Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 1, 2019 | There's An App For That - Romans 8:38-39

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September 1, 2019 | There's An App For That - Romans 8:38-39 · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
0:02
SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Good to see you.
0:05
SPEAKER_01: And welcome to the last week in our series, the U Version series.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: There's an app for that, and we've been through this summer looking at the favorite verses of the world for the last seven, eight years.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: This morning we have we're concluding on Labor Day with the favorite.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm excited too.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: So the favorite verse of Topeka Bible Church, year 2019.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for the dozens of verses you guys have sent in.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: Your favorite verses, the one that won rather easily, is Romans 8, 38 and 39.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: Does that ring a bell for anybody?
0:45
SPEAKER_01: A phenomenal verse, or actually two verses.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: So by the way, let me tell you that.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: So next week I'm starting a series, the fall series, 12 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving Christmas, on the names of God.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: There are about 20 special names of God in the Bible.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: Each one is sort of like cracking open a door to heaven and getting to know something about God you wouldn't know otherwise.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: It's a story surrounding each name.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, some of those names like El Shaddai and Jehovah Roe and so forth.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: Some of those names that you hear in songs that you don't quite understand.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: But remember, what you think about God is the single most important thing about you.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: And unless you get to know God in this life, your entire life is like spending one night in a second-rate motel.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: I sort of ripped that off from somebody who lived 500 years ago, named St.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: Teresa of Avalon.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: There weren't any hotels back then, so I had to make that part up.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, we're gonna we're going to get to know God in a really interesting way this fall.
1:55
SPEAKER_01: I hope you'll come back.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: The names of God.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: But today, Romans 8, 38, and 39, greatest verses.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: According to a lot of people, a lot of Christian leaders from G.I.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: Packer on down would call these their favorite verses in the Bible.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: Called the grandest sentence in the Greek language by one well-known Greek professor.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: I would say that if Romans is the greatest mountain range in the entire Bible, and I think it is, then Romans 8 is the highest peak in that range.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: And the two verses that conclude that chapter, verses 8, 38, and 39, is the peak of the mountain.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: That right there is Mount Everest.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: So the grandest peak right here.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: Now, let's say these verses together.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, which should be demons, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: Oh, those verses are good.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: Anybody memorize those as a kid?
3:14
SPEAKER_01: King James, whatever?
3:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: Slightly different, the King James, New King James, but this is the best translation.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: And we sang a song, really, that sort of flows out of this verse.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: Our first song this morning, I think, was How Marvelous, How Wonderful, and My Song Shall Ever Be, How Marvelous, How Wonderful Is My Savior's Love for Me.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: So this is a great topic.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: We love this topic.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: And your Christian life in many ways will be enriched or impoverished by how well you know inside yourself and experience the love of God.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: Now, the actual, if I could go back, by the way, I would say that's Romans 38 and 39, but it actually starts with a question in verse 35.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: The five verses here hold, you know, hang together, right?
4:10
SPEAKER_01: So to get up to the top of Mount Everest, you camp.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: I think there are four camps on the way up.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, we need to stop at the camps really quickly, verses 35, 36, and 37, on our way to the peak of Everest, which is verses 38 and 39.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: Because the question asked back in verse 35 is the question that verse 39 answers, which is, who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
4:35
SPEAKER_01: Now, when you walk into church on a Sunday morning and you sit next to stained glass windows, you know, there's one over here, uh, not in the College Avenue building, Mulvane building with Jesus the shepherd holding you his sheep and so forth, you go, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, because the Lord's my shepherd, and I shout out what?
4:52
SPEAKER_01: He makes me lie down in Green Pastors.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: He's just so great.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: I love him.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: And then we think, uh, but I do kind of feel farther away from him than I did six months ago.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe even six days ago, or a year ago, because of certain things that have happened in your life that make you feel as though he's walked away from you.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't care about you.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know that you know what I'm talking about, the things where you lost your job, or maybe you lost your loved one.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Either health-wise, or they walked out of your life, or maybe it was a financial setback, and you thought, wow, I thought God was gonna take care of me, because after all, he's carrying me around in his arms like a sheep.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: He says he'll always care for me.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Now, what we don't realize without reading earlier in chapter 8 is Romans 8's all about suffering and tribulation, trials and difficulties and so forth.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: And so, in context, this really fits.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: Paul has on his way to this talked about how many tears and how much suffering there is in life and how many difficulties there are.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: And so he asked a natural question, not a theological question, but an emotional question, who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
6:04
SPEAKER_01: Because it seems like there are things that happen in life that separate us from his love, right?
