For every pain we must bear,
there is a reason. For every falsehood that is said,
for every tear that is shed, there is a reason. For every
grief, for every trial, for every weary, lonely mile, there is
a reason. We will trust our Lord as we
should, knowing that all this will work for our good, because
our God is the reason. In 1947, which was a long time
before many of you were ever born, a 21-year-old man named Henry
Thomas Mahan became the song leader and the assistant pastor
of the Pollard Baptist Church in Ashland, Kentucky. The pastor
was named Don Wells, and Don Wells wanted to have a meeting.
He wanted to have a two-week meeting, but he didn't know where
to look or who to ask. So he asked a fellow named Dr. Charlie Stevens, who was a school
principal. Dr. Stevens, do you know anybody?
He said, yes, sir, I do. He said, I would recommend that
you have Ralph Barnett. Ralph Barnard, who is he? He
said, well, he's billed as the evangelist who is different.
Brother, he was different. And so they had that meeting,
they scheduled that meeting with Barnard, and when Ralph Barnard
was introduced, and it was a large church, and it had a balcony
like this, and the balcony was filled, the balcony was across
this way, filled, church was packed. 21-year-old Henry Thomas Mahan
was right down on the first row. And you never knew what Ralph
Barnard was going to do. He wore his glasses like that,
you know. And he stood up there in the
pulpit, and you wondered if he even knew where he was. Then
all of a sudden, he looked right down at this 21-year-old assistant
to the pastor, song leader, Henry Mahan, and he said, son, and
Henry looked around, yes, I'm talking to you. He said, do you
know Romans 8, 28? And Henry said, yes, sir, I do. He said, stand up and let's hear
it. So Henry stood up and he said, we know that all things
work together for good to them that love God. And he sat down. Brother Barnard stood there and
he said, is that all it says? No, sir, that's not all it says.
Well, stand up, son, let's hear all of it. So he stood up and
he said, we know that all things work together for good to them
that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. And suddenly, as if a new energy
had been infused into him, Rothbard had said, purpose, purpose, purpose. He said, son, God never does
anything by accident. He does it on purpose. When the
Lord Almighty created the heavens and the earth, did he do it accidentally
or did he do it on purpose? Did he determine that he would
create a universe, a cosmos on purpose? That he would create
galaxies populated with millions and millions of stars and planets
that he would create a habitable planet called Earth lighted by
millions of stars and a moon by night and a sun by day? Is the universe an accident? I say he created it on purpose.
The earth rotates on its axis, doesn't feel like it, but it
rotates on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour at the equator.
What would happen if the earth rotated at only 100 miles an
hour? Just for starters, days and nights
would be 10 times longer. Every 24-hour day period would
lengthen to 240-hour days. How would you like to have an
80-hour work shift? Going to work there, yeah, when
you getting off? About three days. What would happen to our
vegetation? What would happen to the grass?
What would happen to the trees? What would happen to the crops?
Everything would either burn up during the day or freeze during
the night. Is it an accident that the length of our days is
perfectly suited for humans, for animals, and for vegetables?
Is it an accident or was it designed that way on purpose? Our sun
sustains life on earth and it has a surface temperature of
about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that an accident that the
earth is just far enough away from the sun to be warmed by
it and not burned up? The moon is 186,000 miles from
the earth. Suppose it was only 50,000 miles
away from the earth. Would anything change? You bet
it would. Twice a day, all the oceans would
cover the earth. Tides would be so large that
we'd all drown. Is that by accident? All the
planets move in their orbits, and they move in perfect harmony.
Ever wonder why they don't crash together? The harmonious relationship
of the planets is perfectly uniform to ensure continuous safety for
those of us who live here on the earth. Was that by design? Was that by purpose? Or was that
by accident? The exact number, weight, and
measure in every part of everything that you see in the heavens guarantees our security here
on earth. The air we breathe, 99% of it
is oxygen and nitrogen, 21 parts of it and 78 parts of it, the remaining
1% composed of all kinds of things, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, argon,
helium, krypton, neon, all these things. So just so we can breathe
and breathe without laboring, did you realize that a child
has 60,000 miles of blood vessels? And a human being, a grown adult,
has 100,000 miles. You know that there's 100 trillion
cells in your body? That your body is made up of
206 bones, 600 muscles, and 78 organs? that you have a circulatory system,
you have a respiratory system, you have a digestive system,
you have a skeletal system, your bones, you have a muscular system,
you have a nervous system, you have a reproduction system. Is
all of that by accident or by design? You, my friend, as the Bible
says, are fearfully and wonderfully made. carefully and wonderfully. Now, did God create man and put
him on the earth on purpose, or are we just the result of
evolutionary accidents? Are we merely the products of
chance, random mutations, or did the almighty God create us
on purpose? I wandered down in the basement
this morning to Dr. Pasilakwa's class, nice class,
large class, You ought to make yourself available to go down
there. And I noticed you had a piece of paper there on the
front. And one of the things that said
on that paper is basically this, I'm paraphrasing, says that God
prepared a savior before there ever was a sinner. Did you know
that? There was a savior before there
was a sinner. What does that mean? It means
God knew that when he put man on the earth, he knew it was
going to fall. All of that was by design. All
of that was done on purpose. Now listen, this is where we
get personal. I don't know your life story. I don't know where
you came from. I don't know where you were born.
I don't know who your parents are. I don't know about your
growing up years, but I know this. Nobody is born into this
world by accident.