Where’s your fruit?  You need to examine how things are going in your life.  It’s not up to me to determine whether you’re thirty, sixty or a hundred.  I’m to be dealing with my own heart.  I’ve found that at many times in my life, sometimes within one day, I find thirty, sixty and one hundred.  There are a lot of days that I’m living far below what I should and could be doing for the Lord.  Aren’t you thankful for His mercy this morning?  His love?  And that all we have to do, the Bible’s very clear that if we sin, if we willfully are living below what we know we should be living, when we sin, if we would confess it, He’s faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all of our unrighteousness?  Say, “Praise God!” for that.  What a merciful, loving Father that we have.  We have to own up to it.  We have to admit it.  There can be no repentance until there’s that conviction, until we’ll allow that horrible occurrence, those times that God gives us a real glimpse of who we are.  Beloved, when we get those glimpses, as we’ll see this morning, it calls for repentance.  It calls for godly sorrow; amen?  It calls for a turning from where we find ourselves to the call and the vision and the place that we ought to be.

Mark, Chapter 4.  I’ve shared it before but this passage of Scripture, in 1973, stirred up in my heart, the message that I was hearing and watching when first regenerated.  I thank God that I was in a Bible teaching church.  I thank God for Brother Hyatt, my first Pastor.  I’ve only had two Pastors.  We’ve hung around here so long that a lot of you have only had one.  That’s abnormal.  A church, in a twenty-year period, will normally go through five, six, or seven pastors at a minimum.  To be able to be in a church where the Word of God was taught!  I cut my teeth on evangelism.  Brother Hyatt was big on evangelism.  We would go out witnessing, constantly.  Many of you have heard me mention Grandma Carter.  Grandma Carter, I don’t know how old she was.  I was twenty at the time, she looked 140.  She was probably my age now.  I was her partner.  She was in charge and I was watching her to learn.  I was a brand-new convert.  Trying to think back, I would guess she was well into her seventies or eighties.  There in the valley in Fresno, California.  My brother just called me.  He drove down in the valley to see his boys yesterday.  He said it was 100 and felt like 108 where he was up in the hills.  It was registering actual temperature 110 in the valley and probably 115 or116 with the index.  We had a lot of days like that.  She never missed a day, man.  She was out there in that kind of heat going door-to-door, sharing Jesus.  Praise God!  Isn’t it great as a kid to grow up under something like that?  She never missed a service.  Just faithful.  Sewing and making garments to send to the mission field.

I was teaching a class on the Gifts of the Spirit, and we were talking about miracles.  Being able to see a lot of them over the years, such a blessing, but this sticks out in my mind.  Grandma Carter was making clothes for the missionaries and they were going to box them up the next day and send them out.  She just prayed, “Father, I’m so weary.”  She needed a zipper.  It’s really strange, you could ask a lot of questions about it in your mind.  She just breathed a prayer as she was getting ready to put her jacket on and go out in the evening because she was a zipper short of a garment she had.  As she was putting her jacket on, she just whispered a prayer.  “Father, I’m just so tired.  Just give me strength to finish Your ministry here.”  She began to walk out the door of her little place there.  She kind of glanced over again as the apparel was over the back of the sofa and saw, on that apparel, a zipper pinned on.  She stopped and she went over there.  She wouldn’t have thought anything if it had just been laying there somewhere on a cushion that maybe, somehow, she had misplaced it but it was pinned to the garment.  God’s angels, messengers; amen?  In an hour.  There’s no doubt that in her mind and heart that an angel had come.  I just wonder why it didn’t install it while it was there.  A life of the supernatural.  People that are doers of the Word of God.