Confidence in where we are going

Job 19:25 (NLT)

25 “But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last.

There is a Redeemer provided for fallen man, and Jesus Christ is that Redeemer. The word is Goël which is used for the next of kin, to whom, by the law of Moses, the right of redeeming a mortgaged estate did belong, Lev. 25:25. Our heavenly inheritance was mortgaged by sin; we are ourselves utterly unable to redeem it; Christ is near of kin to us, the next kinsman that is able to redeem; he has paid our debt, satisfied God's justice for sin, and so has taken off the mortgage and made a new settlement of the inheritance. [Matthew Henry Commentary]

In January 2000, leaders of Charlotte, North Carolina, invited their favorite son, Billy Graham, to a luncheon. Billy initially hesitated to accept the invitation because he struggles with Parkinson's disease. But the Charlotte leaders said, "We don't expect a major address. Just come and let us honor you." So he agreed.

After wonderful things were said about him, Graham stepped to the rostrum, looked at the crowd, and said, "I'm reminded today of Albert Einstein, the great physicist who this month has been honored by Time magazine as the Man of the Century. Einstein was once traveling from Princeton on a train when the conductor came down the aisle, punching the tickets of each passenger. When he came to Einstein, Einstein reached in his vest pocket. He couldn't find his ticket, so he reached in his other pocket. It wasn't there, so he looked in his briefcase but couldn't find it. Then he looked in the seat by him. He couldn't find it. The conductor said, 'Dr. Einstein, I know who you are. We all know who you are. I'm sure you bought a ticket. Don't worry about it.' Einstein nodded appreciatively.

"The conductor continued down the aisle punching tickets. As he was ready to move to the next car, he turned around and saw the great physicist down on his hands and knees looking under his seat for his ticket. The conductor rushed back and said, 'Dr. Einstein, Dr. Einstein, don't worry. I know who you are. No problem. You don't need a ticket. I'm sure you bought one.' Einstein looked at him and said, 'Young man, I too know who I am. What I don't know is where I'm going.'"

Billy Graham continued, "See the suit I'm wearing? It's a brand new suit. My wife, my children, and my grandchildren are telling me I've gotten a little slovenly in my old age. I used to be a bit more fastidious. So I went out and bought a new suit for this luncheon and one more occasion. You know what that occasion is? This is the suit in which I'll be buried. But when you hear I'm dead, I don't want you to immediately remember the suit I'm wearing. I want you to remember this: I not only know who I am, I also know where I'm going." [John Huffman, "Who Are You, and Where Are You Going?" Preaching Conference 2002]

If you want peace of mind, the Scriptures are very clear on that: “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). In 1 John 5:13 The Bible tells us, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” With faith in Christ we have confidence in knowing where we are going.

Seeking the lost

Luke 19:10 (NLT)

10 For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.

Jesus met a tax collector named Zacchaeus and he went to his home to enjoy fellowship and dinner. Towards the end of the meal, Zacchaeus stood before the Lord and said, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord, and if I have cheated people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!” Jesus responded, “Salvation has come to this home today, for this man has shown himself to be a true son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.”

Putti Sok told her Christian college friends, "Leave me alone and quit praying for me." Putti described herself as a "Cambodian Buddhist girl," even though she was born in Long Beach, California and grew up in Dallas. "I figured I was Buddhist because my parents told me I was Buddhist," she said. "I thought Christianity was just a religion for Americans." Eventually Putti came to consider herself "an evangelistic atheist," challenging others to prove that God exists.

When Putti started her college education at the University of Texas in 2008, one of her goals was to build deep relationships. She succeeded in that, but some of her new friends were Christians who were active in a student ministry. During her sophomore year, Putti "hit a wall." "I began to see that everything I was doing was becoming meaningless," she said. "If what I was doing didn't have eternal meaning, then it was all in vain." She began to think, "If God is real, he should be able to hear my prayers." Each night she began to pray that he would help her understand what she had been hearing from her friends because it seemed like foolishness to her.

Then one day Putti entered a closet in the student ministry building that had been turned into a prayer room. Inside she found a bowl filled with pieces of paper with the names of students' friends. One after another she looked at the slips of paper and found her own name written on the slips.

She knew how strongly she had urged her friends not to pray for her and yet they had faithfully loved her and prayed for her anyway. She burst into tears that day in the tiny prayer room. "God was softening my heart then," she said. The next night she felt that God was asking her for a specific response, so she finally prayed to receive Christ.

