Dr. Dean Taylor will speak at our Couples Conference next weekend. Today’s program features a message by Dr. Taylor called “Trusting God in Time of Struggle.”
Download this Message by Dean Taylor
Episode Transcript
Chris Harper: Welcome to Harvest Time. My name is Chris Harper, and our host on this program is Pastor Gary Walton, the lead pastor at Harvest Harvest Baptist Church. Every week, we spend these twenty five minutes together telling you the stories of our church, interviewing our members and other friends of the ministry. We’d like to invite you to join us at Harvest Baptist Church this week. We have two services on Sunday, 08:45AM and 10:45AM.
We have Japanese and Korean translation that’s available during the 10:45AM service, and that’s also when we livestream at hbcguam.org. Hbcguam.org. We’re back in our series, 10 foolish things people do to mess up their lives this week, becoming dissatisfied with God’s plan for my life this week from Exodus 20:17. Let’s begin today’s Harvest Time by welcoming Pastor Gary Walton. Hi, Pastor.
Gary Walton: Hey, hafa adai, Chris. It’s hard to believe that, but we have been studying in the book of Exodus, chapter 20, since this fall, and we’re actually coming up to the second to the last message in the series on the 10 Commandments, if you know about Exodus 20. And as you mentioned, Chris, we’re talking about we’re calling this 10 Foolish Things People Do to Mess Up Their Lives. And so this is the tenth commandment, Thou shalt not covet, and we’re describing it in that way, becoming dissatisfied with God’s plan for my life. And I think it’ll be a really helpful culmination of the series.
Actually, we’ll have one more message that will summarize all of them together after this Sunday, but we’d love to invite you to come and catch up with us. Actually, we’ve got, I think, kind of a special thing this Sunday. Our children’s ministry pastor and the children will be coming up during the service and helping us in some ways to kind of memorize the 10 Commandments. They’ve been working on that alongside us while we’re preaching through this series, and so that’ll be fun. They’re going to show us a good memorization way for reciting the 10 Commandments.
All this will be a good time. We’d love for you to come and fellowship with us and worship our God together. Hey, on Harvest Time today, we’ve got I think, special treat for you. Next weekend, next Saturday, January 27, we have a couples conference that’s going to be taking place sponsored by Harvest. It’s actually down at the Westin in Tumon.
But we have a special couple that’s coming, Pastor Dean Taylor and his wife Faith will be with us. They’re going to be leading and teaching in that couples conference. Chris will give you some more information about that conference at the end of our recording today. And then Pastor Taylor is going to preach for us on the Sunday after that. It’s just going be a great weekend together with them. Pastor Taylor has been a pastor for twenty five years. God blessed his ministry. He’s a very clear teacher of the Scriptures. He understands people. He’s a good communicator.
His wife Faith has been a faithful leader of women, really, all of her life, and, she speaks in many conferences. God’s gifted her as a teacher, as well. And so they’re going to be great leading, that couples conference. Over the last few years, Pastor Taylor has actually been part of, a Bible college leading, let me see if I get this right, he’s the dean, he’s the professor of pastoral studies and the chair of the ministries division at Faith Baptist Bible College in Ankeny, Iowa. And what we thought we’d do, to kinda get us prepared for that weekend and maybe encourage you to be part of it, we’d like to share one of the messages that he preached in chapel at Faith here recently.
The message is called Trusting God in Time of Trouble, and it’s a teaching from Psalm 22 preached recently at Faith Baptist Bible College. And so I’d encourage you to listen and hear from God’s word in this good, clear Bible teacher. And then if you’ll listen to the end, Chris will tell you again about how you can be part of the couples conference that will be next weekend. We’d love to invite you come along with that. So I’m happy to introduce to you pastor Taylor. I know that his message will be a blessing to you today.
Dean Taylor: Please find Psalm 22. Psalm 22 in your Bibles. So it’s prayer request time, and you’re asked, so what would you like us to pray for? And you raise your hand and you say, my goldfish died. I’m feeling a little sick myself, and my dad lost his job, my mother has cancer, my car’s broken down, my brother has walked away from God and I’m drowning academically.
In fact, I feel like God has deserted me. I think maybe I’ve been abandoned by God. And you might not say those last two statements, but sometimes in our hearts, we can feel that way. Everything is going wrong and as hard as we try and as much as we pray, circumstances aren’t changing, problems are not being solved, nobody’s swooping in to rescue us, and we just think, is God really listening to me when I pray, when I cry out for help? Maybe he’s forgotten about me or even just pulled back because of something I’ve done and maybe he has abandoned me.
And again, we might not say it or even think in those words, but deep inside of us, there may be that question, has God left me? Well, Psalm 22 is the cry of a desperate man who felt abandoned by God, and he was facing circumstances that were extremely difficult for him and and he was praying for some kind of deliverance or change in those circumstances and nothing was happening. So look with me at how he begins this song, and I want us to see his cry. When he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Do you hear his cry?
