Pastor David concludes his series on Back to Basics with the message entitled: Back to Basics: Fitness Witness.

<p>Pastor David concludes his series on Back to Basics with the message entitled: Back to Basics: Fitness Witness.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

Back to Basics

David Shin

Back to Basics: Morning Manna

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for your goodness towards us, your tender mercy, for the ways that you have blessed us abundantly above all that we can ask or think.

We thank you for your provisions for us which are new every morning.

Bless us, Lord, as we have gathered together, and pause for a few moments to reflect upon Your Word.

In Exodus chapter 16 verses 14 and 15 the Bible says when the dew on thin flakes like frost on the ground Appeared on the desert floor.

When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, what is it?

The children of Israel are going from Egypt to Canaan, and they have just been freed from bondage.

They're in the middle of the desert and they wake up 1 morning and the dew is there and once the dew is burned off, there is something peculiar on the ground.

The Bible says that it looked like flakes of frost.

And for 40 years, a miracle took place every single day.

The Bible indicates that there were a million men, not counting women and children.

So this was not a small group of people, a conservative estimate, 3000000 people, there on the desert floor, and they wake up, and as far as the eye could see, this has to feed that many people, there is on the ground this bread from heaven.

And for 40 years, God fed the Israelites.

I wanna see some manna when I get to heaven and see what it tastes like.

Here's some Bible texts, before we get to that, here's an artist's depiction of the daily gathering of manna by the Israelites.

What a miracle it was every single day to see that manna on the ground there.

And here are some texts that indicate some descriptions of what that manna was like.

Psalm 78 verse 24, The Bible calls it the corn of heaven.

The next verse says that it was the food of angels or angels' food.

In Exodus chapter 16, verse 31, it says, it's white like coriander seed, and it tasted like wafers made with honey.

And in Numbers 11 verse 8, it says that the taste was like that of fresh oil.

So this was the manna that was there, and they would grind it and bake it into cakes, manna cakes, and this was the miracle that took place every single day to sustain the children of Israel in their journey from Egypt to Canaan.

Jesus referred to this manna in John chapter 6, verse 48 through 51, I am the bread of life.

Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died.

But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.

I am the living bread that came down from heaven.

Whoever eats this bread will live how long?

This bread is my flesh, which I gave for the life of the world.

And Later on, Jesus says, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have no part of me.

And the disciples said, this is a hard saying.

They thought he was talking about cannibalism.

And later on, the disciples came to him and said, what do you mean?

And so he clarified this when he said these words.

The spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing, the words I have spoken to you, they are full of spirit and life.

So Jesus was not literally saying that we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

He was talking about his words, the words of life, the words of spirit.

These are the things that we need to eat.

And this is from Deuteronomy chapter 8 verse 3.

You can see the same correlation that is made here in the Old Testament.

Deuteronomy chapter 8 verse 3, he humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Remember, Jesus quoted it in the temptation there in Matthew chapter 4.

He was quoting from Deuteronomy chapter 8, verse 3.

But what I want to point out in this verse is that there is a correlation between physical manna and spiritual manna.

He said, I gave you manna to teach you that we don't live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

In other words, the Bible compares manna to the word of God.

There is an analogous relationship between physical manna and the spiritual word.

And I want to just spend a few moments and draw some lessons that we can learn from the manna that fell on the Israelites many years ago, because the Bible points out that there is a correlation, there is this relationship between the physical bread and the spiritual bread that God wants to give to each 1 of us.

So very quickly here, lessons from Manna.

God provides for my spiritual nourishment by making it accessible.

The Israelites, when they would get up every single day, they did not have to go far at all.

They didn't have to plant it, they didn't have to sow for it, they didn't have to harvest it, it was right there outside of the tent every single morning, breakfast.

It is accessible, and here it is in Exodus 16, verse 14 through 15, when the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor.

Matter of fact, we live in an age today where the word of God is more accessible than any other time in human history.

Do you realize that in order to read a Bible back during the Dark Ages you had to go into a monastery and it was chained to the wall and it was not even in the common language.

On my phone, I have the entire Bible in audio format.

It's dramatized, you can get it from Amazon, and I downloaded it.

Now, nowadays when I want a Bible verse I don't even go to my Bible program that I paid hundreds of dollars for.

I go to Google And I type it in and it comes up in multiple versions.

I mean, we are living in an unprecedented era where literally the manna is at our fingertips.

