God Knows How!

Every survival kit should have a shot of humor in it. Life is so serious and it’s challenges so frequent. We run head on into problems that we don’t know how to solve. Now we can sweat bullets and initiate a nervous break down or learn how to laugh or as one person said, “Grin and bear it.”

That’s what I like so much about the comic strips in the newspaper. 49 pages are crammed with words and pictures of chaos. It’s like the whole world is falling apart. Then you come to the comic strips. It’s a mood swing paradise. You may not laugh hilariously but at least it will bring a grin to your somber lips.

One comic strip really stood out to me. It had a picture of an MRI machine sprawled out in the middle of a room with a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff hanging from an otherwise bare wall. Now if you have ever had an MRI you can relate to this without stretching your imagination at all. A woman’s head can be seen stuffed into this Closter phobic apparatus. That’s it. Then under the picture are these classic words.

“Everything is going to be fine, Mrs. Witzer! An orderly is getting a can of Crisco and a winch, and we’ll have you out of there soon!”

They had the know how to get the job done. It may have been primitive and unscientific, but if it worked, it worked and that’s all that matters.

You probably laughed or at least smiled when you read that, but in a serious note, let me remind you that most of us have been in tight spots or out right jams that left us searching for ways to get out but not knowing how. Crisco was not the answer, but God is because God knows how!

In the New Testament, Peter described a rare characteristic of God in these words. “The Lord knows how to deliver….” (II Peter 2:9)

That’s the story of God from beginning to end in the Bible.

• He knew how to make something out of nothing in creation – Genesis 1 and 2
• He knew how to turn water into wine.
• He knew how to give buoyancy to a piece of iron in the Old Testament.
• He knew how to redeem the world by an Old Rugged Cross.

God has never faced a situation that left him stumped and without the “know how” to take care of the situation. Somehow I just want to ask you to pause right now and verbalize these words: GOD KNOWS HOW! Repeat them three or four times. They are faith building and miracle producing words that affirm not only the existence but also the Sovereignty of God.

Now in keeping with that affirmation let us examine a few of the “know how’s” of our Sovereign God.

God knows how to rebuild broken lives.

Nothing is more tragic than a broken life. Purpose is pulverized. Happiness is harpooned. The future is forfeited and hope seems helplessly lost.

One young man described his broken life to me in a letter that he sent to me. “I am only a shell of what I once was,” he wrote, and I might add that the shell was crushed and broken. If it was a broken bone, we could have sent him to an orthopedic surgeon, but it wasn’t. It was a broken life, and who knows how to fix it? I can answer that. God can.

He knew how to give a deformed beggar a new set of legs; a madam an opportunity to escape a flop house in the red light district; a foul mouthed, floundering preacher the chance to clean up his act and start all over again.

If He did it for them, He can do it for you….and He knows how!

God knows how to produce resources from unexpected sources.

He squeezed water out of a rock (Numbers 20:7-8). How is that for resourceful thinking? There were no babbling brooks or azure sparkling waters from a beautiful lake near by for the nomadic Jewish pilgrims to drink from themselves and water their flock. Dehydration began to suck the liquid dry from their bodies. Death was imminent and no hope was in sight. The whole land was slowly but surely dying. All water sources were drying up, and water supplies were dwindling. Streams were becoming nothing but dry trenches of sun-baked boulders and dry sand.

Get the picture? Is it familiar to you? Does it seem like everything is drying up and once productive resources are looking more and more like the Sierra desert?

God knows how to produce resources from unexpected sources. When they had nothing to survive, God knew how to bring abundance out of a rock. All their needs were met and even plenty was available for their beasts.

He used a bird to cater food to Elijah. He drafted a donkey to provide much needed ministry to Balaam. He solicited the temporary service of a great, big fish to step into the fray when Jonah was a goner but for the grace of God. He used a little boy’s picnic lunch to feed a teeming multitude. God’s sources are unending and His resources always sufficient.

This is a promise from God to you. “My God shall supply ALL you need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19). He doesn’t tell us how. He just tells us He will. Trust Him, and He will assume responsibility for the sources. He knows how.

