Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / October 14, 2018 | When God Doesn't Make Sense - When God Seems Oblivious

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October 14, 2018 | When God Doesn't Make Sense - When God Seems Oblivious · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Both in the College Avenue building and in the Mulvaine Building.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hope you're having a great morning.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's a nice day to be inside.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're in the second episode, second installment of a series called When God Doesn't Make Sense.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: But before I start on that, I'm going to do something that makes great sense.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: As you remember, last Christmas season, we raised money.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: We always have a holiday project.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: We had sort of a dual holiday project last year, and one half of that holiday project was to raise money for a school in Tegusa Galpa in the capital of Honduras, little school that's right next to a trash dump where all these kids forage around and it's just dangerous, and they don't go to school and they don't learn about Jesus.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a school run by a lady named Jessie, who happens to be here this morning, and we raise money for that school to pay the teachers.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: Would you welcome Jessie as she comes up?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: How are you this morning?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is a great lady.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: So a bunch of us went down last November and uh helped out build a house and spent some time in the school and um spoken is tonight.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's the Trash Mountain Project annual fundraiser over here at where's it at, Shelly?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Capitol Plaza.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Capitol Plaza.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: Shelly is is the do-it-all.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: She's the translator and all that stuff.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: So uh that's coming tonight.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: So Jessie's sort of the honored guest there, but I wanted to have her here because like we raised like$150,000 or something to help with that school, which really helped it a lot.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: They've got about half of the money left that they're parceling out to the teachers.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I stopped, I'm gonna stop talking.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Jesse, it's so great to have you here.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Say hello.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning, family.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't leave this beautiful city without personally thanking each one of you.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: As the pastor mentioned, this has been a difficult uh time for our ministry.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the miracles of God are still happening.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically for the ministry of Milan was a miracle in the middle of such a hard time where there was discouragement.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: There the hand of God was again.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, personally, on behalf of all of the beautiful smiles that work in a mountain of trash.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: God bless you.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: Don't let her size fool you.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: She's a great lady.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: And if you ever have a chance, if you want to take a missions trip this year, we're taking several trips back down to Honduras.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: That would be a wonderful trip.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Phenomenal.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: I've taken so many missions trips in my life, that's ranks right up there.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's really gate time.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so when God doesn't make sense.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: I put on the front of your bulletin, I think, that psychologists like to divide parents into sort of four types.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, the permissive type, the indulgent type of parent who gives his child whatever they want, you know, doesn't discipline them, and so forth.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: Then there's the authoritarian parent who's strict, not a lot of responsiveness or warmth, perhaps, big on rules, uh, very demanding.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Then there's the what's usually considered the best type, the authoritative parent who has the rules but is also responsive, flexible, and warm.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: And then, worst of all, the neglectful parent, the parent who is indifferent.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it's sad, this would be the worst kind of a parent, sad some children have neglectful, rather absent fathers who are gone for hours and hours at a time and seem oblivious to their children.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason I bring that up is that I want to ask you if, and it seems almost blasphemous for me to ask the question is it possible that at times God is that kind of parent?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: A few months ago up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, uh the cars that were heading for uh one of those roundabouts were shocked to see that the family van uh ahead of them that was going around the roundabout, suddenly two toddlers flew out of that van, a one-year-old and a two-year-old, and hit the uh and hit the pavement and rolled over.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: And wow, it was just horrifying.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And the driver clearly did not, was completely oblivious as to what happened.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: That was partly because he had a number of other kids in the van and also because he was drunk.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so he kept on driving and he disappeared.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: The cars behind him stopped, of course, and they picked up these little tikes and took them to the hospital where they were both treated for road rash and one for worse injuries.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: But then what do you do?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: Where do they live?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: Anything like that.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Fortunately, after a while, the two-year-old said his name, first and last names, and so the officers were able to go to the home.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they found that man still drunk, completely confused about where his two youngest children were, but having no idea.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's what you call an oblivious, a neglectful parent.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is God ever that kind of a father?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: He tells us to call him Papa, Abba Father.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: There are times, you know, when you are crying out to him and you're going through it and day after day, and there's no recognition from heaven that you even exist, and you find yourself wondering, is he inattentive?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: Or worse, indifferent?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Some years back, uh, there was a volcano that erupted in Colombia in South America.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: It did horrific damage to the town nearby.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: A mudslide swept through the town, and thousands upon thousands of people died.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: But the one person that everybody uh remembered and still remembers decades later is a young teenager named Omira Sanchez, who was trapped.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: She was trapped in uh in water and cement with steel bars so that they could not get her out and they could not empty the water.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: And with the world's cameras, TV cameras, television cameras focused on her, the world watched day after day as Omira Sanchez trapped, slowly died.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: This is a few hours before her death.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: You see the circles getting darker around her eyes.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: It was horrific.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: And what I appreciated was the one question afterwards that went like this it said, it was bad enough that God didn't seem to pay any attention, but why in the world couldn't He simply have let her die quickly like the other 25,000 people in that town who perished suddenly?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: Why leave her to suffer a lingering death over many days?
