In this sermon, the preacher reflects on the observations and thoughts of an old man named Solomon. Solomon had lived a life of luxury and abundance, but as time was running out for him, he began writing proverbs. The preacher emphasizes the importance of using our time wisely and making a difference as Christians. He also mentions the significance of making friends with our money, as Jesus taught, so that in the future, those we have helped will welcome us into eternal blessings. The sermon encourages believers to live a life that is rich in spiritual wealth and to make a lasting impact on others.

And it still has as much meaning for all who listen as it had when it was written. It's found in the tenth chapter of the Book of Proverbs, verse 22. So, the blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it. Now you can understand this without any strain or any great heroic effort of the mind. The blessing of the Lord, whoever has it, is rich, and here is one man who is rich without having any sorrow added to his riches. That's what it says there, and as I said this morning, the text is from God's word, and then the commentary on the text is what the preacher says about it. Brother Readhead says that the text is what God said, and the sermon is what the preacher thinks God meant. A little bit cynical, maybe, but I think there's some proof in it. So I want to talk tonight about the blessing of the Lord, and what it is and what it means to us, and how it leaves no bad aftertaste. And the man who wrote this text was an old man, and he was rich, or had been rich, one of the richest men in the world and one of the wisest. And yet when he was to leave behind him something for the ages, he doesn't clothe it in language that you have to have two lexicons in the dictionary to get the meaning of. He says very simply that a man who has God's blessing on him is a rich man, and that he'll never have any regrets or any sorrows as a result of that kind of riches. The man was dying, an old man, that is, he was as long toward the end, and he had been a very learned man and somewhat of a genius, and was known widely around the world as such a genius, great thinker, great writer. And a young pastor was asked to go to see him, and the young pastor girded up his loins and decided that if he wanted to talk to that man, he was going to have to really climb the heights of intellectual accomplishments. So they sat down, and the old man said to the young pastor, Read to me. So he began somewhere, I've forgotten where, and he started to read something heavy. The old gentleman interrupted him and said, No, no, no, don't read that. He said, Read this. Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me. He said, Read that. So the young pastor, quite astonished, went on and read the Fourteenth of John to him. Now, that's how I feel about this. Here was an old man, Solomon, and he had lived it up in his day, as you know. He had plenty of everything, and time was running out on him, and he was writing up his proverbs. And you can read those proverbs without ever having gone beyond the seventh grade, the sixth grade, the fifth grade, maybe. You'll find wonderful truth here, though. And I'll tell you a nice thing about this text, is the man who wrote it wasn't putting sour grapes into print. So many of us who've never been anywhere or seen anything or had anything, we condemn it because we're jealous of it. You know the old story of the sour grapes. The fox jumped and jumped and couldn't get the grapes, and walked away saying, Well, they were sour anyway. And we want something and don't have it, and we condemn it. But this man wasn't like that because he'd had it. He said he'd had it, and he'd had it in more than one way. He'd had it in the literal, proper way, and he'd had it in a slang way. He'd had it. He'd watched the drama of humanity, for he had taken time out from his eating and drinking and listening to the music and watching the dancing maidens. He'd taken time out to do a little heavy thinking, too, and particularly he'd observed a lot. He'd observed the long parade of humanity marching, and he'd observed the drama that no poet ever wrote, but the drama that man writes himself, the drama of history and humanity. He'd observed it, and he'd seen his friends come up and go down, and he'd looked in his own heart and noticed how empty it was. And so he said, The blessing of the Lord, that maketh rich. Now, what is this blessing of the Lord? Well, the blessing of the Lord. Now, I suppose that if I were reading this without the benefit of the rest of the Bible, I wouldn't know exactly what the man of God had meant. But when you allow the rest of the Bible to be a commentary on this, then I well know what it means. It began back there when God said to Abraham, Abraham, come out of thy country and thy kingdom and come into a new place that I will show thee, and I will bless thee and make thy name great, and so on. It began there and it's gone all down the