Psalm 23 verses 5 through 6. Before we jump in, let me ask you if you know what you're looking at on the slide today. What is that? You say it's a mushroom, but it's more than that. It's a mushroom from an ant's perspective. If you were an ant, that's what a mushroom would look like. It would look less like a mushroom and more like the oculus in Manhattan. Uh, aunt looks at a child a little differently too. Uh, those of you who are expecting children, uh, your, your child will be cute, but there'll be times your child will seem like a monster, but not like an ogre. Okay. If you're an aunt, it's a scary experience to look at a child looking at you. If you're an aunt, a tennis shoe looks like sudden death, like a meteor falling from the sky. That would be a scary sight if you were an ant. And if you're an ant, then a sidewalk looks like Broadway. If you're an adult, or even a child, you look at a sidewalk like this, and you would see more. You would see farther ahead, farther around. You would know what was coming up in the future, if you continue moving in that direction. But as an aunt, there's just very little you know about what you're looking at, on any road in your life. If you are a human being comparing how you view the world around you to how an ant views the world around them, it's a moment of superiority. You feel in control, powerful, big, and in charge. But it's not very fair to compare our perspective about life to an ant, is it? We need to compare our perspective about life to reality. In fact, we know more than an ant does about what's ahead of us on the road, but we know very little about what's ahead of us in our lives. You probably feel like you know what's coming up today in your life. You probably feel like you know what's coming up tomorrow in your life, to some degree. And you probably feel that you could project your life out a few weeks pretty accurately based upon what is written in your to-do list or your calendar right now. But once you start tracing your life out a month, two months, half a year, a year, it begins to get fuzzy. And the fact is, you don't really even know what's happening tomorrow with much certainty. You just make educated guesses. And some things turn out to be true. You don't know very much about what's ahead of you in life, and you certainly don't know much about what's going to happen when you die. It's going to happen. There's coming a day in your life when this life that is so real to you will end. It will be done, like lights are turned off in a room. Your life will end, and you will enter the rest of your life forever. You thought about that? Have you evaluated what's going to be like for you there? What's going to happen there? Sometimes we say we're not scared about it, but maybe that's because we haven't thought much about it. Are you confident that the Lord is going to guide you into your future and into that part of your future as well? We don't know a lot about the future, and the fact of the matter is we can't control much about our future either. We can make choices, and our choices do impact our future. That is true. However, our future is determined not just by our choices, but by circumstances outside of our control. We cannot, by our choices, control the weather. We cannot, by our choices, decide financial trends in the markets. And we certainly are at the mercy, not only of our own choices, but the choices of not just dozens or hundreds, but thousands of other people's choices affect our future. And there's nothing really we can do about that. Non-believers try to control their future in different ways. They try to remove the fear of the unknown by saving as much money as possible and getting wealthy so that by money they can feel they have control. Non-believers also go crazy about having perfect health. They want to feel healthy and be as healthy as possible so that they are in charge of their physical futures. They resort to religious or superstitious practices or sometimes just take no risks at all. Non-believers have a fatalistic view of the future and are moving into the future of their lives as blindly as an ant walking down a sidewalk or as helplessly as a sheep wandering into the future without a shepherd to guide them. but we as believers have a much better outlook of the future. Not because we know everything, though we do know more. We know a touch more about heaven and the presence of the Lord and what happens when we die. We know a bit more about the new creation that God is going to make when this world is destroyed. A new world, a new place, a new city with many blessings and evil removed. We know about this. There's so much we don't know, but we know enough, more than a non-believer does for sure. But the fact is, we still don't know a lot. There's a lot of things about the new creation and what it's like to be in the presence of the Lord that we don't know. Does that bother you? There's a lot about the rest of your life on this earth that you don't know. You don't know, for instance, when this life in earth will end for you. All of us here today feel we have at least another few decades ahead of