Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / November 18, 2018 | Thanksgiving Service Of Praise

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November 18, 2018 | Thanksgiving Service Of Praise · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: What an awesome morning.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: Love having the kids sing.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: We uh I love TSOP.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: Thanksgiving service appraise every year.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: It's the 41st straight year we've celebrated it with a feast.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Like it partly because I know my wife is about 25 feet straight below me working on the turkeys, and uh I can start to smell all that good stuff.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: She has a gift of service, so I try to let her serve as much as possible around the house.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: I have a gift of teaching.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: She doesn't want to switch places with me, and I definitely don't want to switch places with her.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: I hope you'll stay after this, though, because we're gonna have a lot of good food.
0:45
SPEAKER_01: And as you can tell, we sort of let loose a little bit more during the holiday time, and I love that as well.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: We've got a lot of cool things coming up.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: Well, I get to share with you today my favorite, one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: But I've never, I don't think, ever shared it with you before.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: So this is gonna be absolutely cool, and I think the best way to start is to read this passage.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: This is our text for today, Psalm 50, verses 14 and 15.
1:15
SPEAKER_01: You can see how appropriate this is for a Thanksgiving day.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: I'll stop there and just really briefly say this is a special Psalm, Psalm 50, that more than any other place in the whole Bible says God is disgusted with ritual formalism.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: He hates it when his people play church.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: He hated it when the Israelites just brought the cows and other sacrifices.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: He says in Psalm 50, what, you think I'm hungry?
1:42
SPEAKER_01: For sheep or cow or stuff like that?
1:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm not hungry.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: If I'm if I get hungry, I've got the cattle on a thousand hills, I'll feed myself.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: I don't need it.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'd like from you?
1:51
SPEAKER_01: He says, I'd like something from the heart.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: I'd like a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:57
SPEAKER_01: So he says, I want heart stuff.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: I want heart worship, I want the reality.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: I don't want the games, I don't want the ritual, the formalism.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: So that's what this psalm is about.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: And then now in these two verses, he's gonna tell what he's really looking for.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: And so he says, offer to him to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: And then he says this.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: He says, Call upon me in the day of trouble, I'll rescue you, and you will glorify me.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: On this day, 300 years ago, 300 years ago, on this very day, a writer in Great Britain was finishing up his life's work.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: His great novel.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: It would turn out to be the first great English novel ever written.
2:42
SPEAKER_01: Story of a of a of a of a sailor who is shipwrecked, who was marooned on an island for 28 years.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: And that sailor's name was Robinson Crusoe.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: The story was based on an actual true story about a boy who had run away from home, basically, and against his daddy and mommy's wishes decided he would be a sailor.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: Sailors in that day, whether they are in this one or not, are full of vices and sin.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: They love lust and greed and money and violence and wildness and so forth.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: And this young man named Robinson Crusoe was no different.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: And so he was on a ship with the other sailors, and he was living his kind of life, not religious at all, certainly not a Christian, and then the ship was wrecked.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: Down in the Southern Caribbean slash Atlantic off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, that ship crashed, and everybody was thrown overboard, and everybody except for one person drowned.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Robinson Crusoe washed up on an island.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: Now, he didn't even think about thanking God that he was saved.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: He wasn't that kind of a person, but a couple of casks, you know, and things from the ship washed ashore as well.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: He was able to fashion sort of a makeshift tent.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: But you talk about a life of hardship, every day going out and foraging and trying to find enough food to eat and loneliness and everything.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: And then about a year in goes the story, everything got even ten times worse.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: What happened is there was an earthquake came, the whole island shook under his feet, which was caused, of course, by tidal wave type waves, massive waves, and a huge torrential storm and rains and so forth.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: And he got very, very sick with a high fever, so much so that he couldn't even go out foraging.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: He couldn't even get off the ground hardly.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: He had no one to even bring him a drink of water.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: He was ready to perish, ready to die.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: And in desperation, he thought, what can I take?
4:47
SPEAKER_01: Is there anything at all that I can eat or chew or drink or anything which might help me?
