It Is He Who Is Giving You Power To Make Wealth, That He May Confirm His Covenant

This morning, we're going to be studying the last section of Deuteronomy chapter 8. It recaps many of the things we've covered over the last couple of sermons, but it ends with a warning for the people of Israel. Up to this point in the chapter, he's been saying there's lots of good stuff coming. There were hard times in the past. There's lots of good stuff coming, and now we come full circle at the end of this, the very end of our passage. There's a warning, and that warning is that if the Israelites forsake God, if they don't remember him, That they're going to end up just like the nations they're about to go destroy. They will be wiped out. But if they keep covenant and as they keep covenant with God through their obedience, that God will continue to bless them. So in this passage, the tension is, or the difficulty is, it looks like God is going to do two things. It looks like he's going to both bless the nation of Israel and he warns that he's going to destroy the nation of Israel. And all of this flows.

either blessing or cursing, out of the covenant that God's made with Abraham, their forefather, a long, long time ago. And so as we work our way through this passage, my goal is going to be to work through that tension, the tension that scripture maintains between these two realities, that God both blesses and curses people, and sometimes they're members of the covenant. We could talk about the believers and the unbelievers, but I think it gets more difficult to understand when we're talking about how these things work themselves out in the context of the covenant. Some people are members of all of Israel as members of the covenant, and yet some of them are blessed and some of them are cursed, and that's only compounded or complicated by the fact that the very same things are to one a blessing and to another a curse. And so how do we sort these things out? That's what we're going to be working through this morning. We're going to try to figure out where we fit into this, and how do we know at the end of it all whether to expect for ourselves God's blessing in our lives or his curse?

It's not something we maybe talk about a lot, but it is something that does rear its head, that question in our lives from time to time. So I hope to be of some help to you this morning in sorting that out. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter 8, verses 15 through 20. He led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water. He brought water for you out of the rock of Flint. In the wilderness, he fed you manna, which your fathers did not know that he might humble you.

and that he might test you to do good for you in the end. Otherwise, you may say in your heart, my power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth. But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who is giving you the power to make wealth, that he may confirm his covenant which he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. It shall come about, if you ever forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you today. that you will surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so you shall perish, because you would not listen to the voice of the Lord your God. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Out of previous sermons, we focused on their trek through the wilderness and the difficulties that they faced, the hunger, the thirst.

And here Moses recounts that, that the Lord led them through a great and terrible wilderness with fiery serpents, scorpions, and thirsty ground. And the first thing that we'll observe about this passage is that it's God's way not to lead us through flowery beds of ease, but through great and terrible wildernesses. He doesn't do that because he has to. He doesn't do that because he's unable to keep from it happening. This passage tells us that he does that. to reveal to us and to those around us what we are or who we are, to show us what he already knows about us. He tests us to humble us so that we might look in a mirror when we're not all put together and see what we're really like. I'm sure that you can sympathize with some difficult time in your life where you performed poorly, only to look at yourself in the mirror afterwards and go, Poorly done, and I didn't know that I had that in me. This is the test that God often brings to his people, that he's brought to Israel and that he brings to us in times. It's to show us what we really are. It's really to break the facade or the idyllic image that we have of ourselves. Many of the times our arguments or tensions with other people are over that very thing. We think one thing of ourselves, and they think something different of us, and it's offensive to us.

And so from time to time, God brings difficulties, great and terrible wildernesses, if you will, into our lives for us to walk through to remind us that we're not so neat and spiffy and shiny as we might think. Have you ever learned lessons about yourself in the midst of trial? Have you ever learned good things about yourself? Have you ever done things you didn't think you could do? You women who've had children, I bet you learned something about yourself when you had a baby that you didn't know you could do. You husbands probably learned something about your wife as well. To say that God takes us through hard times to teach us something about ourself is not only to teach us about our weakness and our inability, but also to teach us about his power. He tells the Israelites that as he brought them through a thirsty land where there was no water, that the Lord, he brought water for them out of the rock of Flint. And he brought them out of a land where they had food into a wilderness in a desert where there weren't any food. And then he fed them with something that is...

