Sam, it. It. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Good to see all of you welcome here today and excited to be here in the house of the Lord for a nice little time of worship and on a beautiful Sunday morning. We got the air conditioner going. Yeah, if you need it. And welcome to our worship. Isaiah, why don't you come call the choir up, let us know what we're doing this morning. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, Wesley and Debbie. Randy told me you guys came from Denver, Colorado to come and see me. Sorry, I was in Farmington, New Mexico. But today we're gonna sing 339 standing on the Promises. Linda, Mark, Susanna, Luca and Natalie. And you may stand versus 1, 2 and 4. Standing on the promises of Christ my King through eternal ages let his graces ring Glory in the highest I will shout and sing on the promises of God Standing on the promises Standing on the promises Standing on the promises of God my Savior Standing on the promises Standing on On the promises I'm standing on the promises of God Standing on the promises that cannot fail when the howling downs of doubt and fears assail by the living word of God it shall prevail Standing on the promises of God Standing on the promises Standing on the promises Standing on the promises God my Savior Standing on the promises Standing on the promises and I'm standing on the promises of God Standing on the promises I cannot fall Listening every moment to the Spirit's call Resting in my Savior as my know in all Standing on the promises of God Standing on the promises Standing on the promises Standing on the promises of God my Savior Standing on the promises Standing on the promises I'm standing on the promises of God Amen. Why don't we just remain standing for prayer? How about that? Would you like to tell them that? Remain standing for prayer. Here we go. Let's have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for these promises filled in the word of God that we're able to stand upon and rejoice in and learn from and study. And we are grateful, dear Heavenly Father, to be able to rightly divide the word of truth and determine which promises are ours, which promises are not ours. Know which ones we can claim and which ones we should not. And to be able to rejoice in all of that. And thank you for the beautiful time of worship and a great week of vacation Bible school ahead. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Now you may be. There we go. And welcome each one of you. Glad you're here today and certainly appreciate you and you being here. And hey, Pastor, Mark Bays, come on back up here. I want to say. I want to say a word of greeting. So this, if you were in our Sunday school hour, you know, this is Pastor Mark Bays. Little boy here that came to us about six years ago. He showed up in the service one day. You know how it goes. We make everybody announce themselves and introduce themselves and you probably didn't even get a coaster, did you, back then? We did. Oh, you guess. Two. Two. Okay, well, so see and be. And then I. He told me he was going to be a pastor, and I thought, oh, I better get him straightened out before he leaves this town. So I took him to lunch and I, He. He said at the end, almost thou has persuaded me. Took him a few years slowly, you know, thinking through all that and getting rid of some of the stuff he had learned. And now he makes a great pastor after all these years. And he. He's done some YouTube videos which are. Are fantastic. Well, he does a daily program which is fantastic. He's trying to copycat me. They're called shields and arrows on YouTube. And, and he's done some little. What do you call those little things? Like, you know, one time blitzes. Yeah, edited YouTube. Edited. You know, when you edit, you can make anything look good. Okay, so edits these videos and, and they got like, I don't know, 150, 000 views. And they're. They're pretty good. My favorite is where he. He promotes small churches and says that's a good thing because, you know, we are America's greatest tiny church right here. And so go check him out. What's. What's your YouTube address? Mark Bayes. Pretty easy. YouTube.com markbaes he taught our Sunday school class today. You can find that at our YouTube channel. And listen to the book of Joel in one sermon. I learned a few things this morning. I was hoping you would. Yes. It's about you finally. You know, I got paid back for that lunch. But anyway, I have appreciated Pastor Mark over the years. I don't know. Pastor Mark, you think we can bring your family up here? I think we can. I'm gonna have to go help, though. He's got a. He go. You go help and I'll. He's got a big family, you know. A couple years ago we took a little offering because turned out they were having triplets, as you can hear. And so they have had the triplets, who are almost, almost two now. And then they already had Jake. Jake's been here before, and Mark and Mary like to come through Here on their anniversary and that kind of thing through Taos. They love Taos, love our church. And let's, let's introduce the three newest Bayes family right here. Plus big brother Jake, who's really wanting to go the other way, not this way. But I'm going to let you handle introductions here and introduce your family for us. Yeah, absolutely. So this is my wife Mary. She's a doctor, by the way. Way smarter and better looking than I am. And then our oldest is Jake. He's being a little bit shy today. And then these are the triplets. So this is John and he's the only boy. And then this is Brenda and this is Belle. And yes, John and Belle seem to get the same reddish hair. And then There's Brenda. They're 17. 17 or 18. 17 or 18 months old now. And John and Belle are walking around getting everything. And then Brenda is still enjoying life of just getting held everywhere she goes. So. And then Jake is a very, very good big brother. Also. Two years ago in the wintertime when we were expecting these to get here, your church was so kind to give a very generous love offering to help us with expenses. And so that, that meant a lot to us. Thank you for that. Thank you to the Bayes family. And now welcome everybody here to worship. Glad you're here. Morning. And as you can see, we, we are going to have an explosive week. That was. I deserve some applause. Yeah, we, we got a train theme and a western theme going on here at vacation. Bible school starts tomorrow, 9am, 9 to noon. Got a good group of kids already pre registered. And then we'll have some more that show up as well. Got a group coming in from Louisiana to help us. They help us every year for, I don't know, 10 years now or so. And we're looking forward to that as well as our own helpers. I think the only thing we need at this point is your prayers, your kids and your bottles of water. There you go. If you'd like to donate anything anytime this week, you could drop off some bottled water and we will use that for the kids each day and they have fun here with Bible stories, with music, with crafts, with snacks and with