Light in the Valley 1977

The message today is going to be based on the first three verses and the last three verses of the book of Habakkuk, which is a book that only has three chapters, and you can read it in a very short time at your own convenience toward the end of the Old Testament. Habakkuk chapter 1 verses 1, 2, and 3a. The oracle of God which Habakkuk the prophet saw, O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and thou wilt not hear, or cry to thee violence, and thou wilt not save me? Why dost thou make me see wrongs, and look upon trouble? Some of you will remember a man by the name of Bob Fell, who used to come here very faithfully.

He belonged to a church on the far east side, and for years he attended Bible studies on Monday or Wednesday nights. In fact, he was the one who got us to start out those Monday night Bible studies and agitated until we did it many years ago. Bob is now with the Lord.

One of the strong concerns that Bob had was that there should be more healing flowing out of the ministry of the body of Christ, and he didn't just complain about it and talk about it, but he did something about it. He would go to the hospitals and visit the sick, and he would pray with people. One day, Bob was feeling especially low, and he just shook his head, and he said, I don't know what's wrong, but every time I pray for somebody, they die.

So what do you say to him? Don't pray for me, Bob. Or do you say, as people often will, you're not thinking right, Bob. You're not thinking positive thoughts.

Or could it be that at that time, Bob Fell was in fact going through a real valley. Surely everybody among us who has made any kind of serious attempt to serve God has experienced with Bob times when things just go wrong. Now I'm not just, I'm not talking about when our thinking is sour and we're looking for trouble every time we turn a corner and ferreting out every kind of evil we can think about.

I'm not talking about those times when we truly have to repent of our complaining attitude and get our eyes back on the cross. I'm talking about times when we are in fact looking to the cross, thanking God for his mercy, and trying to do as far as we can tell the things we believe God wants us to do. And yet everything seems to go wrong.

You pray for people and it seems their plight gets worse. Problem after problem keeps knocking the pins out from underneath us. And we say, Lord, I can see your mercy as I look to Calvary, but I just can't make any sense out of these circumstances of mine.

What's happening in these situations is that we are in fact going through a valley. It's not wrong thinking or lack of faith necessarily or a bad attitude, but the fact that we're actually going through a valley, circumstances that are quite real. Maybe we're experiencing a kind of isolation or our daily life is just getting monotonous and boring, whatever it may be.

And while this is going wrong with us, we see brothers and sisters in the faith just chugging along, bearing lots of fruit, having a lot of success, enjoying their circumstances. Everything seems to be working fine for them. And we say to ourselves, and we often will pray to God himself, Lord, I can't figure this out.

A couple of days of this, maybe a few weeks perhaps, but this thing's going on and on and on. How long do I have to stay down here in this trough? What we need to get clear in our hearts when we're going through this, and many of us are, and all of us will and do from time to time, is that it is in the valley that God forms us into men and women who are in the image of his son. Moses, as we were talking about Wednesday night, spent years and years in the wilderness of Midian, cut off from his relatives, his fellow Jews, isolated from all the pleasures of Egypt that were his portion for the first 40 years of his life.

But every single day of those 40 years out there in the wilderness of Midian, Moses was being formed, into the God-fearing, broken, humble, meek, obedient man through whom God was going to deliver his people Israel from their Egyptian bondage. John the Baptist spent his entire youth and all of his adulthood in a wilderness, and it wasn't like going to a state park for your vacation. It was a real wilderness.

It was eerie, and it was dry, and it was desolate. And there in the wilderness, God was breaking him inwardly and toughening him out outwardly for the very brief ministry John the Baptist was going to have. And this preparation made him a burning and a shining light.

The town of Nazareth wasn't exactly Fifth Avenue for the Son of God. Here he spends his childhood, 30 years really, in almost total obscurity among people who are narrow and petty and mean and shallow. And when his ministry begins are the ones who are going to kill him right off the bat.

And at the very height of our Lord's popularity, if you want to call it that, he was still walking through a valley. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And right up to the moment when he is to drink the cup that he came to drink in order to set us free, he's going through it.

And never once do we ever hear Jesus complaining about it. Amid the sorrow and the grief which was common to his everyday life, he continues to glory in his Father. My meat and drink, my meat is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.

