Alright, we're going to be in 2 Kings chapter 13. 2 Kings chapter 13. Let me ask you a question. Why study the Bible anyway? I mean, we call this midweek service, we sing songs, we worship the Lord, and we might call it a little bit of preaching, a little bit of teaching, but why would we want to do that? What do you think? What's a good reason to study the Bible in the first place? Brother Denny? Find out about God's love? That's a good idea. What else? We study the Bible. To please the Lord? Seek the Lord. And when we seek the Lord, we want to please the Lord, don't we? That's right. I'd say there's probably more reasons than we could count tonight, but one of those reasons would be to find out more about the Lord and His Word, we learn the Bible. The more we look into it, we won't get it all in one dose. It's not like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can't just go and sit down and eat it all at one time and get it all. You've got to keep munching on it as you go ahead. And so we want to learn the content of the Bible. But wait a minute, let's ask this question. What good would it do if we just learn the history, stories, narratives, and the commandments of the Bible. What if we learn all of that and don't do anything with it? It would be coming up a little bit short, wouldn't it? So wouldn't you think that by learning the Bible, if we want to please the Lord and seek the Lord, and want to love the Lord how can we love somebody we don't know anything about? How can we be motivated to seek somebody we don't know anything about? And so we learn the Bible not just to fill our head with knowledge from the Bible but as we learn the Bible our motive ought to be application. We learn the Bible so we can do it. both to learn and to do and the more we learn the more we know how to do things that's going to please the Lord the more we're going to learn things that's going to help us in our own Christian life and walk with the Lord so that's why we're here and that's why we study the Bible privately and corporately but in 2 Kings In chapter number 13, we're calling this series that we're going through on Wednesday nights, Voices from the Edge. And it's primarily focusing on those passages that are a little bit odd, maybe a little obscure, and see what we can learn from those. And in our text tonight, we're going to learn about the guy that was buried. He touched a dead man's bones and came back to life. That's pretty odd, isn't it? How many times have you ever seen that happen? They throw this guy's body in the tomb and boom, he just pops up and comes alive again. During World War I, a letter was found tucked into the coat of a fallen American soldier and the note said this. It says, if this note is found, let my mother know that I wasn't afraid and that I died believing Jesus saved me. Now that letter never made it to his mother but it was published in a chaplain's memoir and from there it went to other chaplains who spoke about it to servicemen and women and then it got published in some tracts, gospel tracts that got distributed all over Europe And so dozens, one chaplain said dozens of young men under his care, dozens of men that heard that little testimony that was found in that man's note as he died on the battlefield, dozens of men came to Christ because of that man's testimony that died with that little note. So we're talking tonight about life that doesn't have to end in this world. We're calling the dead man who preached. The dead man who preached. Elisha's bones were in that grave and his life was still preaching. And we'll also give it a subtitle of You Can Outlive Your Life. You can outlive your life. When you die, it's not over. As far as your influence goes on this earth, you may be under six feet of dirt, but your testimony lives on. Let's read the text, just two short verses, but boy did they say a lot. In chapter 13 of 2 Kings, verse number 20 and 21, it says, And Elisha died. Well, he was a great man, he was a prophet, but he died. You ever notice when you're reading in the Bible, every time it says, and he begat so-and-so and he begat so-and-so and he begat so-and-so and he died. And then somebody else begat so-and-so and they died. You know one thing all those people in the Bible have in common? They all died. You know what we all have in common with each other? One of these days we're going to die. Ernest Hemingway copied the phrase from all I think is in the 1600s when the plague was going through England people were dying right and left I mean they were just dying every few minutes and the local church bell every time somebody died in the community they would ring the bell because somebody died a sick man laying on his bed not knowing if he's gonna live or not would hear that bell toll and he would ask himself is it gonna toll for me next and then he wrote this Ask not for whom the belt holds, it holds for thee. If you don't die of the plague today, mister, you're going to die one day. So the belt holds on and on and on. The one thing we have in common is nobody has ever made it out of this life alive. We all die. Let's continue to read. And Elisha died and they buried him. They had