God Keeps His Promises - David Pawson

I'm in a bit of a quandary when Nick challenged me to come here where is he by the way oh they were why you're hiding you're responsible you're to blame I said the burden that's on my heart this week is the burden I shared yesterday morning up at the feast and yet I've already spoken to two of you who were there how many of you actually were there yesterday morning one two and that's all all right you two will just have to sit through it all again I apologize in advance but I came to Israel with this burden on my heart and I had no opportunity to share it when I arrived because the subject I had previously decided at the feast was quite a different subject and they were only giving me one session so I said Lord you'll have to give me opportunities to share the burden on my heart and the first was on Tuesday evening when I spoke to 200 people in the Shalom hotel and they asked me to share that burden and it was recorded for television as well that night so I got one opportunity then the feast said you can have another chance yesterday morning so I got a second opportunity and tonight I have got a third so I think the Lord seemed to want this burden to be shared today oh I know out of the mouth of out of the mouth of two or three meetings it shall be it shall be established right will I begin back in the 17th century when there was an emperor in Prussia by the name of Frederick the fifth and he had a philosopher at court with whom he had many discussions and one day Frederick the 5th of Prussia said to Heidegger the philosopher give me one proof of the existence of God and Heidegger said your majesty the Jews and considering that was long before there was any sign of any return to this land and when they were scattered among the nations and in many cases looked as if they would die out it was quite an amazing answer but the fact is that the existence of the Jews is a proof of the existence of their God it is as simple as that the Jew has been called the eternal Jew but that's only because is God is an eternal God there should never have been a nation of Israel humanly speaking their history is impossible they began with an old man of ninety leaving a place where the houses were made of brick had running water and central heating and two-story houses I've seen the photographs of the houses excavated in error of the Col deze one photograph of a marvelous fireplace I showed to my wife and I said what would you think about that fireplace would you like it she said it's a little old-fashioned and I said it's actually 4,000 years old but that old man that old man left a comfortable brick house and lived in a tent for the rest of his life I don't know many old age pensioners who would do that and he set off with a wife who'd been totally unable to produce new children for him and so it looked as if the family line would come to a dead end anyway and they set off for this land which in those days was not a very fertile land and he would face more than one time of famine when there would be no food for him and he had to go down to the breadbasket of Egypt to get something to eat that's how it all began with the old man his son and his grandson and yet God linked his name with the names of those three men forever and the God we praise tonight is the God of Avraham II Sakon Yaakov isn't that amazing well they did go down to Egypt for food eventually and one of Jacob's sons was sold into slavery and thrown into prison and became prime minister is an impossible story there is a professor of Egyptology in London University who is not a believer lovely man quietly spoken and he says his excavations in Egypt have convinced him of the absolute historical truth of the Old Testament and he's done some brilliant BBC television programmes about his work in which he has found the house of Joseph in Goshen and in the garden are twelve pillars which don't support anything they just represent than twelve relatives 12 brothers and they've he's found his tomb it's a 12 foot high pyramid which has been broken into below ground level and the body removed but then Genesis said that they did that they brought Joseph's body back here he even found a statue of Joseph and there he is actually in a coat of many colors but he's holding the two staffs of Office of an Egyptian Vizier but the face is Semitic not Egyptian and he's even found the storehouses which Joseph built to store the grain during the seven fat years for the seven lean years it's an astonishing bit of work and here's this unbeliever says I'm convinced it's all true he's even actually found the Garden of Eden the most beautiful place still surrounded by mountains and leading down to an inland sea and it's full of fruit trees you see we're not dealing with myth or legend we're dealing with fact but go back to my main theme there should never have been a nation of Israel because down there in Egypt though Joseph was prime minister it wasn't long before all the Jews were slaves and made to make bricks of clay and a clay brick is heavy especially the size that used to be and at first they were given straw to mix with the clay which makes the brick lighter to carry and then to grind them down they were told they must made bricks without straw so they just put any rubbish they could find mixed with the clay to keep the bricks light and then they ran out of rubbish they had to make pure clay bricks you know that an archaeologist has uncovered a building in Egypt where the bottom bricks are mixed with straw and the middle bricks are mixed with rubbish and the top bricks are pure clay who doubts the Bible but let's move on by that time the descendants of the old man Avraham were in slavery they had no time of their own they worked seven days a week non-stop from sunrise to sunset they had no money they had no freedom they had nothing they were slaves and yet they increased in number and now came the first attempt at genocide of this people when the Pharaoh commanded that every boy must be slaughtered and the professor in London has found a cemetery in Goshen where all the skeletons are female there is no other cemetery in the entire world like this and he thought why are there no male skeletons buried here and then he read in Genesis that all the boys had been killed at birth thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile but the Nile saved one boy Moshe whom his mother was desperate to keep alive and God's deliverer been born they should never have got out of Egypt it's impossible the Egyptians from Suez down to the Red Sea from Cairo rather down to Suez had a line of forts to guard the eastern border of their country and to keep slaves in as well as enemies out there was no way those hundreds of thousands of slaves could get out of Egypt it was humanly impossible Simonne and of course when they finally made a bid for freedom they went totally the wrong direction they went south until they were trapped between the sea and the Saharan desert and behind them the chariots of the biggest army in the then-known world trapped they should never have escaped but they did and it was the Egyptian army with all its horses and chariots that didn't escape they were then 40 years in desert with a hot food or water and in 1973 the Egyptian army within three days was dying in the sunny a peninsula and Israel took pity and released them in a place where the Egyptian army of today could not survive three days they survived forty years they should never have got into this land they sent spies ahead to try and suss out the situation and the surprise came back dozen of them but 10 of them said we'll never get in there we've seen their cities and their city walls reached the sky and inside a people who are far bigger than we are there are taller race there Giants will never get in but two of them said were going in on God's shoulders so we'll be bigger than them and those were the only two got in they should never have been able to take this place Jericho was the first city and an impossible city to take but they took it they should never have survived in this little land it's a most precarious land in which to live it's in an earthquake zone it's on the biggest crack in the earth surface which stretches from Syria and Lebanon right down through Africa the Great Rift Valley it's actually two cracks in the Earth's surface and the land in between is dropped that's why you have such a deep valley just over there and why you have the Great Rift Valley in Kenya and right down through Africa it's an earthquake zone if you go to the Calvary behind the bus station in the north here look at the face of the rock and you'll see the strata runs that way but the cracks in it run that way you only get that in an earthquake zone rocks crack along the strata line except in earthquakes when they crack this way and furthermore agriculture here was then very difficult this little land is totally dependent on a westerly wind because there is no rain unless the wind is in the West from every other direction it comes a hot dry Hamm scene which makes the flower and grass disappear overnight so agriculture here is totally dependent on a bit of wind from the West I can remember standing on Mount Carmel with a perfectly blue sky like today and I saw in the West a little cloud and I could cover it with my fist at arm's length a cloud no bigger than a man's hand but I knew rain was