Once again, it's a great blessing
for us to be here with you all. Thank you. If you'll turn with
me in your Bibles to Mark chapter 7. Mark chapter 7. It has been said that all believers
are recovering Pharisees. And I certainly find that to
be true in my own life. I desperately need to hear the
gospel of God's free grace in the finished work of Christ because
there's something in me that's drawn to works, it's drawn to
the law. And I would find a false hope
there if I didn't hear the gospel. In our text this evening, we
have the story of the Lord giving clarity of speech to a man who
had an impediment of speech. And I can relate to this man
because I feel as if often I have an impediment of speech. Oh,
how desperate I want to be able to speak clearly. And I know
the only way that we can do that is if the Lord is pleased to
do for us what He did for this man. It's been said that you
cannot preach Christ high enough, and that's true. You cannot preach
man low enough, and that's true. And you cannot preach grace free
enough, and that's true. And that's how I want to preach.
I want to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ. I want God, by His mercy,
to put us in our place and to cause us to see that there is
nothing that we can do to earn His favor, that it's already
been accomplished in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and that His grace is sovereign and it's free. We saw last weekend that Peter
spoke of Christ as the one to whom we are coming. And we're always needing to come
to Him. This matter of salvation is not
a past tense experience that we hang the hopes of our souls
on. Well, you know, that we're looking
back. No, we keep coming. And the reason we keep coming
is because of this sinful nature of works that are always there
with us. And if the Lord doesn't touch
us, we will speak a confusing message. We'll mix law and grace. There's
a sense in which, though this book is a book of Christ, no
question about it, in the volume of the book, it is written of
me. And beginning with Moses and
the Psalms and the prophets, he expounded unto them those
things concerning himself. This book is all about the Lord
Jesus Christ. That having been said, there's
a sense in which it also is a definition of law and grace. Every story,
every book defines law and grace and contrasts and compares the
two. And by this means, we hope that
the Lord will deliver us from the bondage of the law and enable
us to rest all the hope of our salvation. on the finished work
of the Lord Jesus Christ. I have two points to my message
this afternoon, this evening. The meaning of the miracle. What
does this miracle mean for you and me? And then the means of
this miracle. And there's four points of the
means. The meaning of the miracle is
it defines law and grace. The means by which the Lord performed
the miracle is that first, He took this man aside. Second,
He touched him. Third, He prayed for him. And
fourthly, He spoke to him. Now, if we're going to experience
in our hearts the miracle of grace, the Lord Jesus Christ
is going to have to take us aside, he's going to have to touch us,
he's going to have to pray for us, and he's going to have to
speak to us. And that's what this story is
about. This is not a miracle that is
somehow devoid of... I know a preacher who's always
talking about making the gospel applicable to the culture. And
one of the things that's impressed me in being here is though we
have different cultures and different experiences in life, the gospel
remains the same. We don't try to package the gospel
or make it relevant to a particular culture. We preach the same message. wherever we go. And we are preaching
the same message that the Apostle Paul preached. And we're preaching
the same message that every faithful gospel preacher of every generation
has ever preached. And it is relevant. It is relevant. We don't have to make it relevant.
people concern themselves with packaging the gospel so that
so that it will be appealing and relevant to men and that's
not the objective of preaching the objective of preaching is
to unpackage the gospel and reveal the truth of Christ in hopes
that the Spirit of God will make him known to the hearts of people
so So that's our hope. I hope this evening that the
Lord will make this miracle relevant to each of us. I've prayed for
Him to do that for me and I've pleaded with Him. I've pleaded
with Him to speak to me and to touch me and to loose my tongue
and to pray for me. And I hope that that will be
our heart's desire tonight. You have your Bibles open to
Mark chapter 7, if you'll look with me to verse 31. And again,
departing from the coast of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea
of Galilee through the midst of the coast of Decapolis, and
they being unto him I'm sorry. And they bring unto
him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech.
And they beseech him to put his hand upon him. And he took him
aside from the multitude, and put his finger in his ears, and
he spit and touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he
sighed, and saith unto him, Ephrathah, that is, be opened. And straightway
his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed.
And he spake plain, and he charged them that they should tell no
man. But the more he charged them,
so much the more, a great deal, they published it, and were beyond
measure astonished. I hope the Lord will make us
beyond measure astonished at the miracle of His grace in our
own hearts, and that we will leave here saying, He hath done
all things well. He maketh both the deaf to hear
and the dumb to speak. By nature, we're deaf to the
things of God. We're deaf to the voice of God.