4:52
SPEAKER_01: And he remembered that in this chest, and it washed ashore, there was this lump of tobacco leaves.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: And so he opened the chest, he reached and took out a tobacco leaf, began to chew it, put some others on a pan on a fire, and it started to fill the little tent with tobacco smoke.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: And he got the rest of them and dumped them in a cask of rum, steeping them so they would get soft.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: And he decided that after an hour or two he would drink the rum and chew the leaves and try to fall asleep and see what would happen.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Something interesting happened, however, when he pulled the leaves out, he saw that underneath the tobacco leaves there was a Bible.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: He never had any use for a Bible or for God.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: So he uh, but he decided, you know, I've got some time while these leaves are sitting here steeping in the rum.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: And so he he said, and I quote from the book, he said, so I took up the Bible and I began to read, but I couldn't read.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: He said my head was disturbed because of the fevers, confused because of the tobacco.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: And he said, But my eyes had fallen on one sentence.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: And he said, That sentence etched itself in my mind, and that sentence was call upon me in a day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will glorify me.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: He says, I thought about that, and he said, For the first time in my life, I actually said a prayer to God.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And after he did, he keeled over and he fell fast asleep, and he didn't wake for two days, maybe because of the rum and tobacco or whatever.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: But when he woke up, miraculously, he felt energetic, he felt healthy, he could get up, he could go foraging for food again.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: But the first thing he thought about when he woke up were the words of that verse, call upon me in a day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will glorify me.
6:49
SPEAKER_01: And those words sort of carved themselves deeper and deeper into his mind, and he realized that he was in trouble, that he he'd never even thanked God for saving his life to put him on the island.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: He had never prayed before, but now he was calling on God to deliver him from the island, but he realized at the same time that he was a wicked sinner, and so he began calling on God to deliver him from his sin.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: Suffice it to say that in a matter of days and weeks, he became born again.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: His life was utterly changed.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: It would take twenty-seven more years before God would deliver him from the island.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: But he had a radical change in his life simply because his eyes had fallen on that verse.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: That verse has been famous, though I didn't know it.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: It's been forgotten in our day and age, but it's been famous for thousands of years.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: 150, 160, 170 years later, a famous pastor in uh at Metropolitan Tabernacle in London preached on that verse.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: His name is Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and he labeled it, he labeled it Robinson Crusoe's verse, and the title has stuck.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: So there's two things I want you to remember from this morning.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: I want you to remember the verse, and that it's Robinson Crusoe's verse, and so I'm gonna ask you to recite this uh with me right now.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you to say these three clauses with me one after the other.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: All right, you ready?
8:22
SPEAKER_01: Call upon me in a day of trouble.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: I will rescue you and you will glorify me.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: All right, now it's all black up there.
8:31
SPEAKER_01: See how well you can do.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: Call upon me in the day of trouble.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: I will rescue you and you will glorify me.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Whose verse is that?
8:42
SPEAKER_01: I recommend the book to you, by the way, sometimes if you've never read it, but don't read one of the modern abridged copies because they leave out all the good stuff, the politically incorrect stuff, like the conversion and the cannibalism.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: So um don't know that those two words fit together all that well, cannibals and conversion, but it's a great book, and and you should read it.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: But I want to talk to you about these three lines, all right?
9:06
SPEAKER_01: Because these these lines impressed themselves on me.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: Some years ago when I was a student.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: I was a student in seminary, I found myself in a place of despair, I found myself in a place of loneliness, I found myself in a place of crisis.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: As I was reading the Bible, I happened to cross these words, having no idea that they were famous words that people had known and loved for thousands of years.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: I looked at these words, I memorized these words, I thought, these words are perfect, these words are just what I mean.
