Focal Point

Dave Druey: Today on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: The pains in our life of having God say wait, the struggle in our life of having God say, "This thing that you love, I'm going to take it away from you," those are hard. How do we deal with that?

It starts with this: if you want a godly perspective, if you want ambitious biblical faith that's going to let you navigate through that, you've got to be able to say, "God is still good. God is good."

Dave Druey: Whether it's looking for a new job or simply standing in line at the grocery store, most of us hate to wait. It can be an uncomfortable, even painful experience. So, in the midst of delays, how do we maintain our confidence in God?

Welcome to Focal Point. I'm Dave Druey. Today, Pastor Mike Fabarez continues a study in Hebrews chapter 11. We'll hear about one of the heroes of the faith and how his patience finally paid off. Pastor Mike calls this message, "Trusting God When Hope Seems Lost."

Pastor Mike Fabarez: This week, my family and I had the opportunity to sprawl out one night on the living room floor to play a board game. I was hoping for something escapist, something easy, something relaxing. Boys went to the closet and came back with The Game of Life. Before I knew it, I was having to decide whether to go into debt to pay for college, how much insurance to buy. Hint: this is not the ideal game for dads. I just want to tell you. I did choose, by the way, to go into debt for college, and then I proceeded to pull the lowest-paying salary card in the deck.

I kept drawing those little life cards that kept messing up my life. I bought insurance I never needed. I invested in stocks that never paid off. Then I got to that little square on the board where you get to buy a house, and I looked at my money, which I didn't have—I just had debt cards—and I couldn't afford one. At that point, the game was all too real for me.

I didn't have the best game; as a matter of fact, I came in dead last. I was broke, basically, at the end of the game, and yet I had a good time. I had a good time, I had fun, in part because at the beginning of the game, my four-year-old daughter, who doesn't technically play, she scooted up next to me and she said, "I'm on Daddy's team."

Even at the lowest point, even when I was completely out of money, I was having a pretty good time. Even when hope seemed lost on the board, I was okay. I didn't get depressed, I didn't cry, I didn't moan, I didn't whine, in part because I knew in 20 minutes we'd be seated on the sofa eating ice cream. So, I was okay. I came in last, it was a terrible game for me, but I maintained a grasp on reality. I had an accurate perspective. I enjoyed who I had on my team.

See where I'm going with any of this yet? "Mike, that's really cute, but that's a board game. When that stuff happens in real life, that's different. That's devastating." Well, is it really all that different? Really? Isn't the goal to keep our hope fixed on ultimate realities, not temporal ones? Doesn't it really matter who's on our team? Isn't that more important than how much salary I'm bringing home? Isn't it really all hinged on an accurate and biblical perspective? Isn't that what makes the difference?

I don't mean to minimize the pain or the disappointment or the seeming hopelessness. I know that it hurts when life is not going the way we would have hoped. I get the pain. I know it's real. I've had my own share, and I know that sometimes when you think this is the way it ought to be and life takes you down a completely different path, I recognize the disappointment there, and I know it hurts. I don't mean to minimize the pain, but I do recognize that there are some overarching realities that put all that in perspective.

I also recognize that when I open up my Bible, I seem to find that people in the Bible have not been immune to this disappointment either. I know part of the struggle we have is that we as Christians have this extra layer of discouragement that is added to the whole Game of Life because we're supposed to be special. We're supposed to be loved by God, chosen, set apart. We're supposed to be the focus of God's best intentions, and then we draw a card from the deck, so to speak, and it just reads pain, and we think, "What's going on here? I thought that God loved me. I thought He had His best in mind for me, and what's with this? Why isn't it working out the right way?"

I find in the scripture, too, when we open up the Bible, there are some that seem to be at the pinnacle of those that God loves and honors, and they're at the top of His list. Not only are they not immune from disappointment and pain and hopelessness, but sometimes they seem to be the masters of it. Their life seems to be punctuated with some of the most acute kind of pain and disappointment.

