There appears to be a rumor that I spit when I preach because nobody sits in the first two rows, but I don't spit when I preach. These are the only brave people to come and sit that close. So maybe they'll issue umbrellas next time. I have a handout for you today, but first we're going to read from Psalm 139. You'll turn in your Bibles. It's a Psalm of David. You probably know parts of it well, but let's revisit it. Repetition aids learning. Psalm 139. O Lord, and you'll notice the word Lord is in all caps, and I'm sure being a well-taught congregation, you know that when, in our English Bibles, the word is all in capitals, that's translation of the Hebrew underlying word Yahweh, God's covenant name. I will be a God to you, and you will be my people. It's God's covenant name. If it's capital L, but then lowercase, O-R-D, that means something else, and it's not God's covenant name, it means Adonai. O Lord, O Yahweh, O covenant God, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought from afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. For there's not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it. Where am I to go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend, if I go up into heaven, you're there. If I make my bed in hell or the Hebrew word sheol, the place of the dead, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, well, surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines on this as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to you. For you formed my inward parts, you covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret, when I was unskillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed, and in your book they were written all the days for me. when as yet there was none of them. How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God. How great is the sum of them. If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I'm still with you. Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God. Depart from me, therefore, you bloodthirsty men, for they speak against you wickedly. Your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate you? Loathe, and do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred. I count them my enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxieties, and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. David's psalm of prayer to the Lord, the God who knows him, but he wants to know the Lord better, and he wants to know himself better, and he wants the Lord to search him. You see the title of your handout, You Could Know Yourself. That's the second half of a quote from John Calvin, the first sentence of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion says this. The whole sum of our wisdom, wisdom that deserves to be called true and assured. Well, broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. If you want to be a wise person, then you need to know God and you need to know yourself. And this I taught as a Sunday school lesson a couple of weeks ago, but it also lends itself to a preachment. So today, by God's grace, we're going to go through this and see how God wants you to know yourself by knowing him. Let's pray and ask for the Lord's grace to do this together. Father, none of us in this room have arrived. We are all still growing in grace. We're still reaching out for you who have reached out to us. We pray that you would send your Holy Spirit this morning. We pray that he would enlighten each of us, that he would take us from wherever we are, mentally, emotionally, wherever our minds might tend to run, and you would bring us back to yourself, and you would help us to follow your thoughts. Make this a time that you are glorified and we are blessed. I pray in Jesus' name alone, amen. Who are you if I sat down with you afterwards and we were talking and I said, having, you know, being an adult or being a teenager, who are you and what would you say? Well, you might give your occupation, you might give your marital status. Do you think about who you are? Do you think about who you are? We live in a day when people are very conscious of who they are. Expressive individualism is supposedly the philosophy that dominates everybody under 40. This is who I am, and let me tell you about it. Let me express myself. I'm me, and let me express myself as ever I want. This is what past unbelievers have said about themselves. Socrates said a couple of centuries before Christ, the unexamined life is not worth living. What does that mean? If you don't ever think about your life, you're just marking time, you're not really living. The unexamined life, the life that somebody doesn't think about, is not worth living. I think in my own life, I didn't become a Christian until I was a junior in college at about 21, that you're in eighth grade and you say, what's your goal in life? Be in ninth grade. You ask somebody who's 20, what do you want to do? Well, I want to get on to the next thing. I want to get on to a better job. I want to get on to the next grade in school. I want to get on to the next promotion in the military or whatever. Most people go through life without really having a sense of who they are and why they're here. They don't really think about their lives. They just do the next thing. When you're in the public schools, you go to the next grade. When you're in homeschool, you finish your work, you go on to the next thing. When you're out in the military, you just do what you're told to do. When you're in college, you take the courses you're supposed to take to get to the goal. But you don't really often think about any of those things in any depth. I know I didn't. And Socrates is right, the unexamined life, in a sense, is not worth living because you're just marking time. Flip forward to the 18th century, Henry David Thoreau, or excuse me, 19th century, an American writer, was famous in his day. He has the famous quote, most men live lives of quiet desperation. They're not screaming and yelling. but they know that they're marking time, they know that their life doesn't have any meaning or purpose or sense of who they are, and so maybe on the surface they look calm and placid, but like the duck, supposedly, beneath the water their feet are paddling furiously. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. In the 1950s one of the famous cartoonists, people who ran cartoons in the newspaper, for those of you who are under 30 a newspaper is a white piece of paper that's real big and you fold it open and there's print and you read it and there's information there. It's not on a little phone you hold in your hand but it's in a big piece of paper. And there's a thing called cartoons. And Ralph Barton was the leading cartoonist. He committed suicide and he said in a suicide note, I'm tired of trying to fill up 24 hours in a day. I've gone from success to success, marriage to marriage, house to house, bed to bed, but I'm tired of trying to fill up 24 hours in a day. Ralph Barton didn't know who he was, why he was here. He got tired of playing the game and killed himself. A quote I came across in the 60s, which I think is helpful, someone said, whatever label you put on an empty bottle, it's still empty. I'm Methodist, I'm Baptist, I'm agnostic, I'm whatever. That could be the label on the bottle. Is there anything in the bottle? Well, for many people, they would give you a label. When our church started in the suburbs of Atlanta in the late 80s, we went door to door. We went to 100 homes in our community, 100 homes. On Sunday afternoons, we didn't want to be identified with the JWs who go other days. And those people don't go on Sundays. So Sunday afternoons, we went door to door. 100 homes, everybody was fine. Everybody had a church somewhere, supposedly, they were connected to. But I would suggest to you that most of those labels were on empty bottles. I did not live in a town known for the millennium. The revival hadn't come to our community, but everybody was fine. Peter Sellers was famous in his day. You may remember him if you're over 45 or ever watched the Inspector Clouseau Pink Panther movies. He was the original and I think funniest Pink Panther. He was talking on The Muppet Show one night and said, I can't be myself because I don't know who I am. The real me doesn't exist. He played different characters in different movies, and I could list some of his movies, and he was very different characters. But he said, my problem is I get lost in my characters, and I don't really know who I am. Those are kind of bleak. What have some past believers said about their lives? Well, we just read what David said in Psalm 139, verse 14. I praise you that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. In Jeremiah chapter 17, verse nine, he's talking about his own heart and the hearts of all of us. The heart is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Now the next verse goes on to say, I, the Lord, know the heart. But Jeremiah says, you know, the trickiest thing I've ever met, the fakiest, most deceitful thing I've ever met is my own heart. My own heart can con me. So that's a testimony about human nature, but it's real. Fast forward to the first century, we read about the conversion of Saul of Tarsus to become the Apostle Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15, the famous passage on the resurrection, he says, I am who I am by the grace of God. And that's your testimony and mine too, if you're a believer. We're not who we used to be, but we're not yet what we want to be. But who we are now, we are by the grace of God. Fast forward to the fourth century, Augustine. Augustine is in Florida. Augustine was the famous person in church history, just so you know. God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. It was actually a prayer. It was actually in the second person, not the third person. He says, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. I'm working through a long, very detailed biography of Augustine that's easy to get bogged down in, but it's true. He tried everything and he was in his 30s and had kind of done everything, had a mistress, had a child out of wedlock, was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Milan in Northern Italy. He had done so many things, but he was still empty and he was restless until he found his rest in Christ. This is the quote from Calvin I gave earlier, the first sentence of his famous Institutes. The whole sum of our wisdom, wisdom that is that deserves to be called true and assured, it broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves. Do you really know the Lord? And do you not really know yourself? Fast forward to the 18th century, that means the 1700s. Pascal, the French polymath, that means he did a lot of things amazingly well, said, there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, every person. What does this vacuum look like? What's this hole look like? It looks like God. There's a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, which cannot be filled by any created thing. Anything in the created order doesn't fit the God-shaped vacuum. but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ. Now, in our day, people say, well, maybe not, but you can anesthetize that God-shaped vacuum. You can pour drugs in there. You can pour alcohol in there. You can binge Netflix. You can do all kinds of trivia. You can do all kinds of things to try to anesthetize the fact that there's a hole in the middle of your being. But he said, nothing will fill that hole until you come to Jesus Christ. Now what's currently going on? That was from the 18th century. What does 21st century America say? Well, you do you. That's what I thought I was doing before I was a Christian, that was the problem. But anyway, it says no, you do you. Be authentic. What does be authentic mean? Be you. Don't try to be somebody else, be you. Be your biggest fan. Yeah, that was part of my problem