His joy is his God, his Father. Nor do we ever hear John the Baptist saying, OK, I've had enough of this. Get me out of here.

And Moses, for 40 years, meekly submits to the wilderness of Midian and becomes a man of deep, awesome, holy, godly peace. We need to learn to stop kicking against our valley experience, whatever it is, and to stop saying, get me out of here, Lord, either with our mouths or our hearts, and to learn with Jesus and countless others who follow in his footsteps that right down in the midst of these shadows is the light of God. And here we can truly find our satisfaction.

You don't have to get out of your valley in order to find God's peace. It's right down here in the middle of it. And you can find fulfillment and joy and every other needful thing right down there in the middle of your valley.

Listen to Habakkuk at the end of the book. Though the fig tree do not blossom, nor the fruit be on the vine, the produce of the olives fail, and the fields yield no food. The flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls.

Yet will I rejoice in the Lord. I will joy in the God of my salvation. God the Lord is my strength.

He makes my feet like hind's feet. He makes me tread upon my high places. Granted, Habakkuk didn't start out like that.

He started out with all kinds of complaints and questions. But Habakkuk learned, as every man and woman of God sooner or later needs to learn, that it's down in the valley where you will find God's light. And in that light, you will find every fulfillment and every satisfaction you could possibly imagine.

The best training school in the whole world for you and me is the valley where we are. Harvard Divinity School might make you a snob, and Fuller Seminary might make you a Pharisee. Any Lutheran seminary or Moody Institute of the Bible might train you in habits that will take you years to unlearn.

But the valley where you find yourself at the present moment, if you will accept it as from God, find God's light in it, and keep moving in that light, will prepare you exactly for the work God has you to do. But how do I accept this value from God and find God's light in it? By practicing, learning four lessons every single day down in the valley. First, I need to learn daily that no matter how bad things look, it's going to come out God's way.

Absolutely will. Listen again to Habakkuk just before the end of his book. He says, I will wait quietly.

I will just, I will wait quietly for the day of trouble to come upon the people who invade us. See, and for us, the people who invade us are not flesh and blood, but powers and principalities, rulers of this present darkness, spiritual realities that are evil, awesomely evil, Satan and his hosts. Satan's day of trouble is coming.

Be sure of it. It's going to come. It's going to work out God's way.

Jesus stood on the Mount of Olives and looked down over the city of Jerusalem. And in the eye of the spirit of his father, he could see ahead and he would weep. He wept as he saw 19, 20 centuries of anguish.

And he tells us about this. And this is exactly how it worked out. Stone upon stone thrown down one wave after another of Gentile armies sweeping through those streets.

But in the end, in the end, this is going to be the city of the great King. The Lord's light is going to arise upon Jerusalem. His glory will be seen upon Jerusalem and Gentiles will come to that light and Kings to the bright new brightness of its writing.

And so with us, we have to see that it's going to work out God's way. Jesus says, shall not God vindicate his elect who cried to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? Surely he will vindicate them speedily. He'll take care of it because he's in charge.

You're on a ship and this thing is going through a storm like you can't imagine. And you're sick in the stomach and you're scared to death and you just know it's going to sink. And then you see the face of the captain perfectly calm, absolutely settled.

He knows what he's doing. He knows what's going to happen. And the minute you see his face, all your fears are gone.

You know that no matter what the wind does or the waves, this ship is going to make it. The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him.

Secondly, I need to learn daily that God is in this valley with me and his presence is my life. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life.

Of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked, even my enemies and my foes came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though an host should arise against me, though armies should take the field against me, in this will I be confident. One thing have I desired of the Lord in the middle of all this junk.

That will I seek after in the middle of the valley, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. I can find God right down here in the midst of this apparent hell. We remember the time the disciples shouted, Lord, save us, we're perishing.

And Jesus wakes up, stands up and rebukes the wind and the waves and the great palm and then he turns to the disciples and says, why were you afraid, O ye of little faith? Didn't you know I was here? Isn't it enough for me to simply be in this boat? Don't you understand? And so it is for us. Lots of times, you know, everything looks dark, but just because everything looks dark in your life does not mean that it's darkness. It simply means most of the time that our eyes aren't open and we're not seeing it.