on the way I knew that the wind had turned round to the west and sometimes in this little land there were years without rain the vines of course depended on the dew of Mount Hermon coming off the snow and coming down the valley but moisture is worth its weight in gold here and I tell you there could be a war over water in this very place and then it's near enough Africa for locust swarms to get here I was only once in a locust swarm it was in Cana in northern Nigeria and the Sun went out at midday and I thought what's happening in Eclipse no the sky was full of millions of locusts grasshoppers they looked like about 4 inches long and they were flying at 10 miles an hour and they took an hour and a half before the Sun came back you can do the maths yourself find out how many the word they would descend on a tree I could hear the munching I could hear the meeting and a minute later they would fly off and the tree had no leaves and no bark left on it just a white skeleton the poor Africans were trying to beat them off their vegetable plots but they couldn't but those used to come here we're near enough Africa for them to do so and they did come here this is not an easy place to live by nature and by human nature as well it's a very precarious country it's a narrow corridor as you know between the Mediterranean and the desert and on that side the desert side there is a long Ridge of black basalt rock which is so sharp and so hard that a camel cannot walk on it and in this narrow corridor which links Africa to Europe to Europe and to Asia it's just a little narrow strip of land and of course because of that it's the corridor between the rest of the world everybody traveling from one continent to another has to come through here but right down the Eastern Shore the eastern shore of the Mediterranean is a mountain range and there's only one gap in it not far from here further north that way and the gap is a 12 mile across plane called the plane of yes er L or the plane of Israel um and that's the only way through every army that as marched through this area has gone through that gap it's the crossroads of the world the road from Asia to Africa goes through that gap and the road from Arabia to Europe goes through that gap and the crossroads is it a little hill called Megiddo or in Hebrew Harma gettin' and that was called by Winston Churchill the cockpit of the Middle East and Alexander the Great came through there Napoleon came through there because it's the gap and it links all the then known world this was before America was discovered the whole known world had to pass through here and somebody have said if you insist on living at a crossroads you will get run over which is why this land has been run over invaded so many times little Israel was surrounded by hostile neighbors on every side there were more bites and Midianites and every other parasites you can imagine and they were hostile neighbors and they invaded this territory regularly they came to get animals and crops or they just came to set crops on fire but it's a very hard place for them to live and beyond the immediate hostile neighbors were two world superpowers and the superpowers were based on big rivers because big rivers had a constant supply of water and therefore could bring fertility and with the Nile on one side and the Tigris and Euphrates on the other there were two world superpowers constantly threatening each other and when they attacked each other they had to come through here so on the one hand was the Egyptian superpower and on the other hand was the Assyrian superpower and later the Babylonian superpower and then this little nation had civil war which usually wipes out a nation if it's pursued far enough and they split into ten tribes in the north and two in the south at war with each other and I'm sure you've heard the saying to Jews three opinions one of the problems here is national unity what with over 60 political parties fighting for a hundred seats in the Knesset I mean it's ludicrous every government has to be a coalition of different parties which gives tremendous power to the minority parties especially in this case the Orthodox but it's been like that no wonder David said how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together their histories of brothers falling out it always has been and then after the Civil War the Assyrian superpower came and ten tribes disappeared only two left Judah and little Benjamin and they didn't last much longer and then the Babylonians came and they were gone too they should never have survived a few of them came back 70 years later only a few in comparison to the number who went we tend to think they all came back from the Exile they did nothing of the kind a few thousand came back and managed to begin to rebuild this city though the temple they managed to erect was tiny compared with Solomon's but they gotta build an ear mite on the walls up again still surrounded by hostile enemies and neighbors and they never got their political freedom back they were occupied by Syrians and Egyptians then Greeks and Romans and those who occupied them some of them tried to obliterate Jewish identity and culture one of the worst was a man called Antiochus Epiphanes who came to this city for three and a half years during which he did his best to impose Greek culture here he built Stadium for sports and of course Greek sport was always in the nude as I'm sure you know from old Greek pictures and that was an affront to the Jewish decency and he sacrificed pigs on the altar of the temple and filled the vest reserve the temple with prostitutes he did his best he was the worst and he didn't try and kill the Jews he tried to kill Jewish culture and identity and he is a foretaste of the Antichrist who will do the same thing in three and a half years right here and then with the Romans they crucified thousands of people no one you've only heard of one maybe that there were thousands and it was so painful an occupation that they finally decided to revolt and try and throw the Romans off Jesus foresaw that happening and he said as he made his way to the cross he said don't weep for me weep for yourselves what's coming on you and he said a thing that I've never heard any preacher quote as he carried the cross he said if they do these things when the wood is green what will they do when it's dry that's a carpenter talking Greenwood you don't cut but dry wood you do and as he sees the hammer and the nails being carried in front of him and carrying the wooden beam the carpenter says that and what he means is I am Greenwood and yet they're cutting me down but when you become ripe with dry wood watch what they do to you and they did and in AD 70 this city was destroyed the temple pulled down stone by stone and you can go and see the stones that were thrown down now at the southeast corner of the temple mound you see the huge blocks on the very street on which Jesus walked and the blocks thrown down of crack the street have you seen that what it's all true and Jerusalem was no more and the temple was no more but they still lived on and they tried a second time and a false prophet gave a false messiah to them Bar Kochba and in 135 ad they made a second and final attempt to throw off the Roman yoke but they didn't succeed they were wiped out you've been to Masada some of you I'm sure and this city had a perimeter put around it beyond which no Jew could come into the city and it was renamed aiolia Capitolina and the land was renamed palestinian that word postdates jesus and yet there are preachers in my country in England prominent preachers the leading evangelical Bible teacher of England is now telling my country that Jesus was a Palestinian doesn't he know his history but that was the end a few Jews managed to survive in places like fed the city set on a hill but that was the end they should never have reappeared they should never have kept their identity and many of them didn't they were scattered over the whole world and many of them assimilate 'add and lost their identity others kept their identity by holding on to just three things circumcision the Sabbath and a kosher diet and that way they hung on to their identity but they lost their language they lost so many other things but they kept alive a hope that one day they'd be back here next year in Jerusalem and here they are against every possible human explanation considering that the Crusades ostensibly coming here to release holy sites from the Muslim killed every Jew on the way starting in France and Germany and the slaughter of Jews by the Christian Church is one of the blots on our reputation then in Spain the Inquisition forced Jews either to be tortured to death or to convert to Christianity under pressure 1492 the very year that Christopher Columbus discovers America Spain gets rid of the last Jew interesting because the new world became a refuge for so many Jews England was caught up in his own Masada in York there is a castle where the remaining Jews in England took refuge 1291 and they committed suicide rather than be killed by the British soldiers so it's gone on and there have been so many attempts Russian pogroms the Jews of Poland were persecuting and as you know in our lifetime my lifetime it came to a head with the determined attempt to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth and it succeeded with a third of them six six million