October 20, 2024 // Israel and the End Times

Welcome to Walk in the Truth podcast.

How do we know where to find answers to the toughest questions in life?

While the simplest answer is the Bible, where do we start this search and how do we discover

this truth?

Today, in this teaching podcast, John Metter, lead pastor of Cross City Church, takes a

specific text of the Bible and helps us find truth for the life we're searching for.

We are so grateful that you're here this morning with us in our Great Expectations series,

and I'm going to ask you to take your Bibles to the Old Testament book of Daniel, the book

of Daniel chapter 9.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

Take your Bibles and turn there a few words, because Daniel 9 is a prophetic passage, we're

going to be talking about the nation of Israel and the end times and how all that works together.

By the way, we'll pause our Great Expectations message series next week for one Sunday, and

I'm going to preach a message that I call the election message, and that means that

because there's a presidential election coming up, every time we have one of those, we take

a few moments to look from a Biblical lens at the different policies and issues that

are on stake and what it means for us to represent as salt and light in the world.

So next Sunday morning, the election message, and then after that, we'll get back into the

Great Expectations end time series message.

So Daniel chapter 9, Israel and the end times, please stand with me as we read God's word

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

together.

Daniel chapter 9, now I'm going to be in Daniel for just a moment, and then we're going to

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

go to a number of other passages in the Bible as we talk about the nation of Israel, and

then we're going to come back around to Daniel chapter 9 at the end of the message.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

So we're starting and we're finishing in Daniel 9.

Now Daniel is an incredible book of the Bible, and of course, we know the man Daniel, and

we know what an incredible prophet he was, what an incredible leader, courageous and

bold in every way, and we're going to learn something about his vision that he saw and

how Gabriel the angel helps him with that vision.

But in between the start of this message and the end of it, we're going to go to several

texts in the Bible.

I'm going to ask you to be ready to turn in your Bible from text to text so that we can

understand something about the nation of Israel.

So I'm going to pick it up in Daniel chapter 9 verse 20.

Daniel 9:20

Daniel has set his heart to understand what Jeremiah has written about Israel, and so

he's praying.

He's saying, God, show me how I am to understand what you've written about my nation Israel.

And so God comes to him in this prayer.

We pick up this story in verse 20.

The Bible says, now while I was speaking and praying, this is Daniel, and confessing my

sin and the sin of my people Israel and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God on

behalf of the holy mountain of my God, while I was still speaking in prayer, then the man

Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision previously came to me in my extreme weariness about the

time of the evening offering.

He gave me instruction and talked with me and said, Oh, Daniel, I have now come forth

to give you insight with understanding.

At the beginning of your supplications, the command was issued and I have come to tell

you for your holly esteem so that you can give heed to the message and gain understanding

of the vision.

In other words, I'm going to show you what this prophecy means.

Let's pray and ask God to show us the same thing.

Father today, my prayer is that we would understand the prophecies written about Israel, understand

the nation of Israel and the role that Israel has had and your economy and what you've done.

Father, I ask that you open our eyes and help us understand by the power of your Holy Spirit

today, all these things that we'll talk about.

We ask this in Jesus name and our God's people said, Amen.

Please be seated if you would.

So I would have to say to you that understanding the nation of Israel and its role in the end

times is not a simple task.

In fact, I think my task is pretty hard today and I'm going to keep as simple as I possibly

can because I want to share in a very simple form so that I can understand it well and

explain well who Israel is.

But Israel and the church are on two different tracks with God, even though they are both

people who belong to God.

Yesterday I went to the airport.

We live kind of north of here and so for me to get to the airport from my home, I get

on Highway 26 and when I get down onto 121, I get on off a four-high level overpass.

So I'm on this four-high.

I'm looking down at all these cars around me, car dealerships and cars and all kinds

of businesses that I actually go over when I'm on my car and when I get into 121, I descend

onto either eight or 12 lanes depending on where you are.

All these cars going all these different directions.