"All of a sudden, I had a desire to go and share with people," she said. "God is real, and he has changed my heart." Putti is currently studying in preparation for full time ministry. [Adapted from Michelle Tyler, "Ardent atheist becomes passionate Christian evangelist," Latest News from Southwestern, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (3-25-14)]

The precious dream

1 Peter 1:18-19 (NLT)

18 For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value. 19 It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God.

The Apostle Peter reminds us that we inherited a sinful nature due to the sins of Adam and Eve and it was God who paid the ransom to redeem us from those sins. The random was not of earthly materials such as gold or silver. Instead we were redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ who lived a holy and sin free life. It was Jesus who willingly became the sacrificial Lamb of God.

Tim Keller preached in his sermon, “Suffering”, saying: What does Paul mean when he says, "The Resurrection is going to swallow up the suffering and evil you're going through right now"? Here's a very imperfect illustration from my own life. Many years ago I had a horrible nightmare. I'm not sure if the dream came from something I ate or a movie I'd watched, but I usually don't retell this dream with many details because it was really an awful dream. I dreamt my entire family had been slaughtered. But then I woke up, and my entire family was right there. I really love my family, and when I went to sleep that night, before the nightmare, they were all around me. But when I woke up after the dream, the nightmare in which I thought I had lost them, I got them back again. I couldn't even look at them without crying—for sheer joy.

What had happened? Having gotten them back after losing them, made the experience of having them infinitely greater. It's almost like the experience of losing them had been swallowed up by the experience of having them, so that it was infinitely more precious.

That is a dim hint of what the resurrection of Christ means to us. If his resurrection happened—and it did—that means our resurrection's going to happen. And that means that everything sad and horrible is going to be brought up into our future glory and resurrection and make it infinitely better than it would have been if we had never had any of those experiences. And that's the final and ultimate defeat of suffering and death.

When we have something and loose it that can be devastating. Adam and Eve had the choice of living an eternal life free of sin, but instead they chose a life of sin, because of their desire to be like God. They listened to a lie from Satan and gave up the perfect life. However, God in his infinite love, mercy and grace restored to us Salvation through His Son Jesus Christ. What was a bad nightmare is now a glorious dream of redemption. Christ has defeated the suffering and death we knew and has given us something infinitely more precious – eternal life with Him in heaven.

Take care with your associations

Proverbs 22:24-25 (NLT)

24 Don’t befriend angry people or associate with hot-tempered people, 25 or you will learn to be like them and endanger your soul.

It is the law of friendship that we accommodate ourselves to our friends and be ready to serve them, and therefore we ought to be wise and wary in the choice of a friend, that we come not under the sacred tie to any one whom it would be our folly to accommodate ourselves to. Thought we must be civil to all, yet we must be careful whom we lay in our bosoms and contract a familiarity with. And, among others, a man who is easily provoked, touchy, and apt to resent affronts, who, when he is in a passion, cares not what he says or does, but grows outrageous, such a one is not fit to be made a friend or companion, for he will be ever and anon angry with us and that will be our trouble, and he will expect that we should, like him, be angry with others, and that will be our sin. [Matthew Henry Commentary]

Mike Cosper in The Stories We Tell (Crossway 2014), pages 48-49 writes:  A few years ago I met with a church member who was struggling with sexual sin with his girlfriend, as well as a porn habit. We talked through a variety of means for him to prevent and resist temptation—certain habits of prayer, adding content monitors to his computer, committing to less time online, moving the computer out of his bedroom, not taking his girlfriend to his apartment when no one was home—and he sincerely, earnestly made all of these commitments.

As the conversation was ending, he said, "Are you going to see such-and-such movie this weekend?" It was a gritty new film that featured gangsters, prostitutes, and strippers, and if the advertising was to be believed, would be sexually charged. I searched for words for a moment, until, "Are you kidding me?" fell out of my mouth. My friend seemed surprised at my response, and began to replay the question in his mind, wondering why I was frustrated.

 "We've just spent an hour talking about ways to reshape your life so that you aren't in a place of sexual temptation, and you're going to see that movie?"

"Oh," he said, relieved. "It's fine, man. Movies don't affect me like that."

I shook my head. I had a genuine, but limited, sympathy for the guy. … Most porn addicts take a slow path toward stuff that's hard-core, and in comparison to his drug of choice this movie seemed downright tame. What he failed to see—and what many of us fail to see—is that our consumption of media has cumulative, life-shaping effects.

