And I wrote after that, is that my desire and intent? So the point is that we're called to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind. Now that's what it means to be a Christian. If you're born again by the power of God, the change that comes on you is you stop wanting to do your own things. I mean, it's still mixed in there, because maturity comes along, hopefully, and you get more and more. So you want to do only what the Bible says, only what's in the Word of God. When you start out in life, as I did, I was a little fella, and I was smart as other little children, and I was very inventive in sin, as well as in other things. And I wanted to be like my father. My father wasn't a Christian man. He was a nice man, but he wasn't a Christian man. And man, could he swear well. And so I turned my talents and my mind to trying to swear as well as my father. And then God saved me as a relatively young man. I began to fight the battle of the tongue and fight the battle of swearing. I had to train myself not to swear. And lying, I was a good liar. All children are good liars. And all mothers know that. And fathers know if they watch, if you know your children well. You're good liars. And until God saves you, you continue to be liars. And when we go out into the world and we deal with people, don't be shocked if they lie to you because that's what they are. They're liars. Some are professional liars. They raise it to a new height like I believe Hillary has. But she's not the only one. I mean, there's a lot of liars. And there's liars in business, there's liars in families, unless you're Christian, you don't have any conscience about lying. Lying can get you what you want. You have no conscience, often, about swearing, about misusing other people, until you're saved. So the first really point of the sermon is that Enoch, and we want to study his life, there's not a lot of scriptural verses given to him, but what's given are very, very significant. He was a man of faith. He walked with God, the Bible says. What an amazing statement. His companion in life was God, and he lived because of that for 365 years. The Bible is the oldest historical book there is. There is no other history from any other culture that goes as far back as the Bible. And the liberals and the ungodly hate the Bible, and they attack it with every ounce of strength. If they admit that it's true, they have to admit that their whole lives are worthless. And that's what happens. Their lives ultimately are worthless. Anybody know Abraham Lincoln personally? We know about him. What's happening with Abraham Lincoln now? Well, if he's a Christian, he's in heaven. If he's not a Christian, he's in hell. He was taught the Bible. I hope he was a Christian. I don't know the man. God knows him. But you know, that's what's gonna happen to us. If God tarries, we're all gonna die. But it didn't happen to Enoch. He was a man of faith, the Bible says. He walked with God. And that means that he was a born-again believer. And that's why in Hebrews 5.11, We give him in the list, that great long list of people who were born again from the beginning of the world. After Abel comes Enoch. And God says that he was a born again believer. So the fact of his faith, he believed in the promised seed of the woman. We know that there was a fall, and we're gonna get into that even more. But after the fall, all men had to be born again. We're all after the fall. We all need to be born again or going to hell. If you think things are rough now, wait till you get to hell. And Godly, our hope and our confidence is we're going to go to heaven. Now, there are lots of people that pretend belief. I've met them in my life. I've dealt with many. And when they die, they're going to go to hell. The one thing I'll never do if I do a funeral is I'll never say to the congregation or to people gathered that this man's in heaven unless I have some confidence in him that he is in heaven, unless he's a born again Christian. Not all who say they're Christians are Christians because men are liars. And you find that out as you get to know them. Now some Christians are weak and sin a lot. They're still Christians, I can't judge their souls, but I know that they need to come to repentance or they're gonna live a miserable life, because you can't be smarter than God and you can't outthink Him. And somehow even Christians think they can. So he was, in the Bible we learn that all mankind fell in Adam, and we're gonna look at that a little bit later, and that God promised that there'd be a battle between Satan, the sons and descendants of Satan, and the Satanizers, and the people of God throughout all history. And we know that that's true. So Enoch, right away in the Bible, if you read it, when they get into the genealogies of that long list of names, it's very significant. You have two lines. You have the line of Cain, which is the line of sinners, and the line of Abel, or of Adam, which is the line of the godly. How did they get to be godly? How do you know they're godly? Because the way the Bible puts it there, and then of course of Enoch and some others, Bible clearly tells us they were believers. They had the faith, they have saving faith, and that's a gift of God. How did God communicate with them? I don't know. How did he communicate with Adam and Eve? He came down to the earth and he talked with them. God could send prophets, God could use a man as a prophet, God could talk directly to people, which I think he did. And men like Enoch, they not only learned what they were supposed to do from God, but God saved them and he changed them just like he changed me. And when that