And I'm going to ask you all to stand for the reading of the Word. The title of the message today is, The Mystery of a Mother's Love. We'll come back to the book of Romans next week. The Mystery of a Mother's Love. We're going to look at Isaiah chapter 49, verse 15 and 16. The Mystery of a Mother's Love. Isaiah 49, 15 and 16. The word of our Lord. Can a woman forget her nursing child and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands. Your walls are continually before me. Heavenly Father, today, Lord God, it is a true mystery of the great love that You put into the heart of a mother for her child. And Father God, I pray today, Lord God, that we would just look more deeply into this mystery. That Your Holy Spirit, Lord God, would uncover where this love comes from, and that we'd see the very heart of God. that you have imparted to mothers, Lord God, across this world throughout the ages. Father, be glorified here. Help us to know your love in a greater way. Help us to fall in a deeper, deeper love with you, Jesus. And be glorified here in your holy name. Amen. So, In this passage, God is comparing His love, His love for us, with the love that a mother has for her nursing child. And what the Lord is saying here in Isaiah chapter 49, 15, and 16 is, My love is even greater than this strong, mysterious love that a mother has for her child. Now there are a number of verses that you'll see in the Bible that compare God's love to a mother's love. This, again, this amazing, this mysterious love. You think about this, that a mother's love for her children is one of the strongest forces that you will find in the world. from the time of conception and her carrying the child through the pain of childbirth. And how many of you experienced this? They go through that. By the way, you know, I don't think it's that bad. I just wanted to... Every mother in this church hates me now. I'm teasing. I thank the Lord every day that I'm not a woman. You guys have to deal with a whole set of things that we don't. You really do. And with being a husband of a wife, and having a mom, and having two daughters, and having a granddaughter, I see the challenge. Actually, two granddaughters now, the challenges you face. But the love that literally, again, carries you through the pain of childbirth, and then the amazing wonder that washes over your face, the love that washes over your face and the smile that suddenly just erupts on your face as you look at your baby for the first time. Remember that day, Rachel? I remember. We got into the delivery room with Rachel John and baby John. They let us in and she just had the baby in five minutes. And I looked and said, boy, this room's a mess. There was blood on the floor and stuff. And she goes, I just had the baby. But it was a beautiful thing to see my little grandson and to see my daughter holding him in her arms and just, I mean, after, again, you were in labor for about a day, right? And then all of a sudden all that pain is gone and the joy is suddenly there. The endurance through exhausting days and sleepless nights. The joy of seeing the fruits of your labor as your children flourish and grow. the endurance of dealing with them during the teen years and all their kookiness. And I have this picture there because it reminds me of my daughter and wife, right? There's Rachel saying, what the heck? And that love matures as her children mature and they grow older. In the book of Genesis, chapter 1, 26 and 27, it says, Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over the creeping things that creep on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created the male and female. He created them. I want you to notice, again, the concept of man here. It's talking about both men and women. when he created man, in other words, we are both in, again, this creation of mankind. But, you know, when you look at this, and I wanna just be careful with what I say to you here, God is our father. God is not our mother, okay? And when Jesus said, and Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the son of God, he is the revelation of God, the very word of God, he is the second person of the Trinity. And when Jesus was here, he said, when you pray, pray our father. God is our Father. I was in a meeting, some of you were with me, we were in a meeting honoring one of the brothers here in the church who was being taken on to a town council here in Bergen County, and they had a woman there who prayed. Remember, Sammy, that day, and she prayed? our mother in heaven. And the only reason I didn't get up out of my chair and walk out is because I was there to honor this brother. I would have in any other situation. It's just blasphemy. It's blasphemy and it's heresy. God is not our mother. He is our father. That is what you call feminist theology that is infiltrated into the church. And it's a false teaching. It's deception and it's from Satan. God is our father. But think of this. Think of this. It makes sense. that when he created men, he created men with a very strong love. And you can see that. Any husband and wife, you see the strong love of a father. Not that he can't be tender, but he's got the strong love. And he also created women with that tender love of a mother. And you'll find both that strong love in the heart of God and you find the tender love of God in his heart. All good comes from God. And the