Rob Mitchell, the Castaway Kid

Good to hear and to join in singing that hymn once again.

God has been so good to us. Well, our 52nd anniversary and homecoming service has come by the grace of God. A time to reflect on God's kindness to us over these years. A time to give all the praise and the honor and glory to God, for he is the one who has brought this church into existence and brought you, who are part of it, to become a part of it.

And it is a time, at least we have made it a time, at our annual anniversary to reflect somewhat upon our history. We can't do it all in one service, but it's good from time to time to reflect upon where we have come from and where we are by the grace of God and where we hope by his grace to go. To that end, I want you to open your bulletin to that section that lists the charter members, and I'm going to read through that list, not because these people are any more godly, any more holy, any more special than the rest of you, except that God used them to get us started in the beginning. And we thank God for that, and we want to remember those whom God used. There are 29 on that third day in May, 1973, who signed a charter in the presence of one another and pledged themselves to the Lord and to the beginning of this church. At the most, I think only possibly seven are with us today, and we'll find out in a moment how many are here. Many are with the Lord. Others have moved on to other places, but I'll begin with Gregory and Marty Barkman. We're still here by the grace of God.

That's an amazing thing. Gerald Counts, now with the Lord. May Counts is here. May, where are you? There you are. Raise your hand.

Yes. Living, I think, in Florida, though her home, her house, is still here in Alamance County. And then Randy Counts, her son, who is in Florida. We're glad Randy's with us today.

And Robert Counts is now with the Lord. We have Gail and Joe Davis. Where are you? There's Gail. Where's Joe? I saw him earlier. You out there in the Welcome Center, Joe?

All right. So good to have you folks. 52 years, can you believe it?

It is amazing. Some of us who go way back have got more memories than those of you who are more recent, and those are precious memories. Well, there's Brenda and James Dunn in Tennessee. James and Brenda was such an important part in the early days of our church. Then on to the Mission Field in Bolivia, and then to Hicks in Tennessee, where he established and still pastors Lifegate Baptist Church.

So he's serving the Lord in Tennessee at this time. Agnes Edwards, deceased. Ralph Fawcett, bless his memory. What a godly, encouraging man was Ralph, now with the Lord.

Don and Fawcett, his wife, is confined to her home. She would love to be here today, but she just cannot be here. Cissy Fawcett, Griffin, their daughter in Tennessee. Margie Holland, with the Lord. Otis Holland, with the Lord. Randy Harland, with the Lord.

Carolyn Humphrey, Brenda Mena Zachary. Betty Massey, with the Lord. Eldridge Matkins, with the Lord.

Vicki is still living. Brunette Roberson, with the Lord. Allen Vestal, with the Lord. Betty Vestal, with the Lord. Lee Vestal.

Sue Vestal. Sue's still with us. There's Sue. Lori Vestal Craig is still with us. Where are you, Lori? There you are. Wonderful.

And Mark Vestal. Am I correct? He lives in Virginia. I was thinking that was right.

All right. Well, we thank the Lord for these. Every year, the active charter member list becomes a little smaller. I'm sure the day will come when there will be nobody of the twenty nine charter members who's still alive on earth and serving the Lord here. But how we thank the Lord for this sturdy band of committed Christians that the Lord used to begin this church. I want you to turn in your Bibles to Numbers Chapter six. I'm going to divide my time today to between an exposition of the priestly prayer in Numbers Chapter six and then reviewing some of the history of our church during the last part of my message today. But this well-known priestly benediction.

Number 622. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, This is the way you shall bless the children of Israel. Say to them, The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. So they shall put my name on the children of Israel and I will bless them.

What do we find in this passage? We find number one revelation, number two benediction and number three promise. It begins with an emphasis upon divine revelation. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, This is the way you shall bless the children of Israel.

Say to them. This is a reminder that God has given us revelation, divine revelation that comes from him. The Lord spoke to Moses. We are greatly restricted in our knowledge and understanding of God if we do not have the revelation that God has given us in his word. God has given everyone a measure of revelation. The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament, the earth shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech. Night unto night shows knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. The wonderful creation in which we find ourselves speaks to the existence of a great creator greater than the creation in which we dwell.

