Open—Don Rule
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Lord stands we've seen, I said to the hospital. Grand slaves.
No, God shall prepare me.
Wrong place.
Praise, oh man, God, See, it's more holy and scary you're having.
More life to help me save the sins.
I am more of a kind of being.
We've had before us this weekend.
Several hours.
Of time together.
With the opportunity to learn better the heart of God.
As we've had it in First Corinthians or First John chapter 4.
It's a wonderful thing.
It's a work of God in us to know His own heart.
For our blessing and for His joy and satisfaction.
I would like to take up with you.
What I want to call the other side.
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Of this subject for a little bit.
And that is the necessity to learn our own hearts so.
So there's one side of it to learn. The heart of God is love.
But there's another side that is part of life, and it's an important part of life in its place, and that's the learning of our own hearts. Turn with me to Deuteronomy chapter 6 for a few verses.
Deuteronomy chapter 6.
And verse.
Five or verse four hear O Israel.
Lord our God is 1 Lord.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart.
Thou shalt diligently teach them unto thy children, and talk of them when thou sittest.
In line house and when they'll walk us by the way, and when thou liest out.
And when thou risest up, and thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be as frontlets before thine eyes, and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
There was blessing for these earthly people in verse 11. The time would come when their houses would be full of good things that they hadn't done themselves, but God had provided for them.
They got a warning that we also had in the last couple of days.
In verse 14, thou shalt not go after other gods.
Of the gods of the people which are around you. For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you. Thus the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.
Also.
In numbers, the statement was made to these people.
About the 40 years they spent in the wilderness. Why? That was their life. That was the path of life through which God was passing them. And here's what he said about it.
To humble thee.
To prove thee.
To know what is in thine heart.
There is in the path of life the wonderful and important and joyful side of learning the heart of God, and we often learn it by experience.
In the ways of God with us.
But life has the other side as well, and it's a part of what is necessary for us to appreciate the blessing and love of God.
And to it will make eternity for us a more rich and blessed.
The time or timeless time?
To humble thee.
To prove thee to know what is in thine heart.
You're going through that experience.
Perhaps not consciously all the time, but you are going through the experience that God is teaching you.
What's in your own heart?
It says he that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.
I won't do it, but rhetorically, I'll say it. If I said to you, everybody who hasn't been a fool in their own heart, please stand up.
And I think if you had any sense of your heart, you wouldn't stand up because you know that at times your heart you have acted fully.
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Because you trusted in it. He that trusts in his own heart. That's one of the things that we all naturally as children, start out in life with confidence.
And very often in the process of life, God strips us.
Through the experiences of life in that self-confidence that is part of not knowing our own heart.
It's one thing to be sincere, and in many spiritual things we start out with sincerity.
But sincerity doesn't mean we understand our heart. Sincerity you can be sincere and sincerely wrong.
You can believe and be with sincerity and believe wrong, and part of the process of life is that process that God uses for blessing, painful as it is, that is to teach us.
1St to humble us.
We don't have a right appreciation of God when we're proud.
In fact, if we're proud, it's evidence that we don't really know God.
Because you can't fully be in the presence of God with pride. You're stripped of it, but it's a hindrance because it's natural. It's as natural to be proud as it is to breathe. It's the way we are because we have sinned by birth in US, and man has that independent spirit of God.
Cain, who went out from the presence of the Lord.
He went out with confidence, he went out to live life without God and that fosters pride, self-reliance to humble thee.
To prove thee.
You know, sometimes we do all right. We go along fine.
Until a problem comes up that's too big for us, and then we say, oh God, please help me.
And sometimes at the moment we may seem disappointed because he doesn't seem to step in and take care of it.
At the same time, if we would reflect a little bit, we would recognize that what we were doing and how we were doing it and how we planned it was our own.
And God in his ways with us sometimes says, you want it, you want it this way. OK, go ahead.
Have it your way.
But you will learn the consequences of going your way.
And when you do, I'm not necessarily going to immediately bail you out.
Because it's part of learning. You don't always teach somebody something that's beneficial to them if they've gone their own way. And instantly when it doesn't work there, you're just there to take care of the mess that they've created by their own choices and so.
To humble thee, to prove thee, to know what is in thine heart. And it's a process that's unavoidable.
You can't say I don't want to go that way. It's going to happen.
Because it's for your blessing and mine. It's a process that goes on.
And it went on.
I'll make a comment to moms and dads here.
Made the comment. It's been helpful to me in life, it says.
Verse 7. Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.
That's why.
In part, there's not a single parent in this room that wasn't first a child.
Adam and Eve are the only exceptions in the history of man. Why?
Because to teach your children properly, you have to have experienced what they're going through. And when you've experienced that, then you are able, by your own experience and what you learn through it, to understand and to teach.
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Your children. And so here were some people that had spent 40 years.
In the school of God learning for themselves. And now we're being told, now you're ready, if you will, to teach your children what you've been learning in the process of life for yourself. And part of that process, they were learning the heart of God.
They were learning their own heart.
