I'm gonna plow my field, cause I'm looking for a harvest for my God, He's real. Hello again friends and partners, welcome you to Spiritual Impact. I'm Associate Pastor Steve Rose and I'm here with my pastor Tim Parton and we're looking forward again to studying the word today and I tell you I'm looking forward to the study that you have for us today. So what have you got for us pastor?
Hey man, we're happy to have you with us. You know, I was thinking most of the guys watching this, how many of you ever been on a drive of any length with your wife in the front seat with you? And maybe you're going on vacation or maybe you're taking a drive to somewhere where you're not really familiar with and most of us guys are notorious but we'll never admit it for if we get lost, we never lost. Because we can always get where we're going right up here, soon up the road.
And our wives will be telling us you need to stop and ask directions because your loss and said no, we're not lost. We know where we're going, we're just a little ways, we're not got there yet but then, you know, our wives say you're lost. And finally we have to admit when we can't find where we're going, well, you know, I'm going to pull up here just a, I'm pretty sure I know where I'm at but just to make sure and we'll come out and get back and come and say, yeah, I was right. The guy said we just go right on the, or back down here.
We were never lost but truly we get sidetracked in life as well. It's easy to get on pass that we didn't intend to. We make a wrong turn in life, things like that. We end up going in the wrong direction.
And that's never a good thing when you're going in the wrong direction. Why because you're never going to reach the right destination? You'll get somewhere but it's not where you want to be. And word of God, we find such a man that got on a journey just like this and his name is Jonah.
First chapter verse three says, but Jonah rose up to flee and to Tarsus from the presence of the Lord. First off, that's a, that's never going to happen. King David said, wherever I'm at God, you are there and went down to Japa and he found a ship going to Tarsus. So he paid the fire there of and went down to it to go with him and to Tarsus from the presence of the Lord.
See the enemy will always make sure if you're trying to run from God that there's going to be some past that you think you can succeed on, but all past that are leading from God or leading to the enemy. And you know pastor Steve, sometimes God will let us run a little bit. One thing I'm looking at there though, I've always seen this says it be rose up to flee and to Tarsus from the presence of the Lord. He went down to the ship and he paid the fire.
When you're running from God, I'm going to tell you you can pay the fire when it comes down to paying the ferryman because you know if he's got a mission for you, when we're on disobedience when he loves us, says he will discipline those that he loves. The word teaches us that in duty, which is in his will, we're blessed. In other duty, which is out his will, we're chastised. Jonah didn't even have a clue of what was coming his way.
Had he known what he was running into, he probably would have been willing a lot sooner to go the other direction. A lot of times in life when God calls us to do something, we'll find every excuse possible not to do that. And if you really researched this some, you'll find that Joshua didn't really, I mean, a, a Jonah didn't really care for the Nineabouts that much because they had really been kind of at war with Israelites. So there was not really, he didn't really care about going there to help them out anyway.
You know, so we had a wrong attitude and sometimes God will call us to do the very thing that we say we'll never do because he's going to show us that he's God and that he is in control. So he told Joshua, I mean, Jonah, I got Joshua on my mind, that might be another lesson here pretty soon, but he told Jonah, go to the end of it, preach them, preach them what, repentance judgment. That's what he's telling you and I in the world, they go forth into the world and preach to them, repentance and judgment because if we have the repentance and we put our trust in Jesus Christ and we ask him to come in and be our Lord and Savior, then we get to enjoy the mercy and the grace of Father God. But if we reject that great salvation as Jesus Christ, then we endure the judgment of God in his wrath.
Jonah, thought we could run from God. Sometimes man just, we're just dumb sometimes. Yeah, and see when we looked at that, we were talking about this earlier, we were talking about the will of God. How many people pray for the will of God?
You know, even the Lord's praise says, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now what if we pray, Lord, I want thy will to be done and the answer is, I want you to go to the end of it. You know, that's not a place you wanted to go, but you know the Lord may ask you to do that when you really want his will. That's where you got to have the faith to do what he's called you to do.