That should be obvious. It's only the blindness of sin and the stubbornness of men and women who do not want to acknowledge God that could cause them not to see the obvious that this creation shouts there is a creator. That's the only way that there could be this marvelous world, this marvelous universe in which we live. And furthermore, the Bible tells us that God has revealed himself to everyone inwardly to a certain extent. We might call that the revelation of conscience. There is the revelation of creation. There is the revelation of conscience, what is within us. Paul talks about that in Romans chapter one, that even those who don't have the word of God, don't have the gospel, don't have the law of God. Nevertheless, when they do certain things, their conscience says that's wrong.

Where did that come from? That came from God. And so everyone has a certain knowledge of God, but it is not enough to save them, is it? In creation, in conscience, we do not know about the cross of Christ.

We do not know about the one who died in the place of sinners and took the judgment of God upon him in the place of those who believe on him. And so God in his kindness did not limit us to the revelation of creation or conscience, but he also gave us the revelation of his word. The Lord has spoken specifically in his word, and here is one reminder of that.

The Lord spoke to Moses. Divine revelation. But also I note in passing that it is here mediated revelation.

What do I mean by that? Well, why didn't God just speak directly to all the people of Israel individually? Answer, I don't know, but I do know what he did, and he didn't do that. It's mediated revelation. God spoke to Moses. God told Moses to speak to Aaron and his sons.

God told Aaron and his sons to say to the people, you see these steps? God spoke. It is divine revelation. It is the word of the living God, but God for purposes known only unto him has chosen to reveal most of his word through human instruments that mediate between God and men.

And that's exactly what he has done here. It is mediated revelation, but it is also, and thirdly, prescribed revelation. God is very specific about what the priests shall say to the people.

Did you catch that? The Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to Aaron and his sons saying, this is the way you shall bless the children of Israel. Say to them, and then the exact words that God wants the priests to say. Well, I've got a little bit of extra I'd like to include in that.

Can it? This is what you shall say. The exact words that God wanted pronounced in this benediction are given to them. You shall say, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. These are the exact words of the revelation God wanted to be given through the priest to the people of Israel. And that is the normal way that God speaks to people. Many people say, but I want to hear directly from God. God says, I want you to pay more attention to my word, my written word.

Why? Because that's the way I have chosen to mediate my word to you. That's the way I have chosen to reveal my truth to you. It is now for us written down in the book called the Bible. It was not all written down in the days of Numbers chapter six, but it is now. God gave it to selected people, selected men, prophets that he gave his word to directly.

And then he told them to speak it to the people and in many cases to write it down to be preserved for all generations. And that is the revelation of God. That is the message of God to us. This is a living word of God that is given to us, but we must give ourselves to it if we are going to receive the revelation that God has given. And that, dear friends, is, has been, and I trust always will be, a foundation stone of this church. It is our purpose to endeavor to understand the Bible and to explain it and proclaim it to God's people.

That's it. That's why that's why we gather together on Sunday morning. Now we say, well, we gather together to worship. We do. And that's an important part of our worship.

That's not the totality of it. We do come to sing praises to God. We do come to lift our prayers to God. We do come to worship the Lord in our tithes and offerings. But maybe the most important part, certainly one of the most important parts of our gathering together to worship is to consider a portion of God's word, to look at it carefully, to understand it the best that God through His Spirit enables us to understand it, to apply it to our lives, to grow and change because of it, or in the case of some, to come to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation because of the word which has been given. And that is what we are doing day by day, Sunday by Sunday, week by week, month by month in the life of Beacon Baptist Church.

Revelation. Secondly, benediction. The benediction is given in precise terms in verses 24 through 26.

I've read it to you a couple of times. The word benediction, by the way, means blessing. We don't say a benediction of blessing because a benediction is a blessing.

Those words actually are synonymous. But notice that the source of this benediction, this blessing, is God. God is the one who is able to bless us. And therefore, in the three verses, God is pointed to as the author of the blessing. Every verse says the Lord. The Lord make His face shine upon you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you. The Lord bless you and keep you.

I missed the first one, but there it is three times. The Lord, Yahweh, sometimes pronounced Jehovah. Yahweh is probably the correct pronunciation, though exactly nobody knows for sure.

I won't go into the reasons for that. But it clearly refers to Almighty God. Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Yahweh, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Yahweh, the God that we gather together to worship. And He is the source of blessing, and there are six specific pronouncements of blessing in these three verses, and I will give them to you quickly. Number one, the Lord bless you. Bless means to do good. Bless means to give benefits. The Lord do you good. The Lord bring benefit to your life. Number two, the Lord keep you.

