Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / June 17, 2018 | Game Changing Moves - Game Changing Moves In Greece

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June 17, 2018 | Game Changing Moves - Game Changing Moves In Greece · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, I love the participation.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, that's the Royals, right?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or no.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the World Cup.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also the first time we're seeing this summer's bumper video.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's our theme, our sermon series this summer, game-changing moves.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I should start by wishing Happy Father's Day to you as well.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't gotten your dad a gift yet, just put up a couple ads here, you know, buy him a grill, buy him a drill, buy him root beer, barbecue kit.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But uh things have improved over the years.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Back uh, you know, when some of you were young, treat your father on Father's Day, give him old goals.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Even the dog is offering cigarettes to Daddy.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're familiar with the Al Cap, uh little Abner, you remember Lil Abner came from Dog Patch, you know, the um the South, some impoverished mountain village.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Mammy knows what's best for Father's Day.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's fruit of the loom underwear.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Daisy May says it just wears and wears and wears.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Which uh a lot of you older women know, your husband's been wearing the same fruit of the looms for 40 years.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just wears and and uh honest Abe says, Mammy show knows what's best for us kids too.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So buy them for 49 cents or 69 for extra large, and uh I don't know what that's for.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, happy Father's Day.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So uh game changing moves is our theme.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: I I confess that did not come out of my uh arid as a desert uh creative mind.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually stolen uh from a book.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I put on the front of your bulletin, however, a reminder that of a game-changing move.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: A couple years ago, the Royals were down two to nothing in the game five of the World Series.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the Mets had a star pitcher on the mound who hadn't given up any runs.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Mets were up two to nothing, and then uh Kane got a single, and Hosmer got a double, and all of a sudden it was two to one.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was one out, and then uh Salvador Perez comes up.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you remember Hosmer's now in third.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Salvador Perez uh gets uh there's a pitch in on him, and so the best he can do is fight it off, and it's a little one bouncer to the third baseman, and he throws to first base, and Eric Hosmer makes this mad dash for home.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Eric slow runner Hosmer dashes 80 feet for home and slides in in the most memorable moment of the 2015 World Series to tie the game centered in the overtime where the Royals would win the World Series on the 12th inning 7 to 2.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a definitely a game-changing move and the most memorable moment in that World Series.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: But as I said, uh this is not my creation.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I actually stole it from a really good devotional slash inspirational book written by Chad Parks.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Chad's the uh wrestling coach uh out at Shawnee Heights High School.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you can cheer if you want.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that was first edition.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I have the second edition, Game Changing Moves, subtitled Life's Lessons from the Locker Room and Beyond.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Chad was named 5A Wrestling Coach of the Year.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh good guy.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I've asked him, he comes to TBC, he's married to Bob Meisner's daughter Lori, and as you can tell, the Lord's blessed them.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Chad's going to uh do week number two for me.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: This book, by the way, if you haven't bought a Father's Day gift, just promise your dad that you'll pick up one of these books for him next week.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've asked Chad to bring a bunch of copies and put him and sell them in both of these things.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I love this book.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's got like 50 chapters or six chapters in it, just a couple pages long, good for us guys.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sports stories out of his experience from being a national star wrestler and coach.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I recommend that book to you.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, he's on next week, and I'm looking forward to that.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I've taken his title and I want to talk to you about how we can change the game of our lives.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: All right, and my first uh message, uh, since many of you know I've just come back from Greece with 37 of you, game-changing moves in Greece.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm referring to is Paul's second missionary journey, which took place starting in 49 A.D.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: and lasted for about three years.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And just to rehearse what happened in that story, which is detailed for us in Acts 16, 17, and 18, Paul begins Jerusalem, he goes north through Antioch, Assyria, dips in, and again sees some of the towns that he'd been to before: Derby, Lystra, Iconium, Antioch, and Pisidia.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he wanted to go down into one of the major four cities in the Roman Empire, Ephesus, on the coast, but the Spirit said no.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So he sort of got stymied, and there he is, gotten to Troas, a town on the coast of the Aegean, and that's when, asleep one night, he sees a vision, sees a dream of a man saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is mentioned to us in Acts chapter 16, verse 9.