My God. Now we hear that used commonly as a profanity. People say, oh my God or my God to express surprise or shock or excitement or grief, but he was using it in a different way. Let’s recover the meaning of, oh my God, for just a minute. My means he was claiming God as his own, not that he owned God or had any control over God, but he was saying, God belongs to me in a very real sense.
He’s my God and he’s God. He’s the creator of everything, the creator of the universe, the one who spoke this world into existence, the one who is eternal, the one who made it all, the one who sustains it all, the one who is holy and righteous and just and the one who is loving and compassionate and merciful, God. Not just a god, not even just the god, but my god. He’s claiming a personal relationship with the God of the universe. But in doing so, he’s recognizing that there’s a difficulty there in his relationship with God.
Something is is strained and so now it becomes a cry. My God. My God. What do you say twice? A swimmer who’s going under says help. Help. If you’re the passenger in a car that’s on a collision course, what do you say? Stop. Stop. Or you hear shocking news of a tragedy and you say no. No. It’s a cry of passion and desperation, and this man is in an extremely difficult place. Do you ever cry out in desperation to God? For David, it was an extremely difficult situation facing an enemy.
For you, it may be a family crisis. It could be a financial crisis. It could be a spiritual crisis. It could be an academic crisis. Saying, God, please help me. He cried out because he had this crisis, but he was also feeling abandoned by God. Why have you forsaken me? Alright. Have any of you ever been accidentally forgotten and left somewhere when you were little by your parents. Okay. You know what I’m talking about. Right? Scary feeling. Scary feeling. That has happened in our family. I won’t name any names or tell who did it, but it’s happened.
And it’s like your parents are busy and they’ve got, you know, other kids and going somewhere and all of a sudden they look around in the in the seat and you’re not there. Oh, no. We forgot a kid. No. It’s okay. We got some more, you know. No. We better go back. Okay, we’ll go back, you know, and pick them up. So it’s just a scary thing for for the kid when when you realize it, but also for the parent.
You know, David is is saying not only has God forgotten me, but it seems like God has forsaken me. It’s something else entirely for a father to walk out on his family, for a parent to desert his or her children. That’s something more, isn’t it? And that’s the language David is using here. He’s not just saying you’ve forgotten about me. You’ve abandoned me. And again, that’s how it seems. That’s how it feels. That’s what was going through his mind. And you may feel this way at times even though you might not say it this way.
Everything happens at once, and your resources and your ability to cope and and seeing a path forward is just not happening, and you know you need some kind of outside help and deliverance, and it’s not coming. And you say, I’m it’s sink or swim. You know, something’s gonna happen here, and right now, it is not looking good. And it feels like God has abandoned you, has forgotten about you, or isn’t paying attention to you, or he sees your desperate condition. You know he knows he’s God, but he doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.
So he prayed. He prayed for God to rescue him. He calls it groaning in verse one. He calls it his cry in verse two. So he cried out passionately. He cried out persistently In the daytime, verse two, as well as in the night. Oh my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not hear, and in the night season, I’m not silent. You do not hear. I thought God answered prayer. I’m praying.
He’s not answering. I’m hoping that help is on the way, but right now, all I get is silence. Now here’s where some people might think, well, God has has abandoned me, so I give up on him. I mean, I’ve tried, I’ve prayed, and nothing’s happening, and I’m not being delivered, nothing’s changing, circumstances aren’t changing, people aren’t changing, and so I give up. And we just kinda kinda let it drop.
I’m not even gonna try. Or God has abandoned me, some might say, so I’m finished with him. Seems like he walked out on me, look at what he’s allowed to happen in my life, look at my family, look at my finances, look at my circumstances, look at my health or the health of people I love. I’ve had it with God. I’ve tried, I’ve prayed, nothing’s changing.
So I’ll just do what I want. Goodbye church, goodbye Christian life, I’m out. Or some people might just resign themselves. You may just resign yourself to to moaning and groaning and saying, oh, well, it’s bad and I’ll just bear it and kind of suffer for Jesus and put on kind of this pious air of of look at how bad I have it. What does this man do?
He doesn’t walk out, he doesn’t drop out, he doesn’t fight back. He goes from a cry now to a confession, and look at it with me in verse three. But you are holy, enthroned in the praises of Israel. What does he confess about God? He confesses that God is holy. God’s holiness is his separateness. He is set apart from us and from the world and really from everything that is not God. He is completely separate and set apart in that sense. There’s only one God. He is unique.
There’s no one and nothing like him. So David is saying, you are set apart, but holiness also means pure. He’s saying, you are pure. You’re undefiled. So I’d like to take that thought and put it into language that you and I can adopt as a confession in times of difficulty when we feel that God has abandoned or maybe even forgotten us.
