Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 15, 2024 | Galatians - Don't Look at Me, It's a God Thing!

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September 15, 2024 | Galatians - Don't Look at Me, It's a God Thing! · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: How's everybody doing?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Both of you are doing well, huh?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we're in Galatians, and this is week number three.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Connor told me this morning I can't do it.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Get on up there.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, he told me.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: He gave me more warning.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're in Galatians 1, 11 through 24, and I've titled it one of the major themes actually of the book is don't look at me.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a God thing.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of a paraphrase.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is what you say, of course, in reply, when someone who disagrees with you attacks and pigeonholes you.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's happening to Paul.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's saying, you know, don't blame me, don't look at me.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a God thing.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: So uh last week uh one of you had told me that I should uh read uh Clockmaker's Daughter, which is about Cory Tinboom.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Remember the book The Hiding Place, written years ago, which is about the Dutch family, clockmaker's family in Holland, and they build a hiding place, second floor, where they hid six Jews during World War II.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so uh Corey Tinboom was the only one of the family who survived, and she became pretty famous.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: But this book has come out uh not too long ago, it's really good.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I was listening to it on tape coming back from Utah a week ago, and um and there's something that happens that illustrates this don't look at me, it's a God thing.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So Corey's in uh concentration camp with her sister Betsy, and apparently this happened to non-Jewish people quite a bit uh who were being just terribly treated in concentration camp.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: She was in Ravensbrook, and the commandant apparently called her in, you know, just said, uh, you know, she was nearly half dead.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, you know, you're blonde, you're Aryan, you're not Jewish, you're not the kind of person we have these for, but you know, you just disobeyed, don't you know Romans chapter 13, he said.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Where God says that you are to obey the authorities he's put over you.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently, even uh Hitler said that during World War II quite a bit.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And her response was immediate.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: She said, um, she said, I know he can't have meant that when it comes to the Jews, because Jesus said repeatedly that we should take anyone in.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: We should welcome them in, anyone who's needy, anyone who's hurting, anyone who's under attack, and especially his chosen people, the Jews.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, what she was saying was, don't blame us.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Don't blame our family.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a God thing.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Something like this happened that I that I quoted this last Monday when I was doing a memorial service for an elderly man, 92, who had passed away 10 days ago, 12 days ago, whatever, named Rex, Ginny Miller, if you know Dave and Jenny Miller, Jenny's father.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Rex had only moved down to Topeka.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I had not gotten to know him.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: He'd moved down just a year ago to be around his family during his last years.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Rex was a prominent engineer up in the state of uh Nebraska for years.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: He had not been a religious person growing up, but he told me several weeks ago when he was uh uh when we were talking that he had gone up to the University of Nebraska studying engineering, and by the way, he had become quite a significant engineer in the whole state of Nebraska, you know, putting in underground electrical wiring and so forth, started three companies and so forth.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But he said, so I didn't have much use for God, but I was at the University of Nebraska and suddenly I had a lung collapse, and I was in the hospital.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was in the clinic there for three weeks, and he said, you know, I was a reader.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was clearly a very smart guy, but he said, you know, I complained one afternoon that I'd I'd read everything that was there in the clinic.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, so that night before she left, a nurse came and she handed me a New Testament.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, You know, if you get bored, why don't you read this?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I started reading it.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I ended up staying up all night.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I read it through.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I closed it at the end, and he said, I just sat there and I thought, either this is the craziest story I have ever heard, or it's really true, and I need to decide whether I need to believe it or not.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, it wasn't more than a day or two later when I suddenly realized the debate is over.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: I realize I do believe it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, you know, I go back to my friends and family and and and and they're going, you know, let's do this, let's do that.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, you know, I'm uh, you know, I'm not that same person anymore.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, what's going on?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Don't blame me.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had a collapsed lung.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I read the New Testament in a night, and I had just, I had no choice.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just believe it.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're talking about this morning.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're talking about the idea of something that happens in your life that turns you around.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm going to ask you to consider as I'm preaching this morning in the story of your life.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: What turning point can only be explained as a God thing?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: A famous professor I had at seminary in Amdaimed, Howard Hendricks, would sometimes just stand there, this short guy, this fire plug of a guy, and he'd look at us and he'd said, and it was only men in seminary way back then in Noah's day.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he would just say, he'd say, Men?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: What is there in your life that can only be explained by the supernatural?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I hated it every time he said it.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: But so that's the story, that's the question I'm going to ask you to think about today as we go through this passage, which starts in Galatians 1, verse 11.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel preached by me is not of human origin.