Pastor Jeff and Cheryl Orluck
Pastor Jeff: The last time we spoke was in November. We were talking about the way of Jesus that is childlikeness. We were talking about what it means to be like a child and how, and what that means to our relationship with the father. One of the things that we said about that is that one thing that children do easily is they trust, they believe easily. That just really came alive to me. I'm going to share a little bit later in, in the message how I got inspired even to talk about this. But it really came alive to me. And so Cheryl and I have been kicking around this whole concept of childlike faith for a number of weeks now, and ticking it back and forth and talking a lot about it. I really think that it's, it's just worth spending a morning on. Any of you guys watch, Call The Midwife on Netflix? I would say it's probably the most inspirational TV show of the last 10 years, except for maybe The Chosen, you know, second to The Chosen.
It's just an amazing, amazing, uh, television show. And it's based on the memoirs of a midwife who worked in the East end of London named Jennifer Worth. One of the things that always is in the beginning and the end of this TV show is quotes from her memoirs. And one of the things that she said is, "Belief is the beginning of all things.' And I thought, wow, you know what? I think that's true. Belief is the beginning of all things. And certainly, Jesus thought that the way children believe is even better than sometimes the way we adults believe. By the way, we were trying to fix a problem with our ProPresenter and our livestream computer talking to each other, and in the end, we erased all the scriptures that Marley had so diligently implemented over the weekend. So actually, you are going to have to look up these verses on your own phone or Bible. I know. I know. And they are not going to be on the screen. Can you deal with it?
Cheryl: Get your Bibles out.
Pastor Jeff: Get your Bibles out. Usually most of you have them on your phones nowadays. I understand that way. You can look at any version you want. Cheryl will read them, but you are going to have to read them. If you want to see the words, you got to look them up yourself. We are just going to rehash Mark 10 versus 14 and 15. This is out of the New Living Translation, but this was kind of the heartbeat of our child likeness message. And it's a good place to begin here this morning.
Cheryl: Let the children come to me, don't stop them. For the kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children. I tell you the truth. Anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God, like a child shall never enter it.
Pastor Jeff: Wow. That's a pretty straightforward statement. Oh, and by the way, we should just mention Pastor Brian and Jackie are still on vacation in Mexico. They will be back next week, and Brian and his team will be leading worship again. So we'll get to enjoy that. He doesn't like to fly in and jump right into a message right away, so Cheryl and I will be sharing next week as well. But bless you, Pastor Brian and Jackie, we know you are watching and we love you and great to have you on livestream. Let's go. Now there is another scripture that's also really pretty powerful: Matthew 1125 and 26. Cheryl is reading that out of the NIV.
Cheryl: At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, father, Lord of heaven and earth because you've hidden these things from the whys and learned and revealed them to little children. Yes, father, for this is what you were pleased to do.
Pastor Jeff: Isn't that cool? The deepest things of our Lord are breathed into the hearts of children. You know, what if, nothing else, that should make you want to teach Sunday school? Be with these kids because they got stuff inside of them. If we can tap into it, there are things they understand. I just want to expand that a little bit. Let's not just say just children, let's say childlike. The father isn't looking for scholars who have dug, dug, dug, dug, dug and know all the things about everything. He is looking for those who trust easily that he can breathe his truths to. And they say, yeah, yeah. That's the relationship that our heavenly father wants to have with us. He wants to speak to us. He wants to whisper things to us. He wants to make them come alive to us.
There are things I carry in me. I only share them with my best friends. Sometimes there are things you have, you just wish, who can I tell this to? What if you have that relationship with a father, he is like, who can I tell this to, TaQuaris, she will give it. She understands, she is childlike. She has that ability to trust me and to trust what I say. And when she hears my voice, she can respond to it. I think the Lord is looking for something to happen in us. I think especially for those of us in the West, our believers aren't working very well.
I was thinking about that, that whole metaphor we use. Pastor Brian talks a lot about our dreamers. He has talked a lot about our dreamers being broken and the need for our dreamers to be healed. Lots of times when we talk about prayer and faith, we talk about our knowers. Well, right alongside of your dreamer and your knower is your believer.