mysterious love of a mother has come from God. So I want to share with you, I want to share with you five thoughts here this morning. The first is the mystery of a mother's nurturing love. And you look at, in fact, right from the beginning of the birth of a child, it's the mother's love that awakens the love in the heart of the child. So you have this loving mother, she's got that nurturing stare that she looks into the very face of this precious little baby. And then one day, and think of this moms, I've seen this with my children, with my wife, I just had the privilege of seeing it with my daughter Chrissy and her daughter Beatrice. One day, as you look at that child, all of a sudden that child, suddenly the love in the child's heart is awakened by your love and that child looks up at you and suddenly, right, it just smiles. Remember that first smile? But it's the love of the child that's being awakened by the mother's love. And it is the love of God that awakens the love in the heart of a human being. It tells us in 1st John chapter 419, we love because He first loved us. So I want to ask you this this morning, how many of you, how many of you love God? How many of you love the Father? How many of you love Yeshua? You love Him, just don't be afraid to lift up your hands. I hope you understand, if you don't love Him, you haven't come to know Him. And to know Him is what salvation is, according to Jesus in John 17.3. But we love Him. But why do we love Him? Did we just decide to love Him? Did I just decide to love Him when I was 23 years old? I love Him because He first loved me. I love him because one day his love came into my heart and overflowed my heart. Those waves of love began to flow over my soul. I began to grasp on to his sacrificial love, his nurturing love, his compassionate love. It's an amazing thing, the love of God. It's so powerful that it could bring the most prideful man or woman to their knees in humble adoration. It is so powerful that it can soften the hardest heart. It is so powerful that it can awaken the deadest soul. God loves us, and you know what? He's created us with a need to be loved by Him. During World War II, There were thousands of little orphan babies that the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy had taken in to their hospitals. They were from the Philippines, they were from Malaysia, and they were from other islands in the Pacific. Their parents had been killed in the horrors and destruction of war. Well, they brought them in and they gave them the very best food, they gave them the very best medicines, and the children continued to die. day after day. And they couldn't figure it out. So there was this one doctor who realized that the children needed more than just food or medicine. And they had this major recruiting campaign in the United States and they brought out all of these young nurses They staffed the hospitals with them, and these young nurses had one responsibility, and that was to just simply hold the children. Hold them, feed them, nurture them, caress them, love them, and the children stopped dying. And if that's not an example of the human need to be loved, if we are not being loved, You know what? We die. Maybe it's a slow death, but we die. I see a lot of people, you know, they're dying of old age. I often wonder how many people are just dying because they're not loved. So we do a lot of things to extend life, right? We go, we exercise, we eat right, we take supplements, we go on medications. I think there might be something that's even more needed than those things, and that's just simply love. The love of God in our lives. In Zephaniah 3.17 it says, The Lord your God is with you. He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing. Look at that, He will quiet you. Have you ever been quieted by the love of God? You know, we become at times chaotic. We become confused. We become anxious. And then you just get into the presence of God, and the Spirit of God just touches you with that warm, comforting love. So my grandson, Giancarlo, when he falls, myself, his dad, his uncle Frank, we'll say to him, get up, suck it up, come on, right? He's got tears in his eyes. I'd say, come on, be a man. He's three years old, right? This is what men do, right? And we're tender with him. But you know who he always cries for? Mommy. And you know what, dad? No matter how hard you try, he's gonna still cry for mommy. Ask my son Frank, right? He still cries for mommy. And you know, he'll try to hold back those... I'm talking about little Giancarlo. He'll try to hold back his tears. He'll try to hold back his tears. You know, he'll bite his lip. But as soon as mommy comes, she comforts him. She quiets his love. The second is the mystery of a mother's faithful love. And a mother's love is faithful. It stays up late at night with their screaming baby. I watched my wife, I think it was about seven months with Chrissy, she had colic every night. Just staying up and then God bless Chrissy with a colicky baby and now she's been staying up every night. God's got a sense of humor, you know. It's a love that endures exhausting days of changing diapers and cleaning up messes. Rachel, you ever clean up messes? It patiently persists in innumerable and unmentionable ways, even when no thanks are given in return. Right? No thanks sometimes. A mother's love is faithful, a mother's love is resilient and a mother's love is consistent. In Psalm 91 verse 4 it says, He will cover you with His pinions and under His wings you will seek refuge. His faithfulness is a shield and a bulwark. He surrounds us with his faithfulness. It's a stockade around us. And you look at that verse, it's a mother, right? Just placing her wings over her babies. She's a refuge to them, a shield to her children. And a mother's faithfulness is a shield around their children's lives. And again, it is a reflection of the very faithfulness of God. God is faithful. 