that they and their fathers had never seen before. It was meant to blow their mind, so to speak, to expand their horizons and to get them to trust God that when they had their backs up against the Red Sea with nowhere to go and an army approaching, that God, without any difficulty, could just part the water and have them walk through. Same thing happened with the manna. We're hungry. We have no food. You've brought us out here to die, say the Israelites to Moses, ready to grumble and complain, ready to kill him. and then manna from heaven to feed them, to help them to see their weakness and how quickly they'd turn away from him and from his provision. And so this passage tells us that the goal of this testing is to humble us and by way of humbling us to prepare us that he might do good for us in the end. And so the first question I have for you is when things are difficult and hard, when you can't see your way through it, when you want to quit, it's at that point.

The question is, will you trust God? It's at that point that it's answered. It's easy to say that we trust God when we're comfortable or when things are easy or when things are good. But when things are difficult, that's when the answer to the question matters. Will you trust God at that point? And so God brought them through this wilderness, this difficult time, this time of distress and grumbling and complaining and hardship and hunger and thirst so that they would see his provision. and that that provision would leave an impression on them. Meaning that there are things that you ought to remember about God having done for you or what you've seen him do for others, as we're reminded here, and it ought to make an impression on you. Meaning when you're in trouble and when you're at the end of yourself, you ought to look at this very passage and God's deliverance of his people, and you ought to take strength from it. You ought to climb up on that rock and stand there.

And say, if God provides for them in this way and is capable and possible of doing that, then my situation, however dire it seems to me, is not too much for God to sustain me through. Can't quit. You do remember, and you should always remember and know that Satan's goal in tempting you to sin and to despair is not just to make you miserable and then have you persevere, but actually to make you quit. That's actually the goal he has in mind. It's not just your misery, but your destruction. And those are not the same thing. And so when these difficult times come, they come to us from the hand of God to test us and to work out humility and faith in our life. Have you ever met somebody who's never gone through anything hard in their life? What kind of people are they to be around? I find them unbearable.

Not that you enjoy hard things or you look forward to them or you seek them out and desire them, but you do realize that hardship produces something good in you. And that those who've never suffered and never struggled and never cried and wept tends to be very unpleasant people to be around, proud often, unable to sympathize with the difficulties of the hardships or the weaknesses of other people because they themselves have never suffered. And so to keep you from becoming that sort of person who has no need of God, he tests you. Otherwise, you might say in your heart, my power and the strength of my hand has made me this wealth, has given me this good life, has made it easy for me. Look at me and how much better I am than those around me. It creates a loveless sort of hatred for other people. You just look at other people and you think, well, if I can do it, they can do it. And so what's wrong with them?

But it denies that the way you got to where you're at is not by your own strength or your own power, but by God's mercy. Last week, the whole sermon was on the topic of true heartfelt thankfulness. And I said in that sermon that that is a gift from God, that that's not something that you can muster up in yourself, that that sort of gratitude is something that the Holy Spirit works out in our lives. It's born out of true humility. And I would say that humility is produced through hardship. And so we could do the math like this. Hardship produces trial, produces faith, produces gratitude. It's worth noting in this passage that he says that the temptation would not be to say out loud, look at me, but to say in our hearts, I did this. Which is to say that everyone knows you're not supposed to say it out loud.

