What Hinders Faith Part 2

Pastor Mike will be speaking on What Hinders Faith Part 2. He will be in John 11:14-23.

You keep calling out to Him. You keep trusting Him. You keep believing Him. God will work all things together for your good and for His glory. He will bring it to pass in a way that brings honor and glory to Him.

I’m so glad that you could be with us today as we continue to study the Bible about what hinders faith. And in John chapter 11 verse 14 through 23 we are seeing the resurrection of Lazarus and we are watching the life of Mary and Martha as they respond to this crushing blow to their hearts with the death of their brother and Jesus stepping into their lives and showing them the power of the resurrection.

I’m looking forward to this study. Let’s get our Bibles out and let’s study John chapter 11 together. The limitations of what we believe and understand about who God is and what He can do hinders our faith.

And that is why you and I must be students of the Bible, students of the Word because this is where Christ has revealed Himself and as He has revealed Himself in the pages of the Word of God we understand who He is and we align our beliefs, our thoughts, our behavior and yes our faith according to the Word of God not by what others say.

You may have great respect for other religious teachers and I commend you for that but I tell you there is no greater teacher than the Word of God and the Holy Spirit that lives inside of every believer.

Why did Jesus raise the dead? Why did Jesus cast out demons? Why did Jesus heal the soul? sick I’ll tell you why to validate the claim that he is God to validate the claim that he is God there was no one like Jesus there were many charlatans even in the days of our Lord and Savior as he walked on this earth who claimed to be the coming Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament but there was only one Jesus himself who fulfilled all those prophecies of his coming who when he walked on this earth he did amazing things and spoke with authority and performed miracles that were beyond what any charlatan ever did charlatans like to selectively heal people have you ever noticed that the Bible says in the gospel of Matthew that when Jesus came to the town he healed everyone that came to him everyone.

Jesus was not trying to take advantage of the people. He was validating that He’s truly God. The second reason that Jesus performed miracles is to demonstrate His authority. Mankind lives in fear of disease.

You are, as an individual, like every other individual working hard to try to figure out how you can prevent this problem in your life and that problem in your life and you run to the doctors and you run to the dentist and I’m right there with you and we do different things.

We take vitamins and we take all these bills and we do all this running and we do all these things in our life because we don’t want to get sick and we don’t want to die because we have a fear of it.

But Jesus says I have authority over it. Jesus says I have authority over disease and demons and death and therefore I’m in charge. If you believe in me, Jesus says you never die. You’re gonna live. He’s speaking obviously spiritually because I already told you our bodies are gonna die.

They’re gonna die and so our bodies die but we can live spiritually by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Why did Jesus perform miracles to foreshadow His own resurrection and to foreshadow our resurrection?

He performed miracles that in this resurrection they would see that why would you not believe when Jesus would tell His disciples that I am going to die on a cross and I’m gonna be buried and three days later I am rising again.

Why would you not believe that? He raised a man for you. from the grave. He interrupted a funeral procession of a little girl and raised her from death. Why would this be shocking? But yet the disciples never really digested it.

Jesus performed miracles to remind us of the life that is to come. For all who believe in Jesus, there is coming a day that death will be no more. And God’s people say amen. But I’m just saying that Jesus wants us to know there’s coming a day when there is no death.

We’ll talk more about that, but I know that should certainly cause our hearts to give praise. My theology can hinder my faith. If I remember the story of Ted Turner. Ted Turner started CNN, the news network.

Ted Turner was addressing religious and spiritual leaders from around the world at the Millennial World Peace Summit at the United Nations. And Ted Turner said this, and I quote, we are all one race and there is only one God who manifests himself in different ways.

He continued to say basically the major religions which have survived today don’t have blood sacrifice and they don’t have hatred behind them. Those which have done the best are the ones that are built on love.

God had to love us, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have made us if he had hated us, end of quote. I would say to Ted Turner that I do believe God loves us, amen? But because of his great love, he sent his son to this earth, born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, qualified to die for my sins, went to the cross and he bore my sins on the cross.