At every half mile point, there is a merging lane coming into this highway that I'm on

and at one point, a whole another highway merges into the left and the same thing is

happening on the other side of the road.

So all these cars are going so fast in all these directions.

If I look over to one side, I see a high-speed rail alongside the highway on its way to the

airport and if I look up just a little bit, I'll see airplanes coming in at very low altitudes

just over the same road that I'm driving on.

I mean it's enough to make you go crazy unless you know somebody that is a highway architectural

expert has organized everything so we won't crash and burn into each other.

That's just what it's like to drive in the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

But it's also kind of what it's like to be able to understand what God is doing with

the church, what God is doing with Israel, what God is doing with the Antichrist, what

God is doing with the Old Testament temple being rebuilt, what the tribulation, the great

tribulation is all about, what the rapture is all about, all these different things.

How do we make sense of all this?

The first way you make sense of all this is just come to the point of realizing this is

bigger than you are and to realize that God who holds all things in the hands of his power

does know what's going on and does give us some clues about it.

So today we're going to look at the nation of Israel for just a few moments and we're

going to look at what God is doing with Israel.

Now let me just say that God's love and concern for Israel as a nation is something that's

spanned nearly the whole history of mankind.

From Genesis chapter 12, even to today, God has always demonstrated a favor towards Israel,

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

calling them his chosen people.

So we're going to try to understand how do they fit in the end time and why we love Israel

and why we favor Israel and stand with them in times of war.

Why is Israel so important to us as believers and Bible readers who follow the Lord Jesus

Christ?

Now I'm going to make this as simple as I need it in order to understand Israel.

I'm going to give you four keys that help me understand who Israel is and what God is

doing with them and what role they play in the end times.

So here are the four things.

First of all, I want you to see the promises of Israel, the promises of Israel, literally

promises God made to Israel.

Now in the Old Testament, when God makes a promise to Israel, to his people, he does

it in the form of a covenant.

Now God did not only make covenants with Israel, but he also did with Adam before Israel was

created.

He did it with Noah before Israel was created.

But God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God.

I want to define the word covenant with you for just a moment.

The word covenant is a relationship or agreement between God and his people, and it defines

what God intends to do.

So as such, covenants are both predictive and prophetic.

What that means is when God makes a promise, you can count on him fulfilling that promise.

Even if it's made to a different group of people than you know or that you identify

with.

Some of us look at Israel and say, well, that's so remote.

That's so on the other side of the world.

I don't understand what Israel has to do with us.

And what Israel has to do with us is that God loves Israel like he loves us as followers

of Jesus Christ.

And he's made promises and covenants with Israel that affect who they are and how they

operate in the world.

And so God has made these covenants and promises to Israel.

And I just need to tell you today, you may be a person that's heard promises from people

and they didn't fulfill their promises.

And so you don't think much of promises.

But when God makes a promise, he keeps every one of them 100% of the time.

So when we look at the promises God made Israel, it should encourage you and help you look

for his fulfillment of them, but remind you that he also keeps his promises to you.

He's a promise keeping, a covenant keeping God.

Now, as I said earlier, God made a promise to Adam.

Remember Adam and Eve sinned in the garden and the serpent had deceived them.

And God came in Genesis chapter three and he pronounced a curse upon Satan and a promise

that he would send the Messiah to bruise the head of the serpent.

That was a covenant he made with Adam, eventually fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

He made a promise to Noah.

Remember Noah in the flood.

And he made a promise, I will never again judge the world by flood.

And he hasn't judged the world by flood.

He's kept his promise.

But then he made a promise to Abraham.

Abraham who came out of Ur, a man that was not known apart from the promise God gave

him.

And I want you to turn in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 12 because Genesis 12 is where the

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

beginning of this covenant with Abraham started.

Genesis 12 verses one through three.

And if you want to know why Christians today often look at Israel and say, listen, we need

to respect and love and hold in reverence the nation of Israel, it's because of these

verses right here.

Now the Lord said to Abraham, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from

your father's house to the land.

By the way, the phrase the land is going to be pretty prominent in what we say.

