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Uh, if you'd turn in your Bibles to the book of second Kings and the ninth chapter. Second Kings and the 9th chapter, and we're going to look at just, really, out of this whole chapter, we're just going to really look at one little phrase, but we're going to find the background of it and so on. But the reason that we're having these meetings today is to prepare us for meetings that will take place in the spring. You probably didn't know that. I was made aware of that, that the reason that I am here in September is because of meetings that will take place in when, March?
March. And, uh, special meetings that you have every year. You always have meetings in March, don't you? Easter. Okay, you always have meetings about that time, right? Well, this year, coming up, Lord willing, the purpose for those meetings will be the gospel. And hopefully, that through the experience of our lives in the last days, and also the experience that the Lord's going to give us over the next several months, should he tarry and we still be here come March. Uh, he will have given us a purpose for these gospel meetings, that they won't just be another meeting.
We always have meetings. We run into these little ruts in our lives, don't we? We always have meetings around Easter, and so we're going to have them again this year, and there was some debate as to whether or not we should have gospel meetings or just meetings for encouragement for the saints. Personally, I think if you're going to have special meetings, they should be gospel meetings. And I think they should be, uh, with some exercise amongst the Lord's people. If you're not going to have some exercise for the gospel meetings as a body, as those of you who sit here right now, if there's no exercise for the gospel meetings in March, then please let me know right away so that I can reschedule my calendar because I have other things to do. And I don't say that as, uh, a browbeat.
Just understand that what we're going to do with our lives is going to count for something. Uh, our dear sister sang, For Such a Time as This. Well, that song was written some time ago, I happen to know. I don't know exactly when, but I remember hearing it a long time ago. And the purpose for our lives on this planet really hasn't changed. The course of events has changed. Things have gotten a little more interesting here in this area. But the purpose for which we're here really hasn't changed, and, you know, I was reminded a little object lesson of that is the number of people that now carry the American flag wherever they go.
I have always been, uh, extremely patriotic. Not that I've always carried a flag everywhere I went, but I know every patriotic song in the United States, for the United States, by heart. I grew up that way. We just sang, you know, all the songs, and I know them by heart, and I love them, and we sing them in the car when we were kids, and we sing them even now. And I love being patriotic. I've always been patriotic. I think my patriotism may have stepped up a notch or two or ten. But it's interesting to see now how many people, because of the circumstances, got on board. Young people who have never lived during a time of war, who have never had daddies that went to war, now understand the seriousness of what it means to live in a country where we have freedoms.
It's a tremendous privilege that we have that, that not a lot of other people in the world are afforded, the ability to travel, and when that freedom was taken away, that was the first thing that you and I felt, wasn't it? That we weren't able to move with as much freedom as we were five minutes ago. And the thought of, for me, to get from Mount Vernon back to Yonkers and then back to Newberg, and my mind, as yours was playing, will the roads back to Newberg be clogged with people making a mass exodus out of the New York area, and will I ever get home? I don't know if you thought like that. Maybe you were sitting in your living room. I wasn't. My family was some sixty miles away, and some families were even more separated than that.
And the instinct is to get back with the people you love and, and to move back into that position so that, so that you can know that everything's safe. There are many right now who, as of Tuesday morning, entered into a lost eternity. Many of which could have heard the gospel. Maybe some of those in airplanes and in the building had some last moments before they died to cry out to God. Wouldn't that be wonderful? We'd praise the Lord for that, wouldn't we? That there was opportunity, perhaps time, for some. We know that it's possible to be saved in one's eleventh hour.
Not a lot of it in the Bible, just one in particular, that there was a man on a cross beside the Lord Jesus Christ, and in his eleventh hour he was saved, and the Lord said to him, today you'll be with me. We don't recommend you wait till the eleventh hour, but it's possible, and the Lord gave us that illustration in his words so that we wouldn't lose hope, so that we'd know that there is possibility for those that have been rejecters of God throughout their whole life to come to the Savior. We're thankful for that. I'm thankful that we don't know the cutoff point, aren't you? Uh, to think that, that God dealt with me in his pity and his mercy for so long, so long.
