Having a Heart for God — 1 Samuel 16-17

0:00 I thank you for inviting me back. Come back and speak a little bit more about Teamworkers Abroad. Always like to open the word of god. Before we do that, for those who are new in the crowd, I grew up as a farm boy over in Central Iowa, spent most of my life working for a feed company, Kent Feeds Incorporated, on their research farm, took care of beef cows. And in the process, they, Lord gave us, five children.

0:31 We trained up and have them walk with the Lord also. Have you ever thought about what people are known by? If I were to take a dollar bill, I don't do it because you can't see it from the front row, let alone the back row. You'll find a picture of George Washington on there. How do you think you would characterize George Washington?

1:00 Typically, we would probably say, father of our country. You know, this man that led us in war and in peace. If I were to bring a big poster, now I may be showing my age here, but we're we're gonna pick on Michael Jordan. What would he be known for? Well, for his athletic prowess, you know, how how high he could jump.

1:25 You know, he kinda claimed he could just about float, you know, to the basket. He had such abilities. He was known for his physical abilities. You notice the two different things there as we look at that though. One is known for his physical ability, what he could do.

1:41 Another was known for who he was. Today, I'd like to talk to you about having a heart for god. I'd to go over to first Samuel. Very interesting as you study the word of god and you come across these different ones. And we are able to look at, should we say, kind of a biography.

2:14 The lord is very plain. He's very helpful at times. You know, he just puts us all out there with with our good spots and our bad spots. So, we're gonna look at David and I wanna start over in, actually chapter 13. And let me see if I can find it.

2:37 I had it before. And this particular place though is not talking about David. It is talking about the shift of the kingdom. From Saul, I I would like to assume that you know that Saul was the first king in the nation of Israel. After they had been under judges for many years.

3:04 But but Saul didn't know how to walk with the lord. Verse 13, it says, Samuel said to Saul, you have acted foolishly, you have not kept the command of the lord your god which he commanded you. For now, the lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now, your kingdom shall not endure. The lord has sought out for himself a man after his own heart and the lord has appointed him as a ruler over his people because you have not kept what the lord commanded you.

3:37 See, the lord is looking for someone who is after his heart and hopefully, the challenge today is for your own heart. What kind of a heart do you have? Do you have a heart for the lord? Well, we're going to go over here to Samuel chapter 15. Sorry, it's chapter 16.

4:06 Samuel chapter 16 and you notice the first of the chapter is where the lord goes down and he picks out David having shown up at Jesse's house and he had Jesse bring in all of his sons and he started with the oldest, you know, and he looks at him and he says, oh, there's a great guy. He's tall and he's handsome and oh he would make a great king and the lord makes that famous statement but I look at the heart and not the outward appearance. And so finally, they they round up David out of the field and bring him in and sure enough, he is the one that the lord chooses to anoint and so now that the lord is working in David's life. And he does so, he comes to David. Before I get into that particular one, I want to read a quote and I thought it was nice but I picked it up out of a commentary and they were quoting Charles Swindon because it was repeated, I thought, okay, let's pay attention to this and he is describing a godly person, one who desires to walk with god.

5:42 You stop it. And when he says, this is wrong, I want you to change, you come to terms with it. Because you have a heart for god. So, with that idea and concept that we want to heart after god, let's look at David's life and I find it very interesting as we go down through chapter 16 that this is a place where Saul, as you know, because the lord left him at that point, they suggested, well, you need a musician to come along and play and incidentally, I appreciate the song leading here today. You have a great song leader.

6:21 I do travel. I get in a lot of places but someone that actually says, now remember, this is how the music goes. Let's sing it this way. You know, that's that's nice. I I enjoy that because I I enjoy music also.

6:35 And David is gonna be one of these young men that is this way. But here is is Saul has asked somebody and they said, no, let's go find somebody that can play and and that will calm your spirit. We know music does calm spirits and but I'd like to look at the description of this man. Going down to verse 17. First Samuel sixteen seventeen says, for Saul said to his servants, provide for me now a man who can play well and bring him to me.