It also means you get no credit for not saying it out loud. It can be absolutely true of you, and you can never say it out loud. One way to see if you're tempted by this or have fallen into this snare is to examine how fearful or angry you get when the things you have are threatened. He uses wealth in this passage, so we'll use wealth as our example. How fearful do you get of losing wealth? How angry do you get when you lose wealth? How mad do you get at the Fed when they don't lower interest rates? How mad do you get when your house doesn't sell for what you think it's worth? How frustrated do you get when the stock market drops? How many of you despise people who have enough money to worry about those things? Do you lose sleep over it? Does it make you a miserable person to be around? The idea of losing what you got, what you have,

What you deserve? What you've been working hard for? I don't mean in this example to say that wealth is inherently bad. The passage doesn't say that. But the amount of time that we spend worrying and fretting and being frustrated about it really boils down to a denial that God's the one who provided it and not you. And so if we spend all of our time worrying and plotting and scheming about how to get stuff by our own strength and how to keep it from being lost, we've fallen into the trap that's described here, the one that forgets God, the one that ends in being consumed as the nations were. And so my goal in talking to you this morning is to warn you away from that, to sort of do a diagnostic together of our hearts and say, to what extent and in what ways have I given myself to this? Where has this taken root in my heart? How has it led me astray from the Lord? In Psalm 37, verse 25.

The psalmist writes, I have been young and now I am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his descendants begging bread. And it's just the sort of verse that gives you facial tics because you're just like, I don't want to beg for bread. That would not be okay with me. But we live like that's really the only option between where we're at. It's the only other option. Either I get more and wealthy and I get to keep it all or it's destitute poverty. And when scripture tells us that The Lord's descendants have never been seen begging bread. And that doesn't mean they've never been hungry. This passage we've just read here in Deuteronomy, they were hungry, but the Lord provided and cared for them. And so these are the things we have to do, we have to examine our hearts for. Moses carries on and he says, but you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who is giving you power to make wealth, that he may confirm his covenant, which he swore to your fathers as it is this day. If you were to...

restate that in your own words. What we could say is that God fulfills his covenant promises by making his people incredibly wealthy. But that kind of gives you nerves because it's like, well, but really? Is that what it's about? And the answer is no, it's not what it's about. That is not what it was about when it was said. The goal wasn't like, you're good people, so the way we'll demonstrate that to the whole world is by making sure you're really wealthy. Because that's what signifies your superiority. No, the main point isn't about God's blessing and how it's tied to wealth, but simply that God keeps his promises to his children. He had promised to give them this land long ago. And so for them to receive that land, he gave them the power or the strength or the ability, the means to make wealth. But it is him who created the wealth and then gave that to them.

Another way of thinking about it is, if he had said, not the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey and all of that, but the wilderness, we're just going to set up shop over here. Would they have had the same capacity to make wealth? The answer is no. Because the land wasn't capable of producing what the promised land was. It wasn't as fertile of a ground. It wasn't as lush of a field. The mountains weren't full of iron, as we were told in a previous week. And so their ability to make wealth was predicated on God's giving to them all of the raw material to do it. The danger is that they would think they got all that stuff themselves. And it is hard to distinguish between God giving ability and then blessing faithfulness and someone seeming to do it in their own strength. Maybe another way of asking the question is, do all people who gain wealth, gain it because God blessed them the way he's blessing Israel? Meaning are all the wealthy people of the world the members of the covenant and that's why they're wealthy? Of course not. So how do they get their wealth? So, well, God gave it to them, but not, this is sort of the tension we're starting to get into. I'm trying to get you to feel it, okay? With regard to wealth, not all wealth is a fulfillment of this promise.

It's not a term of God's covenant with them. In fact, many wicked people have lots of money. And it's not because God is obligated to give it to them. We may even be able to say it's because they work really hard and they're really stinking smart. But for the Christian who may work really hard and be really smart, they've received their wealth under different terms. They've received their wealth, their inheritance. under the terms of this covenant. And so two people, the believer and the unbeliever, receive the same thing by doing similar things. And to one of them, it is the evidence of God's blessing on them. And for the other, it will be the snare that pulls them down to hell. But it's the exact same thing gotten in seemingly the same way, a blessing to one and a curse to the other.

