Let's talk about some of the great things that our maker's been doing. Not just done in the past, but this week something happened. I got the strangest phone call I've had in a long time. My wife answered the phone. She goes, hello? Uh, yeah? Who is this? Sharon? Sharon in California? That's my sister. I haven't communicated with her directly in 20 years. You say, well, you hate your sister? No, I don't, I love her. I just don't like her. Do you hang around with people you don't like? No. Do you interact with people you don't like? No. You kind of do what's necessary in your responsibility as a family member. You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends and you can pick who you hang around with. But the strange thing about this phone call was the basic phone call had nothing to do with our relationship. Out of about 90 minute phone call, we spent maybe five to seven minutes talking about the past, just a little bit. And then she said, well, the real reason I called, you know, I've been in a lot of different churches and taught a lot of different things only to find out later on they're not the truth. And she says, I know you know something about the Bible more than I know. She said, God's been urging me to call you for the last three or four months. Now, you don't understand what's going on around here. God is doing something here, and you can't find anything higher in the Word of God, or at least I haven't found anything higher in the Word of God, than His glory. Well, if He's doing stuff like getting my sister to call me after 20 years with one specific purpose, He's doing something, and He's doing it for Himself. How many opportunities do we miss on a daily basis to talk to somebody else about the magnificence of our creator and his abilities and his pure genius in what he's made? Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power. Where's he gonna get his glory from? Thou shalt glorify me. You been glorifying him? You know? How about honor? You honor your father? You want to live a long time? How about forever? Start honoring him. And what about the power? Do you actually give him power over your life when he touches your heart about things or do you just take back control and say, well, I'm just not comfortable. I just don't have enough time. I'm not trying to pressure you into witnessing or nothing like that. I'm trying to get you to start speaking from your heart about the things that God has already taught you about himself. One preacher said, light rejected becomes lightning. He said, what does that mean? When God gives you something, you get it back out. That keeps everything fresh and clean. It not only does that, it reinforces what God's taught you. Out of the abundance of the heart, mouth speaks. I was talking to a good, good friend of mine last night on the phone, talked for quite a while. More than half the time, tears just running down my eyes. How come? Talking about God, talking about His greatness, talking about the great and wonderful things that He's doing. I mean, I can't take credit for anything. Brother Mark can't take credit for anything. I can't take credit for my sister calling. I can't take credit for my wife going to the hospital. I can't take credit for the changes that have been taking place around here. But I can tell somebody about them. You ought to be talking about some of this stuff to somebody else. If you will do those things, the Lord will do something in your life. And I never speak about Him in those terms when it comes out of my heart that I'm not lifted up emotionally, I don't feel a joy and a pleasure that I can't get from anything else on this planet. Anyway, let's move along here. My only passion in these things, really, is to focus on our maker and appreciate him more. That was my desire the whole time I was talking to my sister. I felt nothing between her and I. 20 years of not speaking and the reasons for it and all that stuff clear back to childhood. I felt nothing. There was none of that inside of me. I had no bitter feelings, no bad feelings, no good feelings. They were just gone. My only desire was to draw her attention to him. That's what I wanted. I mean, after all, we spent way too much time focusing on ourself, haven't we? I mean, really haven't. Didn't you spend too much time on yourself this last week? Well, maybe change something this week. I say, lighten up, lighten up. You know what? One day we're going to say, boy, I wish he hadn't been so easy on us. That's right. Didn't you hear me up here say I've regretted the way I've been taught by the Laodicean church about working for God instead of about how magnificent he is so that I could fall in love with him more and more? And that's why I started loving him. That place over there in Revelation 2 where it talks about that first church, that is the perfect Laodicean church. And if you read 1 through 4 down through there, it talks about how you left your first love. He said, I know thy works. He says, but I have somewhat to say against thee. Thou hast left thy first love. And when I got saved, that was the love He's talking about. And for years and years and years, I was away from that love and it wasn't out of choice on my part. It wasn't like, well, God, I'm gonna do this in spite of everything else I've been taught and told. It was just working a lot of times just because it was the right thing to do and I felt nothing from it other than just the sense of maybe a little relief that, well, I went to church today, I did what I was supposed to do. I'd have felt worse if I'd have stayed home That's a sad way to live as a Christian. I know for sure that's not a easy yoke and a light burden. Anyway, let's move along here. Let's talk about something else God did. 145, three to four, over in Psalms, naturally. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts. Let's praise our maker for another one of his wonderful works. What is it? Dragonfly. Dragonfly, yeah, those things are wild. There's about 457 species that they've counted. The reason they call them dragonflies is because the kind of jaws they've got. Those things are eating machines. They're carnivorous. They eat insects and fish and tadpoles. You say fish, yeah, they eat small fish and eat tadpoles. Those tadpoles, that's something else that's really interesting. Those dragonflies get a hold of one of those tadpoles and start to eat on it. That tadpole puts out some kind of a weird warning as he's being eaten. All these other tadpoles and things change color and then they can move faster than they ever did before and they get away. But anyway. This guy's got real big eyes and they're multifaceted up to about 30,000 facets. Each one of these facets comes down and connects back into this thing's brain. You imagine the size of that thing's head. The eyes are bigger than its brain. And so here comes these 30,000 facets into the brain. Do you realize proportionately what we ought to be able to do? That thing flies around 20 miles an hour. He'd cover about 40 feet in a little over a second. He can see that far for his prey. Can you imagine seeing a mosquito 40 feet away? Sometimes I hear him buzzing and I still don't see him. That rascal's got some really good radar. He's got a way that God has given him to go find those things. Now they used to have all kinds of crazy theories about them, how they were from the devil, devil flies, you know, and all this other stuff. But they're really a good bug to have around. They're a little bit like ladybugs because they eat all these bad insects that bother us, you know, especially mosquitoes. They got a really neat flying ability. They got two sets of wings and both of those things independently operated. And Sikorsky, when he started figuring out how to build that helicopter, especially that one with a front rotor and a tail rotor, especially that one, you got studying those things and trying to figure out how to make that thing work. And the way those things fly around, they got two sets of wings, and one set of those wings is for lift, and the other one's for propulsion. So this front set was going forward, lifts him up, and the back one's pushing him along. Got little tiny muscles connected to these big old wings out there, so the muscle barely has to move, and these wings flying all over the place. That'd be like us having an arm as long as this pew and putting 100 pounds out on it and just lifting it up, no problem. And do it real fast, too. We wouldn't have any problem flying if we could hook something up to our muscles like that. I mean, even if we had some wings we could put on there if we could move them that fast. You just can't do it. We're a product of evolution, and boy, we sure have degenerated, haven't we? Wouldn't you like to have eyes in the back of your head to be able to see all around you all the time? I wouldn't mind having that. Anyway, he can fly forward, stationary, both go into lift, no propulsion. He can fly backwards, back straight up. First time I saw one of those Harrier jets over here at the Naval Air Show, you know, and that rascal come flying in and I had aeroplane and know a little bit about stall speeds and all that other stuff. And when I saw him coming in across, I said, man, that guy, he's gonna stall, man. Oh, he's already stalled. He's not crashing. I'd never even seen one up till then. That thing pulled up in front of us and stopped. But anyway, this rascal can do that stuff. Not only that, he can fly around when he's chasing after food. He's got the most incredible flight capabilities of about anything out there. They say that those things are one of the most difficult things there is to catch. You get out there with a net and start trying to catch one of them, and that rascal can chase around and go different angles and turn directions. When he starts turning a corner, You got to curve around like that. So what he does, instead of his front wings and back wings operating together, then one side over here starts working and the other side over here works different. So with that little tiny brain, he can not only see through those 30,000 facets, but he can control flight better than we can. We can't build anything like that. God not only builds them, he makes them reproduce. He not only makes them reproduce, he makes them good bugs so that they go out there and destroy the stuff we pay pest control people to get rid of for us. And he does it with 457 species of every different color you can imagine. And they got really strong wings. They're clear, transparent, and when that rascal comes out, he metamorphoses out, comes up, and he pumps fluid into those wings. Remember that story I told you about that emperor moth? It's like that. And what's really unusual is the cells around the outside of those wings are bigger than all the rest of the cells to start with, while they're collapsed inside of that little cocoon thing. So when he comes up and he pumps all that fluid into there, the cells around the perimeter are much larger and much stronger. Airplanes got things that build strength into it, unitized body construction, you know, a lot of them got this main spar underneath the wings that go out there and supports made out of really good material. Now, I designed all that stuff in. He designed all the colors in. He did it in a moment. He talks about the waters bringing forth the creature which hath life and the creeping things. And these things are born out of larvae in the water, they hatch out, they metamorphose into a little bigger critter, and then they morphose into this