Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to the Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus to everyday life. Hey, Paul, how's it going?

Paul Tripp [00:00:13]: Good. I'm excited by what we're doing. I've loved these times we've had together so far. I love the new format of twenty minutes. I love that we can focus in on one thing and unpack it; and I've really been both convicted and helped and encouraged by our conversation of The Beatitudes.

[00:00:33]: And we really want these podcasts this season to give people courage and hope and encouragement as they live in this broken world and face the hardships of life in this broken world. I just want to say your address is not a mistake.

[00:00:51]: God has chosen between the "already" of your conversion and "not yet" of your home-going that you would live in this broken world. That's for your good and His glory, but it's hard and so, we're looking at The Sermon on the Mount for direction and encouragement; and we think of this as a map and guardrails. So we're at the last one of these. It's not really a beatitude at this point. It's a promise. Would you read verse 12?

Shelby [00:01:24]: Yes, Matthew 5:12.

¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Paul [00:01:39]: You know, one of the things that I think is really hard for us (you see it in your children; if you're able to be humbly honest, you see it in yourself), it's we don't do well with delayed gratification.

Shelby [00:02:07]: Yes, especially in our culture right now.

Paul [00:02:09]: You know, you take your children on a road trip and it's going to be 500 or 600 miles. Two miles down the road, someone will say, "Are we almost there yet?" We find waiting to be difficult and it's important to say that one of the principal things that God calls us to do is wait. His work in us and through us, His great redemptive work isn't quick. Change is a process and not an event.

[00:02:59]: Waiting on the Lord is not like sitting in the dentist's office, where you're 45 minutes beyond when your appointment should be, and you've scrolled till your eyes are bloodshot and you're tired of doing that; and you pick up the magazine in the dentist's office now and it's Family Circle magazine, and you're a man and you're reading recipes that you've never read before, and you're about to go out of your mind because you're just thinking, "This is meaningless."

[00:03:39]: Waiting on the Lord is never meaningless. This promise of a reward to come is a call to be willing to wait and I want to say something that I think that people don't often think about. Waiting on the Lord is not just about what you get at the end of the wait.

Shelby [00:04:06]: Yes, that's good.

Paul [00:04:07]: Waiting on the Lord is what you become as you wait. When you begin to embrace that everything the Lord has called you to is worth it and it's worth waiting for, it changes you; and I want to become that person.

[00:04:31]: I want to become that person who has such a robust trust of God, such a total rest in His sovereignty, such a deep belief in His wisdom, such an awareness of His presence that I'm willing to wait.

Shelby [00:04:51]: Yes, it creates depth and character and integrity in you in that process, and that's often something we just can't stand doing. We want everything to happen magically. We want God to zap us with whatever our desire is or character that we want, but it doesn't ever happen that way.

Paul [00:05:11]: Yes, it makes me want to ask the question: What right now in your life is so valuable you'd be willing to wait for it? Because this is what this passage is about: that I get my destiny; I get that I'm not just bumping around this world and, occasionally, grace meets me.

[00:05:44]: It's that this whole thing is secure, and that means that before the foundations of the world, I was... my name, your name was written in the book of life, that God has written us into a story all the way through, and that Jesus took my name to the cross. He conquered death on my behalf. He ascended to reign on our behalf, and the destiny that's promised is already secured. Done deal.

[00:06:23]: I wait because I believe that. What is hope in the Lord? Oh man, we got to talk about this, Shelby. Hope in the Lord is not some dreamy wish that something good will happen, like you hop in the car with your family and say, "Hope there won't be a lot of traffic," or "I hope Disney World will not be crowded."

Shelby [00:06:50]: "I hope the ice cream truck comes around the corner."

Paul [00:06:52]: Yes, or, "Hope they haven't taken that thing off the menu," or "I hope the Phillies win." It's not like that at all. I want to define the hope that is being encouraged in the end of The Beatitudes. Hope in the Lord is a confident expectation of a guaranteed result. That's what it is.

