Two Journeys

"Whoever rules the waves rules the world," that is the thesis of Alfred Thayer Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History.  He was Naval strategist who wrote in 1890 saying,"Whoever rules the waves rules the world.” He was meditating on the effect of British sea power on confining Napoleon to the continent about 80 years before that. Because the French did not have a strong navy, not strong enough at least, compared to the British, they couldn't expand Napoleon's reign. He was just extending it beyond that, several centuries back and just talking about the need for naval might. He was writing at a time toward the end of the 19th century, when the British Empire was at its absolute apex, when the sun never set on the British Empire, and in which British people sang a somewhat unofficial national anthem written in 1740 by the British poet, James Thomson entitled "Rule Britannia". In the refrain it says, "Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves, Britains never will be slaves." British power was projected by naval might all around the world.

It's an interesting thesis, the one who rules the waves rules the world. I happen to think it's true, I just happen to think Jesus rules the waves. I think he displays that in the text today. It's interesting in Daniel's prophecy and vision, he had a vision of the rise and fall of the world.  Nebuchadnezzar had the dream of the statue, with the gold and the silver and the bronze and the iron and the clay and it was a picture of the rise and fall of world empires. Later in his book, in Daniel 7, he's looking out over the sea and the sea is troubled by the waves, the four winds of Heaven are churning up the great sea and up out of it come four beasts, each of them representing four world empires. John saw the same thing in Revelation 13, as the dragon was standing by the shore and up out of the sea, comes the Beast, which I think is the final world empire, the rule of the anti-Christ in Revelation 13. It's interesting that both the four beasts of Daniel, and this final beast, in Revelation 13, come out up out of the troubled sea, the churning sea and I think it represents humanity. The churning of the nations in its rise and fall, in its ebbing and all of its wickedness, and rebellion, and all of the lack of peace we feel inside our hearts. I think a turbulent sea is a good representation of human history, and I think the theme of the Book of Daniel is really the theme of all of world history, and that is that God almighty reigns over Heaven and Earth, and He will someday clearly establish the kingdom of Jesus Christ over all the Earth.

It says in Daniel 2:44, "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end but will itself endure forever." This is the theme, I think, of the whole gospel of Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven and especially the King of the Kingdom of Heaven who is Jesus, He will reign forever and ever. What is the nature of His power, how great is it? The nature of His omnipotence? I think we see it in our text today. "Whoever rules the waves rules the world, and I say that Jesus, Jesus rules the waves, and He will forever more. Isn't that encouraging as we look at the turbulence of our present day and we think that it's still true, that it's a fit metaphor for human history, the churning of the waves that cannot rest, that churn up mire and mud as Isaiah said, "There is no peace says my God for the wicked.” But there is Jesus, the Prince of Peace and what an image in our text today, Jesus walking on the water, walking through the waves through the bellows with omnipotence holding him up. The power of God.

There was another British poet who wrote something else about an Empire, and it was Isaac Watts. Long before James Thomson wrote "Rule Britannia”, Isaac Watts wrote, "Jesus shall reign where'er the sun does his successive journeys run, His kingdom spread from shore to shore till moon shall wax and wane no more.” That I believe is the true theme of the great passage we're looking at today. This passage shows and displays, so beautifully, the power of Jesus Christ over all things, and is my purpose today to beguile you into a greater estimation of that power that you would have a sense of just how powerful Jesus is, over the winds and the waves.

We begin with Jesus's essential quiet and peaceful communion with His Heavenly Father. Let's set the thing in context. We already saw in John chapter 14, the martyrdom of John the Baptist, how John was beheaded at King Herod's birthday party after the dance of a dancing girl, when she said, “Give me here on a platter, the head of John the Baptist.”   Then John's disciples came and took John's body and buried it, and then they went and told Jesus.  When Jesus heard this, He got in a boat and withdrew privately to a solitary place. He’s wanting to be alone for prayer. Unfortunately, for that purpose, at least at that moment when He lands, He sees a huge crowd, 5000 men plus women and children. We saw last week the great compassion of Jesus to put his own needs aside and to minister in a three-fold way to that crowd in Mark's gospel. He had great compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, so He taught them many things. First His teaching ministry, and then we saw Jesus's healing ministry, a river of miracles, flowing out and there was nothing He could not do.  There was no sickness He could not heal. We see that great power and then He wasn't done. The disciples wanted to send the crowds away so they could buy themselves some food, but Jesus said, "They don't need to go.”  Then we see the great miracle of the feeding of the 5000 that was a full coverage of all of their needs by Jesus, the preaching of the gospel, the healing of the sick, the feeding of the hungry every need met. Now it's Jesus's time. The time has come for him to send the crowd away and for Him to get back into that place of great power and communion with his Heavenly Father, the essential communion of Jesus, so He sends the crowd away. Look at verse 22, it says immediately that Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side while He dismissed the crowd. There's really somewhat of a battle of wills going on here because in John 6:14, it says, "After Jesus had fed the 5000, the crowds wanted to take Him by force and make Him king.”

They want to force Jesus to be king right there and then in their own way, after their own patter. Jesus forces the disciples to get in the boat and then forcefully dismisses the crowd. Who's in charge here? Jesus is in charge. He's not going to be made king in their way. He has his own timetable, and He must go to the cross. He does it his way because if He didn't do it that way, none of us would be saved. He's not going to be king that way, but He will be king, He is king, and He will reign forever and ever, but first He must go to the cross. He’s not going to follow their way; He's not going to be forced into their agenda. No, instead He's going to force the disciples to get on the boat. The Greek word is strong; He's going to dismiss the crowd and so off they go, and then Jesus returns to solitary prayer. He goes up by himself alone. It's night by this time, it's dark, and you can imagine Jesus by the light of the moon or by the light of the stars, making His way up the mountain side, and there He is in solitary prayer with His Heavenly Father. This was His regular habit. In Mark 1:35, it says that Jesus, a great while before dawn while it was still dark, got up and left the house, where He was staying, and went off to a solitary place where He prayed. 

Another time, after healing a leper, such a huge crowd surrounded Jesus, that He couldn't get any rest. In Luke 5: 15-16, it says, “News about this healed leper spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and be healed of their sicknesses, but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” This was His regular habit. He would withdraw from the crowd to get alone, and He'd spend time in prayer. Crowds were overwhelming. Another time in Luke 6:12, He spent all night alone in solitary prayer to his Heavenly Father, then came down off the mountain, and designated his twelve apostles, after spending the whole night in prayer with His Father.  Jesus regularly had this pattern of withdrawal into solitary places, sometimes mountains.  This was his essential communion with his father, and I believe this was the true source of Jesus's power for ministry. This was the true source of the way that He ministered in power. Jesus did a river of miracles before. Toward the end of our text here everybody who comes, even those who just touched the hem of His garment, are healed. It’s a river of power flowing through Jesus. What was the source of that river? Well, Jesus told us He openly claimed it was the father working in him that accomplished these things. That's what he said. And we have to take his word for it, in consistent solitary communion with His Father, Jesus got his daily work assignments. And he also got from his Heavenly Father, the power in order to do those assignments and then went out in the power of the Spirit and did the things the Father told him to do. This is precisely what Jesus said happen in John 14, he said, "Don't you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me." There's a perfect union between the Father and the Son. "The words I say to you are not just my own rather it is the Father living in me who's doing his work.” He says, "Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”  Jesus claimed that the very words He spoke and certainly the miracles He did were the result of the Father living in him powerfully. He also said in John 10:32 to His enemies. "I have shown you many great works from the Father, for which of these do you stone me?”  The Father is doing his work in Jesus again in John 8:28 when Jesus said, "When you have lifted up the son of man, then you will know that I am the one I claimed to be, and then I do nothing on my own, but speak just what the Father has taught me." Jesus got alone with his heavenly Father and He listened to the Father.  The Father gave him the words to speak and the works to do, and he went and did it.

Let me stop for a moment and ask about your own personal life. Is this your regular habit? Do you regularly get alone with the Heavenly Father in solitary prayer? Do you spend time alone with him to renew yourself spiritually or are you stronger than Jesus? Are you wiser than Him? You know just what to do and you've got the strength to do it. I think we're easily deceived in this. Do we really know just what to do and do we really have the strength to do it? Maybe you don't have a mountain side or some solitary place where you can go. Jesus, in Matthew 6 said, "Go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father is unseen." That could be your solitary place. The question is, are you doing it? Jesus did this regularly. This was his essential communion with his father. Next in our account, however we see the disciples’ peril and fear. Jesus is up there in serenity and in peaceful fellowship with his heavenly Father, but the disciples are in a boat in the middle of a storm. What a beautiful contrast that is. it.  I want to apply it to our lives.

What a picture we have of Jesus up on the mountain, the disciples way down below in a boat. They're being tossed and turned by the waves, and Jesus, in peaceful a heavenly communion with his father, sees the problem and descends to help them. Hebrews 7 tells us that Jesus is at the right hand of God and is always living to intercede for us no matter what trouble we're going through. I think it's right for us to think that way, and that Jesus is able to help us in the midst of our troubles. Now we have the disciples in fear of peril. Now fear is intrinsic to our suffering here. Few of us go through a week without feeling some fear, perhaps some of us don't go through a day without feeling some kind of fear.  Fears are connected to the danger of physical or psychological pain for us as people. Animals have physiological reactions. You see a deer drinking at a pond or something like that, and then jerking up its head and looking sniffing and then back down jerking up again, or a squirrel. Try to catch a squirrel.  Squirrels are quick and they know what they're all about. They're all about survival; they have instincts towards survival. I don't know if we call it fear, but they're designed to be able to save themselves. Human fear is different though. It has to do with our intellect, it has to do with our imaginations and our anxieties as much as thinking that we're an imminent physical danger. Most of the time that's not the case, most of the time it's not the case that we think we're about to perish. Sometimes happens, like in a car situation when something unexpected quickly happens, but most of our fears are tied to our thoughts about the future and something's about to happen to us that we don't want to happen. It might be a sickness, it might take something from us or a loved one from us, or our own health, our ability to thrive in this world, we might be afraid of that. It might be financial dangers, thinking that ruin is facing us. Many times, however, our fear amounts to nothing at all, isn't that the case? We fear for no reason. We spent a lot of emotion, a lot of time, a lot of anxiety, afraid about something that never even happens. Wouldn't you admit that that's the way it is with most of your fears? But some of them are genuine, some of them really are genuine things we're afraid of, and they actually do come to pass and cause great harm, and they bring us great pain and suffering. Some of it doesn't go away for a long time, if it ever does go away in this world. It’s painful, we go through these experiences and we're afraid to go through them again. Once burned twice shy. We become afraid. Fear is part of life in this sin cursed world. 

The disciples were afraid, I think, in the midst of the storm. If you look at verse 24, it says, “The boat was already a considerable distance from land buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.” John 6: 18 says, “A strong wind was blowing in the water.” The peaceful calm of the Sea of Galilee can quickly be transformed by a violent storm. It has to do with the way that the hills and mountains around are shaped. It can just kind of a funnel wind down in there. It swirls around and really can whip it up into quite a storm.  The disciples were rightly afraid. But it wouldn't be long in this account before they're more afraid of Jesus than they are of the storm. Look at verses 25 through 27, "During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them walking on the lake when the disciples saw him walking on the lake.” They are terrified; “It's a ghost,” they said, and they cried out in fear, but Jesus immediately said to them, "Take courage. It is. Don't be afraid.” Their superstitions fit into this fear that they think it's a ghost. The theology of ghost does not receive much support from the Bible, but they thought it was a ghost. As a matter of fact, at a more significant moment in redemptive history, this issue is going to come up again namely, at the resurrection when doubts arise in their minds. They thought they were seeing a ghost.  It was Jesus risen, and He has to prove to them that he's not a spirit. This is in Luke 24 when He eats a piece of broiled fish, and shows them his hands, and side. He wants them to interact with him physically to prove He has actually defeated death and that He's not a spirit. He's not a ghost. But here they're being afraid, and they cry out in fear. They're afraid that Jesus is a ghost.

Fear is the great enemy of our faith. Over 100 times in the Bible, God or an angel of God or a prophet of God, or a leader from God assures the people of God not to be afraid. It is a repeated theme. Fear is a great enemy of our faith. God is constantly laboring through the Word against our fears, because, like termites, fears are constantly laboring against the structure of our faith. So, we have to work on this issue of fear. God wants us to trust and not be afraid. How many Psalms pick this up as a theme? Psalm 56:3-4, "When I am afraid, I will trust in you, in God whose word I praise. In God I trust, I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?" I get the sense there that the psalmist in Psalm 56 is preaching to himself, he's proclaiming truth to himself, he’s talking himself out of fear, and we need to do that.  It is important in the Christian life to learn how to take scriptural truth and preach it to yourself. You are definitely your own most important preacher, far more than I am. Preach to yourself against your own fears.

Next, we see Christ's compassion and power as He is sitting up on the mountain. He sees his disciples. We don't get that in Matthew's account, but we do get it in Mark's account.  Mark 6:47-48, says, "When evening came the boat was in the middle of the lake and He, Jesus was alone in the land.” Verse 48, "He saw the disciple straining at their oars, because the wind was against them. About the fourth watch of the night, he went out to them walking on the lake." What an image.  Jesus is up on the mountain and He looks down and sees the trouble the disciples are in. I tell you that God sees everything you're going through, He sees all things. The Lord Jesus sees everything you're going through.  I don't know the nature of his vision at that time and in the days of His incarnate ministry on earth. Maybe God the Father, gave him a supernatural vision of the disciples in the middle of the lake. But He saw them. He looked, and seeing their peril, comes to their rescue. There is such a unifying theme in this text. He sees the disciples' peril and comes to their rescue. He sees Simon Peter's peril and comes to his rescue.  He sees the people of Gennesaret and their peril, and He comes to their rescue. Above all, He sees your peril and mine, and He comes to our rescue.  He comes to them walking on the water. Now we use that expression “walk on water” to do something extraordinary, something that can't be explained. Talk even about politicians, you know, they expected him or her to walk on water, this kind of thing. It's really blasphemous. Only Jesus can do it and those empowered by Jesus apparently. I have to add that because of this text.  Now, people talk about the laws of physics, that expression you'll not find in the Bible. That's just the way God consistently chooses to work in this world.  I'm not saying that science isn't something we can pursue, we can, but God isn't subject to those so-called laws, He can do whatever he wants. He's not asking permission of the water to hold them up, he's not doing a study on buoyancy or surface tension. My goodness, what some unbelievers will do to passages like this: The ever present and moving sandbar just below the surface.  I've never seen a sandbar like that and certainly not one that went all the way across the whole lake. What a strange thing. One study group at Florida State University led by one particularly creative professor was talking about how, if the atmospheric and water conditions are right, you can actually get small chunks of ice floating, and that explains what happened. Imagine Jesus kind of surfing on the ice getting across. That's not convincing to me.   And then, how does Peter get his own little piece of ice just outside the boat? It doesn't make any sense. The lengths that people will do to undercut what the Spirit of God is doing in this text, which is giving us a display of Jesus' power. He can do all things. He's walking on the water, because He's God, because He can do it. When they see Jesus they cry out, thinking he's a ghost, and He assures them that He is Christ, that He is God. He sees Peter's peril and comes to his rescue.

We'll deal with that in a moment, but when He gets across the lake and lands of Gennesaret, his heart is moved with compassion for those people as well. He sees their peril, and his ministry extends to them as well. Look at verses 34-36. “When they crossed over, they landed at Gennesaret and when the men of that place recognized Jesus they sent word to all the surrounding country.” People brought all their sick to Him and begged Him to let the sick just touch the edge of his cloak. All who touched Him were healed. The crush of people resumed, that's Jesus' life, that was his ministry. He has those occasional times alone with his father, but mostly He's surrounded by needy people and He sees the peril. He's moved out of compassion and He wants to heal them and to take care of them. There is nothing that our Savior cannot do. Touching the hem of the garment, they're cured. The power of Jesus, that's what's displayed in Matthew 14. 

But above all, He looks and sees our peril and He come to our rescues. What is the nature of our peril? We could talk about the winds and the waves of your life. We can talk about the trials that you're facing, but let's go right to the heart of the matter. Jesus said, "Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice like a wise man who built his house on the rock, and the rains came, rose... Rains fell, and the streams rose and blew and beat against that house. But it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock, but everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice, like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rains fell on that house and the streams rose and the wind blew and beat against that house and it fell with a great crash. I think this is Judgment Day and the only way we're going to survive Judgment Day is Jesus seeing our peril and coming to our rescue. This is precisely what He has done at the cross. Do you know Him as your Savior, have you trusted in Him? Do you know for certain that your house is built on a foundation that will survive the peril of Judgment Day? Has Jesus reached down and drawn you up out of judgment by His saving grace? Trust in Him, don't leave this place without trusting in Christ. Call on Him as Peter does, “Lord save me.” Call on Him and He will rescue you. This is Jesus' ministry, He sees peril and He rescue, He saves, trust in Him.

Now, let's talk for a moment about Peter's supernatural journey. What a fascinating thing. Let me ask you a question, if you had been with them in the boat would you have been Peter getting up and walking, or will you have been those that stayed in the boat and waited to see how it turned out with Peter? First of all, would the idea have popped in your mind, “You tell me to come to you on the water.” Would that have even come to your mind? What an amazing man Peter was. Aren't you glad for Peter and all of his successes, and even more perhaps for his failures? Aren't you glad to see what God can do through a person like him? What God can do through someone like you. Look at Peter’s supernatural journey, look at its beginning, its middle, and its end. First the beginning. "Lord if it's you, Peter replied, "Tell me to come to you on the water." "Come," said Jesus. Then Peter got down on the boat and walked on the water and came towards Jesus.   Peter was willing to ask something that no one else thought to ask or was willing to ask. And Jesus granted to him a supernatural power that no other human being has ever had, as far as we know. The power to walk on water. We forget that it's not only true that God himself can do immeasurably more than all we could ask or imagine but he actually can do through us immeasurably more than all we could ask or imagine. Isn't it true? And how much we forget that, because we forget to ask, we don't ask him to do great things through us. But Jesus himself said in John 14, the night before he was crucified. "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing, he will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father and I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name and I will do it." We under-asked. Let's just stop and apply it for a moment. What are you trusting God for that only God can do? What ministry are you stepping out to do and you know if God doesn't support you, you will fail? I think we're just living natural lives and we really called to live super naturalized. We're called to do things that only God could do through us.

Verse 30, "But when he [Peter]saw the wind and the waves, he was afraid and beginning to sink, cried out. Lord, save me."  He steps out, he's doing well, but then all of a sudden, he maybe gets smacked in the face by a wave or some sound occurs, and he gets distracted. He stops looking at Jesus, and he starts to esteem the power of the waves to kill them as greater than the power of Jesus to save him. He starts to look at his situation and then he looks inward and says, "Can I do this? No, I cannot do this." And he sinks. Quickly. It's an issue of his faith. He has stopped focusing on Jesus' power and instead he's sinking because he’s sitting on his own strength and he knows he can't do it. He begins to sink and cries out, "Lord, save me," and Jesus says at that particular moment, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" You will never find anywhere in the gospels or in all of scripture where Jesus cuddles unbelief, where he comforts the unbeliever. He doesn't, He rebukes it. "Why did you doubt? Don't you know who I am?" "Lord, if it's you, tell me to come." “It is me. I'm still me, I'm still here.” He never cuddles unbelief. The end of the journey is that Jesus is powerful to rescue. In the end, He gets the glory. He will get the glory for your supernatural journey also. He'll get the glory from mine. In the end, He gets all the glory. Beginning to sink, Peter cries out, Jesus reaches out and draws him up. What kind of strength would that take? But this is a supernatural power of almighty God working through them, and He draws him up instantly. He doesn't let him flounder, He doesn't let him sputter, He doesn't let him drown, He immediately rescues him. This is the compassion of Jesus. He's not going to let you drown either.

The real issue going on in your life and mine right now is an issue of faith. Satan's real design on you is to destroy your faith in Jesus. That's what he’s after, he wants to kill your faith, so Jesus goes to the heart of the matter, “You of little faith. Why did you doubt?”  These are issues of faith. Peter has not yet had at this point his hardest trial of faith. We know when it is. It's the night that Jesus was arrested, and Jesus predicted, "Simon, Simon. Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat.” It's plural, just sift all of them like wheat, “but I have prayed for you, Simon, particularly that your faith may not fail and when you have turned back, then strengthen your brothers." Jesus in that statement shows us the center of his intercessory prayer ministry for us while we're going through trials. You may be going through the biggest trials of your life, you may not. You may have just gotten through some of those winds and waves and all the stuff that was happening, and the water is coming in the boat and you think you're going to drown. But now you've gotten on the other side of it. Or this may yet be in your future. But the object of all of that from Satan's point of view, is to destroy your faith in Jesus. You say, "That's impossible. Isn't it true? Once saved, always saved.” Are we going to continue to believe in Jesus right to the end? Yes, we will. If we have been justified by faith, we will continue right to the end. But you know what? It's a dynamic process. Jesus had to reach up and grab Peter and hold him. Do you have faith independent of Jesus' energetic intercessory prayer in your behalf? Do you have it on your own? Is this your own faith?  He gave the faith to you; He is the vine where the branch keeps sustaining that faith. He's interceding for you in the middle of your trial. “You of little faith. Why did you doubt?”   He's saying, "Oh Father, don't let our faith fail. Oh, Father, don't let his faith fail." He continues to intercede at the right hand of God, that our faith may not fail. This is the issue.

The ultimate inevitable conclusion is worshipping Jesus as God. Someday I'll get to see Jesus and I will get to worship Him. I'll get to fall down in His presence and say, "You are God, You are Almighty God." That's the outcome of this whole journey, that's where we're heading.  What could be better than that? The outcome even in this account is they're worshiping him as God. In verse 27, when they cry out, Jesus literally says, "Take courage. I  AM. Do not be afraid." What are the words “I AM” mean to you? This is God's name, he's saying, "I AM, I am God." This is the name by which the Jewish God, Yahweh, is known. He revealed himself to Moses, in the flames of the burning bush. Saying, "Tell them that I AM sent you, I AM that I AM.” This is what he says, "I AM. Don't be afraid, I AM God."

The disciples, react naturally to a supernatural power, verse 33, "Then those who are in the boat worshipped him saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’” This is God's end. His purpose is worship, in spirit and truth, and there's no jealousy in the trinity. It's not like the father says, "Hey, hey, wait about me, what about me? I'm the one who gave him the power." No, He wants us to honor the Son, even as we honor the Father, that's his yearning. It says in Philippians 2, that, “Jesus being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross, therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the father.” There's no jealousy in the trinity, He's delighted to see the disciples’ worship and say, "Truly, you are the Son of God."

What application do we take from this? First, I've already given you, solitary prayer. Do not think that you can get along better without solitary prayer than Jesus did. Look at your prayer life. How is it? I had to do that just as I was preparing this sermon. How is my prayer life? Is it what it needs to be? I was convicted, that I need to spend more time in solitary prayer.  I take comfort in Matthew 6, where Jesus said, "Go into your room and close the door and pray to your Father unseen.” That's good, but it's still good to have a special place where you can go to be refreshed and renewed spiritually to strengthen yourself. He restores my soul. Do you have that regular habit of private prayer? 

What about this whole issue of allegory? Is He the Lord of our rocking boat?  Jesus will rescue from the storms of your life. What are the storms of your life? The problem with allegories it denies that this ever really happened historically. I tell you, it happened, there are details. It was about the fourth watch of the night. The disciples are straining at their oars. Peter starts, but it starts to sink. Who makes this kind of stuff up? This actually occurred in space and time. But that doesn't mean that there are not spiritual connections, the stuff you will face in your life, even if you never get into a boat the rest of your life. We have permission to do that because in Ephesians 4, it says if you get good teaching ministry, a good pastor and teacher to teach you, then you will no longer be infants, blown and tossed back and forth by the waves. You won’t be blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men that are deceitful, scheming false doctrine, being under the influence of false doctrines, like being in a storm-tossed sea, says Paul in Ephesians 4. James says, "If you lack wisdom, then ask God, but you better believe that He'll give it to you, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man unstable in all he does.”   This is a way of speaking. We know what storms are like, we know what it's like to be under the influence of something that's more powerful than we are that seems to mean harm. We call those things trials. Jesus is watching over you in the middle of your trials to rescue you and help you. But I'm going to go further than that. He actually is bringing the trials to you. He has brought the storm into your life. He is not just managing the storm, he brought it, he has certain purposes in your life. Nothing comes to you except directly by the will of your Heavenly Father, and He is managing and protecting you in the middle of that storm and that trouble. Finally, look at Peter as a commendable example of faith. I know he failed in the middle of it, but he got up out of the boat. How comfortable do we get in our Christian lives? You know what I'm talking about? How comfortable? We don't want to witness; we don't want to go to the far reaches on a mission trip. He may be calling you to get up out of your boat and walk to Jesus.  He may be calling on you to go to foreign lands. 

But there are applications to be courageous, to step out in faith and do things that only God can do in and through you. What are you doing like that? I want to close with the example of DL Moody who made two commitments in his life that carried him the rest of his life. DL Moody made a commitment after hearing Henry Varley who was a fellow evangelist say this, the world is yet to see what God can do with a man fully consecrated to Him. He resolved to be that man. A man fully consecrated Jesus. That means at every moment, I'm given over to doing the will of God. He said to RA Torrey, his co-worker, he said, "If I believe that God wanted me to jump out that window, I would jump." Fully consecrated, whatever God told me to do, I want to do. He made a second commitment, and this is very interesting.  This came out in RA Torrey's funeral sermon for Moody. He preached why God used DL Moody. Moody made a commitment that he would not allow 24 hours to pass over his head without witnessing to somebody about Christ. That's pretty practical, isn't it? Are you courageous enough to make a commitment like that? Try a week, let's start with one week, alright? For one week, you won't let 24 hours pass over your head without witnessing to somebody. There are amazing stories about Moody's commitment. Once, late, late in the day, he hadn't witnessed anybody. It was about 11 o'clock, and he was going back to his hotel. He doesn't know what to do, and he sees a man by a lamp post, and he goes up and he starts sharing and says, "Friend. Are you a Christian?" The man is immediately offended, he says, "How dare you? You don't even know me; you don't know anything about me. And you're asking me that question?" The man knew that Moody was a preacher. He said, "If you weren't some kind of preacher, I'd knock you into the gutter right now." That man went and told some of DL Moody's sponsors that Moody had a zeal without knowledge, and that he was rude and was actually under cutting the work of Christ. The organizer called DL Moody in, he was a young man at this point and said, “You're doing more damage than good.” It caused Moody to doubt some of his own convictions. It was very tough time until three weeks later, late in the night, there’s a loud knock on the door and it's the same man. He said, I've not been able to get your question [ Are you a Christian?] out of my mind. I've come to the conclusion, I'm not a Christian, and I've given my life to Christ, and I just wanted to thank you.

There was another time again late at night. Moody hadn't witnessed and thinking that it’s too late, he goes out and is pouring rain. He sees a man immediately, a man who is walking with an umbrella, so he runs out of his little hotel area, and goes out in the pouring rain, and says, “Do you mind if I share your umbrella? He said, "No, come on." So, there are two of them walking along under the umbrella and he gets an idea and says, "Do you know the security and the shelter that comes from following Christ? He uses the umbrella as a picture of salvation and led the man to Christ.  I just think we don't step out in faith because we're afraid of what will happen. We're afraid of what will happen if we make a commitment to go to foreign places or to not let one day go by in seven that we don't witness for Jesus. We're afraid to try new ministries. Don't be. When you step out in faith, you will find the ground under your feet secured by the power of God, by the power of Jesus.

What a great text we have to look at today, the feeding of the 5,000. What a marvelous thing it is. It's one of the few acts of Jesus that's recorded in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and therefore, it stands with great magnitude. It shines with the brightness that I think will be encouraging to all of us.

I have to confess some weakness to you this morning.  I was thinking about it this morning, and the idea came to me to express to you my own weakness, and why this text specifically encourages me in that weakness. A few weeks ago, I woke up and I immediately sensed that something was different, something was wrong in my house. I got up from my prayer time and it felt very chilly. I noticed, even more significantly, the lack of the constant hum of our heating system and that it wasn't on. I thought, "What's going on?" So, I went down and I started playing with the thermostat and I couldn't get the heating system to go on, and that was a big deal that morning. It's not a big deal other times of the year, but that morning it was a big deal.   First thing I thought as an engineer, is I said, "Alright, you gotta go down and check the circuit breaker, be sure that it hasn't tripped over."  I went down and all the circuits were fine. So, I said, "Okay, this is money is what this is. " And so, it was. But that it wasn't the circuit breaker wasn't true. There was another circuit breaker in our crawl space that had tripped, and the worker found it. I decided to give you an extra layer on this illustration so you didn't think me a fool and say, "Check the circuit breaker, Pastor, that's the first thing I would have done." Well, I knew that, but I didn't know there was another one in there. The worker said, "I put it back over, but it's weak. It's old and weak and it's going to keep tripping on you.  There's no problems, it just you need a new circuit breaker."  So, we got a new circuit breaker. Now, what is the circuit breaker? A circuit breaker is a little device that protects your home from electrical fires if the current is drawn too much. It just trips and it just goes over and won't let all that power go where it could cause some damage. It's essential to the use of electricity safely in a home. That's a good analogy for my weakness. We had a weak circuit breaker, and it just was tripped. When I face the things that God is asking me to do, when we face the things that God is laying in front of us to do, we can easily trip over and say, "I can't do it, I just cannot do it, it's too hard for me."

We keep talking about these two infinite journeys. To be perfect inwardly, like Christ is perfect, and then outwardly to look at the world and see all of its overwhelming needs and to think that God has actually taken those needs and in some sense laid them right at our feet. I get it right out of the text. They don't need to go away; you give them something to eat. Do you feel the weight of that? Do you ever trip over sometimes when you look at the countless millions that have never heard the name of Jesus in the 10/40 window? When you think about the problem of AIDS in Africa, AIDS orphans, when you decide to venture forth and educate yourself so that you can feel some pain and to feel some compassion, and it hurts. Pretty soon you're at that point, where you're just like, "I don't know what I can do."  It could be anything, there could be any of the needs around us. It could be the urban ministry right near us. We see the needs of single parents and the needs concerning gangs and drugs and violence and all that and we just trip over. There's nothing we can do. It could be evangelism, you may even look at your company where you work, and you know that there's a lot of people that don't go to church. Some of them don't seem to know even the basics about the gospel, not in some foreign country of 10/40 window, they don't know it here, they've never been told. You start feeling overwhelmed, you just trip over.

Well, how do we not trip over? How does that not happen? I think we do it by looking at Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. It is an ever-increasing faith; it causes us not to trip over as greater and greater needs are laid at our feet. Jesus called his disciples again and again, "Oh, you of little faith." I want an increased faith in myself, so I don't just trip over and give up. I want to be able to do that, but the only way I can do it is by looking at Jesus. So, we come to Matthew 14:13-21, we come to the feeding of the 5,000 with a yearning, with a specific need. Lord, help me to face the things you're putting at my feet, without tripping over, so that I can face it and trust you and see you put huge amounts of power through me, power that ordinarily would cause me to trip over, that the power of the Holy Spirit can flow through me, and I can actually do something in this hurting world. That's what's in front of us this morning.

So, let's look at Jesus, let's look at how He faced the situation that He faced when He crossed the Sea of Galilee. Let's remember the context. Last week as we were looking at Matthew, John the Baptist had been executed. What a terrible thing, John the Baptist's head cut off to satisfy a king in response to a dancing girl. What an awful thing that is.  I can assure you that it doesn't hit us the way it hit Jesus. Jesus was a human being.  He had emotions, great emotions, perfect emotions, so when He received the news that John the Baptist had been beheaded, and when He heard probably also the circumstances of what happened, He had one desire, He had one drive, and that is to be alone with his Heavenly Father, that's what he wanted for himself. He was extremely and genuinely grieved and sorrowed by what happened to John the Baptist.

Later in Matthew's Gospel, you will see in Matthew 23, Jesus talks about Jerusalem and how they kill the prophets and stone those sent.  He takes all of the martyrs that there have been, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, who was murdered between the temple and the altar. All of this will come on this generation. He thinks that way. He's got all the martyrs in his mind. He knows them, He knows their suffering This isn’t just a straight killing, and it isn't even just a martyrdom. This is John the Baptist, his cousin, his beloved forerunner, the one that He had put in harm's way, by his will, now dead. Jesus is not surprised, not that, it's just that He has emotions, He has compassion. That's going to be the center of the text here for us in terms of Jesus's reaction. It's a matter of his compassion.   Look at verse 13. What are Jesus's desires, what are his needs? You said, "Well, Jesus didn't have any needs." Well, sure he did. He needed to eat while He was on the Earth, He needed to breathe, He was a human being. What did He need in verse 13? When Jesus heard what had happened, He withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. There's three words that tell you what his needs are: He wants to be alone, that's what He wants. He wants to be alone. Now, you can't imagine how not alone Jesus was on the average day of his ministries. He was crushed by people, constantly crushed by people. At this moment, He just wanted to be alone. He even said in the account in Mark, to his disciples, "Come apart so you can be by yourselves for a while." That was his intention. And He intended to leave them by themselves and go up by himself and pray.

Jesus frequently withdrew into times of solitary prayer for strengthening. He would get up a great while before dawn and pray. That's how he prayed, that was the source of his strength, so He withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Notice again the end of the account verse 22 and 23, which is so important. After all of it is done, the feeding of the 5,000, all of that ministry, when all of that is done, look what happens. Verse 22, "Immediately, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat, and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd," This is a very strong Greek word, He compelled them to get in the boat, forced them to go, and then He dismisses the crowd. Then what does he do? Verse 23, “After he dismissed them, sent them all away, He went up on a mountain side by himself to pray and when evening was there, when evening came, He was there alone.”

You see the consistency of Jesus's personal needs throughout the account. But what happens? He gets into the boat to be alone, goes across and the crowd, the very one that he was trying to get away from, had walked around the lake and were waiting for him when he got there. Surprise! There's the crowd. Look at it, verse 13 and 14, "Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns and when Jesus landed, he saw a large crowd," the very people that he's trying to escape. This is the picture of the way it frequently goes in our lives as well, right? You want to be away, and the world crushes in on you and presses in on you. But here we see Jesus's selfless compassion. This is not a small crowd, this is 5,000 men plus women and children, a huge amount of need,  a huge amount of pressure, and He lands and look what it says, verse 14, "When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them." Compassion. His heart was moved for their needs, He forgot about himself. Like a servant, like a good servant does, He forgets his own needs, He forgets his own situation and He goes out to others and meets their need.  He didn't roll his eyes, He didn't sigh, He didn't get frustrated, He didn't say, "Don't you understand what I'm going through at this particular moment? I don't have anything to give you." He didn't do any of that. Instead, there is a river of compassion flowing up from inside him that caused Him to deny himself at that moment. He immersed himself in the overwhelming needs of this crowd.

