Transcript
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Speaker: Here's one. Hi there folks, this is Joseph, and this time I'm gonna tell you about a new device that I just became aware of, which is really cool. It's called the Blend Jet 2 Portable Blender. Now, you see, I love smoothies, but I don't love smoothie bar prices, as you can tell. With my Blend Jet 2 Portable Blender, I can make smoothie bar quality beverages for about half the price, you see.
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Speaker: So what are you waiting for, folks? Shop today and get yours today. That is all. Thank you for listening. And now, folks, on today's podcast, I bring you
Speaker: Blind Camp Thursday morning August 4th on...
Speaker: Morning has broken like the first morning. That bird has spoken like the first bird. Praise for the same.
Speaker: Praise for the morning, praise for the spring, fresh from the word. Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit round head the wind, like the first dew fall.
Speaker: on the first grass. Praise for the sweetest of the wet garden. It's brilliant on cleanness where his feet pass. Mine is the sunlight.
Speaker: Mine is the morning, born of the one light he dance all play. Praise with elation, praise every morning.
Speaker: God's recreation of the new day. That was kind of new to most of us, wasn't it?
Speaker: Yeah, I think we have time. No, we got one more here. Who has a request? I don't know if this is in the hymnal, but how about what a friend we have in Jesus. Oh, that's in there. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know. What is it? What is it? $4 .99. Yes it is.
Speaker: What a friend we have in Jesus. All our sins and griefs do bear. What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.
Speaker: Oh, what peace we often forfeit Oh, what needless pain we bear All because we do not care Everything to God in prayer
Speaker: Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord, prayer.
Speaker: Can we find a friend so faithful? Who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Speaker: are we weak and heavy laden on birthday with a load of care rest the saviour still our refuge take it to the lord in prayer to thy friends the spies forsake
Speaker: Thee, take it to the Lord in prayer. In his arms he'll take it, till thee thou wilt find us all is there. Do you know that text comes in mind when we sing that song? It's 1 Peter 5 -7.
Speaker: Day by day.
Speaker: Day by day, and with each passing moment, strength I find to meet my trials here. Trusting in my father's wife's bestowments, I've no chaos for worry, for fear.
Speaker: He who's here is kind beyond all measure Gives unto each day what he deems best All being laid is part of pain and pleasure Mangling toil with peace and rest
Speaker: Every day the Lord himself is near me. With us bet, so mercy for each hour. All my tears, he fame would bear and cheer me. He whose name is counselor and power.
Speaker: The protection of his child in treasure Is a charm that on himself he laid As your days, your strength shall be in measure This the plan to be made
Speaker: Help me then in every tribulation. So to trust thy promises, O Lord, that I would not face reconciliation offered me within thy holy word.
Speaker: Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting. Ever day is from a father's hand. One by one, the day's the moment's fleeting. Till I reach the promise
Speaker: gracious Lord this morning as the day begins we are calling on the name of the Lord we're inviting you into our life we're asking you to guide us that this day can be given to you and used by you for your glory we praise you and thank you in Jesus name amen
Speaker: Well, I thank you for joining and I recognize that there are some online who are joining and I think that is really cool. I'm glad that the church gave us this facility to use so that we could share this with our blind friends who couldn't come to blind camp this year.
Speaker: And we're getting reports that some are watching. Praise God. We are continuing our study in Genesis. We're all the way up to four and we're going to get into five today. It's been a good week. We're making plenty of progress.
Speaker: Reading in Genesis 4, Adam knew his wife again and she bore a son and named him Seth. For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Abel whom came killed. That word Seth means appointed, chosen, selected, provided. Now interesting, both Abel and Cain are named in this verse.
Speaker: Cain had been the one who was expected to be the promised seed, but he proved unfaithful. Long before the murder happened, it was clear that he just was not fit to be the progenitor of the Christ child. And then he killed Abel, who was obviously more righteous, more holy, more desiring of living for Jesus.
Speaker: I'm sure Adam and Eve already had plenty of children, but they pled with heaven for something to ease the pain of the loss of Cain and Abel. What a terrible, terrible blow that was, losing two boys in one day. And we have interacted with people who've had such crises.
Speaker: It just, it's bad. This world is rough. Seth was a gift. And Seth did not have any more natural spiritual endowments than did Cain. But he chose to align his life with God. Are you listening to me? We all have these propensities to evil.
