Focal Point

Dave Deway: Today on Focal10 Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. He comforts us in all our afflictions so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Dave Deway: You know, some verses never make it onto a greeting card or a framed print in the hallway. Like Isaiah 45:7 where God says, I make well-being and I create calamity. Today on Focal Point, Pastor Mike Fabarez launches a new message in 2 Corinthians chapter 1. But he gets there by way of Proverbs 19:21. Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. It's a sobering starting point and it's exactly where lasting comfort finds its footing. Here's Pastor Mike with the reciprocity of comfort.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Proverbs chapter 19:21 begins with the words, Many are the plans in the mind of a man. Many are the plans in the mind of a man. There's no doubt about that, right? I mean, everyone can affirm that we as people, we make a lot of plans and I suppose like me, there are many of your plans that were made and they were unrealized. Or I think about some of the plans I've made, they've they've crashed and burned. They have uh completely tanked. And uh some people even talk about their uh plans that didn't get achieved.

They talk about shattered dreams and that's uh that's not an overstatement depending on the severity of how your uh your expectations, your plans, your hopes have been dashed. I mean, sometimes it's uh it's it's catastrophic. Very painful because there's grief and loss and all kinds of of of pain associated with some of the things we hope for that uh that don't work out. Things that we envision that never get realized, things that come to a screeching halt in a painful way. The rest of Proverbs 19:21 not only does it say many are the plans in the mind of a man, but the next half of that proverb says, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.

That's a strange juxtaposition of concepts. Right? We plan and then um God purposes. Right? He is making a plan apparently that is uh so strong. It 's never going to never going to be thwarted. His plan is not thwarted. It's his purpose. He makes a plan and it works. And I am thinking about my plans and the struggle in that very verse is the problem with a lot of uh people when they think about Christianity in general because they start to say, well, why would we have a God who is so good and all powerful and all knowing uh not let me realize my good plans?

And I can I can attest to that uh as as a pastor. I spend a lot of time planning and a lot of the plans I I I I'm confident. These are biblical ideas, biblical parameters that help me plan. And then all of a sudden uh this plan crashes and burns. And And are you telling me that uh it was the purpose of the Lord to have my dreams crashed or my plans thwarted? I mean, God wouldn't take responsibility for that, would he? In Isaiah chapter 45 verse number 7, he does exactly that. He says, I form light and I create darkness.

I make well-being and I create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things. That's a verse you didn't learn in Sunday school when you were a kid. Are Are you meaning to tell me the calamity in my life when things don't work out the way I want and sometimes they're so profoundly painful that this is God's purpose? Jeremiah chapter 32 Israel was asking that that question and here's how God responds. Thus says the Lord, just as I brought all this great disaster upon this people, these are his people. Just as I brought all this great disaster upon this people, so I'll bring upon them all the good that I promised.

I've got good that I've purposed here and I've got disaster that I've purposed here for them. That's a hard truth. And it goes back to the very beginning. If you think about it, the good plans of Adam when he left the garden and got kicked out was to uh start cultivating his own garden. That's what he was. He was a he was a gardener so to speak. He was a farmer and um here's one thing he didn't plan for. He didn't say, let's see how many thorns and weeds I can grow in this garden. And yet in Genesis chapter 3 verses 17 through 19, that is precisely what God planned that he would do.

His purpose was to send thorns and weeds into Adam's garden. Romans chapter 8 verse 20 says that creation all of creation was subjected to futility. Not a not willingly, not cuz it wanted to, right? It's not that we want bad things to happen, right? But it was subjected to futility by the one who subjected it. God was the one in Genesis 3 that not only said there's going to be weeds in your garden, you're going to have trouble, you know, pain in childbirth, you're going to have problems in marriage. All of that was promised in that little section of scripture.

But you yourself will uh you'll die. You'll return to dust. That's my decree. The futility, think about that, the futility of having a plan to watch your your children grow up and get married and have children and thrive. And to have that dream shattered when you have to plan a funeral for your child. Happens all the time. Compass HB, they buried one of their teenagers out there, car accident, not his fault, not drinking, not doing anything wrong. Compass HB having to bury one of the teenage girls in in in their church, plane crash in Fullerton.

