Truth Matters

Dr. Cheryl Davis: We're living in a time where people would rather enjoy the lie than endure the truth. We are also living in a time where people are going after trinkets rather than treasure.

Guest (Male): Dr. Cheryl Davis brings a message on staying faithful despite your circumstance.

Dr. Cheryl Davis: When we advance the kingdom, there is a fight that ensues. There's a battle that ensues. If you are doing everything in your power and relying on the Holy Spirit to keep the ministry together, that's how we know that it is God-ordained because the evidence of the struggle is proof of the anointing.

The enemy is not pursuing those with no power or territory. The devil is trying to deceive us and some of us are failing the test. We would rather enjoy the lie than endure the truth. We would rather go after a trinket than God's treasure. We would rather enjoy the lie than endure the truth.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Truth Matters, empowering men and women in the Christian faith to teach biblical truth in the culture and the marketplace of ideas, using the Bible as a sacred trust of truth, ensuring the message of Jesus. Our program host is Dr. Cheryl Davis. Dr. Davis is a wife, mom, speaker, and Bible teacher.

She is a graduate with a doctor of medicine degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. She is married to Thad Davis, pastor of Faith Assembly in St. Paul's, North Carolina. On today's edition of Truth Matters, Dr. Cheryl Davis brings a message on staying faithful despite your circumstance.

When life hits you hard, the tendency is to remedy the problem. But that doesn't mean what you're experiencing right now is not where God intends for you to be. Dr. Davis gives us an encouraging and yet counter-intuitive piece of advice. She says to stay, to stay where you are and invite the Lord in the midst of your pain and suffering to let Him show you that He will never leave you or forsake you. Here's Dr. Cheryl Davis with her message titled "Stay Here."

Dr. Cheryl Davis: I would like to speak today to pastors of churches, ministers that are laboring in the fields. I have a sense that the work that we do is difficult. On some days, I know that some of you as well as myself really feel like giving up. I'd like to encourage you today to say that the Lord is with us and I just want to encourage those that are out working.

You may feel that you are obsolete, you may feel that you're insignificant, you may feel that you're laboring in obscurity, but God knows exactly where you are. Frankly, we are living in times that we thought we would not see in our lifetime or even our children's lifetime. If ever we need the truth, we needed it yesterday, today, and forever.

Second Timothy charges ministers of the gospel like yourself and me to preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and teaching. There's just some advice I would like to give you today is to say never hold back. Be obedient, not partially obedient, but completely obedient.

The stakes are much higher now than they ever have been before. I would like to encourage you to remain faithful. Stay here. I pull this advice and this truth out of the book of Ruth, chapter two, verses eight through nine. If you'll allow me to read those.

Then Boaz said to Ruth, "You will listen, my daughter, will you not? Do not go to glean in another field, nor go from here, but stay close to my young women. Let your eyes be on the field which they reap, and go after them. Have I not commanded the young men not to touch you? And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink from what the young men have drawn."

What I perceive from this message and from these verses is that the word of God is saying to us for this season, you must stay here. In case you have not noticed recently, our world is changing. Like I said earlier, we are living in times that we thought we would never see or that our children would not see.

We have always been in a battle, but it seems like that battle has gotten a second wind and it seems like that has happened recently. Spiritually, Satan has launched an all-out war against the truth and it appears that deception is penetrating the minds and the hearts of people that we thought are the very elect of God.

When we think of the word truth, we think of absolute truth. Truth transcends time and space and context. Today, we are replacing absolute truth by saying that truth is relative. We are allowing multiple truths to be true in one space.

I just sat through a training recently that said this very thing: if you believe it, it is true for you. If I don't believe it, it is not true for me. I can have my own truth, you can have your own truth, and we can both be right. But Second Timothy chapter four describes the times that we are living in.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables. We're living in a time where people would rather enjoy the lie than endure the truth.

We are also living in a time where people are going after trinkets rather than treasure. As I often do, I want to start with the main point just in case you miss it at the end. A church is not a church is not a church anymore.

Just because church is on the sign and it has good praise and worship does not mean that it is the church of the living God. What we need today is churches that are authentically God-ordained. Many people set up churches for many different reasons. They're not always ordained ministries by God.

And those ministries that are ordained ministries by God have shepherds that are there to feed the sheep, not clowns to entertain the goats. The fact that you are a God-ordained ministry means that you are advancing the kingdom. When we advance the kingdom, there is a fight that ensues, there's a battle that ensues.