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: It does seem at times as though God completely is oblivious.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: One of the uh best speakers I've ever heard, one of the most amazing women that I've ever heard speak, is a woman named Helen Rosevere.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Helen uh was grow uh grew up in an English, in a comfortable English home way up north in England uh some years ago.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: And uh uh from when she was young, uh she was known as uh Spitfire, very small woman, uh, even when I saw her years later, but she was restless and she was determined and she was smart and she was quick-witted and she was she was destined and determined to make something out of herself in life.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: And she uh she she made it into Cambridge University, where she decided immediately that she wanted to become a doctor, and so she was she started studying medicine.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then close to the end of her freshman year, uh some other students got her involved in a Christian group there at Cambridge University, and she came to faith in Christ.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point, she decided that uh she would be willing to do whatever the Lord wanted her to do.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: She announced publicly, I'll go anywhere, I'll do anything that the Lord wants me to do.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then she felt as though the Lord had told her that he wanted her to be a missionary doctor.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: So she went through Cambridge and graduated with high honors and became a physician and then went off to Central Africa, a country that then was called Congo, presently Zaire, a troubled, a very poor country.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: And she went in the northeast part of Congo where there was really no medical service.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: She was the only doctor for two and a half million people.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: And all there was was a little hut with a thatched roof for people to come and get medical help from her.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: So she asked the tribespeople, you know, if they would teach her how to build a building.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so they showed her how to how to make mud bricks, you know, mud and straw, and they had a little form that you put over the top.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so she did that until her hands were raw and bleeding, and they came to admire her so much that she made hundreds and hundreds of bricks and laid them out in the sun and they got hard.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then they showed her what kind of trees to cut down and how to cut them down and how to how to make them into sort of boards.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then with their help, she built, after 11 years on that 14 acre, she built a hundred-bed hospital.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: A hundred-bed hospital in Congo.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Back in those days, hopefully not today, but back in those days, missions were still, well, what they did is they looked at that and they said, that's a fine hospital, but it shouldn't be run by a woman, after all.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so they sent from England a man to take over the hospital.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, not having any place to go, she moved a hundred miles away and she built a 250-bed hospital.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: And next to it, a leprosy clinic.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: And she worked, this uh brilliant, enthusiastic, sharp woman, she worked uh for years in the Congo, and then civil war broke out.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: It was a horrible time.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: 100,000 people died in the 1960s in the Congo, and all the other missionaries left, and all the Westerners left the country, and she said, I'm not leaving.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: This is where the Lord wants me.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: I told the Lord I'd go wherever he wanted me to go.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: But then the rebels uh took over the hospital, and they seized her and somehow saw her as an enemy, and they began beating her every day, and she would escape at night, and every time she would, they would trail her and they'd bring her back, and as she writes her in her biography, they'd beat her around the head and around the neck, and she would fall down, they'd pick her up and continue to beat her, and they would rape her.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Every night for five long months, and she cried out to God.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: She'd be forgiven, and is forgiven, that sometimes she thought, why does God seem to have forgotten me?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Why did he give me intelligence so that I could study medicine?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Why did he give me a heart to want to serve him and a desire to serve him here in Africa, to the poorest of the poor, and then leave me here oblivious to my suffering.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: If you've ever had questions like that, then you know that this is not an uncommon thought.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, I I would imagine that young people have this thought of God being inattentive to me.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: It seems to me that I had that thought more often when I was young than before, thinking I'm not important enough for God to even notice.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: I came across a story of Chris, a boy whose face had been burned in a fire and gotten some plastic surgery, but still looked strange.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: And he sent this note to his therapist, dear Dr.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Gardner, some big person.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was a boy about 13.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: He called me a turtle.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I know he said this because of my plastic surgery.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think God hates me because of my lip, and when I die, he'll probably send me to hell.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Love Chris.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Chris naturally figured that his deformity was pretty good evidence that God was oblivious to him and couldn't care less about him.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Does the Bible help us in a situation like this?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: And the answer is you'd be surprised how many stories in the Bible are stories just like this of apparent abandonment by God, being inattentive and indifferent to his people.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the story I've picked out is a famous one that you've heard before, the story of Moses.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: It comes from Exodus 3, 4, and 5.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: I've excerpted some verses from the Christian Standard Bible.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: You've heard this before.