[0:00] This message was recorded at Vision Baptist Church in Alfred, Georgia. It is our prayer that you will be blessed by the preaching of God's Word. What a wonderful truth, God. You are my God and I will not be shaken. Unbelievers in bad times and in trials, they wonder where God is at, but the Christian sees Him more clearly, understand that He is loving and sovereign in our lives.
[0:21] Pastor Kerry Smith is here with us for the next two nights, and after 22 years of ministry out at West Coast Baptist College in Lancaster Baptist Church, working with many different ministries and publications, student ministries, and watching that church grow, God gave him a gift and being able to connect spiritual truth and where people live.
[0:43] And then He gave him the gift of cancer towards the end of his time there, and he wrote a wonderful book called Off Script, and one of my favorite sections is where he goes and he sits down with his family and he says, this is how we will respond to this trial in our life, and he outlines it for us.
[1:00] A couple years ago, we were at our orientation with our missionaries. We went through that book together, and it was amazing. In the months to come, the things that we saw of our team and of missionaries and people in our church as their life went off script, and that book was an incredible encouragement to us.
[1:16] And we live in a world that has gone off script, so we should not be surprised that many times life doesn't go the way that we expect it. So maybe you're here tonight, and your life has went off script, and you'll be encouraged by it.
[1:26] Or maybe God has brought you here to equip you so that you can minister to other people during that time, but we have no idea what tomorrow may hold for us. So I pray that you'll open up your hearts and listen as Pastor Smith will come.
[1:39] And I thank God for the gift that he's given us, this man that he's willing to share, and also the gift of cancer that he used to see God clearly, and now he will use to teach us from his word what to do when life goes off script.
[1:52] We're so honored to have you here. He's an Alpharetta native, and we like that about him. And we're so honored that he would take the time for pastoring. He's been there for a year, and to spend these next few days with us.
[2:02] Thank you, sir. Thanks, brother. Thanks, Trent. All right, you guys awake? This pulpit was made for Goliath's descendant. So, Brother Bush, I'll tell you what.
[2:13] You and Brother Trent, come pull this thing back, and I'm just going to grab a music stand because I feel like a midget. Thank you for coming tonight. And can I grab that music stand?
[2:23] Is that okay? That would be great. All right, well, I am really thankful to be here tonight, and I thank Brother Trent and Pastor Gardner for allowing me to be here.
[2:34] Thank you for taking your Thursday night. Is this a typical midweek service for you? Okay, so Thursday night is normal for some of you. And those of you that came from another church or outside the area, thank you for being here.
[2:46] Yeah, I grew up a good chunk of my life just a couple miles down the road here on Kimball Bridge Road. And the house I lived in at least a couple years, about a year ago or two, it was still there.
[2:59] It was just abandoned. It's way back in the woods, and it's probably hung up in some repo thing with the bank. But I went in. It's like where teenagers in the area go to have their drug parties at night, you know.
[3:13] So there's graffiti everywhere, and I walked through the house. I'm taking pictures and taking pictures of my bedroom, and there's gang symbols all over the wall. And I sent the pictures to my dad, and he goes, yeah, this is a metaphor of my career.
[3:25] Because when we lived there, his career was really doing well, and then it crashed after that. So anyway, it's good to be back in Georgia. We lived here from the time I was 5 to the time I was 15.
[3:36] And we actually started in Roswell and moved out to Alpharetta. We were saved in, our family was saved. Are we stuck? We're stuck. All right, I'm going to stand up on top of that.
[3:47] That's fine. I'll just make do. We were saved at Lebanon Baptist Church, which is in Roswell, and grew up there, and then God took us out to the West Coast.
[4:00] And we were there for a long, long time, and now, believe it or not, I'm in Connecticut of all places. Pray for me, because I'm reaching Yankees. And I found out, nobody thought that New England was open.
[4:15] Everybody said New England's hard and cold, and nobody wants to get saved there. But we're finding exactly the opposite is true. We've seen a lot of people trusting Christ. Just three weeks ago, on the last Sunday of September, we had nine new Christians that got baptized in one day.
[4:33] And I'm talking about adults, moms, dads, husbands, wives, grandparents. This Sunday, we've got four new believers that are lined up to be baptized.
[4:44] You pray that we'll continue to see a revival sparked in New England. I'm not going to divert down a lot of rabbit trails. I want you to go with me in your Bible to John chapter 16.
[4:56] John chapter 16. John chapter 16. John chapter 16.
[5:10] Can we set it down? No, we're stuck. All right. That's okay. John chapter. I'm going to stand out in front of it most of the time anyway, probably.
[5:22] John chapter 16. John chapter 16. And we're going to pick it up. Really just, I'm going to highlight one verse. But we're going to kind of survey the entire context of John, basically going back to chapter 13 and going really through verse 16, 17, 18.
[5:42] But one key verse that I want you to see, John 16. And look at verse 33. We'll go back to verse 31. Jesus answered them, Do you now believe?
[5:55] The old hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own. And he shall leave me alone, yet I am not alone, because the Father, I'm sorry, and shall leave me alone, and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.
[6:09] These things have I spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
[6:23] Would you read verse 33 with me? Ready, begin. These things I have spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
[6:39] Let's pray together. Father, we love you, and we thank you for bringing us together tonight. Thank you for Vision Baptist, and thank you for Pastor Gardner. Thank you for what you're doing here.
[6:50] Thank you for the songs that we sang tonight, and songs that called our heart and our attention, and worship to you, back to the gospel, to the cross, to grace. And Lord, how quickly, how easily we can focus and zero in on our script for life, and our little box, and our little neat control of our perception of control of our lives, and yet things happen that show us, reveal to us, that we really are not in control.
[7:20] And these things can flatten us, or they can fortify us. They can cause us to come unraveled, or they can cause us to become more dependent.
[7:32] They can shake our faith, or they can strengthen our faith. And in these couple of nights that we have together, I pray, Lord, that you'd help us to have a new, a different, a biblical perspective on trials, on hardship, on calamity, on suffering.
[7:48] I pray that you would use the verses that we'll see, and the passages that we'll see. I pray that you'll guide my heart, and my thoughts, and let me be an encouragement to these people, and to your people.
[8:00] And we thank you for it in Jesus' name. Amen. We all have a script for our lives. We all have a way that we think things should go.
