Alright, well, good to see you all be here today. Nice full house. I like this. I like it. So we're in the book of Exodus chapter number 22. And I know it kind of looks like I started to put another verse down there for you. And the truth is I actually did. Went a little too far so I had to wipe that out real quick. But we're reading Exodus 22 verse 21 down through 27. The Bible says, and this is the Lord's commandment here, Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If thou afflict him in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry. and my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with a sword. And your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless. If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an user, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury. If thou at all take thy neighbor's raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him that the sun goeth down. For that is His covering only. It is His raiment for His skin, wherein shall He sleep. And it shall come to pass, when He crieth unto me, that I will hear, for I am gracious." Now, in our last chapter, we looked at some of the rights of property and whatnot. This time, we're looking at some of the rights of the downtrodden. So, we're going to bring our sermon this morning on that thought of the downtrodden. Heavenly Father, we do thank You for all that You've done for us. We thank You, Lord, once again for each and every one that's gathered here this morning. It's certainly doing my heart some good to see so many here. And we do pray, Lord, for every one of them that they will get exactly what they need out of the sermon here and help us all, Father, please, to grow, to become the Christians that You'd have us to be. We thank You, Father, for being so good to us, for loving us, for saving us. I ask You, Father, please, to help me, Lord, to present the sermon the way that You'd have me to. In Jesus' name I do pray. Amen and amen. So, as I was studying this out and trying to see exactly what the sermon should be and all that, at one point I got to thinking about this sign that I saw many years ago that said the true measure of a man can be found in how he treats someone who can do absolutely nothing for him. In other words, if he's going to treat the person badly, then that person really, when it comes down to it, they're a bad person. If they're going to treat the person good, they're going to treat the person well, treat them with respect, then they tend to be an individual who is also good, who is well behaved, who is respectful. And this is the sort of thing that we need to be trying to get others to be as well. To be respectful. To be good toward one another. To behave ourselves. And it's certainly God's mindset when it comes to those who cannot fend for themselves. Those who need help. Those who need more than just a handout. They need the hand up. They need someone to come along and be on their side. And God says, I'm going to be on their side, but I want you to be on their side as well. Even if it's simply just a matter of that they're in the exact same boat as you, you can help one another out. You can do something to lift them up. Maybe it costs you a little bit, but God says if it costs you a little bit in this life, don't worry about it, I'll take care of you in the next. I'm going to take care of you, but I'm definitely taking care of the downtrodden. Now as we look here in verse number 21, we see that the Lord says, thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him. And when you look up a few of these words here, and I certainly like to do it, that word vex, you hear that often, you vex me. What does that word vex mean? I want to know what it meant. The word vex means to maltreat, to treat violently, to do wrong. In other words, you're doing the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do. Now, the word oppress means to squeeze. Kind of like if someone were squeezing you by the throat, it would not feel very good. And God says, I don't want you to be doing that, especially to the stranger. Now, the stranger here means a resident alien, not someone who is just passing through the land. This is a person who's living there. I'm just a stranger here. but I'm living in your land. I've been here for a while." And God says, I want you to make sure you're taking care of them. Because just like Israel had spent 400 years down there in the land of Egypt, and they got oppressed badly, they got vexed badly, God says, hey, look, you learned your lesson down there. You know what it's like to feel that way. You don't want it no more. Don't do it to them that way. They might be different than you. They might be someone who it's really hard for you to be able to sit here and empathize with, to quite grasp what they're saying. But God says, I want you to go and deal with them properly. As a matter of fact, it's so much so that God actually gives these strangers, these individuals, a very rare privilege of legal recourse in the land of Israel. That's not something that was known throughout the world, that this was something that was rare, something that was unique to Israel. And God says, these individuals, these strangers, you don't take care of them, I'll take care of them, and I'm also going to take care of you. I'm going to whoops you if you don't sit here and do right. It's saying the same thing to us nowadays, church. So what if they're different? Treat them with the same respect and kindness would want for you, that you would want for you. The golden rule, do unto others as you have others do unto you. That sort of thing there. God says those who are different, those who are downtrodden, I want to watch out for them and I want you to be able to watch out for them as well. Now besides from the different people, The downtrodden also includes the defenseless. Verse number 22 says, "...ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child." And that word afflict means to oppress. You are just putting them in a bad situation here. You are depressing them. You are hurting them in every way, shape, and form. God says, don't you dare do it. Now, this was a patriarchal society. Now what in the world does that fancy five dollar word mean? Patriarchal. That means it started just a few years before women's lit. That means the man's in charge and the man had the responsibility of taking care of his family. He's supposed to go out there and earn the money. He's supposed to go out there and provide shelter for his family. He's supposed to be taking care of them so that the wife can take care of the family itself there in the home. Now God says if there's suddenly no husband around, no daddy around, and we've got here a widow, we've got a fatherless child, God says you're supposed to go and defend them, not afflict them. You're supposed to go out of your way to be a help to them, a blessing to them, not a curse to them, not something that just runs them down, something that runs them over. You're supposed to be helping them. Unfortunately in our society today, we are too much to the point where we're throwing the fathers out all together and putting ourselves in a bad situation and we're sitting here attacking anyone and everybody. I can do it on my own. God says you're not supposed to be trying to do it on your own, you're supposed to be doing it with Him. But people are trying to get more than what they're supposed to be. God says that's just going to cause problems. People who are ignoring God, God says, I'm here to defend you. I'm here to help you. But these people got to do things on their own. We get in trouble that way. We don't follow God. We're not following after Him. We're going to cause problems. Now God says, listen. I've pointed out the defenses to you. I've pointed out the different people to you. They're downtrodden. But I want you to know something. I've got a declaration for you. Now this is important. Verse number 23, If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry all unto me, I will surely heal them. And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless. Now God says for any reason, He says if they cry out at all, any way, any shape, any form, they cry out for help, I'm going to come their way. Now, quite frankly, we can look at that in our modern times here. And, you know, I'm going to get on my soapbox here a little bit, and you all can throw me out afterward if you feel like it. You can throw me out right after I say it. I don't much care. But we've got one segment in our society that is utterly defenseless, that we do an absolute superb job of attacking. As a matter of fact, New York just became one of these states that said, okay, you can go and kill that unborn baby right at the very moment it's about to exit the womb. An abortion is attacking the completely defenseless. And we wonder why our nation is getting worse and worse. We keep legalizing sin. We keep making this legalized sin worse and worse, and making it more and more legal, and we are causing ourselves problems. And God is going to judge the United States of America. He's already started, and it's going to get bad, church. Because we're not standing up for the offenses. We're not standing up for those who are different. We're sitting here saying, who cares? But God's saying, if they cry out at all to me, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take care of it. I'm going to answer and you're going to answer for it. If one attacked one of these, he says, I'm going to attack you. Now when he talks about here that my wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sword, he's talking about in war. We're so bad nowadays, we've got war out there on our own streets with as much as we can possibly muster. All the gangs going on, all the stray shootings, illegal guns, and child prostitution, forced prostitution, child abductions, kidnappings. They just busted that place down there in Florida who had been importing those women from China to work as sex slaves in the massage parlors. And God says, guess what? I'm going to judge that war that you all are bringing upon yourselves. Because you are not sitting here defending these people who deserve the defense. You are not standing up for the people who need someone to stand up for them. It's going to come upon you. Now there's a deal here that God says He's going to make, or that we need to honor, I should say. In verse number 25, and we're moving through this fast here because God's already said what He wanted to say and He moved on to the next. We're just going to follow suit. Verse 25. It says, If thou lend money to any of My people that is poor by thee. In other words, they ain't got nowhere near as much money as you do, so they're poor in comparison. Thou shalt not be to him as an user, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury. So what's the deal? It's one thing to charge a little bit of interest. I believe God is dead set against MasterCard and Visa and all that because they ain't charging a little bit of interest. Anyone got a credit card? You can say amen right there. It is a whole lot of interest that they charge. God didn't have a problem with a little bit of interest. What He had a problem with was the excessive amount of interest. The amount of interest that makes it so difficult you can't pay back the debt. God says, don't you dare do that. That ain't the type of deal that I am going to allow you to do. Now, their society here back in Bible times, they really didn't have coin money. You know, they would take away silver and gold and give it to you by the weight, but they didn't actually have any coins. Yeah, I ain't got no coins on me either at the moment. I might have a couple of dollar bills. Praise the Lord, the wife left me with two dollars. They didn't have the money. So they would use a barter system. I will trade you this for that. I will do this particular service or job that you need done to pay for this thing over here. And it worked. It worked out fine for them. They didn't have a banking system. They didn't have their credit cards. They didn't have checking accounts, savings, bonds, none of that stuff there. But they would work toward paying off their bills. That's right. But to sit here and to add interest onto what is owed, onto this debt here, would be crippling for their society. It would be crippling toward the very people. In fact, we can look over to the book of Nehemiah, chapter number 5, and we can see very clearly there about how the people were being hit with all this interest. They had mortgaged their houses. They had mortgaged their crops. They had been selling their own kids into slavery to pay the taxes that were due. And the people are charging them interest on top of all that. How are they going to think they're going to be able to afford to eat? Much less be able to pay those taxes after a while. Nehemiah says, uh-uh. We're getting back to the Bible. We're getting back to what God says, and you all are going to knock off all this interest you're charging. I wish someone would do that to my credit cards. Praise God, that would be awesome. But it ain't going to happen. But you know what? God says, I'll allow the deal. But you're going to have to do it my way. And we need to be honoring that exact same thing our own way. Avoid that stuff. Get ourselves out of debt and stay out of debt. Praise God. That'd be a great commercial for Crown College or the Crown Institute. I'm sorry, they're the ones with all that legal stuff there. But avoid that