It's a blessing. It's a blessing to hear your mama sing. And your daughter, her namesake, sing along with her and everybody else. Now, I don't know if I've ever heard anybody preach these verses, but I know that the Bible wasn't wrote in English. But if you turn to Ezekiel, The 30th chapter, we're gonna read two verses. And for us, this is wrote in English. It has an added meaning to it that maybe it wasn't in the original Hebrew. The Lord says in the 15th verse, I will pour my fury upon sin, the strength of Egypt, And I will cut off the multitude of no. And I will set fire in Egypt. Sin shall have great pain, and no shall be rent asunder. And Naf shall have distresses daily." We didn't really have nothing on our heart this evening. And we opened up the Bible and these verses just seemed to stand out to us. And we were thinking about that. We know these are places. But we got a picture there thinking about God pouring out fury upon sin. The Bible tells us, now sin not being a place, but sin being an act that goes contrary to the laws of God and His will, that that will be punished. And we know that we were thinking about that very thing. There are so many people today, though this place no doubt has been destroyed and I don't know that it exists today and maybe if we'd had the thought a little earlier we could have done some research, but I know that everybody that partakes or lives in sin is gonna experience great pain. That's what the Bible says, right? And we know that so many people that say no to God will truly have their life, as it says here, to be renaissander. And in Knopf it says, shall have distresses daily. Listen. If you live in the land of sin, in the town of no, it don't matter what your name is or what follows that, you're gonna be in distress daily. And I'm afraid today there's a lot of people quite content to live in the land of sin, in the town of no. When God asks anything of them, they say no, but I'd like to The land, live in the land of Beulah, along the river of life, in the town of, praise the Lord. Because if you go there, honey, you'll forget about where you once was. These things, these enticements, don't you reckon? There was enticements in the land of sin. But the Lord said that it was gonna bring great pain. The Bible tells me there's joy in sin. for a season. But what comes after this great pain, there's a lot of people that think, I'm gonna live for myself. I'm tired of telling people what they want. I'm gonna do something for myself. And they say no to everything. But no will bring a great pain as well. It'll rip your life apart. if you say no to God and His plan for your life. So I want you to know, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that just like this place apparently that was in Egypt, or not to Egypt, was a place. A physical place. And you yourself is in a physical place today. But is it the place God wants you to be? Has he got something better for you? Because I can tell you that the land of peace, the land of Beulah is much better than the land of sin in the town of Noah. And when God speaks, it would be just like Samuel was. It'd say, here I am, Lord. And we would just say, Lord, whatever you want, I'm willing to give you. He ain't asked very many people at all for something that they were qualified to do. A matter of fact, we see in the word of God that what he does a lot of times is he asks the unqualified how to do the things that he wants them to do. And then when they step out on faith, when they are content, to come into the land that he has provided for them. Then the qualifications come as well. If you give him your 100%, he'll take that which is very little in the eyes of maybe this world. But God can do much with it. But if you live in the land of sin, what little bit you'll have, what little bit you'll be able to attain or be able to keep will be bitterness in your mouth. It'll be as the bicycle on the front porch. It don't matter how good it is or how bad it is. In certain neighborhoods, if it ain't changing, even if it is changed, He won't be there long. And that's what it is, to live in a land of sin. We're seeing that. As we preached, I think it was Sunday, about this wicked ideal that is... coming across our land this whole idea where you won't own nothing and you'll be happy well yeah maybe and you didn't own nothing to begin with but if God has blessed you well that he's blessed you. And that's something, I don't care what you have. It was just a little while ago, I actually got a vehicle in this century. I've got two of them now. But before that, all we had was vehicles in the 90s. And praise the Lord, they were good vehicles in the 90s. I don't know if the new ones coming out of the factory today will last as long as some of them have. But the point I'm making is, it don't matter what you have. It can be a 25-year-old van, and I'm telling you, if it was given to you by God, Well, it's a wonderful gift, and it ain't nothing to some people, but it's