too. Nobody can tell you who you are or what you are to be. Look within yourself for the answers. You've got this. No, I don't got this. And I was coming to the realization I don't have, I don't got this. Being me is the problem. The culture's full of, the world's full of going on eight billion people who are being them. And finally the culture says you create your own reality. It's all on you. You know, the foolishness of this council is, I read an article one time that talked about the most, there are two packed aisles in every grocery store. The pet aisle, everything imaginable in that aisle, and the cereal aisle. So let's say that you want to go get a box of cereal, but someone didn't specify which kind. You turn a corner, it's like, 500 different kinds of cereals. And you spend a lot of time and energy, perhaps even consternation, which should I get? Well, this one sounds good, but it's got 8,000 carbs in it. I probably don't need that one. So you try another one. And there are so many different kinds of cereal, all these different choices. It's on you to make the choice. If making decisions in a grocery aisle causes you to pause, what about the really big, hairy issues of life? How are you going... If you can't be God in a cereal aisle, how are you gonna be God with all the multiplications of choices in a fallen world? Well, there are other wrong places to look. The culture says, look within. But first of all, many people say, look to the cosmos, everything out there. You know, we have that new telescope. There was the Hubble Space Telescope. And the new one is the... I forgot the name. Begins with a B, I think. Anyway, there's a new space telescope. It's basically the Hubble Space Telescope. That ain't nothing. And here's out into, farther out into stellar space. And people who tried to look and see who we are in relation to the cosmos have said things like, you're just a random clump of cells. Whereas R.C. Sproul likes to quote them, you're a cosmic germ. Or, as the singing group Boston said in a very depressing song I found one day on channel surfing, you're like the dust of the wind. Really? That's not going to make me get out of bed in the morning. You're just dust in the wind. Or others have said, Carl Sagan on the TV show Cosmos and other famous pagans have said, you live on an insignificant planet in one galaxy among zillions of galaxies. Astronomers estimate there are as many galaxies. Now, a galaxy is we live in the Milky Way. That's a galaxy. You can see across the Milky Way a big spiral group of stars and planets. This Milky Way galaxy is one of how many galaxies? They said if you could take all the grains of sand and all the beaches of the world, that's how many galaxies are out there. Makes you pretty insignificant, makes me pretty insignificant. Unless there's a God, and then you can have a million zeros, but if you put a one in front of that, those zeros become significant. Looking to the natural world of animals, some people say, well, no, looking to space doesn't give us a sense of who we are, but we are, we have bodies, corporeal existence. Let's look to other animals, other creatures. You are the most evolved of all the primates. You're the highest species of monkey. You know, I have relatives I've always wondered about, and that was my clue that some of them were suspicious. But they said the same thing about me. But you know, monkeys don't write novels. They don't play the guitar, and they don't ask why they even exist. Texas doesn't have as many trees as Indiana, and so birds tend to light on telephone lines. And you can pull up in the intersection. There's 5,000 birds sitting on telephone lines just kind of watching everybody go by. And you never hear birds say, Larry, I'm not really digging who I am. I think I want to be something else. I'm just not realizing my potential here. Do birds sitting on a wire ever worry about such things? Do they wonder about, what's my reason and purpose of life? No. We're not the highest elevated monkey. We're not a cosmic germ. Well, there's some other places where to look, and looking to yourself, as I said, has become the big thing in America. Everybody wants to look to themselves. We're told that we can figure everything out ourselves. That's a fool's errand. We are told that the answers lie within. Fool's errand number two. We are told that we can be whatever we want to be. You know, I used to play sports, but I used to have a vertical jump of about this big. And so if I wanted to play NBA basketball, the chances are zilch, zero and less than zero. But they said I can be whatever I want to be. I want to be a nuclear physicist. Well, actually, I didn't like physics. I can't be whatever I want to be. There are limitations placed on me by how God made me. One man bragged to his friend that he was a self-made man. His friend retorted, well, that's what you get when you use unskilled labor, which is kind of a union joke. But anyway, you are unskilled labor if you think that you're going to craft yourself. As a result of looking for who we are in the wrong places, we, the inhabitants of Western civilization, that would be Europe, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, places that consider themselves civilized, we're suffering from an epidemic of narcissism. You go, that must be the big word for this sermon, narcissism. We'll come back to that. And a mental health crisis. Why are people so miserable? Why do we spend multiplied billions of dollars on things to give us a happier state of mind, because we're very unhappy people. Note, a narcissist is a person who loves himself or herself supremely. Life is all about me. Is wholly preoccupied with themselves. Me, myself, and I are their trinity. And they both crave and demand other people's attention. You will pay attention to them. And this is created in a country where everybody thinks life's all about them, then you're gonna have a lot of miserable people because life isn't about