Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / December 29, 2019 | Why Jeremiah In 2020?

Transcript

December 29, 2019 | Why Jeremiah In 2020? · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm so glad for that personal greeting.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: That was awesome.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna really miss all these Christmas lights.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: I love Christmas.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: It's so much fun.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Did you have a good Christmas?
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that was about half of the number who said good morning.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: So I'm sorry about the other half of you.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we could get together afterwards and share sob stories.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, no, we had a good Christmas, and all of us set my wife now sick, but but the other dozen of us have gotten well.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: So we're doing great.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: So those of you on the front row will not get sick when I spit or whatever.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Why am I doing this?
0:44
SPEAKER_00: I I just torpedo my whole sermon.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: So um if you have a Bible, would you loan it to me?
0:52
SPEAKER_00: No.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, would you open it to the book of Jeremiah?
0:56
SPEAKER_00: Would you give me a pew Bible?
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: So open your Bible to the book of Jeremiah.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: We're in the, as you can see, we're in the hinge week of 2019, going to 2020, about to start a new decade.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: I know that for those of you who are really knowledgeable, we're not really ending a decade until the end of 2020 because there was no year one or something like that.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: But for the rest of us, whatever, right?
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Jeremiah chapter one.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna read it, then we're gonna pray, and then I'm gonna try to sell you on some.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: The words of Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, one of the priests, at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin, just north of Jerusalem, about four miles northeast.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: As soon as you see the word priest, think poor.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay, not much money.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord came to him in the 13th year of the reign of Josiah.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: Everybody say, Yay, Josiah! Right, because he's the last good king of Israel, and he's we had all like him.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: He came to the throne at age eight in 640 B.C.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: This is his 13th year, so it's 627 BC, because we're subtracting years, and we're only about 20 years away from Judea, Judah, falling to the Babylonians, okay?
2:24
SPEAKER_00: But Josiah is a really, really, really good king, one of the eight good kings.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And uh so that's uh who was king when Jeremiah got a word from the Lord.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah's about five years younger than Josiah.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: He's about 16 in verse 2 when the word of the Lord came to him.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: Verse 3, and the word of the Lord came to him through the reign of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah, down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, son of Josiah, king of Judah, whom the people, when the people of Jerusalem went into exile to Babylon.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Verse 4.
3:00
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord came to me, saying, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Before you were born, I set you apart.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: By the way, take that.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: There's a prominent politician these days up in Illinois who's saying that the Bible actually teaches that you're not a person until birth, which is why you can get aborted.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: But this verse would not agree with that.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Before you were born, I set you apart.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Ah, sovereign Lord.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: I said, I don't know how to speak.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm only a child.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: When you see the word sovereign Lord, that lets you know this is the NIV.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: That would be Adonai, uh Adonai Yahweh.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Those two names for God are together.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: And the NIV makes that sovereign Lord.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: But Yahweh said, But the Lord said to me, Do not say, I'm only a child.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you, declares the Lord.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, Now I have put my words in your mouth.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord came to me.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: What do you see, Jeremiah?
4:17
SPEAKER_00: I see the branch of an almond tree, I replied.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: This lets us know, by the way, that it's about March.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: It's early in the year.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Almond tree is the first to blossom.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: The Lord said to me, You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: The word of the Lord came to me again.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: What do you see?
4:34
SPEAKER_00: I see a boiling pot tilting away from the north, I said.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: The Lord said to me, From the north, disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: For I am about to summon all the peoples of the northern kingdoms, declares the Lord.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Their kings will come and set up their thrones in the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: They will come against all her surrounding walls and against all the towns of Judah.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods, and in worshiping what their hands have made.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Get yourself ready, Jeremiah.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Stand up and say to them whatever I command you, do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: Today I have made you a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall, to stand against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: They will fight against you, but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you, declares the Lord.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Dear Lord, we thank you that you've allowed us to wake up this morning, given us a new day, given us a day in which we can come and we can sing with other people.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: We know that there are millions upon millions of people, two billion people perhaps around the world today who are worshiping you or together singing your praises, and we are one with that huge throng.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: We know that one day that throng will be joined to all of the saints of the past, and we will all rejoice to be together with each other and especially to be able to sing and glorify you and your son Jesus Christ, who came to earth to die to save us from our sins.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: So we are really happy to be here on this last Sunday of 2019.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: And as we look forward to the new year, 2020, would you move inside us this morning by your Holy Spirit to help us think clearly, help us plan clearly so that we might be better people, better Christians, better fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, grandparents, especially better leaders and advancers, soldiers of your kingdom to advance your cause in this next year.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Please guide us as we think about that.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: This morning, in these next few minutes, in Jesus' name we pray.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we are moving into 2020.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: And this happens to be the global 2020 has been pronounced by Christian leaders across the world as the global year of the Bible.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: Which, of course, is no problem for us because we're part of Topeka Bible Church, so every year is a year of the Bible for us, right?
7:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: But of course, we're gonna participate in the global year of the Bible.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: I've added my name to the list of uh minor dignitaries.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: That's a joke.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: I've signed up.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, um, it's gonna be the global year of the Bible.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: You go to their website, endorsed by leaders worldwide.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: It's uh fresh movement of re-engaging with God's Word of grassroots level.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: This whole thing was really started, by the way, by mission leaders of other nations around the world who said we would like for the whole world, the U.S., but all of us to be part of it.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Leaders of the other nations uh all around the world have said we're gonna organize, we're gonna try to get people in our country to read the Bible this year.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Some of them, of course, are shooting for big things, like some of you.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna plan to read through the whole Bible this year.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: My hat's off to you if you do that.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Our goal will be a little bit more.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: My challenge to you this morning will be a little smaller than that.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people just calling up Bible 2020, say that with me.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: Bible 2020, that's the cool way to say the global year of the Bible.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: So all around the world we're gonna be reading the Bible, and I'm going to challenge you and suggest to you that you read a certain passage of the Bible with me this year, and that passage is Jeremiah and Lamentations, and that you read it with me in the months between now, or January the 1st, and Easter.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Some of you will remember that two years ago we read uh the book of Ezekiel, and we studied it, and we preached on it from January through March until Easter, and we were really excited about that.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Everybody liked that.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: That's a prophetical book, you know, the wheels within the wheels in chapter one, the valley of dry bones, dry bones, dim dry bones, all that stuff.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh last year we sort of doubled down.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: We took the greatest book in the Old Testament, an even longer book, the book of Isaiah, 66 chapters.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: It's well known for its theology.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah was the court prophet.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: He sort of half-lived in the palace.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: He was a hundred years before Jeremiah and 150 years before Ezekiel.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: And this is the most famous of the Old Testament books, the Romans of the Old Testament.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: And I wrote uh a devotional for uh each of the 66 chapters and cajoled and coerced and bribed a number of you to go ahead and do those.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: And so we went as a church through Isaiah.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: Like the old African proverb says, to go fast, go alone, uh, but to go far, go together.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And so we went together through Isaiah.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: I considered a number of books to do this coming year, wanted to do the same thing, looked at Psalms, Hebrews, Deuteronomy, and so forth, and decided, well, I've got one major prophet left, and it's really different than either Ezekiel or Isaiah, because the book of Jeremiah, by the way, um, neither one of these end up, you don't know either one of these characters, but the book of Jeremiah is so personal, it's so emotional, and it's so biographical that it's really as much about the prophet Jeremiah and how he stands strong in the midst of all of the opposition.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: He's called the weeping prophet, he's called the lonely prophet, he's called the reluctant prophet, he's a prophet, he's the most persecuted prophet in the Old Testament.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: His persecutions rival those of Moses and of Jesus.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: A lot of Jesus' persecutions are quotes from Jeremiah, even his own countrymen, even from his little town, they rejected Jeremiah.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah didn't want to be a prophet.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: At times he tried to shut his mouth and stop, and he couldn't.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And you learn so much about this guy that I'm telling you, by the way, can I be really open for a moment?
11:05
SPEAKER_00: My job this morning, as I see it, is to be a door-to-door salesman.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: And I've just opened your door.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to sell you.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to convince you to read and study Jeremiah and Lamentations with me.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: P.S.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: Lamentations is the little five-chapter book, also written by Jeremiah at the end of Jeremiah.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: It goes Jeremiah Lamentations.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: It's sort of the epilogue.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: It's Jeremiah sitting on a hill right after Jerusalem has fallen, crying, you know, crocodile, big tears.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Five chapters.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: So we're throwing that in.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah's 52, 66 chapters, 52 chapters plus lamentations is another five.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: So one reason you should do this with me is because I know you like personal biographical stuff.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: I know you can sympathize with people who weep and who feel lonely, right?
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Not the court rich prophets.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: You really like these guys, okay?
12:02
SPEAKER_00: These guys who are lonely and who are hurting and who need more money and who like friends.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: By the way, can I just mention here, I'll just toss this in.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: This is just a little extra.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah partly survives because during his 40 years of ministry, he develops a couple of close buddies.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: One's named Baruch, by the way, who's become quite famous since his name has been found on some seals in the past few years in Jerusalem.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: But he gets two close friends who help him survive when everyone else.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: He never got married because he couldn't, he wasn't allowed to.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: But he has two close buddies that help him.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a story you want to know, right?
