The Road To Emmaus - [Luke 24:13-34]

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I love that last line of the first verse of that hymn that's there on the opposite side of the page.
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Chosen in Christ before thee, we are holy and blameless. Are you aware that a not very long ago
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Barna survey was entitled like this, Holiness Baffles Americans.
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And what the Barna group did was they went to, and a lot of church people too, went to people and said, do you think you're holy?
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What do you suppose almost everyone answered? In your dreams, almost everyone answered, well, no, of course not.
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That has to do with a lot of things, including political correctness, okay? But the idea,
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I write a little pastor's letter periodically and I pointed this out in one of them, and three or four guys down in the south used that as a basis for a sermon where they talked about holiness.
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Listen, when we come to Christ, we are holy and blameless. You say, well, what about my behavior?
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Well, it's a big problem for me too. But what we're doing from the day we come to Christ until the day
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He takes us home is we are working on making our behavior match up to what
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God says we are. And the great problem I think that most brothers and sisters make in that regard is to start with my behavior.
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In fact, I think if we have time tonight that I'm going to get to a little bit of, no, no, starts the other way around.
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I start with who I am and then my behavior begins to change by the power of the
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Holy Spirit to match what God says that I am. Anyway, so if you hadn't sung that,
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I wouldn't have even brought that up, but I just thought it was really good. Why don't you turn to Luke chapter 24.
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While you're turning there, as I stand here in this pulpit, I'm reminded that every time
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I climb into the pulpit, I feel like I am committing a grievous error and it is because of our experience here in New England.
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Some of you may even recall this. I was down in the Worcester Antiquarian Society one day. They have a whole rack of pamphlets and stuff that have been published in the history of the
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United States. So I looked under B for Bowman. There I found a pamphlet printed in 1756, not a copy of the pamphlet, but one of the pamphlets printed in 1756.
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In defense of a Pastor Bowman from Dorchester, Massachusetts, which was then a little town south of Boston.
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The church was splitting and the printer happened to be on the pastor's side, but in the course of the pamphlet, he listed the charges against the pastor, and the one that just stood out to me was this.
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On at least three occasions, this Pastor Bowman had failed to preach at least two hours.
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I stood there and I thought, Lord, may I never be guilty of such an error, but I've never really found the venue that would permit me to be sinless in that regard.
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I'll try to not make it the first time tonight, too. Okay, let's pray before we come to the
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Word. Heavenly Father, we're grateful for Your Word. We're grateful that what is contained in Your Word is stuff that we would never come up with by ourselves.
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We could never get there. We could never think like it. We could never act like it. We could never be what
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Your Word is. That's why You have revealed it to us. It's not something we'd come by rationally or by experiment or anything like that.
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We pray tonight as we look at the episode of these men on the road to Emmaus that You'd speak to our hearts.
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Lord, I pray that You'd edit my words at my lips and at the ears of the hearers so that we hear from You and that we pray it in the
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Lord Jesus Christ's name that He might be glorified. Amen. You can run your finger down to verse 13 where that episode on the road to Emmaus starts.
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I think, though, before we get into the details of that whole episode, it's important for us to remember a couple of things.
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It's difficult for us. Twenty centuries down the road to begin to get the mindset of the people that wrote the book under the inspiration of the
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Holy Spirit and to get the mindset of people that read for the first time what they had written and to get a feel for the culture.
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Now, one of the things that you have to do if you're going to a tribe is you have to get a feel for the culture.
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You can't read a few National Geographic articles about what some pagan anthropologist says about this group or that group.
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You have to go there, live with those people, and get a feel for the culture. And we try to do that when we come to the
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Scriptures, and the Gospel of Luke is no exception to that. This is the longest narrative of a post -resurrection event in the
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Gospels, and I think it's legitimate for us to ask of the Holy Spirit and of the writer
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Luke through the Holy Spirit, you know, why is this one the longest? Why all these details?
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In the Gospel of Mark, as Dave was pointing that out today in Sunday School, in Mark it's just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, like that, you know, everything just moves quickly.
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There's two verses in the Gospel of Mark, and the bottom line in the Gospel of Mark is they came back to report to the eleven and they didn't believe them.
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But when we get into Luke 24 here, we get the blow -by -blow description of what happened that day on the road to Emmaus.
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And so we can ask ourselves the question, why all of this detail? And I suppose the overriding message is to pay attention to the details, since the
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Holy Spirit provided the details for us. They are important to the audience to whom this was written, and they are important to the audience twenty centuries down the road that are reading and considering what was written here.
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It will be important for us to remember the following things, that this Gospel is written to Greeks primarily,
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Gentiles. The Gospel of Mark, as Dave pointed out this morning, is written to Romans primarily, also
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Gentiles, but this is written to Greeks. So this is a different audience than, for example, the
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Gospels that talk about the fulfillment of all the prophecies and so on, which would have been familiar to Jewish people.
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This is written to Greeks. Now, lots of the Greeks probably were God -fearers, that is, they had been hanging around the synagogues, maybe even tithing some and so on.
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Cornelius is the prominent one that we always think of in the book of Acts, but in any case, they were
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Gentiles, not included in Abraham physically and so on. So this
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Gospel is written to Greeks by a Greek, and this
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Gospel reasonably, therefore, is the Gospel that emphasizes the worldwide scope of salvation.
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This Gospel embraces the Samaritans. This Gospel embraces the down and out.
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This is the Gospel where we talk about lost sheep, lost coins, and all of that sort of thing, and the idea is that this salvation that is in Jesus Christ is available to these
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Greeks to whom Luke is writing, indeed, and is available to the whole world.