God has made his word, spiritual nourishment, so accessible.

And it reminds me of this verse in Romans chapter 10, verse 8, but what does it say?

Is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.

That is the word of faith which we are preaching.

It is available and abundant for every individual.

But as it goes, the Israelites got tired of the manna after a while.

And we get to the place where we assume that the miracle becomes common, or the miracle becomes common.

God provides for my spiritual nourishment by making it Everything that I need for 40 years The Israelites ate that manna and they were not nutritionally deficient Wouldn't it be wonderful to eat 1 thing?

And it provides all the vitamins, all the nutrients.

And the Bible tells us that their feet did not get sore.

Everything that they needed was provided by God to the children of Israel.

In Exodus 16, verse 35, the Israelites ate manna 40 years until they came to a land that was settled.

They ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.

Once they crossed the Jordan River, the manna suddenly stopped falling.

For 40 years, all the nutrients that were necessary for them to get from Egypt to Canaan was provided by a miracle.

Back to Basics: The Breath of the Soul

On the screen I have a picture of our two-month-old son, or when he was 2 months old, this picture took a lot of work and effort.

And he's laying on a book called Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret, And I finished reading it last year and we just happened to name our son Hudson.

And it is the most inspiring book that I've read in 2017.

Hudson Taylor, great missionary to China.

And he started an organization, he founded in 1865 called China, the China Inland Mission, and it was a remarkable organization because he decided that the missionaries that he would enlist would not be guaranteed a salary nor could they solicit for any sort of donations.

They would just ask the Lord, and people thought that he was crazy to be starting this organization, because who would join?

And in 1876, 52 missionaries joined the China Inland Mission.

And in 1900, when Hudson Taylor retired, there were 750 missionaries that were part of the China Inland Mission.

And from 1865 to the time that he retired in 1900, he asked God alone for the funds and received a total of $4 million during that time.

And this is $4, 000, 800 in the late 1800s.

And thousands of souls were led to Christ as a result, remarkable story, and I read an account in that book, Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret, that just inspired me and warmed my heart.

This is from a third person account, an individual that was there at a prayer meeting, and Mr.

Taylor opened the meeting by leading out in a hymn, his appearance did not impress me.

He was slightly built and spoke in a quiet voice, but when he said, let us pray, and proceeded to lead the meeting in prayer, my ideas underwent a change.

There was a simplicity, a tenderness, a boldness, a power that hushed and subdued me and made it clear that God had admitted him to the inner circle of his friendship.

Such praying was evidently the outcome of long tarrying in the secret place and was as due from the Lord, to hear Mr.

Taylor plead for China was to know something of what it is meant by the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man.

That meeting lasted from 4 to 06:00, but it seemed 1 of the shortest meetings I had ever attended." Hudson Taylor, Missionary to China, phenomenal prayer life.

As we look at our scripture reading today, Mark 1, verse 35, now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, he went out and departed to a solitary place, and there he prayed.

The Bible tells us in Luke chapter 5, verse 16, but Jesus himself would often slip away to the wilderness to pray, and we know the impact of Jesus's life of all the armies that ever marched of all the navies that ever sailed and all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of man upon the earth as powerfully as that 1 solitary life.

Jesus' life made remarkable impact on our culture and our civilization.

And the impact of Jesus, 1 historian in his five-volume work on world history, historian, religious skeptic, H.G.

Wells, found himself devoting the most space to Jesus Christ.

And he wrote, a historian like myself cannot portray the life and the progress of humanity honestly without giving Jesus of Nazareth the foremost place.

And from the beginning I want to tell you my thesis just so that you know what I'm talking about.

Every spiritual Revival can be traced to a person of prayer.

Sacred history, modern history, when you look at every spiritual revolution or every spiritual revival, any time God is moving mightily upon his people, it can be traced to a person of prayer.

You see it in the life of Hudson Taylor, you see it in the life of Jesus Christ.

And here's a quote from Richard Ellsworth Day commenting on these great movements.

It would be of no surprise if a study of secret causes were undertaken to find that in every golden era in human history proceeds from the devotion and righteous passion of some single individual.

At the center of the column, there's always 1 man or 1 woman who knows God and knows where he is going.

Every spiritual revival can be traced to a person of prayer, a radical prayer life.

Martin Luther, we just celebrated last year the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, changed the world, changed history, And when you look at the prayer line of Martin Luther, this is from Great Controversy, from the secret place of prayer came the power that shook the world in the Great Reformation.