Every time you see Israel mentioned, it's mentioned in the scripture as the land.

Go from your father's house to the land, which I will show you and I will make you a great

nation.

Now this is to one man and his wife Sarah that God says this.

They're not a great nation.

They're not a part of any nation apart from what God is calling them to.

I'll make a great nation.

I will bless you and I'll make your name great.

And so you shall be a blessing.

And I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse.

And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

Now this is a pretty direct covenant.

There's not much room for interpretation here.

God says this is what's going to happen.

The whole world is going to be affected by what I do with Israel.

Now I've got to take a moment to talk about Abraham and Sarah for just a moment because

they like everybody else in the world, we're not perfect people.

They struggle to believe that God was going to fulfill His covenant, His promise.

And you would too if you were 99 and your wife was 90.

Wait a minute, God.

Are you sure you've got the right people here?

You're going to give us a child?

You're going to make a great nation out of us?

I mean you think about that for just a moment.

Put yourself in their shoes.

Now I know nobody in the room is 90 but one day you will be and when you are you'll laugh

just like Sarah laughed if someone suggested you're about to have a child.

What an incredible statement God made to these two people.

But the reality is God takes people who could never physically accomplish what He calls

them to do and He does something in spite of their inability.

He takes someone that's unable and He makes him able by His power.

So here's Abraham and Sarah unable to have children even not really willing to believe

that deeply.

In fact, Sarah says to Abraham, this isn't happening.

Here's Hagar, my handmaiden.

Go into her and have a child by her.

So Abraham just obeys God and does that.

And they have a child named Ishmael.

And later on God says that's not the plan.

I'm going to give you a son.

So they believe God.

There's a great story of faith there.

They believe God and God makes them able and they have a child named Isaac.

And from that day on, Ishmael and Isaac are two very prominent people in the Old Testament.

In fact, Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations and it's very easy to trace back the

lineage of that and Israel of course or Isaac is a father along with Abraham of Israel.

So you have these two nations or two people groups that began and Ishmael is a perpetual

enemy to Israel.

The conflict continues on 4,000 years after it began.

But even through all this, God has remained faithful to His promise to Israel and His

covenants.

He makes further covenants with Moses for the law.

He makes further covenants with David through whom the Messiah came.

What about Israel and the promises to Israel?

That's what we're talking about today.

So the covenant of Israel with Abraham defines Israel's central place in history and eternity

because God's going to fulfill His promises.

I'm going to come back a read and remind you one more time.

You worship a God who does keep His promises.

And if you read the Old Testament, you're going to see time and time again where it

didn't seem possible for anyone and sometimes we might say even God to fulfill these promises

but He does it every single time.

You and I need to have full confidence in the scripture, full confidence in prophecy

that foretells this predictive about the thing that will happen.

So I have that kind of confidence because I look back after God makes a promise and

see that He does fulfill His promises every single time.

But not only do we need to talk about the promises of Israel, we need to talk about

something else.

Let's talk about the property of Israel, the property, the actual land that was referred

to in Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

If you jump up to Genesis 17, we see God speaking again.

He says, I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you

throughout the generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants

after you.

I want to emphasize for a moment the word everlasting.

God says this is everlasting.

This is not temporary.

This is not going to expire at a certain day.

This is an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants after you and

I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all

the land of Canaan, getting more specific, for an everlasting possession and I will be

their God.

Now you can't look at Genesis chapter 17 and in any way interpret it to be a temporary

Genesis 17 · chapter mention

promise.

You can't look at it and say, well God didn't really mean the word everlasting.

Surely there's some sort of translational problem there.

But there's not.

God made this amazing, powerful promise to a little bitty piece of land that was to go

to Israel.

I want to put Israel on the map for a moment.

Now you see a globe there, but we've got a little highlight of that very small piece

of land called Israel.

You see it there right next to Jordan and right next to the Mediterranean.

And there it is in the middle of what we would call the Middle East, the giant continent

of Africa under it and the European nations around it.