There's something else mentioned here that isn't directly on what we're talking about exactly, but I'm going to comment on it. I think it's helpful. Verse five says thou shalt love the Lord thy God.
That was a command.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.
It was a command that was conditional, That is, if you obey.
And it's repeated in the Gospels, in Matthew 22 I think, or 21 when they were saying to the Lord, well, what's the law say? The law says you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.
How many people?
Have kept that command.
Not one.
Not one accepting, of course, the Lord Jesus.
Why? Because man in himself is not capable.
Of loving the Lord.
Is God with all his heart?
That's law.
That's the principle of law.
That and love your neighbor as yourself. If you did those two things perfectly, love God as you should, and love your neighbor yourself, you would have fulfilled every requirement of the law.
But the point I want to make out of it is.
Is man couldn't do it.
And we spent two days in the reading meetings.
And you didn't hear once.
Connected with us that command.
Not once.
You and I, as trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, are not given that command.
We heard over and over again the importance of loving your brother.
As evidence that you have the life.
Why does it put it that way?
Why doesn't it say instead of saying you shall love your brother, you shall love God?
As a an injunction, an exhortation.
To us, I'm going to suggest a thought to you.
God is love.
And all things flow from the God who is love.
We love, it says in First John Four. We didn't get that far in the chapter, but we love because he first loved us.
And we love because God has chosen to give us the life of Christ.
In which that love is and can be manifested.
But this comes to the point.
That God is eminently worthy of our love. We say God's love is unconditional. He loves because he is love, and this is true. And so he loves us without regard to what we are.
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But the other side is this.
God has manifested himself in a way that he has absolutely worthy.
Of all our love.
The Lord Jesus in the manifestation of the love of God, has presents Himself to us in perfect perfection and love in activity, and we have every reason.
There was fear of God to tell them to love Him with all their heart.
Under law, even though they couldn't and didn't do it.
But God has turned it around.
He's put what we didn't have in US, and rather than exhort us to love him because he's perfectly worthy of all love.
He constrains us by it. It's a response in US rather than a command. And so God is working in your life and mind to pull us to Himself in responsive Ness.
To what he is, the love of Christ constraineth us.
For God so loved the world that he gave is a constraining statement to those of us who have accepted that love.
And that work that that love did.
And so in that way.
He then though says I'm to love you as I love myself, and you're to love me.
As you love yourself.
We need that exhortation because I'm not worthy of your love. I can't constrain you by the amount of love that's in my heart for you. You may see some of it, but it's not perfect. It's incomplete. And so God says He loves us unconditionally. I have a life that says I'm to love you unconditionally.
Even though I may not always see you worthy.
As God is worthy of receiving that love.
I'd like to go over and connect these thoughts with Hebrews chapter.
13.
Hebrews, chapter 13.
Verse 5.
Let your conversation be without covetousness and be content with such things as you have.
For he has said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.
So that we may boldly say, the Lord is my helper.
I will not fear what man will do unto me.
I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.
If you go back under law, if you go back to the learning experience that God was teaching man, most of the Old Testament really in that way is God teaching man what's in his own heart to recognize that he could never be right under law. It was a long lesson.
You know, a couple thousand years of a lesson, pretty serious lesson, that God would take that long to work it out.
But God said this to those people. He said, If you forsake me.
I will forsake you.
In the prophets, I forget which one, he says. If you forsake me, I will forsake you.
That's what having an agreement with God is like, being under the basis of I should love God with all my heart, but if I forsake him and in fact the forsaking that God was warning them about and said I'll forsake you, goes back to something that was brought out.
When idols were brought before us.
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In particular, emphasis is given in that Forsaken is if you forsake me for idols, I'll forsake you.
And the 10 tribes rather rapidly forsook God for idols, and God in that governmental way, forsook them, and they've never had the relationship yet again with him. And when they do, it won't be on the basis of law. He has to go back before law, as we see in earlier chapters of Hebrews, and he will restore the relationship on the basis of his promises, which were unconditional.
Not conditional with the Law, but unconditional with Abraham and the promises made to Abraham.
Are the basis on which the children of Israel will be restored and brought into their millennial place a blessing, but under law and under the rules of law, God forsook them.
The Lord Jesus who is brought before us in these verses says to us.
I will never leave thee.
Nor forsake thee.
He knew.
He experienced.
In a way more intense than you and I ever will. What it was.
To be forsaken.
Forsaken of God, yes, but also forsaken of man.
He experienced it.
And he in having experienced it in his own life, Here's a man on earth, as it were, as saying.
You're not going to experience what I experienced.
Whether or not we're conscious of it, he doesn't. We may not be aware of it.
But he doesn't leave us.
And he doesn't forsake us.
He could say I am alone.
As a Pelican or as a Sparrow upon the house call.
As a Pelican in the wilderness, he recognized to be in a place alone.
That no others entered into where he was and what he was feeling.
He was intensely alone.
In his life, in many aspects of it, even those that loved him and that he loved could only go so far with him.
And then, as it were, like it was in the garden, there were all 12 of them at first.
