Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / February 24, 2019 | Can I Help? - Faceplant At The Finish Line

Transcript

February 24, 2019 | Can I Help? - Faceplant At The Finish Line · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: College Avenue Building, Mulvaine Building.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you all here.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm excited.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're in a series if you're visiting today.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: A series from the great, greatest Old Testament book called Isaiah.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: The series is entitled, Can I Help?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: You look like you need it, God Speaking.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we're in an Isaiah challenge, and I'm challenging all of you.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: A number of you are involved in this, right?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: You're reading.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been reading five chapters a week.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to now move it down this week to four chapters, chapters 36, 37, 38, 39.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: That'll take us up through what's oftentimes called the first half of the book of Isaiah, but of course it's more than half, just as the Old Testament's 39 books are longer than the 27 of the New Testament, and the 39 chapters of Isaiah are longer than the final 27.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: But so we have four chapters.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be your easiest reading up till now.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you're doing this challenge, you've eaten the broccoli, you've been doing the cauliflower, you've been doing the veggies, and now we're coming up.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: These four chapters, I preached on the first two last week.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm preaching on 38 and 39 today.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're stories, for heaven's sake.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah stories, so they'll just slip right down your throat.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get to chapters 40 to 66, some of the most sublime stuff in the entire Word of God.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, and then I have devotional.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have to four devotionals online this week, and I hope some of you will look at those.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: This morning's title is called Face Plant at the Finish Line.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds really vivid.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually the headline in a recent article two months ago, a little less than two months ago, in the All-European Under 23 Cross Country Challenge.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: This annual race, all Europeans get together.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: This Frenchman, who actually won it last year's name is Jimmy Gressier, was leading all the way this year as well.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's in the Netherlands, December, I think, 27th.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then you can tell, you know, Chris Cross Country, it's a mess.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he fell at the finish line, trance, and did a faceplant.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And though he's won a lot of blue ribbons and awards during his lifetime, he's never been as famous as he is right now.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So so but there's other stories uh in the Olympics and other places where um where somebody, where somebody's run a great race and they're leading and they're doing great, and then all of a sudden they trip on something invisible and they fall at the finish line.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The guy that actually, the guy that won it, he'd won the Boston Marathon, the previous Boston Marathon, he's a Kenyan named Cherry, uh led a teammate and just barely beat him, but he crashed, hit his head so hard he had to go to the hospital for internal bleeding for two days.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So illustrations of crashing at the finish line lead me into the story of one of my favorite guys in the Bible who face planted at the finish line.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have never guessed.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd have lived during his date, you'd have never guessed.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's nobody that I would rather, if I could move back in time, I'd rather live under the reign of David.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But this guy's second, you know, Hezekiah, was this amazing guy.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: He was, he was as far above the other kings of Judah and Israel as a skyscraper is above a shanty.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: He just towered above them in his godliness and his brilliance.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's the one who engineered the Hezekiah's tunnel, that you know, two-thirds of a mile tunnel underneath the rock of Jerusalem to pull in the waters of the spring of Gihon to protect them against the enemy of Assyria.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: A brilliant engineering marvel that I take my groups on every single year when I go.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's the one that transformed the economy of ancient Israel.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's the one who just, it was astounding.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, most of all, he was so spiritual, the most godly king in 250 years since the time of David.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, uh, as we said last week, uh uh, he looked like he was done for because the greatest nation of the world, Assyria, had brought hundreds of thousands of troops down.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: They were going to eliminate Judah, having taken over much of the rest of the Middle East.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to eliminate this little barrier so that then they could sweep down and wipe out Egypt and Ethiopia and so forth.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so they came down in the late 8th century against Judah and surrounded, after taking 46 other cities of Judah, surrounded this little capital city, Jerusalem, called the city of David, like other Israelite cities.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: It had a double wall.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Here was the temple of Solomon.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Here was Hezekiah's palace, this tiny little area, and 200,000 troops, Sennacherib the king, making fun of Hezekiah.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like they're doomed.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: But Hezekiah, unlike his father Ahaz, said, I trust God.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: The decision was made at the very same location outside the city walls that his father, 35 years before Ahaz, had refused to trust God.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah trusted God.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And last week, chapter 37 ended, the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: When the people got up the next morning, there were all the dead bodies.