1 Corinthians 1.9, God is faithful. And the scriptures repeat that over and over. God's love is faithful and it is resilient. It is consistent. It is immutable. You hear the word immutable? It's unchanging. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. He's not like us. He's not flaky. He's not flighty. You can rely on Him and you can trust Him. And even if you deny Him, He will still be faithful to you because He cannot deny Himself. And I want to share with you about the faithfulness of God. I've learned more at times about the loving faithfulness of God in my life when I have failed than when I've succeeded. I've learned more of the faithfulness of God in my weakness than I have in my strength. I've learned more of the faithfulness of God when I've been down than when I've been up. When I'm doing good, the expectation is always, again, this is the human nature, it's kind of what we've been studying in Romans. You become prideful, you become self-righteous. And the thought is, well, you know, God, I'm doing it, so therefore, you know, you're just gonna be there for me no matter what and do what I want. When you're failing, you know that you don't deserve. You know that you're unworthy. And that is where God, again, that faithful love of God just comes pouring into your life. In Deuteronomy 31, 16, be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them. For the Lord your God goes with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Have you found that to be true? He has been faithful to me for 37 years. And I have never experienced a day where God has not been faithful in my life. Totally, 100% faithful. And he's always the same. Number three. The mystery of a mother's protective love. And a mother's love is protective. I'll say this. There are times it can't always protect. And some of you have experienced that. You're doing your best to protect your children. And you know at times just, look, I don't understand it all. We talk about, you know, the bitterness and sweetness of being a mom and some of you have experienced bitterness because there were times that there were things that were out of your control that happened. But a mother's love is a protective love. You could see it, you could see it in nature. Let me just... This is a video. Here we go. Just look at these two scenes. First the bear. She pulls him off the highway. Look at this mother dog. The guy's trying to dig out some type of well. Watch what the dog does. Isn't that great? It goes on and on. It shows here a mother's love. God has imprinted it in nature and in every woman's heart. Mothers, their love is protective. She's protective with her infant. Remember when your kids were infants? Every little sound, right? You go and you look at them just to make sure they were breathing, right? Just to make sure. Is their chest moving up and down, right? You're always alert. Every sound, you wake up. Slightest sound, you're up right there by the baby's side. During times of sickness, you're right there with them. You're always guarding against any potential harm. As the infant grows to childhood and later to adolescence, the mother still remains protective with her child. Sometimes in unusual ways, right? We'll tell you this story. Some of you have heard me tell this before. I got my 92-year-old mother living at my house today and these past weeks. But when I was a kid, we moved here from the city. And being an outsider and coming in, the kids basically were picking on me all the time and trying to beat me up. And this goes for kids that were my age and then, you know, two, three years older. So one day I was literally cowering in the house. They were out in front of my house. There were about 20 of them on their bikes and they wanted to beat me up. So my mother, and my father's at work, my mother comes up to me and she says, what are you doing in here? And I go, they're after me again. So she goes, come with me. And she brings me outside and puts me in front of them. And she says to them, you want to fight him? And they all were like, yeah, yeah, we want to fight him. She goes, OK, one at a time, who's first? So guess who stands up? Yeah, the biggest kid. And I'm just like standing now. I'm like shaking. I'm standing in my dirt driveway. I'm just like this. I'm like seven, eight years old. And this big kid comes up to me and he goes, he does this. And then all of a sudden he punches me right in the mouth. And I'll tell you, I could still feel the numbness. My mouth went numb. And for the next minute, I punched him, kicked him, bit him, spit on him, elbowed him and kneed him from one side of my driveway to the other until my mother had to pull me off of him. He was bleeding and he was crying. She had to pull me off of him because she was afraid I was going to kill him. Now, that sounds like a crazy, but my