He is There & He is NOT Silent! pt1

I’m so troubled, so for whatever you do, get out and vote. I’m not telling you who to vote for, just telling you who not to vote for. Red is bad. Okay, let’s get to a good topic, shall we? In the 1970s, I happened upon a book. I don’t even know how I learned about this writer. He was a philosopher. He was a theologian. He was a professor. He ran a very special retreat in Switzerland called Labrie. That was just the name of it, Labrie. His name was Francis Schaeffer.

I got a hold of this book, and I had trouble reading it because he was talking in an academic language that I never heard. I did not know how to associate with it. I’m so glad I didn’t give up. I’m so glad I plowed through, and by the time I got to the last chapter, and he was talking about God, and he was talking about what is happening right now in this country, what’s happening in our universities, what’s happening to the morals, what’s happening to all this stuff. It was absolutely spellbinding to me, and I thought, surely these things won’t take place. Well, they are. But his primary focus was to help people who might struggle with the existence of God, and his very last chapter was called, He is There and He’s Not Silent. So when I was preparing this message today, I really felt that the title of Schaeffer’s book really would work for me.

So I’ve stolen the title of his book, and that’s an exciting chapter. If you could ever read that book, it’s absolutely astounding. I don’t have a copy of it anymore. I gave my library away to a young pastor some years ago. I wish I could retrieve some of it. This was one of the books that I left behind. So I want to begin this morning. So we’re going to talk about the fact that God is there, and he’s talking, he’s communicating, he’s speaking. So I’m going to begin, first of all, by reading the book of Hebrews, chapter 1. And you’re so familiar with what I’m going to read, but it’s important that I read these passages. As much as you know them, it’s important that I can understand these different passages, and I want to pull them together. 

God, who at various times and in various ways, in times past, spoke to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom he made the worlds. You’ve got to read these verses slowly. You can’t get lost in the verbiage. He’s appointed his Son heir of all things, still speaking of the Son, through whom he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory, the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. That passage deserves five Sundays alone, but we must move along. So God, in times past, the writer of the book of Hebrews says, in times past, he spoke in various ways. 

The big word for me there is God spoke in a number of ways in the past, and especially through the prophets. But he’s in these last days spoken to us by his Son. God did not use a prophet to talk to Adam. He didn’t use a prophet to talk to Enoch. He did not use a prophet to talk to Noah. He did not use a prophet to talk to Moses. But there came a time when the Lord was speaking to those to whom he wanted to communicate, not out loud, but was speaking in other ways. And this passage says, he spoke to us, the Jewish people, in a variety of ways. But now God finally is speaking loudly, loudly, in a climactic way. He’s speaking to us now through his Son.

But the point I want to bring out next is, he’s finally speaking to us through his Son, Hebrews chapter 1, but he’s always been to us through his Son, because Jesus is the Word of God. So he was always speaking through the Son. So when he says, now he’s speaking to us through the Son, he’s not just talking about the vehicle whereby he communicates, but he’s now saying that what he’s communicating is the grandson of everything from the book of Genesis to Malachi and through the New Testament. He’s now speaking in a grandiose way, which includes everything that we learn from God through Moses, everything that we learn through the tabernacle, everything that we learn through the kings, through David and through Solomon, and on down through the prophets. He spoke through prophets. He spoke in visions. He spoke in dreams. But now it’s not just how he speaks, but it’s what he’s saying.

And I want to just throw this in too, that God has given him the name above every name, the name above every name. I want to hastily say that there was a time when I thought, yeah, he’s got a greater name than the President of the United States. He’s got a greater name than Winston Churchill. And it suddenly occurred to me, no, that’s not what that means. We’ve all heard sermons, and we’ve all read it in the Word of God. The glorious names of the Lord from the beginning and on through the Word of God, the Lord our righteousness, Jehovah Tzidkenu, Jehovah Rapha, the Lord will provide all of those names. Every time a name of the Lord was revealed to us, another facet of who God is was revealed to us, the Lord our banner, the Lord our righteousness, the Lord our peace, the Lord our provider.

But in these last days, God has spoken and given Jesus the name, which is the grand sum and total of all of those identifying names. He is Jehovah Tzidkenu. He is the Lord our peace. He is the Lord our banner. He is the one and all. And so, this is what the book of Hebrews is saying. In these last days, in these last days, through Jesus, God has exhausted His vocabulary. 

