Sunday, February 27, 2011

2-27-11 Sermon

Click here to listen to this week's sermon. See below for a transcript of the sermon. May God speak to you as you listen/read Pastor Billman's sermon this week.


MEETING THE JESUS I KNOW
Set for Life
Part 1 of 3  02-27-11 Sermon


We’re starting a new mini-series today, a series called “Fit for Life”.  We’re going to be talking in this series about how we can become fit for life as God intended us to live.  I think we do that by addressing the most pressing issues of our past, our present and our future.  Today we’re going to deal with the present.  How we can know the God who offers us love like no other.  How we can know the God who offers mercy and grace.

Next week we’re going to talk about our past, how we can deal with regrets from our past.  Even though God may have forgiven us from things we have done, how can we deal with the regrets that still gnaw at us?

Then the third week we’re going to look at our future.  How can we live the way that God intended? 

That’s sort of the roadmap for the next three weeks that we’re going to embark upon today.  I want to start out by asking, have you ever heard the expression “Something got lost in the translation.”?  Well, there are now computer programs that are designed to translate from one language to another.  You type in English phrases and words and it translates them into another language.  So, some guy got a bright idea.  He decided to take the song “Take me out to the Ballgame” and type it in English into the translation device and translate it into German and then translate it back into English to see how close he came.  This is how it came out. 

Execute me to the ball play.
Execute me with the masses
Buy me certain fruit and ground nuts
I'm not interested if I ever receive back
Let me root, root, root for the main team
If they do not win it is dishonor
For it is one, two, three impacts on you
Out at the old ball play.

Don’t you think something got lost in the translation!

I think that’s true when you’re talking about Jesus as well.  Something gets lost sometimes in translation.  I'm not talking about the actual text of the New Testament that talks about Jesus.  I'm talking about how people interpret Him and reinterpret Him and change who He is.  Sometimes through the centuries the image we have of Jesus gets translated into something that doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to who He really is and how we can know Him. 

What I want to do today is share some simple things about the Jesus I’ve known for over 40 years.  I didn’t put an outline in your programs today.  I did that on purpose.  I did put the verses I'm going to talk about so you can take those home with you and look at them later.  But I didn’t put an outline for a real important reason.  I just want you to listen today.  I don’t want you taking notes.  As wonderful as that is.  It’s great to learn with our minds.  I want you to learn today with your heart. 

I want to tell you three true stories that will illuminate different aspects of who Jesus is and different aspects of the grace, love, forgiveness, mercy and compassion that Jesus offers to us.  They are three true stories.

First story I have to tell is a sad story, actually.  It’s a story about a woman in Korea right after the Korean War took place.  This woman had gotten pregnant by an American soldier.  The soldier went back to the United States and she never saw him again.  She gave birth to a little girl.  But this little girl was very different than the other little girls.  Her hair was light colored and curly so she stood out.  In that particular culture that meant that child and the mother would be severely rejected by society.  In fact some mothers in Korea who gave birth to children from American fathers actually killed their babies because they couldn’t stand the humiliation, the rejection, the heartache of the way they were treated by other people.  This woman kept her baby and she tried her best to raise this child for seven years.  But the rejection and the humiliation and the taunting and the harassment that she experienced was too much for her.  So she did something nobody here could imagine anybody doing.  She abandoned that seven-year-old girl to the streets.  That little girl wasn’t alone because there were packs of little children living on the streets.  They would live under bridges and in abandoned buildings and they would go outside of town and live in caves.  And they would just eat whatever they could find. 

This little girl was ruthlessly taunted by everybody she would encounter.  They would call her the ugliest word in the Korean language.  The word that means “Alien devil”.  After a while this little girl began to draw conclusions about herself.  This is what she would say years later, “When you hear what you are as a little child day after day after day you begin to believe that about yourself.  I believed that anyone could do whatever they wanted to me physically because I wasn’t a person.  I was inhuman.  I was dirty.  I was unclean.  I had no name.  I had no identity.  I had no family.  I had no future.  And I hated myself.”

For two years she lived on the streets.  Finally there was a new orphanage that opened up.  It had very little money.  It was a very primitive kind of place but at least it was safe and it was a place she could go and not be assaulted and attacked and harassed.  So they took her into the orphanage.  Pretty soon word came that a couple from America was going to come to that orphanage and they were going to adopt a little baby boy.  The word went out among all the orphans in the orphanage.  This was the best news of all.  Some little boy among them was going to have a fresh start, a new chance, a future.  Somebody was going to escape from this orphanage.  So this little girl, who was now nine years old and who was the oldest child in the orphanage, began to bathe the little boys and clean them up and get them all ready wondering who was it that this American couple was going to choose and adopt and take back to America.

