ASI 2015: Lift Him Up

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Morning Devotional

John Bradshaw

Occupy

Our Father in heaven, we are thankful that we can gather here today, this morning in this place in your presence.

As day has broken, we thank you that your promises that the Son of Righteousness shall arise on us with healing in His wings.

So bless us this morning, this day, this week.

Strengthen us for when we walk from here down into the valley.

Be not frustrated by the limitations of fallen humanity, but speak all the same.

We pray in Jesus' name, please join me in saying, Amen.

My brother believed that he was the last 1 in the door.

When he was baptized, he was convinced that Jesus' return was so close that he had made it to the baptistry just in time.

That was the year in New Zealand where we are from that the labor government was voted out of power.

Prime Minister Bill Rowling, who was born, interestingly enough to me, the year my father was born and who died the year my father died, was replaced as Prime Minister of New Zealand by a human lightning rod named Rob Muldoon.

That same year, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada.

Australia had 2 PMs that year because there was an election.

And in the United States, the president's middle name was Rudolph.

When Gerald Ford was president, my brother believed he was the last 1 in the door and that Jesus was going to return any day now.

A quart of milk in this country cost then 46 cents.

You could buy 10 first class stamps for a dollar and a gallon of gas cost 57 cents.

And my brother believed that he had given his heart to Jesus just in time to be ready for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

But he was wrong, wasn't he, About the timing of all of this.

What he didn't know is that Jesus wasn't going to return in 1975, but in 2015.

After all, the Supreme Court has just made some game-changing decisions.

That's surely a sign of the end, isn't it?

And the Pope is coming to the United States in just a couple of months.

The Pope comes to the United States and Jesus comes to the United States just shortly thereafter.

That's going to open the floodgates, surely.

Those among us who have the gift of prophecy see the return of Jesus in every current event, in every earthquake, in every major disease outbreak such as Ebola and SARS and MERS.

Every time there's a presidential election, the drums start beating.

There is proof emailed to you, proof that you cannot speak against.

Soon they may be saying, She's going to be the 1 who will usher in the mark of the beast and earth's final events.

I want to suggest something to you this morning and it's something that you already know.

Just like my brother didn't know when Jesus was coming back, we don't know either.

Other than to say, Jesus is coming back soon.

Now I'd like to take you with me in the Bible to 1 Thessalonians 5.

1 Thessalonians 5 and I'll start reading because time is the enemy this morning.

Paul wrote, But of the times and seasons brethren you have no need that I write to you.

Why did he say, But of the times and seasons you have no need that I write to you?

Because he had just got through writing 1 of the most sublime passages in all of the Word of God.

1 Thessalonians chapter 4, we pick it up in verse 15 where he wrote, Paul wrote, For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent, shall not go before them which are asleep.

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.

Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up, we which are alive and remain shall be caught up, together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air and So shall we ever be with the Lord then he wrote that wonderful PS Wherefore comfort 1 another with these words Paul has just spoken with confidence about the return of Jesus.

He has just said, hasn't he, that Jesus would come and that he would come in a certain way.

He would come back literally, really Him.

He would come back with a shout audibly, a trumpet blast.

You would hear that if you were sleeping.

He would come cataclysmically He said he didn't say that Jesus would come with fervent heat or that the earth and all of its works would be burned up Peter wrote that later, but Paul essentially said the same thing.

He said when Jesus comes back graves would be open The dead would rise therefore mausoleums would be rent asunder Certainly, that would be so Grave markers would collapse and some of those things are impressive.

I remember visiting the burial place of Abraham Lincoln.

And I marvel because you know that at 1 stage grave robbers had tried to get Lincoln's body and so whoever it was in charge at the time it looked as though they tried to make sure that Lincoln wouldn't come up in the resurrection because he's buried beneath concrete and steel and this and that, but even Lincoln, we hope and pray, he's gonna come up from that grave in spite of man's inventions.

And what a turmoil that is going to cause.

Paul said, the dead would rise from their dusty beds, an upheaval of a significant nature.

If he had been preaching this, you would have expected his congregation, irrespective of their cultural background, to say, Amen and Hallelujah.

You know he did because he spoke Suggesting these words would offer comfort comfort to the grieving After this convention, I'm going to a little town Place where I once passed a most wonderful church And I'm going to conduct a funeral service, at least participate in 1.

As sweet a lady as you would ever know got up 1 Sabbath morning, walked from the bedroom to the living room, stood at the window and looked out, sat down in a comfortable chair and went to sleep.

