The Gift of Knowing God

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August 20, 2023 | Shayne Poirier on John 17:1-3.

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.
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Well, as has been noted now a few times, today is going to be a bit different as we study
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God's Word together. We are taking a break from our normal series in the Gospel of Mark, and I'm excited that after our brother
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Sam preaches in Romans 1 next week, we'll be, Lord willing, moving on to Mark, that last section in Mark, and we'll be finishing up that Gospel before we get on to a new series.
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And I'm excited to tell you about that series in the coming weeks. We'll be looking at how it is that we worship
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God and the regulative principle of worship. But first, we're going to look today in John chapter 17 in verses 1 through 3.
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And the reason why we're here is it's been mentioned that I'll be preaching several times over the next week at the senior co -ed camp at Meadow Lodge Bible Camp.
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I counted a great blessing to do that as I speak to some 50 -some 14 - to 17 -year -olds at camp.
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But I realized my limitations, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to prepare multiple sermons this week for camp, and then also a sermon specifically for today.
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And so what you get today is what I might call an adult version of the youth sermon that's going to be preached at camp this evening.
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And so what we're going to do as we study this text is I want to highlight one particular theme, and that is the theme of knowing
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God. Or if you look at the cover of your bulletin, what we could title this sermon,
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The Immeasurable Gift of Knowing God. And what
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I'll do from time to time, I have to bounce around because I have notes for adults only and for youth only.
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So if you hear me pause and back up, you know what I'm doing. But we'll jump right into it.
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We live in a strange time, don't we? We live in a very strange time.
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In many respects, we live in an information -saturated world, in a culture that is, and this is not an exaggeration to say, a culture that is knowledge -obsessed.
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And I'll tell you what I mean. Every single day, we are bombarded with social media and with news, with podcasts and with YouTube, with TV and with radio, even with video games.
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And we live and move and have our being in a culture that must know everything or almost everything at all times.
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In just a few minutes, on any smartphone that you have with an Internet connection, you can know the weather on the other side of the world.
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You can know the latest happenings in news and politics. You can know what the latest celebrity is up to.
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You can find your friends and what they did on their last vacation. You can even know what a distant relative ate for breakfast this morning and even have pictures to go along with that knowledge.
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Every single day, hundreds of millions of people wake up and spend hours of their lives scrolling on their phones and their iPads and on their computers in this pursuit to know.
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I did the math this week, and it's no embellishment to say that, cumulatively speaking, in mere moments, entire lifetimes are spent by these hundreds of millions of people in the pursuit of knowledge, and most of it useless.
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We live in a strange time, and we live in a world that wants to know.
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And yet, I think all of us would agree, especially as Christians, we live in a world that is deeply impoverished when it comes to knowing things that are of any true and lasting value.
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We live in a world that wants to know everything and everyone, but in the process neglects and even rejects coming to know
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God. My question to you this afternoon is the same question that I'm going to ask these young people this evening, whether you're a
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Christian or not a Christian, is this. Do you know God?
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Do you personally, individually, before God, know
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God? I'm not talking about just knowing facts about God, or just some basic details about God, but do you personally and experientially know
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God? Or to put it another way, do you have a relationship with the living
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God? Even now, take a moment to ask yourself that.
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If you were to look at your behavior, Christian man, Christian woman, day by day, do you walk with God in a relationship with Him?
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Or do you treat Him as a set of historical facts to be studied and observed and explained?
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Do you know God? And are you walking in a relationship with Him?
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Brothers and sisters, I won't say this at camp, but I'll say it to you, that this is not purely an evangelistic message.
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This message, in fact, is meant for Christians, at least to some extent.
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There are perhaps people in this room who know many details about God. There are perhaps many people in this room who have been truly saved.