Cheryl: It's in there somewhere.
Pastor Jeff: It's in there somewhere. But you know what, the center of your believer is not in your head. In the West, it's all about our heads. It's all about what we understand. It's all about what we study and learn. It's all about what other people teach us. And everything has got to revolve around up here. But the believer is deeper than that. The believer isn't without thinking, but it's a combination of the mind and the will, and then something deeper in our spirit. Something that in that is less tangible than just our thought life. It fits into our thought life, but I've come to understand that you can believe what the Lord is telling you. And you can still have questions in your mind.
Sometimes in this faith world, where we are talking about having faith, we are afraid if we ask a question or if we wonder, or if we doubt that somehow that makes this so that we have unbelief now our faith isn't going to work. We are not going to get what we need, right? Because we have to believe God to get what we need. But you see, this whole world of childlike faith has nothing to do with getting what you need. It has to do with responding to the Father who is teaching you as you read the word. And as you are in prayer and just--- I don't know about you, but for me, he just, out of the blue when it's least expected, he has a chat with me. Anybody? It's just like, whoa, where did that come from?
Those are the best ones usually. It's like the one I told you about last week where the Lord interrupted my criticism and said, "That's not their baggage. That's a culture, and I don't have a problem with it. Why do you?" This is what he does. He just steps in. He said, wait a minute, wait a minute. You are thinking wrong here. Let's have a conversation. I'll tell you what I think. I just want to suggest to you that, that you have to get out of your head a little bit. And you have to quit being afraid that by asking God questions or by wondering how it works, or by even having these feelings, these moments of doubt that somehow you are going to undermine everything you are believing for, it isn't quite that way. There is something deeper inside of us as children of God that we trust the Father.
That's another word we can use in this area of belief. Faith is another word we can use. You see through the scriptures, believing and faith are intermixed all the time. But we tend to make faith this hard work that we've got to do or sometimes we make it almost a violent act. I claim this scripture. I'm going to declare it. We are going to make it happen. You know? And
Cheryl: Some people break a blood vessel doing it. We don't need to work that hard.
Pastor Jeff: Jesus said something very interesting. he said, "From the days of John the Baptist, until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violence take it by force." It's really interesting because it's such a specific timeframe. You wonder what in the world was he talking about? And in the context of belief, what one of my thoughts is, you know, you can't take this to the bank; I'm just musing here. But one of my thoughts is, what if the violence to the kingdom of heaven is, is the religious leaders of the day, the religious ones, trying to take control of what they thought was the entry to the kingdom and trying to force everybody else to do it their way? What if taking the kingdom by violence is actually the religious part of us trying to make it all happen the way we think it should whereas the entrance to the kingdom is from having a childlike trust in the Father where you don't have to make it all happen and you don't have to exercise this world-changing faith to make the world the way you think it should be? But rather it's walking with the father and being obedient to him and trusting him and moving in that grace. Just a thought. Let's see. We'll go on.
For me, I can't about this without talking about Abraham. And so we are going to spend a little bit of time in Genesis, and we'll start in Genesis chapter 12. Cheryl's going to read verses one through four in, out of the new living.
Cheryl: The Lord said to Abraham, leave your native country, your relatives and your father's family and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you, I will make you famous and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on the earth will be blessed through you. So Abraham departed as the Lord had instructed and lot went with him. Abraham was 75 years old when he left Horan.
Pastor Jeff: I don't know about you, but I puzzle about Abraham all the time. He was singularly one of the most important people in all of history. I mean, the Lord comes to him and says, I'm going to bless you and I'm going to make you a blessing. And all the nations on the earth are going to be blessed because of you. When you just think about that, what was it about Abraham? I have the same questions about Mary. What was it about Mary that she ends up, the Lord chooses her to be Jesus' mother.
