Noah

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Hello. Hey. There we go. Now I can hear myself. How are we? Good. Well, it's good to be back with you guys again. I guess I didn't offend anybody or say anything wrong last time, so thanks for having me back. I wanted to begin this morning with a joke that I heard the other day from a pastor down in Houston. His name is Ed Young, Sr. He's the pastor of a small church called Second Baptist Houston. He says, a doctor, a lawyer, and a pastor go deer hunting together. Now they're all sitting out in the field at three different spots, and a deer comes up, and all three of them end up shooting at the same time. They all convene together, and the doctor says, guys, I got it. And the lawyer says, no, I'm the one who shot it. And the pastor says, guys, I'm pretty sure I shot it. Doctor's like, all right, I'll be able to tell when we get up to it. So they walk out into the field and look at the deer.

The doctor does a brief examination, and then he says, well, the pastor definitely shot it. And they said, how do you know? He said, well, because it went in one ear and out the other. I say that to help us remember to not let that happen to us this morning. Please don't allow the words that you hear this morning and every Sunday from this stage to go in one ear and out the other. With that, let's jump into today's topic. Today we're going to be in Genesis chapter 6. If you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and flip there. Recently, you all have been walking through a characters of the Old Testament that are normally glossed over. Meaning, there are many small characters that are overshadowed by either the event that they're in or bigger names in the Bible. They're not given as much study, not as much time. Pastor Drew wants us to take a look at the smaller names

and see that they do have a major role and that they have so much to teach us in our lives today, even though they are not seen by many of us as major characters in God's eyes, they are. Today, we're gonna be looking at Noah. Now, I know what you're thinking. Noah's a major name. What do you mean, a small character? Noah is usually overshadowed by the world-changing event that he is a part of. What we can learn from him is usually lost by the story of the flood. Noah is first mentioned in Genesis 5, verse 28. This is where we see that he is the son of Lamech and the grandson of Methuselah. Now Methuselah, if you remember, is the oldest living man in history. He lived 969 years. He is one of the most faithful men also in the Bible that many don't know. His father is Enoch, which is the great grandfather of Noah. Enoch was so faithful that God came down and took him away, is what scripture tells us.

He didn't die, he wasn't killed, but he was taken away by God. So Noah comes from a line of truly faithful and blessed men. But Noah's importance is not because of the family that he came from, not the lineage, but because of his own faith in God. Look with me at Genesis 6, verse 1. When human beings began to increase in number on the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal, Their days will be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward. When the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them, they were the heroes of old, men of renown. The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that

every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created, and with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground. For I regret that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, I am going to put into all people, for the earth is filled with violence

because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood. Make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it. When we hear about Noah, we usually think of the Ark and all the animals. And we think about the 40 days and the 40 nights that they spent during the Flood in the Ark. But I don't want us to focus too much on the Flood itself this morning. Instead, I want us to learn from Noah's actions throughout this world-changing event. states that the world was so corrupt, so bad that God regretted creating it. So much so that he wanted to wipe the face of the earth clean of all life to destroy it. But out of all the hatred, all the bloodshed, all the evil in the world, there was a man named Noah. A righteous man. A man who even though you know he faced trials, ridiculed, and was cast out in his society because of his belief, he stayed

true to God. God saw this and decided that Noah and his family should live. That he would spare him. So God placed a call on Noah's life. And not just any call, many of us think that this call was to build a boat and to go gather animals and ride it for a while. But the true call was for Noah to leave behind his brothers and his sisters, his nieces and his nephews, all his friends, everything and everyone that he knew, and go into a world that was brand new and had been destroyed by a flood. Not only was Noah an outcast and seen as a nut job of his day because of his faith, but now he decided to build a massive boat. I mean, can you imagine being in Noah's neighborhood and your neighbor just starts building this giant wooden boat? And for reference, this wasn't just a big boat. It was a football field and a half long. It was huge. Any football players in here?

Anybody ever walked a football field or run from end zone to end zone? It's not a short distance. It is quite big and when you build it out of wood and have to make rooms and coat everything inside to make it waterproof, it's a big ordeal. Especially when it's just you and your sons that have to build it. There are ship enthusiasts and scientists throughout the past that have studied the dimensions of the Ark and said there's no way that this Ark could have sustained life. There's no way that this Ark would have been able to float during a massive worldwide flood. However, if you go today to Branson, Missouri, you're able to see an exact replica of the Ark where it has been built to the exact specifications that are listed in the Bible. And now people have begun to redact their statements because they are able to see that it is possible to sustain life.