7:02 That was his criteria. Verse 18, then one of the young men said, behold, I have seen a son of Jesse, the Bethlehemite, who is a skillful musician, a mighty man of valor, a warrior, one prudent in speech, and a handsome man, and the lord is with him. Let's stop and break those things down. We'll spend our time on that. And then we will go to team workers abroad after that.

7:31 Always like to open the word of God. One person likes to literate. Problem with this particular one, there's too many points to have three points here. So, we're gonna have several points. But first of all, we'd like to say, David is a a harp player, a hymn maker.

7:49 We all are kind of aware of that because we know that he is he's written a lot of the Psalms which were the hymns for the people of Israel. But if you have a heart after god, you have to be like David. Incidentally, I didn't bring it up here. This particular time in David's life, David by the commentators I read is probably 12 years old. Young man The reason that's important is because the description of this man is as a young man.

8:24 It's not like he was old like me with gray hair or 40 and had, you know, a fair part of his life he was into. He was young. We're gonna talk about how he is described. He's a he's a harp player. Now we know from reading some of his life, he was a man that sat around watching sheep.

8:48 Now that's not an exciting occupation. I took care of cows. Sheep are are completely different. They're they're they're kinda calm as I understand, you know, there's not a lot happens. And so what do you do?

9:02 You're gonna entertain yourself. How do you entertain yourself? But granted, there's a not a lot out there in an old pasture but David made use of that time. You know, if you have a heart after god, you're gonna make use of the time that you have. He sat down and he he he learned to play.

9:23 I really suspect that he probably made the instruments too. A few people can do that in life. They can make their own instruments and play them but he was able to play. Apparently, play very well because he is asked to come before the king, to play for the king. So here is a man that has taken the abilities the lord has given him and practiced up with them.

9:45 So look at your own life and say, what is it that lord has given me a talent for? And I I will reference team workers abroad. I I mentioned it to some brother out here during the break. Not everybody is a preacher. Some of us like to work with our hands.

10:05 Well, what do... How do you work for the lord with your hands? Well, come overseas and build something for a missionary. There's a lot of ways to use that. You don't have to go preach there.

10:13 You can help a missionary and let him preach and you build for you. David was a harp player. Then we notice it says, if I can find my right spot here, that he was a mighty man of valor, a warrior. Remember, this guy is 12 years old. He is one that has now taken the time to be before the lord and willing to serve him with his whole life.

10:58 I I reached in in their mouth and I pulled the lamb back out. That's bravery. And that's why you could describe this guy this way. But what I think it is is there's a commitment to the Lord to serve him with your whole life. He was committed to that.

11:16 I don't think of for those of us who are parents. Think about the commitment that the parents had made. Here they send this young boy out there and they expect him to fight off a lion and a bear. It's not necessarily they're hoping the lion or bear would come by, but they trained him to be prepared. Remember, he can use a slingshot very well.

11:38 We know that from Goliath. Again, he probably practiced up on that one. Okay. Can I hit that tree over there? You know, can I hit that weed over there?

11:48 He practiced and he learned to walk with the lord and depend on the lord to save his life. He committed his life to the lord. Next thing he says is he was one prudent in speech. Just to make it illiterate, I would like to call it honest. Here is a man that is honest in the way he talks.

12:12 He was prudent in speech. He knows how to speak to people. You know, a leader does that. A leader knows how to speak and how to guide people. But here's a man that watched his mouth.

12:25 What do we do, you know, today as we listen to people? Typically, we are in our political season right now. You know, how many of you... When you hear something on the news, say, oh, yeah. He said it.

12:40 That's really true. He's a politician. I know it's true. I'll I'll stand on the truth. I don't either.

12:50 It's accepted that he's not necessarily telling the truth. We have those little things we call little white lies. See, we're trying to sugarcoat it. We're trying to make it, you know, the white makes it nicer. And we find as we study the word of god, god hates lying.

13:14 Here's a man. After the heart of god, that is honest in what he says. He uses his tongue, his mouth to build people up and to encourage them. Next thing it says here that he is a handsome man. Everything that's all wonderful.

13:38 Do you ever think about it that the lord makes each one of us individually? He happened to make David handsome. He doesn't do that with everybody. Some of us are tall, some of us are short, some of us are black, some of us are white, some of us are male, some of us are female. Lord made each one of us individually.