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Sennacherib ran home with his tail between his legs.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, there's a great argument from silence that this really happened in history.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it's doubted.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's always doubted until they find historical proof.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: But you have the annals of Assyria, Sennacherib listing all the cities he's conquered and everything, and all he says when it comes to Jerusalem is, I shut up Hezekiah like a bird in a cage.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing about slaughtering the inhabitants or taking over the city.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a great victory.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah, you can imagine, comes out of that looking like someone amazing, like he's Teflon coated, like nothing can kill him, like he's the most amazing king ever.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And people certainly ask at that point, I am sure, is he the Messiah?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is he the one that the prophet Isaiah spoke of when he said Emmanuel will be here shortly?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Is he the one that was spoken of in Isaiah 9:6, that he's the mighty God, the everlasting father?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is he the Prince of Feast?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is he the one spoken of as the golden king who's going to bring about a golden age in Isaiah 11?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is he our Messiah?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting that the Jews themselves oftentimes thought that he was the Messiah.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Rabbi Hillel, 250 A.D.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: in the Jewish Talmud says, there will be no more Messiah for Israel, for they already enjoyed, literally, they ate him in the days of Hezekiah.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Considering Hezekiah was that great a man.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that question gets answered.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, just a couple more things about Hezekiah that are personal to me that I really love.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah did what no other king had the guts to do, no other king had the guts to go and actually chop down the shrines, the sacred pillars, the ashera poles, the false places, including the altars, to the last one.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: He knocked all those down.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was 22 years old, and I was over in Israel, I was doing my first archaeological dig at a place called Beersheba.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Beersheba's best known as the home of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was also, however, the southernmost city, the biggest border of Judea or of Judah in Hezekiah's day.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm with a couple of hundred, hundred other students, and we're digging, and two other students and I are digging in our square, 15 feet square, and we start to dig all of us at the top of the ground.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we had the most exciting discovery the first day, because we got down about a hundred years, which is just a foot or two, and we found a skeleton of a Bedouin woman from the late 1800s, and uh still we got the beautiful necklace which had been around her neck and the bracelets and so forth.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, didn't get to keep them.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But um, so nothing much happened.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the next couple days later, we got down to the Roman period.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can always tell when you get down to the Roman period because the stones are huge and they're always perfectly in line and they're just beautifully cut, and you go, we have arrived at a Roman building or a Roman house.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing much there, so we two guys out of the three of us lugged those heavy stones a dozen feet up now out of our out of our pit, and we kept digging down.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then we came across the Israelite houses in the time of Hezekiah, 700 years before.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell those because the stones aren't.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: The stones are sort of rough, they're sort of like the speaker here, they're sort of misshapen and so forth.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're not really nice.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: So all we had was a house, but we were hearing cries of Yophi, Y-O-F-I, in Hebrew, from a hundred feet away.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And some uh uh uh uh a uh a bulk, a 15-foot square that had some girls in it, they were digging an old Israelite wall from the days of Hezekiah.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And what they were finding is pieces of stone that were very unique, and then they were fitted together, and it turned out it was a horned altar.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: A horned altar, the kind of altar that God specified through Moses should be put in the temple in Jerusalem.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: But God also specified that no one should offer sacrifices on an altar outside of the temple at Jerusalem, the central sanctuary, the very point of Deuteronomy.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Worship God at the one place I tell you.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: What was this doing down here?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they were lazy, didn't want to walk 20 miles to go up to sacrifice in Jerusalem.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And no one until Hezekiah had the guts to break up that altar, and he made it part of a wall to defend against Assyria.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I feel like me and Hezekiah, we're buds.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, and by the way, this is the symbol now of the tale of Beersheba.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: The original is in the Israel Museum, and a model of it is sitting outside the dig.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: We may go visit it in a couple of months when I'm there.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: But this is the kind of guy Hezekiah was.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: He seemed like there could be no one better than him.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is he the Messiah?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Isaiah's answer to that question in our two chapters today is no way.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah can't be the Messiah, the divine king who will rule forever, for two reasons.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because Hezekiah is mortal, he's just a man like us, he's gonna die, chapter 38, and because he's sinful, chapter 39, he's gonna face plant.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'll show you the Messiah in chapters 40 through 66.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: With that introduction, let's dive into these two chapters.