In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of waiting on God and trusting in His faithfulness. He uses the example of the disciples waiting in Bethany and encourages the audience to have patience in their own lives. The speaker urges the listeners to put their hope in Jesus Christ, who is faithful and will fulfill His promises. He also emphasizes the reliability of the Bible, stating that God wrote it and cannot lie. The sermon concludes with a reminder that those who reject God and love sin will be banished from His presence.

In the 89th Psalm, Psalm 89, let me read only a few verses which I'll pick out because they bear on the subject I have before me. I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever. With my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations. Thy faithfulness shalt thou establish in the very heavens. Thy faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints. Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto thee, or to thy faithfulness round about thee? Then God says, But my faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him, and in my name shall his horn be exalted. In Psalm 119, it says, Thy faithfulness is unto all generations. In 1 John, it says, If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. In 2 Timothy 2, it says, If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful, he cannot deny himself. In 1 Thessalonians 5, Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. You know, God is never out of date, and regardless of the season of the year, it's always proper to preach about God. In any season, the Church might drum up that would make it inappropriate to preach about God or to be canceled next week. So, for the time allotted me, I want to speak on the faithfulness of God, this being one of the attributes of the Most High God, whose we are and whom we claim to serve. Now, I have read a great many texts, but still only a few of the texts that say that God is faithful. And of course, I must define it and apply it and then try to show what it means to us now. Now, faithfulness is that in God which guarantees that God will never be and will never act inconsistent with himself. Now, you can put that down as an axiom. It's good for you now, and it's good for you when you're dying, and it'll be good to remember as you rise from the dead, and good for all the eons and millenniums to come. That faithfulness is that in God which guarantees that God will always act consistent with himself, that God will never cease to be what he is and who he is, and everything God says or does must accord with his faithfulness. He will always be true to himself and to his works and to his creation. Now, I have said that God will never be and never act inconsistent with himself. God, you see, is his own standard. God imitates nobody and is influenced by nobody. I know that's hard to take because in this degenerate age, when the Church is tragically degenerate, we introduce the idea of the VIP and man with the influence. And they say, crudely enough, it isn't what you know, it's whom you know. But remember this, that God is influenced by nobody. You can't influence God one way or another. And God imitates nobody, and God is never forced to act any way, and he's never forced to act out of character. No one can force God to act otherwise than faithfully to himself and to us. Nobody can force him, I say, and no circumstance and no thing. If I can imagine a thing that can influence God strongly enough to change his mind or compel him by any kind of pressure to do anything that he hadn't planned to do or to be anything that he isn't, then I am thinking of somebody greater than God, which is obvious nonsense, because who can be greater than the greatest and who can be higher than the highest and who can be mightier than the mightiest? And the faithfulness of God guarantees that God will never cease to be who and what he is. His immutability guarantees that. I don't know whether you remember the sermon I preached on the immutability of God in which I said, and now repeat, that if God changed in any way, he'd have to change in one of three directions. He'd have to change from better to worse or from worse to better, from one kind of being to another. And God, being absolutely, perfectly holy, couldn't be anything less than holy, so he couldn't change from better to worse. And God, being absolutely and perfectly holy, couldn't get any holier than he is, so he couldn't change from worse to better. And God, being God, not a creature, he could not change the kind of being that he is. Then God's perfection secures this, and God's faithfulness secures it, that God can never cease to be who he is and what he is. Now, that may sound dry, brother, but if you get that inside of you and you build on that, you'll be happy that you know it sometime when you're in real tough circumstances. You can live on froth and bubbles and little wisps of badly understood theology until the pressure is on. And when the pressure is on, you'll want to know what kind of God you're serving. And this is the kind of God you're serving. Now, all that God says or does must accord with all of his attributes and, of course, with his attribute of faithfulness. Every