14:01 And we need to learn to live with that. You know, if we start thinking about it, we realize that that can be a problem. You know, if you are handsome, what do you do with what the lord has given to us? You see, and I think you can do this. You know, you can look to Hollywood and you see that their lives are a complete mess and I think part of it is because they have the beauty that we expect them to have.

14:31 But the lord may have given something into your life to help train you and help you and change you. We were talking last night and I I will use the example of of a son-in-law. He's a carpenter by trade. When he fell off the first story, where he preserved his life, there's a lot of things could have gone wrong, but he broke his leg, fractured it, compound fracture. It's it's just an absolute mess of his ankle.

15:07 And he's gone through a lot of pain, and he's gone through a lot of different operations and so forth and so on, but it has changed his ministry as an elder in the church. You know, it's one of those things where, you know, I can see it. You know, somebody says, oh, I couldn't go to church today because well, you know, I didn't feel real well. Well, I have a broken leg that pains you every hour of the day and make it there every meeting. Talk to a guy like that and give him your excuse.

16:03 Take the lord's abilities and use them for the lord. The lord is very helpful or the the lord is helpful, yes, but David was a helpful person. He was willing to do what was asked of him. In this particular case, by both his parents and his king. Are you willing to serve the king of kings?

16:32 With all of your heart. I'd like to go over a little bit into chapter 17. There's a couple more I'd like to pick up about him. Seventeen seventeen, it says, and Jesse said to David, his son, take now for your brothers and Ephad this roasted green and these 10 loaves are under the camp to your brothers and bring also these 10 cuts of cheese to the commander of their thousand and look into the welfare of your brothers and bring back news of them. Here he is.

17:03 He's gonna have to take off. He's gotta take care of the sheep. He's gonna take off. But I would say he was honoring to his parents. Honoring to his parents.

17:15 What they asked him, he was willing to do. Now, was a young man. So he said, well, of course, yeah, that would be the normal thing to do. After all, we do have a command in the book of Ephesians. It says, obey your parents.

17:29 Because this is the first commandment referring back over to the 10 commandments. The first commandment with a promise. You get a long life. It's good for young people to know that. We have this unusual part of our society where we have this thing we we now call the sandwich generation.

17:48 I was talking to a couple last week, and they said, we we just hit this change in our life. My husband is retiring. In the last three years, we lost all four parents, and our children are just getting out of the home. We're empty nesters. And we've gone from the sandwich generation taking caring kids and parents to, now what does the lord want us to do?

18:12 And so we have to consider those things, but we have to be honoring to our parents in the meantime. They were just stepping out of that role, but we need to honor our parents and help them where we can. David was a man who honored his parents. Then one more would be the humility of David. If you go over towards the end of the chapter two verse 28 says, Eliab, he obviously got to the lines.

18:37 He says, Eliab, his oldest brother heard when he spoke to the men. They were asking about why why is Goliath out here yacking to us? Eliab's anger burned against David and he said, why have you come down and who has whom have you left those huge sheep in the wilderness and I know your insolence and the wickedness of your heart for you have come down in order to see the battle. How would you answer somebody like that? You know, a typical reaction.

19:04 The old the old man, the reaction to that is, I would get mad right back at him. But David doesn't do that. What does David do? He says, what have I done? Was it not just a question?

19:18 And he turned away from him. See, that's the way you you calm tension. Turn away from it. He was humble. Well, remember David.

19:34 David was already anointed. That was the first part of the chapter. He's already anointed king. Boy, could that have gone to his head saying, Eliab, don't forget, I was the anointed one, not you. See how easy it is to not be humble.

19:51 The lord desires for us to be a humble people. And so we need to be considering these things in our own lives, our own hearts. How are we walking with the Lord? Do we have a heart for the Lord? Do we desire to serve him in these different ways so that we might walk with him in humility.

20:50 Now I will make a statement. I had to change everything. Technology just got to me, and I haven't figured out the problem. So we're going to just plain pictures instead of a nice PowerPoint that I usually like to use. So occasionally, you're gonna have to pay attention to me and watch the pictures, And I also don't know the timing on the pictures because I usually have PowerPoint two or three together.

