I was wondering if he was talking about me. All those glowing things. Romans chapter number 8 if you would. Romans chapter number 8. I am a Tennessee boy. You can probably tell with my voice. I used to despair because of my hillbilly sound but after I heard J. Vernon McGee on the radio I said there's hope for me. Romans chapter number eight. I'm 62 years old. I'll be married, let's see, 44 years in June. And I have one son and one daughter and eight grandchildren. They keep me bankrupt around Christmas time. And I've been pastoring the same church July be 35 years. And I'm a graduate of Tabernacle Baptist Bible College in Greenville, South Carolina, where Dr. Seitler was the pastor for so many years. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here. And when Dr. Bill first contacted me, I said, well, brother, all I've got is cornbread preaching that you got college kids. I don't know if that'll work. He said, come on. Here I am, and you know a pastor thinks, what am I going to say to a bunch of college kids who are being trained and who know everything? Y'all got it all, don't you? And I'm sure that, listen, I have never met a graduate from Ambassador that I did not feel was very well prepared. All of my men have been very well prepared, well groomed, well taught, and that speaks well to school and I appreciate that so much. Romans chapter number 8. Chapter 7 and 8 are tied together in the book of Romans. I won't take the time to give you an outline of the book. Probably most of you know it breaks down. Everybody's lost in the first three chapters. Then chapters 4, 5, and 6, the benefits of salvation. In chapter 7 and 8, we see the struggle of the flesh and the victory in the spirit. Romans 8 says what the law could not do and that it was weak through the flesh. And certainly our humanity is weak. And I want us to look at just one text of Scripture and we'll try to give you some good thoughts from it. And it's in verse 18. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waited for the manifestation of the sons of God. May we pray. Father, I am thankful to have the opportunity to open the Scriptures today, to preach to this good group of young men and young ladies, this great staff here at the school that is doing all they can, pouring their hearts and their souls and their lives into these young people to train them for the ministry. Father, I'm thankful for a school that stands for old time religion, that believes the Word of God, sings the right music, trains people the right way. I pray you'd bless, Ambassador. Father, I'm asking for a blessing for me today, not for myself, but that I might be a help to this good congregation. In Christ's name I pray. Amen. Sufferings. We don't like to suffer, do we? I'll share something with you. I hate the dentist. I have a good godly Christian dentist, and he's a wonderful fellow, and he's never hurt me, but it took me years to get to the place to where I could stand to go and not break out in a cold sweat. And I remember he was doing something with me one time, and he said, what is your problem, Raymond? And I said, that drill that you have, because he was jiggling my jaw and doing all that stuff when he was sticking a needle in there. And I said, doc, that needle doesn't bother me. What bothers you?" I said, it's that drill. I can't stand that thing. And he said, well, he said, that's your biggest problem. We won't have any issues. So I don't like suffering. I don't like going to the dentist, but you have to go. And he breaks out those tools and scrapes and grinds and whatever else he does. But that's a lightweight suffering to a suffering of the soul, an emotional hurt, a heartbreak. I talked to the evangelist class this morning about Temple Baptist Church, Brother Dooley's old church, what they're going through now, that tragedy they've had up there, how much love and compassion that church is going to need. They have an interim pastor. I pray God gives him great wisdom to help those folks. And people are hurting. There's a lot of pain in this world in which we live. A lot of pain. Some of you sitting here today have bad family situations. your mom or your dad's lost or maybe you've got a brother or sister. My music pastor at church, his brother's an atheist. He calls himself an agnostic Buddhist, whatever that means. But he's actually an atheist and he doesn't want you to talk to him about things of God. That's a heartache for my music pastor to have to deal with. When we talk about the sufferings of this prison, well, we think about hard things. Hard things. unfair by our standards. Do you realize life is not fair? Surely you've understood that by now. I listen to these young men sing and I think, why do they get all the good voices and I got this one. I told Brother Danny Whetstone, he's preached many, many missions conferences for us. I said, Brother Danny, if you die before I do, I want you to will your voice to me so that I can speak with that deep, melodious tone just one time. Life's unfair. There's twists and turns in life. I jotted down just a series of accidents that I was familiar with. I think B.R. Lakin lost his only son in a car wreck. Dr. Harold