recreation and, and all that. A bottle of water is a good thing to, to have. And so we'll give that. Do y' all just trade the bottles of water around all week? I don't know how this happens. We'll see. But, but we got bottled water for the next few days. But if you happen to be at the grocery store Would like to bring some of that. You can. And if we end up gets used eventually. So you pray for Bible school this week. And because of vacation Bible school, we will not be having our regular Wednesday night activities. So no supper this week and no Bible study online this week. Online or in house, either one this week. We'll begin again next Sunday morning and, and by next Sunday the train will have crashed and will be gone and the tunnel will be down and we'll be back to our normal attire here next Sunday. But we do look forward to a great, a great event this week. Now we are always glad to have guests. I've got somewhere here. Where, where is it Luca or Isaiah, Help me out. We like to give a little gift to our gifts, our guests. A gift to our guests. Thank you, sir, I appreciate that. And that is a coaster. How about that? And it has a little picture of our church as America's greatest tiny church because we won the prize of the contest that we put on and we would love to give it to you and have you just remember us a little bit as you take that and put it in your home and go by, you know, as I go, go about a lot of places all scattered out like, like Warren and Linda's house. I was there this week and I saw one of these right there. They, they put away the beer and pulled that out when the preacher was coming and you know, had it all, you know, set up for the preacher. You know, a preacher's coming over, better get that out. But no, I actually go all over the place and I see these and it's nice all around the country. Of course I'm usually dropping into people who have been to see us before, but we got that now. I think we are, we're, we're all home folk except one non home folk friend back here, David. And here's the way we, we do it. He was a pastor in Florida. Remember the, Remember the class they taught in seminary that said never embarrass the guests? Remember that one? Yeah, I don't. I forgot that class. We embarrass our guests here because we love it when people come from all over the place and come to visit us. And so we make them introduce themselves. So Pastor David, introduce yourself. Tell us who you are, where you're from, what brings you down all that. My name is David Fellows, pastor emeritus of Christchurch of Ocala, Florida. I'm originally from Fort Worth. I'm staying across the street. Amen. And my wife is taking care of her mother. This morning she was not feeling well. I'm glad to be with you. Pastor David Christchurch in Ocala, Florida. Pastor Emeritus, thanks for being here with us today. And we're going to give you a coaster here in just a moment. Thanks to the rest of you also for being here. Why don't you stand up, greet someone, tell us them hello. And those of you online, we're thrilled that you're here as well, as well as Linda in Lexington. It's her birthday. Happy birthday, Linda. And you all join us here. It's Sam It. Standing on the promises of Christ my savior Standing, standing I'm standing on the promises of Christ well, before we sing the next one here, I wanted to say a couple of things I forgot here about this. Sorry. Well, I just looked over. We sure appreciate Natalie, who's still here with us singing, and Juna, who's gone back to Vermont now doing all this decoration all through the church here and in the fellowship hall. Thank you, ladies, very much. Very good work. We appreciate that. And of course, Rich and Jody were here and helped a bit of that time. And we missed Brenda today. She is out today. And also her dog died this week, Tootsie. So we pray for Brenda and that family and miss her this morning. But Isaiah, come introduce the next song for us. We're gonna sing 356. We've a story to tell and let's. Let's sing the. The first and the last on this. And I got to do a little preaching before we do, but you can stay standing. You know, I like this song and I don't like this song. How's that? I like that. Hey, we do have a story to tell to the nations, right? The one thing I don't like about this song is it doesn't perfectly fit my theology because it says the darkness shall turn to the dawning and the dawning to noonday bright. And Christ's great kingdom shall come on earth. A kingdom of love and light. His kingdom is going to come. But it gives the idea that when we tell the story, we'll slowly bring about his kingdom. And the darkness will turn to the dawning. And I'm not sure that's exactly the way it's going to go, but it reminds us of a good word, however it's going to happen. We got a story to tell to the nations, right? Let's sing the first and last. Come on up, choir. We shall preach a tale to the nations that shall turn their hearts to the right A story of truth and mercy A story of peace and light A story of peace and light for the darkness shall turn to the dawning and the dawning to noonday bright and Christ's great kingdom shall come on earth the kingdom of love and light Leave a Savior to show to the nations who the path of sorrow that trod that all of the world's great peoples may come to the truth of God may come to the truth of God Lord the darkness shall turn to the dawning and the dawning to noon may bright and Christ's great kingdom shall come on earth the kingdom of love and light now turn to 368 I'll tell the world that I'm a Christian I'll tell the world that I'm a Christian I'm not ashamed his name to bear I'll tell the world that I'm a Christian I'll take him with me anywhere I'll tell the world how Jesus saved me and how he gave me a life renew and I know that if you trust him that all he gave me he'll give to you a to the world that he's my Savior no other one could love me so my life, my all is his forever and where he needs I will go I'll tell the world that he is coming it may be near or far away but we must live as if his coming would be tomorrow today for when he comes and life is over for those who love him there's more to be I see the wonders that he's preparing for you and me. Oh tell the world that you're a Christian Be not ashamed he's made to bear oh tell the world that you're a Christ Christian and take him with you everywhere. Now turn to 363. Let others see Jesus in you all four verses passing through this world of sin and us your life shall be clean and pure without within. Let all see Jesus in you Let others see Jesus Jesus in you in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Keep telling the story be faithful and true Let others see Jesus in you. Your lives above before their eyes they bring it through and through Save us in coins them to the skies throughout the sea teaching Jesus in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Keep telling the story Be faithful and true Let others see Jesus in you. What joy twill be at shadow sun in majesty on the blue to find