us. Some of us, maybe it's down to one or two decades in our foreseeable future, but even that you don't know. You could live past a hundred. We all have a few decades ahead in our view, but we really don't know. We certainly don't know the play-by-play analysis of the rest of this day or tomorrow. Some of you have a plan to go out to eat today after the service. You're going to go out and eat somewhere. You think you know the restaurant you're going to, but even then, what's going to be on the menu? It's not always available. What will the prices be? Will there be parking? Who are you going to sit beside? Who is going to serve you? Will you get food poisoning or not? There really is a lot of things you don't know, even about the things you think you know. Does that make you nervous? Every day you get up and you begin a day of unknown experiences. Are you scared about that? It's a risk. Every day is a risk. The fact of the matter is that as believers we have a truth that should comfort us as King David himself was comforted. He said, You, Lord, my shepherd, prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, You anoint my head with oil, my cup runs over. Surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. When we take this truth to heart, as sheep in God's pastures, we can march into every day and moment of our lives with confidence and peace, even though we know very little about what we're getting into. It's as though we can hear the Lord say, I not only know what's ahead for you, I've been there already and I've prepared the way. You're good to go. Take the next step. Your future, friends, if you know Jesus Christ as your God and Savior, and the Lord is your shepherd, your future is prepared and pre-approved by God. Do you live with that confidence? Sometimes we buy food in New York City, we're not sure, should we eat this or not, who made it? Every now and then we get tempted to buy some food from the food cart. Yes, the shopping cart turned upside down to grill food on. Oh, it smells so good, and it looks so juicy, that skewer of meat. And sometimes we're tempted, and we look at the place, is there good hygiene? Well, I'm sure it's all burned out anyway. And we want to pull out that cash and buy that good food, and sometimes it turns out great. It's like your mother made. And sometimes it's not great, and the next day it doesn't agree with you. We go to the store and we look for the little labels that say pre-approved by the FDA, and sometimes we wonder if that even means anything. Our future is pre-approved and prepared by the Lord, and that truth should comfort our hearts immensely. Are you fearful about what your future holds? What about your future makes you a little nervous right now? Are you nervous about whether or not you're going to get married? Are you nervous about whether you're going to be accepted? Shoshana was accepted and she's made it through her first year of college. But I remember when she was nervous about even being accepted. I wasn't nervous. I knew you would be. But there are still so many things coming up in her and all of our futures. What's gonna happen when I graduate? Am I going to meet that right person? Am I going to get the job that I want? What job am I going to have? Some of us are headed into our futures. We don't know what job we're even going to have. Will I get a place to live? Will I have children or not? Will I be able to take care of them? Will my job be there next year, even though it's there today? There's so many things about our futures we don't know. Are you afraid about any of those things? Or are you confident in the Lord's care? Can you say, I don't know about tomorrow, but my Lord does. And that's all I need to know. From these verses that end Psalm 23, we learned that the Lord prepares your future in this life. The life before you die, the Lord prepares your future. Each year in the earliest days of spring before the snow fully thaws and melts into the soil, a shepherd would track up into the highlands from his farm and his house. Up in that harsh weather, he would hike up and survey the pasture where he wanted his sheep to graze for the rest of spring and the summer and early autumn. He would survey it as the snow was melting, and he would walk through that area, clearing out rocks and preparing water sources, making them accessible and clear. We've talked about this already. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. But he does something else. He looks at that pasture land and he takes steps, literally, to make sure that that pasture land, when he brings his sheep up from the safety of his farm, have a safe, low-risk experience. For instance, he reduces the threat of high-stakes trials. These are the trials we fear the most in life because they threaten our lives, the things that can take our life from us, the fear of the shadow of death itself. That's what we fear most at the end of every fear is the fear of death. He minimizes that for his sheep. For instance, the good shepherd knows not every blade of grass that grows in the field is safe for consumption and nutritious Some blades of grass or plants that grow in a pasture in the mountains are poisonous and deadly. A sheep doesn't know the difference. A sheep sees a leaf and it eats it. But the shepherd has to avoid and minimize that risk. One shepherd writes, unknown to me, the first sheep ranch I owned had a rather prolific native crop of both blue and white camas. The blue camas were a delightful sight in the spring, when they bloomed along the beaches. The white camas, though a much less conspicuous flower, were also quite attractive, but a deadly menace to the sheep. If lambs in particular ate even just one nibble from these plants, as they emerged in the spring, it could spell certain death. The lambs would become paralyzed. They would stiffen up and they would turn to like blocks of wood and would often succumb to the toxic poisons and die from eating these beautiful flowers. So what does a shepherd have to do? to make that a good experience. He has to go ahead before the sheep get there and find all those flowers and remove them. And in those days, they didn't have hoses and little bottles from Home Depot that you can hook on and spray into your yard to kill everything, right? You had to go around and pull them up and remove them yourself. A good shepherd also reduces the risk not only of poisonous plants, but predatory animals. A good shepherd walks through the pasture lands and looks for tufts of fur stuck to a twig, or animal droppings, or paw prints, or leftover carcass remains from a previous kill, or things of this nature, and he looks for clues that there are wolves or cougars or mountain lions or coyotes or foxes or bear or hawks and eagles in that area. And then if he finds them, he tracks them down or traps them so he can remove the predators from that area. He also reduces the risk of other difficult experiences, perhaps not the kind of experiences that will kill the sheep, but the kind that might kill the sheep, but at the least be a very big frustration. Sometimes our own inner spirits, though not threatened by death, can become agitated, confused, fuzzy, frustrated, restless, like sheep. We develop a lack of peace from irritating circumstances and frustrations. A good shepherd doesn't just remove high-risk problems, he removes the frustrating things as well. Three of these experiences a shepherd aims to minimize are fly larva, skin parasites or the scab, and what's called the rut. In summer, all kinds of flies buzz and swarm around the sheep. They will gather in clouds, they'll buzz around the sheep, and they'll try to land on the wet nose of the sheep, if they can. If they're successful, they'll lay little eggs, and those eggs will implant and hatch into little worm-like larvae that will crawl up the nose of the sheep into the head area, and create inflammation and a great irritation. Sheep who are affected by this will find a rock or a tree and bang their head against that object. They can't remove the itch because it's not on the skin. Sometimes they'll even end up going insane or killing themselves from those pesky inner irritations. The results will be even loss of weight or for the female sheep an insufficient milk supply that will lead to malnourished lambs that will affect the future of that flock. One irritation inside one sheep can affect the mental and spiritual health for us today of the entire flock. The shepherd goes through and he looks for the egg sacs and the sources of water, laying water to remove, to minimize these sources of frustration, so his sheep can safely graze. Summertime is also scab time for the sheep. A highly contagious, irritating situation, scab develops on a sheep's skin, and if it's undetected, it will spread and even spread through this microscopic parasite to the flock. So what a sheep does is he attempts to notice this before it spreads, and he'll check as we saw last week with his rod at the end of the day, pull back the fur on each sheep as it walks under before it sleeps for the night. Did anything develop today? Did anything develop today? And if it does, and he catches it, he takes an ointment. And this is what this, he anoints my head with oil, my cup runs over, most likely is referring to in the imagery of a shepherd. He takes a special ointment. reaches in and he applies that specially prepared ointment, that oil, to the sheep's skin where that scab is developing, that parasite is, and he prevents it from spreading. If it spreads throughout the sheep, or all over a sheep undetected and he finds it later on. It's very dangerous for the sheep. And so he takes the entire sheep and he dips it head to hoof into a bucket of solution, the whole thing. And as you can imagine, it is not an easy thing to do that. But he does that. Our Lord himself anoints our heads with oil and his cup runs over for us. He has more than enough supply to meet the irritations of our own spiritual lives. Now, something that's important to note is though a good shepherd removes as many things as possible in the future for his sheep, he cannot remove everything. We have to recognize that. Not every temptation, not every trial is removed from our futures. In fact, 1 Corinthians 10, 