Celebration Sunday - Audio
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It is such a joy to be a part of seeing young people know the power of declaring that they are Jesus, that He's the One, and that they love them, they're going to follow Him. We are a super blessed. Really quick, I just wanted to throw one thing out at you before we invite up our new members, and that's this. In Japan, there's this, I don't know if you guys have seen cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms or the sakura in Japan, they're these really beautiful pink flowers, and we actually have some in the United States that they were a gift, I think, from Japan to the United States. They're planted in Washington, D.C. And so the thing about sakura, the thing about these cherry blossoms is they only last for two weeks. So they are there, and then they're gone, sometimes a lot less than two weeks. And the thing about them is that they blossom, they blossom kind of like based on your latitude, so they start in the south, and then when the weather is right, they blossom, and as the weather warms up, they kind of move north. And so if you know Japan, Japan's like a, it's kind of north to south, the nation. And so over the course of about six weeks or something like that, Japan sees the cherry blossoms bloom, die, bloom, die, bloom, die, bloom, die, and it's a very, it's a sacred time for the Japanese people. They have these Matsuda, these festivals. Well the thing about cherry blossoms is that they signify to the Japanese people the way that life and beauty is temporary. It only lasts for a little while. So if there's something that's beautiful or good, you have it for a little bit of, like a short time, but then it's gone. And there's this interesting thing that a number of Japanese people have done. They become, they become called cherry chasers, cherry blossom chasers. And what they do is, as soon as the cherry blossoms begin blooming in the south, they go, and then they follow the cherry blossoms all the way north. So as new blossoms come up, they keep moving north and participating in these festivals and these parties until they get to the very north of the country in Hokkaido, and then that all comes to an end when those cherry blossoms die. The cherry chasers, their whole thing is they want to hold on to beauty, they want to hold on to life, they want to hold on to joy and happiness until they can't. Which of course, defies the whole purpose of their symbolism about the cherry blossom, but they've recognized something in life that I think a lot of us have recognized, and that is what I want is happiness, what I want is joy, and when I have it, I need to seize it, and I can't let it go. In Jeremiah 2, the Lord says to the prophet, "My people have committed two crimes. They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and they have dug well, broken wells that can't hold water." The people of Israel and the people and us, we do this. We get our thirst quenched by something. Maybe it's money, maybe it's property, maybe it's our love interests, maybe it's a substance, maybe it's, I mean, there's a million things that can grab our hearts. But what we find is that when we pour our lives into that, and we look to that well for living water, it just runs dry. And we find ourselves chasing over and over and over again, it's like a cherry blossom blooms, and we just got to keep moving north, keep moving north until we run out of land. And John 4, Jesus meets a woman at the well, you may have heard this story, where she's
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org