Take Abraham, for instance. If you want to talk about a hero of faith, someone with ambitious and strong faith, Abraham's the guy. He's called the father of faith. Yet what we read about him is not just some wonderful story of a life that's well-lived and where everything works out. As a matter of fact, we find in the verses in Hebrews 11 about Abraham that his life was filled with disappointment.

As a matter of fact, when we were studying this, we kind of took two verses in the middle of this discussion on Abraham and we set them aside because they just set up for a later discussion about another season of Abraham's life. Both of these are acute pain, they're disappointment, and they hurt. When we look at Abraham's life, we've got to remember he may be honored, he may be special, he may be loved by God, God may have the best intentions for him, but he has to experience some difficulties, some deprivation.

He knows the pain of having God say, "Hey, you're going to have to wait on that." He knows what it is to be sick in his heart. Proverbs 13:12 says, "Hope that is deferred makes the heart sick." Longing fulfilled, the next phrase says, "That's the tree of life." That's just great gratification and fulfillment. But when your hope is there and it's put off, that just hurts inside.

Did Abraham ever deal with that? Actually, he did. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of hope deferred in his life. Look at those verses that we skipped over in Hebrews chapter 11. The two verses that I'm thinking of are verses 11 and 12. Let's examine this little season of disappointment. If I say little, it's only because it only happens in two verses here, but it was a long season of disappointment for Abraham.

It works out, it seems, in the end, but let's put ourselves in the sandals of Abraham and his wife Sarah and recognize that the longing and hope that they had, God kept saying month after month and season after season and year after year and even decade after decade, "Abraham and Sarah, I know that's what you want, but not now. No, not now."

Has God ever had you wait on something you really wanted? Something that you think is right and it's good, and God has confirmed this as the right plan for your life, and then God says, "Oh, not now, though"? Take a look at the text, Hebrews chapter 11, verse number 11. It says, "By faith, Abraham, even though he was past age"—which is another question I'm going to ask. How come this guy that we meet who's named Abram when we meet him in the scriptures, which, by the way, means "great father" and he's nothing but a big irony because when you meet him, you say, "Hey, great father. Oh, that's right, you've got no kids"?

Here's a guy in the Bible we meet at age 75 with no children. His wife at 65, no kids. They've kind of given up on babies-r-us. They've been to so many baby showers, but they've never had one for themselves, and they've kind of thought, "Well, I guess life's passing us by there." Loving the concept of following a righteous God, and when God calls him, he proves, "I'm there, I'm for You, I'm going to follow You." He leaves this southern area of modern-day Iraq and he goes up through the Mesopotamian Valley and he finds his way over to Canaan and he's there doing God's will, and God says, "Hey, great father, I'm going to make you a father of a great nation."

When God gives you a sense of something good in your life and He says, "Hey, I'm going to do this for you," and there's that fulfillment in your heart that you have knowing that God is going to take you down this path, and you have wise counsel and you have God's principles and you have that sense of godly longing, and then God says, "Well, not now, though." That hurts.

For Abraham and Sarah, that's how it was. Sarah was barren, and yet in the end, he was enabled to become a father because the whole time he had to wait, look at his faith—his resilient, ambitious, strong, sterling faith—he considered Him faithful who had made the promise. This is the right thing, this is God's path for my life, and God may be saying wait, but it's going to happen.

And so it did. Verse 12: "So from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore." I'm telling you, if it's a board game, everybody's lapping him three or four times. He is really behind in this. It wasn't the next year after the promise, which would have been hard enough. Every month going, "Hey, is God fulfilling His promise yet?" It wasn't even the next two years. Abraham was 75 when God made the promise that he would be a great father of a great nation.

Five years? Seven? 17? Do you know how many years it was until God finally fulfilled the promise for Abraham? 25. 25 years of waiting. God's made you wait for a few things, I'm sure. Desires that He's put in your heart. Maybe it's a desire for a relationship. When's God going to bring that perfect person into my life? When is that soulmate, my partner, going to... and God's got that longing in your heart, there's that sense of yes, God's going to... and you wait. 25 years. Can you imagine? That's a long time from the sense of yes, God's going to do this, to the realization of it all.

