You Are To Know In Your Heart

Continuing our study in the book of Deuteronomy with the opening five verses of chapter eight. And in this section, Moses shows how God cared for and prepared the Israelites to go into the land and to take possession of it. And as we study this passage, there are a few themes that rise to the top. The first is that the heart of Israel, the people's hearts, is what God is concerned about and working on. Basically, if we were to summarize this text in just a sentence or two, we would say that God was preparing not just the people, but specifically their hearts to enter into the promised land. And it took 40 years. A secondary theme that we see coming up in this passage, though it's not mentioned by name, is sort of that Israel, in coming into the land of the Canaanite land, the promised land, they're sort of coming of age. They're growing up. They're moving from being children to being adults.

so to speak. And this passage is a warning and is a reminder to them not to forget where they came from and how God led them through those years. Their way of life was going to change significantly. If you think for a moment that many of them, all of the men and all of the younger, those that were young, they had never known anything other than living in tents and wandering in the wilderness. They don't remember Egypt because they were too young or weren't born yet. They've never lived in a city or a home. They've never grown a vineyard. They've never had a well. And all of these things are about to change. This is the coming of age that's happening in their lives. And so God's been preparing them for that transition. And so as we work our way through the text this morning, my hope is that God will humble us and prepare us for greater responsibility and freedom, just as he did for Israel in those 40 years in the wilderness. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord?

From Deuteronomy chapter 8, verses 1 through 5, this is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. All the commandments that I am commanding you today, you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to give to your forefathers. You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these 40 years, that he might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart. whether you would keep his commandments or not. He humbled you and let you be hungry and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these 40 years. Thus are you to know in your heart

that the Lord your God was disciplining you, just as a man disciplines his son. This is the word of the Lord. Now you may be seated. Do you remember when you came of age? Do you remember when freedom, however it was defined for you, arrived? And you went, now I have my training wheels off. Now I'm free. It's an exciting time. It's also a dangerous time. It's a time where you're put into a new position. with all kinds of new freedoms and latitudes, but with no experience. And it's also a time where you make mistakes. It's a time where you have to learn what is good, what you ought to pursue. In this passage, God sets before them the good things that he's going to give to them. Carefully obey all of these commands that you may live and multiply and go in and possess. And so we see a connection between God's commandments and the promotion of life and blessing.

When we come of age, we want blessings. We want good things. We want happy things. We want freedom. The danger is that we think that the freedom leads to the blessings. But that's not what this passage teaches us. This passage teaches us that obedience, careful obedience to God's commands, is what produces the blessings. Be careful to do that you may live and multiply, go in and possess. God's commands are meant to promote life and blessing. They're not meant to restrict us or keep away from us any good thing. And this is a foundational point that I've made time and again as we've studied the book of Deuteronomy, but I want to say again to you, God is not trying to ruin your life. He's trying to give you life. If you're miserable and sorrowful and frustrated and grumpy and bitter, it's not because God's withheld stuff from you.

It probably has more to do with the way you've lived your life and how you've conscientiously or willfully and systematically avoided careful obedience. So God's commands are meant to promote life and blessing and to give us the good stuff. When God commands us to be careful, he's addressing our lack of attention to the details of serving him. A general effort in the direction of God's law. Yeah, I try to do what God says is not. And it's insufficient on two grounds. The first is that it's insufficient to give glory to God. If your children were like, if you had given them a list of chores to do while you were gone to work or whatever, and they said, yeah, I tried to do kind of, you know, I was, I tried to do it. But you came home and were like, actually the list had seven things on it and you've done like two and a half of them and those two and a half, you didn't do a very good job of. You wouldn't accept it.

You wouldn't call that obedience. You wouldn't say, that's good, son. Thank you. And so it's insufficient to give God glory, this general effort in the direction of living like a Christian. It's also insufficient to secure for us the blessings of God. If we live a mediocre Christian life, we ought not to expect an exquisite Christian blessing. We do reap what we sow. And so if we find that we're sowing things that we don't like, our first work is to look in the mirror and say, what am I sowing? If my relationships are poor, I should ask how I behave in relationships. What would a good doctor do if you came in and said, I'm overweight and I want to lose weight and be more healthy? The first thing a good doctor would ask you is what you eat, right? Maybe you have a thyroid problem. Maybe, maybe. But a good doctor would first start with saying, you know what causes this condition you have? It's not a mystery.

