©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

02/08/04

The Lord Is My Portion

2/8/04 The Lord Is My Portion

In just a few minutes we will return to the study we left unfinished two weeks ago,

but given the recent events in my own life

I really must catch you up on where I’ve been since we were last together.

Two weeks ago

I mentioned to you before I started preaching

that my mind was just a tiny bit distracted

because my daughter, Joni, was in the Petaluma General Hospital

in labor with our first grandchild.

Following our morning service

I pushed you all out the door as quickly as I could

and headed home to see if there was any word

on how things were progressing.

Sandee called soon after I got home

and the report I received was not good.

Joni had been in hard labor for a number of hours

and little Matty

was making it abundantly clear

that he either would not

or could not make his entrance into the world.

Sandee continued to give me updates throughout the afternoon,

each of which seemed more discouraging than the last.

Joni had been fully dilated for hours,

and from everything that could be seen on the outside

that little guy should have made his appearance.

But what we didn’t know at the time

was that little Matty’s head was large enough

so that it was getting lodged on Joni’s pubic bone

and given his head size

and her bone structure

it was physically impossible for him to make it past.

For more than 5 hours Joni kept pushing with everything she had.

I didn’t fully realize the degree of her efforts

until I saw her the next day.

She pushed so hard and so long

that her entire face was swollen as I’ve never seen it before

and both eyes were all black and blue from the degree of stress.

She looked like the guy who lost in the final scene of one of those Rocky movies.

I was scheduled to fly down to San Francisco on a flight leaving Monday morning,

but as the reports became more and more discouraging

I called the airlines and changed my reservations to the next flight to San Francisco with an open seat,

a red-eye leaving just after midnight Sunday night.

I talked to Sandee about 7:30 Sunday evening,

learned there was still no progress,

got in the car and drove to Anchorage.

When I reached Anchorage

I tried calling Joni’s cell phone every 15 minutes until I got on the plane,

but could get no answer,

and heard nothing more until I got off the plane in San Francisco at 8:00 Monday morning.

I went to the first phone I could find,

finally got through to both Matt and Sandee

and found out that, just shortly after I’d left for Anchorage the night before,

Matthew Gregory Thacher entered the world through C-section,

and both mom and baby seemed to be doing great.

I understand now why, in earlier generations,

so many babies

and so many mothers died in childbirth,

and I do praise our Lord

for the medical resources we have available to us today.

Now, I’d like to be able to tell you that,

as your Pastor and the designated resident spiritual giant here at PBF,

in the 24 hours between 8:00 A.M. Sunday

and 8:00 A.M. Monday

I lived with a strong sense of calm peace and assurance,

knowing that my Lord was holding my little girl

and my grandchild in His arms,

and that no matter what happened to either of them,

He would once again work all things together for good in the lives of all of us.

But the truth is,

for 24 yours I was a mess.

Looking back on it,

the most fascinating period for me

was the time between 8:00 P.M. Sunday night

and 8:00 A.M. Monday morning

when everything I was feeling

was completely inconsistent

with what was actually true.

The truth was

by 10:00 P.M. Sunday night

my daughter was no longer in labor,

no longer in agony,

and my grandson was all curled up snug and warm

in a little blue blanket next to her.

But all night long on that flight from Anchorage to San Francisco

I lived in a constant cycle of praying for their safety,

then dozing off for a few minutes,

and then waking up again to my emotional fear and pain

and praying some more,

and then dozing off,

and then waking up to repeat the whole cycle again.

And looking back on that night

I can see once again

how utterly unreliable our emotions are.

Sometimes they tell us the truth.

Sometimes what we feel

lines up perfectly with what’s really happening.

But so often what we feel

is completely inconsistent with what’s real.

And at those times

all we can do is to take what we feel

and keep bringing those feelings to our God

trusting Him to bring what we feel

in line with what is true.

1PE 5:7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

1PE 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

1PE 5:9 But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.

1PE 5:10 After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.

1PE 5:11 To Him be dominion forever and ever. Amen.

ISA 40:28 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth Does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable.

ISA 40:29 He gives strength to the weary, And to him who lacks might He increases power.

ISA 40:30 Though youths grow weary and tired, And vigorous young men stumble badly,

ISA 40:31 Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.