If you are doing everything in your power and relying on the Holy Spirit to keep the ministry together, that's how we know that it is God-ordained because it's a fight to keep it and to hold it together. If you don't remember anything that I say today, I'm here today to tell you just like Boaz told Ruth, stay here.

I don't know what has been going on in your church or in your life, but there are a lot of people sitting in church looking around to say, should I stay here? Is this the right place for me? But if you are sitting in a God-ordained ministry that preaches the truth, it is going to go against society and that is valuable.

Many people are tossing that aside these days because they think that it's politically incorrect or that it's harmful. But what I'm here to say is that the Lord is telling us that we need to stay where the truth is being taught and where the truth is being preached and where love is being shown. We must stay here.

There are some Ruths that are listening that God is telling you that you need to stay here. The Lord is saying if you leave, you will go out full of yourself just like Naomi, but you will come back empty of all your treasure and provision.

There are some Naomis out there that we need to go and get out of Moab before they come back empty-handed and broken and bring them back to Bethlehem. We need to heed the word of the Lord. For this season, we must stay here. Let's get into the story.

The book of Ruth occurred during the time of the judges before the kings ruled Israel. During this time, there lived a family in Bethlehem, Judah. It was the father, Elimelech, Naomi the wife, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion.

Ruth chapter one, verse one tells us, "Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem, Judah, went to dwell in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons."

Allow me to summarize this story for the sake of time. You have an Israelite family living in the town of Bethlehem, which means the house of bread. File that back in your mind because that'll be important later. They experience a famine of food and they decide to go to Moab, which is a heathen nation, because it had grassy fields, fertile land, and had plenty of food.

They go and in the span of about 12 years, the sons marry foreign wives, the husband dies, and the two sons die, leaving Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah to fend for themselves. The average Christian would ask, "Where did I go wrong, Lord? How did this tragedy happen to me?"

We as a church and the people of God are in the same place as this family. The devil is trying to deceive us just as he did this family and some of us are failing the test. We would rather enjoy the lie than endure the truth. We would rather go after a trinket than God's treasure.

So my first point, we would rather enjoy the lie than endure the truth. There is going to come a time, or it may have already come for you, that living the truth is hard. Let's just be honest, walking the truth is going to get harder.

We already know that because Isaiah talks about there is a highway of holiness and few are going to walk therein. By definition, if a road is narrow which leads to heaven and wide is the path that leads to destruction, less people can fit on the narrow road. Some are not willing to endure the truth.

The way of the truth has to be endured. This is not a popular teaching, but I'm going to say it one more time. The way of the truth has to be endured. Rather than endure the truth, the enemy wants to deceive us into enjoying the lie.

For Elimelech, he was living in the will of God at the house of bread called Bethlehem, but there came a famine. Just because there was a famine does not mean that it was not in the will of God for him to remain there. God will ordain famine experiences in our lives. That's not commonly taught either.

This famine came as a consequence of the Israelites' way of living. It was easy for Elimelech to justify leaving to go to Moab because he had to feed his family. Otherwise, they would die if they remained, or so he thought. God is true to His word. He will never leave us and never forsake us.

A man in the center of God's will is immortal until God is finished with him. It does not matter: famine, sickness, persecution, or even the threat of death. No weapon formed against us shall prosper. God had a plan for grace even in the midst of judgment for their own sin.

How do we know that? I'm so glad you asked. The evidence of God's grace was that there was a family for Naomi to come back to in Bethlehem after she came back from Moab. Jesus is the bread of life. David said, "I have never seen the righteous forsaken or his seed beg bread."

If God kept those that remained in Bethlehem, He would have kept them just the same. God has no respecter of persons. He always had a plan to preserve the remnant of Israelites for the Messiah to be born. But rather than endure the will of God through faith, Elimelech and his family chose to exit.

By exiting, they walked out of the will of God and into the land of the heathen. They literally opened the door to the attack of the enemy and traded God's provision for a morsel of bread. Now you may say, "Well, that was them. I would not do something like that. I would never walk into Moab. If that was me, I would not have made that decision. I know what Moab looks like and I would never make that mistake."

But for us, it is much more subtle today. Let me give you a real-life example. There may be a person listening or even in your church who once was dedicated from the start for a certain task. But when you are building something, like at the start of a ministry, it takes a lot of time and when you are growing, it takes a lot of fighting the enemy.

You know that when you are affecting eternity because of the battle, just like I said before. But that is why the enemy is trying to deceive and defeat you to prevent you from advancing the kingdom and the gospel. The evidence of the struggle is proof of the anointing.

The enemy is not pursuing those with no power or territory. The enemy has come into your mind to say, "Church work should not be this hard. You work hard at your job. We shouldn't have to work this hard at the church. You need to spend more time with your children or you need to take more time for yourself. Someone else can do that task."