It's what you put in your mouth. So let's talk about that. If you wanted the blessing and the privilege of being able to be free of pain and misery and to be able to move about with joy and energy, you'd have to look at what you eat and how much you sleep and what you do with stress. And so if we want the blessings of God to be present and growing in our lives, we have to look then at our own behavior. Because his blessings are downstream of our obedience. Not because we earn the blessings, but because obedience produces the blessings. Many of the troubles and the trials that we have in our lives are not because God has arbitrarily and for some unknown reason withheld this blessing. It's because we haven't sought him as we should. We haven't been careful as Moses commands us here. We've not been careful to do all that he commands. And so he promises life and children, property and ownership.

to the children of God. He says, these things are the blessings of God. And to the extent that you have those things or enjoy those things, life and children, property ownership, and the blessing of God, you do have to remember that those things were given to you not because you earned them or deserve them, but because God promised to give them to his children. After he says, you know, be careful to do all these things that you may live and multiply and go in and possess, he says, the Lord swore to give these things to your father. He promised to give them to you. And so we have to be careful here not to take for granted or to take the glory to ourselves because we have these things. If you have children, it's not because you're a good parent. It's not because you're a better parent than somebody else. Maybe you are, maybe you're not, but you're not a perfect parent. Far from it. So why is it that God gives children to some and not to others? It's hard to say. We don't always know.

How come some people have material goods and material and abundance and other people don't? Does it have to do with how they live and the things they spend their money on and the carefulness with which they execute their budget versus not? Yes, there is some element of that. But to those who have an abundance and to those who do well with their finances, why is it that they have these blessings? It's because God's given those blessings to them, the ability to work. And so the things that we have, The blessings that we receive from God, we don't have them because we earned them, because we deserve them. We have them because God's promised to bless his children. And his blessings are different with different people. And so if we have good things from the Lord, we ought not to boast about it. Paul warns us in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 7, he says, what do you have that you didn't receive?

And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? What should you do with the blessing of God when you get it? The danger and the temptation is to boast about it when in point of fact what we should do with it is praise God for it and offer up a sacrifice of thanksgiving and gratitude and renewed effort to obey him further because of his kindness to us. We tend to get this backwards. We tend to get it mixed up. Then he says, you shall remember. In all of this being careful to obey and living and multiplying and all of these blessings, he says, you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these 40 years. And so what we find here is that the key to careful obedience is to remember all of the way that God led them. And so I ask you, in those 40 years, how would you describe the way the Lord led them? Would you want to remember it? Would you want to remember the hunger? Would you want to remember the thirst? Would you want to remember all of the death for disobedience?

Of all of the men. Would you want to remember the traveling through the hostile nations? Who wants to remember any of that? Do you care to remember the difficult times of your lives? I don't think any of us really do. We'd rather forget the hard parts. We want to learn the lesson from it, but then we never want to talk about it or revisit it again. But here God says, no, you remember that stuff all of the way that you were led. You shall remember. You shall remember. And so God often leads us, as he did the Israelites, through these sorts of things, hungers, health trials, danger. And here he tells us why. That he might humble you. Christians must be a humble people. Otherwise, they won't follow God. And so God, in his mercy, often breaks us down through trial and hardship to teach us humility, to test how we respond to those things.

If I were to ask you if you were humble, what would you say? And I don't mean like the Sunday school answer, well, of course I'm not humble. But honestly, if you were to be asked, are you humble? I think many of us would enter into sort of a comparison between us and other people around us. And we would find if we were honest that we are more humble than some and less humble than others. And so we wouldn't know what to do with the question. We wouldn't know how to answer it. Are you humble? I don't know. I suppose I could be more proud. I suppose I could be more humble. There's a danger here about humility. We tend to think that we're being humble because we don't have everything we want and we don't openly rebel against God. But the reality is that we have far more than we deserve and we proudly take credit of it. We think it's ours, that we got it. And the way we know that is we look at the people who don't have what we have and we look down on them.

