First Kings chapter 20. And I'd like us to read verse 35 to 43. First Kings chapter 20, verse number 35. And a certain man of the sons of the prophets said to his fellow at the command of the Lord, "Strike me, please." But the man refused to strike him. Then he said to him, "Because you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord, behold, as soon as you have gone from me, a lion shall strike you down." And as soon as he had departed from him, a lion met him and struck him down. Then he found another man and said, "Strike me, please." And the man struck him, struck him, and wounded him. So the prophet departed and waited for the king by the way, disguising himself with a bandage over his eyes. And as the king passed, he cried to the king and said, "Your servant went out into the midst of the battle, and behold, a soldier turned and brought a man to me and said, 'Guard this man. If by any means he is missing, your life shall be for his life, or else you will pay a talent of silver.'" And as your servant was busy here and there, he was gone. The king of Israel said to him, "So shall your judgment be. You yourself have decided it." Then he hurried to take the bandage away from his eyes, and the king of Israel recognized him as one of the prophets. And he said to him, "Thus says the Lord, 'Because you have let go out of your hand the man whom I have devoted to destruction, therefore your life shall be for his life, and your people for his people.'" And the king of Israel went to his house, vexed and sullen, and came to Samaria. Father, we come to Your word, but also to You, asking that You would send Your Spirit to open the eyes of our understanding and to produce in us a faith that would lay hold of Your promise and would walk in obedience to Your commandments. Minister to us, we pray. Strengthen us. Empower us. Display Your glory in the midst of Your people, for this is Your house, Your temple. And may Your glory descend, we ask, in Jesus' name. Amen. Odd passage. Probably never read it before. The context is about a king of Syria versus the king of Israel. And the king of Syria threatens the king of Israel, and the king of Israel goes to battle against the king of Assyria and beats the king of Assyria and his army in battle. And then a year later, the king of Syria tries again. And Ahab goes to battle again against the king of Syria and defeats the king of Syria again. But God tells Ahab, when you go and fight the king of Syria, and you will defeat them and beat them, you need to destroy the people altogether. Be done with it. Now, Ben-hadad, the king of Syria, flees and runs. And Ahab makes a covenant with him instead of destroying him. And so God prepares a prophet, which is what we were just reading, to confront Ahab in his sin. But there's a little overlooked section here in the narrative that has a very important principle that I want you to be focusing on with me this morning. And that is concerning an unnamed prophet and his unnamed friend. You see, in verse number 35 of this passage, we have the prophet that's being prepared to speak to King Ahab in fulfillment of God's purposes here. We have a, we have a little sneak peek into this discussion of this prophet who's preparing himself to disguise himself to go on and to confront King Ahab. And this prophet says in verse number 35, he goes up to his fellow, which would be perhaps another prophet, someone that he knew well, and said to him at the command of the Lord, "Strike me, please." And this man says, "No, I'm not going to strike you. I'm going to what is that, a punch or a slap or whatever it is, I'm not going to do that." And the result of his disobedience to the word of the Lord results in him dying and being struck by a lion. So this prophet then goes and finds someone else to punch him. It's a very strange story, I admit. But the point is, the prophet needed to be wounded so he could wear a bandage and sit in the way in preparation for King Ahab to come so that King Ahab couldn't recognize the prophet, so then he could take the bandage off. And you know, and all this for a bandage, okay, is the point. All this in preparation for a prophet. And what happens is we read the story because the story is really not about this unnamed prophet and his unnamed fellow. The story is about confronting King Ahab and his sin in the bigger scheme of things. But I want us to rewind, pause, and just have a look at this unnamed fellow with his, with his, and this unnamed prophet and see if we can learn a principle. It's an amazing story because it's just like how Nathan confronted David in his sin. You know, "You are the man." He tells this little story for Ahab first and then points out his sin, just as David did. It's a very intense, dramatic kind of historical account here that is preserved for us in the scripture. But I want you for a moment just to put yourself in the shoes of this unnamed fellow that died by the line in the streets. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment. A prophet friend of yours, let's say you're living in the time of King Ahab, comes up to you and says, "Strike me, please, at the command of the Lord." What would you think, say, or do? "I've never hit anyone before. This is quite uncomfortable. In fact, it's probably not really appropriate to strike a friend. It's not in my personality. The task is too hard. I'm afraid. What will people think of me for bruising a man of God?" Or you might just say, "Look, it just makes no sense to me." Now, the one certain conclusion that we are to draw from this text is found in verse number 36 in this statement here: "You have not obeyed the voice of the Lord." It's amazing how the scripture doesn't lay emphasis upon the reasons for the internal struggle of this fellow as much as we can sympathize with him. The emphasis isn't laid upon that in the story, is it? As if to suggest that there may be reasonable grounds for disobedience to God's word. Instead, what is emphasized and prioritized is obedience to the word of the Lord. And the begging question that arises out of a text like this is to us this morning, is simply this: What if God compelled you in a very extraordinary circumstance to do something that did not logically compute in your mind? To apply yourself to a portion of God's word, to a principle of God's word, in a circumstance or in a scenario in your life in which you think to yourself, "Man, no one's going to understand what this looks like and means." Would you do it? What we have in this passage is someone who, if we could say, what we have in this passage is a call to obedience beyond our reason. What we have in this passage is a call to obedience beyond reason. And we will find in the scriptures, as I take you through, that this is actually the pathway of the just. What I mean by that is there are ample examples in scripture that point to us to a very similar thing. Different scenarios, different scenes, but all at the same conclusion. Will you obey me whether it makes sense to you or not? Think of the life of Abraham. Get up out of your country, out of your family, and go to a place that I will show you. Not I will show you a place to go to, and when you are happy with the location and the place and it's very suited to your liking and makes you evermost comfortable because you can see the wisdom of my ways, then you can decide whether or not you'd like to go. No. The voice comes in the darkness, as it were. Get up. And it continued like that with Abraham. This is partly why he was known as a man of faith. He wrestled with faith, no question about that. But even his only son Isaac, God says to him, "Go take him up on a mountain and offer him as a sacrifice." Abraham goes in faith, trusting the Lord, even though it does not completely make sense to him. This is the son of promise. This is the one that You said will come. And how is it going to all work? You haven't told me yet that there will be a lamb there provided in replacement for him. You haven't told me how the story is going to end, God. But the book of Hebrews says, "By faith, when he, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son of whom it was said, 'Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.'" Listen to this. He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. You see that? Abraham's obedience is rooted in a faith that extends beyond his reason. Moses, the same. He's a man in the middle of the wilderness who has escaped from Egypt whom God appears to in a burning bush and He says, "I want you to go to the most powerful place in the world, Egypt, and I want you to free your people from bondage." You think to yourself, "Come on. Some guy in the backside of the desert coming all the way into the big mighty power of this world. How on earth is this going to happen?" And you know what God says to him? "What's in your hand, Moses?" A rod. Okay, cast your rod on the ground. Becomes a serpent. Moses, take your hand, put it in your cloak, take it out again, leprous. Put it back, take it out again, healed. Now Moses, you take that rod, you go to that mighty power called Egypt, you stand before the most mighty, the most powerful man in the entire world, and you tell him, "Let my people go." Now think about it. Would you take a rod? Would you think that, you know, think about this scene. Here's a rod. Every time he threw that rod down or did something with that rod, he's probably thinking, "Is it going to work now? Is it not going to work now?" His faith had to be in God. But think about the unreasonableness of the situation humanly speaking. And what's more so is when God delivers them out with a mighty hand and power, they come to the Red Sea and they're cornered. And God says to Moses, "You go up to that Red Sea and you raise the rod over the Red Sea." And you know what's going to happen? It's going to part, and all the children of Israel are going to walk on dry land. Moses, take the rod, put it over the Red Sea. Moses obeys. He obeys God. And no doubt Moses' mind would have been no different to our mind. He would have had questions, would have been wondering about all this. The same is true of Joshua when he leads