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The Thirst for Water
Prop: (1) A bottle of water (2) an outline of the human body (3) a bottle of water to give to each child.
Hello everybody! It’s good to see you this week. Please pardon me while I set here and drink my water. Yum! This is good water! I sure wish you had some because it is sooooo good … and important too.
Did you know that you have to drink water if your want to live? If you do not drink enough water your body will go into a drought (we call it dehydration) and you will die.
Did you know you can live for weeks without food, but only days without water? Next to oxygen, water is the most important element that you can give your body.
Did you know that most of your body is made up of water? We think it is mostly skin or bone but its really water.
Look at this outline of the human body for a second. Did you know that when you were a baby in your mother’s womb that you were almost 93% water!? That would be this much of your body.
And now you are still at least 80% water. That is at least this much of your body.
You see your body is mostly water. That is why you get thirsty very easily because you body does not want to quit working and it must have water to work right.
Yep, your body lets you know when you are about to go into a drought (dehydration) by asking your for something to drink (thirst).
The same is true spiritually too. If we are ever going to be spiritually healthy we need to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus calls himself “the water of life.” Listen to what he says:
John 7:37-39 (portions): "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”
People all over the world are spiritually thirsty. They are trying all sorts of things to make them happy but the only thing that will really satisfy them is a friendship with Jesus. Jesus says whenever we are friends with Him he will satisfy that thirst in the heart. I hope you will ask Jesus to be your friend and to quench your spiritual thirst.
Before you leave I want to give you something – a bottle of water. You can drink it after church whenever your parents say its okay. But when you do I want you to think about how important it is to your body and how important Jesus is to you inner self. Okay? Let’s pray.
This sermon is provided by Dr. Kenneth Pell
Potsdam (New York) Church of the Nazarene
www.potsdam-naz.org
FELLOWSHIP @ THE NEIGHBOURHOOD BAR
Research that shows the more friendships a person has in a congregation, the less likely they are to become inactive or leave. I once read about a survey of 400 church drop-outs who were asked why they left their churches. Over 75% of the respondents said, “I didn’t feel anyone cared whether I was there or not.”
These are shocking results, especially as church should be one of the most caring places in the world!
The neighbourhood bar is possibly the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to give His church. It’s an imitation, dispensing alcohol instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but it is a Permissive, Accepting, and Inclusive fellowship. It is Unshockable. It is democratic. You can tell people secrets and they usually don’t tell others or even want to. The bar flourishes not because most people are alcoholics, but because God has put into the human heart the desire to know & be known, to love & be loved & so many seek a counterfeit at the price of a few beers.
WHAT ARE YOU WORTH?
The price of a dead body to be used by medical students and CNBC had the following information:
Spine - $900
Hand and Forearm - $385
Shoulder -$500
Heart - $500
Corneas - $6,000/pair
Kidneys - $300-500
Intact Head - $6,000
Brain - $600
Knees - $650 each
Tendons - $1,000 each
Every corpse that travels through the system can generate anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 depending on how it is used.
The real question is, what does God think you are worth?
How valuable is salt? 40 million tons are required each year to fill our needs. Homer called it divine. Plato called it a "substance dear to the gods." Shakespeare mentioned salt 17 times in his plays. Perhaps Leonard da Vinci wanted to send a subtle message about purity lost when he painted "The last Supper." In that painting an overturned salt cellar is conspicuously placed before Judas. In ancient Greece a far-flung trade involving the exchange of salt for slaves gave rise to the expression, "...not worth his salt." Special salt rations were given to Roman soldiers and known as "Solarium Argentums" the forerunner of the English word "salary." Thousands of Napoleon?s troops died during his retreat from Moscow because their wounds would not heal--their bodies lacked sal...
What is Revival?
1. Revival is not a week worth of meetings.
2. Revival is not started in one day.
3. Revival is not controlled by man.
4. Revival is a heart thing.
5. Revival is always brought on by REPENTANCE.
6. Revival is renewed zeal to obey God
Illustrate FEAR: Dr. Walter Cannon, a pioneer researcher in psychosomatic medicine at Harvard Univ., describes what happens to the human body when it becomes angry or fearful: "Respiration deepens; the heart beats more rapidly; the arterial pressure rises; the blood is shifted from the stomach and intestines to the heart, central nervous system, and the muscles; the processes of the alimentary canal cease; sugar is freed from the reserves in the liver; the spleen contracts and discharges its contents of concentrated corpuscles, and adrenalin is secreted." You don’t want to hold all of that in! It will make you sick!
