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Strong Tower Radio

Jim Nephew

The Indwelling Word

♪♪♪ Fresh manna fell to the ground as a gift from God while the Israelites were in the wilderness.

It was fresh from the ovens of Heaven, baked by the master baker himself.

How the Israelites must have anticipated the taste and the smell of each morning's delivery.

Just like the Israelites, you too can now experience the taste and smell of fresh manna.

Today, you'll be listening to Jim Nephew, pastor of the Alpena and Onaway Seventh-day Adventist churches.

I sometimes haven't forgotten in my head, but my hand still writes the old year.

I believe this year we're going to see things that we have never seen before, like last year and the year before that.

But at an unprecedented rate, we're seeing things change in our world, in our lives, in our society and in our church.

I know I've used to say, somehow God's got to do something with me.

Somehow he's got to take the Laodicean church and wake it up.

Make it see its nakedness, its blindness, its poorness.

Well, we've seen some things happening that have been waking us up.

The shaking time is upon us that the Bible talks about.

Those who have been trying are gonna be shaken out and those who are relying on Jesus are gonna be shaken into the church.

Whatever normal was, they're not going back to that.

But how do we live in these changing, uncertain times?

A small child does not know all the reasons why things are the way they are.

They just depend completely on their parents to care for them.

At times, they desire things to be different than they are.

They feel that they can only be happy if their parents give them what they want, even though they may not even know what that is.

No to those things that are gonna be harmful to them.

Yes to those things that will be a blessing to them.

Their parents tell them what they can and can't do, and as long as they follow the rules, they find joy in life.

As they grow and mature, They move from following their parents' rules to having their parents' character in their hearts.

And their parents' rules become their rules.

He's maturing us as individuals and as a church to have his character.

He wants to take us from seeing his character to experiencing it growing in us every day.

Again, I encourage you as always write down these texts on the back of the bulletin or someplace.

I'm gonna be moving through them rather quickly.

Colossians 3.16 says, "'Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly "'in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing 1 another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

Who are we supposed to sing to in church?

I'm singing to the Lord and preaching to the Lord.

Rightly understood, this text solves the problem of Christian living.

We're going to spend a few minutes to see how much is involved in living as a follower of Jesus.

There is power in the Word of God, far above that of any other book.

The Lord through the prophet Jeremiah rebukes the false prophets who speak their own words instead of the words of God.

The prophet who has a dream, let him tell the dream.

If God's given a message to the prophet through a dream, he should tell the dream.

And he who has a word, let him speak my word faithfully, God says.

And what is the chaff to the wheat, says the Lord.

Verse 29, is not my word like a fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?

Am I willing to let the Word of God break my heart?

Am I willing to let the Word of God have its work in your heart?

Or do I think I need to pick up a hammer to do that work?

The word hidden in our hearts protects against sin.

Psalms 119, probably the longest chapter in the Bible.

Psalms 119 verse 11, early on in that chapter, your word I have hidden in my heart.

Why has David hidden the word of God in his heart?

Often times we think, I don't want to sin against God, so I need to try really hard not to sin against God.

I really need to muster up all my willpower and make it happen.

But David tells us, it's not by trying hard that we keep from sinning, it's by putting the word of God into our hearts that we keep from sinning.

1 way to do that could be through memorization.

It might be maybe putting scripture on your refrigerator or different places around your house, on your bathroom mirror, wherever you might be, just put some Bible texts up there.

Some of us have an amazing memory, you know, we can just see something say at 1 time and it's stuck there and we're good to go.

Some of us, as soon as we walk out of the bathroom, Not only do we forget, like the Bible says, what our face looks like, but we forget what we just read on the bathroom mirror.

But by putting God's word in our hearts, It's more than just putting them in our head, friends.

That is putting it into your heart, from the head into the heart, putting in a place where you can believe the reality of God's Word.

Of the righteous in Psalms 37, 31, we find that the reason why none of the righteous person's steps slide is that the law of his God is in his heart.

I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like I'm constantly backsliding.

I spent some time out in Washington State, and we had a mountain there, a small mountain called Mount Rainier, and it was 14, 400 and some feet tall, which is not that tall except that you start out close to sea level.

So you're climbing close to 14, 000 feet versus a mountain that maybe starts and you're already up there at 6, 000, 7, 000 feet to start with.

But we were climbing up on Mount Rainier and there was a place called a scree.

We had crossed a snow field, which is a glacier, and there were cracks in the glacier, and you had to be careful so you don't fall down in these cracks, as they literally go hundreds of feet down, and they just get a little narrower and a little narrower as they go down.

And you fall in there, you can get scrunched right down at the bottom.

And you need ropes so that if you fall in there, you don't fall to the bottom and your partners can help pull you out.

But we had crossed the snow field and we came to the other side and there was what's called a screed.

A screed is a place on the mountain where rocks come down like this.

The glaciers down here and these rocks are here and there's another screed over here but the screed has broken chips of rock.

Some of them are the size of like your thumbnail some maybe as much as 2 inches, but they're constantly slowly filtering down a very steep slope.

And so you step up as high as you can and you step down with your foot and you may have taken a 2 foot step but you end up only making about 6 inches of progress and we had to go up 1, 000 vertical feet up that screed and at that time we were at 10, 000 feet So we're going to climb from 10, 000 feet up to 11, 000 feet.

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The Indwelling Word

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