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Fontana SDA Church

Jeremy Salvador

Tears in Heaven

Are you glad to be in the house of the Lord this morning?

Are you happy to be in the house of the Lord this morning?

Well, I sure am and it's always a pleasure and a blessing to be here and especially to have the opportunity to speak to God's people.

I just want to give a brief commentary about the children's story.

Those of you who don't know, that was my brother who delivered that.

And just for the record, he doesn't tell me these stories.

So I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed that.

By the way, owls are 1 of the few birds that I have absolutely no idea about.

So I learned a lot of stuff about an owl today.

And so I'm very happy for that children's story.

Well, today we're going to go over a sermon entitled, Tears in Heaven.

Interesting story about how it was entitled, Tears in Heaven.

Well, I was asked to speak and then very soon after I was asked what my sermon title was going to be called.

They said, well, I need your sermon title.

So They said, well, I need it by this date.

Well, I got busy in doing all of these sort of things, and it came time where the deadline was, where I need this sermon title.

It's going to be called Tears in Heaven, God's Love.

It goes into the bulletin and now I'm stuck.

And I have to preach a sermon entitled Tears in Heaven and it has to be about God's love.

And so I scurried away into my home and I started studying and I took a look at scripture after scripture and lo and behold, God blessed with a sermon entitled, Tears in Heaven.

So having said that, this is how this sermon came about.

And God, I know, will bestow a blessing upon his people this morning.

It's been said, it's been vocalized, that I employ an excessive amount of saskopedionisms.

What that means is people say I use big words.

And I am going to attempt to refrain from doing so this morning as much as possible, so that those concerns that have been brought up to me about those problems will be rectified.

So having said that, I'm going to try my best to refrain from the use of those overly large words.

But why don't we go right into our sermon.

We're right at 1150 and so we're going to go right to about 1230.

I didn't think that I'd get up here at about 1150.

But I'm going to kind of skip through these things.

I'm going to speak very quickly because I know all of you are very smart and You can follow along so having said that Why don't we?

Invite the spirit in our midst the same spirit that inspired the Word, may we ask to instruct us and ask Him to be here with us this morning.

Because really when we study the Bible, when we study the Word of God, It is not so much about IQ, but as it is about I will.

And so having said that, we are going to present our wills to God and may we surely see through through his word in a clear, more meaningful way.

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer, shall we?

Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you for this morning.

Father, we thank you for gathering us here together.

And Father, we pray now that your spirit would be in our midst.

Father in heaven, give us a double portion of your spirit this morning.

And Lord, may we see your word as it is in truth.

May Jesus Christ and his love for us be revealed in enormous proportion.

And Father in heaven, may you hide me behind the cross of Calvary.

Father, may the words that I speak not be my own words, but might be words from your throne.

Father I pray these things in Jesus precious name amen.

I'd like to start off with a brief illustration.

At that time he died and he died when he fell from a 53 story window in New York City.

He landed on a roof on an adjacent four-story building and he died instantaneously.

Connor was in the custody of his mother, an Italian actress named Lori Del Santo, and they were staying in an apartment during a visit to New York from Italy.

The boy's father was also in New York and was staying at a nearby hotel at the time of the tragedy.

The death of baby Connor was 1 of those accidents that seemed so preventable.

It seemed like it should not have happened, with hindsight yet aren't imaginable until they happen.

The housekeeper had just finished cleaning the window and left it open to air the room when Connor ran past him and fell out by the 4 by 6 opening.

Now by law in New York City, apartments must have window guards installed on every window.

In all residential buildings with 3 or more tenants, but a 1984 ruling exempted condominiums from this regulation, placing the onus upon the owners of such units to install such safety devices.

The apartment Del Santos and her son were staying in was a condo unit.

Thus, the window Connor fell through lacked a guard.

The death of his son had a deep impact upon his father.

For 9 months, the grieving father concentrated on coming to terms with his loss.

The problem here in our world is that the world that we live in, the world where this tragic incident happened, this story is not an isolated incident.

There are hundreds of baby Connors per se in our world today.

And the questions that so many people ask are how can God experience the same emotions we humans experience?

How can God participate in the very human acts of weeping, bleeding, crying?

How can the God who created us, who loved us, who saved us, who nurtures and cares for us, allow us to experience evil and suffering?

How can the God who numbers the very hairs on our head and who holds us in the palm of his hand, how can that same God seemingly remain detached from human suffering and pain?

Could an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibelevolent God share our pain?

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Tears in Heaven

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