Mark chapter four, where we read in our scripture reading here just a little while ago, we only read about half of what the passage is there, but of course this is one of the recordings in the gospels of the parable of the sower and the seed, and it's familiar to us. It's found also in Matthew chapter 13, it's found in Luke chapter eight, and a familiar place for us. Last week, Last Sunday morning preached about fruit bearing out of John chapter 15 abiding in Christ and abiding in the vine and the Lord Using us to be fruitful in that in that passage there in John chapter 15 as a progression where Lord makes it clear that he expects for our lives to be fruitful and that They would that our lives would become more fruitful to the even the point of much fruit and to the point of fruit that remains by the time you get to, I think it's verse 16 or 17. It's there's an expectation of of much fruit and more fruit and much fruit and then even fruit that remains in our lives. And the Lord expects for there to be spiritual fruit that is produced in our lives as his people, because we are connected into him. And it's not something that we do in and of ourselves. It is not a fruit is not produced because we are good or we are talented or we are smart or we are wise or we are powerful, but because our God is and because he has a plan and he has a purpose for us. And so the Lord works in us and works through us to produce spiritual fruit. and he desires to see that, and kind of continuing with that thought and that theme here this morning in this passage, a familiar parable about, again, ground that brings forth fruit, and where we left off there, we left off in verse 9, And it picks up in verse 10 where the Lord begins to give an explanation. This is one of those parables where we don't have to discover the meaning and the application for ourselves because the Lord spells it out really, really clearly to his disciples who didn't quite get it themselves. And so the Lord spells it out very, very clearly for us. In verse 10, it says, when he was alone, they that were about him with the 12 asked of him the parable and he said unto them, unto you, It is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without all these things are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? And how then will ye know all parables? And the sower soweth the word. And these are they by the wayside where the word is sown. When they have heard, Satan cometh immediately and taketh away the word that was sown in their hearts. And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground, who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness, and have no root in themselves, and so endure, but for a time. Afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake, immediately they are offended. And these are they which are sown among thorns, such as, hear the word, and the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. And these are they which are sown on good ground, such as, hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, some an hundred. Right there where we began reading essentially is the middle of our text here in verses nine through 13, or 10 through 13 there, Jesus explains here his use of parables. And we know that this was one of the devices that the Lord would use in his preaching and his teaching. The Lord would often use parables. Most of, maybe much of his, if not most of his teaching involved some kind of of parable that he would use in his teaching and in his preaching. Parable is essentially it's a relatable story that has a parallel meaning. And so often defined as an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. And the word parable itself actually means kind of like what you think it means. It means a parallel meaning or has a dual meaning to it. And so there is a physical, relatable, illustration that is given, something that we can identify and understand because it is a common occurrence of life. And then there is a spiritual, an underlying spiritual truth inside of that. And here, this was a circumstance that everybody in that day would have understood. Not everybody in these days, even in these days, were farmers, per se, and necessarily that they ran a farm as an occupation. But essentially, everybody, to some degree, in their home, had some kind of a garden, grew some measure of their own food, or at least understood the process involved in this. And so this was something that everybody understood, this idea sowing seed and the seed that would grow and go forth. And it was a known thing that if seed fell on the wayside or seed fell among stony ground or thorny ground, that there wasn't an expectation of fruit, but only the seed that fell on the good and the well-tended, the well-prepared ground would be the seed that would grow forth and grow and go forth all the way unto fruitfulness. A parable was a way to convey truth, and to convey it with some subtlety, and to convey it in a way to which someone would have to have a deeper understanding to really get the main truth out of it. I think sometimes the Lord's intentions in using parables are a little bit mistaken. And the Lord was not trying to prevent anybody from understanding the truth. And sometimes they say, well, there were some people who were supposed to understand it and believe, and there were some people who were not supposed to understand it. And so the Lord spoke in parables so that they would not understand it. And as if the Lord had decided who would and would not be qualified or allowed to believe the gospel. And that's not what this was about. But like with all things of the Lord, faith was the key to unlocking the blessings and the truths of God's word. So those