Random Sermon of the Week (6/1/14 - 6/7/14)

Here is the random sermon of the week!

https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/mydownloads/visit.php?lid=14400

Not sure who the speaker is.

When commenting for the first time on this thread, please include 2 quotes from the sermon that spoke to you.

I am sure this speaker is Zac Poonen.

"We hear a lot about faith in Christendom today. Unfortunately, Satan has side tracked Christians to make them think of faith only in relation to material things, some earthly blessing.
Jesus taught we do not seek for the earthly blessings but we do seek for the heavenly and the earthly gets thrown in as a bonus."

" Every good and perfect gift comes down from the father above"
Everything in my life that is not good and perfect did not come from above. It came from the devil."

/quote/" Every good and perfect gift comes down from the father above"
Everything in my life that is not good and perfect did not come from above. It came from the devil."/quote/

This is a dangerous statement. (I have not had time to listen to the sermon, so this is just a reaction to this statement.)

All good gifts are from the Father, for He can, by His very nature, give nothing but good.

However, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts and His ways are higher than our ways. So if we with our eyes see that something as "not good and perfect" it does not mean that in God's eyes it is not perfect.

Many things that God gives us for our good are painful. Jesus Himself tells us that if we are fruitful, the LORD will prune us.

Many things in my life look as if they are not good and perfect, and in the natural would make believe this statement and that they are not the will of God, BUT I am CERTAIN that the LORD HIMSELF allowed them in my life, which makes them, therefore, GOOD AND PERFECT.

I pray what I said make sense.

quote:

"I have not had time to listen to the sermon, so this is just a reaction to this statement."

I am listening to it on the way to work this morning so I haven't heard it yet either bit it may be best to withhold such comments UNTIL we have listened to it- because he may expand further than the quote indicates.

Seems the point is that if it is from God then it is good, whether it seems good to us or not and vice versa.

"Not faith, but faith plus patience."

"Everything in my life that is not good and perfect did not come from above. It came from the devil."

This sermon was a mixed bag. At a point as he wound down after talking about Hannah, it almost seemed like a different sermon from the first 85% of it. I am sure that I disagree with parts of what he said. I listened to it all.

There were moments where I had to force myself to listen to more because it sounded so .... "word of faith" in its content. Prosperity preaching. I won't say it was that, but it got really close. So, there's that.

I want to spend more time on what I did find helpful. Faith plus patience. The more he focused on that, the more I was drawn into it. This may be one of those messages that you find more in it due to your life circumstances or current experiences. In my home right this moment, we are in a bit of a battle of attitude. Waiting is becoming a labor, and there is some distraction from our own reactions to what other people are doing (or, are not doing). Yet, I think if I were to draw out the "do not be weary in well doing" as a point of discussion it might actually cause conflict. So, instead, I'm praying it.

Because of this, those parts of the message that dealt with faith and patience spoke loudly to me. It reminds me of what I'm tempted to cover up: that God is looking to reward diligent seeking and faith. It is hard to define diligence without the aspect of time and persistence. So, when God rewards those who seek Him, or "diligently seek" Him as the KJV renders it, it requires time. Diligence does not occur quickly, typically.

In fact, I don't know that I'd state it as "faith plus patience"; I actually think it is "faith times patience". To get anywhere with faith, I will go only so far in faith as the Holy Spirit fruit of patience will take me. When I start complaining about "where is your promise, Lord?", or "God this is not happening fast enough" -- and that is a complaint that I confess to having in my soul even if not in my mouth, too -- the truth is that my complaint is a scoff at Him personally. Given all that I know from His Word about His faithfulness, and having all the great and precious promises of Scripture, my impatience or my complaint about timing is truly an insult to Him. And, this is a matter for repentance and lots of thought and prayer.

Where I'll part from the message is here: "Everything in my life that is not good and perfect did not come from above. It came from the devil." I do not blame (or, in another way, give glory to) Satan for everything in my life that is not good and perfect. I am to blame for most of what is in my life that is not good or perfect. When James spoke of "every good and perfect gift comes from above", he did not say nor imply that every NOT good and perfect thing in life is from Satan. In fact, John says, in 1 John 2:16, that "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world." The world. My eyes. My pride. My flesh. Not Satan. I'm perfectly capable, as proven on a daily basis, of generating my own "not good and perfect" in my life. It is in this vein that the speaker sort of lost me in terms of being persuasive. I simply disagree with him. And, he spent most of the sermon in this vein of all-that-is-not-good-in-life-is-Satan's-doing and giving pithy ways of combating that. That made this sermon difficult for me to hear.

