God Has a Plan

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It's good to be back here this evening.
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I always love coming to this church and talking to some of you guys.
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I know that there are people in here that are strongly in the same theological stance as I am when it comes to Reformed theology, and not every church I speak at is like that.
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So I'm excited to be here this evening once again.
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How many people are there that have never heard me share? Is there anybody that's never heard me share? We got just a few.
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Okay, so I'll give a quick recap for the main stories about where we are and who we work with and so on.
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But this church has been supporting us for quite a while.
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So for the new people, we serve in Indonesia, my wife and I.
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My wife is named Jenny, and she's got three of our kids, technically four, because she's due with our seventh in about well, next couple months here.
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She's due on April 23rd with number seven, but I've got three of my sons here with me this evening.
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Their names are Moses, Job, and Lazarus, and then the ones at home are Boaz, Jedediah, and then we've got Maranatha as our daughter, and the next one, we don't have a name yet, and we don't know if it's a girl or a boy.
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We find out the day of, so exciting times for our family.
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And the way we see it, really, they're all missionaries in training.
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My hope is that as we continue to work with the Tao people and go back and forth, by the time that they're out of the house, they'll think to themselves, well, I've traveled back and forth my whole life.
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I know what it's like, so why shouldn't I go reach another tribe? That's what I'm hoping the thought process will be.
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But I know that the Lord has His sovereign plan for them, and we'll see what He has for them.
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But that's what we do, and some people look at us like we're crazy, taking that many kids back and forth overseas.
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If you don't know anything about Indonesia, it's the world's most populous Muslim nation.
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It's 90-some-odd percent Muslim.
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They said 97% years ago when we entered.
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We've been working there for 18 years now.
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But mixed in with those Muslim people, the majority of them Muslim, there are also a lot, hundreds of the animistic people groups, and we ended up in one of those animistic people groups called the Tao tribe, and we're independent.
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So we named our mission after the tribe and made it into an acronym, Desire and Advancement Overseas.
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And there are some photos that they've got, if you want to flip through them, if there's anybody back there.
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And you can see what the Tao tribe is like.
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You've seen the video, but we've been working with this tribe.
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When we first went to this tribe, the way we found out about them, first of all, was by talking to old helicopter pilots that had been flying around for years.
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And they'd come in close to this one area with this split valley system, and the people would run from the helicopter.
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And we heard about this tribe, and we asked them about them.
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They gave us GPS waypoints.
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We ended up hiring a local guide that knew a related dialect of language.
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He became our guide.
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We ended up multiple days going up a river, my wife and I, Muddy River.
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We ended up in a standoff with a bunch of guys from this tribe.
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We didn't know whether they were going to shoot at us or not.
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I've got all that on video, and it's all on our website if you want to see that stuff.
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But we didn't know why they were favorable towards us being there, but they were.
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So we moved in.
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We started learning their language.
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We found that it was an unwritten language.
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So we started equating one symbol to every sound that we heard.
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We went with two other families.
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The other two families quit within the first six months because it was too much for them.
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But we stayed there.
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We continued working.
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As we formed an alphabet for their language, the intention was that we would be able to someday translate God's Word into their language and teach them how to read and write so that they would have that simple privilege that we have every day of being able to open up God's Word in their own language.
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So that's what we started doing.
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We were working with them.
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There came a point, however, where we were also ready to give up.
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The other two families had left.
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We were getting malaria over and over again.
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We were getting ready to give up, and at that time God encouraged us with something very specific, which was that we knew just enough language to understand the majority of what they said, even though we couldn't speak it well.
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And they told us that the reason they were favorable towards us being there, and the reason they hadn't attacked us when we first came in, is because their fathers, one generation before, had all had the same dream that someday there would be strange-looking, pale-skinned people that would hike into their valley with a great message.
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And they said, that's what we're waiting for, is your message.
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And that, for us, turned to the tables, because we realized something, which was that God had been working there long before we ever got there, and He had been preparing them.
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We were encouraged as we saw that, and we started thinking about that, and we realized that if we were to stay, if we would stay instead of giving up, we would be able to be a part of seeing God do something amazing with those people.
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Because He was already preparing them.
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He was already working with them, and then He encouraged our hearts through passages like Revelation 7, where it says there will be people from every tongue, tribe, nation, and language that are one day bowing before His throne and worshiping Him.
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And the thought process was, God has His people called out from every tribe, and there will come.
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He's going to reach them one way or another.