Speaker: Are we going to feed the bad or are we going to feed the good? Are we going to spend our time thinking about the God who loves and saves? Or are we going to wallow in the wickedness of this world? We have the choice every day, moment by moment, day by day. Some people act like
Speaker: Those men of old must have matured late. Some of them didn't get married or have any children until they were nearly 100 years old. They must have been slow to mature. No, that's a wrong thought. They took their time and they had many of them nine centuries to study, to memorize, to analyze, to experiment.
Speaker: I believe that they had larger physical frame than we do, as well as a stronger, much more robust constitution. And just as their physical frame was bigger and stronger, so was their mind, their mental ability, their mental acuity.
Speaker: We struggle with our memories. And I thought that Ashley's goal of memorizing a hymn a month, that sounds like a good goal. And she says she's backed off to four hymns a year instead of 12. But that's OK. Their memories were sharp. We read today about people who read a page and have photographic memory.
Speaker: That's just a holdover from what was the norm in that day and time. They could remember the conversations that they had last year, last decade, last century, and they remembered what they talked about and what mattered in their life.
Speaker: huge, giant brains, able to think and to do. We get excited about the men and women who apply themselves in a course of study and in 20 years or even 40 years they develop something very significant and we say, this person is worthy of recognition.
Speaker: Can you imagine if they were able to do that for five, six, seven, eight, nine centuries? Hundreds of years of applying the mind to scientific or theologic understanding. These men and women were brilliant and strong. Seth was among that group. We're looking particularly today at Seth.
Speaker: I should emphasize also the last verse of verse four. As for Seth, to him also a son was born, and he named him Enish. Then men began to call on the name of the Lord. You catch that phrase? There began to be a distinction between the ones who were careless in their life and lifestyle and those who were calling on the name of the Lord.
Speaker: It was in the time of Adam's grandson, Enish, that there began to be very apparent the difference between those who were serving the Lord and those who were not. It may have been about this time that the
Speaker: There was a great exodus from where Adam had settled. It was a nice valley not far from the Garden of Eden, and they would tend to go for their special worship times to the gate of the garden. But Adam's descendants that I like to call the Sethites, the descendants of Seth, but most significantly, they were the God -fearing ones. Here it said, those who feared, they called on the name of the Lord.
Speaker: The God -fearing ones, they saw that living around these heathens, I know they're cousins, but they're living recklessly, wickedly, carelessly. It's hurting my spiritual life. I need to move away from that. And so they moved up into the mountains. Life was harder in the mountains. It was harder to grow their crops, but they needed to shun the influence of wickedness.
Speaker: I praise the Lord that when we got married, my wife was able to say, we don't need a television in our home. It wouldn't have bothered her because she doesn't get sucked into that stuff as like I do. But it was what a gift to me that she was able to say, we don't need it. And we haven't had. We never had a television. And we raised our children without a television. I praise the Lord for that gift.
Speaker: Because they grew up reading, thinking, doing, experimenting, Seth and his descendants recognized they needed to avoid being influenced by the worldly stuff and choose to focus their hearts and their minds on Jesus.
Speaker: Well, you can see what was good for them at the beginning of this world is certainly essential for us here at the end of the world because wickedness has, well, it has abounded. And we don't even recognize some of the bad stuff.
Speaker: that it's bad, but we don't even see that it's bad until we get sucked into it too deep, but I digress. Verse 5, verse 1, this is the book of the genealogy of Adam, and some people don't like these begats, but once you start mining the joys out of these, and especially these first ten, it's really precious. In the days that God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.
Speaker: Adam was made in the image of God and the likeness of God. And when Adam had been created, God looked at Adam and looked at the world and he said, it's good. Adam was a very good creation in the image of God. Going on.
Speaker: God created them, male and female, and blessed them and called them mankind in the day that they were created. And Adam lived, verse 3, 130 years and begot a son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. You catch that? In whose likeness is Seth?
Speaker: Adam's likeness. Now, Adam's in the likeness of God, but you already see that we're getting a step down. It didn't say that Seth was in the likeness of God. It said Seth was in the likeness of his daddy. I look and act a lot like my daddy. It's kind of precious. There's three of us boys. He had five, and three of us look a lot like him. They're two nuts. It's just the way things are in the genetics. I believe that Seth,
Speaker: looked more like his daddy than Cain or Abel.
Speaker: But more significant than the physical resemblance was that he was seeking to honor God in his life. That spiritual resemblance is the most important. And so now he's not only looking like Adam, but by studying the character of God, it's beginning to show in his very countenance. This is a man who's living for Jesus.
Speaker: After he begat Seth, the days of Adam were 800 years, and he had sons and daughters there. You know that he had plenty of kids, lots of kids. I know, the way God has designed the human reproductive system, it takes nine months.
