Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 23, 2018 | 4 Things . . . About God - God Is In The Real Estate Business

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September 23, 2018 | 4 Things . . . About God - God Is In The Real Estate Business · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever been misunderstood?
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe misrepresented?
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever had someone think they know who you are only to finally meet you and say, Oh, you're not at all like I thought you were?
0:12
SPEAKER_00: We've all at different times been labeled.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: We've all had things assumed about us that aren't true.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: And the truth is, we do this with God too.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Millions of us go through life and we think we know all about God.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: We've heard of Jesus, we've heard of the Ten Commandments, we know most of the rules, but do we know who He truly is?
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Do we know what He's really like?
0:55
SPEAKER_01: So excited about this series.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: This is the third week of four, and I'll start off by telling you about Chester.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: Chester, the homeless dog, discovered five years ago wandering the streets of New York City as a stray and taken into an animal shelter.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: And he's been there ever since for five years, moved from shelter to shelter, a homeless, rootless, transient.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and maybe this is part of the problem that he's a uh pit bull mix, but he's so sweet and he's so cute.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: And after five years, finally, uh somebody took compassion on this eight-year-old dog, and they put an ad on Facebook for him, showing Chester with his brown eyes and his white-tipped paw leaning over his sign.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Why doesn't anybody want me?
1:46
SPEAKER_01: I've been waiting five years.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Everyone at the shelter tells me what a good boy I am.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: So why has no one adopted me?
1:55
SPEAKER_01: I promise to be good and love my new family.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: Please, maybe you are my new family.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: I sit and wait for you to come, Chester.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: And the same reason you go, oh, is why thousands of people immediately responded on Facebook from as far away as Australia and New Zealand and the first family that raced in, named the Door family, dad and mom and two boys, and they'd lost their two Yorkes five years before.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: They immediately connected with Chester and they took him home this summer.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that a great story?
2:36
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for coming today, I appreciate it.
2:40
SPEAKER_01: So, but you know, the story of Chester reminds me of the story, I think, of uh of America and of many Americans.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: Don't know whether you know it, but America.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: And Americans are the most rootless, roving, transient, footloose, homeless people on earth.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: The average American moves over 11 times in his or her lifetime, average European only four times.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: By the time you're age 30 in America, you'll generally have moved six times, and you'll move another five to six times during your lifetime.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: That's just the way we are.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: 40 million Americans get in moving vans every year.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: One out of seven of us move.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: It's so much different, isn't it, than our grandparents?
3:35
SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, your granddad, he was a local farmer, and your grandmother, she was the school mom, and they weren't just known in the community.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: They were considered irreplaceable.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: They knew everyone, and everyone knew them.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: But today, people, even who live 20 or 30 years in a place oftentimes don't put down roots.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: They're just there because of the job.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, today, if you go to Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, any major city in America, you'll find a subdivision outside that city, about which just recently a New York Times writer has written a book called Next Stop, Reloville, Relocationville.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: About the millions upon millions, by the way, I love subtitle of this, is Life Inside America's Rootless Professional Class.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: And he points out that any major city you go to in America today will outside of that city have a subdivision.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: And this is not a subdivision like those old subdivisions of little tacky houses.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: Even though all of these houses look pretty much the same and the cars and the driveways are pretty much the same.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: These are houses that sell from$300,000 to$800,000.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: And these are mid-level executives who work for companies which require that if you want to be upwardly mobile, you be willing to move every three or four years.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: And so these people come and they don't put down roots and they don't get involved in the local community and sometimes don't even find a local church in those three or four years.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: And they relocate.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: What a change has happened in our country from those days when we so valued putting down roots and being part of a community.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: How did things get so upside down?
