Episode Transcript
Jesus said in Matthew 28, verse 19, go therefore and teach all nations. Baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Welcome to go teach all nations, bringing you Christ's teachings through Australian and international speakers.
And here is today's presenter, Dr. Ken Landers. I pray that as we look at this topic, that God will open our hearts and our minds.
I've been praying about it before I came because I believe that this topic is essential. So let us pray and invite God's Spirit to be with us. Father, we pause because we are mortal.
We are finite, we are limited. But you are God almighty. El Shaddai, the Mighty God.
You are the commander not only of the world, but of the universe. Father, when you speak, then things are created. You are not beholden to prior existing material.
You speak and things are made. You command, and it will stand fast. O Father, as we pause before you this morning.
May the Holy Spirit be with us to open our hearts and our minds, so that Your Word may find a dwelling place in our hearts, that Your Word may strengthen us, that Your Word may support us, may hold us up. Because, Father, it doesn't matter what's happening outside. We know things are not going to get better.
So we commit ourselves to you today, lord, we seek Your guidance and Your wisdom to understand Your Word more fully. This is my prayer in Jesus name. Amen.
I thought about something. Thank you for that Bible story highlighting the Scripture, the book that's never on the bestsellers list because the devil doesn't want people to know what's inside. The book that sold over 6 billion copies.
Not 6 million, 6 billion copies, but doesn't make it to the bestsellers list. But friends, there was one thing that I thought about as this lady was leading out that was applicable to the older people. You know, often when the older people I'm not saying old people, okay? I'm one of them.
It's taken me many years to acknowledge that I'm one of those people, the older people that's applicable to older people. And friends, brothers and sisters, we need to spend time memorising this book. We need to spend time studying this book.
Because when this book is taken away from us, the Holy Spirit can't bring to your mind what's not there. God is not going to invent Bible verses if you don't have them stored away in your long term memory. You know, when you get a little advanced in years.
I hope I'm not causing any offence here. You tend to forget things that may have happened just a few minutes ago. Am I right? Anybody? Has it ever happened to anybody? You walk into a room and put something down and you go out and in a few minutes later, what did I put down there's a medical term for that.
I won't bring it up today. But the point is that we need to spend time reading and studying and memorising God's Word. If you don't use it, you lose it.
The brain is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised. And so if we would rather stop looking at YouTube and all the anti covert videos that you find, and we spend time studying God's Word, it would shore us up.
I like to think of God's Word as the reinforcing rods in a block of concrete. A block of concrete without reinforcement can be cracked virtually by a child jumping up and down on it. But when it's got the reinforcement, it's going to stand.
And I've been impressed by God, our divine and sovereign Father, to preach to you today on the topic of holiness. I can remember preaching my first sermon back in South Africa. It was the same topic and it was the same verses.
That was more than 40 years ago, and this topic is still necessary in today's world. And I've always been fascinated by the topic, god is holy and is looking for a holy people. This topic, though, is not a popular one.
It's not preached often. In fact, many years ago in Australia, I preached on the topic of holiness and somebody came to me afterwards and said, don't talk about that stuff again. I don't want to hear it.
Okay? But I'm not hesitant to talk about this topic because it's more prominent in the Bible than the topic of love. Now, our sister that was leading out in the story was talking about the Bible and used that verse. These were more noble, the Bereans were more noble than those in thessalonica for.
They searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things be so. So if you don't believe me, I would invite you to go home and use a concordance and look up the word love in the Bible. In the King James, it's 311 times, but the word holy is 610 times.
I looked at the NLT, I don't know if you ever read the NLT, the word love is 575 times and the word holy is 633 times. I looked at twelve different versions of the English Bible, and in all of them, the word holy is there more than the word love. But when you go online I've got an invented index.
I call it the Google dex. So when you go online and you punch something into Google, you'll come up with X amount of million hits or whatever, and that's the Google decks for that topic. And when you go online looking for God is Love, you'll find almost six times more hits than when you look for God is Holy.
When you ask how many sermons are preached on love, you'll find 39 and a half million hits. And you ask how many sermons are preached on holiness? 4 million hits. But I want to put it to you, and you can look it up for yourself.
