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 1 of 3
 SERMON
Yet I Will Praise Thee When we can't escape our circumstances we must trust God's ultimate plan
Have you ever asked God questions and felt you haven't received a good answer? I heard about a little boy once who said to his father, "How many people in the world, Dad?" He said, "I don't know Son." He said, "How many stars in the sky?" He said, "I don't know, Son." "How many fish in the sea?" "Don't know, Son." "Dad, you don't mind me asking you all these questions, do you?" "No, Son. How are you going to learn if you don't ask questions?" Maybe you've been that sort of parent. But have you ever asked God question after question and sort of got a shrug of the shoulders from heaven? You're not getting anything back. Habakkuk was a man who is introduced to us with a lot of questions. And we get the idea that he's not getting the answers. Eventually he got an answer that he didn't expect and that he particularly didn't want. Habakkuk's name means "to embrace," and I want to talk about embracing things we don't want to embrace or accepting things we cannot change. There's a fine line to walk there, because we don't want to accept things we can or should change, but I don't hear too many people addressing the human dilemma of accepting something you cannot change. And that's Habakkuk's story. I also believe that's where an awful lot of people are that we minister to in our churches. They live in a place where they have to be a Habakkuk, to embrace a situation that is far from ideal—to live in a marriage that is less than perfect and to exist in an environment that needs an awful lot of help. How to embrace that—that's the thing I want to talk about. Our circumstances can cause us to question God's presence in our lives He begins by asking a lot of questions. For example, Is God there? "How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, 'Violence!' but you do not save?" Have you ever said that? I talked to a lady just this week who has grown children. One of her children is living out of marriage with her boyfriend and has produced two children. One of those children is being abused by the father. That grandmother was put in the position of turning in her own children to the authorities. She said to me in tears, "How is it, Jill? I prayed. I did everything I could. I hammered on the doors of heaven, and everybody knew this was going on and that little was abused. Why didn't God answer?" So Habakkuk was saying, "Is God there? Does he care?" Now, the background to the book is very interesting. Josiah, the good king, had been killed in battle. Jehoiakim was on the throne. He was the bad guy. Habakkuk said, "Come on, God! How come the good guy gets killed and the bad guy is sitting on the throne?" Do you ever ask that sort of question? Another friend of mine has ended up in a mental ward in a hospital because as a little girl of six, terrible things were done to her, and the only way a little girl of six could cope with it was to forget it. So she decided to forget it, and the human mind, being the wonderful machine that it is, was able to do that. So all those memories were pushed out of her mind for years. Then she got married and went into , effective Christian service—wonderful girl. But in the joy of the birth of her second child, when all those mechanics are going on in the human body, and the hormones are being released that trigger all these things in our bodies and our brains, all those memories began to surface. She's been nine months now under therapy. I called her the other day as she was about to be released and said, "I want to ask you one question: What is your picture of God at this point? How can I pray for you, because I want to know that?" She said, "My picture of God, Jill, at this moment is he's standing there with his hands in his pockets. That's my picture of God." I wonder sometimes how we answer people like that. So the problem of unanswered prayer is high on the prophet's heart. Are prophets allowed to have such questions? God begins to answer in Habakkuk 1:59, and they're the sort of answers Habakkuk could have done without. Have you ever asked God something and then been sorry you asked? Now Habakkuk's in that position, because God leans out of heaven and says, "Look at the nations. Be utterly amazed. I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe even if you were told. Wait for it. I'm going to raise up the Babylonians." He describes them for the rest of the chapter as a ruthless people who will come "like the wicked foe pulling all of you up with hooks, catching you in his net, gathering you in his dragnet, rejoicing and glad, sacrificing to his net, burning incense to his dragnet." Habakkuk is left absolutely stunned, and he says to God, "First I asked you if you were even there. Then I asked if you didn't care. Now I'm asking you, 'Is this fair?' How can you use the unholy to punish the holy?" He loses hope in the goodness and justice of God. When you do that when you're in trouble; you've lost everything. Where are you going to go when you lose hope in the character of God? Now Habakkuk really has a problem on his hands. What do you do when the intellect is faced with a moral problem in the divine government of the universe to which it can find no solution? These are questions people are asking. Children are asking them today in their own way. A friend of mine is a schoolteacher in the Milwaukee school system. Just at the beginning of last semester, she was passing in the corridor by the lockers, and she came upon two children talking. One of them said to the other, "What sort of vacation did you have?" The little boy said, "Well it was sort of tough. My dad trashed me." "Oh," said his new little acquaintance, "that is tough. I know what it feels like, because my dad trashed me last year. Why don't we be friends?" As they stood looking at each other—nine years of age—describing their experience as children of divorce, of "being trashed," the teacher was able to approach and put her arms around those two kids and say, "Let me tell you about someone who will never trash you." She told them about God, taking that opportunity to be the Christian she was in that particular situation. As she talked with the kids, they asked all of Habakkuk's questions: "Is God there? Does he care? He's standing there with his hands in his pockets. He didn't do anything." One of the little boys said, "I prayed my daddy wouldn't leave me. I prayed every night. I prayed so hard. And he did anyway." So it isn't just the grownups who have these questions. Then we face the hard question of how to embrace that, how to accept something you cannot change. One of them said, "My dad's marrying again. That's why he left my mother." The other one said "My dad did get married again." It's something they couldn't change. It wasn't going to get any better. Could they learn to be a Habakkuk? We must trust God until we can see things from his perspective We come into chapter 2, and we find Habakkuk feeling a bit guilty asking all these questions. "I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts. I will look to see what he will say to me and what answer I am to give to this complaint." This is where we come to the mountaintop. He actually uses the picture of a high tower at this point, but the picture is the same. When we've added guilt to doubt and we end up feeling miserable and we can't even pray because we feel so bad about our attitude toward God, the only thing we can do is to wait until we see it from his perspective.
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