NEC 2014 Camp Meeting: Transformed Agents

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NEC Youth

John Bradshaw

Testimony

Father in heaven have mercy on us by coming close to us I ask.

Let this time be a blessing for your glory.

I would ask that you'd be merciful to me and grant that the limitations of fallen humanity would not prevent you from doing the work that we all need done in our lives at this point in time.

We thank you and we pray in Jesus name, amen.

Well, I'm not always sure where to begin.

So with your permission, I'll begin at the beginning.

I wonder if you would mind turning in your Bible to the book of Exodus.

It seems to me to be a biblical proposition that for every individual, sooner or later, decision time comes.

As we go through life, he allows us opportunity to decide for him here or there, along the way.

At some stage, and we can't always know when, the time to decide comes.

And the protagonist in our account this morning had that experience.

Exodus chapter 4, And we shall pick it up in verse 19.

We read here about the man God tried to kill.

The Lord said to Moses in Midian, Go, return into Egypt, for all the men are dead which sought your life.

You know what's really interesting about God?

Now in looking at this story, I'm mindful that we've just bumped into a fellow who is guilty of murder.

I don't know how many murderers you have met.

As a pastor, you meet these kinds every now and then.

I was pastoring 1 church that had a very active prison ministry group involved with it.

Prison ministry is a wonderful thing that I hope you get involved in someday, have the chance to get involved in someday.

And our church had at least a couple of serial killers as church members.

They weren't serial killers while they were attending church.

In fact, they never attended church and they never will.

1 of them is on what they call in the United States, death row, which means that he has been sentenced to die, to be executed for his crimes.

And the other 1, interestingly enough, who has killed many more people, is not on death row.

He's just imprisoned until the day he dies.

They'll carry him out of prison 1 day in a box.

Now these fellows who have become Christians since their murder sprees, their respective murder sprees, are repentant.

1 man spoke to me about the crimes that I have committed, his words.

And he told me through tears how sorry he is to God for what he has done.

And when they're on death row or in prison for the rest of their life in maximum security, you can't just call ahead or text, I'm on my way.

They don't have telephones or smartphones or any kind of phones.

They don't know you can't make an appointment.

And I just turned up and I arrived at his cell and these cells have rectangular windows in the doors about this long and this wide.

As I approached the door and looked through the window.

There this man was on his knees with the mattress, the thin foam rubber mattress on his bed, turned back over on top of itself and spread around him were his books.

There he was on his knees with a pen in his hand and a pad before him studying the Bible.

He wasn't putting on a show because he didn't know I was on my way.

Aren't you glad that in this world when you do something wrong or something bad even that bad that God is still prepared to forgive you.

I hope you never need to experience that kind of grace.

But those that have needed to and have wanted to have done so.

1 of them still waiting, wondering every day, is this the day I'm going to get word that they're gonna stick a needle in my arm and flood my body with drugs that will kill me?

What's interesting, Moses was as much a murderer as my 2 friends.

But there's something about grace, you know.

It's not wrong for the justice system to do what the justice system needs to do.

But today Moses would do prison time, probably quite a few years.

Then there was rather a different system.

I'm not saying Moses should have gone to jail.

All I'm saying is that Moses was a murderer and yet God was able to use Moses in a great way.

Here He's in the process of using Moses now.

Moses go back down there to Egypt because I want you to be front and center in the liberation of my people enslaved for several hundreds of years.

Moses get down there square off with Pharaoh and tell him, let my people go.

Moses, verse 20, took his wife and his sons and set them upon an ass, a donkey, and he returned to the land of Egypt and Moses took the rod of God in his hand.

And the Lord said to Moses, when you go to return to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I put in your hand, but I will harden his heart that he shall not let the people go.

That's a phrase that troubles some people.

And there are people who have the idea that Pharaoh was merely a pawn in God's drama of the ages.

That God hardened his heart as though he might have had a softer heart except God messed things up for him well the fact is that God hardens a person's heart by sending light And as God sends light and an individual rejects that light, the individual makes her own or his own choice to harden one's heart.

I don't know that Pharaoh ever said, you know what, I want my heart hardened.

And when God sends light, a plague that reveals that God is the God of heaven, that light should have softened Pharaoh's heart.

But Pharaoh shook his puny fist in God's face and therefore his heart hardened.

Hey, don't make the mistake of hardening your heart.

When God sends you an opportunity to repent, when God speaks to your heart, when God floods your pathway with light he's wanting your heart to be softened so your heart can be malleable moldable in the hands of God Pharaoh on the other hand said no to God shook his finger in God's face and said I'm not gonna change I'm not gonna repent I will not let those people go that wasn't smart God said to Moses you shall say to Pharaoh thus said the Lord Israel is my son even my firstborn and I say to thee let my son go that he may serve me and if you refuse to let him go behold I will slay your son even your firstborn serious well now decision time Moses was making his way from Midian to Egypt and I don't know where on the route he was.

The Bible says it came to pass by the way in the inn that the Lord met him, Moses, and sought to kill him.

When you think about the man God tried to kill, I mean, wow, maybe we're talking about some hard-hearted old king who installed idol worship in Israel, or maybe we're dealing with somebody like Judas, or something like that.

But no, The Bible says that God met Moses in a hotel room and was about to turn out his lights.

Well, this isn't the burden of my discourse this morning, but for the sake of it, let's identify this.

It says in verse 25, Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, Zipporah being Moses' wife, and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at his feet and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.

Then she, Zipporah said, a bloody husband thou art because of the circumcision.

Now, I don't want to make too much of that.

You know, back then it was necessary for the Hebrews to circumcise their sons.

Now, today it's not necessary, it's not mandatory.

But then God had said, you must do this as a sign of the fact that you are my covenant people now You might not think it's too terribly important to do everything that God says.

You might think it isn't, that would be good.

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