12:40
SPEAKER_00: Nod your head.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: You say, I want to read this book.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay, thank you very much.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: So Jeremiah is the weeping prophet, he's the pillar of iron, he's the wall of bronze, this is a famous old picture of Jeremiah, uh, a painting or whatever of him sitting overlooking Jerusalem right after its fall, writing the Book of Lamentations.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Because this study is going to be so much, because this book's so much about the person of Jeremiah, my messages will, yes, include theology about sin, like the stuff in Isaiah: sin and salvation and judgment and repentance.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
13:20
SPEAKER_00: This book is so much about how Jeremiah survives, I'm titling it Stand Strong.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: How does Jeremiah Stand Strong when he doesn't even want to stand when he never wanted to be a prophet in the first place?
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So, to my joy and surprise, I found a Christian song by a girl named Mariah Peters as I was just typing in these words, listened to the song, watched it on YouTube, and then wrote her, and she's gonna allow me to use this amazing Christian song written five years ago as a theme for the theme song for our for our uh event.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: And so this is for our uh episodes.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: So stand strong is my theme.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: This is another reason you want to read this because you want to stand strong in your life, okay?
14:13
SPEAKER_00: So the Jeremiah Challenge, if you'll take it with me, is to read Jeremiah and Lamentations during this series, four chapters a week until August, till Easter.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: If you go till August, that's just fine.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: That's just fine.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: You took seven years to get through college, so you can take.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: So um what comes out of my mouth?
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Um and you're going, oh, this will be easier than than this will be easier than than Isaiah.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: You go, because we had to read five chapters a week for Isaiah, because it was 66 chapters.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
14:44
SPEAKER_00: There are actually more words in Jeremiah than in Isaiah.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: So you're gonna get through in four days a week, the chapter's a little longer.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: So there'll actually be more words than Isaiah.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: So it's not gonna be a breeze, right?
14:59
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna I'm gonna put the daily devotionals, and if anybody wants to get started on January 1st or this week, even though officially we're not starting till next Sunday, which is January the 5th or something, yeah, 5th through 11th.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: That'll be our first official week.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: This is just a teaser.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: This is not the beginning of the series, okay?
15:17
SPEAKER_00: This is just a teaser.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: So if this is a bad sermon, forget it, because the others will be great.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: So the daily devotions, I'll write one, and it'll be posted on January the 1st.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: Dear Lord, please.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh this week, in case you want to get started early.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: In case four chapters is too much.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, so uh I'm gonna do a couple things this morning, but all of them again are geared to try to convince you to join me in celebrating the global year of the Bible in 2020 by specifically reading and studying Jeremiah and Lamentations with me.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: So let me introduce you to Jeremiah through the first three verses, which I've already read.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Notice you've already read the first chapter of Jeremiah.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Huh?
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Huh?
16:00
SPEAKER_00: You have a stake in this.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: You can't back out now.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah 1:1.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests, priests, a subset of the Levites, the tribe of Levi, they were poor because they didn't own any real estate like the other tribes.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: They just had to be supported by offerings that people brought when they offered sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: But we are now in a time of apostasy, and half of the people coming to the temple in Jerusalem at this time are offering sacrifices not to the God of Yahweh, not to not to Israel's true God, but to the gods of Assyria and to these other gods.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: In fact, they've they've got a they've got a bronze idols right across, you know, the valley of Kijron, right on the Mount of Olives, to which they throw their babies to burn to death.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's how bad it's gotten in Jerusalem.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: So you know, his family's not getting much money.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: And his dad, and probably he by his side, this young teenager, and now he's 16, are hiking the four miles southwest to Jerusalem, from Anathoth down to Jerusalem, every day for his dad to do the priestly work, territory of Benjamin.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is just south of the northern kingdom, which has fallen.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: The northern kingdom has fallen about a hundred years before to Assyria.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: And Assyria is the great power in the middle at this point until until uh actually until this verse.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: When the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah in the 13th year of the reign of Josiah, son of Amon, king of Judah, that's 627 BC.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: Josiah started in the 640.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: 627 BC is a very important year, by the way, in ancient Near Eastern history.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: Asher Banaphal, just try to say that five times.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: The great final, the king of Assyria, died, and Assyria just, you know, just poofed out and was almost totally disappeared in about 15 years.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: So there's a huge political transition.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: This is Jeremiah's life.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: He's living in huge political transition in his time, right?
18:09
SPEAKER_00: And the word of the Lord comes to him in the 13th year.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: He's five years younger than Josiah.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: He's about 16 years old.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: He was not planning to be a prophet.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: Priest is like a Bible teacher, it's like what I do.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Priest goes and he takes the sacrifice and so forth, but he primarily teaches the word of God to the people.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: That's what a priest does.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Prophet, prophet has to criticize the king.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Prophet gets a fresh word from God regularly.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: He has to do weird stuff.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: He gets everybody mad at him.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: 16-year-old boy, and we know from his personality, he was not the kind of a guy who was a loner.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: He was the kind of a guy who wanted friends.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: He's an emotional guy, he's an artist kind of a guy.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: And the word of the Lord captures him when he is in his mid-teens, when he's 16 years old, in the 13th year in 627 BC, and says, I got a job for you.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, this word of the Lord came throughout the days.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: It just shows he has a like a 40-year pre prophetic career through Jehoiakim, through all of these other kings and so forth, until they went into exile.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Alright?