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: So he's a long ways away from his home country of Egypt, and he's even a ways away from Canaan.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's out west, out east, in what we call Saudi Arabia.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire within a bush.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: And as Moses looked, he saw that the bush was on fire, but not consumed.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: You've heard this story, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: So Moses thought, I must go over and look at this remarkable sight.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why isn't the bush burning up?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: And when the Lord saw that he'd gone over to look, God called to him from the bush.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: Moses, Moses.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: And a few verses later, God gets to the point.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: God says, the Israelites' cry for help over back in Egypt has come to me, and I've also seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, go.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sending you to Pharaoh so that you may lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: What?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: Moses is thinking I'm happy with my flock.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm happy with my wife, with my children, with my father-in-law.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: I've been in Egypt.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you send me 600 miles back there?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so he begins to plead with God.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I know you've been taught in Sunday school that these were, this is Moses doubting and Moses bad and all that stuff.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: I don't, just for a moment this morning, would you imagine that you are Moses and have a little more positive view of him for a moment?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: That he's the meekest man on earth.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: He's humble.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: He really doesn't think he's qualified for this job.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So first he pleads, I'm a nobody.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: He says, Moses asks God, Who am I?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: That I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the Israelites out of Egypt.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a nobody.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: And secondly, he says, nobody's going to take me seriously.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: I just said, What if they won't believe me and won't obey me, but say the Lord didn't appear to you?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: And his third remonstrance to the Lord is, honestly, God, I mean, I'm not the guy you want.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Please, Lord, I've never been eloquent either in the past or recently, or on the last five minutes, either, since you've been speaking to your servant.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: It hasn't improved during our conversation.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because I'm slow and I'm hesitant in speech.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: You're looking for somebody who's a little more verbal, somebody, you know, somebody else.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Not the guy you want.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, when the Lord keeps on saying, No, you're the guy I want, you're the guy I picked, Moses just says, please, please, please send somebody else.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know the result.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: God didn't listen to him.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Moses made lots of good points, but that's why in chapter 5, verse 1, Moses finds himself, having left his family, his wife, his children, his flock, his home, having walked hundreds of miles back west with Aaron, that's how he finds himself in front of Pharaoh.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And they say to Pharaoh, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says, Let my people go.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: How'd that work out, guys?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Not very well.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Pharaoh responded, Who is the Lord that I should obey him by letting Israel go?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, Lord.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: And what's more, I won't let Israel go.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: And Pharaoh then assumes that Moses is the emissary of the slaves of the Israelites, that they're trying to get out of work.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: They want to get out of the country, and he assumes the worst.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so he goes, Wow, they got too much time on their hands.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that day Pharaoh commanded the overseers of the people as well as their foremen, don't continue to supply the people with straw for making bricks as before.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: They got to go and gather straw for themselves.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: You understand how that works.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: You try to make bricks out of the mud, you know, you put that form over the wet mud, you know, and you lift up the form, and the mud goes, you know.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry about that in the front row there.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't mean to spit on you.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why you need straw.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: You need ground, you need something, and you mix it with the mud, and then, you know, when you put the form over the top, I saw thousands of bricks, you know, being made in rural Sudan and in third world countries.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Then the bricks just sit there, and after six hours in the sun, then they're getting harder, and after a day or two, you can do anything with them.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: So the Egyptians had been supplying the straw, and now Pharaoh says, don't give them the straw anymore.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: They have to go get it for themselves, but require the same quota of bricks as they were making before.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Don't reduce it because they're slackers.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Love the Christian Standard Bible.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: They're their slackers.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is why they're crying out, let's go and sacrifice to our God.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're lazy.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, obviously, they they can't find enough straw.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: The quota drops, they start getting beaten.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: How many of the older slaves are in danger of dying?