That means to guard, protect, preserve. We would not last. We would not make it.

We would not survive. Either physically or spiritually apart from God's keeping us. God's keeping power, protecting, preserving us from day to day until He brings us home to heaven. Number three, God make His face. The Lord make His face to shine upon you.

That's an idiom. That means to look upon you with love and favor. If we say the Lord's face is a frowning face, and sometimes we talk in those terms, we know what that means. That's the opposite of the Lord make His face to shine upon you in warmth, like sunshine, in friendliness, in blessing. The Lord look upon you with love and favor.

Number four, be gracious to you. That is the Lord grant His favor to you. God's grace is giving us what we do not deserve. God's grace is giving us what we do not have, and only His grace can provide. It's what we need, but we don't have it, but God has it, and so may God be gracious to you. May God pour out His grace into your life when and where needed. Number five, may God lift up His countenance on you.

Again, an idiom, but it's the idea of, and God doesn't have a body, and God doesn't have a face, and God doesn't act like this, but so many times God is described in anthropomorphic terms, like a man, because we're men and women, and we can understand this to some extent, because God has the eternal spirit, omnipresent, we have trouble understanding. But if somebody is busy, distracted, looking at television, reading a book, doing something else, and you're trying to talk to them, and they are distracted with something else, you know that's not good. You need to get their attention.

So if they lift up their countenance and look at you, you've got their attention. May God lift up His countenance upon you. May God give you His, we could say, undivided attention, except in God, it can be divided by six billion people and still be His full attention upon us at all times.

Isn't that amazing? And number six, may God give you peace. That is a big word. We could talk about that for the rest of the time, but I won't. But may God give you peace. May God give you the peace of reconciliation.

What does that mean? Be ye reconciled to God. In our sinfulness, unforgiven, unpleased, we are at enmity with God, whether we realize it or not. The only way that we are going to be at peace with God is if we come to the Lord Jesus Christ and cast ourselves upon Him, acknowledging our sin, acknowledging our need, acknowledging our deserving of God's punishment, and begging God for His saving favor. And God grants it to all who come to Him that way. And then we have peace with God. May God give you peace.

That's objective peace. But may God give you peace, the peace of inward freedom, the peace, we might call this subjective peace. Sometimes people have a right standing with God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, but they're still troubled about various things and they haven't come to enjoy and appropriate the peace which God has given them. May God enable you to lay hold upon the promises of God so that you enjoy inwardly the peace which God has given to you in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the peace also, bountiful fulfillment.

The word peace as it's used in the Hebrew is much bigger than our English word. It has the idea with it the blessings that come with peace. It has the idea of all of the manifold bountiful blessings of God poured out upon those to whom He has given His peace. And so may that peace come to you as well.

We could call that our or His experiential peace, the peace we experience in our lives day by day, the bounty that comes. That's the words of the blessing and it concludes with a promise in verse 29, verse 27 rather. So having spoken these words, so they, that is the priests, shall put my name, God's name, on the children of Israel and I will bless them. The promise is the special presence of God and the special blessing of God. When the Aaronic priests, the Israelites priests pronounce this blessing upon the people of Israel, they are putting the presence of God upon them. That's really what the name of God is.

The name speaks of God Himself, His presence. That's why this becomes more than simply a prayer or a desire. The priests in their individual capacity could only pray for or desire these blessings for the people of God. But the priests in their official capacity, as God has established them in the priesthood and has given them this benediction with its power, with its promises, then God is saying, when you do this, you are putting My presence upon the people.

Now there is one other thing I suppose I should mention. This benediction comes at the end of a lot of other things. It really is, it concludes God's instructions to the priests of Israel, which began in Leviticus chapter 1. So we've got the whole book of Leviticus and then the first six chapters of the book of Numbers, which all prescribe something about the operation of the priesthood, which has to do with the children of Israel and their order before the Lord. Immediately prior to the benediction, we have the instructions about the Nazarite vow.

That's a priestly area and those instructions are there. So what I'm suggesting is this, what God is saying therefore is, when the people of Israel are ordered according to My word, ordered according to My law, ordered according to these instructions I've given to the Levites, they're sacrificing the way I've told them to sacrifice, they are worshipping the way I've told them to worship, they are living the way I've told them to live, they are following these instructions of My word, they are living in an orderly way before them, them I will bless them, I will be with them, My presence shall be with them. It's a promise of God for the people of God who are living in obedience to the word of God. In regard to our church, I would simply say we are here today because of and only because of God's special blessing upon us. Now, I take up some things that pertain to the history of our church.

I've got four questions actually. Who are we today? Who were we in the beginning? Why did we transition?

And what are some examples of these changes? Who are we today? As you come to this church today, you come to a church that would be best identified or described as a Reformed Baptist Church.

And that has special meaning. We are Baptists. We believe what are sometimes called the Baptist distinctives. We believe in the Bible being the final authority of faith and practice. There is no other authority, no earthly authority, no earthly document that supersedes the Bible as to what governs and rules us.

The Bible is the only, well, it is the final rule of faith and practice. We practice credo baptism, baptism of believers, baptism who give a creed, who give a confession of their faith in Christ as a requirement for baptism. We are adamantly convinced that that is what the scripture teaches and so we are Baptists, that's what we practice. And our form of government is congregational, doesn't mean what some people think that means, but congregational but led by elders who have a responsibility and a certain level of authority. But ultimately it is the congregation who makes final decisions if there are things that maybe are in question and we believe that's biblical as well. So we are Baptists, have been from the beginning, but we are now reformed Baptists because we have come to what is sometimes called a Calvinist soteriology, a Calvinist understanding of salvation.

We have come to embrace the doctrines of grace. That was not easy for this pastor. Didn't start out that way and didn't get there quickly or easily. That wasn't easy for some of you either. It was a bit of wrestling, wasn't it?

For some of you a lot of wrestling. I may say more in a moment about how we arrived at that. But I do want to remind you of something that is so dear to my heart. Many, many years ago I had come to the doctrines of grace, but I really wasn't quite sure what to do with them. How to incorporate them into the life of the church. In fact, I was a believer in the doctrines of grace.

That's a quick phrase for the five points of Calvinism, most of you will know what that is. I embraced them, but for a while I was timid about even telling my wife because I didn't know how she would react. We both came from the same background and she had a godly, godly father who was a Baptist admissions missionary who loved the Lord with all his heart, but he did not believe the doctrines of grace. I was afraid that if I told my wife that I had come to the doctrines of grace that she might be mad, she might cry, she might run to daddy.

I didn't know what she was going to do. Finally, I worked up the courage. I said, honey, there's something I've got to tell you.

What is that? I've become a Calvinist. She said, oh, is that what it is? I knew something had happened. I knew it was good. I just didn't know what it was. And she said, tell me more about it.

I just want to know. The Lord had prepared her for that. Where are you, honey? Thank you for that response. It's good to have Joel and Jess in our service today. Many of you have been praying for Jess.

Thank you for that as well. Well, we are a Reformed Baptist church. We are.

Someone asked me about this recently. So to be precise, we are an independent Reformed Baptist church. We don't have any organizational affiliations, not that we're opposed to that possibility, but we don't.

Although we have many informal relationships, but that's something that also grew out of our background. And so though we have changed in our doctrinal understanding, we haven't changed in our basic position of independence of other organizations. And that comes to the second question, who were we in the beginning? And in the beginning, the label that would have described us more accurately is independent fundamental Baptist. The Baptist has stayed the same. The independent is what I just described without any denominational or organizational affiliations. Because, in that second word, fundamentalist, there was a fundamentalist controversy that went on for many decades in this country.

In the minds of some it's still going on, and I suppose in a way it will always go on. But in that fundamentalist controversy, as most of the mainline denominations in America were becoming more and more what we would call liberal, more and more departed farther and farther from their historical heritage and their confessional roots, eventually became necessary for many Christians to come out of these denominations and organize new churches. And there was, therefore, a bit of, what shall I say, uneasiness about denominations, because that's where the apostasy spread. So we will not be a part of a denomination. We will be independent.

That relates to our background. And why were we independent Baptists in the beginning when we started in 1973? Well, for two pretty obvious reasons. Number one, that's what our charter members wanted. They were coming out of a denomination because of apostasy.