13 says, God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but will with the temptation make a way of escape that you will be able to bear it. A good shepherd removes as many of these major problems and irritating situations from our future as possible. And the things that are there are allowed and permitted for a reason. But here's what we need to understand. We get so focused sometimes on the things that we do experience, the major trials we do go through and the irritating things that we do experience. We focus on those and we fail to remember There were many things I could have and should have encountered and I did not. Because my shepherd cleared them away. We don't see these things. Sheep don't see the predators that were removed. Sheep don't see the blades of grass that were plucked up and the poison that was removed. They see what remains, but they don't see all that was taken away by the shepherd. And sometimes we need to take a step back and say, instead of, Lord, why did you allow this to happen to me? We need to say, thank you for all the things that you did not allow to happen to me. The things that are allowed are allowed for a reason, to teach us to trust in and to be humble towards our shepherd. but he has removed so many things that would surely have overwhelmed and overtaken you. The things that are allowed, he knows you are able to handle. Would you think about that for a minute? With the Lord as your shepherd, you are able to handle what he has allowed. It's just the things that he hasn't allowed that you couldn't handle, and you won't have to worry about them. Your future will not be blissfully perfect, free from trials, but it will be free from the things you could not have handled. And the things that are there, your shepherd is able to guide you through them if you will walk closely by his side. A question for us today is, are you resting in the Lord's preparation? of your future experiences. When you go to bed at night, what are the fears that crowd your mindset? What is it that makes it hard for you to sleep? What's gonna happen to my children? What's gonna happen to my mother? What's gonna happen to my church, to my job, to my money, to this, to that? What is it that prevents you from just going to bed? Those are the things that we need to learn in the future. Whatever is has been prepared by the Lord and we can trust that he's been ahead. He's prepared the way he's pre-approved your future. You can rest in that and find comfort in that. Have you learned the habit of when fears of the future pop into your mind and anxiety springs up like poison to say to the Lord, Lord, I'm struggling with this fear right now, I'm gonna give this to you because I literally know you have this planned out in the future. You've got this all taken care of, I can rest in you. You've been ahead, you've prepared, you've pre-approved, What am I worried about? Are you trusting in his guidance and the help that he will provide? Another interesting thing that David tells us is that he says, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Goodness and mercy together are a kind of a package way of describing the excellent care that our shepherd provides. When you evaluate insurance companies, this is what you do, right? You look for their rating system. You look for a good rating system and you try to see what has the best ratings. And when you evaluate insurance, you don't just evaluate how much it costs. The cheapest insurance is not always the best insurance. When you buy insurance, you want insurance that when you need it, will take care of you. They don't give you the runaround, oh, we don't actually think that qualifies, and oh, we're not gonna give you that much, it's not worth that, well, we can't do that, or they take months to file the paperwork. You want a rating, you want an insurance company that when you need it, they receive it, they pay for it, they don't give you a hassle, and they do it quickly. God's care, his goodness and his mercy is excellent. It is perfect. His goodness refers to all of his blessings, all of his benefits, whether that is moral transformation into a better person or material provision. His goodness refers to all of that. Moral transformation and material provision is the goodness of the Lord. Mercy is a very complex word. It's the chesed, as we've talked about here, the faithful, loving, kindness of the Lord that is so rich in the Old Testament. This is God's perfect and unchanging commitment to you. His devotion, His faithfulness, His loyalty, His love, all of it is undeserved but constant and reliable. The way David describes the goodness and mercy of the Lord, though, is interesting for a few reasons. One, he describes God's blessing not just as experiences that we have sometimes, but he says, goodness and mercy will follow me. And that word follow has the idea of chase after. Chase after. Do you experience God's goodness and his mercy like this? We view God's goodness and mercy as something that is kind of sitting there in heaven waiting for us. If we can just beg for it and plead for it with the right kind of prayer, get ourselves