Taking the Bible from Storybook to Reality | Faithful Focus 01

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Transcript

 Hey there and welcome to the Faithful Focus podcast. My name is Eric the IT Guy Hendricks, and I’ll be your host for this show. I’m really excited to be kicking this off. I’ve got plans for a couple of episodes coming up. Don’t really have a release schedule set just yet, but I wanted to kick this off New Year, new new podcast.

So. So for episode one, I wanted to share a very important milestone. This is the first time that I ever got to preach. So I grew up in a Christian school and went to church every Sunday from the nursery to Sunday school to to to big people, church. And so it took a while for, for. God to become more than just a textbook.

It, it took me some time to realize that it was more about a relationship than it was about a list of things to do or a list of rules to follow. So that was kind of the inspiration for, for the message that I shared first with the elementary school. And you can catch that on my YouTube channel or on my peer tube channel.

Or you can just check this out. This was geared to the high school. I ended up with a little bit more time to, to talk about things. So if you are watching the video version, I will warn you about 13 minutes in to this 25 ish minute talk. The camera died. My theory is that the battery and, and the cold in, in the car didn’t, didn’t really mix.

So about 13 minutes in the video will drop off. But never fear, I was able to grab the entirety of the audio. So check it out and let me know what you think. In meantime, here in a few weeks, I’ll post episode two, which is going to be sort of a, uh, practical look at devotion times and some of the tips and tricks that I’ve found along the way to make it a little bit easier, a little bit less regimented, but be able to grow and learn from it.

So with that said, I turn you over to past Eric at Heartland High School for my first ever message. All right, so as Pastor Danny said, my name is Eric Hendricks and I am the proud graduate of Heartland High School. Class of 2005? Yes, 2005. So I actually started here in third grade, and I see, I see a few familiar faces still and.

So it’s, it’s, it’s a real pleasure to be back. I’m really thankful that, that I got to come and, and speak to you all, especially during Spirit Week, especially, uh, first week back. Hopefully, my story will help encourage each and every one of you as you start a new semester. I. So I, I started out attending church since I was old enough to be in the nursery, and I, I grew up in church.

Like I said, I, I came here around third grade and so God and the Bible has been a part of my life since I was gaal, maybe even shorter than that. And it’s easy in that situation to. Take God for granted to take all this for granted. I had a chance to talk to the elementary yesterday, and they, they were very emphatic when I asked this, is the Bible real or are they stories?

Is David and Goliath just a made up story or did it actually happen? Is Jericho a real city? Did the walls really fall down or is it just a story? That’s the question that you have to ask yourselves today. Do I take the Bible seriously? So a little bit about myself. I went through elementary school, middle school, high school, in this very building.

I used to play trumpet right there, but I wasn’t exactly an academic all star because I spent a lot of my class time writing stories, a lot of them, science fiction or drawing pictures in a book. Not really paying attention because. I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need to pay attention. I can get good grades and just kind of skate by.

I really wish I had spent a lot of my time in these classrooms listening and learning, because everything works together in order to create your own story. Not a made up story that you write down in a book when you’re supposed to be paying attention in biology. But no, all of this works together. Form your story.

What do you tell your friends when you’re 38? What do you, what do you tell your kids? What do you tell those around you that need something from you? Your story is very important, and I’ll tell you why. Today I want, if you’re taking notes, write this down and think on this over the next week if the Bible is true.

That means God is real. If God is real, his word should change the way we live. Is David and Goliath just a story? Is Jesus in the cross just a story or did it actually happen? Because if it actually happened, that means that not only is God real, but sin is real. Temptation is real, and we have to look at this world through real eyes.

So I wanna draw your attention to a passage, Psalms eight, one through four. I’m, I pulled the, the scripture from the Christian Standard Bible, I don’t know about nowadays, but it was the, the King James version when I was here. And all of these and ths, easy to get lost. So Psalms eight, one through four says, Lord our Lord, how magnificent is your name throughout the earth?

You have covered the heavens with your majesty. From the mouse of infants and nursing babies, you have established a stronghold on account of your adversaries in order to silence the enemy and the avenger. That’s not the Avengers. That’s not like Thor and Ironman. That’s the avenger, which in this case is a reference to the devil.

When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place, what is a human being that you remember? Him, a son of man that you look after him. King David wrote this and I like to take a little bit of artistic license as as a creative, and picture that David was out in a field at night ‘cause he mentions the moon and the stars.

