From His Heart

Speaker 1

Today on from his heart, discover what's covered in the Lord's benefits package. Here's Pastor Jeff Shreve.

Speaker 2

Hey, we're going to have trouble in this world. Jesus said if the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you. A Christian in this world is a twice born person living in a world of once born people. Our citizenship is in heaven.

We follow the Lord Jesus Christ. We don't march to the beat of the drumbeat of the world. We march to the beat of the Lord's drum. And so it's a different experience for the Christian, and there are going to be difficulties for us.

It's very important to not forget the benefits package that the Lord gives us: every scar, real truth, real love, real.

Speaker 1

Let's face it, the Christian life can be very hard at times. Christians are twice born people living in a world of once born people. And because our citizenship is in heaven, life on earth can be difficult for us indeed.

But today on From His Heart, Pastor Jeff Shreve shares the five amazing and unparalleled benefits of the Christian life and how important it is for us to be proactive to remember all the wonderful things the Lord has promised to those who follow him.

The lesson we're about to hear is from Pastor Jeff's nine-message series, "Life is Hard, but God is Good." Open your Bible to Psalm 103 as Pastor Jeff begins describing the wonderful things in the Lord's benefits package.

Speaker 2

You know, companies have benefits packages. Probably where you work, you work for a salary plus benefits. Well, just as companies have a benefits package, the Lord, the giver of every good and perfect gift, has a benefits package for those who follow after Him. Now we're in a series in the book of Psalms called "Life is Hard, but God is Good." Today, we want to look at Psalm 103.

Interestingly, I found out just this week in my studies that I thought for so long that the middle verse of the Bible, you know, if you're ever on Jeopardy and they ask you what is the middle verse of the Bible, I was always told it's Psalm 118, verse 8: "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man." What a great middle verse of the Bible! But I found out it's really not the middle verse of the Bible. When you look at all the verses in the Bible, the middle verse of the King James Bible, when you look at the number of verses, is really two verses because it's an even number. So if you have an even number, you really can't have a middle verse, but it's two verses: Psalm 103:1-2, where David says, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of his benefits."

Now, we talk about blessing the Lord, and the Bible talks about praising the Lord. Maybe you're thinking, what does it mean to bless the Lord? Warren Wiersbe, the great commentator, said this: "To bless the Lord means to delight his heart by expressing gratitude for all he is and all he has done." It's not asking him for anything but praising him for everything. David is blessing the Lord for all his benefits. Forget none of his benefits.

Here's a problem that you have, that I have, that David had, and that everyone who's ever walked on the face of this earth has had: we have a tendency to forget his benefits. I mean, the Christian life can be hard, and we can forget his benefits. That word "forget" in the Hebrew means to ignore, to neglect, to give attention to, to cease to care, to fail to remember. We have to be proactive to remember his benefits, to remember all the wonderful things the Lord has promised to those who follow after him.

As I said, the Christian life is a hard life. The Lord said it was going to be hard. An old song from the 70s says, "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden." Don't ever get the idea that the Christian life is all honey and no bees. There are difficulties in the Christian life. In the world, Jesus said, "You have tribulation, but be of good courage. I have overcome the world." Hey, we're going to have trouble in this world. Jesus said, "If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you." A Christian in this world is a twice-born person living in a world of once-born people. Our citizenship is in heaven. We follow the Lord Jesus Christ. We don't march to the beat of the drumbeat of the world; we march to the beat of the Lord's drum.

So it's a different experience for the Christian, and there are going to be difficulties for us. It's very important to not forget the benefits package that the Lord gives us. So let's look at the five benefits that David tells us. Don't forget any of these.

Benefit number one: the Lord forgives all your sins when you come to Christ. When you begin to follow the Lord with all your heart, the Lord forgives all your sins. He says in verse three, "Who pardons all your iniquities." Now, the Bible talks about three main words when it speaks of sin. Sometimes it uses "sin," sometimes it uses "transgressions," and sometimes it uses the word "iniquities."

