Passing the Baton of the Gospel – Part 2

Here's Anne Graham Lotz. If you were like me, you watched some of Queen Elizabeth's funeral and services, and I don't know if you've been to the Tower of London. But remember, those gorgeous jewels are displayed on black velvet because it's a contrast between the black velvet and the jewel that makes the jewel just be seen in all of its magnificence and glory. And God sometimes allows black velvet to come into our lives.

So I can ask you, what is the black velvet? The purpose is to display His glory so that other people see Jesus in you, starting with your children and your grandchildren. Because hard things are going to come into their lives, and they need to know that God will be there for them, that He will bring them through, He will give them strength and stamina and energy and all that they need to go through that difficult thing.

So Enoch teaches us by his example that if we want to pass that baton successfully, effectively to the next generation, not only do we bear testimony, witness to the gospel in our own lives, but we worship, and we never cease to worship. In fact, can I just tell you, I think practicing the presence of God, cultivating your personal love relationship with Jesus, is what keeps us balanced, keeps us sane in the crazy world in which we're living. Because He's so much more important than anything anybody says, thinks, does.

And what the world says and thinks and does just doesn't affect us. It does in that we pray and we want to do something, but you know what I mean? In your heart of hearts, you're secure, you're confident in Jesus. He is Lord, He is King.

Getting off on another rabbit trail, He's coming, okay? Alright, so Enoch passed that baton to Canaan, Canaan passed it to Mahalel, Mahalel to Jared, and then to Enoch. And I want to pick up with Enoch. Verse 21 and 22, when Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years. This is interesting, he began walking with God when his baby was born.

And I can imagine him holding this little baby and seeing the little rosebud mouth and the little lashes on his cheeks and looking at this wonder of creation that had come into the world and thinking, how can I raise a godly boy in this wicked, woke culture in which we live? And that's when he began to walk with God. When did you begin to walk with God?

Were you overwhelmed with the responsibility with your own children or your grandchildren? Something else just impressed you that I can't do this on my own, I need God every moment of every day and you started walking. And what does it mean to walk with God?

So, simple. At home, I love to walk with a friend. Walking is my exercise of choice. And when I walk with somebody, the walk just seems to go faster.

You know, it's just not as burdensome. So we have two rules, or we don't walk together. So the first rule is we walk at the same pace.

The second rule is we walk in the same direction, or we don't walk together. So the same thing is true when you walk with God. You walk at his pace, which is moment by moment, step by step, obedience to his word. And how can you do that if you're not reading your Bible?

And reading it regularly in order to hear what he has to say, apply it to your life and live it out. So you walk at his pace. You walk in his direction, which means you don't go off in a direction of your own.

You don't come up with your own plans and dreams and goals. You totally surrender everything to him. So that you walk in his direction. His will becomes yours.

What he wants, you want more than what you want. And that's what it means to walk with God. Walking at his pace.

Walking in his direction. And Enoch did that every day for 300 years, until God became more real to Enoch than anybody else in his life. And heaven was on his mind. He was focused on eternity. And one day, he just walked right into heaven.

Verse 24, Enoch walked with God, then he was no more because God took him away. I can remember my mother, she was, well my father too of course, but my mother was one that lived in the home so I saw her up close and personal every day. And it didn't matter what time I got up in the morning, I'd find her on our big flat top desk and she had 14 different translations of the Bible and she'd be meditating on the Bible and comparing the verses. And actually before she went to heaven, she gave me her Bible.

And every page, the margins are just cluttered with her notes and her thoughts and her insights. And at night, it didn't matter what time I went to bed, I'd slip down to her room, I'd find her on her knees in prayer for an hour or more. And she walked with God. She had a wonderful sense of humor, very witty, had a sort of a wicked sense of humor because she liked to play sort of practical jokes. But she was deeply spiritual and she felt as called to raise five of us as my father felt called to be an evangelist. And she made sure that when my father came home, she was the well from which he drank. You know, she wasn't always pulling from him. She had an overflow to give to him because she walked with God.

