Opportunities as Trappings of Freedom Psalm 68:19-21

Welcome to the Holy Fellowship South. We're in the, I don't know where we are country,

in in sweets in Elizabeth Town, Kentucky and having a, not impromptu really, but a gathering

of worship. We're going to pray together. But one week from today, one of our number, Aaron, will be

hopefully after he endures the ordination council getting ordained as a deacon.

And so we pray that this last week of freedom is really enjoyed.

All right, let's pray. Father in heaven, we praise you for letting us be here together.

We know that even as a family, we're separated right now.

Comfort my mom and my brother in Tennessee. Be with RJ as he is essentially leading and

Deacon Tony and the other team leaders who care enough to step in and make things happen

in the building in East Toledo. And if there is a guest today, Lord, if there is someone who comes

hurting today, we pray that there and that place they will encounter you. And so be broadly affected,

changed, reborn. And we pray that we'll do the same. We know that enduring trials is part of the walk,

part of the job, part of the eternity that you've prepared for us. And at the same time,

where we are so blessed and strengthened by your presence every day, ask you to just take these

praises that we sing and the word as we go to it and use them for your glory today. We know that

you want to empower us and change us and grow us and we're willing, but really Lord, we want to

glorify you. We pray all these things in Jesus name. Amen. I've got you lead next.

He got the melody. She was singing yesterday.

He got the melody.

We're going to need some knee clasping because we don't have a woodblock.

So we can bang on the table.

If we have a cup, you can bang a cup and I can make a drum.

If there are any spoons in here.

If you turn a cup over, it'll make a drum.

We make do. It'll be fine.

We're going to get a noise at this point.

No, we warned them. The manager said it was okay.

We're not giving quiet out.

We're also tucked in the corner.

And most people have checked out their cleaner.

She knows.

We're good. Manager approved.

I just wait for me to wake up and then go home.

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Amen. Aaron, would you lead us in prayer as we go to the Word here in a second?

Yes.

Lord, I thank you for this day. I thank you for us still being only a gather and worship you and

just learning to grow closer to you even though we're out of town and far away from our church family and we'll still be here with our blood family and law family and do those things together.

Lord, we're so blessed to be able to do that.

I'm blessed and thankful that the hotel is able to accommodate us to do this and that you'll be with us and lead us and guide us to what you want us to see and take from your word today, Lord.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

Okay, so a couple things. So here shortly I'm going to hand out coloring sheets.

Zoe, I've got a coloring sheet for you and Ari, I've got a coloring sheet for you and I need one adult to also volunteer to do a coloring sheet.

Alright, so I'll be taping. So the three of you and not yet, not yet. I'll let you hand them out in a minute.

Okay. And then also, we've got three verses that will need read.

So we need three readers and it can't be any of those three that just volunteer to do coloring. You'll be coloring by that time.

Okay, so Aaron's a reader, Ari's a reader, and Amalia's a reader.

Okay, so Aaron, you're going to take Psalm 37-4 when that time comes.

Ari, you're going to take Proverbs 13-19.

And, Ma, you're going to take Romans 8 where it begins, neither death nor life.

Okay.

Proverbs 13-19.

Correct. We'll get there in a minute.

So, Harkin back to about eight years old and my parents took my brother and I to Shipsoana.

It was one of the times when we did not take a friend along. We almost always took a friend along whenever we went on trips and stuff like that because my brother and I did not get along well.

He was four and a half years older than me and we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things.

And so my mom and dad would let me bring a friend along to kind of hang with me and then my brother who was four and a half years older than me kind of could do his own thing.

And so by the time I was about nine, he was about 13, 14 years old depending on the part of the year.

And he would kind of roam on his own and I would have my friend with him.

This time we did not. And after a long day at Shipsoana in 90 degree heat, you can kind of in your memory kind of imagine what that's like on the ground.

It's covered in gravel and that were covered in dust up to our knees and it's in your nose and your mouth.

And it was 90 degrees outside. We're hot and tired.