And we think, well, you don't have what I have because you're not as good as me. You haven't worked as hard as I am. Your theology's not as good. You didn't go to college. What? We make these value judgments, these comparisons to other people, and that is pride. And whatever way it shows up, this pride is what God is breaking them of. I mean, could you imagine what kind of pride you would have after having been delivered out of Egypt in such a miraculous fashion? I mean, how cool are you? You'd forget the part about where you went in and got scared and God cursed the people. You'd forget that part, but you'd say, man, we are something. We really are something. And so God's breaking them of their pride. They weren't ready. Another way to say this is that they were not ready to enter the promised land when they left Egypt. When you were a kid, or maybe you know this of your own kids, wasn't it always frustrating that the people around you never knew how smart you were? How good you were?

Like they never really recognized your superiority in whatever it is you think you're superior in. What is wrong with everybody? Why don't they see who I am and how good I am at it and how much of a blessing it would be to them if they would acknowledge me? Follow-up question is, how hard did you hit your face on the ground when you had just a little bit of responsibility or a little bit of weight put on you? How quick did you fail? How quick were you to make excuses? How quick were you to blame the people who put the responsibility on you of not preparing you for it? You kids with your parents, they don't know anything. And yet when you fail, it's their fault because they didn't prepare you for success. I mean, really. It flips like that. I'm so smart and I'm so capable and I'm so strong and I'm so wise. And then when I fail, everyone failed me and no one told me what it would be like.

The amazing thing is the fault is never ours. This is the sort of pride that the Israelites are being broken of. If they had been sent into that promised land right then, it would have meant their destruction. They had to be humbled and taught to rely on the Lord for their daily bread. And so God took 40 years humbling them to bring them as a nation to the point where some of them, not all of them, but some of them would be careful to obey. Has God dealt with you like that? Has he disciplined you and humbled you? Has he taken away your strength, your energy, your wisdom, your money, your health? How'd you respond to it? With contrition, with sorrow, with confession of sin, with thanksgiving and praise? Oh no. We are quick, we are quick to grumble and complain.

To be miserable and to make the people around us miserable. We blame our circumstances, but I mean to tell you, circumstances are difficult, but circumstances do not define your response to it. They never do. They just don't. We all want to say, well, it's because of this situation I'm in. It's because of my health. It's because of my money. It's because of my wife. It's because of my kids. It's because of my husband. It's because of my boss. It's because of someone in society. It's because of who? You know who it's never because of? It's never because of me. I never made my bed. And so God's hard at work, graciously at work, breaking us of that pride, slowly, slowly lifting our eyes up and getting us to look in the mirror. As much as we pull our heads away and we cover our eyes, he's getting us to know ourselves. He's humbling us. He's testing us to see how we respond. And he tells us.

Remember the ways of the Lord, how he's led you in the wilderness, all of the hard parts, that he might humble you, testing you, and this is the end. This is why he does all that, to know what was in your heart. We can all talk a good game. We can all say the right stuff. Kids will all say, oh yeah, yeah, I'll do what you say, Daddy. Oh yeah, okay, Mommy. Every man will be a good leader. I will lead and provide and protect and sustain and care for you. Every wife will be gentle and quiet and submissive and respectful until their sin arises. And it's not always that way. It's not always that way by God's grace. It's not always that way, but that does arise in us and in our lives. It does show what we're made of, what our temptations are, what our weaknesses are, where we need the Lord's help and his strength to sustain us.

Our hearts are deep water. You ever known anybody who's afraid of the ocean or deep water? Why are they afraid of it? Maybe they're afraid of it because there's sharks in it or jellyfish in it. But if we could take that away, the unknown sea monsters, and we could say, are you afraid of deep water? Like if we could just take a boat out into the middle of an ocean and it's just dark blue or green. Calm. Are you comfortable jumping off of the boat into that water? I mean, what's the difference between that and shallower water? Difference is, I mean, it's not a trick question. The difference is the depth, right? You don't know what's down there. And even if I tell you we took the sharks away, you're still like, well, I don't know if you did. What if there's one you missed? Deep water's dark. You can't see through it. You don't know what's down there. You don't know if there's something sharp. I mean, even if it was shallow water, if it was...

dark water and you couldn't see the bottom, would you want to walk barefoot in it? You'd want the water to be clear so you could see what was down there. So a man's heart is deep water. And what I mean by that is we don't know what's in it. God knows what's in it, but we don't know what's in it. We don't know what's in the heart of another man. And many times we don't know what's in our own hearts. And it's through testing and through trials and through the discipline of the Lord that we learn about ourselves lessons we never would have learned before.

