Doug McMasters: On New Year's Eve, eighteen sixty two, Tremont Temple was filled to a capacity of two thousand people gathered there in Boston waiting for a proclamation.
Doug McMasters: Presiding the gathering was William Cooper Nill.
Doug McMasters: Frederick Douglass was on the platform.
Doug McMasters: Ten weeks earlier, September 22nd, President Lincoln had declared that if the Confederate states had not returned to the Union by January 1st, 1863, that every enslaved person within those states would be declared free.
Doug McMasters: The promise, ten weeks earlier, had been announced.
Doug McMasters: The promise was dated for January 1st, 1863.
Doug McMasters: But it hadn't happened yet.
Doug McMasters: And so people waited for ten long weeks until December 31st.
Doug McMasters: And people gathered in Tremont Temple on that evening.
Doug McMasters: Evening came, speeches were made, prayers were offered.
Doug McMasters: Messengers were stationed just outside uh the signal house in order to run news back to the church.
Doug McMasters: They still waited.
Doug McMasters: Felt like agony.
Doug McMasters: Frederick Douglass said they felt like they were looking into the deep sky, waiting for some signal.
Doug McMasters: That they were waiting for a dawn that had not yet broken.
Doug McMasters: That they were yearning and longing for the answer of agonizing prayers over the centuries.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't do anything but wait.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't hurry along the news across the wires.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't push the pen of the president.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't even produce what could be perhaps the freedom of some three and a half million enslaved people.
Doug McMasters: All they could do was wait.
Doug McMasters: That's a kind of waiting that does something to us.
Doug McMasters: We're not very practiced at it.
Doug McMasters: We're not even good at the ordinary kind of waiting, you know, waiting for the light to change, right?
Doug McMasters: You know, waiting for the line to go down so you could be the first one there.
Doug McMasters: I mean, we have a hard enough time with those kinds of waitings.
Doug McMasters: But there's a certain kind of waiting that calls for something out of us that's far, far deeper than just waiting for that red light to turn green.
Doug McMasters: Sometimes we're waiting for test results.
Doug McMasters: Sometimes we're waiting for some good news about a loved one that's in some far-off place.
Doug McMasters: Can only imagine what it must have been like for those during times of war longing for news from their loved ones who can't be reached.
Doug McMasters: It's difficult, that kind of waiting.
Doug McMasters: It's hard, it's agonizing.
Doug McMasters: What do you do with your hands when you wait like that?
Doug McMasters: What do you what do you bring your mind to attention to when you're waiting like that?
Doug McMasters: You can't hurry anything along.
Doug McMasters: You can't produce the results you're waiting for.
Doug McMasters: You just have to wait.
Doug McMasters: And that kind of waiting calls not for our some simple distraction like we might do while we're waiting for light to change.
Doug McMasters: It calls for a yearning and an attention and a pressing in, like no other kind of waiting.
Doug McMasters: Well, the disciples are in that sort of waiting here in Acts chapter 1.
Doug McMasters: Some amazing things have just happened over the past month and a half or so.
Doug McMasters: They've seen Jesus Christ crucified, buried, risen, spending 40 days with them, and they've just watched Jesus ascended, taken up into the heavenlies, and two angels telling them that he's going to come back.
Doug McMasters: But before Jesus left, he left them with a command.
Doug McMasters: He left them with a command and a promise that something was about to happen, that the Father's gift was coming, that the Spirit was going to be coming, and that when that did, everything was going to change.
Doug McMasters: But they had to wait.
Doug McMasters: It hadn't happened yet.
Doug McMasters: And so the question that I want us to look at this morning is we look at verses 12 to 14, is that question that's pressing upon the disciples here?
Doug McMasters: And that also presses in on our hearts.
Doug McMasters: And it is this what do you do in between?
Doug McMasters: What do you do in those waiting moments?
Doug McMasters: The disciples had been given the statement, and yet they had to wait for the fulfillment.
Doug McMasters: What do we do during those times in which the ticking clock of waiting begins until the time we find the answer?
Doug McMasters: Well, I think something is told about us in that intervening period.
Doug McMasters: And we're going to see something about these disciples in this intervening period.
Doug McMasters: It tells us what they thought about the one who had told them to wait.
Doug McMasters: And so as we look at this passage of scripture, just three verses, I want us to see these waiting disciples as they put themselves in a posture before the promise that hasn't arrived yet.