What was it about Abraham that God came to him and chose him like this and called him. One of the things about Abraham was, I mean, and you can see it in his response. The Lord says, take your family. I want you to go someplace else. And what did Abraham do? He packed it all up and he went someplace else. As I was taking some time to read over this in preparation for, for this message, one of the things that I realized is his father actually set the, set the pace for him. His father lived in the era of the Chaldees and it was in his father's heart to leave the earth of the Chaldees and go to what is the promised land. He got as far as Horan and he thought, this is far enough, and he stopped. He stayed there and he actually lived there for another 200 years. And that's when the Lord came to Abraham and said, Nope, you are not quite where I wanted you to get, so we have to keep on going.
But Abraham was already 75, so he had lived all of his adult life in this one place with his family in a community that he had settled into probably making a good living, and the Lord comes to him and says, "I want you to leave this land and go to the land that I'll show you." I mean, he doesn't even tell him where he is going. James tells us what? Faith without works is dead. Now can I just change?
I want to interchange a different word for works because the word works to me means you have to do something. You have to prove your faith. Faith with works means we've got to build something up again. It puts the, puts onus on us that we've got to prove that we have faith. So how about if we say faith without a response? Seems to me that when you believe the Lord, what comes out of believing is a response. But you see the order has to be right. You don't do the works to prove you have faith. When you believe there is--- out of belief comes a response; it's a natural flow.
Once again, we don't need to work so hard to try to prove something as much as we just want to trust the father. When the father speaks, we say, okay, I trust you. When we say I trust you, we respond to what he is telling us to do. The response comes out of that trust. Rather than making it a work, it becomes relational, which is everything that our heavenly Father's looking for. He is looking for relationship.
We had our eight grandchildren overnight last night, by the way. It was really a, a pleasure, but one of them was being disrespectful to Cheryl and she said, why would you talk to me that way? Why would you talk to me that way? That is so disrespectful. She just called him out, you know, but what, it just struck me how meaningful that was. She didn't get mad at him. She didn't yell at him. She, she talked to him. Why would you talk to me this way? I love you. We have a relationship. And that just reminded me so much of the way our relationship is with our heavenly Father.
He is always working for us to hear his heart. When we have a child like faith, we get to hear his heart. That's what we learned to listen for. Out of his heart come the deepest understanding. It's the best understanding. It's the things that really transform our lives. How about Genesis 15:1-3? This is also in the new living.
Cheryl: Sometime later, the Lord spoke to Abram in a vision and said to him, do not be afraid, Abraham, for I will protect you and your reward will be great. But Abraham replied, oh, sovereign Lord, what good are all of your blessings when I don't even have a son? Since you've given me no children, Eliezer of Damascus, a servant of in my household will inherit my wealth. You have given me no descendants of my own, so one of my servants will be my heir.
Pastor Jeff: You guys talk to God like that. Oh God, what good are your blessings? I don't even have a son.
Cheryl: That's good to be thinking that instead of taking them all for himself and not thinking ahead, you know?
Pastor Jeff: Sure. I mean, but it's kind of a complaint, don't you think?
Cheryl: It is. It's okay to complain to God, I think.
Pastor Jeff: You think so?
Cheryl: Yes, in a respectful way. I mean, he likes us to be real with him. Instead of pretending, let's be real, I think.
Pastor Jeff: Sure. Let's read the next---
Cheryl: Did I wreck your sermon?
Pastor Jeff: No.
Cheryl: Okay.
Pastor Jeff: It's not my sermon. It's ours.
Cheryl: Next.
Pastor Jeff: It's the Lord, hopefully. Yeah, go ahead.
Cheryl: It goes on to say, then the Lord said to him, no, your servant will not be your heir, for you will have a son of your own and he will be your heir. Then the Lord took Abraham outside and said to him, look up into the sky and count the stars if you can. That's how many descendants you will have. And Abraham believed the Lord. And the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.
Pastor Jeff: That is one of the most pivotal and important scriptures in all of the Bible. The Lord told Abraham something. What did he say? Abraham, you are going to have a son. And it says, and Abraham believed him. And it says it was accounted to him as righteousness. At the moment that God accounted Abraham as righteous because he believed him, he committed himself to send in Jesus to die for us because he still had to make things right in order to account Abraham as righteous. But what you have to understand here is that there was no revelation of Jesus. Abraham didn't believe in Jesus. Abraham believed what God spoke to him. When he believed what God spoke to him, he was made righteous.
