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[Music] [Music] (dramatic music) (dramatic music)

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(dramatic music) (dramatic music) ♪ (ominous music) ♪ Come and play ♪

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♪ Come and play ♪ ♪ Come and play ♪ ♪ Shall I play my part ♪ ♪ Hallelujah ♪

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♪ Every time I think about Jesus ♪ ♪ Every time I think about Jesus ♪ I think about Jesus. Every time I think about Jesus.

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♪ No one can be died on Calvary ♪ ♪ Calvary ♪ ♪ Calvary ♪ ♪ Calvary ♪

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♪ Calvary ♪ ♪ Calvary ♪ ♪ Calvary ♪ ♪ Surely thy God ♪

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♪ Shall love thee ♪ ♪ Thought you him ♪ ♪ Calling his father ♪ Don't you hear him calling his father?

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Don't you hear him calling his father? ♪ Poor lady died on Calvary ♪ (dramatic music) [Music]

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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♪ ♪ (eerie music) [Music] Amen.

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We continue our sermon series based on the book of Psalms. We come today to prayerfully consider Psalm number 116. I should read again the first eight verses of this passage. I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplications, because he hath inclined

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his ear unto me. Therefore will I call upon him as long as I live. The sorrows of death compassed me and the pains of hell got hold upon me. I found trouble and sorrow.

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Then I called upon the name of the Lord, "Oh Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul." that eighth verse says, "For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling." I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

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subject of the message, deliverance from death. Deliverance from death. In his psychoanalytic study of the roots of aggression. Eric Fromm relates early childhood experiences to the development of two types of people. He calls them biophiles and necrophiles.

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Biophilus people love life and all that is alive. They wish to further growth, whether it is in a person or a plant or an idea or a social group. The necrophilous people are just the opposite.

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They are possessed by a passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly. It's a passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive to destroy for the sake of destruction.

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Easter is oriented toward life, life that is in the midst of dead surroundings. In the midst of life, we are surrounded by death. People who are spiritually alive coexist with those who are spiritually dead. Society is a cemetery of sorts with dead people floating around in a dying culture.

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bureaucracy, mechanization, the destructive aspects of the media, the plug-in drug television, continual war, the corroding structures of personality, which isolate the individual ever more desperately

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from others as well as himself. These are some of the words of a dying or dead society. We need deliverance, deliverance from the demons of destruction. We need deliverance from death.

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There is a word that comes from that portion of the Psalter which is known as the Haleo that speaks concerning death, which is the focus of our attention in the message today. The Psalmist begins by saying,

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I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplications, because he hath inclined his ear unto me. Therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.

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First notice here that as we read this particular hymn, the words of it, that there is evidence that the Psalmist has been in a dilemma of distress a dilemma of distress. He has encountered dilemmas of distress. Here is a person who

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has been up against it. He's been on the horns of a dilemma, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Life has been rough. He says, "Death cards were tightening around me. The nooses of Sheol," and Sheol is this Hebrew word that is used to describe the underworld, shadowy existence. We translated hell. In other words, he says, "I have had hell. I

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have been encircled by demonic forces. I have been utterly confused by what is occurring around me. I have been without a definite sense of direction. I've been up against it. I've been without a job. I've been unable to meet my obligations. I've been without money. I've been in distress. I've been seriously ill. The

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sorrows of death have compassed me, the pains of hell got hold of me and refused to let me go." This is one of the hymns that Jesus possibly sang with his disciples in the upper room before going to the Garden of Gethsemane. It's a him that fits well with what he was experiencing and what we experience

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because here is one facing a distressful situation. He was caught in what is known as the dark night of the soul. Jesus says to the father, "Now is my soul greatly trouble. His soul was sorrowful even unto death and whenever one enters the dark night of the soul, he enters into a struggle with the darkness of death. When we suffer from sickness that's destined

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to lead to death, who can deliver us? When we suffer from maladies that lead to ostracism and persecution, who can deliver us? You know, when you actually get caught into prolonged periods of suffering, oft times

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find yourself isolated. Even the doctor, when he finds that the patient is caught with some terminal disease, even the doctor doesn't come quite as often. And many times relatives don't come. They don't want to be around. And your close friends, those associates with you through the years, their visits become few. And this is a distrustful situation.

