Zechariah 2, verse 6, if you have your place in the sword, please say amen. If you're able to stand physically, let's stand in reverence to God's word and read with me. this verse out of the Word of God. The Bible says, Ho, ho, come forth and flee from the land of the north, saith the Lord. For I have spread you abroad at the four winds of the heaven, saith the Lord. Father, we come to you now with thankful hearts, Lord, of being ministered to in song and, Lord, by praise reports and, Lord, also coming to your throne with prayer need. My Lord and Father, we come now to an important part of the service where we bend our ear and our hearts and our mind to what the Word of God has to say to it. So Lord, hide me behind the cross. Put your words in my mouth. You'd have me to speak, Lord. And Lord, I pray especially for that soul nearest hell. Under the sound of my voice, Father, that you'll save them. Lord, any decisions need to be made today. Lord, we pray you'll help them make it. In Jesus' name, amen. You may be seated. As I said, don't run away when you hear the title of this sermon. The title is, Where Are Those Hoes At? Now, let's understand a little bit about what we're talking about here. We just plunged right in the middle of a verse. So what is this at all talking about? Alright, Zechariah. He ministers to the Jews during the time after the Babylonian exile or the Babylonian captivity. And he is generally around the period here of 520 BC to 470 BC. And so during the three years of 520 to 518, they're going to rebuild the temple. It'll be called Zerubbabel's Temple. In chapter 1, in the first six verses, all they're doing here is they're calling for repentance, Israel to repent, just like God is calling on us, the children of God, calling on our county to repent, calling upon our state to repent, calling upon our region, Dixie, to repent, calling upon America to repent. And so it is, over in chapter 2, Zechariah begins his second vision. Now overall, guys, he's going to receive eight visions. But in this second vision, he's going to see a man with a measuring line. Now these visions, guys, they got two layers because these are prophetic visions. And any time you're dealing with prophecy in the Bible, you're going to get two layers. One layer is historical. And so you see something that will relate to the Jews of that time period. Sometime you can see a little bit pointing toward a messianic level relating to the things of Jesus. And then the final layer will be the actual prophetic layer which will catapult into the future at another point in another time. So when we get down to verse 6, we see a couple of things here. Number 1, he says, Ho! Ho! Now, most of the time when you think of hoe, you're either going to think of a lady of the evening, or you're going to think of Santa Claus, or you're going to think of this thing right here. Most people don't nowadays, but anyway. What is this hoe here in the Bible, H-O? Well, one hoe is enough, but this is a double hoe. And it means that God is calling them to listen to something very important. In other words, this is a call to hearken, a call to listen, a call to hear this warning. What does he tell them to do? Come forth and flee from the land of the north. So what does that relate to? Well, basically the land of the north and the historical context. Where did they just come from? They come out of the northern area of Babylon. And there are still Jews up there, and God is calling His people down south. Sounds pretty much right here in America, don't it? Anyway, no extra charge. And so what happens is God is calling His people down, back to the land, out of the land of the north. It's called the Land of the North because invading armies and trading caravans from that land to Jerusalem came around the route called the Fertile Crescent and they entered Palestine or the Promised Land from the north. God says, I spread you abroad at the four winds of heaven. That was again relating back to when they were carried off into captivity. Later, it will be pointing in the future to the Jewish diaspora about after 70 AD when the Jews literally would be scattered to the four winds of heaven even as they still are today. You know, a lot of people look at Israel being reestablished in 1948. That's a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. It's not, God. Israel hasn't been regathered yet. Do you realize there are more Jews in America, specifically in New York, than there are in Israel? Israel will be regathered. But when Israel is regathered, Israel will be regathered in the days of the tribulation, right before the Lord comes back, and every one of them will be saved. But you say, well, what about Israel today? Israel today over there, guys, the only way remotely connected to prophecy is, according to Daniel chapter 9, Israel has to sign a peace treaty with the Antichrist. And that political entity there is set up by God, I believe, to allow Israel, the modern state, to sign a peace treaty with the Antichrist. Hopefully, who knows? One day soon. We don't know. The main thing, guys, is be ready because the Lord is going to come back any moment, any time. We've got to be ready. So in both cases, God, whether it's historical, whether it is prophetic, He's calling His people back to the land. Why? Because there's work to be done. Everything's been burned. Everything's been destroyed. It's been laid waste. The temple's been rebuilt. But the city walls have to be