is going to be out of 1 Peter, chapter 2, verses 1 through 3. And please turn to it. And the title for the message tonight is Desiring God. Desiring God. And thank you all. And when you find those verses, if you could please stand and we'll read them together. 1 Peter, chapter 2. verses 1 through 3, and we'll be looking at some other verses, but this will be our main text tonight. 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 1, we'll start there. Wherefore, lay aside all malice and all guile and all hypocrisy and envies, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby. If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious." Let's pray. Dear Lord, again, we thank you for this day. Lord, we just pray that you might open our eyes, that we might behold wondrous things out of your word. And Lord, just be with me as I try to preach your word and teach it, and that Lord, that in all things you'll be glorified. And we'll thank you and praise you and ask this all in Jesus' precious name, amen. You may be seated. Thinking of what to preach on tonight, I was thinking, well, you know, it's January, right? A new year, a new beginning, and many of us might have made New Year's resolutions. Over your life, you could have made multiple ones. You hear, oh, I got to lose weight. I got to get in shape. And I am sure I've seen it. People go out and buy exercise bikes or join the gym and maybe go once or twice that first couple of months and then forget about it. So when I was thinking about the new year and if I could impart or challenge you for one thing in your life, which I have for myself, and I want for all of you, is to desire God's word more. Listen to what it says. It says, wherefore lay aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envies and all evil speaking, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby. If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. You know, the Bible speaks much of loving God's word, of desiring God's word. John 8.31 says, then Jesus said unto those Jews which believed on him, if ye continue in my word, then ye are my disciples, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. It's knowing God's word that we're set free. putting it part of our life. John 8, 47 says, he that is of God heareth God's word. Ye therefore hear them not because ye are not of God's. Romans 7, 22, for I delight in the law of God after the inward men. And Job, I remember a guy at a men's prayer breakfast one time quoting this verse or reading it out of Job. Job 23, 12 said, neither have I gone back from the commandments of his lips. I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food. I mentioned that several times before. Do we desire God's word more than our necessary food? If a person doesn't eat, what happens? They'll eventually die. But how many anemic Christians do we have out there? That the only time they ever read God's word is when they come to church. How would we feel if the only time we ate was here at church? We'd probably be at church a lot more often, right? God tells us, to love his word, to desire his word. Psalms 1, 1, blessed is a man that walketh not in the counsel of ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night. Do we meditate? Is God's word our delight? I mean, I don't think there's anything... I mean, look at Christ. What's he called? He's called the Word. I heard a preacher one time say, you know, if a person could believe the first four words of the Bible, they wouldn't have trouble with any of it. And what are those? In the beginning, God. And who is that God? Christ. John says, in the beginning was the Word, and was with God, and the Word was God. Jesus Christ is very God. He's called the Word. Why? Because it's through Christ that he revealed God's heart, mind to us. Psalms 1910 says, more to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey in the honeycomb. How much of this world desires gold? People will kill for it, steal for it, ruin lives for it. And it's perishable. I mean, we think gold is something that's going to be around a long, long time. But yet, it's perishable. But the word of God endures forever. And it says it's sweeter than honey. I know Derek and I both had raised bees. I don't know if you still have any bees there, Derek? But I know both of us have raised bees, and it is, honey is very sweet. You go out there, open the hive, take some off the, off the little, super, now I can't remember what it's called. Off the little, yeah. And it's sweet. I mean, you know, bees collect it for us. We do a little bit of work for it, right Derek? My bees took off they left me they one day they left with the honey also, so they didn't leave any for me But the Bible says God's Word is sweeter than honey, and that's sweet You know if you ladies use recipes you know if you're using honey instead of sugar They say cut down on them out because honey's a lot sweeter than sugar Psalms 119 Says, verse 97, says, oh how I love thy law. It is my meditation all the day. And you know, Psalms 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, I think every verse, except for maybe two verses, speak of God's word. Every verse. And do we meditate on it? Do we think about it? I've told my wife, I've told other people, before I got saved when I was 18 years old, and I can't really remember what my mind dwelled on when I was lost. Now, I think of God's Word, I think of God all the time. Now, I don't always obey God like I should. I fall short, we all do, but my mind's constantly, am I displeasing God? Or am I pleasing God? Do I dwell on God? Again, 1 Peter 2.2 says, as newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word. Do we desire God's word? I know there's many parents out here that