Storms

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Romans 831-339.

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What then shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, then who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?

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It is God who justifies, who then is the one who condemns, no one. Jesus Christ who died, more than that, who was raised to life is at the right hand of God and also is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

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As it is written, for your sake we face death all day long. We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

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No, in all these things we are more than conquerors to him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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A whole lot of good stuff in that one, ain't it? Amen? Amen. Billy Graham tells a story about a lady and her husband and her lady's name was Claudia. And she was a newlywed and just got married and she was in her early 20s when she was diagnosed with Hopkins disease and was only given a 50% chance of surviving.

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Quickly she was operated on and began cobalt treatments that transformed her in almost overnight from a young beautiful woman to a complete physical wreck. And her husband was a chaplain's assistant in a hospital and he had seen many sick and dying patients. And he said in the movies...

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Couples who have fought for years in the face of danger suddenly forget all their differences and they come together. But he went on to say that it necessarily doesn't work that way in real life. So when a couple encounters a crisis, it magnifies what's already present in their relationship. He said, but since Claudia and I trust God,

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and we love each other deeply, the crisis drew us closer together. The crisis of our illness merely intensified the feelings that were already present in our relationship.

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You know, Claudia and her husband had no idea, woman, that they would ever face such a crisis. But when it happened, when it came about, they found out that they had already developed the inner strength that they needed to weather them and to get them through the crisis they were facing. I guess quite a question to go to ask here this morning is what about us?

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Are we ready? If a crisis was to come upon us today, or come upon our family, come upon our relationships, are we ready for that? You know most people never have, or probably never will experience that crisis as Claudia and her husband faced when they found out about that. But still, as long as you're alive and you're in...

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world you will have storms. You will have heartaches. You will have heartbreaks. You are going to have to make some time in your life some very, very difficult decisions. And there are going to be gut-wrenching moments in your life that has the potential for bringing us into a life-changing event. And I know that for a fact.

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It will bring you into a life-changing crisis. Are you ready? Now prepare.

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So what are you going to do? What will you do? What will you happen when it comes? Will you be prepared to face it? Will you have the inner resources already instilled in you to be able to get through that? To have all those inner resources that you need? And not? And how can we prepare ourselves?

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for the day that every one of us is gonna have to face. Head happens as you get older too, ain't it? But it doesn't stop even people in our 20s as this story was about. Just cause you're getting older, that's no reason to have a crisis we can have at any time in our life. What are you gonna do? How will you prepare to face it?

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Well, I'm convinced that if we want to have the resources that we'll need for a time of crisis that's gonna be coming upon us, then each of us has to make ourselves ready for that day when it comes. Well, how do we do that?

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I believe as we look into this scripture, we can find a lot of angels. And I've picked out a few of them. But I think the very first thing, and we've talked about situations such as this quite a bit lately. But I'm convinced that the first thing that we need to make sure of is our relationship with God is good and up to date. Amen.

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that Jesus Christ is our Lord and he is our Savior and that we are doing everything that we can do to walk with him hand in hand day in and day out. You know, the Bible gives us some pretty vivid examples of that if you were to get into your Bible and study and read it. I mean, Abraham walked with God and was called a friend of God.

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Noah walked with God and when the flood came, him and his family were saved. Moses walked with God in the desert and God prepared him to lead his people to freedom. David walked with God as a shepherd boy. When he was called upon to rule his people, he was prepared to do that. Daniel was safe from the lions' den and his friends were spared from the fiery furnace.

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What you know?

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God don't always pull you out of the fire.

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Amen. He does not always pull his children from out of trouble.

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You know, Stephen was a young man. The Bible says that he was full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. What happened to him? He was stoned to death. But you know, when he took his last breath on this earth, his entry into heaven was a celebration. There was partying and dancing and singing and shouting going on in heaven when he arrived there.

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to some of the fame of some of the apostles. Peter was crucified upside down. Andrew was tied to a cross with thick ropes for three days before he finally died. John was a prisoner on a desert island, and Bartholomew was beaten, and then he was beheaded. Thomas was murdered while he was preaching.

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These men literally walked with God, didn't they? And yet they suffer.

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But with their lives they echoed the words of Paul in 2 Timothy 4, 7 through 8 when he says, I have fought the good fight, and I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will reward to me on that day.

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And not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearance. Are you longing for the fearing of the Lord today? Are you looking forward to it or are you hoping that he don't come today? Amen? You know, so we need to be ready for that.

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And I believe the second thing we need to do is I've kept heartening and heartening I'm gonna continue to heart is that we need to open our Bible.

