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[ Silence ] [Music] I love the Lord. He heard my cry, and gives me every cry. Long as I live, and troubles rise, I'll listen to you.

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♪ His throne ♪ ♪ I love the Lord ♪ ♪ He heard my cry ♪ ♪ And pitted it ♪

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♪ Every groan ♪ ♪ Oh, thank you, Jesus ♪ ♪ Long as I live ♪ ♪ And troubles rise ♪

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♪ I'll hasten to ♪ ♪ His throne ♪ ♪ Amazing grace ♪ ♪ How sweet the sound ♪

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♪ That saved a wretch ♪ ♪ Oh, a wretch like me ♪ ♪ Oh, yes it did ♪ ♪ I once was lost ♪

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♪ Right now, church, I can tell you I'm found ♪ ♪ I was blind ♪ ♪ But now ♪ ♪ Oh, right now ♪

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♪ I see ♪ ♪ Oh, I love the Lord ♪ ♪ I love the Lord ♪ ♪ Oh, I love the Lord ♪

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♪ He heard my cry ♪ ♪ He heard, he heard me ♪ ♪ He heard my every moan and groan ♪ ♪ I'm his and I'm his ♪

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♪ He heard every groan ♪ ♪ Long as I live ♪ ♪ And troubles, troubles rise ♪ ♪ Yes they do, yes they do ♪

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♪ But I'm gonna hasten, hasten to ♪ ♪ I'll hasten to ♪ I'll hasten to his mighty throne. Said I'll hasten, I'll hasten, I'll hasten,

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hasten to his throne. ♪ Said I'll hasten ♪ ♪ Said I'll hasten, I'm gonna get in a hurry ♪ ♪ 'Cause I need him right now ♪

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♪ Oh, I'm gonna hasten, I'm in a hurry ♪ ♪ I need the Lord right now ♪ ♪ To his throne ♪ [Music]

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(upbeat piano music) ♪ Standing on the cross of Calvary ♪ ♪ The Lord was crucified ♪ ♪ The mob stood round about him ♪

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♪ And they mocked him 'til he died ♪ ♪ Two thieves were hanging beside him ♪ ♪ Just to share the agony ♪ ♪ But one of them, one of them cried out to him ♪

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♪ Oh Lord, remember me ♪ ♪ Oh what, what a shame to kill him ♪ ♪ Out there on that old rugged cross ♪ ♪ Oh, but such, such a death was needed ♪

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♪ Just to rescue all the lost ♪ ♪ Oh, his blood was made a ransom ♪ ♪ Just to set the captains free ♪ ♪ And I know, I'm included ♪

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♪ He will remember me ♪ ♪ Oh will the Lord remember me ♪ ♪ Oh when I am called to go ♪ ♪ Oh when I have crossed the chilly sea ♪

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♪ Will he love my soul ♪ ♪ Oh yes he did ♪ ♪ He heard my people cry ♪ ♪ From bondage set me free ♪

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♪ And when I reach the holy gates ♪ ♪ He will remember me ♪ ♪ But what a shame to kill him ♪ ♪ Out there home at Rugged Cross ♪

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♪ The Bible tells me such ♪ ♪ Such a death was needed just to rescue us ♪ ♪ We were all lost ♪ ♪ His blood was made a ransom ♪

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♪ Just to set the captives free ♪ ♪ And I know, I know, I know I'm included ♪ ♪ The Lord will, yes he will, remember me ♪ ♪ Oh, will the Lord, will the Lord, will he remember me ♪

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♪ Oh, when I am called to go ♪ ♪ Oh, when I am called to see ♪ ♪ Will he ♪ ♪ He is Lord ♪

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♪ He love us all ♪ ♪ Oh yes ♪ ♪ Oh yes he is ♪ ♪ I'm glad he heard my ♪

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♪ Must be ♪ ♪ Feel a cry from God ♪ ♪ God on death ♪ ♪ Set me free ♪

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♪ Oh and when ♪ ♪ When I reach ♪ ♪ Reach the hurly gates ♪ ♪ The Lord will ♪

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♪ Yes he will ♪ ♪ He remember me ♪ ♪ Oh will the Lord ♪ I know he will.