thought that God thinks must accord with his faithfulness, and every word that God speaks must accord with his faithfulness, and every act of God must accord with his faithfulness, and with his wisdom and goodness and justice and holiness and love and truth and all the other attributes of the Deity. To magnify one phase of God's unitary character to diminish another is always wrong, and that's what the man of God who stands in the pulpit ought to always correct as far as he can. You ought to see to it that we see God full-rounded in all of his perfection and glory, because if we magnify one attribute to the diminishing of the other, we have not a symmetrical concept of God. We have a lopsided God, that is, lopsided as we see him. You can look at a tree standing straight and tall yonder and look at it through the wrong kind of lens, and you'll see it crooked. And so you can look toward God and see God crooked, but the crookedness is in your eye and not in God. For instance, if we make our God to be all justice, then we have a God of terror, and we flee from him in great fright. There was a time when the Church swung over to hell and judgment and sin and all that, and we rather tremble when we think of how the Church went through this period, when about all she talked about was the justice of God. And so God was looked upon as a tyrant, and the universe was a kind of totalitarian state with the God at the top ruling with a rod of iron. But if we think only of the justice of God, that's the concept we'll have. And then over on the other side, and the reaction from that came the time when we have only thought about God as being love. God is love is our main text now. And so we have not a God of terror, but we have a sentimental, spineless God, the God of the Christian scientist. God is love, and love is God, and all is love, and all is God, and God is all, and all is God. Pretty soon we haven't got a thing left but a lot of this, what do you call it, spun candy that you buy at the circuses. That's all we have, just sweetness and nothing but sweetness. Because you've magnified the love of God without remembering that God is just. Or if we make God all good, then we have the weak sentimentalists of the modernists and the liberal. The God of the liberal and the modernist is not the God of the Bible, because in order to get the God they get, they have to get rid of most everything that God did in the Old Testament. God couldn't make the sun stand still, and he couldn't send fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. They say that that was just nature. And God couldn't send a flood upon the ungodly. They said, that's just a little flood there they had in Texas sometime back. So in order to make room for a God that's nothing but good, just stands up there or sits up there in a great glob of goodness, they had to get rid of most everything that God ever did by way of justice. And then if we make him all a God of grace and nothing else, and fundamentalism over the past 50 years has made God practically a God of grace and nothing else, and so we have a God who cannot see moral distinctions. And because God cannot see moral distinctions, why his church has been unable to see moral distinctions. And instead of a separated holy church, we have a church that's so geared into the world you can't tell one from the other. It's because grace has been so preached as it was said of a certain great English preacher that he preached grace in such a manner as to lower the moral standards of England. It's entirely possible to preach grace in the church until we become as arrogant and brave as can be, forgetting that grace is one of the attributes of God but not all. Forgetting that while God is a God of grace, he's also a God of justice and a God of holiness and a God of truth. Well, no, God will always be true to his creatures because he's a faithful God. Faithlessness is one of the greatest sources of heartache and misery in all the world, and God will never be faithless. He cannot be. Back in the book of Genesis, I like to go back there and read sometimes what God has said. He said, I say to you, don't you pay one slight bit of attention to these people who are saying that the world is going to be swept off the earth with an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb. Pay no attention to it. Human race is going to be annihilated. God says, while earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease, and I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake. God has said it here and further along in that same chapter, verses 8 and on, God says that God spake unto Noah and to his sons and said, Behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you, and with every living creature that is with you, or of the fowl and cattle and everything in the ark. And I will establish my covenant with you, and neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood, neither shall there be any more a flood to destroy the earth. And it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant which is between me and you, and every living creature of all flesh, and the water shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh, and the bow shall be in the cloud. And