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or literally in the Greek, it's not a human thing.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's an alien, you know.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: For I did not receive it from a human source, and I was not taught it, but it came by a revelation from Jesus Christ.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, every time that Jesus uses this phrase to start a paragraph, start a sentence in the New Testament half a dozen, dozen times, for this is, I want you to know something, he's saying this is important.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason he's really insistent that they listen to him carefully here is because he's pretty ticked off, you know, as Connor has said the last few weeks.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Philippians is a book of joy, Ephesians is a book of unity, Colossians is all about wisdom.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thessalonians, you know, you get to Galatians, it's like, you know, it's a thundercloud.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Paul goes in there and he is not taking any prisoners.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he is really upset.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, and what's happened is that Paul had gone up on his first missionary journey to what we call southern Turkey, the area of Galatia back then, and he had shared the gospel of the grace of God, this wonderful grace of God, that man had a problem, his problem was sin, so as a result of nothing else working, man unable to clamber out of that swamp, God had sent his son down to earth, who had lived and then had died, been killed in our place for our sins, but had risen again from the grave and uh offering the same and give eternal life and forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit and all that other stuff to anyone who believed on him.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the people just responded like crazy.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: They loved it, they loved the story of the grace of God.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the people in Galatia had trusted Christ as their savior, and just churches started, that church has started, and so forth.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Everything was hunky-dory, right?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul ends his missionary journey.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: What had happened is that while he was gone, after a while, some other people had come in.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And these other people had said, listen, Paul's a good guy and all.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he he's doing a really good job, but you need to understand he's a rookie.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's new on this war path.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's not hadn't been a Christian all that long.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so he went to sales school there, uh, the apostle sales school, Peter's sales school, whatever, in Jerusalem.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he learned the sales talk, but he, you know, he got it a little bit muddled.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: He came up here and he didn't share with you the whole story.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: He sort of left some stuff out.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: He obviously can't really have meant that uh, you know, the Jews are no longer chosen people because they're Jews and the circumcision stuff and the law of Moses.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we're gonna help you.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: He's just he's just a little bit off here.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: He he heard the story wrong, he learned it wrong at sales school, and it but you know, we got to tweak it a little bit.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul's not happy, Paul's ticked, and Paul's answer is going to be in this passage what not me.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is a God thing.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I got it from Revelation, and so uh that's why Paul starts, for I want you to know, brothers and sisters, the gospel preached by me is not now for just a second, let's remind ourselves that you and I, you know, uh, you and I would have been, we we would have sympathized with Paul.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine, here's Paul.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's his story is told six times in the New Testament, his biography is in three places in Acts, and it's in three places outside of Acts.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of them.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of them don't tell the whole story, each one of them adds something interesting.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: This one I'll share with you in a minute adds something really interesting to the rest of these stories, not said anywhere else.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: But but but all of the stories added together say that here's think of Paul.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's this young buck, he's this sharp young guy, he's super intelligent, and he is incredibly committed to the traditions of his fathers and grandfather and great-grandfather, and he is super zealous for his nation and for his religion.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there is no, you know, there is no holding back for him.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is the most important thing in life to him.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he says, you know, I surpass all of my classmates and everybody uh in in this stuff.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then what happens is uh he's he's observing that a new group starts up in Israel, and they're calling themselves the Nazarenes, or actually everybody else is calling them the Nazarenes, and they believe in someone, they follow someone named Jesus Christ.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they don't seem like they're any real threat to the Jewish religion, because after all, the Jewish religion has always been sort of a wide tend.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It has included different groups like the Pharisees, of which Paul is one.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the ones that, you know, hold to the box of doctrines and so forth.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: But they also have included that they include the super liberal Sadducees, who, though they're not atheists, you're getting pretty close at times, and uh political zealots and the fundamentalist Essenes.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, what do these Nazarenes, these blue-collar sort of populist group from up north in Galilee, that's no threat, right?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, so you know, Paul is sort of open-minded about that.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: As long as they still go to the temple or synagogues and all that stuff, they're gonna be fine.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: But before long, he begins to hear that among these new Christians, there are some radical ideas.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: There are some of these young guys like Philip and like Stephen who are saying, believe it or not, that Christianity is not just for the Jews, but it's for everybody, you know, around the world, even non-Jews, who believe in Jesus Christ.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, what?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So Stephen and Philip and others are saying it doesn't really matter if your background is Jewish so long as you believe in the gospel of Jesus?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean it doesn't matter?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Paul is thinking.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he starts to get steamed up.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: What do you it does matter?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's the single most important thing in the world.