19:10
SPEAKER_00: So during the years of Josiah, Jehoiak Jehoiakim, Zedekiah, and Jehoiach until the whole thing falls apart.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: This is when, and we have pictures of those guys in case you want to know.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: And this is during the five last kings of Judah.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: So that's when this guy, Jeremiah, is a prophet.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: So he's he, the reason you need to read this book is partly because his days are so similar to ours in a way.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: You talk about political upheaval here in America.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we've got the impeachment, we're in the middle of that, then we've got an election year.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: Oh joy, aren't you so happy?
19:45
SPEAKER_00: You know, 2020 is going to be an election year, and our country is so divided.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
19:51
SPEAKER_00: Or haven't you noticed?
19:53
SPEAKER_00: You know, I uh let me give you a suggestion.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a couple of lines to write on your Facebook page or Twitter, and then you'll learn how divided we are.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: All right?
20:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: So um we're and his his at his time, so divided, so much animosity.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was absolutely hated because he was considered to be on the wrong side politically, Jeremiah was.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's one reason he was thrown into jail, one time thrown into muck where he slowly sank up to his armpits and would have died if an Ethiopian hadn't pulled him out.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, politically and religiously?
20:27
SPEAKER_00: Religiously, yeah, there was a good king for for 15, 20 years named Josiah, and he enforced Bible reading and prayer or whatever.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he he got rid of all the bad idols, but it was a religious veneer.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: And God kept saying to Jeremiah, you know what?
20:44
SPEAKER_00: Their hearts aren't with me.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: They're playing the game, but they're not genuine.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: You ever know is that the truth today in America?
20:51
SPEAKER_00: Where two-thirds of Americans today say that God's word is the final step.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: Two-thirds of Americans will say to George Gallup that they believe that God's word gives the rules for life and how we should conduct ourselves, and yet half of them admit that they never open it, which is probably why half of Jeopardy contestants can't name any of the writers of the four gospels or the first book of the Bible, Genesis.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: These and they're geniuses.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, the questions they can answer.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: What's the first book of the Bible?
21:20
SPEAKER_00: Duh.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we are, as George Gallup says, a nation of biblical illiterates.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: Our religion is in our country to a great extent a religious veneer.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: If the average American has four Bibles in his home and never opens them up and says that they really believe in God Jesus in heaven, that's a religious veneer.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: And that's the same situation Jeremiah found himself in.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay, here's another reason you need to read Jeremiah with me.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: It's got some cool verses in it.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Huh?
21:50
SPEAKER_00: Read this one with me.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: This is everybody's favorite.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: Say it with me.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: Plans to prosper you and not To harm you plans to give you hope and a future.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 11.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that a great verse?
22:07
SPEAKER_00: Come on, it's your favorite.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: And here's another good one.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: I have loved you with an everlasting love.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah 31, 3.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, with cords of love I have drawn you.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: God says, Isn't that a great verse?
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Aren't you excited to read a book that has verses like in it?
22:23
SPEAKER_00: And verses like this?
22:24
SPEAKER_00: The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Who can know it?
22:28
SPEAKER_00: And you know that's true because of your kids.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: You know.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: Or some of your friends.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: Right?
22:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you go, that's truth right there.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: That is truth.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: Not me, but some people I know.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: My favorite verse growing up, believe it or not, Jeremiah 33, 3, call to me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: So in the midst of all the loneliness and the reluctant prophet and the sad prophet and rebellion, you know, you have these great little beautiful glimpses of life and light and so forth.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: Or when we get to lamentations, the the verse on which great is thy faithfulness, that song is based.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Say it with me.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: It is because of the Lord's great love that we are not consumed.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Because his compassions never fail, they are new every morning.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: Great is your faithfulness.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: Those are great verses.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: You want to read those verses, don't you?
23:26
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: So, so uh, but here, to tie this in with the global year of the Bible and the importance of the Word of God, let me share with you that Jeremiah himself has a rather unique emphasis on the Word of God.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh his book, in effect, illustrates the truth of this famous New Testament verse from Hebrews 4.12 that the word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: When I was reading chapter 1 to you today, you know, half a dozen times verses started with the phrase, the word of the Lord came to me, the word of the Lord.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Now that seems to be a familiar phrase in the Bible, right?
24:07
SPEAKER_00: So about a hundred times in the Old Testament.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: Do you realize half of those times are in the book of Jeremiah?