I. So picture, if you will, you’re out in the field, maybe you’re back in the soccer field, the lights of the city dim. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and you can see hundreds if not thousands of stars. And you look up and you think, what am I. Amongst all of that. I mean, you think about the distance between here and Washington DC you think about the distance between here and the moon.

You think about the distance between here and the next closest solar system and average person’s five or six feet tall. Who are we to gather the attention of the creator of all of that? In fact, creation is the place we should go. To think about just how much God loves us and just how powerful God is.

Let me give you a couple of examples. The moon isn’t just a piece of rock that’s caught in Earth or Earth’s orbit. In fact, the moon is just as essential to human life as the sun is, as the atmosphere is because think about it this way, if you take a top. And you spin it. I know low tech, no Bluetooth, no screen, but if you take a top, you drop it on a desk and you spin it, what happens goes around and around and around.

But what happens when it starts to slow down, starts to wobble, goes from side to side until finally it loses enough momentum that it falls over. Now picture the earth. We go around our central axis. And then we go around the sun all at once, but that’s not all. And here we are in the middle of winter as the seasons change, so does the earth tilt.

You came here expecting chapel, didn’t you? Not a science lesson. I, I told you I wrote sci-fi stories. So here’s a little bit of the nerd coming out. Think about this way. The earth isn’t straight up and down. In fact, it tilts from side to side, but it only goes to about 23 and a half degrees either direction.

Why is that important? Well, if you haven’t covered this in, in astronomy yet, it’s important because it provides equal amounts of. Direct sunlight from this, from the sun to all parts of the earth throughout the year. That’s how we have seasons because as this, as this, as the earth tilts away from the sun, you get colder temperatures as it tilts towards the sun, you get warmer temperatures.

That’s how the seasons work. If it weren’t for the moon’s gravity, yes, the moon does have of gravity. It’s not nearly what the earth is, but it does have gravity. What it does is it acts as a stabilizing force on the earth because without, without the moon stabilizing our orbit or stabilizing the tilt of the earth, the earth could tilt over, or it could be straight up and down all year round, which would mean that if you live in direct sunlight, you get summer.

All year long. Now, while that may sound great, how are you gonna build a snowman? When, when are the leaves gonna change? So it’s important that the earth experiences those changes in sunlight. The moon has a big, big, big effect on that. All right, so moon, just a big hunk of rock in Earth’s orbit. What about the stars?

Go back to, go back to King David out in the middle of a field somewhere looking up at the heavens. Did you know that there’s an estimated 200 billion trillion stars? That’s 200 billion trillion. That’s not 200 billion. That’s not 200 trillion. That’s a whole lot more than that. If you go to the beach, you pick up sand, you start to count each piece.

I don’t know about you, but Seagull would fly by or I’d get hit by a wave and I’d lose count after about 15 or 20. But there’s more stars in the universe, just the ones that we know of. Just the ones that we can see there’s more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the ocean or on on the beach.

God is obviously all powerful because he created all of this and it all interacts together. In fact, if you’re a big reader outside of school, I highly recommend the case for a Creator by Lee Strobel. It is an amazing look at science, at biology, at astronomy, at physics, and it talks about how everything from the moon to the stars, to the position of the earth, to the density of our atmosphere all interacts to make life possible.

So great book, the Case for a Creator by Lee Rebel. That was actually the, the inspiration for today’s talk. So let’s bring things a little bit closer to home. We talked about the moon, we talked about the stars, and that that goes to show just how powerful God is, just how imaginative God is. But what about you?

What about the individual? So let’s look at the eye. I, I brought an HD camera from home just to collect the video from today’s talk. But the lenses on that camera, and we have several, are nothing compared to the eye. Did you know that when introduced to a new light source or you take away a light source, your eye adjusts within less than a second.

So if you introduce a bright light source, if you introduce a bright light source, your eye adjusts. Just like that, the ability to focus on objects that are near so I can look at my notes and then I can look at the back row and my, I will adjust to that. The amount of muscles and optical information that is being processed can’t be by chance.

This isn’t just something that showed up one day working. It had to have an intelligent creator. How many of you have a have a phone? Don’t, don’t admit if you have it with you, but if you have a phone, it’s probably 64 gigs of storage or 128 or 2 56. But think about this, within your cells you have DNA.