tombs, you might have seen some kind of semblance of a tomb where Jesus was buried and they usually, it was in a cave in the Middle East there, it was pretty rugged terrain, they'd either bury people in a cave and roll a stone in front of the door or they'd hew out a sepulcher like they did for the rich men who were on the tomb where Jesus was buried. Elisha was buried, he died, they buried him and then it says, And the bands of the Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year. Every year these Moabites would come in during the late spring harvest there in Israel and those Moabites were bad dudes, they'd ride in just as harvest came and they'd swipe the harvest from the farmers in Israel and carry it away and that's how they got by. And so that's what happened. They're burying this man in Elisha's tomb and the invaders from the Moabites show up. It says in verse 21, And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, now they probably had some place in mind to bury him aside from Elisha's grave. But they see these raiders coming and they panic And so they spied the band of men and they cast the man, whoever this dead man was, they cast the man into the sepulcher of Elisha. So evidently they knew they were in the immediate territory where Elisha had been buried, probably being a famous prophet, everybody knew where his tomb was and they were going to bury him close to him somewhere. And before they could get there to that tomb, they saw these guys coming and they said, man, we've got to get rid of this body and get out of here. And so they just, if there was a stone there, they rolled the stone back, threw his body in there, into the sepulcher. They reused those graves over and over in those days. And it said, They cast the man into the sepulcher of Elisha, and when the man was let down, he touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet. Now how would you feel if you're burying a guy and you throw him in there where those bones are, you throw him in there. You know he's dead, man. You hauled him out to the desert to bury him. You throw him in there and suddenly, boom, he just stands up. Hello, boys. How would your eyes do? Whoa, we never saw this before. And you know what else? This miracle that happened throwing somebody into that grave on Elisha's bones, this was a big miracle. It never happened before and it never happened again. If it ever happened again, you know what would have happened? Everybody in the country would say, man, when I die, throw me in there with Elisha. Hey, just toss my old carcass in there on Elisha's bones, man, I'll walk back out. Well, it never happened again. And so, this is a real historical account, it's not a fable. It's not a myth. This is a real Bible event that happened and it was a miracle. The words of our text are few and a little bit odd, but boy, are they powerful. Let's pray and then get into the lesson tonight. Father, I pray that you'd bless us as we look into this adventure where a man is buried and because he touched the bones of the old prophet Elisha, he was raised back to life. Lord, I pray that you'd help us to understand It's more than just an amusement. We didn't come to be amused or entertained, Lord. We came to gain more of your word and to be fed from the word of God. And I pray that you'd do that for us tonight. Bless us, help us to understand how this applies to our own lives tonight. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So it's Wednesday night and the faithful few are here. And so that means there's more of the feed. You can just lap up more of it and gain a lot of weight. Tonight's passage is a little bit strange. It's about a dead prophet, a hasty burial, and a surprise resurrection. It sounds like something that would come out of a ghost story, maybe in the southern states or something, but it's real. Here's a simple message. What you leave behind when you die matters. Elisha's life mattered and it mattered so much. that when he died, even his bones ended up speaking and preaching. So we see a sermon preached by a dead man. Elisha was a great preacher, man. He preached a lot of sermons, and here he is dead, and his bones are already shining there. It didn't take a carcass long to deteriorate in that hot, dry, desert air. And so his bones are probably white and shiny, but they threw that guy in there on top of him, and boom, up he came. Let's look at this first point Talk about this, the prophet died, but God wasn't finished. The prophet died, but God wasn't finished. I've heard people say, maybe on some of those old westerns we used to watch on TV, and some guy gets shot, and somebody's holding up, and they always took the canteen and gave him a drink of water. I don't know why they thought he suddenly got thirsty because he got shot, but they always did that. And so, they'd give him a drink of water and say, you're going to be okay, you're going to be okay. And the man that's dying says, no, I'm finished. Well, Elisha died but Elisha wasn't finished. He wasn't finished at all. It says, Elisha died and they buried him. Well, shouldn't that be over? Man, they buried him. That guy ain't going to preach no more sermons, is