5:23
SPEAKER_01: The author, Peter, asks.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, today, in my message, number three of Four Things I Wish You Knew About God, I've picked a controversial title that I think relates to this, entitled, I Wish You Knew that God is in the real estate business.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: And the reason I picked that title is I have a little bit, if you know me, a little bit of a rebellious streak inside, and I've heard people say just the opposite.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Even preachers have said something like this don't talk to me about the Jewish people and the promised land.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: That's ancient history.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: God's no longer interested in the land of Israel, he's not in the real estate business.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: I'm here to try to argue and convince you today from the Bible that they're wrong, that God is in the real estate business.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna take a look at the Bible and then I'll come back and try to relate this to our own longing for roots and for a place to be.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: So the first great piece of real estate in the Bible, uh it was called, do you remember?
6:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Garden of Eden.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: We call it Paradise.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: Of course, the serpent had another name for it.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: He called it the Big Apple.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: But uh, it was a place, it was a special place that God created for us, and God, like a realtor, puts out an ad for it almost in Genesis 2, in which he describes it in glowing terms as a place that had a garden and orchards and trees and a river running through it, a place where he liked to come down every single day.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: He loved it so much, and to meet with the two people he had created, Adam and Eve.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: It was home.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: But of course, you know the story.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: You know how it all came crashing down, how the serpent lied, and we believed him that God was really our enemy and not our friend, and was denying us the kind of knowledge that we should have.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: And in the end, we lost our place, we lost our paradise, we lost our home, and and uh one of the uh often uh overlooked messages of the whole Bible is that since we lost our home, we've longed always to return to it.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: And it's no accident that the last three chapters of the Bible in Revelation reflect in many ways, even verbally, the first three chapters of the Bible, as if Revelation says you're going to get to come back home to paradise.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: The next great piece of real estate in the Bible is, of course, the promised land, the land of Israel, the land of milk and honey, or as some of you prefer, cream and sugar.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, Jewish people like to joke about this.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: They joke that during the first days of creation, God turned to the angels and said, I'm going to create a beautiful land called Israel.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a land of mountains, of lakes, of forests full of all kinds of trees, of high cliffs overlooking sandy beaches, an abundance of sea life.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: God continued as he was speaking to the angels, saying, I'm going to make this land so rich that the inhabitants will prosper.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: I'll call the inhabitants Israelis and they'll be famous on earth.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: But Lord said the angels, don't you think you're being too generous to these Israelis?
8:45
SPEAKER_01: Not really, God said, wait till you see who I give them as neighbors.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: They like to tell that joke, I'm just telling you.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: Well, the truth is that Israel or the Holy Land is a piece of real estate that is extremely important and called holy to all three of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: All three of these faiths believe and teach in their holy books that the Holy Land was chosen by God to be a place of special significance.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: And so it's the most coveted piece of real estate in history, in the world, as proven by all the wars that have taken place between Jews, Muslims, Christians, and pagans down through the years vying for control of the land.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: So the Jews claim the land as theirs because they're the descendants of Abram's son Isaac.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: The Arabs claim the land as theirs because they say they are the descendants of Abram's oldest son, Ishmael, through his maid Hagar.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: They both agree that the land is holy, the Jews and Arabs, and they lay claim to it.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: Christians don't, we don't lay claim to the land.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: We believe it's holy.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: We cherish it because it's the land of the Bible, and because there our Savior Jesus came, he lived, he died, he rose again, it was from that land, he ascended into heaven.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: But we don't claim the land in the way that Jewish people and Muslims do.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: Now you may be surprised to hear what I tell you now.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and all three of these holy books, the Torah, the Holy Bible, and the Quran, agree that God, Allah in Islam, that God promised to give the land of Canaan to the children of Israel.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: The Bible and the Quran both call the Holy Land the promised land, citing the promise that God gave Abram and his descendants to give the land to Israel.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: It is true that in recent years some Palestinian leaders have come forth and said the Jews have never lived in Jerusalem.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: There was never a Jewish temple here.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: This has always been an Arab land.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: But in saying that, they deny not only history and archaeology, they deny their own holy book, the Quran.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: And a prominent Arab sheikh, for instance, in Jordan recently said, when any Muslim denies that Allah has given the holy land to the children of Israel, he is distorting the words of the Quran.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: And they all three, these three faiths, trace this giving back to words that God spoke to Abraham in chapter 12, 1 through 3 of Genesis.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: When he said to Abram, who lived at that time over in what we call Iraq, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land which I will show you.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: And I'll make you a great nation, and I'll bless you, and I'll make your name great, and so shall you be a blessing.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: And that's when God promised this man, this 75-year-old man, that he was going to give him this land.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: And from the moment that Abram believed that promise and left everything he knew as familiar, and traveled 500 miles west to Israel, from that moment he had, in a sense, ownership of the land.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: And when he landed there in Shekim in the northern part of Israel, the Lord appeared to him and said, To your descendants, I will give this land.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: It's astounding, however, that 4,000 years later this land is the modern state of Israel.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: Now, these twin promises of the land and a people to inhabit it were repeated by God over and over again to Abram and his descendants.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: In the next chapter we read, Genesis 13, the Lord said to Abram after Lot parted from him to go to Sodom, you remember?
