You Will Find Freedom in the Old Testament

Amen, what a blessing. Sorry, Nate has to put up with my singing right next to him. I didn't realize what bitterness was in his heart till today.

Praise God. Lord, I do just want to say that I love you today. I want to proclaim it to the world.

As long as I live, Lord, I want to proclaim my love for you, my devotion to you. You deserve all of it, Lord, and more. I don't give you half the devotion I should.

I thank you, Lord, for your word. Your word is life. Jesus, you are the word, and the word is you.

One and the same in some inexplicable way that we can't comprehend. You are the word of God. You are the communication from God's heart to mankind, and you've given us a part of that in this written text, the Bible.

Lord, open our hearts. Open our hearts, Lord. Open our hearts and create within us a great hunger to know you, to be in your word.

There is no better place for our minds to be than in the word of the living God. Teach us to believe that, Lord, and to respond to that reality, not to just hear a nice little word at church on Sunday, and then go straight home back into the world, back into the YouTube, internet, television, all the junk out there, Lord. Put in us a great hunger to know your word, I pray.

Lord, you know how I struggle with this message, not the typical type of message I would give, and I just pray that you will bless it and anoint it for the sake of every listener, and that you would accomplish your good purposes through it. In Jesus' name, amen. The title of the message is, You Will Find Freedom in the Old Testament.

Or you could say, we could call it, Yahweh's love for the Old Testament. When the Holy Spirit breathed the word of the living God into the hearts of biblical writers, he infused it with the inherent power to go into a person's inner world, his inner man, and wash clean what has been corrupted in there. To clarify what is sinful or displeasing to the Lord.

To reconstruct the attitudes and perspectives of a person's heart. To value the things of God rather than the things of the world. To instill a passion to know God.

All of this is predicated on a person spending consistent time, quality time in the word, and responding to what's being read. It's not enough to just know the Bible as if it's a textbook or something. It's a living thing.

I can't explain that. This is just a piece of material, a bunch of pieces of paper. It's not that this is alive, but what it represents is alive.

It's living, and it has the power to go into a person and dramatically and powerfully affect that person. What a shameful thing that people who call themselves by the name of God spend so little time in it, so little interest in it. I want to talk today about the tremendous value of the Old Testament and why Yahweh loves it.

Now, I've preached sermons on a phrase in the Bible before. I probably have given a series of sermons on a phrase in the Bible. I don't know.

I can't think of it, but today I'm going to preach on 929 chapters of the Bible. Wow, what an undertaking. We may be here a few days, okay? The reason I'm doing this today partly is because the Old Testament has fallen on hard times in the church.

What I mean by that is that in spite of the fact that the Old Testament represents 77% of God's Word to us, there are those out there in the church, voices out there, teachers, preachers, scholars, and so on, who believe that the Old Testament is irrelevant to a New Testament believer. Yes, no, that's true. That is absolutely true.

In fact, I'll give you one example, a certain man who I actually really respected his ability to teach. He was a great teacher, died recently. If you were to go onto his website, you would find 1,600 sermons covering the 260 chapters of the New Testament, and six sermons covering the 249 chapters of the narrative section of the Old Testament.

Why is that? Because that man has a doctrinal system that is so important to him, and you have to focus on the New Testament to be able to espouse that doctrinal system. You know, the Old Testament doesn't work that way because the Old Testament has a simple message from beginning to end. It is this, obey God and live, disobey God and die.

It's really that simple, and I kind of love that about it, you know. With all its intricacies, and there are many, that's the basic message of the Old Testament. I was talking to Dave Weirich, who is not here this week.

He pops in occasionally. He's on our board, and he is a German Baptist, and he was telling me the other day about a conversation he got in with a woman of his tradition, his denomination, and the woman's son is addicted to pornography. Now, you know, can I just remind us all that pornography, as I have said many times, that industry is demonic from top to bottom.

Everything in it, every person in it is being controlled and inspired by demons. It's a wicked, evil, evil thing, and her son is wrapped up in pornography, like just about every one of you guys were, but she didn't want to send him here because we aren't within the traditions of her denomination, and he said to her, would you rather your son set that aside for nine months and came and got right with God, or would you rather he continued addicted to pornography? And she actually had to sit there and think about that. I don't know what ended up happening.

I don't know. Maybe her son's here. I hope so.