Shelby [00:07:18]: That's a total reframing of it, so...

Paul [00:07:20]: It's a confident expectation. Why can I be confident? Because God is the source of my hope.

Shelby [00:07:26]: Yes, that's good.

Paul [00:07:28]: The One who rules everything, who is completely perfect in every way all the time, who has shed, poured out His love on me in the person of His Son, Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb, who now lives inside of me by His Spirit, I have reason to be confident.

[00:07:56]: Nothing has happened or will happen outside of the counsel of His will. It's a confident expectation. Your life is fueled by expectations. Some of those are silly and end up biting you. Some of those are reasonable.

[00:08:23]: A confident expectation in a guaranteed result. The reason I can live with reward in view is because I know my destiny is not being negotiated. It's sealed. What an incredible way of living! I mean, I want to say again, do we actually live this way?

Shelby [00:08:53]: Yes, a person who lives that way is a person of peace, as opposed to a person of anxiety, constant anxiety about wondering what might happen.

Paul [00:09:02]: I also don't require constant and temporary rewards all the time.

Shelby [00:09:13]: You're more content with life.

Paul [00:09:15]: And let's talk about that because that's very tempting, and the Bible does address that. It talks about the pleasures of sin for a season. Well, there's a couple things that come out of that passage.

[00:09:32]: First, sin is pleasurable. It's pleasurable to get what you want. Sexual gratification is pleasurable. Overeating is pleasurable at the time. It may not be later.

Shelby [00:09:49]: Passing gossip along is pleasurable.

Paul [00:09:51]: Yes, having feelings of control is pleasurable. Idols give you temporary pleasure, but it's sin, which is debilitating and destructive and leads to death; and it's only ever for a season.

[00:10:14]: What God is promising us is eternal, unending, inexhaustible reward. I mean, I can't even put that in my brain, but that's what God is promising, and so, we don't suffer well because we don't have true biblical hope: confident expectation in a guaranteed result.

[00:10:47]: But because we've set our hearts on minor, little, temporary seasonal rewards and so, feeling comfortable in my body or being able to see my finances are going to work, although all those things that grip us, that rob us of our joy and our hope, that command our focus, they also rob us from the rest and peace of knowing that my life is in good hands.

Shelby [00:11:25]: Yes, it reminds me a little bit of the chasing after the wind, the whole concept of running after things that will never satisfy us, as opposed to going to God, who actually will be the source of true satisfaction. And chasing after the wind, I think, is a common phrase that a lot of Christians understand.

[00:11:45]: But if you think about someone in a field, running after the wind and trying to grab it and capture it, the ridiculousness of that starts to sink in and help you to understand that so much of my life, in many ways, is chasing after the wind. You put it as like trying to get something, and the sand just goes through your fingers. It's temporary. It's not going to last.

Paul [00:12:04]: Yes, and it's so tempting to do that. It's so tempting to live for the moment. I have this phrase that's a bit humiliating to say, but when something goes wrong, I say, "This drives me nuts. This makes me so crazy."

[00:12:27]: Now I'm catastrophizing. It's not actually going to drive me crazy. That's probably crazy before, but I'm making a big deal out of something that's not a big deal. Maybe it's that I shut the door on my finger, or you know how you get a bag of nuts or something and you cut off the top, and it has this thing that's supposed to seal it, and they don't seal right? And you're going across this with your finger and you think the stupid thing won't seal. I mean, there it is. The whole light is shrunk down to this little, little moment with this bag of nuts and I'm losing it.

Shelby [00:13:10]: You're going nuts over the nuts.

Paul [00:13:13]: Yes, it's just so incredibly insane. Rather than we are offered this life of sanity, it's a confident expectation of a guaranteed result. We know God is in control. We know He loves us. We know His promises are true. We know His word is true. We know the story is marching and nothing can stop it, and everything will be okay.

