Do you have any idea how many promises for godliness there are? Do you have idea how many promises where God says, “I will let you see me,” “I will let you know me if you seek me.” I would [bet] –I’m not a wagering man– but I’d bet everything I have that there are more promises, there are more promises in the Bible with regard to you growing in grace, and overcoming sin, and being used of God, and trampling on serpents, and every other sort of thing. There are enough promises there, that if a man were to pray only over those promises twenty-four hours a day he would have to live ten-thousand lifetimes to win them. To avail himself of them.
Do you understand what I’m saying? Take all the promises of God, all of them that you find, Old Testament, New Testament. Write them down. The ones that talk about godliness, and God being with you, and God helping you, and God strengthening the weak, and God showing Himself to men, and God doing mighty things, and you get down and you wrestle with them all the days of your life. And if you ask about those promises, you will receive! If you seek those promises, you will find! And if you knock on the door of those promises, it will be opened to you. But the problem is we want other things than the promises. We want a comfortable life. We want to be able to minister. We want all sorts of things. God has other plans. Higher plans. Greater plans. To make you conformed to the image of His Son. And then to use you as a treasure, as a focal point, as an illustration of just how good He is. To take you throughout all of eternity and lavish upon you greater and greater demonstrations of His goodness. He has such plans for you. You have such meager, pitiful plans for yourself.
Young men, find those promises. Get down on your knees until you’ve availed yourself of them. Take them one at a time; wrestle with them. Cry out to God. “God you said if I seek you I’d find you.” “You said that.” “I seek you.” “I seek you.” And persevere, wrestle, with a holy boldness. Such timid men. Such timid men. How easy we forget –those of us who know. About three weeks ago – I’d been wrestling with something for many, many years– Just not seeming to make much progress in that area of my life. Then one night about one in the morning I woke up. And you know what, older men listen to me. You really don’t need to learn anything else. What you need to do is remember what you’ve forgotten. And it was like, get up, go out, and struggle, and scream, and cry out to the Lord until He gives you victory over this thing. Next morning a young man that I was wanting to help, he said, “Brother Paul, your looking kinda bad this morning.” “You didn’t get much sleep last night.” And I said in the words of Keith Green, “When sleepless night of anguish prayer I triumphed over sin. One battle in God’s holy war He promised me to win.” There’s so many things that pick at you like those Canaanites in the land. Drive them out! Take God’s promises and drive them out. “Brother Paul, I have this one sin I can’t overcome.” Then fast and pray and drive it out. Grab a hold of grace. Avail yourself of promises. Be sick of the thing. The problem is at first your sick of the thing, and then you begin to be able to live with the thing. And then the thing becomes a part of your life.
Young men, warriors, and radical Christians aren’t those who listen to contemporary music and wear t-shirts with verses on the back. And it’s not necessarily those who hit the streets going door to door. You give me one man who will take the promises of God and fight through them on his knees in the darkness when no one else is around. Everything else will fall in place. There is nothing, there is absolutely nothing in your life that cannot be overcome, through wrestling in prayer, and believing, and availing yourself of the promises of God.
