Please turn with me in your Bible to Luke chapter 17, Luke chapter 17, his name, Eddie Rickenbacher. The date, October 1942, Eddie Rickenbacher was commissioned to get a message to General MacArthur in Papa, New Guinea. He took a crew of seven men and headed that way. But somewhere over the South Pacific, the instrument panel went down and they lost their bearings. And within just a few short hours of being lost, they ran out of fuel. And they had to ditch that plane in the ocean. And as the plane was submerging, all eight men were able to get out and into a life raft where they would spend the next 30 days before their rescue. Eddie Rickenbacher said that there was a horrifying experience. Said we had many formidable foes, the sun, the wind, the rain, the sometimes turbulent seas, the sharks battering the life raft. But he said perhaps the worst was starvation. Eight days after they were in that life raft, their rations ran out. They had a similar routine, slept some slept while the others stayed alert. But they were all up in Adam at sunrise for devotions. And they would have their devotions. Captain William Cherry, the pilot, had preserved a new testament in his flight jacket. And they would read scripture, they would pray, they would sing hymns. At this time it was, afterwards it was Eddie's turn to nap. And he slid down just a little bit. And as he was drifting off, he felt something on top of his head. And as he opened his eyes, and as he looked at the bug eyes of all the other men in that life raft, Eddie realized that there was a seagull on top of his head. And not just a seagull, but food, if he could catch it. He said he took his last ounce of energy, and as quickly as he'd ever done anything his life, he reached up and he clocked that seagull. And they all took a bite or two out of that seagull, and then they cleaned that seagull, and they used that seagull for bait to catch more fish, to continue the process for 30 days until they rescued. When Eddie Rickenbacher retired to South Florida, he had a ritual that every Friday evening about sunset. If we were there hiding behind the dunes, we would see an old man walking down the beach, slightly stooped, bushy gray hair, perhaps a somewhat gnarled hand, gripping the handle of a bucket full of shrimp, heading out to an abandoned pier. And as he would get to that pier, sprinkled in the sky were seagulls. And Eddie would spend the next few minutes feeding those seagulls, paying homage to the one who gave its life so that Eddie and his men could live. This morning's service is about Thanksgiving, God's faithfulness to this church. And it's about God sending his son to this earth to give of himself and to die for us and to send his spirit to redeem us, to call us as children and then to gather us, people of all different walks of life, of all different ages, into a group, he calls a flock, a church, a bride, and for 30 years his faithfulness. I'd like for us to read this passage out of Luke 17 and notice what God, what Jesus says and how this applies to us this morning. Let's remember we're reading the very word of God. To be honest with you, this is the only thing perfect about this service is his words. Let's pay attention to it. And it came about while he was on his way to Jerusalem that he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a certain village, 10 leprous men who stood at a distance met him and they raised their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. And when he saw them, he said to them, go and show yourselves to the priest. And it came about that as they were going, they were cleansed. Now one of them, when he saw that he had been healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice. And he fell on his face at his feet, giving thanks to him. And he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answered and said, were they're not 10 cleansed? But the nine, where are they? Was no one found who turned back to give glory to God except this foreigner? And he said to them, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. For many years, I read this passage and I just kind of glance over it because leprousy is just not something that we have to deal with. But it wasn't until I really studied this that I realized that leprousy was the most dreaded disease of that day. And if we could maybe flip flop it and say, what is the most dreaded disease of our day, we would probably everyone say cancer. Even the very spoken word, tugs at us. We know how awesome cancer can be. Some of us have struggled with it. Some of us have loved one, a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend. And we know how devastating cancer can be. Well, if we see that that's what leprousy was then, but there was another hard part that was worse about leprousy. Leprousy, you couldn't stay at home. Once you were diagnosed with leprousy, you had to go out into the desert and you could form little colonies, leprous colonies, but you couldn't go home. You couldn't see your family. You had to suffer alone. So when these 10 come to Jesus and Jesus heals them, and yes, one of them come back to thank him. For years, I thought, well, the other nine just weren't thankful. Then I said, that's got to be ridiculous. They're thankful. They're very thankful, but I would speculate that what those nine did as soon as they were pronounced clean, they ran home, came in the back door, honey, I'm home, grabbed the children, swung them around, daddy's home. And who could fault them for that? Well, Jesus did. When the one came back, Jesus said, wait, weren't there 10? Where are the other nine?