There’s nothing more that God can tell you that He hasn’t already shared and told you through Jesus, because Jesus is a summation of His glory, of His majesty. We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father. The Word became flesh, and He dwelt among us.

We touched Him. We heard His voice. We saw the miracles. We saw the suffering, but we saw Him rise again from the dead. We saw Him go into heaven, and He told us, I’m coming back for you, and I’m preparing a place for you. He’s the grand total sum of all. So, we go back now to Genesis chapter 1. He’s there, and He’s not silent. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, He was there, and He wasn’t Silent.

But when God spoke, in that instant, in that moment, the universe came to attention. God said, the very first thing, let there be light. Jesus is the light of the world. And God saw that the light, it was good. He divided the light from the darkness and called the light day, and darkness He called night. So, the evening and the morning were the first day. Then God said, let there be a firmament. Then God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place. Then God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree. God said, let there be lights in the firmament, the sun, the moon, the stars.

How many stars are there? I don’t have time to read all the sciences, but every once in a while, I get this little twinge, and I want to know something. So, I tap on Mr. Google. He’s not my Bible, but he does save me a lot of time going to libraries. And I ask Mr. Google, how many galaxies there are? We live in one galaxy. It’s called the Milky Way. It’s astoundingly large. We got all excited back in the 1960s when Buzz Aldrin, and I forgot all their names.

Did you watch it on television? Was that exciting? How many watched the first landing on the moon? Anybody old enough to remember? Oh, good, good, good. Yeah, we were living in a little town up in Espanola. I went berserk that they’re walking on the moon. This is incredible. We’re all excited because we were able to catapult somebody to a planet called the moon. We thought we had done extraordinarily well. What a celebration! What a celebration!

But that’s just a sand pebble in the universe. Hello? The moon is—it’s a pebble on a beach. Because galaxies—we live in one galaxy. We live in something that could be compared to a little cul-de-sac in the largest city of the world. We live in this little galaxy. How many galaxies are there, Mr. Google? Billions! How great is our God! How great and wide his vast domain! To try to tell these lips cannot begin, can’t even start.

I want that to sink in. Pastor, what are you talking about? Of course it just sank in. Did it really sink in? Did it really sink in? How about this verse? The billions of galaxies. I’m going to go nuts here. I get so excited. The heavens declare the glory of God. Billions! Do you feel small yet? Do you feel small? The heavens declare, by the word of the Lord—why don’t you read this? Read that first one with me. By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and all the stars by the breath of his mouth. 

Now, there are scientists much smarter than all of us, and they’d say, I don’t believe that. And my question is, okay, Mr. Brainiac, what is your answer? How do the billions of galaxies, each one with stars and moons and Marses and—we are unable to wrap our heads around it. The word of the Lord established the heavens, not even with a stroke of the pen. Pastor David, how did he do it? I’m going to tell you how he did it. He spoke.

He spoke. Let’s read the next one. By faith we understand that the universe was formed by the word of God, so that the things being seen have not been made from the things being visible. Stop. By faith. Give me proof, Pastor Dave. I just gave you billions of proof. By faith, you have to take this step. By faith, we do understand. If you want to understand, you can. By faith, we understand. We grapple. We don’t understand. I don’t know enough about electricity.

I’m dangerous with a screwdriver. When I was at college, they said, what did you study in school? I didn’t want to tell them. I said I studied electricity, but I was a flunky. They said, that’s okay. You’re now the school electrician. Then he came along and he said, we just bought a new 220- volt deep fryer. The students want fish and chips in the evening, so it’s being delivered today. Can you put it in? There’s a big S on my shirt. I can do anything. You know, there was an S on the shirt of Super Mini Mouse, right?

Remember that? Somebody else was setting up the fryer, and I was doing the electrical. I’m in the basement of this big hospital, and I thought I understood electricity. I went down and I walked around. They didn’t wire that. It was a big old hospital that had been converted into a college. They didn’t worry about it, when they built that place, they didn’t worry about all the codes that we have today, where the wires have to go, inside a wall, they have to do this, this, this, and they have to be coded. They didn’t do any of that stuff. You go downstairs, there’s wires running everywhere. I had a screwdriver.