into the right kind of spiritual mindset to somehow, we want to say it, but earn God's blessing. But the way David describes the goodness and mercy of the Lord is that it's chasing after him. He turns left, and it's there. He turns right, and it's there. He runs ahead and tries to get away from it, and it's there. He backslides, and it's there. God's goodness and His mercy, if you're His sheep, are chasing after you. You cannot buy a car fast enough to get away. You cannot fly a plane quick enough. You cannot fly far enough into outer space to get away from the goodness and the mercy of the Lord. It will chase after you at light speed. God's goodness and his mercy, David said, he is such a good shepherd. It chases after me. And he doesn't describe this just as a past experience. He's not saying this happened to me in the past. I'm not sure about the future, but this was my past. He says, God's goodness and his mercy will follow me. That word will is a future word. It will. What David is saying is my insurance policy with God is locked tight. God's goodness and his mercy. I know his character so well. I know his word so well. I know my God my shepherd so well. I don't have a question. I know that in the future his goodness and his mercy are going to chase after me. Do you have that kind of excitement about the future? your life you look ahead is kind of unknown you feel like you're walking the plank half the time and you don't know is the shark right there waiting to get me and god says take the next step and we're afraid but the reality is we should take the next step because we know we step off the end of the plank if that's really what it is and his goodness and his mercy will be right at our heels this is the kind of understanding of the lord that allows Moses, to lead people through the middle of the Red Sea, or high priests in the Old Testament, to step into a flood-enraging Jordan River, knowing that you take the difficult step God calls you to take, and His goodness and His mercy chase after you. He also says God's blessings are not just something that chase after you and happen sometimes, Goodness and mercy will chase after me, David says, literally every single day in my future. There isn't a day that God takes a break. He doesn't say, well, I have blessed you so profusely, you don't even deserve it. I have given you so many blessings, you haven't even noticed half of them. You haven't thanked me for two weeks. I am going to take a break until you appreciate me, and then I'll come back after 24 hours and see if you knew I was missing. That's not what he does. He never unplugs or turns off the service. His goodness and mercy chase after his sheep every single day of their future lives. That's what you have to look forward to. And we sometimes think, well, I could mess it up. I know I could mess it up. I could be really bad tomorrow. I have that tendency sometimes. They'll chase after you, especially the mercy part. It will chase after you. That's what a good shepherd does. He will leave the ninety and nine to go and find that sheep. He will run to find you until he finds you. That's the goodness and mercy of the Lord. And David prefaces this statement. He doesn't say and goodness and mercy. What does he say? And surely. It's a little Hebrew word that means I don't have a single doubt about what I'm about ready to say. I am 101% certain of what I am about to tell you. In my future, my shepherd, his goodness and his mercy are going to chase after me every single day in my future. How did God bless you yesterday? If I asked you today, tell me one thing that happened yesterday that was really difficult. You would, oh yeah, I had a really bad day yesterday. This happened. This happened. How about looking back and saying, but what did God do? If you're willing to stop and think, unfortunately, a lot of times it takes us to stop and think. We have to stop and think, what did God do for me yesterday? But if you stopped and you really gave it some thought, you would think of one thing and another and another. and you would be in the hundreds. And our memories aren't too good. How many things have God done for us that we will never even remember? God's goodness and mercy, if you're his child, have been chasing you all week last week. Every single day they've been chasing you. Did you notice it? Did you feel the breath on your neck of God's goodness? Did you hear the footsteps right behind you? You thought you were running after him, but you found out he was running after you. He's omnipresent after all. He can do both at once. He can lead you and guide you and chase after you all at one time. You're surrounded by his love. His care envelops you. He has been chasing you like a marathon runner all week with his goodness and his blessings. Let's go into the next week recognizing that. Let's be more aware of that than of our trials that he has allowed. Is your life a testimony of occasional blessings or God chasing you? Now it's easy to focus on these trials and frustrations that come our way. We need to focus on the blessings. Something else about goodness and mercy chasing after