Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: I think there's a ton of opportunities that are happening right now in our lives that we're not paying attention to. God has given us to make good on, but we don't take advantage of them because we don't listen to God's word. We don't apply it in every aspect of our life. Oh, we'll take God to church. We'll take God to maybe a few minutes of Bible study that we have outside of church.

We'll take God to a few minutes of prayer, but we won't take God to our work to develop our professional practices. We won't take God to our financial discussion. We won't take God into our investing conversations. We won't take God into our interpersonal relationships. Why? Because God is compartmentalized by so many of us. When you don't take God with you everywhere, you destroy your opportunities that God puts in front of you.

Guest (Male): Welcome to a very special edition of Light on the Hill. In these days leading up to Easter, we're airing a five-part series on the prophecies that changed the world forever, starting with some prophecies concerning Palm Sunday, which we'll be celebrating this coming week. Pastor James Kaddis is going to focus primarily on how we choose to respond to prophecy and God's word as a whole. When we refuse to apply the Bible to every area of life, it leads to missed opportunities. Here he is to explain from Luke chapter 19.

James Kaddis: Look at how the story goes on. This is heavy. Look at this, verse 29. "And it came to pass when he was come nigh to Bethphage and Bethany at the mount called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples saying, 'Go you into the village over against you in the which at your entering you shall find a colt tied, wherein yet never man sat. Loose him and bring him hither. And if any man ask you why do you loose him, thus shall you say unto him because the Lord hath need of him.'"

Now, I do often times spend a good amount of time monologuing about the fact that when Jesus made this request of his disciples, the request that he made of them was one that was in essence an impossible request. Jesus was asking his disciples to go and to do something that would have amounted to a capital crime. He told them to go steal this donkey in essence. Well, I'm not going to use the term steal, that's a strong word, but he told them to take a donkey that didn't belong to them.

And then to make things worse, think about this for a second. It's not like this is a domesticated donkey. This is a donkey that's never been ridden. So, how in the world are you going to actually get a donkey from that location to where Jesus is? Remember, this isn't like the days that we have today where you can grab your Ford F-150 and get the horse dragger with you. It doesn't work that way. We didn't have the kind of technology that exists today to be able to do that kind of thing. You can't transport these animals that way. It doesn't work that way.

The donkey better cooperate with you. And the thing is, if it's an undomesticated animal, how are you going to be able to pull it away? The fact that you're going to pull it away in and of itself is such an abrasive thought. It's like, what in the world? That doesn't even make sense. It's dangerous. I could get in trouble for this. I could probably lose my life over this. And then Jesus makes it worse by saying, "Oh yeah, and by the way, when they ask you why in the world are you loosing the thing, you just tell them the Lord has need of it." What a crazy thing to do.

I mean, look, if you walked out to your driveway today, you walked out to where you park your car and all of a sudden you see a guy breaking into your car. It's like a legit, he's getting ready to do a GTA, like literally, he's getting ready to take your vehicle. And you say, "What are you doing?" and he says, "Well, God told me to take it." All of a sudden you're going to think, "Okay, this is a lot crazier than you think." It's not going to be taken very well. But that's what's happening here.

So the disciples decide to obey the Lord. By the way, I want to point this out, talking about missed opportunities. The fact that the disciples chose to obey the Lord is remarkable in that, you've got to keep this in mind, had they not listened to him, had they not obeyed him, they would have denied themselves of the opportunity to be part of one of the most amazing moments in human history. Can you imagine? One of the most amazing moments in human history.

I think sometimes God asks us to do things that are risky. God asks us to do things that we often times feel like have no real relevance or sometimes may even be detrimental to us and we choose to decide not to do those things and as a result we cut ourselves off from what God may be wanting to do to us and for us. Isn't that funny how that works? We deny ourselves of the opportunity that God has provided for us for something extraordinary to happen. It's kind of heavy when you think about it.

So these guys listen and they do it. Verse 32, look what happens here. "And they that were sent with their way and found even as he had said unto them. And as they were loosing the colt, the owners thereof said unto them, 'Why loose you the colt?' And they said, 'The Lord hath need of him.' And they brought him to Jesus and they cast their garments upon the colt and they set Jesus therein. And as he went, they spread their clothes in the way.

And when he was come nigh, even now at the descent, the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had done saying, 'Blessed be the king that cometh in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.'" And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto him, "Master, rebuke thy disciples."

