Y'all done got me all teary-eyed up here. Carry on. I can't think of a better reason to be emotional. Often, not often, but occasionally I hear people say, well, they take those kids to camp and they kind of force them, you know, they kind of pressure them and they kind of do this and that. I kind of take this view. They're pressured here. They're pressured in their daily lives not to follow Jesus Christ. So I think it's a good thing for just a small little time for them to have those pressures taken away and let their little hearts be open to what the Lord would do in that. So praise the Lord for that. If you have your Bibles this morning, we're going to start in Isaiah 45. We're going to read a couple of places, 45 and then 46. My title this morning is Upheld by God or Upholding God. Those are two very different things. This has been a week where God has been manifested in the lives of this body. Of course, this is true every week, but sometimes God's intervention is more visible than it is others. This week has been one of those weeks. I want to start by proclaiming that our God is always willing and able and loving enough to pour out His blessings when His children are willing enabled and loved enough to receive them. Many of you have gotten in your Word or you've gotten a document and you've not been able to make any corrections. So what do you have to do? You have to enable the ability to correct that. I think what's happened this week is these children have been given the ability, they've been enabled to make some corrections and to be born again in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have God simultaneously working in different places, working to fulfill the words spoken by the prophet Isaiah that we will presently read. I just ask you to be in prayer for this body because everybody is in a different place. God is working in everybody's life, and I'll show you. Isaiah 45, beginning in verse 19, we have the Word spoken of God through Isaiah. It says, I have not spoken in secret in a dark place of the earth. I said not unto the seed of Jacob, seek ye me in vain. I, the Lord, speak righteousness. I declare things that are right. Assemble yourselves and come. Draw near together." Is that what you did this week, brother? of the nations, they have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image and pray unto a God that cannot save. Tell ye and bring them near. Yea, let them take counsel together who hath declared this from ancient time, who hath told it from that time. have not I the Lord? And there is no God else beside Me, a just God and a Savior. There is none beside Me. Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is none else." What a beautiful, true passage of Scripture. Skip on over to 46. We'll read 1 through 4. Bell boweth down. Nebo stoopeth. Their idols were upon the beasts and upon the cattle. Your carriage were heavy loading. They are a burden to the weary beast. They stoop. They bow down together. They could not deliver the burden. but themselves are gone into captivity. Harken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, which are born by me from the belly, which are carried from the womb. And even to your old age I am he. Even to the whore hares will I carry you. I have made and I will bear. Even I will carry and will deliver you." The words that we see read here this morning are God declaring that I am the only God. I am the only one who can save you. I am the only one that will bear you up. I am the only one that will carry you when you're cast down. And I am the only one that can truly deliver you. Some of us this morning see God all through our lives. You know, in the Old Testament, the Israelite people had an ongoing problem with worshiping idols. And they generally were the nations around their idols, those that they were in contact with. They would bring those idols in and they would stop following God. And some of these were Baal, or if you're in our class, Baal. Hard for me to change that, right? It's Baal to me. It always will be. And then you also see Molech was one of the gods that Israel would follow after, and Mammon. These were all false gods that other nations and then eventually Israel would fall into worshiping. But there are two gods that are mentioned here in chapter 46, Baal and Nebo stoopeth down. And I want you to understand today that God is saying that not only will the people of Babylon fall, but their gods will also stoop down, fall with them, and the people of Babylon will go into captivity along with their gods who cannot save them. And these gods would be placed on the shoulders of the people who would be carried away in captivity just about 120 years or so after this prophecy is made. Persia would come under Cyrus and they would carry away and defeat Babylon and their gods. You see, these two, we've been introduced to these. We don't always understand these, but you know these names. This first one, Bel, was kind of a principal Babylonian deity, kind of the most high or the strongest god. And you understand this by one of the stories that we see of his grandson who was named Bel-Shazar. And it's under Bel-Shazar, they named after their god, that the Babylonians were defeated and carried away into captivity in a single night. We don't have time to go there. But you also have one of the kings that were over Babylon was Nebo or Nebuchadnezzar, right? So he bore the name of this god. So they were steeped in this. He was the patron of kind of art and human learning, if you will. So we had that the king always makes wise intellectual decisions, and when the law was made and the king spoke, it could not be changed because the king was perfect, okay? That's what got Esther in trouble. Don't have time to go that either, but that's what it was. We also had one of the young men carried away into captivity named Daniel. What was the name he was given? Bel Teshazzar, which means God protects life. But I want to tell you, Bel did not protect