Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is God Disappointed in Me? | Torah | Genesis 9:18-28

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Can God love you and be disappointed in you at the same time? Does God get disappointed? Does God love you when you mess up? In a world filled with striving and perfectionism, you can't help but wonder if God loves you. Tanya shares some encouragement from Genesis 9:18-28. Listen to find out how God reacts to Noah's mistakes. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. We're exploring stories from the first books of the Bible. Right now, we're in Genesis. Hey, listeners, I'm excited to tell you about a new way to connect with 10-minute Bible talks in the new year. When you sign up for our brand-new 10-minute Bible Talks email newsletter, you're going to get a blessedly short email once a week.

and it's going to have guides on spiritual disciplines, inspiring challenges for you to grow. It's going to give you more background on the passages we cover, and there'll even be quick studies of Hebrew and Greek words. It will be the one email that asks nothing from you but gives you something instead. Each week will be a little different, and you're going to love the variety. So stop what you're doing, click the link in the show notes, and join us in your inbox. Now, let's hop into today's episode. So I woke up my daughter over Christmas vacation to give her a heads up that she had an ortho

appointment that day. And it wasn't on my radar the day before. So I wanted to give her time to get ready. And she looked at me. Her mouth hung open and tears started to form in the corners of her eyes. So I assured her, you have two hours until the appointment. And it's not even early. It's at 1140. And we have no plans. But she still had that look on her face. Like, I delivered terrible news and said, I can't go. I haven't been wearing my retainer. I was confused, but I wasn't. We were going for a permanent retainer so she could keep her teeth straight for all of her adult life.

But what she was trying to say was that she hadn't been wearing her temporary retainer. And she was worried about what they would say to her when they saw her teeth. She would have to endure maybe 30 seconds of discomfort to make the last three years of braces is actually worth it. But she didn't want to go to the ortho. We totally get this. We do it with the mechanic, the dentist, the financial advisor. We avoid the place where we can be fixed because we're worried that we will disappoint the one who is there to fix us. What if we're actually the only ones disappointed? Do you think the other person loses any sleep over your teeth, your tires, or finances? In fact, I think it's our very inadequacies that keep them in business.

This is a view of myself before God that I've been trying to work through for the last several years. Is he disappointed in me? Or does he love me? Can he love me and be disappointed at the same time? Do my inadequacies possibly cause his love to swell? When Patrick worked out our schedule for this series, the title for my portion today was Noah gets drunk. How perfectly uplifting. Build a boat, save your family, get drunk. Sounds about like us, doesn't it? We're going to pick up in Genesis chapter 9, and here's the context. The flood subsided. Noah and his family made it off the boat, and God gave a blessing and a promise to them. They were supposed to be fruitful and multiply. God reminded Noah that he was made in his image, and God also gave

the rainbow as a symbol of his covenant with them that never again would there be a flood to destroy the earth. There are a lot of parallels between the Garden of Eden and this new post-flood garden. Noah, along with his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth are essentially the new creation, commanded to multiply and promise that all offspring would come through them. So Noah went out to work the soil and planted a vineyard. And similar to when Adam ate the fruits and felt naked before God, Noah got drunk on the wine from his vineyard and lay naked in his tent. One of his sons Ham saw him and dishonored him, maybe by mocking him or spreading the news about his condition. And his two other sons, Shem and Japheth, treated him honorably, covering him without looking at him or exploiting him. So sobered up and learning what

happened, Noah pronounced a curse on Canaan, the son of Ham, the one who mocked him, proclaiming that Canaan and his descendants would serve the others. Then he lived 350 more years and died. So God spared Noah. God kept him safe on a boat while a flood destroyed everything else on earth, and Noah still messed up. He was likened to a second Adam, the new creation, the father of a new generation, and still he got drunk and lay naked and exposed before his family.

Did God still love Noah? It's like that feeling when you're on the way back from church camp. Or maybe you come home from the men's conference. Or maybe when you're fighting with your spouse on the way back home from a great small group prayer time. And you realize you're still a sinner because you still picked a fight and gossiped about the people you were just with. Or maybe for you, it's the feeling that you can never really be close to God because you're too deeply rooted in your non-believing identity or your bad habits or your struggles. No matter how much you want to live

the perfect life, you can't. But our hope isn't in living the perfect life. No matter how much you don't want to, you're still going to get drunk on the wine from your vineyard and your sinful nature will be exposed. It's when you realize this and know how incredibly deeply, purely, God loves you as that person, that you begin to understand who you really are. Your hope is not in your sinlessness, but in the sinlessness of Jesus, who makes you right before God. When we look at the rainbow, it's not just a reminder about a flood. More than that, it's a sign of God's love for us, no matter how disappointing we are. Here's what the Lord says in Isaiah 54, verses 8 through 9, to a Jewish nation in exile.

In overflowing anger for a moment, I hid my face from you. But with everlasting love, I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer. This is like the days of Noah to me, as I swore that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth. So I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and I will not rebuke you. Our hope then is not in living the perfect life. Our mountaintop of spiritually high experiences don't make us worthy to God. Our efforts to be nice people or good people don't draw us closer to God. His love makes us worthy.

His everlasting love and compassion is most deeply known. when we feel our sin most deeply. Now, when we peel back the layers of our anxieties, our biggest worries probably aren't. Is God going to flood the earth? Or is the virus or climate change going to end the earth? No matter how big or real those things might be, our biggest concern that drives all our striving and sarcasm and perfectionism is,

am I loved? And the answer is yes. Yes and yes and yes. When Jesus was with Peter after the crucifixion and resurrection, he asked Peter three times, Do you love me? One time for each of Peter's betrayals. The Lord steps into each betrayal and disappointment with his mercy and compassion

and doesn't just remind us that we're loved, but lowers himself to ask, do you love me? When you wake up the next warning after drinking again, God loves you. When you lie about your plans again, to get out of doing something you don't want to do, God loves you. When you realize it's been more like weeks than days since you last prayed, God loves you. When you feel naked or exposed or embarrassed or ashamed by these realities,

Jesus wants to know, do you love me? His love operating in us melts our hearts to love our very worst enemy, the one within us that tells us we are an unworthy disappointment to our maker. the one that tells us that he doesn't want to talk with us or be with us or hear from us, that he doesn't like us or approve of us. The one that tells us we would be better off to solve our own problems because we need to get better before we come to him. But if Noah wasn't perfect, then neither are we.

If he wasn't able to serve God wholeheartedly, then neither will we. But Noah was still called righteous, and so are we. In his book, Abbas Child, Brennan Manning says, Christianity consists primarily not in what we do for God, but in what God does for us, the great, wondrous thing that God dreamed up and achieved for us in Christ Jesus. The love of Jesus Christ alone creates identity, provides safety, and establishes our dignity. His love is not fleeting or subjective or circumstantial. You are loved. He is on your team. He is for you today and tomorrow.

He will be for you when you fall on your face. Because of Jesus, your sin has no power to separate you from God's love. Set your hope then not on your perfection, for there is none. And set it not on your achievements, for they will soon be outdated. And set it not on your comparative goodness or your benevolence to the poor, for there's always going to be someone doing more than you. but set your hope on the reality that you are so loved that there is nothing that can separate you from your creator. Before you forget, sign up for the brand new TMBT newsletter.

Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that will help you beat the midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.