Episode Transcript
Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, 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, Pastor Warren Strawbridge.
Walking with Jesus. What does that mean to you? And what does that mean to me? What does that look like in our life? So before we start, quite often what happens is when the pastor or the speaker shares, people start getting hungry near the end of a sermon and the pastor gets the blame for the service for going for so long. But I'd just like to draw your attention to the time before I start so that you realise actually it's not actually the pastor that's making us late today.
Okay. Some of you may not know that before I was involved in ministry, I was a farmer. And I want to just tell you about one of the little experiences I had as a farmer.
We used to grow potatoes. And so in the winter, we would quite often spend lots of time grading in a shed. We'd be grading potatoes.
We had a conveyor belt that used to take the potatoes that were not wanted or waste potatoes. They would be taken through a conveyor belt outside into a box outside. Unfortunately, this motor that was driving this gearbox, it actually burnt out, so we took it away.
And even in those days, it was actually fixed. A lot of times today, you just take the motor off, throw it in the rubbish bin and put a new one on. That's mainly what you do.
But now we actually fixed this particular one. And in doing that, all the wires had to be taken off. So when I got it back and I put it on and rewired it, I yelled out to someone in the shed, because this motor was actually outside, yelled out to them to actually turn it on, and they did.
And it worked. There's only one problem. The belt was going in the wrong direction, so I had to change the wiring round so that it went in the right direction.
But the reason I tell you that story is because sometimes in our life as Christians, we are sometimes not always going in the right direction. Sometimes we're going in a direction, but not the right direction. And one of the questions, and it's the most simple thing about Christians is, do we know Christ? You know, in the name of who we are, Christians is the name Christ.
And the question is, do I know Christ? Do you know Christ? You know, Paul the Apostle Paul was a rising star. He was a future leader. He had studied under one of the greatest teachers, Gamaliel.
But he was heading in the wrong direction. He was persecuting the people that followed Jesus. It wasn't till he was riding on the road to Damascus that a bright light came from heaven and a voice spoke to Paul.
The Bible says in Acts 9, 4, 5. Then he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you, Lord? Then the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goads.
Paul was zealous. There was nobody more zealous than the apostle Paul. And I know a few zealous Christians too.
And some of these guys are heading in the wrong direction, just as Paul was, because they're not focused on Christ. They're not focused on Jesus. There was another man who was running away from God his whole life.
Jacob. He'd been running away from God ever since he deceived his father and got the birthright by fraud. What amazing story.
What an amazing experience would be to wrestle with Jesus. But that's what Jacob did. And that's what the Bible tells us happened.
In the Bible, in Genesis, it says, and he said, this is God speaking. Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel.
For I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved. What about us, friends? You know, Moses spent 40 years running from God. I spent 25 years running from God.
25 years running away from God. And just like Jacob and just like Moses, just like Paul, God was still there, waiting patiently for the right time. Just as he did in my life.
He waited patiently for 25 years. Are we running away from God? You know, as I was studying and putting the sermon together, I realised how much God spoke to Moses. Through the chapters of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, God is always speaking with Moses and Moses is always speaking with God.
It's amazing. But in Exodus 33:18, Moses says to God and he said, please show me your glory. And in verse 20, he says, you cannot see my face, for no man shall see me and live.
See the glory of God, you would die. We know the story, so I'm not going to talk about that particular story. But all through Moses life In this last 40 years, he walked.
He walked with God. Or more specifically, who did he walk with? First Corinthians that Paul wrote. Chapter 10, 2, 4, says and were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and the sea.
All ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them. And that rock was who? That rock was Jesus. Who was Moses speaking to? Who was speaking to Moses? It was Jesus.
As Moses went through the wilderness and the children of Israel, he was continually walking with Jesus. And that's what we need to do, friends, to be Christians. At this time in Earth's history, as we're entering into the last days, we probably entered a few years ago, to be honest with you, we need to be walking with Jesus.
You know, David said, a single day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God than live the good life in the homes of the wicked. Did David walk with the Lord? Absolutely.
David made mistakes, but David walked with Jesus the same. If we walk with Jesus, we're not going to be free from making mistakes. We're not going to be perfect.
But we are going to have a friendship and a connection that will draw us closer and closer and change who we are. The prophet Isaiah said, you will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you. You see, when you walk with the Lord, there's a peace that comes with walking with God.
As we walk with Jesus, we receive his peace. A peace that passes understanding. A peace that when you have it, you don't need anything else.
When you don't have it. You see, friends, I know when I'm getting away from my walk with Jesus because I feel the peace is going. And when that peace goes, I become like anybody else.
And I'm not talking about in church here, I mean anybody else in the street, I become anxious and worried. But when I walk with the Lord, I have his peace in my heart and my life. And I have this inner joy.
You know, the apostle Paul says that everything pales into insignificance incompete with knowing Christ. Philippians 3, 7, 8 says, but what things were gain to me these I have counted loss for Christ, yet indeed I count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of of all things and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ. Paul said, everything else except knowing Jesus was rubbish.
