Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 4th, 2015 | Route 66 - Intro

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January 4th, 2015 | Route 66 - Intro · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Are you ready for this?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm as excited as a dog with two tails.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you to open your Bibles to the last book of the Bible, Revelation chapter 19.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Revelation four verses in Revelation chapter 19 to get us started.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw, this is verse 11, Revelation 19, 11, and I saw heaven opened.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine that.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And behold, a white horse.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he who sat on it called faithful and true.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And in righteousness he judges and wages war.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: His eyes are a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems or crowns, and he has a name written on him, which no one knows except himself.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: He's clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called, get this, the Word of God.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Verse 16.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And on his robe and on his thigh, he has a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Father, uh, we're so excited about what will happen one day.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking forward to the day when everything gets set straight.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Your son is revealed and rescues us, rescues the world and then rules over it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we will be happy forever and ever.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: We thank you that uh we get a chance to open your word and study it for the next uh year or two in a special way, and we ask that you would honor us as we do that by revealing to us the wonderful secrets hidden in these pages.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And in Jesus' name, amen.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is an introductory message called Rev Your Engines, and um thought I'd chat with you about a few things about uh where the series came from and why I want to do the series now, and um and then share with you something very important about the whole Bible, and we'll take communion.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that's a lot to do.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll start right off.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, 20 years ago, I preached a series called Root 66 here at Topeka Bible Church.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: That was before we were able to put stuff like that on a video.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that series came out of uh my doctoral studies.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: I uh was uh uh this church was generous enough to allow me, even while preaching here, pastoring here, to go up and it took six years, but to get my doctorate up in uh North Chicago, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And in the process of taking that, uh one of the professors said at one point, just casually, he said, and he's a famous professor, so I I respected what he said, he said, if you've been in a church for 20 years, you should have preached through the Bible in that amount of time.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, on one hand, I I I resisted that.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, I mean, how in the world, in just 20 years, do you, you know, a thousand Sundays, do you um preach the 13,000 chapters of the Bible?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I mean, isn't that really impossible?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought through, I thought, well, I I I've sort of, I took five of those years, I because I was coming up on about 20 years at that point, just a few more years, and I thought, uh, I took five years for Romans, another four or five years for John.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I sort of, you know, and and then it struck me, you know, what I might be able to do is to preach from Genesis to Revelation one sermon per book.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't sure that that would even be reasonable, possible, or even Christian.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, thought it might be a sin to treat the Bible that way.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: I called a couple of different seminaries, called a couple uh several seminaries, the professors in preaching departments, and uh and I said, listen, this is what I'm thinking of doing at my church and making it my doctoral project, which it became.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And is it even possible?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is it even right?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I vividly remember uh the the explanation that one uh uh prof professor that I'd never met, I've met him since, great guy, he said, you know, that that's it's gonna be hard to do, but I think it's exactly right.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever preached through a book?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: I said, have I?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, he said, you're just elevating the categories.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, he said, you know, when you preach through a book, you divide it up.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you take it uh Philippians 1, 2, 3, and 4.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: But he said, what you're gonna be doing, now you're just preaching a different book, a bigger book, the whole book, the 66 uh books of the Bible, but the Bible is one book.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: And in the same way, individual books have a theme, have a message.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: The whole Bible really has a message, and and you can divide it up, but but it'll be hard.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: He said, It'll be hard to preach some of those big books, and says, you won't really be able to do them justice, probably.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: But he said, yes, it is possible.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did do that from 1993, four, five, six.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I preached through those 66 books here.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was a lot of work, but it was valuable, turned it into about a 160-page project, defended it before the faculty in 1996 up at school, graduated, and so forth.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And and it was the most popular series I have ever done here.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I never thought about doing it again until uh a month ago, you know, I was thinking about praying about what should be my next series.