In this sermon, the speaker discusses the instrumentation of the body and how we interact with our environment. He specifically focuses on the eye and its computerization. The main message of the sermon is that concepts, thoughts, and instrumentation cannot arise from random events, but rather are designed by God. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of renewing our faith in God and using our lives and families as a testimony to attract others to the gospel.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to continue what we've been doing in this series, the Logos in Biology. Our main aim has been to show that you can't get concepts and thought and instrumentation from random events. The whole basis of the Darwinistic approach to evolution is that it all happened by chance and was separated then out by natural selection in sexual breeding and things like that. What I've aimed at showing you is that the whole concept of chance to produce instrumentation is absolutely right off beat, right off the mark. And I'm going to continue that tonight, and I want to show you, with a couple of examples, how one nervous system looks into another. Now, it's a horrible thought that sometimes, sometimes you're glad that people don't know what you're thinking about, isn't it? But the Lord knows what we're thinking about, and I'm going to use two examples in biology to show how that happens amongst animals, and how the Lord knows our thoughts from afar. I'm going to read two scriptures to you, first of all, to get this idea into your mind. Now, listen very carefully, because most people haven't read these scriptures with that idea that I've just told you in mind. It is, O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. That is, he's known our thoughts and our ways. He's searched us and known us. Thou knowest when I sit down, and also when I rise up. Thou discernest my thoughts from afar. Got the idea? Thou discernest my thoughts from afar. Thou searchest out my path, and my lying down. Thou art acquainted with all my ways, even before a word is on my tongue. While it's still a concept in my mind, and I haven't formulated it through the computer here into a code, and put the code into words. Right at the beginning of a thought, before it's formulated, he knows it. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. Now, just think what that means, how he must understand and see from afar the working of your mind. And if he does that, can we wonder that very often he apparently doesn't answer our prayers. If he sees what's going on in our mind, over against that which we do and say, you know there's sometimes a discrepancy there, isn't there? Well, we'll have a look at this from the animal kingdom, with two examples tonight. Thou dost beset me behind and before, and thou layest thy hand upon me. Oh, that he does. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high, and I cannot attain unto it. That was the first passage from Psalm 139, verses 1 to 6. And the second passage I want to read to you is from Psalm 148, verse 7 onwards. I'll just read a few of those passages out. 148, Psalm 148, verse 7. Praise the Lord from the earth, all ye sea monsters, and all deeps, mountains, and all hills, fruit trees, and all cedars, beasts, and all cattle, creeping things, and flying birds, young men and maidens together, old men and children. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted. His glory is above the earth and the heavens. He has raised up a horn for his people. Praise for, praise for all his saints, for the people of Israel, who are near to him. Now that's a lovely word, isn't it? Praise from the people of Israel, who are near to him. Praise ye the Lord. That's as far as I want to read from that psalm. But keep this idea in your mind, that the thought processes of us, man, animals, and all that think, they're all well known to God. And I'm going to give you some examples tonight. Then you won't forget them. Because if I just tell you them like that, you know, it's like water on a duck's back, isn't it? It runs off. And I've also thought this, that they say it goes in one ear and out the other, don't they? But I'm going to show you some things tonight, and I've never heard anybody yet say that it goes in one eye and out the other. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to see if we can get something fixed tonight, and therefore I've offended against the order of the church in having some pictures to show you when we're videotaping, because it's quite hard to do, you know. But I hope that the technique will work all right. Now last week I spoke on the instrumentation of the body, and went with you into the means by which we remain in contact with our environment and manipulate it and use it. And I used the eye and went into quite a detail about the computerization of the eye, didn't I? You remember about it? Okay, it's come out quite well on the video, so you'll be able to see it if you want to on the videotape sometime. Then we went into the ears, and then we went into the sense of taste, didn't we? Particularly with clotted cream and strawberries and things like that. And then we went into the sense