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You've placed your faith in Jesus, and you have a cursory knowledge of God. And yet there are perhaps many people in this room who are completely impoverished when it comes to experientially and relationally knowing
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God. You believe on Christ. You have been filled with the
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Holy Spirit. You read His Word, and yet you do not walk with God in a relationship with Him, but you treat
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Him like a detail in history. All of this has happened before.
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I've been studying the Reformed Baptist movement through the ages, since the Reformation recently.
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And I was curious to learn that in the early 1600s, the very first Reformed Baptists emerged out of the
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Congregational Presbyterian movement. And it was about 1640 that the very first Congregational Reformed Baptist Church was established in England post -Reformation.
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And what was amazing was that in about 40 years, by the time they had their newly minted 1689
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Confession of Faith, that one church had multiplied exponentially, and there were now hundreds of Reformed Baptist churches in England and in the surrounding area.
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Because they were people who were persecuted, and yet studied their Bibles and were filled with the
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Holy Spirit, and they knew their God. But it is so easy for churches and for Christians, even of the
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Reformed, Baptistic, conservative, evangelical flavor, to stumble and to fall and to depart, and to begin to treat
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God and the Bible like a textbook to be studied, rather than a living God to be known.
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And so 100 years after that ballooning of the Reformed Baptist movement, what happened was this. That George Whitefield and John Wesley and his brother
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Charles Wesley began preaching open -air evangelistic messages, and they were of the
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Anglican persuasion. And so as the Anglicans were experiencing their own miraculous revival of God, the
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Reformed Baptists were shriveling and shrinking, both in number, in church size, in the number of churches, and in their spirituality.
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And what was the malady? Why were they doing this? Why was this happening? Andrew Fuller, who is a well -known
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Reformed Baptist, wrote this in 1785 of that movement. And some of this old language can be difficult to follow, but just listen very carefully, because the words are piercing.
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He says about his own people. He says, Few seem to aim, pray, and strive after eminent love to God and one another.
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He says, Many appear to be contented if they can but remember the time when they had such love.
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They go on and on, satisfied it seems, if they just get to heaven at last, without caring much how.
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I asked Nicole this week this question. When was the last time you remembered,
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Nicole is my wife by the way, when was the last time you remembered having been filled with such love for God, that it stirred your heart, that you felt fully alive, that you felt as if you were an inch from heaven in your fellowship with God, in your sense of his divine presence, even as you walked and communed with him in that moment.
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I fear that many Christians today, many of us in this room today, content ourselves with the memory of that reality, rather than the present reality itself in our lives.
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J. I. Packer says something very similar. He says, We need frankly to face ourselves at this point.
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We are perhaps orthodox evangelicals. We can state the gospel clearly.
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We can smell unsound doctrine from a mile away. I feel like, put me in that category hopefully.
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If asked how one may know God, we can at once produce the right formula.
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And then he says, Yet the gaiety and the goodness and the unfetteredness of spirit, which are the marks of those who have known
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God, are rare among us. Perhaps they are even in some
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Christian circles, where by comparison doctrinal truth is less clearly and fully known.
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What he's saying is that perhaps there are those who are far less able in their ability to sniff out false doctrine, who know the
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Bible far less, and yet who know God far more. Brothers and sisters, how many of us can say that we know
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God? Not yesterday, not a year ago, not ten years ago, but that we know
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God today. That's what I think our passage deals with today.
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It's a camp sermon, so it's going to be shorter for the kids, but we have three verses. It's a three -point sermon with three verses.
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And so we're going to take one point at a time, one verse at a time, and we're going to look and ask ourselves,
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Do I know God or do I need to go back and make repairs? So I'll read first John chapter 17 and verse 1.
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John writes this, When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, and this is
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Christ here praying, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your
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Son, that the Son may glorify you. The first thing that I want us to show us before we can build the house, we need to lay the foundation of what it means to know
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God. And the first thing we need to look at together is first Christ's consecration.
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Or for the young people, what I'll say to the young people later today, Christ's commitment to die for sinners.
