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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Free Fall

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

Melbourne, Australia is a city of almost 5 million people.

And it's as cultured as a city can be that was settled in just 1835.

It was initially named Batmania after John Batman, 1 of the first Europeans to settle in the area.

Every year between 2011 and 2017, It was rated as the world's most livable city.

Visit Melbourne and it isn't hard to see why.

Its population continues to grow, in part because there's plenty of room for Melbourne to keep on sprawling.

In 1968, Melbourne's population was around 2 and a quarter million and it was growing rapidly.

In April of that year, construction began on the Westgate Bridge, which would connect Melbourne's CBD with the Western suburbs.

It was an absolute necessity and it was strategically located.

Today, it's 1 of the busiest stretches of road in all of Australia.

It was Designed to rise 190 feet or 58 meters above the Yarra River, close to where the Yarra flows into Port Phillip, it's a mile and a half or 2 and a half kilometers long, 1 of the longest bridges in Australia, twice as long as the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

But a problem appeared during construction, and it was significant.

2 spans right here on the west side of the bridge didn't quite line up correctly.

They were off by about 4 and a half inches.

So 8 tons of concrete block was brought in to weigh down 1 of the spans and bring it into alignment with the other.

But all that weight caused the span to buckle.

A span on a similar bridge in Wales had collapsed that same year.

No 1 wanted that to happen here in Melbourne.

They tried to straighten out the buckle, but the attempted fix failed.

Spectacularly, at 10 minutes to midday, the steel on span 10-11 of the bridge changed colour under immense pressure.

And the entire 2, 000-ton section of that bridge came crashing down into the mud and water of the Yarra River.

Amazingly, some men managed to survive the fall, riding the bridge down to the ground.

Many of them were on the ground when that massive section of the bridge came crashing down on top of them.

Of course, the city of Melbourne was in shock.

There'd been warnings from some of the steel workers about the structural integrity of the bridge.

Unfortunately, those warnings turned out to be prophetic.

There are still many people in Melbourne who vividly remember that day.

We're able to see what happened because I was about the seventh or eighth floor in the Flodiloro building in the city and we had a clear view here, it was a clear day and when we heard the thing we just located where it was and we could see the the plume of dust at the time.

I heard some commotion at the other end of the room and some rather colourful language was coming out of them and there were tears and crying and I said, what's going on?

And they just heard that the Westgate Bridge had collapsed and a lot of people in our factory either knew people on the site or had relatives actually working there.

It just collapsed onto the workman's hut.

I guess that you just don't know what's going to happen.

The first concern was the people that were inside the bridge and they died.

A lot of them didn't die, but the ones that were underneath it just didn't have any hope at all.

Well, it's 1 of the largest workplace accidents that was on record at the time.

And it was quite horrendous to the rest of us because we were hoping to see this structure improve our infrastructure so much.

And it just, and it was, when you see the loss of life that was involved, it was very traumatic.

An enormous section of a bridge came crashing to the ground and disaster was the result.

Now let me ask you, What do you do when you crash?

What do you do when your life is in free fall?

You know, the reason that a chunk of this bridge fell in the first place was directly because of human error.

The truth of the matter is, doesn't feel very good, but the truth of the matter is, when we fall, same reason.

The truth is, no 1 has to cave into temptation.

The Bible tells us again and again that God is able to keep us from temptation.

1 Corinthians 10.13 There hath no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man.

But God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." Wherever there is temptation, God has a way out of temptation.

There's power in God's presence in your life.

Wherever there's temptation, there's a way through God out of temptation.

Now remember what Jesus said in the Lord's Prayer, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

That's Matthew 6 13 and Jude verse 24, Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy." Now what can God do?

Aaron, number 2 in Israel, second only to Moses, made a golden calf for Israel to worship while Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the 10 Commandments from God.

Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, nursed a wicked attitude and as a result, she was afflicted with leprosy by God.

These are significant falls, each individual highly esteemed of God.

But in each case, because of their own choice, because they chose to surrender to sin rather than surrender to God, sin came into their lives and brought disastrous consequences.

You've been going along through life, maybe things have been going pretty well, and suddenly, maybe from out of the blue it seems, boom, you come crashing down.

Sin comes and does its work and creates its damage.

You know, it isn't only devil worshippers that carry out road rage.

It's not only atheists who visit websites they shouldn't go to.

Now, that's not to excuse it in any way at all, but it's important to understand what you ought to do when you find yourself in a spiritual freefall because that thump when you hit the bottom can be pretty painful and it can also be disorienting.

Now think about Moses, a fine young man raised in a wonderful home, privileged to be educated and then raised in the royal family of Egypt.

We think about what the Bible says in Exodus 2 verse 11.

It came to pass in those days when Moses was grown that he went out with his brethren and looked on their burdens, and he spied an Egyptian smiting in Hebrew 1 of his brethren, and he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

As a child, Moses' life was spared by a miracle of God.

And yet here he is some years later committing an act of outright violence.

Well, let me ask you, how do you come back from that?

How do you come back from a prison sentence?

How do you come back from some kind of costly mistake?

How do you come back from a sin that you know wasn't necessary, but caused you or others a whole lot of grief?

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Free Fall

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