Children—Jeff Lunden
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We can say the memory verse. Then I have a little story to tell you. So let's look to the Lord for His help first, OK? Our loving God and our Father. We thank you for these children that are here this morning to sit under the sound of the word of God. We thank you for your goodness that you want the children and adults too to come to you. We thank you for the good news of the gospel that goes out that calls children and men and women to come unto the Savior.
So we pray for help this morning as we open the word of God together, that there be a little something that we could glean from it and that we could understand.
And we pray for any that are here today that might not have taken the Lord Jesus as their savior, that they would not delay, but that they would come as soon as they possibly can. So we just pray for help now, and we pray in Jesus precious name. Amen.
Now, I suppose that you all learned the Sunday School verse that was in here.
And I think what we ought to do You didn't learn it. Well, let's let's How about if we just say it all together instead of everybody saying it individually then. And I'll lead it and then if I mess up then you can say the word. If I missed the word and we can all say it together. So I'll count to three and then we'll say it all together. It's let me say it first and then we'll all say it together. OK, then we can say we've all said the Sunday School first. It's if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. Romans 10/9 OK 123.
If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus.
And believe in thine heart that God raised him from the dead. Thou shalt be saved, Romans 10/9 Good. So we all said it, and I think probably most of you already memorized it too.
I'd like to talk to you about a tell you a little story about a hunting trip that I went on. No animals got hurt and they never do when I go hunting.
But I met some guys who had four problems, and those 4 problems are problems that are the same for you and you and you and you for each one of us here.
That the Bible talks about those kinds of problems. And so I want to tell you the story.
I went hunting up on a place called Windy Point and the road up to Windy Point is a narrow Rd. that goes up a steep hill. It goes up across the hill and the hill is very steep like this. So when you go up Windy Point Rd. friends told me before, when you go up there, don't go in the snow because if you go in the snow, you'll probably slide off the road and fall right off the Cliff. You look on the drive on the passenger side, you look out the window and you can see the bottoms of trees, the trunks of trees, where they go in the ground.
You look off the left side. Sometimes you see the middle of the tree, sometimes you just see the top of the tree, and sometimes you see no tree at all. It just goes like that, and you see trees 2 miles away. It's just a Cliff. And when you go up this road, it's kind of steep and it's rocky, and sometimes the back wheels go and they start jumping over toward the side, and it makes you want to kind of sit in the middle of the car, as if that would help because it feels like the whole car is going to go right off the edge.
But you know, there's no choice when you go up that road, there's two tracks and you can't turn to the right or to the left and get into a problem. You have to go straight up that road. It reminds me about the narrow Rd. that we read about. There's that there's a Broadway and a narrow way, and that's the narrow way that goes right straight up. But when you get to the top of windy point, the road turns like this and you're on divide Ridge and it's a big, wide field.
And the road changes completely because there you can see that people first went one way and then probably people followed them, and then all the dirt got wore away and the rain washed the dirt out and the track got deeper and deeper and had big rocks in it. And pretty soon it was too rocky to go that way. So people went another way and that happened again and again. And pretty soon it looks like it looks like you took spaghetti and laid it out on the table, just lines going like this all over. And you can't. It's the Broadway. And everybody chooses their own way.
There's a narrow way and a Broadway, isn't there in the scripture. The Broadway is the way that everybody chooses. And that says, and the Scripture says that's the road to destruction. The narrow way is the way to lie. So anyway, I was going up this Broadway and it was very bumpy, lots of big rocks, and I was winding my way, going about as fast as you could go if you walked. And I thought to myself, I'm sure glad that my pickup has big tires and it sits up high off the ground.
00:05:09
So that the bottom of my truck isn't banging on the rocks. And about the time I thought that, I looked up way ahead of me where the road kind of disappeared into the trees and I saw a little Ford Focus coming out of the woods. That's a little car will load to the ground. And I thought, what in the world are those guys doing here? And they came toward me and they were doing the same thing I was doing, winding back and forth, trying to find the smoothest path. Sometimes I was on the left hand side of the road.
And they were on the right, and then they were going back and forth. We were going fast, we to crash into each other, but we were going really slow.
Finally those guys came up and they got next near me and I could see that the driver wanted to talk to me. He rolled down his window and he kept looking up and so when he got right next to me, we stopped. I rolled down my window and he said a funny thing. I thought he'd say hi or man sure is a bumpy road or seen any deer or anything like that.