Doug McMasters: And I'd like for us to consider this well, because I think in these little elements that we're going to see in this narrative are some principles for us about how to posture ourselves in our seasons of waiting as we long for the coming day.
Doug McMasters: Because what God has promised to us, He will give.
Doug McMasters: And Luke is very precise about this.
Doug McMasters: I mean, just think about this for a second, these details.
Doug McMasters: The Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's journey from the city.
Doug McMasters: These details and are important.
Doug McMasters: They're not just giving us texture in the text, they're documenting things about real people in real time, doing real things.
Doug McMasters: There on that hill, coming down and coming up a short one into the city itself.
Doug McMasters: These real people are coming back to Jerusalem just as they were told.
Doug McMasters: They're being obedient.
Doug McMasters: Jesus didn't give them a suggestion, he gave them a command.
Doug McMasters: Go back to Jerusalem.
Doug McMasters: Don't leave it until the Father's promise comes.
Doug McMasters: And so they waited.
Doug McMasters: They waited.
Doug McMasters: Now, they, when they saw Jesus leave, had some decisions to make.
Doug McMasters: They could have stayed on the Mount of Olives, they could have gone back to Jerusalem as they were told, or they could have done as they did, as Peter did, particularly after the crucifixion and the burial of Christ.
Doug McMasters: Let's go pick up our fishing nets and let's just go back to our job.
Doug McMasters: They didn't do that.
Doug McMasters: The choice they made, they went back to the city.
Doug McMasters: Now I know that sounds small and the distance is small.
Doug McMasters: It's only about three-quarters of a mile.
Doug McMasters: That's not very far away.
Doug McMasters: But I want us to see this: that the promise of Pentecost is not falling on people who are just doing whatever they want.
Doug McMasters: It's not falling on people who are scattered throughout Galilee going about their business, taking back up the tack, the money-changing table, or taking back up the boats and the fish, fishing nets.
Doug McMasters: These people are positioned in obedience.
Doug McMasters: Now let's be quick to say that they are not hastening the spirits coming by their obedience, but their obedience is positioning themselves for what's about to come.
Doug McMasters: And notice this: the one who had commanded them is no longer visible.
Doug McMasters: Jesus has gone up into heaven and he is not around them anymore.
Doug McMasters: He's not looking over their shoulder to see what their decision is about what they're about to do.
Doug McMasters: They're left alone on Mount Olive.
Doug McMasters: What are we going to do now?
Doug McMasters: And they decide, let's do what Jesus told us to do.
Doug McMasters: Because they believe that the one that told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait is the very same one who rose from the dead on the third day.
Doug McMasters: And believing that he could rise from the dead, that they could obey what he said to do, because he knew that they had a Lord who was Lord over life and death.
Doug McMasters: And so they followed him.
Doug McMasters: So this, I think, is one of the things that we can understand from this as we wait, to position ourselves in a place of obedience, of looking at the things the Lord has called us to do and trusting him for the time frame of his answers, and obeying him in the meantime while we wait.
Doug McMasters: And so I pray that whatever situation you might be in, and I know many of your situations, the difficulties that lay upon your heart, and the agonizing circumstances that you're in.
Doug McMasters: And there is always a time of waiting and longing and hoping and wrestling with those things which are in front of you that you can't force, you can't make happen, you can't turn to a better side.
Doug McMasters: Let me encourage you with this.
Doug McMasters: Continue to wait in a posture of obedience.
Doug McMasters: Continue to wait in a posture of trust.
Doug McMasters: The Lord who's put you into this compressed season of waiting is the same one who resides over all of your life and all life.
Doug McMasters: He is the God who rose from the dead.
Doug McMasters: And so we as a church also wait, don't we?
Doug McMasters: We wait for the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: We call it a blessed hope.
Doug McMasters: We long for the day, just as Peter said in 2 Peter chapter 3, we wait for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Doug McMasters: We yearn in this world.
Doug McMasters: We long in the middle of our days for a better day, for a future in which all the troubles of this life are not going to be.
Doug McMasters: When all the sin and its effects and all the tragedy that comes into human existence are finally wiped off of this earth and a new one is made.
Doug McMasters: We wait.
Doug McMasters: But what are we supposed to do while we wait?
Doug McMasters: What God told us to do.
Doug McMasters: Continue in his word, continue to come to his table, continue to gather in prayer, continue to share the gospel with others, continue to encourage, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, to continue to teach our children the things of God so that they might grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ Himself.
Doug McMasters: We continue to obey.