And yes, he did literally die. And yes, he literally shed his blood for me and he gave his life for me so that I could have eternal life. But I tell you Ted Turner’s theology is getting in the way of faith in Christ.

And Christians, be careful that your theology is not getting in the way of your own faith. That what you believe is not the lies that you hear from the world or the myth that circulate among evangelical Christianity but rather that you believe what is true in the Bible and what Jesus has taught us.

You say, well, I can’t always understand it, Mike and I can’t always explain it. Friends, listen to me. We can’t always understand all that God has revealed about himself and we can’t always explain it, but that doesn’t deny it.

I cannot explain that I can hear the wind this morning moving our steeple which is secure by the way. It’s not going anywhere. I can hear the effects, but I cannot see the wind, but I do not deny it.

And I tell you that God is real and that Jesus Christ is real, and I tell you you may not fully understand and be able to explain all the dynamics of all that is going on. But I tell you that by faith God opens our minds and our hearts as we trust Him as our Lord and Savior.

Let me tell you what else hinders our faith, grief. Grief can hinder our faith. We are watching this family grieve as we come to John chapter 11. We see a family that is full of sorrow in verse 31. There is a whole.

a slew of people who are at the house who are trying to comfort the family. And they even follow Mary as she goes out. We see that in verse 20, we see that people grieve differently. Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him.

But Mary sat still in the house. There are those that when they grieve, they want to talk. They want to express their feelings. They want to share what they’re experiencing, but there are those also who grieve, who want to be silent, who do not want to talk.

And there’s nothing wrong with either one. We all grieve differently. And that is affected by our personalities, our experiences, the emotions that we have. However, we choose to grieve in relation to how God has designed us is not wrong.

And there’s never a right way to grieve and a wrong way to grieve when it comes to our emotions and our thoughts and our spirit within us. There is no wrong way. But I do want you to know that the grief had so come upon the people.

And Mary and Martha, that they had really lost hope. They had lost hope. Because we know that what happens when we grieve, look at verse 22 again. I know that even now, whatsoever that will ask of God, God will give it to thee.

Verse 21, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. What do we do when we grieve? We say, what if, don’t we? What if I’d have done this? What if I had not done that? What if this would have happened or that?

That would have happened. We go through this process of grieving and we, in our mind, begin to speculate. We begin to think about different scenarios that could have happened to prevent this. But here we are.

Here we are. The grief was leading God’s people to think about somehow that if they’d have just done that or if they’d had just been there in time or if they’d had just changed this, that it would have been better.

But friends, friends, I want you to know this. You’ll never be able to answer the question why. And that God is in charge of this world, but within the scope of His sovereignty, He allows things that happen and He allows man to make choices.

And sometimes the choices we make because we are flawed, because we are sinful, because we are selfish, they have ramifications. But here we are. And it’s never healthy to speculate. It’s never healthy to think, if I’d have just done that or I’ve done this, that somehow it would have been different.

God is in charge, not us. God is in control, not us. And even though it is hard in our grief to accept that and believe that, we must step towards that. By faith, we step towards that, that God has brought us here.

And God has a purpose, God has a plan. I want you to look at verse 33 of chapter 11, because I think this is important as you see that Jesus sees the sorrow, He sees the hopelessness. And the Bible says that when Jesus therefore saw her weeping and the Jews also weeping, which came with her, He groaned in the spirit and He was troubled.

We jump down to verse 35, the Bible says, Jesus wept. So let me just talk about verse 33, the word groaned has the idea of emotional indignation. Jesus was really upset and He is not upset at the people for their grief.

He is not upset at the people because of their expression of grief and how they expressed it. But He is upset because they do not understand. understand and they do not have hope in the resurrection that they are grieving as those who have no hope they are grieving as they were like the world they are grieving as those who are limited in their understanding of what the Bible teaches about the resurrection they are grieving with despair like there is no future and this is what disturbs and troubles the spirit of Jesus and then the Bible says that he wept it’s a different kind of weeping it’s not the bursting out of tears in the sense of loud anguish but it is that Jesus is silently grieving and weeping is the idea of the Word He is lamenting in his heart.