who did not have faith, they did not hear it with faith, the truth was spoken in kind of veiled terms of parables so that they would not have a false sense of understanding. One of the things that the Lord speaks about and he condemns the Pharisees for doing is that they would speak about spiritual things in really kind of physical ways and from a physical standpoint, from a humanistic standpoint, but they would convince people that they were right and that they knew the path to God. And what he said is they made twofold children of hell. Not only were those people lost, but they were still lost even after they believed what the Pharisees had taught them, but now they thought they were not lost, and so now they were no longer looking for how to be saved. They were not looking for the truth anymore. And so they were denied the truth in kind of two ways. When they were seeking the truth, they sought it from the wrong source, and they got the wrong message, and they believed it. They were still just as lost as they ever were, but now they thought they were okay. And Jesus certainly didn't want to have a ministry like that where somebody who approached his words and his teachings from a humanistic standpoint would think that they had understood what he was talking about because he was speaking in plain terms, but it had not gotten into their heart by faith. to the Lord use parables because someone who would hear that parable with faith, it would speak to their heart and they would come to faith and knowledge and grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. They would come to understand who Jesus Christ was and in his gospel, and they would believe. But those who didn't, they would kind of understand the physical story, but they wouldn't really understand the spiritual truth behind it. And they would continue to give attention to it until faith got down into their heart and penetrated. Rather than if Jesus had plainly spoken about the eternal truths and mysteries of God's word and of God's will, many would have understood simply with their natural reason and their human intellect, and they would have never come to a place of needing faith to believe in Jesus Christ and believe in his word. And parables are to be understood by faith. And God's word is to be understood by faith. And parables, the parables, use of parables force people to use faith to understand This principle bears true for the Word of God even today, that it requires faith to understand fully and understand properly. In 1 Corinthians, it talks about those who could not understand the things of God because the things of God, it says, are spiritually discerned. A lost person can read the Bible, and they can read it because it's words. And if they can read English, they can read the Bible, and they can read and understand the words of the Bible. It's not like it's a mystery language or something that we're able only to interpret because we're... No, it's written in plain English. Anybody can read the Bible. But not everybody can fully understand the Bible because the Bible has to be understood by faith. The Bible is the source, hearing the Word of God is the source of that faith, and so it's a good thing to be exposed to the Word of God, but we cannot fully understand the Word of God without faith. If we try to understand it academically, and there are some out there who try to explain and interpret and define the Bible from purely academic or purely literary terms, And they get things wrong because the Bible can't be fully understood in an academic way. I don't care how many letters you have after your name that define what your degrees and your learning might be. It has to be understood by faith. And to approach it any other way than by faith, you're going to get something wrong. You're going to miss something. Head knowledge of the Word of God is never enough. And so many have a knowledge of God and a form of godliness and a knowledge of God's word, but they don't have faith in God's word. And Jesus used parables, and I believe he used parables to prevent there from being even more false professors in Christ. I mean, it already is enough of an issue is that there were those who were following Jesus Christ simply to see him perform some miracle or do some work, and they weren't really there to hear his words and to obey his message. So the Lord used parables to, to a degree, separate the sheep from the goats. To prevent false professions in Him, those who had not truly believed in Him from claiming to have. The parable that Jesus presents here is, again, related to a subject of everyday and common knowledge to his audience, that of planting crops, of planting seeds and seeing them grow. We see, of course, that The sower went out to sow, it tells us that in verse three, and it came to pass as he sowed, some fell by the wayside and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. Some fell on stony ground where it had not much earth and immediately sprang up because it had no depth of earth. When the sun was up, it was scorched because it had no root and it withered away and some fell among thorns. The thorns grew up and choked it and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased and brought forth some 30, some 60, and some 100. And this was something that as he gives this illustration, this is something that everybody could picture in their minds. And probably as we think about this, even less of an agrarian society than Israel would have been in the first century, we can even understand this and picture this in our minds. And of course, we see here that the sower broadcasts the same seed over all of the ground. Even the illustration itself proves some things