Don’t despair. If He could change hard hearts in the past He can do it again.

Continuing the Vision

<p>Don’t despair. If He could change hard hearts in the past He can do it again.</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>

Uchee Pines Institute

John Bradshaw

The Healed

It has been said, and with great justification, that it was without doubt 1 of the most epic ocean voyages of all time.

A man and his party of 28, including himself, made it to within about a hundred miles of their intended destination, a hundred miles.

But the challenge was that ice closed in around the ship and so the intrepid explorers needed to exercise some patience.

And they did, but the ice that settled in around them was there to stay.

Well, typically down there near Antarctica, if you just waited out, the ice may melt or move or take you that way or this, but this ice was doing none of that.

And then after some months of waiting, after the men had set up camp sort of around the ship, by the ship, That ice closed in to such an extent that the ship was destroyed.

They clambered out, they retrieved every possession that they could.

By now many of the animals, many of the animals had been slaughtered for food.

They waited and waited and waited and waited until finally they could get into these little lifeboats.

Imagine if you were a lifeboat, an open lifeboat.

And they traveled many miles to essentially a great big rock sticking out of the Southern Ocean, a place called Elephant Island.

And they would still be there today if someone hadn't decided to dare and attempt the impossible.

Help was not going to come just of its own.

And so the expedition leader, a gentleman named Ernest Shackleton, gathered 5 volunteers together and together they sailed, well, traveled 800 miles across the most treacherous body of water on the planet.

A biographer said later that these men in their 22-foot long open boat were like an insect in a tidal wave.

1 of them reported later on being in a trough, in a depression, in a down swell, if you like, and they looked up and he thought, my goodness, that sky is beautiful.

And it was about then that he realized that he wasn't looking into a starry sky, he was looking up at the foam of a wave cresting above them.

The wave was somewhere between 50 and 70 feet high.

And again and again and again the men all believed that they would perish.

If they even made it to South Georgia Island, it's a British territory.

The currency there, not that there's really many people there to spend it.

There's the same currency used in the Falkland Islands, so it was south of the Falkland Islands.

But they were sailing there because there was a whaling station there and if they were able to make it to South Georgia Island, surely they could enlist help and somebody would come and rescue the men.

If you've read the story, then you know that at least as remarkable as sailing across that Southern Ocean was traversing South Georgia Island.

They landed on 1 end of the island, they had to cross it by foot.

They did, they wandered into a whaling station and shocked the people there, unaccustomed to people just wandering in.

But Shackleton and his 5 men, 1 of them the navigator, a man from New Zealand, arrived looking much the worse for wear.

They announced that they needed help, would you take us please back 800 miles to Elephant Island.

Now, keep in mind, while Shackleton and his little crew were traveling across that ocean to this island, 22 men were huddled under 5 other lifeboats.

They ate penguins for the longest time, but after a while it seemed that even the penguins had left Elephant Island.

And the men descended into a condition of near starvation.

Shackleton endeavored to come back 3 times, but 3 expeditions failed.

Meanwhile, the men waited, and they waited, and they waited, and Shackleton said, I felt like if I didn't make it back, I would be responsible for the murder of those 22 men.

You think you can imagine what the journey was like, but you really cannot, unless of course you have experience sailing on the ocean in tremendously rough conditions, in impossible conditions.

Imagine what it was like being practically out of food to the extent that all you could find for sustenance was limpets that you were forced to scrape off a rock.

There wasn't much to eat, there wasn't much to catch.

If you were a vegetarian, you were in an unfortunate situation.

And I don't think limpets or penguins make it into the acceptable condition when it comes to the dietary stipulations outlined in the book of Leviticus.

But there they were desperate, waiting and waiting and waiting.

When Shackleton left, he took with him food enough to last him 4 or 6 or so weeks, but he was gone for several months.

They had to have reasoned in their minds that Shackleton and his 5 assistants had come to grief.

They had to have entertained the notion that Shackleton was dead and therefore they were too.

If you speak to somebody who was on death row or spending life in prison without the possibility of parole for the term of their natural life, that person will tell you that it's simply a death sentence slowly administered.

So as long as they were there, and it seemed as though Shackleton was never coming back, this was a death sentence.

Slowly, painfully, and very coldly administered.

And 1 day, as 1 of the men looked out into the gloom he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

A large sailing vessel broke through the mist and there he was.

It was Shackleton and a ship with a crew that had come back to redeem or ransom or rescue these men.

And what's so interesting is that in spite of the desperate conditions in which they lived, their spirits were high.

In spite of the fact that these men were now emaciated, almost at a point of starvation, their confidence was strong for when Shackleton appeared and somebody rode from that ship to the shore to start ferrying the men back, the response they heard from man after man was simply, we knew you would be back.

We never let go of hope of our belief that you would return.

Have you ever just known that something was going to happen?

I just knew she would be there waiting for me.

I just knew that the day was going to turn out like that.

I just knew the result was going to be like this.

Did you ever have that feeling deep, deep, deep in your bones?

What's incredible about this is that in spite of circumstances, in spite of everything they could see, in spite of everything logical, the man hasn't come back.

If he hasn't come back by now, He's never coming back.

In spite of everything they could see, they believed that Shackleton would return.

What does it take to have that kind of belief?

That's what we would in certain circles call faith.

Although for the believer, for the Christian believer, faith is ever so slightly different.

See, you can go to bed at night believing in your heart that the sun is going to come up tomorrow morning.

But you don't necessarily have to have great faith in God to believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning.

It's been happening every day for 6000 or so years.

You have a right to expect that when the rain falls the grass will grow and so too will the weeds and other things.

But as we look at faith in the Bible, we come to the conclusion that faith is a settled conviction that the Word of God will do what the Word of God says it will do, simply because God has said it is so.

For example, we go back to the beginning.

The Bible says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and He did.

The psalmist gave us this testimony, for He spake and it was done, for He commanded and it did what?

There is power, there is power in the Word of God.

And I've got a couple of Bible stories, familiar Bible stories, to share with you tonight that demonstrate the power that is resident in the Word of God.

Let's go in our Bibles to Matthew and chapter 8, the Gospel of Matthew, the eighth chapter.

I intended to start in verse 5, but verse 1 just looks so good we'll begin there.

The Bible says, When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him.

Now what mountain was this that he was on?

If you read in Matthew 7, Jesus has just finished the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon given on the Mount of Olives, just about this far away from the Temple Mount, right there in Jerusalem.

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The Healed

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