9:33
SPEAKER_01: Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will glorify me.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: So I want to take these lines apart before I call Brady and Jess up and just talk to you about them and help you value them as I do, as Robinson Crusoe did, as so many other people have.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: The first line is, of course, call on me in the or in your day of trouble.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: Listen, God cannot rescue a person who's not in trouble.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ never healed someone who was not sick.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: If you're in a place of trouble today, you are in the perfect and only place for God to come and rescue you.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't think you are in such a place today, I recommend that you back up and look at your life a little closer and realize that you and I are always desperate creatures, desperate for divine intervention.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: And when, of course, uh he says, call on me, he's thinking of prayer.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: Call on me.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: Like Jeremiah said, uh 33.3, call on me and I will answer thee or answer you and show you great and mighty things which you cannot imagine.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: And this is sort of like uh the flare that you, the red flare that you send up when you're in trouble, the cry of distress, the sort of like that ivory, magic ivory horn that that someone, I think Father Christmas gave Susan Pevensey in the Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe, gave her the horn and said, Listen, when you're in trouble and all seems lost, blow on this horn and help will come.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And sure enough, every time she blew on that horn, like when the wolf came at her, help came and she was rescued.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: It's why we sing that song to each other, what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: Oh, what peace we often forfeit.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: Oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: So listen, these three lines are like the three stages of a rocket that follow one another, and the rocket most often fails to get off the ground because the first stage never fires.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: Because we fail to call upon the Lord in the day of trouble.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: We call on anyone and everyone else, our friends, family members, the policeman, a lawyer, an attorney, uh a doctor without calling on the Lord.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: That's why James said, You do not have because you do not ask.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: Jesus said, Ask and you'll receive.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: So that's stage one.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: Call on me in the day of trouble.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: And now he flips it.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: That's what you did.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: Here's what I'm gonna do, and I will rescue you, because that's what I do.
12:41
SPEAKER_01: That's what God does.
12:43
SPEAKER_01: That's what we all do, right?
12:46
SPEAKER_01: When we're compassionate, this last fall, this fall a month and a half or so ago, I was watching my grandson, three-year-old Judah, or Reuben, I'm sorry.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: And Reuben and I was, we were outside and I was cutting wood and I was burning it, and so he saw the tree swing over there, the outdoor tree swing.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: He asked if he could swing in it, so I took him over and I gave him a big push.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: He tends to be a little bit of a too much of a boy.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: He likes to stand up when he's swinging, he likes to do other stupid stuff.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm I'll go back over the fire and I'm cutting wood and and whatever, and I hear him yell, help, Papa! And I turned around and I look, and there, yeah, he's tried to stand up on it or something, and of course his feet have slipped off, and now he's hanging with his little arms on the chain as he's swinging back, and his legs are so forth.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: And of course I yell back, You got yourself in this pickle, see yourself out of it.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: So, no, I didn't.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: Of course, I didn't say that.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: I ran to help him because that's what we do when someone who is needy is in a place of trouble, and when they call out for help, and that's God says, that's what I do.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: And I just need you to call out, and then I'll help you.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: I will rescue you.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: That's how I respond.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: There's a really old story, even older than Robinson Crusoe, called Pilgrim's Progress.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: And in that story, Christian and hopeful are walking down the path.
14:07
SPEAKER_01: It's a rugged, rocky path at the moment.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: They're walking down the path toward the celestial city, but they look over the fence, over the style, as John Bunyan called it, and they see it's a grassy meadow, and there's a path just not very far away from them over the fence.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: And so they say, why don't we just climb over the fence and walk on that path instead?
14:28
SPEAKER_01: It's called uh Byways Meadow, I think.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: And so they climb over, begin walking on that path, which meanders a little ways away from the fence, and you know it's going to happen.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: They've gotten off the right path.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: They've done as we Christians do, they've gone to an easier path, just not the right path, and they don't realize that they're actually now in the backyard, basically, of the castle despair and of the giant despair.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: And so as it meanders away, the giant comes upon them and he captures them, and laughing, he drags them off toward the castle despair, saying the penalty for the fact that they have been trespassing is death, life imprisonment.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: So he takes them to his castle and he takes them down into the dungeon, the dungeon of despair, and he locks them in, and they see bones everywhere where other people have been locked in and have died.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: And he leaves them there, and there they are day after day, languishing, knowing there's absolutely no hope, crying out, you know, to each other, complaining, you know, wishing they had done differently.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: The giant comes in one morning and he says, I don't understand why you haven't committed suicide yet, like most others do.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: He said, You're going to be here the rest of your life.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: And after he leaves, laughs and locks the cell door, after he leaves, Christian says, He may be right.
