 Open your Bible to Matthew chapter 11 if you would and at our church right now we're going through the gospel of Matthew and I just felt that this this evening would be a good place for us to stay. I'm gonna call this something different than we did at our fellowship on the weekend. We called it rest for the weary, but it really makes more sense. I want to give it a new title and that is we're gonna call this a come to Jesus moment. How many of you have had a come to Jesus moment? How many had a come to Jesus talk with your loved one too from time to time? This is all about those come to Jesus moments in our lives and if you want to mark your Bible as well, we're gonna turn to 2 Corinthians 11, so 2 11's here, Matthew 11, 2 Corinthians 11 and then Jeremiah 6 if I don't run us out of time and that will be nobody's fault but mine if that happens. But would you stand with me and I invite you to read along with me from Matthew 11 right at the end of the chapter. Let me get a drink. This is I love this cup holder. Wow. This is the tallest glass I've ever seen in my life. I guess that's how it works. That's cool. Matthew 11 read out loud with me if you like to the last several verses there starting in verse 28. Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Verse 28 once more come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Father thank you for the scriptures. Thank you for this one dependable book given to us from you. You breathe this into existence. Thank you Lord for your steadfast love and the sure words in your word. Speak to us tonight father as we open your word as we open our hearts pour your truth into us in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Have a seat and say gracia y pas to somebody. I collect ways to say grace and peace. I'll give them to you. Here's a couple. Harshipache. Anybody know where that is? Anybody? Romanian. Any Romanians here? I might have just butchered your language. I don't know. Grazepé. I think that's French. I'm not sure. My favorite way to say grace and peace comes from a dialect in Papua New Guinea. It goes like this. Marimaribelbelangyepelastapisi. Go ahead. Try that. Phrase by phrase. Marimaribelbelangyepelastapisi. Friends of mine that had spent 30 years in Papua New Guinea I called them and said how do you say grace and peace in your language? And they'd been translating the Bible there for long, long time. Three decades. And they said well it's complicated because there is no word or phrase for grace in our language. Isn't that a tragedy? No way to say here's a gift that you didn't earn. You don't deserve but here's grace. They said Marimaribelangyepelastapisi. But the rest of it is that peace is more of a concept than a word. And it goes like this. Belbelangyepelastapisi. And that means my stomach is at rest between me and you. Isn't that beautiful? I mean isn't that really what peace is? If peace doesn't become relational then it's just a word in a dictionary. If it isn't something that has more than just theology behind it, if it's not a practical thing, what use is peace? We can talk about peace all day long but until there's peace between me and Peter. And peace between you and your loved ones and your friends. What does it mean? So that means that when I see Peter coming towards me my stomach is not in a knot when I see him because there's peace between us. So grace and peace to you in Jesus' name. Tell it to somebody. Turn to somebody. Go ahead. Say it. Anybody ever grow up in a church where you did that? How many of you grew up in a church where the pastor would come out and say peace to you and you would say and somebody in the front row remembers that and also with you? Grace and peace. It's a good thing to say and that's what Jesus is all about here. How many of you have ever flipped through a reader's digest? Don't be ashamed. Come on. It's not just old people that read reader's digest. Readers digest though has this one interesting aspect to it. There are more ads for medications in reader's digest than any other magazine I've ever seen except maybe the ARP magazine, you know, all the retirement magazines. And what's interesting is there'll be the ad that gets your attention. It's maybe this peaceful scene for, you know, you know, some somonex or something like that or one of those sleep aids or whatever. It's got a beautiful graphic that gets your attention and makes you say, oh, I need that. And there may be medications to deal with your headache, your backache, your footache, your whatever it is. Medications that put you to sleep. Medications to keep you awake. Medications for your depression or your anxiety. And the ad gets you, but how many of you have turned the page of the beautiful full color ad to be only followed by two pages of warnings about the medication that's going to make your life worth living? But it also says if you misuse this, it's going to kill you. The same medication. It says, don't use without your what? Doctors prescription. Keep out of reach of gopher's and monkeys and your own children. All kinds of