mother knew what was inside of me and I didn't at that time. And we were just telling that story around the dinner table the other night with her. But that was her way. And by the way, those kids never bothered me again. That was the end of it. And I became part of the gang. But mothers will do some extreme things to protect their kids. I want to show you another video. And if you remember the Baltimore riots, I've always wondered this, whenever I see riots in the United States or in Israel, when I see the Palestinian kids, little kids throwing rocks at soldiers with guns, I'm always wondering, where the heck are their mothers and fathers? Because if that was my kid, And listen, there could be a very righteous way of standing up against things that you feel are wrong, but I don't want my 12, 13, 14-year-old kid standing in front of policemen or soldiers with guns and him risking the rest of his entire life. So I'm going to go over and I'm going to grab him, okay, by the back of his pants, but here's a mother And the words are bleeped. And by the way, I just want to say this. Moms, dads, I would never recommend you slap your child in the face. Okay? In fact, if you're going to spank your kids, use a big, soft paddle. Don't hit them with your hand, first of all, because that's an immediate association with you. But I just want you to see, I don't know if, again, I approve of the way the mother did it, but I will tell you this, I certainly approve of what she did because I believe she was trying to save her son's life. Can we have sound? One new video shows what appears to be an angry, embarrassed mother taking out some frustration on her teenage son after discovering he was one of the troublemakers in Baltimore. Take a look. Well, you can hear the woman shout, I know that's you, before she rips off the teenager's mask. This video, as you can imagine, is getting a lot of attention online. Baltimore's police commission even took notice. Watch what the chief said. And if you saw on one scene, you had one mother who grabbed their child, who had a hood on his head, and she started smacking him on the head because she was so embarrassed. I wish I had more parents that took charge of the kids out there tonight. All of this. I mean, that's a mother protecting her kid in a very radical way. But mothers will do very radical things to protect their children. And I believe, again, that love, that protective love, is what God has put into people's hearts, into mothers' hearts. It tells us in Psalm 18, verse 3, I will love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer, my God, my strength in whom I trust, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised, so shall I be saved from my enemies. That is the very protective love of God that he has placed over our lives. Number four, the mystery of a mother's comforting love. And again, a mother's love is comforting. And my mom, a little over two weeks ago, she was rushed to the hospital. She had a heart surgery. They put in four stents. My mom is 92. Four heart stents and then After she's out of surgery, the surgeon comes in and he says to us, I got to call in a vascular surgeon because she's got a blockage of about a foot long in her thigh. So now we need to go in again. So she goes in again. She's in surgery for like three and a half hours. Now she goes in for another surgery. That's two and a half hours. I mean, I didn't know how hard surgery is on the body. And I wasn't sure, and my sister and I, we weren't sure she was going to make it, you know, make it through the night. And, you know, you believe she's going to go home to be with the Lord. But in the morning I go up and she's sitting up and, you know, she looks at me and says, so my knee was bothering me, really. It was bothering me a lot over Easter, you know, the Resurrection Sunday and Good Friday weekend. I had surgery on it a month or so ago. But, you know, she doesn't even mention herself. She looks at me and she goes, how's your knee? And, you know, she asks me that question every day. She goes, you're walking a little better, you must be feeling better. How are you feeling? How's your knee? And I've gotten that from her for 60 years, just her continuous comfort. And you can see that in the moms with their kids. Become more concerned with their kids than they do with themselves. In Isaiah 66 verse 13, it says, as one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you, and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. You know, if you go through the book of Isaiah, you notice that chapter 1 through 39, it's a historical record of judgment upon the nations. You come to chapter 40 through chapter 66, it really is about the comfort of God. In fact, the word comfort is used over and over and over again. That God is a God who wants to comfort hurting people. He wants to bring comfort to us. In fact, Jesus, when He described the Holy Spirit in John chapter 14, 26, and I'll read this from the Amplified Bible, but the Helper, the Comforter, Advocate, Intercessor, Counselor, Strengthener, Standby. He is our Comforter, the Holy Spirit who the Father will send in my name, in my place to represent me and act on my behalf. He will teach you all things and He will help you remember everything that I have told you. And just like a loving mother who comforts, He is there to comfort us in our trials, in our tribulations, in