Literally Bible prophecy has just been fulfilled in some remarkable ways. I went over Daniel chapter nine with you and you guys saw the fulfillment of that and Jesus is actually going to revert to it in just a few minutes here. We might as well go back and read Zechariah 9:9, that's significant. Zechariah, of course, being the second to the last book of the Old Testament. Look at verse nine of Zechariah chapter nine, look what it says here.

It says, "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold thy king cometh unto thee. He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem and the battle bow shall be cut off and he shall speak peace unto the heathen and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea and from the river even to the ends of the earth." Isn't that wild?

That's speaking of the fact that Christ will rule one day, that he will take on the role as King that he is supposed to fulfill. Pretty amazing to think about the picture that Zechariah is drawing for us of Jesus coming into the city. How about this one, Psalm 118? People, by the way, this is an interesting conversation. Let's go there really quickly, Psalm 118. People oftentimes ask me who my favorite prophet is and I have some favorites that I struggle with every now and then going back and forth.

But one name that never comes up when we talk about prophets or favorite prophets is the prophet David. David was a king, but he was also a prophet because so many of the Psalms that he wrote were very prophetic. And when you see Psalms that are given to us here, it's remarkable how much they point to Jesus. But the Psalm that we're looking at here is Psalm 118 and it says this, we'll start in verse 24. Look at this, this is amazing. "This is the day which the Lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad in it."

This is verse 24. "Save now I beseech thee, O Lord. I beseech thee, send now prosperity." By the way, when they're saying save now, what are they saying? They're saying Hosanna, right? They're saying that's where we get the word Hosanna from that many of you guys know. "God is the Lord which hath showed us light. Bind the sacrifice with cords even unto the horns of the altar." It's interesting. When you talk about "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord," you begin to see this being even more put.

By the way, all of Psalm 118 in many ways has some tremendous significance related to the Messiah. As a matter of fact, Psalm 118 is the same place where you'll find about the cornerstone with respect to Solomon's temple and the significance of Jesus being that chief cornerstone. It's very interesting that discussion. So Psalm 118 talks about this. So all of this is a great fulfillment of Bible prophecy. And so now the religious leaders are basically telling Jesus to rebuke the people who are taking advantage of a very unique opportunity.

The religious leaders are telling Jesus to tell everybody to shut up. Isn't that wild? They're the most elite of all of the religious leaders and they're telling Jesus to tell his disciples to shut up. They're talking to the Creator of the universe folks. Think about that. Think about the absurdity in that. But then look at Jesus's response and I think the response is prolific on many levels. Jesus says this, it says here in verse 40, "And he answered and said unto them, 'I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.'"

You ever heard the phrase "dumb as a bag of rocks"? You ever know where that phrase comes from? Rocks don't have any viable intelligence. They don't speak, they don't articulate thought. They have no vocal cords, they don't have lips to talk. Jesus says if all of these people shut up, the rocks themselves would miraculously speak. By the way, this wouldn't be the first time that we read about in the Bible where God takes something that isn't vocal and makes it vocal for the purpose of communicating his word in a powerful and very unique way.

Perhaps one of the most significant areas that I can point you to is the story of Balaam. You remember that story? If you go and you look at the story of Balaam, Balaam is a man who basically decides to do something that very much dishonors God by giving an enemy king, whose name was Balak, counsel on how to stumble the children of Israel that they might end up dying in battle. And what you'll remember is you'll remember the fact if you study the Old Testament, particularly the Book of Numbers, you will remember the fact that Balaam made the grievous error.

Which by the way Balaam was not just mentioned in Numbers, Balaam was also mentioned by Jesus himself when he wrote a letter to the church in Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation. But the one thing that I want to point out here is that Balaam, the Bible tells us, did something uniquely reprehensible. And what he did, as I said before, was he stumbled the children of Israel by giving counsel to a pagan king on how he could facilitate that.

By the way, it involved fornication. It involved enticing these men with attractive women and then being caused to worship false gods while they were in the middle of their adulterous and fornicating relationships. So it was very heavy how that all worked out. Well, Balaam is on his way home from his successful mission of destroying the children of Israel and as he is doing what he's doing, as he's on his journey, his donkey that he's carrying or that he's taking with him just stops.

"Come on!" Donkey doesn't want to move. "Come on!" Donkey doesn't move. "Come on!" He's assaulting his donkey. He's like, "Let's go!" and the donkey finally, the Bible tells us, the donkey finally says, "Hey dummy." He doesn't use the word dummy, but you get it. "Wake up! I'm stopping because I'm saving your life. The Angel of the Lord is around the corner with a sword who's about to smite you." And then the Bible says that God opens up Balaam's eyes momentarily to see this angelic being that's waiting to kill him.

