This was a guest sermon, by Lance Johnson. There are no sermon notes, however, there was a PowerPoint presentation, which you can view online here.
You can click here to go to the Internet Archive page for this sermon, or listen using the player below.
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Genesis 25:19-21
19These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son: Abraham fathered Isaac, 20and Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife. 21And Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren. And the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.
Rebekah was barren so Isaac prayed that she would be able to bear and God granted his request. The ways of God never cease to amaze.
Isaac is the son through whom God is going to keep His covenant with Abraham. Isaac will be the father of a great nation and through him all the nations of the world shall be blessed. Through him the promised Messiah will come and save mankind from its sin. This is a plan forged before the world began.
And Rebekah is barren.
Are we to believe that God got caught on this one? “Oh shoot”, the Lord says “I should have chosen a woman who could bear children. How’d I let that one get by Me?” Of course not.
God chose Rebekah and God made her barren and God put Isaac to his knees to implore Him to open Rebekah’s womb. No doubt, Isaac reminded God of His covenant, of his love for his wife, of just how much Rebekah wanted children. And God heard him and answered his prayer.
Ask anything according to His will and we know that we have what it is that we asked for (I John 5:14, 15). But what if Isaac had not prayed? There is no such thing as “what if”, but whatever would have happened we know that Isaac’s prayerlessness would not have thwarted a plan made before He created the world. That He chooses to bring it to pass through prayer ought to make us to pray all the time.
Pray dear ones, pray. God does not tell us all the plans He has in the way that Isaac was told about God’s covenant with him, but He does tell us that He has plans and He tells us that they are brought to fruition through prayer. What an incentive to pray! What a God!!
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Genesis 25:12-18
12These are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s servant, bore to Abraham. 13 These are the names of the sons of Ishmael, named in the order of their birth: Nebaioth, the firstborn of Ishmael; and Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, 14Mishma, Dumah, Massa, 15Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. 16These are the sons of Ishmael and these are their names, by their villages and by their encampments, twelve princes according to their tribes. 17(These are the years of the life of Ishmael: 137 years. He breathed his last and died, and was gathered to his people.) 18 They settled from Havilah to Shur, which is opposite Egypt in the direction of Assyria. He settled over against all his kinsmen.
The genealogy of Ishmael is given in this chapter but it is left to hang there. Ishmael’s story drops off. The emphasis is on Isaac and his line. The ultimate interest is in Christ Himself and that is where all this is heading.
All these genealogies make sense when we get to the genealogy given by Matthew. The whole thing is about Jesus. Then couple it up with Galatians 3:7 and Romans 9:6-12 and Hebrews and the prophecies and there is a marvelous account unfolding here. And we are still a part of it and that is what is so mind warping.
Read all this and see the intricate weaving of a plan by God through the Jews, even their sin and rebellion and captivity and reclamation. God is the God of history and He unfolds a plan throughout the Scriptures that ought to make us rejoice. What God did in accomplishing His purposes in the Scriptures, He is still doing in accomplishing His purposes in bringing all people from all nations, languages and tribes, to Himself and to glory.
What a wonder that we are part of a plan by the One who orchestrates whole kingdoms to bring it to pass. Glory!
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Genesis 24:42-44, 50-51
42″I came today to the spring and said, ‘O LORD, the God of my master Abraham, if now you are prospering the way that I go, 43behold, I am standing by the spring of water. Let the virgin who comes out to draw water, to whom I shall say, “Please give me a little water from your jar to drink,” 44 and who will say to me, “Drink, and I will draw for your camels also,” let her be the woman whom the LORD has appointed for my master’s son.’
50Then Laban and Bethuel answered and said, “The thing has come from the LORD; we cannot speak to you bad or good. 51Behold, Rebekah is before you; take her and go, and let her be the wife of your master’s son, as the LORD has spoken.”
When Abraham’s servant told Rebekah’s brother Laban how the events took place that led him to see that Rebekah was the wife that God had chosen, Laban could not argue. It was obviously God at work.
It is not always easy to interpret the work of God in our lives. But we can always be sure He is working.
Even when something is not what we want or is a transgression of the Scriptures, we do well to consider the providence of God at work in all our situations. The fact that God is at work even when the Scriptures are violated by others is a great consolation.
In Laban’s case, the confluence of events was so obviously a work of God that he could put forward no argument to prevent the servant from declaring that this woman was to be Isaac’s wife. Watch life with both eyes open. It is a blind person who fails to see the providence of God at work in the events of his life, whether those events be what he wants or not.
Joseph credited God for being at work through the evil of his brothers. “You meant it for evil, God meant it for Good”. Job saw the hand of God even in the tragedies he was enduring – “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away”. Jesus spoke of God at work in the blindness of a man He was about to heal “This [blindness] happened so that the works of God might be glorified”.
Do not look for miracles. Look for providence. You will see God and that is a stunning sight.
