Taylor, Tom: Greenwood Hills Colorama Conf-1996-02 ~ Mount Sinai

On my trip to the mountains. I'm sorry I don't have some slides or pictures of these things to bore you with. I don't, so you just have to go with the normal type of boring. That's how it goes. On this table over in the back over here, under where it says necessary room and it's literature table, I placed a few brochures of Mark Colchin's planned trip next, next June to Alaska. I just placed the brochures there because they're pretty, and they look nice in here. Yeah, I only put a few of them there because you never know about those things, but I'm one of his mild confederates, and so I placed a few there telling the glories of traveling with Colchin and, and thereby not having to have a lot of money to pay your nursing home later on. That's one of the great joys of these things. Use your money for things you want to use it for. They will squeeze it out of you later somehow when time comes. Whatever the case happened, that's just I'm, I'm on a note of humor. You'll have to forgive me. Uh, humor runs strong in the Taylor family. We do see things seriously too from time to time, but humor has always run strong. That's kind of the way it is. Uh, otherwise you just wind up shooting yourself. Exodus 19, Mount Sinai. I'll read verses one through eight. In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai. For they were departed from Rephidim and were come to the desert of Sinai and had pitched in the wilderness, and there Israel camped before the mount. And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel, You've seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings and brought you under myself. Now therefore, if you will obey my voice indeed and keep my covenant, then you shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people, for all the earth is mine. And you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel. This is the second of our mountains in our trip. We looked last night at Mount Moriah, how God is a great provider, and we look at Mount Sinai this morning and talk about the fact that God is the great protector. I'm not making a series of P's, I'm not alliterating them. It just happens that those two things fall together in this sequence, and after that we'll fall some other direction. But God is the great protector. Sinai is a range of mountains, you know, in the lower part of that peninsula, and we assume that the Mount Sinai was the dominant peak in that range, but there's a whole bunch of them, and you can go down there and see Sinai from several different directions. It's called by a couple other names in the Bible too, and a lot of interesting things take place on it in addition to this. But here's Israel out of Egypt gathered together at Mount Sinai. They are on the journey for some little time. They're gathered there, and the Lord says, have them stop here while I give them a lesson or a series of lessons that are designed for the blessing of his people in many, many years to come. Sinai is a pivotal chapter. In the minds of Dr. Schofield and others, it marked a break in the dispensational arrangement, that you move in chapter nineteen into the dispensation of law or into that particular period under the Mosaic covenant. It seems to be reflected in the book of Galatians that way too. So it's a very pivotal chapter, and with it comes the giving of the law, and the law in many aspects. A lot of times people misunderstand the purpose of the law. The law was never intended to save people. The law was never intended to save people because nobody could keep the law. No human person could keep it. Jesus kept it, and Jesus has kept it for us. So we read in Romans ten four that he is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believes. And when you believed in Jesus as your savior, God looked at you and said, that person is right, just as right as if every law had been kept and righteousness had been added. But the law was never intended to save people. It was not intended to sanctify people either. What the law was intended to do was to protect people, to protect them by the grace and the power of God. And we know that the law came by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ, and the Lord Jesus continues that work of protection too, but the law was chiefly intended to protect the people who were gods from the things about them that would be hostile and irritating and defiling in every sort of a way. I won't look at all of the law this morning, obviously, because I'm on Mount Sinai, and on Mount Sinai, the law is part of it. Israel couldn't come near the mount. We read that back here in Exodus, and we read it in Hebrews also. They couldn't come near the mount. Some of the elders went up on the mountain, saw some of these great things with Moses, and they came back, uh, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb. They all proved unfaithful in time. The concept is not see what they saw or what happened, but what God did, and what God was doing was reaching out to protect his people. He's the great protector. Now, the problem with us when we come to things like that is, is that when we think of protection, we always think of it in very narrow or very limited senses. There's a great protection. I'm not sure I can, I'm not sure I can illustrate that adequately for you this morning. I'll run through it three or four times, but, but here, here, here I'm, I'm, what am I doing next? I'm, I'm going out to buy snacks. I haven't done it yet, but I probably will. My wife