An Oasis In A Desert

I was thinking back this morning, I'd take something for granted, and that's my time in deserts. I grew up in Southern California, and one of my favorite haunts was the Mojave Desert, or going down into Mexico and spending time in the deserts there. My family and I lived in Arizona for quite a while, and one of my favorite things was to go down towards the end of our street and go out in the desert and just go out and see nature or go hiking in the desert, backpacking, exploring—something I just take for granted. The deserts in the United States begin down in Mexico and come up through the western U.S., through California, Nevada, Arizona, moving up through Nevada, Utah, into southern Wyoming, western Wyoming, eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, right up into British Columbia at our feast site in British Columbia—in southern British Columbia there. There's cactus on the hillsides, and there's a desert museum there, and people are a little surprised to come into British Columbia, which is more known for its rain forests along the coast, and find the great American desert goes up into that area and actually proceeds a little bit further north in areas before it sort of dies out. Deserts are caused usually by a mountain range being on the windward side, and as the moisture goes up to high elevations, it squeezes that moisture out and comes out dry on the other side. And so you can see even here in our own state, in the western part of Oklahoma, it's still dry going back until you find that next mountain range, and on the other side it's going to be a lot of precipitation. And so it is in various parts of the world that there are deserts. I visited the Sahara Desert, also—well, the Sahara Desert in Egypt, and it's a big wide desert that covers really the top third about of Africa—flown over a lot of that in various times. And just looking down, you just see desert, just hour after hour of pretty much nothingness down there. The same visiting Morocco and going into 10 years and 210, and in between there it's just desert. It's dry. It's pretty sandy. When you get over to Israel, going into the Negev Desert, some of that's down below sea level. It's very, very hot. Nothing really grows. When you come up a little bit north and east of that, you have the Saharan—sorry, you have the Saudi Arabian Desert. And the Saudi Arabian Desert is another vast expanse. Saudi Arabia is basically a big bunch of sand from one coast to the other. You've got Yemen and Aden along the bottom. I've seen those deserts over to the tip on the other side. When you come out at United Arab Emirates, it's basically a city and a country built on sand. The tallest building in the world there is built on sand. And there's nothing much around it. When you go right out to the city limits, you just find the great Arabian Desert. Skipping over that gulf there, you'll find Iran on the other side. Many times my wife and I have flown the whole length of Iran. Sometimes we come over Iraq and can look down and see the Tigris and Euphrates River. And if the sun's just right reflecting off them, you can see where they split.

All of that country is pretty much just dry. It's desolate. Down at the bottom of Africa, you have the Gobi Desert, leaving the Cape Town area or Johannesburg, if you're flying west from there. Again, just vast amounts of dry country. Here we see an example of millions of square miles in the Sahara Desert. You can turn the overhead lights down if you would. But when you look at this, you find there's not much productivity there. There's not much that can be done there. Deserts have little land, soil, with no rainfall to speak of. It's intriguing. I always find them fascinating. They're very interesting. They're challenging. They're dangerous. But deserts do cover a huge area of the earth. People live in desert environments, and there they often eke out a living, whether it's in this country or south of us or east or west of us. Wherever you find a desert and you find people who are living there, you'll find people who are on the edge of survival and living life on a thin line that's dependent on certain things.

That type of life, to me, is curious. Like I said, I've been around it. I'm comfortable with it because we have connections to food, connections to water, connections to shelter, don't we, and vehicles and means by which you can go in and then come back out. But if you're just there, and that's all you have to rely on, chances are your life is going to be in the balance, and if you have a nice long life, it's going to be an arduous, dangerous, and difficult experience. Sand. I'll use the term sand today in this message a lot. Deserts aren't always just sand. There's other things there. Sometimes there's scrub things, little plants trying to also eke out a survival, some little animals, snakes, various things, trying to pray and stay alive themselves, pray on various things. But sand is, in a sense, a concept here of difficulty, of a life that is not full, not rich, not blessed. I want to use that as an analogy today. Sand is what you arrive with all over you when you come into God's church. We come in, and in a sense, this sand, these challenges that we bring with us are kind of like the Egyptian culture that the Israelites came in to Canaan with. They had a lot of sand with them. They came off the deserts. They came off, you might say, of the great Sahara Desert region, and God brought them into a land flowing with milk and honey. But when they arrived, they didn't just show up as righteous people, knowing good, doing good, living that life of milk and honey, as it were, a type of ease and blessings. One of the first things they did was build a golden calf. They brought sand in with them, in other words. Another example would be when the Jews were exiled to Babylon. They were there 70 years. A couple of generations grew up there. And when some came back to rebuild the temple, you see, with Ezra and Nehemiah, that there were challenges, and people didn't really have the right values. They didn't really have the right ethics. When we think of the Jews in Palestine in Jesus' day, some of those who had come back hundreds of years before now had picked up a lot of kind of sand. They weren't really in a garden spiritually, were they? And so there were a lot of things that had infiltrated into what was called the religion of that time that Jesus talked about. When Paul went as the apostle to the Gentiles, he found people in Corinth. He went through Athens. He was an Asia miner in various places. And what did he find there? Well, he found people living with a lot of sand in their life, and they had brought sand into the church.