Maybe it's parenting. My wife and I have been through that in our lives. We know what it is to wait and long for something that God... we're praying and saying, "God, we want this to happen," and seeing everybody else around us have all their kids. It was 10 years we were married for 10 years before we had our first. Longing and our hearts breaking, especially those last four or five years. It was like, "God, what's going on here?" We know what it's like to wait.

Maybe it's the fruition of your ministry plan. Maybe it's that sense of where your job was supposed to take you. Maybe it was the fulfillment and usefulness of your life in the body... I don't know what it is, but God has made you wait. That's painful. It's a painful pause in your life. Eventually it happened, and he had that child, but it was after a long period of disappointment. Hope deferred, it makes the heart sick. You know that those 25 years were filled with some heartsickness.

Well, he had his child and you'd think everything was great from that point on, but it really wasn't. There was another crisis in Abraham's life. Let's pick it up in verse 17. Here's the other episode that Abraham is remembered for when it comes to pain and the head-scratching season of his life. It was the day that he heard from God after having this child. Now he's over 100 years old. He's got the pride and joy of his life, Isaac, whose name is "laughter." That's what it means, and rightfully so.

A guy who could be his great-grandfather is there parenting this young boy, and you can imagine how his chest would swell when he would walk around with the final fruition of God's plan for his life. "Here is the one." I mean, he had hoped and tried to shortcut God's plan with Ishmael and Hagar and all those other things, but now Isaac is here. You'd think, "Wow, that's great. Everything's going to work out perfectly and they lived happily ever after."

But that's not what happened. There was this thing that's described here as a test from God. That's how Genesis 22 describes it, too. God came and tested Abraham. By faith, Abraham, when tested—look what he was asked and actually did because he was willing to follow God even down a path that didn't make much sense: he was willing to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Can you imagine that?

Some of you don't have to imagine it because God's done that to you. He's taken the thing that you think, "This is it, this is God's path for my life, this is God's plan for me," and then God took that plan, that dream, that hope, and He said, "Okay, now we're just going to take it away." You talk about the deprivation and pain of waiting for God to do something, but do you know what it's like, don't you, when God takes something away? That's hard. That's the crisis of life. There are those painful pauses, but there's also those difficult detours.

Abraham knew what that was like. The path should go from here to there, and all of a sudden God says, "Okay, now take Isaac, take him up this hill called Moriah and I want you to go sacrifice him as a burnt offering." Wow, that didn't make any sense. The pains in our life of having God say wait, the struggle in our life of having God say, "This thing that you love, I'm going to take it away from you," those are hard. How do we deal with that? How do we manage that? How did Abraham manage that?

Part of it is found in the context. The context of the whole list of the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11. Look back up at verse number six. You might remember this verse. It really is the foundation for this chapter. Verses one and two and verse six. Verse six said, "Without faith, without trusting in God, it's impossible to please God." You can't please God without faith. Then he delineates two things: you've got to believe that He is, that He exists—God by definition, this perfect one, this good one—and you must believe or trust in the fact that He is a rewarder of those who earnestly seek Him.

Do you see that there in verse six? There is that predicated knowledge that I am confident in the fact that there is a good God and that God is good to those who seek Him. Now Abraham, was he seeking God? Oh yeah, so much so that when God said, "Leave your home and go to this place I'm going to tell you about and I'm not going to give you a lot of information, but just take the next step here and trust me on this one," Abraham said, "Fine, I'm with You, I'm there, I'm going." He was following and seeking after God.

The bottom-line assumption is that the faith that Abraham had to have every year that God made him wait another year—"I'm going to make you wait a little bit more, that longing in your heart, I'm not going to fulfill it right now"—the bottom-line foundational assertion of Abraham's faith had to be that God is still a good God even when I'm hurting. There had to be that affirmation. That would be a good place for us to start when God makes you wait with a painful pause or a difficult detour. Let's start with this: number one, we need to reaffirm God's goodness. That's really where it starts.