How do we sort these sorts of things out? That's the question. How is wealth a blessing and a fulfillment of the covenant promises for some and yet a curse for others? I do want to say at the beginning that wealth is not the only blessing that God gives his people. And yet I don't want us to be so reactionary to a health and wealth gospel that we deny that God, that is one of the ways God blesses his people, that he's created a world where reaping and sowing is how it works. If you don't, If you don't sow, you won't reap. And to those who sow sparingly, they will reap sparingly. And to those who sow bountifully, they'll reap bountifully. But what they sow and what they reap are not always the same things. Sometimes we sow time and we don't get time back. Sometimes we sow time and we get responsibilities back. More demands on our time. Sometimes we sow hard work and we lose our job because we won't call kids by their preferred pronouns.

And so I don't want you to misunderstand this principle of sowing as reaping as whatever you sow, that's exactly what you'll get back, just more of it. I want you to understand the principle that you can sow, when you sow faithfulness, you reap blessing. And when you sow foolishness, you reap judgment. And sometimes those things are close by each other and sometimes those things are separated by an entire life where the judgment doesn't come or the blessing doesn't come until the end. But wealth is not the only blessing that God pours out on his people. Marriage is a blessing. Children are a blessing. Good health is a blessing. A sharp mind is a blessing. All gifts given to us by God, talents meant to build up his kingdom and further his gospel, not our own. And so when we take those things and bury them, or we take those things and spend them on our own sinful desires, like the prodigal son did, we're being unfaithful. We're sowing destruction, and so we're going to reap it. And so whatever we have, whether it's wealth or marriage or children or health or intellect, we have received it, if we are children of God, from the hand of God, just as the Israelites did. They didn't cultivate this land. Hundreds and hundreds of years, this land's been cultivated by others, and they're just receiving it. I think it's one of the things that makes social class

class is hard to understand in American society today is you don't realize what you were born into, and you don't know what it's like to live in a different culture. So you could do this according to demographics. You could do this according to wealth. You could do this according to region, but it's really quite different to see the assumptions that are made that are just completely wrong, okay? So an example would be, so I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I grew up in a poor neighborhood. After we put our addition on our house, which was like 50%, made it 50% bigger, our house was then 900 square feet. So I grew up in a house that was 600 square feet, which probably, square footage-wise, isn't probably much bigger than this stage. Small. And Michael's going, uh-huh, because Michael grew up similarly. Some of you were like, my living room's that big. Or my parents' living room was that big.

All of my friends were black and Hispanic. There was regular gunfire in my neighborhood growing up, and I learned about playing at the park when there was a fight or a conflict, when it was time to go because somebody was going to go get their gun. I grew up in that culture. I'm comfortable in that culture. I'm not saying I like that culture. I'm like, that'll be fun. But that's the bad side of it. There are some really sweet things about that culture. that if you didn't grow up in it, you don't see it and you don't understand it. You see the bad. You're just like, well, that's all bad. And it's like, well, there's bad stuff about it for sure. But there are some really sweet things about that culture that I miss. I miss the honesty and the loudness of black people. I miss it. It's very comfortable to me. I miss the constant teasing and making fun. Like I've told my kids, I'm like, I grew up in a, like me and my friends, what we would do for fun is we would tease each other until somebody cried. That's how you lost the game.

And we all agreed to play it, and it was ruthless. The only thing you couldn't do was make fun of their mother, because then you'd be in a fist fight. And there wouldn't be any words or warnings. We'd just be in a fight. That's the culture I grew up in, and it was enjoyable to me. And I realized, to you, many of you didn't grow up that way, and you're like, whoa, that sounds awful. And I'm like, you know, if I had to grow up the way you did, I would point to the many awful things about how you grew up. And I'd be like, you know what? I don't have any desire for all of that family politic crap and all of the things we feel and think but don't say. I'd rather be at the playground where I can hear the conflict from 200 yards away and know there's a problem. And so why am I bringing all this up? I'm bringing all this up to say that we don't understand as much as we think we do about cultures, about people, about how God works, about how...