including one and a half million children well you are probably familiar with all of this I just want to underline there is no possible human explanation for the fact that Israel is back on the map and back in their land after all that that there is still and Israel is quite incredible and you cannot find a natural explanation for it they can't find a natural explanation for themselves because once a year they celebrate Passover that their origin as a nation began with a miracle it's not just a miracle that they've survived it is a series of miracles all the way through in other words there is only a supernatural explanation for the survival of the Jewish people and I remember in 1967 six-day war I was riding in a jeep with an Israeli major in the army on the Golan Heights we had to watch where we walked there was live ammunition everywhere on the ground there were huge Russian gun emplacements with the guns pointing down from the top of the Golan Heights to the kyboot scene below and I remember saying to that major how on earth did you get up here I knew one of the heroic stories they decided to build a new road up the side of the mountain for the vehicles to follow and they had a bulldozer making that road up the side of the cliff and every hundred yards or so the driver of the bulldozer were shot dead and his body pulled off the bulldozer and another Israeli soldier ran jumped on board and took it another hundred yards before he died and another such heroism and yet when I asked the major how did you get up here do you know what he said he didn't say a word he just did this and pointed to the sky he knew his history there is no way they could have ever survived these 3,000 years and more 4,000 years unless the God of Israel exists and unless he intervened in their history again and again and again that's why Heidegger said to Frederick your majesty the Jews that's the proof of the existence of God but only of the existence of the God of Israel doesn't prove any other God actually no other God exists the others are all figments of human imagination but the God of Israel exists and that is why Israel exists and I predict now that on the last day of history Israel will still be there jesus promised it he said heaven and earth may pass away but he said this race will never pass away and it hasn't however I now want to say something that seems to contradict all I've said so far the proof of the existence of the God of Israel is ambiguous it is not an absolute proof it is not a clear proof why not because the facts must be faced that there are another series of facts all the way along there three which seemed to point to the fact that there is no God and alongside the fact of their survival is the fact of their suffering and I want to tend to that now because that's an apparent contradiction the God who has preserved them I'm putting it very bluntly the God who has preserved them so wonderfully has not done such a good job of protecting them he may have preserved them but he hasn't protected them it's an apparent contradiction there have been so many attempts to kill them off and God hasn't stopped them to come to the most crucial example I have met Jewish people who survived the Holocaust and they have said where was God when we needed him most where was God in Auschwitz and Treblinka where was he and many survivors of the Holocaust have become agnostic and even atheist because they feel God left them down so badly I could go through the history again from this point of view and show that their sufferings went on and on and on they have never ceased even when they were in the land the natural disasters came there was a terrible earthquake in the time of Amos they had their all the invasion read the book of Judges and they just had one invasion after another and God had to raise up heroes who set them free again but no sooner were they free than another would invade and they have suffered more than any other nation on earth no nation has such a sad history how many times as Jerusalem been invaded and destroyed 17 I think it is an astonishing history of suffering and we must be honest with our facts we may get excited about their survival but we must also include their suffering in our thinking about our faith let me move on here they are they only want to be left alone to live in peace and security like everybody else but they cannot and I have to say that the war may keep out some suicide bombers but it will not give them the security they longed for so why can't people leave us alone why doesn't the world just and why doesn't God now that he's given us the land back why can't he give us peace with it let's face these questions why have the Jews suffered more than any other people there are human explanations that are being given the first is xenophobia that fear that people have of strangers of people who are different and the Jewish people are different and everybody knows that some of them dressed differently more of them each differently as the Bible says they are a people apart and unfortunately human beings like animals turn on those who are different even a litter of pigs has a little a weak one called a runt pig in our language and the others will turn on it and human beings do the same they don't like people who don't fit in who don't assimilate who don't belong keep themselves separate who lived differently is that the reason why they've been hated so much I don't believe that's a full explanation others say it's due to envy that Jews are so successful that the rest of us envy them and we have reason to do so whatever the Jews do they do successfully whether it's music architecture medicine whatever I could keep you here all night talking about the things that we take for granted every day which we owe to the Jewish people the telephone the airplane oh don't listen to talk about an Alexander Graham Bell will you these things came from Jewish people the tomato I've just eaten in tomato before a game here and as I did so I thank the Jew for it did you ever have a cocaine injection for a toothache the dentist's you owe that to Jews and I hope you've never suffered from venereal disease but Silverson the drug that now cures syphilis was a Jewish discovery in the Western world all five Hollywood studios were Jewish metro-goldwyn-mayer and the rest they have contributed more to our life than any other people one percent or is it 0.1% now of the world population have supplied 12% of the world's scientists what a record they have done more for the world to benefit the world than any other people and the world has done more to make their life painful it's a paradox what's the explanation I don't think it's just Envy you know in pre-war Germany in the 1930s the Jews were virtually controlling the banks the hospitals the universities the theaters and Hitler was trying to convince the German people that they were superior to the Jews even the commerce depended on them is it envy of their success in business or whatever that makes us dislike Jewish people no I don't think that's the full explanation then is it guilt remember that it was through the Jews that the highest moral standards the world has known came they were the channel of the Ten Commandments which laid down a moral standard for the whole world a standard which we know we don't keep if we're honest we know we can't keep them if we went through them in detail tonight I don't think there's anybody who could stay and say I kept them all not one of us and therefore we feel a bit of guilt about this they stand for a higher moral standard and that is why the world's media judges Israel far more fiercely than the Palestinians the Jews have been a scapegoat for the troubles of the world for centuries when the Black Death hit Europe and killed off 1/3 of the population the Jews were blamed because everybody noticed that the Jewish people didn't die in the same numbers of proportion as others and the reason was their laws of Hygiene were so much better and so the Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells and then the biggest conspiracy lie of all was when the Russian secret police for Joost a false document called the protocols of the Elders of Zion it was a pack of lies about the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world but that book was printed and published everywhere Henry Ford in America the car manufacturer printed millions of copies and distributed them throughout America and that was a lie today the Arabs distribute that little lying booklet over the whole Muslim world to stir up hatred mind you there was one accusation which the Christian Church made you are guilty of deicide you killed God or his son and their worst suffering has not been in Muslim countries but in Christian countries for centuries Jesus killers we had a dear Jewish lady in our church in England she just died recently at a good old age brilliant pianist lived in Vienna the city of music but she remembers Austrian children coming out of church and kicking her and spitting on her when she was a little girl and shouting you killed Jesus and for centuries that the Jews were hated by the church Martin Luther's last sermon before he died was a dreadful tirade against the Jewish people because in his earlier ministry he had preached the gospel to the Jews thinking that if he could preach the simple Protestant gospel to them because the only thing that seen