has to go home today for her Bible study tomorrow, and so she won't be here tonight to nourish me properly, and so I, I will probably sneak out. Well, we'll go together, we'll go together. I'm not a wimpy husband who sneaks away from his wife. I just say to her, could we please go, dear, and buy some. But whatever the case is, well, and so, so I think of protection, you know, as getting the store and back and not being hurt or not running into anybody. That's the kind of protection I think, but I'll tell you, that's very minimal protection. Or I go to visit somebody who's sick, and I hope that I won't get what they've got. That's very minimal protection. I'm one of those fellows that if you're in the hospital a long time, I'll come to see you. I kind of enjoy, if you're cheerful, I'll come pretty quick. If you're grumpy, it'll take me two or three weeks. You'll be out before I get there. But I, I, I get the hospital, and I begin having what you've got. You know, you say, well, what, what, what, what, how did you feel? Well, I had this little pain, I had this little tremor, I had, and I just suddenly remember that last week I had that pain and tremor too. Well, I never visit them in the maternity ward. I never do that. I just, we have wait till they get home, wait till they get home and find out what goes on at that particular point. And but I go to visit in the hospital, and somebody says, you know, there's a lot of germs there. Listen, there are germs everywhere. I eat germs with every breath I swallow, but there are germs ev- but I just say, well, God will take care of us, and we think of that, and I'm not saying that isn't the protection, but that's minimal protection. Those things are just transient and temporary. I hate to tell you, they're transient and temporary. And that's true of most of the things that associate my mind with protection. They're transient and temporary. But God would look out and give his people protection that was designed for the fullness of soul and fullness of life and the greatness of their being. And that's what I want to emphasize this morning. God is the great protector. He certainly showers daily mercies on us in thousands of other ways. When you think of some hard thing that's happened, think of the five thousand hard things that didn't happen, and you'll discover that God and his love shields us from lots of things in the course of life. But God is the great protector, is not so much the master of the trivial as he is of the great life issues. And they stand out here in Exodus nineteen and in the chapters that follow with the Ten Commandments in chapter twenty and the Levitical and ceremonial laws in twenty one through twenty three and so forth. So that's what I'm working with this morning. God is a great protector, and you walk out of here today, or you sit here today, or you listen here today, knowing that if you're in Jesus Christ, God's protection is over you. It doesn't make you immune to the various deceptive things of life. I've said that several times. You may still have a bad toothache today, a headache, you might even get it during this meeting. You can't tell for sure. Any number of things come. Trusting God is not like taking a medicine, which sometimes makes you immune to all sorts of things. Trusting God is bringing yourself into the family of God's control and care, and living with blessing and eternal purposes. He's the great protector, and his protection is involved in very much in small things too, but very much in the great issues of life. Now see, I'm in danger of talking too fast. You get in a hurry. There's no point to get in a hurry. You've got all day. We're senior citizens. You're never in a hurry, except to get to lunch and breakfast and dinner and the, and the refreshments served afterwards. Those the only things we really, so I'll try to slow down. You have to slow me down. My wife is sitting up front with these couches in the front of this room. Aye, aye. I wouldn't make it through the second point. Those things, I'd be in the kingdom before you knew it. But you can't stay awake for the meetings? I get, I'm plenty rested. It's just that some things lend themselves to a sober, to a sleepy attitude in life. Some things lend themselves to that. In my case, it's a soft chair. I always prefer a hard chair because that, you know, it's, it's more painful to fall asleep in them. When you fall out, you get hurt. And these babies, you wouldn't have to fall out at all. You've already in it, you've already fallen in it when you sit down, and you're just there. But I'll try to be more slow, and maybe you'll have to wave at me too. I can usually talk loud enough, but I sometimes rattle too rapidly. So what I'm talking about this morning is that God is the great protector. First of all, he protects us from bondage. He protects us from bondage. See, the historical references are here in verses one through four in Exodus nineteen. He brought them out of the land of Egypt. Why were they in Egypt? God sent them to Egypt. He told Abraham in Genesis fifteen that he would send them to Egypt. He told them how long they would be there. They were in Egypt to learn the importance of God in their lives and to learn the anguish of bondage to foreign powers and the wicked things of sin. They were in Egypt to learn a national lesson that they would never forget. And throughout the Old Testament, again and again, God will say to them, remember, you were in bondage in Egypt until I delivered you. In our theology today, we let Egypt often stand as