Could it be that some Christians are missing out on some of the blessings God would have them enjoy? In this sermon Pastor Clark explores how God made us as a complete, whole being – and how He longs to restore us as the same. Listen to learn more of God’s divine purpose for the church to be a part of that restoration!

<p>Could it be that some Christians are missing out on some of the blessings God would have them enjoy? In this sermon Pastor Clark explores how God made us as a complete, whole being – and how He longs to restore us as the same. Listen to learn more of God’s divine purpose for the church to be a part of that restoration!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

Emotional Health

Chester Clark

Two-Thirds Blessed

Father in heaven, today we are reminded of your teaching that except we become as little children, we cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Lord, today we just want to pray that you will help us to be restored to the innocence, the honesty, the transparency, the trust of little children.

Help us, I pray, as we open your word, that we might have our hearts moved by your spirit, that we might be better men, better women, better boys and girls for having been here today.

If you have your Bibles, you can turn with me to 1 Samuel, chapter 12.

In fact, a few weeks ago, we studied, didn't we, about David and Goliath, how God used David to demonstrate that he was still alive, that he was still on the throne.

So, David had much that he could look back on and see the blessings of God in his life.

And I'm sorry, I meant to say 2 Samuel chapter 12.

2 Samuel chapter 12, we pick up the story here.

David was once called a man after God's own heart.

He was a genuine, transparent, innocent, simple boy, man who trusted in God and obeyed his word.

He was used by God to kill Goliath, and he was protected by God for years on the run from a jealous King Saul, remember that?

And In 1 way or another, God protected him.

He had once had such respect for the word of God and the will of God that even when given the opportunity to take the life of his aggressor, to take the life of Saul, He had simply, you remember, cut a corner off of his skirt and shown this to his king and said, you know, I could not lay my hand against the Lord's anointed.

He was so open to using God's methods to solve God's problems.

He wasn't going to take things into his own hands and use his own human resources, his own human methods.

And so David was a great man, a great king, and 1 who had been able, almost single-handedly, to establish the kingdom of Israel, from taking from what Saul had done, coalescing it into the nation that it became, fortifying it and building the military and so forth.

And yet we find in these chapters in 2 Samuel, we find that David fell to a sin, the sin of adultery.

We're not going to spend a lot of time talking about David and Bathsheba here this morning.

The main point is that David had been so blessed of God, so honored of God, 1 might ask the question, how could someone who had been so close to God, so connected with God, so in tune and open and transparent and willing to be used by God and willing to use God's methods to solve his problems.

How had 1 like him come to the point where he not only committed adultery, but when he couldn't cover it up in the way that he thought he wanted to cover it up.

David, King David, responsible for the life of 1 of his most faithful subjects.

And as we look in the Bible here in 2 Samuel chapter 12, we see that the Lord sent Nathan to David.

He came to him and said to him, there were 2 men in 1 city, 1 rich and the other poor.

The rich man had exceedingly many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing except 1 little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished.

And they grew up together with him and with his children.

It ate of his own food and drank from his own cup and lay in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him." Verse 4, and a traveler came to the rich man who refused to take from his own flock and give his own herd to prepare 1 for the wayfaring man who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him." Nathan paints this picture before King David.

And King David's intellectual understanding of justice takes over here.

And it says, David's anger was greatly aroused against the man, and he said to Nathan, as the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die, and he shall restore fourfold for the Lamb, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.

Then Nathan said to David, You are the man." Wow, what a story.

And this story indicates that David not only had become an adulterer and a murderer, he had also become a hypocrite, hadn't he?

He had also become 1 who could intellectually recognize the right from the wrong, but who was not living it in his own life.

David had somehow began to trust perhaps in his past, he began to trust in his spirituality.

I mean he wrote beautiful music, he wrote songs, he led out in worship, he had done great things for God, great things for Israel, he began perhaps to trust in some of those things and to think in some way that they might compensate for those things which he was doing or which he was allowing in his own heart and life.

You see there's a tendency in our experience, I believe, as humans, to try to compartmentalize our lives.

There are certain areas of our lives where we're willing to give God freedom to do his thing.

And we've sort of divided out the different parts of our being, and we think of ourselves, and we are, mental beings and spiritual beings and physical beings and emotional beings, but the problem is sometimes we think that we can allow God to have access to some of those areas of our lives without having access to the rest of our lives.

I think maybe this is what happened to David.

David began to think, well, I'm okay in this area.

It sort of compensates for the other areas.

We might think of the sort of like the Western, at least, idea of the yin-yang concept of being good and evil and trying to keep them balanced.

As long as you have more good than evil, well, it doesn't work that way in the Christian experience.

And I suppose even around those, those around David, there's those around David who also were not living according to the will of God and the Word of God.

There were challenges that those around him faced as well.

Do you really believe, do you really believe that nobody knew about the Bathsheba thing?

Do you think David sent for her and nobody knew?

Or do you think there were some people who knew, but they couldn't confront the King.

They couldn't say anything to King David.

King David is such a powerful man, they couldn't confront him.

Turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians 5.

And this is going to be, 1 Thessalonians 5 is going to be what I hope you remember when you leave today, we're going to try to explore some areas of our lives that may not be easy to put into words, but I hope that when the message today is finished, this concept will be in your mind very clearly.

First Thessalonians chapter 5 and verse 23.

When you're there, why don't you say Amen.

Verse 23 says, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you, how?

And may your whole spirit, soul, and what does he say, and body be preserved how?

Blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

You see, sometimes we think of ourselves as being spiritual and God has to help us spiritually, right?

We think of ourselves as being spiritual beings and God needs to help us with our sin problem, forgive us for our guilt and those things which we define as sins, or we know to be a sin.

And we say, OK, God's helping us spiritually.

It's good when God brings us to an understanding of our spiritual need and our spiritual awareness.

Now we know, as Bible-studying Christians, we know that God also has a message for us physically, doesn't he?

He says, Beloved, I wish above all things that you would prosper and be in health, even as your soul prospers.

And so God wants us to prosper physically as well as spiritually.

But notice with me, there are 3 elements here, and There's many ways of dividing, I guess, the human being up.

But the passage here in 1 Thessalonians says, I pray that your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless.

And I would propose to you today that there's a third area of our lives that we often don't recognize that we need to give God access to.

We need to give God permission to work in.

And I'm proposing today, and the title of my message states that if we don't allow God to deal with us in this area of our lives, we are only two-thirds blessed.

We don't have the complete blessing that God wants us to have.

Is it better to be two-thirds blessed than one-third blessed?

But is it better to be completely blessed than 2 thirds blessed?

Breaking the Power of the Past

Have you ever done that, kids, boys and girls?

Ever gone to your parents and said, look what we found out here.

But When the 10 sons of Jacob came to him with what they had found, Jacob knew immediately what he was talking, what they were talking about.

Jacob had 2 sons that were his favorite sons.

There was Joseph the older and Benjamin, the sons of his favorite wife.

And as they got older, there was predictably in such a family, sibling rivalries and disagreements and jealousies and competition.

And as 1 day, Jacob gave his son, Joseph, a special garment.

A multicolored garment, which must have been sort of like a very, very unusual gift for a young boy to have.

And there Joseph would be running around the family compound with his special coat standing out from all the rest.

That didn't help the jealousies or envies, did it?

And then Jacob sent his sons off to a far country to graze their crops And eventually Joseph was sent off to check on their well-being and to send them some provisions.

The 10 brothers said, here comes that dreamer.

And so they threw him into a pit first and eventually sold him to a bunch of traders that were on their way to Egypt.

And Joseph, the favored son of a wealthy patriarch, became a young slave in a foreign country.

Well, they had to have some closure to this.

I don't know why they felt burdened, probably because they knew the truth.

Instead of just allowing their father to think that Joseph was just missing and go into his own investigation, they brought back this coat dipped in a goat's blood and they showed it to their father and said, father, look at what we found.

And immediately When Jacob saw that coat of many colors mangled and torn and bloodied, immediately he knew the awful truth.

But immediately he thought he knew that Joseph was dead.

And yet we find that Jacob was only receiving what he himself had given.

First of all, I'd like for you to turn in your Bibles, or you can just read off the screen actually, Exodus 20, verses 5 and 6.

This is in the 10 Commandments, and it describes a part of the character of God.

He doesn't want to have, well, he can't have others involved in our hearts if he's going to be on the throne of our hearts.

And he says, I'm a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those that hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." Here we find Jesus, or a description of God that is not simply a vindictive God.

It's not that God is going to punish somebody for something their parents or grandparents or great-great-grandparents did.

That's not what God is trying to say here.

In fact, we can read elsewhere in the Bible, particularly in the book of Ezekiel, we talk about how a person is punished for his own sins, not somebody else's sins.

That's a principle that God has put in place.

When we're talking about, at least when we're talking about the punishment of eternal death, the eventual punishment of the wicked.

But do you realize that there are consequences to our decisions that are far-reaching, even extending down into our family tree?

If we were to figure that our decisions will extend to 3 or 4 generations, that means the decisions that I make today, that most of you make today, will continue to have repercussions down through about the year 2300 or so.

We're going to continue to have generations following us, not because they are doomed by our decisions, but because they're influenced by our decisions.

And what we see, what we see, if we were to do some research and to look into the family line of Jacob.

Now I know this is gonna be a little small for some of you sitting far back, but at the top here we have Hagar, excuse me, sorry.

At the top here we have Hagar and Sarah and Abraham.

And of course Ishmael is cut off from the family.

But you remember it all started out with Abraham lying.

Abraham lied twice about Sarah being his sister.

Actually, it was half true, but it wasn't completely true.

Then we have Isaac, who was the favored son, and Isaac and Rebecca were married.

In fact, you can read in Genesis 27 that many lies went back and forth between Isaac and Rebecca.

Rebecca was in fact lied to her father Laban, remember they hid those images they stole from Laban's household.

There was deceit practiced in the household of Isaac.

And Isaac also had a favored son and a cut off son, Jacob being the favored, Esau being the cut off, and Jacob himself was a liar too.

You remember what happened when he wanted to get the birthright?

Well, he thought it was honestly his because he had traded it with Esau for a mess of pottage.

But he wanted that birthright that he knew his father was about to give to Esau, and so he went, and you remember what he did?

He covered his arms with animal skins because his brother was very hairy.

I don't know if he was that hairy, but anyway, and he covered his neck with animal skins and then he went and I suppose he put on his best impersonation of Esau's voice and he tricked his father into giving him the eldest son's birthright.

Is it any wonder then that Jacob himself now is holding a coat which symbolizes deception.

A coat which is a lie, a lie because the 10 sons of Jacob all knew that they had not killed, or that Joseph was not dead, that he had not been killed by a wild animal, but they had sold him into slavery in Egypt.

Perhaps 1 of the most remarkable parts of this story, and It goes along a little bit with our children's story today.

Perhaps the most remarkable part is that 30 years passed or more, however many years it was, and those 10 sons kept this a secret.

I think it was Benjamin Franklin once that said that 3 people can keep a secret as long as 2 of them are dead.

And imagine that 10:10 sons knew their brother's destiny.

They knew what had happened to him And years went by and they never let the secret spill.

It's pretty remarkable, and it's a pretty remarkable testimony as to how deeply ingrained the practice of deception had become in the family of Jacob.

I think this is what Jesus is talking about, what God is talking about when he says, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children and to the third and fourth generation.

It is not so much that God holds us accountable and we will be punished in the end for our grandparents' sins, as much as it is that we learn.

We learn from those who've gone before us.

You see 3 things that are current in all the generations here.

You find that there's a favored child in each generation.

And you find that there's sibling rivalry.

These are all things they learn from the previous generation.

If we were to look a little further at another genealogy, if we were to look at the genealogy of David.

And once again, we're remembering how he was born.

And David at 1 time was known as a man after God's own heart, remember that?

David had eventually become 1 who committed adultery and murder and it seems as though he had a weakness for sexual sin.

We find here that David had a number of children, well first of all he had a number of wives, right?

Well, I won't try to read all of them here.

But the 1 who had been the wife of Uriah, who he killed, was Bathsheba.

And these 2 wives had children, 1 of them Amnon, and you remember what happened to Amnon.

Amnon raped his younger sister, who was the daughter of 1 of David's other wives, Absalom's sister Tamar.

Absalom became angry with that, you remember, and Absalom murdered his own brother Amnon.

And here we find the exact same sins Absalom is guilty of were first the sins of David.

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Emotional Health

Two-Thirds Blessed

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Two-Thirds Blessed

52m

Breaking the Power of the Past

48m

Sound Doctrine