And this is the Lord's way with us, humbling us, testing us to see and to know what's in our hearts. Whether when the difficulty comes, the testing is going on, whether in that moment we will keep his commandments or not. And I tend to find that those who talk the most about doing the right thing struggle the most to do the right thing when the cost is high. And so we need to know what's in our hearts, and we should recognize that the trials and testing that the Lord allows and executes in our lives reveal what's in our hearts to us. Suffering and difficulty, hardship and sorrow show what type of person we are. Think about persecution for a minute. What does it do to the church? What does it do to the professed Christians? It winnows them out.

In Matthew 24, in verse 9 and 10, it says, Then they will deliver you to tribulation and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. At that time, many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. Meaning, we'll all be Christians, we'll all be serving Jesus until the trouble comes, and then we'll say, I can tell you the Myers address. If you'll let me go, I'll tell you where they're at. What's going on? We're all learning what kind of people we are in that moment. Matthew 13, this is not persecution, but the effect of worldliness in our lives. It says, and this is from a section from the parable of the seeds. It says, and the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word and it becomes unfruitful. So what has happened to that plant, to that seed? It's grown up, but then...

The worldliness that they're surrounded by gets a hold and gets on their throat and just chokes it out until it's dead. They started off good. They looked like faithful Christians. But as time went by, you realize something else was true. And it was the pressures of society and of their own hearts that choked them out. And so God uses many of these means to test us. and to reveal what's in our hearts. And what we find is often not what we or other people would expect. I remember when I was in high school, we had what was called February conditioning for football, and we were not a good football team. But they made us come in the dead of winter at like 5.30 in the morning, and they made us run until we puked or cramped or quit. And that was actually the point. That was the whole point. You don't need to condition in February for football that starts in the fall.

especially not that intensely. But they'd bring us in. If you were on varsity and if you hoped to have a starting position, you had better be there. And they'd bring you in and they just made you miserable for two weeks. It's just two weeks. About the time you finally start to catch up with it physically, it's over. What was the point? Why would coaches do something like that to teenage boys? To see who showed up? To see who kept showing up? To see who stopped showing up. To see among those who kept coming who the leaders were. Who were the ones who were going to encourage the team? Who were the ones who were going to complain about the coach? It was a test simply to see who they could rely on when the fall came. It was completely arbitrary. It was unnecessary. It was just miserable. And it was a fabricated misery to test the team.

And what you found out at that test held true in the season. The kids who came half the time, you couldn't rely on them. They were the guys that would blame the rest when the call didn't go their way. The kids who came, the kids who stuck it out, the kids who ran with the slow kids and encouraged them, not because they were slow, but because they knew that if that slow kid didn't make it in the time, everyone had to run it again. There's a certain character that's revealed when the pressure is applied. And so God, in his way and to our spirits and to our bodies, he applies pressure to see how we'll respond. That's what he was doing for 40 years in the wilderness. He was just applying pressure. He tells us he made them hungry. He humbled you and let you be hungry. Why would a good God let his people be hungry? It seems mercenary, doesn't it?

It created such division and such conflict among them. They wanted to kill Moses. Why would God let them do that? Why would he make them be hungry? He used hunger to teach them to trust him. Manna is a pretty incredible thing if you think about it. It's really quite incredible. They're hungry and they're out there and there's no food. And something that has never been done before, there's no point of reference in history to say, well, maybe he'll send us bread from heaven. It'll just be on the ground every day, and it'll be enough of it the day before the Sabbath to last for two days. But if we take too much of it and we're greedy, it'll just rot. It's an incredible thing. It's an incredible provision. No one ever could have thought of it. No one ever could have come up with it. But God, in his wisdom, humbled them, allowed them to be hungry, and then fed them with manna, which they had never thought of, nor had their fathers known before. And it says,

that he, the Lord, might make you, the Israelites, understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. So I ask you, why did God make them hungry in the wilderness? He made them hungry in the wilderness to teach them to rely on him. And that's the lesson that we all need to be taught time and time and time again. His provision was miraculous. Bread from heaven. God's not bound by our small-minded resolutions to our problems. You ever feel like you come to a point in your life where you're like, there's nowhere to turn and nothing can be done. There's just destruction and there's no other choice. And God shouldn't let that happen. That's the subtext, is what we think. This isn't fair. Why? Whether we know why or not, God is teaching us lessons.

