We Need A Vision

It can become something that, you know, well, here we go again, you know, it's time for communion, or here we go again, it's time for emergency services appreciation day. And I don't want that to ever happen in our hearts with any, with communion or with any of the opportunities that we have to worship the Lord, to serve Him, to minister to others. And that includes this time of honoring those that are involved in emergency services. This is a special group of men and women that lay their lives on the line every day.

And usually they come in in the midst of an emergency and handle it, bring it back to a normal flow, and then they're out of there. And though people are grateful later, you know, for what they've done, there are very few cookies that end up at the stations or, you know, thank you cards that make it there. Sometimes there's a thank you in the paper, and it's on the back page, and if you read it, so, you know, that's okay, but a lot of times you don't. So this is an opportunity for us as a fellowship to invite the brothers and sisters in emergency services and just say thank you to them.

So could I, first of all, have all of the men and women involved in any area of emergency services, would you stand, please? Normally we have you come up on stage, I'm not going to have you do that this year, so you can feel good about that. Just stand where you are. And fellowship here at Calvary, on the count of three, can we just show them how much we appreciate all that they do?

And Sean's been through this with you before, and I don't want to instruct in cheerleading, let's just sincerely show them our appreciation, okay? One, two, three. Okay, if we could keep the emergency services people standing and the rest of the people sit down. Now if your spouses are with you, if they would stand as well. You all are appreciated more than you know.

For the times that your husbands or wives are out on those calls in the middle of the night and in storm conditions, tornadoes are around, or icy conditions, and you're at home praying, we want to identify with you as well. If I could have our fellowship now, you can get up and move around, because there's some spaces over here. We'd like to lay hands on you as the Bible directs us to when we're praying for individuals, and we'd like to directly pray for you. So fellowship, if you'd get up and move to these men and women, and just place your hands on their shoulders.

Proverbs, chapter 29. If you don't have a Bible, kind of look around for it, there are several around. Somebody will hand you one. Book of Proverbs, chapter 29. A familiar verse I want you to look at is verse 18. It may sound a little different in the New International Version if you're used to hearing it in King James.

with a newspaper that says, Cloned Sheep Gives Birth and he says, Dolly had a baby, Mr. President and the president's dropping the papers that he's holding and he says, I never had improper relations with anyone named Dolly. Okay. Now that can be funny but at the same time it's very sad because unfortunately that represents the leadership in every segment of society.

There is a trickle down effect that President Reagan talked about and it's not only monetarily, it's attitudinally with the attitudes down through leadership in our society. Let me ask you all a question. Is there someone that you admire? Think of someone if you can right now, try and think of someone that you admire, someone that's alive today, no fair going back 50 or 100 years or whatever, somebody that's alive today that you would like to pattern your life after and that you wouldn't mind telling someone else that you admire this individual and that you'd like to pattern your life after them.

Is there somebody that you can think of? I remember when I was about 5 or 6 years old that I really admired the firemen in our community. I lived in Denver and I wanted to be a fireman and I remember getting a hat with a little thingy on it and the little flashing light and I remembered I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up. When I was about 17 years old, I was working at a Safeway store out there in Denver and it was in a pretty rough neighborhood and so we had, first it started in the evenings and then it was every day we had security in the store and the security were Denver police officers that were working off-duty and I got to know several of these guys and

that was the first time that I can remember really having a desire then to enter law enforcement and one of my friends that I worked with at that time stayed in Denver, he was younger than I was and he entered the cadet program and then when he was 21 went through the academy and is now one of the chief of detectives in the Denver Police Department. But I didn't get to do that, the Lord had other directions for us to go and we ended up, Ann and I and our oldest daughter Lisa moved back here in 1975 and God granted me then that opportunity to fulfill that vision or that desire that He'd laid on my heart when I was able to join the Winfield Police Department. Now 1975 is a while back but they did have radios in the cars and it was an excellent

experience for me. I finally finished college, didn't go to seminary but I truly believe the time that I had with the police department in Winfield allowed me to see more of how God works among His people than all of the theological training I could have received in seminary and I count

for setting the fire that killed his daughter. In the last six months, we have a rash of kids killing kids and kids killing teachers and rage just seems to be uncontrollable right now. People get mad and there's not a cooling off, they just explode and they come at each other with more than words. Anger has become such a problem that not only are there stress management classes but now there's anger management.

and bringing alongside and now he has set him over the church in Ephesus and Timothy is a pastor of that church. And Paul writes at least two letters to Timothy, we have two in our Scripture that he writes to encourage Timothy. And in 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul writes verse 1, but mark this, there will be terrible times in the last days.

Unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And we see that today. With everything that I've just mentioned, we see God bringing to fulfillment His prophecy to us concerning these last days.

And how you view things is how you respond to those things. And our society is in the midst of shifting that, moving from one way that we have perceived things up to this point now to perceiving things in a totally different way. Philosophically, our society is moving from what's called a modern worldview to a post-modern worldview. Now, what's all of that?

Well, an author named Sally Morgenthaler, in writing for Worship Leader magazine in the May-June issue, this current issue, writes, quote, "'What does it mean to be post-modern? It means that you're part of the biggest mind shift in over 200 years, and your outlook on self, society, and truth, reality, and the meaning of life is a reaction against the long, dry reign of rationalism. As a post-modern, you're right-brained as well as left.'" What does that mean? It means you're more feelings-oriented, rather than just wanting the facts.

You want to feel it. You want to see all of the possibilities of something, rather than just having the facts laid out like in rationalism. "'You're right-brained rather than left-brained. You're pro-mystery and anti-humanist. You consider yourself spiritual, but not necessarily religious. You believe that there are other ways of knowing besides reason, for example, intuition and

emotion.

May I suggest to you that we are a society that has lost a healthy fear of God? Somehow we have relegated the commandments of God and the necessity for a fear of God to the historic, archaic pile of outdated and outmoded things. That was your parents' religion, that was your parents' attitude, but we're more technological, we're more scientific today.

Well, Solomon also wrote over 3,000 proverbs which were wisdom to live by based on his conclusions in Ecclesiastes, and we have some of those in our Bibles, and one of those is chapter 29, verse 18 that I had you turn to at the beginning. Where there is no vision, the people perish. Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint. The blessed is he who keeps the law.

Where there is no vision, where there is no revelation, we need a vision, we need a revelation in our society. Now, a vision of what? A revelation of what? Is this some cosmic kind of thing like Peter and Cornelius had? Do we need to have... Am I saying we need to have this spiritual, supernatural thing where we just kind of sit in a trance and a sheet's laid down and we get this vision of something?

No, I'm not saying that. That's not what the Bible's saying either. I want to look at this verse briefly in three parts. I want to look at the foundation of the vision, the foundation of what he's saying here. We need a vision. A vision of what?

That's not a pastor's responsibility. That's all of us as believers. That's our responsibility and calling, to make disciples wherever we are. And so wherever we are, Jesus should be visible in us and through us, and he's not. Somehow we've relegated it to, well, my religion, my Christianity is a private thing, a personal thing, and I do it, you know, I celebrate it in my church and I celebrate it in my home,

but I don't take it outside. I don't take it to where I live.

May I suggest to you that the Bible says that you have been created an eternal being. Your soul is eternal. Because of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, and we've inherited then the results of that, our physical body dies, but the real you goes on forever. So you are an eternal creature, you're an eternal being, but you'll either live eternally with the Lord and experience eternal life, or you'll live apart from him in a place that wasn't created for you, a place created for the devil and his angels called the outer darkness, it's Gehenna, and it's the lake of fire, and that's eternal death.

But you will be awake and alive and experiencing that in eternity. But Jesus says eternal life here is knowing the Father, seeing him, understanding who he is. That's eternal life, coming into that relationship with him and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Now look down at verse 6 there in chapter 17. Jesus says an interesting thing. He says, I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world.

What we need is a vision. What we need is a revelation of God. And Jesus said that eternal life involves knowing him, and Jesus said, I've revealed you. I've let my disciples see you. I have revealed you. I've given them the vision of who you are.

Not that we just click off the work, it's the way that we do it. There's just something different. People may not be able to put their finger on it right away, but it's evident. And it's because you're living in that relationship with the Lord, and as you live that out, you're revealing God. Revealing the Lord involves letting people see what he's like, his nature, his love,

his mercy, his faithfulness, his forgiveness, his grace, his righteousness, his holiness, his long-suffering. Now, how many of those were lived out through you this past week? Or how many of you just kind of clicked off the job, you know, you clicked off the hours, you had X amount of stuff to do, and you did X amount of stuff. And there was no real love expressed, there was not the faithfulness, you're faithful in getting the job done, but there wasn't the faithfulness in doing it in a loving way.

People need to see that. They need the vision of that, they need the revelation of that, they need the revelation

We just had an emergency out at our area in Lakewinds, and without, hey, come to Lakewinds, that's where we are. Well, great. Where are you at there? You need the directions. You need the specifics to know how to get where you're going so that you can be there to respond to that particular emergency, and in the same way, as believers, we've been given directions through God's Word.