[8:11] We have a screenplay that we're writing. And to be honest with you, it's in our imaginations. It's, I don't know, maybe it's our fantasy, or our best ability to put together a perceived future of how we want things to go.
[8:31] How we want things to unfold. When I do a couples retreat, I'll ask some of the adults that are there. And I've never asked this question without having the room break into subtle laughter throughout the room.
[8:45] But I'll ask adults all the time. How many of you, your life has turned out exactly the way you imagined it turning out when you were 17 or 18? And there's always the laughs throughout the room, except the young people.
[8:58] They never laugh. They listen to the adults laugh, and then they go, oh no. You know, because they've got this script too. We all have this script that is unfolding in our minds and in our hearts and in our lives.
[9:12] And in our script, things are good. Things unfold the way we want them to. Things go well. Things don't go wrong in our imagination.
[9:23] We manipulate circumstances in our favor. In our hearts, we don't daydream about trials. No one gets sick. People don't die. Nothing bad happens. Things don't die. They're predictable, positive, sanitized of trouble.
[9:36] And yet, if we're honest, we know that that is not realistic. Every now and then, God takes our lives off script. He allows circumstances.
[9:47] And whether it's God or whether it's God allowed, it really doesn't matter. I mean, honestly, if your child dies in an accident, if you are on your last breath on your deathbed, if your job falls out from under you, if your business collapses, if your net worth falls below zero, I mean, do you really spend a lot of time going, did God do this or did he allow this?
[10:11] I mean, it's happening. Right? And if God is God, then somehow, in some way, he allowed it. Whether he caused it or allowed it, I mean, it's kind of splitting hairs.
[10:27] I mean, and if we're not careful, these off script times can shake us. These are times when our expectation intersects or collides with the path of his choosing.
[10:39] Places where he doesn't follow our predetermined dreams. They're unexpected adventures and they're often alarming. They're painful. They're uncomfortable. They're scary.
[10:50] They leave us perplexed and disappointed. Even with God, they leave us alarmed at him, angry at him, questioning him, his existence, questioning his nature, questioning his purpose or his integrity.
[11:01] Sometimes we think of these times as detours or we start strategizing how we can get back onto script and other times the events are irreversible and we know we're never getting back on script and it's gone.
[11:13] It's shredded. It's entirely impossible. In September of 2010, the Lord intervened in our lives. And I just want to make sure this thing's going to work.
[11:23] Yeah, cool. All right. In the world, you shall have tribulation. In September of 2010, life was good. My life was predictable. I had an annual planner.
[11:34] I had my organizer, my task list. I had my responsibilities in ministry at Lancaster Baptist Church. I had a team of people that I worked with. I went in and worked every day. I loved what I was doing.
[11:45] And I was doing it for God and we had worked hard for 22 years and God had blessed the ministry. And it was, I mean, honestly, it was kind of a Disneyland kind of life. I had a happy wife. I had a happy home.
[11:56] I had a nice home and children, three children. And life was good. And yet, in the back of my mind, I knew that this was not something that was in my control.
[12:09] And I knew that everybody comes into suffering. I knew that everybody has hardship. Everybody has pain. Everybody has trials and calamity. And as I say that, if you don't have any right now or if you haven't had a lot of hardship in your life, if you're 16 and your life is kind of Disneyland-ish like mine was, you hear me or you hear somebody say that and it bothers you.
[12:28] It bothered me. I don't want to hear that everybody has trials because mine's good right now, so maybe I'll be the exception. Forget it. There is no exception. Okay? But we get scared of the idea that a doctor is going to tell us something we don't want to hear someday or we're going to get that phone call we don't want to hear.
[12:46] We get scared. And in the back of my mind, I knew there's going to come some trials into our lives. I didn't know what form or shape they would come in, but I just knew life involves hardship and life involves trials.
[12:57] It's a part of the journey. It's a part of the human existence. Now, for us, it began with some stuff that I knew was going on health-wise that I didn't really know what to think about.
[13:08] I went to an allergist. I thought I had allergies. And the allergist said, no, that's not allergies. And a month later, I was getting a physical, and the doctor was checking my neck. And I said, you know, I do have something swollen under my armpit here.
[13:19] I could feel them. They were like little marbles up under my arm there. And, you know, about the size of those little bouncy balls you buy at the grocery store for a quarter, you know, or a dime. Little gumballs under my arm here.
[13:30] And he felt that, and he went, hmm. And he looked at me, and this Russian guy, and he said, you need to have a CAT scan. I said, okay. And so he scheduled me for a CAT scan.
[13:41] I thought nothing of it. These things had been there for several months. They were going up and down. Sometimes they'd be there. Sometimes they wouldn't. I had one on my neck, too. And I could feel it was like the size of a little, you know, like a little marble here.
[13:52] And I thought, well, and that would come up and down and go away and come back. A week later, I'm in for a CAT scan, and I'm kind of lighthearted about it. No big deal. And left that day, got home.
[14:03] We were having a family night that night. And about 9 o'clock, the phone rang. My wife picked up the phone, and she was in the other room. She comes in. She's just, the look on her face, it was just white as a ghost.
[14:18] And just, she looked at me like, you're dead. You know, that was the look. You're dead, you know. And she said, Carrie, it's the doctor. And my first thought was, wow, what a nice doctor to call me, you know, at night like this.
[14:32] And then I looked at the clock, and I put it together, you know. It's 9 o'clock at night. I'll tell you what, guys, I'm going to switch to one of these. Is that okay? Can I switch to the handheld? Yeah. All right.
[14:43] This thing just doesn't stay on my head. All right. Here we go. Can you guys hear me? All right. When I was a kid, all the kids in my class used to tell me I had little ears, those mics.
[14:57] Unless they hang on to both, they just don't stay on. But so this doctor, 9 o'clock, phone ringing. My wife comes in. Doctor's on the phone. I looked at the clock. I looked at the phone. I'm like, I don't want to talk to this guy.
[15:09] I wanted to just hang up, you know. And I ran upstairs to the bedroom. My wife followed me. I closed the door. I said, hello. He said, Mr. Schmidt. I said, yes. He said, the CAT scan results, the analyst called me.