he? Well, he had a powerful life. He performed more miracles than his predecessor, Elijah. but he died a quiet death. The Bible just abruptly changes right here and just says these words, after the exciting, inspirational life of service of Elisha, the Bible just says, and he died and they buried him. Well, it's kind of a quiet way to go, isn't it? Well, he lived life and he died and they buried him. All she wrote. No, not all she wrote. He didn't go out in a fiery chariot like Elijah did. Boy, Elijah went up in a whirlwind with that fiery chariot and that's pretty exciting, but not Elisha. It just says they buried him. He performed more miracles, yet he died in obscurity. God doesn't bury influence, though. with the body. Aren't you glad of that? God doesn't bury influence along with your body. He lived for God and he lived on even after he was buried. A life lived for God, listen, a life lived, a Holy Spirit filled life lived for God doesn't truly end. He just keeps on going. Life doesn't stop at the cemetery gate. At age 14. several of the guys in my little community up in Isard County, we'd get together once or twice a week and we'd play games, you know, we'd go to one of the other guys' house and we'd play rook or we'd play cards or we'd play something like Monopoly or Chinese checkers or something and sometimes we'd get bored and the cemetery for the community was just up the road a mile or so and sometimes we'd drive up there and park at the cemetery and leave the headlights shining out across the headstone. Now, we're 14-year-old kids, right? And I don't know if any of them were saved. I wasn't at the time. And we're just sitting there with the headlights on. You know what we're watching for? We're watching out across that big graveyard to see if there's any ghosts. Surely if you sat out here till midnight, there'd be some ghosts. Well, there was a few nights we sat there till midnight, and guess what? Not a single ghost showed up. Now, we would have probably profited more from that time if we had got out with a flashlight and read the epitaphs on the tombstone, but we didn't do that. Now, a little bit later, we got to where we didn't think there was a ghost there, and we got over it. Life doesn't end at the cemetery gate, though. Hebrews 11, 14 says of Abel, He being dead, yet speaketh. He being dead, yet speaketh. And then in Revelation 14, 13, John says of those saints that's already in heaven, he says, and their works do follow them. So in other words, those saints in heaven, they went off to the glory land and here come their works following them along. Those works were remembered by the people on earth and they were remembered in heaven by those who were there. So everything that we do on life doesn't necessarily end in the graveyard. You can outlive your life to the faithful ones like in our church, to the faithful people in our church. What you do matters. Sometimes people come to church and say, Just another week, just another church service. I get this over and I'll go home and then I won't have to go back again for a few days. And I'm just tired of it, just tired of serving the Lord and not doing anything much anymore. Or maybe you think, well I'm serving the Lord but I'm not sure it matters much. Oh, it does. Little things matter. You're building a legacy that's going to be passed on down. I remember Jimmy Foster. I remember when Jimmy Foster was living. He and Miss Brenda, sitting right back there, they'd come out here and a lot of times they'd come out here and just work at the church. They didn't even know what needed to be done. They'd come and look for stuff to do. I remember when he built those doors on that shed out back. By the way, they're getting to be replaced. They've about outlived their purpose. We'll have to have another Jimmy to come back and build some more doors. They'd come out here and cut up fallen tree limbs or dig up stumps so they could mow better. Jimmy was out here all the time mowing and Miss Brenda weed eating. You might say, well, whoever knew they were doing that? Well, I did because I was a pastor. I was driving around here and I'd see them doing it. But most of the church members probably didn't know they were out here doing anything. But your life matters. Your life matters and I didn't forget it and there's a few other people that didn't forget it and those of us who used to mow more like me and Brother Al and Brother JT and Brother Paul, we used to do a lot of mowing here. We'd get together and bring all of our riding mowers out here and we'd mow this thing in just a few minutes and we had fun. Man, we'd drag race those mowers out here. You'd have a lot of fun. Then we all got too old. I remember Danny, Brother Danny would come out here, Danny Hopkins and he'd mow, him and Miss Mary would come and mow, and Danny Batchelor would come and mow, Ted Clements would come and mow. We had a bunch of guys always out here just doing stuff. Did that matter? Yeah, it mattered. I still remember it and these guys that were involved in it still remember it and we look at that as a service to the Lord. They didn't do it to get paid. They didn't do it to get recognized. They did it as a