And I must admit,

it really is great

when we once again see our God as He really is,

and what we feel finally lines up with what’s true.

The first human being I encountered

after getting off the phone in San Francisco

was the lady at the car rental counter,

and as I stood there filling out the paperwork for my rental car

I kept having to fight off this urge inside me

to vault across the counter and give her a big hug just to celebrate the wonder of life.

You’ll be pleased to know I did successfully resist the urge.

I knew you’d all want to see a picture of the most recent addition to our blood line,

so I brought one to share with you.

We did have one more emotional hurtle to overcome

shortly after Matty’s birth.

We were all set to bring him home from the hospital

when, at one o’clock in the morning during Joni’s final night there,

the medical personnel

suddenly bundled little Matty up,

put him in an ambulance

and transported him to another hospital about thirty miles away,

one that was equipped with an infant intensive care unit.

There he was hooked up to all sorts of machines

and subjected to all sorts of tests for the next two days.

The doctors and nurses had seen something in Matty’s behavior in the hours following his birth

that they thought might be indications of a seizure,

so they ran every test they could come up with

to see if there was any problem.

In the end they found no problem whatsoever,

but it put us all back into our anxiety modes for another 48 hours.

At last report

everything has now finally settled down

into the normal utter chaos that comes with the birth of the first child

and we’ve assured Joni and Matt that

in our experience it is a chaos that will continue for at least the next 25 years.

Well, this is now our third week

in a series we are calling “Life’s Greatest Surprises”.

For those of you who may be new with us,

and unaccustomed to the rather strange way in which my mind sometimes works,

you might appreciate just a few words of explanation

about how and why we got into this study in the first place.

This past Christmas Eve,

while visiting our daughter and son-in-law in California,

I got to thinking about how so many things in my life as a Christian

have turned out so differently from what I had expected

during the early days of my walk with the King.

I jotted down a list of 18 things

that I have labeled “Life’s Greatest Surprises”.

The first and greatest surprise on my list was God Himself.

His personal entrance into my life took me completely by surprise,

and then the growing discovery of His kindness,

His compassion,

His absolute niceness has been an ongoing surprise that continues to this day.

The older I get

the more I understand these words of Jeremiah.

LAM 3:21-24 This I recall to my mind, Therefore I have hope. The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

His lovingkindness

and His compassions are new every morning.

What a powerful way of communicating the truth about our God.

I hope you do see what the prophet is saying.

He’s telling us that our God’s kindness to us,

His expressions of compassion for us

will continue on this earth

as long as there is a sunrise,

as long as there is a tomorrow,

as long as there is yet another day.

I had a window seat on my flight from Anchorage to San Francisco two weeks ago,

and at one point in my sleeping/praying cycle

I opened my eyes and looked out the window

at the first rays of the sun

just clearing the top of some California mountain range.

And as I saw that sunrise

I remembered the words of that song

that we sometimes sing.

When the morning falls on the farthest hill,

I will sing Your Name, I will praise You still.

When dark trials come and my heart is filled

With the weight of doubt, I will praise You still.

For O Lord our God, you are strong to save

From the arms of death, from the deepest grave,

And You gave us life in Your perfect will,

And by Your good grace, I will praise You still.

We do not have to begin this day

hoping that the kindness and forgiveness and compassion

that we received from our God yesterday

will still hold for today,

that some of it will slop on over

into our lives now.

We don’t need yesterday’s kindness from our God,

we don’t need yesterday’s compassion and forgiveness

because with each new dawn

He renews them to us once again in full measure.

I know this is getting just a little off track from my list of surprises,

but as long as I’ve brought us back to these verses in Lamentations

there’s one other thing I want to point out in this passage.

There is a reference in these verses

to something that was imbedded in the Old Testament Jewish culture,

but something that we could easily miss

without an understanding of the social structure God had established for them.

When Jeremiah wrote these words

he said, "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

That statement, “the Lord is my portion”

is a reference to something that took place in the nation of Israel

in the days immediately following the Jew’s entrance into the land of Israel.

And for this to make sense

we need just a quick overview of Old Testament Jewish history.

As you know, the Nation of Israel began with Abraham and Sarah.