some souls that you have won Let other cities Jesus in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Keep Telling the story Be faithful and true Let others see Jesus in you Live for Christ O day and night Be faithful Be brave and true and lead the loss to life and light Let others see Jesus in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Let others see Jesus in you in you Keep telling the story. Be faithful and true they see Jesus in you Amen. You may be seated for anyone's foot. Amen. You may be seated. And thank you for that good word on some of the sharing of the witness that we have. And keep telling the others. Be faithful, be true Let others see Jesus in you. And we pray for our missionaries this month, Henry and Gretel Gonzalez on their way to Paraguay. And we got to meet them a few weeks ago and that was a joy and a blessing. And so if you give Mark to missions this month, it goes to the Gonzales. If you give unmarked, it goes to the work of our church here. That God has used those offerings to sustain us now over 90 years right here in Taos, New Mexico, at this beautiful spot. And we rejoice in that. Let me lead us in a word of prayer. Father, we are most grateful for your watch care over us for the reminder from these songs of a story that we do have to tell to the nations. And it's a story that has been a blessing for each one of us. And we pray that we are faithful to let others see Jesus in us as we tell the world that we're a Christian. And may the sermon and the ministry of this church and the churches represented even here this morning be a blessing here and around the world. We lift the Gonzales up and ask you to encourage them as you'll encourage us today. In Jesus name, Amen. Well, we got our boys here to take up the offering. And they're going to come around and pass this, pass this plate two, three, four times, whatever it takes. And we sure appreciate them. God bless you young man, as you take up the offering. Sa Sam Ram Samantha. That's the nicest thing about that pianist. And we, we come today now to a time of preaching this morning here. And boys, you can go on out with Brianna if you. And girl, you can go on out with Brianna if you want. And thank you, Brianna, for leading the children this morning. And let's turn to Ecclesiastes, the third chapter. We've been, what I think this is, I don't know, sermon number eight or nine, as we have been been journeying our way through this book of Ecclesiastes. And we see, we come today to the fifth Chapter, the fourth chapter, you may remember, was a. As I interpreted it anyway, a prophetic word. Looking forward even to the day when that child who was poor but wise and would come out of prison would someday be the king. A messianic look in chapter four. And now we come to chapter five. You know, I have in my, in my working through Ecclesiastes, I, I didn't preach. I, I've never preached all the way through the book of Ecclesiastes I, a long time ago, picked a few highlights and passages and gave a. A little bit of this, a little bit of that from Ecclesiastes, but never just preaching the whole thing through. And often, you know, not having preached it, we just think we know what it says, right? And thinking we know what it says. I thought it was this downer of a book of a. Of an old guy who was just totally messed up, trying everything he could figure out to find some sort of hope in life and failed and failed and failed and failed and failed again and said, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. It's futile. There's no hope to it. And then finally he found Jesus at the end. Amen. And that's kind of the way we view the book. What I have discovered already in these first five chapters is it is. I started to say it is so much more than that, and indeed it is, but I might even say it's not even that. He is, I think, walking in wisdom and sharing some of his wisdom as the preacher he calls himself, right from the beginning, the preacher. We talked about that word. How is it? It's really the word of the assembler, if you will, gathering people together and sitting with him, I suppose. Pastor David, you're the pastor emeritus. That means you can say what you want to say, right? You know, there's. I, I'm a. I've. I've pastored 30 some odd years. How many years did you pastor? 33 years. Okay, so you and I know, as opposed to, you know, the young bucks here, the other pastor, you know, the kids, we know that we preach kind of different once we get a little older, don't we? And we a little bit more gather people up and say, you know, oh, grandpa's going to sit down in a rocking chair and tell you some things. And that's what King Solomon is doing. He's not really speaking in a royal way, as he does say in the Book of Proverbs, or in a, In a leadership kind of way, as he does in the Song of Solomon. He really gives it in a grandfatherly kind of way, saying, I'd like to share with you some things that I have learned along the way. And he does that and does it very well and encourages really, a great balance and understanding of life. Life. Well, when we get into chapter five, and we're just going to look at verses one through seven today when we. When we come to these verses, he is talking to the people gathered on his front porch, if you will, on worship and how to worship. Now, there's a lot of things in here I think we'll be able to take and say, hey, yeah, I agree with that. I see that. That's powerful. That's helped my life. But I do want to give you one word of warning at the beginning, and that is to remind you, you know this. But I'll remind you that Solomon was a part of the worship system in the Jewish temple, carrying out the Jewish laws and the Jewish obligations and all that was taking. You and I are in Christ and in the body of Christ and. And there are some differences. Even though I think we'll be able to find a lot of these things here. We'd say, oh, yeah, I. I would go for that, and I would take that. But we'll see some things in this passage that you might look at and say, wow, I don't know. I'm kind of scared about that. That makes me wonder, you know, if I'm going to make it, am I gonna. Am I gonna do okay? But remember, he's writing to people in a different day than now, that we have the death barrel and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the offer of grace that he is giving to each one of the works under the law. But let's begin here. And we're going to. Again, we're going to take the first seven verses, but we're going to just take it a bit at a time. Verse one, first of all, he says, keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God. And be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools, for they consider not that they do evil. Okay. It's a. It's a word of wisdom, if you will keep thy foot. You know, if you've traveled to England, perhaps they have this sort of weird saying for us when you're stepping off maybe the. The subway. What do they call that? The tube or something like that. I can't remember. The tube. Okay, okay. You're