NEC 2015 Camp Meeting: Strong Families, Strong Churches

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NEC Youth

Eric Walsh

How Do You Know God’s Will for Your Life

If you have your Bible, you can turn to Jeremiah 1 and verse 5.

The Bible says, before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee.

Before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee.

And I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Before I formed thee in the belly God says I knew you.

Before you came forth out of the womb I sanctified you and I ordained you a prophet unto the nations.

Our message tonight is entitled, How to Know God's Will for Your Life.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study a word and study the basic principles here of Scripture.

I ask Lord that you make me just a rusty sorry nail Lord and hammer that nail into the wall.

Then upon that nail I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ.

Let Eric Walsh not be seen or heard tonight.

Instead, Father, let us hear a word from the throne room of grace.

As our prayer in Jesus' precious and holy name, Amen.

We're gonna go to the book of Acts, the book of Acts chapter 3, book of Acts chapter 3.

1 of my favorite Bible stories, brief Bible story, but a profound Bible story.

The Bible says now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.

Verse 2 says, and a certain man, lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple, which is called beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple.

So we have a story here where Peter and John are going into the temple.

These 2 men are now the crux, the kind of the center point of the church to be formed.

Peter, John, and James were close to Jesus in his ministry and now it is the time for them to build this church.

As they're walking into the temple at the hour of prayer they come across a man.

He's been lame from the time he was born, and in the Jewish economy, to be born of the disease like this, 1 of the questions the disciples asked when a man was born blind was, whose fault is it that this man is born blind?

In the Jewish economy, if something like this happened, someone must have sinned to cause it to happen.

For this reason, there was not a whole lot of sympathy for such individuals, and this man was laid there to beg to live.

Fortunately for him, there was someone to carry him.

Imagine, this is a time before wheelchairs or prosthetic devices.

In fact, he still had to be carried from place to place.

Whereas people came in and out of the temple, he could kind of pray on their feelings of guilt.

A good day for him was probably the equivalent of 20 or 30 pounds.

And if he could just collect that, it was enough that he could live for a few more days.

It wasn't that much time had passed since Jesus had actually died and resurrected.

The ascension wasn't much too far in the past from the time of this story.

I would have to imagine that this layman was hoping to have met Jesus while Jesus was still doing his healing ministry.

I want you to imagine that for the 3 and a half years that Jesus was doing his ministry, this man was probably hoping to have run into Jesus.

The Bible doesn't say it, but he was in Jerusalem and Jesus was alive and doing ministry at that time and yet Jesus came, ministered, died, resurrected, and returned to his father and this man was still lame.

You have to see that this man has probably reached the depths of desperation, despair, and possibly even hopelessness.

He's hoping for a miracle, but the 1 who did the miracles is gone.

It would seem to beg for the rest of his life.

But into the scene onto the scene come Peter and John and as they are going into the temple, the Bible says in verse 3, the man sees them and he asks Peter and John in other words, he asked them to give him some money, hoping to just get a little something out of them to sustain him.

And verse 4 said, And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him, said, Look on us.

This man's condition was so poor that he probably wouldn't even look up as he begged.

So he probably couldn't see that Peter and John didn't look like folk that had a whole lot of money.

So Peter wants him to actually look at them, Look at who you're asking something from.

We don't really have much to give if you just looked at us.

But the man looks up expecting, the Bible says, to receive something of them.

A glimmer of hope shines forth in his heart that maybe he'll get a few dollars, a few pounds, out of 1 of these gentlemen.

Peter's response to the man in verse 6 is a pretty classic piece of scripture.

Peter says, silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I give thee in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and...

Now here's a man who if he had just gotten a 20 pounds that day, it would have been a successful day at the Temple Gate.

If he had just gotten the equivalent of 30 or 40 US dollars that day, it would have been a successful visit to the temple gate.

But he is introduced through Peter and John to the divine.

And although by now maybe he didn't know that there was still hope of a miracle, Peter looks at him and speaks words that would seem impossible.

He says in the name of Jesus, the Jesus that this man probably hoped to have met and never met in his name.

Verse 7 says, And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up, and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength.

Immediately as Peter grabs him, he gets it.

And look at verse 8, the Bible says, And he leaping up, stood and walked and entered with them into the temple walking and leaping and praising God.

I see some of you missed the B side of the miracle.

Some of you, I don't know what a B side is because you've never seen a record but it's the other side.

The first part of the miracle is that this man, who by the way that the Bible describes this, probably had a congenital anomaly, which caused the actual genesis, the development of his feet and ankle bones to never fully accomplish themselves in utero.

So he's probably born with feet that weren't finished as it were.

Maybe from his ankle down he just had, you know, kind of like knobs instead of actual ankles and feet The Bible says that's what got strengthened when he touched him So so on the 1 hand is a miracle that whatever wasn't finished in his mother's womb Was finished at the touch and command of Peter ha All those years later Now, but that's just the A side of the miracle.

In fact, if someone gets into a bad enough car accident, and when I went to medical school in Miami, and there were many times that guys got shot in the back, and they got spinal cord damage, and we'd give them lots of steroids, or they got really traumatic brain injuries, and if the damage was enough, they had to be re-taught how to walk as part of their physical therapy.

They learned how to walk as a child, but because of an injury, they had to relearn how to walk.

This man never learned how to walk in the first place.

Now I want to show you how complete God is when he works a miracle.

He's so complete that he doesn't just fix the man's physical ailment, the actual problem, and then send him to physical therapy.

When God heals this man through Peter, he fixes the physical problem and he learns how to walk all in 1 failed swoop.

So much so that the Bible says he doesn't just start walking, this man is jumping up and down praising God.

Now you've got to imagine that as he gets up there are folk who just walked by him who didn't put any money in his hand, and this brother now is jumping up around and past them.

In fact, the Bible says in verse 9, and all the people saw him walking and praising God, and they knew that it was he which sat for alms at the beautiful gate of the temple, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at that which happened unto him.

Because you see, Jesus probably could have healed...

Well, we know Jesus could have healed him while he was alive, while Jesus was still on earth.

But this miracle was reserved as a way to actually be the anchor of the development of the church that was to be formed.

Because the Bible says as the lame man which was healed held Peter and John, All the people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon's, greatly wondering.

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How Do You Know God’s Will for Your Life

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