Matt Chandler - God's Protection and Delight

Hey, how are we doing? Well, okay, it’s going to be like that, huh? All right, I can do that. I can do that too. No, it’s counterfeit now, and I don’t want it. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those; we’re going to be in the book of Zephaniah. I want to give you a moment or two to find that one. If you don’t own a Bible or don’t have one with you, there’s a hardback black one somewhere around you. So, here we are in the third week of Advent. Some of you, maybe with a background in church, know exactly what Advent is, and some of you aren’t quite sure. Advent is that season in which Christians begin to look back at the coming of Jesus Christ and what has occurred with His coming. Simultaneously, we begin to gaze towards the future, anticipating the second Advent or return of Jesus Christ, acknowledging that our lives are playing out in what theologians call the «space between» or the «already but not yet.» In the first week of Advent, we talked about hope; Josh Patterson here in Flower Mound addressed hope. I thought he crushed it; he did a great job. He talked about our hope being built not on probabilities but on promises, that our hope finds its root in the promises that God has made and fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ. God is the source of our hope, but also the sustainer of our hope. Then we moved to last week and discussed the refining love of God. One of the things that occurs with the coming of Christ is that God kind of invades. We had one point last week: God is at work in the mess. Your life has a little mess in it; my life has a little mess in it; or maybe your life has a whole bunch of mess in it. We rejoiced in the fact that God is at work in the mess. As much as we long for a life of ease and comfort without difficulty, it’s actually in the mess that we see what we most desperately need, which is a right relationship with God. You know this; I mean, I don’t know if you’re real enough to say it to yourself, but if you’re honest, when everything’s going your way, you think, «I did that,» right? You got that promotion at work; you killed it, right? You’re healthy because you ate your spinach and stretched at night, right? If things go well, we did that. Nobody praises God for great days because we think we did that, right? We were responsible, disciplined, organized; we made it happen. Yet on the difficult days, when the illusion of control slips through our fingers, then we realize what we most desperately need, which is a right relationship with God and dependence upon Him. So, in one sense, difficulty is a real gift from the Lord. But in our day and age, all suffering, all difficulty, and all sorrow is seen as a problem to be solved, never considered as a gift from God for a greater treasure. We covered that last week; some of you are glad you missed that one, right? Now, where we are in Advent is that we step into that space, acknowledging the tension. What I mean by that is we step into this space where we look back upon the coming of Christ and all that He has given and granted to us, acknowledging that all He brought into being has yet to be consummated. We feel the sting of the refining love of God, and we eagerly hope and anticipate the second Advent or return of Christ, where this place we are in, the space between, where there is still anxiety, fear, worry, disease, hurt, and loss, vanishes forever. To do that, we’re going to look at Zephaniah chapter 3, and we’re going to read that together here in a moment. Today, we’re going to do something a little bit different. Maybe, already today, it has been a bit too different for you, but let me explain what we’re going to do. We normally preach and read out of the English Standard Version of the Bible; however, we’re not going to do that today. We’re actually going to read out of the NIV version, the New International Version. Maybe you don’t have a background in church or you do, but no one has ever explained to you why we have different versions of the Bible. If you’ve ever tried to share the gospel with a Muslim, they will quickly bring to your attention that we have many different Bibles. If you don’t quite know what to say about that, let me try to explain it. Here’s why we have different versions of our Bible: Certain versions are word-for-word translations, meaning they look at the Hebrew and Greek and write the English word, making it as readable as possible. Other versions are phrase-by-phrase, looking at just a phrase at a time and moving over the phrases. Then there are paraphrases, where they capture the general idea and poetically write it.