Please open your Bibles to the book of Psalms. We're going to be in Psalm 115 together this morning. Psalm 115 in your Bibles, please. Whom you choose to worship is a matter of life and death. If you worship the living God, you will live. If you worship dead idols, you will die. Whom you choose to worship is a matter of life and death. That's why the Ten Commandments begin with, you shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not make a graven image of anything that is in the air or on the earth, anything that is in the sea, anything that creeps on the ground. God will not share his glory with anyone or anything else. The Creator, the self-existent God, the one from whom life comes, the one from whom love comes, the one from whom everything derives its existence and is held together. He is different. He is high. He is holy. There is no one and nothing to be compared with him. He is worthy of the worship of the human heart more than any created thing. He is the creator. And so we find throughout scripture a zeal, a jealousy, for God's glory, for God's name that is lost on those who are polytheists. It's lost on those who create their own gods and make God in their own image and own likeness. They don't understand why God should be so jealous for his name and for his glory. They don't understand what depends upon it. They don't know that life cannot be lived in any other way. But only death will follow, only evil will follow, only sorrow will follow for those who exchange the glory of God for something that has been created. So we come to Psalm 115 this morning, to a psalm that has very familiar themes throughout the scriptures. There are other psalms that have almost these exact same words. The prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, going back to the words of Moses and God's warnings in the law. This is a foundational truth. The very first of the Ten Commandments, the first two in the Ten Commandments, as I said. So let's read Psalm 115 together, and then as we break it down into parts, you'll see here, we're gonna have verse one standing alone, verses two through eight being our first main section after the introduction, and then verses nine through 18. Contrasting the folly of idolatry with the Lord's blessing in verses 9 through 18. A great passage for us here on Independence Day to remember where independence comes from, where true freedom is found. Psalm 115. Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness. Why should the nation say, where is their God? Our God is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak, eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear, noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel, feet, but do not walk. and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them. So do all who trust in them. O Israel, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield. You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield. The Lord has remembered us. He will bless us. He will bless the house of Israel. He will bless the house of Aaron. He will bless those who fear the Lord, both the small and the great. May the Lord give you increase, you and your children. May you be blessed by the Lord who made heaven and earth. The heavens are the Lord's heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man. The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence, but we will bless the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Praise the Lord." What a great psalm. It begins there in verse one with this heart cry, not to us, O Lord, but to your name give the glory. You see the emotion there and the repetition of the not to us, not to us, but to your name give glory. God will not share his glory with another and those who love God don't want him to share his glory with anyone else and we don't want to take any of the glory that belongs to God and God alone. Now when we talk about giving glory to God's name this reminds me of what we've been talking about in the Lord's Prayer. A few weeks ago we were in Luke chapter 11 looking into how Jesus taught us to pray And that's a lesson that we all memorize at an early age, and yet how often we forget it in our prayers. How often, when I come to the Lord, am I immediately coming to the Lord with my concerns, my thoughts, my worries? Lord, bless me. Lord, bless me. And it's not wrong to ask the Lord to bless us and to bring our worries and concerns to Him, but when I come to Him and my first thought is me, that shows that I'm not doing a very good job of keeping first things first. Remember what we said. You gotta look out for number one. And who's number one? God is number one. You gotta look out for God's interests. And so this Psalm, just like the Lord's Prayer, just like the Ten Commandments, just like all of Scripture, it starts with God. It doesn't start with us. And we have to learn that. We have to learn that life is not about me and my concerns. This world was here long before I was born. This world's gonna be here long after I'm gone. This world is about God. It's His world. and we're just one out of billions of people on the earth and God has given us a role. He's given us a part to