you and it's not about me. So where do we look, as you flipped it over, where do you look to find the answers? You must look outside of yourself to the God who made you. You know, the Bible uses an illustration about the potter and the clay. Where does that come from? Well, you have some dirt. Well, we're made out of the dust of the earth. Just add water, and then the potter shapes the mud and shapes it into all different kinds of things. What's the difference, for example, if he should make a pecan out of that? Now, having lived in the South for many years, a pecan is what you put under your bed if you have outdoor plumbing. A pecan is what you eat, okay? So if God uses the clay to make a pecan, that's not very noble, but he might use the clay to make something beautiful, something special. God made the cosmos and everything in it, including you and me. Genesis 1.1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, which is shorthand for everything. Genesis 1.27. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. Men and women both are created in the image of God. The creator knows who you are. how he made you, and why he made you. Thinking back to what Augustine said, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you. Genesis 3, now you're saying, okay, theoretically I get what the Bible's saying here, but that's not the world I see when I look around. I remember I spent a year before my conversion looking at how messed up the world was. I liken 2020 and all that went on in 2020 to 1968. And you can read about 1968 in history books for those of you who are. younger than a certain age. But in that year we had Martin Luther King assassinated, Bobby Kennedy assassinated, riots in the inner cities, riots on the college campuses, all kinds of social problems. America was unhappy and people like the Beatles were singing, So You Want a Revolution. People were talking about overthrow the system, start over, do something else. And I'm watching all this and going, The world is a messed up place. You go, you must have been a very deep thinker. No, I was actually just observing what was going on around me. But what was, I think, an awful thing several months into this was, wow, whatever's out there in them is in me too. If someone asks you the question, are you part of the solution to the world's problems? Or are you part of the answer to the world's problems? In honesty, I would have had to admit I'm part of the problem in the world. G.K. Chesterton was a famous essayist in England at the beginning of the 20th century. And a London newspaper ran a contest, what's wrong with the world? And then you would send in your answer, and then you could win a prize if they chose yours. G.K. Chesterton said, dear London, whatever, in answer to your question, what's wrong with the world, I am. Sincerely, G.K. Chesterton. And he was right. Think about it. Is our 8 billion sinners going to mess up what had once been a perfect planet? Well, sure. It hasn't been perfect since early on, but 8 billion people doing the kind of things we're talking about so far can make a pretty messed up planet. The original perfect, beautiful creation fell into sin. And these next four points talk about the terrible impact of sin. Watching TV, I'm amazed at times at how much people use hyperbole. Hyperbole is an obvious exaggeration to give effect. This is the worst thing that's ever happened. Well, probably not because I didn't use that dental floss or because I didn't do that. But the worst thing that ever happened is recorded in Genesis chapter three. Every evil that you can see in the world today has its origin back into Genesis three. Every murder, every rape, every ugly word, every frightful thought, every snarky comment, every theft, every lie, everything comes from Genesis three. What happened? Men and women became alienated from God, and therefore they didn't experience his love and his leadership. To be alienated, Francis Schaeffer said, is like having above your head a 20-foot slab of concrete. Men and women used to know God. But because of sin and God's judgment upon our sin, men and women don't know God naturally anymore. They run from God. And when it talks about communing with God or finding out who we are, getting our interaction with God, there's a 20 foot thick concrete slab over your head. Why do people think my prayers don't go very high? Because I'm alienated from God. They could no longer look to God for who they were and how they fit in. Adam and Eve, if they had a question, they could ask God. They could figure out who they were by communing with him, talking to him, not anymore. Plus guilty humans were now under the judgment of God for their rebellion. Not only were they not able to talk to him and figure out life, but they had a constant sense of guilt before him. Not just guilt feelings, but true actual guilt. Number two, men and women became alienated from each other. That's the second terrible thing. Not only was God no longer the one whom I could commune with, who could tell me who I was and where my place was, but I'm alienated. I'm estranged from other people. Well, you know, Lord, the wife you gave me, actually, it's kind of your fault, but she was the intermediary. If I didn't have her, I would be fine. Noble Adam, flame shifting to Eve. Disharmony reigned. Men and women have been at odds with each other ever since. your pastor was talking about falling into patterns of disrespectful speech. None of us could identify with it. Actually, everyone could identify with it. That's why he chose it. We were married and how we're raising our children. And my wife and I grew up in homes that were non-Christian for many years, became Christian later. And it was acceptable in our homes for children to fight with each other, not just verbally take each other on, but throw a punch or wrestle or just generally be mean. And so our children were growing up, our boy and our girl, and they were not being so nice to each