Frankie Mazzapica - Queen Of The South
Thank you for tuning in today. My name's Frankie Mazzapica. The title of today's message is "Queen of The South". Queen of the South. Let me lay a scriptural foundation just so you know where we got this title from. It's interesting to know before I get into the meat of it, I've got three scriptures for you. The first one is in Matthew chapter 12, verse 42 where Jesus refers to a queen, but he doesn't say her name. Instead, he calls her the queen of the south. Now, if you read in 1 Kings from 1 Kings all the way up through about chapter 12, you will find that this queen of the south was mighty, she was royalty, and she was incredibly wealthy because she was the queen of the land. She ruled over the land. King Solomon when he met her, he called her dark and lovely. And now let me tell you how they met.
In 1 Kings chapter 10, verse 1, this queen of the south, or the Queen of Sheba, when she heard about Solomon's fame, and she heard of his relationship with the Lord, see that right there. That's the reputation I hope to have when I live my life. When people are talking about me, I want him to say he's got a relationship with God. Isn't that what you want? Put your hands together. Like, and so when she heard about his fame and his relationship with the Lord, she went to go see him to ask him hard questions. When she arrived in Jerusalem, she had a large group of servants, a huge group of people that were there to serve her. And she also had a grand caravan of camels, and these camels were loaded up. They were carrying spices, large quantities of gold, pure and precious jewels.
Now keep in mind that she had to travel for 80 days to get from where she was to go visit Solomon. Eighty days. When she arrived, she asked him every question that was on her mind. In verse 3, it says this, that when she talked with him, Solomon was able to answer all of her questions. He found it easy to explain everything. Now when we jump down to verse 10, it says that this queen of the south, they also brought rich red sandalwood and pure jewels, precious jewels. And when the king received this rich sandalwood, he took it and he made railings in the temple, and he also used it within the royal place. And then he used it even more, even further, to make instruments like the lyre and the harp for the musicians who led worship.
And so that's the foundation, and what we're gonna do is I'm gonna pick out three major points out of that passage. The first major point is how the queen of the south showed up with difficult questions. She was prepared to ask difficult questions. Number two, she was prepared to make a sacrifice. And then number three, I wanna talk about legacy. I wanna talk about your legacy, my legacy, and the legacy that she left. What the queen of the south had in mind is she wanted to ask hard questions that she was wrestling with. I have this rope here and I want this rope to represent her life, the years of her life. And so she didn't want, regardless of how much power, regardless of the riches and the fame, all of that meant nothing to her in comparison to getting these questions, these religious questions answered. She wasn't willing to continue to live the years of her life without getting those questions answered.
So let's just dive right into the prepared questions that she came with. She already said they were hard questions. If you have never doubted God, then you have never had faith in God. Some people are afraid of doubt. They feel as though if they doubt, then they don't have faith. I wanna tell you that doubting is not the absence of faith. Faith is choosing to believe, even though you're wrestling with doubt, that's faith. Come on. Do you believe that? So, before she was willing to just dive in, see some people can just dive in. I believe in it. I'm in, I'm all in. You can't talk me out of it. And God bless those of us who are like that. But then there are those that say I'm almost in. I wanna be in but I've got some questions that I need to ask and I can't ignore it. I'm not gonna check my brain at the door. Are you with me? Say yes. I'm not gonna do it. And so she shows up to ask these difficult questions.
Now, we already read the end of the passage where Solomon answered all of her questions and he found it easy. She was able to live the rest of her life for the Lord fully committed. And I want to tell you this morning that your questions that you're wrestling with, how you deal with those questions affects the rest of your life and it also affects your influence in anyone's life, beginning with your family, and then the concentric circle are those you live life with, how you deal with those questions. Because the weakest among us, we'll just have those questions and I don't care. I don't, I have unanswered questions. I don't know this about God. I don't know that about God, I don't know. And because I don't have all these answers, you know what? I'm not in. That's the worst decision anyone can make. It is the worst. Anyone, there is no decision more consequential than that one. You're dealing with your own soul, your soul. But the people that say I'm going after it, I'm gonna go figure this out.
