People ask us all the time, or ask me when I'm going to write my book. And I often say I couldn't put my name on it if I've told all my stories. But I have threatened to write a book called, It Happened in Church. Because there's some weird stuff happens in churches. Sad things, how people get sick, and worse, but funny things. And Linda and I were out in Fernley, Nevada. That's Reno, Nevada area. and a dear preacher friend who had started a brand new church just to the east of Reno. And I did their first missions conference they'd ever had, and the church is growing. But I'm sitting beside the young pastor. He said, Brother Godfrey, if I say open your Bible to Matthew or John or the book of Acts, they don't know what that is. I'm having to teach them everything. He said, see that family? And he pointed to an older family sitting in the congregation. He said, that man right there, he had a friend and this friend just griped and complained all the time about his wife. And this man said, well then if you don't want her, I'll take her. Two weeks went by, Saturday came, somebody knocked on this gentleman's door. And he went to the door and there stood his friend and his friend's wife in her suitcases. He said, did you really mean what you said? And he took her. And he said, now that was the way it started. And finally they eventually got married. He said, now both of them are saved. But he said, that's my church. It's just pretty much that way. So you just never know what's going to happen in church. How many of you know the name Dr. J.B. Buffington? Calvary Baptist in Lakeland, Florida. He's a dear friend to me. Not too many JBs in the world, so we were buddies. And Dr. Buffington is in heaven now. But many years ago, he was pastoring in Lakeland. His son was just a little guy. And on a Sunday night or a Wednesday night, they had a guest speaker. Well, Mrs. Buffington and the little boy, they were sitting on the front row, and this guest speaker got up to speak. And Dr. Buffington's son looked up, and that wasn't his daddy in the pulpit. And he was jealous for his daddy's pulpit. He stood up on the pew beside his mother, and he said, he can't preach. The guy became so nervous, he didn't know what to do. And he said, folks, let's pray. And he started to pray. And Dr. Buffett and his little boy stood up on the pew again and said, he can't pray neither. Anyway, you just don't know what's going to happen in church, so let's see what's going to happen tonight. 2 Timothy chapter 2. By the way, we have enjoyed every moment being with you. We say thank you from the bottoms of our hearts for all that you've done for us and just loving on us. Tonight my message It will be different. I guess you might think all of your messages are different, Brother Godfrey, but tonight I want to do something that is a little different. I'm going to read two verses, and then I'll tell you what I'm going to do. 2 Timothy chapter 2, verses 1 and 2. Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also." Folks, can I just stop tonight and tell you, I believe that last verse probably describes missions as well as any other verse in the Bible. Because missions is more than just winning people to Christ. Now that's important. We need to win everyone we can to the Lord. That's where we start. But that's only the beginning. I really believe that's the easy part. The follow-up part, the discipleship part, the building church part. You see, God teaches us things. How many of you would say tonight, thank the Lord that he's been patient with me and taught me some things in my life? And when God teaches us something, we teach someone else. In this case, Paul taught Timothy. And then he's saying to Timothy, you teach some other men so that those men in turn can teach other men. And of course, that would apply to women as well. So tonight, what I want to do is this final time with you before we head north. Tomorrow we head via Chattanooga one night up to Normal, Illinois. We'll start there Wednesday night in a meeting. But before we head out, I want to share from my heart tonight, I want to share some things that God has taught us. Now, I will be honest, some of these things, He's still working on us. I have not perfectly learned these things yet, but I'm working on it. I could preach, there's several other things that I'm not going to preach on the night that come to my mind about God teaching us. Number one, He taught us, don't get too comfortable where you're at. because He can shift you around. He can stir your nest and push you out into something else. I also learned that I have to define the words that I use when I witness to people biblically. Now I know that's a mouthful, but here's what I mean. When we work with Muslims, they use the same identical words that I use. They talk about sin, they talk about sacrifice, they talk about fasting, they talk about praying, they talk about the Bible, they talk about Jesus. But they don't mean the same thing by any of those words the way they define them. And I've got to stop and open this Bible and define my words biblically. I've learned that the hard way sometimes. I've learned that it's not always easy to keep a love for souls. How many of you know some people are easy to love? And then there are the others. And some countries. I mean we lived in France a year and a half. We love French people, they need to hear the gospel, but they're not easy to love. You know how many Frenchmen it takes to defend Paris? Nobody