God never says he is love. God never says that about Himself. Look it up.
Don't believe me. Some people are looking at me as if I've just spoken some blasphemy. God says he is holy.
That's why Peter says in first Peter, you must be holy because God is holy. I am holy. The words I am holy appear three times.
But there are more than 60 references where God is talking about Himself to the Israelites, and he says, you must be holy because I am holy. So in God's eyes, his prominent characteristic, his most dominant characteristic, the one that he talks about the most, is the fact that he is holy. So what is holiness and why is it so neglected? I sent Pastor a JPEG that I had fortunately, led by God, I had come across this website where you can make a word cloud, and I made a word cloud on holy.
But my title this morning is not holiness. My title is chosen for Holiness. Because we're going to spend some time looking at just two of those verses in Ephesians which talk about holiness.
Why is this topic so important? And I want to put it to you, why is it so vital? And to be faithful to the word of God, we must look inside the word of God. The same author, the same person who wrote Ephesians, wrote Hebrews. I believe that if you are a modern scholar and you know more than the spirit of prophecy, well, then you don't believe it.
You believe what the modern scholars say. They say Paul didn't write Hebrews. I believe Paul wrote Hebrews.
And we all know that verse Hebrews, chapter twelve, verse 14. What does Paul say? Let us what? Pursue holiness and then without which no one will see God. That's what Paul's saying.
Okay, don't look at me. That's not Kenny Landers talking. That's Paul.
The Bible is very clear. Why do you think the word appears so many times? This is not something optional, and we're going to see what it is as we get through this message. But God has chosen us to be holy.
It's in the Bible. We're going to see that. I'm sure all of you have read the Book of Ephesians.
This book has been termed the most sublime of the Epistles, the Queen of the Epistles. I love the Book of Ephesians. And in fact, when this young man thank you, young man was reading, I don't know if you realise as he was reading, so many avenues, so many things, so many blessings were opened up.
I would suggest you go and read this passage. And for those of you that are interested in factoids like you know who that is, one sentence, those verses from verse three to verse 14 in the original language is one sentence. It's the longest sentence in the Bible, 257 words.
But it's packed with meaning. Packed and pardon me. The Book of Ephesians has been called the most authoritative and consummate compendium of the Christian faith.
One thing that is often overlooked when people read Ephesians is where was Paul writing from? He was writing from jail. And when you read these verses, you think to yourself, is this the mindset of somebody who's sitting in jail? And as many of you may know, I work in jail. I'm in jail.
I used to be in jail every working day of the week. I want to tell you, Australian jails are like hotels compared to some overseas jails. I've got some video from the jail in Ghana, some video from the jails in the Philippines and other places.
The people lie like sausages. Your head has got to be there and then the next one's head has got to be here because there's no room for two heads to be next to each other and they're lying on concrete. So Paul was in jail.
He wasn't in a five star place, I can assure you. Yet his mindset was different from his circumstances. And you can see that in the first chapter of the Book of Ephesians.
That first sentence is what we will have to navigate to open up our message for today chosen for holiness. First of all, look at first Peter. Sorry.
Ephesians one, verse three. What does Paul say? Blessed be the God. He's in jail.
He's sitting on the ground. Probably they didn't have chairs in those jails. I don't know what they were like.
I can only imagine there was probably some straw lying on the floor and there was the stench because they didn't have what do they call it, amenities. They wouldn't have had running water and water based amenities, would they? There would have been some place in the corner where everybody does their thing. But Paul is sitting in jail and first thing he says at the beginning of this sentence is, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
You see, can we as humans bless God? We don't bring anything to the table. I suppose I haven't said this here before because I haven't been here that much. But as humans, we bring nothing to the table.
God brings everything. We just come as we are to the table. We cannot do anything to make God better, to make God bigger, to make God more powerful, to make God depend on us in any way.
But Paul is telling us that God is blessed. The thing that we can do is we can acknowledge that God is to be venerated and God is to be know. I was reminded somebody sent something to me this week from New Zealand that we must adore God.
Now, we often talk about loving God, but adore, it's got a different connotation to it. It carries a different sort of nuance. To adore somebody is to love them more than just loving them.