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, the chapter about Hezekiah not being divine, just being human.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: In those days, Hezekiah, who was only 39 years old in the prime of life, became terminally ill.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: We have no idea what he was terminally ill with.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it was some sort of a bad virus, whether, you know, leprosy, whether it was cancer, probably not cancer, but he was terminally ill.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: The doctors said so, and then the hammer came down.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: The prophet Isaiah, son of Amos, his buddy, friend, came in and said to him, This is what the Lord says, set your house in order.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a phrase for like write your will, talk with your children, tell your wife what to do.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Set your house in order, for you're about to die, you will not recover.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know what you think about uh how you feel when you think about death.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you are so far away from expecting death, you don't think about it.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Others of you are closer, but I think every single person clings to life.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think I realized that really strongly when my father was 90, going on 91, and had been told he wouldn't live out the year because of both heart trouble and cancer, and he did basically what Hezekiah did.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was so upset, told me, he said, my mother lived to be 96, you know.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, by the way, we I did get a photograph.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have a photograph of King Hezekiah and Isaiah.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted you to know.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not only do we find a photograph, but in the last three years, we found this one was found last year.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is a sun with downward wings.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is the King Hezekiah's seal with his name on it.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is Isaiah Navi, the prophet, there.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: These two seals were found just outside the wall of Jerusalem recently, and they were found at different times, but within 10 feet of each other.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: These two guys were buddies, and so uh the older Isaiah, I am sure, struggled to bring his friend, King Hezekiah, the bad news that he was about to die.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah's response was perhaps what you might expect.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: He turned his face to the wall and he prayed to the Lord and said, Please, Lord, remember how I've walked before you faithfully and wholeheartedly and have done what pleases you.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Notice, no request here, not asking to live longer, not angry, not bitter.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: He does quote, actually, the words that God said to Abraham, you know, uh 1,500 years before God said to Abraham, if you will walk before me faithfully and wholeheartedly and do what pleases me, I will give you a long life.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Words which are picked up in Deuteronomy, a thousand years before.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe Hezekiah is going, hint, hint, you know, you and I are BFFs on Facebook.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have trusted you my whole life.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are close, we are tight, you know.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand what's going on.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm only 39.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's this is not a this is not a sickness that's due to my sin.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I know that, or else Isaiah would have said that.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand this.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he was really sad.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I sympathize with him.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you come to the dead end of your life, and what's following is a cemetery.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care who you are or how old you are, you feel this desire to stay around.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh last week I came across a quote by Bruce Willis.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've always hated the thought of dying.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: If it were up to me, I'd live forever.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Bruce, I can talk to you about that.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe everyone doesn't feel the same.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, to some extent, I think everybody does feel the same.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: We all cling to life, we all want to live longer, and Hezekiah was really struggling.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: He was, shall we say, at that moment, shipwrecked on God.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: He foundered on omnipotence.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: God had said, you're done for, and he had no other place to go, other than crying out to God and talking to him.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing is that then before Isaiah even gets out of the palace precinct, God speaks to him again and says, Turn around and go give Isaiah another message.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: We know it happened before Isaiah was out of the palace from one of the other two accounts and kings.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord came to Isaiah, go and tell Hezekiah, this is what the Lord God of your ancestor David noted that phrase, of your ancestor David, you and David and me, we're all buddies, says, I have heard your prayer.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard your prayer, he says, and I have seen your tears.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Look, I'm gonna add 15 years to your life, and I'll rescue you and the city from the grasp of the king of Assyria.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'll defend the city.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you 15 more years.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, God's gonna give the city of Jerusalem another hundred years.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: What would you do if you knew uh um how long you had left?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: An elderly woman in Brooklyn was told she didn't have much time left, so she went to a rabbi and asked that uh him to help her prepare her will.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: She said there were two things she wanted in her will for sure.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: She wanted to be cremated and she wanted her ashes spread at Walmart.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart, the rabbi said, Why Walmart?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: She said, Then I'll be sure my daughters visit me twice a week.