#344 TORN Series# 3, Heart of God

#344 TORN Series# 3, Heart of God
By Guest Speaker: Bobby Sullivan

Change happens when we represent the Father heart of God everywhere we go. The unveiling of His Love in us reveals to the World what we are truly made of and made for.

John 11:25 Jesus reveals himself as the Resurrection and the life and he was about to prove it.

“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?

There may come a time when you will have to put up or shut up! Back it up or back it down. Sadly, many have backed down! “The only thing of significance that Lazarus did was die. And yet when Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was ill, they said, ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ ”

INTRODUCTION:
We first meet the family from Bethany in Luke 10:38–42. Or rather we meet part of the family—two followers of Jesus named Martha and Mary.

You’re probably familiar with the story Luke tells. Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem for one of the great Jewish feasts when Martha came out to meet Him with an invitation to dinner. But while Martha opened her home, it was her sister, Mary, who opened her heart.

To put the story in a nutshell: Mary worshiped. Martha complained. Jesus rebuked. And lives were changed.

“We all know Jesus loved Mary “After all, look how she worshiped. And we can even understand how Jesus loved Martha. Look how she served. But what about those who don’t know where we fit in the heart of God?”

Strangely, Luke never even mentions Mary and Martha’s brother, Lazarus. Perhaps he wasn’t home when Martha held her dinner party. Perhaps he was away on business. Or perhaps he was there all the time but no one really noticed.

Some people are like that. They have perfected the art of invisibility. Experts at fading into the background, they go out of their way not to attract attention, and when they get noticed, they feel great discomfort.

Of course, I have no way of knowing if this was true of Lazarus. Scripture doesn’t give any information as to who he was or what he was like—only that he lived in Bethany and had two sisters. When we finally meet him, in John 11, it is an odd introduction—for it starts with a 911 call that leads to a funeral:

VERSE 1 Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.
So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”
Lazarus name means-God helps or God is my help.
Bethany means-The House of Suffering

VERSE 4 When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick,
VERSE 6 he stayed where he was two more days.

1.) When you are sleeping God is sowing;

God is always preparing for your arrival!
Genesis 2:7-8 God formed the man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a being. Then he planted a garden and put Adam in it! Even when Adam wasn’t aware of his surroundings, God was working behind the scenes and about to surprise him.

BACKDROP of Verse 4 When Jesus spoke which direction did those words go to? THE GRAVE! Every word that came out of his mouth (and yours) has an assignment. While you are functioning in fear He is functioning in faith!! Jesus sent his word to the place where Lazarus would end up. Waiting for the command to COME FORTH.
The word got there before the circumstance changed!

Tell your neighbor, “MY ANSWER IS ALREADY ON THE WAY”

IF GOD SPOKE IT, IT WILL HAPPEN in your life time.
MY word by Donald Northrup in Calgary while I was washing the bus, taking out the trash and doing office work.

Jesus is never moved by the urgent but by obedience. Why? Obedience paves the way for the miraculous.

Sometimes we can be moved by the urgent right out the will of God because in our humanity we respond from the place of compassion and belief and we think that urgent = God. However, by waiting the Father would be glorified more.

EXPAND….Mayday, Mayday. Its urgent, I need you now, uh HELLO!! Are you gonna take care of this? YES in a couple days! WHAT????

Has there ever been a time in your life when you needed God to move right now and he takes his sweet holy time?

God’s delays are not His denials

I don’t know if God was about to show them what patience was all about? I don’t pray for patience cuz when I do He sends a circumstance.

Your circumstance does not dictate the outcome! When you feel there is no hope. Hope shows up!

“You’re either going to live your life defined by what you go through or by Who you belong to.” @Stevenfurtick

Have you noticed that when Jesus comes on the scene, what seems to be the end is rarely the end? In fact, it’s nearly always a new beginning. Mary and Martha were hoping for a miracle. What they hoped for arrived. Hoping is not a wish. The biblical word for hope is the joyful anticipation of good. It is the eager expectation of an abundance of goodness.

Verse 15: Any answers that are delayed brings you into greater faith.

“BILL JOHNSON Any area of our life for which we have no hope is under the influence of a lie”

Jesus was about to speak truth to Lazarus. Truth spoken in love always carries presence. You may not always understand the truth or even the origin and question HOW? But you will respect the origin of the word out of the demonstration of it.
Mary, Martha and the entire community was about to experience and witness Christ in Action.

There is always hope when Jesus is writing your story!
Never place a period when God placed a comma because an exclamation point is about to come!

VERSE 11-14 He went on to tell them…”Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going to wake him up” 12. His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better” 13. Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. 14 SO then he told them plainly, Lazarus is dead…but let us go to him.”

2.) WHILE YOU ARE SLEEPING JESUS IS SPEAKING
Psalm 147:15 “He sends out his command to the earth. His word runs swiftly”

He Spoke the end from the beginning! Because he is Alpha and Omega! The beginning and the end.

Jesus can speak to whatever is dead in your life and bring in back to life!!

Deuteronomy Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.!

He sees the parade in your life while you are just watching from the sidewalk he is on the roof top.

The enemy always come in the middle! Satan’s greatest opposition comes at the point of your breakthrough! HE will always come to steal, kill and destroy everything that was planted by the Holy Spirit!

Some of need to stop quoting facts and start declaring the truth. You doctor may say one thing, your friends may not support you, but the Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. And the truth says, He whom the son sets free is free indeed! The truth says in Isiah By his stripes you are already healed.
For while it may not add up in our human calculations, the truth of God’s love lies at the heart of the gospel. “While we were still sinners,” Romans 5:8 tells us, “Christ died for us.”

We may not be able to do the math ourselves or reason out such amazing grace, but if we’ll simply ask, our heavenly Father longs to help us find the bottom line.

Jesus goes to help the one who is suffering in the tomb of death and decay. He is the author and originator of the Resurrection. You can’t go to who you already are. You can’t put to death the creator of life!

Lazarus represents all of humanity who is a portrait of the walking dead.

VERSE 17 On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.…

…“Where have you laid him?” he asked.
Jesus said take me to the place where you buried him. All tears aside, He knew that He was there for a purpose, so Jesus said, “Take me to where you laid him.” In other words, “Take me to the place where you stopped believing.”
Jesus knew that Mary and Martha were still in the process of mourning their loss, He knew that they had looked at their brother’s lifeless corpse as it was wrapped for burial, and He knew that pain of death was still all too familiar to them; but He also knew that they needed to exhibit faith on their road to their breakthrough.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. The significance of Lazarus being in the tomb for 4 days was not to show a lack of concern on Jesus part. Jewish tradition held that a person’s spirit would hang around the body for 3 days, after that the spirit would leave.

VERSE 35 Jesus wept

He not only weeps over the city of London like he did for Jerusalem but he weeps over the every day concerns of His creation. When you mourn he mourns.

Pope Leo “In his humanity Jesus wept for Lazarus but in his divinity, he raised him from the dead. The sorrow, sympathy and compassion Jesus felt was for all mankind. The rage he felt was against the tyranny of death over mankind.”

Some things I don’t question when God says DO IT or GO!
If we become to intellectual and believe only by science and not recognizing presence by faith we can be given a word that was supposed to bring life and completely miss the opportunity of it. Like when Jesus said, COME FORTH.

Sometimes your entrance into a resurrection breakthrough comes by experiencing someone else’s!!!

Questions and disappointments, sorrow and fear tend to block out the bigger picture in situations like the one we see in Bethany.
What do we do when God doesn’t come through the way we hoped He would?
What should we feel when what is dearest to our hearts is suddenly snatched away?
How do we come to grips with the love of God with the disappointments we face in life?

But most important, I believe the story of Lazarus reveals the scandalous availability of God’s love if we will only reach out and accept it. Even when we don’t deserve it. Even when life is hard, and we don’t understand.? Even like in Lazarus situation ….life stinks!

The unknown factors frustrate us in life’s story problems as well—and there are plenty of those in John 11. How are we to compute the fact that Jesus stayed where He was rather than rushing to Lazarus’s side when He heard His friend was ill? How do we reconcile Jesus’s allowing Mary and Martha to walk through so much pain when He could have prevented it in the first place?

Difficult questions, without a doubt. But there is a foundational truth in this passage we must first acknowledge before we can tackle the tougher issues.

“Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5, emphasis added). He wept with them and felt the hurt of loneliness which he was soon to witness himself.

Jesus loves you and me as well. He loves us just as we are—apart from our Martha works and Mary worship. He even loves those of us who come empty-handed, feeling dead inside and perhaps a little bound.

The torn heart of God weeps and mourns over his creation. He is burdened by our boredom of His blessings

A.) FATHER I THANK YOU:
Jesus was always referring the glory back to the Father. VS 40: Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”
If we want to see the glory of God we must live in and from the presence of God daily.

A.) Do you involve yourselves in religious practices and still find yourself pitiful , predictable and passionless?
B.) Are you starving for the manifested glory of God and longing for signs and power in your life but still don’t see it happening?
C.) Do you find yourself working and striving, pressing in and doing all the right things for all the right reasons with no results?

Could it be we have sought his presents rather that his presence?
Could it be that our motives for promotion and favor with our peers have outweighed our desire to just be with HIM?
Could it be that we have become so accustomed to powerless lives that we have accepted blandness and mediocrity as the norm?
Could we have resolved in our hearts that the great and mighty acts of power were reserved for the biblical heroes of that faith!

The good news is the biblical heroes of the faith we no different than you and I. Satan’s greatest opposition of doubt comes at the point of your breakthrough into faith!

The overshadowing presence of God is what creates the miracles and its up to us like Mary and Martha to come under that canopy or covering.

We must be a people that passionately pursue His presence rather than pampering our passive, pitiful pathetic poison of premeditated priestly performances!

THE GLORY OF GOD needs the presence of God in order to be manifested. The Glory of what? The open manifestation of His attributes and His nature. It is the exposure of His character and His power. It is the handiwork of God before your very eyes.

The presence of God is the conduit through which the glory comes. Gods glory needs a conductor in order to flow out of. What’s that? His Presence. What opens the door for His presence? Praise. What initiates praise? Intimacy. What creates intimacy? Desire.

The presence of God releases the realm of miracles. It is in this realm of the miraculous that people witness first hand the restoring nature of the Father. It is in this realm that the heavens display the majestic glory and splendor of who God is.

Matthew 5:16 “Let our light so shine before men that they may see our good deeds and praise our Father in Heaven”

Psalm 34:8 Taste and See that the Lord is good; blessed is he who takes refuge in him.”

If you want to taste of God from the pitcher of life, then come drink from my glass!!!

When we pour out our lives to others they will drink of us but taste HIM!

What do people taste when they drink of you?
If you were told to let your light shine, would people be blinded?

B.) ROLL AWAY THE STONE!

That Stone represents the blocks we put up. The coverings, us hiding out in the darkness. The Greek word is LITHOS which means tablet. It is the same word in Leviticus and Exodus where God engraved the commandments on. The Law.
Its one thing to weep and go to the tomb. Its another thing to remove the very thing that keeps you locked up. The Law keeps you from accessing the tomb. What religious rituals prevent you from going to the tombs of this city? What precious pride prohibits you?

There were Levitical Laws in place for the conduct of the priests. Jesus being the High Priests of Priests recognized that. He was not allowed to come in contact with the dead according to the Law!

He may not have been able to touch but since he was a fulfillment of the Law, it never said he could not speak!!! LOLOLOL

The law said it’s over, but it cannot replace grace!

John 10:10 Jesus comes to give life and life abundantly. The reason some people feel that their life stinks is because of the blocks, barriers that they erected or entombed themselves with to hold back the love of God that is constantly knocking at the door. Lord help them to remove the self-limiting beliefs and behaviors! All the hurts, habits and hang-ups!
Therefore Jesus told them to roll away the stone. With that statement Mary and Martha had to have the faith to look beyond their problem, look toward a slim possibility, and also practice obedience. They had to give Jesus access to the thing that was causing them pain.

C.) LAZARUS COME FORTH! Then he waited. Jesus word will never violate free will. I believe if he was the embodiment of the resurrection then just His presence alone in front of the tomb brought Lazarus back to life. When he said COME FORTH he was waiting for Lazarus to make a decision. Remember Decision determine the direction of your Destiny? The spoken word was already sent. Now it was up to Lazarus to act upon it.

Lazarus could have remained in his death clothes although it would be hard to breathe. He chose to get up even when surrounded by decay and leave that tomb!!

Obedience brings the audience.

Suddenly the period placed by humanity becomes an exclamation point inserted by divinity.

D.) TAKE OFF HIS GRAVE CLOTHES:
When you’re saved God says you’re innocent, forgiven, made new, accepted, beloved.
But often we’re saying to ourselves we’re guilty, we’re rejected, we’re losers, we’re trapped.
We don’t live in that place anymore. We were dead. But now we’re alive. We’ve got to take off those grave clothes and live our new life.

Take off the grave clothes and put on the grace clothes.

3. WHEN YOU ARE SLEEPING GOD IS SENDING

Psalm 91:9-11 If you make the Most high your dwelling- even the Lord who Is my refuge No harm will come to you, no disaster will come near you. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways…… vs. 14 Because he loves me, I will rescue him, I will protect him for he acknowledges my name. He will call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him, and honor him with long life…..”

REST and RELAX Favor Follows the Faithful. The silence of God is not the absence of God!

God is sending answers to you and through you!!
A.) TO me this speaks of community.
LOL Love on London! Its not a laughing matter.

B.) LET HIM GO: You can’t keep a good man down nor can you keep in quiet. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”

John 11: Verse 45 “Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him.
BUT SOME OF THEM…..
– It is a long accepted theory that the resurrection of Lazarus was foreshadowing of Christ’s own resurrection. Such a claim could be substantiated by the fact that immediately after the miracle, people headed to the Pharisees and brought about a plot for His death.
– What is even more telling is that people miss the point that had the resurrection of Lazarus been enough to make people believe, Christ would have never had to be crucified.
-Are we any different now than we were then? When God reveals Himself to us, we take it in, but we go back to our old ways time and time again.

Faith is our hearts response to the claims of Jesus and we are putting our trust in the revelation of your nature.

Today may be your second day, your first day or to days from now. The point is there is no tomb to dark, to deep, to wide or to smelly that God can’t call you out of. It is the torn heart of God for all humanity that compels him to go to the tombs of your soul and this city. There are way too many people lying on the bed of ignorance in the tomb of denial that say there is no Christ and its up to us to be TOMB INVADERS!

As a result of the spoken work and the obedience of Lazarus, John 12:11 says, “For on account of him many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and putting their faith in him.

Vs. 19 “So the Pharisees said to one another, “See, this is getting us no where. Look how the whole world has gone after HIM”

Closing Thoughts:

As Ambassador’s of Christ, how can we tear down others and expect the kindness of God to invade their life? When we curse one another or those in opposition to our belief system with our words, we are destroying the very thing we have been charged to build up. If you truly believe that your words create, then every curse that is spoken out of your mouth has a destructive effect in the world we are working so hard to preserve.

Change happens when we re present the Father heart of God everywhere we go. In order to be in places of influence and power we must put on the mind of Christ and let compassion rule our tongue and actions.

Take a look at Daniel in the Bible. When trapped in an evil empire, ruled by a wicked king, Daniel put on compassion like a cloak and served Nebuchadnezzar with the heart of Jesus. Nebuchadnezzar received a dream from the Lord telling him that he was going to be torn down to nothing. Nebuchadnezzar did not understand the meaning of the dream so he called Daniel in to interpret for him. Upon hearing the dream, Daniel became terribly troubled and replied “My lord, if only the dream applied to your enemies and its meaning to your adversaries! Daniel was heartbroken at the word of the Lord because of his deep love for Nebuchadnezzar (the wicked king). What troubles me is that most of the church would think this is the time for great rejoicing, God has judged Nebuchadnezzar. We would be saying, “ This is what he deserves, he got what was coming”. Have you ever had to discipline your children? Have you looked them in the eyes and let them know how their actions have torn deep into your heart?
I can’t imagine their brothers and sisters saying, “this is what you deserve, that’s what you get”. This is what we are doing every time we rejoice in someone’s pain. God say’s to mourn with those who mourn, to weep with those who weep. It does not say to weep with those who did nothing wrong, He says to mourn with THOSE who mourn. Why? When we take time to mourn with those who mourn, we will also take the time to love them into health and restoration. When you love someone in their hardest season of life, you have now sewn seeds towards the prosperity of their soul.

Daniel’s heart for his king planted seeds of love into his life and because of this, Nebuchadnezzar surrendered himself over to the love of God. I will say it again, change happens when we represent the Father heart of God everywhere we go…

It is not our job to send destruction with our words, to hate those in leadership or to curse Gods children. We do not overcome hate with hate, there is no fear in love and no peace in accusation. The love of God is the only thing that breaks down the walls of death and destruction; it is the only tool that wins over the heart of a wicked king…It is the only thing that will draw you to the tombs of London.

344 Torn Series# 3, Heart of God, PowerPoint Slides