here. The seed was all the same. The reason that the seed grew in some places and didn't grow in other places, the reason it was fruitful in some places and it wasn't fruitful in other places, had nothing to do with the seed. His seed was the same. It was the precious seed of the Word of God. It had nothing to do with the sower. It had nothing to do with the discrimination or the bias of the sower. The sower just went out broadcasting the seed. He threw it everywhere. And almost kind of reckless, if you were sowing seed, you're trying to sow your crops, you would probably try to focus your seed onto good ground. I try to garden every year. I like to grow things. And I try to plant my seeds where I actually want them to grow. I don't just go out in my whole backyard and just throw it all over the place. But that's what the sower did. And it's an interesting picture, because even this would be a little bit more than what the typical sower would go for. He would try to focus his seed on the good ground. But this illustration proves that the seed was available, the word of God was available to all people everywhere. That the Lord wasn't just going to one particular place or one particular people or one particular type of ground. The Lord was going to make the word of God available to all men everywhere. And it was up to men to decide what their response was going to be. As he told this illustration, that probably would have struck his audience kind of weird. Like, sower threw seed over on the road? That's what the wayside is. The sower knew this patch of ground over here was stony, but he still threw seed over there? The sower saw thorny ground over there, and he threw seed in amongst the weeds? He really would do that? Because these people are going, I wouldn't have done that. The word of God is available to all men everywhere. The determining factor was not going to be that the seed was different. The seed was, you know, different kind of seed went to one type of ground that went to another type of ground or something like that. It wasn't even going to be that the sower made the decision for where the seed would be planted. The only determining factor and the only difference between where the seed grew and where the seed became a plant that became a fruitful plant along the way, the only thing that mattered, the only difference was the soil it fell on. And the soil, of course, represents the hearts of men in the wayside. would have been the hard-packed and well-trodden paths. It literally would have been the paths and the lanes that people would walk on, even if it wasn't necessarily roads. Even in the fields there would be places where the workers, the laborers would walk and they would walk in between the rows, the plowed rows or in between the different portions of the field and that would not be a place where things would grow because it would be trampled on and be trodden down by the workers, by the laborers in the field. A stony ground, of course, was exactly what it sounds like, full of rocks, and therefore lacking the depth of moist and fertile soil that the seed would need to grow into a thriving and fruitful plant. The thorny ground was an area that had not been cleared of thorns and weeds, and those things would eventually crowd out the good plant and the good seed that was beginning to grow in that place. And the good ground was good ground because it had been well-prepared and it had been regularly tended to. A lot of work and effort and labor had gone into the preparation of that ground so that it would be a place where the seed would grow and would have the water and the nutrients that were available to it so that it could bring forth much fruit. And of course, again, the types of ground symbolize the hearts of men. And the Lord tells us that very, very clearly in verse 15, it says, these are they, which are by the wayside where the word is sown. When they had heard Satan come with immediately and take it, the word that was sown in their hearts. The ground is the hearts of men. The seed is the word of God, and the ground is the hearts of men. And it is different types of, the different types of ground symbolize different heart conditions, spiritually speaking, heart conditions that are found in men. Some hearts will not be penetrated by the truth of God's word. The seed that fell on the wayside was like falling on a hardened heart that could not be penetrated by the Word of God, and therefore, before it could, and it would certainly take a long, long, long time, right, for it to ever penetrate down into that, and before that could happen, Satan comes and steals the Word away with some kind of temptation, with some kind of distraction, with some kind of frustration in their lives. It steals away the word that had been sown in their hearts by the Lord. The other two types of ground, the stony ground and the thorny ground, were penetrated by the seed. The seed begins to take root, but the truth never brings forth any kind of fruit. No lasting change. It doesn't become fruitful, and then more fruitful, and then bear much fruit, or fruit that remains. It never goes and progresses on to that point. Only in the good ground, the well-prepared, tender hearts, is the Word of God fruitful in their lives. And again, I would say this applies to every area of spiritual fruit that one can bring forth in the last week. And similarly, we talked about those are many, many different areas of fruitfulness the Lord is looking for in our lives. We look at this. and we immediately and initially, and I think rightly so, immediately and initially associate this with the gospel going forth to take root in someone's heart and for someone to come to faith unto salvation. And