I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. God said to Noah, This is the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth. Now God wrote that long before they made that little bomb over there under the grandstand at Chicago University down on the midway. God made that before modern science. He made that covenant, and I am perfectly restful in that covenant. I do not expect my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to cease to be, and I don't expect them to turn into hairy apes or green men with one eye in the middle of their forehead as a result of strontium-90 or some other thing. I expect God to fulfill his promise because God can't help but do it to see. God must be true to himself, and when God makes a promise, he must keep that promise. And God made this promise unconditionally, and that promise stands. And God will see to it that it stands. There will be summer and winter. We won't have an everlasting Florida, universal Florida, I mean, all over the world. We won't have it. We will always have nice snow on Easter and other times. And God says, Summer and winter and harvest and springtime, it will always be here. You can expect that. God said it, and I believe it. And then he says in the 105th Psalm that he has remembered his covenant forever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations. And our Lord said, Till heaven and earth pass one jot or one tittle, shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. You can count on that, my friend. You can count on that. Now, that's the fact before us. And I'll be brief and say that this is the fact you have. God is faithful, and he will be faithful because he can't change. And he's perfectly faithful because God's never partly anything. God is perfectly all that he is and never partly what he is, so that you can be sure that God will always be faithful. Now, this faithful God, this God who never broke a promise and who never violated the covenant and who never said one thing and meant another and who never overlooked anything or forgot anything, this God is the God of our Lord Jesus, the Father of our Lord Jesus, and the God of the gospel. This is the God we adore, and this is the God we preach. Now let us look at it in its application. To sinners, let me tell you this. If you're here and you're a lost man and you know it, that God has declared that he rejects his son. God has promised that. Now, he's declared that, he's warned and he's threatened, and he said it will be so. And let no one trust a desperate hope, for every such desperate hope is based upon the belief that God threatens but doesn't fulfill. No, my friend, God waits that he may be gracious, and he will sometimes postpone in order that he might give us another 30 days, another 60 days to make up our mind. But just as sure as the mills of God grind, they grind exceeding small, and the souls of men fall into them and are ground exceeding small. God moves slowly, and God is very patient, but God has promised that he will banish from his presence all who love sin and reject his son and refuse to believe. Then there's that other kind of sinner. There's the sinner. There's the sinner who doesn't intend to come. There's the sinner who won't come. There's the sinner who loves his sin. And then there's that other kind of sinner that the old writers called the returning sinner. I like that old phrase. The returning sinner, there he is. He's a sinner, all right, and he's up to his chin in sin, and the marks of sin are all about him. I wonder where we can find an example in the Bible of a returning sinner. Do you remember that boy that said, Father, give me the portion of the goods that falleth to me? He wanted his part of the will before the old man had died, and his old father gave it to him, and he took it and left. And when it came clear down to nothing, he started back. Now, there's a returning sinner. He's still a sinner because he still has his rags on and he still smells of the swine pen. But he's a returning sinner, and our Lord calls returning sinners, Come unto me. And the promises of the Lord and invitations of the Lord are as valid as the character of God. They're absolutely valid as the character of God. Moody used to offer a child a dollar, and the child would back off and refuse to take it. He didn't believe in Moody strongly enough to believe that when he offered him a dollar, he would take it. Well, when God promises anything, you may be sure God expects to do that. And we in the Church have got so we scarcely believe anything at all. Even Martha believed that her brother would rise again at the great day, but she didn't believe that the Lord would raise him right then. And so we put off everything into the future. They call that eschatology. That's a big word for unbelief, you know. Now, really, I'm supposed to be perfectly right about it. I ought to say that eschatology is a theological word for future things, end-time things. But I have noticed that eschatology is a dustbin into which we sweep everything we don't want to believe. We believe in miracles, but we believe in them eschatologically. That is, they'll come way out there sometime. We believe that the Lord will heal sick, but he'll do it way out there. We