God Has the Final Say

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon's captions — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Williams preaches the closing Sunday of a conference week on two texts about things that come back. The first is God's word itself: "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth... so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please" (Isaiah 55:10-11). God's words are so final that even he does not take them back — by the time he said "Let there be light," light had to come forth. The second text is Job, in one of the darkest trials any man has walked through, finding hope in a stump: "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again... yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant" (Job 14:7-9). Sometimes we listen to every voice but the only voice that matters — family, the enemy, the darkness — and those voices are lies, because it is only final when God says it's final.

His illustration is a story he tells at length: a thirteen-year-old Alabama boy thrown from a trailer behind a four-wheeler, his skull fractured under its weight, who flatlined four times in the hospital. The doctors told his mother that each resuscitation risked a vegetative life while his organs could still save five other children; with tears streaming down her face she signed the papers to take him off life support. The next day, as a doctor was preparing the machines, he caught a scowl of pain on the boy's face — then moving eyelashes, moving fingers, moving toes — and the boy's eyes popped wide open. The doctors had given up hope and even his mother had cashed in; but between God and that boy, death did not have the final say. I don't care if it looks dead: if God didn't declare it dead, you shall live.

The application is watering. Your promises are not dead and your prayers are not dead — they are seeds and stumps waiting on saturation. All it takes is a scent of water: keep praying for your boy until he gets in church, keep crying over the prayer journal, keep your tears on the stump. God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19); cast your bread — your seed — upon the waters and you will find it after many days (Ecclesiastes 11:1). But faith disconnected from works is dead: the only way prayers die completely is when you stop watering them — stop showing up, stop lifting your hands, stop calling your husband's name before the Lord. Keep saturating the stump, and the dead things will be forgotten in the newness springing up.