Father, my heart's desire tonight is that in
part because of what we do here now
together there would be no wasted lives in
this room and in the hearing of my
voice and there would be no wasted deaths.
I pray that you would bring a significance
and a power and a meaning to the
lives in this room and I pray that
you would use that significance and power and
meaning to make every death count for your
glory whether it happens quickly or whether it
happens 50 or 60 years from now.
I pray Lord that if we're not able
to trade in our pain or shame or
suffering in this life we would not postpone
the joy.
Rather find it in the shame, in the
suffering.
So come now and help me to make
your word plain.
Grip, I pray, these young people and don't
let them waste their lives.
In Jesus' name I pray.
Amen.
So here we are gathered on the 29th
of December 2003 and the body count as
we meet from the earthquake in Bam, Iran
is at about 25,000.
That's a lot of human lives snuffed out
at 528 in the morning and you feel
the personal weight of it when you read
about a father digging through the blocks of
his house looking for a daughter and a
wife and uncovering a dead hand and passing
out for grief.
Or when you read about a little baby
being found alive in the grip of a
dead mother, puts a face on it.
What makes this event here at the end
of 2003 feel so apocalyptic for some of
us is not the magnitude of it, though
it's 10 times bigger than 9-11, but
how many other events were packed together with
it, right?
Thirteen people buried in a mudslide in California,
six buried under an avalanche in Utah, 111
dead in a plane crash in Benin, 198
dead and poisoned from gas in China, all
packed together in a few days at the
end of the year.
And it just takes your breath away and
makes us ask, what would Jesus want us
to learn from this about not wasting our
lives?
And I think if we go to Jesus
and ask Him that, He has something ready
to say to us and it's found in
Luke 13.
You don't need to go there.
This is not my main text.
I just want to read you what Jesus,
I think, would say.
Do you remember the situation?
Some people came to Jesus and told Him
about this atrocity in which Pilate had killed
people while they were offering their sacrifices and
he had taken their blood and mingled it
with the blood of their sacrifices just to
mock them.
And they came to Jesus and said, what
about that?
Give an accounting of the Almighty here.
And here's what Jesus said.
Do you think that these Galileans were worse
sinners than all the other Galileans because they
suffered this way?
No, I tell you, but unless you repent,
you will all likewise perish.
Or those 18 on whom the tower in
Siloam fell and killed them, do you think
that they were worse offenders than all the
others who live in Jerusalem?
No, I tell you, but unless you repent,
you will all likewise perish.
Now don't make a mistake here.
Jesus could weep with those who wept.
Jesus had compassion almost everywhere He turned.
But He knows, and you know, that after
a season of extraordinary, wracking grief in calamity,
it begins to ease up and the questions
come.
And when they come to Jesus with these
questions, He does not settle for sentimentality, trying
to make everybody feel good, trying to get
God off the hook.
That is not the way Jesus responds.
Jesus says, are you astonished at the magnitude
of this calamity in Galilee or at the
magnitude of the calamity of the falling tower
in Siloam?
I will tell you what to be astonished
at.
Be astonished you weren't under the tower.
Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
Means everybody in this room deserves to die
and perish tonight.
That's the way Jesus answered this inquiry about
whether God could give an accounting of the
deaths of the tower and Pilate's atrocity.
So when you compare that earthquake to us
tonight, I think Jesus would say, unless you
repent, the thing you should be astonished about
is that this hotel hasn't come down on
all of us.
Our wonderment shouldn't be that 25,000 people
perished in a moment, but that we have
not yet been snuffed out.
That's what should amaze us, Jesus says.
So I conclude from this event and this
sets the stage for my message that your
life is in God's hands.
Your life hangs by a slender thread of
sovereign grace tonight.
You belong to God.
He made you.
You exist for Him.
God made life.
He knows what life is for and He
has a right to take it and a
right to give it whenever He pleases.
You remember Job, first chapter?
All ten of his children in an Iran
-like calamity because the house fell on all
ten of them and killed them.
And Job gets the word and here's what
it says happened.
He tore his robe.