There was no Jesus in the picture. It was relational. Do you see this? The Lord is looking for us to move into a relationship with him where we trust him. And now after the cross, Jesus is at the center. But before the cross, there were all kinds of people who were in relationship with the Father simply because they had a childlike faith and they trusted what he said. Abraham was just one of many. Another one that we, we all love to hear the stories about is David, and on and on and on. And it's because it is just this simple relational, childlike trust in your father that when you read what he is written and when he, you hear his voice, it's settled in your heart and you respond. Abraham had to respond with this one too, didn't he? He and his wife were 75. It actually was another 25 years before they actually had a child, but she didn't conceive immaculately. So as when they were 99, he still was responding to that word from the Lord in order for his wife to conceive. Just quickly, Romans 14 or Romans 4 talks about Abraham as well. So let's just quickly go through that too.
Cheryl: Even when there was no reason for hope, Abraham kept hoping and believing that he would become the father of many nations. For God had said to him, that's how many descendants you will have. And Abraham's faith did not weaken, even though at about a hundred years of age, he figured his body was as good as dead, and so was Sarah's womb. Abraham never wavered in believing God's promise. In fact, his faith grew stronger. And in this he brought glory to God. He was fully convinced that God is able to do whatever he promises. And because of Abraham's faith, he counted him as righteous.
Pastor Jeff: Whenever I read this`, I always have a short question for the father, and it's, whom? Abraham's faith never wavered. Wasn't Ishmael a bit of a waiver? It seems to me Ishmael was a bit of a waiver there, but maybe the Lord looks at waivers different than we do.
Cheryl: I look at Abraham as kind of helping God there.
Pastor Jeff: He is trying to help God fulfill his promise.
Cheryl: Sometimes we think maybe this is how it will work in our thinking.
Pastor Jeff: God seems to be having a problem doing this, so maybe we'll just help out. Our help doesn't usually help at all, does it?
Cheryl: Letting go and letting God.
Pastor Jeff: You know, but when you've been leaving for 25 years, you would like to see something happen, right?
Cheryl: Yeah, for sure.
Pastor Jeff: To me, this is at the very core. Abraham's believing what the father told him was the pathway forward for every single person in all of history to come into a place of right being with God. He gave us the picture. He showed us how it works. God spoke to him and he believed, and that's real for all of us. It's a little harder when someone else speaks to you and you have to believe what they say. Isn't it amazing when we are talking about faith, Ephesians 2 89, where does Paul tell us that the faith that saves you comes from? Faith, not of yourselves. It is a gift. A gift. You can't even say, I had enough faith to receive Jesus. Our Father is so generous and so eager for us to be in relationship with him, that he'll even give us the gift to believe.
Cheryl: Glory to him.
Pastor Jeff: Glory to Him. Glory to him. We struggle with a, especially--- There are all kinds of people that struggle with--- We talked about this, I think the last time we spoke. CS Lewis struggled to believe. He found his place of trust through these intellectual dynamics that I'll never, ever understand or be able to do. But in the end, what happened in his life wasn't that he--- it helped him to be able to intellectually understand things from the way he was wired. But in the end, he had an encounter with the living Jesus. It wasn't his intellectual understanding that transformed his life. It was the person of Jesus that he trusted in, that transformed his life. That's how it is with every single person. When you believe God, your life transforms. That's when it happens.
It happens the very first time you meet him, and it happens every day after that. Just because you are born again or baptized in the Holy Spirit, or you've been a Christian for 20 years, doesn't mean that you don't need the childlike faith to trust the Lord when he speaks to you. Because where you started is not where he wants you to end. Every day he is doing a work of transformation. And every day it happens the same way. You trust him. It's as simple as that, frustratingly simple. There is not something I can do.
Cheryl: I think trusting him is communication with him, and adjoining with him. He likes that so much when we trust him. It warms his heart like it would a father, because that's who he is. We are counting on him and we are stuck to it with big hope.
Pastor Jeff: Let's go to Matthew 9:28.