believe that the Lord will manifest himself to men, but we believe that he'll do it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or next millennium. And so we sweep it under the rug and go off about our business. That's eschatology. We believe that God will bless Abraham, and we believe he'll bless the Jews in the days to come. That is, most people do. I've noticed that some Christians are getting away from that now, and they don't believe in any future for Israel. I do. But we believe the Lord will bless the Church sometime when he comes back again. But the idea of his blessing anybody now, we have a tough time believing that. I preached a sermon one time, and then later on I heard another fellow preach the same sermon. He forgot where he got it, but it's all right. It's perfectly all right. I sat and listened to him preach the whole sermon. All he did was to add one point. But he's welcome to it, and if the Lord blesses it, it's all right. That's what I preach them for. But I said in a sermon I preached one time that unbelief is one of the slickest things in the world. Unbelief always says, somewhere else but not here, some other time but not now, some other people but not us. That's unbelief. Unbelief says, some other time, and we fight for the miracles of the Old Testament and won't believe in the miracle in 1961. We believe that there are miracles tomorrow or yesterday, but we stand in a gap between two miracles. I believe that if we had faith, we'd see miracles now. I don't believe we ought to celebrate miracles and go out and put up big tents and advertise that we're going to have a miracle. One night at a certain camp meeting where I was preaching, I just arrived, and they advertised that night would be the night of miracles. They said, they're going to have a night of miracles tonight, and the only thing that happened that night was a fellow drowned in the lake down over the bank. When I arrived, everybody was running down there, pumping him, trying to get him alive, but he never did come to. And there was no miracle around the place. I don't believe in advertising miracles because God isn't going to allow himself to be advertised. God doesn't have a going-out-of-business sale cut 33 and a third percent. The Lord never gives cheap miracles, and the Lord never exposes his glorious, mysterious will to please the carnal saintlings. But the Lord is perfectly willing to do the impossible when his people dare to believe that he's a faithful God and meant what he said. God meant what he said, my brother and sister, and when he promised you, he meant what he said. We don't take God at his word at all. So I say to you, you returning sinner, if you will come and leave your old rags behind you or come to wear them to the Lord, you will find when the Lord said, Come unto me and I will give you rest, he meant exactly that. It was Frances Havergill that said that one time she came to a spot where she believed that the Lord meant exactly what he said when he said that if we confess our sins he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. She said it was a turning point in her life when she found out that the Lord meant exactly what he said. Why don't you start reading your Bible with the thought that God meant exactly what he said there? We're getting so many translations now that I meet myself coming back around two or three times, say good morning, and then notice it means. Because we have this translation and that translation and the other translation, but I find they add up to about the same thing. And it's one of the biggest fallacies and one of the biggest delusions possible to imagine that if you get it said another way, that it will mean more. Suppose I met you and said hi, or I met you and said good morning, or I met you and said how do you do? Or I met you and said what do you know? Or I met you and said how are you? It would all be the same thing. I'd be greeting a friend. Or if I met you and said as they used to in Russia before the revolution, the Lord is risen. And the other man says the Lord is risen indeed. That's the way they met each other on the street, those old six booted musics that walked down the street in the days before Stalin and Lenin and the rest. Another man, he'd say, instead of saying hi or what do you know, he'd say the Lord is risen. The other fellow would shout back, the Lord is risen indeed. And they'd pass by. That's the way to keep their faith up. But whatever you said, it's a greeting. That's all. It's a greeting. I used to, my mother used to make stuff she called schmierke. Well, you German speaking people know what that is. And then when I got to the city, we called it cottage cheese. I think they have another name for it now, but it was the same thing. Exactly the same thing. What's the difference about the wording of it? People imagine that if they get a new translation that tells them a little better what it means that it'll be wonderful. It won't be wonderful at all. It'll simply be a big disappointment. I tell you because I am the prime sucker for a new translation. Every time one comes out, I run and get it. I hopped down to Eaton's here the other day and bought the new English New Testament. Well, it's all right, but that