Friday, March 11, 2016
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You think you've had a bad day? Oh, I'll tell you about a bad day. It was the summer of 1997; you're a cosmonaut on Russia's space station Mir. So far, you've battled a fire on board. Then a supply ship runs into you in a docking procedure. You lose 40% of your power. You think you've already had your fill of bad days for one mission. But then, the central computer on the space station suddenly shuts down. You are tumbling through space in what reporters called "chaotic flight." Hard to believe! It happened!
The day the computer failed, those cosmonauts were thrown into a particularly dangerous situation. That space station was solar-powered and all of a sudden, as one reporter put it, it lost its orientation to the sun, which means you don't have the power to meet the demands of your flight, and worst case your life is in jeopardy. Why? All because Mir turned its back on the sun.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Personal Power Failures."
The crisis that faced that space station? Not enough power to meet the demands. That's a feeling a lot of us have had in our lives. Trying to meet the demands of our family, our relationships, our work responsibilities, and frankly, our resources just aren't enough. Do you ever feel like you're running without the personal peace you need, the love, the power? Maybe the description of that space station's situation describes your own life - "Chaotic flight."
It could be that the confusion and the power failure is for a similar reason, too, that space station is designed to draw its life from the sun. Listen to these words from the Bible about how God designed us. Speaking of Jesus, it says we were "created by Him and for Him" (Colossians 1:16). That Him is the Son of God - S - O - N. Our lives? Well, they're essentially tumbling aimlessly when we lose our proper orientation to the Son. And according to God's Book, we all have.
Here we go from our Word for today from the Word of God in Isaiah 53:6, "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way." Three words explain why we feel so spiritually disoriented, "his own way." The One who gave us our life was supposed to run our life and we simply took our life and we've run it "our own way."
If you wanted to draw that in picture form, you'd probably put you on the left side of the page, God on the right, and you'd be walking away from Him, with your back to Him; with your back to the source of the love and the peace and the power and the meaning you need. If you die with your back still to Him, erase God from your picture forever. And that's hell. Unless you can find a way to get rid of your sin and get back to Him, like the space station without the sun, the result is ultimately death.
I'm so glad that "gone astray" verse doesn't stop there. It also tells us the way to find the God we've lost. It says, "And the Lord has laid on Him the wrongdoing of us all." The Him is Jesus and all the sin that cuts us off from God was laid on Jesus, God's sinless Son, when He died on that cross. You can literally walk up to that cross and say, "For me. He's doing that for me."
The day you tell Jesus you're putting your total trust in Him to rescue you from your sin is the day you find your Creator, the Son you were created for. For you, it could be today. That's why God brought us together, so this could be your day.
If you want to know how to begin with Him and how to know you belong to Him, that's what our website's all about. I urge you as soon as you can today to go to ANewStory.com. Let your new story begin there.
Hasn't your "chaotic flight" lasted long enough? It's the Son - the Son of God - you need right now. He has all the power you'll ever need to meet every demand of your life.