I have a friend of mine, he will not commit to believing in the Lord as a Savior. I mean, I have pushed him. I have done all that I can. He's out, and the reason why he will not give the years of his life, represented by this rope, the reason why he won't do that is because he has hard questions with no answers. I was sitting with him at a particular football game and I just asked, "What questions do you have"? And I said, "Now, before you answer, don't say that you don't believe that Jesus ever lived. Don't say that. You can ask the other hard questions. But there are more books of history outside of the Bible that confirmed that there was a man named Jesus who claimed to be the King of the Jews and hung on a cross and died. Now, so don't argue that. Now if you wanna argue whether or not he was truly the Son of God, if he was just a good teacher, we can talk about that".
But, so he said, "Well, I'll give you that he was here. I can't argue against history. However, the only thing I will say is that he was a good teacher. That's as far as I can go". And so I sit back, I said, "Look, you can't have it both ways. Either he was who he said he was, he came down and he said, 'I am the Son of God. If you believe in me, you're gonna have everlasting life.' You either believe that, or you do not believe that he was a good teacher. Because if you're a good teacher, you don't lie. Good teachers don't lie. Liars are not good teachers. They're terrible teachers. So he can't be a good teacher and not be the Son of God". And so he says back to me, "Well, you've studied this more than me. So I don't really have answers for that".
That's where he left it. In other words, I am not brave enough to go dig for those answers. This is how I'm gonna live my life. I'm gonna live it, just happy and go lucky. That's how I'm gonna live it, the years of my life. My daughter came to me a few weeks ago and she said, "You know, dad, for the past few weeks I have questioned everything that you have taught me about God". "Oh, really"? And she said, "I came to the point in my life where I'm not just gonna adopt the faith of you and mom, because I needed to question everything and I started studying for myself". And I'm like, "So, what did you figure out"? She said, "I asked every single question, and I went for every single answer, and I looked for sources outside of the Bible, and I wanna tell you, I believe now more than I've ever believed in my life. More than I've ever believed in life".
And she goes, "It's so crazy because I was just living, minding my own business, and I had a couple of friends come up to me at school," she's in college now. "And they started asking me questions," and she was like, "You're not gonna believe it, dad. It was like..." She goes, "I answer them so easily..." See when you're courageous enough to say, I'm not gonna just keep living my life this way and make decisions on, well, I just believe. I'm gonna go ask courageous questions. I wanna challenge you. I really do. Because every single person in this room regularly fights doubt. Regularly. You said everybody in this room, does that include you? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. And I have to back up regularly and get along with God and say, we gotta deal with this.
And I'll study and I'll read books, I'll read the Bible and then I'll read books outside of the Bible. Don't be afraid to prepare your hard questions, because that's when your faith gets built. I wanna talk now about the sacrifice. She saw that, hey, this may change my whole life and I'm willing to make any sacrifice necessary. Everyone is willing to follow the Lord until it's time to make a sacrifice. Everyone, but no one has a problem opening up Christmas presents. No one has a problem showing up on Easter in their Sunday best taking family photos. Nobody has a problem with that. Nobody has a problem until the Lord says I want you to live your life like this.
And you say, well, I live my life like that in this area and then like that in this area. See, there's no sacrifice there. A relationship without sacrifice is no relationship at all. If you're married, you're with me. There's a give and take, I don't want to talk about that anymore. So she shows up and she sacrifices great amounts of gold, spices. She goes 80 days thinking about this as she traveled to go see him, it was an 80 day travel. I wouldn't travel anywhere in a car going 70 miles an hour for 80 days. Skip it. I probably can go all the way around the country, not gonna do it. I'm sorry. I get in a plane, I go five hours to Canada with my wife to go visit her family, I'm going crazy. I'm looking for parachutes. I'm about to jump out of the plane. Five hours. Eighty days? No. But the rest of her life she had, this was a sacrifice.
I read of this Christian believer and he had this experience that changed his life, and when I became aware of it, it changed mine. In his vision or in this dream, he knew the Spirit of God was around him. And all of a sudden he saw himself in these environments that were not godly environments, and there was not godly people in those places where he was hanging out with them. And he saw that when he walked into those places, that the Holy Spirit was with him, he couldn't see him, but he had the awareness that he was with him. And he felt this confidence that wow, you said you'd never leave me or forsake me and you haven't. But when he walked into these places and he walked around these people, because they weren't children of God, they weren't surrounded by the presence of God, they were surrounded by demons.