21:14 We have to look at them one at a time. So we'll see how this goes. Teamworkers abroad, this and is also the second time I've talked about it, so I'm going to assume at least part of the crowd knows about it. We're going to skip over kind of the early part. Teamworkers abroad though is an organization that seeks to take skilled and unskilled people from The United States as teams to help missionaries build things.

21:46 Reason that's important is because missionaries go out in the field and they may be good disciples. They may be good evangelists. They may be good church planners but they may not be able to build something. If you got a good evangelist and suddenly people are saved and now you need a building to meet in because I've been in places where you say home gathering, great. We can get five to 10 people in there.

22:11 They have small homes in other countries. And so we wanna come along and we wanna say, let us build something for you, or a missionary may have some big project that needs to be done. And so let's go down to South America. I can find a little pointer here. We wanna go right in here.

22:30 It's a little place called Faranofi. It's next to Chickaleo, which is right on the coast. And, Tom Clark has a school there. Back, not too long before I was here last time in, 2013, We had been down there in, about the January period, January, February. And, this is my wife, and she had gone along in this particular trip, and they needed sewing done.

22:55 They needed curtains for all the windows in the school, and, she sewed curtains for 28 windows. And in the meantime, the men were out trying to pour a cement slab with the object that the children, which are poor children, probably have one change of clothes, are able to play on a clean place. And they can play basketball or soccer or volleyball as they are doing here. So let's go into 2014, which you hadn't heard of. So we went down there in 2014.

23:24 Now Tom hires the local people to put up the building. As you can probably tell, this is not exactly OSHA regulations here. What you do find, they they tell me that they they pour this whole floor in one day. Starting with this mixer down here and carry it up by five gallon buckets. Okay?

23:43 That's kind of the way the the people work. We come along and and help out where we can. Instantly, all these are gonna be passed up, and we're gonna build a whole new floor up there, which you will see eventually here. Another one that came along with us this particular time, this young lady over here on the right is Lauren Denny. Lauren Denny.

24:04 Thank you. Anyway, she is a librarian by trade. You know, you say, well, what am I going to do with this particular skill? She's a librarian by trade and so she goes out to the missionaries and lets them know this is school. So, they have a library.

24:16 So, she comes in, organizes it, puts it together, catalogs it, tells, this is Carol Clark, Tom's wife, missionary wife, and say, this is the way you run it. This is way you add books, and here it is. It's all set up for you. Take it from here. There's some other people with us on this team.

24:32 There are Canadians down there. This particular guy is a drywall expert, and some of the older buildings were losing their taping. So he was back putting that together. You don't always run into the quality that you want of the taping of the mud, and so it sometimes falls off. So our job was to help clean up some of the areas that were on the 1st Floor that needed painting.

24:58 They hadn't been painted. We were scratching some of that off. Some of the guys are making cabinets for the new, area... For the new classrooms, I should say, that were gonna be built. And, this fellow is an electrician, so he was using his electrical skills putting that in.

25:49 Different type of afterlife than we expect through the lord Jesus Christ and this I threw in here is amazing because this we're kinda walked from one place to another from where that was at. This is was actually part of their town. It would be the the the city hall or perhaps the place where they, they did their worship. But even though that looks like a pile of mud, it was a pile of adobe bricks. The rains had taken the outside and washed it down.

26:21 But it's amazing. I mean, you can tell how tall that is to lay all these bricks because you want to, serve your god in the big things. We also went down to the seashore, and you get to see both the old and the new. This is the the larger fishing boat that goes out into the Pacific Ocean, the right on the ocean. And these are what the guys...

26:43 They will straddle this. They'll go out, oh, maybe a mile out into the ocean and do their fishing, bring it in, and sell the catch of the day. That particular year we were there, there's this large dead jellyfish laying there on the sea. This is a normal site. This is a lady's foot here.

27:00 That's a large jellyfish. We're talking big laying there on the shore. And, of course, you always wanna take you into the local market every once in while. I didn't know, so I pulled up this picture. This lady is one of the Inca Indian descendants, came out of the mountains down to the market for that particular day.

