 I'm always grateful for the fact that people can't tell when I'm blushing. I remember years ago we were, when my kids were young, and by the way, before I do any of that, I should introduce people that I don't often have. I get the opportunity to have. My daughter is here with me. My oldest daughter, Sarah, she lives in these parts. I don't know why she shows up. There's nothing I've said that she hasn't heard before and probably would say it better than I do. And then I have some very special friends here from the Philippines, right in the front row. They're welcoming them. And then I want you to welcome a family that I actually met for the first time through some common friends in Thailand. This is the first time they have ever been in a church. And they're here tonight from Thailand, visiting. They live here, I'm glad to have you. So I broke my train of thought so it wouldn't make any sense now what I was going to say, but let me say it anyway. When our kids were young and we were vacationing in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and we didn't go having fun all day. And by the end of the day, of course, everybody looked red as anything, except our kids. They looked fine. And my son, Nathan, looked at me. He was quite little. And he said, thank God for the pigment, hey dad. So it's nice to have the pigment when especially when you're quite embarrassed about it all. Thank you for coming. You know, the story is told of Art Linkletter who was, let me back up a bit. I think, I don't know if it was Einstein. Some people say it was Einstein. Some people say it was another professor from Harvard who was actually visiting the Princeton campus. And as he was walking a young man driving a golf cart or something, knowing the renown of Einstein said, would you like me to show you around, sir? So Einstein got in and he drove around the campus. And at the end of it, he said, could you please drop me off where you picked me up? So the man brought Einstein back and Einstein said, before I get off, I have a question. When you picked me up, was I coming from that side going here or was I coming from this side going there? And the student said, as far as I know, you were coming from that side going this way. Einstein said, good, that means I've already had my lunch. Or Art Linkletter visiting Convalescent home was walking around and the lady just waved at him and he said, do you know who I am? She said, no, but if you go to the front desk, they'll be happy to tell you. I'm beginning to feel that way these days. I'm not sure where I am. I think I know my name. I don't know whether I've had lunch or dinner or what. The time zones that we hit. When I woke up this morning, I looked at my watch and fortunately I have two time zones in my watch. And the smaller one tells me my home time and the bigger dial tells me where I am. So I figured out I was in the Pacific time zone. Took me a moment or two to get recalibrated. Tomorrow my colleague Matt and I head off to Minneapolis. Pray for us. 16 degrees as we go there for the next two days. And then three days later, the Lord's gonna bless us and take us to the Grand Cayman Islands. So we'll go from the ridiculous to the sublime and have some meetings there. I wanna thank you all for having me. We had a great forum last night at Biola along with Dennis Prager. We had a great dialogue. We're doing two more this year. One in Washington and one in Arizona. The theme that I wanna talk to you about tonight, being a church and you know, in my kind of work we are most often standing in front of hostile audiences. I would never have guessed. We were in an Ivy League school of two weeks ago. Never would I have dreamed that I'd be walking into an auditorium with people holding placards, discouraging people from coming in to hear a controversial speaker. Can you imagine that? Who creates the controversy? And all other kinds of things were going on. But a place is packed. They couldn't stop them from coming in and overflow rooms are opened up and they're such watching online all over the world. And so while they're always those who may take offense or like to think they take offense of what you say, when you really engage them in dialogue, they realize that if you do your homework and know how to defend the Christian faith, they will end up at least respecting you and giving you the opportunity to make that claim. So I don't often get to be in churches as much as I love to be there. One of the reasons I've told you is, our calling is into adversarial settings where people disagree or hold to a different worldview. But it's wonderful. I just have to rework my thinking. Every time I get back into the church, my wife actually what she does, she'll always book me in a church after a particularly tense engagement because she knows I need it at least so that people will applaud before I begin. And otherwise they have to wait till the end time and wondering whether they should after it's over. I want to talk to you on the subject that's sort of grandly titled Interpreting Failures and Conserving Victories. How do you interpret the failures that you face in life? And all of us do. Somebody, my brother in Canada, he's a medical doctor. He's a pain management specialist. And one day I said to him, all of life is pain management. How you deal with pain, how you deal with struggles, how you deal with losses, how you deal with disappointments, how you deal with your own failures and your shortcomings. In fact, I just finished the latest book along with my colleague from Oxford, Vince Vitale, it's called If God, Why Suffering. So we go through a lot of those. But then at the same time when we enjoy successes, when we seem to think we've reached the mountaintop with a grand moment of success or blessing or whatever, how do we put this all