stepping off the tube. I guess that's what it is, right? And there's these signs that say, mind the Step, Mind the step. Mind the gap. Mind the gap. That's, There you go. This is somewhat that same thing, but we'll go a little bit deeper there. Keep thy foot. You know that I like to let scripture, interpret scripture, and so I look somewhere else where it says that same thing. Thing. The interesting thing here is that same thing doesn't come up anywhere. Keep thy foot. There's a few places where there's some allusion to it, like Proverbs, chapter 4, verse 6, or Psalm 119, verse 59. We won't even go there. But it is, as you can imagine, it's a, it's a figure of speech. And it says, hey, be careful. It's not saying when you get to the temple, you know, the, the ground's a little rough. Be, be careful there. Mind the gap. Watch out, don't tread, trip. He doesn't want you to trip. No doubt about it. But it has so much more to do when it says when you go to the house of God. Now remember, the house of God was the temple. When you're going into the temple, the place of Jewish worship, keep your step. Now if you look at rabbinical interpretations of this down through the years, they have mainly, and rabbinical interpretations tend to take a scripture and then say, okay, how can we make this practical? What does it mean to keep the step? They had all sorts of things. You, you, you know, read 10 rabbis and you'll get 12 opinions on what this means. But it's, it's some simple things. One, one rabbi I read, and this was an ancient rabbi actually from, well, from the Middle Ages that you are never to go to the place of teaching. Wasn't, didn't necessarily apply it to the temple. But you're not supposed to go to the teaching. The rabbi is not supposed to go to the teaching, the place of teaching with things in his pocket. And therefore it became a rabbinical tradition. When you preach, you are empty pocketed. Just to let you know, I am empty pocketed this morning, as I am all the time. Normally I have a pulpit and sometimes I get here with things in my pocket and I always set them on the pulpit. And then later on after I've locked the door, I say, oh, my keys are in there, I gotta go back. But it really, it runs the gamut from take things out of your pocket pocket to be sure you go to the bathroom first to one of the rabbis said, this means you should all, you should never pray from a lifted up place. You should always go to the lowest place. To pray and there's a few other things in here that to go with it. Now I think you and I would agree with, maybe there is some, some practical issue here, but really to keep your step before you go into the house of God is much more of a spiritual kind of issue. To examine yourself perhaps we would say, to make sure you're coming in the right mind and in the right spirit, which is so helpful even when you come, you know, here into the, into the modern day church that we gather in to keep your step. You know, when you go to the second temple, Solomon's Templ was the first temple. You go to the second temple which was built hundreds of years later and to, to replace the first temple, just in case you didn't know that that's the temple that Jesus was in. That's the temple that there's a little bit of foundational stones and some things left from that temple that you can go to today. So if you went today and we went to Jerusalem, one of the places we would go is called the southern step. Steps at the southern steps. One of the things that you will notice on these ancient steps that went up into the southern entrance to the temple is you will notice that they have a wide step followed by a narrow step and then a wide step and then a narrow step. You've seen it other places before perhaps, but it was done very purposefully in the architecture of the temple or the entrance into the temple, if you will. That said says, hey, you can't just run in here like you're going to the convenience store. This is a different kind of place. You have to slow down, you have to think about your steps a little bit because you are to keep thy foot when you go into the house of the Lord. And so he's, he, he's speaking to them now. Remember, he's, he's probably at the end of his 40 year reign. It was in the fourth year of his reign that they laid the foundation stone. I should have looked it up. I don't know if we know or not. But you know, let's say 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years to get that temple built. So the temple really is just going into maybe its second generation of worshipers that are there. So it's still a very new thing. This temple is going to last for hundreds of years by the way. And it, they, you know, the, in the scripture they say that and the rabbis continually say if you didn't see that temple, you have never seen be beauty. That it was the Picture of beauty. So here is this place, and they're still sort of getting into. What do we do when we get here? How. What's the protocol? How do we do it? Now, even, wouldn't you say in churches today, most of you have been around a few years that going into a church today has changed a little bit from when you were young. The rules, the protocol of the place, you know, used to be, you know, don't run in church and don't. What were all your rules? No. Couldn't chew gum. Could get. Oh, you take your hat off. Yeah, that's right. What'd you say, Linda? No coffee in church. Yeah. Now they got the coffee store. Coffee store. What do you call that? You know, the barista is out there. It's changed so much. You know, it used to be. Well, I grew up here in New Mexico, and we were always a little more casual. But I remember the first time I went down to Texas and went into church. Literally, the first day I was down there, I went in and we were all at Sunday school. We were college students. We were all, you know, just laughing, talking up like college students. But when we walked into that church, the organ was playing and everyone hushed up, and there wasn't a noise, there wasn't a clap there. I mean, it was a very formal kind of thing, and there wasn't a. It. What? You know, they didn't have a rule up there. You know, shut up. I don't think that's the way you would say it anyway. But anyway, there was, you know, there's no sign. That's just what you did when you went into church. And it was. It was felt, it was sensed, it was noticed. Okay, here, Solomon a bit is trying to give some of this instruction on what to do. So. So keep your foot. When you go to the house of God, be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools. Let me start out on the back end there. The sacrifice of fools. Again, it's a phrase that we don't really know what it is. It's not used anywhere else. But in the temple, that's really what you went for, is to give a sacrifice. They didn't have services. There was no auditorium or sanctuary, whatever you want to call it, you know, there wasn't the place, you know, all the service is about to begin. There really was none of that. You went in, you