Will you turn with me now in the scriptures to Matthew chapter 7. Matthew the 7th chapter and in just a few minutes we will read the words that our Savior has given which provide grand instruction and warning to all who will heed it. Well we're obviously in the graduation season of the year and across this country and around the world and tens of thousands of academic institutions, graduation speeches will be delivered by some special guest, even as we planned for one this coming Friday evening. And I will guarantee you that almost all of those graduation speeches will be identical. No, there'll be different people delivering them with different sounds to their voices, different cadence to their speeches, and different vocabulary, different imagery, different illustrations. But when it's all said and done, almost all of them will have said in one way or another the same thing. And this is what they will say. Students, you've come a long way. and you're going out into a rough world. And what you've got to do is reach down. Reach down as far as you can reach. Reach down and take hold of your shoestrings. And once you've got a good grip on your shoestrings, pull hard. Pull harder than you've ever pulled before. Pull on them and you will pick yourself up and go places in life. Now, that's basically what most of the graduation speeches are. I read in the news where Speaker Pelosi spoke at the graduation at Brown University last week. And her message to the graduating seniors there was, in this time of darkness and insurrections, and hostility toward abortion. If our democracy is to be preserved, it will be preserved by hope. Hope, that's right. When the going gets tough, and everything is dark and rough around you, Scamper off to the kitchen of your mind and open the cupboard and pull out a bottle of hope. And that will make any recipe what it ought to be. Hope will save democracy. Reach inside yourself and pull out something. Reach down and grab your bootstraps and pull up on them. And that's the message of the graduation speakers of our day. Find something in yourself to really make a go of it. And of course, whenever I hear talk of hope from a politician, I recall the former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, as he was featured on the evening television news leading a march in Washington against drug abuse and chanting with the crowd, up with hope, down with dope. Up with hope, down with dope. and they must have repeated it until they were hoarse. And the thing that really made Marion Barry hoarse was when he was arrested for cocaine use in his own facilities. So much for the political world, so much for the deliverance of hope. The people of God respond this way. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest rain, but wholly lean on Jesus' name. On Christ, the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand." And so we read from Matthew chapter 7 at verse number 13. Enter ye in at the straight gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat, because straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. And verse 24, therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man which built his house upon a rock. And the rains descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon the house, and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. And everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his home upon the sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." So much for building a life upon hope or anything else that we can conjure up Out of our bankrupt souls, Christ gives the instruction that we are to build upon his truth. These sayings of mine. I don't have to tell any of you that we are living in an age of confusion. And I will tell you that that confusion is nothing more than the byproduct of the great hoax. And there is a hoax, and it is great. Inasmuch as it has taken in all of the ones of whom Christ spoke, who are on the broad road to destruction, many enter in thereat. A hoax which is the sand, the hope, the whatever, upon which most people on earth are building their life. But the life they build like the house upon the sand will fall and great will be the fall of it. Can you imagine any greater fall or disappointment than living your entire life unto a certain purpose only to come to the end and find out that it was but sand, that you had no foundation, and that your whole life comes crashing down to failure in the one and only thing that really matters. It's an age of confusion, grave, grave confusion, and you have all lived through it recently to see. Confusion in connection with the whole COVID epidemic. I don't want to keep beating a dead horse, but there it is. The whole COVID epidemic. Mask, don't mask. Vax, don't vax. One thing one day, something else the next day. The contradiction of the experts of one another and then of themselves. And so it goes ad infinitum. And we have nothing but confusion coming out of The elite experts said what ought to be and I've told the congregation here that what the whole COVID confusion tells us is that we can trust only the Word of God, not the Word of man. And then there is that term which is so well known to us, fake news. Everybody here has heard of it. confusion on every hand. Who knows what to believe? I would submit to you that the confusion that we're speaking of, the crumbling of that house built upon sand, upon the best of best of best of hope, is attributable to at least two major contributing factors. And they've been with us for some time, and we are reaping the consequences of them. In 1859, a British scientist, biologist named