was Catholic religion and it's idolatry had put them off so he thought I'll take them the Protestant gospel the simple gospel of Christ and they'll all be converted and they weren't they weren't interested and he turned against the Jew so much that in that last sermon he pleaded with Germany to get rid of the Jewish people and said burn their synagogues turn them out take their passports and on the anniversary of Luther's death centuries later on the infamous Kristallnacht it was to celebrate Luther sermon and the synagogues of Germany went up in flames is it then our anger for their crimes whether made up or not no I don't think that can explain it I asked two members of the Israeli government why do you think the world hates the Jewish people and they said we don't think there's an explanation they said some of you may have been present at the session of the feast and heard them say it's irrational totally irrational but it isn't now Christians tend for a supernatural explanation not the natural ones I've mentioned but the supernatural one that it's Satan responsible for all the hatred the anti-semitism that is rearing its ugly head again in the Western world it's Satan well I believe Satan has a hand in it in that he has a vested interest in exploiting it because he knows that it is through the Jewish people that his kingdom will be lost and he knows that it is they who have brought a message to the world which spells death to his power over the world and his ultimate doom whenever a deliverer is born for God's people Satan kills all the boys he did it in Egypt he did it in Bethlehem and he is there exploiting our jealousy or envy or our anger or whatever making it worse so I have no doubt that he has a hand in it but I want to remind you that Satan can do nothing without God's permission read Joe 1 again Satan cannot touch a human being unless God gives him permission to do so and that is why one of the loveliest promises in the New Testament is that a Christian will never be tempted more than he can bear because the tempter is totally in God's control which means alas that if a Christian falls to temptation it is their fault alone if God has said I will control the tempter and he will never push you too far never push you beyond what you are capable of saying no to what a promise that is but I find it frightening that I can never say it's too much for me I couldn't say no a Christian knows that his temptations are under God's control that's why you pray in the Lord's Prayer daily lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one God is in control of sin so I don't believe we can say that Satan is responsible for all the suffering of the Jews I come now to the heart of my message tonight were left with only one answer that God Himself is responsible for the suffering of the Jewish people it's not a message we want to hear but it's the truth the prophets knew this they said is he not a God who brings good and evil meaning not moral good and evil but good and evil experience and circumstances and when you read the Bible you read clearly that God not only loves people but he hates people the wicked that God not only heals but he kills that he's a God who blesses and who curses you see the real important question is not do you believe in God but what kind of God do you believe in and we've now been brought up on a sentimental rather than a scriptural understanding of God's character so that if I say God curses people boy he wouldn't believe the opposition I get but it's there right through the Bible and it's right through Jewish history when he married the Jewish people at Sinai it was a marriage it was a covenant not a contract it was a covenant marriage and God said I will in fact he said it many times I will do this for you I will I will I will and then he asked for them voluntarily they weren't forced into it at all he said now it's for you to say I will only for them they promised to keep all his Commandments all their life simple isn't it and they said we will and the marriage began later of course Israel became an adulteress to that's another story but the marriage was it's an EAJA and it was based on a voluntary mutual commitment God said I will and they said if we will and the reason behind that marriage was that God was already coping with a world that was not living right and he wanted a people who would demonstrate to the world how to live right and that that would lead to blessing and God was saying to Israel I will bless you more than any other people if you live right but if you don't I will curse you more than any other people it's as simple as that and God has kept his promises when they were on the verge of entering the promised land Moses knew his end had come and that he would not get in with them rather said his lack of faith his impatience with God had meant that he didn't qualify and he doubted on Mount Nebo the other side of the Jordan but his last public preaching to his people having led them all that way for 40 years his last sermon to them was this God will bless you with rain with crops with good family life with all sorts of things the blessings and then he said but the curses will be I will take the rain away I will send disease upon you I will bring invading troops upon you ultimately if you don't live right in the land I'm giving you you will lose it and I'll take your right out of it and you know when you read the curses of God in Deuteronomy 28 it is astonishing it's a description of the Holocaust in the 1940s they would flee in terror they would live in terror when they were scattered and exposed to all that other peoples could do to them it's all there it's all there in Leviticus 26 as well I was talking to a dear Jewish lady not two hours ago and she heard me preach she had struggled all her life with the mystery of the Holocaust why should such a thing happen to the Jewish people and she heard me speak and among other scriptures I pointed them to Leviticus 26 and she said when we read that when she read that she understood perfectly well the Holocaust took place and she was released from a mystery that had been a burden to her for years it had never occurred to her that God would ever curse his chosen people well Moses said when you get into the land and you've got it go to the center of it where there are two mountains Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim with a narrow valley between in which the acoustics are well-nigh perfect because the two mountains have a kind of natural amphitheater facing each other take the children of Israel to that Valley put them in the valley and from Mount Gerizim shout the blessings of obedience and righteousness and from a ball shout the curses and Israel in this land lives between a bowl and Gerizim they have lived ever since between the blessing and the curse and it is not because God is arbitrary or capricious it's not because he may be in a good mood one day and a bad mood the other he is not an uncertain god that you cannot trust or know how he will behave that's Allah not the God of the Bible that's Islam not Judaism or Christianity you know exactly why God bless us when he blesses and you know exactly why he curses when he curses you can predict it and the prophets did again and again the message of the prophets again and again was go on like this and you're qualified for the curse God will take you out of this land face straight message but thank God we've got a God we know how he will bathe how he will react he's reliable he can be trusted to keep his word and do what he said he will do but it cuts both ways and it's we who decide how he responds have you ever sung that little chorus I am the you are the Potter I am the clay I think that chorus is dreadful it conveys a totally wrong impression it's a kind of fatalistic it's the fatalism of Islam again you are the Potter and the clay you do what you want and I have to accept it all I can do is be a submitted one a Muslim it's not bad at all Jeremiah was told to go to the powders house and learn a lesson and it was just over there that way you can see those lights The Potter's house and Jeremiah went to that house and God said watched the Potter and the Potter took a lump of clay and he put it on the wheel and he started spinning the wheel with his foot and he tried to make this lump of clay into a beautiful VARs but the clay just wouldn't run in the Potters hands and so the Potter put it back into a lump threw it on the wheel and made a crude thick pot for the kitchen instead of the beautiful Vaz Jeremiah have you learned the lesson of the Potter on that lay what lesson Lord who decided what kind of vessel the clay became the Potter no Jeremiah the clay did the clay would not run in the Potters hands so the Potter had to change his intention he wanted to make God wanted to make Israel a beautiful vars full of blessing full of mercy but Israel wouldn't run in his hands and so he had to make it a crude vessel full of his judgment full of his wrath but whose decision was that and even then God said it's not too late Jeremiah tell my people if they will repent I will repent if they will change their ways I will change my mind and make them a beautiful vessel again the next day Jeremiah go back to the potter's house and learn the second lesson and he went back to the house just over there overlooking the valley of hinnom were told it was and now the Potter