Your heart will have beat an average of 122,400 times every day. None of us want our heart to ask for a vacation or take a day off; we don’t even want to give it a short “coffee break” to skip a few beats. Doctors understand the heart is critically important to our physical well-being; it is so important doctors have developed the 10 commandments for heart attack prevention.
1. Thou shalt stop smoking.
2. Thou shalt control thy blood pressure.
3. Thou shalt reduce dietary cholesterol.
4. Thou shalt reduce dietary saturated fat.
5. Thou shalt reduce dietary sodium.
6. Thou shalt loose thy apple shaped fat distribution.
7. Thou shalt increase time to relax.
8. Thou shalt increase soluble fiber.
9. Thou shalt eat fish three times a week.
10. Thou shalt increase aerobic exercise.
The same principle holds true in our spiritual lives the condition of our heart impacts every area of our lives. Your heart is not just the physical organ pumping blood throughout your body. The heart is the center of your innermost emotions and feeling; the heart is your soul, the center and essence of life. Just as a body is lifeless without the beating of the heart, so too spiritually without the heart, life stops. THE HEART IS “THE STUFF OF LIFE.”
1) ATOM: The actual material of an atom is about 1/trillionth of the volume. Meaning it is a lot of little orbits. If you compressed would make 1/trillions of original size; TAKE ME – squeeze all the space out(space between ears) would fit on head of a pin. 1 100 millionth of a cubic inch. Take that mass up to a cubic inch it would weigh about a billion pounds.
2) DROP OF WATER: Filled with molecules. Took each one and increased size up to a grain of sand then you could build a road a ft thick by ½ mile from NY to LA.
3) SUN: Temperature about 12,000 degrees. 93 million miles away. If any farther any cooler or hotter(50 degrees hotter or cooler then life impossible)
4) EARTH: Rotations, tilts, orbits: control seasons, times, years. 25,000 in circumference yet hangs in empty space. Flying through the air 1,000 a miles a hour as we spin and through space at 1,000 miles per minute. We don’t even recognize it because design is so perfect.
5) 580 million miles circle and we will be right back here in another 365 days. Without missing a beat. PERFECT ORDER AND DESIGN.
6) ATMOSPHERE: 21% oxygen. If about 40-45% then first time spark then whole earth explode.
7) WATER CYCLE: Every Minnesota farmer get 407,510 gallons of rainwater per acre per year and it is free of charge. Buy that much at Homeland. Average year.
MISSOURI: 38 inches average rain each year. 70,000 square miles. If took and made one lake: 250 miles long, 60 miles wide, 22 ft deep. FREE OF CHAR...
The most often visited internet site in the summer of 2001 was reported to be an interview with God. Some of you have sent me a copy of this. It’s an imaginary question-and-answer session with God. In June alone it had 2.4 million visitors log on, and all of this without advertising!
Human beings long for a conversation with God. We’re still looking for answers to the basic questions of life. The greatest longings in our heart are found in Jesus Christ. We want direction for our life. Jesus said, “I Am the Way.” We want to know what’s real. Jesus said, “I Am the Truth.” We constantly look for life. Jesus said, “I Am the Life.” How do I deal with my guilt? John said of Jesus that he was “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
In a 1995 survey by Barna Research Group, it was discovered that non-Christians have no clue what Christians mean when some they use some of the phrases Christians often take for granted. 63% of non-Christians don’t know what Christians mean when they talk about the Gospel. 75% of non-Christians don’t know what John 3:16 is. Add to the phrases like "a broken heart", "I’ve been convicted", and "get into the Word, which non-Christians would hear quite differently. The problem for unbelievers is they hear the unspoken message from Christians, "If you don’t understand the holy lingo, you don’t belong to the holy huddle." However, 40% of Christians don’t know what the Gospel means, and 53% don’t know John 3:16.