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Israelite foreman come to Moses and Aaron.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: They got it figured out.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: They'd gone to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh said, Well, you sent your emissary to tell us that you had extra time and you wanted to go sacrifice our emissary.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Moses, a guy named Moses.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: And they go, What is going on?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: So they confront Moses.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: May the Lord take note of you and judge, they said to them, because you've made us reek in front of Pharaoh and his officials, putting a sword in their hand to kill us.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: They absolutely blast him.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, you'd blast him too.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know, our life was, it wasn't good.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was bad enough before you showed up, but I mean it was sort of stable.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: We knew what the quota was.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: We had the straw, we could work really hard.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: We had the things arranged so that we weren't getting the beatings like we were before.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: People aren't dying, we're just barely making it, and then you come along, you blow in like a hurricane, you get Pharaoh all upset.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: He takes away the straw.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: Now, do you realize you're gonna cause people are gonna die because of you?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Die?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can imagine what Moses is thinking.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, so the moment they leave the house, what does Moses do?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know what Moses does.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Verses 21 through 23 of chapter 5, he turns to God, he goes back to the Lord, he says, Lord, why did you ever send me?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: Ever since I went into Pharaoh to speak in your name, he's caused trouble for this people, and you haven't delivered your people at all.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: God, do you remember our conversation back at the bush where I told you I wasn't the right guy for the job?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: That I make people fall asleep, that I make people mad, that I don't have a good tongue, that I'm not really popular, and you send me to Pharaoh, and guess what?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly what I told you would happen.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: It hasn't worked out.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's your fault.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: I obeyed you.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: I did what you said to do, I spoke the very words you told me to speak, and it's like you didn't even pay attention.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's like you're on the other side of the world, it's like you're totally oblivious to what happened, and people are gonna die.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: What what's going on?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever let me ask you this have you ever given in to God, you know, decided to do something you felt was his will, you felt was right, you're kind of scared to do it, maybe led a Bible study?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe decided to go witness to somebody, you know, take them out for coffee and share Jesus with them.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe teach a Sunday school class, do something you weren't really comfortable with, but you felt God wanted you to do it, so you were obedient, and then you bathed it in prayer, and then it totally fell flat.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: You went, God, what?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: I told you.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: My first year in college, I confess part of my motive, finally I'll confess this.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: My mother never knew this, but part of my reason for volunteering for the DuPage Convalescent Home Ministry on Sunday morning was that I decided I didn't want to go to church on Sunday morning for a while.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: So they had this team of students we can call us.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: They would go to the DuPage Convalescent Home, which is what it was called then.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's now called, it's a huge, it's called the DuPage uh Care Facility.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, but it was huge back then, one of the biggest in the entire Chicago area, hundreds and hundreds of beds.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I joined this team and I found out that what they did is these students would go in and they'd hold a chapel service, and 50 or 100 of the uh of the elderly folks would come in and they would you know sing and they'd do a little message or whatever.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: But most of the team would go, you know, from room to room and just chat with the people, maybe pray with them and whatever.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, I like older people.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: I I can do that.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: And they said to me, Would you like to work with a chapel team?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: I said, no, no, hear me clearly, no, I do not want to ever be in front of anybody.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because I was, you know, I number one fear in America is is to this day public speaking, and that was easily my number one fear.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, the number two fear in America is dying, which is interesting.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you get the feeling at a funeral, you'd rather be the one in the casket than the one delivering the eulogy, right?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: So that was definitely me.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'd much rather be dying than speaking.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: So so I said, I don't want any part of that.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'd been pushed in front of a church when I was little to sing, and I gulped so much, nothing ever came out.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that kind.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was just so terrified.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: So terrified.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: Every rest of my uh freshman uh schoolmates, they're all taking that basic class called speech, you know, that you had to that you had to go to in college, not me.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I passed that, I didn't take that until last semester, my fourth year.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I was terrified of public speaking.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: Still am.