Now, I want to stop and just have a word of application here for us, because you're going to forget, and maybe I will, anyway, toward the end.  What would you have done? Let's make it a little more applicable right now. Let's say you just received a diagnosis that your spouse has very serious cancer. It’s unclear what's going to happen, it's going to be very, very tough ahead. You’ve been crying most of the day, you get home and the phone rings and there's someone from church, they've got a flat tire, and it's raining. Do you get in the car and go help them or do you tell them what's going on in your life right now, what you're going through? Is that what you do? I know what I would do on my natural, normal day. Come on, be honest. What would you have done?   Or you ladies, there's a call. Would you be willing to make a cover dish for tomorrow's meeting? It's like, "Do you understand what I'm going through?" We take our suffering like a trump card and it trumps whatever comes our way at that moment, and we just can't do it.  Or perhaps you get in the mail one of those mailers from a Christian aid agency working in Africa, working with orphans, and you look at it and you just quickly set it aside. You say, "You don't understand what I'm going through. I'm going through this great suffering." But look at Jesus, how is he? What is he like? Let's not focus here, let's go right to the end of his life. We see it incredibly in the final hours of his life as He's carrying his cross to his own execution, going to Calvary. Some women from Jerusalem are gathered around, and they're weeping and wailing for him and he said, "Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves." He's up out of himself and He's saying you ought to weep for yourselves.  And after being nailed to the cross, what does He say? "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing.” He looks down and He sees his mother and He realized she's not going to be cared for by believers, because his brothers haven't come to faith yet, and He says to John, "Behold your mother." And to Mary, "Behold your son," and He gets them together, so that John takes care. From that day forward John took her into his home and cared for her. Who is he thinking about? He's got to arrange that thing between John and Mary. And then there's the thief on the cross, "Remember me, Lord, when you come in your kingdom." "I'll tell you today, you'll be with me in paradise."

Jesus makes seven statements from the cross and three of them are other-centered, that's amazing. He's not going through a hard time; he is going through hell on the cross. He is nailed to the cross, He is drinking a cup of God's wrath and He's thinking of others. None of us has the credentials, friends, to compare with that. That stands over me and it will stand over me the rest of my life to cause me to be ready to be compassionate, even in the middle of my own struggles and my own suffering.  What would you have done? Let me ask a better question, what would you like to do? Is that more hopeful, more encouraging? Not what have you been doing, but what would you yearn? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Would you like to be better? Would you like to be more like Jesus? Here's this example right in front of us. What met him when he got out of that boat? Overwhelming needs. Why do they trek so far on foot to come to see Jesus? First of all, their dedication to Jesus is astonishing. They want to be with him.  Jesus is without question the most magnetic person in history.   "No one ever talked like this man," said some that went to arrest him. His miracles were compelling. There's just a draw to Jesus, people just wanted to be near him. His demeanor was perfect and God-like, his personality unlike any that anyone had ever seen. The crowd couldn't get enough of being with Jesus. But that's not really why they went. They went because they had needs, they personally had needs and they felt those needs. Many of them were sick and Jesus was the only one who could care for them. Others were fascinated by his teaching and wanted to get away from the humdrum of their everyday life, so they felt those needs.

In John's account of this, the next day, they come back for more felt needs to be met. Jesus says, “No, no, I did not descend from heaven to earth to be your personal chef. I'm not going to be feeding you every day of your lives. God and his marvelous providence will take care of that. He will abundantly meet your needs. Do not labor for the food that spoils, but rather for that which endures to eternal life, which I will give you.” He's causing them to lift their eyes off their stomachs up to the heavenly needs that they have. In this account we see Jesus's priority structure. You have to really look across the four Gospels to get a full sense of his priority structure, it doesn't come so clearly in Matthew.   But I think if you put the thing together, you're going to start seeing how Jesus started sorting out those needs as He got off the boat and He saw this huge crowd, and all of their overwhelming needs. Listen to how Mark's Gospel said he sorted it out. In Mark 6:34, it says, "When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, so he began teaching them many things."

That's an eye-opener.  I've heard it said that you can't share the gospel to hungry people, they can't listen to you until their stomachs are full, right? You could extend it and say you can't share the gospel with or teach spiritual things to people have significant health needs. Meet their health need, then they can hear the gospel. Meet the felt needs, then they'll listen to the spiritual needs.  That's not Jesus' approach. He said, "We have got to go to the heart of the matter, we have got to deal immediately with your number one need, and your number one need is spiritual, and the remedy is the word of God."  He puts the teaching of the word of God over everything else that He will do for them. He preached the gospel to them. He does the same thing, by the way, with the paralytic in Matthew 9. You know, it's amazing as you look at this, they bring the paralyzed man to Jesus. If you were to ask him and his friends, the guys who dug through the roof, and you say, "What is your number one need right now?" What's he going to say? "I need to walk, I'm paralyzed, I can't move, I can't earn a living, I need to walk, I need to be free from this paralysis." But what did Jesus do? When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralyzed man, "Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven." He went right to the heart of the matter. That is our number one need, to have our sins forgiven before Almighty God. That's what Jesus would say is our number one need. It doesn't matter what any of your other needs are that you think are so pressing. The number one need is to have our sins forgiven in the eyes of an almighty God, and so Jesus taught them many things.

If you're here today and you don't know for sure that your sins have been forgiven by faith in Christ, you may tell me, "No, I've got five or six other greater needs." No, your number one need is to repent and believe in Jesus, for the salvation of your soul, that you might have eternal life. Believe it or not, for us Christians, we who have already believed, we have that ongoing need for cleansing too.  It's not like once you believe, then from then on, you don't need to be covered. We need to be covered the rest of our lives and we will be, that's the promise of justification, ongoing forgiveness and cleansing and cover. But this is our number one need. Then comes the healing of the sick, Priority number two. Then comes the feeding of the hungry, priority number three. And then comes sending them home, priority number four. It's a remote place, why would you want to be here? We're done, go home. There's nothing else. So, there's the four priorities. They needed the Gospel. They needed the sick healed. They needed their empty bellies filled, and then they needed to go home and go about their lives.

The next thing in the account we meet is the insufficient resources of the disciples, and this is where we make our entry into the text, the insufficient resources of the disciples to meet any of those needs, frankly. Look at verse 15, "As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a remote place, and it's already getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.’”  The disciples had some compassion, just not much. The teaching would have taken a long time. The healings would have taken a long time. Jesus preferred not to heal the whole crowd with a word, which He could have done easily. He preferred to have an encounter with people, talk to them, draw them in, and that would have taken time. By this time, it is very late. They're out in a remote area, there's no village, very little vegetation. There's certainly no fast food or grocery stores.  It's a problem. The disciples began to be concerned for the crowd; they had some compassion on the crowd. Perhaps they thought their master was too absorbed in his spiritual work. “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” There's a lack of practicality there, they're thinking, and they need to come and tell Jesus, "Send the crowd away so they can get something to eat. Are you forgetting that we have that basic need?" Jesus hadn't forgotten anything. He was just dealing with everything in the proper order. 

Secondly, the disciples clearly had a little food, just not much. Now, I don't know how much they brought for themselves. We have on record later in Matthew 16 that they forgot to take food. So, talk about who's absent-minded. They didn't any. It could be that they're really concerned about themselves. "Send the crowd away so we can go to the villages and buy some food. We don't have any food." We don't have any idea how much food the disciples had.   We do know that there was a boy there that had five barley loaves and two small fish.  The little boy's dinner, five little barley loaves and two fish. They had a little food, just not much.  Jesus clearly wants to involve his disciples in the process. Could He have handled this thing himself, alone? No question about it. He wants to draw them in to the solution to the problem, and He wants to draw us in too. He had Matthew write it down, and Mark, and Luke, and John. He wants us to feel the weight of, "They don't need to go away. You give them something to eat." He draws them in.

What is Jesus' motive? His central strategy for the rest of human history is to work his Kingdom advance through his disciples. The whole world is starving for forgiveness and love. Many in the world are starving for healing. Some in the world are literally starving for food. H wants to take all of that and put it at the Church's feet and say, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat. You take care of them." He gives repeated commands to his disciples to draw them in. For example, He says, "Bring me the five loaves and the two fish." He gives a command in Luke's Gospel, "Have them sit down in groups of fifty each." That's a little more specificity than we have in Matthew's Gospel, but He told them to... He directed his disciples to organize the people.

Then He commanded his disciples to distribute the food as it was being miraculously produced, so they're involved in the food distribution. Then He commands them to go get baskets and collect up the broken pieces so that nothing would be wasted. They're involved in that. They're involved right across in every aspect. He wants them involved. He wants us involved. That brings us immediately to our need, and that is the supernatural power of Jesus to meet every need. He's going to do it through the inadequate resources of the disciples. That's very important for me as a Christian, that's He actually going to meet overwhelming need through the inadequate resources I have to offer, and in that way, He's going to glorify himself. He's going to show his great power by taking weak, inadequate people like you and me, and actually doing incredible things through us.

We see the supernatural power of Jesus. He takes the five loaves and the two fish, and He uses them. Why? It’s to teach us to share. We all need to share. We need to learn to share, is that it? Well, I'm not against sharing. I don't want you thinking that I'm here to say that I think we ought not to share. I think we ought to share, but if the Sunday School lesson goes to that and that's it, we have missed the point. The point is not to teach us to share. The point is to see the supernatural power of Jesus making up the deficiencies that we cannot make up. That's what it is. It's the supernatural power of Jesus here. Other than that, five loaves and two fish isn't going to go far, and the disciples knew that very well. It's really amazing how they come up with these naturalistic explanations for this— basically, everyone brought more than enough for themselves and everyone else to share, but they were being stingy, they were holding back. So, this really isn't a miracle so much as it's an example of sharing that, like an avalanche, a little rock starts, and then, before you know it, you have 12 baskets of broken pieces left over. The count in Mark's Gospel said they had no food, so that settles it for me. It's not like they had it and didn't want to share it. They had none. They didn't bring any. That's what the account says there. 

Notice that Jesus uses the five loaves and the two fish as such. He doesn't change them to steak and watermelon, much as you may have liked that or whatever. You got barley loaves out, and you got fish. That's what you got. What went in, came out. There’s a key principle in that too. What we bring to the situation, He takes it and uses it. For me, this may be one of the most convicting aspects of all, is that what I give actually does make a difference. That causes me to feel guilty about those things I don't give, do you see? If there were no connection... We bring five barley loaves and two fish, and lo and behold he turns it into steak and watermelon, we don't see a connection at all. He can do the steak and watermelon without the five loaves and two fish. But He wants us to see a connection between what we bring to the situation, and the actual ministry that occurs and the way the problem gets solved. It could be the 10-40 window. It could be the needs of AIDS orphans in Africa. It could be the needs of the urban poor right around us. It could be any one of a number of needs. He is going to actually take what we have in our hands, and present to him, and He'll use it to solve a problem, but He's going to add his supernatural power. 

Look at what He does in verse 19, "He takes the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to Heaven, He gives thanks and breaks the loaves. Then He gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people." This is a consistent posture of Jesus when it came time to eat. He's looking up to Heaven, and He's giving thanks to God for the food. He does this over-and-over, many times. As a matter of fact, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, they didn't know who Jesus was until they took the bread that they're sitting... “He broke it and gave thanks. Then their eyes were opened, they knew it was Jesus.”  Jesus does this again and again at the Last Supper. He takes the bread and gives thanks. He takes the cup and gives thanks.

In the feeding of the 4,000, He takes the food given and gives thanks. The glowing heart of the miracle? The glowing heart of the miracle is the ability that God has to create something out of nothing. That is the miracle. It's not a miracle of sharing. It's a miracle of creation.  I tell you, anyone who has trouble believing this miracle, they have trouble believing the very first verse of the Bible. "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth." Now, which is harder? To create the nebula and the stars, all of them that are near and far, to create the planets, to create the earth and the fullness thereof, everything in it, all of the ecosystems that God created, or take a boy's five loaves and two fish and make more loaves and fish out of it?

This is a creation of matter, of something out of nothing. And notice the continuation, the barley loaf becomes lots of barley loaves. The fish becomes lots of fish. And I started thinking about this, it must have been cooked fish. Ready to eat.  It came out of Jesus' hands ready to eat. Imagine them all scrounging for firewood trying to cook the fish. The boy's mother had at least thought enough to cook the fish, so out it came ready to eat. Cooked fish. Don't stumble over this. The barley loaves weren't just grain ready to be ground for bread; it came out more loaves.  God had thought of every need, and it was met. Creating something out of nothing, and we see the evidence of total satisfaction in the twelve baskets. We could have them just... Laid out here on the stage, and they'd be filled with fragments.   Complete satisfaction. The barley loaves and the fish are just a symbol of what God will do in Heaven. The rich and full satisfaction of every need in Heaven. This is an incredible miracle. Don't minimize it, either. He didn't feed the 5,000. Oh, there were 5,000 men, plus women and children.  I say to you, it is nothing compared to the satisfaction you'll feel in your souls when you see God face-to-face, when you dwell with him forever. When you sit at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven and you feast. How richly satisfied you will be then because it says in Psalm 16, verse 11, "You have made known to me the path of life, you will fill me with joy in your presence with eternal pleasures at your right hand."  The 15 basketfuls of broken pieces, that is a picture of complete and total satisfaction.

What is the central lesson of this text? The central lesson is to look upward, not outward or inward. Do you realize that Jesus consistently gives his disciples impossible commands?  To the paralyzed man in Matthew 9, He said to him, "Rise and walk." It's impossible.  To Nicodemus, He says, "You must be born again." How can a man enter into his mother's womb a second time and be born again? It's impossible. To his disciples in Matthew 5:48, He said, "You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." That's an impossible command. If you don't think so, you don't know yourself. It's an impossible command.

In Revelation 4, there's John on the Isle of Patmos, seeing a door standing open in Heaven, and Jesus' voice comes like a trumpet and says, "Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this." How is he going to do that? He can't fly. It's an impossible command. Later in this very same chapter of Matthew, Jesus will give Peter an impossible command. Peter's in the boat, Jesus is walking on water, and Jesus says to Peter, "Come. Walk on water, Peter." Another is Matthew 28, "All authority in Heaven and earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations." It doesn't just say, "Preach the Gospel." It says be successful in the preaching of the Gospel, make them followers of Christ and baptize them and teach them to obey everything that I have commanded. Can I do that? Can you? These are impossible commands, and Jesus delights to give them. Why?

Because along with the impossible command, He gives the supernatural power to meet the command. And thus, we are humbled, and He is glorified. To the paralyzed man, He says, "Rise and walk,” and immediately the man starts feeling feelings in his body that he has not felt in years, and he knows he can do it, and he gets up and walks to the glory of God. When Jesus says to Nicodemus, "You must be born again." I'm convinced Nicodemus was born again. I don't know that it happened in John 3, but I think by the end of John's Gospel, Nicodemus has been born again. He feels within himself a change he could not explain, except by saying, "I'm like an entirely new person. It's like I've been born again. The spirit of God did it." In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says, "You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." Brothers and sisters, when the Lord is done with us, what are we going to be, but perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, how?  By his supernatural wonder-working power in us. We will be perfect. To John on the Isle of Patmos, “At once, I was in the spirit, and there before me was a throne in Heaven." So, the command, "Come up here," is immediately met by the supernatural power in the spirit to do so. It's a clear example of what I'm talking about. And what about the command, "Make disciples of all nations”? Has God sent forth his spirit? By his power, has it happened for 20 centuries? It has. All over the world, people are being converted. People are being changed. They're being transformed.  The wonder-working power of Almighty God.

Why does he do it? Why does he give us commands that we cannot obey? He does it to teach us, to train us, to test us. 

In John's Gospel [John 6:5], He says to Philip, "What should we do for this huge crowd? Where should we get bread for all of them?" He asked them, he initiates the question. It says in John 6:6, he asks this only to test him, for He knew already what He was going to do. So, what is the test? — to teach us to do what Jesus did. What did Jesus do? He looked upward to God. God basically puts you in a box with no window, no door, nothing. You're just in a box, and you can't do it. But the ceiling is off, and you can look up to Heaven, and you can lift your hands and you can thank God for that situation. You say, "Lord, move in a mighty way. Send forth your power to do what I cannot do. Send forth your power for an infinite, internal journey. I can't defeat sin in my life. It's too hard for me. Lord, send forth your holy spirit, and enable me, Lord, to overcome sin in my life. To be perfect as my Heavenly Father's perfect day-after-day.  God, you have laid the needs of the world at my feet. I can't do it. The 10-40 window, billions of people never heard of Jesus. Millions of people with physical needs that are beyond me. Ministries I cannot do."  It's to teach us to look upward, not outward at the trial, not inward at your resource, and say, "Well, I can do this. I got it. I can do an evangelistic ministry. I can do urban ministry. I can minister the AIDS orphans. I can do it." That's arrogance. Or, "I can't do it. I can't do it. I'm not going to do anything." That's despair. Arrogance and despair are two sides of the same coin. Self-reliance. God wants us to throw that coin away and look upward, and say, "Oh, God. We cannot do it. Give me supernatural power to meet this impossible command." And that's what he's called on us to do.

Let's begin by meditating on the greatness of Christ. Understand this: Jesus has compassion like we can't even imagine. He is a river of compassion. That means whatever needs you brought in this sanctuary here today, and I don't minimize them, believe me, I don't, Jesus is compassionate toward those needs. He knows what you're feeling. He cares about you. Meditate on the greatness of his compassion and meditate on the greatness of his power to meet every need. Take your needs before him in prayer, tell him what they are. Lift up your hands in prayer and bring those needs and lay them at his feet. He is compassionate and kind-hearted, and he'll meet your need.

But secondly, in the midst of that, realize, "There's some other people that are hurting too around me, and maybe because of a focus on my own problems, I haven't done anything for them. I've neglected to care. I want to imitate Christ's compassion. I want to care about needy people around me. I want to care about the needs of the poor." And if I can urge you to trust God to meet your needs... Do you realize that John the Baptist had it right when he said, "I tell you that out of these stones, God can raise up children for Abraham.”? Can you do that? Was that an overstatement? No. He created Adam out of the dust of the earth, He can do anything. If you're having a financial problem, God is able, out of the stones, to give you enough money to meet that need.

 If you've got a medical need, He can speak the word and you're instantly healed. He can heal the whole world with a word.  He wouldn't even have to speak the world. In John 4, He heals the royal official's son without saying a word. He just says, "Your son is healed, go home." He didn't even say anything, He just thought it and it was done. If you have a financial or medical need and you have prayed about it and nothing's happening, it's for a purpose in your life. God is working a purpose, trust Him to meet your need and He will meet it in due time. Trust him to meet your need. Right out of this text, He will meet every need in his good time.

What I really want to do is challenge to you to see what God could do through you supernaturally. The world's too big for us, isn't it? Do you feel overwhelmed? When you look at the need of the hungry, and you look at the needs of urban ministry, you look at needs of international ministry, you look at the needs of the 10-40 window. You look at just the needs of your fellow co-workers who are around you who don't know Jesus. It's overwhelming, isn't it? It's easy to get discouraged. Can I urge you to just learn to not look inward for the resources, not look outward to get depressed at what's going on, but look upward to Jesus and trust in him to meet every need?

We come to Matthew 14. With expositions through the 13th chapter of Matthew, we discovered that the theme of Matthew's gospel is the kingdom of heaven, and specifically the King of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus Christ. The gospel of Matthew portrays Christ as the King of the kingdom of heaven. In the latter part of Matthew 13, it speaks of the advancement of the kingdom, the spread of the kingdom like a mustard seed. A tiny seed grows until it's a tree large enough for birds to perch on its branches. The kingdom is also like leaven, which starts in a little place and moves all the way through the dough, it advances. But the question before us, as we look at the next section, Matthew 14:1-12, the martyrdom of John the Baptist, is how does the kingdom advance? What is the way that God advances the kingdom? What is the seed that grows? 

Jesus answered this best in John chapter 12, when speaking first and foremost of His own death on the cross, but then also His death as a pattern for how we are to live our lives and how we are to spread the gospel and bring many to faith in Christ. Jesus said , "Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself a single seed. But if it dies, it brings forth many seeds." There is a pattern, those seeds must also fall into the ground and die and bring forth more seeds, and so the Kingdom of Heaven advances when God takes His choicest servants and pours them out like a drink offering.  God takes our lives and looks on them as though we are sheep for the slaughter [Romans 8], and treats us no differently than He treated His only begotten Son, whom He crushed at the cross that we might have eternal life. It's the same pattern. It is by martyrdom, it is by dying to ourselves, either literal martyrdom or a spiritual martyrdom, that the kingdom advances, and now we come to the martyrdom of John the Baptist.

The early history of the church was saturated with the blood of martyrs. We know that the Roman Empire fought against the spread of Christianity, and lost to the glory of God, but it was Tertullian, the North African theologian, who was watching all of this unfold, and  said, "The blood of martyrs is seed for the church." So it was and it's going on today. We should not think this is part of ancient church history, it's part of present church history. 55,000 Christians a year on average are martyred for their faith around the world  55,000. What's especially painful for us as Christians to see is the frivolous way that extraordinary lives are snuffed out to please unbelievers. It was frivolous  that the early Romans observed Christian martyrs, little families huddled together in prayer in the sands of the Colosseum, for their entertainment. They came for a day of entertainment, the way we would watch a football game, and they would observe these Christians being mauled to death by lions, until after a while they realized there wasn't any entertainment in it. Unlike the gladiators, they weren't fighting back, they were just entrusting their souls to God and saying, "Father forgive them, they don't know what they're doing."   There wasn't much sport in it, but so it was, just for entertainment, their lives were poured out. Or Nero who illuminated a garden party, an evening party, with the bodies of martyrs, Christians. John the Baptist was the first of these. His death demanded at a birthday party after a young girl's dance. The cowardly tyrant, King Herod, killed him to please his dinner guests and ultimately his wife. 

The question for us, that's in front of us, the question that it's pressing in our minds is how can God, a sovereign powerful God, watch all of this from heaven and do nothing? How can He just watch and not interfere? Why does He not move with His mighty arm of power and do something?  Reading through the Bible in a year, following a pattern,  brought me to Psalm 18. I was thinking, “Here it is, here is God intervening for David and rescuing him from all of his troubles.” David writes about it, in Psalm 18 saying, "In my distress, I called to the Lord, I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice, my cry came before him into his ears, the earth trembled and quaked and the foundations of the mountains shook, they trembled because he was angry. Smoke rose from his nostrils, consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it, he parted the heavens and came down." Oh, wouldn't you like that to happen to your enemies? Just meekly step aside and say, "Go get 'em, Lord." 

Yet throughout redemptive history, God has not, it seems, parted the heavens and come down with smoke coming from His nostrils and smote the enemies of God to death; that has not happened. This is extremely perplexing when one considers for example, a certain text of Scripture in which it seems that Jesus promises that that's precisely what God will do. Luke 18, "Then Jesus told His disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and never give up. He said, in a certain town, there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men, and there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.' For some time he refused, but finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming.' And the Lord said, Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for His chosen ones who cry out to Him day and night? Will He keep putting them off? I tell you, He will see that they get justice and quickly. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

 What did Christ say? I will see that they get justice and quickly. Quickly? Is that happening for the 55,000 every year? Did that happen to the Roman martyrs? Did that happen to every one of the apostles but John, who were all martyred for their faith? Did it happen to Jesus Himself who cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" How do you put it together? The sovereignty of God, His great love for His people, and the persecution, the vicious persecution, the opposition of the church throughout history, how do you put it all together? It says in Romans 8, "He who did not spare His own Son, how is he not going to give us all things?" Does that include deliverance from our trials? In the same chapter, as I've already mentioned, he says he considers us as sheep to be slaughtered.

Jesus Himself traced out the history of the Jews and spilling of the blood of the prophets to show that God does not always rescue His servants, but frequently gives them over to death, while holding their persecutors responsible for their actions. At the end of Matthew 23, the seven-fold woe that He gave to the scribes and Pharisees,  "Therefore, I'm sending you prophets and wise men and teachers, some of them you will kill and crucify, others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, and so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on Earth, from the blood of righteous Abel, to the blood of Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar, I tell you the truth all this will come on this generation. Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling."

The Book of Revelation speaks also of the cry of martyrs. It's going to get worse, much much worse. Just because we imagine that this could not happen to us in our lifetime does not make it so. Therefore we need to be prepared and step back into the world of the New Testament, where most of our brothers and sisters have lived their whole lives. For us I think there's a gap between what we live and what the scriptures prepare us for. It says in Revelation 6, "When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the Word of God and the testimony they had maintained. And they cried out in a loud voice, 'How long, sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the Earth and avenge our blood?' Then each of them were given a white robe. And they were told to wait a little longer until the full number of their fellow servants and brothers, who were to be killed as they had been, was completed."

So, there is God, for His own sovereign purposes, refraining from interfering until the full number of martyrs comes in. But later, God answers. In Revelation 16:4-6, "The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood. And then I heard the angel in charge of the waters say, 'You are just in these judgments, You who are and who were the Holy One, because you have so judged. For they have shed the blood of your saints and prophets, and You have given them blood to drink, as they deserve.'"  Might not the servants of God feel frustrated that God didn't take all that mighty power and intervene on their behalf and stop them from being drawn and quartered or being beheaded or being burned at the stake with green wood so it took a long time? Would they not say, "Lord, You have dealt unjustly with us"? Might they ask, "Why didn't You save us, why didn't You vindicate us in our day?" I say to you, “No, they will not ask that. When they see the glories of the kingdom of heaven, and they will acknowledge that they are there only by grace and that the sufferings of our present life are not worth even comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Oh, how glorious is the kingdom, and how they are not equal the suffering of the saints and what God intends to give. And might not the saints be frustrated that the persecutors who never repented, who hated God all their lives and took out their hatred on the saints, that they never seemed to get it in this life, they never got punished, they only seemed to prosper? Will they not be frustrated?  I tell you, no. When they see the smoke of their torment rising forever and ever and there is no rest day or night for those that do not repent and trust in Christ, they will not think that anything was left out. As a matter of fact, any insult done to their own persons and their own bodies will shrink into insignificance compared to that which was done against the glory of God himself, and that is the true sin, not the persecution against us. It's that they're attacking God, it's that Satan's attacking God, it's not that he's attacking us, that's the true sin. 

We come to Matthew 14 and the martyrdom of John the Baptist, and we come there with trembling hearts struggling to understand God's ways that we'll never fully understand them. How could God pour out into death in such an ignominious way, a man about whom Jesus said, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist? How could such a faithful and pure servant of Living God, be executed because of a lust-filled promise made by a corrupt King at a birthday party to please his wife and his dinner guests? How could it be?  More to the point now for us, How can God allow Sudanese Christians to be slaughtered in the night by roaming bands of Muslims who are killing them because their faith demands it? How can God allow Chinese house church pastors to languish in communist jails, eating putrid food and never sure if that's going to be their last day or night on Earth, how can it be? How can God allow a Muslim family to murder their own son because he converts to Christ, and not intervene?  I think the answers lie behind John's execution as described in Matthew 14. The question is as ancient as Cain's murder of his brother Abel because Abel’s deeds were righteous and Cain's were unrighteous. It's as ancient as that. But deeper is the question of the suffering of all of God's people, not just martyrdom, but any of the suffering that we face. How do we face it, how do we understand it? In the account today, I think we'll see very clearly two different ways to live your life.

We see the example of the life of fear versus a life of faith. We see the example of John the Baptist, who feared God and therefore feared nothing else, and we see the example of Herod who did not fear God and feared everything else. Of the two, I would rather live that kind of life, wouldn't you? The kind of life that John the Baptist lived, where he made a prior commitment to fear the Lord above everything else and was released from fears of everything, than to live the way Herod did, bouncing like a ping-pong ball from one fear to the next, never quite sure what he was going to do. “Tell me what to do. I don't know what to do.” Driven by fears. Proverbs 28:1, "The wicked man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion." They are running and there's no one chasing them. But the righteous are bold as a lion[ Proverbs 29:25], "The fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is kept safe."

We come  now to John the Baptist. Jesus called him a lamp, burning and shining in the darkness, and said, "And you rejoiced for a time to walk in his light." Who was John the Baptist?  John the Baptist was one of the few people in history that was ever prophesied, whose life was ever predicted in holy Scripture before he was born. Most of those predictions were written about Jesus, but there is an occasional prophecy or prediction about people other than Jesus. Josiah for example was predicted in 1 Kings 13, Cyrus the Great of Persia was predicted in Isaiah 45:1, 150 years before he was born, by name. Alexander the Great was predicted in Daniel 8:21 before he was born. There are two different prophecies predicting the life and ministry of John the Baptist. Isaiah 43 says, "A voice of one calling in the desert, prepare the way for the Lord and make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God." And also Malachi 4:5, "Behold, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes."  John the Baptist  was Zechariah and Elizabeth's miracle baby boy. They were past the age of bearing children, they thought it was over for them. I think they were done praying about it. The angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah and told him the wonderful news that Elizabeth would have a child, and the child was John, a relative of Jesus, a man who had an incredible ministry. He went forth, it says, in the spirit and power of Elijah. He lived out in the desert, he wore camel's hair and a leather belt and  ate locusts and wild honey.  This was an unusual man. He clearly didn't live for food; his god was not his stomach. Nor did he live for fine clothes because Jesus said those who wear fine clothes are in kings' palaces, but John wore the roughest kind of stuff. He didn't live in any king's palace, he lived out in the desert where the lions and the scorpions were. He preached a fiery message— “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Droves of people went out to see him, and even more shockingly, he baptized Jews as though they were dirty unwashed Gentiles, in effect, saying, that's about what you are because you're not keeping the law. He had a very powerful and bold ministry.

I've never forgotten what John MacArthur said about John the Baptist's ministry, a threefold outline of his life.  Why did John the Baptist come? John the Baptist came to prepare the way, proclaim the way and get out of the way. He came to prepare the way through his baptism of repentance and by his fiery preaching and by his example. Hearts were expecting the Messiah, they thought he might be the Messiah. They were ready, the soil was tilled, every valley was raised up, and every mountain and hill was made low. He was making everyone ready, there was an expectancy. And he was saying, "After me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry." And they're asking, "Are you the Christ?" And he's saying, "I'm not." So he came to prepare the way, he came also to proclaim the way because there was a special day in redemptive history, when John in the middle of all of his baptisms with countless thousands coming to be baptized,  and he suddenly stopped and pointed and said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."  When Jesus came to be baptized by John, John said, "I need to be baptized by You. And do You come to me?" Now if you'd been one of John's disciples, you would have marveled at this different treatment this man was getting. Who is this that John's saying this about? It was the Son of God.  John bore witness, "I have seen and I testify that He is the Son of God.” John came to proclaim the way, to identify Jesus as the Messiah. Then it was time for him to get out of the way, and there came a time in John chapter 3, when many more people were going to Jesus than were ever going to John. Jesus was doing miracles, John didn't do miracles. Jesus was clearly at a different level. Large numbers are going, to him, and John's disciples, I think zealous for his own glory, came and were troubled by it. “We need to change our marketing technique. We need to change our approach, we're losing our market share.” Something like that.  At any rate, they were concerned about John's glory. John was not concerned about his own glory. He said, "I'm just the friend of the bridegroom. The bride is going to the bridegroom, the marriage is happening. It's glorious and wonderful, and I'm not going to stand in the way. He must increase and I must decrease." He came to get out of the way and shortly thereafter, God saw to it providently that he got out of the way by having Herod the Tetrarch arrest him and put him in jail. 

So that's who John was. He was truth on fire. Like Elijah, he was a man utterly fearless of what the audience would think of his preaching. He didn't care. He cared about being faithful to the Word of God that God had put like a fire inside him.  Jeremiah 23:29 says, "Is not My word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" This is how John preached. We have a sample of his preaching in Matthew 3, "But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them, 'You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance and do not begin to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our Father. I tell you that out of these stones, God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me, will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor, gathering up the wheat into His barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire."  Both Jesus and John warned of that unquenchable fire.

Flee to Christ. If you have not trusted in Christ, you've never been baptized as a believer, you're not a believer in Christ, you've heard the testimony this morning, what would John say to you? He would say, "Flee the coming wrath, and trust in Christ, the one whose sandals we're not worthy to untie. He shed His blood on the cross that we might have eternal life. Oh, trust in Him for the forgiveness of your sins." This is the way that John preached. He was fearless. Concerning Herod the Tetrarch, he was fearless as well. Look at verse 3 and 4, "Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, for John had been saying to him, 'It is not lawful for you to have her.'" The Greek tense is a kind of a continuous preaching. He had been saying to Herod, "It's not lawful." It wasn't just one time. He didn't touch on it and move on. Now, I don't think anybody really likes to have their sin pointed out, never mind publicly, but still less do megalomaniac kings like to have their sins pointed out publicly. But John was bold and he kept on repeating the need for Herod to repent.

 It is a shining bright radiance really of redemptive history, that God continually raises up prophets who are this bold with kings. They're utterly fearless people. They'll come and say what needs to be said. For example, Moses to Pharaoh, "Let my people go. Why are you rebelling? Let the people go." Very bold. Samuel said to King Saul in 1 Samuel 15, "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams, for rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king," — bold and courageous. Nathan said to King David after his sin with Bathsheba and his killing of Uriah, "You are the man," and then he convicted him of his sin very directly. Elijah said to King Ahab, "This is what the Lord says. Have you not murdered a man and seized his property? This is what the Lord says, 'In the place where dogs licked up Naboth's blood, then dogs will lick your blood. Yes, yours." Christ said to Pilate, "You would have no authority over Me if it were not given you from above."  Peter and John said to the Sanhedrin, "The God of our fathers has raised this Jesus to life whom you had crucified by nailing Him to the cross. God raised Him from the dead," setting the Jews against God. Paul spoke boldly to Felix about righteousness and judgment to come, and Felix was afraid. After that, Paul spoke to that same megalomaniac Nero, who burned the Christians at his dinner party. He preached the gospel fully with boldness in front of kings again and again. John Knox, the great Scottish reformer, said to Mary, Queen of Scots, "Without the preaching place, Madam, I think few have occasion to be offended at me." That's his way of saying, "I'm actually a nice guy, but when I get to preaching, there's nothing I can do." He says, "But there, madam, I am not a master of myself, but must obey Him who commands me to speak plain and to flatter no flesh upon the face of the earth."

 John the Baptist was no reed swayed by the wind, moving here and there with public opinion, but he was a man of courage. Fearing God, therefore, John feared nothing else, and he paid for it with his life. A. T. Robertson said , "John's holy boldness cost him his head. But it's better to have a head like John the Baptist and lose it, than have an ordinary head and keep it." Here is a glorious life and a life well worth living, and God poured it out. He was a man of whom the world was not worthy. Hebrews 11 speaks of those that faced jeers and flogging, and went about in sheep skins and goat skins. Stoned, sawed in two, put to death with the sword, destitute, persecuted, mistreated, men of whom the world was not worthy. That is who John was. By stark contrast, we have King Herod. He was a black hole of pride and power, lust, anger and fear. Jesus said that John was  a lamp burning and shining brightly as in a dark place. John the Baptist had a brightness to his life that came from heaven, it was a heavenly light.

 Herod was a black hole. And what black holes are, they're stars that kind of implode in on themselves and become so dense that they suck everything into themselves. Here is Herod sucking the light of God into himself and extinguishing it as if it could be. He was filled with pride and power, he was not a king, but just one of the three rulers that the Romans divided Herod the Great's kingdom into. He had ambitions, but he was no mighty leader. He was lust-filled because he wanted his brother Philip's wife, and so he took her, Herodias. Herodias was a thoroughly evil woman, perhaps as bad as Jezebel herself. This encounter in Matthew 14 is typical of the way these kinds of women in the Bible and in history manipulate their husbands to get the dirty deed done. They don't have the power directly, but they are like puppets mastering their husbands on strings.  She's got more conviction and more strength than Herod does. We see Herod's complex anger. Look at verse 5, Herod wanted to kill John. He was angry about John's preaching, and yet, in Mark 6:19 and 20, it says that Herodias, his wife, nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him, but she was not able to because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled yet he liked to listen to him. This is strange.  King Herod is angry at John's preaching, but he likes to listen to him. He's protecting John from Herodias, but he's puzzled by what he's preaching, but keeps inviting him back for more preaching while he's in prison. What a strange thing that is. Why doesn't Herod just kill him? Because he's afraid of John, and he is afraid of the crowd. Why doesn't he just say at the dinner, "I'm not killing him?" Well, he's afraid of Herodias. He's stuck either way. He's a man governed by fears, dueling fears. Look at verse 5, "Herod wanted to kill John but he was afraid of the people because they considered him a prophet." So here is Herod, a king, so to speak, but trapped like an animal. Trapped by pride and power, trapped by lust, trapped by anger, trapped by fear, trapped by all of these things before his birthday party. But now, Herodias is about to lay a trap for him and spring it right in front of all of his friends. Look at Verses 6 through 11. On Herod's birthday, the daughter of Herodias danced with them and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, "Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist." The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl who carried it to her mother. 

