Proverbs 14:26

Worthy of trust and able to save

Let us hear from the word of the Lord from Proverbs 14, 26.

In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence and his children will have a refuge.

Parents know that for much of their lives, their children are rebellious little sinners. but we have all also experienced those all too short sweet periods when our children trust us completely. They live their lives just assuming that they can trust us to take care of their every need, that we know everything, and that we are strong enough to do anything, that they would take our hand and follow us wherever we went. They know not only are we their parents, but we are the best parents. No other parents can compare. That's how our faith in God should be, covering the whole of our lives as we trust him to give everything we need and care for us perfectly with all wisdom. And that's the message I think that we see tonight here in Proverbs 14, 26. We have been going through a series in Proverbs looking at the statements regarding the fear of the Lord. We began with the statement that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It's how we know what it is that we should know in order to be wise. Last week we heard that the fear of the Lord is to hate evil. God is good, God gets to define what is good and evil is anything that is against God and therefore we should be against it as well. Tonight we hear that we are to have a strong confidence in God and that he is a refuge. which leads us to our main point tonight, that the Lord is worthy of trust and able to save. The Lord is worthy of trust and able to save. We're gonna have three short points. First, why is God to be feared? Second, he's worthy of trust. And third, he is able to save. So first we want to remind ourselves, as we need to do throughout this series, about why God is to be feared. The simple answer is that he is our creator. He's omnipotent. He is holy. He is sovereign, which means he has both the ability and the authority to rule over our lives in every facet. Compare that to the other gods or so-called gods that are powerless and blind and deaf and without sense, speechless and stationary, unable to act. Or compare that to other people who appear to have power over us, but only in ways that are ultimately minor and temporal and fleeting here in this world. We don't fear Allah or Buddha because they have no power over us. They have no authority over us. We don't fear the state or our neighbor or the culture because ultimately whatever power they have over us is not important. It is a fleeting value, not eternal value. And as we just heard from the book excerpt that Ben was talking about, the fear of God is ultimately loving God as God. love of God as God. And that takes us to our second point. He is worthy of trust. A right understanding of God and who he is and how he is our Lord and sovereign places us in a position to give our full trust in him, having strong confidence that he will do what he says that he will in fulfilling his promises. The word here for confidence is elsewhere in scripture translated as confidence or trust or security. And we have this strong trust or this strong confidence when we are fearing the Lord. And we do this because he has the authority and the capacity to hold us accountable for what he would have us do. and he never fails in what he does. He's the perfect father who cares for us perfectly. To not trust in him is foolishness because he has never failed and never will fail. He has always been true. What he says is good is always good. He's not a fallible human parent who gives advice to the best of their ability, but sometimes it's wrong, or who sometimes even gives really good advice, but it doesn't entirely work out in the situation in which we are in, or sometimes gives advice based on their experience, but doesn't really work in our current circumstances. That's not the kind of father God is. God never fails. And because of that, you should have complete trust in anything that he says and that anything that he asks of you. You should have strong confidence and trust that it is to your good that you fear him. that you obey Him, that you bow down before Him, that you love Him and love His commandments and want to worship Him and want to seek after that which is pleasing to Him. And in Scripture, we have example after example of how this kind of strong confidence, this kind of strong trust is shown over and over again by the people of God. We have Abraham in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac and how he trusts in God, Hebrews tells us, that God will find a way for this to work. And God does. We have David in the battle against Goliath where no one else trusts that God is going to stand up for the people of Israel, but David knows that God has called his people to fight against these pagans and that God will be with him and he will be victorious, or God will be with him and he won't be victorious, but God will be there and fulfill his promises. We see in Job where in the face of horrific loss, of his family, of his every possession, of his health. He says,

naked I came from my mother's womb and naked shall I return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

In the face of literally incomprehensible sorrow, incomprehensible suffering, He still trusts in the Lord and what the Lord will have for him. We obviously see this over and over again in the New Testament as well as Peter, at least for a short while, has the confidence in Jesus to actually walk on water. before he has a wavering of his faith and confidence. But we know that that same Peter, along with Apostle John, was willing to face the beatings of the Jewish leaders and to continue to preach the gospel, even though they were forbidden to do so without punishment. We know that Paul, who worked his entire life to be the Pharisee of Pharisees, studied under the best, worked the hardest, was the one there holding the coats of those stoning Stephen. He got to the pinnacle of his career where he had authority over people to go in and arrest the Christians for what they were believing. And he thought he was doing right. But he gave all that up, all that he had worked for, because he realized that to truly trust the word of God meant to truly trust his son, Jesus Christ. And he was transformed and changed, and that same strong confidence in God led him to a life of suffering and beating and jailing and rebuking and battling for Christ. And we see that same strong confidence, not just in those grand stories of the Bible, but when any new believer hears God's word, is regenerated by the Spirit, and is transformed into a new creature, and responds in faith, responds by trusting Jesus. And that is our primary application tonight, trust in Jesus. We can trust God and his word because he is totally trustworthy without failing. He is an all-powerful promise keeper who has promised from the very beginning of time that he would send the solution to our sin. And he kept that promise. And he did so by sending his very own son, Jesus, who lived the life that we could not live sinless, died for us, took the punishment for our sin upon himself so that we could be reconciled with that perfect, holy, infallible, sovereign God. And I call on you tonight, if you are not a believer, to trust in God, to trust in his son, Jesus, who was sent to save sinners like you. If you have any questions about this, don't hesitate to reach out to those around you and learn more. Finally, point three, God is able to save. It tells us here that his children will have a refuge, and God is indeed a refuge. It is a safe place that is shelter from harm. It's not just a strong place like a fortress, which could be used for battle and be used offensively and to stake out your ground, but this is a place where you can come. when you're suffering, come when you're battling your enemies, and know that you can have complete safety in the arms of God. He can save you. He can protect you against all of those things, including his own wrath, which is upon you because of your sin. He can protect you against the enemies of sin and death and give you everything that you need. As Psalm 62 7 tells us,