happens, it can happen at any age that God wants to save you. I know people that were saved as babies. They always loved God. Or maybe they were saved when they were six months old. I don't know. But they've always loved God, and you can see it in their lives. You can see the way they live. They don't want to do the things of the world. They want to do the things of God. They want to understand the Bible. They want to be with the people of God. And when they go to church, they don't want to hear something preached that's far off from the Bible. They want to hear what the Bible says. And I know people like that who are Christians. I know people that were saved very young. I don't know when I was saved. I just know that I was saved. It's not important to know when you're saved. When I was first saved, I understand from that church and their practice, that they gave me a Bible the day they dunked me. I came up and they gave me a Bible, after I got dried off, of course. They gave me a Bible, and in it their pastor wrote, Leonard Kopp is baptized, X, Y, Z, and he put the date. And so if I ask if I were saved later, they say, where's your Bible? Look at that, what does it say? That's not adequate proof. You can join the church. You can be a member that knows a lot of stuff, but are you born again? And I had to be born again. I don't know when God did it, but I know when he did it that I ceased wanting to lie and to curse. I stopped wanting to do the things that were against the word of God, and I had a hunger to know, even as a little boy, What was in the Word of God? I did not understand it well, and I probably never understood it as much as I could and should, but God was working in my life. We know that Enoch was a Christian because the Bible says that he pleased God. And you can't please God unless God saves you. You may think you're pleasing God, but you can't please God unless God saves you. And then your whole direction in life turns and you want to please God, just like Enoch. So Enoch, therefore, I believe, was a man of faith. On the background of his faith, a little bit of biblical theology. Biblical theology is theology that focuses just on the Bible. Systematic theology is the theology that rests upon the Bible that focuses upon the overall teaching of the Bible. What does the Bible say about God? That's systematic theology. But what does Genesis 1 say about God? That's biblical theology. And very often when we preach, we mix them all together. But when the scholars study it, They draw them out because you have certain issues in each field that can be handled only by studying in a certain way. All right, the background of his faith, first of all, and some theology. The Fall, Romans 5, verses 12 through 14. Romans 5, 12 through 14 says, therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, thus death spread to all men to cause all sin. It's spread to all men, because in Adam all men sinned. You know, I don't know what my background is. I thought my mother was partly Indian. She used to just almost get angry when I said that, but she had dark skin and she had high cheekbones, and she told me once that her grandfather or great-grandfather or somebody came up to the Mississippi River on a boat. hunting expedition or whatever they did back in that day. And they didn't take women with them on those hunting expeditions. And so he got a woman somehow when he came up around Fort Madison, Iowa and across the river and they settled there. She might have been an Italian or she might have been a mixed dux or anything, but I suspect she was a little bit of Indian. And there's no way I can find it out till I get to heaven, then I'll probably forget it because it'll be insignificant. But I used to tell my mother that I thought she was Indian. But all mankind, everyone that's been born are descendants of Adam. I don't know who my ancestors were for sure, But I know ultimately, we all go back to Adam, the Bible tells us that. And I believe the Bible is true. And that belief comes partly from God working in my life, and assuring me that this is the word of God, and partly from the studying. But the studying came after I believed that the Bible was the word of God. Therefore, just as through one man, who is that? Adam. Sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so all men are born and conceived in sin, the Bible says, thus death spread to all men because all sinned in Adam. You know, I'm guilty of what my father did. My father almost killed us. Because he didn't want to be married to my mother anymore. He had lots of women, at least he had one in particular that he loved, and it wasn't my mother. He was a wicked man. And if he didn't repent, he died and went to hell. Somehow, people today don't believe how bad hell is. You can't believe how bad war is. I've never been to war. But I can't imagine standing someplace where men around me are dying, and they're bleeding, or myself being shot by somebody, or killed by someone. War is terrible, but it's nothing as bad as hell. Hell is even worse. And if you don't believe that, you're gonna find it out. And if you're not really a Christian, you're going to hell, because all men sin in Adam. Adam is your forefather. For until the law, until sin was in the world, That is, until God gave the law to Moses by revelation, sin was in the world. But sin is not imputed to them when there is no law. It is not put to their account when there is no law. So the law actually wasn't just Moses. The law came in the Garden of Eden. And that's why sin is imputed after the fall to all men. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even of those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam. That is, they didn't do what Adam did. They didn't have a commandment in the Garden of Eden saying you shouldn't eat that fruit, and then you didn't say I'm gonna eat that fruit no matter what God says because I figured out it's good and God can't withhold from me what's good. I've seen people do that all my life. Not with the fruit in the Garden of Eden, but just anything. God can't withhold this from me because I think it's good. How could he tell me not to do that? He has no right. I'm the master of my own life. I started thinking that pretty young. I don't know about you, but I know when you become teenagers, it comes right away. When it comes to even little children, I can see it in the children. When I tell them what to do, my children, they didn't say, OK, I'm going to do it. They said, no, I'm going to do what I want to do. And then you had to apply the Board of Education to the seat of learning a little bit. OK, so they didn't. sin the way Adam sinned, who was a type of him who was to come, as a type of Christ. Not because he sinned, but that Adam, in Adam, all mankind sinned, and in Christ, his elect people were saved. And if you're truly one of his people, he'll find you. Meanwhile, you're going to be miserable. But part of the way he brings you to himself is to make you so miserable that you can't stand it anymore. Maybe it's conscious and maybe it's just God speaks to you like he did to me in a sermon while a man was preaching and he said you had to be born again and God said to my heart, I didn't hear a voice but I felt it, I have to be born again. And so I did that, and it took me several years before I was satisfied that I really knew God, that God was working in me all that time. Okay, the fall is a fact. The background of the faith of Enoch is that all mankind sinned in Adam. And then the promise in Genesis 3, 14 to 15, so the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And all serpents now are sort of a type of the first serpent. I don't know what he saw when he saw Satan, was the serpent standing up or was he laying down or whatever, but it was a serpent. That's the form that Satan assumed when he tested Adam and Eve. He said, you know, God is not so smart. That thing that's on the tree, that fruit's on the tree, you're giving the whole garden of Eden by God, aren't you? You're the lord and master over the whole earth. Who's around here to tell you not to do anything except God? And he just tried to keep you away from being as smart as you should be. So Adam said, okay, and he and his wife ate of the fruit and through him all men fell. Same thing today, teenagers say. My dad and mom, they're not so smart. Why do I have to follow their laws? I mean, I didn't hear, they didn't say it that way, but they acted that way. I can remember when I had a daughter that didn't want to follow the law of the house, and she wanted to marry somebody that wasn't reformed in spite of what the confession says, and I believe the scripture teaches. Don't be on equal yoke with unbelievers, the scripture says. Or don't marry some man that's not gonna lead you in the full strength of the gospel. That's not from the scripture, but that's the idea. My daughter said, I want to date non-believers, or Arminians. They're not on, some of them are real believers. And so I said, no, I don't think that's scriptural. And so she said, I'm gonna do it anyway. And I said, then you can move out. And she did. Then she came back from me and she said, I've been married, Dating some of these Armenians, you know, they're all immature for their age. Because they didn't have any financial planning. I mean, she learned financial planning in our family from the time she was a little girl. And she met a bunch of people that were nice men, I suspect. They may even have been Christian men, because I think Armenians, many of them are believers. They're just poorly trained. They're like people that never got through first grade. And there's not so many of those people around today, but there are some men that went all the way through high school and some women that never learned anything, especially if they've gone more recently. Some of the stuff they learned is useless. Well, at any rate, God says, look, On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life and I'll put enmity, hostility between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. That is, I'll put hostility between you and the woman and between your descendants and her descendants and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel and he shall kill you and you shall lame him. So what happened in history is in the Bible after Adam and Eve, we see two lineages, the lineage of the wicked, of the godless, of the descendants of Cain, it said the family of Cain, and then the family of Adam, and these were the descendants who were godly. And that's the way the world was set up. The godly were blessed, the ungodly were cursed. And eventually they all got together, because they couldn't stand, the godly men couldn't stand not having the beautiful daughters and descendants of Cain as wives. And so they said, well, because of that, we want these women, because they're so alluring. And I just, I see today that the world makes beautiful women. They can do beautiful things. And their bodies are nice. They're not fat like I am. All of us, eventually, if we live long enough, we're going to get fat. So usually the guys get it in the middle and the ladies have it spread all over. But it doesn't make any difference. You're just not the way you were when you were a young girl. The young girls and