Speaker: from one child to the next. And most don't try to stack them that close, but there are women who've had a baby every year, and every once in a while they get twins or triplets. So, yeah, Adam and Eve had lots of children, and their health was strong. It wasn't as if it was...
Speaker: taken a lot out of them. In Kentucky, there was the joke about how a woman would lose a tooth for every child she bore. It pulls the calcium out of your system, especially the nursing of the child. So it's hard on women to have babies, physically demanding of their system.
Speaker: Well, it wasn't quite so demanding in the days of Eve. She had lots of children. Ah, all the days, verse 5. What's the question? We don't know. We have three named sons and we have reference to other sons and daughters. We don't know how many they had, but Adam lived 930 years.
Speaker: That's time for a lot of kids. Now, I can't imagine that Eve was popping them out every year. In fact, there is some counsel. Don't have your children any closer together than you can nurture them.
Speaker: Make sure that you can give time for each child spiritually, not merely to fix the food and feed them physical food, but even more significantly, both fathers and mothers have a responsibility to give them spiritual food.
Speaker: And so I just have that impression that they space their children enough that they could have time with them. A story from Susanna Wesley, the mother of John Wesley, Charles Wesley, she reserved a special hour each week that she would have one -on -one with each of her children. And that was, they treasured that hour. It was spiritual instruction time.
Speaker: I wish more parents were doing that for their children today. And we don't have the dozen children that Susanna had. There's very few families that have a dozen children. We talked to some Amish folk yesterday and some of them are approaching that.
Speaker: We need to be prioritizing the spiritual development of our children much more than we are. And I'm even recognizing how I did not do for my children all that I could have and should have. Moving on, though, all the days that Adam lived were 930. I already told you that. Seth lived 105 years and began in -ish.
Speaker: After we get Enoch, Seth lived 807 years and had sons and daughters. So we have quite a bit of history already here. And when you start looking this chapter over, you find some interesting things develop. Kind of looking ahead to something that's going to be preached about tonight, Enoch and Seth had lots of time together.
Speaker: I believe Seth was still alive when Enoch was translated. In fact, I believe that Adam and Enoch had hundreds of years of opportunity to talk.
Speaker: I am sure that Enoch spent time listening to his great, great, great grandfather, Seth. And it'd be great, great, great, great grandfather, Adam, because we find in Enoch a godly man. And he didn't figure it out on his own. He listened to other godly people to grow in the likeness of God.
Speaker: Sometimes it's worth thinking about what heritage you get from your parents. What did they bequeath to you? I was about five years old when my parents joined the church. My father had gotten very disgruntled with his local Methodist church. They'd asked him to teach the Sunday School class, and it was on the Ten Commandments. And here he was trying to teach about the Fourth Commandment, and somebody asked him about why do we go to church on Sunday, and the Fourth Commandment was saying the Seventh Day of the Week.
Speaker: And he just gave up on God. He said, I'm going to be an atheist. But then, praise God.
Speaker: Dale Snowden was farming the farm. It was behind our farm. So our farm fronted on 20 -mile road, and that farm fronted on 19 -mile road, and so it met in the middle. So right in the middle of the section, they were talking across the fence, and Dale asked Daddy where he was going to church, and he says, I don't believe in church anymore.
Speaker: And Dale said, what's going on? And he said, oh, this thing about the Bible says that we should worship on Saturday, but the church goes to church on Sunday, doesn't really matter. And Dale says, we can make some sense out of that. Let me come over and we'll have a Bible study. And the Bible studies continue for about three years.
Speaker: And it started with Dale and his family coming over, and we had real good friends with that family. But then I remember a family named 5S in Tustin. They were teachers at the local school. We would go to their home. It was a trailer that we'd visit in and study around the kitchen table. Of course, I didn't study because I was what, four years old? I was just playing in the corner.
Speaker: My big sister, she was sitting at the table with her Bible open. She could barely read. And she was excited when her mother got baptized. She said, I want to be baptized too. But the mama told her, well, Alice, you need to read the Bible before you're baptized. And so Alice went to first grade and started learning how to read. And here she was, seven, eight years old, carefully, carefully reading the Bible. And once she'd finished reading the Bible,
Speaker: Sitting at the kitchen table, word by word, sounding them out, you know? It's really phenomenal, although the Lord blessed her, learning to read so young. She reads 300, 400, 500 words a minute. Now she reads very, very fast.