rebuilt. Everything needs to be built back up because the defenses have been torn down. You know what, God? That's exactly what He's calling us to do. He's calling us to come back to His ground, to His land, and if I may say, guys, that the house of God can be seen as God's land, as part of God's kingdom, if you will, spiritually speaking. No, He's calling His people back to what has been torn down, what has been destroyed. Now, I told you this is going to be a springboard verse right here in Zechariah 2, 6. So what I want to do, guys, I want to springboard from here into Mark. Now, you don't have to go over there, but if you want to, I'm going to settle around Mark's Gospel, chapter 4, and I'm going to read to you this parable that Jesus gave. You know it very well. It's called the Parable of the Sower. Jesus said, Harken, behold, there went out a sword of Saul. And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up, and some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth. Now watch that, it had not much earth. And immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up, it was scorched, and because it had no root, watch that there, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprung up and increased and brought forth some thirty, some sixty, and some a hundred. That's the parable of the sower. Now, if you go down to verses 14 through 20, Jesus is going to explain exactly what he's talking about. And I'm so glad, guys, that he did, because if he didn't, every preacher in every church in every county in America, they'd have a viewpoint about what he was really trying to say, and every one of us would be probably dead wrong. I'm glad that He gave us the meaning of the parable of the sower. He said in verse 14, He said, The sower soweth the Word. Anybody who gives you the Word of God is then the sower. Anybody from me, to your mom, to your dad, to your Sunday school teacher, to whoever it might be, is giving you the Word of God. But where it falls, the ground where it goes to, that's the key index. That's the key point. So then God, the ground has to be likened to your heart and mine, to our lives, if you will. He said, the seed that fell by the wayside, over in verse 15, He said, where the Word is sown. But when they have heard Satan coming immediately and taken away the Word which was sown in their heart, And then he talked about the word that was thrown on stony ground, who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness and have no root in themselves, and so endure, but for a time afterward, when affliction or persecution arrives it for the word's sake, immediately they are offended, so it don't do nothing for them. And then he keeps going on and he said, These are they who are shown among the thorns, such as hear the word, and the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lust of other things, entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful." Beloved, I think that right there, the thorn, is really what we're dealing with a majority of the time where we hear the Word of God. That's our major point. I believe what right now in America is the deceitfulness of Richard and the everything coming and going, grabbing our attention and drawing us away from fruitfulness unto God. And then he says, "...they which are sown on good ground, such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit." I believe James called it this way. He said, be not a hearer of the word, only but a doer of the word. Got to use it, guys. So folks, look around in your lives. Look at the problem with the ground. It ain't the problem with the sower. It ain't the problem with the seed. It's the problem with the ground. The ground has a problem with it. And so that's why we need to be asking ourselves, where are those hoes at? Now guys, I am very familiar with this thing called a hoe. When I was littler, can't get much littler, I'll vanish away. You know, I'll be one of them. You know, the munchkins, anyway. So, when I was littler, my Uncle Jerry came to me and he says, Nephew, you know, you're my favorite nephew. He always told me that, Peggy. I said, Uncle Jerry, I'm your only nephew. He said, well, I want you to do something for me this summer. I said, what? He said, I got a garden down there and I want you to come work for me. I said, okay. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. He said, you need to be down there about seven o'clock in the morning. I said, there's two of them? I thought there was only one, like in the evening. He said, no, there's two. He said, you come out at seven o'clock, and I'm gonna give you a hoe, and I got watermelons planted down there, and I want you to find every morning glory you can, and I want you to get that thing out of there and chop it down and get it out. I said, okay, that sounds easy enough. Oh my. When I got down there, I'm not lying to you, that garden patch stretched all the way from the front of this church all the way to the back, and then some. And they ain't one row to hoe, there's a bunch of rows to hoe. Mounds of, oh my darn. So here I am, I'm out there, and I got that hoe out there, and I'm just muttering and grumbling, and I hate morning glory. I'd go out there and finally I'd go down and I'd chop that morning glory, I'd beat it into the dirt and I would. But you see guys what you can do with this thing. There's a lot of things you can do with a hoe right there. You can chop that weed out and guys don't just chop it, you know