Reader: Romans, the 8th chapter starting with the 18th verse—
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. 23 And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. 24 For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.26 In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; 27 and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. 29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; 30 and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? 33 Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; 34 who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. 35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 Just as it is written,
“For Your sake we are being put to death all day long;
We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:18-39 NASB)
So God add a blessing to the reading of His Word [3:27]
Dallas: And it is right on the theme of the morning and if you will look to the blackboard over to the left or if you have your Bible before you, look at Romans 8:30 and you will find that theme in the last words of the verse.
We are talking this morning about glory and glory as we know is primarily something that belongs to God but what I want to say to you this morning is that you had better get ready to be glorified yourself. Are you ready for that? Can you stand it? [4:07]
We are taught with some justification so much against self-glorification that we are apt to miss the fundamental point that those whom he justified, then he also glorified. We are apt to think that that is something that happens after we die or we are apt to think that that is something for very special people who have a halo around their head, perhaps to only be seen in pictures or paintings, but glory is for you and glory is for me.
Now, I want to say just a few words about the sense of the text before I begin the discussion, which we’ll look at much of the passage, which was ready to us this morning by Wayne and let’s just think for a moment before we begin about what this passage might mean. [5:27]
And first of all, what is glory after all? What is glory? Have you ever seen glory? Have you ever seen something glorious and if so, what did you see when you saw that? In human life, we come most closely in contact with glory perhaps when we see a little child or perhaps when we are present at a wedding and there we see glory. We see the beauty. We see the splendor. We see what is admirable and honorable. Perhaps sometimes we see that in a person who is aged and has learned how to bear their life and their relations and their death in an honorable way.
And in short, to be glorious is to be admirable, to be honorable. It is to be beautiful and if you will look in the dictionaries, you will find the words like splendid or magnificent and what this verse is telling us is that the intention of God is not completed until those whom he justifies are made glorious. Do you understand that that is talking about you? [7:10]
Just look at this passage a moment. Verse 29 and 30—“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his son.” Now, his son was glorious, was he not? And if we are going to be conformed to the image of his son; we are going to be glorious.
Many times, people seems to think that the basic problem with human beings is that they don’t think well enough of themselves but the trouble is that they don’t understand what well being consists in, you see. They think of it in terms of dress and equipage and perhaps, power over the lives of other people or great financial resources, living in certain places. If people but understood what well being is and the glory of it, it would be and indeed perhaps is impossible for them to think highly enough of themselves once they understand what that greatness of the human soul is. [8:38]
There was a rather good philosopher named Milbank of some centuries ago who thought that the human soul was so glorious that God had to hide its nature from the individual in order that they should not be ruined by their pride.
Of course, we understand that this glorious nature of the self—and that’s you we are talking about—is not something which is a matter of self possession self pride because it is the nature of human beings to live in their connections with others and to draw their greatness from their relationship with God and that’s why God is love and that’s why the last word in your life and mine is to be love. [9:29]
We are to be predestined to the image of Jesus Christ. We are predestined to that image. You don’t become a Christian and then decide whether or not you are going to be like Christ. May I say it like that? And if you’ve heard it put that way, then would you please at least put something else down beside it and a big question mark beside the other. We are predestined to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ and that means to be like him and did you even notice how people flocked around him? As you read the scriptures, you see him constantly troubled with too many people coming to see him, and have you asked why is it that it was that way? It was because of his glory. It was because he was splendid. It was because he was magnificent.