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Last year or two, I've been doing these series is four, six, eight, ten-week series is you know, simplify, for example.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a longer one a couple years ago, we did we read through the New Testament, and I preached, preached the New Testament four months.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but I'd ask some people, I asked my wife, and I asked then some younger folks, uh, you know, what, you know, if they had any ideas.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife surprised me by coming to me and saying, you know, I think you ought to do Route 66 again.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Not just because it was so popular, but she said, I've forgotten everything you ever said about.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, no, I think I think that'd be really valuable.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I ran that by some of the some of the younger people.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're very enthusiastic about that.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, there are there's some real good reasons to do that.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for for one thing, uh the Bible has really fallen completely off the radar in the public sphere in America.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it, you know, maybe even 20 years ago it wasn't on a pedestal, but it is it is as though today all of our uh all of our instructors, our school teachers, and our national leaders have completely forgotten.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's like there's a memory lapse, they've completely forgotten that for hundreds of years, prime ministers and kings and presidents have unashamedly and very easily said we base our laws, laws of this country and our policies upon the Holy Scriptures.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Some of the stuff's still written on the buildings, you know, in Washington, D.C.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: We know that's changed.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: We know that people are ashamed to speak of the Bible in public today.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and actually there we have no legal recourse anymore to expect that the Bible will be used at all in the classroom or the courtroom.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm dealing with an issue right now in town about that.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's just legally the that cannot be done anymore.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we have come to expect that the Bible will disappear, will be snubbed in our magazines and on our television shows.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: But the calamity is that some of this, like an Ebola virus, has has seeped out of our TV room and has made it into our living rooms and our bedrooms, and especially into the minds and the hearts of the young and the innocent among us, so that the Bible is, in a sense, snubbed by many of us as well.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so sometimes what we do is we try to meet that uh need with Bible surveys.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm all for the chronological Bible, for geographical and chronological and historical studies of the Bible.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: I myself have taught a number of those courses in Old Testament survey, New Testament survey, and those are valuable because they let you know whether or not Esther comes first or Abraham comes first and when the Exodus is, and so forth, and you move your way through the Bible in that way and you learn.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is, of course, that that then that majors on the historical narrative books of the Bible.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: So Genesis fits in well because it's got thousands of years.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Starts at creation, goes down to 1800 BC, and and and so you got a lot of history there with Adam and Eve and Noah and uh Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's also good for the other narrative books, say, of the Old Testament, like Joshua, Judges, uh, 1 Samuel.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not so good, is it, for the poetical books, like Job or the Song of Solomon.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: That chronological survey has no place to grab hold of when you come to the 150 chapters of the song book called the Book of Psalms, or the books of uh the books of prophecy like Joel and Revelation.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: You see, a historical, a survey of the Bible doesn't hit those, does it?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Those sort of slip through the cracks.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Fine for the gospels, but a survey is not so good for the epistles.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is a rather unique and rare way of approaching the Bible.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I I dare say you probably have never been to a church where this has been done.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's rare and it's a difficult thing to do, where you actually look at the words of the Bible and you take each of the books and you try to figure out what the theme of that book is, and then you teach the book as you go through and somehow try to pull that off in 35 minutes.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I think speed is actually an advantage.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's an advantage, I think, uh, many times.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when my kids were young, we'd sit at the dinner table.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: One of the games that I used to play to them, I used to have to wait until all of the food was out of our teeth before we would play this game.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we'd wait till the end, and then I'd say to them, kids maybe be uh 10, 8, 6, and 1, or well, you know, anybody know the books of the Bible in order?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I do, I do, I do, because that's that's uh uh, you know, one thing we insisted on.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I my folks insisted on it.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: I get no credit for memorizing them because my folks insisted on it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, every parent insists on some things.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta learn how to kick a soccer ball or to shoot a basketball or to run fast or play an instrument or whatever, but we also insisted on things like memorization.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so they knew the books of the Bible.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd say, okay, but here's the catch.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Can any of you say the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation in one breath?