08/27/2019 DAB Transcript

Job 23:1-27:23, 2 Corinthians 1:12-2:11, Psalms 41:1-13, Proverbs 22:5-6

Today’s the 27th day of August. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian, it’s always, always, always good to be here with you, always good to sit around the global campfire, always good to let God’s word wash over us, always good to know that this space, like no matter how crazy your day gets, there is a safe, calm, serene place that we can go and let it wash away and let God’s Holy Spirit kind of wash in as we listen to His word. So, that’s the space that we’re in no matter what else is going on. So, let’s just exhale and breathe in and be here now as we take that next step forward. So, we’re reading from the New International Version this week. Today, Job chapter 23 through 27.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we’ve covered some significant ground in the book of Job watching the back-and-forth of the friends. And, so, let’s kind of just catch ourselves up because we’ve seen…well…we saw a right at the very beginning of Job what happened to Job, and the devastation truly, truly is unspeakable. Like he lost literally everything and everyone in his life. And, so, yeah, I mean, completely scorched earth in his life. So, his friends come to comfort him and sit Shiva with him as we remember. But this, you know, once they start talking, they’re comforting him but that comfort turns into debate, turns into argument, right, which turns into this full-blown existential thing that’s going on now where they’re fighting about what God does and does not do, which sounds so familiar. I mean, it’s such an echo of the kinds of things that we say to people when we’re trying to comfort, when someone’s trying to comfort us. So, as we’re reading today, Job describes what he has observed of God’s movements in the world and then as is the case now and as was the case in this story, then his friends try to start explaining why God did what He did, what it is that Job observed, but these explanations to the why question, they’re just not working for Job. Like, nobody could answer on God’s behalf for Job. Like he was only after God himself, which is really all that Job’s been saying all along. Like, if I knew where to find him, I would go there. I would…I would argue my case. Like, I would…I would present what I know and I would listen to what he would tell me, what he says to me. But Job is just not comfortable…comfortable is not the right word, it’s just not enough to hear what everybody else thinks God is or isn’t going to do. He wants to know straight up. And, so, now the friends and Job have themselves talking in a big circle cause on the one hand Job’s looking for answers from God himself, but he couldn't…he can’t find God himself and on the other hand, Job’s friends keep trying to tell Job that only righteous people can even hope to find God. So, Job must not be as righteous as he thinks he is because he can’t find Him. But Job will just keep going around the circle because he will not be talked out of his innocence. It’s like he truly believes that God is heaping judgment upon him with no just cause. I mean, let’s just put in Job’s own words. So, reading Job’s own words. “As long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils, my lips will not say anything wicked and my tongue will not utter lies. I will never admit you are in the right. Till I die I will not deny my integrity. I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it. My conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.” Right? So, pretty definitive, pretty clear. Like, Job’s drawn the line in the sand. He’s gonna pursue God’s presence, even if it kills him and he is going to hope in God, even if that hope ends up being hopeless. That…that is riveting to me. Like that is a striking posture to me. And, I mean, obviously when we began this book, we started dealing with things that we usually avoid. Like, we don’t talk about suffering unless we are, right? We’re not really focused on hardship unless that’s what we’re facing. And it’s so much easier to give the right answers, right, or even to receive