the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, and they come to the banks of the Jordan River which is overflowing. What's a reasonable thing? "Let's build a bridge to cross it." God says, "No. What you're going to do is you're going to take the ark of the covenant and the priests are going to walk in first with the ark of the covenant, and they are going to put their foot in the water first. And then the waters will dry up and you'll cross." Now think about that for a moment. You're a priest with the ark of the covenant at the brink of the rushing Jordan River that could swallow you up and destroy you. You're saying, "God, the way it should work is you, the water goes back first, then we go." You know? God says, "No, your feet in first." Unreasonable. And so they get to Jericho, and they think, "Okay, we're going to destroy this city." God says, "This city is going to be into your hands." And God says, "The way you're going to destroy this city, guys, is you're going to walk around it for six days, once a day for six days. On the seventh day, you're going to do something special. Seven times you're going to walk around it." Now I'm just wanting you to put yourself in their shoes. I'm being real here, right? This is, humanly speaking, let's fathom with this. Just wrestle with this, right? Seven days. And what you're going to have is trumpets, you're going to shout, and you know what's going to happen? All the walls are going to start tumbling down. And the city will be yours. And that's exactly what happened. "By faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days." March, blow trumpets, shout, no military strategy, the walls fell. We go into the New Testament, we see the very same thing. Jesus is teaching these people and they're hungry. They've been with him all evening. And Jesus says to them in Matthew chapter 14, "When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, 'This is a desolate place and the day is now over. Send the crowds away to the villages and buy food for themselves.'" Very reasonable. Big day. We don't have enough food in the fridge, as it were. Like there's a lot of people here. The logical conclusion is you send the people back to the city where there are foods, where there are market stores, and what they do is they buy food with money, you see. And then they get fed. This is how it works. They've been teaching all day. Jesus has been teaching all day. But you know what Jesus says? He says, "They need not go away. You give them something to eat." Now, this becomes real challenging for the disciples, and Philip starts to reason financially. He says, "Well, man, even 200 denarii is not enough to feed so many people. Like, we don't even have the money to pay for the bread to feed the people." Now this is getting really unreasonable. Andrew's response is a little bit more mathematical. He says, "Well, look, we have a boy here who has five loaves and two fish, but what are these among so many? 200 denarii is not enough to feed them all. Five loaves and two fish is not enough to feed them all. Just send them back to the cities, right?" You know what Jesus says in response to these responses? "Make them sit down." And what does Jesus do? He blesses the bread. He feeds the 5,000. They all go away full, and there's 12 baskets left. And so when Jesus is with his disciples and they are fishing, and Simon has been fishing all night and hasn't caught anything. Jesus goes to Simon and says to Simon before he's done with the day, "Look, go out into the deep and let your nets down for a catch." And Simon says, "Look, Jesus, in case you didn't realize, we've actually been fishing all night. Like, what's you know, one more? You know, what does, like, one minute we missed, you know? Like, if they're going to come to us, it would have come to us by now." "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing." But listen what he says, "But at Your word, I will let down the nets." And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish and their nets were breaking. Peter obeyed God at the word of Jesus beyond reason. The entire call, if you haven't realized already, the entire call of the gospel, to preach the gospel to every creature, is also in this realm of obeying God beyond reason. The message of the gospel really makes no sense to man. We are told in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 18, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing." For Jews demand what? Signs. And Greeks seek after wisdom, knowledge, philosophy. "But," Paul says, "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews, and folly to the Gentiles." Now let's just apply some human reason to this. If you want to win people, what are you to do? Well, you give them what they want. That's how you win people. That's the method of consumerism, right? People have needs, people have wants, you meet their need. You show them, "This is what you need. We sell this at this shop." And that's why consumerism doesn't fail in the short term. There's always customers and stores and people that need things. And