You know, I think sometimes there's a little Jonah in all of us. I'll tell you, when I was younger and I always knew in my heart that God had called me at some point in time to preach, you know, maybe I thought maybe somewhere when I'm an old guy, he'll call me the pastor out there. But you know, I was a young musician, songwriter, singer, getting to travel around the country, around the world and do some stuff and I was excited and God kept, you know, when the phone would call and it was a pastor somewhere, you know, I'd be tickled to death, they were asking me to come sing, but man, if they were asking me to come preach, I was just running from that. So I know what it's like to try to run from God.
So if you're out there watching this, I'm sure you're relating a lot to this because it's easy to run when the reality of his easier part would just simply be to obey because when we run, we cause so much more trouble on ourselves. But as a songwriter, one day I sat down and I was writing a song and he ended up being a song about Jonah. Imagine that. Now God, I'm running from what God's called me to do.
I'm trying to serve him in my own terms and he's blessing me, but you know, you still know there's something missing. It's not quite the same and I write that song and I'm singing, it's a fast-paced song. A lot of people really like it, but it's simply called Jonah. And I'm thinking of myself as I wrote that and I say, boy, God, this is a good song.
He says, you know, it's like he spoke to Martin and said, you like that, huh? I said, yeah, he said, damn, I'm talking to you. God has a way to get our attention and he knows how to do it. Absolutely, that's good.
I think I've stored Nathan, you know, and David said, man, it's really God. Like he says, you are the man. And again, when you're talking about the will of God, we fought the will of God so many times, not knowing that, you know, again, in duty, we are blessed, out of duty, you know, you're chastised. So when we're looking at the will of God and the will of God is always better.
That's what we don't understand because we're looking at, you know, that's going to be hard on me and we talked earlier in one of our shows about, you know, the purging of the fruit tree, but you know, that ain't easy for the fruit tree. I'm sure it's painful to be cut back and for people to be tried by fire. It's not easy, but you know, he says, when you come out, he says, give me my goal is tried by fire because when you come out on the other side, you're pure than that. And I remember a guy telling me a story about a silver refiner.
And he's asking me to go in and sit there and he'd heat up the silver and melt it. And he goes, how do you know when he's time to take the silver out? He goes, well, that's the easiest part. He says, when I can see my reflection in it.
And you think about that because we're a reflection of God's love. We're not God, but we're a reflection of that love to others. So he wants to see his reflection in us. Amen.
That's good. I enjoy that. So John gets on the ship fleeing from the presence of God. He's probably feeling pretty sure of himself about this time.
And there again, we can relate. But suddenly a storm comes up, you know, in our disobedience to God, you know, I've heard people say when I was going, you better serve God or he'll make you wish you had God doesn't force people to do anything. We serve God because we love him and we want to. Now there'll come a time in the time of judgment that you'll wish you had served God.
But I think when God has a call upon our life and he's got a job for everybody to do, but specifically he was given a job to go warn an entire country of the wrath. It was an important job. You know, it's one thing if God tells you to read a chapter and you fail, well, you've lost out on something. But so when God really starts planning some big things that people's lives hinge on and you know, studying the word is important.
I'm not saying that because if we're studying his word, then we've got food to give to the people when we go out. But Jonah had to go preach this gospel message, repent or you're going to be destroyed. This was urgent. Yet he was running.
So what happens? He runs into the storm and the sailors on the ship, they're trying everything. These are experienced sailors. They've seen storms like this before, but not quite like this.
See, there's a difference when God is stirring up the waters to get your attention. Well, say it's one of the things about the story I like when you look at this. I'm sure Don't send your watch and I'm trying to do everything they can to keep this boat floating. And the whole time he knows what the cause will storm is.
He's like, it's me. I'm the cause of the storm. That's a heavy load when you think about that to realize, no, so they're throwing everything overboard. Nothing's happening.
The ships going to sink. They know they're going to die. And finally, Jonah comes clean and he says, you know what? It's my fault.
You're going to have to throw me overboard. And they didn't want to do that because they feared, they feared God that was arranging all this here. But you know, in the end, they realized that unless they cast Jonah overboard, they were going to perish. So better one man than the entire ship.
So there he goes into the water. What happened? I like what he says and God had prepared the fish. He knew exactly where he was at when he was going overboard.
So even though he ended up interraging sea, God prepared a fish to swallow him. He said, well, that ain't much better. Well, at least he's in a different situation now because this is something God prepared. So God's got him now where he can really talk to him.
Yeah, and see, that's what I think of what we call those reflection moments. When you get in the midst of a trouble or a trial, where do you have to look? You know, and unfortunately, you know, a lot of people keep the Lord in what I call the fire extinguisher box. It's there, you know, it's there, but you break in case of emergency.
But that's not what our relationship is. It's supposed to be a day by day. We live for him. We talk to him.
We seek his face. And here again, this was a time to reflect when he's in that Wells belly. What else do you have to do to look up to know where your help comes? It was a guy one time his house burnt down lost everything that he had.
And somebody was talking to him and said, I really hate that happen to you. He said, he said, I'm not. He said, you know what? This is just the attack of the enemy.
So I can't wait to see what God's going to do about it. Now that's the right attitude. I mean, because God's going to restore anything the enemy takes away and destroys God. We'll restore it back to this.
But in the belly of the well was a great time to contemplate. There's times in our life that when we hit that wall because of disobedience, we'll call it what it is because of disobedience, it is that time of reflection, the time to look back and the time to seek the face of God because he is compassionate, faithful and true and merciful. And all he wants is to get our focus on him. And you know, this was not a comfortable place to be.
Because when you look at this, he says, but it comes there, he says it from the belly of hail, krata. This was some place he was in pain. But you know, again, that time of reflection, even though he's going through the pain, even though he's going through the fire, now there's stuff being burned off of him. It's the impurities, it's the disobedience and things that are being burned off of us.
And that's what we don't understand a lot of times. When the fiery trials come and they try us, it is for a purpose. They're not an easy purpose, but you know, it should help us grow in our relationship with the Lord because we should grow closer to him to these fiery trials because we know who's in the fire. Amen.
When the three days had passed and the Bible teaches us that the will spit Jonah upon dry ground, a three day journey he made it one day. So when God brings you through that trial, even though you may have brought that upon yourself through disobedience, when God brings you through that, there's a renewed urgency. As much as Jonah was trying to get away from them, he put far more effort getting there. Now like I say, there's some bad blood there.
Was he excited now just to go on and tell them, hey, God's going to kill y'all. But no, when he went there and he preached, God had already been softening hearts. So sometimes the very thing that we're running from obey God in because of fear or whatever, we just don't want the very thing, we don't realize that God is already working on the other end. And here he was running from the presence of God, running from the will of God.
He gets there and preaches one of the greatest evangelistic messages ever preached because it's said from the king to the pauper. Everybody, everybody repented in sack of cloth and ashes. Everybody. That was a great evangelistic message.
Oh yeah. Can you imagine if you had a revival like that in your church today? Well, I think people will be talking about it for months and months and months. But the people received the word of God and that's the beauty, the word of God is life-changing.
And if we can just get that message out and we may never preach before hundreds and thousands or nations of people, but if we get one, if we can tell one person about Jesus and that changes their life and they end up making heaven their home, then it was worth the journey. It was worth the struggle. It was worth everything that we had to go through to get to that point in our Christian life. And I tell people, if you're seeking and you've talked about that early about praying for the will of God in your life and we were talking before we came on camera, that's a prayer that is really putting your faith to test because if you're saying, God, I want your will in my life.
We're asking a lot. We're trusting God for a lot, but he's always got good things for us, but it's the journey to get there. You know, grape juice and olive oil is great and people enjoy them all the time. But to get to the point where they were at, they had to be crushed.
Sometimes in our spiritual walk with God, he has to crush our will. Something with Jonah, Jonah's will was being crushed so that when he was conformed where God could use him, then he did it with haste and with joy. And then it seems like we go through the rotation. Oh, yeah.
It's a lot of times we have a great victory and then the next thing that we see, we come back and after that great victory, it seems like there's another problem pops up and sometimes it seems like you can take the wind out of your sails. It's like we're at Elijah runs after Jezebel after a great victory. He runs and hides in the cave and that's where God's asking him a question a lot of times. I think we're getting that same cave sometimes.
God asked the same question. What are you doing here? He never meant for us to be there, but that's where we end up because of disobedience or cause of fear. You know, and it goes back to my little story at the first there.
We did it just for a little comedy there, but it's true. We end up in our Christian life in places God never intended for us to be. And it's not always because that we run from something, but sometimes we go in places and God didn't send us. You see that happen a lot.
Our W. Shambok and some of the older fellas will know who I'm talking about a great evangelist of God. Some of the younger generation may not know who I'm talking about. But he made the statement one time, you'll know the ones that were sent versus the ones that just went.
And that's true because if God sends, there's going to be the harvest. These people, none of them are repented. Now years later, like you say, they had a flip-flop, but you know, that wasn't Jonah's responsibility, his responsibility was to take the gospel message and preach to them, you got to repent or you're going to be destroyed. And that's what we're telling the world today.
That's what the gospel message is. For God so loved the world that he gave you is only to be gotten some of the who so ever believeth. You got to believe. You believe you're going to live for him.
If you believe, you're going to serve him. I think when we see in Jonah's case here too though, you see that battle we always face today too, that battle that we have between the flesh and the spirit. You know, the spirit really is willing to do stuff, but you know, the flesh fights us, constantly fights us. And here he was, preached that great evangelistic message, then he went up on the hymn, goes, okay, now destroy them.
So, you know, so he went there in the spirit and the power of the spirit, and then all of a sudden he goes back and says, he goes back and says, you know, we got to be careful, we got to walk in the spirit. Because if we walk in the spirit, it says we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh. You know, Apostle Paul said that when I was a child, I thought I was a child. I done as a child.
I acted as a child. But when I became a man, which is what he's meaning, when I became a mature Christian, then I put away the childish things. And you know, a lot of times we use childish excuses to not do what God wants us to do. Everything that comes up will put before God, you know, everything is a catastrophe.
Why? Because we're not putting God in his proper place, because if he's not first in our life, and if we're not willing and obedient, we can't eat the good of the land. That's where being able to be prosperous and blessed comes from is being obedient in his word. And many times he blessed us and inspired ourselves because we've all failed to come short of the glory of God.
Tim Hart and fails God. But you know what? He's merciful. And when I make a mistake, I say, Father, forgive me, pick me back up and dust me off and keep me going.
There's a lot of times the past receive that when we do or say something instantly, the spirit checks us and we know, you know what? That didn't come out like that I meant for that to be. And so we correct that right then. Or we seek God or we say, God, you know what?
Forgive me for that. And he's faithful in just. Now we don't make habits, but we're in a flesh to the body. So we do some stumble and fall, but he is faithful.
When you think about that too, you said something very important there too. You said that, you know, if God's not first, that's the first of the commandments. That shall have no other gods before me. The second one is locking into it.
That shall not make any graven images or worship them. When you look at that, anything that stands in priority before God really is an idol. It's becoming your God. Yes, it surely has.
I'm talking about the rich young ruler, for example. He says, listen, he told you, oh, I've done this from my childhood up. You know, Jesus didn't argue with you. He says, get you lack one thing.
He didn't argue. You say you hadn't done that. He says, sell all that you have. Give it to the poor and come follow me and have riches in heaven.
You know, where he said he couldn't do that because what was his God? There was still one thing standing between him and the true God and that was his wealth. You know what? And if he'd been willing to give that to the work of the Lord, God would bless that back.
He's not telling what he would have been blessed with. But you know, we just got to trust God, believe God. And when he's called us to do a work and that's everybody that's watching this program, he said, who's the way for will? And if we've got breath, we should be praising and acknowledging God for who that he is.
And it doesn't matter if anybody else around you's doing it or not. You worship God in the beauty of holiness. You acknowledge who he is. You let him be God in your life.
And you do that. You simply love him back and be obedient to his word. We're going to go to the Lord in prayer because I know that maybe there's some people out there that you're in a battle, that there's things God's laid upon your heart that you really want to do but the devil said, no, the devil keeps pulling back to your past and saying, you know, because of that you can't know. When God forgives, he forgets and he makes you a fit subject to do anything that he calls you to do.
Pastor, Steve, you take us to the Lord in prayer. As we come to you today, Lord, there's many people joining us and they all have carers and they all have troubles. They all have trials. But Father, I know that it says that many of the reflections of the righteous but the Lord delivers us out of them all.
And then we Father, I'm standing upon the Word of God which will never fail. And then we follow today Lord, I pray Lord, that they ask right now for the mighty hand of God to move in their life. And then we follow the lead by faith that they receive these things. And then we follow the revealing to them the will of God for their lives.
And then we follow the given the boldness and the courage of the line. And the only Father stand up and Lord do what you call them to do. And Father, we want to above all things for you to receive the glory for it all. May they look upon us and our good works and glorify our Father which is in heaven.
And then we follow the Lord, we just ask you to open doors to this ministry. And then we follow, I'm just asking Lord to touch people's hearts by the power, the Holy Spirit of God. Bring people to the saving grace and saving knowledge of our Lord and Savior of Jesus Christ. And to God be the glory for all things, for I ask these things in Jesus name.
Amen. If you prayed that prayer, just trust God. Get on the right boat. Get up going back in the right direction.
It don't matter as long as you are trying your best to serve God. He will help you along life's journey. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to slip and fall occasionally.
That's where the Spirit comes in. He leads, he guides, he directs us in truth and righteousness. And he's there for us. You know, it's been good to be with you again today.
And we always enjoy this time and we'd like to invite you to come visit us at the London Life Force Center and pastor Steve's got a lot of information that you can find out more about us. Yeah. We'd love to see you in person. We're at 923, part and Parkway in Severeville, Tennessee.
You can join us at our website at alwcsevereville.com. Also, you can email us at alwcsevereville.com or they can call us at 865-366-3600. And again, I appreciate all those who join and support this ministry. We want to thank you so much.
Again, we'd love to see in person to get to shake your hand and hug your next. Amen. We've got a lot of wonderful people. Just really family.
We're just country people. Family of God people. We love Jesus. And you know what?
I believe that the Bible says we know that we passed from death and to life because what? Because we love the brethren. God is love and that's what it's all about. And we ask you to continually pray for this program, the name of the program is Spiritual Impact.
We want it to be because we wrestle against not flesh and blood, but spiritual weakness in high places. So there's a spirit of God. There's a spirit of the enemy. And those are the two forces that are at work.
And you see them evident in the life in which we live today. But greater is he that lives within you than he that is in the world. And once again, this pastor, Tim Parton, I want to pass through Steve Rose inviting you to join us next time right here on WVLR for Spiritual Impact. We look forward to seeing you again.
And hopefully you'll be able to stop by and visit us at church real soon. So next time though, we say God bless you. Walk with God, trust God. Great things are in store if you serve Him.
Amen. Amen. Hello everybody. This is Pastor Tim Parton of Abundant Life Worship Center.
For those of you that live in the Subramal area, or maybe you just visit from time to time, we'd like to take a moment and invite you to come visit us at the church. We're located at 923, the Ollie Parton Parkway right here in Subramal. Our service times are Sunday morning at 11 a.m. Wednesday evening at 630.
We just love sharing the Word of God. We're just a family church, so we invite you to come grow with us. God bless. We're just a little faith.
We are never alone. So this battle I won't fear, because I can hear the sound of Him.