Title: Remembering Your Sacrifice 09/08/02 West Side
Text: Romans 8:35-39 A.M. Service
Purpose: Special service honoring our local Police and Firefighters. A 9-11 Sunday Morning Service. May be used at any time.
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Introduction
Once in every lifetime something happens on the world stage, which shapes the course of human events. That event occurred one year ago on the morning of Sept 11th. Consider for a moment what was set in motion by the terrorist attacks of that day:
Our nations capital was attacked.
1. Over 3000 people lost their lives.
2. The Manhattan skyline was irrevocably changed.
3. The financial trade center for 150 nations was completely destroyed.
5. The world’s economy was greatly tested.
We waged a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But, a long-standing almost invisible war will be fought for years to come around the world.
That’s the big picture and it says nothing of the tens of thousands of people here and abroad whose lives were changed. Try to calculate the human toll emotionally and spiritually and you can’t. Only God can weigh such matters. But we try in feeble ways to understand. Events like these raise fundamental questions. Why is there so much evil in the world? Why do innocent people suffer? Where is God when tragedy strikes?
I am struck by how universal these questions are. They are as old as Job and are asked by the wisest people among us.
Question: Where were you?
A. Many were getting ready for work
B. Some where at school
C. Others might have just been getting their morning coffee.
No matter where you were, you remember those first few moments of unbelief. (Show slides…)
We witnessed horrific scenes of disbelief, uncertainty and confusion. We wondered why all this began to happen, and what did all this mean?
As I searched for pictures to use today, even though it was a year later, I found myself reliving those images again and again. I replayed the towers collapsing over and over. I could feel an emptiness in my stomach, and a heavy heartache in my chest. There was an overwhelming sense of helplessness.
In fact one writer put in words like this to describe the emotion of grief.
OUR YEAR OF GRIEVING
Author Edgar Jackson poignantly describes grief: Grief is a young widow trying to raise her three children, alone. Grief is the man so filled with shocked uncertainty and confusion that he strikes out at the nearest person. Grief is a mother walking daily to a nearby cemetery to stand quietly and alone a few minutes before going about the tasks of the day. She knows that part of her is in the cemetery, just as part of her is in her daily work. Grief is the silent, knife-like terror and sadness that comes a hundred times a day, when you start to speak to someone who is no longer there. Grief is the emptiness that comes when you eat alone after eating with another for many years.
Grief is teaching yourself to go to bed without saying good night to the one who has died. Grief is the helpless wishing that things were different when you know they are not and never will be again. Grief is a whole cluster of adjustments, apprehensions, and uncertainties that strike life in its forward progress and make it difficult to redirect the energies of life.
--Charles Swindoll, Growing Strong, p. 171.
I. Remembering the Sacrifices of our Police Officers/
Firefighters.
But helplessness is not the same as hopelessness.
As we witnessed those events, the people in the towers and buildings must have thought “how helpless I feel.” Unfortunately, some of them did feel hopeless, and plunged to their deaths. I can’t begin to try to know what it must have felt like to be faced with the reality of certain death, and have know hope. And yet, coming up the stairwells were men and women, who were bringing hope. Firefighters and police officers, who in the face of ultimate danger rose to the occasion and provided hope by giving direction and comfort.
The sight of those individuals must have been a welcome relief that help was on the way.
None of us could have imagined what took place on that day. Those men and women where people just like you and me. People who got up that morning, showered, dressed, kissed their loved ones good bye, and went to work.
None of us knows what lies before us in a day. But there is probably not one family here represented that doesn’t know or at least has entertained the thought, about the safety of their loved ones. For there are things that yes, may be within our control, but like so many, there are things out of our control.
Today in honor of the hundreds and thousands of men and women who march into harms way each day, providing hope, may I say thank you. Thank you for the countless hours and days, you spend training, and working, so that we might live in safety.
We realize, that while you may not have been one of those individuals in NY, we know, that you would and will do the same for us.
Would you stand, and let us honor your today, with a small token of our appreciation, we want to remember your sacrifices. Thank you!
These are ordinary people, with extraordinary courage.
TRANSITION:
IN TIMES LIKE THESE
In reference to the terrorist attacks on America, Rev. Billy Graham stated, "In times like this, we realize how weak and inadequate we are, and our greatest need is to turn in repentance and faith to the God of all Mercy and the Father of all Comfort. If ever there was a time for us to turn to God and to pray as a nation, it is now--that this evil will spread no further."