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He's going to reach them.
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If we would have given up, God would have raised up somebody else, and we would have missed out on being a part of seeing God work.
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And that thought really was amazing to us.
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Honestly, it was a wake-up call just to the greatness of our God, and the fact that He does have a plan for every tongue, tribe, and nation.
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But that's the background of where we work, what we've been doing for 18 years now, and we're going to continue to work with those people.
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A couple years ago, we finished translating in our New Testament, and I'll put it on the table back there if you want to look at it.
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But it's called, Ebe'atame me kapoge.
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That's what it says on the front.
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Ebe'atame is their word for the Creator.
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Me is His, and kapoge breaks down into two words, which is kapoie, and what that means is white leaves.
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Kapo is white, ie is leaves, because when they look at it, to them, it looks like a bunch of white leaves.
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So they say it's the white leaves of the Creator.
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And now we're translating the Old Testament.
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We finished the first five books recently, and right now, I believe we're in Psalm 69.
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My wife is the translator, and then I take what she translates, and I teach it to the people as we go back and forth.
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But right now, we're waiting for the country to open up after all this COVID stuff.
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Offices are closed, so we're finding new ways to team up with other missionaries to start a business front, and we're going to try to get visas that way, and Lord willing, we'll be back in this next summer when the passport's ready for the baby that's about to be born.
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In the meantime, we're also working on a training center.
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We're working with a bunch of churches to train up more missionaries to go to other tribes as well, and I can tell you more about that if you'd like to know about it.
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But I don't want to just tell stories this evening.
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I'd like to share from the Word, and what I've been reading in my own life, in my own devotions, is Ephesians.
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So if you've got your Bibles, Ephesians 1, verses 3 through 10, is a passage that just this week, the Lord's been encouraging my heart through, and I've seen a number of things in it that just, honestly, they just make me praise Him, as I think about what He's done in my own life, as I think about what He's done in the Dao tribe, and as I think about what I hope and pray that He will do in my children's lives as well, as they get older, and have their opportunity to trust in Christ, if that's what God has for them.
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So I'm going to read Ephesians 1, 3 through 10, and then I'm going to pray one more time, and just ask God to use our time together this evening.
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So Ephesians 1, 3 through 10, say this, 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, 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 protested us, for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the Beloved.
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In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.
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God, I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for the privilege it is to open it this evening.
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I thank You for just the fact that we're in a country that we have the freedom to do that.
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I think about all the people groups.
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Lord, they say 4,300 people groups still waiting for even one verse to be translated into their language.
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4,300 people groups that don't have Your Word like we do in their language.
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4,300 languages.
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None of us chose where we were born.
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Lord, You sovereignly chose that for us.
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And I thank You for that.
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I thank You that I was born into a place where I could learn how to read.
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I could learn how to write.
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I can open Your Word.
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Thank You for that privilege, Lord.
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Help us not to take it lightly.
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Thank You, Lord.
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Speak to us this evening.
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Change our hearts, Lord, in the ways that only You can.
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I know that I can't change hearts.
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I know that You can.
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You're the one that makes Your Word effective.
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Lord, please make it effective this evening in our hearts.
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Change me in some way as the speaker.
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Lord, work in my children's hearts as they listen this evening.
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Change us, Lord.
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Amen.
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Ephesians 1, 3 through 10.
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You know, if I could give one overarching theme to the way that God's encouraged my heart through this passage, the theme would be that God has a plan.
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God has a plan.
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He has a plan for us.
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He has a plan for His elect, for His chosen, and He has a plan for the whole world.
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God has a plan.
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So I look at these verses, and I look at this first section, and I see a theme in there, which is that God has a plan to redeem you and me.
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If you're part of His family, He's got a plan to bring us in, to redeem us, and then to slowly sanctify us, and to work us to be more and more and more like Him.
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Again, verse 3, it says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing and heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.
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And that is an awesome verse, that He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love.
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He predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ.
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You know, it's interesting as I think back on my own personal testimony.
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My dad was a preacher.
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I don't know if you knew that.
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My dad was a preacher.
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He worked with an organization called Word of Life, and I heard the gospel preached regularly.
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My dad had us in church whenever the doors were open.
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Sundays, mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday night, if there was weekend events, we were there, right? We were there, and I heard about Jesus dying on the cross.
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I heard about Him raising Him from the grave.
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I could have told you the story back perfectly, but I don't believe I understood salvation and became part of God's family until I was in college.
