better athlete than he was. And at one point, the coach looked at me during two-a-days when we're all exhausted and miserable, and he says, do you want to start? Like, do you want to play, or are you just here to be on the team?

And I looked at him, and I was like, well, I want to play coach, because that's, of course, what you would say. And he says, well, why don't you practice like it? And the other kid was standing right there, and he goes, is he better than you? Are you just going to let him have the spot because you won't try? What that coach was addressing in me was that I was just showing up and going through the motions, and I just assumed that because the older kid was the older kid, that it was his spot, and I was just going to be his backup. But that wasn't my coach's expectation.

My coach's expectation was that if I was going to come, I was going to try hard, like I actually wanted to play, like I actually wanted to win. And that's what Paul's calling us to here when he says that we're supposed to strive, we're to struggle, we're to try to win, we're to fight and scrap, to make progress. And so the one who goes through the motions on the football team is wasting his time. But the one who goes through the motions as a Christian is worse than that. He's a hypocrite. He's a Pharisee. He's a liar. And many times, unfortunately, he's an unbeliever who gives lip service to what he believes, but no effort to it. And so both laboring and striving assume a certain thing. And the thing that they assume is that there will be resistance. To grow in godliness is not a race to the bottom of a hill. It's a journey up a mountain. What sorts of things do you have to contend with? You say, well, I'm supposed to labor and I'm supposed to strive. And in what way? In where? How?

Well, first, you have to wrestle with your own weakness. There are many things you'd like to do that you find you're too weak to do. When Jesus was going into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, and he brought along the disciples with him, and he told them, you guys keep watching, you pray. What happened to them? They fell asleep. And then Jesus comes back and he speaks to them, and he says, what's wrong? Why are you sleeping? Wake up, keep watching, pray. The hour has come. And he goes away to pray again, and what do they do? They fall asleep. And then again a third time, right before the mob comes, what does he say about them? He says, keep watching and praying, Matthew 26, 41. Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. And what he's saying to them is, you have desire. You're here with me. They're not just quitting.

Your spirit is willing, but your flesh is weak. You have to do battle against your own weakness. How can you make progress in godliness if you don't say, I'm not as strong as I should be, and one of the things I have to contend with is the apparent weakness in me. In addition to our own just weakness, we have to do battle with our own sins. Romans 7.19 says, For the good that I want, I do not do. The good that I want, I don't do it. But I practice the very evil. that I do not want. And so the struggle that we have isn't limited to our weaknesses and us going, man, I wish I, I want to do the right thing, but I'm just too weak. So I'm just not doing anything. No, it's worse than that. It's harder than that. Our striving actually is against, not only do we not do what we should do in our weakness and in our temptation, we do things we shouldn't do. And so we have to fight against our weaknesses. We have to fight against the sins that we give ourselves to in knowledge that we know what we should do or we shouldn't do. We know why.

We know we could map out, if we were honest and weren't ashamed, we could map out how we get into situations time and again. We have to fight against our sins. And that's hard work. Laboring and striving. Which one of us can say we've made progress against sin without laboring and striving? Did you just wake up and learn how to work hard one day? Did you just learn how to control your eyes? Did you just learn how to control your tongue? Did you just wake up? humble in the morning? Did you just wake up on time in the morning? I don't need an alarm clock anymore. I'm no longer lazy. No, it's with labor and striving that we make progress. What else? We have to combat other people's sins. If we're to make progress in godliness, we have to fight against other people's sins that they've committed against us. Peter once came up to Jesus talking about sin and about forgiveness.

And Peter was griping and complaining. How many times do I have to forgive my brother? And the implication is, he just keeps on sinning all the time. How many times do I have to forgive him? When can I just tell him, away with you. I'm done with you. Jesus said to him, I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to 70 times seven. In your pursuit of godliness, you realize that what's hanging in the ballast right now in this situation is Peter's bitterness. Peter's bitter. He's angry. He doesn't want to deal with his brother's sin. And he's going, when can I just give in to my frustrations and not have to keep struggling to forgive and to trust God and to be vulnerable and to care for my brother? When can I just be done with all of that? And Jesus manfully says, never. You have godliness to pursue.