15:49
SPEAKER_01: We don't have any hope.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: There's no reason for us to even try.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: And they sit there and hopeful says, wait a minute.
16:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, ever since we've been here, we've just simply been bemoaning our sad state and complaining.
16:09
SPEAKER_01: Have we ever cried out to God for help?
16:12
SPEAKER_01: No, we haven't.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: Well, why don't we try that?
16:16
SPEAKER_01: And so for that whole, that rest that dev day and night, they kneel down and they they call out to God for help and they confess their unfaithfulness, though God has been faithful, and they and they cry out to him to deliver them.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: And as they're praying in the nighttime, Christian feels somehow a little thing in his pocket.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: He reaches his hand in, and there is a key that he'd forgotten about, a very special gift from a very special uh person sometime back.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: And he takes it out and he looks at it in the dim light, and it's the key of promise.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: And the promise is call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will glorify me.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: And Christian says, I wonder if this key would fit into that lock, and he takes it over to the huge ancient rusted lock, and he puts it in and he turns it, and the door creaks open, and they are free.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: And the message that John Bunyan is trying to communicate there is that God has given us a promise that if we call upon him in the day of trouble, he will rescue us.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: We do our part, he does his part because God is a generous and a gracious and a rescuing God.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: And that's stage two of the rocket.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: Stage one, my side of the deal is I will call on you in the day of trouble.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: Stage two, his side, is he'll rescue me.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: And then we come to stage three, which is really what we've been looking for for the whole time, what God's been looking for.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: It's the reason we even exist.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: And I will, in response, and I will what?
18:01
SPEAKER_01: I will glorify you.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: Which is even more than giving thanks.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: It's, it's, it's, because God says, you know, the reason I created you, Isaiah 45 says this, the reason I created you, the reason I created everything in the universe is to give me honor and glory.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: He said it sounds really selfish of him, but no, as Lewis pointed out, you know, this is just natural.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: You you we we honor the things that should be honored.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: We should not honor the things that should be dishonored, nor should we dishonor the things that should be honored.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: And God deserves as our creator, as the world's creator and our Savior as well.
18:32
SPEAKER_01: He deserves to be glorified and honored.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: We will be thrilled to do so for eternity after, you know, upon eternities.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: And God says, one day you will do this, and yet the reason, the reason I put you in places of trouble is so you will call upon me, so that then I can rescue you, so then that you will turn around and see me for who I am, a rescuing God, and you will glorify me and honor me.
18:59
SPEAKER_01: And God would say to us, I think, isn't that why you're sitting here this morning, that sometime in your life, even when it wasn't health or your income or a spouse or college or anything else, that you saw yourself spiritually for who you really were, a lost sinner, someone who was who is apart from me and alienated.
19:17
SPEAKER_01: You saw yourself as in trouble and you called out to me and I rescued you.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: I sent my son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to earth, and he died on the cross for your sin, so that your cry, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner, would be fulfilled in that moment when he was merciful, when I was merciful to you in the person of my son.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: And you responded to my gift, to my rescue by trusting in my son as your savior.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: And now I call upon you to glorify me.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: It's a personal relationship of love and adoration.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: It's a worship thing that goes even beyond thanksgiving.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: A girl, a young woman actually, screamed for help from a high floor of a burning building.
