Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Pastor Skip Heitzig guides us through First and Second Peter in the series Rock Solid.
First Peter, chapter 1; let's pray together. Lord, I remember
that when the apostles prayed in the early church in
the book of Acts, they prayed, "Lord, you are God,
who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and everything
that is in them." And I think it's important that
as we pray we begin with that perspective that we
are talking to the One who can do anything, who
created everything. Because you and you alone understand who you
have made, those you have made, the way we think,
the way we act. Nothing takes you by surprise. We're
very comforted in the fact that though you are all
these things that you are in love with us, you are
intimate towards us. Lord, I pray that this message would
serve to elevate our thinking and our focus as we
live. There's so many distractions in this world, so many
things that take our thoughts off of what is true and
right, and onto the values of this world that can
even steal our joy. So we begin, Lord, just in this
simple act of worship, this act of dependence, this prayer,
asking you to speak to us, in Jesus' name, amen.
I will forever be grateful to a man by the
name of Dave Ellen for saving the life of my
son. Many years ago when my son was just a
little kid, it was in the wintertime, it had just snowed. He
and a buddy went over to a golf course not
far away, and they took a sled, and they went
down this big hill. And the contest was to see
how far they could go and who would get the
farthest. Well, my son won the contest by taking it
all the way down the hill and onto a lake
on the golf course, frozen-over lake. The
ice broke; he was immersed in the water. If you
know how hypothermia sets in, does so very quickly, and
he could not get out of that lake. Dave Ellen
a friend of mine was running his dog up on
that hill, and saw what was happening, and came down
and threw out a dog leash and pulled him out
to safety, and he told my son to run home. Well,
I didn't know that part of the story; I just
know he was sledding and I saw him come up
the drive. Actually, I heard him come
up the drive. [shivers] You would hear it outside. He
was so cold, and we got him warmed up. But
I didn't know the whole story; I just knew that
he was playing and he fell on the ice. Well,
years later we are in Israel with a team of people from
the church going on a tour, and we're having lunch
at a local pizza joint. And I'm there with my
wife and my son, Nate, and Dave Ellen who saved him---but
Nate had no recollection that was the guy. He just
knew some guy saved him---and his wife Cheryl. And we're
all talking, and talking about the scariest moments in our
lives. And Nate goes, "You know the
scariest moment of my life is when I fell through ice
on a lake on a golf course, and I thought
I was going to die." And Dave Ellen who was at lunch said, "Did you ever
tell your parent the rest of the story, Nate?" And
he didn't even know what to say. He goes, "Remember
the guy who saved you and threw that dog leash
out? That was me." Nate's eyes got real big. Now, I didn't know this story. I said, "Well,
tell us this whole story here. I didn't get all
this when he was quite young." So, I got the
full scoop. And that's what we have here.
In the book of Peter, First Peter, chapter 1, he
gives them the full scoop of their salvation. Saving a
life is wonderful, but saving an eternal soul is even
more wonderful. And it's that salvation that's on Peter's mind
as he writes the next few verses of First Peter,
chapter 1. You see, his audience has been suffering oppression
and persecution and trials. And if you know anything about
suffering, it causes your eyes to look downward. You are
weighed down. You are looking not at the hopeful horizon,
but at the painful path. And you need the encouragement
to look up and get your thoughts refocused into the right place.
And, essentially, Peter does that in these verses.
He has a theme, a recurrent theme in this book.