27:17 You can tell by the dress, everybody else tends to be in more what we consider the western dress. We had arrived on a Saturday... Friday, I think it was, and we went touristy on Saturday. Sunday, you stop and you break bread with the local fellowship, and you join in the fellowship break like we seem to all have. That seems to be a worldwide thing.

27:40 And join in the Sunday school songs. They invited a bunch of us up there to participate with that. And you get to preach. Often you're asked to preach. Someone will preach.

27:51 This actually is a Wednesday night meeting. And Scott is here leading that. So we wanna see how it finished off. This is, Laura... Or not Laura.

28:03 Lauren. This girl was Laura. Lauren's standing here, and these girls had helped her to get everything organized, set up, straightened out, and ready to go for the library. We had hauled different things out of the buildings that had been stored while they did the construction and cleaned it off, got fingerprints and gum and everything else that comes on desks, and moved them over to the particular places. And this is after we painted it, we had put in, you can't quite see it there, but there's a fan there we'd put in.

28:32 I got the electrical in, and we made doors and windows. The Canadians stayed longer than we did, We also painted the outside of the building and cleaned off some of the mortar things. Two weeks later, school started. And this is a picture of what it looked like. Intentionally, they built it with, not intending to use this, although I did talk to one of the teachers and know that they did go out there and use it for a year or two.

29:00 Two years later, this last, February, we went in there and they had not finished doors and windows, so they took them back out what they'd put in and finished it off. This is all cement and they narrowed it up, which created a little bit of problem because it was slightly narrower than what we had guessed at. They also were putting up a new building that needed doors and windows. And so we went down as a small team this time because it was very quickly put together. This is a father and his daughter, a Midwesterners out of Iowa.

29:33 Didn't ask him. It probably the first time they had put their feet in the Pacific Ocean. So, it's good to go on missionary trips. You also get to see the local guys. Here he is pulling in his boat and it's full of fish for him to take.

29:46 The object was to put the, windows back in, put doors back in, and they were also painting a stairway. Odessa was not into the carpentry. She wanted to help paint. And my job ended up being cutting these boards. You take boards like this, basically, 2x2s or 1x8s and create a window out of them.

30:06 You cut them in the right sized pieces and you go, Mark is a carpenter, so he was doing the doors and the windows that were already made just to meet... Needed to be readjusted. Although, he did run into a problem when he got to this door here. You can hardly see it right there, but there is a lavatory. And you couldn't get the door open the way it was set to go ahead.

30:27 Sometimes mistakes happen. So that took more time, turned the door clear around so it'd work out. They took a look at the work of the stairway and they said, you know, this is not going to work because all these little kids with their grimy fingers are gonna get everything dirty. We need a mural and so, Laura Messerle, Laura is a missionary teacher and Hadassah, the one that came on our team. Got their heads together, decided on a verse out of Jeremiah and they went to painting it.

30:57 Putting in a river flowing down. They had to take time off occasionally, come by and help paint some of the framing as we continue to work on that. This is the end result. Doors and windows were put in. Those are brand new.

31:12 Here is part of this. It was clear up and down both sides of the stairwell. This is just kind of the landing. And obviously, Spanish, in very beautiful. And while we were there, they were working on getting this sidewalk laid to the new building.

31:29 But the object is to touch lives. Here are the kids coming in on the first day of school. Get all these kids coming in. They're going to sit in their classes. They're going to hear of the lord Jesus Christ but the other thing they do is and this is a first day assembly but the parents are invited in at least once a month to hear of the lord Jesus Christ.

31:48 Some get saved and they are baptized and join the church. It's a shot of the classroom with Tina teaching the new class that particular year. Wanna run over here to Columbia now. We're going to fly into Bogota. You drive three hours north, and you end up right in about this area.

32:20 We got there. The roof had fallen in in this camp and dining room area, so some of the locals had started on it, started some of the welding on it. We also wanted to cover this porch way right next to the dining room. It's interesting. When you go on these trips with the different interactions, Couldn't get both pictures together.