We're standing there waiting for my mom to finish up doing something.

I don't even know what it was. I'm waiting for my brother at first to meet up with us.

And my dad's standing there and he's in his work shoes.

He worked at Dana at that time and so they had the big heavy heels on the shoes because of metal shavings with pierced your shoe.

And so he would get metal shavings on the bottom of the shoe, but never in his feet.

And he was wearing his work pants as he wore every day 365 days a year.

Didn't matter where he was. He had his shirt on.

He had his little pocket protector and his pens in his pocket protector, short sleeve white shirt that he wore at work all the time.

That's what he wore all the time everywhere. As we're standing there, I got tired.

There's nowhere to sit down, no bench, no chair.

And I thought, you know, nine years old, I'm a little too big to ask my dad to pick me up.

And I didn't think he would do it anyway.

And as we're standing there together and he looked at me, I think he saw I was tired.

And he said, son, you can lean on me.

And I'm like, no, it's okay, dad. I'm good.

But a few minutes later, I was pretty used up.

And so I started leaning on my dad. So my brother came up.

He got there before my dad, before my mom did.

And he was he was obviously hot and tired. He goes like, he said to me, can we go somewhere where we can sit down?

So I said, well, this is where we're supposed to meet mom.

And I'm leaning on my dad the whole time.

And after a few minutes of that, he looked like he was pretty fed up with it.

We've been standing there about 15 minutes.

I've been leaning on my dad for the better part of 10.

And I said to my brother, I said, you can lean on my dad. You can lean on dad.

Go on the other side, lean on dad.

And he said, no, no, I'm not going to do that.

And I said, it's okay. It's working for me.

And he said, no, I'm not going to do that.

And I said, well, if you lean on the other side, then he won't tip over so much.

And he goes, no, I'm not going to do it.

And so he stood there and waited for the remainder of like 10 minutes in 90 degrees.

He tired dancing around from foot to foot, pretty exhausted, but refusing to lean on my dad.

I want you to bear that in mind then as we look at Psalm 68.

So those of you who are not marking a page can go there.

And if you're marking a page, if you can do that and go there as well, we'll do that.

So Psalm 68 and it begins in verse 19, just three verses.

Psalm 68, 19 says,

Blessed be the Lord who daily bears our burden, the God who is our salvation.

God is to us a God of deliverances and to God, the Lord belong escapes from death.

Surely God will shatter the head of his enemies, the hairy crown of him who goes on in his guilty deeds.

Okay, this time we're going to pass out the coloring pages.

We're going to put those in one for each of you.

At the end we're going to ask you to show us what you colored.

So do a good job.

It's not a contest, but it is a challenge to do well.

All right, crayons and markers.

There was a box of crayons in there.

If you want to take a picture, you can show the markers.

Blessed be the Lord who daily bears our burdens.

So where it says that God daily bears our burdens,

we realize that God is willing, God desires, he is more than able.

He can recreate entire universes or destroy whatever he needs to do to be able to do what it is.

God is faithful and that faithfulness is the same one thing that he's looking for from us,

which is an interesting challenge then because if he is the one who is willing to bear our burdens,

then in theory the faithfulness is just to continue to lay our burdens upon him.

He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Going all the way back, people have been getting saved by the Lord.

Going all the way back, if you think about how Moses got saved,

he looked forward to a way that God would make and that way would be Jesus.

Going all the way back, if you think about how Adam and Eve repented and turned to God after they were out of the garden.

We know they did that because you can look at their lives and Adam lived for a long, long time worshiping God.

They did not walk in the coolness of the Garden of Eden or really relish the garden as they had before because they were cast out,

but they had turned to God and it wasn't until a few hundred years after Adam died that the people of the earth became so wicked.

Noah was already alive. Adam was still alive while Noah was alive.

But a few hundred years after Adam's death, the people of the earth became so wicked as they no longer looked to God.

In Matthew 18, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep.

There are a hundred sheep and there are 99 sheep that the shepherd is taking care of.