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, but anyway, so I go to convalescent home and I'm fine, I'm happy as a little camper, and I'm going from room to room, and not having to go to regular church, but I am going in and talking with and praying with older folks, and it's just really great.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then after about two months, and the leader, the student leader comes to me and says, It's your turn Sunday afternoon.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: I said, What do you mean, my turn?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: He said, It's your turn to speak.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: I said, No, no, that's not the arrangement we had.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: I visited, no, he said, it doesn't matter who you are, what you do.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: We have to pass that around, so so we don't download that on one person all the time.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: He said, It's no big deal, you just speak for 10, 15 minutes max, and you know, it's just really simple.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: I said, it matters.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you don't want you don't want me to speak.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to speak, and you don't want me to speak.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: They won't want me to speak, so it's unanimous.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: He said, I'm sorry.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: He's speaking.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, utter total panic.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm freezing up, I'm thinking, and my grades really bad that first semester anyway, but I'm sure they tanked those next two weeks because I was just living in terror, not sleeping.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: Call my dad back home in Oregon, who who's a public speaker, and he had a compassionate moment.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't many in his life, but he said, son, what I'd recommend for you, knowing that you're, you know, shy and can't talk, is I'd recommend you you find a track stand somewhere, like in a store or in a church, and you you pick out a tract and you memorize that and you deliver that.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good idea.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I went to First Baptist Church or something I went through and I picked out a Billy Graham tract.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Bingo.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I carried that thing around with me, got it all sweaty and crumpled the next two weeks as I memorized what I was going to say when I spoke on Sunday morning in this little chapel.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I kept working on it.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's really all I worked on for a couple of weeks, and I was scared, you know, and I got all the way, and including the buses will wait, all that stuff at the end, you know.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was really good.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so, and so, but I still could hardly breathe as we rode in the van that morning to Dubai Convalescent Center on that Sunday morning.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we go in there, and now I'm part of the chapel team this morning, so I help move the spin-it piano in, and I watch as the orderlies bring in the people and and the older folks, and they sit them in chairs, and then they wheel in all the wheelchairs, they were all in the front row.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: 60, 80 people.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so I go, you know, stand in the back, and so somebody plays the piano and sing the old hymns and so forth.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's getting closer and closer, and I'm reading the tract, and and then they point at me, and it's my turn.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I still seize up thinking about it today.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I walk up to the microphone and I start speaking.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever been, have you ever heard someone try to speak something that they've memorized that someone else did or something?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know how bad that is?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was exactly as bad as I knew it would be.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I, but I wasn't unhappy when I saw people nodding off, you know, and so forth.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Fall asleep, all of you, please.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so I'm working my way through, and I get about two-thirds of the way through, and the whole thing absolutely falls apart.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: What happened that I noticed is that suddenly a wheelchair right there in the front row swerved that way and crashed in another wheelchair.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then a wheelchair over here swerved that way and crashed in another wheelchair.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then a whole hubbub grew out, and the wheelchairs were starting to move and everything, and I'm just standing there and I see what the problem is then.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I hate to describe this on a Sunday morning this way, but the person in the wheelchair right in front of me, dear old man, had some bladder issues.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: And he was just spraying, hitting the floor, and it was spraying, it was bouncing up and hitting people.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: So the whole thing completely, and I mean totally, fell apart at that moment.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: So they're helping people out and they're wiping off chairs, and and so forth the orderlies are, and you know, and I'm standing there, and they're within there wiping up the floor, and and that was it.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that was before I'd gotten to Billy Graham's good illustration at the end, before I'd gotten to the invitation, the buses were anything.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: But I was kind of glad it was over.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: But I remember thinking, Lord, I told you I wasn't gonna be good at this.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: I told you this is gonna be a terrible idea.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: And didn't get any better in the van on the way home because you know, normally, you know, your fellow students would say, I was really good.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: I wish I could have heard the end of it.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Nah, that didn't happen.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody said, Wow, that was, you know, that was no, they're all just laughing.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: That was really entertaining.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: I thought nobody says anything about my trauma.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're oblivious, God was oblivious.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, God sometimes does seem oblivious when we think, you know, the whole issue is that we're obedient.