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We need to open our Bible and we need to use it as a guide for our daily life. Not just something we open up when times are troubled, but something we use in our daily life.

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How many Bible verses do you have in your memory? Hmm, that's a tough one, amen. I can remember that you were in Sunday school when I was just a little boy. You used to be able to, they would have memorized verses. And you'll memorize as many verses as you can memorize in order to win a prize in the Bible or something, you know.

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But you try to memorize as many verses as you could. And then even in Sunday School for Adults, I can remember the time when we tried to commit the verses to memory. Try to memorize and remember as many of them as I could. I cannot remember near as many as I could at one time. I didn't.

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Word for word and the address of it, the Bible gets by me sometimes. But I can pretty well get close, amen. But not like we used to do.

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But you know, today there are more people that knows the words to a TV commercial than they know the words to a Bible. Amen. This commercial is called, Go Lord, and may you know my word. Open up the Bible in your laws. And what about the ones that...

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Like I said, the commercials, we memorize the commercials, it just seems a stick of reminder. But we don't even.

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And that brings about a question to me. How many verses have you stored up for your future and what's going to happen in your future?

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I hope you had enough persons to be able to get through. Because of the time of crisis, we need to remember them. They need it. We need to repeat them.

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And I think the third thing we need to make ready is a prayer line. I'm gonna stay on prayer. And we need to make prayer a very vital part of our life, a very, very important part of our life. Well, we've talked about it before, amen? Over and over and over again, we talk about prayer, we talk about reading our Bible, we talk about having that relationship up to date with the Lord.

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But again, most of us only pray in a time of crisis. And when we're not in a crisis, we seem to neglect the rest of the time in our lives.

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But I'll tell you what, if we ever needed to call for the power of prayer, we need to call for it right now. Amen. That's right. Now is the time. We have so many battles going on in America today. All you gotta do is look. Our government needs prayer. Our president needs prayer. Amen.

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Our leaders need prayer, our schools need prayer, our youth needs prayer, our families need prayer, our churches need prayer. Today our nation and church, we are facing an undisguised hatred of those within and those outside of the United States.

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We have a terrible threat upon the people of the United States and upon churches right here in the United States is preparing. That's right. Whatever they're-

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We need prayer because that movement is fueled by nothing but hate. Amen.

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But you know, Pastor Paul tells us all about it. We would read it. But he says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but is it against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

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Are you spiritually prepared? Are we prepared as a nation? Are we prepared as an individual? Are we ready for what is about to come? If we are to survive in a godless and a materialistic world,

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in a world increasingly witnessing the hatred that is going in all different directions. It seems to me that hatred is not just pointed to the Jews, hatred is pointed to everybody. It does not matter. You've got the right hating the left, the left hating the right, gays hating the straight, straight hating the guys, gays and right on down the line.

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Hate is an equal opportunity hate. Amen. And it is being spread around and it's sad to say it is also coming out of the churches.

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We must repent. Amen. We must repent. We must repent for a lot of different things, but I believe that we need to repent for not making prayer a priority.

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Here's a statement I'm gonna make. It may strike you a little funky, but here it is. Even churches today has gotten away from prayer. Food and fellowship gatherings have seemed to take it over prayer. Yeah, Lord God, yeah. Amen. As scary as that is, it has become the truth. Yeah. And it's growing more and more.

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You know when God's people turn back to God in prayer, what happens? Miracles! A whole lot of miracles will happen if God's people just turn back to Him in prayer. And it is wrong, church, to pray that God is on your side. Because your side probably ain't right. Amen?

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We don't need to pray that God is on our side.

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But we need to pray that we are on God's side. Amen. That's what we need to be. Remember, God does not promise to always deliver us, but He promises to always be with us. Amen. I mean, nowhere in the Bible did He tell us we was gonna have smooth sailing in this dirty, filthy world that we live in.

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because the God of this world is evil. Yeah, right. Mean and nasty and destructive and wants to tear up everything and anything and he wants to do as many people as he can to help.

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I did promise that he delivers, but he did take the whips. Yeah.

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And you know, I believe that a very important thing that maybe some of us are missing in our Christian walk is maybe we don't practice the presence of Christ in our life like we should. Yeah, right.

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Well, how do we do that? How do we experience the nearness, shall we say, of God in our life?

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Well, we don't need a picture, another picture hanging up in a church or another picture of it hanging up in our house, drawn by some artist, just in a way for us to imagine us being with God. You understand that? We don't need more pictures of God, although I enjoy them myself. But we don't need that to have Him here with us.

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I picture ain't nothing you're doing with God sitting here.