24:14
SPEAKER_00: Out of 250 times that that phrase appears in the entire Bible, 20% of those times are in this book of Jeremiah.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah was all about the power of the word of God.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: And the reason you need to join me in the Jeremiah Challenge is that this word of God will have power to do something in you, even if you don't expect it to.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: It's just the way it works.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: It all starts in Jeremiah 1.9, a verse that I read to you that the Lord, you know, here's a teenager who goes, Hey, I can't be a prophet, and then the Lord tenderly reaches out and touches his mouth.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Such a personal act for the God of the universe, touches his mouth and says, Look, I've put my words in your mouth.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: So now he's stuck.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: Now he's got the word of God in his mouth, transforming his tongue, transforming his mouth.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: And from that moment on, he is Mr.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Word of God.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: He's Mr.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: Bible, in a sense, to the nation of Israel and to the other nations around about.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: Not that they like him for that, doesn't make him popular, but he's Mr.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Word of the Lord.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: And that word of the Lord has this act of power in the same way that God breathed into Adam the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: And that's why you're alive today.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: In the New Testament, we read that God breathed into men the Word of God, inspiring the Word of God.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: And that's why the Bible is as alive a document as you are.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: That's why when you read it, you're just not reading it.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: The Bible's very clear about this.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: They did not think of the Word of God as just something that you read and study.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: It had some sort of an active power, sort of a yeast power inside of you that would transform you.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: And would transform the world in six ways, four of them negative and two of them positive.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, and here's what the word of God in his mouth would do.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: First, it would pluck up and break down.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: That's the first pair.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: The second pair is it will destroy and overthrow.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: That's even more dark and powerful.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: And third is positive to build and to plant.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah's probably going, can I get four positives and two negatives rather than four negatives and two positives?
26:39
SPEAKER_00: But that's really, this is the theme verse of the book.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: And you'll notice that the first of these pairs has to do with attacking sin.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: That when you read the Word of God, though you may have a hidden sin inside you, even though you're not wanting or even expecting the Word of God to do anything about that, it will pluck up and break down that stronghold inside you.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: It will just do that because it's alive.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: And the second thing it will do is it'll bring judgment.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: It'll demolish any evil.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: In a society, if a society reads the Bible or in your life, it will destroy and overthrow evil.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: But it will also do something else.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: It will bring life, it will build and it will plant, transform, it will save people.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: That's so important.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to repeat it.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: It will attack God's word as you read it this coming year and as it's read around the whole world, it will be attacking sin.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: It will be plucking up and breaking down.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: And second, it will be bringing judgment, destroying and overthrowing.
27:43
SPEAKER_00: I was reading, uh reading the story uh recently of Mutiny on the Bounty.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: You've seen the movie probably, Captain Bly.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: You remember the story of the ship and from England.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: So it went to Tahiti, I believe it was, to pick up plants, uh breadfruit plants or something, sell them the West Indies.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: And Captain Bly was this.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: If you've seen the old movie, you should see the movie sometimes.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: He's this tyrant, just this tyrant.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: And so the the he had a he had about three dozen um sailors on board, and about half of them mutinied, and they had the power, and they kicked uh Fletcher Christian, I think his name was, was the leader, and they put Captain Bly and I think 17 others on a longboat and just pushed them out to sea.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: And fortunately, you know, though it was very tough, finally Captain Bly and the others, they got to an island and they finally got back to England safe.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: And which at which point, of course, all the powers of England were sent to look for these mutineers.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, the mutineers had sailed the ship, uh, the bounty, uh, back to Tahiti, which they really liked.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: They liked the women, so they grabbed all these girls and they put them on board, and and then they sailed to find an island that would be remote.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: And they found a little island, primarily a mountain called Pitcairn Island.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the Solomon Islands there with Fiji and and uh and uh some of those other islands whose names I forget, but um at Tahiti.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: And uh and they found this island and they took everything of any value off the bounty and they burned they burned the boat so they couldn't be found.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the 15 mutineers uh knew how to make a distillery, and that was their first goal.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: So they made a distillery, and so they all just lived, these 15 small island, 15 and the women and so forth.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: So they had children, they got drunk, and the alcohol would make them uh do crazy things and they murdered each other, and finally, after 10 years, there was only one mutineer still living.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: His name, interestingly enough, was John Adams, and uh and he looked around at all of these kids that they had all, you know, spawned, and and it was wild, none of them were educated, and the place was a mess, and it was wild, and he knew he was in charge, and he and he and he knew he had to do something.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: And he found Captain Bly's chest, which they'd saved from HMS Bounty, and at the bottom of it, a book that they had never paid any attention to was the Bible, and he got that book out, and he read that book, looking for help to how to start a school or anything else, and he became converted.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: And he did start a school and he started a church.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: And that island became so civilized and so ordered, for they all became Christians that when the English government found out, after about 15 years, you know, of looking where where the uh mutineers had gone, they came to the island, they saw the only mutineer left was leading an island that was so ordered, they forgave him, they let him go.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: And it was amazing because then they sent out ships to the other Solomon Islands to Fiji, which recently was 80% Christian.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: So all of these Solomon Islands were evangelized, and they're still primarily Christian islands, which became quite important, by the way, in the Second World War, because, for instance, when John F.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy's PT-109 boat went down, he happened fortunately not to be rescued by Japanese.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: He was rescued by Solomon Islanders from Pitcairn Island, who, as the Japanese planes flew over, strafing and looking for people, they hid him under uh rushes at the bottom of their canoe, and John F.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy testifies they sang Christian hymns all the way uh back to to they found a uh secure island for him, and and he said he sang Christian hymns with them.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: Really interesting.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: And and so, and a number of other American sailors testified that when their planes went down, they got rescued by Christians from the Solomon Islands.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: And it all started, it all started with finding a Bible at the bottom of Captain Bly's trunk.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that amazing?