It was a good-sized screwdriver. I’m wondering, you know, one wire sends power, and another one, it comes back. One of these is live, one of them is not live. I knew that. This is great. I’ve got to find a live one, and then maybe that will give me 220 volts. And I put my screwdriver up, and I saw this little spot. I don’t know if it’s a screw or whatever. And I put my screwdriver up to that and touched it over to something else, and my screwdriver that was this long suddenly was this long, and this was the handle. The whole shaft of the screwdriver melted and dripped onto the floor like ash.

I don’t understand electricity, but I came in today, and I flipped a switch, and voila! I don’t have to understand how electricity works to have faith in it. When I flipped three specific switches this morning, when I came in, first of all, the place is in darkness, and I hit those switches, I didn’t say, now, I’m not going to trust this unless I can understand it. I’m one screwdriver short of a good load here. I just flipped the switches. I don’t care how it got here. I’m glad it’s here. I don’t have to understand the glories and the mystery of God. I tested it out, and I didn’t lose my screwdriver when I touched His power, and it went into my heart and my life. He spoke, and it was. Colossians, one more verse, okay? For by Him all things were created. This is speaking of Jesus. Things in heaven, things on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or 

rulers or authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him. 

Let’s go back to the verse before this just for a moment. By faith we understand that the universe was formed, how? By the voice of God. The voice of God, the Word of God. They’re equal. It’s the same. It’s the same. The voice of God is the Word of God.

So we understand that this universe, the universe is the collection of all these galaxies, and nobody has any idea how big it is. Nobody. The universe was formed by the Word of God. Here we go. So that the things being seen, we’re now seeing the universe in ways that we’ve never seen before, because now we have technology. It’s unbelievable technology. We’re seeing out there in outer space. So the things that we are seeing were made from things that were not visible. The voice of God is not visible. God created it all from, can you see what’s in my hands? Nothing.

God made it all from nothing, from nothing. By Him all things were created, everything in heaven, the earth, the visible and the invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities. He’s saying it right here. This writer is saying, you know, these rulers, this guy that’s running for election, and if he gets in there, he wants to destroy Canada. He’s a European. He wants to win this election. I saw him on a panel when they said, well, you’re the one outsider here, you’re Canadian. And that man said, no, I’m a European. He’s got three passports. He wants us all to join America.

Everybody’s afraid that Trump’s going to take us. He won’t let that happen, because his plan is that Europe will take us. Hello? Vote for him. Go ahead. No matter who these people are, no matter what they’re going to try to accomplish, they’re like a flea, and God will finish them off. God will finish them off. Sorry. God said, let there be light. Let there be an expanse. God creates the sky and then separates the waters on the second day. Let the waters under the heavens be gathered.

He gathered the waters together so there was some dry land. Let the earth bring forth vegetation. You know what’s fun at our house right now? I built some little bird houses. And we’re watching the birdies come now. We’re all excited. April said, look, look, look, look, look. The one that you put down at the bottom. It’s a junky thing, like what I did. But you know what? The birds don’t know it’s a peasant’s village. And it’s a blast.

These little creatures know. They will come, 20, 30 sparrows will come racing into our yard, and they’ll all go inside a bush. It doesn’t matter the kind of bush. Okay, watch this. And they all go in, and they get inside, inside, inside the bush. And I’ve watched that, and I thought, what are they doing? What are they doing? Why? They don’t sit on the outside. They’ll go in, in, in, in. Then you step outside, and you look up at the sky. And there’s a hawk circling. They know that the hawk can’t get into the little branches to get them. How did they know that? How did they know to go inside the bushes? Well, their mama taught them with the World Encyclopedia by Binkley, Binkley, and Bonk. These little rascals have only been alive for, what, the last three or four months. And they know about the trouble in the sky. We had some peanuts in the shell.

 They’d been in our house for a couple of years. We tried to feed them to guests, and people just pushed them aside. So I rigged up this little… I took this glass dish. April was asleep.

She didn’t know. I’m not allowed to do this kind of… I took this glass dish, and I put it outside, and I put all these peanuts in the shell. And then I went in the house and looked out the kitchen window. It wasn’t two minutes, and there was a blue jay there. It picked up the first one and went… i didn’t like that one. I thought, you’re just like my guests in my house. A couple of days ago, I dug up a little piece of garden. I’m going to plant some potatoes. Guess what I dug up? Peanuts in the shell.