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And there came a point where God opened my eyes.
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I'd heard about Jesus my whole life, every week, multiple times, but it never clicked.
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Now, there was different things that played into that.
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For instance, we went to the types of churches, and I don't mean offense if this is that type of church.
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I'm assuming it's not, but we went to the types of churches that every Sunday at the end of the message, they would have anybody that wasn't sure they were going to heaven repeat these special words after me, repeat this prayer after me.
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And every Sunday, I would sit there in the pew, and I would hold onto the pew in front of me like this until my knuckles were white, and I would pray that prayer, God, please come into my heart over and over again.
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And every Sunday, I knew I was no different after I walked out.
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Every Sunday.
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Well, there came a point in college where God, I believe He had predetermined to open my eyes.
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There came a point where I heard about Jesus again for probably the, I don't know, thousandth time, and the speaker, he was giving an illustration, and he put up an illustration.
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He put a C and then a CW and then a W.
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He said, the C stands for Christ, the CW stands for Christ and works, and the W stands for works.
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And he went through each one of those things, and he said, if you're trusting in works to get you to heaven, the Bible obviously doesn't say that.
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Ephesians 2.8 and 9, he quoted it.
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By grace, you're saved through faith.
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It's not of works.
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It's not of yourselves.
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Gift of God.
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And then he says, if you're trusting in works, then you're basically looking in the face of God, and you're saying, Jesus, your son wasn't needed.
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You might as well not have sent him at all.
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And then he went on to the second one, Christ and works, and then he said, if you're trusting in Christ and works, then he quoted some verses that the Bible clearly says, Titus 3, 5, and 6, and other verses that talk about how it's only by Christ.
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And then he said, if you're trusting in Christ and works, you're basically looking in the face of God, and you're saying, God, what Jesus did was great, but it's not enough.
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And then he went on to Christ, and he said, if you're trusting in Christ, you're simply trusting in all that Christ has done, and you're falling back on what he's done, and that's enough.
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Not anything at all that you've done.
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And at that point, I realized, God opened my eyes, and I realized that in my whole life, I'd been trusting in Christ and works, and that had been the problem my whole life.
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If someone was to ask me, how do you know you're going to heaven? I would have said, because I prayed a prayer, because I meant it.
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You hear what's missing? Had nothing to do with Jesus at all.
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And God opened my eyes, I trusted in Christ for the first time, and now I know that he's my only merit before a holy God.
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He's the only way I can get to heaven, and I go to heaven for him, not just to escape hell.
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He's the treasure, right? But that's my own personal testimony.
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But I look at that, and I think about this, and I think about the fact that I could hear about Jesus so long, but he predestined me, and I believe he predestined me for a very specific time, and he saved me, and it's only by his grace.
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And so I look at that, and it's just amazing to me.
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It's amazing to me.
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But this isn't the only thing that God's planned.
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You look at different parts of Scripture, different things that God plans besides our salvation.
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Another thing that it says that God plans is our day of death.
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I'm not sure if you're familiar with Psalm 139.16.
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It says every single one of our days are written in his book before a single one of them comes to be.
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Have you thought about that lately? In a day and age where everybody around us is scared? People that don't know Christ are hiding in their house and putting two and three and four masks on and saying, hit me with another booster, because they're so scared.
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What are we scared of? Right? What can we be threatened with? The only thing I can be threatened with is what I long for the most.
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And that's to stand in front of Jesus and to tell him what he means to me.
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You know, you think about that.
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You think about in these times.
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I believe there are many churches that missed a huge opportunity to show the world what it's like to have hope in death.
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Man, you think about that.
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That's an encouragement to me when I think about that.
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God has his exact, our exact day of death even planned out.
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There was a man named George Whitfield, a great preacher.
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He said, we're immortal until our work is done.
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That's a good one.
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That's a really good one.
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And when we go back and forth to the mission field, to Indonesia, those are the type of thoughts that just embolden us to go.
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All three of these boys had dinghy fever the last time we went.
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We thought we would lose at least one of them.
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God spared them.
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You know what we encourage ourselves with when we see our kids laying in bed and wonder if they're going to die? We encourage ourself with the thought that God predestined and planned their day of death before a single one of their days came to be and that we can trust him.
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That's what we trust him with.
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And in these times, man, if you trust him like that, people will notice a difference.
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People around us will notice a difference.
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People in your communities, people around this church, they will see a difference, you know, they'll see a difference.