[15:25] And he said, he's broken Russian accent. He didn't want to talk to me. He was in a hurry. He said, you have spots in your lungs. You have masses in your lungs. You have to go to oncology. You have to go talk to a doctor. Okay, okay, bye.
[15:35] And he wants to hang up. And I'm like, wait a minute. You know, you're telling me I got stuff in my lungs and you want to hang up. You're a Russian in a hurry. Slow it down. Speak more clearly.
[15:47] And I said, spots in my lungs. He said, no, in between your lungs. I said, okay, that's the difference. I'm already planning, okay, who's going to help with Dana and the kids and the life insurance and all this stuff. I'm dead in three months in my mind, you know.
[15:59] And I get off the phone. I look at Dana and I go, I got spots in between my lungs. I got masses in my chest. And we, you know, we were scared.
[16:10] I mean, scared. And so two days later, we're sitting in the office of a doctor that was a friend of ours, attended our church, had been saved probably, I don't know, eight or ten years prior.
[16:21] And it was six o'clock, five-thirty, and I told the office, I said, I may not be at church. I had somebody ready to cover for me. And Pastor Chappell was overseas.
[16:32] I said, if I'm not there, pray for me because it's not good. And we're sitting there. He reads that report to me. And that doctor looked at me and he said, you probably have lymphoma cancer.
[16:45] And I'm just like this optimist. And I'm going, nah, these people have got to be wrong. I don't do cancer. I help people with cancer. This is not something I do.
[16:56] And I said, okay, doctor, what's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario? And I'm sure he's going to say, worst case scenario, you got cancer. Best case scenario, you're allergic to your wife's chicken recipe, okay?
[17:09] Or she's got to change her detergent or something. And he said, the worst case scenario would be this is non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. That's about 30% survivable, curable. He said, the best case would be if this were Hodgkin's lymphoma.
[17:22] That's about 90% curable, depending on where it is and how far along it is. And so, I mean, I'm sitting there. I can't believe what he's saying. Best case scenario, I've got cancer. Worst case scenario, I've got cancer.
[17:34] He didn't leave any alternative. And I'm thinking, no, these people have got to be wrong. You know? And he said, you're going to have to go to hematology and oncology and special doctors, and they will do some tests and stage it and figure out how far along it is and what kind it is and biopsies and all these things.
[17:52] And then you'll go through treatment. And he said, if it's Hodgkin's, you have a pretty good outcome. And he said, Hodgkin's is less common.
[18:04] Non-Hodgkin's is more common. So the more deadly kind was more common. And I flipped that around in my mind. I left the office thinking the Hodgkin's kind was more common and thinking I'm going to survive.
[18:15] And my wife left hearing the reality that it was probably non-Hodgkin's and I was probably going to die. So we walked out of the office. I'm pretty upbeat. And she's pretty down and crying on my shoulder. And I looked at her.
[18:26] I'm like, hey, come on. I'm not dead yet. You know? And he said, I probably got Hodgkin's and I'm probably going to live. And she didn't want to tell me that I misheard him. You know? She didn't have the heart to go, no, you're probably dying. You know?
[18:37] But that's what she's thinking. So a month unfolded of appointments and tests and biopsies and one thing after the next and blood work and lungs and heart and all this stuff.
[18:49] And they're trying to figure out what kind of cancer I've got. And I mean, it was three or four, I forget all the play out of the calendar, but it was three or four weeks before we even found out what kind of cancer it was.
[19:00] And so there's about a month there where I'm just, I'm planning and I'm thinking about who I'm going to ask to talk to my kids after I die and who I'm going to ask to help take care of Dana and help her make decisions and help, you know, where does she live and what does she do with the rest of her life?
[19:15] And it was not good news. And my script never included cancer. How many of you could say with me, yeah, my life, some point in time has gone off script.
[19:28] I mean, it took you a place you weren't expecting, a place that you didn't ever expect to be. And I made a list of them, health trials, tragedy, financial burden, family breakdown, abuse, disappointment, job loss, maybe consequences of bad decisions.
[19:44] Some of the circumstances are completely out of our control and we have no reason why they happened or where they came from. Other circumstances may be consequences of sin or bad decision that these are some decisions I made and now I'm living with the results and they're irreversible.
[20:02] But we all bear, we all enter into these times of off script seasons. And Jesus in this passage of scripture is preparing the apostles, he's preparing his disciples, his followers, for a time when their journey is going to become worse before it gets better.
[20:22] That's what he's about to do. I want you to write this statement down. Hardship either flattens us or fortifies us. It either flattens us or fortifies us.
[20:32] These seasons become catalysts that thrust us in one of two directions. Closer to God and forward in growth and understanding him and his grace and his presence and all of his truth and developing our faith and preparing us for eternity.
[20:51] They can thrust us to him, fortify us, strengthen our faith or further from God in anger and doubt and despair. And I will tell you, we're going to dig into this in a few minutes.
[21:03] Nothing, nothing challenges our theology, our faith. Nothing shatters bad theology and weak faith like off script times.
[21:17] Nothing challenges us more in our spirit and in our relationship with God than when God takes us on a journey that doesn't make sense with our conventional understanding of God or our conventional expectation of who he is.
[21:37] And that night we left the doctor's office. We walked down the hallway. Dana buried her head in my chest. She was weeping. I was trying to be cheery and upbeat, but I was scared out of my mind.
[21:48] We got in the car. We drove. We were just in a daze. Our kids were still in church. I'm thinking, I've got to call some people.
[22:01] I've got to get some people praying. I've got to, you know, I've got to decide what to do and how to respond. We found our way to a park, to a soccer park, which is out in the desert by the church.
[22:13] And there was lots of games going on all around the soccer park. And there was probably, I don't know, there were probably 500 people out there at all these soccer fields with all the youth soccer leagues. And it's Wednesday night about 7.30 or 8.
[22:26] It's dark. We parked the car. We sat there for a few minutes. And I said, let's just get out and walk. And we're walking along the soccer fields. And we're just in a fog. We're just absolutely numb.
[22:40] And I'm holding Dana's hand. And we went over to a chain link fence. And we began to talk. And I said to Dana, well, I've been expecting a trial. And I said, Dana, there's a couple things just right now coming to my mind.
[22:56] And I'm just going to share with you. I said, number one, I'm so glad we've lived our lives the way we have. I'm so glad our marriage is healthy and our children, we've loved them.