into context? One of the most profound chapters in the Bible is in Deuteronomy chapter eight. I'd like to read for you from this chapter. And if you don't have your Bibles, I'll read it for you from the new international version. The book of Deuteronomy is referred to by commentators, by biblical commentators, as the most favored book of Jesus because he quoted so often from the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomos literally meaning the reiteration of the law as the law was given to them again. If the proliferation of usage is an indication of favored status, then chapter eight must have been one of his most favored chapters of all because in his temptation or testing in the wilderness, all of his responses come from this chapter. That tells me how defining this chapter was for the people of Israel and for your walk and my walk with God, if our Lord Jesus in the wilderness is being tested by the enemy of our souls and all of his responses come from this particular chapter, this had to be very germane in the biblical passage. Chapter eight, verse one, be careful to follow every command I'm giving you today so that you may live an increase and may enter and possess the land that the Lord has promised on earth to your forefathers. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these 40 years. Why? To humble you and to test you in order to know that what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you causing to hunger and then feeding you with manner which neither knew you nor your fathers had known. Why? To teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these 40 years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you. He goes on to later on when he says in verse, the latter part of verses six and so on, he says, observe the commandments of your Lord walking in his ways and revering him. The Lord your God is bringing you into good land, a land with streams and pools of water with springs flowing in the valleys and hills, a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey, a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing, a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills. When you have eaten and you are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God failing to observe his commandments, his laws and decrees that I'm giving you this day. Father, I pray you will bless, minister, inspire and help us to learn what it is you're trying to say so that we too may be wise in this day as we live and know how to go through the pain and suffering we sometimes have to go through and how to celebrate the triumphs which also so punctuate our lives. In Jesus' name, amen. When you look at the Old Testament, many of the teachings come in threes. It is this, for example, the salvation was accomplished at the Exodus. Their identity was defined at Sinai and their preservation was guaranteed through the 40 years wandering in the wilderness. Their salvation, accomplished in the Exodus, identity defined at Sinai and then the righteousness and the path that they were to follow is shown in that 40 years of wandering in the wilderness how they would be preserved. They were to refresh their memories of God's saving grace at the feast of the Passover. They were to renew their commitments at the feast of Pentecost. They were to respond as a blessed community at the feast of Tabernacles. They were a redeemed community, a commanded community and a blessed community. And yet things went wrong. Things went wrong because of the way leadership went wrong. Leadership is critical. In the home, in the academy, in politics, in church, wherever it is, at the center of a column will always stand one person who has to lead, who has to blaze the trail. And if you read the history of Israel, you'll see where the failing scheme amongst the leadership. You see the untamed passions of a gifted man, wanton power in a privileged man and the untouchable temperament of a man with a possessed promise. You see untamed passions, the gifted man, wanton power in a weak man and the untouchable temperament in a privileged man. In Solomon, you saw all of that capacity never able to control his sensual inclinations. In Rehoboam, you saw all the power that suddenly came to him, but he was weak, unable to know how to handle genuine power. Jeroboam was given an extraordinary promise, a promise that he would be blessed like unto David. But he was not teachable and he lost out. And if you look at leadership today, you'll see one of these three failings. You'll see the sensually driven, unable to handle power with thinking they themselves are the beginning and the end of it all and an untouchable person. This is where our failings really come. But as they were going in through the wilderness, Moses is leading them. He himself has had a tough time coming to this point of believing that he was called to do this. And the most fascinating and ironic thing about preparing Moses to me at least comes in the passage when after all of the miracles he'd seen, all of the impoundments given to him, all of that, he really said, how will I know that you've actually called me to do this? How do I know that? God gave him the most incredible answer, which probably caused Moses to say that's really not what I was looking for. God said, when you get there, you will know I'm the one who brought you. So that's not what I'm asking for, Lord. I wanna know before I get there whether you really want me to get there. When you get there, you will know I am the one who has brought you. You know, the younger you are, the more you think you can manage it all. The older you are, the more you realize if it weren't for him, you would never have made it. That's how the Grand Weaver works. The designing threads, you realize more and more how sometimes you blundered into the right. You