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you've seen the question, what would you do if you learned you were gonna die tomorrow?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or sometimes people say, live as though you're gonna die tomorrow, plan as though you're gonna live a hundred years.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's dissatisfying to me, to be honest, because if I knew I was gonna die tomorrow, I or I had one day to live or two days or even a week, I I wouldn't go to work tomorrow.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm sorry, I just wouldn't.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have enough time to go to Hawaii either.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: But um and if you told me I had a hundred years, I'd go, wow, am I gonna live way too long, and I wouldn't change a thing.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: But if you were told you had 10 years, or if you're told you had 15, how would that, what would you do with that knowledge?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't that be wouldn't that be interesting?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect what you would do is uh well, you know, one thing you'd probably do is you'd take the Isaiah challenge if you hadn't been doing it up till now.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you'd be reading the Bible, you'd take a Bible challenge.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing I'm guessing you'd probably be more, you know, faithful in things of the Lord.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: You'd probably tithe, or maybe like me, you'd avoid giving that exact amount, but you'd give generously to God, knowing you were gonna lay up treasure in heaven.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: You'd probably try to reconcile with someone you hadn't talked with in 20 years, right?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: The things you'd do if you knew um how long you had left, 15 years.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is the sign to you from the Lord, says Isaiah, that he'll do what he's promised.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make the sun's shadow that goes down on the stairway of Ahaz go back by 10 steps.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is before the sort of sundials that we're familiar with.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: They oftentimes used steps.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps we're told some of the times they had to put a little pyramid or whatever, and the sun would shine on it.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so you could tell it down to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, and more than just guesstimating, you know, as you saw, the shadow.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I imagine that Hezekiah there, dying, would look out and see that shadow growing and thinking, My life's almost over.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're told in Chronicles that God said, Would you like a sign?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah is thinking, You asked the same question to my dad.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Ahaz said, Oh, I'm too spiritual for that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And how stupid was he.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: So Hezekiah goes, Yeah, I want a sign.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: God said, How about if I make the shadow go forward, make time go faster, you know, for you, that at least the shadow go forward, you know, ten steps.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah said, No, I've been looking at it go too fast already.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: I want it to go backwards.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I take it.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's thinking, and so here we have daylight savings time.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it went backward ten steps.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, uh, I'll just be really brief with this, but when I was young, people made a big deal out of this.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: People would say this is science, science proves the Bible.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a statement that even though the story began in about 1880, well before NASA, in the mid-20th century, people said that NASA had been researching things and found a day missing in history, which is silly if you know anything about science.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: NASA doesn't do that anyway.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And anyway, how would you know anyway?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: So uh and and someone was a Christian at NASA, and they looked back at Joshua 10, where the sun stood still for about a day, and said, Oh, well, we're missing uh that would be 23 hours and 20 minutes.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And someone else said, Yes, but it we've we're missing exactly 24 hours, and someone else said, Oh, well, then Hezekiah says it went backward 10 degrees, which it doesn't, it says 10 steps.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: 10 degrees out of 360 degrees would be 40 minutes, and so then they solved it.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I used to hear that at a church I was going to.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to say, listen, we have enough defending the faith without making up stuff, okay?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that this is all made up.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: So let's not be stupid.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to talk to me about it, I'm fine with talking about it.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it doesn't work mathematically, it doesn't work scientifically.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, the I believe it was a local thing.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that God made the shadow go backward there.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: I do not believe that God turned the earth going the other direction, which would have made all the The oceans fly out into space, you know, et cetera.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So then Hezekiah does, he writes a poem.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: We know about Hezekiah that he was a writer and he actually wrote music for the temple.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote this poem after he'd been sick and had recovered from his illness.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this poem's very interesting because the first half is sort of the back when I was really upset and bitter and sad, and the second half is when I got the news, okay?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: I said, here's his poem.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: I said, in the prime of my life, I must go to the gates of Sheol.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's the underworld.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: I am deprived of the rest of my years, okay?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'll never see the Lord, the Lord in the land of the living.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: He loved going to talk to the Lord in the temple.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll not look on humanity any longer with the inhabitants of what's passing away.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was missing, he was gonna miss his koinonia class or whatever.