So far the word "salvation" appears three times. It's the focus; it's
the highlight of the book so far. Look at verse 5:
"Who are kept by the power of God through faith
for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." Verse 9, "Receiving
the end of your faith---the salvation of your souls." And
now in verse 10, "Of this salvation the prophets have
inquired and searched carefully." Salvation---there is not a more assuring,
more comforting word in all of language than the word
salvation. It appears four hundred times in Scripture---saved,
saving, salvation---four hundred times. It is a broad scope of
meaning. It can mean anything from being saved physically from
harm's way to being saved eternally from sin and death
and hell. And just as I that day in Jerusalem learned
the full scoop of the story of how my son was saved,
so Peter gives to them the scoop on their eternal
salvation. You'll notice in verse 10, "Of this salvation the prophets
have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace
that would come to you, searching what, or what manner
of time, the Spirit of Christ who was in them
was indicating when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ
and the glories that would follow. To them it was
revealed, not to themselves, but to us they were ministering
the things which now have been reported to you through
those who have preached the gospel to you by the
Holy Spirit sent from heaven---things which angels desire to look
into." When Paul wrote to Timothy, he said,
"Timothy, God desires all men to be saved." That's God's
great desire. That's God's great hope, is that people would
come to salvation. But we run the risk of losing
our gratitude for salvation, the simplest most basic component of
the Christian life, and we run the danger of not
realizing just how good we have it, just what a
great deal we have been given. When you said yes
to Jesus Christ, or should I say, when God said
yes to you---that's salvation. I've told you
before that when I first came to Christ I was
watching Dr. Billy Graham on television, and I turned it
off after hearing the gospel. And I went into my
room and I immediately thought, "Okay, let me get this
right. You gave your Son, your best, you gave all
to this world; in exchange you want me, you want
me to give you my life. So, you gave Jesus;
you want me to give you this broken life." And I just thought,
"Excuse me, but, God, you're getting a bum deal. This
is not great in terms of what you're getting out
of this deal." But then I immediately
thought, "But I'm getting, like, a killer deal. And I'd
be stupid to pass this up." And I think from
time to time we need to stop and realize what
it means to be a saved man or a saved
woman, what our salvation means to us. What Peter tells
them is, "Not only do you have salvation, let me tell you how great it is. Let me tell you
a little bit more about what you may not be realizing." Sort of
like an insurance policy, you know, most of us have
insurance policies for life or for home or for automobiles.
Most of us don't read the insurance policy, I've discovered. Have you discovered
that? You just know you have one. You don't read
the fine print until you have to make a claim,
and you want to find out if you're going to
get reimbursed because you gotta dish some money out. Does
what happened---is it covered in the insurance policy? And then you
find out, oh, yes, they cover everything except what you
need at that point. [laughter] "Yes, we cover everything for
your car, except your drivetrain that fell out on the
road two miles back. We don't cover that." So Peter
says, "Not only do you have a great insurance policy,
this one comes from heaven. It's been going on a
long time, and it's so great that even the angels are checking it out.
They marvel at it. They ponder it." So that's how
these verses divide up, verse 10, 11, and 12. The prophets
predicted it, preachers proclaim it, angels ponder it, and that's
what we're going to unpack today as we go through it.
First of all, prophets, the prophets predicted it. Verse 10,
"Of this salvation the prophets have inquired." That's the Old
Testament prophets, by the way. "They've inquired and searched carefully,
who prophesied [or predicted] of the grace that would come
to you, searching what, or what manner of time the
Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when
he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories
that would follow." Who were the prophets? Prophets
were spokesmen. They were spokesmen for God. Look at them
like field agents, field reps; they represented God by giving
a message from God to a group of people. It's
like they came and they said, "And now a word
from our Creator," and they gave a message, something that
God wanted people to hear. And their messages centered on
two things: they proclaimed God's Word, and they predicted future
events. They proclaimed God's Word, they predicted
future events, and all of it was anticipating salvation. Think
of the prophets like archers, you know, the guys with
the bows and the arrows. And the prophets shot arrows
of truth up into the air, but they didn't know
exactly where those arrows would land. So Isaiah shot up
his arrows, and Daniel shot up a few arrows, and Zechariah, and Zephaniah.