play. Yes, we're created in the image and likeness of God. We're extremely important. We have a majesty from God that is amazing, but it's all because of God. It's all for Him. And so we play our role and we do the things that God has told us to do, not so that we can exalt ourselves, but so that we can exalt God. That is the heart of worship that God has died to create in this world. Yes, mankind is religious. Mankind has always been very religious and had many forms of worship. But nowhere in the world was there a form of worship that honored God. It was all idolatry. It was all vanity. It was all misplaced until God saved a nation, became their God, gave them the law, instituted their worship, gave them the covenants and the promises, and through that nation sent the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who died in order to redeem a people for himself, so that people would no longer be idolaters, but that now we could be worshipers. These are those whom the Father is seeking, those who are going to worship in spirit and in truth. And this psalm helps us to do that. Now, when we talk about putting God first and giving God the glory and not taking the glory for ourselves, it's very easy to say that, but it becomes something that's hard to keep in mind, hard to keep in practice. I was paying attention to the Southern Baptist Convention this last month, and there was a lot of discussion among the Southern Baptists and among Christians who were watching to see which direction the Southern Baptist Convention was going to go. And the Southern Baptists, they get a lot of attention because they are the largest denomination in the United States. And so they've got a powerful voting bloc that people are interested in. Which direction is the Southern Baptist going to go? And how is that going to affect our country and our nation? And they've got lots of schools where they train lots of pastors and sending out missionaries. So there's a lot of power and money and influence that is there in the Southern Baptist Convention. And so people will put a lot of time and effort into trying to to gain control and to send that convention in the direction that they want it to go. But we don't want glory for the Southern Baptist Convention. We don't want glory for any institution of man. And as I look through church history, especially the recent history here in the United States, every denomination, every seminary, every Christian college starts off with good intentions gets off track and gets lost and go to the Ivy League schools today. And all of those schools were started as Christian Bible teaching colleges that were largely designed to produce preachers like me. People who would exposit the Word of God and shepherd the Church of God. And if you go to Yale and Harvard now, that's not what is going to happen there. Just the opposite. And you look at this and you say, well, you know, you had all the denominations going liberal in the 30s and the conservatives, they lost the battle and they had to leave their denominations, they had to leave their schools, they lost a lot of their buildings. Our church has history with that. We lost our property and our building because we left the denomination because they'd left God's word. And you start to wonder, well, how come God can't keep a denomination? How come God can't keep a seminary? Why can't God keep a college? Why is it that as soon as they get big, They get taken over. Is it because God is weak? God is not able to keep a seminary and a college or keep a denomination? No. It's not that God is not able. He doesn't want them. He doesn't want them because when we get too big, when we get too powerful, when we have this amazing campus and the world looks at us and says, wow, look at them, they're really doing something. then the glory is no longer going to God. Instead, the glory is starting to come to us. So I say, let them have the institutions. Let them have the money. Let them have the power. Let them have all those things. God doesn't use those things. God uses nobody's. Look at who Jesus chose. Look at who Jesus himself was. A nobody from nowhere, with no standing, no credentials, That's whom God uses. And so we're not fighting for the glory and the power and the control. That's not how God works. God delights to overturn the things that are by the things that are not. And so let's just keep on being not so God can use us to overturn the things that are. That's what is really at the heart of this prayer. Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory for the sake of your steadfast love. and your faithfulness. Well, let's look then at the folly of idolatry there in verses 2-8. As I mentioned, God does not share his glory and as we look at verses 2-8, the mockery of idols that is contained here, it starts off with the nations mocking God. In verse 2, the nations say to Israel, where is their God? This is not just a philosophical question This is not just a well, you know, we've got our idols in our temple, but Israel doesn't have any idols So like where is your God? He he's not visible. He's not physical. You can't touch him That's not the heart of this accusation The heart of this accusation as you read it in other places in the scripture when people ask you, where is your God? They're saying how come God's not helping you? Where was your God when your prayer wasn't answered? Where was your God when disaster fell on your family? Where was your God when the tidal wave came through and killed a hundred thousand people on Christmas Day when everybody's supposed to be celebrating the birth of the Savior? Where's God then? Where's your God? He doesn't do anything. And so the same type of mocking that Israel was experiencing here in Psalm 115 is the same kind of mocking that Christians experience today. The atheists will ask you, they'll mock you and say, where's your God? He doesn't seem to be doing anything. He doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of answering prayers and blessing Christians because you're all suffering and there's so much evil in the world. Where's God? And so the psalmist says in response to their mockery, our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he pleases. Come with me to the book of Isaiah. You know, it's my favorite book. Don't be surprised if I take opportunity this morning to go forward from Psalms to the book of Isaiah. And I want you to start there in Isaiah chapter 42 verse 8. We're going to spend some time here in Isaiah because it ties in so well with Psalm 115. Isaiah 40 through 66 is the great book of comfort in which God tells Israel their future after their captivity. So the nations would have been mocking God during the time of their captivity. Where's your God, Jerusalem? You got captured. You got destroyed. You lost your sovereignty. You're now slaves in a foreign land. Your God's really powerful, isn't he? Looks like the Assyrian God might have been more powerful. Looks like the Babylonian God might have been more powerful. Maybe you should become worshippers of our God instead of your puny God who wasn't able to protect you. And so God, in the Book of Comfort, is explaining to Israel why he has given them up to captivity, that it was God who did that, it wasn't the Babylonian gods that did that, and what God's plan is for them for the future. And you know what's cool? Is that we live in that future. And so we have seen everything that God told Israel through Isaiah come to pass exactly the way God said it was going to come to pass. We get the long view. We don't get the short view and say, What I expected God to do in the short run didn't happen, so I'm going to lose my faith in God. No. We got the long view. We look at all of history. And God is working things according to His plan and His purpose, which goes far beyond our immediate daily concerns. Not that He's not concerned about our daily concerns. He certainly is. But He's got His own way of being faithful and handling those things that sometimes we don't understand. And so God says there in Isaiah chapter 42, verse 8, I am the Lord. Yahweh, that L-O-R-D is his specific name that he made himself known to people of Israel through Moses in the Old Testament. I am is the root idea in his name, Yahweh. I am the Lord, Yahweh. That is my name. My glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols. Behold, he says in verse nine, the former things have come to pass. New things I now declare to you before they spring forth. I tell you of them what we see here in Isaiah chapter 42 and following is God's defense of his own unique deity as His name was being slandered as his name was being blasphemed because his people were taken into captivity God then gives the defense for himself before Israel and before all the nations and We need to get back to biblical apologetics this ties in with our first verse verse one not to us not to us but to your name give glory and I think our Apologetics in the Christian Church have been so focused on being intellectually respectable That we have lost the plot Don't try to impress the intellectuals in this world. I Instead give the evidence that God gives in his word, which is despised by the intellectuals They will look at biblical apologetics and say you are a fool You are just as foolish as any other religious person in the world who believes in your holy book when there's really no evidence for it the Intellectual will not listen. We can't try to impress them God is saving those who are nothing in this world the weak, the poor, the despised. God is going to save them through the proclamation of his word and the way that God defends himself in the way that he is going to open up the ears of the masses to hear is through the evidence of prophecy. We can make wonderful philosophical arguments about the existence of God and the Kalam argument and all this type of stuff but God's says, if you want to know that I exist and that I'm real, look at the evidence of prophecy. We need to get back to this in our apologetics. And so, that's what God does here in these pages, in these passages. The former things have come to pass, just like God said. The prophets predicted the captivity of Israel, starting with Moses and continuing on. And now, new things I declare, God says. Before they spring forth, I tell you of them. Now then, let's go to chapter 44. No, actually, back