He says to us, you were once out there. You were once out there.

You know, there's this thing that we call the church, and it's like an oasis. The title of the sermon today is, An Oasis in the Desert. We might take for granted that, kind of like me, there's deserts, and yeah, it's kind of fun to go out in a desert and poke around, and it's interesting out there. But we are actually called to a type of a garden where God is. Like Adam and Eve were brought into this garden, and the church is the body of Christ. It's not mingled with the world at all. When we look at the world and society out there, if we think of that as a desert, and the church of God is an oasis. God's spirit is not out there. As the Bible uses an analogy, it's kind of dry. It's parched ground. It's difficult. But here we have the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit flowing in us like water. The sand, however, and the dunes out there are attractive. I must say that physically, whenever I see sand and sand dunes and deserts, I want to stop and go out and see it. It's kind of curiously interesting. It's not fruitful. It's not beneficial. Everything in a desert, they say, hurts. It has thorns. It stings. It bites. Or it's going to hurt you because there's no water or nutrition there. That's pretty much the way it is. So it is with the world. Pretty much everything in society is going to hurt you. Whatever people are selling, whatever people are doing, whatever is the latest rage or the thing that people are really involved in, there's an ulterior motive there for self, and it's going to hurt. You know, as an analogy, there are sand dunes in this country that are very popular with recreationalists who like to go out in dune buggies. Now you have what we saw well ago. You see in the horizon, there's these beautiful sculptured sand dunes, and there are state parks in the United States of sand dunes that allow people to go out in dune buggies and drive all over those. Powerful engines and big tires, knobby tires, and they just destroy the looks of that because it's kind of fun to run up and down on these sand dunes. And it doesn't really hurt anything, they say, because, you know, the wind will come back and re-sculpt those sand dunes, and it'll be kind of like Las Vegas. You know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so that there's really no really no problem with doing that. And so right now, believe it or not, out on the dunes in the U.S., there are hundreds or thousands of people who came out with their toy-holler RVs, opened up the back, and rolled out their sand dunes, and they're off in the southwestern U.S. enjoying that, right? So, but as a type, this defacing is okay. This lifestyle, if we go to spiritually, it's okay to go out and do that because, you know, it's not really hurting anybody.

Similarly, on the dunes of society, people are living and doing things saying, it's just me. I'm not hurting anybody else. And they're destroying, as it were, married lives, family lives, through their greedy thinking.

And this concept of, well, it's not really hurting anybody else, has spread globally. And this, whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, is now an international concept. People are involved in all types of commerce that's illegal, all types of sort of backstabbing and corporate theft. People just think nothing anymore of all these ads that you get on your device or your computer or whatever that are spamming and scamming. Nobody's going after those, it seems. And it's just become so commonplace of politicians stealing their seats, lying to people, you know, taking money. More and more people are just, you know, acting out in ways around the world globally. This culture of depravity, lust, and greed is what I would like to say today is like the desert. And I'll sort of take that analogy that the Bible hints at, and we will see a contrast today between this oasis of the church and the desert outside. The question we should ask ourselves is, as we see the daily news of the degrading underbelly that is collapsing around the globe, we should see the stark difference in God's church and come to respect and appreciate and defend it from sand coming in so that it doesn't become sort of overrun by sand and just become something that's common like everything else because our human nature said, oh, that looks interesting. Let's do that, too. How much of society's sand dunes does Jesus Christ want brought into our lives, into our church? You know, you ever go out in the sand and you have a picnic? What's it like? You go down to the beach, you have a nice picnic, and you start eating, and guess what? You get some sand. Somebody kicked some sand in the potato salad, in the hamburgers. Is that okay? Is that fun to chew on? You get it in your shoes, you get it in your clothes, and you come back home, and now you got sand in the house and sand all over. See, it's kind of like that. How much sand does Jesus Christ want brought into His oasis, into His garden, into His body?

