As you walked in the church this morning you were probably caught by surprise at all of the preparations are being made for the Vacation Bible School that begins this Wednesday and lasts through next Saturday. This week will be a very busy and exciting week with a lot of visitors, both children and their parents, and if you want to come and help, you will be most welcomed. It would be great if everyone could come at some point to lend a helping hand, or just to greet the visitors.
I want to also acknowledge that we have help coming from other churches. A few of the youth from The Church International and Faith Fellowship will be here and we are grateful for their commitment to all the kids who come. We want to see kids and adults touched by the Love of God.
The theme of the VBS this year is “True North” and all of the decorations point to things from the northern outdoors such as mountains, waterfalls, mountain lakes, wilderness wildlife and camping. The natural surroundings are there to remind us of God’s beautiful creation. We see His handiwork in the earth, in seas and in the heavens, but as beautiful as these things are, the kids will learn that none of those things are what points us to the True North. The only way to find the True North is to follow Jesus and discover all the ways that we are able to find the way to eternal life.
The true meaning of “True North” is found in Jesus, who is our True North. Jesus Christ is the single focus point from which everything should radiate in our lives. He is The Ultimate Authority and the One who can guide every one of us through life with all of its good times, not-so-good times, and times that are completely chaotic.
Where does that term “True North” come from? In the ways of nature the true north isn’t always what we think it is. In times past sailors on the open seas, and often wanderers in the wilderness navigated and found their way through the use of a magnetic compass. It became obvious to many that compasses were not all that reliable for reaching their destination.
I have here a fairly reliable compass. It’s very similar to the type that we were issued in the military to try and navigate ourselves through the dense jungles in order to reach our destination. They aren’t nearly as easy to use and you might think and you always have to aware of holding them too close to anything metallic and magnetic such as a rifle or even things in your field pack.
I set it on due north while standing in the center of the office, but when I approached the metal filing cabinets it would interfere with the earth’s magnetic field and draw the needle as much as 10-15 degrees off of magnetic north. If you are trying to travel from here to New Orleans with that much deviation, you might end up in Slidell or Covington on one side, or Grand Isle or some point west of New Orleans.
Because of this deviation, In time sailors on the open ocean where there are no landmarks to reference, learned to navigate the trackless seas by focusing on the position of the North Star. Navigators who could sail a ship from Europe to America, or from America to the Far East were few and far between because most people had never studied astronomy and had even heard of the constellations.
If you ever wanted to find the right city across the ocean you dad to know where the North Star was and how to use what was called a Sextant to be able to calculate the right direction to sail You didn’t want to have sail for 3 months and more from England to discover that you had reached Cuba instead of New York.
The positioning of the North Star was determined when God placed the stars in the sky and gave them a name. We have studied the Constellations, and if you remember, every star has a name that serves the purpose of telling the story of the gospel in the very stars of the sky, so their positions in their constellations are fixed in order for men to see the Truth.
The North Star happens to be the only star in the sky that never changes in its position in the skies above the earth, even though the earth is moving, and the constellations are passing overhead in order every month and year, and over time some have moved farther north and others farther south over the horizon.
Through all of this movement the North Star has never moved it is position in the night sky, and it has been, and continues to be the only true reference point among the stars. Of course, with the development of Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), man has found a more reliable and easy to use method than the North Star.
God knew that we needed a very reliable, unchanging method of guiding our steps through life, before we could reach the destination that He had planned for us to reach. In his great wisdom, and through His own mercy and grace, God not only gave us a North Star to navigate this world in which we live; but He did something far greater. He gave us a “North Star” for us to navigate through this life in order to find our way to eternal life. Jesus is our North Star!
When we are walking through life each day, we need to have a compass helping to keep us on track as well, but like the travelers in those times past, we must know whether that which is our compass is trustworthy, or if it will allow us to go astray and be lost.
What those travelers of the past didn’t know until it was often too late was that while magnetic compasses always point to magnetic north, magnetic north is not a constant and unchanging point on the globe. While it always points to the magnetic north pole, the position of the north magnetic pole is always moving as the earth itself is spinning on its axis. (Perhaps that’s why we’ve never found Santa’s workshop.)
If you were to travel to the north using a magnetic compass right now, trying to find the absolute location of the north pole, you would end up several hundred miles from where you needed to be. That’s a long way to walk or travel in the arctic ice. Magnetic north changes each year, but True North is always the same. It’s where the lines of longitude all come together at the top of the earth.
So what does all of this have to do with Jesus as our True North. The bible tells us that Jesus never changes. He is always the same. His word is sure and it will never fail. So if we want to reach our destination that God has designed for us, then we must focus on our True North and follow Jesus.
When we align ourselves with the Word of God, following Jesus’ teaching, learning from His examples, and allowing the Love and Grace of God to determine our thoughts, cause us to act right and we have a right relationship with Jesus, then we will never go astray. Our course to that heavenly city will be straight and true and there will be no wandering aimlessly in the wilderness with no direction.
Every one of us will face changes in life. Sometimes the path ahead seems straight and narrow, easy to find; but at other times we come to some crossroads in life and we don’t know which way to turn. That’s when having Jesus and His Word as our guide will help us to choose the right path.
