This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark
Wofford, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland,
County of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he
continues teaching through God's Word.
Jesus is the perfect example of forgiving us, isn't it?
And everything we did to him, he never once said, hey, I'll
forgive these people, but no way am I forgiving them.
They're just like they hurt me too much, they did too much
evil. They just, they're worthless.
No, God sees value and worth in every human being, and He died
for our sins. And so how can I, how can you
not be willing to forgive other people for their offenses?
Forgiveness is one of the single most difficult topics in the
body of Christ. Stop and think about your own
struggles and the struggles of the people you know.
They're almost all deeply rooted in an unwillingness to forgive.
Pastor Clark will remind us today that forgiveness is
central to the life of a follower of Jesus, and Jesus was
our very best example. While we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us. So we need to walk in the
forgiveness that Jesus walked in.
Now. Here's Pastor Clark in
Revelation Chapter 11 with today's edition of Living Waters
of Grace. And you look at the goal of
modern healthcare today, it's it's fascinating.
They want to deny the reality of death.
I mean, the last thing that they want to tell you in the hospital
is like there's no more hope. I mean, an honest doctor will
say that they'll be upfront with you, but most of them say, hey,
we can do this, we can do that. They got all these ideas with
magic tricks they can pull out of their hat and maybe give you
another couple years. They don't tell you like how
miserable you might be or you might you don't have to be
forced to be on artificial life support and that kind of stuff
because it's a point on the man wants to die and after this a
judgement. So my question is at times, when
does medical science become a blessing and when is it becoming
a curse? Because if it gets in the way of
God's preordained plan, right, and begins to try to make life
its own sustainer as opposed to God himself, then these poor
people are are on these tubes unconscious and staying alive
for a sometimes a very long time when they're already pretty much
gone. It's an interesting discussion
and I'm sure all of us might have some different points of
view on that, but it's the medical and the new age gurus
today that have this philosophy that it's just a matter of time
before we conquer aging. Isn't that good news, guys that
make you feel better than any? This a matter of time, brother,
before we conquer aging. You're going to live to be 500?
No, boy. Yeah.
I have a friend. He's a doctor in Charleston and
a fascinating guy who developed a good friendship, good brother
and a Lord. And once in a while I go down
there. He invites me to stay at his
house and I do business down there.
And one morning I'm getting up, having coffee there and I'm
talking to his son and I see this guy, this picture of this
guy on the wall, physique guys like in his early 70s.
This guy's cut man. I mean, he looks like he's like
a Charles Atlas of like 73 or whatever.
And he, his claim to fame, doctor life is that you can have
perpetual youthful longevity. If you deal with these youth
hormones, you know, you get shot up.
He's the guru doctor of all the Hollywood stars, all the glamour
people, right? And so I'm like, looking at this
picture, I'm thinking, what's the connection here with my
Christian friend? Why would he have the picture of
this guy on the wall? Is he like, is he into this?
Is this what? And so I asked his grand.
I asked his son, who is that guy?
This is my grandfather. So David wakes up.
I said, man, I read about that guy.
I mean, what's he into? He says, Clark, my dad's he's
he's a great guy, but he's like totally out of it because he
thinks that he can conquer death.
And in other words, instead of the body dying, it can be
restored through all these metabolic changes.
You know, And I said to him, I said, what's interesting, maybe,
you know, for a few years, but his does he realize that
eventually this isn't going to work?
I mean, eventually he's going to die.
I mean, it's appointed unto me and wants to die.
And after this is judgment. And so the society is always
trying to like, push away the inevitable.
The church should be the most clear, peaceful place for us to
learn about our destiny, right? What's in store for all of us
now? The idea of Christianity being
reconciled with death. You know God hates death.
It wasn't his intention to have death.
When he created us in the garden, He created us to live
forever. We're the ones that changed the
setup, didn't we? We took it upon ourselves to
take life in our own hands, and sin and the wages of sin is
death. Christ is our life and death,
Christianity proclaiming it to be namely an enemy to be
destroyed and not a mystery to be explained.
The scriptures teach about death as being abnormal.
It's not God's plan, is it? If it was his plan, there would
be no resurrection. God wouldn't have come in the
flesh to die and to go through what He went through for you and
I if death was his plan. He's done everything he could
for you and me to sustain us in eternity.
Turn to John Chapter 11. This is Jesus own experience of
death with Lazarus. See how he feels about it.
He's God in the flesh, fully God, fully man.
John Chapter 11, verse 28. And when she had said these
things, she went her way, and secretly called Mary her sister,
saying, The teacher's come and is calling to you.
As soon as she heard, she quickly arose and came to him.
Now Jesus had not yet come into the town, but was in place where
Martha met him. And then the Jews who were with
her in the house and comforting her, when they saw that Mary
Rose up quickly and went out, followed her, saying, She's
going to the tomb to weep there. And then when Mary came where
Jesus was and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying to him,
Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came
with her weeping, he groaned in the Spirit and he was troubled.
And he said, Where have you laid him?
And they said to him, Lord, come and see.
Verse 35, Jesus wept. Jesus didn't say, don't worry,
he's in a better place, everything's OK.
Death is the final enemy, isn't it?
God hates death, what it does to people, what it does to
families, what it does to human existence.
And the Jews said, see how he loved him.
And some of them said, could not this man who opened the eyes of
the blind also have kept this man from dying?
Then Jesus again, groaning in himself, came to the tomb.
You know the darkness of death, the horror of separation of
family and loved ones, the waiting of the Conqueror who had
not yet gone into Hades to set the captives free.
This is pre death burial and resurrection that is occurring
here and Jesus senses obviously the extreme intenseness of the
demonic spirits and the hatred of the devil and all his demons
and dark powers. And Jesus groans in himself and
he comes to the tomb. It was a cave, a stone lay
against it. And Jesus said, take away the
stone. Martha, the sister of him who
was dead, said to him, Lord, by this time there is a stench, for
he has been dead for days. Jesus said to her, Did I not say
to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory
of God? And then they took away the
stone from the place where the dead man was lying.
And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that
you have heard me, and I know that you always hear me.
But because of the people who are standing by, I said this now
that they may believe you sent me.
Now when he said these things, he cried with a loud voice.
Lazarus come forth and he who had died came outbound hand and
foot with grave clothes, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.
And Jesus said to them, lose him and let him go.
Jesus wept. He doesn't again say, hey,
everything's OK, he's in heaven, everything's well.
He's gone from this difficult life, He's in a better place.
Have you ever found yourself saying that kind of stuff?
We have to see death as God sees it.
Now Paul tells us to be absent the bodies, to be present with
the Lord. But keep in mind the final
resurrection has not occurred yet.
You know, we understand today the Lord in some small degree,
don't we? All of us?
We have some insight of His love, His grace, and His mercy.
Do we know it all? I mean, my understanding of
God's love and His grace is so small compared to the way it
really is because I can't grasp it in my fallen human condition.
I know God's good. He loves, He's merciful, He's
forgiving, but I don't know him today like I will know him one
day. When Jesus said through Paul, I
hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor entered into the heart of
man the things that God has prepared for those who love him.
None of us can comprehend that yet, can we?
We get, we're looking through a glass darkly, Paul said in First
Corinthians 13. We're seeing a little bit right
now, but one day the Bible said we will see him face to face,
for we shall see him as he is, and we will become like him.
Now when we think of Christ, it tells us in the Word that he was
crucified and he was buried. He suffered.
He's a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
Christ lived a life of constant suffering for your sake and
mine. He had joy, He had pleasure, he
loved the children, he obviously loved communing with the Father,
because every chance he got, he was alone with his Heavenly
Father, praying and glorifying, worshiping him.
But he was a man of extreme sorrow and grief, it says.
He looks out over the city of Jerusalem.
He looks out today in the city of southwest Greensburg.
He looks into your homes, your neighborhoods, your families,
this country, this world. And he still is broken.
His heart is grieving because he sees the majority of people on
the earth as sheep without a shepherd.
He sees people trying to live life without him.
And so the suffering and death is interwoven in the human
experience. And the presence of 1 implies
the presence of the other. Suffering and death are entwined
together in Christ. When he died on the cross, his
suffering wasn't removed, was it?
He experienced extreme agony and pain and sorrow.
Everybody abandoned him and forsook him for the most point
except for his mother and John. He died alone, even to the point
that he allowed himself to be separated in the greatest
mystery of all. When he said, My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me? He understood in a brief second
what you and I deal with every day.
If we don't have God in our lives, Can you imagine never,
ever being disconnected from the reality of the Trinity, Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit? But He became one of us, and for
that brief second when He took upon Himself our sin, to atone
and pay the price for all our sin, He knew what sin did.
It cut us off from our Creator. And yet in His suffering He
transformed death into victory, and His death in a cross becomes
our victory. Without His death, there's no
way into the Kingdom, is there? There's no hope for anybody
apart from his death. And so we enter into the Kingdom
because of what Christ has done, and that's where we receive our
true healing. Our final victory is one day,
the resurrection of the dead. And when you think about these
things, you have to put them in the context of us being
reconciled first to God before we can be resurrected in
immortality and incorruption. Every one of us have to come
first to God in repentance. We have to come and confess our
sins to Him. We have to repent.
The Bible tells us if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just
to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness. So we ask God to forgive us, and
he's faithful, isn't He to forgive us?
And then we need to be reconciled with one another as
human beings where there's strife and where there's angst
and where there's unforgiveness and bitterness for all the
things we've been through in our lives that other people maybe
have caused us or we've caused them.
Jesus tells us in the Lord's Prayer when we pray, forgive us
our trespasses as we forgive one another, right?
Later on, Jesus says if you don't forgive others their
trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you of
yours. So all this reconciliation, all
this truth of resurrection comes out of our lives being
sacrificed for the sake of others.
Jesus is the perfect example of forgiving us, isn't he?
And everything we did to him, he never once said, hey, I'll
forgive these people, but no way am I forgiving them.
They're just like, they hurt me too much.
They did too much evil. They just, they're worthless.
No, God sees value and worth in every human being.
And he died for our sins. And so how can I, how can you
not be willing to forgive other people for their offenses?
When someone's on their deathbed and you have a chance to
minister to them, you want to lead them in the Lord's Prayer
and remind them of God's mercy, right, and his forgiveness.
And you also want to ask that person to forgive you and you to
forgive them and thank them for their lives and tell them you
love them and then tell them goodbye.
Jesus says to the guy down by the pool, Besazia Besavia.
He was lame. And Jesus asked him, do you want
to be made well? That's the ultimate plan of God,
Wellness for every one of us, spiritual, physical, emotional,
psychological wholeness throughout all eternity.
And one day it will come to pass.
He's restoring us right now to the likeness we had before the
fall. I'm becoming a little bit more
like Jesus every day. And you are too, if you're a
Christian. We still got a lot of flaws, a
lot of things. None of us are perfect, but
we're being conformed to the image of His Son.
That's what thrills me when I can look back and think about
the way I used to be. And I'm certainly not what I
want to be yet, but I can look back and say, thank God, I'm not
like that anymore. And I can't take any credit for
it, and you can't either. All you can say is God's grace,
right? His mercy, the power of his Holy
Spirit. There's a testimony of this guy
back in the 11th century. He was a very sick man from his
youth, but he had this heart. He just wanted to love God and
to serve him at a young age and radically be a disciple of Jesus
Christ. So they took him to this place.
It was known for healing and he stayed there until his death
actually. But what he prayed for when he
was there, he prayed more to be content in his sickness and for
health. Isn't that an interesting
perspective? Sort of like Jesus.
Not my will, but your will be done.
One night angels appeared to him.
You ever believe angels can appear all through the
scripture? I remember when my uncle died.
He was in Torrance Mental Hospital and he spent most of
his life there with schizophrenia.
He had a simple faith in Jesus and he'd always tell us.
Every time we left his presence, he'd say tell Melanie and
Jessica. He'd tell me my kids tell them I
love them with my heart, soul and conscience and I would I was
with him when he was dying of Melanoma.
My mom and dad went out to take a break for a few moments and he
was laying there belabored breathing very difficult.
And he's he's getting ready to pass and he had no strength to
so weak. And he's laying there I'll never
forget on the bed and all of a sudden I see him get up like sit
straight up in the bed. And first of all, it's a miracle
because the guy had like no strength.
He put his arms out and he had to smile on his face.
And I believe that he saw the angels coming for him and he
just laid back down, stop breathing.
And that was it. So one night the angels appear
to this man telling him he would be sick until his death, but
would be healed at that very moment of his death.
So he lay sick for 20 years. And yet this man worked many
wonders in his life for others. During his life of suffering,
people would come to him because he was a very deep Christian.
He would pray, give them counsel.
People would get healed. I mean, that's a wonderful, true
servant of God. And I think about the testimony
of this man again, reminds me of Jesus, a man of sorrows,
acquainted with grief. And just at the time of his
death, he got up from his bed completely healed.
He prepared his grave and he entered into his rest in the
Lord. To be healed of God of our sins,
we must first acknowledge that we have sins before we can made
be made whole. You got three groups of people
here today. You have believers, unbelievers
and pretenders and only God knows our hearts.
But for all of us today, no matter for believers,
unbelievers, or pretenders, we need to always go back to the
basics of what God asked us to do, and that's to repent.
I don't repent anymore to get saved.
I repent now to stay close to the Lord.
But if you're lost today and you've never come to Christ,
your first act of repentance would be to admit your need of
Christ and that you're a Sinner and that you want him to make
you whole. For Jesus is the healer.
He said, you will know the truth and the truth shall make you
free. And we can't receive God's
forgiveness until we realize our utter helplessness to change our
hearts apart from God's mercy and grace.
Sometimes Cindy and I'll sit and talk and maybe we're working
through something on our marriage and, and one of us will
will say something like, well, I'm trying, but I'm having a
hard time letting this go. You ever say that to each other?
And we look at each other and she'll remind me or I'll remind
her. I'll say well.
We can try until doomsday. We can't change our hearts, only
God can. We have a willingness to change
and then we ask God to do and us what we can't do for ourselves,
right? And God's faithful to do that.
So as we conclude here today, just some practical things that
give some thought to the essential element of healing our
own lives today. First of all, we're to give
glory and worship to God on all things.
Maybe today there's something in your life you're not happy
about, you're not thankful for, you're bitter, you're upset,
you're like angry, you're just, maybe it's something you've
carried around for years in your life.
But I can't think of a better place to give glory and worship
to God. Our relationships with God and
our neighbors have to be made right.
You know, whatever's going on in your hearts with people,
situations, make it right, guys. Go to the people and let them
know you forgive them. You're not going to hold any
grudge. You're not going to be bitter.
This, this, let it go. And as Jesus said, love one
another as I've loved you. And this is a powerful thought.
When Jesus became one of us, God Incarnate in the incarnation, it
is only because Christ assumed our entire nature except for our
sin nature and he entered into death itself that we can be
healed. Because he died and resurrected,
He overcame death. The acceptance of our own death
and repentance can be our cure and our own healing cause.
Life comes out of death, death to self.
And Jesus says, if anyone of you will follow me, let him deny
himself and take up his cross daily and follow me every
Sunday. We celebrate the Lord's death,
don't we? Maybe you come here and you
think that's sort of odd. I go to some churches, they
might do it once a month or once a quarter, or, you know, why do
we do this every week? The early church did it every
week. Every time they gathered
together, they broke bread. The signal signifying the
remembrance of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. And I can't think of a greater
thing to do to honor our Lord when he says, as often as you do
this right, eat the bread and drink the cup, you do this in
remembrance of me. Then I, John, saw the holy city,
New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as
a bride adorn for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from
heaven saying, Behold, the Tabernacle of God is with men,
and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and
God himself will be with them and be their God, and God will
wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Are you looking forward to that? There shall be no more death,
nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for
the former things have passed away.
Then he who sat on the throne said, Behold, I make all things
new. And he said to me, write, for
these words are true and faithful.
And he said to me, It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end. I will give of the fountain of
the water of life freely to him who thirst.
He who overcome shall inherit all things, and I will be his
God, and he shall be my son. But the cowardly, the
unbelieving, the abominable murderers, sexually immoral,
sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in
the lake, which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the
second death. We are digging into the Book of
Revelation here on Living Waters of Grace.
Pastor Clark is tackling this challenging book as we try to
discern the messages that are within its pages.
There's so much imagery, and at times you're not always sure
what's literal and what's metaphorical.
At one point, there's a reference to an adulterous woman
riding on a beast. And as someone else mentioned,
at one point, it almost sounds like a rodeo from hell.
And in actuality, it kind of is. You learn about the downfall and
demise of a sinful and rebellious world, falling down
in worship to someone who is the anti hero, the enemy, Satan
working his insidious ways into the minds of fallen people.
It's sad and it's heartbreaking, but it's a classic story of good
versus evil. Thankfully, we know how this
story ends. Jesus wins, Jesus reigns, and
evil is conquered once and for all.
We pray and trust you've received Jesus as your Savior.
But if you haven't, don't wait until the events and revelation
become what's happening on the streets.
None of us wants you to be there at that time.
Instead, we'd love for you to be with us in heaven as we
celebrate the marriage supper with Jesus as his bridegroom.
To get a better understanding of where we are in the Book of
Revelation, to listen to any messages before or after this
one, you can find them at our website,
calvarychapelonline.com. That's it for today's edition,
but we hope you'll want to hear Pastor Clark teach more from the
Book of Revelation. It can be exciting to think
about the future for believers, but it can feel a bit harrowing
for those who don't believe. Come here more next time on
Living Waters of Grace.