years. The blessing of the Lord is simply to stand in the right relationship to God, in full covenant relationship to God. It is to be an heir of the Almighty. It is to be an heir of the Almighty. Every once in a while you will see a picture of a young fellow or girl in the newspaper, and they will say that he or she is an heir. This is an heiress. She is the heir to the thus-and-thus fortune. She is an heir to the great onion fortune, or she is an heir to the great Woolworth fortune. Somebody has made a lot of money, and this is the little chick that's going to get it after they're gone. That's what it means to be an heir. It means to stand in relationship to somebody in such a way that everything they have is yours. Everything they have finally comes down to you and you possess it. That seems to be the teaching of the Bible. Children of the Heavenly Father, says the little Swedish song, children of the Heavenly Father, they have it all. They have the care of the Father over them, and they are heirs of God and joined heirs with Jesus Christ. That's what it means. It means to stand in right relationship to God through Jesus Christ the Lord. It means to be named in the will of God in the New Testament through the work of Christ on the cross. That's what it means, the blessing of the Lord. And then this blessing of the Lord, let's look at it for a little bit, this standing in right relationship to God through Christ. It's the greatest possession that anyone can have, because it's eternal and because nobody can take it away from you. If all you have and what you trust in can be taken away from you again, you'll never quite be restful because it might easily be taken away from you. The blessing of the Lord, nobody can take it away from anybody, because the riches of God can't decay. Peter said, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance eternal, immortal, incorruptible. And these incorruptible riches of God, they are eternal and they are incorruptible, and nobody can take them away. Everything can decay. There isn't anything, they tell me, that smells quite as bad as a decayed lily. And there isn't anything that is quite so pathetic as an old house that families have lived in, and now it has all gone down and the roof has blown partway off, and you'll go inside and the dust of ages or centuries rises, and you look about you and you see, I was in one of them over in the state of Pennsylvania, where I was born and brought up. My old friends there, they'd long gone. A man I knew had been found dead at the edge of the woods, and the woman had long gone, and the only boy had moved away to the city. There was the old house, and I went in. It was standing empty. I went upstairs and downstairs and looked it all over, and there's nothing there but memories, nothing. They had been there, but they were gone. Everything about there was evidence of decay, and that pungent smell that is in an old house that's been lived in and hasn't been lived in for a long time, that the various rodents and birds and various little things that creep and crawl have made themselves at home. There it is, decay. Well, there's riches that cannot be. There are riches. Now, I'll mix that all up because I'm thinking of it in the singular, really riches, and I'll probably not be able to unsort it as I talk, but you'll understand I know better even if I do make the mistake. But the riches of God here, they don't get old on you, and you can't burn them. When I was a boy of ten years old, our house caught on fire and burned to the ground. There wasn't anything left at all of it, not anything left but a smoking chimney standing there, and I was quite a little hero. I took my little brothers and sisters and took them down safe and kept them there like a mother over her chicks until the final thing, my mother and father had got home and things had gotten under control. I remember that part about it, you know, a man would, a kid would. But everything was burned down. There wasn't anything left. We didn't have anything, not anything except the clothes we had on, burnt. And whatever you have, whatever you have that can burn, brother, you are not sure you have it at all. I don't disturb anybody, but you don't even know your house is there now, because things burn, and it hasn't taken very long. Then there are two words I want you to hear. One is depreciate, and the other is devaluate. Those two words, and they will wreck everything we have. There's that word depreciate, I think, of the woman who went and said that she had understood that there was a higher depreciation on X brand of automobile, and she said, that's good enough for me, and she bought it. But the poor woman didn't know that depreciation was nothing she wanted. Depreciation was what she didn't want. The thing depreciates, that is, it goes downhill and loses its value. It's worth $3,400 today, and two years from now it's worth $2,200 and on down. That's depreciation. Then there's devaluation. Do you know