Now, that was a birthday party to remember. I'm not saying that it's wrong to celebrate someone you love, to make them feel special for a day. I'm not saying that, but it can go too far. They can be kind of gluttonous self-celebrations; I read of a man who threw his wife a $62,000 birthday dinner. This is going too far, but that was nothing compared to the dinner party thrown by Herod as recorded here in Matthew. This gluttonous, lavish party’s climax was the presentation of the head of John the Baptist on a platter, one of the greatest men that ever lived, and that's because Herod was trapped by the conniving of his wife, Herodias ,baiting and springing the trap at this lavish party. There's a famous old poem that begins this way, "Will you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly." Hernias knows that Herod is motivated by lust. She knows that her daughter is attractive. Tradition tells us her name is Salome. We don't have that in the Bible, but it perhaps was. There's a good chance that the daughter's dance was of a lascivious nature,  playing to his lusts. Mark 6 says, "When the daughter of Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests and the king said to the girl, ‘ Ask me for anything you want, and I'll give it to you. Even up to half my kingdom and it's yours.’” Now, that's bizarre. I don't think there's any dance that would be that good. This kind of a lavish oath was meant to impress his dinner guests. They would be impressed with him and his generosity. I would be staggered by his foolishness. He has now surrendered up to half his kingdom to the next words in the mouth of a dancing girl. Little did he realize it would cost him his soul. I don't think he could have even imagined what would come next. He was probably thinking money and power at this point, but instead it's this, "Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist." It wasn't the girl's idea, it was the mother's, prompting. The trap has been sprung. What a sick, twisted request.You see the deep-seated hatred of Herodias, her anger and her scorn for this servant of God. She wants him to suffer, and so Herod cowardly surrendered. Herod honored and respected John. But he honored and respected himself and his dinner guests more, and he had John executed. John's disciples came and took the body and buried it, and then they went and told Jesus.

What lessons and applications can we take from John's martyrdom? First, can I urge you, fear God, and I promise you, you need fear nothing else.   Let's keep it simple. If you fear God, you don't need to fear anything else. God will take care of you. You don't need to fear death, you don't need to fear suffering, you don't need to fear poverty, you don't need to fear the scorn and opposition of the world, it will not matter to you, because if you fear God, God Himself will reveal Himself to you and He will love you.  The Spirit of glory and of grace will rest upon you and you will know Him in a deeper way than you can possibly imagine. Jesus Himself said, "Do not fear those who kill the body and after that can do nothing more. I'll tell you who to fear. Fear the one after the death of the body has the power to destroy both soul and body in hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him." Jesus said if you fear Him and trust in Christ, you need fear nothing else. You're free from death and mourning, and crying, and pain, and condemnation eternally in Heaven, and even if you are poured out like a drink offering, even if you are sheep considered for the slaughter, you'll have a sense of the presence of Jesus Christ in the middle of trials that the unbelievers can never imagine. Fear God and fear nothing else.

Secondly, if you don't fear God, I warn you, you'll have cause to fear everything else. Maybe you're free from needing to be concerned about the laws of God. You don't need to worry about the laws of God, so you think. But inside your conscience there's a growing sense of unease. A sense that the other shoe hasn't fallen yet, that you're eating, drinking, and you're making merry, but your conscience is uneasy and you're not sure how it's going to go for you when you die. Not sure if there's a Judgment Day. Therefore, you are afraid. And you fear what people will think, concerned about public opinion. Like Herod, you're afraid of John, the holy prophet of God, you're afraid of what he might say. Herod was afraid of his wife, afraid of the crowd, afraid of the Romans, afraid of everything. Do you want to live like that? It all stems from not fearing God and not trusting in Him. 

Thirdly, understand that Christ ordains in His kingly rule both martyrdom and the mourning of martyrs. He Himself mourns after them, and He is personally concerned with them. Remember what He said to Saul of Tarsus who was breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?" He takes it very personally when people persecute His body. Even if He doesn't intervene because of His own wise purposes and plans, He doesn't intervene with sovereign power, as in Psalm 18, He doesn't come down with smoke coming out of His nostrils and sweep them all away. Let me urge you, if what Jesus said is true, and it is— that the persecution of Christians is the persecution of Christ's body, — if you are a member by the Spirit of God, of that body, then you're being persecuted when your brothers and sisters are. It's you. They are your family. They're your kin spiritually. Your brothers and sisters around the world in Christ. Hebrews 13:3 says, "Remember those who are in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners."

 I think we need to learn more about the persecuted church. I think you ought to go to the websites that I've listed at the bottom of my sermon outline. There's three of them, and there are other ministries, but Voice of the Martyrs is one of them. Persecution Project, Christian Freedom International. There's also the Barnabas Fund, which is not listed there but you can look up for. These are various ministries that are getting information to the West, which is isolated somewhat from martyrdom and from persecution of what's happening to their brothers and sisters around the world. Hebrews 13:3 says, at least we should remember them in prayer, we should be praying about them. We should learn what the Muslims are doing in Nigeria, how they are burning and destroying church buildings and attacking Christians. What they're doing in the Sudan. And how, as I said, between two and three million Christians have died, literally, hundreds and even thousands hacked to death at night by roving bands of Muslims.

One pastor in Rangoon, Burma was speaking to American Christians pleading for help, and he was asked about the view that some in the western church hold that persecution and martyrdom are good for the church, making it stronger, purer, and more committed. He said, "They don't know what they're talking about, because they live in a free country and have never experienced what it's like. If they think persecution is good, why don't they try it?" We don't want persecution, we don't agree that persecution is good for the church, we can do without it, we would rather have peace and freedom. We want our children to have opportunities for a better life. That's the very thing we're commanded to pray for concerning governments, that we would be able to live peaceful, godly, upright lives. In Voice of the Martyrs, I was reading about Pakistan. A Christian man was arrested in 2003 for using a restroom that was attached to a mosque. Leaving the restroom, somebody noted the cross he had around his neck.He was seized and brought in in front of the MOLA or the authority there, and he was falsely accused of defacing the Quran.  They accused him of tearing pages of the Quran out and stomping on them with his feet. He never did it, but even if he did, listen to the penalty, life imprisonment for ripping out pages of the Quran and stomping on it. That's in Pakistan. This is the nature of Islam when Islam has this kind of control. 

Let me say a word about Islam. Last week, I was at a conference that was talking about the problem of militant Islam. One of the points that the conference was making is there isn't such a thing as militant Islam and moderate Islam, there's Islam and then there's not Islam. And the question in front of us is, is Osama bin Laden right in his interpretation of the Quran or not? More and more Muslims are finding that he is actually right in his interpretation of the Quran and they're leaving Islam. Many of them for Christianity, but many more are being convinced that he's right and they are following their faith in the ways that we see in the news. Here is a big difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam advances by the sword, Christianity advances by the cross. One of them an instrument of murdering others, the other an instrument of ourselves being done unto death. The one kills to advance, the other one dies in order to advance. The Crusades forgot that. The crusades were an abrogation of our mission, it was false and we have to ask where the Crusades lined up with the New Testament. They weren't in my opinion. At that conference, there was a man there who has an incredible ministry.  His name is Ray and he's down at Hyde Park in London. Every Sunday, they have something called the speaker's corner and they get up and debate issues. He focuses on the difference between Christianity and Islam. His is the most popular corner, everybody comes and listens to him. What a show you get, because he's immediately surrounded by militant Islam students in London. Let me tell you something about London. The year 2012 is the summer games  in London. Right next to the stadium that they're building for that, the Muslims are building a mosque that will hold 40,000 people. It'll be completed within a year before the Olympics are there, so when worldwide coverage for 12 days or whatever of the London games are there, it will be under the crescent moon shadow. They will see how Islam has made huge inroads into conquering London. Anyway, there are a lot of Muslims in London. This man stands up and  preaches, and he does it in a loving, powerful, courageous way. Once he noticed that there were some people that were missing that used to be regulars. He didn't know where they were and he asked about these two men. He said, "Do you know where they are?" Nobody was saying anything, nobody knew where they were. A week or two later, he saw their faces on CNN, they had tried to blow up a disco in Tel Aviv and had succeeded in taking many Jewish lives with them. The other man, his belt hadn't gone off, so he committed suicide by throwing himself into the ocean, thereby assuring his salvation into paradise, by dying in a Jihad. Ray, because he knew these people, not well, got their pictures and made posters of them and brought them down to the next speaker's corner. Boldness isn't dead. I wouldn't do this right. Not yet anyway. Okay? I don't know that he'll do it for long, but this is what he did, he brought their posters and he held them up and said, "Do you know these men? Do any of you know these men?" Some murmuring. Finally, they acknowledged that they knew them. So now, here's my question, how many of you Muslims agree with what they did? Fifty hands went up. He said, "I want to ask you another question, how many of you would personally be involved in something like that here in London?" Fifteen men raised their hands. Now there were a huge number of onlookers there, people that were claiming to be Christians, at least. He said, "All right, now I ask you Christians, how many of you are Christians? Raise your hand if you love and honor Jesus Christ." No one raised their hand at first. No one. He said, "Come on, we just had 15 men who will raise their hand in broad daylight, saying they're willing to commit a crime here in London for their faith. What about you?" Then large numbers of hands went up. What I get out of that, I think is that we ought to show them what true Christianity is like. True Christianity doesn't advance by killing and blowing people up. It advances by the blood of martyrs. It advances by the cross. It starts with our own private lives in which we take up our cross every day, and die to ourselves. We do not, as it says in Revelation 12, love our lives so much as to shrink from death. Start with witnessing, start with sharing the gospel with your co-worker or even your boss. You might actually disadvantage yourself in your workplace, and in your career. Yes, you might. But you might actually save someone's soul.  

Then start with your own private lusts. Don't be like Herod and be a slave to lust.  Crucify your lust by the power of the cross, be a martyr there and grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. Then be a martyr when it comes to witnessing and then see how far it takes you. This is the way the Kingdom of Heaven advances, not the other way. I believe in the end, the Islamic countries will be won to Christ in the end. I believe that God has His people in every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, and He will have them, but I think the price for their conversion will be the blood of martyrs. Are you willing? Am I willing to have that much zeal for our faith as we see the Muslims have for theirs? 

Now, I was raised in the suburbs, and my father had a little garden out back of our house and we ate some of the fruits of his labor. But I'm not personally acquainted with harvest time, really. I kind of more read about it or see it in movies. But when I was studying in Louisville, I took a course one semester up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I had to drive from Louisville to Grand Rapids and back. What a long drive that was, but it was a magnificent drive, went with one of the other students there, and we had a fantastic time, and I'll never forget seeing for the first time the cornfields there in Indiana, seeing corn as far as the eye could see, just until the Earth curved, just seeing this bumper crop of corn.

And I started thinking back to when I was involved in our little harvest and went out and picked a few ears of corn, and I thought, how in the world do they get all that in before it goes rotten, how do they harvest it? And it shows how much I know, I'm a kind of a suburbanized person, that I didn't really know what they do. And then I saw this huge combine one day, International Harvester, and there’s the farmer driving in air-conditioned comfort surrounded by modern technology and electronics and all, and it's just doing a job on these fields, just sucking up the corn and all that, and I was... I couldn't believe it, and I said, wow, miracle of modern technology.

So being the research-minded person that I am, I wanted to find out about these combines and harvesters and all that Cyrus McCormick invented in 1831. It was a rattly, clackety thing that was dragged by horses and, as a matter of fact, made so much noise that certain people had to walk alongside the horse and constantly comfort them. But it did the work of five men, and it was just revolutionary in agriculture. These machines are incredible, and the development from that to this air-conditioned combine that I've seen now is able... We can trace it out and see how human technology really has changed the way that farmers bring in a harvest and literally feeds millions today.

But what can be done out in a corn field or a field of wheat with machines can never be done in the harvest that we're looking at today. There will never be a machine that can do this harvest, never. We are the harvesters, we are the ones who must bring them in, and they must be brought in one at a time. They must be brought in through the personal involvement of people like you and me. We will never go automated on this one, friends.

Now, I'm not saying that technology doesn't have a place in church life or even in evangelism. I'm not saying that. We can broadcast the Word and we can get things out even through the internet, all that, that's fine, but we must personally be involved in bringing folks in. “How will they hear unless someone preaches? And how will they preach unless they're sent?” This is what God has ordained, and my delight and my desire is to be part of that harvest. Amen?

Don't you want to be part of that? Don't you want your life to count for eternity? Don't you want to be involved in the harvest that Jesus is talking about here? Now, Jesus ordains multiplication still. Now, last week, we talked about biological multiplication, Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. We talked about how God said, blessed them. And said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” But I think that that same thing must happen spiritually.

I want to see our church multiply spiritually. I would love to be able to lead someone to Christ, who then leads someone else to Christ, who then leads a third generation to Christ and on. And you don't have to wait 20-plus years for that, like you do with the biological reproduction. We could see it happen in an ever-escalating way, and I yearn for it, I pray for it, for this is what God has ordained. And this is how the church has grown over 20 centuries. How it began, 120 believers in the upper room waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and it will end, Revelation 7:7, with a multitude greater than anyone could count from every tribe and language and people and nation standing around the throne.

How do we take that journey from 120 in an upper room to a multitude greater than anyone can count, millions and millions of people around the throne, except by this spiritual multiplication. This is what God has ordained, that we be fruitful and multiply. Now, the last time we looked at John 4, we saw Jesus interacting with just one person, the Samaritan woman. He is doing the will of His Father. He's doing the work of His Father, and he is bringing in one soul into the kingdom. Is it worthwhile to Jesus? You better believe it is. And what works with one will work with tens of millions to the end of time. It's the same pattern, but that one matters to Jesus and He's reaching out for her.

But now in our text today, we see that He turns His attention to the disciples. And whereas with the woman, He's working on a lost sinner, bringing her into the kingdom, now He's turning to His disciples and trying to train them and prepare them to do that labor, that they would be spirit-filled harvesters for the kingdom, active in evangelism, fruitful in evangelism to the end of their lives. And it's written down for us, by the inspiration of the spirit, so that we would do the same. We can come to John 4 and read, and we can be transformed. 

So I urge us today to just sit at the feet of the Master and learn from Him how to do this work, for that's what he was doing with His disciples, He's training them. I think we could say there's as much work to be done on us as there was on the Samaritan woman, and as there was on the disciples in the first generation. So I say amen, Lord, do the work in us, work in us so that we can be active in this harvest.

Now, let's start with the disciples and their feeble start. I don't want to be hard on them at all. I think they're in the text so many times to encourage us, right, as they just keep missing it a lot of times, they just don't do what they need to do. And I think that's the case here. They had a subtle, homely little mission, and it was laid out in verse 8. Go ahead and look at it. They went to buy lunch. Maybe you've been sent to buy lunch for a group before. They went to buy some lunch, verse 8. His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.

There it is, that's the mission, all right? Jesus had different ideas for that trip. Look at verse 38, “I sent you to reap.” See that? Now, those two are not mutually exclusive. They're not contradictory, they can fit beautifully together. They must fit beautifully together. There's nothing wrong with going to buy food, but Jesus had a higher purpose for that homely mission. So often we go through life with blinders on: A trip to the grocery store is just a trip to the grocery store, and the other human beings there are the competition because they're in the way with their carts and all that. And you can't get to where you need to go, and then you come around and it's time to check out, and there's eight people in each line, and you had hoped to get through there twice as fast as you're going to get through there.

We go through life with blinders on. We don't see people the way Jesus would have seen them. A trip to work is just a trip to work, we've got projects to do, we've got a certain deadline, co-workers will either help you or hinder you in that project. That's it, and that's how we see them. We don't see them the way Jesus saw Zacchaeus: “Come down, I must eat with you today, I've got some work to do on your soul.” We don't see people that way, as we should, go through life with blinders on, we've got to get rid of those blinders. John 4 is just the text for us, because the disciples had them too, they went to buy some food and that's it. But there was a higher work that Jesus sent them to be about, and so we face these wasted trips and wasted time.

The disciples came back all excited. “Okay, let's eat, I'm ready to go.” Verse 31: The disciples came and urged Him, “Rabbi, eat something.” That's good, it really is. It's surprisingly good for Samaritan food, actually. But He said to them: “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” And His disciples said to each other: “Could someone have brought Him food?” How are they different, at this moment, than the Samaritan woman who thought Jesus was just talking about physical water?

This is the way we are. We start with the physical, we're thinking about our bodies and their ever constant demands on us. It's hard to get our minds off the needs of our bodies. Now, there's nothing wrong with holding down a job, there's nothing wrong with providing and cooking food, there's nothing wrong with mowing your lawn, there's nothing wrong with getting your car repaired, there's nothing wrong with going to a ball game, there's nothing wrong with everyday life, nothing wrong with these things. And frankly, I believe the harvest happens while all that's going on. If we get the blinders off, we can see it.

Nothing wrong with all that, and the disciples were providing not only their own needs, but Jesus's too. There's nothing wrong with looking after Jesus's needs. That's fine, but they had a hard time, as we do, seeing the eternally significant encounters that happen while all of that's going on. We have a hard time, and so the text is calling us to lift up our eyes and our mind. The disciples are a bit of a failure here. But under the patient tutelage of the Master, what happens to them? They become world-changing apostles of Jesus Christ. World-changers, these men who have turned the world upside down are here now, speaking of Paul and Barnabas, but it's true also of the apostles.

Wouldn't you love to turn the world upside down for Jesus, wouldn't you love to be turned upside down yourself, so that we can accomplish it, achieve it? Jesus has the power through His spirit to do that to us. I want it done in my life. I'd love to have it done in this church, so let's learn His lessons. And He's got a number of them, some powerful lessons for His disciples. The first was just the power of example. Jesus taught them by example. When they came back from the Samaritan village with their food, what was Jesus doing? He was talking with the Samaritan woman. She was already in the kingdom by then, I think.

I think there was more to their conversation than what we have recorded here. John himself said the whole world couldn't be filled with all the books that would be written, so there's a lot more I'm sure they talked about, but I think she's been brought into the kingdom or at least she's very close. She says, “Could this be the Messiah?” Well, the disciples, they came back and they got a shock. Here is Jesus alone talking with a Samaritan woman. A Samaritan woman alone. I mean, what levels of shock are we going to get to here? This is very shocking to them.

Verse 27: Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find Him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” It didn't matter, they're going to get an answer anyway. They're going to find out what He wanted, and they're going to find out precisely why He was talking with her. He was of a mind to tell them, but they didn't ask. So there He was, sitting and talking with a Samaritan woman. This was scandalous, and it would have been even more scandalous if they had known about her, what Jesus knew about her, it would have been even more scandalous.

But what is Jesus doing here? He's doing many things, but one of the things He's doing is He's leading them by example. They are seeing Him bring a single lost sinner to faith in Christ. They're watching Him do it. Luke 19:10: “For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.” He was doing it right in front of them. They got to watch it. This is a challenge for me, you know the best leaders in history lead from the front, not from behind. And there's many examples of this in military history. I was reading about Alexander the Great, who was a tremendously courageous man, in addition to being a great general.

And he was at the end of all of his conquests in India, and they were in a particularly tough spot against a very warlike tribe of Indians, and there was a citadel and his men were just like, “Let's bypass it and move on,” but Alexander the Great was never of a mind to do that. And he was bothered by their weakness and laziness and cowardice, and after all those battles. So there were ladders laid up, siege ladders laid up against the wall, and he says, “I'm going,” and he went by himself up over the wall.

Well, three of his trusted soldiers went immediately with him, and Alexander gets to the top of the wall and jumps over into the courtyard below and just starts fighting. Wow. Well, the Greek army is shocked by this for a moment, and then they'd flood over the walls and they win. He, Alexander, it seemed, was mortally wounded by an arrow, but his armor saved him and he recovered within a week. As I look at that, and I bring it to this topic of evangelism, I realized that I, as a leader, as a senior pastor, I have to lead by example.

I can't urge you all to be active in evangelism and not be active myself. Ministerial staff, we can't do that. The deacons, the leaders, spiritual leaders in the church, we have to lead by example. Now, this work is for all of us, but the leaders need to lead by example, and nowhere is that clearer than Jesus. Jesus led by example in this matter, and when they came back, they found Him about his Father's business, that's what He was doing. He was doing the will of His Father.

I learned evangelism, personal evangelism, from example more than from training seminars. When I came to faith in Christ in college, my third year in college, I was trained by Campus Crusade for Christ and personal evangelism, and they did it by taking you places and doing it. That's what they did. We would go down to Daytona Beach and we would witness on the beach, we'd go from blanket to blanket, and we got some good reactions and some bad ones. And all of it was instructive for me, it taught me, all of it, you know, how to have a good conversation and how to not have a good conversation and be gracious about it.

But we learn these things by example, we learn it by doing. Now, I'm not saying that there's not a place for training, there is. I think it's important, 'cause you get into a situation, you don't know the answer, you don't know what to say, and then there's a time to talk it through, and Jesus did that with His disciples as well. Leading by example is vital, vital for me.

I see secondly, that Jesus gives them a lesson by rebuke. Now, this may not be your favorite part of the sermon, but I think there are some times that we need to be rebuked for wrong activity, and it could even be a rebuke concerning a sin of omission, not a sin of commission. We tend to immediately think about things we've done that are wrong and want to confess those, but have we been as passionate about the harvest as Jesus would have us be?

Have we been as involved? Have we done the works God intended for us to work, and if not, we have to start by repenting and confessing sin. Now, there's a rebuke in this passage for the disciples. It's not easy to see, but it's there. The rebuke is there concerning what they did while they were in the Samaritan village, and what they didn't do. They came back with the food, but look what Jesus said. The disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” Verse 32, He said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Wow. And you put it together, He's going to tell them in a minute what the food is to do the will of God, you apparently know nothing about that, that's a rebuke.

How could it be that they knew nothing about that food? How could it be that we know nothing about that food? We have got to be faithful in this area, and so I think for us, it may be a start is to acknowledge, Lord, I seem to know nothing about your food. I seem to not be able to eat it. Jesus had called them to a higher mission. I sent you to reap what you have not labored for, but they hadn't reaped a thing, they had failed to do anything concerning that higher mission.

And I think we need to start by accepting a rebuke and be willing to confess our sin and say, I want to be different. I want 2007 to be the most fruitful evangelistic year this church has had since I've been here. I would like each one of you to have the most fruitful year in evangelism you've ever had as Christians. But maybe we need to start by saying we have missed some great opportunities, just like the disciples did in the Samaritan village, we've missed some opportunities. We didn't see them, we didn't take advantage.

The third way He teaches them is by making analogies. We already touched on one of them, but He talks about food and harvest. He's teaching by way of analogy. Jesus was great at this, taking everyday life things and just teaching out of that everyday life experience some spiritual principles. So they came back talking about food, Jesus talks about food, and He turns it around to talk about His mission in life. His mission in life was to do the will of the Father. Soul-saving work focused on lost people and saving them from hell. That was His focus.

And we see it again and again in Jesus's statements. In John 6:38 and following: For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. Now, there's a man who knew what He was about. He knew the will of the Father, and look what He says, My father's will is, this is the will of Him who sent me. I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but to do the will of Him who sent me.

The will of the Father, the will of the Father, that was the focus of His life. And the clear display of this is Gethsemane, where Jesus, sweating, as it were, great drops of blood is down on His hands and knees and says, “Father, if you are willing, if it is your will, take this cup from me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.” That was the clarion call of His whole life, was living for the will of God.

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work.” So he likens there the work of God the Father to food. Now, this may be your favorite part of the sermon. I mean, I like food, I think we all love it, so Jesus is using it, an everyday analogy, talking about food to link it to evangelism. So how is the work of God like food? Well, first of all, food gives us energy for life, it enables us energetically to keep on living; without it, we die. Jesus is saying, doing my Father's will and evangelism gives me energy and strength. If I can't do that, it would be better to die.

Secondly, food brings delight and pleasure, doesn't it? Now, you shouldn't admit it too much, but it does. I mean, think about it, this may not be your favorite meal, but I love a good steak cooked well, baked potato with all the stuff on top that I'm really not supposed to eat anymore, you know, that kind of thing. You know, salads with the salad dressing that I'm not supposed to eat anymore either, but it's good occasionally, and then maybe a fruit drink or something like that I love, or some people like carbonated beverages and then ice cream with dark chocolate sauce, something like that. Amen.

Thank you, Tom, I appreciate it.

Oh, boy, your mouths are watering and see, this is the problem, you're already thinking about where you're going to go eat lunch, and you already have that predisposition anyway, and now here I'm making it worse, but bear with me just a little longer, okay. Food brings delight and pleasure, and you know why it does? God made it that way. He made it delicious. He made a variety of fruits, and He made a variety of flavors, and He made the tongue with different places to identify those different flavors. God did it. He is the God of pleasure, a God of delight.

Jesus is saying, I enjoy, I delight in doing the will of my Father, it's delightful for me to lead the Samaritan woman to faith. It brings me pleasure. That's a great joy. Food is also a focal point of relationships. In every culture, fellowship is kind of consummated to some degree around a good meal. You know, this is in all kinds of cultures, you sit down at a meal with someone and you're friends for life, covenant of salt, that kind of thing, things that we do together, we eat at a meal together.

Jesus, I think, speaks of this, when He says concerning the Last Supper, and we're going to be celebrating the Lord's table today, but the Last Supper, He says: I have earnestly desired to sit at table with you and eat. And in the future of this table that we're going to celebrate later on, the future is, like we're going to hear in a beautiful song, God and man at table are sat down. We get to sit at fellowship with the Father at His table. Matthew, chapter 8: Many will come from the east and the west and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom.

That is the consummation of this meal, we get to eat with God. Now you can see the bitterness of Judas' betrayal. In John 13:18, he says: He who has shared my bread with me has lifted up his heel against me. That is a great betrayal to eat a meal with someone and then get up and betray them to death. Now, Jesus is saying, my food is to do the will of Him who sent me and finish His work. What he's saying is, doing my Father's will in evangelism is the center of my fellowship and friendship with the Father.

And I've noticed My Father is always at His work, and I, too, am working. So that's where I find the Father. That's why I have fellowship with the Father. Can I just speak a word of application to you right now? Do you feel out of fellowship with the Father, and you don't know why? Could it be that you're neglecting to be where He is and do the work He's doing? He's out in the field and you're not, and so therefore, you don't feel a sense of closeness and fellowship to Him. You don't see sparkly, exciting moments of Providence when you sit next to somebody and you get into a conversation and it's just awesome, and you feel the presence of God by the Spirit in that, and you haven't felt that in a while, because you haven't ventured forth into the harvest field.

Jesus is saying, my food, my sense of fellowship and togetherness with the Father is to be where He's at, doing His work. For some people, food is the focus of their entire life. To some degree, it's true of all of us. It says in Ecclesiastes 6:7: “All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied.” I love that. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. Paul said in Philippians 3 that there are some whose God is their stomach. But I think we can relate to this, that food can be meeting that need for yourself and your family, the focus of life, and Jesus is saying, no, my focus is this kind of food, the focus of my life is to the will of God.

And notice He says, it's not enough just to do the will of Him who sent me. It's to finish His work. I want to be a finisher. It's not enough that we should just witness once a month for 2007. Look, those are transitory goals, or something like that. I'd like to see some finishing going on, I'd like to see the thing accomplished. Now, I'll get to sowing and reaping, we'll talk about that in a minute, but I see in Jesus a passion to finish the work God assigned to Him. And that's what I'm talking about.

John 5:36: “For the very work that the Father has given me to finish, and which I am doing testifies that the Father has sent me.” John 17:4, high priestly prayer. “Father, I have brought you glory on earth by finishing [or completing] the work You gave me to do.” And then even more on the cross, after He had taken that drink in fulfillment of the last prophecy that needed to be fulfilled while He was living, He took the drink, and what did he say? “It is finished.” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of Him who sent me,” and what? Finish His work. He finished it. He shed His blood on the cross for sinners like you and me. He finished it.

Let me just stop a moment and say, I trusted God this morning, that there would be somebody here today who has not come to faith in Christ yet. Let Christ's work finish in you by faith. Trust in Him in the shedding of blood for your sins to the salvation of your soul. Trust in Him. Trust in Him to finish your salvation. He said, “It is finished” because it is complete, it's all we need is the blood of Christ. And if I can stop at this moment of the sermon and say, if you're not sitting near any non-Christians, why don't you invite a non-Christian to church next week? 'Cause I'll be trusting God next week, there'll be somebody that will need to hear the gospel directly, so bring someone who needs to hear it. But Jesus is a finisher and He finished the work of salvation.

All right, the second analogy He uses is harvest, and we've already talked about that. Verse 35: “Do you not say four months more and then the harvest? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields, they are ripe for harvest.” So Jesus likens the work of evangelism to the reaping of a harvest. A harvest is a wonderful time in a farm community, it's a wonderful time. Now, we are very removed from our food, aren't we? A long way away from the farms. All right we go to the supermarket and it's frozen or packaged or wrapped in cellophane or something like that, but it comes ultimately up from the earth when God gives it, and so therefore a harvest is a time of celebration.

Look, the Pilgrims in Plymouth, they knew it, they knew that God had sent Squanto so that they wouldn't die that next winter, and when the crops came up better than they could have expected, what do they do but celebrate. They had a celebration. A celebration of life. It's a time of joy. Now, the problem is that these disciples were waiting four months more and then the harvest. That was the problem. No, now, today, here and now, is the harvest in this case, not four months more.

So He uses food and He uses the harvest. He also gives them a lesson by command. He tells them, lift up your eyes and look. It is so easy to miss what God is doing around you, and what that moment calls for. The disciples seem to have been blind to the Samaritans in that village and how ready they were to hear the Gospel, how prepared they were to hear the Gospel, they were blind to it. A Samaritan woman rejected by her own people puts down her water jar and goes and demonstrates how ready they were to hear the Gospel. They were ready.

Verse 28: Then leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ? They came out of the town and made their way toward Him.” Now, how much more effective would a group of Jewish disciples buying food have been who didn't see one little thing about you've had five husbands and the man you now have is not your husband. No, they've seen a river of miracles, they've seen dead people raised to life, they've seen... they've seen lame people able to walk, they have seen stuff that this woman has not seen, they could have gone in there with a tremendous excitement and say, “We have got to introduce you to someone, come and see a man who...” And then lists a bunch of things, not just told me everything I ever did, but did all of these things in Jerusalem, healed huge crowds of people, come and see. They could have done it.

I get the picture that they went into the Samaritan town not wanting to touch anything. I know it's just imagination, maybe they didn't. But you get the picture like, what are we going to buy? I don't want to eat any of this Samaritan food. And there is a kind of a racism there, I think, a racial hatred of the Samaritans, they don't have anything to do with them, and it isn't it enough, Jesus, we went and bought the food? And I think that can be demonstrated, you can see that in someone's facial expression, a hesitation in approach, they were not opened, and so therefore, I think their eyes were closed to what God was doing and how ready these folks were, for Jews do not associate with Samaritans.

I find this confirmed in another text, in Luke 9:54, don't turn there, but just listen. There was another Samaritan village Jesus went to and they were not ready, they were against Jesus, and they did not want Jesus to come in their village. Now, I tell you, not every field is ripe for harvest, that is an important principle in this text. Some Samaritan villages are ready, come on in; other Samaritan villages are closed, get out of here, we're not interested. Not every field is ripe for harvest.

Well, how did the disciples deal with that village? What? How dare they reject Jesus? Lord, do you want us to call down fire and let's just deal with this right now? Remember that Sodom and Gomorrah thing? I think the Samaritan village deserves it. What do you think? Calling down fire on the enemies of God. Jesus rebuked them and said, You don't understand the spirit I have. The Son of Man came not to destroy lives, but to save them. If I wanted to destroy from heaven, I could have done it without the incarnation. I came here to save. Let's move on. 

They weren't ready. And so the disciples Weren't ready either, they weren't ready to reap a harvest of Samaritans, so he uses a Samaritan woman. All right, now having gotten them ready and taught them, he now gives them some key lessons on how the ministry is going to go, partnership in ministry, hard and easy labor. Look at verse 36-38. “Even now,” it says, “the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus, the saying ‘one sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

I was reading a book recently by Tim Downs called Finding Common Ground. And he argues in that book that America is not a field ripe for harvest anymore, and that many Evangelicals are still in harvest mode when they should be in plowing and sowing mode. We live in a kind of a post-modern, some say post-Christian era, in which we have a hard time connecting with people because we just see things so differently. America has changed, and some churches are still in big-time harvest mode, when really there's a different work being called, we're being called to do a different work.

And imagine a farmer who decides, “I am done with plowing and I am done with sowing, I like to reap. I enjoy reaping and the party that comes afterwards. Let's just do harvest from now on, what do you say? Let's just go out and harvest. Look, if you go out into evangelism with that mentality, you will not last long. I would like to see this church and the individuals in it be versatile in this work. If the situation calls for sowing, then sow. If it calls for plowing, then plow. If it calls for reaping, then reap. I think we need to be discerning and be ready to do any of it and consider it a success as we're led by the Spirit.

It's vital to discern what God is doing in someone's heart. This week, I went to a conference in New York City on dealing with militant Islam. You pretty much have to be blind to current events to not see the impact that militant Islam is having on the flow of human history today. You look at the places in the world where there are hot spots of military conflict and different issues, and you'll find militant Islam behind most of them. The question before us is, what's the church to do about it? What are we doing about the fact that in the year 2012, I think it is, the Olympics will be in London, and right next to the place where the Olympics will be, will be a huge 40,000-person mosque completed by then.

The images that will come from London will be of Islam right next to where the Olympics are being held. The question is, what do we do about it? Well, I was on the plane flight and God chose for me to sit next to... And I love who God chooses. It's just exciting to me. Who's going to sit next to me and will I have a chance? If they put on those infernal headphones and they get into their MP3 music, I'm finished. What can I do? Would you take your headphones off? I want to talk to you about Jesus. It doesn't work too well.

But this man was a very open, friendly Indian man, going back to India to be with his sick mother. He was it an oncologist, a very intelligent man, we talked the whole way to New York. And he told me all about Hinduism and the Vedic scriptures, and we talked about reincarnation, we talked about idolatry. I talked about idolatry as a diminishment of God, and we talked about Christ, we talked about the sacrificial system, we talked about all these things, we would still be talking if we hadn't landed. It was a great conversation, but I knew the whole time the likelihood that he was going to bow and pray the sinner's prayer with me on that flight was pretty much zero. Now you say, oh, you of little faith. It had nothing to do with that, it had to do with sensing where the man was at and what the situation called for.

And the situation called for building a relationship. I gave him my card, some other things, and I think he's going to call me. He lives down in Fayetteville. He said he'd like to meet me for lunch. I don't know what's going to come. Maybe the reaping time will be two years down the road, maybe ten years down the road. I don't think anything's wasted. That was the time. Coming back, I had a taxi ride with a man who was from Guyana. He was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist situation, had rejected his spiritual background and was doing nothing, but he did have a Bible at home. He had no idea that there was specific prophecy in the Old Testament about the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. Never heard of it.