We need to acknowledge that in the morning, when we say our prayers, when we acknowledge that God has brought us back to life, all that is a blessing. How many people have gone to bed but they don't wake up the next day? And so just waking up in the morning, the fact that you know your name is a blessing because you haven't had a big stroke in your sleep and you've forgotten your name, the fact that you can still breathe is a blessing. Do you know you use nine areas of your brain and it takes 13 muscles for a human being to take one breath? And yet people tell you that you came from the pondscom.
What a load of nonsense. Something that I don't hope that any of you believe. But we can acknowledge thank you.
We can acknowledge that we are dependent upon God for everything. Isn't that what Paul says in Acts chapter 17? That he gives us life and breath and everything else? I don't want to go there. There are so many things that I could share with you about the human body.
The human body is one of the most marvellous complicated systems in the world. But here, this word blessed is used seven times, seven more times in the New Testament and is reminding us we owe everything to God. Then God paul goes on, he says, God has blessed us with every we're still looking at verse three.
We're only going to look at verse three and verse four. He's blessed us with every spiritual blessing. I want you to notice it's very self evident, isn't it, that God is not promising to bless us with physical blessings? He blesses us with spiritual blessings.
You see, brothers and sisters, God knows we don't need physical blessings, because physical blessings are going to come to the end, at the end. And it may not be the same for everybody that's here today. I may go home today and not get home.
None of us that are here can guarantee that we're going to be here tomorrow. Put your hand up. If you know that you're going to be alive tomorrow, put it up.
You can't, because any of us in fact, there was just a sad thing that happened a few weeks ago, wasn't there? Of this man who was in church. He preached the morning, he went to a different service the afternoon and while he was playing his guitar, he died. And brothers and sisters, we need to young people, I know that you when you're young when you're young, you feel so strong and energetic, isn't it? I can remember when I was younger, I thought I was bulletproof.
Well, that's before I got sciatica. It just came out of the blue. I didn't do anything bad or wrong, but I was in bed for three weeks.
That was a treatment back in those days. I went to the specialist and he said to me, you shouldn't do this you shouldn't do that. And I walked out.
I felt old walking out. It was more than 35 years ago, so I presume it wasn't so bad. God spared me for a bit longer.
But the point is that we do not need physical blessings. We need the spiritual blessings, because the spiritual blessings is what going to take us through to eternity. The physical blessings are going to burn up.
Don't tell my wife what I'm going to say next. I may make even more bad friends amongst you today. What's the use, brothers and sisters, of having a house that's worth $5 million when it's going to burn? Does it make sense? Am I making sense? Come on, say yes or no, because I may never see you again.
I don't want to walk out of here feeling a fool. The point is that the eternal things are the spiritual blessings. The eternal things are the things that we're going to take with us to heaven.
You see, it doesn't matter what you drive, where you stay, what you have, what property portfolio you've got, how much money you've got in the bank. Because when you get to heaven, god is not going to ask you for your bank account. In fact, we know because we have been given insights, we have been blessed.
God has poured out his blessings on us. We've been given insights that the rest of Christendom doesn't have because we know that there's going to come a time when all the money that you've got in the bank you won't be able to touch. Because the book of Revelation revelation.
What does the word mean in English? It means God is revealing things to you. God is telling you. And the Revelation, chapter one, verse eight, says that the revelation that God gave to his servant to show him the things that must shortly take place.
The Book of Revelation tells us that that there's going to come a time when you can't buy or sell. So we need to focus on the spiritual, because the spiritual is what we're going to take with us, is what's going to be important in the last days, not the physical, you see? Pardon me. Our spiritual blessings are assured.
In fact, they are guaranteed. But we may come to that later. There's one necessary condition that comes, though, with that.
Notice what it says. Pardon me. In verse three of Ephesians, chapter one, he has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.
Those blessings come with a condition. We must be in Jesus to receive the blessings. You see, we will not be blessed with every spiritual blessing if we're not abiding in Christ.
If you think you can make your own way, if you think that you smart enough, that you educated enough, that you're wealthy enough, that you're influential enough that you can go your own path and you're going to make your own way, then you are not going to be blessed. We have to have accepted Jesus. We have to go down on our knees and acknowledge that we are worthless, we are hopeless, we are nothing.