our sickness, in our weakness, in our disappointments, in our discouragements. You go to Him and you open your heart and He will comfort you in such incredible ways. And the beauty about His comfort, it fills us with power. It's not just, hey, are you okay? The supernatural work of God through the Holy Spirit is He takes us in our failures and our weaknesses and He strengthens us and He empowers us and He gives us hope and vision to live a new day. All right, last one, number five. The mystery of a mother's sacrificial love. Does that picture say it all or what? Doesn't it? A mother's love is sacrificial. I think more than anything a mother's love is sacrificial. You think about this. A mother stretches herself literally and metaphorically from the time of conception until the twilight of her life. A mother never stops being a mother. She will sacrifice her time, her money, her comfort, her career, her health, her well-being for her children. And I think in this way, a mother, she teaches us the profound truth of God's sacrificial love for us. In the verse that I read at the beginning of the message, Isaiah 49, 15 and 16, it says, can a woman forget her nursing child and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, but I will never forget. And then notice the second part. I think a lot of times when I've seen pastors, I've read sermons given on this message, they usually live out verse 16, but it says, see, I've inscribed you on the palms of my hands. Your walls are continually before me. Now, I wanna show you something. I've inscribed you on the palms of my hands. I think you get an understanding of what that means, but your walls are continually before me. Sometimes scripture, right, you gotta really go deep into the original language to understand what that means. Your walls are continually before me. It's a term that is used for an architect with architectural drawings. So Len here, Lenny Savino, our worship leader, he's an engineer and they draw up these diagrams. And the diagrams are what? They're a foreshadow of what is going to be built. So you get an idea here, your walls are continually before me. You know what it's saying? God has a plan for your life. He's got an architectural plan for each and every one of you. And it's not a plan to hurt you. It's not a plan to harm you. It's not a plan to destroy you. Think about a mother. A mother wants the very best for her children. She wants to see her children succeed. And you know what, a Christian mother, and this makes a Christian mother very different than a mother of the world, we not only want, right, ladies, I'm including myself in there, you not only want your children to succeed, but you want to see your child saved more than anything else in this world, right? There is nothing more then you want them to see your child to come into a saving relationship with Christ. It's there in your mind, in your heart all the time. And you're praying. You're crying out to God to bring people into their lives, to share the gospel with them. Because maybe they've heard it all from you, right? And then they tune you out. Jeremiah 29 11 it says for I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you plans to give you hope in a future God has plans for your life You know as a believer, I never imagined the plans that God had for me early on I mean, I never would have imagined that I would be doing this. And I never would have imagined all the twists and turns that my life has taken, and every one of them, God was right there with me, guiding me. Just amazing, amazing throughout. You know, some of you who are younger, you haven't experienced this yet, but as you get older, you look back, and with hindsight, you see that God has been working His plan in your life the whole time. And even when you thought He wasn't there, He was there and He was working. Even at times when you had no awareness of Him, He was right there and He was guiding your life. He has a blueprint for your life. And then, again, I'm going to come back to verse 16, the first part. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands. I'll tell you a story. A woman up in Massachusetts, Her house had caught on fire and the fire was raging on one part of the house. She was in another part of the house and her young baby was in this room and she realized that the fire had basically began to consume the room. She could hear the baby crying and when she got to the door, she reached and she grabbed the doorknob and her hand was seriously burned. She didn't pull her hand away. She kept her hand on the hot doorknob. She turned it, opened the door, and went in and saved her baby. And she saved the child's life. You get a picture here about her love, right? For her child. She would go through the rest of her life. Every time that child would look at that hand, she would see the love of her mother. Well, I don't know if Isaiah fully understood what he was writing. A lot of the prophets didn't. 700 years before Yeshua came, he penned this. And then we see Yeshua going to the cross and he offered up his hands freely. He had offered up his life freely. And he was nailed through his hands to the cross. His love for you is inscribed on his hands. I hope you understand too, it wasn't the nails that held him to the cross. It was his love for you. Amazing thing in the scriptures, after Jesus is raised from the