32:40 When we're on a crowd like this, in this particular place, a third of the people spoke Spanish as their main language. And so we would have devotions at mealtime. And so he's giving the devotions. He is translating. Incidentally, that is, I've lost his name.

32:57 Sam Killins and thank you. Missionary down in that area. This is a shot of the fellowship. The break between their meetings and we continue it on with the work getting some of these truss, wooden trusses put in here. Take a crooked beam to sit em on and make em straight and level.

33:17 That's why you have experts with you. There's a shot of the roof going on over the dining room and from the other side including the porch. Year later, it came down. This is '19 or 2015. This is the team that the lord brought in.

33:33 This this fellow and his daughter were there. They were Canadians, missionary. This is one of the wife of the local caretaker and so so forth and we had more roofing to do. This is the entryway. We wanted to work on.

33:47 This is the kitchen. Obviously, need a little work there. And again, you get there and someone preaches, someone translates. And this is Wednesday night. Brian is teaching using the young people as an illustration of what he was talking about.

34:04 Shot of the getting some of the rafters and purlins laid in and the roof out over the entryway. Sorry to go so fast but I'm watching that clock back there. And then there's also a dorm area here that's going to get covered before we get out of the place. And so here's the completion of the entryway. This is over the kitchen.

34:27 We do actually get the other side and get it all covered in before we leave the place. And this is getting the last, pretty well, the last piece of roofing put on at that place. 2014 was a busy year for us. We actually had four trips we went on. We were the Columbia trip, the Peru trip were back to back.

34:50 And then at the same time, Kim DeYoung had gone down to Kenya. His dad had made some arrangements with some of the locals down there, and he went down to help him. He had a nice time to work with his family. And there was a building there. They had gone for...

35:06 They wanted to increase the size of their assembly building, and so they went from this one to this one. And they needed some help with some of the roofing. This is laying out one of the trusses across the roof being welded together. More welding and carrying the things into place. And typically, you sit down and you share testimonies.

35:27 This is after, I think, a noon meal, shared testimonies of what the Lord has been doing in your life. And it's an interesting perspective to hear of other people and how the Lord has worked in their lives. Next, I wanna go to, and this is 2014 also, was down in Serbia. For us old people, you... We used to call it Yugoslavia, and they broke it up into Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia Herzegovina.

35:56 Can't even say that correctly. Anyway, over here in Serbia, we're gonna go right up in this area. Second largest city is somewhat nearby, but we went to help a missionary family. We knew him from Emmaus when our children went... Some of our children were at Emmaus, So, that puts him about 40 years old.

36:14 He was about 37 at the time. He had rheumatoid arthritis and he wasn't able to hold and squeeze his tools. I've heard him turn down his wife from holding the children because it hurt too much. Saw that that was a need to come. It changes the ministry because there were just two of us went.

36:31 My wife and I went. And so we, you sit at the table and you listen to them talk to their neighbors as they walk by outside and you eat with them. You spend time with them. You play grandma with them. And I like to encourage you.

36:46 If you know a missionary, go see them because it's it's lonely out there. His parents will get there once or twice a year. Her father may get there. Her mother does not fly, so she will never be over there to see them, to hold the grandchildren. So you you do these things.

37:05 And a famous statement that the wife made as we were leaving to my wife said, it was so good to have you here because you think in English. Help your missionaries out. You jump in. My wife went to a ladies meeting that first weekend. This is interesting too from sitting down.

37:26 This is a baptism. It was kind of a, shall we say it? Another group. It wasn't really part of this group but they are Christians. It's kinda like it's probably the only other Christian in their town and they invited him over to a baptism.

37:41 The interesting thing about going down to a shore with a baptism and I'm not showing the people being dunked but what was interesting is while we were there, there were people standing on this side of this particular group taking pictures. There are guys on the other side playing with a soccer ball and watching and listening to us. I stood on this side of the crowd for a while and the guy walked up to me and started talking to me in English. He'd been fair around the world. I think he'd been in America.

38:10 I wonder what we were doing. He needed to hear about the lord. So then I... He was kinda talking. So I walked around the other side to take some other pictures and another fellow walks up to me and starts talking to me in English.