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: No young buck can stand up and say that it doesn't matter whether you're part of the chosen people of God, the Jews who for thousands of years have tried to keep the light, the candlelight of the truth, uh alive in a darkened pagan world, who have been exiled, who have been uh who have been enslaved, who've had miracles done, who have labored under the burden of being spat upon and treated as different, these Jewish chosen people.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's always been that you had to become Jewish through circumcision and so forth to become God's chosen people.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden you have these blue-collar flakes who are standing up there and saying it really doesn't matter.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: All you have to do is believe in Jesus Christ.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Of course it matters.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can't become one of God's chosen people unless you become Jewish.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I suspect that if you just stared at Paul as he said that, as he admitted it to you, he'd say, Listen, I want you to imagine something.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to imagine that you're 17 years old and you're the only son in a family.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then your family, your dad and mom decide when you're 17 they're gonna adopt someone.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So they adopt another, they adopt a 17-year-old boy, and now there are two of you.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Six months later, though, when you're 18 and you're sitting at the supper table, your dad comes in grinning and waving a sheet of papers.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Guys, honey, I've signed the papers today.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've gotten it all arranged, our will is taken care of.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're leaving everything the family business, the property, all our money and everything else.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be leaving everything to our two sons.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think, guys?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you know what one son is thinking.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's thinking, what?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna make him equal with me?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've been here, I've been mowing the lawn, remember when I painted the basement?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Remember when I've done all these things you wanted me to do?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: We've been you've been coming to my soccer games for years, you denied me the car on Friday nights, you know, I've passed ninth grade, you know, with your help and so forth, and you have this latecomer's coming along, and you're gonna say we're we're equal, and you're gonna give him a full 50% share.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So now imagine how Paul feels.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Paul's gonna think, you know, for generations after generations after generations, for my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, we have always believed the same thing.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: We've been taught the same thing.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: We have all of these saints in our background that say God, the Jewish people are God's chosen people.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we have gone through so much suffering and so much struggle and all everything, all my my family, my the national traditions, the religion, everything that I've always believed, everything that I've heard every day in school, every day of my life, all of the jobs that I've thought about having in life, all of them rest upon this one single idea, and all of a sudden you're gonna allow some little Nazarene group with Jesus of Nazareth to say that none of that is true.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody is equal if they just, you know, they're gonna, and this, and Paul, you know, this young Paul, we'll call him Paul's name, Saul, at this time, but you know, the funnel of anger is getting darker and darker, and it turns into a funnel cloud, and it begins to rest on the new young churches in the land of Israel and all around there, because Paul sees himself as Phinehas in the Old Testament, you know, who saved the people of Israel by killing other Israelites who were who are about to ruin the nation of Israel.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul goes, you know what, there's blood that's got to be shed for the sake of God, for the sake of our fathers, for the sake of our religion, for the sake of everything.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's Paul.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul's saying.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden, as you know, Paul is headed up to Damascus.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's front and he's first in line, and there's all these other people, I'm sure, that are going around him as he's headed up that hundred miles to Damascus to wipe out the Christian church there.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he gets almost to Damascus, you know, filled with the fire, the righteous fire of God, and all of a sudden the heavens open and a light shines down, and God knocks him off his horse, or maybe he's not riding a horse, I don't know, but he's on the ground.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he looks up, and he's the only one, apparently, who can see Jesus of Nazareth.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's in heaven looking down, saying, What are you doing?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: How come you're persecuting me?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they have a conversation, and God says, Stop it immediately.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna call you as uh an apostle to the Gentiles, and everything changes for him.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a complete U-turn.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So Paul thinks, I certainly never chose this.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was headed the opposite direction.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don't blame me, don't look at me.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely a God thing.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And now, of course, he's hearing, he's hearing that somebody is spreading the rumor that he's gone to the apostles, you know, that he's he's been listening to the apostles' tapes and getting trading, but he hasn't, he's not doing it very well.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's gone to sales school, but he's got the sales talk a little bit off.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, he's ticked, he's upset.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now he's nice.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: He says, brothers and sisters, we're family, but I want you to know something.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to know how squirrely this is, brothers and sisters, because there's a gospel involved here, and it's incredibly important that we agree on the gospel.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: The last last week uh I'm just gonna go back to Connor's excellent sermon last week.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't seen it, if you haven't heard it, you ought to go back and do that.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: But he included two slides that I asked him if I could include today.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: He gave me permission.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them was uh, you know, what is the true gospel that forms the basis of Paul's argument in Galatians?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he actually, Connor actually took it from Ephesians 2, 1 through 10, because it's more of a fulsome gospel and includes all five points.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and I've tweaked it just a little, but it's we're saved from, in the gospel gospel, we're saved from our sin, God's wrath, death, and Satan.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're four things.