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have a Bible, I would love for you to open it and take a look at Acts chapter 16, much of which I'm going to read this morning.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: As a result, we find in verse 11, we set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, that's an island that's still there in the Aegean, and the following day to Neapolis.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's the coastal town, the port in northern Greece, or Macedonia.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Today it's called Kavala, K-A-V-A-L-A, and we were there two weeks ago, our tour group, beautiful little town.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and then from thence eight miles inland to Philippi.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: So what we did, by the way, on our Greece tour is it was walking in the footsteps of Paul following second missionary journey.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we just flew to Thessalonica, today called Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece behind Athens, and we backtracked to Philippi on the first day, and then went back to Thessalonica, Berea, went down to Athens, Corinth, then over to Ephesus in what is today Turkey, and then to Rhodes and Crete and some of the other islands.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Terrible, it was no fun at all.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you didn't miss a thing.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So um, no, it was great.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I want to talk to you today about the game-changing move, three of them that happened in the town, then a city of Philippi.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we started there at Philippi, like I say, and then we went south.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thessalonica, Brea, Delphi, Athens, Corinth, and so forth.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, today, uh Philippi is a nice ruin.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it hasn't been a city built on top of it.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the four uh Roman ruins, major Roman ruins that we visited on this trip, and they have dug up and excavated a couple of early Christian basilicas or churches, a library, a theater up there to the right hand side, an agora.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is a marketplace, and so forth.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we visited.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: These are pictures from some of the people who are on the trip.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we overlooked the town.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: That road that you see in front of you is left over from Paul's day.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Via Ignatia, that is the Ignatian Way, which is actually mentioned in this section of the book of Acts.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was one of those great, you've heard of the Appian Way, the Appian Way, north and south, Ignatian way, clear across the Roman Empire.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Probably one of the reasons Paul says in Galatians 4 that when the time was fully come, God sent his son.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: When the roads were built, so that the gospel could be spread.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul walked along this road.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: This was a road sign that dates from Paul's day.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Rich and Cheryl Harrington loved walking where Paul walked.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Wherever we were, they would take a picture of their feet standing where Peter was.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we uh we loved looking over the very large Roman ruins, looking down at the Agora, the marketplace, some of where there were temples, and noticing some of the things that that dated uh from, you know, that dated from Paul's day that that sort of were referenced in the Bible.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, he writes Philippi later, I count everything as loss.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: In view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, I count them as rubbish, but the actual word in the Greek is, I grew up on a farm, so I can say manure, you can't.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: But toilet waste, in order that I may gain Christ.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And there in Philippi you can see dozens of outdoor toilet seats that uh just the men for those, please.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: The women's is on the other side.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, so that may be what Paul had in mind when he wrote it.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps when he in Philippians called Epaphroditus a fellow soldier of Jesus Christ, he was referring to the fact that this town was now full of ex-soldiers because Philippi was the scene, just a historical note, one of the great, great battles in ancient days.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably heard about how Brutus and Cassius killed their friend Julius Caesar in 42 BC, or 44 BC, I'm sorry, et tu brutae, right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's what Shakespeare wrote.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh actually, Brutus and Cassius were our kind of people because they were small government people, and they saw that Julius Caesar was going to take a republic, which was Rome, and is going to turn it into an imperial, big government.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Julius wanted to be worshipped as a god and so forth, and so they shouldn't have.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was Brutus' worst moment, but he kills Julius Caesar.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then they ran for cover because Mark Antony of Cleopatra fame and Octavian, who would later be the greatest Caesar of all, Augustus Caesar, came after them.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And where did they trace them down to?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Philippi, right outside this city.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: They had one of the great battles of ancient days in 42 B.C.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And even though Brutus and Cassius seemed to have an advantage, they were outwitted.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a very interesting story.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: But they were outwitted by Mark Antony, who's a great fighter, and they were defeated.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Brutus and Cassius committed suicide.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And to celebrate that location, by the way, Octavian and Mark Antony told all the soldiers that wanted to, and there were 250,000 of them, they told them that they would set them up right there in Philippi.