Did you ever watch people gather around a little baby and go “goo goo gah gah,” see? And did you ever especially watch grandparents—grandmothers grandfathers—they are almost disgraceful in the way they carry on. [Laughter] My older brother has a whole bunch of grandchildren by now and he is well, you would almost not trust him to drive down the street after you see him around his grandkids. [Laughter] And what is that? Well, that’s beauty, that’s splendor, that’s magnificence, that’s life. And that’s you are to be and that’s what I am to be because I am predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. You see there to be many of us like that and that’s what the church is to be. [11:27]
The church is a glorious thing. It’s a splendid, magnificent thing and just as we must not ever be put off by the low thinking and false images of what human life is to be like so must we never be put off by the low standards we sometimes find in churches, where there is often as much gloom and despair and lifelessness as anywhere on the face of the earth. The church is a group, a family of people who are grown together and they have the family resemblance and they feed on the glory of one another and in the moments when they face discouragement and despair and perhaps hopelessness, they draw hope from one another like a baby draws milk from its mother’s breast because they are in a connection with one another which is so intimate and so deep that the glory which is in one is transfused into the other.
“Many brethren, moreover whom he did predestinate, then he also called and whom he called: them he also justified and whom he justified, then he also glorified.” (Romans 8:30 Paraphrased) So the sense of this passage is that there is a great destiny that is carried out in a number of stages in the plan and working of God in human history and that the end of that plan is the glorification of the redeemed—the glorification of mankind in its proper relationship to God and to lay all of the abstractions aside, that is the glorification of you and of me as we walk in the faith in the goodness of God which was betrayed in Eden and which has been betrayed ever since and which we betrayed when we came into the world no doubt as soon as we had a chance but which Christ has called us back to and has shown us what the goodness of God is like. [13:44]
Now, that’s the sense of this passage and I want now to back up and remind you of the entire point of the book of Romans. We are concluding today our discussion of it and I want to say to you once again that the theme of the book of Romans is –nothing new to say this and you already know it—but we need to be reminded about it as we look now at the total scope of Paul’s intention in coming through to the end of the 8th chapter.
And the intent of this book is to reveal the righteousness of God. It is to give a vision of what it is about God that really makes him good—that really makes him right. And we have seen as we’ve gone from the very 1st chapter up through the 8th chapter of Romans, which we entered last week. We have seen Paul winding his way, as it were, through these conceptual and theological mountains and uphill and downhill and one heavy topic after another and now we see him coming to the mountain peak. [14:52]
And here he is going to express that great a confidence, which lives in him because of his knowledge, not only of the great acts of God but of the small acts of God in his own life. And as coming into the 18th verse, he gathers himself together. He reaches out one more time and this time takes in the entire of scope of creation, the entire cosmos as the basis of his claim about the purpose of God in redemption and he says, “For I reckon”—in the 18th verse—“I reckon that the sufferings of the present time”—remember our discussion of reckoning earlier—to reckon is to consider it to be so.
It is not just to know it in the sense of being convinced of it. It is to know it in the sense of believing it and being resolved that it should be so. And he says, that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared; that is to say it isn’t just that they are small. It is that they are so small in comparison that they are not even worth thinking about. They are not even worth thinking about. [16:23]
You see, the remedy for our problems as human beings is to lose ourselves in the greatness and goodness of God and to not be trapped by the things that afflict us into an obsession with them. Many times, you will meet people who are caught up in a seemingly endless circle of troubles and if for many of those folk, if they were but able and if they aren’t, then it’s our business to help them become able. But if they were but able to simply lay it all aside and not consider and simply turn to the good works at hand in human life, their problems would be solved and the goodness that God is placed in this world, simply even in other people apart from great works of grace would enter their lives and transform the whole thing.
And Paul you see has traveled to the point to where he is free to say that. He is free to say very simply, they aren’t worthy to be compared. It isn’t even worth considering. When you think of the glory that shall be revealed in us—the glory that shall be revealed in us.
“For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.” (Romans 8:19) Now, here he turns to the entire scope of creation and he refers to the story in Genesis of the subjugation of all of reality to the will of man. We are to have dominion over the world in which we are placed and I must say, we have done a pretty miserable job with it on the whole. And the creature is groaning. He’s made subject to vanity, not willingly but by reason of God—him who hath subjected the same in hope to humanity—because the creature shall also be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious—there’s that word again—glorious liberty of the Sons of the children of God. (Romans 8:21 – KJV) [18:36]
This 22nd verse is very touching. When we look at the world around us, we sense that there must be something wrong. We must understand that it is the groaning of creation. “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together unto now.” (Romans 8:22 Paraphrased)
The English poet James Stephens has written a poem called Little Things and he says,
Little things, that run, and quail,
And die, in silence and despair!