"Oh!" and then he's loving the donkey at that point, right? But the donkey opened his mouth and was used to speak the word of God when no man would. So when people come up to me and they say, "Oh Pastor James, God used your Bible study so much in my life, you were so brilliant, the words that you say," I always remind myself of something. God can use a rock and God can use a donkey to speak. So don't make a big deal out of that, right? If I shut my mouth, God will find somebody else to bring the message.

So take that with a very, very tiny microscopic grain of salt, if you know what I mean. So that's pretty heavy. Jesus says the opportunity is so big that if you choose to close your mouth and not take it, I will give it to a rock. Multiple rocks for that matter. It's heavy. I think there's a ton of opportunities that are happening right now in our lives that we're not paying attention to. God has given us to make good on, but we don't take advantage of them because we don't listen to God's word.

We don't apply it in every aspect of our life. Oh, we'll take God to church. We'll take God to maybe a few minutes of Bible study that we have outside of church. We'll take God to a few minutes of prayer, but we won't take God to our work to develop our professional practices. We won't take God to our financial discussion. We won't take God into our investing conversations. We won't take God into our interpersonal relationships.

Why? Because God is compartmentalized by so many of us. When you don't take God with you everywhere, you destroy your opportunities that God puts in front of you. That's just the fact. It's never about not seeing an opportunity, it's always about not being ready for the opportunity when it comes. And that's what we're talking about here. Look at this in verse 41, "And when he was come near and beheld the city and wept over it saying, 'If thou hast known even thou at least in this thy day the things which belong unto thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes.

For the day shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee and compass thee around and keep thee in on every side and shall lay thee even with the ground and thy children within thee and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon the other because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.'" Okay, so this is a pretty powerful prophecy because what Jesus is prophesying here is exactly what Titus came in to do in 70 AD. And it's funny how he talks about the fact that not one stone will be left upon the other.

You have to note this because it's really important. When Titus came in in 70 AD, Titus came in with the orders that the temple was not to be destroyed because the temple was actually built by a man who was Roman, but also a man who was partially Jewish. And it's funny because Herod's temple was supposed to be the place that the Caesar was going to walk into and basically commit the abomination that causes desolation. He was going to go into the temple and he was going to demand to be worshiped.

That was the plan. But when Titus came in in 70 AD and they went to attack all of those positions, the temple guards were giving them a difficult time in the fact that they were defending the temple itself. And so Titus's men actually launched these arrows that were flaming and one of them actually started the temple structure on fire and the fire burned so hot that all of the gold that was on the temple seeped through the cracks of the stones and every single stone was ordered to be taken off the other so that they could recover the gold.

So when Jesus said that not one stone would be left upon the other, that's exactly what he was talking about. But Jesus was mourning and weeping over that. Why? Because Jesus undoubtedly was thinking about the history of his people. Jesus may have been thinking about the moment that we read about, that we know about, where in 605 BC, the first of three sieges was put into place by King Nebuchadnezzar. At the time he was General Nebuchadnezzar, he wasn't the king, he was actually a general for his father, but King Nebuchadnezzar goes in and in the first siege, that's the siege where Daniel was taken away.

The next siege, which would have been in 595 BC, would have been the siege where of course Ezekiel was taken in. But the last siege that ended on the ninth of Av, 586 BC, on that day, 500,000 at the minimum, 500,000 men, women and children were killed in Jerusalem on that day. And the temple was in essence destroyed and the city was made abandoned. And people mourned and grieved. It was the destruction that many lamented over.

The most notable of those lamentations happens to be the Laments of Jeremiah and that's when he actually wrote the book of Lamentations, which was in essence the documenting of his crying concerning the destruction of the city of Jerusalem. By the way, remember that date. Remember the date ninth of Av, 586 BC because when Titus came in and destroyed the temple in 70 AD, it was also on the ninth of Av. Very interesting to think about the significance of all of that.

But Jesus said that all of that would be destroyed. Why? Because they missed this thy day. What does that mean? They did not recognize the prophetic words that were being offered about what would happen to him during that time and as a result they brought judgment upon themselves. I think it's interesting because for us, there's a personal application that we can draw from this. There's also one on a national level that we can draw from this.

I think the personal application lies solely in understanding that God designed his word for us to take into every part of our lives, right? His word needs to be applied in every area. If we applied his word in our finances, our finances would be a lot better. If we applied his word in our health, it would be a lot better. If we applied his word in our daily disciplines, our lives would never be the same. If we applied his word in every aspect of our life, it'd be completely different.