He is lamenting because of the sorrow he sees in the family, the sorrow that he sees in the lives of the people who are entangled in this sorrow. He is upset at death. He is upset and broken that death has put its grip around this family and they can’t see their way out of it.

That is what Jesus is upset about. And he is a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief. And I want to remind you that there is a savior who walks with us in our grief and that he is a man of tears.

Hebrews 5, 7 reminds us that in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and he was heard because of his reverence.

Jesus is moved by the tragedy of seeing God’s people suffer and God’s people grieve. And in your grief, I do not want you to let the darkness of the world and the trap of Satan who would like to use death to hinder your faith.

I do not want you to fall into that trap but to go running back to God’s word and his promises and his truths and his reminder. As he said back in verse 25, go back there. I am the resurrection and life.

And he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall… never die, believest thou this.” The difference between the grief of the world and the grief of a believer in Jesus Christ is simply this, that we have a living hope and we know that death is not final.

God is not saying that you could not cry. And I recommend you to cry. He is a man of tears. He is a man who is moved by the hurt and the pain and the sorrow of others. Jesus was not stoic. He did not suppress his feelings but rather expressed his feelings in prayer to God and expressed them even in public before others and therefore there is nothing wrong and shameful about expressing your emotions before others and God himself.

But, as you express those emotions, do it with a living hope in your heart. Express your emotions with a clear understanding that the bookends of our theology says that this is not final, this is not the end, and that we are going to be reunited with our loved ones, and this is only a temporary separation, and one day, all of God’s people, the dead in Christ shall rise first, and we which remain shall be caught up together.

Can God’s people say amen? Grief can hinder your faith. Do not sorrow as the world, church, but continue to have faith in a God who is in charge. And as I walk through many who go through grief in their life and sorrows, I remind them that our loved one who has left this world is more alive today than they’ve ever been.

And I don’t want you to think of them in those terms of the grave and the tomb. I want you to think of them in terms of standing before an almighty God, beholding our God, worshiping our God, loving our God, and fellowshiping with God and others who have gone on before.

What hinders our faith? I use the word pragmatism. Pragmatism in the sense of this, that sometimes the practicality of how we see things hinders us from thinking outside the box and believing that our God can do the miraculous.

So we come to verse 39 through 41, and here is something amazing, that Jesus comes to the tomb, and he says to them, take he away the stone. And Martha’s response is simply this, this is not good. She says he stinks.

He’s been in there for four days. This is not practical, Jesus. This is not gonna work out. And in her mind, after Jesus already said, I am the resurrection, I am the life. After already saying to her, your brother is going to rise.

After helping to expand and understand in her theology about the resurrection, she still is struggling. because it doesn’t make sense in her mindset. And I want you to know this, that the Bible is more than a how -to manual.

It’s an important point for us to remember. So many people fail to understand that what we read in this Bible is to expand and help us to understand who God is. And we are finite beings. We are limited in our thoughts, and I get that.

But when we come to the word of God, we need to see a God who is an amazing God, who is a holy God, who is a wonderful God, and is a God who can raise the dead. And you say, well, that doesn’t make sense, Mike.

Your pragmatism is hindering your faith. Your pragmatism is hindering your faith. The Christian life is not always wrapped up in a nice package, and sometimes life gets messy, and sometimes we have to, hear me, sometimes we have to bear the stench of suffering before we can experience the joy of the resurrection.

Don’t you limit God in your suffering. Don’t you put God in a box in your suffering. You keep calling out to Him. You keep trusting Him. You keep believing Him. And when rolling away the stone does not make sense, and when rolling away the stone, when God calls you to roll it away, means that somehow you are struggling with it, and it may be more difficult, and you may think, this isn’t gonna work out.

