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Due to the large amount of sermons and topics that appear on this site I feel it is necessary to post this disclaimer on all sermons posted. These sermons are original to the author and the leading of the Holy Spirit. While ideas and illustrations are often gleaned from many sources including those at Sermoncentral.com, any similarities and wording including sermon title, that may appear to be the same as any other sermon are purely coincidental. In instances where other minister’s wording is used, due recognition will be given. These sermons are not copyrighted and may be used or preached freely. May God richly bless you as you read these words. It is my sincere desire that all who read them may be enriched. All scriptures quoted in these sermons are copied and quoted from the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible. This sermon also contains quotations from the New International Version.
Pastor James May
PLUG YOUR LEAKS
Hebrews 1:1-3, "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;"
NIV 1:1 In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. 4 So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.
Hebrews 2:1-4, "Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip. For if the word spoken by angels was steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward; How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?"
NIV 2:1 We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. 2 For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, 3 how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. 4 God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.
We are a people that are greatly blessed this morning. We are living in the greatest time that man could hope to ask for. We are seeing the culmination of all of the prophecies of the Bible as we come down to the very end of God’s great plan for the ages. Isn’t it wonderful to have the living Word of God at your fingertips and to have the privilege of experiencing the very presence of God in the midst of the church? Isn’t it great to know that the God of the Universe, the creator of all things has chosen to come to live within your heart! If you know the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior then you have the most wonderful gift that could ever be given to you.
Many Prophets of old, and multitudes of people who were faithful to God according to all they knew, would look upon us with envy. While they walked upon the earth they desired to have what we have and what we often take so much for granted. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, and -all of the great men of faith in the Old Testament would have given everything they had to have the Holy Spirit within them in the fashion that we have in our day. They were faithful and have now entered into the realms of Glory but they never knew the presence of God like we know Him on earth!
God has never wanted His presence and His nature to be a mystery to man. Even in the Garden of Eden, God walking with man and talked with man, one on one, to reveal Himself to us. He has spoken to us from His Holy Word. He has revealed Himself in our hearts. He has shown Himself through miracles, signs and wonders. He has used every means possible to reach out to fallen man and to show those who do not deserve anything from Him, all that He is and all that He will be for us if we will only serve Him.
In these last days, since the coming of Christ and the beginning of His ministry on earth, God has chosen to reveal Himself in a fashion that had never before been seen by man. God sent His very own Son, Jesus Christ, that all men could know God in a very personal manner.
God was not satisfied that man would only know Him as the God on Mt. Sinai that made the mountain tremble and caused thundering and lightning. - That revealed His power, but God is so much more than just raw power.
God was not satisfied with revealing His nature only through the words of the prophets. He wanted us to know more than words, but He wanted the Word to become a living, breathing, growing part of every human heart. His Word is more than just Words on paper. His Word is alive and moving and doing what God intends for it to do. God is so much more than His power and His Word.
God was not satisfied with an outward revelation of Himself to man. He wanted to man to have a personal, one on one, relationship with Him once again, just as it had been in the beginning but was lost because of sins separation.
So God sent His Son, Jesus, to show us the very express image of who and what God really is! Through Jesus we are shown that God is a God of mercy, a God of grace, a God of Love, a God of salvation and a God that will go to any lengths to reach out to us and bring us back into right relationship with God.
God’s desire is to make each of us an heir to all that Heaven has to offer! God desires to be a part of our lives. He desires to have a very intimate and close relationship with each of us. He has even given us equal rights to all that Heaven is because He has made us to be joint heirs with Christ.
Illustration:
In a natural sense, every family has to face the passage of grand parents and parents from this life to the next. There is always some sort of property or earth wealth, large or small, that is left behind. We came into this world with nothing and we will leave with nothing. There has never been a hearse with a trailer behind it. Those things left behind become the property of the heirs to the estate of the one who leaves this life. Everything is divided according to the Will of the one who has gone on, if a will was done. If no will was done, then everything is divided equally among the offspring of the family. God intends for each and every one of His children to be equal heirs with Jesus Christ in the wealth of Heaven. What an inheritance that is!
God has provided for us, through Jesus Christ, everything we need to make Heaven our home. Jesus paid the price for our sins upon the cross. He is risen from the dead and is alive forever more. His death, burial, resurrection and ascension in Heaven, as the first-fruit of the resurrection power of God, has paved the way for each of us who would choose to follow Jesus and place our faith in Him.
Jesus, God’s own Son, is our elder brother! Jesus, God’s own son, is our Savior! Jesus, God’s own Son is my best friend! Jesus, God’s own Son is my counselor! Jesus is my all in all and I owe everything to Him!
Because it was not some angel, as great as that would be, that has brought us the message of the gospel, and not some great prophet of old who called down fire out of Heaven to bring us the message of the gospel, but it was God’s Own Son, Jesus, then we have all the greater reason and responsibility to listen to what Jesus has to say to us through the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit within our hearts.
How many of you this morning have heard the gospel message, obeyed the call of God and accepted Christ as your Savior? I know that most if not all of us here this morning have done these things and that all of us are trusting in Jesus to help us make Heaven our home!
That’s wonderful and great, but the real meat of this message today is to tell you that you had better be on guard and not let your salvation “leak out” and find your heart empty when Jesus calls you home.
Our minds and memories are like a bucket with a pinhole in the bottom, they do not retain what is poured into them.