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna miss the fellowship of other people, right?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was gonna miss his Christian friends, he's gonna miss the social interaction.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he was a social guy.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: We know from this first that Hezekiah was a social guy.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he's going, oh man, I I really hate to say goodbye.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, it's just so short, and it's so quick, I feel like my dwelling's being plucked up and removed from me, like a shepherd's tent.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know how a shepherd will just camp with a sheep, and then the sheep like goats, how we raise goats, and they just eat everything down to the ground.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: We had to move our goats every couple of days, you know, uh, on our farm, because they would just devour everything.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so all of a sudden the shepherd closes his tent.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Your life is over.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: It seems so short, so quick.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've rolled up my life like a weaver.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: He cuts me off from the loom.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: The weaver is making a garment and sewing the garment, sowing, whatever, weaving the garment.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden stops, cuts off the garment, it's all done.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Isaiah's going, that's what I feel my life is.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've only lived 39 years.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's stopping so quickly, it's stopping so suddenly by nightfall.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: You make an end of me.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: I thought until the morning, he stays awake all night.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know how it is.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you have got a serious disease, and you stay awake much of the night.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like a lion, God will break all my bones by nightfall, he says again, you make an end of me.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the first half of his poem, and it ends with, I chirp like a swallow or a crane, I moan like a dove.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: My eyes grow weak looking upward.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, I'm oppressed.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Support me.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Notice he's not asking for more time, but then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, he gets the incredible news.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, What can I say?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's spoken to me, and he himself has done it.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: You've restored me to health and let me live.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think this was probably turned into a song that they sang as a worship song in the temple.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the first half of it was in the wine minor key.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last half of it is here in the major key, as he says in 38, verse 20.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord will save me, and we'll play with stringed instruments.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or the Hebrew is interesting here.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: It could be we will play a song I wrote.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: It actually might be that all the days of our lives in the house of the Lord.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Just a beautiful poem.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: This beautiful song that Hezekiah wrote, thanking God for his deliverance.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I need to stop for a seminary moment very quickly because those of you who are a little alert will have asked yourselves the question: how can it be that God Himself said Hezekiah was going to die?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then what?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Then goes back in five or ten minutes later and says, No, you're not.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: What about God's knowledge of the future?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: What about his sovereign plan?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: How can we read here that somehow God says, Because I've heard your prayer and I've seen your tears, I'm going to give you another 15 years?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't God know that?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Half an hour before, when why would he send Isaiah in to say you're dead, you know, it's all over, set your house in order.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: How do you resolve that?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we could talk about that a long time.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, my answer is going to be short.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: My first point today, applicationally, is God has a plan, but built into his plan is flexibility to respond to prayer.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Jim, aren't you Calvinist?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you believe that God has a foreordained plan before the foundation of the world and knows and plans everything that happens?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: And when God decrees something will happen, it will not change.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: But we find all of these occasions in the Bible where God responds to prayer in such a way that he seems to be flexible, though he has a plan, the sovereign God flexible enough to invite you and I to pray.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or as a seminary who was discussing this question called Gordon Conwell concluded, sometimes God retracts an announcement of blessing or judgment because of the human response to it.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Think of Nineveh.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Jonah says, God says you're going to be destroyed within 40 days.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: You are so evil.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Nineveh repent and even clothe their cattle in sackcloth.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: They so repent, and God changes his mind, he says.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: What he does is he says, I never change my character, which is I will always show mercy to those who repent.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, I'm not going to judge you.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Jonah, who wanted Nineveh burnt to a crisp, is really upset, you know.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: But that's an illustration of how sometimes God retracts, He's flexible in answer to prayer, which makes prayer, right, so important, especially when you realize this chapter is also saying this, that even at death's door, sometimes God heals in answer to prayer.