service to the Lord. People staying in the nursery, people wiping down the glass, the windows, the doors, vacuuming, deodorizing, and seeing about things here at church, washing the dishes, cleaning up after maybe there's some kind of fellowship. I always appreciate seeing people who stay behind and say, can I help clean up? And that matters. Your life matters and there's nothing too little And what you do in this life in service to the Lord will live on. Charles Spurgeon died in 1892. He preached to thousands of people in his lifetime. And you know what? He died in 1892 and his sermons are still going out across the world and still seeing people get saved. Hey, your life doesn't end at the graveyard. When they bury you, it's not over. And Elisha got put in this grave, but it wasn't over for him either. Missionary Robert Moffitt, this is back a couple hundred years ago, one of the first missionaries to go to Africa. He came back and reported, he said, I can see the smoke of more than a thousand fires. He died after over a half century of service to the Lord, he died. But you know who else caught the vision from Robert Moffitt? that heard about those thousand fires burning out there in nowhere land? David Livingston, the great missionary David Livingston. You see, Robert Moffat's life was not over when they buried him. Livingston heard it. and he went on and carried on the work and other missionaries have carried on the work since Livingston was there too and it's still going. Your life matters, it doesn't end at the graveyard. An old lady maybe prays and faithfully prays every day for the missionaries and nobody knows that she's able to do anything but she's praying and maybe you find out years later three or four pastors came and surrendered their life to be pastors, to be preachers because of her prayers. You never know. Little things are often what people remember about you. Be concerned about your little words, your little actions, your little attitudes. The little things live on. Calvin Coolidge once said, President Coolidge went to church one time and he came home after church and his wife started quizzing him and said, did you go to church? He said, yes, I did. Calvin Coolidge was a man of few words. He just didn't have much to say. He was quiet Calvin. And his wife said, so you went to church? He said, yeah. Did you hear a sermon? Yeah, I did. She said, well, what was the sermon about? He said, well, the preacher preached on sin. She said, well, what did he say about sin? He said, I think he was against it. Well, little things matter. You know, that was kind of a nonsensical little discussion, but it lives on after he's been dead now for decades. Little things, people remember it. What else does this story tell us? A crisis, number two, a crisis through a man into the grave. Here's a man, we don't know who he was, we don't know why he died, we don't know how old he was, we don't know anything about him, we don't know if there was a funeral procession besides those men that went to bury him, we don't know. Just a nameless man. But getting thrown into that grave in a crisis meant something. You know, we don't all respond the same way when a crisis happens, do we? Some people are very calm and some fall apart and everything in between. I heard about the man, the old drunk, he's going home late one night about drinking all night. He's drunk as a dog and he's staggering through the cemetery and there's an open grave. He didn't know it and didn't see it. He staggered along there and fell into that grave, open grave, and it's like six or seven feet deep. He starts fumbling around trying to climb out and he can't get out and finally he says, well, it's a useless, I might as well sit down over here in the corner of the grave and wait until daylight comes. take a nap, sleep until maybe somebody will find me in the morning. And he sat down there and he's leaned up against the one end of that grave. Well, this other young man come walking through and he wasn't drunk, he was just walking home and he fell in the same grave. And when he fell down in that grave, he started climbing and clawing, trying to get out of there. And that old drunk in the dark corner over there said, there's no use, you'll never get out. But he did. We don't always act the same way in a crisis. In our text in 2 Kings 13, 21 it says, And they spied a band of men. These were marauders, these were raiders. They spied a band of men and they cast the man into the sepulcher of Elisha. The funeral got interrupted by these enemy invaders. And so there's no time for the ceremony. I mean, they might have had a whole sermon planned and maybe they're going to sing and maybe they're going to pray, but man, they see these bad guys coming and so they just toss his body into the tomb and say, hey, we've got to get out of here. And so no time, they're just in desperation, they threw the body in there. And sometimes God's most powerful work happens in a time of chaos and confusion. God can do that because we're usually at the end of ourselves and we don't feel like we can do anything and that's when God can. God allows disruptions to bring about His divine appointments. You