Daniel shot up some arrows. They pulled
back on the prophetic bow strings, and out launched that
prophetic missile of truth high into the sky till it
disappeared into the sky over the horizon. And they wondered,
"Where's it going? Where is it going to land?" Did you know
that about 330 predictions were made about what Jesus Christ
would do, who he would be, where he would be born,
what would happen to him? About 330 arrows were launched
into the sky over a sixteen-hundred-year period. And all of
those arrows fell on one person---Jesus Christ. Here's just
a sampling. Trust me; I wouldn't try to go through
all 330. It would be a great study, but it'd take us like 330
days to do it. So, here's just a sampling of
some of predictions they made: They predicted he would be
born of a ***, Isaiah 7:14; that he would be
born in Bethlehem, Micah chapter 5 verse 2; that he
would be born into the tribe of Judah, Genesis 49:10;
that his ministry would begin in Galilee, Isaiah chapter 9
verse 1. They predicted he would work
miracles, Isaiah 35 verse 5 and 6; that he will
enter Jerusalem on a donkey, Zechariah 9:9; that he would
be betrayed by a friend, Psalm 41:9; that he would
be sold for thirty pieces of silver, Zechariah 11:12. They
predicted he would be wounded and bruised, Isaiah 53:5; that
his hands and feet would be pierced, Psalm 22:16. They
predicted he would be crucified between two thieves, Isaiah 53:12. They
predicted that his garments would be torn and those around would
cast lots for them, Psalm 22:18. They
further predicted his bones would not be broken, Psalm 34:20; that his side would be pierced, Zechariah 12:10. They
predicted he would be buried in a rich man's tomb,
Isaiah 53 verse 9; and then they predicted that he would rise from the dead,
Psalm 16 verse 10. Now that's just sixteen predictions, sixteen arrows shot up; that's to say nothing
of all the glories that would follow, the millennial glories
that would follow. Isaiah the prophet, Daniel the prophet, Ezekiel---they
all speak of the millennial kingdom, the reign of Christ
upon the earth. Now, let me remind
you of something. The sheer odds, the sheer odds of
any one person in history fulfilling 330 predictions, it's crazy.
The idea that all of those prophecies, all of those
arrows would fall on one person, the odds against that
are astronomical. I mean, there's certain things humanly impossible to prearrange. You didn't arrange
where you were going to be born, who your mother
would be, what tribe you would come from or town you
would be born in, etcetera. I have
a little book in my library; I pull it out
from time to time, called Science Speaks by Dr. Peter
Stoner. Peter Stoner was the emeritus professor at Westmont College
in science and applied mathematics. And he did a book
all about this: calculating the odds of one man in
history fulfilling the predictions made about Christ that he indeed fulfilled.
So, for example, he says in his book: "If you were to take
eight, just eight of the predictions"---I gave you sixteen---"for one
man in history to fulfill eight things foretold about him
before he was born, for him to actually see those
things come to pass, the odds of that would be 1
in 10 to the 17th power. To visualize that," said
Stoner, "You could take the state of Texas and fill
it two feet deep full of silver dollars." Now if
you could to that, you'd be a very rich person. But let's just
suppose you could do that. You'd fill the state of
Texas two feet thick full of silver dollars, you premark
one, you send a man in blindfolded---the odds of him selecting
the one silver dollar you have premarked is 1 in 10 to the 17th power.
And Stoner even got more elaborate, he said, "The odds
of one man in history fulfilling sixteen"---we just gave you sixteen---"of
the predictions made about Jesus Christ that he fulfilled would
be 1 in 10 to the 45th power."
And again, whenever you have numbers, you gotta visualize it, because it's like, "Yeah, whatever, that's a
number, so." So this is what it would be like:
if you could get enough silver dollars to make a ball so big that from
the center of that ball to the circumference edge of
that ball would be thirty times the distance the earth is presently
from the sun, which is 93 million miles. So 93 million miles times 30 is the distance
from the center of your silver-dollar ball to the edge. You premark a
silver dollar, send somebody in that globe, the odds that he could find the
silver dollar is 1 in 10 to the 45th power. Then
Stoner went on to say, "What about forty-eight predictions?" And
it gets so crazy that he has to use electrons,
not silver dollars, because there's just no way you could
do that. Now, here's what I want
you to know: there are twenty-five books in the world,
thereabouts, that claim to be Scripture. All of them have
one important ingredient absent from them. All of them, except
for one, have something missing---prophecy, predictive prophecy. The Qur'an doesn't have it. The Upanishad
of the Hindus don't have it. The writings of Confucius,
they don't have it. They're absent from them. The Bible
has predictive prophecy. So, the prophets made
all of these crazy predictions, they problem is they didn't
understand everything they wrote. In fact, I would even say
they understood very little of what they wrote. They shot
the arrows out, and they were looking like, "Now, where's that going to land?" Example:
in Isaiah, chapter 6, God commissions Isaiah to go proclaim
to a nation the desolations that will come, and Isaiah asks a question:
"How long, O Lord?" The prophet Habakkuk says
the same thing when the predictions are made about Judah
and Jerusalem. "O Lord, how long?" We studied the prophet
Daniel for months, Daniel didn't understand everything. Daniel 7 says,
"I was grieved in my spirit within my body, because
this vision troubled me," and he had to ask the
angel who was standing by him what these things meant.
So these prophets predicted these things, and then they looked
at what was written to try to figure out what it all meant. And
there were two basic things they were trying to understand.
Notice what it says, "Searching what," verse 11, "or what
manner of time, the Spirit of Christ who was in
them was indicating when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ
and the glories that would follow." Now some translations say,
"searching what person" or "what time." Basically, those were the
two things they wanted to know: Who am I writing
about? When will these things happen? What's the timing and
the circumstances around the coming of the Messiah?
I mean, imagine Isaiah the prophet writing what he wrote. Okay,
so listen to how this sounds, Isaiah 7:14, "Behold, a
*** shall conceive and bear a Son." He'd go, "Uh,
what does that mean, God?" I'm sure God would have
to say, "Don't worry about it, you wouldn't believe it
if I told you." And so it was with Jeremiah
and Ezekiel and Daniel and Micah and Zechariah and the
rest of them. I mean, it's like twenty-five men all trying
to put together one of those 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles.
You know, every one of them has a few of
the pieces, but none of them has all the pieces,
and no one has the picture on the front cover
of the box. Add to that, most of these guys
didn't know each other and lived hundreds of years apart.
That's what being an Old Testament prophet was like. David has a few of the pieces, Moses
had a few of the pieces, Isaiah had a few of
the pieces, Daniel had a few of the pieces, Zechariah
had a few of the pieces but no one prophet
had them all. But when all of those pieces were put together,
the picture on the front of the box was Jesus
Christ. And so Jesus walks from Jerusalem toward Emmaus with two of his disciples, and they're
bummed out because they don't know why Jesus died on that
cross. And they don't think he's alive from the dead; he happens
to be right next to them. And in revealing himself
to these two apostles, Jesus says these words, "O foolish
ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the
prophets have written! Ought not Christ to have suffered and
enter into his glory?" And then Luke
says, "Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he expounded
to them in the Scripture all things concerning himself." On
one occasion Jesus even said to his disciples, "Many prophets
and righteous men desire to see what you see, and
did not see it, and to hear what you hear,
and have not heard it." Folks, that's why we study
all the Bible. If you ever wonder, "Why do you study
the Old Testament?" So we can understand the New Testament. Because you
got a whole bunch of predictions made in the Old
Testament, you gotta know where they're going. Those arrows were
shot up; where they gonna land? In the New Testament.
But if you just read the New Testament, it's like you
go to a field with a bunch of arrows and you ask, "Where did these
things come from?" You gotta read the Old Testament; that's where they shot
those things off at. So, as one
scholar put it so beautifully, "The New is in the
Old contained; the Old is in the New explained." That
is, the New Testament is in the Old Testament contained;
the Old Testament is in the New Testament explained. You
need both to see who and when those arrows were
shot, and how they were fulfilled in Christ. Look at verse 12,
"To them"---that is, to those prophets he's still speaking about,
"it was revealed that, not to themselves, but to us
they were ministering the things which have now been reported
to you." At some point those prophets
began to understand that what they were writing about was
going to be fulfilled at a distant time far into
the future. It wasn't going to happen in their time.