Little things, that fight, and fail,
And fall, on sea, and earth, and air!
All trapped and frightened little things,
The mouse, the coney, hear our prayer!
As we forgive those done to us,
— The lamb, the linnet, and the hare —
Forgive us all our trespasses,
Little creatures, everywhere! [19:33]
There is so much sadness and so much sorrow in the world around us, and it isn’t even necessarily restricted to human beings. There are many things that hurt and look very bad without reference to what we do. The sad little lemmings in their yearly trek to the ocean when overpopulation pushes them out and one senses as one looks at the world around one that there is a great heartbreak at the heart of things as the poet has said.
In the last few Sundays, you’ve had on the front of your bulletin what is in truth a very moving picture of a great lion, lying down and between the lions paws there stands a little lamb. And in the 11th chapter of Isaiah you know the great prophesy that speaks of a time when the cow and the bear will live together in peace and the lion will lay down with the lamb and the child shall play upon the whole of the asp, a poisoness snake. You see, the vision of the prophet has always been that there is something terribly wrong in creation as we know it and it is groaning, waiting to see the time when the children of God should come forth into their full power and liberty and remove all of that suffering and all of that pain. [21:00]
Not only so in the 23rd verse of the 8th chapter (of Romans), “ . . . not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan. . . ” Now, you see, we have in this passage a combination of groaning and glory. The groaning of creation and then in verse 23, the groaning of those of us who have received something of the first fruits of the spirit because having received these gifts we come to sense how out of order things are and we suffer with the discrepancy. “ . . . we ourselves groan, waiting for the adoption, the fullness of redemption . . . “ when the body and the mind is fully transformed and the goodness of God is as plain as daylight. (Romans 8:23 Paraphrased) That time which again, both Isaiah and Habakkuk the prophet referred to as the time when “ . . . the earth shall be covered with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” (Habakkuk 2:14)
There is not much left out in the way the water covers the sea and we groan for the time when it should be so. There are so many things that we cannot explain and we cannot understand. In the best of lives, there is suffering and pain. There is failure and heartache ad these are the things over which we groan. [22:36]
There are sometimes sent out I believe signals that if you will but become a Christian or follower of Christ, everything will be made simple and easy after that. That certainly isn’t true. The glory of the Christian does not consist in simply having no trouble, in having no pain, in having no failure, in having no limitations. That is not the glory of the Christian and in this present interim where we live as we grow and as we look forward to even a greater redemption, we sometimes are oppressed and we groan with the weight of things, which lie upon us and we are saved as Paul says, by hope. Hope saves us.
How does hope save us? It is the mark of an undeveloped person in general if they cannot forego impulsive drives to satisfaction on behalf of something that is a little further off and as we grow from children into manhood and womanhood, normally the process is that we should know how to extend our hopes beyond the present need. If we are in school, we may wish to rest or to watch a television show, but we know we need to study. [24:15]
Consequently, we put aside what we would like to do for the moment on the basis of a hope that by behaving in a different way, something good will come to us and we learn that it is so if we act in that faith. We learn that it is so and we learn the goodness of behaving in that way. Now that is a simple human principle and Paul is not saying, “You’re saved because since you have hope in your heart, God looks down and says, ‘You are a good boy or a good girl and I am going to save you.’ ” Rather, we are saved by the efficacy of hope as a principle of our minds and our characters and as we live in that hope, we reach out toward the resources of human and divine good that is all around us and we learn how to work with them. And we come to the point to where the spiritual world is as real to us as anything else that we know.