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Not only has God planned our day of death, but as I was reading through this passage, another amazing thought that God encouraged me with was it was in Revelation chapter 6.
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Revelation chapter 6, verses 9 through 11.
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Listen to these verses.
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It says, when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness that they had borne.
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They cried out with a loud voice, O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? Then they were each given a white robe.
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They were told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.
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You know what else God has planned and predetermined? The exact number of martyrs that will be killed.
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The exact number.
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God knows it right now.
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How long do we have to wait? Wait until your number is complete.
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That's a victorious thought to me.
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That's amazing to me.
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On our way down here, we stopped to visit a girl named Tirza Clapper.
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Her dad was named David Clapper.
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He flew us supplies in the jungle.
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And other tribes, other missionaries are working in different places.
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One day the weather moved in, he flew a little bit too low to try to escape it, and his plane hit a mountaintop and he crashed.
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He left his wife and five children.
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Tirza is one of those children.
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A couple weeks ago, we hung out with her older brother Judah, Judah Clapper.
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She's got three other sisters as well that we used to babysit when we'd come out to the city to get supplies ourselves sometimes before he flew them in.
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And all five of those kids, after seeing their dad die when they were just teenagers, they're all in training to be in missions and ministry.
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And that's amazing to me.
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That's amazing to me.
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But I think that they trust that God had a plan even in their father's death.
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And you know what? Places like Indonesia and Africa and other places like that are full of missionary graves.
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There are tons of missionary graves.
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We've had lots of pilot friends that have died.
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Neil Rossler was another one.
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Paul Westland was another one.
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All leaving behind kids.
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But thoughts like this, that God even has planned out the number of people that will die, even martyrs.
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God has our days of death determined.
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They won't be any shorter anymore.
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I believe he sovereignly planned it.
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And that's an awesome thought.
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God has a plan.
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God has a plan.
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He has a multifaceted, intricate plan.
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And it's not going to fail.
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Yeah, I go on to, I think about some of these other verses here.
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Ephesians 1, 6 through 8.
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Let's read those as well.
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To the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the beloved.
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In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight.
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It's a, it's a, it's a wonderful thought to me that this verse, verse 6 starts out to the praise of his glorious grace, to the praise of his glorious grace.
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He predestines, he redeems, he lavishes on us all of these, these wonderful things, these blessings, according to his blood.
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But it's all to the praise of his glorious grace.
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Not ours, not, not our glory, but his glory, his glorious grace.
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That's the way I've seen it in my own life.
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And that's the way I see it a lot of times within missions.
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You know who God loves to use? The people that have nothing to offer.
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He uses us in such a way that he gets the glory, that he gets the glory.
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I've been reading through, before the Ephesians, I was reading through 1 and 2 Corinthians, and I was, I preached on 1 and 2 Corinthians the last couple weeks in a couple other churches.
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But, you know, it's an awesome thing, 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 27 through 30, to think about the way that God uses people like me, honestly.
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Some of the verses from there, 26, starting in verse 26 of chapter 1, it says, Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world's eyes, or powerful, or wealthy when God called you.
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Instead, God chose the things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think that they're wise.
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And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful.
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God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important.
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And then it says the reason why, it says, As a result, no one can boast in the presence of God.
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No one can boast in the presence of God.
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God uses people like me because it's to the praise of his glorious and grace.
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You know what my biggest fear was when we went overseas? My biggest fear was that I would be too stupid to learn another language.
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Has anybody in here tried to learn another language? Okay, was it easy? Was anybody successful in learning another language? Okay, so you guys understand.
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I was so scared.
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Man, I was so scared.
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I thought, there's no way.
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I was a C student, a D student.
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I got kicked out of multiple schools.
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Finally went to Bible school.
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I got kicked out of Bible school.
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But the school was part of the organization my dad worked for, so he was able to call his buddies, the dean, and get me back in.
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They let me back in under the condition that I would not come out of my dorm room except for classes because I was causing so much trouble.
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That's me, you know, thinking about that.
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We got over there, and I started trying to learn the Indonesian language.
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We lived in Java first, and I was learning Bahasa Indonesia, which is the trade language of the whole country, and we had to learn it to get around.
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It was a challenging language, but comparatively speaking, it was nowhere close to as challenging as the Dao language.
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But when we were learning the language in Java, I said all kinds of stuff wrong.