Some things they predicted did, but much of it was going to
happen beyond their time. And Peter is saying to his
audience, "You're the audience. You're it. You're the recipients."
I can just cite a couple of examples: Moses in
Deuteronomy 18 made one of earliest predictions of the Messiah, and
he put it this way, "The Lord your God will
raise up for you a Prophet like unto me from
among your brethren. Him you shall listen to." In the
book of Daniel, which we studied at length, in Daniel 10:14
the angel said to Daniel, "I have come to make
you understand what will happen to your people in the
latter days, for the vision refers to many days yet
to come." Daniel 12 verse 4, "But
you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book
until the time of the end." I find this extremely
encouraging. I find it encouraging that my salvation was never
an afterthought. I was never an afterthought. It was all
planned in the mind of God who gave a message
sent from heaven, given to and through prophets, fulfilled in Christ, proclaimed by
the apostles, and received by you and I.
Because life happens---sometimes life happens so suddenly it take us
off guard. It's so surprising, what Peter is saying is,
"This whole salvation enterprise was not surprising to God, it's
all part of his eternal plan, and you're part of
his eternal plan." You see, sometimes things happen and we think, "Man,
that's so random what happened." Redemption isn't random; it's all
part of God's great plan. The prophets predicted it.
Second thing I want you to note is: preachers proclaim
it. Oh, by the way, a little piece of trivia: this
is the only Scripture where prophets, preachers, and angels are
talked about on the same section. The Bible has a
lot to say about all three of them, but this is the only place where
all of them are put together. The prophets predicted it, but
notice, preachers proclaim it. Verse 12, "To
them it was revealed that, not to themselves, but to
us they were ministering the things which now have been
reported to you, through those who have preached the gospel
to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven." Prophets
predicted it, but they did not originate it. It came
from heaven to the prophets, through the prophets, and it
was picked up by preachers who preached to anyone who
would listen. Now, who does he refer
to "those who preached to you." Well, primarily the apostles.
In that day and age it was Peter and it
was Paul and it was John and James and the
rest of them going out and sharing the gospel. It
was the earliest apostles who preached the gospel to people.
In fact, Peter, the author of this book was the
first preacher in the early church. The Day of Pentecost he showed up and preached,
thousands of people got saved, came into salvation.
Sometime later Peter and John were going into the temple,
there was a man who was lame from birth, he
was picked up, healed. Peter preached a message and he
said in that message, "Nor is there salvation in any
other, for there is no other name under heaven given
among men by which we must be saved." So, what
began with the prophets, and was passed on to Peter
and the apostles, was preached to anybody who would listen.
Now fast-forward two thousand years to Albuquerque, New Mexico, 9:30
service, Calvary Albuquerque---here you are. The reason you are here
is because of the faithfulness of those who picked up
that message and preached it, and others heard it and preached it, and others heard it, and
you and you and you and you and you and
you and you are all commissioned to take up that
banner and to preach the gospel to this generation and
to the next generation. My question to
you is: Have you preached it? Have you taken this
sacred trust given to prophets and apostles? Have you ever
seen yourself as on a mission from God? Isn't that kind of cool? You wake up
in the morning---"I'm on a mission from God." No joke,
you are on a mission from God. You've received the gospel;
now it's your turn to transmit the gospel.
And please don't say something like this: "Well, I would, but I
don't want to offend anyone." Oh, really? What do you
mean by that? "Well, it's a disturbing message. I could
disturb someone and offend them." Well, I suppose you could,
but if you had a neighbor's house that was on
fire would you say, "I don't want to disturb them or offend
them by telling them that?" It would sound
like this: "The other day my friend's house was on
fire. I don't think he knew it even though he
was inside it. He must have been asleep. I thought
about telling my friend his house was on fire, but then
I wonder what he would think. He might get embarrassed.