Daniel's life. God Almighty protected Daniel's life because Daniel means God is my judge. It wasn't Bel It was God that protected Daniel. So you see these gods that they all served left them wanting in the end. We have some familiar gods and I don't want you to be deceived into believing that our passions cannot become our object of worship. We may not call them Bell. We may not call them Nebu or Nabu or Nebo or all these different forms of... We may not call them those things, but we fall into the same cycle of worshiping things other than God, the one God. of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who manifested Himself in the flesh in Jesus Christ and who dwells in the heart as the Spirit of God. I want you to understand, young folks, that we don't call them that same words, but we do call them materialism. That goes along with this and that goes along. You have intellectualism. Actually, this bell is this materialistic. You have this intellectualism that we fall into. You see, in America, you're successful by how much stuff you get. That becomes your God. You know why? because you are constantly serving the stuff that you accumulate. We move it over and around and around and we put it in and we pay for storage and we think that if I have all this, the people next door are going to think better of me. And pretty soon we're owned by all the things that we've accumulated. And we're bearing it up. It's on our shoulders. We have intellectualism that folks serve. I read an article about the person that was studying Alzheimer's and dementia. Anybody read this? They're the ones that kind of came up, this plaque that builds up in your brain, and I'm not in the medical field, but it's some kind of protein that builds up in the brain. And this is what clogs up and makes you... So for 20 years we've been going down the road trying to look at that and follow through curing that. And here over 20 years later it comes out this man who wanted His colleagues, to think more highly of him, intellectually lied about the results that he got in his testing and manufactured those x-rays and the things that showed what he had come up with. And we have made policies and medical research based on that for 20 years. Now, I'm assuming the article is true. I don't know these days. But I'm just saying, when you are so intellectual and you need to be thought of that way so much that you're willing to harm millions and millions of people for 20 years or more and draw off billions of dollars in research because you want to be thought of, it's your God. What about hedonism? You know what that is, young folks? That's pleasure. I've got to be happy and have fun or my life is not worthy. And I want to say to you, video games are excessively pleasurable. They produce endorphins in your brain that give you a pleasure you don't even understand. And now we have kids who for eight hours or more a day will sit in front of that and just receive pleasure, letting go all of the other parts of their life that are falling behind. It's their God. It has become their God. And there's a whole lot of others. We all have this. I want to say this to you. a preacher that neglects his family and does not do what he's supposed to do as the man of his household because he thinks the church would not run without him, has made the church his God, and he's not serving God. Do you understand what I'm saying? Anything that you put above God is your idol. These gods must be upheld. They're made by men. on the front Isaiah 40. We'll mount up with the wings of eagles as we wait upon the Lord. But just a little bit back in Isaiah it says men will cut down a tree. They'll take half of this tree and they'll fashion themselves a god and they'll bow down in front of that tree and they'll worship. The other half of the tree they chop it up into firewood and burn it to cook dinner with. That's what it says in Isaiah. And you begin to understand that these gods will not uphold you. You have to hold them up. You have to bear them up. You have to be the burden of beasts to a false god. Whenever you begin to see that God is saying here in 46, that Bel and Nebo, they're going to be carried. These carts are going to have to carry these, and these beasts are going to be weighted down with these giant statues of these gods that they worship, but they will not serve them. These gods, little gods, promises to deliver people, to give them purpose and peace, to give them power and fulfillment. That's the promise that all the things make. And yet we see person after person after person. They achieve the highest levels of income. They got more stuff than everybody and they're miserable. And they turn to drugs and alcohol to try to mask the emptiness that feels, that they feel on the inside. You see so many of these false gods that make these promises. And when they get to the end of what ought to be successful, they're left empty because the promises are empty because they're not truly God. They're the manufacturer of a man's imagination. And it's sad. Because these gods are upheld in the world. They want you. Satan wants you to believe in these gods. He wants you to believe that if you'll follow this path behind this, you will be the most famous, the most successful, the most rich, the most whatever it is. And when you get there, boy, you're going to be happy. And it's just always out of reach. When you get to here, then it's moved to there. And when you get here, it's moved to there. And it's a constant battle to chase and chase, and it's elusive for us to be able to have peace like you have in the Lord Jesus Christ. Then there are the gods that uphold you. You see, the god we serve is an all-your-life god. Do you know that? These young people, they're getting started in God. They're just created new in Christ. They have a birth of Christ. In the context of what we're talking about here in Isaiah, we're talking about the nation of Israel, but there is application in our lives as well. Look