us is that when God's blessing chases after us, it blesses others too. This is poetry. Psalm 23 is a poem and it's written in a compact, poetic, artistic way that causes us to, like sheep chewing on grass multiple times, to digest it fully. We meditate on a psalm like a sheep chewing on grass, and we meditate on it, and we read a line, and we say, oh, that's good, and we chew it again, and we say, wait, there's another layer to this gobstopper. It's soft and sweet inside, not just sour and tangy on the outside. What's that inner sweet spot? And it's this. Did you know that sheep, who are well cared for, were called in ancient times the animal of the golden hoof? Because if a sheep was properly cared for, a flock was well shepherded, when that flock left the pasture, they left that pasture better than when they came. a good shepherd will take care of sheep and rotate them properly and feed them properly and care for them properly so that they leave the pasture better, better fertilized, better grazed, and more robust in its grasses. When God's people, you and me who have believed on Christ as Savior, Learn to accept God's care and live in peace and confidence in him. We follow him wherever he leads. He says, grace here, we grace there. Grace here, we grace there. Go there. I don't like to, but I will do it anyway. I'll go there. Do this. Lay down, stand up. We follow the Lord. He knows what he's doing. He's a master shepherd. He is caring for you. And when you follow him and you do what he tells you to do from his word, you go from A to B to C. And when you move on in your life, What you were doing, where you were at, the people there are better off than when you entered. The question for us is this, what kind of effect do you leave on the people and the places God puts you? At home, husbands and wives, are you making your spouse a better person? because of God's care of you and your rest in his care? Parents with children, are you leaving your children better off than when they came into this world? I hope so. Children, do you leave your parents more refreshed and encouraged by your life in their home? All of us, when we go to our places of schooling and work, are we coming home at the end of the day not just saying, it was a rough day, I can't wait to get home, leaving our school and our work better? Not just concerned about meeting quotas and getting the job done and not breaking any rules of the workplace code, not that, but are we leaving saying, I left my hospital, my job site, my plant, my office, my company, my corporate supervisor better off than when I clocked in? a well cared for sheep who takes steps in life following the word of the shepherd with confidence and peace knowing he's cared for their future prepared and pre approved walks with peace and confidence and leaves the people and the places of their lives in peace and fruitfulness better than when they came in because when the Lord is allowed to care for you, that's the effect. My father taught me as a kid When you borrow something, let's say you borrow someone's vehicle, they loan a vehicle to you. Return that car, you would think he would say, just like they gave it to you. What would he say? He said, son, if you borrow something like someone's car or their mower or whatever, if they give it to you and it's clean, clean it before you give it back. If they give it to you with a half tank of gas though, what should you do? You're going to use some of that gas. If you fill it back up to half, right? Nope. If they gave it to you with a half tank of gas, give it back with a full tank of gas. That is a perfect illustration of how we as God's people should affect the people and the places in our lives. They should become better because we were there. And not because of us, but because we let the Lord care for us there. Stubborn, rebellious sheep leave the grass and the pasture more stirred up and agitated, less peace, less fruitfulness. It's a place that's getting worse and run down, but cared for sheep leave it better. Are the people and places of your life in a better position emotionally, spiritually, physically, and any other way better because of your presence and God's care through your life? Your shepherd not only prepares your future in this life, David comes full circle to the end, which is really the beginning. Your shepherd ensures your safe arrival in eternity. Not only does he ensure his faithful blessing and care in the future of this life, but he ensures your safe arrival in eternity. This world is a very, very, very temporary footpath. We do not understand or comprehend, as we should, how brief this life is. To us, it is an eternity filled with a litany of problems. To him, it's a quick, sharp turn in the road. When I was a kid growing up in Indiana, me and my brother and sister, we looked forward to our annual pilgrimage back to York, Pennsylvania to visit grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles. And we would get in the car early before the sun came up. We'd get in the back seat of our Mercury Grand Marquis, a big boat of a car. We'd load up back there, and we'd argue about who