I turned away from him. I was raised in a meeting just like this. I went to Sunday school with my family every week. My brothers and I used to fight o- over getting out of the car first so we could be the first one to run in the house and smell the roast that was cooking, that my mom left cooking on Sunday morning. Every, every m- morning, we, we never missed the meeting, I'll guarantee you that. You'd have to have a hundred and three fever, you know, and chickenpox or something in order to miss the meeting. It wasn't going to happen in our house. All those years I memorized verses from the scripture. All those years I saw portrayed before me the lives of godly parents, and yet so long till I received the Lord as my Savior.
How long he dealt with me. I lived a life that honestly I'm not going to ever give you the details of, but I'll tell you this, it wasn't pretty. And yet the Lord saw fit to somehow, because of the work that my parents did in my life, to make sure that even in my worst moments, I never missed a meeting. Can you believe that? I never missed a meeting, ever. Far from God, dead in sin, still right in the meeting. And I'm thankful for that, you know. If it hadn't been for that, I'm sure I wouldn't have been saved. The Lord somehow got my attention.
And the Lord's got our attention now, doesn't he? And we look around us, and the question would have to ring in our hearts to some degree as to why. Why are these things happening? You know, the world doesn't have to answer that question. Brother Robinson and I were talking about that in between the meetings. The world doesn't have to answer the question why, because the world has said there is no God. You don't have to ask yourself, if you believe there is no God, to ask yourself, why would God allow it? That's... doesn't make any sense. Those of us who do believe in the God of heaven, we're the ones that have to answer the question why. And of course, we're not God's counselor, are we?
We don't tell him what to do. This isn't the first time in human history that things like this have happened. He did this with his people all the way through their history. The farther they got away from God, the more he stepped up the pressure from their enemies, the more slaughter, the more people that lost their lives. Now, for maybe the first time in many of our lives, we woke up one morning and we under- can understand, maybe enter into it a little bit, what it was like on the day of the Exodus. To be there on that morning after, to hear the wailing that went on in the land of Egypt, because everyone had been affected by that tragedy. No one didn't know somebody who didn't lose somebody.
We talk about these things in the scripture like they're blase, like they're no big deal. Many have suffered over a long period of time, have seen tragedies come and tragedies go. And the Lord has used those opportunities to bolster his people and to bring more on board. We trust that somehow, as we would prepare our hearts then for March, and it's not too early, by the way, not too early at all to be preparing our hearts, what's going to happen. And of course, we don't have to wait till March to preach the gospel. Matter of fact, I would think that maybe we're a little bit more spurred on than we ever have before to share the gospel with those around us.
I'm reminded of the lovely song that we sing from time to time, Every day they pass me by. People need the Lord. They pass by, and they don't look, they don't acknowledge. For maybe the first time since I've been here in the last four years, people actually, actually acknowledge you when you walk on the street now. I have people wave to me in my car because there's a big flag hanging in the window, and they can identify, and there's some medium ground. Never happened to me before around here. I've had a lot of gestures from cars, but it was never a wave hello. The Lord's got our attention, and we got to seize the opportunity to rise to the occasion as men and women of God, to take advantage of the opportunities that we have.
C. S. Lewis said very well that God whispers to us in our pleasure, and he shouts to us in our pain. And God has our attention, and he has the attention of the whole world and a whole nation. For maybe the first time in a long time, people are open. When I got done speaking at that little social workers conference, people came up to talk to me. It wasn't about social work. It was about a lost eternity that they feared they'd go to. Honestly, from that platform, I could say very little of what I wanted to say and still stay up there, you know.
But it was enough to draw people's hearts and to draw out of them the things and the emotions that they were already feeling, the fears that they had. And there's lots of people around us that don't have the hope that we have. And they ask the same question that the whole world is asking now, and it was the question that a man in the Old Testament by the name of Joram, it was the question that he asked somebody. The question that he asked was, is it peace? And he asked it of a man by the name of Jehu. Now, I don't know how many of you know your Old Testament very well, but Jehu was an assassin, a very good assassin, tremendous assassin.