An oasis is a striking anomaly whenever you go into a desert. An oasis just is absolutely the opposite. It's very curious that there's so much water in an oasis in various types. That's what makes it an oasis. But there's nothing immediately green surrounding it. That lake, for instance, if that's been there a thousand years, where's the vegetation climbing up all the hills, you know? Where's the vegetation going 30 feet? You know, that's an interesting phenomena. If you follow the Colorado River down through the Great American Desert, you don't see any vegetation on the sides. You'll see some reeds. If it gets shallow, you'll see some reeds standing in the water, and you'll see a tree or a shrub right on the bank, but walk this far away. And typically, there's nothing there but just dry, sandy, rocky terrain. So it creates quite a contrast, and it's quite a black and white situation if you're looking at a printed word, you know, on your page. Next to the letters, there's nothing. There's no sort of shades of gray. No, it's just stark. So we see this island of life, as it were. It has food, shade, housing, trees, some palms in there.

We have recreation, food, water, rejuvenation, people swimming, people having a nice time. Today, I'd like to focus on the contrasts of wet and dry, water, sand, and life and death. And I'd like to show a link between these physical oases and a link between the church and society outside. The Bible often speaks of a wilderness. When it says wilderness, the first part of the word wilderness is wild. Wild-er-ness. What it means is people don't live there. For whatever reason, people don't live there. In Leviticus chapter 20 and verse 24, we see Israel being called out. Leviticus 20 and verse 24 says, But I have said to you, you shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the Lord your God who has separated you from the peoples, from society. And I'm sure scriptures can come to your mind about being separate. Come out of her, my people. Don't be joined together with, you know, Satan and Belial, or sorry, Christ and Belial, you know, Satan and evil, plus righteousness. Don't be joining yourself with the desert. You know, God says, I am the Lord who has separated you from the peoples. Therefore, you shall distinguish between clean beasts and unclean, between unclean birds and clean. You shall not make yourselves any abominable, anything abominable by beast or bird.

And so, in verse 26, you shall be holy to me, for I am the Lord I have separated you from the people, for I am the Lord I have separated you from the people. That is what you and I need to focus on in our life.

He's called us to something else, called us out of a spiritual desert into his oasis. The single difference between a desert, by the way, and an oasis is water. That's it. That's it. In the Bible, water is synonymous with God's Holy Spirit. In John 4, verse 13, Jesus answered and said to her, Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again. Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst, but the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water, springing up into everlasting life.

So we are called into this body and given this water of life and Jesus as our bread, and the whole purpose is it will become a fountain of water through anything we go through and ultimately will end up in our having everlasting life.

We in the church have spiritual food. Think of outside. People are blind. They don't know what to eat. They don't have the bread of life available to them in their thinking. Thereafter, other types of food, in a spiritual sense, things that don't provide nourishment towards happiness, towards eternal life.

We have water here. We have God's Holy Spirit. And with that comes growth. We grow and develop and we produce fruit. Jesus Christ said, my father desires above all that you produce fruit and your fruit remains. You can't do that in a desert. You can't produce fruit in a desert. Nothing's harvested out there. It's just a bunch of sand. Paul describes life in the oasis in Colossians chapter 1 and verse 9. Sometimes we don't think of it in these terms and think of it as special.

We just think, oh yeah, we're all here on planet earth and some of us keep the Sabbath and some of us don't. Oh, there's a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge difference between those who are in God's church and are the bride of Christ and those who at this time are following a different mindset from a different God, small g. In Colossians 1 and verse 9, he says that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.

Verse 10, Colossians 1, that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. See how rich it is in this spiritual oasis? Verse 11, strengthened with all might according to his glorious power, for all patience and long suffering with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light.

He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the rule of his Son, the Son of his love. We have a really wonderful opportunity filled with blessings, filled with life-giving spirit and food and a great future. Abundant life happens in the church of God, God's spiritual oasis for his people. We look at this city built in an oasis. Look at what's on all sides.

This is what you typically see in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, where somebody can get enough water or you have a source of water in an oasis. And look at the beauty and the productivity. Compared with what's outside, you see the dunes and you see the scrappy bushes that are trying to survive, and they're probably just creosote bushes or something that have no nutritional value to us whatsoever.

