Children—James Ferguson
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I see there's a lot of kids here in the front row and that's wonderful. If there's any more who want to come and join in the front row, that would be great.
Maybe we'll start off by singing a hymn. And so who would like to give out the first song?
Yes.
Three.
40 OK #40 And we'll get that one after OK, Henry.
#40.
You guys must have been talking. You both wanted the same, the same song. That's that's wonderful.
#40 is Jesus loves me. And let's start by singing that one Jesus loves me.
Is strong, yeah, I feel like.
I did. I belong to me.
I mean, yeah.
Well.
I can't help me so.
Our brother yesterday read a verse in first Peter 5 and it said feed the flock of God, which is among you. Now I just want to read one more verse that's connected to that one and it's in John.
21.
And just the last part of verse 15, the Lord Jesus says to Peter, he says feed my lamb. And so that's why we have this children's meeting this morning because if everybody here, if we're all sheep, well we've got some smaller sheep in the front rows here. So we got some lambs. And it's important that not only do the sheep get fed, but that the lambs get fed too.
00:05:12
And so I hope that all the the children enjoy this meeting because it's it's meant, meant for you. So let's sing another hymn. Who has one that they'd like to sing? Yes, 39.
1A friendly.
It's all I can do. I'm greatly prepared. Whoa.
Nsnoise.
Nsnoise.
You know what the Lord loves to hear from each one of us?
And he wants to hear from each one of your children as well. So in my family, every night before we go to bed, we, we thank the Lord. And sometimes, and I remember being young too, sometimes you're going to bed and you're just not feeling too thankful. There's, uh, you just want to go to sleep. But I try to tell my kids.
Let's just think of one thing that we can be thankful for tonight.
Maybe it's the nice cozy bed that you have to sleep in, or maybe it's the fact that you have toys. But let's thank the Lord for one thing every night. And I think the Lord appreciates that if we can think of even just one small thing to thank Him for. And as we grow older, I think we'll find that there's many more things that we can thank Him for as well, instead of just one thing.
OK, who has another song?
41.
That's the number 41.
Around the throne.
OK. And you don't have anything for myself, but that is what I need to like. We'll be out of rain.
Well, they don't even have a lot of.
00:10:02
Birthday sinking.
Umm, I mean, through all of our business, it's been a problem. I said, Oh no, no, no, no, no.
But bring them to the world.
I can't say we're always dreams and joy and love about any industrial grandparents.
Nsnoise.
Who has another song they like to sing Tom?
#5.
Oh, happy day.
Oh my God.
Well, make it falling hard to each other. I need to get on the lake and someone's gone.
I do know where.
Transaction.
I am my boy and he is calling his grandmother and I followed her. Like your son's house. The one thing called I have to be there and I have to be glad to be there.
No, I didn't give us a call to my Timberwares.
He started how to do what you're right.
Home.
Nsnoise.
9034 6.
Nsnoise.
And for those of us here who do have our sins washed away, we can look back on that day and know that that was a happy day when all that burden, that heavy load of sins that we were carrying, the Lord Jesus washed him away with his precious blood.
00:15:01
Let's pause. We'll thank the Lord.
And then maybe we can sing one more.
Let's close our eyes.
Our God and our Father, we thank you that we can come here this morning and we can learn about the Lord Jesus our Savior, that we can open up your precious word to us. We pray that the children here would listen and learn and enjoy the Lord Jesus. And we pray that if there's any here who do not know you, Lord.
That today they would not wait any longer, they would want their sins washed away. And today might be that happy day for them. So we would commit this time to our God and.
Just pray that the message would be clear and simple in Jesus name, Amen.
All right, who wants to give possibly the last one, Savannah 14, OK.
I'd say possibly because maybe we'll sing one at the end but haven't decided yet #14.
Have you been to?
His brains and how hard he was.
Over your heart and the blood in the soul might take Wow.
Oh, so far then, while I can die, No. Why do you want to stay in the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah?
OK, does anybody have a memory verse that they learned for this week that they would be willing to to say this morning?
OK, we have some over here. OK, go.
Psalm 23. Six. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I'll dwell in the House of the Lord forever. Psalm 23/6.
756 and three OH.
What time? I'm afraid I was trusting the 5066.
There's some Sev, some 7116.
I will go on the strength of the Lord God. Psalm 7116.
OK did anybody else wanna say a memory verse?
Romans 839.
So I'm persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor powers northern present, nor things to come, nor light, nor debt, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of Christ, that love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
00:20:31
15 Verse 26 The thoughts of the Lord are about our abomination to the Lord, but pure, but the words of the pure are pleasant words.
OK, anybody? Anybody else have one that they wanna say?
Wonderful that.
From a young age that you kids can learn these Bible verses.
I think of Bible verse and Colossians. It says it says let the word of Christ dwell in you richly and if you.
Memorize a little portion of the word of God. It's like that is inside of you because you could say it at any point in time to somebody. And that's a really valuable tool to have. So I encourage all of you children to continue working hard on memorizing your verses. OK, so let's get into the the talk.
Umm, after we're done, I I've got quite a few questions for your kids, so I hope that you'll help me out, because I don't.
Really want to do all the talking.
And if everybody listens and helps me out, then we have treats at the end of Sunday school at the end of the meeting, OK. And so make sure you grab one after. So I got them in my pocket here.
And what is this?
Yeah, an envelope. OK. And what, what do you get in an envelope? What? What might you get? Yeah, a letter, Right. And I know my kids, they love going out to the mailbox when they hear the the mail person coming along and checking to see if there's any mail. Now, usually it's Flyers or bills. And so that's not always exciting, but every once in a while, somebody writes us a letter.
Who cares about us? And that is exciting when you get a letter in the mail. And so I want to read a very short letter to you. I have a letter in my hand and it's actually in this hand. And I don't think we'll read all of it, but, uh, but we'll touch on a bunch of it. And it's, umm, the letter that Jude wrote.
Has anyone heard of Jude here? It's right at the end of.
Your Bible.
And this letter is full of interesting pictures, so.
We'll pause as we go through it and.
We'll try to get your kids to understand a little bit about what June is trying to say. But we know that even though Jude wrote this, it was really God who wrote it. And so when a letter comes to our house, we like to see who is the letter from and who is the letter written to. And so.
At the start of this letter, the first verse, it says Jude.
The servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James to them that are sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ and called.
So this letter is from a man named Jude and it's written, written to you, written to us. Now who is Jude? That is the question, and I could be wrong, but this is very interesting. I'm just going to read a verse in Matthew chapter 13.
And it tells us who this man Jude is.
And Matthew 13 and verse 55, people are asking questions about the Lord Jesus. They say, is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary and his brethren James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?
So we see here the Lord Jesus had four, had four brothers, James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. And we know that Jude in his letter said that he was a brother of James. So could it be that Jude was a brother of the Lord Jesus?
00:25:10
Maybe, but here his name is called Judas.
But in his letter he's called Jude. Why? If he's the same person, why do you think he might wanna go by Jude and not Judas? Anyone have any ideas?
Do you have an idea? Judas Iscariot? Yeah, we learned all about Judas Iscariot last night.
And I wonder if Jude went by Jude because he didn't want to have the same name as that disciple who betrayed the Lord.
Now let's just think about this for a minute. So, Jude.
If he's a younger brother of the Lord Jesus.
Put yourselves in Jude's shoes and what would it be like if you're?
I guess so, yeah. What would it be like if your oldest brother was perfect?
Would would it be hard for you to?
To follow that that example, your parents would always be telling Jude, why can't you be like your older brother Jesus? Because the Lord Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life. We know that about him, don't we?
And so poor Jude, I wonder what he thought of his oldest brother. I want to remind you kids of the story of Joseph.
Joseph. He wasn't perfect, but Joseph followed the Lord. And did Joseph's brothers appreciate him?
No.
No, they didn't. They didn't really appreciate that. And so I just wonder if if Jude might have grown up as a child and not really had an appreciation for Jesus and who he was, but.
This letter that we have it, there's a lot of Gray showing here. And it's awesome that the Lord Jesus would choose his brother Jude, who maybe didn't appreciate him as a as a kid, but later on came to appreciate his older brother, not just as a good older brother, but as his Lord and savior. So let's let's read on. Let's see what Jude has to tell us here.
First two, he says, Mercy on to you, peace and love be multiplied.
Who's in about grade 4 here?
Marissa Alright, so do you know all about multiplication? Yeah. So if we have 10 + 10, what does that equal 20? But if we have 10 * 10100? And that is what Jude wants, mercy, peace and love, he wants it to be multiplied. And so if for those of us who can do a little bit of math, we know that.
He wants us to have those things in abundance, and it's through the Lord Jesus.
That we have those.
So in verse three Jude says.
That he wants to write to them because he wants.
He feels that they need to earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered onto the Saints. And so the faith delivered on to the Saints we have written in this book. And Jude wants all of us to be reading our Bibles carefully. And he's gonna go back and he's gonna talk about some things that happened in the Old Testament. And he expects us to be familiar with them. So we'll we'll talk about them.