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we're saved because of God's love for mankind, right?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: John 3.16, for God so loved the world.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we're saved how Jesus Christ died for us in our place as a sacrifice.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're saved by, and now we get to the key point of Galatians.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're saved by grace through faith apart from works.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: The key verse in the book of Galatians, the key line is coming up in about 16 verses.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: We know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Christ.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: All the commentaries agree this would probably be the key verse.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, we're saying for good works.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: We are to do good works.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the true gospel.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: There are, as Connor pointed out last week, false gospels.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's the carefree gospel, which says, well, God's love.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: He won't really judge people for their sins.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's too nice.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's the optional gospel.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Personally, I do trust in Jesus, but there are many paths to God.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's the good people gospel, he said.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a sinner, yes, but I'm a good person, and God knows that.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's the legal gospel.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm right with God because of Jesus' death and my deeds.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that's fundamentally the gospel that Paul is speaking about here, and what he says is I didn't receive it from a human source, and I wasn't taught it.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: But it came by a revelation from Jesus Christ.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look at me.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a God thing.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that should remind us of the first verse of the entire book, Paul and Apostle.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not only my gospel, but it's my calling as an apostle.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't come from men, it's not by man, it's not a human deal, it's by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Alright?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then he continues, for you've heard, here's his biography, his testimony, for you've heard about my former way of life in Judaism.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: I intensely persecuted God's church and tried to destroy it.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: I advanced in Judaism beyond many contemporaries among my people because I was extremely zealous for the traditions among my ancestors.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure Paul won the award as the young, new young leader in Jerusalem.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, but when God, who from my mother's womb set me apart and called me by his grace, that's Damascus Road, was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I could preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't go up to Jerusalem and go to sales school to those who had become apostles before me.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he says, and here's what we never knew until this biography, autobiography, I went to Arabia and came back to Damascus.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we find out a couple verses later, he spent the better part of three years in Arabia.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know this.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Arabia, as you can see on the map, is just south of Damascus, where where Paul was after, you know, he the light shined on him and he went up and he got baptized by Ananias and so forth.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we thought maybe he started his career then, but no, he went down to Arabia.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Arabia was a large territory whose capital was Petra.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was at that time called the Nabataean kingdom.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was called Nabatae, just for from 200 BC to 100 AD approximately.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting kingdom, populated not by Greeks or Romans, but by people who are sort of Arab, very mighty warriors, and so forth.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And just a little geography lesson.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Damascus is in Syria today.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Arabia is Jordan today.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what we call Arabia is Saudi Arabia, and it's farther south, the very bottom of the Nabataean kingdom back then, and a lot farther south.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Alright?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's just a map.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's your geography lesson.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: It helps to know where Egypt and Sinai and Mediterranean are too.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Alright?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: But notice what Paul says here.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: He says, God called me by his grace.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: That was when he saw the light from heaven.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: He got saved.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then he says, I did not go up to Jerusalem.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, I went to Arabia.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Has the Lord ever led you?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is a question I'd ask you today.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Into Arabia.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't look into this whole Arabia thing without realizing it is a barren desert.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was a place of pain for Paul.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And a place of failure.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let me defend those three things.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, when the movies want to picture a place that's hot and barren, and they need hot, barren desert life, they tend to send their cameras over to this very place where God took Paul into Arabia, southeast of the Dead Sea.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's true of Lawrence Arabia.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was filmed there in 1962, the Martian of all that.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: You want alien landscape?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Go to the Dead Sea area.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Go to the Old Arabia, 2015.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was a great movie.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Dune was filmed there.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Aladdin, 2019 was filmed there.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And especially, of course, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed right there in Petra, much of it, and in the Capitol.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And with Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a hot, barren three years for Paul.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I would suggest it was probably a place of pain for him.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because last year, when Connor preached in 2 Corinthians 11, in a famous paragraph, we find that Paul says he was in prisons.