20:06
SPEAKER_01: A fireman heard her, put up a high ladder, climbed up, and at the risk of his life, rescued her from the building and brought her down to the ground.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: The next day, the young woman sought him out to tell him thank you.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: When she met with him and gave her thanks, something happened between them.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: It started a relationship and they started meeting, they fell in love, and then she married him.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: Now, listen, that parable is explained like this.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: When she called out from the building, she called on him in the day of trouble.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: When he responded and he saved her, that's like the rescue, much like the rescue that God does for you and me.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: Now, when she met with him afterwards to thank him, that's why we're here this morning to say thank you.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: But when she actually married him, that was more like honor.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: That was love and that was adoration, and that's what God's looking for from us.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: Thanksgiving that moves into love and adoration and worship.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: So that's the three-step process.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: It's like a rocket firing up.
21:27
SPEAKER_01: Step number one is call on me and say it with me.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: Call on me in the day of trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will glorify me.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: We get the rescue.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: God gets the glory.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes, uh by the way, let me say you may say to me, Now, Jim, I have a problem.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: The last six weeks you've done a series called uh When God Doesn't Make Sense, and when God doesn't rescue us, when God doesn't answer our prayers, when he doesn't make sense this way, how do we?
22:00
SPEAKER_01: React and it's exactly right, but it doesn't make sense because that's just strange work.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: The verse I've given you today, this is the way God acts.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: This is his character.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: God says, just ask and I'll answer.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: There are some times you must trust me for this.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: He says, sometimes where I will not answer your prayer the way you're asking.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: I will not rescue you until the next life.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: There are some times, and you must trust me when, for my glory and for out of my wisdom, that this is what I choose to do.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: But what I really love to do is I want you to see me as a rescuing God, as a generous God, as a beautiful God, as a God who loves you.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: See me that way and keep calling out to me because I want to rescue you so that you will glorify me in the here and now.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: So on Thanksgiving services of praise in the past few years, I've interviewed a couple who've been in the midst of a dark place.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: They've been in the lion's den and they still haven't gotten rescued, but they're trusting God anyway, right?
23:03
SPEAKER_01: But this morning, and this is why I chose one of my favorite verses, this morning I'm gonna call up a couple who illustrate all three elements of Psalm 50, verse 15.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: A couple who was in trouble and they called out to God as all of us did.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: And God did rescue them in some remarkable ways, which you're gonna see.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: And today we're glorifying him together.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna call up Brady and Jess Sorensen, and we'll start out by showing you uh the news video, uh, Channel 3 Omaha that introduces their story, and then I'll interview them.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful ending.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: 33-year-old Brady Sorensen had experienced liver rejection before, but this time was different.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: As he learned he would need a transplant, his wife was pregnant with twins.
23:51
SPEAKER_03: And the timing of what happened next was a bit chaotic.
23:54
SPEAKER_03: In today's Your Family Now, we sit down with a family of four from Topeka, Kansas, who all called Nebraska Medicine home for a few days for different reasons.
24:08
SPEAKER_02: Looking back, it was it was smooth and perfect.
24:11
SPEAKER_02: Uh in the moment, it was absolutely just a chaotic mess.
24:16
SPEAKER_03: Babies Emory and Riley.
24:18
SPEAKER_04: They're kind of sassy.
24:19
SPEAKER_04: I've noticed that.
24:38
SPEAKER_03: Brady Sorensen had his first liver transplant at the age of eight months, another in his twenties.
24:44
SPEAKER_03: He learned this summer he'd need a third.
24:46
SPEAKER_04: I was just not sure how that was all gonna play out, and I was like, I don't want to have to have go through labor by myself.
24:55
SPEAKER_03: He received his transplant on July 10th at Nebraska Medicine.
24:59
SPEAKER_03: Being 160 miles from home, Jess found an OB here, too.
25:03
SPEAKER_03: Good thing, because at eight days post-op for Brady, Jess was 33 weeks pregnant.
25:09
SPEAKER_02: Jess stood up maybe to come over and give me a hug or something, I don't know.
25:13
SPEAKER_02: And then her water broke.
25:15
SPEAKER_02: And uh, so I pushed my call light, several nurses from the transplant floor came in.
25:21
SPEAKER_04: And the nurses were making me laugh because they just were like unsure of what they should do with me.