You might have saw it in the news. And you mean to tell me that God isn't in in involved in all of that? Uh look at what the scripture says. Amos chapter 3 verse 6, does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it? How about Lamentations chapter 3 verse 37 and 38? Who has spoken it and have it come to pass unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both good and bad come? I mean, that's from the hand of the Lord. That's the purpose of the Lord.

You got to be kidding me. You're out there pitching Christianity to your coworkers and your non-Christian relatives and and and you don't start with that. We talk about, oh, God's good and he's going to do good for your life and he's got a great plan for you. These aren't the verses we uh we stitch into some piece of art and hang on the wall. These aren't printed in in greeting cards in our bookstore. But this is precisely what the Bible teaches. When Job is having an argument with his wife, and you must remember the context, right?

Seven of his sons and three of his daughters were all killed at one time as the roof collapsed in where they were meeting. A storm came through. And also after the Sabeans came in and stole the herds and all kinds of of disaster coming upon Job and his wife says, curse curse God and die. Just as he is done because like many Christians today, they think that all that God has planned for you are good things. And Job responds by saying, shall we receive from the hand of the Lord only good and not evil? Think of that word, evil, from the hand of the Lord.

Are you kidding me? That's not what I was taught in the 21st century mega church I went to. The hand of the Lord has the purpose of of suffering. I mean, there's hardly any more shattered dream than the most extreme way to to to describe uh uh uh uh a broken dream than death. And according to Psalm 139, every day that is planned for every human being that God forms in the secret place in the womb of of his or her mother, every day is written in God's book before there was yet one of them.

Everything. Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. That's a hard truth for us to grapple with. But once you do, if you get that clearly in your mind, then when you're suffering, whatever your loss is, maybe you haven't had to bury a loved one lately, maybe though you've uh like we've had several here this weekend, lost houses up in in Pacific Palisades, up in Altadena, they they've lost their homes. Two people in the last two services both of them had lived in their home in Pacific Palisades for 41 years.

One of them lost his business and his home. Wow. That the purpose of the Lord that's that's standing or is that what we're supposed to say? Their their plan was to to live out their years in their home, that they had spent so much time trying to decorate, model. They'd invested their money in it. When suffering happens, a lot of Christians say, well, where's God in all of this? Proverbs 19:21 would be a good place to start. They say why. I think that's a bad question to ask, but it's almost like this is this is unique.

This is like I I didn't think death would ever visit our family. I didn't know we'd ever get sick. I didn't know there'd be weeds in our garden. I didn't know our marriage would have any problems. I I I I didn't think there'd be any pain in our lives. Once you recognize that it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand, when you go into suffering, you won't put everything on pause in your spiritual life and say, well, I can't wait for this to be over so I can get back to, you know, rejoicing with Jesus on the other side.

You'll start to say, if this is the purpose of God in my life, this unemployment, this cancer, this death in the family, this joblessness, if we can say, no, no, this is the purpose of God for you. This is the path that he's laid out for you. Then we can start to look at this a little differently. We can lean into this and at least say, I'm not a masochist. I I don't enjoy it and God doesn't want you to enjoy it, but we should be asking some questions about it and going about it a little differently.

We're not supposed to just put everything on pause, try and dig our way out of this as though God wasn't paying attention and he was looking the other way when you got into trouble and now all of a sudden you know, God get me out of this trouble because, you know, clearly this wasn't your plan for me. We can start to embrace the reality of the truth of scripture, which is hard for some people cuz they just have a very shallow one-dimensional view of God. If we can get there, then we can think about suffering a little bit differently and I think we can come through our suffering much much better than if you view it as a mistake.

It's not a mistake as it relates to God's purpose. It may be something unexpected and unanticipated in our planning. I never planned the problems that I encounter. I never planned the pain, the sickness, the diseases, the the the conflict. I don't plan any of those. But they've been purposed for me. And so we must say, what do we do with it? Now, the theme, I know you thought it'd be much more encouraging here in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, is a theme of comfort, but it's against the backdrop of suffering. We introduced this topic last week just looking at the first three verses of 2 Corinthians.

Like to tackle the next four verses. Now, the whole theme carries all the way through verse 11, but let us look today at verses 4, 5, 6, and 7. And I want to recapitulate, go through a second time 4, 5, and 6. Let's look at it twice. I know you want to get to the comfort part, but let's start with the affliction part. Try and marinate in that and and try and figure that out. And then we'll settle in on verse 7, which is a good way to end our time together. So let's read this together.