This little piece of land, keep in mind as we talk about Israel, it is a very small slice

of really state in the middle of the Middle East, but it becomes central to God's supernatural

work.

In fact, today you can't really read the news about anything that happens without also considering

something going on in Israel at the same time.

It's a special place made special by God's declaration.

It's the place that God gave Israel after their wilderness wanderings.

It's the place where the temple was built and worship began.

It's the place where the holy presence of God came down in the holy of holies.

The place where Old Testament kings ruled, the place where the Messiah was born and where

God personally visited His people.

It's a special land.

That's not special because of archeology.

It's not special because of the old buildings and the great history.

It's special because God says, this is the land I'm giving you as an eternal gift to

you.

Now if you study the land of Israel and the geography of it and the quality of what it

is, you'll be astounded.

I was astounded to learn that it's one of the richest farmlands in the world.

It has diverse geographical features, mountains and valleys and everything else.

Fertile, fertile in every way.

Access to the Mediterranean.

It's basically the breadbasket of the Middle East.

Many, many millions of people find their sustenance through the nation of Israel.

And through the centuries, God has remained faithful even when Israel did not.

Israel as a nation is unique because no other nation on the planet, including America, that

God ever speak of as being His people.

And yet He said that of Israel.

It's hard to miss the fact that God's hand that protects us on Israel, especially in these

latter days.

When we talk about Israel, we do it with a mixture of awe and respect for what seems

to be happening there.

Tony Evans in his book on prophecy said this, he said, here are a few million people surrounded

by millions of their enemies and yet Israel's enemies cannot undo Israel.

The only explanation is God's faithfulness to His covenant.

Fervent to His promise.

But Israel did endure dark periods when they were divided, they were driven from the land

and a 2000 year history of absence from this land from 70 AD until 1948.

And the reason that Israel was scattered, as God delivered them out of Egypt and out

of bondage, He gave them another covenant.

It's called the land covenant or the land promise.

And this promise was conditional.

Deuteronomy chapter 28, 29 and 30 is where God articulated this and as He shared this

Deuteronomy 28 · chapter mention

covenant with them, He said this is really about being blessed or being cursed in terms

of how you follow me.

And He basically foretold their rebellion.

Let me read this to you.

Deuteronomy chapter 29 verse 24 through 28.

Deuteronomy 29:24–28

Part of the prophecy was before all this took place, God said people will say, all the nations

will say, why has the Lord done this to this land?

Why this great outburst of anger?

Then men will say because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers,

which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt.

They went and served other gods and worshiped with them, gods whom they have not known and

whom He had not allotted to them.

Therefore the anger of the Lord burned against that land to bring upon it every curse which

is written in this book.

And the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and in fury and in great wrath and

cast them into another land as it is to this day.

While they were moving out of Egypt towards the land of promise, God said this is what

is going to happen.

One of the saddest periods of history.

God did not break His promise but Israel disobeyed.

And for 2000 years Israel was not occupied by the Jewish people but by various warring

people.

Warring lots of names of lots of different nationalities that were there.

But what happened is Israel was scattered.

Now there's a lesson here even for us in this last day, this age of grace, we have a relationship

with God through Jesus Christ not by Old Testament covenant.

But here's a lesson.

Walk with God and you'll know His blessings.

Turn your back on God and you'll know the absence of those blessings.

It's important for us to know that God has called us to walk with Him not away from Him.

And the Bible says in the New Testament, as a man sows so also shall he reap.

So it's really important to know in this day when we really want to hear about God's love

for us, oh absolutely, God absolutely loves us.

But it's also important for us to realize that when you walk away from God you miss

the blessing of walking with Him and so many other things.

This is always going to be true.

So the promise to Israel, the property of Israel, and keep in mind that God was not

through with Israel and still not.

They had to endure this awful time of disobedience.

You might remember in the days of Jesus, before they were scattered, Jesus looked at the temple

in the Olivet Discourse, Matthew chapter 24, another great prophetic passage.

Matthew 24 · chapter mention

And He said, do you not see all these things pointing to this temple?