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So this wide scope of salvation you need to keep in mind, and then, fourthly, you need to keep this in mind.
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We are Gentiles. So, the Gospel of Luke has some important things to refresh our spirits and our hearts and to encourage us as we read it, and this episode in that Gospel is no exception.
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So let's start reading at verse 13, and I'll stop where it's appropriate and try to keep from heading down the rabbit trail, but you never know how.
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Behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which is about seven miles from Jerusalem.
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Now, you need to bear in mind that's about a two or two -and -a -half -hour walk, and they were talking with each other about all these things which had taken place.
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While they were talking and discussing it, that doesn't quite deliver the intensity of what is there.
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It's while they were arguing and debating, it's while they were really going at it about the events that had happened that weekend in Jerusalem that Jesus Himself approached and began traveling with them.
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But their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him. In Mark it says something like He appeared in a different form, and commentators have gone at that in several ways.
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He was wearing clothes that were unfamiliar to them, but Luke says that their eyes were prevented from recognizing
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Him, whatever He would have been wearing, and so one of the legitimate questions to ask at this point,
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I think, is why would His identity be kept from them? After all, it was
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Resurrection Day, and you would think that if the resurrection were going to be validated and so on, that Jesus would have appeared and been recognizable to as many people as possible, but that is not the case.
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In fact, the Scriptures go out of their way to say, now watch this, God closed their eyes to keep them from recognizing
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Him. Why? That's a legitimate question to ask, and here's the
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Bob comment on that. So that they would come to believe in His resurrection all right, but that they would not come to believe in His resurrection on the basis of a physical manifestation.
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Oh yeah, we saw Him. Now those physical manifestations that came later were traumatic indeed.
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But nevertheless, finally it got to the point where we see Him with our eyes, we touch Him with our hands, we put our hands in His side and so on, but not for these two on the road to Emmaus on that resurrection day, and as they walk down that road arguing with each other and debating with each other, and we get some inkling a little bit later about what that was about and what they were doing,
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Jesus walks up beside them. The priority here is on the spiritual, and may
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I say the priority here is on the spirit, not just the spiritual. When these two guys came to believe that Jesus, and they were quite disappointed as we'll see in what had happened, when they came to believe in the
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Lord Jesus and in His resurrection and that death had been overcome and all that goes with it, it would not be on the basis of what they had seen, the basis of what they had heard, except as the
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Holy Spirit illumined them, nor would it be on the basis of anything physical.
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The emphasis here is on the spiritual, and I say on the spirit as we'll see later.
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You remember the experience that Jesus had with Thomas? Over in John, Thomas says,
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I won't believe that He is resurrected unless I touch Him, unless I thrust my hand into His side, unless I feel the nail prints in His hands and so on.
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And so that happened, and of course the reaction of Thomas, once he had touched the Lord Jesus, felt the nail prints, thrust his hand into His side and so on, his reaction was to fall down on his face before the
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Lord Jesus and say, my Lord and my God. And we all go, wow, that's great, and that would be a natural reaction.
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But Jesus' reaction to that was this, in verse 29 of John chapter 20, Jesus saith unto him,
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Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.
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And that, the Thomas episode was not going to happen on this day on the road to Emmaus.
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And these two that ultimately believed, rushing back two and a half hours the other way to report what they had seen, would believe in the resurrection of the
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Lord Jesus on a basis other than that which was physical, even after He was revealed to them.
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All of us have come to know Christ spiritually. There's not one soul in this room that has seen the
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Lord Jesus Christ, that has heard Him physically, that has touched Him as Thomas did.
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We have all come to the Lord spiritually. And the transformation has been to make our spirits alive.
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Romans chapter 8 says our bodies are dead, dying, but our spirits are alive because of righteousness.
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Mike talked about it this morning. What righteousness? The righteousness that baffles Americans. Are you holy?
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Well, no, you know, I'm not so good, so on. No, no, no. The righteousness that is imputed to us, counted to us, credited to our account, the perfect righteousness of God, which is all that will qualify us to get to heaven.
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We have all attained that in a spiritual fashion.
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So how's that? Well, it goes like this. Jesus said, no one comes to Me except the
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Father draws him. Okay? Concerning the Holy Spirit, He said, when the
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Spirit comes, He will convict of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And Jesus said of Himself, and I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto
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Myself. The whole Trinity is involved in salvation. And there is no one that has come to be saved that is saved absent the ministry of the entire
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Trinity to them before they ever come to Christ. Now, down in North Carolina, we kind of live in, we kind of live in the extremes of Arminianism and Calvinism.
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Up every little holler, now that would be in Kentucky, okay? But up every little holler and gulch in Kentucky and to a lesser degree in North Carolina, there will be a
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Free Will Baptist Church. Now, the Free Will Baptists are regularly having revivals, and lots of people are getting saved.
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Same guys every time. And the
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Free Will Baptists trace their heritage back to Charles Finney.
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You know, we get all exercised about the seeker -sensitive movement and all those kinds of things. It goes way back beyond there.
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When Charles Finney first began the raise your hand, your bus will wait, sign a card, and all that kind of stuff as some signal of salvation.
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The only signal of salvation the New Testament knows—this was taught to me, by the way, by Chuck Strong—the only symbol, the only signal of salvation that the
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New Testament knows is to be baptized. They believed and were baptized.
