March 29, 2024

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GOD’S FAVOR IN THE MIDST OF FIERY TRIALS

IN THE DAYS OF HIS POWER SERIES.

TOPIC: GOD’S FAVOR IN THE MIDST OF FIERY TRIALS

SERMON BY-:
Rev. Innocent Chukwudi Peace-Udochukwu
President Living Fountain Ministries Int’l LIFOM

“Thou shalt arise and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her Yea the set time is come.”
Psalms 102:13

Every child of God needs the favour of God upon his/her life. The favour of God takes a believer to places where money and qualifications cannot take. The favour of God will bring opportunities into your life which skill and hard work cannot bring. If all you have has only come through toil and sweat, then you are leading a very difficult life. What hard work and sweat cannot bring into your life, the favour of God will bring into your life.

But the Christian life rarely proceeds in a straight line. Just think of the journeys that some of our favourite Bible characters went through. Before Joseph had risen to the ranks to become the Pharaoh’s right hand man, a false accusation sent him straight to prison (Genesis 39:6-23). It would take many years of waiting, and many experiences of betrayal and injustice before he was finally put in a position where he could see how God turned the “evil” that was brought against him into “good” to benefit those around him (Genesis 50:20).

There are times in the calendar of God when He steps in to favour His children. Your days will never be the same.

WHAT IS THE FAVOUR OF GOD?

Someone described the favour of God in the following way: (1) It is the power of God behind a believer which prepares the ground for success (2) It is the grace of God which enables a believer to rise above competitive and negative forces (3) It is to be given preferential and special treatment as compared to others. Many people in the Bible operated in the favour of God.

When divine favour gets you to the top nobody can pull you down. The bestowal of divine favour is supervised by God Himself. this product can transfer a man from the prison to the palace and from the pit to the palace within twenty-four hours. Favour beautifies destinies. it has a capacity to double God’s glory on anyone. Favour eliminates struggles and grants easy ride into blessings. It also releases blessings in abundance. It enables you to obtain the good treasures of the Lord.

Many Christians believe they have to somehow earn the favor of God, but the truth is, we already have His favor. God saved us because of His favor toward us.

Ephesians 2:8 tells us, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God” (NKJV).

Simply put, grace is favor.

God’s favor is the power that changes things for us. First and foremost, you and I are saved by His favor, and I’m not just talking about going to heaven when we die. To be saved means to be delivered, protected, preserved, healed and made whole.

God’s favor covers every area of our lives! By His favor, He has taken care of everything we will ever need—spirit, soul and body. His supernatural grace is so vast, the Bible says it is going to take all the ages to come for Him to show us all the riches of His grace in the kindness He’s given us in Christ Jesus (see Ephesians 2:7).

You may be thinking, Oh, I can’t wait until I get to heaven, so I can experience the fullness of God’s favor!

You don’t have to wait! God is pouring out His favor on us right here and now. Even before we were born again, He was giving us His favor. While we were still rebelling against Him, “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8).

It was God’s grace at work in your life that enabled you to be born again. From the moment you stepped into that new life—the moment you made Jesus Lord—God’s favor began working nonstop on your behalf. Being born again was just the starting place for His favor to pour out. And He will pour out grace and more favor to you every moment of your life if you’ll receive it!

“Grace is the free favour of God, the undeserved bounty of the ever-gracious Creator against whom we have offended, the generous pardon, the infinite, spontaneous loving-kindness of the God who has been provoked and angered by our sin, but who, delighting in mercy, and grieving to smite the creatures whom he has made, is ever ready to pass by transgression, iniquity, and sin, and to save his people from all the evil consequences of their guilt.”

But in all of the above a LIFE without trouble would be very uninteresting. Our opportunities for greatness would be narrowed down if trials were gone.

A man who should live and die without trials would be like a setting sun without clouds; he would have scant opportunity for the display of those virtues with which the grace of God had endowed him. In the case of David we have much cause for thankfulness that he did not lead a life of unbroken tranquility. It is well for us that his was not a flowery path of continuous prosperity. Over him the waves and billows dashed full often; both within and without he was assailed daily, so that he became the epitome of all the temptations and the aspirations, the graces and the weaknesses, the joys, and the sorrows of our humanity, and hence his life became so wondrously instructive. David owed much to the Philistines, to the tracks of the wild goats, to the cave of Adullam, and to persecuting Saul; his hunted life, and a thousand trying circumstances, trained him for a grand life, and made him for us a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected in all our varying moods and passions. None of us can know what we are till we are tried, nor will the good within us increase to any degree of betterness unless it be exercised. The arm unused loses muscular force, put it to stern labour and it gathers strength ; soldiers are made by war and mariners by storms; the scholar may think it hard to be severely examined, but he becomes the wiser by the searching test. Our trials and troubles, while they test and develop us, do also by divine grace strengthen and improve us, and ever have we great cause to bless God for them when grace sanctifies them to our highest good. Had not David been a man of many afflictions he would never have penned such a verse as our text, a confident utterance of unstaggering faith, full of meaning, rich with consolation, the very cream of assured hope in God.

God is unseen, but none the less present and energetic in our lives; he is unheard by the ear but none the less perceived by the heart; he is certainly at work accomplishing his purposes, although our coarse and earth-bound senses cannot discover him. Faith has a far greater perceptive power than the senses, it is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” While carnal men say “seeing is believing,” we assure them that to us “believing is seeing.” We turn their saying upside down, our faith is eye and ear, and taste and touch to us, it is so mighty in us that we do not only know that there is a God, but we regard him as the great motive force of the universe, and daily calculate upon his mighty aid. Hence it is the Christian’s habit to fall back upon God in all time of faintness, to cry to God in all time of danger: he does not pray because he thinks it a pious though useless exercise, but because he believes it to be an effectual transaction, the potent pleading of a child with its parent, rewarded with loving grants of blessing. The believer does not look up to heaven because it is a natural instinct to hope for better days, and to cheer one’s self with a pious fiction about providence, but he looks up to heaven because God is actually there, truly observant, tenderly sympathetic, and ready with a mighty arm to come to the rescue of his people. So, then, because it is our wont to wait upon the Lord, we go to him in troublous days as a matter of course. We do not make him an occasional resort to be used only when we cannot help it, but we dwell in him, and morning by morning pour out our hearts before him; and so when adversity comes, we fly to God as naturally as the dove to its dovecote, or the coney to the rock, or the weary child to its mother’s bosom. The nautilus, when disturbed, folds up its sails and sinks into the depths, and even so in every hour of storm we descend into the deeps of divine love. Blessed is that man whose spirit looks to God alone at all times.

SHALOM!

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