Podcasts about biblical themes

The boys jump on the hype train with a Sinners Spoiler Free Review! What did they think of the highest reviewed film of the year so far?Jamie goes on an epic rant about the cinema experience....02:27 Discussion on Recent Films Watched05:23 Exploring the Film 'Real Pain'08:25 The Importance of Going in Cold to Films11:30 Buffy and Angel: A Nostalgic Dive14:23 Transition to 'Sinners' Review17:34 Overview of 'Sinners' and Its Themes27:27 The Struggle for Respect and Freedom. 28:29 Choices and Predestination in Life30:46 The Cultural Significance of Blues Music35:33 Exploring Identity and Heritage37:38 The Role of Music in the Narrative43:23 Visual Storytelling and Cinematic Techniques51:42 The Vampire Metaphor and Societal Commentary57:17 Biblical Themes and Character Names59:04 The Moral Implications of the Story01:00:16 Character Development and Redemption01:02:08 Genre Blending: Horror and Drama01:04:12 Sequel Speculations and Future Directions01:07:23 Cinema Experience: The Good and the Bad01:11:51 Audience Etiquette and Cinema CultureSearch Moviesinapodshell all one word to find us on all of your podcasting services!https://twitter.com/inapodshellThe Instagram- @MoviesinapodshellJon's Instagram- @jcb.videoYoutube - https://www.youtube.com/@MoviesinaPODshell/videosOur merch shop is now OPEN! You can buy a t-shirt from the link below.https://moviesinapodshell.sumupstore.com/

Series :: Exodus - Part 3: Show Me Your GloryExodus 34:29-35 :: Andrew Rutten03–09–25 :: Sunday Gatheringprovidenceomaha.orgFacebook InstagramYouTube

For Lincoln's birthday month this year, we unpack Biblical themes in a crucial speech he gave at the end of his life where he interprets the Civil War entirely in Biblical terms. The Republican Professor is a pro-correctly understanding the Bible and Politics podcast. Therefore, welcome our first Republican president to the podcast, Abraham Lincoln. The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.

The Book of PsalmsSermon Preached by Steve DuBransky on February 2, 2025 Foothill Church exists to glorify God by living as disciples of Jesus who make disciples of Jesus. https://foothill.church Learn about our For the Sake of His Name 2-Year Discipleship Journey: https://foothill.church/FTSOHN→ Check out more sermons

Join us for our continuing visit with the talented artist and sculpturist Deborah Samia! With a God-given gift for art, she's been creating since she was a child. We've been talking with her about her exploring how to combine her art and her faith, "but communicating in a language that is not just for people who know the stories of the Bible!” 

Join us as we dig through some of the more recent Godzilla and King Kong movies to see the Biblical themes that Hollywood is using. Is it a subconscious indoctrination or innocent use of a Biblical narrative for entertainment? You may be surprised!

Join us as we dig through some of the more recent Godzilla and King Kong movies to see the Biblical themes that Hollywood is using. Is it a subconscious indoctrination or innocent use of a Biblical narrative for entertainment? You may be surprised!

In this episode, we dive into Gary Schnittjer's insightful and engaging book, Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch. If you've ever felt that the first five books of the Bible are daunting, this book (and our review!) might be just what you need. Schnittjer offers a fresh way of approaching Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy with clarity, curiosity, and a pastoral heart. We'll unpack his key ideas, explore how he makes the Torah feel relevant for today, and share why this resource is a must-have for students, pastors, and curious readers alike. Plus, you can win a copy for your very own!!!Featured Resources:Gary Schnittjer - Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the PentateuchBig thanks to Tim Whittle for editing and extra production on this podcast. Get more info at Riverlife Church, and find us on Facebook and Instagram.Subscribe to Bible Streams on Apple, Spotify, Google, and Amazon. 

Join Pastor Josh Slautterback and Pastor Craig Stephens as they dive into the heart of the Christmas season in this new three-part podcast series. In the first episode, they'll explore the themes of Christmas through the lens of Scripture, uncovering how the story of Jesus' birth not only shapes our celebrations but also reveals the ultimate hope and joy found in our Savior. As we reflect on these themes, they'll share practical ways to weave them into meaningful discussions with loved ones during the holidays. These conversations can spark opportunities to share the love and message of Jesus, making this season even more impactful. Whether you're decking the halls or reflecting on the wonder of the season, this episode will inspire you to celebrate the true reason for Christmas: the birth of Jesus Christ.

162 - Join us here - https://locals.com/member/LoriandMichelle And READ through the WHOLE bible with us - starting Dec 1. Here are some ideas of Biblical themes to track: light dark water covenant righteousness sin 3rd day seeing We list more inside our locals community page. Also check out the Bible Project for ideas. When we 1st read through the Bible - https://youtu.be/722MCGT9moE Mistakes and regrets with writing in our Bibles - https://youtu.be/jfbyEBgWBPg The Bible translations we use to read the Bible - https://youtu.be/h6MT4SfRPGM Podcast episode Michelle mentioned - A Word Fitly Spoken podcast - God doesn't whisper with Jim Osman ♡ If you enjoy our content, please consider helping support our channel - here are 2 ways: ♡ https://loriandmichelle.locals.com (Locals allows you to join our community for a small donation where you'll receive access to bonus material and exclusive content.) ♡ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/loriandmichelle We appreciate any and all support as it helps keeps us going and able to produce content for you. Thank you. ♡ Give this video a like, comment, share the video and subscribe to our channel. //MORE VIDEOS// Our testimony back to Jesus from LOA| new age- https://youtu.be/znjZd94XMRA #biblestudy #bibletalk #newagetojesus #homeschool KEEP UP WITH US: ♡ Youtube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@loriandmichelle ♡ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loriandmichelle ♡ Rumble: Lori and Michelle ♡ Our Podcast: Lori and Michelle Podcast Spotify -https://open.spotify.com/show/2vywzqtDiLhPEudJBMSsy1  Bible study with us: ♡ Our Podcast: Sister and the Bible Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/2h6KoMUBT8RELAWqpBPGjl ♡ Rumble: sisters and the Bible ♡ CHECK OUT OUR AMAZON storefront https://www.amazon.com/shop/loriandmichelle (if you use our link we may receive a small commission. Thank you for your support of our channel.) Songs from Epidemic Sound. We appreciate any and all support as it helps keeps us going and able to produce content for you. Thank you. Disclaimer: Please remember this is our first time reading and studying the Bible, so we don't know everything and we will continue to learn and grow. We do our best to speak God's truth. Here to encourage you to read and study God's word. Purelytwins, Lori and Michelle, will not be responsible or liable for any injury or harm you sustain as a result of our videos and information. This video is for informational purposes only and the author does not accept any responsibility for any liabilities. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transcribed, , in any form, without the written permission and signature of the author. We are not Bible scholars, pastors, or teachers. We are sharing what learn from reading and studying the Bible for the first time. Thanks for your understanding and for your support. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lm-podcast/support

In this episode of I Love to Tell the Story, the hosts explore the transition from Exodus to Samuel, focusing on the story of Hannah. They discuss themes of God's promises, the important role of women in biblical narratives, and the theological significance of Hannah's prayer and song, which sets the stage for the anointing of kings and the unfolding of God's plan through the prophets. Commentary on 1 Samuel 1:9-11, 19-20; 2:1-10 by Jacqueline E. Lapsley: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/god-answers-hannah-2/commentary-on-1-samuel-19-11-19-20-21-10-3. Overview to Year 3 of the Narrative Lectionary: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/introduction-to-year-3-2/47470. Watch the Full Episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eTyB_53F12I.

In this episode, Jenai Auman covers her personal experience of feeling othered within the church, and how that led her to write the book "Othered". She discusses the biblical themes of othering and marginalization, and how God pursues and cares for the marginalized. Jenai also shares insights on building healthy communities that welcome and embrace those who are different, centered on the "hesed" or steadfast love of God. We talk about the importance of self-compassion, forgiveness, and creating space for people to be in process as they journey together. Whether you've been othered or are learning how to see the marginalized, this is the episode for you.Jenai Auman is a Filipina American writer and artist. She draws from her years in church leadership as well as her trauma-informed training to write on healing, hope, and the way forward. She is passionate about providing language so readers can find a faith that frees. She received her bachelor's degree in behavioral health science and is currently pursuing a master's in spiritual formation at Northeastern Seminary. Jenai lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Tyler, and their sons, Quinn and Graham. Jenai's Book:OtheredJenai's Recommendation:The Lord of the Rings as read by Andy SerkisJoin Our Patreon for Early Access and More: PatreonConnect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.usGo to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Threads at www.facebook.com/shiftingculturepodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/shiftingculturepodcast/https://twitter.com/shiftingcultur2https://www.threads.net/@shiftingculturepodcasthttps://www.youtube.com/@shiftingculturepodcastConsider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link belowSupport the Show.

The intersection of many Biblical themes. Celebrating the eternity of a great city after a tremendous victory... yet sowing the seeds for future calamity. Text here: www.sefaria.org/Psalms.48

Making sense of judgment and de-creation in the Bible isn't easy. Oftentimes, it can cause us to question God's character or simply leave us confused. In this episode, we unpack the theme of judgment in the Bible, asking questions like:Is judgment good?What would be true about God if he didn't judge?How do we escape this judgment?Links- Sunday Exodus Sermons

Why is circumcision such a big deal in the Old Testament? In Exodus 4, it seems as if God is going to take Moses' life because of a failure to circumcise his son. Join us as we discuss why circumcision is so important for God's people and what implications does it have for us today.Links- Sunday Exodus SermonsBible Reading Tip- Write down different passages and / or questions as you are reading scripture. What comes to mind? How could that be connected?- Is the idea of circumcision used one or two times? No, it is used a lot. So, let's look at the stories that mention circumcision and see how, overtime, this idea is explained to us.

In this episode we seek to trace the theme of trusting God's means of salvation by looking at the ark in the stories of Noah and Moses. Links- Sunday Exodus SermonsBible Reading Tip- Ask yourself, "Have I seen something like this before?" When you recognize a theme or similar story in the Bible. Then, rest in it. Meditate on it and what God could be saying to you.

In this episode we seek to trace the theme of choosing/fearing God, or choosing evil. From Eve in the garden, to the midwives, to prophets, to Jesus, we see choices for good or evil throughout the Scriptures. And we too have a choice - trust God or trust the snake's deception.Links- Sunday Exodus SermonsBible Reading Tip- Ask yourself, have I seen something like this before? When you recognize a theme or a strange story in the Bible.If someone is struggling in their awe and reverence for the Lord and choosing to please man, where should you start?Pray that the spirit would convict you of sin and reveal Jesus to youJust do the hard thingRead some helpful books on God's natureKnowing God by JI PackerGive yourself some time to build the muscles of choosing God. You have to start to consistently do it.

*****LINKS AND INFO IN THE DESCRIPTION BELOW***** What is the most trusted source for us to use when trying to find the meanings of Hebrew idioms or phrases? #biblicalthemes #scripture #interpretation Contact Ken Email: askbible4family@gmail.com Phone: 401-47-BIBLE https://www.bible4.family *****Support This Channel*****Paypal: https://paypal.me/jimivision?locale.x=en_USMonthly Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JimivisionCash App: https://cash.app/$JimivisionVenmo: https://venmo.com/Jimmy-Cooper-17 Mail To:Jimmy CooperJimivision MediaP.O. Box 654Hixson, TN 37343

Is the sun going to be darkened, the moon stop giving her light, and the stars fall from the heavens in the last days? What is meant by this in Matthew 24:29? #Matthew24 #biblicalthemes #Jesus Contact Ken Email: askbible4family@gmail.com Phone: 401-47-BIBLE https://www.bible4.family *****Support This Channel*****Paypal: https://paypal.me/jimivision?locale.x=en_USMonthly Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JimivisionCash App: https://cash.app/$JimivisionVenmo: https://venmo.com/Jimmy-Cooper-17 Mail To:Jimmy CooperJimivision MediaP.O. Box 654Hixson, TN 37343

Welcome to part 4 in our theme study. In this episode we will be talking about water, and specifically how we see water used scripturally within the context of judgement and also within the context of salvation, which we call the water of life. Both reflections of this one thematic image pervade all scripture from beginning to end, and like every good theme culminates in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Join us as we dive into the scriptures and learn about how God uses water to tell the story of the gospel. Grab a drink and enjoy. 

Welcome to part 3 in our themes study. In this episode we discuss the theme of trees  in the Bible. When trees appear in scripture, we're tempted to just see them as mere details in the story. Our argument, however, is that is most certainly not the case. Trees play important roles in the story of the Bible and play a significant role in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Join us as we dive into the Old and New Testaments and discuss the theology behind the imagery of trees. Grab a drink and enjoy. 

This is the second part, but third episode, in our new themes study. In this episode we discuss the theme of wilderness in scripture. Throughout the Bible there are multiple stories where the author wants to depict spaces where human life does not flourish. These are the chaos spaces or "wilderness" places, which are adverse to the ordered world humanity needs in order to live. The great surprise of the theme is that in God's loving kindness He chooses to enter those spaces to rescue His people. During these moments in the stories we see the workings of the Gospel message being worked out before Jesus arrives on the scene to perform His grand Exodus as our new Moses.Grab a drink and enjoy. 

In this episode we trace the theme of fire throughout scripture. Fire is an important image that appears in the early parts of scripture and get's developed throughout the Bible. We see it in Eden, in the priestly duties, in judgement moments, and even in the spiritual beings. The theme culminates in the person and work of Jesus. Join us as we discuss how the fiery moments of scripture help to inform the Gospel message. Grab a drink and enjoy!

The Bible is made up of 66 books, but each book fits seamlessly into the Great Story of the Scriptures. In her latest Bible studies, Kat Armstrong invites us to step back and look at the big picture by tracing themes. You'll never look at sticks, stones, mountains, or valleys the same way again!Find Kat Armstrong at https://www.katarmstrong.com/.Order Kat's Bible Studies: https://www.katarmstrong.com/the-storyline-projectFollow Kat on the socials: @katarmstrong1If you enjoy the show, would you please consider rating and reviewing Honestly, Though? Those reviews help others find us in the PodUniverse, and we deeply appreciate the love! Also, you can reach out to us personally to join the conversation on the following platforms:Rebecca Carrell: https://www.rebeccacarrell.com/ ; IG - @RebeccaCarrell ; Twitter: @RebeccaACarrell ; FB - Rebecca Ashbrook CarrellLiz Rodriguez: IG: @lizannrodriguez ; FB - Liz Rodriguez - https://www.facebook.com/liz.rodriguez.92775Nika Spaulding: stjudeoakcliff.org ; IG - @NikaAdidas ; Twitter - @NikaAdidasWe have the world's best producer! Are you interested in podcasting? Do you know someone who is? Taylor Standridge can help with audio engineering, production, editing, show mapping, and coaching. Connect with Taylor at taylorstandridge1@gmail.com or on Twitter: @TBStandridge

Mark continued BBS Better Better Study focused on the theme of sacrifice. The Bible was built over time, and associations are built into it. Mark defined sacrifice as the destruction or surrender for the sake of something else. Marks presents this lesson with two points: 1. Lessons on sacrifices from more obvious passages like with how Moses explained how sacrifice association are built into the Passover regarding unintentional sin. 2. Lessons on sacrifices from less obvious places noting that defiant nor intentional sins were covered by sacrifices. Points for home: Jesus was always Plan A. Let's live like we were Plan A Let's worship like we were always Plan A Homework.  What do you find as biblical themes of the Messiah? Listen to Mark teach the biblical theme of association with sacrifice and how Jesus fulfilled all the criteria for sin with His ultimate sacrifice for all time, past, present, and future. The blood of Jesus takes the abnormal and makes it normal. Join us Sundays at 9:30am CST! Links below: YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCfocCxLc8BFCta-NO4JkTcA?view_as=subscriber CFBC Website: championforest.org/worship/watch/biblit.php

5 Biblical Themes from VBS

In this episode, Paul and Mary discuss the popular animated film Encanto. While you might think this is just a movie for children, Encanto addresses much of our society's concerns such as struggling to find identity and purpose, breaking under heaps of pressure, trying to find our value in what we do rather than who we are, and so forth. This is a fun episode, so dive into the world of Encanto with us, and see if you can find biblical themes all throughout the story.

Phil Soussan is a bass player, songwriter and music producer.  He has worked with some absolute legends including Ozzy Osbourne, Jimmy Page and Billy Idol. His latest project, Last in Line has a new album out on March 31st titled “Jericho.” We discuss the new album, songwriting process, satanic themes in music, working with Jani Lane & Vince Neil and more! 00:00 - Intro 00:50 - Technical Difficulties 01:38 - New Last in Line Album 03:50 - Progression of the Band 05:18 - The Evolution of the Songs 07:58 - Songwriting Process 11:35 - Biblical Themes & Positive Message 14:28 - Satanic Imagery in Music & Ultimate Sin Cover 16:35 - Music Bringing People Together & Challenges 18:20 - Work with Jani Lane 19:20 - Common Thread Among Superstar Frontmen 20:40 - Phil's Continued Success & Taking a Break 24:25 - Phil's Work with Vince Neil 26:05 - MusiCares & Randy Castillo 27:38 - Paralyzed Veterans of America 28:40 - Outro Phil Soussan website:https://philsoussan.com/Last in Line website:https://www.lastinlineofficial.com/MusiCares website:https://www.musicares.org/Paralyzed Veterans of America website:https://secure.pva.org/Chuck Shute website:https://chuckshute.com/Support the showThanks for Listening & Shute for the Moon!

C. S. Lewis wove dozens of Biblical themes into his Narnia Chronicles. But some of them may escape our notice. Christin Ditchfield has written a helpful guide so we don’t miss them - and can teach them to our children and grandchildren in delightful ways. Recommended Resources: Christin's Website A Family Guide to Narnia by Christin Ditchfield Biblical Truths in Narnia

In this episode, we continue our mini series on Biblical themes and discuss the "King and Kingdom" theme we see throughout the Old Testament. We'll chat about what this theme looks like, how to recognize it, and how to apply it to what you're reading.

God's promise to be with us... doesn't that sound nice? But when you think about the Bible, where is this promise apparent? In this episode, we discuss covenants, how they are God's promises to us, and how they can give us security in knowing fundamental truths about Him.

The more we read our Bibles, the more layers we start to uncover. If this hasn't happened for you, or you find yourself thinking that you've already learned everything there is to know about a passage, let me encourage you to start thinking about biblical themes. The themes in the Bible connect the dots in amazing ways. Not only do they cross over from the Old to New Testament- but they also cross over between different biblical genres. Today we'll look at a theme in the Bible that crosses between Genesis, Proverbs, and Revelation. Two different testaments and three different genres. Let's connect the dots and enhance our Bible reading!Support the show

This is the beginning of our mini series, exploring different biblical themes that help us understand the story of God. In Genesis 3-11, we see the world's conflict in God's story. People are sinful, broken, and need restoration. Genesis 12 is God beginning the restoration work on humanity through a promise to Abraham. God's promise is centered around 3 areas: people, place, and presence. God promises Abrahamto build a new community of peopleto give them a place to dwell inthat  His presence will be with themThis is the ultimate work of God in redemption: creating a people in a place with His presence. In this episode, we look at that promise, how it plays out in the gospel, and why that matters to us today.

In this opening sermon of our series on the Book of Acts, Pastor Josh explains the importance of authorial intent when interpreting God's Word, what the Book of Acts is not, and the 4 main themes of this second book written by Luke.

The Old Testament is often thought of as confusing, hard to understand, and difficult to follow. Sadly, that can be all but true if we don't know the full story. Thankfully, earlier this week, we realized that there is a cheat sheet to remember the stories leading to Jesus. This cheat sheet lies in the place many of us tend to skip—a genealogy.In this episode, we look at Matthew 1; Just as a movie trilogy has three parts, so too, does Matthew organize the Old Testament story into three parts that lead us to Jesus. By understanding this trilogy of sorts, it will allow us to better understand the Old Testament in deeper ways.

There are so many epic story themes in the movie Top Gun: Maverick - from love, to honor, courage and bravery, even sacrifice. Truth is, nothing moves the human spirit like the stories we see on our screens! But is there a spiritual point to the movies and shows we watch? In part 1 of Liquid Church's annual At The Movies series, Pastor Tim Lucas explores the Biblical themes and lessons behind the movie Top Gun: Maverick. There are actually 3 spiritual lessons we can observe from Top Gun: Maverick to become a relationship ace: Agape love for your enemies, Commit to pray for your enemies, and Extend forgiveness to those who hurt or disappoint you. "This message features short clips from the critically acclaimed film Top Gun:Maverick which was produced by Paramount Pictures and Skydance Media. No copyright is claimed for Top Gun: Maverick and we assert that use of the short clips within this sermon is permissible under fair use principles in U.S. copyright law.” At The Movies Series | Pastor Tim Lucas| Liquid Church #TopGun #Maverick #Spiritual #Bible #Movie #Gospel #God #AtTheMovies #LiquidChurch #TimLucas #Christianity #ChristianChurch

Forefront podcasters Rich, Cody, and Heather, plus returning guest Dan Becker, discuss all things Stranger Things. Note: the first 20 minutes are spoiler-free, but spoilers abound after that. 02:19 - When Did You Start Watching Stranger Things? 05:59 - What Made Stranger Things Successful? 20:08 - Spoilers Begin / What Did You Think of Season 4? 28:14 - Should Everyone Watch Stranger Things? 34:56 - Biblical Themes in Stranger Things 01:02:09 - Favorite Character / Which Song Would You Play?

In this episode, we take a deeper look at our Hymn of the Month, reviewing its doctrinal themes and intriguing hymn background. We also look at another hymn that teaches many of the same biblical truths. Enjoy! - KristenLinks & Resources:Learn how to share a hymn testimonial on the podcast here.Go to our HOM resource page here.Start your Hymns Illustrated membership here.Get your free devotional guide for the hymn, "How Firm a Foundation."Support the show

The final installment of our series on Biblical Themes! We wrap up by exploring the theme of the Messiah.

Join us for week 4 of our sermon series on Biblical Themes as Pastor Adam teaches on the theme of Holiness in the Scriptures!