You know what he said.
You got a pair of pliers, That's what he said. You got a pair of pliers?
Not this strange thing to say, but I thought, well, it must be a problem if he that's he didn't even say hi. He said you got a pair of pliers so I pulled off and he pulled off.
And I got out. I said, yeah, I got a I got a pair of pliers. You know what pliers are? You know what pliers. You don't know what pliers are. Let me show you pliers. Here's some pliers, and they're for squeezing stuff. Everybody know what pliers are.
Ed, your dad has some right.
Yeah, there's different kinds of pliers. This is the kind of pliers I had. So I got out and I before I even handed him my pliers, he said something else that must have been troubling him even more because he said.
This road comes out at White Past, doesn't it?
Well, you know, I measured it.
Just on the way over here this time and where that road comes out is 27.1 miles from White Pass.
I realized that man was lost. That's the first thing I want to talk about, about being lost.
He I said where do you come from? He said, well, I came from Yakima and he told me how he went on one road and then another. And then they went on some roads that weren't marked and then they went through a gravel pit and then they didn't know where they went and they finally ended up on this road and he thought they were near White Pass.
You know, there's two kinds of loss that I can think of. One is that you don't know where you are, and the other one is that you're not where you're supposed to be. And I think that's the loss that we find in the Bible. I asked about being lost the other day in our meeting, and Russell said he'd been lost. I want to tell you Russell's story. Is that OK if I tell your story? Because your dad kind of told me a little bit about it. It happened. Well, was it a year ago today? It was at the end of conference, anyway.
And the Harkins were all getting ready to leave the motel and they had all their stuff packed up and they were just about ready to leave. And right before they left, Russell went into the bathroom. Smart thing to do because it's a long road, long drive. But while he was in there, the family all went and got in the in the elevator and just before the door closed him said I heard Russell cry out. He was Russell, said he was lost. But Russell knew where he was. He was in the apartment.
He was lost because he wasn't with the people he was supposed to be with.
And I think that's the kind of loss that we talk about it in the Bible. People who are lost are not with the person they're supposed Who is it that we're supposed to be with?
Which is that, huh?
Who is Who says? Who says Come unto me?
Jesus. Yeah, the Lord Jesus wants children and men and women to be with him. But why are we lost? You know that verse that says all we like sheep have gone astray. That's how we're lost. We all do our own thing. We go our own way. And when we do that, that's called sin. And then we can't really enjoy the company of the Lord Jesus, can we? We're lost. We're we're we're not supposed to be.
But you know, there's an answer to that, the Lord Jesus. It says the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. He wants you and me to be with him, to enjoy his company.
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I would ask you, have you, have you come to the Lord Jesus? Have you recognized that you've gone your own way sometimes, that you're a Sinner and you need a savior and that you can talk to the Lord Jesus as your friend because he's put your sins away?
That's the first thing.
So let's get back to our story about the pliers. So I said, why do you need the pliers? He said. Well, he said while we were driving down our bumpy, the bumpy Rd. the hose broke on our engine. And so that we don't have any cooling. Well, you know, car engines have to be cooled off or they get hotter and hotter and hot. Pretty soon they just stop working all together. They freeze up or they heat up and stop. And he said, so the hose broke. I'll show you. I've got it right here. I've got an example. Here's like a hose.
And here, let's say this is the piece of the motor. The hose has to go in, goes like that, but it would leak right there and it would come back off if you didn't have a little clamp on it.
So here's the little clamp. There's a little clamp like that. That's what the guy needed. But to put it on, you have to squeeze these two little ears right here. It's kind of a funny clamp because when you squeeze like this, when you make this smaller, this gets bigger. So you squeeze it down hard and you put it over the pipe and then we let go. It gets littler and it holds it on to the other piece of pipe.
That's what he needed, was a pair of pliers to squeeze that.
This car was broken. I gave him the pliers. I gave him these pliers. I want to ask you, do you think these pliers can do this job?
Well, I want to show you something.
See how big those players are. Do you think those players can squeeze those little ears down?
Let me tell you, I tried. I tried in my shop a few times. You know what happened? Each time the pliers slipped off and the little clamp went off this way and off that way. And I was trying up here on my workbench. These guys had to work down inside the engine where they could never see and they had to work in the dark. You think that would work? Let's talk about broken.
Their car was broken, and that's the second thing I want to talk about. Have you ever had anything that's broken? Who here has had something that's broken?
These people I know, kids have things that are broken because dad's job is to go to work and make money to buy things and then come home and fix them.
I know that because I did that all my life. What? Who has that? Have you had something that's broken?
Go Kart. How did you know it was broken?
It didn't run. It didn't work. Was it that way? When you got it, was it broken? When you got it, was it broken?
When the guy first made it, No. Did he intend for it to be broken? No.
You know, I think broken is just like lost in some ways. If lost is not being where you're supposed to be, broken is having a go Kart that doesn't work the way it's supposed to work.
And, you know, not only do toys get broken, people get broken, too. I think if you look around this room, you can see lots of people that are broken. You can look at me and see I'm broken. I wasn't supposed to have glasses when I was born, but my eyes are kind of broken and they don't work very well anymore. And you can look around this room and see lots of people that are kind of broken a little bit, but, you know, broken inside, too. I want to read you a verse about that, a verse that tells us how we're supposed to be.
Eric James read this verse in his meeting. Let's turn to Revelation.
Revelation Chapter 4.
And verse 11.
This the last part of the verse it says.
For thou that's the Lord has created all things.
For thy pleasure they are and were created.
That's the way we're supposed to be, isn't that right? We're created for the to please God, to please the Lord. Do you think people always please the Lord?
You remember back in Noah's day when the Lord looked down from heaven.
To see the people in the earth. And you know what it says. He saw the people and they were wicked all the time.
Let's read the verse because it's pretty sad verse, but it's a pretty important verse. It tells us about broken.
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In Genesis.
Genesis 6 and verse six. It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart. Do you think God was pleased when he looked down and saw all those people? He was grieved in his heart. He was sorry. How about today when he looks down and he sees you and you and me? Is he pleased? Do you please, God every day in what you do?
You know, if we're broken, if we're in our sins and we're broken, we can't, Please.
Without faith, it's impossible to believe God. We have to take the Lord Jesus as our savior, otherwise we're broken. There's a verse in Ephesians that I like that gives me hope in Ephesians chapter.
Chapter One.
Verse 12 That says that we should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted in Christ. We can please God, we can be to the praise of His glory if we trust in the Lord Jesus. That's how we cannot be broken. So let me tell you about these guys with their pliers. There was three of them. These three guys, they were bear hunters, and I don't know how they were bear hunters because they had the little Ford Focus and three big guys in the little car. There was hardly room to put a squirrel in that car. I don't know what they'd have done if they shot a bear.
So they got out and they got their pliers than my pliers and they reached down in there and they were trying to fix their car and I didn't try to help them. I just kind of watched and they tried and tried. I could hear them grumbling and talking among themselves and climbing underneath and shining a little flashlight down there and trying to squeeze and I could tell from their conversation that it wasn't going very well.
And they their their faces got longer and longer and longer. They knew they.
It wasn't working. And finally they came to me and they said, you know what? Your pliers just we just can't do it. We can't fix our problem. And I think that's the third thing I would like to talk about. Helpless. They were helpless. You know, you and I are helpless too. We can't fix our problem. We can't be good enough to be be right with God, can we? We're sinners. That's what the Bible says for all of sin. And come short of the glory of God. We can't fix our problem. We can't.
Find ourselves. If we're lost, we can't find the right.
We have to trust in the Lord Jesus and his work on Calvary's cross. We have to trust in him. We can't fix our own problem. We are helpless. But you know, those guys realize that. They realize we can't fix it. And right about that time, you know what happened? One of us, one of them said, hey, I think I hear somebody coming.
And we all look back down the Broad Rd. that I'd come up where the roads went like spaghetti and we heard this noise and it sounded like wheels against rocks in the car engine. And pretty soon an old beat up pick up came up over the hill And I thought, oh boy, that guy can't fix his own pick up. How could he fix anybody else's. It was a old beat up, but you know that pick up came up and it came up and it stopped. It could have kept on going.
It came up and it stopped and a cowboy type guy got out of it. His name was Harry Cowboy Harry and his two dogs jumped out and he walked up to it and he saw the hood up so he knew there was a problem. He said what's the matter fellas? And so they explained about their hose clamp and that they weren't able to open up the hose clamp and fix their car.
