Audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. King David's vision of building a temple for God is an example of dreaming big, even bigger than his own lifetime. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah continues his new series Forward, with a closer look at the importance of trusting God with your dreams as you follow him in faith. Listen now as David introduces the conclusion of his message, Dream. Seize your tomorrow today. I can't wait to tell you some of the stories that are involved in today's message about dreaming and having vision. So what does it mean to have a vision that captures the future? And how does that look every day for you and me? How does the Bible illustrate that for us? Here again from the scripture and from my heart is this first step in going forward.
It's to dream and seize your tomorrow today. One of our family Christmas traditions in the Jeremiah family is assembling jigsaw puzzles. This year, my oldest grandson David Todd joined in and he enjoyed it so much that he told his roommates about it when he got back to college. And they decided to tackle a puzzle together. To my amazement, they bought a 2,000 piece puzzle.
I've never even thought of doing one of that many pieces. So what did he and his friends do? Determined to complete what they started, they took 10 days to finish the puzzle around their regular obligations.
And then I got a phone call from a very frustrated David Todd. He said, Poppy, our puzzle is done, but we can't find the last piece. There's one piece missing. One piece out of 2,000.
So what did he do? They went back to the store, they bought the very same puzzle in another box, they used the box top as a guide, and they went through all 2,000 pieces of that other puzzle until they found the culprit. And with great satisfaction, they snapped that final piece into place. The completed puzzle now hangs on their wall bearing the signatures of everyone who helped. I don't know if I would ever have had the determination to do that.
I mean, the puzzle was just a fun project, a simple shared goal among a bunch of friends. But their determination to achieve that goal was real. The picture on the box top was both vision and guide, showing them their goal as well as the exact puzzle piece they needed to achieve it. God's vision is a guide for you to follow too. And when God places his dream in your heart, you become more determined and dedicated, and you press on to make sure the work is finished. So root your dream in history, reproduce it in a picture, reinforce it with determination. And number four, reconcile your dream with its cost. As you build your vision, be willing to sacrifice.
Let me tell you something that's without possibility of contradiction. Dreams are costly. Dreams are costly, as David found out when God led him to purchase some land for the temple at a high spot in the area.
Here's the story. This place was owned by a guy named Arunah the Jebusite. He used to use the high location for its winds to thresh out his wheat.
The chaff would blow away, and the grains of wheat would collect, and then he would sell them. And as David approached Arunah for this valuable site, the most desirable location in Jerusalem, here's what happened. Because he was the venerable king of Israel, I mean, he could have seized the land. He could have just taken it.
That may be why Arunah offered to donate to him. He said, King David, this is my land. You want to build something here? Let me just give it to you. But David said in 2 Samuel 24, 24, no, no, no.
I will surely buy it from you for a price. For I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God with that which costs me nothing. Big dreams are expensive.
If you've experienced a fulfilled dream, you know what I'm talking about. The cost comes in money and energy and criticism and unbelief and unplanned obstructions and unfaithful helpers and a multitude of other very discouraging things. I think Jesus was trying to help us with this when he said, For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it?
Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who comes against him with 20,000? Your dream may not involve building a tower or going to war, but hear me now, there's still a cost involved if you want to see it through. Not understanding that cost up front can cause you to give up on your dream when you hit the first hurdle. Dorothea Dix was a woman who understood the cost of a dream. She was born in Maine in 1802 and ran away from home at the age of 12 to escape her alcoholic family and abusive father.
She lived with her grandmother in Boston. By the age of 14, she was teaching in a school for girls. Eventually, she was asked to teach a Sunday school class of women in a prison housing the insane and mentally disturbed who at that time were jailed alongside criminals and treated like animals.
Many of these souls were cold and naked and kept in darkness and chained to the walls and even flogged. Dorothea determined with all her heart to help these wretched castaways from society and she devoted the rest of her life to a relentless vision for prison reform. She visited penitentiaries and filed reports. She testified before legislatures. She wrote articles. She gave speeches.
She initiated reform. She visited hundreds of prisons and jails and everywhere she went, she grappled with a level of suffering that made her sick. In her trademark bonnet and cashmere shawl, Dorothea logged more than 60,000 miles by train and carriage testifying that God's providence was defining her path.
Horseman said she had a divine magnetism. Dorothea was among the first American reformers to speak up for mentally ill children and when her proposals were voted down in state legislatures, she just redoubled her efforts. Traveling abroad, she championed prison reform for the mentally disabled across Britain throughout Europe. And when the Civil War broke out in America, she was named Chief of Army Nurses for the Union and wore herself out organizing medical care for wounded soldiers. When the war ended, she was 63 years old and weighed 95 pounds, but she was far from finished. Dorothea hit the road again on behalf of the mentally ill, spending another 15 years traveling between Maine and California, establishing ministries for society's forgotten victims. It would seem all my work is never to be done, she wrote, yet she kept on working. For the last 50 years of her life, Dorothea had no home. She simply lived in the quarters of the 1, 2, 3 asylums and hospitals that she founded.
She passed away at the age of 85 and Matthew 25, 35 to 36 was read at her funeral. Here's what that says. I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me.
I was in prison and you came to me. Dorothea paid a huge price in pursuing her dream, but she also received a great reward, namely improvements across the globe in the treatments of millions of people suffering from mental illness. The costs she paid for her efforts were real, but the benefits are still rippling throughout our world today. You have to reconcile your dreams with costs.
If you're looking for a cheap, easy way to get where you want to go, just stop right now, there is no such thing. To realize your dream, if it's a God-given dream, there's a price to pay, but I promise you it is a price worth paying. Finally, release your dream to your legacy. Looking back on this period of Israel's history, one thing jumps out at me and here it is. This was David's dream and it ended up being called Solomon's Temple. David's dream? Solomon's Temple? You see, David not only accepted that, he made that happen.
It was his dream all right, but when the dream was not going to be realized in his life, and God said pass it on to your son, David refused to allow his dream to die when he died. And although he was not allowed to build the temple, the Lord gave him the construction details, which he passed on to his own son, Solomon. Here's what he said, consider now, Solomon, for the Lord has chosen you to build the house for the sanctuary.
Be strong and do it. Then David gave his son Solomon the plans for the vestibule, its houses, its treasuries, its upper chambers, its inner chambers, and the place of the mercy seat, and the plans for all that he had by the spirit of the courts of the house of the Lord, of all the chambers all around, of the treasuries of the house of God, and of the treasuries for the dedicated things. You say, Pastor Jeremiah, what does that all mean? Well, the Holy Spirit had instructed David with the specific details of the temple, and David in turn passed them on to his son, Solomon. I can imagine David transferring that information from God onto an architectural blueprint and laying it out before Solomon and saying, here it is, boy, God gave this to me, and this is what you're going to build. David had dreamed of building a permanent place where God could be worshiped, and he determined to leave something behind that would honor the Lord. It was his dream and the resources he put in that place that allowed his son Solomon to move quickly toward the construction of the temple. And David's instructions to his son Solomon have been a charge to pastors and missionaries and Christian workers ever since. First Chronicles 28, 20.
Be strong and of a good courage and do it. Do not fear nor be dismayed, for the Lord God, my God, will be with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you until you have finished all the work for the service of the house of the Lord. Friends, this story illustrates how it's possible to achieve something after your death that could not have been achieved during your life. Before he died, David decided to pass on something that would live on after him. From his life, we can learn the great importance of dreaming beyond the span of your years. How can God use us? What is something he could do through each of us after we're gone?
Well, when I think of that question, I often think about this. I remember as a young man, when I turned 16, my parents gave me a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible. It was part of my spiritual education. I still have that Bible and I cherish it. It was really the only reference Bible that there was back then that I know about. It was the standard reference Bible during my growing up years, even though it was copyrighted in 1909. Years after its inception, years after C.I. Scofield put that whole study Bible together, it was still helping people like me understand what the Bible says, what the Bible means, and what the Bible means for me.
I can only hope and pray that in some small way, the Jeremiah Study Bible, which was released in 2013, will have that same impact on some future student of the Scriptures. One Sunday afternoon in 1771, a man named Valentin Howey ducked into a restaurant in Paris for dinner. He sat near the stage and the show that evening featured blind people in a comedy routine. They were objects of ridicule and cruelty. The act was designed to make fun of their blindness. Deeply offended, Howey began to develop a burden for the blind.
Sometime later, he spotted a sightless street urchin who was begging for coins outside a Parisian church, giving the boy some money. Howey was amazed to see the boy feel the raised markings on the coins and distinguish the amounts. He gave Howey an idea. Why couldn't books be written with raised letters, like images on coins?
Why couldn't people learn to read with their fingers? Howey took the boy off the streets, offered him food and shelter, and devised a plan with wooden blocks and numbers and taught the boy to read. In 1784, Howey started the world's first school for blind children. He was in Paris, and one of the first teachers was the blind boy rescued from the streets.
But that's just the beginning. Several years later, another boy named Louis was born in the village of Coubadry, France. His father was a farmer and a harness maker. And as a toddler, Louis loved watching his father work with leather tools. But tragedy struck in 1812 when three-year-old Louis began playing with a leftover strap of leather, trying to punch holes in it.
His hand slipped, and the sharp tool punctured and put out his eye. An infection set in that spread to the other eye, and little Louis ended up blinded in both eyes for his whole life. A local minister named Jacques Poulai loved the boy and began visiting him to read him the Bible. Seeing the boy had a good mind, Father Jacques determined he could receive an education. So at age 10, Louis was enrolled in the school Howey had established in Paris, where he proved to be a brilliant student. Eventually, Louis began teaching other students in the Paris School for the Blind. He studied Howey's method of reading. He also became aware of a system of military communication developed by a French army captain that allowed soldiers to communicate in the dark by running their fingers over a series of dots and dashes. Though still a teenager, Louis Braille began adopting these systems into a program of his own, and in 1829, at age 20, he published a little book on the Braille method of reading. The school resided in a damp building by the river Seine.