God Knows How

Pastor Jimmy & Bob

Radical Faith

A student at Stanford University answered a want ad for a stenographer. During the interview process, the applicant was informed what the job would entail and the necessary qualifications that were required. One particular applicant quickly replied, “I will take the job, but I can’t start until Tuesday.” That seemed a bit bizarre, but the young man was hired and told to return on Tuesday.

Upon arrival to assume his new position, someone asked why he could not come to work before Tuesday. No doubt with a grin on his face, he replied, “I had to go rent a typewriter and learn how to use it.” That young man later became the 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover.

The man who applied for a job and later occupied the White House was a radical opportunist. Timidity was not his tutor. Passivity was not his partner. He rose to the occasion and made his own opportunities.

Radical people do radical thing to achieve radical successes! The Wright Brothers were radical visionaries who believed that with proper equipment man could fly. Robert Kennedy spent his life living on the edge and declared that “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

Peter would never have left the security of a boat and walked on water had it not been for radical faith that believed what Jesus said and acted upon it.

Teilhard de Chardin described what radical faith really means in these riveting words. “Our duty as men is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist.”

Such faith depends upon the ability of our Almighty, limitless God and not upon ourselves. His wisdom will win every debate. His power will prevail in every crisis. His authority will abrogate any plans of the enemy.

Radical faith trusts Him. J. Hudson Taylor summed radical faith up in this simple statement. “Not a great faith we need, but faith in a great God.” The size of our faith is not nearly as important as is the Great God in whom we place our faith.

Turn your attention with me to some key elements of radical faith and how it plays out in our daily lives.

1. Radical faith is independent of flighty feelings.

Feelings are at the mercy of a variety of negative and positive emotional events that occur in life, but faith is based upon timeless, unerring principles. Feelings change but principles don’t.


The changelessness of God is painted so clearly in Hebrews 1:12. Look at it in the Message. “Earth and the sky will wear out, but not you; they become threadbare like an old coat; You’ll fold them up like a worn out cloak, and lay them on the shelf But you’ll stay the same, year after year; you’ll never fade; you’ll never wear out.”

My feelings will be as fickle as the weather, but God will ever be the same. As He was so He is and ever will be. Radical faith is attached to the Rock of Ages.

2. Radical faith does not waver under unfavorable circumstances.


God is not changed by our circumstances, but He can change our circumstances. God is our God and no circumstance can change that.

Annie Johnson Flint described it so eloquently in these poetic lines.
• God has not promised skies always blue,
• Flower strewn pathways all our lives through;
• God has not promised sun without rain,
• Joy without sorrow,
• Peace without pain.
• But God has promised
• Strength for the day,
• Rest for the labor,
• Light for the way.
• Grace for the trials,
• Help from above,
• Unfailing sympathy,
• Undying love.

Radical faith looks for God in every circumstance and finds Him there!

3. Radical faith is reconciled to leave time and timing with God.

Radical faith does not become accusative and bent out of shape with God when He fails to synchronize his calendar and wrist watch with mine.

The Psalmist understood this principle and confessed his confidence in God when he wrote, “My times are in thy hand…” (31:15) Again the same Bible that houses the treasure of John 3:16 also says this. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Radical faith believes that God’s time and timing are always perfect. He’s never too early and will never show up to late. Trust His timing. His character and integrity will always keep Him on time.

Developing Radical Faith
Pastor Jimmy & Bob

A Good Bad Thing

A puff of smoke. A pile of smoldering ashes. Everything was consumed in the flames of a raging fire that broke out in his hut. It was not only bad. It was a horrible disaster. He was totally wiped out.

A ship wreck was bad enough. He was the only survivor and was miraculously washed ashore on a small, uninhabited island. No one knew that he had survived or where he was. He was lost in “no man’s land” but managed to build a tiny hut out of driftwood to protect him from the elements and to store his few possessions. He prayed feverishly and constantly scanned the horizon for help but none came.