a type of sin, and we can certainly do that with some justification. Sin in itself is a cruel bondage. There's not a lot of parallel as to how we got in it because we were born in it and practiced it from our earliest days, but we were bound in it. But God says to us who believe in Jesus, I did not leave you in bondage, I delivered you from it from my son. I love that passage in First Corinthians six where the writer tells about all of the wicked things and wicked people who can't enter the kingdom of heaven, adulterers and liars and so forth. And then he says, some of you were that, but now you're washed, you're clean, you're accepted, you're God's people. Deliverance from bondage, the bondage of sin, the bondage of Egypt. He tells that they were not only delivered from Egypt, but delivered from the desert and the wildernesses in which they went through, and eventually brought to this great place of blessing, which he had promised that he would give to them. And he says in verse four, he says, you just look back and see what I did unto the Egyptians. See that I brought you out on eagle's wings. A lot of them drowned in the sea, but I brought you out on eagle's wings. A lot of them suffered for their rebellion, but I brought you out on eagle's wings. I brought you out to myself. I delivered you from bondage. That's real protection. Bondage is a frightening kind of thing. We were all bound by sin until we found Jesus Christ, or until he delivered us. Some of us knew it in different degrees. I've known some people who thought they were terrible, wicked sinners because they did a lot of bad things, and other people who thought they were somewhat better, but I will tell you, everybody who doesn't know Jesus is equally lost, equally lost. I do think there are degrees of punishment, but all punishment is lostness, and I think they're all equally lost. And we've known some self-righteous people who just thought they'd done so much good in life that God would have to accept them, but nobody does that much good in life, nobody does. We were all in the bondage of sin. We were just in it to different degrees. My family, a lot of the men were alcoholics. A lot of them. There weren't as many as there should have been. A lot of them died. Well, never mind, but that was a great thing. We knew they were in bondage. They were in bondage to alcohol. They were in bondage to all the things it produces and all the evils it produces, and there are plenty of those things. We knew that. But I'll tell you, those of us that weren't drinkers were in the bondage to something worse. We were in bondage to self-righteousness, and self-righteousness, in terms of how you stand before God, is no better than self-drunkenness. We thought we were so good because we didn't do what others did, but we hadn't done anything right before God. In some ways, our bondage was worse than theirs, if you can put it that way. In some ways, because anybody could see what was wrong with them, they were drunks. Wretched, hard to live with, abusive people. They were drunks. Anybody could see what was wrong with them, but with we goodies, you really could hardly tell us goodies what was wrong with us. We were so good, you know, but actually we were as far from God as they were, and in some ways further. But when the grace of Christ enters your life, he frees you from sins of condemn and bondage of sin and the necessity of it, and he frees you from all this self-righteousness nonsense and a lot of other things too. He frees you because you suddenly see what sin is, and you've been delivered from it by the grace of God, and that's God the great protector. Your sins will never rise in condemnation of you again. Now, the concept of Romans eight one has to be tightly linked to chapter seven in Romans. When he says there's no condemnation, it looks certainly at eternally there's no condemnation, but there's also nothing to condemn us to keep living under the law and under principles of law. We are freed from those things, freed by the grace of God. God is the great protector, and God knows that bondage is the great enemy of your soul. Now, when someone says, well, I have this particular sin and I really can't help it, I've never known exactly what to say. See, it's easy to be a know-it-all. Almost everybody in the Taylor family is a know-it-all. It's easy to be that way, and I don't want to be that way. But we are freed from the dominion of sin. We're freed from the domination of it, maybe I should say. Someday we'll be free from the presence of it in the concept of Romans six. but for the moment, it really does not have mastery over us. We yield to the devil and give place to him, and Paul in Ephesians says, don't do it. We do do it sometimes. Every time I get mad at somebody, I do it. I don't have to get mad at people, and I don't get mad very often. I become righteously irritated. That's what happens to me. You just get mad. I know you. You just get mad. I get righteously irritated. I'm smiling at that. But when I get mad at somebody, does God want me to be angry with my brother? Angry? Well, if my brother's doing a wicked thing, I ought to be in a place of rebuke and ought to be in a place of help. But the kind of anger that most of us get is not righteous anger. It's just good old fleshliness letting off a certain amount of steam. Do I have to do it? I don't have to do it. I choose to do it. It makes me feel good to do it. It makes me feel good when you look miserable when I do it, and so I choose to do it. Anger is not a very big important