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we only know of one prison that he was in in the book of Acts.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Five times he said I was whipped 40 lashes minus one.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Acts doesn't mention any of the five.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Three times I was beaten with rods, he says.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Only once is listed in Acts.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the conclusion I have to come to is that Paul the rookie evangelist, who was street preaching for the first time in Arabia, that he got attacked in Arabia and suffered greatly.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I put place of failure there, and I'm not saying anything here that isn't that isn't said in uh in uh an academic article written by the probably the top New Testament theologi uh biblicist in America who teaches in a Methodist seminary.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: A place of failure.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: There is no record of conversions or churches started by Paul, and in the end, Saul goes over the wall and runs for his life.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about that.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hello?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Am I, are you in Arabia now?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Why did Paul have such a hard time in Arabia?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the Bible hints that he was trying to evangelize Arabia.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was so excited about what he had learned about Jesus.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he was trying to do it in the capital city of Petra.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he angered the king there, the famous pagan king, King Aretus.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: So King Aretas put his picture in armor on a coin that you can still get.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: He ruled there from about the same years as Jesus lived, 9 BC to 40 A.D.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus would be 4 BC to 33 A.D.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this is during the time of Jesus that King Aretus ruled, and he was paranoid.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was strong.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: His capital was extremely wealthy.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you had to walk down this narrow, you still have to, a narrow area.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody been to Petra with me one of the times we've been there?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's it's yeah, it's uh one of the seven wonders of the ancient world because there's not one freestanding building in this entire huge capital city.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: Every building has been carved out of rose red sandstone.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the most famous one, of course, is this first building.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing you see, Jordan literature says Petra Jordan's Rose Red City.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is called the Treasury, and uh that's the first thing you see, and uh this is it's funny that in the movie, uh, what was that?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was the third movie, they were looking for the holy grail.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: So Indiana Jones and Sean Connery go in that front door and then they just keep going for like a half a mile looking for the grail.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the truth is you try to go for a half mile, you go for 20 feet and then you run right into the rock wall.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: They just carved it out, it was actually a tomb, probably King Aretus's own tomb later on, but it is it is the most famous and photographed place, called the treasury because it's been thought for thousands of years that there was a whole lot of money in that urn, hidden in that urn at the very top there, which is why there's all kinds of bullet holes in it, with everybody going by shooting at it, hoping to get all the money to spill out.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Petra.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is the it was the capital of the Nabataean kingdom.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: You come through that just past the treasury and you see this astounding place with hundreds of caves, which were villas or tombs back in those days.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you look up on the sides of the cliff, and there are the huge royal tombs.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um first time I was there was when I was 22 years old with about 30, 35 college students.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we were told uh that was going to be where we were going to camp out and sleep overnight in our sleeping bags.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we hiked, it's quite a hike up there, and it is just this gigantic place.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: We bedded down outside the tomb, we guys, and had quite a view.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Although when it turned dark, it was incredibly dark.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: The stars were super bright, and there was just one little Arab campfire way out in the distance.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the girls bedded down inside the tomb, so we protected them.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that was waking up to Petra in the morning.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, so we sat with our legs before we all went to bed, hanging over the edge, you know, down it'd go down a hundred feet or whatever, and sang all these uh Christian choruses, and it was really a wonderful memory.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that was in Petra.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And except the girl I was flirting with sitting next to me, she got so sick in the night she had to be helicoptered out.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's so everybody else stayed away from me that rest of that trip.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: So um anyway, but it was a religious place, and this is where Paul got into trouble.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: So he's witnessing, he's he's he's trying out his first street, you know, street evangelism stuff, and he's walking down here and so forth.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: But you've got a lot of priests, and you have this amazing at the very top of the cliffs, you have this place where they're making all kinds of sacrifices, and it's surrounded by all the Nabataean gods, and you have a place you can see where the blood flows out here of this altar, and then you can see from their way down to the great temple of Petrov, which is one of the great temples in the ancient Near East, and here's Paul talking about Jesus Christ and saying, none of these gods are true.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's only one God, and he's an invisible God, and you can't see him, but his son Jesus came and died, and so forth, and the priests are complaining, and King Aretus puts out an order to have Paul arrested.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul runs back north to Damascus, and in Damascus we find out the governor under King Aretas had the city guarded in order to arrest me, but I was lowered from a window in the wall, and I slipped through his hands.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: So this was not, you know, Paul's first three years were not a time of wondrous joy and Hawaii and so forth.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was not successful.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was painful.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, stop for just a moment.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is a seminary moment.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is not gonna make you closer to heaven at all.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: But so I'm doing a Ripley's Believe It or Not thing on Wednesday nights, and I found a Ripley's Believe It or Not little nugget here.