had no intention to turn out to be looking so right in it all and God brought you through. I look at my own life, born and raised in the city of Chennai in India, called Chennai, long before the British came. They changed the name to Madras and then the spirit of nationalism arose. They hucked back and changed Madras back to Chennai. In the early days when I used to go and visit the home where I was born and raised, when I take my wife, my wife's from Canada, I'd go or take friends there. If you'd put about three people with an outstretched span like that, that'd be as wide as the street was in where I lived, if maybe three. And in that one tiny little room where seven of us would be raised, and it's okay, nothing to complain about, I'm just telling you, the Grand Weaver had a different story in mind for the years to come, for all that he was preparing one individual for, another individual for. And if you tonight are sitting here wondering, what does it take to get to the place of God's choosing? How do I get there? I promise you, if you honor the directions he has given, when you get there, you will be absolutely certain in your mind that if it weren't for him, you would never have made it through this terrain. I'll guarantee you that. And so what is it that God tells him he wants of them? You see, he was going to take them across this little over 100 plus miles. It should not have taken them more than six weeks to cross, maximum, 40 years. You know, the old story is told of the Texan rancher who was talking to a Punjabi Indian in Punjab and he said to him, Mr. Singh, how big is your farm? And the Punjabi farmer says, you know, if you stand here and look straight ahead, you see that lamppost? That's how long it is and that's how wide it is. And the Texan said, do you know how big my ranch is back home? If I got into the car at six o'clock in the morning and drove and drove and drove several hours later, I still wouldn't have reached the end of my ranch. The Punjabi says, I know exactly what you mean. I used to have a car just like that. We can brag about how big things are, how long it is. And here's God taking them through this terrain. Imagine in that rugged terrain, with such a vast number, how annoying it must have become after some time to put up with all of the grumbling and all of the complaining, 40 years. Here's the first lesson I want to leave with you. The shortest route is not always the best route because it can bypass some of life's most important lessons. And he says, I took you through all of this wondering, why? So that you would get to know what was in your heart. One of God's great designs in your life and mine is for us to look at our own hearts and understand who we really are on the inside. Not what people think we are. We are the people who are in our hearts. We are the people who are in our hearts. We are the people who are in our hearts. What people think we are. Not how it looks with the plasticity on the outside and all the makeup that we can have. Many years ago, in the year 2000, the former Soviet Union was releasing its political prisoners. And one of them was a Hungarian prisoner by the name of Andres Thomas. He had been incarcerated in the Soviet Union in 1945, when he was 20 years old and was released in the year 2000 when he was 75 years old. A lot of that time spent in solitary confinement. They basically almost devastated this man psychologically. When the prisons were being, it's a true story. When the prisons were being emptied, they were going to do away with this man because he was talking total gibberish. They thought he was a psychiatric basket case. And somebody else said, you know, don't do that. Why don't you bring a Hungarian psychiatrist and let him at least talk to this man and see if there is some hope. And so the psychiatrist spent a protracted period of time with Andres Thomas, came out and said, the man is not talking gibberish. This is an old Hungarian dialect. Give him to us. We will work with him. We will reshape his mind. We will get him back into society. And so the Soviets granted that. And so they put him in a wheelchair and the psychiatrist was wheeling him out if you have never read the story, you will never guess what his first request was. As he's being wheeled out, he looks at the psychiatrist and says, can I have a mirror? I haven't seen my face in 55 years. Now you figure out, you're a strong, determined young man at the age of 20. And the next time you see your face, you're 75. Politics, ideologies, does these things to people. And he could only last of glimpse for no more than a second or two. When he held up that mirror, he burst into uncontrollable sobs and put the mirror face down. He couldn't for the life of him believe that this was the same man that picked up when he was 20. We get up every morning, put on our innocent forms of disfigurement, look at the mirror, we like what we see, and then we go out. Let me ask you this, is there a mirror for the soul? Is there a reflection God intends for you and me so that we know what we are intended to look like? It was George McDonald from whom C.S. Lewis borrowed this statement, you do not have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body. You do not have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body. Is there a mirror for the soul? Here's the first lesson. I took you through that wilderness for all these years so that you could see in the humility of your own heart what you really are like. Humility, you know, God alone knows how to humble us without humiliating us and to exalt us without flattering us. God alone knows how to humble us without humiliating us and how to exalt us without flattering us. So said the famed Australian and New Zealand writer, E.M. Blakelock, many, many decades ago. It's a statement I remember