I really like the entire sermon. Any sermon that gets me excited about prayer and resisting the devil and fighting for the return of what the devil has usurped is a good thing.

The speaker, Zac Poonen, IS NOT a WOF/prosperity teacher. I do not believe so many of his sermons would be on this site if he was. What he says is absolutely the truth. We are just so unused to hearing it spoken in our run of the mill cessationist evangelical churches that it sounds foreign.

My favorite quotes with time marks for context:
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"I believe that God’s will for me is physical health.” 13:43

"That’s the position I have taken for many many years””I say ‘Lord, You gotta either heal me or give me something better than healing.’ I will not accept anything less than that.” 18:42

(In regard to Paul’s thorn in the flesh): "Do you know how long he prayed? People will say he prayed three times --well that’s what the bible says. That’s not really the answer. He prayed until he got an answer from God. " 21:49

"A lot of us think, ‘Well, whatever is God’s will will happen.’ You know, that’s not Christianity. That’s Hinduism. That’s a fatalistic attitude… Well, I’ll tell you a lot of things in my life didn’t happen automatically because I said, "Lord, I’m gonna get it.” 38:59

TMK, I respect your defense of our brother. Please know I was not calling him WOF/prosperity. My antennae go sky high on any hint of that stuff. So, I have a built in "ehhhh" when people declare what they will not accept, what they will accept, and blame Satan for it all. I do disagree with that much -- the Satan blaming for all that is not good and perfect -- substantively.

That, however, is not prosperity teaching. It is, though, common rhetoric found in such teaching. I do not fault our brother in his understanding of patient, persistent, enduring faith. I do not fault his comments in that regard, nor in his own personality or how he expresses that idea. I just found it hard to hear because of the similar rhetoric and tone. Surely, we can humbly point out our own shortcomings in hearing and assess the truth of another's comments with humility. I hope that is what I did. It is what I intended to do.

Hi dolfan...

Sorry if I came across heavy handed. This is actually the first sermon by Zac Poonen I have listened to although I recognized his voice fro some clips I have heard. There is a video circulating on YouTube called "whatever happened to the fear of God" or something like that. He is one of the speakers.

I agree with you that some of the language he uses may be used by some WOF teachers. But they go way too far.

I think part of the issue is how we view God. Brother Poonen thinks that God wants what is best for us and the devil wants what's worst.

He is not afraid to call sickness "bad." How do we know it is bad? Because Jesus said so and healed it. That does not mean that God does not allow sickness because he obviously does. But Zac's (and my) default position is that sickness is bad and therefore of the devil. Thus we are able to resist it and pray against it with confidence. Like he said Paul would have prayed 50 times to be delivered from the thorn in the flesh but it only took 3 times to get his answer. God had something better for him than a healing (assuming the thorn was a sickness although I am not convinced that it was.

One suggestion when you make a post linking a sermon. Please don't link directly to the sermon its self but link to the comments page.

When you are cycling through the sermon lists, each sermon has a link at the bottom of it that opens up a "Comments Page". Open that link and then copy and paste the url from that into your thread that you are creating.

This will allow everyone to see the title of the sermon AND who preached it. :)

I am still not sure of the title of this sermon. I would really like to know.

Here is how the link reads to the comments section. I know that you think we are being picky and I'm sorry but I like to know who I'm listening to and what they are preaching on.

https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?lid=16267&commentView=itemComments

But thank you, you did a good job, havok20x!!

TMK, you were not heavy handed at all. I did a poor job in my original post. I appreciate your testimony, too.

Okay, the modified Excel equation is as follows:

="https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?lid="&RANDBETWEEN(1,25100)&"&commentView=itemComments"

This will lead to the title and comment section.

This particular sermon is called "Faith must be coupled with patience" by Zac Poonen.

And thank you hulsey for pointing that out!

After listening to this sermon, I feel like I need to make this comment:

Word of Faith is dangerous in 2 ways.

