With that title having been read, most of you will be expecting an end time message.... When will the rapture be, and the tribulation, the second coming, and the millennium.....Well, here we are, we are living the end times message...and yes, we are on the threshold of some amazing bible fulfillment. So, I would prefer to call this a “Life time” message as we look for and expect redemption every day.... My other title would have been “Help Is On The Way”....
Luke 21:28 “And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption is near.”
Notice the posture that is described here....”Then Look Up”.... It says, “And Lift Up Your Heads”.... As Christians, we can get so busy with the cares of life and making a living, that we aren’t seeing with our spiritual eyes.... We can be so earthly minded, we’re no heavenly good, and we can be so heavenly minded, we’re no earthly good”... There is a balance!
When we lived in Connecticut, the car wouldn’t start on a cold winter morning, so, I thought my battery was dead. (That’s not Florida sand, that’s ice and snow in the picture) We called Winnie’s uncle, Phil Hobbs, who was a mechanic, and he came over and cleaned the contacts, and tightened the terminals, and it started right up. It wasn’t the battery it was the connection. We have to make sure we stay connected to the source of power, and keep our contacts clean and tight...That’s about focusing correctly and giving priority to eternal things, that keep the power flowing! Applying the word and staying in fellowship and prayer.
Notice also that this verse speaks about when “These things begin to come to pass”....It is speaking of things that come to, and through our lives....They are not intended to be a permanent part of our lives, but they visit our lives, go through our lives and then pass on and we should be moving on as well.
It's about eating the meat and spitting out the bones, instead of choking on them ..... When you eat fish, you better not swallow until you check for bones. We don’t camp at those places that are full of bones that want to lodge in our throats or our lives, and we are not supposed to camp there or live there while we choke to death over a hurt done to us by someone. Tell someone “SPIT IT OUT”!! Your current situation is temporary, There is an expiration date on most everything that we encounter in this life. Anyone who has ever drank an outdated glass of milk, knows it is important to know what that expiration date is. Uck! Hopefully you didn’t take a big gulp, just a small sip.... I’m reminded of the guy who got up from bed, looking for a drink of water. He was half a sleep, and saw a glass of water, took it and drank it down and went back to bed. The next morning his wife asked what happened to the glass of water she had her false teeth in...A BIG Uck!
I ran across a few interesting facts that show this. The average life of copper wire is twenty years. The oldest chicken on record is eighteen years old. The average age for a cat is fifteen years. The average life of a dollar bill is eighteen months. The average life of a painted line on the road is four months. The average life of a pro basketball player’s shoes is two weeks. The average life of a tornado is ten minutes. And the average physical life of a human is 25,550 days. During our church service today over 5,000 people will die. When Confederate General Andrew “Stonewall” Jackson was asked how he could be so fearless in battle, he responded, “I feel as safe in battle as I do in bed, because God has fixed the time of my death.” It was Woody Allen that said “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, It’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.”.
Tim McGraw wrote a song in memory of his dying father, he describes how his impending death caused him to reevaluate his own life. After learning the bad news, he “went sky divin’, went rocky mountain climbing, went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu. He loved deeper, and He spoke sweeter, and He gave forgiveness he’d been denying, and he said someday I hope you get the chance, to live like you were dying.” We all must deal with our expiration date because it is coming sooner than you think...but if you’re prepared for it, you can live a full life in the time you are given to accomplishsomething much bigger and longer lasting.... We can’t ever say that we don’t have enough time. We all have the same amount of time per day. It’s how we use that time that makes all the difference.....There is a point where everything moves on, you learn from the experience and then you move on as well.
The last time David and Vicki were with us, they went through our emergency food storage closet and pulled out all the outdated products. We just put stuff in there every week and didn’t give much thought to it, it was for later. BOY LATER HAS GOTTEN A LOT OF PEOPLE IN TROUBLE. (I’LL DO IT LATER) So, They pulled expired prescriptions that we no longer took. We just hadn't bothered to toss them out. It was time for those products to pass.. but they were there in our back up food storage area, and they were no longer useful to where we were now.. They had expired! When we first came to Key West, there were certain folks who were always sick, and needed prayer. We went to their homes and discovered that they were getting bloated cans of food that were being thrown away by the store and bringing them home.