everything when you see where it comes from. Somebody said, never look, a gift horse in the mouth. Do you understand that saying? That means that if it's been given to you, it don't matter how old it is. Oh, you might give me something, and the Lord might have told you, or told me to give you something, and that ought to be a blessing. But when you see the hand of God move in your life, though the world might have much much more than the temporal things. It's a sweet thing, is it not? Give me black-eyed peas and cornbread over a steak any day if I know that the Lord is blessed in. If I know when I put my head on my pillow at night that everything's all right. Because I live in the land of Yule, next to the river of life, in the town of Praise the Lord. And because He's real in my life, people can see a difference. And I can see, you know, I come in contact with a lot of people. And there's somebody, just last week, I was filling the man's tank. He come out there and he started talking to me. We weren't talking about church or nothing. And he says, I can see that you're a religious man. I said, really? I said, what makes you think that? I can't even remember what he said. I think he said, you seem to have peace. I was on my knees. They were both hurting me. on an infield tank where you fill them on the end and the gauges never work right. It didn't have a pressure gauge on it and it didn't have a spitter on it. It was empty. So all you can do is look at the gallons on the tank and then you know if it's empty or what it'll hold. I told that man, I said, because you ain't got a gauge or the gauge on it don't work and you ain't got a spitter valve. I said, maybe some people wouldn't fill it. I said, but I knew it was empty. And I said, and I can't fill it again until it's empty. Aren't you glad it ain't the way God is? He won't let us go empty if we hunger and thirst after righteousness. Yeah, I've got a spinner valve on me, but praise the Lord. He gave me a hanky too. I love the Lord. He's my all in all. If I come someday, I won't be able to stand to preach because my knees are too bad. We'll praise the Lord. I still live, Mama, in the land of Beulah. I still dwell along the river. I know there's one in heaven, but I'll tell you one. But from time to time, the Lord sends me sweet water from my heart, the Bible says. A spring of well bubbling up, and I'm thankful for it. It don't matter how dry times get. I've got an artesian well from the Lord. Why? Because I don't live in the land of sin, in the city of no. Because I live in the land of you, hallelujah. And because he's real, and because he's real, each and every one of us can live in peace in a land of trouble. This world around us is getting more and more like the land of sin and always has been. I tell you what, I can remember, I don't mean to offend nobody. I was born in 1970, and there was, I reckon the hippies were in the 60s, but there still was a lot of them in the 70s. And then even in the 80s, there was even a song, He's an Old Hippie, and I can remember that. And I didn't fully understand all of that. At counterculture, as a boy raised in church, the longest I ever had my hair, it touched my ear. It never was long enough, really, to go over the top. Now, I know I got big ears, but that might help me some. If I had little mouse ears, maybe, the longest I ever had my hair, it might have covered all mine. But you know what? I didn't understand the whole counterculture. I went to the barber. But this was when I was a little about, well, in the 80s. That was about when I can remember the most, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old. I don't know how many barbers we went to, Daddy. They had one barber, but they had three or four. I can remember that one baler on Main Street. I think it might have had four or five. But still at that time, they had one barber. And I even asked the old man once, he said, well, before the... Before the hippies, he said, there's a barber in every one of these chairs. And I thought to myself, back in the 50s, where you got a fresh haircut every week, how to square off your flat top. I've got a flat top. This was another one, he's working out of his house, and he cut my hair every week. But the point being is, that to me, I look at them hippies, and I think, boy, they're wicked. My goodness, what have we got today? I tell you what, I thought it was disgusting to see a man with hair like a woman. But what we got today, my wife was telling me, she went to the grocery store, and there's a cashier there about the age of my mama in her 70s. And she had her head shaved on one side, not because she had cancer, but because she was trying to be hippie. No, I guess that's what they said when the 70-year-old people were teenagers. I don't know what the lingo is today, but I'm sure that old washed-out woman could have told me. Of course, you had pink and blue, all manners of color. in her hair, and we see it all around us. People put it, they