One of my favorite passages on this point is in a book called Arguments for the Existence of God by John Hicks and he is describing the kind of sense that the person has who has lived this life of hope and he says, “If we consider the sense of living in the divine presence as this was expressed by Jesus or Paul or St. Francis or the others of the great prophets in the Old Testament, we find that their awareness of God was so vivid that he was as indubitable a factor of their experience as was their physical environment around them. [26:22]
Do you remember what it says of Moses in that great passage in the 11th chapters of Hebrews? It says, “For he endured as seeing him who was invisible.” (Hebrews 11:27) That’s how he was saved by hope. His hope put him in touch with a reality and that’s how we are saved by hope in this time of groaning, and as we move more and more towards the time and the place of glory in our lives. And not only so, but we have a little help in all of this in the 25th and 26th verses, we see the apostle speaking of waiting patiently for the hope and then also saying that this spirit also helpeth our infirmities. (Romans 8:25-26 Paraphrased)
The word helpeth here is a very good word. It’s like “lends a hand.” The only other place I think that this word occurs in the New Testament is in the story of Mary and Martha. You may recall that Jesus had come to visit them in the 10th chapter of Luke and the 40th verse and as he was in the home, Mary was so attracted to his glory that she just couldn’t fix the biscuits and wash the pans and Martha had a very great sense of responsibility for these things and as she went about her business, you can bet that the banging of the pans became louder and louder (laughter) and perhaps the slamming of the cupboard door and finally she walked in and said to him, “Master, tell Mary to get up and come and give me a helping hand.” It’s a lovely word. It’s the picture of helping along with, of someone coming and taking the other end of a heavy burden and that’s what Martha was saying. Have Mary do that for me. [28:16]
And now we find here one of the most marvelous pictures in all of the scriptures of the working of the gracious presence of God in our lives because here the spirit who is now that great helper that was sent in place of Jesus. Remember Jesus said, “I’m going away and a comforter, a strengthener with is coming alongside of you to help you.” (John 16:7) They were so conscious of his helping presence. They didn’t think they could get along without him and when he spoke of dying they almost wanted to die too because his glorious presence had given them life and now he is going away and they are very upset. And he says, “There will be another presence. There will be another presence in your life.”
And I love the fact that in this 26th verse, the spirit is described as making intercession and you have to put that with the work of Christ also making intercession in verse 34—making intercession in verse 34—“It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8:34 Paraphrased) and you have to put that with Hebrews 7:25—a great passage on the intercessory work of Christ. “Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” And the picture is this in this time of groaning as the glory moves into our lives and as we feel the tension and perhaps as the more we see the possibilities, the more our heart is broken with the actuality. [30:20]
There enters into our lives a new principal and we find ourselves feeling things that we can’t express. The spirit helps our infirmities. We can’t express them for we know not what we should pray for. We don’t know what to pray for often. You are in that situation perhaps sometimes as you open a new church and as you began to move towards finding leadership and making decisions. And very often, if you are honest, you may say, “I don’t know what to pray for.” And I would almost say if you are not feeling something of that, you are not being honest about it.
But you see, that’s natural and that’s right and there is in that time, whether it concerns the work of this church or you as an individual, that time when you don’t know what to pray for, there is something in you which you may sometimes feel constricting your heart and pressing in your mind. And perhaps that makes you groan and remember that that is the spirit itself making intercession for us with groaning’s which cannot be uttered and it is as if we in our restriction living in this world look up to God and he seems so far off and there is a move in which Christ comes into the world and we look at him and he says and we know in our hearts, he says somehow what is right, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (Romans 14:9) and yet he is not here. He is there. [32:02)
What is in our heart—it is something bigger than we can express, and we are caught up in a life, which is not under our control, see? The Christian life is not a life of works; it is not a life, which is under our control. It is a life of experiencing forces drawing us to love and in love beyond anything, which we can plan or utter or describe. It is the sense of lying in a great spiritual tide that draws us and moves us and surprises us and thrills and frightens us to death sometimes and causes us to put ourselves in a way where almost anything could happen.
