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BEHOLD, HE COMES! #5
ALL I EVER WANTED TO DO
It sounds like a childhood fantasy come true, but Ricky
just always wanted to be an astronaut. Not a fireman, not a cowboy, and
not even an Astro – as in ballplayer. No, from when he was just a little
kid, it was to be an astroNAUT . . . or nothing.
So he ordered his life toward that. In school, he took the classes that
would qualify him. He chose the career paths that would lead him to Houston.
He joined the Air Force and jumped through those necessary hoops. His
resumé was right; his credentials were all there. And finally,
on the fourth time through the exam process, NASA said yes to Colonel
Rick Husband. He was going to be one of the elite who made it to outer
space.
So many of us spend – or, I should say, waste – many years not really
getting down to the main goals of life. We spend decades, even, in a dead-end
job, or not really getting from our marriage what we should, or without
really experiencing a vibrancy in our Christianity. What a beautiful thing,
then, when a little boy already has that outer-space gleam in his eye,
and then just puts every building block of his life in the right place.
By the time NASA is ready to call him, he’s already taken the bricks God
gave him and constructed a life that is qualified to receive the prize.
The reason I bring up this poignant story today – and many of you already
know why it’s poignant – is this: friend, I believe many of you listening
on this Friday join me in wanting to be astronauts too. Not to fly on
the space shuttle, or to journey to the manned space station, or to attempt
a trip to Mars. You want to travel beyond the stars, to a faraway City
whose builder and maker is God.
And what that means is this. If we want to be those kinds of astronauts,
then we have to do like Rick Husband did – and configure our lives with
that goal, that journey, in mind. We have to get ready to be space travelers
and to be citizens of a place that Christian preachers now can only faintly
describe on the radio.
Speaking of radio preaching, we’ve already borrowed in this series from
a beautiful old collection of sermons from the gentle giant and founder
of this ministry, Pastor H. M. S. Richards, Senior. Half a century ago,
he preached a message entitled “He Said He’d Come.” And one paragraph
really seized my soul; here it is:
“When this blessed hope really gets into a person’s
heart,” Richards wrote, “it makes him different. It changes his outlook
on life and leads him to put less value on mere things. He will spend
less on pleasures and needless things and will put more time and effort
into the work of God, for he knows that His Savior said: This gospel of
the kingdom shall be preached for a witness unto all nations; and then
shall the end come.” That’s Matthew 24:14.
And I suppose we all say right there, “Oh dear.” We
don’t want to think that we must qualify for heaven. We don’t want to
do like the astronaut trainees and have to spend hours a day on a Stairmaster,
watch our diet, attend endless lectures about payloads and flight trajectories
and the engineering details regarding a space shuttle. We don’t want to
train.
And it’s true that a believer can never qualify for heaven by doing spiritual
pushups or jumping jacks. The tickets for God’s intergalactic flight have
already been paid for. But it’s equally true that God calls us to be team
members on the flight. We want to help make the mission a success. You
probably read how Commander Husband took his six fellow astronauts for
an 11-day outdoor survival training trip, just so they could bond, get
to know and trust and love each other, learn to mesh as a united team
that could have the optimal hope of success.
Pastor Richards then takes us through several powerful Bible passages
that describe how the hopeful candidates for God’s ultimate space mission
will be living and preparing and orienting their lives. First of all,
they’ll be watching. They’ll be scanning the skies, using their spiritual
telescopes, eagerly planning to see Jesus coming in the clouds. Mark 13:33-35:
“Be on guard! Be alert! . . . Keep watch because you
do not know when the owner of the house will come back.”
Secondly, Richards continues, we’ll be people who patiently
but eagerly wait. Rick Husband didn’t get in until his fourth try, but
he just kept knocking on the door there at Houston. He had confidence
that his childhood dream would come true. The Apostle Paul had friends
tell him how the new believers in Thessalonika . . .
“. . . turned to God from idols to serve the living
and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from
the dead – Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.”
Here’s another lifestyle commitment of God’s team of
astronauts. They actually work to move up the Cape Canaveral launch date.
They want Jesus, their flight leader, to be able to come sooner, and if
they can assist, they work to make that happen. II Peter 3:12 describes
how God’s loyal friends can “speed its coming.” “Hasting unto the coming
of the day of God” says the King James. And I know we could go round and
round with the theologians about the fact that our all-knowing God already
has the date in His mind; He firmly knows the future, and how could we
alter it. True, and yet when Jesus says that the gospel must go to the
entire world, “and then the end shall come,” it stands to reason that
if Jesus’ fellow astronauts help proclaim that gospel faster, then the
return of Jesus could happen faster too.
Revelation 22:20 tells us that God’s people can and should pray the “Maranatha”
prayer. “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” A person who is passionately eager
for the Second Coming will pray for it to happen. Friend, when’s the last
time you specifically begged Jesus, pleaded with Him, to PLEASE come soon?!
When’s the last time you informed Him that you were ready to leave all
the nice things of this world behind – your car, house, job, earthly trinkets
of security – and journey away from this intriguing but doomed blue planet?
I invite you, every single day, to join us in praying for the Second Coming.
Then we do have to “occupy.” We have to keep on. That’s taught in one
of Jesus’ parables found in Luke 19. The master went away for a very long
time – much more than what people expected – and told His servants, “Occupy
till I come.” Just keep working, keep trusting, keep investing, keep looking
up at the sky. But don’t just look at the sky – work and witness at the
same time.
Finally, we have to just plain and simple love His coming. Not only love
it, but love it MOST. Do you want Jesus to come more than anything else?
Do you want to be with Him in heaven more than anything else? Enough to
do some spiritual jogging, some exercising, some living out of your faith
in daily obedience to Him?
Some of you probably read how this Christian Air Force pilot wanted so
much to be an astronaut. But twice in a row, his application was rejected.
The third time around, when he got to the physical, he wondered if maybe
that was part of why he was flunking out. His eyesight wasn’t that great.
So, without saying anything, he wore a pair of hard contact lenses. Now
he could see fine . . . except that hard contacts weren’t allowed.
What to do? Rick wanted so badly to be an astronaut! Would a little white
lie be such a big deal? So he did. He lied on the application form, said
he wasn’t wearing the lenses. And he got rejected again! So the fourth
time around, after three more years of “occupying” and waiting and examining
his soul, Rick decided that, even more important than qualifying for NASA,
he wanted to be a faithful member on God’s eternal crew.
“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you
the desires of your heart,” he recalled from Psalm 37:4.
So he finally got one more shot. He told the truth
on his form. He remembered Proverbs 3:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not
on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will
make your paths straight.”
And, as we all know, Commander Rick Husband made it
onto the space team. Last February 1, and it fills us with both anguish
and pride, he and his six fellow star travelers entered eternity when
the shuttle blew up early Saturday morning. And for this faithful servant
of heaven, astronaut for his country and space warrior for the King of
kings, they touched the face of the God he so wanted to serve and meet.
He rests now in the arms of the Almighty he directed his life toward serving
and obeying and honoring.
Before liftoff, all seven astronauts had to fill out a form “in case of
accident.” What final request might this godly man have? His was eight
words long: “Tell them about Jesus. He’s real to me.”
Friend, may our own journey to the land beyond our Milky Way be just as
important to us.
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