I don't know what happened, but that kind of thinking is out there way too much. You know, there's a place for traditions and doctrinal systems. I don't have any problems with that, not a bit, until it comes to the place where it divides brethren in the Lord, or it becomes a source of pride for a person, or it becomes actually bigger and more important than the actual Word of God it's supposed to represent.

It becomes a filter, and everything you read in the Bible has to go through that filter, or you're not in truth. That's basically the way it's presented. Let me put it this way to you.

I don't mean to offend anyone, although I typically don't really mind too much. I never got the class in, you know, social etiquette. I just lack the ability to be, I don't know, whatever it is, diplomatic.

But let me just put it to you straight. Don't talk to me about your doctrinal opinions until you can live out the simple truths of Scripture. I don't want to hear about your doctrines.

I want to hear that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. I want to hear about how you're laying your life down, sacrificially, unselfishly, to meet the needs of those who need help, and so on. I want to hear about that stuff, because those are the things that Jesus said were important.

John Oswalt will be here in a couple of weeks. We'll be having special meetings, yeah, two weeks from now, starting on the 11th, I think it is. Is it the 11th? Yes.

Sorry about giving you the wrong verse, by the way. I wasn't thinking too clearly. But anyway, John Oswalt is an Old Testament scholar, and he's one of the contributing scholars that created the New Living Translation, if you ever have read that.

It's a good translation. And he said this. He's a professor at Asbury Seminary, not far from here.

He said this last time he was here. You cannot understand the New Testament until you have been immersed in the Old Testament. And that is true.

That is true. And there's a number of reasons why I can't get into all of it this morning, because I still have 929 chapters to get through here in a minute, so I don't have much time on my introduction. But let me just say this, that the New Testament writers were raised in the Old Testament.

That's the only Bible they knew. And they were raised, it was in the culture. It made up the entire Jewish culture.

It was the Old Testament. And you can't really understand the New Testament properly until you can put yourself in the shoes of those men who wrote the New Testament. Where were they coming from? What was their perspectives? That's what you need to understand before you can really understand what was being expressed in the New Testament.

The New Testament was not written in the framework of the Reformation. And it certainly was not written in the framework of 21st century America. It was written in the framework of the Old Testament.

That's what the culture was that those men came from. That's how they knew God was through the Old Testament. The New Testament is packed with quotations and allusions to the Old Testament from beginning to end.

I mean, far more than we realize. Things are expressed in there. We learn stuff through osmosis.

I've talked about that before. Meaning we just pick stuff up. We don't necessarily think it all through every jot and tittle.

So and so said such and such exactly. It's more like just information that kind of comes in and clouds and shapes our perspectives and the way we think and the way we speak and so on. And that's the way it was for these New Testament writers.

They were immersed in the Old Testament thought. It's in the Old Testament that we first learn about God's kingdom. About his covenant with humans.

The seriousness of sin. The need for atonement. The love and mercy and holiness of God's character.

And many other elements that shape the New Testament. That all came out of the Old Testament. The early church fathers understood and loved the cross because they grew up in a culture that had a fear of the Lord.

We've been raised in a culture with a very weak and sappy perspective of God. He's like this benign, grandfatherly type of person who just kind of winks at sin and well it's not that serious. Don't get overly concerned about it.

No that's not what they were raised in. And there is a revelation of God that comes forth beginning in Genesis all the way through the Old Testament and all the way through the New Testament. It's an unfolding revelation of who he is.

But it all begins in the Old Testament. To read just the New Testament, to focus on just the New Testament, it's like reading the last chapter of a novel without reading the first 25 chapters. Do you get the gist of the story? Well yeah, kinda.

You know how it all ends and stuff. But what a shallow way to read a book. Man, there's actually people that do that too.

Yeah, I don't get that. It's like skipping high school and going right into college. Can you do it? Yeah, I mean I guess you could probably pick up some things in college that you missed in high school.

But it's going to be a very shallow understanding of the concepts that are being expressed. You need the foundation first of grade school, middle school, and high school before you're ready for college. It's not just a matter of having a brain that can absorb what's being taught in college.

It's also being prepared for what's being taught. When Paul told Timothy, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. He was talking about the Old Testament.

And when the writer of Hebrews said, for the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart, he was talking about the Old Testament. Now those things came to be true of the New Testament as well. But that's what the context was for those statements.

The Old Testament was the only scripture they had. So I want to share four reasons I love the Old Testament. And we're going to get through this.