But to do so in an attitude of trust and with a knowledge that there is this much knowledge of love that has come into the world and I look at it and I not only know it with my head but I commit myself to it and in that divine moving of the tides. On one end the intercession of Christ at the right hand of God; on the other end, the intercession of the spirit in my heart. I grow and I am transformed and my faith is magnified and made greater and changed qualitatively in ways I never suspected because I am in the divine ambience of the spirit of God that gives me life and moves me. [33:37]
He searches our heart and he knows what is the mind of the spirit because he makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God and God accomplishes his purposes and so you see, in this time of groaning, we have not only our hope but we have the spirit helping our limitations and our infirmities.
And then finally, verse 28, we have a certain knowledge. “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” It is not just a belief at this point; it is more something in the way of a knowledge. Notice that it does not say here that all things work separately for good. [34:31]
I once heard this illustrated by reference to some high jinx in a fraternity house where they invited a person who was going to be initiated to come
for a meeting and they were going to have a cake and eat it too and they brought him in and there was the cake—the only problem was it was not cooked. It was not mixed. There was the flour and the sugar and the eggs and the milk and they made him eat those things separately. (Laughter)
It is not alone that things work together for good for God. Do not ever stop and ask of one thing taken alone—how does the work for good for God? If you do, you will often be hurt and surprised. It is as things work together. There is a divine chemistry in the will and working of God in the life of the faithful of the disciple who is committed, which makes all things work together for good. [35:40]
And again, we must not be obsessed by the nature of the particular thing because there are many bitter and unhappy things that happen to us and one of things I like to try to avoid above all is a kind of Pollyannaish, optimistic, super-sillyish attitude that tries to identify itself with Christianity and just say, “Well, everything’s wonderful!” Everything isn’t wonderful. There are awful things. There are terrible things. And they are not good in themselves and don’t ever say that God says they are. They are bad. All things work together for good—it isn’t even sometimes that they come about through good things and another thing or through good purposes.
That’s another thing we have to keep in mind. It isn’t that God sends everything into our lives that comes into our lives. It’s that if we love him and are called according to his purpose anything, which comes into our life can be made to work to good. But we don’t have to seek the good motive, which brought some very unpleasant and painful thing in our lives. It may not have come from a good motive. There are awful things in this world. And the viewpoint of this verse is not looking backwards and saying, “I see that everything was sent by God.” It is looking forward and it is saying, “Everything which comes can be blessed by God, can be made to work together with the other things that have come into my life,” and this is true of the most bitter things. [37:19]
One of my favorite passages in all of the Bible is a little word in the book of Joel. Joel was a prophet in bad times and they had seen their harvest, their crops ruined upon a number of occasions and in the 2nd chapter, the promise of the prophet of God’s good favor is expressed in terms of rain and in terms in abundance of crops and wine and oil but in the 25th verse, this phrase, “I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten. The cankerworm, and the caterpillar, the palmerworm, my great army which I sent amongst you,” and in this case, there was no question in the prophets mind but what these things had been sent.