of touch, that I looked around, you know, with consternation at the end and found I'd exceeded my time by a long time. So I cut off what I was going to say more about touch and left it at that. But I would like to say tonight that the sense of touch is not only in the fingertips. It's in all the muscles, particularly the muscles of the legs and the muscles of the arms and the thighs, and that in all the muscles there are little sensors which sense the pressure on the muscle. And they sense the pressure down to a few milligrams. Very, very, very sensitive indeed. And all these pressures are measured by the sense of touch in the muscles, and they're synced up to the central computer. And the central computer works them out and gives the answer. You'll have to put a bit more pressure on that muscle. This flexor will have to be tensed a little, and that extensor will have to be extended a little, otherwise the man will fall down, you see. And that's all done subconsciously in your mind. There's a constant stream of information necessary to stand up, to keep an upright stance, and that is an exceedingly complex computer process which has to do with the mind, the unconscious mind. It isn't—we don't think about these things. It's done all under the table, as it were, and we are very glad that it does work so nicely, otherwise we wouldn't be able to get around as we do. Now, last—two years—three years ago, just over three years ago, I debated at the University of Oxford at the Oxford Union on the subject that the theory of the doctrine of creation was more scientific than the theory of evolution. They asked me to debate on that subject, so I did. The person I debated, one of the two main people I debated, was Richard Dawkins. And Richard Dawkins is at Oxford University, and he teaches biology, particularly evolution, and he's written a book called The Blind Watchmaker. And The Blind Watchmaker goes from the precept that the human being is, and all biology is, a machine. He admits that, which is some progress over the past. But he said the machine is so badly made that the watchmaker that made the watch, the creator that made me, is what he means, did it so badly that he must have been blind. That's the whole subject of the book. So when I went to the University of Erlangen in Germany a little time ago, and was going to talk on these things, they got the whole marketplace decked out with thousands of copies of this book, The Blind Watchmaker. Now, I can't advise you to read it because it'll annoy you in the end, and it's absolutely, it's, I wouldn't like to annoy the dear people at Calvary, you know, not for worlds. Although sometimes a little bit of annoyance does wake you up, doesn't it? So not all negative. Well, now what his theory is this, that he's got at home, Mr. Dawkins, he's got at home a computer. And he with his little girl, little girls always get around the hearts of their fathers, don't they? They play on this computer, and he's computed, he's programmed his computer such that when you tap on the keys at perfect random, it'll produce figures like, say, a spider, or, say, a bat, or, say, a porpoise, or a dolphin. And he prints a lot in this book, prints a lot of the figures that he's made by random tapping on his computer, because he's computed it right to do that. And therefore he says that if there's any evidence from design in us, it comes from the fact that there was random tapping on the computer that did it. And he thinks that's the proof that the blind, the watchmaker that made us was blind. He did it by blind tapping on the computer. What he doesn't explain, this is important that you understand these things, because your education department takes these things very seriously, and they teach these things to your children because they think they've got proof for it. What he doesn't say, Dr. Dawkins, he doesn't say who made the computer with a program like that, nor does he say two things, nor does he say who programmed it. But if he thinks that computers and programs are made by tapping at random, I'm afraid I shall order for my next little debate up there a good psychiatrist to stand by in case of need. Because when you get down to arguments of that type, which are just simply non sequitur, then you have to be very, very wary of what you do. Now tonight I want to look at some animals, and I'm going to look at two just to show how supreme the instrumentation of an animal's brain is, and then apply it to our brain, and see what we're like. That's the process we're going to do tonight. I'm going to look at first, and I've got some pictures, but I'm not going to put them on just yet, get your appetite whetted for this. I'm going to put on some pictures of the royal albatross. Now the royal albatross is a southern hemisphere seabird. It has a wingspan of about three yards. It's an enormous bird, and it's a consummate flyer, what you call a flying freak, if I can borrow that from your worthy pastor here, you see. It really is a super bird, this royal albatross. Now we had opportunity a few months ago to visit one of the nesting places of these birds, and we got some nice photographs. They are beautiful birds in the air. They