And you know that this coming Sunday I'm going to read from 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 about the comfort that we have in these words.

These words don't wipe away our tears, but they offer hope.

Paul's words didn't bring anyone back from the dead, but they remind us that 1 day soon Jesus' words are going to do that very thing.

Grieving parents are still weeping themselves to sleep and asking themselves and God, when will we see our precious baby again?

There are those who are going through days in a fog asking God, When will I see my spouse again?

And when you add to that our particular theological slant, We just cannot help ourselves.

Gracious

Our Father in heaven, thank you that we can be here together this morning.

And today I ask you to speak and be heard.

Grant us clarity of thought this morning and the ability to discern your beautiful voice.

We thank you that you've given to us your word.

A little over 15 years ago, my wife and I were wrestling with that decision that you have likely wrestled with, that you have certainly wrestled with if you have children.

And that is, what are we going to name our child?

Now, we didn't know whether our firstborn would be a boy or a girl.

And so, as far as naming her, if she was a girl, there was no question.

I had decided what my daughter would be named years before I was married.

Melissa put forward the name she had chosen.

But we didn't know first time around whether we'd have a girl or a boy.

The oldest is Paul, Paul, then Jacqueline, Jackie, and then Wayne, and then Leslie, my sister, and then David, and then Greg, and then there was a very, very good chance I was going to be named Vanilla by my family.

So with 7 names like that in my family, and Melissa is 1 of 3 sisters, and they have perfectly ordinary names, There was no way our child, whether he was a boy or a girl, was going to be named anything exotic, or anything really very different, or anything original.

You see where I'm going with these names.

Very standard, stock standard, but solid.

Now it transpired that my son's middle name was Nicholas because right at about that time we met a whole lot of bratty little Nicholases.

And so there was no way he could be Nicholas.

Just the correlations were just not working for us.

If you fall over at our family reunion you may land on a David.

And so we couldn't call him David, even though David's a wonderful name.

And I said, it has the added advantage of the fact that there are very few Jacobs.

I had never met a boy, yea, verily, even a man, named Jacob.

I'd met some fellows whose last name was Jacobs, but I'd never met a Jacob.

Well, of course, you do know what happened.

The year my son was born, he was a Y2 kid.

That year, Jacob went to number 1 in the charts.

And we'd go to the park or wherever and we'd call out, Jacob!

And 7 children would come running towards us, 2 of them girls, they'd just come running towards us like that.

But you know that that name Jacob has an interesting connotation.

And that is that the original Jacob, that biblical Jacob, was named Jacob because of really a defect in his character.

That name Jacob means a supplanter, 1 who gets what he gets by devious means.

We told him that Jacob means good boy who puts his toys away.

And when he found out that that wasn't actually so, just last week, he was really rather surprised.

I didn't really want to name my son Cheetah, fraudster.

And then I realized that, of course, we're all Jacob.

The Bible says, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

And then for any of us to get from here to there, we must, like the original Jacob, wrestle with God and say to God, I will not let you go except you bless me.

We all must go from Jacob to Israel if we're going to go from here to there.

And so he was Jacob, the supplanter, but the 1 who became Israel.

My daughter Shannon was named after a river.

Her great-grandmother, my grandmother, was born on the banks of the River Shannon in Ireland.

She's just really glad my grandmother wasn't born on the banks of the Mississippi.

Laughter My wife's name, Melissa, means honey bee, which is sweet.

And my name, I was happy to learn years ago, My name, John, means God is gracious.

And so I have often had the opportunity and taken the opportunity to reflect on this idea that God is gracious.

But of course, then you come down to this question, and that question, this question is, what is grace?

You and I both know that if we polled most Christians, the predominating answer that would come back, if we had a debate and we put 10 candidates on stage and asked them to describe for us what grace is, most of them would say, first up, grace is what?

Look and Live

Our Father in heaven, we thank you that we have this opportunity to come to you today.

Thank you for being here when we arrived this morning.

As you speak to us, I pray that we would be alert, awake, aware.

I pray that we would hear the sound of Your voice.

Be merciful to me today so that it would be Your voice that we all hear.

Please take this time and make it special and meaningful for Your glory.

We pray in Jesus' name, please say with me, Amen.

On a Wednesday evening in July of 1977, lightning struck 1 of those electrical generator station things 50 miles north of New York City.

Except this time when the lightning struck and the breaker opened up, it didn't close again.