An oasis's border, as I mentioned before, has a strong stark contrast at its edge. When you look at the date trees that are there, their roots go down and they tap into the water, and you can see some rushes along the edge. You remember that Moses on the Nile was floated out in a little, when he was a baby, he was floated out into some bull rushes, and the queen or the princess of Pharaoh retrieved him from there. But whenever you go to, let's say, Cairo, Egypt, and you see this Nile River right on the edge, you forget, there's some flood plain that happens, and this flood plain, they will farm it out as far as it goes, and at the edge of that, at the edge of it, there's sand, just as far as the eye can see, just a clear line.

You know, they can pump water out so far, and they can have have crops, and then nothing all the way across Africa. It's abrupt. We should think of the churches that way. We should not think of it as, oh, you know what, it's kind of blending. We're all kind of the same. People God has called, and the nice people that are in society, we all kind of think the same. Our lives are kind of the same. So we can just go out and mix and mingle and, you know, bring all that in. Is that right?

Let me tell you something about oasis, oases with food. You see the date palm there, the one with the long branches. A medjool date palm produces 900 pounds, or about 450 kilos of dates each tree a year. Now, you might just think that tree is, you know, just a tree, but when you start bagging the dates, you cut the limbs off, as I've done with our friend, Monty Knudsen, he pastors the Phoenix congregation. He used to have date trees in his yard, and I said, let's start harvesting those. So he learned how to get them pollinated and everything, and then invited the church to come over, and we'd have date harvests of medjool dates. Each medjool date contains 120 calories. Now, if you have medjool date trees, you've got a real supply of food. Now it might be, it might be 55 degrees Celsius there, it might be 130, 140 degrees. Dates survive just fine, and 140 degrees, you can store them all day. It might be 20 below zero Celsius or Fahrenheit. Date storage is fine. It's an incredible food. It's just indestructible, very nourishing, full of energy. So here's the thing. There's a lot here that we might just take for granted in the church. We might say, yeah, we're in the church, yeah, but we go to the feast and we keep the Sabbath. We have good relationships, and God's way works and everything, but see that road going up the hill over there? That looks kind of interesting. I wonder if my car would get up over there. I wonder what's on the other side. I wonder who's over there. Maybe I'll go hiking out there. Maybe I'll go get a whole bunch of sand. Maybe I'll go out and see what kind of snakes and scorpions live out there. See if I can get a good sunburn and lose my way, maybe, and try to survive with no water, etc., etc. That looks exciting. The world can look like that to us, too. It can kind of look—everything's kind of boring in the church. You know, if you have good relationships, God loves you, He blesses you. You know, we have our church family, but look what's on TV. I mean, look what people are doing, you know, spring break. And look how much money people are making on the dark web. It kind of looks kind of interesting out there, different. Maybe I'll go make a friend out there. Maybe I'll go, you know, develop some relationship with the Bedouins. They've got those camels, and camels have fleas, maybe, but you know, they've got camels, and that might be interesting. But in God's church, people are building their futures. It really is fulfilling, it's loving, it's family, careers. Growing up towards God's kingdom, we have truth, we have right, we have joy, we have challenges that we succeed in instead of failing in. We have peace, helping one another, friendships, right goals, proper relationships, great futures for young ladies coming up to marry young gentlemen coming up with good futures for their kids and grandkids. You don't find that out in the desert. You don't find that on TV. You don't find that in the world. Today, you would raise your daughters to soon after puberty to be free, recreation for the boys and men that will be in the rest of their life. That's pretty much what society offers young girls these days. And you can pretty much forget about any sort of deep, meaningful marriage, future children when you see what goes on in much of the world today and where that's headed. And so, again, God's church is truly an oasis in a wilderness. It's pleasant. When you look right here, what do you see? You can't hardly see the oasis. There's so many trees. There's so much growth, you know, but look at the edge and look what's out in the distance.

One thing that we have in the church is something that's predictable. God doesn't change. Doctrine doesn't change. Relationships don't change. Love doesn't change. Sacrifice for others doesn't change. Selflessness doesn't change. When we look at the fruits of the Spirit, they've never changed. Love, agape, joy, peace, harmony, long suffering. You can depend on the long suffering that you will have and others will have for you. Gentleness and goodness, you know, self-control. You don't find that out in the desert. You know, it's...