Doug McMasters: These things will not generate the Lord's coming or an answer to his prayers, but the Christ who ascended into heaven has called us to do what the church needs to do.
Doug McMasters: And so we don't withdraw and retreat as some do.
Doug McMasters: Oh, this world is so bad.
Doug McMasters: Let's just sort of gather up into our castle and get up into our safe places and just agonize over how bad the world is.
Doug McMasters: And we'll just wring our hands and say, Oh, Lord, please come.
Doug McMasters: It's terrible out there.
Doug McMasters: Guess who got elected president?
Doug McMasters: He's like, What are you doing?
Doug McMasters: Obey me.
Doug McMasters: Do what the church should be doing.
Doug McMasters: This is a season of obedience.
Doug McMasters: But I want us to move on.
Doug McMasters: Verses 13 and 14.
Doug McMasters: They're not only gathered in a posture of obedience, but they're gathered as a community that only the resurrection could build.
Doug McMasters: Look at verses 13 and 14.
Doug McMasters: And again, Luke is laying down quite a few details here.
Doug McMasters: When they arrived, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, the son of Alpheus, Simon the zealot, and Judas the son of James.
Doug McMasters: They were all continually united in prayer, along with the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.
Doug McMasters: That's a lot of detail, right?
Doug McMasters: Here we have eleven names.
Doug McMasters: You might have counted them.
Doug McMasters: That's twelve minus one.
Doug McMasters: I know.
Doug McMasters: You like amazing insight, Pastor.
Doug McMasters: Who's missing?
Doug McMasters: Judas is missing.
Doug McMasters: But look at verse 14.
Doug McMasters: Who else is added?
Doug McMasters: Mary, the women, and his brothers.
Doug McMasters: Now, why is Luke bothering to name these guys?
Doug McMasters: Well, partly because the whole group are real people.
Doug McMasters: They're identifiable people by name, people that soon were going to be seen going into all the world and witnessing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: But this list is doing something more than just giving us historical happenings.
Doug McMasters: It's showing us all the various people that are in that room together.
Doug McMasters: And I want you to think about these particular people.
Doug McMasters: We'll begin with the 11.
Doug McMasters: Peter.
Doug McMasters: That he's there.
Doug McMasters: What about Thomas?
Doug McMasters: Even after the resurrection, where others had came and spoke with eyewitness testimony that they had seen the Lord.
Doug McMasters: He's like, not me.
Doug McMasters: Until I can touch and put my fingers in the wounds, I'm not going to believe.
Doug McMasters: The rest of them?
Doug McMasters: Soon as Gethsemane was over, they're gone.
Doug McMasters: These are the men in this room.
Doug McMasters: But here's another detail.
Doug McMasters: Jesus brothers.
Doug McMasters: Every mention of Jesus brothers in the gospels shows them as people who don't believe.
Doug McMasters: John 7 5 says very plainly, his brothers did not believe in him.
Doug McMasters: You catch that?
Doug McMasters: They thought Jesus had lost his mind.
Doug McMasters: They weren't in the inner circle.
Doug McMasters: They weren't at the Last Supper.
Doug McMasters: They weren't waiting at the foot of the cross.
Doug McMasters: They were watching everything that Jesus did from a posture of distance that was skeptical and unmoved.
Doug McMasters: Why are they here?
Doug McMasters: Why are the brothers of Jesus here?
Doug McMasters: There's only one thing that made the difference.
Doug McMasters: And you know what that difference is?
Doug McMasters: The resurrection.
Doug McMasters: That's what made the difference.
Doug McMasters: Listen to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15.
Doug McMasters: I passed unto you that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.
Doug McMasters: The gospel, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, foretold in the Old Testament prophets, now realized in Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: And it says, He appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve.
Doug McMasters: Now listen, then he appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, but some have fallen asleep.
Doug McMasters: Then he appeared to James and then to all the apostles.
Doug McMasters: James, the oldest brother after Jesus, who did not believe.
Doug McMasters: James.
Doug McMasters: James, who is, as we read in Acts chapter 12, is now the one.
Doug McMasters: Peter says, report these things to James.
Doug McMasters: This is the leader of the church in Jerusalem.
Doug McMasters: This is the author of the book that we read after Hebrews.
Doug McMasters: This is the man who was eventually martyred, thrown off of the temple wall, and lived, and then was stoned to death by those to kill him.
Doug McMasters: This is James.
Doug McMasters: The last person you would expect to find in this room is him and his brothers.