In Exodus 34, where the Lord revealed himself to Moses, he said, "Remember, he hid him in the cleft of the rock, and he passed by. He said, 'Moses, you can't see my face. No one can see my face and live. But I'll hide you in the cleft of the rock. I'll pass by. You can see the backside, the edges of my glory.'" As he passed by, he said, "The Lord. The Lord. The Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth. Who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgressions, and sin." So it delineates those three. Here it just says, "Who pardons all your iniquities." The word "iniquity" literally means moral twistedness. It's also defined as serious moral evil.

Now, this is David saying he pardons all your iniquities. David had some serious moral evil on his account. We know from the life of David that he did some terrible things. Here is a man after God's own heart, the one that the Lord chose when he was just a kid, the one who defeated Goliath when he was probably only 15 or 16 years old. God's hand was on this guy from the time that he was young, but he did some terrible things. He committed the sin of adultery, which was a terrible thing. It's doubly terrible when you understand that David had multiple wives and then he had a harem of women. The Bible calls those concubines, not porcupines. Concubines are girlfriends.

So he's the king, and he has lots of wives, and he has lots of girlfriends. He sees a woman bathing named Bathsheba, and he was just overcome with this desire for her. She's the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Uriah the Hittite was one of David's faithful soldiers. He was one of David's 30 mighty men. David calls for Bathsheba, has a night of illicit sex with her, and sends her on her way. The word comes back to him, "I'm pregnant, David." David's in a bind because Uriah is fighting the king's battles; he's not home. So there's no way this could happen. It's not Uriah's baby. David says, "I got to cover this up."

What does he do? He calls Uriah back from the battlefield. "Hey, I need you to come back and tell me what's going on at the battle." He's hoping that Uriah will go home to his house to see his wife and be with his wife, and everything will be covered up. But Uriah has too much honor to do that. He says, "There's no way I'm going to go and be with my wife when my kinsmen are out fighting the king's battles. No, I'm just going to stay here at the door of the king's house and guard the king."

David said, "Crud." So David, the next night, got him drunk. "Crud" is a Hebrew word, I just tell you that. He gets him drunk thinking, "Well, if I get him drunk, then he'll do it." But he wouldn't do it. So here's what's so terrible: David writes a note, seals it in an envelope. The note is to Joab, the general, and it says, "Put Uriah in the fiercest part of the battle and then everyone withdraw from him so that he'll die." He seals the note and puts it in Uriah's hand. Uriah takes his death note, unbeknownst to him, to Joab as a good and faithful servant of the king. And Uriah dies.

Those were the sins that David had. The sin with Bathsheba was a hot-blooded sin, and the sin with Uriah the Hittite was a cold-blooded, calculated sin. David had both of those on his conscience. David said, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of his benefits. Who pardons all, all the terrible things I did with Bathsheba, all the terrible things I did against Uriah the Hittite. He forgives all of that. He doesn't forgive most of it. He doesn't forgive some of it. He forgives all of it."

The worst thing that you've ever done, you know what it is. Maybe some others know what it is, maybe they don't, but you know, and God knows. When you confess your sins to God, if we confess our sins, "Homologeo," I John 1:9. "Homologeo" means to say the same thing as God. When we confess our sins to God, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Hey, do you have some bad sins that seem to haunt you? Haunted by the ghost of guilt? I remember a friend of mine who was starting to grow in the Lord. He would tell me, "Jeff, you know, I think about my failed first marriage, and I think about how terrible I was to my wife." I think he was physically abusive with her. He said, "I have so much guilt." Every morning, he would wake up and ask God to forgive him for the way he was to his wife. I said, "You do that every morning?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Quit it."

He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, every time you ask God to forgive you for that, you're just saying, 'God, I don't believe that you forgave me when I asked you yesterday. I don't believe when I asked you the day before. I don't believe the day before I said you.'" You ask God from a sincere heart, "God, forgive me for this," and then you thank him every single day for forgiving you. He pardons all your iniquities.

The Scripture says, when it comes to removing your sins and dealing with your sin, Jeremiah 31: "I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin. I will remember no more." Micah chapter seven says that the Lord buries our sins in the depths of the sea. As Corrie Ten Boom says, then he posts a sign that says, "No fishing." He doesn't bring that back up again.