The prophet says, “I will restore to you the years and so many of our years have been eaten up with fear, with guilt, with our own wrong doing and willfulness, sometimes without our own ignorance and even stupidity because very bright people can be very stupid about some things. And we suffer and we lose years and we find ourselves at some point looking back and saying for the last ten years, I’ve just been holding on by the bare edge or we find ourselves looking back at a wasteland—perhaps financial gain—nothing—downhill; health, perhaps bad; trouble in the family, trouble in the neighborhood—what God is saying is that it is even possible for him to take those years which are already spent and change their entire color and fit them into life as it goes onward and restore the years that the locusts hath eaten. [38:39]
You see this is the confidence now of Paul as he looks at this time of groaning, the confidence that we know that even such things as the bitter past can be sweetened and changed b the way it is made to fit into our lives by the chemistry of God. “We know that all things work together for God to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) [40:18]
Paul has reached now the summit of his presentation of the righteousness of God. It does not just summarize his thinking; it summarizes his experience. It summarizes much grief. It summarizes a life of labor, seeing others disappoint him and yet in the midst of all of this, he stops at verse 31 and says, “What shall we say to these things?” Looking all the way back now to the first part of his letter, what shall we say to these things? And I wish that you would write this answer on your bathroom mirror where you have to look at it every morning or on your car dash or wherever it might be that you would see it constantly. For the answer is—“If God be for us, who can be against us?” If God be for us, who can be against us? [41:25]
This was the basis of Paul’s great confidence. He says in 1 Corinthian 5:6: “Therefore we are always confident”—confident in trouble and beatings, in jail—Paul perhaps new the insides of the jails around Asia Minor as well as anyone—confident when others fail when those who have worked with us turn against us and go a different way—still confident—therefore we are always confident Paul said and his confidence was simply based in that fact—if God be for us, who can be against us? “He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all; how shall he not also freely give us all things?” How many things does all things leave out? It doesn’t leave out any, does it? All things—the second letter of Peter says “all things that pertain unto life and to Godliness.” (2 Peter 1:3 Paraphrased)
Now, that’s what we can be confident of and when those who come lay charges against us, we can say, “It is God who justifies.” When those who come in verse 37 to condemn us, we can say to them, you condemn me, but Christ died for me. And is even now presenting my case, “who shall separate us then from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword?” (Romans 8:35 Paraphrased) He thinks of all of the bad things but we have to think also of the good things because sometimes it is prosperity, it is success, it is good health. There are many things, which might, but Paul in his confidence, says, “None of these things. In all of these things, we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.” (Romans 8:36-37 Paraphrased) [43:30]
How are you more than a conqueror? What more can you do than just win? Well, Paul was conscious that there was another possibility. There was more than just winning. There was benefiting from what you went through. When he says, we are more than conquerors through him that loved us, he is saying that in the large and small connections of our lives, we have learned not only how to overcome, but to benefit from what happens to us by the grace of God. We have learned that all things promote us. It isn’t just that we manage to stay afloat as long as someone doesn’t make a big wave but that whatever comes, even the big waves, move us forward to the destiny which God has set before us to be conformed to the image of Christ.
Are you ready to be glorified this morning? There are two dimensions of it. One comes beyond death and that is a great dimension without which this life is not complete. But what I am most concerned to say to you today is that it comes also before death. You are to be a glorious person by the grace of God. The Lord of Glory gives his glory to you. He shares that with you and as he does so, you become as the Psalmist says, “All glorious within” and as your faith is, so it will be unto you. (Psalm 45:13 Paraphrased) [45:29]
We are going to stand now and sing. If there are those who care to make some decision or commitment, settle some matter in some way, we’d invite you to come forward. There will be someone here to greet you. If you care to join with this church and place your membership here, this is your opportunity to do it as we stand and sing Trust and Obey.
Before Dallas pronounces the benediction, I would like to say a little personal word here. We are going to miss you Dallas and I hope your schedule will bring you back to us very soon.
Dallas: Okay.
I’ve grown accustom to him being here and he’s been a real blessing to us and I trust that the Lord will be with him and as we continue the ministry here and to think that he has brought so close to us that the Lord will be with him and he will be part of us. We have some big decisions; many things happen, and if what he said this morning. You know we pray, “Lord how should we pray;” yet he tells us that all things will work together and without him, nothing can be done but with him, all can be done. [46:30]
If you are not one our members, I would like to personally invite you to join with us. We need you. If you know not the Lord Jesus as your personal Savior, you need him. You really cannot give thanks, you cannot participate in thanksgiving without knowing Jesus Chits as your personal savior. If you have not made that decision, won’t you do it today? There are men here at the front that would love to talk to you. Remember tonight at 5:00—the potluck; this is a marvelous time to get together to know each other a little bit better—5:00 tonight over at Granada Hills Pres. God Bless You!
Dallas: Let’s bow for the benediction. Now may the grace of God surprise you in all of the places of your life with its presence and with its power to accomplish what is good and may you know continually the presence of God. May your minds increase in the understanding of his word and of the truth and the freedom to trust him and the power of that truth and it alone. I think we can pray that in Jesus’ Name on his behalf. Amen.