Welcome to the sermon podcast of Coosada Baptist Church. We want to be a lighthouse to guide you on your journey through life. Listen, as our pastor, Dr. Jim Graham shares a message from God's Word, and offers sound biblical direction for your daily life. Here we are, starting a brand new series. It's called If You Believe, and I hope you'll join us for these next few weeks as we talk about it.
We're going to be walking through the book of Second Kings, I'm going to be telling you some stories from the life of Elijah. And the premise is basically this. If you believe something, it affects your actions and affects what you do. If you believe it's cold outside, then you put on a jacket. If you believe that the traffic's bad on the way to where you're going, you're going to leave it a little early.
If you believe that they won't take a credit card at the place you're showing up to, you're going to make sure you got some cash with you. Like, just what you believe affects what you do. And so we're going to talk about that over the next few weeks, because people come to me all the time, and they're like, they'll say, you know, I believe, I believe. And oftentimes, I don't look at them going like, you don't know because if you believed, wouldn't you do this or if you believe what, you know,
wouldn't it affect what you're doing? When you make different choices, if you really believed that there was a God, and he was who he says he was. So that's my premise. Today, I want to specifically ask this question. If you believe that there's a God, and that he loves you, that he cares about you, that he's a just God, that he's a righteous God, and that he has a plan for lives, and he wants to direct our paths.
If you believe that, then if you've got a situation, and you want to know the truth, you want to know what to do, then you would go to God. And then myory man is, we don't often do that. So I want to talk to you about that if you really believe. And as I thought about this, I thought about a situation in our own home. Because often times, my kids are all young adults, they'll call, and they're wanting to tell us some grand thing.
And then a lot of times this grand thing is some problem, some situation, right? And so they're telling us this whole thing, something happening work, or something that happened with someone, and they're telling me. And as soon as they start talking, if they're talking to me, I start wanting to fix the situation. Like, I'm like, well, I want to ask questions, I want to give them advice, I want to whatever.
And sometimes I get frustrated in those conversations, because they're going on and on, and I especially get frustrated, if I say, this and they go, yeah, but, and then I tell them, and they yell, but, and I was like, ah, they don't want solutions, they just want to be in, and then I say, I think you call the wrong parent. The parent who will just listen to you and let you go on and on, and just be so patient and take it all in, is the other parent.
She's sitting over there. Like, she'll do that. I don't have that level of thing. In fact, I'll tell you something. This is actually true, and this will happen. We will have them on speaker phone, between us, and they're telling us this whole thing, right? They're just going it whatever. And at a certain point, I look at her, and I go, you can take them off speaker phone now. You with me on that one, brother. Thank you, Amen. How will you? Like, you can take them off. You can just take over.
You can do, you can fly solo on this when I'm done. I'm checking out. Let me know if y'all need me, you know? You see, here's the thing. When we have a situation, and we often have situations, right? I mean, some are minor, some aren't that big, big deal, but sometimes they're a little bigger. They're a little more involved. They're a little more, you know? I have a situation this week. Somebody asked me before the first service of how was your week. I said, I'll tell you how my week was.
I had one of those weeks where I had a situation that took over three days of my week. Like, literally took over three days of my week. I didn't get anything else done except that thing. I kept dealing with that thing for three days, you know? And there's, oh, your week sounds like his week. And I was like, oh, you had one of those weeks. We often have those, those kind of things.
So if you got that kind of thing, a thing that's takes over, maybe don't take over your work, why it was a work thing. Sometimes you'll have a personal thing, and it'll consume the personal parts of your life, at least that part of the time. But you have a thing, okay? So you're in a thing, and it's consuming some of your emotions. It's consuming some of your time. You're having to deal with the thing. And you want to talk about it. We tend to talk because there's a couple of things we want.
One of the things we want is sympathy. We want sympathy. We want someone to turn to us and go, you poor thing. I cannot believe that that's terrible. That's all. I can't believe how dare them. You know, they just, we want sympathy. This is definitely what Carl Hart do not call me. Doesn't, I don't, I'm not very good at that. You know? So like, you know, they want sympathy. Second, but I want sympathy too sometimes. Like, I have those, and I go, you know what I do? I go talk to her.