25:29
SPEAKER_03: Once Jess's water broke, Brady got the all-clear from doctors to be by his wife's side.
25:34
SPEAKER_03: So he got in a wheelchair and went downstairs to labor and delivery.
25:37
SPEAKER_04: I've wanted to be a mom for a very long time.
25:40
SPEAKER_04: And so now that they're here, it's just really like it's kind of like a dream come true for me.
25:46
SPEAKER_03: The premature baby girls born via C-section had no real issues, but stayed at the hospital for about a month to make sure they were growing well.
25:54
SPEAKER_03: Not the plan they would have scripted.
25:57
SPEAKER_03: But somehow, this birth story still seems perfect.
26:01
SPEAKER_04: And it's all behind us, and we get to go home soon and like figure out what our new normal is gonna look like.
26:08
SPEAKER_04: Hi, are you opening your eyes?
26:12
SPEAKER_03: And they have since gone home to Topeka, and everyone is doing well and healthy.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, is that great?
26:25
SPEAKER_01: So, uh introduce us to these two little girls.
26:29
SPEAKER_04: This is Riley, and Brady has Emory, and they are four months old today.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: You guys look they look four months old today.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's pretty cool.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: So um you guys look so relaxed in that video.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is no big deal, you know.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: So really?
26:46
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it wasn't that way.
26:47
SPEAKER_04: No, that was like that was filmed about a week or less before we came home.
26:51
SPEAKER_04: So it was kind of at the end of everything, and that's why we look relaxed.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: So there was high stress before that.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: So when did you, by the way, Jess, long as you go uh when did you find out that you guys were pregnant and that and then when did you find out that you had twins, or how did that we found out I was pregnant in December, and then in January we found out that it was twins.
27:12
SPEAKER_04: Um and then at my first O B appointment is when we kind of thought that maybe something was up with Brady because his eyes were turning yellow.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: Really?
27:21
SPEAKER_01: How did just a second?
27:22
SPEAKER_01: So you're in an OB appointment.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: How did they know his eyes were yellow?
27:25
SPEAKER_01: They looked like a vampire or something.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: What was that?
27:27
SPEAKER_01: What happened?
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Did somebody see that?
27:29
SPEAKER_02: They just looked over at me uh as we were both in the appointment, and and my eyes were probably the shade of these headbands, uh, which for you non-medical people is not a natural eye color.
27:42
SPEAKER_02: So that's when we first knew that something might be going on with the liver.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: So how did you feel with these two things happening at the same time and sort of seeming to maybe converge?
27:55
SPEAKER_01: Didn't that wasn't that low frequently?
28:02
SPEAKER_04: Um just how everything was gonna play out.
28:04
SPEAKER_04: At 29 weeks, I was in the hospital with preterm labor and they were able to stop it.
28:10
SPEAKER_04: Um, but that was really nerve-wracking, also, because 29 weeks would have been way too early, and they would have been in the NICU and Topeka with Brady potentially being in Omaha, and um so it was all just very scary, and we were not calm like on the video.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: Oh well, let me ask you a question.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: So yellow eyes doesn't necessarily mean you needn't need a new liver.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: When did you find out you needed a new liver for heaven's sake?
28:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh we so I had um had some blood work done and some of the lab numbers were off.
28:40
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then we actually went up to Omaha to do some more testing.
28:44
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and first or second day we were there, I don't remember, one of the physicians walked in and didn't introduce himself, but that's okay because we already knew him.
28:54
SPEAKER_02: Uh and he just blurted out, Well, you need a new liver.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: Good bedside manner.
29:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great bedside manner.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: Uh and and that was a shock.
29:04
SPEAKER_02: That was, I mean, we knew that there was some something going on with the liver, but we definitely were not expecting to hear you need another liver transplant now.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: So that's March, right?
29:17
SPEAKER_01: So now you need a new liver, but everything has to be now you needed a special liver, right?
29:21
SPEAKER_01: Like a like uh you couldn't have a liver that had holes in it or anything.