Doug McMasters: Unless the resurrection.
Doug McMasters: Until Jesus showed up in his presence, resurrected.
Doug McMasters: And now he's here.
Doug McMasters: This room is not a room of faithful people.
Doug McMasters: This is not a room of people who have always been believing, who are always doing those things that they should have been doing.
Doug McMasters: These are people that are changed people.
Doug McMasters: This is why they're in the room together.
Doug McMasters: Not because of how good they are, because the resurrection of Jesus Christ has done something to them.
Doug McMasters: That's why.
Doug McMasters: Not the upper room where they are or were, but this room.
Doug McMasters: There's some of us in this room who are here, and if we were to ask some of our friends about us, they would say that something absolutely miraculous must have happened to us in order to get us into a room like this.
Doug McMasters: Right?
Doug McMasters: I can testify to that.
Doug McMasters: I was just sharing with one of the lovely ladies who comes to our church just a few days ago.
Doug McMasters: That when I went to church for the first time, I had an ounce of hash in my pockets.
Doug McMasters: And that was just my private stash.
Doug McMasters: I was in Florida in December last year with two of my old Air Force buddies.
Doug McMasters: And boy, did they have stories.
Doug McMasters: And Royal's six feet away, and I'm just hoping they don't bring them all up.
Doug McMasters: Some of you were the doubting sibling, the James who refused to believe.
Doug McMasters: Until God, the resurrected Christ, met you.
Doug McMasters: Some of you came into this room skeptical.
Doug McMasters: Fearful, uncertain.
Doug McMasters: But you're not skeptical, fearful, or uncertain now.
Doug McMasters: What's happened to you?
Doug McMasters: You're a changed person.
Doug McMasters: That's what's happened.
Doug McMasters: The same Jesus who appeared to James and changed him completely is not done appearing to people in his grace.
Doug McMasters: Awakening them to their sin, transforming their lives, bringing them into a gathering of people that they would never have ever been numbered among before.
Doug McMasters: He's still doing that.
Doug McMasters: And while we wait, we position ourselves not only in obedience, but we position ourselves among the gathered people of God and we wait and we sing and we praise together.
Doug McMasters: Because we are a people of everlasting hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Doug McMasters: One last thing I want us to see here is they positioned themselves in prayer, not only obedience, but not only gathered people in the hope of the resurrection, but also in prayer.
Doug McMasters: They returned to Jerusalem, and in verse 14 it says they were all continually united in prayer, along with the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.
Doug McMasters: Notice that word that Luke reaches for: united.
Doug McMasters: United.
Doug McMasters: Not just in the same room, united.
Doug McMasters: He uses this word over and over again in the book of Acts.
Doug McMasters: We'll see it several times.
Doug McMasters: This is not just people occupying the same space.
Doug McMasters: These are people that are postured and bent toward the same thing.
Doug McMasters: They're praying together, united in prayer.
Doug McMasters: And notice how the verb tense gives it.
Doug McMasters: They are continually united.
Doug McMasters: Continually united in prayer.
Doug McMasters: This is not just an afternoon prayer meeting one time.
Doug McMasters: This is the same word that Paul uses in the next chapter, which we'll read, where it says they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and the breaking of bread and prayer.
Doug McMasters: These people were not just together, they were united together in prayer.
Doug McMasters: This was a sustained posture that they had, an orientation to the God who wouldn't stop doing great and wonderful things.
Doug McMasters: This is perhaps a little different than what many prayer meetings are like in churches, where prayer is just perfunctory, dry and stale, occasional.
Doug McMasters: What Luke is describing here is a defining activity of the people as they wait.
Doug McMasters: Yes, they're obedient, they go back to Jerusalem, and yes, they're gathered, but they are united continually in prayer.
Doug McMasters: As they're waiting, prayer is the key thing that they're doing.
Doug McMasters: We'll see more of what they do here soon, but they're united in prayer together, without ceasing, with one mind.
Doug McMasters: Why prayer?
Doug McMasters: Because they're bringing themselves before the God of heaven to do things that they could not do themselves.
Doug McMasters: They couldn't produce Pentecost, they couldn't make that happen, they couldn't call down the spirit, they couldn't, by any effort or creativity, bring about what only the risen Christ could do.
Doug McMasters: What could they do?
Doug McMasters: Put themselves in a posture of dependence and pray.
Doug McMasters: And so they prayed.
Doug McMasters: They prayed together and they prayed persistently together with one voice.