Christians and non-Christians, they're all pretty good looking. I remember when I was looking for a wife, there were a lot of good looking girls, and I didn't want a good looking girl, although I didn't want an ugly one either. But if the only one I could find was, the only Christian I could find wasn't all that hot, I was willing to marry her. I was concerned about whether or not she was godly. I had enough of ungodly people around me in the, Christian school, college that I went to, there were a lot of ungodly women and ungodly men. And there's that in the church. Just because you meet a girl in church doesn't mean she's godly. You've got to know something about the Bible to find out whether or not she's godly. But if you find a godly woman, she's worth her weight in gold, even if she's not so hot to look on. I happened to get a good looking one too. I don't know what she was thinking when she married me, but she must have really been desperate. Okay, the background of his faith is the fall. The history of his faith, that is the history of faith in the Bible, is that there are these two generations, and Jesus talks about it, interestingly enough, in the parable of the sower. He says, the field is the world, the good seeds are the sons of the kingdom, and the tares are the sons of the wicked one. that Jesus acknowledges that there are two lineages in the world from the foundation of the world. The world is the field in his parable. He's talked about the parable of the field. And there are good seeds and tares are sown in that field. And the good seeds are the sons of the kingdom. That's really the spiritual descendants of Adam, the first man to really believe. And then in John 8, 44, Jesus says, you are your father, the devil. Talking to whom? the religious leaders of the day. What's happening to the religious leaders of our day? There are very few of them that stand on the scripture and are well enough trained to understand what the Bible knows. I mean, you don't have to go to college to learn it. You just need to know how to go to church. Most of you people understand the Bible pretty well. And when you hear somebody preaching and teaching that's away from the Bible, you can pick it up. You don't have to go to college and seminary for that, but you have to be well-trained and well-educated. And that's what we're trying to do to people. We're not trying to wash your minds. We're trying to teach you what the Word of God says. Because that's, you don't want to be of your father the devil. The ungodly want to be, they don't want the law of God. Even children raised in the church, they don't want to follow the law of God. They want to be free to lie and to steal and whatever else, to be themselves. In other words, they want to be their own God. They're theologians, but they're pretty weak theologians. because they're not God. Just look at them. Look at yourself. You're not God. Well, then why do you act like God and have you draw your own principles and conclude for yourself what's true and what's not true, and you're determining for yourself which way to go in this world. So what are you doing? You're being your own God. Christians, we submit to the word of God. Jesus said to the Pharisees, Religious leaders you have your father the devil and the dires desires of your father's you you want to do He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth. What did the Pharisees think of that? What does he mean were murderers? He's speaking this man's insane, but when it came down to it What did the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the people of Israel do to Jesus Christ? They killed him, they murdered him in the most cruel manner. They were standing around cheering on, some of them, the death of Jesus. And the Pharisees were the leaders of it. Your father, Satan, was a murderer from the beginning. He does not stand in the truth because there's no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks it from his own resources for he's a liar and the father of it. And we all, if you're not Christians, you've bought a lie. And the lie is that you could be satisfied in this life without a right relationship with God. That's a lie. You may be temporarily satisfied and feel free and not bound by whatever it is you want. But ultimately, you're gonna end up in hell. You know, when I was a kid, we had some stupidity that somehow had bred into us. But I can remember going up on top of the barn and jumping off the barn into a pile of straw. If I saw my kids doing that now, I found them, they'd have a red part on their bottom, on their landing gear. Because we could have broken our legs, but we were young kids, we knew. And we did it, and we survived. Both my brother and I. We didn't know if there was a pitchfork in that pile, or if it was a pile of hay or a pile of cow manure. Because my father put the piles of cow manure, mixed with straw of course, right there by the barn. It smelled great. It used to make me sick. But my father would say, smells like money to me. Never smelled like money to me. At any rate, we did stupid things as kids. Absolutely stupid. I can remember I couldn't swim. And we had this little pond on the farm. And we found my brother and I were, he's two years younger than I, and we were out there playing in the water in this pond. which for the cows to drink out of, and we found a log under the water. And it floated. So we sat on the log and paddled across the pond. I think if my father had caught us, we never would have done that again. We were risking our lives. Because we are young and stupid and not informed. And people that don't know the Lord Jesus Christ are