You're listening to another edition of It's Preaching Time. This broadcast spotlights Bible preaching that will feed your soul and stir your heart. And now for today's Bible message, Thou Shalt Meditate by Dr. Tom Wallace. In Joshua chapter 1 and verse 1, our Bible says now, After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses' minister, saying, Moses, my servant, is dead. Now, therefore, arise, go over this Jordan, thou and all this people, unto the land which I have given to them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses. From the wilderness in this Lebanon, even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, and all of the land of the Hittites, unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun shall be your coast. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee. I will not fail thee nor forsake thee. Be strong and of good courage, for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land which I swear unto their fathers to give them. Only be thou strong and very courageous that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law which Moses, my servant, commanded thee. Turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper, whithersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein. For then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Now pray with me, if you will, please. Our Father, thank you for thy word. We're grateful that you have given us insight and discerning power. And we can understand the parables because you gave them to confuse and to blind the minds of them who were insincere and those who didn't care. and to open the minds and hearts of those who did care and were sincere. So Lord, we're glad to be among those who can understand what the Bible says, because you have revealed them to us. This book says that you, that I have not seen or heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those that love him. but you have revealed them unto us by your spirit. And so open this up to us today and help us to see what this has to do with us here today. We realize this is written thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away, but Lord, we thank thee that it is for us here this morning and we pray you'll help us to know individually what it is for us. We pray in your name. Amen. Now, this is a wonderful story. You're familiar with this. This is one of the Bible classics. We have a number of them, Noah's Ark and Daniel and the Lion's Den and the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace and the opening of the Red Sea. And this is a very, very well-known passage. Moses has died. Now Moses symbolizes or represents the law for us, the dispensation of law. And he is dead now, and we're going to transfer everything over to Joshua. Now Joshua is a Hebrew name, and when you move that Hebrew name into the New Testament, it is translated in Greek, Jesus. So that's a period of grace. So really what we're doing here is we're going to leave the dispensation of law and we're going to now open up the dispensation of grace. And that's where we live. This is for us. And this eighth verse says, this book of the law. Now some folks say that just speaks of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I believe it represents all of the 66 books and all of the 1189 chapters and all of the 31,173 verses. This book of the law, the whole Bible, shall not depart out of my mouth. Now that poses a theological problem for us this morning. I have stood here in your pulpit, Brother Weaver, and I have allowed eight verses of this Bible to depart out of my mouth. And this verse says, this book of law shall not depart out of our mouth. What are we going to do about that? Well, I couldn't possibly mean that. What does it mean? Well, it means what the next verse says, the next little phrase says, but thou shalt meditate. Meditate. Now, what this means is if somebody came into Sunday school or church this morning, you might say, you know, I came by a big farm down here on the way into Sunday school and I saw a cow over there in the field. She had her head over the barbed wire fence and she was chewing her cud. I'm glad to be in a place where you don't have to explain that. We know when a cow eats grass, she chews it up and she grinds it and she absorbs it, puts it down in her first stomach and then after a while she gets it back out of there and works on it some more and finally it works its way through all four of her stomachs and you know, now what she's doing is she's getting all the nutrients and absorbing all of it. I really got an understanding of what this word meditate means when we had a speaker in for our elementary section of our school. And he said, now boys and girls, I want to give you a beautiful word out of the Bible this morning. It's the word meditate. Now let me tell you what that means. He said, I want everybody to get an imaginary sponge about the size and the shape of a basketball. Now hold them all up, he said, and everybody hold one up, and they all did. I did too. I had my sponge up. And he said, now I want you to squeeze your sponge and make it the size of a softball. I did and all the kids did and we were all having fun. He said, now squeeze it again, make it the size of a baseball. Now squeeze it one more time, make it the size of a golf ball. I had my golf ball and he said, hold them up, let's see them everybody and all the kids were cooperating with him. He said, now for your left hand, I want you to get a big two-gallon