And when that battle takes on the shape of those who've sinned against you, you have to continue to do battle. What else do we have to contend with? We have to contend with persecution. You remember at the beginning how I said we often think that if we live a godly life, if we just do the right things, trouble will steer clear of us. No, it won't. In Luke 21, 12, Jesus said they'll lay their hands on you and will persecute you, delivering you to the synagogues and prisons, bringing you before kings and governors. Why? For my name's sake. Put another way, he says, your love and devotion for me is what will get you in trouble publicly. That's what will happen. Be forewarned. No. Don't shy away from it. Trust God and give him glory. Could we go on and talk about the other sorts of things we have to do battle with, the sorts of temptations we have to face, peer pressure, our family histories? Everyone in my family struggles with this. You want me to stop? Yes.

Nope. You need to stop. It needs to stop. It's sin. If I do that, my friends are all going to make fun of me. If I do that, I'll get kicked off the team. If I do that, no one's going to ever ask me out on a date. If I don't do that, you have to labor and you have to strive for the sake of godliness. You say, it's going to make me stick out like a sore thumb. And I go, yep, it's starting to come into focus for you. And that's okay. Because in all of it, God will be glorified. And you don't need to worry about what other people think or the pressures that they feel. You don't need to remain in bondage to your past sins and you say, well, I've always just done it this way. And you want me at this old age to stop? Well, yeah. Well, but I'm black and these are our sins. You want me to not be black? Well, if it's sinful, yeah. But I'm white. You want me to stop the sins of white people? Uh-huh. Yeah. And I don't want you to trade them in for the sins of Asians or blacks or Hispanics or anything else.

I want you to trade them in for godliness. And so to all of these temptations and all of the work that we have to do in laboring and striving, Scripture says this, 2 Corinthians 12.10, Paul says, Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, for when I am weak, then I am strong. This is the Christian life. We're to have our hope fixed on the living God, on Jesus Christ. on his father who sent him into the world to save sinners, and let all the rest of it fall away to the side. We're to have our hope fixed on Jesus Christ. Scripture also tells us that hope does not disappoint. How often do you think, there's a good thing out there for me, I bet I won't get it. I see God be good to other people, I bet he won't do that for me. This is not how Christians think, not how they ought to think. It's how we're tempted to think. That's why scripture tells us that hope doesn't disappoint, Romans 5.5.

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. You say, well, what if I hope for something and I don't ever get it? And I say, then you have to trust God that what he will give you and what he has done for you is better than what you were wanting and that it's not what you needed. And that in the end, God will be no man's debtor and he won't have done you any disservice by withholding from you the things that you think you can't live without. And it's a difficult thing to think. But I want it. And I need it. And I deserve it. Yes, thank you, Gollum. Now set it aside and trust God. Labor and strive for the sake of godliness. How will he who's given us his only begotten son not also give us along with him every good thing?

You might think, well, I can list a bunch of good things that I wasn't given. And I'd say, that is not how a Christian thinks. It's how we are tempted to think. And when we think that way, we're to take our thoughts captive and to say, get behind me, Satan, because that's not a godly thing to think. So I'm just supposed to ignore those sorts of questions. And I say, well, if they don't turn a profit for godliness, then yes. And you say, well, no one else thinks that way. And I say, well, are they going to go into heaven? Do they trust Jesus? Who do you trust?

Do you trust what God says and what he's done? Or do you trust your own eyes and your own desires and your own inclinations? But I really, really want it. I know. And I don't stand up here to tell you and I know why God hasn't given it to you. Because I don't. But I do know that God is faithful. And I do know that he loves his children and that he takes care of them and that he never leaves or forsakes them. And that when they die, they won't be disappointed. So labor and strive. This is the gospel message. Salvation from your sins and hope of eternal rest. Free from all of the burdens and all of the trials and all of the hardships that you endure daily. Now to the carnal mind, that's just stupidity. Everything I've just said, they just go, that's just stupid. You're telling me not to do things that make me happy right now because there's some good stuff coming in the future. Well, that's just stupid. A hard life now for blessings later? No thanks. I think I'll pass. But this shouldn't be the case. And I don't mean for you, I mean for them.

They shouldn't even say that. Why? Because the only reason they have breath in their lungs to say it is because of God's kindness and his mercy to them. Even as unbelievers, even as those who are his enemies, even as those who breathe out threats against him. They only can say those things because God's been kind to them. Our passage says that the living God is the savior of all men. Savior in this context, Paul's not using it in a spiritual sense. Savior from sin, Savior from salvation, or from death and hell, a promise of heaven. That's not the sense in which he's using this word Savior. He's using it in a more general, more broad sense. He means provider or sustainer. God cares for and loves and attends to the needs of his creation, recognizing that much of his creation does not give him the glory that it should.