sits in the middle, and we'd bring our pillows and our blankets in, and we had our little squeeze-it drinks with cartoon faces on them that we couldn't wait, and our chewable fruit snacks and the things Mom never bought us were all there for the trip. And you know how it is, about 30 to 60 minutes into the 10 to 12 hour drive, All the parents know what I'm about to say. The world famous question gets asked, are we there yet? As silly as that question was, it was that question that got us as kids through the next toll booth, through the next exit. through the next gas station stop and rest area at a time. It was that question that got us through that difficult journey. And it seemed like an eternity until we finally arrived. We pulled off the exit on Route 30 in York, Pennsylvania. We made a couple random twists and turns and climbed a very sharp hill. And then we finally pulled in to Grandma and Grandpa Secret's house. And the smells of that house, and the food, and the candy bowls everywhere, and the toys were unloaded downstairs, and the dinners, and the lunches, and the activities, and the cousins. And then it was over in a week. And we get back in that back seat again, tears in our eyes, looking forward to the same trip 51 weeks later. That question, are we there yet, is what gets us through this life. Grownups in this church, kids aside, and you're included, would you be honest enough to admit you ask that question sometimes? Are we there yet? And it's about as silly as a kid in the backseat of a long road trip, but we all do it. But that question is a good question. It's a question that should be on the front end of all of our hearts. Are we there yet? We are going to someday breathe our last breath. We are going to someday take our last step. We are someday going to drive a car for the last time and own a house for the last time and make a deposit for the last time. We're going to earn a paycheck for the last time, draw Social Security for one last time. We're going to do everything one last time, and it's over. And we're going to enter into eternity. And even that will be temporary in the presence of the Lord. There's coming a day that he's going to make all wrongs right in this world, destroy this earth, and recreate a new creation that will last forever. And there's coming a day that you and I will step into the pastures that have been prepared for us. the new heaven and the new earth. Real blades of grass, real trees of life, real 12-month seasons, real water of the river of life that we can run to and drink from freely. There'll be no access beaches there in that new creation. And frequently, we will make trips from the New Jerusalem to explore and do whatever we do for eternity. I technically, personally believe we're going to explore the solar system. I mean, eternity, you got to have something to do in eternity. But we're going to make frequent trips back to that New Jerusalem. We're going to go in with a lamb. Our shepherd sits at the city center and worship him with the believers of the ages forever. A real world, friends. A real, material, physical, new creation. The pasture that will be weeded, all the predators and the evil will be removed. There'll be no poison there, no problems forever. And the difference between that and my grandma's house, there's a lot of differences, but the big difference I want to highlight this morning is it won't last for a week. It will last forever. Every believer that you have ever known in the history of this brief temporary life will be there forever, and you'll never have to say goodbye again. And all the believers you've ever read about in the Bible will be there, and you get to talk to them. Everyone will get their chance. They'll be talking to you about things I'm sure as well. It will be there forever. And our Lord, David says this about him, not only will his goodness and mercy chase after me every day of this life, when this life ends, I know something else. I'm gonna dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Jesus, our shepherd said this, John 14 three, in my father's house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I would not have just told you that. Why? Because he doesn't lie. I'm going to prepare a place for you. Christ died on the cross and he removed the greatest enemy and predator of our souls. There's still a bit of weeding to do left. He's gonna come back and he's gonna take us all to be with him in eternity. And we're going to see the pastures that he's been working on for us. Are we there yet? No, we're not. But keep asking the question because one day you're going to turn that corner and you're going to be there. How much does your safe and secure future in eternity actually motivate your day-to-day life? I want to leave you with this challenge. Heaven and the new creation is more real than you realize. It should motivate you more than your paycheck, more than your family, more than your comforts, more than anything in this life. That motivation alone should motivate every decision that you make. I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Therefore, I'm taking the next step.