we come to be who we are and where we've come from, the assumptions we make. And so when we take this sort of thinking and we bring it into talks of the covenant or talks of wealth or talks of marriage or talks of lifestyle or culture, we just presume that everyone starts from the same place and has all the same inputs, and we don't. Is it better to be born into an intact family than into a single motherhood? Yes, of course it is. Who would say it's not? I mean, I suppose there are people who would say it doesn't matter, but they would be wrong. It is far better to be born in. Now, you have to realize that someone who grows up in an intact family versus someone who grows up in a single-family home do not have the same experiences, do not make the same assumptions. And it's very easy for the one born into the intact family to despise the other one. But it's also worth noting that they had no say in being born into an intact family or receiving the blessings that they received as a...

an outworking of that reality. What I'm getting at is their frustration with someone different than them is based on them thinking, the things I have, I deserve and got them by myself. The temptation is to think exactly what the Israelites thought would be tempted to think, which is, well, I got this because I deserved it and I worked hard for it. And it's like, no, there really is a considerable difference between growing up with or without a father in the home. and it shows up in all kinds of places in your life. And for you to think that you're better off than that person because you had a dad and they didn't is wicked of you. You are better off, but not because you're a better person, but because God was merciful to you, because he planted you in a land full of life, not in a land full of strife and conflict and trouble. And as a result, you will have opportunities, understandings, and blessings that they didn't have.

that they had to travel a lot of ground before they got to the point where you started. And the difference is not skin tone. The difference is not education. The difference is God's secret and hidden will in putting some people in this situation and some people in that situation. And so his blessings, though you may have known them for generations in your family, if you're a Christian, they've come to you because God's been merciful to you, not because you're better than other people, not because you worked harder than them. Because God was merciful to you. It's also worth noting that God is not bound to work in ways with regard to the covenant and who the wealth in this passage would be a blessing to versus a curse. He's not bound to work in ways that make sense to or are agreeable to us. When we're trying to sort out, is this a blessing or a curse? Is this a door I should, this door presented itself? Shall I walk through it or is this door a temptation?

These are hard questions. We tend to, in two directions. One is legalism and the other is random chance. Legalism wants a consistent, reliable, controllable system that always produces the desired outcome. If you put these things in, you will always get these outputs. So what was the difference in terms of input regarding Jacob and Esau? I mean, if you had to judge their childhood, which one would you think was righteous? The one who was hungry and said something stupid because he was hangry? or the one who willfully conspired with his mother to lie to his father and steal his blessing. Like, which one do you want to name your kid after? I do wonder why people name their kids Jacob. But God loved him. But what was the difference between how they were raised? There wasn't a difference. It wasn't a matter of one of them got the right inputs, and so they produced the right thing, and one of them didn't, and so they produced...

The wrong thing. It was that God chose one and not the other. He loved Jacob and he hated Esau. It's really frustrating to those of us who want a system, a flow chart that never deviates and never has dead ends or hidden parts or anything like that. Some of you will start out that way, wanting that sort of thing because it makes sense and it's predictable and I can be in control and choose my way through it. Some of you get so frustrated with that, you throw your hands up in the air and you say, it just doesn't matter. None of it matters at all. Because Jacob didn't do anything to distinguish himself from Esau. There was no discernible difference between the two of them and God chose one and not the other. And it just doesn't matter at all. But there's this nagging reality in the background that actually it does matter because heaven and hell are the consequence. So it does matter. And so I can't just be like, well, whatever. We'll eat and live and tomorrow we'll die. So no big deal.

And so where legalism wants a very consistent, definable progression, random chance just says, nah, there's no connection between actions and consequences. And so we come to God's promises and to his covenants, and we say they either need to be perfectly predictable or they're entirely random. One way or the other, the uncertainty of it all has to go. Because what we want to know is, are these promises for me or are they not? To sort out the answer to this question, we have to lay some groundwork first. And we have to come to a foundational understanding about a few things. First, about who God is and how he works. The first thing you have to understand if you want to make sense of these types of things, if you want to look at wealth and say, is this an evidence of God's blessing on me or is it an evidence of my destruction? Is you have to start with this basic commitment and understanding and belief that God is good and that everything he does glorifies him, even though...