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly that town, which for hundreds of years had been 200 people, 2,000 people strong, been founded by Philip, Philippi, Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, suddenly that became one of the major cities in the Roman Empire.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why it was uh staffed by soldiers and children of soldiers who had lived 100 years before.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we loved going through that town and seeing all these remains and uh and seeing that this was one of the great cities of the New Testament.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is the ancient theater at Philippi, would hold up to 50,000 people, and uh and we loved uh we loved going through it.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: But first, the first thing we did was we went to uh the riverside just outside the city, which was about three-quarters of a mile away, because of a big city, called the Gangites River.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And now we move to the Bible, and I'm going to read Acts chapter 16, okay, and I'll tell you why we started with that.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because, verse 12, Acts 16 says, Philippi was a Roman colony and the leading city of its district in Macedonia.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And on Shabbat, on the Sabbath day, Paul says, we went outside the city gate by the river where we expected to find a place of prayer.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why does he say that?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: He says that because uh whenever there were 10 Jewish men in a town, they would have a synagogue.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: They'd have a minion, M-I-N-Y-A-N.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's still true.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have ten Jewish men, you can't have church for Jews.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: But so if they were in a Gentile town like Philippi, uh observant Jews would always go to the river, because the Jews have a lot of ablutions, washing ceremonies, and they would always meet to pray by the river.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, Paul found some women by the river.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously not ten men, but he says we sat down and we spoke to the women gathered there.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: A God-fearing woman named Lydia, God-fearing is a technical term for a Gentile person who went to synagogue or worshiped with the Jews because she realized there weren't a thousand gods.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Polytheism was crazy, that there was one true God, and the Jews probably worshipped him.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So she's a God-fearing Gentile woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, immediately ding-ding, you know, she's very wealthy.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Purple, the purple dye to make the purple cloth used primarily for royalty, or very wealthy nobleman, uh, was gotten out of uh special sea snail shells, a drop at a time was worth thousands of dollars.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so she, dealing in purple cloth, was clearly a very successful businesswoman.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: She's from the city of Thyatira, presently in Turkey, uh, which uh uh which was the main purple dying city in the world in that day.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And she was listening to Paul.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord opened her heart to respond to what Paul was saying.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 15, and after she and her household were baptized, so she has a household, no mention of a husband, maybe her husband's dead.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows what happened?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe she was divorced, unlikely, but uh she clearly had cousins or nephews or nieces or children or somebody.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe she had a husband, but she says she urged us, if you consider me to be a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And she persuaded us.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So there's the river, and it's fun to go by the river where you know that you're standing in the location, almost the exact location where Paul met Lydia and where he baptized her, and so forth.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, um, once, he says, as we were on our way to prayer, a slave girl met us who had a spirit by which she predicted the future.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's the Christian standard Bible.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, in the Greek it says she had a spirit of python.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: A spirit of python.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing about that is that uh Delphi, uh 350 miles south, was the uh, if you wanted to know the future, if you're looking for guidance in that day, in fact, for a thousand years of our world's history, this is the place where you would travel to from around the world and pay any amount of money to find out the future.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: From 700 BC to 300 AD, people found that this demon-possessed, to be honest, this oracle at Delphi, whatever woman they used, who we now know just in the last 10, 15 years, had a stool, three-legged stool, perched over two great earthquake faults in the earth, and we now know the gases from that mixture of faults would send her into a trance, she would foretell the future.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander the Great went to her to find out that yes, he could conquer the world, and forth he went.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: The Spartans went to find out whether or not they should send some troops to try to hold up the half a million Persians at Thermopylae.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Well, yeah, but you're not gonna win.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And on and on and on, if you wanted to know what girl you should marry or what college to go to or whatever, you would get your money together, you would travel hundreds of miles, you would wait in a very long line, and you would go to Delphi.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: We were at Delphi.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the interesting thing about Delphi is the story of Delphi is that Delphi began with the demon serpent slash dragon at the heart of the earth, Mother Earth employed the demon of Python, the serpent, as as the fortune teller, basically, who would whisper through those fumes.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: But Apollo, the god Apollo in Greek mythology, came down, killed Python, and imbued his prophetesses with the spirit of Python, the dragon serpent at the heart of the earth.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what's happening 350 miles north.