Let's go to the 44th Psalm. See, if you think you're something,
you can't praise God. You've got to see what you are.
All of your righteousnesses are as filthy rags. I'm doing this
for the Lord. The Lord never needed you. The
Lord works in you and me to His praise and glory. What an honor
it is to be used for God. It is. Just an instrument. That's all. The hammer never
builds a house. It takes a carpenter. And I know
a lowly carpenter that builds great houses. The temple of God. The Lord Jesus Christ. Alright. Psalm 44. You're there? Verse 1. We have heard with our
ears. We have heard with our ears,
O God, our fathers have told us what work Thou didst in their
days and in the times of old." I want to talk to you just a
little bit. What are you telling your children? What are you telling
your children? I brought some very important
gifts here today. This is Dora, Private Adventure. How many of your kids know Dora?
How about this one, Barbie and the Three Musketeers? And this one, Princes and the
Pauper. Oh, I got a bunch of them. The
Diamond Castle. By the way, I've seen most of
them. And Miss Pam's seen them a hundred
times, right? Very big journeys. Strawberry
shortcake. What are you telling your four-year-olds?
Or your three-year-olds? Our granddaughter, Hayden, when
she comes over, she says, Papa, you will be the prince. And I'm
the princess. Go get the chariot." And of course, whatever she says,
that's what I do. That's what grandpas do. But
Miss Pam got me thinking about this several weeks ago. And it's
really been on my heart. She knows about the group Strawberry
Shortcake. She knows about princes and princesses.
She knows about Cinderella. But I personally have never heard
her say anything about Jesus Christ. Shame on her grandfather. My personal testimony is this.
God did a wonderful thing in blessing me at four, five, six,
seven and eight years old with wonderful Sunday school teachers. Carolyn Hines and Mrs. Hayes were my Sunday school teachers
early on. They watched for my soul. They
told me great stories about God. But they would also tell me at
four and five years old of my need of Jesus Christ. And even
though I was very young, it bothered me that I didn't know Him. I
knew there was something wrong with me. By the time I was four, I knew
something was wrong. By the time I got six, seven,
I really knew something was wrong. And by the time I was eight,
I was lost. William Bixler was my Sunday
school teacher at eight years old. He made the Bible come alive
for me. I loved his Sunday school classes.
As I grew up, he never turned loose of me. When I went to seminary,
he'd write me. When I'd come home, he'd ask
me questions. I remember one Sunday morning
at Grace Church, he walked up to me and he said, I've got a
question for you. He said, Ephesians 2 says that
we're saved by grace, but it also says we are His workmanship
created in Christ Jesus unto good work. I want you to think about that.
And one of these days, come back and tell me what that means.
And of course, one of the sermons, one of my first printed messages
was, We Are His Workmanship. And I preached that all over
the world. But there was somebody responsible for that who challenged
me with that passage of Scripture. Brother Bixler. What are you telling your kids? What are you telling your kids? We're living in a country, a country filled with sadness. We'll be sad tomorrow to some
degree. We know the answer. for the drug
problem. And it's not present-day music. It's God Almighty. You're going to serve a God. And if you're not careful, your
God's going to kill you. Whatever's biggest in your life,
that's the God you serve. And it can be money, it can be
job, it can be children, husband, wife, crack, heroin, or whatever. But it's not going to get you
where you want to be. Not really. Only God through
Jesus Christ can do that. So I just want to challenge especially
all of you that have come to Christ, out of the drug culture,
into the glorious light and liberty of Jesus Christ. Yes, your kids
have sat in the back seat. and slept in the back seat of
your car. Yes, you fed your kids out of
a dumpster. Yes, you've lived in a vacant
house, but you're not there anymore. So I don't know what to tell
my children. Listen, you have a story of once I was lost and
now I'm found. Let me tell you, baby, about
mommy. How about that one? Let me tell
you how God reached down into Lodibah. Let me tell you what
a miracle I am of the grace of God. You know, I came in here today
thinking this. I've got goosebumps right now.
Let me kind of collect myself here a little bit. Do you know
right now God could save you? Do you know when God comes, He
comes like the clap of thunder? And He's powerful to do that.
He's able to do that. Do you know that God right now
is able to save every person in here who doesn't know Him? Right now, your life can be turned
around by a powerful God. God is able to do that. Little
mixed up fool that you are. God is able to take you and turn
you inside out. And give you a real high the
rest of your life. God's able to do that. Don't
tell me you don't have anything to tell your kids. I get to thinking about The many
blessings, the awesome things that God has done here. And I
told you this two or three times. Preachers come up to me and pastors
of large churches and, you know, they come up to me like this.