I think he’s saying, you are holy, you are infinitely superior to me, and you are supreme over me. We might say you’re God and I’m not. You are infinitely superior to me and supreme over me. So, God, you can do anything you want, and you have a right to. Or anything you don’t want to do, you don’t have to do is the implication.
So you are holy, you are set apart, you are superior, you are supreme, you can do anything you want, and then also you are pure. God, you are pure. You are flawless in your character. Your purposes are right. Whatever you do is right and good, and again, whatever you choose not to do, that’s right and that’s good as well.
This is the confession coming from this man’s heart and his lips. So he redirected his thoughts from what was happening around him, and what he was seeing, and what he was feeling, and how it affected him, and the way it bothered him, and the the burden that that brought to him, and the threat that it was to him, he redirected his thinking from all that he was feeling and experiencing to what he knew to be true about God. And that is a step that you and I can take, in fact, must take to deal with the problems and the circumstances that oppose us and will take us down is to to to draw back our gaze from what is happening to us and redirect it to the one who is over us, to God. And that’s what he did. We can do the same thing.
We can say, God, I feel like you’ve forsaken me. And I’ll be honest, I feel like maybe you’ve abandoned me in this, but you are holy. I know that to be true. You are over me. You are infinitely superior to me, and so you can do anything you want, God.
And I’m not saying that begrudgingly. I’m saying that sincerely, you are God, and you have the right and the prerogative to do anything that you want or to withhold anything that you don’t wanna do, and you are pure. God, you’re flawless in your character, your purposes, and your acts, or whatever you do or choose not to do, that is right and that is good. Now believing this and confessing it led him to another place in his thinking. So follow this.
He’s feeling abandoned by God. He confesses truth about God, and now that leads him to a place of trust, of trust. How did he get there? Well, he looked at real life examples. Look at verse four. Our fathers trusted in you. They trusted and you delivered them. They cried to you and were delivered. They trusted in you and were not ashamed. Keyword in those two verses would be what?
Trust. Yeah. So he’s saying, I know about some people. They happen to be his ancestors, the the fathers we call them, the patriarchs, the people who came before him, who had faced difficulties as well, hardships as well, impossible circumstances also. And he’s now, I remember they trusted you, God, my God.
They trusted you, the one who is holy, who is pure, who always does what’s right. They trusted you, and eventually, ultimately, you delivered them. So he’s reminding himself again not only of truth, but now of experiences. To trust means to rely with full confidence. In fact, this word has the idea and an emphasis not just on the person doing it, oh, I trusted God, but on the outcome of it, I trusted God and it worked.
He is trustworthy and the outcome was, I was secure, I was safe, I was rescued, I was delivered. The emphasis is on not only the act of trust, but on the trustworthiness of the one whom we place our trust in. He says they trusted you and you rescued them. So what’s his point? Well, if God was able to do that for them, then he’s able to do that for me.
And then it becomes very personal. Now he looks back to the more recent past to his own life. He says in verse six, but I notice the contrast, verse three, you, verse six, but I’m a worm. He says, you’re holy. They trusted you and they were delivered, but but look at me. He says, I’m like a worm. He says, you know what? Look. I see you. You’re holy. I see the patriarchs, these great men of god, but what am I? I’m like at the bottom. I’m on the ground. People step on me. I’m disgusting.
No man, a reproach of men despised by the people. All those who see me ridicule me. They shoot out the lip and shake the head saying, he trusted in the Lord. Let him rescue him. Let him deliver him since he delights in him.
Already struggling. He’s going back and forth. Look at verse nine, but you are he who took me out of the womb. You made me trust while on my mother’s breasts. I was cast upon you from birth, from my mother’s womb, you have been my God. Be not far from me for trouble is near for there is none to help. What’s he doing? He’s saying, you know what? From the moment I was born, I was dependent on someone, and on a human level, it was my mom. But looking back, I know now that it was you who was looking out for me.
I was dependent on someone without even knowing it. I was dependent, God, on you. My very life and existence depended on you. That’s what he’s saying here. So what’s his point? Alright? If you help them, my ancestors, I think you can help me. And if you’ve taken care of me since the day I was born, then I believe you will take care of me now. And he doesn’t use the word trust, but notice his prayer in verse 11. He has gone from you’ve left me to be not far from me. There’s a thread of faith. Do you see it? It’s like, okay. I I know you haven’t really left me, but please draw close. Let me know you’re here.
Trouble is near, so I want you to be close because nobody else is gonna help me right now. So we’ve seen his cry and his confession, which included God’s holiness and his trust. He circles back to the crisis. You know, if only it would just settle it for us. Well, I believe God, I trust God, and everything is good, but we tend to return to the problem, don’t we, in our minds?