6:10
SPEAKER_01: There are killer seven, and he lists them.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: He lists seven because seven's sort of the number of completion.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: So he's going, you know, I'm just gonna list the things that make you feel as though the savior, that is your shepherd, doesn't care as much about you as he used to, or maybe he cares about other sheep, you know, the ones that won the blue ribbon at the county fair, or the ones that don't won't that would that don't wander away as much, or the ones that look better.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: And so he lists these killer seven.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: They are like the fearal dogs, if you watch the movie Babe, one of the great movies of all time, I must say.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, the dogs that attacked the sheep and killed one sweet old sheep, these are like the seven killer dogs that attack the sheep and make us feel as though the shepherd's not really watching.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: That, you know, we wandered away, we're on the side of the cliff, and he's not leaning over to get us, right?
6:59
SPEAKER_01: And here are the seven.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: So tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger, peril, or sword.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Really quickly.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: Tribulation is the stuff that's going on in your life that's that's difficult right now.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, the loss of your loved one, the loss of your job, the loss of that friendship, the stress that you're under right now, that's tribulation.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Distress is the feeling that goes along with it.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: That's why I took out the comma right here.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: Tribulation leads to depression, it leads to distress.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: David said, I'm under distress.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: How long, O Lord?
7:35
SPEAKER_01: How long?
7:36
SPEAKER_01: My tears, I drink my tears all day long.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: I can't go to sleep at night.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: Right?
7:41
SPEAKER_01: Distress is what keeps you awake at night because of the tribulation.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: So tribulation or distress, third one's persecution.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: Some of us have a little persecution, people make fun of you, they call you names at school or at work or whatever, they say, you know, you're the holier than now person and so forth, and you don't put on airs, but you know, it's easy to make fun of Christians.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: And that, according to the Apostle Peter, is legitimate.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: That's persecution, but of course, people all over the world, outside generally of America, they know persecution that's even stronger, physical persecution.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: It's the kind of persecution Paul spoke of when he said all of the godly in Christ will suffer persecution eventually.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: Life is an anomaly for us, folks.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: We have to admit that to living in America as we do in the early 2000s, where the economy is good, where we can dress well, where nobody persecutes us for coming to church and so forth, we are living in a wonderful time, but it will not last.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Most of the world or much of the world doesn't have the privilege we do.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: They understand this word persecution, maybe a little quicker than we do.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: That's the third one.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: The fourth and fifth go together: famine or nakedness.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: We don't, none of us have this problem, that is no food, famine, or no clothing, no roof over our heads.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: But a number of people in the world do.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: Number six and seven, danger or sword means getting under attack, right?
9:04
SPEAKER_01: Being attacked, which happens all the time.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: It's happening in Africa, it's happening in Israel, happens and so forth.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: But these are things which make you feel as though your shepherd, you know, doesn't really care about you as much as he used to, make you feel separated from the love of Christ.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: Shall these things do it?
9:24
SPEAKER_01: These killer seven, these dogs that are attacking me?
9:27
SPEAKER_01: His answer is you don't understand.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: These are things you're supposed to feel.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: He quotes, as it is written, for your sake, quoting Psalm 44, David, as for your sake, we are being killed.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: All the day long we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: Sounds like Paul, who said, I die daily.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: And what's he saying here?
9:49
SPEAKER_01: Well, what he's saying is God's saying, My sheep are dying sheep, you don't understand.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: I didn't promise you a rose garden.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: I didn't promise you that when you came by faith into my forever family, when you joined my flock, my sheep hear my voice.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: Then they follow me.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: That is, they say, I believe in you, Lord Jesus.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: I didn't ever promise you that just because you became one of my lambs, one of my sheep, that your whole life would be easy.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in fact, my sheep are dying sheep.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: You're being killed all the day long and regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's a little startling, isn't it?
10:30
SPEAKER_01: But it's true, more true for some folks than for others, right?
10:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's be honest, over 300 Christians are targeted and killed every single year.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: This happened just in June.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: Terrorists in uh in uh Mali, very Muslim country in in Northwest Africa, underneath Morocco, surrounded a village.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: Guess how many people lived in this Christian village, a rare Christian village in Mali?