Each cell of DNA can hold about 1.5 gigabytes of information. That’s. That’s a few minutes of video. That’s few dozen pictures. 1.5 gigs per cell. That means throughout your entire body, you are carrying around the storage capacity of 200 exabytes. So for those of you that aren’t my computer nerds, if you think about maybe about 10 minutes of HD video is about a gig of storage.

Start to do the math. 200 exabytes is even bigger than a gigabyte. Let, let me break it down this way. Your body carries enough storage space, enough information, storage space to hold all the Earth’s books, information, news, articles, videos. The entire library of the earth could be stored in one human body multiple times over.

These are cool science facts, but science is nothing more than a picture of God at work. Everything that you see from the changing of the seasons to the, the adjustment of your eye is all a reflection of a creator. So it’s a Wednesday morning, it’s early. Sure. Most of you, like me, had to drag yourselves outta bed.

So what does this mean? Why does this matter? This isn’t science class. This is chapel. The two are interlinked. I promise you that. Look at Romans one 20 through 21 for his invisible attributes. That is his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen since the creation of the world being understood through what he has made.

As a result, people are without excuse for though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless and their senseless hearts were darkened. What does that mean? That means that all of us in this country, in this school have the amazing opportunity to talk about God openly.

You know, there are places in this world where just by doing this, I could go to jail just by having a conversation about this. You all could be taken from your families, and I don’t tell you that to scare you. It is the harsh truth of the world we live in. Sin is real. The battles that we fight are real.

So you all are without excuse. Each and every one of you has heard these stories time and time again, and I pray that you don’t do like I did and waste that opportunity drawing pictures or writing stories instead, think about. What it means for your life. Because the creator who thought of everything from 200 billion trillion stars to the ability for the eye to adjust to light created each and every one of you.

It says in the Bible that not only does he know you by name, but he thought of you even before you were born. He knows right now how many hairs are on your body. That is how powerful, but also how loving our God is. So you are without excuse. How are you going to tell your story? Are you gonna stand in front of a bunch of people and say that you painted pictures in in class, or are you going to take the knowledge that’s shared here and use it to change someone else’s life?

If the Bible is true, that means God is real. If God is real, his word should change the way we live. Every morning you have a Bible class, every week you have chapel. Take advantage of those opportunities. When, when I came to school here, we didn’t get to dress the way that each of you’re dressed, granted spirit, we, to this day, I cannot wear a pack, a pair of khaki pants because when I went to school here, it was khaki or black, and it was solid colored polos every day.

I cannot wear polos and I cannot wear khaki pants to this day, but the experiences that I gained here. Really impacted my life because I am here today talking to each and every one of you, which is the utmost amount of excitement. Whether you wanna be a nurse, whether you wanna be an astronaut, whether you want to be a teacher.

No matter what you do, you can tie it all of it together, whether you’re, whether you’re learning about science, you can tie it back to a creator who loves you and cares about you. So if the Bible is real. If the Bible is true, that means God is real. If God is real, his word should change the way we live.

So what does that look like when you turn on the TV tonight? Is what you’re watching, something that would help you learn more about God? Is it, is it, or is it something that would make you feel shame to go to God in prayer? How you talk, if you say, if you slip up. Say something, use God’s name in vain or use that, that swear word you know you’re not supposed to use.

If the Bible is true, it’s changed the way we live. How do you treat others? When I went to school here, being a nerd wasn’t cool. Being into computers and science fiction not cool. I’d like to think that’s changed today, but how you treat others, how you treat that one kid in your class that. Hard to get along with, or maybe that’s you and you’re in denial about it, but think about how you treat the other people in your class when you, when you go to make that funny comment to your friends behind your, behind that person’s back, think about how your eye is designed and the creator that created that.

I, how do you spend your time? How do you deal with challenges? Anytime you go to make a decision, anytime you think a thought, anytime you interact with a friend or a teacher or a parent, think about the sheer number of stars in the universe and think about what it would mean for that action, for that comment to get back to an infinite creator.

Ultimately, the question is, what are you living for? Are you living for your Xbox? Guilty. Are you living for popularity? You have YouTube channel. Just wanna get one more like, eh, guilty I, I have like three YouTube channels. So what are you living for? Are you living for God? Are you living for the benefit of others?

We are called to love the Lord your God. Second to love. Our neighbor is ourself and our neighbor is anyone that we come into contact with. Whether that’s someone we run into at the store, whether it’s the student that sits next to us in class, or whether it’s our mother or father or brother or sister.