One of the sheep has wandered off and been lost. He is no longer under the shepherd's watchful care.

The shepherd leaves that 99 sheep then in a safe place theoretically and goes off and hunts down the one that has wandered off.

God has always been saving people. That's what the verse said.

Verse 68-19.

Blessed be the Lord who daily bears our burdens, the God who is our salvation.

It's not that God will ever lead you to go searching for the one.

That's not what that parable is talking about. It's not that God says,

I'm going to put Dan away in Toledo while I go off to the darkest Africa and search out a lost soul.

It's not that he goes away from us in a simple sense, but rather this parable is to demonstrate his love for the lost.

And so it is to teach us to go after the one who is failing or who is distracted or tempted or wandering from leaning on the Lord.

It is to say to us, go and do likewise.

Every Christian, every parable, early Christian teaching this story and all the stories of the New Testament

are to say that we love God's pursuits, God's pursuit of the lost.

What God desires is to win souls and we ought to desire to win souls with him.

But the truth is there are a lot of challenges in life. We face a lot of crazy things.

And then it says again, God is to us a God of deliverances.

And the God, and to God the Lord, belong escapes from death.

We're all dying. It's not a thing we like to look at or face, but our cells are dying off and being replaced.

And if you're still kind of youngish, then your cells are being replaced more rapidly than they're dying off.

And if you kind of made the other side of that line, then your cells are dying off more rapidly than they're being replaced.

Nobody likes to think about death, but there are daily deliverances from death, a separation from God,

a bleak existence where we have ceased to lean on the Lord of the universe and allow him to take on our challenges.

And we are taking them on ourselves.

Jesus said in John 8, to those who had believed in him, if you believed in me, come follow me.

And then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Notice that they had already believed in him. A lot of times we make salvation is in the believing.

But at the same time, we know the scripture says that even the devil believes in God.

He knows, in fact, that God is real.

There are days where we might wonder whether God is real or not, especially if we don't know Jesus as Lord and Savior,

but he knows that God is real, but he would never come and follow.

He would never lean on God. He will never let God bear his burdens.

Went to Camp You Can, had a life-changing experience that was unexpected.

I learned to jump into the pool, jump into the lake.

Struggled with that for 53 and a half years or whatever of my life.

I don't think I probably have that many more.

Fifty years, since I was about four years old, I've always had trouble getting used to cool water.

I still don't want to jump in cold water, but I can kind of tell the difference.

And two days in a row, I was forced by circumstances to jump into the water without taking the long duration of time to get used to it.

And now I just jump in. I realize my heart's not going to stop.

My brain's not going to stop working. My muscles aren't going to freeze up.

I'm not going to cramp up. I'm not going to get hypothermia in the first 90 seconds while my body is adjusting to the water, and I can jump in.

It's like that. I always believed I could do it, but I was always kind of slow and moving toward the point that I would do it.

Now I know that I can do it, and so I've gotten past that barrier.

It's like that with God. Do you believe in God?

When I was a young Christian, I struggled with lying for the first almost two, two and a half years, something like that.

I was still struggling with telling little lies, things that were convenient.

I kind of remember the last lie that I intentionally told.

Maybe I'll never forget it, because the Holy Spirit convicted me to stop doing that.

I struggled with foul language.

I worked in a restaurant with minimum wage employees by the dozens, and their foul language was—it was a lot.

It was all the time. And that's the way I was.

And I saw it on TV, and I watched rated R movies, and the F word was very common.

And so it was very difficult. In fact, I remember being a young Christian playing softball for East Toledo,

and sliding into second base, and getting called out when I debated whether or not.

And I'd give it my all, run as hard as I could, and slid in, and then got tagged, and they called it out.

And I still to this day wonder or not whether or not I was out.

I'll never know this side of heaven, but I was out because the umpire called me out.

And when he called me out, I said that cuss word out loud, and it was against the rules to do so.

I could have been cast out of the softball team, kicked out of the field, because back then,

if you said a single cuss word, you could be removed from the game.

