Pastor Stephanie Ike preaches on the story of Job in the Bible from an uncommon angle, suggesting Job wasn’t as intimate with God as he appeared to be. She says he lived out of a fearful, works-based mentality, worrying that if he didn’t perform enough righteous deeds, he might lose all he had. So the enemy, Satan, attacked him at his most vulnerable point when he took his earthly treasures away.
“The Bible tells us that Job feared the Lord and he shunned evil and all these things, but as I studied the life of Job, I recognized that Job lived a life out of fear of loss, not out of relationship with the loving Father,” Ike says at The Potter’s House at OneLA in Los Angeles on Dec. 22. “And you see when you study his life, when calamity fell upon him … the Bible tells us that in all these things Job did not sin with his lips, [but] it emphasized on where sin did not come through. It did not speak anything about his heart.
” … What stillness does is that it begins to reveal who we are. After Job was silent for seven days, he wanted to make sure, look, I don’t want to say the wrong thing with my mouth. But nothing changes. His condition is still the same. The first thing that comes out of Job’s mouth is not ‘The Lord is my keeper’ in silence. It’s not that.
“The first thing that comes out of Job’s mouth is, ‘Cursed be the day I was born.’ … God is not looking for who you’re pretending to be. God is looking for what you really feel, because until that comes to the surface, God cannot help you.”
For more teaching on Job and the difficult concept of why bad things appear to happen to “good” people, watch the entire sermon here.
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