risking their lives because they're young and stupid. They think they're smart. Now, I think I'm smarter than some. I don't think I'm smarter than anybody, but at least academically I'm smart. That doesn't mean I'm wise. I did very well academically. But I still got on top of that log and went across. I mean, that was a plainly stupid thing. I did a lot of stupid things when I was young. I've tried to stop them as I get older. Thankfully, I've got a wife that's smart, and she keeps tapping me on the shoulder and say that's, she doesn't use this language, but what she's telling me is that's pretty stupid, you know. You shouldn't be doing stuff like that. That's why God gave her to me, because I need somebody to help me that's wise. The ungodly believe that they are wiser than anybody else. They believe they're smarter than anybody else. And I can make my own way just fine without God. They don't need God. They don't believe the Bible. And it's been proven to them over and over again that the Bible is not the word of God. You know, I was convinced at one point, philosophically, that I might not even be here. You can convince yourself of all kinds of stuff. That's called temporary insanity. And a lot of people are temporarily insane. And it lasts through their whole lives because they'll do things that God says in the Bible are going to bring you to destruction. They do them anyway, and certainly, sure enough, it's destruction. And then they either get mad at God, or they have a divorce, or they change their work because it's stupid, or they realize they're so deeply in debt they can't get out of debt, and they're all depressed and discouraged, or they just can't find anything that's going to make them happy. They just can't find happiness anywhere, because happiness in this world is temporary. It's not permanent. You can't have satisfaction any place but in the Lord. The Bible tells us that. We preach it. We teach it to our kids. Does that mean they learn it? No! Because until God speaks to their hearts, they're just as stupid as that chair. You can't convert that chair. Did you ever try preaching to a chair? Well, when I was a young man, I was taught that, you know, the prayers of a godly person could move mountains. And so my friend and I thought, well, we'll just try to move a chair. And so we went to church one night, about nine o'clock at night, and we were praying to move the chair. We put a chair there. I can't remember exactly that, but I know we were praying about a chair, and we prayed and prayed and prayed, and I left at 10 o'clock. And he stayed there, I don't know how long. He became a Pentecostal minister. Maybe Satan moved that chair for him. I don't think so. He just was not willing to face up to reality. And God taught me reality, that those things are miracles from God. And he did them in the Bible, and this is not the time of miracles anymore, not in that sense. But I would say, that was the Bible says is a miracle. Okay. First John 3.8, he who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the son of man was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil. So the theological background at first is that the fall, and secondly the promise that there'd be not only the seed of Satan, but there'd be the seed of God. When Jesus was born, God said, Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a son, and you will call his name Jesus, and he will be great, and he will be called the son of the highest, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there'll be no end." And then Mary said to the angels, how can this be, since I don't know a man? I'm not married. How am I gonna conceive a child? And the angel answered and said to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the highest will overshadow you, and therefore also that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. You believe it? I do. I haven't seen Jesus. I've never touched him, I've prayed to him. But I know he's alive. And when I read the scripture, it speaks to me. When the Bible says that Jesus was the Son of the Highest, I believe that because of who he is, because the way he works in my life when I read the scripture, his work through the years. Okay, Enoch walked with God. The Bible tells us that's the practice of his faith. And this implies that he lived always with God, that God was preeminent in his life. First, he wanted to know what God said. And he was man enough that God, and chosen by God in such a way that God spoke to him and told him all the ways to go. So Enoch never disobeyed what God wanted him to do. And the Bible implies that he lived a near perfect life. He's one of two men in the Bible, in the history of the world as far as we know, that never died. Wow, I'm getting pretty close to that. I hope I've got more time than it seems for some time, but God's gonna take me. He's gonna take you. I remember when I was 16, I was convinced that God would come before I was 21. Because, well, my church taught. It wasn't a reformed church. We don't talk a lot about the second coming of Christ. We believe in it, but we don't measure on that. The first coming is the important thing. We do believe that Christ is gonna come. He's gonna come quickly. There'll be no warning that he's gonna come, but just suddenly someday this history will stop and he'll draw it all to an end. But we don't know when that is. We don't know if it's gonna be today or tomorrow. We know that we must be ready. You must be ready. Are you ready if Christ were to come? Are you ready to answer to God for your life? And that's what it's all about. Enoch was always ready. He walked with God. And so the