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Charles Spurgeon, I found this quote and I really like it. Once said, Charles Spurgeon once said, there's never been 15 minutes in his life when he did not sense the presence of Christ. Man, I wish I could say that. I really do. But I can't, I can't say that.

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But what strength we would have if we trained for life as if Christ was walking alongside of us all the time. Right. That happened. If we lived our life like Christ was there, right there besides every moment of our life. How would your walk with Christ be better? How would it be different?

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Maybe then we could say, well, I've kept Christ for the last 15 minutes. Instead of, I've never been away from Christ for 15 minutes. Can we say that?

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Do you remember that bestselling book I don't know if you do or not, but it was called In His Steps? I know some of us read it. I have. Well, in His steps, in that book, came out that challenge that WWJ then. What would Jesus do? Well, do you know, it was some research, do you know how that came about? Do you know how that...

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phrase and that movement started. Okay, it came about when a tramp or a homeless person who was mourning his wife because she had just passed away and she had passed away in poverty. They had nothing.

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Well this guy, this baker, this bum, stumbled into a church, into a very, very wealthy church, and he addressed the congregation he just spoke of.

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He said, I want you to know something. He said, I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other night. And they were singing all over Jesus, all over Jesus. All my beings ran some powers all over Jesus. All my thoughts and all my doings, all my days and all my hours. He said, as I sit there and I listen to them sing.

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I began to wonder as I set on the steps just what they meant by that. It seems to me that there's a lot of trouble in the world but somehow would not exist if all the people who were singing such songs went out the door of their church and lived what they were singing.

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What difference would that make in your world? Lord, help.

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Is that good?

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who had spoken to that church.

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came walking into our church and said the same words to us and he said to that church, how would we respond?

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Do we live our lives with the thought, what would Jesus do? How would Jesus handle this? I mean, everyone, do we practice the presence of Christ in our life every moment of our life?

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In the story, the bum died. But within that congregation, he struck conscience. He really embedded into them what was going on.

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And that congregation was so proud to profoundly move that the lives of many within that very wealthy church were changed in that moment.

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And it would be just like us if we began to practice the presence of Jesus in our lives, every moment of our lives.

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I would say there's times in your life when you really don't want Jesus there. Amen! Guilty. I felt that way. Boy, I hope Jesus don't come. I'll be in trouble. Or we thought, I hope Jesus comes. I'm ready now! Amen? I ain't by myself.

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We need to practice the presence of Christ in our life every moment.

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What would Jesus, well maybe do? You know, Christ promised his disciples of Matthew 28, 20. He said, surely I will be with you always until the very end of the age. That's when you can take home, right now, put it in your refrigerator. What a promise.

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Now we need to cultivate that sense, that sense of His presence in our life daily as we go about our routine, about our life. And we need to remember the words of Romans 31-39 again. If God is for us, who can be against us? Amen. Amen. We need.

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to get into that mindset. We need to live our life that way. So what about it? Are you prepared for the storms that's gonna come in your life? I don't know if I've ever known anybody.

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storms. Have you? Do you? I mean even we look back on our on on preachers and Christians that we've grown up around we thought they were great and probably holy as anybody we ever know but they had storms. Things went on in their life. Their loved ones died. They got sick. Whatever. You know?

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Storms come at us north, south, east and west. We need to be prepared when they do.

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Don't be caught without the resources that you need. Amen. The best way to prepare for that is make sure that you know God and that Jesus Christ is your Savior, and that you are living your life the best that you can for Him and following the leading of the Holy Spirit within your life. And then we need to open up our Bibles and read our Bibles.

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You need to take the treasure that's in the Bible and put it in your heart. Like I said, I can't remember exactly every word, nor is there a water strip if I can't remember the exact address in the Bible. But I know what it means. Amen. You know what I mean? I've got it there, do you? If not, we need to keep working on it. Amen. And there's not something we're going to be done with.

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until our final day on Earth is over.

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We need to make prayer vital part of our life.

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You know, you can't carry on a conversation with anybody if you don't talk to them by the same way it is with Jesus. You ain't talking to God and to the Lord. Well then how does He know what's going on with you? Yeah, He knows, but He wants to hear it from you. I ain't asking too much, amen? Amen. And we need to practice living in His presence.

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Every day. Amen. All day.

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And for many that's a hard thing to do, but you need to work on it. You need to grow in it. And the more you work on it, the more you grow in it, the easier it's gonna become. All right, then? All right.

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That's what we need.

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We need to be prepared for trouble that's going to be coming our way. It may not happen for 45, 50, 55 years. We're going for that, huh? Yeah. It may happen quick. You never know.

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God bless you.