took the crude pot which was ugly anyway and he smashed it in pieces and threw the pieces into Hinnom into Gehenna have you learned the lesson Jeremiah yes I think so the clay has become too hard now to change it back again and it can only be thrown away as rubbish in Gehenna that's the relationship between God and His people and it's the relationship between God and every one of us God wanted to make you a beautiful purse full of his mercy full of His blessing but insofar as we said no I want to do my own thing I did it my way sang Frank Sinatra and that became the national anthem of all young people in the world almost to be able to get to the end of life and say I did it my way whether I enjoyed it or not whether I was happy not the important thing was I did it my way I was with Cliff Richard in Berlin good friends I baptized him and we were together in Berlin and he sang a song in Berlin beautiful song he sang the song I did it his way and it was a beautiful song but he was only allowed to sing it once and then they went after him for copyright reasons and he could never sing it again so it's never been recorded but it was a beautiful song do you want to be a beautiful life then do it his way let the Potter make you what he wanted to make him but if you're stubborn and stiff-necked like the Jewish people then he will make you something quite different you will still demonstrate that he is God but you were demonstrate that is a God who curses those who are disobedient you will still be proof that God exists and I want to say now that Israel is proof of God both in their survival and in their suffering and it tells us what God is like that's the most important thing now that's the first point of my talk to you tonight and I have two more but they won't take as long I want to say first that the God of Israel is the God of all nations and will treat them the same way he treats his room and the third thing is I want to say that the God of Israel and the father of our Lord Jesus is one and the same person and that he will deal with Christians in the same way let's look first at all nations God is not confined to Israel he's the God of all nations because he's the owner God there is he said there is no God beside me I'm the only one the God of Israel is the only God that exists and therefore he's the God of the whole world he's the God of every nation whether they are knowledge it or not the God of Israel is the God of Britain the God of America the God of Russia they got of China got of India God of effort he's God of the whole lot that's why they need to hear about the God of Israel because the other gods don't exist before there was Abraham before there was Israel before the way Israelites before the Hebrews began God was dealing with the world in the same way he would later deal with Israel the God of your Bible is a God whose blessing and cursing from the very beginning he blesses his creatures in Genesis 1 and his curse comes in Genesis 3 the word curse is there because when he'd finished making creation he said that's good and when he made us he said yes very good that's the best thing I've done it's good and it pleased him brought pleasure to him to have made something so good and so right and then it all went wrong God's whole plan of a universe that was right was now all wrong it's a very sad story and then from then on you find that the blessing and the curse flowed down two lines of people a godly line that sought the Lord and a godless line that wanted to do things its own weight it even split two brothers Cain and Abel and it continued down the line until it reached the peak of human pride ambition and rebellion in the Tower of Babel but even before that God cursed the whole human race except for one family one man his wife his three sons and there was eight people and he didn't destroy them I want to say something now that this Jewish lady I was talking to earlier today liberated her she said it came as a revelation that answered her question and set her free to serve the Lord and it was when she heard me say this God loves righteousness more than people now she'd never heard such a thing before in her life and when I've said that I get letters of objection agate howls of protest but the god of my Bible loves righteousness more than people and if people say how happened how could you prove that I say with one single event Noah's Flood Noah's Flood if he loved people more than righteousness he'd never have done that but he loved righteousness more than people and that's the thing we forget at our peril God loves righteousness more than people and if you don't accept that you will never understand the cross because if God loved people more than righteousness he would never have demanded that of his son he would have just forgiven and forgotten without the cross but because he loves righteousness I can put it this way this may shock you but God is so righteous he cannot bring himself to forgive anyone sin until it's been paid for I think about that God is so righteous it would be wrong for him to forgive sin until it had been paid for and that's why Jesus died I hope you with me so far because we're dealing with very big issues and very important things so even before Israel came God was cursing unrighteousness and blessing righteousness and he was killing unrighteous people and saving righteous people and so it went on and now he is dealing with the nation's in the same way righteousness exalts a nation but sin is a reproach to any people 21 civilizations have come and gone and we dig up their ruins and marvel at the skill and the artistry that has been lost every one of those civilizations were not destroyed militarily from the outside they were all destroyed morally from the inside they all collapsed internally Roman Empire is a classic case of the 15 Roman emperors 14 were practicing homosexual they collapsed internally and now the Western civilization is on the way out is collapsing morally inside and the civilization in which we've been brought up is on the way out while these empires come and go Israel goes on amazing isn't it Britain is under God's curse at the moment the signs are all there but the few of us who are saying that are not the popular preachers of our day but we are read Romans 1 when men give God up God gives men up one of the first signs is a great flow of increase in unnatural sexual relations and it's followed quickly by the breakup of family life by the breakdown of law and order in society it's all they're listed in Romans 1 and it's all happening in my country and it's now happening in America too and we're on the way out we are under God's curse you see we never learned the lesson from Israel and many people don't think that God in heaven is the God of Israel and so they don't learn the lesson from Israel's history how quickly we blame God for not protecting us God has promised to preserve the human race he said that after the flood he said I won't do that again from now on seed time and harvest summer and winter will not fail while the earth remains and God has kept his promise to preserve the human race I was talking to the United Nations health and food organization one of their top directors and I said is it true that there is enough food in the whole world every year for everybody to go to bed fed he said yes that's true there is too much food in the world every single year and yet a third go to bed hungry in another third of starving why because we don't share it out because half the world is trying to get thin and is overeating and overweight while the other stuff and yet I hear God blamed for all this I was on Australian national radio ABC and the interviewer was an atheist I said why you Nathan why didn't you believe me on well he said I've been to the starving children in Ethiopia and I've seen this and I've seen that how can you believe in God when that's going on I said but brother there is more than enough food for all of them God has provided it every year there's never been a year yet when there wasn't enough food to feed the population of our world God why do you allow this it's it's impudence to say the very least why did you allow the Pakistani earth King why did you allow that tsunami why did you allow 9/11 why did you allow 7/7 in Britain why did how quickly in disaster we turn to God as if we are innocent good people and he's guilty bad God it is extraordinary as if we don't deserve premature a violent death I want to prove to every one of you in this room that you don't deserve to be alive now most of you I want to prove to you that every one of you deserved a premature violent death and that when you read of people suffering premature of Island death your reaction should be I deserve that but Joe of my proof is because Jesus died a premature of violent death in your place at the age of 33 he suffered the worst death imaginable on your behalf because that's what you and I deserve and if you don't accept that then you will never understand the cross that's what we deserve and therefore when Jesus was asked about a disaster that took place just down there when the towers of Siloam fell and killed many people the towers of a SIL worm collapsed just down there I don't know if there were twin towers or not but they went down and Jesus was asked did the people who died in that deserve it more than other people were they worse sinners than anybody else