The blue jay didn’t put them there. No. Grandpa, great-grandpa Squirrel taught little Billy Squirrel, when the blue jay tosses the peanut, it’s yours. And that critter went and buried the peanut in my garden. Where do they learn to do these things? It’s in them. It’s in them. It’s their nature. I want to move over to Genesis chapter 12. So the Lord God speaks to a man named Abram. He spoke. What language does God speak?

Whatever language you understand. The Lord God had said to Abram, get out of your country, from your family, from your father’s house, to a land I will show you. I will make you a great nation. God’s speaking. I’m going to start again. God is speaking. He spoke and the universe was suddenly created. What happens when God speaks to a person? A universe is born. When Jesus spoke into my heart and in tears in the basement of a church, all alone, screaming at the top of my lungs, what do you want? What do you want of me?

You’re tormenting me. And God spoke to me in here. In times past, he spoke directly to Abraham. Abraham heard something with the eardrum. But Moses, he learned from God. God spoke to him out of a bush that was burning. He had burned for God and was destroyed by it. The fire that hit Moses in his early life, that fire out of control destroyed him. Now he sees a bush on fire, and it’s not being destroyed. God was speaking to him. It’s possible to walk with me and be empowered by the Holy Spirit, and you don’t turn to ash.

And when God spoke to Moses that day and Moses listened, something incredible happened that day. It was the beginning of a saga that is still happening to this very moment. Israel’s the most talked about nation in the world. Sorry, Mr. Trump. They’re still talked about more than you. The dinkiest nation. Postage stamp of property, and everybody says, they don’t deserve to be there. God spoke it. I’m giving you the land of Canaan, and nobody’s going to take it away from you. And he says to the Houthis, go ahead, make my day. So God speaks, and what he says is life-changing.

God speaks, and if I listen, I don’t have to understand how the lights work. I just have to flip the switch. God spoke, and Abraham flipped the switch. He had to act. This story was not going to be launched. This new universe was not going to be formed unless Abraham moved in anticipation. Get out of your country. Get away from your family. Leave your father’s house to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great. Put yourself in Abraham’s sandals. Do you hear what he’s saying to you, Abraham? I’m going to give you a country. I’m going to make you a great nation. I don’t have a son yet. You’re going to make me a nation. I am going to bless you, and nobody can stop me. I’m going to make your name spoken all over the world. It’s going to become a great name, and you will be the source of a blessing to many. 

I will bless those who bless you, and heaven help those who curse you. You and all the families of the earth will be blessed. Let’s read on. God speaks. God doesn’t give him a map. God doesn’t use GPS. God doesn’t give him a written promise. God simply spoke to him. We don’t know how that exactly happened. Did a person show up, and Abraham recognized it as a deity? We’re not given that, and there’s got to be good reasons for it. I have none of those reasons. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It matters that Abraham heard.

Pastor, are we sure he heard? Oh yeah. Look what the man did from that day forward. The Word of God says in the New Testament, he looked for a city whose builder and maker is God. God’s spoken by faith. Abraham began to walk. He walked away from everything. He walked away from the language. He walked away from his farm. He walked away to a country that he’d never seen, to the people who were inhabiting it, but they were ungodly. God says, I’m going to deal with them. And it all happened because he heard a voice. You see, there’s Abraham in that country, in Ur of the Chaldeans. He was not a Christian. No, he wasn’t even a Jew. He was a dirty Gentile. He was an idolatrous man. His father was not a godly man. It’s likely, it’s believed by theologians and historians, it’s believed that Abraham’s father was a priest, and that Abraham, if he’d stayed where he was, he would have become himself a priest in idol worship. And only God knows what that would have looked like, because they would sacrifice their children. They’d build a fire and throw their babies in the fire. They did the wackiest things. Why did God choose him?

Because God chose him. The one who created the universe doesn’t answer the dumb questions. Let’s read on. God says to him, Go. So Abraham went as the Lord had spoken. Lot went with him. When Abraham responded by faith, Lot got blessed. When I hear the voice of God, and I follow the voice, and I do what’s right, people get blessed. When God speaks to you and says, Go to Japan and play the piano, people are going to faint when you play that piano. And there’s going to be a little lady there, Japanese. They’re very, very difficult people to persuade to leave their Japanese culture, to move over to Christianity.