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Nothing about hands and buses and all that kind of thing. And so these dear folks, these folks that are up and down every little holler in Kentucky, they are living in a constant state of, you know, have
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I lost it? Do I have it? You know, and the obvious question is, well, how much do you have to do?
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You know, how much sinning do you have to do to lose your salvation? You know, I said to one guy kind of in jest—he didn't think it was very funny—I said, you know, what, 38 pounds?
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Or, you know, what? How would you decide when you'd lost your salvation? The problem is they think they are saved on their own decision, which is a part, in their view, when you begin to pin them down on this, might be a part from the
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Holy Spirit convicting the Father drawing and the Son being lifted up to draw them to Himself.
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On the other end of that spectrum, we have those that call themselves primitive Baptists. Primitive Baptists, they are really interesting.
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Those dear folks believe, first of all, they don't want to talk to me. I'm with New Tribes Mission.
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We have no need for evangelism. If you've won the election, you've won it. If you've lost it, you've lost it.
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That's that. Okay? So, there's no need in me, there's no need in you talking to us.
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But more tragically than that, if you talk to some of those folks, have you trusted Christ as your
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Savior? Yes, you have. Well, then, you're going to heaven. No one can know that until you get there.
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I'm talking about the day after the funeral. Okay? No one can know that until you get there.
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I'm going to tell you what, that is a tragic way to live. And they'll tell you that, those old
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North Carolingians. No one's going to know that until you get there. Okay? And so on. So, there is no assurance of salvation on either end of that deal.
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But we have come to Christ, and we are in Christ because of all that has happened spiritually to us.
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You know, Jesus said, God is spirit. They that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth. And from beginning to end, the salvation is spiritual.
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The Father draws, the Holy Spirit convicts, the Lord is lifted up before people, and we can have a part in that.
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But if those things do not happen before people, then salvation cannot happen.
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I'm going to take my watch off now. That always makes folks a little more at ease. It means nothing, actually.
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And we go from there. All right? Verse 17,
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Jesus has walked up to these guys. He said to them, what are these words that you are exchanging with one another as you are walking?
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Now, that's pretty calm too. Apparently, as they were talking and discussing, as the way the
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English translations put it, I would say it got loud enough for a traveler pulling up alongside to kind of get the idea that something was going on here, which was pretty intense.
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So, what are these words that you're exchanging with one another as you are walking? Now, remember, they were walking on the road doing
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Mass. All of a sudden, the phraseology says they stood still. You know, this guy pulls up beside, what are you guys talking about?
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And they just, boom, stop. And it says they looked sad. One of them named
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Cleopas answered and said to him what he said to him. We'll talk about it in a second, but it is not insignificant that this guy's name was
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Cleopas. The old commentators say, well, Cleopas, he's Clopas that was there at the foot of the cross.
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No, no, no, no. Or he was Alpheus. And so, no, no, no, no. Cleopas is a contraction of the
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Greek name Cleopatras. This guy was a Greek. At the, you know, in terms of Jewishness, at the very closest, he would have been maybe a
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Jew from Alexandria that had a Greek father or mother. But he would fit into the audience that Luke was writing to.
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This was not one of the twelve. These were not the Jews that had followed Jesus all over Palestine and so on.
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This guy, although he may have followed Jesus, and some have suggested that these two only newly had followed
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Jesus, in other words, they hadn't been there from the beginning, and that's another story. Can't get into all of that tonight.
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But I think we need to make note of the fact that this guy that is named by the Holy Spirit is a name that is
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Greek, that fits the audience to whom Luke is writing. And I would say for our own encouragement and our own edification, this probably is the case, that like some other episodes, one in particular that occurred post -resurrection, this is a foreshadowing of something.
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You remember in John chapter 20, Jesus says to the apostles, receive the
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Holy Spirit and He breathed on them, the word that is used for He breathed, that's very parallel to what goes on over in Genesis chapter 1 when it says,
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God breathed into Adam the breath of life. And I do not agree, I do not agree with those that say, oh well, you know, that just means that He animated
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Adam, because I don't read anything in Genesis that even smacks of God breathed into the animals the breath of life.
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Dr. Ryrie, for example, thinks that, well, no, you know, when God breathed into Adam the breath of life,
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He simply animated him. Well, since Dr. Ryrie is in Texas or wherever he is now and I'm here,
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I say no. Okay, and he can write a letter about it, all right?
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No, when God breathed into Adam the breath of life, breath is that word that is used all the way through the
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Scriptures from Old Testament to New to signify that which is spiritual. And so, when
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God breathed into Adam the breath of life, He breathed into him the ability to be sensible to God who is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and truth.
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That is untrue of the animals and the plants and even of crystals for any of you new agers who might be here, okay?
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That's not true of any of those things. So, then Adam falls into sin. You know, kind of a short version of a long history.
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Adam falls into sin. He dies spiritually. He doesn't die in his mind, his will, or his emotions.
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His soul doesn't die, but his spirit dies. He no longer is able to be sensible to the
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God who made him because his spirit is dead. Paul talks about it in Romans. But after the resurrection and Jesus Christ has proved that God in the flesh has come to redeem man,
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He says to these apostles, receive the Holy Spirit and He breathed on them.
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Listen, that's just a parallel of what happened over there in Genesis. And the second Adam breathes on these guys and spiritual life becomes possible and possible for all of us.
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Listen, brothers and sisters, it is an inestimable, that's a correct word, it is an inestimable truth that God the
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Holy Spirit dwells in our bodies. Okay?
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And so, as we come to this episode on the road to Emmaus, it is a foreshadowing in my judgment of the church.