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Even at death's door, the elders of our church love to anoint with oil and pray over those who are sick.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: James 5 says, if you're sick, go to the elders, confess your sins, and ask for prayer and you'll be healed.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we do that.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we find about one out of six times, which just happens to be the same percentage as the, I notice, the most Pentecostal of churches, we find about one out of six times something happens that's unexplainable, that's inexplicable, that it seems like a miracle that God turns that around and he does something really fantastic.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: He does a miracle that what the doctor said doesn't happen.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would just say, you know how we pray for people even at death's door?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good thing.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Even God said that Hezekiah was toast.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Hezekiah cried and he prayed.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And even though he wasn't praying for more time, God, whose heart is soft toward his children, especially those who love and trust him, God decided he'd give him 15 more years.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we all agree, I hope, that prayer changes us.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: We all go into prayer like tabby cats and we come out of prayer like lions.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it changes us 100% of the time, but what I'm saying here is pretty radical.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: That it not only changes us, your prayers can change history.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And in the last couple of weeks, I came across a quote on prayer I'd never seen by my favorite church father, whose name is Chrysostom.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: He was the greatest preacher in the early church, and about 400 AD he said this about prayer.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Prayer is a treasure never diminished, a mind never exhausted, a sky, unobscured by clouds, a heaven, unruffled by storm.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is the root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: The power of prayer has subdued fire, bridled lions, hushed anarchy, stopped wars, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, healed diseases, rescued cities from destruction, and stayed the sun in its course.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Amen?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Pray.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you find yourself shipwrecked on the Almighty, if you find yourself on the sandbar of God's omnipotence and omniscience, pray.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Even though he's sovereign, your prayer matters to him.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because even at death's door, sometimes God heals in answer to prayer.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which leads us to this question: what would you do if you knew you had 15 years left?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: What did Hezekiah do?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we knew Hezekiah, we know from other things that Hezekiah did some great things.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: He had a little boy, he hadn't had an heir yet, a son, and he had a little boy after three years named Manasseh, who would be the next king.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was a rotten king, terrible king, but at least the line of David went on.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: We also know from ancient manuscripts like Qimran and so forth, we know that Hezekiah had this huge, he was worried about the Bible, the word of God, going out of print.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so he had all of these scribes that he hired to copy the book of Moses, to copy the Bible.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of each of the manuscripts that they copied, they would write three little letters, HZK.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that they don't use vowels in Hebrew.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be Hezekiah.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what's funny is over the next 500 years, other scribes who copied those manuscripts went ahead and wrote down HZK as well.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: So many of our ancient manuscripts actually have HZK for Hezekiah on them, which lets us know that Hezekiah's last 15 years were valuable and that it gave us many, many copies of the Bible.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: However, in Isaiah chapter 39, we're told that, wow, Hezekiah face planted at the finish line.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Notice these eight verses in chapter 39.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: At that time, Meredok Baladin, king of Balad, uh son of Baladan, king of Babylon.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Babylon now is the nation that we're gonna deal with in chapters 40 through 66.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Babylon is a rising, growing power.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's underneath the power of Assyria at this time.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Assyria's headquarters in Nineveh.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Babylon's capital is in Babylon.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's growing and it's getting stronger, and it's gonna become the kingdom that wipes out Judah.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: But at that time, they sent letters.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, a mailman came, and it's a letter from the president of the United States or Bill Gates or somebody cool, okay?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah goes, I can't believe we got a letter from King of Babylon.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Since he heard that Hezekiah had been sick and had recovered.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, it's a good news card.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so heard you're sick and recovered.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, can we come visit you?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah was pleased with the letters, and he showed the envoys, the ones who brought the letters, his treasure house.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Think that's gonna impress him?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna impress Bill Gates if you take him and show him your piggy bank?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Judah's this small little nation.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Babylon is just fabulously wealthy.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, he's kind of excited, you know.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a movie star at my house.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, and all his armory.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna show him your uh your weapons?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: You think that's smart?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: And everything that was found in his treasuries.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: What would make you think, Hezekiah, that was a smart move?