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Oh, that it is Christ's will. It was Christ's will to die for sinners, and it was
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Christ's will, friends, Christian brothers and sisters, to die for you, for you specifically.
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In John chapter 17, just to orient ourselves here, we find
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Jesus Christ in the upper room. This is sometime between the
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Last Supper and his journey to the Garden of Gethsemane, where we've heard recently he poured out his soul even unto death as he looked for an alternative to going to the cross.
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And contained in this 17th chapter of the Gospel of John is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus.
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And so, young men, young women, Daryl, Alice, if your parents ask you or if your family quiz you later, you need to know what is the longest or where can you find the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in the
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Bible. John chapter 17 is the answer. And if you have a red letter
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Bible like mine, you'll see that except for the first verse, every word in this entire chapter is in red.
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And that is because Jesus has business to do with the Father as he prepares to go to the cross.
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He has a great deal to say. And with this being the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in the
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Bible, it's fair to ask, what was to happen that necessitated such a long prayer?
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And we find those details nestled right in verse 1. Here is
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Jesus turns his attention from his disciples to his Father in prayer. The very first words out of his mouth are these,
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Father, the hour has come. Here you have Jesus Christ addressing his
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Father. There are three persons in the triune Godhead, the
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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And here we see, if we fast forward just for a moment to verse 5 for a second, the fellowship that this
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Father and the Son had known from eternity past when he says, and now Father glorify me in your presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
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Here's the eternal Jesus praying to his eternal Father. And for what purpose?
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We have such a short time, I don't get a lot of opportunity to drill in deep, so I'm just going to cut to the chase.
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Here Jesus knew that the hour had come and that the time was fast approaching when he would go to the cross to die for sinners.
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And when his relationship, that thus far in all of eternity past, his relationship with the
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Father had never been severed, in just a few hours time he would be forsaken by the
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Father. People widely refer to this prayer as the
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High Priestly Prayer. If you have the ESV Bible, that's probably the heading that reads above the chapter number.
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But some have called it, and I agree with them, that it might better be called Christ's Prayer of Consecration.
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After all, that is what Jesus was doing here, was consecrating himself, devoting himself to die for sinners.
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If we see that, if we look even to verse 19 for a moment. Verse 19, for those of you like me, who love the doctrine of particular redemption, limited atonement, that Christ died specifically for his people, he says in verse 19, and for their sake, for the sake of his own people,
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I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.
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The reason why Christ is praying, and the reason why Christ is consecrating himself, brethren, is because he is going to die for sinners.
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He's going to scale Calvary's mount, as we heard, with that 40 -pound cross beam for as long as he could carry it, up to that hill where he would be nailed to the cross, and where he would bear the very wrath of God on our behalf.
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But to what end? We're going to get there in a moment. Why did
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Jesus Christ have to go to that cross? Many of us know the story, but we know that when
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God created Adam and Eve, at the very beginning, if we go back to Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2, what we find there is that, for those first two chapters, we're told that God created man, male and female, in his own image,
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Adam and Eve, and it was very good. And in those first two chapters of our
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Bibles, we read that there, for a short time, man and woman existed in harmony with God.
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They had only a few responsibilities, and really only a few real purposes, and that was to know
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God and to love God, to walk with God in the garden, to serve him and to obey him.
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And the only prohibition on their freedom that was placed upon their freedom as a man and woman under God was that they would not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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They were given the task to eat from the tree of life, of which I'm concerned, had they eaten from the tree of life, the garden scene would have been over, and eternity, as we look forward to it now, would have begun.
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But instead, rather than desiring to know God, and rather than desiring to walk with God, what did they do?
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But as we already heard, in the strange world in which we live, they sought to know something else, namely, the difference between or the knowledge of good and evil.
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And so rather than walking in fellowship with God, as we are all called and purposed to do, they sought the knowledge of good and evil and ate from that tree.
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Now many of you know, I'm not going to go into as many details as I might with the kids, that this sin then now has spread from Adam and Eve to every man.