True, I say to you, He said, not one stone will be left upon another which will not be

torn down.

37 years later, the temple was torn down completely after the Jews rejected Jesus and the Roman

armies He were occupying destroyed not only the temple but also the city and the Jews

were scattered to the nations for the next two millennia.

And Israel was no longer recognized as a nation.

What a sad moment.

But they would return.

They would return.

And as you look, you're aware they're back.

So first of all, the promise, the second, the property, thirdly, the prophecy, the prophecies

about Israel.

Does anybody remember the book of Ezekiel and that prophecy of the Valley of the Dry

Bones?

How many of you remember that being taught that in class or in Sunday school?

How many of you remember the song that goes along with that?

There's a song that goes along with that.

Please do not sing that song.

I will not sing that song if you will not.

But there was a song that helped us remember this amazing prophecy of the dry bones.

In Ezekiel chapter 37, you've got this amazing moment where Ezekiel the prophet sees the

Ezekiel 37 · chapter mention

vision of a valley of dry bones that are disjointed and all dried out in this desert and he heard

God tell him to command the bones to come to life.

I mean, this is wild stuff in Ezekiel chapter 37.

Ezekiel 37 · chapter mention

So he's called to do that and when he did, they came together and this vision became

a great army according to the Lord.

So I'm going to read Ezekiel chapter 37 verse 14.

Ezekiel 37:14

It says, I will put my spirit within you and you will come to life, promising this to Israel,

and I will place you on your own land and then you will know that I, the Lord, have

spoken and have done these things.

I don't know about you, but I was always fascinated from the time I was six years old and in Sunday

school class in a little Baptist church.

What an amazing and weird prophecy this is.

Dry bones coming to life, really?

I mean, I mean, nobody even makes movies about that or maybe they try to make movies like

that now, but wow, what a prophecy.

But Israel did come back and Israel was raised up.

And the truth is, they came back in a supernatural way.

As God is prone to do, He fulfills His promises in amazing ways.

So after being scattered for 2,000 years, the Jews began returning to the homeland when

World War I resulted in the English having rule over what's known as Palestine.

Palestine, how you pronounce it?

And Israel was not there.

But after World War I, England was sympathetic to the Jews and said, you may now begin to

go back and repopulate the land that God gave you.

By the way, England and America are both founded in Christianity at their beginning and they

understood the view of Israel from Scripture.

So that led itself to opening doors from the British government.

And so the Jewish people started trickling back to the land of Israel.

But what happened in World War II was even beyond that.

And in World War II, when it was completed, and as you know, World War II, closely associated

with the Holocaust, where six million Jews were literally put to death, but the million

survivors of concentration camps that remained, listen carefully, were allowed to return.

When you see pictures of Holocaust victims, what do you see?

You see pictures of people who are skin and bones, skin and bones.

The largest group of people to repopulate Israel before 1948 were Holocaust survivors

who were only skin and bones.

God gave them back their land.

They had nowhere else to go.

Everything else was taken from them.

God gave them back their land.

And by 1948, these million survivors, along with other Jewish people coming from other

lands, began to be recognized officially as a nation once more in 1948.

And the same land that God had given them 4,000 years before.

So now the nation Israel is completely repopulated, a nation of nearly eight million people today.

And the Arab nations still rage against this.

Part of the Gaza conflict is a part of that Ishmael Isaac kind of competition and battle

that's going on.

And the struggle in the Middle East is always about who owns the land.

It's always about that.

But when I read my Bible, I know who owns the land.

God gave this land to Israel.

And today when you hear chants from the river to the sea, what's really going on are people

saying we want to eradicate Israel today from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

We want to push them right out.

And that's that conflict that's age-old that's been going on for many years and on and on.

So let's get real about this for just a moment.

Such incredible prophecy that's being fulfilled in such a supernatural way that couldn't ever

be orchestrated by man should impress you to believe your Bible.

It should impress you to hold tightly to everything that scripture teaches.