And then he goes a little farther, and then there are three, and then he goes farther, and he's alone.
With God.
He understood it and the difficulty of it, and he makes this promise.
I will never.
Leave you.
I will never forsake you.
If he had not become a man.
And had not experienced what we recognized as recorded for us in the Word of God.
We might be tempted to say, Lord, you don't really understand what I'm going through.
And sometimes we can't help another person in a situation because we've not experienced it.
A little amusing, but I think it makes the point. Best way I know to make the point.
There's no father in this room.
That is ever said to his wife when she was.
Delivering a baby Honey, I know just how you feel.
And there's not a father to be in this room that's going to say it either.
Because the father has never experienced.
What the wife is going through and consequently other sisters OR others who've had children can say that and may say that and be a help and be a comfort in the pain and the.
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What is going through in the person?
But one of the things that we want to appreciate about the Lord Jesus becoming a man.
Is that he went through the experiences of life.
That he might be able to say to us in time of need. I know just how you feel.
I know just how you feel and I will not leave you.
I will not forsake you.
You know, there's something very comforting in that because in the Old Testament sense of it.
It wouldn't have been said that way.
Because sometimes when the people failed.
God didn't.
Take care of it. He allowed it to happen and the consequences of it without giving them the comfort of his presence.
They're going to experience some of that and learn the other side during the tribulation. Some of the two tribes during the tribulation, we'll we'll go through experiences that they'll be totally bewildered and not know what's going on and why it's going on and why Jehovah is not coming in.
But the Lord, in our relationship with him, it's pure sovereign grace of God that God is free to work with us differently now. He's been liberated in his freedom of grace through the work of His Son, so that he can work with us in the purity of grace that will stay with us even when we have failed.
And this promise is unconditional.
That doesn't say I'll be with you unless you mess up and sin and get away from me. We won't enjoy his presence if we're out of fellowship with him, but the promise that He's there with us is good.
I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.
Particularly would like to leave that sentence.
If I could burn it on your heart and mine, I would just remember it. It's a simple sentence, but it says a lot about knowing the heart of the Lord Jesus for you in a personal way.
The second statement and and that is simply a simple statement to.
That statement is.
The Lord.
Is my helper.
Next time something doesn't go right.
Pause and say thank you Lord.
That you're here with me to be my helper.
That's grace. That's a promise.
The Lord is not maybe not if.
Not conditional.
But it's a statement of fact. The Lord is my helper.
May the Lord help each one of us to enter into it individually.
I can say to you, the Lord is your helper, but that's not the benefit to your own heart this afternoon unless you make it. Enjoy it personally.
My helper.
We the first hymn of this these days of meeting and the first prayer had to do with doubt.
The question of doubt.
And why?
It's a good thing when there's doubt and why that produces fear very often to notice what's said right here. The Lord is my helper.
I shall not fear.
Make a little personal application of it because it's been a lasting joy.
To my own soul in these things.
Many of us and very shortly are going to get on the road.
And.
Some tomorrow be on the road.
I want to recount a personal experience that helped me.
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To get the words the Lord is my helper, more practically into my own soul.
Some years ago, a brother, Seth Palmer, who lives out in the state of Washington now and I determined to go, felt the Lord's mind to take a BTP display to an Aberdeen conference. And it was.
2567 hours of travel and we were going to.
Made the arrangement that I'd do a tank of gas and then he would and we wouldn't stop. We would just go both ways that way.
A little younger and a little easier. So we did.
We had a nice, happy conference in Aberdeen and we started home.
On the Lord's afternoon, like this afternoon, and we got several hours out of Aberdeen.
It's been out that way. It can be pretty hilly. We were going on an uphill slope in the middle of nowhere. It was probably 5 miles from the bottom into the top. We're halfway up the slope.
The BTP van sprinter van just quit.
We pulled off to the glided off to the side of the shoulder of the drop off.
There we were, middle of nowhere.
I don't know, 50 miles from on large, the afternoon from.
I don't even know how many miles we were from any quote. Help?
I can assure you the first words out of my thoughts were not the Lord is my helper. They were. What do we do now?
What do we do now?
We did thankfully turn to the Lord immediately and say Lord, we're in, we've got a problem and we have no idea what to do about it. Neither Seth nor I, we knew where the engine was and that was about it. We also, that was their extent of our knowledge.
We sat and we.
Set.
The Lord knew.
Maybe 30 minutes later, a vehicle pulled off behind us.
And up to the window came Arthur Buchanan and Wally Classo.
There probably wasn't a person at the conference at Aberdeen that new vehicles better than Wally Clausen.
That was his work and this was a diesel.
And so on. So we told them.
And.
Off comes the engine hood and in relatively no tools.
We didn't have any tools, they didn't have any really tools and so on, but with minimal amounts of anything.
Wally in a very short order said here's your problem, I've disconnected this and that and you drive back without it and when you get back get it fixed and then they'll re hook it up and you'll be good and that's what happened.
A practical but real.
Reinforcement. I hope to you to be able to say for yourself, the Lord is my helper.