reading in one of his tiny little books and writing it down. And here's the first lesson. God intends you and me to have a humble heart and a humble spirit. Do away with pride, do away with arrogance. The difference between David and Saul was that David was a man of a humble heart. Saul was an arrogant man who always wanted to look good and powerful in front of the people. Humility, there are two ways to learn humility. Number one is this, to focus on the person of Jesus Christ. The Bible says in Philippians chapter two, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God. Talk about Jesus, but made himself of no reputation and humbled himself. Being found in fashion as a man, he became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also has exalted him and given to him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God but made himself of no reputation and took upon himself the form of a servant. If the very Son of God can go all the way down to the humiliation of the cross, showing us that he was a humble servant and walked with the ordinary, talked with the needy, found himself with the destitute and the poor and the widow and the fatherless for whom he placed such value in life. So often he found himself with the common person and the Bible says the common person heard him gladly. It was the power brokers that were really fighting him. Humility, you learn this emulating capacity by observing a very Lord and how he lived, how he walked, how he died. God also finally exalted him, gave him a name above every name. That's the best way, it's a tough way. I've seen people like that in my walk. I've seen the humble of heart and every time I've been with people like that, I have walked away just overwhelmed by it all. Just this week I think, well, maybe if it was not here, it was, we came here from Indianapolis, I think it would have been somewhere there. Somebody was talking to me about a man that I knew in Calcutta. His name was Mark Bontain. I have some special friends and colleagues from India here tonight as well. They all know who Mark Bontain was. He was known as Saint Mark of Calcutta. Thousands were fed by his congregation every day. One of the humblest human beings you could ever meet. When I was 19, preaching my first two or three sermons, he was sitting on the platform in his church and gave me the pulpit to preach. I was a nervous wreck standing in front of that people and preaching. It was the second or third time I had ever stood in front of an audience. And I'll never forget as I sat down and my whole body literally trembling but I was glad it was over with. The saint of a man reached out and grabbed my hand and he said, that was anointed. Anyone who knows Mark Bontain, if you're in the audience, you'll know I have not exaggerated what I have just said to you. An extraordinary human being. And the hallmark of Mark Bontain, his humble heart, his humility. And I call upon you, whoever you are, no matter how successful God wants you to humble yourself. And when you watch the person of Christ, that humility naturally comes. If you don't come to it that way, I'll tell you he'll get you there one way or the other. And here's a terrifying statement from Thomas Aquinas. The first time I read this, I didn't like it. I'm not even sure I agreed with it. But the more I've read it, it is chillingly true. Listen to what he says. In order to overcome pride, God punishes certain people by allowing them to fall into sins of the flesh, which though they may actually be less grievous than pride, are outwardly more shameful. From this indeed the gravity of pride is made manifest for just as a wise physician, in order to cure a worse disease, allows the patient to contract one that is less dangerous. So also the sin of pride is shown to be more grievous by the very fact that as a remedy, God allows men to fall into some other sins. Wow. You know what Aquinas is saying? If you don't deal with pride, he'll know how to bring you to that point of dealing with it. That which in culture may be atrocious though in the eyes of God is actually less grievous than the sin of pride itself. He'll bring you to recognize the grievousness of pride by allowing you to fall into something lesser where culturally you'll be seen what your heart and my heart really is. You see this happen time and time again. I think that's why Billy Graham prays a prayer every morning. I heard him say this. Every morning I pray, Lord, please today let me not do that, which has taken you, do that which will destroy that which has taken decades to build. Let me not do today to destroy that which has taken decades to build. Humility of heart and the humbleness of heart. One of my great heroes as a young theological student was John Wesley. I don't know how many of you have read John Wesley's life. He was not a gigantic personality. He's fully stretched. He was five foot four. So not exactly a towering presence to walk up in front of an audience. Wesley traveled 250,000 miles by horseback preaching. He preached 40,000 sermons in his life. Compute that. When the famous Oswald J. Smith in Canada was celebrating his 80th year, Billy Graham came to Toronto to preach and talked about the fact that O.J. Smith had preached 12,000 sermons in his life. That's 12,000 on the day of television and radio. John Wesley, 40,000 in the day of horseback, the original version of the sermon on the mount. Mount his horse, go and preach. Mount his horse, go and speak. 40,000 sermons, 250,000 miles, worked with 15 different languages, wrote 600 piece of literature, some of them massive journals. At the age of 83, he was angry with his doctor because his doctor didn't let him preach more than 14 times a week. At the age of 86 in his journal, he writes, laziness is slowly creeping in. There's an increasing tendency to stay in bed after 5.30 in the morning. Now I've consoled myself by saying he probably went to sleep at four in the afternoon. I don't know what time it went. He was one of 19 children raised by Susanna Wesley. Susanna herself was one of 29. I don't know. I won't want that, I wouldn't want to buy their shoes. 