13:03
SPEAKER_01: Lift your eyes up from where you are, Abram.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: Look north, south, east, and west.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: All the land that you see, I'll give to you and your offspring forever, and I'll make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone can count the dust, your offspring will be counted.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: Walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I'm giving it to you.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: The twin promises are there, the land and the people.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: Two chapters later, God said to Abram, I'm the Lord that brought you out of the land of Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to inherit it.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: Abram goes, How can I know this for sure in the next verse?
13:35
SPEAKER_01: And God does something remarkable.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: You ought to read it sometime in the latter part of Genesis 15.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: He says, Listen, and make a solemn covenant with you right now.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna make the, I'm gonna cut a covenant, literally, a blood covenant with you, like everybody else does when they make a solemn covenant.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: Get me a heifer, get a ram, and get a goat, and get a pigeon and a dove.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: Abram did.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: God said, Cut the heifer in half, cut the ram in half, cut the goat in half.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: It was a bloody mess.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: God said, put them just in.
14:03
SPEAKER_01: This is what happened in ancient uh Near Eastern covenants.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: So you would put the halves of the animals on either side, and you'd have a bloody path in the middle, and both sides of the covenant would walk through and basically say, Cross my heart and hope to die, just like these animals.
14:19
SPEAKER_01: And so God said, Okay, are you ready for it?
14:21
SPEAKER_01: Abram goes.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: Abram's on one side, God's on the other, and God snapped his fingers and put Abram to sleep.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Put him fast asleep.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: And God then, all alone, walked through and pronounced the covenant.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: I promise, I guarantee, by my name, by my faithfulness, by my character, that I will give you this land and give you a nation to inhabit this land, a people.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: And Abram never walked through as if God is saying, I can't trust you.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna make this dependent on you.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: This is a one-sided, unconditional covenant.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: No matter what you do, I'm gonna make sure this happens, which is fortunate in light of how Abram and his children and his descendants and Israel have acted since then.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: But it was an unconditional covenant.
15:03
SPEAKER_01: So as you go through the Old Testament, you find that God reiterated that covenant to Isaac after Abram died.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: Abraham died.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: God reiterated the covenant to Jacob and named him Israel after his dad Isaac died, and then reiterated it on and on.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: And when Israel went down to Egypt because of famine in the land, and the Egyptians took the captor for 400 years, God raised up Moses, who went down and took them out of Egypt to take them to what?
15:32
SPEAKER_01: The promised land, right?
15:34
SPEAKER_01: That land that he had promised, because it was a covenant and God had made that promise, no matter how you behave, which is good.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: But God said something to them at Sinai.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: He said, While you have title to the land, while you have ownership, you I may remove you from controlling it or possessing it or enjoying it for a while if you're disobedient.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: And so he did during the time of the judges, 1200 BC, 1100 BC, they would disobey.