Or what if I got all full of soot? And
what would my friends who don't believe in fires think?
Besides, isn't this the fireman's job?" You don't want to
offend them? How shallow would that sound on judgment day? "Yeah, Lord, I
didn't share with them because I didn't want to offend
them." Don't you think it's more offensive to end up
in hell? So, the prophets predicted it, preachers proclaimed it,
and I hope you and I are part of that
preaching choir. Now, before you get all guilty, "Yeah, man, I haven't preached the gospel for a long time.
I haven't shared with anybody." Well, let me just tell you something: the onus, really, it's on you to engage, certainly,
but the power doesn't come from you. It's not like
you have to go through a special class and get a---all you have
to do is get plugged into the right source. And
I want you to notice this in verse 12. "Reported
to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by"---what?---"the
Holy Spirit sent from heaven." Do you know "the Holy Spirit
is sent" is mentioned twice in three verses? The Spirit
of Christ with the prophets, verse 11; and the Holy
Spirit verse 12. In other words, the
Holy Spirit animated the prophets in the Old Testament; the
Holy Spirit activated preachers in the New Testament. So the formula is simple:
When the people of God receive the power of the
Spirit of the God to preach the gospel of God, lives
change. It's a winning combination; it still works today. Prophets
predicted it, preachers proclaim it, finally, in verse 12, angels ponder
it. Look at the last part of verse 12. "Things
which angels desire to look into." The
things he's speaking about are the things of salvation. "Things
angels desire to look into." The New Living Translation renders
it, "It is also wonderful that even the angels are
eagerly watching these things happen. Okay, there's two important words
that you need to be aware of what they mean
at the end of verse 12. First is the word
"desire." The word "desire" means to have an overpowering impulse that is not easily satisfied.
Okay, so what does that mean? It's like, "Man, I really---I really gotta do this. I really gotta have this.
Really, really, really, really want this." That's the word desire.
Now, the angels have that kind of a desire. For what? Look at the second word: "look," or "look into."
The word means to stoop down and take a peek. They really, really, really, really, really want to stoop
down and take a peek; literally "to stretch one's neck forward."
Peter is picturing as if the angels are on their tiptoes
looking from the ramparts of heaven at us. They're terribly
interested in salvation and how it works. That kind of makes
sense, right? I mean, who was present at the birth
of Jesus? Angels---they announced it. Who was there at the
tomb of Jesus when he rose from the dead and
told the women? A couple of angels. And now they're
still interested as they look down on us.
Now, here's the question: Why? Why are we such a
wonder to these creatures? Here's the simple answer: Because angels can't be saved, only humans
can. Only human beings can take part in the redemption
that comes through believing in Christ. Now, there are fallen
angels, and there are faithful angels, there are bad angels, there
are good angels, there are elect angels, but there are
no saved angels. We can be saved; they cannot. Only humans
can experience God's saving grace. The angels watched as
God gave his best to earth's worst, and they're fascinated
by that. I think they are fascinated when a drug addict becomes a pastor. I think
they're fascinated when a criminal becomes a missionary. When a blasphemer
becomes a born again child of God, they ponder it, they marvel
at it, and they rejoice over it. Jesus said in
Luke 15, "There is rejoicing in the presence of angels
over one sinner who repents." So it
seems that in the classroom of the universe God is
the teacher, the angels are the students, the subject is
salvation, and the illustration is the church. And the angels are looking down
and going, "Man, that's interesting, it's marvelous," and they ponder it. One of the
reasons I think they're so curious is a little phrase
that Paul wrote in First Corinthians 6, that I think has
bothered the angels ever since he wrote it.
