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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Janice Watson: W.O.W - Women of the Word Weekend

Janice Watson

The Spit In Our Eyes

And I'm delighted to be here talking about and talking to daughters and sons of the King this morning.

And I noticed earlier when they said, well, ladies, if you want to talk to her, men, I will talk to you as well.

I thought I ought to mention that just in passing.

You know, in thinking about the theme for the weekend, being a child of the king is indeed our greatest privilege, But at the same time, our most challenging responsibility, it's 1 thing to say, I'm God's child.

It's another thing to believe I'm God's child.

And it's a totally different thing to live like God's child.

And what we're going to be talking about today, this morning, this afternoon, is living like, living as a daughter, a son of the king.

And I anticipated as I started praying for this presentation that I'd have a lovely story from scripture about some woman who had done wonderful things that would show us what we needed to do.

So I went to the Bible for that story, or that passage, and what I got was something else.

And so I went back to the Bible, because you know sometimes when God talks to you, you think perhaps you didn't get the memo.

And so I went back and the story that came time and time again was the same story.

That's not even a good essay for those of you in graduate school.

So we're gonna spend some time this morning unpacking slowly 1 little story from scripture.

And the focus of this story, or at least part of it, is spit.

And so we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about daughters of the King, sons of the King, and the spit in our eyes.

Father, we have come here in your presence because we are in need and because you have what we need.

I ask that you would take all that I have and all that I am.

Remove anything that stands between me and you, But more importantly, between you and your people, that your word might flow freely, that your Holy Spirit might touch us, convict us, and change us.

And when you have done what only you can do, We will give you all of the honor and all of the glory forever.

I've been reading stories about blind people.

You know sometimes you take something in Scripture and just follow it through?

And for whatever reason, I was following through the stories about blindness and how Christ healed the blind and how Christ came, he says, to give sight to the blind.

And I was excited about what Christ had been doing.

And in Mark 8 verse 22, it says, speaking about Christ, and he cometh to Bethsaida, and they bring a blind man unto him and besought him to touch him.

And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town.

And when he had spit on his eyes and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw aught.

And he looked up and said, I see men as trees walking.

After that, he put his hand again upon his eyes and made him look up and he was restored and saw every man clearly.

Not much at all in terms of size, but I suspect a lot in terms of 1 man's life, and I think says some things today to us that may say a lot in terms of our lives, our lives as children of the king.

And I'm gonna ask you to walk with me through that story, step by step.

Because this story starts off differently from some of the other blind stories.

If we look at Luke 19 and the story of the blind man there, the blind man comes to Christ and Christ says to the blind man, what is it that you want?

And I will talk to you And you will talk to me because I'm a stranger and a foreigner here and you want to be nice.

Does it start the same way with a man who comes to Christ and says I want to see?

No, it starts where some people brought a blind man to Jesus and said, Lord, touch him.

Because understand that there are some blind people who seem to be okay with the fact that they're blind.

They've been blind a long time and they know how to function as blind people.

They've got the braille down, they know exactly how many steps it is to get from here to here, and life is going on just fine for the blind man.

At least we have no indication of anything else.

And perhaps occasionally he dreamt about being able to see, but it didn't sound like he was doing a lot about it.

We're talking about being daughters and sons of the king.

Are there some of us, you knew it was going to come like this, didn't you?

Who are quite comfortable with where we are.

I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand, But some of you have been Christian a long time.

Some of you were raised in Christian homes.

Some of you have been studying the Bible a long time, and I should say us.

And sometimes We're just busy doing life.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you are in graduate school?

I remember what it was like to have school almost absorb and take over your entire life.

You get up in the morning thinking about what you have to do, planning what the next step is.

Some of you have theses and dissertations coming, and life gets to be day-to-day, busy about what it is I'm here to do.

And some of us teach and some of us do other things, but I suspect that for many of us our Lives go on pretty much day to day.

Or is this a different group from the groups that I'm used to?

Because if so, talk to me and we'll make adjustments along the way.