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There was this one time we were going to what they call the pasar, the market, to buy groceries, and their word for soybean, like these blocks of soybeans they sell, is kerulai, kerulai.
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So I walked up to the place to buy some, and I said, I'd like to buy so many pounds of kerulai, and they all started laughing at me.
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Well, the word for donkey in their language is kerulai, kerulai, kerulai.
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The whole pasar, the whole market, was laughing at me.
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I didn't know what I'd said, and they said, I'm sorry, we don't have any donkey.
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You know, and I realized I'd said this thing wrong.
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Not long after that, I was going to the store to buy a hat.
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I said, I need a topi, topi baru.
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Saya perlu satu topi baru, karena saya ada kelapa yang besar sekali.
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I said, I need to buy one hat, and I want to buy this one, because it's a big hat, and I've got a really, I thought I said, have a really big head.
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Okay, so the word for head is kepala, but the word for coconut is kelapa.
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So I said, I have a huge coconut.
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Then they all started laughing at me, you know, and they laughed and laughed and laughed, and there were many times where I thought I was too stupid.
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Then we got into the Dao language, and that's a tonal language.
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So they see things in different tones to get across different meanings.
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If they said the sentence, that person eats people, because referring to the cannibals that live in the lowlands not far from them, they would say, meh, meh, meh, meh nugi, meh, meh, meh, meh nugi.
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All four of those mehs have different meanings according to the pitch, the tone, the pitch you speak them at and how long you hold them out, right? And I thought, Lord, what am I doing here? I prayed for the gift of tongues.
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I did.
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Lord, give me the gift of tongues.
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In a roundabout way, I almost feel like he did, because it only took us 14 months to learn that language, and most people, it takes them five years.
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But it was a miracle in itself.
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But, you know, I was talking to the, when we teach the Dao people about things like God's sanctification, his patiently changing us a little bit at a time, we always try to come up with tribal illustrations.
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And, you know, passages like this, I would ask them, do you think you understand what this is talking about, how God patiently works with us? And when I was asking them about a passage like this, that at one time they said, we think we get it.
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And I said, well, how do you understand it? And a man named Da Pui, he looked at me and he said, it's like this.
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He said, sometimes when we go out into the jungle, and we're hunting wild pig, he said, we'll go out, we'll see one, we'll get our pig arrow, right? And then we'll draw it back, we'll shoot that pig, and we'll kill it.
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After we kill it, and it's laying there, and we go to cut it apart and section it up to carry it back to our village, we'll hear off in the bushes a bunch of little squeals.
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And then we'll go look in the bushes, and there's a whole mess of baby piglets.
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And we'll realize that we've killed its mother.
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So what we'll do is we'll get those piglets, we'll gather them into a string bag.
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We won't kill them, we'll take them back to the village with us.
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And they squeal and kick while we're carrying it the whole way back.
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But we finally get back to the village, and we hang that string bag with all those piglets in it, we'll hang it on the rafter of one of our thatched roof houses, and we'll just leave it in the middle of the village.
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And all day long, we'll just go about our business, and we'll just be doing our things, doing our normal stuff, and those pigs will be so scared, they'll be squealing and squealing and trying to escape.
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He said, but then eventually they'll get really hungry.
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And we'll chew up a sweet potato or a taro, and we'll place it in our hand after we chew it up, and we'll walk up to the bag and they'll smell it, and we'll start feeding it to them, feeding them by hand a little bit at a time.
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And every day for a long time, we feed them by hand.
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And eventually they get a little bit less wild, a little bit less wild, a little bit less wild, and they look forward to us feeding them.
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And then there comes a point where we'll take them out of the bag, and we'll place them with our domesticated pigs.
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Now, they've got two words in their language for pigs.
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They've got tapia, which is a wild pig, and then ekena, which is a domesticated pig, a pig they raise in their village.
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And their pigs, it's interesting, they'll call them like dogs.
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Does anybody have a dog, right? You whistle when it comes running, you scratch his belly, and it'll lay down and roll over.
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Well, their pigs are the same way.
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They know their pigs by name, literally.
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And they'll call them like this.
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They'll go, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, like that.
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You'll hear this in the village.
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And then all these pigs will just come running right up to their owner because they know it's going to give them food.
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And oftentimes you'll see them scratch his belly, and it'll fall over, and it's amazing.
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But they said, those pigs eventually will let them out of that bag, and they'll start hanging out with their domesticated pigs.
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And then they'll get a little bit bigger, and they'll start growing these huge tusks.