doesn't give me any more faith and it doesn't make God any more real and it doesn't bring heaven any closer and it doesn't bless me any more. There's a difference, a little change in the language. When you people say, let me have a serviette, I know you mean a napkin. And so it's all right with me. And when you say you're tired and you ought to sit down on the Chesterfield, I know you mean the couch. So you see, it doesn't make any difference. And when you say the plane is right on schedule, I know you mean it's on schedule. It's just a different way of saying it. And it's all the same thing, don't you see? So don't imagine by getting a new translation you'll get God any nearer. I like the old King James, although I know as Tom Hare said, it's inspired, but there was a mistake in it. I don't know how you got an inspired mistake, but that's Tom Hare anyhow, the Irish plumber who prayed day and night. Well, now, God meant what he said. And when you read your Bible now, instead of reading it, wondering about it, say to yourself, God wrote this, and God is faithful, and God cannot lie. And I'd say to all you Christians, now, 1 John 1, 7, here's a heartening truth, a wonderful truth. You Christians who may have sinned, but somebody says, I don't believe in sinning Christians. I don't either, but I meet a lot of them. I don't believe in sinning Christians. I don't think Christians ought to sin, and I don't think it's funny. And I don't think that we ought to make light of it. I think that when a Christian sins, they're doing a deadly and dangerous and terrible thing. But I also know that the Holy Ghost said, little children, I write unto you on these things that ye sin not. But if any man sin, he has an advocate with the Father. And he also says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, here's something you may have never noticed. I want you to see it here. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, faithfulness is all right. Somebody would say, well, that's good. God promised he would forgive, and so he would forgive and does forgive. But it says he's faithful and just to forgive. Why, justice is on our side now. Instead of justice being against us and grace being for us, the blood of Jesus Christ worked such an amazing wonder before the throne of God and before the presence of man that now justice has come over on the side of the returning sinner. And when the sinner comes home, there isn't a thing standing against him between here and the very heart of God. It's all been swept away by the blood of the Lamb, and there isn't anything preventing it from coming, even justice. And so if any old memory is back in your mind, or the devil or some preacher tells you that justice is against you, you say, the scripture says he's faithful and just to forgive. Justice has come over on the side of the Christian because Jesus Christ is on the side of the Christian. So if you confess your sin, God will put them away and you will be delivered. Then to the tempted, I notice that in the book of 1 Corinthians, it tells us that the Lord will not suffer us to be tempted, but he is faithful and will not allow us to be tempted above what we're able to bear. So there's the faithfulness of God operating to deliver us also from all of the temptations that bother us. I had a card here with the thing on so I won't have to flop to it in the scripture. Here's what it says. There is no temptation taking you but such as is common to man. But God is faithful who will not suffer you to be tempted above what you're able, but will with the temptation make a way to escape that ye may be able to bear it. Some poor suffering Christians say, I feel all boxed in. I feel as if there was a wall all around me. Well, somebody pointed out that when you can't get away to the right or the left or forward or backwards, you can always get up. There's always a way up. And God's faithfulness is the way up because it's the way up. You can be sure of that. Your temptation is common to everybody. I'm preaching to some people right now. You're on the borderline. You're a Christian, but you're on the borderline of the victorious life. And you say, I simply live under circumstances that I just can't make it. That's all. I can't make it. God said your temptation was common to all. Every time a fellow gets a headache, he thinks he has a unique headache. There's never been a headache like that in the beginning of the world. Everybody's had a headache sometime or other. Every time a man gets a cold. My father was a big, well, he wasn't so big, but he was tough. He was a tough English farmer, and I was proud of the strength of my father. He was a great, great strong man. But when he got a cold in his head, he just became the biggest baby in the whole world. There wasn't anything. Nobody ever had a cold like that. My poor little old German mother. She could get so sick, and she'd go limping around, you know, pale and tired out. She had to keep going. But when my big tough father got sick, he laid down there and called for a woman. He called her Mammy. That was his name for my mother. And Mammy had to wait on him, and everybody had to circle around saying, How awful, how awful. This man has a cold, you know. He has a cold. He