That it is possible to float in the water. If educated people from today's world doubt Noah and the ark, can you imagine the jokes and the hard things that were said to him by his own people? But all of it though, Noah stayed faithful. Here's a major point I want us to pay attention to today. Noah shows us that even in a world that stands against God, Noah shows us that it is possible to remain faithful in the midst of unfaithfulness. This is not the only lesson from Noah's life though. Noah must have felt lonely. He must have thought, I'm the only righteous person in my entire generation. I'm all alone. He must have felt lonely once the flood was over, and he opened the door, and there was a world without humanity, without life, except what was on his boat. But it is believed that Noah exercised more faith after the flood than he did before and during. How? How can this be possible?

How is it possible to build an ark and get in it with all these animals and all your family and lose everything you have, but exercise more faith afterwards than you did when getting onto the boat? Look at Genesis 8 verse 15. Then God said to Noah, Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you, the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground, so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it. So Noah came out together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds, everything that moves on the land came out of the ark, one kind after another. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord. And taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.

The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart, Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done, as long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.

After the flood, the very first thing that Noah did after he walked out of the boat was what? He built an altar of praise to God. Now, I wanna ask us, when was the last time that we spent about a year in trial? Which is actually how long Noah and his family spent in the ark. It wasn't just 40 days and 49s. But as you do the math and you go on to see how long it took for the waters to recede so that they could actually step out, it is about a full year that they spent living in this wooden boat with all these animals. When was the last time we went through a hardship like that? Isolation like that. And the very first thing we did when it ended, When we saw relief, saw the chance for hope, as we fell down to our knees, and through prayer and praise made an altar to God. As humans, so often, what we do is we pray our way through difficulties. And as soon as the difficulty begins to ease up,

we either forget God, or we say a quick little thank you prayer, like one of those before we eat prayers. But why? Because we focus more on the relief than we do on the reliever. The next time you pray, I challenge you to pay attention to what you were praying for. Are you praying for relief? Are you praying for a possession? Or are you praying for the name of God to be made known through every situation in your life? I hear people talk all the time about how great the faith was of major people in the Bible. like Isaac, David, Solomon, John, Matthew, Paul, I could go on and on. But we wonder how was their faith so strong? What we need to recognize is that they started just like us. The having to learn to focus not so much on the blessing, but on the blesser himself. Paul when he was in prison over and over and over again, took time to write letters to the churches of believers

to remind them to stay joyful like Him, to be hopeful. How? How could a man who was wrongfully convicted be thrown in jail and eventually sentenced to death still be joyful? How could all of Jesus' disciples be killed for their faith and stay joyful? How could Noah get into a boat with his family and a bunch of animals and be hopeful and joyful. And the first thing he does is praise God when it ends. Because they didn't spend their time wondering when is relief coming? When is this going to end? But instead, they focused on the one who brings relief through his name, through his love, through his faithfulness towards us. They knew that physical relief would come, maybe not in this life, It would definitely come in the next. How did they have such great faith? Because they learned to focus more on the blesser than on the blessing. So our question is, is that still possible?

Is faith like this still possible in a world that grabs for our attention at every turn through technology and politics and war? Is it possible to still put God above everything else. Noah showed us that it is possible to follow God faithfully in a culture that stands in opposition to Him. And ladies and gentlemen, let me state that Noah was able to do it in a culture that needed to be completely wiped out because it was so far from God. But we do not live in a culture that is completely in opposition to God. At least, not yet anyway. Is it getting that way? We will one day. Each day the world grows farther and farther away from God. And we get closer and closer to Jesus returning. This is why it is important for us to use this time to learn more about God, to have knowledge with Him and to have a greater relationship so that the distractions of this world don't lead us astray.