Why would I trust anything else when something that God says 4,000 years ago is coming to

pass before my very eyes and I see the impossibility of it happening apart from anyone except Him?

So you have the prophecy of Israel.

God is fulfilling His promise and His prophecy by bringing them back to the land.

I was in Israel last year and we were hoping to go again this year before the conflict

but it's a beautiful land, a land, an amazing land.

And as you drive through you see and feel so many of the things that I'm talking about

when I talk about God and the blessing on God's people.

It's such a huge thing.

But number four today, I need to tell you about the period of Israel.

The period of Israel.

When Israel rejected the Messiah in the days of Jesus, God turned His attention to those

who believe in Jesus Christ.

And we began what's called the age of grace or the age of the church.

We're still in that age today.

We're still in the age of grace.

We're still in the age of the church.

God is working in the church.

He's working through the church and He will continue to work through the church until

He comes appearing to us to gather us together.

Now that's called the rapture and I'll talk about that in the weeks ahead.

We're still in that stage where we're waiting for God to rapture the church.

And when the church is raptured, again we'll talk about that soon, when the church is raptured

that will end the church age and begin what's known as the great tribulation.

Now the book of Jeremiah prophesies the great tribulation and he calls it a time of Jacob's

trouble.

Jeremiah chapter 30 verse 7 says, "...the last for that day is great."

Jeremiah 30:7

There's none like it.

And it is the time of Jacob's distress.

But here's a moment of hope that he will be saved from it.

Great tribulation is to be seven years long filled with incredible and terrifying events.

The great tribulation is the time when the Antichrist will rise in power and be revealed

or the much anticipated rebuilding of the temple begins to take place.

Do you know that today, even today, there are four large organizations that are all

working towards the plans for the rebuilding of the temple?

Architects are moving together with building construction experts called the construction

group and they are planning to rebuild that temple at the appropriate time.

But God will be focusing in that seven year period on the Jewish people.

Now we remember when we started this message we were in Daniel 9 right?

But in Daniel 9 God fulfills and explains the prophecy he gives to Daniel.

And I want you to read Daniel chapter 9 verse 24 and follow with me.

Daniel 9:24

I'm going to put it on the screen again because this is pretty detailed and we'll just take

a moment to fly over it.

Gabriel explains the vision to Daniel, 70 weeks have been decreed for your people and

your holy city to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for

iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy and

to anoint the most holy place.

Now those five things we'll talk about in future weeks when we look at the tribulation

period.

So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild

Jerusalem that was given to Nehemiah in the book of Nehemiah until Messiah the Prince,

it will be seven weeks and 62 weeks.

It will be built again with plaza and moat even in times of distress.

Then after the 62 weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing and the people of

the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary and its end will come

with a flood even to the end there will be war, desolations are determined referring

to 80, 70 when the Roman occupiers destroyed the temple.

And he will make a firm covenant with the many for one week.

This will be referring now to someone coming along later.

He will make a firm covenant with the many of them one week but in the middle of the

week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering and on the wing of abomination will

come one who makes desolate even until a complete destruction one that is decreed and is poured

out on one who makes desolate.

Now that's a pretty heavy duty prophecy there.

It refers to 70 weeks, it refers to things that happened in 80, 70 but also refers to

another time when the one who makes desolate comes and many things happen in that tribulation

period.

So stick with me for just a couple of minutes.

I'm going to take two minutes or three minutes to cover all of these 70 week notations with

time.

We can't possibly understand them all at once but one by one we will.

The week of Daniel refers to years and it literally refers to a week of seven years.

The prophecy says that 69 weeks or 69 seven week periods after Nehemiah was given the

command to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem the Messiah would come.

If you go back and calculate that that's 483 years and it literally happened from before

the time or at the time Nehemiah began and the time that Christ came and died on 33 AD.

Shortly after his death Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed as we've said and the people

were scattered.

So this 69 weeks of seven have already happened.

So if you're keeping track of what the prophecy says and what I've just said and explaining

that you know there's another week to go.

What happened to the 70th week?