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The church would include not only the Jews. You know, they found it quite fantastic that any Gentiles and Samaritans in particular could be included in salvation.
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But it was already foreshadowed by our Lord Jesus Christ when He pulls up alongside these two guys, one of whom at least maybe both were
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Gentiles on the road to Emmaus. Well, they've stopped. Cleopas is going to say something to him.
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And I would say we miss it in English translation, but it kind of is a polite little statement that goes like this.
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Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem and unaware of the things which have happened here in these days?
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Well, you know, that really just sucks the wind right out of that because you remember they were walking on the road to Emmaus.
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Don't want to get off here too far to the right. There's something about that. But anyway, they're walking on the road to Emmaus.
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The guy pulls up. What are you guys talking about? Are you the only one visiting?
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I mean, there is mocking irony in what is being said here. The equivalent for us would be, are you kidding?
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Did you just fall off a turnip truck? You know, that's what it would be. How in the world do you not know about what we're talking about?
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Well, Jesus didn't respond to that and say, you know, how'd you like a punch in the mouth or anything like that?
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He said to them, what things? And then they begin to recount this to him.
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And you will see them, you will hear them spiraling down into despair as they recount what has happened in Jerusalem on this weekend.
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They said to him the things about Jesus, the Nazarene. You notice it's, they said to him all of a sudden, this other guy, he starts talking too.
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I think this whole thing was an exchange where there was just a lot of chatter going on.
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Jesus listening to it. They said to him the things about Jesus, the Nazarene, who was a prophet, mighty indeed and word in the sight of God and all the people.
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First of all, they identified him as a prophet and correctly so, because in every respect,
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Jesus Christ qualified to be a prophet. He was a true prophet.
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Over in Deuteronomy, we have standards for prophets. Well, here's a standard for a false prophet.
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If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder and the sign or the wonder comes true concerning which he spoke to you saying, let us go after other gods whom you have not known and let us serve them.
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In other words, somebody comes along and he begins to say, let's go after other gods and begin to serve them.
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Gods that you have not yet known. That wouldn't, I want you to notice it's assumed here in Deuteronomy 13, that's going to be accompanied by signs and wonders.
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So, dear friends, because you see signs and wonders in something very unusual, do not jump at the idea that, oh, this must be of God.
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No, no. The people of Israel were warned about that long ago. What you test is the doctrine.
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What you test is what they're saying about God Himself and how salvation comes and so on.
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You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams for the Lord your God is testing you to find out if you love the
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Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. And man, if that is not applicable to the day in which we live,
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I don't know what is. As the dreamers come and the signs and wonders come across the horizon of the church and you see
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Christians going after that stuff, as the bigger and better circuses run on Sunday morning in places to get people to come.
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I heard of one pastor, frankly, that said, look, on Sunday morning, we just do fluff. That was his words.
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On Sunday morning, we just do fluff. Okay, see, that keeps the seekers coming.
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My own personal response to that, by the way, is, do you think there's anything that could happen in any church or at Bethlehem Bible Church that could suck a pagan off a golf course on a
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Sunday morning? And my answer to that is no, no.
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So why bother? Let's build up the saints for the work of the ministry and the evangelism will happen out in the marketplace
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Monday through Saturday. That's where it will happen. Anyway, I don't want to go down that road, okay?
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You shall follow the Lord your God and fear Him and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve
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Him and cling to Him. American is awash in false, America is awash in false prophets.
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Check this, 80 % of Americans respond to surveys, 80%, first of all, that they are spiritual people, and secondly, that they feel, now watch it, feel accepted by God, to which we might ask, which
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God are you talking about? Because the same kinds of surveys also tell us this, that only 35 % of Americans at the street level, not at the university level, at the street level, only 35 % of Americans believe that there is any such thing as an absolute truth, a truth that is good for all people, all places, all times.
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And guess what? In the presumed evangelical church, the percentage is not much higher, maybe pushing 40.
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When we lived in Wisconsin, we went to a church, a good church, that 10 ,000 people there on a weekend.
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I got to believe in 10 ,000 people from the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin, that there had to be someone there who in fact did not know the
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Lord, but to think that only 3 ,500 of the people in that congregation of a good megachurch, of a good megachurch would consider that Christianity, that what they believed about Christ was the absolute truth, that is, that just is chagrining to think that that would be true.
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Nevertheless, that's what the surveys say. So much for I am the way, the truth, and the life.
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No man comes to the Father but by me. So much for there is no other name under heaven whereby we must be saved.
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You don't say stuff like that. You sure don't say it in fluff, I'll tell you that. The words and the deeds, not just the deeds, but the words of the
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Lord Jesus Christ were in absolute harmony with the Word of God. He was, after all, the living Word.
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Isaiah says something like that. If they speak not according to the light, the light, and a little senioritis attack here, anyway, amounts to the law and the prophets.
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There is no light in them. The law and the testimony, if they speak not according to the law and the testimony, there is no light in them.
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You can do all kinds of wondrous things, but if they speak not correctly, pointing the listener to the true and living
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God, there is no light in them. So they go on. The chief priests and our rulers delivered him to the sentence of death and crucified him, but we were hoping that it was he who was going to redeem
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Israel. Indeed, besides all this, it's the third day since these things happened. You notice, we were hoping, we were counting on the chief priests.
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Well, some women came and amazed us, astounded us would be a good translation, when they were at the tomb early in the morning.
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But they were women, okay, and did not find his body. They came saying that they had also seen a vision of angels.