In verse 4.
He wants to warn them.
Against.
Against certain teachers. Now who here goes to school?
OK, most of you kids do.
And trip, you probably have a teacher, right? Yeah. What's their name?
OK. And what, what do teachers do?
00:30:05
OK, Yeah. So sometimes they discipline you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. What do teachers do, Ernie? They, they teach you. Yeah. So. So you learn from them, right.
And I think that when we're in the lower grade, we would expect that our teachers would be telling us the truth. Is that not right? Like when they when they show us how to add, they might say 1 + 1 equals. What does that equal? Two? Yeah. So what if they said 1 + 1 = 3?
Hi. Some funny laughs. Yeah, you'd laugh. Yeah. Right. Because they're. Because they're not telling the truth, are they? And.
You wouldn't believe them, but if they continued to tell you that they're older and wiser, and if they kept saying it over and over again, you know what? You might actually start to believe that. I don't know, maybe 1 + 1 does equal 3 and.
So Jude was warning against these teachers and they're called false teachers and he said that they were gonna gonna creep in amongst the flock.
And they were going to be telling lies, telling lies about the Lord Jesus. They're going to be telling lies.
About what we as Christians should do, and we need to be on guard.
Do you wanna go see Bob and Jenna?
And so Jude wants to remind these people about some things that happened. He talks about the people who came out of Egypt.
Did they all get into the promised land? All the people who came out of Egypt?
Tripp says no, and Tripp is absolutely right. We know that because of unbelief. Many of them, most of them except for Joshua and Caleb, I believe they died in the wilderness.
He talks about in verse 7 two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. Does anybody know what happened to those cities? Savannah.
God sent fire and brimstone and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they did not obey, they did not believe.
And so he's reminding.
Us of the fact that God has judged in the past.
And God is going to judge again in the future for those who do not believe.
So he talks more about these false teachers. He says one thing. He says they've gone in the way of Cain in verse 11. Now does anybody know who Cain is?
Yeah, Cain killed his brother Abel, didn't he?
It also says that these teachers, they've run greedily after the error of Balaam, they say. Does anybody know who Balaam is? Never getting a little more obscure.
Yeah, Salem. No. But Balaam wasn't a false God.
But maybe to help you out, yeah. Do you know Max?
He was he was a false teacher, that's for sure. But does anyone know anything kind of unique about about Balaam? He wrote an animal. OK, Do you know Molly? He wrote a donkey. And what did the donkey do?
Yeah, the the donkey saw an Angel dot and the donkey did something very strange. Yep, the donkey talked to Balaam.
And and the donkey said to bail him. What are you doing to me? Now that would be strange, wouldn't it? And Jude is, is reminding us of all these stories in the Old Testament. There's one more.
He talks about Korah.
Inverse 11.
Does anyone know what happened to Cora? And this is for the young people too.
00:35:07
There's a lot of references in this book and it's good that if we don't recognize them because some of these stories are buried in in the Old Testament, We need to study our Bible and figure out well, what is Jude trying to say? Because this letter it's written to us in in verse one. So we need to we need to understand what he's saying.
Does anyone know what happened to Cora?
No, yes. OK. Well, Cora.
He rebelled against Moses and the earth actually opened up, and Korah and others were swallowed up by the earth because they would not obey God.
OK, verse 12.
These false teachers as well, He says that they are clouds without water, clouds without rain. Now you might think, oh, I like clouds without rain. The clouds come and they they block the sun. So it's nice and cool, but then it doesn't rain. So I can go outside to play. But picture yourself for a minute. OK as a farmer, OK as a farmer who has crops.
And it hasn't rained.
For a long, long time. And you're wondering if your plants are gonna survive. This is your. This is how you make money. This is your food. And you check the weather and it looks like it's gonna rain that night. Lots and lots of rain.
And all of a sudden, you see a cloud coming along, a nice dark cloud. And you're so hopeful it's gonna just pour rain down on your crops and they're gonna survive, OK? And then this cloud comes along, moves over your field.
And just slowly keeps going without giving a drop of rain. How disappointing would that be?
You were hoping so much for rain and it didn't happen. That is what these teachers are like. They're like a cloud without rain.
Another example.
Is trees whose fruit wither it or without fruit.
Now, we went apple picking a month ago or so, and these apple trees were full of apples. But imagine we'd be pretty dismayed if we showed up to the apple farm at the right season, went into the field, and there were no apples to pick.
We are looking forward so much to picking some apples and eating them and there's nothing there once again that's like these false teachers. They're like trees without any fruit on them.
