A Community Worth Taking For God

A community worth taking for God 5/31/2007

This message was inspired by a message by Frank Page. The overview of the message is similar to the overview of his inspiring message.

Read numbers 13:17-33

Introduction… Frank Page… the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention… Delivered a message to the SBC Executive Committee on February 19th of this year.

In this message, he gave an illustration that Billy Graham had used in his autobiography entitled Just As I Am.

Mr. Graham tells of a conversation he had with John F. Kennedy shortly after his election. Here is what Billy Graham Said…

He said… On the way back to the Kennedy house, the president elect stopped the car and turned to me. “Do you believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ” he asked.

“I most certainly do”

“Well, does my church believe it?”

“They have it in their creeds”

“They don’t preach it”… he said… “They don’t tell us about it… I’d like to know what you think.”

I explained what the Bible said about Christ coming the first time… dying on the cross… rising from the dead… and then promising that He would come back again…

“Only then”, I said… “are we going to have permanent world peace.”

“Very interesting” he said, looking away. “we’ll have to talk more about that some day” and he drove on.

Several years later the two met again, at the 1963 National Prayer Breakfast.

“I had the flu” Graham said… After I gave my short talk and the president gave his, we walked out of the hotel to his car together, as was always our custom.

At the curb he turned to me.

“Billy, could you ride back to the White House with me? I’d like to see you for a minute.”

“MR. President, I’ve got a fever” I protested… “Not only am I weak, but I don’t want to give you this thing. Couldn’t we wait and talk some other time?’”… it was a cold snowy day and I was freezing as I stood there without my over coat.

“of course” he said graciously…

But the two would never meet again…later that year Kennedy was shot dead.

Graham says… “his hesitation at the car door and his request haunt me still. What was on his mind? Should I have gone with him?... It was an irrecoverable moment.”

It was an irrecoverable moment…..

…I asked my wife’s permission to give two illustrations from her life, that tie in with the idea behind the message this morning…

Bill Stafford says that God speaks to our wives first… because we men are so hard headed…

…. One of those moments involved our Ex Brother in law named Curtis…

Denise’s Sister and Curtis were married and had a beautiful child together…

That Child was a wonderful girl named Ashley… I have told you about Ashley before…

Denise and her sister Glenda were both pregnant at the same time… Denise was pregnant with our second child… Derek...

And Glenda was pregnant with their first child… Ashley…

Well… Glenda went into labor first… and Denise went to the hospital to see her…

While she was at the hospital… Denise went into labor as well.

So… Denise was admitted to the hospital… and the same doctor would go back and forth between Denise and Glenda…

Derek was actually born first… and then about two hours later… his cousin Ashley was born…

Derek and Ashley were almost like brother and sister… we even had their first birthday together…

But tragedy struck…

When Ashley was about 20 months old… She died in a house fire…

And as you can imagine… the stress to the marriage was enormous… and Curtis and Glenda came to the point where they ended up getting divorced…

… Then tragedy struck again… as a few years later… Curtis took his own life…

And Denise told me that God had been telling her all week leading up to Curtis’s death that she needed to go see him…

but we were just such busy people… you understand that don’t you?

Now… I don’t think that Denise seeing Curtis would have kept Him from taking his life…

No one had a clue… Curtis didn’t seem depressed… he had even made plans with other people… no one had any idea what he was going to do…

I don’t think it would have saved his life…

But there was some reason God asked Denise to go see him… Maybe just to speak with him that one last time…

We will never know this side of Heaven…

There was that irrecoverable moment…

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

… Another One of these moments was when I came home from work one day and my wife said to me…

“ I called my dad today… we are going to go see him.”