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And the reason why there is death in the world is because of sin. And the reason why there is disorder in the world is because of sin.
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And the reason why all of us must confess that we don't know God as we ought to is because of sin.
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And God would have been perfectly just to leave us in our sin, and to let us die in our sin.
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But at just the right time, God sent His Son to be the
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Savior of the world. And as Jesus went to His Father in prayer, here in John chapter 17,
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He was preparing Himself for the divine mission that was ahead, which was to take the punishment that you and I deserve on the cross upon Himself, that we might have everlasting life, and that we might know
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God. Jesus was preparing to become what some might call a penal substitute.
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And what that means is that Jesus was preparing to pay the penalty for our sins, and to die in our place in order that we might live and live to Him.
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In order that we might find forgiveness and eternal life. Now, oftentimes at youth camps, and I'll tell you this so that you don't get duped by this, or your kids, perhaps, if they go to youth camp.
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But in youth groups and youth camps, there is a story of penal substitutionary atonement that is often told, that is, it's a very emotive story, and it will move you, but it is not accurate.
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And I want to tell you this story to prepare you and to right the ship as it were.
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There's a story of a man, I'm sure this is a fictitious story, of a man who worked at a switch house on a railway.
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And every morning he would wake up and leave his family at home and go to his work, and he would ascend a tall hill and at the top of the hill go into his switch house.
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And overlooking a railway on one side and a river on the other side, he would man a drawbridge that would come up and down, up and down, to let ships pass under the drawbridge when the big ships came down the river, and to let the trains cross the river when they came to that section of the track.
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And one day, on a very special day, the father brought his son to show him his work.
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And for the morning they operated the drawbridge, and they brought the drawbridge up and down and up and down for the passing trains and the ships.
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And when the afternoon came, the young man had an opportunity, the little boy, to go to the river and fish.
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And as he stood there fishing at the river, he noticed that his dad was doing maintenance in the switch house, and he saw in the distance a passenger train that was coming towards the bridge.
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And frantically he tried to get his dad's attention that there was a train coming, and the bridge was still in the up position.
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Eventually, after he wasn't able to get his dad's attention well enough, he ascended the hill up to the switch house, and as he crossed over the bridge mechanism, he fell into the gearbox of the bridge.
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And as he got his father's attention, his father went to the switch house and was left with one of two options.
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One, he could rescue his son and leave the bridge in its up position, and the train would derail and careen into the river with all of its passengers.
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Or he could bring the drawbridge down with his son still stuck in the gears of the drawbridge, and he could kill his son, and in so doing save all the passengers of the train.
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As the story goes, as the man stood there in agony, trying to determine what he did or what he ought to do, eventually he pushed the button and brought the bridge down upon his son, crushing his son.
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And as he cried his eyes out and the train went past, inside the windows of the passing train were passengers who were drinking and gambling and partying with no thought given to the fact that his son had just died so that they would live.
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What a moving story in some ways. And many people will tell you that story and say, that is a picture of penal substitutionary atonement.
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But it's not. Because here in John chapter 17, what we see instead is this.
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A son who is consecrating himself, devoting himself to die for the sake of sinners.
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In John chapter 10, it says in verse 14, Christ said,
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I am the good shepherd, I know my own, and my own know me, just as the
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Father knows me, and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep.
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In John chapter 10, in verse 17, he says, I lay down my life, I lay down my life, that I might take it up again.
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No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. The first step, the foundation of knowing
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God, is first knowing what Christ was willing to do that you might know
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God. If we were to rewind and tell that story again at the train tracks, what we would find is this, perhaps, if it were to be more accurate.
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That one day, the father had a day off work because the bridge was under maintenance and there was no train expected, and the bridge didn't have to go up and down.
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And so the father and the son went to the river to fish. And there, as they enjoyed fellowship with each other, and as they spoke of their love for one another, and of their great care and thankfulness of their relationship that they had, on the top of the hill, they saw a train, a passenger train, that same passenger train filled with wretched sinners.