The next week this American man and his wife came.  This is what the girl recalled:  “It was like Goliath had come back to life.  I saw that man with his huge hands lift up each baby and I knew he loved every one of them as if they were his own.  I saw tears running down his face and I knew if they could they would have taken the whole lot.  Then he saw me out of the corner of his eye.  I was nine years old but I didn’t even weigh thirty pounds.  I was a scrawny thing.  I had worms in my body, lice in my hair, boils all over me and I was full of scars.  I wasn’t a pretty sight.  But the man came over to me and he rattled off something in English and I looked up at him.  And then he took this huge hand of his and he laid it on my face.  What was he saying?  He was saying, ‘I want this child.  This is the child who I want’.”

This is a picture of the Jesus I know.  Do you want to know what Jesus is like?  That’s Him.  The Jesus I know is one who peers beneath this ugliness of our spirit.  He’s the one who peers underneath the scars of our sin and He’s the one who’s able to look down to the very core of who we are to people made in the image of God Almighty.  And He wants to just take your face and cup it in His strong but gentle hands and He wants to look you in the eye and He wants to say to you, “I want this child.  This is the child I want.  I’ve been waiting from the foundation of the world for this moment to hold this face in my hands.  Because this is the child for Me.”  That’s the Jesus I know.

Jesus knows all about your stuff, your issues.  He sees it all.  He’s aware of it all.  He knows every secret you have.  He knows every sin you’ve ever committed.  Even still He wants to cup your face in His hands and look in your eyes and say, “I want this child.  This is the child I want to adopt.”  Because Jesus doesn’t see us the way we see ourselves.  And Jesus doesn’t see us the way other people see us.  Jesus sees us through heaven’s eyes.  And that’s a very different thing. 

That’s how God sees us.  As Peg sang for us, In heaven’s eyes there are no losersThere’s no hopeless cause.  Jesus said I want to adopt you to be My son, to be My daughter forever.  And if you ask me about the Jesus I know the first thing I would say to you is that’s how much He loves you.  That’s how much He cares for you to want to adopt you forever.

Then an incredible thing happened with that little nine-year-old Korean girl.  An amazing thing happened at that moment.  As that man was reaching out to her, “The hand on my face felt so good and inside I said, ‘Keep that up, don’t let your hand go.’  But nobody had ever showed that kind of affection to me before and I didn’t know how to respond.”  She said, “I yanked his hand off my face and I looked up at him and I spit at him and then I ran away.”  

Can you imagine that?  Here’s her window of opportunity.  Here’s her future.  Here’s hope and what does she do?  How does she respond?  She spits at him and she runs away. 

Haven’t we all done it to God?  Has there ever been a time in your life when you’ve felt spiritually open, when you felt like God was calling out to you, felt like you had such a huge desire to know this God who loves as no other?  What did you do then?  What happened? 

Maybe it was a Sunday School teacher.  You were a little kid and your parents took you to church and there was a Sunday School teacher you really liked and they liked you and they told you about Jesus.  It was a warm picture they painted about Jesus.  You were attracted to that Jesus.  Then what happened?  You got a little older and went to high school and it wasn’t cool to be a Christian and you sort of let the whole thing fade away. 

Or maybe you were getting married and the minister was talking about building your marriage around Jesus Christ.  It sounded like it made so much sense.  Something inside you said, “I want that.  I want to start over.  I want a firm foundation on God as I start this marriage.”  But then in the hectic, harried experience of the wedding and the honeymoon and the new house and all this stuff, you sort of lost the emotion.

Maybe you had a marital problem or a problem with your kids or a problem with a spouse, a financial issue, a medical issue or whatever it was and you were desperate at that moment and you called out to God, “I need to know You.  I want to know You,” and you made promises to Him.  “If You’ll come through for me, I’ll do ‘this’ ‘that’ and ‘the other’ for You.”  Then the crisis past and you forgot about the promises and you went on in life as always.