That's what I do. And like, can you believe that they did that right? Second thing we want is affirmation. We want somebody, instead of focusing on what they did to us or what happened or can you believe it. We want somebody to look at us and go, like, I don't blame you one bit. I would do the same thing. Of course you should do that. Of course you should build that way. We want affirmation. Now there's a third thing that we should want, but it can be problematic. The third thing is truth.
Truth. See, the problem though, is sometimes truth goes against sympathy or affirmation. That's problematic. Now please don't misunderstand me. Sometimes truth will let you give you a little bit of sympathy or for a little while. Or it will give you a little bit of affirmation for a little while. Sometimes it won't give you any at all, okay? Truth. And the problem is when we're seeking, you know, situation. I mean, go ahead and think about what your situation is easy for me.
I had a big one this week. So it's easy for me to think about my situation. You get yours, you know, whatever it is. Unfortunately, some of you have four. And you got these things and think about it. What we do is we want sympathy, we want affirmation. Do you want the truth? And if you want the truth, where you go for truth? If truth is the opposite or against sympathy or affirmation, we have a problem. A problem? It's hard. I don't like it. So I want to tell you a story.
The stories and second kings, I'm just going to ask you to put a few of the verses. Okay? We're not going to put all the verses up this morning. I want to put a few of them up. I'll put this first one up. It's about a guy named A. Hazar. And he'd fallen through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and injured himself. I would like to have more details on that story. Sometimes I look at the Bible and go, like, could you tell me a little bit more about this?
How does it do fall through whatever office balcony? Something. Push him was, you know, as the a little bit tips, like what happened? I want to story. I want to know what happened. But regardless, I don't know what happened except that he failed. And he severely injured himself. So severely injured himself. And it says, so he sent messenger saying to them, go and consult bells above the God of Echron to see if I'll recover from this injury. Echron was this city and Philistine territory.
And that's where he went. All right, you can just put it back on the main slide there. And I'm not going to read this to you. I just want to tell you this story. Okay? The story is, just put it on where do you go for a trip. There you go. I want to tell you the story. Instead of you reading it. So here's what happens. He says, go find out. Go ask this. Now he's not going for truth, right? There's a source of truth. And so he's seeking something else. You would think he really wants to know.
He doesn't really want to know. If you really want to know the truth, you will go to the source that will give you the truth. Right? He's not going to that source. But his advisors take off and they start going to Echron. Well, at this very moment, God speaks to Elijah. He's a prophet. He's a man of God. He has an audience with God. He listens to God. He speaks for God. And God says, go, and listen to what's happening. Go interrupt their journey and ask them a key question. Is there no God?
Is there no genuine God that you would see him? Why are you going to other places? Now we know why. It's the same reason you do. It's the same reason I do. Because I want someone to give me sympathy. Oh, you poor thing. You fell off about getting. Right? Or we want affirmation. No, you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. It's no big deal. You're good. You're good. We won't that. We don't really want truth. If we wanted truth, we would look in God's word. We would talk to God ourselves.
We would seek the prophet of God to speak on behalf of God. We would go to wise friends who have an audience with God. Right? We won't truth. Where do you go for truth? So my question for you is even right now. Whatever your situation is, or your four situations, whatever it is. Are you seeking truth? Or are you just seeking sympathy and affirmation? We have a path. We know what we want. We know how we wish it would be. We want to vent. We want to have our moment. We were wrong. We were victims.
We were whatever. We had a good with faith. We were kind of happy. So I want to have faith. We was like, are you. You know. And now I'd authorize us to feel this way or do this or whatever. And oftentimes we don't really want to talk to God. Because we kind of afraid of what God's going to set. I think I shared with you this with you before. So I've got a situation with my parents, especially my mom.
know what I really want to do, you know, I'm sitting on a really, would like to, you know, do this and she said, well, what is God telling you? And I looked at her and she said, she and I'm telling you, and I sat there and she goes, it's Jim Grimm, you're not going to tell me that you have an asked him what you want him to do. Well, I knew he wasn't going to tell me what I wanted him to say. Me, your pastor, I'm admitting it to you. I know how you are because I'm that way too.
