In this sermon, the speaker expresses his love and support for homeschoolers and the unique bond between homeschooling mothers and their children. He advises mothers to be careful not to hold on too tightly when it comes time for their children to leave the nest and pursue their own paths. The speaker also discusses the importance of fulfilling one's life purpose and not regretting old age. He references Galatians 4-6 and emphasizes the need to cry out to God for help and guidance. Additionally, the speaker highlights the limited role of feelings in Christian living and the importance of taking up one's cross. He encourages believers to trust in God even when it seems like He has abandoned them and to be willing to endure the darkness of the soul. The speaker also mentions the concept of God sifting believers like wheat and relates it to the process of removing impurities.

Our new doctor was sharing with me, in order to be licensed, you have to take classes, even as a doctor. I thought when you became a doctor you didn't have to take classes anymore, but he did. And the class he took, or had to take, was how to help people to die in peace, taught by non-Christians. So here he's going to, he knew it would be probably a lot of new age stuff all around this thing, but he went to this thing, and he was amazed that the speaker, who was a non-believer, said there were five things that people have to have in order to die in peace. Otherwise, they struggle desperately with dying. They fight the whole process. You may want to write these down, they're very interesting. The first thing they say, the foremost thing for a person to die in peace is that relationships, past relationships, are healed. He's talking about what? Forgiveness. Unresolved conflicts in a person's life makes it very difficult for them to let go, to die. The second issue was this one. They didn't mind the suffering they were going through if you could give that suffering some meaning. So the suffering process in the dying process was not as difficult for these people as if they had no meaning to the suffering. And isn't it... Well, I'll go on. I'm getting excited here. I mean, when you think of who's saying this. The third thing is who am I? Now that I have cancer, I can't work. I'm sick and I'm dying. Who am I? I'm no longer a pilot. I'm no longer an executive. I'm no longer that. I can't do any of that. And I've lost my identity. And I need to get an identity. Remember, Bill has said this many times. If I build my life around, or if I build my identity around something that is temporary, can change or be taken away, I'm going to struggle with insecurity. Let me throw this out. I love speaking to homeschoolers. I believe in it with all of my heart. I love doing the homeschool conventions. There's something very unique in homeschooling. And that is the bonding that often happens between the children and their mother. Because she has so much involvement in their life. And you may find it very difficult, Mom, when it comes time for the eaglets to fly and to leave the nest. Be careful you don't hold on to them too tightly when it's time, in God's timing, for them to leave and to go into ministry or whatever, because of the bonding and all that's going on. The fourth principle here, or the fourth thing that, in order to help someone to die in peace, is have I fulfilled my life's purpose? I am old, and I don't regret being old. The only problem is, when I get on the floor with my grandchildren, and when I go to stand up, I sound like that cereal, Snap, Pop, and Crackle. I'm going, Are these noises coming from me? But one thing about being old, and I like telling it to the council of a number of young people this week, younger than 12, but one thing about being old is you look back. And looking back, if I had to do it over, there's things that I would do differently. And so when I talk to your alert sons, or we did the father and son thing down in Dallas, I forget when it was, March or something, where fathers and their boys came and we ministered to them there, and we planned to do something every year at the Dallas, different kinds of ways of ministering to families. But I try to share some of the things that I believe that God has shown me that I missed out in my life. And one of the major things that I see in my life that I missed out, and many of you know this, is in the area of prayer. And so for the last three or four years, God is helping me to deepen my prayer life. And I'd like to share this. One night I was laying in bed, and I was just talking to the Lord in my spirit, and I said, God, I want to be a godly man. And I don't often, or I should say seldom, really hear the Lord apart from Scripture. But it was as clear as anything in the darkness of that night as I was laying there in bed, God said, Jim, that is the wrong goal. Godliness can lead to personal pride. That's what he said to me. He said, Jim, I want your goal to be that you would want to know me deeper and better. And so whatever time I have left in my life, I want to come alongside your families if I can and help you in any way I can. But the goal for the rest of my life is to know him deeper, better, in a more intimate way than I've ever