Gospel—S. Bambauer
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The first in Exodus 30. A couple of verses there as an introduction to.
The subject.
In Exodus 30 verse.
14.
Everyone that passes among them that are numbered from 20 years old and above shall give an offering unto the Lord. The rich shall not give more.
And the poor shall not give less. This is what I want to note. The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel. We're all brought to the same level.
There's no more to give because of course the half a shekel speaks of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
And God has provided that.
Nothing more could be given, and of course nothing less would do.
So the rich and the poor meet together here.
Half a shackle. What's the shackle for when they give an offering unto the Lord to make an atonement for their souls?
Your souls is very personal.
So what we find in type in the Old Testament is fulfilled in the new, and that's one of the intrinsic truths of the authority of the inspiration, the inspiration of the Word of God.
So we turn to Luke's gospel.
We find how all that.
Scriptures tied together so perfectly, so intricately.
Written by so many men over so many thousands of years.
And yet perfectly blended together in its themes. A mere man couldn't have done that.
And we find that the Scriptures speak to us in a moral way.
That's how God deals with us, because we are moral beings.
He has created us as responsible moral agents.
And sometimes we think we can make our way through with our intellect, that we are intellectual agents, or with whatever other capacity we may have at our advantage that our resource.
But we're all leveled at the cross the rich. The poor, whether rich in IQ or rich in your bank account, or rich in good looks, or whatever you may have or whether you're poor.
All come together at the cross.
Now in Luke's Gospel verse chapter 18 and verse 35.
We have the Lord Jesus coming to a man who was poor. The first one we're going to look at was poor.
The one right after that was Rich.
The first one is poor.
The Lord Jesus is going along.
And in verse 35 And it came to pass that as he was come nigh unto Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the wayside, begging, He comes down to Jericho.
Is the city of destruction. The whole world lies under judgment.
But the Lord comes right down into that scene of judgment and defines the lost article right here.
And who is it we think? Well, Who is God interested in? The rich? The well to do?
He finds there a certain blind man who was sitting by the wayside, begging.
And this man, he hears the multitude passed by. He couldn't see, but he could hear some certain. He could hear certain things.
And it's the multitude that's passing by.
The multitudes are passing by. How many people are in this world? Billions. Going it in, going out, passing by.
And this is a certain man because God deals with each of us individually. He doesn't just see the multitudes and the masses and the the the nebulous faces and he sees each one of us individually.
We think sometimes man thinks that sometimes God is just sitting out at the edge of Infinity and he doesn't see each one individually.
But he knows each one of us individually.
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And he knew right where to find this man.
And this man was hearing the multitude passing by, and he asked what it meant.
Think of them sitting there.
Taps the guy next to him and he says what's happening.
I hear some people going by what's happening. What does it mean?
The Lord Jesus Christ is passing by. What does it mean?
And that's a good question and everyone of us is going to have to answer it.
Who is the Lord Jesus Christ? Why did he come here? What was he about? He's the one who manifested God. God manifest in the flesh. Think of that. This is what's happening and this is what the man is asking. Have you ever asked that question?
I think most have all should.
Who is the Lord Jesus Christ? Why did he come here?
And they told him.
That Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.
Now he must have heard something about Jesus of Nazareth, though he was blind.
And he probably didn't move too far from this post there where he was begging by the wayside.
Because it gives an answer.
He cried saying.
No, he didn't speculate.
And he didn't philosophize, but he cried. And that comes from down in the soul, doesn't it?
And we all have a soul. We all have our being. We know that I do, you do. And that's where he cried from. Now we can sit in our armchairs and we can go to college and take philosophy classes, and we can listen to people with letters after their names and they can speculate on the origin of things and religious matters and so on. But that's not crying.
And man cries, whether he's willing to admit it or not. Every one of us does. And the Lord Jesus has come to meet that cry. He has come to find the one who is crying, the one who is looking for him.
Just seek the Lord with all of your heart. You shall find Him.
He says, Jesus, thou son of David.
They told him it was Jesus of Nazareth.
But he responds, Jesus, thou son of David. So this man, though he was blind, he knew a few things.