brought your sacrifice. There might have been a choir singing and some music going on, but there was not a service time. When does the service start? When does the Service, stop. There was none of that. You went and you brought your sacrifice. Now, the sacrifice of fools. From everything we can get from reading through the Torah, the sacrifice of fools is, yeah, you win meant you gave your sacrifice, but really your mind was. I just want to check this off the list and get out of here. I got, you know, I got places to go and people to see, but I need to look religious, you know, because I'm trying to sell insurance. Well, that was not nice. So, so you, you know, come in, check it off, boom. Foolish, you know, as if God doesn't see. God doesn't know. So he says, don't come in to give the sacrifice of who fools. Rather, he says, again, I'm backing up a little bit. He says, be, be more ready to hear, to hear. Now I want to, I want to take that word for just a moment. A lot of the modern translations have changed the word to listen. And you can understand why. And you know, to hear and to listen, you know, they're pretty similar. Do you hear me? Can you hear me now? Right, Listen up. Yeah, similar. We, we see it. However, I think this particular word here is actually used in a different way. We can't even use the word listen. But normally when we talk about listen, we're, we're, we're saying, you know, audibly. Give me attention. Here is used in the same way here as it is In Deuteronomy, chapter 6, verse 4, which the Jewish people call the Shema. And the reason they call it the Shema is the first word is shema, which is the word that means. Would anyone like to guess here? Exactly. Shema, O Israel. And it goes on. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Okay, here that the Lord your God is one. Now it really, and it's used a lot of times in this way throughout the scripture. It is a word for obey. Carry this out, you know, the instruction. And so go to here. The reason I, I, I'm a little uncomfortable with the word listen is, as I've already said, there wasn't really anything to listen to once you got there again, maybe some choir was singing out in the background. Background. But you weren't going to listen to the choir. They weren't having a concert at 7, you know, that kind of thing. It was something that went 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You never went to hear the rabbi give his sermon. As a matter of fact, they didn't have a rabbi in that day. Right. They had the, the priest, the Levitical system. But the Priests literally never in their duty anyway. They never gave a sermon. And if they did give the sermon, they didn't give it at church. I just think it's a horrible world where a preacher can't give a sermon. Yeah, but there the, the, the ancient Old Testament Judaism was not a come, sit, listen to what the preacher has prepared, take notes, go home and act upon it. It wasn't that kind at all. Rather it was, ah, God has given us his instructions in the, in the law, in the, in the Torah, Torah. And we are to hear, obey, go and do it. So when you come again in, in verse one, you come into the house of God, he says, come to hear, come to obey, come to do what you're supposed to do. And rather than bringing the sacrifice of fools and these fools, then he says, they consider not that they do evil. You know, there were a couple of people in the Bible named Nadab and Abihu. Anybody remember Nadab and Abihu? Who. So we have the pop quiz. Nada. You, Charles, remember as Nadab and Abihu and their dad was Aaron. You got it there. They were the sons of Aaron. And being the sons of Aaron, of course they were priests because it was an inherited kind of thing. And they brought what Leviticus, chapter 10 calls a strange fire unto the altar. Now what that means is they were not being obedient. This was not the things that they were supposed to do. They were creating their own religion, if you will, or their own religious practices. And you could put this verse to them. They come to give the sacrifice of fools and they consider not that they do evil. That was early on. And the Lord took care of Nadab and Abihu. If you may remember, they, they ended up the same way as Ananias and Sapphira. If you remember this, them, they, they fell over dead right there in the temple before the Lord. So there, there was in that Old Testament day very much a, hey, be careful how you come into worship. Now again, I want to say there are some things in here that could sound scary if we don't remember that we are in a, in a time of the dispensation of the grace of God, that we come freely. He invites us to come before him because we might think, oh, you know, my goodness, I forgot to wear my tie. I need to, you know, I might be struck down before the day is over. I, you know, I don't know. I scrolled Facebook during church. Well, you should be knocked over. We can come with these fears that are unfounded because of where we live. Let's go on into verses 2 and 3 where he continues on temple protocol, if you will, and especially on guarding your words in God's presence. He says, be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty. Now, the mouth usually expresses the heart, right? It puts the. The thoughts and feelings of the heart come out the mouth. And so it's a. It's a surface level thing of what you can speak, but it's also a heart level thing of what goes down deeper into your soul. And he again says, be not rash with thy mouth. Let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything before God, For God is in heaven and thou upon earth. Therefore let thy words be few. You. I have to say this verse used to scare me because I'm a preacher who sometimes preaches long. And here's the Bible verse that says, you don't know very much. Sit down and be quiet. That's. That's my paraphrase of verse two right there. You know much. You're just this little thing down here. God is big up there. Quit talking. That's not good words for a preacher, is it? Back, I got the preachers on the back row here. Yeah, well, as you, as you come to this, first of all, I want to point out two words that I think are especially important, and they're right in the middle of the verse. And the two words say before God. Now let me start at the beginning of verse 2 again. Be not rash with thy words. Let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything before God. Okay, again, in the temple, they didn't have the preacher like we have today. They did go into the temple to bring their sacrifice, but also they were invited to pray in the temple. And in fact, when Solomon dedicated the temple, the Lord told him, my ears will always be attentive to prayers prayed in this place. It really was the place of prayer. You know, some of this carried through into modern churches, I guess you would say, where the church was a place that sometimes people would want to come and pray at. In modern evangelicalism, fundamentalism, even, I'd say Protestantism. Most places outside of Catholicism, we've