question is, at least to me in this, do I walk with God? Do I walk with God? I can't be perfect the way Enoch was, or seems to be. I'm already way beyond that stage. I've done far too much in my life that's wicked, even maybe as a minister. I haven't done it intentionally, but no doubt it's there. I've certainly had a lot of people tell me that I wasn't right and I was wrong on this and that, and even sinful. If I thought I was, I repented. Now I've got a good counsel, I ask my wife. She's good at telling me when I'm wrong. If she does it sweetly and gently, usually. But you know, am I ready to stand before God? When I married my wife, I married her partly because I loved her, partly because I felt she was the girl that God picked out for me, because there are too many coincidences things. We talked for four and five hours a night on the phone, because I couldn't afford to get next to her, and that was great. We talked through everything, and I had been through seminary, so I sent her through the whole business of marital counseling that I had in seminary. Poor girl, I probably scared her to death, but she kept coming back for more. And so then when we talked about what love meant and what the marriage vows meant, we talked about what does it mean to love, honor, and cherish. When I got married, when I took those vows, I meant it. Love, not hate, not be jealous. I had a temper, so I had to control my temper. That took me a long time in life to learn to control my temper. and control my mouth. She probably thinks I'm still not controlling that properly, but that's her problem. All right, at any rate, when we took the marriage vows, I promised to love and to honor, to honor her. This big business about women being put down, what's the best things that can happen to a woman in the Bible is to have a husband that honors you. That is, we respect their opinions. We're building a life together. And my wife and I sometimes I had to make decisions and she understood that when we got married that I was the head of the family because the Bible said so. She understood that I wasn't going to be a perfect head of the family because I'm a sinner. You know, I made a lot of mistakes, but we went through life with me making major decisions, usually consulting her in them. I didn't always follow her advice, which may have probably been good or bad, I don't know. But some of those decisions worked out very, very well. I tried to honor her and treat her with respect because the Bible says I should. I respected her more than any other human being. So I tried to do that, you know. I tried to treat her as a person of value. And I cherished her because she was the most precious thing in my life. She's more important than anything else. And to as much as I could do that, I tried to do that. And I kept, all through my life, and it's been, she's been stuck with me for a long time now. And so I've tried to remember those vows, love, honor, and cherish her. And if I love, honor, and cherish my wife, why shouldn't I love, honor, and cherish my God? And when I joined the church years and years ago as a young boy, one of the things that I believed and then the church taught, it was an Armenian church, but they taught you should read and study the Bible. And so I did. I read it. I took it to school with me and I read it. And you could do that back then. I think you can still do it now, but you'd probably be teased a lot the way I was, but I was more concerned about knowing the word of God than I was about what men would say to me. Okay, so when I joined the church, I promised that I would submit to the leadership of the church. Every one of you that's a member of this church has promised to submit to the leadership of this church. My wife made that promise when we got married. Does that mean she had to submit to everything? No. Does it mean she couldn't give in her two cents? With respect, of course, no. She could give her two cents, and she did, and she does. But I have made a vow to the church that I'd love, honor, and submit to the church. I'd follow the instructions of the elders. Now, all of our elders are sinners. You probably don't realize that, but I'll tell you that, including me. We're all limited in our intelligence. None of us are as smart as God. And so we do the best we can with what time and talent we have. Will you disagree sometimes? Yes, you will. You have that right. You submit yourself, and I know in marriage, my wife submitted herself to me, even though she found out, or she felt sometimes, probably I was a total idiot. And she probably was correct in some instances. Sometimes she found out she was wrong and I was right. But she always acknowledged that I was the head of the family. And so I did in the church. I joined the OPC church, and as long as they're faithful to the word of God, I will be in submission to them. I left the Baptist church because I became convinced they were not faithful to the word of God. And so I came to the Presbyterian church, the Orthodox Presbyterian church, because by that time I'd read the Bible enough that I became what you know as a Calvinist. It's really just somebody who believes in the Bible. People that aren't Calvinist don't believe the whole Bible. They believe it in general, but not the whole thing. Calvinism is very clearly taught in Scripture. I'm sorry that it's called Calvinism, but historically we have a lot of these isms, and Calvin happened to be one of the leaders that really landed full on both feet before the Scripture and gave us what the Bible says, and so does his successor. And I love the OPC, not because it's a perfect church, it's not. I've caught