Introduction Directions Back to the Lord Almighty Turn in your Bibles to James 4. We're looking this morning at this incredible passage in the Book of James. Last summer, I had the joy of going on a graduation trip with my son, Calvin. And the day that we were to leave was complicated for me because I was speaking at a conference in the New Jersey area, and I had to fly back to Raleigh, Durham and I was going to meet him and we were going to drive back up the Eastern Seaboard. Kind of inefficient, but it was exciting. We were looking forward to that. However, my flight was delayed, and then delayed, and then delayed some more so we got quite a late start. And as we drove that late afternoon and on into the evening, we were to have stayed at a hotel outside Philadelphia, but we were supposed to get there around 11 o'clock in the evening and it was actually two in the morning. And when we arrived at the location, there was no hotel or a motel or anything like it in that place. And so, there we were in the dark, outside Philadelphia. And thankfully I had my smartphone with me and there was an amazing device on there called the GPS navigational system, which many of us did not grow up with. We had to stop at gas stations and get maps. Some of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. The maps that would fold out. But now all you have to do is type in a location for the nearest motel where we could stay. And though we did not know anything about where we were, though it was dark, we didn't know the road we were on, we knew nothing, the device was able to navigate us from that situation to a safe destination. Relatively safe. I won't tell you about the motel; it was an interesting place. But we spent the night and we're fine. Got started early the next morning. For us, in the Christian life, the Christian life is a journey, and we are in the process of being sanctified. We're on a spiritual journey, and it is very likely that at some point we are going to stray from God. We're going to stray from Christ. You think about the hymn, “Come Thou Fount,” and I wrote at the lyrics while I was sitting in my seat and I remember them. So powerful. "Oh to grace, how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be. Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above." How many of us who have been walking with the Lord a long time can say, “amen” to that line, "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it." But when we wander, we're going to find ourselves, sometimes, in a place that's unfamiliar. And we're going to wonder, how will we get back? Is there a GPS navigation system? Is there a way whereby we can get out of that mess that we've sinned our way into, and find our way back? In Pilgrim's Progress Christian and Hopeful got off the path because they found, they thought, a better path alongside the way. And one of the basic rules of the road in Pilgrim's Progress is: Never leave the path. Every time they did, they got in trouble. And they ended up in the land of a giant called Despair, and they didn't know where they were and it was rainy, and it was windy, and it was dark, and as they tried to get back some other individual that was a minor part of the story, they didn't even know him, was ahead and he fell into a pit and died. And so they decided just hunker down, and they ended up having the worst trial they ever had. And what about you? If you can say, “amen” to that statement about your soul, "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it," and you will sin your way into some great difficulty, how will you get back? And I want to commend to you the text that we're looking at today, as a way to get back to God. There are going to be specific steps James is going to tell you to take. And we are going to look at those steps today so that you can find your way back, through the grace of God, to a healthy walk with Christ. That may be your situation today. You may be saying, "Pastor, I feel like you've written this sermon exactly for me. I am in a bad place spiritually. I'm in a bad place. It's my own fault, but I'm in a difficult way. How do I get back to a healthy, joyful walk with God, where the fruit of God is at work in my life?" This text is for you. The Journey of the Christian Faith Now as I think about the Christian life, I think, as I said, about the journey of the Christian faith. I think about the Gospel and how privileged we are to understand the Gospel rightly, to have the Word of God unfolded for us. And for me, as a church historian, I know that a key moment in redemptive history was the moment that Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation and nailed the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle, and that was the beginning of the Protestant reformation that reclaimed, that found again the Gospel, justification by faith alone apart from works of the law, which had gotten covered over by all kinds of false teachings and idolatries and superstitions. And just through the word of God. Now, the first of those 95 theses that Luther wrote, 95 theses were just concepts for debates that he wanted, and he put it up there on the door. That was a place like a public community bulletin board. And the first of the 95 theses reads this: "When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ said ‘repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” You don't just repent at the beginning of your Christian life, you repent and repent some more, and then you repent even more, and you keep repenting. Your whole life is a life of repentance. Now, justification is the beginning of the Christian life, the way by which a sinner is made right with almighty God, the way by which we are forgiven of our sins. And the Gospel is clear on this, we maintain, Romans 3:28, that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Not by works but by faith, we are forgiven, we are made right with God, always. But what kind of faith justifies? What Kind of Faith Justifies There are lots of different kinds of faith, and the Book of James is written, uniquely, to answer that question. As we saw in the second half of James 2. It's not dead faith, or useless faith, or fruitless faith, or demon faith that justifies. But there's a genuine faith worked in us by the Spirit of God that inevitably produces works in keeping with repentance. The fruit of good works that keeps with repentance. Now, I've said many times before, I find this to be a helpful statement: "Faith is the eyesight of the soul by which we see invisible spiritual realities, past, present, and future." Ephesians 1:18 mentions the “eyes of the heart.” "May the eyes of your heart be enlightened... " I think the eyes of the heart refers the ability of the heart to see spiritual things, that is faith. And saving faith, as I've studied it, has two sides to it. There is an attractive, beautiful side to what we see. The attractional side of faith. And there is a repulsive side to faith, and both are necessary for salvation. So, attractionally, we see the beauty and glory of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God. We see in the face of Christ, the glory of God shining. We see his radiant beauty in his virtues and the attractions of his person. We see his love, his power, the perfection of his work and his death on the cross, we see to be glorious and beautiful and radiant. And we see his mighty resurrection from the dead. We see him, the author of Hebrews said, by faith we see him seated at the right hand of the Majesty in Heaven. All of that's beautiful and attractive. Not only that, but we see Heaven, we see the glories of Heaven, we say how beautiful it will be. That's the attractional side of faith. But there's also a repulsive side to faith as well. And in that, we see ourselves. When we're justified, we see ourselves rightly for the first time. You see who you really are and it's repulsive. It's wretched. Like “Amazing Grace” said, "That saved a wretch like me." We see ourselves as genuinely, to the core, polluted by sin and depraved and sinful. And in that we see that we deserve to die for our sins, and that Christ's bloody death on the cross under the wrath of God was as a substitute for us. We deserved to die that death. We see that. So, that's what saving faith is. We see both sides of that. It's the eyesight of the soul. And as we go on in the Christian life, we see both of those things. If we're healthy in the Lord, and we're taking in the Word of God, we see both of them more and more and more clearly. So what's going to happen is, as you go on in a Christian life, you're going to see Jesus more and more beautiful, and more and more attractive. And you're going to see the holiness of the Christian life more and more attractive. You're going to see the beauty of Heaven more and more beautiful and attractive. But the flip side is you're going to see your own sin and you're going to hate it more and more. And you're going to say like with the Apostle Paul, after years of walking with Christ, "I am the chief of all sinners." I. The Need for Continual Repentance The Reality of Indwelling Sin So that's what's going on, and that's what I think James 4:1-12 is all about. We have the need for continual repentance displayed for us here. Now, not just Martin Luther in the 95 Theses, far more important is the Lord Jesus when he began his public ministry. And when he did, in Mark 1:15, he said, "The time has come, the Kingdom of God is near, repent, and believe the good news." So there's the negative and the positive side. Repent of your sins and believe the good news of forgiveness. Now that just begins at the moment of justification. The moment you're born again, that starts and then it continues. And why is that? Because of the reality of indwelling sin. The reality of indwelling sin. We have battling within us both beautiful good desires and corrupt evil desires. We have that indwelling sin. Paul said it most clearly at the end of Romans 7, and there Paul said, "I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is," listen to this, "sin living in me that does it." That is nasty. That's disgusting. Some time ago, I read an article on the body's immune system. They had remarkable scanning electron microscope pictures of viruses, and bacteria and other pathogens, the parasite that causes the disease malaria. And you could actually see it and it was disgusting. Imagine if you were shown all of the pathogens there were in your body right now, how much that would freak you out? Isn't it better not to know? As I've said to my wife before, as she talks to me about my diet sometimes, I said, "you gotta die of something." So that's not very satisfying to her, but I don't want to know. But here, Paul says, "sin living in me." And so we have these evil desires. Look at verses 1 through 4. This is a diagnosis. On the GPS journey, you have to begin by knowing where you are. Where are you spiritually? What's going on? The Effects: Fights, Quarrels, Worldliness Look what he says, "What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something, but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. And when you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God. Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." So that's verse 1 through 4. And so James is writing to these local churches, and this is going on. Fights and quarrels among you. And then again at the end of the passage, verses 11-12, "Brothers do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him, speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you're not keeping it, but you're sitting in judgment on it. There is only one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able both to save and to destroy. But you, who are you to judge your neighbor?" So this is the kind of corruption that's going on in the hearts and minds of the people and in the church. And it comes in families, it comes between husbands and wives, between parents and children, between neighbors, between co-workers, between leaders in the church, pastors and elders and the people in the church. This is just going on, these battles, this corruption. And the root cause of all of this is what he says in verse 1, "your desires that wage war within you." We have conflicting desires. And we've already seen this in James. The reason for all temptation and then of sin, is lust, evil desires. James 1:14-15, "Each one is tempted when by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. And then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it is full grown gives birth to death." So, it was Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount, that zeros in on the heart. What's going on in the heart? So he says, "you have heard that it was said, 'you shall not murder, and anyone murders is subject to judgment,' but anyone who is angry with his brother will be in danger of the fire of Hell.” So the root of murder, that James mentions here, is anger. A heart condition of anger. Jesus said the same thing about adultery, the root of adultery is lust, it's the internal desire of the heart. And so James says, "you kill and covet." So you're desiring, you're coveting, you're looking on your neighbor's life. Looking on your neighbor's wife, his house, possessions, his privileges, all of those things that he has, and you covet it and you want it. That's where the desire comes from. And he says, "you quarrel and fight." The bickering, the arguing, the brokenness in human relationships. It's amazing. If you look at the acts of the flesh in Galatians 5, which is right before the famous fruit of the Spirit, so many of those things are just person-to-person bickering. “Factions and divisions and dissensions and fits of rage.” There's all this relational brokenness. Prayerlessness James also zeros in on prayerlessness. Look at verse 2, he says, "you do not have, because you do not ask God." That's such a great verse, isn't it? It's like prayerlessness. Prayerlessness is a tremendous diagnostic. What things do we not commit to God in prayer? In those areas, we are self-reliant. We're not inviting God's wisdom in, we're not inviting God's power in. We're on our own, we're fine. For me, a matter of sanctification is to become prayerlessness in less and less areas of my life. I don't want to be prayerless when I drive, I don't want to be prayerless when I come to work, when I go home, when I sit, when I rise. I want to bring God into everything and lose this, this self-reliance, this arrogant self-reliance. And so, James says, "you do not have because you do not ask God." And then he says, even when you do pray, you don't receive. Look what he says in verse 3, "When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." So if I can just summarize verse 1 through three, James are saying, "you folks are seriously messed up." And we all are like this, we can't read that and say, "Well I'm glad that's not happening in our Church. I'm glad that's not happening in our family. Nothing like it. We are not like this at all." It just isn't so. We've got this sin problem. II. The Spirit’s Deep Longing for Our Repentance Our Worldliness is Spiritual Adultery Now we see the Spirit's deep longing for our repentance in all of this. The force taking hold of us and causing us to take that spiritual GPS journey back to righteousness is the Holy Spirit. Now, our worldliness, the Spirit is saying, is spiritual adultery. Look at verse 4, "you adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." So when we talk about being a friend of the world, that's not planet Earth with its populations of human beings, that's not what the world is. God loves the world and sent his only begotten Son, John 3:16. “The World” No, no. He's talking about the world system, the evil, corrupt, satanic, demonic system that pulls us away from God. The reason that our hearts are prone to wander, is because of the magnetic attraction that comes to us through the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the boastful pride of life. That's 1 John 2, that's what the world is. And James calls it spiritual adultery. He calls them adulterous people. They're hankering after the world, they're claiming to be part of the Bride of Christ, but instead they're wandering in their minds after the world. They're a spiritually adulterous people. And he says, "you're aligning yourself with the enemies of God, those that are deeply hostile to his person.” They are setting themselves up to be God's enemies. You don't want God to be your enemy, but the people of the world think like enemies of God. “The mind of the flesh is hostile to God, that sinful mind, it does not submit to God's law, indeed it cannot,” Romans 8:7. So you're lining yourself up with that. The enemies of God. Now, Jesus one day will crush all those enemies. As the Father said to the Son, "Sit at my right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet." You don't want to be Christ's enemy and God's enemies. At one time, we were his enemies, but we were rescued from the dominion of darkness and we have become like Abraham, God's friend, James 2:23. Well, how then can we now join in with Christ's enemies? How can we through worldliness become an enemy of Christ? Peter’s Betrayal Do you remember the night that Jesus was arrested? Do remember how, earlier that evening, Peter said, "I am, of all of your followers, I am the most loyal." he didn't say those words, but effectively, he did. “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” Remember? Remember the boasts he made? And Jesus said, "This very night before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times." And he swore up and down that it would never happen. We remember what happened. Jesus orchestrated the escape of all of his apostles, that they should run away, John 18, he orchestrates that they should go away. "If you're looking for Me, then let these go." he wants them to go, because they're not ready to be arrested, not part of God's plan yet, and they all run away except one person, Peter. Follows at a distance because of all of his arrogant boasts. He tries to go into the courtyard where all of Jesus's enemies are, and there is a servant girl there at the door, remember? "You're not one of his disciples, are you?" "No, I'm not," there's his first one. And once you tell one lie, you're going to double down with another lie, and there he is standing with Jesus's enemies by a fire warming his hands. Even though Jesus had orchestrated his safe escape that very night, there he was standing with Jesus enemies and it gets worse and worse to the point where finally he calls down curses on himself if he even knows Jesus. I remember one preacher was talking about Peter that night, and he said he had warm hands and a cold heart. Standing with the enemies of Christ. We don't want to be like that, we don't want to be spiritual adulteresses. Hosea’s Unfaithful Wife Remember that tragic story of Hosea the prophet in the Old Testament? Remember that? Where God commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute, a woman named Gomer, to model the agony that Almighty God was feeling over the nation of Israel's spiritual adultery, going after the Baals and the Ashtoreth. And so Hosea marries Gomer, and at one point God commands Hosea to go buy his wife back, to buy time with his wife, the prostitute. Hosea 3, it says, "The Lord said to me, go, show your love to your wife again even though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes. So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and a homer and lethek of barley." It's one of the most tragic verses in the Bible. “I had to go buy her.” "And then I told her, you are to live with me for many days. You must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man and I will live with you." So as I was memorizing Hosea, going through all that, I was like, "Lord, what are you saying to me? Who am I? Do you have to buy my affection with stuff or I will not follow you? Do I really love you, Jesus, the way I should, or am I wandering?" The Spirit Deeply Longs for Our Hearts And look at verse 5, this lines up exactly with what we're talking about from Hosea. "Do you think the scripture says without reason that the Spirit," I think we should capitalize that, like the Holy Spirit, "the Spirit that he caused to live in us envies intensely, or is jealous over us." He has a strong desire over us. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity who lives within us, deeply yearns over our hearts to love him. Remember how it said of God, in Exodus 34:14, "Do not worship any god, for the Lord, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God." he actually says, "One of my names is Jealous." One of my names is jealous. And so the spirit, if you're a Christian, the Holy Spirit lives within you, and if you wander into spiritual adultery, into worldliness, you wander into that, he yearns for you and is jealous over you and wants you back. He knows your heart, he knows your mind, he knows what you are made for. And you were made to worship God in your intellect and in your mind, to understand the story of God and to see the evidence of God, and to know and to have your heart go after him so that he would be uppermost in your affections. There would be nothing you love more than God, the triune God. That's what he yearns for. The Spirit Works in Our Hearts But we are by corrupted nature, idolatrous, and so we reverse the order. God is not uppermost in our affections anymore, some created thing, some creature, is. And that's the essence of idolatry, worshipping and serving the created thing rather than the Creator. And so he wants us, he yearns over us, that our hearts would be on fire for him, that we would love him and go after him, but the world creeps in and pulls us away. And so the Spirit works within our hearts. He works genuine fiery repentance and jealous love, and he will orchestrate, if you're one of the elect, and your straying, he will come get you and he will do things in your life. Hosea 2, Hosea, speaking about his wife, but then by way of allegory or analogy to Israel, "Their mother has been unfaithful and has conceived her children in disgrace. She said, I will go after my lovers who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink. Therefore I will block her path with thorn bushes, I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers, but not catch them. She will look for them but not find them. And then she will say, I will go back to my husband, as at first, for then I was better off than now." Blocked in, walled in, still corrupted in the mind, and then she has no choice but to turn in a certain direction. Is that you? Does God have to buy your affections? Does your heart continually wander after the “lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life?” Do you act like an enemy of God? The text stands over all of us, when we sing, "prone to wander, Lord, I feel it," this is what the text is saying. Do we hate that? Do we say, "I don't want to live my life like that"? Is the Spirit filling your heart with a longing after God? So God, in his mercy, gives us the gift of continual grace for repentance. III. God’s Gift of Continual Grace for Repentance Look at verse 6, "He gives us more grace." Hallelujah. He gives us more grace. That is why scripture says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." To save us, God must give us more grace, and then more grace, and then after that, even more grace, and more grace, and more grace. And so we need a steady stream of that. And you need to say that in your mind, say, "Oh God, give me more grace. Fill me with grace." May there be grace to you through the ministry of the word of God. You need a steady stream of grace. Not like grace, born again, forgiven and done with grace. Not at all. You need a steady stream of God's sovereign grace every moment. Bunyan’s “Fire Against the Wall” In Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's classic about the Christian life, there is this powerful image in Interpreter's house. He goes to Interpreter, and he gives him a bunch of allegories and stories that give aspects of the Christian life, and they're acted out, and you can learn things. Bunyan thought in pictures. And so there is this one allegory of the fire burning against the wall, and he said, "I saw in my dream that Interpreter took Christian by the hand and led him into a place where there was a fire burning against a wall." So, picture like a marble wall, and a marble hearth and a fire in it. It's burning. "And one was standing by it, always casting much water upon it to quench it. Yet did the fire burn higher and hotter." So picture this fire in a hearth and there's someone just pouring water on it, but the fire's not going out. Then said Christian, "What means this?" What does this mean? The interpreter answered, “'The fire is the work of grace that is wrought in the heart, and he the casts water upon it to extinguish it, and put it out, is the devil. But then that thou seest the fire not withstanding, burn higher and hotter, thou shalt see also the reason of that. So he had him around to the back side of the wall where he saw another man with a vessel of oil in his hand of the which he did also continually cast, but secretly, into the fire.’ Then said Christian, 'What means this?' The interpreter answered, ‘This is Christ, who continually, with the oil of his grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart by the means of which, not withstanding what the devil can do, the souls of his people prove more gracious still. And then that thou sawest that the man that stood behind the wall to maintain the fire, that is to teach thee that it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is actually being maintained in their souls.’" God Opposes the Proud but Gives Grace to the Humble So that's such a powerful picture. If you're born again, God lights a fire within you, a work of grace. And that fire is going to keep burning and there's nothing the world, the flesh and the devil can do to put it out, praise God. But the only way it doesn't get extinguished is more grace, and that's why James 4:6 says, "He gives us more grace." But he gives it to the humble. "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." I remember when I was teaching this verse to my kids and we used to do much more physical things that we do now. We used to play wrestling games until I broke a rib and then I retired. My kids were getting bigger and bigger and they just consistently won. The game was to get me off the couch within five minutes. That's all they had to do, just get me off the couch. It got pretty violent. Lamps were getting knocked over. It was not good. But I wanted to teach them God opposes the proud. So I stood in the way and I told them to go through a door, and I opposed them, and I was much bigger than they were at that point. They're much bigger than me now. But at that point. So you don't want God, Almighty God, opposing you. You don't want God, the omnipotent God, fighting you. But he gives grace to who? The humble. And so, the grace of God comes and makes you a spiritual beggar, makes you, like the beatitudes say, it makes you mourn over your sins, it makes you hunger and thirst for righteousness, it makes you humble. And so you are humbled by your sin, you're humbled by your condition, and you go toward Christ, you go toward God and you say, "Give me more grace," and he will. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And here we see the nature and fruits of true repentance. IV. The Nature and Fruits of True Repentance Nature and Fruit Intertwined: What God Commands He Works in Us When he's doing that, what does he do? He grants repentance, and he works in us repentance. God gives us what he commands. He commands us to repent, and then he works repentance in us. Now the commands given here could be given both to unsaved and saved people alike. If you're here today, and you are as yet not a Christian, these words can stand to you. And they say, "Submit yourself to God, take Jesus's yoke upon you and learn from him. Submit to his kingly reign, stop fighting him. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands in the blood of Christ, trust in him and you'll be forgiven." This is the Gospel invitation to anybody to believe in Christ. And so if that's you here today, then God brought you here by his grace to hear, for this moment, that all your sins can be forgiven. All you have to do is trust in him, apart from works, just by trusting in Jesus, all your sins will be forgiven. But these words are written to Christians and so we need to hear this too. And so, maybe you see worldliness creeping in. Maybe you've defiled yourself through some pattern of sin this week. Maybe you're locked in some addictive pattern. Perhaps you're a married couple constantly fighting and quarreling. Maybe you're a teenager, and you're rebelling or fighting against parental authority. Maybe you see an overall pattern of worldliness in your life where you're living for the things of this world and not for the things of God. And you say, "What do I do now, how do I get home?" James 4:7-10 tells you how, tells you what to do. Submit Yourselves Then to God First of all, submit to God. “Submit yourselves then to God.” Kneel before God as the king of your life. Kneel before him right now, in your hearts. Kneel before King Jesus. Take his yoke, his kingly yoke upon you, and stop fighting it. Maybe when you get home physically, literally kneel before him. Paul did. In Ephesians 3 he said, "For this reason I kneel before the Father." Sometimes we just, with our bodies, we want to say, "You are my King and I yield to you." So submit yourself to God. All salvation is of, in essence, bringing us into the kingdom of God and yielding to his kingly reign. Resist the Devil and He Will Flee From You Secondly, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." Say no to what the devil is tempting you to do. Say no to the devil's schemes of temptation. Ephesians 6, "Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand in the day of testing." In the day of temptation you've got your armor on, you're going to say no to sin. Resist the devil. And then amazingly, he will flee from you, as though he's afraid of you. Friend, he's not afraid of you. He's not afraid of you at all. He is so much more powerful and experienced than you are. Is he afraid of something? Yes, he's afraid of Jesus. He's afraid of Jesus. We're going through men's Bible study on Thursdays. We just got to the account, you remember where Jesus drives out Legion, the legion of demons from the demoniac of the Gadarenes, remember that? And there's this demoniac breaking chains, literal chains that could not hold him. Naked, cutting himself with stones, howling at the moon, no one would go near him. He's terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And then he is terrified of Jesus. Begging Jesus, "Please don't torment us before the appointed time. If you drive us out, please send us into the herd of pigs." And Jesus just says, "Go," and they go. They are terrified of Jesus. So what ends up happening? You're resisting the devil, the devil's tempting you, the demons are assaulting you, you're being tempted and you say, "No. No, by God's grace, no." And then the Spirit of God gets around you and puts the devil to flight. I love the image and the promises in the Old Testament about Israel's armies. They will come at you in one direction and flee from you in seven. Isn’t that a great picture? And so putting the devil to flight, all you have to do is just put on the spiritual armor, and stay and stand firm in holiness, and say no, and he will put the devil to flight. "Come Near to God and He Will Come Near to You" And then, "Come near to God and he will come near to you." Our sins have made a separation. That's the distance. That's where the GPS comes in. We need to get back to God. We feel distant from him, and that distance is a spiritual reality. It says in Isaiah 59:1-2, "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear, but your iniquities have separated you from your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear." And so we feel distant from God. Well, then come near to him. Like one of the minor prophets said, "Take words with you." I love that. So what words? Psalms. "Well Pastor, do you have a Psalm in mind?" I actually do. Can I recommend Psalm 63:1-3? "O God, you are my God. Earnestly, I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld Your power and Your glory, because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you." Say those things to God. "I feel so distant from you. Other things have crept in, and I've loved them. Now I want them out and I want the love of God in me. Your love is better than life, it's better than any created thing. I want to be close to you, oh Lord." Say that to him. Draw near to God. As it says beautifully in Jeremiah 29:13. "You will seek me and you will find me if you seek for me with all your heart." So I just commend Psalm 63:1-3 or some other passage like it, and just say that to God. And let your heart be heated up and you will find that he will draw near to you. "Wash Your Hands, You Sinners" And then he says, "Wash your hands, you sinners." We come to Christ's cleansing blood. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” So we get spiritually cleaned. But the hands are practical, they do things. The hands are attached to the heart and so we need clean hands and a pure heart, and so we purify our heart by the Word of God. But then, what about your habits? What about your behaviors? What about what you're doing? Wash. And you do that by holy resolutions and by living up to those holy resolutions. "Lord, I've been doing this, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to fight that sin pattern. I'm going to wash my hands. I'm going to bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance. I'm going to put this sin out of my life. If my right hand is causing me to sin, I'm going to cut it off and throw it away. If my right eyes is causing me to sin I'm going to gouge it out and throw it away. Jesus told me to deal seriously with sin. I am going to wash my hands by the grace of God. I'm going to change the way I'm living." "Purify Your Hearts, You Double-Minded" And he says, "Purify your hearts, you double-minded." It ultimately comes to that. As I've already mentioned, the bottom line is, what are you doing? Double-mindedness is like, "I'm going after the world, I don't want to do that." So, what are you feeding in your mind? So feed on God's Word, meditate on scripture. Stop thinking those worldly thoughts. "Purify your hearts," he said, "you double-minded". And then, “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.” Long ago I stopped asking for a show of hands and sermons. I don't do that anymore, but if I were to ask for a show of hands, how many of you would say this is your favorite verse in the Bible? How many hands do you think? Well, this is my favorite: “Grieve, mourn and wail, change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom." It's nobody's favorite. Let me tell you something, it's part of the journey back. Grieve, Mourn, Wail We American evangelicals, we like a kind of Christianity lite. With chipper sermons designed to make you laugh and feel good about yourselves. John Piper is speaking of churches that try to create an atmosphere of bouncy Chipper, frisky, lighthearted playful worship. Well, that's not what James is talking about here. Not at all. Now, obviously we don't want a Christianity that would be characterized by these words. Morose, gloomy, sullen, dark, heavy, solemn. Jesus did come to bring us joy unspeakable and full of glory. And we're going to a place where there will be for all eternity no death, mourning, crying or pain. We will not spend a moment in Heaven grieving, mourning and wailing over sin. None. But we're not there yet, dear friends. We're not in Heaven yet. And sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is to join the Holy Spirit in grieving over your sin. Join the Holy Spirit in grieving over your sin. Do you realize the third person of the Trinity grieves over sin? It says in Ephesians "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God with whom you're sealed for the day of redemption." It says in Isaiah 63:10, concerning Israel, "They rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit." And so what happens is, we're going along, we get tempted and we have the temporary pleasure and joy of sin, but the Holy Spirit is immediately, instantaneously grieved. So we're up here in terms of the happiness thing, and he's down here and grieving over us. Then by the power, the sovereign power he exerts over the redeemed, he pulls you down to his level of happiness, which is grief, and then together, you go back up to the joy of the Lord. "Restore to me the joy of my salvation," David said. And so he does that. But there's a process. “Grieve, mourn, wail. Change your laughter to mourning and joy to gloom.” Don't go too quickly to feeling good again after you've sinned. Take the time to go and think and pray, and say, "God, would you please show me what you felt about my sins? Show it to me. And I will join you and grieving over it." Do you remember when the Lord was working with Peter that very night? Do you remember? And after he had disowned him for the third time, the rooster crowed and the light went on, remember? And at that exact moment, in Luke's Gospel, Jesus was being moved from one place to another on his night of trials, and he had the opportunity, sovereignly ordained by God, to look right at Peter, right as a rooster was crowing. What do you think that did to Peter? It must have been like a javelin thrown through his heart. And you know what he did, we know what he did. He went outside and wept bitterly. And after the resurrection of Jesus, he pulled Peter aside and asked him, "Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me?" And it says in the text, Peter was hurt because he asked him a third time. "Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you." he said, "Then, feed my sheep." Was he intending to hurt him? In one sense, yes, but not as an ultimate end. But to cause him to repent and to turn away, because someday he would be martyred for Jesus and he had to lose that fear of death and fear of man and preach boldly and he had to be healed from his sin. And so, humble yourself before the Lord. Humble yourself, like the tax collector. Stand off at a distance, beat your breast and say, "Be merciful to me, oh God, a sinner." And you will go home justified. You'll be forgiven, you'll be restored. And then it says plainly, "He will lift you up." Humble yourself before the Lord and he'll lift you up, he'll fill you with joy, he'll give you the peace of justification, he'll give you the joy of your salvation again. Prayer Close with me in prayer. Father, you have taught us here in these verses, you've taught us the way back. And there are some of us here today that know immediately, they know directly what you're talking about. They feel it in their hearts, they know that they're sinning. They know that there's a pattern of sin that's corrupting them. And you are working by grace that the fire of grace would not go out in their hearts, that Satan's pouring water on it, but you will not let it go out. Father, I pray that if there's a brother or sister here that needs to just take these verses and go quietly into a room somewhere and kneel down and pray, step-by-step, until they have been restored to you, Oh God, give them strength to do it. Thank you for the Word. Thank you for its truth. In Jesus's name, Amen.