19, 29, one day Susanna looked at John and said this to him. When he said, mother, how do you define sin? She said, son, whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things. In short, if anything increases the authority and the power of the flesh over the spirit, that to you, John Wesley, becomes sin. However good it is in itself. So he covers the two great continents, brings in this great evangelical awakening. You go to his home in London. There's a monument at the back there, a tribute to him. And these words, reader, if you feel constrained to praise the instrument, stop and give God the glory. If you feel constrained to praise the instrument, stop and give God the glory. We have nothing extraordinary over anybody else, just because you stand in front of an audience and proclaim it. We ultimately preach our last sermon and are called to give an accountability before God. With Charles Wesley said, God buries his workman, but his work will go on. Humility, number two, spirituality. He said, I took you through these 40 years so that you will learn that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Isn't it interesting? Here in America, the more bread we have now got, the less time we have for God. In places where they're so impoverished, people are still crying out to God in the hope of getting in communion with them. We have so much here, we have forgotten how to even say thank you before we bow down and enjoy a meal. Spirituality, God desires from you and me that we understand this body will one day be shed and cast away. What really matters is that spirit that God has given to you, that inner reality, that inner you, how much it'll ultimately count for ultimate things. I was reading recently again the story and the life of Elvis Presley. Because I remember as a young teenager growing up in Delhi, Elvis was the big thing. Everybody combed their hair like him. I tried, today there's no point. Just leave it and let it flop, just give them individual names and move on. We all wanted to look like Elvis, walk like Elvis, rock like Elvis, sing like Elvis. Elvis was a smile like Elvis. Everybody wanted, every kid wanted that. The theaters were jammed to see this man's life. Read about his last two years, 19,000 doses of narcotics. The coroner said his body when it was opened up, he was a pharmaceutical freak. Every morning they would swab his nostrils with cocaine just to get him breathing normally again. I knew, I know his half brother, Rick Stanley, who lives in Georgia. He came to me one day and said, I want to talk to you. He's written a book after Elvis died. He's the one who found Elvis, Elvis's body. And he wrote a book called Between Two Kings. Because after Elvis died, he said I was shattered, I had nothing left, my entire identity was with him and his money and his fame. And when I lost everything, I had to come to the only king that really mattered, come to Christ. But I looked at Rick and I said, Rick, you know what boggles my mind? How was a man like this so driven to drugs and ruined his life? How did he get to that point of drugs destroying him? He said, Ravi, I think this is where we've got it a bit wrong. I said, what do you mean? He said, drugs didn't destroy Elvis, fame destroyed him. And when he started to lose his fame, drugs was his only escape and his recourse. He is not all accidental that many of our icons in the movie world turn to drugs, turn to something else because they found out that being famous amounts ultimately to a hill of beans as somebody else shoves you aside and they reach the top of the ladder and you are on your way down. What really matters, what really matters is if you know your God and you know that that spiritual is primary in your life. I couldn't help but think during the winter games and just now I didn't watch too many of them. I was watching these great athletes coming down the slopes. I remember a story that I've told many times. I was in my office one day when the telephone rang from this man and he gave me his name. I said, is this for real? He was an Olympic medalist in one of the events that was just run in the Winter Olympics. He said, Ravi, can I come and see you? I said, sure. I said, are you who I think you are? He said, yes, I am. He flew 2,000 miles to come to Atlanta and he went out for lunch solidly built and he said, I want to tell you my story and I'm telling you my story because I hear you, I've read your book and I think you have a similar story at least in your past. He said, from the time I was 12, I wanted to win an Olympic gold medal. He said, and I trained and I trained and I trained. I would look at the world champion, cut stride by stride, try to figure out where I was losing the precious fractions of seconds and so on. My father never encouraged me, never had a new relationship with him. He told me I was going to be a loser and that I was no going to win. He said, finally I got selected for the Olympics. I go in for the Olympics in Japan and I'm breaking all kinds of records and all of a sudden I'm in the last run and now it's for the gold. He said, I couldn't believe what plateau I had reached. I was about to go down the hill for gold. My dream was about to come true. Everything had longed for from the age of 12 and the nation is watching with bated breath as their fair-haired boy was going to do it. He said, something went wrong at a fraction of a second as that gun was sounded. He said, I lost my concentration when the question came into my mind is my daddy