fed your babies, and you know what it's like, a baby wants that milk. They don't care if, you know, you ladies, you bear the brunt of it, but they don't care if you don't get any sleep, right? They're going to cry and cry and cry. A baby's weak, they need help, but one thing God gave them was an incredible set of lungs. Sheila's a singer, but babies, they can scream and cry for hours. I remember my wife being so tired. She wakes me up and said, hon, can you hold him or her, depending on which one it was at the time. And she would walk him, and she would feed the baby. But a baby lets you know that they're not happy. And when they want milk, I said, if a baby had superpowers, they would use everything in their power to make you give them what they want. A baby, a newborn baby especially, they want fed. They don't care who's around. They don't care if you're tired. Do we have that desire? And this word here, desire, it's actually a command. It tells us, it's a preposition too. It's in front of it. This word desire makes it a very compelling command. Like, I really want you to do this. I want you to have this desire, this love, this hunger for my word. Now, if we really love something, most of us don't have a problem doing it, right? Like, you know, I mean, just think If there's a certain food you like, you don't have a problem running over and eating on it, snacking on it. I mentioned in Sunday school about Reese's peanut butter or something like that, right? I know there's a person in this auditorium that really loves it. I like them too. I like nuts and peanut butter and chocolate. But we have things we love. Koreans, I worked at a Korean church eight years and they love kimchi. Now, if you don't know what kimchi is, most Americans called it spoiled sauerkraut. And when we got off the plane in Korea, some of the other team that was with me, we were going to the Philippines, and we stopped in Korea. They go, what is that smell? I said, that's kimchi. You can actually smell it in the air. And most of the Koreans will tell you they think it stinks, but they love the taste of it. Why? They develop the taste because they've eaten it all their life. I mean, anytime we had a church dinner, guess what we were gonna have? Kimchi. And you could smell it on the breath. But they had a desire for it because they fed on it from when they were little, little tykes. Psalms 42, one says, as the heart paneth after the water brooks, so paneth my soul after thee, O God. I like watching nature videos. Now, I'm sure many of you, I know Pastor, he's mentioned it sometimes, I'm sure some of you other ones, have you ever watched the gazelles in Africa? And doing a drought, if you're watching one of these nature things, what is probably going to be one of the little video clips you'll watch? You'll see that gazelle. up to the water, drinking, and you'll see all these crocodiles in the water. But that heart, that gazelle, has such a desire for water. It doesn't care about that crocodile. I mean, it cares, but it's still going to go over there and try to drink that water. Watching out for the danger, and sometimes in these shows, they show you that the ones who don't quite watch out close enough, but that's that desire. If that was the Greek word, you know, translated in from Hebrew, that's the same word for desire here. That they want it that bad, that they're willing to stretch their neck out over the water that may be crocodile infested. We're supposed to have that much desire. You know, and God's Word satisfies us like water does. You know, you're out working in a hot climate. I used to work on the roads in the summer when I was a teenager and, you know, making roads, you don't, typically they grade all the places around it so there is no shade. So when you have shade, you try to find it, but you always carried a water jug with you. you know, ice jug full of water or tea or something like that, but it was hot out there. And you know how it is when you're hot. I know somebody does some landscaping once in a while, right? It gets hot out there, doesn't it? I worked at a foundry, 120 degrees. It got hot. And I drank a lot of water back then. Do we have that desire? Psalms 119 verse 174, I have longed for thy salvation, O Lord, and thy law is my delight. Do we long for God's sincere, pure word? Do we consume it? Is it part of our everyday life? And people say, well, and I've had people tell me, Barry, I don't always read it like I should. And I said, well, you know, One, God commands us to read his word, to study his word. But you know, if you consume something, even out of duty, eventually you're going to have a taste for it. I see, you know, Marilyn, I'm sure that you had made Derek eat things that he didn't really care for as a kid, right? Now, he may like them now, some things he may not. But you knew things were good for him. So you tried to make him eat healthy food, things like that. And God wants to give us health. The Bible's, the word of God is called food, milk. Other places, it's called our meat. And what do we do? Why do we eat food? To live and grow. I mean, If you want to be an athlete, you're going to probably concentrate on your diet. Certain athletes want to, you get these big guys that are wrestlers or powerlifters, they're going to eat thousands of calories a day. When I was a runner, I was eating 7 to 10 sandwiches for lunch and 5 cartons of milk because I was running 10 miles a day at least. So I had a good appetite when I was a teenager. But do we desire God's word like that, like newborn babes? And the Bible says, desire the sincere milk of the word. Sincere, that's pure, good for us. This water, I'm just assuming, since there's nothing in it, that it's good for me. It's