BACKGROUND:
This salvation, now so clear to those who believe, had been a mystery to the Old Testament prophets who wrote about it through the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ, but wanted to know more about it. The prophets were amazed by the prophecies God gave them. They had many questions, and they wondered what was meant by Christ’s suffering. Peter was saying, “How can you be discouraged? Don’t you realize that you have seen the fulfillment of all the prophets’ yearning?” Jesus once said to his listeners, “Many prophets and godly people have longed to see and hear what you have seen and heard, but they could not” (Matthew 13:17).
The believers of Peter’s day (as well as believers today) had the privilege of understanding the prophets’ writings better than the prophets themselves had understood them. All of those prophets’ predictions regarding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ had been completely fulfilled. Other prophecies concerning the end times are being or are yet to be fulfilled.
The Spirit revealed to the prophets that the prophecies would not happen during their lifetime. The prophets had the great honor of having Christ’s Spirit speak through them, but the privileges of our understanding are even greater and should move us to an even deeper commitment to Christ.
All the experiences regarding the coming salvation that the prophets had so wanted to see and hear have now been announced by those who preached the Good News. As the Spirit inspired the prophets, so he inspired the apostles and missionaries in the first century. This is all so wonderful that even the angels are watching these events unfold. Angels are spiritual beings created by God who help carry out his work on earth. Just as the prophets could not understand or experience the coming salvation and grace because it would occur after their lifetimes, neither can the angels understand or experience it because they are spiritual beings who do not need the blood of Christ to save them.
SO WHAT? (what will I do with what i have read today?)
What kind of people is God looking for so He can use?
#2. GOD IS LOOKING FOR SURRENDERED PEOPLE.
Richard Baxter said “A surrendered life in the hands of a holy God is a fearful thing.” God is looking for surrendered or submissive people. The Bible word for “surrender” when we surrender our total selves to God is the word is the word “broken” or “brokenness”. God uses broken things, broken vessels because that represents something totally surrendered to God. It was a divine principle.
When Jesus fed the 5000 it says He took the bread, He broke it, He blessed it and then He used it. That is a divine principle that we see all through scripture. God takes us, He breaks us, He blesses us and then He uses us. So the principle of brokenness is the principle of total surrender to God, where we say, “God, whatever You want, that’s what I want to do with my life. Whatever you want me to do.” In Psalm 51:17 David says, ”It is a broken spirit You want, remorse and repentance. A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not ignore.” Jeremiah 4:3 says, “Plow up the hardness of your heart otherwise the good seed will be wasted among the thorns.” God uses broken things.
The story of Gideon in the Old Testament, God said, “I want 300 of you to go out against 450,000 enemies,” – not very good odds. He said, “Surround the camp and take three items for warfare – a trumpet, a lit torch, and a clay pot to go over the torch to hide the fire.” They went out and surrounded the camp at night. When God said Go! they blew the trumpets, they broke the pots, the light shown out and caused mass confusion among the enemy. They began killing off themselves and God gave a tremendous victory to Gideon and his band of 300.
What would have happened if the pots had not been broken? There would have been no victory. But when the pots were broken the light shown out. Then they got victory.
When our lives are broken before the Lord, the light is able to shine out in our lives. Light, when it’s broken, fractured, makes a many-colored rainbow. That’s what happens in our lives. Our lives take on new meaning and new color and new vitality when we are fully surrendered to God.
Jesus is the supreme example of this. Luke 22:42 says, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from Me. But not My will but Your’s be done.” When Jesus looked at the cup, He’s in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the New Testament, “cup” always represents suffering. The cup of suffering. When Jesus looked into that cup, He saw every sin ever committed – that I ever committed, will ever commit, every sin you’ve ever committed. He saw every income tax cheated on, every adultery, every dishonesty, every lie, every murder, every rape. He looks at that and realizes that He’s going to take the blame for all those things on His life. He looks into that cup of suffering and says, “Father, if it is possible take this cup away from Me. But nevertheless, not My will but Thine be done.” That’s surrender. That’s total submission.
I want to say to you that God cannot use you to your fullest extent until you come to your own personal Gethsemane. You come to the point in your life where you say, “Father, not my will, not my ambition, not my desire, but Thine be done.” When you do that, God will do all kinds of amazing things in your life. When we’re broken of our self-will and our self-dependency, David said “A broken and contrite heart, You God will not ignore.”
What do we need a broken heart for? We need a broken heart over what’s happening in the world. Bob Pierce, who founded World Vision, used to say, “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.” We need to be broken over a lost and dying world.
This point of total surrender, this Gethsemane that I’m saying you need to come to, usually requires a crisis. You find Peter after his denial “Lord, I’ll never deny You!” and goes out and denies Christ three times before the rooster crows that morning. You find David after he has committed adultery with Bathsheba, a broken man, falling flat on his face before the Lord.
You see Samson after he’d finally given into the temptation, his hair is cut off, he’s a broken man strung between two pillars. Yet Samson’s greatest victory came after his brokenness. You wrestle with God the way Jacob did. The Bible says that Jacob wrestled with an angel all night and the Lord touched his hip, his thigh, and weakened it. And it says that for the rest of his life, Jacob walked with a limp after that. Why? In the first place, your thigh muscle is the strongest muscle in your body, the biggest and the strongest. God touched Jacob at his point of strength and made him weak there, so that the rest of his life he would walk with a limp. When you’ve gone through Gethsemane you’ll never walk the same again after that. You just aren’t the same.
God is looking for surrendered people. Will you be one of those people? I love you guys. Stay faithful. Stay the course.
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