watching? I wonder if my father is watching. He said, I lost the stripe. I got the bronze. I was getting a bronze and not exactly that bad, is it? He said, no, but that's not what this is about. He said, I'd give that bronze up. Look, I'd have a relationship with my father. He knew I would connect with him. That's why he came. You see, deep within that soul of yours and mine is a longing to be connected with our heavenly father, the one who created us and shaped us in his own image with all of your material pursuits, with all of the materiality that we chase around. Do you realize that man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, the very word of God? Where is the word of God in your life? Are you reading it? Are you meditating on it? Are you imbibing it? Are you drawing it into your very being? I'll give you a simple story of years and years and mainly because it is so beautiful. You meet many other stories along the way, but this is one of the ones that shaped my own soul. In the 1980s, when I used to go to Lebanon quite often while things were terrible out there, I met a man in the 70s actually by the name of Sammy Dagger. Sammy Dagger is Yehi. Probably makes John Wesley look like he plays for the basketball or something like that. You know, he's a tiny little teddy bear of a guy. But he expends more energy in saying good morning than most people would in a whole sermon. How are you, my friend? Yeah, that's the way he talks. He got caught in North Carolina for going through a red light. And you know what he told the police officer when he was visiting his son? He said, Mr. Officer, in Beirut, when we see a red light, we think it's Christmas time. That's Sammy Dagger. So Sammy knows no fear and that's the problem. I was thrown with him going through the country and he knew no fear. And so his wife, whose English joy, they were telling me this story. He was driving at 11 o'clock at night during curfew. Everybody says, oh, Sammy's driving to visit somebody. And as he's driving, he sees a suitcase on the side of the road. Now, you don't pick up a suitcase on the side of any road, particularly in Beirut. And he looks at Joy and says, darling, there is a suitcase on the side of the road. She says, Sammy, I can see it and it's not ours. Let's keep going. He says, but it is somebody's. He pulls up and he pats it. He says, it's full. She says, Sammy, please leave it and let's go home. And he says, no, somebody has lost it. So he lifts this thing, puts it in the trunk of his car. And if I were him, I'd walk home, but I wouldn't go with him. He drives it back, goes there, opens the lock, opens it, packed to every square inch with money. Nobody ever has that experience and says, why me, Lord? So he looks at that, empties it out and there's a business card and he calls the man. He says, have you lost anything? The man pauses and says, have you found it? Man is shocked. He says, I'm coming right now. He said, look, it's curfew. If I had any other plans for this, I wouldn't be calling you. You come tomorrow, I'll give it to you. So the man comes the next day and he's staring at Sammy. He can't believe this. Who is this man? He's turned in all the suitcase full of money. And so finally he puts his hand in, takes that and says, here, you're a pastor, give this to the church. Sammy says, we take that on Sunday morning, you come and put it in. So he invites the guy, he comes in on Sunday and he couldn't believe what he heard. Couldn't believe what he saw, music, song, phrase. He said, I wanna bring my whole family to meet you. I happened to be there that day when he came. That's how I know the story. Sammy was gonna take me back to the boat. So I go, go to Cyprus. The airport was closed at that time. And this man comes with his wife and his children to meet a man who had such honor. You know what Sammy says to him? You think you got all your treasure back. That's what you think. I want you to know this is nothing. Moth and rust are gonna corrupt this. He said, have you ever wondered how many people outside of Beirut are looking for Lebanese money? You thought you had your riches? He said, I'll give you the thing that is the greatest treasure of all. And he gave him a Bible. He said, read it, study it, give your life to Jesus Christ. This is his word, this is the word of God. The guy sitting there with tears running down his face as I'm being told in interpretation, what is being said, he takes the Bible, kisses it, won't take it away from his lips because he's just met a man who lived it out and demonstrated that's where the treasure really lives. Your lies, you do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Humility, spirituality, and finally faith. How you trust in God ultimately with all that is within you. Faith is not credulity, faith is not credulity. You know, naturalists love to make fun of those of us who believe in God as if we are believing in tooth fairies. We believe in something intangible and demonstrable and on and on and on. Let me tell you something about what some of them actually believe. Sir Frederick Hoyle, what the great Cambridge astronomer. Remember during my days at Cambridge, they're seeing his name writ large, great Cambridge astronomer, highly revered. He and Chandra Vikramasinger, who is professor also of astronomy at Cardiff, were colleagues in their research. And Chandra Vikramasinger came out with the statistic that the human body in its enzymatic makeup is so complex. The enzymes are so complex and he goes into a description why with the number of them and the chemical interaction between them. Big words and big time laden equations and all of that. And he said it is so complex based on the number of animal and number of hormones involved and all of this kind of stuff. He comes up with the fact that in order for all