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Well, women, what do you expect? They had seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. And that, by the way, is a recounting of something that verifies the truth of the
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New Testament. This was a day in which women were treated and counted as property, yet they were pivotal in the ministry of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. You know, all the liberal theology theories about, well, two or three centuries later the
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Christians got together and said, now we got to get this story straight about how all of this happened and so on and so forth.
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And by the way, I wouldn't worry too much about that. Liberal theology is so bankrupt that it's basically on the way out.
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It's going the way of Darwinian evolution, and they will both be taught as theories of antiquity at some place down the road.
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But anyway, that whole idea, you know, if some guys had gotten together later and said, now let's get this story about the crucifixion and the resurrection down so that it's credible.
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In this kind of a culture, it would have gone something like that. And so we got up early on Sunday morning.
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We went down to the tomb. We saw Roman soldiers there. We ran them off. Okay, then there was this big stone in front of the tomb.
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Okay, we rolled that sucker back, and we looked inside, and lo and behold,
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Jesus was not there. But because of our fantastic masculine analytic powers, we immediately knew that He had been resurrected from the dead as He said
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He would, and so on and so forth. Later the women came, and they were all hysterical and so on, and you can't count on what the women said and so on.
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You know, that's how I'd have written that. It would have been, especially if I was one of the guys that ran off the
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Roman soldiers. That would be cool, right? Okay, that's how I'd have done that. No, no, no.
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The women came. They had a vision of angels to see He was alive. And because the men did not believe them, some of those who were with us also,
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Peter and John namely, over in the Gospel of John, went to the tomb and found it just exactly as the women also had said, but Him they did not see.
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Now, when you get over there to the 20th chapter of John, and you find Peter and John running to the tomb, there's a whole little word study there about the words, look, saw, see, and so on, and what happened?
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The idea was John got there earlier, because old guys don't run as fast as young guys, and so John got there first.
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He goes in. The Scripture says he believed, and the word that is used for there, he saw, is that kind of see that is a see with understanding.
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Peter went in. He looked, and the words there for see are,
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I don't get it. And Peter didn't get it, and he left.
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In any case, they checked it out. Jesus was not there. Well, as these guys talked to Jesus about this, they have nothing but despair as they rely upon what they had seen and what they had heard.
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Nothing but despair. Physical truth is true truth. You know, in our culture, physical truth comes under the broad heading of science, and it's true truth, and it has produced all kinds of great toys.
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I mean, I love them, okay? That's probably not true if there's an English teacher. I can't love them, but you know,
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I really like them, okay? And so do you. Do we not enjoy sitting here under the electric lights and all that kind of stuff, okay?
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Physical truth is true truth. The problem with it is it's incomplete, and so there is some truth that must be revealed to us, and it had not yet been revealed to these two on the road to Emmaus.
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There are two religions in the world, two, that's all.
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One of them, no matter what you call it, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, whatever, they boil down to a religion of works, okay?
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And when human beings start to respond to what is in them because the image of God, though defaced and not erased, causes them to move in spiritual directions, they inevitably and forever come up with religions of works.
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I better do this, and then the spiritual response, we'll find it with tribal people. Listen, it's a spirit that makes that blackbird cross the trail at 45 degrees, and then you better go back and do something about that, sacrifice a chicken or whatever to keep the juju from being put on you.
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It's a religion of works. It's animistic pantheism, but all the others amount to the same thing, and then there's another religion.
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It's salvation by grace through faith alone, and you know what?
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That had to be revealed to us. We would never, never, ever come up with that by ourselves.
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In fact, it is so incredible that one can be saved by grace through faith alone that most people in your world do not believe that it's possible, not until the
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Father draws and the Spirit convicts, and the Lord Jesus draws them to Himself as He has lifted up before them.
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Well, there would be elation to come at revealed truth, and it's here we find
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Jesus responding, and He said to them, O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.
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Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?
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Now we don't know how informed these guys were. If they were new followers of Christ, and if they were really
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Greek Greeks, you know, and didn't have some smattering of Jewishness involved there, then they would have known almost nothing.
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On the other hand, if they were God -fearers, been hanging around synagogues for a while, they might have known that.
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But Jesus' accusation to them is that they are slow of heart to believe what the prophets had said.
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And then, verse 27, beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the
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Scriptures. It was back in the middle 80s that a young Australian new -triber by the name of Trevor McIlwain went to Palawan Island in the
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Philippines. He was to go, he was there to minister to the Palawanos that were being preyed upon by their
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Muslim neighbors. Sounds like current events. In any case, it was the 1980s.
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And as he began to know something about the Palawanos, he learned very early on that something had happened there which was not good.
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For the Palawanos told Trevor, they said, we're all Christians. You know, you don't have to tell us about being a
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Christian. We're all Christians. You know, we don't chew betel nut anymore. We don't beat our wives as much.
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We go to the meetings that they have on Sundays sometimes. And there's just all kinds of Christian things that we do.
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And it became also immediately apparent to Trevor that they were not Christians at all. And what had happened is, somebody had come and John 316'd them.
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And that basically goes, here's John 316, now I'm going to give you the sinner's prayer, you say this after me.
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Well, you got to understand, when you go to a third world country and you say something like that, they are looking at you,
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I don't care if you are a new driver with the worst support in New Tribes Mission. You know, of the 3 ,200 new drivers around the world, you're number 3 ,200 in support.
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If you're looking at a Palawano, you are fabulously, fabulously wealthy.
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And so, if you say, pray this prayer, sign this card, do this thing, whatever, and you'll be a
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Christian, you're going to do it. After all, you got the goods, obviously, you know something that I don't know, you're fabulously wealthy.