bucket of water. A little fourth grader hollered out, where am I supposed to get the bucket of water? He said, same place you got your sponge. We were having a good time. He said, put the sponge down in the bucket of water and turn it loose. He said, you know what will happen? He said, it will drink up about a gallon of that water. Now he said, your mind is built just like that sponge and it looks just like that sponge and when you put your mind into the water of the Word of God and absorb it, and boy he had it. So we could understand it. Meditate. Soak up. Saturate. And it says this book of the law shall not part out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate day and night, absorbing and absorbing, in order that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein. For then thy way will be prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. In Sunday school we learned that that success and prosperity is found in eight different areas, the spiritual, the physical, the mental, the emotional, the social, domestic, financial, and eternal. So that covers a broad, broad space here. Now, as I was reading through this passage, the context says Moses died. We're going to turn it over to Joshua. And the Lord says, now Joshua, I want you to take up the reins of Moses and I'm going to make you some promises. as I was with Moses so I'll be with you. Now I have this plan I want to give you and I want you to take these people and go across the Jordan River. Now I'm going to open up the river just like I did the Red Sea for your predecessor and As I was with him, I'm going to be with you. And when you get over there, I want you to drive all the way through to the great sea and conquer the nations of the Hittites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Gershites. Now, when you get through over to the sea, I want you to go south and conquer all those people and up north, conquer all those people. And then I want you to divide it all up into nine and a half tribes over on that side of the river and two and a half tribes on this side of the river. Now, you understand what I'm saying to you, Joshua? Yeah, sure. All right, now if you don't mind, I'd like for you to go over my plan, and I don't want you throwing your two cents in on it. Okay, okay. All right, so now here's what I want you to do. I got this plan. Now I'm going to promise you something, that if you will go over my plan, I'll be there with you. I'll give you my presence. As I was with Moses, I'll be with you. And I tell you what else I'll do. If you go by my plan and I'm there with you in my presence, I will put my power upon you and your ministry. And when you get to the walls of Jericho, I'll get you to go around there one time each day for six days. And then on the seventh day, you go around seven times. And then I'll get you to blow some trumpets and shout real big and then jump out of the way. And I'll tear the walls down. I'll give you my power. And I'll tell you what else, I guarantee you if you'll follow my plan, you're going to prosper. I sense a formula coming up out of this context. Now when I was a little boy, I was just a whiz at math. They taught me that 2 plus 2 was 4. Man, I got that right off the bat. Didn't have a bit of trouble with that. They said three times three was nine, and I got that too. And I did so good in math all through elementary school and junior high that we had a rule in the school that if you got a certain grade level, you didn't have to take a final exam. I never, never took a final exam in math. I exempted all of them. And then I got into ninth grade. And then they gave me this course, they called it algebra. And I'll tell you, it blew my mind. They said X plus Y equals Z. And they said that they wouldn't tell me what X was, and they wouldn't tell me what Y was, and they expected me to tell them what Z was. And I couldn't handle it. It just messed me up. I got the lowest grade ever recorded in the history of the Kennett Consolidated School in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. They had five passing grades, A, B, C, D, and E, and five failing grades, F, G, H, I, J, and I got J minus. Formulas, wow. But when I was reading through this, suddenly I saw a formula. It's not an algebra formula, it's a Bible formula. It's God's formula. God's plan for Joshua plus God's presence for Joshua plus God's power for Joshua equals God's prosperity for Joshua. Now, I wonder when I'm reading the Bible, the Bible says that all the scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction and righteousness, that the man of God, that's me, the Christian, that's you, the Christian, that the man of God will profit doctrinally and so forth, okay? Now, I wonder if this thing would work for me. God's plan for Tom Wallace. We might want to call that God's will for Tom Wallace. Plus God's presence and his power upon the life and ministry of Tom Wallace equals prosperity in the eight areas, mental, physical, emotional, and financial, and so on. Okay? Now, well, in Acts 10.34 it says, God is no respecter of persons. If he did for Joshua, he'll have to do it for me. I remember Stuart Hamlin, when he got saved in the Billy Graham meeting in San Francisco, they decided to make a film called Mr. Texas. And, you know, he had this big cowboy hat on. I saw the film. And he had cowboy boots and a cowboy outfit, and he had his guitar. And I remember him standing up there with his big old smile. What he's done for others, he'll do for