I think that that's an important application of this verse, but I think that this is true of every area of spiritual fruit, every area of spiritual growth that's supposed to take place in our life. It starts with a truth from God's word taking root in our hearts. and many areas of fruitfulness that all begin with truth from God's word. And yes, salvation comes by faith, and faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Without hearing the clear gospel from God's word, there cannot be faith unto salvation. That's true. But without the hearing of God's word, there cannot be faith unto any area of spiritual growth in the Christian life. Not real and genuine and true and fruitful growth. Not without the truth of God's Word. And so just as salvation, first and foremost, is growth out of the truth of God's word, of the truth of the gospel, so is a developing in a daily communion and a walk with God, where you're going to truly begin to walk in a relationship with the Lord. You're going to grow first by the sincere milk of God's word. I read that in 1 Peter this morning. And then move on and progress on to the strong meat of the word. And you're going to be... Getting your spiritual daily bread, right? If that's going to take place, it's by the Word of God and through the Word of God. We're going to get victory over the flesh. If we're going to get victory over temptation, if we're going to get victory in this present world and live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world, it is going to be a work of faith that starts with the truth of God's Word. Not the conformity to man's ideas and not conformity to this world, but transformed by the Word of God down in our hearts. We're gonna grow in grace and in knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as we're commanded to, if we're going to be established in sound doctrine and godly Christian principles. All of that starts with the truth of God's Word. If we're going to have an effective Christian testimony and a bold witness for Christ in this world before the lost, it starts with faith in the truth of God's Word. If we're going to develop strong relationships and we're going to grow and improve in those roles and those relationships that God has given to us in our homes and in our church and in our communities, if we're going to be developing and growing in those things, it starts with truth from God's Word. If we're going to understand and discover God's will and His purpose for our lives, and with that eternal purpose that He's put us here on this earth to do and to accomplish, it's going to start with truth from God's Word. If you're going to begin producing Christ-likeness and the fruit of the Spirit in your life, it starts with truth from God's Word. If you're going to understand and put into use what your spiritual gift is, that gift that God has enabled you with to serve Him and to serve others in the body of Christ, starts with truth from God's Word. And understand something, that truth from God's Word to whatever area of growth it's supposed to bring forth, it needs to fall on good ground again and again and again. They may have fallen on good ground at salvation, but there are areas of our lives and areas of our hearts that sometimes we're a little bit more resistant to. Maybe it takes a little bit of time, and maybe the first time that truth comes our way, our hearts in that area are stony ground. Our hearts are maybe thorny ground, and we're not ready to receive that truth. Maybe, God forbid, our hearts have become hardened and hard-packed. You know, we're saved, we're born again. There's nothing that changes that. But now our hearts have become more and more and more impenetrable to the truth of God's Word. We've become hardened against the truth of God's Word. We're at a point where we're just going through the motions. Seed of truth must take root in good ground in all of these areas if they are going to become fruitful. What we find from this parable, just in a real practical way, is first that I am responsible for my heart's condition, and you're responsible for your heart's condition, at all times, in any and all times. The Word of God is available, it's always available, and it's available. The Lord is faithful to cast the same seed on all types of ground. But it is up to us. to respond to it. Only you and God really know your heart's condition. And this was something that the Lord pointed out to Samuel, when it came time to choose a king to replace, to anoint a king to replace Saul. And he was sent to the house of Jesse, and Jesse's sons passed before him, and he was looking on the outward appearances, surely this is the Lord's anointed, right? This big strapping lad, broad shoulders, and looks real good. He looks like a king, and the Lord, said a real important, conveyed a really important truth to him that we understand, of course, is that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart, and only God looks on the heart. I can't know your heart condition. You can't really know my heart condition. The Bible even says, and this is in Jeremiah, that I can't even know my own heart condition truly and fully, right? I know my heart condition better than you know my heart condition. You know your heart's condition better than I know it. But the truth is we don't even know our own hearts. Our heart is deceitful and desperately wicked above all things. It's deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and it says who can know it? And Proverbs tells us that only a fool trusts in his heart. Your heart's a liar. 1 John tells us that your heart will lead you into sin and then condemn you for doing the thing it told you to do. I say halfway jokingly, the