And the way we speak is the way we hear. The reason why we have
a different accent than you all have, and we love your accent,
by the way, is because we're speaking the same way that we
hear, don't we? And so the only way we're gonna
speak clearly the things of God is if God clearly speaks to us. And this miracle is not. Miracles in the Bible are not
an end in themselves. They are a means to an end When
when those unbelieving Pharisees insisted that the Lord perform
a miracle He said unto them a wicked and perverse generation seeketh
after a sign No sign will be shown unto this generation except
for the sign of Jonah Now that's the the only miracle the only
miracle that God has given us to prove that the Father accepted
the offering that the Lord Jesus Christ made was the miracle of
the resurrection. And that's what the miracle of
Jonah is all about. He spent three days and three
nights in the belly of the whale and was brought forth. The resurrection
of the Lord Jesus Christ is the proof that God has given to His
church to say to us, I am pleased, I have accepted the offering
that my Son made on your behalf. He didn't make it to you, He
made it to me. And I could not allow my Holy
One to see corruption. I was obligated to raise Him
from the dead because He was faithful. He was faithful to
accomplish that for which I sent Him. What about all these other miracles
that we have in the Bible? You remember on the cross when
those unbelievers said, if thou be the Son of God, come down,
prove yourself to us. And I find people today that
are always looking for a sign. They want proof from God. And
I'm not just talking about the Pentecostals who do silly things,
insisting on some sort of supernatural manifestation of God's presence.
I'm talking about each of us who might think, well, you know,
if I had an experience, or if I had a feeling, or if I had
this or that, then I would have the confidence and the proof
that God has saved me. You know, the hymn we sing, feelings
come and feelings go, feelings are deceiving, my only warrant
is the Word of God, none else is worth believing. You remember,
we sometimes are tempted to think, well, if we just had a mountaintop
experience, you know, if I could just have an experience with
God that would be inexplicable, that would be the evidence that
I'm a child of God. Peter had one of those experiences
on the Mount of Transfiguration. You remember the experience he
had? And when he writes his epistle to the church, he says to us,
he says, we did not bring to you cunningly devised fables. We didn't make this up. We handled
the Word of God. We saw him with our own eyes.
We touched him and we were on the mountain when God spoke from
heaven. We heard the audible voice of
God from heaven on that mount of transfiguration, when the
veil of his humanity was taken away and the radiance of his
glory shined forth like the noonday sun. We were forced to the ground
and we heard the voice of God say, behold, this is my beloved
son, in him I'm well pleased, hear ye him. Peter speaks of
that experience in very lively terms, but don't miss the next
verse. The very next verse says, but
we have a more sure word of prophecy. For the word of God came not
by private interpretation, but holy men of God wrote as they
were moved by the Holy Spirit. What is the proof of our salvation? It's the promise of God. It's
the word of God. We're not looking for that mountaintop
experience. We believe Peter had it. But
even Peter said, we have a more sure word. We have something
that's more substantial. Peter may have been having a
vision. He may have been having a dream.
He wasn't relying upon that experience that he had on the Mount of Transfiguration. He hung all the hopes of his
salvation on the Word of God, the promises that God made and
the fulfillment of His Word in Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ
is the yea and the amen of God's Word. He is the fulfillment of
all of God's promises. That's what he came to do. And
so these miracles are not for the sake of having an experience. The blind man that was healed
here in our text, It wasn't long after this experience that his
eyes closed in death. The very sight that the Lord
gave him, or the blind man that was born blind, is the one I
was thinking about. This deaf man that's in our text,
His ears were closed and his mouth was shut when he took his
last breath. So the lame man who was given
strength to walk, the day came when his legs could no longer
bear the weight of his body. These miracles were temporal. They were temporal. And the meaning
of them wasn't the significance of the temporal. It was the significance
of the eternal. They're relevant to us today.
Remember when John was in prison and he sent word by his disciples
to the Lord and asked him, he said, Art thou the one? Or should
we look for another? And our Lord so tenderly and
compassionately said to John, you tell John, tell John that
the blind see, tell John that the deaf hear, tell John that
the lame walk, tell John that the dead are raised, and tell
John that the gospel is being preached to the poor. That will
encourage John. John will understand that this
is what I came to do. to give spiritual sight and spiritual
hearing and the ability to stand in God's presence and the hope
of resurrection. And that's my purpose. And that's the purpose of the
gospel, isn't it? We don't want to read these stories and see anything other than the eternal
significance of them. So, what is the meaning of this
miracle? Well, man by nature has an impediment
of speech. You can always tell a person
who has an impediment of speech, because every time they try to
talk, it comes out, I, I, I, I. That's a sure sign of a man who's
got an impediment of speech. You hear men talk about, I gave
my heart to Christ, I made a decision, we used to sing a song, I have
decided to follow Jesus. I know some of y'all sing that
song, terrible song, but that's when we had an impediment of
speech. We talked out of both sides of
our mouths. And the thing about an impediment
of speech is you can't make sense of it. You cannot make sense
of it. And an impediment of speech is
the mixing of law and grace. And no one can make sense out
of nonsense. An impediment of speech sounds
like this. God loves everybody, but most
of the people he loves he's gonna send to hell. Now that's an impediment
of speech. You can't make sense out of that.
Christ died for everybody, but most of the folks that he died
for are not going to make it to heaven. God is omnipotent and sovereign. He's all-powerful. Until he comes
up against man's free will. And then he becomes impotent.
He can't do anything. What they're portraying is an
irresistible force coming up against an immovable object.
That's an impossible scenario. You can't make sense of it. That's
an impediment of speech. But men will hold to that, won't
they? They'll say, well, God's an irresistible force. And man's
will is an immovable object. But in the end, man's will will
be moved. Or God's force will be stopped.
And man's will will be sufficient to stop it. That's an impediment
of speech. They will say that we're saved
by grace. We're not under the law. And
then just like those Judaizers that came in behind the Apostle
Paul in the church at Galatia, they will turn right around and
put you back under the law. They'll say that Christ is the
Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the
last. But then they'll say, well, you've got to do your part in
order to make what God did work for you. That's an impediment
of speech. It's the mixing of law and grace. They will say,
well, works is not the cause of one's salvation, but it certainly
is the evidence of it. And you need to look to your
works in order to make sure that you're a child of God. If you're
looking to your works either as the cause of your salvation
or the evidence of your salvation, you're not looking to Christ.
You're not looking to Christ. You see, all of religion has
an impediment of speech. Just like what we talked about
last weekend, the Tower of Babel. And you look at Babylon. Babylon, the destruction of Babylon
in the book of Revelation is God putting an end to man-made
religion. And that began at the Tower of
Babel. And what did they do at the Tower
of Babel? They said, we're going to get our, we're going to reach
out to heaven. We're going to build a tower. And what did they
build it out of? The scripture says they had brick
for stone and they had slime for mortar. Now that word slime
is the same word for pitch, which is the material that Noah used
to cover the ark. And it's the same word translated
atonement. The shed blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ is our atonement that protects us from the wrath of
God, just like it sealed that ark and kept Noah and his family
safe. Well, what does man do? God said,
when you build an altar, that's what they were doing in Babel.
They were building an altar. He said, don't, don't use the
stones. Don't put your hand to it. Don't
try to shape them and don't make steps on your altar. And that's
what religion is. Religion is, well, you got to
take step one and step two and step three. I've been to Mexico,
and I've seen those old temples that the Mayan Indians built
down there, and they would make their sacrifice on the top of
the temple, and all the way up that temple is steps. And that's
what the Tower of Babel was like. And God said, don't do it, because
if you make steps in your approach to God, what you're going to
do is expose your own nakedness. And you can just see a worshiper
going up those steps, those steep steps. and being able to see
up their skirts and the exposing of their nakedness. And that's
what God said will happen if you make steps. And if you put
your hand to the altar, if you put your hand to the stones,
you defile it. But that's exactly what they
did in Babylon. In Babel they made bricks. That's what the children of Israel
were doing in Egypt. Now Egypt is a picture of the
law. God says, I brought you out of Egypt. I broke the yoke
of that bondage. But that's what they were doing
in Egypt. They were under the taskmasters of the law, having
to produce a quota of bricks made by the hands of man. And
they never could, every time they'd get close to the quota,
what'd they do? They increased the amount of bricks that they
had to produce. And that's the way the law is. You can never
satisfy the demands of the law. But that's what men do with an
impediment of speech. They want to say, well, yeah,
we're saved by grace, but then they want to interject works
in with grace. And all religion does it. All
religion does it. I don't remember if I shared
this with you all last weekend, but it's such a simple illustration,
and I'm sure you've heard it before, but the gospel can be
defined with two letters. N-E. N-E are the two letters
that can define the gospel of God's free grace in the finished
work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every other religion of the world
is spelt D-O. Every religion of the world.
Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if you're talking
about Islam. Doesn't matter if you're talking about Catholicism.
Doesn't matter if you're talking about Protestantism, Presbyterianism,
Buddhism. The only difference between one
religion and another religion are the works that that particular
religion requires in order for you to get access to God. That's
the only difference. And it's all do, do, do. What is the gospel of God's free
grace? D-O-M-E. Oh, we're not mixing
long grace. We're not having an impediment
of speech. We're not talking out of both
sides of our mouth. We're making it clear. The Lord
Jesus Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone
that believeth. Men speak with an impediment
of speech when they say, well, the Bible is the authoritative
Word of God, until it comes up against our tradition. And every
religion has its tradition, and every denomination has its tradition.
I was telling somebody tonight, I grew up Roman Catholic, and
then I was freewill Armenian, and then I was Reformed Baptist,
and then the Lord was pleased to call me by His grace and reveal
Christ in me. And every one of those religions,
that I was in before, they would have said the Bible is the word
of God. And every one of them had traditions that were contrary
to the scriptures. And when the traditions were
compared to God's word, the traditions were chosen as authoritative.
That's an impediment of speech. The only question that you and
I have to ask about what we do and what we believe is, what
sayeth the Scriptures? What does God's Word say? That
settles all controversies, doesn't it? We don't speak with an impediment
of speech. We speak clearly. What does clear speech sound
like? Well, it sounds like what your pastor preached Sunday week
ago. In Him dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you
are complete in Him." Complete. We are the true circumcision
which worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and
have absolutely no confidence whatsoever in the flesh. When we preach the gospel, Our
whole purpose is to hold up Christ in His clarity, and in His simplicity,
and in His glory, and not mix man's works with God's work. It is finished. It's done. Christ is all and He is in all. And here's a clear statement.
As He is, so are we in this world. By virtue of our union with the
Lord Jesus Christ, God looks upon his people and he sees them
in Christ, being found in him, not having my own righteousness
which is of the law, but that righteousness which is by the
faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's clear. That's
simple. Christ gets all the glory. But
man in his pride wants to rob Christ of his glory, doesn't
he? And that's where the impediment of speech comes in. Here's a
clear glorious truth. He that sanctify us, that's the
Lord Jesus Christ. He that makes us holy and them
which are sanctified are all as one. Wherefore, he's not ashamed
to call them his brethren. God has made Him to be for us
all our wisdom, all our justification, all of our sanctification, all
of our glory, all of our glory, everything, all of our wisdom,
everything. Of Him, through Him, and to Him
are all things. I love what Isaiah said when he
when he said, Behold me, behold me. Set your affections on things
above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. What
Paul say in Galatians, Oh, be not entangled again with the
yoke of bondage. What can a man not hear? When
is a man deaf? He cannot hear that God delights
only in his son. He cannot hear that all of his
righteousness are as filthy rags before God. He can't hear it. He wants to justify himself.
And he speaks with an impediment of speech. Why? Because he's
not heard. My sheep hear my voice and they follow me. But the Lord
said to those Pharisees, you can't hear me. You're not my
sheep. You're not my sheep. I love what the Lord said when
he was talking to those Pharisees and they came back and said,
are you suggesting that we're blind? Are you suggesting that
we can't see? Well, we've been studying God's
word all our lives. We know the Bible and what the
Lord say to them. If you were blind, if you were
blind, then you could see. But because you say you can see,
therefore your sins remain. God's people come to the Lord
Jesus Christ. Lord, if you don't open the eyes
of my understanding, if you don't teach me, I'll have an impediment
of speech. If you don't enable me to see
the gospel, if you don't enable me to see the Lord Jesus Christ,
I won't be able to see. It is not of him that willeth,
nor of him that runneth. It is God that showeth mercy,
isn't it? That's so simple. That's so clear. The men want
to confuse it. And you can't ever talk about
the grace of God to someone without them bringing up James chapter
2. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I got
that. And I know it's all of faith
and it's all of grace, but you always tell a sheep when he butts,
don't you? A goat. Goats are always butting, aren't
they? And what would they say? But, you know, faith without
works is dead. Faith that outworks is dead.
And faith does work. But let me tell
you what James was addressing. One of the very first heresies
that came into the church was the heresy of Gnosticism. Now
these Gnostics were true antinomians. They were true hyper-Calvinists. They heard what was being said.
