What Does Faith and Oxygen Have in Common?

SPEAKER A You once to every time in the sight of the good or evil sky don't break on you that I choice of life forever with that darkness. And. SPEAKER B The Bible assures us in Ephesians two, verses eight to ten, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Welcome to faith to faith Here are your hosts, Ettienne McClintock and Braedan Entermann. SPEAKER C Dear listener, greetings and a warm welcome. Thank you for joining us on the program again today. It's always a pleasure to have your company. And just as we start the program, we just invite you to bow with us for a word of prayer. Gracious Father in heaven, you are our Creator, our redeemer and sustainer. We thank you, Father, that we can receive eternal life with Jesus Christ our Lord, that in Him we live and move and have our being. In Jesus also, we know that he upholds all things that are created by his powerful word. And Father, now, as we come before you to learn from you, we just pray for the enlightenment, the illumination of your Holy Spirit. Baptize us afresh Father, and lead us into all. Truth is our prayer. In Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Now, all of those listening on the airwaves and us here in the studio, of course, all have one thing in common, and that is that we are all alive. When we can't, you can't. SPEAKER D Great, isn't it? SPEAKER C It is great to be alive. Yeah. I remember living beside a gentleman that was 72 years old and he was still running his own business. He had this engineering business he was running. And I remember one morning, it was a crisp morning out west, Sydney, and it was a fresh morning. And I said to him, as I saw him about at 630 in the morning, 730, the sun was just starting to make it a little bit lighter. Hadn't even come up properly yet. And I said, It's a great morning, isn't it? Great fresh. He goes every morning above ground is a good morning. So he was, at the age of 72, appreciating every single day as a gift from God. But I want to ask you this, Braedan. I've at times tried to set a few records myself. PBS personal best. And in life, we know there's a few things we need that is essential for us to live. Obviously, we need to be able to breathe. We need to be able to get liquid into ourselves. We need to be able to eat. And of course, if you look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and so know we've got wants and needs, but needs, you need shelter as well, shelter and clothing. And then we also need some social interaction and all those things that add to your life. But when you boil it down to the bare essentials, basically you've got oxygen. That's the most essential. You can't live very long without that. Then after that, you have water. You can't live a matter of days, basically, for water, and then the other one of that is food, and it's a matter of weeks for food, and then you'll be dead as well if you don't get any sustenance, the brain needs oxygen, otherwise it will die. Now, I have tried to keep my breath, and I've done it a few times where I've been around the two minute mark, maybe just a little bit over two minutes, and that's been my PB. But have you ever tried anything like that at holding your breath? How long have you been able to hold your breath? SPEAKER D Yeah, I had a go. I got around four minutes. SPEAKER C Four minutes? SPEAKER D Yeah. SPEAKER C Well, that's about twice as good as I was able to do it. You must be a very fit guy. I thought two minutes was pretty good because most people say, oh, they struggled to hold it for 1 minute. So did you train? I mean, how did you do this? SPEAKER D Well, I was a swimmer, so growing up, I was in the pool from a very, very young age and did competition swimming. And so I think that probably did give me a little bit of a bit of assistance. Having a bigger, maybe bigger lung capacity. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And learning how to use oxygen efficiently, especially in a race context. I actually did cheat a little bit. I hyperventilated for maybe 30 seconds before I started. SPEAKER C And so that hyperventilate means that you breathe deeply the whole time and then you actually fill your blood, you oxygenate your blood, and therefore you can, in theory, hold your breath a little bit longer. SPEAKER D That's correct. SPEAKER C Because it's all about not starving the brain of oxygen, isn't it? SPEAKER D Because you just don't want to die. SPEAKER C Right, that's true. But have you got any idea who has the world record and how long that world record is for holding their breath? SPEAKER D So what I've got down here is there's a guy by the name of Tom from Germany, I think in 2012, he held his breath for 22 minutes and 22 seconds. SPEAKER C Really? Can people hold it that long? Because normally we'd told her that if your brain is starved for oxygen for too long, there could be brain damage. These people aren't brain damaged. SPEAKER D I assume they've got some kind of strategy, involves hyperventilating, direct oxygen, maybe. I don't know. There's a few different things they do. SPEAKER C But they also obviously train themselves, and the body does adapt in regards to the way use oxygen. I know they can even slow down their heartbeat and all kinds of things. SPEAKER D I just say there's got to be a better hobby. SPEAKER C Oh, wow. SPEAKER D It's like the free divers that go through the caves. SPEAKER C I think this guy you're talking about, Tom Cietta, he's a free diver. SPEAKER D He's a free diver. And it's just like I just think look, it just seems kicking a ball around just seems like a much better hobby. Just seems so extreme. SPEAKER C That is true. SPEAKER D We've actually got another statistic here from a guy by the name of Herbert from Austria. And I think in the same year, he set a record for there's one record he set for 214 meters. SPEAKER C So that's unassisted. That's free diving. SPEAKER D Free diving. Holding your breath, swimming down. And I think he also broke it as well and did maybe around 250, from what I was reading. That's an awful long way underwater. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And just the risk as you're going down that far, you're constantly repressurizing and the effect on your body, what a hostile environment. Not to mention the water gets really cold as well. SPEAKER C Of course. Yes. And after a few meters, I forgot how many meters it is, but because of the pressure on your lungs and that it compresses the air and you're no longer buoyant, so you naturally tend to go down. SPEAKER D Interesting. And it gets darker and colder as you're going down, further into the darkness. SPEAKER C But that's not really the environment that human beings are made for, is it? SPEAKER D No. When I was younger, a friend of mine didn't realize what she was doing. We were only very young, and she kind of was on my shoulders in the pool, thought that was a great idea, and she wouldn't let go. And I was like, I'm going to die under the water. And I took in a bit of water, and I just scrambled free and swam down to get away because I couldn't go up. And I came up and started coughing out water. I'll tell you what, the stressfulness, because I was confronted with the reality that I am a land dwelling creature. I'm not made for the water. I can kind of swim in water, but I cannot breathe water. It's not going to do any wonders for me at all. I'm going to die. And so being underwater is not an environment that we can live in. We can go in there for a while. We can survive for a time, but we have to come back to the surface. SPEAKER C Absolutely. And if you go under and you start getting a little bit worried and you come up, that first breath is. SPEAKER D Such a beautiful breath. SPEAKER C It is a beautiful know, in a spiritual sense, we can actually apply that ourselves. We know that Adam and Eve, so that they would not perpetuate sin and become immortal sinners were taken out of the Garden of Eden so they couldn't have access to the Tree of Life, which gives us our mortality, is conditional on eating the Tree of Life. So sin separated us from God, and then also we no longer have access to that tree, which is to perpetuate us so that the tree of life we can now say represents oxygen in this sense as well. So we can go into an environment and based on the breath we took prior to diving under the water, life can be sustained for a while. So in our lifetime, typically 70 years, maybe 80, 90, some people get it to about 100 or so. But people don't go a long way over 100, typically, if they're very healthy and they've got some strength of life in them. And so it is with our spiritual life, we can be sustained for a little while in this natural life. And really, we have one go. It's like a probationary period God has given us. We've got one go to understand and know the law, Jesus Christ, because the Bible tells us that he who has the Son has life, and he who does not have the Son that's right. Does not have life. So Jesus can actually represent oxygen to us. Now, in the Bible, we know, we've spoken about oxygen, we've spoken about water. Water, they reckon it could be two to seven days or so without water and you're dead, depending on how hot it is. Because in a very hot environment, you could lose a lot of liters of water in a day just by sweating because it's so hot, even up to. SPEAKER D A liter and a half sometimes for an adult in a hot environment, they can lose that much fluid, so you're in trouble. SPEAKER C That's right. And Jesus tells us in the Bible, of course, that he is the living water. So we have that thing know, being sustained by water. And we know that when God made Adam and Eve, he breathed into their nostrils, the Bible says the breath of life, and they became living beings. So here we know that we are connected from God because of your sin, but reconnected through Jesus Christ. SPEAKER D And this is something I just want to note here with the Garden of Eden, obviously, that we're talking about this oxygen, this atmosphere that they were breathing. We still breathe oxygen as they breathed oxygen. And obviously we live in a world that it's quite broken in the physical realm. But what I've been thinking about is what's a different atmosphere that they were breathing in that garden, the relational atmosphere, right? So they were breathing an air of relationship and connection with God, where they knew that God was good, they knew that God was gracious. And when he said things like he defined the reality around them. And when God spoke, they trusted him. They had a trusting and here we say it faith. They had trust in God, they had a friendship with God. And when they sinned, that relationship was severed. And the Bible says in Isaiah 59, it says your sins have separated you from your God. And so while Adam and Eve continued to breathe, obviously the air around them physically, the relational oxygen, as it were, of knowing God's goodness and his love and receiving his words and trusting Him that changed. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And it's interesting, right, like we've been living starved of the knowledge of the goodness of God. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D It's as essential for us as oxygen is to breathe. For those free divers, they go down under the water and they can survive for a while, but then they start to slow down and they just can't take it anymore, and they die. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER D When we do not have a knowledge of God's goodness and his grace, it's just we can survive for a little while. We can survive for a little while. A subpar existence. The body's under stress. Life is under stress, family's under stress. What we need is a knowledge of God's goodness and his you know, getting married very soon, I've had to spend my fiance is from Finland, and we've spent months at a time apart this year, which is just terrible. And I was actually feeling it just today and many times where you actually feel just how much you miss them. And it's almost like you're starved of oxygen, relational oxygen. Life is not right while you're apart. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And there's just this almost like an irritation, as it were, like life is not right. SPEAKER C Life is not complete. SPEAKER D Life is not complete while that person's so far away. And we don't recognize it as human beings. But what our deep anxiety and longing for is the friendship of God. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER D And when God and us are united together and faith is that binding thing, which is the trust in God, where he proves his trustworthiness and we respond in trust, we can breathe again. We can joy. Jesus said, I've come that you may have life that you may have it more abundantly. So a better life than we could ever hope for ourselves is found in a relationship with Jesus. So not only does he sustain our physical life, he also breathes, I guess, the breath of life into our relational spiritual life as well. SPEAKER C That's right. Yes, he does. And it reminds me of that know, we're talking about the breath of life, but it also reminds me of that text where Jesus talks to a lady and he asks her for water. Now, water is the second said, you know, breathing a few minutes, drinking two to seven days roughly. Now, he offers her water because she's just offering water. He says, well, look, the water you've given me, if you drink that, you're going to have to come back and drink more because you get thirsty. But whoever drinks the water that I will give, he will never thirst. So what we're saying is Jesus says, I am the living water. If we take Jesus into our lives, he who has the Son has life. We can receive eternal life through Him. Matter of fact, we can be transformed and changed. The Bible says that we transformed and changed into his image from glory to glory by beholding Him. So spending that time, it's like having that spiritual oxygen in which we're breathing continuously. Now, we can try and walk away from it, but if you don't come back to it, you will die. SPEAKER D And it's interesting, what people forget is just what because we receive the kindness and grace of God, he shows it in so many different ways. Yes, we're benefiting from that. What people don't realize is that there was an experiment done by a German king a few hundred years ago, and he gave a decree that children be put in, be separated once they were born. And the nurses that feed them can't speak to them. Yes, they can't nurse them or help them. They just got to feed them. That's all they can do. And the children actually died. The German king had a hunch that they would speak German because he wanted to work out what language they would speak. By nature, they died. And the person who was researching that said they died because they were not touched, they did not have connection, they did not have that love and that sympathy and the support that comes from the parents. So they didn't have that. They were physically fed, they had enough oxygen, all that kind of stuff, but they died without love. That's what God really is addressing here. He is wanting to allow us to breathe the atmosphere of his grace and his goodness and anything less than that, it leads to depression. And just like fear and a subpar existence, a life where we're afraid, we've got all that kind of stuff. Guilt and God's goodness and grace kind of is that new atmosphere we breathe. SPEAKER C We need that life flowing through us. Now, obviously, we inherit life from our parents, which ultimately goes right back to the creation of Adam and Eve. And we know that that life principle there was affected. But ultimately, the promise of a savior has enabled God to keep us alive enough that's right to choose to reconnect to God because Adam and Eve chose to believe a lie and therefore disconnected themselves from God. But if you look at that principle about breathing, drinking and eating to sustain life, there's a principle that comes from the Bible, and Jesus actually quotes it when he goes into combat with the devil. It comes from the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter eight. Now, God allows the children of Israel after they leave Egypt to experience hunger, they run out of food there for a while. And Moses reminds of them, of this in Deuteronomy, chapter eight. And we're reading from verse two. It says, and you shall remember that the Lord your God fed you all the way these 40 years in the wilderness to humble you and to test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep the commandments or not. And then verse three, so he humbled you allowed you to hunger. So they had to see their need of the existence by eating food. But God made them feel hungry first so they could see, look, if we don't get food, we're going to die. We're going to starve. Matter of fact, they were a long way away from death. God was not making them fast for 40 days. No, they were a long way, but they started murmuring, complaining. But then it says, then God fed you with manner which you did not know, nor did your father know it, that he may make you know. So there was a lesson in this that God was teaching them. Make you know that man shall not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. SPEAKER D I love this passage here. It's interesting that they're traveling through the wilderness, the most hostile environment for life. Yes, it's hostile as anything. And they get to a point where all of the bread that they were carrying with them, the this that they were carrying with them is running out. They've got nothing left, and all they've got is God's word. What did he say? I will get you to the promised land. So God's made a promise that he's going to get them there. Now they're like challenged, like, oh, we're running out of food. It's going crazy. And they start to complain. They start to say, oh, God's abandoned us, and then God provides for them. And then the same thing happened with water. The same thing happened over and over again. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER D And Moses is saying, guys, this is what God was trying to teach you, that if you have a promise from God, it is worth more than having a big silo full of grain. If God has made a promise that he will look after you, it's done. SPEAKER C That's right. SPEAKER D It's almost like God wanted them to come to the place where just having a promise from God was enough. They're like, that's all I need. If God's promised, that's enough. And that there is establishing a trust with heaven again, rather than trying to solve all the problems down here, going, you know what? God is my provider. God will help me, and he's trustworthy. And that's where faith comes in. SPEAKER C Absolutely. Yeah. Now, when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, the first temptation there is he's 40 days fasting and in communion with his Father in vision. And then the devil then comes to him as an angel of light and he says, look, your fastest over. Now, what I want you to do is say to these stones here, which probably look like loaves of bread, turn into bread so you can feed yourself. And then Jesus replies, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Interesting, he wasn't sure that this angel here was actually from God and was speaking the word of God. And he said, until my father tells me I don't know who you are, but until my Father tells me my fast is not broken, my fast is not broken, and I will not live by trying to sustain my own life by my own power, I will live by the Word of God only. And he quotes from this experience, it's. SPEAKER D So interesting that they had 40 years in the wilderness. SPEAKER C In the wilderness? Yes. SPEAKER D Jesus had 40 days in the wilderness, and he suffered like he didn't eat for 40 days. And so he's at a place where his body is screaming out for food, and the devil comes along and says, if you are the Son of God, he questions what God has said. God had just 40 days prior said, you are my son. In you I'm well pleased. And so Jesus now has conflicting messages. This person in front of him is angel, is saying is questioning whether he's. SPEAKER C The Son of God if yeah. SPEAKER D And Jesus has to choose, is God's word enough? Will I trust what God says or will I look at my situation, evaluate and do my own thing? And he says, God said that I'm his son, and that's good enough for me. SPEAKER C The original temptation was the same thing as well. Wasn't it said to Eve, did God really say that you can't eat everything? So questioning God's word and God's authority, and here the devil comes with the same temptation. And Jesus must have, in those words, recognized the original temptation that came to humanity, making them doubt God's Word. SPEAKER D And then he meets it with it is written he meets the devil with scripture. SPEAKER C That's right. Yes. SPEAKER D He just meets him and says, now, this is fact. The Bible. What God says. That's the fact. He did not allow his subjective experience to direct his life. It's so easy for us to make a decision based upon the situation that we're in, rather than asking God, what's your thoughts about this situation? SPEAKER C That is true. We've spoken through this whole program, this series of programs so far, that faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God. And here Jesus says, man shall live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So we are to live by the word of God. Now, in the book of Romans, paul quotes there in Romans, chapter one, verse 17, that the just shall live by faith, quoting from Habakkuk, chapter two and verse four. So faith comes by hearing hearing the word of God. They basically, in essence, are saying the same thing. If we want to live, if we want to survive, we are to live by every word that comes from God. That is how we to receive eternal life. And Jesus even said that people need to eat my flesh, they need to drink my blood if they want to have eternal life. SPEAKER D Interesting. SPEAKER C And then people said what do we need to become cannibals? Jesus said, no, I'm talking about it in a spiritual sense because the words that I speak to you here again, the word of God speaking to us, they are spirit and they are life. I was just recently over in China and I met with the underground church there and I met a gentleman who had been thrown into prison. He's 95 years old now. He'd been thrown into prison for 23 years in communist China back in the 1957 and he wasn't released till 1980. And he got beaten in prison many times for his faith. Whenever they caught them praying, they would beat them. And he said, Eleven times I was unlucky. They caught me praying. But he didn't stop after the first beating, not the second beating, but eight times. He was beaten severely, almost to an inch of his life for praying to God. They caught him praying and he said in prison, many people around him died of starvation just simply because there wasn't enough food. People didn't care about them, didn't care about their life, and occasionally would get food. It was sporadic. And he said only some, him and a few of the other Christians that he knew actually survived because there wasn't enough food to go around to sustain their life. But somehow God sustained them and he basically believed it was the word of God