worst lesson that Disney ever taught us was to follow our hearts. Our hearts are desperately wicked. And they're deceitful and they lie to us. We don't really know our own hearts, but certainly, certainly nobody else can know our hearts. The most the Bible tells us we can really do is know by their fruits. You should know them, right? I mean, I can't know for sure what's going on in your heart. You can't know for sure what's going on in my heart. All we can ever judge about each other and discern about each other is the fruit on the outside. I can hear the words that you say. I can see your countenance. I can see your appearance. I can observe your actions and your conduct, but I can't really know for sure. It's not always fully, fully indicative of what's really going on. And so with that, we should humbly and honestly examine our hearts for evidence of obedience or disobedience to the Lord. And we should let the Lord reveal those things. Like the psalmist prays, search me, O God. and know my heart, try me, know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. We should humbly examine our hearts before God, and let the Holy Spirit examine our hearts before Him, so that we can better know if our heart is right before God. We can look at our own fruit, and we can say, we know, I know the kinds of things I said and did in this past week, and I know the kinds of sins I needed to confess before the Lord in this past week, and I know the things that I was ashamed of in this past week, and is that the kind of fruit that I ought to be bringing forth? I know the things that the Lord used me to do in this week, and I know the people the Lord used me to encourage, and I know the people I prayed for this week, and the people I witnessed to this week, Is that the kind of fruit that I need to be bringing forth and bringing forth more of? We look at our own fruit. We can examine our own lives. But understanding that I am responsible for the condition of my heart. I can look at my own life and I can see if there are areas of my life that aren't bearing the kind of fruit that it's supposed to bear. Or as much as maybe it should have been, or as much as maybe it had been in some time past. And if that be the case, then something has changed about my heart's condition. And I can see that something is not the way that it ought to be, or something is not the way that it used to be along the way. And so what can we do? We understand, of course, that a heart condition can change. Heart condition is not a permanent state of being. A heart that is good ground right now may not be good ground forever. A heart that is hard ground, wayside kind of ground, hard packed ground, doesn't have to remain that way. Heart that is stony ground or thorny ground does not have to remain that way. And our hearts can change and do. Our hearts are constantly undergoing change. It takes attention and it takes intention in order for good ground to stay good ground. It takes hard work and it takes honesty and humility for ground that needs to be amended to be made into good ground that can be fruitful ground. Your heart can change in either direction. It can improve or it can deteriorate. because their heart's condition is not permanent. And the Lord, in two places in the Old Testament, in Jeremiah and in Hosea, in both places, He gave an instruction, He gave a commandment to the people to break up the fallow ground of their hearts. And what's interesting about fallow ground is it is ground that used to be ground that was worked and plowed and prepared ground, but it was ground that had now been neglected for at least one year. That's what a fallow ground was to the people. It was the ground that they had let rest for a year. That was something they were actually supposed to do. The Lord had commanded them to do that in Israel, was to let the ground every seven years, to let the ground rest. And so what a typical landowner would do is they would have a parcel of ground any given year that they were letting rest for its Sabbath year while they were working other pieces of ground. But the problem with that was that after that year of rest, this ground was much, much harder to work and get prepared again because it had laid dormant for a year. It hadn't been grown in. It hadn't been plowed. It hadn't been tended for a whole year. And so it was gonna take a lot of extra work to get that ground ready again. And I find that kind of an interesting thought here is because understand again, that ground that was once good, hearts that were once tender before the Lord can be hardened over again to a place where they become really impenetrable. Until they are broken up again, fallow ground, unplowed ground must be broken up. It's a call to humility and it's a call to repentance. And we really have an option in this as the Lord's people, we have an option to break up that fallow ground through humility, a response of humility, or we can wait until God has to break that ground up. And that can be much more sudden and much more surprising and much more devastating and much harder to recover from in some cases. When the Lord has to get our attention, when we don't give the Lord our attention, the Lord has to get our attention, it usually comes in some pretty drastic ways. When the Lord, in Jeremiah, when He tells them to break up their fallow ground, it goes into how the Lord is about to send them into captivity because they would not. It's a pretty devastating set of circumstances that were coming their way. We can either fall on the rock and be broken into pieces, or the rock can fall on us and we can be ground into a powder. Both hurt. One hurts more. Humility is not fun. Repentance and confession