Say Something - Part A

A design speaks of a designer. And when you look at the art that's hanging in the skies, you're forced to say, how much more glorious is the artist himself? The glorious art speaks of a glorious artist. One of the most difficult things about relationships is maintaining healthy communication, whether it's with parents, your kids, your spouse, or friends.

Poor communication can lead to broken relationships. Connect with Skip Heitzig today as he shares how you can cultivate great communication with the Lord and hear his voice more clearly. But first, reading the stories of the Bible is a very good thing. Walking where these stories took place is at a whole nother level. Skip Heitzig is planning his next tour and you can be on it.

Here's the invitation from Skip. You're in for an incredible time as we travel throughout Israel and experience the culture that's so unique to that country. Now, I've been to Israel a number of times over the years and I can honestly say that visiting the places where the events of the Scriptures unfolded, where Jesus lived, taught, and healed, it just never gets old. We'll start on the Mediterranean Sea and head north, seeing places like Caesarea and Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River. We'll spend several days in and around Jerusalem and see the Temple Mount, Calvary, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Mount of Olives, and much more. This remarkable itinerary is made richer with times of worship, Bible study, and lots of fellowship.

The Bible will come alive to you in a way it never has before. I hope you'll join Lenny and me on what is always an unforgettable trip. I can't wait to see you in Israel. This dream can come true for you. Start planning and saving now to tour Israel with Skip Hitek. Information at inspirationcruises.com slash c-a-b-q.

That's inspirationcruises.com slash c-a-b-q. Now, we're in Psalm 19 as we dive into the teaching with Skip Hitek. There was a couple that was married. They had been married for 60 years and they loved each other deeply. They shared everything together.

They kept no secrets from each other except one. The wife in this couple had a little shoebox that when they were first married she put on the top shelf in her closet. And she made her husband promise that he would never look at it and he would never ask about it.

He promised and he complied for 60 years. One day, the wife grew very, very sick and she went to the hospital. The husband put her affairs in order and then took the box down from the top shelf and brought it to the hospital and asked his wife's permission if he could open the box. And she said, yes you can.

He opened the box and he was surprised to find simply two dolls, two crochet dolls and $95,000. And she said, let me explain. When we were first married, my grandmother gave me advice. She said, if you get into a fight with your husband, an argument, you reconcile that argument as soon as you can. If you cannot reconcile, you say nothing.

You don't say a word. What you should do is just go into the room and crochet a doll. So she said, that's what I did. Now, he looked and saw there were only two dolls and he, a new love for his wife just welled up in his heart and tears came to his eyes as he realized, after 60 years of marriage, we've only had two unresolved conflicts. And then he said, now what about the $95,000 in cash? He goes, well, every time I crocheted a doll, I'd sell it to the craft store.

Craft store. So now we get a different picture here, right? What we have here is a failure to communicate. In the words of Cool Hand Luke, if you remember that movie. So now we don't have a wife who quickly resolves conflict. We have a woman who's got pent up frustrations and not saying something when she should. And that's been going on for 60 years. In the song that we played this morning, Say Something, it's about a relationship that is coming to an end.

And communication is replaced with silence. There's one final hand going out to fix it, if at all possible. Say something, I'm giving up on you. I'll be the one, if you want me to.

Anywhere I would have followed you, say something, I'm giving up on you. There's a lot of people that echo those sentiments when it comes to God. God, if you would just say something, speak to me. Isaiah, the prophet said, oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. How many of us have felt that at some time in our Christian life? Well, in Psalm 19, David says, God has spoken and God still speaks. And there's three parts of this Psalm, we'll get into it in a minute.

But basically, David says, God is revealed in nature, God is revealed in Scripture, and God is revealed in character. So he looks upward at the skies, he looks downward at the Scripture, he looks inward at his soul. And in all three places, he notices that God is speaking. Sometimes we say, say something, God would say, hear something.