God in God's way is so dependable. You can go right now in Palm Springs, California, which is in the summertime. I don't think anybody wants to be there. It's really, really hot. I used to pastor the church there. It is hot. It is dry. It is desert. It's kind of fun to go poke around and...

but there's nothing really there except there is a little state park. And when I say little, it's little. There's an oasis just on the outside of town with old grove palm trees. And those palm trees, I don't know, they're huge and they're just covered in palm fronds and they're really close together. Now it might be 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and you're just dying. What's dependable about an oasis is you can walk in those trees and need a jacket. Literally. I'm not kidding you. Don't hang around there too long unless you have a jacket on a hot day because it is air conditioned. The ground is kind of a little bit damp and the trees, you know, God just made trees to suck up moisture and pump it out the leaves. And it is just cold in there. And every time you think, oh no, it can't be that cold today. You can hike on out of that and go on up, follow the little, what used to be a creek or sometimes is a creek, and you can go up on the hill where it's all stony and you'll be very, very hot. You'll be panting. You'll be hot. You'll be just miserable. And go back down to the grove. You'll be cold. I wish you hadn't worn shorts. I wish you brought a coat. You'd think that God's people would treasure this. Did Israel? No. Did the New Testament church always treasure it? By the end of the New Testament period, we see people wanting to go out on the dunes, as it were. When we look at Revelation 2 and verse 3, well, let's just go to Revelation chapter 2 and 3 real quick and look at Jesus' view of His church.

This is powerful and something that you and I need to read from time to time. I know back in the 1800s there was a theory that somebody brought up that Revelation 2 and 3 were about church eras, but the Bible here says that this is the church of God. Jesus Christ is writing this to His church, and there's seven lessons here that would do us well to pay attention to and not follow somebody's idea that this is all history or future, but rather seven lessons that we can actually learn from. Let's look in chapter 2 and verse 13, for instance. I know your works and where you dwell where Satan's throne is, and you hold fast to my name and did not deny my faith.

But verse 14, I have a few things against you because you have there those who hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality. So there's that. You see, all you got to do is let yourself sort of go outside, right, and these things are readily available, and we can bring that sand back into our lives. And when we do, we bring it into our church. We look down in verse 20. Nevertheless, I have a few things against you because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and beguile my servants to commit sexual immorality and to eat things sacrificed to idols. And you can say, well, you know, there's other religions out there, and they use the name Jesus, and that Jezebel, that, you know, the Babylonish woman, as it were, and her immoral daughters, we can go out and we can kind of mix up with that and say, oh, that makes it a little more easy, a little more comfortable. Let's bring some of that sand in. Jesus is saying it's right in the church. It's a tendency that humans have. So, when we look at this way of life and we decide to say, you know, well, it's wonderful, it's beautiful, you know, you've got rivers of flowing water of God's Spirit, you've got, look at the crops being brought in, look at the trees, look at, you know, the olives on the trees and the various vegetables and look at the housing. It's all very nice, right? But wait, look into the desert. Yeah, what's going on out there? Let's get on the TV. Let's get on the radio. Let's listen to our friends. Let's go to university. See the people out there, they're having fun. They're sliding down those dunes. They're driving them dune buggies. They're rolling around, looks inviting. You can almost hear people out on the dunes, sounds coming from them. Looks fun and easy. Maybe we're missing out on something here in the oasis. If you don't believe that, where are the kids in this room? We have a few. Where are the young adults? Where are the young adults that have come up through the church for years and years and years? Oh, the only ones are here. You know, the rest have been attracted to what's going on out there.

Looks inviting. But you know, reality out on the dunes is, like I said, in the deserts, everything hurts. I don't know why that is, but that's true. Everything's got thorns. If you even remember one time, one of our daughters, I think it was Michelle or Cindy, we were driving through a desert and spring rains had hit. And so they were filled with blossoms, a real short event. You know, you get all this flowers pop up and then they disappear. Well, the flowers were up and she reached down and picked up a purple one. It was so pretty. And the moment her fingers touched the stem of that purple flower, she started screaming. And it hurt. It just burned and stung. And our little outing suddenly became, how can we manage whatever this particular thing is? And of course, you walk very far and the cactus, the cholla cactus, they call them jumping cactus. They don't actually jump, but if you get anywhere near them, they have these things, parts of the plant, that are just barely connected to the plant. And so if you just brush them, little things kind of go like this and they latch on to either you or your clothing. And they've got hooks going in different directions. So it's not like you can, well, if you pick them off, well, you can't really pick them off, but now your fingers are also stuck. It's just a mess. It really, really is.

You get in an area that there's a lot of discomfort.