You don't want to go to truth. Do you want truth? Do you want truth? If you want truth, you will go to the source for truth. God always gives you truth. Always. He loves you. Let me tell you what love means. Love gives you what you need. So I just want you to know something. If you need sympathy, he will give it to you. He is the God of all comfort. He is. If you need affirmation, he will give it to you. He is the God of encouragement. He will give it to you.
But I also want you to know something. If that is not what you need, he will not give it to you. He won't give it to you just because you want it. He won't give it to you just because you need it. He will give it to you if you need it. But he will always give you truth. So where do you go or truth? Now here's our problem. How do we react to the truth? I love emojis. I love the little thing. I love the fact that you can text me and I don't even have to work at giving your you an answer.
I can hold my thumb on it and just choose like it. Don't like it. Ha ha. Right. Exclamation point. It's been such a blessing to others of us who don't want to, you know. Thing. Good. How do you react though when you go for sympathy and affirmation and you get truth that doesn't give you that? No, we don't like that. See that truth is uncomfortable. That truth is telling you the opposite of what you want.
You're telling God about what they did or that situation, your coworker, your spouse, your kid, your whatever. You're telling them about that thing and you're going now God, you know, if you step in there, straighten them out and you're talking to other people who are going I can't believe and God looks at you and goes let's talk about you for a second. I don't want to talk about me. I don't want to talk about what I need. I want to talk about them. Oh, is this uncomfortable for you?
I want to talk about you. I want to talk about your attitude. I want to talk about your mindset. I want to talk about what you need to change. All you want to talk about is me changing that or them and I want to talk about changing you. Well, I want to hear that. So we've run from the truth. Sometimes we even get mad at the truth. Like mad at it. We'll get angry and we lash out because we're hearing the truth. We get upset at it. How do you react? Let me tell you how a has reacted.
Here's what he did. He said, I don't want to talk to that guy myself. He sends these people to go talk to the other God and Elijah God tells Elijah to go interrupt them. Elijah goes and stands in the road. His hold up, fellas hold up, hold up. Is there no God? Where you all headed? Is there no God? And he said, I'm going to save you all some time. You all can go back to King A. He has ironed. You can tell him he's not going to recover. So they turn around and go back to the King.
You ever have this happen when somebody says, I got to run to the store. I'm going to win Dixie here. I'm going to whatever I got to go to the store and you're thinking they're going to be an hour and they show back up 15 minutes and they said, he said, whoa, I thought you were going to the store and I stopped at Dollar General on the corner because there's a Dollar General on every corner. Well, that's what happened.
They just showed back up and the King says, hey, you hadn't had time to go do what I told you to do. What are you doing here? They said, well, we already got the answer. This guy shows up and he told us God said, you know, you're not going to recover. He actually said, why are you even going to talk this? Is there no God? Is there no God? Why are you consulting anybody else? And not God. If you believe there's a God and you want to know the truth, of course you would consult God.
He is the truth giver. So if you're not, do you really believe? You either don't believe there's a God or you don't want to know the truth. One of those things, right? He said, what that guy looked like, now they take some Elijah was kind of weird. He's a prophet and he's kind of weird. He was like a mountain man or something. He dressed in like, skinned, animal skinned stuff with fur on it and leather straps and scraggly beard. He looked like he walked out of the heel.
Come off some heel and walk down here and go, oh, hold up. He didn't look like everybody else. He's dressed with linen. They got cotton clothes on or whatever. He didn't look like that. And so they tell him, well, he looked like this and he went, I know that guy. That's Elijah. You know, that's Elijah the prophet. I know that guy and he said, go get him. He was angry because the messenger, you ever done that? You ever gotten mad at the messenger? And the messenger's just telling you the truth.
And he got mad at the messenger and says, you go get him and you bring him in here to talk to me. So he sends a captain with 50 million and they go and confront Elijah and guess what? He is sitting up on a heel. He's sitting up on a heel, you know, perched up there and it's kind of steep and they come up and they said, call that to him, man of God, come down. Get down here. And Elijah looks at him and says, what did you call me? You call me man of God. You call me a man of God.