And he was going to kill one of the most powerful people in the world, maybe one of the most successful people in human history at sin that there has ever been. Her name was Jezebel. She was a woman that struck fear into the heart of not only the world, but God's people. You see, she had been able to defeat Yahwehism. She had destroyed all but one hundred servants of the Lord. Single-handedly, she had wiped out the worship of Jehovah from off the face of the planet, except for a hundred men who had divided in half into fifties and been hidden in a cave by a little guy, a little meek guy by the name of Obadiah, who fed them with bread and water.
Even Elijah the prophet, the one that you see with the big bulging spiritual muscles, you know, the one that was able to defeat four hundred and fifty of Baal's priests at Mount Carmel. You remember that account, don't you? Eh, he had had enough of listening to this other god, uh, about this other god by the name of Baal. So he went out to the people of Israel, and he said, look, how long will you halt between two opinions? Either Baal is God or Jehovah is God. Not both of them can be God. It's interesting that people still today have trouble with that particular argument. I've run into so many people in the last several weeks who have said to me these exact words, well, there are many roads that lead to God.
Very kindly, I always tell them, you wish. Even in Elijah's day, he understood one thing, and that was there were only two options. How long will you halt between two opinions? Either Jehovah's God, or your God is God. But you can't have the best of both worlds. I'm not the only one saying this, you know. A man who of much renown said it this week, by the name of Osama bin Laden. I don't know if you heard what he said. He said that he praised Allah for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Praised Allah. There are many people that I have worked with in this world who considered, at least up until this week, Allah to be the same God as Jehovah God. Very difficult to separate it for some people. I'm not sure that that's the first plan of attack you want to use with the Muslims right now. But understand this, that even the Lord's enemies are clear on the matter. Not all roads lead to God, Jehovah, the creator of the universe, the Lord Jesus Christ. And people from other religions don't believe that, so why should we buy into it, that all these things are going to eventually lead you to God? They're not.
The Lord Jesus Christ said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. Nobody. Not lots of roads, just one narrow path. In order to get up that path, you have to trip over a rock. His name is Christ. He's the rock of offense, but he says this, maybe something that we can identify- phi with more today than we could a week ago, and that was, it's better to trip over the rock than to be crushed by the weight of it, he says in the Gospel of Matthew. And there is a day coming.
There was a day coming for Jezebel. Here is the most successful person at sin you'd ever want to see. It could have been quite discouraging to live in Jezebel's time, you know, to see this woman run, run roughshod over the Lord's people. I mean, I'll tell you how powerful she was. She was married to the king Ahab, and Ahab in his own right was a ruthless guy. And as he's walking home from, from work one day, as he was out taking care of some business, he passed by a, a vineyard that he passes by every day, and he had been admiring it for some time, and it was the vineyard that belonged to a fellow by the name of Naboth. And he went up to Naboth and he said, hey, uh, Naboth, I'd, I'd really like to have this piece of property, you know?
I, I could turn it into a really nice, lovely garden to entertain my friends with, if you'd just, uh, let me have it. Naboth said to him, well, you, you see, I can't let you have it because it's the inheritance of my fathers. Uh, Jehovah's law says that I can't give it to anybody outside the family. And Ahab, who's the king now, understand, he says to him, well, I'll buy it from you. He said, you're not getting the point. I wouldn't sell it to you if you paid me a hundred million times what it's worth. It's outside God's law for me to sell you this piece of property. It's not going to happen. So Ahab goes home kind of dejected, and little did he know his wife Jezebel had cooked him his favorite dinner, and she sat it down on the table, and he sat down at the table, and he kind of pushed it away.
He couldn't touch it, you know. And he went over and he laid down on the day bed with his face against the wall, and he just kind of laid there all depressed, and Jezebel says, what's the problem? I made you your favorite dinner, you know, uh, and you won't even touch it, and now you won't even talk to me. What's going on? He explains to her how he stopped by Naboth's house on the way home, and he wouldn't sell him the vineyard. She said, what's the matter with you? You're the king, for crying out loud. You don't ask people for things, you take them. Sit down, eat your dinner, I'll be back in a half hour. She came back with a piece of paper, said, there's the deed to your little vineyard.
