WYC 2008: Something Better

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GYC West

WYC 2008 Morning Devotionals

Cosmin Ritivoiu

The Courtyard: Better Than Genius

Our gracious Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning thanking you for the silence that we have available here, that we can spend time praying for our friends, praying for each other and praying for ourselves.

Lord, we often lose sympathy for others around us and we forget to pray for them.

And this morning I ask that you would help us to regain the meaning of sympathy in our lives.

Many of you don't know me, So for those of you that do not know me, I want to begin by telling you a little bit about my name.

You probably saw the name Cosmin Ritivoiu and you thought, I can't pronounce that, so I'm not even going to worry about what exactly his name is.

My name is actually Romanian, and my first name comes from the word cosmos, meaning outer space.

And then my parents decided to give me a flower middle name.

And that was because I had 2 older sisters and the oldest sister she Got a middle name that was a flower and then the middle sister got a middle name that was a flower So when I was born they wanted to keep the tradition going So they decided they'll go with the most masculine sounding flower in Romanian, which is Edie's and Then my last name Ritivu you They don't really know what it means.

But the closest thing that they could get to is beating stick So I guess that would mean that I'm like outer space flower beating stick.

Your schedule says that I'm going to be talking about the outer court.

But if I could put a title on my talk this morning, it would be better than genius better than genius When we're thinking about the outer court, what is the main thing that happened in the outer court?

What was the main focus of the outer court?

Now I want to talk about What has caused us to lose a lot of the meaning of Jesus' sacrifice?

In our culture today, wisdom is very prized, and especially genius.

And maybe I could put it in a different way and say it's actually information that is really, really prized.

When you think about genius, there's 2 different types of genius.

1 type of genius is the type of person that is really, really good at 1 thing.

They're just an expert at that 1 field and they can really pinpoint that 1 field.

And then on the other end you have people that are good at everything.

They know a little bit about everything or they know a lot about everything And those people are called polymaths.

The dictionary calls that a person of encyclopedic learning.

That means you could ask them a question about anything, and they know.

An example of this would be Leonardo Da Vinci.

He was really good at many, many different things.

It seems like today we all need to be polymaths.

And the reason I say this is because we're bombarded with so much information.

We're surrounded with so much information that in order to be able to discern and to put every piece of information that we receive into its right place, it seems like we all need to be polymaths.

In fact, the way that our culture is going, it seems like we look to information to solve all of our problems.

If we could just have enough information, if it could just come to us quickly enough, if we could just have better technology, then maybe we could solve our problems.

But since the dawn of all this new technology, and since we started getting information quickly, a lot of problems still remain.

And yet, we can download a video of a starving child on YouTube.

We could put, we could watch a video of starving children in Africa on our high definition flat panel TV, hear them crying as they die in our surround sound, and perhaps if we follow this line of reasoning, we would need a hologram of a dying child in our living room floor before we did anything about it.

But that's not the only thing that comes in through all this technology.

Isn't there a lot of other different information that we get?

I want to read the definition of confuse.

The verb of confused is to make indistinct, blur, to mix indiscriminately, to jumble, to fail to differentiate from an often similar or related other.

The adjective of confused, indistinguishable, being disordered or mixed up.

So the side effect of all the technology that we have received is that We not only hear news of disasters, but we also get other stuff We've been overflowed with information about anything and everything an example of this I Was looking at the news the other day and I was thinking why do we really need to know that Kobe Bryant jumped over a swimming pool full of snakes?

I mean, is that really something that's related to our lives?

What are we going to do because we know that?

And I was looking at a Yahoo news page a few weeks ago, and I saw the headline.

And the headline was, American Idol breaks the record for the most hits in the digital songs chart.

I believe it was like 17 hits and then 4 lines later no picture just headlines 4 lines later 2 commuter trains collide in Boston now what happens when you mix the serious and the trivial When you mix the serious with the trivial, you trivialize the serious.

All of a sudden, it's not as important anymore.

What has God offered us that is better than the genius of this world?

You know, God was kind of going through the same thing in Samuel's time.

And I want to first talk about how the loss of meaning leads to a loss of sympathy.

This is the first point that I want to make.

The loss of meaning leads to a loss of sympathy.

I want you to turn in your Bibles with me to 1 Samuel, chapter 15.

