Sorry about that. So I'm totally lost today. I left home without my phone. And Esther said, do you want to turn back and get it?
And I said, no. And that's the only thing I can have running through my head ever since. Why did I say no? Why did I come here without my phone?
Like, I'm going to need it. And sure enough, I forgot. All the AC stuff is run through my phone. And then the songs, the keys for the songs, I have that all on my phone.
And it's just like, what could we do before we had cell phones? Probably spoke to each other and stuff like that. All right, let's look to the Lord. You guys do have my thing, right?
Because it's on my phone. Thank you, Lord, for bringing us here this morning. Thank you for the Lord Jesus, our Savior. A wonderful Savior is Jesus, my Lord.
A wonderful Savior is He. Lord, may we ponder the wonder of who He is. And may we glorify Him in all that we say this morning. Help us, Lord.
I know it's a hot day. And I'm sure it's quite long for the children. I pray that you'd help us, Lord, to have patients. And to be open to the moving of your Holy Spirit in our lives.
And the Word of God would do its work. That we may be changed to be more like the Lord Jesus, our Savior. Thank you, His name. Amen.
This morning, I will conclude, Lord willing, the series that we started a little while ago. This is the third in a series on Psalm 139, looking at the attributes of God. If you remember in the past, we looked at the amazing knowledge of God. He is omniscient.
He knows everything. There's not a thing that He doesn't know. God does not have to acquire more knowledge. God does not have to say, well, I think this, or let me look that up.
He has perfect, wonderful, and complete knowledge of everything all the time. Then we looked at a very unusual attribute of God the last time. And I say it's unusual because when it comes to knowledge, I might know stuff. But I always know somebody who knows more than me.
And I can say, well, yeah, God knows a lot more than everybody. I can compare that. And the one we're going to look at today is power. I mean, I have a certain amount of strength and power.
But Christian has a lot more. I know that. I'm looking at him. He is built strong.
And yes, I could acknowledge, OK, God is stronger than all of us. And He is stronger than Christian even. Stronger than Luis. Who is stronger than Christian?
I can tell by looking at him. I had to get that in. And then we looked the last time at God's omnipresence, his ability to be present in his whole being everywhere all the time. There is not a person ever that has displayed that.
There is not a person who could even be in just two places at once. I've tried. But it doesn't work. It doesn't happen.
I'm sure there was a Star Trek episode that they did have people in two places at the same time. But it does not happen. That was fantasy. But today we want to look at power.
Read with me, if you would, please, from Psalm 139. And I put it up on the wall here. Verses 13 to 18. It says, for you formed my inward parts.
You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works. And that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from you. When I was made in secret and skillfully, wrought in the lowest parts of the earth, your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed. And in your book, they're all written, the days fashioned for me. When yet, there was none of them.
How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God? How great is the sum of them? If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I am still with you.
Power is an interesting thing. Every day we try to acquire power. We require power. My phone, if it drops below 95%, I start to panic.
After on the other hand, if her phone's above 5%, she's wondering what happened. Did I do something wrong? And there's those two people in the world. There's those who run their phone, 95% above.
And there are those who run their phone 5% less. How many times did people call me and say, look, I've got to keep this short because I'm almost out of power. I mean, everybody. Kirk Huubic is one of the worst.
Just so you know. When Kirk Huubic calls, he's always on the bottom 3% of his power. That's just the way it goes for him. Esther says, I need to charge my phone.
Well, where are you? I'm at 4%. Okay. And I'm sitting there going, yeah, I better charge mine.
I'm at 93. So we consume an awful lot of power, an awful lot of energy. So every day humans use more than a million terajoules of energy. Now what's that?
That's just a lot. Okay? It's like every person on the planet, 7.5 billion of us, boiling our kettles around the clock 24-7. Every single person, boiling their kettles all the time.
Every human being. That's kind of what it would generate. The average American household, North American household, has 50 devices that are drawing power. I just clip a picture of devices drawing power.
I googled it, and there you go. And you know what the funny thing is? They're all drawing power, even when you're not using them. If you leave that phone charger in the wall, it draws more power than when it's charging your phone half the time.
That's just the way it goes. All those adapters, you go over anything in your house that feels warm, is drawing power. That cable box, if you are a person who has cable or whatever you call it, fiber rock, you go over and put your hand on that. You cook an egg on it when your TV is off.
Why? Because it's drawing power. We're drawing power all the time. That's interesting.
