Jim Van Gelderen: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. This is Jim Van Gelderen and I’m broadcasting today from Chesapeake, Virginia at the great Hope Baptist Church. We’ve been here this week conducting some revival meetings, also preaching in the Christian school and doing some things with them.
And tonight, Friday night here, we will be having our final service and a big youth night and trusting God to work in many hearts. I’m excited about tonight. Trusting that many young people will be touched.
Gave an invitation today in chapel, and we’re thrilled when most of the young people stepped out that this week, God had worked in their heart and they responded. And they want God to continue to work in their life. And that decision that they made to be life changing.
Well, we want to mention something that’s coming up. You probably know this, but just two weeks away, in fact, less than two weeks now, we’ll begin an annual thing that we do now with degeneration every year called the Degeneration Youth Summit. And we use the theme Cola Clash.
Plus, some of you have attended, but many of you have not been able to attend. And even though it’s a last minute, if you are still able to come, we’d love to have you. And of course, it’s going to be starting on Wednesday, October seventeenth, uh, going all the way through Friday night, the nineteenth of October.
And we’re very excited about all the Lord is going to do in hearts and lives. In fact, as I was thinking about this podcast, I thought to myself, what would I tell somebody who was heading to something like the Generation Youth Summit, where there’s going to be concentrated preaching and an opportunity for God to work in their heart in their life?
And certainly a verse came to mind that I actually preached on last night, many verses, but this was just one, and it’s found in James four six. Some of you have memorized it, but he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
And certainly I would encourage any young person going into a revival meeting or even Sunday Church for that matter, or youth camp, or the Generation Youth Summit, or War of Special Forces or anything where there’s going to be concentrated preaching is to go in with a heart of humility. Now God says right here that he gives grace to the humble, but he resists the proud. Years ago, when I did a study of that word resist.
It’s quite an interesting word. It comes out of military terminology and the idea of the olden days, when you would see a line of soldiers locked shield to shield, marching forward, and the idea would be a lone soldier trying to resist that line of soldiers, which would almost be impossible. It’d be certain suicide.
You would be resisted, push back, probably killed. In modern terminology, we of course, have never experienced that kind of warfare. In modern terminology, I would think of football.
Um, sometimes some of the great defenses of the past have had a front for that, even sometimes had a nickname. I remember back in the nineteen seventies, the Los Angeles Rams had a front line, a defensive line. It was called the Fearsome Foursome.
In the nineteen eighties, the Chicago Bears were called the monsters of the midway, and they had a front line, a very fearsome front line. And anchoring that front line right in the middle was number seventy two. Uh, Richard.
They called him the Refrigerator Perry out of Clemson University, and I think he was weighed in excess of three hundred pounds and was quite a quite a big line. So here’s the picture. If you had the football and were instructed to run through the fearsome foursome or those monsters of the midway, some front line like that, you would be resisted, probably driven back five yards.
And if you’re like me, you’d probably be buried half buried before the play was over and maybe even be, uh, it’d be over. Uh, certainly we understand what it means to be resisted.