Doesn't Jesus himself say, apart from me, you can do what? Nothing. So we need to acknowledge our need and our dependence upon Him. When Jesus came to this earth, he took on finiteness and he could no longer be everywhere at once.
And so he sent the Holy Spirit to be everywhere, to guide and to strengthen us. I want you to remember that the Bible was not turned into sentences or chapters by the Holy Spirit. It was a man in the 15 hundreds who did that.
And we still in this first part of this sentence, this verse emphasises this sentence, sorry, emphasises that we must be in Him. If you look through the eleven verses, you'll see the words in Christ, in Him, in Him 14 times. There's only one thing that humans must do in this verse, and it's in verse four.
And we're going to come to that in a minute. But Paul goes on to say that we are the ones who are chosen in Him, verse four, according as he hath chosen us. I want you to just think about that for a minute.
Just reflect on the fact that you're living in the most neglected, most crime ridden, most downtrodden suburb in a small town somewhere in America. Sorry, I'm not being disrespectful to any Americans. I'm just saying in America.
Pardon me. And one day you hear a knock on the door and you go to the door and there's President Trump standing. He says, I've chosen you to come up to the White House.
And you look around, you look at the conditions that you're living in. You can't believe it. Isn't that what Paul is saying God has done in this verse? Because God says paul says God has chosen us.
Where did God come to choose us? Did he come to, pardon me, to some palace somewhere in Europe? All those gilded buildings with gold furniture and golden taps and all that stuff? He came to the most crime ridden, sin ridden planet in all of creation, and he chose you. Just think about it. Not somebody who's on your level.
The song says, he came down to your level. God came down to our level because he wants us and he loves us, and he came to choose us. And he is showing his love in doing that.
And Paul goes on, though pardon me, he goes on. He says he has chosen us. In Him again, we're seeing in Jesus before the foundation of the world.
So before this world was founded, god already had a plan for you and for me, to get us out of the misery that we will be in otherwise. As I said earlier, I have always been fascinated with the word holy, or more accurately, the concept of holiness. What is holiness and how does one become holy? Well, first of all, let us see what the word means in the original language.
And here is where we may start to get nervous or anxious. Please be patient. Most things do not happen at the snap of a finger.
The word for holy is a Greek word. Now, I'm not a Greek scholar, but I use the dictionary the lady was talking about, dictionaries. It's the Greek word hagios.
And one of my favourite New Testament dictionaries is Vine's Expository Dictionary of the New Testament. And this is what it says about this word. Please listen.
It is evident that haggaeos and its kindred words express something more and higher than Hiros, which means sacred or outwardly associated with God. It is something more than semnos, which means worthy or honourable, something more than hagnos, which means pure or free from defilement. The word hageos, according to the author of this dictionary, and he's quoting from a scholar, g b.
Stevens, is more comprehensive. It is characteristically God likeness. That's a big ask, isn't it? A well known scholar, R.
C. Sproul, says, the task of the Christian is to mirror and reflect the holiness of God. And you see, he uses the word reflect advisedly, because we as Christians must not seek to represent God, we must seek to reflect God.
Because when you look in a mirror, unless it's one of those mirrors that you find when you go to these amusement parks, you two foot tall and you come inside and all of a sudden you're six foot when you look in the mirror. No, if those mirrors, they're not real mirrors. When you look in a real mirror, you see the exact representation of who you are.
And so the scholar is saying that as Christians, we must reflect God. That means that when we look at God, his light shines and gets reflected from us. And this is what I want to put to you today, very simply.
Holiness is not a fruit. It's not something we can grow in our lives. And I see it as a state, a state of holiness.
Give me a chance to explain myself before you start reaching for your telephones to call Barrand and say, where do you get this guy from? Very basically, to be holy, we must be separate. And in fact, I was watching a video in preparation for this message by the same author, and this is what he says holiness is it means to be separated. To be separate.
We are set apart for a holy use, brothers and sisters. That is why God says I am holy, because he is set apart from us. You see, God has never sinned, god has never fallen, god has never been tempted and he has never indulged himself.
Because he is holy, we can't grow holiness. That's the fruits of the Spirit. We all know those verses.