1) If a person falls headlong into that kind of thinking, that person will name and claim just everything that they think is good. Anything they want, they perceive as being good. It is me-centered spirituality. The glory of God is lost in our own desires. While I don't entirely agree with Poonen's definition of what is considered good, I definitely don't think that he advocated word of faith thinking.

2) It is also dangerous in the fact that those who recognize the dangerss of it will jump as far from anything that sounds like it as possible. They will become fatalistic (as Poonen pointed out) and I definitely believe fatalism is equally as dangerous as name-it-claim-it theology (and I am fairly reformed in my thinking). But we've got to remember that WOF theology is derived from the scriptures (although they are seriously misapplied). We can't just throw out those scriptures cause they sound like something WOF would use. They mean something and have legitimate application for the children of God.

Finally, something that I think Poonen could have made a little more clear was that we should be basing our claims on already made promises of God. He did point it out, but I personally would have said it about 98 times. The ONLY reason that Isaac and Jacob and Abraham and their wives could pray for children was based on the promises of God that he already made--that God would make Abraham a great nation. As far as Hannah goes, she prayed 1 time (from what we see in the scriptures) and God answered. It most assuredly was in faith and it definitely was in the will of God. But he could have said "no, my grace is sufficient for you" or "yes" and then just gave her a son who didn't happen to be one of the greatest examples of godly men we have in the Scriptures.

I definitely loved how he pointed out that sometimes it takes YEARS for prayers to be answered. That is a much needed concept in America. Prayer is not like ramen noodles and faith is not like a microwave, so we ought not to think that when we pray in faith that the results should only take 1.5 minutes.

Now this isn't a critical review of it, because I need to hear a LOT more of his stuff before I say, "oh this guy isn't exactly right." A lot of what he said can be heard through a "anti-WOF" detector that will set off our alarms. I am not sure he leans that way yet.

There are other brothers and sisters here who seem to know a lot about Zac Poonen. Some may have seen him in person. I wish they would chime in here regarding his background. I am almost 100% certain he would reject WOF doctrine simply because I think he is held in pretty high regard here.

Here is a link to the website of the fellowship he is associated with:

http://www.cfcindia.com/web/mainpages/about_us.php#bel

Since he takes no salary or royalties for his books I seriously doubt he is a WOF proponent!
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Now to the sermon-- especially in regard to Hannah. I love her story. Here she is, a Godly woman, barren but deeply loved by her husband but under great pressure because of tormenting from her husband's other wife who has children and her own desire to have a child. I liken these years of pressure to putting a finger over a garden hose. The pressure builds and builds. She prayed and prayed and then finally at the tabernacle she pours her heart out one more time and finally the pressure is released- just like that garden hose when your finger is removed the water shoots out. What came out of her pressure and faith was Samuel-- and like Zac said no one knows the names of the other wife's children.

It seems that this type of pressure produces greatness. I always thought the radical nature of Paul's conversion was because of the intense internal pressure he felt when persecuting the church. Of course I am surmising but I am convinced that when he saw Stephen martyred and how he died that he knew the truth right then but because of pride he was resisting and "kicking against the goads." The pressure of this kept building and when confronted on the Damascus road he was undone and all he could do was a 180 as a radical slave of Jesus Christ.

However, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts and His ways are higher than our ways. So if we with our eyes see that something as "not good and perfect" it does not mean that in God's eyes it is not perfect.

Jesus defined Good as Godliness.
Mark 10-18:- And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone."

So the Goodness that God brings in our life is his nature not the goodness that we think from earthly perspective. If something in ourlife is leading to sin then it is from devil. All sickness or financial losses and struggles that we have on earth, if they teach us to become more Christlike then they are from God. He imparts his nature in us through these sufferings.

Sree-

Do you think the speaker of the sermon would agree or disagree with you? I think he would agree-- although he might distinguish between "allowing" and "causing" and I might as well.

I think the example of dealing with our children is a good one. As parents none of us would intentionally cause them trouble or heartache- at least I wouldn't. But once they are in it, we may choose not to "save them" out of it so that they will learn a lesson or whatever. But we are always watching and will step in when necessary.

Sree I very much agree with you. Anything in our lives that makes us depend on The Lord and gives Him glory is good. I firmly believe that God's glory is our greatest good.