10:58
SPEAKER_01: 95 people lived in this Christian village.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: No one could escape.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: They killed everyone, including the very old and the babies.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: That happened in June the 9th.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: This happened June 19th and 29th.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: Christians flee as Islamic terrorists murder at least 19 in Africa's Burkino Faso.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: Again, again, Islamic terrorists went in, identified who the Christians were, asked who are the Christians, and by the way, they came back on the 29th, June 29th, and killed 10 more, so 29 died in that.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's real, genuine dying for Jesus Christ, being martyred for the cause of Christ going on in this world.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: It's important just that we know it.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm not telling you you need to go over and get martyred.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm just telling you that for us to sit here and not be aware of this, or never to look at some of these websites and to pray for these persecuted Christians.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: And when you go talk with them overseas, I've been overseas in some pretty bad places and talked with persecuted Christians who've just lost their families weeks before and so forth.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: You know what they say they want?
12:08
SPEAKER_01: They say they want prayer.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: They're not trying to run away from it.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: In all these things, he says in this next verse, in all these things we're more than conquerors through him he loved us.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't allow us to escape these things.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't, he didn't deliver that village of 95 people.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: But he what he says is, but my dying sheep, I want you to know they are conquering sheep.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: In the moment of your death, in the moment of your martyrdom, in the moment of you following me all the way to your cross, like I went, my son Jesus went to his cross.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: In that moment, you've got to realize that you were conquering just like Jesus did.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever wondered when was it that Jesus conquered?
12:45
SPEAKER_01: Was it when he did his miracles?
12:47
SPEAKER_01: No, it wasn't.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: Was it when he appeared in glory on the Mount of Transfiguration?
12:52
SPEAKER_01: Was that when he conquered his enemies?
12:53
SPEAKER_01: No, it wasn't.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: Was it when he came on a little donkey on Palm Sunday?
12:59
SPEAKER_01: Through the door and everybody through the through the gate into Jerusalem and everybody cheered him?
13:04
SPEAKER_01: No, no.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: Colossians tells us that having disarmed the powers and authorities, he conquered them on the what?
13:12
SPEAKER_01: On the cross.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: It was in the moment that the Lamb of God died that in that moment he conquered the enemy.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: Because he conquered your sin and he conquered mine.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: He conquered death forever.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: And therefore, when you and I go through persecution, when these people go through suffering for the cause of Christ, in that moment they are conquering and they are conquering sheep.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: What's the strongest animal in the world?
13:39
SPEAKER_01: It's not the male lion of Africa, it's not the tiger of Sudan.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: It's not the cobra of India.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: It's not the shark of Florida.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: It's the conquering sheep of the Lord Jesus Christ.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: And maybe instead of some of those cheesy tweets that we have on our church signs, we should have something like this: beware of conquering sheep inside who are suffering and yet who are smiling because they understand that Christ's sheep are conquering sheep.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: They're dying sheep, but in the moment of dying, they are conquering.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: Corey Tinboom and her sister Betsy, being Jewish, were captured and sent to an all-women's concentration camp called Ravensbrook, where it was sub-zero, oftentimes.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: Where the siren went off at 4.30 in the morning, and they were all required to go and stand for hours in the bitter cold until their captors decided to come out and count them.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: The ones who were alive.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: They had just endured a night, these poor women, of hearing screams and beatings in the building next door as women were tortured.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: So they would stand around at Ravensbrook, and the women were losing hope.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: But Corey and Betsy had a little Bible that was squirreled away and hidden, and so when they were left alone in the afternoon in the cold, they would get the other women here in the dorm at Ravensbrook.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: And they would hide and they would hold hands, and Betsy would read Romans 8, 38.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: Actually, she'd read, they said she would read Romans 8, 35 to 37.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: Who shall separate us from the love of God?
15:33
SPEAKER_01: So tribulation or distress, so persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
15:42
SPEAKER_01: No, and all of these things.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: In all of these things, we are more than conquers through him who loved us.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: And Corey said it was as though there were two concentration camps, one that was full of nakedness and cold and horror and death, and then another concentration camp that was the most wonderful, heartwarming, cozy place of her life because they were flooded with the knowledge of the love of God.