[00:13:46]: My brother, Tedd, gave me a great example of that. My father was very biblically knowledgeable, was an elder in the churches we were members of, but lived a horrendous double life and died seemingly unrepentant, and I was really struggling with "where's my dad now".

Shelby [00:14:20]: Of course.

Paul [00:14:21]: And my brother, Tedd, said to me, "You don't need to have that struggle. He is in the hands, right now, of the wisest, most perfect, most loving, most holy Judge ever and that person, your Lord, will do what's right." And I wept.

Shelby [00:14:41]: Yes, what a fantastic reminder, yes.

Paul [00:14:45]: I just cried and it wasn't tears of loss at that moment. It was tears of release of joy that I actually could be confident in my Lord, that whatever was right with my dad, he would do. He would never do anything evil, never do anything wrong, that my dad's destiny wasn't up to my dad. It surely wasn't up to me. It was up to my Lord.

[00:15:14]: What a great way to live! That was me experiencing reward and peace in one of the hardest moments of my life. My dad had lived with us for three years. It was very, very hard at the end.

[00:15:29]: He died suddenly. He fell and then immediately went in and out of a coma, and I'd be in the hospital and the last person he saw was me. And he'd scream my name and he'd scream, "Oh, God, no! Oh, God, no! Oh, God, no!"

[00:15:45]: He's afraid to meet God. Very, very hard to go through and Tedd invited me into the peace of this reward, where one of the hardest moments of my life, all of a sudden, I was flooded with peace because I was viewing it from the standpoint of the security of destiny that's in the hands of the best Person ever.

Shelby [00:16:18]: Yes, and what an important, helpful reminder for us. Maybe we're not going through experiencing the difficulty of seeing a parent die and wondering about their spiritual condition, but there's a myriad of other things that we wrestle with all the time, just to be confident in the fact that your life is in the hands of a just, fair, loving, caring, tender, kind God. That's something that is a daily, hourly reminder that we all need, all of us.

Paul [00:16:48]: There's one more thing I want to say about this that I think is the ticket. If Jesus is saying, with this guaranteed reward, that your destiny is secure, it means everything going up to your destiny is secure, too, because if this moment isn't secure and the moment after isn't secure and the moment after it isn't secure and the moment after it isn't secure, on down through history, then the destiny isn't secure.

Shelby [00:17:18]: Yes, absolute chaos.

Paul [00:17:20]: It is the security of eternity that secures today. It's the reward of eternity that's the reward for today. Your life is secure. If reward is secure, your life is secure.

Shelby [00:17:38]: Yes. Now, how do we factor in the difficulties that we go through, the trials that we go through? How does that weave its way into that?

Paul [00:17:50]: There's a difference between security and comfort. Difference in security and pleasure. A secure life doesn't mean your life won't be, at moments, hard. Jesus is saying you're going to face hardship here and I think we get the two confused.

[00:18:10]: It's like when you go through hardship with one of your children, you have to say no to them and they don't understand why you're saying no to them, and that means they can't enjoy something.

[00:18:22]: It would be wrong for them to feel at that point that they're not being loved. They are being loved. That hardship is a function of that love. The Bible, all the way through, talks to us about how that the things that we don't want to face are the very things that God uses to do good things in us and through us.

[00:18:55]: You see, if you think that any seemingly unanswered prayer or any hardship you face is God abandoning you, abandoned His promises, turning His back, walking away, you'll never have a secure life.

[00:19:12]: But if you understand that destiny is secure because God is perfectly in control all the time, then today is secure, too, and I can get up, even though it's hard that my neighbors hate me because of my faith.

[00:19:31]: It's hard that I'm misunderstood. It's hard that I lost my job. I can get up and say my life is secure and I'm not going to turn my back on my Redeemer. He's for me and in me and with me, and He's dragging me along toward reward.

Shelby [00:19:46]: That's right. Keep your eyes on the prize.