knows, they've never done it. Anyway, I'm sorry. I can't help it, it's just... So there's several things that we've learned that I'm not gonna preach about tonight, just mention some of them. Let me give you three things that God has taught us or is teaching us that I wanna share with you tonight before we head on to another place. And I wanna start with, I believe to be the most important thing that God has taught us. And here it is. God has taught us what really is important in life. You say, Brother Godfrey, what are you talking about? Well, number one, my relationship with God, knowing God, I believe that's the most important thing in the world. Now listen to me, friends. I'm not talking about knowing about God. There are a lot of people know all about God. They've got it down. They know the theology. They can argue with you. They can tell you every little thing they believe. But I'm not talking about knowing about God. I'm talking about knowing God. And I don't know about you, but I've had enough of modern-day, mediocre, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road kind of Christianity. I want to be a man of God so much that when I'm out in public and I'm traveling or wherever I'm at, people can tell that I've been walking with Him. I want to know Him. I want to be building for eternity. I want my family to know that their husband and their daddy loves the Lord Jesus Christ. There's nothing wrong in having a lot of things. I would never condemn that. But I've learned that it's not that that brings about life's most important things. Knowing God and loving God, I think it goes together with knowing and loving your family. You've probably heard enough from me this week to know that I love my wife, and we love our children, and we've had the best time with them. When we were married almost 44 years ago, I remember thinking, first year anniversary, and then the five year anniversary, how many of you men think this way? I used to think, man, it can't get any better than this. And then we've been married 15 years, and 25 years, and 35 years, and now 40, and going the other way. But let me tell you the truth, it can get better. You know the reason it can get better? It's because our life together is hidden in God. And we always taught our children, we love our children, we thank the Lord for them. We always taught our children, we do not have a list of rules that we have to keep. We have a principle of life, and that is to honor God with everything that we do. And we've learned that having a lot... I'm going to tell you where God taught us this truth. Not that we already knew it, I think, but I'm going to tell you when God really taught us this truth. In 1990, we had gone down to live in the jungle in Zaire in those days, and we got there. Two weeks after we got there, fighting started, and 10,000 foreigners fled the country, and we were out in our village, and those Christians there had been praying for 30 years for the missionaries to come back. We had just gotten there. I tried to get Linda and the kids to leave till it was safer, and they said, no, God wants you here. God wants us here. And so we stayed, and no one heard from us. We couldn't get out letters. We didn't receive any letters. We didn't get any money. For six months, we didn't receive not one penny from America. For six months, we didn't have a letter. When Brother Ron Bragg and another gentleman came to visit us and bring us some mail and bring us some food, six months later, I shouldn't even tell this. The first piece of mail we had after six months was a questionnaire from a church. But that, anyway. We'd been there six months. Well, toward the end of that six months was Christmas time. I don't know if you've ever, I know you haven't, you haven't had Christmas out in the middle of the jungle probably. And here we were away from home for all that time, our three younger children with us. We had a, we had a married son and a, and a daughter in Bible college and there we were and Christmas came. Now our Christmas there was very different. It was different because it never got cold. We didn't have any snow. We didn't have Christmas tree. We didn't have Christmas cards. There was no Santa Claus, thank the Lord. I mean, we just were down there in the jungle. And the Sunday before Christmas was a special Sunday there. In fact, from our house in the village, we walked down this mountain, two kilometers, that's a mile and two tenths. Excuse me, walked down the mountain. And on the Sunday before Christmas, we had baptismal service. That was part of the Christmas thing. And we baptized differently there. Now, preacher, don't panic. We just used the way we did it. We had this pond down there where the elephants wallowed out this water hole, and the Africans dammed it up. And we did a lot of things down there, but we baptized down there. So I and two African pastors, we waded out into the water. Then the deacons would bring us the short people, and we had baptized three of them. And then as they were starting out, we'd back up a little deeper in the water, and the deacons would bring us people a little bit taller. We baptized three more. And then they would leave, and they'd bring us three more a little taller, and we baptized three more. And Sunday morning before Christmas, we baptized over 30 people. Then we walked up the mountain, and you're talking about embarrassing. Linda and I, we're walking up the mountain in our kids, and we're, and hear these African