2 Corinthians chapter 1 beginning in verse 4. And I guess for the sake of completeness, we should look at verse 3 cuz that started the sentence. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. We thought of this in terms of the resources we have in the midst of our trial, but now we get into the action. What is this Father of Mercy and this God of all comfort do? Well, he comforts us in all our afflictions so that so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Verse 5. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we're afflicted, it's for your comfort and salvation. And if we are comforted, it's for your comfort which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. For our hope for you is unshaken for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you also will share in our comfort. Now we got sufferings and comfort. And this great unshaken hope of the Apostle Paul. But I want to look at verses 4 through 6 and just focus a little bit on the reality of affliction and suffering that he's going to talk about here that he, as we looked at kind of looking ahead in this passage starting in verse number 8, he describes that he too is someone who suffers.

And he said, when I was in Asia for instance, I was suffering there on this missionary journey despairing even of life itself. I thought after all we'd receive the sentence of death. We'll look more in more detail about that next time. But he says, I know what it is to suffer. And of course he's going to lean in on this idea of comfort and he's going to say, that's my hope and I 'm confident you're going to be comforted, but we got to deal with the affliction problem and the suffering problem to start with. Cuz not only does Paul suffer, but he's assuming here and probably has some detailed information about the kind of suffering the Corinthians are going through.

Is he covers he comforts us in all of our affliction and that hour there probably includes the Corinthians too. He's starting this concept of how God responds to our affliction with the fact that we're we're all going to be comforted, but it's all of our affliction. We all share in this. And the comfort is we're going to be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For we share, look at this word, abundantly in Christ's suffering. You want to talk about someone doing the right thing for God and you think about Paul and Titus traveling around as missionaries.

Well, that's a good thing, but Christ was sinless. And he was a sufferer. All that suffering, was that a mistake? Was God looking the other way? The father was saying, well, I didn't know you were going to get into that trouble with the Pharisees. No. It's the purpose of the Lord that will stand for Christ, for Paul, for Timothy, for the Corinthians, and for all of you sitting here in this auditorium. We share abundantly in Christ's sufferings. And that means your life is going to share abundantly in sufferings. So that through Christ we may share abundantly in comfort.

But we'll get to that. If we're afflicted, and of course we all are going to be, he just told us in verse 5, it's for your comfort and salvation. If we're comforted, it's for your comfort which you experience when you patiently endure. That's a word we encounter a lot in our study, the word the verb to stay, to stay under. We're going to have to stay under this affliction. We're going to patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. So suffering is here, suffer, affliction, suffer, suffer, suffer. Okay, that is the reality. And I think the first thing we need to do when we're suffering is to suffer number one perceptively.

We need to think about what's happening. You need to be perceptive. You need to even be inquisitive. You need to think about it. Not like some people do why as though this wasn't supposed to happen, but let's start with a little systematic theology that it is going to happen because we live between Genesis uh chapter 3 and Revelation chapter 19. We're going to live in this period of a sin-laden world where God himself, as I quoted in Romans 8 verse 20, he has purposefully subjected creation to futility. And we need to think of this in two ways.

The thorns and thistles, the weeds that are in the garden of Adam's garden. Right? That's what we would call natural evil. If you're talking to a philosopher or you're do you're sharing the gospel with someone, having to defend the faith and apologetic, you need to distinguish two kinds of evil. And even in what Job was saying to his wife, shall we receive both good from the hand of the Lord and not evil? Of course we need to receive evil from the hand of God because that's what he promised in Genesis 3. And what kind of evil did he encounter?

Well, he encountered some bad people stealing his stuff. That's not natural evil, but he did encounter a storm that knocked down a building and killed his children. That's what we call natural evil. Storms. Right? This is something that no one makes a moral decision to do. This is the futility of creation and God has subjected the world to it. When he cursed the ground of which we're made, all the materials of earth and we have part of what the earth is all about, the the soil built into our our constitution. And that is cursed. Our cells do not replicate perfectly.

Our DNA doesn't even replicate perfectly. Our lives are are are messed up. And because of that, there are people in this room that have cells that are rebellious. They don't have a soul. They don't they're not a moral agent. But those cells, we call them cancer cuz they don't do what they're supposed to do. Because in the world the nature itself, the plate tectonics don't they're not greased quite the way we'd like them to cuz we have earthquakes here in Southern California. And who knows before the day is over, we might have a huge one for all we know.