It costs them everything. It costs them family. It can cost them their job. It can cost them their life. It’s hard for them to take that step. I was pastoring a church in Vancouver. I was a denominational president. I was over—I was a general superintendent of thousands of churches, Uganda, Taiwan, South America, the Philippines, Mexico. I had a Bible color. I had all of this responsibility. And for this college that we had in Taiwan, I would go over and I would preach at the coronation of the young people who were graduating, and I would ordain ministers and work with them.

And so it was suggested, could I take some of the students from that school, that college, to Canada and let them taste Canada? And it could be part of their curriculum. Well, the interesting thing is that the whole city knew—Taichung is the city of Taiwan—everybody knew that it was a Christian college. But if you went to that college, you’d learn English, you’d learn so many wonderful things, and people from America, Canada would have an influence on you to have a great education. So parents allowed and even paid for their children to go to this great college. So here you had all of these people. They were a part of another religion, Buddhism, okay? And they’re going to chapel every day, and they’re singing songs.

They’re singing the hymns of the church, and they’re hearing Jesus, and they’re hearing prayers. And so the 15 or 16 young people who were in their early 20s, most of them were girls, came to our church in Vancouver. Our family put them up in their homes, and it was a wonderful thing. And I had chapel services with them, and we fed them every day, lunches and so on. We took them on tours to the parks. They wanted to see Canada. They were all excited. But I had an opportunity in the chapel service to share it with them. And one morning, I said, apparently you young people have not been water baptized, and I got news for you.

It wasn’t planned, but we’re going to do it. We’re going to have a water baptismal service on Sunday. How many have given your hearts to Jesus? Everyone raises their hand. Are you ready? Everybody raise your hand. Yes, I’ve given my heart to Jesus. I said, good, you’re all candidates. Repent and be baptized. You’ve got to be baptized. You’ve got to follow through. You know how many we baptized? Uno.

One. Why, pastor? An explanation was given to me. Their whole religion is based on ancestry, ancestors. And when their grandparents perish, you’ve gone into a restaurant. They’re all around here. And you go into a Chinese restaurant, and you’ll see there’s a little creche thing on the wall, and sometimes you’ll see fruit and whatever in there. It’s there to honor the grandparents. They go to a temple, and there with real Taiwan money, they will purchase, I’m going to call it monopoly money. It’s run off a photocopier. So for one Taiwan dollar, you can get $15. And then outside, there’s this big cauldron. It’s a fire. And so you throw the money into the fire. That’s how you’re honoring your ancestors. It’s an incredible thing. For somebody to give their heart to Jesus, apparently that was okay. Now, we don’t know if they even told their parents about this, but to be water baptized, that is death to the old and embracing the new. And they would have been betraying their parents. They would have been betraying their grandparents. They would have been as much as spitting on their grandparents’ grave. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it. The story doesn’t end there.

Some of them, when they went back, we’d had some influence on them. I can’t tell you the whole rest of the story, but one of them we brought to Canada. He lived in our house, and I mentored him for a whole year, and he’s pastoring an incredible church in a city in Taiwan to this day. God did some wonderful things through Stephen. But this man goes to Japan. Same thing. It’s a cultural thing. You heard a voice in your heart. You heard God speak to you. Here’s Japan. The Lord wants you to go there. You go, and in the very first service, a little lady walked to the altar. It was like an Abraham moment somehow in that service, God spoke. When you played your piano, He was there, and He was not silent. He was touching. He was brooding over her. It was like the Holy Spirit brooding over the face of the deep. It was dark. Remember, it says, Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, it says it was dark, but the Spirit brooded over. In that little Japanese lady’s life, the Spirit was brooding over the darkness, and the Lord spoke in that service. As you played the piano and as you shared the gospel, it was like when the Lord said, let there be light. And when you spoke of Jesus, God spoke into her heart and said into her heart, let there be a

light. The light came on, and that light was transforming. And you said it on this platform a little while earlier, and those who are listening in, you didn’t get in on this, but our dear friends have just come back from Japan and telling stories of what God did there, and you stood right up here, and you said about that little Japanese lady, come to the altar. 