is that what happened to them and Jesus said no they were not worse than anybody else but they weren't any better either they got what they deserved and you will likewise perish unless you repent Jesus saying disasters that kill people are reminders that we all deserve to die that none of us deserves to live but because there's none of us have lived right by God's standards none of us and so God is gonna deal with the nation's on exactly the same basis he's dealing with Britain right now on exactly the same basis as he dealt with ancient Israel he doesn't judge us by what we have never known or heard about but Romans 1 makes it quite clear that everybody knows that God is God and that God is good by the creation around them and the conscience within them everybody knows the difference between right and wrong they may not have heard the Ten Commandments they may never have heard the gospel of Christ but they know what's wrong and what's right and they usually better at telling other people what's wrong with them than telling themselves what's wrong with themselves but everybody says that's wrong that's not fair that's not just you see and God will judge us in the same way as he judged those who had more knowledge yes and therefore greater responsibility but he judges the nation's and the same when I listen to this the blessing and curse of God both on Israel came to a climax in my lifetime in the space of one decade the 40s the 1940s the curves came to a head in the Holocaust and the blessing in a return to their land just a few years later and directly as a result of what they suffered and God brought them back here to their own state within years of 6 million of them suffering now then in the Holocaust one-third of the Jewish population perished now when you read the book of Revelation which I've been teaching for the last three years of the Feast of Tabernacles there is a description of the Holocaust coming on the whole world it's called the big trouble of the Great Tribulation but a holocaust of natural disasters and human disasters of earthquakes and wars and famines and Jesus predicted that all these are gonna get worse and worse and the Christian who knows his Bible will expect hurricanes earthquakes and other disasters to increase and get worse from now on until as Revelation says one-third of the entire population of our world is perished now isn't that an interesting coincidence one-third of the Jews perished in their climactic Holocaust one third of the world population is to perish it mirrors the Jewish Holocaust was a foretaste a foreshadowing of what's to come to the nation's and you know the response that the Bible says the world will give it faces facts will the world repent when these disasters come and the answer is no they will curse God instead of learning the lesson they will curse God I was talking to a man at Heathrow Airport who is responsible for the little black boxes in every aircraft do you know what I'm referring to a recording machine that records the movements of all the controls and the words in the cockpit between the pilots and in an air crash they look for that box it's not black it's bright orange to make it easier to find but it's called the black box and then they take that recording to an inquiry board who listen to it and try and find out what made the aircraft go down and I said to this men I have heard that before that recording is played to the inquiry board you always wipe out the last few minutes I said is that true it seems a strange thing to do he said yes it's true and I said I have heard why you do that he said what have you heard I said it's because the pilots invariably curse God in the last minutes of their life as they perish and he said we don't like to destroy the reputation of the pilots so we wiped that bit out before people hear it they cursed God as if he caused the plane to crash as if they were innocent and didn't deserve to die but that's going to be the reaction of the world population when the world Holocaust comes but I've got news for you just as the Holocaust for Israel was followed by the establishment of their own state so the world's Holocaust will be followed by the Lord Jesus returning to reign and bring justice and peace to the world but the Holocaust comes before the establishment of his kingdom on earth can you see Israel's history is for us all to learn what God is like and how he deals with his people and it's the same God it was going to deal with us now I've reached my third and final point the God of Israel is the father of our Lord Jesus and God hasn't changed one little bit he is the same God he is a God to fear and to love because he's a God that you cannot play games with you cannot bribe him you cannot corrupt him because he's good and he can do nothing wrong everything he does is good nothing he does is bad he is a righteous God and I'm so glad he is I can rely on a God like he never breaks a promise never tells the dirty joke never does half the things that we do because he's righteous I believe Israel is still God's chosen people we haven't replaced them but the church what I'm saying is the church has the same responsibility to demonstrate what God is really like to a lost world and to show how God will deal with others and if we don't show it in one way we'll show it in the other the Christian Bible is composed three-quarters of it Jewish Scriptures and 1/4 Christian the old and the New Testament centuries ago there was a heretic called Marcion and his views are still called Marcion ism and i want to tell you there is a sweeping revival of Marcion ism among evangelical christians worldwide and the heresy he taught was this that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the new that the God of the Old Testament was harsh cruel barbaric even whereas the god of the New Testament is loving and kind and compassionate that is a lie God has not changed but people get this impression and they they swallow it and the tragedy is that evangelical Christians today are reverting to that heretical position they want to know about God's love and God's blessing and God's compassion is kindness they don't want to hear the other side and so that's being dropped it may shock you that the leading evangelical communicator on television in England the leading one has recently said that the God of the Old Testament was guilty of ethnic cleansing when he ordered the canaanites to be killed and inevitably he went on to say that if God punished his own son for our sins he was guilty of cosmic child abuse which would encourage father's to abuse their children now you're shocked but this is going on in my country and some of us held a three-day conference to decide how best we can tackle this of evangelical leaders into a horror found that a third of those present believe that it's the idea that there's a harsh cruel God in the Old Testament and we've got a nice kind loving God in the new rubbish once you believe that heresy you will no longer fear the Lord and if there's one thing that's disappeared from my nation it's fear of the Lord and that's the beginning of wisdom you can have a clever man who's very foolish and you can have a very simple man who's very wise wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord when you take God seriously stop playing games with him and realize that he loves righteousness more than people so God is looking for new people who will demonstrate his righteousness who will live differently who will be a people apart and yet often you can hardly tell the difference between Christians and their neighbors except that one goes to the religious club every Sunday morning well this is a heresy it's the idea that God is so loving that he would never hurt a human being and as you see what has happened getting now to the heart of it we've been saying to the world god is love and God loves you that is not the gospel Jesus never preached that the Apostles never preached it you don't believe me read your New Testament in the book of Acts which describes how the early church evangelized and turned the world upside down there's not a single verse mentioned the love of God they never preached it it's a pearl of great price it's a pearl that you shouldn't throw to pinks jesus warned us about doing that they will turn and trample you if you do and I tell you when you tell the world God loves you you're inviting to be trampled under shall I prove it whenever you say to a lost world God is love and God loves you they will immediately come back and say impossible and they will say it in two ways why does a God of love allow suffering in this world hurricanes tsunamis earthquakes and then they will say and how can a God of love send anybody to hell and it's your fault that they've come back with those unanswerable problems because you tell them God is love there are only 30 verses in the whole Bible that mention God's love and every one of them is addressed to those who've been redeemed by God check me out I don't want you to believe anything I say without checking it out in your Bible for yourself yes god is love but that was said to Christians it wasn't their preaching yes he is shed abroad his love in our hearts through the Holy Spirit but the world doesn't have the Holy Spirit the world knows nothing of God's love they don't even know the meaning of the word agape which is the word used for his love they know the