Touching Lives With Dr. James Merritt

The challenge we all face every day is confronting the things in life we can change and making the right decisions about those changes. Life really comes down to making decisions. You are who you are today, what you are today, and where you are today because of the decisions you have made in the past. Nobody understands the importance of being able to make wise decisions more than a king. As one of the greatest kings who ever lived, he clearly understood the value of decision-making and made a decision that, in turn, made him the great king that he was. God did something for this king that He will do for us, and if we will follow this king’s example, we can make decisions fit for a king.

Forgiveness must always be the rule of the day between two followers of Jesus Christ. Both the offended party and the offending party have a biblical responsibility to heal the relationship and to restore what has been ruptured. Now we are going to get into the nitty-gritty of the process of forgiveness itself. It is one thing to know that you need to forgive. It is one thing to know that you want to forgive, but it is an entirely different thing to get to the point where you do forgive. I will warn you though the steps are simple the steps are difficult. But this is the one thing to remember: I must choose to forgive others just as God has forgiven me.

How do you repair a relationship when you are not the one who ruptured it? It is not me. It is you that broke this. It is not us. It is them that caused the problem. In other words, we are going to answer the tough question, “What do you do when you are not the one that needs to get forgiveness, but the one who needs to give forgiveness.” For many of us, that is going to be a much tougher thing to do, because it is easier to seek forgiveness than it is to show forgiveness. It is easier to ask for it than it is to give it. C.S. Lewis wisely said, “Everybody thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.” When someone has offended us, someone has hurt us, someone has sinned against us, and it is their fault, we are going to see what God has to say about why we are the ones that should take the first step and how we are to do it.

In Psalm 32, David wrote a song that talks about how he found the way back to redemption, restoration, and reconciliation. At this point in his life, David would have been a prime candidate for the series that we are in, because we’ve said that the first step you must take in order to make things right when you are in the wrong is to confess your sin. David had done that. We said the second thing you must do is repent of your sin and with God’s grace turn away from it. David had done that. Now, in this song, David tells us how to plant your feet on the solid rock of forgiveness and turn the sadness of a fault into the gladness of forgiveness. There is a reason why some of you in this room have confessed things you have done wrong and repented of them and have truly asked for forgiveness, but you still don’t feel forgiven. You struggle with guilt and I know why. I hear it all the time, “I still can’t forgive myself.” I am going to show you how to do that today once and for all.

Last week, we talked about confession. We said that the first person we must ask forgiveness from whenever we do wrong is God. The good news is we found out last week that God has a perfect record. Every time we sincerely confess our sins to God, God surely forgives us. The problem is too many people stop at confession and they think that all they have to do is just confess and all is well. But there is a second step that must be taken. I call it the seismic shift. A seismic shift is when there is a shifting in rocks so great that it causes another earthquake. There is a seismic shift that must take place with us and our sin if we are going to truly maintain our fellowship with God and that is found in the word “repentance.”

As we begin this new series called “Faults,” we are going to begin with the place where every relationship must begin if it is going to be fixed and fixed right and that is in our relationship with God. We are going to start at the epicenter. Do you know what the epicenter is? The epicenter is the location directly above the surface of the earth where an earthquake begins. The epicenter of every fault that causes every earthquake in our relationships is this: Sin is always against God first. You can sin against God and not sin against others, but every sin against others is first a sin against God. The first step that must always be taken to restore relationships, fix friendships, and mend marriages is confession. Confession in most cases always has two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. When our sin or our thought has hurt someone else, we must confess that sin first to God and then to others. So today, we are going to show you, in one verse of scripture, the most important step anyone can ever take that w

There is not a greater teacher in life than trouble. Quite honestly, you learn a lot more about yourself and about life in the hard times than you ever will in the good times. Not to mention we can always count on when hard times hit, people of faith and no faith, religion and no religion, church and no church, come out of the woodwork and they ask the big question, “Where is God?” There is a man in the Bible who was probably outside of Jesus, the best known, and his name was Paul. If anybody had a right to be asking that question it was him. He blazed a trail for the Christian faith that no one else has come close to doing. He became the greatest missionary, the greatest apologist, the greatest church planter, the greatest evangelist and the greatest theologian that the world has ever known. What did he get for all of this? The words we are going to study today are in a letter he wrote to a young pastor named Timothy. He wrote sitting in a Roman dungeon, from which he would never escape, facing imminent deat

