Transcript SESSION 1
Well, on October 19th 2014, I was having some, what I thought were minor physical symptoms. I got a hold of my physician and he said, "Paul, you live in Center City, Philadelphia. Live close to Jefferson Hospital. Just walk over there to emergency and they'll check you out." I wasn't concerned. I thought they would affirm that I was in fabulous health and I'd go home. So, Sunday afternoon after church, Luella and I walked to the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital, we stopped at Starbucks on the way for worship. And we sat in the emergency room watching the Eagles play that Sunday. In those days, the best place to watch the Eagles was in an emergency room. They called me back into the examining room, and before very long, there were representatives from five different departments in the hospital in my examining room. I couldn't make sense out of what was going on. They let me know that I would not be out of the hospital anytime soon. When I got up to the room, all of a sudden, my body went into full body spasms. Unrelenting spasms for 36 hours. It felt like somebody was stabbing me in my abdomen, I literally screamed for 36 hours. Still disoriented, still not understanding all that was going on, and the next morning when things had calmed down, a physician came into my room and let me know that I was in the hospital because my kidneys were dying, that if I had waited another week, I would not be on the stage with you. I was in the hospital for 10 days and I thought that would be it, they had taken care of me, I had retained enough of my kidney that I could live. I had an operation that January, which was unexpected, and that was followed by six more surgeries. A surgery every four months for two years. If you have a surgery every four months, you don't recover before you have the next surgery. I grew weaker and weaker and weaker, to the point where I literally could not get out of a chair. Now, this was happening when God had given me this worldwide gospel platform. I would sit there in the chair pondering how could it be that God would give me this kind of influence for his kingdom and render me so useless? Now, I haven't told you my story so that you would have sympathy for me. But as an illustration of something that sometime somewhere everyone in this room will face, there are moments when life doesn't make sense. When you're trying to hold on to the presence and the promises and the grace of God, but it seems distant from your experience. And there's a reason for this, we live in two worlds, all of us do. One world is the world of God's love and God's grace. It's so incredibly beautiful, it almost defies human description. We're quite apart from anything we could have ever earned or deserved or achieved. God has chosen to pour his love on us. And he blesses us with his presence. He blesses us with his grace, he blesses us with his promises, he blesses us with his power. He literally comes to live inside of us. That's just such an astounding reality, it's so beautiful. And he gives us with his word, where would we be without his word? And he gives us with his church, where would we be without his church? It's so gorgeous, so wonderful to get up in the morning and say to yourself, I am redeemed, I'm a child of God. I've chosen to be an object of his favor. I have a destiny that's secure. I have been given everything I need for life and godliness. It's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful. But you don't just live in that world. You live in a world of pain and loss and betrayal. Some of the darkest experiences you could ever imagine. A car wreck that turns a loved one into a quadriplegic. A sudden death, the walking away of a dear family member. The encroachment on your heart and mind of depression that you don't seem to be able to fight. Fear that grips you so much that it becomes a physical reality. You shake and you gasp for breath. The unwanted, the unexpected, the hard and the difficult enters your door. Sometimes God seems distant. Sometimes you wonder, where are his promises? Sometimes you think, is he hearing my prayer? Two worlds. And there are moments when it seems almost impossible to hold those two worlds together. And what's important about facing that, facing that you don't just live in this world of glorious
Transcript: Session 1
GOSPEL HOPE
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