ladies with babies on their back and stuff on their head walking up, passing us, and doing great. But anyway, we went back up to church, and church there lasted all morning. They loved to sing, and we loved to hear them sing. And so we had church, and we had the We accepted the people who had been newly baptized into the church membership. We had the Lord's Supper. We just had a great time. Then everyone left. I think it was the next day, one time a year, our entire village, we killed one cow. Everybody in the village, every family paid a little bit of money. We purchased the cow. They killed the cow. Our son, Robert, he's just a little guy. He's right in the middle of slaughtering that cow. He'd come down telling us all about it. But at the end of the day, they came down to our house and they had some banana leaves. And in the banana leaves wrapped up was a little bit of ear and a little bit of liver and a little bit of the spleen and a few good pieces of meat. Every family in the village got a little bit of that cow. Well, then Christmas time came. And that was a different Christmas for us because we had the three little kids there and we didn't have a lot of stuff. Honestly, we had nothing that would impress anybody here. Understand, I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for us. I'm trying to show you a lesson that we learned. That year, our kids, their Christmas gifts were two Walt Disney videocassettes that my mother, when we flew out of the airport to go out to Africa, my mother stuck them in my hand. I stuck them in a suitcase. And our Christmas that year, all our kids got was two videocassettes. We didn't have electricity. We didn't have a TV. We didn't have a videocassette player. A lot of people would have looked at that and thought, you know, that wasn't much of Christmas. Can I tell you this? That's when God really emphasized what I'm sharing from my heart with you tonight. That's when we learn what really is important in life. Having God and having each other is worth more than having all the riches of the world. I'd rather be in the center of God's will. I'd rather be doing what He wants me to do wherever it's at. It may be for you right here in this church, for many of you it is. I'd rather be doing what God wants me to do and have God in my family than all the riches that we don't have in America anymore. We've learned what really is important in life and are still working on that. Let me tell you the second thing that we've learned. Part of it goes back to that story, but not really. Anyway, we've learned that we can trust God. Now this morning in my message, I talked about faith and trust and resting in Him, relying upon Him. That's so true. But let me say to you that we didn't learn to trust God down in the jungle. People will say, Brother Godfrey, if you didn't get any money at all for six months, how did you live for six months? And I want to jump, sometimes I just ever get excited. I just want to jump up and down and say, have y'all ever heard of God? Isn't He the same God down in the jungle or up in the Sahara or over in Tokyo as He is right here? You don't think God can take care of you? And God took care of us in some miraculous way. But you know how God did take care of us there? By poor African Christians walking 20, 30, 40 miles to bring us a pineapple, or a handful of eggs, or a bowl of grub worms, or the back leg off an antelope, or whatever they would bring into us. And for six months, God fed us. But we didn't learn to trust God down there. Let me tell you when we learned to trust God. Newly married young couple, we left South Carolina and moved to Tennessee. Now in that day, that was a major move. Because our mamas and daddies, they thought a long trip was up the mountain to Asheville, 45 miles. And here we took off. We left mom and daddy and we left familiar surroundings and we moved over to Chattanooga to enroll at Tennessee Temple. I wasn't enrolled yet. I didn't really know how to do it. I just knew God wanted me over there. We had a 1962 Plymouth Valiant. Anybody here old enough to remember, that was the ugliest car that was ever made. We had a 1962 Plymouth Valiant, and we rented a little U-Haul trailer that we hooked behind a car. And everything we owned was in that little trailer and in that car. And we had a little baby boy then. And we took off and we went over there. And again, we were just green and dumb. And I didn't have a job. I wasn't enrolled in school yet. I didn't know anybody. Moved over there. First weekend, I went to the bus pastors meeting. Cuz Parker, we called him, M.J. Parker, started the bus ministry, Highland Baptist Church. And I didn't know anyone. I said, Brother Parker, we want to go so into today. Is there somebody who needs somebody to go with them? And he said, right, here's a man. And he introduced me. to Robert Heath, Pete Heath, we called him. Pete and Gene Heath, they hadn't been at Temple long with us. We visited all day long that day, went slow, went in, worked his bus route. And God called them to Japan. God called us to Africa. And we became good friends and still are good friends. But now I'm involved in the bus ministry. We're over there. We rented a three-room apartment And some of you all remember the old houses around Highland Park. They were big old houses, and they remodeled them into four apartments. And when somebody moved out of one, they sprayed it, and all the roaches from there would come down to yours. And it was just three rooms in a row. So we took, we had taken what little, we didn't have a lot of money, we took part of that to rent the U-Haul, move over there. We took the last money we had, we rented this three-room apartment. All right. Tennessee Temple sent me down to a big factory in Chattanooga to apply for a job. And I went down and I applied, and they found out that I'd been electronics tech in the Marine Corps. They gave me some tests. The personnel manager came back to me and said, sir, we noticed that, he said this, we would like to hire you, but we noticed you checked on your application that you don't want to work on Sunday. And I said, sir, let me just explain my situation. I know there's some people have to work on Sundays. There's nurses and doctors. They don't have any choice. But look, I'm a Bible college student. I came over here to go to Bible college. I'm working in the bus ministry. And sir, I need a job. And if you hire me, I will work hard for you. But I don't want to check that, that I work on Sunday. And that guy looked at me. And he said, sir, listen, I'm a Christian too. He said, and the Bible says that if the ox falls in the ditch, you're supposed to get it out on Sunday, on the Sabbath, he said. And I did the, I guess looking back on it, I thought at the time it was the dumbest thing. I said to him, sir, if I had an ox and it fell in the ditch every Sunday, I would shoot that thing. And you're laughing. He saw no humor in that at all. Have you ever done something like that and afterwards you feel foolish? Because, you know, I'm having this conversation with myself. Lord, you know I needed a job. I got a wife. I got a baby. We don't have any money left. Lord, I needed a job. But they didn't hire me. Well, the next day or two, they sent me down to another place to apply for a job, and it was in Ringo, Georgia, Ringo Junior High School. And I went down there, and I talked to the principal in the school, and he asked me if I'd ever done that kind of work before. And I said, sir, I haven't, but look, I grew up on a farm. I'm a hard worker. I need a job. If you'll hire me, I will work hard for you. And he said, you know, I believe you will. And he gave me a job. I worked for Catoosa County, Georgia. But here's what he said. He said, but all of our staff get paid on a monthly salary. You'll have to work a month before you get paid. I got back in my little 62 Valiant, headed back up I-75 to Chattanooga. saying, Dear Lord, thank you. I've been asking you for a job, and you've given me a job. You've answered my prayer, but Lord, you know I got a wife, and you know I got a baby, and how are we gonna eat for a month? But the next day I went to work, and I walked in the, well, I started working. I did the custodial work and the maintenance, and that day I went in the cafeteria of the school. And I introduced myself to those ladies that cooked and worked in the cafeteria. I called them, I was only, I was just a young, very young man. I called them granny ladies. Thinking about that now, they probably were in their 40s or so, I don't know. I thought that, anyway. I told them that I was a Bible college student up at Tennessee Temple, and they looked at me and they said, Brother Godfrey, it's against the state regulations for us to serve this food over again. They said, if you want us to, we'll just leave the food in the pots and pans and casseroles, and you get what you want, and then you can throw the rest out. Now, folk, I want you to listen tonight what God taught me that day. For four years, I fed half of my block at Tennessee Temple University. And I'm not talking about bread and water. I went home with gallon jugs full of black-eyed peas, fried chicken, yeast rolls, banana pudding. I'd eat all we could eat and pass it and go up the street to other students we knew. Are you hearing what I'm saying tonight? Folk, if we believe and we do, if we believe that we can trust Him to save our souls, why can't we believe Him to take care of us? And God taught us a very important lesson way back there, way before we ever went to Africa. By the way, I'll just park here a moment. If young missionaries can't trust God to take care of them on deputation, how are they going to trust Him to take care of them when they get to the mission field? So we learn that we can trust God. Let me give you my third lesson that we've learned and I'm finished tonight. Let me give you my third one that kind of goes together with the last one. Because we learn that we can trust God, we also learn that we cannot out give God. We do not give in order to get. However, it is true when we do give to God, He takes care of us. And when we say that He can take care of us, we learn to step out in faith. And I'm going to give you two examples tonight that I think will illustrate what I'm trying to say here. I wish that, and I'm serious about this, I wish that everyone in this church tonight could go just one Sunday to church with us out in the old Belgian Congo where we live. I wish you could go to church there just to see our church, number one. A big rock church building. Very often, not everyone could even get in the building. They were standing outside looking in the windows. When we had visitors come, one of the things they would always find interesting was if no one was sitting on the last row, now it didn't have backs, just little boards on logs. If no one was sitting on the last few, the chickens roosted back there. But our church service would last two or three