Introduction Jesus’ Parable of the Hidden Treasure My sermon title is, “Joyful Perseverance in Trials Produces Spiritual Maturity.” Jesus told a parable saying, that, “the kingdom of Heaven is likened to treasure hidden in a field. And when a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy, sold everything he had and bought that field.” There is no more precious commodity in this world than salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. It is the most precious thing that there is, and it is real. We, who are Christians, we know that that salvation is real because God is real. Though we cannot see Him, we know that He created the universe and by faith we understand that, and by faith we know that Heaven is real, and that salvation is real. But what if our claim to that treasure, what if our claim is counterfeit? That man went out and sold everything he had and bought that field, but imagine he bought it from a fraudulent salesman and that the title deed he had to that field was fraudulent. What if it was a fake? Speaking more directly, how can we know that our faith in Christ is genuine? How can we know that we have the kind of faith that will save our souls? There are frauds. Fraudulent Faith There are counterfeits in everything. You can think of fake rolexes. You can think of even fake hiking and mountaineering equipment. I saw in Nepal, there were name brands, and the name was spelled slightly differently than I'd seen before. They have WcDonalds in China where the M is upside down. And so there are fraudulent things. Probably the most lucrative fraudulent businesses is in art. I was reading recently of a painting that was sold supposedly from the 16th century, a painting of Saint Jerome, and it was so realistic looking at had actual cracks of age that followed a certain pattern that was characteristic of the 16th century, it was that accurate. But the painting sold for almost a million dollars contained some pigments, some chemicals that were impossible to be from the 16th century. In the end it was exposed as a fraud. Now, the art collector that bought that was out $860,000. We're talking about something infinitely more valuable than that. We're talking about your eternal soul. We're talking about, whether you'll spend eternity in Heaven or in Hell. And therefore it is vital for us to know whether our claim to Christ is fake or genuine. Some have told me before, and we're going through the Sermon on the Mount, in men's Bible study on Thursday. And one of the scariest passages in the Bible, is in Matthew 7 where Jesus says, "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But only those who do the will of my Father, who is in Heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles.' And then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me you evil doers.'" People tell me that's a scary verse for them because they are aware of the possibility of being self-deceived, they're aware of the possibility of a fraudulent faith, and I think that's a good thing. Be Willing to Evaluate Yourself The New Testament encourages us to evaluate ourselves to test ourselves. 2 Corinthians 13:5 says, "Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you unless, of course, you fail the test." So we are told by 2 Corinthians 13, and many other passages to evaluate our faith, to test ourselves, to not make assumptions. Now, the consistent answer the New Testament gives to the question, “How can I know if my faith is genuine?”, is the issue of fruit, or works. There's different ways of saying it, but it's the same answer. If there is fruit, genuine fruit, then there is genuine life. If there is not genuine fruit, there is not genuine life. Then you may wonder "Well, what fruit, should I be looking for? What is the fruit that God wants to see in my life?" Again, the Lord has not left us as orphans on that question, He has told us what He wants us to be and do. The New Testament defines the healthy Christian life. But one book in particular, zeroes in on good works as proof positive of the kind of faith that saves and that is the book we're about to study the Book of James. The Practicality of James Now James is a book that's hard to synthesize into one overarching theme. It actually reads somewhat like a Christian book of Proverbs, taking on various topics and sometimes even it seems changing the subject, and now we're on to another topic and it's hard always to connect the dots. It's a very practical book. However, one could argue that the theological center of the book is in James 2. A James 2:14 says this, "What good is it my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds, can such a faith save him?" It's an interesting phraseology in that translation, "Can such faith save him?" That kind of faith. “Can that faith save him?” So, what that raises is the question of, “What kind of faith is genuine, what kind of faith saves souls?” And James says there in that chapter, the faith that produces good works will save your soul, but the faith that does not produce good works is not a genuine faith. It is a dead faith, it's a demon faith, it's worthless. And he'll go through all that in Chapter 2. So it is a diabolical thing to be deceived by Satan, for Satan to lie to us about our true spiritual condition. But to some degree, it's even more diabolical when he enlists us in that process where we deceive ourselves, where we lie to ourselves about what's really going on. And so, the whole Book of James is written, I think to help us not do that, to expose fraudulent faith while there's still time to do something about it, to show us what the kind of faith that saves our souls really looks like, and this first sermon will fit right into that as we look at joyful perseverance, in trials, and how that will prove faith to be genuine. I. An Introduction to James: The Man and His Letter (vs. 1) Who is this James? So let's begin with an introduction to James both the man and his letter. That would be the first heading in my outline and look at verse 1, "James a servant of God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations. Greetings". So who is this James? Well, there are four James’ mentioned in the New Testament. Two of them we can remove right away, that leaves James, one of the 12 Apostles, the brother of John one of the three inner circle with Jesus. The problem is that he was the first martyred among the apostles. And so, would have died too, soon, I think, to write this letter. Most scholars zero in on James, the half-brother of Jesus. Now Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born, but she did not remain so. She and Joseph had a normal healthy married life, and so she gave birth to other children. And at one point, Jesus's enemies in Nazareth say of Jesus, "Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't His mother's name Mary? And aren't his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? Aren't all his sisters with us?” So, there's clear textual proof that Mary had other children. Now they would have been half-brothers and sisters of Jesus because only Jesus had God as His true father while they all had Joseph as their father but the same mother. James’ Journey of Faith Now this man, James, had a journey of faith. It's very plain in John Chapter 7, and 5 that Jesus brothers did not believe in Him while He was ministering, they did not believe in Him, John 7:5. However, after the resurrection of Jesus, James is there with his brothers, and Mary in the upper room, waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit. So what happened? What changed? Well, I believe 1 Corinthians 15 and verse 7 makes it plain, that Jesus, as Paul's going through the evidence of the resurrection on how Jesus appeared to Peter and then to the 12, and then to 500 people. It says after that, He appeared to James. So think about that, a private appearance by the Lord of the universe, to you. And at that point there's no doubt in James’ mind who Jesus was. And his role as biological brother Jesus just disappears is not important. It was a historical note of some interest, but what really mattered is that Jesus was James' savior, and James believed in Him, became a genuine follower of Christ, and became a leader in the church in Jerusalem, became what Paul calls in Galatians chapter 2, a pillar of that church, in Acts 15, he led the Jerusalem Council as they discussed the role of circumcision for the Gentile converts. James was a leader, a pillar of the church in Jerusalem. So that I believe is the author of this book, the half-brother of Jesus. Who is He Writing To? Now, who is he writing to? Well, he's the leader of the Jewish church in Jerusalem. These were Jews who had come to a genuine faith in Christ, but he writes, he says to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations. Now the Jews were very aware of the scattering that went on after the exiles. They were the exiles by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and they were scattered throughout the Gentile world. So that would have been the Roman, the Greco-Roman world, and they could have just been in the diaspora, the scattering at that point, or there might have been a specific scattering that happened with Jewish Christians. As we learn in John Chapter 9, that the Jewish authorities had already decided while Jesus was still ministering that if you believe that Jesus was the Messiah promised by God, you would be kicked out of the synagogue as the blind man that was healed was. Kicked out of the synagogue, by believing in Jesus. And so what that would mean for you economically as you couldn't carry on a business if you're a tradesman or craftsman or a merchant. No one would buy your wares. They wouldn't sell to you, you'd be ostracized financially, and so you would become poor, poverty-stricken, and you might have had to flee from Palestine, from Jerusalem just for economic reasons. So we don't know for certain why they were scattered, but it might have been those reasons as well. II. Joyful Perseverance in All Trials (vs. 2-4) The Suffering of Trials Now, in verses 2-4, we get to the first urging the James gives. Joyful perseverance, in all trials, that's my heading of the second part. Joyful perseverance in all trials, verses 2-4. Look at the verses, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance, Perseverance must finish its work, so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." So we come to the issue of the suffering of trials of afflictions. And so, the first test of the Christian faith is how you respond to trials. Remember the parable of the seed in soils and only the genuinely rooted, grounded in the true soil of a noble and right heart endures and perseveres and bears fruit. But there is that rocky soil that as soon as any trouble comes because of the Word they quickly fall away. So, falling away is a clear evidence that the faith is not genuine. So how do you behave in trials? Now James does not specify what sorts of trials he's talking about, he just says trials of any kind. Anything you find difficult anything that afflicts you, that crosses you, that you find challenging, we could, as Christians, put those into two categories. Those afflictions and trials that are common to the human race that we share with all human beings, and then those things that are specifically focused on our Christian testimony. So the first would be sickness, injury, pain, accidents, the death of loved ones, poverty, financial challenges, economic issues, natural disasters, troubles in the family, difficulties in the family, or conflicts at the workplace, or in the neighborhood where you live, these are common to all people. They just have to do with us living in a sin-cursed world. Everybody has to face those. And the world needs us Christians to be evidently, clearly filled with hope at times like that. When we get that diagnosis of cancer that we would have a radiant hope that we're going to live forever. And it's a hope that the other people with the exact same malady, the same diagnosis but not the same faith, not the same Lord have to go through alone stripped of any hope that they would see in you, a hope that they have no earthly answer for, they have no understanding of why, what's the root system of that hope. And they might ask you to give a reason for the hope that you have as 1 Peter 3:15, says. They need you to be evidently filled with joy and hope. But then there are also trials that come because of our Christian testimony as well. Afflictions and persecutions that come some more in other parts of the world than in this one, where there's religious freedom. Persecution, economic isolation as I mentioned already with the Jews there in Palestine, a boycotting confiscation of property, loss of personal freedom, incarceration, and perhaps even martyrdom in very rare cases. Jesus said these trials, must come really of both categories. They must come. John 16:33, Jesus said, "I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world." Trials Will Come So it's a new year, 2020. Doesn't feel like a year name to me, I'm still not used to that, but it's a new year. And who knows what will come, but I can tell you this, congregation of 500 plus people, there's going to be a lot of suffering in this community over the next 12 months, but we don't know what it's going to be, but isn't it a beautiful thing to not have to go through that alone, to not have to go through that alone. The more faithful we are in our Christian witness, the bolder we are in our Christian testimony, the more trouble we're going to have in this world. It says in 2 Timothy 3:12, "Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted." And so the bolder we are in testimony, the more persecution. That's in our context. In other contexts, like in North Korea, just to be a Christian, just to assemble together, you have to be watching at all times, for the governmental police, the authorities to come in, or in the controlling government of China, same kind of thing, where brothers and sisters are arrested frequently, or in the fundamentalist Islamic states like Iran and Saudi Arabia where our brothers and sisters live under the constant fear of persecution from Muslim family and friends and neighbors and the authorities, or the fiercely nationalistic situation among Hindus in India, persecution comes much more vigorously in those places. Well, James is not specific about the trials. He speaks of trials of various kinds. Whatever they are, expect them, they will come. And he actually uses this language, "Whenever you fall into trials of various kinds." Sometimes it feels that way, doesn't it? You're just moving along in your life and then suddenly you're in a dark pit, metaphorically, you're in a dark pit. And how did I get here? And the light seems so distant, and you're injured by the fall, and you're there wondering, what to do, how to get out of it, what to do next, when ever you fall into trials of various kinds that are going to come. Now, we should understand that our heavenly Father's quick carefully orchestrating all of these things, isn’t that encouraging? You don't fall into anything. It's not an accident, it's not like you're going to God in prayer, and He's saying, "Wow that happened to you. Wow, I wasn't watching at the time." God actually carefully orchestrates our trials and temptations “lest we be tempted beyond what we can bear” as we've already learned, in 1 Corinthians 10. But God is orchestrating these things. Our Response to the Trial is Everything The thing is you can't control it. You can't control your life's circumstances, the only thing you can control is your response, your attitude, your demeanor, and what James says is that you are to, “consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds.” Literally, “all joy.” Consider it all joy, or joy through and through, joy straight through. Now, we should not think that James is saying that we should minimize it like it's not happening. That would be weird, it would not be a good witness. It's like, "Do you not understand what's happening to your loved one, what the diagnosis is?" “Well, no. Now I am happy all the day!” No, it's a real rooted, grounded awareness like in Romans 4. Abraham faced the fact that his body was as good as dead since he was about a 100 years old and that Sarah's womb was also dead. They did not waver through unbelief. So you know what's going on, you're aware of it. And you take I think the eternal perspective. I think exactly like the attitude that Jesus had about the cross in Hebrews 12:2, "We are to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfect or of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God." What was the joy that was set before Him? I'll tell you what it was. It was us, a multitude of the redeemed from every tribe and language and people and nation, won by His suffering, won by His blood to eternal joy and bliss in His presence. That was the joy that was set before Him. The cross was still physical and spiritual agony. But there was a joy beyond it. I think we're supposed to see it the same way. These trials that are coming are working in us and for us, “an eternal glory that far outweighs them all,” Paul tells us in Corinthians, that's the joy. So we have joyful faithful submission then to the trial. What Joyful, Faith-filled Submission to Trials Produces What does that produce? Well everything starts with knowledge. Look at verse 3, "Knowing that the testing of your faith develops perseverance", or endurance. The testing of your faith, that's the testing, the trying, the assaying of it to separate out the true gold from the fool's gold. So there's assaying, but there's also a purifying of our faith. Now, the trial reveals our faith to be the true thing if we stand firm through it and are not cast away. So, if we stand firm. More than that, however, the actual process of the suffering of the trial produces a stronger faith. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen,” so what happens is we become more reliant on the invisible God, more aware of the presence of the invisible Christ, more mindful of the invisible death of Jesus centuries ago on the cross for us, more mindful of the invisible New Heaven and New Earth that are coming, more mindful of the glory that we will have in our resurrection bodies. All of these invisible realities become much more intense, stronger, if we walk well through the trial and the affliction. That's its purpose. Just like some of you have begun a time in the health center and the weight rooms, because it's January, after all. And so you're on the treadmill and you're working the weights, and you're working off whatever it is you may have eaten in the last part of last year. And you're working the muscles, and the weights oppose the motion, and cause the muscles to get stronger, and so these circumstances cross you and oppose you, and cause your faith to get stronger. Now, what is the end of a Christian endurance? It says in verse 4, "Let endurance have its full effect so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." So as we stay steady, under God's working, steady under His hand. He will work on your souls. There's a clear grammatical insight here that some translations omit. “Let endurance have its full effect.” You're being told to allow endurance to work in you or even better, “Let God do His work in you.” Stay calm and steady under His surgical touch. Imagine a situation where someone has a serious gash somewhere in their body and they're away from medical treatment, but there happens to be a doctor, a skilled doctor there with the necessary tools to disinfect the cut and to sew it up. But imagine the person is skittish and flinches and twitches and yells at the doctor and pushes the doctor away. The doctor is like, looking around saying, "Someone strap him down. You got to hold your hand steady, so I can help you." And so, if we're like that spiritually, and you're going through the trial, it will not have the right effect in your soul. “Let God do His work in you.” That's what it's saying in Verse 4. And what does perseverance produce? Well, one translation says that you'll be “perfect.” I think a better translation is “mature.” We're not going to be perfect in this life, but the word is more Christ-like. That these trials will produce Christian virtues in you, the fruit of the Spirit, love. You'll be more loving if the trial does its work in you. More patient, more joyful, more hopeful, bolder, more compassionate to others that suffer like you are. It just makes you more like Christ. It conforms you, and these things do not happen automatically. They happen because God is working, and what happens is there's a feedback loop here, where you start to realize "I'm not going to fall away. I love Jesus more now than I did six months ago, I'm real, I'm a real Christian. And that proven character, Romans 5 says is the ground of my hope. I know I'm going to Heaven when I die, because of how I reacted how I responded. I'm actually more in love with Jesus, more strong in Him that I was before the trial. Praise God, I'm real, I'm genuine, I'm going to Heaven." And so, that's what happens with endurance, and you'll see it says “mature and complete, not lacking anything.” So my geeky engineering mind at one point turned that whole thing around. Well, I guess what that means is, without the trials we'll be immature, incomplete, and lack things. Exactly! And that's how we start in the Christian life. We're immature, we're incomplete, we lack some things that we need. Justified, yes, forgiven adopted. But you need to grow up. And the only way that's going to happen is with trials. III. Seeking Wisdom from a Generously Wise God (vs. 5-8) Now in Verses 5 through 8, he turns to the topic of wisdom. Look at those verses, it says, "If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind. That man shall not think he will receive anything from the Lord. He's a double-minded man unstable in all he does." So my third heading is, “Seeking Wisdom from a Generously Wise God.” A Timeless and Universal Promise Now I think these verses, verses 5-8 give a timeless universal principle, that you can use at all times, whether you're suffering or not. But I also think it's helpful to see them in context too. So I think we'll do both. First, you just need to ask God for wisdom more than you do. You should not say, "Well, some days I like wisdom, but other days I'm perfectly fine when it comes to wisdom." You can imagine your Heavenly Father saying, "Are you sure there's nothing you might, no insights you might need from Me?" But that would just pose Him as a counselor, He's more than that. He's your king, and you're not your own you're bought at a price, and so you should, in your daily morning quiet time, be asking your king what He wants you to do today? You should go to Him for wisdom. God, what should I do today? What should I do next? You should have this incredible humility about you saying, "I lack wisdom, I lack wisdom, I lack wisdom and you're just going in God, the Ancient of Days, who knows you from your mother's womb, who knows everything that's going on, He will give you wisdom about anything. And so, we always need wisdom. But then there are those big moments in life. Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should we move to this city? Should I go on this mission trip? Should I contribute to this or that or the other Christian ministry, and how much? There's so many things. What are my spiritual gifts? What ministry should I do with my spiritual gift? There's a lot of those big moments. The Purpose of Wisdom in a Trial But we also, I think, should see these verses in context. James said that, "If you stand firm and are steady you will be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Next verse, "If anyone lacks wisdom." So there seems to be a link between verse 4 and 5. So verses 2-4 is all about afflictions. I think that fits very, very well in terms of the afflictions. One of the number one questions that comes up when we're in afflictions, is, "Why is this happening to me?" Whenever you're facing pain and suffering, "I don't understand God why you're doing this to me?" "Why is God not hearing our prayer for the healing of our little girl? Why not?" Or even "Why did you take her from me,” if in the end she dies? "Why is this chronic ailment in my life not responding with the treatment when usually it responds well in other cases?" Or in persecuted countries, “Why do the wicked prosper? Why are the wicked in charge? And then our Godly pastor got arrested last month, and he's being tortured and we have to hide from the authorities. Why is this happening?" Or, "Why in a natural disaster did you allow our home to be destroyed and then those homes were spared?" It doesn't seem to make any sense. And so, if you are in affliction and trials of various kinds, you should bring your questions to God, you should ask Him for wisdom and He will give it to you. He'll tell you why you're going through this trial. Very clear example of this is Paul's thorn in the flesh. Remember in 2 Corinthians 12? Paul talks about some incredible vision he had, where he was caught up to the third heaven and he saw indescribable things. He saw heaven, he saw God on His throne. But then the next thing he says, "To keep me from being conceded because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me. Three times I sought the Lord that it be removed from me, and He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness', therefore I will boast in my weaknesses." You see what's happened there? He didn't know why this thorn in the flesh, this messenger of Satan had come to him. He was told, "It's to keep you from being arrogant Paul, it's to keep you humble, to keep your feet nailed to the ground after you ascended to heaven and saw heavenly the things you're not allowed to talk about.” And you're like, "Wow would Paul ever become prideful arrogant?" All of us are prideful. We all, we all could be conceded and Paul needed that help, he needed the pain, the suffering, that God did not heal. So, he's healing other people but he's not healing himself, but he had understanding. "Alright, I get it. My strength is made perfect in weakness. I'll keep praying I'll keep trusting, I'll walk in agony and in pain until God chooses to heal it, or until I die." But he got the insight, he got the wisdom of what the reason for it was. And God doesn't tell everything in this world, but He gives you enough wisdom. Seeking Guidance for Your Lives Now you need to seek guidance in your life more than you do. I do too. We are so independent aren't we? We're like, "I know what to do, I got this one, God. I know exactly what to do." If any of you lacks wisdom, it's like, "Well that's not me, I'm on it, I know what I'm doing." But when big decisions come along many decisions we need some guidance don't we? Now, I could give you the guidance of the famous philosopher, Yogi Berra, the catcher for the Yankees. He said, "Whenever you come to a fork in the road, take it." I don't find that incredibly helpful. I guess, at least I know I'm not turning back, so at least that. But I don't know, right or left, but God wants us to express our dependence on Him. He has searched us to know us. He knows all the days ordained for us, He knows exactly what way we should take and He wants us to ask Him. And then we hear in Isaiah 30, in verse 21, "Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it.’” Don't you see the gift that is from God? You won't have no idea what to do in life. “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God. But when you ask, you should believe and not doubt. You should believe that God will give you the wisdom. He'll tell you what to do, He will guide you.” So you're asking has to be in faith, because if not, then James says, you're a double-minded person, you're going back and forth. You believe, you don't believe. You believe, you don't believe. You're acting like a believer, then you're acting like God doesn't exist. James also, later in chapter 4, uses double-minded people to speak of those that are worldly. They're after the world's golds, the world's applause, the world's power and position. And so you're not getting wisdom because in James 4, "You're asking, but you're not receiving because you're asking wrongly. You're asking like a double-minded person." And so you have to go as a faith-filled disciple of Christ and He will give you the wisdom that you need. Seeking Wisdom by Faith Now how does He do that? Well, He gives it through the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Spirit is God's direct minister to you, to guide you in your life. Now the Spirit speaks primarily through the scripture. The more you study the word of God, the more you memorize Scripture, the more tools the Holy Spirit will have to get specific in your life and guide you and you'll know what to do. You'll know the big picture of what God is doing in the world and you'll know details about spiritual gifts, or various ministries. You'll just know what to do more and more. Even then there's some things that are pertinent to you, and the Holy Spirit will guide you by counsel from friends, disciplers, men and women that speak wisdom into your lives, and you also have internal impressions. Be careful about those internal impressions. I've studied them for my entire Christian life. When I got down on my knees and asked the Lord in my PhD office at Southern Seminary, "Should I come to Durham as pastor, senior pastor of this church?" I felt that I needed an answer. I felt that the search committee needed an answer. It was only polite to give them an answer. “God I met the fork in the road, what do you want me to do?" And I had a strong impression to come here. Now, here's the thing about impressions. They're from one of three sources. They're from God through the Holy Spirit, they are from the devil as he deceives us and they're from you as you talk to yourself. And some of the wisdom you give yourself is pretty good. And some of it isn't. I remember once seeing a man wearing this t-shirt saying, "I do whatever the voices in my head tell me to do." That's not the way to go. But we need to believe that God is able to guide us in those key moments well, without becoming erratic and strange following voices in our heads. IV. Temporary Wealth vs. Eternal Wealth (vs. 9-11) Verses 9-11 in Connection with the Rest of the Chapter Now in verses 9-11, James addresses temporary versus eternal wealth. To some degree, you could almost see a seam here, is there's a whole, new topic. James is like that. Sometimes we don't know, are we getting to a whole new issue now that he brings up? But I think it's possible even here to see some points of connection. Look at Verses 9-11, "The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position." By the way, that's not talking about Andy Winn preaching on the third floor. I told him that this morning. He said, "It's right in the text." I said, "Bad exegesis." So he's in the high position. We're in the low position. Tell him what I said about that whenever you see him. "The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position, but the one who is rich should take pride in his low position because he will pass away like a wild flower, for the sun rises with scorching heat, and whithers the plant its blossom falls, its beauty is destroyed in the same way the rich man will fade away, even while he goes about his business." So what is the connection? It could be that the connection is just economic suffering that the Jewish Christians are doing, that they're poor. They're poor. They can't make a living they've had to flee their homes in Palestine, and they're in new cities and people even then aren't really buying their wares and they're suffering, they're struggling, they're poor. And as with the advice he's going to give, I think this section is best to read it as rich and poor Christians except toward the end. Whereas in James Chapter 5, the rich are clearly oppressors who are murdering people, that's a different matter. So I think it's best to read this as rich Christians, and poor Christians except at the end, he changes just a little bit. Eternal vs. Temporal Wealth In any case, we should all have an eternal perspective on physical, material wealth. Its advantages yes, but it's limitations. And so both poor and rich, Christians need to be very clear on the limitations of earthly wealth. Poor Christians need to realize that the money and the possessions that they lack in this life are actually a very limited value. The poor can be led by their circumstances, into bitter coveting, bitterness against God, tempted even toward crime, they can become materialistic, and this will only make their trial in poverty much worse. James says that poor Christians should focus on their exalted position as adopted sons and daughters of the living God and heirs of Heaven. That's their true wealth. They're storing up there in Heaven, every day by their faithful service. Set their minds on things above and things to come, not on earthly wealth, because it's not going to help their lives as much as they think it is. They should boast. "Let the wise man, not boast in his wisdom, or the rich man boast in his wealth or the strong man boast in his strength, but let him who boast, boast in this, that He knows me." Jeremiah 9. And so, boast in God, boast in Christ, boast not in your material situation because it's nothing. It's dust in the wind. That's what he's saying. Conversely then, rich Christians should focus on their humiliation as Christians in this life. They serve a Lord who was rejected by society, who was cast out from Jewish society, who was crucified outside the city gates. And the author to Hebrews there invites us to stand under the bloody cross and join with Him in suffering the reproach of the name of Christ. So you can see how rich Christians, might have business connections which would be jeopardized if they're very honest about their Christian confession. Rich Unbelievers Fade Away in the Midst of Business Don't do that. Don't do that. Be humble in this world as a Christian. Be willing to be named by the name Christian, and take whatever comes. Now rich unbelievers, I think he shifts a little bit there. He says, "The rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business." It's like Isaiah 40 says, "All flesh is like grass and all their glory is like the flower of the field, the grass withers, and the flowers fall, when the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are like grass. “The grass withers, and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.” And so, those rich people we know we hear stories, they're going about their business. They're just moving along and then suddenly they grab their chest and fall dead. Or suddenly there's a car accident, or suddenly some other malady, a sudden fever, something comes and then they're gone, even while they're going about their business, they're dead. Proverbs 11:4, says, "Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, the righteousness delivers from judgment." So wealth isn't going to help you spiritually, in this world and it's certainly not going to help you on Judgment Day because the Judge of all the earth cannot be bribed. He judges justly. He judges to the glory of God. Well, verse 12 wraps up this whole first section, "Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial, because when he is to the test, he will see the crown of life that God has promised to those who love Him." So that goes back to the issue of perseverance under trial. Sums up this whole section. Speaks of blessing of eternity on you. If you persevere, look what you're going to get. You're going to get a crown of life, that God's going to hand you and that really is just eternal life, just being alive forever and ever, but also the rewards of your faithful labor. He will give it to you, if you love Him. And you love His appearing. Application Get Prepared for Your Last Day on Earth So, applications. First and foremost, just all I can say to you is come to Christ, come to Christ. This week some of you know my mother died. Don't have any clear assurance that she was a Christian. Had the opportunity, the responsibility of preaching the Gospel to my unsaved family. Many of you prayed for me in that regard. About two months ago, my mother asked me, "How can I prepare to die." Coming from a mother that had never made a testimony of faith in Christ, I looked on that as a golden opportunity. Probably the 100th time I could have shared the Gospel with her, but it was a gift to me, and I said, "Mom I want you to think about the thief on the cross, when Jesus died, he didn't die alone, but two other thieves were crucified with Him. And they began insulting and reviling Jesus, but at one point, one of them realized what was happening, and he stopped and he said, 'Don't you fear God?' He said that to his other thieves, 'Seeing we are into the same judgment. And we're only getting what we deserve, but this man here, Jesus has done nothing wrong.' And then he turned to Jesus and said, 'Remember me when you come in your kingdom.' To be able to see, in a crucified dying man, a coming King is a gift of faith. He already had faith. He hadn't done any good works. He couldn't. His hands and feet were nailed to the cross. But by simple faith in Jesus, he was able to be saved to have all of his sins forgiven, and to spend eternity with God in paradise.” I said, "Mom. That's how you get ready to die." I said those exact same words at the grave site on Monday. Do Not Assume Your Soul is Secure My desire is that any of you that came in here today, unsaved that you will hear the wise words that James is giving and understand what God is doing, and the ultimate gift of salvation, and trust in Christ. For those of you that are already Christians, just test your faith to see if it's genuine. Don't assume. Just say, "Lord, what is the fruit of my life? What's happening in my life. Is there fruit? Are there good works? Do I see that in my life?" Don't just assume. And especially zero on how you respond to trials and afflictions. Many of you have expressed a desire to be more evangelistic. It could be that God will make you more evangelistic by putting you into suffering on a platform of suffering, so that other people who have the exact same diagnosis as you can see how you behave and will ask you to give a reason for the hope that you have. Suffer Well Suffer well. Suffer well to the glory of God. And just generally, if I can urge you, in the year 2020, seek wisdom from God more than you've ever done it before. I would just say every day in your quiet time, just get up and say, "You're my King. I'm not my own, I'm bought at a price. What do you want me to do today?" And then listen, and let Him guide you by His Scripture, and by His word. And finally, to wealthy Christians, which is all of us who are Christians. We are amazingly wealthy. Let's realize the limits of our material wealth. Let's be generous, let's give to the needy. Let's give more than we've ever given before realizing our true wealth is Heaven. It is a benefit for us to have material blessings, but let's be generous and faith-filled with it and realize, either way, we're going to fade away, or pass away when the Lord says. Let's be ready for that by faith in Christ. Prayer Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time we've had to be here. I thank you for all of the gifts of the spiritual gifts of this church. I thank you for the love that me and my family received from this church. I thank you for the gifts of those that like Wes and his team are so excellent leading worship, I thank you for those who are so good at logistics to be able to plan this whole double worship service with such skill. Lord, I pray that in 2020, we would more than ever before walk in wisdom asking you what to do and seeking Your guidance. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Introduction This morning as we continue in our study on spiritual gifts, I'm going to zero in on the gifts of prophecy and healing to try to understand those spiritual gifts. As I do, I think about this season of the year, and I think about the Christmas hymns that we sing and how many of them mention fulfilled prophecy in reference to the birth of Christ. One of the clearest is a hymn written by Charles Wesley in 1744, "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus," one of my favorites. And he wrote it with these words, "Come Thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free, from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee. Israel's strength and consolation, hope of all the earth Thou art. Dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart." Well, why was Jesus long expected by the Jewish nation? Well, it's because God told the Jews through the prophets that He would come and He gave many details of the birth, and the life, and the death and the resurrection of Christ through the prophetic gift. How prophets with the eagle eye of prophecy were able to look down through the long corridors of centuries before they even happened, were able to give us details. A supernatural vision ahead of time, even centuries ahead of time of what the Messiah would be like. The Gift of Prophecy Distributed To Many This gift of prophecy was given to many different individuals, at many times in various ways. One example is Balaam, who's a fascinating study in prophecy, and he spoke of the coming of Christ in this powerful visionary kind of language. In Numbers 24:17 he said, "I see Him, but not now. I behold Him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob. A scepter will rise out of Israel." So there's that visionary work of the prophet, how he can see the Messiah who was to come, a star rising up out of Jacob, but He was not near, He was far away. Seven centuries before Christ was born, the same kind of visionary gift was given to the prophet Isaiah and he spoke with these powerful familiar words, Isaiah 9:6, "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on His shoulders, and He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." These words are sung in Handel's Messiah and in other hymns, and sermons that are preached. Seven centuries before Jesus was born, that level of clarity on the incarnation was given to Isaiah the prophet. At the same time as Isaiah was prophesying, another prophet, Micah, predicted the exact location where Jesus would be born. In Micah 5:2 it says, "But you, Bethlehem, Ephrathah, although you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel," listen to this, "Whose origins were from of old, from ancient times." And so the origination of Jesus was before the foundation of the world, in the councils of the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Spirit. But little by little, God, through the Holy Spirit, paid out some information through the prophets, so that Jesus was long expected. This stunning ability to see the future, this prophetic gift sets Christianity apart from every other religion in the world. God alone has the power to see the future. He's the only one that can do it, He's the only one who knows the future, only God and those to whom God reveals the future and those who believe those revelations. God makes His boast in Isaiah the prophet over against the false gods, and goddesses, that Israel was wandering after in Isaiah's day. And God challenged those gods to a duel. And the contest would be a prediction of the future. Listen to what He says in Isaiah 41, "Bring in your idols to tell us what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come. Tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods. Do something, whether good or bad, so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear. But you are less than nothing, and your works are utterly worthless. He who chooses you is detestable." In other words, God challenges the gods, the idols, to a duel and He knows they can't succeed. God’s Sovereignty to Determine the Future Now the reason that no one but God can foretell the future is that God is sovereign over the future, He's sovereign over everything that happens on planet Earth. And as the Book of Proverbs says, "Many are the purposes of a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails." And so, if individuals predict the future and God says, "Yeah, no, it's not going to happen," then it's not going to happen. There's a clear example of this in Isaiah 7, where the kings in the area are conspiring to topple the Davidic seed, the son of David that's on the throne in Jerusalem, and they're making all these plans and schemes, and God says, "It shall not take place, it shall not happen." Conversely, He says of Himself in Isaiah 10, "The hand of the Lord is stretched out and who can turn it back?" When God decrees to do something, no one can stop Him. That's why God alone knows the future, He also knows the end from the beginning, and the beginning from the end because He is eternal. So what that means is that prophecy and fulfilled prophecies in particular, have always been the centerpiece of our presentation of the Gospel to unbelievers. It's the center of our apologetic, our defense of Christianity. Fulfilled prophecies set Christianity apart from every other religion in the world. There are no Muslim predictions of the future. There are no Buddhist predictions of the future, no Hindu predictions of the future. The cults that tried to predict the future, failed and should have ended that day. I speak of the Jehovah's Witnesses that predicted at different times the end of the world. Didn't happen. I would think that would end it, but it didn't. So the ability to predict the future rests alone with Christianity. Christianity’s Fulfilled Prophecies Josh McDowell in his apologetic book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, speaks of the fulfilled prophecies around the life of Jesus from His birth through His life to His death. There are 61 prophecies that Josh McDowell lists. Sixty-one! The theme of promise fulfillment was central to the way that the apostles presented the Gospel in the synagogues, trying to persuade unbelieving Jews to cross over into faith. Again and again, they would point to the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. They learned this promise fulfillment approach from Jesus Himself. As Jesus began His public ministry in Nazareth, you remember the scene, how the scroll of Isaiah the Prophet was found. He opened up the place in Isaiah 61 where it says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor," and after reading that prophecy rolled it up and set it aside and sat down. And He said, "Today, in your hearing, this Scripture is fulfilled." Now you can imagine how electrifying that must have been there in Nazareth that Jesus was claiming to be the long-expected Messiah. Promise and fulfillment. So that's how God has used prophecy in the past to identify Jesus as the Christ, the Savior of the world. Born the son of Abraham, in fulfillment of prophecy. Born the son of David, in fulfillment of prophecy. Crucified with His hands and feet pierced, in fulfillment of prophecy. Raised from the dead on the third day, in fulfillment of prophecy. And since that time, the Gospel has spread from Jerusalem through Judea, Samaria to the ends of the earth, in fulfillment of prophecy. And we still have more prophecies to come, especially the second coming of Christ, so Jesus is still the long-expected Jesus, He's the long-expected Savior. One of the last things Jesus said to us through Scripture is, "Behold, I am coming soon." And so, we've been waiting for 20 centuries, and we still wait for the fulfillment of that prophecy. Dealing With the Charismatic Gifts Now, what does all this have to do with spiritual gifts? Well, we've been trying to answer one of the more perplexing questions that faces Evangelicals, and it's been divisive in Evangelicals and it has to do with the sign gifts or the miraculous gifts, some call them the charismatic gifts. And the question is: Are all of the gifts listed, that you heard Topher read about a few minutes ago, that you read about in 1 Corinthians 12, are they all still active today, or have some of them ceased? We zeroed in specifically on five in particular, the gift of prophecy, the gift of healing, the gift of miracles, speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues, these are sometimes called the sign gifts. Last week I traced out the history of the Pentecostal movement and the charismatic movement, beginning in Topeka, in 1900, Topeka, Kansas, and then in 1906, at the Azusa Street Revival, and we traced out how Pentecostalism, the movement of Pentecostalism grew. And then a subset of that, the Charismatic movement, similar but different in some ways, grew and spread, and we talked about how widespread in the world it has been and it is. Probably at this point, over 600 million Pentecostal plus charismatics in the world. It's hard to be an evangelical at any length of time without bumping into this issue and questions that arise. And so the goal for me here is to do the best I can, as I did last week, in seeking to address that question. The divide in Evangelicalism between cessationists, which are people who believe that the Scripture teaches, and it's clear that these sign gifts have ceased. So they're cessationists. Versus, broadly speaking, continuationists would be the opposite, that those gifts continue. And there are different flavors really of both. Now last week, we walked carefully through 1 Corinthians 13:8-13, which is the clearest text on the end of the gifts. And it does say that the gifts will end. It says, "Where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfection comes, the imperfect is done away with or passes away." “Imperfect” is not a great translation. The “partial,” the “in part” would be a better translation there. And so, we walked through that. And what I sought to do last week is show that this is clearly talking about the Second Coming of Christ, an eternity in which we will see God face-to-face. And that level of knowledge of knowing God face-to-face, that's decisively what Paul's saying, when the gifts will cease. So rather than teaching I think a clear cessationism, it actually points more clearly to continuationism, but that leaves some questions in front of us, and those are some of the questions I want to seek to answer today, some practical questions. As we address this gift of prophecy, let me just lay out my cards on the table as I've thought about it. This sermon like last week's was a work in progress right until the time I walked up here, so I have no desire like last week to be a fog machine here, pumping out uncertainties and “inclarities”. That's not even a word, "inclarities." Anyway, you know what I mean. What I'm trying to do is help you think through how you would address this scripturally. Four Convictions Concerning Prophecy So these are four convictions I have right now about prophecy. Number one, the New Testament points to a kind of prophetic gift that is less authoritative than scripture. That's a key divide between, let's say, me and a cessationist. Number two, I believe there is not sufficient scriptural clarity or evidence to support a hard cessationism, to make the absolute statement, “Prophecy cannot happen today.” I looked at the clearest Scripture that they have 1 Corinthians 13, and I don't think it's clear enough. To be that ardent and clear, I think, is not helpful. Third, this kind of prophetic gift, if it still functioned today, would be very helpful in our lives, both for personal holiness and for the spread of the Gospel. But now hear me clearly, on this fourth point, unless and until, an individual predicts the future and that prediction comes true, I will not know, and I don't think the church can know that that person's a prophet. And that would make me very different than most continuationists. I think it's reasonable to expect a prediction of the future in order to mark someone as a prophet. The Gift of Prophecy The Beginning of the Office of Prophet So let's walk through this, let's talk first about the beginning of the gift of prophecy and where it started in the Old Testament. The first time the word is used, it's used of Abraham, in that rather scandalous encounter he has in Girar, remember when he lied about his wife, said “She's my sister,” not a great moment for Abraham. And the king of Girar wanted to take her as his wife, and God came to him and warned him in a dream, and then said this to him in the dream, "Now return the man's wife, for he is a prophet, he will pray for you, and you will live, but if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die." So that's the first time and the actually the only time the word prophet appears in the book of Genesis. However, it definitely appears in the Exodus and beyond. And the key moment there, let's skip ahead to the key moment, and that's Mount Sinai. At Mount Sinai, God descends in fire on the top of Mount Sinai. There's a terrifying earthquake, there is this unearthly supernatural darkness, and God descends in fire on the mountain and begins to speak to the people, and the people are utterly terrified of God's voice. God speaks the Ten Commandments to the people in the hearing of the people. Deuteronomy 5 talked about that moment, Deuteronomy 5:23-31 says this, "When you heard the voice out of the darkness, while the mountain was ablaze with fire, all the leading men of your tribes and your elders came to me and you said, 'The Lord our God has shown us His glory and His majesty, and we have heard His voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a man can live even if God speaks with him. But now why should we die? This great fire will consume us and we will die if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer. For what mortal man has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire as we have and survived? Go near and listen to all that the Lord our God says, then tell us whatever the Lord our God tells you. We will listen and obey.' The Lord heard you when you spoke to me, and the Lord said to me, 'I have heard what this people has said to you. Everything they said was good. Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commandments always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever. Go tell them to return to their tents. But you, stay here with me so that I may give you all the commands decrees and laws you are to teach them to follow in the land I am giving them to possess.'" Well, that is the formal beginning of the office of prophet in the nation of Israel. This is the beginning of the office. Later in Deuteronomy 18, He makes it clear that that office would continue after Moses was gone. In Deuteronomy 18:15-20, it says, "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers, you must listen to him, for this is what you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, 'Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire anymore or we will die.' The Lord said to me, 'What they say is good. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him. If anyone does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name, I myself will call him to account, but a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, must be put to death." So that clearly establishes the opening of the office of prophet, and also what the nature of the work was. The prophet would effectively stand spiritually in the presence of God, God would teach the prophet the words to say and the prophet would then deliver them to the people. That was the essence of prophecy. That pattern continued. Throughout the history of Israel, God raised up what He called "My servants, the prophets," and they would come and they basically would press, effectively press the Mosaic covenant onto the consciences and the hearts of the Jewish people and show where they were failing to keep it. That was the centerpiece of their work, although they did other things. And so God would speak, and this prophet would listen. You see this pattern with the little boy Samuel, remember that when God was raising him up to be a prophet, and he was sleeping in Eli's house and he heard God speaking to him, and he had to be instructed to say these words, "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening." And so that was the essence of the prophecy, and the prophet, the office of prophet. And so, he would hear the word of God and he was like a table waiter, bringing the words that God spoke directly to the people. It says in 1 Samuel 3:19, "The Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and he let none of his words fall to the ground.” So he successfully delivered to the people everything that God told him to say. So, again and again, we have these individuals who hear God speak words and then speak those exact words to the people. Jeremiah 1:4-7, "The word of the Lord came to me saying, 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you as a prophet, to the nations.' 'Ah, Sovereign Lord,' I said, 'I do not know how to speak, I'm only a child.' But the Lord said to me, 'Do not say I am only a child. You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you to say.'" And then a verse later it says, "Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, 'Now, I have put my words in your mouth.'" So that's the essence of that prophetic gift, was delivering clearly and directly the words of God to the people. And there were a variety of prophetic communications. Hebrews 1:1, which I already quoted, "In the past, God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways." Now, many of the prophets were commanded to write down the things that God had committed to them, though not all. Elijah and Elisha, there's no record of them writing down any of their prophecies. But Jeremiah and Isaiah were commanded to write them down. And so we have the written word coming from this prophetic gift. How to Identify Prophets: The Fulfillment of Their Words Now, the key issue for our purpose today is the question of how can we know that this person is a prophet? It was an issue then and it's an issue now. And so, it was raised in Deuteronomy 18:21-22, "You may say to yourselves, 'How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?' If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him." So in other words, if they make a prediction that does not come true, that is a false prophet. That is a person who has not spoken in the name of the Lord. And so fulfillment of predictions was the marker of the prophet. We see this in Jeremiah's time. You remember how all of the false prophets were saying to the kings of Judah, that Nebuchadnezzar wouldn't even come? But then he comes, and he takes over most of Judah, and Jeremiah is saying, God is bringing the Babylonians as a judgment. Your only hope is to go out and surrender, which was not very popular with the fighting men on the walls. He looked like a traitor, but he was given the word of the Lord to say. And when it started coming true exactly as Jeremiah had said, he pointed to that and separated himself from the false prophets. He said to the king of Judah, "Where are your prophets who said he wouldn't even come?" The Babylonian king wouldn't even come. There was a false prophet named Hananiah, who predicted that there would be an exile once Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians had come and started to win battles. It's like, "Okay yes, there's going to be an exile but it's going to be really short.” Jeremiah predicted 70 years. And this is what Jeremiah said to Hananiah, the false prophet, "The prophet who prophesies peace will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord only if his prediction comes true." There it is again, it's the same pattern every time. This is is how we know. Ezekiel 33:33 says the same thing, "When all this comes true, and it surely will," I love how the prophet says that, "When all of this comes true, and it surely will, then they will know that a prophet has been among them." A Description of Prophets Alright, so my own description then is an Old Testament prophet is an individual called by the Lord, who is appointed by God to speak His words directly to the people. He would say, "Thus says the Lord," and everything that followed was the word of God directly to the people. The prophets didn't only predict the future, they didn't even mostly predict the future. There was forth-telling, "Thus says the Lord," and He would uncover the sins and the wickedness of the nation. But it inevitably involved some prediction of the future so that the people could know that the individual was a prophet. And so, he would say directly the words of God. To disobey those words was equivalent to disobeying God Himself. The Yearning of Moses and the Prediction of Joel Now, Moses in his day, yearned that all of God's people would be prophets. He says that in Numbers 11:29, "I wish that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put His Spirit on them." Now, Joel predicted, maybe not a universal gift of prophecy, but a widespread expansion of the gift of prophecy in the new covenant. In Joel 2:28-29, it says, "And afterward I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days." Well, the day of Pentecost came. Jesus had told them to wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit, and as they were assembled there in the Upper Room, 120 of them waiting for the Lord to give His gift, suddenly there was a sound of a terrifying powerful wind, and they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them, and all of them began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them." And a crowd gathered because of the sound of the wind, and because there were many there for the feast of Pentecost, they were all gathered, and so the apostles streamed out into the streets, they had no fear of the Jews at that point, no fear of being arrested, they had a mission to proclaim the Gospel, and so they did. Peter, speaking on behalf of the apostles, preached a message. Now, the people were deriding them, they were mocking them and saying, “They're drunk.” Peter said, "These men are not drunk as you suppose. It's only nine in the morning." I think that's humorous, anyway. "This is that which has been spoken by the prophet Joel." By the way, someone wrote a book on interpretation of prophecy, This is That, that's the title of the book. What it is saying is this thing that you're seeing is that which was predicted, it's that promise fulfillment motif. That's exactly what he says, this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel, "In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days and they will prophesy." The Cessationists Understanding of the New Testament Prophets Now, the cessationists as they look at New Testament prophecy, they effectively say that's what prophecy is and only that, it's scripture-level prophecy. And they rightly say, I agree with them, that the Canon is closed and there is no more scriptural-level prophecy coming. That once the book of Revelation came, that all of that type of perfect revelation which is written down, the perfection of scripture has ended. You remember the end of the Book of Revelation, where these words are written, this is the very end of the Bible pretty much, "I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his portion in the Tree of Life and in the holy city, which are described in this book." So he says, this book is a book of prophecy, and you can't add anything to it and you can't take anything away from it. But it's interesting that it's positioned at the end of the last book of the Bible, and so many Christians think that it also is speaking a word in general about adding to or taking away from the Bible, the 66 books of the Bible, saying those days are over. We have the Canon. And I think that's actually not a bad way to look at it. Now the gift of prophecy was functioning in those days in ways, however, that we don't fully understand. It wasn't just scriptural-level prophecy. The apostles are listed first, then prophets in verse 28, "He gave first of all, apostles, then prophets.” I've tended to see the prophets as the Old Testament prophets, and I don't have any problem with that, but there are clearly New Testament prophets at work in the church at Corinth and in other places. It says in Ephesians 2:20 that the Church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. Now cessationist John Stott says this about that, "The simplest knowledge of architectural construction is enough to tell us that once the foundation of a building is laid and the superstructure begins to be built, the foundation cannot be laid again. So in the primary sense of prophets as vehicles of direct and fresh revelation, we must say that this charisma, spiritual gift, is no longer given. There is no longer anyone in the Church who may dare to say, 'the word of the Lord came to me' or 'thus says the Lord.'" I think aspects of what Stott says there are true. Are There Different Types of New Testament Prophets? We don't look for scripture-level prophecy anymore, but are there different types of prophecies? Are there different aspects of the gift? This is the point of division between cessationists and continuationists on the gift of prophecy. Wayne Grudem, he's a continuationist, cites a number of examples of the gift of prophecy that's lower than Scripture. For example, Acts 21:4, some disciples urged Paul through the Spirit, that is by the gift of prophecy, not to go to Jerusalem. But Paul disobeyed and went to Jerusalem anyway. If New Testament prophets spoke with an authority equal to that of Scripture, Paul would not have disobeyed it. So, that's one example. Other examples come in with what we call the weighing of prophecies. Alright, 1 Thessalonians 5, 1 Corinthians 14. 1 Thessalonians 5, it says, verse 19-22, "Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophecies, but test everything. Hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” And then 1 Corinthians 14:29, "Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said." Wayne Grudem says this, "We cannot imagine that an Old Testament prophet like Isaiah would say, 'Listen to what I say and weigh what is said, sort out the good from the bad, what you should accept from what you should not accept.' It's just a different kind of prophetic gift," says Grudem. There's also other examples of prophecy which I don't really even understand what they're about. For example, 1 Timothy 1:18, it says, "Timothy, my son, I give you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies once made about you so that by following them, you may fight the good fight of faith." I don't know what prophecies were made about Timothy. I don't know if we would call them scriptural-level prophecies, or what, just something it seems about his teaching ministry or his gift, but just we don't know what it is. Also this one is very interesting to me. Acts 21:9, "Philip had four unmarried daughters who prophesied." I know nothing about those ladies. I don't know what they said. I don't think that their prophecies made it into Scripture, they just had a gift and they used it. So I don't really know. There's just things that we don't know. Now sometimes the prophets gave direct guidance concerning the Great Commission. Clear example of this is in Acts 13, "In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul," so that is Paul. "While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 'Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.' So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus." So I don't think it's too much to say that it was the prophets who spoke under the influence of the Holy Spirit that said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for this missionary work." And so that would be an example of how the prophetic gift would give a clear guidance of ministry and missions that people could do. And that's why I say if it were still to function like that, it'd be very useful or helpful. So, prophesy didn't always function as predictions about the future but a form of communication of the mind of God. Prophets also have the ability back then, in the church at Corinth, there were various people with the gifts. We would not say they were all speaking at Scriptural-level prophecy, but they just had a gift. And it's interesting, it says, "If an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all. And the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, 'God is really among you.'" So there's some aspect of the prophetic gift that was at work in the Church at Corinth, which would uncover and lay bare secrets of hearts so that people are convicted and come to Christ. An Analysis of the Facts Now Wayne Grudem has an interesting idea of prophecy which I don't share, but I'll just share it with you. How could someone be a prophet and still speak imperfect words? So he says that God gives a revelation to the prophet, and the prophet then puts them into imperfect human words. So the idea is true, but the articulation is different. I have a hard time accepting that because it seems that the verbal communication has always been of the essence of the gift of prophecy, but that would be a discussion we would have. So, if prophecy does not actually literally contain the word of God for us, word-for-word, then what is it? And how is prophecy different today from let's say preaching or teaching? One of the Puritans, William Perkins, wrote a book called "The Art of prophesying." But you shouldn't go get it, it's probably free online. You can read the PDF and it's like I want to be a prophet. Read it, it's just about preaching, friends. It's how people like me should preach, and so they make it equivalent, prophesying and preaching. I don't think that's helpful. I actually just think prophesying and preaching and teaching are different. Grudem thinks so too, I think they're different. With preaching and teaching, you're taking the written Word of God that we all have, and you're walking through it, and explaining it through rules of exegesis and theology and applying it to people, that's the gift of preaching and teaching. Prophecy is just "Thus says the Lord," and you say it. Or, according to Grudem, a revelation, and you try to articulate that revelation. Grudem says preaching and teaching is more authoritative than that type of prophesying. Well, let me give you my analysis. I think Grudem brings up some interesting points. I'm not ready to say that prophecy doesn't exist anymore, but I have serious questions. I want to know why it is that many of these continuationists set aside my requirement that the prophet, or prophetess, because God uses women too, needs to predict the future before the Church knows that they are prophets. It's always been there. There are examples of New Testament predictions. Agabus predicted a famine that would come over the entire Roman world. And like in the days of Joseph, they got ready ahead of time for the famine and set aside stores for it because they believed that Agabus was predicting the future. Why couldn't we require that of prophets today? What ends up happening, I've heard, in some of these churches like Sovereign Grace churches, or some of these other charismatic churches, is that they'll have open mics. And if you want to know what's the application, we're not going to see open mics anytime soon. Just, that's a prediction, but it's not a prophecy, it's just kind of a judgment that I'm making. But what happens in these Sovereign Grace churches, and I had this confirmed even a week ago, I talked to somebody who used to attend there. So you would go up and you would talk to the elder and they would filter it, because they were really trying to follow the New Testament prescriptions. want to weed out anything wacky or strange that would be said. And what ends up happening is the prophet or prophetess just ends up doing scriptural exhortation. “The Lord is saying to us that He is our Shepherd and that we shall not want, and that he makes us lie down in green…” I'm like, friends if you just want to read Psalm 23, read it. That's not a prophecy. Or to say the Lord wants us to be active in evangelism. Again, I do that as a preacher, but I'm not claiming prophecy. “The Lord is saying to all the members, all the men, the married men in this church, that you are to love your wives as Christ loved the Church and you're to lay yourself down…” It's like, look I actually think that's even harmful to call that prophecy because I don't know that the Spirit is saying, that there's a specific deficiency in the husbands of the church that this is an area of emergency that needs a prophetic word. So it's better to just say the Scripture says this, it's binding on all of our consciences, but don't call it a prophecy. However, if someone is willing to come along and make a prediction and we mark that person as a prophet, then I think we could listen, if they were to say something like a 21st century version of, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." What is that work? X, Y, and Z. I think that would be powerful if God wants to do that, but He first has to mark the person with a clear prediction. What I call, this is very geeky, but here it is: Independently verifiable prediction of the future that then gets verified. Don't predict something that's going to happen in seven centuries. Because how can we know? It has to be verified by fulfillment. And that's always been the rule. Prophecy in Church History Now, has anything like that happened since then? Well, Church history gives us some interesting insights. I want to tell you a story of a Viking raider, that was converted by a prophecy. This is fascinating, this man, his name was Olaf Tryggvason, he lived a thousand years ago, over a thousand years ago, born in the year 963, died in the year 1000. He eventually became king of Norway. He was a viking. Viking was more of a verb, it was like a raider, and he went up and down the coasts of England plundering and killing and doing all the stuff vikings would do. But he was anchored at one point in a place called the Isles of Scilly, that is how you pronounce it, off the West Coast of England. And there was there a Christian hermit who was known to be a prophet. In other words, his reputation as speaking predictions that came true was established. Well Olaf was interested in that. He knew a lot about Christianity, but he was not a Christian. So he decided to test this guy, and he sent one of his tall men to pose as himself to the hermit. The Hermit saw right through that. He said, "You are not the king. And the advice I give you is to be faithful to your king." Well, the man went back, and then Olaf went in person and sought him out and asked if he, Olaf, would attain a kingdom, a kingdom. The hermit replied with a holy prophecy, "You will become a famous king and work famous deeds, you will bring many men to the true faith and to baptism, and in so doing you'll benefit both yourself and many others. And lest you doubt my answer, let this be taken as a token. When you return to your ships you shall encounter a band of traders, and you will yourself receive a mortal wound, and be borne on your shield to your ship, but you'll recover from this wound within seven days, and you'll be baptized soon thereafter." Now, that's a very clear prediction. Well, when Olaf returned to his ships, the events occurred just as the hermit had foretold, Olaf then believed he was a prophet, Olaf then visited the hermit and asked where did he get the wisdom that he could foretell the future? The hermit said that it was the God of the Christians who alone knew the future and who told him all that he was anxious to know. He told Olaf of the many miracles of God, he shared the Gospel with him clearly, and he persuaded Olaf to be baptized. And Olaf and all his men were baptized there. He went on to be the king of Norway. You can look it up. The Gifts of Healings Alright, on the gifts of healings briefly, we don't have much more time. Paul speaks interestingly in verse 8-9, he speaks of the gift of healing, in Verse 9, he says, "to another faith, by the same Spirit, to another, gifts of healings," gifts of healings. All of the English translations make gifts plural, but they all make healing singular. It's odd, it's actually double plural, gifts of healings. Therefore, it could be that they're just different kinds of healings and healing ministries that go on. They're not all of the same sort. Now, for us, you could say, I heard John MacArthur in a sermon on spiritual gifts say, "If I could have one gift I don't have, it would be this gift, the gift of healing." And I think anybody who's been to an ICU, anybody that's been to minister to sick people, hurting people, injured people, you know why he says that. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to lay your hands on somebody and pray for them and have them healed? And that would be a remarkable thing. Jesus Healing Ministry Unmatched No one in all of human history, no one, has had the gift of healing like Jesus. The apostles did not have Jesus' level of healing. Huge crowds went to Jesus and He healed everyone of every disease, there was nothing He could not do. And as a matter of fact there were huge crowds because of this healing gift. You understand why. When you're sick and dying, or someone you love is sick, and dying, it's top priority for you to get that addressed. And we see a number of individuals that are urgent to get the healing, like the royal official in John 4, and the Syrophoenician woman, all they want is to be well or have their loved one well. We understand that. Now, here's the thing: Disease and suffering and accidents and pain, all of that leading to death, is part of the fall in Adam, it's part of the final enemy, what Jesus, what Paul calls the final enemy: Death. Jesus in one sense, banished illness from Palestine for a brief three-year period, but everyone He healed eventually died of something. The gifts of healings, were in some smaller measure committed to the apostles, but they didn't have the same level. Paul left Trophimus sick in Miletus. He gave Timothy counsel about his hurt stomach about not drinking water from a well anymore, but taking wine, so that he wouldn't have these microbes I guess. He didn't heal him, he just said, manage it in this way. Paul himself had a thorn in the flesh, which the Lord chose not to remove. There is in some sense a diminishing of the miraculous gift of healing. However, I don't believe that I can say like an ardent cessationist that there are no miraculous healings anymore. And, frankly, in my 21 years here, I have seen again and again and again, remarkable answers to group prayers. God Answers Prayers for Healing It says in James 5:14-15, "Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him, and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. The Lord will raise him up." So many of us have had people that we know that have had very serious diagnoses, and are prayed for, and they go back and there's just remarkable evidence of healing and there's no medical explanation, and so we've seen that again and again. Now is that the gift of healing? I'm not up here to say it is or it isn't. Imagine if there were a brother or a sister that just had a heart for sick people and loved to pray for them, and followed James 5 and went and prayed all their life, again and again, sick people and saw many people healed. Certainly it's different than Jesus who never failed to heal somebody, but it's more similar to how the apostles sometimes left people sick. And so, I cannot say, like I'm a kind of a black and white cessationist, that that kind of gift doesn't happen. I am skeptical of public healers like TV-type people, as we all should be, because we've not seen organic diseases healed by those individuals. But I think we have seen, there's many testimonies of organic illnesses healed in answer to group prayer. And to have a brother or sister that might want to be in those groups again and again, and has seen multiple healings to look over 20 centuries of Church history and say that couldn't happen, I'm not ready to do it. So where does that leave us? I don't know, it leaves me out of time. What I would say is that I cannot go with the cessationist scripturally and say that these gifts have certainly ceased, but I have pretty serious questions about some continuationists and the way specifically the gift of prophecy functions. And so, at least for me, and I'm going to commend it to you, dear church, to require prediction of the future for somebody to be identified as a prophet. And if they won't do that, I'll just welcome them as giving me good, sound, scriptural, Christian exhortation. Does that makes sense? Prayer Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank You for the time we've had to study Your word. We thank You for its complexity, its depth, its power. I thank You for the gifts of the Spirit. Lord, as I'm going to say in two weeks, God willing, the ordinary ministry of the Spirit is sufficient to do so many things, and I pray that as in the end we understand spiritual gifts we'd realize that the non-controversial gifts that are going on all the time, that everyone agrees are so powerful and so sufficient to finish the work, but that there may be advancements of the power of the Spirit that we should seek that is often called revival, that we should seek Your face, and ask You would pour out afresh and anew Your Holy Spirit, that we might be empowered to share the Gospel with people who need to hear it so much, and that we be empowered to do all the good works You have for us to do. In Jesus' name. Amen.