Let me tell you something else about this Jesus I know.  When you shut that window of opportunity, it was open and you let it shut, the amazing thing about the Jesus I know is that American couple at that orphanage.  The next day they came back to the orphanage.  And because they understood what was behind that little girl’s hurt and they understood the trauma she had gone through and all these things she had suffered, they understood all that and in spite of her initial rejection of them, they looked at all the children in the orphanage and they went back to that little girl, the one who spit in their eye, and they said, “We still want this child.”  And they adopted her.  They cleaned her up and they got her the medical attention that she needed.  They raised that child like she was their own.  She’s married today and she’s a follower of Jesus Christ.

The thing about the Jesus I know is you may have turned your back on Him.  You may have even spit in His eye.  But the Jesus I know is still there.  The Jesus I know has not turned His back on you.  Even though you’ve turned your back on Him the important thing to understand is He’s there. 

Maybe there’s something inside of you saying, “I want to know Jesus.  I want to meet Him.  I want to experience Him.”  If that is true in you then don’t let that window of opportunity shut.  Pursue God.  The truth of the matter is He’s already pursuing you.  That’s the first thing I’d tell you about the Jesus I know.  He loves you.  He wants to adopt you into His family. 

The Bible actually uses that word “adoption”.  The Bible says in Romans 8:23, “We wait eagerly [there’s something inside our spirit that makes us wait eagerly] for our adoption as sons and daughters of God.”

But there’s something else you need to know about the Jesus I know.  I’ll tell you a second story that will illuminate something else about Jesus that you need to know.

It’s about a woman who was baptized.  At her church they’d have two big baptism services a year and baptize hundreds of folks at once.  So when people would come up to be baptized what they would ask them to do was to take a little piece of paper and write down some of their sins.  Then they were to fold that piece of paper and when it was time for them to be baptized they would come up on the platform where there was a huge wooden cross on the stage.  They would take a pin and pin that piece of paper with their sins on it on the cross.  The Bible says in Colossians 2:14, “Our sins are nailed to the cross with Jesus Christ thereby fully paid for by His death.”  Then they’d turn and come to a pastor to be baptized.

I want to read you the words that this woman who was baptized had to say, “I remember my fear.  It was the most fear I ever remember as I wrote as tiny as I could on that piece of paper the word ‘abortion’.  I was so scared that someone would open up the paper and read it and find out it was me.  I almost wanted to get up and walk out of the auditorium during the service.  The guilt and the fear were that strong.  When my turn came, I walked up to the center of the stage toward the cross and I pinned the paper there and I was directed over to a pastor to be baptized.  He looked me straight in the eyes and I thought for sure that he was going to read in my eyes the terrible secret that I had kept from everybody for so long.  But instead I felt that God was telling me, ‘I love you.  It’s ok.  You are forgiven.’  I felt so much love for me, a terrible sinner.  It’s the first time I ever really felt forgiveness and unconditional love.  It was unbelievable.  And it was indescribable.” 

Is there some secret that is souring your soul?  Is there some secret so dark and so ugly you haven’t told anybody but it’s festered inside of you for years and years?  Maybe it’s some painful words that you’ve said to someone you loved dearly and you never took back those words.  You let them stay and you walked away.  Or maybe it’s the way you disappointed your children or disappointed your parents or disappointed a spouse.  You let them down.  They loved you and you loved them but you let them down in a key area and you never said you’re sorry.  Or maybe it’s a promise you made to someone and you meant it at the time but you broke it.  And you left them hanging and you never went back and said that you’re sorry.  Or maybe it’s a time you should have helped someone but you didn’t.  You just turned your back.  Or maybe there were choices you made in a lifestyle that you lived that hurt the people that you love the most.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe it’s not just one thing but a cumulative effect of all these little things that weighed you down over the years.

Something else about the Jesus I know.  Not only does He want to cup your face in His hands and adopt you as a son or daughter but He also wants to ease the burden of guilt that is weighing you down.  He wants to lift it off your shoulders.  He wants you to feel liberated like that woman felt liberated.  The Bible declares over and over again that we can have complete and total forgiveness for all our sins past, present and future.  The Lord said in Isaiah 43:45, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions, for My own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”  And in Psalm 103:12, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” 

Some of you have been Christians for a long time and you’ve forgotten that moment, not just when you were forgiven, not just when you understood you were forgiven, but you’ve forgotten what that moment felt like.  Years ago when God lifted you up and you felt it, you experienced the weight coming off your shoulders.  That woman is right.  It is indescribable.  It is unbelievable.  Incredible.  

Or maybe you’ve never felt it.  Maybe you still live under the weight of regret.  The Jesus I know wants to forgive you and He wants to liberate you and He wants you to experience that kind of freedom that woman experienced.  It will be nothing like you’ve ever experienced before.  He can do it.  He wants to do it.  He’s waiting to do it. 