32:08
SPEAKER_00: And even today, Pitcairn Island and those Solomon Islands are Christian islands.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: And it all starts with a Bible, the power of the Bible to attack the sin on that island of murder and vice and so forth, and to bring judgment to that and to demolish it and replace it with life.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: That's the power of God's word.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: That's the power that it can have, even if you're not even thinking that way as you're celebrating with me the year of the Bible in 2020.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: That's why you need to read Jeremiah Lamentation.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: So, a couple more verses on the Bible, which illustrate this so well.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: In Jeremiah, how about this verse?
32:48
SPEAKER_00: Jeremiah 23, 29.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?
32:56
SPEAKER_00: Boy, that really does illustrate the attacking against sin and the demolishing, doesn't it?
33:01
SPEAKER_00: In fact, Jeremiah himself, about 10 chapters before, said, after his own townspeople, his own friends in his small town, they all said, We don't like you anymore.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: They rejected him because they didn't like what he was saying too.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: He said, I'm not gonna say anything more.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: God, I'm not gonna be a prophet anymore.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: I know you put your words in there.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna shut up, I'm gonna close my mouth.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: This is just too rough.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: I can't handle this.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: I hate being everybody's enemy.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, but then God's word like a fire burned me from the inside.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: It was like he had a bad Mexican taco.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, he just couldn't stop it, he says, and I just and he popped out his and he couldn't stop talking.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: The fire, his word was like a fire inside him.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: But a fire can also be a warming fire, right?
33:45
SPEAKER_00: I was uh I I I I I think of when God's word first sort of burned in a warm way within me, really deeply.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: I had been at I'd been at college and I'd majored in mathematics thinking, I'd be a math teacher, and I didn't like the fact that back in those days math teachers were super common, and I was gonna have to go to the University of Michigan, they said, and get up to get a doctorate to teach in a high school or whatever.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, and I thought, well, I really enjoyed taking this Greek course last year at Wheaton, and I really enjoyed this uh this Bible course.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: It was taught by this uh, we would call them liberal today, didn't believe that most of the books in the New Testament were written by the people who they say are written by and so forth.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: But I had always considered that the Bible was the shallow little book, Sunday school book, and I couldn't believe that there were, you know, that that that it could be, you know, that there were these issues with the Bible that were so intelligent or something.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: And so and so I started studying the Bible, and it was one fall in a September in Dallas, Texas, in the second year of seminary, that all of a sudden it just something happened inside me.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: And I remember stopping the class and raising my hand and saying saying something to the teacher about it, just saying, Wow, I I just need to tell you, you know, that I have just realized for the first time in my life, you know, that even though I grew up in a Christian home, I I am I'm just really an awful sinner.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: And I am just so moved by the fact that God loves me and forgave me.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: And uh, and and you know, from that moment, the word of God, like a warming fire inside of me, impelled me.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: I certainly, even at that point, never sought or wanted to be a pastor, but but that's just you know, that's further story.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: That was the hammer that broke the rock in pieces, maybe, but but that's what the word of God will do in you as you read Jeremiah and Lamentations and as you read it this coming year.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it'll be so positive, right?
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Here's the verse that only Jeremiah has.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: Your words were found, and I ate them.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: And your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I'm called by your name, O Lord God of hosts.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: Is that a great verse?
35:48
SPEAKER_00: It's all positive.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: And I happen to be a fan of Chef Ali, who was sitting in the second row there in first service, as she always does, with her husband Pat.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: And I like looking at her recipes, and I'm sorry, I know some of you are vegetarians, so don't look at the meatloaf.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, that looks so good to me.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: But, and that's what Jeremiah says the word of God is.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: The word of God is like a meal, and you're so, it's the kind of meal you eat that you're so happy about it afterwards.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: And I promise you, I promise you, there will be those times when when even though you don't feel like reading Jeremiah 46 to 51, which are, you know, his diatribe against the nations, or whatever else, you will find little moments of absolute delight when you say, This is what I was meant to do, this is what I was meant to do.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: I was meant to rehear the words of God from so many years ago because they're transforming my life today, because they're living and they're active.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: Right?