When we put Jesus first, he puts us first. When we walk with Jesus, we have this love relationship, this connection. You know, sometimes when young people are young and they're in love, they'll do Silly things like jump out of the window at night to go and visit the one that they love.
Why do they do that? Well, there could be a couple of reasons. I won't talk about what might be one of the reasons, but one of the reasons is because it's love. There's nothing that can stop them from being with the one that they love.
And friends, we need to have that sort of connection with Jesus that there's nothing that can stop us having that relationship with Jesus. I remember my mother and father in law, they were always together. In fact, I didn't notice this at the start, but they had the same mannerisms.
They were together so much, they had the same little mannerisms. And I do see this in husbands and wives at times, but they were especially, you know, when he died in 1999, he would have lived a lot longer, but he died of stomach cancer. My mother in law, who was very fit and healthy at that stage, she didn't last much longer.
I think it was about a year, just over a year. She just pined away. And you see, she couldn't live without the one that she loved.
So how do we walk with Jesus? How do we grow in this love that I'm talking about? How did Moses do it? How did Paul do it? How did David do it? How did all these people in the Bible that talked about Jesus with such love, how did they do it? The first one is prayer. I'm talking about personal prayer. You see, we can pray throughout the day, but if we don't start the day on our knees, our personal talk with God almost becomes zero eventually.
Except when we're in trouble. You know, prayer doesn't enable us to do a greater work for God. Prayer is the greater work.
Prayer doesn't help the work. Prayer is the work. A lot of us are busy today and many of us have a timetable that we need to keep to.
And so things slide in our life and quite often prayer is one of them. And I know that because for me the same thing happens. But I know that without prayer I can't be connected to Christ.
I can't walk with him without prayer. You know, spirit of prophecy calls prayer the breath of life. Can we live without breathing? Absolutely not.
A Christian cannot live without prayer. In the same way, we need to breathe in and we need to breathe out. What are some of the other ways reading the Word? Some people find this difficult.
Some people are not readers. And look, I get that, you know, I'm not naturally a good reader. If I were to read a Book.
I'm not talking about the Bible. Now, if I'm to read a book, I just have to be really consistent because I can't read much. Maybe a chapter and then I've had enough.
But if you do that every day, it's amazing how much you can read. The Desire of Ages and I love this particular quote says we should carefully study the Bible, asking God for the aid of the Holy Spirit that we may understand His Word. We should take one verse and concentrate the mind on the task of ascertaining the thought which God has put in that verse for us.
We should dwell upon the thought until it becomes our own and we know what saith the Lord. You know, some people say, well, if I read three chapters a day, I can read the whole Bible in one year. And I don't think that's the way that we should read the Bible.
Honestly, even one verse, meditated on, prayed over, studied can be enough. Now, I usually read a few more than one verse. But God wants us to fully comprehend what we're reading.
This is not a to do list where we can tick it off and say, okay, I read the Bible this morning. Continuing on this quote. They will find Christ is a personal Saviour.
As they feed upon His Word, they find that it is spirit and life. The Word destroys the natural earthly nature and imparts a new life in Christ Jesus. If you want to get rid of that earthly nature that we were born with, read the Word.
The Holy Spirit comes to the soul as a comforter by the transforming agency of his grace. And the image of God is reproduced in the disciple. So important to read.
It changes us. You know, I have an area in my life that I struggled with and that's showing respect to people who don't deserve respect. It's something that I've really struggled with in my life, or respecting authority who don't deserve respect.
But the Bible tells me that I should respect all authority. And I've struggled with that. I read it in Romans, I've read it in other places in the Bible and it's really hard for me to do that.
But I say, lord, I'm willing, but you're going to have to do it in me. And each time I read that in the Bible, it reminds me of my need to give respect to authority. You know, when I first came to Masterton and preached here a few times, the only thing I could preach on was Jesus, because that's all I knew.
I'd only been a Christian a very short time and I didn't know much, but I had a fire burning inside of me that Jesus had lit in my life and he was living and dwelling in my life. And I remember sharing many sermons about having a relationship with Jesus, just like this one. And there was a lady that used to come to this church and she had three daughters.
I don't think she's been to this church for a long time. And I'm talking about. This is about 2008, probably 2009.
This little girl came up to me and, you know, kids say the darndest things, don't they? This little girl said to me, you're my favourite preacher. And I thought, you know, she's just been really nice, as sometimes children can be. So I thought, oh, I'll ask her.
I said, so why am I your favourite preacher? And she said, because you always talk, you always talk about Jesus. Here's a little girl who's just a simple human being, but she loved to hear about Jesus. You know, people don't come to church for programmes.
They come to meet Jesus Christ and if they don't meet him here, they'll go looking for another church where they can meet him. We sometimes wonder. We have all the truth at Seventh Day Adventists and we really do have the truth.