You see, the big part of the story is not that the other nine weren't thankful, but there's only one who stopped to express it. We are a thankful people. We are all every one of us thankful. We could list our blessings, name them one by one. But do we express it? This morning, I want to express our thanksgiving for God's faithfulness through the years. I want to tell you a few stories of what God has done through the years. Some of you have been here a long time. Some of you have been here a short time. We started June, officially June 6th, 1976. There are about 18 adults and a few young people. And we rented a little space down on colonial drive. It was just a storefront. It was 20 feet wide, 80 feet deep. It looked like an airplane or a Boeing alley. But to me, just coming out of seminary, 30 years old, ready to conquer the world, it looked like a beautiful cathedral. But now, 30 years ago, we didn't have church planting courses, or books, or seminars. We didn't know what to do. So we just started knocking on doors and went to people and invited them to come to church. I began to volunteer to pray before any civic group who would have been. To give the blessing, just to promote the gospel, yes, but the church, yes. I remember being asked to pray at the opening, the grand opening of a public's downtown.
I remember before they cut that ribbon, and people were all gathered around. And I was thanking the Lord for this grocery store that would provide food and sustenance to the neighbors. And also, we really want to thank you for the bread of life, Jesus Himself, where we can hear about Him every Sunday morning at Orangewood Presbyterian Street, 180's colonial drive, 1030 service nursery provided.
1980, two significant things happened. We started a school. We were still in that little storefront, we were in that storefront for six years, 76-82. We started a school with 18 students. Six grades, we had two little windowless classrooms, and we had nine kids in each, first, second, and third grade, and one, fourth, fifth, sixth, and the other. And it was like little house in the prairie. It was fun. The next year, we grew from 18 to 12, which is not quite as much fun. And we prayed about whether God was leading us to close the school. But lo and behold, the following year, we were able to get property, and we had 54 that next year. And the school made it by God's grace. In 1981, I made the very best decision. I made in the 20 years, nearly 20 years that I had this watch. I hired Carl Smith to be my assistant. We were in seminary together, and after seminary, he went to a church in Macon, Georgia, and had a good ministry. It was a youth pastor and good stable church. And I brought him down to the storefront and convinced him that this is where God wanted him. And as a Carl, if I got a deal for you, and he came in about the second week, he came into my office from his little closet. And he said, by the way, what is my job description? I said, well, that's pretty easy, Carl. Whatever I don't want to do. The truth is, I said, Carl, I'll get him here. You keep him here. And from that day forward, Carl Smith built the infra structure of this church. From the Bible studies, the discipleship, the leadership training, he still has his hands in it. He still works on revising it and is just a great blessing to this congregation. Another thing that happened in 1980 is that the Chamber of Commerce in Orlando listed a bunch of projections for how they would see the city growing in the next 20 years. They realized Disney opened in 1971 and the 70s were just kind of crazy. Here in Orlando, nobody anticipated the impact Disney would have. And so they said, let's try to make some projections about Orlando for the next 20 years to the year 2000. And one projection that they made is that they thought that the center of the population of Great Orlando would be right around I, four, and Maelan Boulevard. And we thought, by the grace of God, that's where we're going to be. God opened up five acres. I just north of here, a half a mile. Next to the Greek church, we were able to buy those five acres and move in there. And we were there and had just some wonderful experiences there for six years. We hired Joe Creech, Vaughn Stanley, again two guys that we were in seminary with. And we just we just had a lot of fun. We were just good friends pouring our lives into starting a church. And Joe, when he got out of seminary, he went to the mission field for eight years. Uncle Poco. He lived two blocks from the beach. They had a full-time maid for a dollar a day. And he's sending support letters, sweat, sweat, and for Jesus. I asked Joe when he came to head up a counseling ministry. Also, Joe, help us develop a world mission's strategy. And lo and behold, he introduced us to Saul Cruz, Marmanilla, took some folks down there. And through Joe's been here almost 20 years. And through these 20 years, hundreds of our members have been on various mission trips. We just heard Jeff say that there's a group that left today, Honduras, Joe's in China today. I don't know what he's doing, but and the millions of dollars that we have spent really seeking to evangelize the globe and to be world a world force. And the genesis of that was Joe Creech, was and is Joe Creech. We were able to start three daughter churches. And I'm thankful that Jeff has that same vision to start more daughter churches. Started a church down south called Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church, a bill co-closure, out in Tuscany, Willow, Willow Creek with Pete Alwinson and University President Church with Mark Bates. And as we have, perhaps a thousand people here this morning in those three churches, they're probably a total of another 2000 that indirectly are descendants. And it's just so exciting to see what God's doing. And we give him thanks for that. I remember on occasion giving an altar call. And that was a little unusual. But I remember sentemic waters getting up and coming down and tears in her eyes and accepting Christ. And then I remember a great big good-looking guy, named David Lundberg, came forward tears streaking his cheeks, accepted Christ, changed his whole life. And he and Steve Lash, another fairly new member at that time, developed an incredible singles ministry, just a real powerful ministry.