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, no, I say for a dollar.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they go, oh, well, money was pretty important.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's main motivator, right?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so they try.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Genesis, Exodus, gasp, and they're done.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: And um, but but then they'd take another run at it, and they'd try to get up, and maybe they'd get up to Psalms or maybe even part way through the prophetic books, get close to the end of the 39 books of the Old Testament.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'd always say, Would you like, would you like me to try?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, we'd like you to try.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so then, you know, I'd turn it into a game where I pretended it as always going to be hard, you know, and where I so I'd nearly run out of breath at the end of the Old Testament and start staggering through the gospels and get to Corinths and Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, you know, and so forth.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and then they're starting to scream and they're grabbing hold of the place that think you're willing to die rather than not finish.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, and finally you gasp out revelation, you know, and yeah, and they cheer.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, then on the same breath, you whip through and do it a second time, and then it loses all the fun.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but I think there's real value.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I'd suggest if you're a parent and you have children, that you find fun ways to do things just extra.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Just do things like that.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Have them memorized verses, have them memorized them.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Try to, I when I help with a wanna, I try to get the kids to say the verses as fast as possible.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and and when I had my kids checking me to see if I knew the books, you know, I'd throw in things like uh uh first and second Fleshelonians and the book of Hezekiah and and and and and second and third capitulations just to see if they can catch them.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, some of that stuff, you know, you can make it fun.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: So all of that is extra.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: But but I'm I think that's doing it fast.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're not gonna we're gonna be very modest here.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna try to do it on one breath.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do over 66 Sundays, which is which is hard for books like next week's Genesis, you know, which is 50 chapters and covers thousands of years and covers prehistory in the first 11 chapters.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I would suggest uh I'll try to help you through this.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna hand out study sheets each week, come up with a little notebook, you can put them in, and I'll put we'll post online and so forth, chapters that you can read out of each book that'll help you prepare for the following Sunday.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've just suggest for Genesis, if uh if you wanna if you want to read, just read the first 21 chapters, three chapters a day of Genesis, you you know, it takes you right up to Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that'll be a great preparation for next week.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna help you through that because I'd like this to be something that you really enjoy and that it that it be instructive, but also life transformative and fun.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, sort of like my Israel tours.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I like instructive, transformative, and especially fun.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: So so that's that's gonna be the goal.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Some books will be easy, uh like Philemon, you know, one chapter, you know, and some books will be hard.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Psalms is tough, 150 individual chapters in a songbook, you know.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Isaiah is tough.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's got more words in the 66 chapters than Psalms has, and it's 150.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: But some books will be easy.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll meander our way.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Isaiah will only get one sermon in 3rd John, uh, short as it is, we'll get one sermon as well, and we'll make it through, and and at times we'll dress up and and I will be the character who wrote the book.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's gonna be valuable for you, and and that's why uh I'm doing it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I think we need it.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that in the in the same way uh that the Route 66 started in the starts in the cornfields of Illinois and then drops down through the waterways of Missouri before cutting across a corner of Kansas, and then hitting Tulsa and Oklahoma City, going into you know western Oklahoma, and then going down into the deserts of West Texas, then moving into the uh scrub of New Mexico, and then meandering through the canyons and the ravines of Arizona before coming over the mountain and down into the sand country and the beach of California, where it ends in LA, in the same way the Bible does sort of the same thing.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with the character sketches of Genesis, those stories of each of these very interesting patriarchs before moving into the Red Sea and then the legal literature of Exodus and Leviticus, and out into the barren wilderness of Numbers, you know, in Deuteronomy, before it hits the wars of Joshua and Judges, and then love story of Ruth, and then the poetry of Job and the music of Psalms, the Gospels of Jesus, and then to the classroom of those epistles of Paul before heading to the coasts, to the far coast of Revelation, where the Lord Jesus comes and appears to us, and it all ends and it all ends well.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: We have it's just it's a really nice parallel, I think.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that you'll enjoy it because I think it's exactly what we need.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: We'll hit historic Route 66, our root uh road trip through 66 books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the we and one reason we need this, of course, is that we live in a day when even things that were once nailed down have completely come loose here in America.