Oh, by the way, Naboth's dead. This was a woman that got whatever she wanted. She had destroyed the Lord's altars. She didn't just pick them apart a piece at a time, she came through like a bulldozer. And even Elijah, who had stood up to these prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and had taunted them, even he was afraid. He felt that he had met his match, at least at that particular time, in Jezebel, and so he ran and hid. But God had a plan, and he had prophesied that not only Ahab and all his family would die, but that Jezebel would die too.
And he prophesied the way that she would die, that when she died, there wouldn't be anything left but the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. Of course, she threatened the life of many of the Lord's servants, including Elijah. But I want to read you this account, starting at verse twenty two of second Kings chapter nine, and you can read the rest of the story on your own. It starts in the book of first Kings and goes all the way through this chapter. You can get the data on your own, but here's, here's the phrase that I really want to look at. And it came to pass when Joram saw Jehu that he said, is it peace, Jehu? A- and this is Joram, this is Ahab and Jezebel's son.
He's on the throne now. Jehu had already killed his father, and he was coming to kill him and his mother. And so Joram, out the window, sees Jehu pull up in his chariot and says, is it peace? Is everything okay? And the answer that Jehu gives back to Joram is something that really is going to be the answer to our question this morning. He said, what peace, so long as Jezebel, so long as the harlotries of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many. What peace could there possibly be so long as your mother is still alive?
And with that, Joram runs, and he jumps in his chariot, and he starts to drive away at full speed. And Jehu leans back in his chariot, pulls his bow back, and makes a shot that maybe one or two other people in the entire human history could have made. He pulls his shot, and it goes right through the back of Joram and comes out through his heart. Kills him. It's interesting that Jehu then goes down to the palace, and Jezebel was expecting him, and we pick up in verse thirty, And when Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it, and she painted her face and attired her head and looked out through a window.
Now, I've heard this portion of scripture used to preach that women shouldn't wear makeup. I'm not sure that's the, the case at all. It's probably some innocent form of disfigurement, and it's okay. Um, and Jehu entered into the gate, and she said the same question that, that Joram asks, she asks in a little different way, and she says, had Zimri peace, who slew his master? And I don't know if you recall the history of the kings at all, but Zimri was one of the kings of Israel who probably had the shortest reign of any king in, in, in Israel's history. It was somewhere around six or seven days.
And how he got the throne was he had assassinated a guy by the name of Baisha, and he had taken the throne, and six days later somebody assassinated Zimri and took his throne. And this was Jezebel's only line of defense. This woman who had been so successful in her sin and so powerful throughout all these years. She's scared to death now, and so her last line of defense is to try to play with his mind and say, had Zimri peace who slew his master. In other words, you know, anybody who takes the throne the way that you're about to take it, well, the same thing could happen to you. Jehu doesn't even answer the question.
He looks up at her and says, who's on my side? Two or three guys up in the balcony, they said, we are. We heard about the shot you made over in the chariot over there, and we're on your side. So throw her down. And they threw her down the stairs. And it says that when she fell down the stairs, that her blood splattered on the wall and on the horses. Jehu says to the men that threw her down, come on, let's go out to lunch. Least I can do for you. And they hop in the chariot, and they all go down to the local restaurant, and while they're eating, Jehu says to those men, you know, it really wasn't right what we did with her.
I mean, she was a queen and all. Uh, tell you what, go back and pick her body up and go bury it for me, would you? You know, that's the least we can do for her. She was a queen. And those men went back, and of course they couldn't find Jezebel's body. All they saw was the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, because animals had come through and eaten that body up. The reason that I tell you this account this morning is because there's a question that has been going through my mind since, really since Tuesday morning. Is it peace? It's probably the same question that you've been asking yourself, and the same question that the whole world is asking.
Is it peace? And the answer for us is the same as it was in Jehu's day, and that is, what peace, so long as the god of this world is alive and active? You know, it's interesting to hear the blame as it's placed. So much of the blame for these things happens to land on God himself. How could God allow this to happen? A loving God like that. Well, God's certainly not the God of evil, is he? He has allowed evil in this world, and and it would seem to us at times as though evil wins.