Luther did not fail to devote 3 hours each day to prayer, and these were taken from that portion of the day most favorable to study.

The place of prayer was the place from which the world was shaken by the Great Reformation.

And we think of Ahab and Jezebel and the apostasy in Israel.

And James chapter 5, verse 17 says, Elijah was a human being even as we are, and he prayed earnestly, and Israel was revived.

The Book of Acts began in a prayer meeting, in a prayer vigil, a prayer session, where men and women were gathering together in fellowship and community to pray, and the rest is history.

Here's a quote that I quoted earlier in our series on the Book of Acts.

3 crucial decades in world history, that's all it took.

In the years between 8033 and 8064, a new movement was born.

In those 30 years, it got sufficient growth and credibility to become the largest religion the world has ever seen and to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

It has spread into every corner of the globe and has more than 2 billion putative adherents.

It has left an indelible impact on civilization, on culture, on education, on medicine, on freedom, and of course on the lives of countless people worldwide.

And the seedbed for all this, the time when it took decisive root, was in those 3 decades it all began with a dozen men and a handful of women, and then the Spirit came.

Book of Acts was born in a prayer meeting.

Bounds on prayer, and he says this, God shapes the world by prayer.

Prayer is God's singular condition to move ahead in his son's kingdom.

Therefore, the believer who's the most highly skilled in prayer will do the most for God, and the secret of success in Christ's kingdom is the ability to pray.

Now, have you ever asked, why ask God when he already knows what we need and he wants to give it to us.

Well, evidently, there is this dynamic in the great controversy where There are rules, evidently, where God will not move above and beyond a certain point without your consent.

Your consent in The great controversy is the most powerful thing that you can give God permission to intervene you remember in the book of Jude where Jesus is going to resurrect Moses from the dead who was standing there to contest the body of Moses?

Evidently, there was this disputing over the body of Moses, which indicates when God is about to move and act, such as raising Moses from the dead, that Satan is contesting that intervention.

And when you ask God for intervention in your own life, God then has permission to move above and beyond that which he would naturally be able because he's not going to barge his way into our lives.

There's a power also in intercessory prayer.

The Bible tells us when that story of that paralytic that was brought by 4 friends to Jesus and they tore down that roof to bring that friend to Jesus.

By the way, there are people that can only come to Jesus if you bring them.

They are not physically incapacitated, but they are morally incapacitated.

And so these 4 friends bring this man to Jesus.

They lay him before Jesus, and the Bible indicates when Jesus saw their faith, It was not his faith alone, but the Bible says when Jesus saw their faith.

Did you know that you can have faith for somebody else?

You can pray for someone else and say, Lord, please intervene in my son's life.

Intervene in my daughter's life who is apart from you.

And God is able to move beyond what he normally would.

And when the devil's like, hey, what are you doing?

Jesus says, the Lord rebuked you because he may not have asked for it, but his parents asked for it, and God is able to move.

I don't understand all the dynamics of how it works, but when you pray for your son and daughter, heaven's resources are able to be marshaled above and beyond because of your consent on behalf of somebody else.

Now, it's not the same as them asking for themselves, But there is power that God has entrusted us in, in this wonderful thing that we call intercessory prayer.

God wants to save them more than we do, but it's giving God permission and consent to intervene in someone else's life.

We're told by your fervent prayers of faith, you can move the arm that moves the world.

We're also told in another place that prayer is the breath of the soul, the secret of spiritual power.

Prayer is the key in the hand of faith that unlocks heaven's storehouse.

There's something about prayer and it is mystical in a sense.

We don't understand all the Dynamics of it and it's very experiential we live in an age that is high on experience the Millennials are looking for experience and prayer is highly Experiential I can't explain all the formulas I don't know if there is but it is something that you have to experience in order to know that it is real and that it works.

When Knox prayed, Scotland was refreshed.

Back to Basics: Fitness Witness

You make all things beautiful in your time.

We thank you for the work that you've started in our lives and for the promise that you will complete it.

We thank you for Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, for we ask these things in Jesus's precious name, amen, amen.

Right now, the country of Venezuela is going through a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

I didn't know this, but Venezuela has the world's largest oil supply, even greater than Saudi Arabia.

But due to some mismanagement and corruption, they are facing a crisis in which food prices have skyrocketed and 1.3 million people are facing starvation as a result.

And it has completely redrawn the social landscape.