And one thing he knew was that Jesus, the son of David, the root and the offspring of David, has come, and he is the one who is the answer to all the promises to Israel. And here is a blind beggar who cries to this very one in his need and calls him Jesus. Thou son of David, he knows a little bit about the Lord Jesus.
Thou son of David, and the thing that he says is have mercy on me, and that's just the person that the Lord Jesus is looking for.
And they which went before him rebuked him.
That he should hold his peace.
Now there's always somebody who's going to get between you and the Lord.
They have a way of doing it. They rebuked him. If your cry is earnestly from the soul in sincerity to God, you won't find any shortage of people to say, well, that's just a religious experience or it's a crutch, or it's a psychological phenomenon and so on and so on. And they're going to try to talk you out of eternal life in attaching yourselves to the Savior, to the Lord Jesus.
Some way, somehow, somebody near you because they were near him.
Is going to rebuke you.
When we were flying out here from Sacramento, we got a transfer in Denver.
We got on the airplane, my wife and I, and the plane was only about 1/3 full.
And there were three seats across and we sat down in the two seats and the Stella came in and he sat down beside us and he he sit at talking. As soon as he sit down, I think there was a solenoid there that spring loaded into the top position. He says I like to talk.
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And he said, well, where are you going?
Hardly anybody in the plane he could have. That was his seat.
I said, well, we're going over. He knew the plane lit in Indianapolis. That was on the schedule, so I didn't have to answer that. But I said, well, figured he meant something more than that, where you'd go. And I said, well, we're going over near Vin Sands. That was the biggest town I could think of in this area.
Oh, he says, and then he used the name of the Lord Jesus has people casually do.
That's my old stomping ground, you know, I think he said Manchester.
Some 3 syllable were a town that starts with an AM. I don't hold me to it, but I think he said Manchester. We'll use Manchester for the sake of the story. Insignificant.
I thought, oh, I could have put up with this for two hours. He could have sat anywhere.
I said no, I don't know Manchester, but I know the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he kind of started, you know? He chuckled a nervous laugh, and he sat down and kept going anyway.
I was looking at all those empty seats on the airplane.
Wondering why I wasn't in one of them.
But I got to thinking, I got two hours with this man, learned his name was Tom.
And he's a little older than I am, retired, coming back from some wing and in Las Vegas where he had been and.
We kept on the conversation.
I was trying to figure out how I could get him on serious matters.
And Tom, most people that talk a lot, you know, you can you can kind of get a rapport with them.
Tom eventually came to his operation, as those that talk a lot usually do. He had had a brain operation for an aneurysm.
Pretty soon he lit on that subject.
And.
This conversation is vocabulary was still pretty disturbing, but it calmed down a little bit.
And he was telling me about this aneurysm that he had and he did an they did an operation on it. And he was one of the 5% upon whom this operation is done that that come out with good memory and are able to still get up and get around and make a full recovery.
And so I was just talking to him about the mercies of God in connection with his case. I knew he could relate to that, said, yeah, Come to find out, Tom.
His mother is 84 years old, is a godly woman, his mother praying for him, telling him about the Lord. Tom's sister and her husband are the Lords and they were a testimony to Tom.
So they had been somebody planted, somebody had been watering. I thought maybe I could add a little bit of water to that.
He said. My sister, she after this operation, you know, I, I let her talk me into going to church with her.
And sitting up there on the front row and after church, my sister said, you know, Tom, you ought to really get serious about these things. You ought to really take part and come to church on a regular basis. And, and Tom says, well, you know, sis, if you knew all those guys down there shouting their hallelujahs on the front row, like I know them like I knew them last night where I was.
You wouldn't be so excited about this.
His sister said Tom.
Those people you're calling hypocrites are closer to the Lord than you are.
Tom says what?
Yeah, you've set them between you and God. You've got them standing between you and God, so they've got to be closer to God than you are.
They rebuked him.
And somebody is always around to stumble you.
And you know who it is.
They wanted him to hold his peace. A little bit of religion would be all right.