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It's one of the reasons in New Tribes Mission that we discourage churches from sending money and people to tribal locations to build little
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North American churches for them. Don't do that. Don't bring bricks and concrete and all that stuff.
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Whatever they do for a place to worship, they will do under the leadership and guidance of the
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Holy Spirit, because we want an indigenous church, not a copy of what's going on up here.
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And that certainly would be true as history progresses before our eyes in some cases.
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I think I have showed here in this church the video Etow. Maybe you remember that.
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It's the story of the conversion of the Moab people of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In Etow, you see
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Mark Zook, a New Tribe missionary, beginning with Moses and all the prophets delivering the gospel to the
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Moab people. Now, the Moab people have no background in the Scriptures. When you say
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God, whatever comes into their mind, you have no idea what that is until you've lived with them for quite a while.
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Okay? Finally, Mark knows the culture and he knows the language well enough to speak from the heart to these folks, and he begins to teach.
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He teaches for three months, twice a day, five days a week, to a village of 310 Moab people.
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Not any of those people miss any of the sessions for that three months. He does not come to utter the name
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Jesus Christ until he is two months into the teaching. So, what did he do?
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Well, he started talking about God as in the beginning God. Who's that? And then he defines that.
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And then he talks to them about key Old Testament stories that lead to the
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Savior. So, how does that work? Well, it works like this. When Mark told the
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Moab people about Sodom and Gomorrah, they became afraid. They became afraid that God would judge them before Mark got to the end of the story.
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They said, we are just like those people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Imagine that happening in the
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United States on any Sunday morning. I think not because, of course, we don't have sin like the
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Moab people did. We have boo -boos, hang -ups, little psychological problems, and stuff like that. We don't have sin.
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Okay? The Moab people knew by the time Sodom and Gomorrah had rolled around that they were sinners before a
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God who was loving, but at the same time holy and could not tolerate sin.
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He comes to the Abraham and Isaac episode. Mark leaves it kind of like this. It's the second session.
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Isaac is on the altar. Abraham has the knife raised. See you in the morning. Okay? That night three
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Moab guys come to him and they say, Mark, we've got a problem here. We know that Abraham is a godly man, so he will obey
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God. Imagine that in any church on Sunday morning, or a lot of churches in America on Sunday morning.
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These guys, not believers, pagans, had a concept of what a godly man would do.
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Abraham is a godly man, so he will obey God. But we also know, now you run this by the average church member in North America in 2006, but we know that Isaac is the one through whom the
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Savior of the world is to come. So here's what we think is going to happen,
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Mark. We think that God is going to substitute an animal for Isaac.
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That's what we think is going to happen. Well, guess what? That's what happens.
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Well, guess what would lead you to think something like that before you ever had come to Christ? To know who
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God is. To know about man falling into sin and all of the implications of that.
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To know that the loving God was going to send a Savior of the world. That's what
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Trevor did with the Palawanos. He got so frustrated with that whole deal, he said, what am
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I going to do? So he just said, I'm going to go back to the beginning and start over. One thing
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Trevor did that not all of us do is he wrote down what he did. That is known in New Tribes mission as the chron.
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The chronological presentation of the gospel. If you go through New Tribes training today, four years of training from beginning to end, if you're going to go to Bible school also, you will not be taught when you get to the school of intercultural studies and they begin to talk about here's how you plant an indigenous church that is finally going to be self -propagating, self -teaching, self -governing, and self -evangelizing and so on.
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You don't get, well, you know, you could try this. These guys tried this, seemed to work pretty well. Or you could try this, or you could try...
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No, in New Tribes mission now we're saying you're not going to try anything. Here's what you're going to do. And the
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English version of this is firm foundations, but the chronological presentation of the gospel has been translated into about 40 languages by this time.
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We are finding that we are seeing on the average now eight new presentations of the gospel every year.
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Back in the old days, whatever that was, that didn't happen for years and years and years.
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Why? Because we start at the beginning. I was in a missions conference not long ago. Yeah, it was long ago, probably eight months ago.
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There was an SIM missionary there who was a missionary to Niger. Ralph said when we went there, we got in, we got to know the culture a little bit, got to some facility with the language and so on and so forth.
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And he said then we started translating the gospel of Mark. Now, you do that because the gospel of Mark is short and it's easy for translation.
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He said we found out that not many people were responding to that. Not many of these folks were responding to that.
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He said and then we found the Qur 'an from New Tribes.
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He was doing a complimentary deal to New Tribes, and of course we were saying you're exactly right. We found the chronological approach to the gospel when we began to translate key episodes of the
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Old Testament leading toward the New Testament. These people began to respond.
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He said, why are you telling us all of that? Well, outside of the fact that I'm with New Tribes, I'm telling you that because the
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North American Gringo tribe among which you live is no better off biblically as far as background is concerned than the
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Moke people of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea or the Yukis in South America or the
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Ireos who killed the first five New Tribes missionaries. They know as much about the
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Bible as many, many, many Americans know and that's zip when you first encounter them.
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9 -11 happened when we were in Bolivia. You know, it kind of comes to us over a few days.
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We get home. We're driving out of Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. We're driving north. We come into the city and there are all over every freeway overpass and the skyscrapers and all this.
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God bless America. I said to Judy, to whom do these folks think they are referring?
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Because we had learned by that time that they had a great prayer service in New York at ground zero attended by the
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Imams, the Hindu gurus, the New Age crystal lookers and led by Oprah Winfrey.