16:01
SPEAKER_01: And God would bring other nations in to control the land and put the Jews in subjugation, and they would cry and weep, and then God would remove them, and the Jews would be in, Hebrews would be in control again.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: And then came the kings, and in the same way, most of the kings were bad, and God would send nations in to punish them and even kick some of them out of the land for a while.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: As if to say, listen, I told you, ownership and title, that's one thing.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: You've got that, but possession and enjoyment is another thing.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: And eventually God said, I'm so sick, I'm gonna send you into captivity.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: And he sent them to Babylon for 70 years.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: Remember that series we did from Ezekiel earlier this year?
16:43
SPEAKER_01: If you didn't follow that series, spend the next four days solidly, night and day, watching it.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm just kidding.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: But God said to the prophet Ezekiel, when they were far away in Babylon, in exile, God say this.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: God showed them a valley of dry bones and then said, Prophesy and say to them, Thus says God, Behold, my people, I'll open your graves.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: I'll cause you to come up out of your graves and bring you back into the land of Israel.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: Nine verses later, and say, This is what the sovereign Lord says.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to take the Israelites out of the nations where they've gone.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: I'll gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land and make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: And six verses later, you will live in the land that I gave your fathers.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: You'll be my people, and I'll be your God.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: The promise continued, even though Israel may not be possessing or enjoying the land.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: Five hundred years later, Jesus came.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: And now possessing and owning the land is not the Assyrians, it's not the Babylonians, the Babylonians, not the Persians, not the Greeks anymore.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: It's now the Romans.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: And the Jews and the Romans are, you know, have a difficult relationship.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: They hate each other.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: But the Romans are in control of the land.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus lives during that time.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: Born in 4 BC, he lives his life, grows up up north in Nazareth.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: He's a carpenter, and then he begins his three years approximately of ministry.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: And as you know, he he finally suffered, was crucified, and he died, was buried, rose again, and then he ascended into heaven.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: And all of this time Rome was in charge of this country that God had given title to the Jews to own.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: And 30 years later, in keeping with a warning that Jesus had given his followers, 30 years later, a great war began.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: What happened in 63 AD is that the Roman garrison, the commander of the garrison, came to the high priest there in the temple and he said, from now on, no more sacrifices to Yahweh God.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: From now on, only a daily sacrifice to the emperor Nero.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: The priest, of course, said no.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: And the Romans killed some Jews, and then the Jews annihilated the garrison at Jerusalem.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: And then there was a big uprising over in Caesarea on the coast, and the great Jewish revolt, the Jewish war of 67 to 73 AD was on.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: Vespasian was the general that Rome sent to conquer Judea, it was called at that point.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: Later they would call it Palestine.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: But so Vespasian was the general, he started up and conquered finally, after a few years, he conquered Galilee, and then he went down, but at that point Nero died, and so Vespasian went back to be the emperor in Rome and left his son Titus, who then conquered Jerusalem and burned the temple in 70 A.D.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: And it was at that moment, at that moment, that Israel ceased being a nation.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't until modern day, nearly 1900 years later, in 1948, that Israel would become a nation again.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: But that was what happened in 70 AD, and it was Tishaba on that day, the day of mourning, the exact same day on the calendar that Nebuchadnezzar had burned Jerusalem, way back in 600 BC.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: On that day, Jerusalem burned and the Jews wept.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't until 73 A.D., by the way, until Mazada fell, that Rome act, that that war actually ended.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: But from that moment for the next 1900 years, the Jews, though they always kept a presence and a population in the land, theirs been spread all over the world far more than any other minority, all over the world, spread into Asia, into Africa, into Europe, and then later on into America as well.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: But during that time, as you know, it's been a difficult time for them, even more difficult than it was before Jesus came and before the fall, and before they were expelled.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: But during this time, during this period of time, first of all, there were those Jews in the land were underneath the Romans until 400 AD, and then after that, the Byzantine Christians came along and were in charge of the land.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: And after the Byzantine Christians, then the Muslims came in about 600 A.D.