You've probably seen movies or something where a person who's out there very long, you dehydrate so quickly, and then it begins to play on your mind. It doesn't have to play on your mind. I've seen mirages my whole life, but it's funny to look out in a desert and you can see a lake out in the desert. And you can drive towards that lake, and that lake is kind of like a rainbow. It just keeps moving. It's always away from you. You can never catch it. But let's say you don't have a car and you are really, really thirsty and you're going to die, but you see that lake and you start walking for it, and you start crawling toward it, and you can't get it. But you can hallucinate to the point where you think you've finally shown up at the edge of that lake, and here is the water, and you start gulping down all the water you can get. But it's sand.

Now what state are you in? You've got a mouth and a throat full of sand and no water to wash it out.

You know, it's kind of like society. You think, oh well, you know, this is, my life isn't, but that would make me happy. I'll just go after that. If I can get some of that, well, my life, my life will really be happy.

Then you end up in prison for that little escapade. And what are you going to do with that now?

There's another thing out on the desert, and that's winds.

And oasis is fragile because of winds. You can see the giant mountains of sand, and look, they're pushing right up against that farm on the right side of date palms. This is really what Satan wants to do. He wants to obliterate the church. He wants to just pile sand in. He wants to have people bring it in by various means, or have you and me bring it in even better and obliterate the church, like happened in the New Testament period towards the end. When you get to James and Peter and Jude, first part of Revelation, first, second, and third John, you're talking about the apostles here pleading with the members, don't bring any more sand in the church.

These winds of change, you might say, come thundering in.

The winds of the Sahara and the Arabian deserts have certain names. A Haboub is the Arabic name for a wild, sand-laden wind associated with a thunderstorm. We have those in Arizona. If you ever seen on the news, this wall of dust that comes rolling in. There's a thunderstorm on the other side, and the winds that are coming off the front of that serious, severe thunderstorm are just pulling or pushing wind at you. And it is like fog. It's like a blackout is coming.

These winds are called Haboubs. There's another one called a Qamsin. In Arabic, it means 50 days. For 50 days a year, you have 90 mile an hour, 145 kilometer an hour winds that sweep across.

From March through May. And it fills the air with hot sand and dust. Then you have the Harmata. Harmata in Arabic means tears your breath apart.

Tears your breath apart. This happens November through April. And it's mostly dust combined with smoke and agricultural chemicals from the burning of crops that are a deadly mix for hundreds of thousands of people a year who die from the Harmata season. But we in God's church live in a fragile environment. It's in constant danger. We have had winds of change blowing on us. You know what I'm talking about? If you've been in the church for a long time, the Apostle Paul and Galatians and various theories and various false doctrines, you go to Jude and you see individuals there. These have repeatedly devastated much of the church. So what's so bad about life outside the church? Out on the dunes where lives are lived man's way. In Romans chapter 1 and verse 28, we see a passage that explains why humanity is not living a life in a sort of an oasis setting. Romans chapter 1 and verse 28 says, Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind.

So if we think of humanity left with the depravity of Satan the devil and his demons, and this is their resource if they want to tap into something, to do what ought not to be done, they become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. This is the daily news. I'm not pointing at anybody or trying to make us sound better than us. I'm just telling you that outside God's church, outside the body of Christ, this is what humanity is left with as a resource as a resource. They are gossip, slanders, god-haters, insolent, arrogant, boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents. They're senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Shall we bring some of that into the church? Shall we become kind of like that? Is that what you and I could be tempted to do? Or should we go out and join together with people like that and try to bring that into the church this way? That's not really living. That's just cycles of struggles to stay alive, to survive in a society of repeating materialism, repeating greed and warfare to take more and warfare to protect what you've taken.

Out on the dunes, without God's Holy Spirit, the water, dry wind sapped moisture from the body so rapidly, so very rapidly. When it's hot and dry and windy out there, you can drink water all you want and never have to go to the bathroom because it's just coming out of you that fast. If you fail to have water, over time your mouth, because you will breathe through your mouth if you exert energy, your mouth will become dry. And if your mouth becomes dry to a point, your tongue at the very end will split. I've had mine split a few times, just right on the tip, just from dryness. And that's very, very painful.

If a person was left out there, also your eyes will begin to matter up because of the lack of moisture. Your lungs will have a difficult problem. Your muscles will begin to discordinate and legs, etc., will go into cramps because of lack of moisture.

You can get sunburn, especially in a pale face like me. You can blister. You can get second and third degree burns out there. Jesus related the worldly type of life to being dead. That's the term he uses. Let's go over to Matthew 8 and verse 22.