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Oh, when I am called to go. Oh, when I have crossed that chilly sea. Will he hear love's call? Yes!

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Yes! He heard my cry from bondage. The Lord set me free, yes and when I reach the holy gate, oh He will, yes He will, oh will.

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♪ The Lord will remember me when I am called to go ♪ ♪ Oh, when I cross that chilly sea ♪ ♪ Will He love us all ♪ ♪ Oh, I heard Him say, yes, yes ♪

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♪ He heard me from Barnett's gate ♪ set me free. Oh, and when, when I reach the

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early gates, He will, He will, yes He will. Oh, when I,

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when I reach the early gates, He will, yes He will,

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Oh, be alright. (congregation applauding)

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- The region of Tyre and Sidon, and a Canaanite woman from those parts came to meet him, crying, "Son of David, have pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil."

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devil. But the disciples did not want to see Jesus interrupted as they thought. They considered this woman a nuisance, but she persisted even to the point of saying that she was willing to scraps that fell from the master's table. Life has limits.

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Our lifespan has its limit. According to the Psalmist, our days are three score years and 10. But you may go beyond that limit. The psalmist goes on to say, and live possibly to 80 years old. But at any rate, life has limits. And we learn to live

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within our limits. At least some people do. And then we also are challenged in this particular passage of scripture to live beyond our limits. We make a journey from time to time and from place to place and we see a sign saying city limits and then as we

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travel on we may see the sign leaving the city limits. Within that jurisdiction it means that there are certain rules, certain regulations by which we are to abide within those limits. This particular episode, which involves our text, begins with these words in the King James Version, "Jesus withdrew to the

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region of Tyre and Sidon." Now this was foreign territory. He was among strangers. He was among people of a different nationality. He had gone beyond the boundaries of Israel. He was beyond the narrow confines of Judaism. In Tyre and Sidon, the people worshiped a different

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God. They worshiped Baal. It was from this area that the wicked Queen Jezebel came. She brought to Israel 450 prophets of Baal and went about to stamp out the true religion of Israel. What is Jesus doing in the region of Tyre and Sidon? Why doesn't he stay at home? He sent to the

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lost sheep of the house of Israel, then why doesn't he stay there? That's what many people thought. Why should he be in Tyre and Sidon? In going to this region he's going beyond the limits. But there is no warrant that specifies that Jesus must remain in Israel, neither does he need a passport to go beyond Israel. He's

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free, free to do as he wishes. After one of the most busy periods in his life, after feeding more than 5,000 with five barley loaves and two small fishes, and after a very taxing period of healing people of diverse diseases, after this taxing period, Jesus withdrew to Tyre and Sidon. Maybe this is an area where he's

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not well known and there's a certain anonymity that goes with the city. The larger the city, the more impersonal people tend to be. And here he is in the region of Tyre and Sidon, a region known for its trade, for its industry, for its commerce. But Jesus does not limit himself. He was born on a small town,

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Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, but he does not limit his ministry to these places, he goes beyond these geographical limitations. He goes beyond the border. You know we here in Texas have certain ideas many of us do about the border. We don't want too many people to cross over the border, not if they expect to stay

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on this side. It affects our economy. It affects the jobs. It affects the pay. So we are concerned about the border, going beyond the border, especially the people on the other side. Then if I were to address Austin, you know, we have a certain number of people who've come to Austin and now that they have come and

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They enjoy the great benefits of Austin. They want to close the door to anybody else coming in. And we call those people, no growth people. We have our limits.

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- Yes. - Our limits. And Jesus here goes beyond the limits of city and country.

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Mark tells us in his gospel, in the beginning of Jesus' public ministry when his popularity was soaring, that Jesus withdrew.

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And his disciples were looking for him. And when they finally found him, they said, Master, why are you here? Everybody's looking for you.