That's what's called the final week in Daniel's prophecy and it seems as though God has halted

or stopped the prophetic clock while he deals with the church before this final seven years

in which he deals with Israel or the time of Jacob's trouble.

I've written it down like this.

The final week of the prophecies about Israel point to a period of seven years that takes

place after Jesus comes for the church and during that time God will save many in Israel

as they turn to him but he will also condemn the unbelieving world who refuse him.

These are huge things that are going to happen that are initiated when Christ comes from

the church which we talked about a little bit last week.

So when will he come for the church?

That's what everybody wants to know.

When is he going to come for the church?

When is he going to appear to the church?

When is he going to rapture his church out to begin these end time things?

And my answer is next week I'm going to talk about it.

Next week I'm going to talk about it.

Some of you almost lost your breakfast there.

Next week?

Did he really say next week?

Jesus coming back next week you need to get ready right now.

I don't know when he's coming but we're going to talk about these weeks ahead.

But what I want you to walk away with today is the understanding of a covenant-keeping

God who keeps His promise in spite of all the impossibilities we see or think of in

our minds.

I want you to see that when God sets His favor on someone and loves someone He never stops

loving them.

He loves Old Testament Israel today.

He loves the Israel people today.

He loves you today.

He's got His eyes set on you.

I want you to see a God who prophesies and fulfills things in such a way that lets you

read your Bible and walk away and go, this is something I can build my life on.

You've not thought about building your life on end times type of prophecy but what end

times prophecy should say to you is everything God says both predictive and prophetic comes

to path so every promise He gives to you personally will also come to path.

Do not doubt God in any way because He's a covenant-keeping God.

You know today as I think about preparing to talk about the rapture of the church, I

think I mentioned this last week, when Christ comes for the church that's your last opportunity

to witness, to give your life to Jesus.

It's your last opportunity to praise and worship Him, give to Him, serve in His name.

Do it now because when He comes back you'll have no other opportunity.

Now granted when He comes back for us as a church we'll be with Him forever and ever

but there will be those that are not with Him because they do not believe in Him that

we know that we have some influence over.

Keep in mind serve Him while He waits, while He tarries so that you will have completed

your course when He comes.

And pray for Israel, pray for peace in Israel, pray for the salvation of Israel, pray for

God to reveal Himself to Israel in a powerful way and appreciate them for all that God has

done with them what He will do with them.

Just a few moments, I'm going to close in prayer, we have our decision stations as always.

We want to talk to you if you have questions about a relationship with God and we have

people that are just waiting to do that.

You may even have questions about what I've shared today and we can talk about that but

certainly your relationship with Jesus is the most important priority that we have.

So I invite you to stop by if you have a decision you'd like to make, a question you'd like

to answer.

Secondly, I invite you to our guest reception room, it's right outside the center exit doors

and one of the great joys, one of my favorite times on Sunday morning is to go to that guest

reception room and meet people who have come here for the first few times and just say

hello, just thank them personally for coming and tell them a little bit about Cross City

Church so join me in the glass room right across the central exit doors and I'll see

you there if you drop in.

Thirdly, I want to invite you back.

I did say to you that next week we have the election message and I will be focusing on

that next week.

But if you can trust me in talking with you in a sensitive way about biblical prophecy

for example or anything else, you can trust me with that message.

It won't be caustic, it won't be hard but we will be taking time to look at biblical

perspectives about what all the issues we face are.

So let me pray for you before we go.

Can we stand?

Father, what a blessing, what a joy it is to be in this room today.

Thank you so much for drawing and bringing every person that's here today to let them

be in this room for this moment.

I don't believe in coincidences God so I know that you bring people for a variety of reasons

but I pray at the heart of it all, it's allowing them to draw closer to you, to know you, to

know your ways, to know your word.

And I pray that you'll encourage us to make the decisions that need to be made in our

lives as we follow you.

Lord, my prayer is that in the days ahead we will see the importance of a relationship

with you as being more important than anything else in our lives.

Allow us to have that.

Father, I ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.