As though people who are sinners are successful at their sin, and it becomes disheartening from time to time. If you're like me and you're honest with yourself about it, you would have to come to that conclusion that at times sinners are so successful. But God is a God of judgment, you know. And he's going to judge sin once and for all. And there will be no peace in this world until the Prince of Peace comes, our Jehu. It's hard to look at Jehu as a whole and understand that he's a picture of Christ, but he is, you know. He's the one that came to redeem Israel from out, from under the power of Jezebel.
And we have a God who is our redeemer, who's our savior, and he's going to come back someday, and he's going to fight, and he's going to win the victory. And just like that blood of Jezebel splattered upon the wall on the horse, there's going to be blood. The Lord Jesus Christ says that he's clothed in a garment down to the foot, and at that day it will be as though it was dipped in blood. Not his blood this time. The last time we saw him on this earth in a robe that had blood on it, it was his own.
And that was the day that he really won the victory, wasn't it? Over sin, death, hell, and the grave, so that you and I could come to him, so that there would be a message. Because as you look at the world around you today, they're crying out, and I have a message for them. Yes, there's a lot of evil in this world, but there is a cross. There is someone who died for your sin. Not just the weight of my sin, but the sin that took place on that horrible tragedy on Tuesday morning.
He died for that sin too. He knew the weight of it. The grief that we feel, and and if your heart is like mine, it's welled up. It's almost no room left. I've cried so much in the last few days that I didn't think there were any tears left. But he's the one, he's the man of sorrows. He's acquainted with grief. He bore the cross. And because he bore that cross, we can live in the power of his life. Sometimes we sing that song, because he lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because he lives, all fear is gone. We live in the light of a risen savior, and we have an opportunity now more than ever to preach deliverance to a world that is lost. Their hearts are open. They're ripe. I had the opportunity the other day to run some supply down to the New York City Rescue Mission because in the flight of people coming up from out of the area around the World Trade Center, they opened their doors to people who had lost their shoes and socks.
And so they gave them shoes and socks, and they allowed them to wash up and to clean up and to shower and to call home, and... Because of that, they were completely run out of toiletries. And so, uh, one of the men in the mission and I were able to get through with three suitcase loads of, of supplies for the New York City Rescue Mission. And we got through, praise the Lord. We got through all the police checkpoints and walked right into the mission. But I gotta tell you, what I saw.
There's a whole world. It's not missing just towers. They're missing hope. And you see, you can get angry and you can say that there is no God. Fine, there's no God. But you haven't eliminated suffering. All you've done is eliminate hope. And if all you are is here by some bizarre happenstance, and this life that you live is some charade, I pity you. Because even through this time of despair and grief and loss, there's a cross, and there's nobody on it.
You see, he's risen from the dead, and he is Lord. And he's given me hope, and he's given me the promise of a bright tomorrow, that whether I leave the planet today or not, I'm going to spend eternity with him in a place called heaven. And I'll tell you what, I can get excited about that. Can you? It's all right, you can get excited. We have a future in heaven, for sure. And it's all right to, to get a little excited about it sometimes. And there are people in this world who are lost and dying, that if they get in a plane today, they don't know whether the plane's going to crash, and if it does, where they're going to end up.
And we have to move. You don't know how long it's going to be before the Lord comes back. Our brother prayed this morning, it could be today. You know what? I believe him. It could be today. It could be this week. It may not be for another ten years, but you and I don't know that, and we're not promised. And we've got to move. The opportunity is ours. This room is not even half full this morning. Could you imagine that if in March we had gospel meetings every night and this room was full? I know it's hard for some of you to believe. It's almost as hard for you to believe as it were that somebody actually made it out of that building alive the other day.