want to be identified by the vows, by the vile sexual deviance. I don't know about you, but a man ought to be judged by who he is. and not what he does in the dark. But God sees it all, and God's gonna see to it that we're all judged about what's done in the light and the dark, about every one of us. Oh, to be content, to search out the old paths, and to see that they lead. to the land of Beulah, because that's where I want to go. You do what you will. You go ahead and go to a place of sin where there's great pain. You go ahead and go to the land of no and be renaissance. You go ahead, whatever your name is, you will have distresses daily. And I see that. There ain't no peace for the wicked, the Bible says. We was trying to tell some of that to some people that we love dearly. I said, look at you. You can and will not prosper. Everything that you hope to obtain will fall through your fingers. And what, you'll be able to grasp somebody else or rip it from your hands. And why is that? because I'd have rather had the protection of the Lord than the best security system that money could buy. The Bible speaks about that, about the watchman on the wall. He ain't the one that provides safety for the city. All he can do is tell you trouble's coming. Destruction's coming. You better get your clothes on so you don't have to die naked. But praise the Lord. If we serve the Lord, he'll do more than just tell us the trouble's coming. He'll redeem us. He'll lead us out. And we can find, let that, let that old path lead to a better land. I'm striving. to go to the same place my granddaddy went. You know, I can remember. I don't know why I was blessed as it was, but I'd read over about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I'd think about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I'd think about Riley, Herbert, and Darryl. Or was I gonna be a Jacob? Or was I gonna be the third generation? Or was it gonna be Abraham, Isaac, and Esau? That scared me. I wanted to have something. I wanted to keep something. I wanted to make something. Praise the Lord. If you allow the Lord to work in your life, He'll do a work that you'll never imagine you otherwise could. But every generation is going to have to make that same decision. Because, see, the land of sin is not some faraway country. It's all around us. And the land of Beulah, if you're living in the land of sin, is much closer than you would realize. It's just over the hill. We was, our boss is kind of like me, he's somewhat forgetful. He hops from vehicle to vehicle. Well, we was sitting, we had two tanks to sit. We was sitting in the second tank, and we got almost done. He lets his trucks idle all the time, and when you're running the PTO, you gotta have your truck running. We was kind of sitting on the side of the hill. And before we was done, he turned the vehicle off. And he said, Darryl, I'm almost out of gas. Well, I know what that means to me. That means, you know, like an eighth of a tank, a quarter of a tank, something like that. Well, no, he was plumb on empty. Matter of fact, when we pulled up all the hill, it said something about your fuel filter malfunction or something. And I said, oh, this ain't good. Now, I didn't say that to him, because he's my boss. And I didn't want him to think I was worrying. Because he has enough worrying of his own to know that there's somebody else right next to him worrying. But he had an answer for it, because he'd been there before. That brings you comfort on it, when you're with somebody that's been there before. Listen, Jesus Christ, there ain't a place you can't go. that Jesus Christ did not experience on the cross. Listen to me. That pain and that guilt you're feeling from your sin, he's been there. He bore it on Calvary. So my boss said, let me turn the vehicle. We got on flat ground. He said, let me turn the vehicle off and reset it. Sure enough, it did. He fired it up. He says, Darrell, we've got 17 miles. How far is it? 16 miles. Well, I just punched in Conway, which will always take you to the post office. Well, it was going to take us down by the old highway, which is closer when you figure on how it comes into the post office versus going to interstate. And so he said, nurse, it'll take the old highway. I said, well, yeah, because the gas station's out on the north side of the highway. And I said, yeah, well, I'll go to the interstate. And I said, besides. when you're coming to Conway, there's that long hill, there's that long decline that at least, you know, maybe if we run out, we can coaster all the way so that we can just hop across there and won't have to walk very far. Well, it got down there to about, it got down there to nine miles and we had 7.8 to go. So it's like, all right, that's good. Then it jumped up to 10. It's like, that's even better. Then it just went to low. He said, Darrell, I said, I think we've been here before. He said, yeah, but I can't remember how far we drove on low. So he dropped her down