But many of the things he does, we do not understand and they don't please us. So he's good and glorifies himself in all things. And yet many of the things we come into contact with that he's done, it's not what we would have done. It doesn't please us. We don't understand why or how. That's the first commitment you have to have. If you're trying to determine based on what you see, whether God is good or not, you'll never find your way out of that maze. You'll never find your way out of that maze because scripture tells us that God is good and that he works all things after the counsel of his own will and that he's jealous for his own glory. And so if we're starting out trying to figure out if God is good or being good, we'll never get out. God is good. He's the definition of good. Second foundational principle you have to have, God can do anything he pleases. Nothing limits him, right? We can't.

We can't stop water from flowing, but he can just stop it. He can just stop up the Jordan River so that they can walk across, or he can just stop up the walls of water in the Red Sea so they can walk across. He can just do things we can't do, we can't even conceive of. And so he can do things, anything that pleases him. And so whatever comes to pass isn't the result of his inability, like he lacks some sort of power, or his lack of interest in it. Whatever we see come to pass, in ways we don't understand, those things are the working out of God's will in the world. Every single thing. Down to how many hairs you have on your head. It's the working out of God's will in the world. God keeps his promises. Third foundational principle. God chooses some to save and others to condemn. And who is saved and who is condemned?

was a judgment made in the private council of God before he said, let there be light. The Lamb's book of life and the names written in it was sealed and closed before he spoke this world into creation. And your name's either in it or it's not. And it has been in it for thousands of years or it hasn't been in it for thousands of years. And you can't get your name into it or get your name out of it. But we don't know if our name's in it because the Bible verse told us. And that's the difficulty. Really frustrating at times. But this is our principle, that those choices, that choice from long ago belongs to the Lord alone. And there is nothing that we can do in the present time, nor was there anything he looked out into the future and saw about us that influenced his decision. These judgments are hidden from us, objectively. Though God does give us assurance of his love and his adoption of us.

in other ways by the working of his spirit. So these are the three things. There are probably more, but these are the three I think are most important. God is good, God is capable, and God has chosen. So how does God relate to us, to people, to mankind? He relates to us by way of covenant. He deals with us individually. You're a person. You are going to heaven or you are going to hell based on your personal faith or lack thereof in Jesus Christ. That is true. But when we're dealing with God's interactions with people groups, he deals with them by way of covenant. And he deals with his people particularly through the covenants that we find in scripture. A covenant being a promise he makes to them that have certain terms and certain obligations and as we saw in Sunday school, certain signs that attend to it.

I think many times when we come to the idea of whether we're a child of God or a Christian or whether this wealth that the Israelites are about to receive, whether it's a blessing or not, we come at it backwards. We get things out of order. Think of it this way. Well, let me say it this way first. God's fulfillment of the covenant, him blessing them with wealth, was that dependent on their obedience? Was it dependent on their fulfilling of? And it's kind of hard. Daniel's face is saying, he's like, well, I know that the answer is no, but it is kind of yes, but it either is yes or no. And here's how you can know that for certain. If it's contingent upon their obedience, we then have to ask how much obedience has to be rendered before God will act. When is there enough obedience for them to enter into the land? Like if they have to obey enough to get God to bless them, how much?

obedience over what period of time is necessary. How long did they have to wander in the wilderness? How long did they have to serve God in other places before he would bring them into the land? They didn't. Like what brought the end of their wanderings in the wilderness? Was it like, oh, these people have finally obeyed long enough, now they can have the land? No. They were slowly having all of their old men die, right? And they were wandering and they were hungry and their feet weren't swelling and their clothes weren't wearing out, but they were in hostile lands living as... as foreigners and sojourners, and what brought that to an end? God said, make your way up through these lands and interact with them in this way, and then go across over here and start killing them. And there'll be a couple of battles on the east of the Jordan first. Had they obeyed enough to get brought up into the land? No. If they'd had another 10 years of it, could they have obeyed enough? So why did God bring them into the land when he did?