And as a Christian, I struggled with foul language.

I've often struggled in my personal walk with a lack of personal courage, the ability to face a real challenge head on.

Somebody wants to cuss me out, or yell at me, or threaten violence, or they say,

well, I need to talk to you about something important.

And I've had that side of me that lacks courage, is lingering, wondering whether or not there's any way that I can avoid that confrontation.

But Jesus said it to those who already believed.

He said, believe first, and then come follow him, and then know the truth and be set free.

There is a real danger in our lives of compartmentalization.

These were people who believed in Jesus, but probably would have gone back to Judaism and lived like a Jew.

The reasons compartmentalization seems real.

It's like, well, this Jesus, he's for when I'm worshiping.

He's for when I'm giving my tithes and offerings.

He's for when I'm serving in my Sunday school class.

When Sherri and I were young Sunday school teachers at East Lido, which I didn't want to do, she sort of forced it on me.

I'm sure she was serving God in the process.

But when we were doing that, we never shared the gospel outside our Sunday school class.

We taught every lesson.

We knew the stories of David and Goliath, and we knew Noah's Ark.

I mean, eventually, after a while, we knew them all pretty well.

We've had kids who've been in church for years, in fact.

But we never talked about Jesus with our coworkers or offered to pray with somebody or shared the gospel, the ABCs of salvation or one, two, three, Jesus.

Roman Road took me probably five years as a Christian before I even knew what the Roman Road was.

Areas where we are free to choose.

Well, gosh, that's all areas of your life.

You're free to choose what you do with the gospel at work.

You're free to choose what you do with the gospel in a hotel pool area.

You're free to choose what you do with the gospel when your server asks you what you'd like to drink.

You're always free to choose.

So if you're free to choose and you're choosing not to follow Jesus in that moment, then you will not experience the freedom that Jesus has prepared in that moment.

There are areas where we've convinced ourselves that choosing provides us with a good course.

So we think, well, I want to do this instead because it's got a better result.

If I do this, I'll get a better result.

If I'm quiet now or if I show respect or if I back down, this person will stop being angry or whatever, and we think we'll get a better result.

And you're free to choose in that moment.

The question is, if you choose something that does not include God's plan, what happens next?

You can say it this way.

The more you are following him, the more you will experience freedom, which purpose is to follow him.

That's the point of the freedom.

The more you experience freedom, the more you will recognize courses that are options but do not necessarily prioritize following him.

You never have so many ways to turn unless you enter a maze.

Leave your home and head south.

How many roads can you take?

How many detours are there?

What if there's an accident and congestion?

How many times can Google recalculate your path?

There is no limit.

You can do so many.

Notice seductive, these courses that are seductive, they can be due to your own desires.

They can be by ease of selection.

So there's just like a simple road to go down.

There can be an argument for taking a thing because it has no cost.

I may as well take this.

It's nobody's.

Nobody's claiming it, so I may as well take it.

It can be an argument that you can't live without it.

We begin to think dramatically, oh, my goodness, I'm going to die if I can't have the purple marker, if I can't have more sweets, if I can't have the time off or whatever.

And we begin to think we just cannot survive unless we get what we want.

And there can even be an argument that it's a necessary sacrifice or stepping stone.

Well, I have to give in now and work the overtime and not go to church because I can't risk losing this job or I can't risk making the money.

And so we think it's a necessary stepping stone to achieving God's good plan for us.

But if you will cast yourself down and allow God to lead the plan, you will see his plans unfold.

These courses then try our metal.

They possess an extreme degree of divergence from the course.

And then we have those options.

We are to choose his plan, which he has laid out for us, not one that looks a little bit like his plan or one that offers great benefits.

OK, Psalm 37 for Aaron, is that you?

Psalm 37 for delight in the Lord and he will give you your heart's desires.

OK, so restraining desires, holding back the things that you want.

Not enough.

Recognizing those desires and say, hey, I want that, but I'm not going to go there because I know that's not what God wants from me.

Not enough.

What did the verse tell us to do?