up first to chapter 41. Chapter 41, I want to look at verses 21 through 24 momentarily here. So in Isaiah 41, verse 21, God calls the nations of the world into his courtroom, and he's going to give his argument, his case, and he's going to ask them for their case. God, the Lord, says, set forth your case, says the Lord. Bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. So you've got your gods, Babylonians, Assyrians, all the nations in the world. Make your case. Present your positive apologetic that your gods are real, that they exist, that they are powerful, that they are worthy of your worship. Let them, bring them in and tell us what's going to happen. So, nations, bring in your case, bring in your gods, and let them tell us what's going to happen. Tell us the former things, why things have happened the way that they have in history. Produce the evidence of prophecy where your gods said what the course of nations was going to be like. Anybody? Silence. Bring forth your case. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them and that we may know their outcome, or declare to us the things to come. Do your gods have a purpose and a plan for history? Are they making that purpose and plan known? No, because they don't exist. They're not the gods of history and space and time and creation. They are creations of the human brain. And so God challenges the nations. He tells them, tell us what is to come hereafter so that we may know that you are gods. Do good or do harm. Do something. Bless a nation, curse a nation. Just do something and let us know that you're going to do it so that we can see. Now, 2700 years after Isaiah, when God gave his challenge to the nations, what God is there besides the God of the Bible who can do anything like this? Did any of those gods that existed on the earth at that time bring forth any evidence? No, they did not. And that's why Jeremiah prophesied. He said, the gods who did not create the heavens and the earth shall cease to exist from under those heavens and on this earth. And that's exactly what's happened. Where are the temples to Zeus? Where are the temples to Apollo? Where is the Baal worshippers today? Those gods are gone with the nations that trusted in them. They cease to exist. Another fulfilled prophecy. But how about the God of the Bible? Is he worshiped? Is he honored? Is he believed and trusted in? All over the world? Yes, he is. You know, sometimes the atheists will come to the Christian and say, yeah, you Christians, you know, you believe in your God, but you don't believe in any of the other gods. And so just take the same skepticism that you have about Zeus and Apollo and Hera and Poseidon, and apply that same skepticism to the Bible, and you can throw out that God too, and then we can all be atheists together. Well, if the God of the Bible is the same as Zeus and Hera and Apollo, then yes, let's do get rid of him. I am all for demolishing any claims to divinity that are not genuine and true. There are many claims to divinity and prophets that are populous today. Go to Utah and find a lot of people who believe in a prophet, and we should test him. Was he really a prophet come from God? It's no small thing to claim to be speaking for God. And if a man should be found to be misspeaking, to be lying about speaking for God, then that is the highest crime a man can commit against God and against his fellow man. and it's worthy of death. God's Word says so. But there's something unique about the God of the Bible. There's something special about this God. God presents His case. Come with me to chapter 44, verses 6 through 8. Now, the atheist who mocks at God has such a low concept of divinity as to be totally unworthy of Him. And I would mock the God of the atheist as well. The God that the atheist imagines is nothing but a figment of the imagination. Powerless. Evil. I don't believe in a God like that. The Bible is good at mocking at false gods. The Bible does it better than the atheist does. But the God that we're talking about, he's not just a person. who is like us, who's been around longer and is a little bit more powerful. That's not who God is. We're talking about the fountain of being. We're talking about something that is so sacred, someone that is so sacred and so holy, that everything that is good comes from this person. Isaiah chapter 44, verses 6 through 8. Thus says the Lord, the king of Israel, he keeps using this title for himself, I'm the king of Israel, and his redeemer. So Israel's human kings were defeated, but the king of Israel is not defeated. The king of Israel gave up his people, as God explains, but he's going to redeem his people. And did God do it? Yes, he did. We have the benefit of history. He says, I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God. Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. God says, come on, challengers. He's ready for any challenger. He's ready to take on any comer. Any God you have, let him stand up and let him try to act like God. Let him declare and set it before me, since I appointed an ancient people. You've got the record of God appointing the ancient people. And how did he do it? He did it by destroying the mightiest nation on the earth at that time and drowning his army in the sea. God did it in time, space, history. God appointed that ancient people, so let's see another God who did that, who brought plagues and brought people out of slavery. Fear not, do not be afraid, God says. Have I not told you from old and declared it? And you are my witnesses. Israel is God's witness. You know, there was a czar in Russia who asked, how do I know that the Bible is true? He asked his men in his court, the religious leaders in his country, How do I know that the Bible is true? How do I know if I should worship the Christian God? And the answer was very simple. One word. Israel. Look at Israel. Look at their creation in the Exodus. Look at the conquest of the land. Look at their kingdom. Look at the exile. Look at the return from the exile. Look at how they rejected their Messiah, just as God said. And that Messiah of Israel has sent out salvation to all the nations. And look at how they're in the land again today. Israel has survived every attack, every attempt to destroy them, and they're still here. In accordance with the promises and the plan and the purpose of God, Jacob Yeltsin, if I'm pronouncing his name right, he said Jewish history is the visible empirical act of revelation. There's a visible empirical act of revelation. You see, pluralism would be right if there was no empirical act of revelation in history. Pluralism teaches all religions are basically the same. We shouldn't fight over whose religion is right because we've all just made them up anyway. And so whatever is helpful to you is helpful to you. You can mix and match whatever you like. And it really doesn't matter. We're not searching for truth because we've socially constructed our truth. That's pluralism. And that would be right except for one thing. That there is truth. There is revelation. There is something that has been revealed from heaven. And it's got evidence. It's got compelling evidence. And so the pluralist hates the Bible when it says every other religion is okay. We'll accept any man-made religion. We just don't want the revelation that comes from God. Because that destroys our system. That destroys our philosophy. You ever wonder why Christians are the ones who are singled out? Because we have a heavenly revelation, a divine empirical revelation. God has shown himself in history. He's not the God of the philosophers. He's not the God that we have thought and created out of our own selves. I was down on the University of Nebraska campus years ago when I was a student, They had on one of their signs outside one of their buildings a quotation from God It wasn't a Bible verse. I'll tell you that And then it said they thought therefore I am They referring to the philosophers and the theologians and the thinkers of mankind and they thought God into existence You turn things around The pot didn't make the potter. The potter made the pot. We didn't think God into existence. We exist because God spoke, and it was. The God of the Bible is unique in that He is the God of time and space and history. He is the God who is the living God, as opposed to the creation of human imagination, the idols. We don't have idols in the same sense that they had idols back in that ancient time, but we still have functionally the same system. What do I mean by that? Well, you don't go to your temple and lay your little offering down in front of the idol like they do in some parts of the world yet today and our ancestors used to do before the light of the gospel came in and destroyed the idols. But we still have idols, don't we? Our idols aren't made out of gold and silver like in this psalm. But you can turn on the television and watch American Idol. And people idolize athletes, actors, politicians. Our founding fathers were just men. They were sinners. Trump is a sinner. We don't idolize these men. They have their faults. We're not going to apologize for everything they do. We have our idols, don't we? flesh and blood, that we're no longer able to think critically about, no longer able to think objectively about, but instead we're just defending our own ideologies instead of searching for the truth. You know, the monotheist who goes to church on Sunday can be just as much an idolater as the polytheist who goes and lays his offering down at the Hindu temple. But instead of going to many different gods for many different blessings, we got the system worked out. We can go to one god for every blessing. Because the heart of idolatry isn't how many gods you have. The heart of idolatry is, are you subject to the Creator? Or are you trying to manipulate the forces in this world in order to achieve your own ends? The heart of idolatry is manipulation. I do this for God, God does that for me. I put this coin into the church, I get this blessing out of the church. That's the heart of idolatry. And it's all over Christian television. You do this and God's going to do this for you. The exchange, the manipulation. You can manipulate the machinery of God. Just say this prayer. Just do this thing. We don't manipulate God. God is not a vending machine. We worship God. We obey God. We believe God. We tremble before His word. That is the heart of religion. And so don't think just, well, I'm a Christian. I'm not an idolater. Why did 1 John end his letter then to Christians saying, little children, guard yourselves from idols. Guard yourself from idols. All right, so let's go also to the following verses here in Isaiah chapter 44. We read verses 6 through 8, but let's now see the mockery that Isaiah also has for the idols here, just like what we read in Psalm 115. So let's read verses 9 through 20. All who fashion idols are nothing. That's quite a strong statement, isn't it? All who fashion idols are nothing. He doesn't say the idols are nothing, he says those who fashion the idols. nothing. That's a different statement. And the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know that they may be put to shame. Who fashions a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing? Behold all his companions shall be put to shame and the craftsmen are only human. You can't create something greater than yourself. The effect can't be greater than its cause. A man-made God is is no greater than a man. Let them all assemble. Let them stand forth. They shall be terrified, and they shall be put to shame together. The ironsmith takes a cutting tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it with hammers and works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry. He's just a man. His strength fails. He drinks no water and grows faint. The carpenter stretches out a line. He marks it with a pencil. He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes it into the figure of a man with the beauty of a man to dwell in a house. He cuts down cedars or he chooses a cypress tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it becomes fuel for a man. He takes a part of it and warms himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread. Also, He makes a God and worships it. He makes it an idol and falls down before it. Half of it he burned in the fire, over the half of it he eats meat, he roasts it and is satisfied, he warms himself and says, aha, I'm warm, I've seen the fire. And the rest of it he makes into a God, his idol. And he falls down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, deliver me, for you are my God. That's the greatest tragedy, the greatest folly. How low has man sunk? They know not, nor do they discern, for he has shut their eyes so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, hmm, half of it I burned in the fire. I also baked bread on its coals. I roasted meat and have eaten. And should I make the rest of it? into an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood? He feeds on ashes. A deluded heart has led him astray and he cannot deliver himself. Or say, is there not a lie in my right hand? How low man has sunk in his sin. And what a great affront to divinity idolatry is. Idol is an insult an idol is blasphemous an idol is hateful Other prophets will talk about how the people who fashion the idols they'll say oh, it's good good You did a great job on this idol and then they'll they'll fasten it in place with some nails or some a chain or something So it doesn't fall over like Dagan falling down before the ark of God Wobbly gods are not to be trusted. We don't have a wobbly God. We don't have a man-made God. So come back to Psalm 115. This is why the psalmist says in verse 9, O Israel, I say this to Israel today, O Israel, trust in the Lord. Don't trust in the United States. It's a wobbly God. Trust in the Lord. Turn to Jesus Christ, your Savior, your Messiah, and you will be saved, Israel. He is for you. He is your Savior. The house of Aaron, living in Israel, trust in the Lord. Oh, that God's salvation would come to his people. Not just for God's sake, although that should be my primary concern, Not just for Israel's sake, although that's a loving neighborly thing to want, but for our sake. When Israel turns to Christ, it's life from the dead. The kingdom of God comes, and we enter into glory. That's why we pray for the salvation of Israel. All those reasons. And then he says, you who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord. He is your help. He is your shield. You are God-fearers, those who have turned to the Lord from among the nations, who have come to recognize the God of Israel as the living God, the only God. You come to worship His Son, Jesus Christ. You, trust in the Lord. God's going to test you. He's going to put you through trials. You're going to have things that you don't want in your life, and the atheists will say to you, where is your God now? Trust in Him. He has told you before it comes to pass you will have tribulation. His prophetic word to you as his follower is it's through many tribulations that you must enter the kingdom. So don't let your faith falter and grow weak when life does not go the way you want it to, when your body is full of pain and illness, when a loved one is breaking your heart. Don't give up on your faith. He is your strength. He is your shield. Apart from Him, you have nothing. No anchor. Tossed on the stormed sea. Doomed. Trust in the Lord. He is your only salvation. And you wait for Him. You don't say, it's gotta be now. I gotta have my way now. Do what I want now. What can I do, God, to get you to do what I want you to do? That's not how we treat God. We trust in his promise. We say, God will deliver me from every trial and bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. He will. You'll see it. Soon we'll be there. You know how fast time goes? See how fast your life has gone by? You don't need it now. You need it in God's timing. You need it forever. You need to be established. And that's what's going to be happening at the coming of Jesus Christ. So fix your hope on the grace that is going to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Don't fix your hope in this life. Jesus Christ showed us the way. He was the pilgrim. He came, accomplished the Father's will, and returned to the Father in glory. We're here. We're going to do the Father's will, and then we're going to go to the Father in glory. We're going to overcome and sit down with Jesus Christ on His throne. It's not about now. The only thing that's important now is to do the will of God. Do the will of God and let everything else be what it is. It doesn't matter if you're happy. Be holy. It doesn't matter if you're honored and exalted. In fact, it's probably better if you're not. It doesn't matter if the country goes the way that you want it to go and if you've got the freedoms you want to have. Obey God. Trust in Him. Don't fear the future. Don't tremble before what could be, what might happen. God is with you. He is your strength. He is your shield. And so I'll give you this blessing from the scriptures. May the Lord give you increase. You and your children. And I know that it might be hard for some of you to hear that right now. Because you're hoping for increase God didn't give it the way we wanted. But He does bless. He does give increase. We don't have everything we want all the time, but just look at what you have. And may the Lord give you every good gift and every spiritual blessing. I like how the psalm ends. The heavens are the Lord's heavens. Our God is in the heavens. He does whatever He wants. But the earth He has given to the children of men. Father, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The heavens belong to God. The earth He's given to men. And we want to see men, women, children, God's creation, worshiping and honoring God. And that's the message God has given to us as His people. Be reconciled to God. Be restored to God. Don't die in idolatry. The dead do not praise the Lord. But we, notice the confidence in this statement. We're not going to die. We're going to live. We're not the dead who are not going to praise the Lord, who go down into silence. We will bless the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Jesus Christ came to give us life, and we have it. We're alive now, and nothing can take that life away. Eternal life is eternal, otherwise we wouldn't call it eternal life. And it's not something we're just waiting for, we're waiting for the fullness of it, but we've already got it. We're alive and we're living and we're praising God and we're worshiping God and we're gonna continue doing it forever. Forever. It's never gonna end. We got this life and it's not going to be taken away from us. So in conclusion, we have to remember that God is not limited to your idea of who he is. Years ago, a author, David Wells, who wrote a lot of good things, he said, God rests too inconsequentially upon us. If God really is with us, if God really dwells in our hearts, then we really don't need anything else. We don't need money, we don't need power, we don't need influence, we don't even need respect. We got God. Let the world fight their way. Let us fight our way, trusting in the Lord and in the strength of His might. And He will lead us from glory to glory, victory to victory. No one who puts their trust in the Lord gets disappointed. Let's pray. Blessed are the meek, is what Jesus Christ taught us, Father. You have destined the meek to inherit the earth. Not the bold, not the daring, not the self-assertive, But those who are meek before fellow man, who are humble before God, who make themselves servants of all of mankind, like the Lord Jesus Christ, who when he was on this earth said, I judge no one. And so, Lord God, we are not here to judge. We're not here to establish justice and righteousness in our own way. But we're waiting. We're waiting for you. We know you're going to do it. And Lord God, now is a day of mercy. Now is a day of grace. Justice is not exactly what sinners need right now. They need mercy. They need grace. They need the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Lord God, help us to recognize the people in this world who are idolaters, not as our enemies, but our mission field. Yes, they are your enemies, and if they do not repent, they will end up on the other side of the battle line when Jesus Christ returns. Today is not the day of battle. Today is the day for ambassadors. Today is the day to make peace, to call all the nations, all the people, all of our neighbors, all of our friends, all of our family, to repent of their idolatry and to trust in the Lord. Trust in you and in you alone. Amen.