known him before. And the fifth thing that these people need to die in peace is the eternal things. And that is what's going to happen after I die. Remember Bill, what he said to that stewardess on the airplane. These are the five things that we try to accomplish as we're counseling our counselees. Heal relationships. Try to share with them the purpose in the suffering they're going through. Give them a new identity in Christ. Send them out with a whole new vision and purpose for their life. And have the eternal question settled. If you have your Bibles, but that's just a freebie. You know, I usually share something free for Michael Lefebvre. Michael Lefebvre is just an outstanding young man. So I called Michael on the phone and I said, what can I share at Knoxville this year? Some tremendous insight from the Word of God that you have for me. And I'm sorry that Michael at this point in time in his life is totally worthless. He's engaged. And I met his fiancée. She came down the aisle and said, I'm Michael's fiancée. And I said, you've ruined his life for one year. He's just so in love that the poor guy has no insights. But I tell you, she's a jewel. When you get to know some of these kids over the years that I've known them, I mean, they were kids when I knew them. I've been doing these things for ten years. And then you see them go from 15 to 25, and then they introduce you to the life. It makes sense. Because once you know a quality person, and you know the quality of that life, when you meet the person they're going to marry, you're not surprised. You can see that they picked a very quality person. And Mike picked a very quality young lady. God brought them together. But Galatians 4.6. I want to take what I wanted to share with you that God put on my heart, and I want to connect it with what Bill has said about crying out to God. I can't remember what day I called Bill's office, and Bill heard I was on the phone, so he said, I've got to talk to Jim. And he shared with me this crying out to God. Well, I am a very skeptical... maybe that's not a good word. I am old. I started with that. That's not what I mean. I'm hesitant about grabbing onto new truth unless I can see for myself in the Word of God it's true. You understand what I'm saying? When Bill gave the thing on iniquities, it sounded true. But I had to read through the Bible and mark every verse on iniquities, study it in its context, then I could grab a hold of it, believe it, and teach it, and I'd bleed over it. And so when he gave me this stuff of crying out loud... crying out loud, you know what I'm saying? For crying out loud, Bill! But when he gave that truth about crying out, my spirit leaped with joy. It was truth. You know what I'm saying? It's true. And you know how fast he went the other night? I was sitting in the front row and I said, would you slow down? I can't get these notes. This is important stuff. You're flipping those things too fast. Well, he gave it to me over the telephone. And I'm trying to write. And he's quoting all this Scripture and throwing all these verses out. And I know it's true. My heart is saying this is true. And I've been going through it. You'll love this. I've been going through the Psalms and praying the Psalms back to God. You who get my prayer letter, my next prayer letter, and I can't tell you right now, I try to put books in there that are extremely helpful. One was Developing Your Secret Closet of Prayer, one of the best books on developing a prayer life, overall book on developing a prayer life. He has one chapter in How to Pray Scriptures. This new book that I got, and I can't think of his name even, the guy that wrote it, it's How to Pray Scriptures. It's not very thick. It's InterVarsity Press. I think the guy's name is Howard something or other. But I read it. I really liked it. His appendix is excellent. There's appendix on every kind of issue and all the Scriptures listed you can pray through. And so I liked it so well. My wife doesn't like to read books that are marked and I mark them up, so she bought one. So you know it's a pretty good book if the Logan spent money for two. So she's got one and I got one. You get it from a bookstore. It's not something we're trying to sell you or whatever. We're just saying, hey, you ought to look at this book and if you don't know how to pray Scriptures back to God, this book will be a real help to you. And as I've been praying through the chapters of Scriptures back to God, I've been marking every time in the Psalms where the psalmist cried out to God. It's absolutely wonderful. But one of the verses that I came to in studying through this, and I'm not through it yet, I mean I believe it and I'm with it, but I still want to look at all the verses and all of this on this thing of crying out to God, was Galatians 4, 6. Bill alluded to it last night, but he jumped over it too quickly. And so I want to start there. In verse 6 of Galatians 4, write that down. I don't even think he had it on the over, he had to have it down, but it's a crucial verse on crying out to God. It says, Because ye are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Now, I look this up, first of all, you can look it up if you have Zoyotes or whatever, you