Not only can Jesus forgive our past, He can rewrite our future.  Through His grace He can change us and He can transform us and He can put meaning into our life like nothing else can. 

That brings me to the third story I will tell you about the Jesus I know.  He wants to adopt us because He loves us.  He wants to forgive us and lift the weight of sin and guilt off us.  The third thing I would want you to know would come from a story about a guy named Billy Moore

Billy grew up in a tough city in Ohio.  He was very poor growing up.  He would spend time with a bunch of other teenagers in the community getting high and breaking into taverns at night and stealing cash registers, breaking into vending machines.  Then he got married and joined the army and his wife ended up leaving him.  He was destitute financially.  One night he went out with a friend of his and they had gotten drunk and were smoking grass and talking about how they needed money.  His friend started telling him, “Not far from here there is an old guy who lives in a house and I can give you the address.  This guy doesn’t believe in banks.  He’s got all his money in his bedroom.  That’s the rumor anyway.  The guy’s harmless.  Old guy, wouldn’t hurt a fly.”  Billy Moore’s listening to all this and he’s starting to hatch a plot.  He goes back to the barracks and gets his gun and loads it and he pulls up to the home and breaks in the front door. 

Put yourself in the position of this elderly man.  Gentle, kind seventy seven-year-old grandfather named Mr. Stapleton.  He’s in the bedroom and he hears somebody break in the front door of his house.  He’s scared to death.  He doesn’t know what to do.  He hears someone rummaging through things in his house and then he hears someone trying to break in the door to his bedroom.  He didn’t know what to do.  He had this shotgun for hunting purposes.  So, as the door broke in and as Billy started coming in the bedroom with his gun this elderly grandfather takes the shotgun and shoots in the direction of Billy and missed him.  And Billy takes his gun and he aims and he shoots twice and he kills that kindly old grandfather.  The guy falls dead.  Billy searched the body for any cash.  Steps over it and searches the bedroom, finds $5600.  Then he flees and goes to his trailer in rural Georgia.

It didn’t take long for the police to track Billy Moore down.  They found him the next day.  They came to his trailer, arrested him and charged him with capital murder.  A death penalty case – home invasion, murder.  And Billy was taken to prison and he sat that first night in his jail cell and he realized at that moment that life was over for him.  That was it.  There’s no hope.  There was an electric chair down the corridor from him and he knew he was going to be sitting in it before too long.  They were going to kill him and he was never ever going to see the light of day again. 

Billy’s mom was a Christian.  She calls some friends of hers that lived not too far from that jail, a husband and wife.  She said, “Would you please go talk to my son Billy?  He’s charged with murder and he’s going to face the death penalty.  And he doesn’t know Jesus.”  So this couple went over and asked if they could see Billy.  They sat down with Billy and they told him about the Jesus that they knew and they said, “Billy, God is willing to give you a fresh start.  He’s willing to forgive you.  He’s willing to give you a second chance at life.”  And Billy looked back at them dumfounded.  He said, “But you don’t understand.  I went into somebody’s house and I murdered an innocent old grandfather.  I’ve been charged with capital murder.  I am all out of fresh starts.  My life is over.  I'm going to die in that electric chair before too long.  It’s too late for a fresh start for me.” 

The pastor said, “Billy, it’s never too late.  The truth of the matter is I don’t care what you’ve done, God loves you.  God wants to adopt you as His son.  God wants to forgive you and lift this burden of guilt off your shoulders.  God can find a way to make your life count.”

Billy Moore not only heard the Lord in that couple, he saw Jesus in them.  He saw Jesus in their countenances and in their words and in their love.  He said later, “No one had ever told me that Jesus loved me.  No one ever told me that Jesus died for me.  This was the love I could feel.  It was a love I wanted.  This was a love I needed.”

So Billy Moore, as broken and as hopeless an individual as you’re ever going to meet, said yes to Jesus Christ, “Yes, forgive my sins.  Yes, adopt me as Your son.  Yes, do something.  I don’t know how You’re going to do it but do something to make whatever life I have left count for something.” 

God heard that prayer.  There was a little bathtub sitting there that they used for bathing the inmates that hadn’t been used in a while.  They got permission to fill the bathtub with water, and they put Billy in it kneeling, and they baptized him that day. 

