Touching Lives With Dr. James Merritt

If you have ever felt like shaking your fist in God’s face or gone ahead and done it, you aren’t the first person and you won’t be the last. There is an entire book of the Bible built around a man who did just that. His name was Habakkuk, and he was a prophet. When he sees his people suffer and his nation on the verge of collapse, he can’t help but wrestle with this question, “If God is good and God is in control, why are these things happening?” If you are like Habakkuk and the ship of your faith is being overwhelmed by the tsunami of doubt, and your hand is slowly being raised to God in the shape of a fist, because you don’t understand why God is allowing you to lose your job, why God has allowed your mother or father or brother or sister or son or daughter to die, and why doesn’t God do something and do it now? The prophet tells us the answer to the “Why?” and the “Why not?” question.

When David wrote Psalm 23, we don’t know how many more days, weeks, or years he had left in his life. But he definitely closes on a high note of what his life will be like for however long it lasts and what his life will be like after his life ends. He is looking at both now and forever. In this last stanza of this beautiful song, David shares with us what is true of us or can be true of us if the Lord is our shepherd, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6). David basically says two things: one about life and one about death or life after death. These two things will be true of you if the Lord is your shepherd.

In studying through Psalm 23, it is amazing to see how this psalm addresses practically all of our greatest needs from the cradle to the grave. In today’s key verse, David is describing how he realized that his greatest need and our greatest need is God. I believe that God is the only one that can address our greatest problems. Our greatest need will always be God, because only God can meet our greatest needs. The philosopher was right who said, “There is a god-shaped vacuum in every life that only God fill.” Listen to what David writes, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows” (Psalm 23:5). When you understand this from a shepherd’s perspective, you will understand that God will always be just what you need. God meets our needs, but it is how he meets our needs that make this such a beautiful verse.

I love what Jerry Seinfeld said, “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking and number two is death. This means to the average person if you have to go to a funeral you are better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Whether or not you fear death you do have to cope with it. Basically, you will cope with it in one of two ways: with hope or without hope. Two things have to be true, either this life is all there is or there is more to life than this life. This is one reason why I wish everyone would consider Christianity because I don’t know of any faith, or any religion, or any spiritual concept that gives more hope for death than Christianity. If just this one statement that David wrote is true, to rephrase Winston Churchill, “Death is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is just the end of the beginning.” The last walk we will ever take is the walk with death. We don’t know when, where or how we are going to take that walk, but we will. Let’s do what Davi

In the third stanza of Psalm 23, David shares with us that this shepherd loves us so much he will correct us when we make the wrong decisions and he will lead us to make the right decisions. If you are on the wrong road because of a wrong decision you’ve made, there is hope for you. If you are at a crossroads and you don’t know which way to go, there is help for you. In the third stanza, we find that there is healing for our past, help for our present, and hope for our future. David writes, “He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake” (Psalm 23:3). We are all God’s restoration projects at times in our lives. This beautiful sentence tells us how God carries out that project perfectly.

Stress is robbing us of our rest and the lack of rest is increasing our stress and we are caught in this vicious cycle of physical, emotional and spiritual fatigue that never seems to end. But the good news is, the Lord is your shepherd, and He promises to give you rest. Close your eyes and get that imagery in your mind. You are a sheep. You have been walking all day. You are tired, thirsty and hungry. All of a sudden, you are lying in thick green grass, under the shade of a tree, beside the still waters of a stream that is flowing right beside you, resting easy. No matter where you are, and no matter what you are going through, that green grass, those still waters are right in front of you. You can enjoy them every day and rest easy. In the beautiful stanza of this beautiful psalm, we are told that if we follow the shepherd, we will find the rest we are looking for in these green pastures and still waters.

As we begin this study, we’re going to start witt the first verse. Anybody who has ever heard this psalm before knows that it is actually not just the first verse, but it is the foundational verse of this passage. Everything else David is going to say in this psalm is built upon the first line in the first stanza, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). David gives us three reasons why, no matter what happens going forward, faith ought to be in, and fear ought to be out. Worship ought to be in, worrying ought to be out. Prayer to be in, and panic ought to be out. Let’s take a look at those reasons together.

As believers, we have a fire burning in us that is the Holy Spirit. As we live the Spirit-filled life, we are to be shining the light of Jesus to other people. There are things that we can do individually, as believers and together as a church, that will put out the Spirit’s fire and turn out the Spirit’s light. That is why we should not grieve the Holy Spirit by hurting His feelings nor should we quench the Holy Spirit smothering the fire. There is a difference between grieving the Spirit and quenching the Spirit. Here is the difference. We grieve the Holy Spirit by what we do to Him. We quench the Holy Spirit by what we refuse to let Him do through us. To put it another way, we grieve the Holy Spirit by doing what He tells us not to do. We quench the Holy Spirit by not doing what He tells us to do. So in this message, I want to share with you some things we must do, that the Spirit wants us to do, that to fail to do, would quench the Holy Spirit.

God the Holy Spirit loves you and wants what is best for you. He wants to take you only places where you should go. He wants to lead you to do things that only you should do. So the question is, “What are those things that a believer or an unbeliever can do that grieves the Holy Spirit, that breaks the heart of the Holy Spirit? Because, if we love God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit like we should, then we should never want to do anything that would bring them hurt to their heart. In today’s key passage, Paul tells us several things that we must do if we do not want to grieve the Holy Spirit and bring holy hurt to the One that loves us.

Have you ever been in the presence of a Christian that you just immediately knew there was something different about them from the vast majority of other Christians you are with? You could just sense their closeness to God. You could just sense they were filled with God’s presence and God’s power. Maybe you have even found yourself wishing that you could be like them. Maybe somebody has come to your mind right now. The good news is that level of Christian living is not just for the so-called spiritual superstars. You are going to see in this message that it is for everyone. We know that because of something that was written 2000 years ago and who have brought to Jesus through the Spirit of God and lived His life filled with the Spirit of God.

What happened in that upper room to them was a low blow. Their dreams were going up in smoke. Their hopes were being dashed and the world was being turned upside-down. Everything was going wrong. Judas had just left to betray Jesus. Peter had just been told he would soon deny Jesus. Worst of all, Jesus tells them not only that He is going to die, but He is going to leave them. You name it, these disciples felt it. They were depressed, afraid, discouraged, and confused. But Jesus said that the Holy Spirit was so important that it would be to their advantage for Him to physically leave them, so the Spirit could come live inside them. Jesus said we would be better off having the Holy Spirit inside of us than to have Jesus beside us. You read that correctly. We are better off today with the Spirit inside of us than the disciples were with Jesus beside them, and in this message, we are going to learn why that is.

Have you ever thought about the fact that any religion, any spiritual belief that talks about any heaven or hell always talks about heaven being “up” and hell being “down.” You find it all over the Bible. For example, Psalm 14:2 says, “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind...” You see, Christmas is really just the beginning of a round trip that Jesus took from heaven down to earth and then took back up to heaven. In the second chapter of a letter that Paul wrote called Philippians, Paul describes this round trip. He tells us in this passage that if we do three things, we too can take the way up to heaven.

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where lying is common, practically expected, and seemingly just the way we do business. But at the end of the day, character is still important, and it still matters. It matters not just morally, ethically, and spiritually, but practically. We began by saying that the foundation of character is integrity. In this message, we are going to learn that the first fruit of integrity is honesty. Integrity is more than just honesty, but there can be no integrity without honesty. There is a man in the Bible who exemplified this trait in an incredible way, and that is Samuel. What elevated Samuel, both in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his people was his absolute, unfailing, uncompromising honesty. What distinguished him was not the high positions that he held, but the honest person that he was.

In our first message of this series, we are going to help those of us who need God to show up in a strong way in our lives, but for whatever the reason He hasn’t yet. We all have those times when we wonder, “Is God asleep? Has He taken a leave of absence? I need God to do something, and I need God to do something now.” In the fourth chapter of a book called Galatians, a man by the name of Paul takes us all the way back, not just to the Christmas story, but what happened before the Christmas story. There are three things we can always know is true about God that should give you, not just peace about your present situation, but patience knowing that God will show up. If you are wondering where God is, what God is doing, and when God will act, let the Christmas story remind you of three things that are always true.

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Have you ever wondered why life is so hard? Why it is such a struggle? Why there is so much suffering, pain, and agony in the world? Have you ever wondered why it is sometimes so hard to maintain a good marriage? Raise good children? Please your boss? Get your act together financially? Have you ever wondered why somebody is always fighting somebody else? It is because there is a war going on. It is a war between two rulers: Jesus and Satan. There are two kingdoms light and darkness. There are two armies – Jesus’ and the devil’s. The reason why everywhere you look there are struggles, suffering, and strife. We have a theological term for that. It is called spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is the battle that is being fought in the invisible spiritual world that has visible physical consequences. Every problem that you have outside of you is really a problem either on the inside of you or the inside of the person causing you the problem. So in this war manual that Paul gives us, he is going to share with us

Interestingly, work was not a human invention, it was actually God’s idea from the beginning. The very first command that God ever gave a human being was to work. Adam and Eve had barely taken their first breath when God said to them, “Your job is to be fruitful, to multiply and you are to subdue the earth. You are to rule over it and make it productive.” In fact, the very first time the word “work” is ever used in the Bible is used at the beginning of the biblical story, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). Nobody is exempt if they are able from work. Even the Son of God came to do the work that God had given him to do. At the end of his life, Jesus said this, “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). So it shouldn’t surprise us that the Word of God has something to tell us about work and how we should work. With that in mind, Paul showed people then how to live within that economic system a

What would happen if every day of our lives every Christian experienced a power surge? What might happen in the church and what might happen outside the church? I believe our problem is not a power surge; it is surge protectors. There are many things that keep up from really experiencing God’s power. We are too busy. We are too uncommitted. We are too apathetic. We are too bothered if out of our comfort zone. More than anything else we need the one thing a daily basis that Paul talks about and it is, “We need a power surge of the Holy Spirit.” Here is the good news. The Spirit-filled life is not for super-star Christians, pastors or seminary graduates; it is for everyone who claims to know the Lord Jesus Christ. In this passage, Paul tells us three simple things.

There are only two dimensions where we can serve God: time and space. You live for God here and you live for God now. When you die, you go to a place where there no time and there is no space. That is why when it comes to our life, the time is always now. Our life is made up of time. When time is up, life is over. That is why the most important use of your time is spending most of your time on what is most important. Thankfully, God has not left us on our own to sort out how we ought to spend our time and how we ought to live our days on this earth. He has given us specific advice on the best way to use every day and get the best of every moment. You only have a certain amount of time and when time is up life is gone. So, how do we live so we understand that for us the time is now?

Let’s be honest. Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally, and it very rarely comes easily. It may be because of what the word means. The word “forgiveness” literally means “to let go” or “to send away.” It is a financial term that refers to the cancellation of a debt. When someone hurts you or does you wrong, they are in your debt. Forgiveness is your willingness on your own to simply write off cancel the debt. It is the willingness to simply say to a person who has done you wrong and really does owe you, “You don’t owe me anymore.” Sin is a debt that is owed. When you sin against someone you owe them. When they sin against you, they owe you. The only thing that pays the debt off is forgiveness, but when somebody is forgiven somebody has paid. Many of you need to become debt free today. If you will take three simple steps, you can become just that.