29:25
SPEAKER_02: Right.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: Uh since this was going to be my third liver transplant, it really needed to be uh basically a perfect liver.
29:33
SPEAKER_02: Um had to come from uh uh donors, same blood type, same uh several other factors, and uh couldn't have any any history of disease, any any problems whatsoever wrong with the liver in order for it to be a a viable liver for me.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: So now you're headed March, April, May, June, and things are a little you know freaky.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: You're really sick, and your babies want to come out, I got I guess 29 weeks.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: And that would have been bad, you said, because they would have been here in in NICU and and he would have been up there and he couldn't have been with you.
30:15
SPEAKER_04: Right.
30:16
SPEAKER_04: Right, we would have had to be separated, which was not what we wanted at all.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: So this is just a little thing, but this is one of those many answers to prayer in this situation.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we come into what July?
30:27
SPEAKER_04: July was when Brady had his transplant.
30:30
SPEAKER_04: Um at the beginning of July, we were called and offered a liver.
30:34
SPEAKER_02: Um we got the phone call.
30:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh they they told me that they had a liver available for me uh and wanted us to come up to Omaha.
30:43
SPEAKER_02: What'd you say?
30:44
SPEAKER_02: Uh I said, well, I kind of had plans for July 4th, like can we push it back a day maybe?
30:50
SPEAKER_02: Um no, so we we got in the car and we went up there.
30:54
SPEAKER_02: Uh and I got admitted to the hospital and um was there for several hours.
31:01
SPEAKER_02: Uh and then we went down to pre-op to get ready for the transplant.
31:08
SPEAKER_02: And as we got down there, the nurses came and said, actually, uh this liver is not gonna work for you.
31:16
SPEAKER_02: So you can spend the night here if you want.
31:20
SPEAKER_02: And we're we all decided, no, thanks, we'll just go back to Topeka as opposed to stay in the hospital for the night.
31:27
SPEAKER_02: So that was rough.
31:30
SPEAKER_04: Very rough.
31:31
SPEAKER_04: The week that followed was probably the hardest week that we had had just because we were questioning Lord, what is the plan?
31:38
SPEAKER_04: Like, is Brady gonna get a liver in time?
31:41
SPEAKER_04: We knew that I wasn't gonna make it full term with the girls because of the preterm labor, but we didn't know how long I would go.
31:48
SPEAKER_04: Um and so we just were very nervous and very it was kind of depressing to come home after that, like, oh, we thought this was the end, we thought the waiting of that part was over, and then for them to be like, nope, sorry, it was hard.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: Definition of T D O T, the day of trouble, baby.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: So you're because you're in critical, approaching critical condition.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: We got mortality issues, you know, we want the babies to live, we want you to live.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: And now the question is, will you even get a liver?
32:17
SPEAKER_02: Right.
32:18
SPEAKER_02: So the actually the very next week we got another, or I actually had low sodium.
32:24
SPEAKER_02: Went to the hospital here in Topeka, and it was low enough that they decided to life flight me up to Omaha so that the doctors there could kind of get a better handle of what was going on.
32:37
SPEAKER_02: And with low sodium, uh, as low as mine was, you were supposed to be removed from the transplant list until the sodium is back up to normal levels.
32:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, my doctors, they're a little bit of a rebel, uh, and he didn't remove me from the list, which is another one of those god things, because just a day later, uh they had a liver for me.
33:02
SPEAKER_02: They redrew my sodium level, and it was normal, high enough to where they could proceed with the transplant.
33:08
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
33:09
SPEAKER_04: Which, if they would have taken him off the list, they would have had to wait 24 hours to put him back on the list so he wouldn't have gotten that liver.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: So that's when you went in and you got your transplant.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: Right.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: And you're still holding on to the baby, so he he gets out and you're going, and now he could he could come by your bedside at any time, right?
33:31
SPEAKER_04: No.
33:31
SPEAKER_04: Um so after transplant, Brady had some steroid-induced psychosis.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: Steroid-induced psychosis.
33:38
SPEAKER_04: Yes, he was delusional.