may have had your plans disrupted before. It just might be that God allowed that to bring about His will. Romans 8, 28, you know what it says. All things work together for good. to them that love God. Psalm 46 1 says that God is a very present help in trouble. Well, these guys are in trouble and something happens and God is behind it. God's using the crisis. God uses a crisis in your life. You see, I said at the beginning when we study the Bible, when we're listening to a sermon or we're We're studying the Bible in private. We're looking not just to learn historical facts or to be entertained or amused. We're looking for things in the Bible that will help us to respond to God in the right way. Application. In San Francisco, in April of 1906, there was a huge earthquake and most of the city was just destroyed. I think 80% of the city was destroyed. It's been estimated that it was a seven-point nine magnitude earthquake, over 3,000 people died, and a well-to-do store owner there on Market Street, he had, in the past, before the earthquake, he had heard the street preachers on the corner down there by his store, street preachers preaching, trying to get people to repent and turn to Christ. He'd just kind of mock and brush them off, and he'd usually say something like, Those holy hollerers make more noise than since. And so now this earthquake happens. He was a pretty wealthy man but everything that he had built there in the city came tumbling down with that earthquake. He lost everything. It was gone. His store, his home, his warehouse, fire swept through whole city blocks destroying everything. and people were in shock and people set up relief efforts in tents for food and shelter and so one of those groups come by where his property was, he's trying to dig through his property to see if there's anything left and so a church group's got a tent set up and they're serving some food and preaching this time he stops to listen he's interested in what the preacher is saying this time and this phrase got his attention one of the preachers said your house you can rebuild but who will rebuild your soul and he started thinking about it The man paused a little bit and he stepped a little closer, wanting to hear more. It wasn't long before the message was finished. He had broken down, sobbing and asking Christ to save him. Later on, he said this, he said, I spent 30 years building what was lost in 47 seconds. The earthquake lasted a little less than a minute, but boy, it destroyed that city. He said, I spent 30 years building what was lost in 47 seconds but in one moment I found something that fire can't burn and earthquakes can't shake Christ in me. He became a tireless volunteer. He even set up a soup kitchen and he was feeding people and he was giving out gospel tracts and he had this sign out there by his soup kitchen that said, earthquake tested, eternally secure. He didn't plan on meeting God that day but he did. And so sometimes God allows a chaos to happen in your life to make your life count for something more than it would have. It did in the man's life that was cast into that tomb. Chaos happened and I suspect that those guys that were burying that dead man had a life-changing experience as well, too. I think they must have had one. So, the chaos that you endure may just be the vehicle that God's going to use to bring somebody to faith that you're acquainted with or will become acquainted with. Let's look at a third thing we can learn from this passage. Short passage, but boy, it's powerful. The power of the Holy Spirit the power of the Holy Spirit through a holy life still spoke. Elisha was a man of God, there's nobody that could deny that. He had been the one who had poured water on the hands of the great prophet Elijah and then he laid down his plow instruments and put them in the fire and turned his mules loose, told his parents, I can't plow anymore, I can't help you farm, I've got to preach. And so he took off and his life was spent preaching the gospel of his day and in 2nd Kings 13 21 in our text it says and when the man was let down and touched the bones of Elisha he revived and stood upon his feet. I've heard stories about people who work in a funeral home and hearing strange things and seeing strange things in the funeral home late at night when they're there But I bet none of those things have happened exactly like this. Oh man, this fellow didn't just set up. He didn't just groan. He stood up on his feet. This was big. There was no sermon. There was no music. There was no entertainment. There was no fellowship supper. This was just the message of the bones of Elisha that touched the dead man's bones and up he went. Resurrection power. What do we learn from that? The influence of your life is not limited just to your lifetime. It wasn't in Elijah's case. He'd been dead for some time. Proverbs 10 7 says the memory of the just is blessed. 