Psalm 34: 8 Taste and see that the Lord is good
Taste is applied in two ways:
- We taste God
- We are the flavor that others can know God.
Taste is is an acquired taste. We learn to love the taste but first we have to get through the fact that our sin has separated us from God.
Romans 11: 22 Behold the goodness and severity of the Lord. Good if you continue to trust in His goodness
Isaiah 9: 6 His name shall be called Wonderful…Mighty… Father
Can God be both powerful and Good? Mighty and a Father? Many claim that he cannot be good and powerful because calamity continues to happen to us and we are left wondering where God was in the midst of the problem.
Let’s look at three questions about our Good Father who is Good and Mighty
1. Is our Mighty Father able to meet your need?
Israel was in the dessert for 40 years with no shopping malls or grocery stores. They were between 2 and 3 million people yet what was their situation like?
Deuteronomy 2: 7 “You lacked nothing”
Nehemiah 9: 21, 25 “Your clothes never wore out.”
Question “Does your father have everything you need?”
2. Does your father know what’s going on?
Psalm 139: 1 – 5 God knows when you stand and sit
Psalm 103: 13 God responds to the cry of a child
Psalm 34: 17 Hears our call for help.
Psalm 139: 17, 18 Thoughts toward you outnumber the sands of the sea
Thoughts = precious valuable, appraised.
Does God know what is going on in your life?
3. Does God care what is going on in your life?
We can end up accusing our Father of child neglect.
EXAMPLE: Elijah at Mount Carmel. He mocked the prophets of Baal for crying out to their god and not getting an answer. Yet we accuse our God of the same thing.
Don’t understand everything that happens when problems come, but there are some truths that we can build our lives upon.
Psalm 86: 5, 7 Day of trouble call and I will answer you.
Win the battle of the lies that come into our minds.
- God is mad at me. (Remember His thoughts toward you are precious)
- Sin in my life is keeping me from God. (Judges 3: 7, 9 Israel had a pattern of deserting God and then God answering them and delivering them.
- Satan is powerful and stopping God. (Colossians 2: 15 The cross disarmed satan and made public spectacle of him)
- God does what He wants (Then why pray?)
- God says we can come boldly before the throne of grace in time of need. (Hebrews 4: 16)
- Collects prayers in bowls (Why collect them if they are not important to God)
We need to establish these thoughts in our minds so faith can fill in the blanks.
James 1: 3, 4 Faith is being refined and it is more precious that Gold.
WE can’t try and measure what is a success Roma Black story
Deuteronomy 10, 11 Moses stated that we have to know that God is faithful because we need to teach our children to know God.