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a slave girl who's demon-possessed who has the spirit of Delphi, and so her owners are able to say, why would you want to travel for weeks, 350 miles, taking all your money down to Delphi, when you can actually speak to a Delphic oracle right here in Philippi?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so naturally she made a large profit for the consortium of owners by fortune telling.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as she followed Paul and us, she would cry out daily, these men who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation are the servants of the Most High God.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's a remarkable statement because she's one of the few demon-possessed people in the Bible who's actually telling the truth over and over and over again.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: She did this for many days, and Paul's greatly annoyed.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: You finally get sick and tired of even the devil stealing her thunder.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, turning to the Spirit, he said, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it came out right away.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care how powerful the demon is, a demon cannot stand even for a moment against the power of Jesus Christ, right?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when her master saw that their hope of profit was gone, did they care about the girl?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't care at all about the girl.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: They were like sex traffickers today.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: They just cared about the prophet.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so when they saw that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace, the agora, which we saw a moment ago before the authorities.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when they had brought them to the chief magistrates, they said, Quote, these men are throwing our city into confusion being Jews, and are proclaiming customs which it's not lawful for us to accept or observe, being Romans.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: What customs would those be?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Making money off of girls?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps, but it's uh they're just lying.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the crowd rose up together against them, and the chief magistrates tore their robes off them and proceeded to order them to be beaten with rods, and when they'd struck them with many blows, they threw them into prison, commanding the jailer to guard them securely, and he, having received such a command, threw them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 25 But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty impressive.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there came a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison house were shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone's chains were unfastened.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: When the jailer awoke and saw the prison doors opened, he drew his sword and he was about to kill himself.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that uh in those, and he probably was the son of a soldier, had been a soldier or whatever, and he knew that that's what happened back in chapter 12.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Remember when James uh got out of prison by the angel, the jailers were killed by Herod.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: So he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, because if you kill yourself, by the way, and you commit suicide, then your family's safe.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't kill yourself, then your family gets judged just like you do, because suicide was considered noble among the Romans.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: So he's about to kill himself, supposing the prisoners had escaped.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: But Paul cried out with a loud voice, saying, Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so the jailer called for lights, and he rushed in and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas, and after he brought them out, he said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: They said, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the King James, Christ, and you'll be saved, you and your household.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they spoke the word of the Lord to him together with all who were in his house, and he took them that very hour of the night and washed their wounds, and immediately he was baptized.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Second person who's baptized in our story, besides Lydia, and he and all his household.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he brought them, and that was in the middle of the night.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he brought them into his house and he set food before them, and he rejoiced greatly, having believed in God with his whole household.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty cool story, am I right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there's three game-changing moves that I see in this story.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, a spiritual woman discovers Jesus.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, a demon-possessed girl is presently singing.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can hear.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is uh is healed.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, for those of you across the street, it was a cell phone.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: It it's just speaking up.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh demon-possessed girl is healed.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And third, a desperate man is saved.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So let me share with you six game-changing moves that I see uh from this chapter.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, game changing move, singles and families story from the story of Lydia.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: I find that singles and families matter.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: To God.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: The world will tell you that God cares about great movements, God cares about huge churches or corporations or things like this.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what God's eye is on?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: God's eye is on singles.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like a man from Macedonia who says, come over and help us, like a slave girl who's demon-possessed, just uh, who knows, a teenager perhaps, a woman named Lydia, who perhaps doesn't have a husband, a jailer.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know much about him, but singles and their families matter to God.