Preaching at Nishinasuno Church by Uncle Timo.

TOPIC: WHEN THINGS ARE DOWN, LOOK UP

TEXT: LUKE 21:25-33

Greetings in the blessed name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus. My topic for today is “When things are down, look up”.

However, I will like to convey my sincere appreciation to the Church, the Pastor and his elders for your infringing support to ARI. As you are supporting us from the developing countries in ARI, the pride in it is that you are supporting our communities, because if you support a participant, you have supported his or her whole community. So therefore I want to stand on behalf of the ARI community around the world today and say God bless you.

Now the question is; as we see what is happening around the world today, is there anything that we can hold on to? Is there anything that gives us meaning in our lives? There are emptiness and frustration in people of today.

The economic situation has changed drastically that some big companies like Toyota and others are just firing their so called casual workers, while they do not think about the future of these young people and the country Japan rather they are thinking about how they can make money. Things are changing, things are getting wrong. But there certain this that are not change

1. The nature of God does not change. Nothing can compare to the God that we are serving, He is unchangeable God. He is what he is now and what He was before. He is still the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

He is the unchangeable God. Human person changes most of the time for even a promised that they have made, but throughout all these centuries Our God has not changed. He said, “I am the Lord, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should [change]” (Numbers 23:19).

2. God is unchanging in His holiness. God is a holy God, a righteous God: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!” (Revelation 4:8).
God is unchanging in His judgment.

A day is coming in which all of us will stand before the judgment of Almighty God to give an account of our lives; we will give an account of what we did with His Son, Jesus Christ, and of our response to Him when He said, “I love you, I want to forgive you, I want to change you, I want to be your Friend.” What will we answer? What will we do with Christ? The Bible says, “The Lord will judge the ends of the earth” (1 Samuel 2:10).

3.God is also unchanging in His love: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God loves us! God is interested in us. He has the hairs of our heads numbered. He knows all about us, and He loves us! God loves us with a love that we do not understand.

When we come to Christ and give our hearts and lives to Him, He will give agape love—His love—to us so that we can love people whom we usually don’t even like. Now we will love them. He will give us a supernatural power to love.

4. The Word of God has not changed: “The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever,” says the Bible (Isaiah 40:8). The Bible was given to us by God. The Bible is our guide, our compass through life.

The first question that the devil put to Eve in that encounter in the Garden of Eden was, “Has God indeed said?” (Genesis 3:1). He was questioning the word of God. The devil will do everything in his power to keep you from reading God’s Word, from studying it, because believing the message in this Book will change your life!

5. Human nature has not changed. The Prophet Jeremiah wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Human nature is the same all over the world.

I have preached in all kinds of cultures and in all kinds of conditions, and I have learned that the human heart is the same everywhere. The Gospel meets the need of the human heart when a person turns by faith to Christ.

The Bible says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We are sinners.

We have broken the moral laws of God. We are all sinners. And the moral Law has not changed. God gave the moral Law to Moses who recorded it in the Ten Commandments.

• “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). Anything can become a false god.

• “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12). Even when we no longer have to obey our fathers and mothers, we are to honor them.

• “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Adultery is thrown at us from every angle. I don’t know how people today can stay clean and pure in their moral lives without Christ. But with Christ Jesus we can.

• “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15). Robberies, muggings—all kinds of things these are going on; we read about them every day in the newspapers. We watch on Televisions and listen to it almost everyday on radio.

• “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exodus 20:16). That’s lying.

These are from the Ten Commandments, and Scripture says that if we have broken one of those Commandments, we are guilty of breaking all of them (James 2:10).

So we are guilty in the sight of God. That makes us sinners, and sin comes between us and God. We are separated from God by our sin. We all need Christ!

It doesn’t mean that you will become perfect overnight. As long as you live on this earth, you will be imperfect. And you won’t find a perfect church. Only one who has ever lived was perfect and that is Jesus Christ.