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And I'm saying, excuse me, who, bless whom?
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And that is exactly right. Church attendance after 9 -11, I'm told, went up for about three months and now nothing has changed.
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You guys are, you know, we're living in a tribal culture. We're slicker. We have more toys and all that stuff.
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But people with whom we move know less than some tribal people know.
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We've got to finish. They approached the village where they were going.
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Jesus had given them this two or two and a half hour Bible study beginning with Moses and all the prophets.
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And he acted as if he were going further, but he wasn't really going to do that. But they urged him saying,
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Stay with us for it's getting toward evening. The day is now nearly over. So he went in to stay with them. When he reclined at table with them, he, now
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Jesus assumes the role of host, he took the bread and blessed it.
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And breaking it, he began giving it to them. Now, does that echo of anything that might have happened, you know, a few days earlier?
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Well, yeah, it does. But since the Gospels are very explicit that at the so -called Last Supper, Jesus was there with the twelve, the
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Gospels go out of their way to say that Jesus was there with the twelve. Cleopas and his friend were not there.
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They're Gentiles. Salvation is going to come to the whole world. And so Jesus sits down.
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He assumes the role of host. He picks up the bread. He breaks the bread. Okay. And when he broke that bread,
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Luke goes on to say their eyes were opened and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.
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Their eyes were opened then. And he vanished from their sight. I want you to just keep this in mind.
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That the revelation of Jesus Christ to these two guys not only included them being prevented from knowing him, but his revelation to them was all of God.
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What you see here in this whole episode is not only the elation at them coming to the resurrected
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Christ, but you see the sovereignty of God in his revelation to them.
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That's important. They said to one another, here was their reaction.
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And here's the heartburn. Were not our hearts burning within us while he was speaking to us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?
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It wasn't, didn't our hearts burn within us when he broke the bread? No, it was, did not our hearts burn within us when he opened the scriptures to us?
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Remember I said we all came to Christ spiritually. The Holy Spirit convicted the father, drew, the son was lifted up before us.
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That's how we came. That's what happened to these two guys on the road to Emmaus. Jesus sovereignly revealed himself to them.
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And then as he opened the word of God to them, the written word of God, their hearts, and the description here,
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I don't know what that means and neither do you if you think about it. Is there anyone here that would like to describe to me what it would be for your heart to be burning within you?
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That's just an expression of intensity. One translation tries to put it this way. Our hearts were strangely warmed.
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So what's that mean? Well, who knows? You know, I think at all times, when
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I'm not sick, my heart is 98 .6 degrees. That is an attempt to describe an encounter with Christ that is essentially spiritual.
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And I think it's probably indescribable. Well, they got up that very hour. Enough of dinner. They got up that very hour, they returned to Jerusalem and found, gathered together the eleven.
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So some commentator said one of these guys was Peter. No. They returned and found the eleven gathered.
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We don't have Peter finding himself gathered with the others as he gets back. And those who were with them, saying, the
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Lord has really risen and has appeared to Simon. Then they began to relate their experiences on the road and how he was recognized.
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Now watch it. How he was recognized by them in the breaking of bread.
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Now, you know, we evangelicals, we get so scared that something sacramental is going to happen in the business of communion and baptism that we kind of, you know, it gets tacked on the end or wherever.
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And yet in the Scriptures, as the Lord breaks bread, He is revealed to those to whom
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He's... I would say that when we come to the communion table, whenever that is in this church, in any church, in any gathering of believers, the communion table is intended by the
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Lord Jesus Christ, by God the Father and God the Holy Spirit to be a real serious time of heartburn.
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God grant that the next time I sit at a communion table that I find that my heart burns within me, whatever that means, burns within me as the bread is broken and that the
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Lord reveals Himself sovereignly to me when that happens.
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Before He was known of them in breaking of bread. He was known of them in the
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Scriptures. Before you and I have ever come to a communion table that the possibility of our hearts burning within us at the breaking of bread and the remembering
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His shed blood, before that ever happened, we knew Christ in the Scriptures. As the
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Spirit convicted, the Father drew and the Son was lifted up. For there it says their hearts burned within them as He opened the
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Scriptures. So I guess the question for us all tonight, and I'll try not to prolong it lest I actually make good on what
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I purpose to do over there in the Western Antiquarian Society, the question for all of us, including me, is how long has it been since your heart burned within you over Christ?
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How long has it been since you had a good case of heartburn for Christ? You say, does that ever happen?
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Does the Scriptures expect that that will happen? Yeah, I think so. We are so leery of the modern charismatic movement, and I'm not talking about the modern charismatic movement here, that we fail,
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I think, sometimes to really expect what the Scriptures say to happen.
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Romans 8, verse 16 says, His Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am
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His child, and I don't think that's just a Bible study. Now, I think that may come out of a
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Bible study, but I think there is a sensibility to my own spirit where God the
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Holy Spirit, and who is that by the way? 2 Corinthians 3 .18 says, The Lord who is the
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Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I belong to Him. Not only that, it goes on to say,
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The Lord who is the Spirit intercedes for me with words which are too intense even to be uttered.
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You say, well, what does that mean? I don't know. I think it's something quite maybe indescribable. I think it might be parallel to what
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Revelation says when Jesus says to one of the churches, To him who overcomes,
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I'm going to give a white stone with a name engraved on it, known only to him who receives it.
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You know what? When we get to heaven, did you ever ask yourself this? When we get to heaven, here's all these Christians. And we're some of the latest ones.
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I'm going to be back at row 1 ,523 ,780.