and his faith and confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ that allowed him to survive when many other people asked people who were getting the same amount of nutrition as he was getting. SPEAKER D Interesting. SPEAKER C So that's an example of people actually living by faith. SPEAKER D And it's actually interesting. I've been reading a book recently by Richard Wormbrand, the Tortured for Christ as you have. And it's so interesting that in that environment he said even when he was facing tortures, he had such a peace from God. And he said, God was so close to me through those times. He was being starved physically, but he was being fed relationally and spiritually. He knew they had a friend, and it's amazing he had something that others didn't have. He was breathing an atmosphere of grace. He knew that God cared about him and how much of a difference that would have made for him, just having that knowledge and experiencing the grace of God. SPEAKER C Yeah, it's incredible. These men would be in prison, and when they were in a sick bay, there was a number of men together. It was quite often they'd be in cells by themselves. But when they're in sick bay, there'd be a number of guys together. And even in their sickness, they would have Bible studies together. Not that they had a Bible, but they would quote Scripture to each other and then sort of encourage each other and preach. And ever they get caught, whoever was leading the study would get taken out, get beaten, and then we get brought back and he'll be all bruised and battered and bleeding. And as he goes and sits down, you'd think there will be enough of a discouragement to continue to not preach the word of God? SPEAKER D Not for these guys. SPEAKER C Not these guys. These guys would go, now, where was I? Let me continue for where I left off. And that keep on preaching the word of God, because they loved God so much and they had a peace. Regardless of being beaten, they had a peace and a full confidence in the Lord that whatever happens to them would be in the Lord's hands. SPEAKER D It's beautiful, isn't? Isn't it? I've got a verse here in John, chapter 15, because it's like a diver. They've got a certain amount of time that they can function before they run out of oxygen. It's like a person who's recently died. There's a small window of time where they can be resuscitated. SPEAKER C Yes. SPEAKER D And also, when you snip off a branch off a tree, there's a window of time that that can actually be grafted back on again. SPEAKER C That's right. Matter of fact, they can put out green shoots even after they've been severed for a while. It can still look like there's plenty of life in the branch. SPEAKER D And it's so interesting, Jesus uses this metaphor and he says in John 15, verse one, he says, I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine dresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away. And every branch that bears fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I've spoken to. You abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. He says, I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit, for without me you can do nothing. SPEAKER C Yeah, well, the fact that the tree is bearing fruit and putting out shoots and buds and all that shows that it's alive, because quite often in winter, some trees can look like they're just dead. But then as spring is about to come and the atmosphere and the temperature gets a little bit more warmer, then all of a sudden you can see a little bud shooting out of this thing, which looks pretty much dead, doesn't it? SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER C And then that life comes. So here we are told in a spiritual sense that if we are connected to the vine and the SAP of the vine is running through us, which are the branches, we can bear much fruit. And then Jesus says, in a spiritual sense, without me you can do absolutely nothing. And what I like about it, verse seven goes on to say, if you abide in me and my words abide in you. SPEAKER D Interesting. SPEAKER C So how are we to have the SAP come. In us? How are we to have Christ living within us? It is by the word of God, it is by believing the Word. SPEAKER D Isn't that so interesting? We've been looking at faith and saying that faith comes by hearing and hearing by God's Word. What makes the connection between this branch that's going to die it's got no hope. And the vine as well. What makes the difference? What makes the connection god's Word flowing through us, like understanding and comprehending the promises that God has made and then entrusting dependence, believing that God will keep His Word in that state of trust, dependence on God. That relationship with heaven is locked together, that's fused and life flows through us and we actually start to bear fruit, which can be a blessing to other people. But whileever we are disconnected, while ever we have distrust towards God, while ever we have suspicion towards God, basically the best that we can do is just look half green for a while before we go completely bone dry. SPEAKER C That is true. SPEAKER D That's the best our lives can be unless we're connected to Christ. SPEAKER C So dear listener, we pray that you would also be connected to Christ and through Christ by His Word and that SAP, the SAP of His Word, that SAP of his life flowing in and through your body which gives you everlasting life. We pray that God will bless you and keep you until we meet with you next time. God bless. SPEAKER B Thank you for joining us on Faith. To Faith. If you would like more information about today's program or if you have any questions, please contact 3ABN Australia Radio by Phoning. 02 4973 3456. Or you can send an email to [email protected] You can also contact us on our 3ABN Australia radio Facebook page. We'd love to hear from you.