Galatians five is 22 and verse 23 but in the Scriptures, God says that the temple is holy. How can a temple grow something? God says that the clothing that Aaron put on was holy. How can the clothing grow anything? So, pardon me.
Paul is also pointing out in the same chapter, hebrews, chapter twelve, verse seven to eleven, he talks about when God chastises us, when God disciplines us. He is doing it so that we can partake of his holiness and we can have the peaceable. Fruit of righteousness.
Read it for yourself. Hebrews twelve, verse seven to eleven. So righteousness is a fruit.
I often confuse the two in my younger, wonderings in my mind what is holiness? How do I become holy? Holiness is pardon me what God is seeking to see in our lives. As we separate ourselves from the world and worldliness, we must rejoice that God has seen us worthy of being diamonds in his kingdom. You see, you don't get a diamond from just putting a lump of coal under the ground.
I used to think that diamonds came from lumps of coal, but it's not true. Apparently, according to the scientists, diamonds are formed 150 kilometres beneath the surface of the earth by pressure and by heat. And God sees that we need to be polished to be diamonds in his kingdom.
I came upon this quote recently from Review and Herald, december 1919, seven. And God's messenger says christians are Christ's jewels. They are to shine brightly for Him, shedding forth the light of his loveliness.
Listen to this their lustre, in other words, the brightness of their shining depends on the polishing they receive. So is life a bit rough? Does it seem that we are in a corner? That we're under pressure and we can't move? As Paul himself says in everything, give praise and give thanks to God. It doesn't matter what situation we in.
The fact that we are alive is a blessing, regardless of our situation. And we don't have time to look at how you can choose your mood. I don't know if you've heard those words before.
You can choose your mood and that will affect your attitude, won't it? There was a clinic I must be careful. Maybe I've told no, I didn't tell the story before. There was a clinic that I used to go to regularly.
I won't name the clinic because somebody may work there or know somebody who works there. And I would always go with something when I come to a clinic for the first time. I don't know, it's a bad habit that I have.
I take them chocolates now. I'm not saying you should eat chocolates. I don't eat them myself, okay? I'm vegan.
I don't eat that stuff. But I used to take them chocolates. Not just cadbury lint.
I mean, you know, the nurses are special people. Any nurses here today? Nurses are special people. I grew up with two nurses.
I love nurses. I mean, I love my wife more. But the next two, after my mother, were my sisters.
One, of course, has passed on and the other one is still alive. She retired when she was 75. Maybe I must aim for that.
But anyway, the point is that every time I went to this clinic and I took not only chips, I would take snacks, I would take chocolates and everything and I put it down there. Nobody would ever say those two words that you would normally expect from humans. You know what it is? Thank you.
Nobody would ever greet me. I mean, isn't that just something basic that we as humans do? Just greet somebody to acknowledge that they are human? They wouldn't greet. And it used to make me annoyed until I realised, hang on, those people are controlling me.
Their attitude is choosing my mood. And so now when I go there, I greet, even if they don't greet. In fact, I've just recently, when I've been walking where I live in Ride, I greet everybody that comes past me.
Good morning. Well, probably 20% or 30% don't even acknowledge that I'm alive. But doesn't matter.
We can all do things that we can do. We don't have to give them money, but we can give them a good morning. We can give them an acknowledgement of their humanity, of the fact that you have noticed them as a human being.
Most of them are just, but here, Sister White says they may choose to be polished or to remain unpolished. But everyone who is pronounced worthy of a place in the Lord's temple must submit to the polishing process. Without the polishing that the Lord gives, they can reflect no more light than a common pebble.
We have chosen to be separate. That doesn't mean that we must become hermits in a small cabin somewhere. And whoop whoop.
It means that our desires, our ambitions, our appetites and our practises, all that we can do is to seek to be apart from the world. Yes, we still eat, we still breathe, we still talk with people and we still mix. But if we are pursuing holiness, we are different from them.
Not because we are seeking to be different, but people will see that we are different. They'll see that we have a different mindset, a different frame of mind, that we have a different attitude to things and things that are happening. We would dress modestly and our actions and language would not reflect the ways of the world.