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And that passenger train had no care for the fact that the bridge was out. The passengers in that passenger train were hell -bent for destruction, with no thought to the future.
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And there, as the father and the son looked upon that train, they devised a plan. If I can say, from eternity past, if we're to reference
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God in this, that they would save the passengers on that train together. The father said,
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I cannot go into the gearbox, and the son said, here I am, send me. And he went down into the gearbox, and the father manned the station in the switch house, and together they manually brought the bridge down, and they brought the bridge down upon the son.
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And as the train passed, with those who were drinking and gambling and smoking and partying, as we see the train go by, we see our face on that train.
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Christ laid down his life, that we might know
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God. Are we taking hold of that?
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He made him to be no sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
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Let me ask you, do you believe that message? That is the foundation of knowing
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God. Next in verse 2, we see this.
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Since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.
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We see here Christ's gift for the elect. At camp, I can't use that word in the same way.
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Here we see Christ's gift for his people. His elect.
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It was not enough that Jesus Christ came to die. As we've looked at many times in recent weeks,
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Christ did not just die on the cross to show us how much he loves us, but he died on the cross to accomplish something.
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And here we see what I would call the gift box, or the gift wrap of what
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Christ is giving us in his atoning work. Christ didn't just come to die.
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He came to give us eternal life. A true gift.
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Scripture uses that expression. He says in Ephesians 2 verse 8, For by grace you have been saved through faith.
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And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. And what a thought, friends, that God loved, for God so loved the whole world.
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He loved the world that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in him would have eternal life.
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John 6 verse 40 says, For this is the will of my Father, that anyone who looks on the
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Son and believes on him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
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If you're a Christian in this room, meaning that you have repented of your sin, and you believe on Jesus, you believe that he died, on that cross for you, that he was in the proverbial gearbox as the train went across.
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He was there to save you. And brethren, we have eternal life ahead of us.
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The vast majority of people in this world have only eternal death to look forward to.
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Everlasting punishment, where the fire is not quenched and the worm does not die. But if in Christ you have eternal life, something that I'm going to go a little bit lighter on later, but I can go full bore now, is this.
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This is not given potentially to all people, but to God's very own people.
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Now you might say, where do you see that, Shane? Look in verse 2 one more time. Since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to who?
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To all whom you have given him. This speaks to the redemption, not of all people, but of God's chosen people,
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God's elect. Not because of anything that we have done, but because of his own purpose and grace.
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You see, the father and the son, as they live together in perfect harmony, before the worlds began, in eternity past, they not only planned this world, but they planned to redeem this world.
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Ephesians 1 verse 3 says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.
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Listen to this. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
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In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace.
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Not only has Christ died for us, but he died specifically for us, for every
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Christian, by his own divine initiative. And brethren, what this means is that if you have placed your faith in Christ, you have not done that because of some inner desire on your behalf, but because of an inner working on God's behalf in you to effectually call and draw you to himself.
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And what that means is that not only has Christ died for us, and not only do we have eternal life, but it means that we are secure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ.
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And what this means is that we are secure forever. As I say often, and I'm not ashamed to say again, this means that in 10 ,000 years,
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Christian, you'll be alive in the presence of God, looking forward only to another 10 ,000, 100 ,000, 10 million years in the presence of God.
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So that every contrary providence that befalls you in this life is but a momentary and light affliction producing in us an eternal weight of glory.
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We are forgiven forever. Some of you have been around for this story, but I know that many of you haven't, and I'm going to tell it to the kids, so I might as well tell it to you.
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You might remember, if you were here in June of last year, I told the story of a man named J. Wilbur Chapman, a doctor, a
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Presbyterian minister who in his church had a bit of a wild scientist, a mad scientist who joined his church.
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He was a mathematician and a university professor, very accomplished, who could calculate wild formulas.