so we would think, "Okay, if you want to reach Jews, you give them miracles. If you want to reach Greeks, you give them philosophical wisdom." "But," we preach Christ crucified, contrasting what they want, contrasting what would ordinarily win them, "we preach to them what they need. We preach to them Christ crucified, which to the Jews is a stumbling block, and which to the Greeks is folly." That's as crazy as Elisha telling a leprous man called Naaman to go wash in the Jordan seven times and his skin will be healed. But that's it. Why? Because Christ is the power of God and Christ is the wisdom of God. And to those who are being saved, Christ is the power and wisdom of God. Do you understand this? And the challenge of this text and of all these texts of scripture is that we are challenged not to limit our obedience to the sphere of our human reason, because as soon as we say, "God, I'll obey You when it makes sense to me, when You can prove to me and show me that this is the best thing that I should do, then I will give You my life, then I will follow Your commandments, then I will obey Your word." Now, it's not all unreasonable, because there's a reasonableness behind obedience beyond reason. What is that reasonableness? Well, it's this: that the reason of man, human reason, is fallible, faltering, limited, and it's not final. Do you see that? It's reasonable to obey the voice of the Lord because the voice of the Lord is superior to human reason. And it's a very important thing to wrestle with in our hearts and our minds. Now, let's revisit the scene. That prophet is gets goes up to this fellow and says to him, "Strike me, please," at the command of the Lord. What is actually more reasonable? Is it more reasonable to obey or to disobey? What makes more sense? To reject and refuse to obey the commands of the Lord or to submit yourself to the all-wise creator of the universe, although it makes no sense to you? What makes more sense? I think it's quite clear if you're honest that what makes sense to us is not the measure of truth nor the measure of wisdom. You see? What God says is superior. What God says overrules. And that's because our mind is finite. That's because our mind is faltering. That's because our human reason does not have all the information to process. We are limited creatures. Let me illustrate this. One man said this, "A cube makes no sense in the world of only two dimensions, length and height." It's a logical impossibility. But add a third dimension called depth, and it's not only possible, but completely sensible. We are so accustomed to thinking in our three-dimensional world that what we call logically impossible is actually perfectly logical once you factor in a fourth, fifth, or sixth dimension. Did you get it? Our limitations, our two-dimensional thinking, is limited in how we can process what is before us. But when we understand that there is God who lives in a different dimension to us, who speaks into our dimension, then we do well to trust that the God who sees all things, knows all things, can see things from a thousand other angles that we cannot process, that His ways are much higher than our ways and His thoughts are much higher than our thoughts. This is why human reason must always be the servant of God's revelation, because the God who speaks speaks from a viewpoint and from the world of infinity to us finite people. And the minute that we think that we are smarter than God, and that our ways are higher than His way, we end up in the situation that the judges were in, or the Book of Judges, the people in the Book of Judges were in, where there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which is right in his own eyes. Why? Because they thought that their understanding, their reason, their sensibility, that was exalted to the highest authority. This is why the foolish notions that characterize our generation are readily accepted, because we have rejected God and His word. This is why things like happiness is the highest good is so easily believed in our world today, isn't it? Happiness is the highest good. Happiness equals goodness. So satisfaction equals and defines goodness. And there's a logic to this argument. It is to be happy is a good thing and good things make us happy. Therefore, happiness is the highest good. But that belief produces such a moral drift, and it fails to understand that every stable institution—marriage, parenting, community, government—is built upon sacrifice, duty, endurance, and obedience, and they depend upon a commitment that goes beyond happiness. You see? But when you have this mentality that happiness is the highest good, and it's unchecked by a higher authority, by God's word and the ways and wisdom of God, and you make that your authority, well, there you have it. What about if it feels right to me, it must be right? You live your truth, I live my truth, follow your heart, you do you. Well, that does is prioritizes human emotional experience to the place of an authoritative place. You know, this forms part of the human reasoning that undergirds