During one year, the Earth absorbs twice as much energy from the Sun as one year. Then we'll ever be obtained from all the non-renewable resources. If you combine coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium that has ever existed on this Earth in six months and depleted, that's what the Earth gets in six months from the Sun. That amount of power.
It's amazing. The Sun goes out so do we. That's just energy is going to be used as going to be tripled by 2050 no matter what we do. We can tax it to death.
We're still going to end up using triple E amount by 2050. Then there's always, what if? What if it stops? It's down.
I remember Hurricane Wong came and we lost our power. When we lost our power because I live in the country, I lost my water too because my well won't work. It's like, well, a week without power. People think, oh, that's just nice.
It's a week of camping. No, it's a week of terror. It's not good. There's nothing good about not having power for a week.
It's just like crazy. In Venezuela in 2019, they had a nationwide five day shutdown. You think, wow, that's pretty big. It was massive.
Many people died. Why? If you're on a dialysis machine, if you're on a machine that's keeping you alive and there's nothing to power it, you will die. If you come to an intersection and there are no streetlights and there are no traffic lights, you're going to have an accident.
It was just bedlam for five days in 2019. That's just in Venezuela, the whole country shutdown. So I can't imagine what we are so dependent on power, but we don't have it in and of ourselves. But you see, God is an unlimited source of power.
God has abundant power. He has all power. He has an all-powerful God. God doesn't have to charge his phone.
God doesn't have to charge himself. He doesn't need to rest. You're saying, well, yes, he does. It says in Genesis that he created the earth in six days and then he rested.
Yeah, he rested because he was done. He didn't rest because he was tired. He's God. He doesn't get tired.
He keeps on going. You see, I have three favorite psalms, 73, 121, which tells me that he never slumbers or sleeps, which I like that. I like to know that while I'm asleep that he's awake and he's working. That's a great thing.
God never loses power. And in Psalm 139, David considers the power of God. I have three points this morning at the bottom there. God's work is marvelous.
From verse 14, his craftsmanship is meticulous and his wisdom is measureless. Now, my spell check did not like the word measureless. I don't know if it's a real word or not. I think it is, but whatever dictionary runs through Word, Microsoft does not think it's a word, but it is a word to me.
So therefore, in this day of everything goes and it's all about me, it's a word. So David made a summary statement in verse 14. He said, marvelous are your works. Marvelous are your works.
And he also says, and my soul knows that very well. And my soul knows that very well. Philos can be translated singular or miraculous. There's the Hebrew word.
I'm not a Hebrew scholar by any means. I wouldn't even know how to pronounce that. But it means wonderful or miraculous. You see, his works are incomparable.
I looked at some photos, and this is worth googling if you want to have a look at it in Google, the James Webb telescope. Some of the images that are now coming back from that are absolutely amazing. I think I have one a little further on. And it's just like one little tiny spot in the universe.
And there's like a thousand galaxies in this little spot in the universe. It's amazing. I mean, you would think that that's where David's going to go when he wants to talk about the marvels and the wonders of God. He's going to just say, all right, let's talk about the universe.
Let's talk about the stars. Now, he does that in other places in Psalm 8. He speaks of the stars and the universe that God has made, that your hands have made. But here he gets into the intricacies of the human body, the microscopic machines that are at work in your body that keep you alive, that give you life.
It's absolutely amazing. Now, I learned this morning that there's a doctor in the house. So I don't want to go into all this medical stuff and look like a fool. You can tell me privately.
You're a fool. But it's very, very interesting because David turned to the human body to describe the greatness of the power of God. He didn't go to the stars. He didn't go to a great waterfalls.
All of those things are wonderful. All of those things display the power of God. But you see, the crowning glory of creation was not Niagara Falls. It wasn't Orion.
It wasn't the galaxies that are far away. It's the human being. It's the person. That was the crowning glory of God's creation.
Why? Because we're made in the image of God. I want you to read these verses with me. Very important verses, foundational verses for life.
Foundational verses for faith. It says in Genesis 1, verse 26, and 27 says, then God said, let us make man in our image. According to our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all of the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image.
In the image of God, he created him, male and female. He created them. I believe it was a Mother's Day in the May that you spoke on these verses. I want you to notice something here.
First of all, and I underlined this, let us make man in our image, in the image of God. We are made in the image of God. I don't mean that I look like God, my face. I mean, that would be pitiful.