pure. And it says, purified drinking water. I know Jason was in the service, military, and I don't know if you ever went on a bivouac out in the woods, out in the jungles, but you usually made sure you tried to take water with you. You didn't just drink out of a pond, did you? Because if you did, you could get sick. In the Philippines, when I was there, they told us, don't stick your mouth over the bottle like this. Just put your lips right where the lid was. Keep it there. And out of 16 of us from Liberty that was there, I was the only one that didn't get sick, because I tried to do what they said. And of course, I drank well water and other things, so I might have had a bit more immunity to it. But almost everyone got amoebic dysentery overseas. So be careful. Make sure you head down Honduras. We had to be careful, so when we brushed our teeth, we didn't use the tap water. They bought bottled water, and we had to use that to brush our teeth. When you're taking a bath, you didn't let the water go in your mouth. You were careful, because the water wasn't pure. But the Bible tells us that God's Word is pure. It's uncontaminated. This Word is only used one other time in the Bible, particular word for word, a logen, and it's in Romans 12, where it says, Romans 12.1, where it's translated reasonable. You think, well, why would logos, a form of logos, be called word one place and reasonable the other place? Well, I look at it like this. If you know the words of God, you know the mind of God, and it would make it reasonable. When God tells us something, he does it for a reason. He wants to help us. He wants us to grow. He wants us to become more like him. It says, for the word, and when we looked at that first word in verse one, it says wherefore. Well, I had a teacher tell me, when you see the word therefore or wherefore, see what it's there for. And that goes back to chapter one. If you look in chapter one, verse 23, it goes, and this is a participle, it goes back to verse 23, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but by incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. It takes us back. He's given us a command here in verse 1 of chapter 2, but it goes back to verse 23. It says, we're born again. We have a spiritual life now. You don't have to do all of this yourself. God's going to help you. And it says, how are we born again? It says, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, and what? It abideth and liveth forever. God's word is one of the things other than God that is eternal. I mean, everything around here. Now, my one daughter got married here long ago, and it was before this roof collapse. You know, looking at this roof, I would think, boy, this looks pretty sound. It's probably going to last a while. But things fail, don't they? Cars fail. I mean, I had a Mazda B3000 truck. It was a 95, and I just got rid of it, what, last year, I think, or close to last year. So it was almost 28 years old. That's pretty long for a car, right? Still using it, driving around, not just setting it on the side and taking it to antique shows. But they get old. They fall apart. We get old. We fall apart, right? We have prairie quests. There's a need out there. People, we're weak. We're humans. Our body decays, but the word of the Lord abides forever. So because of that, verse 1, it says, wherefore, lay aside. There's things in our life we need to get rid of. I have things, you have things. If I asked out there, how many people here have a junk drawer? Or junk, right? Things you have that you might have had them your whole married life. Yeah, but I don't want to get rid of this light switch. I might need it again. I heard a person talking about decluttering your life. He says, people will try to save two bucks. Of course, that was older then. A person will try to save two bucks and burn down a $100,000 home. Try to save two bucks. He said, get rid of it. Ink pens, how many of us have ink pens that stop writing and instead of throwing them in the trash, we put them back up on the shelf or in our pencil thing and magically we hope that it'll get more ink, right? Just throw it away. And God tells us there's a few things in our life that we need to lay aside, we need to get rid of. And what are these things? Malice. You know, malice is a general word for evil, or trouble, or naughtiness, or wickedness. Basically, it's like, okay, good for nothing. You ever hear somebody say, oh, that person's good for nothing? Well, think of malice like that. It's something that's not really, it's not good for anything. Why are you keeping that? I mean, you probably look down in my work area, and there's probably things. Why are you keeping this? A little piece of wood like that? I might need it one day, right? My wife encourages me to try to declutter. It's hard for some things. But God tells us to get rid of it, to lay it aside. Guile, that means deceit, craft, treachery, dishonesty. A word that probably would describe that guile is fishhook. Now, a fish sees that hook, and it looks really good. It's shiny, it wiggles. I'm not a fisherman, but I have fish, and I know when you have it out there, you just don't want it to sit like that. You want it to wiggle it around, you want it to shine, you want the fish to say, boy, that looks good. But it brings death. How many of us have things in our life that are really hurting us, that are causing us problems. Do we spend more time on sports? Do we spend more time at the gym than we do reading God's Word? I had a friend I used to work with. If you ever played Trivia Pursuit with him and you got on movies, you were never going to beat him. He could say, That movie was made in 1963, and Rock Hudson starred in it, and this was the producer, and