He explained all that. They explained it to him. They said, can you help us? They were desperate. There was nobody else to help him. I couldn't help him there, couldn't help themselves.
They were helpless.
You said, Well let me just a minute, let me go check. So he went back to his old beat up pick up and he rummaged around in the back. Pretty soon you know what he came out with.
Some things like this.
Cody, you and Mike, I want to come up and see if you can do this hose clamp with this thing.
Cody and Michael are Cracker Jack mechanics on Junk So.
Right. Well, I'm sorry on good stuff here. See if you can put that hose clamp on here and fix this the way it should be. And, you know, you might probably have to help him hold it.
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And don't let it go springing across the room. I don't want it hitting anybody.
You know.
Harry, the cowboy, he got in there. He didn't give them the pliers. He got in there and he started working himself and he started working and grunting and and pretty soon, you know, he said there, right, You got to put it on the hose first, fellas.
Maybe they're not Cracker Jack mechanics.
He said there, I think I fixed it. And they all went and he looked there you could. You saw the smiles on there. They were just, oh, he saved us, you know.
You know, kids, he was the only one who could have saved him.
And you know who is the only one who could save you and me? Jesus. Isn't that right? He's the only one who can save us.
That's what I said before. Jesus just exactly suits us sinners. Cowboy Harry was the only guy who could fix them. Nobody else could. And he got there just in the nick of time. And it says in due time Christ died for the ungodly. The Lord Jesus is the only one who can solve that problem. So they were all happy and they were about ready to leave. And I I guess I'd say that's the end of my story. But I told you there was four things right. And I've only talked about 3:00. I've talked about lost.
And broken and helpless.
What happens when you have a water pipe on a car and you're driving it for a while and it's broken? What happens to the water?
It all runs out.
They were empty too. They were empty.
Oh brother.
I did it by myself. There we go. Let's give him a round of applause. They fixed it.
That's what.
That's what Cowboy Harry did down inside the engine in probably half the time.
These guys were empty and one of them said, hey, it doesn't do us any good that we have the hose fixed. If we don't have any water we still can't drive. We don't have any power to go anywhere because the cars doesn't have any water to cool it off. It's empty. They looked at me and I said I got a little bit of water in my coffee cup and that's about it. So they looked at Cowboy Harry and you know what he said? He said my two dogs come with me all the time up here into the mountains.
Sometimes they drink the water up here and they get kind of sick. So I always bring some water. So he went and he got 2 gallons of water and he gave it to him and they poured it into their radiator and it filled it up. You know, that reminds me of the story of the Lord Jesus and the woman of the well, you know, she was getting water, but she was really thirsty. She was not satisfied with all that she had tried. And the Lord Jesus said, I'll give you living water that lasts forever. That's the spirit of God that we get when we.
Accept the Lord Jesus as our Savior, and that's what he has for you and me, too. He can fix us. He can take us to the right place. If we're lost. He can bring us to himself. That's where we're supposed to be. He can fix us so that we will give praise to God. That's what we're supposed to do. That's why we were made, was to give glory to God.
He can help us because we're helpless. And he is the verse that says the Lord is my helper, and he, You and I can say that too. And you know what? He can fill us with the Spirit of God. He can give us the Spirit of God so we can live lives that are pleasing to Him.
That's the end of my story about Harry and the three bear hunters. You've heard about Goldilocks and the three bears. This is a better story.
So let's pray, and then we'll get the Sunday School papers. Our loving God and our Father. We thank you for your goodness to us. We thank you for the Savior who can answer all of our problems, the One who is the solution to all of our problems. We thank you for His death at Calvary's Cross and that we can claim Him as our own. He can be our friend, and then we can walk with Him. We can be to the praise of His glory, our Father. We thank you for our Savior, for your goodness to us. We pray for your blessing on these children now.
We commend ourselves into your hands for the rest of the day we pray in Jesus name. Amen.
Just a minute. Let me get the Sunday school papers right over here.
I'll give them to your kids and then anybody else who wants 1, they're right here. I don't think we have enough hands to pass them all out, so.
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And do I have somebody here who has a really nice loud reading voice and can read the verse for next time You can use the.
Come on, I know somebody here knows how to read.
You want to read it good.
I'll help you if there's any.
Little words that you can't read or big words here. You want the mic.
For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Thank you.