This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

This is day two together of our look at 2 Corinthians chapter 5, we're going to
focus in on verses 6 to 9 today. Yesterday we began a look at what it means to
survive the wait, and we talked about what it means to choose groaning over
grumbling, to choose longing over complaining. There's a second thing that we
learned from the Apostle Paul here that you and I need to do to survive the
wait.

In verses 6 to 9 he talks about the need to live by faith and not by sight.
You're not going to survive it if you try to live by sight, you're going to live
in constant discouragement, so you have to live by faith. Listen to what he says
in verses 6 to 9, "Therefore we are always confident, and know that as long as
we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord.

" We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to
be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to
please Him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.

Paul is encouraging in these verses a question each day in my life, and that
question is, am I living by faith or am I living by sight? Am I living by what I
see in front of me or what I know about God and who He is? Do I make my
decisions based on what I see or what I believe?

Are my attitudes controlled by the visible circumstances around me or the
visionary commitment within me looking to who Jesus is? Am I walking by faith or
by sight? And Paul a couple of times in these verses uses the word confidence.

Waiting by faith creates confidence, but waiting by sight creates worry. Waiting
by faith creates assurance, but waiting by sight creates anxiety, because you
see if all you have is what you're seeing, what you're looking at, there's a
million things to worry about. But when you look through eyes of faith, you see
the million things to look forward to, the million things that God is doing.

Now Paul is very practical and real in these verses, and as you walk through
these, as he talks about living by faith and not by sight, there are two
sentences that give us some truth that can help us to turn to living by faith,
because the question is, how do I get there? There's so many circumstances
around me, it's so easy to see those circumstances, get caught up in those
circumstances. How do I get to the place of living by faith?

Two sentences. Sentence number one, Paul says, we know that when we are at home
in the body, we are away from the Lord. He's reminding us here that there's
something you have to know in order to walk by faith.

You have to know that we are, and Paul says it here, away from the Lord. Now
what's he talking about here? I mean, isn't Jesus with us all the time?

Paul is talking about our physical body here, because Jesus is in heaven, and
we're on earth in our physical body, that means we're not in his physical
presence. Spiritually, you're always in his presence, because God is everywhere.
So you're always in his presence spiritually, but physically you are not.

So you have to walk by faith and not by sight. Think about this with me for a
minute. When the twelve disciples followed Jesus down the road, when Jesus was
physically here on this earth, and these twelve disciples are following Jesus
down the road, they didn't have to walk by faith.

All they had to do was keep their eyes open. If Jesus made a right turn, they
made a right turn. If Jesus stopped, they stopped.

If Jesus made a left turn, they followed him. But when Jesus went to heaven, the
moment he went to heaven, you couldn't follow by sight anymore. If he depended
on the circumstances around you, you'd get caught up in the wrong circumstances.

So now you've got to trust in faith. You've got to realize I'm away from the
Lord, and because of that I need to make my decisions based on faith and not
just what I see in front of me, what I see around me. When we're at home in the
body, and he's talking about this physical body that we have right now on this
earth, that means we're away from the Lord.

But then there's a second sentence that Paul has that encourages faith in our
lives. He says we prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
There's something he says you have to prefer in order to walk by faith.

You have to prefer being with the Lord. If you're going to walk by faith, you've
got to prefer the presence of God in your life. If what you prefer is your
success, you're not going to walk by faith, if what you prefer is other people
saying good things about you, you're not going to walk by faith.

In the end, you're going to walk by what you prefer, what your preference is in
life, and if what you prefer is being with the Lord, you're going to walk by
faith. And when Paul says here we prefer to be away from the body and at home
with the Lord, he's talking about that moment when we die in this physical body
that we're walking with through this earth, and when that happens, he's saying
we immediately go to be in the presence of Jesus and we're at home with the
Lord. There we are with him, celebrating him for all eternity.

We're then spiritually in his presence, but we're also physically, materially in
his presence in that moment. Paul says prefer that, and you prefer that all
through your life, and as you prefer that, you will walk by faith. The more the
preference is in my heart, my life towards this world, towards the things of
this world, the attitudes of this world, the favor of this world, the
pleasantries of this world, or even the ease that this world could offer, the
more that my attitude is towards this world, the more I'm going to lean toward
walking by sight.

But the more that my attitude is focused on the presence of the Lord in my life,
the more I'm going to walk by faith. So we prefer to be away from the body but
at home with the Lord, but he says right now we're not. We're at home in the
body, so we're away from the Lord's physical presence.

And then he says at the end, whether we're at home in the body or away from it,
we're going to serve him. In fact, something that Paul says based on both of
these sentences is out of these two, we make it our goal to please him. There is
something you have to choose to walk by faith.

There's something you've got to prefer, and that's being with the Lord, and then
there's something you have to choose to walk by faith. And that is, you choose
to please him. You choose to please him.

And the question all of us have to ask ourselves every day is, is my goal
pleasure or pleasing him? Is my goal pleasing myself or pleasing him? Is my goal
making sure everything is okay in my life or looking to him and recognizing he
has a path for me to follow, a purpose for me to live out, waiting, waiting for
Jesus to return, waiting through the difficulties of life, waiting in this world
for the reality and the hope of heaven?

It can make us impatient. And one of the problems with impatience is it can make
us selfish. We want to get to where we want to be quicker because we're
impatient.

And sometimes out of that we decide, I'm going to please me rather than pleasing
the Lord. Is my goal, is my goal to please God with my heart, mind, soul, and
strength? Sometimes we seek the pleasures of this world and we seek it to fill
our longing.

Now it's like trying to fill a jelly donut with cement. The hole might be
filled, but it sure isn't very satisfying. Trying to find satisfaction in the
pleasures of this world is the single most common reason for our being
devastated by the weight.

Even for Christians, we try to fill our lives with the pleasures of this world
because we're impatient in the weight and then our lives just get torn out, torn
apart. Paul says that those who have learned to survive the weight, they make it
their goal to please him. They have both a goal in sight and they also have an
end in sight.

The goal in sight is to please him, whether you're at home in the body or away
from it. Paul wasn't about to wait to begin to please God. Like I'll wait till I
get to heaven and I'm going to live a life of worship and pleasing God.

While I'm on this earth I'm just going to make it through. He determined I'm
going to begin now. I'm going to start living my eternal life now.

The moment you became a believer you were given eternal life. Now you get a
whole new quality of eternal life, a whole new body, eternal body when you get
to go to be with Jesus in heaven. No doubt about that.

But the guarantee of eternal life began the moment you became a Christian. So
start living that life now. It's so much easier to wait when you don't let your
commitment to him wait.

But right now you decide I'm going to start living that kind of life. I know I'm
going to live it for all eternity, worshipping him, pleasing him, serving him.
So why not start now?

See, the real problem in our lives is not discovering God's will. I know a lot
of people that say I only knew God's will about where I should live or what I
should do. The greatest problem in life is not discovering God's will.

It's wanting to do it. And one of the keys in wanting to do God's will is
remembering that doing God's will is pleasing to him. It's not as if God says,
oh, OK, here's my will, now do it or I'm going to get you.

That's not the attitude that God presents in the New Testament. God says, here
is my will, now do it, and I want you to know it brings me great joy. There's a
relationship that I have with God.

As I fulfill his will in my life, it is pleasing to God. That is the goal in
sight that I want to have every day of my life. Now there's also an end in sight
that Paul says helps us in living this way.

And he talks about something called the judgment seat of Christ. This is so
important. We're going to take tomorrow to look at this.

But for now, just focus on what it means to please him. In fact, these last two
days, we've talked about the fact that I can live as somebody who complains or
someone who longs for the future. I can live as somebody who's just living by
sight by what I see around me, or I can live as someone who's living by faith to
please him for all eternity.

How are you going to live today? That's the question. Let's pray together.

Jesus, help me to live by faith today. Talk to you and to trust in you. Lord, I
won't always see exactly why I should do what you're asking me to do.

But seeing it would be living by sight. If I could always see it and always
understand it, that would be living by my logic, by my sight, by my
circumstances. Lord, help me to live by faith today in the way that I talk to
people and the choices that I make in my own life, in the time that I spend with
you, and the integrity that I have in my relationships.

Help me to live by faith today. I need you for this. I can't live by faith apart
from you, Jesus, so I ask you, would you show me the way to go?

And by faith, would you give me the strength to follow you? I ask this in your
name. Amen.