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: We're doing what we think he wants us to do, and it's bathed in prayer, and we do it over a span of time in prayer and so forth, and the result is, you know, it's it we crash and burn.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was the worst day probably of Moses' life up to that point.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: It was so dark when even his own relatives, his own the Jewish friends, had come to him and they hated him now, and God had completely abandoned him.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: And this story is not unique in the Bible.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: You find this throughout the Bible where God seems oblivious to his best saints.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Take John the Baptist.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: John the Baptist is a real Jesus follower.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Remember, he's Jesus' cousin, and he's out baptizing, and all of a sudden he sees his cousin Jesus coming, and he realizes who Jesus is, the Messiah, the Son of God, and so he says, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he's the Messiah.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not even worried to latch his sandals.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: He's a Jesus follower, right?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then he gets thrown in jail.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Thrown in jail.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: John gets thrown in jail, but everything's gonna be okay, right?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because the Messiah's there, his cousin's there, and his cousin's the Messiah, everything's gonna get turned upside down, the Romans are gonna get kicked out, and and after all he's doing miracles, he hears about that out of this filthy jail cell, and yet there is.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: He's there day after day, week after week, month after month.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: And after it's been over a year of him stuck in Herod's jail, wondering what in the world is going on, why nobody's paying attention, especially not Jesus, one of his buddies comes to the jail to visit him and he says, Would you mind going to Jesus and saying, Are you the one who's to come, or should we expect somebody else?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, I mean, are you noticing what's going on?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Do you not have the power?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Are you not the Messiah?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: Or for instance, uh, a few years later, the early church, you know, Jesus is up in heaven now, and the early church is being persecuted, and they're all together, and their pastor, their head in Jerusalem is a guy named James.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: He's just such a wonderful man.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the persecution hits, and then King Herod's arresting some of the leaders who belong to the church and throwing them in jail just to persecute them, and he arrests the most beloved of them.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: He arrests James, and then all of a sudden, he kills him, puts him to death with the sword.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine the early church looking at God saying, What?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: You couldn't have protected James had Herod kill somebody else?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it's this way throughout the Bible.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Jeremiah gets put in a hole in the ground and just left there and forgotten the Apostle Paul and Caesarea, two years in prison during the height of his effective ministry.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, God, are you around?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: Have you even noticed?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about situations in your life where you're obedient to God and you're obedient over time, and prayers included, and yet God seems oblivious.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't shared this before.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: But this is personal for Melody and me because we have a daughter.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Her name is Adriel, she's our oldest child.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: We love her, she's an amazing girl.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Really intelligent, really spiritual, she loves the Lord.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: She has three little girls, she lives in Canada, and up until this last year, she had quite a ministry.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: Canada's a post-Christian country, so she would meet with a number of Asian women who've hardly heard the name of Jesus, and she would take them through the Gospel of John and explain Jesus to them.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: They loved it, she loved it.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: She would go visit her neighbors.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: They're in the high-rise apartment for a while, and then even in her neighborhood, you know, take a brownies or something and sit down and have coffee with her neighbors who didn't know anything about Jesus.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: She's outgoing, she's friendly.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: She had a women's Bible study, started the first one at her church, sang in the choir, teaching her children violin, reading to the books every night, the three little girls.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: But now for the better part of a year, she's lost her voice.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: She can't read to the girls anymore.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: They read to her at night.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: She had to drop out of all of her Bible studies, or the Sunday school classes, the singing, or anything else.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: She's gotten help.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: She's we've flown her down here and she's gotten the best medical treatment, a wonderful doctor in our church and some others, ENTs, have tried their best to identify it and fix it and give her the drugs, and still.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, when she calls us, it's rarely and briefly in a whisper.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: Last month she called and she says, uh Dad, I'm not gonna call for a couple weeks or anything.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Okay.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: She said, I'm got my the girls and Daniel have agreed to this.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna say one word, I'm not gonna even whisper for two weeks.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just gonna fast and pray.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's come and that's gone, and there's no change.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't understand, you know.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: As a father, I don't understand.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: I say, God, why did you give her the intelligence to be smart enough to meet and deal with people and to minister to them?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Why did you give her an outgoing personality so she loves to talk to people?