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You can click here to go to the Internet Archive page for this sermon, or listen to the sermon using the player below.
EFFECTIVE FAITH
Thistletown Baptist Church
February 15, 2009
Philemon 1:6 (ESV)
and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ.
I Introduction
1. We are in our final week of messages relating to the theme of our Missions Conference, “Let Your Light
Shine”. The focus of the conference is “home missions”, that is, the fact that missions is not just a foreign activity. There are plenty of people in our neighbourhoods, our city, our country, who need to hear the Gospel. There are plenty of people, I have no doubt, within a stone’s throw of this building, who haven’t a clue what the basic information of the Gospel is. We live in a mission field.
2. So far -
Matthew 5:13-16
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. [14] “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. [15] Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. [16] In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
The main point – Be pure salt. Don’t let the impurities of the world make you unfit for salting the culture the way you are called to do.
1 Peter 2:9-10 (ESV)
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. [10] Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Main point – We are a chosen nation … so that we may proclaim HIS light. He is the light and we want people to see and honour Him.
Luke 11:33-36 – “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. [34] Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. [35] Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. [36] If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.”
Main point – In conjunction with the baptism of two people last week – make sure you are in the light. The heart is deceitful and it is possible for people to think theyv are believers when in fact they are not.
3. Today, the text we are looking at does not have the word “light” in it. But it is about light. One book I
was reading this week about Philemon 6 specifically mentioned that what Paul says in there is so that Philemon’s light might shine before men and that people would therefore glorify their Father who is in heaven. This text we are in this morning, while not referring directly to light, is a demonstration of what it means to be light in the world.
4. Dear Christian, let me ask you this. Do you want to be light? Do you long to be so used by God that you
shine in the world as a follower of Jesus Christ and some, even if it is only one, turn and glorify your Father in heaven because you showed them your Light?
What we are gong to see this morning is a man who was told how he could do that and try to relate what Paul said to him, to our situation. Continue reading
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You can click here to go to the Internet Archive page for this sermon, or listen to the sermon using the player below.
DARK LIGHT
Thistletown Baptist Church
February 8, 2009
Luke 11:33-36 – “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. [34] Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. [35] Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. [36] If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.”
I Introduction
We continue working our way up to our Missions Conference by focussing our attention on a few texts of Scripture that speak about the concept of “light”. The theme of our conference this year is “Let Your Light Shine” and we are simply preparing ourselves for the conference with this emphasis on light.
This morning we celebrated the baptism of two people. The only requirement for baptism in the Bible is a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. That means that all that is required for someone to be baptized is that they are trusting Jesus Christ to save them from their sins. Before Samantha and Colleen were baptised we insisted that they both take baptism classes. When the classes were done they had to write out a testimony of how they came to know the Lord. They had to read the church covenant and doctrinal statement of the church and agree to them both. After that they had to meet with an elder and one other church leader to be interviewed to see if they were ready for baptism. Why all this if all that is required to be baptized is to trust Christ? We want to make sure that they are sure of what they are doing and that they are really ready. Are they deceiving themselves? Do they want to be baptized for the wrong reasons? (A sense of belonging, to be saved, so they can take communion, because it would make mom and dad happy, make my friends happy …) Do they think that they are Christians when in fact they are not? Do they have light that is dark? Continue reading
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Psalm 150:2 -
1 Praise the LORD!Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens!
2Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his excellent greatness!3Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
4Praise him with tambourine and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
5Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
6Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!
How does one praise God appropriately? To think that it is possible is to make God small. But that does not mean that we can never praise God in a way that He accepts.
We cannot praise God to the degree that He is great. The version quoted above says praise God “according to” His greatness. Other translations say “for” His greatness.
This is a call to praise God with an understanding that He is far above whatever we are able to attribute to Him. It is a call to praise Him from our hearts, in sincerity, in truth, without hypocrisy, without our minds wandering off somewhere else. But we simply cannot praise Him to the degree that He is great.
But we can praise God through Jesus Christ. Come to God through Christ. There is no other way to approach Him, either as a repentant sinner or as a blood bought child. God dwells, after all, in unapproachable light. If He is unapproachable, how can we approach in worship?
We approach through Christ. To praise God through Christ is to praise God according to His excellent greatness. We praise God through Christ, in Christ, by Christ. And God counts all that and more as if Christ was the One approaching .
That is the only way to worship God according to His excellent greatness. Lost people simply cannot worship God acceptably and far too many believers come to worship thinking that it is a matter of them being holy enough, obedient enough, or strong enough.
We certainly must not worship with wrong altitudes and wrong motives and actions. But we must never think that we are ever able to come into the presence of God on our own. We can only worship God through Christ. The only acceptable One is Christ Himself and we are hidden in Him and He is the reason we can approach God. This is a great miracle.
Today, when you pray, marvel that you can. Because it took the death of the Son of God to enable you to do so, as it did for every act of worship. Oh what God has done.