Charles Darwin published his famous book, The Origin of Species. and became the first to put forth the theory of evolution in a manner that was readable by the public and seemed to assemble the thoughts that had been simmering in many minds in one volume. And today's culture is built upon the theory of evolution. the elite powers of this world system will continually refer back to evolution as the cause of this and that. If you watch a nature video, it will talk about what was taking place so many billion years ago as man, as animals, as everything around evolved, and they speak as if it is verified, proven fact. And many of them indeed may have their doubts, but you don't speak your doubts or you lose your status among the crowd. You lose the funding for your research. And so you cling to what is admittedly the most ridiculous, ludicrous idea that has ever been hatched publicly among men. We know that order and sophistication never arise unaided out of chaos. We know that to be the case. You do not find a jet airliner suddenly coming together out of the local landfill and flying off to wherever. And yet a jet airliner is a very, very simple machine when set in contrast with the complexities of this universe and creation. And yet, such a theory is embraced by so many who refuse to state the full title of Darwin's book. which is on the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. It was an exceedingly racist work. No wonder that by the end of that century, The experts in biology were bringing African pygmies to the World's Fair as an exhibition of a stage of evolutionary development that is fact. And our entire culture is now built upon this. When you begin with a lie, you will never end with truth. When you begin with a lie and begin to structure a system of thought upon it, you will only have a seriously deformed system of thought structured upon it, for you can never get above the lie and the deception. And so, as COVID has demonstrated, Organisms evolve into something more damaging, and as the evolutionary hypothesis has been applied to explanations and all of that, what we have is only compounded ignorance. What we have is simply confusion. And so the confusion we've witnessed in our society over the past several years is but the to-be-expected byproduct of a society now structured and built upon Darwinian evolution. All of this was taking place in the early years of the last century. And so in order to complete out the confusion in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court of the United States bought into the thinking of the evolutionary elites of that day in order to rule that prayer and the reading of scripture in government schools was impermissible. And so there was thereby established an official policy of eliminating God consciousness from our society and our culture. And yet we read in the scripture the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Thus, if you do not know what the fear of the Lord is, you've not begun to know how to handle knowledge. You've not begun to exhibit and gain the wisdom necessary for handling the facts. Thus, all of the scientific facts around us, on which creationists and evolutionists would agree these are the facts, are put to perverse interpretations and applications by a culture which officially adopted the fear not God mentality. No prayer, no Bible reading in our state schools and thus generations have arisen who are utterly absent of God consciousness. Now these two grave misdirections, Darwinian education and the deliberate and legal exclusion of God consciousness are the foundation of all of the confusion that you students see in the world around you and that we all witness on a daily basis in our society. The result of these actions The adoption of Darwinian evolution and the exclusion of the Word of God have had their results. Let me name just four of them. One of them we've already mentioned and you all know, fake news. We cannot trust anything virtually that we hear in the media. Oh, it might be that if there's something like a horrible tragedy, let's say the crash of an airliner, that they'll get some of the facts straight. But as you are well aware, if they are reporting on political matters or religious matters or moral matters or ethical matters, it is utterly unreliable. The result of building upon fake news foundations beginning with absent God, present evolution. We cannot trust the philosophical, the political, the belief-oriented reporting of our day, nor can we trust the government agencies that have embraced the values of the elite communication systems. This is the dilemma that we are in. This is the kind of thing that we're supposed to include in our hoping which will deliver democracy, when in fact, the destruction of democracy is the perversion of facts and truth and reality. A second result of all of this is fear. There is such fear in the world that you're graduating into, fear in the culture of this country, fear of disease, how the COVID paranoia overtook us as a nation, and I'm not suggesting it's not serious. I've known seven different people who've died from that disease. But the fear that overtakes a nation becomes irrational very quickly when we are not united to the fear of God. It is the fear of God which is not only the beginning of wisdom and the beginning of knowledge, but the deliverance from the fear of all other things. Those who know the fear of God, those who receive his word as we've read from Matthew this evening, know a certain confidence and strength even as Paul wrote to Timothy, God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of wisdom