crippling stuff. So that God can use us properly. So many times we see People can't afford to even pay their tithes because they've got so much bills that they're worried about. God says, take care of me first, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but render unto God the things that are God's. Now, part of the way that they would do with their finances, they understood they have a debt, and sometimes they wouldn't actually be able to pay the debt off that same day. It would require a second day, a third day, a week, or whatever the case would be. So, what they would do is they would give a deposit. Verse number 26, it says that thou would all take thy neighbor's raiment to pledge. Thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down. Now, that doesn't mean, okay, you take this deposit for the one day, he still owes you money for the next three or four days, but, you know, he got his coat back that same day. That's not what it means. By daytime, whoever The debt was owed to, you give them their coat. So that coat that they have to sit there and take off, says okay, thank you Miss Betty for the loan, here's my coat as a deposit. And I go and I do whatever it is I gotta do, the end of day comes. Well Miss Betty, I know it ain't all the money I owe you, but here's half of what I owe you. She's supposed to give me my coat back. But the problem is, so often, just like she went and she put her hand over there, people would say, no, you haven't paid me all of my money. You're not getting your coat back yet. God says that's not how it's supposed to be. You're supposed to give him back the coat so he can put it on, because he's going to be cold at night. He needs to stay warm. And God says, I'm watching out for the poor, those downtrodden, those people who can't afford these bills as is. I want to watch out for them. The next day I've got to come back, I still owe her money, I've got to give her my coat all over again, and when I get the rest of the money, I come and I pay her back. She either gives me my coat back because it's the end of the day, or she gives me my coat back because I paid her back. God says you can do the deposit thing, but every night it goes back to the one who owns it. If you hold on to it, if you are not going to sit here and take and fulfill your end of the bargain, I'm going to get you. God's watching out for those downtrodden. And the whole thing about it is, church, this. It's all so simple to obey. But we have to be willing to do our part. If we're not willing to do our part, yeah, we're going to end up having problems. God says, you watch out for these downtrodden here, and I'm going to take care of you. Maybe He takes care of us in a way we weren't expecting. Maybe He takes care of us in a way that it really doesn't look like it's helping us out any. But if God's given it to us, then it's going to help us out. It's going to be what we need. It's going to be that little unexpected miracle, that little unexpected direction that we weren't looking for. It does not always have to be money. It does not always have to be some sort of physical blessing. But if we'll follow His rules, and I realize this is Old Testament. This is the law. We may not be under the law, we're under grace now, but who says we are no longer obligated to follow these as a guidance? As guidelines? God says these are great guidelines. If these weren't great guidelines, guess what? Once Jesus got there on the cross at Calvary and rose again on the third day, parts of the Old Testament just instantly went blank. We wouldn't need them no more. They're still written there. So they have not been completely fulfilled. Jesus said that no jot or tittle will fail, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm not quoting, until everything's done. It ain't been done yet. Which brings me to the last part, the disclosure of verse number 27. It says, for that is His covering only. It is His raiment for His skin. Wherein shall He sleep? And it shall come to pass when He crieth unto me, that I will hear, for I am gracious. Number one, disclosure. He needs it to sleep with. We're talking about that. He gets it back at night. So it's non-negotiable, end of story. He says he will complain to me. Not to Dennis, but to God. God says they're going to complain to me if you don't do what you're supposed to do. And I'm telling you now, this ain't a matter of cow tailing. This is a matter of their rights. This is a matter of what he deserves. And you're going to do it, buster, and you're going to get it. And then God says thirdly, I will hear him. I'm so glad for that. Because even in the times when I have been seemingly as far away from him as possible, when I have asked, when I've gone to him, I've confessed my sins, he has heard me. When I've complained about something going on, he has heard me. When I've made a request for something, he has heard me. I've said it time and time again, I'm being able just to get over here on time on Saturdays. Y'all know, until a couple years ago, I used to be able to show up here in a suit. The route I had, I was able to stop off at home, take a quick shower, get changed into a suit, and head on over here. Now, with this new route, I ain't got time to do that. I gotta come straight from work, straight to here. Praise God, I made it. That's a blessing to me. That's Him saying, I heard you guys. You asked for My help, and I heard it. I've answered. Yeah, I had the one time a few months back, Miss Betty beat me here, and I didn't get here until after 10, but you know what? I still made it here in time. Because everyone was already gathered here that day. Praise the Lord for that. God says He will hear. And to the downtrodden, this ain't just to those who are quote unquote, better than the downtrodden. Those who are supposed to be helping the downtrodden up, but to the downtrodden themselves, God says, I will hear you. I will help you. You've got to work with me as well. Are we willing to work with God? That's something that only we can answer for ourselves if we're willing to work with Him, through Him, by Him. I've got just one question here in closing for you. And it's simply this. How are we treating one another? Heavenly Father, we thank You, Lord, for all that You've done for us. We pray, Lord, for Your blessings upon us today. Lord, I don't know why You wanted this particular sermon here this morning, but You obviously did. And we're grateful, Father, for the opportunity to present it. I do pray, Lord, that everything that it was meant for got exactly what they needed out of it. I thank You, Lord, for what You showed me in there as well. We love You, Father, and in Jesus' name we do pray. Amen and Amen. So the next page of our song book will be our closing song for today.