thought that the kind of cold he got was a unique cold. It wasn't. It was just a cold in his nose. That is all. If he'd kept his vitamin A up, he wouldn't have got it. But he got a cold, and we think we're tempted above all others. No, my dear friend, remember that there have been saints that crossed that briary patch where you are now, and they got out all right. You'll believe God. You'll make it. You'll get out all right, too. Some of you men may have wives that are wildcats. Remember, John Wesley was married to a wildcat, and she didn't even have her claws trimmed. And God got John Wesley through all right. He used to kneel down on his knees and pray in Latin so his wife wouldn't be able to know what he was saying. And while he was praying in Latin, she was throwing old shoes at his head. And that, you know, nice family affair, but that's the way they got on. And the time came when he had to preach, and so he said goodbye to her. And he went off preaching, and they never did get together much after that. He kept her and looked after her and saw that she was taken care of, but she didn't want him to preach, and he wanted to preach, so John went preaching, and she went grumbling. She stayed back home, grumbled, and he went out everywhere preaching the gospel and transformed England. And then one day he was riding along on a horse. He was usually either reading or writing or meditating or praying or all four. And as he was riding along, somebody rode up alongside him and said, Mr. Wesley, your wife is dead. He was looking up, and he looked down and said, Oh, she died, did she? And he went on looking up. Well, Wesley got along all right. And in spite of the wife he had, and I could tell you a lot more stories, and I could entertain you here if I was in the entertaining business for the next half an hour telling you about men that have gotten along married to wildcats. And then there are some of you dear little women that love God with all your heart, but you're married to slobs, and those slobs just won't be anything but slobs. They just refuse to be anything else. Colonel and boulder and he and masculine and more or less not what you hope for. And you think, well, there's nobody like nobody stuck the way I am. I knew a woman. She just died the other day. She wanted me to preach a funeral sermon, but I guess she must have been too sick to remember, so they didn't call me down. She died in Chicago. Remember, she had a husband, God bless him, and had some kids. And he was a, I don't know, he was a drunkard. That was the worst thing you could say about him. He was a drunkard. And she was a praying woman. Oh, she prayed. And he used to come home, and his stomach wouldn't hold down his food, and the result was he came home with his clothes dirty clear to his feet. And I'm afraid I know what I'd have done. I'm afraid I know, but she didn't. She prayed and cleaned him off and got him into his clothes and bathed him up and then got him into his clothes and put him to bed. And he woke up the next morning sorry, but with a hangover. Then he'd promise everything, and then he'd go out again with the boys, and then he'd come down singing sweet ad lines, swaying from side to side, covered with that same filth. And she'd go through the same thing. He prayed on for years and for years for that man. I don't know how the poor little woman ever endured it, but she prayed on and prayed on. She was one of those happy Christians, about as thick as your hand through. That was a little wisp of a woman. You could pick her up like this. I never did, but you could. And she was a tiny little woman. And one day her fat, drunken husband came to church, came down to the front, got down on his knees and bawled like a drunkard, bawled, you know, half self-pity and half something else. But God saved him. And he became a model Christian and lived for God for some years afterward. And she walked around as proud of him, just as proud of him as an eagle that had hatched another eagle. She'd brought him to God. She'd literally hatched that fellow out by prayer and patience. I suppose there were times when she heard him snoring there in a corner in his drunken sleep that she wished she'd never seen him. And I suppose there were times when she used to pity herself and look up and say, God, how do you expect me to hang on? But something whispered in her heart, this is common to all. Temptations are common to all. Believe me, I'm faithful. I won't let you down. And so the result was, not only he got converted and went to heaven, but now she's in heaven and a lot of the members of the family. I've forgotten how many, but a number of them converted. And they'll be in heaven with their parents one of these days. That just shows that God, when he says that he's faithful and won't suffer you to be tempted, he means, beyond what you're able to bear, he means exactly that. Then there's the anxious and the fearful people. Let me read a little something to you here. You fearful people that just can't believe that everything is all right between you and God. Listen. For a small moment, said God, I have forsaken thee. But with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment. But with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, says