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Jesus said to them, let us go into the next town. and preach the gospel there, for they need to hear the gospel also. He wanted his disciples to go with him beyond the borders of their occupation, their daily

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occupation. So through this we see our Master as he moves from place to place serving first of all the needs of home. He starts at home, starts in Galilee, the area way. He lived until he began his ministry. He starts there, but we have an old saying, "Charity begins at home

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and spreads abroad." That's what we say. So, the call to Christian discipleship is to live beyond the limits of country, beyond the limits of culture, beyond the limits of race, beyond the limits of class. Alexander the Great, who was instrumental in leading his armies

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from victory to victory and is said to have conquered the world in his day, came with his soldiers to a particular point that they didn't know where they were. So they got off the map and they looked and the place where they were was not on their maps. They had literally marched off of their maps. They had gone beyond

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their limits. Lance, who was a champion who has won the title, the world title, for four times, defied cancer, and really set an example of how one may live beyond his limits. Jesus teaches his disciples to live beyond the limits, and And he leads the way.

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Jesus says, "Sure, there are mountains." But he also says that if you have faith, you can say to this mountain, "Move, and it shall be moved." You can live beyond your limits,

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beyond the difficulties that you encounter, among, beyond the obstacles that are in your path. Matthew at the beginning of this chapter, if you read the beginning of this chapter,

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he talks about the fact that there were some Pharisees and scribes who came from Jerusalem. They were really following Jesus. They wanted to find really what was to this man

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and the way he was carrying out things, so much so that they had their delegation from Jerusalem to come and stay on his heels, so to speak. And so here he is out of the country.

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So they've left the homeland. He's in strange territory. He's in a foreign country. And they're there in this company.

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And they raised a question, they said, "Now, Lord, how is it that you have departed from tradition?" Tradition has to do with limits. How often have we heard it over and over again?

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You haven't done it the way we are accustomed to having it done. That's tradition. You're getting out of the right.

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Tradition, tradition, tradition. And I said, well, let us hear your answer to this question. Why is it that you don't have your disciples to wash their hands before they eat like John's disciples?

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Why is it they don't engage in this ceremonial cleansing? Why is it? They thought they were asking a question that would be difficult for Jesus to answer and they thought they had him on the spot, so to speak, because he wasn't following tradition.

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But Jesus answers, he says, "Well, you haven't been following tradition either because you have tried to evade doing for your parents what the scripture says you should do and honoring them. taken a pledge not to do so when it's been profitable to you. Tradition, yes, but

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going beyond tradition is what we see in Jesus, one who is willing to blaze a new trail. You know, sometimes we say, "Well, what are they doing?" And we keep ourselves from releasing that energy, those great possibilities that are harnessed within us because we don't want to get away from what they are doing. And what

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they are doing may not be the thing that we ought to be doing. Tradition, tradition. Going beyond our limits. Jesus wants us to go beyond our limits. Rudyard Kipling has a poem called "The Explorer." And this man goes, he comes to the edge of a tremendous mountain range, and he settles

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there. He thinks that he has reached the end of the world. This is the thing for him. voice came to him saying something lost, something hidden, something lost beyond

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the ranges. Go and find it. And it came to him day after day. It sort of haunted him until one day he decided to go and he went beyond those ranges and there he found the course of future rivers and new cities because he was willing to go beyond, beyond, going beyond our limits. Oh, so often we limit ourselves. We drop

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because of somebody else rather than go beyond our limits, those possibilities and those potentialities that God has given us. Well, Jesus leads the way for his disciples to go and what happens when he goes beyond the boundaries, beyond the borders into a new country where he meets a woman, Canaanite woman

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and she has gone to beyond her limits. She has a daughter who's ill, she's possessed of a devil. Oh this poor woman is no doubt exhausted her resources going from place to place using the patent medicines that were available and doing everything she could in hiring this doctor and that doctor and finally

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she goes beyond her limits and there she meets Jesus. Whenever we go beyond our limits. He's always there. She meets Jesus and said, "Lord, help me!" In other words, we are finite beings, we all have our limitations, but there is a possibility of going beyond our limits. Ask Joshua and he got more time. We get more added to us

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somehow we realize more because when we go beyond our limits we hook up with the eternal and the eternal invades the finite, the contemporary, and there we have more strength than we would ever possess in and of ourselves because God is with us. He enters into the struggle with us and he helps us. When we go

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beyond our limits we do what is humanly impossible. When we go beyond the limit. We're traveling then by faith, by faith alone. We're not depending upon human strength. We're not depending upon of the limits of our existence. We are going beyond that trusting in God. She says she's hooked up with God when she says,

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"Lord, Lord help me!" And whenever we make that cry to God, He always hears and He comes to our rescue. But all of us have the experience of having come to a point where we're beyond our limits. Sometimes you hear people setting limits before we get there. I'll never do that. We have certain limits that we set. But to go

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beyond, if I could challenge all of us to go beyond our limits. Some years ago we made the decision to go to Europe and to get a Euro pass and go to all of the countries in Europe that we hadn't been in except the Balkan countries. And so There were about nine countries and I had just about two weeks.