know, that one. Look up crying in the back. I looked it up in Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, and he said in that verse, crying is the appeal of the believer to God the Father. Bromley, Dictionary of New Testament Words, and he's the guy that did Kittles, that great big, horribly expensive set of Greek books. But don't buy that big set unless you're a pastor. But you buy the one volume Bromley, which is a condensation of all the Greek words that came from this ten or twelve volume set that sells for I think over a thousand dollars. And you buy the one volume Bromley, and this is what he said as you looked at that word. The word crying refers to a special cry of sonship, a deeper, outer cry that is prompted by the Holy Spirit. So, there is a prompting in my heart by the Holy Spirit to cry out to God in this situation. Now, as we cry out to God, we're to use the word Abba. Abba, Father. The word Abba expresses trust, safety, confidence, belonging, and most of all, intimacy. It's the most intimate word that you can use addressing God. It's Abba, Father. Did you know that there is not a single example of the use of the word Abba as addressing God in all of Jewish literature? Any Jewish literature that you can read, scriptural, outside of scripture that's available, you will never find them using the term Abba to God. It's a very special term for those in the New Testament who have been born into the family of God. When I'm born into the family of God, God becomes Daddy to me. That's what the word is. Daddy God. We have five children, and all but one is married. And there's some advertisements that I put up on the post for my daughter that's 42. I'm glad she won't see this video because I would be killed. She's single, and she said I wouldn't change my singleness for most of the jerks out there. I'm serving God, and the man I want needs to be committed and able to lead me, and I haven't found one yet. And so I choose to serve the Lord with all of my heart and my life until God brings that one in my life that could be a leader. So I'm not against singles. I've seen my children married and serving God. Three of our kids are in full-time ministry. And I've seen one single serving God, and wherever God calls him, He'll give him the grace to be there. But she just hasn't found that one yet, and she's not going to lower her standards just to be married. Now, this cry of the heart, this crying out to God as Abba, if you read in the classic Christian literature, and I've been reading the Christian classics. They're not easy reading, but what a blessing they've been to me. We're prolific readers. We read all the time. And they refer, if you read in there, when they talk about the prayer of the heart, they're talking about that prayer that is generated by the Spirit of God within my inner self that causes me to cry out to God. They call it the prayer of the heart. There are three stages in prayer, in a prayer life. The first stage is the prayer of the lips. You know, now I lay me down to sleep. That kind of prayer. The second is the prayer of the mind, which is more intellectual. You know, when you're in a prayer meeting and you want your prayer to sound very intellectual as you're sitting there? You know, someone's praying, how can I say this and how can I say that? You ever been there? Anybody been there? Am I the only one that's ever been in a prayer meeting trying to figure out how to pray that people think I was spiritually intelligent? But the third is the prayer of the heart. And when you move into that stage of prayer, you enter the realm where the Holy Spirit is the initiator. And that's where God wants all of us to go. Now, I want to move into what I want to share with you. And I've never shared this before ever with a group. What happens when I cry out to God and nothing happens? What happens when I'm crying out to God and things get worse? They put in your program that I was going to talk on discouragement because it looked like the title of what I was going to talk about would be discouraging. I want to speak on what the classics... You read, I don't know of any missionary, and you know we collect biographies. We have over 1,000 of them in our home. I don't know of any Christian that was ever used of God that did not experience this. And so many of the phone calls we get at our office, over 5,000 phone calls from families wanting help. And many of those phone calls are prompted because they're in what is called, what we would term, the dark night of the soul. And I want to share with you some insights if you are going through right now the dark night of the soul. If you're not going through them, jot them down. You may have a friend that's going through it. Or maybe down the road, you will go through the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul, I put some of this in my last prayer letter. And I have just a few over here. Just some that were returned because people moved. The prayer letter just went out. So I don't have a lot, but I have a few over here. And I got a letter from a lady who was going through the dark night when she got my prayer letter. And I'm not going to read all the three years of the darkness and how every