38:21 Where are you from? Well, I'm from those apartments up there. I just wonder what you guys are doing down here. So you get to explain again what we're doing. And this particular lady sitting here in black, nobody knows who she is.

38:33 She's owed up to sing along with them. So that's what you do when you have a baptism out in the open. Serbia is a crossroads nation. It's the only sign I saw like this, but I like the idea. This is all the same thing.

38:47 It is saying you are living Novosad. You write it Cyrillic. That's the language that... Or the alphabet that the Russians use. This is in what you call the Roman saying the same thing in the Roman language or Roman lettering like you and I are used to.

39:03 This one is Hungarian. This one is Serb Serbian and we're guessing this one is Macedonian. All these places are close by. It's an Orthodox church. This is a nice, tall thing sitting up here.

39:20 So, it's not so tall people come by and kiss it on the way in to their meeting. As you can tell, this is, if you see it close, this is Christ coming out of the cup, the Eucharist. They also are very, shall we say, a spiritist type people. This is their graveyard and they pour more money into that than they can afford because that is the thing to do. But the thing that also gets to you is they put out food for the departed spirits.

39:54 We think this is a western country. This is the assembly that they are in, and a lot of the work is with gypsies. We drove an hour to encourage this particular group of gypsies. These... This family are the ones that had the main responsibility of reaching out and touching lives of their neighbors, and we see the Lord doing a lot of work amongst the people that understand that they don't have everything in life.

40:47 Okay. One more quick one. This was last year, 2015. When we were down there in 2011, we had worked on an assembly building. It was well used.

40:58 I hope you remember that story. But this couple was newly married at that time, and they had put their life into the Lord's work. And so they did not... Her father had given her a piece of land. They had got a building up, but it still needed electrical, plumbing, and all those other things that we like to have in houses.

41:20 And so they were living in this room. The photographer backed against the wall. This is kind of it for four people to live in and it's difficult place because the neighbor kid would wake up about 04:00 in the morning and scream till I had the neighborhood awake. The chickens start crawling at daybreak. There's a lot of ministry that they could miss out on because they didn't have a home to use.

41:47 So, what the home looked like? So, he came in and he decided to build a second story on it to supply. It was better than going level. It was very high water table. So you put up pillars, you put up rafters and purlins, you part of it up, getting the roof on.

42:04 This is actually the end of it. When we were leaving, this fellow here is, I forgot his first name at the moment. His last name is Tuggy. His wife is the daughter of Cameron Townsend who started a Wycliffe organization. They are still translating, and so he was gonna use the house as a place to study, a place to store some of his materials.

42:27 Other people will come by the Aztecs out of the mountains, would need a place to stay overnight, so their home will be open for that. They work with a discipling program, and so they would work with that. And so here's a young family that has committed their lives to the lord, and every money they got in was being poured into the work and not into their house. And so we came along to help them. What I want you to take away from that is to think about what the lord would have you to do.

42:58 This is a a picture we caught of one of the young men who was with us on a trip. He was 15 years old. But each one of us needs to think, what would the lord have me to do? What have I learned for him? What did he learn?

43:11 Things he'd seen, things he'd smelled, things he had tasted, the work he'd done for the lord while he was on a trip. So I encourage you to pray for us. That's the important thing. Pray for us and then participate if you'd like. You may have the abilities.

43:29 Come along with us. Find out when we're going and come with us and and then pass on the word to other missionaries in particular because I just told this crowd of, I don't know what we have here, 80 people, 90 people, and they're out there in the field working, so they might hear about it. The easy way to find out what to pray about, what to when we're going is to sign up on the list back there to display. Need name, address, Email address is really what we like. Snail mail if you don't have an Email address.

44:04 So, that you might hear what is going on. You can pray effectively for us and then pray for us as we go on these trips because a lot of things can happen, great stories come out of it. Ran over just a little bit. Are there any questions? Alright.

44:50 And, father, we thank you for what we've been able to see this morning of the work that you're doing in other countries, in other people's lives, and seeing the change that you affect in them too. Thank you for this day and the opportunity to gather around your word, together around the lord Jesus Christ, together with the people of god. We pray that you would continue to guide us in the way that you would have us to go. We'd ask in Jesus' name. Amen.