On Eagles' Wings Pt 28 — Don Courville

Renewing Strength by Waiting on the Lord

Hest thou not known? Hest thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increases strength.

Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.

I'm Don Corville. We welcome you today to On Eagle's Wings, and we trust that today's program will be an encouragement to you. Have you ever thought about the area of what your obedience to God costs other people, and what your obedience means to you personally in your walk with Jesus?

The Cost of Obedience and Disobedience

How about your disobedience, what it costs other people? Chambers said if we obey God, it's going to cost other people more than it costs us. And if we're in love with our Lord, obedience does not cost us anything.

It's a delight, but it will cost those who do not love him a good deal. If we obey God, it means that other people's plans are upset. But if we disobey God, we're going to upset God's plans. Can we afford to be disobedient?

Numbering Our Days and Redeeming Time

The psalmist said, Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreath, and mine ages as nothing before thee. Verily, every man at his best state is altogether vanity, selah. Someone said, Life at its best is short, time flies so very fast.

Lord, help me not to waste this day, lest it should be my last. A friend of mine says, I'm ready to go, but willing to wait. You know, the tracks of time are all around us. That gray hair sneaks up on you.

One day your house is old. There's a funeral. Or there's out of style clothes. We say, I don't have time. Is that true? I don't have time to do all that I want to do. I seriously doubt that. We find time to do that which is important.

We live in the times of the tyranny of the urgent, and the things that are priority many times are pushed aside by the urgent. We say, My, how time has flown. Or where has the time gone? The psalmist said in Psalms 90 and verse 12, So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Revival, Prophecy, and the Urgency of the Hour

Well, there's no doubt that we live in some very different times. Very different. I was listening to a message today on prophecy, and I'm seriously thinking about playing this message for you in the weeks ahead, by Jack VanIppe, one of his newest messages.

Just a powerful message that should prime the Church to seek the Lord, to seek him in revival and cleansing because of the soon return of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7 .29, The time is short.

Let me ask you something about time. Is it mastering you or are you mastering it? Can you save it? Well, we know the Bible says that we can redeem time. Ephesians 5 .15, Colossians 4 .5 talk about redeeming the time.

The definition of that means to rescue from the loss or from loss. Maybe your time has got away from you, the things that you're doing. Someone said that time is either a bondage or a freedom to you. If you're in jail, then time is a bondage.

I heard the story that a preacher shared once of a man that had got out of jail, and another friend of his asked him how it felt. He said, I don't know yet. I'll tell you. He came back a few weeks later, and he had during that time picked up wire and stuffed it into a bottle.

Then he showed this bottle stuffed with this wire to his friend. He threw the bottle down and he busted it. A few of the wires popped out here and there, but basically the form of the bottle was still there.

He said, that's how I feel. I'm free, yet the impression of the prison has left its mold on me. How about you? Have you received Christ as your Savior, yet you feel like the mold of the world is still on you?

In the area, excuse me, I have sort of a raspy throat, but in the era of revival, we're talking about having that mold from the world completely broke. You know, we live in some unusual times, and we have some unusual things happening.

A Revival Testimony and the Need for Spiritual Cleansing

I wanted to get on the radio today. A pastor up in a state that's been calling me about once or twice a week, keeping me informed on a revival that's going on in his town. I wanted to get him on the air.

The last I heard, there were about 20 a night getting saved, and they're going into the third week. Starting today, April the 8th, they'll be going into their third week in this revival meeting, and the evangelist is just awed.

He's afraid. He doesn't want to touch anything. He realizes this is God doing him, and the pastor is a friend of mine, and actually the evangelist had to learn some things new. The pastor asked him to do some things he's never done before.

Well, revival is hitting that town. One man was driving through the town. I guess he was a long-haired man and headed for Las Vegas, and I'd like to get him to share this with you himself, but somehow or another he ended up at the meetings a few blocks from the main highway.

He got saved, and the next night he was back at the meetings with a haircut, clean shaved, and a new suit, had decided to stay in that town, and another pastor there went up to introduce himself and was floored that it was the same man.