other. We're at a acquaintance's home, and he had four boys. And they were boys. Their dad was a professional football player, so they were manly boys. But they didn't fight. And I go, that's interesting. Your boys don't fight. And he said something that was like, you watch a tomahawk flying through the air, and it kind of wedges between your eyes. He goes, no, that would be sin. Oh, you mean it's not the right thing to do to let kids fight all the time, because that's destructive. Oh. Well, that's a way that even children show their alienation from each other. Why do boys hit their sister with their tractor? Or why did the sister return it and hit him back with his dinosaur? Number three, men and women become alienated from their created order around them. Plants and animals. You go, what? The beginning of the ecological crisis took place in the garden. The ground was now cursed. You couldn't go out and everything was just out there growing for you. Now you had to plant it, and you had to hoe it, and you had to weed it, and you had to watch for creatures, and you had to detassel the corn, and you had to pick tomato worms off the tomatoes. And if you live in the South, tobacco worms off the tobacco. You had to do these things because the creation didn't naturally cooperate with you anymore. Adam and Eve couldn't talk to the animals anymore. That's something to think about. Number four, men and women became alienated from themselves. You don't really know yourself. People develop psychological problems. What's a psychological problem? Well, left to ourselves, people develop wrong ways of thinking, of feeling, of acting, along with the fact they already had this huge sense of cosmic guilt. So this is the terrible impact of sin, these four alienations. I'm alienated from God. I'm alienated from other people. I'm alienated from the whole created order around me. And at the end of the day, I'm alienated from myself. I don't really know who I am or why I'm here or which end is up. And these are the people who can't make choices on the cereal aisle, let alone learning how to run our country or how to make wise choices in life. Sin is an evil existence within people that rebels against God's glory and mankind's good. It pollutes, it defiles, it harms, and it seeks to destroy everything. Sin is so evil that it causes each person to go or to act against his own best interest. You and I have made choices that were against us, and we made it anyway because sin had us. Without turning back to the God who made us and beginning a new life as a Christian, a person will never find their way. It's said in the business world that men often reach the top of the ladder only to discover the ladder's leaning against the wrong wall. They've made a choice, they've pursued it with all their being, and they get to be a certain age and they realize, man, I'm messed up. This has not been a good plan. I have not given myself to the right thing. But when a person becomes a Christian, they become a new person. And I would guess most of you in this room have. I trust that most of you have. But what kind of a new person are you? Does that mean you're totally different? Does that mean there's no carryover? In what ways are we changed and in what ways are we yet unchanged? Number one, each person still has their own unique DNA. We do not become clones. I look around the room here. You all look different. You all don't look the same. Why is that? Well, even if you're in Christ, it doesn't mean you become a clone of other people. You are your own unique person known to God. You have your own temperament, your own personality. And this is a helpful distinction to make. The Bible says that God changes our character, not our temperament, when he gives us new life. Christians are to become more and more Christ-like in their character. If you're outgoing before you were a Christian, you're probably still outgoing today. If you were quiet before you became a Christian, you're probably still quiet today, with Christian benefits poured into both of them. But for most people, their personality never changes. The talents and abilities you received at your birth are still there. It's not like you were a basketball player and you became a Christian and you go, I can't even dribble the ball. Well, that doesn't happen. Your talents and abilities that God gave you before you became a Christian are still there, but now they're to be used for his honor and glory. The affectionate relationships we were born with remain. Your parents are still your parents. Your brothers, your sisters, your relatives, they still relate to you, you to them. But here's an illustration, like scraping off the barnacles clinging to the hull of a ship. I had a man do a drive for me one day. We were going down to Scottsburg, to the Brethren down there. And the man I was with said, you know, two of the greatest days of my life were, number one, the day I bought my boat, and the second greatest day was the day I sold my boat. Because he said, I just got tired of all the maintenance. What happens, why can't you just leave the boat sitting in the lake? Well, these creatures called barnacles attach to the hull of your boat. If you see a boat that's been sitting in the water a long time, it's probably sinking lower in the water than it used to. And if you could pull the boat out and turn it over, it's covered with all these mollusks, with all these animals that have shells and bodies, and they're weighing down the boat. Barnacles. What happens? Well, you go to the trouble and you have to pay someone to scrape off all these barnacles and then pressure clean the bottom of the boat and get it all smooth again. The boat's lighter. It sits higher in the water. It's faster through the water. It's more seaworthy. But it's the same boat. That sin that still clings to us more and more is dealt with over the course of our lives. As I tell some younger guys, you might not have wanted to know me 50 