And they wanted nothing to do with that. They wanted an independent church, an independent Baptist church. Number two, because the person they asked to come and found the church with them as pastor also came from that background that had the same concept. So we agreed on that, and so we started out as independent fundamental Baptists. Question number three, why did we transition? And that's a question that we could consider different aspects of for many hours, and we don't have many hours. But I think more than anything else, it was our commitment to expositional preaching. That we had from the beginning. We just didn't know where it was going to take us. If we had known, we might have said, let's go another route. But when churches are fed a diet of topical preaching, when pastors prepare only topical messages, they don't necessarily intend to do this, but what happens is they continually go back to passages which they understand, passages which they love, and they thereby ignore many of the most difficult passages in the Bible. We don't have to deal with them, we won't deal with them.

Thank you, we're happy the way we are. But if you're committed to expositional preaching, particularly consecutive expositional preaching, which means you're going to preach through books of the Bible, it's pretty awkward to say, now we've come to a section, we're going to skip over this and go on to what's beyond it. I have a pastor friend now with the Lord who did that by his own confession. He started the series through the book of Romans. He was doing pretty well until he got to the last part of chapter 8 and he knew he was in trouble. And he got up one Sunday and said, folks, chapters 9, 10, and 11 are very complicated. We're going to jump from chapter 8 to chapter 12.

I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice. And so he just skipped chapters 9, 10, and 11 and went on to 12 because chapter 9 is one of those difficult chapters that a lot of people would rather not have to consider. But it's part of the Bible. Are we Bible believers or not? Are we Bible believers or are we Bible samplers? Bible tasters?

We taste the dessert but we leave the tough stuff, the steak, alone. So our commitment to expository preaching is what should I say? It's what doomed me. I said, oh, no, I'm forced to look at some things here I've never really looked at carefully before. And it's clear, it becomes more clear as I continue on, it's clear that these Calvinists who I rejected, neglected, opposed, disagreed with, they're right.

This is what the Bible teaches. I didn't know it. I didn't understand it. I don't particularly personally like it. I didn't then.

I do now. But it's what God's word says. I am going to have to surrender to it because it is the Bible. So commitment to expositional preaching forced us to surrender, to rather wrestle with difficult passages and confronted us with questions of tradition versus scripture.

And I would venture that many, if not the majority, of Christians in America today are more committed to tradition than they are to scripture even though they probably don't realize it, wouldn't admit it, don't think so, but when it comes right down to it, that actually turns out to be the case. And so this commitment to the word of God, even if it goes against my cherished tradition, became our rallying cry and we came to the doctrines of grace as a congregation. It took a while. It took me a while to get there and then it took a while for the congregation to get there and we're there by the grace of God, but that took a while. Now number four, and this is what I'll conclude with today, what are some examples of the changes that were made? It affected many things. Coming to the doctrines of grace affected our style of worship. That was one of the things that Marty noticed about me. I wasn't even aware of this, but she said, you've adopted a more God-centered, God-honoring posture in your preaching and in your leading the services than before. She said, I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was a good thing.

I wasn't even aware of that. But a different perspective, a more complete, a more full perspective of God brings that about. I know a man, somebody sitting here today will know who I'm talking about, but I won't mention it, but I know a man who wrestled with the doctrines of grace and he finally came to embrace them.

This goes back many years. And he said one of the most difficult things for me to embrace the doctrines of grace was, I realized, and this is the way he put it, I've been worshiping the wrong God. I wouldn't put it that way. I don't think he was worshiping the wrong God. I think he was worshiping the right God with a very small understanding of who God is. Now he's worshiping that same God with a much larger understanding of who God is.

He knows more about God and that's good. So it affected our style of worship. It affects our choice of music and so forth.

I don't have time to go into that now. But we don't choose our music as to what will be most appealing to people, either unconverted or converted. We choose our music as to be what will be most honoring to God and most edifying to people. We're supposed to learn according to psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And so we choose our music accordingly.

But now let me give you two examples of some pretty significant changes and then I'll be done. Number one, the altar call. You'd have to go way back to remember when we gave altar calls. But some of you do. May does. Randy does. Joe and Gail do. Lori does.

Sue does. And I might say from a human standpoint successful ones for the first several years of our church. There were very few Sundays when nobody walked the aisle. Again, I didn't realize it until later, but I had learned how to do this successfully by the concept, the background in which I grew up in. And it came to me very naturally. And I realized later a lot of this is emotional and psychological manipulation.