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So we get scared that they're going to gore our children or our wives, so we yank them out.
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We yank out those tusks, and then eventually they start acting like the rest of our domesticated pigs.
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And there comes a day where we will look at those little pigs, and we will say, you are no longer Tapia.
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You are Anakena.
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You're no longer a wild pig.
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You're part of our pigs.
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And it would be just like that.
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And then they told me the story, and then they said, isn't that like what Jesus does for us? We're a bunch of wild pigs off in the jungle.
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We have no right.
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We have no part in God's flock, in God's group.
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But he pulls us from the jungle, from the wild family.
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He patiently feeds us.
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He teaches us to recognize his voice.
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He's patient with us.
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And then he makes us part of his, even though we have no rightful place to be in it.
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And Daupoit told me this.
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I said, Daupoit, you're right.
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That is what he does for us.
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I love the fact that these verses, they use the word lavish.
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Isn't that a beautiful word? Lavish.
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His riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight.
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God has a plan, not only to redeem me and you.
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He also has a plan to lavish his love on us, to slowly sanctify us, to make us more and more like himself.
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And then in verse 9 and 10, it goes on and says, making known to us the mystery of his will.
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According to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
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It's interesting to think about that as well.
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You know, his will.
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The phrase his will.
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You know what the big question was in college and still is today with a lot of my friends that I see for the first time in 15, 20 years? I wonder what God's will is for my life.
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Everybody's looking, what is his will? What is God's will, right? These verses in a roundabout way, in a certain aspect, they make very clear what his will is.
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The mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, his will in verse 10, it says, as a plan for the fullness of time is to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
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That's his will.
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In other words, his will is something he made known in Christ.
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And Christ made clear to us, right? In Matthew 28, your passage you were talking about earlier, and also at the end of that passage and many other passages, he's given us a mission, which we call missions, to go into all the world, to preach the gospel to every creature.
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We know his will.
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It was made clear to us.
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Through Christ.
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And that we all have a part in that.
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It's interesting to think about that.
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The purpose of his will.
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Also, it says, according to the purpose of his will, before that in verse five, it says he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ.
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So another part of his will that he purposes to predestine us for adoption.
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He's made known to us the mystery of his will.
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And it's that through Christ, all things, both heaven and earth, will be united, will be brought to him.
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Specifically, it says, his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him.
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Things in heaven and things on earth.
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And it's very clear.
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Jesus gave us his command to go into all the world.
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You know, it's interesting.
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Last time I spoke here was only about a year ago.
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The next church that I spoke at after I left here was in Homosassa Springs, Florida.
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Okay.
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I went to this church.
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They had a new pastor.
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They had a new pastor, a guy that I'd never met.
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I walked in and I introduced myself.
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They asked us to come speak that evening.
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And this church had been supporting us for 17 years.
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17 years.
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I walked into the church, shook hands with the pastor, started setting up a table.
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And he was standing there.
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So I told him about the history of our work.
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He'd never heard me speak before.
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And I showed him our Bible that we translated into the Tao language.
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When I handed it to him, I looked up and he was backing away.
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And he turned like this and he wouldn't touch it.
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I thought, wow, this is kind of weird.
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So I just kept talking.
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I didn't know what that was, but I just kept talking.
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Tried to be nice and cordial.
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And it finally came time to speak.
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And I went to show the video, which was the same video that they showed.
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He had edited it to cut out all the tribal people and he had done it with no sound.
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And I thought, wow, that was strange, right? And I tried to narrate as the video was going.
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And then I went to preach my passage for that evening.
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It was from Psalms.
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I got one verse in and he stood up and he said, Mr.
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Phillips, King James, please.
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And I realized what was going on and I didn't know what to do.
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So I closed my eyes and I didn't say a word.
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I just looked down and I prayed in my mind for a few minutes that the Lord would work on my heart, give me a good attitude and show me how to handle such a situation.
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And everybody was sitting out in the congregation like this.
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I looked up and he was walking up into the stage and handing me his King James Bible.
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So I took it.
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I looked at it.
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I handed it back to him.
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And then I said, thank you for your faithful support.
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And I went to sit down.
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And as I went to sit down, someone out in our congregation said, can we at least ask you some questions? I said, okay.
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Came back up to the pulpit and they said, do you translate from the King James Bible? And I said, no, we do not.
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We translate from the Greek and the Hebrew because those are the original languages of the Bible.
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And that's what we need to go to.