But sometimes people leave our churches because they don't sense the presence of Jesus in our lives or in our church. Programmes without Jesus are a waste of time. To know Christ is life eternal.
You know, the Bible says in First John, he who has the Son has life. It doesn't finish there, though. He that does not have the Son of God does not have life.
So the question is for each one of us, and this includes me, is Jesus real in my life? Because he needs to be. You know, one of my favourite verses in the Bible, Revelation 3:20. Behold, Jesus says, I stand at the door and knock.
If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him and he with me. You know, Jesus is knocking at the door to our heart. He wants to come in, but there's no handle on the outside.
There's only a handle on the inside. Are we going to open that door because he wants to walk with us? Friends, I want to finish with a story, a story about a lady named. It's not even a lady, actually.
She was a girl named Andra. Andra lived in Romania and while she was a girl, she was into drugs, prostitution and other things. Her parents went to the pastor and they said, she won't even talk to us.
We pray for her and nothing happens. So the pastor remembered Andra when she was a girl and she loved to go camping. She loved to go into the mountains.
So the pastor came round to the home and invited Andra to go up camping into the hills. And she said, yeah, yeah, I'll come, but only one condition. You don't talk to me about God.
I don't have to sit around a campfire and sing songs, and I don't want anyone asking me to be baptised. She said, if you don't do those things, I'll come. The pastor said, great.
We'd love to have you. Please come. They had a great time.
But every evening they had the campsite set up so that the fire was in the middle and the tents were all around the fireplace. Andrew would just go into her tent at night, but the pastor would talk to the youth about walking with Jesus. He would challenge them, are you walking with Jesus? And then he would talk to them about what they needed to do to actually walk with Jesus.
But one night, Andra had had enough of this and she jumped out of her tent and said, can you please stop talking about Jesus? And the pastor said, what's the problem with talking about Jesus? She said, he's not real. I pray to him and nothing happens. The pastor said to Andrew, have you ever invited Jesus into your heart? Andrew went quiet.
He said, have you ever asked Jesus to come into your life, to be part of your life? He said, if you draw near to Jesus, he will draw near to you. Call him every day. And to get the pastor off her back, she agreed and said, yeah, I will.
They went home. A couple of weeks went by, and then one day, Andrew comes to see the pastor. She said to the pastor, she said, I've been praying and I've been actually asking Jesus to come into my heart for the last two weeks.
And I didn't think anything would happen. But she said, last night I saw him. He came to me.
She said, in his presence, I felt that I would die. The glory that he had. I saw him.
I knew I didn't deserve to live. But Jesus tenderly spoke to me and said, I didn't come to condemn you. I came to save you and I came to love you.
The pastor said, did he talk to you about the Sabbath? She said, no. Did he talk to you about drugs? No. Did he talk to you about eating tofu? No.
He just showed himself to me. Did you know that Andrew's life was never the same again? You see, her life changed. She went back to college.
She started going to church. She changed. And you see, anybody that meets Jesus will be changed.
You see, just coming to church won't change anybody. It's meeting Jesus Christ that changes us. Just as it did with Andra.
Just as it did with me. Most of you didn't know me before I was a Christian. Most of you don't know that I had an alcohol addiction.
Most of you don't know that I was a smoker. And many other things that I don't want to share. Today, my highlight of any week was the weekend where I could go parting.
And I'm sure that some of you can identify with this. But what happens sometimes, friends, is we take our eyes off Jesus and we start slipping back. It's like Peter, when he was going down under the water.
He was going down because he took his eyes off Christ. And that's what happens to every one of us. If we take our eyes off Jesus, we start to sink.
I actually. I had forgot to say something that I also do earlier in my sermon. One of the other things that people say about prayer.
Oh, I don't know what to say to God. You know, if I ever feel like that and I'm driving or I'm walking or I'm on my own, I sing. I sing songs like Amazing Grace.
I sing songs like I Need Thee every hour. I actually sing one of the songs you just sang this morning. Stand Up, Stand up for Jesus.
I teach myself these words so that I can sing them when I'm on my own. And when I don't know what to say to God, I just sing. And I don't have a good voice.
But Jesus is not worried about what my voice sounds like. He's just happy that I'm singing to him. So today, friends, I'm just encouraging you that no matter where you are, and maybe you are having this amazing walk with Jesus.
And I praise the Lord if you are, but if you're not, that's okay. Because now you know the formula is that you focus on Jesus Christ. You talk to him, you read his word, you meditate on it.
And each one of us is here for a reason today because we felt drawn to come today. And so I pray, friends, that we will all be walking with Jesus. Because, you see, when we are all walking with Jesus, when someone walks through that door, they will feel it.
They will see it, they will sense it. And this church won't be big enough to hold the people. And that's my prayer for each one of us today and for our families.
And friends. And I pray that in Jesus name, amen. This message was made available by the Masterton Seventh Day Adventist Church.
For more resources like this, visit mastertonsda.nz.
This this programme has been brought to you by 3 ABN Australia radio.