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And there's going to be this little Lord Jesus up there, way up there. No, that's not what the
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Scriptures say. The Scriptures say when we get there, they say, welcome. And I trust good and faithful servant got a little pet name for you.
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And only you and me. We're going to have one -on -one, a one -on -one relationship with the
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Lord in heaven, I'm absolutely convinced, which will make anything that has happened to us here, including what we read about tonight, be looking through a glass darkly.
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Okay? There are some little things.
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Mike just sent out a deal about David Brainard. Do you remember that? Jonathan Edwards.
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He said, wow, those guys were Puritans. They had experiences with the Lord which were indescribable to them.
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He said, wait a minute now, you're not telling me they were charismatics. Absolutely not. That is in the sense of the modern charismatic movement.
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Jonathan Edwards writes about, first he writes about studying 13 hours a day, which, by the way, got him in trouble in the church at Northampton because they thought he wasn't visiting enough.
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Okay? And he took an hour break every day. And this one day he's walking out in the woods and he walks out by a pond and his writing is,
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I was so overcome by the presence of the Lord Jesus. So what does that feel like?
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I don't know. I'm just telling you what he said. So overcome by the presence of the Lord Jesus that I began to weep uncontrollably.
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Taking a walk. David Brainerd, I just picked a few things out of that that Mike sent.
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Most of my time and morning devotion was spent without sensible sweetness. Say, sensible sweetness, what's that?
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I don't know. But David Brainerd had something that he described as sensible sweetness.
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And on this morning, he didn't have much of it. Yet I had one delightful prospect.
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But it was delightful being in devotions that morning of arriving at the heavenly world. Heavenly world, where do you get information about that?
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Out of the book. It's revealed truth. I am more amazed than ever at such thoughts, for I see myself infinitely vile and unworthy.
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What's that about? That's making good on what the book says is the truth. No poor creature stands in need of divine grace.
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Where does that come from? The book. More than I. And none abuse it more than I have done and still do.
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I don't have time to do this. I'm serious about that. No, I'm not just kidding you.
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But he goes on there for a couple of prayers. He says, you know, I'm not sensible to the Lord much.
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And he begins to think about some things that he knows from the Scriptures and to meditate on them.
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He said, I had some sweetness in the thoughts of arriving at the heavenly world. After public worship, now watch this,
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God gave me special assistance in prayer. I wrestled with my dear
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Lord, and intercession was made a delightful employment to me. In the evening as I was viewing the light in the north,
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I was delighted in the contemplation of the glorious morning of the resurrection. It's all rooted in the
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Word. And as he is sensible to the presence of the Lord, by his own testimony here, as he is sensible to the presence of the
01:00:08
Lord, it doesn't happen all the time.
01:00:15
As on the road to Emmaus, as on the road to Emmaus, God sovereignly enabled
01:00:23
David Brainerd to have particular sensibility to him at different times.
01:00:31
The difference in my judgment between the modern charismatic movement and the experience of these
01:00:37
Puritans is this. Through the modern charismatic movement, you see the will of man everywhere.
01:00:43
It's a formula. You go in, you sing for an hour. You sing a lot of 7 -11 songs, seven words sung 11 or 1 ,100 times.
01:00:55
And then after a while, then people begin to sense the Spirit falling on them and so on.
01:01:02
And some very unbiblical things sometimes begin to happen. The will of man, thinking this is how you do it, this is how you produce it, if I do this, in fact this instruction is, you want to be speaking in ecstatic languages, just begin moving your mouth.
01:01:19
It begins in the flesh, pretty soon it will be in the Spirit. What? How does that work?
01:01:26
You don't find any of that in the experience of these Puritans. What you see all through the experience, the experience of the
01:01:33
Lord in these Puritans is the sovereignty of God. Now, the Holy Spirit is always witnessing with my spirit that I am
01:01:41
His child. The problem is my sensibility to what's going on. And God sovereignly, sovereignly makes me sensible to His Spirit.
01:01:52
Just as on the road to Emmaus, the Lord Jesus sovereignly revealed Himself to these two disciples who in my view signify that salvation is coming to all of us, including us sitting here tonight, twenty centuries later.
01:02:12
And I say praise His name. And I'm encouraged by every remembrance of that.
01:02:18
And I pray that my soul, my mind, my will, my emotions may not so overwhelm my spirit that I may not be available to the
01:02:28
Lord to make me sensible to His presence in ways that I perhaps at some point may not be able to really describe, even as the
01:02:39
Jonathan Edwards, David Brainerd type of experience. This was so precious to David Brainerd that he would, you know, they were all diarists.
01:02:48
He wrote two volumes of his experiences with the Lord and directed that they be burned before he was buried.
01:02:55
Only a few excerpts remained because it was just about him and the Lord. No room for pride.
01:03:02
No shouting, there are signs and wonders going on here. No, it's not about that. It's about His Spirit bears witness with my spirit.
01:03:12
God sovereignly reveals Himself to me, even as to these guys on the road to Emmaus. Thank you,
01:03:17
Lord, for Your Word. Thank you, Lord, for Your Spirit who indwells us.
01:03:23
Lord, we pray that You might be refreshed as we rehearse all that You have made us in Yourself.
01:03:32
And we pray, Lord, that You would refresh us as You remind us of all that we are in You.
01:03:42
We're grateful for the opportunity to rehearse it. We look forward to the day when the rehearsal will be unending and to the day when the rehearsal will be ever new and ever exciting when we stand in Your presence where we shall be as You are.