Whom Will He Teach?

WHOM WILL HE TEACH?

Text: Isaiah 28:8 thru 13

Following the Sunday morning service, the pastor stood at the back of the church, shaking hands with the worshipers as they left.

As one man was leaving, he looked intensely at the pastor and said,

"Powerful sermons, Pastor. Thoughtful, well researched. I can always see myself in them…uh…could you please stop?!?”

Listening to God’s Word can be challenging for each of us…if we let it.

If you don’t…you will not change

Joyce Meyers said it so well,

“I am not where I need to be, but thank God I am not where I used to be. “

The Bible can change any of us. Likewise, we need to understand that our world is constantly changing (also).

Change is not usually bad.

In fact change is normal – it can be healthy. Change is really a sign of life.

Listen to what the medical definition of death is a -

“body that does not change... “

Medical Science has a lot to say about how we all change.

Our skin replaces itself every month

Your stomach, your liver, and all of your bones change periodically....

Men - your whole body every 5 years, where the women....it is every 7 years.

During my sermon your body is going to change – modern science says that about ½ million cells in your body are going to die and be replaced with a half a million new cells during my message.

Come on - I won’t preach that long…

Change is a natural & constant part of us.

But we should understand that our world today is in a warp drive kind of change...

Example: Did you know that the digital watch you have on your wrist contains more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1961.

How about your car? It has more computer power to get down the street than all the computers combined in the Apollo 11 spacecraft that carried Neal Armstrong to the moon.

I read recently –In the next five years, your new car will be steered, stopped & started with only a printed circuit board.

Millions of drivers will soon be depending on a computer to literally drive their cars.

How about the pager they give you at a restaurant? I was recently at an Outback and asked if I could take my pager and go check in at the hotel across the street. I got out of the parking lot and a strange noise started sounding.

(As you might expect, I ignored it.)

I learned that these pagers are hooked up to a satellite somewhere in outer space.

Listen; we are now living in a world where it is cheaper, faster and safer to a send a signal over 20,000 miles to a satellite and back again than it is to walk 20 feet (across the restaurant) to tell you that your table is ready...

We live in a fast changing world...

It has been estimated that more information has been generated in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000 years....

Have your kids ever asked you, “Hey dad tell me what it was like in the olden days when you had to walk across the room to change the TV channel...”

Think about what is going on…

Not long ago people cooked on wood stoves... And when grandma said, “Log On” she meant make the wood stove hotter.” And when she said, “download” she meant, “You kids go down & load up on some more firewood...

No matter where you live or how you live, you are constantly changing. The question is, “Are these changes for the good for you, or are they bad?”

You see we all are influenced (in some way) by the changes around us.

A well-known Jewish author, Elie Wiesel, tells this story: “A just man once came to the sinful city of Sodom hoping to save it. He picketed the streets, going from marketplace to marketplace, shouting, ‘Men and women, repent. What you are doing is wrong. It will kill you; it will condemn your soul!’

They laughed at him, but he kept on shouting. And then one day a child stopped and asked him. ‘Hey strange man, don’t you see it’s useless?’

‘Yes,’ the just man replies.

‘Then why do you keep preaching?’

He told the child, ‘In the beginning, I was convinced that I would change the people. Now I go on shouting because I don’t want them to change me.’"

This is similar to the backdrop of our text in Isaiah 28. Sin was at a fevered pitch.

Judah was destroying itself with evil.

The nation of Judah was

· Once a beautiful nation, but now was in jeopardy with God

· Succumbing to the evils of their day, just as our nation is in our day.