meaning of eros and philia they know the love of attraction and the love of affection but they don't know the love of action which is God's love a gap a love and so I believe we should not be preaching about God's love to a lost world Jesus never did the Apostles never did why do we do it and unfortunately this emphasis on preaching the love of God has added an unbiblical adjective to the word love unconditional love how many of you have heard that phrase God's unconditional love would you put your hand up right how many of you found it in the Bible you've all swallowed it and I could name the man who coined it he's the most popular author Christian wise worldwide and he coined the phrase unconditional love of God and everybody but everybody has swallowed it whole without checking it up in the Bible it's not there and it conveys a totally wrong impression and I'll prove that in a town called Danbury in the County of Essex in England there are two men gay living together in marriage and they wanted a family so they paid a woman in Florida to be a surrogate mother and produce a baby for them and then they had difficulty importing the baby into England it hit all the newspaper headlines anyway they got an import license and now they've done it twice and they've got two babies and they took the two babies to the local parish church and asked the vicar to christen and baptize them and he hesitated didn't quite know what to do I think and the older man of the couple said this but God's love is unconditional it is non-judgmental and he rebuked the vicar for not being more loving and this unconditional love has done away with repentance God loves you just as you are come just as you are God loves you no repentance no change just accept the love of God that's not the gospel of the New Testament the gospel of the New Testament is about righteousness not love proof Romans 1:16 17 I'm not ashamed of the gospel it is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes for in it is revealed a righteousness from God a righteousness that is from faith to faith because it is written the righteous shall live by faith not a word about the love of God and Paul called for repentance and then he would tell them now you know how much God loves you because you forgive me you understand it love comes later when you've realized he's wiped you past heart and you're free to live in his presence now at last you know what love is happened during Jesus day when a prostitute came and washed his feet and people were horrified and the owner of the feast says he can't be a prophet or he'd know what kind of a woman she is and Jesus said do you see this woman do you really see her she loves me because she's been forgiven much and you don't love me as much because you've not been figured love is a pill that we should not throw to pigs it's the most precious truth righteousness that's the message we should be giving and so what I'm saying is this God will deal with Christians in the same way as they dealt with Jews two million Jews left Egypt how many got into Canaan two and that fact is used by three different New Testament writers as a warning to Christians Paul uses it the letter to the Hebrews uses it and Judas the Lord's brother or Jude as he prefer to be called he uses it in other words it's not who starts the Christian life at who finishes and many can get lost on the way one of the most dangerous phrases that has got into Christian talk and you can't find it in the Bible is this once saved always saved have you heard them once out of Egypt you're bound to get into Canaan it didn't happen to the Jews and it won't happen to Christians you don't play games it's God and I meet Christians who say don't worry about me I'm so saved and they're living in open adultery and the thing that's still going to happen I just don't understand that you see what I mean and furthermore there is one scripture which makes it crystal clear that God will deal with us in the way he deals with Jews it's in Romans 11 where he still acknowledges that the Jews are his people and in the middle of Romans 11 he says this many Jew Jewish branches were cut off from their own olive tree and you Gentiles were grafted in in their place among the remaining Jewish branches never forget that not all the Jews were lost the 12 apostles were all Jewish Jesus was and is and always will be a Jew never forget these things however many Jews were lost and many Gentiles have been grafted in to their olive tree and then Paul says this and it's his reason for writing the whole long letter to the Romans he says don't you Gentiles boast that they were cut out and you were grafted in he's talking to born-again believers and then he says this behold then the goodness and severity of God goodness to those who believe in severity of those who don't believe and then he has this and you too will be cut off if you do not continue in God's kindness if there was only one verse like that in the New Testament it tells you that once they had always saved is wrong but there are actually 80 passages of the New Testament warning us not to lose our salvation I've written a book once saved always saved question mark in which I teach all 80 warnings God is still the same God and he's still looking for people who will live righteously and he will cut out those who do not therefore by this time I'm sure you have one last question for minutes this so what's the difference between the old and the new between the covenant with Israel and the Covenant the Messianic covenant the mosaic and the Masonic it's no better were no better off than the Jews were and they failed God and they paid the price and they couldn't live righteously and still can't I believe that's why they're still having problems here that just goes sidetrack for a moment I missed something out earlier I want to add it in have you ever noticed that when God brought the Israelites from Egypt and put them here he also brought the Philistines from Crete and put them here he put the Israelites up in the hills and the Philistines down on the plain of Cherone down there why did he do that putting two incompatible peoples in the same territory he told them I'm putting them there I've brought them from Crete for your discipline and when you are living right you will defeat them and when you are living wrong they will defeat you and the Philistines became the major thorn in the side of early Israel right until David right through centuries till he found adult with them and he served them during his early life well Palestinian is the same word as Philistine and now here they are they've got the land back but I tell you God hasn't got his people back this land is a secular and unrighteous as any Western society the tragedy is they've brought in not only Western democracy and the Jews were never intended to be a democracy it's not God's plan from and they brought in all the Western weaknesses with them you know there's a very tall building in the Jaffa Road it's now a Christian Church or much of it is it's called the pavilion the king of Kim Kings Fellowship meets there and I went through yesterday and magnificent church auditorium in the basement car park in below and the whole top floor is going to become a prayer chapel from which you can see everything in Jerusalem marvelous scheme and yet surrounding the church in the same building the multitude of sex shops I've never seen a church sharing building with so many Shack sex shops before listen this is not a holy land and this is not a holy city and if you want to find that out come and live here God doesn't have his righteous people here yet but is the church any better our church in Britain is now totally calmed runner compromised we we have homosexual bishops we've got everything imaginable inside the church there are now as many divorces and remarriages inside church as they used to be outside and Jesus said remarriage after divorces adultery so there's legalized adultery inside the church even more than in America would you believe now and we have the highest number of single parents and teenage mothers in the whole of Europe and family life is breaking it's all there and it's all here as well I was once asked just preach at a gathering of Jews and Christians outside the Yad Vashem in the Piazza outside the exit where the trees of the righteous Gentiles are planted and the last exhibit in the adverse shame is at last case for the child shoe inside the case and on the glass it says one and a half million children died in the Holocaust and they asked me to speak a Jewish rabbi sang a lament for the dead Mervin mela watson played an amazing piece of spontaneous music which touched the heart and then I got up to speak and I said since 1948 Israel has murdered one and a half million of its own children through abortion I've said you want the sympathy of the world for the one and a half million the Germans killed and then you kill the same number of your own number and you desperately need them to it gave me half an hour with the President of Israel in his residence and at the end of half an hour he said to me mr. Paulson I'm an agnostic I don't know whether there's a God or not I said how can you live in this land study the history of your people not believe in God I was shattered but listen don't most of you live here I know so yeah under no illusions are you God they've got the land back but God hasn't