And this is interesting and this is the truth. I never saw my mother lose her temper. And she had five of us to raise, pretty much as a single parent. Never saw her. I maybe have seen her cross a couple of times. But she had joy, she had peace, she was a very strict disciplinarian, but you could see the character of Jesus coming out in her.

That's what Enoch had. So, how's your walk going? Something stopped you? Something interrupted your walk? Weariness can do it.

Traveling can do it for me. Not, you know, but just my disciplined prayer life and Bible study and Bible reading, it seems hard to juggle it with so many responsibilities. But you know, I've gotten so that I don't dare go into my day without it. So, whatever you do, if for some reason you've halted, maybe you're limping and you walk up and down, up and down, sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, sometimes you do. So just from today on, recommit yourself every day to reading God's Word, every day to spending time in prayer. And you do that in the morning, then that stays with you all day and you can do it again at night or whenever. But don't forsake walking with God, His pace, His direction.

It's critical because that leads us to the next one. It's as you walk with God, He'll give you that assignment, the work that He wants you to do. This is Noah. In verse 28, Methuselah passed it to Lamech who passed it to Noah.

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son named him Noah. And Noah, you can find him down in chapter 6 verse 8, Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time and he walked with God.

He was the tenth man on this list. And in chapter 6 verse 8, Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time and he walked with God.

Tenth man on the list. And Noah could have said, Oh God, you know who my family is. Lamech is a great man of prayer. Enoch walked right into your presence. You know, I've come from a great family, you accept me because of who my family is. Or he could have said, Oh my goodness, I can never pray like Lamech and I can never walk like Enoch and so I just can't do this.

But Noah wasn't overwhelmed and he wasn't proud. He just was a man in a wicked civilization who walked with God. I remember at the age of 16, I have no idea what triggered it, but I thought up until that point, if I stood before God, I would tell him who my father was and tell him who my grandparents were. And that he would somehow give me credit for my family. And then it just struck me that when I stood before God, I would stand before him by myself and give an account to him for what I had done and the way I had lived my life.

And that just jerked me up cold because I hadn't done anything for him. You're going to stand before God also, not for judgment of your sin, praise God, that was dealt with at the cross. But we're going to go through that award ceremony and where your life can either be wood, hay and stubble, burnt up because it wasn't done in God's way according to God's will and obedience to his word or gold, silver precious stones.

So which will it be? Noah was someone who wanted to serve the Lord and I remember kneeling down in my bedroom, the same one where I knelt and asked Jesus to be my Savior. I knelt down by the window and I told God I wanted my life to count.

This was at 16. I wanted to do something so that when I stood before him, I would have something to show for the life I had lived. With all my heart, I wanted the gold, silver and precious stones. That was a decision I made and looking back at this age, I can look back and see that God accepted my commitment, took me sort of a circuitous route but I've been able to serve him. I believe in a meaningful way according to what I believe his will is for my life.

I was telling Jeffrey who is interpreting this into Chinese, so Jeffrey thank you. I'm telling my grandfather. My father's parents lived about two and a half hours away from us and so I wasn't as close to them as my mother's parents. I will tell you about my father's parents. My father's father was somebody who never made it to high school but he was a very successful businessman in Charlotte, North Carolina. One of the things he did, he met with a group of other businessmen and they began praying for their city. He started the rescue mission in Charlotte and that started rescue missions that are now in cities all across our country. Then he also started praying with this group of men that God would raise up an evangelist, somebody who would share the gospel with the nation and never dreaming it would be his own son. That was the work that he did. My mother's father, L. Nelson Bell, signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles, the baseball team that gave him the option of not playing on Sunday because he refused to play on Sunday. He actually got out of the contract because he became a surgeon and went to China and served in China as a medical missionary for 25 years, I believe it was, and established the largest hospital outside of the continental United States. It had 300 beds.

That's where my mother was born and raised in China. Then he came back. When the Japanese came in, he had to come out and stay in Asheville where he set up his practice. While he was setting up his medical practice, he became an adult Sunday school teacher.

He was the moderator of what was then the Southern Presbyterian Church and serving the Lord. My grandmother, my mother's mother, headed up the women's hospital in China. She helped to raise me. When my father was gone, she taught me to read. She taught me to sew.

She was just the most precious person in my life other than my own mother and father, and that was the work that they did. My mother had a sign over the kitchen sink that I've copied for my kitchen sink, but it says, divine service will be conducted here three times daily, implying that housework done unto the Lord, doing dishes done unto the Lord, raising children done unto the Lord can be work that brings God glory. But I believe at our age, God would have something for you to do outside your home, maybe in your church, in your neighborhood. I have a friend who played tennis, and all the women out there are just godless, and so she started a Bible study at the racket club, and they came with their little confirmation Bibles, little zippers that had never been opened before, and she began a Bible study just to teach them about God and how he loved them. I have another friend who had four children at the same time, and so all of her neighborhood children would congregate at her house, and she was getting frustrated because they're trampling her bushes and her flowers, and finally she said no, you know, and she started a backyard Bible club, and now she teaches about 500 people in a Bible class in my city. Another friend whose children were going to catch the bus in the morning, and it was raining, so her house was right at the bus stop, so the children and the other children that gathered at the bus stop came into her house, and so she did with them what she does with her children. She read a verse, and she prayed for them, and then the bus came, and she sent them off. The next day it was still raining.

They did the same thing. The next day it wasn't raining, but here come all the little children, and they want to hear that verse, and they want to be prayed over. So how do you know what your assignment is? I can promise you, Ephesians 2 says you have preordained works to do.

What are they? I don't think you're going to know unless you start walking with God. It was while Noah was walking with God that God told Noah, my paraphrase, I'm fed up with what I see. The world is wicked, people evil, saturated in it.

I'm going to destroy both man and beast. Judgment is coming. As Noah walked with God, he knew that judgment was on the heart of God, and then God said, so build yourself an ark. Salvation from judgment was on his mind, and I don't walk with God as closely as I should, as consistently as I should, but I can tell you, I know those two things are still on his mind today, and when he looks at our nation, and I'm not going to tick off all the national sins, you know what they are, but my mother said that he would have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah if he doesn't judge America.

I think we very may well be under his judgment now, where he just backs away, leaves us drawn to vices, and our own devices are just evil. The enemy has come in like a flood, but there is an ark, and Noah, he built the ark. God brought him all the animals.

He got them all situated for seven days. The door was open. New Testament says he's a preacher of righteousness, so you know he stood in that door, and he was telling anybody who came to look at this crazy old man in this great big boat and all these animals, and what are they doing, and judgment's coming. You can be saved. Come into the ark. Judgment's coming. You can be saved. Come into the ark, and nobody came. So on the seventh day, God himself closed the door, and the judgment everybody said was not coming, came.

Swept them all away, but because of Noah's work, oh, listen to me, because of his work, his family was saved. You're praying for your grandchildren, your unsaved children. Then listen to me. Wrap your hand around that baton of the gospel. Don't give it up.

Don't even loosen your grip. You know, we know what the truth is. You must come to God through Jesus or you don't come, and you fill your life with worship.

Oh, goodness. Develop your love relationship with Jesus, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Call on his name, especially in those hard times. Let your family see. Nothing has interrupted your praise, and you walk with him every day. Let them catch you on your knees in prayer. Let them catch you reading your Bible. You apply it to your life.

You live it out. This is what the Bible says, and then as you're walking with God, ask him to give you an assignment. What can you do for him?

Ask him to impress it on your heart. I think as we walk with God, he puts his burdens on our heart, so our prayers are not so much gimme, gimme, gimme. Our prayers are, God, what's on your heart?