Sightler lost his daughter in a car wreck and his wife was severely injured and spent months in the hospital. George Truitt, the great preacher of bygone days, shot a man, his friend, in a hunting accident. He didn't mean to do it, but he did. Ron Hamilton got cancer in his eye, I believe, and became Patch the Pirate. And I was in Greenville, South Carolina when Brother John Vaughn's little girl and wife were burned horribly in that fire in their home. And as far as I know, he started the only Christian school for special needs kids that I know of in the United States. Hard things. Not a one of those men would have volunteered for that. Not a one of them would have said this is what I want to have in my life. I forgot who it was, but a preacher, when Dr. Seitler was in the midst of that dark heartache of his daughter being killed and his wife being injured, another man of God came to his door, knocked on his door and said, I just want to see the man that God is going to greatly use. He's broken you, but God's going to greatly use you. We're all going to go through some sufferings. but we have to make sure we have the right attitude about those sufferings and not allow them to overwhelm us. John Flavel said, however many troubles are upon her, the church referring to the church, her king is in her. And the Bible tells us in Psalm 46 that God is a very present help in time of trouble. He's with us. God's not far away. I've been doing a study with my men on the attributes of God, doing a Bible study, and it's Bible Institute, Bible College level with them. I told them it's not Sunday school, fellas. And we're having a good time. We've studied the infinitude of God. Isn't that a great word? and we've studied the immensity of God and we've been working on the goodness of God. Once you get a grip on who God is and begin to expand your mind beyond this little thought process that we have so many times and see that God is not only is He everywhere where people are, God's everywhere where people aren't. And He's 100% everywhere that He is all the time. And so that means that God's not far away from me. I don't have to go looking for God when bad things come. He's close by my side. What kind of attitude am I going to have about problems? First of all, I want to tell you, you need to understand that they're real. You need to take some kind of inventory. I've heard men stand in the pulpit and kind of make light sometimes of heartaches and heartbreaks, and that's a wrong thing to do. Making light of what is grieving another person is very, very unwise. I went through recently, my father passed away in August of last year. He was 90 years old and my father had gotten Parkinson's and had a rare form of dementia. I'd never even heard of it. Lewy body syndrome or Lewy body features dementia. And eventually that's what killed my dad. The rest of his body was in pretty decent shape but that dementia just shut his mind down. But I had to watch as my dad just slipped away a little bit at a time. My father was a hard working man and he knew how to do industrial wiring. He built cotton gins all of his life and he knew all about tools and various things. My mother came to get me one day and said, Freeman, you need to help your dad. And I went over there and my daddy was sitting at the kitchen table with a light he was trying to put together and he said, son, I can't figure out which wire goes where. his mind was just slipping away. Sometimes it was funny. He would talk about the great water ball that came down the street spraying water. And the trees that had crossed the road that had been cut down, that was a pipe factory and we'd laugh about some things. But it was a heartache as I watched my dad go through that and eventually the last six weeks of his life just laying in bed, not able to get up, have to wear a diaper. That's a lose his dignity. It was tough, tough. And as hard as it was on me, my parents lived with me, I built on a number of years ago, to watch my mom was really hard. I want to tell you, we ought not make light of the heartaches that come. Take inventory, they're real. They're real. Being consumed by them though is wrong. You can't let your difficulties just eat you up. And some people do that. They're so introspective or maybe so emotional or maybe sometimes so self-centered that whatever is wrong with them is wrong with the entire world and so they allow that to consume them and eat them up. But being hampered by these things is absolutely human. They're going to happen. You hear the saying that every preacher wants to resign on Monday. I can be honest with you. The times that I've actually thought about maybe leaving and going and doing something else, I can count on the fingers of one hand. I like pastoring. I enjoy preaching. I like my own preaching. Charles Spurgeon said, if you don't like it, nobody else is. So I thought, well that's pretty good advice. I better follow that. And so on Mondays, I'm not ready to resign. On Mondays, we have staff meetings. I work on Mondays. An older pastor told me, he said, look, you're wasted on Mondays. You're worn out. You're tired anyway. Don't make that your day off. Go on in