got the people back and that's why they have no peace or security the wall won't keep out the insecurity it may reduce suicide bombers but it's what happening in the people's hearts here that is the real oppressor well I just throw that out but we are Christians part of the Church of Jesus Christ and he's looking for a righteous people now what is the difference between the Jewish Covenant through Moses and the New Covenant through the Messiah well I can tell you there's a huge difference and is this when God made a covenant at Sanya with the Jewish people he demanded righteousness from them but when the Messiah came to make a new covenant he didn't do that he offered righteousness to them God still requires righteousness but whereas under Moses he demanded it through Christ he offers it but whether we are stiff-necked and refused to receive it is another matter and he offers to make us righteous totally righteous that's my gospel that I preach God can turn a bad man into a good man a sinner into a saint - wicked into a righteous person that's the good news I was asked to preach to all the judges in London and a church full of judges and barristers and can you imagine it and the poof it felt like a doc in a court and I stood in this little pulpit and I looked and there was lord denning read the lesson he was our top judge and I thought what do I say to these judges and then I remember some words in Romans chapter 8 what the law could not do God did through Jesus Christ by sending his own son and I said what can the law not do the law can punish the evildoer the law can make it more difficult from the dude again the law can discourage crime and vice but the law cannot make a bad man into a good man I go to preach in gypsy camps in top security jails where I'm speaking to murderers and drug pushers who are there for life and I tell them God can make you into a good person and that's good news because most of them had given up hope of ever being any better how does God do that in two stages going to use technical terms here but I'll explain them the first stage is when he imputes righteousness to you when he wipes the past out because Jesus died for that and he treats you as if you are good so that you can come into a relationship with him within which he can make a good and that's the second stage when he imparts righteousness to you and makes you like himself holy as he is holy righteous as he is righteous my wife has tremendous faith it was my wedding anniversary three days ago and she was home I was here but she has tremendous faith but there's one thing I preach that brings it to the very cliff edge of doubt she says she has great difficulty accepting and do you know what it is it's when I tell her that one day her husband will be perfect and she says she said if I based my faith on experience I could know I could never believe it but she said I'll try hard and base it on the Word of God and then I'll tell her and I've got to believe that one day my wife will be perfect listen what if salvation it is being made perfect people think it's just being forgiveness nothing of the kind that's only the beginning to be saved is to be made perfect and have the image of God restored in you so that you looked just like his son Jesus so how many are saved here interesting I'm not I can put my hand up I'm not perfectly restored to what God wanted me to be that beautiful of ours but I'm on the way I'm being saved I'm not what I was and I'm not what I'm going to be the way of salvation I'm sorry when somebody says I was saved last Sunday or saved 20 years ago you weren't you began to be takes a lifetime and God wants to complete what he's begun until you are righteous and there are only two things that will prevent that happening and I'm really finishing now there are only two things that will prevent that happening one that you hang on to unrighteousness that you so enjoy doing the wrong things that you hang on to them that's why the most important word there is repent it means stop doing it turn your back on it renounce it it's not saying sorry it's not praying the sinner's prayer Lord I'm sorry for my sins that's not repentance a young man came to he once called Paul he came in a motorbike with handlebars up here Bambang and he had a leather jacket covered brass studs and I rang the doorbell I said hello Paul or do you and he said I want to talk I said okay come on in he came in and he squirmed onto our city still bears the marks and I said what do you want to talk about he said I wanna be baptized I said oh do you know how we baptize people here is that yeah you duck him in the water and said so you want to be ducked in the water II said yes I said Paul do you know the meaning of the word repent giver heard that word he said no and said well let me explain it to him I said I want you to go home and ask Jesus this question is there anything in my life that you don't like and whatever he says to you cut it out and come back and see me off he went three weeks later I heard it and there it was at the front door and I said hello Paul what is it he said there I said what do you mean there I've stopped biting my nails and I said I said right Paul I'll baptize you now because Paul said I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision so I preached repentance to the Gentiles that they should turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds and you know many people have been baptized without ever proving their repentance by their deeds and this boy had just done that and he never looked back from there he turned his back on anything that Jesus didn't like it was as simple as that that's repentance anything unrighteous that we cling to you're not gonna be made perfect unrighteousness is one barrier but there's one much worse and that is self-righteousness you can't have the righteousness of God while you cling to your own and even the most religious Orthodox Jews in this country are trying to establish self-righteousness and that's gonna be a bigger barrier to them than the loose living liberal Jew self-righteousness Jesus couldn't handle it it's why he and the Pharisees came unstuck again and again they were trying to establish their own righteousness which could never get anywhere near God's because the more self-righteousness you have the more pride you have in yourself and the more contempt you have for other people which is unrighteousness it's a self defeating goal to try and be good enough and I can tell you in the churches in Britain there are so many self-righteous people they would never ask for the mercy of God because they think they're too good self-righteousness is the biggest barrier of all that's why Jesus said prostitutes get into the kingdom before you Pharisees and you've been in the mere She'arim keeping all the commandments for so long and you're so far away I went to Canada and I was put on the television fairly quickly and the director said you can talk about anything you like for 20 minutes oh boy I wish the BBC would say that and he said he said what would what you're going to talk about I've said the kingdom of God and his face fell he said look this is a commercial channel we've got to keep the viewers watching for the adverts he said do you think they'll be interested in that I said well I said I don't really care whether they're interested in that or no you said I could talk about anything I like that's my favorite subject it was Jesus the Messiah's favorite subject as well so I'm going to talk about it he said all right there were telephones in the studio for viewers to ring in and when I'm finished talking the first telephone rang and a woman came on and said to the person who answered it could I speak to mr. Paulson please so they passed that phone to me and a voice said hello mr. Paulson can I ask you something I said go ahead she said I'm a hooker that's the prostitute in Canada and she said I'm on youngest street in Toronto that's the red-light district and she said can I ask you a question I said go ahead she said how can I get into that Kingdom you talking about I said why do you want to get hit she says it because it's time I got my life straightened out and I thought at last I'm preaching the gospel Jesus preached you can always tell that is when the prostitute wanted and the bad boys wanted and the protection racket boys like the tax collectors wanted you see they're not self-righteous they know they're bad and they want to be good that's my gospel a God of righteousness and a gospel of righteousness is what I preach and not until they found forgiveness and started being put right would I dare to tell them about God's love because then then they'd know how real it is and then they will understand that he loves the ungodly but he loves sinners really he knows nothing I've said tonight cancels that it's what he told us to tell them that I'm talking about the God of Israel is the God of all the nations and that same God is the Christian God as well and we dare not play games with him he's righteous he's good he's pure he's holy and he's saying to us I can make you the same and then I can bless you and use you to show the world how to live right

Channel: David Pawson - Official

Views: 85,070

Rating: 4.8539553 out of 5

Keywords: David Pawson, God Keeps His Promises

Id: 7T4ZYxIY7vE

Length: 114min 25sec (6865 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020