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I don't even know enough about math to explain what he did, but he was a math wizard, you could say.
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And as is often the case, he was a very accomplished man, and sin wreaked havoc in his life to the point that he lost almost everything, including his professorship.
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And under the ministry of J. Wilbur Chapman, he came to believe on Christ. And, man, you've been to our men's groups.
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You know what those are like. Picture this. One day he had a group of the men of the church around, and he was teaching on Psalm 103 in verse 12, that God has removed our sins from us as far as the east is from the west.
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And he looked at this mad mathematician, say that three times fast, and he said,
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You, sir, calculate for me the distance between east and west.
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And so the man got out his notebook and frantically started writing and working out equations, and all the men stood there and waited patiently for him to get there.
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And then he dropped his notebook, and he looked up with tears in his eyes, and he said,
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The distance is immeasurable. If you were to plant a stake in the ground here, and you were to walk from this stake from the east to the west, you would come back to this stake, and the east would still be in front of you, and the west will still be behind you, and there is no end.
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And then he looked at the man and he said, And that is how much God has forgiven my sin.
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And that is how much God has forgiven your sin. That you should not only send his son to die, but die that you would have eternal life, forever secure.
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In John 10, 28, Christ says, I will give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.
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And then in verse 3, Christ says,
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And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true
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God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. If Christ died for sinners, and eternal life is the gift wrapping, the package, an eternity, and the substance of that gift, is that we would know
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God. Heaven isn't the end. That's not the end of the gospel.
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Heaven, in a sense, is the means of the gospel. And the end is knowing
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God, as Adam and Eve did in the garden. Better than Adam and Eve did in the garden when they walked with him face to face.
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This is my third point. The substance of that gift. One Puritan, Samuel Rutherford, wrote tremendous letters.
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Banner of Truth publishes a book of his letters. The letters of Samuel Rutherford. And he said this one time.
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He said, Oh my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without thee, it would be a hell.
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And if I could be in hell with thee, well then it would be but a heaven.
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What makes heaven, heaven, is that we get to be with God.
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And to know Him. And to walk with Him. And to see Him. Randy Alcorn says,
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Heaven without God would be like a palace without a king. Heaven without God would be like a honeymoon without a bride or a groom.
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The substance of eternal life is knowing God. And dear friends, knowing
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God doesn't begin when we die. Knowing God begins when we become recipients of eternal life.
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Which is now. Which is the day in which you turned to God. And by repentance and faith in Christ you were saved.
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And so in Christ we have a Savior. In Christ we have eternal life. And the forgiveness of sins. And in Christ we have not only a new covenant, but a new covenant relationship with God.
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Isaiah 59 too says that, your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God. And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.
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That's the sin dilemma. But it's part of a new covenant that God was making with His people.
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And a new covenant that He has now enacted with His people. In Jeremiah 31 it says this,
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Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord. Those days have come now. When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
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Not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. And I'm going to skip ahead a little bit.
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He says this, For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the
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Lord. I will put my law within them. I will write it on their hearts.
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And I will be their God. And they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying,
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Know the Lord. Why? This is a big problem by the way for our
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Presbyterian brothers and sisters. Each one will... Shall each one teach his neighbor and brother saying,
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Know the Lord. Know. For they shall all know me. From the least to the greatest declares the
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Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity. And I will remember their sin no more.
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Brother or sister in this room, you might say, I am the least of all Christians.
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They might all know the Lord. From the least to the greatest. You feel like you have the weakest faith in the room.
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You feel like you're pitiful and wretched and unworthy. You are. And yet, through Christ, we have a new covenant.
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We are partakers of a new covenant. And you can go home this afternoon, if you have said,
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I have no relationship with God. I believe the gospel with all of my heart. I read my
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Bible. I pray. But it's all just one way requests.
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I have no communion with God. You can go home this evening. And you can say to God, God, I have not taken hold of all that I can in Christ.