and work and do the best you can and take another day off and spend it with your wife so it can be productive time. And so on Mondays I don't go to the office and sit and moan and groan. We've had issues, we deal with them, we line them up, get the staff to deal with things and if it's something I have to handle, we do that. We get hampered. We get hampered by things that happen in our life and we should not allow those things to consume us. Our God is bigger than any problem we will ever face. And God knew whatever problem you're having today, God knew you were going to have it before He laid the mud seals of the earth, as some guys might say. I'm glad to tell you that heartaches have limits. Thank God. They have limits. Do you notice what our text said? For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time, right now, what's going on right now? My father knows what I can bear and in the Bible he said he won't put more on me, more than I can take. He'll make a way to escape temptation. Hebrews chapter 13 and verse number 5, the last half of the verse, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. Isaiah 49 verses 15 and 16. He said, I've graven thee upon the palms of my hands. God knows what I'm going through and His proximity to me has not changed and so He's well aware of what's happening in my life. Can I say to you that the sufferings of this present time are inferior to the glory that's going to be revealed? God lets some people go through harder times than others. I have a family in my church. I can't give you an answer why. But that family has a lot of sickness. The husband, the wife, the daughter, some of the grandchildren. And I'm not talking about lightweight sicknesses. Leukemia. The boy's gotten cured of leukemia, but the treatments have given him vasculitis. And it's attacking the veins in his body and if they don't get it stopped, it's going to get into his kidneys and it's already there a little bit and it's going to kill him somewhere along the line. One of our missionaries, Brother Mike Riffle, I found out he's got some kind of inflammation. You know Brother Mike? He's got some kind of inflammation in the bowel duct from your liver down to your intestines and they're just going to have to be able to treat it. It's a deadly thing. It could take his life. but nothing we face here is going to compare to what's going to happen in heaven. And God allows some folks, I don't know why, it's not up to me to say, He allows some people to go through special things and He uses them because of that. You and I are shaped by the events in our life. We're formed by the things in our life. That's what school's all about. You have an opportunity to sit under these professors who have years of ministerial experience and you gain from them and they mold you and they make you. But when you leave here, you're going out into a world that is not going to love you like you're loved here. When I first got saved, I thought everybody will want to be saved. I was 21 and I thought this is great. Hallelujah. This is wonderful. So I had to take my wife to the doctor downtown Memphis so I got all dressed up. And I put on a red and white checkered seersucker jacket and a pair of slacks and stood out on a street corner and said I'm going to tell people about Jesus and watch folk get saved. And so I tried to talk to people who wouldn't even look at me. Finally, one very well-dressed guy said, son, nobody wants to hear what you're saying. He said, they don't know who you are. You could be a nut or a wacko. And he said, I know you're trying to do good, but nobody wants to hear what you've got to say. That hurt me. I hadn't been saved but a few weeks. And so I stood there a minute, and I said, well, I guess I'll go back to the doctor's office and sit down. I mean, it just crushed me when I found out that everybody wasn't going to love what I love. When you get out from here, you're going to go places and find out not everybody likes what you like. Not everybody is going to love the Jesus that you love. You're going to run into some hard knocks. But their weight does not equal the blessings. It sure doesn't. Weighing our sufferings shows that we're placing too much value and importance on them. If you think about them all the time, boy, nobody's been through one like this. The devil is a master at trying to cut you out and make you think that you are the single focus of everything that's going on. You remember Job? He singled Job out. Thank the Lord God sustained him. But the devil will try to make you think that you're the only one that's going through this event. And if he can single you out and cut you off from the fellowship of the body of Christ, he'll devour you. He'll chew you up and spit you out. Be careful about weighing your sufferings. Paul just said they're lying affliction. That's the terminology used over in 2 Corinthians. What attitude do we have towards our sufferings and afflictions? I know most of y'all are young, and when I was in school and first getting started and everything, I'd hear the old saints talk about the sufferings of God, different things, and I'd think, I don't know what they're talking