What is the psalmist saying we must do?

The Lord our desires.

Exactly.

We've got to we got to learn to want what God wants.

It's not enough to want something and turn from it because you'll just turn to something else you want.

But if you can turn your wants into something that God wants for you, then now God will give you what you want.

And since God has a good plan for us and always desires for us to go in the greatest place, which will provide still more freedom, that's going to result in still more opportunities to choose what we want unless we refrain.

We reform our desires to be the desires that God wants for us.

Proverbs 13, 19 says desire accomplished to sweep to the soul, but it's an abomination to fools apart from evil.

Okay, so the dummies of the world, which we don't go around calling people a dummy, right?

They continually think that there's always the option.

I always can do what I want.

I can always do it my way.

That's a little different than God's way.

And I may get some advantage out of it.

I retain that ability to do the wrong thing.

And that's not what freedom is.

Freedom is not there for the purpose of retaining the ability to do the wrong thing.

Although God does guarantee you that down the road.

If you choose later to not follow God, if you choose later to not do what God wants you to do, that's part of your freedom.

You can do that.

But the fools of the world, they won't choose to do the right thing.

They won't choose to go the right way.

They will not submit themselves to the Lord and allow their desires to be reformed.

It is a wonderful thing to get what you really want.

And you probably felt that.

Like there was some time in your life, you think, man, it would be awesome if this happened.

And then suddenly it happened.

Your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your job, something came about that you were looking forward to, hoping for.

And it felt awesome.

That was a small, small taste of what it's going to be like to walk into heaven.

A small taste of what it's going to be like to walk into heaven.

Multiply that by infinity.

And now if that's what's at risk, that infinite desires met glorious moment is what's at risk,

then it makes a lot of sense not to choose what seems like a shorter, faster path or a better path to success here on the earth,

but rather to allow our desires to be reformed so we can experience again and again that sweet nourishing to our souls.

And then Romans 8 beginning at neither death nor life.

For I am persuaded that not even death or life, dangers or rulers, things present or things to come,

hostile powers, height or depth or any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Good.

Now, I didn't give her the verse.

How'd you find the verse?

I Googled it.

Okay.

No, nothing wrong with that.

Okay.

There is a way.

The direction of God does not always come with a book and verse reference.

Sometimes you got to do a little bit of work.

Sometimes you got to go, oh, I kind of know what it says.

And you Google a phrase.

All right.

And it's the same way.

Do you know what the good plan that God has for you?

Does anybody?

I mean, you might know some pieces of it.

God's calling me to this, calling me to that, showing me the way to that, providing that miraculously.

So that's got to have something to do with it.

You can discover those things, but no one really knows because ultimately the plan is to come into heaven.

And so going down the road with the Lord is going to require sometimes doing a little bit of work.

And it might be that God wants to order you to move a thousand pound boulder by yourself,

which you could never do without great assistance.

And he says you can have none.

And you spend years or decades trying to move that boulder.

And the end of it, he says, you didn't move the boulder.

He says, no, I've worked all this time.

You say, I've worked all this time and I could not move the boulder.

You gave me an impossible task.

And he says to you, but now look at you.

Look at what that task has turned you into.

Look how strong you are, how young and able despite the years that have passed.

Sometimes the task is mighty.

In the movie Robin Hood, as we're almost to the conclusion, Robin Hood says,

and it's with Kevin Costner, I don't know if it's in any of the others or not.

He says, even a child can be trained to target the gaps in armor with an arrow.

Because knights know that the gaps in their armor are real, they need a shield.

And we need a shield of faith.

If your head had no armor in Dungeons and Dragons and Low Moon, whatever,

one in 20 blows will land there and your AC will be considerably less

and you'll be more likely to get hit and dangerously so.

And then if you factor in called shot, the danger of not wearing a helmet becomes very real.

We need a helmet of salvation, the kind of helmet that is provided by God.

The cross section of a helmet of salvation and a shield of faith is believing that God is a God who,

as it says, God is to us a God of deliverances.