the views of sexual orientation in our day. What matters is not biology, what matters is how you feel. And so you exalt feeling to the primary place. And I ask you this question: When will it end? When does it stop? What if it makes me happy to hurt people? What if I have desire for animals? I mean, you can go on and on and on. At what point does it end? Where is this higher being? Where is this authority that goes beyond our reason? That we are to submit ourselves to, and we are to weigh the things by which we think. Now people logically work through this. Death is natural, death is biological, death is inevitable. Therefore, death is morally neutral, and it's okay then to take life. It's an old lady, she's suffering, just give her injection and let her go. Young man with cancer, just euthanize. You know, it's just natural, it's ordinary, it's a path that we're all taking, not seeing it that is an evil as a result of the curse and of the fall. That God is wanting to redeem, that we we should be facing with fear and trepidation, realizing that we must be ready for death and for eternity. But if you reason through human reason logically, and you do not check it by the authority of God's word, you get all these sorts of things. And what man in our generation, perhaps what we have forgotten today, is that there is another main character and player in the universe whose name is God. And that the only thoughts in the universe that actually really finally matter is His thoughts. The only ways in the universe that actually are infallible, perfect, and unfailing is His ways. And that we do well as His creatures to recognize that. That we are the finite and He is the infinite. "For My thoughts are not your thoughts," says the Lord. "Neither are your ways My ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts." Therefore, the wisest, most reasonable thing for you and I to do is to discover and obey the ways and the thoughts of God, because they do exist. Because He does exist. And God has spoken and guess where He's spoken? In His word. And therefore what we have right here is the ways and the wisdom and the word of God. So when the prophet says, "Strike me at the command of the Lord," you have to pause and say to yourself, "If this really is the command of the Lord, then it doesn't matter how I feel. If this really is the command of the Lord, then I do best to submit to His authority and His ways." Because many of God's people have come to the place in their lives where they've constructed their own religion built upon their own preferences by which they give to God things, they say things to God, they give things to God, but they do not give their all to God. They do not yield themselves to God as the final authority in their lives. This happened with King Saul. Samuel told King Saul, "When you go in to Amalek, you destroy everything in the city. You don't take anything back with you." And so Saul goes in and the children of Israel have a great victory, but what Saul does is that he keeps the best ox, the best sheep, and he spares Agag, king of Amalek, and he brings them out. And Samuel comes back to see how they've gone with the battle, Prophet Samuel, and Samuel says, "What is all this bleating or the, why do I hear the cattle moaning and bleating in the sheep bleating in the background? What's going on here?" Oh, I love Saul's response. Just like ours, isn't it? "You know, Samuel, the people spared the best of the sheep, the best of the oxen, all that was good they spared." And look what he says, "to sacrifice to the Lord your God. And the rest we have devoted to destruction." See that? God says devote everything to destruction. Saul says, "Hey, these are good sheep. These are good oxen. They could really be used for the kingdom of God." And this is what the Lord says, "Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings as sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination or witchcraft, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he also has rejected you from becoming king." You see that? Constructing your own kind of obedience and religion in such a way that, "Oh, we devote some things to destruction, and we give the rest to the Lord." Isn't that amazing? And it looks so holy and it looks so spiritual, but is it really the word of the Lord? Is it really what God has said? Now what the Bible teaches us is that true rest comes from obedience. And there's a passage in the Old Testament that was referred to in our Bible reading this morning from the book of Hebrews, about the children of Israel that came to the land of Canaan, the promised land of God. And they had left from Egypt through the Red Sea and now they're in the wilderness and they've gone to the land of Canaan, the land promised by God. And God says to the children of Israel, "Go in and get it. It's yours. It's yours. I've promised it to you. My word says it was yours. Take it." And so they send 12 spies into the land, the land flowing with milk and honey promised by the word of the Lord to them. But the spies come back and ten of them