sort of lost this some. Every now and then you get this thing of, you know, you're supposed to go to the church in prayer. I just thought about back when I was just a young boy with hair like Mark, and I was the youth director at First Baptist Church of Moran, Texas. And I remember a business meeting one time, and the business meeting, it got heated. I'm Telling you knew they were having a discussion about whether or not they should lock the doors of the church during the week. And something that we wouldn't almost. We wouldn't even think of. You know, those. Those doors had never been locked from the day that building had been put up. And some people didn't want to lock the door. Why? Because it's a church. People come into the church and they pray. And they might need to pray in the middle of the night or the middle of the day or the pastor's gone or whatever. It's a place of prayer. Okay. A little bit of that was a carryover from the Old Testament where you went to the temple and if there was some place you could. That God was going to hear, you get down to the church. Now, you and I, I think, have a little different perspective again today. We would say you could pray here, you could pray there. You can pray, you know, wherever you are. Go ahead and pray. In the Old Testament, God really had. Specifically had said, I will listen. So it would be very easy. And we have seen this a thousand times. I bet you've seen some movie somewhere along the way where someone was in a big heap of trouble and they went down to the chapel or the church or whatever in the movie, and they said, lord, if you get me out of this one, I will be a missionary to the Congo. And they made some commitment unto the Lord, I've been there. You've been there. And this is why Solomon comes to a place where God really says, I'm going to you let listen. And I might add in the law, we won't go through there because I should not speak too many words. But if you were to go back through Deuteronomy, for example, Leviticus, you would definitely find places where it says, if you make a vow to God, God takes this seriously, you better bring about your vow. As a matter of fact, Jesus came. And we know from the apostle Paul in the book of Romans that Jesus was a minister of the circumcision, confirming the promises to the Father. So Jesus came under that temple system, under that Jewish system, and he basically said the same thing. Remember when he said, you know, do not swear by the gold in the temple and all this, Let your yes be yes, let your no be no. There was really some danger in committing yourself to something that you couldn't commit yourself to. And so really, Solomon is giving, I would say, the same advice that Jesus would later give, give. And that is, hey, be pretty careful before you commit to God for something you might not be able to carry it out. And so be not rash with thy. Thy mouth. Let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything before God. And then it does say, for God is in heaven and thou art upon earth. Now, that happens to be true today, doesn't it? That has not changed over any dispensation. God is in heaven, you are on earth. The. The Jewish people, as you know, Jewish men, they cover their head when they go into worship. We take our hat off, they put their hat on. They put maybe a yarmulke, a kippah, sometimes a hat, whatever it is, and cover their head. The. If you ask the Jewish people why, they will say tradition. They said, well, where did the tradition come from? They will say, and. And I'm sure this is right. They will say we put something on our head to remind us that something is up there that we're not on top. And a little hat, a Kippa yamaka, depending on what form of Judaism you come from. All of that is just this constant reminder, hey, hey, God's up there, I'm down here. It's sort of like a string around the finger, okay? Just a little reminder is all it is a symbolic reminder that is there. And. And Solomon comes. I don't think they had kippas in those days, but Solomon comes and he says the same thing. God is in heaven. Tower upon earth. Verse 3. For a dream cometh through the multitude of business. And the fool's voice is known by a multitude of words. Again, I want to start at the back at verse three, and I want to back up. A fool's voice is known by the mo by a multitude of words. Now, I do want to say in my own defense that this is talking about a Jew talking to God. Be real careful. God's actually listening to you. You. There's a record. He'll hold you to it. I think we have a lot of Puritanism into our American society, and Puritanism was built upon a lot of this Old Testament law. And we sort of built this idea that across the board, fools talk a lot and wise people don't talk very much. Now there, no doubt there's a lot of. Of anecdotal evidence that we can give to that. I think, of course, of one of my favorite presidents, Calvin Coolidge, right? He's everybody's favorite, right? One of them, remember his nickname, Cool Cow was one of them. And the other was everybody's favorite president. Silence Cow. Silent Cow. Calvin Coolidge gave advice to presidents after him. Does anybody remember who was after him? Another one of my favorites, Herbert Hoover. Yeah, nobody likes Hoover but me. I'm the sole Hoover fan. But anyway, he gave advice. Hoover was a salesman and a talker. Silent cow gave advice to him and said, when. When people come to you, they'll stay there all day if you talk. Just sit there and look at them. That was his. Sit there and look at them. They'll leave. He didn't talk much. There's an anecdotal story of Calvin Coolidge sitting at a banquet, and a lady was assigned to sit next to him. And she said, I made a bet that I could get you to say more than two words. He looked at her and said, you lose. He was known for being silent, for not saying much. Every now and then we would kind of like that. But let me just say, I don't think we should apply this and say silence is always wisdom. Sometimes there are places when silence is foolishness, right? There are times when you need to speak up. There are times when you need to explain it thoroughly. There are times when you need to let your opinion be known. There are times when you, you really do need to talk and you need to do a lot of talking and you need to do it fast and you need to do it now, right? So I don't want you to take this across the board. I want you to take it for the Jewish people, people in the temple there. And Solomon gives this very wise advice that again, Jesus gives Paul's advice. You know, you could argue, is this different or not? But Paul does say in everything, by prayer and supplication, let your request be made known unto God. He almost gives this picture of. Now let me use from the book of Hebrews to, you know, come into the throne of grace in order to find mercy and grace to help in time of need. It's, it's. It's much more of a different. Pouring yourself out before God, if you will, that is given. But in that day in which you are really going