you. Yeah, that's Acts 1034. Oh, I guess it's fit. Now, I wonder if that worked for a church, the plan of God or God's will for Worth Baptist Church, plus his presence in this church, his power upon equals prosperity for this church. What if that worked for a Sunday school class? What if that worked for a choir? What if that worked for a bus route? What if that worked for a missionary, brother Mike? What if that would work for your home? Wonder if that would work for your business. It'll work wherever you put it. It's a general biblical principle, works wherever you put it. If you get God's plan and His presence and His power, you'll have His prosperity upon whatever you got your hand to. That's what the book teaches. Let's think about those three things, the plan of God. Is that important that I have the plan of God, that I be in the will of God about something? Well, God has always had a plan. He had a plan when He created the heavens and the earth. He didn't come out one morning and just say, Oh, I got a good night's sleep. I think I'll do something special. No, no. The Scripture says he worked out everything way ahead of time. In fact, there's a verse that says Jesus was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. It was all worked out before creation, that Jesus would die on the cross and pay for our sins. God's always had a plan. He had a plan of creation. Dr. Clarence Benson wrote Sunday school lessons up in Wheaton, Illinois, years ago. And he had one lesson that really grabbed me. He said, you know, when God created heaven and the earth, he used one of the laws that we call the law of variety and regularity. He said, now, for instance, the law of regularity, he said, let's suppose we have a student go into the class and sit down and the teacher stands up in front of this student and all the others and says, now, young people, what is this? And somebody will answer, that's a leaf. Okay, it is a leaf. Now, tell me what kind of leaf is that in one of the students' lands? That's an oak leaf. Okay, that is an oak leaf. Now, how do you know it's an oak leaf? Simply because it is identical to every other oak leaf. It's got the same shape. Everything about it is identical to every other oak leaf ever grew on a tree since the Garden of Eden. True. Call that the law of regularity. Hold up. Maple leaf, that's not an oak leaf. That's a maple leaf. And there's a variety. It's different. However, every oak leaf is identical to every other oak leaf except for the fact that no two oak leaves have ever been the same width, the same height, the same thickness, the same shade of color, the same design, and the same weight, and the same number of cells and atoms and protons and neutrons, and the same shade of color. No thing about that leaf is the same as any other leaf that ever grew on any oak tree. Take a hair off your head. You have a design or a little snakeskin pattern in your hair that is, you're the only one in the universe that has that. Now they can put that under a microscope and they can identify you. That's the law of regularity. Every hair on your head has that design. It also has a DNA count. And they can check that and they can say, this is your hair. You're the only one who's ever lived since Adam who has that pattern or that DNA count. However, no two hairs on your head or anybody else's head since Adam has ever been the same length or the same circumference or the same diameter or the same length or the same shade of color. My barber says the 268 shades of gray. One woman said to her husband, honey, you think you're going to love me when I get old and gray? He said, I don't know why I wouldn't have loved you through three or four colors already. But you know, no two hairs on your head. Now that's true of Let's say, God has this plan, and you see, this plan is a plan of variety and regularity in creation. God had a plan when he built the ark. And by the way, we can go and you can compare grains of sand on the beach. Billions of tons of little grains of sand, but no two the same weight, same anything. Grains of sugar are all round, but you'll never find two of them identical. Grains of salt are all a cube, they're square. No two have ever been the same. And the same is true of anything or everything you could come up with in creation. God said to Noah, Noah, I'd like for you to build me an ark. And Noah said, what? Now God had a plan for this ark. You know, you can't learn anything completely brand new. There'd never been an ark, never had rain, didn't need an ark. The Lord said, let's see, you wouldn't have any way of knowing what an ark is. I'll tell you what, Noah wants you to build me a boat. A what? Never had been a boat. Noah, I tell you what, I want you to build me a house that floats on water, okay? I know what a house is and I know what water is. You can't learn anything new, you have to base it on something else. You start out with mama. That's what you call a, that's a, one bit of information is in a neuron in your brain. Now when you get 8, 1 neuron is a bit. You get 8 bits, you've got a byte. You get 1 byte, now you have 1 byte. If you get 1,024 bytes, now you've got a kilobyte. You get 1,024 kilobytes, now you've got a megabyte. You get 1,024 megabytes, now you've got a gigabyte. And you get 1,024 gigabytes, now you've got a terabyte. You get 1,024 terabytes, now you've got a petabyte. And you get 1,024 petabytes, now you've got an exabyte. and then you get past that. You don't need to go any farther than