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Lansing SDA Church

Wes Peppers

The Faith of the Faithless

There was a preacher, a pastor, who was a very, very good speaker.

And every week, every Sabbath, he would wax eloquent in his messages, and the people's hearts would be stirred.

And there were many souls that would come to Christ because of it.

People were in tears and they were coming to Christ left and right.

There were baptisms in the church and the preacher began to think of himself pretty highly.

He began to think of himself that, wow, I'm a pretty good speaker.

And then as he continued to think this way, he had a revelation from the Lord.

And the Lord revealed to him that the magnificent sermons, the spirit filled sermons that he had been sharing with his congregation were actually not due to his ability, but because there was an illiterate lay brother who would sit on the front row of the church every week and before, during, and after that pastor's message this brother would be pleading with God that the Spirit of God would come and speak through him.

That the Spirit of God would move the hearts of the people and that the people's hearts would be broken under the power and the influence of the Holy Spirit.

And it was because of that brother's prayers, that humble brother, that those souls were won to Christ.

It's not by might or by my power or strength of any preacher or any person, but by His, what friends?

It always has been and it always will be by the Spirit of God that any soul is brought into the kingdom, including your own.

I'm here thankful today for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

You know there's an interesting pattern in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, that you find with many backslidden and unrighteous people.

I was studying it today and throughout this week I've been reading about it and that the pattern you find is that people who in Old Testament times and it's true today, who were unrighteous, who were unfaithful, who had backslidden, they still believed in the great power of prayer.

Because you find many examples throughout the Old Testament, throughout Scripture, of these people who had left God, who when they found themselves in a very troubling, tight, difficult situation guess who they would always appeal to?

They would always appeal to someone who they knew was right with God, who was righteous with Him, who had a good standing with Him, whether it be the prophet or whether it be some leader in Israel, some great mother in Israel, they would always appeal to them to pray for them that whatever disaster had come upon them would be relented.

Now you might say, well they were just wanting the problems to go away.

But in many other cases it was the prayer of those faithful people in Israel that brought the hearts of those who were wicked back to the Lord.

So what we're going to do, there's many examples actually too many for us to look at, but we're going to look at a few this morning.

Go with me in the book of Numbers chapter 21.

Numbers chapter 21 and this is the story of Israel with the fiery serpents.

Numbers chapter 21 and we're going to take a look at this story here with the bronze serpent.

Numbers chapter 21 and we're going to start in verse 4.

It says, they had just made a commitment.

It says, So Israel made a vow to the LORD and said, If you will indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities.

And the LORD listened to the voice of Israel and delivered up the Canaanites, and they utterly destroyed them and their cities.

So the name of that place was called Hormah.

Then they journeyed from Mount Horeb to the way of the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom.

And the soul of the people became very what?

And the people spoke against God and against Moses.

They were becoming to the place where they shouldn't be, and it says, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?

For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread.

So the bread of heaven, the manna that came down from heaven to feed them miraculously while they were in the desert, what was that bread a symbol of?

Jesus said in John chapter 6, I'm the living bread which did what?

So that bread they were eating each day was a symbol of who?

And when they said, We loathe that bread that we're eating.

What they were really essentially saying was, we loathe who?

So it wasn't really, the bigger issue here wasn't really the bread that they just said, well, I'm just tired of eating that same stuff every day.

The real problem was the seed of sin in their hearts, which was causing them not to just simply despise that physical bread, but the spiritual bread that was symbolizing Christ because Christ wanted to be within them.

They wanted nothing to do with the righteousness of God that He wanted to plant in their hearts.

So there's a bigger background here than what the surface reads.

And so the Bible says in verse 6, So the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, and many of the people of Israel died.

Therefore the people came to Moses and said, what?

We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you.

Pray to the Lord that He take away the serpents from us.

So here's this people who are sinning against the Lord.

And when they find themselves in the predicament that they're in, this terrible thing, where's the first place that they always go?

They come back to the Lord whom they have originally rejected.

When we also in our lives today, when we find ourselves backsliding and we find ourselves on the wrong track and we start to experience some of the negative consequences of our choices and it gets usually will take us to the place even though we may sometimes resist we always know where we should go, don't we?

And these people always knew where they should go back to.

They came to the 1 man who just 1 verse before they were speaking against and criticizing, they came back to the man of God and said what?

We've sinned against you and against the Lord, pray for us that God would relent these things.

So that everything is the same true for us.

You ever have somebody in your life that is always coming to you for advice and you give them advice and they don't follow that advice and then they have all kinds of problems and then when they have the problems they come back to you and say what?

My prayers aren't going to do any good for you until you turn away from your wicked ways.

Until you turn back to the Lord God with all your heart.

Because it's only then that my prayers are going to help you.

Now my prayers might help you turn back, but I'm not going to pray that God would deliver you from the consequences of your sin when it's the consequences of your sin that he wants you to endure to turn your heart back to him.

But the people somehow, it seemed like, friends, you read throughout the whole Bible, and no matter how wicked, no matter how backslidden God's people became, they always knew where to turn to when they had that turning point in their life.

And in the back of their minds, they knew what the true answer was.

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The Faith of the Faithless

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