what that means? Remember back in the days of Herbert Hoover right after the First World War, when the German mark went so low that you would take a whole basket of it to get a loaf of bread? They actually literally did it. They came to the stores with baskets of German marks, because they had been devaluated to a point where they were not worth anything. That's what happens to everything and the glory of man and everything that we have. It just goes like that, you know. Sick transit, they say. So it passes, and it amounts to nothing. But the blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and there isn't anything there to decay, nor to burn, nor to deteriorate, nor depreciate or devaluate, and there's no sick transit around there because it doesn't pass. It stays. Then another thing is that Satan can't rob a Christian of anything that really riches. Satan can't take away. The devil goeth about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. And if he can't devour you, he'll devour everything of yours that he can. But if you're standing in full relationship to God, the devil can't rob you of that, because that's yours. What God wants to know is how much you have after all of the exterior trimmings have all been taken away. When I was a young fellow, about 18, 19, 17 or 18 years old, another chap and I went for a long trip by canoe down the waterways of the state of Ohio, and we had our rifles with us and all sorts of things. I remember that one day we didn't pay attention to game laws at all, and we decided that we'd like to have some game deeds. So I drew a bead on, or one of us did, I don't remember which one. It doesn't make any difference, we were all shooting around. Anybody drew a bead on a duck and shot, and the duck turned over, as he properly should have done under the circumstances. We went and retrieved him and brought him in, and he was a pretty big-looking duck. Now, I say he, I don't know exactly whether it was a he or a mama duck, but it was a duck. We went to work on it, my friend and I, and I remembered how my mother did it. She heated some water and dipped the birds, and then the feathers came off. And do you know what happened? We dipped the bird and the feathers came off, and there wasn't anything much but feathers. It was what they called the mud hen. Now, if any of you know what a mud hen is, you know what I mean. The bird wasn't much bigger, if any bigger, than the pigeon, but sitting out there in the water it looked as big as a mallard. It was a huge thing. We thought, what a hunk of meat we'll have, and we didn't have enough. As I recall, we threw it away. But what I mean is, it was a hypocrite, and it ought to have been shot, because it had them. It was telling everybody, look what I have. All right, all you got's feathers. You haven't got duck enough to write home about. You're just full of feathers, or rather feathers all around you. Now, if you could know how little we are, how small the average fellow is. Look at this fellow down here. He lives in a big house with four entrances and nine bathrooms and people to push around. But if you know that when God trims him down and takes the feathers off, he isn't a very big duck, I tell you mostly. Pretty small potatoes. You'll excuse the metaphor when I say this. But God wants to know how much you've got left and how big you are after you've been all plucked. He did that with Job. Job was a great fellow. Have you ever noticed in the book of Job, particularly in the 29th chapter of the book of Job, what a proud fellow he was. He said, I used to be back in the days of my glory before the depression. He said, My candle shined upon my head, and when by God's light I walked through the darkness as I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle, I washed my steps with butter and rock, poured out rivers of oil. When I went out to the gate through the city, when I prepared my seat in the street, the young men saw me and hid themselves, and the aged rose and stood at attention. The princes refrained from talking and laid their hand on their mouths. That's what you call a VIP. And all those held their peace, and their tongues cleaved to the roof of their mouth. They said, Everybody, here comes Job. Well, when God was through with Job, there wasn't anything left. Even his family left him and his wife left him. She never came back, thank God for that, I don't know. She said, Why don't you commit suicide? He said, You're no good anyhow. Now, I've always told you that. And there he was, scraping himself with oil. His wife said, Curse God and die and get it over. He said, You foolish woman. He said, Did I come into the world naked, and I'm going out the same way, blessed be the name of the Lord. He lost his pride and got back. God wanted Job to know how much there was left, and I'll tell you, there was quite a bit of Job left after the feathers were off. And God wants to know how much of us is left after they've taken everything away. Well, now look