and of a sound mind. You can name a number of official public fears yourself, no doubt. I think of the great fear of climate change, which is overtaking our country. And I'm not being political when I bring these things up. I'm speaking rather about knowing God. who is our refuge and strength and our very present help in trouble. Therefore, we shall not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. Indeed, the fear of climate change, which man imagines he has made, and it amazes me that a weather forecasting system that has yet to get it perfect yet imagines that man can do something to impact and affect the weather patterns. The logic of that escapes me. And yet, how much fear has been generated by these very means? The fact is that there is climate change. And there are major examples of climate change in the scripture that we need to take heed to. There was a climate change that brought a great famine in Egypt centuries ago, which, before the famine, had brought great water to the land and prospered it. And it wasn't under the control of Joseph or of Pharaoh. He was under the control of God himself. And there was a great climate disaster that took place when the entire earth was overrun with a flood. And man didn't make it, nor could man stop it. These things are in the hand of Almighty God and the people of God do not fear what He will do. They fear Him with a reverential awe and trust and find in Him the greatest comfort in the midst of true crises and disasters and changes. Indeed, At the great flood, there was a climate change that overtook all of the wicked, and Noah and his family were preserved. And after Noah and his family came out of that ark safe and dry, Noah worshiped God and offered a sacrifice to him, and God there made a covenant with the human race. That's all of us. And this is the covenant that he made. while earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. The people of God can take God at his word and rest in that truth and be cured of the fear of climate change. You see, every cure to our soul's need, every cure to our mind's anxieties can be found in the scripture. It is a tonic for the soul. It is the health of those who partake it. We've mentioned fake news, we've mentioned fear. A third result of this whole evolutionary exclude God system of our nation is folly and foolishness. The wisdom is the world is, let me begin again, Paul writes, the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. Students, if you can remember simply that, you will spare yourself of so many of the anxieties and follies and wastes of this age. The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. He taketh the wise in their own craftiness." They think themselves to have it all figured out. They have their evolutionary scheme in place, and they've put God out of it. And aren't they exalted in understanding? But the fact is, God counts their wisdom as foolishness and by their wisdom has taken them in their own craftiness. We sing from the ninth psalm here from time to time, one of those stanzas that says, the wicked are sunk in the pit they prepared. Their foot in the net which they hid is ensnared. The Lord by his judgment hath made himself known. He by their own works hath the wicked o'erthrown. And this is how God works. He takes the wise in their own craftiness. And so folly and foolishness results. There's such great interest in the royal family. in the Kardashians. You name it, the celebrity culture of our day, which focuses upon some of the most unstable, undeveloped, and non-exemplary people as something to be adored and mimicked. Foolishness is what it is. And so, we've come to the point that if a boy thinks he's a girl, treat him like one. Feed him in that thinking. Yes, even go to the extreme of surgically mutilating his body in an effort to make it conform to a twisted, confused mind. That's what I mean when I say that the result of the whole evolutionary God-excluded culture is folly, foolishness. There was a time when such was treated in hospitals and facilities for mental confusion, not for realignment the body with the confused mind. And a fourth thing that all of this produces is simply failure. The house on the sand falls, and great is the fall of it. Failure. And we needn't look any further for failure than to a week or so ago in Uvalde, Texas, where once again, A devastating failure of mass murder was undertaken by a person whose actions are rather consistent with an evolutionary system that excludes God. If we are simply an evolutionary creature, then there is really no purpose. There's really no goal. And there's no God that we have to appear before. And with God consciousness officially excluded from our national ethic, what else are you to expect than men acting out savage, hate-filled, mass murder of children? It speaks of a whole system that has failed. And the system that has failed, rather than recognizing the failure, wants to blame guns made of metal and wood, simply an object to be properly used or improperly used. Failure. The failures of the world around us which our politicians lament but fuel. The failures of the world around us which the popular theologians refuse to address biblically. Are all failures inseparably connected with ignoring God as the source of all things and ignoring God as the source of truth before whom we must bow? And I would surmise that any of the serial killers who exhibit the fruit of such thinking, if they understood they must stand before God and face before Him the consequences of their evil, much of the evil they've wrought would never have been put in place. We could go on at length in these things and you know that we won't. What is the fix? Well, the fix we've read from scripture, enter ye in at the straight gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that enter in thereat. Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man that built his house upon a rock. In this age, when there has been a loss of the profound, there are things that are profound. Your life, God, truth, hell, These matters are profound, but the profound has been swept to the side, and when the profound is put to the side, the absolute trivial piffle of human folly will be elevated to a rank of the profound. And that's why I reference the Hollywood set that is so adored, but so misdirected. What is the fix to all of this? Acknowledge these profound truths. God is. I was reminded just recently of the first words of the scripture which we read tonight, in the beginning God. If those are the only words of scripture we had, they would be enough to show us that God is, that He predated all that is, and was therefore the source of all that is, and that we come from Him, and that we are answerable unto Him. And the list goes on of what we know about God just from those four words in the beginning, God. God is, and that is profound, and it matters. The Supreme Court of the 1960s forgot that it mattered. It didn't matter to them. But it does matter. God is. He made everything. He made you, each one of you, every one of us, is not an accident of cellular biology, but a creature created by God in the image of God who saw us when we were yet unformed in our mother's wombs and observed the development through the stages of gestation. And when we were born, knew the number of hairs on our heads, and knows them this very night. God is, and that matters. And if you forget that, you may as well forget life. And how many have taken their own life because they forgot that? God is, and therefore he made everything, He upholds everything. He owns everything. He disposes all things. He matters. In fact, he is all that matters. And if you leave Harvard Christian School not knowing that, then you have missed the whole matter. of life and reality and eternity. You have missed the most profound reality that can be known to mankind. God is, and that's all that matters. Not only is he, but God has purposed all things. We read in the book of Ephesians that he works all things after the counsel of his own will. In other words, when you were born, it was not simply an accident that happened to take place, but it was the creative wonder of Almighty God creating you for a purpose. And the most fulfilling life that you can have is the life that is lived to fulfill the purpose for which God made you. Any other living is purposeless. Oh, it may run after this trail, or that goal, or some other objective, but will never find satisfaction. Because satisfaction exists only in the spiritual realm. And satisfaction will exist only as you fulfill the purpose for which you were created. And so, God is, that's all that matters. God has purposed all things and it is for you to find the purpose that God has for you and fulfill it. And now somebody asks, how in the world then do I find that purpose? I've been looking for God's will for how many years? God's purpose for you is laid out in the scripture. It's right there in black and white. It is for you to read and heed. And as you order your life according to the precepts of the scripture, even as we've read, whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house upon a rock, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon it, and it stood because it was built upon a rock. Take the scripture, the word of God, and submit yourself to the Word of God, and therein you will be fulfilling the purpose for which He created you, and this, I say, is success. You'll never find success by trying to reach into your own self and get a hold of hope, whatever that is. You will find success only outside of yourself. And that success is in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when you are united to Christ, you are bound to the one who is the very creator of life and the preserver of life forevermore, who has promised to his people, I am come, that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. And there is success. And there's no reason for any student graduating from Harford Christian School to have anything less than such success in Christ. This is success. This is joy. This is peace. This is satisfaction. This is everlasting life. There's a great hoax. we've spoken about it. The greatness of that hoax is highlighted by the fact that most of humanity is taken in by it, and that is what is making Earth a more miserable place to be all the time. But in the midst of that morass, there is, for those who know Christ, true peace. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. And that's the testimony of God's people and that is peace and that is rest. Oh, may every one of us know these things in our hearts. With a life, that is fulfilling because it is fulfilling the purpose God has for us. The purpose clearly reviewed, revealed in his word. O Lord our God, bless these students and their families in this dark and warring world whose war first and foremost is against God. Bless these students and bless these families with the knowledge that Christ is their Savior and that they are his people. And may each of these students, heeding the precious saving word of God, know the great peace and blessing that attends only to those who lose themselves in Christ. May we know what that is. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.