role in my life. I have things that are perhaps worse, but I kind of know how it goes like that. We are not under the domination of sin. We are not bound to it. We sometimes put ourselves under the devil's influence and whatnot in ways that we shouldn't. He that is greater in us, I'm sorry, he that's in us is greater than than the power that exists in the world, and we are freed because God is a great protector, and God doesn't want us obligated and bound to things that are wicked and contrary to him. Am I clear on that? I'm not asking you to say yay or nay, I'm saying it to myself. I hope I'm clear on it, because God's a great protector, and on Sinai he says, look, look, I brought you out of Egypt, didn't I? I brought you through the sea and the wilderness, didn't I? I delivered you from the power of those things. Look and see what happened to the Egyptians, and then look and see how I've blessed you. I'm the great protector, and we need to rejoice in that. He protects us from bondage. Secondly, he protects us from lawlessness. If you will obey my voice indeed and keep my covenant. That's all the further I need to go in verse five. He protects us from lawlessness. Yeah, lawlessness is tough. You never kind of appreciate the law until you need it. You never, you know, we, we growl a lot of times because there are lots of laws and whatnot that are probably, um, probably just ridiculous. It's like the time when I had this accident a long time ago. The Henrys were close to me when I had this accident. I've had a couple since, Don, too. And it went, went to court, and Donald came up to be a witness in court on my behalf and whatnot, long time ago. He was young then, and I was young too. So whatever the situation happened to be, the attorneys are asking me about the thing. They're asking me how fast I was going at the intersection. Who's watching the speedometer when you're going at the intersection? But I didn't think I was speeding. I hardly ever speed, except where it's a very slow speed, like fifteen miles an hour. Some of you speed too on the Greenwood Hills ground, but but whatever the case is, I, it is my nature to s- but you can, oh, I didn't know how, I didn't know how fast I was going, but I said as honestly as I could, I said, well, I said, I'm sure I wasn't going more than fifty. I said, I think I was going between forty and fifty. I'm sure I wasn't going more than fifty. and I certainly wasn't going more than fifty. but the attorney for the man, the attorney for the other party, who I referred to as the man who hit me, the attorney for the other party said, he said, he said, oh, he said, oh, he said, that's interesting. He said, have you seen this law in the Pennsylvania statutes that when you're approaching an intersection governed by a stoplight, you must slow your automobile to fifteen miles an hour. He said, you were going more than fifteen. Well, certainly I was going more than fifteen. My car stalled at twenty. And he read the statute to us, and the judge leaned off the bench and said, I never saw that before, let me see that. And here was a law that was passed in nineteen ten, had never been changed in the legislature, see? Stupid law. And the judge said, listen, he said, if everybody obeyed that, he said, traffic would never get anywhere. He said, just forget that, just forget that. Uh, the case was decided in, in my favor because the other guy who, well, anyhow, that's how it went. But I thought about that law, and I said to myself, I wonder how many other laws there are that are dumb. But there are times when you need the law. You see that somebody has decided to, decided to build a, um, a house in your yard. He's out there with a bulldozer plowing up your yard. You say, this is my yard, and he says, buddy, I've got a bigger bulldozer than yours, and the guy with the biggest bulldozer wins. Now, you know better than that. You call for the law. The law protects you in some situations. Sometimes it can be a great pain in the neck. I understand that. But God gave a code, protection from lawlessness. Lawlessness is a terrible situation, a terrible situation. We do not know nearly as much about it in this country as they do in some parts of the world. We're, we're not big authorities in these things, so you just have to understand that. But we visited Ruth's sister and brother-in-law in Brazil. We've been down there twice to see them. They, the Lord has blessed them, and we like to go and see them, and then I like to come home. That's what I really like to do. I like to come home, but we always have a nice time visiting them. We've been friends for years. My brother-in-law and I were roommates in college years ago, and we still speak to each other. That will show you something, but we are, we, we are good friends. They, they have a nice house. They're missionaries. They've had to work for God and been faithful in it. They've got a great stone wall around the property. The top of the stone wall is embedded with cut glass of all sorts. The gates in the wall are, are iron, good heavy iron with enormous locks and padlocks. My brother-in-law is popular in the neighborhood. People come to him for all sorts of help and all sorts of things. I'm looking at seeing the first time in Brazil I look at that, and he said, well, he said, people here will steal you blind. And he said, calling the police doesn't help much. He said, half the time they're the thieves. That doesn't help much. So he said every, so he said, yeah, he said everybody does this. Everybody, I thought, well, the