it's like, yeah, I guess that's nice if you're playing trivia pursuit, but is it really worth much in life? For believers. I mean, this passage is talking to believers, so a lost person, you know, that might be their only joy. But we as believers, if we want to pursue God, if we want to have a desire for God like we should, there's certain things we have to get rid of in our life. It says, Gal, hypocrisy. Now we all know what hypocrisy is, right? Think of the actor in the Greek plays. They wore a mask. And that's what hypocrisy is. Are we putting on a show? Are we fake? Are we a phony? God tells us, if you wanna have the true desire for me, you're gonna have to get rid of those falses. Be real, don't be phony. Envies, grudge and spite or jealousy, ill will. It'd be like, oh, Why does Jack have that nice a car? I deserve that nice a car. Right? I mean, there's nothing wrong with having something nice. But I shouldn't envy Jack because he has something nice and I don't. I just need to work harder, right? Do we envy people? I mean, remember David? He envied the wicked. He said, they're always prospering. David realized, he said, but then when I walked into the house of the Lord, I realized their end. You see some of these rich people that seems to prosper and have everything in life, but you know, this life isn't the end. There's a day that each one of us, and them also, that are gonna be accountable to God. Thankfully, we as believers have somebody that paid our price. But if you never came to Christ as your own Lord and Savior, you'll have to answer to God for your life by yourself. And everyone's going to fall short, because Christ is the only way into heaven. And it says, evil speaking, backbiting, distraction, defamation, gossip. is our lips. You know, the world out there, they don't mind truth for the most part. But, you know, they want to see it lived out in your life. If you're a Christian and you try to witness to them and they don't see that walk in your life, they're just hypocrites. How's our speech? How's our life? How's our walk? If it's not right, we need to get rid of it. You know, we are a needy people. We have sins, failures, but we have 1 John 1, 9, if we confess our sin, he's faithful and just to forgive us sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He wants to have right fellowship with us. You know, many times we get out of God's word and we lose the craving. But the best way to get the craving, the desire for God's Word is to get back in it, to read it. And you'll be surprised how you'll grow. I mentioned in Sunday school about a neighbor friend of mine, Juanita. She was a little younger than me. And her mom, she was crying as a baby, and her mom threw her down on the floor. And it caused her, you know, Basically, she kept a baby's mind most of her growing up life. And it wasn't till, I can't remember, 15, 16, 17, that she actually started speaking words. But I remember how sad it was to see this girl, just a little younger than me, holding a baby bottle. And how many believers are holding baby bottles because they're not into God's Word. Verse three, we'll finish up here. If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. You know, you could say since we're saved, do you ever really count your blessings? We had a praise back here from one of our members. Their daughter was in that. pile up down here. The car got sandwiched between two vehicles and survived. Jack and Sheila was in an accident lately. I know your daughter wrecked a car. And I just passed through that a little bit before that. How often do we not even realize that God protected us? Sometimes we do like that. Other times it just goes right over our head and we don't know it. But do we as believers count our blessings? Do we look and are we thankful for what we have? David, when he lost his son, He said, hey, I'll see him again one day, even though we lost him as a baby. You know, we go through hard times, sad times, but yet we are a blessed people. And you've heard me say it so many times, if we got what we deserve, we'd be in hell today. The Bible says, the Lord, have we tasted him, that he's gracious. I mean, think of that word, gracious. Acrostic, you've probably heard it before, grace, God's riches at Christ's expense. Do we realize how good and gracious and kind and merciful God is to us? This verse, you may have heard Pastor quote it sometimes. He doesn't always give out the reference, but Psalms 119, verse 18, it said, Open my eyes, that I might behold wonderful things out of thy law. Okay, Randy? Checking them? So my prayer for you, my goal for you, my desire for you, is if I could tell you one thing, eat. Eat God's Word. Feed on God's Word. Have a desire, a longing, to feast on one thing that's eternal, one thing that's pure, one thing that's right. We might have many New Year's resolutions. We might have many goals in our life. But my prayer for you and myself, David, my life verse, Psalms 27 4, said, one thing have I desired of the Lord, and that will I seek after, that I might behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple. David wanted to know God. He wanted to know his word. He loved his word. And that's why, even though he had his faults, the Bible says David was a man after God's own heart. Let's pray. Dear Lord, again, we thank you for this day. We're thankful for your love, your mercy, and your grace. Lord, help us to study your word, to read your word, to feast upon your word, and Lord, to enjoy your word. Thank you, Lord, for all the blessings you've given us. Pray that you might be with us tonight, guide and direct us, and watch over us as we go home. And Lord, we'll thank you and praise you and ask this all in Jesus' precious name, amen.