The Precious Gift

So, in a moment, I'm going to ask all of you here to repeat a prayer.

You can remain seated as you repeat this prayer.

It will appear on the scene.

Would you just pray with me?

Lord Jesus Christ, by an act of my will, I open my heart to hear you, and as you speak to me, I will respond in your name.

Amen.

So our text today, it comes from James chapter 4, beginning in verse 13 through 17, and I want to focus on that and get right into the word the Lord has given me.

James 4 · chapter mention

Come now, you who say tomorrow or today we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell and make a profit.

Whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow.

For what is your life?

It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.

Instead you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.

But now you boast in your arrogance.

All such boasting is evil.

Therefore, to him to know who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.

John 10, 10 says, The thief comes only except to steal, kill, and to destroy.

I come that you may have life and to have it more abundantly.

The title of my message today is The Precious Gift.

I call it precious because the word precious means unique.

It means to be set aside.

It means that it is something very unique that is given to each one of us.

So I use the word precious.

I'm talking about the life that God has given you.

So I want to just begin sort of into the message and into the text as the text does today.

He says, Come down.

It's an invitation to sit down and talk.

It's an invitation to, let's just reason together today.

And so I want to invite you just to reason together as the Lord, through the Holy Spirit, speaks through my voice.

It's really easy, as all of us know, to get caught up in situations of life.

We can get into a maintenance mode, into a routine of life, rather than a pursuit of our place and our destiny according to the Lord's purpose in our life.

And I truly believe that every one of us has a purpose, a unique purpose, a part in God's kingdom, a part in this life on earth that only we can fulfill.

It is ours, and we should be on the page of pursuing that.

He says in this passage, you go and buy and sell and make a profit and talk about tomorrow.

It is not wrong to buy, sell, and make a profit and to have wealth.

The emphasis is not there.

It's not about even having stuff, as all of us do.

The emphasis is trying to do that without involving the guidance of the Lord and his direction and his will for our lives.

On any given pursuit of life, wherever you are, whatever vocation you're in, it is about not seeking the kingdom of God first in your life.

That means of exchange and wealth that I referred to is a necessary part in every culture of the world that I've been in.

Some means of exchange is absolutely necessary.

But that pursuit, money, wealth, can become a goal in itself.

And that's dealt with in the rest of the book of James that I read from in the fifth chapter.

But that's not my subject today.

I want to take a brief look, though, at the background of the book of James just to give us a little insight about it.

There are several men in Scripture that are named James.

Most believe that this book, James, that we have in our New Testament, was written by the half-brother of Jesus, who had trouble himself believing in the Lord.

According to John 7 and verse 3, we begin there.

His brothers therefore said to him, Depart from here and go into Judea, that your disciples also may see the works that you're doing.

For no one does anything in secret while he himself seeks to be known openly.

If you do these things, show yourself to the world.

And verse 5 says, For even his brothers did not believe in him.

Seemingly that would be the reason, then we have the passage in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 7, that says, After that he was seen by James, then by all of the apostles.

1 Corinthians 15:7

Unbelief is only wrong if it persists and becomes a controlling factor in your life.

Please hear me.

Some of you, under the sound of my voice today, may be church comers.

But you do not have a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The issue in the New Testament is not about church.

As important as it is, it's Christ's body on this earth.

And it's an important place, and we do need to attend.

But listen, you can have a personal, intimate, private relationship with the Lord and never be in church, although we are all supposed together.

And that is the emphasis that I want to make today, especially to those of you who may not know the Lord.

It is about you yourself when no one is looking and your relationship personally through the Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.

God is reaching out and pulling at your heart today.

He wants to woo you to himself.

He loves you.

He's done everything in the world he can to have you surrender your life and heart to him.

So let me talk just a little bit about my first point here, which is life is.

By the way, Pastor Robert and I talked about this, and I said, he said, you ought to have at least three points.

And I said, Well, I've got about 15.

He said, narrow it down if you would.

Okay.

But in this passage in James, the word appeareth comes.

In the Greek, it means to shine, to show forth.

In other words, I want you to think about for just a moment the stage that I call eternity.

There's an earth that is spinning and orbiting around.

And actually, there are several estimates, and nobody knows for sure, but the best estimates I could find is that right now all of us are traveling about 70,000 miles an hour.

I know it doesn't seem like that, but when the next time you stumble, just say the earth balked.

It really wasn't me.

But what I want you to understand today is this stage of eternity was created by God, this world.

And life appeared on that stage.