I. Worldwide Fear of Death Please open your bibles to Acts 2. We’re not going to do an exegetical walk through this text, but I want to say some things from that and then look at some other texts. There are always new things happening in this world of ours. I had not heard of this terrorist attack until this morning. And we're mindful of the fact that we live in this complex and diverse world and there are cultures very different from ours, language is very different than ours. People who answer the basic questions of life of what they will eat and how they will speak and what they will wear and how they will celebrate very differently than we do in our culture. We know that those lands have different heritages, different histories, different stories that they tell from their own past, they're very different than ours. So it's just an incredibly diverse world that we live in, but one thing unifies the human race, very much on my mind this morning, and that is fear of death, fear of death. In 1973, Ernest Becker a Pulitzer Prize winning author wrote a book entitled "The Denial of Death." And the thesis of the book is that humanity is enslaved worldwide by a fear of dying. This man is not writing from a Christian perspective, but he said that what people do all over the world is deny, deny, deny, deny. And they find a lot of different ways to deny death and their fear of death. There are religious ways, narcotic ways, alcoholic ways, ways of success and labor and all of that, that distracts and diverts. There are cosmetic ways and surgical ways to deny that you're aging. There are all kinds of denials of death. Becker said the main thesis of his book is that the fear of death haunts the human being like nothing else. It is a main spring of human activity, activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. Now this author back then had no answer for this. He's just making an observation. But we have the answer, amen. We have the answer to death itself and to fear of death. And we praise God, and we're assembled today to celebrate that answer. Hebrews 2:14-15 says that by Christ's death, "he destroyed him who holds the power of death, that is the devil, and freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." What a triumphant passage that is. And if I'm not careful I'll just go over and preach on that one right now. There's so many celebrating passages that we can... But liberated from fear of death. All over the world, death is known as the final enemy. We understand this, funeral rituals, very diverse, different cultures, but they're there and they're powerful, and they involve immense lamentations and overwhelming grief. It's really very simply. You just live long enough in the world, you know this reality. A certain person who's important to you is alive, he has wrapped himself up in your life in some way, he's part of your life, you eat with him, you talk with him, you enjoy his company, laugh at his jokes, maybe, work together on some project. He's woven into the fabric of your life to some degree. But then suddenly one day something happens, and you never see him alive again in this world. Maybe you see his dead body and maybe you don't, but one thing you know, that person who you remember is gone, and you never from that time on saw them again alive in this world. That's the experience of death, every culture, every nation, every tribe, subject to the same sorrow. And there's no refuge on this planet. No one's figured it out somewhere. It could be the distant mist covered valleys of Irian Jaya, there's no stone age tribe that's found some secret to the problem of death. Or even in the barren outreaches of the outback of Australia. It's not like there's some group there that has found the secret. Or you could go to the steel and glass high rises of Asia, Macau, or Hong Kong, and all of the teaming population there and there's not some back alley there where there's some specialist that is an oriental expert in herbs and has some interesting remedies that has delivered him and everyone that comes to his shop from death. Or you could go to the farmlands of the Ukraine where people are working hard, leading a wholesome life, and they're having year after year crops growing and they live that life of a Ukrainian wheat farmer, but there's no remedy, they die with no remedy. We've got missionaries that work in the northern regions of the Laplanders in Finland, and they send back reports that they haven't discovered a secret to death, and the Gospel is needed there, because they die just like we do. And the same thing in the jungles of the Amazon, this unites the people there too. They have all kinds of flora and fauna there, they have all kinds of interesting species of spiders and tree frogs with special poisons in them and all kinds of other chemicals that we don't have here in Raleigh-Durham, but they haven't discovered a secret to death. Not even in Durham, North Carolina, the City of Medicine, where right near us within a few minutes drive there are pharmaceutical companies that are researching various aspects of pain and suffering and disease, but none of them has conquered death and they won't. So this brings us to this Easter celebration, this Resurrection Day celebration. II. Jesus Christ Has Conquered Death Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. He has conquered death. And He is the only one. I'm not denying that some people have been resuscitated by CPR or those electrical pallets that put electricity and revive a dead heart. I don't even deny that there are in the Bible accounts of miracles of Lazarus and others that were resuscitated to the same mortal life that we now experience, but Christ alone has been resurrected, never to die again. He's the only one. And He says in John 10:17-18, "The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life only to take it up again. No one takes my life from me. But I lay it down freely of my own accord. I have the authority to lay my life down and I have the authority to take it back up again. This command I received from my Father." Can you imagine anyone else making such a claim? There is no one else, no religious leader has made such a claim. I have absolute and power over life and death, my own. No one can kill me if I don't will to be killed, but I lay my life down freely and I have the power to take it back up again. And again, Revelation 1:18, where Jesus appeared to the Apostle John, when he was in the island of Patmos in exile, and he says this, Jesus said to John, "I am the living one. I was dead and behold I am alive forever and ever, and I hold the key of death and Hades." So not only that, Jesus claims to unleash that power toward us, to give us the fruit of His resurrection victory. That's what makes all of this a celebration. He said in John 14:19. "Because I live, you also will live." Cherish that O dear brothers and sisters in Christ, "Because I live, you also will live." And again, John 11, Jesus said to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." But we may ask how can we be certain of these things? I need to know how can I be certain that Christ is risen, and that he can give me that same resurrection victory? What would be the ground of my assurance, the ground of my certainty? How can we who live here in the Raleigh-Durham area, in this high tech era, this digital age, 21st century, how can we derive any kind of certainty or assurance of these things? We're skeptical people, we need to know how can we know that any of this is true? And I say to you right now, the only way you will ever have certainty that Christ is risen from the dead, and that you also will be raised from the dead in the end is by faith in the Word of God. There is no other ground of assurance. Only by faith in the Word of God in the Scriptures will you have this certainty. If you don't have that faith in the word of God, you'll not have any certainty, either that Christ has been raised from the dead, or that you also could be raised from the dead. And the Bible is given to minister that faith to us, to feed us by faith. At the end of John's Gospel, in John 20:31, the Apostle John expressed why he had written his account of all the miracles, including the miracle of Christ's own resurrection. And said, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name." So by reading the words on the page, so you may have eternal life, you can access Christ's resurrection victory by simple faith in the Word of God. III. “This is What is Written” Now you may say there are many holy books. Wise men in the past, religious leaders have written things down, there are holy books a plenty. Seems like every religion has its own library, its own set of holy books. What is the difference between the Bible and the Hindu Scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu writings? Or the Muslim writing, the Quran, what's the difference between the Bible? Why should we believe the Bible as a holy book compared to the Quran? Or the Analects of Confucius or the Sutras of Buddhism or other holy books. But what is the difference? Well, there's two central differences in reference to the Bible. The first is predictive prophecy and the second is the testimony to the person and work of Jesus. No other scriptures have this combination of predictive prophecies culminating in this perfect historical figure, Jesus, that's the difference. And Jesus claimed to have power over death and He... It is said of Him by the eyewitness that He was physically raised from the dead. But his central evidence was the prophecies that were written in the Old Testament, and that's what we're going to spend the rest of our time on, feeding our faith on the prophecies. What is written? The Jewish religion was founded on Scripture, the writings of Moses, and then of the Prophets, and they were assembled in what we call the Old Testament, the 39 books of the Old Testament, written centuries before Jesus was born. And the Jewish life and religion was based on the Scriptures. Moses said in Deuteronomy 32:47, concerning the words he had written there in The Five Books of Moses. "These are not just idle words for you, they are your life." But not only did Jewish Scripture contain the laws by which the Jewish nation was to live, it also contained God's predictions about the future and this is what makes the Bible unique, God's ability to predict the future, and then tell the prophets what was to come and they wrote it down. There's no other religion in the world that has this aspect of predictive prophecy of foretelling. As he said in Isaiah 46:9-10, "I am God and there is no other, I am God and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning from ancient times what is still to come. And I say, my purpose will stand and I will accomplish all that I please." I love that, that's Isaiah 46:9-10. He says, I declare to you, I speak to you the end from the beginning. I tell you where we're going with all this. No other religion does. The Bhagavad Gita doesn't do it, the Quran doesn't do it, the Sutras don't do it, the Analects of Confucius don't do it, but Scripture does. And it was all asserted centuries before Jesus was born, the central event in human history was the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth and it was all predicted centuries before He was born. And so Jesus, after He was raised from the dead, went to His own disciples there in the upper room, and this is what he said, Luke 24:44-48. "He said to them, this is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms. Then He opened their minds, so they could understand the Scriptures." He has the power to do that. He has the power, and I actually prayed for this yesterday that this would happen. In my mind, in your minds, in the minds of any unbelievers that might be here that were invited to come worship with us, that He would open your mind by the power of the Holy Spirit to understand the Scriptures. He has that power to do it. And Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. He told them this is what is written that Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. Well, that was just the beginning of a 40-day period in which Jesus trained His disciples in the Old Testament Scriptures. It was the greatest seminary in history. Now, we're right near by Southeastern Seminary. I happen to teach there from time to time and I love it. It's one of the greatest seminaries in the world, it's nothing compared to that 40-day Seminary. And I think all of you students that are at Southeastern or any of you professors, you must assent to this, that you would rather sit at Jesus' feet than any of the esteemed faculty at Southeastern. But the topic of that 40-day seminary was very clear. This is what is written, this is what the prophets said would happened, so that their faith would rest certainly on the unchanging, the written Word of God, Acts 1:3. "After His suffering, Jesus showed Himself to these men and gave them many convincing proofs that He was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days, and spoke about the kingdom of God." Now, what Scriptures did He share with them? We don't know, but we do know how Peter and the other Apostles preached on the day of Pentecost. And we do know how the Apostle Paul wrote the Book of Romans and all of the Scriptures, the Old Testament Scriptures that he used to feed into them. Now, Paul was not there in that 40-day seminary, but he received a special tutoring session from the Holy Spirit. But it's the same Old Testament prophecies and scriptures. IV. The Three Greatest Prophecies of Christ’s Resurrection And I'm going to look with you this morning at the three greatest Old Testament prophecies of Christ's resurrection from the dead, and then the three greatest prophecies of our own resurrection from the dead, also from the Old Testament. Psalm 16 And we begin with Psalm 16, this is the one that Peter quoted on the day of Pentecost. Now, if you look at Acts 2, we're going to just give a setting of this, this preaching that he did. The day of Pentecost was one of the three major festivals in the Jewish year. It was very close in time to the Passover just 40 days later, and so, pilgrims would come from all over the Greek speaking, the Roman world, the Jews from distant lands, and converts to Judaism would come to Jerusalem for the Passover and they would stay over for Pentecost. Thousands of Jews have made this journey and they would stay. Now, Christ was crucified, in fulfillment of the Passover symbolism was crucified on Passover Friday, He was buried just before the Sabbath, He was raised to life on the third day after the Sabbath, the first day of the week. Now for 40 days, Jesus met with the disciples to go over these Scriptures and He told them that at the end of that time, they should wait in Jerusalem for the gift that the Father would give them, the Holy Spirit who would be poured out on them from on high. And Jesus would ascend up to heaven and that He and the Father together would pour out the Holy Spirit. Well, then Jesus did ascend and the church went back to the upper room, and they are waiting in the upper room for the gift that the Father was going to send. On the day of Pentecost, the gift was given. The Holy Spirit was poured out from on high, and they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. And there's the sound of a violent tearing shredding wind, powerful like a hurricane level wind and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them. And this crowd gathered of these pilgrims that were there for Pentecost, gathered around the house where they were staying, because they heard the sound of the wind. And Peter and the other Apostles went down and began to preach the Word of God to them. And what was amazing is that people heard all of them hearing one message, but they all could hear that one message in their own native languages. So God was doing something in their minds so that they heard, their eardrums would vibrate, but they would hear it in their own mother tongues. And Peter preached this incredible message, and in verse 22, he talks about the life and the miracles of Jesus' ministry. He said in verse Acts 2:22, "Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs which God did among you, through him as you yourselves know." So many of those people were eyewitnesses to the miracles Jesus had done. But then Peter in the next verse lays the blame for their death right at their feet. He just lays it at their feet. They had seen Jesus' miracles, they knew who Jesus was. And God and handed Him over to them, the Jewish nation, for judgment. Look at verse 23, "This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge…" Stop right there. Let me just tell you, God had worked this whole thing out before the foundation of the world. There's no surprise, He didn't throw this thing together at the last minute. Not at all. He knew exactly what He was going to do with the problem of sin before He said, "Let there be light." And He made this whole plan, that's how He was able to speak through the prophets and let out a little bit of information to mark Jesus as the Messiah, the Savior of the world. But anyway, Peter said, "This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of lawless men, wicked men, put Him to death by nailing Him to the cross." "You did it." He was blaming the nation of Israel, along with the wicked men, the lawless men. Peter then declared very simply the greatest good news in human history. Look at Vverse 24, "But God raised Him from the dead, freeing Him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on Him." Oh, don't you love those words? Can you just spend the rest of the day meditating on Acts 24? God raised Him from the dead, and freedom from the agony of death, why? Because death couldn't hold Him. It's impossible for death to keep hold of Jesus. And then in verse 32 again, "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact." So the church was based on the power of eyewitness testimony, "We have seen Jesus alive." This is a matter of historical record. In space and time, we saw this individual, we touched Him, we ate with Him, we saw Him. Eyewitness. But God knew that was a temporary... A temporary status. Very soon after that, the physical evidence of the resurrection would be gone, maybe later that same day it was gone. And the eyewitnesses themselves would be arrested, and would martyred, and even in John's case, die of old age in exile, and they'd be gone. And future generations would only have one thing, the Bible. Only have the scriptures. That's all we would have. And the eyewitness would write down what they saw, and so we have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And we have... But it's the same thing, the Scripture. And so only by the prophecies of Scripture can we believe that these things are true. And so Peter there in his Pentecost message, turns to the solid foundation of predictive prophecy, and he turns to Psalm 16. It was the resurrection that had been predicted by King David a thousand years before Jesus was born. Look at verses 25-28, and that's chapter two. David said about Him, "I saw the Lord always before me because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices. My body also will live in hope because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your holy one see decay. You have made known to me the path of life, you will fill me with joy in your presence." So that's Psalm 16. The Jews had been reading it for 10 centuries. It was well known to them, they didn't understand the meaning. And they hadn't really thought it through. They hadn't put two and two together. Peter puts it all together for them. He said, "Look, David, King David wrote this... " He didn't say, a thousand years ago, but they knew, a long time ago. And he wrote these words speaking of the defeat of death and decay at the grave, a corruption, "You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your holy one see decay." Think about it. Peter makes the point here, David could not have been speaking about himself, because David himself died and was buried and his body decayed. Look at verse 29, "Brothers, I can tell you confidently, [boldly, clearly] that the patriarch David died and was buried and his body is here to this day." It decayed. Remember the death of Lazarus and how the sisters were worried that if you took the stone away too early after four days, there would be a bad odor. You know what decay is all about, the corruption of bacteria, of worms eating the body, the defilement of the body because of sin. The body is sown in corruption and it's sown in dishonor. That's what decay is all about. But this prophecy says, "You will not abandon me to the grave, and you will not let me see decay." Well, Peter says... "He's not writing about himself because he died and decayed." But who's he writing about? Look at what he says verse 30 and 31. "He was a prophet, and he knew that God had promised him on oath that He would place one of his descendants on His throne. Seeing what was ahead [I love those words], he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay." Just ponder that, what other religion? Seeing what was ahead, and we would add writing what he saw. It's predictive prophecy, he was not talking about himself, to declare in words and write it down and have those scriptures handed on from generation to generation of Jews. Have the scribes copy them, all of those Hebrew letters, copy them, the generation after generation, not think it through. But the time had come for the veil to be removed from their minds and from ours, and say, "How could this be possible? How could someone die and see no decay?" And this is this testimony that is given in Scripture. It gives us the certainty that Christianity is true, and that Christ is risen from the dead. No other religion has these predictive prophecies. And these prophecies center on the most important issue in life, how we sinners can be forgiven by almighty God, and how we can live forever, and not die. That's what these predictions have to do. Psalm 22 Well, what other prophecies do you think that Jesus showed to His church? I want to give you two others, Psalm 22 and you can turn and look there if you would, and also one other, Isaiah 53. First Psalm 22, again written by King David, so a thousand years before Jesus was born. Jesus quoted Psalm 22 from the cross. He said, "My God my God, why have you forsaken me?" Psalm 22:1. I've often thought to myself that's Jesus' way of saying, "After all this is done, go back and read Psalm 22." But it also was a real sense of abandonment by God, with Him as our substitute. God made Him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God, that exchange at the cross, and so that sin, our sin was laid on Him, and God in some mysterious way, abandoned Jesus. And He says, "My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?" Now, that... This Psalm breaks into two main sections, and Peter spoke about it, how the prophets spoke of the sufferings of the Christ and the glories that would follow. That's a good two-part outline to Psalm 22. The sufferings of Christ come through the first section, the subsequent or following glories is in the second half of Psalm 22. Jump down with your eyes if you would at verses 14 through 18. This is a description of the physical process of crucifixion. It says there, "I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax, it is melted away within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. Dogs have surrounded me, a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones. People stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing." Well, there are many details in this Psalm that were directly fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, including His garments being gambled over, but especially amazing are these words in verse 14 and verse 16. Verse 14, "I am poured out like water... " Dehydration. "And all of my bones are out of joint." Disfigurement. And then verse 16, "They have pierced my hands and my feet." So again, this was written a thousand years before Christ was crucified, but it was also written about three centuries before the Assyrians invented crucifixion. Nothing like this had happened to anybody in David's time. David's hands and feet were not pierced, his bones were not physically put out of joint, he wasn't dehydrated, he wasn't surrounded by a bunch of enemies, and his garments were not gambled for. Again, he was a prophet, and he spoke filled with the Holy Spirit, seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the crucifixion of the Christ. But then at a certain point, the Psalm just turns and gets really happy. The Psalm just turns and gets really happy. The Psalm just turns and gets really celebratory. Look at Verses 22 through 25, "I will declare your name to my brothers in the congregation, I will praise you. You who fear the Lord, praise Him. All you descendants of Jacob honor Him. Revere Him all you descendants of Israel, for He has not despised or disdained the sufferings of the afflicted one. He has not hidden His face from him, but has listened to his cry for help. From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly. Before those who fear you, I will fulfill my vows." Suddenly, this suffering individual is celebrating a great deliverance in the great assembly. Look at verses 29 through 31, "All the rich of the earth will feast and worship. All who go down to the dust will kneel before Him. Those who cannot keep themselves alive. Posterity will serve Him, future generations will be told about the Lord, they will proclaim His righteousness to a people yet unborn, for He has done it." This is resurrection, triumph, victory. Now, I was going to take the second half of Psalm 22 and put it in the second category, predictions of our own resurrection, but I kept it here. "All of those who go down to the dust… who cannot keep themselves alive... " Do you know who that is? That's us. And on the basis of Christ's piercing, on the basis of His crushed status, and His death on the cross, we will live forever. This is the celebration of Psalm 22. Isaiah 53 Now, Isaiah 53. Go and look at Isaiah 53, specifically verse 5 and 6. If Psalm 22 describes clearly how Christ died, Isaiah 53 describes very clearly why Christ died. Isaiah 53:5,6. Jesus' death was as a substitute for our sins. The centerpiece of Christianity was, or is substitutionary atonement. Atonement literally means "at-one-ment." We were estranged from God, and through Christ's substitutionary death, through His suffering, we are made at one with God, reconciled with God. And no verse in the entire Bible, including the New Testament teaches substitutionary atonement as clearly as Isaiah 53:5, and also verse six. Look at it, "He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds, we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Written six-and-a-half to seven centuries before Jesus was born. Why did He die? He died because we all like sheep have gone astray. Because we're sick with sin and we need healing. Because we're rebels. We have all turned away from God and followed our own path, and we deserve to be condemned to hell, we deserve to die eternally for our sins. And God sent His son, His only begotten son, Jesus, born of the virgin Mary, to come into the world, lead a sinless life under the law of Moses, never violated the law, but then die an atoning death, a substitutionary atoning death. Look at Verse five, look at the substitutionary language. "He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds, we are healed." Again, notice in verse five the word pierced. That's a very unique, interesting word. I picture a sharp implement, a sword, a needle, an awl, something like that going through with force, a membrane to the other side. That's what piercing is. And there are actually four prophecies in the Old Testament linked to the death of Jesus in which the word pierce is used. How do you explain it? But here it's not actually talking so much about the mechanism of Christ's death, but the purpose of it and the results. By His wounds we are healed. Now, you may ask healed from what? Let's just keep it in the context first. Healed from sin, healed from turning to our own way and doing what we want. Healed from rebellion. Now you say... I've heard some people say this means also physical healings involved. Oh yes, infinitely so, more than you can imagine, not like the health and wealth prosperity Gospel where you can be healed from a cold. I mean healed from everything, from every pain and suffering you can ever imagine in a resurrection body for eternity in heaven. That's the healing He's going to give you. And all of it blood-bought. Verses 7 through 9 in Isaiah 53 also depict details of Christ's death and burial. "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before it shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and who can speak of his descendants, for he was cut off from the land of the living [that means dead]. For the transgression of my people, he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked and was with the rich in his death." You don't need a grave if you're not dead, so he died. But he was buried in a rich man's tomb. I've often thought about Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who were hidden secret disciples of Jesus before He was a corpse. Think about this. Did the Romans do guilt by association? Oh, big time. Would they have wanted any of Jesus' secret followers, to arrest them and maybe execute them? Absolutely. Where then did Joseph and Nicodemus suddenly get their courage to ask for the dead body of Jesus and bury Him with lavish spices in Joseph's rich man's tomb. Where did that courage come from? I tell you, it came from the Holy Spirit. Did it come from them reading the prophecies and saying, "You know Joseph, we need to go and fulfill this prophecy right here. We need to be certain that He's buried in a rich man's tomb." Nothing of the kind, they just suddenly, out of a love for Jesus and a sorrow at His death, took up courage and got the body and buried it in a rich man's tomb. But Isaiah predicted it seven centuries before Jesus was born. Look at the end, verse 10 and 11, "Though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days." Oh, He has a future, a history after being buried. Yes, He does. "The will of the Lord will prosper in His hands." Praise God. Verse 11, "After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied, and by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities." He was buried, and after the burial, He will see light. He will see His descendants, and He will rejoice. Resurrection. Well, those are the three greatest predictions of Christ's death and resurrection. V. The Three Greatest Prophecies of Our Resurrection What about our own? Do you see that this day would not be a happy day for us, if Christ is risen, and ascended and glorified, and we all end up in hell? It's because Christ is willing to take His resurrection victory and give it to us. He's the champion. He wins the championship and He gives all the plunder and the booty and the gold medals, and all of that to us. He already has all that, He's going to be seated at the right hand of almighty God. He did it for us, and it was written down and predicted centuries before He was born. Isaiah 25-26 Turn, if you would to Isaiah 25 and 26. We'll start at 25. On Maundy Thursday, I talked about this Isaiah 25:6-8. I'm not going to walk through it carefully, but just read it. Isaiah 25:6-8: "On this mountain, the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud that unfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations. He will swallow up death forever. The sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. He will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth, the Lord has spoken." There is a rich feast coming, a banquet, and what's amazing about this banquet so lavishly described is that it really comes down to one thing: The destruction of death. He's going to destroy the shroud that's wrapped around the corpse, the sheet that unfolds all nations. He's going to swallow up death forever and we are going to celebrate. Now look to the next chapter, Isaiah 26:19. "But your dead will live. Their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning. The earth will give birth to her dead." A clear prediction of not Jesus' resurrection here, but the resurrection of those who went down to the dust, whose bodies did decay, who were buried, but the earth is going to give birth to her dead. You have to put the two together. By Christ's resurrection victory, death has been destroyed and the earth will give birth to her dead. Job 19:25-27 Turn to Job 19:25-27. Job was a godly man who suffered greatly, the loss of all his possessions and his children in a single day, and then the loss of his health, but these immense sufferings could not shake his trust in God. So look at Job 19:25-27. There he wrote, "I know that my redeemer lives and that in the end, he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see him with my own eyes, I and not another. How my heart yearns within me!" So after the worms have eaten me up and after my body has been destroyed, because my redeemer lives, I in my own flesh will see my God. Job 19:25-27. Daniel 12:2-3 The final one is Daniel 12, Verse 2 and 3. Turn to Daniel 12:2,3. Prophet Daniel lived six centuries before Jesus was born. God gave him amazing visions of the end of the world, and the greatest promise of all concerned the bodily resurrection of the dead from the grave into eternal glory. Daniel 12:2-3, "Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt." That's the doctrine of the general resurrection. But then Verse 3, "Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens and those who lead many to righteousness like the stars forever." Now, that's a glorious resurrection, resurrection glory. Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will arise and shine with radiant glory. Look again at Verse 13. Daniel as usual was overwhelmed by the vision, didn't have any idea what he was talking about, was just told to write it down and not worry about it, and then was given this specific prediction concerning himself. Look at Verse 13. "As for you," this is an angel speaking to Daniel, "go your way till the end. You will rest," that means you will die, "and then at the end of the days, you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance." How powerful is that? So, this morning, we've looked at clear predictions of the death and resurrection of Jesus and clear predictions of the general resurrection of the righteous into bodies that will shine and live forever. VI. Applications What application can we take from this? Well, you don't have to turn there, but go back in your minds to the end of Peter's Pentecost sermon. After you get done preaching, it says that the people who heard him were cut to the heart or pierced in their hearts, and said to Peter and the other apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?" And Peter and the other apostles replied, "Repent from your sins and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." He didn't say it, but he could have added, "And you will be raised in a glorious resurrection body at the end of the world." So simply, all of you who hear me should believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. If you've never done that before, Welcome. I'm glad that you're here. I'm glad that somebody invited you. Maybe you just decided to come to church because it's Easter. If you did not come in here knowing that your sins were forgiven by faith in Christ, this is the time to cross over from death to life spiritually, and Jesus' resurrection victory will be yours for all eternity. Peter said it plainly, "Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." For those of you that are Christians, let me just say this to you. Be healed emotionally. You need emotional therapy. You're like, "Well, how do you know that?" I just know because I need it and I know all of you. It's like, "Yes, another Easter. We need to sing and celebrate and the music needs to be a little bit louder and a little bit faster tempo, and so we'll do that, and the preaching needs to hit a certain pitch, and all that," look, set all that aside. That'll all be gone within, by the afternoon. Do you realize that almost all of Jesus' disciples and apostles emotionally reacted the wrong way to the news of the resurrection? They're all off. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were just straight depressed. And furthermore, some of our women have told us that the tomb is empty and we can't make hide nor hair of it. They don't know what's going on. And Jesus said, "How foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken to you." And He healed them by the ministry of the word. They didn't know who He was. His identity was hidden from them. But at the time... By the time He got done, their hearts were burning within them based on the scriptures. Think about Peter, Peter sees the actual evidence for the resurrection, and he went away puzzled. Peter. John saw and believed. Peter went away wondering. What about Mary there at the empty tomb and she's weeping and she sees the physical evidence for the resurrection and she's just weeping and crying? And the angel says, "Woman, why are you weeping?" "They've taken my Lord away and they put him somewhere and I don't know where he is and I want to get him and bring him back and bury him. I want to finish his burial." That's what she was about. Focused, focused individual. Alright? "I got to finish his burial." "No, you don't." And then Jesus appears and she thinks he's the gardener. It's one of the great moments in redemptive history, Mary thinking Jesus, the resurrected Jesus, is the gardener. "Sir, if you have taken him, tell me where he is and I'll get him and bring him back." Really? What's the plan, Mary? Then Jesus just spoke out of tenderness, and said, "Mary," and she immediately, with the hearing of her name, fell at His feet and worshipped Him. So I don't know what your emotional state was when you came in here. Maybe it was fine. Maybe you're just filled with joy, but I know this: Our joy is under constant assault by the world, the flesh and the devil. And my job here isn't to heat you up to a fever pitch and send you out like a coach at halftime and you're losing by three touchdowns. That's not my job. My job is to preach the Word and say you have a lasting permanent basis for unchanging joy, and you may be sometime sorrowful, but you can be always rejoicing based on these facts. So emotional therapy. Thirdly, let's put sin to death by the Spirit. We have the power to live in Christ a resurrected life. His resurrection physically gives us proof that we can live by the Spirit a resurrected life spiritually in holiness. Put sin to death this week by the power of the Spirit. The things that depress me the most in my life are my own sins. We don't need to sin ever again. We are set free from sin. Think like this. It was impossible for death to keep its hold on Jesus. It was also impossible for Him to sin. Some day, it's going to be impossible for you to sin. The more you live like that now, the more joyful you will be and the more fruitful you will be. And finally, let's go out this week as messengers. The staff went out on Monday and were handing out invites to Easter. Two-thirds of the people we talked to didn't know it was Easter. I was excited about that. You know why? It means we can do the same thing next week. Don't tell them it's Easter, but you can tell them we'll be celebrating the resurrection. We'll do that for sure. They don't know. We are becoming an increasingly post-Christian, pagan society. People don't know these things. They don't automatically go to church on Easter anymore. So let's go out and tell them this week that Christ has risen and that they in Him can live forever. Close with me in prayer.