36:46
SPEAKER_00: A couple more stories about how powerful and active this is seven years ago.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: His name's Tim Tebow.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: He was regarded as a very poor quarterback with his passing arm, but he had led somehow Denver with a mediocre eight-and-eight record into the NFL playoffs, and they were playing this coming week, Sunday, against the mighty Pittsburgh Steelers with the best defense in the NFL.
37:06
SPEAKER_00: And somehow, in overtime, he led them to a victory, but he had, as he had in the in the college title game three years before, he had stenciled John 3.16 under his eyes that game.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: And Google reported that 91 million people, 91 million people Google John 3.16, trying to figure out what in the world that was during the game.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: I know it's surprising to you and me that that many people would have no idea what John 3.16 is.
37:31
SPEAKER_00: But it just so happened that the Billy Graham Association was doing a special study on John 3.16 at that time, which had moved their line up close to the very top of the John 3 as John 3.16 when you Google it, which meant that that night their association, their counselors fielded thousands of phone calls and texts from people trying to figure this out, and they led 150 people to Christ that night because of John 3.16.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: The word of God has the power to bring life.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: Or think of Alex Chu, Alexander Chu.
38:07
SPEAKER_00: Alex Chu grew up hearing the click, click, click every morning of his parents' uh his parents keeping count of the number of times they recited the Buddhist mantra.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: His parents grew up in Taiwan, though this wasn't Taiwan, but he said some days they would get up to a thousand on their clickers, which meant they had spent two hours meditating, saying the Buddhist mantras, which purified them.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: He says, our home was like a Buddhist temple.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: We had a large Buddha in the opening hallway.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: We had 30 Buddhas around the house.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: We had a prayer room to Buddha with incense burning.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: We would put out fresh oranges and pineapples, and we would constantly go in that.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: And he said, but this wasn't in Taiwan, this was in Lawrence, Kansas.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: Because he said, My father was a notable, it still is, by the way, a notable chemistry professor at KU.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: And my mother was one of these tiger moms, so all of us children, we had to we had to super succeed and so forth.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: And he said, So I never knew anything about Christianity, but some of my friends from school I would see walking to a church nearby every Sunday morning as I would be playing my violin.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: But he said, still, by the age by age 18, I didn't know anything about the gospel.
39:17
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to go to KU, he says, because I wanted to go to a place where they had more Asian students like me, and I had gotten a full ride to the University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana, in engineering, so I went up there, and sure enough, he says, my dorm was filled with Asian students, but to my surprise, a number of them went to this thing called Intervarsity.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And he said, they said they were Christians.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: I had never met another Christian from Asia or Taiwan.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: And by my sophomore year, I got so curious, I asked if I would go, if I could go to Intervarsity with one of them, and I went.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: And he said, and then I got involved in a Bible study, and the Bible study was on the Gospel of John, and we opened it as I studied the Gospel of John.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: He said, it was as though it was like a fire inside me.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: It was alive and it wouldn't let me go.
40:02
SPEAKER_00: I could not believe what this, what this was like.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: Somehow God was talking to me for the first time, and he said, I'd always struggled in Buddhism with the question growing up, with the question of why so many people have to suffer.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: And he said, God addressed that question in that book.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: And now Alex Chu is an outreach pastor at a church called Christ Church in the suburbs of Chicago.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: Gospel of John did that for him.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: I think you might want to shut that door over there, one of you thinks.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: And I think too of I think of a couple of my friends who are in Tel Aviv right now, who are in Israel.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: I think of Abigail, Abigail is what she calls herself.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: And this month, this month, she's been spending some time with a really gifted artist and musician and writer named Sivon over in Tel Aviv, a Jewish girl.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: And earlier this month she shared with her Isaiah chapter 53.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah chapter 53.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: You know about Isaiah chapter 53.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: And Sivon put her faith in Jesus Christ.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: And across town, another guy known named E.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: Gaul has been walking the streets and talking with a homeless Jewish man, a large kid, a guy named Max, who dropped out of his job, has a lot of alcohol problems, and just lives on the street.
41:16
SPEAKER_00: But he's been taking him food for weeks.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: And earlier this month, he sat down with him.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: He said, I've got a verse for you.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: And he shared with him a verse, some of Jesus' words out of the Gospel of Matthew.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: And Max started weeping.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: And he said, It's partly the fact that you love me, you've been visiting me and being nice to me for months now, but partly the words of Jesus.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: He says, I want to trust in a guy like that.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: Or I think, for instance, a friend of mine named Jack Sternberg.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: Jack was born a Jewish guy in New York City.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: And he was more of a bagel y Jew.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: That is, he wasn't Orthodox at all.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: He celebrated the High Holy Days and ate bagels.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: But still, certainly not a Christian.
42:00
SPEAKER_00: Certainly that's because Jews aren't Christians.