Unusual things happening up in that area. A small town of about 10 ,000. Not great numbers, anywhere from probably 100 to 200 a night coming out, but they're seeing God cleanse their town, cleansing their churches, and last report I heard there'd been about 23 churches represented in these meetings.

Unusual things happening. We should be prepared for the unusual. The times are changing. We should let the delays in our life turn us to delight in God's ways. You know, Egypt was a mirage to Moses, and this old world to us, to many of us, we've let time trick us, and we've set our sights on things that are temporal and not the eternal things, and we're not ready for the unusual.

As I've shared with you, God has allowed me just to take some time off from the busy pastoring schedule, and let me tell you, I'm for the pastor that's preaching the Word of God. This ministry, we're not really here to promote our ministry.

We don't promote for funds. We just let God take care of that. We want to promote the local church, the preaching of the Word of God. We are behind the man of God and the local church that's preaching the Word, and we're for you.

We know you're not perfect. We're not perfect, but we want to be an encouragement to you. We want to encourage you to let God cleanse your church if you need it. If you're out there riding down the highway or sitting there listening in your kitchen, your living room, take a look at your life.

What has time done to your life? Has it made some difference in your life, or has time become a bondage to you? Where are you in relation to time? You know, there's some things maybe we should understand in relation to being free in time.

Yielding Every Moment to God

One thing we need to consider is that our time needs to be yielded to God. If you yield your time to God, and I did this back in 1974. I was out in Denver, and I've never forgot it because God reminds me from time to time.

Then let God do with you what he wants. It will stop frustrations. It will stop fruitless activity. You let him determine what the starts and the stops of your day, your priorities, what you do, your vocation, and where you go, your vacations, where you shop.

You let him be the Lord of every moment of your day. You know, a couple weeks ago, I had an unusual thing happen to me. We had a little girl, our little five-year-old. I got home one evening, and she was just crying and crying, and she was sick, and the wife said, we've got to get her to a doctor.

And boy, that meant the next day to go in and sit for maybe an hour or two in a doctor's office. And then I remembered I'd ran into a doctor up in this area, up in the Joplin area here, that does something that's unusual.

Now, I don't remember this in my time, but maybe you do. Do you remember the days when doctors made house calls? Well, if you do, you're probably way up there in years, but I don't remember those days, and I'm 43 years old before my time.

But there's a doctor in this area, a Christian doctor that makes house calls. That's his ministry. He will come to your house. You don't have to go sit in a clinic. You call him. So if you're been to us, it was a great blessing.

We came up here to Joplin and just met him right in front of a drug store so we could get what we needed. Time was running out for getting the prescription filled, and he just met us right there. He'll come to your home.

This doctor, isn't that unusual? But he ministers that way, and God's just led him to do this. I'm not pushing his business or anything, but if you'd like to get a hold of this doctor, I'm sure he wouldn't mind just me passing this information on to you.

His name is Dr. Dennis Greer, and his phone number is 625 -0143. So if you'd like to have something unusual, that's it. You give him a call. That's 625 -0143, Dr. Greer. He's an MD. Well, God just prompted him to carry on his medical practice by this means.

It's unusual. His time has been yielded to God, and he ministered to our family. We met him in our van, and he ministered to our family, both on the physical and by way of spiritual, too, and it was also educational.

He let some of the other kids look inside of some ears, and we're homeschooling, so that was interesting. But we live in unusual times. Let God do with you what he wants. At the cross, our time ceases, and God starts.

The Cross as the Center of Time and Eternity

When you meet Jesus Christ at the cross, your time stops, and his starts. Isn't that good? If you read in Oswald Chambers, my utmost for his highest and his little devotional on April 6th, he said, there's nothing more certain in time or eternity than what Jesus Christ did on the cross.

He switched the whole of the human race back into a right relationship with God. He made redemption the basis of human life. That is, he made a way for every son of man to get into communion with God.

Let me just ask you a question. Look at your life. Have you come to know God in your time? If not, I believe you've missed out on life. You've missed out on it. The cross is the center of time and of eternity.