21:09
SPEAKER_01: And after the Muslims came, then came the uh the Crusaders in 1100, 1200 A.D., and then came the Mamluks, and then the Ottoman Turks, all the way up to World War I, when Britain conquered the Ottoman Turks.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: All of these people were in control of the land, not Israel, though Israel always kept the presence of the land.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: But when you think about that, you've got to be amazed.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: Amazed just in a historical sense, because civilizations, kingdoms, and nations go through a typical cycle.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: They rise and then they get strong and rule, and then they fall, and then they fade.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: And usually their length of existence is only 50 or 100 or 200 or 300 years.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: And that's what's happened to all these other civilizations: Assyria and Babylon and Persia and Greece.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Rome and on and on and on.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: Every other ancient civilization, especially in Mesopotamia, in this region where none of the lands are defensible, no natural defenses, and so the kingdoms are always rising and falling, except for one nation, except for one group.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: It's the Jewish people.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: Somehow, thousands upon thousands of years later, for 4,000 years, they can trace their presence in the Holy Land way back to Abraham.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: It's a miracle, it's a God thing, it's a thing that can only be explained by the supernatural.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: And in the 1600s, in the 17th century, when King Louis XIV asked the most brilliant man in France, name was Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician, the inventor of the first sort of computer, a Christian philosopher.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: Asked him, What proof do you have that there's a supernatural?
22:51
SPEAKER_01: And Pascal answered, quote, Why the Jews, your majesty?
22:56
SPEAKER_01: The Jews.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: What an astounding answer by such a brilliant man when asked, How do you know there's a supernatural?
23:04
SPEAKER_01: He mentions the Jews, but he explained to Louis XIV.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: That here it was in the 17th century, and in all this time, when civilizations and nations rise and fall and fade from the annals of time, the Jews still existed.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: And this was over 300 years ago.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: And since in that time, many other scholars and writers and important people, even people you'd never expect, have realized the same thing in 1899, writing in Harper's Magazine.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: The well-known skeptic, called himself an atheist at times, an agnostic, Mark Twain, wrote this: the Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded and passed away.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: The Greeks and Romans followed, made a vast noise, and they are gone.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Now are vanished.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: All things are mortal, but the Jew.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: All other forces pass, but he remains.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: What is the secret of his immortality?
24:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, you and I know.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we haven't thrown away the Bible or God like Mark Twain did, and so we know the answer.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: We know that it's a God thing.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: We know that it's a promise that God gave to Abraham and to his descendants, that until the end of time, that God would give a land and a people to the Jewish folks.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: And during these 1900 years, spread as they are over all the world, the Jews have always looked back and longed for Jerusalem again, longed to have that homeland every year, whether in Russia or Argentina or wherever they are, they celebrate Passover and then look at each other and conclude next year in Jerusalem.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: And what happened in this last hundred years, this miracle is that it has happened again.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: They have returned.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: They've become a nation again in sort of a three-step process.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: It started 100 years ago in 1917 during World War I.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: The British, as they were in the Holy Land kicking out the Ottoman Turks and fighting, published what's called the Balfour Declaration, in which they publicly announced the British government did, that they believed that His Majesty's, and I quoted His Majesty's government, view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will work toward that end.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: That was in 1917, and then five years later, the League of Nations, remember what's the precursor of the United Nations, the League of Nations affirmed that in what was called the Mandate for Palestine.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: And then 25 years later, after World War II and the horrible Holocaust, with the help of President Harry S.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: Truman and others and Americans, the United Nations affirmed that.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: And as a result, in 1948, on May 14th, the Jewish people in Israel proclaimed independence, stated that they were a nation again.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: It had been 1900 years, but in tears and in joy, they celebrated their independence for 24 hours, and then the Arab nations surrounding Palestine invaded, attempting to eradicate and destroy this new nation.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: It's just astounding what's happened.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, every nation on earth, can I mention this, chooses where their capital is.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: In 1948 and 1949, Israel declared that its capital was Jerusalem, as the professor of international law at Northwestern University says, every nation chooses their own capital and no other nation has any say in it.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: And so Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and is its government center and its religious center and so forth.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: And America's leaders and many other leaders across the world have always acknowledged this.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: America's leaders have always kept promising to move their embassy to the Capitol, but kept kicking the can down the road because of fear and political reasons and so forth, saying we promised we'll move to Jerusalem where the Capitol is, just not today, maybe tomorrow, until this past year, right?