are ungainly on the ground because they're so heavy and so big, and they're made to fly. They're not made to waddle along the ground. It's like a duck, you see, in the water it's graceful, but on the land, well, it waddles like a duck, doesn't it? And that's what these birds are like in that respect. Now they're so big that they have to nest in places where there's a good sea breeze, and they build their nests so that they can run downhill and take off against the breeze. If they can't run downhill, they can't get off. And if they can't fly, they're lost because they feed by flying, you see, over the water and diving in and getting out the fish and the squids in the water. Now they usually will only nest because they're very shy birds. They'll only nest where humans are not likely to disturb them, and therefore they love islands, small islands. The two birds that found out this nesting place that we saw in Dunedin on the southern island in New Zealand apparently thought it was an island. It's a peninsula connected by a very narrow strip of land to the mainland, the main island of the South Island of New Zealand. And it's quite lonely, it's quite isolated away from human beings, although the town is not more than Dunedin, not more than 10 miles away, the area is quite rugged and wild and all the rest of it. Now they build a nest, they mate for life, they're absolutely faithful to one another, and they build a nest on the ground. And the chick that they hatch out is so voracious, has such an appetite, he's just like a little boy, you know, instead of a stomach, little boys have bottomless pits, don't they, that it takes two parents flying all the time just to keep that little mouth closed, that big mouth closed, and they do it. Now they prospect very carefully what they, where they're going to do their nesting place, and they keep to the same place every year. They nest year after year within a yard where they nested the year before. Now you think in the vastness of the Antarctic Ocean there on the South Island of New Zealand, what a memory bank they must have in their broad heads to keep the exact spot where they're going to nest in their minds, because they fly thousands and thousands of miles and see lots and lots of landscapes, Arctic landscapes and all the rest of it, in the course of their life. But when the chick is hatched on the ground, you can see them, the New Zealanders have built a little hut into the hill with a window just above the ground level so that it doesn't disturb the birds, and you can go there and watch them. And there you find three or four nests around you, each with one chick in it. I was going to say one little chick, but it isn't like that, it's one huge, fat, flabby chick that they have in these holes. Now perhaps we'd better have the first slide on, if you just show us. This is the bird on its nest, and yes, there we are, there we've got father and mother there, and the one egg which they hatch out. They can only hatch out one egg in about four years, three to four years, because the strenuous nature of keeping that chick fed exhausts father and mother to such an extent, they go away for two years afterwards and don't want to look at a nest again. Now you see she's got the egg, she's turning it over underneath her, and he's supervising operations. Okay, let's have the second one, if we might be so kind. Right, now that's the father coming back and vomiting up the squid that he's caught on the wing out at sea for the chick, and that's how they do it. They come back and they've got their crops just full of squids, and all sorts of fish, but mostly squid, and they come back and vomit it up to the chick, and the chick will take anything that he can get from its mother or father. Some relationships to human beings aren't there, from a nervous point of view. Right, now there's one thing I would like you ladies and gentlemen to think of very carefully, and it will be shown in the next picture. The father and mother mate for life. They're faithful and monogamous. Now when they go out, they first of all watch the chick until it's big enough to be left alone. They don't leave it alone when it's quite small, just after it's hatched out. But after it's been fed by one of them for some time, one standing guard over it, the chick will require so much that father and mother have to go and feed the chick and leave it to fend for itself on those rough windy cliffs where they nest. Now father and mother work then for four days at a time, only filling their crops. They must have an enormous weight of food in their crops. And when they come back, and say mother is standing by the nest and father wants to vomit his contents of his crop into the beak of the chick. When the father comes back, he just looks at the chick and the mother, and he goes into ecstasy. He will stretch up, perhaps you put the next one on there. He goes into an ecstatic greeting, and he dances all around the nest and all around the mother. And she sits there and is very, very satisfied with this performance. He puts his beak, you see, right up to the heavens. And I think he must thank God he's got such a nice wife, you see, to stay at home and look