16:13
SPEAKER_01: Those are the words that lead up to verses 38 and 39.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: My sheep are dying sheep, but dying sheep are conquering sheep, and you can never, never, ever be separated from my love.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: For Paul says, I am persuaded.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: Interesting word, patho, sometimes translated convinced.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: I normally have thought that it just means something that you know, but then I notice that Paul a couple chapters later says, For I know and am persuaded that, and he goes on and on, and I go, hold it.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: He clearly is distinguishing knowing something, we would call it head knowledge, from being persuaded.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: So that must mean being utterly heart-convinced of something.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: I can't think of anything more important when you're going through a crisis, when you're going through a deprivation, when you're going through a real difficult tribulation and pain and loss.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: I can't think of anything more important than not having just a head knowledge, but having a heart's persuasion that neither death nor life, these ten things, death nor life, notice the four pairs, angels or rulers or demons, things present, things to come, powers, height nor depth, nor any other created thing able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: God saying, I want you to know I'll never let you go.
17:47
SPEAKER_01: In fact, let's take a quick look at these ten, but first let me mention a guy here named He and Fom.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: Fhom is one of those rare people in Vietnam who in the late 60s, early 70s would translate for every Billy Graham or uh Robbie Zacharias who'd come over.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it was his translating for Robbie Zacharias in 1971 that nearly got him killed.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: Robbie went over, and this young man who loved the Lord translated for him.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: And so when Vietnam fell, captured by the communists later that year, he was immediately thrown into what they called a re-education, sort of a concentration camp, whereby for hours every day, forced him to read Marx and Engels and be yelled at and so forth by people who made fun of Christianity and people who talked about communism and atheism.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: And after a couple of years, Pham says he was utterly worn down, and one night he had decided that maybe Christians had lied to him, or maybe Robbie wasn't telling the truth, and that he made a decision that the next morning, that that night would be the last night that he ever prayed, that he wouldn't pray anymore and he wouldn't think about his Christian faith anymore, that he would go back to communistic atheism the next morning.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: The next morning, as happened a number of times, to persecute him, he was required to clean out the latrine with a little shovel.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: It was a messy job, as you can imagine, a smelly job.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: And he says, as he was cleaning it out, a little piece of paper seemed to catch his eye right in the middle of all of that stuff.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: A piece of paper and it looked as though it had an English word on it, and so he fished it out when the guard wasn't looking, and he put it in his pocket, and later on he surreptitiously washed it off and he looked at it, and there, there it was, the words of Romans 8, 38 and 39.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor powers or demons, height nor depth, nor uh spiritual forces can ever separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And from that moment he knew that God loved him and has come over and testified that that was the moment that changed his life.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: That was the verse that we're looking at right now.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at these ten things, neither death nor life.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: It would seem, many people used to believe, even in the Old Testament days, that death would separate you from God.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: We know it separates us from our loved ones.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: It's so painful.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: One of my best friends died ten years ago this last week.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: I'll never forget him.
20:24
SPEAKER_01: I think of him all the time.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: Like to, you know, we like to say in sort of a mushy way that, you know, we're never far from him, we're not separated from our loved ones, but let's be honest, we're separated.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: I used to spend part of nearly every day with him.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: We're separated.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: Are we separated like that from God?
20:45
SPEAKER_01: Some of us have family members, mothers, fathers, grandparents who love the Lord, who on the moment of their deathbed sadly said to us, I'm not sure.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: Is this really gonna happen?
20:58
SPEAKER_01: Is there really a heaven?
20:59
SPEAKER_01: Is there really God?
21:00
SPEAKER_01: Does he love me?
21:01
SPEAKER_01: Am I gonna go there?
21:03
SPEAKER_01: And he held their hand and you said, Yes, yes.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: You've been the one that's given me my faith.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: Don't lose yours.
21:14
SPEAKER_01: And maybe, if you were fortunate, you remembered some of those words of Jesus where he said to a man hanging next to him, Today you shall be with me in paradise.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: A man who'd only been a believer for one minute and who was about to die.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe you remembered Paul's words, absent from the body, present with the Lord.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: My desire is to go and be with Christ, because death is a doorway to the love of God forevermore, right?
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, death can't separate you from the love of God.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: How about life?
21:49
SPEAKER_01: How could life separate you from the love of God?
21:54
SPEAKER_01: I know how that happens, temptation or pleasure or money.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: I see it happen all the time.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: But listen, if you've put your hand in the hand of God, if you've believed in him, and I should stop here and say, listen, if you're not sure that you've ever come to that place where you've looked at Jesus Christ, who loved you when you were still a sinner, hung for you on the cross, right?
