Week #8: Inward Trials & the Adequacy of God

Presupposed Truths (Week #1)

1. God has specifically revealed Himself through His Word (Hebrews 1:1).
2. The Lordship of God over all – “He rules everything” (I Cor. 5:18)
3. God is a redeeming God, actively seeking to save through Christ.
4. God is Triune, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, redemptively active.
5. Man is sinful and must respond to God’s salvation in faith, obedience, worship, praise and service.

Inward Trials & Suffering

Philippians 1:29 – Anybody view suffering as a gift?

Psalm 44:1-8
The World (1 John 2:16), the Flesh (Romans 7:14-20), & the Devil (Ephesians 6:10-12)
Which, if any, can you control?
When suffering, how do you know the source?
Matthew 13:1-9 & 18-23

Psalm 44:9-16
What is happening & what might be some possible explanations?

“The preacher wants to win his hearers to Christ; therefore, he glamorizes the Christian life.”
(Knowing God, pg 245)
What is the health, wealth & prosperity gospel?
Who has been told, “Obey & be blessed, but sin & be punished?”
Place punishment in context with Hebrews 12:4-6

Psalm 44:17-22
What have the people done wrong?
Sanctification (2 Peter 1:3-11) & Christian warfare (Ephesians 6:10-18)

“Sooner or later, the truth will be that God is now exercising his child – his consecrated child – in the
ways of adult godliness, as he exercised Job, and some of the psalmists, and the addressees to the
epistle to the Hebrews, by exposing them to strong attacks, from the world, the flesh, and the devil,
so that their powers of resistance might grow greater and their character as people of God become
stronger.” (Knowing God, pg 248)

“Don’t expect Jesus to save us by teaching us to depend upon the things we are afraid of losing.”
(When God Interrupts by M. Craig Barnes, pg 124)

Grace
J.I. Packer says in Knowing God…
 Grace means God’s love in action toward people who merited the opposite of love, pg 249
 Grace is God drawing us sinners closer and closer to himself, pg 250
 This is the ultimate reason, from our standpoint, why God fills our lives with troubles and
perplexities of one sort or another: it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold him fast, pg 250

Psalm 44:23-26

1
The Adequacy of God

Romans 8 Why is God adequate?

What makes a believer’s position in Christ secure?
Verse 1-2
Verses 9-11
Verses 15-16
Verse 17
Verses 26-27
Verse 28
Verses 29-30

Romans 8:31-35 asks a series of rhetorical questions

1) 31What, then, shall we say in response to this?
2) If God is for us, who can be against us?
3) 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not
also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
4) 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?
5) It is God who justifies. 34Who is he that condemns?
6) Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right
hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love
of Christ?
7) Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or
sword?

Romans 8:36
36
As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep
to be slaughtered.” (see also Psalm 44:22)

Romans 8:37-39
37
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I
am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present
nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all
creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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Ron Smith, 302-545-9049
Ray Bertolet, 302-245-0148