after the egg as she does. That it's such an ecstatic performance, and it never wanes. It never wanes. Every time he comes home and finds her, or she comes back and she finds him, there's this ceremonial dance around one another, the chick sitting there and taking it all in, while father greets mother. Now ladies and gentlemen, don't you think that's rather nice? The Holy Scriptures says, you know, that we should exalt in the wife value. Now we've been married 40 years, and I must say that seeing those birds there greeting one another like this, you can get a video film of this to see it in motion, how they do it. I must say, it does show that the Creator has pleasure when we have pleasure in one another. I think if we love one another and have pleasure in one another, as these birds obviously do, it's an ecstatic dance around one another. Now I don't suppose that Mrs. is perfect, you know. I expect Mrs. on occasion is a bit selfish and things like that, and says, you've been out for one day, and I've been out for three, you see, fishing, and now you go and make that up, and things like that. But the ecstatic, does it ring a bell to you, that sort of thing? I'm absolutely sure that those birds that come back year after year, and every three years, four years, they'll lay an egg and hatch it out, and the same cycle starts over again, that, you know, that must be in the Creator's program, especially as we're told as humans to exalt in the wife of our youth. And it says also that she's a graceful doe, and graceful and beautiful hind is the word that's used. You know, those animals that are so great, graceful, and beautiful. And if we ask God for that great grace in our married life, that other people may see what God's done for us, we'll be able to do that, you know. We've been married 40 years, and I must say that through the grace of God, that he's given us that joy. We're glad to see one another when we've been away for a time doing a job here, there, and everywhere, you know, as we have to do. But I often think when we come back, if we were like Mr. Arbatros, how great it would be for the unbelievers to see that, a man really rejoicing in the wife of his youth. Because after all, she gave her youth to you, didn't she? Now it also does say, you know, ladies, she sits there and takes it all in, you see, she's got a very staid face. Even though he does dance and be ecstatic, she does reverence him. And it says, you know, that Sarah reverenced Abraham, and she called him Lord. Now I don't think that Abraham was perfect. Abraham had lots of things that are common to all men, but she did that. And he does his little external ecstatic dance, and she reverences him. And there you've got the picture of it. It's beautiful, isn't it? That's the the Arbatros. Now there's one other thing that I'd like to mention to you, ladies and gentlemen, about this. When the two have worked their fingers to the bones, you might say, feeding the nipper on the nest, they get him up, are you listening? They get him up to 13 kilograms, that's 26 pounds. You've never seen such a fat chick in all your life. And he'll sit there on the nest and flap his wings, but his wings won't carry 13 kilograms, you know, he's just too, he's just had too much of, he had too much of good things. So the parents have a little, have a little consultation over the state of affairs. They're stuck with him on the nest, you see, and they've got to feed him every day to keep him stuck there. So what they decide is, this has all been done by the New Zealanders, weighing the chick every day. They go out and weigh him, and they let the parents then let the chick starve for three to four weeks, till he's down to nine kilos. And then the little fellow will be down, when he flaps his wings, he finds that his weight on his legs get less and less and less. And suddenly, quite suddenly, he takes off. He'll run down the run, where the New Zealanders are careful to keep the grass mown, so that the youngsters and the oldsters can get off. And they fly off into the wind, and he doesn't come back again. He doesn't make any trial flights or anything like that. He just simply takes off, and for three to four years, he flies around the circle, fishing with his parents. They dive into the water, get the squid out, and then they run on the water, like a swan does, and up into the air they go. Now after they've done their tour of the Antarctic, they come back to the exact spot where they were hatched. Within a yard of the nest, they land. Within a yard of the nest, they've done this with marked birds, they land again, and get ready to build their next nest. And that takes three to four years until they're ripe enough, mature enough, to do that. But you think, ladies and gentlemen, of the memory bank those birds must have in their brain, and a memory bank of two kinds. Because they don't exercise and try around to do trial flights. They take straight off from the nest, run down the runway, and they're gone. They didn't come back again until the four, three to four years up, when they've done their fishing all throughout the Arctic, the Antarctic circle. Now that's one type of memory bank. You think of the other memory bank, they've absorbed in their minds, while they're sitting on the nest there, and being fed by their parents, they've absorbed the exact area where they are. They know all the landmarks, and they come back after three to four years, and land just where they took off, exactly where they took off. So you've got a memory which is genetically controlled. It's inborn. They don't need to make trial flights. They just flight right off from the start. They navigate from the start. They don't have to learn that. Think the engineers, oh ye engineers amongst us at Calvary Chapel. They think what that means, to have put on the one sperm, and the one ovum, the genetic part of the ovum, which made them, you think of the recording of everything necessary to teach a bird to take off and fly without practice. Think of the supreme intelligence, bits of information, put on the one sperm of the father, and the one small part of the ovum, the genetic part of the ovum, which made them, because it's all in there. And those birds of nine kilograms weight, with a wingspan of three yards, take off without any trial at all, because it's all autonomous in their genetic code. Now if you think that such miniaturization and computerization can be made out of random processes, I'm afraid I can't follow you. I'm absolutely, it's against my sense of gumption to believe anything like that. But then think, not only of what's inherited from the sperm and the ovum, think also of what they've learned while they were sitting on that nest, guzzling all the food that their parents brought them. They impressed onto their minds the exact topography of the whole area where that nest was. New Zealand's quite a big place. You think they navigate back to that and to within a yard of where they took off. You think of a supreme memory system like that. We think of our own memory system. You know, when we come to America, we lived and brought up our children in Wheaton, in Illinois, when I was at the University of Illinois. You know, when you come back here, and if you've been abroad you won't appreciate this, but I'll tell it to you. You'll notice it then later perhaps. There are certain smells about certain countries. When we come back, we notice those smells. Sometimes it's the soap. Sometimes it's the washing material you use to put into your washing machines. But all those things come back, you know, and they bring back a whole vista of memories as you smell them the first time. We only had it happen the other day when we smelt in the evening the orange groves here, you know. They're just simply marvelous, aren't they? Now I hadn't smelt that for quite a long time, but when it came back to me one evening when we were out in Lake Elsinore, the whole memories of our children when they were small, and going out for walks in the evening, and the various smells that you get as you go around a city, a nice clean city like Wheaton, come back. Now you think of the working of the synthetic mechanisms of the mind to store that in a person's mind, so that when these molecules come into the nerves, that's computerized and sent back to the brain, and wakes up all the memory banks up there which contain these old memories. It's an amazing system of instrumentation. Right, well we can leave that one for the albatross there. The great thing about them is their faithfulness to one another and their joy in one another. And if God gave that to the animals, he gave it much more to us when he said that we should exult in the wife of our youth. And I think we should, and there's not much better purpose in their married life than that. Now let's go on then to the second animal that I'm going to take through with you tonight. We were several years ago, two years ago, in Australia, and we saw there what's called an ornithorynchus platypus. Now it's a duck-billed platypus. You all know about the duck-billed platypus, don't you? It's supposed to be a missing link, but believe me it isn't. It looks, it's about this big, and it looks like a beaver. It has a big tail and it swims a lot in the water, but it is a monotreme. It's a marsupial and it has a pouch for its youngsters and it has in the pouch a small mammary gland which of course delivers milk to the minute embryo which hatches out of the egg. This is the only mammal that we have today that lays an egg. And the egg, when it hatches out in the pouch, is a minute little creature. You wouldn't recognize it as a duck-billed platypus, but it crawls then out and around into the pouch and attaches itself to the nipple of this mammary gland and there it lives as a complete parasite. Now the duck-billed platypus has a bill, a beak, just like a duck. Perhaps we could have that one on so that we can have a look at it, the slide of that. Oh, we're not, oh no, it's a little, that's the fellow, that's the fellow. Now this animal is a wild one. We didn't get this photograph in a zoo or anything like that, although you can see them in the various zoos in Australia. The animal, you see, has a bill, a beak, just like a duck. Behind the beak you can see the two eyes there, and he has fur all over him. He's a typical mammal in that respect. And nobody knew