22:15
SPEAKER_01: And gave his body and blood for you.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: If you've never looked at him and said, Wow, that there, that's for me.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: He died for my sin.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: And reached out for him.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: If you've never done that, thanked him for dying for your sins, then you're not one of these sheep.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: The promise doesn't apply to you.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: You need to stop, you need to look at that.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: That's the single most important thing.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: He wants to welcome you into his sheepfold.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: And when you do, he promises neither death nor life can separate you from his love.
22:45
SPEAKER_01: And third and fourth, neither angels nor the word is rulers, and I know that's what your modern translations have.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: It's the word archai-ar-C-H-A-I, from which we get archaic.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: But the word is always used in the New Testament, like in Ephesians 6, that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: And what it's referring to when it means rulers, is not just baby demons, by the way, not just those ones that whisper in your ear during the day and tell you to get mad or lose your temper or gossip or, you know, look at something you shouldn't.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: It's not those, it's the big ones.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: It's the old ones.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: It's the old long-term colonels and majors and generals in the enemy's army.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: Those are the, we're talking about, you know, the ones that, if you liked this show, I watched it several times.
23:33
SPEAKER_01: It's now done.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: Anybody familiar with the show?
23:35
SPEAKER_01: It's supernatural?
23:37
SPEAKER_01: By the way, there's something interesting about this.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: So a poll recently taken shows that, shows the number of non-religious people in our country, the ones who answer N-O-N-E none when asked what religion are you, and do you believe in God or religion?
23:54
SPEAKER_01: The answer, it's up to 20%.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: It was 15% four years ago, it was 8% 12 years ago.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: It's now 20%.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: One out of five people in our country say they're non-religious.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: And yet at the same time, twice that many and growing say they believe in the occult and they believe in the supernatural, and they love watching the shows about the vampires and the you know all of that other stuff.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that interesting?
24:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, there really are angels, and there really are demons, and there are major ones, and they'd love to separate us from God, right?
24:28
SPEAKER_01: And yet God says I'm not gonna let them do that.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: By the way, yesterday I came across in National Reviews yesterday's edition, they uh gave a review of a book that's just come out from Oxford Press, a less than 200-page book, shortest book ever, on C.S.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: A book by a real scholar who's trying to say something in a short period of time on C.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: S.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: Lewis that'll make a difference.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: And very interesting what this book, according to the review, says.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: The review is entitled Oxford Don, that is Professor versus the Devil.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And my favorite sentence was this: what offended and confounded many of Lewis's peers at Oxford was his supernaturalism, an unapologetic belief in the traditional Christian doctrines of heaven and hell and angels and demons and things like that.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: And that really bugged the other professors.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: They said, you know, that's just, you know, life is here and now.
25:22
SPEAKER_01: You know, forget all of the supernaturalism stuff.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: And they really got upset because C.S.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: Lewis wrote not only the Narnia tales, which are cute, but he wrote something you ought to read sometime called the Space Trilogy, three books entitled Out of the Silent Planet, Paralanger, this about Mars, Paralangra about the angels and demons on Venus and that hideous strength, angels and demons on this earth.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: And so they were upset at him, and yet, you know what?
25:49
SPEAKER_01: If you're a Christian, you believe in supernaturalism and you believe at the same time that there is a God who says, no matter how strong the supernatural forces are, they can't pull you away from me.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Neither death nor life, neither angels nor incredibly powerful and archaic demons can pull you away.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: Number three, neither the present nor the future.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: When I think of the present, I think of the seven things listed, three two verses before that, you know, tribulation and distress.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: When I think of the future, I think of, wow, the fact we don't know what the future holds.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of scary sometimes.
26:33
SPEAKER_01: What's the doctor going to say this week when he gives me the report on the tests I took for my cancer, whatever, right?
26:42
SPEAKER_01: That's a scary thing.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: For those of you that follow international news, like I do, especially Israel.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, what's gonna Iran in the last six weeks is deliberately trying to provoke Israel to war.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: Just deliberately.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Is that gonna happen?
26:58
SPEAKER_01: If so, how's that going to change everything?
27:01
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
27:02
SPEAKER_01: The future is so unknown.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh then we have the seventh one here, nor any powers, which is a technical word that refers to like astrology and zodiac stuff, which they really believed in strongly back then, but nobody cares about that today, right?