Well, we got to Indianapolis and we parted our ways, Tom said. Well, we had quite a conversation. I said, yeah, we covered some bases, Tom.
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I hope, I hope Tom something got to his conscience in those few hours of conversation.
And I hope something gets into your conscience tonight that you haven't put somebody between you and God, that you haven't felt that you're so clever that you can hide behind somebody you have found somewhere that you can call a hypocrite place between you and God.
This man didn't, and that's the beauty of this man. He was poor and he was a beggar.
And he overcame.
And he cried out so much the more.
He wouldn't be still.
If you seek me with all your heart, ye shall find me. This man is serious. This man is honest. This man means business.
This man is poor.
Thou, Son of David, have mercy on me.
And Jesus stood.
It said Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. This man cries.
And now it says Jesus stood.
Now for a living, I just have a little mom and pop grocery store and you get to know the people in the community fairly well. You know how busy we get.
With our own affairs there.
There is no shortage of people that come into my store. Sooner or later you learn what their distresses are, what their heartaches are, what their difficulties are, and you hear their cry. The Lord Jesus stopped what He was doing, stopped where He was going, and he stood for this man. And we hear the cry. Oftentimes we hear the cry of those in need. That's what we need to do is to stop.
Have we got time for the poor beggar who's crying in his distress? The Lord Jesus does.
I hope I don't get so occupied that I haven't got time.
In the affairs of life, to stop and talk to somebody that comes into the store.
Who cries in their distress?
And Jesus stood and commanded him to be brought unto him.
And when he was come near, he asked him, saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?
And so the Lord Jesus has come to you now in this tower of your visitation, and he would say to you, What will I do for you?
Really, what do you want?
What do you want? Do you want a relationship with God that's real?
Or are you just going to try a religion to see if it works?
Like Western civilization drives marriage as an experiment rather than a commitment.
And it fails. And how often do you hear people say, while I was in, I tried this and that didn't work. And I tried that and that didn't work. And after a while I tried religion and that didn't work either.
Lots of people say that there are just no reality and they haven't cried from the soul.
This man was real, and I hope you're real.
And the Lord, when the Lord says, What wilt that I shall do unto thee?
The man was begging. He didn't say, well, fill my cup with enough for a meal tonight, or a new wardrobe or a place to sleep. He thought well beyond all of that.
What was this man's most urgent need?
He said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.
That's what he needed and that's what man needs today. He needs to have his eyes opened to the things of God in reality.
It's what He has to have. We all need it. That's what he asked for. And so the Lord Jesus said unto him, Receive thy side by faith have saved thee. He had asked the right person.
He didn't go to a group of men, he didn't go to a religious organization, but he went.
To the Lord Jesus, that's the one that can open the eyes.
And so the Lord Jesus had received thy sight. This man hadn't been able to see. You know how often in the Gospels the Lord Jesus says to a person, take up thy bed and walk, stretch forth thine arm.
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Here, take receive thy sight. Do you think that the man was able to do that in his own strength?
That a man could stretch forth the withered arm in his own strength. He'd never been able to do it before. To take up his bed and walk. He'd always been bedridden.
He had no natural strength whatsoever to do that.
But the Lord said, Receive thy sight.
It comes as a command. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Do you really think that there's an option?
Or do you think that you will put this off for a little while and attend to it later?
He says, Receive thy sight, thy faith hast saved thee. And the man received his sight in simple obedience to the command that the Lord Jesus had given him. He receives his sight, and in simple obedience to the command of God. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Thou shalt be saved.
And I suppose the man would have thought, well, where is the optometrist and where is the doctrine? How are you going to do this? And I want to know just how it's going to be done before I submit to this. And I don't know if it's going to work and.
That's the way people come to the Lord Jesus.
And they always ask all these questions, and they've got to have all these questions answered before they'll obey the command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's just simple. It's obedience to God.
And so that's what the man did. And immediately he received his sight and followed him, glorifying God, he received his sight.
In answer to the command, he received his sight immediately, not at the end of his life. You come to Christ, you're saved right now.