And I want to first look at how meaning is lost.

First Samuel chapter 15, and I'm going to begin reading in verse 20.

First Samuel chapter 15, And I'll begin reading in verse 20.

And Saul said to Samuel, but I have obeyed the voice of the Lord and gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me and brought back Agag king of Amalek.

But the people took of the plunder, sheep and oxen, the best of the things which should have been utterly destroyed to sacrifice to the Lord, your God in Gilgal.

So Samuel said, "'Has the Lord as great delight "'in burnt offerings and sacrifices "'as in obeying the voice of the Lord?' In this conference, we're looking for something better.

"'Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, "'and to heed than the fat of rams for rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and Stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry Because you have rejected the word of the Lord.

He has he also has rejected you from being king So here's Saul and he's Supposed to destroy the Amalekites and he destroys them But he keeps some of the things and says oh, I'm gonna sacrifice these things to the Lord And I want to read a quote from patriarchs and prophets.

The messenger to the remnant explains this passage, and she says something very interesting that I want you to think about in your own lives.

The sacrificial offerings were in themselves of no value in the sight of God.

They were designed to express on the part of the offer penitence for sin and faith in Christ, and to pledge future obedience to the law of God.

But without penitence, faith, and an obedient heart, the offerings were worthless.

When, in direct violation of God's commands, Saul proposed to present a sacrifice of that which, listen to this line, God had devoted to destruction.

Open contempt was shown for the divine authority.

The service would have been an insult to heaven.

Yet with the sin of Saul and its results before us, how many are pursuing a similar course?

While they refuse to believe and obey some requirement of the Lord, they persevere in offering up to God their formal services of religion.

There is no response of the Spirit of God to such service.

No matter how zealous men may be in their observance of religious ceremonies, the Lord cannot accept them if they persist in willful violation of 1 of His commands.

Now I want you to think about, is there something in your life, is there something in my life that God has devoted to destruction?

Perhaps it is music, perhaps it is a job that you're hanging on to, a hobby, and you're trying to worship God with it.

Here Lord, here's something that you don't want, but I'm going to give it to you anyways.

Here comes Saul and he doesn't want to let go.

And so he gives a kind of a false whiny repentance.

Then Saul said to Samuel, I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words.

And if he would have just stopped there, then perhaps we could say, oh, maybe he's sincere.

Because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.

So you can kind of see that he's not really repenting because he's blaming the people.

Tim Taylor

The Holy Place: The Better Lifestyle

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the way that you have been working this weekend so far.

We thank you for answering our prayer so far of pouring out your Holy Spirit.

I thank you for the many messages that we've heard that you have spoken to us.

And I pray that this morning on your Holy Sabbath day that you would continue to speak through the speakers, that your Holy Spirit would be present and that hearts would be touched and lives would be changed this morning for you.

We pray all these things in Jesus' precious name.

I want to begin this morning by asking you a question.

What would you do if a week from tomorrow you woke up only to discover that while you were sleeping, you had been robbed.

And I'm not talking about a small robbery.

I'm talking about everything that has any type of material value to you is gone.

I'm talking your Bible, your computer, your cell phone, even your iPod.

How would you respond to such a situation?

Perhaps you would buy some of the basic necessities for life for that day, Go to the store perhaps, and among other things, like reporting to local authorities, you would probably buy some local supplies for that day.

But say you went to sleep that evening, and you woke up the next day to find out that you had been robbed again.

And the next day you fell asleep and woke up to find out that you had been robbed again.

Well some people might say, well I would probably just stop buying stuff so that way when they come again there will be nothing for them to rob.

But that's not what the Bible says we should do.

Let's open our Bibles this morning to Matthew chapter 24.

Jesus is telling us what we should do in such a situation.

Matthew chapter 24 and I want to read verse 43.

Matthew 24 and verse 43 says, But know this, that if the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into." So the Bible provides a solution to what we are to do.

We are supposed to prevent your house from being broken into.

The reason I mention this is because today there are thousands of people who live in constant fear that their material possessions will be stolen from them.

And so they buy all sorts of safety devices and alarms to put on their cars and on their houses to prevent their material possessions from being taken from them.

They want to prevent what is of value to them from being stolen, and they want to prevent a great void to be left in its place.