and getting right with God and getting right with others, it's not fun, it's not easy, but it's far better than the humiliation of being exposed for what we really are. Break up the fallow ground. Tend the field of your heart. To keep the good ground good, it takes attention, it takes tending. Stony ground can be amended the stony ground represents. And I was kind of thinking about this and what it all represents. It's obviously there's some soil there, but there's a lot of rocks. And those rocks would be, in some cases, surface level. And in many cases, it would be under the surface where it really, really matters. But there would be problems underneath the surface that have not been dealt with. And we all have to some degree something like that, something deep down in our heart, some heart condition, some spiritual condition on the inside, something that the Lord needs to work on us about and something that the Lord needs to help us get victory over. And sometimes we're just real, real, real hesitant to get victory over those things because they're under the surface. Or they're infrequently a problem, but when they're a problem, they're a big problem. Some area where we have a besetting sin or we have a bad habit, something that we're not willing to let the Lord get out of our lives just yet. And those things, as we see clearly from the parable, those things prevent us from being fruitful in areas of our Christian life. The thorny ground is exactly what it's described to be. It is the cares, verse 19, the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, the lust of other things entering in and choking out the worst of that becomes fruitful weeds that are the cares of this world, the materialism and the spirit of this age and the pursuit of things in this world that are far less important than the eternal riches that Christ would have us to set our hearts and our affections upon. And it's setting our affections on things of this world. And because of that, we make an exclusive choice. We say, I'm either going to pursue God's will or I'm gonna pursue the riches of this world, but no man can serve God and mammon. And it is making the choice to serve mammon, to serve the life that we're living, the here and the now, the material, the immediate, rather than to pursue after that which has eternal riches and value. And we must tend to this ground. We must let the Lord remove those stones and pull those weeds and clear that ground so that it can be fruitful ground, good ground. And that ground must be watered and fertilized. More and more and more of the Word of God. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And the more that we're exposed to the Word of God, the more that we're exposed to truth, the more that our faith grows and increases, and the more that we can be fruitful in the Word of God. Old Testament in Isaiah says that truth grows line upon line, precept upon precept, and if we're going to be growing in these areas, it's just more and more and more exposure to the washing of the water of the Word, and the daily bread of the Word of God, that nourishment that our souls need. Say even that the Lord would challenge us to step out by faith, and step out of our comfort zones, and plow into new ground, and let the Lord open up new areas and new avenues of faith and of service as He would go along. Let the Lord carve out more and more room in our lives for Him that would surrender more of our hearts to His control. But your heart's condition is your responsibility. And your heart's condition, as it changes, is because of your responses to the truth of God's Word. I'll close with this, this morning. What is your heart condition right now? What's it like? That's a question that we all have to answer before the Lord. In just a moment, an opportunity to answer that before the Lord here in prayer. But what is your heart's condition right now? And it may be a little hard to discern in some points, and that's why we have the ability to look at our own fruit and evaluate the fruit that is being produced by our lives. If my heart condition is what it ought to be, and the Word of God is taking root in my heart like it ought to be, then the fruit that that area of my life is producing is going to be the kind of fruit that God wants it to produce. And so if I'm not seeing fruit there, or if I'm not seeing the kind of fruit that I ought to see there, then I can know that there's a problem in my heart, and my heart's condition is not what it ought to be. And I can let the Lord reveal that to me as I go to God. I'm like the psalmist, again, that I would pray that God would search me, and try me, and reveal in me any wicked way that needs to be changed. so that I can be what God wants me to be for Him. What is your heart condition right now, this morning? Let's have our heads bowed for prayer, and we'll take just a moment here to respond. We will have Some music here, the piano will play in just a moment, and we will have an opportunity here to respond in whatever way the Lord may be speaking to our hearts this morning. Has the seed of the gospel gotten into your heart? Have you trusted Christ as your Savior? Most important response we can make to the Word of God is to trust Jesus Christ for salvation. If you've never done that, please don't leave here without doing that. But the Word of God speaks to us in so many ways. And there are other areas where we may or may not have responded the way that we ought to. And if the Lord is speaking in your heart about something like that this morning, then let's take this opportunity to respond in that way this morning also. And so while the piano plays, let's respond to the Lord's leading in our hearts this morning.