I need to be able to say, "I might be hurting, God may be making me wait, there may be disappointment, a dream may be shattered in my life. Things that should have worked out aren't working out, and I'm sitting here drawing life cards that are like, oh, why this now? I don't believe this is happening to me." It starts with this: if you want a godly perspective, if you want ambitious biblical faith that's going to let you navigate through that, you've got to be able to say, "God is still good. God is good."

Asaph, we've quoted him a few times in this series. I want to go back to this because what Asaph does in this little psalm, Psalm 73, is exactly what needs to happen in our lives when we're feeling the pain or the injustice or the heartsickness that we all go through down here on Earth. We've got to have this resolve of Asaph. Asaph is feeling it. He's thinking, "God, I don't get it. I'm following You, I'm trusting You, I'm seeking You, and look at my life. It's hurting, there's pain." Well, he shows that he is going to specifically affirm the goodness of God.

But let's at least feel his pain a little bit. Look at verse number three. He's looking around and he's seeing people that, unlike him, are having a pretty good time in life. So much so that he's envying those people. Now they're not godly, they're not doing the right thing. He's envying arrogant people, which is an odd thing for someone who's godly to do, but he's doing it because he's seeing their prosperity. "I saw the prosperity of the wicked. I don't get it, man. My youngest kid doesn't go to college and he pulls the highest-paying salary card that he can have. That ain't fair. I'm carrying these little white debt cards around and I'm a college-educated artist making $12,000 a year. That was my arrangement. And my kid skips it and he's out there prosperous. What's with you, wicked kid? How did that work? It's not fair. Tried to teach you a lesson. Yeah, go into debt, go to college. This isn't right. It's unfair."

And he says it's just not fair sometimes. Sometimes it seems that people that cut corners and don't do the righteous things, it's like verse four: they don't have struggles. Look at them, their bodies are healthy and strong. Do you ever feel that way when the doctor says you're sick? You've got some chronic problem, something goes wrong in your body, and you look across the street at Mr. Tan, Tone Pagan across the way? What's with him? That guy's never sick. Come on, what's with me, God? I don't get it. How come their life is better than mine? I'm trying to follow You, I'm trying to do the right thing.

He feels that pain. He says it seems that those people are free from the burdens that are common to man, verse five. They're not plagued with human ills like I am. He's got a beef with God here. Well, he ends this chapter. This is a song, this is poetry, I realize, and that's why it starts with the conclusion. Look up at verse number one. He's going to end this song after thinking through it all, and he's going to get to this affirmation, verse number one. Look what he says: "Surely God is," what's the word? "Good. He is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart." Now that's a weird way to start this description of his frustration about the injustice of life.

But that's where he's going to end up. He's got to step back and say, "Even when I'm hurting, God is good. He's good to Israel, His chosen people. He's good to those who are pure in heart. I know that God is still good." He specifically speaks of God's character. He is a good God. He's not torturing us, He's not with a magnifying glass trying to hurt us. He doesn't have malicious intent in His heart just because He's saying no to our desires, just because He puts us on a difficult detour. He's not a mean God, He's not a bad God. The affirmation of this is important.

Because for him, look at how this ends, verse number 27, Psalm 73. He recognizes as he stands back and actually says he's got to go to church, so to speak—he's got to go to the house of God to get this perspective—and he realizes that those who are far from You will perish. They may be toned and tanned now, but they're in trouble with God. You're going to ultimately destroy all who are unfaithful to You. But as for me, now this may seem unjust, he's not having a good day, "but for me it is good to be near God. I've made the Sovereign Lord my refuge. I will tell of all Your deeds." Reaffirm the goodness of God and I start with His character. God is a good God.

So when it comes to me saying, "Life's hurting right now for me, God. I've got desires that aren't fulfilled. I've got a plan that seemed right and good and now all of a sudden You put me on some weird detour and it hurts," I've got to step back and say, "Okay, wait a minute, like Asaph, I've got to say God's good." And like Abraham, I've got to say in the end it's going to be made perfect and right because You will overcome all evil.