about. I hadn't been through that. Does that happen to everybody? Well, I got saved 41 years ago, and I want to tell you, it happens to everybody. It sure does. What attitude are you going to have? You can become bitter and you'll be defeated. Bitterness is terrible. Matter of fact, the Bible says that we're supposed to be careful lest a root of bitterness springing up in you and thereby many be defiled. If you're a bitter person, you'll embitter others. If you get bitter, you'll infect your wife or your husband, whichever the case might be, and it might spread to your children. You want to be careful about that. Don't let that happen. You can become a pessimist. I am an optimist. You can ask my wife and she'll say sometimes, Freeman, how can you look at that that way? And I say, I'm an optimist, honey. God's on His throne and as long as God's on His throne, He can take care of anything. And you know they say, well is the glass half empty or half full? Those kinds of things. I am an optimist because I believe that God is working in any situation. God is not letting anything go by that He can't put His hand on and use it in some way. And so we can become victorious in our sufferings. Well we have some assurance from God. Look in verse 28 of Romans 8. Very familiar text of Scripture. If it wasn't for the Calvinist, we wouldn't even know this verse existed, would we? We poor folks that aren't Calvinist. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose. We know some things. All things work together. I was doing a little reading last night and a fellow called on a deacon in a church to pray. And the old gentleman stood up and he said, Lord! I don't like lard. He began to go through a list of ingredients and he said, but lard, when you mix them together and put them in the oven, they make biscuits and I like biscuits. And so we are going to have individual things in our life that are very distasteful. You all know what cat head biscuits are, don't you? How many of you don't know what I'm talking about? God have mercy on you. That's homemade biscuits where you take a big old spoon and just plop it down out there and it's got little bumpy, knotty things on it and you cook it. It's a homemade biscuit. These things that you get out of a tube are not real biscuits, they're make-believe. We've gotten so used to instant everything that we've forgotten it takes years to accomplish some things. There is no instant spirituality. It takes time. I think Harry Ironside in one of his books gives an illustration about how his wife was cooking biscuits and used all those different ingredients. You know the flour. Who wants to eat a handful of flour? One year we were having an activity at church and we challenged some folks to take a packet of Kool-Aid and throw that dry packet of Kool-Aid in their mouth and be able to get it down without getting any water or anything. We had two people throw up. Kool-Aid is wonderful but not when you pour the whole packet in your mouth. It's terrible. Some things are individually bitter, but God is working everything in your life together to bring it to pass, you see. Who's on our side? Look at Psalm 124 with me just a minute. Psalm 124. Verse 1, if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, now may Israel say, if it had not been the Lord who was on our side when men rose up against us. Who's on our side? God is. Romans 8 verse 31, what shall we say then to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? Look down in verse 33. Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifies. Let people accuse. Let the devil rail. We belong to God. And no accusation can stick to us. We've been pardoned by the grace of God. We've been justified in Him. And nothing the devil does is going to permanently alter us. We've been saved and born again you see. Verse 34. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, brethren, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Well, I like that. Hebrews chapter 7 talks about that, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for us. When you're going through a hard time, Jesus in heaven is calling your name out before the Father. That's encouraging, isn't it? I like it when people contact me and say, Pastor, you were just on my heart, and I want you to know I was praying for you, or maybe send me a little text with a little something in it, a little picture, and the men will do that and say, I just want to encourage my pastor today. I like that. It does help me. But brother, when you find out Jesus in heaven is praying for you, that stirs you in the depths of your being. God has a plan and a purpose. He's working when I can't tell it. In 35 years of ministry, there's been times when I've sat down and said, what's going to happen next? What are we going to do? We had built up, we started in a little brick storefront building. And listen, we had one toilet and it would only flush about once every five minutes. We had some room air conditioners and when they were running, it was so loud you could barely hear me preach so I learned to get loud. and it was cold in the winter. We had those little heaters about this wide and about that tall