that because 1,024 petabytes is a Yotabyte. You can stop right there because they don't even measure past that. You can put all the information in 10 worlds into a couple of Yotabytes. So we got all that in there now and yet I have to start out with one bit, mama, and then I get two bits. That's not a quarter. The two bits is I know mama and daddy. And then I learned brother and sister and puppy dog and kitty cat and so forth. Now, most of you have used about three or four percent of your information even if you have a Ph.D. And 96, 97 percent of it goes to waste. God gave you a lot of capacity. If they duplicated what you have up here, it would take the Empire State Building to house it. with modern-day circuitry, okay? So the Lord said to Noah, build me an ark. What? Give me a house. I know what a house is, okay, and make one float on water. Now, I'll tell you what. Now, put three layers or three decks in this thing, stories. Why? Well, you're not going to get this, Noah, but you see, this ark is going to represent the plan of salvation, and it has to involve God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Son. I want three levels. Oh. Now, I tell you what, you put one door in that ark. Why? Well, you're not going to get this either, but you see, I'm going to make a statement, I am the door, and by me, if any man or any shall be saved. Oh, and I want a picture of that in that ark. Okay. Now, I tell you what you do, you pitch that thing without and within with tar. Why? Well, you're not going to get this either, Noah, but you see, tar is the word kephar in Hebrew, and it is identical to the word blood atonement. And you see, when the blood is applied to the plant of salvation, then the judgment warders won't be able to get in and drown Noah and his wife and his three sons and their wives. And then Paul can write in Romans 8, 1, there's therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus. Now I could bring a Bible teacher down here for six months on Sunday night. We could teach you symbolism, typology, and that art. Because God had a plan for that art. I could bring another teacher in here and for six more months we could teach you typology and symbolism on the tabernacle in the wilderness. It's got to have three sections. You've got to have this courtyard out here, and then we've got to have this holy place, and then we've got to have this holy of holies. For God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit. And you're going to have one gate in it because there's only one way. There's no other name under heaven given among them. You've got to go through the way. I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father but by You see, that represents God and the plan of salvation. God has a plan of redemption. I go out and ask people, do you plan to go to heaven? Oh, I'm doing the best I can. I think I'm going to make it. Not according to the Bible. God has this plan. God has a plan of prophecy. It's all spelled out. Boy, if you'll study upon prophecy, you can have peace about all this talk about people getting nukes. Okay, God has a plan of giving. I tell you what I think, that's humanism. That's secularism. You're not biblical. You're not scriptural. You're not going by Christian philosophy. You have allowed yourself to get on a throne like Satan in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 36, I believe it is. You have made yourself your own God, made up your own rule book and it's collapsed on you and you're going to have problems with it. God has a plan for giving and God has a plan for building a church. And God has a plan for missions. God has a plan for revival. And God has a plan for your home. And God has a plan for our life. And God has a plan for me. And God has a plan for you. And it is not my opinion. Here's what I think. And this is my view. And this is my preference. And this is my judgment. No, it's the plan of God. And now I have a real simple question for us. Do you know what God's plan is for your life? I have another question. Are you in it? If you're not in it, you don't know what it is and you're not in it, you're not going to find what you're looking for. You can look in all those places out there. It's not out there. It will never fit together. But once you find God's plan and get God's presence, all of a sudden it all adds up and it's wonderful. and you can find fulfillment. And instead of having joy, you can have joy unspeakable and full of glory. Instead of having peace, you can have peace that passes all understanding. And instead of getting a prayer answer once in a while, you can get exceeding abundantly above all you ask or even think. The plan of God. Now he says, if you get my plan, I'll give you my presence. Now is it important that I have the presence of God? When I was a little boy, We moved from West Virginia to Pennsylvania. I may have told you that I was born in West Virginia when I was here last time. I was born in Odd, O-D-D. My wife said, that explains everything. Somebody wanted to know, why did you want to be born there? Well, my mother was there, and I wanted to be with her. But we moved to Pennsylvania when I was 11 years old into an Italian neighborhood. And here's a little hillbilly boy growing up among all these Italian boys. And we had quite an interesting time. One of those Italian men said to my dad, why you hillbillies come up here in Pennsylvania? Why don't you stay down there in the mountains where you belong? And my dad said, well, they