He said, “Where are they?” I said, “I'll write them down.” I took my card and wrote them down on the back, we talked the whole way to JFK, the whole way, and he said, “Well, I'm going to read that when I get back.” He was not going to bow and pray the sinner's prayer with me, better not while he's driving. All right, 6:00 in the morning in New York, there's no traffic and there's no time for bowing and praying, okay? But again, what did the situation call for? It called for that.

Then I sat next to, on the plane, and this was fun, you get to that little terminal, that little computer thing, and you can kind of choose your seats if you get there early enough. And so I had my choice of four different seats, and it's like this moment of providence, 'cause I don't know who's in the occupied seat next to it. And I say, “I have no idea, Lord.” So then I just think, where do I want to sit? That's right, it comes down to, so I don’t want to sit right over the wing, you can't see anything, all right? So I chose a seat up a little further so I could see out the window, 'cause I don't fly that much and I like to look out and see.

So I chose up there, and there was a young lady who's a student at Chapel Hill, really intelligent young lady, went to New York to be involved in a kind of a political dialogue, whatever, she's a very high-powered person, very intelligent, young, probably 20 years old, came from a Presbyterian background, was basically rejecting, it seemed, inerrancy, rejecting central aspects of our faith. We talked the whole way back about militant Islam, about a number of things, and about Jesus's view of Scripture, and why I believe that there are no errors in the Bible, because Jesus believed it.

That called for a different situation. It was a different time. I just would like us as a church to be versatile, to handle whatever God gives, so that we're ready to do the work of the Father. And may I say too that the plowing and sowing is harder work than the reaping. Jesus says, others have done the what? Hard work. The hard labor is that... Is it fun bumping into somebody's hostility to Christianity, do you enjoy that? I don't. But if you do it well, you'll make it easier for the next Christian who bumps into it, it's not so hard anymore, because of some things you say, some Scripture, your demeanor and approach. I think we need to be able to do whatever the situation calls for.

Now, Spurgeon preached the sermon, he was talking about four months more, then the harvest. Can I urge you not to be lazy in this matter? He was frustrated, because we don't expect conversions. We always think God did great things in the past, and He will do great things in the future. Four months more and then the harvest. Four months more and then the harvest. I keep hearing it, said Spurgeon, and he is saying, lift up your eyes and look, when the field is ripe, bring them in, because hell keeps open and death keeps scything and reaping people. It keeps going on.

And so it says very plainly in Proverbs, “He who harvests in the summer is a wise son, but he who sleeps during the harvest is a disgraceful son.” Oh, that we may not be disgraceful during the harvest time. We have got to be active and involved in it.

Well, what's our way of application? Well, first of all, I would love to see happen what happened here in this text, wouldn't you? Look at verse 39. “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’ So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them. Two more days, he stayed. And because of his words, many more became believers.” Verse 41.

A harvest into the kingdom. Where are those people now? They're in Heaven with Jesus, eternally there. Don't you want to be involved? Aren't you hungry and thirsty to do the will of your Father and bring a whole bunch of people into the kingdom? That's the yearning that comes out of the text for me.

And so we must imitate Christ's example. We must be focused on the will of God, we must repent where needed, we must be willing to do the hard labor of sowing, and I'm urging you to be expectant to reap. For the rest of my ministry here, I'm going to kneel down and pray and expect that God will use the message to convert somebody. I'm going to expect it. It's going to affect the way I preach, it's going to affect the way I come into the pulpit, it's going to affect perhaps where some of you will pray for me, it's going to probably affect the way you'll think about in terms of inviting people. I will trust God that these words will be words of life for somebody. Won't you close with me in prayer as we prepare for the Lord's Supper.

Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Genesis 1:26-28. The main subject of the sermon is how people being made in God's image is the reason human life is sacred.

So this is this morning Sanctity of Human Life, Sunday, it's another opportunity for us to celebrate with great joy the gift of life given us by God himself to celebrate that and to find our significance there, and in the cross of Christ, as I've already mentioned, we are significant because we are human, we are significant because Jesus shed His blood for us, and we've come to trust in Him, and we're born again through faith in Christ. People are searching for esteem, self-esteem. They're searching for significance, that's where we'll find it, not in anywhere else, so it's a time for us to celebrate those things, but it is also a time for us with sadness to look at the attacks on the sanctity of human life that are going on around us, through abortion and euthanasia. It is right for us to face that as well, because we have a responsibility concerning these things. And it's so easy for us to start listening to Satan and get confused about what's right and what's true and who we are or what God's calling on us to do. As though the ground were quicksand under our feet...well, it isn't.

We have the unshakable Word of God under us, it will never change, and it makes great promises concerning our future in Christ, but it also lays before us great responsibilities, doesn't it? And in order to be faithful to those responsibilities, we have to have that rock of the Word under us, and that's what I wanna do today. Sanctity Of Human Life Sunday. I say a strong view of the sanctity, the sacredness of human life has been behind some of the most heroic moments in our history. I think it was the mentality of the founding fathers of this nation and the Declaration of Independence, as they looked at the value and worth of common people, all men are created equal, they came up with that concept and then they had to battle over racism and slavery and I think it was a sense of the sanctity, the sacredness of human life that led Abraham Lincoln to sign the emancipation proclamation, somewhat converting the Civil War into a war to end slavery, which it did. As I read the history of soldiers that have won the Congressional Medal of Honor, so many of those incidents were motivated by a desire to save life. Like there would be buddies that were out in the field and people would go out and rescue them with no concern whatsoever for their own lives.

I was reading about one soldier in the battle of Guam during World War II who rescued...he doesn't know...somewhere between 50 and 100 fellow soldiers during that savage battle. The congressional medal of honor citation said it right in the middle. He thought humbly it was 50, others said definitely was at least 100, so they set it at 75. He rescued 75 at least soldiers under withering fire, received many injuries to himself, and he lowered these men over a cliff with ropes on a pallet again and again, one by one, one after another, till finally he was overcome by his own wounds. And that's a story we see again and again in those accounts of those who win that highest military award. But it's also motivated rescue teams to risk life and limb and their own security to rescue victims of natural disasters. You see the accounts of rescue workers combing over wreckage, calling for people to see if they're still alive and they'll do anything and everything they can to un-bury them and get them out and rescue them. Or during that earthquake in the Kashmir province of Pakistan back in 2005, there was a blizzard, it was up in high mountainous area after that earthquake, they had a great deal of difficulty bringing rescue supplies for those folks, they never gave up, they kept pressing through because of a sense built into ourselves of the sanctity of human life.

I read an account of some coast guard helicopter crew that went during Hurricane Katrina when the winds were gusting got well over 100 miles an hour, and they got in a helicopter and rescued just three sailors out 10 miles from the eye of the hurricane. Went right into the teeth of it to rescue these folks and get them out. It was the sense of the sacredness, the value of human life, they weren't going after the boat, they were going after the people on the boat, to rescue them and bring them back. Sanctity of Human Life has moved our emotions deeply, both positively and negatively, like when we hear about a baby that's wedged in a drainpipe and finally, they're able to extract it safely and bring it out, we feel a sense elation. Conversely, when you hear in the inner city of a toddler killed by a stray bullet in a gang-related violence, it just crushes me when I hear that, it bothers me because of the sacredness of human life.

As a matter of fact, my first brush with human death, with seeing a human being die, was on a mission trip in Pakistan in 1987, when I saw a little 20-day-old infant who had had diarrhea and the parents cut off the child's fluid intake, the exact wrong thing to do, and it immediately suffered from kidney failure and had double pneumonia by the time we got it, and there was really nothing we could do, and yet this eye surgeon from England labored just with CPR for four hours to just keep this infant alive, even though he knew and we knew we were not solving any of its mortal problems. And eventually he just stopped, and it died within 10 minutes, and we all cried. And there's a sense there of the value and the worth of a human life. Emergency room doctors and nurses will labor and go to extraordinary efforts to save victims from a car wreck in an ice storm. Or in a Neonatal Unit, if the baby has been born prematurely, it's amazing what they can and will do to keep that baby alive and allow it to survive and thrive, and I think a strong view of the sacredness of human life is behind all of these heroic moments. Conversely, the opposite view of human life is behind some of the blackest moments in our history. I will not soon forget my trip to the Holocaust Museum, and I saw one particular display of baby shoes piled up, and I just stood there and I just cried, I couldn't believe it. Here are these shoes no longer needed at that time by the infants, the babies that had worn them into the death camps.

And it is the attack on the value of human life there that is so insulting to us as human beings. Robert Burns in 1785 wrote a poem. The name of the poem is A Dirge, For Man Was Made To Mourn, and he coined a very famous phrase that you hear frequently in the media, and that is. "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn." Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. Now, that phrase, man's inhumanity to man, I meditated on this week, I started thinking about it, what I got out of it is we become somewhat sub-human when we deny humanity to another human being. It makes us somewhat less than human, beastly really. We lose a little of our God-given humanity whenever we deny full humanity to other human beings. The Nazis became like beasts when they denied humanity to those that they were slaughtering in the death camps. And so does I think any nation or government or people who denies humanity to any other human being. It's even worse when a systematic denial of humanity gets established or enacted into law by the prevailing government, that's a serious moment in the history of that people.

When government exploits and crushes the weak, government becomes sub-human. Daniel 7 pictured a series of human governments as beasts coming up out of a troubled sea, the fourth was the most devastating. Daniel 7:7 it said, "After that in my vision at night, I looked and there before me was a fourth beast, terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth, it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot, whatever was left." This terrifying vision of human government as beastly or somewhat of a sub-human beast has its roots in the concept of man's inhumanity to man. We become beast-like when we enact laws that strip humanity, strip others of their humanity. And so we come to Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. Legalized abortion has been a law of the land for 12,444 days in our country, and as I've said, it is not a small thing when a government declares something immoral as being legal. And therefore I say to you, I cannot know. I do not know the full impact of that decision on the psyche and morality and ethics of our nation, we cannot know. It's too complicated. It's all woven together, what effect it's had on families, what effect it's had on marriages, what effect it's had on parenting, what effect it's had on our economy, on the environment, I don't know, only God knows, but I do know that these things are significant.

They're all woven together. And today, I think it is enough for us to declare again the biblical truth that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that we're committed to that. That human life is sacred, there's a sanctity to human life. To declare again how committed we are to that Biblical truth. To declare again that we are against the demonic spirit that attacks that concept, that truth, we're against that demonic spirit. And to rejoice in the truth that I preached some time ago in Romans 16:20, "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet." Oh, how I yearn for that day. And I look forward to the day when the spirit of the age, which includes the spirit of abortion will be crushed forever. And I look forward to that, and so I'm preaching in hope today. I'm not ultimately defeatist, I think ultimately, abortion will be obsolete along with all the rest of the sins. Hallelujah to that! But in the meantime, we have work to do. In the meantime, we have to stand firmly, even as it seems that the ground is cut out from under our feet. Now when we come to sanctity of human life, we need to ask the question, what do we mean by sanctity? What does that mean? Well, I think it means sacredness or holiness. A sense of something set apart unto God as special to him.

Now, frequently we use the word holiness or sanctity to refer to separation from sin, holiness from sin, I think it's that, but I think there are times that we get indications from scripture, it also just means set apart unto God as special to him. For example, when Moses was at that burning bush, looking at the flames of the burning bush, and he was told, "Take off your sandals for the place where you're standing is holy ground." It is ground that is set apart as special unto God. Or we see, for example, the high priest would wear a plate on his turban that said, "Holy to the Lord." Or it says in Exodus chapter 30, that the blood of the atoning sacrifice was “Holy to the Lord”. Or that the recipe for the anointing oil or for the incense was not to be used for common things, because it was holy to the Lord. And then the people themselves, Israel, were declared to be holy to the Lord out of all the nations on the Earth, He made them to be a holy nation, a kingdom of priests. Deuteronomy 7:6. And so therefore, I say that human life is separated and holy to God, it is sacred to God, that's what we mean by sanctity of human life.

Now, there are many attacks in this world on that sacredness, all of them come from Satan. He is attacking it because he hates us, and so he's attacking non-Christian religions. When my daughter, Jenny and I were in India, we had a chance to look at Hinduism full in the face. And to try to understand Hinduism, we did some study on it before we went. And I see in Hinduism, a consistent attack on the basic idea of the sanctity of human life. For example, the cycles of reincarnation blurs the distinction between us and animal life. You can be reincarnated as something less than human. And so they think it elevates the sacredness of all life. But it flies right in the face of the Genesis 1 teaching that human beings are intrinsically different, created in the image of God. And along with it in that system comes the idea of untouchability, the low castes who are not even part of God. They're not even part of His feet, they're not related to him in any way. And so therefore, when a Dalit (an untouchable) from that caste walks down the sidewalk, they're supposed to sweep behind them so that higher caste people will not be defiled by their foot falls. That's an attack on the sacredness of all human life.

We see it again and again. Those polytheistic animal sacrifice systems that we read about in the Bible, they degraded humanity as the blood thirsty gods demanded that children be sacrificed and burned, and God said something that I did not command and neither did it even enter into my mind. It's an attack on the sacredness of human life. So also philosophies. There are philosophies that attack the sanctity of human life. I was reading about a fascinating man named Peter Singer, who is an ethicist of some sort at Princeton, and he's advocating animal liberation. He's got a book out called Animal Liberation. What he's saying is that there are some animals that are just at this high level of function that we should recognize them legally as persons.

Oh, there should be more laughter there. I mean that we should recognize them legally as persons. He's starting the great ape movement. And so there are certain great apes that should be legally recognized as persons. Peter Singer. But there's a dark side too. Because he would deny personhood to those who, through various reasons, have lost the capacity to think and reason as human beings. Whether Alzheimer's or birth defects, or whatever, they should not be legally recognized as persons. And you know what comes right on the heels of that is euthanasia. It's a dark philosophy, so also other philosophies. Materialism, the idea that all we are is matter. Just stuff. And I don't just mean materialism and that we wanna get as rich as we can, I mean just the basic idea that all we are is matter. Or pragmatism, that just looks at things in terms of their usefulness.

And so the less usefulness you have, the less value you have. These are attacks on the sanctity of human life with dark consequences. Scientific, medical and technological advances have attacked the sanctity of human life. Stem cell research, the fear there is that human embryos will be grown and harvested for their stem cells, thus degrading humanity like we're a crop or something. Now, I know that there are other kinds of stem cells and distinctions could be made, etcetera, but I think there is that concern there that degrades the human being. Secular governments, communism, the value and worth of the individual, just submerged into a concern for the kind of iron clad, monolithic state.  George Orwell wrote a book in 1984, talking about how bleak and dark that human existence is. Or, Nazism as we already talked. Foundational to that is racism, the idea of Aryan superiority, in which one race is better than another, and therefore the lower races can simply be killed. Now, there's a decaying world view in the West, we have less and less a grasp on the sacredness, the sanctity of human life. We're loosening our grasp under all of these attacks, these different kinds of attacks, we're loosening our sense of it. The clearest indication of that is in the country of the Netherlands, which has had legalized euthanasia laws for a while, but in March of 2006, extended that to infants. Stop and think about that. If the infant has an incurable disease that puts it in a high level of pain, it is legal to kill, for the parents, together with the doctor to agree to kill that infant in the Netherlands.

Where does it stop? Some day, society may decide that we are obsolete. I mean, you've got to stand somewhere, there's gotta be a point in which you say enough is enough. This isn't biblical. This is wrong. Yes, it is tragic when people suffer, it is tragic when they're in pain, but do we have the right to come and deprive life from someone else like that? It's a terrible thing. And abortion, there's a special problem with that, because it's been the law of the land in this country for a full generation and more, and there's mentalities and ethics and culture all around it, politics, and it makes it very hard for us to be. We're very intimidated as people to wade into this again and to talk about it and say, "But it isn't right. It's just wrong." And so therefore, God give us courage, God give us boldness to be salt and light here. Our country needs it. It needs the Christians, the churches, the pulpits, the pastors to stand up and tell the truth again, because all of us are together in this. We're all degraded. We're made inhuman by denying personality to those that God gave it to.

And so the best thing we can do is to go back to scripture, to Genesis. And Genesis Chapter 1, I think is the best foundation for a strong view on the sanctity of human life. I'm gonna look briefly at five reasons that the text says that we are sacred. First, we are sacred because we are specially created by God. Genesis 1:26, "Then God said let us make man". We are created and not evolved. Evolution is another one of those attacks on the sanctity of human life. Created and not evolved. Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." And again and again, in Genesis 1, God speaks in this way, let there be, and there is. You get that again and again. Let there be light, and there's light. Let there be an expanse, a firmament, in the KJV, in the midst of the waters. Let the waters be gathered to one place under the Heavens. Let the Earth sprout vegetation you see. God said, "Let the waters swarm with living creatures." God said, "Let the Earth bring forth vegetation." God uses that kind of language. Not in any way that he's not directly involved in all those things, but to create a special way of speaking when he came to the human being.

Instead of let there be, let there be, let there be, he says, let us make. Do you see the difference? And so he's speaking very personally. He's involved in a fascinating way. "Let us make man." There's a special involvement. Now, that plural has been interesting to people. Let us make man. When I was a kid, I read a book called “Chariots of the Gods” by Erich von Däniken. He said that basically, beings from outer space came to the earth thousands of years ago, and they made the first people, and there's indications of space travelers and all that, fascinating but utter hogwash. But one of the things he said is, all you have to do is just look at Genesis 1:26, and there's proof that there was a multiplicity of the "Let us make". You know, there was a bunch of them making people. Others, as they come to let us make, they say that God is deliberating among the heavenly counsel with angels that are observing what he's doing and applauding. The stars of the Heavens are applauding the creation of God, and I think that that's true, that the angels watch, but they're not involved in creation. And it says, "Let us make." So the "us" that's doing the us-ing is doing the making. Do you see what I'm saying? That's not good grammar but you understand theologically what I'm saying. The one that God is deliberate... He is the one who makes. Let us make man in our image. Christians don't have any problems with this. I believe this is a trinitarian statement. Father, Son and Spirit equally and passionately involved in making the human race in the image of God. That's wonderful. Same kind of plural we get in John 14:23, when Jesus says this, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." Do you have problems with that plural? I don't, I just understand it, it's the best we can do to understand the Trinity. And so we use that kind of language, but here we are, we are sacred because we are specially created by God in a unique way.

Secondly, we are sacred because we are created in the image of God. It wasn't just that God specially created us but he specifically created us in his image and in his likeness. Now, what do we mean by image and likeness? Well, the word image was frequently used in the Old Testament to refer to little idols and figurines that were made by polytheists to worship. They would make those idols, those images and then worship them. The very thing that we were forbidden to do in the Ten Commandments. And the Jews entering the promised land, were commanded that they should destroy all of the images of the nations they were dispossessing. And that it was not within our power to make with our hands any accurate representation of God. We can't do it. But here's the fascinating thing, what we are forbidden to do, God in some mysterious way did by making us in his image and after his likeness. The human race in its entirety are created in the image of God, and the perfection of this was in Christ. Colossians 1:15, "He is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation." And so in some mysterious way, humanity displays the Glory of God more than anything else that God has ever made. And also this word likeness, I think creates a similarity, but difference.

We are similar to God, but different too. And so there's somewhat of a unity and a closeness, but still a separation there that's very appropriate. And I get that out of Ezekiel Chapter 1. Ezekiel has an incredible, almost indescribable vision of the glory of God, and this is what it says at the end, in Ezekiel 1, "Above the expanse over their heads, there was the likeness of a throne in appearance like sapphire and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness with a human appearance. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God." He's putting words between us and the actual glory of God. He's just saying, I can't really describe it. And so we are in the likeness of God, we are like God. And that's a beautiful thing. Now, what does this mean? Well, I think it means our inner being, our internal selves are created with certain capacities that are God-like. The ability to think and reason, to feel emotion, to build relationships, to converse, to plan for the future, to remember the past, to observe other creatures and understand them to take existing raw materials and shape them into something according to an internal plan and design, to choose and reject, to love and to hate, these things are aspects of the image of God.

But be careful now, let's not follow Peter Singer. Let's not follow utilitarianism, that if you should lose some of those capacities, you become somehow less human or less in the image of God, don't make that mistake 'cause it isn't true. But I think these capabilities are part of what it means to be in the image of God. I think also our bodies fit in there as well. You know, God uses what we call anthropomorphic language. He speaks as though he has a body. Have you ever noticed that? The eyes of the Lord roam to and fro over the surface of the Earth, looking for anyone who will be truly devoted to him. Or it says that God brought Israel out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Do you imagine that God has a hand and an arm? Or the ear of the Lord is not too dull to hear, but your sins have separated you from God, it says in Isaiah. He's not hard of hearing. In another place, he said, he who made the ear, does he not hear? And he who made the eye, does he not see? He just doesn't need the organ of the ear and the eye in order to do what those things do for us. But we are somehow, in the image of God in all of that, created in the image of God. And the scripture clearly testifies that both genders, male and female, equally share in the image of God.

And so God created man in his image, male and female, he created them in the image of God, he created them. And so, God specifically communicates the value of both genders, male and female, and frankly, and we need to say that these days, of sexuality itself. There is a value to it. There is a worth to it. It matters to be male and to be female. And it matters in a good way because it's all part of Genesis 1 where it says, "And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." And so it is a good thing to be a male if you're a male, and it's a good thing to be a female, if that's what God chose for you at the moment of conception. That's when he made the choice, actually, before the foundation of the world, I believe. But physically, you were that from that very moment of conception. And it's a good thing we embrace it, but there is an attack on gender in our culture today, and I think it's part of an attack on the sanctity of human life. And despite our wickedness, despite all of our sin, despite the pollution and corruption that came into the human race after Genesis 3, which we acknowledge and recognize, we are still in the image of God, even still.

And so it says in James 3, speaking of the tongue, the problem of the tongue, with the tongue, we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the image of God. "Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing, my brothers, this ought not to be." And salvation in Christ perfectly restores that image. Isn't that magnificent? We are in our new creation self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Oh, how beautiful is that? If you have come here today and you've never made a commitment to Christ, hear me now. The Lord Jesus Christ has the power to transform you and make you into a new person, to cleanse all of your sins by his blood shed on the cross and to make you to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Isn't that magnificent? Simply trusting in Christ does all of that for you. Through repentance and faith in Christ. But I say to you a corollary of this, the dark side is that attacks on human beings therefore are attacks on God, because we are in the image of God, and that is precisely what Satan wants to do.

The reason he attacks humanity so much, the reason he hates us so much, he wants to murder us so much is that any attack on a human being is an assault on the image of God. So all the false religions that debase humanity, all of the humanistic philosophies that degrade humanity, all of them are bubbling up out of the dark mind of Satan because he hates God, that's what he's doing. And thus, abortion itself, I think is a filthy attack on the image of God. The effort to call the pre-born, a fetus or even worse, a product of conception, there's a mentality behind that to separate it from personhood. It's not a baby anymore when you talk like that, even though the word fetus in Latin just means young one. I tell you what, instead of doing the fetus thing, let's call it what the Latin means, young one, would they like that? I don't think so, because they want to deny personhood, that's why they use the word. God does not deny it. He gave it and he will not deny it, and we must not either.

Thirdly, human beings are sacred because we are preeminent over all other Earthly beings. This should be obvious, it's not obvious to Peter Singer. You know, the great ape movement and all that? He wants to make laws to protect animals not from cruelty and all that, which seems reasonable, but to elevate them. I don't know if he's gonna give them voting rights, I don't know what... You can imagine politicians going after the ape vote, you know?

I don't know what they're promising, and if the apes can listen and stroke their bearded chins and say, "I'll get back to you, I'm considering, I'm gonna listen to the other... " It's ridiculous, but there it is. We have a clear... Is it not clear? A clear superiority to every other created being that we see around us. Over the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the livestock, the creeping things, everything. Every four years, we have the Olympics. I like to watch the Olympics because that's the best that the human race can do in some certain measurable tangible ways. And the Olympic motto is, "Faster, Higher, Stronger". So I started thinking about the Olympics, if we had kind of a planet-wide Olympics and invited the animals to participate too. Okay? How would we do? Let's take faster, for example, imagine lining up next to a Cheetah, okay?

I don't care who you are, I don't care what university you went to, or if you set the world record or whatever, you are going to lose. If the Cheetah goes off when the gun goes, the Cheetah may go after the guy who shot the gun. But if he could be trained to stay in his lane and go, man, he's gonna hit 70 miles an hour. You have no chance, or in the swimming, a sailfish can go 68 miles an hour, we have no chance, but the turn might be tough for the sailfish. He might wanna go 1000 meters straight and he'll win for sure. But we will lose on the faster one. What about the higher one? Think about the high jump. The human record for the high jump is 8 feet 5 inches. A Puma can do 15 feet. 15 feet. We lose. Okay? We just lose. Well, forget that. Why don't we just go with a bird, how high is the bird gonna go? Okay? Or what's the pole vault record or the long jump record? You know, the human record for the long jump is 29 feet four and a quarter inches. But I learned this, a bar-tailed godwit travels 6300 miles without landing, from Alaska to New Zealand. Try beating that.

6300 miles is an awfully long, long jump. Again, we lose. What about stronger, weight lifting? The Iranian Hercules, a guy in 2004 won the gold medal, Hossein Rezazadeh. And he set the clean and jerk record, all-time record, 580.9 pounds. That's a lot of weight to pull up, and then, you know, this guy is amazingly strong. But in comes the elephant, he's got his trunk, he can do a ton without even sweating. I don't know if elephants sweat, they probably do. But just straight up, again, we lose, but if the rules change a bit and we're allowed to use not just our regular rather mediocre bodies, but everything that we can invent and create and bring that to these events, there is no comparison at all. There's no bird ever that will fly to the moon, literally. But we've been there. That's higher than anything that there has ever been of these created things that started here on Earth. Alright? There's no bird or any animal that can fly faster or go faster than the spy plane, the SR-71, which went three and a half times the speed of sound. After all of it's engineering problems were solved, three and a half times, it's still a record. In terms of deadlift, I found a crane in some shipbuilding yard in Mississippi that can dead-lift 600 tons. 600 tons. It can just pick right up. Like a whole ship and just pick it up. Okay? An elephant can't do that. This is clear evidence of the superiority of the human race over anything else that's made. We were made better, and we have a higher value, "Of how much greater worth are you than a sheep?" Jesus said. There's just a higher value.

Fourthly, we are sacred because with that capacity, we were given that position of dominion on the earth. It wasn't just we're capable for it, it was given to us. We were put in charge. Look what it says, "And God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over the livestock, over all the earth and all the creatures that move along the ground." Verse 28, "God said, Fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Notice how he talks about realms or spheres, the sea, the air, the ground, we're in charge of all of it. The sea, fish naturally swim in the sea and feel comfortable there, far more than we ever will. But it was given to us to rule the sea, the waves. The air, birds naturally soar through the heavens, and they feel comfortable there, but it was given to us to rule the air, to be in charge.

The earth, animals roam the earth, they live a lot closer to the soil than we do, some actually live in the soil and burrow through it. But we rule it, we're in charge over it, because God put us in that position. This is the right to rule coupled with the capacity for it. It was clearly established, and therefore there is a link between us and this planet. We saw it at the curse when Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed the ground because of him. So there's a link, there's a cursing of the ground because of our sin. We see it again in the flood, when everything that breathes the breath of life is destroyed except those animals that are with the man, Noah, on the Ark. There's a link between us. We're in charge. And therefore, we are to use our power and our influence to bless and serve and nurture, not to destroy or crush, just like Jesus did for the church. And so that's the position we're put in, to be that kind of leader. But what did we do? We gave it to Satan at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We gave it over, and so Satan has the temerity to say to Jesus, "I'm in charge of all these kingdoms of the Earth, and I can give it to anyone I want, because it's been given to me."

Who gave it to him? Well, Adam did. Handed it right to him. And you know what Jesus did? He's bought it back through the blood of Christ, he shed his blood to get it back for us. It says in Revelation 5, "They sang a new song to Jesus, You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priest to serve our God. Listen, and they will reign on the Earth." He bought it back, he paid a high price and bought it back. Therefore, human life is sacred because we are to rule over the Earth and everything in it. Fifth, we are sacred because we are blessed by God in procreation. "God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply." Do you see how those two have been ruptured by the abortion mentality? "Blessed and told, Be fruitful and multiply." We don't look at children is a blessing anymore. I spent a whole Sunday on this last Sanctity of Human Life Sunday a year ago.

We have to work on this. Children are a blessing from God. Let's not talk about how costly they are, how difficult or any of those things, or every child, a wanted child, like Planned Parenthood tells us, that's ridiculous. Children are a blessing from God, we were blessed so that we could have children to fill the Earth and subdue it. It says in Psalm 1:27, "Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with him with them, that he shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies at the gate."

Five reasons in Genesis 1:26-28, the human life is sacred. Sacred because we are specially created by God. Sacred because we are created in the image and likeness of God. Sacred because we are, in ourselves, pre-eminent over every other created being, Earthly beings. Sacred because given dominion by God over the Earth and sacred because we're blessed by God in procreation. What application do we take to this? First of all, can I urge you, please, to honor this sacredness in other people?

I mean, out with racism. It makes no sense at all, get rid of it. C S Lewis in his great sermon, Weight of Glory, he stated that every single human being you meet will spend eternity either in Heaven or Hell. And if you could see them now as they will ultimately be, you would see them either so glorious, you would be tempted to worship them, or so hideous you would run away screaming from them. And every significant encounter you have with another human being, hastens them in one direction or the other. That's pretty weighty, isn't it? There are no insignificant people. There are no insignificant encounters with other people. And therefore, one of our applications is respect and honor the significance of humanity by preaching the Gospel to them. Share the Gospel, that's why Jesus came, because of our value, he shed his blood for human beings. And therefore, seek and save the lost. Seek them and save them. Share the Gospel with them this week. We've begun to pray for the cards you gave us last week, we're excited about that, we're already praying, we're waiting for the stories to come back in of how God used you to lead those folks to Christ. But honor the fact that they're created in the image of God and can be recreated by the blood of Christ. Be faithful in that. And on the abortion issue, learn how to make a defense for the truth that you believe.

I have this book here, Randy Alcorn's book, Pro-life Answers to Pro-choice Arguments. Get a book like this. Study some of these things. Work with the mind so that you're not ashamed but know how to give a defense for what you believe. Start with the Scripture foundationally. Look at the five points I've made today, establish what may have been a little murky in your mind under the rock-solid foundation of the Word of God, and be active. You have some bulletin inserts. There's a beautiful one there from Focus On the Family, look at the pictures of the development of these babies in their mother's wombs. It's beautiful. Praise God for it. You have another insert there from Pregnancy Support Services, you may wanna volunteer your time or give financially to support them. There's a pro-life ministry also in Raleigh, if that's closer to your home. You can get involved. Pray, pray for an end to abortion and euthanasia and be willing to be faithful like the widow, persistent widow and praying until it finally goes. Let's not give up.

Let's not get discouraged or think this is it... We're gonna win. Abortion is not gonna be in the new Heavens and the new Earth, that means we're gonna win. So therefore, anything we do toward that end will be successful. Please close with me in prayer.

I hope all of you saw this morning this pamphlet called GAP Ministry, I’m just holding it up in front of you. This is a beautiful little booklet, the first of its kind that says volume 1, 2007. That's hopeful, isn't it? We're looking for a volume 2. It's the missions committee mostly, Ron Halbrooks and others, that worked hard on this, many people involved in this. I hope you got one and I hope you took only one per family unit. In other words, if you get home and find that each of your kids got one in their Sunday School and there's six of them, bring five of them back, okay? We would like every family unit to have one of these, and these will, I think, focus our prayer attention over the next number of months throughout the year as we're praying for missions around the world, so I hope you get one of those.

I also wanna call your attention this morning to another insert, and that's a little card, go ahead and get it out of your bulletin. In this card, we're urging everyone in the assembly this morning to think about a lost person that you'd like to bring to faith in Christ in the year 2007. We'd like you to write that person's name down, we'd like you to write your name down and pass them in. We've pushed the offering to the end of the service so that you can put these in the offering plates as they go by. And we will pray with you regularly for these folks, and we look forward to a chance to ask you about any encounters you may have had with them, or for you to come and tell us. We want to just stimulate people to love and good works by these kinda stories, and if you really cannot think of a name of a lost person to write down that you'd like to lead to Christ, then write down, "I don't have anyone but I wanna get someone, and I wanna change my life so that I can make some non-Christian friends, neighbors, co-worker, somebody that I could lead to Christ," so write that down and we'll pray for that for you.

But think about that through my sermon, don't think too much about it during my sermon, think about some of what I'm saying during the sermon. Think about a person you might wanna write down and write down a few details about their lives as well, so that we can have a sense of how to pray for you as you try to witness to them. So hold on to those cards and when the offering plate goes by, go ahead and put them in with your name and the person's name.

We're looking this morning at one of the most glorious passages in the Bible on personal evangelism. I actually think this is probably the best passage in the whole Bible on technique of personal evangelism. You're gonna learn how to witness, how to share your faith. I will take you first to John chapter 4, and here we see the master, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, skillfully attracting or luring a woman to eternal life. Now, we know that Jesus went by the Sea of Galilee and he saw Peter and John, and James and Andrew plying their trade, for they were fishermen, repairing their nets or getting their boat ready, and Jesus walked by purposefully, just walked right by them. And said, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men." Follow me and I'll tell you how to attract people into the kingdom. I'll teach you how to do it. I think this is one of those times that he did that. John chapter 4. 

Now for myself, I've never been much for fishing, I don't desire to insult those of you that really love to fish, for myself, I never like sea food. Some of you that know me know that, and so I don’t like the product and the process seems a little dry too, quite frankly. But for others, it's a great sport and there's a lot of skill involved, and I think all the more, when you consider the different kinds of fish that you're trying to catch, of which I know nothing, some of what I've learned, I've learned from movies and books, and not from personal experience. But if you're gonna go after a swordfish, for example, in the deep water, you're gonna use a different kind of bait than if you're gonna go after a clever lively river trout. If you're going after that swordfish, you're gonna use 500 test line with a J-Hook and some live bait like mackerel or squid, and you're gonna perhaps intersperse your bait with fluorescent light sticks to attract them at night. Or you might just have one you're going after with a pole and you're gonna be there an awfully long time. There's different theories on how it is you're gonna land a 500-pound fish.

And so it is with a swordfish, if you're gonna go out to a mountain stream in the west and you're gonna try to land a river trout, you're not gonna use that same technique. They probably have very little interest in squid. But instead you're gonna use the fly fishing technique, and you're gonna learn how to cast out and make it float over the water as the trout looks up and sees, and it better look like the kind of bugs they're eating that day, or they're not gonna be interested in it. Well, there's just different techniques to drawing fish in, to alluring them and attracting them.

Now when Jesus said, I will make you fishers of men, he's not saying you're gonna use the same technique for everybody. As a matter of fact, he uses different approaches all over the place, it's very different between him and Nicodemus as it is with the Samaritan woman at the well. He has a different approach, but what he's trying to do is draw or attract people into the kingdom. He said, "No one comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." And there's the drawing. There's an attraction that Jesus has, a pull, and we see it so powerfully in this encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. Now, as I look at the American church scene, as I look at our own church, FBC Durham, as I look at what's happening here and around, I feel that we have to embrace the Great Commission better than we've ever done before.

Jesus said, in the Great Commission, "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded. And surely, I am with you always to the end of the age." That's the Great Commission, it stands over us as our purpose. But I have noticed that there are very few churches that are faithful to the entire thing. Some churches are faithful to no part of it, frankly. They do not honor or revere the Word of God, and they're not faithful to any part of the Great Commission.