thing that's flying around. They're quite a character. So why'd God do that? So we'd appreciate him more. He gave us the ability to study those things and understand them. He said, Who's the Word of Truth? The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us. Without Him was nothing made that was made. If you think that's just a reference to what's written in this book, You've made a mistake. Once again, you've underestimated God. What do you study? You study His creation. You study the sun, the moon, the stars. You study the trees. You know, like Brother Mark said, picks up that one little blade of grass. Study that. Anyway, I'm going to jump back on some of God's mighty acts and mighty works. I'm convinced that that Psalm 145 verses three and four is a lot more involved than you give credit to just by reading it, although it's pretty impressive just to read it. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise thy works to another and shall declare thy mighty acts. And why does he say to do that? You think that's just a matter of him saying, hey, I deserve it, give me the praise. Why did he give you free will then? Because it's not a command performance, it's a, you should do these things. You think that'll change somebody if that was being done? No doubt about it. Kids can't have somebody bragging on their dad or their mother constantly without gaining a lot of respect for them. You gotta have something busted inside of you to have a really good parent, have everybody else recognize it, and you not see it because you're so selfish and stingy and so self-absorbed that all it does is offend you when somebody's bragging on them. But as God's children, if we were to keep bragging on Him from the time we got saved until right now, our relationship with Him would be different than it is. It just would. Anyway, that's the effort to talk about some of the things that God's doing. And instead of just looking at the Bible from the perspective like we used to of, what does God want to show us out of this? What do we want to understand? Hear and tell basically some new thing that's so impressive to us. It'd be like, oh, that's cool. Oh, I never heard that before. Oh, that's neat. You want to come out of here, if you can, with your attention on the Lord, not on what was taught, not on how different that was, or I never heard that before, or I disagree with that, you know. The idea is that if your attention's on the Lord when you're done with whatever's going on, it's profitable. If it's on the message, it's kind of passive. If it's on the one that delivered it, that ain't no good at all because that's counterproductive. Your attention's on the wrong thing then. Your attention should be on the Lord, or at least, if nothing else, it ought to be on what He said. But the best thing is whatever He tells us draws our attention to Him and magnifies Him in our mind and in our heart and in our sight. Anyway, over in Genesis, He says, And God said on the sixth day, Let the earth bring forth a living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping things, and the beast of the earth after his kind. And it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind. And God saw that it was good." So he gets done with the creation, and the last thing he makes before he starts forming man, you know, that wasn't just say, let this happen. He actually, like Brother Mark said a while back and demonstrated it somewhat, got down there and picked up the dust of the ground and formed a man out of the dust of the ground. And he didn't speak that into existence. There's something different about it, quite different, formed him in his image. But before he did that, he finished making all this stuff that's running around on the earth, the beasts and so forth. And one of his creations on the sixth day was a thing called a river horse. You ever heard of a river horse? You have, you just didn't know what the name meant. A river horse, that's a hippopotamus. Now these things are huge, they really are. Up to 7,000 pounds those things get up to. That is one monster animal. It spends most of its time in the water. And it breathes about once every six minutes going up and down in the water. I mean, it'll get over there in shallow water and keep its head out of the water enough where it keeps breathing a lot of times when it's awake. But that rascal will actually sleep underwater and about every six minutes it'll come to the top Take a breath and then sink back down, just like we turn over in our sleep. Never even wake up, just come up and get a breath, go back down. Its nose and eyes are placed right on the top of its head. How come? Because God said, okay, I designed you to do all of these things. Made him specific, that thing was not something that evolved because it went down in the water, his eyes moved. This stuff is just like everything man makes. You don't throw a pile of lumber out there on the ground and hope it evolves. They say, oh, when it take too long, it'll rot away. Everything in nature is proof that the stuff has to be designed. Even if you threw it all out here with all the materials, it wouldn't come together. Well, how are you going to get something to evolve with the copper in the right place, and the insulation on the wires in the right place, and the switches, and the springs, and the nails, and the screws, and the concrete, and the rebar, and the plastic underneath it? How are you going to get that stuff to happen? You say, oh, well, that's different. No, it's not. Man, these creatures that we're talking about were designed specifically unique to that creature. There's nothing else that crosses that boundary and says, oh, well, here's the other semblances of it. Well, they all have eyes. You got to sure stretch that stuff to