Contributed by: Charles Mallory
Suffering should not drive us away form God, but help us to identify with him and allow his love to heal us.
There are moments we might feel abandoned by God, but the Scriptures tells us that nothing can separate us from the Love of God.
II. Remembering that nothing will separate us from the love of God.
READ TEXT: Romans 8:31-39
Paul was writing to the church in Rome. His words would be reflected upon for years to come, especially during the horrific years of when Nero, burned Rome, and blamed the Christians.
Paul may have been reflecting on questions like these, because Paul feared neither the tangible hardships of life nor the intangible fears that creep into the consciousness of any normal person.
A. Am I suffering for a reason?
B. What if I wake up on the other side of death and discover I have been fooled?
C. What if I do not wake up on the other side of death?
D. Where will the love of God be then?
Let me summarize what the writer of this book, Paul, was trying to convey up to this point.
1. In the first couple of chapters, Paul is describing for us man sinful condition and the consequences of sin.
2. How sin separates us from God.
3. How a sinful life begins so innocently but if allowed to continue begins to drag us down a spiral of destruction. Farther and farther away from the Lord.
4. Yet, because of God’s grace, we can have faith in him, and when we do, as Abraham did in the O.T. who believed the promises of God, God called him holy.
a. He didn’t earn it or even deserve it, but it was by the grace of God.
5. You and I stand in that same situation. We are all born into sin. The Bible says,
Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Now that COULD BE a dismal story if allowed to end there. But that’s not where the story ends.
Paul continues on…. Chapters 5:8 says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Illustration: USA Today Paper (September 5, 2002)
Article on how the elevators in the WTC which were suppose to be state of the art, actually did not work properly.
The elevators were designed so that in case of a fire, the elevators would automatically return to the ground floor and hold the doors open.
During those horrific moments, there were many who were caught in the elevators as the next plane hit their building. One story told of a man who said, as the plane hit, all but one of the cables either broke or melted, sending he and everyone in his elevator car, plummeting 900 feet to the bottom. It was only near the end did the last cable, the thinnest of them all, snapped tight, and held the safe.
Many were hurt, and some even died in the free fall. They had stopped just short of one of the openings. He was able to push one lady out, and then he crawled out himself, and ran for help, just before the building collapsed.
As I read that story, I pondered how that is analogous to our life in sin. Something that was suppose to work:
a. I have a good job
b. I make good money
c. I love my wife and kids
All of a sudden, comes crashing down around us. Almost in a free fall. And yet we find moments of God’s grace, maybe like the last cable, where we find that we might be rescued. Rescued, not by our own efforts, but by Christ himself. He is the one who takes my place. He is the one, that because of his death, allows me to have life.
While we were trapped in a life of sin, Christ died for me. He gave his life for me, so that I might be forgiven and free.
In the following chapters of 5-8, Paul refers to the struggle within us. The struggle inside when we know what is right, and what we should do, yet there is this tension that draws us away, so we follow the temptation anyway. Paul is referring to God’s deeper work in our lives.
It’s not only freeing us from our sin, but freeing us from a sinful nature inside that would cause us to continue to sin.
As I witnessed people coming out from under the dust clouds of smoke and debris, they were covered in soot. I remember how thankful one lady was that someone at the last moment, pulled her into a building, thereby saving her life. The people I saw had been saved, but now they needed a good cleaning, or cleansing. They were not content, just to get out, but eventually, to remove all the filth and dirt from themselves.
So what do we have? We have now Paul remembering about the Sacrifice that Christ made, and he asks, almost rhetorical kinds of questions:
Knowing all that we just talked about and is laid in as our background, he then asks:
If God has done all this for us,
If he’s freed us from sin
If he’s cleansed us from our sinful lifestyle
1. Who can oppose us? If God gave us his only Son, and he paid the price, there is no one who can oppose us.
2. If no one can oppose us, who can accuse us? V. 33 No one! Because it was God himself who called us holy. God would not say, I no longer choose you to be my own.
Illustration: Gas Station Robbery
Suppose there was a man, who was a citizen of the U.S.A., yet walked next door and robbed the gas station. What’s happened. He’s broken his relationship with society, and must pay for his crime. He’s still a U.S. citizen, but has broken the relationship, and now does not have the freedom that he once had.
He serves his time, and is released. Now this does not give him the freedom to go and rob it again saying, I’ve already been forgiven, so it doesn’t matter what I do now, no. If he’s been released, the relationship has been reestablished. But if he commits the crime again, then the relationship is broken once again.