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They dropped our support the next week.
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They haven't supported us since.
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You know what I think about when I look at that? And I think about the fact that there are 4,300 language groups in round numbers that are still waiting for their first copy of the Bible in their language.
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Meanwhile, in English, we have new versions coming out every week.
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When we are not busy with what we know God's will is for us, namely what was revealed to us in Christ Jesus that the whole world is supposed to have representatives before his throne and will someday have representatives before his throne and Christ told us to go into all the world.
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When we are not busy with the task that God has given to us, you know what we get busy with? Stuff like that.
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That's what we get busy with.
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And there are a lot of good ministries out there.
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There are a lot of good ministries out there.
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There's puppet ministries.
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There's homeless ministries.
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There's youth ministries.
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God can use those things.
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But you know the task that Jesus Christ gave to us, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
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And then Paul, he comes along in Romans 15 and he says the plan spoken of in the scriptures is that every eye should see and every ear should hear.
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Not just the ones that already have multiple churches on the same street.
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He says, I'm looking for the places where the name of Christ has not yet been named and the foundation has not been laid.
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Personally, I believe that those places should take priority.
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I do.
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Because that is the task that Christ has given us to go into all the world.
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Not just the same places in the world over and over and over again.
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And I believe it's so important that we really think these things through.
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You know, I came across this statistic recently.
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There's been studies done on how the church sends out its missionaries.
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Right now, roughly 97% of the church's missionaries are being sent to and working in the parts of the world that are already reached and already have churches and Bibles available to them.
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Only 3% of missionaries are being sent to and working in the truly unreached places that have no access to the message of Jesus.
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Only 3%.
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Isn't that wild? To me, it is.
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It's wild.
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In other words, right now, there are roughly 30 times as many missionaries that go to work with Christians as go to unreached people groups.
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Far less go to the frontier people groups where there are as of yet no believers.
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That is wildly unbalanced to me.
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I'm sorry.
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It really is.
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And my intention in sharing that is not to put a guilt trip on anybody.
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Please don't understand it that way.
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If anything, my intention is a call to arms to say Jesus gave us a mission and there are a lot of things that we can be involved in.
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But we need to focus in on the mission that Christ gave us.
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The thought that those that have not seen should see, those who have not heard should hear.
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And that's the plan spoken of in the scriptures, according to Paul.
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I believe he's quoting Isaiah 52.
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It's a wild thing to think about.
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But God has a plan.
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We know that.
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God has a plan for all that become part of his family, those that he's predestined and called out.
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God has a plan for our sanctification.
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He will finish a good work.
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If he started it, he will finish it.
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And God has a plan for the whole world.
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He has a plan for the whole world.
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He has a plan to redeem people from every tongue, tribe, nation, and language.
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And that's encouraging to me that God has a plan.
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Even if God decides that he's going to take one of my children, the next time we go, if he decides he's going to take me, he planned it from the beginning.
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And we can trust in that.
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I hope that's an encouragement to you.
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That is what Christ is teaching me in my own life.
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And that's why I'm sharing from that.
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And I hope my kids are listening this evening and hearing this and not just drinking lots of Coke and Sprite.
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They like that too.
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But I hope you're hearing this.
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If the Lord takes me, if the Lord takes me, the next time we go back, the next time you see me get malaria, he planned it.
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Okay? Trust him.
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Man.
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Our God is a good God.
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He is.
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We were talking through that passage a couple days ago that talks about he's a father to the fatherless.
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I said, if the Lord takes me, you still have a father.
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You still have a father.
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That's the only reason I wrote that book that's out there on that table.
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Because we'd had malaria so many times, I thought the Lord might take me.
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I want my kids to have a way to know us if he takes us.
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And I hope they do.
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But we can trust him.
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We can trust him.
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God has a plan.
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And we can trust in that plan.
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We can trust in that plan.
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And when we trust in that plan, I'll tell you what.
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We look different to a watching world.
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We look different to a watching world.
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You know, another one of the ways that God sanctifies us and changes us, oftentimes it's through trials.
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It's through trials.
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That was another illustration that we had with the Tao people.
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They, you know, they make these bows and arrows and they'll hold up an arrow.
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When they're making an arrow, they'll make it out of bamboo.
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They'll choose, first of all, they'll choose a piece of bamboo, whichever one they want to choose.
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There's a lesson in that.
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And then they'll hold it over the fire.
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They'll straighten it for hours.