let us out of the insane asylum down there and sent us up here to teach school for you people. We really enjoyed it. But my barber was an Italian named Tony. He was a wonderful fellow. And we had a man in our town by the name of Joe Thompson. Now, Joe was a wonderful fellow, and he was a fine Christian, but he was tongue-tied. He couldn't talk good. And I was getting a haircut and Joe walked in. And Tony was clipping away and he looked up and he said, Joe Thompson, heard you wrecked your car. I did. I did, Tony. I go down the road, I run off the road, I run down through the torn field, I tore down $50 worth of torn. Tony said, now, Joe, you told me you're a Christian and that Jesus rode with you everywhere you went in your car. He does. He always go with me everywhere I go in a car. Well, what happened? Well, Tony, he said, going down the road and Jesus, well, right there, he is sitting right up on the hood of the car and he said, you know, I got over the P limit, he got off. Now, I'm not saying that you're going to lose your salvation if you get out of the will of God. I'm not going there, down that road. But what I'm saying is if you decide you're going to do your own thing, you get off down in the mud hole or down in the briar patch, you're going down there by yourself and you're going to struggle and suffer it all out and be miserable and unhappy because you're doing your own thing and you're not in the plan of God and you don't have His presence about you and you can't afford to do that. So God has a plan and he gives us these presents. Now is it really important that we know and have the presence of God about us? Well, you go to the Bible and get an answer like that. Anybody here ever hear the story of Moses and the burning bush? Oh yeah. We learned that's another one of those classics. We know all about that. We've got folks here who can stand up and give us 75 facts out of that story all by yourself. Everybody here knows 8 or 10 or 15 or 20 facts about that story. Okay, now I'll ask you a real, real theological question. Is that the only bush that grew out there on the side of the hill? I have an idea that there were thousands of bushes out there. Most of them came out of the same seed pod that one did. Would somebody want to tell me something about one of those other bushes? It's just one fact. We don't need a dozen. Just one fact. Never found anybody could tell me anything about any other bush. How come everybody knows all about one bush and nobody knows anything about any of the other bushes? The only thing I see difference was that that bush had the presence of God in it. It immortalized it and everybody who ever picked up a Bible knows 40, 50 things about that bush. The presence of God made the difference. How about that story of Daniel in the lion's den? Ask your five-year-olds. My little five-year-old came into my radio room one day. Daddy, I want to preach a sermon. I said, Tim, you got a sermon? Yes, sir. I said, all right, sit on this chair right here. Now, right here's my microphone. You talk right into that microphone and preach your sermon, and you can be talking to people all over town. I turned on the tape recorder, and Tim said, My name is Tim Wallace and I want to tell you people about Daniel and the Lion's Den and for five minutes you never heard such an exposition of Daniel and the Lion's Den in your life. I was flabbergasted. I still have it on tape. I went downstairs and I said to his mother, how in the world did this kid learn all that stuff about Daniel and that Lion's Den? She said he's got this little children's record and he's listened to it 27,422 times and memorized Oh yeah, but everybody knows about Daniel Leinstein. Well, tell me something, was Daniel the only fellow that ever got put into Leinstein? Hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people were put into Leinstein. Would somebody want to name one of them? Never found anybody that could do that. I can't do it. Well, now what is it about this story? Well, listen to the story. The king came next morning and said, oh, Daniel, has our God been able to deliver thee? And Daniel said, oh, yes, he has. He sent his angel. Angel? Yeah, a Christophany, an Old Testament appearance of Jesus Christ the Lord in angelic form, who spent the night with Daniel. And boy, the presence of the Lord made a difference in that story. Otherwise, you'd never know about Daniel. He'd been another one of those unknowns. How about those three Hebrew boys? Ask your five-year-olds. Man, they memorize those names the first time they hear them. Teacher gets up and says, our story today is about three boys. These are Hebrew boys named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Now those are hard names. That's not Tom, Dick, and Harry. That's not Sam, Bill, and Pete. Those are hard names. Those little kids memorize them. One kid heard it for the first time. He went home and his mother wanted to check on him. She said, now did you listen to your teacher? Oh, yes, Mama. What was your lesson about? Oh, he said it was a wonderful lesson about my shack and your shack in a bungalow. Everybody knows about those fellows. Well, tell me, are they the only fellows that ever got thrown in a fiery furnace? Hundreds and thousands of people were thrown into fiery furnaces. Would somebody want to name one of them? Never found anybody who could do it. Why do we all know about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and nobody knows? Well, let's listen to the