Lo, I am with you always. I will never leave you nor forsake you. For instance, there are times when we have services here or Bible studies or whatever it may be where everything just clicks together.

You know, you just feel the presence of God. Everything works. And then we have services and Bible studies and everything goes haywire.

Chaos. You know, nobody's paying any attention, it seems. Everybody's mind seems to be wandering.

We just can't seem to get it together. Does that mean because we can't seem to feel the presence of God that he's not here? He's still here. There are two or three here in his name.

He's here. He's here with us when we have a headache, when we're just swamped in problems, even when we have a sniffle. He walks with us in a fiery furnace.

He's here. Thirdly, I have to learn every day and continue to remember every day that God is my joy, even if everything else in my life lets me down. He's my joy.

Listen to this again at the end. Though the fig tree do not blossom, nor the fruit be on the vine, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herds in the stalls. Yet will I rejoice in the Lord.

I will joy in the God of my salvation. When everything was going smooth, it was very difficult for me to know whether I was rejoicing in the Lord, as I said I was, or whether I was rejoicing in the fact that I got grapes on the vines and olives on the olive trees and the flocks are growing and things are going well. You know, I got money in my pocket and everybody likes me.

But when I get stripped down so that I have nothing left but God, and I still rejoice, this means that I have begun to experience the pure joy of God. Who else is there in heaven but Thee, O Lord? And there is none on earth that I desire but Thee, O Lord. Now, there are people in the world right now who understand exactly what that means and are doing it.

There are men and women sitting in prison cells, and there are probably tens of thousands of them across the earth for their faith in Jesus Christ, who greet the dawn every day with praises to their God. And you don't have to go miles and miles to find people who have learned to do that. You just go down to the boulevard to the Whittier Convalescent Home, where we go every Wednesday afternoon.

There are many people there whose lives have been stripped down to nothing but sheer monotony. That's all you got left. Yet these people are rejoicing in God, praising Him.

They have a wonderful time with God. You say that's whistling in the dark. No, it isn't.

That's the purest form of faith, the most deep pleasure there is, and the most holy, awesome wisdom a human being can have. May God bring us to the place where we begin to see that He is our joy. When everything else has failed, that I can still rejoice in Him.

And finally, I need to learn every single day that God is my strength, and by His strength I'm going to emerge from this valley when the time comes. This valley that you and I may be walking through is not our destination, it's our training tool, but one day I'm going to be training to high places with my Lord. Now I'm getting stronger feet and I'm learning how to do it, but eventually, and it may be before death or it may be after death, that's God's problem, not mine.

I'm going to be up there with Him. Now the people of Israel perhaps didn't have to spend 40 years in the wilderness, but they sure did have to spend a season there. If they had shot from Egypt immediately to the land of Canaan in three weeks time and started to try to conquer it, they would have been absolutely wiped out by the Canaanites.

They needed that season in the wilderness to learn from God how He is their strength and how to conquer in His light, and so do we. If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. If we walk the valley with Him, we're also going to tread to high places with Him.

If we submit ourselves under the mighty hand of God, He will for sure exalt us in due time. This valley that you may be walking through right now is not a mistake and it's not some kind of hell. In that valley where you may be, God's light is to be found.

God help us to find that light and to walk in that light till we're ready for the high places. Let's pray. Amid so many Gospels that are going forth, oh God, that promise people that they can have their cake and eat it too, help us to see where our true joys are to be found.

And to experience that joy in the midst of the shadows, and the pain, and the anguish, or the frustration, or the loneliness, or whatever it may be that we are experiencing now. And we pray that before we leave this room today, Lord God, you would flood everyone here that longs for your peace with more than they could ask or think of your Holy Spirit. And that if there are any among us, Heavenly Father, that want to recommit their lives or open their hearts afresh, that you would help them to do this.

And that this will be a time of strong encouragement and radical healing. And a time when we move from death to life. These minutes that we have with each other this day for the work that you have called us to perform, we ask it Father in Jesus name.

Amen.