come back with an evil report. And that evil report is this: "There were Nephilim or giants in the land, and we seemed to ourselves to be like grasshoppers. Yeah, the land is great. The grapes are excellent. The milk and honey is whoa, man, there is there is an abundance of provision in this land, and this is a great land. But there's one big problem, there's giants in the land. And we're like grasshoppers to them. If we go in there, we're toast. We're done. We're not going to survive this thing." And so they come back and the ten people come back with an evil report, and they say, "We're not going in there. We'd rather die than go in there and die. Like we'd rather just stay here and die." And Joshua and Caleb, two spies who also went into the land, they reply with faith's obedience. Listen to what they say, "If the Lord delights in us, He will bring us into the land and give it to us. Only do not rebel against the Lord and do not fear." But what did the people do? They took up stones to stone them. And listen to what the Lord said. This is probably one of the most saddest passages in the Bible. Listen to what the Lord said in response to their disobedience and to their unbelief and their unwillingness to submit themselves to the word of the Lord because it didn't make sense to them. Because of course, giants kill grasshoppers, not the other way around. "How long," God says, "will this people despise Me? And how long will they not believe in Me in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?" You know what happened? God said, "Done. That generation that wouldn't go in will die in the wilderness." 40 years they wandered in the wilderness and each one of them perished in unbelief. You know what the amazing thing is? In Deuteronomy chapter 1 verse 2, it says it's 11 days' journey. It's only 11 days' journey from Horeb, Mount Sinai, to Kadesh Barnea, which is the entry to the promised land. It was only 11 days' journey. 40 years of wandering in that wilderness to get back in the land of promise because of unbelief. It was only really an 11-day journey. Why? Because they exalted human reason above the word of God. Why? Because they said, "You, God, make it all clear for us before we obey You." Why? Because there's giants in the land. Why? Because they wouldn't strike me as it were in the name of the Lord or at the command of the Lord. You see what the problem is? The problem is that they came to the place where they exalted human reason and what made sense to them, and they measured their obedience according to their human reason rather than submitting to the word of God. And the question for us this morning is, have we allowed reason to keep us from the rest that God gives us and has provided for us if we will but obey Him? And there are many people who will perish in unbelief and will never enter the kingdom of heaven and know the joys of salvation because they wrestle with the consequences of believing in Jesus Christ, and it doesn't add up to them. If I trust in Jesus Christ, and if I give my life to Christ, what is that going to mean for this relationship and and my wife and my spouse and my family and all these things? And God's saying to you, "Come unto Me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." And here you are wrestling and struggling and saying, "What am I going to do?" Let me ask you this: Is it better for you to try and save yourself and stress and be anxious and never enter the kingdom of God? Or is it better for you to cast yourself upon the word of the Lord and say, "Jesus, I come. Save me. If this is at Your word, I will come to You." This is what happened to Peter. The water, the wind, and the waves. "Lord, if it's You, bid me to come," because if it's really Your word, I'll walk on water just like You. And He says, "Come, Peter, come." And he comes. You see, but there are many people that will perish in unbelief. Perhaps you are here today and you are thinking about spiritual things and the gospel and Christianity and how can I be saved? And as you hear about your sin and you hear about what repentance means and what life will look like, you start to wrestle and think, "If I do this, it's not going to make any sense to my future. It really doesn't add up. What it's going to mean for this and that, my job, my whatever, I don't know what if Jesus takes full control of my life? What's that going to look like?" And you reason and you reason and you reason and you reason, but you reason not realizing that you will actually experience true rest when you come and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. When you actually come to trust in Him. When you actually come to hear His voice and stop hardening your heart as they did in the wilderness. You can avoid a 40-year journey that will lead to your destruction. And you can have milk and honey now in Jesus Christ if you but trust in Him and believe on Him. And that rest that we enter into is from a faith that trusts in the word of the living God and obeys despite our inability to comprehend and understand everything. It's realizing that