Trials and temptations often come our way as our faith is tested. If we fall away from serving the Lord because of the Trials, and if the temptations draw us aside, even for a moment, we can find ourselves lost in the wilderness. That’s when we have to call upon Jesus to be our True North and lead us home.
The earth around us is in a state of constant change. New technology, new ways of doing things. Everything in life on this planet is all about innovation, changing and seeing progress in industry, in living conditions, in entertainment, and in every other way of life. There are always new things to distract us, to draw our attention aside from keeping our eyes on our True North. The world is full of glitz and glamour, of fun and sun, of new cars, new homes, new jobs, new churches starting up, new everything, and if you don’t embrace the “New”, then you get left out and relegated to the past. The older I get the harder I find it is to keep up with changes; and in many ways, I don’t care to try and keep up, because I’m satisfied with things as they are now.
Yet the heart of man is always chasing the rainbows of change, always looking for the one invention, that one innovation, that will be his “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow. We are always chasing after dreams, and that’s fine. But we must be careful that the dreams we are chasing are not leading us away from seeking after our True North. Innovations, dreams, goals, new things in this life will never lead you to eternal life. They can be used as tools to help, or the can become the thing that destroys your hope and steals your victory. That is why we must always keep our eyes on our True North.
Jesus is our True North because He alone died for our sin. Only through Jesus and His blood can we find reconciliation to God and we can be spiritually redeemed. Turning to Jesus as our True North means that we turn away from sin, and from our wandering in the paths of sin, ever chasing the rainbows in life, and turn toward Jesus, the One who created rainbows to begin with. We must seek Him first in true repentance. Then our feet are set on the right path once again.
The only rainbow I seek is not the one that appears so beautiful and colorful in the sky. I love to see those because it reminds me of my True North, the God in Heaven that put it there as a promise to all mankind to never destroy the world by a flood. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what gender the heart of rebellious people decides they want to be.
The rainbow I’m really looking for is found in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 4, verse 3, which says, “And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby. A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne.” The one who sat there is my Heavenly Father, with the Lord Jesus Christ at his side, and the Father sat upon a throne surrounded by his promises that appeared as a rainbow of green representing eternal life, and promises that will never fail.
Psalm 18:30 As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the LORD is tried: he is a buckler to all those that trust in him.
If we follow God’s way, it’s impossible to be lost. God is perfect in all His ways and that includes the path of life that He will set before us. He is our “Buckler” which means that through faith in His power, we can depend upon his grace and mercy; we can stand upon in his word, and we put our trust in Jesus as our Lord and Savior; our advocate with the Father, and he will never fail to bring us through to victory. He is fastened to us by his Love and holds us in his protective hands so that no enemy can defeat us.
The Bible is the roadmap, and also our compass that always points us to Jesus, our True North. The Bible offers guidance in every circumstance and wisdom for making every decision. Obeying its teaching always leads to Jesus Christ.
We cannot count on any other source to find True North. Man tries to make up his own way to God, but man’s ways are not God’s ways, and they will often cause us to go astray from the Truth to follow after a lie and be deceived.
Following Jesus as our True North means that we have to not allow distractions to lead us aside and alter our course. Just as a magnetic compass can be changed by the nearness of the wrong objects, so can the life of a Christian. We can get our eyes off of Jesus, begin to desire the things of this world, and lose our way.
We have to be like the GPS that we use while we travel the highways. It constantly has to recalibrate, or adjust its directions, if we stray from the path it has already set for us to travel. So must we constantly recalibrate our lives to only follow Jesus and his word. Our biblical values must never be compromised. Our faithfulness in serving the Lord must never falter. We must live by the unchanging moral compass of the commandments of God, and live with integrity, as faithful to God and His word, as He is to show us the way to truth and life.
In a world where there seems to be so few moral values; where our moral compass has been shaken by hearing, seeing and trying to copy those who have no moral compass, we need to be ever more aware of what is happening, and stick closer to the True North than ever before.
Remember, Jesus said that He alone is, “the Way, the Truth and the Life, and no man can enter into the kingdom of God except through Jesus alone.” That is important to remember when everyone around us is shouting that there are many ways to God, and many ways to salvation. Jesus is the only True North; the only way to find salvation and eternal life.
Some of you may remember Twila Paris who was popular in gospel singing back in the 1980s and 90s. She recorded a song that tells us our need for Jesus as our True North; as our guide to making heaven our home.
“We lost our bearings, following our own mind.
We left conviction behind…
How did we ever wander so far?
And where do we go from here?
How will we know where it is?
Follow the True North…
There’s a strong and steady Light
That is guiding us home…
And we need an absolute compass
Now more than ever before.
Turning back to where You meet us
We will follow where You lead us
There is truth inside Your dwelling
We have come to face with the True North”
Jesus is our True North - our compass point - our focus and guide for all of life. He will never leave us or forsake us. He promised to be with us to the end of the world. Don’t worry about what the road of life may be like ahead because Jesus is already there and He has blazed a trail for us through the wilderness of life.
He’s already overcome the devil and his roaring. Jesus has already defeated every enemy. He has already promised to give us all a new body in perfect health in a place where there will be no more sickness and death. He’s already building a place for us in the Father’s house, and He has paid in full the debt we owed, giving us an open door to enter into that heavenly home.
Jesus is your True North! He alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life! Follow Him!