We can do the same thing with old bloated cans of emotional hurts and wounds, injustices, betrayals, areas of unforgiveness, and things that should have expired long ago, but the Hatfields and McCoys are alive and well.. and we bring it home and live with it....
The Jewish people could have gone directly into the promised land in a month, instead of 40 years, because it is 250 miles in a straight line from Egypt to the promised land. We know that They covered 10 miles a day, including camping, which means they could have made the trip in one month. But the extra 39 years 11 months was because even though God got them out of Egypt, he had to get Egypt out of them. Egypt should haveexpired for them, but there were things that they had tucked away in the storage area of their hearts that they were still living with.....They had tucked the Gods of Egypt in theirhearts and in their luggage. They were clinging to the memories of a season that had expired and it was preventing them from being 100 percent in the season God wanted to take them to.The pull of those things kept tugging at their hearts, so that it caused them to be double minded, and have divided hearts. Everything of this earth has an expiration date...Our bodies, seasons of life that come and go, and our trials and tribulations, all have an expiration date. Tell someone, “let it go”. Let go of the bitterness, the resentment, the rehashing it over and over....
What if we focused on redemptive moments, and redemptive situations, instead of the urgent things that are always pullingus away from our redemptive purpose that God planned for us.
Our opening scripture asks us, what if we lived our lives, so that as people, and things begin to pass through our lives we walk in it and through it as though “Our Redemption is drawing near”..... Then we will discover that Redemption is always there, in all things, it’s God’s central purpose.... Listen to Jesus: John 10:10 “The thief comes to kill, steal, and destroy. But I have come that you may have life, and that more abundantly.” That statement is saturated with redemptive purpose.
A gathering of friends at an English estate nearly turned to tragedy when one of the children strayed into deep water. The gardener heard the cries for help, plunged in, and rescued the drowning child. That youngster's name was Winston Churchill. His grateful parents asked the gardener what they could do to reward him. He hesitated, then said, "I would like to see my son go to college someday and become a doctor." "We'll see to it, consider it done" Churchill's parents promised. Years later, while Sir Winston Churchill, was prime minister of England, he was stricken with pneumonia. Thatthreatened to take his life. The country's best physician was summoned. His name was Dr. Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered and developed penicillin. He was also the son of that gardener who had saved young Winston from drowning. Later Churchill remarked, "Rarely has one man owed his life twice to the same person." In saving Winston, the gardener saved multitudes. A remarkable story of how a redemptive moment can change the life of countless numbers of people.
You see, when God says “These things must come to pass”, He is telling us that “We not only pass through things but things must pass through us”. We see it in the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and so many others. We see how as they went through all those things that passed through their lives, it was always for the purpose of redemption. God was looking through them, and into future generations, that would stand on their shoulders and be greatly blessed by what they accomplished and achieved, in the challenges and tests of their lives.
In the story of Job, in the midst of all he went through, redemption was always the central theme. On and on we could go as we read of so many, who partnered with God’s redemption power, and generations were blessed because of it!
I’m reminded of the man who had a huge boulder that stood in front of his home and blocked the view of the beautiful valley below. He became depressed that he lived in the shadow of this thing. It blocked the sun by day and the stars by night. He had a vision, where God spoke to him and said “get on top of that boulder with your pick axe, and start chipping away at it.. Sohe climbed up on it and swung away, one day, two days, a week.... and the sparks were flying, and the sweat was pouring but with very little effect on the boulder. Finally he said, God I’m making no progress... And God said, “You aren’t changing the boulder, but the boulder is changing you. He realized, that the boulder had given him new purpose, it had strengthened his body, and he had gone from complaining about it, to doing something tangible, about it!!
You have not only passed through this test, this season, this hard and difficult place, but it has passed through you, and you are not the same as when you started! Redemption has been working!
Redemption has no expiration date....Can you say “Thank God, as long as I’m on this earth, there is no expiration date on redemption.” Lamentations 3:22-23 "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness..”
There’s No expiration date on His love and mercy.....No expiration date on grace.... Not expiration date on His promises, His provisions will never run out, No expiration date on the Holy Spirit’s working.... He’ll be here, even through the tribulation, drawing men and women to Christ... Kathryn Kuhlman believed This so much, that she made an entire library of video teachings to be released after she died, and she left a fund designated to covering the expense ofairing it on T.V. during the tribulation period, when people are crying out for redemption.