Doug McMasters: This is not a new thing.
Doug McMasters: Evan Roberts, at the start of the 1904 Welsh Revival, kept saying this one thing: bend the church and God will save the world.
Doug McMasters: What was he saying?
Doug McMasters: If there's going to be any increase in our area for gospel advance, it has to come through prayer.
Doug McMasters: William Carey, expect great things from God.
Doug McMasters: Attempt great things for God.
Doug McMasters: What is the expect great things from God but prayer?
Doug McMasters: It's prayer.
Doug McMasters: Martin Lloyd Jones, watching the church trade committee meeting or prayer meetings for committee meetings, said the call of the church is not so much to organize as it is to agonize.
Doug McMasters: We're not a people who collect our heads together.
Doug McMasters: Oh, what a sight that would be.
Doug McMasters: We are people who call to the very mind of God Himself.
Doug McMasters: And so here the disciples are not generating Pentecost by the sheer determination and intensity of their prayers, as if their prayers were somehow the lever release for what God was about to do.
Doug McMasters: No, God was going to do it, and they wait in prayer.
Doug McMasters: Prayer is the express posture of a people that know God and only God can do what's about to happen.
Doug McMasters: So this is the third way that they posture themselves.
Doug McMasters: They obey, they gather as a people of resurrection hope, and they pray.
Doug McMasters: Now I want to take a moment here, just sort of as an aside, because I think this is a good place to do this and to stop.
Doug McMasters: And for us to have a bit of a family moment.
Doug McMasters: And some of you have been at this church long enough to know what I'm about to say.
Doug McMasters: And others of you perhaps have not heard the story and need to hear it.
Doug McMasters: But as we sit with this text, I think this is a good moment for us to talk about this.
Doug McMasters: Fourteen years ago, before Micah came, and 13 and a half years ago before I did, this church was in a difficult situation.
Doug McMasters: It was extremely difficult.
Doug McMasters: The church was, as Kevin Cooney put it, to me more than a few times.
Doug McMasters: He said to me, he said, when we went off to every tribe and to begin our training, we didn't know if we'd have a church to go back home to.
Doug McMasters: Because they couldn't make it better.
Doug McMasters: They had tried, and it only got worse.
Doug McMasters: They prayed.
Doug McMasters: And they knew that if the Lord didn't act, this place would not be here anymore.
Doug McMasters: And I want to tell you, for those of you who've been here for just a little bit of time, everything you see right now, and everything you experience right now, there's an invisible foundation underneath it.
Doug McMasters: And it is a people postured in dependent prayer and a God who graciously acts.
Doug McMasters: But it's not just a 14-year-old story.
Doug McMasters: There's something happening here, and I want you to see it.
Doug McMasters: When I first came here, we would have our prayer meetings in the back, and we'd set up one table, sometimes two tables.
Doug McMasters: There would be anywhere from seven to a dozen people gathered in prayer on a Wednesday night.
Doug McMasters: And it just seemed like for a long time it wouldn't get any more.
Doug McMasters: You come on a Wednesday night now, there are tables set up, and the table is full.
Doug McMasters: There are chairs wrapped around the back of the wall, and most times those are full.
Doug McMasters: And there are even times when people are sitting out in the in the entryway with the doors wide open because there's no room for them to get in.
Doug McMasters: People in prayer.
Doug McMasters: Elder council meetings.
Doug McMasters: We spend a lot of time in prayer.
Doug McMasters: A lot of time in prayer.
Doug McMasters: The missions team.
Doug McMasters: You know what they do?
Doug McMasters: They don't spend time strategizing about missions so much as they spend time praying for missionaries.
Doug McMasters: We've started a congregational prayer meeting right after the first Sunday of each month, in which we go downstairs for a little time with the elders and break up into little rooms and we pray for our missionaries.
Doug McMasters: And many of you are showing up to that.
Doug McMasters: And then to say nothing of what these pews are.
Doug McMasters: How many times I've walked in here and seen people in small little groups praying, or talking to someone up here and another person up here, and then finally leaving and seeing little pockets of people gathered together and praying together.
Doug McMasters: Or watching the door open there on the side and people coming out, wiping tears off of their face because they've been praying together.
Doug McMasters: This is what Luke is describing here.
Doug McMasters: A people who are weak, frail, they're not impressive, but they're doing what the Lord told them to do, and they're gathering together, as only the resurrection could do, and they're praying because they're asking God, the only one who can do what needs to happen, to do those things.