And yet he sustains it. And so Paul here speaks like Jesus does. They're talking about what is typically called common grace as opposed to special grace. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus says, For he, the Lord, causes his son to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. Now again, what does it mean that he sends the son to the evil and he sends the rain to the evil? What it means is that he provides for their needs. He gives them food. if the sun didn't come out or the rain didn't fall, there would be no food and the result would be death. And so he provides life and food and nourishment to the wicked along with the righteous. Psalm 104, 27 and 29 get at this same point as well, not just for us, but for all of creation. It says, they all wait for you to give them their food in due season. You give to them and they gather it up.

You open your hands and they are satisfied with good. So this is the Lord's providing. And then it says, what happens if he doesn't provide? He says, you hide your face and they are dismayed. You take away their spirit. They expire and return to the dust. And so if the Lord doesn't provide for and isn't the savior in this sense, the sustainer, the caregiver of even the wicked, they'll die. And so whether it's acknowledged or not, the truth is that everything that is and everything that comes to us, comes to us from the merciful hand of God. And that's true of believers as well as unbelievers, but it is especially true of believers. If the Lord provides food and shelter and covering for the wicked, how much more does he provide for his people? And I would think that you'd say, but Hebrews says that those men didn't even have homes, that they ran around and hid in caves and rocks and holes in the ground. And yet the wicked had houses. How do you reconcile that?

And I say, well, what's the rest of the verse say? These men who live under rocks and in caves and holes in the ground, how are they described? What kind of men are they? Does anyone know? What? Yeah, men of whom the world is not worthy. Men who are finishing their race and entering into what God has really provided that will not burn away, will not be destroyed, and is not corrupted by sin. These men in their time ran around in hidden rocks and holes in the ground. They're laboring and striving. And their faithfulness to God brought them to that point. And it's also what qualified them to be described as men of whom the world was not worthy. And in their due time, God called them home and they were not disappointed. And nor will you be. Because God is a savior of all men, especially of believers. And so our work as Christians, our laboring and striving begins with contenting ourselves with the Lord's wisdom here and with his provision for us. You say, that's not what I want it to be. And I say, that's okay.

The truth is it never would be. More and more stuff is never going to make you happy or satisfied. More and more money is not going to fix your problems. More and more of whatever you want in this life is not going to make you love God any better. And so we have to content ourselves. The first battlefield we face is to content ourselves with his wisdom and how he cares for us. Shutting up our hearts and our mouths in places where they lead us astray from him. That's our work. In verse 9, Paul says, this is a statement. deserving full acceptance. This is a statement. Everything I've just said to you is a statement deserving full acceptance. And it's my job to tell you that because Paul finishes by saying, prescribe and teach these things. Now some of you might squirm a little bit and go, I don't know. And I say, well, it's too bad if you don't know. I know that we're weak and I know that we struggle and I know that we have all kinds of questions.

that attend our lives. And it's very easy for us to forget. It's very easy for us to set aside. It's very easy for us to turn away, even if it's only in our hearts. But you're here to be called back, to have your eyes refocused on the things that God has said and the things that he has done for your good and for his glory. And so you're under obligation as his people to remember these things. Peter said that after his departure, He said, I don't mind reminding you of these things because I want to be confident that after my departure, you'll be able to call these things to mind, that you'll remember them. You might not be in the middle of a trial or a difficulty or a hardship right now that you think of in your mind as, why is the Lord doing this? Now, maybe you are. But if you're not, it's my hope and my expectation that you're going to be able to remember the things that have been said to you now and that they'll do you good then.

That's my hope. That's our hope. That when we suffer and when we struggle, we don't blink and lose faith. That we don't wander away from the Lord. Either quickly or slowly. And so instead of, to close with, instead of looking always for the new thing that's going to fix our problems, let us content ourselves to labor and to strive for godliness. Jeremiah says from the Lord in chapter 6 of his book, verse 16, Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, not the new things, the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. Jesus says a very similar thing to us. All of you who are weary and heavy laden, come to me, and you will find rest for me. Learn from me, for I am meek and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

You say, you're telling me I'm supposed to have rest and you're telling me I'm supposed to labor and strive. And I say, yes, exactly. You're to labor and strive for this rest, for godliness. That peace and that rest only come to those who labor and strive. If you won't labor and strive for godliness sake, you will have none of it. But if you do labor and strive and you do trust God to sustain you and to bring you along and you pursue it, you will have it because God is good to his children. And if he gives food to the wicked, How much more will he give to us? Let's pray.