Because God decided it was time to bring them into the land. They hadn't obeyed first. What I'm getting at is God's fulfillment of his part of the covenant is not contingent upon your obedience. But we often think it is. We often think God will be good to me if I do this. Or if I do this long enough or well enough or better than somebody else. No, that's not how covenant works with God. He's the initiator. He brought them into covenant with him. He brought them through the wilderness. He brought them into the land. And it wasn't because they were mature enough to handle it. If you read further on in the history, many of them weren't mature enough to handle it. And so his fulfillment of the covenant was not contingent upon their obedience in any way. God blessed Israel before they fulfilled any of their commands. It has to be this way because most of our obligations to obey God are perpetual. We never say, okay, I've done enough and now I've received these things from God and now I don't have to do it anymore. Those promises and the fulfillment of them belong to God's people and are fulfilled already. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1 verse 20, 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 20, he says, for as many as are the promises of God, the covenant obligations of God to you as his people,

For as many as are the promises of God in him, referring to Jesus Christ, they, referring to the promises, are yes. Therefore, also through him is our amen to the glory of God through us. These promises that God has made to those people, though they hadn't taken possession of the land, they had a whole life to live and children and grandchildren and generations to follow, still had life to live and obedience to offer and blessing to receive and judgment to endure. Those promises were theirs then, right then. And it wasn't because they'd earned it or deserved it or proven themselves faithful. It was because God had chosen them. And so we have to get this sort of transactional tit for tat in dealings with God out of our minds. This is not how God's covenants work, okay? God is obligated to give to us all these good things and he does it. We didn't earn it. We don't deserve it.

All right, you don't get it eventually. When do your kids deserve the inheritance you have? If you have an inheritance set up for them, when have they earned it? Isn't the whole point that they didn't earn it, you did? And you're giving it to them as a gift. How will he who's given us his son not also freely along with him give us all things? And yet, some of the Israelites didn't fulfill their obligations to the covenant. God acted, God blessed, God gifted them. Not because they earned or deserved it, but because God had promised it to them. So why did some of them fall away? Why did some of them break the covenant with God? Why did some of them go after other gods? Here's the answer. Because that's what was already in them. They already were what they were. You already are what you are.

Now, if you're not a Christian, you may become a Christian later, and that essential fact may change about you. But all that difficulty or trials do, remember at the beginning of this, he gives them trials, and he says, I'm giving you these trials to test you, to humble you, to reveal what's already in you. The difficulty is we think trials are only hard things. And sometimes the tests that we get are good things. And we have to figure out what we're going to do with those good things. Dave Ramsey often talks about wealth, and he's always fighting against this idea that wealth is a bad thing. There's some Christians that would say wealth's a bad thing. And he's like, it's the love of money that's the real problem. It's not the wealth. And in this thing, this statement, he's right. What he says is wealth doesn't make you anything. It just reveals who you are, who you were already. And that's all you're seeing here is God's going to give wealth.

to his people. And it's going to reveal what they are like as individuals. Some of them will double down on their love and their devotion and their thankfulness and gratitude to God, while others will say in their heart, yep, this is mine. And the wealth didn't cause it, the wealth just revealed it. That's why I asked you at the beginning, when you're tested, have you ever learned something about yourself? And not a bad thing, but a good thing. If there was a good thing in you and it was exposed, how did it get there? It got there because God put it there. That's how it got there. And so wealth in this passage and the ability to make wealth was a blessing to those that already loved God. And it was a snare to those that already hated him. And so if you want to know if you're a member of the covenant or whether you're a child of God or whether God loves you,

You're going to run yourself ragged looking for a transaction between you and God that settles your conscience. It doesn't exist because you're a sinner. And you'll never do good enough to be able to stand up straight before God and say, you know what? I'm good enough. Look at all the stuff I did. If you take the credit for it, it's filthy rags before him. So how do you find out if you're a child of God? You look and you see, particularly in the tests that come into your life. How you respond. And if when you're cut, if what comes out of you is bitterness and frustration and anger and ingratitude and this isn't fair and I don't deserve that, that's sin and there's no excuse for it. If what comes out of you after that is remorse over that response, that is a gift from God. I don't mean to tell you that you're gonna respond well when difficulty comes straight out of the gate all the times.