Immediately fully saved, sins forgiven, relationship to God as a child, brought into the intimacy of that relationship to God. Immediately everything full salvation. Immediately he receives his sight. Then it says he followed him.
And that's just a natural result.
Of one who has done so much.
For you to want to follow him.
A young lady doesn't say I do to a young man and consider the transaction done at that point and not go and be with that person. We understand this in the natural realm, it would be unusual for two to get married and the the woman not to be with the man. And it's unusual to take the Lord Jesus as Savior and not want to follow him because it's a relationship of love.
God is love. I had a college professor. This guy had letters after his name. Stand up one day and say God is an idea in the mind of man.
But God is love is love and idea. Everyone of us knows love. We have experienced love. We have been brought into families where we understand love between children and parents, between husbands and wives, between brothers and sisters. God is love.
He followed the Lord Jesus and did everybody say, look at that man, what a wonderful man he is. See how he received his sight.
We're going to make a lot out of that, man.
They didn't. He just simply, in obedience, received his sight.
And he followed the Lord Jesus according to that nature that he received from God. He wanted to please the Lord. He glorified God.
And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto not the man, but to God.
God is glorified in the salvation of a lost Sinner.
Today in this country, when we're trying to make a lot of people, we set the person forth and make a lot of him. Perhaps he gets titles, perhaps he gets a certain uniform.
But God is glorifying.
This poor beggar was saved and saved completely. The next man, Jesus, entered and passed through Jericho.
And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans and he was rich. Now we've got a rich man and that I think that you will find the story here of Zacchaeus. You know, all you children have heard of Zacchaeus. You've had Zacchaeus in Sunday school. It's one of the most popular characters in the Bible to, to learn about in Sunday school, all the children know about Zacchaeus. You, you ask that any child that's been to Sunday school, who is the short man who climbed up into the tree? Zacchaeus, they know that answer right away.
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This man was rich, the last man was poor, but you're going to find that the conditions and the ways in which the Lord dealt with this man are pretty much basically the same, because the rich and the poor meet together. The rich Zacchaeus can't give any more than the blind beggar. He can give the obedience of faith, and that's all there is. He can receive what God has provided for him.
Behold.
There was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the public publicans, and he was rich. This fellow worked for the IRS and he wasn't a very popular person.
Not too much has changed in the history of man in the last few thousand years. You can go back to the Old Testament and read there in the book of Judges and the book of Genesis, and you can find out what was going on in the very hearts of man way back then, and it's no different than now.
He sought to see Jesus, who he was.
And that's what we want to know. Who is the Lord Jesus now? How are you going to find out?
In the 16th of Matthew the Pharisees came to the Lord Jesus and they said, show me a sign.
One of my children was taking a class in college by all these professors and and they were talking about that miracles and signs and empirical evidence that might might convince them that God is.
These Pharisees came to the Lord Jesus there in the 16th of Matthew and said, show me a sign.
And the Lord Jesus said a wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and you won't see any sign but the sign of Jonas. And then do you know what it says? It says he turned and left them.
And what that means is he left them absolutely.
Have you ever thought about the how intricate?
Of a being you are.
And the consequences of tampering with the grace of God.
One of the old philosophers was that Aerosol said know thyself. Now how are you going to know yourself until you get a description of yourself by the word of God?
And as you read through the word of God you come across the story of Pharaoh and it says God hardened Pharaohs heart.
Do you think that you are so free in your moral agency that you can settle these things according to your own time and pleasure and will, and that you can figure these things out, and that you can make your moral path through life according to your own direction and carve out your own life?
According to your own will.
And that you will deal with God on your terms. God hardened Pharaohs heart.
It says in Romans one that he gave them over to a reprobate mind.
It says of neighbor.
That he went into a drunken stupor for 10 days after Abigail and after David had come with a message to him which he rejected.
10 days he went into an unconscious stupor. What can you tell a man that's in an unconscious stupor? Western civilization is in an unconscious stupor and we're coming to the last chapter and time is running out because western civilization in all its.
Knowledge and where the gospel has been brought forth has trampled upon these things, and God has given it over to a reprobate mind. Do you know how solemn it is to tamper with these things? Do you think that you can get away with that, young people? Do you think that you will put this off, and someday in your own will you will, you will get these things right? It was not so with Pharaoh, It was not so with Nabal. It was not so with those.
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In Romans chapter one.
It says of Absalom, when he went out in rebellion, 200 men followed him in their simplicity and they knew not anything at all. How did they get that way?
Do you want to get in that kind of a position?
It's so sovereign. The human conscience is the most delicate instrument that we possess, and to be tampering with it puts us under the solemn government of God.
Well, might we be reading looking at the last chapter of the capitalistic experiment. Is God obligated to preserve this when it turns to legislation of moral evil?
No, and these may be the very last days that we're living in.
Heat. On that basis, you read the Sermon on the Mount.
You have read in the law thou shalt not kill. You know what's in your heart, hatred. You've read in the law thou shalt not commit adultery. God knows what's in your heart. In the Lord Jesus tells you he is gone. If you lust, you have committed it in your heart.
Thou shalt not steal. And God turns to the heart, and he sees what's in there.
And he says, you have coveted in your heart. Now how are we going to deal with God who is righteous, who is holy?
The Lord Jesus went to Calvary's cross.
To take up that issue.
I was 23 years old before I understood that, so I was driving down the road with the man that I had picked up to take to a father and son banquet that my father had talked me into going to.
And I didn't want to go, and I was lost. And I had heard that Christ loved you and died for you, and I didn't know what that meant.
And this man, an old retired man driving down the road, he said, Are you saved?
And I said, well, no.
And that kind of took him back. He thought I should have been, if I was there to pick him up, to go to a Christian banquet.
And he said, why not?
And I said, well, why didn't the Lord Jesus just come down? And as a man, he was here, you know, and, and the people that wanted to follow him, where they could have followed him and they could have been with him and they could have heard his instruction in his precepts. Why did the Lord Jesus die? I've always heard the Lord Jesus died, but why did he have to die? I was 23 years old.
And this man said he had to die to settle the question of sins.
There is the subject of atonement. Our sins have to be taken care of. That's how we come into the presence of a thrice holy God. Mere religion isn't going to do it, and good intentions aren't going to do it. Only Christ can bring the lost Sinner into that position. He did it with the blind beggar, and now he's going to deal with Zacchaeus. And Zacchaeus wants to know who the Lord Jesus is. But he was short.
He was little of stature. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. No matter how rich he is, how well he has done in life, what his assets are, he is little in stature. He is short. He has come short of the glory of God. And he ran before and climbed up into a Sycamore tree. Do you know what we read about Zacchaeus here? A little bit about his character. He was diligent.
Now, are you diligent in these matters? Are you? Can you hardly wait to get out of here so you can do something else this evening or tomorrow or the next week?
Zacchaeus knew the issues of life.
And he knew that this was his hour of visitation, right here, just as it is yours tonight, your hour of visitation. This is the time for you.
To resolve these issues.
And so he was diligent, and a man would be a fool if he weren't diligent about these things when you think about the consequences.
He ran before and climbed up into a Sycamore tree to see him, for he was to pass that way.
And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste.
And come down for today I must abide at thy house.
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He was to abide at Zacchaeus house. Would you like to have the Lord Jesus come to your house except.
The Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. And if you're laboring in your house in your life right now without the Lord, you're laboring in vain.
And the further you go, the further away you get and the harder it is to get back.
He made haste and came down in verse six and received him joyfully.
As diligent as he was, he came down in command in response to the command come down.
Then he received him joyfully. When the Lord Jesus came to different ones, there were different ways in which they responded to Him.
Some were mad, the Pharisees, some were glad Zacchaeus, some were sad, the rich ruler who couldn't give up his goods and give it to the poor because they had those riches, their tentacles around his soul and were eaten at his soul, the edges of his soul like acid, and he couldn't let go of what he had. So he was sad. But Zacchaeus received him just as he was told to do.
And he did it joyfully.
And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying that he was gone to be a guest with a man that is a Sinner. And there they are again.
Just like they were in the last chapter with the poor man, somebody is going to be around to try to block.