dead, Right, he appears to the apostles, and Thomas isn't there. And then the apostles tell Thomas about Jesus, and he said, we've seen him. And apparently they told him, you know what, he was glorified. Right, he ate some food. He ate fish and ate some honeycomb with him. Honeycombs, you know the breakfast cereal honeycombs? Not quite, but he ate the honeycomb. And he was able just to move in and out of the walls. By the way, that's a glorified body. That's what you're gonna get when you were raised from the dead. So Thomas said, I won't believe unless I see his hands and I see where his side was pierced. And the next week on Sunday, Jesus appears to them and he's standing before Thomas and he said, Thomas, take a look. You know, there's my hands. There's my side. He said, go for it. Go ahead. You can stick, you know, stick your hand in there. And Thomas fell on his face and he said, my Lord and my God, I believe those wounds are going to be a reminder of all eternity of His great love for us. His love for you has been inscribed in the palm of His hands. Even John in Revelation chapter 5, when he gets a glimpse of the glory of heaven, he sees one who looks like a lamb who had been slain. And you're looking at that and saying, he's the Lion of Judah, he looks as one who is the Lamb who was slain, he is Jesus, Yeshua, the risen Savior, the glorified Savior, and still there must have been some markings that John saw in his hands and his feet as a reminder of his great love for us. See, I've inscribed you on the palms of my hands. a reminder of His great love for us for all eternity. So I want to wrap this up. I'll wrap it up. I want to share a story with you. You know, a little baby will not reject the love of its mother. But when that little baby grows up, that little baby, who now becomes a man or a woman, can reject the love of its mother. And we all have the power to reject the love of our Father. He's not going to force it on us. But 25 years ago we had a woman here in the church, she was a dear sister. Just like you get many mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters as you go through the years in the church. And I've been in the church, not this church, but I've been in the Lord for 37 years, and I've been in this church for 30 years, and just I've had many mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. And you really love them, you love them. And I'll tell you, there's an amazing love that happens that God puts in our hearts of how he knits our hearts together with these people and you really, they become your family. And this very dear woman, she was probably in her late 60s, maybe mid 60s when she was attending here. And she had a son who had a serious drug problem. And we were continuously trying to help this boy and getting him into rehabs and out of rehabs. And she was just broken over him. And she had another son who was, I think he was a graduate of Annapolis, the naval training center for officers in the Navy. But this kid had this drug problem. just in and out of trouble. I would go to court for him and I just would see her weeping and praying for this kid all the time. And one day I go to the house, I visit over at the home and they lived over in Pramus and I went into the house and her husband led me in. She said she's in there and I just was standing at a door and I look and he's strung out on the bed and she's holding his hand and she's down praying like this. And she saw me and she got up, tears running down her cheeks, and she looked at me and she said, it's the only time I can hold him. He died a short time later, he overdosed. And then she died a short time later. But it's a picture again of the love of God. God loves us. If you're not in a relationship with Him, He's trying to reach you. And you know that He will weep. You know, some of you are looking at, well, the Lord is just angry at me because I'm such a rotten singer. No, not quite if you understand the Scriptures. A day can come where He will abandon you and He will let you go for all eternity, but while you're still on this earth and you still have breath in your lungs, He loves you and I believe He loves you in spite of your resistance. He loves you in spite of your rejection and He weeps over you. Now, my wife read the Scripture verse this morning and we didn't plan this. But from Matthew chapter 23, 37 through 39, when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, He says how often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings but you were not willing. See, your house is left desolate, for I say to you, you shall see me no more till you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." And this is Jesus. He's grieving, weeping over the people of Jerusalem who have rejected Him. They have resisted Him. They have rejected Him. They rebelled against Him. And He knows what they're heading towards. They're heading towards a total destruction of the city that would occur about 40 years later in 70 AD by the Roman legions. That's what he's grieving over here and he goes into detail about it in the next chapter. So he's weeping over a people, you know, he wants the best for us as human beings. He has died on the cross to give us the very best for all eternity. And when he sees his creation rejecting him, rebelling against him, it breaks his heart. Why? Because this is what he wants. He wants us to come to