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna share with you, and all it is is just for me, and it's for fun, and I'll share it with you.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And a Ripley's Believe It or Not, here's something I'm sure you've never heard.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: The stories of Paul and John the Baptist link up as I was studying this.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here you go.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: For the controlling tyrant Aretus, things were always personal.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: He had given his 12-year-old daughter, Faziel, whose name, by the way, I noticed means escaped.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: He'd given his 12-year-old daughter in a political marriage to Herod Antipas.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Had to be horrible for her since he was more than twice her age.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Herod Antipas was the Herod up in Galilee where Jesus grew up.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: After 20 years, Herod, while visiting Rome, fell in love with his wife, Fazael, fell in love with his half-brother's wife, Herodias.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Phasael saw the divorce coming, and this is a great story in and of itself, how she got away from her husband.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: She executed a clever escape back to her daddy, Aretas.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Herodias, with her daughter Salome, remember, they danced and beheaded John the Baptist for calling what they did sin.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: But Irate Aretus simmered and plotted his revenge for several years.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, he got his revenge on Herod.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: He mustered his warriors, came north, and defeated Herod and the Roman soldiers, and seized land east of the Jordan, just south of the city of Damascus, in the very same year, 36 AD, that Paul, that Saul the evangelist, went over that wall and escaped his clutches.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Just something that Paul and John the Baptist linked them up.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know this, you can get into heaven.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Just tell the story.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Wrong.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing about this that is super spiritual, but it it's sorry, it's fun for me.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Alright?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: The real question is: has the Lord ever led you?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Has the Lord ever led you to Arabia?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: A place, a barren, hot desert, a place of pain, a place of failure.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Are you perhaps even now in Arabia?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: As someone told me after first service, they were.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: When you find yourself in Arabia and you feel alone, remind yourself that God has led many of his favorite children into Arabia.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: He led Moses into Arabia.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: You remember he ran east to the land of Midian, this very exact, very same country, the land of Midian, after Moses fled Egypt.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And for 40 years he was simply a sheepherder in Midian.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Lord revealed himself in a burning bush.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that to Moses.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hundreds of years later, several hundred years later, the Lord sent Elijah the prophet into the same area of Arabia and revealed himself to Elijah the prophet down there in a still small voice outside a cave.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: He sent David into this same desert area, these desert areas when he was running from Saul for a dozen years.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: And in the New Testament, Jeremiah was in the desert.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the New Testament, John the Baptist was in the desert for several years and then started his ministry.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus he sent into the desert, into the wilderness, remember, for 40 days and 40 nights.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: And now the apostle Paul, remind yourself, if you feel like you're in a desert, that God has led many of his favorite children into a desert and oftentimes has revealed himself to them there.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Second, if you feel stuck in Arabia, you need to remember that waiting time is not wasted time.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like wasted time.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: How could you, at the beginning of Paul's career, and then at the end of his career, as he's stuck for the same amount of time in a prison, you know, near the Mediterranean Sea, waiting to go to Rome, how could you waste this valuable time in Paul's life?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, no, this is this is my plan.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: This was waiting time and preparation time, and it's not wasted time.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And even though you feel perhaps stuck, revving your wheels and the and your tires are not moving, it's not wasted time in God's plan.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: And third, if you feel insecure, remind yourself that this isn't about you.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: None of this in your life is about you.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's all a God thing.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul sees that, Paul sees that very clearly because that's how he ends the chapter.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: He says that after three years, I did go up to Jerusalem to get to know Cephas.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was a spiritual, it was a social thing, not a theological sales talk thing.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to get to know him.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I stayed with him 15 days, but I didn't see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother, and I declare in the sight of God, I'm not lying in what I write to you.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: And afterwards I went to the regions of Cilicia and Syria and Cilicia, obscure places.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: That if you're trying to become, you know, a TV preacher, you're not going to go to those places.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: I remained personally unknown to the Judean churches that are in Christ.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even visit them.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they simply kept hearing, he who formerly persecuted us is not preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he ends the chapter with these words.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they glorified God because of me.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I care about because it's not about me.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's about God.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look at me.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: My whole life, my career, my ministry, my salvation.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a God thing.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's not me.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Look elsewhere, look at heaven.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the amazing thing is that nowadays this has become something that can be one of the most powerful things that you use when talking to your friends or in evangelism.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take the Muslims, for instance.