Do you really think I'm a man of God? I mean, think about it. What authority are they ordering him around? The kings of thwart, right? What Elijah is answering to a higher authority than the king. So this guy's ordering him around on the kings of thwart and he just looks at him and goes, like, you think I'm a man of God? Well, if I am, let's just say I am a man of God. I mean, you don't want to know the truth. You don't want to listen to the man of God. You want to chase after some other thing.
So here's the deal. If I'm a man of God, may fire fall from heaven at this moment and consume you. Well, now that'll get your attention. So word gets back to the king. Now does the king go, oh my goodness, I better listen to this guy. No, he just gets madder. Now before you laugh at the king, I won't tell you something. We do that too. Sometimes we just buckle down. We get mad at God because we're going to God about our situation. We're telling him about our thing or that person or that thing.
And he doesn't do what we want him to do. Like he's not doing it. He's telling us some other thing. The truth, we don't like it. And then things get worse because we just do it our way. We step in and say what we want to say and do. And things get worse. Now we're more upset at God. So he sends another captain with 50 more men. And this guy steps it up. He says, man of God, this is what the king says. Come down right now at once immediately. So he steps it up.
Hey, I'm coming based on the king's authority. You better get down here and you better get down here right now. Kind of reminds me of talking to my kids when I was a little younger. You better get in here and you better get in here right now. He says, well if I am a man of God may fire come down from heaven and consume you in your 50 men. So I have some questions. We have to figure out guys, how can I figure out if something is truth or not? Is there a way to do that?
Is there a way to figure out what's truth and what's not truth? And we have some problems in this area. One, we might not want the truth. We want sympathy or affirmation. But I want to tell you another problem we have. We have a problem called confirmation bias. Is anybody ever heard of that term? Confirmation bias. Here's what it means. It means you already have developed your own theory about what is truth and so you look for evidence to support what you already think is true.
Like you call it looking for truth but you are not really looking for truth. You are looking for evidence that will support what you already think is true. So if you think that guy is a jerk and then something happens that will confirm that there a jerk, you go see. I told you so. And if it's a little squirrely, you'll pick out the parts and go see. I told you there a jerk.
And if you think that guy is a jerk and you see information that goes against that, guess what you do with that information, you dismiss it. But you are not really seeking truth. Now here's the problem. We all have confirmation bias. It's not something that we people have. We all have it. We all have confirmation bias. So deal with it will research this week on journalistic integrity. So not saying it exists. I'm just saying it's supposed to exist. It's supposed to exist.
If you go to journalism school, they teach you certain things. And one of the things they teach you is that you need to verify that something is true before you print it. That's what you're supposed to do. You verify. And one of the things you need to do is you have to realize you have confirmation bias. You have to realize that you're prone to go get information that confirms what you already think. So you actually have to work hard to find a counter argument.
If you really want to know the truth, you look for the counter argument. You go to the wise person, you go to the Lord, you go to somebody. And you say, this is what I think. Now tell me how I'm wrong. Tell me. I need to know the counter argument. I need somebody to tell me the opposite. Because sometimes the opposite isn't easy to hear, but when I want to hear it, it's not hard to hear. I want to hear it because I want to know if I'm doing the right thing. I want the truth. I am a true seeker.
Here's the beautiful thing about the Lord. He wants you to know the truth. There are not a lot of things that are black and white in life, but I want to tell you something that's very black and white in life. Satan tells nothing but lies and God tells nothing but truth. Period. That's it. Satan tells nothing but lies. God tells nothing but truth. If you want to know the truth, God will tell you the truth. Now the problem is, a lot of times we really don't want to know the truth.
So if we want to know the truth, we actually approach God a certain way and we actually say to God and whatever you tell me, I'm going to accept it and I'm going to do it. So I want to ask this question like, how do you approach? So these other two guys, they're coming in their approach and with some problems. They're approaching on the kings authority, which doesn't hold water to God's authority. And they're arguing for their rights. We often go to God and we think we have rights.
You don't have any rights in front of God. The only argument, you know what I mean? We say, God, this is not fair. No, God is always just. People will come to me and they've dismissed God because God didn't do what they wanted them to do about their situation. Well, I don't think you won't God then. But surely God would do this or that. Like we start putting ourselves on God. We think we have rights.