Your reception of the Lord Jesus.
Zacchaeus stood and said unto the Lord. He didn't even pay any attention to them.
It's like the fellow that was telling me that he was preaching the gospel in a detention home one time and he had this fellow down. They were sitting there together. It was a a man's youth authority something I was in jail and he was telling this fellow about the Lord. And there were other group of people around here kind of listening in.
And there was one other fellow here as a colored man standing off to the side listening also, and he was telling Estella about the Lord. And these guys over here started to snicker at him because the man who was giving him the gospel said, do you want to receive the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior? They started snickering over here.
And the guy that was given the gospel said, you know, they can laugh you right into hell, but they'll never laugh you out. And it reached the man's soul and he got down on his knees and took the Lord Jesus as his savior. And this colored fellow over here watching all the Snickers and watching the transaction, he says, I want to receive the Lord Jesus too.
Meant business paid no attention to the people that were snickering and two men.
Glorified. Gone were trophies of His grace that day, and so was Zacchaeus. He didn't take any heed of that.
Remember your friends.
Can laugh you right into hell. They will never laugh you out.
Zacchaeus stood and said unto the Lord, Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. And the Lord cut him off at that point, and just simply said unto him, This day is salvation, come to this house. Why? Because the Lord Jesus had come.
Not because of any good works that he had done, but simply because the Lord Jesus himself, who is salvation, who is eternal life, who has passed by the beggar, and now Zacchaeus and his, you might say, passing by tonight.
Has come to where you are, Right there where the blind beggar was. Right there where Zacchaeus was in the tree. Came right to where they were.
And he gave the command, received thy sight come down. And they did, and they were saved.
This day is salvation. Come to this house.
Now verse 10 and you've all heard verse 10. The children have learned verse 10.
Somewhere along the line, they have learned verse 10 in their Sunday School memory work.
For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.
About 2100 hours on one June day in 1969. Two flight crewmen.
On the USS Constellation, somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, about 200 miles off the coast of San Diego, went out onto the flight deck to saddle up in their F4 to an engine two place fighter bomber.
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They got into that aircraft.
They turned on the huffer, came up, blew that hot air through the turbines as the raw fuel was poured in there, and the pilot hit the ignorant switch and the fuel was ignited and the turbines are turning up to General Electrics at 17,000 lbs of thrust each straining at the cable ready to launch.
The pilot salutes the flight deck officer. He salutes back. He touches the ground. The guy in the tower up there is watching all this and he gives the signal to the man underneath. The buttons are pushed and 85,000 lbs of material are hurled off of that flight deck.
In supposedly what is to be a flying attitude in less than two seconds.
From zero to 200 knots.
I was sitting in the back of that airplane.
And we came to the end of the flight deck.
In the nose of that aircraft is pitching down and it's supposed to be pitching up.
You have 80 feet to play with from the flight deck to the Pacific Ocean.
80 feet seconds, less than seconds. I see the flight deck rising above me on the right. I see the gyro getting blacker and blacker.
And there's just seconds I pull the handle.
The back canopy goes off and I go out. The guy in the front seat who is the pilot just sitting in there hollering, eject, eject, and he's talking to himself. I'm gone. His canopy goes off and then he goes out and there's a rocket seat under you that shoots you up 250 feet up into the air.
And in that June evening, I'm going around in circles and I see the stars, and then I see the ocean and then I see the stars, and then my whole seat appendage comes off as it's programmed to do and the chute pops.
But I'm going 200 knots and I'm pretty close to the water and when I hit the water I hit it at a lateral angle with velocity and somehow I rolled and I had popped these two little.
Chords on my life vest that activate too little CO2 cartridges to inflate the life vest just as I hit the water. Hit the water, I roll a little bit and I pop those **** fittings to get rid of my chute. But somehow in the roll the froude line from my chute had gotten caught in the back of my survival vest.
And I couldn't get it loose.
And I get my equilibrium and I look up in the ship, it's 1000 feet long.
5000 men are its complement. It's a seagoing city and I see it going by about from here to that wall and the guys up on top are throwing their little hand lanterns down. It's just about dark because they see me down there and they're throwing these little, they're flashlights from the flight deck crew that they use. They're throwing them down because they see me and they want the helicopter to know where I am.
And the ship goes by and I'm trying to get this cord off of my harness and it won't budget. And the 1St wave from this big ship goes by and just swamps me. And I'm under the water and I don't know if I'm coming up. And I like air just as well as the rest of you people. And I come up for a breath and the ship goes by. And the big screws of that thing were about as big around as this opening here are churning and it leaves quite a turbulence.
But the Navy is courteous enough to have a helicopter airborne for every flight and recovery, and it's right there for just such occasions.
So the helicopter knows right where I am, he's flying right over the top of me and he drops down on a line.
This harness that I'm to get into to get lifted up to the helicopter.
And he was just just from me to hear just this far apart and I grabbed that thing.
But I'm still attached to the parachute and it's all underwater and he's hollering down through his megaphone. Pilot, get away from your chute because he doesn't want to be brought down into the Pacific Ocean as well.
And I didn't really want to let go of that thing because I'd already been underwater a couple of times.
But I knew that I wasn't going to be able to be lifted up.
There I was in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, treading water for all I'm worth. Now you can relate to this little similitude as to how it connects to the distresses of life. I never wanted to be there. That's the last place I wanted to be.
00:45:17
But the line is down and I let it go and I back off and he sends down a swimmer. He pulls it up and he sends down a swimmer to come around and back at me and to loosen that cord that I couldn't get loose. You can't get loose from your sins. You're going to drown in them. You're in the depths of judgment with these things. The sins that you have committed have put you where you are, in your distresses. The whole world lies in judgment. And I've just got my nose above the water and there it is right there. And he wasn't hollering down with his megaphone, giving me swimming instructions on how to swim to land 200 miles away. I couldn't do it.
He wasn't telling me how to scale the wall of the ship to get back up there. I couldn't do it.
I was absolutely helpless and at the mercy of what they could provide.
So the swimmer came down and he got me untangled.
And now I'm at liberty, take hold of that life, that harness that they had sent down.
The very things that I had depended upon were dragging me under my good intentions.
My own works, what I had accomplished, my own will about things. I had one chance and one only, and that was to lay hold of what had been provided for me right there at that time.
Now imagine the situation if I were sitting there and saying I'm going to try a little bit longer.
Or I'm going to wait for another helicopter. How long are they obligated to sit there and wait in patience and grace for me to take hold of what was perfectly needed?
And suitable for me in my case right there.
How long is God obligated to strive by His Spirit with the souls of men?
I can guarantee you right now, but I can't guarantee you tomorrow.
I took hold of that and they lifted me right up into the helicopter, took me back to ship and I was thankful.
I was really thankful.
And I'm thankful that God has reached down right to where I am and given me.
The Savior.
With the Navy, it cost them a certain amount for that helicopter to provide for me there. What did it cost God to provide the Savior of sinners for you and for me? The Lord Jesus went to Calvary's cross. The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost, and He is here tonight asking, beseeching.
Looking in to your soul's deep needs.
He is available tonight.
That you may be saved.
And this is your hour.
To receive the Lord Jesus Christ and to be saved.
Can we sing #38?
I know not why God wonders praise to me He had made no, nor why on the earth.
I am.
Playing before him.
Rich and poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of them all. We all stand in need of God's salvation through Christ Jesus.
And if anything, the coins in my pocket while I was there waiting to get hold of that harness would have only bumped me faster. And riches have a tendency to do that, you know.
Not just the riches of a bank account, but all the things that this world has to offer.
That entertain our minds and put this solemn and eternal question off.
It must be decided each one individually before the Lord, in sincerity of heart. And this is the night for you, our God, our Father, how we thank thee for the Lord Jesus our Savior.
That he has come to give life. He gave his life that we might have life.
And we thank thee for the word of God, that our eyes might be opened like the blind beggars, that we might come into true riches like Zacchaeus.
We ask our Father, thy blessing on this word spoken in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Amen.