And even though thousands of people are paranoid about their personal material possessions being stolen, there are even more.

I would say there are millions who are spiritually blind to the fact that they are being robbed on a daily basis.

And instead of their homes being robbed, it's their hearts that are being robbed.

They're being robbed of a precious gift, a relationship with Jesus.

I want to invite you to turn with me now to Exodus chapter 25.

Over these morning manna sessions, we've decided to cover the sanctuary message.

And so we split it up into several, several sections.

And before we begin to talk about the sanctuary this morning, I want to read what the purpose is of the sanctuary.

Moses is upon the mountain and he's speaking with God.

Moses and God are spending 1 on 1 time with each other.

And in verse 8, God begins to tell Moses a specific instruction.

And in verse 8, it says, God tells Moses, Moses, Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them." There are 2 things I want to focus on this morning in this verse.

Number 1, that is that God wants to spend one-on-one quality time with you on a daily basis.

And number 2, God wants to be in the very center of your life.

Notice that God did not tell Moses, Moses, let them build me a sanctuary that I may dwell just around the corner from them.

Notice God did not tell Moses, Moses, let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell just not too far away from them.

No, he said, Moses, let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.

God wants to be in the very center of your life on a daily basis and we can begin to learn this.

But even though God wants us to have this gift, he wants to give us this gift of dwelling with Him, a relationship with Him.

It's more than we could ever realize because John 17 verse 3 says, this is life eternal that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." So the Bible tells us that a relationship with Jesus to know God is actually eternal life.

God wants to give us this gift, a relationship with Him.

And He knows that this relationship with Him will lead to eternal life.

But there's a problem, you see, because there is a great robber, and He wants to rob us of this gift.

And instead of having a relationship with Jesus, the devil is also fighting for prime time access to have real estate in your heart.

And the devil is constantly trying to force his way into your heart and to place sin there instead of a relationship with Jesus.

Because he knows that if he can get sin in your heart, that will lead to death.

Even though God wants to put this relationship with Him in our heart, Isaiah chapter 59 in verse 1 and 2 tells us a problem that we have, a problem that God has.

Isaiah chapter 59 in verse 1 and 2 tells us a problem that we have, a problem that God has.

Isaiah chapter 59 in verse 1 and 2 says, Isaiah 59 1 and 2 says, Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy, that it cannot 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." So even though Jesus wants to have this relationship with us, He wants to put this gift inside of our hearts.

He is sometimes being held back by sin that is in our hearts that prevents Him from giving us this gift of a relationship with Him.

And so God begins to outline, He begins to come up with a great solution to this problem, and he calls it the plan of salvation.

And he outlines it in the sanctuary message.

He begins to give us through types and symbols an example, a plan of what this plan of salvation is all about in the sanctuary message.

And so as we learn about the sanctuary message, we can begin to learn about how this is God's plan to remove sin from the heart.

And so the sanctuary message is categorized into the 3 sections in which we have decided to preach the 3 morning manna sessions.

Cosman yesterday spoke about justification, the outer courtyard.

This morning I'm going to talk about the holy place of the sanctuary.

And tomorrow, Eric Nelson will talk about the most holy place of the sanctuary, which in reality is God's solution to the sin problem.

It is God's freedom from the 3 Ps of sin.

In the outer courtyard you find freedom from the penalty of sin, justification.

And then you move into the holy place and you find freedom from the power of sin.

And then in the most holy place you find freedom from the presence of sin.

And so this morning we're going to look at freedom from the power of sin, the sanctification experience in the holy place of the sanctuary.

So for those of you who are familiar with the sanctuary, as you enter into the holy place, there are 3 items of furniture in the holy place.

There's the altar of incense, the table of showbread and the golden candlestick.

And what we are about to find out is that each of these elements, each of these items of furniture are a special gift from God.

There are 3 keys that God gives us, 3 steps to follow to prevent ourselves from being robbed by the great robber.

And so we are about to discover what these things mean.

Because God knows if we have each of these keys, if we begin to follow these steps and apply each of these lifestyles, I would say each of these items of furniture in the Holy Place represent a type of a lifestyle.

And if we begin to experience this lifestyle in our life, it will enable God to work in and through our lives in a powerful way, in a more powerful way than you've ever experienced before.