years ago when I became a Christian. You go, how old are you? I'm older than 50. And God changes us. Now, my tears are still the areas that haven't changed. I still sin against the Lord. I still sin against Christ. If you don't believe I'm a sinner after all these years, you may ask my wife. And she was kind enough to give a hearty amen. But the reality is that we still have sins that cling to us. Why does God let that happen? Some of the weaknesses we were born with are changed, but some remain to deal with, to teach us not to rely upon ourselves, but upon our Savior and Lord. Jesus himself said that one of his purposes in coming to earth was to give his people an overflowing life. God is the architect. The Father is the architect. The Son is the master builder. The Holy Spirit is the one who empowers all this. John 10.10, I actually had a person say, I don't believe that, let me look it up in the Bible. And they looked it up in the Bible and this is really what John 10.10 says. I have come that you might have life and you might have it more abundantly. Now, what does the word abundant mean? It means more than enough. If your glass is three-fourths full, that's a pretty full glass of water, or whatever. If it's totally to the brim, it's really full. If it's overflowing, it's abundant. Jesus said, I didn't come to give you a cramped existence. I didn't come to give you a minimalized experience. I came to give you an overflowing life. Jesus also compared the new life that he gives to an overflowing life springing up within. He stood up at the feast in Jerusalem. Now, you may have never lived in the American Southwest or spent much time in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Southern California. It's very arid. In fact, when you exercise there and you break out in perspiration, it's gone. And then you have salt crystals on your skin where sweat was a couple of minutes ago. It's a weird phenomenon. But there's so little water in the air. Well when you come to a river in the southwest rivers out there are not like the Ohio which I recently crossed visiting my daughter in Charlotte. It's not like the Mississippi. It's not like the Wabash. It's not like any of the rivers around here. But there are rivers. It might be as wide as this room. It might be a foot deep. Now, Jesus said, if any man is thirsty, well, everybody in a dry climate's thirsty. There weren't water fountains in the middle of the town square. There weren't bottles of water standing on kiosks all around you. You had to go to a well that somebody dug and you had to crank it up and bring up the water. He said, if any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. And out of his inmost being, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water. And then John adds, he spoke this about the Holy Spirit, who was yet to come, but had not yet been given. When the God makes you a new person, a Christian, there's something that wells up within you, the grace of God, the power of the Holy Spirit that gives you an overflowing life. It gives you an overflowing life to take care of your own life. I'm married to the overflowing life. I have enough to give to my wife. I have two adult children. It's enough to give to my two children when they were living in my home. I have an overflowing life. It's not diminished. It's greater than it was in my BC days before I was a Christian. I ask you the question, are you thirsty? If you're a Christian, hopefully you're not. Hopefully you're experiencing this grace of Christ, this overflowing life. Only Jesus, God come to earth can show us the way, the truth, and the life. Until you come to know Christ, you're not gonna really know yourself very well. And you're not gonna experience the life that God created you for. If you're not a Christian, may God give you grace to trust in Christ, to turn from your current way of living and say, Lord, I want you to be my all in all. I can remember when the gospel was presented to me in January of 1969. You go, I have read about that in history books. Well, that was a long time ago. And thinking about it and as the person explained the gospel, Jesus isn't a dead hero. He's alive. He was raised from the dead. He's sitting at the right hand of the father and he's governing planet earth. Do you want to turn from your sins and trust in him? And I understood the gospel by God's grace, and I trusted myself to Christ. But I remember lying in bed that night, repeating everything in my head that we had discussed that afternoon. If Christ is raised from the dead, if he is alive today, then all bets are off. I have to live for him. He's God. He made me. I have to live for him. And so my college experience, my life experience, did a change as I started following Him. As you follow Him, your life will be filled and you will fulfill the purpose for which God created you. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we've gone through a number of things today. We've gone through ways that our culture and its lostness says we ought to live. But our culture seems to be getting more and more desperate and more and more unhappy. So we're not sure we want to take the culture's clues. We're not sure that the radio gives us the clues of how to live. The TV shows don't give us the clues to live. Our phones don't give us the clues to live. But only Christ, through his word, gives us the truth about how to live and where true life is to be found. Would you help us to close our ears to the sound of the world around us? the foolishness, the dead end scenarios that the world keeps pushing on us. May we not look to ourselves, may we not do us, may we not think that life revolves around us, but may we humbly bow before Christ and everything revolves around him. As we see the promises of God in scripture, may we claim them for our own and live in the abundance that you have created for us and produce in our life as we walk with you. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.