The cross did not just happen to Jesus. He came on purpose for it. It wasn't just a mistake, a tragedy, a great accident. No, the cross was God's plan. If the cross is not in your plan, you've missed out on the whole purpose of your existence on this earth.

Your time will have been wasted. From the day you're born to the day you die, God gives you opportunities to come to him and receive him as your savior. The whole meaning of the incarnation, we're going into the Easter season, the whole meaning of Christ coming in the flesh and dying on the cross, the whole meaning of it is for you to be saved and so that he can be glorified.

The incarnation was for the purpose of redemption. Chambers shared, God became incarnate for the purpose of putting away sin, not for the purpose of self-realization. The New Age movement has taken us into the self-realization, but the cross is the center of time and of eternity.

It's the answer. It's the answer. The cross is not the cross of a man, but the cross of God. The cross of God can never be realized in human experience. The cross is the exhibition of the nature of God, the gateway whereby any individual of the human race can enter into union with God.

When we get to the cross, we do not go through it. We abide in the life to which the cross is the gateway. So the center of salvation is the cross of Jesus, and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because it costs God so much.

The cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is open, but the crash is on the heart of God. God took our sin. He bore our sin on himself at Calvary. My friend, he died for you.

The purpose of your time on this earth is for God to be glorified in your life, and until you come to the point where you repent of your sins and trust Christ and Christ alone for your salvation, not Christ plus your good works, not Christ plus your baptism, not Christ plus your giving to the church or your being a membership of this or that.

It's Christ in the blood alone that saves. Time. How you doing on time? Someone shared, the years slipped by and time was spent and all the good things that I meant to do were left undone because I had no time to stop and pause.

I rushed about, went here and there, did this and that, was everywhere. I had no time to meditate. On things worthwhile, no time to wait upon the Lord and hear him say, well done my child, you've shown the way.

And so I wonder after all, when life is over and I am called to meet my savior in the sky, where saints live on and never die, if I can find one soul like one, to Christ by some small deed I've done, or will I hang my head and whine, forgive me God, I had no time.

Using Time to Share the Good News

You see, God gives you time to repent and trust him as your savior and then when you do that, he gives you time to pass on the good news. Many believers in our churches, even our leaders and even some pastors have no time to win souls to Jesus.

Backsliding is one of the most detrimental, damaging things to a believer's life, to a church. One of the evidences of a backslidden believer in a backslidden church and one of the evidence of its deep need of a brokenness and of a repentant heart and of a revival of God's spirit is the evidence of no time for the things of God, no time to reach out to the lost.

Who does your time belong to anyway? When you came to the cross and received Christ as your savior, your time ceased. Your working time is God's time. When you go to work, you're working for God. Housewife, you're there with those little ones, wiping those little snotty noses, taking care of those dirty diapers and all of that, and you get discouraged and you wonder what's going on.

You're there for God's glory. Look at yourself from the perspective of eternity time, not earthly time, your family time. You know, God does unusual things in the men and women's lives who give their time to him.

God's Work Through Long Seasons of Waiting

Look at Joseph. Look at Joseph, 13 years of his life from the pit to being in jail and 13 years seemingly snuffed out, but when he emerged on the top, second in command, God took that time when he was buried.

Moses, 40 years, seemed like 40 years out in that wilderness. What a waste, they say, of time. Daniel, 70 years. Think about it. He was an old man before God gave him the revelation that we now really need to know a lot about.

Seventy years in the Babylonian captivity, an old man, but he saw that time was about complete. What about Paul? After he was saved, 14 years of his time, seemingly lost. No, my friend, those were the years where God took Paul deep into the Lord Jesus Christ.

Time. You know, Jonah had a time experience, and we're coming into the Easter season. Jonah, three days in the belly of that fish, whale, whatever it was. Time. All of a sudden, Jonah had a new perspective on time, and he decided, after he had this encounter with God, that he didn't want to take time to go off for a vacation and run away from the will of God.

I believe God killed him. I believe that he died. You read the book of Jonah, and he went down to Sheol. Jesus said that as Jonah was three days in the whale's belly, in the fish's belly, so he would be in the heart of the earth.