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Genesis 24:10-21
10Then the servant took ten of his master’s camels and departed, taking all sorts of choice gifts from his master; and he arose and went to Mesopotamia to the city of Nahor. 11And he made the camels kneel down outside the city by the well of water at the time of evening, the time when women go out to draw water. 12And he said, “O LORD, God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham. 13Behold, I am standing by the spring of water, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water. 14Let the young woman to whom I shall say, ‘Please let down your jar that I may drink,’ and who shall say, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels’-let her be the one whom you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master.”
15Before he had finished speaking, behold, Rebekah, who was born to Bethuel the son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, came out with her water jar on her shoulder. 16The young woman was very attractive in appearance, a maiden whom no man had known. She went down to the spring and filled her jar and came up. 17Then the servant ran to meet her and said, “Please give me a little water to drink from your jar.” 18She said, “Drink, my lord.” And she quickly let down her jar upon her hand and gave him a drink. 19When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, “I will draw water for your camels also, until they have finished drinking.” 20So she quickly emptied her jar into the trough and ran again to the well to draw water, and she drew for all his camels. 21The man gazed at her in silence to learn whether the LORD had prospered his journey or not.
Find a miracle in the account of Abraham’s servant going back to Abraham’s homeland to find a wife for Isaac. You will look in vain. There is no miracle. But there sure is providence in big ways.
To fail to see God at work in this account is to fail to see evidence of God anywhere. Abraham tells his servant to find a wife for Isaac from his own land and his own family (verses 4 and 37f). The servant does not go to the place openly searching for the relatives of Abraham. He simply prays that God would lead him to the one that Isaac should marry. And Rebekah, a granddaughter of Abraham’s brother comes out and proves to be the one Isaac will marry.
Why did she come out at that time and why did she do as the servant had prayed the woman who was to marry Isaac should do? Because God was far ahead of everyone involved in the whole process in the first place. Rebekah, remember, is the mother of Jacob and Esau and she will favour Jacob over Esau and she will concoct a plan for Jacob to receive the blessing from Isaac instead of Esau.
She was a schemer and what she did was wrong and Paul tells us in Romans 9:10-12 -
And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, [11] though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad-in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of his call- [12] she was told, “The older will serve the younger.”
Rebekah was, even in her sin, fulfilling the larger plan of God. God was not guilty of the sin and Rebekah is not off the hook because God used it for His purposes. But God was seeing to it, in the selection of a wife for Isaac, that she would become his wife. What a God.
When you read your Bible, look for the over ruling providences of God in situations where people do what they should not and God uses it to accomplish purposes that He had previously determined to do. See Acts 2:23 as perhaps the most famous example of this.
Today, rejoice in the fact that God’s purposes cannot be thwarted. He even uses evil to get His will accomplished. If He could not and did not, He would not be God.
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Genesis 24:1-9 -
1Now Abraham was old, well advanced in years. And the LORD had blessed Abraham in all things. 2And Abraham said to his servant, the oldest of his household, who had charge of all that he had, “Put your hand under my thigh, 3that I may make you swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell, 4 but will go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac.” 5The servant said to him, “Perhaps the woman may not be willing to follow me to this land. Must I then take your son back to the land from which you came?” 6Abraham said to him, “See to it that you do not take my son back there. 7The LORD, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my kindred, and who spoke to me and swore to me, ‘To your offspring I will give this land,’ he will send his angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son from there. 8But if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from this oath of mine; only you must not take my son back there.” 9So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master and swore to him concerning this matter.
Abraham sends his servant back to his ancestral homeland to find a wife for Isaac. A country that he left over 100 years previous he still refers to as “my country”. This is not unusual and we see this all the time from even long term immigrants to a country.
The act of faith in Abraham in this account is his insistence that Isaac not go back with the servant. This is to keep Isaac from settling there, a possibility that might arise if Isaac liked it there or if his future wife refused to leave.
While Abraham loves his native homeland he also loves his God and wants Isaac to receive the benefits of the covenant made with him. What an encouraging note this is. How many missionaries, pastors, ordinary believers are in a place not of their choosing because they believe they are where God wants them? God does not give us a hatred for the place that we came from, but He does give us a love for Him and His cause, that is bigger.
Today, we should labour with all our might, realizing that we are in the service of God in the place where He has put us, and we should be thankful that we can look back with fondness on the places of our birth and know that God used that place to fit us for the work we am now doing here.
This can also be applied in a spiritual sense. Jesus Christ has rescued us from a past life that was ruining us for eternity. There may be temptations to go back at times but where God has put us is far, far better.
Let us also remember that Jesus Himself left glory for us and when He was about to be handed over to be crucified and felt the temptation to run, prayed “not my will but yours be done.”
Today, see your location, your situation, your circumstances, as an opportunity for service to the God who has you where you are for the purpose of demonstrating Him to the world.
What a God we serve.
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