The reason why our country fell apart during the COVID pandemic, as they would call it, the reason why our country fell apart during that time was because the church refused to apply the word of God during a time that was critical for the word of God to be applied. There were more pastors in a cowardly way that shut down their churches because of the fear of death than kept them open because they trusted in God through that time. That's what happened. It happened all around not only this country, but all around the world.

And our country suffered the most. You know one of the reasons why we closed our eyes and woke our eyes up to drag queens in the library has everything to do with the church not participating like it always was. Because when we abandoned our post, we created that condition. God gave us an incredible opportunity. God gave us this remarkable way of looking at things that we didn't take him up on because we didn't trust his word. I think it's hilarious.

I got into a conversation even recently with somebody on this. The topic of Jack Hibbs seems to be coming up quite a bit. People talk about him because he's a bit of a controversial person. I don't know why he's considered controversial, I just think he's biblical. Okay, there's nothing controversial about Jack, he's just biblical. I guess being biblical I guess could be controversial, you know? But it's interesting because I heard somebody call Jack a church stealer. That was recently.

They said, "Oh, he's just a church stealer." I couldn't contain myself. I had to chime in. And I had to say, actually, the reason why Jack's church tripled in size during the time that you're talking about was because Jack loves God so much that he took advantage of the opportunities that God was putting in front of him to show the world that he was going to trust God more than he was going to fear death.

And what's even more interesting is all of the people that he so-called stole, they were victims that came from cowardly pastors who shut their churches down because they were more worried about George Floyd, more they were worried about what God said. And they shut their churches down and the effectiveness of their ability to be able to articulate the power of God was gone. During the time of George Floyd, let me tell you something, the church failed every Black family in this country.

Because what the church chose to do, a lot of people in the church while they were shut down, they chose to do what? They chose to give in to the secular humanistic lie that fueled the Hegelian dialectic that taught everybody that there was no absolute where they were bowing down at the feet of something that God never told us to bow down to. And they ripped away an opportunity that God was making for the church to show himself strong.

I don't know about you, but I love opportunities that God gives us to show himself strong because in doing so he shows up and amazing things happen. If you want to know the story of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, that's how that story really went. And every church that did the same thing, that's the story of that church. That's the story of Calvary Chapel Signal Hill. God gave us a unique opportunity and we took him up on it. And what did he do? He did amazing things, did he not?

That's the faithfulness of God you guys. I think we have to wake up and recognize the opportunity put in front of us. The most tragic day was the one that Jesus was seeing when he noticed the religious leaders did not trust him enough to take full advantage of what God was doing in the moment. Let the story of Palm Sunday be the fact that God in his mercy and God in his grace is giving us another opportunity to do something remarkable and that opportunity must be vested in walking in obedience to God to watch his power show up on our behalf to do great things. Amen?

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Pastor James Kaddis on Light on the Hill and part of our new study, Prophecies That Changed the World Forever. Pastor James will be right back with more. There are a few ways you can listen to today's message or the entire five-part series again. We post all our programs to lightonthehillradio.com as well as oneplace.com. You'll also find Light on the Hill on most major podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google.

We also have an app that makes listening to messages easy to do on any of your mobile devices. Just search for Calvary Chapel Signal Hill in the App Store or Google Play. We're thankful to the Lord for the listeners that come alongside us with their prayers or financial support. It helps us do what we do every day. If you'd like to donate to the ministry today, please visit lightonthehillradio.com. You can also give through the Light on the Hill app. Pastor James, it's a good time to mention our Palm Sunday and Easter services here at Calvary Chapel Signal Hill. Will you fill our listeners in on what's coming up?

James Kaddis: Yes, we are very excited about those services and what we do is we spend some time focusing very uniquely on aspects of that time in history that completely changed the world. And in this particular year we're going to be dealing with some of the prophetic leanings that took us to a very practical and dare I even say historical understanding of the Christ that so many people don't know and it will prove to be a very encouraging time.

You will grow in your faith, you will come to appreciate the resurrection of Christ and you will also come to appreciate the sacrifice that he made. It's going to be a great time. Our Good Friday service and all of our Easter services will be live streamed if you are not in the area but coming in attendance you're always welcome. We are excited and very much looking forward to celebrating a very special time.

Guest (Male): If you'd like more information about our services and how you can join us online or in person, visit calvarychapelsignalhill.com. More prophecies that would change the world forever are coming up next time on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.