33:39
SPEAKER_04: At one point, thought he was Father Christmas.
33:43
SPEAKER_02: I am actually Father Christmas.
33:44
SPEAKER_01: You are what you thought you were Father Christmas.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: I I I am.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: You are out of the Narnia tales.
33:51
SPEAKER_01: Christmas will be happy for everyone this year.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: My goodness.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: So how long did that psychosis go on?
33:58
SPEAKER_01: How long was he in handcuffs and straitjacket?
34:02
SPEAKER_04: About a little less than a week, um, maybe five or six days.
34:06
SPEAKER_04: So if the girls would have come one day sooner, Brady would not have been able to be with me because he would have was not clear-headed.
34:13
SPEAKER_04: Um, so the day that they came, he was able to be in the OR.
34:17
SPEAKER_04: He had woke up that day and wasn't.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: You woke up after the rum and tobacco, and you were ready to go, baby.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
34:25
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: So I mean they look like they're healthy and and you look healthy.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: Tell tell us about the since then stuff.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: Now they did have to stay in NICU for like a month or so, right?
34:36
SPEAKER_04: They were in the NICU for 40 days, um, which was another God thing because we were gonna stay in Omaha for six to eight weeks post-transplant, regardless.
34:46
SPEAKER_04: Um, and so them being in the NICU was not like an ideal situation, but we didn't have to live in a hotel room with them for six weeks.
34:53
SPEAKER_04: Oh, so it kind of worked out.
34:55
SPEAKER_04: Bonus.
34:56
SPEAKER_02: As fun as that sounds.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: That's so cool.
35:02
SPEAKER_02: Since then, though, since we've gotten back home, the girls have been very healthy.
35:06
SPEAKER_02: They're gaining weight, they're uh hitting the you know developmental milestones and things like that.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: Um they sometimes like to sleep, sometimes they don't.
35:17
SPEAKER_02: We've been very lucky this morning.
35:19
SPEAKER_02: Um and then as far as my health goes, it's been it's been very good.
35:24
SPEAKER_02: Uh when we were in Omaha, I was getting labs drawn about every or about three times a week just to check liver levels and things like that.
35:34
SPEAKER_02: And when we came back home, it went to monthly lab, or excuse me, weekly labs.
35:40
SPEAKER_02: And then just a couple of weeks ago, they uh kind of dropped me down to monthly labs, which is a good indication that things are going very well.
35:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh, doctors are positive and and things seem to be working out great.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: So before I'm gonna ask you to pray in just a minute, Brady's one of our young church leaders, he's a deacon, he's in a um special group that I have with some young church leaders.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: And uh, but uh as we wrap this up, I mean the number of times God stepped in and answered our prayers and your prayers, is there anything you more you'd want to say about how God can't has come through for you in this?
36:18
SPEAKER_04: We just think that God has been very gracious to our family and taking care of every little detail, we could not have uh planned it better.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Praise can you say praise the Lord?
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just so you can see why why when I thought of I I thought of them, I thought of that my favorite verse on that's like this, which is call on me in the day of trouble.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: God says, Oh, thank you so much.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna rescue you, and then you will glorify me.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: Not just thank him.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna love him, adore him, worship him, glorify him.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: Would you glorify God in your closing prayer?
37:05
SPEAKER_02: Father God, uh, we come before you and we just thank you that uh we are able to call on your name in the midst of trouble.
37:13
SPEAKER_02: Um we're able to call out to you and we trust that you hear us.
37:19
SPEAKER_02: Um and we uh we just thank you for all the ways that you answer our prayers, whether it be uh just uh obvious blessings or if it is uh things that are a bit more uh subtle and hard to understand.
37:35
SPEAKER_02: But God, we uh we just thank you for all the ways that you work in our lives, and we uh we just want to uh glorify your name.
37:44
SPEAKER_02: It's in Jesus' name, amen.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for coming.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: Hope you stay with us for Thanksgiving feast.
37:50
SPEAKER_01: You're just missing.