next morning I'm taking a walk early in the morning. I'm walking along the street where most of the houses are very poor. Know what? Everybody's got a stone wall in front with glass at the top of it, or iron spikes sticking up, or all sorts of other things. The most wretched looking hovels were protected with barbed wire. I was amazed at it all. I'm not a critic of Brazilian culture. We had a great time there and had no problems, and nobody stole my wife or anything like that, but we had a great time there, and I was glad to be there. But I was struck by that. He says, you don't call the police. He said, a lot of times half of the thieves are police, he said. It gets to be a game, but it's not much of a game. A friend of mine was telling me of staying in a, in a home in Brazil, and he said that, he said I was, uh, he said they'd locked the house very close at night, and he said in the middle of the night, he said, a little noise awakened me, and he said there, he said, some fellow outside with a long fishing pole had poked it through the bars of my window, and with a hook on the end of it was trying to take my wallet off the dresser. So I said, what did you do? He said, I kept the pole. I kept the pole. Might be a thief in reverse, I don't know. But lawlessness is a terrible thing, and you can go back into the ancient world and discover what it was like. And for those people who think this country is worse today than it was a hundred years ago, you need to read about life on the frontier in the eighteen thirties, forties, and fifties. You need to read about it, where murder was as common as anything you can think of, and where life meant almost nothing. There's lots of literature on the subject. You were better off in Philadelphia. They, they mugged you privately there. But, but lawlessness, when men don't obey the law, brings a terrible bondage into circumstances in life. But God gave the law, not to save people. Only grace and faith save people. In any dispensation, Noah found grace in the sight of God. He looked to God and walked with God. But the law shows people what's right and wrong, and the law protects you from a lot of abuse. In a lot of cultures, in animal cultures, when the animals get old, you know what the younger animals do? They just knock them out of the way. That's what they do. Have you never seen that? When the old, when the old buffalo bill is no longer able enough to dominate the herd, the young bulls just kill him, that's all, knock him out of the place. But God said to his people, he said, you're not lawless, you'll honor your father and mother. Aren't you glad God said it? Hope you're doing it still, but aren't you glad that God said it? God brings order to society because God is a great protector, and God says, I'm not so much interested in whether you hit your hammer, uh, hit your thumb with a hammer. I'm not so much interested in that. He gives me enough judgment not to do much hammering. But he said, I'm not so much interested in that, but I am vitally interested that my people not be subject to lawlessness and the whims of these things. He protects us from lawlessness, and he protects us from lawlessness in religious things too. I used to marvel because you learn things bit by bit in life, and you can always learn more, but I used to read through that not, not boiling the calf in its mother's milk in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. I could hardly understand that until somebody explained to me, read to me some of the old Assyrian pamphlets and Assyrian tractates, in which one of the standard fertility worship practices was to take a calf and to cook it in the fat or the milk of the mother, and that was supposed to make the other flocks bring forth more lambs the next year. And the Lord said to his people, he said, you won't do any of the things that the pagans do in their false worship and their false, you won't do those things because you're mine, and I'm protecting you from lawlessness. Isn't that a great thing? You know, we see the laws abused a lot in our society. We shouldn't be the abusers of them. We see some bad laws that need to be changed, and prayerfully we hope God will allow some of those things to happen. But God protects from bondage, and he protects from lawlessness. And I'll tell you, it's a great thing to know that, that God in his will and in his blessing and in his care reaches out to us that way. And in the third place, he protects from uselessness. Now he says, if you keep my covenant, you'll be a peculiar people unto me above all people. We know that Israel didn't keep it. We know that Israel fell into bondage. We know that they were carried away captive and be restored. We know that someday they will keep it. I'm a strong believer that Israel will be restored someday, and that God's kingdom will be set up on earth, and that they will indeed be the people of God. But in the meantime, if you go to First Peter two, you'll find that we are that people today. We are the peculiar people. Christ Jesus has sealed the covenant for us, and we are God's peculiar people, not because we keep the covenant, but because Jesus kept it, and we are in him and accepted in him. Other writer says, you'll be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. You won't just be another nation. You won't just be another group. You'll be a particularly useful people to me. We are kept from uselessness. In my notes, I say purposelessness. The longer the word is, the harder it is to say it, but uselessness. You ever get that feeling that