Doug McMasters: And so this is not a coincidence, what you see here.
Doug McMasters: This is definitely not about the abilities and the organizational expertise or the whimsical, wonderful, attractive personality I have.
Doug McMasters: Just ask Royal.
Doug McMasters: I bore her to tears.
Doug McMasters: And the only thing that He's calling us to do is to be His people, to obey His word, and to pray for Him to work.
Doug McMasters: So if you've been here as one of the ones that have been here before Mike and I arrived, and you know you knew what I was about to talk about.
Doug McMasters: Keep doing it.
Doug McMasters: Keep praying.
Doug McMasters: And if you're one of the newer ones who's come in since then, don't witness this from the outside or just alongside of it.
Doug McMasters: Join in.
Doug McMasters: Be a part of the prayers that we have.
Doug McMasters: Come alongside people.
Doug McMasters: Be one of those who are continually united in prayer, just as it says here.
Doug McMasters: And just one last thing I want to say.
Doug McMasters: If you're here this morning and you don't know Christ as your Savior, let me just bring these people back out one more time.
Doug McMasters: They are asking God to do something they can't do.
Doug McMasters: They're waiting for something that only God can accomplish.
Doug McMasters: They know that they can't bring anything about from their own power.
Doug McMasters: But God can.
Doug McMasters: And so they position themselves in this kind of dependent prayer.
Doug McMasters: Salvation is exactly like that.
Doug McMasters: You can't make yourself a believer by the intensity of your prayers, or by the focus of turning your life over, or even by showing up here.
Doug McMasters: You can't make yourself a new creation in Christ.
Doug McMasters: Only God does that.
Doug McMasters: But here's what I want to say to you: this salvation is given by the crucified, buried, and risen Christ to all those who come to Him with empty hands, who say, I have no hope of saving myself.
Doug McMasters: My only rescue is you and you alone, Christ.
Doug McMasters: Save me.
Doug McMasters: Save me from myself.
Doug McMasters: Deliver me, Lord.
Doug McMasters: I trust you to save me.
Doug McMasters: Because only He can.
Doug McMasters: You can't do it yourself.
Doug McMasters: And if you're here this morning and you feel the conviction of sin upon your heart, you feel the Lord drawing you to yourself, don't resist him.
Doug McMasters: Because he is a God who will do things in your life you can't even begin to imagine.
Doug McMasters: You will find yourself filled with a hope that nothing in this world can ever, ever, ever come even close to.
Doug McMasters: You can find yourself with a joy in the middle of troubles that would break anybody.
Doug McMasters: And you could say, I trust him.
Doug McMasters: And you can find yourself in the middle of a tempest and a storm of life and say, My soul's at peace.
Doug McMasters: You can kiss loved ones goodbye as you lower them in the grave.
Doug McMasters: And you can say, See you later.
Doug McMasters: Only God can do that.
Doug McMasters: You can't make that happen.
Doug McMasters: And I urge you, go to Christ.
Doug McMasters: Call out to him.
Doug McMasters: Believe on him.
Doug McMasters: He receives all who do.
Doug McMasters: Let's pray.
Doug McMasters: Father, as we've sat with this short and often overlooked passage of scripture, we thank you for the lessons that are learned in it.
Doug McMasters: Father, calling us to simple obedience, you, the resurrected Christ, have given us things that we are to be about.
Doug McMasters: While we wait for that blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: May we be a church, Father, who are active in our obedience, pursuing those things that are right and pleasing in your sight, being fruitful in every good work.
Doug McMasters: We pray, Father, that you would watch over those whose personal lives are filled with the gnawing, difficult season of waiting.
Doug McMasters: That you would strengthen their hearts and secure them in hope, the same kind of hope that the resurrection has brought us all, and the reason why we gathered today.
Doug McMasters: And Father, we pray that you would continue to impress upon us just how wondrous and great you are as a generous and giving God, and that we are not here to devise or to scheme, but to pray and to seek you, to do things that only you can do.
Doug McMasters: And Father, we pray for those in this room or those who will hear this message at some point in time who don't know Christ, that you and your mercy might draw them and awaken them to a new life in Jesus.
Doug McMasters: And may this be the day in which they say, This is my emancipation day.
Doug McMasters: This is my day of freedom.
Doug McMasters: This is the day when I've been, the chains have been broken from my soul.
Doug McMasters: And Father, we ask this in Christ's name.
Doug McMasters: Amen.