warnings. This medication just might do you in this wonderful thing that could help you. Well, let me tell you something in the passage we've just looked at. Jesus is prescribing the medication for the soul. He says, you come to me and I'll give you peace. Paz, pache, bel-belong your power. I stop easy. He said, I'll take that knot out of your stomach. I'll give you rest. I'll give you peace. And Jesus prescribing to us and you and I, you need this now or let me guarantee you, you will need it at some point in your life. You're going to need the peace of God. You're going to need the rest that he promised to give you. Jesus says it like this. Come to me. All you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. How many of you have a Bible in your lap that says something besides labor there? Come to me. All you who labor. Does it say all you who are weary and I'll give you rest? Well, which is it? Which Bible is right? I want to tell you why I'm not really concerned which one it is because both those words are connected, aren't they? Isn't it the labor that makes you weary? Isn't it the hard work of life that makes you weary? Well, whatever the nature of the work is, the labor creates weariness. One is the cause and one is the effect and again, I guarantee you, if it hasn't already happened, it will. Life will get hard for you. You will get weary if you're living life right because we're supposed to work hard, right? I'm not saying anything about Blanca, okay? I'm just saying we're all supposed to work hard as part of life and that's part of what parents teach their children. You're going to have to work hard to get along. It's going to hurt in different ways though. Life at some time is going to hurt. If you haven't yet, then it's just the fact that you haven't lived long enough to lose a loved one. There's nothing that hurts any worse than that. Life will hurt. You will get weary. You will lose a loved one. You'll be tempted to run away and there'll be times where you just want to hide your face and get away from it all. How many of you have felt that way recently with all the things happening around us? I want to show you something up on the screen here. I want to talk to you for just a little bit. I'll make this very, very quick. We are at one of the most desperate times, I think not just for our nation but for our world that I have ever either lived through or studied. Are you familiar with the fact and aware of the fact that the life cycle of nations is a very real thing? Life cycle of human beings is very real. I feel in my head and really in my heart that I'm still about somewhere between 19 and 21 years old. Why are you laughing at that? That's rude. I'm serious. I have mirrors in my house and I know the truth but my head still tells me that I'm much younger than I really am. How many of you also have that inner clock that tells you? I don't care what the mirror says. I'm a young man. I'm a young woman but it's catching up to me. My body has a life cycle and I am most certainly at this point in the second half of my life. I'm 60, almost 63. I'm praying God lets me have as many years as Moses got and as many years as Abraham got. I'd like to hit 120. I'd like to be healthy when I get there. Who knows? I'm definitely in the second half of my life. I'm not a baby. You know what nations have life cycles too. I want you to follow this with me. This is the life cycle of the nations. I'm going to put the first one up on the screen if you can, please. Go away. Maybe it's before that. I thought I put that in before that. The life cycle of the nations. Look for that if you can. I'll read them off and then you can put it up there when you find it. All civilizations have this life cycle. The first one is the pioneer stage. You can look back to the pioneer stage in any nation. It's where people said either because of crisis or maybe it was a crisis of a flood, something that wiped out a civilization, wiped out a town and they said we can do better somewhere else. Maybe the water dried up and we had to move away. In ancient times you built your civilization right where the water was but the people decided we can do better and maybe the government was overthrown at that point. Maybe there was a coup, whatever it was, but the pioneer stage from revolution or crisis. So you decide let's go do better and you go someplace else and the second stage is the building phase and that's conquest. It's commerce. It's setting up systems by which every civilization has to have them intact so that you can survive. There's got to be a place to grow your crops and a place to sell your crops. There's got to be all kinds of systems. There has to be some sort of a healthcare. There has to be community rules that you work on. Now if you do that, that stage of your civilization or your town or your nation, if you're successful at that you reach the next stage which everybody wants and that's affluence. And an affluence means we've done it. We don't only have enough. We have more than enough. Have you heard recently about Zimbabwe in the