You turned to me, and I thought, this guy’s reading my memos for my service. You said, I couldn’t do it. You looked at me and said, you can’t do it. It’s God that does it. It’s God who speaks and says, let there be a light. And the light comes on, whether it’s in Scotland, or are you from Timbuktu? I’m sorry. All over the world. Port Colborne, that’s Timbuktu. You know how far these people drive on Sunday mornings to get here? Not as far as Tomboy, a whole hour, and the other Siegfried, with a saddlebag tied on the side, he and his lovely wife, struggling to breathe. What is it draws him? I’ve asked them. What is it that compels you? It’s Linda. No? Pardon? That’s what I said. Judy. I said to Judy one Sunday, they’re on their way out, and I said, Brantford, you can’t get here in less than an hour. I know it. From your house, it’s got to take an hour and 15 minutes. Well, it depends on how fast this guy drives. And Judy, who sometimes is known as Linda, she said, we have to come. We have to come for what we get here. What do you get? The fellowship of the saint? Did you even have a coffee? You didn’t have a coffee. You didn’t come for the coffee. And there were no Chelsea buns waiting for you. Why do you come?

Pastor David, you’re great. No. No. What’s drawing you here is when you come, in this service today, he’s here, and he’s not silent. He’s been speaking to everyone in this house. Not one of you has gone to sleep. A couple have threatened. You haven’t gone to sleep. And it’s not just because I’m yelling and cracking jokes. Sorry. Letterman’s off the air. Somebody had to take his place. It’s the Word. It’s the Word. It’s the preaching of the Word. It’s you receiving the Word. It’s you digesting the Word. And as Abraham digested what God said, what God said to him was outlandish. Are you nuts, Lord? You want me to do what? I’m going to leave everything that I. . . I’m a rich man. I got so many camels. I got so many. .

. The Lord said, out. And when he moved, a whole universe changed. He took Abram. Then Abram took Sarah, his wife. Lot was his brother’s son. And all their possessions that they had gathered, not all, just humongous. And the people whom they had acquired in Haran. So they would have hired servants. They departed to go to the land of Canaan. So they came to the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the labyrinth tree of Moreh. The Canaanites were in the land. And the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to your descendants, I’ll give this land. There shall be built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. And he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel and on and on. I want to drop what to me is an atomic bomb on you folks this morning. Not a bad bomb, a good one. I’ve been reading about this, and I’m tormented with the thought. It’s one thing to speak of sparrows hiding in a bush from a hawk. It’s quite another to look into the eyes of you people today and to know this. The universe is billions of galaxies.

Scientific medical people know how your heart works. They know how your liver works. They know how your lungs work. But there’s one part of you that the greatest medical minds in the world will say, that’s a playground none of us have mastered. What is that? Your mind. And I read this this week, and I copied it down. The greatest medical minds who work with the gray matter and what happens up there. Here’s what they say. The mind is more complicated and has far more complexities to it than the universe. Your mind, your mind. Right now, just for a moment, let’s go to the Sea of Galilee and jump in a boat. Anybody do it just now? In my mind, I went down to the shore. Did you do it, Al? Okay. Let’s all go to the moon with Buzz Aldrin. 

You saw that, right? In your head. Can you remember him going down? He said, it was probably somebody else who said, one step for one man. Neil Armstrong. What did he say? One step for man. Okay. This is interesting now, Alfred. You remembered that. And in your mind, can you see him going down the ladder? That’s your mind. You can travel the universe. A few moments ago, I went to Taichung, and I saw the little gal that worked for me there and ran that Bible college. I saw Stephen just a few moments ago standing on a platform in that church in Taiwan. This is incredible. Did you know that there’s a part of your brain, the only thing it does is it recognizes faces. Proven fact. The only thing it does is it recognizes faces. Is that incredible? Okay. Let me jump. I’ve got to quit. I don’t want to. Let us God spoke. They were speaking to one another, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. They spoke. Let us make man in our image. The intelligence of the universe. It’s an intelligent place. The smart scientists see a plan.