the Lord thy Redeemer. For this is as the waters of Noah and Amin. For as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee. I will not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee. It was a great day in my life when I believed God on this. And I believed that though God may have to correct me and chasten me, God will never be angry again. For Jesus Christ's sake and for his own promises' sake and for his own faithfulness, he said, I have sworn that I will not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee. For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, says the Lord that hath mercy on thee. I believe that, my friend. And that's for the anxious. Then there's the Christian who may have been unfaithful to the Lord down the years. If we believe not, yet he is faithful, for he cannot deny himself. Then there's the discouraged person. Faithful is he that called you who also will do it. Some of you have been serving God quite a while, and instead of feeling you're getting better, you're feeling you're getting worse. You know what's happening to you, I'll tell you. You're getting to know yourself better. There was a day when you didn't know who you were, and you thought you were pretty fine. And then by the good grace of God, he showed you yourself. It was pretty shocking and disappointing to you. So you're a little bit discouraged. But don't be discouraged, because he's faithful that called you, and he will also do it. God will finish the job. There was a corner of a building out here, a certain church by the name of Avenue Road. And I gave up. I didn't think they'd ever finish that. They should have finished it six months ago, and there it was still hanging. And I never thought, but you know, they got through. And they said, we'll have your entrance open Easter. They got around to it. And you wonder, is it ever going to happen? It'll happen. It'll happen. There's a reason for delays. And if the Lord isn't making you all you feel you want to be now, continue to believe and trust in the faithfulness of God. And it's coming around. God is faithful. I always wondered, or often wondered, how a hen must feel about the 18th, 19th, or 20th day. She's been sitting there now nearly three weeks on 13 eggs. My mother always set 13 eggs and had me set them. She said, if I set them, they hatched. I don't know what I had to do with it. But she set 13 eggs under the hen, and the old girl would sit right there, only take just a little, little coffee break once in a while to jump up and run off the nest and go. But back she'd come again onto the nest. And after, oh, you know, a week of it, it was a novel day. And two weeks of it, you might endure, but that last week must have been torture. Sitting there, you know, listening, and nothing happened. Listening, and nothing happened. Twenty days went by. Listening, nothing happened. Twenty-one days. Listening, nothing happened. And then about noon of the 21st day, the first little experimental peep was heard down there somewhere under her wings. And she smiled, if a hen can smile, and said, thank God they're here. And after that, it was just a question of time, you know. One after the other, one after the other. Pecked themselves out. And I used to get down on my hands and knees as a boy and watch them. Picking themselves out. They were messes when they first appeared. But give them about ten minutes in the sunshine, and they're as fluffy as can be and lovely to look at. All that long waiting. Twenty-one long days of waiting. Well, God sometimes makes us wait. He made them wait there at the house of Bethany, in Bethany. And he may make you wait. But remember, God is faithful who called you. And he also will do it. This is our faithful God. Now, I recommend to you that you withdraw your hope from a changing world, a treacherous, false world. And put your trust in Jesus Christ, who is faithful, who also will do it. And dare to do it now. And believe now. And believe now that what he promised he'll fulfill. And believe now that he meant what he said. And believe that you're dealing with a faithful God who can't lie nor change his mind nor be anything but what he is. For your home, for your business, for your health, for your travel, for your church, our church. This is the kind of God we have. And all of his promises are faithfulness and truth. Unto them that trust. Wonderful, isn't it? Could you risk an amen? Thank God. Father, we pray, help us to believe. Forgive us for doubting. Take away our unbelief and our diffidence and our slowness to believe. And help us now to put our trust in thee and throw ourselves out upon thee with all the trust that a child does when he puts himself in the hands of his father. May we now trust thee. We pray for the discouraged man. We pray for the discouraged woman. We pray for the sinner. We pray for the Christian who has failed thee. We pray for the discouraged. We pray for those who are on the borderline of despair. We pray for those who are living under circumstances that are very hard to bear. O God, thou art faithful and thou wilt not allow us to fail. Thou wilt keep us and hold us up and bless us. Thou gratefully lift us and help us this night through Christ our Lord.