there is a God who made the world. There is a God who made me. There is a God in whom who has made heaven, who has made hell. There is a God who has designed salvation and orchestrated it, and I would do wise to realize that I am not that person. I am not that God. I am not the one who made all these things, who made me, who gives me life and breath. He is God. To realize that, He is far above what I am and can ever be, and therefore the best thing for me to do is to cast my soul into His care and to rest in Him and to trust in Him. And as we do that, as believers in Jesus Christ, we live a life like that. You know, this is what the whole Christian life's about. We walk by faith, not by sight. We are saved by faith, not by sight. We walk by faith and not by sight. The whole Christian life is patterned after the very same move of faith that was given to us by God in the gospel. We come to Him, we keep coming to Him. We don't come to Him, find our forgiveness and assurance, and then all of a sudden we go back to good works and think to ourselves, "You know what? If I sin, I got to do penance for God to forgive me." No, you just keep coming to that same blood that cleansed you in the first place and you feel that cleansing again. You keep believing in His promises that God won't fail to finally save you. That He that began a good work in you will complete it to the day of Jesus Christ. "But I don't feel saved today." Why don't you just hang on to that word that saved you in the first place and keep hanging on to that word that will save you in the last place? It's the word of the Lord. You see, and this is how we we wrestle in the Christian life so often with these things. We think to ourselves, "How on earth am I going to survive in such an expensive society in which we live?" And we start to forsake the things of God in order to build bigger barns for ourselves and to be more comfortable in our lives. But you know what? Many people lose their families, their lives, and even all their wealth in pursuit of wealth. But you know what the Bible says? "I have been young and I have been old, and I have never seen the righteous forsaken nor his children begging for bread." It says, "My God will supply all your needs according to His riches and glory by Christ Jesus." But how's it going to work? How's it going to add up? And you get the calculator and you're working it out. How about you do the calculations, you set your budget, but how about you take that budget and you go to the Lord and say, "Lord, this is the reality of it. And I'm not going to disobey you in order to make things work. I'm going to trust You because You will provide for me. You own the cattle on a thousand hills. You can provide for me a job. You own the cattle on a thousand hills. The gold and the silver is Yours. You can provide for me a house when You want me to have a house." Do you understand that? I don't like usually sharing personal testimonies, but I would just for the sake of you thinking that these things don't just happen in the biblical realm, in the Bible, and nor do they just happen to people like George Müller. They happen to your sinful, weak pastor. And for you, if you but trust him. You know, it was about 13 years ago now, Natalie and I were living in a rental property in North Ryde. And my father, as being generous, not just because he's Lebanese, but he also has the spiritual gift of giving. He said, "Joshua," when I moved from Melbourne, I got married, we went to we went to Sydney to to live and I was studying at Bible college. And when I'm looking for a place, I'm looking for a place in my budget. Dad says, "Don't worry, I'll you get this place because when I come, I'll stay with you and I'll pay your rent." I'm like, "Oh man, okay, whatever." We did that, very generous. So dad's paying our rent, an amount that we can't pay for, but he's a very generous guy. About 13 years ago. Dad went through some financial struggles at that time, and he would never suggest to stop paying our rent, never. He would die before he stopped helping us. But Natalie and I were praying and we're thinking about this and we said we need to stop this. We just, we can't do this anymore. I can't take money from him, which means inevitably we have to leave the house. So you get the connection. We can't afford to stay there. And so we said to dad, "Look, we're going to stop." And dad's reasoning through reasons why, we said we believe God wants us to stop taking the money from you until, you know, this is it. It's like we don't want to, we don't want to burden you anymore. And I know that you're not going to do this. He was still insistent, but we disobeyed dad. We believe God wanted us to do this. And so we were living in a duplex, and in this duplex, there were two bedrooms up here, and there was one bedroom up here. We slept in this bedroom. You go downstairs, you had a kitchen, you had a lounge room, and then you had two bedrooms up there. So when Mom and Dad came and guests came, they stayed on this side of the house. And that wall separated our neighbor's wall who