For my purposes, this world is just, this earth is just our place of habitat.

It's just a place that we call home.

It's all about eternity before and after this life's journey and what we call here on earth and cherish so much.

I also wanted to just share a few facts with you about this life as we know it, as it appears in orbit on the earth.

The best figures I could find, and they're constantly changing all the time, is that today there's 7,506,794,746, people on the earth today.

Just under 8 billion.

In our world today, there are 1,642,000,683,368, overweight people in the world.

In this world today, there are 741,722,949 undernourished people on this earth today.

Today there will be 192,097 births in the world.

Today there will be 79,408 deaths in the world.

This year there will be 421,418 people to die by suicide.

Today, Facebook addiction disorder is now mental disorder identified by psychologists.

Some of you may already have that disease.

The average woman uses in her height, uses in her height lipstick every five years.

Did you get that?

Uses her height in lipstick every five years.

I'm not done.

And so my point is life is.

But please understand, it is a gift.

It is a privilege to live in this world and have life today.

It's beautiful.

Laugh a little, love a little, do whatever you have to do, but enjoy your life, and that can only be possible through a relationship with Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord.

The story is told in Scripture of a man who was very successful in the eyes of the world.

He was a farmer, and the harvest season came, and it was overwhelmingly good.

He said to himself, I will build a bigger place and I will store up and prop my feet up and live it up.

That's my paraphrase.

He made great plans about tomorrow.

But in Luke 12 and verse 20, God speaks to that man and he says, You fool, this night your life will be required of you.

Then whose will these things be which you have provided?

Now, folks, in all seriousness that I could be, if God calls you a fool, you're in trouble.

Be sure you're not in that category.

And again, my point here is tomorrow I will.

Tomorrow I will.

As I'll reference in just a few minutes.

But equally important about tomorrow is also yesterday.

We are not intended to live in yesterday.

There's a passage in Luke chapter 17, verse 28 through 33.

Luke 17:28–33

Likewise, as it was also in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planned, they built.

But on the day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

Even so it will be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.

In that day he is on the housetop, and his goods are in the house.

Let him not come down to take them away.

And likewise the one who is in the field, let him not turn back.

And verse 32 says, Remember Lot's wife.

Why does the scripture say to us, Remember Lot's wife?

Well, Genesis 19, verse 25 and 26 helps us.

Genesis 19:25

So he overthrew those cities, all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.

But his wife looked back behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

We're told to remember Lot's wife.

Why?

Here's my point, I think.

Do not live in yesterday.

To do so is to render yourself stagnant.

That is, there's no progressive movement in your life.

I think that's the meaning of the pillow of salt to us.

Again, live today.

Don't miss it.

It's the only day you have.

And that leads me to my final point.

Life is a vapor.

James chapter 4, verse 14.

James 4:14

What is your life?

It is even a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

I wanted to ask you something.

Is life really a vapor?

Several years ago I was in Augsburg, Germany, and I took a picture of a lake that was there early in the morning.

That lake looked like this.

And if you'll notice just a moment, you'll see the white looks like clouds right on the lake.

Every morning, that would rise up.

I call it a fog.

They called it a vapor.

And about an hour later, it looked like this.

The vapor was gone.

And the Lord spoke to me about this message that I'm bringing today.

He said, Your life is just like that.

It appears for a season and then it's gone.

It really is a vapor.

Today I want you to understand.

I'm not a pessimist.

I love to live, but I want to make my point.

Life goes by real fast.

It really does slip away.

Listen, hear my heart today to you and to all who are listening to me, wherever you are throughout the world.

I want to show a few pictures of my life and then make a comment.

Notice the screens if you would.

I did this to show you that I had hair at one time.

And there I am standing a few months ago on the very spot where I was born.

And listen, all of those scenes that you just saw in the pictures of me, it seems like a snap in my finger.

It was only yesterday.

I know it was over 81 years ago.

I know that, but it seems like it has gone so rapidly.

And so my word to you is your life will be the same way.

One day you will look around and wonder, where in the world did my life go?

And that's why I'm saying to you, today, today, today is the only day you have.

Live it to the fullest.

Live it for God's purposes upon this earth.

That's the only way you will have and find your destiny and have peace in your heart when this life's journey is over.

Ron Ruskin, in his book, The 1% Doctrine, writes about former vice president Dick Cheney and his policy regarding the war on terror.

And I quote, even if there's just 1% chance of the unimaginable happening, act as if it is a certainty.

It is not about analysis, it's about response.

I believe in my heart today that God put this message on my heart, and I have this burden on my heart today.