And to God the Lord belong escapes from death.

Lastly, surely God will shatter the head of his enemies, the hairy crown of him who goes on in his guilty deeds.

Now it's interesting because if I say God's going to shatter the hairy crown of a man,

what kind of man are you thinking?

An unrighteous man.

An unrighteous man, that's the kind of man.

One with hair.

Okay, so what kind of man is a man with hair? Any man.

Is it? My brother doesn't have hair. He has hair.

True, but this is talking about the head obviously, it's the crown, right, it says his crown.

Talking about a young man.

In other words, God is not going to wait.

Once you know what calling there is, God is not going to wait for you to get around to it, right?

And then also notice if you take it from the back to the front, it says an enemy of God is one who goes on in his evil deeds.

We might fool a parent, fool a teacher, fool an officer, but we won't fool God.

We might do that which is wicked but not illegal.

There's a lot of that in the United States, right?

The law allows for things that are not wicked.

Or even things that are against the rules, but God expects nothing less than repentance,

which is us turning to him in every situation.

Acts 17, Paul says, now all men are called upon to repent.

If you're getting away with something, the scripture reminds us here and also in Galatians 6, 7, among other places,

we will reap what we sow.

We always talk about that, Ariana and I talked about it this last week, the verses, we will reap what we sow.

But we forget that verse 8 then says, for the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption.

So let's put that in the context of freedom.

You are free to do what you want.

If what you want is governed by your flesh rather than by your spirit man, rather than by your soul which is submitted to God,

then you will go after at some point in time that which you want.

And then for the one who sows to his own flesh will reap from his flesh corruption.

But the one who sows to the spirit will from the spirit, Holy Spirit, right?

Capital S spirit, one who sows to the spirit, Holy Spirit, will from the Holy Spirit reap eternal life.

Let us not lose heart in doing good for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.

So then, while we have opportunity, what's opportunity?

Opportunity is freedom.

It is freedom of choice to go the good way or the bad way, to go God's way or a different way, to give in to temptation or to not.

While we have the opportunity, let us do good to all people and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

So as we come to a close, we're going to look at our pictures here in a second.

Are you about ready? Are we getting close? If you've got major things you want to finish, finish them up.

Paul introduces the armor of God in Ephesians 6.

But before the actual armor of God, before he begins it, he says,

Finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Which is to say then that in 11 when he says put on the full armor of God, he is defining what it means to be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might.

What Lord was that again?

It was that Lord who daily bears our burdens, the God who is our salvation, the God who is to us a God of deliverances and to God the Lord belong escapes from death.

Surely God will shatter the head of his enemies, the hairy crown of him who goes on in his guilty deeds.

And then Paul says, finally be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might.

And then he goes into put on the full armor of God so you'll be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil for our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

And right after that he breaks down what each piece of the armor is.

This life lived for God is full of good. There's a ton of it.

And we can enjoy it in passing. But we have to remember that's exactly what we're doing, passing.

If you grab a piece of candy on the way past the candy dish, it doesn't make you have to do less physical activity or sit ups to burn off those calories.

Right? If you enjoy a quick glance at a pretty girl, even though you're faithful to your spouse, your girlfriend, the person that you supposedly love, or whatever, but you take a quick glance at the girl in passing, it doesn't mean that that's not later going to bother your soul.

So we have to be careful about what we take in passing. But there are many good things that we can enjoy in passing.

We can even have a measure of success as the world says. We can be very successful in our careers, whatever they might be, because we do them as if we do them unto the Lord.

So possibly very successful in our careers and make huge differences. And our name may become great in the sense that we have lots of fame or whatever.

Our church could grow to thousands, perhaps. But we must not be enticed away from the reality that is God's victory over his enemies.

And because God is going to have victory over his enemies, we must never be an enemy ourselves. And an enemy is one who continues in his own villainy, which you are free to do.

And the truth is, the more you follow God, you will be all the more free to sneak. You'll get smarter, more crafty, more able.