Number one, I love the Old Testament because it gives us the Pentateuch. How many of you know what the Pentateuch is? Wife was right that a bunch of you don't know that word. The Pentateuch is just the five first books of the Bible.

That's the Pentateuch. Genesis through Deuteronomy. Let's just talk about Genesis for a minute.

The word Genesis means origins or beginnings. And in the book of Genesis, there are many origins discussed. The origin of the universe, the origin of life and the reproductive process, the origin of man, the origin of marriage, the origin of evil and its judgment, the origin of language and culture, the origin of the Jewish race.

Those are just a few mentioned in the book of Genesis. Now I've got to take a minute and just talk about the first one, the origin of the universe. I don't know, do you guys ever get upset about all the evolutionary teachings out there? How our nation has been inundated with those teachings? I saw a video recently of an Answers in Genesis scientist who was having a conversation, what a day we live in, with a chatbot, Elon Musk's chatbot, called Grok4.

And he had this conversation and he wanted to know, is the teachings of evolution true? He knew they weren't, but he just wanted to have this pure mechanical logical system he's having this interaction with. So let me just go over this, the conclusion of it. I can't go through the whole thing, but this is the conclusion of it, basically verbatim.

AIG, according to strict logic, mathematical probability, and observational science alone, what is the probability of a sequence of DNA letters forming through random processes to code even the most basic life form? What's the possibility of that occurring? Grok says, the probability of a new functional gene around 1,000 nucleotides forming via random mutations is about 1 in 10 to the power of 600. There's more. AIG guy says, give that to me as an analogy, as to the improbability of chemical evolution and the mutation of DNA.

Grok, it's like picking a grain of sand from all the beaches in the world, blindfolded on your first try. That should kind of build some faith in you guys that the Bible is true. And aren't you grateful that the Lord put that in here? He told us how it started.

Such an awesome thing. You know, I probably shouldn't put that in my sermon, but it was just, I couldn't resist. You know why these humanist scientists refuse to believe in an intelligent designer? Because that would mean they would have to subordinate themselves.

They would have to submit to his demands. They would have to give an accounting for their sinful lives. And they don't want to do that.

So they would rather concoct this whole elaborate evolutionary system so that they can convince themselves that there's nothing out there, that it's all just by chance. There was a big explosion and somehow that turned into man eventually. It's just insane that anyone could believe that.

No, there was a God behind creation, but you're not going to figure it out through a cunning brain. You're going to figure it out with the heart that's open to God. And that's the only way you'll figure it out.

All right. So we're just talking about Genesis 1 here. We've got 928 more to go.

Okay. Genesis also provides us with the story of the flood, man's rebellion to God and Babel, the disbursement of the heathen nations, God's judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Joseph. Okay.

So that's the book of Genesis. The rest of the Pentateuch is basically the story of Moses and the giving of the law to the Jewish people. Why is this important? Because the ancient world was steeped in demonic idolatry.

Darkness, spiritual darkness covered the whole land. Everywhere that people were was the same basic thinking. They had different names for different gods and so on, but it was there everywhere.

And into that, Yahweh brought a system of laws. For the first time, humans had a moral and social framework unparalleled in the ancient world. It provided them protection for the vulnerable.

It insisted on the sacredness of life. Unlike these cults that would throw live babies onto the white hot arms of a steel idol, things like that, or in our culture, butchering babies, it provided a rule of law that would enable people to live together in peace. For the first time, people would have God's own code of conduct so they could know the difference between right and wrong.

You know, we take this stuff for granted, guys, but this all came out of the law. You know what this world would be like if there was, if the law had never been introduced and they are doing their utmost to purge the world of the law of God. For the first time, God revealed himself and formed a theocratic nation of his own people.

The Pentateuch is important because it served as the foundation for everything else taught in Scripture. It all goes back to those first five verses of the word of God. Everything in Scripture goes back to the Pentateuch.

It's the foundation for everything else. Now, it's true that the 613 laws were written for a people of another time, and so many of them don't seem to apply to us today. But still, the God who thought of those laws and who decreed them is the same God that we serve today.

The Pentateuch presents powerful revelations of God, many of which you don't find anywhere else, such as you see him as the creator, the mighty being from which everything else finds its existence and its origins. You see him as the self-existent God of eternity. I am that I am, he told Moses in Exodus 3. You see him as the holy one and the merciful one, as the redeemer and deliverer, the lawgiver, the judge of all the earth.