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Father's Day is important to him, read an article this last week.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Should we just get rid of Father's Day?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because we don't have as many fathers around, and that makes people who don't have fathers feel that.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, families matter to God, they're important.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so do singles.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: One person matters to God.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: You matter to God.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, no matter how spiritual you are, you're not spiritual enough to get into heaven.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine if Lydia had died, you know, right about, you know, before she'd met Paul?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know what people would have said?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: They would have stood up at the funeral and said, Wow, she's church going.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: On the Sabbath day, we went outside the city gate by the river.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And she was there.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we expected to find a place of prayer?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we found it.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: She was a praying woman.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Lydia was a praying woman.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: We sat down and spoke to the women gathered there.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: A God-fearing woman named Lydia.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: So she's a seeker.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: She's God-fearing.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: She believes in the one true God.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: She's clearly a spiritual woman.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: She's noble in every possible way.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And at a funeral, you can imagine, the people would have stood up, everybody who knows her, and put her in heaven for sure.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because she's spiritual, church-going and praying and God-seeking.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, isn't it interesting that her heart wasn't open, her eyes weren't open.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Lord opened her heart or eyes to respond to what Paul was saying.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And after she was baptized, she surged, if you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how spiritual you are, you're not spiritual enough to get into heaven.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to overestimate ourselves, don't we?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: And our and our good works.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we think we're qualified.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: As I was thinking about this this week, this picture came into my mind of something happened in my college career.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: God occasionally, through my life, has reminded me that I overestimate myself, like many of us do when it comes to our endeavors or good works or whatever.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: For me, in college was sort of divided into thirds, a third of my time I spent in eating and sleeping.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't want to, didn't want to do, I'd rather have played around, but had to eat and sleep.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: A third of my time was taken into going to interminable classes at Wheaton College and studying.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I wanted to reduce that part my life.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: The third part of my college career, what gave me the most delight, was playing games.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Primarily three games basketball, card game called Rook, and ping pong.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Table tennis, let's call it table tennis.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds so much better.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hours and hours and hours of ping pong.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: My best friend as a result was Pete Alvino.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: He was a Puerto Rican kid from inner city, New York City.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he and I played ping pong for hours almost every day.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then when every year the tournament came around, the university, the Wheaton College Tournament, 50-60 entered and so forth.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Each year he and I would finish one and two.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: He would always finish one, I would always finish two.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd look at each other and we'd say, We're pretty good.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'd say, No, we're not pretty good.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're really good.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: We weren't surprised when the sports department asked us to put on a show at halftime of a girls' basketball game, so we pulled out a to reenact our championship match, and so we pulled that out and we dove around the floor and we showed off and so forth.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then we thought we got to go a little wider with this thing.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we heard the Moody Bible Institute was bragging that they had the best uh ping pong players in the world, so we went down there and we we whooped up on them.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: We showed them stuff.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we were then really cocky.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: We came back and one day Pete Alvino said to me, you know, I've heard there's a Chicago table tennis club downtown.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we go downtown, get a world rating, a national rating, or whatever, and play down there?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that'll be a lot of fun, won't it?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, so we did.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we took the train downtown, went child, beautiful Chicago Table Tennis Club went in there with our paddles, carried our paddles with us.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Gotta, if you're cool, you've got to have your own paddle.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh smooth on one side, a little bumpy on the other.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: And um so the guy said, What's your ranking?
