Mars Hill Fellowship

MESSAGE |

Renew Your Works in Us

SERIES |

2013 Sermons

SCRIPTURE |

Habakkuk 3:2

SPEAKER |

Pastor Joseph Ardayfio

KEY THEME |

I. In Habakkuk 3:2, the prophet shares how the fame of the Lord has been proclaimed throughout the land. In our age, we live in a society that is aware of God, but fame by itself is not enough. The fame and awareness of God must translate into awe and transformation.

1. For the prophet, the fame of the Lord was a catalyst to draw Him into deeper intimacy and knowledge of God. The Message version says: “God, I’ve heard what our ancestors say about you,” and that has placed me in awe of you.

II. What did it mean for the prophet to stand in awe of the deeds of the Lord?

1. To be in awe means to have an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.
2. The Message version says that the knowledge and renown of the Lord prompted the prophet Habakkuk to be “stopped in [his] tracks, down on [his] knees.”

III.  Habakkuk stood in awe of how God dealt with the children of Israel and corrected past wrongs.

1. Habakkuk’s complaint to the Lord was that injustice was prevailing and God wasn’t doing anything about it. “How long, O LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?” (Hab. 1:2)
2. The Lord answered Habakkuk by telling him to watch God work. “For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.”
3. Even though the prophet didn’t understand everything that God was doing, he waited to hear God speak and he watched God unfolded his actions. Habakkuk realized that just because he couldn’t immediately see what God was doing, it didn’t mean that God was not working.

IV. What are the characteristics of God that are constantly at work?

1. God is holy – He is without blemish. Everything that He does is pure.
2. God is all-powerful (omnipotent) – He is self-sufficient and self-existing. He has all authority in all of the earth.
3. God is all-knowing (omniscient) – His wisdom is infinite and we will never outsmart God.
4. God is all-present (omnipresent) – He will never leave us, nor forsake us.
5. God is all-loving - We love because He first loved us.
6. God is always faithful – When He speaks, He always accomplishes what He said he would do.
7. God is completely just - His goodness goes beyond measure.

IV. Based on the work that God did in the past, the prophet called on God to “renew” those deeds in the present day. Habakkuk asked that the Lord’s deeds would be known for his generation.

1. The Bible recounts a generation that came after Joshua that neither knew the Lord nor what the Lord had done for Israel. We don’t want to be a generation that knows what God has done in the past but forgets Him and his ways. Our prayer for this generation is that God would continue to work in our present day.
2. The Lord shows forth his deeds by transforming our lives to display his glory. (Matthew 5:16)
3. No matter what is going on, we have to learn to “rejoice in the Lord” and he will “enable us to go to new heights.”
4. One writer concludes, “Never doubt in the dark what God has told you in the light.”