in neutral, and we was coasting down that one hill. And then I thought, well, you know, I told him about that. And then I thought, this might not be a good idea, because I remembered that you coast down there. But then you start climbing the hill again before you get to the exit. And I thought to myself, but I didn't say nothing to him. I said, hey, you know, I was thinking, maybe he ought to have that and drive and just have her smashed to the floor so that momentum would carry us up the hill. Long story short, it didn't matter. We made it there, and he even let the truck idle when he was filling it full of diesel fuel. We put $175 in it. 50 gallon, $175. In the 70s, I can remember when I bought my truck in 1994, my first diesel truck I had, I can remember 88 cents a gallon. Now that was where it dropped down, you know, it had been higher. I thought to myself, all the days, they fastly change, don't they? And that's the way it is. If you was born and raised in a home, in a Christian home where your mama and daddy lived in Beulah land, in the town of, praise the Lord, you'll be amazed how fast it'll go from good to, oh my goodness, how fast he'll go from praise the Lord to taking your God's name in vain. I was telling somebody just this week, why is it, doesn't matter what generation it is, they always manage to take their Lord's name in vain. They don't take my God's name in vain anymore, because they don't even speak his name, think of him. He has no influence over them. We don't live in an immoral society. We live in an amoral society. We actually, everybody, You know, in times past, there was things that would benefit people, but they would not do them because it was immoral. But today, the number one question is, is will it benefit me? Will I profit from it? And because they don't even consider whether it's right or wrong, a man is truly, the spans of what man will do in his depravity will blow your mind if he does not consider whether it is right or wrong. Just live in the land of sin for a while, though, and you'll discover that it'll bring great pain. Just live in the providence of no, and you'll discover that everything you have will be torn apart. And it don't matter whose name you is, but what always follows sin and no, is distresses daily. I think we're done. I hope this has been a blessing to you. Don't know that I've ever heard a message preached on these two verses, but that's all right. I hope it gave you a picture. Can you imagine? Can you imagine hearing this prophecy from Ezekiel? Now, he was, and I don't, you know, You're reading. Isaiah did it. Not so much Jeremiah, but I even think Jeremiah did it. Ezekiel did it. Zachariah did it. I think Haggai did it. Hosea did it. But they prophesied the destruction that was coming to Israel. And then God would then use them to prophesy the destruction that was coming to the foreign lands around the bow. Why was that? Because God wanted me and you both to know that he weren't just the God of the Jew, but he was the God of the world. He did not just move men on account of what the Jews were doing, but he moved men all over the world that his will might be known, and that men might know that God brought this about. I would encourage you to pack your bags. My boss, he bought new luggage and he brought some of the old, he brought the old luggage in and says, Darrell, do you want this? And I looked at it and I said, sure, I'll take it. Not that we'd go anywhere, but you know, I mean, you could use it for something else, I guess. That's what we'll use it for. Once every five years we go somewhere. But I brought it in the house, and there was three big old bags. My wife says, what are you doing? I said, I'm moving out. Well, she'd have been smart. She said, well, hold on. One of them's for me. I'm coming with you. Yeah, Donnie said she might just help me back, sure enough. But anyhow, I said all that to say, that's what you need to do. You need to move out of the land of sin and the town of no. See, sin is bad enough, but then when God tells you and asks you to give it yourself and to repent, When you move from the land of sin into the town of no, you've got that much farther from God. Listen to His voice. Don't turn Him away. Life is too short. I can remember that song. I think Ricky Skagg sang it. Why Did I Wait So Long? It's a beautiful song. Because when you come to the Lord, that's exactly what you're gonna say. if you love his ways and you surrender your will. Because there's a lot of people that have bowed at an altar only to get up and say, I'm going to the land of Beulah. But before they can leave the land of sin, they enter into the city of Noah. And when you come to the city of Noah, you'll go no farther. and you'll experience distress, great distress, great pain that'll rip you asunder. And it won't just be one time, but it'll be, and it'll come to you every day. Let's get some songs to sing. Where'd you come, anyone? Lord spoke to your heart. Don't turn him away.