at verse 3. Harken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, which are born by me." Where? From the belly. I created you, Israel. You're born from me. When Abraham was called from the earth, Chaldees, the nation of Israel was born, one man. He had Isaac. Isaac had Jacob. Jacob had twelve. From that twelve, the nation of Israel sprang. These young people are born today. You were born again, I hope. You were born of the Spirit. You were renewed away from the death that was upon you into the life that's through Christ. We also see in verse 3. Carried from the womb. You see, it didn't catch God off guard that at church camp He touched your soul. It didn't catch you off guard that you came to Harmony Church and you heard the gospel preached and your heart moved and you said, What's happened to me? I've been to churches before. What's different about this one? It's the Holy Spirit. that has had a divine appointment with you and has enabled you now to hear the Word differently. That's what he's talking about. Then he says this, verse 4, And even to your old age I am He. Even to the whore hairs, that's gray hair, Even until you have gray hair, I'm with you. I'm He that has been with you from the birth all the way to your old age. Now I want you to do, there's four things that He does. First, you're born. That's what we talked about. I have made you in verse 4. The second thing, and I will bear. What does that mean? That means all through your life, You're going to have times when there's a valley and you go down in the valley and it's a sickness or an illness or a financial setback or a divorce or whatever it is and God's going to be there and He's going to bear you up. He's going to lift you up and keep you on your feet. And He's bearing you along all through your life. These young folks that were born again, they're going to need bearing up. You middle-aged folks, you need bearing up because we all fall and fail and need a God who upholds us rather than carry the burden of upholding a false God. I've been a little sad. The people that I love, they often have reached a place where they had to be carried. I think about Ms. Ann. She's been born up all these years, but she came to a place where she needed more help than she could give herself. And God came along with people who loved her. And they became the arms of God. And they carry her. They're not just... He's not just upholding. He's carrying her when she fell and we fall. And the Lord Jesus Christ comes along and He don't just bear us up because we have fallen and He carries us so that we are not cast down. But He upholds us in the palms of His hands. You're going to Oscillate between both of these there gonna be times in your life where you as a young person Will just be born up. God's bearing you along. He's helping you carrying you And then some things are going to happen in your life and you're going to want to just give up. You're going to want to fall flat. And He's going to say, I've got you. You're in My hands. You're My child. You're born again. You're a citizen of the kingdom. You've become a child of the living God. How could I leave you alone? And He holds you when you don't think you can go on yourself. The last thing I want you to know today, the fourth part, This is Israel. You see, God's been carrying Israel for a long time. They were not a nation. They were dispersed throughout all of the world, and yet He gave them those things that made them a nation. And He upheld that. all through this, all through the plots of people that tried to destroy them. Haman in Esther, Hitler in Germany, and I can't tell you how much even in our country today there's anti-Semitism. God has got them. He's holding them. And then this last promise in verse 4, and I will deliver you. Where is He delivering Israel to? When is He delivering Israel? You read over in Revelations when the world attacks Israel God gives them the victory and Jesus Christ comes back and He sets His kingdom up in Israel and Israel is then the place where all of the world goes and worships and they have been delivered into the way that God would have them to be from the time He called Abraham. There will be a day when you'll be delivered. He'll take you because you can't carry yourself. And the angel of the Lord will arrive. Your body will be placed in the tomb and your spirit will be carried to heaven with the Lord Jesus Christ who we live forever. You are delivered under perfection. Do you understand this is a God of all your life? not just the God of you as a child, not just the God as a young adult who, oh, God, help me raise these children. Okay, well, I'm done with that. I don't need you anymore. Thank you, God. No, no, Lord, now my children are grown. Lord, bless my grandchildren. I'm praying for them. I want them to know you as Savior. And then you get to that point and you think, God, oh, man, surely there will be something that I don't have to do. No, now you can't even care for yourself. God, bear me up through this. Carry me, Lord. And then all of a sudden, one day, we're delivered into the hands of our Savior, Jesus Christ, to be with Him forever. He's the God of all your life. So what I would say to you tonight or this morning Embrace the God that made you, not the one you make. Is that good advice? Okay. Embrace the God who bears you up, not the one that you have to carry. Is that good advice? Embrace the God that can carry you, not the one that makes you have a heavy burden. And lastly, embrace the God that can deliver you into perfect eternity, not the one that delivers you over to evil and destruction. You have my sermon today. May I ask our musicians to come. We serve an awesome God. We're born. We're born. What? Yeah, that's right. B-O-R-N-E. And King James is B-O-U-R-N-E. We're held up, bared up. We're carried. And then we're delivered. Hallelujah. There'll come a day. It's appointed unto me and wants to be delivered. if you are in Jesus Christ. Would you stand as we sing?