Cheryl: When he had gone indoors, the blind man came to him and asked them-- The blind man came to him, and he asked them, do you believe that I am able to do this? Yes, Lord. They replied.
Pastor Jeff: That's a good question. Does the Lord ever ask you that question? Do you believe me about this? Anybody had the Lord ask you that? Do you believe me about this? I can't go into the details of what this was about, not on livestream, but the Lord gave me a promise recently, and it was in the middle of a season and a situation where there were all kinds of opportunities for me to be afraid. But he gave me a promise, and I was couched in a scripture, and I received it when he spoke it to me. Every time something would happen that would make me afraid in relationship to the circumstance, he was immediately there and he'd say, do you believe what I told you? Do you trust me?
Cheryl: That is so sweet.
Pastor Jeff: And I would say, yes, Lord, I trust you. And the fear was gone and I went on. This is real. So there is another place in Matthew 5 where he is with Jarris and Jarriss' daughter had died. Before he even gets there to pray for her, the messengers come and said, Jarris, don't bother him. Your daughter's dead. Go ahead with what he said.
Cheryl: While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jarris, the synagogue leader. Your daughter is dead, they said. Why bother the teacher anymore? Overhearing what they said, Jesus told them, don't be afraid. Just believe.
Don't be afraid. Just believe. Don't be afraid. What have I told you? What does my words say? Don't be afraid. Just believe. It's so easy to be afraid, isn't it? I've been there, done that every day. It's so easy to be afraid, but we don't have to be afraid. We can believe we can trust the Lord that his hand is on our lives for good and not for evil, for a future and for a hope, as he said in Jeremiah. Jesus said, do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. That's where your faith comes in. Right there. It calms and eases your troubled heart. In this day, where we are living right now, what do we need more than anything else, than for faith that calms our troubled heart? A little bit about how I got inspired for this message: I've talked a lot about how I like to read novels.
I've read a lot of Christian romance novels. I I just found out this morning we have an author in our midst, and I'm going to get one of her books. Right, Erica? Anyways, I was reading a Francine Rivers novel. To just give you a little bit of context. There was this angry artist, angry at God, angry at the world, the whole world, self-professed atheist, very talented, destroying his life. His life is unmanageable. He needs to hire a business person, like an administrative assistant to run his calendar in his life. There is this young woman who is struggling in her faith, but she loves Jesus and she really needs a job. And she applies for the job and ends up working for this angry artist who finds out she is a Christian because she won't back down.
He starts challenging her and he starts pushing her. Why do you believe? And he starts, like forcing her, tell me why you believe, why do you believe, why do you believe? Her whole reason why she believes even as an adult is because she had an encounter with Jesus when she was a child. She doesn't ever tell anybody that, because it sounds so foolish, but it's the real her. The Holy Spirit says to her, tell him. Tell him, tell him. So finally she does. She just tells him the truth about how Jesus met her when she needed him the most, when she was a little girl. He scoffs and he ridicules her. He is just abusive in the way he responds to her testimony.
Well, fast forward, they are together, actually, they are going to have dinner in a restaurant. He is walking on the sidewalk and he drops dead of a heart attack. He is a young man in good health. But he had a problem with his heart that nobody knew about. Boom, on the sidewalk, dead. She tries to do cpr and next thing she knows, there is a man there doing cpr. And she is praying and praying and praying. Well, he is going to hell. And there are demons that are digging their claws into his legs and dragging him to hell. And he is fighting and scrambling and the imagery is vivid. I'm not a guy who thinks about heaven and hell much. When I was very young in the Lord, I came to an understanding that eternal life means more than longevity. Eternal life is a quality of life, not just longevity of life.
I've tended to live most of my life focused on the kingdom of heaven in my life now and living in the kingdom now, and not really thinking a lot about heaven, but thank the Lord, this church with Pastor Brian and Jacque's leadership, there is a real heart for what God has for us in heaven. And of course, with all the funerals we do, that's really important and it's really hopeful to know that. But for me, it just awakens something in me about the reality of Helen. As the demons are dragging this guy down to hell, the Holy Spirit, just right in the middle of it. He says, the devil owns you.
