Finding Peace and Purpose in Troubling Times

Well, if no one else is going to attempt an answer, this is a time for us to prove in our own lives the gospel that we've always professed to believe. And just to start the conversation, in the passage that probably is best known to most true Christians in which Jesus gives us teaching about living the Christian life in the Sermon on the Mount, he has a whole section there where He underscores for us that the knowledge of God as our loving, caring, heavenly Father delivers us from two things. [00:02:23]

Because we know that no matter what happens, our lives are in His hands, that our lives are secure, as our fathers used to say. You know, our life will never be done until the Lord's numbering of our days is completed. So for ourselves as Christian believers, I think this is what anchors us, much else in Scripture that anchors us. [00:03:30]

It gives a very clear, direct, simple strategy for overcoming the anxieties and worries and fears of life and that answer is prayer. And so, it's important during this period that the saints are just stepping up their devotion to spiritual disciplines, being in His Word and communing with God in prayer. He bids us to take everything off of our worry list and put it all on our prayer list. [00:05:03]

The promise attached does not bid that God will change circumstances, even though He is able, as Paul will say in Ephesians 3 to do that, to do beyond what we could ask or think. But he says if we give all of the matters we are attempted to worry about to God in prayer, God will give us peace that surpasses all understanding, to guard our hearts and minds. [00:06:11]

The Bible tells us, it doesn't just suggest it to us, but it tells us to cast all our cares upon the Lord because He cares for us. So the Bible is allowing for the reality that we do have cares and that various concerns and anxieties will indeed bubble up in our lives. And we all know people in our lives, friends and family who are certainly more or less given to anxiety, given to great concern and worry. [00:07:37]

The question is, what do we do with those worries? What do we do with those fears? What do we do with those anxieties in our lives? And the question that we need to answer for ourselves and as we strive to lead our friends and our families and our churches is that we don't run to the answers that the world gives us or even the answers that our own flesh might give us, that we run to the Lord with our worries. [00:10:00]

I think the second thing to say is that from a biblical point of view, all suffering that we experience exposes one, our frailty; two, our need of God; three, the sinfulness of our human condition; and four, our need for repentance. And think of, for example, what Jesus says when people come in Luke 13 and people come and say, "What about these people that Pilate slaughtered? Were they worse than others?" [00:15:54]

And certainly, the pattern all the way through Scripture of this kind of event in a nation, or now, on the face of the earth is that written into it, coded into the language of this cosmic affliction, really, for us, is, we do need to repent. And I actually think that, you know, in the midst of all the suffering, the great issue for us in the West is whether we will heed that call. [00:17:02]

We are talking among our elders and our staff about just what it means to be the church when you can't, in the vernacular of the tradition I grew up in, how to be the church when you can't have church. You, know, we're not able to hold our meetings, but what does it mean for us to be the church? It makes me also grateful for technology. [00:20:47]

And then we're just encouraging just the human connection by whatever means we have to mutually care for one another, which I think is reminding us of the importance of being the church right now because of the church and our size. There are some people who are attracted to a church like ours because it's easy to hide out and show up to a service and not be required of much and we work on that to challenge a participating membership and the connections now relationally really, I think, and Romans 12 just kind of fleshing out our community of fellowship with one another. [00:23:29]

And my observation is we've all...we've got different resources in order to serve the people around us. We've got different gifts in doing that. You know, there are some people who know exactly what to do and then there are the people like me who say, "Is there anything I can do?" And we need to help one another in that. But it seems to me the absolutely fundamental thing is, who we are in what we do. [00:40:27]

And I think we must have confidence in the Spirit's ministry to use what God has done in our lives, to speak through the service that we render to the people who are around about us, especially those who are most anxious. Living out what we believe in the gospel and as you said, Dr. Ferguson, that means living with a certain peace. This is a time I think for Christians to really show forth the calm that we can have, that we take proper precautions but we don't overreact, that we are able to live out truly the fruit of the Spirit with a calmness and a steadfastness. [00:41:58]