[23:07] I'm so glad we've served God. I'm so glad we've invested. And I'm so glad that our lives have taken the course they've taken. And I said, if I live, I want to honor God through this.
[23:21] If I die, I want to show people that dying isn't so bad if you're a Christian. I mean, that's what we're supposed to believe, right?
[23:32] Do we really believe that, though? I don't want to die. I mean, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to go now. Now, you know, do we really believe that Jesus conquered death, saved us from our sins, redeemed us, gave us eternal hope?
[23:47] Well, in a moment like that, you find out. You find out whether you really believe all the stuff that we say that we believe. Hardship either flattens us or fortify us.
[23:59] They teach us much. They reveal in us even more. And they call us to a deeper and different kind of living. These are not trivial times. They're pivotal. They're defining moments.
[24:11] And early on at that fence with Dana, there were three things that just came clearly to my mind. I want you to write them down quickly, and then we're going to turn a corner and dig a little deeper.
[24:22] The first thing that came to my mind is I'm not in control. I'm not in control. Jesus says in this passage over and over to the disciples, this is what I'm doing.
[24:34] This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing, and this is what's going to happen to you, and this is how it's going to impact you, and this is where it's all going, and you're not in control, and it's not going where you think it's going.
[24:46] I mean, you can read it for yourself. You can go back to John chapter 14. Look at it with me. Let not your heart be troubled. That is King James Version English for buckle up.
[24:59] Are you guys awake? You're staring at me like you're bringing bad news to me, Brother Schmidt. Go back to Connecticut. We don't want to hear that life is hard. Jesus says, let not your heart be troubled.
[25:12] Why would he have to say that? Because there's about to be trouble. There's about to be some bad stuff unfolding. Going back to chapter, this is his last night before his crucifixion. He's about to be betrayed, beaten, bloodied, battered, rejected, taken up to a hill, and crucified.
[25:31] And you've got these cinder block head apostles that don't get it. They're fishermen turned followers of the Messiah. They're oppressed by the Roman government.
[25:42] They're really into their national patriotic spirit. They're Jews, and they want their patriotism. They want their independence. They want their nationality. They want to be free from Roman tyranny. And this is the guy that's going to make it happen.
[25:53] And they're on his inside track. They're his cabinet. They're the cabinet for the new president. You got it? That's their script. They are the chosen followers, the key guys of the Messiah.
[26:07] They're all on board with their script. They want Jesus to be who they want him to be. And so often, that's what we want. We have God put in a little box, and we want to contain him.
[26:19] He's like our genie, and he's like in a cosmic galactic lamp. And if we rub the lamp good enough, if we do exactly what he wants, everything will go smooth for our script. God isn't playing according to our rules.
[26:31] And he doesn't owe us an explanation. Now, he gives us enough of an explanation to know him. But not enough of an explanation to control the circumstances or to figure out why.
[26:44] He gives us enough of an explanation to trust him and to hold on to him and to walk with him through the trial. And he says to these disciples over and over and over, you aren't in control.
[26:56] Look at chapter 16. We'll see a couple of verses here. Look at verse 33. See, these things have I spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you shall have tribulation. We read it. But be of good cheer.
[27:07] I have overcome the world. So he's saying, you're not in control, and it's about to get worse. But it's okay, because I'm in control, and I have overcome the world. You're going to have tribulation.
[27:19] He tells them, I'm going away. I'm going to prepare a place for you. I want you to serve each other. I want you to love each other. And then it's going to get bad. It's going to come unraveled.
[27:29] Everything is going to fall apart. All of your expectations are going to be shredded. It's not going to go the way you think it's going to go. But don't lose hope. And don't walk away. And don't quit.
[27:40] Because it's going to get better. I'm going to come back. Your joy is going to be full. It's all going to be good. He's giving them these final instructions. He's preparing them for off script.
[27:51] Their expectations are about to collide with God's plan in a way that's going to produce a massive crisis in all of them. Massive disappointment. Massive discouragement.
[28:02] They want control. Listen. You do too. I do too. I want to control my life. I want God to make my plan happen. And I want to perform for Him so He'll make my plan work out.
[28:19] Now, that's the theology that we get going. As long as I do all the things that God wants me to do, as long as I'm tithing and attending church and reaching out and reaching people and living according to my little code of behavior, my dress, my music, my standards, my entertainment, as long as I'm morally in line with my little box, God's going to do exactly what I want Him to do and make my plan happen.
[28:43] And what happens is when our plan comes unraveled, then our whole theology is shaken. Our whole faith comes unraveled because suddenly we find out God is not who we thought Him to be.
[28:55] And then everything we thought we believed and everything we thought we knew about God comes into question because our theology was built on shaky sand to begin with.
[29:07] We are not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. We cannot know it all or control it all. I am not in control, neither are you. And when our script is ripped from our hands, our illusion of control is completely destroyed.
[29:18] And it's a helpless, hopeless feeling coming face to face with, this is totally out of my hands. The second thing that came to my mind and thoughts as I stood there with my wife is that Jesus is in control.
[29:35] Think about the verse we just read again, verse 33. Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
[29:47] So Jesus says, I'm in control. I know where this is going. I'm doing something. And because of me, because of me being in control, you have the capacity to be of good cheer.
[29:58] You have the capacity in the midst of tribulation, in the midst of undesirable circumstances or dynamics, you have the ability to consciously choose faith in him and cheer in him because he's in control.
[30:15] He says it again in chapter 14, let not your heart be troubled. He goes through that passage. Verse 27 of chapter 14, peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth. I give unto you, let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
[30:29] John 16, verses 6 and 7, look at it. But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth, it's expedient for you that I go away.
[30:40] For if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you. If I depart, I will send him unto you. Look down at verses 20 through 22 of chapter 16. Verse 27, verily, verily, I say unto you that ye shall weep and lament and the world shall rejoice and ye shall be sorrowful.
[30:58] But your sorrow shall be turned into what? Joy. A woman when she's in travail has sorrow because her hour has come. But as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish for the joy that a man is born into the world.
[31:11] And now ye therefore have sorrow, but I will see you again. And your heart shall rejoice and your joy no man taketh from you.
[31:23] Now the picture he uses there is a woman with child. The illustration that comes to my mind is when our goddard Haley was in the womb. A few weeks into the womb. It must have been by about the second month or third month, Dana started having preterm labor.