news? Zimbabwe used to be the bread basket of Africa and they were feeding other nations. They had more exports of food and now they have imports. They're importing more food than they're growing. Something's gone wrong. They've lost their affluence. Affluence is when we as a nation come to a place, a civilization, we've got more than enough. And we're doing well. Now that's a dangerous place. The scripture actually tells us when things go well, we forget why we're doing well. The next stage is decadence. And decadence is nothing but the abuse of the abundance. So we abuse the blessing of God that he's given us. He's starting to track with the history of our nation. It's where we kind of even sometimes we thumb our nose at God. And the decadence is always followed by this next stage. And that's decline, collapse. And that collapse can happen from invasion. It can happen from judgment. I want to read something to you from this is not a Christian book. It's written by historian and his wife Will and Ariel Durant. It's called The Lessons of History. If any of you are familiar with them, they wrote an 11 volume, massive 11 volume series on the story of civilization. Then they wrote this tiny little book. I love tiny little books. I really do. I'm a pitiful reader. I have a terrible attention span. What was I just saying? No, it's really true. It's true. But in this, this chapter, what they did in this book is they wrote essays on all these mega themes in the story of civilization and history. Growth and decay is this one, The Lessons of History. Listen to this. As education spreads, theologies lose credence and receive an external conformity without influence upon conduct or hope. In other words, we got all this theology, but it doesn't really mess with our life. It doesn't mess with my morals. It says life and ideas become increasingly secular, ignoring supernatural explanations and fears. The moral code loses its aura and force as its human origin is revealed, and that's his opinion about that, and as divine surveillance and sanctions are removed. Listen to this carefully. Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next. That's where we are. How many of you live long enough to realize, wow, Ricky and Lucy are no longer sleeping in separate beds? Those are the older people that are laughing right there, by the way. They wouldn't even let them use the word pregnant. Do you remember that? We're not living on a little house in the prairie anymore when it comes to morals. Everything is everywhere on every network and every station immoral. It's all out there. Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next, an unmoored generation, in other words, are not tied to anything. They surrender themselves to luxury, corruption, and a restless disorder of family and morals in all but a remnant, clinging desperately to old restraints and ways. Few souls feel any longer that it is beautiful and honorable to die for one's country. A failure of leadership may allow a state to weaken itself with internal strife, and at the end of the process, a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to bring the civilization to a close. How many of you realize that's where we live? Our civilization is on the way down and I'm just going to say I don't think that's up for argument. I believe that we're living in the dusk of our civilization. I'd like to have confidence that we're going to turn it all around, that some things that came out of the closet are going to go back in the closet. I'd like to believe that. I don't believe that. I've been feeling this way for a long time and I heard my friend Skip Heitzig say this recently. He said I don't believe that God is about to judge America. He says God has already begun to judge America. When you think of what has fallen, I said this in our church a few weeks ago about a month or so ago and I got a nasty letter back. It might have been from somebody here because they were there for the first time. I don't know but they went away and they said they're never coming back. I talked about the Twin Towers. When we say Twin Towers we always think of 9-11. I'm not talking specifically about 9-11 and what they objected to was the comparison. There's other Twin Towers and maybe triple towers that have fallen in our culture. The first one that fell was when we decided God we don't need you in our public schools. We don't need to allow prayer and that has unfolded to we don't need those 10 commandments in the courthouse either inside or outside. We don't need to make children say in the Pledge of Allegiance the name, the word God. But in on January 22nd 1973 the Tower of the Sanctity of Life fell in our nation with the Roe vs. Wade decision and since then just in America almost 10 times the souls that died in the Holocaust have died in America, unborn souls. God didn't miss that and he hasn't missed it all along. But then in June was the 25th or 26th of this year the Tower of the Sanctity of Marriage fell and has been redefined. And if you study nations you'll see that any nation