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They'll hold it up to see if it's straight.
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They'll weave it, the way that they'll weave decorations onto it and get them to stay is by using the beeswax of a bee's nest.
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And finally, they'll get it done and they'll take that arrow and they'll take it out and they'll use it to take down a huge enemy.
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Right? And it was a picture to them of the way God bends us and he makes us useful into something that can take down an enemy.
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Right? In the sanctification process.
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But we talked about how one of the ways that God changes us and bends us and gets us where he wants us is through trials.
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Oftentimes, it's through trials.
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It really is.
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And when we have a different attitude in the midst of trials, a watching world, they see the difference.
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One of the first times, one of the first questions I understood from the Tao people, it was from my friend named Daokagi.
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And Daokagi, he looked at me one day and he said, friend, I got a question about your people, your family, your land.
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And I said, what is it? And he said, do your people die? And I said, yeah, of course we die.
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Of course our people die.
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He said, well, is your father alive? And I said, well, yeah, of course.
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That alone was strange to him because the average life expectancy is about 35 there.
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35 years old.
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Most people die before that.
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I don't know almost any kids that both of their parents are alive.
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Okay, so he looked at me and I could tell the look on his face was kind of like, yeah, right, your people die.
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Your dad's still alive, right? And then he takes it a step farther and he says, well, is your grandfather still alive? And I said, well, yeah, he is because he was at the time.
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And then he really didn't believe me that we die.
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He thought we were some sort of oddity that kept on going on living.
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There was only two people with gray hair in the whole tribe when we first went in there.
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And even right now, seeing some gray hair, they would look at this room and shake their head because they would think it was amazing.
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But, you know, when they did start to believe that we die is when we started getting malaria over and over and over again.
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We started getting the same sicknesses that they got.
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And we had a strand of it that went dormant in our liver.
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We had it for six months in a row.
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And when you get sick in the Dau tribe, they call into your house all day.
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They call in, which means love to you, friend.
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You're sick, love, love, love.
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And you can't rest.
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You can't rest.
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You can't get better by rest because they're screaming in your house all day.
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But we came through about the six months in a row that and that same guy, Daukagi, he says, man, he says, he's starting to realize we can die.
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And he says, Degapia, they call me Degapia.
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It means tall white tree.
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He says, Degapia, he says, what do you do when you get malaria in your country, in your country? And I said, friend, we don't get it in my country.
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And he just shook his head like he'd never heard of a place you don't get that right.
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And then he says, well, what do you do when you get dinghy fever in your country? I said, friend, we don't get dinghy fever in my country.
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We don't have that where I'm at.
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And then he says, well, friend, what do you do when you get giardia? You know, like all those stomach rumbly sicknesses that we have that make us sick all the time.
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And I said, man, we don't get that in my country either.
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And eventually you could have guessed.
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He said, well, then, well, then why are you staying here? Because you're sick all the time.
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Why are you staying here? Why don't you go back to your country? You won't have these sicknesses anymore.
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And that was an awesome question because it asked for an amazing answer.
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And the answer that I gave him was this.
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I said, Daokagi, the reason we're staying here despite these sicknesses is because the message that we have to bring to you is so amazing and so wonderful.
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It's the biggest message you'll ever hear.
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And it's worth staying despite the sicknesses to give it to you.
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And God made himself look absolutely amazing and glorious through our suffering.
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And I believe that's what he wants to do even now, as the church suffers with simple things like COVID.
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Honestly, I think God wants to make himself look glorious to a watching world that doesn't know him.
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Because when they see us suffer with no fear, quoting passages like 2 Corinthians and 1 Corinthians and passages that say, death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? They notice a difference and they see the beauty of Christ through that if God opens up their eyes to it.
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And that's my prayer for you guys.
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I don't know what anybody's dealing with, but I pray that God will use your trials as well to point others towards him.
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God, I thank you for your word this evening.
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I thank you for this group of people.
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I thank you that they're so faithful to pray for us and to support us.
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Lord, I thank you that there's pastors and teachers and elders here that want to see a passion for missions spread in the church.
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So many churches that aren't like that, Lord.
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And so it's so refreshing to be in this one.
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And I pray that you continue to grow their passion for you, for making you known, Lord.
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I pray that you'll grow their gratefulness for the way you take wild pigs like us.
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And you slowly and patiently change us to be more and more like you.
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Thank you, Lord, for your patience with me.
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Thank you, Lord.
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Amen.