They heard that the believer has two natures. One nature is
perfect in the Lord Jesus Christ, without sin. And the other nature
can never be anything but sinful. And so here's the conclusion
that they drew. They said, well, if that be the
case, there's nothing I can do to affect my eternal destiny,
because Christ is the Lamb that was slain before the foundation
of the world. We're secure in Him. He made an offering for
God's people, and all of God's elect are already saved in Him.
And since my flesh here in this world can never be anything but
sin, therefore, let me just indulge myself in all the pleasures of
this world, and it won't make any difference how I live. It
won't make any difference how I live. Now you don't hear a
gospel preacher talking like that. You don't hear God's people
talking that way. But that was the natural conclusion
that they came to. And James said, you say you have
faith, but you have no works. You show me your faith without
your works. I'll show you my faith by my works. Now he didn't
say, I'll show me my faith by my works. He said, I'll show
you my faith by my works. And the truth is that we do see
faith in one another by each other's works, don't we? But
as soon as we start looking to our own works in order to get
affirmation of our faith, now we've lost sight of Christ. Now
we're speaking with an impediment of speech, aren't we? Oh, how
men rest the scriptures, how they twist God's word in order
to justify their impediment of speech. Condemnation has come into the
world. This is the condemnation. Light
has come into the world. And men love darkness rather
than light because their deeds were evil. Everyone that doeth
evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, that his
deeds might be reproved. Men don't want to come to Christ
because coming to Christ exposes the things that they're hoping
in for their salvation as evil. It exposes all their righteousness
for what it is, filthy rags. Oh, I pray that the Lord will
give us clarity of speech. I pray he'll enable us to speak
of the Lord Jesus Christ and of him only. Those men in Judges chapter 12
had an impediment of speech, didn't they? Jephthah was the
appointed judge over Israel. This is before the days of the
kings. Jephthah was the judge in Judges chapter 12. And the
Ephraimites came up against the Midianites and they were trying
to, the Ephraimites were pretending like they were Gideonites to
keep from being killed. And so Jephthah said, just ask
them to say Shiblah. And the Ephraimites could not
pronounce a Shibboleth. All they could say was Sibboleth.
They could not pronounce the S-H. And Jephthah had, I forgot,
35,000 of them put to death because they had an impediment of speech.
And what a picture of what God's going to do for those who cannot
speak clearly about the Lord Jesus Christ, who want to mix
law with grace, works with the finished work of the Lord Jesus
Christ. What are the means by which the
Lord gives this man his clarity of hearing and his simplicity
of speech? He loosens his tongue and he
opens his ears. What are the means? It's the
same means he uses now. The very first thing that our
text tells us is that he took him aside. Have you ever sat in a congregation
where the gospel is being preached and you feel like nobody else
is in the room, everything that's being said is being said to me?
That's the work of the Holy Spirit, isn't it? That's what we hope
for. That's what we pray for, that
God would take us aside. Because every time the Lord gives
a miracle of healing, And every time he gives salvation, and
every time he clarifies the gospel, he always takes his people aside. And he speaks clearly to them. You remember when Elijah was
running from Jezebel, after that experience on Mount Carmel, when
he had the prophets of Baal put to death, and Elijah went up
in the mountain. He went to Mount Nebo. Or no,
he went to Sinai is what he went to. And when he got there, the
Lord speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing here? Why did you run back to the law?
And so the Lord's going to speak to Elijah. And the scripture
says that the Lord sent a great wind so strong that it rent the
rocks, but the voice of God was not in it. And then the Lord
sent an earthquake, but God was not in it. And then he sent a
great fire, but God was not in it. And then he spoke with a
still small voice. He took Elijah aside and he spoke
to him. And God says, be still and know
that I am God. In our busy lives, the Lord speaks
by taking His children aside, giving them a quiet place, and
speaking personally to them. When the Lord arrested Saul of
Tarsus on the road to Damascus, the scripture says that there
were other men with him, and they heard the voice, but they
saw no man. Saul's the only one that saw
the Lord Jesus Christ. Saul's the only one that heard
his voice say, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? If God's
gonna speak to you and me, he's gonna take us aside. And that
doesn't mean physically he takes us aside. You remember the woman
with the issue of blood that crawled on the ground to get
to the Lord to touch the hem of his garment and the Lord said,
who touched me? There were a lot of people thronging
him. The disciples said, Lord, how
can you say who touched me? Everybody's touching you. Oh
no, virtue's gone out for me. Someone has been taken aside
from this crowd. I've ministered grace to one
person. What is the means by which God
opens our ears and enables us to speak? He takes us aside. And then what's he do? He touches
with his healing touch. You know, for years, because
I've read these stories where the Lord, you remember one time
He spit on the ground and made mud and put it on a man's eyes
and gave... And I thought, what's the significance of spitting?