They see mental. They see intelligence. It would take a bullfrog to miss this. Intelligence in the universe. Because God in his majestic mind created it with a word. Why did God create the universe? For you and me. He made a place for us to dwell. And he put us on this little sandbar, and we’re living on one little pebble. God is emotional. For God so loved, and you love, he made you like him. He gave you a mind that can comprehend what love is.

I asked my mama. See, I’m going to go on for days here. Forgive me. I asked my mama, mommy, I don’t know how old I was, probably dying to get into puberty. I was about eight. I said, Mom, will I ever fall in love? I would look in the mirror, and I actually would think, who could love a face like that? God bless you. Yes. Mama, will I fall in love? Of course you will, Dave. How will I know? How will I know?

And she said, you’ll know. Two little fellows were sitting down somewhere in Alabama on the curb, little wee rascals, haven’t even gone to school yet. And the one says to the other, is your foe, or was your five, not sure? No. Do the girls like you? No. Your foe. How will I know, mama? I was too young to get a grasp on love. It’s a feeling, it’s an emotion, but it’s more than that, it’s an intelligent decision. I’ve had couples come to me and say, we’ve got a problem with our marriage.

I said, what’s that? They said, we fell out of love. I said, simple, fall back in love. Go out, get out. Love is a decision, for God so loved, He made a decision to love you, and He made you like Him. And so loving each other, loving the church, loving the world, regardless of what we think about their stupidity, we have to love them, we have to care about them. Love is a decision, it’s an intelligent decision. Intellect, mind, working with emotion, designing will. I will, the Lord said, for God so loved the world He gave, you’ve been made like Him. I’m going to catapult and finish, finish, finish, finish. I’m going to finish.

Abraham passed it on to Isaac, the dream, sat his son down, said, this is what, we used to live in Ur of Chaldea. Don’t ever go back there. You don’t need to go back. You don’t need to go back there. No, no. This is where we belong. God told us. And God spoke to Isaac. Isaac spoke to Jacob, and Abraham had some time. My research says Abraham had some time to talk to his grandson, Jacob. But God spoke to Abraham. God spoke to Isaac. God spoke to Jacob.

God spoke. And so when God speaks and somebody truly hears, he that hath an ear, let him hear. Book of Revelation, verily, verily, verily, I say unto you, Jesus would say. In the book of Revelation, he has ears to hear, hear who wants to, who wants to hear. Enter in and experience the power and the wisdom of God. Abraham made a decision. And then he shared the vision. He started a tsunami. It went from generation to generation to generation. They all caught the vision. People all over the world who have Jewish heritage, they’re heading home to help the homeland. They’ve never been there.

They’re a sparrow that has never made the flight, but they’ll get there. And how come they’re going? Because God is speaking to them. God is speaking to Jewish people all over Israel. People are getting sick. God is speaking in Iraq. And people, there’s a revival going on in Iraq. There’s a revival going on in Iran. There’s a revival going on in Brazil, in Argentina. The light is coming on, and God is speaking. And these powerful politicians who want to run the world, they want all. They’re filled up with a desire for power.

Power. I want to have power, power, power. They’re termites. God says, the day will come when every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess, Jesus is Lord. Some in torment and abject fear, and others will say, Jesus. Jesus. Hallelujah to God. Okay, I’m done. And I’m going to continue next Sunday if I’m still here. Now if I’m not, if I’m no longer here, if I’ve been translated upwards, don’t you worry. I’ll finish my message in heaven. There are some old patriarchs who need to hear this. We’re all

going to go sooner or later, some sooner. Hello? Are you ready to go? It’s important because the primary way that God wants to speak to you, I’m falling for you, Jeannie. I just about, yeah. Behold, I come quickly, and I almost did. Everything that you claim God says to you, it better line up. Hello? I don’t want to hear horse feathers. I don’t want to hear all the, you know, the junk that’s going around today in the name of Jesus. Trash it, honey. Get rid of it.

There’s wacky things out there being spoken and promoted. This is the only roadmap. This is the Word of the Lord. And what a book it is. So Jesus, we thank you. We thank you. We thank you. We thank you. What a pathetic little word to say thank you. I say thank you to the lady at Tim Hortons. What does that mean? Oh Lord Jesus, we don’t just thank you. We adore you.

We love you. We want to honor you. We want to give you all the glory, all the glory.

In Jesus’ name, amen.