sentence here in this letter, it gets darker and darker and more tragedies are happening, more things are going on. But I want to write what she said. I read what she said. She said, I felt that no matter what I prayed or how much I prayed, things just kept getting worse. And I kept asking myself, do I believe in God? Do I believe His Word? Do I trust Him? Logically, I would say, yes, I do. But I still could not find comfort. I came to the point of decision. I had to decide to stay on course or abandon ship, thinking I've been a fool to trust someone who doesn't hear me. I concluded that no matter what He does or doesn't do, my path is clear. I really don't have a choice. I must do what I believe He wants me to and remain faithful because it's the only truly thing I can do. I have nowhere else to turn. When I come face to face with my Creator, I don't want to say, I gave up. He owes me nothing, and I owe Him everything. So your words about the dark night of the soul meant a lot to me. And Bill Gothard's insights on crying out to God, which I put in my prayer letter, reaffirmed what I had been learning through this time. I think there were some attitudes, mixed priorities that blocked God from using me to do His will. I now feel light at the end of a long, dark tunnel with some wonderful things God is teaching me. I couldn't do His will because I couldn't see what He saw in me. Thank you for sharing. I really thought I was the only Christian feeling this way. Everybody else seemed to be up, divinely blessed, and I really felt totally alone and that nobody would understand. So, let's start going through the dark night of the soul. This dark journey. The first thing I want to share with you is the only place that God can bless you is right where you are. Because that's the only place you are. I used to tell the kids in Bible college where I was teaching that often we think we could be what we're not where we're not. And if I'm not becoming what I should be where I am, I will not become what I ought to be where I'm not. Isn't that right? If only, if this, if that, or whatever. Hey, this is where I am. God knows where you are. You know that God knows the hair on your head. This morning an angel yelled, Logan lost 20 more. They put it in the computer up there. See, prayer is an ongoing love relationship with God. You know, it's amazing. We've been married a long time. And when we speak of these other things besides here, these other conventions, state conventions, and so on for homeschoolers, I sent out an old, what do you call it, you know, tells you who you are and all that stuff. It's not a resume, I'm not looking for a job. But you know, that thing that tells you about you. And so my wife happened to grab the last one from the Illinois convention I did for the state of Illinois. And she looked at it and she said, Jim, this is terrible. I said, yeah, the picture is kind of old. You know, but I look so much better in my high school graduation picture. No, she says, it's not the picture. You said we've been married 39 years. Three of our kids are going to be surprised. You've got to change that. And so my wife looked at me and said, how long have we been married? And I said, since we were kids. She said, I don't know, it's forever it seems like. But you know what's amazing? I don't mean that in the wrong way. My wife may mean it in the wrong way. But what is interesting is my wife is going to be 70 next year and I'll be 68. And my wife wants me to tell her more now than ever in our marriage, she wants to hear these words. I love you. Isn't that important? And prayer is a way that we can tell God, I love you. Psalm 23 talks about going through the valley of the shadow of death. And when you go through the valley of the shadow of death, often as we go through the dark night of the soul, one of the things that God wants to accomplish is a deeper death of self. Now what are the symptoms of being in a dark night? Number one, from my perspective, my prayers are not being answered. Two, God seems to have left me. Three, a deep sense of total aloneness. And the fourth one, unbelievable darkness. We recently, as an organization, went through the dark night of the soul. You can go through it individually. You can go through it as a couple. You can go through it as a family. You can go through it as a church family. You can go through it as an organization. There's many ways of going through the dark night of the soul. Years ago when I was pastoring in the upper California, really northern California, we went to the Oregon Caves. And they did something, I hear that they don't do this anymore, but when you walk to their big room, which if you've been to Carlsbad Caverns or everything, isn't a big room. But to us, we've never been there, so it was a big room. And you walked into what they call the big room. It was a mile from the entrance of the cave. So a mile of twisting through stalactites and stalagmites and all that stuff. You're down a mile in the hole of the earth. And the fellow says that there's measurable light there that you can measure with some kind of a meter. But basically, most of us will never be in as dark darkness as we will experience in that room. And so he told us