I wish we did. I wish I did. But we don't. Many times our flesh just stands up to its full height and just pours itself out. And it's hideous. But if after that you say, oh, wretched man that I am. Look at all that God's done for me. How could I be so ungrateful? That's how God's children respond. Don't believe the lie that God's children always respond well. to difficulties in the first pass. They don't. Sometimes they do, and it's incredible when they do, when we do. But if there is repentance and sorrow over your sins and thankfulness for God's mercies, even in the midst of that difficulty, that's the strongest evidence you have of being a child of God. Not that you didn't respond poorly, but that you repented of your poor response, that you were sorry for it. It's not that you won't do it again. Don't believe that lie. You will do it again. At some point in your life, you will likely do it again.

Repentance doesn't mean, and now I will never fail like this again. Tell me one sin in your life where when you repented of it, then it just was never again a temptation or a trouble. But tell me that you've seen growth in your fight against that sin and it's become less frequent or it's become less powerful. It's become less tempting. And so when I say these things, I'm not saying it's either perfection or damnation. Those aren't the terms of the covenant. If they are, then there's no hope for us. But God works in his life, in our lives, in the same way he worked in their lives. He gave them all of the stuff they needed to become very wealthy. He gives us all of the things we need to serve and honor him in every situation. And one of the things he gives us is conviction of our sins when we respond poorly. So when you or someone you love is struggling and in sin and is saying or doing things that are terribly wicked, the thing is not to say, well, a Christian would never do that.

Really? Rather, what I would say is, what do they do going forward? Are they sorry for their sins? Do they repent? Do they apologize? Don't become that wicked person who won't forgive. You're just going to do it again. Yeah, I know. Who can live with you if you act like that? How does God live with you if you sin so often? Why can you not live with somebody else who sins? There's so much more I could say. I told Eric when I started this sermon, I said, I have, I preached from three pages and I stopped at the end of four writing. I'm not done, but I'm done. And so I'll read this to you from 2 Peter 1, verses 10 and 11. He says, therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about his calling and choosing you. And so he's telling us how to do this. He says, as long as you practice these things, which in the preceding verses, he's talking about Christian living, basically.

So long as you practice these things, you will never stumble. For in this way, the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you. So if you want to know if you're a Christian, you look at the fruit of your life and you say, am I into it for obeying him and repenting of my sins for the rest of my life? That's how you make sure you're calling. If you're always trying to get out of having to do what God said, trying to get away from the authorities that are in your life, if you're always trying to just get to where you can do what you want, which is a sin that tends to attend young people more than older people, but if that's your goal in life is just to get away from everybody telling you what to do, that is not evidence of saving faith in Jesus Christ. If that temptation is in you, however, and you see it as a bad thing and you're fighting tooth and nail against it, that is evidence.

of saving faith in you. And so the evidence of you being a child of God, you being a member of the covenant, you being one who's receiving blessings from God and not your treasure in this life, is whether you persevere in the midst of trial and in the midst of blessing. Who are you? That's the question. Who are you? What do you want? What do you value? God knows. And his goal is to reveal the answer to that question to you. throughout your life. And if you're a Christian or aren't yet, but will become a Christian, he will use those trials to reveal himself to you in new ways. And even if you are already a Christian, he will use those trials to reveal himself more fully to you. And so he uses trials in our lives to sanctify us, to bring us to saving faith, to sanctify us, to preserve us, to change us, to humble us, that in the end, he might do good for us. Let's pray.