We ought to go away from this sermon asking ourselves, we should look right straight at the suffering in our life and say, what is God teaching me through this? And what am I resistant to learning? And I'll tell you, the thing that is likely to show up on the list is the thing that you say, I've already done enough of that. I've already changed enough over there. I don't like to plan and I don't like to think about the future. I don't like to prepare. I've already grown enough in that. Have you? God used hunger. to teach them to trust him. Did you recognize that this lesson was the one Jesus learned and recited to Satan when he was tempted in the wilderness? After 40 days in the wilderness, what did it say about Jesus? Jesus was hungry, and so Satan came to him and tempted him with food. And Jesus quoted back to him, Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. That was a comfort to him in the midst of his hunger.

It framed his hunger, you know? It wasn't just like this picture of hunger. It like had a frame on it that gave it definition and border and context. And it was that God uses my hunger to teach me to trust him. I can go without food, but not without the word of the Lord. And so when we suffer physically, whether that suffering is acute or chronic, God is teaching us. Whatever else he's teaching us, he is teaching us to entrust our bodies to him and our lives to him and the conditions of our lives to him, just as we claim to have entrusted our souls to him. Isn't that a strange thing that we would entrust our souls and our eternal destiny to God based on what we read in the Word? But when it comes to our felt lives, it's so much harder. It's like we'll believe that we're Christians, but that God won't take care of us, our physical bodies. It's really a struggle.

And so he uses those physical weaknesses and that slow death that's being wrought in all of us that brings about eternal life to teach us to trust him. So sometimes God introduces difficulties to test us. But did you notice also in this passage that he gave them blessings that they probably would have missed had it not been pointed out to them? Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your feet did not swell these 40 years. Can you imagine wandering around for 40 years? Like where does clothing come from? Like when you go camping, which we're going to do in a few weeks, my family, like out camping, away from everything camping. Take everything you need with you kind of camping. What do you do with your clothing? Do you bring a bunch of clothes? No, you don't bring a bunch of clothes. What I was told is bring a pair of shorts, a couple pairs of socks, like two, and like two shirts. And we're going to be for like eight days. It's like that's not enough clothes.

but we have to carry it all. You don't have enough. And what happens if the clothing you get when we're out there gets torn up, hung on a branch and ripped in half? What if it's cold and we didn't bring cold weather clothes? What if it's rainy and we didn't bring rain weather clothes? Bring enough, right? Maybe for an eight-day trip, but for 40 years, their clothes didn't wear out. God knew that they wouldn't have the means and the ability, given their wanderings that he was putting them through, to be able to produce their clothing. And so, Just as a kindness to him, he made it that their clothes wouldn't wear out. He made it that their feet wouldn't swell, carrying around all of their life with them. This trip we're going on, I'm told that our backpacks will be somewhere between 60 and 80 pounds of additional weight. And we're not walking on anything paved or flat. Rocks and roots and holes with a big pack on. And some of us get to carry a pack.

and a canoe when we have to portage. Think your feet will be sore at the end of that? Incredibly, their feet didn't swell these 40 years. And so, was God providing for them? Was he intimately involved in every aspect of their life while they were in the wilderness those 40 years? Yes. And some of it was to test them and some of it was to take burdens off of them. You realize when he keeps their clothes from wearing out, he's taking a burden off of them. Do you ever see him taking burdens off of you when he places other burdens on you? You don't always notice it though. You don't always notice it. I remember when Vanessa and I first got married, we were talking to a family at Trinity Reformed down in Bloomington, Elder's family. And they were poor. They had a bunch of kids and they were poor. And the kids were in youth group and they told us, they said, you know,

They were going through some sort of financial thing, and the daughter just declared that our feet didn't grow. None of the kids' feet grew for 12 months, and none of us needed new shoes. And you just kind of laugh. You're just like, right, sure. Sounds like a Bible story to me, you know? But she meant it. With every bit of her meaning, she meant that. She's like, literally, our feet didn't grow and our shoes didn't wear out because we couldn't afford to buy shoes this year because something had happened in their family. Things were just tight. So who are we to say that their feet didn't grow for a year?

I'm not prepared to stand up and say she's foolish. I'm much more comfortable standing up and saying that's childlike faith that we're all supposed to have. Apparently her and her family were paying attention to the burdens God was taking off of them in light of the ones that he was placing on them. And so God was intimately involved in these Israelites' preparation, their coming of age, their training, their humbling. And so we have to learn to slow down. and to look around and to see the ways that God's blessing us and caring for us and taking burdens off of us, even if he's led us into a valley of sorrow or a valley of grief or a valley of pain or difficulty. It's not all bad. It's never all bad. Now, remember earlier up in the passage, it said that they were being tested and humbled to know what was in their heart. And so that was the discovery part of their heart. We're going to find something out about ourselves.

And then he says, God's brought you through all of this. And the passage ends saying, thus you are to know in your heart. This is the lesson learned. Thus you are to know in your heart that the Lord your God was disciplining you as a man disciplines his son. So there is a real question of what we do with the things we find in our hearts. Do we just go, oh, looky there, and forget about it? Do we discover it and blame God for it or someone else? Or do we look at it, discover it, and go, oh, the Lord knows how many hairs are on my head. And he cares for me intimately, just like he did for the Israelites in the wilderness. And so, what, Lord, are you disciplining me about? And discipline's not a dirty word. If you want to be a disciple of Jesus, you have to realize the means by which you will become a disciple of Jesus is discipline. It's the same word. We don't become disciples by comfort. We become disciples by discipline. Thus, you are to know in your heart.

That the Lord your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son. The sweetest part of that passage is in all of the hardships, it's put into a frame and into a context. And what is the context? It's that you are a son of God. That God's taken you through all of your paces and all of your difficulties and all of your hardships, and he's worn you out and worn you down so that you will know in your heart, not just in your head, but in your heart, that you're his son or his daughter. What a comfort. What a kindness. Hebrews 12, 6 through 11 says this. He says, And just as an aside, if fathers don't discipline their children, they essentially have withdrawn their right to fatherhood.

It's that serious. If you aren't training your kids, if God's not training us, he is saying, you have no part in me. And I have no part in you. That's why I don't discipline you. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children. Other translations would translate that bastards. Those without a father. Then you were illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them. Meaning, you've had people tell you no and put you through the wringer, and you did what they said. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they, speaking of our earthly fathers, disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them. But he, referencing the Lord, disciplines us for our good.

so that we may share his holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful, yet to those who have been trained by it, it produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness. That's what you should want. And that's what God's working out in your life when he's running you through it. So if you quit, what does the author of Hebrews say about those who shrink back? My soul takes no delight in him who shrinks back, but we are convinced of better things concerning you. And so this passage ought to be an encouragement to you and sort of a, like, it's like a gentle hand of encouragement and a firm hand of keep going because God is with you. This is God's way with us.

to discipline us and to prepare us to receive the blessings of holiness and righteousness and peace. That's all he's doing with Israel in the 40 years in the wilderness. He's preparing them. He's loving them. He's confirming to them in their hearts that he's their father. Now, who would look at those 40 years and say, that's what good fatherhood looks like? That is exactly what good fatherhood looks like. That's exactly what good fatherhood looks like. And so we ought to aim to be fathers and mothers who discipline and disciple, not only our children, but the nations, our neighbors, caring for them, teaching them, exhorting them, loving them, comforting them. God both gave them hunger and clothes that didn't wear out. In what areas of your life are you giving people hunger and clothes that don't wear out? Hardship and blessing. This is the meat and potatoes. This is the work of the Christian life. As we go through it, I'll tell you, people are watching you.

And you have an incredible opportunity to be an encouragement to those who watch you suffer. Everyone watches when they're suffering, right? We're all like, oh, did you see? You have an opportunity to give glory to God when you're suffering. And so my exhortation to you is to give glory to God when you're suffering and not to grumble and complain and not to be some like half-hearted Christian who's like, yeah, I know God has a purpose in it, but I don't know what it is. Yes, we'll figure out what it is. Ask God to show you what it is. Ask him what sin in your life, what weakness, what temptation is he purging out of you? In what ways is he teaching you to trust him? We'll trust him with some things and not with others, but we're to trust him with all things. And so praise God for being at work in us, for loving us, for giving us his son, for taking us through our valleys and our 40 years of wilderness that we might come out the other side into his land, into his rest and into his presence. Let's pray.