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: A shrewd move?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I know.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, are you just so excited?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking Hezekiah feels like he's made out of Teflon, like nothing can defeat him.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's watched 186,000 enemies fall dead.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's going great.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's got an extra 15 years.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: God's my buddy.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so somehow.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last line: there was nothing in his palace and in all his realm that Hezekiah didn't show them.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, Hezekiah.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: You think maybe they have uh an agenda here that you're too naive to notice?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Number four, in your life, in Hezekiah's life, it used to always be about him.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah, like his great-grandfather, father Uzziah, whenever people would come to the kingdom, he'd always go, I'm so blessed.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's all God.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Can I take you to the temple?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Can I show you what God's done for us?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't see a bit about God as he's taking them through his palace treasuries.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing about going to the temple.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Hezekiah has suddenly become like that, you know, the guy who's not very tech oriented, who's got one of those uh strips, you know, that you plug into the wall and he plugs it into himself, the power strip into itself, you know, and can't figure out why nothing goes on.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah now it's he's plugged into himself, it's all about himself.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, really?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Number five ties in with it.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Don't squander a golden opportunity to tell someone what's really important to you.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, really, Hezekiah, you've got extra years of life here?
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: You got an opportunity, people coming from out of town, and you don't take them to the temple, you don't talk to them about Yahweh God at all.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you always used to witness to people.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you were the greatest evangelist, you know, in ancient Israel, and all of a sudden, now that you have extra years, just because, you know, this is somebody rich and famous, it's gonna take time to spend with you.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you see this sometimes, don't you?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: You see, people who get sort of full of themselves, and they've always been wonderful people and they've always followed God, but later on in their life, you know, their life is extended, and all of a sudden it sort of becomes about them, and all of a sudden it's no longer about God or Jesus, and they stop talking about Jesus and all, and it's all, you know.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a song I like to hum sometimes, it's really old, so it's 750 years old.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's called O Sacred Head Now Wounded.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the last line in that beautiful song, beautiful song, uh Bach rearranged, wrote the tune for, is uh, oh never, never, never let me outlive my love for you.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because you gotta ask the question, was it really good that Hezekiah got another 15 years?