you're just dragging on life one day at a time? Wonder how many days will drag it out? Well, I want to tell you this, without batting an eyelash, God has something for you to do for him as long as you're here, because he's made us a unique people, a holy people through the work of Jesus Christ, a people who are peculiarly his. And as long as he leaves us here, there's something for us to do. I can't tell you what it would be. I think when you get older and older and older, the great thing you're left to do is to show a good testimony to the people that follow you, a cheerful, happy testimony to the people that follow you, so that they will know that through the bulk of your life, God's faithfulness and grace encouraged you and kept you and made you love him and love them too. I think it's unfortunate if we just get more crabby as we get older. I'm fighting it, trying to fight it. I was a grouchy little boy. I didn't mean to be, I was just born that way. It's my mother's fault. My mother said that I didn't smile until I was eight months old, and then she said it proved to be a gas pain. Mother has long been with the Lord. We were saved on the same night back in the middle forties, my mother and I trusted Jesus the same night. She's long been with the Lord, but she said that many times, and she said a couple times, she said, if you have a second childhood like your first one, she said, your wife is going to have a lot of hard days. Well, I'm hoping that that won't be the case, and so I try to smile more. I try to wake up more happily. I try, when the children come around making a lot of noise, I try to say, oh, isn't it good to be able to hear this noise? You know, some people are deaf and can't hear this noise. Isn't it good to be able to hear this noise? I try all those things. I don't know how it will go, but God has protected us from uselessness. Your life is useful as long as you live it. That's one of the great things that's wrong with suicide and Dr. Kevorkian and a bunch of other stuff like that, believe it or not, your life is useful as long as you live it. Sometimes it's merely useful in teaching the people that come after you love. That's a kind of a tough lesson, but you really learn love when your life is giving and caring and sharing for people who can't pay you anything back. That's what they do when they're little. You love those kids when they're crying and howling, but you have a feeling they'll grow up someday and you'll be proud of them. Praise the Lord. They usually do. Whether you're proud or not depends, I suppose, but they usually do. When you get to be a hundred and three, you're not likely to recover into a new life and suddenly become a vibrant high school student again or something like that. The circumstances are that God protects us from uselessness, and a lot of times people get feeling their lives are useful, but God says that's not the case. It is here, it's a covenantal arrangement. In First Peter two, it's a statement of fact, and God says you're a peculiar people to me. Don't care how old you are, don't care what you're doing, you're a peculiar people to me. Your life is meaningful and useful and blessed and ought to be an encouragement and a source of strength to others because you're a holy people, a holy nation, a kingdom of priests, and as long as you live and breathe, you will be a priest. Well, well, we've often thought of my, my wife's brothers, another bro- well, all these relatives, who cares where they are? But we've often thought of my wife's brother's mother-in-law, who lived the last three years of her life in a coma. That's about right, isn't it? Three years. She was unconscious. She'd been a missionary in Bolivia. She was a godly woman. She was an outspoken tough cookie too, but she'd spent the last three years of her life in a coma following a stroke. She never spoke, didn't open her eyes, just laid there. My wife's daughter, I'm sorry, my, my wife's sister-in-law went to her mother, I think I can say every day. She went every day and read her the mail that had come, and read her from the church bulletin, and read to her from the newspapers, and read to her from the Bible, and prayed with her. I think once or twice there was very slight types of response, very slight, but they were so minimal that none of us would think of them that way. And people say, well, what good did that woman's life do those three years? Well, I'll tell you one thing it did. There were lots of roommates that got to hear the Bible read, and there were a lot of people who got to see what the faithfulness of that girl meant and what her testimony for the Lord meant. Do you understand that? There were people who got to witness that that would never have seen it under other conditions. And you can't say, well, is that why God did it? God has created us and lets us live, and in some cases, life is arranged one way or another. You can't blame him for your sore thumb or your bad toe. You can't do that. Uh, you just have to say in the course of life, God gave opportunity for his testimony to be witnessed in the love of that girl, and my wife's brother too, incidentally. He gave opportunity for his love to be witnessed in their affection and their willingness to honor your father and mother, as God said in the law a long time before that. And that becomes a beautiful thing. And somehow, without things like that, we don't learn love, and we don't learn responsibility, and we don't learn what grace really means to us. Your life is useful as long as you've got it, because