And I appreciate them loving me. Give me a handspace. We're
praying for your brother down there. Down there in Lodibar. Down there amongst prostitutes.
Crackheads, and I'm praying for you in that dead church that
hasn't seen a miracle of God in years. Wonder when is the last time
a real bona fide pedigreed crack addict has been saved in some
of these suburbanite churches. Wonder when. You know, Christ
came to save sinners. I've always asked God this, send
me some big sinners. Send me some big, I want to see
some big sinners. All you little sinners need a
little gospel. Us big sinners need a big gospel
and a big God. Well, I'm probably getting ahead
of myself. Have you ever thought about, I was thinking this morning,
by the way, we could be here for hours because my printer
wouldn't print, so I had no notes. And what that means, I can go
any which way I want. I was thinking this morning probably
that Abraham sat down with his children and told them about
the great flood. Your children know about the
great flood? How the world got so wicked. Just got so wicked that God said,
I'm going to wipe this thing out. In fact, the strong words
are, it repented God that He had made the world. I know some
of you are going, that's not theologically correct that God
would repent. I'm not talking to you anyway.
I'm talking about telling your kids Bible stories. And probably Abraham said, you
know, things like, God told this one guy that found grace in the
eyes of the Lord. And he was a nobody. Noah was
a nobody, boys and girls. That's probably what Abraham
said. He said, in fact, he got drunk after the flood. And all
those people, when it began to rain, and they'd never seen it
rain before, and they'd never seen an ark before. It took him
120 years to build the thing. Boy, you've got to have faith
at this thing. You've never seen an ark. You're going to hope
it floats. If there's really such a thing as Water covering
the earth, right? I remember being told those stories.
I remember being told this too. First of all, Noah found grace! Unmerited favor. Noah wasn't
better than anybody else. So from a child I've heard, if
you're going to get saved, it's going to be by grace. It's going
to be unmerited favor. And I'm telling you from the
top of my head to the bottom of my feet, I know it's grace
today. I've known this by grace a long
time. I've rejoiced in this grace a long time. Somebody taught
me that. Or how about the story about
the Israelites leaving Egypt? Boy, I used to love Brother Bixler
to tell that story about how God sent all the plagues and
the Pharaoh said, I'm not going to let them go. I don't know
the Lord and I will not let Israel go. He said, you will, because I
shall. And God began to send them plagues.
If I had frogs everywhere, in my bed, in the flower, in the
sugar, in the house, frogs everywhere, I think really real quick I'd
repent and say, let them go! That always fascinated me about
the frogs and the plagues that God sent. Pharaoh wouldn't let
them go. He let them go, three million
of them. And I love this part of that story. I'm recalling
this from my Sunday school class, right? I thought, actually, if
Hayden had been here, I was going to have her see how long she'd
sit still with me up here, and I was going to tell her these
stories. So you'd get the point. So I can drive the point home.
Where are your kids today? Where are your grandchildren
today? And what have you not told them,
yet you have experienced? Amen? You know, we sang, Oh Happy
Day. We could have sung it again.
I'd have been just as happy. But I want to tell you this.
This ought to be the most exciting place in all the world for your
kids, for our kids. They ought to be able to see
this is a great time for us here. God is doing Red Sea things here
for us. He is. And God said, I love that
verse. And this I learned in Sunday
school too. Let me just come down here. I don't have any notes
anyway. So, I love this verse. God said to Moses and to the
Israelites, now when all three million of you leave, Not a dog
is going to bark. Now, we only have about 66,000
people here in Pontiac, but if we all just got up and left with
all the dogs that are in this city running around, one of them
is going to bark. But God said, when the three
million of you leave, not a dog is going to bark because I want
you to know that I make a difference between you and the Egyptians. In other words, I chose you.
I loved you. I predestinated you. I will never
leave you nor forsake you. Do you tell your kids those kind
of stories? Jonah and the Whale. I always loved that one too.
I was always asking, some of you have asked too, how do you
know it was a whale? I don't know it was a whale. It was a
whale of a story, though. In other words, it was a big
fish. And God prepared the fish. And Jonah said, I'm not going.