why he had that beak, because, well, he can eat with it, of course, but he has around the beak, you can just see there's a ridge of little paws around the beak. And nobody knew, they're like the midline paws which you see around some fishes, you know, right around them they have some paws, and these are for navigation purposes or whatever, or for chemical testing of the water in which they live. Now these animals are quite rare, but you do find them. Some friends of ours, Christian friends of ours, went out canoeing on an Australian river, I believe it was up in the Blue Mountains, it's on the back of those slides they gave us, went out canoeing, and while they were risking out in the middle of the river in their canoe, they noticed an animal jump in from the side of the river and swim straight out to them. And it was one of these, it was this duck-billed platypus. And he came out to their canoe, inspected it, didn't show any fear of man or anything like that, but swam around it and played with the oars and played with them for over two hours. And they got, during this playing with them, this is where he was coming out of his little hole, you see they have a hole in the riverbank, they got him just as he was coming out. Now the remarkable thing about these animals is nobody knew how they found their food. They feed on little crabs and crayfish and worms and things like that. And they feed on them even when they're in the mud at the bottom of the river and you can't see them, because the water is often very cloudy and the eyes aren't very well developed, but they can find these little fellows with an uncanny certainty. So some experiments were done. They thought that the paws around the bill were like the lateral line on certain fishes, that is electrical organs for smelling or something like that. So what they did was this. They got the idea that as soon as a worm or a crab moved its muscles, then you couldn't see it from above the mud in which they were hidden, but these animals were on them like a minute, dive down two or three yards into the water and fetch them out with absolute uncanny certainty. What they do is this. These lines, these paws in the sort of lateral line around them are electrical organs. And they can measure at two to three yards distance in the water the electrical impulses of the nervous system of frogs and crabs and worms. That is that these can detect microvolts and microamperes at a distance of two to three yards through the water. Now you ask an electrical engineer to do that for you and see what he says. He'll probably send for the psychiatrist we've talked about so often. But these animals can do it, don't think anything about it. If you drop a flashlight battery into the water where they are and it buries itself in the mud, they'll go in immediately, dive in and fetch out the flashlight battery for you, because they can measure the electrical current that's being discharged from them. Now you think, ladies and gentlemen, of the exceeding accuracy and fineness of the instrumentation of an animal that's supposed to be primitive, according to the evolutionary theory. To have an organ like that, it's one of the most superb organs that we've ever known, and is so sensitive that it's almost incredible to believe that. Because you see, what he's doing is really reading the nervous activity of his prey at a distance of two or three yards in the water. And if you were to think very hard and start to do your mathematics again, which you maybe haven't done since you were at school, in the water, he would notice the platypus, duck-billed platypus, the activity of your old cogwheels going around up here, you see, and would be able to measure them and find out exactly where you were by measuring your thought activity by this mechanism. He can do it by worm. Now worm hasn't very high intellectual ability, but he can measure what bit of intellectual ability he's got. Or the crab or the crayfish, he can measure their intellectual ability when the nerves start to discharge. Now, ladies and gentlemen, when you see instrumentation like that, you think of the concept that must be behind the creator to make an animal that can read at a distance through water the microamperes and the microvolts that a worm or a crab may be able to develop. Think of the engineering concept of how to do that. Well, you've got to measure a thing, you know, you've got to understand it. That the Lord understood that and gave this little animal this instrument in order to find his food. I think it's absolutely incredible. Now, you see, these animals then can trace the inward workings of the nervous systems of these quite lowly animals which don't develop much in the way of millivolts or milliamperes, you know, they're quite lowly worms and things like that. They can do it without turning a hair. Right, could you show me the second one? Yes, there he is again. You see his beak there, and they're going back into his hole on in the riverbank. A wild one, and very carefully protected by the Australians because they're getting rather rare, they're getting rather rare as civilization takes away their habitats. Now, I read out to you at the outset of