to look where we were standing and not to move and not to panic, and he turned the lights off. And you could put your hand and feel your face and you could not see your fingers. That's the dark night of the soul. That's what we're talking about, that darkness. It just seems so dark. And I feel so alone, so abandoned. And my prayers don't seem to work, and I'm crying out just like Bill said that it isn't happening. My daughter hasn't returned. I don't know where my son is. My cancer hasn't gone away. Or our finances are getting worse, or whatever is taking you through all of this. The worst thing you can do when you're in the dark night of the soul is make a major decision for change. The worst thing. And do you know what happened in one week when it was the darkest for our office? I got two calls from two wonderful Christian organizations, very conservative, both of them asking me to leave where I was and to come with them. And what would you want to do in your heart? Hey, glad to come. Get out of this darkness. I'll take it. But I knew in my heart, nothing wrong with these organizations. And what they wanted me to do would be a wonderful thing to do. It was the timing of the call. It's when we were going through this darkness and the worst thing I could have done is by my own to choose to leave until God took us through this time. See, the dark night of the soul. Often God is using us to get our eyes off of methods and steps and all this stuff and bring us to the place that it's God and God alone and He's the only one that can help me and God, I need you. Peter's prayer when he was sinking may not have been very long and it may not have been really theological, but all he did was cry out, right? Lord, help me. That's all he could say. And the Lord reached down and pulled him out. The darkness can go for long periods of time. It can be short. It can be long. Whatever. The first step as you journey through the dark night, respect the necessity of silence. Satan can begin to whisper into your ears that God is being cruel, that God has abandoned you, that maybe you've pushed God away. So many of those that come to us feel that maybe they've committed the unpardonable sin and now they're destined for hell. As the enemy whispers this, there's no hope for you. Let me tell you, beloved, we have a God of hope and there's not anything that you're going through that you're hopeless. It's impossible to be hopeless with a God of hope and He said in the Word, He's given us everything for life and godliness. But realize that during this time you may be crying out, but there's going to be a silence. The second thing, remember, you're not alone. So many Christians have experienced in their lives what you're experiencing. You're going through maybe a spiritual dry, I don't know what you want to call it, a dry period. You feel you're in the desert or whatever that's going through, but you're not alone. There's others going through. You go through this alone possibly, but others are going through this very same thing. The third thing, remember, and this is vital, remember God is not judging you for having less feelings. Spiritual feelings are not the gauge of our spiritual maturity. God will not judge you because you have less feelings at this time. See, feelings are not a reward of God and the lack of feelings are not the punishment of God. We've shared this with you. In Revelation chapter 12, it says that Satan is the deceiver. What is the difference between Satan the liar and Satan the deceiver? Remember, a lie is just a plain lie. It's just an absolute outright lie. A deception is when your mind and emotions believe something that's not true. So it's a lie with feelings. But the problem is that in our culture, we've been trained to believe what we feel and not to believe what we don't feel. This morning as I sort of drug myself out of bed and went in to take a shower to get over here early, I don't know if I felt like a Christian. Maybe I wasn't one. You know, when I have the flu, I don't feel very spiritual. In fact, I feel more like dying. You ever had the flu and said, Lord, if you want to take me, it's fine? This is terrible. But we base so much on our feelings. And so as these feelings begin to go, we're in trouble. I love this. One of the old classic writers said this. I want to read it to you. When God takes the feelings away, we need to remember that spiritual feelings are the beginning, not the end, of Christian living. Now this was written hundreds of years ago. Fenlon said that, and he also said, that how many souls, having had too tender a childhood in Jesus Christ, too delicate, too dependent on so much mild milk, draw back and give up the life that's within when God begins to wean them. They make the sanctuary out of what was the porch of the temple. Don't you want to go deeper? Do you want to stay on the porch? Or do you want to enter into the holies of holies of the very presence of God, where He can minister to you? Often the way into the holies of holies, way into that deep relationship with God, is going through the dark night of the soul. Number four. Remember... Oh, we said that one, didn't we? Remember that feelings have a limited role in Christian living. The