27:19
SPEAKER_01: When we announced America said we're going to move it to Jerusalem.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: And all hell broke loose.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: Oh, actually, in Jerusalem, tens of thousands of Israelis went out on the streets and jumped up and down and screamed with joy and happiness that finally we were going to recognize reality.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: The Arab nations threatened war and said it might be the end of the world, and talking heads in the West, including America, said it could be the worst decision, that war might break out.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: And the funny thing is that absolutely nothing has happened.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: It's been months.
27:49
SPEAKER_01: Nothing's happened, nothing will happen.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: It hasn't provoked a huge war.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: And as I speak, America is hard at work spending money, building a new embassy in Jerusalem.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: But I say that to get to this, because Jerusalem, God says, may be or may not be your capital, but it's my capital.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: And one day, when I come back, I'm going to establish my capital in Jerusalem because it's the city I love and it's the place where I am going to rule.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: And now we begin to draw the tentacles, shall we say, or the parts of my message together.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: I end the first part, which I started by saying God is into real estate.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: He's in the real estate business.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: It started with the Garden of Eden until we sinned, and then it continued to the promised land, which all religions agree God gave to the sons of Abraham, the children of Israel.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: And then as you went on, God reaffirmed that promise, and it's an unconditional promise.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: And Jay Sekulo this year, in a book published six months ago called Jerusalem, which I got to read this last week or two, said, as I've defended Israel, both in and out of court, I've heard the counter-argument.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: God is not in the real estate business.
29:10
SPEAKER_01: In the case of Israel, however, this claim is absolutely untrue.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: But importantly, God says, in a coming day, upon my return, I'll establish my capital in Jerusalem, and the whole world will stream to worship me there.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: Now, here's the real question: what difference does this make to us?
29:35
SPEAKER_01: And how does this relate to how I began the message?
29:38
SPEAKER_01: Talking about how we are the most rootless, homeless people in the world.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to make, uh I want to say four words that actually draw this thing together and answer the question.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: What difference does this make to me?
29:51
SPEAKER_01: The first word is friendship.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: What I mean by that is that this whole thing is a friendship issue, that if you love God, if you call God friend, then you need to care about what God cares about, and you will care about what God cares about, and God cares about a piece of real estate called Jerusalem.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: You know how you have friends who love their hometown or they love some place where they've been and they're talking, they always talk about Hong Kong or they or they gush about Hawaii or Paris or Prague or Rome or Rio or Montreal or Manhattan, Kansas, and they're just, you know, they can't stop talking about it, and they can't change their tune.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, when you when you talk to God, God's always gushing about Jerusalem.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: No less than 700 times in his word.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: He dropped, name drops Jerusalem.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: Another 150 times he uses the nickname for it, Zion.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: He said, It's mine, I love it, I chose it.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: It's my capital and the capital of my land.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: And my point is this that if you love God, if you call him friend, you'll care about what God cares about.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: And God, the one you love, cares about Jerusalem.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: The next word is blessing.