At the end of the book in Revelation 21 and 22, what does it say? He's going to take every pain, wipe it away, wipe away every tear. Death, mourning, pain, the first order of things gone, and God is going to correct everything. In the meantime, it's just an opportunity for God's saving grace. That's a whole other sermon, but it lets me say, "Okay, God, I'm hurting, but it doesn't mean You're not good. You are good as a person and You will overcome evil in the end."

Romans chapter 8, let's turn there. This is an important verse. Romans chapter 8, verse 28. Here's what the Bible says. The Bible's very clear. It says, "We know"—now look at it carefully, this is important—"We know that in most things," underline the word "most" there. Do you see it? I've got the new version here. What's the old version say? "All." Oh, that's right. "All things." In all things, that's pretty inclusive. That means when everybody has lapped me on the board, that means when I get that life card that messes up my life.

In all things, God works for the, here's our word, what? "Good. Of those who"—now here's the definition, do you meet it?—"those who love Him." Do you love God? "And who have been called according to His purpose." Very specific: you're a Christian, you've been called by God to follow Christ. Two things: do you love God and are you called according to His purpose? If so, then read that phrase again: "All things." Every single episode of your life is designed specifically to work for the good of God's plan for you. He's got a plan for you.

That's the third thing you can jot down: God is working good in your life, even when He says to you, "Here's a painful pause or a difficult detour." Either one, God is trying to work something good in your life. Now that's an important thing. That's affirming the goodness of God. Now you may still hurt just as bad. It may hurt. You may say, "God, I don't like this painful pause or I don't like this difficult detour," but at least I can stand back and say with Asaph and Abraham, and I can say here with Paul, that He's working all things to good in my life. He's working all things to good in the world, and you know what? He's good in His heart. God is a good God.

Dave Druey: Sometimes we need to step back to see the big picture of what God is preparing for us. We're learning from the example of Abraham here on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez, and today's message is called "Trusting God When Hope Seems Lost." If you want to hear it again or share it with a friend, just go to focalpointradio.org. You'll also want to subscribe to the Focal Point podcast to get every day's message downloaded automatically, or download the free Focal Point app to get access to all of Pastor Mike's Bible teaching content wherever you go.

And as we continue our study through the book of Hebrews, we have something special we want to offer you this month. It's called Songs of the Son by Daniel Stevens. If Hebrews has been opening up the Old Testament for you in new ways, this book takes that further. Stevens works through the Psalms that Hebrews actually cites, reading each one first on its own, then through the interpretive lens that Hebrews provides. What emerges is a portrait of Christ that was woven into those ancient songs all along. These aren't just poems about human experience. They're songs about Jesus: songs He sang, songs that speak of His kingship, His priesthood, His representative humanity.

It's the kind of book that changes the way you read your Bible. So don't wait. Request your copy of Songs of the Son when you give to Focal Point today. Simply call us at 888-320-5885 or go online to focalpointradio.org. And if you're new to Focal Point, we'd love to welcome you with a free copy of Pastor Mike's brand-new booklet, Do the Right Thing. It's a perfect complement to our series, Ambitious Faith, and it's yours today absolutely free when you contact us for the first time at focalpointradio.org.

What does the Bible have to say when military benefits, a union strike, or a question about your eternal security comes knocking on your door? Well, I'm your host, Dave Druey, and tomorrow, Pastor Mike Fabarez fields real questions from real listeners in a brand-new Friday feature of Ask Pastor Mike Live. Honest questions, biblical answers, Friday here on Focal Point.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hi, Pastor Mike here. God's word promises it'll never return void. So I wonder, how is God's word moving in your heart right now? Drop us a line, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to be praying for you here. Just go to focalpointradio.org, and then be sure to join us again tomorrow right here as we continue to explore the depths of scripture. We'll see you then.

Dave Druey: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.