2 Timothy 1 and 5 speaks of a generational faith where Timothy, who was Paul's right-hand man for so long, Timothy was brought to faith because he grew up in the household of Eunice and Lois, a mother and a grandmother who taught that boy from the time he was a little tyke to have faith in the Lord. And so he grew up believing and trusting the Lord and then when the opportunity opened up he became a great servant with the Apostle Paul. And so your influence can live on. There's a story about a battlefield museum in a little town in Georgia. Not a big museum, just a little place in Chickamauga, Georgia. There's a quiet display in a little glass case and it's an old Bible, the leather is cracked, the edges of the pages are all curled up, kind of pitiful looking, just a tattered old Bible, brown with age. But on one page where John 3,16 is, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. There's a blood stain right beside that verse. It was a Union soldier in the Civil War He was found dead on the battlefield clutching that Bible and he wrote this as he was dying. He wrote this, to my son, should this reach you, Jesus saves and I am his. We don't know if the son ever got that message or not but somehow that Bible survived the Civil War and some family member later on down generations down the line donated it to that little museum in Georgia. Now here's the remarkable part. A local high school had a field trip. and some of those teenage boys going through the museum had been cutting up and just acting silly like boys do one of them though happened to notice that old Bible and he looked down at that note written on the inside cover of that Bible that Jesus saves and I am his The man who died on the battlefield must have believed that really strongly. Well, the kid on that field trip looked at that phrase and he couldn't look away. He kept looking back and thinking about it and he let the other kids go on. It wasn't long until he came to the feet of Jesus for salvation. You see, we don't know who that soldier was that died on the battlefield. We know he had a Bible and we know that his testimony was that he trusted Jesus and he believed that he would save his son. Well, this young boy was somebody's son and here's what the boy said after he trusted Christ as his Savior. He said, It was like a voice reached across time and called me out by name. That soldier's voice had been silent for 150 years, but his faith still preached. I am here to tell you, according to this passage of scripture, that your life can live beyond the cemetery. Your obedience today may speak life into someone else long after you're gone. What you've said to your kids, what you've said to your grandkids, what you've written in your Bible, what you told some Sunday school boys or girls or what you told somebody at church or what you told somebody on the job or a friend or maybe you gave a tract to someone and they read it long after you were gone and got saved. I always think of Wade and Bessie Cox. They lived up at Balknob. They had been in independent Baptist churches in the years gone by. They didn't know our church was here. they hadn't found a church anywhere, they'd gone to one or two and didn't stay stuck. And one of our, I think it was one of our ladies, several years ago in Walmart, Wade was working as a Walmart greeter, and one of our ladies handed him a gospel tract similar to this, handed him a gospel tract telling him how to get saved. Well, he took it politely and put it in his pocket. And he told me later, he said, I was already saved. But I took that gospel tract and I just laid it up. He said, I saw the address on there and the name of the church. He said, I laid it up on my dresser. And he said, didn't touch it for ages and ages. He said, one day my wife and I were talking, we need to find a church, get back in church. He said, oh, let me go in here. I've got a tract from an independent Baptist church. Let me go in there and look at it. And he pulled it out and found the Liberty Baptist Church, 1099 North Maple. He said, let's go there Sunday and see what's going on. He came in, him and Bessie were very friendly. He had the biggest old smile, always did. They loved where they were at. They joined the church immediately and stayed in it until they moved back to Michigan years later. They've both gone on to heaven now. But you know what? His life is still speaking from this pulpit tonight because a gospel tract ended in his hand that influenced his life. So what you do may live on for a long, long time. Let me give this last one and then we'll be done. What will your life say when you're gone? What will your life say when you're gone? Proverbs 10, 7 says the memory of the just is blessed. Everyone preaches their own funeral by what you're doing right now. What will people remember about you? Will they remember? That person was a really pleasant person. They had a really nice spirit. They were really, really dedicated. They loved the Lord. Will they say that about us? Maybe. In Acts 9, 36, Dorcas, when she died, you know what the testimony was of the people after she died? Here's what they said. She was full of good works. They remembered what she had done. They remembered her. Psalm 112 and verse 6 says the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance. We live on. Billy Sunday's tent lived on. Billy Sunday was a major league baseball player who heard the preaching at a tent revival and he couldn't