But we are created beings with the characteristics that God has, our likeness. And then we are, again, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So we are set apart over and above all of these animals. Every other created being, we are set apart.
We are above them. We are created in the image of God. He created him. So if you didn't get it, it's in here three times in these two verses.
Male and female, he created them both. God was very specific. He created male and he created female. He didn't create 57, or 54, whatever it might be, that is claimed today.
He created two, male and female. And it was created by the hand of God. God did not make a mistake when he made you. God did not make a mistake when he made you the way you are.
You are created in the image of God. I went over a long walk last night and I sure didn't feel like it because I came back. I'm thinking, oh my goodness, I'm stiff. But I'm in the image of God.
I'm created in the image of God. We need to glorify him because of that. God is described here as operating by David. He's described as operating at full strength.
He's not lacking. He's not deficient in power. He says, marvelous are your works. Oh God, marvelous are your works.
The Bible calls God the Almighty 57 times in the new King James. Job said, now this is after Job got schooled. Sam talked about this a few weeks ago. Job went through all of the trials, all of the troubles, listened to all of his friends, the good friends, the bad friends.
And then God said, you want to sit up and listen for a minute? And God spoke to him. And at the end of all of that, he said, I know that you can do everything. And there is no purpose of yours that can be withheld from you.
God is all powerful. There's not a thing that he cannot do. Well, I'm not correct on that. When Mary is pondering, OK, I'm pregnant.
I've never been with a man and I'm carrying a child. Like, how does that work? Well, the angel Gabriel came along and said, with God, nothing shall be impossible. That's in Luke chapter 1 verse 37.
Now, the opposite of that, speaking of salvation and camels going through the eye of an idol, what does Jesus say with God? All things are possible. So everything is possible with God. God has the almighty power.
Nothing is impossible without him. Everything is possible with him. Because of God's power, as Christians, we need to have a big view of God. We need to look at our God as the one who knows everything, the one who can be anywhere, and the one who is all powerful.
And that should thrill your heart. That should help you when you feel powerless. That should help you to avoid feeling powerless. Nothing is beyond God's ability.
Now, you might say, is there anything God cannot do? And I'm not even going to get into that stupid question. Can he make a rock that he can't lift? So the answer to that is stop asking stupid questions.
So that's kind of the way that goes. Or you could always go back and say, have you stopped beating your wife? And then get them to try to answer that one logically. Because it's the same foolish logic that goes into that question.
Because if they say yes, that implies that they beat them. If they say no, then they're still beating them. So there, stupid question. So you cannot ask that stupid question.
Can God make a rock that's too big for him to lift? I spent way more time on that than I said I was going to. But there are things that he cannot do. He can only do things that are within his nature and character.
Hebrews, chapter 6, verse 18. God cannot lie. It says it is impossible for God to lie. God cannot act in a way that's not loving.
It says love is of God in 1 John, chapter 4, verse 7. God cannot approve of sin. Habakuk 1, 13. And God cannot be tempted, nor can he tempt you.
He does not do that. Those are the four things that God cannot do. But he can do anything that he pleases that's in harmony with his nature. His works are marvelous.
Next part of this, his craftsmanship is meticulous. Now I had the opportunity to travel a number of years ago to a place overseas where they had this little wood shop. Now it was just called the Lucky Store. Why it was called the Lucky Store?
I have no idea. But I was lucky. I got to go to the store. So we went to the store and we went down and they wanted us.
We were on a cruise and this group went in and they said, OK, so we've arranged to come here and they'll give you water to drink but you have to go for a walk through the store. Of course, hoping you would buy one of their $9,000 jewelry boxes. But there was this wood shop and I mean $9,000 jewelry boxes. They had the craftsmanship in this wood and stuff was just meticulous.
I was going to put a picture up but it just didn't do it justice. But they had this big table that had a peacock engraved in the middle of it, all made of different kinds of wood. And I'm thinking, how in the world did he do that? And I asked somebody, so now a wood or is that thing stamped on the top of me?
He said, no, it's all wood. He makes it. He makes it out of wood. What?
It's all this furniture and it's all made with different kinds of wood with pictures and it was amazing. It was meticulous. The craftsmanship was unbelievable. So David looks at the craftsmanship of God and says it is meticulous.
Verses 13 to 16. He calls it in verse 13. He says, you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother's womb.