[31:38] That's not good. And so the doctors put her on bed rest. They put her on medication. Suddenly bed rest. I mean, she means literally bed rest. She's got to sit on the couch all day while I do laundry, make meals, get the lunches ready, get the kids ready, put the kids to bed.
[31:52] She sat there and observed it all for five months and six months. It was the worst. I'm telling you, I don't know if it was her hardest pregnancy. It was definitely my most difficult pregnancy.
[32:04] All right. I was miserable. I was begging for the doctors to let her off bed rest. They said, we can't. This baby can't be born. It wouldn't survive. And so we got to the end of, I mean, all the doctors in our area were saying, this is the critical point.
[32:16] Once you pass that point, the baby can survive and everything's good and she can get off bed rest. And that day we had an appointment an hour and a half from home. We went down to the hospital to the key Kaiser hospital for preterm labor and all of that department.
[32:30] And they get down there. They're doing all this ultrasound. They're checking everything out. And she's having contractions. And this doctor was looking at this. And I'm expecting she's done with bed rest today.
[32:40] We're going on a date tonight. We're going out to dinner. We're going to have a great time. And the doctor looked at her and said, well, you can't leave the hospital like this. And I went, what? And she said, we cannot let her go home while she's having these contractions.
[32:51] This baby, it cannot be born in the next month. This is way too early. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. They told us today is like the critical point. And after this, the baby's okay. And the doctor said, yeah, the baby would be okay.
[33:03] But the baby would be in NICU for weeks and weeks and weeks. And all kinds of things can go wrong. And no, we've got to. So an hour later, she's admitted to the hospital.
[33:14] 30 minutes later, she's hooked up to IVs with stuff going through her veins that is making her literally feel like she's on fire. She's crying. She's miserable. I'm putting rags all over her and ice water to try to calm her down and settle her down and cool her down.
[33:29] I mean, misery. And I'm really frustrated with these doctors like I know what I'm doing. You know, and the doctor came in, and I kind of got belligerent. What in the world? They said, what do you mean?
[33:40] She's miserable. And this doctor, this lady was a tough drill sergeant doctor. She looked at me, and she said, Mr. Schmidt, you listen to me. And I was like. Well, she got forceful.
[33:52] And she said, I know this is a pain. I know your wife is miserable right now. She said, every day that this baby stays in that womb, it's about another week that this baby doesn't have to stay in the ICU.
[34:06] She said, there's a lot that can go wrong if this baby is born anytime soon, not to mention long-term problems. She said, I know she's miserable right now, but there's nothing we can do about that except get through it.
[34:20] She said, now sit down and help your wife get through this, because this baby is going to be born in a few weeks, and when that happens, none of this is even going to matter. And I'm like, yes, ma'am.
[34:33] I mean, she dressed me down and sat me in my place. And I sat back down. I'm like, I started out like I'm going to save my wife from these oppressive physicians.
[34:45] And I sat back down, and I was just totally emasculated. I'm like, sweetheart, it's going to be okay. You know. And so weeks in the hospital, they never let her come home.
[34:58] And I don't know, a couple weeks later, two, three weeks later, I get a call. We're going in for an emergency C-section. We've got to deliver the baby now. I rush back down there an hour and a half from home. And we're in the room.
[35:09] They're prepping her. They take her in for surgery. I'm down there by Dana's head, and I'm talking to her. She's nervous. She's, you know, getting hooked up to the anesthesia. And the anesthesiologist is talking to us and kind of coaching us.
[35:20] They put a curtain right here. My wife's tummy is right on the other side of the curtain, right? And so you're in this operating room. All the doctors are over there. And I'm right down here by Dana's head. And I can tell they start operating. I'm rubbing her hand.
[35:30] I'm going, you're doing good. You're doing good. It's going to be good. I thought, I'll look over the curtain one time. Not a good decision. The first time I looked over, they had her opened up, and there were guts everywhere.
[35:45] It was just guts. I just remember looking over, and I looked at my wife, and I'm like, you're beautiful on the outside. But I've got to tell you, I love you on the inside, too. I love your guts. You have beautiful guts. You know, and I'm talking to her. And I'm like, Dana, you're doing fine.
[35:56] It was like she's, you know, cut in half. And this top half of her doesn't know that the bottom half is in another room somewhere. You know, it's insane what they're doing. And a few minutes passed by, and I thought, you know, I'm curious.
[36:10] Curiosity's getting the best of me. I'll look up over that curtain again. And that time was so funny, because what happened at that moment was Haley's head was sitting on Dana's tummy. And the incision was closed around Haley's neck.
[36:21] So it looked like you're just taking a baby's head and set it on her tummy. Just sitting there, you know. And I'm like, hey, her head's out, you know. And they had told us, she's not going to talk. She's not going to scream.
[36:32] She's not going to whine and cry. Don't worry. We'll get her ready. And she'll cry when she gets out. The baby's not going to make a lot of noise. Don't worry. Well, they didn't know Haley. Haley is a woman.
[36:43] And this is my daughter I'm talking about. And she was ready to talk the minute she got out of the womb. I was like, yeah, she's here. And I'm telling you what. All of the months, all of the months of bed rest.
[36:55] And then the misery of the medication to stop the transactions. What do you call them? Contractions. All of that hardship vanished.
[37:08] I mean, it was gone. It was not even a, barely a memory. I was like, because now Haley was here. They brought Haley around the other side of that curtain. And they brought her right down by Dana's face.
[37:19] And we just wept and wept and wept. Thank you, Lord, for a healthy daughter. She's here. And the joy was so, so, so much greater than the burden. And Jesus says, you're going to have trials.
[37:33] You're going to have hardship. You're going to have a hard time. It's not going to go the way you think. But it's going to be worth it. It's going to be worth it.
[37:44] It's going to work out in a way that you're not even going to hardly remember the hardship. The third thought, I'm not in control. Jesus is in control.
[37:56] All I need to know is Jesus. All I need to know is that Jesus is in my life. I can't be in control of the circumstances. I can't be in control of what's happening to me.
[38:08] But I can know the one who is in control. Aren't you glad of that? Aren't you glad that if you're going to suffer, if you're going to have hardship, that you are in the hand of Almighty God and he has all power over everything.