Illustration:
I remember a few years ago, that the Disney Channel presented a movie called “Flight of the Navigator”. It was a Sci-Fi movie where a young boy is abducted by an alien spacecraft. It seems that this spacecraft was piloted by a computer generated being that consisted only of one long mechanical arm with a large eye at the end of it. This spacecraft had somehow been damaged and needed some place to store its memory banks before it lost all of its star maps. The alien had attempted to fill the mind of the captive boy with all of the information contained in its computer systems but found out that the information was “leaking” from the boys mind as fast as they could put it in.
I believe that this is the same problem that we have in our own minds this very morning! We come to church, sit before the preacher, or even study the Word of God in our own study time and then we find that we can’t remember most of what we read or heard because our mind had a pinhole in it that let all the information leak out!
It is only by earnest study and hard work that we retain what has been read and taught. Most of us learn only by repetition after repetition. Most of us learn only by repetition. Most of us learn only by repetition. How do most of us learn? There, see, it does work!
I wonder just how much we would know if we could just remember everything we ever learned. We have the capacity to remember but we have leaky brains. We have to stop up those leaks or we may soon forget, not only the trivial matters, but the important things of God as well.
Paul understood the condition of the mind due to the effects of the fall. God’s original intent was not for man to have a “leaky mind”. God’s intent was for man to have ultimate intelligence second only to God’s own intelligence. That’s proven by even science that says that man only uses a very small percentage (perhaps as much as 10%) of the brain’s power to think. Some of us, I believe, use far less than that!
That’s why Paul says to the Hebrews and to us by proxy that we should be very careful to guard against losing the information and the good Word of God, including the message of the Gospel that Jesus has given to us through His death on the cross.
Illustration:
We are coming into the Easter Season right now and there will be millions around the country and countless numbers around the world who will observe the Christian Holiday that commemorates the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They will all read the story again and they will all be reminded that there is not promise of tomorrow and that Jesus could come at any time or that their life could end after each heartbeat or each breath. They will resolve to do better. They will consider their ways for a little while, maybe a day or two, and then the remembrance of the cross and the message of the cross will slowly begin to “leak out” until they go right back to their old ways again.
The cares of this life, the pleasures of this life, every temptation that comes our way, and the corruption of our own heart due to sin in our lives, will begin to make that hole even bigger. The “leak” begins small at first as we are slowly drawn aside to the things around us. Then the hole gets bigger and the “leak” begins to grow until the message of the Gospel is completely drained.
Satan’s greatest trick to is to slowly lull us to sleep spiritually. He begins to bring old friends around who will draw us away from the church to their parties or their social gatherings. He brings old memories back of all the good times while not allowing us to see the bad times that we had in our old life. He slowly but surely begins to flood our minds and our hearts with the desire to see the old places we used to seem to enjoy. He replaces the gospel with things of this world because we allow him to.
Paul reminds the Hebrews of the same thing that I want to remind each of us this morning. If God judged those who only had the prophets and the thunder and lightning to let them know about God, when they disobeyed, then how can we escape if we neglect our salvation and let it slip from us?
God judged Israel time and time again for their “forgetfulness”. God told them on several occasions that they had “forgotten Him days without number”. I wonder how many days you have lived without giving God a thought or meditating upon His living Word? How many days have you neglected your salvation?
None of us would want to be lost! None of us desires to give up the glory of Heaven to choose the flames of Hell but that’s just what we do when we neglect the salvation that Jesus has provided for us! You are not going to just float into heaven without a struggle.
Any dead fish can float downstream but it takes a fish with a purpose, with some energy and with life to swim upstream against the current and against the obstacles that float down river!
I tell you that most of the world is like that dead fish – they are just going with the flow and don’t realize that there is a pitfall that lies at the end of the river called life, that cascades right down into the very Lake of Fire itself. The natural tendency for all of creation since the Fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden is to go downward. The ultimate lowest place is Hell itself.
If you are going to make Heaven your home, you can’t just float along, you had better be swimming or paddling for your worth. There had better be some energy in your life that only the Holy Spirit can give. There had better be some power in your life that only comes from the Baptism in the Holy Ghost! There had better be some hard work of praying, studying and a commitment to keep going no matter what. The moment you stop, you start floating downstream again. That’s why so many people never seem to get any stronger in the Spirit or never seem to get closer to God. They quit paddling and then float down to where they began before, then they paddle for a while to get back closer to God, they quit again and the cycle keeps repeating over and over. Don’t quit paddling the next time and you will get closer to God!
Paul’s warning, if you read between the lines and see the gist of what Paul is saying, is that we will not escape a greater judgment because we neglect the message of the Gospel that Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, gives to us personally through the Holy Spirit and the living Word of God.
God has proven His power and His message to each of us! He has healed us when we were sick! He has given us miracles time and again! He has provided for all of our needs! He has filled our hearts with His love! He has extended His mercy and grace to us without measure! Who can doubt that God is not real when we have experienced Him in such a great manner as this?
Those of you that are here this morning who are not living your life in total commitment to Christ, have you let the message leak from your heart? Those of you who are here this morning; how much of this message has already leaked from your heart and your memory? Will you remember this message tomorrow, or even tonight? Do your mind and your heart leak? Some have a hole so big that you can’t even remember the questions that I just asked!
It’s time to plug those leaks in your mind and heart! It’s time to hold on to the truth of the Word of God! It’s time to embrace tightly the presence of the Holy Spirit within! It’s time to remind ourselves over and over of what Jesus has done for us and that He is coming soon!
As we come to the close of this message I want us to check our own heart and mind for leaks this morning!
Have you neglected God days without number?
Have you neglected to reach, study and meditate upon the Word of God?
Have you neglected to spend time in prayer, talking to your elder Brother?
Have you allowed your salvation to leak away?
It’s time, right now, to stop those leaks!