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: We used to have a missionary to Muslims who grew up in our church named Isla Davis, and for 40 years went over to Moroccum.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ellen and I would visit her there every year or two.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: In Morocco, she had a ministry there for 40 years, and by at the end of her life, she lamented to me she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of Muslims who'd come to Christ.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was glad that she went to heaven before she saw that some of those four or five left the faith.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so hard to be a Muslim because you're persecuted.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like the Hotel California you try to convert.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can you can check out, but you never can leave.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's such persecution and you lose your job, and then maybe you get beaten.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe even worse, in Pakistan, every six months you hear about some family where the father has become a believer out of Islam and his neighbor, you know, hates him anyway, and then it falsely accuses him of having trampled on a Quran or torn a page out of a Quran, and the whole village comes and they s and they herd all of his family and his children into the house and they burn it all to a crest.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that's what it's like.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: No wonder so few Muslims come to Christ, except that's all changed in the last couple of years.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: For some reason, millions of Muslims are coming to Christ all over the world.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know how many, but Al Jazeera, which is the Arab network, came out with an imam announcing he said, I am sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, at least six million Muslims have converted to Jesus Christ that I know of.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And why are why are they doing that?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the answer is that the majority of them are converting because of something that no Muslim can argue with a vision or a dream.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in all the reports, all the studies that are being done is that the majority of Muslims who are coming to Christ report that they have seen a vision or they have seen a dream of someone dressed in a white robe that comes to them and either says, you need to go find Jesus Christ or else they are Jesus Christ.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think, for instance, of the of a of a well-known story of a of a Persian man who came to the ministry center there and he ran and he said, he said, I don't know what happened, but last night I had this dream of a of a person in a white robe, and in this dream he came to me and extended his hand.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, You need to, you need to follow me.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am the alpha and the omega.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the only way to God and the only way to heaven.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I've asked people, nobody knows what that means.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: What's Alpha and Omega?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Fellow at the ministry center said, Would you come inside for a minute?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he opened up to the book of Revelation.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as he read to the man, I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, said Jesus.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: The man began weeping.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he came to Jesus Christ.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the ministry center guy said, You can have this New Testament.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you hide it, you know, because you'll get persecuted.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I how can I hide this?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: He said, This is this is remarkable.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I didn't plan on doing this.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't my fault.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he took it back, and then his family came in and they came to Christ, and then his friends did, and so forth.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: But you see, he could say, he could say, No, nobody slipped me money.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a missionary that browbeat me.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't been listening to radio programs.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is just, it's not me.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is a God thing.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a dream, I saw a vision.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the Muslims then say, well, those are every bit as true as the Quran.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those are inspired stuff.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and this is happening, happening more and more.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh brother and Andrew, uh his magazine, was telling a story of one of their people, you know, they hand they take Bibles to places where they don't have Bibles.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were in one of the Arab countries and it was night, and they were they had a load of Bibles in the back of their jalopi, you know, and they were going through, and as they were climbing this mountain road, all of a sudden the brakes jammed.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they were stuck and they couldn't go, it didn't make any sense.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, in the midst of uh in the darkness, there was a knock on the window, and they're scared, but they roll the window down, and and the and the man there says, So are you the ones with the books of life?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, What?
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I I'm in the village up here, and we've been getting dreams and visions, and all of us that I'm gonna be sending you the books of life, and you need to go down to the road and you need to get them, they're gonna be coming by.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have them?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so they take the books of life up there, and the whole that whole small village comes to Christ.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, they can say when anybody yells at them, you know, we and it's not our fault.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look at me.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: We got dreams, we got visions, and that's what's happening across the Muslim world.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's also been hard for Jewish people to come to Christ, as you know, I'm associated with a Jewish organization called Jews for Jesus.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's very hard for them, and they get because they get uh, you know, excommunicated from synagogue and their families and so forth often.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: And many of my friends, their parents, they can't go home for Christmas.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: But um last week in Utah, I'm I'm I'm playing golf with a really close friend, uh, uh a brilliant man, oncologist who got his degree down in in Houston at the number one place in the nation, came back and started the first first cancer clinic in the entire state of Arkansas.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and he's he's just this huge man.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and and so forth.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh but he starts to weep when he starts telling his story.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: He was they were Jewish, grew up in New York City, both he and his wife, and uh, you know, certainly, and they went to synagogue, and but he said, when he started this clinic, he says, Do you have all of these all of these Christian people in Arkansas?