And here He spits and touches the man's tongue with His fiddle. And the commentators have all
sorts of suggestions as to what it means, but scripture interprets
scripture. And if you go to Leviticus chapter
17, where the first mention of spitting is in the Bible. The
Scripture says that if an unclean man spits on a clean man, the
clean man becomes unclean. Even if he spits on his shoe.
If an unclean man spits on the shoe of a clean man, the clean
man's got to go wash all of his clothes, wash his body, in order
to recover his cleanliness. And here we have the only clean
man that ever was, the one who's holy, the one who's harmless,
the one who's undefiled, the one who is separate from sinners,
taking that which we would consider to be unclean and making a man
clean. You see, this is the touch of
the Lord Jesus Christ. He is transferring, if you will,
imputing to us His righteousness and making us clean. Here's the
opposite of what we read about in Leviticus law. Here's the clean
man making the unclean man clean by his spittle. What a miracle. What a, what
a glorious picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we, we need
him to touch us. We need him to pray for us. You see what
he did? He looks up to heaven. He wasn't
just looking up to heaven, he was communing with his Father.
And he said, Father, I thank Thee that Thou always hear me,
but I pray for their sakes. And I thank Thee that Thou hast
hid these things from the wise and the prudent and revealed
them unto babes. What was the difference between Judas and
Peter? They both did the same thing
that fateful night. They both did the same thing.
What was the difference between them? One of them was a child of the
devil and the Lord just let him do what he was going to do and
never interceded. What did he say to Peter? Peter,
be of good cheer. I've prayed for you. And when
you are converted, you teach the brethren. We have a priest
who is seated at the right hand of God, who ever lives to make
intercession for us. And if you read John chapter
17, you hear him praying for us. Father, I pray not for the
world, I pray for them which thou hast given me out of the
world. Thine they were, and thou hast given them unto me. Oh,
we're in need of the Lord Jesus Christ to intercede for us. Our
prayers are so feeble, aren't they? What James says, you pray amiss
that you might consume it upon your own lust. And how many prayers
we pray that are selfish, and how many prayers we pray that
the Lord mercifully says to us, no. But every prayer the Lord
Jesus Christ prayed, was right and holy and perfect before the
Father and was answered with a yes, yes. The Lord, in giving clarity of
speech to his people, he calls them aside, he touches them,
he prays for them, and then he speaks to them. In our text,
what did he say? Ephrata, that is, be opened. Oh, how desperate we are for
the Lord to speak to us. And never, never has He spoken
that His Word hasn't been accomplished. Right from the beginning, right
from the beginning in Genesis, what's the Scripture say? Let
there be light. And there was. And that's a spiritual
message, isn't it? The Lord says to each one of
us, let there be light. And if God calls on there to
be light, there's going to be light. There's going to be truth.
There's going to be life. God's people just want to hear,
they'll say, what does God say? What does God say? Lord, speak
to me. Turn me, Lord, and I'll be turned.
Speak effectually to my heart. Lord, don't let me just hear
the voice of a man. You know, what a man can teach
you, another man can un-teach you from, can he? What one man can convince you
of, another man can convince you out of. But what's the Lord
say? They shall be all taught of God. God teaches you something. If
you know you've heard something, you've heard the voice of God,
you've learned something from God, If the whole world turns
against you, you're gonna believe God, aren't you? You cannot believe
Him. You cannot, not once you've been
taught of God. Lord, speak. Speak to me. Take me aside. Touch me. Touch me. Pray for me. And speak
to me. And I won't have an impediment
of speech. Loosen my tongue, open my ears,
enable me to speak clearly about the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, here's
what God says. By your words, by your words,
the words you speak, you'll be justified. Or by your words,
you'll be condemned. You see, a man speaks what he's
heard. And we're going to give to Christ
all the glory if we've heard from him. And if we have an impediment
of speech, if we mix law and grace, by those words, we'll
be condemned. Might God give us the ability
to give Christ all the glory for our salvation.