An unknown person once said, “There are two great moments in a person’s life. The first is when you were born; the second is when you discover why you were born.” That leads me to make one of the most arrogant statements any pastor could ever make to anybody. If there is a God and if that God has revealed himself in the Bible, and if the Bible is God’s word and true, then I can confidently, though it may sound arrogantly say, “I know the purpose for which every person was born.” Now we may not carry that purpose out the same way throughout our lives, but nevertheless we were all born for the same purpose. Paul in one simple sentence gives us the one purpose for which we were created. It is the purpose of the church. In fact, in the grand scheme of things it is the purpose of everything. The reason we exist individually, why do we exist as a church, why did God create anything or anyone? Here is the purpose, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)

When we get to heaven and we stand before the Lord, I am convinced that one question he is going to ask us individually and as a church is this one simple question, “You only had one job. Did you do it?” We don’t have to wonder what that one job is because Jesus clearly spelled it out. What he is about to say is not just to pastors, preachers, professors, priests or professionals. He is talking to people of all stripes, all colors, all ethnicities, men, women, rich and poor. We all have the same job. As a follower of Jesus, you are going to understand why we only have one job and why we should always be doing it.

I can say without deliberation, hesitation or equivocation that there has never been a greater time to celebrate Easter, nor has there ever been a greater Easter to celebrate. Why? Because if Easter is true, if Jesus is alive, if He was raised from the dead, then not only do we have hope, not only do we have the best hope, but we have the only hope for our past, our present, and our future. Only a risen Lord can take care of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Therefore, we can have hope even in the darkest, most depressing circumstances. Those of us who believe in a risen Lord may feel helpless at times, but we are never hopeless. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at three truths about the Lord from which we can derive our hope.

As we wrap up this series, we are going to deal with the third area where not only certain people need help, but frankly we all need help, and that is in the area of temptation. I want to challenge you to think about something. If you think about every regret you have in life, every do-over, or as we golfers would say, “every mulligan you wish you could take,” everything you wished you hadn’t done, words you wished you had not said, places you wished you had not gone, or people you wish you had not hurt, I would say without exception it is because you failed to handle temptation. The great playwright, Oscar Wilde, once said, “I can handle anything except temptation.” The good news is everyone who knows Jesus, loves Jesus, and follows Jesus can overcome any temptation because of Jesus. Jesus, himself, has shown us how to do that.

There is a difference between worry and concern. You should be concerned about your children getting a good education, coming to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, and concerned about the relationships they have and the friends that they make. If those things don’t concern you, you are a bad parent. You should be concerned about saving money for a rainy day and planning for retirement. Otherwise, you are foolish. There are certain things every day that call for legitimate concern. There is a difference between being care-free and care-less. But worry is a different matter and in the greatest sermon ever preached in the history of this planet, by the greatest preacher who ever lived, Jesus Christ, He took this issue of worry head on. He addressed it with the greatest advice any counselor could ever give. In this message, we’re going to take a look at what Jesus has to say about worry and how we can overcome the temptation to worry in the circumstances we face each day.

It’s a very common goal to want to be the best version of yourself. Go into any bookstore and bookshelf after bookshelf is lined with writings that will help you address your self-image and your self-worth and give you all kinds of techniques to help you feel better about yourself. But here is the problem. At the end of the day, whether it is losing weight, or gaining financial success, or becoming famous, or getting plastic surgery, or photo-shopping, it doesn’t solve the problem of low self-esteem. Here is why. The problem is not on the outside; it is on the inside. You will never see who you truly are on the inside until you know who you should be on the inside. Only God can help you see that.