that became a nation or a culture of death and a culture of sex perversity, sexual immorality that was rampant that nation did not last long. They were on the slide. They were on the way down. Now let me say that having said that I don't hate anybody that I know of. Not a great way to say it. I don't have any hate in my heart. As I'm asking God to make sure that that's true. You ever pray that way? God please take anything ugly, anything dark that's in me. David put it this way Lord if there's anything crooked in me. If there's any way that's evil in me, lead me in the way everlasting. But I'm concerned about what's happened in our nation. But here's the only thing that encourages me. I know it sounds strange that you're about to hear some encouragement in the middle of all that. When Paul crossed over from Asia into Europe and he started making his way from Philippi down to Athens and then to Corinth. You know where he was walking? He was in almost modern day Western world. He was walking into the same death culture and immoral culture. It may be a step or two ahead of us and you know what he said when he got there? These people need the gospel. These people need Jesus. He didn't preach a different gospel to the homosexual than he did to the cheat in the marketplace. It was the same gospel. A Christ who came shed his blood for the sins of sinners like you. And by the way are there any sinners in the house tonight? Are there any saved sinners in the house tonight that have found hope in Jesus? We sang about the hope. That there is hope. Amen. There is hope and there's only hope in Jesus Christ. But our nation, I don't know if you agree with me, but our nation is in trouble. It's times like these. What does Jesus say to nations? What does he say to people? He says, come to me. All you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give your rest. In times like these, times that are difficult like these, where do you run when life gets hard? Now let's get back on the personal level. Where do we run when life gets hard? Where do we run when the rug is pulled out from underneath us? Where do we run when we lose a loved one when we're tempted to run away? We're going to run somewhere. Which way do we run? Jesus says it like this. He said, come here to me. Come to me. It's probably the most common invitation from God in all of the Bible. And it comes in all different forms. I'm going to throw these up on the screen for you. That was the first slide that you had back there. You'll find God saying this, look to me and be saved. Isn't that great? He said, I'm your hope. Look to me and be saved. And then he says, turn to me. Go on to the next one and just keep them rolling here. He says, return to me. How many of you are thankful that God allows you turns? Siri does too. And the GPS on my phone does too. And I just like how kind Siri is when she says, you know, you might want to turn around. Not at all. Now my wife is pretty patient too. But Siri never gets to the point where you've ignored her or your GPS. And by the way, how many of you have an Aussie voice for your GPS? You can get that if you want. But they never get to the point of saying, really? Come on, are you going to listen to me? Am I talking to myself? She just keeps saying, turn around, take the next left turn and then another left turn and get back where you belong. God says, you can turn around. That's repent. He says, return to me. He says, trust in me. He says, believe in me. Keep going. I'm taking too much time here. He says, call upon me. I love that one. Call upon me while I am near. He says, cry out to me. Sometimes you have to do that, don't you? It's not a patient little, oh Lord, I would truly love your help this evening. I mean, it's a cry. It's even a groan that can't be uttered. You don't even know how to say it. Next one. Follow me, Peter, the apostle Peter. Check it out in your own Bible. The very first thing that Jesus said to him was, Peter, follow me. Follow me. You know what the last thing Jesus said to him was? Peter, stop worrying about John. You follow me. That was beginning to end of Peter's life. It's the same for you and I. I know exactly what God wants you to do with the rest of your life. Follow Jesus. Follow him every day. Do the next thing he puts before you to do. Next one, come to me. Is there another one there? An abide in me. Now that you're with me, stay here with me. Did you notice that all of those phrases had one word in them? It was me. It was me. It's all about Jesus. We have that on the front door of our church. We have that on our bulletin. We have that on our website. It is all about Jesus. True Christianity is not an invitation to another man-made ism. Anybody thankful for that? It's not an invitation to come to my slick program or my facility that's better than anything else you've ever seen in your whole life. It's not an invitation to a ritual. How many grew up in ritual? Oh my goodness. I fell asleep through most of the ritual as a kid. Even when I was an altar boy, it was hard to keep my eyes awake. And that's bad when the altar boy falls asleep. Especially if he's swinging the incense burner. That's bad. I got to tell you that one day it was my brother Kevin and I returned to be the altar boys for the week for the morning mass. And then during that week there was a high mass and it was our turn. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Is this Greek or Latin anybody? So it was my turn to go back and light the incense burner, bring it out to Father Scanlon. I think it was. And he would, you know, say the Latin stuff and he'd swing it in the air. And I did my job perfectly except I forgot to lock the top of the incense burner down. So he's he's facing the crucifix and he starts to swing this thing and the burning incense pours out of that incense burner like lava, you know, and it hits the brand new carpet that had just been installed. And I found out from one of the pillars of the church. I went back like 20 years later and said, Billy, do you know that we just replaced that carpet you burnt 20 years ago? It's smoldering there. And Father Scanlon walked over to the side. He got some holy water and he poured it on the smoldering carpet and it was out. But I am so thankful that Jesus doesn't invite us to a ritual. He doesn't invite us to just a ceremony or a system. He says, come to me. I want you to see this statement up on the screen. True Christianity, read it with me, is simply the restoration of the original primal relationship between God and man restored by Jesus Christ. That's true Christianity. If you want to use the term Christianity, which is nowhere in the Bible, if you want to use that term, please make sure that you give the people you speak to the understanding it's a relational thing. It's not a religious thing. It's not a ceremonial thing. It's about you and him. Think about God and Adam in the garden even before Eve. It was a relationship. Can you imagine? Do you ever dream or think or meditate on what that relationship might have been like? It had nothing in it like, okay, Adam make sure that you meet me on Wednesday nights at seven o'clock in the chapel because we've got to go to church that night. It was just walking in the sanctuary God had built for him. I'm not saying don't come to church on Wednesday night. But that relationship is beyond all that ceremony. It's you and Jesus. So who here? When Jesus says, come to me, abide in me, who is he inviting to come to him? Well, he says, come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I'll give you rest. Two chapters before Jesus has said of the multitudes. It says as he looked out at the multitudes, he had compassion because they were weary. Maybe he's talking to the multitudes of lost people. But then in the same passage as one verse later, he turns to his disciples and he says, wow, look at all these people that are scattered like they have no shepherd. Look at them out there, he said. He said, what we need to do is pray for laborers. That was a clue to me. Just recently within the last year, when I read this, the whole tone of this passage changed for me. We've always used this as an evangelistic passage and that's appropriate. Jesus says to the lost wandering center and there's probably someone here tonight who have never made a focused commitment of their soul to Christ. You're still maybe trying to save yourself. You're still trying to put your own life together. And Jesus says, stop that nonsense because you don't have the wisdom to do that. You don't have the ability, you don't have the power to do that. Jesus says, come to me. Every lost soul in here. And anyone that's listening, if this is going out over the internet, Jesus says to you, stop the nonsense and trying to save yourself. And he says, come to me. And I would just ask you, aren't you tired if that's you? Aren't you tired of that deadly grip that sin has on your heart? That you can't stop those things that you know are destroying you and every relationship around you? Aren't you tired of trying to save yourself? Aren't you weary from the burdens you've been lugging around all these years? Aren't you tired of trusting man? And don't make the same mistake this next election cycle, okay? How many of you have been through enough election cycles? You thought, I thought I could trust them to keep their word. I thought I could trust them. You know, why do we think Jesus is here tonight? Because he said he would be here. Why do we call on him in prayer because he told us he'd listen to us? And he never breaks a promise. We stand on promised ground. We stand on the sure word of prophecy. And he said it, he'll keep his word. Amen. Anybody agree with that? So if that's you, where do you run? But Jesus said, I want you to do this. Simply run to me. But there's something I realized, like I said, somewhere in this last year, this is for me. This is for the follower of Jesus that he says, come to me all you who labor weary, heavy laden. I'll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me because I'm lowly and amic. And you'll find rest for your souls because my