[38:23] And he's going to be with you. And if you'll allow me a few more minutes, I want you to go with me to the book of Isaiah. As you're turning there, go to Isaiah chapter 64.
[38:34] As you're turning there, I want to give you a couple of thoughts here on responses and dive into this a little bit for a few minutes and try to equip you for responding right to trials.
[38:48] There are four responses I shared even recently with our church family. Some leave. Some run. They question God. They doubt. They despair. And they want to get away. Get me away from my trouble.
[39:00] Get me away from my hardship. I don't want to face or deal with it. Some languish. In other words, they just melt down in self-pity. And they struggle and they just stay at the door of opportunity and trial in self-pity and meltdown.
[39:18] Some decide to learn. Some go, you know, I'm going to grow through this and I'm going to learn. But then some, like the Apostle Paul, decide that they're going to leverage their trial. They're going to let God use it in them and they're going to use it for God and to glorify God.
[39:32] And that brings a whole different understanding of trials and what they do in our lives. And this is what Dana and I did standing there at that fence.
[39:44] I want to share the verse with you. Isaiah chapter 43. What chapter did I tell you? Sorry, 43. Isaiah 43.
[39:55] And I want to talk to you for a minute about responses and particularly about resolving your response. Isaiah 43, verse 2.
[40:09] When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee. And through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.
[40:21] Neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. Go back to verse 1 and look at it. But now thus saith the Lord that created the old Jacob and he that formed the old Israel, fear not. I want you to hear God speaking to you in your trial, in your circumstance.
[40:35] Fear not, for I have redeemed thee. I have called thee by thy name. Thou art mine. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.
[40:48] When we come into a trial, what we want to do is we want to escape. We want to get back to our script. We want a plan to fix this.
[41:01] We want a plan to get out of this. We want a solution. What God wants to give us in our hardship is a person. He wants to give us himself.
[41:15] He wants to be with us. We want to know why. We want to know where this is going. We want to know how it's going to unfold and how we can get out of it.
[41:25] And we can't know those things. And can I tell you something? Information doesn't change the trial. God, why did this happen?
[41:40] If I knew the answer to that question, it wouldn't change the trial. Are you with me? It wouldn't change it. Having information doesn't change the situation.
[41:52] And so don't get onto a track spiritually where when trials unfold, I didn't stand there at that fence with Dana going, why would this happen to us? We were doing good for God.
[42:04] We were serving God. Why us? What did we do to deserve this? Why, why, why? Because there is no answer to that question short of heaven. There is no way to understand that. There is no way to grasp at answers in the eternal mind of God that he hasn't provided to us.
[42:18] And information wouldn't change the journey through the trial and wouldn't take away the circumstances. We need to know, we don't need to know why or how, but we do need to know who.
[42:29] We do need to know him. We do need to discover this verse, when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee. I said to my wife standing there at that fence, we're going to do everything the doctors tell us to do.
[42:46] We're going to pray that God will heal me. We're going to pray that I'd like to live longer. Yeah. But I'm not going to live in denial. We're not going to pretend that God has to heal me.
[42:59] We're not going to pretend that I might not be dying. We're not going to saturate ourselves with, you know, some artificial, you know, fantasy land thinking of, oh, you know, if I just have strong enough faith, God's going to have to heal us.
[43:17] We're not going to lie to ourselves. We're not going to lie to our kids. We're not going to lie to people around us. We're going to grab a hold of God. We're going to walk through this with him. Now, was I terrified? Sure, we were terrified.
[43:28] But we were trusting. And we were not tormented necessarily. I want you to very quickly, and we're going to wrap this up quickly, but I want to talk to you about natural responses.
[43:38] This is what you will want to do in your own human nature. I'm going to write down three of them. I want you to write them down quickly, and I want to explain them. The first is we want to be traumatized, freak out, fear, anxiety, dismay, desperation, depression, despair, hopelessness.
[43:57] Oh, no! Are you with me? Okay. By the way, these are not you might have these responses. This is you will have these responses.
[44:10] This is the way your human nature will respond. And by the way, you're going to read it throughout the Bible. You're going to find the Bible to be brutal and raw and transparent and real when God's people came into trials.
[44:24] God does not have a problem with you complaining to him. He does have a problem with you complaining of him. Okay?
[44:35] So, you have a choice. You're going to complain. Pain hurts. Suffering is hard. You need to complain to him, not about him.
[44:45] And not of him. You need to go to him and take your complaint to him. And you're going to find he's not going to be surprised about your complaint. He's going to hear your complaint, and then he's going to walk with you and give you a different perspective.
[44:57] If you're human, your natural response is going to be to be traumatized. You're going to fear. You're going to panic. You're going to worry. You're going to be anxious. Second response is to ostracize. In other words, to salve your pain or hardship with isolation.
[45:11] You want to pull away. You want to go into hiding. You don't want to be around people. You don't want to be around God's people. You don't want to pray. You don't want to talk to God. You don't want to read his word. You want to find something to numb the pain.
[45:23] Maybe that's an illicit relationship. Maybe that's alcohol. Maybe that's drugs. Maybe that's just sleeping pills and sleeping as much as you can. Again, you want to do anything you can to escape reality and ostracize yourself from God and others.
[45:36] And thirdly, you want to demonize. And what is that? You want to fix blame. You want to figure out why bad stuff is happening to you when you're a good person. And what you've done is you've way overestimated you and you've way underestimated God and God's goodness.
[45:51] Instead of figuring out why bad stuff is happening to you, a good person, you ought to be asking this. I'm a bad person. Why not worse stuff? Are you with me? I know you guys don't like to hear what I'm telling you right now.
[46:03] I want to help you in the next few minutes to correct your theology. Okay? Because we think, okay, God is good. And if I'm good enough, then God will be good to me. He has to be, right?
[46:13] Because he's good. And so if something bad happens to me, then that must mean God, either I got off track or God got off track. And we know, you know, God doesn't get off track, so I must have gotten off track.
[46:24] But wait a minute, I was working hard for God. Where's the problem here? Good God, good me, good life, right? And now bad stuff.
[46:34] So, you know, God let me down. And we want to fix blame. We want to try to attach some reasoning to this. And this can cause us to be angry and resentment and fear of God and even trouble with God.