that glowed, you know, when you lit them up and it would be warm until you opened the door one time and then it was cold in there. And we met in that place and that's where God put us for a couple of years and I began to wonder if we were ever going to get out of there. And then the Lord gave us a building. Numerically, we got up to about 70 people fairly quickly after we got in that new building. And in 45 days, 21 people left church. We went from running in the low 70s to running in the high 40s and low 50s overnight. And nobody was mad. They got job transfers, moved for various reasons. Brother, that's a blow when you've been in the ministry and you've worked hard and you've built and you've struggled and you go, what am I going to do now? But God uses those things to help you and to shape you. When I don't see Him, God's still working. I don't know if you ever read any of Oz Guinness' works, and I'd recommend you read them with a grain of salt, but he's got a book called God in the Dark. It's a pretty good book. It's worth reading. I want to tell you, God is still God when the lights are off. When you can't see a way out, when you have no idea what to do, God's still God. He's still with you. And the only thing you can do then is just do what's right. Just do what's right. God intends nothing but our profit. You know, Hebrews chapter 12 talks about chastening. And God uses that for a reason. Without grace, our hurts remain just that. Hurts. But with grace, your pains and your hurts have a reason. I've debated atheists quite a bit. through the years. And one of the things that they keep hammering out is that there is no purpose or meaning to life. I spoke with one whose daughter was born afflicted somehow. He wouldn't give me the details. But he said, my daughter lives a life of pain every day. And you expect me to love a God that would do that to her? And I said to him, and you expect me to think that her having absolutely no purpose is better than God having some purpose in that? God has a purpose for everything that happens. My home church that I went to when I first got saved, they brought a little boy to church in a box about that long. He was about 14 years old. And his bones were horribly twisted and stuff and they had to be careful just sometimes taking a washcloth and just rubbing him like that to get him clean. His fingers would break. He was the happiest little fellow you've ever seen in your life. Excited, loved God, talked about the Lord all the time. But those parents had to deal with that heartache and he died when he was 18 years old. Without the grace of God, hurts just stay hurts. But with the grace of God, He uses them in our life. Without grace, our lives end without a purpose. God has a plan for you. It may not be your plan. It may be different than what you think you're going to do. We've got a missionary who's been in a desert area of the world and the security situation has gotten so bad and his health and his wife's health has been so affected. They've had to leave. They've had to come home. They had planned on spending their life out there and have done a great job where they were. But God has led through circumstances they've had to go somewhere else or die. One of the two. I mean, that's the way it was. So our lives have a purpose and we may start out going a certain direction. I never knew I'd pastor the same church 35 years. As a matter of fact, I hate to confess it, but as a young preacher, I thought, well, I'll give this thing a year and see how we do. You know, after a year, I may have to rethink what I'm doing. But God just put me, and when I went to a toca, the city limit sign said population 540. And some of my preacher buddies said, Freeman, what in the world are you doing here? Ten miles south of you is a city with 20,000 with a large military base. Ten miles north of you is another city with about 8 or 10,000. Why are you in this little hole of a place? And I said, all I can tell you is where God put me. We have become the fastest growing area in the entire county. Some few years ago, the mayor walked into my office and rolled out a plat across my desk and he said, we're going to cut out 2,000 housing lots within 5 miles of your church, Pastor, and I want you to know, God put me exactly where He wanted me to be, exactly where He wanted me to be. We have the best location of any church. that I know of in the county. We're about 100 yards off the highway. You've been there. One turn off the highway and there you are, but we don't have to deal with highway traffic to get into church. God has just worked all kinds of things together. And if you ever came there and I could show you how the buildings were laid out, it would amaze you that through different types of building programs, God had a bigger plan than we did. And when we built our last auditorium, we were able to just do a couple of things and it looked like we had planned that entire facility from start to finish at one time. And I promise you we hadn't. God has a purpose. Your life has a purpose. Without grace, our explanations of why are pretty hollow. and shallow. Without grace, our sinful falterings would be totally