Steve Lash, can a used car salesman be a Christian? I mean, look at the way he dresses.
I think he gets his clothes from yesterday.com. In 1988, God raised up this property for us, 17 and a half acres. It took us a year to get through the zoning process. And it was the Hope Strong family gave it to us at an incredible deal. In the mid-80s, this property was very, very expensive as they're developing the mainland center. And the Strong family gave us this property for $100,000 an acre. And then they took off another $25,000 an acre as a gift. So we had this very valuable property at 75,000 acre. But we just didn't have much money. So we tried to figure out what would be a best to build first. And of course, creatures would like to have a sanctuary. But we felt as tight as money was that our first building should be multipurpose. That'd be a better part of stewardship rather than just use a sanctuary for a couple hours. We would build a facility that could have lots of activities. And I'll tell you that one of my dreams back in 1988 was that someday I would be able to drive by this church. And no matter what time, day or night, you'd always see cars here. And that dream has come true. This church is a very busy church with lots of programs, lots of activities, lots of ministries. When we started building the church, laid this lab and started going up with the bricks. All of a sudden, the workers got here and found a crack in the wall. They didn't pay a lot of attention until the next day and the crack had gotten a little bigger. So they suspended construction and low and behold, after some investigation, they found out that we had a sink we're over a sinkhole. Now when you build a building, you have to do soil test bearings where you drill down certain amount of feed, depending on the size of the building, the weight of the building, the capacity of the building, all the formula they have. And I guess our formula said to go down, I forget the number now, let's say it was 60 feet. And we were good, we were solid, but low and behold, at about 65 feet, there was this sinkhole. Now what in the world are we going to do? We had no idea, Bill, you can't drop a little man down there with a lantern, although we thought of it. So we decided with all the options, we said, let's fill it, not knowing how big it was. So we started filling it with grout, just that cheap kind of concrete. And we ended up filling it with a thousand cubic yards of grout. I remember asking our building command, I said, how much is a thousand cubic yards of grout? They said, well, you know Chuck, when you put in traffic, when you pull up behind a cement truck and it's going, you know, turn around, that's 10 cubic yards. Imagine a hundred cement trucks up and down, Madeleine Boulevard pouring grout down this sinkhole at Orangewood. It cost us $106,000. Now, if you thought raising money to build a building was tough, we eventually got some insurance money. It took, I took them a few years, I don't want to say anything bad about insurance, claims. They're quick to lend you an umbrella until it rains. So now we're over this
there's a sinkhole that's been filled with a thousand cubic yards. It's a now we truly are the church built on a solid rock, spiritually and literally. In 1990, the fall of 1990, Friday evening, five o'clock PM, a tornado bounced through Madeleine and did a lot of damage to this property, including tearing a big section of roof off. We had leaks everywhere. At five o'clock PM, there were a hundred kids in this gym, various supervised activities. And by God's grace, nobody was injured or hurt. It happened fast, but it was quite, it was the picture on the cover of the next day's Sentinel, not quite the kind of publicity you like. But the next day, we had two or three hundred people, our members on this property fixing it up, carrying trash away and trees, cutting up trees, and then when we finished with our piece of property, we went into Madeleine Woods to help some of the people there. That had a hard time. In 1994, we had this dynamic young youth pastor who is just doing a great job with our youth, but he said, oh, I could do so much better if you could just get me a facility. I said, we've given you a gym. He's all, but if we just have a youth house, and so low and behold, God raised that. In fact, we had a non-member give us a hundred thousand dollars. And I remember that wouldn't go as far as we'd like, and we need more money. We didn't want to take it out of the budget. I remember, so I tell this story, can we talk? I remember parking next to Mr. Jim Gooding at a magic game. And Mr. Gooding was a neat Christian man. His first store was one here in Maryland. He loves Maryland, loved orangewood church, and wasn't a member here, but just loved it. And I waited until after one of the big victories that we had during the glory days of the magic. And I made sure that I got to my car first, and here came Mr. Gooding, and talking about what a great, great game it was, and maybe we'd go all the way and this kind of thing. And I said, you know, Mr. Gooding, let me tell you about another victory. We've got, we've got something going on at orangewood with our young people. And I know you're concerned about Maryland, and I know how concerned you are about