Our desire and pursuit is to be holy, to be set apart, so that when Jesus comes, we are ready for his return. In addition, we mustn't miss the last part of verse four. Verse four says that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.
Friends, this topic is so unpopular because the devil is fuel gathering. He seeks to divert, to divide and to deceive and to discourage us. He is using every means.
At his disposal. Apparently, one third of American pastors do not believe that you have to be a Christian to be saved. I could not find a similar survey for Australian pastors.
But all around the world, Christians are placing less and less emphasis on being saved, on being in a saved relationship with Jesus. And ecumenism has crept in everywhere. The devil does not want us to be holy and without blame, according to him.
You just need to love God and all is well. But Paul says that we are chosen for holiness. And again in Hebrews Twelve, that without holiness, no one will see God.
I want to close with this quotation from the Pin of Inspiration Council to the Church, page 345. Sister White says in heaven, God is all in all. Their holiness reigns supreme.
There is nothing to mar the perfect harmony with God if we are indeed journeying there, the Spirit of Heaven will dwell in our hearts. But if we find no pleasure in the contemplation of heavenly things, if we have no interest in seeking the knowledge of God, no delight in beholding the character of Christ, if holiness has no attractions for us, then we may be sure our hope of heaven is vain. You see, I don't know where you're travelling, how you're travelling, and I don't know what's important in your life at this moment.
I know that for some it may be money or status or position, but God has chosen each one of us to be holy. And to be holy we must be separate from the world. We must seek to separate ourselves from all that is worldly and earthly and seek to live a life of commitment and devotion to God allowing the Holy Spirit.
Remember, this is not something that we can do on our own. Paul has emphasised that over and over. He says we can do it when we are in Christ.
That God gives us the power to divorce ourselves from worldliness and the worldly things and to turn our attention and our minds and not be distracted to things that are going to last forever. And everything else, brothers and sisters, is not going to last. Let's remember our value and our worth.
You're not worth something because you've got dr in front of your name or because you've got PhD after your name. You're not worth something because you belong to the millionaire circle somewhere on the east coast of Sydney and your house cost 20 million. No, you are worthy because God sees worth in you.
And he didn't just see it, he lived it. He came and he died because he wanted to show the world and the universe that he is not a God who's an exacting monster who's waiting for your finger to come over the line so it can be chopped off. No, he's a God who loved you in word and indeed and young people, I grew up as a worldly young person.
But we had not one 20th of the temptations that faced the young people today. There was no Instagram, no Twitter. There were no celebrity influencers on YouTube showing them how they must show their cleavage so that they can make money.
No, there was very little drugs. Alcohol. Yes, there was always alcohol.
Cannabis. Yes, there was always cannabis. But all the other temptations that are facing the young people of today, and I meet many of them at work, I meet many of them who are broken, who are sad because they in jail, because of all the bad things that they were influenced to do by their friends.
Young people, God loves you. He has chosen you for a reason. He wants you to spend eternity with Him.
No. You're spending a few years here. You're all high and strung out on ice and cocaine and all that kind of stuff, and then when you die, you end up in the you nowhere.
What value is that? Nothing. But please, if you haven't yet made up your mind to commit yourself to Jesus, do it before it's too late, because I don't know. I'm not a prophet.
I'm not claiming to be a prophet, but Jesus is coming sooner than we think. And Jesus himself said matthew 24, verse 44, therefore be he ready, not get ready did jesus didn't give us a date because as humans, if we had a date, we would be waiting. You wait for the date, and the day before you would be looking to get yourself ready too late.
So, friends, brothers and sisters, young people, if you are on the in between, if you are sitting on the fence, make up your mind and follow Jesus. Find the peace that only he can give you. Find the acceptance that only he can guarantee you, and you will end up enjoying eternity, not just recriminating why didn't I? Not asking yourself and cutting yourself, why didn't I, when I had the choice? Don't wait until it's too late, Father.
Now dismiss us with Thy blessing, father, the God who sees everything, who can read our thoughts and our motives, who knows our hearts and who knows our minds, please be with us in our walk with you. Please give us the desire to love you more dearly, to follow you more nearly, and to be ready when Jesus comes. And O Lord, please turn off the shiny, glitzy glamour of the world and all its accoutrement, all the other rubbish that comes with it, the glitzy glamour and grandeur supposed things of value that are all going to burn up in the fiery furnaces of hell.
