Sirach 2:1-3 “My son, if you come forward to serve the Lord, remain in justice and in fear, and prepare yourself for temptation. Set your heart right and be steadfast, incline your ear, and receive words of understanding, and do not be hasty in time of calamity. Await God’s patience, cling to him and do not depart, that you may be wise in all your ways.” Today's podcast talks about how important it is to know in advance that if you want to serve the Lord you will be tempted. It is also important to cling to the Lord in times of calamity and wait for His patience. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Remain Steadfast
Sirach 2:1-3 “My son, if you come forward to serve the Lord, remain in justice and in fear, and prepare yourself for temptation. Set your heart right and be steadfast, incline your ear, and receive words of understanding, and do not be hasty in time of calamity. Await God’s patience, cling to him and do not depart, that you may be wise in all your ways.”
What originally drew me to this verse was the word steadfast. Each person in my mentoring group asks God to lead them to a word for the year. This is a word them will help guide them throughout the year. Before receiving that word we do a worksheet that asks questions like “What do you want in this upcoming year?” “What has been getting in your way?” and “What is the truth?” Once we have our word for the year, we come up with a mantra, something to say everyday to remind us of what is important to us this upcoming year. For instance, my word is Breakthrough and my mantra is “Every day I step out in boldness to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit, even if I am scared. I am unwavering in my commitment to grow in all areas of my life. This year is a year of breakthrough for me!!” One of my friends chose the word steadfast, so when I heard this verse at my prayer group yesterday I instantly thought of my friend Kelly.
Then when I went back to look up the scripture I decided it was a good one to share with all of you. I know that not everyone listening to this podcast is Catholic. If you are not Catholic and you do not have the Book of Sirach in you Bible, I want to encourage you to read through it. You can find it on biblegateway.com or any other website that has various versions of the Bible. If you just put “read Sirach” into the search bar, it will come up. There are also various Bible apps where you can read the different versions of the Bible. Sirach is full of so much wisdom, I think if you take a look at you will love it as much as I do.
The verse begins by telling us that if we come to serve the Lord, we should remain in justice and in fear. I think I have talked about fear of the Lord before, but let me just touch on it here really quickly. Fear of the Lord does not mean that you are afraid of God in the same way that you would be afraid of a bear, or someone robbing your house. Fear of the Lord means to be in reverent awe of His holiness, to give Him complete reverence and to honor Him as the God of great glory, majesty, purity and power. For instance, if God was standing in front of me, I would probably fall to the ground and kneel before Him, I may even be trembling. I wouldn’t be trembling because I was afraid he would hurt me, I would be trembling because it would be so hard to believe that God, who is all powerful, would visit me. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense.
The other thing that first verse says is to prepare yourself for temptation. If you are going to serve the Lord you are going to be tempted. The enemy does not want us working for the Lord. He will do whatever He can do to make that not happen. So, don’t be surprised if as soon as you decide to teach Sunday School at your church that you get an offer to make extra money working at your job. Don’t be surprised if as soon as you decide you will help out with the youth group that your boss suddenly wants you to work late on those days. Right when you decide you want to go into ministry and work for a church, you get an amazing job offer somewhere else for a lot more money. You will be tempted if you decide to serve the Lord.
The next verse says, “Set your heart right and be steadfast, incline your ear, and receive words of understanding, and do not be hasty in time of calamity.” I looked up the definition of steadfast to make sure I understood the verse correctly. This is the definition I found, “To be steadfast is to be firmly fixed and not subject to change, to be firm in belief and determination, and to be loyal and faithful.” God is asking us to set our heart right and then be firm and not to change it. He is calling us to be loyal and faithful in our beliefs. Can we do that? Can we set our hearts right and be steadfast? Next, the verse says to incline your ear, and receive words of understanding. This is something I talk about a lot because I feel God talks to me about it a lot. Are you taking the time to listen to the Word of God? Are you listening to what God wants to say to you? I feel as though God has a lot to say to us and we just aren’t listening. When this verse is talking about receiving words of understanding, it is not talking about words from the world, He is talking about His words of understanding. If you spend even just five minutes listening to the Lord each day, you will have such a greater understanding of your life.
This verse ends with “Do not be hasty in time of calamity. Await God’s patience, cling to him and do not depart, that you may be wise in all your ways.” Don’t jump to fix things on your own in time of calamity. For instance, you might have a loved one that is struggling and you want to just fix everything for them. However, this verse is telling us to wait for God’s patience. Maybe it is not a good idea for us to fix it. Maybe our loved one needs to go through this thing. On Monday nights mentoring session my mentor talked about how we usually don’t get our breakthrough until we have hit rock bottom. The same is true for our loved ones. What if we are taking away their chance at a breakthrough because we keep preventing them from hitting rock bottom?
The same is true in our own lives too. Most of the time when things are crazy in our lives, we aren’t sure why the things are happening. We can’t see the plan, we can’t see beyond the chaos. However, God can. He can see it all. He knows why we are in the mess we find ourselves in and He knows our way out. The verse says to await God’s patience, and then it also says to cling to him and do not depart, that we may be wise in all our ways. If we cling to God He will get us through whatever we are going through. He can get us through anything. If we listen to God and let Him guide us, he will lead us out of any calamity that we find ourselves in. I know it is hard to be patient. It is hard to be patient when everything is going right, being patient when calamity strikes is almost impossible. I say almost impossible because all things are possible with Jesus who strengthens us.
We can do this! We can await God’s patience and we can cling to Him and not depart. We can be steadfast in our love for Him. We can be steadfast in our listening to the Word of God and our reading of the Word of God. We can remain in justice and in fear and we can be prepared when the enemy tries to tempt us. I think it is important to remember that we will be tempted. This is important because then we can recognize the enemies temptations for what they really are and we can turn them down. Remember if we want to serve the Lord, we will be tempted, but we have the power to resist because we have the power of God living inside of us. We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, you are amazing and we are so grateful for You! Lord, help us to resist any temptations that come along and try to distract us from our goal of serving you. Help us to remain steadfast in our love for you and help us to await your patience. Lord, you know what each person listening to this episode needs and I ask you to hear the prayers of the hearts today Lord. We pray all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I want to ask everyone listening to consider giving a witness for Witness Wednesday. I know they really help build up the faith of others. I know you probably don’t think you have anything to talk about, I certainly did now know I had so many witnesses to give. Just think about any time in your life when things either worked out really well, or didn’t work out really well. Where was God in all of it? What did you learn from it? You have a story, we all do, and sharing them helps and encourages others to see they are not alone. Please give it some thought this weekend. I look forward to spending time with you again on Monday. Remember Jesus loves you and so do I. Have a blessed weekend!