42:03
SPEAKER_00: He went to Harvard, graduated with high honors, and went down to M.D.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: Anderson, where he studied oncology and graduated again well, and he went up to Arkansas where he founded the first oncology, purely oncology clinic in Arkansas, there in Little Rock, marrying his friend, another Jewish girl named Marilyn.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: And they weren't, you know, fervent Jews or anything like that, but at the same time, he says, when some of my cancer patients would say to me, You need to become a Christian, I'd say, I'm Jewish.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: Jews don't become Christians.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: And he said, We made a lot of money with a big, beautiful house, we had the cars, we had everything going for us, we decided to try the nightlife, we decided that didn't really make us happy and so forth.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: But he said, then one day I met a 30-year-old mother of two, and I had to tell her she was dying of breast cancer.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't believe her response.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: She said, That's fine, I know where I'm going.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: I know Jesus as my savior.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: And he said, then she asked me if I knew Jesus as my savior, I said, I'm a Jew.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: I we don't believe in Jesus.
43:13
SPEAKER_00: And she said she was gonna pray for me every day until I did.
43:17
SPEAKER_00: And so every time she'd come in and she was dying for the next year, I could tell she really wasn't.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: She really wasn't feeling sorry for herself.
43:27
SPEAKER_00: She was so, so much more concerned about whether or not she was gonna see me in heaven.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: So he says, when my 11-year-old girl, a daughter Jennifer, came home and said her best friend, a Jewish girl, said that she and her father, another doctor, that they had they had visited a church.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: I called up the other doctor and I was really, really angry at him.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: I said, Jews don't go to church.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: And he said, You ought to try it.
43:50
SPEAKER_00: Will you come with me next Sunday?
43:51
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, I am that 30 year old woman is just amazing.
43:56
SPEAKER_00: So he said, I decided I would.
43:58
SPEAKER_00: And he says, I went.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: And the pastor was talking on Psalm 73.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: Psalm 73 about why do the righteous suffer and why do why do good people prosper?
44:10
SPEAKER_00: Why do bad people prosper and the righteous have?
44:12
SPEAKER_00: I said, I'd struggle with that question all my life.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: And the fact that the Bible addressed that question, he said, that burned inside me.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't get it out of my head.
44:20
SPEAKER_00: I said, the last thing I want to do is believe in Jesus, but the Bible wouldn't let me go.
44:25
SPEAKER_00: And now Jack Sternberg is one of my best friends on the board of Jews for Jesus.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: That's what the Bible will do, whether it's the book of Psalms or whether it's John 3.16 or Isaiah 53, the Bible has a way of coming alive, of burning like a fire, attacking sin, of demolishing strongholds, but finally in the end, bringing life.
44:47
SPEAKER_00: Oswald Chambers finishes his wonderful devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: I think it's December the 31st.
44:54
SPEAKER_00: He writes, at the end of the year, we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: And yet our present enjoyment of God's grace is held back, held back by the memory of yesterday's sins and blunders.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: What we failed to do or what we did wrong in 2019 holds us back from making resolutions for 2020.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: He says, but leave the broken, irreversible past in his hands and step out with him into the invincible future.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what a man did this week.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: A man who's in his 90s, I think.
45:31
SPEAKER_00: He was in hospice in South Carolina.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: This man, Jeron James Grinstaff.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: He loves Jesus, has loved Jesus for years, say his sons Craig and Jim.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: Craig says he stood for the Lord for years.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: Jim says, but he's never been baptized.
45:53
SPEAKER_00: And he told us that his dying wish was that he let the doctors and nurses and everyone know that he testified that he's a Christian by getting baptized.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: When his doctors and nurses heard they did all they could to make it happen.
46:05
SPEAKER_00: So earlier this week, they brought a special tub because he said, I ain't getting sprinkled.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: I gotta get dunked.
46:13
SPEAKER_00: So they got a special little tub, and his chaplain held him under, they poured water over him and so forth, and he came up grinning.
46:21
SPEAKER_00: He says, The fact that I haven't been baptized all these years isn't gonna stop me from getting baptized now.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: And I thought again of those words of Chambers, leave the broken, irreversible past in his hands and step out with him into the invincible future.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: The 500 million people, or I'm sorry, the 50 million people who have looked at that Twitter, looked at that Facebook of that old man getting baptized in the last three days.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: I hope learn what you and I can learn from this, that no matter what the past has been, we can step boldly into the future of 2020, knowing that it's the global year of the Bible and God wants nothing more than for us to hear his words once again.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: Will you join me?
47:12
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that you've given us another day and perhaps another year to live, and we pray that in that year we will please you and that we will listen to you, that we will listen to your word.
47:25
SPEAKER_00: That your word will do what you designed it to do inside of us, that it will burn us, that it will hammer us, break us down, but then build us up, plant us and give us life.
47:38
SPEAKER_00: For the sake of your son Jesus, in whose name we pray.
47:42
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
47:44
SPEAKER_00: Thank you and happy new year.