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And today, as the least of all Christians, I will know you and walk with you and live in fellowship with you.
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In Christ, Jesus, our Lord. Ephesians 3 .11 says, We have boldness and access with confidence to God through faith in Him.
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We're not like the Catholics, who pray to dead saints, asking that they would go to God on our behalf.
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But we are Christians. And through Christ, we go to God directly.
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There's the life of one man. They called him Praying Payson. His real name was Edward Payson.
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I guess it would have been America in the late 1700s. He grew up and quickly was recognized as a brilliant little boy.
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By the age of four, he was reading books, and he had developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge.
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By the time he was 17, Harson, you're 17?
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When he was 17 years old, his dad enrolled him in Harvard. He graduated in three years with his degree.
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And the students at Harvard used to mock him and say that he had read every book in the
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Harvard library. But when he was 21 years old, his brother died, and he turned his mind from pursuing the temporal knowledge of this world, and all the books at Harvard, and he turned to things that are of eternal worth.
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And he asked himself, Who am I? And where will I go when I die?
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And how will I get there? And by God's grace, he was marvelously converted, saved at the age of 21.
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And from that day forward, he sought to know the Lord. He wrote to his mother shortly after that.
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He said, I am so happy. Speaking about his relationship with Jesus Christ, he said,
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I am so happy that I can hardly think about or write about anything else. And convinced that God had called him into the ministry, he poured himself into reading his
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Bible every morning. He would get up and read his Bible. He would immerse himself in good books.
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He sought to know God better every day by spending not minutes, but hours with God in prayer.
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And it wasn't long before Payson was recognized and seen for his devotion and his gifting, and was called to be the pastor of a church in England.
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Just a modest and a small pastor. And there he excelled as he sought to know his
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God and to lead his people to know God. He was given many offers to move to the big city, to move to New York and to serve in a pastorate there.
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He turned them all down. He was content to minister amongst the flock that God had called him to in Portland, Maine.
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And in his early 40s, he began to fall ill. He lost the use of his arms and legs.
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Eventually, he was restricted just to his bed. And as he laid there in this bed, unable to move, he said,
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I can find no words to express my happiness. I seem to be swimming in a river of pleasure, which is carrying me on to the great fountain.
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In 1827, he reached the fountain. He went home to be with the Lord. And while he lived a marvelous life, my favorite story is what came after his death.
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After his death, someone was in his home. And near his bed, they noticed two deep grooves in the hardwood floor.
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And they said, what was that from? And someone said, that was where Edward Payson would kneel every morning to be with his
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God. He was there so frequently that he had left two ruts in the floor.
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Someone said of praying Payson of Portland, they said, he prayed without ceasing.
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He studied on his knees. Much of his time was spent prostrated with the Bible open before him, pleading the promises of God.
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Brothers and sisters, we have a promise here before you that you can plead, that through Christ, you can know the living
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God, that you can walk with him all the days of your life. And then when you die with him, you can meet him face to face.
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So how then will you spend your life? Will you spend it pursuing temporal knowledge on a screen, or even in a book?
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Or will you spend your life seeking to know God, the Father through Jesus Christ, our
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Lord. In Christ, we have the immeasurable gift of knowing
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God. And who among us will take that gift and open it?
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I'll finish with this quote, a man named Howard Guinness. In 1939, he started the
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International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He was of like mind and heart as Steve and I, just working amongst the students.
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And he challenged the students, he said this, where are the men and women of this generation who will hold their lives cheap and be faithful, even faithful unto death?
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Where are those who will lose their lives for Christ's sake, flinging them away for love of him?
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This is the verse, or the quote I really want you to think about. He says this, where are the men and women of prayer?
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Where are the men who count God's word of more importance to them than their daily food? Where are the men who like Moses of old, commune with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend?
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Where are God's men in this day of God's power?
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Oh, that we would be a church that's filled with those men and filled with those women believing on Christ, looking forward to an eternity with him and knowing and walking with our