All the while, God has sent you to your church, to my church, for such a time as this and the task is for you. All the while, there are blessings waiting for you. We know that because the word tells us, "Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man what God hath prepared for them that love him," if you complete the task that God has presented you with.

But instead, at some of our most weak moments or some of our blind moments to the will of God, we resign our job and we walk out of the will of God. We leave the place where the Lord has ordained us to be for what we think are justified reasons. But what the root of the matter is, is that we're blind to the will of God and we walk out of it.

What it boils down to is that we don't want to endure the truth to sacrifice the time to put in the work for the ministry. We would rather pamper our flesh. We would rather spend more time at home and with the family than building the kingdom of God.

Trust me, time with our children is good, but it should not take the place of God on the throne of our hearts. And we can go out and justify doing a lot of good things. It's not that we're leaving the church to do bad things or even sinful things. But what we trade is that we trade perfect for good.

Where God's will will put us in the perfect place, but we would rather be in the good place because it's where we want to be. But we're trading perfect for good. And this gets to: if where we are is not the will of God for the season of our life, it is sin. Being outside the will of God is disobedience and that is sin.

What we are doing may be good and noble and sacrificial, but if it is not the will of God, it is sin. Sin will separate us from God. Choosing sin forfeits the provision of God. But why would we rather leave and walk in sin than endure and abide in the vine?

The root of the issue is two things: one, a shallow commitment, and two, deception. Our commitment only goes as far as our own preferences when it's shallow. When we do not get what we want, we start looking for the exit. When things are not as smooth as we want, we start looking for the exit.

When things are not as trendy as we want, we start looking for the next new thing. When there is a drought season, rather than pray for rain, we look for a place where it is already raining and we go there. When there's a difficult person in the church that it seems that the pastor is not dealing with, rather than pray for them and the pastor, we say, "Well, there's nothing that is going to be done about it."

We stop going to church therefore and we leave. But soon after that, we're going to church nowhere because we are out of the will of God and the enemy deceives us into staying home. We do all of this and have not heard from God. Really what we'd heard from is self and we have thought that that was God.

We think we've heard from God, but we have heard from self and from Satan through our flesh and our emotions, thinking that our feelings are the voice of the Holy Spirit. And frankly, and this is sad, but some of us do not know the difference between ourselves and the Holy Spirit. The Bible says that the heart is wicked, who can know it? Many of us are trusting ourselves more than we should.

And sometimes it comes to the point that we break up our families where the husband is going one place and the wife and the children are going another. And when I think about this, you know, when I think about fathers and how fathers are going to stand in the judgment, and I wonder if your wife and your children are in one place and you're in another place, or even if you're home, how is that going to work for us on judgment day?

If we cannot worship together here or together in one place, if we can't get on one accord spiritually in the home, how are we going to worship together in heaven? What I want to say is that one of us runs the risk of not making it to the homecoming. Stepping out of the will of God is a dangerous road.

When you forfeit the provision of God because you think you know better than He does, you begin to serve the God of your own mind. He may just give you exactly what you want, your own will. And then when you get it, you want to return it, but what you don't realize is that God's judgment has a no-takeback policy.

God is longsuffering. He's not going to give you your own will until you've begged for it, frankly. And when you get it, often times we realize it's not what we want. God's judgment may be slow, but it is certain to come. For the husband or wife whose spouse is out there, you know, if you're living in a situation where you're not in the same church or your family is separated and you're not worshipping together, now's the time to go to them and tell them, "Hey, the word of God says that we should be together, that the husband is the priest of the home."

We should come back, worship together, before we come back with nothing. Just like I said before, when Naomi walked out along with Elimelech, they came back to Bethlehem empty-handed. If we're standing outside the will of God, we need to come back before we come back with nothing. Naomi suffered loss and we may suffer loss, but it can be avoided if we will heed the word of the Lord.

I told my church this just recently, just like the prophet Haggai said in chapter one: "Is it time for yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, and this temple to lie in ruins? Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways! You have sown much, and bring in little; you eat, but you do not have enough; you drink, but you are not filled with drink; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes. Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways!"

We need to consider our ways. Are we willing to endure the truth or would we rather enjoy the lie? And this is what I really want you to understand. If you're in a God-ordained ministry, the pastor and the pastor's wife have been delegated by the Lord and anointed by the Lord to be the shepherd for that fellowship.