What can I do for you? So, the baton, the gospel, was received face to face, as God himself imparted it to Adam and Eve, and then it was relayed faith to faith, to the generations. From Adam, to Seth, to Enosh, to Kenan, to Mahalalel, to Jared, to Enoch, to Methuselah, to Lamech, to Noah, to Shem, to Eber, to Terah, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Joseph, to Moses, to Joshua, to Deborah. And I know I'm skipping some generations.

I would be here all day, okay? To Gideon, to Samson, to Ruth, to Samuel, to David, to Solomon, to Josiah, to Hezekiah, to Elijah, to Esther, to Nehemiah, to Ezra, to Haggai, to Zechariah, to John the Baptist. And once again, man's faith became sight, and Jesus of Nazareth walked beside the Jordan River, and John the Baptist said, oh, my goodness, there goes the Lamb of God, who will take away the sin of the world.

The sacrifice that God requires is actually a person of his Son. So the baton, once again, was face to face. And John the apostle said, I've seen him.

I've seen God in the face of Jesus Christ, full of grace and truth. And Polycarp heard John's testimony. And Polycarp passed it to Ambrose, Ambrose to Augustine, to Anselm, to Wycliffe, to Huss, to Luther, to Knox, to Calvin, to Bunyan, to Edwards, to Wesley, to Whitfield, to Asbury, to Carey, to Spurgeon, to Moody, to Haldim, to Sunday, to Mordecai Ham, to Billy Graham, to me, and to you, and to your children, and your grandchildren. Don't drop the baton.

Don't even bobble it. Have you ever thought what would happen if everybody like us neglected the huge privilege and responsibility of passing the gospel to the next generation? I know God always has a remnant, but I believe, you're looking at the next generation, something has happened, and we've been dropping the baton, maybe because we leave it up to the evangelists, we leave it up to the professionals, you know, instead of ourselves, living out our own testimony, our witness in front of them, from a heart of worship that never ceases, walking with him on a moment-by-moment basis, working for him as he's assigned us, and they see that, and they want to grasp the gospel for themselves.

So, make sure you've received the baton for yourself. Make sure you're saved. Don't bring Cain's sacrifice. Church membership, baptism, rituals, traditions, maybe your Sunday school teacher, maybe an elder or deacon, maybe your, you know, people call yourself a Christian, but listen to me, it's not good enough. God requires the blood sacrifice of his son. It's the only sacrifice he will accept.

Make sure that baton is firmly in your grip. And then, relay it, faith to faith, through your witness, your worship, your walk, and your work, until your faith becomes sight. And we see him, face to face. Pray with me, please. Father God, Abba Father, creator of all things, what would it have been like to live in the Garden of Eden, to see your face, see the expression in your eyes when you would look on us, feel your touch, hear your voice. Oh Lord God, thank you that even now, you're preparing a place for us like that. We can hardly wait, but in the meantime, we're in a race called life, and we want to run our race with perseverance, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Lord, I pray that you'll take this message, that you'll take it down into our hearts until we make the decisions that we need to make that our lives would count for you, that we would make an impact in our families for your glory, so that not only our children, and Lord, I know that not all of our children are going to grasp the time, but Cain shows that children can be raised in the same home, the same way, and make different choices.

But we're not going to let our prodigals go. We claim them for you, and we want to do our part in living out our faith, boldly, courageously, lovingly, winsomely, so that they can see who you are, and who you can be to them. We pray also, as grandparents, that we don't just have fun with our grandchildren, play games, take them on trips, spend money on them, spoil them, but Lord God, we share our testimony with them. Teach them how to worship. Call them the names of Jesus. Teach them how to walk.

Read their Bibles and pray and get answers to prayer, and then pray that God, you will reveal to them the work assignment that you have. They're created for a purpose, so we just commit this message to you, thanking you for this opportunity. We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. You can hear Living in the Light with Ann Graham Lotz weekly. And for ways to experience the God-filled life as you pursue your personal Bible study, go to anngramlotz.org. She'll help you get started with free resources you can use and share with others. Join us here each week for Living in the Light.