the next generation of young people. We've got this dynamic youth pastor, and we really want to build a youth house. But we're a little short. He said, how much do you need? I said 50,000. He said, I'll write you a check in the morning. I went home that night driving home. I was so thrilled and just overwhelmed at God's grace. And then I laid up all night thinking, why didn't I ask for a hundred? I don't know how many baptisms we've had, weddings we've had, funerals. We've had a lot of laughs. We've shed a lot of tears. We're a church that has been growing, growing together. There's a dynamic ministry everywhere you turn from the women's work, the joy bells, the counseling, the birth laces coordinating now. It's just, God is really blessed this church. I think of the various music leaders we've had. When we were downtown in the storefront, we had a 16-year-old kid who could barely shave by the name of David Moore. Play the piano. And we can't get rid of him either. Judy Hiller, Ashley, Burrell, Larry Davies, Reggie, and of course our permanent interim, Vicki Taylor. She has helped out all these years. It's been amazing to see what God has done with our members sent some disseminaries, some of the mission fields. Some of our members have started their own ministries, Pat Morley, with men in the mirror is the most dynamic, men's ministry in the country right now. And that's just something for us to give thanks for. True life choice, our crisis pregnancy center, was begun by two women from this church. And we were the ones who funded it for years until the funding took hold a little bit better. 1995, I had to take disability retirement. That was difficult physically and emotionally. But God had shown me as I was deteriorating from a spinal cord injury from being a teenager, but God has grace allowed me to walk with a cane for 35 years. And I was thankful for every step. But as I was going back, I knew it was best for me and my family as well as a church to step down. And we even went to one of our mission churches for the next seven years so that Orangewood could have a new reign. Bob Cargo came for four years and had some fruit from his ministry. And yet it was a difficult four years. It was a difficult year. It's transition and change is very difficult. And I talked to Bob the day before left and he said, I believe that God called me here to have a ministry of transition, a ministry of transition from the old guy to whatever guy would succeed him. In 1987, sweet young gal by name of Katie Ward called me and asked if I would officiate her wedding ceremony. And I said, well, I'd like to meet this guy you're going to marry. So she said, well, two things you need to know about him ahead of time. He's from New York and he's a Baptist. And as I first met Jeff and Katie and got to officiate their wedding. And then later, got to hire Jeff. Carl just convinced me that we needed to hire him. And I finally relented on one condition, Carl. And that is that he didn't answer to me. He answers to you. And Carl said, I can handle him. The first week that Jeff was on staff, I was coming down the elevator and I heard a skirmish in the hall. I thought I was some kids. And Jeff had picked up Carl, his boss. Abside down was putting him in one of the large waste baskets. When God called Jeff three and a half years ago to be the senior pastor he called me as if I would come back, when did I come back. And I said really as a proud grandfather, I hope that that not sinful pride. But to see what God's done. You know, third John four, John says, I have no greater joy than this than to hear of my children walking in the truth. And I identify that I have no greater joy every Sunday than worshipping here. And seeing what God is doing in this next chapter of Jeff's Jeff's vision. I love Jeff's vision. This is a story of God's faithfulness 30 years. And it's our opportunity to express our thanks to him. I want us to always appreciate the past. One reason God gave us the Old Testament was to tell us stories of what he did in his faithfulness. Appreciate the past. Enjoy the present. That's why you're here today because you're enjoying the ministry of orangewood right now. And catch Jeff's vision for the future. It's an exciting one. This is the bride of Christ. We have our imperfections. We have our idiosyncrasies. We have our quirky people. But we're the bride and he loves us. So today we're that one in 10 church. As we say, happy anniversary. As we say, happy Thanksgiving. Let us pray. Father, we praise and thank you for what you've done these 30 years. Oh God, just a few stories. We relate. You have done such wonderful things, God. In spite of us, not because of us. We thank you for your faithfulness, God. We thank you for all those who've come to know Christ through the ministry of this church through the years. We thank you for those thousands of people who've come through this doors, some staying for a long time, some staying for short time. God, we thank you that you've given us some ministry, sometimes a healing ministry, sometimes a discipling ministry. God, we are that one in 10 today that we want to thank you for what you've done. Oh God, we thank you that there's only one head of this church. And that is Jesus himself. We pray in his name, amen.