MWYC 2010: I'm the Vine, You are the Branches

<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>

Midwest Youth Conference

Chantee Nebblett

Sean Nebblett

Wholeheartedly His

We are excited to be here today, beautiful Sabbath day the Lord has made and I'm gonna do something a little bit different today.

This Sabbath for many of you regular members of this church, is a special Sabbath for many youth that have come from many states to come to this place and worship God together and seek his will in their lives.

The Sabbath is Midwestern Youth Conference And many times you get to the end of a conference like that and the speaker will start talking about, okay, where do we go from here?

Well, I'm going to take a little different approach this time And we're going to start this day with a little bit of that kind of message.

Because the truths of God's Word that we're going to explore today are truths that I think will set the stage for putting our hearts in a place where we can understand what we need to understand and learn what we need to learn from the Bible and from our God today.

Before we do that, I just want to seek the Lord and ask Him to be with us in a very special and precious way during this Sabbath day.

So if you would, kneel with us as we pray and begin this message.

It's a day that we can come together as believers and seek your face and learn from you.

And in a special way this day, Father, we want you to open our minds that we might be able to learn the truth of your Word.

That that truth might enter into our hearts, that we might be changed thereby and go from this place different people.

We pray that as we open our minds for the first message of this day, that You would teach us just what You need us to know.

I pray that you would anoint Shantay and myself with the Holy Spirit, baptize us with fire, and let none of ourselves, none of our opinions, and none of our personal conclusions get in the way of the work that your spirit wants to accomplish in the lives of all the people within hearing this day.

We thank you for your promise to be with us.

We thank you for Jesus that makes congregations like this, messages like this, meaningful and makes our lives so full.

We pray that he would be an honored guest.

Have you ever wished that a good thing would not end?

Have you ever wished a good thing would not end?

Have you ever gone, say, to a friend's house and you've just spent a beautiful time with them, encouraging and being encouraged and all at once, maybe you've been there for a few days, and the time draws nigh when it's time to go home.

And in your heart you cry because you don't want to lose the blessings that you've been experiencing.

The last few days Jesus is with them and Jesus keeps saying this same kind of thing over and over.

I'm going away, I'm going away, I'm going away, but I'll come again.

And how their hearts must have burned within them.

And then when Christ actually died, how their hearts must have burned because something that was so beautiful that it made up some of the most meaningful years of their lives was going away.

Well friends, I have a piece of good news for you this morning.

He does not want us to pull away from our time with Him in the morning and be 2 hours down into our day and be completely devoid, completely empty of the blessings He gave us.

He does not want us to come away from rich spiritual seasons in our lives and soon again be empty.

God's blessings, God's promises last forever.

But far too often we find ourselves in a place where we come to a place like this or we have a beautiful time with our Lord in the morning, we make some commitments and a few hours into the day it's all gone.

Look at the young people around you in the world.

We are a dying generation in a land of plenty.

Turn in your Bibles to Matthew, the 13th chapter.

Matthew 13 and I will start reading in verse 3.

Then he spoke many things to them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow.

Verse 4, And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside, and the birds came and devoured them.

Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth.

But when the sun was up, they were scorched and because they had no root, they withered away.

Verse 7, And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them.

But others, others, fell on good ground and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some 60, and some 30.

Here lies our secret, and here lies the basis for our study this morning, the parable of the sower and the seed.

Okay, so this morning, as Sean said, we want to look at this parable, and actually, probably many of you have heard messages about this parable before, but I don't want you to check out because we're going to be looking at a slightly different angle.

We're going to be looking at how it is for young people, our hearts as young people, how this parable practically applies to us.

And I think that you will find as we look at these different categories, the seed that fell by the wayside, was eaten up by the birds, the seed that fell on the stony ground, the seed that fell among thorns, and the good heart.

You will be able to identify with these different areas.

I want to start out by Talking about the seed that fell by the wayside.

You know, our spiritual weakness is not due to a lack of seed.

We can see in this parable 3 different reasons why we struggle as Christians.

I think that in some ways, I know that in many ways, I have yet to experience the life-changing power, the way that God wants me to experience because of various reasons.

And this seed, God's Word, When it falls by the wayside, it's falling on hard-packed ground, a heart that is hardened.

And let me read you a quote here that is by 1 of my favorite authors.

It says, The seed sown by the wayside represents the Word of God as it falls upon the heart of an inattentive hearer.

Like the hard-beaten path, trodden down by the feet of men and beasts, is the heart that becomes a highway for the world's traffic, its pleasures, and sins.

You know, the world's traffic will take different forms in every life.

And I want you to ask yourself, how is the world's traffic being allowed in my heart today?

Because the answer may be different for each 1 of us.

And the world's Traffic does not necessarily have to be a really super bad thing that looks absolutely terrible.

Good things that are keeping us from humbling our hearts before God and allowing Him to have access to us.

Good things that are keeping us from being still and knowing that He is God.

And you know, Satan loves to have our lives full of those good things, because it's harder to recognize those good things that are distracting us from God than terrible things.

And people looking out from us on the outside think, wow, she's got her life together, wow, she's doing wonderful things.

But if they are separating me from my Savior, then they are dangerous things.

They are going to cost me my soul's salvation.

You know, the enemy does not mind if we make a profession of Christianity.

He doesn't even mind if we conform our lives to certain standards.

In fact, he loves to use people like that, because it's people who look like they are walking the walk, who are talking the talk, but are not living the experience that can turn most effectively others out of the path of righteousness.

1 of the most tragic things in the world is a hard-hearted Christian.

And I say Christian in quotations because I really believe that No true Christian will be hard-hearted.

But the world is full of people who call themselves Christians whose hearts are hard.

They're not willing to do what he asks them to do.

I remember hearing a story recently, actually, about a church full of Christians back during World War II in Germany while the Holocaust was going on.

And these Christians, every week they had their church right by the train tracks.

And trains full of Jews, just boxcar after boxcar, stuffed with these humans, heading towards concentration camps, would roll by their church while they were having their church service.

And the Jews could kind of look out of the slats, you know, in the boxcars, and as they would drive by the church, they would think, the Christians, the Christians have got to help us.

If anyone can help us, it would be those Christians.

And so they would cry and scream and shout, help to these people worshipping in this church.

And you know what the Christians in that church would do?

Back to Menu

Wholeheartedly His

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine