I forget it you can be damn sure it is a damn week.  Everything goes to pot!  I have my mind and my focus and my emotions and my attention, and usually my will, on every center that’s available to me except the Lord.  It’s so simple!  It’s like everything else we get off the track on.

         Now you don’t have to be a spiritual nut walking around “Praise the Lord!  Praise the Lord!” all day long.  But in the envelope of our consciousness you keep yourself aware of a basic truth of Christianity and the whole Hebrew-Christian Faith, or what in the world you doing here anyway?  Remember I’ve taught you the distinction in the Old Testament as we studied the Heroes of Faith?  You remember the distinction between Elijah and everybody else around him?  When he came on the scene there was something about Elijah himself that made people think of God.  When he showed up they got very spiritual.  He comes on the scene where the widow’s starving to death and she says, “The Lord God of Israel.”  He comes upon Obadiah—good man because he hid the prophets when Ahab was gonna kill them but it took Elijah to come on the scene—then suddenly he got spiritual:  “The Lord of Israel liveth.”  Elijah—no matter where you meet him there was a little footnote: “The Lord God of Israel liveth, in whose presence I stand.”  The more you live, the more you get involved, the more things come in that crowd out the reality of God’s presence and the reality of that message we’ve been preaching for the last 6 weeks—God’s care over us, His knowledge about you and me, His concern for us, His call on our life.

          I’ve said, more than any other philosophy of life, Christianity teaches individuality, because in God’s plan He has something each of us can do in relation to Him that no other person in eternity can do, much less will do.   And you have to settle it when the fretting comes, and I had to settle it every time I have come through any

circumstance of fretting—“Can I trust?  Can I trust the Lord?”  That’s the issue.

Now, frankly, the way He’s been acting this last year I’ve doubted it plenty of times.  Come on you smug hypocrites….  At least fifty-two times this past year—that’s once a week—I’ve said “Look Fella, I’ve been telling them You can be trusted!  And this is another fine mess You got me into.”  You see, every so often you have to come to a fix on this.  I don’t know what kind of mess He’s got you into today but you know that I’ve told you this many times.  I didn’t have visions—I wish I had a vision like my Dad had.  I never saw a 70-foot-tall Jesus.  Frankly, if I’d seen a 7-inch one materialize I’d not be very braggadocios about it.  I’d be on my face.  Most of the time in the Bible when they see an angel they’re down flat.  That’s the most convincing proof they’re telling the truth.

I lost my Faith.  I know what it is to wander in uncertainty for years.  And I came back from a hard study of the Resurrection and I believe He came out of that tomb—not because somebody told me or brainwashed me into it, from a hard study!  There isn’t any other explanation.  And you know I’ve said, and I preach it every year, if you came along and said what Jesus said about Himself I’d probably think you ought to be committed, but if you came out of the tomb 3 days after we locked you in it I’d take another look at you, particularly if you sailed off into the blue in another few days.  And once I made that commitment to trust this Lord, when the fretting comes it’s usually because I’ve got my eyes in the busyness on everything else.  And your Pastor has to start settling it as he goes into 1988, as you do—is the Lord trustworthy?   Because if He is I better run and renew that leaning on Him.