of this to come together for us to have this human DNA of ours, he said the possibility of that is one in 10 to the 40,000th power. Mathematically almost impossible. In the words of Frederick Hoyle, it would be like saying that a jumbo jet came about because a tornado went through a junkyard. That's his words. On in 10 to the 40,000th power. So he says, how did this all come about? You know what Hoyle concluded? I don't know if you've heard this. I footnoted it in one of my books. He believed in the Pan-Spermian theory that he colluded with, he agreed with Vikram Asingha who postulated it that spores from another planet ceded the earth. So Francis Crick said maybe a spaceship brought those spores. Nobody asks what that spaceship was. Maybe a tornado went through some junkyard on another planet and brought it out here. And the spores come to cede the earth and that's how we produce our Einstein's. And they tell us we have faith. But here's the deal. When Noah was in the ark, do you know what was not present in the ark? All the detail, height, breadth, depth, names of atoms, do things missing. No sail or rudder. Wow. Which means shut the door but there's nothing else you can do. Nothing to control. No chart, no compass, no sail, no rudder. You're at the mercy of the flood and the waters and the waves. It takes that situation and life for you and me to realize that only God is big enough to explain some of our stories of how we came through what we did. It was only through His grace and through His power. And I think if you and I will just pause long enough just on this thought, I don't know where you're at tonight. Your world may be collapsing. Everything may be falling apart. My daughter is here and we all remember when we buried my father-in-law some years ago. He thought he was having a pain in the back because he'd be moving some bookshelves turned out to be a tumor on the kidney from diagnosis to death, two and a half months. And he was just numbed by the news when the doctor told him he didn't give him more than eight weeks. Just stared at us. He cried and cried and, great man, good man. And yet when he breathed his last, his last words looked to the heavens and said, amazing, just amazing. And then he looked at his wife of 63 years and said, Jean, I love you. And he was gone. And that last breath has taken, you will ultimately see what God it is, what God has created you and me for, for living in His presence. If you're going through a tough time tonight, I just want you to think of this. Trust Him. Trust Him. He will bring you through onto the other side. And when you get there, you will know it is He who has done it. You could never have done it on your own. And as I look at my own life now in its sunset years, I look at my team and I humorously say to them, I'm not ready to ride out into the sunset, but I do know which side my horse is facing. And it's true. You're closer to the finishing line than the starting line. And I look back and I say this, Lord, if you were to take me home today, I'm okay because you gave me a life I never dreamed about what you have provided to raise a calling out of an absolute failure. God does His miracles best and greatest in people who will least take credit for what it is has done. My brother, when you gave the introduction tonight, I'm so glad you made it brief. I get tired of listening to these long accolades of what all we've done and accomplished. And you sit there and say to yourself, what does it all mean, really? What it really means is, have you trusted Him? Have you run the race well? I want to close with a story that I know many of you may be familiar with. When I travel over the globe, people tell me of all the stories you've recorded in your books, this one makes the greatest impact on me. And it makes it on me. For all I know, the man I'm going to talk about may be present here because he lives in Los Angeles. In 1971, when I was just 25, I was in Vietnam, preaching to the American troops. Through the helicopter gunships and the courtesy of American boys, I'd be taken all over from right down from the south in Vung Tau, through Saigon, through Bien Hoa, Hue, Nha Trang, Da Nang, Dalat, all of that, right to the demilitarized zone in Quang Tri, covered that. I was only 25, and my interpreter was a 17-year-old young man by the name of Hien Pham. Hien's a wee guy. I pitched voice. Everywhere we went, dynamically would interpret everything. And it was only years later I realized when I was reading the history of the church in Vietnam that this revival broke out in Vietnam and changed the course of the church in Vietnam in 1971 when a young preacher, 25 years old, and his interpreter, 17 years old, preaching, I didn't even know that. I'm sitting in an airport reading this. I said, I think this is talking about us when we were there, cumulative age 42. I only had one sermon book I used to put in my pocket and repeat them wherever I went, you know, three or four of them. This guy was a packet of dynamite, absolutely anointed. In one message, I remember he stopped in the middle. I said, he said, I think you've said enough, God's already moved. Let's just talk to the people now to bring them up to the front. It's a 17. So while I was leaving him in Nha Trang, going on to Saigon, gave him a big hug. I said, Hien, I don't know if I'll ever see you again. In 1971, 1988, my phone rings in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says, Brother Rafi. I said, Hien, how did you know it was me? I said, you're the only one who ever called me Brother Rafi. I said, it was melodic. He said, really? I said, yeah, he said, yes, it's Hien. I said, what on earth are you doing? He said, I'm in California. I said, really? I said, how did it get you? He said, have you got a few minutes? I said, sure. I haven't talked to