Life goes on and it keeps us busy and we're involved and the blind man was busy doing his life.

The Bible says that Jesus took him by the hand.

You know, just kind of hit him, Lord, and say, be healed.

Jesus often doesn't do what He does the way we anticipate.

And so He takes this blind man who's doing fine by the hand, come with me.

Have you felt yet Jesus reach out and hold on to you?

Because if you haven't felt that yet, we're not quite ready to talk about being children of the King.

The children of the King are men and women who Christ has taken by the hand in the midst of the lives that we're busy doing, in the midst of all that's going on and said, come.

Our Identity as a Daughter of The King

We're grateful for the opportunity to be here.

We're grateful for the opportunity to be your children.

In a special way, we're grateful for the fact that your Holy spirit continues to guide and direct.

As we open your word, and as we consider what it means to be your daughters, to be living for you, we ask that your spirit would guide us.

We ask that our hearts and our minds might be open to your leading.

May you be the 1 who speaks, may you be the 1 that does the work.

And we promise that you will be the 1 that gets all of the glory.

When you think of yourself, and in a minute here I'm going to start walking around, I can tell.

When you think of yourself as a daughter of the king, When you think of yourself as God's child, what does that mean to you?

I'm a teacher so I'm gonna walk around and a minute later I'm probably gonna get the board.

Is there anything difficult about being the daughter of the king?

Are there any challenges for you about being the daughter of the king?

Okay, that got even more of a response than the first question.

What kinds of challenges do you face as a daughter of the king?

Expectations as in yours, his, someone else's.

If you were talking to someone else who did not know what it meant to be a daughter of the king?

Okay, and where would you start that conversation?

Okay, so he is the creator, he's the owner, and you talk about us in relationship to Him, to the vastness of who He is.

When I first, and this was probably about a year ago, that I was asked for the first time to talk about being a woman of God, and you know, for many years I just refused those invitations.

I'm happy to come and preach, I'm happy, but I don't do woman's stuff.

And somebody called, they asked me to come, I said I would come, we had went through all of that, and then she told me what she wanted to talk about.

She said, talk about being a woman of God and talk about Proverbs 31.

And those of you who've heard me on AudioVerse know that I am not the Proverbs 31 woman in the sense of what I believed that was growing up.

I don't consider myself to… And that's what I thought she was, this very quiet, meek woman who cooked all the time and, you know, stayed home and took care of her children and so forth and so on.

How can I go out and speak if that's not me?

I don't have any children to rise up and call me blessed.

And folks, let's be very careful of what we do with our children.

Talk to our kids about what they hear, because what they hear may not be what we think we're teaching.

I don't know that anybody meant to teach me that, but I do know that it's what I heard.

And I know it's what stood with me for a very long time in my life, about what God wanted from me.

And when I thought I couldn't be that person, I just gave up.

I figured, you know what, I'll just be who I am because I can't be who she is and oh well, I don't know what God is going to say about that.

Well none of us need to live in that space.

And 1 of the things that I learned as I got ready, I said you know so often we start the story about being God's child in strange places.

In fact, we don't start the story about being a woman of God with being God's child.

What kinds of messages did you get growing up about what it meant to be a godly woman?

I won't ask, do you feel comfortable to share?

I'm watching some of your faces already and I'm seeing that.

Yeah, I remember and I'm not going to tell.

But when you think about those messages and what they were about, if you were like me, a lot of those original messages was about what the godly woman does and does not do.

You know, if you're a godly woman, you dress like this.

If you're a godly woman, you don't do this.

And it is true that women of God do things differently from people who are not daughters of God.

You cannot talk about a daughter without talking about parent.

And I'd like to suggest to us, because I think it's the only place to begin, that when you're talking about being a woman of God, You begin with being a daughter.

In fact, I talked just this last week actually to a counselor.

We're working on a problem with a student.

Series

Janice Watson: W.O.W - Women of the Word Weekend

Our Identity as a Daughter of The King

Transcript

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