the evening, the Lord knows our thoughts from afar off, and the Lord reads our hearts from afar off. I think what this little fellow can do about the thoughts, if any, that a worm might have, or a crab might have, as they move their muscles with the help of their nervous systems. It's a very real thing to know that the Lord sees our thoughts. He knows just what's in our hearts, and he answers accordingly. Now, it makes one very, very humble, doesn't it? Because how often our thoughts are not the thoughts that please him. Our thoughts are not his thoughts, and our ways are not his ways, yet he knows them. But think how wonderful it is to know that the hindrances that we may have in thinking the thoughts of God. You see, there's this telepathy, if you might call it that way, of these animals towards their prey. But you think of us trying to think the thoughts of God, and yet we're required to, you know. It says, you have the mind of Christ. Think what that means. When God designed all these animals, he has thoughts on that matter, and concepts, and he wants us to think his thoughts after him. Now, if you don't think the thoughts of God after him, there's one thing which upsets our instrumentation in projecting onto the thoughts of God, and that's, of course, sin. If any man regards iniquity in his heart, the Lord will not hear him. There's no respect for persons there. Now, if we don't have this reality of thinking the thoughts of God after him by reading his word, and then taking the concept of his heart into our hearts so that we're on the same wavelength as he is, if we don't do that, or if you haven't been doing it, then remember that it's usually that we've stultified the instrument that God has given us, because he's given us the capability of doing it. He's given us the understanding to understand the Bible, which we can read. And he's also told us that if we regard iniquity in our hearts, he'll not hear us. So, the great, stupendous thought that I have when I think of these things is this. My instrument has got very rusty, because sometimes I find prayer, you know, a burden. Whereas it should be talking to God and enjoying him forever. Now, if prayer is a burden to us, and thinking God's thoughts after him is a burden to us, then we need to repent, you know. There's something gravely wrong with us, if we don't think these things, these thoughts of God after him, because we're made to do that. That's the purpose for which God made us. These little animals here were given the capability of doing it to get the daily bread. And we get our daily bread, not from bread alone do we live, but from every thought and every word that comes out of the mouth of God that feeds us. So, if the instrument has got rusty and doesn't receive and communicate with—you will understand, you won't you, ladies and gentlemen—with the nervous system of God, if I might in ever such great humility say that, then we need to repent in our prayers, turn more towards the Lord, and ask him to freshen up the system, so that our contact with him becomes more real as the days go by. Now, you find that working out best, you know, if we fulfill his thoughts in our married lives. You see, we've never been through a time such as the present, in which the family and marriage has been so attacked as it is today. And if you don't, friends, if we don't find that we can extol in the wife of our youth, then there's something gravely wrong. And how many divorces do we have in Christian circles? And that's because this business of understanding the thoughts of God haven't been, that hasn't been looked after as it ought to have been. Now, he's here to restore us and put us back into the place where we need to be, so that we can do this little dance around one another when we meet one another again. Now, if we can't do that, if we don't really rejoice in one another, then we need to ask God why. Because the wife, you know, is in his image, and you're in his image, and he's the God of all joy, and at his right hand are joys forevermore. And I think this, that one of the strongest means of attracting people towards the Lord Jesus are happy marriages. Because that is what's so rare in this world, and that's what everybody's wanting. And they want to see that in us. And if they don't see it in us, where should they see it then? Well, they have to turn to the animals. But you know, they're so convinced that the animals are the result of natural selection and nothing else, that they don't see the parable in the animals, such as I've shown you tonight. So as we think about these things, let's ask God to renew the spring in us. That's what we need, and he's the God who gives that. So we'll ask him to bless us and keep us, so that we can attract other people to his gospel. We'll pray together. We ask thee, Lord Jesus, that thou mightest give us these things which thou hast prepared us for. Help us to understand thy mind and love it, and also thy purposes in our married life and in our families, that these things may be a strong testimony and attraction for other people who are sad and lonely. We thank thee that thou art the God of all joy. So bless us this night, and watch over us. Amen.