Now, when the Bible says God doesn't remember your sin anymore, that doesn't mean that God has some kind of divine Alzheimer's. It just means he doesn't remember it against you anymore. That sin is forgiven. That sin is dealt with. Psalm 103, verse 12 tells us, not only does God forgive our sin, not only does he forget our sin, but he also removes our sin as far as the east is from the west. So far has he removed our transgressions from us. He just takes them away as far as the east is from the west.

Now, think about this. What if it said, "As far as the north is from the south?" You say, "Yeah, just as good. It's just talking about direction. East, west, north, south. Doesn't matter to me, just so long as he removes them." Let me tell you why it's a big deal. Because if it said, "As far as the north is from the south," the distance from the North Pole to the South Pole is a calculated distance. I calculated it. Another thing: if you're on Jeopardy, it's 12,436 miles from the North Pole to the South Pole.

See, "as far as the north is from the south" is a fixed distance. So say you're at the South Pole and you're going to start traveling north. You're going north, north, north, north, north, north, north. You get up to the North Pole and keep traveling in the same direction. All of a sudden now you're going south, south, south, south, south. That's a fixed distance between the North Pole and the South Pole.

"As far as the east is from the west" is an infinite distance. We're in Texas. We start traveling east, and we go east and we go into Arkansas, and we go past Arkansas and we hit the coast there, the Atlantic Ocean, and we get into Europe, and then we get into Asia, and then we go all the way around. Now we're coming back around, and we're in Hawaii, and we're in California. You say, "Well, California, why that's west." Uh, because you're still going in an easterly direction. The distance between the east and the west is infinite.

And God says, "That's how I take away your sin. I remove it an infinite distance as far as the east is from the west." We don't need to be walking around haunted by the ghost of guilt. We can confess our sin and know that God forgives our sin. I think about the woman in Luke 7, the prostitute in Luke 7 who wept at Jesus' feet. What does he say to her, that repentant woman? "Your sins are forgiven. Your sins, which are many, are forgiven. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace." Don't go in guilt, don't go in shame, don't go in condemnation. Go in peace. God is the God who forgives from the guttermost to the uttermost.

So the Lord forgives all your sins. That's the first benefit of the Lord's benefit package. Benefit number two: the Lord heals all your diseases. "Who pardons all your iniquities, who heals," verse three, "all your diseases." Now we have a name for God in the scripture, a wonderful name that we introduced in Exodus 15, verse 26: "For I, the Lord, am your healer." I, the Lord, L O R D, all in caps, which is the Yahweh, Y H W H, the four letters that's translated Yahweh or Jehovah. "I, the Lord, am your Rapha, your healer."

So we have that name, Jehovah Rapha, Yahweh Rapha, that we call upon when we're sick because he's the healer. Jesus is the great physician. Everywhere Jesus went, he healed the sick, and the Lord is the healer, and so he heals all your diseases. What a great benefit! But now somebody may say, "Well, hold on, time out. I mean, Jeff, we know that that's not true. I mean, there are a lot of Christians who have ailments and difficulties in cancer and leukemia and this issue and that issue, and they're not healed."

Well, maybe not in this life. It doesn't say he heals all your diseases in this life. It just says he heals all your diseases. One of my great heroes in the faith is Joni Eareckson Tada, just a wonderful lady. She's the lady who broke her neck when she was 17 in a diving accident and became a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. She prayed for healing, and healing didn't come in the way she wanted it. Then she said, "Well, if I can't be healed, then I want to die."

So she tried to kill herself. It's hard to try and kill yourself when you're a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. She would take her wheelchair and run it as fast as she could to try and run into the wall, hoping that she could break her neck a little higher and suffocate and die. She would ask her friends, "Please slash my wrists. I won't even feel it. Just kill me. I don't want to live like this."

She came to the place where she said God was working in her heart. She said, "God, if I can't die, then show me how to live." And God showed her how to live. She was on Larry King a number of years ago, and it was when Christopher Reeve was really in the news, and he had made that declaration, "I know that I'm going to get out of this wheelchair one day and walk again."

Well, Larry King asked Joni, "Do you think that you're going to walk again?" She said, "Larry, I've been in this chair almost 50 years. I have no hope or vision that I'm going to get out of this chair in this life. But when I get to heaven, I'm going to take that wheelchair and throw it into hell, and I'm going to leap and run and dance and shout because the Lord is my healer, and he heals all your diseases."