27:18
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then height nor depth, no matter if you go up to 30,000 feet or even 130,000 feet and the engine shuts down, God is there.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: No matter if you go down underneath and some giant eel decides to bite your head off or whatever.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, no matter if you go a thousand feet deep, both of these height and depth, they both scare me to death.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that's why I'm not looking at the pictures right now.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: But but you know what?
27:44
SPEAKER_01: Nothing can separate you from God's love.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: And finally, the number tenth one is nor anything else, literally, anything else that's created.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: God is the only uncreated thing, so he means anything else can separate you from God's love in Jesus.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, what's the anything else?
28:07
SPEAKER_01: And you know what it is that people think most often can separate them from God's love?
28:12
SPEAKER_01: It's right here.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: It's you yourself.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: People will tell you, you know, nothing else can pluck you from the Father's hand once you've believed in him, but you can pluck yourself from the Father's hand.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: You wonder, is that really true?
28:31
SPEAKER_01: But this verse says, no, nothing that's created can ever separate you.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: Once you put your hand in the Father's hand, he won't let it go.
28:40
SPEAKER_01: He'll never let you go.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: And it can never separate you from the two arms, from God's love, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: These two aspects surround you and hold you and caress you with his love.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: Let me uh wrap this up with a with a story about uh guy named George.
29:02
SPEAKER_01: George is really smart.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: George went to high school and was one of the top students, but at age 15, the eye doctor told him he was going to go blind, and he was gonna go blind within a few years.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: Well, he graduated with highest honor and he went on to university where he was also doing fantastic.
29:20
SPEAKER_01: But while he was there, he graduated at age 19.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: While he was there, at age 18, he completely lost his sight.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: He had some hope in life.
29:29
SPEAKER_01: He was engaged to a beautiful girl.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: He absolutely loved her, and his sisters adored him.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: He had three sisters who actually they themselves learned Hebrew, Greek, and Latin so they could read to him and help him graduate with highest honor from university.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to become a pastor, and he did become a pastor.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: But he had that shocking realization that he was now blind, and then the worst thing happened.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: His fiancé came to him and pressed the engagement ring in his hand and said, I can't see myself going through life, being married to a blind man.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: And that's what broke him.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely crushed him.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: He loved the Lord, he was a child of the Lord, he followed the Lord, but he this he had based his life on living with this incredible girl.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: He was getting over it, and then one of his sisters got engaged, and on her wedding day, as he was helping give her away, it hit him again that he would never, and no, he never did get married, that he would probably never get married, and it broke him again, and he wondered how he could live.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: And he went home and he wrote a poem, and that poem became famous.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: And we even sing that poem today as a hymn.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: It begins this way, O love that will not let me go.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: I rest my weary soul in thee.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: You see, if you've come to Jesus Christ and seen him on the cross and put your hand in his hand and he says, I'll never let you go, no matter how much tribulation and distress you go through, no matter what attacks you, no matter how you feel as though I don't love you anymore, I do.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: And I'll never ever let you go.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: Bow with me in a word of prayer, and then I'm gonna have the band come out and play a song about this, and then we'll take the Lord's table together.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: Heavenly Father, thank you for the amazing, marvelous, unbelievable truth of our Savior's love for us.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: In the beginning, when we were still sinners, he died for us, he's loved us ever since, and he'll keep loving us forever and ever.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: And that's this is hard to grasp that.
32:03
SPEAKER_01: It's impossible to put our heads around that, Lord.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: How wonderful that is.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: That's why the text we read, I didn't point it out to you.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: That's why the text we read said, conquered through him who past tense loved us.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: It didn't say through him who loves us, we conquer through him who loved us.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: That is, he loved us when we were sinners.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: He loved us on the cross, and because he loved us at that moment in the past, we can count on him loving us forever from now on.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: So when you take the bread, when you drink the cup right now, you are putting inside yourself the evidence, the proof that he loves you right now.
36:16
SPEAKER_01: Allow that as you eat and drink to flow up through you and give you the assurance of his eternal love because it happened back then on the cross when he gave his body, when he gave his blood.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Do you understand me?
36:32
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we we commit this moment to you, looking back at the cross when you loved us, which is the source and support and reason and proof of your present and eternal love for us, that you'll never let us go because you grasped us on the cross and forgave us our sin.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: Bless us as we grasp you in this moment, Heavenly Father, as we take your bread and drink your cup and drink you to ourselves in Jesus' name.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: Amen.