There was demons walking next to them and around them, escorting them to places that they wanted these people to go. And when he was standing there, he saw the demons laughing at the Holy Spirit. They were looking at him, pointing, laughing, joking, making a mockery of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit could just stand there because the Bible says in 1 John chapter 3, verse 10 that we can tell who are children of God and who are children of the devil. We can tell, you can't fake us out. Because those who do not love other believers and live righteously, you are not a child of God, you are a child of the devil.
And so when he would go into these unrighteous environments, and hang out with these unrighteous people and in these unrighteous way of talking, and all this kind of stuff, they would laugh at the Holy Spirit, saying, you may stand there as long as you want to but make no mistake about it, he isn't pursuing you. He's pursuing us and look at you, you're standing there, you can't do anything at all. And they were laughing, laughing at the Holy Spirit. Look, we got... he's following us. He's not following you. He's following us, as they just joked and mocked the Holy Spirit. When he came to, when he came out of the dream or vision, he was just crying and he said, Holy Spirit I'm so sorry for taking you places where you were mocked and where you were laughed at.
Let me share with you as you live your life, I hope this inspires you and it never... every year of your life, I pray that you, not one year goes by without you thinking about what I'm about to say. In the Bible, the Holy Spirit takes different forms. Sometimes it's fire, sometimes it's wind, but in one particular place in Acts chapter 10, verse 38 there's the... he represents a dove. The Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord comes down like a dove, and it lands on the Lord.
Now let me ask you, if a physical dove, a bird, were to land on your shoulder, a dove, and you wanted to walk through your entire day without that dove flying off, how would you walk? I'll tell you. Every step you take would be with that dove in mind. When you are living your life and the years and the days are going by, I wanna challenge you, every step you take, keep that dove of the Holy Spirit on your mind. Do you receive that? Come on. Before you say what you're about to say, before you do what you're about to do, before you adopt an emotion and anger and let it get a foothold in your life. It's okay to get mad, just don't stay mad long. It'll get a foothold in your... and you just say, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I wanna be intimate with the Spirit of the Lord and no one's gonna mock the Spirit in the supernatural realm. I love him and he loves me. And if you ever make a mistake, please don't ever forget this, the very next decision is the most important decision after you make a mistake. Because if the enemy can get you and say, well, you've already said that, you've already done that. You might as well just throw the towel in the air and just go down the spiral. But if you back up and you say, oh my goodness, I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I said that. The next decision, I love you. I'm sorry for what I did. I need your mercy. I need your grace, and then you begin to walk forward, you begin to walk forward, you begin to walk forward, you begin to walk forward. The next decision is the most important decision after you make a bad decision.
Let me go on to the very last point. The queen of the south had a legacy. Because she made the sacrifice, because she asked the tough questions and she was courageous enough to go after it, she left a legacy so great that 4,000 years later, you and I are still talking about it. Four thousand. Let me just tell you. When people talk behind your back, they're not oohing and awing about your car, about your house, about your job. They don't talk about that. They talk about who you are, the kind of person you are. Hey, have you met so and so? Yeah, I met them. Boom. We both tell them what we think about them right there. Bang, bang, bang, bang. And none of us go, have you seen his car? Or maybe you mentioned that, but it's further, it's not his legacy. It's not her legacy.
The sandalwood was so rich and so pure, it was such a great sacrifice, that her legacy was in the temple. It was found in there, in the holy place. The musicians that played the harps were made out of her sacrifice. She didn't have to preach a word. She didn't have to lecture anyone. The only thing she had to do was answer those burning questions and give a sacrifice, and it led people into the presence of God. This is how the Lord treats you. And now I got just one last point. I'm sure some of you noticed it. There's a red tip on this rope. Yeah, this rope represents an entire life. It just keeps going for eternity. But guess what? This part of the road is the only part on earth. This part, this little tiny part affects all of this for eternity. For eternity, forever and ever, and ever, and after forever, it still keeps going and going and going.