at some of the false riches that people have. Popularity, that is one. People are, I say in the United States, because I wouldn't say this about my friends here, you've been too nice to me. But down there, popularity is a goddess. Great is Diana of the Ephesians, and everybody dreams about being popular. Some people commit suicide, literally, if their rating slips a little bit on television. They can't stand it, they want to be popular. Well, then we have our beauty queens. Beauty queens. I don't know what you think about beauty queens, ladies and gentlemen, but don't get me because I'm older, because I've always thought this about beauty queens. You can take all the beauty queens from Dan to Beersheba, and from Vancouver to Miami, Florida, and put them on one side of the scale, and put one nice old farm lady who loves God and knows her Bible on the other side of the scale, and she'll go down and they'll go up. All of them put together with cellophane wrapping around them, and a bow wouldn't be worth as much as one dear old lady. We had visitors, I won't say who they were, but they were friends from here, out to the house the other day. Passed by, you know, to say hello at Christmas time, and they brought along the mother-in-law. And the mother-in-law was a little Scotch lady. She told me her age. Said she'd been in this country, in Canada, 52 years. And I said, oh, you must have come when you were just a girl. I said I was 21. She told me how old she was. But my wife and I have talked about it ever since she went. What a character here. What a woman. Quiet, but you could talk to her about real things, and she knew what it meant. And I got my braid Scots New Testament, and I can read it, but I can't pronounce it. And I brought it down, and she sat there with a shining face and read out of my braid Scots with the Scottish burr. Well, now, brothers and sisters, you take that little lady, a 73-year-old Scottish Saint, and put her in one end of the scale, and put all your painted beauty queens in the other. And she's worth more than all of them. Popularity. Some people give their souls for it. There's the pugilist. And the star. Oh, how we use that word star. They that win many to righteousness shall shine as the stars forever and ever. And we've taken the word star, that beautiful word, and applied it to people that have the morals of alley cats. Popularity. Let's write that off and say, God, we don't want it, we don't care anything about it, really. Then there's friends. If all you have are your summer friends of the world, remember, they don't stay with you when you're in trouble. Jesus was forsaken, and Paul was forsaken. And I remember, was it in Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, when Cardinal Woolsey had kissed the hands of the old king for a lifetime and sold out his soul and his church and everything else. Then the king got mad at him and, as I recall, threw him in prison, and he was dying. And they had died, and they said, How did he do? How did he die? And he said, He died better than he lived. He said, If he had lived as well as he died, he'd have been a better man, somebody said. Of course, they said it in Shakespeare's cadences, not in my plain, blunt language. But the quoted Woolsey is saying this, If I had served my God as faithfully as I served my king, he would not desert me now that I'm an old man. Oh, you can say that again. He'd served his king, and the old unpredictable king turned his back on him when he didn't need him anymore. If I had served my God as faithfully as my king, he'd never have deserted me, and he never would have. So be careful who your friends are. I'm going to talk a little later on about friends, the kind you ought to have. But watch out, because your friends easily can run away from you. And then possessions. The heathen have their possessions. You know, an eagle feather or two around their head, or some monkey teeth that they wear and use, or cowrie shells. A little child has treasures, too. Everybody knows that if you pick a little boy ten years old up in the summertime, pick him up by the feet and shake him, what drops out? His treasures. He's got them in his pockets, all his pockets filled with them. Some of the weirdest things. My kids used to go out and bring home snakes of all things. Boy, they'd give me the shivers, but they seemed to like them. They'd come in carrying them by the tail, and they'd be wiggling and wiggling and wiggling, and I couldn't even stay around. But there were treasures to those boys. They'd bring in salamanders. You know what they are. A salamander is a kind of a weird-looking lizard, red. You bring them in, and you go down in the basement, and there would be a salamander in the wash tub. You never knew when the snake was going to come slithering out. They were harmless, but no snake is harmless when I'm around, because I'd get ulcers from just knowing they're in the same area with me. But they were treasures, and they'd keep them around. Notice