Children—Paul House
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He's got a song that we can start with this morning.
Any of the kids? Children. What about a little child of seven? We know that one.
All right, let's do that.
Anybody.
Dave, I'll do it all for Jesus. Boy, can someone help me on starting that one?
In the house.
I mean by nature.
I can do, I'll do it all origins.
All of you, Jesus, I don't know what it's coming rather than.
Do you bring?
Me through.
I want to.
Well, let's pray and ask the Lord to help us to listen good and that we would have a good lesson today. Our loving God and our Father, we thank thee for sending the Lord Jesus.
Thy son, to come down here to this Dark World.
To live here as a man, to heal people, to be so kind. And then people like us put Thy Son on the cross. And we just pray that as we are here together, to think a little bit about him, that we would be thankful for thy love to send him, and that we would think of His love for us in coming.
And we think of his sufferings and how he did it for us.
If there's a boy or a girl or perhaps an older one here today who has never opened their heart to the Lord Jesus yet that they may do so this morning. And so we ask for thy help. We ask for the leading of thy Holy Spirit, that thou might work here today for the blessing of someone, or maybe more than one. And so we give thanks in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
Does anyone remember what the verse is for today from the Sunday school paper?
Where I come from, we have a bunch of kids and they go out under the trees.
For Sunday school.
And somebody speaks to them and they learn the verse in the Sunday school paper each week.
This week my little guys didn't do too good on the verse because their dad didn't help them very much. Their mom did, but their dad didn't. I didn't even know what it was. That's not very good.
Does anybody else know though what it was?
Anybody.
Bigger people too.
I'll help you. It says this. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. John 832 The truth shall make you free.
00:05:11
I have in my bag here.
I'll pull this out and see if you know what this is.
This boy here?
A cage, What's it for?
For pets, well.
Maybe pets you want to get rid of?
I'm going to see if I can get this open. I put these things in here.
I thought I was smart putting this basket inside, but may not be quite so smart.
We have a real problem in our house with squirrels.
And the problem with squirrels is that they can get into your house.
Just need to get that cage up and over. Thank you. The problem with squirrels is that they get into your house and they can make a terrible mess on the wiring and I had to learn that.
When electricians put wires into a building, they often do this. They pull the wire along, and if they do it in the summertime, they're sweaty and they get sweat on their fingers.
And then that sweat dries off. The water is gone.
But something stays. That's the salt that's in our sweat. And then months later, that salt is still on the wire.
And.
The squirrels.
If they get in your attic or in your walls, they say, ah, they're salt. I'd like to have the salt and so they chew the wire. Well, if they chew through the wire, they can cause the.
The house to burn down. If the two wires touch you can have a fire. So you don't want squirrels in your house? Are we having some troubles here?
If you're good.
Thank you.
So we have this squirrel problem, like I said, and the little red squirrels that we have in our house are the toughest of the of the squirrels. We have grey squirrels, we have black squirrels, and we have the little nasty red squirrels. The reason we have so many squirrels.
At our place.
Is that there was a man, and some of you know him, called Doctor Wood and he used to live in Chicago. I'm going to put this right here.
And I think I can set it.
So it's ready to go. Let's get this.
There we go.
And doctor, what he planted, he brought these these things from Chicago once, many, many years ago. Who can tell me what this is?
Anybody. This boy?
A what?
It's a black walnut.
See, so if you cut through this casing, this green casing, there'll be a seed inside of here. And inside the little hard shell is a nut. And that's what the squirrels like to eat. Well, Doctor Wood planted a whole bunch of these behind our house, and now they're trees like this, and they're huge and they have hundreds of these.
So we have hundreds of squirrels around that try to live near our house to get near to the food, and they stash these away. There's piles of them here and there and in our woodshed and all kinds of stuff. But there was a squirrel that was particularly ornery and I tried to catch him with my trap and I could not catch that squirrel no matter what. He was so smart.
He would jump up on the top of this thing and tap dance on the top and it would make all kinds of noise because it's there's.
So you can imagine that squirrel.
00:10:04
So that was our first demo.
So he would tap dance on the top of that and sometimes he would set the trap off and then he would kind of almost seem like it was laughing at us.
And we trapped all kinds of squirrels. And we would get rid of the squirrels after, but more would come and more would come and more would come. But this one squirrel, he would, we could never get him. And I knew it was him because I'd go out in the morning to go to work and he'd just start yelling at me and he'd yell and yelling. Finally I said we got to catch this squirrel. Well, the boys and I, we like to pick up the nuts. And so Tom and Ernie have this big.
Wagon about like this, with sides like this, well, we can fill the whole wagon up with these.