For those of you that may be questioning and having doubts about the Bible and the truth of the Bible.

And doubting is not wrong, as Pastor Robert has so beautifully preached in his message on doubt.

But I wanted to share what I call, use the word odds, the odds of something happening.

For instance, here are some probabilities from studies reported by Good News Dispatch.

The odds of being killed by a lightning stroke are one in two million.

The odds of becoming President of the United States are one in ten million.

A meteorite landing on your house, one in a hundred and eighty trillion, that you will eventually die one to one.

If there is in your mind just a one percent possibility that the Bible is true and Jesus is the only Savior, why on earth would you ever risk that?

Act on the one percent possibility.

Dr.

Philip Stoner in the early 1950s published a book called Science Speaks.

We don't hear anything about this.

The book is out of print, and if you do find a copy, it's pretty expensive.

But in this book, the study, he reports the results of the study conducted by 600 students in Pasadena City College.

This study was conducted by the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.

And in this study, they took eight of the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus Christ, of the more than 53 prophecies that are given in the Old Testament about Jesus of Nazareth being the Christ, and I want to summarize these eight prophecies for you.

Christ to be born in Bethlehem, that he would have a forerunner, that he would enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey, that he would be betrayed by a friend, that his betrayal price would be 30 pieces of silver, that that price would be thrown away and used to buy a potter's field, that Christ would remain silent at his trial, although he was innocent.

Christ was to be crucified.

Those are the eight prophecies that they took of more than the 53 existing in the Old Testament.

And they concluded.

What are the odds of the probability of one man fulfilling just eight of these prophecies?

And here was their conclusion.

One in ten to the 28th power.

There it is on the screen.

28 zeros.

They concluded that Christ had to be the Christ.

He had to be the savior of the world because of his fulfillment of those Old Testament prophecies that occurred and were written down thousands of years before he came on the scene.

Dr.

Stoner concludes in his book, and I agree, any person who rejects or doubts that Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind is rejecting a fact proven perhaps more absolutely than any other fact in the world.

In 1834, there was a lady named Charlotte Elliot who lived most of her life with bad health.

She was constantly sick, depressed, discouraged.

She had repeated nights of being awakened with a feeling of uselessness, which often occurred.

After such a night, she woke up on the day when her brother, who was in the ministry, was trying to raise money through a garage sale, except they didn't have garages back then.

It was called a bazaar sale.

She was very depressed, and they were her brother was doing this for people who had children in ministry to raise money for them to go to school.

Charlotte was unable to help, and she stayed inside.

But just to comfort her own self, she began to write a poem.

And it goes like this just as I am, without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me, and that thou bidst me come to thee.

O Lamb of God, I come.

Just as I am, though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, within, out, O Lamb of God, I come.

Little did Charlotte Elliot know that God would take that poem, put it to music later on, and it would be used by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to win millions and millions of people to him.

And you may be there today.

That's just how you come, just as you are.

You may be mad, you may have trouble, you may be fussing with your wife, you may be fussing with your husband.

It doesn't matter where you are, you can come just as you are today and give your heart to him.

That's the only way you can come.

But I'm especially trying to speak today to those two men.

God put a burden on my heart and confirmed it by Pastor Robert.

If you're under the sound of my voice today, there's something about urgency.

There's always urgency, but especially to you men.

Come to Jesus today.

God is reaching out.

Life is a precious gift.

It is a vapor.

It appears only for a while.

Please don't wait.

If you need Jesus today, you need a Savior, simply repent in your heart of your sin and ask Jesus Christ to come into your heart and let someone know that you've made that decision.

Perhaps you're here today and you have a relationship with the Lord, but you're out of fellowship with Him.

Perhaps you have uh drifted away from God's church and God's purposes.

Would you hear this heart today?

You only have today.

You cannot guarantee me today that you'll be alive tomorrow morning.

I hope all of us will.

But you don't know that.

Life was intended to live one day at a time.

God's given you today, and I voice to the best of my ability the message I want you to hear.

But hear me today.

If you need prayer for any reason at all, our precious team is going to come and stand down here at the front in just a moment.

They'll love on you, they'll pray with you, they will help you find direction, they'll help you find the Lord, they'll help you pray for any reason that you want prayer.

We just want to invite you to come.

Now, would you stand with me?

Lord Jesus, would you grant courage to those today who need you?

And to those who need prayer for any reason.

Allow them to understand today is the only day we have.

Life is a precious gift, but it is a vapor.

In your name I pray.

Amen.