that. You got to dig down to the root and then pull that thing out. If you chop it off it's just gonna come right back. Got to get to the root of the problem. Then you can also make a small little ditch, a small little trench, if you will, and you can sow seeds in there. Or you can hill it up. You can move it together and manipulate the dirt around and make a hill for cantaloupes or watermelons or something of that nature. Then if you're digging down in there and then you got a rock, like in stony ground, you can pull that rock out, then you can pitch it out and throw it out. Thing is, guys, you You are having to manipulate the ground to make it good ground. To make it good ground. You can't ask God, God make my ground good. You've got to do that. I've got to do that. So let's find the holes here. So we can get the ground prepared. So how do we spell the word hoe? Now I ain't looking at how they spelled it in Zechariah. Cause this here is spelled hoe, H-O-E. That's right. Hoe with an E. Although while I am talking about where are those hoes at, I am calling you to hoe, hearken, H-O, hearken to the word. So this is what I, as I was mulling this over guys, I thought I was going to be preaching today about where's life at. But that'll come sometime later, I'm sure, because God didn't give it to me for no real purpose. He gave it to me for a reason. But I was riding with Brian yesterday, coming home from a heritage event where I had spoken for two hours. And I was coming home, and God kept bringing this and mulling it over in my mind. I started thinking about it Friday night. And I said, surely not, Lord. But anyway, I said, OK, where are those hoes at? Yes, sir, I'll preach it, Lord. You give it to me. And I really, Frank, brother, I really had to pray over this and make sure God gave me this and not just me thinking some weird thing. So I look at HOE. There are three words that God kept giving me about this. And so the first word, guys, is honor. To manipulate the dirt, the ground, to make it be good ground, guys, we've got to have honor. Honor. You say, what is honor preacher? Honor means to esteem or highly regard. Thomas Carlyle said this, show me the man you honor and I will know what kind of man you are. You look at people today, a person they hold in high esteem, you will know exactly what kind of person, what kind of values, what kind of character they generally will have. Well, as I looked in the Bible, guys, I found a ton of people that God said to or ordered to honor, to hold in high regard. The first one, of course, is God. 1 Timothy 1, 17 says, the only wise God be honor and glory forever and ever. So God deserves respect. He deserves to be held in high regard, in high esteem. Christ also, John 5, 23, He said, He that honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father which is in Him. So He said that all men should honor the Son even as they honor the Father. So you've got to hold Jesus Christ in high regard. We need to honor Christ. How can we all forget one of the first groups of people that we are ever taught to honor, and that is our parents? When we all hear in Exodus chapter 6 verse 2, honor thy father and thy mother, which is the first commandment with promise, and Exodus 20-12, honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. I said that wrong. That's Ephesians 6-2 and Exodus 20-12. Sorry about that. So even in the Old and New Testament, we are told both to honor our mother and our father. That means to respect them. That means to hold them in high regard, in high esteem. How about another group of people? The elderly. That's a big one right there, God, that our young people really need to get down in their noggin and from their noggin into their heart. So stop throwing the elderly into nursing homes and into other centers, and just throw them out, throw them into a home by themselves, and never ever care about them at all. We need to honor our elderly. You know guys, that's biblical. 1 Timothy 5.1, Rebuke not an elder, but entreat him as a father, and the younger men as brethren. 1 Timothy 5.3, Honor widows that are widows indeed. Now we need to honor our elderly. I want to do like old Justin said from, you know, Creole. He said, now what I want to do is I want to tell you a story. But I'm going to tell it like him because I can't talk like Creole for very long. But anyway, this is the story. He said, once there was a little old man. His eyes blinked, and his hands trembled as he ate. He clattered the silverware all over the place, and he missed his mouth with the spoon as often as not, and dribbled a bit of food on the tablecloth. Now, he lived with his married son, having nowhere else to live, and his son's wife really didn't like her father-in-law living there with them. She told her husband, she said, I can't have this anymore. He interferes with my right to happiness. So she and her husband, they took the old man gently but firmly by the arm, and they led him to the corner of the kitchen. They got him a stool, set him on the stool, and then they got a big old bowl, and they gave him his food in that bowl. And from then on, he always ate in the corner, blinking at the table with wistful eyes. One day, his hands trembled more than normal, and the earthenware bowl hit the floor, bam, and it shattered everywhere. Well, this daughter-in-law, well, she ought to have been reached up by her ear and taught a lesson or two, but she said, if you're a pig, you need to eat out of a trough if you can't eat out of a bowl. So what did they do? They made him a little trough. And so he began to eat his meals out of that little old trough. Well, they had a four-year-old boy of whom they were very fond. One evening, the young man noticed his son playing with some bits of wood. And he said, boy, what are you doing over there? He said, I'm making a trough. He said, a trough? He said, grandpa's already got a trough. He said, yep, and I'm making a trough to feed you and mama out of when I get big. Right when he said that, mom and daddy looked at each other real hard. They didn't say anything. They went back into the room. They cried a little bit about that. And they went to the corner. They took the old man by the arm. They led him back to the table. They set him in a comfortable chair. They gave him his food on a plate. And from then on, nobody ever said a word about how he clattered and clanged and made spills and everything else all over the table. Then they were honoring him. Before they were treating him like a thing, like nothing, like lower than dirt. So you've got to be careful how you treat others, because the Bible clearly says what you sow is what you're going to reap. So you better find that hoe in a hurry, and you better get that H, that honor, in a hurry, because if you don't, you expect others to honor you, and you're not going to honor God, you're not going to honor Christ, you're not going to honor your parents, you're not going to honor the elderly. How about church leaders? Philippians 2.25. Yet I suppose it necessary to send you a paphroditus, my brother, that's what he's talking about, and you go down to verse 29, receive him therefore in the Lord with all gladness and hold such in reputation. That means to give him honor. Now I thank God that you all honor your pastor. You all have honored every pastor we've had here. From preacher Guy, to preacher Riddle, to preacher Jack, now to preacher Craig. Wives! You say, what? Everybody says, oh, Christianity is a he-man, woman-hater club and all that other stuff. How about in 1 Peter 3, 7? These people that don't know nothing about our faith, they ain't read the book very much, God. He says, likewise ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers be not hindered. So if you and the missus have a spat in your... you better get right with each other or else your prayers ain't going to go no higher than your head. But the Bible tells us men to honor our wives. The Bible tells you wives to love and obey your own husband in the Lord. That's right, your own. Amen. Make sure we stress that. But we're going to get to that in just a minute. All right, so if we've got honor, meaning the letter H in hoe, then we've got to have an O, and that has already been alluded to. Obedience, or obey. You know, Ms. Dorothy, I got thinking about that word obey, and I said that, and I probably sounded like I was mentally challenged to somebody. One day I was in my office, and I just said, obey. Obey and I got started thinking about obey and I said it several other times and I heard the way that word Sounds and I got started laughing because I thought it sounded pretty funny But what does obey or obedience means it means submission to authority? My mama said years ago that when her and daddy weren't really seeing eye-to-eye, of course that wasn't a Easy to do because mama was short, daddy was taller than her. But they had to get on the same page, you know, like we all do when we're married. We got to see eye to eye, especially when raising children. And so it is that mama shook her hand up at the ceiling and I know she went through the ceiling to God and she said, I don't like that word submit. I don't like that word obey. Cause she told me, she said, God told me if I wanted to be a mama, I had to be a wife first. I had to learn to obey and submit to my husband. But you know, there's a lot of people in the Bible that the Bible tells us we need to, or things in the Bible we need to obey. Christ. Acts 5, 29, then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, we ought to obey God rather than men. You see, folks, if the government says that we're supposed to do something that's again God's Word, you don't obey Uncle Sam, you don't obey the governor, you don't obey the county commissioner, you obey God and His Word. The commands of God that come from the Word of God. The commands in Deuteronomy 27, 10. Thou shalt therefore obey the voice of the Lord thy God. Well, what is the voice of the Lord today? Right here, guys. It's called the Word of God. Joshua 24, 24. And the people said unto Joshua, the Lord our God, we will serve and his voice we will obey. But you know what, folks, a lot of people, they don't know the Word of God, they don't know the voice of the Lord, and so therefore they don't know what to obey many times. They think the Pope's the voice of God. I got news for them. He ain't God in the flesh. He thinks he is, but he ain't. Husbands! Husbands are to be obeyed. 1 Peter 3, verse 1. Likewise, you wives, be in subjection to your own husband, that if any obey not the word, that they may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives. In other words, if you have a lost husband, you need to live a life so fitting before the Lord that you can reach him by living out the Word of God. Children, parents are to be obeyed. If he's in 6.1, children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Now, by my understanding, guys, that goes also back to the husband, that if the husband says, woman, you don't need to go to church, well, you need to obey the Lord rather than man. You need to go to the house of God. And here's another one. Servants, slaves ought to obey their masters. He said, really? Yeah, that's in the Bible, Ephesians 6, 5. Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling and singleness of your heart as unto Christ. He said, well, preacher, we don't have slavery today. Oh, yes, we do. The Muslims have slaves. Africans have slaves. There are some sex slaves in this country. And you know what? If it's all going against the Word of God, they don't need to obey that master. They need to obey That's one true master. And that's us, guys. We're slaves this morning to Jesus Christ if we're His. And what He says, that's what we need to obey and do. You know, I don't like that obey. Well, how many of you have ever admired the obedience of a dog to his master? My father-in-law had a dog when he lived in Michigan that he said he could tell that dog to sit on a stump while he cut the grass and that dog would not move. And that reminded me of Archibald Rutledge. Mr. Rutledge wrote that one day he met a man whose dog had died in a forest fire. He said, the man told Rutledge how it just happened. He said, this man worked outside, he worked in the forest, he worked with the forest service and he often took his dog with him. That morning he left the dog in a clearing and gave him a command to stay and watch his lunch bucket while he went into the forest. He'd come back at dinner time and eat lunch with the dog. His faithful friend understood the clear command, stay. And that's exactly what he did. A fire broke out in the woods and the dog sat and stayed. When the fire was over and they put it out, with cheerful eyes, the dog's owner came and found the remain of his beloved friend, his little old dog. And he told Mr. Rutledge, he said, I always had to be powerfully careful what I told him to do because I knew he would do it. Can God say the same thing about you and I in regards to His Word? Too many Christians, too many of us, too many times we cherry pick and we pick and choose what we feel like obeying in regards to the Word of God. It is not the ten multiple choices, it is the ten commandments. And thank be to God, He took those ten and took them down to two. To love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our might, with all our might. And then to love your neighbor as you love yourself. That is the commands of God. And He said that His disciples would be known by their love one for another. That goes back, guys, to obedience. You know, some men get so high and mighty, they say, oh, I'm the king of the castle. Obey, obey, obey. Man, you need to remember that you are supposed to first obey God. And when the husband obeys God, it will be very easy for the wife to obey the husband. And then mom and dad together on the same level are supposed to have the children obey them. Not obey dad and not mom, or mom and not dad. It is supposed to be together. It's a team effort. And you and I are supposed to obey the Lord. Now, we're not done yet. We've got one more letter to go. Because we're not spelling HOE as Zechariah does, we're spelling it HOE as this tool does. H-O-E. And we've seen honor. We've seen obedience. Guys, we've got to have obedience. If you're trying to get good ground built up so the Word can go in, so you can live by the Word, you've got to have obedience. Otherwise, the Word's going to go in, the seed's going to go in, and what's going to happen? Nothing. Because you'll have the Word, but you won't be doing the Word. You won't be obeying the Word. You won't be doing anything with it. So the egos is endurance. I wrestled about this letter and I really didn't know where God was telling me, but finally I felt him leading me to go to endurance. Because if you know anything about hoeing a row, you've got to endure. You can't do like I did with my mater patch. I don't even like tomatoes. But I had it in my head, I'm going to plant tomatoes, and I'm going to grow these things, and I'm going to sell them. I'm going to make some money to help provide for my family. Maybe I can can some for tomato soup or whatever during the winter. Well, Craig spent money, and he bought them steaks, he bought rabbit wire, he bought all kinds of stuff. No, not rabbit wire, hog wire. And I had them things staked out, and I had them better boys and big boys and everything else out there. I even had tommy tools out there. I said, man alive, I've got every kind of mater you could possibly want, except the white mater and the yellow one. Them things came up in the evening. Daddy, he helped me. He helped till the ground. And we got the Miracle-Gro out there. I even sprayed some on me, man, and it didn't work anyway. So I got all that stuff out there done. I was working hard. It was good. The little maters started growing. I'd go out in the evening. I'd sing my little songs. I'd sing to my plants. I'd water them babies. And lo and behold, they began to grow. It was exciting for a while. And then I had to get the hoe out, and I said, oh, morning glory. Yuck! Ah! Every time I see this thing, I'm reminded of morning glory. I'd get out there, and I'd weed it a little bit, and then I started getting tired of that. I said, you know, them plants are plants. They'll do all right by themselves. God will do it. Well, by and by, the weeds began to take over. And it began to take over, and oh, my goodness. You didn't even know there was a mater patch there. It looked like a brower patch. It looked like a weed patch. But Gerald and Rex, they said, Preacher, you got maters? I said, yes, I got some. You're going to have to go through and get you a machete and go out through the jungle and try to find them. And bless God, they brought I don't know how many buckets and pails. And they loaded themselves down with maters. So much for making money. I said, use them, eat them, give them away. Don't do like I did. I read a book even on that. The $64,000 tomato. where a man kind of did like me, but I didn't do it like on his scale. But anyway, we got to have endurance, God. You got to keep on keeping on. You can't just say, well, I'm going to do this a little while, then hang it up. The weeds will get in. You remember that ground where the word was shown? You remember what choked it to death? It was the thorns. And the thorns and the weeds come. Why? Why are they so dangerous? Because they're going to suck nutrients out that are supposed to go to the seed. The seed needs that nutrient to grow. And so you've got to get that hoe in there and chomp that root out, chomp that weed, get that bar out of the way so the thing can grow. And that's our problem today. Many people, why are the weeds growing in the church? Because many times, God, we don't have the whole hoe. We might have honor down, we might have obedience down, but we don't have endurance down. You say, well, preacher, who is supposed to endure? You say, what does endure mean? I didn't remember that word at Shiloh. Endure means that you're going to hang in through an unpleasant or difficult situation without giving way. Remember the Battle of the Bulge? They told the commander, you're being surrounded. He said, nuts to the Germans, and he laid in, and he held his ground. Time and time again throughout military battles and wars, you will find those boys that lay in and hold in, they're the ones that become the heroes many times. That's why they have endurance, just like you are supposed to. He says, a soldier in the Lord's army, 2 Timothy 2, 3, Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. We, you and I, are supposed to endure. And then there's times when you have to sit. and listen to your preacher. Amen. There are times when the clock seems to be broken. I got a dose of it yesterday. My buddy H.K. You say, who's H.K.? H.K. is a former president of the NAACP chapter in Asheville. And he left that communist organization. And he is one of the only black men you will ever see carry a confederate flag. Because he knows the truth. And my buddy H.K., he and I are good buddies. I gave him a jar of honey yesterday. He says, oh preacher, your mama sold me. She'd be so happy and proud of you. He said, you tell your daddy. I said, thank you. But H.K., when he gets wound up teaching about the true history of his Southland and his beloved white Southern babies out there being persecuted because of their belief in the Confederate flag and our Confederate heritage, he's worse than I am. He will go on a tangent. And we sat there, Brian, for what, an hour and a half? Almost two hours listening to that black man hoop and holler about the truth of history and modern day events. So trust me, when you're sitting there saying, oh, please hurry up, I'm done here. I know where you're coming from. 2 Timothy 4.3, you say, you're not done. I'm getting there, hold on. He says, for the time will come when they will not, here it is, endure sound doctrine. Huh? What's that mean? It means, guys, that there's going to come a time when you go to church, there ain't going to be a long time to hear the Word of God. A lot of churches nowadays, what do you have? I mean, you've got music. We've got music here. Thank God for good singing, good praising the Lord through song. But they're going to have a whole gollywopper of music. And then the man of God will step up and say, OK, Preacher, you've got 15 minutes. What? And then ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, 12 o'clock comes, and then whoosh, off they go. How dare the preacher go over his time. May I remind you, we are on God's time. That chicken coop ain't going to fly away out there at KFC. It's still going to be there. I promise you that. It's still going to be on the corner out there. But I do try to be mindful of your time because I know that we can only take in so much when we're here together. But sometimes, God, we do have to endure. That's one reason why, guys, I ask you to stand, not only in reverence to God's Word, but because you've got to stretch, you've got to get blood flowing to your legs, so your butt can be able to sit for a little while longer. I know, guys, we try to compensate for that here at Daniel Town. There's a reason for the madness, I promise. But we've got to endure, we've got to hang in there with doctrine. There were some teachings. I remember one Sunday night I was teaching a Bible class and we had some visitors come. This had been years ago, around when I became pastor here. And I taught something and they didn't like it. They did not agree with it. And she stood up and she said, I was about to leave when I heard you teaching that. And I said, why? She said, because that ain't right. I said, according to who? I said, that's the Word of God. I don't care how you don't like it. That's the Word of God. Well, I was going to leave, but I respect