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And after getting into the place to get up and down at our age, get on the train, carrying your luggage and we had more luggage than we should have had, carrying all that luggage. And as you went from country to country, it soon got old and you soon got pretty well worn.

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But I shall never forget, we were on our way to Rome and we got on the wrong train and we realized we were on the wrong train. It had been sidetracked and we were just sitting on the train by ourselves and I looked and I saw nobody but us.

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So it made us late, so we got to Rome about midnight. And we were tired and my wife was really tired. And when we were going to go to the hotel and we were trying to find a cab, she just sat down and she said, "I am at my limit and I'm not going to move!"

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And she just sat down on the curb and didn't move. And I went and found a cab so we could move her to the hotel. But she had reached her limit. And all of us have experiences in our lives where we have reached our limit.

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Where we find ourselves, if you please, against the wall. That's the limit. We've reached it. it. We would like to go further, but the wall is there. But God has a way of moving the wall. He's able to cause the wall to tumble down. God is able to do that. We reach our limit. We find

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ourselves in a cage, in a cage with lions, but God is able to lock the jaws of the lion. We find ourselves in a fiery furnace, but God is able to air condition that fiery furnace when we come to the limits of our lives. And I'm so glad, I'm so glad we serve a God who has that power. That when we come to the limits of our

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existence that he is there and he heals, he gives healing. Whenever we hook up with him there is healing, there is wholeness, there is peace, there is power, that's joy when we hook up with him. There's an old old story of a man who lived next door to another. They were both farmers and this man and the next door

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neighbor did not get along very well. There was a quarrel over where his fence was to be and where the other man's fence was to be. And this quarrel had existed for some time among them. Finally, one man of the group decided to take the matter to God and not to the knowledge

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of the other, he did so. And the other man did the same thing. Neither one knew what the other one had done. And it so happened that the next day after they'd made this decision, both having made

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it independent of the other at night, got out the next morning to go out to give the other man the benefit of the fence line, let him have what he wanted. The other man had decided the same thing in his experience, but it all had been by the power of God.

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brings us together, he gives us strength, he gives unity, he gives power when we trust him and that's the power of prayer. To lift us beyond the ordinary, to give us strength beyond that of our own and to help us over the hills and to lead us us through the valley, going beyond our limits. I think this

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woman had a story to tell when she went back to her family and friends in that region. She had a story to tell. I met a man. Where was he from? Well, he was from Israel, but he was in our country. He had gone really beyond his limits, but he helped me. He lifted me up, changed the course of my life. I met

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I met this one when I was just a boy nine years of age. He lifted me up from the muck in my place, my feet on a solid rock, put a new song in my mouth and established my goings.

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He went beyond his limits. And he went beyond my faults. dealt with my needs. It's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful life when you go beyond your limits. And I could testify about this for some time because there are always instances where you

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go beyond your limits. As a youngster in the ministry, I never wanted to build anything. I talked with older ministers and they told me how people acted when you tried to build. And so I didn't have that on my agenda at all. And when I got called to a church that

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seemed to have been well built, I said, that's great. I won't have to ever worry about-- I can patch it up, but I don't have to build it. And so there I came to Ebenezer.

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And as things went, God just pushed it along. Some people said, you know, you'll never do that. You'll never do that. And you don't.

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God does it. And that's enough. That's enough. You put your hand in the hand of God,

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and God enables you to do that which you could never, never do of yourself. God. Trust in him.

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So go beyond. As the songwriter says, I want to live above the world. Though Satan's darts at me I have,

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I've caught the joyful sound, the song of saints of higher ground. As we sing higher ground. - Thank you Jesus, thank you.

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