Revelation chapter 21, verse 4 says, "And he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall no longer be any death. There shall no longer be any mourning or crying or pain. The first things have passed away." Everyone in heaven who is healthy and whole in a glorified body says, "He is the healer. He delivers from all diseases. He heals all your diseases."

And hey, when the Lord doesn't heal in this life, you know, anytime we get sick, what do we want? We want healing. That's a normal, natural thing. The apostle Paul had a thorn in the flesh. We don't know what that was exactly, but I think it was a physical thing because he calls it a thorn in the flesh. He said it was a messenger of Satan that was given to him, and he didn't want it. He prayed three times, "Lord, let this pass from me. I don't want this. Take this thorn from me."

It wasn't just one of those little prayers, "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my thorn to keep." It wasn't that kind of prayer. He was really praying, "God, take that. I don't want this anymore." The Lord said, "Paul, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness."

Hey, when God doesn't bring healing, physical healing in your life as you want him to, just know that his grace is sufficient for you. For Joni Eareckson, his grace is sufficient for you. When Paul heard the Lord say to him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness," he said, "Most gladly, therefore, I would rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. For I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with persecutions, with distresses, with difficulties, for Christ's sake. For when I'm weak, then I'm strong. Because then the power of God fills me."

Hey, what's on the benefits plan? The Lord forgives all your sins. Secondly, the Lord heals all your diseases. Thirdly, the Lord redeems your life from certain destruction. Verse 4: "Who redeems your life from the pit?" God is the Redeemer. Now, redemption and forgiveness are tied together. So who pardons all your iniquities? Who heals all your diseases? Who redeems your life from the pit? From the pit of destruction?

Colossians puts it this way: "For he delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption." What is that? The forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins, redemption, and salvation, and the forgiveness of sins. Those go together like iniquity and transgression. Those are synonyms,

Speaker 1

What a marvelous truth to know that we can be delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of his beloved Son Jesus. As we've been reminded of today in part one of the message the Lord's Benefits Package, we know that the Christian life can be very difficult at times. Christians are twice born people, but we live in a world of once born people. Because our citizenship is in heaven, life on earth can be difficult for all of us.

How are you doing on the struggle side of life versus the peaceful side of life? Are you remembering that God is good and faithful in the good times and the bad times? If you're on the fence about that, then you'll want to get Pastor Jeff's nine lesson series Life is Hard But God is Good, where he shares the real truth about the nature and the actions of a good God.

Today's lesson is called the Lord's Benefits Package Part 1, but the series is available on CDs, DVDs, USB flash drive, or immediate MP3 download. And it's our gift of thanks to you for your support to From His Heart this month of any amount. When you make that gift, we'll also send you the bonus booklet Strong Faith for Tough Times.

To get these resources, call 866-40-BIBLE (866-40-BIBLE) or go online to fromhisheart.org and get the series Life is Hard But God Is Good and the booklet Strong Faith for Tough Times. Thank you so very much for investing in this kind of ministry work around the world through From His Heart, knowing that you'll enjoy the Lord's Benefits Package one day.

We're going to pause right there for today. I'm Larry Nobles, thanking you for joining us as we journey through the series Life is Hard But God is Good. We trust that you'll be here tomorrow as we'll have a brief review of today's lesson and then part two of the message the Lord's Benefits Package, when we'll continue describing the redemption found in Christ—a benefit that trumps them all. Here's a little of what's coming up on Thursday.

Speaker 2

If a Christian has fallen into terrible, horrible sin, what happens to that Christian is they start to wonder if they're saved at all. They really begin to doubt their salvation because they're not doing right and they're thinking, you know, I don't like me because I'm doing these terrible things.

And there's no way God could like me if I don't like me. How could God like me? He loves you because you're accepted in the beloved.

Speaker 1

Join us then when we'll open up God's word and share real truth, real love and real hope. From his heart.

Speaker 2

There is truth. There is hope that you always bring love. He can heal every scars of his heart.

Speaker 1

From his heart is the listener supported Broadcast Ministry of Dr. Jeff Shreve speaking the truth in love to a lost and a hurting world.

Remember that no matter what, God loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life.

Find out more at from his heart.