Again, back to Genesis chapter 1. God's creation of life on the earth. There's that picture I mentioned and it does not do it any justice at all but each of those, they're not stars, they're galaxies that we're looking at. They're all galaxies.
In one corner of the universe. Just one little spot. I mean, that's craftsmanship on a scale. So the thing is, God created it.
God made it. He made you. He made me. He did not make any mistakes.
And you see, the thing is, today, we live in a day that if you brought that up, I mean go to your local coffee shop and say, yeah, I'm just enjoying creation today. Man, the creator, his handiwork. Really? You believe that?
That's what you would get today. You'd be laughed, stand up in the classroom someday over at the housing station, but I have another theory on that. A creator created that human. Okay.
You're suspended. I mean, whatever. It's just going to be, or else I'm going to shame you to death in front of your whole class. I actually dropped out of a class in 1978, because I was told, dismiss any thoughts of God at the door when you come in here.
Dismiss any thoughts of creation before you come in here. And I thought, ooh, I can't do this. You see, Darwinian evolution suggests that life can just happen by chance. Nick and I were watching pollinators.
You know what pollinators are, they're bees. We were watching bees over in PEI the other day. So isn't it interesting that somehow a flower came out of nothing for a while, and it existed until a bee evolved from whatever it came from, and then the bee started populating all these flowers. Like, seriously, that's madness.
It's absolute madness to start going down those roads. Science actually points to a lot of problems in Darwin's theory. And I put two quotes up here. Michael Denton, microbiologist.
Evolutionary theory is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support. Darwin himself said the fossil record does not support what I'm saying here, but hoped that over the next while it will. David Rop, who was a curator at Natural History Museum in Chicago, he's an evolutionary paleontologist. He is not a creationist by any stretch.
He says we now are about 120 years after Darwin at the time he said this, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much. We have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. That's just the facts.
It's not a fact. It's a theory, and a theory with a lot of holes. All logic teaches me that where I see order and form, I have to assume that there is a creator, a creator of order and form. If I look at this table that's right here in front of me, and you were telling me this just happened by chance.
It came out of nothing. I would say you're mad. You're crazy. If I look at this building with all the craftsmanship, the details, I actually think we have a fairly beautiful building here.
It's covered with cedar. That's just a facade. It makes it look beautiful. But I mean, it's a nice building.
But if I could in and I look at all the intricacies of it's the plumbing, the heating, the electrical systems. I have to conclude that this building just show up. That this building started off as a tar paper shack turned into a gas station turned into this. No.
I'm really simplifying and stupeifying some things here. But the whole fact that this building has all this order and structure to it, it had to be made by an architect and a builder and a designer, an electrician who knew what they were doing and a plumber who knew what they were doing because we're fixing a lot of stuff. But it had all of that had to take place. It didn't happen by chance.
You see, at the same time, when I look at my body, which is superior to this building, there had to be a designer. If I look at my eye in the mirror and see how the iris works when there's more light or less light, how did that happen? That can't have happened, could not have happened by chance. It had to be created that way.
When I look at my personality, my intellect, it can only come from a creator, one who has a personality and has intellect. We are a wonderful creation of God. And to think otherwise, it's totally illogical. It's contrary to all laws of probability.
Somebody who knows a lot of probability is George Gallop. He's a famous statistician. He says, I could prove God from the human body alone. He said that one human body could just be a chance product is a statistical monstrosity that defies everything we know about the laws of probability.
Mathematically, it's impossible. Not only is human evolution improbable, it's illogical. Basic science, learn this when I was a kid, cause, effect. For every effect, there has to be sufficient cause for that effect to take place.
If I have an intellect, there has to have been a superior intellect to have made it. If I have a personality, I had to have been created by a person. Not only is human evolution improbable, it's not scientific, and it has never been demonstrated that chance produces order, form, beauty, or design. I have an example from music, but the time is racing ahead of me.
So that's in creation. And then in gestation, it says in verse 15 that he is skillfully wrought in the New King James. God formed us in our mother's womb. David uses some poetic language here to describe our fetal development.
I've always found that fascinating just to how two cells will come together and split, and then split, and then split, and then the next thing, it turns into a fetus, or an embryo, and then it turns into a fetus, and then goes on until a baby is born in your arms, now they're yours for life, and best of luck to you. This is what the doctor usually says when you're walking out, or he's walking out, you're still stuck with the baby in your arms. He says my frame, he references in verse 15, my frame, my skeleton, skillfully wrought in the lowest parts. Put together in my mother's womb.