And we have the only argument that I have before God is to call back to him a promise that he made to me, hey, God, you said, that's the only thing I can offer to him. The kings authority on my rights, on my whatever, none of that operates in the realm of God. The only thing that operates in the realm of God is God, you said this, this is a promise you made. You said, you love me. You said you would direct my path. You said, you had a plan for my life. You said, you know.
So do you want to know the truth? And you know how we do, you know how your kids do or we do like. But you said, Johnny, Johnny hit me first, right? And you know, as a parent, you always look at him and say, well, I'm not talking to Johnny, right? I'm talking to you. We do that with coworkers, you know, yeah, but they don't have to do this or what it, like we want to be fair and whatever. See God is always talking to you. He's, I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to you. Do you want to know?
Do you want to know? The truth. So the King sends a third captain. Can you imagine being here? Since a third captain, he sends him with his 50 men. But this guy goes to the bottom of the hill and he bals down and he says, man, of God, please, please, please respect my life and the lives of my men. We are your servants. I'm just here doing my job. The King wants to talk to you. I realize I have no authority over you. I'm just trying to do my job. Please don't kill us.
We do believe your man and God. And God said, you can go with him. Part of our problem is how we approach God in the first place. So I've got a couple of pieces of advice for you on that. And you need to go humbly to your God. If you go humbly to God and say, I want to know the truth, and it doesn't matter what it is because I believe in you and your God and I'm going to follow you. I'm your servant. You just tell me what I need to know and what I need to do.
And even if it's hard for me to hear, just open my ears and help me hear because I'm going to do it. I'm going to tell you in that instance, he'll go, all right. Thank you, servant. All right, here you go. The second thing that I need to tell you is you need to be patient. Because we often, I like to act once, you know, when I can pray in the God and I want to do something, I want them to do it right then. But God's timing is always perfect. You will talk more about God's timing.
We're going to talk about it in my Bible study on Wednesday night and talk about God's timing. But I won't tell you one last thing, okay? If you want to know the truth, you need to know this. The truth is the truth. The truth is the truth. Doesn't matter. Because Elijah does go down, he does go to talk to the king and he faces the king and the king is laying there in his bed and he's really, really sick. He's really injured and he says, tell me the truth.
Now in that scenario, look, it's easier to act. It's easier to declare the truth standing on the road to the king's health. It's different to stand in the king's room where he could say, pull the sword, take him out. I don't like his answer. And Elijah just looked straight at him and he said, I'm going to say what I said to them, is there no God? Because if there's a God, you should be seeking God to know the truth. The message that I gave them is the same message I'm going to tell you.
You're not going to recover. You're never going to leave the bed, you're lying on them. And then the last verse of this story says, so he died, so he died. The truth is the truth, whether you believe it or not. So this is what I want you to do right now. Whatever your thing is or things, whatever that person is or that situation, I want you to talk to God about it right now. So would you close your eyes? Would you focus in with God right now? Just close your eyes right now.
I want you to focus in on God right now. And I want you to ask in about your situation. Would you say, guy, I really, really want to know the truth. I want the truth. And whatever the truth is, I'm down with the truth. And I realize my 10-lit see-years, the secret I want, my 10-lit see-years to want sympathy, my 10-lit see-years to want affirmation, but what I want more than anything is the truth. Because I do believe in you. I do believe in you. I even believe in you in the truth is hard.
I want the truth and I'm your servant and I will follow you. My friend, I believe if you say that to the Lord, he'll give you the truth. And you'll have a path. You can follow with your situation, but you need to open your eyes and you need to open your ears too. And you pray for your Lord, help us to seek the truth, to seek the truth, to seek you, to seek your word, and to be open to you.
The follow, the true path, Lord so many things happens and they disrupt our plans or our thoughts or the picture that we had of how it would go and it doesn't go right. And it throws us for a loop and struggle. And we want answers. Is there no God that we would go anywhere else? We seek you and we seek your truth and Jesus namely, friend. Amen. Thank you for listening to our podcast. It is our prayer that it's been helpful in this part of your life journey.
We invite you to join us at Kusata Sunday Mornings for Worship. Visit our website at kusatabaddis.org for directions and more information about our church.