30:57
SPEAKER_01: This should be no surprise to you, but unfortunately, it may be a surprise to some people, and that is that if you want God's blessing, then you've got to love Jerusalem.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: He said it when he said to Abraham, those who bless me, those who bless you, I will bless.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Those who curse you, I will curse.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: He said in Psalm 122, 6, pray for the peace of Jerusalem, those who those they will prosper, those who love you.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think it's any um surprise that when you go down through history and look at the nations that have opposed and hated Israel, from Haman of Persia all the way up to Hitler and so forth, you see nations which have been destroyed, which have lost, which have faded from history.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's any surprise then that America is the most successful nation that has ever existed and that has existed for as long as we have already, because we are oftentimes Israel's only friend, and certainly Israel's best friend.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: Our nation loves Jerusalem.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: Some of us don't so much, but as a nation, we have supported Jerusalem, and as a result, I think have been blessed.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: And if you want God's blessing, you must love Jerusalem.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: The third word is longing.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: We've all felt the loss of home.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: We all feel a longing for a place to call home.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: Even if you've moved, whether you've moved dozens of times in your life or only a few times in your life, it is likely that you've lost your childhood home.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: I've lost mine, even though our family lived in it for 60 years.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing about that home that anyone would want.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: In fact, as it was being torn down just a couple of years ago, I saved only one thing that I wanted.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: I went back and got a brick.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: Because it was a brick home.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: A tiny little home.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: Every single mattress in that home, there were 12 of us there, either had one Grand Canyon dip in the middle, or else two, if two of us boys slept in the same cot.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: There was no TV ever.
33:05
SPEAKER_01: There was nothing, we left the doors unlocked because there was nothing that anybody would ever want to steal.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: But it was our home.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: It was our 1,400-foot home, and 12 children were raised in that tiny little home.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: And there's something about that home that no one would else ever uh no one else would ever value.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: But it was something that uh that that felt like a loss when finally, after mom and dad died a few years ago, we finally, finally sold it.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: And we each brought one or two things from it.
33:35
SPEAKER_01: I got this brick.
33:37
SPEAKER_01: My little sister, uh Ruth, who lives here in Topeka, had helped paint the sign that we put over our barn called Congon's Cow Castle.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: And she shares this this morning.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: She pulled it off since she had helped paint it when she was about eight years old.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: And that's what gives her the memory.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: And all I'm saying is that I think each of us have a longing for a home that we have lost.
34:01
SPEAKER_01: I think that's God has put that in us to remind us of the longing for paradise that we have lost, which leads us to the fourth word, and that is home.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: Everyone needs a place to call home.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: That's a theme of habitat for humanity, and I think it's spot on.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: And God says that place is being prepared for you.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: That's the promise of Jesus.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: So you and I have this longing.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: We've left home, we have this longing for home.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: And on the other hand, as we read the Bible, we find that God's into real estate, and the place he loves is he loves Israel and loves Jerusalem.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: And he says, one day I'm coming there, and if you love me, if you're gonna be one of my people, you're going to come there too.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: And that's gonna be home.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm preparing a place for you.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: It's called heaven, it's called the New Jerusalem, and that's gonna be your home.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: Sense it, feel it, love it.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: A couple of years ago, a movie was put out.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: It was not a documentary, but it was based upon a true story.
35:08
SPEAKER_01: This movie called Lion Two Years Ago was about a five-year-old boy that got lost named Saru.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: Saru grew up in a sort of a hamlet, a little village with no name on the outskirts of a rather big city of uh that no one's ever heard of in the southwestern part of India.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: And as a five-year-old boy growing up, he loved his older brother and they would scrounge for coins and for scraps of food on trains to help their impoverished mother and their siblings.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: And what happened is that uh his older brother had a job a ways away, and so five-year-old Saru would follow him out of town a ways, and uh and would play around or would fall asleep under a tree or in this sort of abandoned train waiting for his brother to come back and they would go back home.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: And one day in 1986, Saru fell asleep inside this empty train that was not being used.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: And when he woke up, hours later, he was panicked and hungry, and the doors were locked as that train had been recalled all the way across India to Calcutta, and he was already hundreds of miles away from his hometown, which he didn't even know the name of.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: His village had no name, the city he couldn't think of.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: He couldn't have found where he lived in India on a map.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: And when he finally landed, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away in one of the largest cities in the world, Calcutta, and he got off that train, he found he could not even communicate because he spoke Hindi and the dialect in Calcutta was Bengali.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: So he couldn't tell anybody anything and they didn't care, and so he simply wandered, a five-year-old wandering the dangerous streets of Calcutta for weeks.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: And he hunted for scraps of food and drank from faucets.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: At one point, he ran away from a gang of boys who were abducting homeless children.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: And as he was wandering around in a market one day, another teenage boy, a teenage boy, looked at him and watched him for a while and realized that he was homeless and that he couldn't communicate and took him home and then took him to an orphanage.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: And Sarew lived in that orphanage until an Australian couple named John and Sue Brierly came and saw him and adopted him out of that orphanage and took him to Australia and then out of compassion adopted another Indian boy so that Sareo would have a playmate.