So we collected a whole bunch, maybe 4 inches in the wagon. So that'd be a few, and we brought them all to the front door of our house. Well.
This squirrel was so angry that we were stealing the his nuts that instead of going to the tree and getting the hundreds of them from the tree, he started taking them out of the boy's wagon. Those are my nuts, he would say, you know, and he would take one knot at a time and one knot at a time.
And then my daughter Tammy said, you know what? Why don't we do this? Why don't we put a nut in there and we'll put one there, We'll put one there, we'll put one there, we'll put one here and we'll put one here and see what happens. Well, that squirrel, he's like, those are my nuts. Those people have taken my nuts. I'm going to get those nuts back. So he came running up and he grabbed the 1St.
Not in a way when so this knot was gone.
Then a few minutes later, the squirrel came back again and he kind of looks up at the house and he goes, that's why not. And he takes it and he goes and he hides it somewhere. Then a few minutes later.
He came and he looked at the house, a little more careful this time. It's like that's my nut and where he went with the nut.
Then he came.
And he came toward the trap. Now he knew this was dangerous.
So he went up to this one and he kind of looked really careful everywhere. And then he kind of went closer and closer and then grabbed it like that and away he went. But then he had to go into inside, right? So he came to the front of this and I, we watched out the window. This took about half an hour.
And he came like this and he went around.
And he went on top.
And he looked inside and then he got down on the side and he looked. He looked and he looked and then he went to a boat. Here he stuck his head in and nothing happened. Nothing happened. And he quickly went and he grabbed it.
And he went away, but there was still one there.
It was still one and he knew it was there and he wanted it. So guess what happened?
He came back and he thought, now what am I going to do? I'm going. I don't want to go in there, but I want that nut.
So we thought.
What will I do? So he looked at the house for a while. Just like you guys have my nut and I want to get that nut. And he looked at the house, looked back. Then he got up on top and he ran around the whole thing a whole bunch of times. He looked in and then he thought, you know, when I went in a little bit, I didn't get caught.
So you know what? I'm going to take a chance.
And you know what he did? He went in just a little bit and then he looked all around. Then he went in a little bit further and nothing happened.
And then he hit the little piece of metal here that makes the track close, and we had him. He was in the trap. And if squirrels can say terrible things, that squirrel said every terrible thing you can imagine.
He was so mad, but he was caught.
And after all those weeks of listening into that squirrel yelling at me, he was in the trap.
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And he was caught. And you know what? I never had to listen to him again.
But I learned a lesson, boys and girls, that day.
And we've been talking about this a lot this week when I've been sitting in the meetings. I've been thinking about that box, right?
I've been thinking about how, you know, we think, well, you know, it's maybe not so bad if I do little things that are wrong.
You know, when that squirrel took the nut that was out here, he probably thought, you know what? I'm I'm OK. And then he took the next one. He was closer to the trap, but I'm still OK. And then he took the next one and he said.
I'm OK still, nothing's happened to me. Then he took the one inside. Nothing happened. But he was pretty close to danger, wasn't he?
Then he went too far and he was caught.
Now I want to talk a little bit about sin, boys and girls.
You know, we may think that we'll never do something.
But we have a tempter and he puts things before us, just like we tempted that squirrel.
And the squirrel went closer and closer and closer, and then the door shut and he was caught. And sometimes we may think, oh, I'll never do that.
But we get closer and closer and closer.
And then we get caught.
Now how could that squirrel get out of that trap?
Does anybody know?
This girl.
He could have stopped and never got into the trap, but he went too far and so he got trapped. Now that squirrel got out of the trap, but he was dead when he got out of the trap.
I took the squirrel out.
Bring it to the.
Yeah, because this you see when there's a squirrel in here and you put it under the water then.
After a few minutes, the squirrel doesn't move anymore.
And that's kind of sad, isn't it? But you know, I don't want my little boys.
And my wife and my other children. I don't want them to burn up in a fire. So I would rather have the squirrel die than have my little boys die because the squirrels would chew our wires. So I have to decide what to do as a dad, and I would rather get rid of this bad squirrel than to lose my little boy.
That's why I do it. It's not because I don't like squirrels. I do.
And in fact, some of the squirrels aren't dangerous. So when we catch a black squirrel in there, you know what I do? I take it out in the back and I open it and let the wax squirrel out. And the grey squirrels, I let them go too, because I like squirrels. But the black one, the Gray, the little red ones are the ones that get into my house. They do. They chew right through the wood to get in.
Because they the trees are near our house, they say, you know, there's a nice warm place I could live too. And I could store all my nuts in Paul's house.