The Bible tells us not to befriend people or associate with hot-tempered people for they will lead us into danger. The truth is we must always be on guard who and what we associate ourselves with in life. For unless we carefully guard our hearts we have a tendency to follow others into danger. Jesus told us, “Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.” So be careful of your associations and who you are willing to follow; for the wrong choice can lead you places you don’t want to go!

Sting of death

1 Corinthians 15:55-57 (NLT)

55 “Where, O death, is your victory?

       Where, O death, is your sting?”

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

In these verses the apostle asks the rhetorical questions to death, where is your power and where are your pains? For the apostle knows that God through His infinite love, mercy and grace gave man the power over sin; through the death, burial and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ.

A boy and his father were driving down a country road on a beautiful spring afternoon, when a bumblebee flew in the car window. The little boy, who was allergic to bee stings, was petrified. The father quickly reached out, grabbed the bee, squeezed it in his hand, and then released it. The boy grew frantic as it buzzed by him. Once again the father reached out his hand, but this time he pointed to his palm. There stuck in his skin was the stinger of the bee. "Do you see this?" he asked. "You don't need to be afraid anymore. I've taken the sting for you." We do not need to fear death anymore. Christ has died and risen again. He has taken the sting from death. [Adrian Dieleman, Waupun, Wisconsin. Leadership, Vol. 15, no. 1.]

We have a Father in Heaven who took the sting out of death. For we can know that when our earthly bodies die; we will live an eternal life in heaven.

The message of The Cross

1 Corinthians 1:18 (NLT)

18 The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God.

This is the sum and substance of the gospel. Christ crucified is the foundation of all our joys. By his death we live. This is what Paul preached, what all ministers should preach, and what all the saints live upon. [Matthew Henry Commentary]

In the book, Raised? Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection, author Jonathan Dodson writes, "The resurrection is a dividing line—a parting claim." Here's how he illustrates that "dividing line":

The resurrection is like a river that parts a road. People are on the road approaching the river. Arriving at the river of the resurrection, you look across it to where the road continues and see quite a few cars are there. In your doubt, you can't imagine how people got to the other side of the river. How did they get across? How can rational people come to the belief that Jesus died and rose from the dead?

Faith is the unnoticed ferry, lying hidden near the bank of the river that can take us from the riverbank of doubt … to the other side of belief in the resurrection. [But] it's not blind faith … You don't cross by closing your eyes and wishing Jesus' resurrection was true. No. You cross with your eyes wide open. This is an informed faith, faith in a historical plausible resurrection, attested by hundreds of witnesses, one proven to be worth believing.

Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, wrote:  The plan of redemption unfolded as Almighty God sent His Son to earth on a mission to die, to “give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45, NIV). And not simply to die, but to die on a cross in punishment for our sins so that we might be forgiven and receive the gift of eternal life.

To many, that sounds like nonsense. But the Bible says, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

The Lord is the only true God

Jeremiah 10:10 (NLT)

10 But the Lord is the only true God. He is the living God and the everlasting King.

But the Lord is the true God, the God of truth; he is God in truth. God Jehovah is truth; he is not a counterfeit and pretender, as they are, but is really what he has revealed himself to be; he is one we may depend upon, in whom and by whom we cannot be deceived. [Matthew Henry’s Commentary]

The world we live in often deceives, but The Lord will never deceive us. In the Matthew West song, HELLO MY NAME IS, regret and defeat are given a persona of one who would deceive us. God tells us we are forgiven, but regret will not let us forget our wrongful actions of the past. The Lord tells us we are victorious, but defeat calls out that we will just be dragged down again. Here are some of the lyrics to HELLO MY NAME IS by Matthew West:

Hello, my name is regret

I’m pretty sure we have met

Every single day of your life

I’m the whisper inside

That won’t let you forget

Hello, my name is defeat

I know you recognize me

Just when you think you can win

I’ll drag you right back down again

‘Til you’ve lost all belief

Oh, these are the voices. Oh, these are the lies

And I have believed them for the very last time

Hello, my name is child of the one true King

I’ve been saved, I’ve been changed, I have been set free

"Amazing Grace" is the song I sing

Hello, my name is child of the one true King

In the chorus we are reminded we are children of The Lord. The Lord has extended His grace towards us and provides salvation that we may be set free from the traps of sin. Don’t let the things of this world become your god, but do as the apostle said in Hebrews 3:13, “You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.”