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we have more copies of the Bible.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: The prophet Isaiah came to him and said, What did this men say, and where did they come to you from?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: As if he didn't know.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah replied, They came to me from a distant country, far away.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: No, it doesn't really matter.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Babylon.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Babylon.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: I bet he said it really quickly.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: From Babylon, you know.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh Hezekiah goes, Um, what did they see in your palace?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah goes, and Hezekiah's honest, and this is his friend.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: So he just tells them, he lays it out, Well, they've seen everything in my palace.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: There isn't anything in my treasures that didn't show them.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think Hezekiah's going, uh, maybe not too smart.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Notice Isaiah says to Hezekiah, I want you to hear the word of the Lord of armies.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Look, the days are coming when everything in your palace and all that your fathers have stored up, all those fathers that you really respect, all they stored up until today is gonna be carried off to that country of Babylon.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing is gonna be left, says the Lord.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: These people who now know what you have, they're gonna come back and take it.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: And some of your own descendants, your children, your grandchildren who come from you, whom you father, will be taken away, and they will become, ooh, oh, I don't want to say it.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: They'll become eunuchs.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Castrati in the palace of the king of Babylon.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your children, your grandchildren.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, there's one more verse, one more verse in the first half of the book, and here it is.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so sorry to have to say this.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: This response, I think of his response here so often.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah said to Isaiah, the word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, for he thought to himself, there will be peace and security during my lifetime.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how you make that sound any better.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how there are a couple of commentator commentaries that go, well, he had a good heart here.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let's not talk about that.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, really?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, isn't that sort of like maybe Congress or a president or something going, we're gonna add$10 billion to the debt, or we're gonna we're gonna do this or that, and it really won't matter because we're gonna be out of office by the time your children and grandchildren have to pay for it.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, something like that.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe parents are up in up in years, you decide even though they don't have much money, they're gonna borrow double mortgage on the house so they can go to a round-the-world trip, and it really doesn't matter, we're gonna be gone, and our children and grandchildren will have to cover that, you know.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: How can you do that?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: How can you not care about the next generation?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: How can you live such a wonderful life of trust and long-term thinking about other people, and then all of a sudden do something so stupid, and when told that it's gonna rebound on you, go, well, I'll be okay because my lifetime will be fine.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I think this chapter's point is God is perfect, only man like only man makes mistakes.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: So just no, Hezekiah, he's not even close to the Messiah.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, I want to show you the Messiah, chapter 40 through 66, but Hezekiah is not him because Hezekiah face planted.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the last point is starting strong is great.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Finishing strong is epic.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, start strong, live strong.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a finish line coming.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if God gives you 10 or 15 more years, it's been years ago.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: A guy was outside here in the parking lot, a grown man.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, quite a bit older than me.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: He was in his 60s and he was crying.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never seen him crying for it.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: I went up and said, What's wrong?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I've been waiting for it.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Doctors told me I don't have long to live.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a cancer, and it's a bad cancer.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I cried with him.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said to me, uh, Jim, would you pray for me that God would give me 10 more years?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: I said, sure.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: I said, why would you like 10 more years?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: He said, well, as you well know, I haven't been really faithful in coming.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: I come sometimes, but I never serve.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I've he was a well-to-do man in town.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: He said, and you know, I've never given, even though I've come for years.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he said, I'd like to I'd like to serve in the church.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to be faithful.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, give me ten more years than I can give to the church.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in those days, and the church is small, man, I was desperate for money.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: You've never heard a prayer like that before.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, Lord, do you hear me, Lord?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: I want this man to live ten more years.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: I want to, you know, and I'm thinking of his pocketbook and so forth.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, I pray, I pray a great prayer.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Get this.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord let him live ten years more, almost to the month.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: He got the word that scans was remission later that year and so forth.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: And this man never, ever served in the church or gave any money.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking as I did his funeral, obviously I didn't say any of this.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I remember thinking, if God was to give me 10 more years and I knew it was ten more years, how would I use that?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: Would I really use that the way I would hope that I would use that?
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: Or would I squander the opportunities I had to introduce other people to him because it would really be all about me in the end instead of God.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: Friend's death comes so suddenly.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: A woman was in the grocery store buying a frozen turkey, she's upset, she had too many people coming, she couldn't feed them all.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: And she, you know, she's going, you know, what?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: She calls over the butchery, she says, don't they get any bigger than this?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: He says, No, ma'am, they don't get any bigger than that, they're dead.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And once you're dead, you know, once it ends that quickly, you can't improve anymore.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can't, there's so many things that you can't do that you can only do while you're alive.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's that's just the way it is.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: You are now past the opportunity of reconciling with people, past that social opportunity of talking with people, of relating to God, of giving, of doing any of those things that lay up treasure in heaven.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, what will you do with the time you have remaining?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Jews like to say, live each day as though you're last, and one day it will be your last.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's finish strong.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let me pray for you, and then I'll ask Jeremiah to come out and sing a song about that, Heavenly Father.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: I thank you for the story about this great man Hezekiah, who faceplanted at the finish line.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so sad about that, but we've seen it happen to others.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ask that you would, wow, never let us outlive our love for you.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.