Who are you living for yourself? Are you living for God? So I’ve got a few minutes, and if you’re not sure I want to talk to you. This world is dark. It’s, but. There’s a light in this world and it’s believers, it’s Christians, it’s people that wake up every day and think about, God, give me just one person to touch for you.

Give me one person who I can loan five bucks. Give me one person who drops all their books in the halls that I can help pick things up. When you live like that every day, you can shine just a little bit more light into the world. But if you’re not sure if that’s what you’re living for, if you’re not sure.

Where you would go if, if the world ended right now, if the moon fell out of the sky right now, where would you spend eternity? If you’re not sure, this is for you. There is hope. There is a light in the darkness because we all need a savior. We’ve all messed up. We’ve all let that cuss word slip. We’ve all told a lie.

We’ve all told the teacher that, uh, the internet ate our homework. But Romans 3 23, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We’ve all messed up. Sometimes the biggest person you lie to is yourself. Not hard to do. The, the passing grade for heaven is a hundred percent. It’s absolute perfection.

And if we fall short, which we all have, Romans 6 23 says, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And I am so excited to tell you that. No matter how many times you mess up, there’s a free gift We just had Christmas. What do you do to get a gift? Nothing.

You receive it, you accept. You say thank you, I hope. But see, God knew that we couldn’t measure up. God knew that we’d mess up. God knew that we’d forget to do our homework. God knew that that would happen. So Romans five, eight. But God proves his own love for us and that while we are still sinners, Christ died for us.

Think back. Run that verse through this filter of all the stars. Run that verse through the filter of just how complex and powerful the eyeball is. And remember that if, if all that was created by a creator, how much he must love each and every one of you, that God proves his own love for us, that even though we’ve, we fall short, even though we messed up, Christ died for us.

So. I kind of jokingly said, how, how do you, how do you receive a gift? Well, you say Thank you and receive it. There’s a way to respond, and Romans 10, nine, and 10, if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with a heart, one believes unto righteousness and with a mouth confession is made unto salvation.

In verse 13, whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. All you have to do is pray a simple prayer. And just acknowledge that God is the creator of the universe, but that he sent his son to pay your debt. That’s what sin is. Sin is a debt. Every time you do something wrong, you charge against that account and that account is empty.

So you’re overdrawing that account. You’ll learn about this in in home EC and economics class. There’s nothing in our account. We cannot pay our way into heaven. We cannot pay our way into, into doing good or being good people. You have to accept this gift, but all it takes is to acknowledge, God, I’m not enough.

I can’t do this. I need you to come in, take over my life. I need you to come in and be my, my guiding force to be my Savior, to be my Lord. And the result is Romans five, one. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering where you’re gonna go.

You don’t have to wake up every day and wonder what you’re supposed to live for, because through salvation, you can have peace. You can know where you’re going. You can know what your, what your purpose is in this wor, in this world. Trust me, I was in high school. It was a little bit longer than I like to admit ago, but I.

There’s a lot of questions, but the one thing you don’t have to question is who you serve and what that means for others. So when you’re serving God, that means helping out that friend. That means helping that stranger pay for some groceries at the grocery store being just a little light in a big world.

If you’re curious about salvation, if you’re curious about saying that prayer, go to your teachers. Go to Pastor Danny. Go to your principal. I’ll stick around for a few minutes if you want to ask me. I. There’s no more important question. There’s no greater lesson to be learned. There’s no more important test to take than to acknowledge your need for savior and to pray a prayer salvation.

So thank you Pastor Danny for letting me come and talk, and thank you each and every one of you for paying attention. I know any, anything before about nine 30 is early for me, so don’t feel too bad with that, let’s, let’s close this out and, and have a wonderful day. Father God, just thank you for, for the school.

Thank you for this place where we can come and learn more about you and learn about your creation, learn about your plan for, for each and every one of us in, in a safe and and loving environment. Lord, I just pray that as we leave this room, that we wouldn’t just fall into a routine of going to class and.

Taking notes and going home and playing video games that we would, we would let this word change us, that we would take Psalms eight and remember that you are all powerful, but you’re also all loving that you have your eyes set on the universe, but also on each and every one of us individually. You know us by name.

You know the number of hairs on our head. So father, I just thank you for, for the teachers and for these students and, and just the ability to come and share a little bit of my story. Just help us as we go through our day, help us keep focused on you and on what we’re really on this earth for all this we pray in your name, amen.

Thank you everybody.