And I'll live there too. I'll be one like one of his kids, and I don't want that.
Now I want to turn to the book of Luke.
And we've heard this story before.
But I want us to think about it in connection with the trap.
Luke, chapter 23.
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And verse 33 if you have your Bible.
And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him and the malefactors, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
This is speaking about the Lord Jesus, and Calvary is outside of the walls of Jerusalem where they crucified the Lord Jesus. But the day that they crucified the Lord Jesus, there was two other men that they brought to die too.
And they put the Lord Jesus on the center cross.
And then they put one of these malefactors, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
So sometimes I've seen a picture that somebody painted of this and tried to make it look like it probably was. And there was a cross like this in the middle, and the Lord Jesus was on that one. And then on each side of that main center cross, there was another cross. And there was a man on the first one and a man on the second one.
Now who can tell me why those two men were hanging there? This boy at the back?
They had done something bad, that's correct. They had done something bad, and I think they had done many things that were bad, but they had got caught.
They had got caught because they had done something wrong. Now who can tell me what they did wrong?
This girl.
They were, they had stolen things and in those days if you got caught stealing.
You got hung on a cross to die. You know you'd think twice about stealing, wouldn't you? If you knew that if you stole something, that you were gonna maybe be hanging on a cross the next day. You think, hey, maybe I shouldn't do that?
Now may let me ask you this question, have you ever taken something that didn't belong to you?
Boys and girls.
We've all taken things that we weren't supposed to have.
Now there's lots of different kinds of sense. That's just one thing.
But in God's word, the Bible, we learn about what's right and what's wrong, and when we do something that disobeys what God has said, then we commit a sin.
And there's punishment for sin. We understand that in the world, don't we, that we live in. When I was coming here, I drove by a whole bunch of cars that had blue lights and red lights on the top. They're police cars. And there were people at the side of the road that have been going too fast.
And so the police pulled them over, said excuse me, but you are going too quick. How come?
Personally, I'm going to the cottage.
Going too fast? Here's your here's your fine, here's the punishment for going too quick. And we understand that if we disobey, there's consequences. And a lot of people think that.
They're good enough to get to heaven that God's just going to say, well, it's OK, you've done things that are wrong, but that's OK. So is that how it works in the world? You do something wrong and you you say to the policeman.
I was going to, he says you were going too fast. And then he says, oh, that's OK.
You've done a few other good things, so I'm not going to make give you a fine for going too fast. Of course not. He's going to say here's your ticket. You were going too fast. We understand that. And God is the same. God holds each person responsible for everything that they have done. Now let's read a little bit more about these these men that were caught stealing.
So it says one was on the right hand and the other was on the left. Then said Jesus father forgive them for they know not what they do.
Drop down to verse 39. And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Does not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds, But this man.
00:25:21
Hath done nothing amiss.
Nothing wrong.
And he said unto Jesus, Lord, Remember Me when thou comest into thy Kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
So we're going to talk for a minute about this trap again.
And let's just give it a little shake, see if we can get it.
So if you look at this strap, you see the door shut. Now there's no way for something to get in, but usually.
There's something already in and there's no way to get out.
So what I have to do as the owner of this trap, is to push this little bar like this and lift this gate, and then the little black squirrels and the little Gray squirrels can run out and be safe, but they can't get out unless I open the door.
Now what about these thieves?
Were they going to get off those crosses that day? They had nails through their hands and their feet, just like my Lord the Lord Jesus did.
They weren't going to get down. They were going to die. They were in this trap, weren't they? The door was shut, as it were. They couldn't get down. They were stuck there and they were going to die. And their only salvation was in Jesus.
And one of the men, he turned to the Lord Jesus, and he said, Lord, Remember Me. But what about the other man?
The other man, he didn't. At least we don't read that he did.
And so that man, said the thief that came to the Lord Jesus said, Lord, Remember Me.
When The Alchemist into thy Kingdom, he first said Lord, he recognized who the Lord Jesus was.
His Lord.
The Son of God. And he said, Remember Me. And if I can say it this way, when you're a king in your Kingdom, I want to be part of it. He believed that the Lord Jesus was going to rise again and then he would too. And he wanted to. He had faith in the Lord Jesus.
Today I want to talk a little bit about the other man.
You know, we don't often talk about him.
But maybe there's somebody like that here today.
And.
You're locked up.
In sin.
And if you've never said to the Lord Jesus, Lord.
I want to have my sins forgiven.
