ASI Southern Union 2019: Present Truth | Happening Now

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ASI Southern Union

John Bradshaw

Shields of Brass

There is no substitute for the real thing.

You know in civilized countries we say margarine.

My father grew up on a farm and he ate meat and he drank milk and he ate eggs and cheese and if it was part of a cow then you ate it.

My dad grew up on a farm and he ate like he grew up on a farm and he died like he ate like he grew up on a farm just short of a 68th birthday.

I remember being a child and we bought it, well mom and dad bought a new fridge and it had this wonderful thing in it, had a butter conditioner in the refrigerator because 1 of the challenges with butter and in the interest of full disclosure before some of you wish to take me out and stone me, I don't eat butter.

In fact when I was a child I considered butter to be absolutely pointless.

If you're gonna put jam on your bread what did you need butter for?

You had bread, you needed jam, you did not need an interloper getting in the way of the experience.

I remember saying to my mother, why do we use this?

Why would I have peanut butter and butter?

And I caught her, she struggled to give me a good answer.

But we've got a butter conditioner because when you scrape the butter, and then you put it on the bread, what happens to the bread?

The butter conditioner made the butter soft and spreadable.

But then for some reason, the bread shores, with my dad who was raised on a farm at his first jobs were farming jobs in terms of employment, in my dad's house, Margarine, not margarine.

My father somehow managed to keep it together.

I'm not sure why we moved from butter to margarine.

I think it had more to do with convenience.

7 children in my family, but at the time there were 3 living in the home, 3 hungry boys, and my mother would make sandwiches for us and send us off to school, you know, with a small mountain of sandwiches.

I think the margarine was just easier than the butter, and so for the sake of convenience, it wasn't anything to do with health, It wasn't anything to do with health.

It wasn't anything to do with maybe cost, but really I think convenience.

It might act like butter but it wasn't butter.

Love it, loathe it, I'm not criticizing it, but margarine is not butter.

If you're a butter purist like my father was, that might matter to you.

You might say an imposter but I don't have a dog in that fight all those years later, all these years later, I don't really care.

But while some substitutes work, others do not.

7 up, Sprite, I cannot discern that there's any difference largely because I don't drink either of them but I've never heard that there's a difference maybe there is Publix and Walmart one's a little fancier but at the end of the day, you're buying bread, you're buying coconut milk, you're buying olives.

It's the same no matter what shop you buy it in.

Same, different, same, no big deal, no big difference.

You will never confuse Publix and Piggly Wiggly.

We read in the Holy Bible about a fascinating substitute that was made, an inexplicable substitute, but it speaks to us about the mindset of the substitutor at the time and more importantly it speaks to us concerning our experience today.

So you have your Bible, please turn, and your Bible are on your device, to 1 Kings and chapter 10.

1 Kings chapter 10, and we'll start in verse 1.

And the Bible says this, and when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord she came to prove him with hard questions and She came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bear spices, with very much gold and precious stones.

And when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart.

She was impressed with Solomon as a man and impressed with Solomon's stuff.

Verse 10, she gave the king 120 talents of gold.

There was some wealth here, there was some value here, there was something precious here, this was amazing and we're just talking about 1 little wee manifestation of the wealth of Solomon.

And I read verse 21, all King Solomon's drinking vessels were of gold.

The vessels of the house of the forest of Lebanon, pure gold.

It was nothing accounted of in the days of Solomon.

Now how in the world was Solomon able to demonstrate this bounty in this way?

How did he come into possession of this incredible blessing?

It came to pass when Solomon had finished the building of the house of the Lord and the king's house and all Solomon's desire, which he was pleased to do, that the Lord appeared to Solomon the second time as he appeared to him at Gibeon.

I've heard your prayer and your supplication that you have made before me.

I have a hallowed this house which you have built to put my name there forever.

My eyes and my heart shall be there perpetually.

And if you shall walk before me as David your father walked in integrity of heart and in uprightness To do according to all that I've commanded you and will keep my statutes and my judgments now.

If you'll follow me faithfully and keep my statutes and my judgments, then I will establish the throne of your kingdom upon Israel forever, as I promised to David your father, saying, there shall not fail thee a man upon the throne of Israel.

But if you shall at all turn from following me, you or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I've set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them and so forth.

So Solomon was able to place shields of gold, hundreds of them, tremendously precious, greatly valuable, not in the temple now, but in a secondary residence.

Look, he had to do something with the gold.

And he had so much gold because he'd been faithful to God and God blessed him.

Now ladies and gentlemen, financial and material blessings do not always follow faithfulness to God.

We let God decide whom he wishes to bless 1 way and whom he wishes to bless another but when you're faithful to God Blessings come would you say men they just do God wants to bless his people again I'm not specifying the manner he wants to bless his people.

He wants to bless his church people to see that he is a God who blesses and that faithfulness to God is the right path.

But now, let's see what happened in 1 Kings 14.

This is now a story that takes a sharp turn.

The Word of God says in verse 21 of 1 Kings 14, and Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, reigned in Judah.

He reigned for 17 years in Jerusalem, the city which the Lord did choose out of all the tribes of Israel to put his name there.

His mother's name was Nehemiah and Ammonitess.

And they provoked him to jealousy with their sins, which they'd committed above all that their fathers had done.

For they also built high places and images and groves on every high hill and under every green tree.

And there were also Sodomites in the land.

And they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.

And it came to pass in the fifth year of King Rehoboam that Shishak, king of Egypt, came up against Jerusalem.

When you go back to the time of the Exodus, God said, you can go and take from the Egyptians.

And God's people essentially pillaged the wealth of the Egyptians and carried that wealth away.

Shields of Brass

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