We go back to the problem, and that’s exactly what David does, I think, in this Psalm. His mind strays back to the crisis, and again, we don’t know what it was, but he describes how bad it was. I’m not gonna take the time to read this this morning, but will you just glance at the next verses starting in verse 12? Many bulls have surrounded me. He named several animals and he’s using these animals as as figures to describe and communicate the fact that he was surrounded by enemies.
They were intent on destroying him. Verse 14, I’m poured out like water. My bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It has melted within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd. In other words, a a cracked brittle piece of pottery. And my tongue clings to my jaws. You’ve brought me to the dust of death. So he’s surrounded by enemies.
He’s suffering terrible physical anguish. Verse 18, degrading personal loss. They’ve stripped him of his clothes, and they’re gambling them away. Verses twenty and twenty one, the sword, the dog, the lion, the wild oxen speak of of harm and peril and pain that is threatening him. He can almost feel the points of their teeth on him and the sharp horn of the ox and the tip of the spear.
Pain is imminent and death is coming. This is interesting, the end of verse 21, it may show up differently in your translation. Here it says the end of verse 21, he’s praying, God save me, and then all of a sudden, you’ve answered. So God intervened in some way. Again, we don’t know how, but God did intervene and provide either the promise or hope of being delivered or actually rescued him from his circumstances.
So in this crisis, the answer came, and now we see him begin to recount truth about God. Verse 22, I will declare. You see the pivot, the complete change now from despair into dependence and now into declaring the wonderful truths of God. I will declare your name to my brother. In the midst of the assembly, I will praise you. His crisis turned into an occasion for worship. You are holy. It also turned into an occasion for witness. I will declare your name. Is that what should be happening to you, to us in your crisis?
I will worship him no matter what. You are holy. But I will also tell others of how he has enabled me and strengthened me and and ultimately delivered me because he is such a great God, and I want all the world to know that. There’s so much in this Psalm. In fact, you can’t miss the most important element of this Psalm.
Do you know what it is? It’s Christ. This psalm is a prediction in amazing detail of the experience, the actual experience Jesus himself would have on the cross. And as you read through this Psalm, if you know the scene, if you if you’re familiar with the events that happened when Jesus was crucified, you are picturing them. And God used this man David in his own set of circumstances to actually kind of rise above that and and in some senses, you might think he’s speaking in hyperbole.
Was it really that bad, David? Well, it felt that bad. But what was hyperbole for David was reality for Jesus. These things happened to him. Do the words, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me seem familiar to you?
They do if you know what Jesus said from the cross. It is the fourth saying, there were seven. This is the central saying of Jesus from the cross. In fact, some people divide this whole Psalm into two parts, verses one to 21 have to do with his crucifixion and verses 22 to 31 relate to his resurrection. Verse one is Jesus saying, you’ve forsaken me.
Why have you forsaken me? The very last word in the Hebrew in verse 31 is he has done it, which could very easily relate to what? It is finished. The amazing work of the cross and the person of Jesus Christ is portrayed in a phenomenal way in this psalm. Did God abandon Jesus? In some sense, he did. God passed judgment on his own son so that he could justify you. God punished his pure and righteous son so he could forgive you. He rejected his own son in those moments when he became sin. He who was without sin became sin for us, and God had to withdraw from his own son in those moments so that he could accept you.
And he abandoned his beloved son in in that sense so that he could say, I will never leave nor forsake you. A man by the name of Friedrich Krumacher, a German preacher published in 1854, a classic work called The Suffering Savior Meditation on the Last Days of Christ. It’s one of the richest devotional works on the crucifixion of Jesus. Will you give your attention now to his words?
“The Lord tasted the bitterest drop in the accursed cup being forsaken of God. Though we may be abandoned by the world’s favor, the friendship of men, earthly prosperity, bodily strength, even though we may be bereft of the feeling of God’s nearness and that freshness of the inward life of faith, yet God himself always continues near and favorably inclined to us in Christ. However, strangely sometimes he may act toward us. However completely he may withdraw himself from our consciousness. Yet in every situation, the blissful privilege belongs to us. Not only to courageously approach him and say, why do you forsake me, your child, for whom your son has atoned? But also to say to him, with still bolder confidence, you cannot. You will not. You dare not forsake me because the merits of your only begotten son forever bind you to me.”
Chris Harper: Well, thank you for listening to today’s Harvest Time. Of course, we wanna invite you to the couples conference with Dean and Faith Taylor, Saturday, January 27. It’ll be at the Westin. If you need more information on it, just contact our church office, and they’ll be happy to help you there. We also wanna invite you to services this week at Harvest Baptist Church, 08:45AM, 10:45AM on Sunday, Japanese and Korean translation at the 10:45AM service, and the livestream at hbcguam.org.
Hbcguam.org. Hope to see you this Sunday. Thanks for listening to Harvest Time.