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the Psalmist cries out, "I have been caught hold of by the pains of hell." And he has faced crisis after crisis and each crisis threatens to destroy him and the question is who will deliver us when we are riddled by anxiety, when we are so fearful that ordinary occurrences give us the jitters. You know you'd be like

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that sometimes you become just so fearful your nerves are so much on edge that they're just the crack of a branch on the tree causes you to get disturbed. When we have no peace of mind, no relief from suffering, when each step that we take seems to cause us to become more bogged down in the muck and mire of

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depression. To whom can we turn? The psalmist turns to the Lord. In fact, he He makes what we may call a SOS call to the Lord. He says, "Lord, rescue me. "Help me, deliver me."

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And his testimony is, after he looks back upon it, he says, "I love the Lord "because he has heard my voice and my supplications." And we sing a hymn that is somewhat descriptive

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of that situation when we say, "I love the Lord, "he heard my cries and pitied every groan, "and long as I live and troubles rise, "I'll hasten to his throne."

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So not only has he been caught in dilemmas of distress, he has experienced God's deliverance. This person who has been down was raised up, caught in the clutches of degradation,

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and he experiences relief. He has been trapped in the network of deep distress. He has prayed for deliverance, and the Lord has heard his cry and restored him to health.

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He has been snatched from the jaws of death. And that's what Easter is all about. He has been delivered from death into life. He has gone from sorrow into joy.

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He has gone from insecurity into stability. The Lord has delivered him. And so because the Lord has delivered him, he now comes to the sanctuary,

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and as he worships in the temple, the presence of his brothers and sisters he says I love the Lord because he has heard my voice and my supplications and I love him and I'll serve him as long as I live. He had been delivered from the worst that can happen because he had been

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delivered he knows that there is one no matter what occurs in his life he knows that the Lord is able to deliver him and this my brothers and sisters is the message of Easter God delivers us from death that's what it's all about that the worst thing that can happen in our lives death itself that God is able to

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deliver us from death. And what does that mean? Well he's able to deliver us from the death of meaninglessness. A whole lot of things all around us that get us down are meaningless. A whole lot of things that would entrap us, that we get bogged down in, they really don't matter. It's meaningless, but God is able to

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deliver us. He's able to deliver us. You can't go around worrying about everything people gonna say about you. Oh it hurts many times, they drive nails in that cross that you have to carry, it hurts but don't worry about it because God is able to deliver you. When you lay up close to him and trust in him he's

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able to deliver us from meaninglessness and then he's able to deliver us from from tragic endings. So don't worry about when you serve God, don't worry about how you're going to end up when you serve him. When you serve God, many times as you

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come to the end of the way, it looks like on this side that it really doesn't matter. You know, I see it happen so often. I see it happen every--

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I see sometimes, you know, I see people who live long and useful life, beautiful life, been faithful to God for 50 years. And when they come to the end of the way,

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sometimes when you come to that funeral, You'll hardly have anybody there. But don't worry about that, because that's really not the end.

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When you come to the end of your way, what looks like a tragic end, God can make it triumphant. That's the message of Easter. That's the message of Easter, that he

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makes of our tragic endings in this world a new beginning. He delivers us from death. And when everything stops, he keeps on keeping on. That's the message of Easter.

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He delivers us from death. I think Paul Tillich describes it in one of his books. And he talks about during the World War II that there were a group that was hiding in a cemetery,

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hiding from Hitler and his forces in that cemetery. And while they were hiding, taking refuge in the cemetery, that one of the members of the group had a child born in the graveyard.

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And he uses that to describe really the meaning of the resurrection. That in the midst of all of the dead circumstances, in the midst of this terrible atmosphere of a cemetery,

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God brought forth new life. And he's still doing that. He's still doing that in our lives. In the midst of all of the circumstances

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that we may encounter, we may make a whole lot of mistakes and many failures, but God is able to take our life and make of it a new life. And he just keeps us going on and on,

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bringing forth signs of new life. There's a story that's told by Garrison Keller, who's author of a bestseller known as Lake Wobegon Days. And this story occurs in the experience of a Minnesota

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farmer. This man was in the field in the spring. using a tractor and a disc plow. It was a long field.

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The tractor was moving at about five miles an hour. And the man was just bored. It was a warm day. And he wished that he could be anything but a farmer.

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He was tired of working for his dad. And out of sheer boredom, he dozed off. And he started to fall backwards off the tractor seat. And he woke up as he was falling.