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, who shall I match up with?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have a ranking.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll give you a ranking, okay?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll we'll find out by the end of the evening what your ranking should be.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll start you both off uh playing somebody 11 points different.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I gotta give somebody 11 points.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, he said, we'll pair you up with somebody who'll give you 11 points.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I start off 11 to nothing?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Yeah.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I go, okay.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like that.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I figured for every five points switch through, if I get two out of five, then I win 2115.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm in pretty good shape there.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking pretty cocky.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: So he calls a guy named Long Chu or something like that, and he's about six foot three, and he's Chinese, and I get my paddle out and I hold it like I'm shaking hands, and he holds his like he's got chopsticks.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going, what?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then he proceeded to treat me the way some people with chopsticks treat their bowl of meat.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: The best I did was 21.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: We play three games, you play three games against these people, you play.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Best I did was 2118, and I started off with 11 points.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Needless to say, at the end of that night, as Pete and I took the hour-long train back west to Wheaton College, we did a lot of looking each other in the eyes and saying, wow, I thought we were better than that.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: What had happened is that we found out how good we really were, which wasn't very good.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, that's what happens in all of life, isn't it?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to think we're better than we actually are.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: We rate ourselves and we rate our spirituality and our goodness on a standard of our own creation.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And God says that's not the right standard.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Come down to the heavens table tennis club, show you a thing or two.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how spiritual you are, you're just not spiritual enough to get into heaven.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And neither is your best friend.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Even though they come to church, and even though they pray, and even though they're God-fearing, they need the Spirit to open their heart and have them respond with faith and trust Jesus as their Savior.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And let me let me say the third thing here: a note to seekers based on Lydia's story: if the Lord opens your heart or your eyes, same thing, same thing.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Heart includes your mind and eyes.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: If he opens your eyes, please don't walk out of this service without believing in Jesus.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Lessons four through six come from the other guy in our story who's converted.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the jailer.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the first lesson I learned here, lesson number four, is God does some of his best work in the dark.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was midnight, wasn't it?
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: When we're in the dark, we feel like evil is all around us, and God has deserted us and we're all alone.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way we feel.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, do you realize that at many of the greatest junctures in the Bible, it's been midnight or dark?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: When did God create the universe?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't there either.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I did read about it, and it says that it was dark and it was chaos, and there was no light at all until God said, Let there be light.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: A few thousand years later, there was a prophet named Jonah, and he was running away from a job God had gave him.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they threw him overseas at his own re over the shipside at his own request, and he gets swallowed up by a great fish.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we read in Jonah chapter 2 that it was utterly dark in there.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when he came to himself, and God moved upon him, and he said, Salvation is of the Lord.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: A great moment for him, but for the great city of Nineveh as well.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: How light was it at Golgotha when our Lord hung on the tree for those three hours?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was dark, wasn't it?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Completely dark, not a stitch of light, when he saved the entire world.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And three days later, when he was in the tomb, there was no light at all when God resurrected him from the grave.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, God does some of his best work in the light.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what he calls upon you to do, if you're in the dark right now, is to realize that he does some of his best work in the dark and to trust him.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Second, it takes an earthquake to wake some people.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: It does, doesn't it?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: It did with the jailer.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was, you know.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and sometimes you'll have shared the gospel with someone.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: A woman told me, you know, that she, every time she'd say anything about Christ or the gospel or church or anything, her husband would either turn the TV way up or he'd walk out.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: But when he had his third heart attack, I was an earthquake that caused him to say to her, you know, I've been re-evaluating some things.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's go over that whole thing again.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: People say, how did the jailer know to ask that question?
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: What must I do to be saved?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you read the whole story, don't you remember that slave girl?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine the jailer walking downtown to get his sword sharpened, buy a new pair of sandals, or just get Baskin Robbins or something, and then uh, and he hears this noise.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he sees these guys, you know, Paul, Silas, Luke, Timothy, whatever, he sees them and he sees this girl, this wild-haired girl that everybody knows, very famous, making loads of money, the fortune teller.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he hears her screaming out again and again and again, these men are servants of the Most High God to tell you the way of salvation.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Salvation.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: He probably didn't quite know what salvation that was, didn't fully understand it.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: But like a person that you've witnessed to who doesn't, who just turns you off, turns away, doesn't even listen, you need to believe that that gets internalized.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's a seed that goes down in their soul.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes in crisis, God sends an earthquake and it jolts that seed right out, comes to the surface.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: God uses an earthquake.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: And some people require a quake to wake up.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happened to the jailer.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that should give you hope and encourage you to share the gospel with someone who at this point simply rejects it.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, the gospel is simple.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Please, please don't muck it up.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Don't make it hard.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Why clutter up the simple gospel?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Jaylor says, What must I do to be saved?