I’m telling you that God will work all things together for your good and for His glory. He will bring it to pass in a way that brings honor and glory to Him. So, what it means is this, is that I have to be willing to roll that stone away, because that’s what Jesus said.

He said in verse 39, take it away. Moving that stone was a step of faith and there are stones in our life. False beliefs, if we already talked about. Fears that we need to roll away. There are stones in our life that are limiting us from truly believing and having faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and stepping out and trusting him to do the amazing in our life.

It isn’t always easy to believe, but I say to you church, roll the stone away. Roll the stone away by his grace. Roll the stone away by his strength in your life. Now, I want you to jump down to verse 43 and I won’t keep you much longer because I know you’re anxious, but I just have to give you these final thoughts.

Jesus said. And when he had thus spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. Lazarus, come forth. It was a preview of his power. It was a preview of what is to come for all who love Christ.

This life is a prelude to the life that is to come. For those who trust in Jesus, you will be rewarded for your sufferings. You will be rewarded for all that you go through for Christ. And remember, as Paul said, if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

The hope that I have is that I have a Savior who has conquered death, a Savior who is stronger than death, a Savior who has authority over death. And the resurrection, the doctrine of the resurrection of not only Christ and his people is the focal point of every Christian truth.

It is the foundation of every Christian truth. And if Jesus had not risen again, and if Jesus did not have authority over death, then everything that he said means nothing. But Jesus did rise, and he did raise the dead.

And therefore we are reminded by the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 14, knowing that which he which raised up the Lord, Jesus, shall raise up us also by Jesus and shall present us with you. How powerful is that verse?

And if I’ve said it to you once, church, I have said it to you a thousand times, and I’ll say it to you again, his resurrection is our resurrection. And not only is his resurrection, It is resurrection, our resurrection.

It is the resurrection of everyone who believes in Jesus. All of your family and friends that have trusted in Christ, they will rise again, church. And they will live forever more with you. And we will be together forever more.

And those who belong to Jesus will be raised to new life. And they will rejoice forever more. But look, look at verse 45. After teaching the resurrection, after displaying his authority over death, look at the response to Jesus.

Then many of the Jews which came to Mary and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him. But look at verse 46. But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees and told them what they wanted to do.

of things Jesus had done, meaning that they were skeptical. They were trying to incite. They were trying to cause problems for Christ. Here is what’s before you, the resurrection of Christ, the evidence is overwhelming, the resurrection, the authority of our savior over death.

It’s all before you. Will you fall into the group that believes in Christ? Or will you be the one that runs to the religious world and mocks Christ and denies Christ and does everything you can to try to refute Christ and His authority and His power?

I invite you to come to us, living savior, who has authority over death. Don’t let your theology hinder your faith this morning. Don’t let your grief hinder your faith. Don’t let your pragmatism hinder your faith.

Invite you to trust. The Bible is very clear. Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved this morning, right where you’re sitting. You are invited to trust Christ. As your savior. And all you have to do is simply acknowledge that you are a sinner and He is a savior.

The Bible is more than a how -to manual. It is important for us to understand that the Bible is a source of our strength and our comfort. It’s a reminder of how important our faith is. And story after story helps us to see the power of faith and the power of the resurrection.

And today, as we come to this amazing story of the resurrection of Lazarus, you and I are reminded of that. the things that might hinder our faith but we’re thankful that we have a God who even when we struggle he understands our hearts and he continues to work in our lives.

You and I are blessed that we have a God who will not give up on us and he loves us to the end the Bible says. I’m encouraging you today that as you learn and grow and as you are walking through the challenges of life to turn to Christ and to trust Him completely and to fully rely upon Him.

Today if you’ve made a decision for Jesus, if you sense that He’s drawing you and you’re calling upon His name, I want you to go to our website and let us know of how God is working in your life. Go ahead and hit that contact button at hopeworthhaving .com and just share with us a little bit of God’s good work in your life.

Each and every one of these stories are a blessing to me as I read them. I hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity and let us know how God is at work. This is Pastor Mike Sanders reminding you that in Christ there is hope worth having.