Descending Into the Muck Turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians. My purpose today is to just give an overview of the 16 chapters, and as I do, I think about where we've recently been in the preaching ministry of this church and where we're going, and the dichotomy, the difference, the contrast between those two is rather stark. It reminded me of a moment in Jesus' life in ministry in which he (now this is in Matthew 17) took Peter, James, and John with him up a mountain and there he was transfigured before them, before their eyes, and his face became as radiant as the sun, shining in all his brilliance, and his clothes became as white as the light. And they fell down trembling, and a cloud surrounded them, and a voice came from the cloud saying, "This is my son, whom I love; with him, I am well pleased." And they had the ultimate mountain top experience with Jesus. But as they came down off that mountain top experience, they came back down into the muck of everyday life in ministry. Because what had happened while those three apostles were up on the mountain with Jesus is the other nine apostles were down in the valley blowing it big time, because a man brought his demon-possessed son to them to drive out the demon. This demon seized control of this man's son, and had done for many years, often driving him in a suicidal manner into the fire or the water, and the father again and again was rescuing his son from death, and heard that there was a ministry, Jesus and some men that could drive out demons. Matthew 10 had already happened, Jesus had already empowered them to go out and do exactly that, but they were completely ineffective. And the man had very little faith at that point, frankly in Jesus or in his followers, saying, "If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us?" And Jesus responded, thinking about his church, thinking about his apostles, with these words, "Oh, unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me." And later the nine who were unable, they came to Jesus privately (that was probably wise) said, "Why couldn't we drive it out?" Jesus said, "This kind can come out only by prayer." Now, you stop and think about that. They didn't pray. In their own strength they tried to drive out the demon, and they completely failed. And so as we go from Revelation 21 and 22, the church in its radiant glory and perfection, perfected in the presence of God, shining like the sun, with all of her sins completely removed and atoned for, and the church in resurrection glory and standing in the presence of God, sitting on His throne, and they see His face, and they're filled with joy. You go from that to 1 Corinthians. Now, if you know anything about 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians is the story of the church dysfunctional. It's not just boots on the ground Christianity, this is boots in the mud. As the Apostle Paul writes and traces out one problem after another with this dysfunctional church, this is the bride of Christ still in garments of filth, not done being saved, wrestling with some of the darkest sins you can wrestle with. And as I look at the summary of this book, I think about 1 Corinthians and what it's all about, I said to Wes right before we began worshipping, "I think what sums up these 16 chapters, as Paul goes in serial form from one problem to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, and in every case, he brings this dysfunctional church back to the gospel, the simple gospel of Jesus Christ. This sums up for me the 16 chapters of 1 Corinthians." The gospel is sufficient to transform a dysfunctional church. And for me as a pastor, that's encouraging news because that's what we are. Now, some of you may have been visiting for a while, you're praying about membership in this church, and you're a bit shocked to hear me say that, that this is an imperfect church. But this is an imperfect church, and all around the world in 24 time zones, imperfect churches are assembling to meet and worship Jesus Christ. All over the world. Imperfect, dysfunctional, faction-ridden, sin-struggling churches, local churches are assembling to meet and to worship Jesus. And the themes, the issues that come up in this book, in 1 Corinthians, they're not comprehensive, there are other issues that come up that aren't addressed in 1 Corinthians. But just the idea of the local church as sinful, struggling, imperfect, needing help is actually immensely helpful and encouraging. Actually, I think both of these are helpful. We need to know where we're going to end up and we're going to end up there. And we need to keep the glorious vision of the church in perfection, in glory, always in our minds. So read Revelation 21 and 22 again and again. Read it today. As we go through 1 Corinthians, God willing, every chapter, every verse, as we just walk through that, and you look at all of the dysfunctionality and the sin and the struggle, and you realize it's in your own heart too, and it's in our church and we're struggling. Just keep going ahead to where we're going to end up, and say, "The sovereign power of God is going to get us there.” But this is reality. This is what we're really dealing with. And so we're going to walk through it. So today, what I want to do is I want to go through five major themes that I think are central in the Book of 1 Corinthians: The power of the gospel, the lostness of the world, the sinfulness of the local church, the power of mature Christian witness, and then the supremacy of love. These five are vital themes. They're not the only themes, but I think they're major themes that we're going to see as we study 1 Corinthians. And as we go through, we're going to go through some of the most controversial issues that local churches ever face. You may wonder, "Why did you wait until the 20th year of your ministry here to preach on 1 Corinthians?" Well, that's why. I lack a certain amount of courage. At some point in these 16 chapters, every one of you will be offended with me. Every single one of you will be, in some way, upset with me. And honestly, if you're not, I don't think I've done a good job because all of us are off to some degree in our thinking. I might be completely right in what I'm preaching on that controversial topic, and you may be off, and you'll come to me in your off-ness and be upset with me for what I preached. Or I may be off. These are controversial and difficult topics, but we need to face them. And if we're going to be healthy, we need to address them. We're going to just walk through them over the next number of months, God willing, if God gives us the time. I. The Power of the Gospel And let's begin with the power of the gospel. It's the best place to start. It's where Paul starts. It's where Paul finishes. The power of the gospel, the basic, simple milk message of Christ and him crucified is sufficient for every one of the issues this church faces, and that's Paul's point. Now, the Apostle Paul brought the gospel to Corinth in a way that was scarcely even noticed at the time. Paul coming to Corinth wasn't a major heralded event in the history of Corinth. He had just been mocked in Athens by the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers on Mars Hill where Paul had reasoned with them in Acts 17. When he began his disputation, they said, "What is this babbler trying to say?" So they had a very disdainful attitude toward him. And then at the end, that was even more intensified with some of them when Paul mentioned the resurrection from the dead, which was preposterous to these spiritually-minded, philosophically-minded Athenian philosophers. And so when they heard about the resurrection from the dead, some of them mocked him, but others said, "We want to hear you more on this topic." Well, that was Athens. He left from there to come travel 50 miles southwest to Corinth. He entered the city quietly. He found a couple of Jewish tentmakers named Priscilla and Aquila, and joined with them because that was his trade. And he settled in and he began reasoning in the Jewish synagogue like he always did if there was a synagogue in the town, and he began preaching. And he described his mentality, and you heard it in the reading that we just heard in 1 Corinthians, "When I came to you brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God, for I resolved to know nothing while I was with you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling." That was Paul, and he began teaching about the gospel there in the Jewish synagogue. But soon they became abusive and Paul had to go to another place and rent a hall and begin teaching because of the abusiveness of the Jews there in Corinth. And frankly, despite Paul's amazing courage, unlike anybody, I think, in church history, in perseverance and courage, he needed to be buttressed by God in that preaching ministry. And so in Acts 18 it says, "One night, the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision, 'Do not be afraid, Paul. Keep on speaking and do not be silent for no one is going to attack you and harm you because I have many people here in this city.'" That means many elect people, unconverted elect people; they are the focus of the International Mission Board, they should be the focus of the Southern Baptist Convention, the focus of this church; unconverted elect people who we want to see brought into justification and then fully saved by sanctification. That should be the focus of the work. And so God gave Paul a special message of encouragement, "I'm going to put a bubble around you here in Corinth, and you'll be able to do your ministry for a while because you have a lot of work to do. There's some people that want to see you... " And those people, "I have many people in the city," they're the ones he's writing to here in 1 Corinthians. Those are the people that would cross over from death to life. So as a result of that encouragement, Paul stayed for a year and a half teaching them the word of God. And as we saw, his resolution in that ministry was to stick to Christ, to him crucified and resurrected. He was rejecting the worldly philosophies of the Greek experts and thinking, the Greek philosophers. He was determined to stick to the simple facts of the gospel, and those facts of the gospel are plain. He repeats them again and again. He goes back to it at the end of this book, 1 Corinthians 15. And there, he said, "Now, brothers I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you." Well, that's his mentality. It's like, "I want to remind you of the gospel. I want you to go back again to the gospel which you received, and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved." Or I could say it this way, "You are being saved by this gospel if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you; otherwise, you have believed in vain." So you need to continue in the gospel. Now, I want to remind you about that gospel. "For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures." That's the basic gospel. And for me, as a pastor, as a preacher, the best thing I can do is to keep reminding you that Christ was crucified for your sins and that he was buried, and that he was raised from the dead on the third day, and that everything you need for life and godliness is wrapped up in those facts. They are the facts of the gospel, and that gospel has the power to save sinners to the uttermost, to save them completely. That message of the cross is the power of God. In 1 Corinthians 1:18, he said, "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are in the process of perishing, but to those who are in the process of being saved, it is the power of God." So the gospel is the power of God for full salvation. There's an initial saving work of God by the power of the gospel when you first hear with faith and you are justified at that moment, you are forgiven of all of your sins: Past, present, and future. The righteousness of Christ is credited to your account. You are seen to be as obedient to the law of God as Jesus was. That's given to you as a gift, and in that righteousness, you will stand on judgment day, perfect, holy, and blameless. That happens in an instant. It happens at the first moment when you're born again, when you hear and believe the gospel. But then the gospel is the ongoing power of God to finish the saving work in you. You're not done being saved because you have indwelling sin in you. See Romans 7. Paul had it (indwelling sin) inside him at that point. He no longer has it, he's glorified now, but at that point, he had indwelling sin. And the very thing he hated, he did, and the thing he wanted to do, he didn't do. And we have that indwelling sin. And that's the Corinthians' problem too. That's our problem. That's what's making this thing so difficult. So the ongoing work of salvation generally called sanctification, the gospel is the power of God for that as well. Tim Keller, in one of his commentary said this, "Paul is showing we never get beyond the gospel in our Christian life to something more advanced." So some of you high schoolers or even college students have graduated or will graduate soon. That's exciting, it's exciting to celebrate that. Can I tell all of you as Christians, you'll never graduate from the gospel? You're never going to go to the next level. That's what Tim Keller is saying. "The gospel is not the first step in a stairway of truths, rather it's more like the hub in a wheel of truth." It's the center of all truths. "The gospel is not just the ABCs but it's actually the A-Z of Christianity" The gospel is not just the minimum required doctrine necessary to get to heaven or enter heaven, but it is the way we make all the progress into the kingdom." And that's what we're going to see in 1 Corinthians. The Role of the Holy Spirit Now, along with this, we see the role of the Holy Spirit. The gospel is a set of doctrines, a set of truths that come up out of the pages of the Bible. Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. Christ was raised from the dead, according to the Scriptures. Just facts, doctrinal facts, historical facts. But we have learned that without the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit, they will not, cannot save anyone. So the gospel itself, just the facts of the gospel, the words of the gospel are insufficient to save souls. It's not enough. Many people prove that by hearing the words preached very well, preached very clearly, and they're not saved. So it's the gospel plus the sovereign application of the Holy Spirit. That combination save souls every time. And so Paul says that too in 1 Corinthians 2, he says, "My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on man's wisdom but on God's power." Only the Holy Spirit can transform a sinner into a Christian. As we're about to see in a moment, the natural mind cannot accept the gospel. Only as the Holy Spirit works through human messengers like me and others, evangelist preachers, while they are proclaiming the true message of the gospel, only at that time, through the sovereign work of the Spirit, can an individual be convicted of sin and see the greatness of Christ and be saved. 1 Corinthians 12:3 says, "No one can say Jesus is Lord apart from the Holy Spirit." This incredible sentence in Romans 10 says that is the essence of salvation. "If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Well, you can't do that apart from the Holy Spirit. In 1 Corinthians 6, he talks to the sinners who have been rescued recently by the gospel, he says, "You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." So all of you equally owe your salvation to the Holy Spirit as to Jesus. And there's no jealousy in the Trinity. Jesus won't be offended by that. It is the Spirit of Christ who's ministering Christ to you. Alright, that's the first point. The transforming power of the gospel. We'll find more about that as we go. II. The Lostness of the World Sexual Immorality Secondly, the lost-ness of the world. Corinth was a city that loved wickedness. They were known especially for sexual immorality, and centuries before Paul ever reached there, there were epithets and slogans tying Corinth to exceptional sexual immorality. Many scholars these days say by Paul's time, that was centuries old. I think Corinth was just an average pagan city that was sexually immoral like all of them are. It was a very bad place. It was a wicked place. Now, there was a specific geographical advantage. They were in a very narrow isthmus of land connecting the Peloponnese, the lower portion of Greece, to the upper portion by a narrow neck. And there were two gulfs that came in, and so ships were tempted to try to get across. There was no canal at that point. There is one now, but sometimes they'd even carry their ships across, but this was a busy port area. And anywhere in the world where there's unconverted people and sailors, and merchants and tradespeople, there's going to be sexual immorality. And so there was there in Corinth as well, especially tied to the pagan temples. There were temple prostitutes who would ply their trade and it was tied up with their worship of the pagan gods and goddesses. And the gospel of Jesus Christ alone has the power to break all of those sexual sins. And they were all going on in Corinth: Adultery, fornication, homosexuality, all of these things were going on. And so it's incredibly relevant to our day as well. Beyond that, we had the problem of idolatry, which is the basic sin of the human race, worshipping and serving created things rather than the Creator, that's idolatry. But when we think of idolatry, we think of systems of religion tied around gods and goddesses, and they had them. They had idols and they worshipped them, idolatry. Idolatry And especially tied into their whole sensual thing, you had temple prostitutes, so there was a sexual side, there was also an appetite side, people who like to eat meat. But in the days before refrigeration you needed fresh meat, and so the place to get it was at a temple. And that's where they're offering animal sacrifices to the gods and goddesses, and you could go and get some meat. So you get your fill of meat and sexual immorality. And that's what the temple system was all about. Paul went beyond it to say, "Do you understand the spiritual realms? Do you understand the spiritual dimensions of paganism? In 1 Corinthians 10:20 it says, "the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons." "Demons. Not to God. And I do not want you to be participants with demons." So I believe that demons are god and goddess impersonators who get behind the fake gods and goddesses but make them be spiritual and supernatural, and lure people in. And so there's a demonic side to the pagan worship there in Corinth. There also was human philosophies. As in all of Greece, it was a place rife with human philosophizing. Greece was known in the world as the center of human philosophies. So you have Plato, and Aristotle, and Socrates and all of these, the Epicurean philosophers and all of that flowing out of Greece, especially out of Athens, Athens not far away. And the Greeks were very prideful of their system of thinking, they were very arrogant about it. And so the first chapter is dealing with the arrogance of human philosophies. In chapter 1 he 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. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate. Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" And then he said, "Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified. To the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." And so they had that philosophical system, and the sinful mind couldn't accept the things of God. 2:14, it says, "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they're spiritually discerned." And only by the power of the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit can that ever change. So that explains the frustration we all have in evangelism. That explains it. When we go out and we explain the gospel and people react the same way now as they did 20 centuries ago, don't be surprised. This explains exactly why. So you got this powerful gospel surrounded by a very sinful wicked world of people who cannot accept its message. III. The Sinfulness of the Local Church Thirdly, we have the sinfulness of the local church. And here's where the rubber meets the road. The Corinthians were a truly dysfunctional messed up church. Now, for those of you that are hunting for the perfect church, if you think in some secluded valley somewhere, there's a group of redeemed people, Christians who are doing it perfectly and they are a flawless perfect local church here on planet Earth, if such a group exists, I know nothing about it. And as someone once wisely said, "If you ever find it, don't join it, you'll ruin it." It was fine before you got there and now look what you're bringing into it. Honestly, the gospel is for dysfunctional messed up people like you and me. Do you realize how we must look to the perfection of heaven? The insanity of our lives, the corruption and divided nature of our hearts, the fact that we keep doing things we know are sinful. We need the ongoing help of the gospel, and it's actually encouraging that there's a book like 1 Corinthians, which is God's word to a dysfunctional church. Now, the Corinthian church was lavishly gifted. Paul, at the beginning in 1 Corinthians 1 says, he thanks God for all of the gifts they had gifted in every way. They're a supremely gifted church, but it was also rife with just about every, almost every trouble a local church could ever face. I could imagine this church personified showing up at an ER, like a spiritual ER, a pastoral ER. And they've got this level of disease. It's like, where do you even begin? It was difficult. You see factions and divisions, there are false teachers, lawsuits among believers, sexual immorality even of the most scandalous kind, even the kind that pagans don't do, marital problems, divorce, remarriage. There was problems with single people and fornication, problems with singleness and understanding the gift of singleness. There's problems with idolatry, the fact that some had recently come out of idolatry and others have been out of it for a while and they weren't meshing very well. The whole meat sacrifice to idols, he's got to address that. Gender roles are addressed. Conflicts over the Lord's Supper, spiritual gift problems, false teaching on the resurrection. Now we're going to walk through all these. I just want to touch on each of them briefly to see what a catalogue of difficulties this is. Factions and Divisions First, factions and divisions. I find it interesting and you should do a study yourselves and confirm what I'm about to say. Almost every epistle, you can discern divisions among the people Paul is writing to, problems in that church where people just aren't getting along. You definitely see it in Romans where he has to write Romans 14, where he has Jews and Gentiles it seems not really getting along well. You definitely see it in Galatians where they were about to bite and devour each other, the effect of legalism. You can see it in Ephesians where he's more general there, but he's pleading with them to do everything they can to maintain the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace. You see it in Philippians where he is pleading with them to have the humble mind of Christ and to get along with each other. And there's two women in particular, they get called out throughout all of time for 20 centuries because they couldn't get along with each other. Euodia and Syntyche. They're up in heaven now, they love each other, doing fine as far as I know. But then they were not getting along, and Paul pleaded with I think the pastor there to get in a room with these ladies and not come out till they were in perfect agreement with one another. I don't know how long that took. But every single church, there's dysfunction, and factions, and divisions, people not liking each other. And Paul has to appeal to them to be one. False Teachers There's a problem of false teachers. You see this much more developed in 2 Corinthians, but it's the same issue. There were these false teachers called super apostles who were totally throwing Paul under the bus, and Paul has to defend his apostolic ministry there. But he said that they were false apostles actually, they were servants of Satan masquerading as angels of light. That's serious. And they were drawing the bride of Christ away from her sincere and pure devotion to Christ by their false teaching. We definitely see it in chapter 15 of this epistle though where they are openly saying there's no such thing as resurrection. That's heresy. And he has to address that. Lawsuits Then there are lawsuits. Back in the day, Tertullian said... One of the number one apologetics, when Jesus said, "By this will all men know that you are my disciples if you love one another," and Tertullian said, "The pagans watch us and say, 'Behold, how they love one another,' we hate each other. 'Behold, how they would die for each other,' we want to kill each other." Well, that's when the apologetic is working well. When one is taking one another to court in front of pagans, that's a bad look. Very bad. And so Paul has to deal with this saying, "Is it possible? There's not anyone with enough wisdom within the church to settle these disputes?" Sexual Immorality And then there's sexual immorality. 1 Corinthians 6, he's pleading with them to be sexually pure. They'd come out of the grossest type of immorality, and homosexuality, and fornication, and all that. And he said, "And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified…" "you've been redeemed out of that lifestyle." And yet in chapter 5, he's got to deal with a member of the church who's sleeping with his father's wife, probably his stepmother. And Paul says it's an immorality of such a kind that pagans even know not to do it. Scandalous. And so he's got to teach them about church discipline because of that individual. And then in chapter 6, he has to plead with the members of the church to not frequent the temple prostitutes. "Don't you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? May it never be." And so he's got to reason with them concerning this sexual immorality. It's very relevant. We may think we 21st century Americans are the first Christians to struggle with sexual immorality. It's been there all along. And 1 Corinthians can help us in our battle for holiness. Marital Problems And then there's marital problems, address in 1 Corinthian 7. That'll be an interesting chapter as we walk through that. But just Paul laying down what a healthy marriage looks like, and divorce, and remarriage, and various issues. Idolatry, Meat Sacrifice to Idols Idolatry, meat sacrifice to idols, the problems in chapter 8 through 10, he does three chapters on that. And you may be saying, "Thank God that we 21st century Americans are done with idolatry." Don't be deceived. But there are other issues there where those that knew that meat's just meat and they can eat it whenever they want were flaunting their freedoms. And they didn't understand that some people have been out of that lifestyle for about three weeks, and their consciences were being hurt and they didn't know what to do. And Paul was trying to draw them together and say, "Your holiness should matter to me." And so he's got to teach them of a kind of a community conviction and discipleship on holiness, three chapters of that. Gender Roles And then there's gender roles. I'm not going to go into head coverings much this morning. I'm just mentioning that it's in this book. And so there Paul was talking about timeless gender roles wrapped up, and I believe a temporal expression of those timeless roles. And we'll talk about that in due time, but I think there may be no generation that's been so gender confused as our generation. And so we're going to need some good teaching on biblical manhood and womanhood, and it's going to come out of this book. Conflicts over the Lord’s Supper Then there's conflicts over the Lord's Supper. The Lord intended this to be a meal that united, and instead some of them were running ahead and taking half the bread, there was none left. And others were literally getting drunk on the wine served at the Lord's Supper. As a result, that was so serious that God, that Christ killed some of them, and others were sick because of how they were dealing with the Lord's Supper. Spiritual Gift Problems Then there was spiritual gift problems. So in due time, we'll get into the charismatic question. I'm telling you, one after the other, it'll be very, very fascinating. It comes from the Greek word gift, the gifts of grace, the charisma. But they were having problems back then too. There was an arrogance going on. There was a boastfulness. So those speaking in tongues were arrogant over those that didn't. And so, there's all of these things that are going on. 1 Corinthians 12-14, those three chapters all have to do with spiritual gifts, and right in the middle of them is the famous love chapter, so he's got teach them to deal with their gifts in love. False Teaching on the Resurrection And then finally, as I said at the end, there's a group of false teachers that were saying in verse 12 of chapter 15, there is no resurrection. "We're Christians but we don't believe in resurrection." Paul is saying it's impossible. Christ has been raised from the dead, and all of us are going to be made like him. He's just the first fruit of a vast resurrection, and you all are going to partake of it. So it is a church that needs some help. And so are we. And this timeless word to this dysfunctional church is going to help us in the midst of our dysfunctionality, whatever it might be. IV. The Power of Mature Christian Witness Fourthly, the power of mature Christian witness. The most powerful weapon for gospel advance is a healthy church, and so the healthier the local church can get, the more powerful will be its witness in that community. And Paul has to teach these Corinthians how to be witnesses. 1 Corinthians 4 may be, for me personally, one of the most convicting chapters that there is in the Bible. For pleasure-loving, affluent Americans. American Christians who want a comfortable relationship with the surrounding world, who want to be thought well of, who want to dress like kings, eat like kings, live like kings, and still have an impact on the world. Paul is saying can't be done. And he gave himself as an example in 1 Corinthians 4. "We are fools for Christ," but then he says rather cynically to them, "But you, you are so wise in Christ. We are weak, but you, you are strong. You are honored but we are dishonored. To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we're in rags, we're brutally treated, we're homeless, we work hard with our own hands. When we're cursed, we bless. When we're persecuted, we endure it. When we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment, we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the worlds." Now, if you hear that and you're like, "Is that what I have to become to become an effective evangelist? That's a hard ask for me." It was hard for them too. But Paul is presenting himself as an example saying, "It's this kind of really other worldly commitment to Christ that really makes a difference in your generation." And so later in chapter 9 he's going to say, "I have become all things to all people, so that by all possible means I might save some." And so this is a call to us to learn what it's going to take to become powerful witnesses for Christ here in our time. And we're going to get a lot from 1 Corinthians. Now, the great joy of this is we need to be confident of final success. Every single one of the elect, chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, are going to end up in resurrection bodies. Not some of them. Not most of them. All of them. And therefore, Paul links a final exhortation toward laboring in the gospel with his whole teaching on the resurrection. It's a little bit of a disconnect for most of us, it's like because there is going to be this glorious resurrection, you should work hard in the gospel. But that's what he does at the end of chapter 15, in verse 58, he says, "Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." That's so encouraging. V. The Supremacy of Love Finally, the supremacy of love. This was a supremely gifted church as we've said. Every gift was at work in that church. They were all there, but there was serious pride issues as well. The gifts were not given to them by God to make them arrogant so they could compare one to another, so the hand could say to the foot, "I don't need you," or conversely, another could say, "Well, because I'm not a mouth or an eye or a hand, I don't belong to the body." And so, it was working both sides of the equation where you had some that were arrogant and think they didn't need anybody else, and then you had others who thought because they weren't gifted in a certain way, they didn't belong, and so they didn't have anything to do. And so all of this was going on around the spiritual gifts. And so in the middle of Paul's teaching on spiritual gifts, he gives the most famous chapter, maybe in the New Testament, certainly in this book, 1 Corinthians, and that's 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. And he links it right to spiritual gifts. "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and I can fathom all mysteries, and if I have all knowledge [if I'm a theological giant], and if I have the gift of faith and I can actually move mountains, but have no love, I am nothing. And if I give all that I possess to the poor, [for those of you that are committed to mercy ministry], "I give everything I have, every moment I have to the poor, and I actually even surrender my body to death, but I have not love, I gain nothing." So right in the midst of all that spiritual gifts, if you don't have love, you gain nothing. And then he defines it so beautifully. Love is patient. Love is kind. It doesn't envy, it doesn't boast, it's not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs, it never fails. That's the demeanor we're supposed to have while we're using our spiritual gifts, while we're ministering to the lost and even to other Christians. And he says all of those gifts, all of them, they're all temporary. They're all going to pass away someday. You won't need them. When we get to Revelation 21 and 22, when the church is perfect in glory, there won't be any spiritual gifts. You don't need them. When we're children, we need childish things. But when maturity, perfection comes, you don't need them anymore. And so when we get to heaven, all the gifts will be fulfilled, they'll be done, but love will still be there. Frankly, even faith and hope will be fulfilled and done. You won't need faith in heaven, and you won't need hope in heaven, but you'll still have love. And so love is supreme above everything else. That's taught clearly in this book VI. Applications So what applications can we take from this? It's where we're heading. It's just quick overview of some of the main themes. First and foremost, I every week call on any that there are in the sound of my voice. If you know yourself to be in darkness, you're on the outside, you're not a believer in Christ, you're invited here today to come to church, and maybe only some of what I've said makes any sense to you, but let me be very clear. The Bible reveals that all human beings are sinners. We all fall short of the glory of God. We've all violated God's laws. The Bible is also clear that judgment day is coming, when we'll stand before a judge who knows everything we've ever done and all the motives of our hearts. There's no escaping that. It's coming. It is appointed us to die once and after that, face judgment. And Jesus is offering himself to be your righteousness on that day. He's offering to cover all of your sins and be your savior and speak for you and advocate his righteousness on your behalf on judgment day. Oh, I would seize it if I were you. I would seize it now while there's time. You don't even know if you'll be alive tomorrow. I would seize this moment and say, "What do I have to do?" All you have to do is believe this good news that God sent his son to die on the cross, that he died a physical death under the wrath of God for sinners just like you, and trust in him to take your sins from you and put them on Christ, the substitute. And that God didn't leave him in the grave, He raised him from the dead on the third day, and that someday you also will be raised like him in glory. Just believe that, and you'll be forgiven, you'll be saved. Secondly, for those of you that are members of this church, I hope I haven't shocked you when I've said that this is a dysfunctional church that needs the Book of 1 Corinthians. Those of you who've been here any length of time, you know it. I think a church can be healthy and still need this message. And I think our church is healthy. I think God's done a great work in this church, but I think there's a lot more that we could and should be doing. And we need this book. Now, I don't know that every one of the headings of problems or dysfunctionality that the Corinthian church faced, we face. I don't know that everything we face, they faced. But I know this, we are an imperfect, sinful church that needs the grace of the gospel, so we need to stand under this gospel more than ever before. We need to go back to Christ and him crucified, him resurrected and trust in that message. Drink that milk day after day. Remind yourself who you are, who you were, what God has done for you. Stop being arrogant. Stop being arrogant in your marriage. Stop being arrogant in your family life. Stop being arrogant toward lost people. Wherever you find pride, be like the tax collector beating his breast saying, "Be merciful to me, the sinner. That's who I am." And just know we need that gospel. And ask God to work in this church. Pray. If you can't come at 6:00 AM and join us in prayer, okay. Pray where you are with us. Pray for our church, not just to be more fruitful evangelistically. Pray that we'd be holy. That we would be healthy in our marriages. Healthy in our personal lives. Healthy when we look at the internet. Healthy in everything we do. The internal journey of holiness. And that flowing out of that power we would be very courageous and bold witnesses. Pray for that. Be willing to suffer as messengers for the gospel. 1 Corinthians 4. Maybe if you have time, read it. It's very convicting. And as you read it's like, "I don't want to be like that. I want to be a comfortable, affluent, pleasure-seeking American who's seeking the esteem of the world around me. I want to be a messenger of the gospel. Make me one, Lord." And then finally, just have a spiritual gift ministry and do it. Find what you're gifted to do and just do it. Stand firm in that ministry. And know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Close with me in prayer. Father, thank you for the initial overview brush that we've had across 1 Corinthians today. We are thankful for the power of the gospel to transform a sinful, dysfunctional people. Lord, we know in the end all local churches will become obsolete. They will go away. But the individuals in them are eternal. And I pray that you would help us, O Lord, to make the most of our time in this church. To grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ. Help us to love one another deeply from the heart. Help us to be humbled by the gospel and to love each other in that humility. And help us to be bold and courageous as witnesses to the lost people that are just pouring into this Triangle Region that don't know the Lord, that need Christ. We pray this in His name and for His glory. Amen.