They weren't dead dead, but he uses sort of the analogy of zombies. You know what a zombie is? It's a dead person that somehow is up walking around, and they make movies evidently. I'm not seeing one, but I've seen ads, something about zombies walking dead. Okay, well, I think Jesus invented this because notice here, Matthew 8, 22, Jesus said to him, follow me and let the dead bury their dead. Notice he's saying that's not really living. That's not life. That's not living. That's just surviving. That's doing time. That's dead while you're still alive.

In Romans 6, we won't turn there, but in Romans 6, he tells us, don't be slaves to sin anymore. Slavery is not life. It's not living. Again, it's stuck in a, I don't know, doing time kind of situation.

Satan has a philosophy that is tempting. Looks interesting, but it leaves people empty. It leaves lives meaningless, confused, hurting. Jesus is our way, and his way is about right and love, direction, going places, fulfillment. It's about nurturing, helping, being loved, loving. He gives us bread. He will never leave us or forsake us. We can have confidence. We can have trust. We can have faith. We will be given challenges just like anybody else, but all of our challenges we can rejoice in. As James says, when you find yourself being challenged or in trials, count it all joy. God is with you. When you look, however, at the respectability in the community that we have with God and can have with each other and the joy that that brings and the eternal future that we look forward to, we compare that to life out on the dunes. Selfish pursuits, destructive methods, fractal relationships, people who are disrespected, unfulfilled, and as it says in Revelation 22, but outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murders and idolaters and whoever loves and practices a lie. That is not what God wants in his kingdom, in his house, in his oasis. And you and I, as we think of Passover coming up and days of unleavened bread, we can use sand as an analogy for leaven and we can say, you know, we really don't want this leaven in here. You might say, well, a little bit of sand is okay. Okay, well, let's have a meal. Let's serve it. Think of a food that you really like. Now, we're going to introduce a little bit of sand to it. Not much, just a little bit. Not a bucket of sand on your meal. Okay, not a cup, not a cup of sand. Not a tablespoon of sand. No, that would... no, listen to that. A pinch, you know, just a little pinch. Not that much. Let's put one grain, just one grain of sand in your meal. Just one. That can't be a problem, right? Just one grain of sand. Sooner or later, you're going to hit that grain of sand. Might chip a tooth. It is so small, it's going to be hard as you're chewing to figure out what the sand is. You want to get rid of that and what the food is. You're going to be going through a situation here because that sand, even one grain of sand, is not going to be pleasant. Not going to be pleasant. And so God wants us to put all the sand out of our life. He wants us to find all of the leaven. He wants us to find all of the mind of Satan, as it were. All of the self-centered, breaking the laws of God, things that are anti-Christ. So you and I then have a little bit of a question. You and I have this opportunity to be in the Oasis and to respect it and protect it. And yet, you and I have to take this to an internal struggle, an internal struggle, for choosing right instead of wrong, for choosing life over death. And that's a daily thing. We can't just say, well, I'm in the church, so it's nice to hear a nice message about life in the Oasis. No, it's a choice we make all the time. We have to choose. Whether we're adults or teens or children, we have to choose. We have to choose. Generations have grown up living on television sitcoms. Every one of them has a motive, has an agenda, and that is to teach the values of this world. They can do it through humor, but the sitcoms tout abominable lifestyles that tear apart what God says that we are to do. They promote fornication, adultery, lying, stealing, cheating, murders.

First, there's tolerance. And we're taught through them and through all of the entertainment we have in articles and the news pressured over and over and over and over and over and over. You have to be tolerant. Look, these people weren't tolerant, and they're horrible, but you be tolerant. First, you're tolerant. Next, you want to accept. Acceptance. You have to. They push acceptance. And thirdly, coming on its heels at some point is participation. If you don't participate in that which you learn to be tolerant of and you came to accept as somebody's right, it's going to be pushed at you to participate in. We must not do that. In 2 Peter chapter 2 and verse 17, we find that some may wish to or think they can go out there, let's say, and bring some of that sand back in, merge God's way with Satan's way, you see. I can be in the church, but I can also do this thing as well because it's good for me and it's not hurting anybody else.

In 2 Peter chapter 2 and verse 17, it talks about wells without water. In the Oasis, we've got wells, but they don't have water, individuals, in other words, who are bringing something in that doesn't have God's Spirit, clouds carried by a tempest to whom the gloom of darkness is reserved forever. Verse 18, for when they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through licentiousness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error.