But God had said, you are going. And then Jonah got all mad, you
know, and sulked when he got there, and the people didn't
repent real quick. He wanted God to kill them all. And God
showed compassion, remember? But the Bible says, They threw
Jonah overboard, and he went down, down, down, down, until
he learned a great lesson. And I was taught this in Sunday
school. You remember what Jonah said when that whale upchucked
him on dry land? He said, salvation is of the
Lord. Oh, listen, you'll never praise
God until you go to Whales Belly University. When you get your
degree in Wales Valley University, you're going to say, what a great
thing God has done for me. We used to sing at Grace Church,
save, save, save. Saved by His power divine. Saved to new life sublime. Do you feel that? Do you sense that? No wonder kids don't go to church.
We haven't told them the great stories. I can remember dead
services at Grace Church. And I can also remember getting
up on a Sunday morning thinking, Dear God, please be there and
make this an exciting time. It was kind of exciting seeing
a happy day, wasn't it? And for all of you sophisticates
who can't move in church, church shouldn't be like this. Amen. Amen. It shouldn't be that
way from a Catholic standpoint. And then the chosen frozen in
the Baptist church, it shouldn't be that way. Church ought to
be a happy place. Hey, my sins are gone. Buried
in the deepest seas. That's good enough for me. I
shall eternally praise God my sins are gone. telling your children great things
that God has done. We've got to start talking it
around here. Some of you don't tell your testimony.
I don't understand that. Listen, it ought to pop out of
you. My dad had bird dogs, and one
of them was very special to him, named Tilly, Old Tilly. And I
can remember my dad saying this. He said it for a joke, but I
don't think my mom laughed. People would say, do you have
a picture of Mrs. Clark and the children? And my
dad would go, no, but I have a picture of Tilly, my bird dog. Do your children have a picture
of Christ? Or do they have a picture of Strawberry Shortcake and Cinderella? What are your kids thinking about?
You know, they're little adults. Did you know that? Don't think
God can't save a four-year-old. Oh, too young, too young. You
know, I've been raised in the Calvinistic churches where, you
know, if you don't know the five points, you can't get saved.
The Bible doesn't say you have to know the five points of Calvinism.
The Bible says, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt
be saved. If you ever get to a point where
you just trust Him, right? You just trust Him. And then
you can learn how great He is. and how gracious He is, right?
You grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen,
do this too. Not only tell your children about
the great things that God has done that you know about. You
know, everyone here, many of you here, how many of you have
been here with me, say, ten years? Youngin, you've been here ten
years. Who else? Anybody else? Yep, yep, yep,
yep, yep. Okay, so there's some of you
that could tell about Seneca Street before God got on the
street. Is that right? Some of you could
tell about Seneca Street. And you could say, you know,
we got a poor pastor. He had no money. We were a bunch
of ragtags. All of you can tell this story.
You know we own about 98 pieces of property here in the city
of Pontiac? Do you know that we're right on the verge of inhabiting
clutch cargo and throwing the cage wrasslers out and the boos
out and we're moving in? Do you know that soon our budget
will run around $14 million? And just look at us. Good Lord,
look at us. There's not a millionaire here
today. And if you are, I want to talk to you after service. You think about the people God
uses. You know, I didn't know this until just a few, maybe
a week or so ago. But one of my heroes, my pastor
is Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that God called, saved as a 15-year-old
boy and called him to preach and was anointed of the Lord. and built the Metropolitan Tabernacle
in the hood in London, England, right in the hood. They used
to have a saying among the taxi cab drivers, of course it was
horse and buggy, people would get into the buggy and say, over
the bridge to Charlie's house. That was the Metropolitan Tabernacle. It would be like now, you know,
from Bloomfield Hills to Clark's house. Down here amongst them. Anyway,
you've got a story to tell what God's done here. That's what
I was trying to say. You've seen enough. If you've
been around here a month or so, you can tell what great things
God is doing. Set your kids down and tell them.
I didn't know this until about ten days ago. Another one of
my heroes is George Whitefield. George Whitefield was outlawed
in the churches in England. Came to America. outlawed here
and just would begin to preach. 20,000 people would listen to
George Whitfield in a cornfield, or what was a cornfield, or out
in the open air. They would chant after George
had preached a message, we'll hear you again, we'll hear you
again, we'll hear you again, we'll hear you again. He would
sometimes preach four messages and nobody would leave. Oh, to
have an audience like that, that would be great. Finally, on one
occasion, he said, I am exhausted. I cannot stand up. Two men got
up, put their arms under his armpits, and held him up, and
he preached two more times. I want to be able to tell a story
like that. I want to tell that kind of story. God has done great things for
us wherever we're glad, right? So you have situations that you
can tell of the greatness of God and what He has done for
you to your children. And I hope you'll do that.