Listen to something when I speak. In the skies, God reveals his glory. In the Scriptures, God reveals his greatness. And in our soul, God reveals his grace.

So let's look at the first six verses. Here's the first way God speaks. God speaks in the skies. The heavens declare the glory of God. And the firmament shows his handiwork. Day into day utter speech, and night into night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of its chamber and rejoices like a strong man to run its race. Its rising is from one end of heaven and its circuit to the other end.

And there is nothing hidden from its heat. David says the heavens are talking, they're declaring, they're giving a record of something. Now David was a shepherd, so he spent a lot of time outside, camping out, looking at the stars. Perhaps he wrote this psalm as the sun first flushed over the Dead Sea. He was in Bethlehem and maybe after the sunrise he wrote this. The heavens are preaching a sermon, he said. In his words, they utter speech. You know, for a long time, for a long time, I think since the beginning of mankind, people have wondered is there anybody up there?

And if so, who is he? It's really interesting, I was watching a little news clip, an NBC news clip, about how that mankind is listening to the universe and they have this huge ear. It's a radio telescope, it's the largest on earth, it's so big and it's called Green Bank, West Virginia. It's a little sleepy town, they put this big apparatus. It's so big that you could drop inside of it a 60,000 seat stadium. It's enormous and it's listening to frequencies that may be emitting from outer space to get some kind of a signal.

Well, they want it quiet around Green Bank, West Virginia and for miles you cannot use a cell phone, you can't use wi-fi, you can't turn on a radio in your car. One of the workers that was being interviewed said, you know, you start wondering, how did all those stars get up there? And why are they there? Where did they come from? And then that leads you to ask, where did I come from?

All good questions. And those are the kinds of questions that the skies are meant to have you ask. David says the heavens are declaring something, they're preaching a sermon and the sermon is a special sermon. You'll notice he says, the heavens declare the glory of God. They don't tell you of the grace of God.

The heavens don't tell you of the love of God or the mercy of God or the judgment of God, but they do tell you of the glory of God. The glorious design of the universe speaks of the glorious designer behind it. I'm going to give you a word, throw this out at lunchtime.

You ready? Teleological. I didn't say that just to say a weird word, but the argument of what I'm talking about is called the teleological argument in apologetics. In other words, we argue from the vantage point that when you see something designed, you expect that there was a designer. If I were to say, you know, your car, well, your car is really cool. I bet it just oozed spontaneously out of the asphalt.

You'd say idiot. But if I were to say, boy, that's a great car. The manufacturer had some great design they put into it. You go, well, now you're onto something. A design speaks of a designer. And when you look at the art that's hanging in the skies, you're forced to say, how much more glorious is the artist himself? The glorious art speaks of the glorious artist. The heavens declare the glory of God. Also, the sermon is continual.

Notice what David writes, day unto day, utter speech, night unto night reveals knowledge. So here we are, we're able now actually to observe planetary movements, rotations, and patterns every day, every night, every week, month, year, keep going on. We're able to observe this. Just like I talked about your car as oozing up out of the pavement. Suppose I said this, all that we see around us, it's just one fantastic accident. It's a spontaneous generation that just so happened, wow, what a coincidence. It's a fortuitous occurrence of accidental circumstance.

I could say that. I could say, and it just so happens that the surface temperature of the sun is 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and we are 93 million miles away from that, but it's just an accident. See, actually, if our rotation were a little bit further away, like Mars, or a little bit closer, we'd either burn or freeze to death.

We couldn't have the kind of life we have on this planet. But amazing, it just so happened. And get this, it just so happens that the little sphere that we're on the earth rotates 365 times as it makes its yearly journey around the sun.

Why? Why not 30 times? Well, if it did rotate 30 times on its axis, the days and nights would be 10 times longer, and there would be alternate freezing and cooling and carbon-based life like we know it could not be sustained on this planet. It's a marvelous accident, though, isn't it? And I could say, and get this, it just so happens that the earth is tilted 23 and a third degrees on its axis, giving us four beautiful seasons year after year. Incredible coincidence. And furthermore, it just so happens that the atmosphere that we breathe is a perfect balance of oxygen to nitrogen, 79% to 20% with 1% of variant gases.