[46:48] And I know so many people that get angry at God and shake their fist and flip God off when they come into a trial. Instead of asking, why wouldn't God just destroy me altogether?
[47:03] Why would he even redeem me? There's a second set of responses and there's spiritual responses. And as you write this down, I want to tell you, these are not good either.
[47:14] All right? I don't mean spiritual as in the way of helpful. I mean spiritual as in like placebo Christianity. Ways we try to make ourselves feel better. You know, pseudo-biblical psychology that we try to cope.
[47:29] Coping mechanisms where we try to grasp again for control. We try to take our trial and lasso it into control with little biblical trite-isms that, again, make God somehow controllable and manipulatable, if that's a word.
[47:48] We try to leverage scripture to bring our trial into control so that we can, again, get back on our script and fix this problem. And the first thing I wrote down is we spiritualize.
[47:59] And what I mean by that is we confuse two true biblical teachings. We reverse them.
[48:10] And I want to visit with you for a minute about this. And hang with me. Glory theology is God deserves all glory.
[48:22] And the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed hereafter. Right? You remember this?
[48:33] Glory is happiness and perfection and bliss and the joy that no man can take away.
[48:43] And glory is everything that we know we were ultimately created to experience in a perfect unfallen world. But sin has broken that. And Christ, because of what he did on the cross, has made it possible to be redeemed.
[48:58] And that one day, because of that hope that's set before us, we can enter into glory with him. And we can experience a body that's new and can never get sick and never die.
[49:08] And we can experience a life in eternity with him that can never be tainted by sin or hardship or trial or sorrow or suffering. That's going to be one day. Amen? Right?
[49:20] Okay. But that's not today. That's not now. Now is a cross theology. Take up your cross and follow me.
[49:33] Jesus was entering in John chapter 16 into a great sorrow and suffering and hardship and death and brutality and bleeding.
[49:49] And he was saying, because of what I'm going to do, the Bible says, for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross. And we had this idea that when we came to Christ, when we got saved because we know Jesus and because he's in our lives, our life is going to be good.
[50:07] Everything's going to be better. And we take that promise of glory one day and we impose it on today. And our expectation of God is that glory is now.
[50:20] And we confuse the teaching of the Bible. In reality, Jesus said, you're going to have tribulation. Take up your cross and follow me.
[50:32] Walk with me through suffering. Walk with me through hardship. The second word I wrote down, and if you'll write it down, is we moralize. And if you'll want to define this, we determine or we try to determine a behavioral cause.
[50:47] We try to connect what's going on in our lives to some behavior. What did I do that God is allowing this? We reduce God to a cosmic scorekeeper, continually rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior.
[51:05] And can I tell you, we might talk more about this tomorrow. God doesn't punish you if you're his child. I know there's a couple of you going, no. No. God does not.
[51:18] If. Let me ask you a couple questions. You guys talk to me out loud. Did Jesus die for your sins on the cross? Did he die for all of them?
[51:31] So every single sin was paid for on the cross. So all of the wrath of God for your sin, all of the punishment that's due for your sin was poured out on the cross. Then God, if God is punishing you, he's very unjust in doing so.
[51:47] If he punishes you, either Jesus didn't pay at all and there's something left to pay. Or he's getting double payment. There is no punishment left.
[51:58] I know that sounds foreign to us because we've created this God that is somewhat of a tyrant. That if we're being good, he blesses us. And if we're not being good, he punishes us.
[52:09] All right. We confuse the Bible teaching of chastening with punishment. We reduce God to an earthly parent who, it's a cops and robbers game.
[52:21] God's the cop and I'm trying not to get caught. And when I get caught, he punishes me. Which means I'm going to run from him and hide from him and hide my sin from him so I don't get caught, which is a game. Because there is no hiding and getting caught with God.
[52:35] Right? He knows it all. And, you know, we grow up hearing the story of Jonah. We grow up being told, if you disobey God, God's going to send a whale to swallow you too.
[52:47] Can I tell you something? That is unbiblical teaching. The whale was not Jonah's punishment. The whale was God's grace. How was the whale God's grace?
[53:02] Jonah was destroying himself. Jonah was running from his loving father. Jonah was so self-destructive that either when he came time to repent and obey his loving father, he said, throw me overboard.
[53:23] Just kill me. And God said, I'm not going to let you destroy yourself. And he saved Jonah with a whale. Now, I know.
[53:34] You grew up thinking Jonah was punished by being in the belly of the whale. No. Jonah was saved by the whale. Jonah got a second chance because of the whale. God was good to send the whale.
[53:50] I know I'm confusing you. God doesn't punish you. He punished Jesus. And when we try to moralize our trials, we try to figure out, why is this happening? What did I do?
[54:03] And that's really bad theology. Trials happen to everybody regardless of their behavior. Look at Job. He did nothing to deserve what happened to him.
[54:14] It wasn't something that could be moralized. Thirdly, we try to minimize. In other words, we almost trivialize scripture. We come to somebody that's got some horrible, horrific tragedy, pain unfolding in their lives.
[54:29] And we say things like, well, you lost that loved one two months ago. You should be over that by now. God's grace is sufficient. And we take huge pain and huge loss and we try to dismiss it like you could flick it off your sleeve or something.
[54:48] And we use scripture to minimize it. And it's not minimizable. It's huge. It hurts. It's overwhelming. It's difficult.
[55:02] And we try to spiritualize, moralize, or minimize. But there's thirdly a biblical response. And this is where I want to finish for tonight. We're done. I want you to write down what's on the slide.
[55:13] I want to finish telling you the story very quickly. You can't fix your trials. You can't escape them. You can't logic through them.
[55:24] You can't figure out why. You can't make God come back to your script. You can't control God. You can't make him a genie and rub the lamp and get him to do what you want him to do. What you can do is claim his promise.
[55:39] I will be with thee. And you can accept that hardship in life is the precursor of blessed, awesome, wonderful eternity.
[55:53] And it just is a part of a fallen time, space, existence. A sin-ravaged humanity.
[56:06] We left that fence. We prayed together. We made a couple phone calls. We went back home. We waited for the kids to get home from church. Dana said, when are you going to tell the kids?
[56:16] I thought about waiting until the next day or a few days. And I thought, no, right now. I'm not going to play a game. We're going to talk right now when they get home. They walked in the door. My son Lance was the first one on the door.