And we get skeptical. It was interesting that as we made our way from Yonkers Gospel Mission down into New York City with those bags, the measure of skepticism we met from the Lord's people. As I was rounding up suitcases, understanding that I had to have the ones that rolled because we weren't going to be able to drive the whole way, we were going to have to walk. And as I was rounding up enough suitcases to load up, people that were giving me the suitcases and people that were watching me were going, you'll never get through. You'll never get. You're not going to be able to walk down the streets of New York pulling a bag like that without getting stopped. And as Clark Smalls and I drove down into Manhattan, and we stopped the car and got out, we stopped and we prayed the Lord would get us through.
And when we got through, he looked at me and he said, I can't believe it. I said, why can't you believe it? We prayed, didn't we? My God is a God who hears and answers prayer, and if we were to start right now today and get excited about preaching the gospel in March, don't be a bit shocked when the room is full, when there are unsaved people in here every night. Don't be surprised. I can remember having gospel meetings in a little town called Brookville, Pennsylvania. Anybody ever heard of Brookville? I didn't. Okay, one, Mert, you know Tony Sashreba or something, because there aren't even too many Christians that I know in that town.
It's a town of nine hundred homes. And we were able to visit every one of those homes with a packet called a seed sower packet. I'm going to show it to you in a minute. And we went to this little country chapel out in the middle of nowhere, seemed so to me anyway, and we had our first night of gospel meetings. We were going to have a week and a half of gospel meetings there. And I remember going in that little back room to pray, and you know how many people are in that assembly? There's only about nine people in the whole, whole assembly, and they're all related. That assembly's not there anymore, by the way. But as we gathered in that little back room to pray, I gotta tell ya, I wasn't really thinking anybody was showing up.
And much to my surprise, when I came out of that room, there were nine people there who weren't from that chapel, who weren't saved. The next night we prayed, and the Lord brought in twenty two. The next night there were thirty four, and every night the number increased. One guy kept coming back every night. You know what happened, don't you? Yeah, he got saved, gloriously saved, and he wasn't the only one. And out of an assembly of nine people in a town of just nine hundred homes, the Lord did a marvelous work.
You've got thousands and thousands of homes around here, and they're all next door to each other. They're right side by side. Do you know how many people you can hit in a short amount of time here? It's amazing. You're sitting on a gold mine. But you have to do something about it. The Lord put us here on this planet to do something, not just to talk about doing something. You have to get ready to go. We have something marvelous that has, it's a, it's a no-lose situation with this thing, I'm telling you. I've used it in literally over fifteen different cities, and you, it is, you do not miss.
And I don't know whether you want to use this or not, but I highly recommend it because you just, I mean, I'm telling you, this is called a seed sower packet. It's a text at John three sixteen for those of you who are nearsighted in the back. It's a lovely text, and it's suitable for framing, and it's got a lovely gospel track in there. It's got a card to return. It's got a, we, we put in a few extra things, you know, we put in the, the, the death to life cards. You've seen those little cards that you flip it one way and it says, it says life, and then you flip it the other way and it says death because it says the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, and we got other tracks in here. Why Christianity, why Christianity can't compete, and is it possible to, to meet as a New Testament church today?
And if you take this to somebody's door and you hand it to them, I'm gonna guarantee you that you won't have more than five percent of the people that you visit tell you no. And we have seen over and over again how people have come to Christ by this simple text. I walked into a gas station to pay for the gas that I pumped in Ohio. And when I went in to pay, I took one of these in with me, and I handed it to the woman who took my money. I said, here, I'd like you to have this. It's a little gift from me to you, no- no- nothing else, just take this and enjoy it.
She started to read it. And I'll use her words because they carry a little more impact. She goes, oh my God! She said, we have been looking for this verse in the Bible for months. Every day we watch the football, every Sunday we watch the football game, and it's in the back of the end zone, and we always wondered what it said. I don't know how she missed it. It's right there in John, but here it was for. She said, I can't believe it. She says, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go home, I'm gonna take this to my kids, and then we're gonna read it, and we're gonna read the material inside of it. I knocked on one woman's door in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I handed her this packet, and she grabbed my arm, pulled me inside, and said, I was just praying the Lord would send you over here.