to be held to it under the, under the Old Testament law, he says, hey, be careful. Now, one thing in verse three that I must say before we go on just to say a little more. A dream cometh through a multitude of business. There's two ways you can take through that. One is. It sounds kind of positive. If you want to fulfill your dream, get busy, you know, in order to, to. To. To get your dream to turn into reality, you've got to, you, you got to go there and you've got to work at it. However, I, I think that this is actually a negative phrase, not a positive phrase. A dream comes through a multitude to business. I get this from a number of reasons. I won't go into, in order to be wise, I won't go into all the detail, but if you, if you, if you need some support for it, I'll go back to it later. What he says is when you are way too busy, you lay your head down at night and your mind goes all night long. You have all sorts of, of vivid imagination. You know, that's, it's working in there. So that kind of dream, worry, anxiety. The old man Solomon says that means you've been working too hard. You got, you got too much on your plate right now. A dream comes through a multitude of business and, and then keeping that negative tone a, a bunch of words before God comes from being foolish. And he's given this parallelism that's very popular in Hebrew poetry. Now let's go on to verses four through six, because after a few verses about a few words, I would hate not to finish my sermon. Verse 4. When thou vowest a vow, same, same, same concept, same thing, thing. When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it. For he hath no pleasure in fools. Pay that which thou hast vowed. Better it is that thou shouldst not vow than thou shouldest vow and not pay. Now again, it sounds like a very frightening thing, and we could look into a number of passages in the scripture which make it a very frightening thing for those living under the law, is that you were to come, you were to pay, defer not to pay it, pay it here, pay it now. Get that one done. Get that debt out of the way and bring this. You know, Jesus said, speaking about prayer, he said, you know, do not think by rambling on that God is going to answer your prayer. Avoid vain babblings, I think is the word that the King James uses. Vain babblings as you are before God. So here you're going on and on and on and on and on. And then you end up giving one commitment after another after another after another. And Solomon says, hey, let me just give you some advice here. Zip it up, you know, be quiet, hold off on all of this to make sure that you can actually carry it out better that you shouldn't vow, then you should vow and not pay. Verse 6. 6. Suffer not thy mouth to cause the flesh to sin. Neither say thou before the angel that it was an error. Now that's kind of interesting on both parts. Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin. That is my mouth said, you know, I'm going to be there at 3 o' clock. But my body didn't show up there. And my body is the one that's going to be punished for it. Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy body to sin is what he's talking about. And then again, neither say thou before the angel that it was an error. Oh, I didn't mean to say that. I was just, you know, for whatever reason it came out. Now the interesting thing is who's this angel? Right? Don't say to the angel there when, when, when you're reading the script scripture anywhere in the Old Testament and the New Testament, because this is true of both Hebrew and Greek. The word angel is one of those words. You always have to stop and put it in its context to figure out what it means. There's the angelic messenger, the supernatural being, the one we picture, you know, with wings and all that. There's that kind of angel and then there is angel. That is a messenger, any messenger from God. Anyone who is, is representing God in a sense carrying out that work. And the word malek is the, the Hebrew word and angel is the Greek word. Anytime you come across angel, as it's translated in the New, in the Old and New Testament, we have to say, okay, what kind of angel is this? Now here, sometimes it's easy to see. By the way, John the Baptist was called an angel angel in the Greek. Well, we know John the Baptist was a messenger from God. Many of the prophets were called messengers. But even sometimes in some very routine kind of ways, that word angel was used not in an angelic way, just in a messenger guy kind of way. A lot of times. Most times it's real easy to figure out what's going on here. The problem here is I don't know what's going on here. Right. What angel are we talking about? There are two possibilities, obviously. One is the supernatural being. Now, I don't think we're going to experience that necessarily when we come before the Lord and pray that an angel is going to come down and hear us and take our, our, our prayer, you know, on the, on the wing of an angel, it's carried up into heaven. But they were in the temple. Isaiah talks about the seraphim in the temple and, and seeing the seraphim. Even in the holy of holies. There were the seraphim that were, were chair. Cherubim. Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. There were the cherubim that were there in A representative kind of way. Way. And, and, and God certainly said even, even sometimes in some angelic ways, I am going to hear your prayer when I am there. So this very well could be angel in that sense. And then maybe in the more negative sense, it could even be when the angel shows up to get the page payment, don't tell him, you know. Oh, I, I didn't mean to say that. But it could also just mean the priest, the Levitical priest that's there. That, that, that word, the in Hebrew is also used of the priest. So either way, Solomon is just coming and saying, hey, you better be careful here as you say this. Neither say before the angel that it was in error going on. Wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, voice and destroy the work of thy hands? Okay, there was a judgment that was given here again. Aren't you glad that, that we do live in an age in which we can, we can come serve out of a, a liberty, liberty within Christ. We can come, you know, present our bodies a living sacrifice unto God rather than, you know, oh, God, I promised that I would give $20,000 if you ever, you know, did this and did that. I, I, I'm out of time. But I'll go ahead and tell you one more story. I, being a pastor through the years, I did a lot of building campaigns. You know, that's what Baptist preachers were supposed to do is build another building. And so we're going to have a banquet. You know how the whole thing goes. We're going to have a banquet, everybody's going to come. We're going to bring in the high powered speaker. He's going to make you feel like you're not even going to heaven if you don at least $10,000 to the building campaign. You know, over the next three years. That's only $52 a week, ladies and gentlemen. That's how you