And it will knock down buildings as sure as the Santa Ana winds fuel the flames that burn down a massive amount of of buildings in Southern California. Natural evil. And there was going to be natural evil in Eve having to suffer the pains of childbirth to bring a child into this world. That's natural evil. And the world is filled with it. When a volcano and some South Pacific island kills a bunch of people that live on the on the on the mountainside of this this inert volcano that decides to become active. Well, it doesn't decide.

It's natural evil. When there's hurricanes in Florida, when there's tornadoes in Oklahoma and we sit back and read about the death and the devastation, we watch people's homes scattered like like like toothpicks on the scene of the helicopter after the disaster. That that's natural evil. It comes because God has subjected the world to futility including all meteorological realities, all geologic realities, all cellular realities. These are all subject to futility. So natural evil is what God endowed the world with in Genesis 3. Genesis 4 we see moral evil. When Adam and Eve have to bury their son Abel who's a pretty bright and godly young man and now he's dead because his brother Cain was envious of him and decided to pick up a rock and smash his head.

Can you imagine having to bury a child and it's because one of your your other children killed that child? That's the moral evil that strikes to the heart of Eve and you can only imagine what it was like to suffer the broken dream of having your child killed by your other child. Moral evil's taking place in this world and you're not exempt from natural evil. Your house can fall just like your neighbor's house in the next earthquake. And you can be the victim of crime. You could be murdered before we get together and study the Bible again because we are all subject to moral evil and natural evil.

We better understand moral evil and our non-exemption from being victims and subjects of moral evil. There's another kind of suffering the Bible talks a lot about and that's self-imposed suffering because you sow to the flesh and you reap from the flesh. Here's a word that's painful, corruption. Sowing and reaping. It's all over the Bible. Read the book of Proverbs. There's a lot of things that can happen. You can be lazy and then you can starve. Right? You can uh be a crook and the Bible says sometimes being a crook will lead you to punishment and you can end up dying over that, being being killed.

You can enjoy so much the dopamine hit you get from taking your paycheck and driving out to Vegas and wasting it all on on the craps table that you you end up becoming a broke person looking for government assistance. You you can suffer because you do something that you know is wrong. Your conscience yells at you when you lay down another bid and all of a sudden now you are doing something that you know is going to end up hurting you. You bring this pain upon yourself.

Dave Deway: You're hearing Pastor Mike Fabarez on Focal Point with a message called The Reciprocity of Comfort where the comfort God gives us in one season becomes the comfort we pass along in the next. If today's teaching stirred up questions about your own hardships, replay it anytime at focalpointradio.org or download the free Focal Point app and bring these messages along on the drive to work, the evening walk, or the sleepless night. When plans come apart, a lot of us reach for a verse or two from the Psalms. In this month, we'd like to hand you a resource that reads them all the way through.

It's called Psalms of Trust, Living with Confidence in God at All Times by Pastor HB Charles Jr. One insight we love comes from Psalm 46, Be still and know that I am God. Pastor Charles points out that being still isn't only quiet reflection, it means stop striving, stop fighting against God, and stop fighting for yourself. It's a timely word for anyone gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly right now. Request your copy when you give to Focal Point this month. The number is 888-320-5885. Once more, that's 888-320-5885 or give online at focalpointradio.org. Gifts can also come by mail address to Focal Point, Post Office Box 2850, Laguna Hills, California 92654.

When a listener gets hard news from a doctor or a phone call nobody wants to receive, we want biblical teaching to be there waiting, not only today, but next year too. Monthly Focal Point partners make that possible. A recurring gift of any size helps us keep offering comfort and answers grounded in scripture through radio, podcasts, and ask Pastor Mike live. Become a partner today by calling 888-320-5885 or by visiting focalpointradio.org. Listening for the first time, we'll gladly send you Pastor Mike's booklet Seeking Comfort at No Cost. Call 888-320-5885 or reach us online at focalpointradio.org. Thursday Pastor Mike continues The Reciprocity of Comfort with five reasons God may be allowing your season of suffering.

I'm Dave Deway. Join us then on Focal Point.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hi, Pastor Mike here. God's word promises it'll never return void. So 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 Deway: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.