He only lived on this earth 12,000 days and yet He is timeless.His life changed the course of history which was supposed to be about Him anyway. He was a man on a mission and man was His mission.. He was single minded, focused, and goal directed. He made each of his days count by doing only what His Dad told him to do. The relationship with His Father and with others dominated His life. His days were filled with joy, and pain, and suffering but he never got off track. In fact, it was His very last day as a man, that provides us with the hopewhich makes life worthwhile. For on that day, He re-made us as more than dust, or flesh and blood, or a vapor that’s here and gone. He gave us the opportunity to be called eternalchildren of God and bear His image and His likeness....
I John 1:12 “To all who have received him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God”
You’re not just another person going through hard times and challenging situations, You’re a redeemed child of God, releasing His redemption power into every situation of your life. I came across a story which demonstrates how, if we see things through the lens of redemption, then we will see that everything we go through has hidden eternal value and worth. A gem collector was strolling through the displaysat the Tucson Mineral Show when he noticed a blue-violet stone the size and shape of a potato. He looked it over, then, as calmly as possible, asked the vendor, “You want $15 for this?” The seller, realizing the rock wasn’t as pretty as the others in the bin, lowered the price to $10. The buyer took the stone to an appraiser, and it was certified as a 1,905-carat natural star sapphire, about 800 carats larger than the largest sapphire of its kind. It is now known as the Lankan Star of Adam and it was appraised at $300 million dollars. It took someone who could look beyond the surface and the rough exterior, to recognize the true value and worth. It took our redeemer, to recognize the true value of ordinary-looking people like us, going through our ordinary challenges and trials.
Each one of us stand at the intersection where Redemption is drawing near.... Last week, Phil Dunn shared the story of Joseph and his journey. What a powerful example of God turning a disaster into a divine reclaimation program, through one man who fully believed that Jehovah is God of the good times and He’s God of the bad times. He’s God of the mountains and the God of the valleys. He’s God of the times of plenty and He’s God of the times of famine.
The bible tells us that when Paul and Silas were at that intersection and were bound in stocks and chains in prison, they believed they were in God’s redemptive purposes. And while it looked like they were having a bad day, they were still singing and praising God. And God shook the prison, opened the prison doors, and the jailer and his family along with all the prisoners came to Christ and became believers.
Begin praising Him now, that whatever your situation may be, financial, physical, family, or your career, REDEMPTION IS DRAWING NEAR!! Redemption is working out God’s purposes in it and through it.... The enemy may be pressing on every side, but stand your ground, child of God, Redemption is drawing near.. A small business owner was being pressured to sell his store to the owners of a large department store who had bought every storeon both sides of him, except his. His store was right in the middle. Frustrated by the man’s refusal to sell, they eventually opened their huge store on either side of the small one, with a big *.......banner, proclaiming in huge letters "GRAND OPENING stretching over his own store." Feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, the small storeowner did finally outsmart the big boys... when he put up a banner across the front of his business that said.... MAIN ENTRANCE! Listen, no matter how big and powerful the enemy’s attacks against you may be... You are the main entrance to the blessing of God!! You’re where God’s power is located. Heaven knows your name, and angels are waiting for your words as you speak the word of God.
Romans 12:2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, (redemptive thoughts) that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Oh, yes, and how about Romans 8:28 “God works all things together for good for those who love Him, who are the called according to His (redemptive) purpose”.
Lift up your hands, and praise Him that redemptive power is working in the midst of your trial, your difficult place, your upside down, topsy turvy situation!! God will have the last say... You are the main entrance, where heaven comes into the earth...
That family member will turn around, that opposition will produce a good outcome for God’s glory...your finances may be stretched, but God is changing things for His purposes.... your job situation looks shaky now, but you will understand how it all fits together in God’s plan as you look back and see it from a different perspective!
All things are working together... say it with me if you believe it... “All Things Are Working Together”.....
God is working through all of this.... God has a way that He is bringing about in His plan and purpose. The cross couldn’t hold him, the grave couldn’t hold him, and the devil couldn’t stop him!!