When Billy Moore came out of that water he was a different man.  Billy’s life from that moment on began to change.  He went into court.  What could he do?  He couldn’t lie and say he didn’t do it.  He committed the murder.  He said, “I did it.  I killed him.  I intended to.  I went with a loaded gun.”  He pleaded guilty.  They brought down the gavel and said, “Death.  You’re going to the electric chair.”

But you know how court cases drag on and on.  It was sixteen years that Billy lived in a cage waiting to die.  During that time, Billy opened his heart and his life up more and more to God and God began to change this man’s attitude and his demeanor and his philosophy and his actions.  Everything about Billy began to change.  He became a model inmate.  The guards had a nickname for Billy.  They called him The Peacemaker.  The cellblock – Death Row – was a place of despair and hatred and hopelessness.  Billy led many other inmates to Jesus Christ and their lives began to change.  The whole environment Death Row changed for the good.  It went from a place of being hopeless and full of violence and hatred to a place of hope.  To a place where people cared for each other.  They studied the Bible together.  They asked God, “Change us!  Please.” 

Billy took 32 correspondence courses from a Bible college and he became such an effective counselor that local churches would send people they had to counsel to Death Row to Billy Moore to be counseled.  It was an amazing thing.  There were so many people on Death Row and beyond Death Row that were impacted for eternity because of a guy who lived in a cage for sixteen years. 

The question has never been will God forgive you?  That has never been the question.  The Bible tells us in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins to Him He can be depended upon to forgive us and cleanse us from every wrong.”  That has never been the question.  The question has always been will you allow God to forgive you?  Because if He can forgive a killer like Billy Moore who took the life of an innocent grandfather what in the world have you done that you think would be worse or beyond the ability of God to forgive.  The issue is not will He forgive you.  The issue is will you let Him.  And the issue has never been can God inject meaning into my life, can God change me as a person? 

The Bible says clearly in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “When someone becomes a Christian he becomes a brand new person inside.  He’s not the same any more.  A new life has begun.”  So the question is will you open your life to Him and to His power and His grace to change you from the inside out and to give you a purpose for your life that goes beyond eating and drinking and sleeping and working.  Will you allow Him to do that?  If He could take a guy like Billy Moore living in a cage for sixteen years and use him to impact so many people for good, think what He could do with you!  You’re free!  What could He do through you in your family?  With your children?  In your neighborhood?  At your workplace?  In this church?  Think what He could do through you. 

August of 1990 is when the court system finally caught up with Billy Moore.  The sentence had been affirmed all the way  to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court said, “That’s it!  Time to die!”  The date set for him to die was August 22, 1990.  As the hours ticked down to that moment his lawyers started calling Billy.  Billy was put in the Death Watch cage right next to the electric chair.  His lawyers said, “It was the strangest thing.  We called Billy with the intention of consoling him but what happened was Billy Moore consoled us.  Billy said things to us like, ‘Are you guys doing ok?  I know this is hard on you.  I know this is really difficult.  Are you getting through this ok?  Is there a way I can pray for you guys?’  It was an amazing thing.  We tried to console him.  He ended up consoling us.”

Why was that?  Because Billy Moore was ready to die.  Billy Moore was ready to meet Jesus face to face.  His reasoning was if Jesus loves me enough to forgive me of all my sins and to lift that guilt off my shoulders, if Jesus loves me enough to cup my face in His hands and say I want to adopt you as My son forever and ever, if Jesus loves me that much then I can trust Him with my eternity.  When I close my eyes in this world and I open them in the next I can trust if Jesus loves me that much He’s going to take care of me. 

On August 24 of 1990 just 7½ hours before they were going to shave Billy’s head and legs so the electrodes could be attached so the current could course through his body,  something absolutely amazing took place.  The Georgia Pardon and Parole Board decided to hold an emergency hearing about this model prisoner everyone was talking about and who’d had this incredible impact on so many lives.  And guess who came to this emergency hearing of the Pardon and Parole Board?  All of the relatives of the kindly old grandfather who was murdered by Billy Moore.  They got up before the Pardon and Parole Board and they begged them to spare the life of Billy Moore.  Why was that? 

“Because,” they said, “Many years ago Billy Moore asked for our forgiveness and we gave it to him.  How could we not forgive him?  God has forgiven him.  How could we not forgive Billy Moore?  If we’ve been forgiven our sins by God how could we withhold forgiveness from Billy.”  They said, “Please, spare his life.” 

The largest newspaper in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution ran an editorial that referred to Billy Moore as a saintly figure.  Mother Teresa called all the way from India and offered a simple bit of advice.  She said, “Just do what Jesus would do.” 