Amazing. Why not 50-50? Well, if it was 50-50, you wouldn't be doing this.

You'd be doing this, plop. And the first guy to light a match would blow it all up. But there's more. It just so happens that the water to land ratio on the earth is just marvelously balanced. There's 71% of the earth's surface that is ocean. Did you know that if the oceans were half the dimensions they are presently, we would only have one fourth of the rainfall we have on earth. Imagine what this place would look like. It wouldn't exist.

If the oceans were just one eighth larger than they are, we would have four times the amount of rainfall that we have and the earth would be a flood zone. So yeah, I could say it's a marvelous accident that just happened. Or I think I could be a little wiser and say, no, no, no. There is design built into that. And therefore there must be a designer behind it all. I remember hearing this stuff in school. I heard it for years.

You hear it. We all just came from spontaneous generation of a single bacterium. I love what Sir Frederick Coyle, the noted astronomer once wrote. He said, the probability of spontaneous generation of a single bacterium is the same probability that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could assemble a 747 from the contents therein.

It didn't just so happen. The heavens declare the glory of God. The sermon is continual and the sermon is universal.

Everywhere on earth you see stars, everywhere on earth there's moon, everywhere on earth there's a sunrise and sunset. And this is the reason the apostle Paul said, what you see around you is enough to make you responsible to believe in God. It's enough to let people know God exists. In Romans 1, verse 20, Paul writes, from the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and the sky and all that God has made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, i.e. glory. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God. So yeah, we can say, say something.

God would say, I did, but evidently you're not listening. You notice in verse five and six he poetically describes the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening like a bridegroom and like an athlete running a race. When you walk outside and you feel the sun brush against your cheek or perhaps today beating harshly on your head, what you are experiencing is the radiation that the sun is giving off. And did you know that the radiation that the sun gives off is produced by the loss of part of its mass? Did you know that the sun loses 4,200,000 tons of its mass every second and it only recovers 1,200th of what it loses?

You know what that means? It means the sun is running down. The light bulb is running down.

And if the light bulb is running down, it means it must have had a beginning. The heavens declare the glory of God. So the skies speak. God speaks in the skies. Second, you'll notice David writes that God speaks in the scripture.

In verse seven he turns, now looking downward at the scripture after upward at the skies. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. So he looks upward, but he realizes, you know, the universe speaks, but it doesn't tell you the whole story. There are certain things the universe cannot tell you about God. Can't tell you about his love, can't tell you about his grace, can't tell you about his mercy, can't tell you about his judgment. But when we look at the scripture, now we get special revelation.

Now this is specific speech. And in the scripture, God will speak to you about life, about death, about what happens after you die, about love and relationships and the future. Now if you'll just indulge me a moment and you look down at your Bibles that you brought, you'll notice that there are essentially what I read six lines, six poetic stanzas.

And each line has three parts. First of all, there's the title for God's truth in scripture. Second, there is an attribute of that truth.

And third, a result. So notice the titles, law, testimony, statutes, commandments, fear of the Lord, judgments, all synonyms for scripture. The attributes, it's perfect, it's sure, it's right, it's pure, it's clean, it's true and righteous all together. This is a high view of scripture, by the way. Sometimes people may wonder, why is it always a Bible study? And that's one thing that I do. I do expositional Bible study.

I don't run back and forth and dance and shout and come up with an idea that I had after a late night pizza or something that I think is cooler. Here's my opinion. I want to give you what the Bible says because I believe God speaks through his word very, very specifically to people's hearts.

But I just want you to know something. I think you already know it, but I want to tell you and explain why I believe the Bible is indeed the very word of God. I believe it is without error in its original documents. And I believe we have the complete mind of God in the scripture. I realize in saying that, that a whole lot of people do not hold to that. And it could be that some people here may not even hold to that. And that would be evidenced by the fact that you don't read it.