fifth one. Take up your cross. We never so need to abandon ourselves to God as when He seems to abandon us. Seems to abandon us, as we're going through this dark time. God is plunging us into the night of pure faith. And we need to be willing to suffer the agony of the darkness of the soul. When we go through that, often God begins to sift. Remember He said to Peter, God said, Peter, Satan has asked permission to sift you like wheat. Well, I've been to other countries around the world. I remember in various countries in Africa watching the women with the big round type of a woven thing, a disc type of woven thing, taking the wheat and throwing it in the air so the wind could blow the chaff out of it. That's really what the Bible is talking about. But let's bring it down to today. In the old days, people bought wheat, flour, and big sacks. And if you live in the South, women sifted the flour for a number of reasons. The first reason is because it wasn't pre-sifted. The second reason was to keep the critters out of the cake and the lumps. And God can use the dark night to sift us so that the critters and the lumps in our life stay in the sieve, the shaker thing, and He can dump it out. Often we sense that we're walking with God and we're high with God because of all of the things He has done for us. And often this is a time where God begins to show us that our motives were not right. You know, are we like those that stop following Jesus because He stopped the miracle of bread and fish? Are we going deeper with Him? Is it just because of what He's given to us? Or is it because of who He is? And as we take up the cross, we want to realize that God is taking us through a time of dying to self. Jesus said, if any man will come after me, let him deny what? Self, and take up his cross daily and follow me. The sixth one, and this is so important. We see so many people do this. Don't seek spiritual feelings in new circumstances. As we begin to feel these feelings are going, then people often go out and seek new spiritual feelings and spiritual experiences that will give them feelings. And what's been amazing to him as a counselor, as a medical doctor, how many counselees have religious spirits because they were seeking religious experiences and they got them. In all the years that we've been helping people to come to freedom in Christ, we have found the most difficult people to work with are those who sought, not Christ, but an emotional experience. And in that process were demonized with religious spirits. And the reason it's so difficult to help these people is that these particular type of demonic influences only push them deeper in experiences. They don't push them to evil. I hope I'm making sense, but I'm telling you this is a very dangerous thing to do. I want to get these feelings. Now, I'm willing to die to these feelings. I'm willing to let them go at this time. I am not going to fight or try to get that which has left me. This next one is so important. It's so very important. And that is, because up to now, and as you do a deeper study on this, you'll find that we are fighting God. We don't like what's happening. We don't like the darkness. It's like we're on a roller coaster. And the thing starts, and you decide that you don't want to go for the ride. But maybe jumping off is going to be dangerous. And you're kind of just going for a ride, and you sense that you're out of control here. Don't fight it. Surrender. If you are wrestling with God, I have never known anyone to win. Just surrender in that darkness. God, I don't know what you're doing. But God, I can trust you in the darkness because I trust you in the light. I don't know what's happening here. I've cried out to you. Before you, I know my heart is right. You know, I've searched my heart in this. And I don't know if I keep searching within, I'm going to get really depressed in all this darkness. And so, God, I'm going to trust you in the darkness like I trusted you in the light. I'm going to believe what you said, whether I have any feelings about it or not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God loves me. I don't always feel that, but I know it. I know that God has given to me eternal life, and I will never perish. I have never doubted, thank God, my salvation from the time I got saved at 20 through the Navigators. I've always believed that once that was done, I was a child of God, and Satan could never shake that. And so I feel my heart goes out to those, well, I'm not sure, did I pray enough, did I say enough? And I love what Bill said. If there was a special prayer that you had to pray to be saved, it would be somewhere in Scripture. And it's not there. And if you cried out to God, and you wanted God to save you, He will save you. If you don't surrender, and you are holding tightly to something, have you ever had your kids hold on to something they didn't want you to see? What's in your hand? Nothing. Yes, there is. No, there isn't. And so you try to open their hand. You know, you can give your child some pain to figure out what they've got in their hand. Is God putting some pain on your fingers because you're not willing to open your hand and say, God, take it, whatever it is. You can just