37:44
SPEAKER_01: And he grew up in a wonderful home in Australia, a home that was happy, a home that was full of love, and yet always, always Ceru thought back of his old village.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: He didn't know the name of it, he couldn't find it if he had no idea, but he said he remembered three or four things.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: He remembered the smell of dust.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: He remembered the screech of breaks, he remembered the sounds of shouting, and he remembered the beauty of his mother's face.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: Ceru grew up to be an adult down in Australia.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: And then with the encouragement of his parents, of his adoptive parents, and his own obsession, he decided to do whatever he could to find his old home.
38:31
SPEAKER_01: And he found Google Earth on his computer.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: Google Earth, which is a mechanism where it shows all parts of the earth and you can zoom in.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: And he started this obsessive year-in, year-out pattern of hours every night, zeroing in on villages in India that were anywhere close to a railroad track to see if he would recognize anything about them.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: And one night he saw a water tower, after five years, a water tower that looked kind of familiar.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: And he zoomed in, he thought, that train platform, that looks kind of familiar.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: That little narrow bridge, that ravine, and with the help and the money of his adoptive parents, he went back over to India, to this village and wandered around.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: And he began smelling that dust again and hearing the screech of brakes and hearing shouting voices.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: And then some villagers took him in hand when he explained his problem, and they took him to the home of an elderly woman who looked at him, and a look of recognition came in, and she reached out and touched her little boy.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: And Saru realized he had finally come home.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: That story won awards in a movie a couple of years ago, but it's the story I think of you and of me, of people who are in a sense born under a wandering star and have gotten trapped far from home.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: We don't quite know how to get back.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: And God says, Listen, you actually left paradise and you're my children.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: If you'll come back to me, come back to my son Jesus Christ, look at him on the cross, loving you, dying for you.
40:09
SPEAKER_01: I'll bring you home to my place.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: I'll prepare a place for you and you'll be with me.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: And if you love him, you'll love that place.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: If you're his friend, you'll care about that place.
40:22
SPEAKER_01: And one day you'll get to go home to that place.
40:26
SPEAKER_01: We call it heaven, we call it paradise, and God calls it the New Jerusalem.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna get to go there one day, and all our longings and all our hopes will be fulfilled.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: Join me in a word of prayer, will you?
40:40
SPEAKER_01: Father, we're so grateful that you don't just care about our souls, that you care about our bodies as well.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: You say that you want our bodies to come serve you in your household.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: You want our bodies to be soldiers in your army.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: You want our bodies one day to come and join you where you are, in your place, in your home, in our home.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: Lord, I pray for the people within the sound of my voice that they'll recognize that that longing inside them is a longing for a home, for a crib that once was enclosed and once was safe, and it's there to be had again one day in the New Jerusalem.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: Father, I ask that people who are uh who've heard this message will say, Lord, I love you.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: I love your place, I love your home.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: I want to come to your home.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: Bring me to your home, Lord Jesus.
41:39
SPEAKER_01: It's in his name that we pray.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for coming.