In the Nick of Time

Outline




Music: I will Sing of Jesus' Love (hymn 183 in SDA Hymnal)




Pastoral Prayer: Lindsay Lagasse




Scripture Reading: Romans 8:37-39




Sermon: Lindsay Lagasse




Closing Prayer: Lindsay Lagasse









http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HRLcNU6LtI









Heavenly Father, we take this time now to bow, bend a knee, and humble ourselves to You. There is truly no one like You in all the universe. You sent Your only begotten Son to die for us, just so we could have a chance to be with You. We are sinners, Lord, and only through the precious blood of the Lamb can we be saved. Only because of Your love do we have a chance. So Father, we ask now that You sit with us in this worship time. Give us the will to listen, and make our hearts soft and open to Your grace. And I pray, Lord, that You guide my hands to say not my will, but Your will. In Your holy and all-powerful name, AMEN.









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ROMANS 8:37-39



Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.







Brothers and Sisters, it is so nice to be writing to y'all again! Last week was quite rough but, God is good, and all seems to be well now. I'm rested physically, but I also feel renewed spiritually. Who's with me in saying "Bring it, Satan! You can not overpower us, we have Jesus on our side!" How cool is it we can say that? No matter what we do, He loyally walks by our side, only waiting for us to turn to Him and give a single step in His direction. That is one remarkable guy, right there. Don't know about you, but if people continue to stomp all over what I say and ignore me, I tend to have the normal human response: "Yeah, fine. Didn't want you around anyway..." I won't mean it, but it's what comes out and, being stubborn (hey, I'm a goat and cat girl), I will keep my back turned on them. Aren't we lucky that your salvation isn't on MY shoulders? Be happy to have someone like Jesus, who walked the world, but was not of the world.





Well, here today we are going to talk about His love for us. I think we all read about how much He loves us, and how He forgives us unconditionally, and all that. But when we read it, do we digest it? A couple weeks ago I mentioned about digesting the Bible like a wild yak digests its lichen--consume it over and over again. This way you get everything out of it that can possibly be taken from it; you don't want to miss any of those scrumptious spiritual nutrients, do you? You can't survive without all the components of the food pyramid. Well, same goes for the "Bible Pyramid". You know that big section on the bottom of the food pyramid? The grains and such? Well, if a pyramid of important Bible nutrients was to be made, that section would be Jesus' love and forgiveness. Without it, we'd have no chance of salvation. We'd get lost in our struggles, drowned in our sin. No amount of works can earn your way into Heaven, only Jesus' love can get you there. Isn't it grand? Haven't you heard? No matter what you do, Jesus loves you. You can be the king or queen of the sinners, and He will adore your every cell. That's where you come in. Ask and you shall receive (Luke 11:9), this includes forgiveness.





A young nun once claimed to have had a vision of Jesus. Her bishop decided to test her truthfulness and ordered that the next time she had a vision she should ask Christ what the bishop’s primary sin had been before he became a bishop.


Some months later the nun returned and the bishop asked if she had asked Christ the question, to which she affirmed that she had. "And what did He say?" the bishop asked, apprehensively.


"Christ said..." and the nun paused a moment... "He said, ‘I don’t remember. ’"





Oh, that nun was so lying. God doesn't forget. He's like an elephant ("an elephant never forgets"). Such foolish ramblings from a lunatic...Wrong! That is precisely how Christ would answer. If one asks for forgiveness, He wipes away the sin and tosses it into the deepest of the ocean's trenches. How remarkable! The King of all Kings takes the time to not only say, "You are forgiven, my child", but also to go back into His 'book' and ERASE the sin. I say, my parents don't do that. They remember my every wrong done against them. Heck, I don't even do that for myself, nor anyone. Someone crosses me, and even if I 'forgive' them, I will remember it always. My former pastor once said to me, when I spilled a wrong done against me, to forgive but never forget. That was a great piece of advice in my mind at the time and I thought he must be all wise to have thought of that. But as time went on I realized how wrong he was. God calls us to forgive as we have been forgiven (Matthew 6:12), so shouldn't we do like God and also forget? Yes, He has called us to do so! We learn the lesson that that betrayal has to teach us, but then we wipe their slate clean in our mind and move on. Because how can we forgive if we constantly bring ourselves to remember? If Jesus did, we'd all be in some big trouble. But His merciful forgiveness and bountiful love has Him be above it all. Thank goodness nothing can come between us and Him--nothing, but ourselves. My former pastor once said that God tosses our sins into the depth of the sea and we shouldn't go fishing them out. Isn't that insulting God? Here He has kindly and lovingly forgiven and forgotten, and we drag it back and wave it at Him shouting about us being unable to be forgiven. That's questioning God, I'd say. Basically you're saying that even the all-powerful Father can't take care of it. Sheesh, mine as well just give the Father a good ol' punch in the heart.





I was in Universal Studios a few weeks ago. We went on this 3D Spiderman adventure ride there. So we're beamed with some gravity-taking-away ray thing and begin floating away. Spiderman keeps us from drifting into space and all, while fighting off the bad guys. Suddenly, Spiderman is distracted and the beam wears off so gravity gets to work again. As can be expected, we started crashing down to earth. We all screamed as the ground came rushing up at us. Our noses were ON THE GROUND before Spiderman finally got a web down to catch us. He waited until the last minute, but he saved us in the nick of time.


As thrilling as this is in fiction, it’s even more thrilling when it happens for real. Just ask Mike Robinson. He is a maintenance worker for United Airlines at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. He had just left work and was on his way home, very early in the morning of January 13, when a tire on his car blew out. He lost control of the car, jumped a median and slammed into a ditch, where the car immediately burst into flames. Robinson remembers trying to get his door open, but it was jammed. Then, as flames began to rise around him, he lost consciousness.


Del Wolfgramm is another airport worker who was working in a hangar near where the accident occurred. He just happened to be stepping outside at the very moment the car jumped the median. Seeing the accident, he ran to the car. As the flames engulfed it, Wolfgramm pried the jammed door open and pulled Mike Robinson from certain death.


When he was later interviewed, Robinson called Wolfgramm his hero and said, "He saved my life." And, indeed he did.


When Mike Robinson was in that car, trying desperately to escape the flames that were encircling him, everything must have seemed lost. All hope must have been gone and death must have seemed imminent. And then, out of nowhere, a hero arrived to save the day.





The Lord does these sort of saves all the time. From the little girl about to end her life and suddenly gets a loving text message from a friend, to the teenager about to give his life to a world of alcohol abuse and drugs suddenly getting caught by his parents and stopped, God jumps in and saves us 'at the nick of time' in so many ways. For that little girl he impressed a friend to show her love, and for the teenager He sends the parents forward to discover the life-destroying mischief. He does this because He loves us. As Romans says, nothing can come between us and Him, nothing but ourselves and the wrong choices we make every day. But God doesn't ever give up on us. He can't because He loves us so much. So, Brothers and Sisters, why don't we try and make it easier on the Father? Show Him how much we love Him and how much we appreciate His always being there to save us just in time.





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Father, there is none like You. None that can love so unconditionally and under any and all circumstances. We pray, Lord, that we can learn to love like You, forgiving and forgetting. As we get up to welcome another week, we pray You work in our lives, continuing to save us from this world's temptations. We pray we make Your job easier, Father, so that we can reap the harvest in Heaven. In Christ's Name we pray, AMEN.