him in big errors. Sometimes errors that even affected my family and myself. But I realized that they're not God, they're just men trying to do the best they can, and they make mistakes. And so this session will make mistakes and has. And we're doing the best we can before God. And that's when you get married, the husband hopefully is doing the best he can. Do we all give enough money to our wives? Well, how much is enough money? When I was a little boy, we had a house on the farm where there was no indoor plumbing. Was that my father's problem? Well, it was cold in the wintertime to take a trot out to the path, but it worked. I didn't like going there because it's stinkier than the barn, especially when they turn it over at Halloween. But you know, that's the provision that God made for us. When I was six and seven years old, I didn't understand we were poor. As far as I was concerned, we were rich. We had food. We had a big farm to play on. We had a big barn to play in. We had chickens and pigs and all kinds of pets, several dogs and lots of cats. To me, it was a wonderful thing, like living in a circus the whole time. I never thought we were poor. And I didn't realize until the years later that we were so poor that we couldn't afford shoes. They were poor. My father worked very, very hard. He was a good man. My stepfather was a good man. Not a Christian man, but a good man. Well, so when it comes to Christ, my vow to Christ when I became a member of the church, of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, was if you're a mature person, I mean, you go into marriage as a mature person, not as a child. You understand you're one sinner marrying another sinner, and you're pledging together that you try to work these problems out. Will you ever become perfect? No. Will she ever become perfect? No. But you work it out before God according to the rules of God to the best of the ability of you two. And in the church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I was convinced, was the one church committed to the Bible above all else, and they'd fight to the death for the Bible. And so far, that's been true. There are other good churches, and there are other Christians. But as I read the Bible, as I studied the scripture, I saw in it so clearly what's called Calvinism. I see so clearly that thanks to the Baptist, that the Baptist position is wrong on baptism. The Bible does not teach immersionism. It teaches the sprinkling of children and of adults when they become a member of the church. I don't know why they don't see that. But they don't. God allowed me to see that and other things too. So as a Christian, what's my practice? What's my intent? Am I like Enoch? I'll never be the equal of Enoch, no doubt about that. But am I like Enoch that wanted only to please God? What's my practice? Is it to the best of my ability and my limited talents? to walk with God. I mean, what a wonderful thing. If, when I die, probably they'll just dig a hole and throw me in it. That's okay. I don't mind. But if they're gonna do something, and they wanna put something, he tried to walk with God. I mean, that's, what a better thing to put on your life, that you're trying to walk with God, to the best of your ability, you're walking with God. Of course, you're not perfect, I'm not perfect, but I am Christian. And I'm called by God to be faithful to him. And if you're a born again Christian, so are you. If you're not a Christian, you're going to hell. I can't put it any straighter than that. And you may not believe in hell, that's okay. A lot of people that drive cars don't believe in accidents. Just look at them the way they drive. A lot of young people, they believe they'll never be in an accident. I mean, they're impervious. Somehow there's a magical thing around them as they drive, or they're in a car, no one's gonna hit my car, no one's gonna have, and if it's gonna hit, it's not gonna be serious. Don't kid yourself. Hopefully you'll never have to face that. And you might think, well look, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, and in that way I'm wealthy. And you're not wise. And you can destroy that health, or as you get older, you know what's gonna happen to your body? I'm a living example of it. It's gonna go, your strength's gonna go. It's gonna disappear. You can't do what you did before. You get tired, and you just have to accept it. What can you do when you get old? And some of us, it happens to, not so old. And we have to, even as a young person, I've had a lot of friends down through the years that lost arms and legs or got very, very sick and died quickly. I mean, this life has no guarantees. You ungodly people have to understand that you're not God. And you're gonna have to face God. And when you face God, if you're not a Christian, if you think things are bad now, just wait till you get to hell. Thankfully, by God's grace, I'm not going to hell. I hope you are neither. Let's pray. Precious Jesus, we thank you for the witness and testimony of Enoch. We can't, we've already sinned so much that it can't be said of us that all we did was to walk with God. And we admire these great heroes of the past. But oh Lord God, we pray for your help, those of us who are believers, You'd help us to be sincere in our desire to walk with you. And to that end, might we study the scripture, might we learn what the Bible says, give us strength to follow its commandments to the best of our ability, and be with us, O Lord, God, when we sin, that our sins would not be disastrous in our life or in the lives of others. Bless us this day, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen.