God Cares and Loves You 2 - Part 2

In London Airport, one of the terminals, you know, I thought, shall I go scouting up along this huge pile to see if somewhere my suitcase can be found? My wife said to me, no, that's not possible. It appears they have had difficulties over baggage, and you know how, just with so many travelers out of London, my, it comes to millions of pieces of baggage. Well, well, well, how to find such baggage? Anyway, you say it's lost, it's gone, irretrievable, the matter is closed, the chapter is over, forget it.

Now, God never says that. God should have said that about me. How wonderful that he did not say that of me.

I say, you know, my own classmates and my friends, my sports buddies who played games with me, hey, some of them were such excellent fellows in comparison. I could see what sterling fellows they were. And yet, should God care for me? Should God retrieve me, pick me out of the mire, and give to me a life with some meaning and purpose? You know, it would have broken my heart if I woke up one day in my fifties and said, hey, I've been beating about the bushes.

I've been fighting the air. Now, what have I been doing with my life? And should God care for me like this and love me like this? And yet, this is the way I spent my days. My dear friends, if there were not a goal and a purpose placed before me, by the love of the cross, I might tell you I would have lived a most frustrated and bitter, you know, it's terrible to be bitter, you know, life that anybody could have lived.

But the Lord saved me from that kind of bitterness and that kind of total failure. And so Jesus says, even if it is just one, one, one lost sheep, I'll go after it till I find it. How amazing, how amazing.

I've seen this happen again and again. And sometimes when I look upon the audience and I can discern how unique are the cases of people seated in front, saved from the brink of the grave, people who should have been long dead 30, 40 years ago with chronic diseases, which doctors and hospitals could not handle. People who had attempted suicide over and over.

And when I look at their faces and say, how did the Lord find this fellow? How did the Lord find this girl? So proud, so empty-headed, so arrogant. And you know, my dear friends, if you want me to name some of these afflictions, some people die of self-pity. You can't do a thing for them.

Self-pity is not repentance. It is a kind of something between remorse and self-justification. Well, there was nothing I could do about it.

So I succumb to this temptation. Don't we see that all these temptations are common to us all? The Bible says so. But the Bible also says God will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able to bear.

But with the temptation, he will give you a door of escape. You know, if somebody should push me against that bare wall and this ruffian had me by the neck and just got me right against that stone wall and if a door just opened and someone received me into his arms, my dear friends, wouldn't I be amazed when I found that there was no way of escape from that terrorist or from that ruffian or whoever and I found loving hands receiving me through the wall. Yes, that's how Jesus is.

Through the wall, a door of escape. And so the Lord Jesus Christ told us about these two boys. One who had squandered everything.

He had squandered everything. He had spent it with riotous living with harlots. My, I remember the day some 40 years ago as somebody was driving me into Detroit one day.

He said to me as the downtown high-rise buildings were coming in to view, he said, you know, I was a part of that wickedness that went on there. You could buy a girl for $5. Well, for a young man like me at that time speaking in various places and parts of the U.S., it was shocking to hear someone say I was a part of the wickedness that went on there.

But he was a very different fellow when I met him. Completely transformed. My dear friends, I do not know how many of you are in daily touch with situations which seem to be irretrievable.

I don't like to give up anything and call it...