the right encouragements when life is pretty stable, but Job’s life is not stable. Like Job’s life is upside down. Job’s life is basically splattered all over the ground. So, he’s thinking that words of friends or enemies, like words from other people aren’t going to get him there. The only way he’s gonna find which way is up, like find a north star again, find equilibrium again is to find God. But that’s the thing, he doesn’t know what he will find if he can find God. I mean, these are Job’s words. “He stands alone and who can oppose Him. He does whatever He pleases. He carries out His decrees against me and many such plans He still has in store. That’s why I am terrified before them. When I think of all this, I fear Him.” So, let’s notice how the Bible just let’s Job wrestle with this, lets his friends wrestle with this, which in turn lets us wrestle with this. Job is truly looking for a conclusion. His friends are truly trying to explain what they think they know about God. Job just wants to find God, but he doesn’t know what he would find. And, so, this kind of lets us…it pricks us, it disrupts us because we can think of our own hearts posture when we’re trying to ask why questions. Are we pursuing God so that he will just take the struggle away, whatever it is that we’re facing that we want gone, that we don’t want to have to deal with? Is that…is that why we are getting close to God, so that because we think He’ll take it away or is it because we think He’s going to give us an answer that appeases us? Like, what if he doesn’t? Like, sit with that one for a second. Like, what if he doesn’t. If you could choose to have God or you could choose to have the answers that you’re looking for, what is that you want? And what I’m not like trying to do here is like being discouraging, “like you just never know with God, what He’s gonna do. You just kinda settle for it”. God loves us you. He loves us. Like that's…like that is fed to us on a continual basis in Scripture. He loves us. We are his children. We are His masterpiece. He adores us. He died for us. He loves us. Well…we need to kinda get it through our heads, that just because He’s not Santa Claus, like just because He doesn’t do everything we tell Him to do, that doesn’t mean He doesn’t love us. It means there’s a whole lot of things we don’t know. And for somebody with my personality, kind of makeup, I don't…I don’t like that. I go in pursuit of the knowledge. I need to know what I don’t know so that I can even know what I don’t know. But I have been on that path most of my life and all I have come to the conclusion with God is that there is this leap of faith that must be taken on a continual basis because all roads lead back to a leap of faith. So, when we face circumstances that are confusing or baffling, when we’re facing hardship and, it’s pretty hard to face the hardships of Job, but even if we were, like Job is this example of where everything is touched because everything in his life got wiped out. So, even if we step back and go like, “that hasn’t happened to me but lots of bad things have happened to me and I’ve pursued answers that I don’t have, what we usually do is blame God, like He’s withholding from us, He’s withdrawing from us, He won’t tell us…but why? Why? He loves us. So, when we’ve hit the bottom then we can try to keep digging lower or we can realize everything is now out of my control and the only thing left to do is let go. And when we do, we find that we have taken a leap of faith and that’s when the unexplainable and unexpected begins to happen, when we let go of expectations, when we realize that we don’t know what’s coming next and we have no control over it. All of those things have been false constructs. Hardship and suffering sort of peel those layers away and force us to see things as they really are. We are all utterly dependent upon God for our next breath. So, Job wants to find God. Will he find God? We’ll find out as we continue this book. Job’s friends want to explain God. Will they be able to explain God? We’ll see. But what we can see at this point in the book of Job is, nobody knows all they think they do.