While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption. He's talking about church members here, people in the church, people in the Oasis, who brought in something that has no water. They're trying to dry it out. They're trying to bring in corruption.

In verse 21, for it would have been better for them to have not known the way of righteousness than having known it to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. But it has happened to them according to the true prophet. A dog returns to his own vomit and a sow having washed to her wallowing in the mire. You know, that's essentially a person going back into the world, at least mentally.

Most people led by God's Holy Spirit in his church appreciate the Oasis. And my point today is just merely to show the contrast, a clear picture contrast, to what special thing that we have here. Sin spoils life, you know, it just takes it away. It's just gone. Here is a row of crops that dried up and died off because they didn't have water.

Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 22 It says, that you put off concerning your former conduct the old man which grows corrupt according to deceitful lust and be renewed in the spirit of your mind. That you put on a new man which was created according to God in righteousness and true holiness. You know, that's the old man and there's nothing but death and destruction. And there's no God's Spirit going to go to that way of life. And if we walk away from it, that's what happens. We should have never, as he said, it'd been better if we'd never known. But therefore, in verse 25, put away lying.

Speak truth was his neighbor, for we are members of one another.

Drop down to verse 29, let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but what is good and necessary for edification?

In verse 30, and do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by which you are sealed for the day of redemption. Don't grieve that Spirit. If God pulls his Spirit, that's the end of life in the oasis. So, here's a question for you and me, and that is, will you help push sand out from your section of the oasis? Each one of us has a little section, don't we? Each one of us is a part of the body that can contribute life, or we can contribute, essentially, death or encouragement for death. Will you help push sand out from your section of the oasis? If we look here in verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 4, this I say, and therefore testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentile walk. Will we do that? Will we come back out? Will we push that back? That is something that we have to live with ourselves. We have to perform ourselves. We have to be on our knees asking God, help me today to come under your rulership and do your will, not my will. And forgive me when I brought some sand in, some leaven in, or whatever analogy you want. Forgive me and help me put that out, because it's important to the body that that's out. Jesus does not want that in his body. Jesus wants that body to grow, in fact. Let's go to Isaiah chapter 35 and verse 6. Isaiah chapter 35 and verse 6. There's a great future for the oasis of God because it's going to swallow up the desert. It's going to ultimately cover the earth. It's not going to be just, you know, stuck out in some little clump on a hillside.

Isaiah chapter 35, the last part of verse 6. For water shall burst forth, burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. Now, we often take this just physically, but what he's talking about here is spiritually. Yeah, it'll happen physically, but he's talking about spiritually. In verse 5, the eyes of the blind will be open. He's not just talking about, oh, how many blind people do you know? Not too many, but their eyes will be open. No, the whole world is blind. Jesus said, you know, be thankful that your eyes can see and your ears can hear because the world can't. So their eyes and ears are going to be open. The lame shall leap like a deer. The tongue of the dumb shall sing. You know, people don't know how to walk or where to walk. They're on the wrong road. They certainly don't know what to say. For the Holy Spirit will burst forth in the wilderness, spiritual wilderness, and streams in the desert. The parched ground shall become a pool. The thirsty land springs of water, in a physical sense, but more importantly, in the spiritual sense. Go back up to verse 1, and the wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, even with joy and singing. Well, physically, deserts don't sing, and they don't have joy, but mentally, spiritually, humans living in the desert, in the wilderness, without God will strengthen the weak hands, make firm the feeble knees. That's what's important here. Say to those who are fearful-hearted, Be strong, do not fear. Behold, your God will come with vengeance. With the recompense of God, He will come and save you. So there is a time coming when the whole world will become filled with the knowledge of the Lord, filled like an oasis, filled with spirit of God. So in conclusion, brethren, you and I should feel very blessed. We could even say, congratulations! You are invited to be here in God's spiritual oasis, and what a blessing that is. None of us can choose that for ourselves. Nobody on earth can choose that. For some reason, you and I have been invited to live in God's special oasis. But right now, that oasis is set within a big parched desert. Appreciate the oasis that's God's church. Drink God's Holy Spirit, the water of life. Let's all work hard in our personal lives to shake off the sand of this godless society that so easily wants to attach itself to us. Let's come inside and get rid of everything that would hinder us from this journey of productivity, of accomplishment spiritually as becoming the bride of Christ. And I'd like to close by reading Revelation chapter 22 and verse 17. Revelation 22 and verse 17. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come, and let him who hears say, Come, and let him who thirsts, Come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.