when they get at a certain age, they get a magpie complex and begin to collect things. They collect old matchboxes, or stamps, or whatever it is. It won't amount to much, but it satisfies the instinct of inquisitiveness, and it's treasures. And when they get a little bit older, their treasures get four wheels under them as a rule, and a marvelous engine. Boy, what I'd get out of that car! And we get our possessions around us, and I'm glad everybody can have anything, even from the boy who plays with snakes up to the man who plays with cars. I'm glad for it all, but if that's all you've got, I'm sorry for you. Because the blessings of the Lord make a man rich, and they don't add any sorrow, no depreciation, nobody steals the blessing of the Lord. I knew a family in Chicago that had a big Buick, and they left it outside of all places. Moody Bible Institute, when they came down with it, they never did find it. But here it was a kind of a poetic justice. The whole back seat of the car was filled with gospel tracts. I imagine those thieves, whoever they were, certainly got a stomachful of those gospel tracts. But anyway, the big Buick had gone, so possessions go like that, and then there's fame. We all want to be famous, and if we're not famous, we wish we were. Remember what Napoleon said to his secretary out on, where did they banish him to, Alma? He said to his secretary, You ought to thank me, I've made you famous. He said, Made me famous? What do you mean, sire? I always called him sire for some reason, I never figured out. He said, What do you mean, sire? You made me famous. Why? He said, You're famous because you're my secretary. And he said, Will you please tell me who Alexander's secretary was? Nobody knows, of course. But fame is a marvelous thing, and grace and the boast of heraldry and the pomp of power and all the beauty all that wealth e'er gave, a way to like the inevitable hour and the path of glory leads but to the grave. They all go the same way, but you say, Oh, I know, but they'll make a bust of him and put it up on his shelf. But you go out in the graveyard dead, and they make a statue of you and put it on a shelf, what do you get out of it? Nothing absolutely, nothing at all. I've often wondered how Shakespeare enjoys his statues that he's got around all these libraries, when anywhere there's a statue of Shakespeare, a bust of the Bard of Avon. But what's he getting out of it? I think of the artist that died and put on his tombstone. What I was as an artist meant an awful lot to me while I lived, but what I was as a Christian is all that matters to me now. So fame doesn't mean anything. It's great, but it isn't worth your trouble. The Christian is rich. The blessing of the Lord makes a man rich. And why? Well, he's rich in faith, he has his unseen glories, and he's rich in relationship. I've mentioned that already. Lord, my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. I've been reading old Meister Eckhart. I read him a lot. He says that God loves people so much that when he sees a good man doing a good act, he's absolutely delighted. Now, that old German scholar, you can't brush him off and say he was a mystic. He was, but he was a lot more than a mystic. He was a profound theologian and a great Saint. He said that God loved people so that he just loved everything they did. Have you ever seen doting parents sit and look at their little baby, maybe a year old, anywhere from 9 months to 14 months, as I recall they walk? And here he stands balancing himself around on his little feet or her little feet, whichever it is, and the parents with shining faces watch this marvelous act, never performed since Abel. This wonderful act. Well, they love the little fellows, and because they love them so, walking or any little act they do is wonderful to them. I believe that's true. I believe one of our riches is that God loves Christians and his people so much that he loves everything they do. Everything, except, of course, if they fail him and do wrong, he doesn't love that. But he loves everything they do. God loves us and is pleased with us, and I think God smiles. We don't think he does, but I always usually, theologians wouldn't grant it. He hasn't learned it enough. But I kind of think God smiles because I read that passage in the Old Testament that he bears his people on his shoulders. I used to call that a riding piggyback when I was a boy. Many times my father carried me that way, and I carried my boys that way, and I believe God carries us that way. You can't think of a father taking his little boy up piggyback that didn't smile while he was doing it. You can't think of God that isn't pleased with us when he takes us up like that and bears us. Then I think of contentment. A Christian is contented that he actually, honestly doesn't want something. It's not sour grapes with him, he just doesn't want it. Can you think of a lot of things you don't want? For instance, money or a big estate or a yacht. I hope nobody