I want so desperately to be saved, she says, and I don't know how. And I could go on and on, and you wouldn't believe me, but I could go on and on for at least two or three hours and tell you account of account of account over account of how we walked in and knocked on somebody's door, how we met them in the street and handed them this little piece of literature, and how the Lord opened the door then. And we've not seen one person saved, not even ten people saved. I'm going to, and it's not an exaggeration, I'm going to tell you we've seen hundreds of people saved. Why? Because we have such a good technique? No, because they're ripe. They are sitting on the tree ready to be picked.
That's what they are. And they just want somebody to come and tell them the truth. They've heard all the lies, and they don't register. They don't meet the standard. They understand that there's a problem with, with every one of them. We have a gospel to give. The problem, though, is this, and with these thoughts I want to close. Is the question is going to have to be asked on a personal level, at this level in the assembly. Is it peace in the assembly? Or are there things that in this assembly need to be taken care of before we can reach out beyond this assembly?
And if there are, and you can be honest and say that there are, then they better be dealt with in a quick hurry because we don't have a lot of time. And the only way that the Bible says that you can be ready and prepared to go out and give the gospel is to be holy at home. If nothing else has been proved to us in the last five days, it's that we can live without television. Isn't that marvelous? Didn't realize it before, did you? You can live without sporting events. Your kid's soccer game doesn't matter so much anymore, does it?
Everything else has been put on hold in our lives. If you don't mind, I just... Some of you don't realize, and and you won't ever realize some of the things that I personally have been going through. For the last year and a half, off and on, I have been hunted by an individual who wants nothing more than to kill me. The pressure on that had been stepped up over the last two months. I don't know if you know what it's like to be looking over your shoulder all the time, but I want to tell you something. I didn't think a thing about it since Tuesday morning, until a brother called me on the phone and said, your problems don't seem so big anymore, do they, brother?
That may seem callous to you. It was quite a joy for me to understand that there are bigger fish to fry than my personal little life, my wants, my desires. The Lord's doing something on a grander scale, and our little problems that we have don't seem so big anymore, do they? You need to take care of the things here so that we can go out with a fervor in the gospel. Make sure that everything's taken care of at home first. Because when you invite people through these doors, you want them to be greeted with a warmth, with a joy in Christ that they've never seen before.
And if we can unite around a flag that's red, white, and blue, I hope certainly that as Christians we can unite around the cross, because we're never going to be any closer together than we are there. And as we focus on that cross, it kind of puts all the other problems in perspective, doesn't it? That my little issues, my little wants, my little desires, my little pet peeves, they don't really hold a candle to what Christ suffered on the cross. And he could do something marvelous, you know. He could do something remarkable in the next months to come. You might invite people to come, and they might actually show up.
Not only that, you might be able to share the gospel with him, and don't be surprised when you share the gospel that people actually get saved. It happens, you know. The Lord's still in the business of saving people all over the planet. Christians busily at work today, preaching the gospel, encouraging the saints to go on. I trust that, as we looked at this little phrase, and that's all we did was look at one little phrase, is it peace? That you'll be able to answer this. It's peace in my heart, because I know Christ is my Savior. It's peace in the assembly because we have nothing between. And someday it's going to be peace in the world because the Prince of Peace, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, will return.
I trust that we all might encourage e- uh, each other in the days to come to go on and live for Christ more than we ever have before. Let's pray. Our God and our Father, we bow in thy presence. We give thee thanks for thy Son, the lovely Lord Jesus, and we ask in his name that you would bring peace to our hearts and peace that only comes through the blood of his cross. We pray that if there's one here that doesn't know thee as Savior, that perhaps they might receive Christ as Savior and understand what it means to be one of his and have the hope that we have.
Father, we pray for the peace of this nation. We pray for our president and congressmen and senators. We pray for the mayor. We, we pray for all those that are working diligently to rescue. Father, that causes us to think of our own rescue efforts, to pluck some, as it were, as brands from hell. Father, give us courage. Help us to be steadfast as we have an object lesson in front of us of those who unrelentlessly serve. Help us to realize that we're Christians and that we need to serve thee with a fervor until you return. Father, help us, we pray. Give us strength for the journey.
We pray it in Christ's precious name. Amen.