Message Title: Experiencing God Through The Restoration of Lost Years
Message Truth: God has a way of restoring lost blessings despite lost years.
Message Text: Joel 2:23-27
Three Actions of Restoration:
- Hear the Call (2:1-11)
- Leave Your Sin (2:12-17
- Believe God’s Promises (2:18-27)
Things that Can Be Restored
- Money can be repaid – earned back over the years
- Property can be fixed
- Things (Car, House)- restored
- Relationships can heal
- But you can never get TIME back.
The Years that The Locust Have Eaten
- Fruitless Years – bad investment, failed ventures in business.
- Painful Years – loss of a loved one and your future is altered and empty, illness in life.
- Selfish and Rebellious Years– wasting life in sin and rebellion against God.
- Loveless Years– Singleness, Divorce, married without love.
- Christless Years – You are saved late in life and realize you have just wasted your life on things that will not matter overall.
The Promise of Restored Years are Given to People who:
- Feel the Need for Gods Mercy (v.17)
- Wants God’s Name to Be Honored (v.27)
How Can This Promise be Fulfilled?
- By deepening your Communion with Christ
- Multiplying Your Fruitfulness
The Lord promised to give such bumper crops that the harvest would more than compensate for all the people lost during the locust plague and the drought. “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25) is a word of promise to all who return to the Lord with sincere and broken hearts.
“You cannot have back your time, but there is a strange and wonderful way in which God can give back to you the wasted blessings, the unripened fruits of years over which you mourned. … It is a pity that they should have been locust-eaten by your folly and negligence; but if they have been so, be not hopeless concerning them.” Charles Spurgeon