You can get people to respond in certain ways if you do certain things. But in coming to the scriptures, I was forced to confront some troubling questions about the altar call, such as why are so many of the people who respond to an altar call and make a profession of faith, why does so many of them drop by the wayside? Not all of them. I would not say that nobody is saved in the context of the altar call. People are saved when God the Holy Spirit does a work of regeneration in their hearts. And many people have responded to an altar call as a result of that work of God in their hearts, and this is what they were told to do.

But the sad thing is that many people have been encouraged and sometimes pressured to go to the front, pray a prayer. They've been pronounced saved, but they've never been born again. It's not a regenerating work of the Spirit of God.

And so they go out unchanged. The only difference is now they think they're saved, and that's not good for them, and that's not good for the church. Someone has estimated that somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of church members across the nation in churches today are probably unconverted.

It will vary from church to church, but that's got to have a detrimental effect upon biblical Christianity and serving the Lord and pleasing the Lord and doing true evangelism. So why so many empty professions? Why is it impossible to find an altar call in Scripture? Did you hear me? Why is it impossible to find an altar call in Scripture?

Because there's none there. Some of you will remember. It was 1982. I preached through the Sermon on the Mount, three chapters in Matthew, 5, 6, and 7. It took several months to do that. I'd come to the end, and I was going to go on into Chapter 8, and during that week this thought came to me. This is your opportunity.

Don't blow it. So next Sunday my sermon went like this. Before we go on to Chapter 8, we've just studied the longest sermon recorded in the Bible, and I want you to see what's there. We've already looked at what's there. I want you to see what isn't there. The sermon begins here. It ends here.

And guess what? There's no altar call. Oh, well, let's look at some of the other sermons of the Bible. We started through Acts Chapter 2, Peter on the Day of Pentecost, and so forth.

We just quickly thumbed through about 14 or 15 sermons recorded in the Bible, and we said here's where it begins, here's where it ends, and notice what isn't there. No altar call. So I've come to realize that Jesus didn't give altar calls. Paul didn't give altar calls. Peter didn't give altar calls.

John didn't give altar calls. So, folks, Greg Barkman has just given his last altar call. You won't have any more. I heard a gasp going across the congregation when I said that. You've got to be kidding. You can't mean that.

Just wait and see. Somebody said, well, how will anybody get saved? That's part of the problem. When this has become a part of your thinking, you don't even think correctly about salvation. I remember Bethany was asked that question by somebody she worked with when she was probably 14, 15 years old. The lady said, I hear your father doesn't give altar calls. How does anybody get saved in your church? And Bethany just looked at her.

She's just a kid. She just said, now, Margaret, or whatever her name was, I don't remember now, you just think real long and hard about what you just said. But if you think it takes an altar call to get people saved, then why didn't Jesus use one? Why didn't Peter use them?

Why didn't John use them? Why is it impossible to find one in scripture? Why are altar calls misting from historic evangelists such as George Whitefield and Charles Spurgeon? Charles Spurgeon was surely one of the greatest soul winning preachers that the English speaking world has ever known.

But I've read a lot of Spurgeon. And I can't tell you where to find this, but I still remember reading it where Spurgeon said something like this in a sermon, preaching for people to trust in Christ. And he said, now some of you will say, I would feel better about this if you would just give an altar call. Let me come to the altar.

He said, I guess you probably would feel better about it, but I'm not going to do that because that's confusing to you. Trust in Christ. Believe on him. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.

You don't have to walk an aisle. Thousands were saved under his ministry. I remember reading the biography of George Whitefield when I was recovering from serious cancer surgery in 1985 and I couldn't do much else.

So I got those two volumes of George Dallimer's biography of George Whitefield and I read that with help, interest, delight. Thousands saved under his ministry never gave an altar call. When the Spirit of God does his work, people get saved. They hear the word of God and God uses the word and they believe it and they are saved. So that was one thing.

And I don't have time to deal with the second one, so I'll bring this to a close. We have come a long ways, folks, a lot farther than some of you realize if you've come here more recently. We are what God's grace has made us.

We've still got a lot of learning and growing to do. We will continue as God's protection guards us and we pray that he shall. We trust God to guide, guard, and provide. The Lord bless us and keep us. The Lord make his face to shine upon us. The Lord be gracious to us. The Lord lift up his countenance upon us and give us peace. Shall we pray? Father, how we thank you for your goodness and grace. Help us, O Lord, to walk before you in love, in obedience, in holiness, in reverence, in concern for the souls of others. O Lord, use us for your glory, we pray. Amen.