believe with that kind of nonsense. It takes a lot more faith to be an evolutionist than it takes to believe in God. It just does. I mean, everything proves the fact that this stuff was designed. In fact, you listen to these evolutionists, they'll start talking about design. Evolution designed it. Mother Nature designed it. His nose and eyes are on top of his head and he can get all the way down that water where you just barely see a couple little bumps for his nose and a couple bumps for his eyes. You don't know water actually over the top of his forehead and everything. That's all that's sticking up. He's pretty ferocious. Doesn't sound like it. He's pretty docile when he's in the water. But that rascal's got teeth up to 18 inches long. I mean, you get bit by one of those, you've been bit. Now that thing's got a monster mouth. It's mouth's bigger than any other animal. It can open that mouth 180 degrees. Say, how in the world does it do that? That whole top jaw just moves on back. Say, why does it do that? Well, I guess it was necessary. Evolution had to make it do that. You crazy people. God made it do that. Why'd he make it do that? Because he liked it. That's why he made the critter to start with. And he says, okay, now that I've made you, I want you to bring forth after your kind, and all of that takes place too. And it doesn't become a hippo dino or something. It doesn't cross across over there, you know, and become half this and half that. All that stuff just keeps producing after its kind. How come there's not crossing over all of this stuff? Well, they do, like a donkey and a horse, and you end up with a mule, and they don't reproduce. How come? If evolution's in effect, how come you haven't got more of this stuff crossing across? Well, it takes millions of years. There's the magic wand again. This thing was designed and created just like this building, just like these fans. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. I mean, one of these days we're going to start talking about this stuff. And if you think this other stuff's unreal, he doesn't say anything like that to them. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Anyway, so he can open his mouth up, and on land, this guy's an adversary. You get one of these rascals at 7,000 pounds chasing you, you think you can outrun it? 30 miles an hour. 30 miles an hour. 7,000 pounds, 30 miles an hour. I guarantee you, if something like that crashed into your vehicle, you'd take the worst end of the hit. It's said that those things have killed more people than any other animal in Africa. How come? Well, you just kind of look at them, underestimate them. I heard one guy talking about African lions and he said almost every person ever killed by an African lion underestimated how far it could jump. And you would not believe how far one of them cats can spring, as big as they are. It's kind of like this thing here, you just wouldn't believe it. Anyway, moving along here. God gave it half-inch skin to protect it. I mean, our skin isn't anywhere near that thick. It spends its time underwater. I mean, can you imagine you being underwater constantly? You talk about some kind of a washed-out white prune-looking thing. You get washing dishes for any length of time, you start getting wrinkly skin, you know, you go out there and wash your car or something like that, and your fingers all start wrinkling up. This rascal spends days at a time down there in the water. Well, what keeps it from getting out and then the skin all drying out and cracking? God gave it a real special set of glands. And when that rascal gets out of that water, there's a reddish pink oil that comes out and starts lubricating his whole body. But it doesn't happen until it gets out of the water. So does he do that on purpose? Is it set up to just do it when it gets into oxygen? I don't know. When it dries out, it just starts doing it. I don't know. It's kind of like you. When you start getting hot, do you have to turn on your air conditioning system and start sweating? No. Why? Because it's designed India. You know, you have to go over to your house and change the thermostat, don't you? I mean, you've got to change it from heat to cool. If you've got a real automatic thermostat, you know, you're really rich and you can waste the money. It'll go from heat to cool within a few hours and you'll be running the heater and then running the air conditioner, then the heater will come back on. Why does it do that? To keep you real comfortable. Most of these schools, they're running hot air duct and a cold air duct right beside each other and then mixing the stuff together for each individual room. Can you imagine paying to heat it up, paying to cool it off, and then mixing them back together to come up with nothing? That's what they do. I mean, God's built you in such a way you don't even have to go change your thermostat. And I'm sure he built this hippopotamus the same way. That rascal's oil ducts come on and he starts coating his skin with this reddish oil, and that stuff not only keeps his skin so soft, but it also protects it from insects. and it's also a healing agent. So if it gets scratched or hurt or something up there and they get in big old fights with each other, it repairs that skin. And you say, what's the point in this thing? That's some of the scuff that your father, listen, your father enjoyed making. You want to know more about him? You study what he did and why he did it. You don't just look at it and say, oh, that's interesting. God, why'd you put an 18-inch tooth in that rascal? I just thought it'd be cool. You think so? Listen, he made that stuff when he got done. He said, and God saw that it was good. I just like it. Those are neat critters. Well, let's close in prayer this morning.