If you want an example of a society that is so far from God, You can look at one, the one that Noah was in. But you can also look at Sodom and Gomorrah, a society that is so against God, God didn't destroy it to end the people of Sodom's grief and their evil ways. But he did it to save the unborn of that city. Because God looked down and recognized that anyone that would be born in that city would not have the chance for good, but because of the way they would be brought up in the evil that they would be brought up in, would destroy them before they even had a chance. And if the church of today continues to go down the road that it is, we may see that happen again. On birthdays and Christmas, we give each other gifts, right? And when somebody gives you a gift, they either write their name on the package or in a a card because they want you to know that they are giving you something because they

care about you, because they love you. Many of us are able to recall who gave us this gift because it brought us joy. We're able to look at it years later and go, wow, I remember when my uncle or my aunt or my parents gave me this. For me, one of the things I always think about is when I was a kid, I loved Legos. That was my thing because it was just creativity. I had like this huge tub that was full of all these random Legos that I could build stuff with. But like the next step up in my friend group was Lincoln Logs. Why I don't know. But it was. And I had been wanting one and my uncle had brought me for my birthday a Lincoln Log set. And years later, even now, when I go home to visit my parents, I see that set sitting over in the corner and I think about the joy that was brought to me because my uncle cared enough to get it for me. Many of us, when it comes to God, tend to become consumed by the gift, and we forget to acknowledge

the giver. We could claim that this world has all its problems because we are focusing on the wrong things. But the world will always focus on the wrong things because it is not of God, it does not know Him. But what is scary is the decline in churches around the world, even here in the United States. Not only is the world running from God, but it's beginning to seem that the people of God. Did you know that around 1-2% of the United Kingdom attends church regularly? 1-2%. That's 854,000 people. Now that sounds like a big number, until you realize that it's out of a country of 67.22 million. 854,000 attend church regularly. It's terrifying. Okay, well we're in the US. We don't have to worry about what the UK is doing. We should pray for them, but that's not the trend here, surely. As history serves, the United States and the rest of the world tends to follow the same trends that the United Kingdom sets. The

Pew Research Center did a study that shows over the past decade from 2009 to 2019, adults in the US who identified as Christians dropped by 12%. A new study showed that between 2019 to 2021, the average churchgoers in America dropped from 34% in 2019 to 28% last year. Now, COVID had something to do with that, right? But a lot of people use that as an excuse to not go back. Why? Because we we are losing focus on God. Throughout the Bible, we see that it is possible to stay faithful to God in a culture that is running from Christ. And the key is to keep our focus not on the things that we have, not on the relief, but on the one who brings it. This is a struggle. It was for all the major characters in the Bible. It wasn't just a cakewalk for them. but true faith is seen and built through trial. For those of you today who may not know the giver of all things good,

but you want to, please do not leave here without having a conversation. Church, I implore us today to try this week to focus more on the reliever than we do on the relief, Because true relief is found in Jesus Christ, not in the things of this world. If the world is going to change, you must do it through the one who built the world, the one who created it, and that is God. If we don't like the way that our world, our country, is going, then the church needs to be the one to stand up and change it. Because without the church, we will end up just like Sodom and Gomorrah. Pray with me. Father, we come before You this morning. We thank You for the ability to be able to come to church and praise Your name. God, we ask that You would help us have faith like the greats of the Bible. Help us be able to see You instead of the things of this world. Help us focus more on You than the distractions that are given to us.

We ask that You would be with us throughout this week and that our faith would grow stronger. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Thank you, Gabe. We're going to enter into a time of invitation. And as we do, Mark and Jennifer are going to lead us in singing. And so what I want you to do is I want you to consider all that was preached, all that we read, all that we looked at, all that the Lord said. In our time of response, want to come forward to be baptized or if you just need some prayer that's that's fine too. I'm gonna be up here and so you can just just come on up and talk. Some of you might be you might be wanting to join our church to become a member. Some of you might just maybe just have questions about salvation. You're not really sure kind of what that next step is. That's what we're here for man. That's what we do as a church so we want to help you take that next step.

And so as we sing, I want you to consider all those things, be praying through all those things. Let's sing. What a beautiful name it is, the name of Jesus, Christ my King. What a beautiful name it is, nothing compares to this. What a beautiful name it is, the name of Jesus. You didn't want heaven without So Jesus, you brought heaven down My sin was great but your love was greater What can save us now? What a wonderful name it is What a wonderful name it is The name of Jesus Christ my King What a wonderful name it is Nothing compares to this What a wonderful name it is The name of Jesus What a wonderful name it is The name of Jesus Death could not hold, but it all fell before you And I lent the boast of sin and grave Heaven's all roaring The praise of your glory For you are raised to life again I have no rival, you have no equal Now and forever God you reign

Yours is the kingdom, yours is the glory Yours is the name above What a powerful name it is. What a powerful name it is. The name of Jesus Christ my King. What a powerful name it is. Nothing can stand against. What a powerful name it is. The name of Jesus. What a powerful name it is, the name of Jesus. What a powerful name it is, the name of Jesus.