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, and I'm always having to tell people after people that they're gonna die.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I couldn't believe how many people would say to me, I'm fine with that, because I know where I'm going.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, but the one that tipped tipped it over was a 30-year-old woman, a beautiful woman with with three small children.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: She came in and I said, I didn't, I told my wife Marilyn said, I did not want to have to tell her.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: She's not just stage four, she's only got months to live.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, So I told her.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I was nearly crying when I told her.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: And she was beaming.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, What's that for?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, I know where I'm going, but she said, you know what?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: The thing I really worry about is you.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be praying for you every day these last few months that you find what I found.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I went home and I couldn't forget it.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And several a month later he said, you know, I just I would talk about it with Marilyn, I couldn't believe it.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when she died, he said, I looked at Marilyn and I said, We're not going to synagogue this Sunday.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've got to go to one of these churches.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, That's how we came to Christ.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he's told that story all over the place.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to hard to blame a person who doesn't come to Christ because, you know, he got browbeat into it or he got paid for it, he you know, had some TV preacher.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is real life.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's an a picture off here of a of a Hindu, one uh one of the most fervent Hindus, much like the Apostle Paul in India, Sundar Singh.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was so fervent for God that when he came across the Bible in his Indian village, he carried it out, uh, carried it out in front of everybody in the town square just to show.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: He poured kerosene on it and he lit it aflame.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: But as he stood there, he said, all of a sudden I was caught up in a vision.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I could see my whole village was aflame and the whole world was aflame, and then out of that flame came someone in a white robe to me.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he put out his hand and he says, You need to go find out about Jesus Christ.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: He just burned his book.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, So I did, and that's how I came to Christ.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, When the Hindus, the fervent Hindus in my family, they say to me, What are you doing?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I can't help it.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: What would you do if you were me?
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: These are wonderful stories.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look at me, it's a God thing.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I ask you this question in the story of your life: what turning point can only be explained as a God thing?
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it isn't salvation, maybe it's uh something else that you need to tell people about.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it wasn't salvation.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a Christian family, twelve children, dad, a preacher, and a Bible professor.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: I trusted Christ when I was four or five, but then I went away to college.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And had a good time, boy.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: But not spiritually.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: I wandered away from God.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was going into mathematics and I was just, and I was having, you know, I was doing.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Doing everything but, you know.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then after about three years, you know, I got coerced.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was a girl.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: She said, uh, you know, this this morning chapel speaker, we never paid attention at Wheaton College the chapel, but she said, you know, he's speaking every night.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: What's that have to do with me?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, would you go with me tonight, just to the first one, Monday night?
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: She's cute.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll go.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sat as close to the door as I could.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: For some reason, after about an hour, I don't remember, I think she had to go to bed, but I sat there and I couldn't move because instead of speaking, this pastor from Southern California, who was enmeshed in the Jesus Revolution, said, I'd like to start by having the student body president.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's asked if he could share something, and a guy we all knew and looked up to walked up there, and in front of five, six, seven hundred of us, he shared his moral sin.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we were just awestruck.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And there was weeping that started then, and then the speaker who was the speaker who was part of the Jesus Revolution down there, he said, Did anybody else want to speak?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody else walked up.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody else went to after that, and then there were more, and finally there was a line, and so he never spoke.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I was there at 9 o'clock and 10 and 11 and 12.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't about to get up, but I was in the very back row and I was listening to story after story.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the Holy Spirit fell in what's famously called the Wheaton Revival of 1970.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the Jesus Revolution come.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it went all night that night, it went through the next day, classes were canceled, and my life was changed.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: And my buddies, you know who I would play basketball with every single night, or ping pong or carj or you know, whatever else.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: The whatever else is not too good.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: Say to me, hey, join us, Jim.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: And say, I'm not gonna do that anymore.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna be there.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: They go, What?
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Are you judging us?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, I said, I just don't have a choice myself.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is, you know, I didn't come up with this.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's just something that God's done to me, and it's changed my life.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it did completely change my life, my career, my heart.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't conversion, but it's the same question that I ask you.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is there some turning point, some moment in your life that you can't explain other than the supernatural, other than that it's a God thing.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: There needs to be.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you need to share it.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, I pray for those who are going through Arabia right now.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're stuck and they don't know what to do, and it's hot and it's painful, and they're suffering, and there doesn't seem to be a future, and I pray that you would encourage them, remind them to preach to themselves during the week, to tell themselves a lot of great saints have gone through that sort of stuff.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: To ask you to reveal yourself to them.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: I wish you would, Lord, the way you've revealed yourself in the desert of Arabia to so many people through the years.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: I pray for all of us, Heavenly Father, that as you meet us in those junctures of life and you turn us around 180 degrees, that Lord, we would see those as coming from you and we would be able to share those in such a way that other people would want to know your son Jesus Christ better.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's in his name that we pray.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.