was our landlord. Okay, you get the picture? Okay. I said to Dad, "We're not going to take money from you. We're going to stop right there. Thank you so much for everything you've done for us." Straight away, I speak to the landlord, and Natalie and I say to him, "Look, we we can't stay here anymore. The rent is too high. We can't afford it." He says, "How much do you want to pay?" "Well, how much can you pay?" I said, "Man, we can only pay like, like half or that half the amount that we're paying now." He says, "Let me think about it." What are you going to think about? You're going to lose money. You right? Like think about losing money. It doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't add up. He comes back, I think it's a couple of days later, maybe in a week later, and he comes into our house and he sits down on the couch and he says, "I've got an idea. He goes, 'I'm going to put a hole through this wall and cut out a door from this wall, and I'm going to build a wall into your house so I can take these two bedrooms on this side, and so you can stay here, have your kitchen and have your lounge room, and not have to move out of your house, and you can pay what you can afford to pay for the house.'" He paid for the renovations, he did all the renovations, he sorted out the the house, and we stayed in that house. Who, what, how does that work? Tell me. How does that work reasonably? How does it work out? But God provides for His people. You see, and when you trust in the Lord and when you rest in the Lord, you start to see things happen like red seas part and like Jordan rivers dry up. But if we're living in the realm of our reason being the final authority by which we judge our decisions, we will never see the water part. Do you understand that? And I believe so many of God's people have constructed a kind of religion whereby they'll never jump and trust the Lord. They'll never do it. What they'll do is they will try and reason through all of it. And if it doesn't make sense, they'll wait for God to prove it first and then they'll do it. "We walk by faith and not by sight." And this is not only one feeble story of God's great act and might, not in our faith, but by His grace and by His mercy. And I tell you, we could have people stand up all over this room this morning and tell us how God provides for His people if we but trust Him and step out by faith. But the truth is, when we hear something that doesn't make sense to us, most of the time we're like, "Mm, nah. I'm going to make sure it makes sense first before I go with it." You should ask this question: "Is it God's word or is it not God's word?" And if it's God's word, what do I have to fear? What do you have to fear? "Will you trust me," says the Lord, "with your future? Who will I marry? Where shall I live? What shall be, what shall I do in my retirement? How's life's going to, how is life going to look like if I surrender the call of full-time ministry?" These are real questions that are not bad to ask. I'm not against human reason, if you haven't worked it out yet. I have been both criticized for being, using too much reason and the opposite as well. Okay, but the point being, I hope you get this. This is about reasoning in such a way that you understand God's revelation and who He is comes first and what He commands comes first. But what will be of our future? What will be if I surrender the full-time ministry? You know, and and and all these kind of things. Listen, I'll tell you, if God is leading you, if you have a clear word from the Lord, you have nothing to fear. Why? Because the plans that He has for you are good. Do you understand that? No good thing does He withhold from those that walk uprightly. His plans are for your welfare and not for evil, to give you future and to give you a hope. You say, "How's it going to look like? Can I trust him with my greatest fear?" Yes, you can trust Him this morning with your greatest fear because though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are to fear no evil for He is with you. And His rod and His staff, they comfort you. You have more to fear living in disobedience to God's word than you do by living by faith in a world that makes no sense to you. And therefore, dear children of God, obey the voice of the Lord. You don't need to control the future. You don't need to frantically scramble and lose sleep at night. God is working all things for your good and for His glory. And be careful at any point if you start worshiping the God of reason. Because that's the problem. If we worship the God of reason, we will not worship the God of heaven and earth. You cannot serve two masters. If we have elevated our obedience and sacrifice and service to the final authority of reason and not God's revelation, we are in a dangerous position, no different to the unbelieving world. But if you really think through this issue well enough, you'll start to realize that maybe the call to radical obedience is not so crazy after all. It actually makes quite a lot of sense when the God who reigns has spoken. Let's pray.