Getting Up and Moving On This is a message of inspiration of the help God gives to us and of what He expects us to do with this help. At the end of this message I hope to have rocked all of your worlds and have greatly inspired you all into personal motivation and gratitude to our Lord. This is a message that includes a few miraculous examples from the lives of others both in the Bible and from those alive today. So let me tweak all your interests about this topic by bringing you this first example and it comes from a man living today whose life and the way he lives it has been recorded on video and has been now shared by millions on Face Book. What makes this man so special is that he has no arms or legs and one part of one foot and what seems to be a fully functional complete left foot. When you first start to view this video you are ready to be very sympathetic for this man but you are soon shown by this man that he is very active and very independent. His name is Nate Vujicic, He states that he is happy, loves living life, traveling and even likes going fishing. He walks on his own using his hind end and his left foot and as the video starts goes for a short walk with his dog after climbing down from his bed and opening his bedroom window blinds with his teeth. His walk leads him to his own outdoor built-in swimming pool, and upon reaching it he gets in and goes for a swim. At the end of his swim he climbs out of the pool on the steps of the pool on his own. The next thing the video shows you is Nate and the fact he made himself a sandwich for lunch but what happens then is amazing. He goes into his refrigerator and nudges a can of Coke into his neck between his left check and neck and carries it over to where he is going to eat his lunch and also closes the refrigerator door. He then takes his teeth and his bottom lip as a brace and pries open the flip top on the can and then is set to drink it with a straw he gets with his teeth. The next thing you see is Nate petting his dog with his good foot and then reading a book, using his good book to turn the pages. He reads the book from another couch that he climbed up on. Now he wants to watch a video but his TV and Video machine are on the second level where he lives. So guess what he does. He walks up the stairs to the second level which are winding stairs and contain 9 stairs but first he takes a phone call on his cell phone, propping it on his left shoulder and using his nose to push the buttons. Once upstairs he can pick from videos which are on a shelf at a level which he can get at. So then he picks one out with his good foot and goes over to the DVD Machine which is also located at his level. He then opens the case with His good foot and lifts out the video. Next he puts it into the video player. Then he walks over to a love seat not too far from the DVD and TV set-up. In front of it is a table with the multi-use controller. So he pulls himself up on the love seat and reaches over with his foot and lays back on the headrest and with his foot controls everything and watches a movie. Now he does have an electronic wheelchair for extremely long distances. The video then shows him surfing and playing golf using his body, his head, neck and foot. He has a huge fan base and following and he is an inspirational speaker. The video gives a moment of one of his speaking engagements. During this one he talks about falling down and then he allows himself to fall down onstage to show everyone what it is like for him to fall down. But then he ensures the audience not to worry that he is no different than anyone else in that everyone has had the occasion to fall down one or more times in their life time. Then he shows them how he picks himself back up. It is this message which is so brilliantly given by him. He says if I don’t give up getting back not having no legs or arms that is the really important thing in life and even if it takes him a hundred times he shouldn’t and won’t give up. Then he relates this determination to the efforts that his audience should have when they fall. So obviously he is referring to more than the physical act of falling down. “It matters how you are going to finish, are you going to finish strong?” As the people see this in his audience they are moved. That was the end of the short moment from his speaking engagement and was the end of the Face Book Video. Let us move on to the Holy Bible now for other pieces of great inspiration. As good students of scripture we should all know of the following examples of which I shall now speak about but they are as always very worthy of repeating. The first of these examples comes from Matthew 8:5-13 (NIV), “When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Shall I come and heal him?’ The centurion replied, ‘Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, “Go,” and he goes; and that one, “Come,” and he comes. I say to my servant, “Do this,” and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, ‘Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Then Jesus said to the centurion, ‘Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.’” So how is the Centurion like the Nick in the first example which I gave? He got up when his servant was ill and got active. He physically sought out the Lord for help. He didn’t just sit like a bump on the log and wait for the illness of his servant to hopefully go away by some fluke or by some random act of mercy from the Lord, and he didn.t order any of his other servants or soldiers under him to seek out the Lord when it was his servant whom was sick. Instead he took the proper responsibility for his actions and went out and physically sought the Lord. He didn’t wait around for the Lord to come to him or his servant for the needed help, he actively got busy and sought him out. We today can associate what that Centurion did as showing his faith through his actions which is indeed very similar to that of the actions in which Nick takes daily in his life. Let us never forget the famous passage from James 2:26 (NIV) in which it states, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” So onto the next example from scriptures and let us turn to the Gospel of John Chapter 9. This is the chapter that gives the details surrounding the healing of a blind man by Jesus and what happens afterwards. The message of what is being presented here in this chapter fits right in with the message of this sermon as well as we shall see. But first here is the part of chapter 9 which details the miracle that Jesus performs on the blind man. So this is what it says in John 9:1-7 (NIV), “As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (this word means ‘sent’). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.” As we can see it is quite a miracle to heal a blind man whom hasn’t seen from birth, and by the way the Pool of Bethesda is the scene of another famous healing that Jesus performs. The significance of both pools maybe that if we are washed in the blood of Jesus we are made pure and those pools did that ritually in that era for the Hebrews. So there is most likely a symbolic connection between the pools and Jesus. Everyone was astonished and some even disbelieved in the righteousness of Jesus whom performed that miracle. Now let us continue with this discourse starting from verse 13-21 and 24-34. “They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. ‘He put mud on my eyes,’ the man replied, ‘and I washed, and now I see.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.’ But others asked, ‘How can a sinner perform such signs?’ So they were divided. Then they turned again to the blind man, ‘What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.’ The man replied, ‘He is a prophet.’ They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. ‘Is this your son?’ they asked. ‘Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?’ ‘We know he is our son,’ the parents answered, ‘and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself…A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. ‘Give glory to God by telling the truth,’ they said. ‘We know this man is a sinner.’ He replied, ‘Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!’ Then they asked him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ He answered, ‘I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?’ Then they hurled insults at him and said, ‘You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.’ The man answered, ‘Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. To this they replied, ‘You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!’ And they threw him out.” Now as we can see our newly sighted man from scriptures did in fact get up in a very real sense and moved on, but in more ways than just physically moving on. He moved on spiritually big way as well. He stood up for the Lord in the face of possible persecution from the religious Jewish authorities in that era and he did so without reservation and fear, just like the Nick in the video I talked about. Finally let’s come forward to recent times to an example I can give from my own life from not too long ago. This example is from a terrible event that occurred in my family’s and my life back around 1981. During that time I was not a good man but I believed in the Lord and I found myself doing very good things for people right alongside some very evil things that I was doing at the time as well. We were living in a three story U-shaped apartment building in a basement apartment in a complex in Ypsilanti Mi. At the time we didn’t know that we were living next door to a mentally disturbed young girl whom loved to play with fire. Well one day she happen to be in our group storage area where we all had screened in bins and tried to steal someone’s doll whom was in a bin but couldn’t get it. So she set the storage area on fire. Soon the whole building was on fire. I was at the opposite end of that building from my apartment which was the other side of the U. When the fire started I had to go rescue my Mom and sister and family pets. But I didn’t stop there. None of the fire alarms in the building were working. So I stayed in the building until I got everyone out. I was the primary example back then of getting up and moving on. Even then something inside told me to put all my trust and faith in the Lord concerning my actions that day and I did. Ad you can see I am still here. For me the lesson is you can do anything with the Lord and if you are called upon to do anything by the Lord then never hesitate to go do what he wants you to do. For He is with you; He is your fortress, guide and protector and he will never let you down. Selah!
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 04:07:11 +0000
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