Sermon Tone Analysis

*A community worth taking for God   **5~/31~/2007*

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  This message was inspired by a message by Frank Page.

The overview of the message is similar to the overview of his inspiring message.

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*Read numbers 13:17-33*

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*Introduction… *Frank Page… the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention… Delivered a message to the SBC Executive Committee on February 19th of this year.

In this message, he gave an illustration that Billy Graham had used in his autobiography entitled Just As I Am.

Mr.

Graham tells of a conversation he had with John F. Kennedy shortly after his election.

Here is what Billy Graham Said…

 

He said… On the way back to the Kennedy house, the president elect stopped the car and turned to me.

“Do you believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ” he asked.

“I most certainly do”

  “Well, does my church believe it?”

“They have it in their creeds”

“They don’t preach it”… he said… “They don’t tell us about it… I’d like to know what you think.”

I explained what the Bible said about Christ coming the first time… dying on the cross… rising from the dead… and then promising that He would come back again…

 

   “Only then”, I said… “are we going to have permanent world peace.”

“Very interesting” he said, looking away.

“we’ll have to talk more about that some day” and he drove on.

Several years later the two met again, at the 1963 National Prayer Breakfast.

“I had the flu” Graham said… After I gave my short talk and the president gave his, we walked out of the hotel to his car together, as was always our custom.

At the curb he turned to me.

“Billy, could you ride back to the White House with me?

I’d like to see you for a minute.”

“MR.

President, I’ve got a fever” I protested… “Not only am I weak, but I don’t want to give you this thing.

Couldn’t we wait and talk some other time?’”… it was a cold snowy day and I was freezing as I stood there without my over coat.

“of course” he said graciously…

 

But the two would never meet again…later that year Kennedy was shot dead.

Graham says… “his hesitation at the car door and his request haunt me still.

What was on his mind?

Should I have gone with him?...

It was an *irrecoverable* moment.”

It was an irrecoverable moment…..

 

…I asked my wife’s permission to give two illustrations from her life, that tie in with the idea behind the message this morning…

 

Bill Stafford says that God speaks to our wives first… because we men are so hard headed…

 

….

One of those moments involved our Ex Brother in law named Curtis…

 

Denise’s Sister and Curtis were married and had a beautiful child together…

 

That Child was a wonderful girl named Ashley… I have told you about Ashley before…

 

Denise and her sister Glenda were both pregnant at the same time… Denise was pregnant with our second child… Derek...

And Glenda was pregnant with their first child… Ashley…

Well… Glenda went into labor first… and Denise went to the hospital to see her…

 

While she was at the hospital… Denise went into labor as well.

So… Denise was admitted to the hospital… and the same doctor would go back and forth between Denise and Glenda…

 

Derek was actually born first… and then about two hours later… his cousin Ashley was born…

 

Derek and Ashley were almost like brother and sister… we even had their first birthday together…

 

But tragedy struck…

 

When Ashley was about 20 months old… She died in a house fire…

 

And as you can imagine… the stress to the marriage was enormous… and Curtis and Glenda came to the point where they ended up getting divorced…

 

… Then tragedy struck again… as a few years later… Curtis took his own life…

 

And Denise told me that God had been telling her all week leading up to Curtis’s death that she needed to go see him…

 

but we were just such busy people… you understand that don’t you?

 

Now… I don’t think that Denise seeing Curtis would have kept Him from taking his life…

 

 No one had a clue… Curtis didn’t seem depressed… he had even made plans with other people… no one had any idea what he was going to do…

I don’t think it would have saved his life…

 

But there was some reason God asked Denise to go see him… Maybe just to speak with him that one last time…

 

We will never know this side of Heaven… 

 

There was that *irrecoverable* moment…

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

… Another One of these moments was when I came home from work one day and my wife said to me…

 

“ I called my dad today… we are going to go see him.”

……Now… that may not seem like a strange conversation to you… but you need to understand that we had not seen my wife’s father for over three years… and we only lived about 25 miles away…

 

Kari was about a year old… Kristin was about three years old… and he had never met either one of them at this time…

 

You see… my wife’s father was an alcoholic… He had lived a life where he had been abusive to his family… And He had left Denis’s mother as soon as Denise and I got married…

 

We had tried to help him time and time again… we would take him to a treatment program… and then… as is so often the case… after a day or two he would check himself out.

We had tried to help him by allowing him to stay with us for a while… but try as we may… it seemed like nothing ever changed.

We finally came to the point where we… and pretty much the rest of his family… just could not handle the stress and pressures of trying to help someone who truly did not want help… and the family pretty much stopped having anything to do with him.

And it had been like that for over three years when I came home that day and Denise told me she had called her Dad…

 

So… while I was standing there pondering what she was saying… I asked…

 

   “what brought you to that decision”

 

And my wife looked at me and said… “God told me to make things right with my Dad… so I am going to.”

She said… “We are going to go see him Saturday”

 

…Well… just a day or two after this conversation… before we were able to go see him…my wife’s father had a heart attack…

 

Was it another Irrecoverable moment?

….

I will finish this story in a moment…

 

…My friends… I believe there are those irrecoverable moments in our lives…

 

There are those times when we find ourselves at a crossroads… we find ourselves at a point in our lives where the decisions we make alter our destiny… the destiny of our families… the destiny of our churches… and the destiny of this nation.

The decisions we make today will change our lives forever…

 

There are opportunities that lie before us and when we miss those opportunities… they are gone forever…

 

   They are truly *Irrecoverable* moments…

 

My friends… Today… as a church… *we* stand at just such a crossroad…

*Today*… the opportunity lies before *us*…

   

*We* must be a church that is centered on carrying out the great commission…

 

 *We* must be a church that is focused on a *vision* that is given by *God* himself…

 

And from the passage we read a few moments ago from Numbers chapter 13… we see just such a vision…

 

In this passage of scripture we can see a land that is worth the effort… we can see a land that is worth working hard for…

we can see a land that is worth taking for God…

 

…The people had become tired I am sure… longing for a home… waiting for the promised land… the land that God had led them out of Egypt to bring them to…

 

They had sent 12 spies into the Promised Land from the Negev to Hebron… from the South to the North in the land of Canaan.

They were to bring back a report on the land… they were to report about the fruits and vegetation… they were to report about the people… weather they were weak or strong… many or few…

 

And when the spies brought their reports… they were full of wonder and awe…

 

The fruits of the land were more than they could have imagined… the land was flowing with milk and honey…

 

Just think of a people who had been wondering in the wilderness finally hearing the reports of such wonderful things… of such a beautiful and fruitful place to live…

 

 

For forty days the spies surveyed the land…

 

According to verse 29 the inhabitants of Canaan were a diverse group… they were a mixed population… so it wasn’t like the spies had to hide out in the day and travel only at night… they were able to walk amongst the population for the most part…

 

And the reports they brought back were mixed reports… reports of excitement… as well as reports of fear…

 

They were afraid of the people… but they were excited about the wonderful resources of the land…

 

…My friends… We too are called to Survey the land…

 

Jesus said in John 4:35 “open your eyes and look at the fields”

 

Let us open our eyes my friends… there are unreached un-harvested resources for the Kingdom of God all around us…

 

 There are precious souls that are loved by our heavenly Father that are not being touched… and they are right here in our community…