We've been given the directions on how we're to respond, how we're to move in this life that we live. Ultimately, the Word is made flesh for us in the person of Jesus Christ, and He's revealed to us who can't see Him now yet in flesh through His Word that He left to us, that describes to us how He moves, what He desires, what He's wanting us to do. Therefore, God's revealed through His Word, and He's revealed to the world through those that have come to know Him through His Word, right?

retirement so that you can finally quit and really go do what you really want to do? Or do you see it as an opportunity? Do you see it as a mission field? Do you see it as a place where God can reveal Himself to the people around you? Because Christian, whether you're in emergency services, whether you're in law enforcement or fire prevention, the fire department, or EMS, or whatever area of life, that's exactly

how God sees you. You are a vehicle through which He wants to reveal Himself. You're the person through whom He wants to give someone else a vision of what God is really like. Now, that's just the first part, and we're going to end here shortly, but I quickly want to give you the other two. That's the vision. That's the foundation of it. The fallacy of forsaking that, when you and I remove ourselves from that reality, when

we make our Christianity simply a private thing, Proverbs 29, 18 says in King James, the people perish. New International says the people are unrestrained. Well, look at society. Our society is perishing. Our society is crumbling. The people around us are unrestrained. There is a brutality in life that wasn't there 20 years ago, 25 years ago. There's a lack of love for humanity that wasn't there 25 or 30 years ago.

Society around us is crumbling. The family as we know it, as we have known it, is dying. Discipline is, for all intents and purposes, in the home, non-existent, as parents relegate that to other agencies, to the schools, or to SRS, or to the law enforcement. It's your job. You take care of them. I'm busy doing other things. Toleration is now the politically correct attitude.

We're to tolerate each other. It doesn't matter if our lifestyle is unbiblical, if it's an aberration, as homosexuality is. We're to tolerate because we're not to condemn. We're to tolerate everything other than biblical Christianity. Anything that has any resemblance to a conservative faith is associated with the militia. People should be allowed to do what people want to do.

Well, there's a history of that in the Bible. It's called the Book of Judges, and it says that every man did what seemed right in their

In Spanish, it means the child, and specifically, because it's capitalized, it means the Christ child, the Messiah, and it has a connotation from way back when it was first used that that meant that He was coming in judgment because every time the El Nino pattern would come, it would bring about catastrophe like that of judgment. It's interesting with the tornadoes and the floods and everything that's happening as a result of that, specifically in our society because we have lost a vision of God.

Jesus even mentioned that these things were going to happen with increasing intensity as a woman who was coming into the last stages of birth, and to watch for that. And we're seeing that on our eyes. Why is it happening? It's because we're a society that's lost a vision for God, and that's the fallacy of forsaking it. Finally, there's a fruitfulness here in 29.18 for following the vision.

He says, blessed is he who keeps the law. The word blessed there is the same word in Hebrew that it is, the meaning for it is the same in Hebrew as it is in Greek.

question that all husbands ask their wives when they're in that kind of condition, are you okay? And she was in the bathroom, and she was laying down trying to get over the tub trying to get rid of this, and she's in pain, and I'm thinking, man, I'm going to have to get her to the hospital. And she got up, and she started moving out of the bathroom, and I thought, well, I better, you know, I better go to the bathroom because I better get done because I'm going to have to take her, and I'm going. And she says, I think I'm going to pass out, and I'm going, oh, no, and all of a sudden

and stuff, and when I was in law enforcement, I saw a lot of death, and that was usually after the fact. I've experienced a lot of death as a pastor during, you know, being right there at the point of death, but not like this where the eyes glaze over, and they don't hear you, and they're going down the wall, and I thought, man, she's having a heart attack. Her heart has stopped. I'm going to have to do CPR, and I got to get to the phone and call 911, but I can't do that if I'm doing CPR, and we're right outside my dad's room.

My dad is 82, and he's asleep, and here I throw open the door and flip on the lights, and I yell, dad, you know, Ann's down, and he jumps up, and he comes out, and he's going, oh, my, you know, oh, my. And I get back to her, and she's breathing, and she's conscious again, so I ran and called 911, and the ambulance was quick to get there, and the people that were involved that came, the paramedics were so gentle and so nice, and they just brought a calming to the scene, you know, and they just started telling Ann, just, you know, just breathe easy. Just take your time, and just, you know, I could have thought of that, but I'm standing there going, you know, we got to get clothes on, you know, we got to get ready to go to

the hospital, and she's in pain, and they calmed her down. They brought peace to the situation. It was upstairs, and so they had to put her in a carry chair and get her down the stairs and onto the stretcher and into the ambulance and start an IV, and there was just a calming effect. The Spirit of God hovered over that situation. We got to the hospital.