turn loose of it. He had to stay and listen and he found out how to be saved. and he responded to the preaching that night and he got saved and he began to be a preacher himself. He preached to millions. Billy Sunday was one of the most athletic type preachers you'd probably ever know. I've never seen him. This was back in the 1970s. early 1900s up to 1920 or so when he was preaching, but they said, man, he was just all over the place when he was preaching. He'd jump up on the pulpit and jump off, and he's on top of the table, and he's on chairs, and he's just doing all this stuff, and he preached to millions of people. And people got saved, thousands upon thousands of people got saved under a tent. He wanted to get a tent just like the one he heard the gospel from, and so he bought a tent. And he preached under that tent until he died. Well that tent ended up in a storage room barn of a church. It stayed in there for years. Finally somebody dug that tent out and said let's have a tent revival. And they pulled that thing out and set it up on their church grounds and they had a revival meeting and guess what? A bunch of people got saved. Billy Sunday's tent kept on preaching even though he'd been in the grave for years and years. Your life can keep on going. So Elisha might have died, but he wasn't done. He's not finished. He wasn't done. You may feel like what you're doing on Wednesday night. Man, I could have been home watching a good movie. How long would you remember that, huh? Might have been sitting around listening to some music, yeah? but how would that change your life and how would it cause your life to live on? Well, I could have been going down to the pickleball fields. Do they still do that around here? I didn't know you could make a ball out of pickles. I've never tried it. But anyway, you can find a lot of things new on Wednesday night and there's a lot of distractions and a lot of other things to get your mind. Being in church on Wednesday night, anything useful to me? If you see with your own eyes of faith that a dead man thrown into a tomb who touched those bones of Elisha came up alive and see how Elisha, the man of God, his messages kept on preaching even through his bones. It just might give you the idea that what I do matters. And when they put me in the ground Maybe, just maybe, something in my life will keep on speaking. We ought to be remembered that way. I've said a number of times that we don't do what we do for recognition. We don't do what we do for fame. We do what we do as Christians because we love the Lord and He expects it. You don't have to put anything, you don't even have to put on my tombstone. I planted Liberty Baptist Church and pastored it for nearly three decades. Just put on there a servant of the Lord. Servant of the Lord, that's good enough. That's what Elisha was, he was a servant of the Lord. He'd done some great things and he saw some great miracles, a lot of them, but he was a servant of the Lord. You and I can be servants of the Lord. Our legacy will live on. people will be changed and even though nobody might fall on our bones and be changed the ideas, the attitudes, the works that we left behind people will remember we can't give up because sometimes bad things happen we can't get discouraged and say well life's not as exciting as I want it to be We just can't give up. We gotta keep living. We gotta keep sowing. We gotta keep a sweet spirit and not let discouragement or bitterness creep into our lives. Because listen, it will matter when we're gone. Just keep on going. Peter denied the Lord, but Jesus sweetly brought him back into a powerful ministry. Judas also denied the Lord, sold him out, betrayed him. Now Judas is remembered, but I don't think he really wanted that kind of legacy, did he? We can't grow bitter. Here's the thing I'm trying to point out. Out of those two men, they both denied the Lord and one even betrayed Him to the crucifixion. But you know Jesus wasn't bitter. He brought Peter back into the ministry and He said when Judas, last time He spoke to Judas, He called him Friend? Friend? How could he do that? What's wrong with him? Well, he's Jesus. You know what he did? He kept the sweet spirit even though he knew that man betrayed him and he's going to be crucified because of it. Well, you haven't gone through crucifixion, so don't give up just yet. Don't grow bitter. Don't grow discouraged. Keep on living. Keep on having a sweet spirit. Keep on doing things for the Lord and others. Let's pray. Father, I pray that you'd bless us with the knowledge of this story and how it affects not just the lives of those men who buried the dead man, when they saw him arise but Lord use it to affect our lives to know that the life we have may speak well beyond the grave. And Lord, I just pray that we determine in our hearts right now to be faithful. Lord, I pray for those who may be listening online in this building who don't know Jesus as Savior. I pray that they know that their soul will live on beyond the grave. And if they don't accept Jesus as Savior, we know that their soul won't live on in heaven. It will live on in hell. What a sad way to end the story. of the