Abraham and Sarah had one son, Issac,

Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob.

Jacob was chosen by God to carry on the bloodline for the future nation of Israel.

Jacob then had 12 sons who formed the foundation for the Nation.

One of those sons was Joseph

who, in his teens, was sold into slavery to Egypt by his brothers.

Through the direct intervention of God,

Joseph rose from his slavery to become the second most powerful man in Egypt,

and was used by God to deliver that whole region

from a famine that devastated that section of the world for seven years.

As a result of that famine

all the descendants of Jacob moved down into Egypt

where they lived and multiplied for 430 years.

In their early days in Egypt they were treated with great honor

because of their brother, Joseph.

But when Joseph became only a distant memory in the minds of the Egyptians,

and the Israelites continued to multiply rapidly,

the Egyptians forced the Israelites into slavery.

Then, four centuries after their arrival in Egypt,

God brought Moses onto the scene,

and through Moses freed Israel from their Egyptian slavery

and brought them into the land He had promised to Abraham,

the land of Israel.

Now, once the people entered the land,

God guided Joshua, who took over leadership after Moses,

in the division of that land,

dividing the country into eleven sections,

and allotting a section to 11 of the 12 tribes of Israel.

But one tribe,

the tribe of Levi,

received no land allotment in the this new nation.

With Aaron, Moses’ brother, serving as the first Priest for Israel,

the tribe of Levi had been placed under Aaron’s leadership,

given to him to serve as the priests for the Israelites from that time on.

And in Numbers 18:20 we have God making this remarkable statement to Aaron.

Then the Lord said to Aaron, "You shall have no inheritance in their land nor own any portion among them; I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”

God then instructed the Israelites to set up a system

in which the Levites were dispersed throughout the nation,

and a tithe was collected from the other 11 tribes

and given to the Levites to meet their physical needs.

But it is that phrase spoken by God to Aaron that I want to draw our attention to,

that phrase where God says,

“I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”

God had chosen the Levites for Himself.

He had given them the highest calling any Israelite could have,

the calling of standing between the people and their God.

When God said to the Levites, “I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”,

it was His intention to honor them with the greatest prize of all,

the greatest inheritance of all,

the greatest portion any person could ever possess.

He was saying,

“Your countrymen each receive a little piece of dirt as their hope for the future.

They will have to toil over their little bit of dirt,

working it,

caring for it,

guarding it,

protecting it.

And in the end it can give back to them

only what they have already poured into it through their own effort and agony.

But you, Levites,

you get ME.

I am your portion.

I am your Provider.

I am your hope for the future.

You don’t have to care for Me,

and guard Me,

and toil over Me,

and protect Me with the hope of some return.

I will care for you,

and guard you,

and protect you,

and toil over you.

You are honored above all others, because I am your portion and your inheritance among the sons of Israel.”

But I have sometimes wondered how many of the Levites

really understood what God was saying.

I think there

were more than a few of them

who looked at the land allotted to their countrymen,

and then looked at what had been given to them,

and said to themselves, or to one another, “What a rip-off!

You get something real,

something you can touch,

something you can build your future on,

and all I get is God.”

And as I was reading Jeremiah’s comments in this passage from Lamentations,

it struck me how clearly the prophet had seen the truth.

LAM 3:24 "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

He knew there was nothing in this world

that a person could hold in his hands

and, through the possessing of it, really have hope for the future.

But in the midst of all of his turmoil,

all of the adversity that was flooding into his life,

Jeremiah saw the truth,

he saw the way things really are.

Because the Lord is my portion, therefore I have hope in Him.

And it is this same principle

that forms the centerpiece

for our life with God through Christ.

From the very beginning

what Christ came to offer us

was not forgiveness,

or purpose,

or healing,

or gifts,

or eternal life,

or great insights into life.

What He came to offer us was Himself.

Everything else is just fringe benefits.

But the one thing,

the only thing that gives us hope

is that we have Him,

with us,

in us,

for us forever.

And when we see things as they really are,

along with Jeremiah we will say, "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I have hope in Him."

I had intended to talk this morning

about the third big surprise on my list,

the true nature of spiritual warfare,

but my grandson got in the way.

If he behaves himself this next week

I’ll return to my list of surprises next Sunday.