you for 17 years. He said, Brother Rafi, after Vietnam fell, I was arrested because they accused me of working for the CIA. I said, I did not work for that. They even knew I interpreted for you. He said, some preacher came here and you would interpret. He said, I never worked for the CIA, but they wouldn't believe it, so they put him in prison. And he said, I am laboring away in this prison and they took away all my English books and took away my Bible, just gave me French and Vietnamese marks and angles, marks and angles, marks and angles, French and Vietnamese, French and Vietnamese, till they knocked God out of me. He said, I decided to go to bed one night and say, that's it. He said, Brother Rafi, I thought of you many times and I said, maybe it's not true, not true. He said, I woke up the next morning and the commander called me and said, I want you to clean the latrines. So he said, Brother Rafi, in that camp, the latrines, he said, they were the dirtiest and the filthiest place you'd ever want to be. I used to take a piece of cloth and tie it around my nose, cleaning it off the floors, cleaning all the excrement and all the fluids and all of that on the floor. He said, horrible stuff. He said, as I was emptying out a bucket of used paper, I thought I saw one piece of paper with English in it. I looked around, hosed it off, put it in my hip pocket. I went back to my room that night sitting under my mosquito net. Everybody's asleep. I took out my flashlight and this damp piece of paper and I shine it on it. On the right corner, it said, Romans chapter eight. And he said, I started reading. And we know that all things work together for good, to them that love God, to them that are called according to his purpose for who shall separate us from the love of God. All of this, that, that, no. And he goes on to talk about how they were triumphant through it all. He said, Brother Rafi, it's all I could do to keep the sobs and the cries in my heart from bursting out. I said, God, you didn't let me out of your reach for more than 24 hours. I prayed. I said, forgive me. Next morning, I go to the commanding office and said, do you mind if I clean the latrines again? He said, I found out the commanding officer owned a Bible. He was tearing out pages from the Bible using it as toilet paper. He said, I would wash it off, take it to my room. Under my mosquito net and read the Bible at night. Every night I'd have my devotions now in English and from the Bible. I said, finally they decided I was not guilty of the things they said and they released me. He said, 52 others joined me and I started to build a boat to escape. This is him for you, you start to escape. One of them was the daughter, I think the vice president or something like that. So he's building this boat and it's, how do you hide a boat? So he's building this boat and he's getting it already and four Viet Cong come to knock on his door one day and said, we hear you trying to escape, is that true? He said, no, it's not. He said, are you telling us the truth? He said, yeah. He said, no, not building a boat, he said, no. Not trying to escape, he said, no. So they left. He said, I sat on my cot and I said, there I go again, trying to do it my own way. He said, I prayed a prayer that I prayed would never be answered inside me. I said, all right, God, if you want me to tell them the truth, bring them back. Hours before his departure, these four boys come knocking on the door. They're armed to the teeth. He said, you're lying. You're trying to escape. He said, yes, with 52 others. You're gonna put me back in jail. They said, no, we want to go with him. Four of them, four of them. They joined him and escaped and he said, brother Rafi, we were caught in some violent storms if it weren't for these four men who are the best skippers you could have had, they got us to safety into Thailand and there we were in a refugee camp and then I got my papers and now I'm in America and he was heading to Berkeley to study business. Flew into Atlanta to meet me, my family, because he had met a beautiful young Vietnamese girl to whom he was gonna get married and he said, I want you to come and officiate at our wedding and so on. What a precious guy. And here's it. He sits across the table and he says this, the greatest pleasure in the world is to have that intimate relationship with God and no, you will never win doing it your way. You will only win doing it his way. Humility, spirituality and faith. My message to you is over. I close with him from Charles Wesley and I want you to just close your eyes and listen to these words. O thou who came us from above, the pure celestial fire to impart, kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart. There let it for thy glory burn with an extinguishable blaze and trembling to its source return in humble prayer and fervent praise. Jesus, confirm my heart's desire to work and speak and think for thee. Still let me guard the holy fire and still stir up thy gifts in me. Ready for all thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat till death thy endless mercy seal and make my sacrifice complete. If you don't know Christ tonight, will you invite him in with humility of heart, spirituality of value and faith and trust in him? If you do know him, will you recommit to live with these virtues so that when you step aside onto the other shore, you will know it is because of him that you're actually there. Deuteronomy eight, to remember, I took you through the wilderness so that you'd see what was in your heart so that you'll know manchill not little by bread alone and you'll know in the 40 days of wandering I preserved you and kept you, humility, spirituality, faith. If you don't know him, give your life to him tonight. If you do know him, commit to live for these precious truths.