Billy knew something on that day beyond a shadow of a doubt.  He knew he was guilty.  He had committed a heinous crime.  No question about it.  He admitted it and under the law in the State of Georgia the appropriate justice to be meted out was for him to be strapped to that electric chair and be killed. 

But the five members of the Pardon and Parole Board did something so amazing and so unprecedented that the next day it made the front page of the New York Times.  They looked out at this repentant man and they said unanimously “We are going to show mercy to Billy Moore.”  And not only did they throw out the death penalty against Billy Moore they set the gears in motion for Billy Moore to be set free from jail, to go out in society.  The first time in America history that a confessed murderer on Death Row had been allowed to go free.  When that Parole and Pardon board announced its decision spontaneously everyone in the audience stood up and started singing “Amazing Grace”.  Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like Billy Moore.  What else did they do but sing the anthem of forgiven people.

That is a small taste of what grace is about.  It is undeserved forgiveness.  Billy Moore deserved to die but they said he could live.  Incredible clemency.  Unmerited favor.  Outrageous compassion.  Could I tell you where Billy Moore is going to be tomorrow morning?  He is going to be where he is every Sunday morning.  He’s in church where he goes to worship the God of the second chance.  Now Billy Moore is an ordained minister and his church is located in Rome, Georgia right between two public housing projects.  Billy Moore spends his spare time in Rome, Georgia finding all the people who had been forgotten by everybody else and reaching out to them and loving them and caring for them and providing for them.  That’s the heart of Billy Moore.

What changed Billy Moore?”  He said, “Plain and simple it was Jesus Christ.  He changed me in ways I never could have changed on my own.  He gave me a reason to live.  He helped me do the right thing for a change.  He gave me a heart for other people and He saved my soul.” 

That’s the Jesus I know!  The five things that we all need.  To change in us what we cannot change on our own.  To give us a reason to live.  To help us do the right thing.  To give us a heart for other people.  To save our souls.  The five things that we need most are the five things the Jesus I know offers to every single human being. 

And the most amazing thing of all is it’s free.  It’s a gift.  It cost Jesus everything.  It cost Jesus his suffering and death on the cross.  The price tag was huge for God, but to you it is free.  That’s the grace of God. 

And if you would say, “I want that.  I really want that.  How do I experience this?  How do I know this Jesus?”  You just do what Billy Moore did.  You go into court like he did and plead guilty.  In effect you go before the court of God and you say to Him, “I'm guilty.  I know I’ve done things I never should have done.  That’s why I feel this guilt on my shoulders.  I know that’s true and now I understand these wrongs that I’ve done that have separated me from You because You’re pure, You’re holy, You’re perfect.  And it’s created a distance between us.  I don’t want that distance anymore.  I want You to live inside of me.  I want You to change my life and I want to know You starting this moment forever.” 

The Jesus I know never turns a deaf ear to a prayer like that.  Never.  The Jesus I know would respond by forgiving, by adopting, by empowering and by changing your life.  How could we not want to know a Jesus like that?  If you’re being pulled right now towards Him, if the window of spiritual opportunity is open for you right now, why would you not want that in your life?  Don’t spit in His face again.  You can say “Yes”.  You can know Him.  You can meet Him today.  Then spend the rest of your life getting to know Him better.  It’ll be the biggest adventure you’ve ever had.  Then when you die you’ll go into eternity knowing Him perfectly forever.

Do you want to meet Him?  Do you want to know Him?  Let me give you an opportunity to do that. 

Prayer: 

If you want to meet Him right now just repeat these words in your mind.  God knows your heart.  He knows your mind.  He knows everything about you.  He’ll hear you.  Say, “Lord Jesus, I do want to know You.  I have committed all kinds of sin.  I’ve fallen so short of how I know You want me to live and I'm sorry for that and I want to turn from that.  I want to follow You.  I want to not just know You, I want to experience You.  I want You to take me to heaven.  I want You to change my life.  I want You to lead me from this moment on because, Lord Jesus, I love You.  How could I not love You when You want to forgive me, adopt me, empower me and change me.”

Father, for all who prayed that prayer we know that they are on the threshold of a great adventure of knowing You, of You working inside their hearts to change them.  The single greatest thing they’ve ever done is just simply saying yes to the freely offered gift of Christ.  We pray that You would work inside them to begin this transformation process even now and we thank You that You offer this out of Your love for them and we pray this in Jesus’ name.  Amen. 

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