have it. I just surrender to you. I surrender to your will. Teach me what you want me to learn through this. I'm willing to go through this. And I'm going with my hands wide open. I'm not going to clutch anything that you want to take from me. And then following the dark night, if you look in Scripture, is blessing. There is a mysterious woundedness that somehow goes with the great darkness. And it accompanies the great blessing that follows the great darkness. Remember Jacob? After wrestling in the dark, he was blessed by God. And what was the sign of the blessing? Woundedness. The rest of his life is a reminder. He went through the dark night, and God had blessed him. I want to go to Isaiah 45.3. I shared this a number of years ago here in Knoxville. And I went through, the first time ever, went through the dark night of the soul. I had been discouraged before. And I thought I had been through that. But when I went through that, I was with an executive of a large Christian mission at that time. And it was a personal thing. It was not an organizational thing. What we're going through now in Sioux City, where our counseling center is, is an organizational darkness. This was a personal darkness. And I had just come back from Australia. And in Sydney, we went downtown to see the Square Tower. Have any of you been to Australia? You know what shape the Square Tower is in downtown Sydney? It's round. It's round like a record. Or a CD, I should say. You see how old I am, record? You talk to kids about records, what are we talking about? A CD. Round like a CD. And it's the Square Tower. And to go there, you get on like a train, more than a subway. It's more like a train that takes you down. I remember as we went down, we went in this tunnel, and it was a long, dark tunnel. And we just kept going and going and going and going into Sydney from wherever I was in Australia, going in there. And that's what it was like. It was like I was on a train that was going, this was back a number of years ago, going through this dark tunnel that I couldn't understand. I didn't know why. I searched my heart. I cried out to God, and it only got darker. I went through this. And I kept thinking, there's got to be something I've done wrong. And that's a real trap of Satan getting me into myself. You know that in my flesh dwells what? Oh, you guys know me. In my flesh dwells no good thing, so I'm looking within for something good. Isn't that kind of the wrong place to look? In my flesh? You know what's good about me? Christ in me. That's what's good about me. Not me in me. Christ in me. And so as I was going through this, I don't know how I was directed to this passage, but I was directed to this passage, and God gave me such a blessing. And I want to give you this as the very last thing. If you're going through the dark night, or you come along someone going through the dark night, they need Isaiah 45, 2 and 3. I knew, verse 2, I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight. I will break in pieces the gates of brass and cut and cinder the bars of iron. I knew that verse. That God will go before me, and there's no hindrance that God can't just remove. When I was teaching at one of these Bible colleges, one of the students we had was coming from Africa. It was an African young man. And as he was coming to America, they were saying, Be careful. Don't put your suitcases down because in America they'll steal them. That's in Africa. I mean, in Africa when you go through the thing, you don't want to put your suitcases down. They'll disappear. But not so bad in America right now. And so here this young man, he could speak English, never been to America before, and he flies into either Kennedy, you know, there's two airports. One's in New York City and one's in New Jersey. If you've ever been there, you know there's two of them. And you have to take a shuttle from one to the other airport. So he flies in, goes through customs, has all these bags, and he comes to these doors. He has to go outside. And he cried out to God, you know, if he puts these bags down to open the door, you know what's going to happen. The Americans are going to steal them. And so he prayed that God would do something, miraculous, and he walked to the door, and they flew open. And he prayed again, and the other doors flew open. And so he came and he told us about it at the college, how God miraculously opened the doors for him. But let me tell you, where it says I will break the gates of iron and all of that stuff, let me tell you, my God can break that stuff down. I don't care what's being thrown in your path, when you're walking with God, He can bulldoze that stuff right out of the road, blow it out of the way. But then it was verse 3. And maybe I had to be in darkness for this verse ever to speak to my heart. And he said, I will give thee the treasures of darkness, the hidden riches of the secret place, that you may know that I, the Lord, which call thee by name in the God of Israel. When you're in the darkness, Satan will say, God doesn't care. You know what you can say? Ha! He knows my name. I'm not a number. He knows my name. And he calls me by name. And I'm going to trust him as I go through this deep darkness. The