Now I've got AI got a star here, OK.
And here's another example of what these.
False teachers are like now.
For ships today, how do you think they know where they're going? Anyone know Savannah?
They follow the sun. They might do that, but I feel like, feel like most ships today would have GPS in them and they'd follow their GPS and it would get them to where they're going. But you know what? Back in the Bible times, they didn't have GPS, did they? And so you.
You know what they would follow what they'd they'd look up at the sky and they would follow the stars to figure out where they need to go. Now, so we know that there's a a star called the North Star.
So what part of where do you think the North Star would be? It would be in the in the north, right? And so if you head for the North Star, you'd be heading north. But these false teachers, it says they are wandering stars. So imagine if you let's say that this direction is north, I'm going to take a guess that maybe it is. Imagine if you want to go north, so you head for the North Star, but the North Star wandered its way over here.
To the South.
And you're still following the North Star. You'd be going the wrong direction. Isn't that right? If the star that you're trying to follow wanders away, you're completely lost.
00:40:05
And that is what these false teachers are. Like you, we don't want to follow them. We will be completely lost.
Now in verse 14.
Very interesting verse.
Jude talks about a man named Enoch who we can read about right at the start of the Bible and somehow through God he knew that Enoch said these words and Enoch said behold the Lord cometh with 10,000 of his Saints.
And if we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that he died for our sins.
We are one of those Saints that will be coming with the Lord very soon, and the Lord is going to come and He's going to put things right down here in this world.
Verse 15 says that he's going to execute judgment upon all. And so all the stories that we've been referring to in the Old Testament, a lot of them have to do with judgment.
And so this book might sound a little bit harsh, but I think it's a a really good word for all of us today because we see a lot of crazy things going on.
In verse 15.
There's a word ungodly. Can anyone with the Bible count how many times it says ungodly?
In that verse.
Jude verse 15.
Four times.
That's who the Lord is going to come, and he's going to execute judgment upon these these ungodly ones.
But this book isn't all doom and gloom. I think of the verse.
Umm, it's in Colossians chapter four. Let me just flip to it for a second. Oh no, I know it. It says let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt. And so Jude is writing this letter. There's some gracious words in this letter and especially at the end here. He has something for each one of us.
He says.
That we need to build up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost. So it's important that at home and at school that we remember the Lord Jesus, what he's done for us on the cross, and that we need to live for him.
Praying in the Holy Ghost I've really appreciated over the past couple days.
So many.
Have just mentioned to me that they're praying for me and they're not only praying for me, but they're praying for each one of you. And so many in this room care about you just like how Jude does and especially just like how the Lord Jesus cares for each one of you. And so many in this room are praying that each one of you would know the Lord Jesus as your Savior and that you'd wanna, you'd wanna go on for him.
Verse 21 Says.
Keep yourselves.
In the love of God, now it's a nice sunny day outside today.
And so you can go outside and you can stand in the sunshine, or you can choose to stand in a shadow, can't you? And you won't. You won't really feel the sun, will you?
And that's what it's like with the love of God. It's not that God's love.
Isn't there anymore.
But we can choose to stand in it and enjoy it, or we can choose to stand in the shadows and be a little chilly. So let's make sure that we're standing, that we're keeping ourselves and the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. We know He's coming back soon to take anyone who believes in Him back to his Father's home. What a day that will be.
Let's go down to the last verse.
Verse 24.
Says now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy. Do you know that it's the Lord Jesus who can, who's going to keep us? He wants to keep each one of you. He wants to keep us from falling, falling into sin, doing things that we shouldn't. And you know what? He's able.
00:45:11
The last verse to the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. I like how this verse ends.
Or how this chapter ends. The last word is power. The Lord Jesus gets the glory.
He's he gets the majesty, the dominion, he has the power. And it's so nice that he reminds us of this because with what we've been reading with these false teachers coming in and when we look around us, we might think, oh man, things are looking pretty bad. But.
He has the power both now and ever. Amen. And this is our Savior that we have. This is the one who Jude wanted to write about. For one, his older brother Jesus, But most importantly, his Savior, the one who died on the cross for his sins. And he gives a warning to each one of us, especially in these last days that we live in.
That we should. We should wanna live our lives.
For the Lord, be obedient to our parents.
Be kind to one another and all those things.
Let's pray.
Our God and our Father, we thank you so much for your word that we could have before us. We pray for these children that they would believe it, want it for themselves, desire to read it, want their parents to read it to them or God. We, we pray for their souls. We pray that you would keep and preserve them. So we thank you for this time we could spend and we just would give thanks.
In the name of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.