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Things that were nailed down just 20 years ago about marriage have completely been pulled loose.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I cannot help thinking of a verse in Ecclesiastes 12 where the writer says that the words of Scripture, he says are like it's translated, goads in the King James.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's firmly embedded nails.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: What we might call, what mountain climbers might call uh mountain bolts, anchor bolts.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the these words of scripture are like railroad spikes hammered into the rock, by which we can hang on and survive and climb the mountain of life.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that is what we really need.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so we need to go through the Bible, I think, in this way.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: Some of you uh will remember that a couple hundred years ago, mail was uh kind of an iffy thing.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: And over here at St.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Joe, Missouri, uh started the Pony Express.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: They found 40 terrific riders and and got 500 of the best horses that the West could offer.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And and and they they bragged that they could make it all the way, Mel Canada, all the way from St.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Joe, Missouri to Sacramento, California in just 10 days, which is about how long it takes today.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: But to do that, of course, these these riders were told that they had to travel light.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: The horses had small horseshoes, sometimes no horseshoes at all.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: The riders uh uh dressed lightly, even though they were gonna have to go sometimes through sleet, hail, and snow.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: They did not wear heavy clothing.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: They did not uh carry a gun, even though they might go through hostile territory with animals and with Indians, because the gun was considered too heavy.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: And if you were gonna write a letter, you you could not send the regular letter.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: You had to find this thin onion paper, and you had to send it on this very thin paper, and then they'd still charge you an astounding amount in that day, five dollars an ounce.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had these flat saddlebags and they would gallop.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: But but listen, uh one thing that every Pony Express rider carried, though he didn't carry a weapon, and though he didn't carry a heavy coat, is he carried a Bible.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't just carry the New Testament plus Psalms and Proverbs, or those he carried a full-size Bible with all 66 books in it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because back then they knew what we have forgotten today.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: That the Bible is that place where you have uh where you have firmly embedded nails, where you have uh uh entrenching tools where we can survive the difficulties of life, and that's what we're going to discover.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh one other thing I want to do is I want to step back from the 66 books this morning for for just a moment and do what you and I both do when we take a cross-country trip.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Mel and I took a uh drove up to Toronto uh this last week and drove back uh through the night again Friday night and so forth, 18 hours either way.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Before you take a trip like that, uh you know, you you stand back and you look at the whole trip as it goes up South Chicago and West Detroit and so forth.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: As you take the trip, of course, you're involved in each one of the states and and and so forth.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to do that this morning for the whole Bible.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: I want to step back and take a look at what has often uh been a source of great disagreement among scholars, and that is is there a theme to the Bible?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: To the whole Bible, all 66 works.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a single idea that controls all of the elements of the Bible?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a number of books written on this.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: What is the heart?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a common theme?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I would submit to you in the I have a short time, so I'm gonna get right to it.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: The theme of the Bible, in my view, of all 66 books, is that God will break in from outside.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: God breaks in to rescue and to rule his creation.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's very important.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think that that's the picture that I read to you at the beginning.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the picture of uh of God, you know, on that white horse coming in at the end of time.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think you find this throughout the Bible.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: The Lord, Psalm 103, has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: We pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: We are told that at the end of time every knee shall bow, that Jesus, for Jesus Christ is Lord.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's gonna say that.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: But God has to come in and he has to rescue us from the mess we're in and and and and then establish, re establish his rule over us.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I just want to say something about those two things because I think those are the two things that you and I, you know, uh need to think about this morning.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Morning before we get into this study.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: The reason God has to break in and rescue us is, of course, that we've gotten lost, or we're broken, or we're in the mire, or we're in the dark, and we're in a prison, and we are handcuffed to rebellion and sin.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the prison is owned by our enemy, Satan, and to paraphrase James Taylor.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: All of our hopes and dreams in life are like flying machines and pieces on the ground.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so God comes in and he rescues us because we desperately, before anything else can happen, we need to be rescued.