Well, how was Jesus? Jesus died. Jonah was a type of Christ. The liberals don't like the book of Jonah because he was a type of Christ. The resurrection. Power there. But his time. God had a hold of his time.

When he came back and he hit the earth, that fish vomited him up, he hit the earth on the run. He was making tracks for Nineveh. He had a new encounter with God. And maybe you need a new encounter with God.

Entrusting Circumstances and Priorities to God

If my time belongs to God, then God can do whatever he wants to do. He is my Lord when he is the Lord of my time. The psalmist said in Psalms 31 15, my times are in thy hand. Do you try to manipulate circumstances?

Do you try to always get your way? One of the greatest evidences of freedom in a believer's life is he has the ability to wait on God and to let God work things out. He doesn't have to manipulate. He moves by prayer.

He watches God move circumstances. Sometimes we miss out on the basics of time. Have you given God the first hour of each day? Have you given God the first day of each week? Have you given God the first dime of each dollar?

Those are basic things. If God doesn't have the basics, he won't get into the details of our life. We all have the same amount of time, and where you use it and where I use it reveals our priorities in relation to God.

Accepting God's Plan Instead of Our Own

Don't always be trying to manipulate things and have your own way. You remember Peter? He rebuked the Lord Jesus, and the Lord turned around and rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.

Why was it that Peter didn't want Jesus to say that? Jesus said he's going to go and be killed and after three days rise again. You see, this was in God's plan, but it wasn't in Peter's plan. Many of us are wrestling right now with God because he has done something in relation with our time.

Maybe he slowed you down. Maybe he set you up in a bed. Maybe he's caused you to lose your job, and you are kicking and scrapping and arguing and fighting, and you're bitter against God because he's done something with your time.

Jesus said, Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake in the gospels, the same shall save it. Has God called you into the ministry, but you're putting your time somewhere else?

You know, there are not many people that would throw their life away at one time, but many will throw it away a minute at a time. You know, it's been said that it would take 80 hours to read through the Bible.

Eighty hours, but yet many of you out there listening today have never read through the Bible. You say you don't have time, but yet you'll watch 80 hours of TV in a couple months' time. Some men die in battle, and some men die in flames, but most men die inch by inch as they play silly little games.

A fool will waste your time, and you'll be a fool to let a fool waste your time. What is time? Someone said it is opportunity. It is opportunity to serve the Lord. Well, don't manipulate the circumstances.

Pleasing the Father With Every Moment

Don't let others manipulate you. Jesus said, My time is not yet. When they tried to force him to go to Jerusalem, he said, My time is not yet. Do you know what the goal of Jesus was with time? Do you?

He said, For I do always those things that please him. His goal was to please the Father in everything he did. How are you investing your time? Are you pleasing the Father, or are you glorifying the Father with your time?

You remember the story when the mother of Zebedee's children came to Jesus, and she wanted her two sons to sit on his right hand and one on the left. And Jesus answered and said, You know not what you ask.

Are you able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? I believe we should be very careful in our prayer request, because God knows what we need.

We should be very careful to always want his will above our will. Chambers said there are times in spiritual life when there is confusion, and it is no way out to say that there ought not to be confusion.

It is not a question of right and wrong, but a question of God taking you by a way which in the meantime you do not understand. And it is only by going through the confusion that you will get at what God wants.

Well, sometimes God's ways are confusing, and I'm sure many of the great men and women of God of the past, many of them were confused. They didn't know what God was doing, but yet they had faith and they hung in there.

Well, it's been good to be with you today. I've enjoyed it. If you'd like to write to me, you can write to O 'Neill's Wings, Box 1100, Webb City, Missouri 64870. And that doctor again, Dr. Greer, if you'd like his number one more time, it was 625 -0143.

And he doesn't know I'm doing this. Just the way he used his time was a real ministry to us. Well, until next week, I trust that God will minister to you, that you learn the ways of God in relation to time.

And so until next week, may God richly bless you, my friend.