It was cold and unhealthy, and the food and conditions were poor. Louis got tuberculosis, but he continued working on his system of reading, which began catching on and soon was being exported all over the world. As his health failed, Louis said, I am convinced my mission on earth has been accomplished. I asked God to carry me away from this world.
Now pause for just a moment with me and think of the chain reaction of that cascading dream. One man developed a burden for the blind when he saw ridiculed actors on stage and a beggar boy on the streets. His burden led him to establish a school and attempt a system of reading. Then a local pastor developed a burden for a blind boy in another village and taught him the Bible and longed to send him to school, and that blind child, Louis Braille, developed a burden to improve and expand Howey's work, and the world was changed, and as a result, millions of sightless souls have experienced the joy of reading the Bible and other books for themselves, now for almost two centuries. We may never create a language for the blind or build a temple for the Lord, but please remember there are no small tasks in the Lord's work and no insignificant dreams. Our work is never routine.
Our labor is never wasted, and our legacy is capable of outliving us. I've always loved radio and everything about radio. From sitting next to the radio as a child with my ear to the speaker so I could listen to the Lone Ranger or the Shadow, to putting together night radio kits as a teenager, for reasons I can't explain, I have always loved radio, and radio has had a mysterious hold over me as far back as I can remember. When I became a student at Cedarville College in 1959, I was given the radio opportunity of a lifetime. A real Christian FM station was being launched in Springfield, Ohio, just 15 miles from my home. I don't remember how it happened, but I was able to audition for an on-air announcing position, and I got the job. Every day, Monday through Friday, I drove to Springfield to do the 3 to 11 shift on WEEC-FM.
I did the news. I hosted the call-in music shows. I queued up and played radio programs like Back to the Bible and Unshackled. I loved every minute of it, and when I was asked to help start a radio station on the campus of Cedarville College, I teamed up with Paul Gaffney, a college classmate, and my girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, Donna Thompson, and we launched WCDR-FM. This station had a humble beginning.
It had a 12-watt transmitter on the third floor of the administration building, and we used to joke with each other that on a good day, you could hear that station on the first floor. But in time, that station grew to a network of stations that literally covered the entire Miami Valley with great Christian music and the message of the gospel. I personally believe that God used WCDR to help grow Cedarville College. When I was a junior in college, God called me into the ministry. It was absolutely, definitely clear to me that I was to become a preacher of the gospel, so I immediately enrolled in Dallas Theological Seminary. Donna and I got married right after graduation from college, and we headed off to Texas for four years of post-graduate learning.
My greatest regret, if I could call it that, was this. I loved radio. I had spent most of my life involved with radio.
Now it appeared God was leading me in a totally different direction in terms of my vocation and lifelong calling. Radio was put on hold for four years while I worked on my master's degree, but what happened after that is one of the most amazing stories of my life. After a short stint as a youth pastor in New Jersey and 12 years as a pastor of a start-up church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I accepted the call to Shadow Mountain Community Church in San Diego, and the next year I began a local five-day-a-week teaching program on a Christian station in San Diego, Salem Radio's KPRZ. The station manager, David Ruhlman, helped me get started in this new format, and the rest is history. Today, Turning Point hits the airwaves on more than 3,000 radio stations in the United States, and on many of those stations the program is heard two or three times per day. Memento de Saívo, the Spanish edition of Turning Point, is heard in every country where Spanish is spoken.
We broadcast more than 121,000 radio programs and 4,050 television programs outside the United States every year. So, you can see God did not call me into the ministry to take my dream away. He called me into the ministry because my dream was way too small. He had a much better and a much bigger plan for my life, and as a result of those experiences, I've learned I can trust God with my dreams, even as I move forward toward his plans for my life.
And I've told you all these stories and shared all of this gospel message from the Bible to tell you one thing. You can trust God with his vision for your life. You can be like Nehemiah who said, God put it in my heart. And when God puts something in your heart and gives you a dream, never stop until you've realized it, and you will be the most blessed person on the face of God's green earth. Amen.
Amen. Well, we're going to take a break for the weekend, and when we come back on Monday, we're going to talk about pray, how to consult with your Creator. When God gives you a dream, he doesn't abandon you to your dream. He gives you the dream, and then step by step, he walks with you as that dream is realized in your life.
It is an amazing thing to see how this happens. You pray at the beginning of the dream, in the middle of it, and at the end. And God is with you every step of the way. He's your co-pilot. He will go with you if this is from him. Have a great weekend, friends.
We'll see you Monday. Our message today came to you from Shadow Mountain Community Church, where Dr. David Jeremiah serves as Senior Pastor. How is Turning Point enriching your faith? Please write and tell us at Turning Point Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. Or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of David's powerful new book, Forward, Discovering God's Presence and Purpose in Your Tomorrow. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard Version, the New International Version, and the New King James Version.
All available in a variety of handsome cover options. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hooke Fleet. Join us Monday as we continue the series, Forward. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au
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