Prayer:

Father, we invite Your Holy Spirit into that because we pride ourselves on what we think that we know and what we think that we can discover and find out and yet everything that we have ever discovered or found out has been by Your mercy, by Your grace, by Your patience, and by Your kindness to us. And we apologize for…we apologize for all that You’ve been blamed for that You have nothing to do with. We apologize for misinterpreting our lives in pursuit of understanding. We surrender ourselves to You knowing that You are good, and our only hope is in You. So, come Holy Spirit we pray into all of our hardships, all of our disruptions, all of our sufferings. Bring comfort we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website and its home base, and its where you find out what’s going on around here.

There is an important announcement I need to make today, an announcement that I’ve been waiting to make for a long time, months now, and that is that the Daily Audio Bible app has just been updated and it’s a big one, a massive update, the biggest update we’ve ever had I think, 10 months of development into this. So, yeah. I mean back when we launched 1.0 of the app of our own proprietary app, that was in January of 2018. And, so, and we updated, updated, updated because we were learning so much. It was so overwhelming…I mean we got bowled over so quickly with the new app. And, so, we did learned like some really, really crucial things in those first days, but just because you’ve learned something doesn’t mean it’s coded out. That takes a long, long time. And, so, we worked for months to stabilize as many things as we could and all while learning like there’s a bigger pie here, there’s a bigger thing because we built everything to…I don’t want…I don’t want to get into the weeds here. Like, I really could talk for well over an hour about just this, but we fundamentally learned like wow we really need specialized stuff, doing specialized things. So, a lot of technology is baked into this new app. For years and years we had been running 17 servers to serve up the Daily Audio Bible and it was creating so many little pesky things that we couldn’t figure out because when you’re running a bunch servers you don’t know which ones causing a problem or if one is causing a problem or what. So, we moved into a much more robust environment that now will serve us content from the nearest server. So, wherever you are in the world you’ll be getting content from the nearest server and that just stabilizes things dramatically. We also learned that, you know, like we were little kids we learned there’s a difference between boys and girls, and then when you grow up you realize there’s a difference between Apple and Android and they’re very very different. And, so, yeah, some strengths some weaknesses on both sides from a programming perspective but we’ve had some really pesky Android issues for months, especially with more current Android phones. We think…we believe most of that is resolved…and maybe all of it is resolved in this release. We’re having a hard time like picking and choosing because there’s pages of things that are updated. For example, the player. The player, when you push play and it like plays the Daily Audio Bible, that was reconfigured from the ground up so that it could better communicate the data back about where you may have left off so that you can better return to your place if you return. So, just tons and tons of stuff. Now that doesn’t mean that every…I mean it’s just impossible when you’re talking about phones all over the world and Internet providers all over the world. Like it’s hard to, you know, bulletproof everything but we have made massive strides toward a robust platform that we’ve had to build from the ground up and will lead us forward. So, if you haven’t already updated your app, do update this app. And I have a few more things I want to say but I want to stop here because I don’t want to wait until the very end to tell you about the one thing that is tremendously exciting and that is when you update to the latest version of the app, and you’re looking at the channel screen. You will notice that there’s this little red button up at the top, right after Daily Audio Bible, right after it says Daily Audio Bible. You’ll see this red button. That red button is a hotline. So, if you have a prayer request or comment, you’re shouldering burdens, you certainly, certainly can call the numbers that we have located in different places around the world, that’s is not going away but now that’s just built-in. You have a hotline. You press that button, start talking. And then when you’re done you can listen to what you had to say or you can just submit it and you’ll be able to submit to the Daily Audio Bible or to the Daily Audio Bible Chronological, depending on what it is you’re listening to. So, this just gives us a portal, a hotline no matter where you are and no matter what’s going on and that was something that we had been dreaming about it for a couple of years. It’s just now finally where at the place in development where that is in this new release, and I am so excited to have it and I think it’s gonna be a meaningful thing to our community. We’ve also tightened up integration to all the different things that are connecting to the platform. So, like the Prayer Wall is much more stable in this version of the app. Now there are some things, some things that have been pesky or have been annoying like if you click the box that says you’ve listened today and then you go and you’re like, “well…it didn’t click, it didn't…it didn’t show me the checkbox. Like what do I gotta do?” That’s because everything on the platform updates every five minutes. And, so it will. Like those things, they do work themselves out, but the technology that we’ve put into this new app has put a lot of things into place. We still have a lot of building to do, but ultimately, we’ll be able to update the app a lot more quickly…like it’s not gonna be another 10 months. And very, very soon, those things will be connected in a totally different way, so they’ll be instantaneous. When you check the box that you’ve listened or something like that, it'll….across the platform…no matter what…I mean like if you were on the player watching from your desktop computer and you made that change on your phone it would just be made on your screen as well…like it’s gonna be across the board. Those changes will just happen instantaneously. We’re not quite there though. A lot of the technology that it’s gonna take to do that has been built into the app so that we can then build it on the platform side and that’ll work in a future update, but massive, massive strides forward. Let’s just remember, we launched with 1.0 and this is 1.1. So, we’re still like in version 1 of a grand vision, but we are really really excited about this one. So, brand-new Daily Audio Bible app or brand-new, updated Daily Audio Bible app is out now across all the platforms. So, whether your Apple devices or android devices or for that matter Amazon devices, they’re Android devices but they have some of their own special stuff going on. And, so, all those apps have been updated and couldn’t encourage you more to update your app now and have that hotline from right within the app.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link and it lives on the homepage and I thank you profoundly for your partnership. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner. If you prefer the mail, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you for prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.