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Why did you give her a heart for evangelism?
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: Why did you give her a desire to serve?
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: And now leave her in a situation where she can't go next door with brownies and she can't lead a Bible study and she can't do this, she can't do that.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Are you noticing, please?
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: Are you being inattentive, indifferent?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: I know it sounds like doubt, but you must know that she is a woman of faith, and we are her parents, people of faith.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: So we're patient, but these are struggles that you have, these are struggles that I'm just telling you we have.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is highly relevant to us.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: But what we've noticed is that in the Bible, when you cry out to God and you say, Why are you being so oblivious that God always seems to answer?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: For example.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: In the story of Moses, when Moses calls to God and says, God, I don't understand why you're acting this way.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: You're ignoring me entirely.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: God then responds in the next verse, chapter 6, verse 1, and he says this.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: The Lord replied to Moses, now you are going to see what I will do to Pharaoh.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: He will let them go because of my strong hand.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: He will drive them out of his land because of my strong hand.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Do you understand, Moses?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: You're just seeing the very beginning of what I am doing.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: I understood.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: I knew that Pharaoh was going to lose his temper.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: I know that things are gonna get worse before they get better, but you need to know that I'm I'm there, I'm working something out, and you need to trust me.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, as I looked at this verse, meditated over this verse, it seems to me that God's telling us five things in this verse, five things for those of us who feel as though God's oblivious to our need.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing I think he's saying is something that he's not saying.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: He's not saying, I blame you for being upset.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's noticeable to me that when Job or Jeremiah or Moses cry out and yell at God and say, Why are you ignoring us?
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: God never yells back and says, Who do you think you are?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm God, you're a nobody.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: No, God says basically, I understand why you feel that way.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't blame you for being upset.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then God says this.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: He says, even though it seems like I'm oblivious, I'm not.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm watching.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: I see what's going on in your life, and not only that, I understand that it seems I'm far away, but I'm not.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm there with you.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, even if you go up, as David said in Psalm 139, as high as you can in the sky, I'm there.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Even if you make your bed in the depths of the earth, that's north and south, as far as you can go south, I'm there with you.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be there.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: And even if you go as far east as you can, if you take up with wings the dawn and you rise with the sun in the morning in the east, I'm there with you.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: And if you zoom across the sky as far as you can west and you settle down at the far side of the sea, there my right hand will guide you.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: And there I am present with you.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, one of the most academic commentaries on the book of Exodus, a Hebrew commentary.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: When the writer gets to this point, instead of being super academic, all of a sudden, he says, This verse, 6.1, gives us a theme of this whole narrative, which is that God is present with his children, even when they don't see it.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so God says, Yeah, it seems like I'm oblivious and far away, but I'm not.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the fourth thing he says is, even though it seems I'm not doing anything, I am.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm working.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Be patient.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: At the moment that it seems like God's doing nothing, you need to believe he's doing something behind the scenes.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, number five, even though it's hard to trust me, trust me.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: I have a plan.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: Wait for it.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_02: Helen Roosevere uh escaped after five months in the Congo and uh returned to England and recovered from sexual abuse and the beatings and so forth.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: For the two years of her recovery, she looked back down at what was happening in Congo, at the hundred thousand deaths, at the fact that all the hospitals had been burned, at the fact that people were lying dead, and she felt compassion for them, and after two years, she said, I'm going back.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: That country needs to be rebuilt.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: And she did.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: She built another hospital.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: She built a medical school to teach Congolese people how to become doctors, and built another leprosy clinic.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: I heard her in Chicago when they flew her back from Congo to share her story.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: They had just published her biography, Daylight Must Come, the story of Dr.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: Helen Roosevelt.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: This woman who had cried out to God for daylight to come for five long months, had somehow come to a place of faith and trust in God where she realized he was watching, he was there, and the daylight would come.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: And you can trust the same God because he tells you the same thing.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: He says, No matter how dark it is, and no matter how distant you feel like I am, I'm not oblivious.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: Even when it's hard to trust me, trust me.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: Because daylight is coming.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for letting us call you.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for the reminder that even though I was so right there, watching over and