Then one day as he left the hut scavenging for food, he arrived back at his make shift hut and found it engulfed in flames with smoke boiling up into the expanse less sky. He felt the worst had happened, and everything was lost. Stunned and angry he cried out, “God how could you do this to me?”

He finally dosed off to sleep that night only to be awakened by the sound of a ship that was approaching the island which had come to rescue him. Excited but bewildered he asked the sailors how they could possibly know he was there. There answer was: “We saw your smoke signal.”

It was at that moment that he realized that what had happened to him was a good bad thing! What looked like a disaster was the beginning of his deliverance.

It was grace in action and the answer to his prayers in disguise.

Vance Havner, the famous evangelist from North Carolina, hit the nail on the head when he explained, “God marks across some of our days – will explain later.”

For Joseph, it was many, many days later. How do you explain detours through a pathetic pit or a pitiless prison to a man who is destined for the palace? 15 to 20 years passed and his hopes went up in ashes. How can you find anything good in all the bad that happened to him?

No explanation is better than the one that came from the lips of Joseph himself in Genesis 50:20. “You thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good…” In the eyes of God, the unpleasant things that preceded the palace were good bad things. Look at some of the good bad things from Joseph’s life.

He lost his shirt but he got a free ride to Egypt.

In Genesis 37:23, the Bible tells us that Joseph’s siblings stole his shirt (coat) right off of his back. Nothing could replace it because it was a one of a kind, tailor made gift from his father. No value could be placed upon it. It was sentimentally irreplaceable, but his captors took it, tattered it and doused it with blood to make it appear that an animal had brutally snuffed out his life. (v.33)

It was a bad situation perpetuated by cold, calculated men who were of his own flesh and blood. It was a bad, brutal plan carried out by bad men, but in the end it was a good bad thing. Read verse 28 again. The last 6 words are critical bits of information. “and they brought Joseph into Egypt.” That’s the good part. Egypt was farther from home but closer to the palace. In fact, he lost his shirt for a free ride to the place of his dreams.

His horrible humiliation was the gateway to exaltation.

How humiliating to be sold like a bar of soap and treated like a pig in a poke. They didn’t just strip him of his shirt. They robbed him of personal dignity.

They divested him of personal belongings and freedom of movement. He was a slave and had no rights of his own, but they could not and did not pry his dreams out of his heart.

His humiliation was worse than we can imagine, but it proved to be a good bad thing. Let me draw your attention to Genesis 39:2-3. It says, “And Joseph was brought down to Egypt…and the Lord was with Joseph and he was a prosperous man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptians. And the master saw…”

How much better can it get? As bad as it was, good came out of a bad thing. What a fantastic plan that God had, and it worked. He was in the house of his master. He was where God wanted him to be, doing what God wanted him to do, and the master SAW IT. That could never have happened over in the pit so God gave him a free ride to live in the palace environment. His humiliation was a small price to pay for the exaltation that was to come. It was a good bad thing.

A bad chapter has a good ending.

Pits and prisons are not the best settings for closing the book. Joseph had been there, but they were just chapters not the end of the book.

I’m not glamorizing the days that Joseph spent in prison, but as bad as they were, they proved to be a good bad thing. It was while in prison that he got acquainted with a cell mate that became a key player in reaching the palace. I don’t know what the butler had done to demand a prison sentence, but the meeting of Joseph and the butler were not chance meetings.

Two prison buddies had dreams that they could not understand and turned to Joseph for counsel. The baker was told that he would be killed by Pharaoh in 72 hours, and he was. The butler was told that within 3 days that Pharaoh would restore him to his original position in the palace, and he was. The only thing that Joseph ask the butler to do was to speak a favorable word to Pharaoh on his behalf, but the butler forgot. (Genesis 40:23)

This must have been a bad chapter in the story of Joseph’s life. Two years past, but then the butler remembered and encouraged Pharaoh to consult with Joseph. Genesis 41:14 is the beginning a story that has a bad chapter but a good ending. It says, “Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him out of the dungeon…”

Those chapters when God said, “Will explain later…” were now clear. God can help us to see the good in a bad thing.

Waiting Courageously,

Pastor Jimmy & Bob