Right before it's too late, and he is lost the hell forever, he remembers what he is been talking about with his Christian girl. And he says, Jesus, help me. And the Lord is right there, pushes the demons away and brings him on his way out of hell. And by then, the paramedics are there and they are doing the paddles, and he comes back to life.
Cheryl: A Second chance.
Pastor Jeff: Second chance do over. But that just gripped me when the Lord spoke to me and said, the devil owns you. In first John, it says, we know that we are children of God and that the world around us is under the control of the evil one. When Adam and Eve gave up their authority on the earth, they sold themselves into slavery. Every single descendant of Adam and Eve since that time, have been sold into slavery. The devil owns us. And when you die, you belong to him. Period. And that's why Jesus came; he came to set you free. He came to do something so that you no longer belong to the devil. He did that for every single person that's lived in all of history. Amen. Every Buddhist, every Hindu, every Muslim, he died for every single person in all of history to be free from the ownership of the devil. And the key that unlocks the shackles on your legs is faith. It's believing.
The amazing thing is because this girl withstood all the abuse and all the rejection and was honest about her faith with this guy, he had a chance to cry out to Jesus when it was almost too late. I realized how important it is that we give everybody in our lives an opportunity to believe Amen in Jesus, everybody. It doesn't matter if they mock you. It doesn't matter if they get mad at you, if they hear from your lips about the Jesus that changed your life. They might have an opportunity to trust in him and then they will be free too.
Yesterday morning, we were kind of talking through our notes and stuff and I thought of Grandpa Norman, it would be Cheryl's grandma on her mom's side, her mom's mom. She was married a number of times. I think he was he fourth husband. She had one that died when, I mean different circumstances. But anyways, and they've been married. They were married a long time, 25 years. We went to their 25th wedding anniversary. He was a tried-and-true agnostic slash atheist. We tried to talk to him so many times about Jesus and he said nope. I would send him books as gifts, and he would say, "Thanks for the book. I'm not going to read it."
Cheryl: He would also say, "I've done all of this myself. I don't need God."
Pastor Jeff: He'd say when you are dead, you are dead. There is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no God. When you are dead, you are dead. That's just the way it is. And it's what he believed in.
Cheryl: And it seemed really disappointing his responses to us. But in the end, that doesn't matter because we told him what the truth was. And so that if there is a moment when you are dying, you might... I think God always is revealing himself to us. I think he does it to the very end. I think there is a possibility that he remembered what was said and he had a sight for something he had never, he had never seen in his life before. Possibly he could have said, Jesus.
Pastor Jeff: He could be in heaven right now.
Cheryl: He could.
Pastor Jeff: He could be in heaven right now. I know that that messes with a lot of people's theology because the way we are as a church, we always want to do everything we can to disqualify everybody else. And so we've decided that, well if you don't believe before you die too late for you, you are going to hell. Except that I've got a friend, many of you know him. His name is Mickey Robinson. This is a real person who's a 19-year-old Catholic boy who died in an airplane crash and was on his way to hell. And he said, "No, Jesus, one more chance." That's what he said, 'Jesus, one more chance." And the next thing he knew, he was at the throne of heaven. And all he remembers is God saying, Nope, you got to go back. And next thing he knew, he was back in his burned body. I know a living testimony that you can still cry out to the Lord after you've died. So sorry if I'm making you mad.
The one thing I know about God is he wants to open the doors. Why does he can for anybody who will to come into relationship with him, because that's why he made us in the first place, was to have relationship: to have a love relationship. So I'll just let him do it whatever he wants.
It's so much better for people to come to Jesus before they die because your life gets better. When you believe in Jesus, everything changes your whole life changes, everything gets better. It all changes for the good. It's the most powerful transformation anybody can ever experience on earth. So that's what I want for everybody I know. That's why I pray for them. That's why I talk to them. But if they reject me, and you know, I mean the world we live in, in the West, is very anti-Christian. So you are not politically correct if you love Jesus. You end up having all kinds of people mad at you just because you love Jesus.
Nevermind that you are a Christian. That's even worse. If someone asks you if you are Christian, first thing you have to say is, well define that for me, would you please? I may or may not be based on what you think a Christian is . But I'll tell you one thing. I love Jesus . Believing is everything. Second Corinthians 5:17: if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. All things could become new. And then John, it says to those who believed in him, he gave the right to become children of God. The way that you come into Christ is by believing. You are welcomed into the family as a child. Now you are in Christ. Now you are new. Everything is new.
I don't know why we are all brand new. We still have the old struggles. Somebody else can explain that one to me. But it doesn't matter because now we are in relationship with the Father and he is there with us all the time and it's okay. We'll find our way through. If we have a few waivers, it doesn't disqualify us. Because it seems to me even Abraham had a waiver, but he still had a son. He still had Isaac.
We were talking when the Lord told Abraham to look at the stars. She was talking about how in the city we don't see very many stars, but where he lived in that day, can you imagine what he saw when he looked up? That's how many descendants you'll have. And I said, well, when you think about it, every Muslim, every Jew, every Christian that has lived through all of history is a descendant of Abraham. That's a lot.
Cheryl: And he knit all of them together in a womb. Think about that.
Pastor Jeff: Follow your genealogy back to Abraham. Yeah, that's cool. That's, that's it for today. Let's just pray. Pastor Robert, maybe you can come up and close us out here. If there is anything I want you to walk away with, it is I want you to realize that what you do to help people know that Jesus is real is one of the most important things you'll ever do in your life. Thank you, Jesus.
Pastor Robert: Praise the Lord. We are reminded in scripture. Out of God's motivation, we hear in John 3:16. He said for this is the love that God had for the world, that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Belief. So do you believe this morning? Those of you watching, do you believe? Even if you are beyond your childhood years, you can still come to him like a child. You don't have to have it figured out. I'm still trying to figure some things out, but I believe him. I trust him.
It starts very simple. I think that sometimes the world and religion wants to complicate the way to God. But God made it very simple. He gave a gift. He said to trust that gift. So I scan the room and I think I recognize most people, but I don't assume where you are. And those of you that are streaming or will watch this video later, you can see me, but I can't see you. So I don't know where you are at. But what I can do is offer the gift the same that God gave to me and to all that believed. And so I'm offering that same gift to you, to give your heart, to give your life, to give your trust to Jesus, the one that you can, as a song sing, trade in your sorrows, that you can trade in your shame, that you can give him your pain and receive the joy of the Lord. So all you have to do is believe.
The belief is that you are sinner and that you are estranged from God and you want to come back to him. All he says is for you to believe that he sent his son this gift, Jesus, and for you to believe on him. And he says that when you do that, you repent, and that means you turn from your ways. You say, I don't want to do it my way anymore. I don't want to do the things that are not pleasing to you, and I ask you to forgive me. And you know what the great news is? You don't have to do acts of penance. You don't have to jump through hoops. He forgives you because you come to him asking for it.
The miracle by faith is that transformation takes place. As you invite God to be a part of your life, you ask Jesus not only to be your savior through your confession, but you ask him to be your Lord to guide you through your life. And yeah, you have all the things that you know, you still have to continue with because you are still in this fleshly body and this fleshly body and mind still likes to do those fleshly things. But that's why Jesus says, follow me and he'll show you the way. So you don't have to have it all today. Just trust and believe him.
Father, I thank you for all those that have responded in faith and entrust in your message of good news, salvation through Jesus Christ. And those that through this message will respond in faith to take you by your hand and trust you. I pray at this moment as those that are watching listening, it's the hour of decision is at hands right now as God is moving on your heart. There is a wrestling in your mind. I just say surrender and trust him. It'd be the greatest decision, greatest response that ever have in your entire life. I thank God for you and I welcome you to the kingdom of God now in forever in Jesus mighty name. Amen.
Pastor Jeff: Well, remember, stay for lunch. We will have a great time of fellowship and good food. And other than that, go and be blessed. Have a wonderful week. May the Lord go with you. Amen.
Hey everybody, I forgot to mention we have people that can pray for you up here if you'd like. Jim and Brenda Steinhart are passing communion out. If you want to come and have communion with them, please do.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 2-5-23. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.