3. Then can anyone condemn us? No if Jesus Christ is Lord of our lives, because he died for my sin.
4. So then, v. 35 “can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love?
NLT says, “Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or are hungry, or cold or in danger or threatened with death? NO!
Despite all these things, OVERWHELMING victory is ours through Christ who loved us.
Don’t you want to be on a winning team? I’m tired of living a defeated life on my own efforts. I’m tired of trying to figure life out. I’m tired of struggling with sin that does nothing more then lead me down paths I know are wrong, and don’t want to travel.
We can’t even figure our the tax code, so how in the world can I know what tomorrow holds? I want there to be peace in my soul.
I want to know, that if I die, I can wake up on the other side and have God say, well done thou good and faithful servant, and not, “I’ve been fooled.”
In fact Paul finally says in v. 38 “I’m convinced…”
(Now he’s not from Missouri- the “Show me state”)
But if you’re convinced it means that you’ve tried and tested it.
You might say, I’m convinced – I’d lay my life down for anyone of these guys in my squad. Why? Because when the going gets tough they come through.
Might I say, there is nothing that can separate you from God’s love.
Not things we CAN control, nor things that are OUT of our control.
Jeremiah 29:11 says, “For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Lisa Beamer: Reflecting on the loss of her dad.
“Slowly I began to understand that the plans God has for us don’t just include ‘good things’, but the whole array of human events. The ‘prospering’ he talks about in the book of Jeremiah is often the outcome of a ‘bad’ event. I remember my mom saying that many people look for miracles- things that in their human minds ‘fix’ a difficult situation. Many miracles, however, are not a change to the normal course of human events; they’re found in God’s ability and desire to sustain and nurture people through even the worst situations. Somewhere along the way, I stopped demanding that God fix the problems in my life and started to be thankful for his presence as I endured them.” (Lisa Beamer: “Let’s Roll” Wrestling with the Whys” pg. 69)
III. Remember to lay your life down as a living sacrifice. Romans 12:1-2
A. Give your bodies to God
B. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice
C. Don’t copy the behavior of the world
D. Let God transform you into a new person and the way you think.
E. Then you will know what God wants you to do.
Conclusion:
Question: What will you do to make a difference?
1. Is it just for the here and now?
2. Will it make a difference in eternity?
Focus on the Family Magazine: September 2002. Pg. 18-19
“Al Braca was a beam of hope for people caught in a desperate situation.
On the morning of Sept. 11, Jeannie Braca switched on the television to check the weather report, only to hear that a plane had just hit the WTC. Jeannie’s husband, Al, worked as a corporate bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald. His office was on the 105th floor of Tower One. Jeannie hadn’t spoken to Al since he had left for work that morning.
There For A Reason:
Al had survived the WTC bombing in 1993- even helped a woman with asthma escape from the building. Jeannie didn’t think it would be any different this time. “I knew he would stop to help and minister to people,” she says, “but I never thought for a minute that he wouldn’t come home.”
Family members held out hope tat Al had only been injured. They called area hospitals, searching for him. But, Jeannie says, “By the time I went to bed that night, I knew he was never coming home.” A week later, Al’s body was found in the rubble.
Then reports trickled in from friends and acquaintances. Some people on the 105th floor had made a last call or sent a final e-mail to a loved one saying that “a man” was leading people in prayer. A few referred to Al by name. The Bracas learned that Al had indeed been ministering to people during the attack. When he realized that they were all trapped in the building and would not be able to escape, Al shared the gospel with a group of 50 co-workers and led them in prayer.
This news came as no surprise to Jeannie. For years, she and Al had been praying for the salvation of these men and women. According to Jeannie, Al hated his job; he couldn’t stand the environment. It was a world so completely out of touch with his Christian values. But he wouldn’t quit. He was convinced that God wanted him to stay there, to be a light in the darkness. To that end, Al freely shared his faith with his co-workers, many of whom sarcastically nicknamed him “the Rev.”
“They mocked him,” Jeannie recalls, “but when horrible things happened in their lives, they always asked Al for prayer.”
He prayed with them and shared the importance of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
We wanted to be a light and to shine and let people see Jesus in us…
The last thing my dad did involved the two things most important to him- God and his family. He loved to lead people to Christ. That takes away a lot of the hurt and the pain.
Closing Hymn: It is Well with My Soul