devastated. I want you to think with me for just a minute about some of the places and hurts you and I are going to go through. You remember reading about Bacchus, the veil of tears? It could be, and what reading I've done seems that probably that invoked somewhere the same, And in the book of Judges, chapter number 2, the angel of the Lord met with the Israelites there and he rebuked them. You and I are going to go through some places where we get rebuked. Where instead of getting a pat on the back, we're going to get shot between the eyes. And it may mean we need it. A number of years ago I was in a camp meeting and they called on this real young guy to get up and preach. And I thought, why'd they call him? He's just a young kid, what does he know? I thought, why didn't they call me? I've been preaching for so many years. I'm embarrassed to even say this. But that young guy got up, and I'm going to tell you, he educated me. He had something to say, and I've never forgotten to this day, and it was over 20 years ago. He preached that message. I've never forgotten some of the things he said. But here's what God did to me after that. They called on an old preacher to preach. I had a radio broadcast at that time and so a lot of those fellows were familiar with me. And that older preacher got up and went to the man who was running the meeting and he said, I want to give my time to Brother Weems. I felt like I was about that big. And so I had to confess to that crowd that I had sinned the sin of pride sitting there thinking I could do a better job than that young guy. And I'm going to tell you God used him greatly in my life. We get rebuked sometimes. And we need it. We're not going to always be right. I know we're Christians. I know we love God. I know our hearts are in the right place. But you've got an old nature on the inside of you that's as wicked and vile as it's ever been. You will never tame your flesh nature. Quit trying. God gave up on flesh in the Garden of Eden. It's the new man that we need to feed. And if you'll feed your new man and continue to satisfy him, your old man will starve and become weak. But that old nature is kind of like a cockroach. You know, a cockroach can live on cardboard and the glue that's inside of it. Your old nature doesn't need much to feed it and it's not very far below the surface. It'll break out on you if you're not careful. We go through the valley of tears where we get rebuked. You remember another valley, the valley of Achor? Remember that fellow by the name of Achan? He just saw a few things. He said, why should I let all that get torn up, burned up, destroyed and buried? And so he grabbed a few little things, a wedge of gold, some silver and some garments. Boy, did he suffer. And his family paid a price. You and I are going to go through valleys where we suffer sin's consequences. You know, preachers are not perfect. We sometimes say the wrong thing. We sometimes get angry and lose our temper. I have preached when I lost my temper. And I've always found out that cost. It never helps people. And so you go through that and you suffer consequences for those things. And it is where God is shaping and forming you and teaching you things. The Valley of Eli. You remember David and Goliath, that little story, 1 Samuel chapter 17? You and I are going to face some giants in our life. Not long ago, I got invited to join the Southern Baptist Convention. I'm an independent Baptist. And the fellow said, we got a place for you fundamentalists and you conservatives. And I said, well, I think I'll just stay what I am. He said, no, we want you to come on and join with us. And I said, no, sir. And I gave him some reasons. And I said, I've got this information, that information. He said, well, send it to me. Well, I did. And I never heard from him again. That was the end of it. But you get this temptation, if I'll just do this, I can go along and maybe that will increase this. Maybe that will build this up. We get tempted and we're going to fight some giants. Now I don't know you. You don't know me, but I want to tell you something. The things that you did before you got saved and the appetites that you created for sin before you got saved, you're going to fight them the rest of your life. That's why we preach to young people, don't start drinking, don't start smoking, don't look at pornography, don't do this. You think we just don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. No, we're trying to help you avoid some pitfalls and some poison. And if you have been involved in that, I didn't get saved until I was 21. Nobody's fault but mine. Nobody's fault but mine. And because of that, I have a track record behind me of some things that I messed with and dealt with and lived in. And so those giants come roaring out. And you're going to have to fight some giants in your life. Your prayer life. I'm probably going to preach on prayer on Thursday. But your prayer life is the easiest thing to let slide. And it's also the easiest thing to cure if we just get a little determination. The valley of Eschol in Deuteronomy chapter 1 verse 24 and 25. They came through that valley and they came out with