first church I ever pastored was out in Nowhere, California. Now the name was not Nowhere, but it could have been. I knew when I was there I was somewhere, but somewhere when you were there was nowhere. We had 480 people, and it was like 60 miles one way, 40 miles another way. This was cowboy and loggers. Here I am a city kid, grew up in Los Angeles, and I'm with cowboys and loggers. And I was out of my realm. I was no threat to anybody up there. My wife says, Did you ever notice when these cowboys come to church, we had high noon, or whatever they called it, you know where these guys standing in the back of the church looking for a place to sit. It was unbelievable. It was really quiet. These roughnecks, roughneck characters and all this stuff in that town. Oh, here we were out in nowhere. But when you drove one way, you could see where the stagecoach used to come to town. And you look in the hills, there was a gold mining town, and some gold mines you could go into. But there were some sluice boxes built on the hill there where they were doing the gold thing, which came down. If you want gold, you can pan for it. You know, do this. But if you want diamonds, you have to go in the darkness. Don't waste your darkness. Because in the darkness, when you're in the dark night of the soul, God wants you to dig for diamonds. He wants you to give you the treasures that you can only get in darkness. And when you go through the darkness and you come through that, those treasures that God opened up to you that you would never have seen because you hadn't experienced what the writer had experienced when they were writing this, or the depths of the meaning of those verses. When you have a beloved friend that's going through darkness, you can come alongside and share the treasures that God gave you. I know that a number of you are going through darkness right now. A number of you are hurting on the inside. And I'd like us to bow in prayer. And if you're here right now and you're going through some real darkness in your life, will you by faith open your hands and let go? Is it a deep hurt or financial problems? Do you have a wayward son or a wayward daughter that maybe you don't even know where they are right now? Will you release them, open them up and give them to God? Do you have a partner that isn't all that they should be? You know, when a woman goes through the dark night of the soul, she usually becomes very fearful. When a man goes through the dark night of the soul, he has a real desire just to give up. And so do you have a life mate that is breaking your heart and is not what they ought to be, but they have a blue suit and a white shirt and carry a Bible and have a nice tie on? Just let go of that. Cry out to God for that. Let it go to the will of God. Say, God, I don't want to stand in the road of what You're doing here. I'm going to trust You. I will trust You in the darkness. See, are you going through a private Gethsemane? Will you lay down your human will? Will you, as Jesus said, Father, not my will, but what? Thy will be done. Oh, God, I just give this to You. I reach out and I give it to You. Father, You deal with it. Cry out to God, first of all, as Abba Father, then cry out to El Elyon, the Sovereign One in control. David said, When I go to the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear evil, because Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me. Two pieces of wood. How did two sticks bring comfort to a man in absolute darkness? One was a club for the wolves. The other was a staff to guide the sheep. And David was saying, You're my shepherd, even in the darkness. It was a symbol that he was under God's control. Beloved, God is control, even of the darkness. Gather the diamonds. Learn what He's teaching you. And right now, we join our hearts. Father, we may not be hurting at this point. We may not be in a dark session. But we cry out for our brothers and sisters who are here that may be going through some very dark times. Father, You know what's happening. If there is a loved one, if there is something that's out of their control, they can't control it, they don't know where this person is or what's going on, You know where they are. And Father, we pray that You would minister to their hearts and lives. Father, we're thankful for the ability of putting Your Word in the hearts of young people and that You, if they are not walking with You, You can bring that Word up and bring conviction and bring them back to Yourself. You know the needs of those that are here in darkness. We release them to You. Meet those needs, Father. And as they go through, give them diamonds. Give them a very special truth or truths that they can hang on to as they go through this time. Because Father, we know that all of us, at some point in time, have, are, or will go through the tunnel of darkness. But Father, we thank You that it's never permanent and there's light at the end. And we just look to You to guard our hearts, to remove the dross, dross deeper. And then, Father, may we experience the blessedness that comes from the darkness and that You would be glorified in our lives. We ask this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and for His glory. Amen.