If you have ever felt like shaking your fist in God’s face or gone ahead and done it, you aren’t the first person and you won’t be the last. There is an entire book of the Bible built around a man who did just that. His name was Habakkuk, and he was a prophet. When he sees his people suffer and his nation on the verge of collapse, he can’t help but wrestle with this question, “If God is good and God is in control, why are these things happening?” If you are like Habakkuk and the ship of your faith is being overwhelmed by the tsunami of doubt, and your hand is slowly being raised to God in the shape of a fist, because you don’t understand why God is allowing you to lose your job, why God has allowed your mother or father or brother or sister or son or daughter to die, and why doesn’t God do something and do it now? The prophet tells us the answer to the “Why?” and the “Why not?” question.

When David wrote Psalm 23, we don’t know how many more days, weeks, or years he had left in his life. But he definitely closes on a high note of what his life will be like for however long it lasts and what his life will be like after his life ends. He is looking at both now and forever. In this last stanza of this beautiful song, David shares with us what is true of us or can be true of us if the Lord is our shepherd, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6). David basically says two things: one about life and one about death or life after death. These two things will be true of you if the Lord is your shepherd.

In studying through Psalm 23, it is amazing to see how this psalm addresses practically all of our greatest needs from the cradle to the grave. In today’s key verse, David is describing how he realized that his greatest need and our greatest need is God. I believe that God is the only one that can address our greatest problems. Our greatest need will always be God, because only God can meet our greatest needs. The philosopher was right who said, “There is a god-shaped vacuum in every life that only God fill.” Listen to what David writes, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows” (Psalm 23:5). When you understand this from a shepherd’s perspective, you will understand that God will always be just what you need. God meets our needs, but it is how he meets our needs that make this such a beautiful verse.

I love what Jerry Seinfeld said, “According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking and number two is death. This means to the average person if you have to go to a funeral you are better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Whether or not you fear death you do have to cope with it. Basically, you will cope with it in one of two ways: with hope or without hope. Two things have to be true, either this life is all there is or there is more to life than this life. This is one reason why I wish everyone would consider Christianity because I don’t know of any faith, or any religion, or any spiritual concept that gives more hope for death than Christianity. If just this one statement that David wrote is true, to rephrase Winston Churchill, “Death is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is just the end of the beginning.” The last walk we will ever take is the walk with death. We don’t know when, where or how we are going to take that walk, but we will. Let’s do what Davi

In the third stanza of Psalm 23, David shares with us that this shepherd loves us so much he will correct us when we make the wrong decisions and he will lead us to make the right decisions. If you are on the wrong road because of a wrong decision you’ve made, there is hope for you. If you are at a crossroads and you don’t know which way to go, there is help for you. In the third stanza, we find that there is healing for our past, help for our present, and hope for our future. David writes, “He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake” (Psalm 23:3). We are all God’s restoration projects at times in our lives. This beautiful sentence tells us how God carries out that project perfectly.

Stress is robbing us of our rest and the lack of rest is increasing our stress and we are caught in this vicious cycle of physical, emotional and spiritual fatigue that never seems to end. But the good news is, the Lord is your shepherd, and He promises to give you rest. Close your eyes and get that imagery in your mind. You are a sheep. You have been walking all day. You are tired, thirsty and hungry. All of a sudden, you are lying in thick green grass, under the shade of a tree, beside the still waters of a stream that is flowing right beside you, resting easy. No matter where you are, and no matter what you are going through, that green grass, those still waters are right in front of you. You can enjoy them every day and rest easy. In the beautiful stanza of this beautiful psalm, we are told that if we follow the shepherd, we will find the rest we are looking for in these green pastures and still waters.

As we begin this study, we’re going to start witt the first verse. Anybody who has ever heard this psalm before knows that it is actually not just the first verse, but it is the foundational verse of this passage. Everything else David is going to say in this psalm is built upon the first line in the first stanza, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). David gives us three reasons why, no matter what happens going forward, faith ought to be in, and fear ought to be out. Worship ought to be in, worrying ought to be out. Prayer to be in, and panic ought to be out. Let’s take a look at those reasons together.