The will of God is going to go on in your church with or without you. There is a struggle because the anointing is what breaks the yoke and the enemy wants to bind up the ministry. God will send someone by if you are not willing. This is an opportunity for you to serve God in the place that you're in. This is an opportunity for you to honor God and be blessed by God if you are in the right place in this season. The choice is yours.

But God says for this season, you must stay here and endure the truth. I know sometimes this is hard to hear because we don't like to endure things. We would rather go through things, we would like to celebrate things, we would rather enjoy things. I know that. But the truth is what will sustain us in the times that we are living in.

So let's move on to the second point. The second point that we learn from the story of Ruth and Naomi is that we would rather go after a trinket than God's treasure. The enemy is a great deceiver and he will deceive you to forfeit God's treasure for trinkets. You may be asking, "What is a trinket?" I'm glad you asked. Let's get into that.

A trinket is a small ornament or item of jewelry that is of little value. What is a treasure? A treasure is a quantity of precious metals or valuable objects. A trinket is of little value, a treasure is very valuable. The difference lies in their value. Both trinkets and treasure may look the same. They may be bright and dazzling and look expensive or valuable.

But when the water hits them or the heat hits them, they tarnish or they melt like wax. Trinkets have little value in the fire, where treasure goes through the fire and comes out even more brilliant than before. Let me break this down into modern-day church terms. Churches today are replacing women's ministry with ladies' night out at LongHorn, exercise groups with devotions, book clubs about the Bible rather than actual Bible study.

And I'm not saying, please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that any of these things are bad within themselves. But the keyword is that we are replacing. These things can be added to core ministries of a church, but they should not replace or dilute the ministries of the church.

And please don't think that I'm discouraging you from that. But what we'll learn is that when affliction comes, and it will come, those of us that have been doing book clubs about the Bible, not about Bible study, and not hiding the words in our heart so that we do not sin against God, we will have no power to battle against the rulers, the authorities, and against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

What we need to be doing in our churches in our core ministries is equipping people with the word of God so that when the onslaught of evil comes, we have spiritual weapons. People are running after false light, not actual true light. Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light and we can be deceived that those churches are true and authentic when they are not.

Also, it could be that it is not the season for you. You may be at a good place, but if it is the wrong time, then it is the wrong place. And what I'm telling you is the Lord is saying for this season, stay here where the treasure lies because where your treasure lies, there your heart will be also.

In my closing, I want you to understand that for this season, the Lord is saying to us just like Boaz said to Ruth, stay here. And I know that churches are not perfect. I understand that. My church is not perfect. And I know that there are times where our relationships are even strained within the church and there are times where it's difficult and I know that there's sometimes that we're not motivated to go to church on Sunday mornings. I know that.

But just because it is difficult does not mean that is not where God intends for you to be. If the field where the Lord has us has rocks and the work is too hard and you begin to stumble, stay there. I would rather stumble underneath the grace of God than to succeed in the world of the enemy.

If you leave this field, you will go out full of all your own plans, but you will come back broken and empty. We can avoid that if we just remain and abide in the vine and stay in the will of God. These afflictions that you are facing are light and but for a moment, but it is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. You are building up treasures in heaven.

The will of God for you is the treasure and not the trinket. Stay here. I hear the word of the Lord saying, stay here even though it's difficult. Stay here even though my feelings do not push me to stay here. I gotta put a hedge around my mind and a hedge around my heart and even a hedge around my emotions to know the word of God and to do the will of God even though my feelings do not push me into that.

It is better to act ourselves into a feeling rather than feel ourselves into an action. I obey God not based on my feelings, but because of my love for Him. I hear the word of the Lord saying, stay here.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Truth Matters with Dr. Cheryl Davis and her message titled "Stay Here." In these changing times, there has been one thing that has never changed: the message in the Bible. The truth in God's word stands stronger than ever. Read it for yourself so that you may know and discern what is true, holy, and acceptable in the eyes of God.

Friend, if you're searching or confused in what to believe in this ever-changing modern culture, Dr. Davis would like to help you discover and understand what is true and genuine. You can reach her by email at cheryldavis@projecttruthmatters.com. Cheryl is spelled C-H-E-R-Y-L Davis at projecttruthmatters.com.

You can also write to her at P.O. Box 159, St. Paul's, North Carolina, 28384. Or you can connect on Facebook at Truth Matters with Dr. Cheryl Davis. And lastly, if you'd like to hear more of Dr. Davis's messages, the Truth Matters with Dr. Cheryl Davis podcast is available on Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Pandora, and Castbox.

Our website is projecttruthmatters.com. Truth Matters is made possible thanks to the prayers and financial contributions of friends like you and is a production of the Truth Project.