story. It says the king came and said, hey, didn't we cast three men in that fiery furnace? Right, we did, king, three of them. Well, I see four in there now, and one of them looks like unto the Son of God. Brother Weaver, I don't know how he knew that was the Son of God, but that's exactly who it was. Boy, the presence of the Lord made a difference in that story. How about that girl who got married to Cain of Galilee? That's the first miracle. Everybody knows that. Let's use our background Bible knowledge now, and everybody help me. Let's put that famous miracle together. Somebody tell me now, let's see. Who was the bride? What was her name? Goodness, I don't believe I remember. Do you? Who did she marry? I'm pretty sure it was a boy. We don't know anything about this wedding. What did the mother of the bride wear to the wedding? Man, that's important, isn't it? Look at your society column. Man, they spend about five inches on what the bride's mother wore to the wedding and they don't barely even mention the preacher that performed the ceremony. During the millennium, we're going to change that. Instead of having a big old picture of the bride, we're going to have a picture of the preacher with his Bible standing up there. and about a three-column wide and about four inches deep, Pastor Wallace performs another wedding ceremony. And down at the bottom, and the bride was Miss so-and-so. We're going to fix that. Who was this bride? I don't know. Who'd she marry? I don't know. Well, what we know about, I guess about all we know is Jesus was there. He immortalized that wedding. That the only girl ever got married in Cana of Galilee? Hundreds of girls are married in Cana. How come we don't know anything about any of them? I guess Jesus didn't go to their wedding, okay? What about that blind man in John chapter 9? Well, you wouldn't know about him, Jesus hadn't come along. What about that impotent man in John 5? You wouldn't know about him. What about that noble man in John 4? You wouldn't know about. What about Lazarus and John 11? You wouldn't know about them. In fact, you wouldn't know about any of that. Now, are you ready for this? Who are you and who am I? Well, who cares and what difference does it make? But every once in a while somebody gets a little handle on Galatians 2.20, I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, who loved me and gave himself for me. And all of a sudden it makes a difference. Boy, now. Let your light so shine before men that they might see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven. Okay? Okay, so God has a plan and he's present. He said, I'll tell you what, if you go by my plan and you let my presence be a part of your life, then I'll give you my power. And instead of the natural, instead of you depending on your education, how smart you are, Instead of depending on your pocketbook, how much money you got, how much influence you can buy, or depending on your personality, how much you smile and how good you shake hands, instead of depending on your abilities and all that sort of thing, we realize that it's not by might or it's not by power, it's by my spirit, sayeth the Lord. And he says, I want you now, don't get drunk or controlled by wine or foreign substance, but be filled with the spirit. And when you're filled with the Spirit, then you will give forth and manifest the fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5.22, love and joy and peace and longsuffering and gentleness and goodness and faith and meekness. Those are worth a million dollars apiece. And if I am manifesting those things, then I'm going to be attracting and drawing people to me and they're going to see Christ in me, the hope of glory. and they're going to want what I have, and it's going to work for them. Oh, my. Now, if I put those three things together, God's plan, God's presence, God's power, that equals prosperity in eight areas, spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, financial, social, domestic, and eternal. It meets our need. It covers every base. It covers every inch of the road. Do you have God's plan in your life? You say, well, I think that's humanism. I believe. That's humanism. You have been taken in by Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and you're on the broad road. You got to get your mind into the narrow road philosophy. This is what the Bible says. Okay, let's bow our heads together and we'll pray. Our Father, I pray you'll meet our needs. And Lord, as the pastor comes to extend the invitation this morning, I pray that you'll help us to weigh carefully who we are, where we stand. I pray you'll help us, Lord, if we don't know your plan and don't have your plan working, help us to come and find us a corner somewhere or a little spot so we can get with you on our knees and ask you to reveal your plan. You've said in John 17, 7, that if any man want will to know his will, he shall know whether it be of God. Lord, you want us to know what your plan is and you've said that plainly. And you want your presence to be real to us. You said our body is the temple of God and the spirit of God dwells in us. And Lord, help us now that we might have your power upon us, that we might accomplish your purpose, and that we might know what it is to prosper in all those areas. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. You just enjoyed listening to a Bible message by Dr. Tom Wallace entitled, Thou Shalt Meditate. 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