Verse 13 says you knit me together in my mother's womb. Knit me together, I think. This is really cool. We're a matrix of veins, arteries, the whole vascular system.
Knit together perfectly. We start off as a microscopic spec, but David said that every cellular second is monitored by God. We go to embryo, fetus, baby, toddler, teenager, adult, and so on. The growth continues all the way through, and God has governed that.
God was present for existence from the moment of our conception. That alone should tell you the importance of human life. God was there at the moment of your conception. God was there all the way through.
He's knit into you, the framework of your life. We should, as Christians, we really need to think about this. We live in a day when abortion is just rampant. Why don't you touch on it yesterday?
I had no idea what Warren was going to speak on, or I didn't even listen to his message yesterday. I thought, oh, wow, we're crossing paths on a lot of things here. But in our country, in our country, Canada, this is Canada. Never mind the world.
I think you gave some stats for the world. But in Canada, since 2007, I'm not talking about going back to 1973, 2007, 1.25 million abortions, and this is from government records. So that's probably understated. 1.25 million.
That's greater than 10 an hour. It's so sad. In the US, it's 137 an hour going back to 1973, what Roe v. Wade?
137 murders an hour. I'm sorry, but this is the worst slaughter in human history. And we find it. And we need to be on our knees about this.
This is dreadful. God has knit us together in our mother's womb. This isn't a front against the Creator. Isaiah, chapter 42, verse 2, Thus says the Lord who made you and formed you from the womb.
He formed you from the womb, who will help you. Fear not, oh Jacob, my servant, and Jesheron, who I have chosen. Jeremiah, chapter 1, verse 5. I love this verse.
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. You were in the mind of God before you were even formed in the womb. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I ordained you a prophet to the nations.
That's what he's saying specifically about Jeremiah. But he knew you before the womb. The God who knows everything, knew everything about you before you were even conceived. Next I call this preparation or predetermination.
In verse 16, David says this. There I saw my substance being yet unformed. And in your book, they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when yet there were none of them. It's interesting.
The God has written every day of your life in his book before you even had one. Before you were even formed. He knew. Written could be translated as pre-recorded or predetermined.
David understood God's sovereignty over his entire life every day. God has the power to know the past, the present, and the future. Pre-recorded brings to mind the programming that's in your DNA. In your DNA, there's somewhere between 37 and many, many more trillion cells in your body.
Our DNA is in every single one of them. Our DNA is encoded from the time of conception to adulthood containing the information of everything your body will be, everything it will do, and everything that it is. Everything from the color of your hair to the color of your eyes, right up to the moment of your demise. It's all there.
You see, here's the question I have to ask. If there's all of this information in every single cell in my body, where did that information come from? Someone had to put the information there. Information doesn't just evolve out of nothing.
Information doesn't just develop over time from just random chance. I am full of genetic information that God designed and put in my body. There has to be a creator who has done this. He has to be perfect in all his ways.
Finally, God's wisdom is measureless. His knowledge, his power. I love these verses. In verses 17 to 18 in Psalm 139, how precious also are your thoughts to me, oh God.
How great is the sum of them? If I should count them, they would be more than the numbers, more in number than the sand. When I awake, I am still with you. David wasn't stirred up mostly about his thoughts toward God.
David was amazed at God's thoughts towards him. Have you ever stopped and thought about that for a moment? The God of heaven has thoughts toward you. God thinks towards you.
He has thoughts of you. That amazes me. What amazes me is the quantity of them. More than the sand.
I remember years ago when you crossed the bridge into PEI and they bragged that they had more sand than any other problems than other sand in Canada. Sometimes I like to forget that. They had a little cube of sand and it said how many millions of grains were in that. It said now that you know how many are in this, guess how many are in this box.
It was two foot by two foot by two foot box. Plexiglass box filled with sand. Guess how many grains? I mean, I can't.
You just can't. But there are people with time on their hands. There are people who measured how much sand is in a teaspoon and then they extrapolated that to all the deserts and all of the stuff and they said that there are 7.5 sextillion. I think that's what that number is.
It's 75 with 18 zeros following number of grains of sand on planet Earth. I think they're way understated. There's got to be more than that. But the fact is that David says if I should count your thoughts toward me, God, they would be more in number than the sand.
That's amazing. That's amazing. Not only is God just cognizant of you. He's concerned about you.