These just represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of truth that's in the Pentateuch. So I asked you, where would we be today without the tremendous revelations God gave to mankind about himself in the Pentateuch? God loves the Pentateuch, and so should we. It's not, the Pentateuch is not the New Testament's, you know, how do they say, ugly stepchild or something? I don't know if that's exactly right.

Number two, I love the Old Testament because it gives us the narrative books. I'm grateful for the narrative books because it created a chronological framework for the whole Old Testament. You know, now the wisdom books and the prophetical books will color in that framework, but it's the narrative books that give us the story of God's dealings with his people.

Praise God for the narrative books. It's in the narrative section of the Old Testament that we see the conquest of the promised land, the story of Samuel and Saul, of David and Bathsheba, the miracles of Elijah and Elisha, the stories of good kings like Hezekiah and Josiah, and bad kings like Ahab and Manasseh. It's the narrative books that really, you can just go through and see the interactions between God and man, the way that the Lord sees things, and the way that he sees what people do, and how he reacts to it, and that sort of thing.

Now, when we think of great statements in the Word of God, we don't tend to think of the narrative books as being a place to go to, but let me just give you a few examples. It was Joshua who said, choose this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh. Joshua said that, and that was the first time, or the least one I first I can think of, where God expresses the all-in or all-out attitude he has towards people.

And Elijah would come back later and reinforce this when he asked the people, how long will you go limping between two different opinions? That's in the narrative books. But Jesus, it's really, he says the same thing. He says, you're either for me or against me.

This fence seat, like I heard recently someone saying, rightly so, Satan owns the fence. People can convince themselves because they go to church that they belong to the Lord. You belong to the Lord if you have an ongoing relationship with the Lord, not just because you call yourself Christian.

Of course, the story of the narrative books is mostly compromise and apostasy. And, you know, the Hebrew word for repentance is used 40 times in the narrative books. 40 times.

40 times. This is what Jesus taught. It's the first thing it says about him.

He came and taught, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. That was his message. Repent.

And 2 Chronicles 7 is that wonderful statement the Lord makes, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now, we all know the stories of the Old Testament, and this is what I'm going to get at right now. This is important.

We know the stories of the Old Testament, you know, David and Goliath and Jonah and the whale and stuff like this, and even some of the, you know, stories that aren't so popular and culture and so on. But how deeply do we know them? How deeply have you studied them? I have on my computer, I have a word file for every chapter in the Bible. So, I have a word file and I put the text in there, and then as I'm studying that chapter, I put in there commentaries and notes and word studies and different translations and paraphrases and stuff.

The typical average chapter in the narrative books, because I looked at it, is about 40 or 50 pages of notes. So, when I study a chapter in the narrative books, any part in the Bible, I mean, I have chapters, files that are a couple hundred pages long, you know, but in the narrative, well, you average probably 40 or 50 pages. So, you know, out of usually, what, 30, 40 verses or something, that is studying.

That is digging into the Word of God to see what it's saying. That is a hunger for the Lord, to know the Lord, to want the Lord to speak to me, to desire to know how God operates and thinks and so on. That isn't just a superficial hearing about it in church on Sunday.

I don't study like that because I'm a preacher. I study like that because I'm hungry to know Him, and I'm a preacher because I was hungry to know Him 40 years ago. Those stories are important because they give us a glimpse of how God deals with people.

And, you know, it's not just the outward. That's what we tend to think of with the Old Testament. Well, that's the outward behavior and stuff, but, you know, the New Testament deals with the inward, and that's true.

It does tend to be that way, but it isn't the New Testament that first tells us about the inward life of man. I mean, go all the way back to the Shema of Deuteronomy 6. Here, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and spirit.

That's in the Shema. That's the Old Testament. And Samuel, in the narrative books, he says, the Lord sees not as man sees.

Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. So I ask you, where would we be today without the great story of God's work in Israel found in the narrative section of the Bible? Where would we be without that? God loves the narrative books, and we should, too. I love the Old Testament because it gives us the wisdom books.

Now, there's five wisdom books. The two most prominent ones, of course, are Psalms and Proverbs, for good reason. Psalms is really the title in the Hebrew, literally means book of praises.

It really is one of the richest places in Scripture to know to come into a real worship and love for the Lord. C.S. Lewis said, the most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance. I find an experience fully God-centered, asking of God no gift more urgently than His presence.