You'll have more opportunities to do it secretly, to do it on the sly, to get away from it.

The more free you are, the more following you do, the more free you'll be, the more opportunities will come.

And the more, at the very beginning, you must determine not to fall into those traps, which requires putting on the armor of God,

which we must do in order to be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Okay, what do we got? So, first of all, Zoe, let's see your picture. Let's go in order of age.

Can you turn it over and show us what you got? Okay, just bring it up here. Okay. What have you colored here? What is this picture? It's very beautiful.

Much work went into this picture, I can see. You worked very hard. And you worked something on the back, too, because you ran out of paper. That's very good.

Okay, tell us what you drew. Okay, do you know who these people are? No. Well, you did a good job coloring them anyway.

Do you want to work on the back a little bit more? I can tell you we're working on it. Okay. All right. And then, Ariana, show us your picture.

I have one more second to add. Exactly one. Time's up.

My wonderful creative daughter who does not understand the concept of a deadline.

I'm going to give you three seconds and then your display begins. Three, two, one. Okay, show us what you got.

All right. That is awesome. Very detailed, colored different pictures. I see you made his beard a certain color, his hair. They all look very realistic color choices.

Okay, what is this picture? Tell us what it is. This is David and Goliath. Here I drew just the corner of the river where David picked the stones from.

I'm thoroughly impressed. That's very detailed. Yes, there's even some extra stones that he didn't choose.

And how many do you remember? How many stones David chose? That would be impressive. Three. It was five. But good try. Okay, very good.

And is this Goliath, the little guy with the sling? No, that's David. This is Goliath. And at the top of Goliath's hat, I gave him red and purple colors because those were the colors of royalty and champions.

So very fancy colors back then. Very nice. Very nice. Okay. All right, Caitlin, let's see what you got.

Did Goliath not carry his own shield? He did not carry his shield. Yeah, the picture is not historically correct in certain ways. Yes, he's wearing a helmet and carrying a shield.

How would he die that way? He might not have. That's right. He had a shield bearer and he waved him off because David was so small.

I know, a shield bearer could not have looked at the shield high enough to stop the stone from hitting him in the forehead. The stone was coming from three people. It was trajectory. It depends on how far away he was.

Mathematically, we are fairly certain that the shield bearer would have reduced the likelihood of his death. He could have just shield bashed David. It depends on how high he was.

He was only nine feet tall. So a lot of tower shields were six feet tall. So you'd only have to be like 10 feet closer. Yeah, he can hold it up.

Okay, anyway, so but he didn't have you didn't carry a shield into combat. I think it's anyway, he's pretty cool. All right. So tell us what you've done here, Caitlin. I colored in David and Goliath. Yes, you did. Neatly.

Very color. I like the color choices and the stone is flying through the air and Goliath's face looks like I'm not going to die by that stone little boy. And then down he goes. Right. Yes. Very good.

Okay, so tell me how I will let you give a stab at tell me how the story of David and Goliath relates to what I just talked about and trusting God.

Because all of David's older brothers and the whole Israelite army who were trained to fight could not trust in God even the smallest amount to go out and try but David, the little boy, their younger brother, who's never been on a battlefield before besides to bring food to his brothers.

Trusting God so much that he went out there and defeated him with the stone this small. Amazing.

There were every opportunity. If you read that stories every opportunity for David to say I'm not going to go. You know, even his brothers were mean to him saying why should he be there.

And then when he made the comment like why isn't somebody going out against Goliath they said who are you basically I'm paraphrasing before you to even comment always stirring up trouble.

Everybody attacked him and all he was doing was trusting God, the more free you are to follow the Lord the more opportunities you are going to going to have to choose not to follow Lord.

If you don't want to have opportunities to not follow the Lord, then you shouldn't start following him, because the opportunities to not follow him are vastly going to outnumber the good choices to following him.

You may even have to hunt for them sometimes.

But here is the great glory of it.

God is a God who delivers.

And he'll show you the way we're going to close in song and pray and be done.

I sent you the song. It was in a sanctuary.