There are some churches that are set up for, and especially skilled at bringing unchurched people into an initial commitment to faith in Christ, but at that point, they have a hard time bringing them on to full maturity. The church doesn't seem set up for maturity or plumbing the depths of the Word of God. It doesn't seem skillful at doing that, and so they go for a while, but then they say, "I'm just not being fed, I'm not growing here."

And then there are other churches that are better at that part, at plumbing the depths of the Word of God and bringing established Christians on to maturity and helping them to understand the mind of God and growing in maturity and accountability and all that, but they don't seem very fruitful at bringing people to an initial commitment to Christ. I think that's what our church is more like. And for me, I would love to be one of those few churches that is faithful across the board to all aspects of it. Amen? That we would see at our new member class a percentage of those folk giving testimonies like, "Well, so and so talked to me in this situation. I realized I didn't know the Lord, and he brought me or she brought me to faith in Christ, and then I got baptized a few weeks ago, as you remember, and now I'm here for membership." I would love to see that happen in our church.

I would love to see that happen, and I think that it can happen. As a matter of fact, I think it will happen. I think it's going to happen. As we follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I wanna keep Luke 19:10, last week's sermon text, in front of us all year long. And that is, “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” But here we see seeking and saving going on again, this time it says the Father is seeking and Jesus is doing the saving, and it's so beautiful to see, isn't it? 

Now, Jesus was one who fed on the Father's word. He fed on the will of God. He came into the world to do the Father's will, and the Father, as I just mentioned, was seeking true worshippers, that's who He's seeking, that's what he came to do. And Jesus came to do the Father's will, relentlessly, at every moment. In effect, he ate the Father's will. Look at verse 34, it says, “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of Him who sent Me and finish His work.” Jack didn't read that this morning, it's not in the focus of what we're looking at this morning, and I hope to be able to look at that in a couple of weeks, but Jesus fed on the will of God. Now, Jesus knew precisely why he had entered the world. It says in John 6, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

So Jesus came to do his Father's will, his Father's will was to lose none of those people that he entrusted to him before the foundation of the world. He wasn't gonna lose any of them, but he was there to save them, and he would save them. Now, Jesus had been very fruitful in his Father's will, look at verses 1 and 2, the Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John. Although, in fact, it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. It's hard to overstate how powerfully effective was the ministry of John the Baptist. Huge regions of people were flooding to the Jordan river to be baptized by John, huge quantities of people wanted to hear him preach, but now in a very simple statement, the very thing that John the Baptist said would happen, "He must increase and I must decrease," it's now happened.

Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John. Although, in fact, it says, it wasn't Jesus who was doing the baptism, but it was his disciples. Now see the wisdom of Jesus here. He's already drawing these new disciples and making them leaders, getting them ready to take on for him after he is going to ascend to the Father. They are gonna carry on that baptizing and disciple-making ministry, and already they're being trained for it. See, therefore, the wisdom of Christ here. He wants to train up laborers for the harvest field.

Now, in verse 4, we see a surprisingly compulsive statement on Jesus' part, and I know it doesn't come across very strongly. But it's very strong in the original language, it says, "Now he had to go through Samaria." He had to go through Samaria. He must go there. Very important. We've already seen this word once in the Greek in John chapter 3, verse 7. He said to Nicodemus, "You must be born again. If you wanna go to heaven, Nicodemus, you wanna see heaven, you must be born again." We see it also in John 3:14 and 15, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life." Jesus must die on the cross if we're gonna have eternal life, he must. John chapter 4, verse 24, which we heard read already, "God is a spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth," or else it isn't worship.

And we'll see it again in chapter 9, verse 4, "As long as it is day, we must work the works of Him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work." There's an urgency there. Do you see it? Does that urgency capture your life? Is there an urgency to you? Is there a Samaria you must go through? And why must Jesus go there? Well, because the Samaritan woman is there, and of all that the Father has given him, he must lose none, but raise them up at the last day. And she is one of the ones the Father had given, and so Jesus' heart, like a compass, is gonna go after those and he's going to hunt them down and find them, and you know what? He's still doing it now, and he uses us to go find those people. We don't know who they are until we start sharing the gospel, but when they start to respond and come, then we know they are Christ's sheep, and so he's going after...

Now the Jews ordinarily would have avoided Samaria, they would have gone the long way around, they don't want any encounter with the Samaritans at all, at least not of that type. They wouldn't have minded a military encounter with the Samaritans but they didn't wanna go through there for a friendly encounter 'cause it wouldn't have been friendly. They ordinarily would have gone way around. Jesus had to go through Samaria because she was there. Another 'must' verse that is on my mind when I think about this, is John 10:16, and Jesus said this, "I have other sheep that are not of the sheep pen, I must bring them," so that there'll be one flock and one shepherd. That covers the last 2000 years. That covers the last 2000 years.

He must bring those sheep and there'll be one flock and one shepherd, and he's working that must inside me, the love of Christ constrains us, 2 Corinthians 5. We must go to whatever Samaria God has in mind for us. So he comes to this town in Samaria called Sychar near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son, Joseph, and Jacob's well was there, and Jesus tired as he was, sat down by the well; it was about the sixth hour. The must overrode his physical weakness and weariness and thirst. Jesus had a body, he got tired like you and me. He was busier than you and me, he had three years to save the world, okay? So that's busy, very busy, okay? And he got weary. And he's weary that day. And it says, it's about the sixth hour, that's high noon friends, it is hot in Palestine at high noon. It's not a good time to be going to get water, and Jesus is sitting there dusty and tired, and yet his heart is ready for work, he's ready to do the Father's will, and here comes the Samaritan woman, and he's ready even when weary, even when busy, even when tired, he is ready to do the Father's will and seek and save the lost.

That's a lesson for me to not make excuses, say, "I'm too busy, I've got important things to do," when God brings somebody that we're ready to witness to. And now we see Jesus' technique as she comes. We see him baiting the hook or luring her into eternity, he's luring her to life. And it's so beautiful. When the Samaritan, verse 7 and 8, the Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. Jesus, as always, takes the initiative, he's always taking the initiative. But he does so here in a fascinating way. Usually he takes the initiative by meeting other people's felt needs: they've got a son or daughter who's sick or dying or dead, they're hungry, the feeding of the 5000, they have needs, they're sinful and they need forgiveness, he's always meeting their needs and drawing them in that way. Here, he begins to attract her by having her meet one of his needs. "I'm thirsty. Would you mind getting me a drink?" Hey, whatever it takes to get into a conversation. If that's what it takes, then do it. [chuckle]

And so, fascinatingly, Jesus is drawing her in into a conversation. What's even more fascinating is who it is he's seeking to reach. This is a Samaritan woman, and he is reaching out to her. I will never forget Ronnie Stevens at Mike Waters' house a number of years ago. I was a disciple now, and he talked about this, you know how some things just stick in your mind, and he said it with such a beautiful poetry. That's the way Ronnie talks. He's poetical in the way he put thoughts together, but he said this, he said, "The Jews were the rejects of the world. The Samaritans were the rejects of the Jews. The Samaritan women, the rejects of the Samaritan men, and this Samaritan woman, the rejects of the other Samaritan women." She was pretty much at the bottom of the pile. She was the lowest of the low in the way people thought, but not in the way Jesus thought. And isn't it fascinating how he can use this encounter with this woman to give the clearest description of what true spiritual worship is, the clearest statement he ever made concerning his messiah-ship, and for us this morning, the clearest display of evangelistic technique we'll find anywhere in the Bible, he uses her to do that.

Amazing grace. Amazing grace that the eternal Son of God would talk to any of us. And we think, "Oh well, we're better than her, we're better than him." I've often talked to somebody about that, people that feel self-righteous, feel that they're good people, moral people, and all that. I especially like doing it if it's a guy who's taller than me. I do. A guy who's 6'2", 6'3", look up at him a little bit I'll say, "Between the two of us, which of the two is closer to the sun right now?" He said, "I don't know what you mean." I said, "Well, I mean, between the two of us, which of us is closer to the sun?" He said, "I guess I am, I'm taller than you."

I said, "Now, if I stand on a step ladder, which of the two of us is gonna be closer to the sun?" He said, "What are you getting at?" I said, "Well, the sun is 93 million miles away. Does it really matter which of the two of us is closer? The real infinite distance was covered by Jesus when he came from heaven to earth and walked on this guilty land that we all call home." That's the infinite journey, and which of us is naturally a little more moral, a little better, it's not even worth discussing, what's really amazing is not that Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman. What's really amazing is that he talks to you and me. That's what's really incredible.

So there is the amazing grace, and so he's talking to this Samaritan woman, and he lays out for her what I'm gonna call a lure with four hooks on it. Verse 10. It's worth memorization. It's just so powerful. "If you knew the gift of God and who it is who speaks to you, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." Now she's shocked he's even talking to her.

"What are you talking to me for? I'm a Samaritan woman, and you are a Jew, we don't have anything to do with each other." But Jesus said, "Let's get to the... Let's get to the heart of the matter. If you knew the gift of God and who it is who speaks to you, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water." Do you see the four hooks? He is drawing her very powerfully into an evangelistic conversation. He doesn't say, "Hey, would you like to have an evangelistic conversation with me?" Go ahead and try that technique sometime, see how far that gets. There is some technique involved here, okay? There's some approach, and Jesus lays out four enticement saying, "Come on, come on, let's have a conversation, let's talk, open up, talk to me." And so he's drawing her in, and it creates within her four questions, I think, she's... No not right in the text, but it's not easy... it's not hard, sorry, to find. The first is, “What is the gift of God?”

And the second is, “Who are you?” Or at least, “Who Do You Think You Are?” And the third is, “Why should I ask you for anything?” And the fourth is, “What in the world is living water?” There are four enticements into a conversation. She's hooked in four ways and let's take them in the order she asks them back, okay? The first question is basically, “Why should I ask you for anything?” All right, look at Verse 11, "Sir," the woman said, "You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep." All right, let's just stop there. She said, "I may not be expert at many things, but I know about drawing water from this well, that's why I brought my water jar." All right, "I perceive that you have nothing to draw with, and I also know probably better than you do, 'cause I've been here many, many times, that this is a deep well." She knows how to get water out of this well. She also knows right away that Jesus has nothing apparently in his hands to offer, and yet he's talking about asking her for something.

And so the question I'm sure popped in her mind, "Why should I ask you for anything?" All she can see is the outside surface, she can't see the spiritual reality behind it. At that moment, she can't. At the end of the conversation, she will. But not at this moment, all she's seeing is physical, and I tell you, it will seem that way again when it comes to Jesus. When he is up hanging on the cross, when all of his clothes have been confiscated and gambled for in fulfillment of prophecy, when his blood is being shed out and he is clearly dying, it would be easy to say at that moment, "Sir, you have nothing. What do you have to offer me? Your disciples have all deserted you and fled, there's no one left, what do you have to offer me?" And only the gift, the supernatural gift of faith can see Jesus properly at that moment, as God gave to the thief on the cross, that dying thief that we talked about who looked over and said, "Remember me Lord, when you come in your kingdom." Kingdom? Oh yes, he's coming and he's coming with the kingdom. Only the eye of faith can see through the outward surface, and she can't do it yet, but she will at the end. She says, "Sir, you have nothing."

You know what I get out of this? The better you know Jesus, the more you're gonna ask him for things. The better you know Jesus, the more you're gonna ask him for something. Ask him right now for a name to put on that card. Ask him not just to put a name on the card, ask him that you would have the privilege of bringing that individual person to Christ this year. Ask Him for it. Ask him for boldness in witnessing, ask Him for what you want. If you knew who it is who speaks to you, you would have asked him for something. The second question in her mind is, "What is living water?" She said, "Where can you get this living water?" We're gonna come back to that. But she picks up this mysterious phrase, she can scarcely understand what it might be, but she's certainly intrigued, and she wants to know about it. Her initial issue at this moment is whatever it is, you don't have it to offer because you have nothing to draw with.

So she goes immediately at that point to her next question, and that is, "Who are you?" Verse 12, "Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?" Jesus speaks like this, "If you knew who it is you're speaking to you... " She's saying, "All right, who are you? You apparently think you're somebody, are you then greater than Jacob, our father?" She obviously assumes the answer to the question is, "No." She set the bar really high, Jacob was a great patriarch from the Old Testament revered by both Jews and Samaritans. He was the one who God had appeared to when he was sleeping with a rock as a pillow, and angels were ascending and descending, his mind filled with heavenly light, and God making him a promise of eternal consequence, "To you and to your offspring, I will give this land and it will be yours forever." This is the same one who wrestled with an angel and overcame, this is the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Are you greater than him? The one who gave us the well? It's the very same thing that Jesus is gonna face later in John 8, when he made another outrageous statement, he said, "I tell you the truth, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death."

Wow. And Jesus said that to his enemies who are not favorably disposed to his speaking at that moment. And they said, "Are you greater than our father, Abraham? He died, the prophets died. Who do you think you are?" And Jesus said, "Before Abraham was born, I am. I am God in the flesh, that's who I am. And if you knew who it is who's speaking to you, you would have asked me for something." "Are you greater than Jacob?" "I created Jacob, and I'm the one that made him those promises, and I'm actually the ladder on which the angels ascend and descend. Yes, I'm greater than Jacob. But I'll prove it to you by the gift that I give." Fourthly, "What is this gift of God? Jacob gave us the well, that was his gift. What about your gift? What are you gonna give?" Jesus said, "You know, I will prove how much greater I am than Jacob by what I give you compared to what he gave you. Have you noticed that you have to keep coming back here to draw water? It doesn't really satisfy? Actually then the water that I give you will become inside of you a well of water springing up to eternal life, and if you drink the water I give you, you will never thirst again. That's how much greater I am than Jacob. That's the gift of God." Now, I believe at this moment, though she doesn't understand everything, she's hooked.

She's enticed. She's intrigued. She is interested. And so she says, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't have to keep coming here to draw water. I'd like some indoor plumbing. That would be pretty good." She wants to keep talking to Jesus, Jesus is fascinating, but she doesn't yet fully get it, although there's something opening up inside her that she can't really fully understand. And now Jesus has to go painfully to the heart of the matter, painfully. Yes, she's interested in living water, she's interested in the gift of God, we know that the living water... We know that the gift of God is eternal life. It's eternity in the presence of God. In your presence are eternal pleasures at your right hand, eternally forevermore, Psalm 16, that's what he's offering her, forever pleasures in the very presence of God, but she cannot have it as she is, she is sinful, and so are we all. And so he must save her from sin.

Save from what? Save from sin. He must be a Savior from sin. And so he skillfully, but painfully and very bluntly and directly opens up the issue of her sin, "Go call your husband and come back." He brings up her marital life, he brings up her sexual life. This is very personal, all sin is personal, but especially this kind of sin, very intensely personal. And for this reason, she speaks an evasion, a partial truth, it amounts to a lie, "I have no husband." I don't know if that's how it was, but maybe I'm thinking she's not wanting to talk much about that right now. And what's so remarkable to me about Jesus's holy approach here, he knows everything but he actually takes the time to commend her evasive answer. He says, "You know, you're right actually, as I come to think about it. You're right when you say you have no husband, the fact is you've had five husbands and the man you're now with is not your husband, but what you've said is quite true." You know Jesus, while dealing very directly and bluntly with her sin, is doing it in a very winsome and appealing, and I would say, supernatural way.

She's not turned off at this moment. To some degree, I think she wants to go there because she wants to know, "Am I going to hell? Can I be forgiven? Can I be reconciled to God or is it too late for me? I'm already spurned by all of my neighbors, nobody wants me, my life is ruined. Is there a way back for me?" She wants to talk about it, just like someone with a mysterious and growing pain in their chest wants to talk to a doctor about it, they really do, 'cause they're anxious about it. And Jesus does it in a winsome and sweet way. Now he probes her life with supernatural skill. I don't know what so amazed her about his statement, but there was something that really amazed her, I think it's either the word 'five' or the word 'now' as I've meditated on it. I think her neighbors know about her sordid lifestyle, I think they know that. But they may not know what led to it in the past. It may be that in the past, she had all kinds of encounters with other men and bad situations in the first marriage, and all this stuff that happened, and finally it just falls apart, and then she ends up relocating and trying to start afresh in a new community, who knows?

But probably she kept all that hidden and no one knew about the one, two, three, four, five husbands she'd had. Jesus knew the exact right number. It could be that, it could be the word 'now', "The man you now have, the one you're drawing water for, well, he's not your husband," it could have been that. Either way, he clearly has supernatural knowledge of her life. And may I say to you, that some day you're gonna stand before this one, the one whose eyes are like flaming fire, who sees all things, who knows everything, there's no secrets with him, he sees it all, and he will talk to you very directly about every careless word you've ever spoken. And it's good for us to be reconciled to Him, isn't it? It's good for us to feel the forgiveness that only he can offer, very good. Now, obviously, Christ does this in a supernatural winsome way, you could say, "Boy, witnessing would be so much easier if I could just get a little file on somebody before I talk to him, and really wow him with some kind of secret knowledge or something."

“Oh, Lord, send me the information." You don't need the information friends, no temptation has seized us except what's common to man. Use the law of God. Look at the 10 Commandments. "You've heard that it was said, 'You shall not murder,' But I say that anyone is angry with his brother is in danger of the fire of hell. You've heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery,' but I say if you even look at a woman lustfully, you committed adultery in your heart." You don't need to know. Just know the law and know that they've broken it, they're transgressors.

Use the two greatest commandments, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength every moment of your life. And love your neighbor as yourself. Have you done that?' "No. Well, no one's perfect." "Well, you need to be. As a matter of fact, if you're not perfect, you can't go to heaven." Now you're talking... Now we're talking about sin. But you must do it, without it, we are not truly witnessing.

There's another thing we can do that Jesus can't do. We can commiserate with him in a horizontal level and say, "Look, I'm just as sinful as you, there's no difference between us, really, I've violated the law of God and I am saved only by the grace of God. I know what it feels like to be a sinner." Jesus can't say those words, but we can, and so in that way, we can be both winsome and clear about sin. In verses 19-24, we see Jesus seeking a true spiritual worshiper. This is the greatest passage on worship in the New Testament. The word worship is mentioned 10 times in five verses. Amazingly, as this woman tries to evade the force of his inquiry, she leads him precisely where he wants to go. Ask God for that, say, "God help me, I'm not good at witnessing, lead me where I want to go, 'cause I don't know how to get there." And so here is this woman and it seems, at least outwardly, that she's put up an illogical smokescreen behind what she can affect a quick retreat and get out of there before she has to talk anymore about her five husbands and the one she now has that's not her husband. And she says, "Sir, I perceive that you're a Prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place were you ought to worship is Jerusalem. Now, tell me what you think about that hot controversy." Come on let's debate that please."

That was a hot topic. John Piper, in Desiring God, said this, "A trapped animal will chew off its own leg to escape; a trapped sinner will mangle her own mind and rip up the rules of logic." "Why yes, as long as we're talking about my adultery, what's your stance on the issue of where people should worship?" Have you ever done that, you're witnessing and they suddenly bring up evolution or dinosaurs, say, "What does that have to do with if you're angry, you're in danger of the fire of hell, the fact that were there dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, you know?" But you know the thing is I don't think this is a smokescreen, I actually think this is going to the heart of her problem, "Can I still worship God?" And Jesus takes it that way, he goes right to this matter, the issue isn't so much where you worship, the issue is whom you worship, and how you worship. Whom is answered in verse 23, and verse 21. Look at verse 21 "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you'll worship the Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem." Verse 23, "A time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks."

Three times, verse 21 and verse 23, three times, the answer to whom is given, the Father. We worship the heavenly Father, not where, but who should we worship? And how should we worship? Well, and spirit in a truth. In spirit means with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your strength, with all of your mind, but also in truth. You see the Samaritans rejected the rest of the scripture after the first five books of the Old Testament, they rejected it. Jesus said, "You Samaritans worship what you do not know, you've rejected the Word of God. You can't worship the one you do not know, and so the Word of God comes to tell you who to worship." And so when you're witnessing, when you're evangelizing, you're telling them who God is, how glorious, how holy, how powerful. Tell them things about God. And what's gonna happen is they're gonna start getting enticed, they're gonna start moving inside themselves, and they wanna know who this is. This is the living water friends, it is God himself satisfying, refreshing, delightful for all eternity, enough within himself to keep you fascinated for the rest of all eternity.

That is God. He is the spring of water opened up inside you, which can refresh you forever and ever. But you cannot know him apart from Jesus. You cannot know him apart from Christ, no one can. And so Jesus reveals himself plainly in verses 25 and 26, we end where he began with the question, Who am I? This is, as I've already mentioned, the clearest messianic statement Jesus ever made in the gospels. You know how frequently they asked, "Tell us plainly, are you the Messiah?" He answered something like this, "I already did tell you, but you didn't believe me because you're not my sheep." You see how it works? See but here, she says this, "I know that Messiah, the Christ, is coming. And when he comes, he will explain everything to us." In the original language, he answers, "I am, the one who's speaking to you, I am." What is he claiming? He's claiming to be God. He reveals both that he's Messiah and the Messiah is incarnate God. He reveals both of those things to her immediately. And her reaction is eternally priceless. Verse 28 and 29, leaving her water jars, I imagine she's running. It doesn't say that, it just says 'went' but let's put run in there, at least in our minds or imagination. She is running back to people that she up to this point had been trying to avoid, and she runs back into the Samaritan town and said to the people, "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”

If you're listening to me this morning and you are lost, you have not trusted in Christ, you don't need technique on evangelism, not yet. You need to come to Jesus and drink from the living water. You need to see in the cross of Christ, the blood shed on the cross, sufficient for all of your secret, hidden sins that are not secret and hidden from Jesus. You need to bring those sins and confess them and put them at the foot of the cross and let him save you, let him open up inside you a spring of water welling up to eternal life. Trust in him for the salvation of your soul. Trust in him. And all you have to do is ask him for it. You wanna know, "What do I do?" He said right there in verse 10, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is is speaking to you," you would have what? Asked him. Ask him, and he'll give it to you, simply, freely. For those of you that are Christians, I want you to learn from the master, I've given you a sheet in there, in your hand out with evangelistic questions.

We're hoping that you're going to rise above, "Hey, would you like to have an evangelistic conversation with me?" If you wanna try that one, go ahead. I'm urging that you not, or if you do, please don't give the name of this church while you're doing that, okay? "I went to the FBC Durham Evangelistic Class, would you like to have an evangelistic conversation with me?" We'd like you to do a little better than that. We'd like to be winsome and attractive, come up with your own John 4:10. Or use living water, talk about it, but draw people into conversation. Yesterday, I was getting some gas, it was at the gas pump and there was a guy right next to me, a beautiful day, and he had a Harley Davidson hat on, so I asked a stupid question, but he indulged me, I said, "Hey, do you like to ride motorcycles?" That's a stupid question. It just is, it's a stupid question, but he lowered himself to my level and we had a conversation. It was a good conversation. It was a really good conversation, I enjoyed it. Open your eyes, there are people around you all the time, and what we've got is some categories of questions which you can draw. Questions are very effective because they draw people into conversation. Read them over.

I'm not gonna read them right now, but there are questions about listener's background, questions about listener's opinion or advice, you wanna get their opinion about something, questions that involve the listener's opinion or advice, questions that asks for listeners emotions, that's on their twice it. You'll have to figure out a better heading for one of those two, I'm not sure which one. But these are good questions, these are very good questions. Get into good gospel conversations. On the back, there's more questions in which you're gonna go from opening to a closer, to closer and closer with the gospel. Read through and pick one that you'd like to try the next time you're gonna get a chance to talk to somebody. Make this your own. And now as we close in prayer and the time for the offering comes, I want you to offer up a name of somebody that you'd like to lead to Christ this year, and we will pray for you to have a chance to witness to that person and lead them to faith in Christ, and hopefully we'll have a chance to hear from you how you brought them to Christ or whatever, for us to ask, "Have you had a chance to witness to that person?" We would love for you to lead many people to Christ this year. Let's focus on one person that God has laid on your heart I hope during the time that I've been preaching. Let's pray.

Don't you just love new things? Like a new day, the freshness of a new day, like a clean slate. Nothing written on it yet. Walk with the Lord, don't have to do any of those things you've been doing, a fresh start, I think that way always about New Years. I promised myself I wasn't gonna say that word that talks about commitments you make at the beginning part of the year, no, I'm not gonna say that word in this sermon, but I want us to think about this upcoming year in a very purposeful way. I wanna think about this question, why am I here? Why am I alive? What is my purpose on Earth?  I think that's so important to do.

Socrates on trial for his life in 399 BC, said his most famous statement, most frequently quoted statements that he made, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Well, you could take that and bring it down to the smallest level, the unexamined day isn't worth living either, neither is the unexamined year. So I think it's good for us to examine not just what we've been doing, but what we intend to do, what we will do in the future, by God's grace, if God gives us time.

Now on the bulletin, you don't have to look there, but it's there every week. Our vision statement or our purpose statement, says very clearly why we're here as a church, we exist, it says, "To delight in, display and declare the glory of God equipping others to do the same through Jesus Christ." That little word 'to' is our purpose, that's why we're here. We exist for this reason. Now, my desire is that each one of us today, all of the believers in Christ that are here today would be asking this question of themselves: Why am I alive? Why am I here today? Why am I alive this year? What is God's purpose for me? And then we collectively as a church would ask that about ourselves: Why is FBC here as a church? What is God's purpose for us?

I think this is important, and I don't think we can do in this matter any better than staring at Jesus Christ, who I believe was the most purpose-driven person in history, the most purposeful person in history, no one more so than Jesus. He was more purpose-driven than a hostage rescue team would be trying to rescue hostages from some Al-Qaeda terrorists. More purposeful even than a woman coming to the point of delivery of her first child, she's only thinking about one thing at that moment: the baby. Jesus was more purpose-driven than that, more purpose-driven, for you athletes, than a relief pitcher going in with a one-run lead in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series; all he cares about is getting those outs. Jesus is more purpose-driven than that. Over and over in the Gospels, we have the same things stated different ways. Why did Jesus come to Earth? We see it again and again.

In the verse we're looking at today, look at it at Verse 10, "The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." Very clear, that's why he came into the world. But that's not the only one, there are many. I've actually counted 12 different purpose statements for Jesus life that all say about the same thing. I pair the list down. But just listen to it, I think, if you hear these, you'll start to remember some others. John 3:16-17 is an example, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."  Verse 17 says, "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." So there it is, twice in two verses. Or this one, Mark 1, when Jesus got up very early in the morning and was out in a solitary place, praying and seeking the fellowship of his Father... They came out and they wanted him to come back to the same town where he just was. They wanted him to stay there, they liked what he was doing, his healings, his teachings, just stay here. And Jesus said, "No... " It's one of the few times he ever says no to anyone who comes and asks him for anything. One of the very few times (talk about that more later).  But he said, "No, let us go somewhere else to the nearby villages so that I can preach there also, for that is why I have come." So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons, he knew what he was about, and it even affected what he did that day. He was saying, "No, I'm not gonna stay here, I'm gonna go to the next town. I know why I've come, I know what my purpose is." And it went right to the end of his life.  He's on trial for his life, in John 18:37; the issue of Jesus being a king comes up, that's what they were charging him with, and Jesus talked about his kingdom, and so Pilate picks up on this and says, "So you are a King then?" and, “Jesus answered, ‘You are right in saying that I'm a king. In fact, for this reason, I was born and for this, I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. Purpose, I entered the world to speak to the truth and to gather people who wanna hear the truth through me.’” Or This one, Matthew 20:28, "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Even the apostle Paul had purpose statements for Jesus, this is my favorite, and that's in 1 Timothy 1:15, and what an incredibly encouraging Verse, for any that are here today that Jesus would call lost. I will talk about that more in a minute.  But if you're here today, and Jesus would say, you're lost, you don't know the father or the son. And you might feel I have too much sin in my life, I could never come to Christ, I could never be a Christian. It's too hard. The Apostle Paul said, 1 Timothy 1:15, "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst." That's what the Apostle Paul said. But it's the same thing over and over. Do you not see it? So many different ways to say it, but it's the same thing again and again. Jesus entered the world for a purpose, and that purpose was to save lost sinners and he never forgot it.  Every day of his public ministry, every day he woke up, he knew what he was about; he knew in a big sense and he knew, at a detailed strategic level, logistical level, every day, what he was about. He was there to seek and to save the lost.

Now, the immediate application to you is, are you living your life that way? Are you living what Socrates would call the unexamined life?  Are you just going through your life? I say that you probably have a 100 different purposes a week, if not more than that. And if you were to go through and say, "Well, I'm going to the store to buy...” and you list out some things, that's your purpose for going to the store or to the mall?.  Some people don't have a purpose going to the mall, they go for the experience. Alright. Not me, I always have a purpose. Like most men, it's like a hunting expedition. Okay? I wanna get in and get out. Like a SWAT team I was talking about earlier, I wanna get in and get it done and out. Alright, but it's alright.

I say to you that we generally are purposeful beings and we'll have purposes, I think if you kept a record over the next week of all of your purposes, I just wanna ask you, are any of them Luke 19:10? What's the purpose of your life? Are you seeking and saving the lost? Are you involved in that? Because I say that if we as individuals, or we as a church or not, we're off message, we're off what Jesus is doing.  That's what he's doing, it's what he's been doing, he will continue to do it 'til the end of time, and if we as a church are not seeking and saving lost people, we are off Christ's message, we're off his life. We may be doing many other good things, but we are off what he's told us to do, he sent us for this purpose. "As the Father sent me, even so I am sending you." And I think that means each one of us.

So as I look at our church, so I look at our strengths and weaknesses, I look at what we're doing well and what we're not. I think we have understood, we've come to understand the save part is a full-bodied, full life thing, that everything that helps you along becoming more like Christ, any good sermon, good Sunday school classes, any good ministry, all of that is part of your salvation, which isn't finished yet, and won't be until you have your resurrection body.  So it's an ongoing seeking and saving. Jesus is still seeking you every day, and he will until the day that you are finished being saved, then you won't need to seek you, 'cause you'll be face-to-face with each other. He will continue to do that, but we know that this text is meaning something else, he's talking about lost people. So anything that we do, that's part of sanctification, and that's good, but my question is, are we crossing the gap between us and lost people seeking them the way Jesus did? That's my question, I don't think we do that as well. And I would love to see us be more faithful in 2007 than we've ever been, at least since I've been here at crossing that gap, seeking lost people, and I think this is a good text to begin.

Now, let's talk about Zacchaeus. Who was Zacchaeus? Well, Zacchaeus was lost. We'll start there. Jesus in effect said that. Jesus is not meaning to be insulting to anybody, if he calls somebody lost, he's meaning to be a physician that accurately diagnoses a situation. Talk more about lost in a moment. Look at Verse 2, we have this man Zacchaeus. “So, a man was there in Jericho, by the name of Zacchaeus, he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.”

So, who was Zacchaeus?  Well, he was a Jew, and he was a tax collector. And tax collectors were Jews who acted as Roman frontman, who would collect taxes from their neighbors and give them to the Romans and keep some of them, some of the tax money for themselves as their salary. Herein lay the problem.  Now, taxation by the Roman started with the Roman conquest of Palestine in 63 BC. It was for taxation purposes that Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And that's what moved Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem where Jesus was born in fulfillment of prophecy. Jesus took on the question, one of the most controversial questions ever asked... "Jesus, is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" He dealt with that. So this is an issue all the way through. But you know Caesar is remote, he's out there in Rome issuing decrees and censuses and getting thousands of talents of tax money rolling in. He's remote.  These tax collectors, they weren't remote. They were your neighbors. And if you're a Jew, a patriotic Jew, you don't want the Romans there at all, and you sure resent paying taxes to them in the Promised Land. How then are you gonna feel about a neighbor who's profiting from that whole system? You're going to hate him probably if you don't see him the way Jesus did.

Now, Zacchaeus was a tax collector, but he wasn't just a tax collector, he was a chief tax collector.  That meant that other tax collectors reported to him, that means if they were wealthy, he was really wealthy.  He probably took a commission from each of those lesser tax collectors who probably were lower level operators who probably struggled some financially, but a chief tax sector, he didn't struggle. And this meant that he was probably a very strong-willed leader, probably very committed to being a tax collector, his life brought him into direct and constant contact with the Romans with Gentiles, so that he was incessantly ritually unclean, very much like a leper would be. It had probably been years since he went to the synagogue or the temple to worship, he was probably alright with that. It probably didn't mean much to him anyway. That means his life consisted of business and pleasure, he was all about this world, he was about making as much as he could, didn't care what you thought about him.

And now you stop and think about that. What kind of person does that make you be? What kind of shell do you have to have? You're just walking through the streets and you just don't hear it, it doesn't matter to you. It makes your heart hard, and he didn't care about widows and orphans, he didn't care about the poor and needy, he didn't care about anybody but himself. And he's willing to take way too much tax money from people and encourage tax collectors to take even more, so that he would get as wealthy as he could. That made him an idolator as well, didn't it? Because if you're greedy, you're an idolatry, so he worshipped money and worshipped things.

Now, how is Zacchaeus lost? Well, God calls that lost. Most of all, he's lost to God himself, his heart is separated from God, that's why he's doing all these things. He has an emptiness inside his heart, and he's filling it with material possessions and with pleasure and parties, and while living in all of these things, he's filling the empties that's meant for God, he's filling it with all of these idols. That's what it means to be lost.

Jesus in Luke's gospel, in Luke 15, there's a cycle of parables that he tells about what it means to be lost. There's the lost sheep, the shepherd goes and looks, leaves the 99 on the hills and goes to look for the one that wanders off. And there's a lost coin, the woman who's looking for, I think the interpretation is, one of the coins she got in her wedding day, it's precious to her, and another coin won't do, she's got to get that coin back, and she searches for it until she finds it.  And the most poignant of all by far is the lost son, we generally call it the Prodigal Son, in Luke 15, and that's of a son who grows discontent living with his father, and he goes off and squanders half of his father's inheritance on wild living.  And he ends up slopping pigs and realizing things would be so much better for him if he would just be back in his father's house where he started, and so he comes back and the father welcomes him back in.  These three parables together about lost-ness. It's about being away from God. Separated from God, you're lost, and you can't find your way home.

A few years ago, I read a heartbreaking story, kind of story that makes me cry, and this is one of the reasons why I don't watch the local news. My wife does every... But I hear these stories and they break my heart, I don't wanna hear it, but she's willing to listen and she does a good job and keeps me informed, so I get it through her. But this was a heartbreaking story of a 10-year-old boy lost in a blizzard, couldn't find his way home, died under a picnic table about a mile from his backyard. I just cried. The picture, I transferred it to my own kids.  I could picture one of them frozen under a table so close to home, but can't find it and dead, and imagine finding them as they did a few days later when the storm was gone

But I tell you, that as tragic as that story is, it's nothing compared to Zacchaeus or perhaps you, if you're here today and you don't know Christ, being lost from God. Because Ephesians says that if you're lost, you're actually “…dead in your transgressions and sins,” it says, it says that you are “…without hope and without God in the world.” That's what lost means, and Zacchaeus was lost, but any present experience that we have of lost-ness.  That emptiness, purposeless-ness, unable to answer eternal questions, don't know why you're here, that lostness is nothing compared to eternally confirmed lostness and hell, that's the worst lostness of all, from that there can be no salvation, will be no salvation, no escape. And Jesus warned about it again and again, and Zacchaeus was threatened with that very issue, lost. Zacchaeus was lost.

Now, Jesus came to seek him. He came to seek Zacchaeus. And I found a number of ways in the text, and I wanna bring them out, and what I had originally desired to do is just bring some of these details out of how Jesus came to seek Zacchaeus, and then at the end, go over them all and say, "Are you doing this?" What I wanna do is I wanna apply them as we go, okay? So, the application will be as we go, and then one at the end.

But first, Jesus came to seek Zacchaeus by entering the world. He entered the world for this purpose, he came into the world to save sinners. As we already said in 1 Timothy 1:15, we just celebrated Christmas. This is what the incarnation was about.  Jesus however, is the only person who's ever lived who could say to Pilate or anybody, for this reason, I entered the world. “This is why I came in the world…” You can't say it. So why were you born? You had no choice in the matter. You just were born. Okay, but Jesus entered the world for this very thing, he came into the world to seek Zacchaeus. Now, application for you. Hey, this is a freebie. Okay? You're already here. You're already born. You check that box. Be encouraged. We're one for one so far, okay? You're already in the world, you already have a life, you already have people you're interacting with, you're already here, praise God for life. So you already got that one, I don't know how you do on the rest of them, but that one you got. Okay?

But secondly, Jesus came to seek Zacchaeus by establishing a reputation as a powerful friend of sinners. By the time he got to Jericho, his reputation preceded him. He was notorious, you could say it that way. As a friend of tax collectors and sinners. That was like a tag line under his name. And what's so amazing about this is that Jesus is the holy and pure Son of God, who will be the judge of all the Earth and who will judge with perfect righteousness. His credentials for righteousness far surpass the Pharisees and teachers of the law who questioned him about this matter of being a friend of tax collectors and sinners, but he was willing to freely associate with sinners, he was willing to have a woman who was a known adulterous, wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair and speak words of forgiveness to her and encourage her. He was willing to have that happen. He was willing to say to another woman caught the midst of adultery, “Go and sin no more,” and speak reassuringly to her, but also try to strip her from her sin. He's never gonna coddle sin. But Jesus was the greatest friend of sinners that ever lived.

“Jesus! what a Friend for sinners!

Jesus! Lover of my soul;

Friends may fail me, foes assail me,

He, my Savior, makes me whole.

Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Hallelujah! what a Friend!

Saving, helping, keeping, loving,

He is with me to the end.”

There is no better friend for sinners than Jesus. But what I'm saying to you is that his reputation preceded him, and could it be that Zacchaeus for the first time in years was interested in a religious figure as a result? For the first time in years, he thought, Maybe there's hope for me. They probably had made some jokes at their tax collector parties, "Well, you've got a friend in Jesus, at least, maybe he'll come to your next party, that would be interesting, maybe he'll do a miracle or something." So Jesus already had a reputation.

Now, that reputation cost him dearly, I want you to understand that, it cost him dearly. Because they said, "Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners," they said, Matthew 11. Let me tell you something, Jesus was never a glutton, never a drunkard. But they misunderstood 'cause he associated with, he identified with sinners, he had this reputation. Now, he defended this reputation vigorously, because he said, "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." So, my question to you is, What is your reputation? Have you established a reputation as a place where sinners could go to find the Savior? Through your works, through your words, through the way you carry yourself, by the things that you do to reach out, do you have a reputation where people know where to go? Have you put the sign out in front of your shop so that your reputation precedes you and they'll know where to go? It's gotta be a reputation of holiness, but also of openness as Jesus was to sinners, so that you're gracious and you recognize you don't forget that you're a sinner. And so, you are open for salvation business.

Thirdly, Jesus sought Zacchaeus by coming to where he lived, to Jericho, a cursed city. It was a cursed city. Now look at Verse 1, “Jesus entered Jericho when he was passing through.” Now, you may not know this, but Joshua, after destroying Jericho, cursed the city. “And he said, ‘Whoever rebuilds this city, two of his sons will die.’” And they did. It's a cursed city. But I got to think about this and my application to you on this is, are you willing to go to places that sin has made ugly? You know, the wealthier you get, the more affluent, the more comfortable, the more beautiful your world gets around you. And we forget that sin makes things ugly, it makes whole countries ugly, it makes cities ugly, it makes rooms ugly, it makes little apartments ugly, and it's not pleasant to be there. Are you willing to go to ugly places?

Now, there's beauty in a lot of those places, common grace beauty and even the redemptive grace of God's beauty, especially in people, you can meet Christians that are doing great work, and there's such a beauty, if you know what to look for. But I'm just saying initially, just the outward appearance, it's not attractive to go to an AIDS Hospital in Africa, to go to Port-au-Prince in Haiti. I remember City Soleil, which is not an attractive place, it's a tent city, where kids are coming out and getting water out of muddy puddles and bringing it back in for, I don't know what purpose. I think its only purpose would be to pour it back out of the bottle. I don't know what else, but I worried about it. You look in and it's just not an attractive place. 'Cause you don't have to go overseas, you don't have to go to places that idolatry and false religions have made ugly, there's enough ugliness around us. It could just be the house of an alcoholic man whose his wife is leaving him and he just can't seem to kick the drinking problem. You go in, the place stinks, it's a mess. Wife's been gone for a month or two, and you're trying to reach out to him, it's not a pretty place. To go to a cursed city, it's hard, he saw it in that way.

Forth by baiting the hook. Now, I wanna talk more about this next week, so I'm not gonna say much this time, but you know Jesus said, "I'll make you fishers of men," right? So next week I wanna talk about, well, Jesus' counter with this Samaritan, a woman at the well. Never has there been a fisher of people like Jesus, he's the best. But what I mean by this is make the Gospel appealing and interesting, not a turn off, not a Bible thumper kind of thing. It's like, Please come and beat on me some more, I'm lost and I'd like you to come beat on me and tell me why I'm wretched, I really get into that. That's something I enjoy.

No, there's a winsome appealing aspect of Jesus, Jesus made the Gospel appealing, because he was so magnetic, people just wanted to be around him. Well, how did he do it in Jericho? Well, he did it by healing a blind man right outside the city. And so, here's another great miracle, and by the time he enters the city, there's a huge throng of people around Jesus, huge throng. So that little Zacchaeus... In the kids picture, he's pictured like 3 foot 2, my guess, he's probably not the 3 foot 2, okay? But a little bit taller, but you know what I mean? You ever been in a parade, and just can't see? Sometimes they sell those periscope things. Zacchaeus couldn't see. And isn't this a marvelous thing? Isn't this an incredible thing?

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1).  You don't have to strain to see Jesus in heaven. He is the center of everything there. He's easy to see in Heaven, but here Zacchaeus couldn't get a good look at him. That's part of Jesus' downward journey, is humbling. There was a crowd of people around, he couldn't see him. So Zacchaeus runs ahead and gets up in the sycamore fig tree, so he can get a good look at him.

But Jesus made the Gospel interesting by the miracles, by the parables, by his personality, by the winsomeness. Do you know how to do it? You know, to some degree, it is a bit of a technique, you learn how to ask good questions, draw people out, they talk about issues going on in their lives. You learn how to turn it around and draw out some things, rather than just make a pronouncement, and they seal off. I'll talk about that more next time.

Fifth, by being interruptible. Jesus was interruptible. Now, let me tell you something, Jesus, I say is the most purposeful being in the history of the world, and at the same time, it seems the most interruptible. How in the world do you put those two together? I've not been able to figure it out. Do you ever see a time, I already mentioned this in my message once, do you ever see a time where somebody come to Jesus and he says, I just don't have time for you right now, I just can't? Never. We get no encouragement in that regard for our busyness. Alright? I'm too busy for you.

Who was Jesus too busy for? Point to a person he was too busy for. Even when they came and said, Come back to our town, Jesus didn't say no, he just said, "I'm going to the next town, you wanna hear me, go there," in effect. He never said no to anybody.  Jairus comes, he gets up and goes with him. The Roman guy comes, whose servant is paralyzed, he says, "I'll go and heal him." He just goes with everybody, and he did it in three years, that may be the greatest miracle of all, to be so purpose-driven and yet so interruptible. How is he interruptible?

Well, he is on the most important mission in history, he is going up, up, up to Jerusalem. There's a long journey in Luke's Gospel from Luke 13 through Luke 20. I had all the Verses written out, I'm not gonna share them with you, but there's something like six, he's going to Jerusalem, he's going to Jerusalem statements. From Luke 13 through Luke 20, he's going up to Jerusalem while he was on his way to Jerusalem, he's going to Jerusalem. And then in Luke 18, just go back and just, maybe just a little bit on the page even, Verse 31 and following says, “Jesus took the 12 aside and told them, ‘We are going up to Jerusalem.’”  Well, if they didn't get it by then, they weren't listening. We are going up to Jerusalem and everything that is written by the prophets about the son of man will be fulfilled. He will be handed over to the Gentiles and they will mock him, insult and spit on him, flog him and kill him. And on the third day, he will rise again. That's what he's going to Jerusalem for.  There has never been a mission as significant as that. Are you busier than this? Is your purpose higher than that one? Then how can we be too busy to seek and save the lost? He stops along the way, looks up in a fig tree, and there is Zacchaeus and says, "Come down Zacchaeus, I must have dinner at your house today." He is interruptible, again and again, not just with Zacchaeus, but as a regular pattern.

So, we pride ourselves in our busyness, don't we? We like talking about it. I guess it makes us feel important. I'm being honest with you, that's why I talk about my busyness when I do. I wanna do it less.  But all I'm saying is, I think there's a pride aspect there. I just ask that we look at the issue of being interruptible for the sake of seeking and saving the lost. So that if somebody comes and ask directions, if somebody comes with a financial need or somebody comes and wants to pray or there's some intersection of your life with somebody who's lost, that you say, "Oh, this is one of the good works that God ordained and events that I should walk in. I have to make the most of it." And whatever you were doing, put it aside for a moment and see God multiply your time to make up the difference, interruptible. 

Six, by looking at Zacchaeus and focusing on him, and calling him by name, “‘Zacchaeus, come down from the tree, I must have dinner at your house today,’” and I don't wanna eat in the tree, so let's go to your house, alright? We could do it in the tree, but I don't wanna do it, okay? So let's go to your house. He focuses on Zacchaeus and how precious is that?  That the son of God would look at you with his eyes, you know, like with Nathaniel. He looked at Nathaniel and he knew he was a true Israelite in whom there was nothing false. He could just look at someone and know their hearts. Just focusing on their case. And we have a lot of wonderful physicians in this church. It's pretty costly usually to get a specialist of the best to focus on your case and look at you. It's costly.

We were watching on, I think it was New Year's Day, a children's movie called Treasures of the Snow. It was a children's story written by Patricia St. John and it's set high in the Swiss Alps, and there's this boy named Lucien, who's a troublemaker kid, and he is tormenting a younger boy named Danny by holding his kitty cat over a cliff, over a precipice. Well, Danny in trying to save the cat slips and falls, and he's crippled. Lucien wants to do everything he can to redeem himself and to heal him and the bone maybe wasn't set properly or something, and there's a specialist from Geneva who is nearby, but he's through a mountain pass, on the other side of a mountain pass.  And a kindly wood carving guy there who's trying to help him, gives him a huge sum of money, he goes on skis in the night, through a storm to get to this guy, just about dead by the time he gets there, and he says, "Is this enough money to have you come?" He says, "It's enough money to buy my clinic actually. If you wanted to buy the clinic, it'll be enough money for that." He says, "Will you come and look at him?" He said, "I'll come."

Now, what I say to you is that Jesus is willing to focus on someone's case and let their situation go into his mind so he deals properly with what they need. We're not good listeners sometimes. Oh, you know, I'll pray for you, you know, a quick thing. I think one of the best ways we can do this in our church is through the counseling ministry, that's developing. In 2007 we're gonna see it develop, but our desire, 10 years down the line is that our counseling ministry would bring us into regular consistent contact with lost people whose needs, whose sin has brought them to a point where they know they need help, and if that's not a teachable moment, I don't know what it is.

And that we would get ready this year for that year, and then start seeing people getting converted through our counseling ministry. But you don't have to be in the counseling ministry in order to counsel people who are being hurt by sin, you just have to listen to them and focus on their case.

Seventh, by taking the initiative. It says, Jesus said, come down immediately, I must stay at your house today. Jesus took the initiative here. He is the seeker, he's the one going after the lost, he's taking the initiative here. Now, just as a matter of etiquette, I would not recommend inviting yourself over somebody's house for dinner, don't generally do that. If you're really desperate for a meal, okay, I mean, after the service go say, "Do you mind if I come to your house for meal today?" I think that the people of this church are gracious people, and they'll probably cover it with grace and say, "Sure, come on." Maybe. Depends who you talk to. Alright?

But Jesus invites himself over. That's rather amazing, isn't it? But he is taking the initiative, he is the seeker, he's seeking the lost. And I actually think the shoe is on the other foot on that one. He actually desires to invite Zacchaeus to his house for an eternal dinner. He wants him to dine with him in the Kingdom of Heaven. So, you feed me now, I will feed you forever. Do you take the initiative with lost people? Do you walk across the office carpet to meet the new employee, 'cause you hope to witness to him two months down the road? Or maybe even that day, if the opportunity provides itself, or cross the street with the new neighbor. Do you take steps to take initiative? I'm talking... This is the issue for me, crossing the gap between our lives and that of lost people, that's a matter of initiative, Jesus took the initiative. That's what seeking is.

Number eight, oh, by the way, I've been waiting a long time for someone to come up to me and say, "Excuse me, my name is John Smith, and I was really hoping you could tell me how to become a Christian. I've been lost and for years now, would you please tell me how to become a Christian?" That has never happened to me in my life, and I probably will die before it happens. And I've had some that come close, but it doesn't tend to happen, right? Are you all waiting for that? Are you waiting? I will be evangelistic and be fruitful in 2007, if God brings me one of those people that the pastor was talking about, that come up and say, "Would you please tell me how to become a Christian? 'Cause I don't know." But for the most part, that doesn't happen. They're just busy living their lives, their lost lives, and you have to take the initiative as Jesus did.

Number eight, by having a sense of urgency, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today. See the urgency in Jesus here. There's always in Jesus a sense of urgency. Nicodemus comes to at night and wants to explain... Exchange pleasantries. Oh Teacher, we know that you're come from God because you do all this. Jesus doesn't have any time for that. Nicodemus, you must be born again. Immediately, there's an urgency to Jesus, he has three years to save the world. It's even more urgent at this point. He will be dead on the cross within a week or two, depending how you measure it, maybe 10 days. He has very little time and he has no time to waste. How properly good are we with time? We just waste it. But there's a sense of urgency. Do you feel urgency? This might be the last time I'll get to talk to this relative. This might be the last time, this probably will be the last time I sit next to this person on the airplane.

I actually, when I do airplane witnessing, I almost always say, "I probably will never see you again." I feel it acutely, if I haven't had a good chance to share the Gospel, and they come on saying, "We are now beginning our initial approach into... " I feel like, "Oh man, I've got about four minutes. I don't have much time." There's a sense of urgency. Jesus had that. Do you have a sense of urgency? 80,000 people die every day in East Asia, never having heard the name of Christ. Does that bother you? Is there an urgency there for unreached people group ministry? Are you planning on doing anything about it this year through prayer, through giving, through a short-term mission, just through educating yourself, writing letter of encouragement to a missionary, hold the rope as we've been talking about? There's an urgency to this ministry.

And number nine, by being willing to associate with lowly sinners. We already touched on this, but are you willing to sit at a table like Jesus was with a tax collector and eat food bought with tax money? That gets a little dirty, you know? It's like, I don't know. Now, Paul talked about not asking questions of conscience, about whatever sat in front of you. Maybe that's what was happening there. Do I need to know that this was, you know, widow so and so's last two copper coins that's paying for this meal? Jesus was willing to get involved in lives that you could think would be morally defiling. He was willing to associate with people, willing to associate with the lowest and with the highest. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to reach out across racial and socioeconomic lines to get involved with people that would be ordinarily difficult for you to get involved with, so that you can seek and save the lost?

Number 10, by being confident in Jesus' power to save. Amazingly, in just the previous Chapter, in Luke 18, Jesus had had the encounter with the rich young ruler, you remember that one? Rich young ruler comes, wants to follow him, and all that, Jesus says, "Okay, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me." Do you remember what happened? The rich, young ruler, his face fell because he had vast wealth, lots of possessions. And remember what he has said? He said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." Now the disciples were amazed and asked who then can be saved? Do you remember what he said? "With man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible" (Luke 18:27).

The next chapter, he saves a rich man. Do you see it? I mean, I've never seen the connection. Rich young ruler, Chapter 18, saves the rich man in Chapter 19. I think that's amazing. Do you trust God enough to use you to save someone in 2007? Do you trust his power to use you to save someone in 2007? He can do it. With you, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible, even the saving of a rich person. And by seeing God's work in Zacchaeus' heart, number 11, Jesus saw the eagerness of Zacchaeus to have him come over to his house. In Verse 6, it says, "So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly." He was glad to have him.

Are you able, like Henry Blackaby, to experiencing God? Are you able to see the work that God's doing in somebody? Are you able to see it and say, "Oh... " to take a question that they ask about marriage, or to take a statement, a new father, a new mother says, "You know we really need to get back to church," do you see that as, "Oh, let's jump on that. That's an opportunity, God's at work in their heart, let's see what we can do." Or you're out at a state park and somebody comes up and they just say, "Boy, isn't that a beautiful sight? Beautiful." Are you able to turn that around and draw them out and talk about spiritual things at that moment?

And then finally, in this list, by being willing to pay the price for the seeking. Verse 7, "All the people saw this and began to mutter, he has gone to be the guest of a sinner." Do you realize there's a cost to seeking the lost? I think you do. As a matter of fact, I think you think about it more than you think about anything else on this topic. It's going to hurt you to seek the lost in 2007, it's going to inconvenience you. You might have to move and live in a different place. You might have to not do some things financially, ordinarily you do. Very directly, you probably will be disliked, if not openly hated at some point if you're faithful in this area and you know it. If you try to share the Gospel, people might turn off, they might misunderstand you. They might say bad things about you, like they did about Jesus here in Verse 7, are you willing to pay the price?

Now, this is how Jesus was seeking Zacchaeus. But you know something, the good thing about Jesus, he didn't come just to seek, that's half the journey. He didn't come just to seek, he came to seek and to save what was lost. And so, he's going to save Zacchaeus.  He didn't say Zacchaeus come down, I must stay at your house today so that he could seek him. He came to save him. And he's willing to pay the price, not just for the seeking, he's willing to pay the price also for the saving.

And how does he do it? Well, by convicting Zacchaeus of his sin, and by working faith and repentance in Zacchaeus' heart. Look at Verse 8, "Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, ‘Look Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor.’" Isn't that what Jesus told the rich young ruler to do. Actually he told him the whole amount. But Zacchaeus didn't finish there, remember what else he said?

He said, “‘And if per chance...’ " I love that. There’s actually humor in the Bible, if you know where to look. “‘If it happens that I may have cheated anyone at all over the last period of time, I will repay four-fold.’” So it's actually double restitution there from what's ordinarily required. That's gonna cost him a lot, I think, he may actually end up a poor man, if he actually follows through on that, and I think he will. Jesus worked faith in his heart, because he said, "Lord... " Do you see the word Lord, don't skip it. He called him Lord, that's Jesus' divine name. Anyone who calls on that name will be saved. Anyone who calls in the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved. And he said, "Lord,” and he repented of his usury and his greed and his hatred of the poor, and his idolatry of wealth, and he brought forth costly fruit in keeping with repentance.  And Jesus rejoiced over Zacchaeus' tiny seed of faith. Now, you might have been skeptical. You might have said, "Yeah. We'll believe it when we see it."

But Jesus said, "Today, salvation has come to this house." What a word of assurance. What sweeter words could ever be said than were said there, today, salvation has come to this house. For this man too is a son of Abraham. And so, he assured Zacchaeus of his salvation based on an IOU. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, I'm not saying that Jesus owed anything, but basically Zacchaeus sins deserved eternal wrath and punishment at the hands of a righteous God. Jesus would pay his bill for him. That's why he was going to Jerusalem. So he didn't come just to seek, he came to save. And we can't save. Never misunderstand, we have no power to save, only Jesus does. But Jesus is a great savior, and he shed his blood on the cross for sinners like you and me. That's what he came to do.

Now, one final application to you who are First Baptist members. We desire to be faithful in visiting visitors or guests that come to our church. Every week we have a good number of people who visit us for the first time. Many of them are Christians when they come, but some of them are not. There may be some here today that are not believers. I'm gonna say something to you in a moment. But for those of you that are First Baptist church members, we need your help, we wanna be far faithful than we have ever been before in 2007 in visiting guests. Eric Campbell is working on our connection partner ministry, and next Sunday, I wanna get it right, next Sunday, June 14th, at 4:30 PM in the conference room, we have a meeting for how to get involved in just visiting visitors. The more laborers we have for that the better. The lighter burden it would be for anyone else.

So we need help, we need laborers for the harvest field. And I think the more laborers we have, the more visitors are gonna come. I really believe that with all my heart. I think it's just going to ramp up. And so, I'm asking you to think of an application for this sermon being, I am willing to be a connection part, I'm willing to be somebody who goes out during the week and visits a visitor. Now, those of you that are visitors or just those of you that are wondering, we don't visit anybody who doesn't wanna visit, okay? We call ahead of time and we ask and we yearn to meet needs as they are there. But these are folks who have already come to our church, let's start there. But some of them are unbelievers. Won't you commit to being one of those connection partners, to go out and visit a guest? If you have any questions about that Eric Campbell's gonna be in the parlor after the worship service, come and ask him, or just come to the meeting next Sunday afternoon at 4:30 PM.

Now, my final word is to any that are here that have never made a commitment to Christ. I've been speaking mostly to First Baptist members, mostly to believers. All I can say is that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. And if you don't know Jesus, if you haven't had your sins forgiven through faith in his name, you're lost. Don't leave this place lost, come to faith in Christ, come and talk to me while we're singing the closing hymn, and then we can talk after the service a lot more if you'd like. Don't leave this place without trusting in Jesus. His blood was shed for sinners like you and me, so that we would be saved. Close with me in prayer.

Let me ask you a question. Are you looking forward to tomorrow morning? Come on, tell me the truth. What are you looking forward to? Already we have some gifts under the tree. There’s one in particular that has piqued my interest. I’m looking forward to opening it. I’ll admit it, it’s true.

I think we enjoy Christmas gifts, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Of course, to a point. I think any good gifts of God can become an idol, and we have to watch that all the time. Our hearts are so idolatrous. We’re always moving toward that, and we have to fight it every day. But it says in James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavily lights.” He’s the one who’s shown us how to give, and lavishly too. He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also along with him graciously give us all things? Lesser blessings.

It says in 1 Timothy 6 that God has given us all things richly to enjoy. So that’s fine. The question is, are we idolatrous? That’s something we have to watch all the time.

This morning I want to try to beguile you away from considering what might be in some of those mysterious packages that are under the tree right now, to consider the infinitely greater gifts that Christ came to give. And I’m going to begin by considering just a time that I spent overseas a few years ago. In the summer of 2003, I had the privilege of going to the Czech Republic. I was there with Mike Waters who’s listening to me. We had a wonderful time, and what he said, and it was true, although I gave a little trouble at the time, “The most beautiful city we had ever seen.” Now it’s true, I think, that Prague, at this point, is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. I know in the end, it won’t be. I think the new Jerusalem will top it. I’m looking forward to that.

But Prague was a beautiful city. We went into the old town, and we were near the magnificent castle. It’s just a huge castle. And there, in the square outside the castle, was a bronze statue of a warrior on a horse, and it was King Wenceslas, whom they considered the patron saint of Bohemia. Now, every Christmas we sing a song that was written in 1853 by John Mason Neale, Good King Wenceslas. As I looked into the lyrics of the song and the truth behind it and the story behind it, I became more intrigued and drawn in. You see, Christmas is a time for giving gifts, but for the most part, throughout history, Christmas at its best has been a time for those who are rich and powerful and able, to bless those who are poor and needy and without and not able. That’s its heritage. That’s the heritage of Christmas.

Now, all along, it’s had to battle that pagan Bacchanalia mid-winter thing that’s always been there too. It’s so for us as well. But at its best Christmas was a time for those who were able and those who were wealthy in positions of power to give and to bless those who weren’t. The ultimate pattern, of course, is Jesus Christ.

Who is this King Wenceslas? He was born (we think) in 907 AD. He lived just 22 years. Isn’t it amazing how God in his providence cut short the lives of so many of his choice servants, men and women, and takes them home? This man was assassinated by his own brother Boleslav, who wanted to be king of Bohemia in his place. But in his brief life, he used his influence and his power to spread Christianity through that part of Europe, where it hadn’t really taken root up to that point.

Now, John Mason Neale found a story about Wenceslas. We don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it was consistent with his character, and he wrote about it in the hymn that we sing, Good King Wenceslas. He looked out on the feast of Stephen. It’s a story in which he’s standing—you envision him—on a cold bitter winter night looking out from his castle and down on the snow below, he sees a peasant scrambling around for firewood. He asks one of his pages, a servant, to come and says, “Who is this?” And he knows who he is, and he knows precisely where he lives. This King leaves the warmth and comfort and security and luxury, probably, of his castle and goes down with his servant into the snow and follows this man a good distance, a long way away from the castle, to bring him food and wine and firewood, and just to bless his home.

I thought this was a tremendous picture of Christmas. I mean, there is Jesus in the ultimate place of security and pleasure and comfort, his heavenly castle. He looks down and what does he see? He sees us, the poor and needy, scrambling around and scrubbing around for firewood, in effect. In the song it’s a stormy bitter cold night and he enters into the howling storm of our sinful world, and he comes to bless us. He comes to bless us with infinite gifts.

I want to talk about those gifts. You look at verse 14, it says, “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten, from the Father full of grace and truth.” And then in verse 16, which is going to be basically our meditation this morning, “From the fullness of His grace, we have all received one blessing after another,” or literally “grace in the place of grace.” Christ came to give us Christmas presents.

What I want to do is I want to just kind of, like I said, beguile your minds away from whatever it is that you might be wondering about under your tree to think about the far greater gifts that Christ came to give us in Himself. I think it’s easy for us to lose sight given the deluge of material prosperity and of comfort that God has given us. It’s easy for us to become idolatrous.

Statistics show that, based on a study recently, somewhere between 38 and 40 billion dollars were spent over the last month on children between the ages of 4 and 12. Well, I don’t know how much it is for everybody, I guess multiply that by three. We might be heading toward $100 billion spent on Christmas.

That’s pretty lavish, isn’t it? But some of us, at least, are old enough to know that a vanishingly small percentage of those things that are waiting for you under the tree will even be part of your lives in five years. You know what I’m talking about? It could be a Christmas sweater that might still be there in five years, but there may be some other things. The fruit cake is definitely… Well, that might be here too as well. [Laughter] But anyway, the toys and many other things will be gone. For all men are like grass and all their glory is like the flower of the field. And the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the God stands forever. So also do the gifts that Christ has come to give us. So, we’re going to focus on what those gifts are.

I want to begin with the supernatural fullness of Christ. I want to talk about the fullness that’s in this verse. “From the fullness of his grace,” it says, “we have all received one blessing after another.” Christ was and is fully God. Colossians 1:19 says, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.”

God is a full being. In him there is no lack at all. He is full of joy, full of wisdom, full of power, full of love, full of mercy, full of everything that He is. He’s full of, all of those things. We, on the other hand, are so used to lack and emptiness that we can’t know really what ultimate fullness is. Christ before the foundation of the world was fully God, with as in our language, a capital G. Fully God.

In the beginning, verse 1, was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And thus, Christ fully participated in all the deity of God the father. He was fully joyful, fully powerful, fully holy, fully wise, fully loving and fully as righteous as the father. He is a full being. Nothing was lacking in the person of Christ. God the Father, and God the Son equally shared deity from the beginning, and they shared glory together equally as well. Then, God became man. Jesus took on a human body, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

Look what it says, “We have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten, who came from the Father,” and here’s this word, “Full of grace and truth.” Jesus, in taking on a human body, didn’t lose any of his fullness. I know it says in Philippians 2, “He emptied himself and made himself nothing.” I think we have a sense of that. He didn’t lose any of his deity in doing that, fully God still.

It says in Colossians 2:9, “For in Christ, all the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form.” So when taking on a body, he didn’t lose any of his fullness. Thus, Christ was the perfect display of God’s fullness in bodily form. “Full of grace and truth,” says John. Full of grace.

Now, I don’t mean gracefulness. That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not something most males aspire to, okay. We’re not looking necessarily to be graceful and it’s hopeless anyway, isn’t it guys? For the most part even if we wanted it, but we don’t. We don’t, okay. We’re not looking for it, you know, like Anna Pavlova up on point, like some ethereal angel floating across the stage. That is better for the women and that’s wonderful. Or like a figure skater, that’s fine.

Delightful. That’s not what we mean, full of grace. Really, what we mean there is theologically, that God is lavishly generous to people who deserve his wrath. That’s what grace is about, and Jesus was full of grace. You see it in his bodily life, you see it in the things that happen to him, and the things He did in his reactions. He’s just full of grace in dealing. You just see the way he dealt with children, the way that children felt comfortable to come and sit on his lap and just wanted to be with him. You can’t fool a child and they knew he was full of grace. They wanted to be with him. You can see it in his kind and gentle manner to a leper from whom most people would run screaming, who is ceremonially unclean because of his disease.

He said, “Lord, if you’re willing, you can make me clean.”

“I am willing,” he said.

“Be clean.”

There’s just such a fullness of grace there. Or in his kind and gentle demeanor toward the parents of a dead girl, Jairus and his wife, and they were mourning over their dead 12-year-old daughter.

Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid, only believe. And she is not dead, she’s just sleeping.” And he has the power to wake her up, and then gentle with her when he says talitha cumi, “Little girl, I say to you, get up.”

You see the fullness of grace there in Jesus, in his tenderness. Filled with compassion over hungry people, 5,000 and more of them, and said, “They don’t need to go away, you give them something to eat.” You just see Jesus as an open conduit of God’s grace to a needy world.

Then full of grace as he’s nailed to the cross and says, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” You see, Jesus filled with grace, full of grace. And it also says, full of truth as well. Jesus was truth embodied. But he always spoke the truth, even if I got him into great trouble.

“I charge you under oath by the living God,” said the high priest, “Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”

“I am,” he said, “And in the future, you’ll see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

The high priest tears his robes and condemns him to death, as if Jesus didn’t know what would happen. Of course, he knew, he was just telling the truth. And he would also give the good confession in front of Pilate as well: “For this reason, I was born and for this, I came into the world to testify to the truth. All on the side of truth. Listen to me.”

Jesus is full of grace and full of truth. He told his disciples the truth. Like Peter, “Get behind me, Satan. You’re a stumbling block to me.” Oh, that’s a sharp word of rebuke to a good friend. Satan is using you right now—stop it. He always told the truth, whatever it is we needed to hear. In all of these ways, we see Christ full of grace, full of truth.

He’s a full being in the flesh, and thus Christ had not come to receive but to give. He didn’t need anything. He wasn’t coming to receive. Now, I know the magi offered him gifts, gold, incense, and myrrh. I know that Mary anointed his feet with perfume worth over a year’s wages. I know they wanted to come and take him by force and make him king and give them all the lavish honor that they could.

I know that. I know people gave him gifts and tried to give him gifts but let me tell you something. The gold in the new Jerusalem is infinitely superior to anything that magi brought. The worship that the hundred million angels give him, surrounding is thrown all the time, it’s better than even what Mary poured out on his feet. Purer, more perfect. The kingdom that he will reign over forever and ever, it’s infinitely superior to what those people who are just eating their fill of bread wanted to give him that day. Jesus didn’t come to receive these things. We weren’t in a position to give. Those gifts really, in an absolute sense, are pathetic. He only receives them because of the faith that’s behind them, or he doesn’t receive them if there’s no faith behind them.

Jesus didn’t come to receive gifts rather he came to give them. He came to give gifts of grace. He was rich, infinitely richer than good King Wenceslas. Infinitely richer than any man that has ever lived, than any king that’s ever lived. We can’t imagine how wealthy he was. And so, it says in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor. So that you, through his poverty, might become rich.”

Jesus didn’t come into the world to get richer. He didn’t come in the world to receive any gifts from us; rather he came to give. Again, Mark 10:45. It says, “Even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” The giving, the giving. He came to give. To give his life.

Jesus, as well, served in Heaven. He doesn’t need us, as we learned from Psalm 50, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you.” I have all my needs met. Even if I wanted to meet them, I wouldn’t meet them your way. Just like he said to Simon Peter, “Put your sword away. If I wanted to fight, I’d ask the angels.” They’d do it just fine. He doesn’t need us to serve him. He didn’t come to receive. He was full and he came to give.

Now we, on the other hand, we are naturally empty. That’s what we are. We’re naturally empty. Martin Luther on his deathbed said in German, “We are all beggars.” Wir sind alle Bettler. That’s what we’re all, beggars.

Then he said in Latin, “This is true.” Now, that’s the end of his theology. He knows he’s about to face his judge and maker, but he’s doing it unafraid, and why? Because he’s justified by faith alone apart from works. But we’re beggars. I think for this reason, Jesus began the greatest sermon that has ever been preached, the Sermon on the Mount, with this statement: “Blessed are the spiritual beggars, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

We’re beggars. We’re naturally empty. We don’t have anything to give.

We’re universally empty. From the fullness of his grace, we have all received. Find yourself in that word all. We’re in the receiver place. We’re in the place to receive, not to give to Jesus. Even the wealthiest, most powerful, most envied people in the world, the lifestyles of the rich and famous people, even those who have nothing to give, naturally empty.

John Wesley in a journal entry, December 23rd, two days before Christmas, 1755, he wrote this: “I was in the robe chamber, adjoining to the House of Lords, when the king put on his robes. His brow was much furrowed with age and quite clouded with care. Is this all the world can give even to a king? All the grandeur it can afford, a blanket of ermine around his shoulders so heavy and cumbersome he can scarcely move under it, a huge heap of borrowed hair and a few plates of gold and glittering stones upon his head. Alas! What a babble, is human greatness, and even this will not endure.”

Is that the best the 18th century could have given to Jesus if we wanted to give our best to him. That’s the best the nation of England could give to King George II, who was a man at the height of his power and who probably wanted to be done with all of it, and two years later, he was. His aorta ruptured while he was using the toilet. What a disgusting way for even a king to die. We’re all beggars. We don’t have anything to offer naturally. That’s what I’m saying. Is this all the world can give even to a king?

Jesus isn’t looking for that from us. We’re naturally empty. This is a universal emptiness, and I mean that from the poorest to the richest. The poorest beggar living in Kolkata (Calcutta) who’s barely scraping by and doesn’t even know if he’s going to be alive a year from then, six months from then, who doesn’t know Jesus, is empty before God. It’s not like God naturally loves the poor. If they don’t have Christ, they’re empty. And so, also the wealthiest captain of industry who’s making billions of dollars in the stock market or in the petroleum industry or in high tech, empty if they don’t have Christ.

This emptiness is proven by the law of Moses. If you look at verse 17, “The law came through Moses, and grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” But what does the law tell us? It tells us of our emptiness. That’s what it says. In Romans 3:20, it says, “Therefore, no one will be justified or declared righteous in his sight by observing the law, rather through the law we become conscious of sins.” The law uncovers our emptiness. It uncovers our empty hearts and our empty lives. The emptiness is especially proven in comparison with Christ. Here is this perfectly full being, full of grace and truth, and here we are just side by side. How do you do? How have you done the last year? Take your best day, how’s it doing? You line it up next to Jesus, you see your emptiness there.

Martin Lloyd Jones was dealing with this question of “blessed are the spiritual beggars” and he was dealing with the question, “What if I don’t feel like a spiritual beggar?” You know what he said to do? Look at Jesus and keep looking. And keep looking. After a while, you will see. Here is this being filled with grace and truth, filled with love, filled with holiness, filled with power, filled with God through the Holy Spirit and here we are by contrast. Soon, you’ll realize that we are spiritual beggars.

One of the bitterest aspects of our emptiness is we don’t know how empty we are. As a matter of fact, the impurer you are the less empty you think you are. Jesus said to the church at Laodicea, “You say, ‘I am rich. I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

“You do not realize,” is the essence of our problem, although the word of God tells us the truth. We are all beggars, apart from Christ. But it doesn’t end there. Thanks be to God we don’t end up as spiritual beggars.

Look at the verse again, verse 16, “From the fullness of His grace,” we have all what? “Received grace upon grace.” That’s what we were. What are we now? We are wealthy in Christ, with gifts of grace.

Now we see the lavish generosity of Christ’s gifts, generous in quality. It’s like when you pick up that gift and you’re holding it, and it’s just weighty and you’re excited, you think, “What could it be?” It’s not likely to be a granite boulder that someone got out of their backyard and wrapped up as a gift. It’s like, “What could it be?” There’s a weightiness to it. It’s even better if the weightiness is in a really small box. That’s really exciting when it’s really weighty in a small box, especially for ladies. There’s something really dense in here, something exciting.

There’s a weightiness to the quality. Feel then the weight of the quality of Jesus’s gifts. From the fullness of his grace, he gives them.

There are wonderful gifts, better than anything we could buy at Macy’s or JCPenney’s or Hecks, or at South Point, or North Square or what… I don’t know all of them. I always mess up. North Gate, I guess it is. Nothing you buy there can compare with the gifts that Jesus has come to give to you. They are lavish and generous in scope from the fullness of his grace, we have all received. Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

It doesn’t matter to me if this is your first time in church in the last year. Well, in one sense it matters, but for this, it doesn’t matter. Because Christ is willing to be very generous to you right now. Just call on his name. Trust in him for the salvation of your soul. Receive the first gift from him, and that’s full forgiveness of sins. Bring your sinfulness and your sin to the cross and receive from him the gift of grace.

Ask him to be your savior, and he will. Call on the name of the Lord. It’s a universal thing. From the fullness of his grace, we have all received. And by this, I don’t mean every single human being on the face of the Earth, he already covered that in John 1:12. But to those who received him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Children born, not of natural descent or a human decision or the will of a husband but born of God. That’s it.

By simply trusting in Christ, you have full forgiveness, generous in scope and generous in cost too. I don’t think we should… I know the word grace means a free gift. Well, it is free to us. He doesn’t want your price. He doesn’t want you paying for it. But don’t imagine for a moment that it didn’t have a price. It did. It was infinitely costly to bring to you the gifts I’m about to describe to you. Infinitely expensive, these gifts. They came at the blood, the precious blood. 1 Peter 1:18 and 19, the precious blood of a lamb without blemish or defect, Jesus Christ. He shed his blood to purchase your Christmas gifts. There’s no one here who has sacrificed that much for Christmas. It was Jesus who did it.

Generous also in quantity. I know Jesus Himself is the central gift, and that’s enough. But I think it’s good to kind of unfold his gifts and just look at them. Suppose, for example, you woke up and some person or a group of people had put 54 gifts with your name on it under the tree. 54. I’d be embarrassed for myself, especially if everyone else got five or six. I’d feel like, “Oh boy.” If everybody in my family had 54 gifts, that would be the 360… I don’t know. Some huge number. We have a lot of people in our family. Christy would not be able to get into the den, I think. 54 gifts. I think we’d have ought to open each one and look at it. Generous in quality. Look what the verse says. I know it doesn’t come across necessarily, but literally in the Greek, it says, “From the fullness of His grace, we have all received, grace instead of grace.” In other words, it’s grace, then another grace than another grace than another grace. I imagine a train.

I remember reading on a Christmas morning, “The Little Engine that Could.” I never thought I’d use that in a sermon. It teaches human works and effort, and I can get to Heaven, that’s not what I’m saying. I just want you to imagine a train laden with gifts. Think like a child. I’m thinking, the gifts looked really good back then, now they look like… Not so good. But at that time, they looked really good. And I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t that be great?” And of course, because it’s just a little engine that they could there are only so many cars.

The longest train in history is 682 cars. It was a coal car. I don’t want that much coal. But it was four and a half miles long and it moved very slowly, so imagine coming to the intersection and you see the first of the 682 cars going by. But imagine if you would, let’s get out and let’s just stand by the railway track and watch one gift of grace after another, come. Because that’s what it is. It’s just generous, generous. Grace instead of Grace, instead of Grace, instead of grace, day after day after day, on into eternity, friends. We are incredibly rich, and whatever you have under that tree tomorrow, it doesn’t even compare with the good things that God has already given you, is giving you now, and will give you up into the future. Or like what?

0:25:40.9 S1: Well, let’s start way back. Let’s not start at the birth of Christ. Let’s start before the foundation of the world. When God worked out his salvation plan. He worked it out with you in mind. And the next gift of grace, he chose you. If you’re a Christian, he chose you by name before the foundation of the world. And the next gift of grace, he created a beautiful world for you and others like you to live in. He created the heavens and the earth and made them beautiful and lush and lavish. And he put Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, in that garden.

The next gift of grace, after Adam’s fall, he didn’t kill the human race as we deserved, but he allowed history to continue, and he even promised a redeemer who would crush the serpent’s head. The next gift of grace, at the time of the flood, he didn’t kill the human race as we deserved then, but he preserved a remnant in Noah’s Ark, so that we would be able to survive.

Then the next gift of grace, he called Abraham, so that salvation would come from the Jews. And the next gift of grace, the Exodus under Moses, in which He took the two million perhaps Jews out of Egypt and brought them into the Promised Land, a beautiful picture of our salvation. And the next gift of grace, the Law of Moses, to expose our emptiness, as I’ve already said. But also, to point ahead to the future through animal sacrifice, when we would understand the shedding of the blood of Jesus on the cross, so we would know how we would be saved. The next gift of grace, the kingship of David, a perfect picture of Jesus, our ruler, our savior. And Jesus is the son of David.

And the next gift of grace, the words of the prophets. The servants and messengers of the covenant, who came with a lawsuit against the people of God and showed them how they had violated the Law of Moses, but they also spoke of redemption, of renewal, of restoration, and ultimately, of the Christ.

The next gift of grace, the birth of Christ Himself. Born of a virgin, born under the law, born in the fullness of time. At just the right time, Jesus was born. And Mary wrapped him and swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn.

The next gift of grace, Christ’s perfect sinless life that he made it through 30 plus years of life and temptation and never once yielded. And his righteousness will be and is your righteousness. The next gift of grace, powerful miracles. Healing a man born blind, healing any disease and sickness brought to him, healing Lazarus, dead in the tomb for four days, pictures of his resurrecting power. The next gift of grace, his perfect teaching ministry, parables, and teachings. No one ever talked like this man, no one ever taught like this man, perfect teachings, and we have a record of some of them, not all of them, but some of them.

The next gift of grace, His redemptive death on the cross, His blood shed on the cross before you were even born. His blood shed for all of your sins, if you’re a Christian. And the next gift of grace, God didn’t leave him in the tomb, but raised him from the dead on the third day and gave him a resurrection body that will be like your body or yours like his forever and ever. He will be the first fruit from the dead, and there will be a huge harvest.

The next gift of grace, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit of God on Pentecost. And the Holy Spirit has come to inspire the writing of the New Testament, the next gift of grace. And to convict the world of sin and judgment and righteousness. And the next gift of Grace, the steady, irresistible advance of the gospel for 2,000 years. Satan has been trying to stop it, but he can’t, and the gospel has spread from the Upper Room, 120 believers to a multitude greater than we are able to number from every tribe and language, almost every tribe, and language, and people and nation. The spread of the gospel. The next gift of grace, the way that God has sovereignly ruled over the nations to accomplish his historical purposes.

To watch over the rise of this empire and the fall of that one, and to watch over the inventions and medical discoveries and the discovery of the New World with Columbus, and to watch over all of history to accomplish his ends. Part of which is saving your soul. Isn’t that beautiful? And the next gift of grace, a bunch of brothers and sisters, most of them who we have not met, who were martyrs and witnesses, and missionaries and pastors, and godly women and men who are your brothers and sisters. A royal heritage for 2,000 years.

And the next gift of grace, your personal family lineage, your great-great-grandparents and your great-grandparents and grandparents and parents. And how each of them met and what kind of people they were, and what their strengths and weaknesses were, what their sins were, and what their godliness was, if there was any. All of that. Before you were born. What about since you’ve been born? Well, God watched over you and cared for you. He gave you parents to care for you, to look after you. He gave you a series of people to tell you about Christ, to teach you the Bible.

Long before you ever trusted in Christ, you’d heard of him many, many times, and God sent different people, whether parents, brothers and sisters, college roommates, pastors, Sunday school teachers, missionaries, who knows? But he sent them to you. And he’s given you beauty. You’ve seen beautiful things in the world, mountains and oceans, and different things. And each one of us has a different set of postcards in our minds of the beauty of the Earth, and it’s nothing compared to the future beauty of the new Earth. But it’s there, and you’ve seen it. From the fullness of his grace, we have all received. One gift of a blessing, one grace after another. And then at the right time, the Holy Spirit opened your eyes to your own emptiness. And he showed you what you’ve been unable, unwilling to face, up to that moment. You needed a savior, you needed Jesus, you needed him to shed his blood on the cross in your place or you would deserve to go to hell. At some point, you came to realize that, and you were regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit. You were given the gift of faith. At that moment, God justified you of all of your sins, forgave you of all of your sins, past, present and future, and he gave you the indwelling Spirit, and He adopted you into his own family from which you will never depart.

He gave you spiritual gifts in a ministry and opportunities one after the other, day after day to live a life worthy of his calling and of his name, and he’s kept a careful record of everything you’ve done by faith, and he’ll reward you for it someday. And he’s going to give you continued opportunities to serve him, and he’s going to watch over you the rest of your life, in the future. He’s going to protect you, and he’s going to keep you safe and there will be no combination of temptations that will separate you from Christ, because he will sovereignly not allow it to happen. He will protect you until the day you die. And then that day, he’ll give you grace to die well and to his glory. You may die at 93 years old in a hospital, you may die in a car wreck, you may die of a heart attack, you may die of a disease. If the Lord doesn’t return in our generation, you will die. And he will give you grace to get through it. And then on the other side, is he done being gracious to you? No. He will take that soul that has been separated from your body, which cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven anyway.

So good riddance, I think at that point. I want to see what he does with my body. But I’ll be separated at that point, and he will also separate me from all wickedness and all sin in my soul, and I will love only righteousness. And I will hate all wickedness, and I will be made perfect and holy. From the fullness of his grace, we have all received grace upon grace, upon grace, upon grace. And then judgment day, he will give me grace. He will give me grace to survive the day of wrath, and I will get through it, and so will any who call on his name. We will survive that day. And we will even thrive on that day, because on the other side of it, we will be in resurrection bodies, and we will live in a perfect kingdom, a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness and we qualify. How did that happen? But Jesus’s righteousness was given to us. And then will it end? No.

There are your 54 gifts. He intends far more than 54, friends. And a good thing too, you kind of like to get to Christmas tomorrow, wouldn’t you? I’ll stop here, but I think you could meditate far more than I have over the past and present and future gifts of his grace. And so, you will do forever, and of the increase of his government, there’ll be no end, because you will continually see more and more of his grace. He has more to show you.

If you came to that intersection of the 682-car train, and you’re looking at your watch and wondering, “When is this ever going to be done?” This train, you are not going to want to end. You want to just see a gift of grace after gift to grace to keep on going past you for eternity. And you will be filled with a sense of gratitude, you can’t even imagine.

What application do we take from this? Well, I think it’s good to open the gifts that somebody else took the time to wrap. I think you ought to do it. I think you ought to. But let your heart be already filled with light and glory of the things we’ve talked about today. Meditate on the generosity of God through Christ. If you haven’t come to Christ yet, don’t miss it, because none of these gifts of grace are yours, if you’re not a Christian. None of them. Just a fiery expectation of judgment, of raging fire that’ll consume the enemies of God. I would rather have this than that, wouldn’t you? Why will you die? Turn and repent and believe and trust in him. Don’t leave this room without receiving that first as far as you’re concerned gift, forgiveness of sins.

But for those of you that have already made that commitment, then meditate on God’s goodness. Let me say one more thing. As I’ve studied Christmas, I had a whole bunch of stuff about Christmas and decided to get rid of it. If you want to know more about the history of Christmas and how it has had a rich heritage of the rich blessing the poor, find out more. The History Channel had a history thing on Christmas, look it up. There’s a lot of stuff on Christmas. Consistently, the wealthy and the positioned folks used it to bless the poor.

I have talked to so many people this Christmas, saying, “They are weary of the treadmill. The Christmas treadmill.” As a matter of fact, I haven’t talked to anybody who’s not. The thing is, why don’t we change it? How do we change it? How do we get off? If you feel it’s become to idolatrous, how do you stop it? And so, I would urge that you enjoy whatever you have planned to enjoy tomorrow. Enjoy it with a free heart, but make plans to make 2007, a year from now different than any Christmas you’ve ever enjoyed.

Our small group, what we did was we gave to the Persecution Project in Samaritan’s Purse. They have different ways. You can buy little chicks. You can buy a well dug in a village. You can buy all kinds of stuff for people who are barely making it, barely surviving. Maybe instead of giving gifts to people who don’t need what you’re going to give them anyway, that’s why you’re having such a hard time finding what to give them, because they don’t need anything. And if they need something, they bought it already. So, what do you give? I would urge think differently, a year from now. No, no, think differently seven or eight months from now. Make plans. Make plans. Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Matthew 1:18-25. The main subject of the sermon is how Jesus, who is God over all, came to us in human flesh.

What did Enoch experience? He who is seventh from Adam, when he walked with God and then suddenly was no more, and they looked for him, but they couldn't find him, because God had taken him without death. What did he experience? What did Abraham experience, as the friend of God? So he was called, as he looked up in the starry night sky and heard the promise from God's own mouth, “So shall your offspring be.” And Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. What did he experience later, when he entertained three men, so it was. But it was God and two angels, who ate a meal with him. What did he experience, and then later, as he stood in front of God and interceded for Sodom and Gomorrah? What did he experience on Mount Moriah, when he was about to kill his only son, and the Angel of the Lord stopped him? What did Hagar experience as she fled from her mistress and from that harsh treatment and was about to perish in the wilderness, when suddenly the God who sees her, spoke to her and showed her where she might find some water and command her to go back and submit to her mistress and spoke about the future of her son, Ishmael?

What did Jacob experience twice? Once at Bethel, as he was leaving the Promised Land and going to find a wife and to begin his adult life, and he slept with his head on a rock, as a pillow, don't try that, but he did it, and he had within his mind, an indescribable light, his mind was opened up, and he was in the very presence of God, and he saw heaven open and angels ascending and descending on a staircase. And when he awoke, he said, "Surely this is the very house of God, the very presence of God. I didn't know that God was in this place." And then when he came back from that trip, years later, with his wives and his children and his flocks and herds and all of that, and he heard that Esau was coming to kill him, probably thought he was anyway, and he wrestled with an angel. What did he experience that night, when he wrestled with God and overcame? What did Moses experience at the flames of the burning bush, when the Lord spoke to him? The angel of the Lord spoke out of the flames of the burning bush and gave him a mission.

How about Gideon, what did he experience, when the angel of the Lord came to him and said, "The Lord is with you, oh mighty warrior." and Gideon questioned it because the Midianites had the upper hand at that point, and they dominated the people of God? What did the experience? And what did Samson experience, every time the Spirit of the Lord came upon him in power, and he did something that we couldn't even describe, like ripping a lion to shreds as though it were a young goat, or taking the door posts in gates of a city and throwing it up over a hill, because the Spirit of the Lord came upon him in power? Or how about Elijah, what did he experience on Mount Carmel, when he called down fire with a simple prayer, and then called down rain, it hadn't rained in all that time, and then he ran faster than a chariot, ahead of Ahab, and then fled for his life, from Jezebel and then went up into a cave, and God appeared to him, speaking to him in a still small voice. What did the experience at that time?

Or Ezekiel, by the river Kebar, in the land of the Babylonians, when God revealed his glory to him, and actually it was just the likeness of the imitation of his glory, because we can't handle the full glory, and he could barely put into words, what he saw at that time. What did he experience? Or what did Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego experience in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace that had already incinerated the soldiers that threw them in there, and suddenly, one like a son of the gods appeared, in my opinion, brighter than the flames, that's how Nebuchadnezzar knew it, and he just walked with the three of them through the fire? What was that like? Or what did Daniel experience later in the lion's den? When God sent his angel to shut the mouths of the lions, and he spent the greatest night of his life in the presence of lions, that would have eaten him if they could have, but they were restrained.

What did the disciples experience every moment of Jesus' earthly ministry? When they beheld him, they saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. What did they experience in every day of his physical life in ministry? What did they experience, as they stood there on the mount of ascension and watched him ascending up, until a cloud finally hid him from their sight, and angels came and said, "Let's get on with the ministry now. He's coming back, but not today." What did they experience? And what did Peter experience, when he saw the sheet let down by its four corners and a bunch of animals in there that he was told to eat, and then later, as God sent an angel to deliver him from four squads of four soldiers each and he suddenly came to himself and realized that the Lord had rescued him? What did Stephen experience, as he looked up and saw heaven open as they were stoning him to death, and he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God, waiting to receive him? And what did Saul of Tarsus experience on the road to Damascus, when the resurrected Christ appeared to him in a glory that's indescribable and changed his entire life, changed his heart, gave him a mission, made him the apostle to the Gentiles? And what did John experience on the Isle of Patmos, when he saw a vision of the resurrected Christ, and God gave him a lot more after that?

What unifies all of these experiences and others? I think it's unified in this word that we're studying today: Immanuel, God with us. Now, you would like to have just one of them, wouldn't you? Just one of those experiences would be incredible. But I say to you, if you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, all of your best Immanuel moments are yet to come. You're gonna spend eternity in the very presence of Almighty God, that will make all of these seem like nothing in comparison. That's what Jesus bought for you and for me, with his blood, at the cross. He bought a full and rich experience that we call: Immanuel.

Now tonight, you're going to have a chance to celebrate this in music, to listen to some music sung skillfully around this theme, Immanuel. Well, I didn't wanna be left out, so I figured I'd preach a whole sermon on this theme this morning, and to speak to this issue in a very similar way to the sermon that inspired those things that are going to be celebrated tonight, a biblical, theological look at this concept of Immanuel. I'm gonna trace it out.

Now, when we talk about Immanuel, it is helpfully translated for us in Matthew chapter 1. The word appears only three times in the Bible, the third time is in Matthew chapter 1, which you just heard Tom read. And that has to do with the account of God dealing with Joseph, after Mary's news. You know, Mary had heard astonishing news concerning Elizabeth, her cousin, and even more astonishing news concerning herself, that she, without ever having known a man, would be the mother of the Son of God. Well, it's not recorded in the Scripture, but you have to assume that she related this news to Joseph and he didn't believe it, couldn't believe it. But he didn't know what to do. He loved Mary, he didn't want expose her to public disgrace, and he had resolved to divorce her quietly, to put her away quietly. But after he'd come to this resolution, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name, Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." And then Matthew gives us this incredible interpretation, “All this happened will fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’- which means, ‘God with us.’”

Now, Jesus is never again called Immanuel in the New Testament. Never appears again. The word is more of a theological interpretation of his significance, of who he was and what he came to do and to be. Now, Isaiah's prophecy shouldn't hinder us too much this morning or trouble us. There are great details there, that are worthy of an entire sermon, but basically, the message is that God's people are facing a very difficult time. The Assyrians were coming, and King Ahaz was troubled by this and began to cast around, looking for earthly allies that could help him with the ensuing or the coming invasion of the Assyrians. And the Lord spoke to him through Isaiah, saying, "The virgin will be with child and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel,” and basically, the promise of this baby is that, “God is with us." And then again, it's repeated in Isaiah 8, and it's applied, saying, "These enemies are going to invade and they will not succeed because God is with us." And so Matthew lifts up that concept and applies it to Jesus, only infinitely more so. Now, there are two senses or two different meanings of this word, Immanuel, as far as I understand. “God with us,” it could be taken two different ways. One is, “God for us in order to bless us.” Second is, “God alongside us, in fellowship with us.” Those are two different ways you can look at it.

First: “God for us.” It means that God is willing to take his omnipotence and exert it on your behalf. He's willing to take his infinite weight and put it on your side of the scales. He could have done the exact opposite. He could have taken his infinite power and exerted it to your infinite destruction. That would be hell. But instead, he has chosen to save us, he has chosen to rescue us, and therefore, his power will be exerted to bless us and to sustain us and protect us and save us to the uttermost, and finally, to bring us into his very presence, “God for us.” A key verse on this is, Romans 8:31, "If God is for us, who could be against us?” And then the river of blessings that flows from that, are indescribable, both in this world and in the next. Described in Deuteronomy 28, "All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you, if you obey the Lord your God, you'll be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land, the young of your livestock. You'll be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The Lord will grant you abundant prosperity in the fruit of your womb and the young of your livestock, and the crops of your ground and the land he swore to your forefathers to give you. The Lord will open the heavens, the store house of his bounty to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands." Now, those are all covenant blessings given to Israel, if they'll just obey the Old Covenant. We have to imagine that these blessings, the blessings of God for us, are even greater, far richer, and so they are. I'm gonna talk more about those, next week.

So that's one sense of Immanuel, God for us, on our behalf, exerting his power to help us and to bless our lives. But I wanna meditate on the second one, the rest of our time together. And that is, the sense of God alongside us in fellowship with us, so that we have a relationship with him, that's what I wanna think about, today. This is even more intimate, more intense. The sense of the very presence of Almighty God right with us in face-to-face fellowship, God having active fellowship with us, an active relationship with us; the ability to walk and talk and eat and work and live with God Almighty. Is that appealing to you? It's appealing to me, God with us, to actually be able to be with him. This is the theme that I'm going to trace out the rest of our time. Now, I'm gonna do it in three senses: God with us in the past, specifically Old Testament, I'm gonna look at God with us in the present, now, and God with us in the future, on into eternity.

In the past, we're gonna look at five aspects. First: God with us in Eden. From creation, it was God's deepest desire, to have intimate relationships with us. He created us, it says in Genesis 1, in his image, male and female, in the image of God, he created them. And I think this at least means he intends to have a relationship with us, similar to the one he has with his own Son. And so there's going to be an intimacy, a relationship there. And then he set up a beautiful place, The Garden of Eden, with everything that the man and the woman would need, in order to fulfill the mandate that he'd given them, a rich place with beautiful fruit trees and work to do productive work. And he set Adam, the man in Genesis 2, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." And he intended, I believe, reading between the lines, to work with Adam. Luke's genealogy calls Adam the son of God. So in that sense, to work with his son and to train him and prepare him for all the work, Adam didn't know anything, and so he would have to be trained and taught about agriculture and about everything that he would need, and God intended to do that side by side, the Father and the son working together.

And there's such a beautiful relationship there, because God also brings the animals to Adam, to see what he would name them. And whatever he would name them that was what the animal or the bird was called. And so you see that sweet relationship. And so, I think that Adam walked with God, even though the expression isn't used of him, but later of Enoch. But I think he walked with God, and you get a strong sense of the truth of that when it's lost in the next chapter. And how sad and how tragic a chapter is Genesis 3, but there we know the story, they eat from the forbidden fruit, and they heard the sound of God walking in the garden, in the cool of the day, and they recognized that sound and what had been a delight for them, before the sound of God walking in the garden, was now a cause of abject terror, and they fled and hid. And that terrible cry from God, saying, "Adam, where are you?" And that is just echoed throughout all of history. That's been God seeking and saving the lost. But you see “God with us” right from the beginning, that was God's desire, and he has never left it, and he will have it in the end. Praise God. He's going back to that, through the redemptive work of his Son.

Secondly, we see “God with us” in the Exodus. Now, we know that God called Abraham. I've already mentioned that. And he made him promises concerning his descendants, made him promises concerning the Promised Land, but that was all in the future. It was all in the future, there are indications and fulfillments with the birth of Isaac and all that, but it was in the future. And in the course of time, Abraham's grandson, Jacob, had to leave the Promised Land because of a severe famine and he went to Egypt, to be with his son, Joseph, and to eat the food that Joseph had laid up in store. But at the end of his life, God spoke, I believe, God spoke to his own people, through Jacob, as Jacob lay on his deathbed and he made him a promise. And this is what he said, Jacob speaking to Joseph said, "I'm about to die, but God will be with you," plural, "He will be with you and take you back to the land of your fathers." That's Immanuel. “God will be with you, to take you back to the Promised Land.”

So there is Israel, in bondage for 400 years, languishing, and it says at the beginning of Exodus, that God looked upon them and was concerned for them, and he remembered the promise that he had made, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he raised up this man, Moses, who was tending his father-in-law's sheep at the back of the desert, not a worldly success at this point. But God called him through the flames of the burning bush, and he said this, he said, "The cry of the Israelites has reached me. And I have seen the way the Egyptians are pressing them. So now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites out of Egypt." But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" Do you remember what God said? He said, "I will be with you." That's the promise of Immanuel. "I'm not gonna send you on any mission where I will not help you. I will be with you, I will come alongside you and I will give you the strength and the courage and the miracles to do everything that you need to do there, in Pharaoh's court. I will be with you. But that's not all, and this will be the sign to you, that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain. It's not just I'll be with you individually, Moses, but it's my intention to be with the people of God. I want them to worship me and I wanna be their God, and I want them to be my people, I want us to be together, and you will see when it happens.” This is the sign. This was the central purpose of the Exodus. A great verse speaks of this in Leviticus 26:11-12, it says, "I will put my dwelling place among you," God said, "And I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people." Did you hear that? “I will walk among you.” It goes back to the garden, that's what he wants to do. He wants to walk among his people and live with them. That's the purpose of the Exodus. And so he carries them out. And the pillars that he sent, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, were evidence of God's presence with His people, leading them on to the Promised Land, to that purpose that he had.

But the problem with the Jews, with the Israelites, same problem with us, was their sinfulness, their wickedness. They worshipped an idol of gold, the golden calf. “Here are your gods that brought you out of Egypt, O Israel,” and they worshipped them. They violated the Ten Commandments just about as soon as they'd been given. And so God made a threat at that moment, a very serious threat. And this is what he said to Moses, in Exodus 33, he said, "Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way." Oh, that's devastating. “Then I would be God with you, but it wouldn't be good for you. I might destroy you.” Okay. So he said, "You go on up the Promised Land, but I'm not going with you." And you remember what happened at that point. Moses got busy and prayed. He got down on his knees and he prayed, and he begged God in that same chapter, “Then Moses said to him, ‘If your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people in the face of the earth?’ And the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing you have asked because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.’” So Moses wrestled with God in this point and overcame, but this was God's intention from the very beginning. And then Moses got really bold with God, at that moment, and said, "Now show me your glory." And it's so beautiful that he did that. I really believe he did it under the motions of the Holy Spirit, because that's the very purpose in the end, anyway. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what Jesus wants for you? “I want those whom you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory.” And so he said, “‘Now show me your glory.’ And the Lord said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I'll proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’” So you don't get there apart from God's mercy, nobody gets there on merit. We all get there, if we get there, we get there by mercy. And so, we will see his glory only by mercy. But then he said this, “but you cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.” And so God put a barrier there to the fellowship, and it remains throughout the Old Covenant, “Thus far you may go and no further.” that is- that sums up the whole sacrificial system, that sums up all of what God was doing. You can come close, but you cannot come ultimately close. “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” And so, we see “God with us” in the Exodus.

We see “God with us” also in the Tabernacle, and later in the temple. God ordained that the Jews make a tabernacle a dwelling place for God in their midst. It says in Exodus 29:44 and following, “So I will consecrate the tent of meeting,” the mishkana is what it's called, “the tent of meeting and the altar, and will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests. Then I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. They will know that I am the Lord their God who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God.” So first came the Tabernacle, that was merely a tent, nothing impressive, it had been made as God directed Moses according to the heavenly pattern that he had seen, and the reality that it was demonstrating was God dwelling, living in the midst of his people in the form of this tent. Exodus 25 says, “Then have them make a sanctuary for me and I will dwell among them and make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.” Now later on, 1 Chronicles 28, David had a pattern for the temple, and it was to do the exact same thing, only seem a little more permanent. You know the tent moves around... I mean, the Tabernacle moves around, the temple has a foundation, but even that's not permanent, you know, because God would ordain that it be destroyed. But it was least an indication of permanence concerning this dwelling that God would have with his people.

Now, in both cases, what happened was the Shekinah glory of God came and invaded the Tabernacle, and then later the temple, as a visible display of God dwelling with his people. Now, this word Shekinah troubled me. I'd heard it mentioned and it's always Shekinah glory. And I said, Now, I looked up the words for glory and it's not Shekinah, it's kavod, and so I kept saying, what is this? So I traced it to its roots, and it really is not related to glory, it's related to dwelling. The Tabernacle is the mishkana; it's the dwelling place. And so, it's the dwelling glory is what it is. It's the glory of God that he reveals when he comes to dwell with his people. It's been his desire all along. It unifies the whole Bible, that's what he wants with you and me. And so, his glory came to show that he was there living among his people. But of course, when Solomon dedicated the temple, he asked a key question, “But will God really dwell on Earth?” Now, just think for a moment, will he? Will he?  Now, those of you in my home fellowship, you know the answer to this, the answer is, yes, he will dwell on Earth in the new Earth. For the new Jerusalem will come down... I can't get there. We'll get there later. Alright, I'm too excited. Okay? But yes, he will dwell on Earth, but not at that point, and not in that way. Solomon realizes this temple can't be it. He's, I think, overcome with humility at this point, not pride, and he says, “How much less this temple that I've... Heaven, even the highest heavens cannot contain him. How much less this temple that I have built.” So there's a limitation again, and there's a key problem too, because the Israelites continued to be sinful, they continued to have hearts of wickedness and rebellion against him, and God has said very plainly, Psalm 5:4, for example, “You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil, with you the wicked cannot dwell.”  So God cannot dwell with wicked people and we are wicked. Some more so than others, but all of us, by comparison with the holiness of God, we need a savior; we must be redeemed. And so, God could not continue with his people in the temple, couldn't keep living with them. And in Ezekiel, the glory of the Lord departed. Ezekiel 10:18, from the temple and he left. The glory of God departed. And so, we see the glory of God dwelling symbolically, but only temporarily in the Tabernacle and later in the temple.

Fourthly, we see it in God, “God with us” in the King. Now, he was temporarily with Saul, but that didn't last long now did it? God was with Saul for a little while, but Saul rebelled and disobeyed, and so God raised up another one, a man after his own heart, named David. And God anointed him, and Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed David in the presence of his brothers, and from that day on, it says, “The Spirit of the Lord came upon David in power.” David had a consistent sense of the abiding presence of God with him. And it didn't matter what he was going through, no matter how difficult the trials, he had a sense that God was with him. And so, he says in Psalm 23:4, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Why? “Because you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” And so David, I believe, represented the future reign of Christ with his people, but he also represented the experience of a Spirit-filled believer in the New Covenant, who would know that the Holy Spirit of God was ministering the very presence of God in everything he went through.

And so, that was “God with us” in the King, and then finally in the Old Testament, we see “God with us” in the words of the prophets. Now, I say to you that God's consistent purpose has been to dwell with his people. How many times does he says, “I will be with them and I will be their God and they will be my people”? He says it over and over, but especially in two prophets, the prophets, during the time of the exile to Babylon when that was seriously called into question, and that is Ezekiel and Jeremiah, clear and repeated evidence. Now the backdrop, of course, was Israel's wickedness and Jeremiah lamented the desolation of Jerusalem. Desolation is emptiness. He looked down in Lamentations and says, “How desolate lies the city once so filled with people.” It's an empty place. And why? Because God isn't there, he's not dwelling with his people; he's given them over to the Babylonians. But God promised through Jeremiah, a restoration of his people in the new covenant, he promised to deal once and forever with the very problem that was evicting God from dwelling with his people, and that is our sin, our wickedness, our own hearts. And so, the new covenant is predicted in Jeremiah 31, “‘This is the covenant, the new covenant that I will make at the house of Israel after that time.’ declares the Lord, ‘I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest.’ declares the Lord, ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more.’” God is gonna take away our sins and he will atone for them through the blood of Christ, and he will transform us from within and give us a new nature to love his law and to walk with him purely, and then he will live with us forever and ever, and we won't need any teachers or preachers then, you'll know the Lord completely and perfectly. That's the future of the new covenant.

Ezekiel saw the same thing. Ezekiel had, as I already mentioned, a vision of the glory of God departing from the temple, and it's very clear why, because of the wickedness of the people. But then he makes an astonishing prediction, he says concerning his people that God will take out their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. He says, “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them. I'll remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh, and then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people and I will be their God.”

Now, at the end of Ezekiel, there are nine chapters describing a temple that no one can quite figure out. Some people take it literally and say there's going to be a temple rebuilt in the future. And the thing that troubles me about that is the fact that God is done forever with animal sacrifice, done forever with it, doesn't need it anymore. It's finished. It's an insult to his Son. We're not going back there ever again. Do you understand that? Okay, read the book of Hebrews 8:13, “What is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.” It is gone. The animal sacrificial system will never be welcomed by God again, he doesn't need it. So what do you need the temple for? Well, I think it's a symbolic representation of the future of God dwelling perfectly with his people, and what cinched it for me was Ezekiel 43. There in Ezekiel 43, after the description, two chapters describing the porticos and all this thing, I saw this and I said, “This has got to be a spiritual representation of God dwelling with his people for this very reason.” Listen, “Then the man brought me to the gate facing east, and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east. His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory. The glory of the Lord entered the temple through the gate facing East, then the Spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. And while the man was standing beside me, I heard someone speaking to me from inside the temple, and he said, ‘Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet. This is where I will live among the Israelites forever.’” Now, God is done with animal sacrifice, this is a representation of that future, which I'll get to in a few minutes. When the new Jerusalem comes and there's no temple, because God himself will be the temple and he will dwell with his people forever. 

And so, we have seen Immanuel, “God with us,” in five ways in the Old Testament. So we see Immanuel in the past. What about in the present? What about right now? What about in Jesus Christ? Now, let's start with the incarnation, the incarnation is the central manifestation of “God with us” in the whole Bible. What was merely symbolic in the Old Testament became reality when Jesus was born. Jesus, it says in John 1, literally pitched his tent among us. In John 1:1-2, it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was [what] with God, [you see that] and the Word was God.” and then John immediately picks up on that, the second aspect, “He was with God in the beginning.” So, Immanuel is patterned after that, friends. You wanna know what Immanuel means? It's like the Father and the Son together before the foundation of the world. That's what it's like, with God, God with us. And so, Jesus came and it says in John 1:14, “The Word became flesh, and pitched his tent among us, he made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Jesus came to live with us.

And so the shepherds, after listening to the angel, they went into Bethlehem, and what did they see? They saw a physical literal baby wrapped in cloths, nothing unusual about that. I have friends in the neonatal thing, and they say that they frequently swaddle babies, alright? So the fact that swaddling a baby... Alright, there's no sign there, but I don't think they put it in a manger. It's usually a very clean place, right? So the sign was a swaddled baby in a manger, and it was physical, there was a literal baby there. Shepherds knew that this was God with us. His mother Mary knew, and she watched him grow up in the normal way as a little boy who became a 12-year-old youth, who became a strong young man working with Joseph as an apprentice carpenter, perhaps, who became the prophet who healed people, and who stood up at the Synagogue in Nazareth and proclaimed quite boldly that the Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 60 was fulfilled today in their hearing.

This Jesus physically walked with people along the road, he talked with them conversationally, you could see the look on his face; you could hear the tone of his voice. You could see him as he did everything. He fished with his disciples, when he stepped from the dock into the boat, the boat would rock like it does for an ordinary person, right? He had a body. And when he got tired, he slept in the back and he even used a cushion for his head. I bet he even adjusted it. And it wasn't quite right, I don't know if he hit it in the center or whatever he did to fluff it, okay, but he had a cushion, that I know, okay? If you're gonna use a cushion, you might as well fluff it a little bit, get it just right. He had a body, just like... He ate meals with them, and every time he ate, he broke bread and gave thanks to his Father. And he would look up to heaven, I think; his hands might be lifted up. There was a physicality to his presence among them. He slept in their presence, he got weary in their presence, he rejoiced and he got righteously angry in their presence. His hands made a whip, and then he drove out the moneychangers from the temple. And he bled in front of them, just like any normal person would bleed when their back is ripped to shreds with a scourge, and when a crown of thorns is smashed into your forehead, there's gonna be a little rivulets of blood coming down your face, and so it was for his face as well. And he died as any normal person would die when crucified, just a little quicker because he had the power to give up his spirit. And he was physically raised from the dead. His resurrection body, get your mind around this, is human still. It's just perfect human body. He has never ceased being human, and except for three amazing days in which he was separated from his body before his resurrection, he has been in a body since the moment he was conceived inside his mother's womb, and he will be in one forever and ever. He is human, and he will forever be human.

After his resurrection he ate at least four meals with his disciples. With the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he broke bread, and that's when they knew, he was just like a stranger to Jerusalem until then. In Luke 24 he eats a bit of fish to prove that he's not a spirit, that he has flesh and bones as they did. He cooked breakfast for them in John 21, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, fish again, but that's what he did. So he cooked fish for them and he ate with them. And then in Acts 1, he ate a meal with them and explained about the coming kingdom of God during those 40 days before he ascended to heaven. These four are tantalizing images of our future experience with God, Immanuel, being with God in the new heavens and the new earth. He is still fully human and still in his resurrection body, so we see Immanuel in Christ.

But now we experience that in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a gift from the father and the son to us, so that we can know the truth of Immanuel. And Jesus said this in John 14: 16-18, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever. The Spirit of truth, the world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him, for he lives with you [and listen] and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” And so therefore, to expand the doctrine, the trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit lives in us spiritually, by the power of the Spirit, and we have intimate fellowship with the Father and the Son and the Spirit, by the power of the indwelling Spirit through the blood of Christ. That's what we have. But this, it is said, is just a deposit, just a taste of the future inheritance. Someday we get the full thing, the full inheritance, when we see him face-to-face. So that means that God is with you in everything that you do. He is with you when you wake up in the morning and you turn off your alarm after you hit the snooze button the first time. The second time when you turn it off and get up, he's with you. When you go in the bathroom and splash water on your face, so that you can be alert for your quiet time, he's with you. When you stumble down the stairs or into whatever room it is that you have your morning quiet time, he is with you, into your den or study or whatever room. As you open the Bible and say, “Lord, please help me understand the scripture today.” he is with you. As you finish your study of the scripture and you close the Bible, and you get down on your knees and you pray, and you ask God to bless your day and your family and your church and your nation and the world, and as you pray through, whatever it is God lays in your heart to pray, he is with you at that time. And then when you're done with all that and you eat whatever cereal you eat for breakfast, he is with you, so that you can eat to the glory of God. And when you say goodbye to your spouse or whatever it is that God has for your day, whether you go off to work or you stay at home, whatever it is you do he is with you through all of that. When you eat your lunch, he is with you. When you witness to a co-worker, he is with you. When you haggle with a salesman to get the best price, he is with you, better do it in a holy way, because he is with you. He is with you all day long, all day long. And when you come back and eat a meal with your family and you pray and give thanks, do it seriously, don't do a rote prayer, do it because he's with you and he hears you. He is with you always, right through. And then finally when you adjust your pillow at the end of the day, however it is you do that, and you put your head back down on the pillow, he is with you then. He is with you always.

But he's not just with you, friends, he's with a countless multitude from every tribe and language and people and nation. He is with the church. He is uniting individual Christians in a mystical spiritual body, the body of Christ, from every tribe and language and people and nation. He is with each Christian equally all the time. How do you figure that out? He's with a believer in rural China who drives a donkey cart with Chinese cabbage to market, at the same time that he's with a Polish transmission worker in a Polish factory at the same time that he's with somebody suffering from AIDS in a hospital, a believer suffering from AIDS in a hospital in Uganda, at the same time that he's with a believer who manages mutual funds on Wall Street, at the same time that he's with a 9-year-old girl who's praying for her sick grandma in the Ukraine. At the same time that he's with a believer, an 80-year-old man who is suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's in Brazil, he's at the same time with each one of those equally and with every other believer on the face of the Earth. For the scripture says in Ephesians 2 that we are a temple. In him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in which God dwells by his Spirit. It says in 1 Peter 2, “You are like living stones being set into the walls of a spiritual house, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God.” And it says in 2 Corinthians 6:16, “We are the temple of the living God, as God has said, ‘I will live with them and walk with them, and I will be their God and they will be my people.’”

God with us in the past; God with us in the present, but what about God with us in the future? Now, here's where it gets really good. I can't wait, 'cause I don't fully understand it. I don't think it has entered into the heart or the mind of man fully what God will do for us. But as we've been teaching through Randy Alcorn's book on heaven, I can tell you this, it will not happen that God will show us heaven, and we'll look and say, “Oh, I had hoped it would be better.” And he would say, “Gee, I thought you'd like it. I've been working on it for 2000 years.” That will not happen, friends. God knows how to make you eternally delighted in himself and in what he has made. You will not be disappointed. And you know why? Because Ephesians 3 said, he is able to do immeasurably more than all you can ask or imagine. But we have some tantalizing glimpses.

Now, God will be with you between now and when you get there, he's gonna be with you every day. I ask God to be with me before I came up to preach, so I'm glad he's with me now. So I said, “Please be with me.” It would be ironic for him not to be, and for me to preach on this. So I said, “Lord, you said you'd be with us, so please be with me as I preach this.” And he has made a promise to each believer saying, and he's paid for it with the blood of his Son, “Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you,” so he will be with you from this point until the day you die. And not just with you, but with all of his believers, through the great tribulation, through the sufferings of the anti-Christ, through all the things his people will go through no matter how vicious and awful, He will be with the church until the march is over.

But then he will be with us eternally in Heaven. It says in Revelation 21, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And then I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now,’” you almost get the sense of “at last,” “the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” In Revelation 22, it says, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life as clear as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the great street of the city, and on each side of the river stood the Tree of Life bearing 12 crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city and his servants will serve and [listen] they will see his face.” You get to see the face of God, the very thing denied to Moses at that holy moment. It's gone, now, now you'll be in your resurrection body and you will be able to look on his face and survive, and you will thrive gazing at that beauty, and his name will be on your foreheads. We will dwell in a perfect city, the new Jerusalem. We’ll be in direct face-to-face fellowship with God and with his incarnate Son Jesus Christ. We will walk with the risen Lord on the roads that connect every part of the new earth, we will gaze at the cleansed and perfected beauty of that gorgeous new world, you can't even imagine how beautiful it would be, but you'll be there. We will see the nail marks in his hands and feet; we'll enjoy the sound of his voice. We will never tire of his presence or of the marvelously creative labor he'll give us to do in that place.

We will sit at his table and eat with him, and with a countless multitude from every tribe and language and people and nation. We will shine brightly ourselves with his glory in our resurrection bodies, and we'll see the glory of God radiating through a city that can barely be described through the gold and precious foundation stones in the new Jerusalem, a massive city 1400 miles long and wide and reached up to the sky, as high as it was long and wide, 1400 miles high. I can't picture that. But we will drink whenever we want from the river of life, flowing clear as crystal through the center of the city, we'll eat whenever we want from the Tree of Life on both sides of that river, and we will speak directly to the Father. And you know what? He'll answer us and call us by name. And we will dwell there forever and ever, and that's what God intended by conceiving Jesus inside Mary's womb. He intended that. And he will have his way.

Now, what application can we take from this? Well, first, I wanna speak to those of you that may be visiting with us today, those of you that know that you have never come to faith in Christ. These things that I have shared are for believers, therefore, those who... They are for those who have trusted in Christ. If you have never repented and trusted in Christ for the salvation of your soul, the things I've described to you are not for you. God is against the wicked, he's against the unrighteous, but anyone who calls in the name of the Lord, in fact, everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved. Call in his name. Trust in him, he shed his blood on the cross for you. Trust in him so that you can be with us forever and ever in this place, you can know fully what it feels like to be “God with us”, Immanuel, to have the Spirit of God dwelling in your midst.

Now, if you're already a believer in Christ, are you fully experiencing this, Immanuel? Do you have the sense of the presence of God throughout your day? I say to you, you could experience it far more than you are. He is the deposit, the Holy Spirit, guaranteeing the full inheritance. Why not ask for more? “If you [Jesus said] though you are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?” Ask him, say, “Lord, I want to experience you more, I want you to be in the middle of my workday.” I've often talked to my kids about this, and when they face a challenging day and they don't look forward to the things... And we all face that. And I said, “If God granted you something that he who will not grant to anyone else, but he gave you a gift, the physical presence of Jesus for 24 hours to walk through those exact same things with you, would you do it?” They said, “Absolutely.” I said, “Would you enjoy it?” They said, “Absolutely.” “The exact same things now?” “Yes, if Jesus were with me going through.” I said, “Well, he is.” Experience it. Feel it by the power of the Spirit, and then walk with him, bring him right into the very center of the things that you're doing. Trust in him and meditate more on heaven. I suggest that you get Randy Alcorn's book and read it. He uses good exegesis scripture with God-given logic and some fascinating God-given imagination to make it very spicy and interesting. And you can debate with him about certain aspects, but certain other parts of it, I say this, that if you're gonna have a resurrection body, it needs to have a place to go, alright? So meditate on that and think about it and make it rich for yourselves. Close with me in prayer.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Psalm 50:15. The main subject of the sermon is God's tendency to free people so that they will give Him glory.

 I am so excited to be able to bring this message to you today. This is somewhat unexpected. I didn't plan on preaching twice from Psalm 50, but I'm going to share with you, in essence, a sermon that was preached back in 1885 by Charles Spurgeon, one of the greatest preachers that ever lived. I first learned of the sermon when I read John Piper's book, Desiring God. And in the chapter on prayer, there was a sub-section in which he talked about Robinson Crusoe's text. And a couple of weeks ago, as I was preparing for Psalm 50, I came across the sermon and I read it to my daughter, Jenny, and we had an incredible time. It was very moving and very powerful. However, I couldn't bring myself just to preach his sermon, somewhat like David, not able to wear Saul's armor. That just wouldn't have been me, and you would have thought it strange, I assure you. So what I did was just drink it in and let it kinda work its way through my heart and my pores, and some of what you hear today were ideas that he voiced in his own way and in his own time, but some of them are new ideas, that have come to me, and if you wanna discern which is which, then you'll have to read his sermon and lay it next to mine, and then you'll find out. But I pray that God would take the power and the strength of these ideas and specifically of this text and press it home to our hearts today.

Now, Robinson Crusoe, of course, is a novel written in the 18th century in 1719 by a Presbyterian minister named Daniel Defoe. It's based on a true story, a Scotsman named Alexander Selkirk, who is marooned on an island, San Fernandez, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. This is a true story and was sensational in his time, and so Daniel Defoe took it and changed it somewhat and turned it into the novel that we know as Robinson Crusoe. Now the text Psalm 50:15 comes up in the novel when Robinson has discovered a footprint in the sand and it shakes him to his core. He thinks he's alone on this deserted island, and he's afraid, furthermore, he's sick. He's in bed with a fever, and he is utterly helpless, completely alone. He's alone with his fears and alone with his fever and no one can help him. And he had been an irreligious person up to that point with the common sins of a seafaring man, but he knew at that point he had reached the end of what he could do. And he found in a sea chest, a Bible that he had neglected reading. But he opened up to Psalm 50, verse 15, and there he read, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me."

And the truth of that came through. He couldn't deliver himself. He was shut up to God alone, and only God could help him. Only God could save him. And in the novel, it says, “from that point forward, a heavenly life entered him and he was never the same again.” Now, that's a powerful text, isn't it, how one text of scripture can so radically transform our whole lives and from that point forward never the same? Well, what is it for us today? How does this text, Robinson Crusoe's text, how does it speak to us? It could be that someone is listening to me today, and you may feel a little bit like Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked somewhat in life, shut up into yourself. You have no resources to meet the challenges. You have no way to get off the island of trouble that you're on, and God speaks to you today through this sermon, through this text, a word of comfort and consolation and exhortation, "Call upon me in the day of your trouble; I will deliver you and you will glorify me." Perhaps you came in here struggling with a problem, a burden. Maybe nobody even knows about it. Maybe you're a Christian, but you're struggling with some kind of secret besetting sin. Nobody knows about it. But you know about it, and it's such a big issue that nothing else is in the front of you at this moment. You're thinking about it even now as I speak.

Could be that your marriage is struggling, or you know a marriage that's struggling, maybe that of a son or daughter. It could be that you've got parenting problems. You're struggling with issues with your children or with your parents. Maybe they're not saved. It could be that that's the issue for you today. You came in today and you know you're not saved. You know that you have a problem, a problem of sinning, and you've never come to a place in your life where you've given yourself to Christ. And so you feel the sentence of God against you, the wrath of God, and that's what's on your mind right now, but you don't know what to do. Or maybe you're a teenager and you wonder if anybody could ever really love you the way you are, or for what your future holds and what you're gonna be when you grow up. And you've got all kinds of intense feelings and nobody seems to understand. It doesn't matter what your day of trouble is. It could be as many as 400 different versions of a day of trouble, listening to me today, but whatever your day of trouble is, this text is speaking to you, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will glorify me."

Now, from this, I want to get four points, and we'll look at the first one right away, and that is that God prefers reality to ritual. He prefers reality to ritual. Now, the context of verse 15, verses 8-15, which you heard Dick just read a moment ago, and we went through it carefully last week, but we see the Israelites given over to ritualism. Let's look again at verses 8-15. He says there, "I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me. I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Sacrifice, thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will glorify me." So here are the Israelites deeply steeped in ritualism, and we don't need to belabor it. We talked about it last time. But there are some reasons why God prefers reality to ritualism. Let's think about it together. 

First of all, there is a reason why in, that there is meaning in reality. There is a meaning in that prayer, there's a meaning in that worship that comes out of a day of trouble. God delights in one simple prayer uttered in a moment of great suffering, far more than a religious ritualism, because there is meaning, there's significance in that prayer. Prayers and worship offered by ritual is more likely to be somewhat like a play offered by inmates of an insane asylum. Like Shakespeare said, “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Perhaps you've seen these kind of religious worship services, maybe in this country or in another country. You've seen perhaps a priest dressed out in some ornate garb and he's leading a big procession of other people dressed in a different kind of garb, and they come to some kind of place, a sacred place, and they do these rituals and there's bowing and there's bending, and there's words muttered, and they're not for you and no one can understand them anyway, and there is symbols and incense and all kinds of stuff.

I saw it in Shintoism in Japan. I saw it in Buddhism, there as well. But sadly, we even see it in some Christian traditions. And the thing you're thinking the whole time as you're watching this grand production of spiritual ritualism is, “How can God possibly be honored by this, when the worshiper is so distant from it, just observing and not even understanding the significance of all these rituals?” But I tell you this, a simple prayer offered by a child, or by a woman, or man, or an elderly person in the midst of a heartbreaking trial, now there's reality in that. There's a sense of urgency and realism there, and God greatly prefers it to ritualism.

Secondly, the reason he prefers reality to ritualism is that the cry of a troubled heart is in essence spiritual worship. God has told us that he prefers spiritual worship. As a matter of fact, it's the kind of worship that he's seeking all over the world. In John chapter four verse 23 and 24, it says, "…the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks.” God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth. Your worship every week, every day must come from your own spirit. There must be passion in it. There must be truth in it, but there must be passion. It must be truth on fire. It must be mingled with your own heart or it's not real worship.

I suppose I stood in front of you this morning and I read every word of the most Orthodox and perfect creed that had ever been written, and I read all of those words to you, and yet I didn't believe a word of it, and neither did you. Would worship be happening in this room today? It would not, any more than if I just recited the alphabet, 26 letters and called that worship. There has to be a spirit in it. There has to be a passion in it. It has to be for us personally, real and alive. God has abolished the sacrificial system. He's abolished ritualistic worship. He set it up. It had its purpose, and now he's done away with it. There is no longer that one altar at Jerusalem. There's no longer the ironic priesthood. There's no longer any of those ritual sacrifices. It's done. Jesus fulfilled it all.Why would we set up something in its place that does not have the sanction of God?

Thirdly, God prefers reality to ritualism, because God himself becomes very real to people who are in trouble, a person crying out to God in the midst of some heart-wrenching circumstance. They're crying out to the living God. They're crying out to a God who is not an idol. They want a God who can be alive in their circumstance, in their situation. They're done with all the rest. And so God himself has become very real to that individual. Oh, how real God becomes to those who are perishing, and they cry out, out of that trial, and God is real to them.

Fourthly, there is sincerity in those kinds of prayers. I'm afraid that many of the prayers we offer during times of ease and prosperity, during times of comfort, are hypocritical to their core. We offer them by wrote. We have our own rituals. We have our own ceremonies. It could be as simple as a prayer offered before a meal, or your thanksgiving prayer a couple of weeks ago. Oh, that it would not have been hypocritical, but it may be that it was hypocritical. But you know when you're in the middle of a difficult trial, when you're suffering and hurting, and you go to God with that trial? Now, there's some sincerity in that prayer. It's a real prayer. It could be you prayed many prayers up to that point and cared little whether God listen to them or not, but you care whether he hears this one. It matters intensely to you. It's a real prayer, and so God prefers it. Consider a man who's lost his job and has been looking for nine months. He's got four children. His bank account’s just about gone, credit cards are maxed out. If he prays in that situation, it's likely to be a real prayer. Or you take another situation that I know about, a woman whose husband became very strange, acted strangely. She wondered if there was another woman involved. He separated himself from her and from their three children and lived in his own apartment and never came around to see the children who went to bed crying every night for their daddy. "Where is daddy?" And he wouldn't come. Now, when she has put the kids to bed again for another night and she goes down and just weeps in the den, and she cries out to God, bring him back, there's some reality in that prayer. You know what I'm talking about. It's a real prayer. There's no hypocrisy in it. She wants God to move in their marriage and save it. 

People speak disparagingly of foxhole conversions, and I know why because sometimes they're not genuine, but I wonder if anybody gets converted except that they're in a foxhole. I'm talking about foxhole means you're in a battle, and there's bombs blowing up all around you, and you think, “I'm not gonna survive this night. I'm not gonna get through it. I've got to have something from God.” And they don't feel ready to meet their maker and so they cry out and they ask for salvation. And I wonder if anybody ever gets to the point where they get shaken of that good works religion, and I'm basically a good person, and all that stuff that we always think about, except that we go through a foxhole experience and then at last, we realize, “I'm not ready to face my maker.” God send us more foxholes then, if that's what it takes, that we might be genuinely converted.

You know when you're on the airplane and it's making sounds. I mean, the structural members are making sounds you've never heard before, it's creaking and groaning, and there's an electrical storm and there's this intense turbulence and the airplane is purposing like this, and there's an off-duty pilot who is just trying to go to his home city and he's sitting there next to you and he's sweating bullets, and he's like this, and he gets up to offer his help to the pulpit, I mean to the cockpit and go back. He probably needs to go to the pulpit at that moment. And he's desperate. You're looking at him and you realize you are in deep trouble. It could be at a time like that, that there's some people on that plane that are gonna cry out to God, and there's reality in that prayer. It's not hypocritical.

Fifthly, there is humility in those kinds of prayers. When we make a big show of religion, when our religious duties are exceptional and note worthy, we have the temptation to become arrogant about it and think about it, don't we? A soloist who's giving special music on Sunday morning might be thinking more about his or her performance and the technicalities of it, and any praise they might be getting afterwards, than about whether God's people are worshipping, or God is honored in it. It's so easy to do. A pastor in the middle of a sermon might be thinking, "Hey, this is going pretty well, which it wasn't a moment ago, but it's going better now," okay. But you can begin thinking like that, and the focus isn't on God anymore. It's not real. It's hypocritical, and it's arrogant actually. You're at a prayer meeting, brother and sisters at a prayer meeting and saying, "Hey, my prayer is the best one so far. Well, I really captured it there, didn't I?” That's not humble. But when this happens, God becomes greatly dishonored by our worship at that point.

However, when a humble, trembling heart brings their crushing burden to God. What they're saying is, “I have come to the end of my resources. I have nothing I can do about this.” It's incredibly humble at that moment. You really have nothing else. You know that if he doesn't step in, you're lost. At that point, humility is right in the midst of your prayer. It's the very thing you are praying out of because you know you can't do it. And finally, God prefers reality to ritualism because there is a measure of faith in those kinds of prayers. God knows faith when he sees it, you know why? Because he's the Father of it. He sends it as a gift, and so therefore he recognizes even a flicker of faith. He sees it in the middle of that trial and he is moved by that. What is happening with you right now? What are you going through? What's happening in your life? What happened this week? What's happening these months? What is your day of trouble? What's going on for you? This isn't just a sermon. This is God speaking to you saying, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me." What is happening for you today?

Secondly, we see in this text, adversity turned to advantage. Now I say this with all reverence concerning Almighty God, but even Almighty God cannot deliver someone who's not in trouble. I'll say it again, even Almighty God who created heaven and earth in six days by the word of his power, even God cannot deliver somebody who's not in trouble. Think of Jesus. He's the greatest physician that ever lived. He is so great that all he needed to do with a man born blind is spit on the ground and make some mud and smear it on the man's eyes. And that man went off and washed and he could see, he is the greatest physician that ever lived, but even Jesus said this. Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." He cannot heal healthy people. And so therefore, it is somewhat to our advantage to be in adversity. Now, Spurgeon, when he preached the sermon, said something I wouldn't dare to say. But I'll quote it so that he can say it and you will hear it, but I'm not gonna say it. And when you hear him say, you'll know why I don't wanna say it. 

But he said this, I do not feel today as if the text I'm preaching on encourages me half so much as it might encourage some of you, because I'm actually not going through trouble right now, praise God. Things are going well for me right now, but I might wanna patch up a little difficulty so that this text could become even more real to me. Well, I won't say that, But Spurgeon did. I don't wanna patch up any difficulty. I don't wanna go try to find some trouble. It's going to come soon enough. Isn't it brothers and sisters? It's coming. So it may be that you're here today and things are comfortable and at ease, and you're not in a day of trouble and that does happen. God doesn't just send us days of trouble. He does give us days of refreshment, but days of trouble are coming, and so therefore, it is somewhat to our advantage to be in a time of adversity. But it takes a certain amount of skill to turn adversity to advantage. It isn’t automatic. Sometimes adversity can just lay you low and depress you and hurt your faith and make you murmur hard things against God. So therefore, we need a certain amount of skill. And what we can do is look at Psalm 50:15, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me." We can take certain things from that and bring them to God, and in this way, our adversity turns to our advantage.

First of all, we can plead the time. We can say something like this, "Oh Lord, you said, 'Call upon me in the day of trouble.' Well, if ever there was a day of trouble, it's right now," and then tell him what your problem is. Tell him about your sick wife, or your dying child, or your job situation, or your struggle with besetting sin, or you're sinking business, your rebellious son and daughter, your own failing health, whatever it is, but say, this is the time. Now is the needed time. You spoke about a day of trouble. This is the day of trouble. Secondly, you can plead the trouble itself, you can say, "I've been through a lot of things, but I've never been through anything like this. This trouble is so great that I can't sleep at night. I can't eat. The anxiety is churning. I have no answer for these things," and so you can plead the trouble.

Thirdly, you can plead the command, "O Lord, you commanded me to call upon you in the day of trouble. Now, I may be evil, I may be wicked, but I would never command anyone who reports to me or is under my authority to do something and then rebuke them for doing the thing I commanded. Even I who am evil wouldn't do that, but you have commanded me to bring my trouble to you. Now, I'm in trouble. Oh, Lord." And furthermore, not just will he not rebuke us, but he actually will help us. Imagine a homeless person came to you and they needed some assistance, financial assistance, and you weren't in a position to help them then, but you said, "Please come to such and such a place tomorrow, that's where I work, I can help you tomorrow." Suppose they did it, did the thing you told them to do. Would you refuse to help them? Would you not find yourself bound to help them, having made that promise or pledge? If we although we are evil know that kind of a loyalty to something that we've said, how much more our almighty God?

So plead the command. God didn't give this command so that he could increase your torture and your torment, in your day of trouble, He gave you this command so that he could deliver you. That's why he gave it, so plead the command. And finally, plead God's character. What kind of being is he? If your neighbor had said, "Look, if you're ever in trouble, give me a call. I would wanna help," then the trouble comes, you don't wanna call them 'cause maybe he didn't really mean it. Maybe he was just saying that and wants to be a good neighbor, or maybe you think your trouble is too great for his resources, so you're not gonna burden him even though it is a very great trouble for you, and you think he might be able to help. But you need to think about who it is that made this command. This is Almighty God. He has all power, all resources. He's the one owns the cattle on a thousand hills and everything else. He has everything in his store houses, and he has the resources you need to handle all of the problems you're facing. Furthermore, he's made promises and he will keep them. Plead his character, "God, you're the faithful God, the merciful God. You're the all powerful God. You are the all-wise God. You are the God of Scripture. I come to you now and I plead with you in my day of trouble."

Jesus Christ came to the earth. It says in first Timothy, it is a trustworthy saying, he came into the world to save sinners. Could there be a greater day of trouble than to feel yourself condemned by Almighty God eternally? That's a great day of trouble, Jesus came to save us from that one above all other days of trouble. Judgment Day is coming, and if you come here today and you have not trusted in Christ, you're not ready for that day. You're not ready to stand in front of him when you will have to give an account for every careless word that you've spoken. You're not ready for that day of trouble. I wish that you would feel the day of trouble now by faith, and know that Jesus entered the world to save people from that day of trouble. Call upon him and he will save you. He shed his blood on the cross for sinners like you and me. And don't leave this place without calling upon him. Do it right now. You don't need to wait for the end of the service. You don't need to wait to the rest of the acts of Jesus. Just humble yourself and ask him to save you from your sins and he will.

The third point, is we see here, grace, voluntarily freely submitted to a kind of bondage. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, look what it says, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you…" This is what's known as a promise. This is a promise from Almighty God. Now, there is nothing freer in all God's universe than grace. It's free. He gives it. But here, he has placed himself somewhat under voluntary bondage. It's really interesting and encouraging and amazing to meditate on what God can do. Think about it. I mentioned earlier in this message how God created heaven and earth in six days, by the Word of his power. He spoke and billions of galaxies simply sprang into being. He spoke again, and the solar system with its great planets, Jupiter and Neptune and Saturn, these Great balls of gas just sprang into being and the sun to give light to the earth. He spoke and these things came into being. In six days he created heaven and earth.

Or again, consider this, even more significantly for us, in one afternoon in a backwater area, 2,000 years ago in Palestine, a Jewish carpenter in one afternoon really in three hours, shed his blood, sufficient for the sins of our entire human race, for the whole world, sufficient for all of their sins in one afternoon provided a fountain of redemption that is responsible for that multitude of people from every tribe and language and people and nation. In one afternoon, he can do that. Oh, it's wonderful to think of the things that God can do. But you know, it can be almost as amazing to think about the things that God cannot do. You may think there's nothing he cannot do. In one sense, that's true, depending on what you mean. But there are some things he cannot do. The Bible says God cannot look on evil or tolerate evil, or be tempted by evil, nor himself tempt anyone with evil, James 1:13. The Bible says that God cannot tolerate wrong, Habakkuk 1:13. The Bible says that God cannot lie, Titus 1:2. The Bible says that God cannot change, Malachi 3:6. The Bible says that God cannot repent for he is not a man that he should repent or change his mind, 1 Samuel 15:26-29. The Bible says that God cannot stop being faithful, for he cannot deny himself, 2 Timothy 1:13. 

Okay, well then it's absolutely vital for us to look at this text and consider what God cannot do. He cannot make a promise and then break it. And so therefore, God has voluntarily bound himself with a chain here, “Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you...” We say this with all reverence, God can make a chain that even God cannot break. And that is the chain of his promise. Now, I say to you, it's not just Psalm 50:15. I'm saying it's as many as there are promises in the Bible. Will he break any of them? I tell you, he will not. Now, we should not think of this wrongly as though it's a lack of power or anything like this. God cannot break these promises and still be the faithful covenant-keeping God that he is. He will cease being that God. And we should not think that he's reluctant saying, "Oh, I wish I could break these chains." He did it himself. Any more than a godly loving husband desires to be free from the promise that he made to his wife so many years ago, to be faithful to her and to be her husband and to love her. He's not desiring to be free from that commitment that he made. And so we see grace put under voluntary bondage.

Now, this promise is unconditional. Any one of you listening to me today and I myself as well, we can cash it in. It doesn't matter what you've done up to this point, it doesn't matter how sinful. "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you...." The “you” that calls gets delivered, even these Jews who are into ritualism and all this kind of thing, they get delivered if they call upon God, so don't leave yourself out. It's like a check from a good firm or from government or something, that's definitely good for it, in the amount of however much you need for your day of trouble and paid to the order or is left blank and God will move you by his grace to sign your own name in there when he moves you to obey this text. "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you…" the one that calls. He's good for it.

And “I will” means that he will supply everything needed. Everything needed. Now, notice that God has promised that he will deliver us, but he has not promised how he will work his deliverance. Let him work in his own way. Don't tell him his business. Don't tell him how to deliver you from your day of trouble. Did Abraham know how God would deliver him and Sarah from childless-ness? Could he have ever imagined how he would do it? Or how Joseph would be delivered when his master's wife slandered him so deceitful and wickedly, how God would deliver him out to be second in command of all of Egypt? Did he know? He did not. Did Daniel know how God would deliver him from the lion’s den? He did not. It's not our business to tell God how to deliver us from the day of trouble. 

Neither is it our business to tell him when we are to be delivered from the day of trouble. I will deliver you is clear enough. What is not clear is when the deliverance will come. Now you want it today, I know it. You'd like it right now while you're listening to the sermon, “It's gone and won't that be sweet?” You are in a great hurry, but God may not be in as much of a hurry as you are to deliver you from your day of trouble. Think of it like refiners fire and you are the gold ore. And he is the goldsmith. And you are screaming out in the pain of the refining process, and you're saying, "Take me out. It's hot in here. It's unpleasant, I don't like this." And the skilled craftsman, the goldsmith says, "There's still more dross floating to the surface, you gotta stay in there longer." He knows how long to keep you in the fire.

Alright, probably none of you have ever refined gold before, but I myself at least have made chocolate chip cookies. It's true. And I have mixed up a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and I have spooned out the appropriate amount with the right spacing, I learned that early on, you gotta separate them enough, so they won't run together. One big cookie isn't good. Maybe it is, but anyway, it's just chocolate chip cookies and you put them in. And I've put them in the oven and forgot to set the timer. And about 16 minutes later or so, I start to smell something. It's that distinctive odor of burnt cookies, and I take them out and that batch at least is ruined because I forgot to set the timer. God doesn't need an external timer. He has an internal timer on how long every one of his children, however many millions of them there are around the world, need to stay in their trials. His wisdom has set the time, and you're crying out about the time will not change it a bit, but he will deliver you when the work on your soul is done. So you just need to trust him and say, "Lord, I don't wanna be delivered a moment before your wisdom is set the time. Then, deliver me. Take me out before I burn." And he will.

The fourth and final section is that God and the praying person here take shares. This may be an odd way for us to end our meditation together, but let me explain myself. There is your share, and there is God's share. First, here's your share. "Call upon me in the day of trouble..." That's your share. Next comes God's share. "…I will deliver you." Now you get the next share. You are the one who is delivered. Then God gets his share. “…you will glorify me.” Now, here is a delightful and an eternal partnership. God gets the glory. We get the deliverance. God gets the glory and we get the joy. Now, this is a contract. God is sliding it across the table to you, “Will you sign it? Is this acceptable to you these terms?”

God says, "Sinners, I will forgive all of your sins based simply on faith in Christ, but I must have full glory for it." We answer, "Yes, Lord, we will glorify you forever and ever." God says, "I will justify you by faith, but I must get the glory." And you say, "Yes, where then is boasting? It is excluded on what principal on that of the works of the law, no, but on that of faith." God says, "I will adopt you into my family. You'll be an adopted son or daughter, but I must have the glory." And you say, "Yes, Lord. Behold, what manner of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are.” God says, "I will sanctify you through and through. I will make you holy just like my son, Jesus Christ. You will be conformed to his image. But I must have full glory for all of it," and we say, "Yes, Lord, you will in heaven, we will sing, we have washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb, therefore we will serve him day and night in his temple, giving him all the praise." And God says, "I will take you home to live with me forever in heaven. I'll wipe every tear from your eyes. I'll bring you into a place where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. I will give you a place, and an inheritance in the New Heaven and the New Earth. But for all of that, I must have the glory." And we say, "Yes, Lord, forever, we will magnify and exalt you and sing, blessing and honor and glory and power be to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb forever and ever."

Now, have you been robbing God? Have you been stealing his glory? Have you been ascribing to yourself those things God worked in you? Have you been taking credit for things you ought to be giving thanks for? How wicked is it for a person who's been saved from fornication or drug abuse or alcohol after they've cleaned themselves up, repented, brought forth fruit and keeping with repentance have become very respectable religious people, living good, solid, upright, moral lives, how wicked is it for them to forget what they were delivered from and to rob God of his glory. Some pastors and theologians rob God of his glory by speaking much about free will and, “Yes, but we needed to repent and all that.” That will all be finished when we get to heaven, I can tell you right now. There's not one of us who will be talking about those themes in Heaven, for we will realize that God must have the glory and he will. 

By way of application, I don't know what I can say other than what I've already said to you. It's been kind of application-oriented all the way through. "Call upon me in the day of trouble..." What do you need to do? Call upon him. I don't know what your day of trouble is, but ask him. Pray. Say, "God help me. God save me from my day of trouble." We're gonna close in a minute, and we don't usually do this, but Eric's got all the chairs up here. There's room here at the front. You know that I'm against empty ritualism, and we don't encourage people to come forward and pray because you know what, God is no more God in the front of the sanctuary and he is right where you're sitting. But you know something, you may need to come forward and give him a burden that's been on your heart and just lay it down in front of him.

You may need to just come up and in about a minute or two of prayer, say, "God, this is what's been on my heart, you know it, but now I lay it before you and I'm calling upon you now to deliver me," and get up and walk away as Hannah did with a light heart, knowing that God will answer that prayer. I say one final word to those of you that are here who have never trusted in Christ. I urge you, don't walk out of here with the burden of the wrath of God, the just wrath of God for your sins. Free salvation and forgiveness is offered through faith in the blood of Christ. Trust in him, whether you're sitting in the pew or whether you come forward. It does not matter, but call on the name of Jesus, and if you do, talk to me about it afterwards. Say, "How can I follow? I want to follow Christ, and I've called on his name. Am I forgiven?" Talk to me about it, or someone. Close with me in prayer.