I wanna read an article from a story that was written on the crisis in Venezuela.

For many low-income families, the crisis has completely redrawn the social landscape.

Mothers go days without eating, shriveling to the weight of children themselves.

Young boys leave home and join street gangs to scavenge for scraps, their bodies bearing the scars of knife fights with competitors, crowds of adults storm dumpsters after restaurants close and babies die because it's hard to find or afford infant formula, even in the emergency rooms, and children are arriving with the same weight and height of a newborn.

The devastation that Venezuela is experiencing right now, and currently the government is not allowing any humanitarian aid to get into the country and the doctors are not allowed to document even the data as to exactly how many children are dying because of starvation and malnutrition.

The recent trend has been that women are choosing to be sterilized instead of bare children that they're unable to feed.

And the story goes on to say that the lines outside of these sterilization clinics go for a long time as hundreds, if not thousands, of women are making this just incredible decision to choose sterilization rather than to bring a child into the world that they are unable to feed.

Stories are told of mothers that are unable to find formula so they're having to mix water with rice starch to feed their children, and it's damaging the internal organs as the liver and these children are dying.

We need to pray for Venezuela, amen, that the Lord will just touch the leader's heart so that they will open this country to humanitarian aid and many individuals are unaware of this crisis that is taking place there.

These mothers are grappling with this unimaginable decision of whether to bring someone into this world and then have the challenge of being unable to find the resources to feed their children and they're having to choose not to bear children at all.

This is a very important aspect of human life.

It's important to be born and it's important to have the proper nutrition and resources after birth.

And the same is true for the Christian life as well.

It's important to be born again, and it's also important to have life after the new birth as well.

You need to have new life and also you need to have spiritual life and nutrition after you have experienced the spiritual birth.

Now in our status quo class we're going through the sanctuary and for those of you that are in there just bear with me as I do a brief review.

The sanctuary depicts a model of the Christian experience.

There's many things that the sanctuary points to, but 1 of them is our own journey from birth to growth in our Christian experience.

This is a bird's eye view of the Mosaic Sanctuary, as though you're looking from the top down.

You have the courtyard, the outer compartment, which has 2 articles of furniture.

You have the altar burnt offering and the laver.

Then you have the holy place, which has 3 articles of furniture, you can see them there, the table of showbread, the lampstand, and the altar of incense, and then you have the most holy place where the Ark of the Covenant resided.

Now Adam and Eve were here in Edenic perfection.

They were able to have a face-to-face communion with God.

Because of sin, the entire human race were out here.

And so This is a kindergarten illustration, as it were, to help us to understand that God wants us to bring, God wants to bring us all the way back to that face-to-face communion with God, that Adam and Eve had.

And he does this through 3 distinct processes.

You have the altar of burnt offering and the labor, baptism and the new birth.

And then you come into the holy place and you'll notice that there's 3 distinct articles of furniture.

You have the table of showbread where the bread resided, you had the lampstand where the light was, and then you had the altar of incense.

Scholars have made the application that these 3 articles of furniture refer to in application to our Christian experience.

You have the table of showbread, man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, the word of God.

You have the lampstand, which is the Holy Spirit shining through us.

An application there is ministry or witnessing.

And then you have the altar of incense, which the book of Revelation indicates signifies the prayers of God's people.

So you have 3 distinct elements that are essential for life after the new birth.

So after you're born, Those 3 elements are important to keep you alive spiritually after you have become alive When a baby is born into the world There comes this startling realization that this baby cannot just be placed on a shelf and it's amazing so much of the focus is on the birth but then you realize it's like after birth is a whole other reality my dad said enjoy the time when the baby's inside, because once he gets out, then life dramatically changes.

Series

Back to Basics

Back to Basics: Fitness Witness

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

By the Grace of God I Will

39m

Anticipation

Pt 1-The Holy Spirit and Creation

57m

These Things We Know

These Things We Know: God Fights For Us Part 2

46m

The Disciples Who Gave Up Everything

33m

Encounters With Jesus

Jesus’ Encounter at Simon’s Feast

44m

What Time Is It

57m

Last Day Events

Armageddon and the Seven Last Plagues

1h 5m

The Parable of the Talents

1h 9m

These Things We Know

These Things We Know: God Stands for Us

48m

The Beatitudes

Blessed are the Meek

39m

Self-Inflicted Dysexecutive Syndrome

40m

Experience The Power

The Power of Helplessness

1h 18m

Sound Doctrine