gives me a yacht. Now really, I hope you'll pray that nobody will give me a yacht. What would I do with a yacht? And then I hope nobody will give me a big estate somewhere. What would I do with a big estate? The taxes would have me in the poorhouse alone. There are so many things that I just don't want, so don't give them to me. I don't want them, because I love God and I have a little, and that's about it. The miller at the dee said, I envy nobody, and nobody envies me. And the king rode by and heard it and got off his horse and went in and said, Don't sing that any more. I order it. He said, This is a command. Don't sing it. He said, Why, your majesty? He said, Because I envy you. He said, I wish that I could say, I envy nobody and nobody envies me. So don't sing it any more, it isn't true. The old miller had to think up a revised version to keep from breaking the royal commandment. But I don't know how he did it, but he was just as contented as ever. The nurse companionship, I saw a picture one time advertising the classics, the great books, and it showed a man sitting on a streetcar, the old-fashioned kind with the side with the seats pused, running lengthwise of the car. Here he sat, and he had a book in his hand. Beside him sat Shakespeare, and next to him sat Beethoven, and on over here sat Plato, and over there sat somebody else. Here they were all lined up there, and it said, When you have these books, you fellowship with the great of the ages. I'll always remember that ad. That was a good one. Well, you do all right. My days among the dead are spent around me, I behold, where my roving eyes are cast, the mighty minds of old. I have books in my library that are so valuable to me that the brother said, I wouldn't take a kingdom for them, because you can have fellowship with the great and the mighty. You ever think of having fellowship with Moses? Here is a book that didn't cost me a dime. Somebody gave it to me, but it would be, I would suppose, a twelve-dollar Bible. Well, here I have this Bible, and if I make good use of it, I can have fellowship with the greatest moralist that ever lived in the world. His name was Moses. I can have close, warm fellowship with one of the greatest hymnists that ever lived in the world. His name was David. And I can listen to the voice of one of the most eloquent poets that ever lived in the world. His name was Isaiah. And I can listen to the deep, beautiful speech of the greatest mystic that ever lived in the world. His name was John. And I can sit at the feet of the greatest theologian that ever lived in the world. His name was Paul. Now, you tell me that I have to go to nightclubs. Incidentally, have you heard it? Somebody wrote me and sent me a clipping. You know what we have now? Some new thing under the sun. We have a Christian nightclub. You know, he got it all right. He got it in a certain town in the United States. I knew these things were on the way. I saw this coming, but I didn't know it would be so soon. One of these times we're all going to get sick to our stomach, and we're going out back and be sick, and then we're coming back and start over. Then we're going to have something from God. But as it stands now, we have this Christian nightclub. Some fellow wrote sarcastically in the New York Wall Street Journal and said they supposed that they would be selling candy cigarettes there and drinking water on the rock. Because they said that one thing about that Christian nightclub was that they weren't to smoke nor drink. But they had their entertainers, but they were Christian entertainers, of course. Well, amen. If you like it to amen, take it, brother, but I don't. I'd rather fellowship with Moses the great moralist, or David the great hymnist, or Isaiah the great poet, or Paul the great theologian, or even just simple, plain Christian people such as we have around here. For companionship, do you ever get bored? I don't think I've ever been bored in my life, except when somebody bores me. But just lead me to myself, and I'm never bored. You can always think of something worthwhile in all ways. Right along, I've sat way into the night at railroad stations, but as I recall, I've never been bored, because I can either write or I can read or I can get still and think. Companionship is a beautiful thing. Do you ever read that passage in the 16th chapter of Luke where Jesus said to what we were to do with our money? He said, "'Make friends with the man of your own rights,' and that was his word for money. "'Make friends with your money,' he said, so that when you die, the friends you make will receive you unto eternal tabernacles. Some of you have given your money to missions or given your money to help the poor, and in that great day when our Lord comes, you will meet people you never knew, and they will say, I want to thank you, and they'll welcome you into the eternal tabernacles.' Now, that's the meaning of it, all right. I've looked it up very carefully. Dr. R. A. Torrey said that was the meaning of it, and Dr. Robertson, the great Greek teacher, said that was the meaning of it. So I'm accepting it, that we help people down here, and they die and go, and we forget them almost. But one day we go up there, and then they meet us and say, I want to greet you and thank God for you. Turn your money into blessings. Think of it, and think of the riches of prayer and communion, and think at last of the riches of heaven and its rewards. Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you. I don't know whether this is good theology or not, but it's harmless. It won't hurt you if it isn't altogether sound. But I think of the man that grew up in a carpenter shop. He knew how to bevel and did all those nice things I used to hear when I was a kid. I never could bevel. I never could get one bevel to fit into another one, you know. But those who know how, the skilled cabinet makers, I think he was that kind of a carpenter. And the hands that used to make the fine cabinets are working on our mansions. I go to prepare a place for you, and I come again, he said. Well, into that is no sorrow. I say the test is, how rich are you at the last? If you make this world, any of its riches, any of its false riches, if you make them to be your final riches, you will have grief at the last. But there's no sorrow, no regret to those who made God all in all. Nobody was ever sorry that he had served his Lord. You will never be. There are two kinds of the general wealth that God gives to everybody. Emerson said the best part of a field is the part you don't have title to. My friends all around me grub and buy great pieces of property and improve them, and I walk down the road and I get all the blessing and benefit of their fields without paying a dime. The sweet smell floats in from the buckwheat fields, and I go down and I get all the taxes. Well, you can do that. Those are the general benefits God gives to everybody, but there are particular benefits he gives only to his people, God's own few. I've mentioned them. Eternal life, forgiveness, fellowship with God, the privileges of prayer, communion with the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, and heaven at last with all its rewards. These can be yours. I'd hate to see you go out into a new year trusting in the riches that decay and perish. These can be yours. The blessing of the Lord maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrows, no regrets. You can be a rich man this year, my dear friends. You can be a rich woman, rich man, rich in the things that don't pass away. And the way in, as you well know, too well know, maybe, is through Jesus Christ our Lord. That's the way in. This is my beloved son, said the Father about Jesus, in whom I am well pleased. And Jesus said to his people that loved him and followed him, that thou hast loved them even as thou hast loved me. And the Father loves the members of Christ's body with the same love he loves Christ himself. So those are the riches. I think this would be a great night for you to make up your mind to follow Jesus, if you're not now following him. It would be a great night for you to make up your mind that if you're a nominal Christian, that you're going to do something about it that'll change the nominal Christian to a real Christian, and have riches that perish not. So in that great day, if it comes a little later soon, that you'll die rich and be rich forever and ever. Our dear missionaries, God bless them. We send them out with such buoyancy, so much prayer, and they live a lifetime. And the people that sent them out die, and they're forgotten, and they get old, and they're retired, and they can't work anymore. They come back, and we send them out to California or Billa Beach or somewhere, and retire them and put them in old folks' homes. We do pretty well by them, I'll say that. I don't even know the names of some of them, but they were one Chinese or Formosans or Congolese or somebody else to Christ. They're over there waiting for them now, rich. When they die, they haven't got anything except a few missionary letters and a few books and the Bible or two, and memories. And we hustle about because we've got the help and the money, and we hustle about, and they sit around and dream of the days when they serve God in the far fields. We go and pity them. I've walked through the great colony in California where missionaries and old broken-down preachers go just before they go to heaven. I've walked through those little cottages and down those little winding ways and looked them over and pitied them because I said their friends are all gone. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. But I don't think they deserve my pity. I mean to say I don't think I should pity them. They should pity me, for they have earned riches that can't perish. Riches that can't decay, they've got it. Yeah, it's great to be a Christian, friends. I wouldn't be anything else for all the wide world. Christian. Let's pray.