[56:27] He looked at our faces. He could tell we'd been crying. He said, what's wrong? I said, just come in. We went into the living room. We sat down. The kids are panicked. They could just tell there's something real bad happening.
[56:40] And I said, guys, and to be honest with you, this is the hardest moment of my life, I think, up to this moment, up to this day. And I said, guys, God's giving us a trial.
[56:53] And I said, I just want to say before we even tell you what it is, God is good and it's going to be okay. Whatever happens, it's going to be okay. And I explained to them the cancer and the situation and, you know, the possibilities and what the next year would hold for us and treatment and all that stuff.
[57:13] They cried and my wife cried and I cried. And we kind of took, you know, 15 minutes there and we just cried. You would have thought, man, what a bunch of women. I mean, really, it was like a chick flick on a, I mean, it was just really bad.
[57:25] We were just all crying and teared up and everybody was hugging me like I was already dead, you know, or like I was going to be dead tomorrow. And after a few minutes, I said, okay, everybody, dry your tears for a minute.
[57:39] We've got a lot of time to cry and there will be lots of tears, I'm sure. And they all sat up and they looked at me. And I got, at this time, I've got a 16, I got a, no, let me think here.
[57:49] I got a 19-year-old son, I got a 16-year-old son, and I've got a 10-year-old daughter. This was three years ago. Three years ago from this month, actually. And I said, now, guys, I said, a trial is a gift.
[58:07] And I know they didn't get it. Some of you are going, how could that be a gift? I said, God gives us a trial to steward for him. And it's something that we can use to magnify him.
[58:21] It's something we can use to help others see him. And I said, we can't control the trial, but we can control our decisions, our choices. And this is what we're going to do.
[58:32] We're going to make an agreement as a family. These are the decisions we're going to make. I said, we're going to love God. We're going to trust God. We're going to live for God for the rest of our lives, no matter what.
[58:45] And I looked at each of my kids. I said, I'm not going to lie to you. I might be dead in a couple years. I might be dead in five years. This cancer could be cured, and then it might come back.
[58:55] I said, there's no, we don't know. I said, but no matter what, no matter what. I looked at my kids, and I say this to you, just like I said to them.
[59:07] There's something worse than being dead. There's something worse than dying, okay? And that would be not knowing God, not loving God, not having his presence.
[59:20] And I said, guys, I know I'm going to be fine. Live or die. If I die, I'm going to be in heaven. I said, but no matter what, for the rest of your life, for the rest of my life, we are going to, from this day forward, we're going to love God by faith.
[59:34] We're going to choose to love him. We're not going to question him. We're going to love him. We're going to trust him because he's trustworthy. We can't see what he's doing, but he knows what he's doing. And we're going to live for him, no matter what, the rest of our lives.
[59:46] And I said, Lance, do you promise me? And I went, Larry, do you promise? Haley, do you promise me? Dana, no, I didn't do it to Dana because we were already on board. And I said, okay, now we're going to pray.
[59:59] And each of my kids promised me, Dad, no matter what happens, we'll love God. We'll trust God. We'll live for God. I can't tell you how God walked with us through that trial.
[60:16] I'll just tell you this in closing. My salvation, my marriage with my wife, Dana, the birth of my three children, getting to pastor Emmanuel Baptist Church, and cancer.
[60:37] Those are the seven best things that ever happened to me. You guys are like, you are one sick dude.
[60:47] No, I'm just telling you, the way God showed up and the way God walked with us every day in that trial was, it's indescribable.
[61:01] It's indescribable how God will be with you in the waters. He will be with you in the fiery furnace if you acknowledge him, if you faith him, if you reach out for him.
[61:15] The Bible, in the story of the storm, the disciples in the boat, the Bible says that Jesus walked out to them on the water and it says in one of the accounts, he would have passed by.
[61:27] But they saw him and they thought he was a ghost. Remember this? They thought he was a ghost. And they cried out and then they realized it was him and then he says to them, it is I, be of good cheer.
[61:40] I mean, they're falling apart. And he says, it's I, it's me. Everybody be happy. Happy birthday to you. I mean, congratulations, it's me.
[61:53] That's weird. But it says that he would have passed by. It's almost like they were there struggling and toiling and trying to save themselves and Jesus was waiting to be acknowledged and when they saw him, then he got involved.
[62:08] And tonight, what I challenge you to do in your off script season, stop trying to figure it out. Stop asking why. Stop, don't go the human route of demonizing and don't stay too long and being traumatized.
[62:23] Don't stay too long in that position. Don't go the, the pseudo spiritual route of, of trying to, you know, moralize everything or minimize everything. That, this stuff is big and hurtful.
[62:35] Just decide, I'm not in control. God is. And God, I'm gonna love you, trust you, live for you. It's all you can do. It's all you can do.
[62:46] But can I tell you, it's all you need. If you've got him, you're gonna be okay. You say, well, it's easy for you to say, you survived.
[62:58] Yeah, but when we made that decision, I didn't know if I had one more year, two more years, ten more years. And you know what? God showed up very personally every day and walked with me every day.
[63:16] And some days were miserable and some days were better and some days I was puking my guts out and some days I was fine. But through every day, God said, hey, let's do this together. Let's have our heads bowed and our eyes closed, would you?
[63:29] Love God, trust God, live for God. I want you to think about your off script time. I want you to think about who you perceive God to be.
[63:41] I want you to think about your response. Now, I just ask you tonight, why don't you let go of the logic? Why don't you let go of the attempts to wrangle God into control, wrestle your circumstances in control?
[64:02] Why don't you stop resisting and just accept where God has you and accept that he's with you and decide intentionally, resolve your response intentionally.
[64:17] I'm going to love God. I'm going to trust God. I'm going to live for God. I'm going to ask Pastor Gardner to come and close out our invitation after I pray.
[64:28] Lord, I thank you for this time and thank you for the attention of your people and I pray that your word will stay with us tonight. I pray that those in difficulty and hardship would decide to trust you, to love you, to live for you no matter what.
[64:45] Help us to make right decisions in this moment, we pray. This message was recorded at Vision Baptist Church in Alfred, Georgia. For more information, log on to www.visionbaptist.com where you can find our service times, location, contact information, and more audio and video recordings.
[65:03] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.