But Satan knows that if we get a hold of these keys, if we begin to spend time with Jesus and follow the outline that He's given us in the sanctuary message, that His time on earth will not last very much longer, and He knows that it's a war between Him and Jesus to have access to your heart.

And so He does whatever He can to prevent you from experiencing this kind of a lifestyle.

And He does whatever He can to provide counterfeit keys in their place.

Psalm 66 verse 18 says, If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.

Not because he doesn't want to, but because he can't.

Sin is so disgusting to God that he cannot hear us if we regard iniquity in our hearts.

And so it's all about the heart this morning.

The holy place is all about a heart experience.

And So we should begin by talking about the altar of incense, which represents a prayer life.

But it does not just represent any average kind of prayer life.

It is not just an ordinary prayer life, but it is a very specific kind of prayer life that is outlined in the holy place of the sanctuary.

It is not a prayer life that consists wholly of prayers that are go a little something like, Dear Heavenly Father, please bless this food.

Eric Nelson

The Most Holy Place

This morning, I need to talk to you about the most holy place.

And I suppose that the obvious thing to talk about would be the Ark of the Covenant.

We could learn some lessons from the fact that the law of God is the foundation of his character.

We could talk especially in this group about the day of atonement, excuse me, and the many lessons that are especially applicable to us from that day.

We've talked a lot about many of those things this weekend already, haven't we?

The blotting out of sins, the day of atonement, how we are living in that day, and this is a special serious time for us.

But this morning I wanted to talk about something a little bit different.

Something that it's likely many of you have never heard a sermon or a Bible study about.

Nevertheless, this object in the sanctuary that I would like to talk about this morning, I feel is extremely important.

This object, unlike many other parts of the sanctuary, the symbolism is explicitly interpreted in the New Testament.

The New Testament says this is what it is.

This object also ties together, in my mind, the services of the daily with the services of the day of atonement in powerful ways I believe this object is so important that in the Old Testament times specifically in the book of Daniel an understanding of the symbolism of this object in the sanctuary divided between true and false prophets.

And in the New Testament, an understanding of the symbolism inherent in this object, the use expanded.

It not only separated between true and false prophets, but between true teachers and false teachers, the spirit behind teachers, true pastors, false pastors, and a misunderstanding of the symbolism of this object is even in the New Testament stated to be a sign of the Antichrist.

The object I'd like to talk with you about covered the Ark when it was being transported from place to place.

This morning I'd like to talk with you about the veil.

Now for those of you who take notes, our devotional this morning has a very simple outline.

We're first of all going to look at 3 literal uses of the veil.

Then we're going to look at that New Testament passage, which tells us what it represents.

And then we're going to, again, look at those 3 uses of the veil with the understanding of what the veil represents.

Okay, before we do that of course, let's all kneel for prayer.

Dear God, I ask that the Holy Spirit would be present with us here this morning as we consider your sanctuary again.

You set up these symbols and in some cases you tell us what they represent and I ask that through our time together we will understand Jesus better.

Now there are undoubtedly more than 3 functions to the veil in the heavenly sanctuary, but we're only going to look at these 3 for sake of time.

If you look at the surrounding verses, you find that this passage is describing when the tabernacle was put together.

And during the time that the tabernacle was being put together in Exodus 40 verse 3, what do you find the veil doing?

Series

WYC 2008 Morning Devotionals

The Courtyard: Better Than Genius

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

WYC 2012 Plenary Sessions

Repentance and the Latter Rain

1h 19m

Breakout Session C

Reflecting Christ to Your Community as a Healthcare Provider

1h 7m

Gem Castor Weekend

Tis So Sweet

55m

Are You Sure You Are Lost?

43m

Restoration 2005: To The Point

Can God Feel My Pain?

35m

When the Truth Stagnates

19m

Carrying the Cross

38m

Breakout Session #2

Following Christ Through the Crisis

1h 20m

WYC 2012 Plenary Sessions

John’s Work, Our Work, Part 2

55m

FYI 2009 Plenary Sessions

From World-class Dancer to Word of God Preacher

1h

Fresh Manna by Steven Conway

An Unexpected Turn

40m

Final Events

06 Praying for the Latter Rain

1h 14m

Sound Doctrine