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not even sure exactly, probably, what that means.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's just heard it so much.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they say, Well, you got to do this and you gotta do that.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: You need to go to church and need to pray, you need to change your life.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: But no, Paul says, say it with me, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.
• 34:03
  unknown: Wow.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: One of my heroes that I've never met, looking forward to meeting him in heaven, because he lived a couple hundred years ago, was a man of Scotland, sort of the Jonathan Edwards of Scotland.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: I've read books about him.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Name was Thomas Chalmers.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Chalmers was born a genius.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Just born one of those kids who was so bright and always studied and it was outgoing as well.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: He just seemed to have everything going for him.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Graduated from high school in Scotland, age 12, and graduated from university at age 15, being the top student in chemistry and astronomy and science and everything else.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Went to teach at the University of Edinburgh, teaching chemistry, teaching astronomy.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote pamphlets on astronomy that were just brilliant.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And teaching natural resources.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote the pamphlet that the government used to figure out all the natural resources of Scotland.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, he became a preacher.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: He became a clergyman.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: He was a lawyer and a clergyman.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: He became a clergyman by age 19.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now he had three doctorates.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: He had a doctorate in science, doctorate of laws, and doctorate of divinity.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he began preaching at a church at age 20.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was a clergyman.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: They said his voice, he had so, so eloquent, his voice was more sweet to listen to than the pipe organ behind him.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: His sermons were published in the national newspaper.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Chalmers, the most famous individual at age 20 in the entire country of Scotland.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: And still famous today, his statue in Scotland stands in Edinburgh.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Still one of the most famous people in Scottish history, Thomas Chalmers.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Later in life, Thomas Chalmers became famous for this statement.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you better get ready to say amen after this statement.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's that good.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: The best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world, Christ.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Can you say amen?
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: But Thomas Chalmers did not believe that when he was 20 or 21 or 22, the first eight years of his pastorate.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: He preached the law.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: He preached repentance.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: He preached thou shalt not.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: He thundered down against the sins that he knew were present in his parish, sins of thievery and sins of lust, all kinds of sins.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he preached against those sins for eight years solidly.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then some things happened.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: An earthquake, back four earthquakes happened in Thomas Chalmer's life.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: One, at age 28, he got deathly ill and he was afraid he was going to die for a while.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he sort of wondered about his own salvation, began looking at it.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, the Encyclopedia Britannica of that day of Scotland, of the British Empire, asked him, young him, to write the huge article on Christianity.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so he began reading through the whole Bible, summarizing all of theology for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: And number three, thing that happened is someone gave him a book about William Wilberforce, a famous man of that day who had helped Britain overcome slavery, but had a dramatic conversion in his life, though he was a very moral man, because he'd converted to amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saves a wretch like me.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: I once was lost, but now I'm found, but now.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: He wrestled with that, and he was stunned that it was actually a command that we could be expected, that lost men could be expected to believe.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: He got up off of his deathbed, finished his article on Christianity, went back into the pulpit.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: Four years later, he accepted a parish that was one of the largest in Scotland.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in his departing speech at a banquet for his church, he said, I'm a chemist and I've run an experiment the last 12 years here.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: The first eight years I preached repentance and the law, and not one of you changed.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not one of you could I point to about a change of life, but the last four years I preached Jesus Christ and grace, and we've seen an amazing revival.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's such a simple gospel.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: If there's any confusion in your heart or in your life right now, that the Lord's opening your eyes, don't believe without believing in the Lord Jesus Christ so that you can be saved.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the grace.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the law that leads us to Christ, but only condemns by itself.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the grace and mercy of your Son who died in our place for our sin and thereby paves the way for us to enter heaven and eternal life.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: I pray for lost people, Lord, lost people here in this room, lost people whom we know, lost people that we love.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: I pray that earthquakes will come into the lives of all who need to trust your son as their Savior.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: So they'll do that and have that life change, make that game-changing move that will change everything for them.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming.