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Lansing SDA Church

Wes Peppers

High Places in Heart Spaces

Father in heaven, you've promised to be with us this morning, and we claim the promise that where 2 or 3 are gathered together, there you are in the midst.

And Lord, this morning we claim your presence to be not just in this room, but in our hearts, in our minds.

And Father, we pray that the Holy Spirit this morning would enlighten our eyes, would enlighten our hearts, would open our ears and cleanse our hearts as we look at your Word.

And may your Word speak to us this morning.

May we be challenged, Lord, and may we each have a surrender experience with You.

We pray, Lord, that You would be first in our lives and we anticipate Your soon return.

So be with us now, we pray, in Jesus' name, Amen.

I in 2010, 2011, took a trip to India when I worked for Amazing Facts and we planted a school of evangelism there.

If you haven't gotten the picture, how many of you believe it's important to share your faith?

And we established a school over in India, the amazing facts center of evangelism in India, where pastors would come and get training to be able to share their faith.

And while I was there, I explored, I like to go around the places that I visit and find cultures very interesting.

I began to interact with a lot of the people locally and I would ask them questions and find out about their life and what they believe and why they believe that.

And 1 of the very intriguing things about India is that much of the nation, not all of the nation, but much of the nation is the religion for many people is Hinduism.

Now I don't know if any of you are very familiar with Hinduism.

I'm not an expert, but I know a little bit.

And 1 of the main gods that they worship there is a god named Ganesh.

And this is what a picture of Ganesh would look like.

It's a person that has a human body and it has an elephant head and I believe it has 6 arms.

And there's a story behind how this god came to be.

And it's 1 of the more prominent gods in India.

You see here is a Hindu priest and he's burning fiery incense in front of Ganesh.

And they have temples all over the place with dedicated to the various gods and people will go there and they will worship worship these gods and also Ganesh and every year I actually happen to be there during the time when they had the festival of Ganesh.

It's a 10 day festival where people, they make a whole lot of these gods and these statues and they will put them up everywhere and they'll pray to them and fast and they'll offer food offerings to them and so forth.

And then at the end, while I was there I would see these big trucks going by and they would have like dozens and dozens of these statues of Ganesh in the truck and they were hauling them places to sell them and so forth.

And as I watched them, I became very fascinated with how they would, the dedication and the reverence that they gave this God.

And at the end of that festival of 10 days, they would take all the statues that they created and they would go down to the river and they would dump them all into the river.

There's all these Ganeshas floating down the river.

And they believed that when they did this, it would bring prosperity to their lives.

It was very interesting that they would have that belief.

I talked to some of these people and I would talk to them in the temple and I would ask them why they worship this particular God and so forth and I encountered 1 gentleman and some of the things he said to me I found very intriguing.

He said to me that I have a very impersonal relationship with my God.

And he says I give my God what He wants, which is, you know, all these offerings and so forth, so that he will give me what I want.

He said, well, I need a job, I need a house, I need all these things.

So it was really a very basic transaction type of relationship.

I give you what you want, so that you will give me what I want.

And it occurred to me very clearly that this was a God that was created in the very image of man.

It was created with the intent that it was similar to the person that created it.

And you know, I caught to thinking about that, and I thought to myself, I wonder if it's possible that sometimes Christians would like to have that kind of a God.

Where I want Him to give me what I want, and I want Him to be personal towards me, but not so personal that he knows about everything in my life.

Or is there a part of me that I can withhold from this person?

Now, as Christians, many times I hear them scoff at, oh that kind of worship, that's just idols, that's just paganism, that's just heathenism, they're worshipping demons.

And we can be quick to cast a stone at people who are worshipping Ganesh and all the other Indian gods and any kind of religion around the world.

It doesn't have to be this 1 only, but we can oftentimes make a judgement call on those people.

But as I begin to think about it, I began to think to myself, there's really a lot of parallels between false, that kind of false worship and a Laodicean Christianity.

There's a lot of parallels between that because we want a God that's going to take care of our needs, we want a God that's going to get us out of a crisis, we want a God that's going to solve all our problems, provide for everything that we need and want, but yet we don't want Him to be too close to us because sometimes it's more comfortable to be afraid than to trust Him.

Now we're going to take a look at some passages in the Bible.

And there's a phrase in the Bible that the Bible uses over and over again, and it's primarily in the Old Testament, and it's the phrase, High places.

Okay, so there's this phrase in the Bible that's used over and over and over again called the high places.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna open our Bibles.

I have the verse on the screen, but I don't want us to become lazy as Seventh-day Adventist Christians, amen?

I want us to take our Bibles and open our Bibles because we're a Bible-believing Christians.

And Bible-believing Christians, we believe that we are a Bible-believing church.

So if you're a Bible-believing Christian who's a part of a Bible-believing church, then we ought to be Bible-using people.

Bible-opening people, Bible-reading people, Bible-following people.

Isn't it wonderful to be a Bible-believing Christian?

Because the Bible says in John 1, verses 1-3, that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and in verse 14 it says, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

So the Word that you hold in your hand is a transcript of who?

And how many of you want to follow Jesus today?

If you want to follow Jesus today, you need to follow His Word.

So, with that being said, let's go to our first verse that talks about the high places.

If you can find 1 Kings, you're going to be doing good because Most of our texts this morning are in 1 Kings.

We believe in the Old and the New Testament here because both are inspired according to the Apostle Paul.

1 Kings chapter 3 verses, we'll start in verse 1.

The Bible says this, Now Solomon made a treaty with Pharaoh king of Egypt and married Pharaoh's daughter, and then he brought her to the city of David until he had finished building his own house in the house of the Lord.

Meanwhile, the people sacrificed at the what?

The high places because there was no house built for the name of the Lord until those days.

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High Places in Heart Spaces

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