yoke is easy. And my burden is like, I think he's talking as much to those disciples who probably have just come back. Do you know why? I don't know if your walk with Jesus is anything like mine. But I know Peter and I, we get tired sometimes. And I know we get discouraged at times. Although I've never seen him look as discouraged as sometimes I feel. But am I talking to anybody here? Anybody getting this that, you know, there's times when we get tired. There's times when we blow it. Oh, that's just a nicer way of saying we what? We sin. And I remember one time, 1971, probably this time it was it had to be in the summer. It was a hot summer's day. And I'd been saved since November of 1970. And I gave up. I said to myself, I'm just not cut out to be a Christian. I just can't do this. And I'm sure I'd sinned, whether it was greed or anger or lust or I don't know what it was. But I know it was something I just said, I can't do this. Anybody ever feel that way? I'm done. We were living on Ocean Boulevard in some really cheap apartments. Can you believe there were cheap apartments down there on Long Beach on Ocean Boulevard? There were, yeah. And I decided I'm done. I'm just going to go back out and do what I always did. I still look like the hippie that I'd been before I got saved and I thought I'm going to go out and hitchhike on Ocean Boulevard. I'll stand at the corner of cherry and ocean. Hippies will pick me up and I'll just go get loaded again. I'll just go smoke pot or whatever they got. I'll take whatever they got. Because it always happened. I had hitchhiked. Since I've been a Christian, I'm not encouraging that. But I did. And I always got picked up by people that had dope. And there's a reason they call it dope. But I'd always get picked up with people that had it and they'd offer it to me. I said, oh dude, look, I got something better. They said, whoa, what do you got? I said, I got Jesus. And that was usually the end of the ride at that point. But so I went out there and I stood there like this for 45 minutes or more. And VW a bus after VW a bus full of hippies just went right on by me and let me just stand there with my thumb flapping in the wind. I thought, oh, the dream is dead. I still look like a hippie, but they wouldn't pick me up. So I walked across the street. Now I'm a little upset and I'm starting to get it. OK, God, this is not fair. You won't even let me run away from you successfully. So I walked across the street in the Bixby Park. And in the middle block there, there used to be, I think it was called Roke. It was like croquet for old people on sand. And there were benches all over the place. And so I remember laying down on this bench, taking off my shirt, and just laying there to get some sun. And I'm still fuming. I'm still feeling horrible about myself. And I'm laying there on this bright summer's day. And I could feel, I could sense, eyes closed, that something had just covered up the sun. Maybe a cloud, deep cloud, maybe a storm's coming. I looked up and there was this old, old, old. One more. Say it with me. Old man. And he was hovering over me. And I'm not exaggerating on this. Black coat, black tie, white shirt, black pants, black hat, leaning on a cane, looking down at me, looking right into my eyes. And he said, young man, you're going to get a sunburn laying there like that. I looked up at him and I know I said something rude. It was like, oh, just don't worry about me. Just leave me alone. And he leaned in like a little bit further. And he said, son, did you know that Jesus loves you? It was just like a surgeon's knife to my soul. No, God's not going to let me run. Yeah, I gave up. But he didn't give up. And I got up from there. And I just thanked him. Never got his name. I'm kind of of the opinion that as old as he was, that was probably the last thing he ever did. He went home and died that night probably, went off to heaven. And the Lord said, thank you. Thanks for helping me chase down that runaway boy. Or maybe he said, well done, Michael. Maybe it was an angel unaware. I don't know. I don't know if angels dress all in black on a hot summer's day. But you felt like giving up before. You felt like I'm not cut out to be a Christian. Some of you felt that this week. You felt like I'm just going to keep going through the motions. I'll keep going to church. I'll just keep trying this. I'll keep trying that. But this is for you. Jesus says to you, come to me. This is a come to Jesus moment for you tonight with whatever has disappointed you, with whatever has broken you, with whoever has let you down. It's time for you as a father. Are there any Christians here that are committed to serving Jesus for the rest of your life? Let me see those hands. Yeah, praise God. You mean that? You mean that? Let me see. I have one more time if you really mean that. OK. If you mean that, let me tell you something. On the way from here to heaven, it's going to get hard at times. And with our culture, the way it is, it may get as hard as it is for Pastor Said right now, for some of us. I don't