Speaker: and understands it much faster than I do. But once she had read the Bible through, she said, OK, Mom, I'm ready to be baptized. And Mama said, well, you need to go talk to the pastor. And so she talked to the pastor. The pastor said, you need to do a set of Bible studies. And so she did the Voice of Prophecy Junior Bible study course where you sign up for it, and they send you two lessons. You fill out the lessons and send them back. And they, well, the turnaround time at her house,
Speaker: was only about two days. But the turnaround time with the mail service, and it's not as if voice prophecy was slow about getting them graded, but it takes a while for it to go and then come back. They would grade those two lessons. Excellent, excellent. She's always been a good student. And then she would get back her completed lessons and the next two lessons. Well, there were 26 lessons. So that's 13 rounds before she was finally
Speaker: She was nine years old when she got baptized. The pastor says, it's a little younger than I usually like. What can you do to stop the girl? She'd done her homework and she wanted to live for Jesus.
Speaker: Well, that's what we all need, this desire to live for Jesus. That has stood me in good stead. My parents' dedication and commitment to seek truth and follow truth.
Speaker: And a love of learning, both my parents finished college. Now, I was 12 years old probably when they graduated from Central Michigan University, but they kept at it until they finished. Both became teachers.
Speaker: Question comes talking about what I have received from those previous generations. What am I passing on to the next generation? See, we don't live in a vacuum. We learn from others, but we have a responsibility then to share what we have learned about Jesus. Seth was doing that. He was learning, but he was sharing.
Speaker: I believe he had a mission responsibility to the cousins, to the family. When Adam first sinned and faced that first death with that lamb, he was horrified at the thought that he was going to die. Death seemed like a terrible, terrible thing.
Speaker: But after 900 years of the mess in this world getting worse and worse, and remember for him, every murder is one of his kids. Every rape, that was one of his kids. It's very personal now. For God's glory, we need to get so that we can appreciate
Speaker: When we hear these stories of murder and rape and other bad stuff that's happening in this world, we shouldn't be just thinking about it. Well, those folks, they're not part of my circle. We need to recognize that these are our brothers and sisters that are being hurt and care and see what we can do to change things for the good. That's where Seth was living.
Speaker: And he went and confronted those who were doing stuff. And they called him goody -goody two -shoes. Yeah, you get called names if you live for Jesus.
Speaker: As he made his choices, it impacted his very carriage. For hundreds of years, Seth walked with God.
Speaker: and shared his life and his love, passing it on to his children and his grandchildren. And we've already mentioned his great, great, great grandson Enoch that we're getting ahead because we'll talk about Enoch tonight. I believe Seth became a respected counselor for good. Those who wanted to know what was right, they would go and say, Gramps, let's talk. They wanted to know what's truth, what's righteousness, and they could learn it from him.
Speaker: I believe Seth understood when Adam was so tiredness of the wickedness of the world that Adam was ready to welcome death. Perhaps you have visited with some person who's lived their life and are saying, Lord, I'm ready to go. There's a reason sometimes that we say, I've experienced enough of the rough stuff of this world
Speaker: Lord, any time. And I've had members who've said to me, Pastor, I don't know why the Lord's keeping me around any longer. My body's getting bad and my mind's going. And I have to say to them, the Lord's keeping you here because He has a purpose for you. Seek every day for that purpose. And even if your body can't get out of bed, you can pray and you can influence people. You can interact with people. More than one parishioner I have had who
Speaker: sick of bed, can't get up. And sometimes it's chronic. They know that they will never get up. But when you walk in the room, the smile on their face, the greeting, the praising the Lord, you're blessed for having been in their presence. Adam was getting tired. And I believe Seth was there closing his eyes in death and tucking him into the ground. And Adam was ready to take a nap.
Speaker: They understood that the next sight, the next thing they'll see is Jesus coming in the clouds of glory. They knew that this is just a rest. It's okay. And if we live godly in Christ Jesus, then whether we live or die, it's all for His glory. It really doesn't matter.
Speaker: Seth, Adam, those early men, they began to understand that and were able to praise God even as they were facing the time of the demise, trusting in Jesus.
Speaker: Let's pray, and we'll pick up the story again this evening. Gracious Lord, we thank you that you gave to Adam and Eve, a godly son, willing to trust you, to serve you, to share in your life. And we, great, great, great, how many greats, grandchildren of Adam, we thank you that you have called us out of darkness into your marvelous light. We invite you to use us today for your glory, an episode we can share your life and your love with others.
Speaker: We'll give you the praise and the glory now and forever in Jesus name Thank you again pastor, you know Jim Crisps cannot wait
Speaker: Well folks, this completes another episode of... Until next time, bye for now.