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And because the tractor was an old model with a throttle lever that was notched into place the tractor just kept moving and the man fell between the tractor and the disc plow and the tractor just kept on moving he hit the ground and he grabbed for the tow bar and he hauled himself up as far

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as he could but he couldn't pull himself all the way up. He just kept hanging on to the tow bar with both hands as the steel discs were moving behind him and his body was literally being dragged through the dust and and through the manure.

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And he held on as tightly as he could because if he lost his grip, he didn't even have enough strength to cry out for, or to weep, and he recognized that if he lost his grip,

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that would be all. He just kept hanging on and the tractor kept on moving, just ever so slowly, but it kept on moving, until it came to the end of the field and there it met an incline and it went into the woods and then it hit a tree.

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And it was still, the wheels were still turning as it hit this tree and stopped. And the man stayed there for some time, unable to get himself up even after it had stopped. and finally pulled himself up and stood on his two feet, climbed up the seat and turned the key off. That man was delivered from death and he knew that

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he had lost his life and he had gotten it back again and he stayed in farming, he kept on farming, but he began to farm then with a new perspective because God had given him a new vision of life. God had given him a new vision of his love and God had given him a new vision of his power to deliver from death and he

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was a person that had died and had been reborn and when confronted afresh by life we often discover the new meaning of life sometimes when we have a crisis And we find ourselves caught in distress and in dilemmas and it causes us to take a new look at life and we see life afresh and we recognize the goodness and the power of God.

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That's the dilemma of the psalmist. He has been in distress and he's been delivered by God and the last thing he does is that he makes a declaration of praise. know all of us have had some distresses all of us have had some deliverances and

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when we have God to deliver us we ought to praise God for what he has done and that's why every day is sort of an Easter celebration every time God wakes us up we ought to praise him because the Lord has heard our cries and He has delivered us and we ought to declare how good God is and so he says I love the Lord

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He says I Love him because he has heard my cries and my supplications and I will offer sacrifice Unto my Savior because God has done so much for me. I want to do something for him And he said I will pay my vows unto the Lord

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I'll sacrifice to my Savior. I will go to the temple and I will testify concerning the goodness of God in the presence of the worshippers. I will take the cup of salvation because of what the Lord has done for me. It's not enough just to look at the changing of the seasons. It's not enough just to wear some new clothes.

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It ought to be a new sense of dedication. It ought to be a new sense of commitment. It ought to be a new sense of celebration of what God has done in our lives. Oh, I remember that old hymn that says, "Oh, oh, oh, what he's done for me. Oh, oh, oh, what he's done for me.

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I never shall forget what he's done for me." There's a verse that says, "He took my feet out of the Maori clay. That's what he's done for me." He took my feet out of the mirey clay.

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That's what he's done for me. Oh, I never shall forget what he's done for me. Oh, he's done great things for us. He's lifted us up from the muck and bar,

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placed our feet on a solid rock, put a new song in our mouth. He's done wonderful things for us. We ought to be able to say, I love the Lord.

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He's heard my cry. He's heard the voice of my supplications and I will serve him as long as I live. Well, that's the decision we ought to make everybody. We rededicate ourselves to be able to say I come this morning, I don't know about anybody else, but I know for

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myself I come to the garden alone where the dew is still on the roses and the voice I hear falling on my ear, song God discloses, and he walks with me. That's the good news. He hasn't left us, he doesn't just come once in a while, but he's always there. He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I have his

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own. And the voice we hear as we tarry there, none other has ever known. Won't you come? We invite you to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and as your Savior. Join with that fellowship that says, "I love the Lord. I'm committed to him. I'll make that commitment today." Come. We invite you to accept him.

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(upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC] (upbeat music)

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(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (dramatic music) (upbeat music)

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(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (music) (upbeat music)

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(upbeat music) (upbeat music) [Music] (upbeat music)

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(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC]

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(upbeat music) [MUSIC] [Music] (music)

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[Music] [Music] (dramatic music) (upbeat music)

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[Music] [music] Oh gracious God our Father we thank you for your divine deliverance in the midst of our dilemmas of distress. When we call upon you, you hear us and you answer.

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You're always right there in that time of need. You snatch us time and time again from the very jaws of death. And so we praise your name, praise your name as as we glorify your marvelous works on this Easter day. Help us to go forth with recommitted lives

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to tell others of your wonderful work of salvation. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace now and forevermore. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]