Then you're like the squirrel that's in the trap and the door is shut. And I talked a little bit about what happens to the squirrels that need to die because they're going to make us trouble for us. We put them down under the water and we leave the trap there for a while. And you know, if you're in your sins and you've never accepted the Lord Jesus as your Savior, then maybe you won't die right now.
Maybe you say, well, I'm still young, I have lots of time to live. Maybe not.
Maybe you won't get home this week and don't know. Maybe you will be an old, old man or an old, old lady someday. But if you've never come to the Lord Jesus, eventually you're going to go into punishment. Now. Sometimes.
When I set my trap in the morning, a squirrel comes in in the morning.
Right after I go to work and that squirrel is in the trap all day.
And it's running this way and that way and this way and that way, trying to get out, chewing on the wire. You know, squirrels teeth are pretty sharp, but they don't work good on steel.
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Anyway, I come home and then I have to decide what I'm going to do with the squirrel. And that squirrel may be waited one hour, 2 hours, five hours, six hours. But you know what? If it's a bad squirrel, then it's going to have to die. It didn't die. Maybe right away it thought, oh, well, you know, maybe I can still get out some other way. I'm going to try and try and try. And they chew and yell and make all kinds of noise.
But if they're going to die, then they're going to die.
Maybe not right away, might take three hours when I get home or 8 hours. Sometimes we don't catch anything all day and it just stays open and then at night we catch them and then they wait all night in the trap until I come out in the morning.
Sis, like boys and girls who say, well, you know what, I have lots of time. I'm not going to get saved right now. I'm going to put it off. But eventually there's judgment isn't there for those that don't know the Lord Jesus as their savior. So let's have a couple more songs and then we'll pray.
Anymore to sing this girl.
Once was a wild little donkey OK?
There once was a walk.
When Jesus was driving up on him.
It went just the way that he should.
I write some. Basically, I'm kidding.
So by God bless, I love God.
You know, we just sang, the Lord wants to make us happy and.
What was the last thing free? You know, it's such a relief to those black squirrels when they get out of that trap.
They may have been trying to get out for days if I've forgotten about the trap, or maybe hours, but they're so glad to get out. The Gray ones, too, you know, it's a wonderful thing to have our sins forgiven. I remember when I was a little boy, and I knew because I'd been to lots of gospel meetings.
And I knew that I had done lots that was wrong.
And I remember laying in bed.
Maybe there's somebody here like this?
I remember laying in bed on my back and I look up at the ceiling and I was having trouble going to sleep.
Because I remembered the stuff that I had done wrong.
There was a little voice inside of me that was saying, Paul, what about the time you did this?
Paul, what about the time you did that? What about the time you disobeyed your dad? What about the time you were rude to your mom? What about the time you took something that didn't belong to you and I remembered my sins and I couldn't go to sleep?
Perhaps there's somebody Last night you couldn't get to sleep because you were worrying about your sins.
I trust that's not anybody here that you know, your sins are washed away and the good part of the story is that.
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I remember accepting the Lord as my savior and I didn't worry anymore about those things.
I was sad that I did them, but I knew that Jesus paid for my sins. OK, one more.
When he cometh. When he cometh to make.
Progress you'll promise you lost.
It's all done in the storm, like a swine fall down your way.
Little children let no children.
Who are very king, right? I want you to love Christmas juice.
It's all. Kind of. It's all.
Letting us die.
Just before we pray.
If there's a boy or a girl and you want to have one of these to plant at your house.
I have six of them.
First time I ever saw one of these was in Dorothy, NJ and I was standing talking to Tim Ruga. I'd be the man who spoke last night up here where I am now.
I was standing talking to his mom.
And one of these fell out of a tree way up high and hit her right on the head. And I wondered what it was. Somebody told me what it was. And then when they started falling out of our trees, I knew what they were. So if you want to plant one, you can have one. So let's pray. Our God and Father, we give thanks that we could be here this morning to consider.
These two men.
These two men that were sinners.
And who were on a cross on each side of the blessed Lord Jesus. We think of the Lord Jesus dying there, and how he could say, Father forgive them, for they know not what they do. And we think of the one thief who realized who the Lord Jesus is and how he cried out to him.
And asked for forgiveness and asked that he would be.
His Lord and that He would be remembered in eternity. And we pray for any of the boys or girls that are here, or older ones too perhaps have not put their trust in the Lord Jesus yet we pray that they may do so. We think of these two men who were locked in their sin and could only be freed by the Lord Jesus. And we just pray for each one of us today.
That we might tell others about the Lord Jesus and how He's died for us.
And how he gave his life on the cross of Calvary. And so we give thanks for this time together, and we ask for thy blessing in the name of the Lord Jesus, Amen.