You never carry it. It's not a big deal. It's just something the preacher does on Sundays. And we listen to it.

You might have a much lower view of inspiration than I do. Here's what I want you to know. I believe the Bible to be the word of God for one simple reason. I believe it is the word of God for one simple reason. I believe Jesus Christ.

I believe I follow him and I believe what he said. Now let me just tell you, when I, when I first got saved, I was drawn not to the Bible. I was drawn to Jesus as a person.

I was compelled by the person of Christ. I didn't know much about the Bible. I didn't get the Bible.

And when I tried to read it, it's like, what? But I kept reading and I was presented in the Gospels, in the Bible, the historical Jesus. And I started reading what he said about the scripture.

And it floored me. He said, his words, the scriptures cannot be broken. That's a high view. He said, I didn't come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them, not one jot, not one tittle will pass from this law till it's all fulfilled. High view of scripture. Heaven and earth will pass away.

My words will never pass away. High view of scripture. So now when I read the Bible, I believe that I'm seeing it and reading it and believing about it, what Jesus saw and believed about it. That is indeed the very voice of God and the word of God.

So let's go through that list quickly and give you some of the results of the special revelation of God in the scripture. What will it do for you? Number one, it'll refresh your soul. Verse seven, the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul.

The word convert means to turn back to something or you could translate it to restore or to refresh or to revive. The scripture will turn you back to God and in turning you back to your God, you will be refreshed. It will always realign you. It'll do it the first time when you come to him at salvation. It'll do it the second, third, fourth, fifth, umpteenth time in sanctification. The Bible is like an unending well that refreshes and realigns your life with God's purposes.

So here's this. You can go to a doctor for the needs of your body. You can go to college for the needs of your mind. You can only go to the scripture for the needs of your soul. It refreshes your soul.

Second thing it'll do is it'll challenge your mind. Verse seven, the testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple. And when you hear the word simple minded, you might think of a naive person. That's one way to look at it.

But the word also means open minded, open to instruction. Now I will grant you that you come across certain things in the Bible. It's hard for your mind to get around, hard for your mind to deal with.

They're just like so big and you look at it and you go, really? But hang in there. Even if there is, listen, an apparent contradiction, not a contradiction. I believe there are none, but there are apparent contradictions.

You just keep applying yourself and you will see how things weave together and align themselves beautifully. I've discovered that people don't reject the Bible because it contradicts itself, but people reject the Bible because it contradicts them. And they're just looking for something to say. See, contradiction. That's because you don't want to deal with you and the Bible does. It'll challenge your mind. Third thing it'll do is it'll delight the heart. In verse eight, the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. Remember the happy man last week in Psalm 1? His delight is in the law of the Lord. In his law, he meditates day and night.

That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series playlist. Now we want to share about a special resource that will help you grow closer to the Lord and stay plugged into his word. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the re-evaluation of priorities, life choices, and the path forward. This illuminates the question, what do I want out of life? Here's Skip Heitzig with some thoughts on priorities.

Don't we all want the life with a happy ending? A life marked by growth, a life marked by productivity and refreshment, and God's touch of blessing and prosperity and maturity upon it. Here's our special offer for this month for those who support this media outreach. The Daily God Book by Skip Heitzig plus playlist, eight CD messages on significant psalms. Start 2022 with Skip's Daily God Book. And they're both our way of thanking you when you give $35 or more today to help more people connect with God's word. Call 1-800-922-1888 or go online to connectwithskip.com. Now here's another playlist sample from Skip. When you pursue him, when you pursue holiness, happiness tags along.

Call 800-922-1888 to give or visit connectwithskip.com. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares how God can speak to your soul through the power of his word. Scripture is like the sun coming up on a dark alleyway in the inner city. It's dark, you don't want to go down it, then the sun pops up and you can see to navigate. The Bible throws light on life. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times.