Nothing Like It In The World

Our trip - 2400 miles - Sedona’s red rocks, Canyon DeChelly’s rounded rims, 800 year old ruins and kivas, 2000 yr. Old bristle cone pines among the lava rock laden Cedar Pass, 10,300 feet up. Tens of thousands of hutus in Bryce Canyon each one individually sculpted by wind and rain. Immense arches spanning nearly a football field. Then the Grand Canyon, 10-20 miles wide, 250 miles long carved by a river no wider than this room and 30 feet deep. There is nothing like it in the world, and so the world all over travels to see this wonder of God.

I am gripped by a world so harsh - over and over I said "I would never want to live her" but people did. Others wanting to link up the rich tableland of the Midwest with the flourishing lands of the Pacific built a transcontinental RR. 5/10/1869 the spike that connected the West to the East was driven at Promontory point Utah. 20,000 men worked 12 hr. shifts for 6 years and when it was finished a trip from coast to cost which used to cost $1,000 and took months to complete now cost $111 for 1st class and only $40 for emigrants, and take only 7 days. People declared it took so fast you hardly had time to take a bath. People marveled that there is nothing like it in the world.

Nothing like this man Jesus. Imagine disrupting a grieving family - if you had been here.

John 11:1-45

How did Lazarus feel w/o Jesus at his sickbed? Or Mary or Martha?

What was Jesus’ relationship to them? Special relationship with "the one you love"

Why didn’t Mary meet Him first? Why did Lazarus stink?

Foreshadowing of Mary vs. 2. See chapter 12 for reason.

A home after a funeral. There is a coat and a hat, to remind you that a dear one is gone.

Come out - come out and play! You bet he did

John 11:25 "I am the Resurrection and the life..."

Don’t cling to death, don’t take joy in the death of others, especially if separated from God by sin.

Jesus calls us to come out and play you were meant for freedom, will you come out and play?

You need a miracle? The power to live the life you dream of - supernatural life to and thru you

That day a dead body (taboo) was touched and embraced, unclean, made clean again

The church must touch in a way that people know it was Jesus - spirit born, formed and filled

Close - War in El Salvador - 1981 - a young girl was brutally beaten, raped and all the while she sang songs of Jesus. It infuriated her tormentors so they shot her in the chest, blood flowed still she sang, they shot her again, then hacked at her neck with a machete, but you know what - the song could not be silenced. Love stronger than death, fearless of death and suffering,

There is Nothing Like it in the World!