God has given it to you. You will not stop being a priest till the day you're in glory. I don't know what happens after we go to heaven, but you will not stop that. Your priesthood will not end. The meaningfulness of your life will not end. The concepts of it will not end as long as you're here. You may have to change direction. It may be that you'll not be the chief soloist of the choir after a while. They can only take so many crows in one nest. It may be, maybe it'll take a different direction, but useful it will always be, and beautiful and meaningful to God it will always be. Now, what I said a few moments ago, I'll go back and repeat. He's a great protector. I worry about little temporal things. I worry, like, will my house burn down while I'm gone? I don't worry about it. I just mention that in a humorous sort of way. Will it, will it still be there when I go home? Every time I go home and see the house as we drive up the road, I say, thank you, Lord, it's still here. Is there any reason to think it wouldn't be there? No, no. But sometimes they're not there. Sometimes things happen to them. Sometimes windstorms come in and blow them away. My grandfather used to tell of the town in Indiana where the tornado, this is just a story. You have to be careful because in conferences like this, there are some people who believe the wrong things. This is just a story. He said the tornado went through the town, and it lifted up every roof and turned it around exactly, exactly forty five percent, exactly forty five degrees. So the roof went up like that, and it came down square in house, but it was just forty five degrees the other way. He said the only thing they had to do was build another chimney, and they were all right. He said, believe it or not, he said, after four years, he said every town in that, every house in that town had four chimneys on it. That's just a story, and told much too quickly for good effect, but that's just a story. But we look, we get worried about things like that, but what do those things mean in eternity? What does the loss of my hair mean in eternity? I don't worry about that. I'm the oldest of all the Taylor brothers. I'm the only one has any hair on the top of his head. I don't have much, and if I look down, I don't have any. But God is a great protector. He does protect us from a lot of very, very regular things too. If you could see how the angels hover over you and guide you, you'd have a greater appreciation of what God does. But those things, on the whole, are relatively trivial things in terms of where God's protection is greatest. He protects us from bondage. Sin will never rule over you. The devil will never own you. The concepts of life will never bind you away from God. He protects us from lawlessness. We're free from the pagan religions and religious influences, and free from the concept that everybody just does what he wants to do and things go on well. And he protects us from uselessness, the feeling that your life doesn't mean anything anymore, or the feeling that you're really not going to do anything with it. Now, you'd have to track these out in the next four chapters to see that in detail. But God says to his people, you're mine. These people failed the covenant. We know that. They failed the covenant. But God still said to them, you're mine. And he would deal with them for their failures and would promise to restore them someday, and will restore them someday, and all those conditions will be fulfilled in them someday. But in the meantime, through faith in Jesus Christ, they are completed in us, and we're freed from the bondage of sin, and we're freed from the lawlessness of the world about us, and we're freed from the useless feeling that easily comes to us as life passes on. Isn't that good news? God's a great protector. Praise the Lord. Nice to see you this morning. I've said it humorously many times, I'm not sure where else you could have gone. The Walmart doesn't open till nine thirty. But anyhow, it is nice to see you this morning. It's good the way God cares for us. It's good the measure of fellowship he gives to us. It's a beautiful and happy experience. And I'd like to tell you that this is an audience that challenges any speaker that comes with regard to eye contact. Because there's almost nobody out there. Well, Mr. Chitty is not nobody, but, but he's the only guy that's out there. The rest of you are at wide angle ranges. That's all right. We love it that way. God protects us from uselessness, see, along many lines. But you can go out today and you can praise God for being the great protector. And don't look up and say, well, if you protect me so much, why, why did you let me, why did you let me break my leg? You, you, you broke your leg because somehow you got it in a place where it shouldn't have been, or in a condition in which it's tough to say it, but that's how you broke it. It wasn't that God suddenly came down and said, I'm going to break his leg. That's not the way the Lord deals with us, but he has left us in a world where accidents and occurrences happen, but where God's love is supreme over all things. And if we take Romans eight twenty eight seriously, then even the things that look like tragedies to us are often in the province of God, the greatest of blessings. Let's pray. We thank you this morning, our Father, for your love and care, your mercy, kindness, and goodness. Watch over us today. Help us to be a thankful and happy people who love to do your will. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.