know who's going to come to shut us up. I don't know what they're going to do about our buildings. I don't know what they're going to do about our tax exempt status. I don't know what they're going to do about our radio programs, but they won't shut me up. And I hope they don't shut you up. No matter how hard it gets, I hope that your heart is saying, Jesus, if I have to limp into heaven, if I have to crawl into heaven, if I have to roll into heaven, if Peter has to sort of roll me toward the gates of heaven, then I'm going to keep serving you with whatever I got. If he gives me 120 years and they're not all healthy, I'm going to still give him whatever I can give him. If all I can be is a coat rack in the corner until Jesus comes, then I want to serve him in that way. I had a moment, though, and you've had these. If you've served Jesus, I want to tell you something. Your heart will get broken a thousand times between here and heaven when you run into somebody who says, I don't need your Jesus. I'm sorry, I don't need your Jesus. I communicated with a few people after the Supreme Court decision back in June, and I told some of these young men, I said, I'm praying for you and Jesus loves you and there is hope for you, but this is not right. And I had some angry and some foul words back and I had some threats and people that wanted me to die and wanted to help me die and all that kind of stuff. But this one young man says, you know, I don't really want your Jesus. I don't want anything to do with him. He said, I'm going to live my life, the rest of my life and have as much fun as I can. And whatever happens after that, I'm okay with it. I'm okay with it. And he said, hey, but you know, if God loves me, that's kind of nice. And that's the last I've heard from him. That broke my heart to hear him say that. But there's other things that'll break your heart. It was December 10th, 2002. And I got the call that a precious little friend of mine, 11 year old Heather had passed away. She'd had five open heart surgeries by the time she was five. And mom and dad knew that she probably wouldn't make it to adulthood. But she was the most radiant, young Christian I'd ever met. She'd come running into the sanctuary after church, ignore the no running in the sanctuary rules, which we don't have by the way. And she'd come up and just interrupt whatever conversation I was having just to throw her arms around me and say, Pastor Bill, I love you. And I say, Heather, I love you. And she'd run off. She was always telling people about Jesus. I got the call that she had collapsed at school and it didn't look good. And they'd taken her to Fountain Valley Hospital. And I jumped in my truck and I started heading over there. And I just said to God, and I don't know what backstory was behind this, but I said, God, I can't do this anymore. I don't have what they need. I can't go change this. And if I could interpret what the Lord said to my heart that night, it was this. So Bill, you're telling me that it's okay with you if her parents and her little sister Danielle go through this without you? That is what I would call a gentle rebuke from God. And then I thought about Pastor Chuck had been doing this over 50 years, just walking into people's nightmares. And I said, Lord, if you'll give me what you gave him, I'll keep doing this. And I got there and there was Danielle, her sister, sitting on the bench. The bench was right by the emergency door entrance. I've been on the bench personally. When I was 16, my brother of 17 passed away. That's sick in August and died in September of 1968. And I know what it's like to sit on the bench and feel hopeless and maybe a little bit angry with God. And all I could do was just sit with her. I put my arm around her and I just said, Danielle, I know, I know. And to be with her parents, that's hard. You know what Jesus says to you and I when it gets hard? He says, come to me. Just come to me. And I want to encourage you right now. I'm not gonna say anything else that I had to say. Watch this. I'm gonna close this up. I'm done. But I know that when time gets hard for you, you'll run somewhere. You'll run to a bottle. You'll run to a substance. You'll run to food. You'll run to television and sit there for hours and hours and hours. You'll run to the thumb game. You'll play the thumb dance on your little device. You'll run to sex. I don't know what you'll run to, but we'll run somewhere. And Jesus says, run here. Run to me, Christian. This isn't just for the people that will stream forward in August here at the Harvest Crusade. This is for you and I to say, Jesus, I'm coming to you with my burdens. I'm coming to you with my weariness. I'm coming to you with my failure and with my sin. And I'm gonna lay it down before you. Would you please keep me on my feet? And would you keep me on my knees? And would you keep me on track, Lord? And would you keep me close to you? Because I'm not done. If you got a pulse, then God's got a plan. If you still got a pulse, God has a plan for you and it is not to give up. Amen?