Oh, please, Father, turn that off in our hearts and our minds. Help us to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith, and to pursue holiness without which we will not see you. And Lord, when you do come, in all your glory when you do come on the clouds of heaven, when the people around us are falling and running to the mountains and crying out for protection from the rocks, may we be standing on the rock, the rock of Jesus.
And may we be amongst that number that will be crying out, that will be shouting loud. Osannas. O Father, we look forward to that day when we will see your return, when Jesus will come in all his glory and we will fall in adoration, in humble adoration before his feet and thank Him for his sacrifice, as our eyes try to comprehend all the glory and the grandeur of heaven around us and he comes to welcome us.
Welcome, my child. It is for you that I died. May we, Father, be ready, forget about all the worldly things and be ready and be amongst that number is my prayer.
In Jesus name, amen. This message was made available by the Waitara 7th Day Adventist Church. For more resources like this, visit waitarachurch.org
Au I could hold diamonds in my head hundred thousand mansions by the sea write the secrets of the universe and endless mystery. But they could never set my spirit free. You can.
Hide the stars just give me Jesus you can roll just give me Jesus you can take tomorrow I will still believe for the love he's given me is all I'll ever need you can have everything just give me jesus in my heart calm the storms with whispers of his love. Now I know that I could never live without his tender touch. I never knew I needed him.
You can have the star. Just give me Jesus. You.
Can roll the moon just give me Jesus you can take tomorrow I will still believe for the love he's given me all I ever need you can have everything just give me Jesus all the treasures of this earth all the pleasures of this life turn it down. In the light of his life you can have just give me Jesus. You can roll the moon just give me Jesus.
Marley Defong sang Give me Jesus and coming up next complete in thee by the Galken evangelistic team may take you lord the place of I blood has heart and bought for me and I am now complete justify all blessed heart and sanctify salvation love thy blood has gone and brought for me. And glory I too shall be thy grace hath conquered reign within thy voice shall be the tempter flee and I shall stand complete in thee yea justify, O blessed heart and sanctify salvation ross thy blood hath pardon my for me and glory, I too shall be complete in me each once a fight. And no good thing to me tonight, since thou, my fortune lord, will be I ask no more complete justified.
All blessed heart and sanctify salvation thy one has hard and my for me and glorified I shall be for thy heart all right and I told them where and only and glory I too shall be gay justify all blessed thought and sanctify salvation rock thy blood ad for me and I am now complete in me nice to be with you again, friends. And this is William Aklin speaking. Like to share another one of my poems? This one today is entitled Time's Tide.
The tide of time is a long way out as the year is nearly spent and we see the caps of the quieting waves and ribs in the sand as nature paves a pattern by water lent but the wetted sand and the patterns there will soon be all washed away for the tide will turn as the year goes out and New Year's time for work and thought will come for a while to stay. Oh, don't be lulled. By a full year's time as it swirls around your feet for the full tide surge on the drying sand will not run high on the bordering land but return where many sleep so each day is given to work.
For Christ to serve him and to be spent in the field of the Lord or next year too, as we have served and prayed the old year through. And thus we shall be content. This is seed of our health retreat sharing health, hope and happiness.
Do you feel tired, stressed and burnt out? Do you need rejuvenation? Here are some ways you can find rest for your body, mind and spirit. Practise good sleep hygiene go to bed early, have a comfortable environment, eliminate nightlights and screen time just before bed. Try to get seven to 8 hours of sleep each night.
Also, you can rest your body by relaxing daily and even devoting a whole day each week to recreation. And don't forget to schedule in a holiday for a yearly rest to fully switch off from your usual activities. What about rest for the mind? Take time out to quiet your mind and reduce stress.
Avoid negative thoughts and focus on the positive. We experience rest for the spirit when we have contentment and peace inside. The deepest peace comes when we learn to live in harmony with God and with the people around us.
Find out more about Cedarvale at cedarvaleretreat.com.au this programme has been brought to you by three ABN, Australia radio.