The gift of Himself, joyous to the highest degree, and unmistakably real. There's no other portion of Scripture, really, that can usher a hungry soul into the presence of God like the book of Psalms. I mean, just take Psalm 119.

Matthew Henry's father had his children read one stanza a day, every day, so they would continually have the words expressed in Psalm 119 in their hearts. Because Psalm 119 is what? It's a great cry to know the Word of the Lord and to love it. You can't read the Psalms without having a lofty perspective of God.

How far different is it in much of the church today where God is treated disrespectfully and flippantly, and much of the worship out there is nothing but self-centered performances by professionals, many of whom don't even know Him. The Psalms, another thing that it brings us are the intimate communications between a godly man and the Lord. You know, it's like it just peels back something that's very sacred and private, and we're shown those interactions that go on between these men of God and the Lord.

It's like a candid compilation of the mental, emotional, and spiritual struggles of these different ones. Their seasons of joy, seasons of anguish and despair, their highest hopes and deepest fears, their conflicts or even failures with sin, their compassion for the needy, their disgust for self-serving flatterers, most of all for their overarching appreciation for the Lord's sovereign involvement in their lives. That's what the Psalms bring us.

It's a treasure house of profound interactions between God and man. Let me just give you a few examples. How are we going for time? Psalm 16, you make known to me the path of life.

In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's someone who understood that true joy, the kind of joy that can fill your soul and bring true fulfillment, this was written by someone who understood that only God's presence could do that for you.

Psalm 27, one thing have I asked of the Lord, this one thing I have asked, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple, for he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble. Psalm 63, oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Psalm 84, how lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of hosts, my soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord, my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

Now the Proverbs are rich in a different way, you know, they are focused mostly on the subject, dual subject really, of godly wisdom and the folly or the foolishness of ungodly men. And, you know, the Lord had such a premium on this subject that he devoted two books, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, to cover it. So I ask you, where would we be today without the great cry in the hearts of the psalmist or the depths of profound wisdom we find in Proverbs? Where would we be without that? You know, when I ask this question, I'm thinking of, it's a wonderful life, remember that? George Bailey and what, what, what's that town? Bedford Falls.

What would it be like if George Bailey wouldn't have lived? What would we, our lives be like if we didn't have the wisdom books, if we didn't have psalms to turn to? We would be a lot poorer spiritually, that's for sure. Number four, I love the Old Testament because it gives us the prophetical books. Amos said, the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants, the prophets.

And the book of Hebrews opens with this, long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. The 16 prophets that wrote those books, five major prophets and 12 minor prophets as we call them, there's 16 books, I mean 16 prophets, they lived over a thousand year period, which is basically the narrative section. That's, that's when they lived.

You know, if you ever want to do a fascinating study, I did this once a few years back, I traced all the prophets when they lived and I corresponded them with the Old Testament, you know, the narrative stories and found where they were at in those stories. So as I was reading about Malachi or Jonah or Joel or whoever, I would find where they were at, what was going on in Israel at that time. And just interconnecting the kings that were in ruling then with those prophets, it was fascinating, just interesting to me.

But anyway, these, these men of God lived under the rulership of these kings and many of these kings were godless men, full of pride, full of themselves. And you know, they lived in a system where if they didn't like what you had to say, they could cut you down in an instant. But these men of God had such a mighty anointing from the Lord that they were going to speak the truth to the people regardless if the king liked it or not.

Praise God for those men. The dominant message in the prophets is God's outcry against sin. And you know, one way to look at it is these are the, like the best sermons these men of God preached and put in the form of writing.

That's basically what they are. A. W. Tozer wrote the forward to Leonard Ravenhill's book, Why Revival Tarries. And um, in that he, he explained, gave the best explanation I've ever seen of the heart of a prophet.

And I'm going to read some of it to you here. And you know, he was thinking of Leonard Ravenhill, uh, when he wrote this, God has always had his specialists, whose chief concern has been the moral breakdown, the decline in the spiritual health of the nation or the church. Such men were Elijah, Jeremiah, Malachi, and others of their kind who appeared at critical moments in history to reprove, rebuke, and exhort in the name of God and righteousness.

A thousand or 10,000 ordinary priests or pastors or teachers could labor quietly, almost unnoticed while the spiritual life of Israel or the church was normal. But let the people of God go astray from the paths of truth. And immediately the specialist appeared almost out of nowhere.