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was a year ago this month up in Michigan that an 80-year-old woman, a lady named Kathleen St.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Ange, stepped out of her house into her garage.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was bitterly cold, 20 degrees colder than it is right now.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it was icy, and she slipped and she fell in her garage and she broke her hip or something and she could not move.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And she prayed to God these words.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: She said, Lord, if if if you if you don't send somebody to find me, if no one discovers me, I am going to die.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And she just laid there, uh uh praying, um, Lord, if somebody doesn't find me, I'm going to die, for half an hour, and then an hour, and then an hour and a half.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and a car went by.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: An hour and a half later, a 10-year-old, a little boy named 10-year-old Danny, who lived a block away, and his dad were returning in their car uh from a hockey game Danny had played in.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Danny thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye as they went by the house.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Danny says it was late at night and it was super cold out, and their garage was open, and something just didn't feel right.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: But but his dad said, no, things are fine.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they went home, but Danny could not get that out of his head, and he pestered his mother until she went uh down the block to check it out.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why 90-year-old Kathleen St.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Ange is alive today.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way, you and I are like her.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we're not 80 years old, but we we have fallen and we have broken ourselves.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if if it's not for God, we are lost, utterly lost, and lost forever.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: But as you know, he came down and he's rescued us.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And one question you should ask yourself today is you should say, where in my life has God rescued me?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: What are the places in my life where God has come down and rescued me?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: I hope he's rescued you in that sense of salvation, for this is part of the theme of the Bible, that he's come down and rescued you from yourself and sin and Satan and death and hell and all of that stuff, which he does if you look to him on the cross and say, You, I believe in you, Jesus Christ.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: But there it's more than that.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's more than just rescue.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: We are rescued in order that he can establish this order and this rule over us.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: And they took it to the Melbourne Animal Hospital, and there in front of the doctors, a kitty collapsed, collapsed.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and as they ask uh they asked these people uh what they were doing and what they were feeding it, you know, they told them we're we've given it pasta and we've given it potatoes, we we don't give it meat.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have meat in the house, and I don't like the smell of meat and so forth.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and the doctor said, You can't enforce your views on your cat.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they put an IV in and they stuffed the kitty with meat, and the cat revived.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and you say, Why would you tell that story?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: I tell that story because just as cats have a special dietary need.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: For me, you and I have have been given by God a special sort of dietary need.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that that need that He's given us is to submit to His rule.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way we're wired, that's the way we're made.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And this world comes along and it offers us other stuff, the shallow stuff, it offers us pasta, you know, and it offers us potatoes, but we need the meat of God's sovereign rule over our lives.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we find if we open the Bible that that this is the theme that that starts right at the beginning.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just just a couple more minutes here, but uh but the Bible starts the way all pagan myths start with chaos and darkness and yucky and and so forth.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Something that we know, we and I know God would never have created because God is the author of beauty and so forth, Genesis 1, 2.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Darkness covers the face of the earth.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tohu vabohu situation in Hebrew, and it's awful.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and all is lost if something doesn't change.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: But God breaks in, he rescues, he says, let there be light, and light shines in and conquers the darkness.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the next week, what God does is he establishes order and rule over this thing, and at the end he's able to say, That's good, that's that's very, very good.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and it includes two people, Adam and Eve, in a paradise, and everything's perfect, and God's talking with them.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Seems like it's perfect, but then the first words of Genesis 3 are but the serpent, as you know, comes in and everything gets messed up.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: The serpent whispers to Eve, you're not wired for this, you're wired for something far better.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: God doesn't want you to really have a good, a fun life.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: And she buys into it, and as a result, she and Adam rebel against God's rule.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: They turn the other way, and now everything's broken, and things are in deep trouble because they're in an everlasting garden where they're locked in forever, gonna live forever now, separate from God.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: So God has to come in and rescue them, puts them out of the garden, kills a lamb, covers them, starts over.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the story again and again, you know, of the Bible, of God breaking in and saving us or rescuing us and then establishing his rule over us.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then he has to do it again a few chapters later, because the world again rebels against his rule.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: So here comes a flood, and he rescues man.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: That would be Noah and his family and re-establishes his rule.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it has to happen and happens again and again throughout the entire Bible that God breaks in to rescue and rule his creation.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you have to ask yourself not only the question, where in my life has God broken in to rescue me?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Has he rescued me from sin, death, hell?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Have I trusted him as my rescuer?