spend more than that on whataburger. So, you know, it goes in and digs pressure. Now that I look back on it, I wonder out there, I wonder how many people there are that now think they've lost their salvation because they promised $10,000 and never packed made it. And they're still thinking, I got to get back there and do this before the Lord comes back, you know, I'm going to be in such, such trouble. I, I am glad we live in the age of grace, right? And, and, and by the way, I've gotten to the point now where I just say, hey, why don't you give when you can Give whenever you want to give, however much you want to give you. You figure it out. I don't want to put people under some burdens that they're going to feel guilty about not being able to carry out. I think now we do. We come before the Lord, and sometimes we express our desires, our thoughts, our intents. But even. Even in the book of James, you know, it says, hey, don't. Don't say, you know, next year I'm going to go to such and such a town and make so much money and do all this kind of stuff. Nobody knows what the future holds. And so you and I do live in a relationship now in which we're able to carry this out. No, we don't really know what the future holds now. Verse seven. And I'll conclude, for in the multitude of dreams and many words, there are diverse vanities. Okay, Same theme. You get a lot of dreams at night, and you say a lot of words before God. He comes right at the end and says, hey, you get all this. There's a lot of vanities. It's the same word he's used all the way. What it means is poof. No, that one's not gonna make it on our Ask the Theologian program I had a few weeks ago. Maybe it's been a couple months ago now. I don't know. I had a. A question. I didn't know. The. The lady, she. She said, I have a lot of bad dreams. Can you tell me what they mean? And I said, it doesn't matter. They don't mean anything. They mean you're having bad dreams at night. You know, maybe you're low on potassium. I don't know. Maybe, maybe, maybe you just have a mind that's. That's geared this way. Maybe you maybe, maybe, you know, try nyquil. And really, I don't mean to be sarcastic quite that way. Someone who's suffering from that is. It is quite a burden to, you know, wake up in a horror. But I wish I'd have known this verse. In many dreams, there's a lot of vanities. There are diverse vanities. How many of you have woken up in the middle of the night utterly frightened about how you were going to take care of something? How in the world am I going to fix this? What am I going to do about it? Finally you got back to sleep, and the next day you were like, what was that? I was worried about. I forgot. You know, I said, it's just totally. It's a. It's vanities. It's poof. Don't worry about those things. So any of you suffer from dreams? Dr. White is saying, you know, when you have a dream, get some popcorn, okay? Enjoy the show. Whatever. There's nothing to it at all. It's a. Our mind does weird things. Even if it repeats itself itself, it does all sorts of weird things. Now, in a lot of dreams, there's diverse vanities, and in many words there are diverse vanities. We've all met someone, you know, we say something like, I've heard that before. I heard that. But yeah, I've heard, I've heard him say that. We, we just know that doesn't really mean anything. There's a lot of, a lot of smoke and mirrors there, you know, I mean, as we, we believe every politician, right? No, we say, what's the old joke about when does a politician lie? When his mouth's moving. That's right. There you go. So it's this idea here that, hey, words come cheap. They're easy dreams. Who knows when you're going to get them? Don't put your stock into that. And then he goes on and he says just four words, but fear thou God. Don't be afraid of what you dreamed that night. Just fear God. Have a reverence for God. One of the, one of the reasons, the things I want to point out here, and I gotta quit, lots of vanity and a lot of words. But one of the things I want to say is that when you look up, up the meaning of the book of Ecclesiastes, as I said at the beginning of the sermon, it comes. They all say, you know, Solomon tried everything and it wasn't until the 12th chapter but that he said, fear God. He says it right here in the fifth chapter. Fear God. And if we look, we won't go back through the other eight or nine sermons I've had on this. But you know, all along he said things like, like I had wisdom with me. I took wisdom. I didn't give up wisdom. He's been trying to say, hey, all of the. There's a lot of vanity in this, a lot of vanity in that. And he doesn't even prohibit all vanity, by the way. He just says, just remember it's vanity. But that's not, that's not where the circus is at, you know, fear right there, just. But fear thou God. And he lays it out there and carries it. And of course, you know, again, the, the reverence for God, even the reverence for worship and the reverence for. I think there's so much that we can take and we can learn from it without bringing a fear as in a fright of God that comes but in. In developing a reverence that for our case comes out of grace and rejoicing in the grace that God has given and the manner of in which that caused us as causes us to turn around and have a deep reverence for God. There you have a little temple worship right here in our modern grace worship. And we put those together and if I don't quit, I better fear the congregation. Let's have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for the the word of God especially when it's rightly applied and we can can take and see even in our own lives. Heavenly Father, there are so many things that we. We worried about and maybe made some commitments that were now that we look at them a little bit foolish, maybe a lot foolish to make. And we rejoice in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that in Christ God is reconciling the world unto Himself, not counting their trespasses against them. That he offers a gift today which is by grace, through faith, not of works, lest anyone should boast. And we come not based upon any righteousness of the law. We come in the righteousness of Christ complete in him. And in this dear Heavenly Father, we rejoice and go from here reminding ourselves God is above and here we are below, seeking to know the wisdom of God through the word of God given to us in the Words of the 66 Books of the Bible. In which we rejoice. Thankful for Jesus today. In Jesus name, Amen. Well, we are out of time again. A reminder vacation Bible school starts in the morning. Morning. Look forward to that. No Wednesday night study. Those of you online. We'll have our Thursday online study but not our Wednesday in person study here. And so look forward to that. Thanks for being here very much. God bless you. Look forward to seeing you soon. Guests. Always glad to have you with us as well Pastor David and the Bayes family. You all take care. God bless you. You're dismissed it all right. Bye everyone. Have a good day.