His instinct for trouble brought him to the help of the Lord and of Israel. Such a man was likely to be drastic, radical, possibly at times violent. And the curious crowd that gathered to watch him work soon branded him as extreme, fanatical, negative.

And in a sense they were right. He was single-minded, severe, fearless. And these were the qualities the circumstances demanded.

He shocked some, frightened others, and alienated not a few, but he knew who had called him and what he was sent to do. His ministry was geared to the emergency, and that fact marked him out as different, a man apart. To such men as this the church owes a debt too heavy to pay.

That's the truth. And I say that about Leonard Ravenhill also. His son, of course, is a good friend of mine who I greatly love.

So I asked you, where would we be today without the clear sight of God's hatred of sin that comes to us through the prophetical books? Or the prophecies about the coming Messiah or the final days of mankind on earth, where would we be without them? God loves the prophetical books and so should we. All right, so what did I mean when I gave the title, You'll Find Freedom in the Old Testament? I could say it in a different way. The Word of God is an absolute necessity for someone who wants to walk with the Lord.

All the more if you've been bound in some kind of sin, you need the Word of God. Every believer, every believer should spend time in the Word of God every day. You know, I gave a message at our conference a few months ago on relationship with the Lord, and I just said, I don't understand how anybody could say they have a relationship with God who only hears about Him on Sunday.

I don't know how anyone, this is why we're teaching you guys to have a devotional life. I don't know how anyone could say, could claim to have a relationship with someone they're not talking with, communicating with daily. How's that even possible? I don't, I don't know.

I guess it's possible. I don't know. I don't know how.

The Word of God is an absolute necessity. All of the Word. The New Testament, yes, and the Old Testament.

We need all of the Word of God, and we need a daily ingestion of it. I mean, this is what Jesus told Satan, you shall now live by, quoting the Old Testament, by the way, you shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Meaning that we need that daily infilling of His Word, because like Pastor Nate mentioned, just by nature, even if you're someone who hasn't been in some horrible sin or something, by nature you have a fallen nature.

You have a sinful nature. You're away from God. You're not by nature, and you're not, your natural self, just because you go to church doesn't put you in the harmony of the Lord.

We need the Word of God, and we need a prayer life too, of course. Earlier I said the message of the Old Testament is pretty simple. It's obey God and live, disobey God and die.

And I will say that that is the truth today, spiritually speaking. If you are not obeying God and living in obedience to God, you are going to die spiritually. The Bible says it from beginning to end.

Now, I realize there's teachers out there that do their utmost to tell us that we don't need to fear God. I mean, they just double down on that message. They are so bent on developing a following and having such a fear of what people think of them that they just sugarcoat everything.

I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen in this place. We're not going to sugarcoat anything. You're going to get the Word of God and what it says.

And it says in the Old Testament, that's where it begins, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So I could say the opposite of it is just as true. The lack of the fear of God is the beginning of folly.

And you look at how sexual sin has swept through the American church, almost unstoppable. And I would put a lot of it to the lack of concern about what God has to say. Lord, I just want to express my deep, deep gratitude to you for every jot and tittle of the Bible that you gave us, Lord.

I thank you for the Old Testament. I love the Old Testament, Lord. I love every section of the Old Testament.

And I want to love it more than I do today, Lord. I hope that you will help me to love it more in the days ahead. It's full of rich truth about you and who you are and the way that you operate, the way you think.

It's full of that kind of truth. And we need it in a great way. And Lord, I pray for the men in the program that the day would come that they would want to spend time in your Word, not just do it because they're required to do it as part of a program, that the day would come that they would look forward to spending time in the Word in the morning, that they would have to force themselves away from it because they're just caught up in a study or in what you're saying in the Word.

And then they just have to stop it, force themselves to get ready for work or something. I pray that that kind of love would take hold of their hearts. I pray for my staff, God, that they would develop a great love for your Word as well, Lord, even more so as those who are being used by you to speak into the lives of others.

Lord, I pray that the love of your Word would grip their hearts and for our visitors back there. I pray, Lord, that this little sermon today is awkward and everything as it was. Lord, I pray that you would use this to stir up in their hearts a desire to spend more time in your Word and less time in social media and the internet and television and all the junk coming forth from the spirit of the world, less time in that polluting atmosphere and more time in the sacred atmosphere of your Scriptures.

Give us a love for your Word, I pray, O God. In your name, Jesus. Amen.

God bless you. You're dismissed.