you, and that's why I sat. And I said, well, you still need to sit, and you still need to get the peanut butter out of your ears, and listen to what thus said the Lord. Not what Craig said, but what God's Word said. And lo and behold, she stuck around for about another week, and then she left. I don't know what happened to her, but I pray for her. Bless her heart. But God, we've got to endure the teaching of the Word of God. If you sit for two hours and watch some god-awful, heathen film in a movie theater, and then we won't even sit and fidget through one hour of church service, God help ourselves! Affliction. You say, affliction? Uh-oh. Where is that in the small print? It's in the Bible, 2 Timothy 4-5. But watch thou in all things, endure in affliction. You're going to be afflicted in this walk. Chastening. You say, what? Oh yeah. It's Hebrews 12-7. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with son. For what son is he whom the Father chasteneth not? That means God believes in women. If you get out of stepping out of alignment, God, you better believe payday someday, it's going to come on your head. It may not right around now, but he's going to have a payday and he's going to drag you out behind the woodshed and he's going to give you a whooping like you'll never forget. Now, I promise, I've been there about three times in my life and it don't, it don't hit back here on the gluteus maxima where it'll sting and go away. It goes here to the heart and you know what you've done wrong and God will let you know about it. So you've got to endure that, guys. Grief. Grief is another thing we have to endure. Miss Peggy, bless her heart, she just came back this week from burying her brother. That's grief, God. It hurts. Now in a day that goes by that I don't look out and I see my three neighbors. Brother JR, planted at the top of the hill. Geraldine and Rex. right there in the middle, and my mama. I jokingly tell people, yeah, I got the best neighbors around. They don't bother me. They don't call me. They don't do nothing. They don't get on my nerve. I don't get on their nerve. I go out and hoop and holler and raise sand or whatever, and they don't say a peep, but no. I look out, and I have, you know, like the old song says, David, precious memories. I look up there and I see the one, knowing that one day my own fate, unless the Lord comes back, will be to be planted here at Danieltown one day. And it's a time of grief, God, when we have to bury a loved one. But he said in his word, for this is thankworthy, if a man for conscious toward God endure grief. Endure grief. We've got to go through it, God. You can't sit down there and mourn as those that have no hope. You've got to go through that valley of the shadow of death and get through to the other side. Because there will be another side if you cling to the nail-scarred hand. The final place I looked at is happiness. If you endure, God, you can have happiness. You said, really? Yes. James 5.11, Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy." Anybody here ever watch the Olympics this, what, this past week? A couple of you did. I didn't. I heard about it. But, you know, the Greeks, they had a race in their Olympic games that was very unique. And it wasn't a race about being the fastest. That race was, the winner was not the one who finished first. In that race, y'all remember how they start the Olympics usually with a big old fanfare and things? What do they generally have that they use? It's usually passed from country to country, around the world. It's the torch, the flame that burns. This race, guys, the runner who finished with his torch still lit, with his torch still lit, he's the one that won. When you got saved, God lit your life for Him. And there's a lot of folks out there, guys, them weeds and them thorns are choking the Word so that honor, obedience, and endurance are being choked out of their life. And it's showing. Because they don't have their hope. They're leaving the Garden of God to go chase out every other thing coming and going. They don't question, they don't wonder where's the hoe at so they can get to work for the Lord and hang in there. You know, it's like that little old song that Amaya sings from time to time in the evening services on Sunday night. This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. God, we better let it shine and we better get the weeds, the rocks, the thorns, the morning glories out of the ground. until it becomes what? Good ground. So when it becomes good ground, then it will produce thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. So, as we receive that good seed of the Word of God this morning into our hearts, as we hear the Word of God, we can honor Him by obeying Him and enduring until the end of our race when we lay the old hoe down. And then, you talk about a morning glory. Oh, it will be glorious that morning. Whoo! When the face of our Jesus, whoo-hoo-hoo, we will see. And you will see it even brighter and better because you knew exactly where the hole was. You honored Him by obeying Him and by enduring for Him. Guys, don't lose that hole. Hang on to it. because you hear the word of God. So now, you know how to use that word ho in a different way than the vast majority of Americans ever will think. So, as we bow our heads and as we close our eyes, now comes to the point of you really finding that ho. Are you going to honor him? Are you going to obey him? Are you going to keep enduring?