those great big grapes and all the goods of that land. Remember the grapes were so big it took two men to carry one bundle of grapes, one bunch of grapes. You're going to get to a place where you're going to have to make some decisions about whether you're going to go on with God or you're going to stop where you are. And if you stop, God will bring you back eventually to that place, but it may be years. before you get another opportunity. Here in this college, make your decisions. I'm going all the way with God. Whatever it is, I'm going all the way with God. Just throw the door open. Don't close on anything. My missions professor, Dan Truax, wanted everybody to go to the mission field and I didn't want to go. I wouldn't even pray about it. And I got under such conviction about that that eventually I had to pray and say, alright God, I just knew God was going to send me to Africa. I just knew it. My wife's about 5'1", a little fair-skinned, red-headed little lady, and I could just see her baking over there in Africa somewhere. But when I broke and was willing to go anywhere at all, God gave me the desire in my heart and let me pastor. That's what I wanted to do. But I had to be willing. And if God had said, go to Africa, that's what I'd do. And if He said it tomorrow, I'd pack up my stuff and go. We want to follow the Lord. Make that decision to go forward. Ezekiel 37, that valley of dry bones. Bible college is the easiest place to backslide. I remember my second year, I got real dry in Bible college. and you need a revival. Ezekiel 37 is where we're going to have some revival. Hopefully that's what these chapels will do for you. You get preached to and preached at. Maybe you're in your dorm studies and the Bible studies and different prayer bands together. God will stir in the depths of your being and motivate you and move you. We need revival. We don't need to just be dead theoricians. We know all the theology. We know what to do and how to do. We need the power of God on our lives. to get anything done. You may have the best sermon outlines that have ever been in the history of outlining. And you may have the best grip on theology. You can write your own theology set of books. But you need the power of God to make those things effective. Well, the last valley we're going to face is the valley of the shadow of death. Every one of us is going to die somewhere along the line. If the rapture doesn't take place, I'm looking for Jesus, aren't you? I am a pre-millennial, pre-tribulational preacher. I believe the rapture is the next event. But, I know folks are going to die. In 35 years, I've buried a lot of people, well over 100. We have a couple of plaques in our church, and on those plaques we put the names of our loved ones or church members who passed on. I'll stop by their off times and just look and remember those people. When I see their names, I remember them. I remember their funeral. I remember fellowshipping with them. We're going to face the king of terrors. And I want to face him with my head up and unashamed. Valleys, heartaches, hard places. You've never read the book by Herbert Locke, Your Last Words of Saints and Sinners. It's a gold mine. Charles Spurgeon, when he came to die, said, oh wifey, we've had such a wonderful time. I think yesterday was about, what, the 150th year of his death, something like that, maybe 100 years. You ever heard of John Warburton, old strict Baptist from over in England? He went to church and he'd been trying to get saved. He called it chapel. Couldn't find the Lord and told his wife, said, Honey, you and the kids stay home today. I'm going to go to chapel one more time and if I can't find God, I guess I'll just have to go to hell. And so he went to that little English church where they were preaching and he said, I don't know what the man was saying, but halfway through the sermon, the light broke through. He said, I had to put my hand over my mouth to keep from shouting right there in the service. He said as soon as the service was over I went out between those English hedgerows and he said, I danced and shouted until I collapsed in the dust. And he led a great life, did a great work for God. But he came to die. And of course in the 1700's they didn't have the medical technology with which we've been blessed and he lay on that bed. and his children gathered around him and he was trying to say something and one of the boys said, I think daddy's trying to say something and he leaned over. John Warburton got one last gasp of air and shouted hallelujah. I want to leave out in victory. The giant will take my life if I live long enough and the Lord doesn't take me home. That king of terrors will squeeze the physical life out of this body. but I'll be more alive then than I've ever been. My father left that bed where he'd been confined for weeks living in a diaper with his mind slipping away and entered into the presence of God and I'm sure his mind exploded with the wonders that he saw. We're going to a great place and the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the eternal weight of glory which shall be revealed in us. Heads are bowed and eyes are closed. Dr. Bill.