Paul said in First Corinthians 6, "Do you not know
that we will judge the angels?" If I'm on angel, I'm going, "What
was that? Excuse me? They're going to judge us? These
human beings who are made a little lower than the
angels are going to judge us? These Christians who rarely pray,
who don't witness much, who don't even know much about
angels except they eat angel-food cake---they're going to judge me?" [laughter]
But it is true. You're going to, with Christ, even
make that final pronouncement for those angelic beings who have fallen. Wow.
You know what? You could do something today that would
make the angels marvel. You could do something today that
would make the angels rejoice---get saved. Every time one person is
in that process of salvation, it's like all the angels they get a little bit
closer to the railing going, "Look, look, look, look, look!"
And then a person goes, "Jesus, come in." "Wow! It happened again! Come on, guys, let's
have a party." [laughter] You see, a
person may go to a doctor and walk away a
healthy sinner. You may go to a psychiatrist and walk away a well-adjusted sinner.
He may go to a church and walk away a religious sinner.
But only when this person comes to the cross of
Jesus Christ will he walk away a forgiven sinner. And
that is the message of the gospel that game from
heaven announced by prophets, proclaimed by preachers for the last
two thousand years, received by us, and the angels look at it and
go, "Man, how cool is that?" Father,
we also take the time to pause and to marvel at your grace to
us, our bedrock salvation, a part of your plan from
the beginning---Jesus the Lamb of God slain from the foundation
of the earth. It was always your plan to save
people. It was always your plan to send your Son.
That's why you animated the prophets of the Old Testament
to write what they wrote even though they didn't quite
get it. They looked and searched to find out what
it meant; now we know what it means.
We know far more than the prophets who wrote what
they wrote, because all the arrows fell on our Savior
Jesus Christ---figuratively by prophecy, and literally on a cross. And,
Lord, I just pray for anyone who might be here
this morning who has never said yes to Jesus yet,
never turned to him personally. Good people, religious people, but they have
never said, "Yes, I'm going to turn from my past. I'm going to
turn from my sin. I'm going to turn my life
over to the Savior Jesus Christ." If you're
gathered here and you're with us today, as our heads are bowed,
I'd like to pray for you. If you want to
give your life to Christ, and I mean really give
your life to Christ, sincerely turn your life over to
the Savior, and in so doing cooperate with God's plan
for your life from the beginning, the message preached for
the last two thousand years, and a message whose results cause
even God's angels to marvel. If you've
never personally accepted Christ as your Savior, or perhaps you made
some decision years ago but you're not following Jesus now, and you want to experience his
peace, you want to know his forgiveness. God would love
to see that happen, the angels would love to see
that happen, and I join with them and say I'd
love to see that happen. I'd love to pray for you.
I need to know who I'm praying for. If that
is your desire to give your life to Christ, I want you
to raise your hand up. Just raise it up in
the air so I can see it, and I'll pray
for you as we close this service.
By raising your hand you're indicating, "Skip, pray for me. I'm going to
give my life to Jesus. I'm going to surrender finally
right now to him." Raise it up in the air.
If you don't know Jesus yet, or if you need
to come home to him---God bless you, ma'am; in the middle; and toward
the very back; and way in the corner to my left.
In the balcony, God bless you. Anybody else in the balcony? Raise that
hand up. Anyone else? Well, Father, we thank
you for another time where we rejoice together in your
work in the lives of men and women---that's really what
it's all about. All of eternity and time and space
is really all about this transaction that happened on the cross and
is happening right now with those in this auditorium. If
you raised your hand up, I want you to say
something right where you're at. Just say
something to the Lord, and here's what you tell him:
Lord, I give you my life. You say that to him in
a prayer. Lord, I give you my life. I know
that I'm a sinner. Please forgive me. I trust in
Jesus Christ who died on a cross, he shed his blood
for my sin, and he rose from the dead---I believe that. And
I turn from my sin and I turn to you, Lord, as
my Savior. I want to follow you as my Lord, in Jesus' name, amen.
For more resources from Calvary Albuquerque and Skip Heitzig visit calvaryabq.org.