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing you have to ask yourself is where in my life, where in my life have I not yet allowed God to rule?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Where have I not yet submitted to the Lordship of Christ?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because this is a book, this Bible is a book about the rescue and rule of God and constantly approaches you with a question: are you allowing God to rescue you?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: And secondly, are you allowing God to rule over your life?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ask yourself those two questions.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: Will you do that?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's what God planned, it's what God wants, it's what God deserves, it's what we are wired for, it's what everything is waiting for, and it's what the Bible is all about.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Let me say that again.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: God will break into rescue and rule his creation is what God planned, what God wants, what God deserves.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, it's what we are wired for.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Number three, it's what everything is waiting for.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Romans 8 and 4th, it's what the Bible is all about.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: One final uh illustration for the Lord's table.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: The largest radio telescope in the world is really not a single telescope.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's a complex of telescopes that sit just south of Route 66 in New Mexico.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And hours drive or so south of Route 66.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Route 66 runs, if you've driven Highway 40, and many of you I know have through Albuquerque and so forth.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: The old Route 66 is just south of that, uh half a mile or so.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: And down south a little more in Socorro, New Mexico, you have this amazing complex of 28 gigantic dishes, and they're radio telescopes, each one of them uh 82 feet across and so forth.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And they function.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're on 38 miles of railroad tracks, so they can be moved around, but they're all in sync.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that in effect you have a radio telescope as large as Washington, D.C., sitting out there in a desert, uh, you know, uh accepting the very faint radio signals from outer space, and astronomers come from all over the world in order to investigate black holes and magnetic things and and to try to figure out what is there's a something at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and they're not quite sure yet what it is, and then to investigate the very edges of the universe.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and they and they do this to these very, very do you realize that all of the signals that have ever come to us from outer space, radio signals, combined together, only have the energy of a single snowflake hitting the ground.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's how hard we have to work to get any evidence, any word from outer space.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: But we work that hard, and yet, isn't it amazing that you and I have in our possession something so clear and so powerful from outer space, from heaven itself.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: We have a word from God, something very clear that we can read.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I would urge you, I beg you to join me in this Route 66 walk through the Bible, because this is the very word of God.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now we come to the Lord's table.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: And in the Lord's table, I want you to revisit the idea of rescue and rule that in this table, Jesus comes to rescue us and to rule over us.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Heavenly Father, thank you for your Son Jesus Christ, for how everything in history and everything in space and in time all revolves around him and it just lands on, comes, comes to root in him.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we thank you that here in this fine little infinitesimal point that we get to meet him here at the Lord's table this morning.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: We see him on the cross, we watch him give his blood and his body for us.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: We tell him we love him and trust him.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we submit, Heavenly Father, to your rescue and to your rule in Jesus' name.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: That you would take my place.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: That I would be set free.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus, I think for all that you've done for me.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Worthy is the king who conquered the grave, and worthy is the lamb who is slain, worthy, worthy is the king who conquers the grave, and worthy is the lamb who is slain, and worthy is the king who conquers the grave.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Worthy is the lamb who a slain.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Worthy, worthy, this is amazing.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is unfailing love that you would take my place That you would bear my cross you would lay down your life that I would be set free.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus, I sing for all that you've done for me.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: There you would be my cloud.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: You lay down.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: There I would be my.