hours. We had several choirs. We had a young men's choir and a men's choir and we had a ladies' choir. They tried to get Linda to sing in the ladies' choir, but she never had to move. But anyway, we'd start church and one of the most exciting parts of our church service there was the offering. And the offering was different there, too. I've seen a lot of different offerings taken up. Here in America, we mostly pass a plate. At Maranatha Baptist in Okinawa, they never pass a plate. They just got wooden boxes built like a church in the back with a place you stick your tithing missions in it every Sunday, never pass a plate. And their faith promise last year when I was there was $220,000. In Japan, they have a sock on the end of a stick. That's the way they take offering. That's not the way we took offering in Africa. Right across, we had a big church built, right across the front of the church, all the way across, were these huge baskets. And when time came for offering, our psalm leader would say, everyone stand and we're gonna sing, and boy, they loved to sing. He said, we're gonna sing and we're gonna take the offering. Now you have to imagine our church, over on this side right here, this was the ladies' side. They called them the mamas. Any female out there was a mama. Over on this side of the church, this was the papas. So for you 60s generation, we had the real mamas and papas, but anyway. You younger people, you won't get that, but that's okay. Offering started. How many of, don't raise a hand necessarily, but have you ever seen a really joyful, hilarious offering in the United States? Most of the time it looks like everybody's in agony when I'm in offering time. That's not the way Africans took the offering. Well, they didn't take offering, they gave offering. We stood up to sing and we started to sing and row by row those mamas, those ladies would start out. And they can't exactly walk quite still, they had this little thing they did. But they would start out and here would come one lady and she'd have a handful of eggs. And then the lady behind her, she'd have a big old two feet tall pineapple. And then there was another lady, she had some cassava root, that's what they eat every day. And another one would have a hand of bananas. And then we ate a... It's like a little watermelon of a thing down there. It wasn't sweet. They only ate the seeds out of it. You had to crack every seed. Our fingers would get so sore cracking those seeds. You made a little bread out of it. But they would put some of those seeds in there. And then here would come this mama out, and she got a live chicken. And she put that chicken in one of those baskets. And every row, every lady would come and give her offering. See, they lost their money. We had 38,000% inflation there in one year. They didn't have money. They put in whatever they had. All the ladies gave. And then when the ladies finished, all the children would come. And the children would put in their offering. And then when the children finished, all the men. I'm telling you, it would take us 20 to 30 minutes to take the offering. And all the while they're coming down and putting in, it's one of these papas, he'd come and he'd put his chicken in. One of them might even have a goat. And he'd put that goat in the basket alive, what I'm talking about. Put that goat in the basket, and then they'd call on me to come preach. And I would get up and start preaching. You talk about not being easily distracted. When we go out, when I go out to a different village to preach, they would bring five chairs outside. And I would sit and Linda and our three little kids and Africans would come by the hundreds and get around us. And one of my girls, one of our girls has natural curly red hair. She got it from me. And they would feel of our girl's hair. They would rub my arm. They'd never seen a man who had hair on his body before. I'd be up preaching out in villages and it was so hot I wore sandals. I'd be preaching and some little kid playing with the hair on my toes while I preached, but anyway. Now I'm having a little fun, but you get what I'm saying tonight? Look, when you know that you can trust God, whether it be out in the jungle or over in the desert or whether it be right here, when you learn that you can trust God, you cannot argue with God. And those Africans love to give, they gave with joy. And I wish you could just go, just watch them, so that number one, you know that I'm not lying. But I wish you could just see the joy on their faces they give. Let me tell you another story. I was out in the Philippines. I love to go to the Philippines. I see people say that every time I go. I was preaching at a missions conference, and the other speaker was a Filipino pastor from the island of Negros, and it's a very poor island. They grow sugar cane, and the price, there's no money for it now. This preacher friend of mine, he was telling me about his church. He said, Brother Godfrey, my church sits down in a rice paddy. And my people walk down out of the mountains. Some of his people, every Sunday, they walk an hour and two hours and more down out of those mountains, sticky humid, walk down there to go to church. They fill that church up. He said, Brother God, for one Sunday, I was there and I was preaching and I looked out and one of my faithful ladies, she wasn't there. Did you know that Pastor Bloom knows when you're not in your spot? Cause y'all sit in the same place every time you come. And Pastor Rabbi told my friend, he said, I looked out one Sunday and this lady, she wasn't there. Next Sunday came, I looked out, and she still wasn't there. He became concerned about her, and he sent one of the deacons up into the mountain, a long walk up there, to check on this dear little lady. And the deacon came back, and he said, Pastor, Pastor, Mom so-and-so, she's very ill. Her feet are swollen up. She has heart trouble. She's not doing well at all. So my friend, Pastor Rabaton, he took two things with him. He took his Bible and his hymn book. Did you know that the old time hymn books are full of doctrine? the old godly hymns. And he went up there, and he opened up the hymn book, and he and that little lady, they sang some songs, some hymns of Zion together, and he opened his Bible, and he read her some chapters out of the word of God, and they had some prayer time together, and then finally he looked at her, and he said, Mom, I've got to go back to the church now, just wanted to come see you. And she looked at him, and she said, Pastor, Pastor, You're forgetting something. He said, Mom, what am I forgetting? She said, Pastor, you're forgetting my tithe and my faith promise offering. He said, Mom, you can't do that. You're sick. You need to go to the doctor. And she said, Pastor, don't be cruel to me. Say this whole thing about grace giving and faith promise giving and sending out missionaries, it's not about money. That little lady didn't have a lot of money, but she had a lot of God in her, and she had a lot of joy in her heart, and she understood that whether she's sick or not, even her pastor was not going to deprive her of the joy of giving her tithe and her faith promise offering. I don't know how this started in my life. I didn't go looking for it. I don't even know the first time someone asked me to do it. But probably the last five or six years of my life, I'm being asked to come to the poorest countries in the world and teach them about faith promise giving. Now, just put yourself in my spot for a moment to do that. I will be honest. The first times I ever did it, it was probably one of the most difficult things I've ever done. Because even though I know what the Bible teaches, how many of you believe the Bible teaches we ought to have? Yeah. How many of you believe we ought to give the missions and give offerings to God? We believe it, but boy, when you're standing up before a bunch of poor people, you kind of talk yourself out of it. And I was down, I've been many places and done this, but I was down in Nicaragua with Brother Bob Dayton. And I preached multiple, multiple times in churches. And I said, Brother Dayton, why? Why would you ask me to come down here and teach them about grace giving? He said, Brother Godfrey, they will listen to you because you've lived in poorer places than they live. I looked at them and I thought, I'm not sure about that. Let me tell you about one of the, several of those churches actually. These were churches, folk. They were so poor, they could not afford to buy tithe envelopes. Every family, every member of the church had one envelope. And when they took the offering on Sunday, and they took the money out and counted it, they put their envelope back in a rack on the wall, like a track rack. They put their envelope up there, and when they came back next Sunday, they would get their one envelope down, put their offering and faith promise in it, and they didn't have enough money. And yet, I would preach there, and I would just teach basic, simple truth about giving to God, and I would give an invitation. And this is confession time for me. Honestly, when I gave the invitation, I would think, what are they going to respond to? They don't have any money hardly at all. And I would give the invitation, I want you to listen to me. Every believer in the church would come to the altar and make a commitment to give to God. And you say, what does that mean? It means now they can send their Bible college students out on the other side of their country or to another country. Look, we've got over a hundred Filipino missionary families now that have raised every bit of their support in the Philippines. Three Filipino families in Zambia, one of them in Uganda is running a thousand people in church every Sunday. And he's never been to the U.S. I'm just saying, folk, God's taught us some real lessons. He's taught us that knowing Him and loving Him is the most important thing in the world. He's taught us we can put faith in Him. We can trust Him. And He's taught us that because we can trust Him, we cannot give Him. Just stand back in amazement to see what God can do when we are faithful. Let's pray together. Dear Lord, I thank you tonight that we can be back with these dear folk, and I haven't said anything to them tonight that's new, and there is no new truth, because Jesus is the truth. But I pray that you just remind us tonight of what really is important, what really does matter. Lord, having a certain kind of a car, wearing a certain kind of clothes, or living in a certain neighborhood, Those things may not really matter in the light of eternity. But seeing people saved and churches built and missionaries sent out, Lord, what an important thing it is. And I just pray that you'd reinforce in our hearts and our minds tonight that we can trust you and we can give and see great blessings when we give to you by faith. And I just ask that you'd work in a special way by your Holy Spirit, in Jesus' name.