Pastor Cho's Sermon Outline - Yoido Full
Gospel Church - Seoul, KoreaWhen Life Unravels Like Loose Yarn (When Your Life Is Entangled Like a Skein of Thread) Psalms 37:5 ~ 37:11 2003-06-01
When I was young, things were scarce, and my mother had to make our clothes by hand. She would go to the market to buy a ball of yarn, which had to be kept tight until ready to be threaded onto a spool. Helping mother with the yarn and spool was fun, but at times I would fall asleep while helping her. Then the ball of yarn would become too loose, and the thread would become hopelessly entangled. My mother would carefully straighten out the mess. When our lives unravel like loose yarn, what must we do?
Turn all blame on yourself. Of course, many things go wrong because of others such as a child born with a handicap due to one of the parent's drug use, or a person physically injured when a car drove through a red traffic light. Blaming others leads to resentment, grief, hatred, and revenge (Romans 12:14,17). Blaming others makes us think we are righteous, and we become arrogant. Let us even take the blame for the faults of others (Romans 15:1; Proverbs 10:12; 1 Peter 4:8), because it helps us to repent (Proverbs 28:13), to be humble (1 Peter 5:5,6), and to seek God's help (Isaiah 41:14,15).
Let God work out the problem. When we are struggling like a drowning person, God waits for us to come to a dead-end, until we become hopeless so He can help us. He wants us to "abandon" our greed and ourselves and trust in Him (Proverbs 3:5,6). We must pray until we receive rhema, God's personal word to us. A lady prayed for her unsaved husband, and received rhema that it was not time yet for him to go to church and repent. A few days later, he was in an accident and in a coma in the hospital. Because of God's personal word to her, she was happy knowing this was God's way of bringing him to repentance. He recovered and accepted Christ! When Esther, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were at a dead-end, God solved their problems, too (Esther 4:16; Daniel 3:17,18).
Envision and pray for the solution. Faith is the actualization of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1,2). When Jacob followed the principle of envisioning, he could picture God's will that he would become wealthy in livestock (Genesis 31:11,12), and he became a rich man. Envisioning is followed by faith (Psalm 37:9; Ephesians 3:20). Believe that you have received it and pray with conviction (Mark 11:24). Call those things that are not as if they were and go forward (Romans 4:17; Hebrews 10:38). An elder had numbness in his face; it was drooping. However, he continually confessed by faith that he was healed, and within one week Jesus healed him! Words are seeds of creation and have great power. Believe and see positive results (Matthew 8:13).
Heavenly Father, when our lives unravel, help us to take personal responsibility, humble ourselves, and envision and pray for Your solutions to our problems.
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