him, so that he may love us, and love all over us, and love in us, and love through us, and give us the gift of eternal life. And just like that mother who would weep over her lost son. He weeps over those who are lost. If you have not opened your heart to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and invited Him in to be your Savior, your Savior, it's a personal thing, it's a personal choice that you make to invite Him to come into your life and say, Jesus, be the king of my life, be the savior of my soul. I believe in you, that you died for me. I believe you were raised from the dead. Jesus, I invite you in and I take you into my heart. You have to make that choice. And that is the most important decision and choice you will ever make. May this day be the day that you make that choice. to take Jesus into your life and experience the miracle. Experience the miracle of salvation in Jesus Christ. Would you all bow your heads, we'll close in prayer. In your presence, thinking of the good things you have done Waiting here, patiently, just to hear your still small voice again Holy, righteous, praise God to the end Standing here in your presence, Lord. Standing here, in your presence Thinking of the good things you have done Waiting here, patiently Just to hear your steps one more second Holding my chest, faithful to the end I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. Jesus. You are so good, Lord. You alone are worthy of our praise. My soul is secure in You. Your promise sure, Your love endures. Let's sing that together. My soul is secure. Your promise sure. Your love endures always. My soul is secure. I will worship you for who you are I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. Jesus. My soul. My soul secure. Your promise sure. Your love enduring. My soul is secure I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. Jesus. One more time, I worship. I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. I will worship you for who you are. You are worthy. You alone are worthy. Lord, we want to continue to fix our eyes on you. by human hands. You are not a god dependent on any mortal man. You are not a god in need of anything we can give by your plan. That's just the way it is. You are not a God created by human hands. You are not a God dependent on any mortal man. You are not a God in need of anything we can give by your plans. That's just the way it is. From before time began, you are on your throne. You are God alone. And right now in the good times and bad, you are on your throne. You are God alone. You're the only God whose name and praise will never end. You're the only God who's worthy of everything we can give. You are right now Unchangeable Unshakeable Unstoppable Unshakeable, unstoppable, that's what you are. You are not alone. From before time began, you are on your throne. You are not alone. And right now, in the good times and bad, Unchangeable Unshakeable Unstoppable That's what you are Unchangeable Unshakeable Unstoppable You are God alone From before time began You are on Your throne You are God alone And right now In the good times and bad You are on Your throne Unchangeable Unshakeable Unstoppable Unstoppable Unchangeable Unshakeable Unstoppable You are not alone, not before time began. You are on your throne, you are God alone. And right now, in the good times and bad, Unchange Unchangeable Unshake Unshakeable Unstoppable That's what you are That's what you are Unchange Unchangeable Unshake Unshakeable Unstoppable That's what you are Praise you, Lord. He is so good. You know, you can rely on the Lord for anything. Do you understand that? Anything. There is nothing that is bigger than our God. There is no one that is greater than our God. There is none that you should fear, but God alone. And in that reverence of you, Lord God, we lift up our hearts and surrender. We ask you to continue to fill us with your Holy Spirit and renewing power and grace and mercy that overwhelms us. Praise you, Lord. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, your perfect love is casting out fear. In the middle of the storms of this life I won't turn back, I know you won't hear And I will fear no evil For my God is with me And if my God is with me Whom then shall I fear? Whom then shall I fear? Oh no, we'll never let go Through the calm and through the storm Oh no, we'll never let go Every high and every low I can see the light that is coming For the heart that holds on A glorious light beyond all compare And there will be an end to these troubles But until that day comes ♪ To know you here on the earth ♪ ♪ And I will fear no evil ♪ ♪ For my God is with me ♪ ♪ And if my God is with me ♪ ♪ Who then shall I fear ♪ I can see the light. ♪ That is coming from a heart that holds on ♪ ♪ And there will be an end to these troubles ♪ ♪ But until that day comes ♪ ♪ Still I will praise you ♪ ♪ Still I will praise you ♪ I can see the light, Lord. I can see you. ♪ I can see the light that is coming ♪ There will be an end to these troubles But until that day comes Still I will praise you Still I will praise you Oh no, you never let go Through the calm and through the storm Every high and every low. Oh, no, you never let go. Lord, you never let go of me. Oh, no. Oh, no, you never let go. Through the calm and through the storm. Every high and every low. Oh no, you never let go. Lord, you never let go of me.