He cares for you. We come to prayer meeting. Why? We come to prayer.
Because God cares about us. We know He cares for every single one. That's why we have a list of all the names. Because we know God cares for every single person in this building today.
And we need to pray for one another. We need to somehow connect our mind with the thoughts of God and pray towards each one. Our knowledge of God's strength and His wisdom should influence our lives. Our faith and His power should bring us peace and comfort.
If you think about it, He made the whole universe out of nothing. There's nothing in accordance with His power or His character that's impossible for Him. He can do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask and think, the scriptures say. More than we ask and think.
God knows you. He formed you. His thoughts toward you are thoughts of love. His thoughts are more in number than the sand.
And the fact is that He loves you enough that He provided salvation for you. You see, the most well-known verse in all the Bible is John chapter 3 verse 16. And it speaks really of God's thoughts towards us. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
First John chapter 4 verses 9 and 10, I took this from the NLT. I like the way it translated this. It says, God showed how much He loved us by sending His one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him. This is real love.
Not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. You see, that's your greatest need is to have your sins taken away. And you can work all day long trying to get rid of your sin. You do not have the power to do it.
I could work all day long to try to remove your sin. I don't have the power to do it. But God of heaven has the power to take away your sins. And He did so by sending Jesus Christ to the cross to die for you, to take away your sins.
He knows you. Do you know Him? This morning I ask you if you're here and you've never come to a point where you've believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who died for you, the one who has the power to take away sins. You see Jesus Christ when He walked on this earth, He demonstrated the knowledge of God.
There were times when He knew what people were thinking before they even said the words. He demonstrated the power of God. He raised people from the dead. He gave legs to the lame.
He opened the eyes of the blind. But He said He did those things. Why? So that you may know that the Son of man has power to forgive sin on the earth.
Only God has the power to forgive you of your sins. And if you have not, I pray that this morning you will come to Him. I'll close with two illustrations. The first one is how am I going to live my life?
Am I going to live my life at 5% power and then desperately seek? I've got to plug into something. I've got to plug into something. I've got to get power in my life.
Or am I going to run myself at 100% knowing that I'm connected all the time to the source of power. See when I said to my desk my phone is always plugged in. Always know. Confident.
I'm just sitting there, I'm confident. I know that phone is going to work and it's going to work for a good long phone call. Why? It's sitting on the power base.
But if my phone is at 5%, I'm curcubic. I can't talk very long, man. I'll take my phone to 3. You can live your life at 5% and then you're desperate looking for power.
You're desperately calling for God. Please fix this in my life. Or you can live your life connected to the power source, the God of heaven. With confidence knowing that you can go through whatever it may be.
The long call, the short call, the long text, the short text, the good text, the bad text. You've been connected to the power. A little boy one time was playing in the sandbox. In the middle of the sandbox as he was playing, there was a huge rock.
What the size? And he thought, that rock is in the way. I got to get it out of the sandbox. He's just a little guy, probably 5 years old.
And he's pushing it. He's pushing it. All his might need lies down. He pushes it, pushes it, gets it to the edge of the sandbox.
And his dad is watching him over sitting on one of the swings. He's at the edge. I can't budge it. I can't get it over.
He's a daddy. Dad comes over. He says, yes, son. The rock, I can't get it out.
He said, did you use every available power that you have to get that out? And he said, I did. He said, no, daddy, I did. I used every bit of my power.
I did everything that I could. And he said, did you call upon all the power that you have to remove that rock? He said, I did. He said, no, you didn't.
He said, but he did. He said, no, you didn't. Because the power to remove that rock was sitting right there on the swing. And he reached down.
He picked the rock up and he put it out. You see, if we try to do things in our own strength, in our own power, we're like that little kid in the sandbox trying to move the things around in our life. And we don't have the strength and we don't have the power. But if you're a child of God, he does.
No matter what it is, we can call upon his power. That's a great comfort as we navigate through this strange and troubled world that we're in. We can be confident in him. Father, thank you this morning that you have brought us here to think of your greatness, of your great power.
Father, we think of the Lord Jesus Christ in his words. But to show that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins. I say to this, lay men, take up your bed and walk. What power that is, the forgiveness of sins.
I pray, Father, if there's anyone here this morning who has never come to that point where their sins are forgiven, that they will turn to the one who has the power to save them. And as they will look to him, Father, we thank you for this time together. I pray that you would take us to our homes in safety. In Jesus' name, amen.