This was a problem compounded by repeated lightning strikes.

Tripped off kind of a series of unfortunate events which resulted in Con Edison's entire network being shut down and all of New York City was in the dark.

Couldn't really have happened at a worse time.

New York City was in the midst of a tremendous financial crisis.

It was locked also in the grip of an unrelenting heat wave.

David Berkowitz had shot 13 individuals, 6 of them fatally, and was still, This was son of Sam, was still on the loose.

He would not be apprehended for another month.

New Yorkers were distressed and they were nervous.

Looters and vandals cloaked in the darkness caused mayhem.

1616 stores were damaged or looted or destroyed.

At 1 dealership, 50 new cars were stolen, at 1 dealership.

Almost 4, 000 people were arrested in that 1 night.

You see, some people are more comfortable doing what they do in the dark.

Anonymity is a form of protection, perverse protection, really.

When the sun has set and the twilight has faded into blackness, that's when some people feel emboldened to do that which they otherwise would not do if the sun was shining.

1 of the most famous verses, no, the most famous verse in all of the Bible was uttered in the dark.

The Savior of the world had only recently begun his ministry.

He had changed water into wine and people had noticed.

And then, while people's mouths were moving and voices were intoning.

He went to Jerusalem at the Passover, at the Passover, and emptied the temple.

He emptied this magnificent structure which not long before had been renovated by Herod the Great.

It was like Old MacDonald's farm in that temple with a moo moo here and a baa baa there.

There were cash and coins changing hands as though this were JerusaVegas.

And Jesus went into the midst of that maelstrom of merchandise and money-grubbing and put an end to it.

Lepta and Denarii and Drachmas were sent clattering to the ground.

And men who had lost sight of the true meaning of the temple service scurried to rescue what was clearly most precious to them.

The prophet Haggai had said that the glory of the second temple would exceed the glory of the first temple because the presence of Jesus would make it so.

This obscure Galilean was suddenly very popular.

Hashtag Jesus and hashtag trouble in the temple started trending on Twitter.

A Facebook page was set up by somebody in the name of Jesus.

Conservative talk show hosts started criticizing this upstart while late night comedians joked that it was the first excitement the temple had seen in many years.

Jesus of Nazareth was now a household name and if that were not enough people were now talking or would soon be talking about this outlandish claim he made when he said, destroy this temple in whatever time it takes and in just 3 days I will raise it back up again.

But although there were those who were deeply offended by what he had said, there were others who were not so.

Some were driven to study the prophecies relating to the Messiah.

1 of those was a man named Nicodemus who had begun to wonder if this 1 could indeed be as Haggai had said, the desire of all nations.

But how could he, a ruler in Israel, be seen with this Jesus?

Nighttime, you know, is the friend of the stealthy.

It would provide the cover he needed so he could carry out this meeting.

It's recorded in John chapter 3 and verse 2.

He said, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that you do except God be with him." This was an attempt, a not so subtle attempt at righteousness by flattery.

Nicodemus needed and urgently and in counter with the very blunt truth that he was not nearly as holy as he had supposed.

Outwardly he was a man of some means, certainly, but he had the statement in the book of James backwards.

He was rich in this world's goods, poor in faith.

We know that you are a teacher come from God.

That was the statement of a man who was hedging his bets.

This important man had to become aware of his great spiritual lack.

And you know and I know that that's true for all of us.

The Bible tells us that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Paul wrote in Romans 3.10, quoting from Psalm 14, there is none righteous, no, not 1.

He thought he was a shoo-in for the kingdom of heaven.

But he is being made aware that that is not so.

And before we attempt, or before we attempted to look down our nose at this poor fellow, The Bible says that we're all in the same boat.

For only the righteous will go to heaven.

Listen, I believe it's important for us, we Christians down here in the close of time to get it once and for all out of our heads, this idea that good people go to heaven or that somehow you have to be a good person in order to please God.

The human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, Jeremiah wrote.

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Occupy

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Bits & Pieces

38m

Get Ready!

44m

The Inevitability

53m

Lets go Home

37m

Jesus On Prophecy

Hour of Judgment Part 2

46m

Michael Shall Stand Up

52m

On Worship

1h 18m

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Who Shall Be Able to Stand?

29m

SWYC 2006 Plenary Sessions

The Final Conflict

1h 10m

The Three Angels' Message

01 Because Jesus is Coming

52m

Which Way, America?

17 The Disintegration of Christianity

58m

He Said He’d Come

29m

Sound Doctrine