Introduction Recently, I was in England ministering to some of our International Mission Board missionaries. I had a day in London before I left to visit places I have always wanted to see, including the British Library. It houses one of the oldest bound Bibles in the world, called the Codex Sinaiticus (because it was found on Mount Sinai) — the whole Bible in Greek. I also saw an original first edition King James Bible, and even older, a Tyndale Bible, one of six left in the world. I also saw an original autograph manuscript of Handel’s Messiah, specifically the Hallelujah Chorus. I was in awe. I love that piece. Some of you share a love for classical music, others not so much, but you may know the incredible story of how Handel composed this piece over 24 days. A friend recounted that he would not open the door, would not eat — he was swimming in a sea of paper, surrounded by notes, tears streaming down his face. He said, “Whether I was in the body or out of the body as I wrote it, I know not. God knows. But I think I did see all Heaven opened before me and the Great God Himself.” The most famous part of Messiah is the Hallelujah Chorus. Most people do not know about is that the entire text of Messiah is Scripture. Charles Jennens, who wrote the text for Messiah, used Scriptures that testified prophetically to the coming, the person and the work of Christ. The Hallelujah Chorus quotes three verses from the book of Revelation. We will discuss two in the future, if the Lord wills: one from Revelation 19:6, “And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, ‘Hallelujah: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.’”; one from Revelation 19:16, speaking of Christ, “On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.” The third is the text we will discuss today, Revelation 11:15: “The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.’” For 276 years, music lovers have thrilled to hear these three texts set to this incredible music. In 1743, when King George II heard it for the first time at the Hallelujah Chorus, he rose and stood for its duration. It is now tradition to rise for the Hallelujah Chorus, out of respect for the greatness of the theme. My desire is that you would have heavenly meditations of the greatness of Christ, that you would be recaptured back into a fervent love for Christ from whatever has been pulling on your soul this week. The world, the flesh, the devil pull on us all the time; we are prone to wander all the time, prone to drift away from Christ. The ministry of the Word of God is primarily what draws us back, recapturing us again in the grips of Christ and grace. That is what I pray will happen as you listen. Let us set context for the sounding of the seventh trumpet. The Apostle John was in exile on the island of Patmos, a small rocky island of the coast of modern-day Turkey, for preaching the Word of God, the testimony of Jesus. He had a vision of the resurrected glorified Christ moving through seven golden lamp stands. Later, a voice invited him to rise from the surface of the earth to enter through a doorway into the heavenly realms. He was enabled to do that by the power of the Holy Spirit. When he went through the doorway, he saw the central reality of the universe, a throne with Almighty God seated on it. In that vision, Almighty God had in his right hand a scroll with writing on both sides, sealed with seven seals. Jesus Christ alone was worthy to take the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne, to break open its seven seals. As Christ opens the seals, successive judgments pour out on the earth. As the seventh seal is opened, there is silence in Heaven for half an hour, followed by seven angels with seven trumpets emerging from the seventh seal. These seven trumpets unleash a series of horrific judgments on planet earth, such as has never been seen ever in human history. They are depicted as the direct answer to cries from suffering, martyred saints, the people of God, for vengeance and justice. Their prayers are incense, the smoke of which rises before the heavenly altar. An angel fill a golden censer with coals from the incense and hurls it to the earth in answer to the cries for justice and vengeance. The first trumpet sends fires to rage on the surface of the earth, burning up a third of all of the trees and vegetation and all the green grass. The second trumpet turns a third of the sea to blood, kills a third of the sea creatures, and sinks a third of the ships. The third trumpet poisons a third of the fresh water on planet earth, rendering it bitter. The fourth trumpet reduces a third of the celestial beings — the sun, the moon and the stars — in their heavenly luminosity. When the fifth angel sounds his trumpet, he releases from the Abyss billowing smoke and a demonic invasion, producing an unimaginable level of torment, pain, and agony. It was like a locust swarm but with power to sting like scorpions. Those who reject God are tormented for five months. The sixth angel unleashes with his trumpet a terrifying demonic army, 200 million strong, to rampage over the surface of the earth to kill a third of the human race, perhaps two or three billion people. Despite all of these incredible judgments being poured out on planet earth, we have this incredibly sad statement at the end of Revelation 9:20: “The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent” of their wickedness. Despite that level of agony and judgment, the people are still hardened in their sins. Just as an interlude happened between the sixth and seventh seals, there is also break in the action between the sixth and seventh trumpets. Revelation 10 shows a mighty, massive, powerful, radiant angel standing with one foot on the dry land and one foot in the sea, his head in the clouds. In his right hand is a scroll lying open with writing on it. John is commanded to take the scroll and eat it. It is sweet in his mouth but bitter in his stomach. Then he is commanded, or rather recommissioned, to prophesy to many nations and languages and peoples and tribes. He is sent as a prophetic messenger to the world through the writing that he will do. Thus, the scroll represents the written Scripture. In the first half of Revelation 11, two flesh and blood witnesses take their place in this moment in redemptive history to explain God’s purpose for these plagues of judgment and to provide a final warning to urge people to repent and flee to Christ. The witnesses’ testimonies combine with John’s writings to make it clear to all. After the witnesses are killed and resurrected, the seventh angel sounds his trumpet. Just as the seventh seal seems to unfold or unleash the seven trumpets, so the seventh trumpet is will unfold or unleash the seven bowls. The description of those appear later, in Revelation 16. With those seven bowls come the final judgments at the very end of human history. It is telescoping action, like those little Russian dolls which are opened to reveal increasingly smaller dolls. The judgments cover similar but not identical ground, so they are clearly not simultaneous but subsequent. Before we get to the seven bowls, we will go behind the scenes in Revelation 12 and 13 to see Satan the red dragon, his demons, and then the Antichrist and his world system. We will look into “this present darkness” [Ephesians 6:12] that will escalate to a degree we can scarcely imagine. We will seek to understand the career of Satan and that of the Beast from the Sea the Beast from the Earth, as well as the evil world system that Satan has set up in which we already live but which will reach its worst level, which God calls Babylon, the Great Whore in this end time. We will examine the world and the devil and the powers that are assaulting the people of God right to the end, which will lead us to Revelation 19, the Second Coming of Christ. Heaven Celebrates: God’s Eternal Kingdom Has Come! The Seventh Angel Sounds His Trumpet Let us begin with Revelation 11:15, “The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.’” The seventh angel sounds his trumpet. Much of this awesome book involves waiting for God’s timing. As we read, it seems to be happening all at once, but in reality there is an unfolding over time. God has conceived meticulous timing for everything he does. The unfolding sequences as John sees them correspond in a complex way to a timetable of judgments that God has already worked out in his mind to come later. For John these are visionary, not actually happening before him. He recorded what he saw, and we, by faith, can also see it happening even though it has not happened yet. The account of numbering the seals and the trumpets in order gives a sense of wise sequencing by God, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. His order is perfect and right. The seventh trumpet and the consummation of the coming Kingdom of Christ are decisive. Now that all this judgment has occurred, at last the seventh angel sounds his trumpet. With that blast it is as though heaven is saying it is finished; it is as good as accomplished, even though there are many chapters left in the book of Revelation. Imagine watching a game in which something so decisive happens on the field that you realize the game is over; there is no way the other team can recover. That is the feel here: the declaration of the seventh trumpet is so decisive that there is no way the powers of evil will recover. “Loud Voices” Immediately John hears loud voices, in contrast to the seventh seal which results in silence for half an hour in Heaven. Powerful angels and elders and the redeemed celebrate with all their might. Elsewhere, the sound of their voices is compared to a mighty waterfall, like Niagara Falls, an overpowering, cascading sound. They are not shy or holding back; they are excited. What Heaven Celebrates What do they celebrate? Verse 15 says, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.” The kingdom of the world represents the force that is in obvious control of the earth. It is singular — not the “kingdoms” of the world, but the kingdom of the world. The human race is a single unit. We all descend from one man, Adam. Through him, the whole human race was given planet earth as a stewardship, one kingdom of this world. But Satan usurped Adam’s place and took over the kingdom of the world. Adam surrendered the keys of that kingdom to Satan, so Satan is in some dark ways the god of this age or the king of this present kingdom. He rules in devious ways as the power, the puppet master, behind all the thrones of dictators and tyrants. When he takes Christ up a mountain to tempt him in Luke 4:5-8, he shows him in an instant all the kingdoms (plural) of the world, with their glory and riches. “And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours.’” The kingdoms become one entity in Satan’s hands. He offers it to Jesus, who refuses, answering heroically, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’” Satan has been ruling in secret behind various thrones, over the various large and small kingdoms and fiefdoms and countries of the world all along, pitting one against the other, causing one to rise and another to fall. He does that for his own wicked and evil purposes. We will learn more about that in Revelation 12. Christ refused Satan’s offer of all the kingdoms of the world on his wicked terms, that Christ would bow down and worship him instead of God. Instead, Christ submitted to his Father, doing His will, and his Father has given him the world. This is what the angels and elders and all the redeemed are celebrating in Revelation 11, that the Father is giving the world to the Son in his own time and in his own way. The Kingdom Has Become... It says, “The kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” indicating that it is a finished work even though it has not happened yet. These words were written twenty centuries ago, but there is a sense of certainty in the prophetic past tense. The prophets often speak about future events as though they have already happened. For example, Isaiah 53:5-6 says, “But he [Jesus] was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Isaiah wrote those words seven centuries before Jesus was born, yet he uses the past tense. For us, it has happened in the past, but for Isaiah the prophet, it was a future event that he described as past. The Lord’s Prayer Now Fulfilled This statement proclaims the fulfillment of the very thing we, as disciples of Christ, have been praying for throughout our Christian lives in the Lord’s prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” How many hundreds of millions of times have those words been said to God? Here at last, God has answered all those prayers; the time has come. A “kingdom” is the place where a ruler openly, evidently rules. This verse refers to the time when God is clearly ruling on earth. Currently He is already the king of the world. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof…” [Psalm 24:1] It is His and He rules it now, though not openly. He is secretly maneuvering free-will beings to do His will, whether they acknowledge Him or not. Thus Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” His will is not presently done on earth as it is in Heaven, but after the Second Coming, all will see. The seventh trumpet will quickly set in motion the final judgments that will culminate in the destruction of Satan’s wicked kingdom and of the Antichrist. God the Father’s Pledge to Christ the Son Here at last we also see a fulfillment of the pledge that the Father made to the Son to give him the world. Psalm 110 shows powerfully how God makes it plain that He will give all the world to the Kingdom of His Son. Psalm 110:1-2 says, “The LORD says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’ The LORD will extend your mighty scepter from Zion; you will rule in the midst of your enemies.” After Christ died, rose again and ascended, Hebrews tells us he went through the Heavenly realms to the right hand of God. He is seated there and has been for twenty centuries. During that time, God has been extending Christ’s scepter to the ends of the earth. He is ruling in the midst of his enemies in secret permeation. It is not evident and obvious. Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid in kruptós — Greek meaning encrypted — in a large amount of flour until it permeated the whole dough. That has been happening for twenty centuries. But God intends a more open obvious glory for his Son because he was willing to leave Heavenly glory and make himself nothing to be found as a servant and to be obedient even to the point of death on a cross. God said He would give Christ “the name that is above every name” and guarantee “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” [Philippians 2:9-11] The Eternity of God’s Kingdom Revelation 11:15 shows the eternality of God’s reign: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.” All human kingdoms terminate in death. In Daniel 2, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a statue with a head of gold and chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet partly iron, partly clay. He did not know what it meant, so Daniel interpreted it for him. These various precious and other metals represented a span of history from the Babylonian empire through the Medo-Persian Empire, through the Greeks and the Romans — they represent human kingdoms. But then the focus comes in on the feet of clay. Having feet of clay refers to a weakness in a great man or leader, like an Achilles heel. The coming kingdom of Christ strikes the statue on its feet of clay, smashing them and collapsing the entire statue as a result. Daniel 2:34-35 says, “While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.” The chaff is particles of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay — a pile of nothing, like sawdust. All the human kingdoms of the world, all evidence of their glory, are like dust, which is blown away in a whirlwind. There is nothing left; the threshing floor is clean. The rock that strikes the statue and the feet of clay becomes a huge mountain that filled the whole earth. The rock represents the kingdom of Christ; unlike all of those human kingdoms, it will last forever. Daniel 2:44 says, “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.” The feet of clay is the mortality of the leaders. God said to Adam, “You will sink back down into the dust from which you came for dust you are and to dust you will return.” We will die, but Jesus has triumphed over death. He cannot die again, so He will reign forever and ever. Human kingdoms are dust in the wind, just as Isaiah said in Isaiah 40:22-24, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in. He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing. No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner do they take root in the ground, than he blows on them and they wither, and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.” Every morning, I read a biography to my kids of Adoniram Judson. He was a missionary in the 1820s to Burma. He sailed up the Irrawaddy River, along the jungles of Burma, to see the king, or to “prostrate himself at the golden feet” as it was called. Along the river, he saw many former ancient royal cities of previous Burmese kings. In Burma, when a son took the throne, he would build his own royal city rather than ruling in his father’s royal city. Within 10-20 years or less the jungle would capture former royal cities and turn them back to nothing. This represented a cautionary tale to each ruler of Burma: someday you will die and your royal city will be reduced to jungle again. The Kingdom of God and of Christ, however, will last for all eternity. The final conquest of this royal Kingdom will be achieved only by the immeasurable greatness of God’s sovereign power. The 24 elders join the praise. Verses 16-17 say, “And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, 17 saying: ‘We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign.’” They are prostrating themselves before God in joyful worship, thanking Him for the open display of His sovereign power, which is essential to seizing back the kingdom of the world from Satan and from the Antichrist — the wicked human rulers. The elders celebrate the awesome power of God to finally establish Christ’s reign on earth. My understanding of history is that God raises up monsters, such as Pharaoh who enslaved the Jews, allows them to have a wide range of power, and then crushes them as a display of His power. Romans 9:17 says, “For the Scripture says to Pharaoh: ‘I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’” This is true of all tyrants in history who have had massive power, but the greatest monster, the beast, is yet to come. Verse 17 says, “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, who is and who was, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.” This is a great display of His power. Satan, Antichrist, and all the human opposition will not hand it to Him; He must take it from them. Most people read this verse without pause, but we need to realize that this is about omnipotence — infinite power. If we asked God “Was that particularly difficult for you to do?” What would He say? It would be like asking Jesus, “Of all your healings, which was the hardest ?” It is a ridiculous question. They were equally easy for him; he can do anything. Or if we asked the raging inferno that is the sun, “Which is hardest for you to ignite, a matchstick, a twig, a branch, a tree or a forest?” what would it say? None would be difficult. That is a picture of God’s omnipotence. But from our perspective, as created beings, this is a huge accomplishment. The power of Satan, of the Red Dragon, and of the demons, and of the beast, and of the world-conquering empire that he will set up will be the most powerful the world has ever seen, directly attacking the people of God and slaughtering them. From our perspective, it will take immense power to set this kingdom up, and God will do it. The elders fall on their faces to worship and give Him thanks for it. They have yearned for that in their hearts, that God would use Him omnipotence of yours to clean this world up. At last He does it. Earth Enraged: God’s Eternal Kingdom Has Come! The Coming of the Kingdom of God ENRAGES the People of the Earth But the joy of heaven is not shared by the inhabitants of the earth. Verse 18 says, “The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” The coming of God’s kingdom enrages the people of the earth. They have not been praying, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom of God and of Christ is repulsive to them, to every fiber of their being. It is the very thing they do not want. They do not find Jesus’ yoke easy and his burden light. They are not excited that a thrice holy God actively reigns over every aspect of His kingdom, not thrilled that God is light and in Him, there is no darkness at all. They are not attracted to the person and work of Jesus Christ. They hate this work of God and are filled with rage. Rage Characterizes Twenty Centuries of Opposition to Christ and His Kingdom This rage is clearly depicted in Psalm 2. Here we see twenty centuries of human opposition to Christ and his Kingdom. Psalm 2:1-3 says, “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One. ‘Let us break their chains,’ they say, ‘and throw off their fetters.’” They do not consider his yoke easy; they want to throw it off. The kings of the earth, who have always been enemies of Christ, have taken their power and authority at every stage of history and fought against the Lord and against His Christ. Psalm 2:4 gives God's reaction, “The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.” He laughs in judgment and derision. If you all of you banded together to combine your power, I would still laugh. If all of the demons, every one were together against me, if every created being took their stand against me, I would still laugh. Omnipotence. This is God’s decree and action after that laughter: “He rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, ‘I have installed my King on Zion, my holy mountain.’ I will proclaim the LORD’s decree: He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.’” Then the psalmist gives some advice: “Therefore, you kings be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling. Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in Him.” The End of the Rage-Filled Opposition This rage-filled opposition to Christ and His kingdom will reach its final act in those last chapters in the book of Revelation. We will see it in the coming of the Antichrist and his blasphemous reign and in the great escalation of persecution. The overwhelming majority of Christian martyrs that will have lived have not yet been murdered. There is a huge number of martyrs yet to come. We will see it in the way that the world and its leaders, its sub-kings under the Antichrist, will gather for one last battle against the people of God at Armageddon. One last time they will fight. Their rage is a replica of the dragon, Satan’s, rage, that we will see in the next chapter. Revelation 12:12. He, Satan, “is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.” Judgment Day: Eternal Rewards and Endless Wrath Judgment Day Imminent Finally, verse 18 gives us Judgment Day, eternal rewards and endless wrath. “The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth.” Judgment Day is coming. The seventh trumpet heralds the events that will lead rapidly to the Day of the Lord and judgment on the wicked forces of evil. Many verses talk about the day of the Lord or Judgment Day. Hebrews 4:13 says, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Jesus said that on the Day of Judgment we must give an account for every careless word that we have spoken. The time will have come at last for that judgment. God Waits Patiently for That Day and its Rewards for His Servants God has been waiting patiently for that day to come and predicting again and again that it will come. Later in the book, we will have Judgment Day clearly depicted. Revelation 20:12, “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.” All of us who are genuine believers in Christ will be rewarded by God for any good deed you did, done by faith, done for the glory of God, done with a loving demeanor. He will reward anything, no matter how great or small. He will reward great courage shown in going to an unreached people group and taking your life in your hands, maybe dying that that group might come to faith in Christ; or small things like giving a cup of cold water to somebody in need. God does not forget anything. Hebrews 6:10 says, “God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him…” He will reward the saints and prophets and all those who have served him faithfully. Destroying those who Destroy the Earth He will also destroy those who destroy the earth. This shows the special anger that God has reserved for the wicked of the earth whose sins have resulted in the destruction of His beautiful planet. After God made this beautiful world and everything was arranged just how he wanted it to be, it was so beautiful. The oceans and the rivers and the lakes and the mountains and all of the sea creatures and all of the air breathing animals, and insects, and birds — everything was beautiful. God saw all that He had made and behold, it was very good. Who are those who destroy the earth? The entire human race, for one, because in Adam we sinned, we fell, and God cursed the earth as a result. Romans 8:20-21 says, “…the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” But this verse — “The time has come … for destroying those who destroy the earth.” — might also zero in on people who have, in a specific way, destroyed aspects of the earth with ecological disasters through industrial greed or policies that have ravaged some aspect of the planet, polluting the sky, the earth, the water. God will judge people who destroy the earth and He will make in its place a beautiful new world. Heaven’s Temple Unveiled The Heavenly Realities Behind Moses’ Sacrificial System In verse 19, we see Heaven’s temple unveiled: “Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant.” In the language of the Old Covenant, Moses’ tabernacle and the Ark, the golden box that he made of acacia wood inlaid and overlaid with gold, were a type and a shadow and a symbol of a heavenly temple. So also was Solomon’s temple. Hebrews 8 tells us that the Levitical priesthood in the sanctuary is a copy, a replica of the heavenly reality. This is not like in Steven Spielberg’s movie in which the ark was found at Tannis and stored in a shipping crate in a warehouse in Washington D.C. I believe that God is in the habit and process of destroying his physical replicas of heavenly realities, such as the ark and the bronze serpent. God’s temple in heaven is the genuine reality of what the ark symbolizes: the place where one hears God’s voice and has communion with Him, where the glory cloud was over the mercy seat, where He spoke to Moses and to the high priest, where the blood was poured out by the high priest once a year, where the actual stone tablets of the law of Moses and the jar of manna were. All of those items and actions represent communion — intimate, close fellowship — of God with atoned-for sinners. This is what is seen in heaven in verse 19, bringing the sense of fear and judgment that comes with flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, earthquakes and a great hailstorm. Applications Christ’s Kingdom and Judgment are Coming Week after week I preach astonishing things from this book, and for me, the most important thing you can do is delight in the coming king and kingdom. Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you [that means let me be your king, stop fighting my kingly rule. Bow your neck, let me put my yoke on your neck] and learn from me for I am gentle and humble at heart and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Do not fight my kingdom; delight in my kingdom. Submit to Christ. If you have never trusted in Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, do it right now. Christ is the Son of God; He died on the cross in your place as an atoning sacrifice. Trust in Him and come to Christ. Yearn for the Coming Kingdom! For believers, our job is to delight in that kingdom ever more, to celebrate it, yearn for it, look forward to it. One of the big differences between Christians and non-Christians is we are looking forward to and cannot wait for this kingdom to come. Non-Christians are enraged at the coming Kingdom. We need to pray, as never before: Oh God, may your name be held in honor, may it be hallowed all over the world, and may your kingdom come, and may your will at last be done on earth in the same way that it is being done right now in heaven. And then we need to live like this. “So do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” [Matthew 6:31-33] What does it mean to seek first His kingdom? It means to pray for it to come, to evangelize and embrace missions to talk to lost people about this, and to look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. I am looking forward to the international picnic tomorrow because I never get an easier chance to share the gospel to people from all over the world. I do not have to get on a plane. People from all over the world come to a picnic that we host, eating our food, so they will have to listen to at least some of us talking to them about Jesus. It never gets easier. This is worldwide evangelism in one picnic place. If you do not come to the picnic, pray tomorrow around noon when we will be sharing the gospel with people from all over the world. And if you cannot come, find somebody this week whom you think is lost and share the Gospel with them. Delight in the Eternal Nature of Christ’s Coming Kingdom Finally, feed the delight that you have in the coming kingdom — get excited, look forward to it, celebrate it. Think about the Hallelujah Chorus: “The kingdom of this world has become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, hallelujah, and he will reign forever and ever.” Make those your prayer this afternoon. Closing Prayer Father, thank you for the time we have had to celebrate, to rejoice, to delight in the coming Kingdom. I pray that you would give us a zeal and an energy and a delight such as we have never had before, based on the Scripture, that we would be so evidently, clearly filled with joy and hope, and that we would allow that to move us to share the Gospel with people as we have opportunity. Father, we thank you for these things, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Introduction As I listened to Ben read our passage for today, I was struck by the challenge of preaching on it. Even as of this morning I was reading commentaries, wondering what I would do with the two witnesses. I worked on this sermon while I was in Bulgaria at an area group meeting; I was completely immersed in “two witnesses” all the time. The missionaries in Bulgaria were not thinking about the two witnesses and had no idea what I was talking about. I want to begin this sermon in an unusual way with three application-oriented illustrations, though you have not even heard the sermon yet. These are more general applications on why we should read the book of Revelation, and especially chapters like this which have difficult sections with have so many details that are hard to understand. The first illustration comes from the story of Rebekah when she was pregnant with twins. The twins were jostling inside her womb and she did not know what was happening to her. She inquired of the Lord, “Why is happening to me?” The Lord said to her, “Two nations are in your womb…” [Genesis 25:22-23] He gave her a prophecy about her children, whom we know were Jacob and Esau. The first reason we should read the book of Revelation is that as we experience life, we will have trouble — anguish, persecution, affliction, trial, difficulty — and all the more as we are faithful as witnesses to Christ. The more faithful we are, the more trouble and persecution will come to us in this world. We know that. We can say, “What is happening to me?” not only in relation to ourselves but more so to our brothers and sisters around the world who are being persecuted or going through hard times. We go to the Lord and he gives us the explanation, which is far weightier and far longer lasting than we can possibly imagine. Reason number one to read about the two witnesses is to understand our own life. Second illustration: My father was from Miami, Florida and when I was a child, we went one time for Christmas down to Miami from Massachusetts, my home state. I forget how old I was, but I was little. We got packed up in the car and started rolling south. As we crossed the state line into Connecticut, I asked the famous question of that age child: “Are we almost there?.” That is an irritating question for a father who knows we are nowhere near almost there. I have no idea what my dad said to me. We made a similar trip to Daytona Beach for Spring Break when I was at MIT with Campus Crusade. I knew that we were almost there as the weather got warmer and warmer. Traveling from New England, from Massachusetts, you could tell as the trip unfolded where you were. My point is that we Christians believe in a linear view of history. We do not believe in karma and endless cycles. We believe there is a point A and a point B. In Revelation 22:13, Jesus said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” We are going somewhere, and the Lord has, in his wisdom, given us this incredible book to tell us details about where we are going, that we might know the things that must soon take place. That is what it says at the beginning of the book. We can know the future. You might wonder what this has to do with you for today or tomorrow. Perhaps nothing directly, although studying the book of Revelation tends to shape and color the way you see your everyday life. So it does have an impact on whatever your day holds tomorrow, whether you are a student, a stay-at-home mom, or a man with a certain job working with your hands or with your mind. Whatever you do tomorrow, the book of Revelation, as you immerse yourself, your mind and soul in it, will color the way you see things. You will see the world differently, realizing how temporary everything is as we move to a final Omega day. Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and last, the beginning and the end, has already figured that day out. He had it planned out before the foundation of the world, and he has chosen to give us some details about what it will look like. It is very powerful. The third illustration comes from a question I wrestle with a great deal, and that is, “Why is this book so complicated and difficult?” The image in my mind is of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. I do not know that I have ever done a 1000 piece puzzle, but I have done some big ones. The way I approach jigsaw puzzles must frustrate my family — I set all the pieces out in a matrix and go through systematically like a machine. It is boring and awful. Most of you would likely look at the cover to see what the final picture looks like — there is a sky, a sea, one of those old mills, some trees. You would collect all the tree pieces together, all the river pieces together, all the stone pieces together, and fit the smaller elements together first. So today, we will try to gather together like pieces and start to fit them together. We are not going to cut off little nubs or fill in little empty spaces with speculation or imagination; we will try to make them fit like they should. So I am asking you this morning to work hard with me on this text. It will not be easy, but we will try to assemble some sub-pictures and then see how they fit together with other sub-pictures and the big picture. I could take the easy way out and look at only the big picture on the two witnesses, as you heard Ben read about. There will be two witnesses (or are now, depending on how you look at it) standing before the Lord of all the earth, proclaiming and prophesying in the power of God. They have a hard time; they are persecuted and put to death, but they rise and ascend to Heaven and glory. The big picture is this: We are called on to witness to Jesus Christ. The ministry of reconciliation has been given to us. We are still set in a hostile world. Satan, whom we will talk much about in the next number of weeks, will oppose us, will fight us, using government for that purpose, so the church will be witnessing to Christ in a hostile world. We will have a hard time but we will be faithful, and in the end our enemies will be judged by the wrath of God if they do not repent, while we ourselves will be in heaven. That is the big picture, and I do not know any evangelical that would not sign off on that big picture. Here is one additional illustration. We are flying at 35,000 feet. There is the sun — the bright round yellow ball; there is the blue sky; there are the white puffy things — clouds. Through the occasional break in the cloud, we see some green down there — earth. That is the big picture. But friends, are you interested in the details? Do they matter? Yes, they do. We will exegete these 14 verses to look at the details. I cannot agree with many conservative Calvinistic commentators that discuss the big picture and say, “This is a representation of the church in its suffering witness in the world and of the final judgment of the enemies of God.” I do not think the details line up with that big picture. It is literally about two individuals who at some point will stand on the Earth in Jerusalem, testify before the Antichrist, and die at his hand, but will rise after three and a half days to ascend to heaven. That will have a certain impact, specifically on the Jewish nation, that I will talk about today. Do your best to follow with me — if all I am covering is the big picture, then the sermon would be over and we would be going into applications now, such as “Be faithful witnesses, be praying, etc.” That would be easy to do, but I will not do that. The details say that there will some day be two individuals. I have already answered why you should care about them, though I will add to that application at the end. God’s Messengers Throughout Redemptive History Two Messengers who Speak the Words of God Before I walk through this, understand what we mean by the prophetic witness of the world, the fact that the ministry or message of reconciliation has been entrusted to us, the disciples of Jesus Christ. This is significant because salvation of lost people depends on this. This is what we heard from Jonathan’s baptism today, what we believe — we are surrounded by lost people everyday. Every one of those sinners is under the wrath of God right now. Those who are not Christians are presently under the wrath of God, which abides on them (John 3:36). The only answer is the gospel of Christ. [Romans 10:13-15] “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? [That’s the point.] And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” The key to our salvation is the ability to accept the word of God through human messengers. In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, Paul says to the Thessalonian believers, “And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.” The Bible and sermons are not merely human words but a living active powerful word from God. It can change your heart and soul. What is a Prophet? What is a prophet? These two are prophets with power to prophesy. A prophet is an individual who stands up, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and says, “Thus says the Lord.” He says the words of the Lord directly. The office was instituted for the nation of Israel after they had come out of bondage in Egypt and through the Red Sea. They came to Mount Sinai where they received the Ten Commandments, the Law of God. As God descended on Mount Sinai in fire and cloud, shaking the ground beneath them, he spoke the Ten Commandments. The people were so terrified to hear the voice of God that they pleaded with Moses. “Please, would you go up the mountain and stand in the presence of God and hear His words and come down and tell us? We will listen to you.” God said, “What these people have said is good.” The prophet would stand in the presence of God. God said in Deuteronomy, “I will raise up a prophet like you, and he will speak to the people.” God actually raised up many prophets — Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel — who spoke the word of God. Israel Refused to Listen But consistently the Jewish people would not listen to them. Again and again the Jewish nation refused to heed the Word of God. Stephen charged Israel with this crime in Acts 7:51-52. He said to the Sanhedrin representing the whole Jewish nation, “You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? And now you have betrayed and murdered [the Son of God].” That is the culmination of their rejection of the message, the word of God through the prophets: they killed Christ, together with the Gentile leader, Pontius Pilate. Throughout the Old Testament we have clear evidence of the Jewish nation refusing to listen to the prophets whom God sent. As the Northern Kingdom of Israel was about to be deported by the Assyrians, this summary statement happens in 2 Kings 17:13-15: “The LORD warned Israel and Judah through all his prophets and seers: "Turn from your evil ways. Observe my commands and decrees... But they would not listen and were as stiff-necked as their fathers, who did not trust in the LORD their God. They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made with their fathers and the warnings he had given them. They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless.” All the more, as Stephen pointed out, when the culmination of the prophetic ministry, Jesus, stood before them. They would not heed him but handed him over to the Gentiles to be killed. Two Witnesses Are the Final Prophetic Warning I believe these two witnesses are a portion of God’s final warning to the Jewish nation to turn and trust in Christ, and I believe that they will be effective. In the end, God will take hardness or blindness away from the Jewish nation, and they will turn and believe in Christ. That has to happen before he appears in the clouds. It has to happen by hearing the word preached. I think that these two witnesses will stand at a key final moment with a final opportunity to testify, and I think it will be effective. The Temple Measured: God’s Meticulous Control Let’s begin with Revelation 11:1-2, in which the temple is measured. We see God’s meticulous control here. “I was given a reed like a measuring rod and was told, ‘Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, and count the worshipers there. But exclude the outer court; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months.’” John Involved in Action As often happens in the book of Revelation, John is drawn into the visionary, apocalyptic action. In Revelation 4, he is invited to go up through a doorway to heaven. In Revelation 5, he weeps and weeps because no one is found worthy to take the scroll from the right hand of God until Jesus appears and takes it. In Revelation 10 he is commanded to take the scroll which lay open in the hand of the mighty angel, and to eat it. He is likewise involved here, given work to do. He is given a reed like a measuring rod. The task here is of measuring and counting. The Greek word for reed implies a tubular long plant that would grow in marshy areas, sometimes used as a measuring stick. It could grow as long as 10 feet, very lightweight and stiff. He is told to measure the temple of God and the altar, and then he is told to count the worshipers there. In the vision of Ezekiel, in chapters 40-48, which I consider to be nine of the hardest chapters in the Bible to interpret, the prophet is present while an angel measures an idealized prophetic temple with a measuring stick. He also measures the walls, the courtyards, the land surrounding the temple, and the river of life flowing from that temple, which gets deeper and wider as it goes, and Ezekiel reports those measurements. Here in Revelation, we do not hear the results, only that John is told to measure. The “Temple of God” What is this temple that he is to measure? It is a very difficult question to answer. I believe that Revelation was the last book of the Bible to be written. Most scholars put it at the very end of the first century, around 80 or 90 AD. John was a very old man. By that time then, the Jewish temple would have been destroyed two decades prior by the Romans, so there is no earthly temple in John’s day. Those who hold to a literal view say that this temple is built by the Jews under the reign of the Antichrist. Some call it the tribulation temple, which will be built during the last seven years of human history and is where the Jews will renew the animal sacrificial system. Though I do believe that will happen, it is very important to realize that it is repugnant to God. I do not hold with dispensational theology that say there are two tracks, one for the Jews and one for the rest. When Jesus died on the cross the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. God signified by doing so that the new and living way into the Holy of Holies is open through Jesus, and therefore, animal sacrifice was obsolete and aging and would soon pass away (Hebrews 8). The blood of bulls and goats has never taken away sin. It was symbolic. The need for symbolism is done now that Jesus has come. But someone at some point sewed that curtain back up. I guarantee Jewish hands did it. They re-established animal sacrifice for at least several decades after Jesus, through the 40s, 50s, 60s, on to 70 AD. Why? Because they did not believe in Jesus, that he was anything but a deceiver of the people, or that the animal sacrificial system was finished. They killed Stephen for saying so, and they would do the same to the Apostle Paul for saying that the animal sacrificial system had been fulfilled in Jesus. It is obsolete; we do not need it anymore. Hebrews 9:26 says, “…now [Christ] has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Once. For all. Done. The temple in Revelation 11 is called the Temple of God. That is significant. I do not think God wants his name attached to that physical temple in the Book of Revelation. This must be a heavenly sanctuary, the true temple in Heaven. This is the way the word “temple” is usually used in the book of Revelation. The tabernacle (the tent) and Solomon’s temple (a physical building that was built) both were built according to a heavenly pattern that was shown, first to Moses then to David, of how to build it. Those were earthly copies of a heavenly reality. The author to Hebrews says in 8:5, “They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven.” The true temple is up in heaven. Revelation 11:19 says, “Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant. And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a great hailstorm.” That is the heavenly temple. If this is a heavenly temple, what is the outer court, the Court of the Gentiles, that will be trampled by the gentiles for 42 months? I believe that is the earthly version, Jerusalem. I will talk more about that in a moment. Measuring = God’s Knowledge and Protection Measuring implies God’s careful knowledge and protection and his provision of scope and limitation. God is a God of details and mathematics. Some may argue that God is only artistic to the exclusion of precision mathematics, or vice versa. Both are true. There is so much beauty but also order and precision. Scripture says even the very hairs of your head are numbered. In this context, John is telling believers not to fear their persecutors. God knows the numbers of hairs on your head and will protect you. This also refers to election, that there is a specific number of people whom God will save; none will be lost. This is reassurance, not random, as though God does not know what is happening. God knows exactly by name all that he will save, all whom the Father gives to Jesus, who will com to Christ. There is also a sense of delimitation, of provision through boundaries which he has set that up for all of creation. Job 38:8-11 says, “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?” When you go to the seashore in North Carolina or Cape Cod or anywhere in the world, you see a thin boundary of sand and dune grass —that is not protecting you from flooding. It is the will of God by the word of God that puts a limit to things. Here in Revelation 11 is a sense of the limitation and protection of the people of God versus the satanic forces that will engulf the earth at that point. John says that the Court of the Gentiles has been given over to them to be trampled for 42 months, referring to the worst part of the reign of Antichrist. My Interpretation Here is my big picture interpretation. Revelation 11 has two parts. The measurement of the temple and the counting of the worshipers — part one. The work of the two witnesses in Jerusalem — part two. Many take a figurative approach, saying it is in general talking about the witness of Christians in the world and the persecution they endure, their final glory, and the final judgment of the enemies. All of those things are true, but I think that is insufficient to explain the details of this chapter. Therefore, I will take a literal interpretation here. The details, for example fire coming out of the mouths of the prophets or their ability to strike the earth with plagues, do not line up with general Christian witness over 20 centuries. Nothing like that has happened. Our desire usually is the conversion of our enemies, so we turn the other cheek, not consume them with fire. Therefore, I believe this is a final phase of witness in which God is openly displaying His wrath. Verse 14 is situated between the second and third woe, which lines it up with the seven trumpet judgments. I will talk more about that in a moment. Another key in interpretation, especially regarding Jerusalem and the temple, comes from 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, which is not apocalyptic, not prophetic visionary language, but rather an epistle written to a New Testament church by Paul. The Thessalonians were being told by false teachers that the end had already come and they had missed the day of the Lord, they'd missed it like a train like a ship that had sailed. The people were greatly discouraged, having missed the day of the Lord. No — it is not possible to miss the Day of the Lord, so Paul says this to the Thessalonians: “…that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed… the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” It is interesting phraseology. The phrase “God’s temple” is used differently than in Revelation 11. Antichrist will set himself up in, supposedly, “God’s temple”, proclaiming himself to be, supposedly, “God”. I put those in quotes because they are equally invalid. He is as much God as he is in God’s temple. It is significant and meaningful. The end will not come until that happens. The man of lawlessness is the Antichrist that is coming of 1 John 2:18. “… you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.” There are many dress rehearsals but one final Antichrist coming who is the focus of Revelation 13. This one specifically rises up and kills these two witnesses. Based on prophecy from Daniel and on Jesus’ statement here, at the end of the world a powerful ruler will rise up and make a covenant with the Jews for the rebuilding of the temple and the establishment of the animal sacrificial system. I am walking a middle ground between Reform commentators that do not talk about details of the future at all and dispensational types that talk about many details (allowing for a separate plan for the Jews), to say that this temple will be in no way pleasing to God, but it will be built at some future point. The tribulation temple is the place where the Jews will resume animal sacrifice, but halfway through the final seven year period, the Antichrist will break His covenant with them and put an end to animal sacrifice and set himself up as God within that temple. The true temple is in heaven where Christ went to present his own blood. It will culminate in the second coming of Christ, in which Jesus will destroy the Antichrist by the breath of His mouth. 2 Thessalonians 2:8, “And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.” This is an epistle, telling you what will happen; it is not apocalyptic. The Two Messengers: God’s Powerful Warning Their Mission Now we focus on the two witnesses in verse 3: “And I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” They are sent by Almighty God to prophesy, to speak forth his words. God is sending them to planet earth, which is hurting and reeling from being judged. They are situated between the second and third woe. As we saw in Revelation 8 and 9, the seven trumpets came from the seven seals. Six of the seven trumpets have been blown at this point in the account. The first trumpet was hail and fire mixed with blood, burning up a third of the earth and the trees and all the green grass. The second trumpet was a huge blazing mountain that fell into the sea, turning a third of the sea into blood and killing a third of all living creatures in the sea and destroying a third of the ships. The third trumpet was the blazing star named Wormwood, which fell on fresh water and poisoned a third of the water supply. The fourth trumpet was the sun, the moon, and the stars, darkened to a third of their usual illumination or intensity. The fifth trumpet was demons pouring up out of the abyss, the abode and place of punishment of demons, released to afflict and torment human beings for five months, like a plague of locusts but stinging like scorpions. The sixth trumpet resulted in a (likely) mixed demonic and human army spreading over the surface of the earth, which killed one-third of the population of the earth. These events have been absolutely staggering. But without someone interpreting them for the people, saying, “This is happening because of your sins”, they will not know to view it as a religious event. Thus, these two witnesses are a grace from God to unbelievers, who do not have the Bible, to explain what is happening. Their task will be difficult. They will tell suffering people who are in agony and torment that they are suffering because of their own sins, but the God who is sending these afflictions will welcome them back and forgive them if they will only turn to Christ. That is the message. You can imagine it will not be well-received. It will be a hard message to give. Not only that, I believe there is an additional wrinkle that fits into the overall eschatological scheme. The two witnesses will tell the Jews that the temple that is being rebuilt is worthless, and that they should turn from these vain things and from animal sacrifice and trust in Jesus. That will not be popular with the Jews. Needless to say, the Antichrist, the ultimate control freak, will not appreciate these two telling the truth about who he is and pleading with people to come to Christ. He will do what he can to assault them. When they are finished prophesying, the Antichrist, the beast from the abyss, will rise up and kill them. These two are sent out as a pair, patterned after Jesus sending out his disciples two by two. They reflect the general pattern in the Bible that every matter must be established by the testimony of at least two witnesses. They are also able at the human level to encourage one another. It is hard, day after day for 1260 days. In verse 3, God empowers them: “And I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days.” This is like Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses.” The real power of the prophets will be in their words from their mouths. Jeremiah 23:29 says, “‘Is not my word like fire,’ declares the LORD, "and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” God’s word is powerful like a fire and a hammer. The two witnesses will have a powerful presence. They will be bold and unafraid and will stand firm though surrounded by rage and hostility. It reminds me of the ministry of Jeremiah, who was sent with a very unpopular message at the end of that phase of Judah’s history. In Jeremiah 15:20-21, God says to Jeremiah, “‘I will make you a wall to this people, a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but will not overcome you, for I am with you to rescue and save you,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will save you from the hands of the wicked and deliver you from the grasp of the cruel.’” How much more these two witnesses? God also gives them supernatural powers to do miracles, as we will see in just a moment. Their Location Where are they located? For me this is one of the easier parts, though not every commentator agrees. They will be ministering in the city of Jerusalem. Verse 8 says, “… where also their Lord was crucified.” Given that Jesus, who was their Lord, was crucified, there are only two options: it refers either to planet earth or the city of Jerusalem. Yes, he was crucified on earth, but it seems to be more specific. This refers to the city of Jerusalem. Why is it called Sodom? At that point it is a wicked immoral place. Why is it called Egypt? Again, the same thing. The Jews remember their bondage, their slavery in Egypt. As the Apostle Paul says, the physical Jerusalem is in bondage with her children. Thus, the location of the witnesses is a symbol of wickedness and bondage and where their Lord was crucified. Furthermore, the Antichrist will be there. Commentators say that it is not Jerusalem because of the term “great city”. They usually interpret that as Rome, the city of military power. The Antichrist definitely has a military-governmental power aspect, that's true, but he also has a religious aspect. He wants to be feared and obeyed, but also worshiped as God. That puts him, in the providence of God, in Jerusalem. Their Duration They will prophesy in the city of Jerusalem for a certain length of time. The time measured out for their ministry is 1260 days. That same span of time is given to us in four different ways: 1260 days; 42 months, with the standard solar month being 30 days; time, times and half a time, meaning three and a half years; and Daniel’s 70th week — he describes 70 “sevens” in which Jesus is cut off in the 69th “seven”, then one last “seven” at the end of time. The Hebrew translation of Daniel 9 uses the term “halfway”: “In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice…” Half of seven is three and a half. Elijah shut up the sky for three and a half years. We see this number again and again: time, times and half a time, in Daniel 12:7; the woman in Revelation 12 who gives birth to the male child flees into the desert to be protected for 1260 days. In Verse 2 of this chapter, the Gentiles “trample on the holy city for 42 months.” This is a consistent length of time. The only question is whether this length of time occurs in the first half or the second half of the seven year period. It makes sense that it is the first half. They prophesy in relative peace, while the temple is being built, while things are being established. Then the Antichrist clamps down on them and the horror starts in the second half. Their Clothing and Demeanor Verse 3 says they are “clothed in sackcloth.” Sackcloth is a sign of mourning and grieving over the seriousness of the sin of the nation, of the people. Elijah wore it continually as he prophesied to the people, as did Isaiah. Their demeanor is also serious, in keeping with their clothing. They will preach a message something like this: “Hear now, you inhabitants of the earth, listen to what we have to say. You are suffering as no generation has ever suffered in history. You are suffering ecological disasters, torment and death — a third of earth’s population has died. None of these things is accidental. They are sent as judgments from Almighty God, the God who created Heaven and earth, the sea and everything in it, the earth and everything in it, the sky and everything that flies through it. This God you have offended by your violation of his laws. You are idolaters, wicked and sinful." “But God, in his grace, is giving you an opportunity. You are not dead; you are alive and can hear what we say. He sent his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross, under the wrath of God, to take away the penalty of sin. If you believe in him, trust in him, all your sins will be forgiven; you will not suffer the real torment, eternity in hell." “And you Jews, who are here for the building of the temple, do not think that God is pleased with this. This is an abomination of desolation. The temple itself is displeasing to God. God sent his son as the final sacrifice. The blood of bulls and goats will not save you. You do not need to turn to these vain empty things, or to go back to an obsolete law that has passed away. Come to Christ and trust in him. Do not trust in what this ruler is doing. He is deceiving you. Believe in Jesus.” Their Prophetic Heritage Verse 4 calls the witnesses “…the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth.” The Lord of the earth is either God or the Antichrist. They stand before both, in a sense. They stand before God and truly serve him, but they also stand in front of this wicked man and boldly proclaim the truth. The image of the two olive trees and lampstands is from Zechariah 4. The message is a symbol of Israel’s ministry in the world to be a light, a golden lampstand, to the world, an oil flowing. The real message is this: “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.” [Zechariah 4:6] Only by the Spirit of God and by the Word of God will any transformation and salvation happen. They stand there in the power of the Lord, and by the power of the Spirit they preach. Their Identity Who are they? John MacArthur has said that he would volunteer to be one of the two. The simple answer is the text does not tell us who they are. The way they are able to judge the earth and strike it with various plagues points to two key individuals: Moses, who is able to turn the water of the Nile into blood and strike the land of Egypt with plagues; and Elijah who calls down fire. In 2 Kings 1:9-10, wicked king Ahaziah sends a captain with 50 men to capture Elijah. The captain says, “Man of God, the king says, ‘Come down!’ Elijah answered, ‘If I am a man of God, may fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men!’ Then fire fll from heaven and consumed the captain and his men. A second captain goes with the same demeanor and attitude, yielding the same result. The third captain sent by the king is a wiser man. I picture him on his knees saying, “Elijah, if you wouldn’t mind, please have respect for my life. I have a wife and kids. I want to eat dinner at my home tonight. Would you mind coming?” Elijah complies and gives the hard message to the king. Given the fire Elijah calls down from heaven, many people think the witnesses must be Moses and Elijah. Those two also appear with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. At this point it is all speculation; however, they will definitely be real individuals. Their Power Verses 5-6 say, “If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. These men have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want.” Again, this is not the character and nature of Christian witness for twenty centuries. Christians, such as John Hus and William Tyndale, are the ones who are burned at the stake, persecuted and killed, not the ones who bring the fire. In the book of Luke, James and John asked Jesus if they should call down fire when a Samaritan village would not let them enter. But Jesus rebuked them. In his Incarnation, the son of man did not come into the world to destroy lives but to save them. That is not the case with his Second Coming. At that time, he will come to judge and kill, as Revelation 19 makes clear. Prior to that, there is a clear display of God’s wrath as a final warning to the sinful human race. These two fit into that display. Their ministry is different than ours. We are like Stephen — as we are stoned and sink to our death, we say, “Lord, please do not hold this sin against them. Please let some of them come to Christ” — some like Saul of Tarsus. We want our persecutors to come to Christ. But at that time, those who physically attack these two (not simply those who mock or do not believe their message), fire comes out of their mouth to consume their attackers. Whether literally (which will be possible) or figuratively, (I do not think a literal sword comes out of Jesus’ mouth to slay his enemies), they have the power to do so either way. They also have the power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain. This is a grievous plague — after Wormwood has polluted a third of the water, now they are not getting rain. This is the final prophetic warning to the Jewish nation: “…so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: ‘The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.’” [Romans 11:26-27] Their Death Verse 7 says, “Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them.” We will meet the beast again in Revelation 13, where he is not called the “Beast from the Abyss" but the “Beast from the Sea”, though I think they are one and the same, the Antichrist. John already knows who the beast is but he gives us a foretaste here. The beast that we meet two chapters from now is the one that rises up, overpowers them and kills them. God is in the process of raising up monsters, mighty Leviathan sea creatures and dragons, Goliath figures, and then defeating them. The final monster that will rise up, humanly speaking, will be this Antichrist. His power will be evident in that he defeats these two witnesses, actually able to kill genuine people of God. But this is not the final word. He himself will be destroyed by the breath of Jesus’ mouth and by the splendor of his coming. How great will our joy be when Christ’s power is displayed at that time. This will be the fulfillment of the horn in Daniel 7:21 that “was waging war against the saints and defeating them.” It says “saints,” plural. He will wage war not only against these two, but against all the saints on earth at that point. That does not preclude a literal interpretation here. He will wage war on these two and defeat them, and they will die. Their Dishonor The witnesses will then be dishonored. Verses 8-10: “Their bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. For three and a half days men from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.” This wicked world, so filled with hatred for God and his people, will overflow with dishonor and disrespect by not letting these two be buried, and with joy such that they actually send each other gifts to celebrate their death. One commentator, who interpreted this text figuratively, said mockingly, “What, will the whole world watch by television?!” At the time that person, who is a good brother and scholar, wrote his commentary, television was the primary medium for news. Now we can livestream any event, any time for all to see on their phones. That is a big part of 21st century culture. It is not so hard now to imagine that the death of these two will be captured on livestream and that the whole world will be able to gaze on their bodies in some sense and celebrate. Their Resurrection After three and a half days, they rise again from the dead. Terror seizes those who see their resurrection. Verses 11-12 say, “But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, ‘Come up here.’ And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on.” Why are they resurrected? To vindicate their message. Jesus, it says in Romans 4:25, was raised to life for our justification. Resurrection is the vindication of Christ and everyone who believes in him. Their Impact Verse 13 says, “At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed [clear judgment on that part of the city]. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and [here is the point] the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.” Praise God. Some people will get the message. Who? Let’s start with the Jewish nation. Something must turn them. They are bitterly disappointed by the Antichrist, and the animal sacrifice will not happen now. Perhaps they are able to listen to the message that these two have been preaching now for 1260 days and will turn to Christ. Finally, Revelation 11:14 says, “The second woe has passed; the third woe is coming soon.” Applications Come to Christ! First, I have preached the Gospel to you this morning. You will go outside, as we do every week, and everything will look normal, like it always does. You must decide if you believe the Word of God that says these things will happen. How will understanding the details of the two witnesses help you in your life tomorrow? I don't know, but if you are lost, I would urge that you flee to Christ. You do not know when the Antichrist and all these details will happen, but you also do not know when you're gonna die. This very day might be your last day on earth, so come to Christ, trust in him while there is still time. Witness! Second, for those who are already Christians, having crossed over from death to life, our job is to witness to those who have not crossed over yet. We show a striking lack of courage and boldness. Pray to the God who will give these folks incredible boldness to give you boldness this week to share the Gospel, to say something to somebody. Try asking someone at work or school if they have ever read the Book of Revelation. Have a conversation, talk about the Gospel. Apply the Illustrations Finally, understand my three illustrations: When we ask why something is happening, recognize that God is at work. The suffering we go through is part of God’s plan. When we ask where we are heading and if we are there yet, recognize that crossing the border into Connecticut is not the same as arriving in Miami. We have a long way to go, but in time, perhaps within our generation or our children’s, it will come. So parents, tell your children the details things to prepare them. And start to put the puzzle together. Reread this passage and all of this book. There is a blessing given to everyone who reads and understands the words of the Book of Revelation. Closing Prayer Close with me in prayer. Lord, thank you for the time we have had to go through these very complicated challenging verses. I thank you for the things that we have learned. I thank you for the celebration that we have had in worship. I thank You for Wes and his wife Annie being with us today. Thank you for the grace we see in their lives. Thank you for the baptism. And Lord, I pray that as we go from here, that you would please enable us, Lord, to be witnesses, enable us to be bold and courageous. We know that we will not be as bold and courageous as we could be, but Lord, give us more boldness than we have ever shown before. Help us to reach out to the perishing and to share the message of life. We thank you for these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

In this episode, Dr. Darrell Bock and Naima Lett discuss the state of faith films in Hollywood, focusing on the methods of evaluating these faith films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices