Classic Sermon #6054: Alive and Effective

Deuteronomy 11:18 "You shall put these my words on your heart and on your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, and you shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk about. the way, when you lie down and when you get up. And you shall write them on the posts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be so numerous on the earth that the Lord swore to your fathers that he had them. to give as the days of heaven upon earth. For if you carefully keep all these commandments which I command you to do, and if you love the Lord your God, walking in all your ways and following him."

They are promises for today, my brother and you walk like this carefully keeping these commandments of the man that you love God, walking in all your ways and following him, Jehovah will also drive out before you all these nations, that is, all the enemies of the people of God we could say, and you will dispossess nations great and more powerful than you, every place that the soles of your feet will step on will be yours from the desert to Lebanon, from the Euphrates river to the western sea, it will be your territory . No one will stand before you; the Lord your God will put fear and fear of you on all the land that you will walk on, as he has told you.

say amen Brothers, we are listening here to the words of Jehovah for his people, Israel, at a key moment in the history of Israel. The people had spent 40 years in the desert, God had brought them out of the land of Egypt with a strong hand, with an outstretched arm, the Bible says, he had done great miracles for them. Forty years had passed the Jewish people with all kinds of vicissitudes and problems and setbacks and obstacles. A whole generation had died in the desert, all the men and women who came out of Egypt died except Joshua and Caleb because they had a different spirit. And all those who were born in the desert could be alive to enter the land that God had prepared for the Jewish people, because that other generation did not have the vision of God, did not have faith in God, did not honor God, did not keep the commandments of God, they harassed God until God got tired of them and Moses had to come and intercede again and again so that God would not violently destroy them, but God said, at least I am not going to allow this genre, this lineage enters the Promised Land, all are going to die and only a new generation is going to enter.

Imagine, 40 years of history and experience and preamble, and expectation about that land that was not so far away, nothing, it was like let's say, saying we were in Cambridge as we were and coming to Boston, that sometimes one reads the Old Testament, brothers, and one thinks like these countries of Egypt and that the people left Egypt and was in the desert and that later they crossed the Jordan River and entered Canaan, and one is thinking like in great extensions of land, immense tracts of land.

You know, that these dramas of the Old Testament take place in a territory about the size of Texas, that's all, there are all these countries included rather. And in that closeness in reality, but God had not given permission to the Jewish people to enter the promised land, it was going around, there were those nations full of strength and power, waiting nothing more than for the Jews to cross the river to cut them off head. And the Jews could not because God had not moved his power in their favor so that they could enter this land.

Finally, after 40 years of waiting, preamble and so many preliminary events, the day comes to cross the river and everything is ready, the priests are at their posts, the people are behind the priests, Joshua has been called to replace Moses and then God calls the people and says, ok, before you go through, before you can enter into what you have been waiting for 40 years, I want to make certain warnings to you and make clear how it is that you are going to be successful and how is it that my promise is going to be fulfilled in your lives.

Imagine in such a sublime and solemn moment and of such magnitude as that, what God was going to say had to be something very important, very key, very fundamental for the life of that people, and what is it that God chooses for point them in that very historic moment of that nation. At the time we could say, almost of the founding of this town because the Jews celebrate their return to Jerusalem and the founding of the Jewish nation in 1948 and for them that is a terribly important day.

Now imagine the first day of that nation entering into their inheritance, and look at what God chooses to point out to them, because that helps us understand how important what I am talking about is to God. What was God talking about at this fundamental moment in the life of his people? He speaks to them about his word, to keep his word, to meditate on his word, to ingest his word, to obey it in everything, he speaks to them about keeping the law of God in his heart and loving Jehovah.

That was to determine the future of that nation. And brothers, let me tell you that today is no different, what determines the success of a believer, what determines the degree of blessing that the believer receives, what determines his effectiveness in the Kingdom of God, what determines his ability to be happy and successful is your relationship with the word of God. The Holy Spirit tells you again today, measure your relationship with my word. How important is my word for your life? When you come to my house, what brings you to my house, is it simply a social, religious ritual or do you come hungry and hungry to listen to my word, to learn from it, to receive instruction, to put into practice what you learn, of having an intimate relationship with my word and being a man, a woman who projects a relationship of intimate friendship with my word?

This is the difference, brothers, between a merely partial and lukewarm and religious believer and a believer who is radically committed to the Kingdom of God. That is why, no matter how sophisticated we get, brothers, I will always love to see people with their Bible in hand or under their arms entering the house of God, because we are the people of the word, there is something important. But people do not get used to the fact that sometimes they are even ashamed to be seen with the Bible in their hands, and we lose this character. I think it is something beautiful that the people of God, people see them with their Bible in their hands. hand and that our young people have their Bibles, although sometimes they leave them lying around and you have to call them to come get it. No lie. Sometimes adults do it and I think there are Bibles out there and the owners of them don't even remember that they left them three months ago.

I think it is a symbol, we are the people of the word of God. And you know something brothers, think about this, the Jews spent two thousand years without returning to their land. You have heard the expression wandering Jew, two thousand years passed the Hebrews out of Israel. In the year 75 they were expelled from their beloved land and from then until the year 1948 they never returned as a nation to visit the land, or to be in the Holy Land. And the Jews were taken to all parts of the world, to Europe, they were persecuted, they were burned, they were reproached, and two thousand years later, as if nothing had happened, they returned to take their land again and that nation of Israel was alive and well, doing incredible things. .

What has allowed these people for two thousand years to exist as a nation and maintain their cultural and religious identity? What prevented the Jews from disappearing or disappearing from the map and that like so many other cultures that have existed throughout history, the only thing that would remain would be archaeological documents and remains of that nation and that culture, what saved them from cultural extermination? Because they have tried to physically exterminate them, Nazis and the inquisition and so many other groups throughout history, what has allowed this town to survive? The word of God. Love of the Old Testament.

And let me tell you that even the most secular of Jews have been taught to respect the Bible, albeit culturally. I had a most interesting conversation with a Jew, a pianist, a man of tremendous artistic talent. This Jews, I didn't know he was Jewish, I knew he was Russian, we started talking in his business this week and at the moment I realize that the guy is Jewish. We had a conversation for about an hour and a half and a tremendously educated man, I discovered that he is an excellent pianist, he plays in a Jewish synagogue as a musician. But when we started talking and I had a conversation there, these deep conversations, I began to realize that this man doesn't even believe in electric light, as they say out there. He starts talking to me about man being an animal and animals, and there are a lot of men that this applies to, sure, but he starts telling me about there being no difference between animals and the human race and then we get into it. a very interesting conversation about this.

At one point when we were quite confident I confronted him about, look, I said, you are a Jew, right? And you play in a synagogue, and he told me about his father. His father taught him the word, the Bible, the Old Testament in Russia when the Marxists, the Leninists, the communists were in power. And he told me that his father, who was a cantor in a Jewish synagogue when he was a child, taught him the Old Testament, taught him the Torah, taught him the Pentateuch, the entire Bible. And he says that he was taught the Old Testament at home and then went to the Russian school where they taught him that God did not exist, that man had to be an atheist, that matter is the only thing that predominates and that there is no such thing. thing as spirit, is an invention of men. And this man, one time he was reading the Bible and another time he was receiving an evil doctrine. And I told him, and which of the two won? Seeing now what has happened in Russia, where is the Marxist, Leninist empire? Where is dialectical materialism discredited. Look at Russia, rubble.

But what captivated me about this man is that with all his intellect and all his culture, the dramatic thing about this man is that despite his total disbelief, this man had been trained as a child by his father and even in disbelief he was still working with his town, playing in a Jewish synagogue and listening to the word of God. He had not been able to escape, he had not been able to untie himself from this inheritance.

Hello God bless you, this is Pastor Roberto Miranda speaking. Thank you for listening to our messages and it gives us great joy to know that this program is being a blessing to your life.

I want to leave you with the blessing words of Moses to the people of Israel. Jehovah bless you and keep you, Jehovah make his face shine upon you and have mercy on you. Jehovah lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

It is a privilege for me to be part of your life, I hope you stay tuned to our program 'An appointment with Christ'. I bless you in the name of Jesus.

And the Jew of today, although he does not believe in the Bible as we believe in it, or in the Old Testament, even if it is, they go to the synagogue and sing the ancient psalms and Hebrew songs and love the teachings and stories of the Bible and celebrate Easter and celebrate the different festivals and Jewish culture, despite the fact that it is an eminently secular culture in Israel, is tied to this book. This book has preserved the Jewish people from cultural extermination.

Look at the power of the word that still, is like Elisha's bones that says that when Elisha died a man was running away, they threw a dead man into Elisha's tomb and the dead man came out alive, Elisha's bones still blessed that dead man . The Bible, even when it is treated as a mere cultural document, still blesses men, how much more with us who accept it as the word of God. That's what I mean.

If that document is a skeleton in the hands of cultural unbelievers, it can still bless humanity, how much more so we who are eating its marrow, its blood, its life through faith. And that is why, brothers, we have to be the people of the word because this word has something mysterious, something wonderful.

I have read hundreds and hundreds of books in my life, but I have not seen before, if they told me that I was going to be on a deserted island and they told me which book you want to take with you, without hesitating I would say, give me a Bible, because there is no book that blesses like the word of God. Because? The Bible itself says in Hebrews 4, because the word of God is living and effective, it says, and it is sharper than any two-edged sword. He says that he discerns, that he divides the soul from the spirit and discerns the thoughts of the heart. And he says that there is no impulse of the human soul, no matter how intimate it is that the word of God does not discern it and does not illuminate it, does not illuminate it.

The most psychoanalytic book of the entire human race is called Scripture, here is the heart of man structured, drawn, dissected, studied in all its ramifications. The word of God is alive. And that is why when you feed yourself, when you plug your life into the word of God, you are receiving, not mere knowledge, not mere theory, you are receiving electricity, life, energy, power. Because the Bible has something that I believe is a magical configuration of its letters that when they are united like this and blessed by the spirit of God, when you read that word and that word enters your mind and your brain, it blesses you because it is the life of God itself coming into you. No other book can do that because no man can produce life, but God has mysteriously enclosed all the secrets, all the arcana of the universe in a limited book. The infinite is contained in the finite. Only God can do that, no other person can do it.

I believe that all the secrets of the universe are compressed here in this book. Computers today have developed the ability to take the information that is inside of it and compress it so that a limited space can hold more information. God is capable of doing that infinitely. And in this tiny book, relatively speaking, God has compressed all the secrets of the universe, all of life, all the knowledge of the human race, of the future, of the past, of the present, it is in this beautiful, mysterious, magical book that is the word of God.

Therefore, no matter how many books you read, and how anointed the meditations are, and the stories of men, the word, the naked Bible, will always have something that other books do not have. It should never be a substitute, reading secondary meditations, instead of going directly to the fruit taken from the tree, which is the word of God. The difference between eating canned vegetables and eating them fresh from the ground, with their minerals and nutrients intact. Never go to a man's book when you can go directly to God's word. The books of men are good, they are interesting, they are intuitive, but the word of God has something very special.

And let me share something very personal, perhaps I've said it before, and I say it as a tribute to my mother. Some of the most beautiful memories of my life are waking up early in the morning, to the smell of coffee, in my country, the Dominican Republic, as a child, and waking up and seeing my mother sitting at her table reading the Bible. I grew up with that image and have held onto it as an inspiration throughout my life.

And despite all the twists and turns that my life has taken, this image was tied to me and I to it through the years, and when God's time came I had to return to his call. And I still keep my mom's Bible from many years ago, all tattered and torn apart and marked with its loose pages from so much use, and I hope that I can keep it through many, many years and that it will be an inspiration to me because brothers, there is something wonderful inheritance that you can leave to your children. I thank my mother for the blessing that has been throughout my life, the inspiration, that attachment to the word of God. She has transferred me. It is an inheritance that she has left me and that she will leave me through all the years.

My brothers, what a greater blessing you can leave your children than the memory of a father or a mother who loved the word of God above all things. You can leave them millions of dollars and you can leave titles and other things, but hopefully you leave them the image of a father or a mother who revered, studied and knew and honored and obeyed the word of God because this is going to persecute them through life and even if they go out and walk around, whatever, this image is going to be like a bloodhound that is going to be looking for them, looking for them, looking for them until they give up and say, ok, I give myself up, because says the Bible says, instruct the child in his way and when old he will not depart from him.

This is a ticking time bomb that you put in their guts. It may take years to explode but one day it explodes and covers the whole being and this person has to fall at the feet of the Lord. Brothers, we have to love the word of God, we have to revere the word of God, which is why God gave it so much importance because he knew that what he was giving them was life, that God was enclosing his life, his spirit, his revelation in the very matter of the word, in the very verb that he was giving them, he was giving him all the secrets and all the nutrients and all the laws of the universe. And when they entered into an intimate, personal relationship of faith with that word, what that word declared was actualized and gave them life.

Then God tells you there, when you enter this land that I have promised you, to fight nations much more powerful than all of you, these nations could eat you alive and you would not even realize that they swallowed you, how powerful What are they. When you go to war with these nations, you better take my word with you, love it, study it carefully, ingest the strategies that are within it, because that is what will assure you victory. when you cross the river. And he is going to make sure that his national life is a fruitful life and a positive life, and a life of progress and blessing.

Why do nations decline? Why the great Russian empire with all its power and with all its weapons and with its vision so precise and so intense, why that empire, the extent of the Russian empire, you cannot imagine, thousands and thousands of miles, cover not only Asia but also other countries where they reached, part of Europe, parts of Latin America, Africa, it spread everywhere, where is the famous Russian empire today with all its greatness? Debris, destruction, death, mourning, regret. What is the Russian nation today? A third world country. Because? Because they dared to raise their pride against the word of the Most High, and nations prosper as long as they stay aligned with God's revelation. It is hard for you to kick against the pricks, says the word of the Lord. It is hard to try to live life according to a different structure than the one God has established through his word. God has declared his word and his word reverberates throughout the universe. There are circles and there are secret channels that govern this universe and men can only prosper when they operate and function according to those secret waves that God has established for human life and for the universe. Whoever violates this is going the opposite way and will have to fail, will have to be destroyed sooner or later. What God wants is for you to align yourself with your word. And how are you going to align yourself if you don't study it, if you don't scrutinize it, if you don't read it? That is why God tells them, therefore you will put these, my words, in your heart and in your soul and you will tie them as a sign on your hand, they will be frontals between your eyes, you will teach them to your children, speaking of her when they sit down, when they get up, when they walk on the road, when they lie down, you shall write them on the posts of your house and on your door.

That is what God wants. Brothers, we are going to renew our love for the word of God on this day. We are going to promise that we are going to be lovers, in love with the word of God because that word has so many things. The word of God gives direction and illumination. The Bible says, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. The word of God will give you advice when you have dilemmas, when you have problems, when you have difficult situations, go to the word of God, it will give you a path to follow. She will open your understanding, she will tell you what you have to do. It gives direction, it gives illumination, the word of God gives intelligence and wisdom.

Says the psalmist, the entrance of your word illuminates the face. Many of us haven't been to school, we're maybe even semi-illiterate, we haven't been to high school, but you know what? Many of us look like professionals and even have a doctorate because we have been working with the word of God for years. One sees how the evangelical people progress by dint of studying the word, their children are blessed, they become intelligent people, who project more authority than they actually have according to the titles or academic experiences they have had. Because? Because the word of God illuminates them, by dint of listening to sermons like this, and listening to classes, and handling the Bible and reading and all this, it lights up their face, they seem like intelligent people even though they are not, I am playing. But it enlightens you, the person studied has something, a configuration, it is something, the movement of an eyebrow, the turn of the mouth, something that expresses the richness that is inside. You are rich in the word of God, we are rich in the word of the Lord. That illuminates the face, gives intelligence, gives wisdom.

The word frees us from ties, prejudices, fears. The Lord Jesus Christ said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Men live prisoners of all kinds of psychoses and neuroses and complexes and fears and anguish. Brothers, in the word of God there is liberation, the chains, the yokes are removed and faith comes why? For the ear But you will not be able to grow in your faith if you are not growing in the word. How much time do you spend reading the Bible? During the week, how many times have you taken that book and sat down with it to read it, to study it, to savor it, how much? I'm not saying this to make you feel guilty. Or yes, feel guilty, it's okay. I am saying this so that you can go home, when you leave here make a pact with God that I am going to take the word more seriously and I am going to dedicate time.

Nobody has time, I know, but look sometimes you don't even have time to breathe, however you do, right? Because he knows what the consequence of not doing it is, because the word of God is even more important. It helps us to know ourselves, because that is what it says, that it discerns the thoughts of the intentions of the heart. There is nothing, men and women live in neurosis and problems because they do not know themselves. The Bible is the best instrument for one to know oneself.

Through the Bible, when you see David in his problems, when you see Peter with his tribulations, and see Abraham with his failures and Jacob, and you will know yourself because you will see yourself portrayed in different ways, different perspectives and you will know yourself, the springs that move your soul, your mind, your subconscious. The Bible is a tremendous book of psychotherapy, of psychoanalysis, of introspection. When you know the Bible thoroughly you will know yourself too.

Finally the Bible assures us of success in life. As you see in this passage here, God tells the Jews, if you do this and do the other, I will give your land rain at its proper time, early and late, you will gather your grain, your wine and your oil, I will also give grass in your field for your cattle, you will eat and be satisfied, many of us eat and are not satisfied, we are spiritually and emotionally hungry, because we do not have the word of God. But God wants to ensure success in life.