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[ Music ] >> President Lassiter and Dean Mangrum, faculty, student body, and my fellow participants in this institute, I'm going to ask that before we have musical rendition by Miss Michelle Spates, that the

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president of this college will come and present our preacher for the morning. We praise God for President Lassiter and we want him to know how much we love him and that we are praying for him and with him for we know that he will lead us to higher heights. He will present our preacher this morning and then we'll have the musical selection

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by Miss Spates. To my brothers and sisters, to the presiding minister, at this time we will continue our tradition of bringing to you renowned preachers, teachers, and basically men of God. Our speaker for the morning is also a friend of mine.

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This is not his first time to bishop. It is his first time coming to Bishop in this capacity. Dr. Wendell Russell is a broadly educated man, having received his undergraduate training

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at Virginia Union University, moving to Case Western Reserve and to that prestigious university, the University of Virginia, for his doctorate degree. He's had some unique experiences during his lifetime.

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He has served in the vineyards at Virginia Union University in a number of capacities-- professor, dean of students, and in other roles at Virginia Union.

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Also in the state of Virginia, he served as president of Virginia State College, had a very successful tenure at Virginia State. He then moved to Federal City College,

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where he also served as president there. He's now with the District of Columbia in the OIC program as its executive director. He is a renowned scholar, writer, consultant, educator.

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But for our purposes today, I would say to you that he is also a renowned preacher and pastor. He serves as the pastor of the Matthews Memorial Baptist Church in Washington, DC.

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I have been his guest there, and he has a sterling ministry. I would say to you that we will be privileged to hear the Reverend Dr. Wendell P. Russell this morning, Welcome him here to the L.K. Williams Institute.

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[APPLAUSE] [DRUM ROLL] [MUSIC PLAYING] (music)

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[MUSIC] [ Music ] We are heavenly father's children. And we all know that he loves us one and all.

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Yet there are times when we find the answer. Another's voice echoes. If we are willing, He will teach us His voice only to obey no matter where. ♪ And He knows ♪

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♪ Yes, Uncle Emma, God knows ♪ ♪ He knows just ♪ ♪ Just how much we can bear ♪ ♪ Though the Lord ♪

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♪ It gets heavy ♪ ♪ So heavy ♪ ♪ You never left ♪ ♪ Alone to bear it all ♪

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♪ Just ask for strength ♪ ♪ And keep, keep on toiling ♪ ♪ The dust teardrops may fall ♪ ♪ You have the joy of this assurance ♪

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♪ The heavenly Father will always answer prayer ♪ ♪ For He knows ♪ ♪ Yes, yes, my God knows ♪ ♪ He knows just ♪

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♪ Just how much we can bear ♪ [applause] We ought to say amen to the singing, [applause]

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the beautiful singing of this fine young lady and the music provided by her accompanist. The presiding officer Thank you, dr. Lassiter for your introduction

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Dr. Mangrum for the invitation to come and share with you Preachers of the word from this section and throughout the country in the Lacey Kirk Williams ministers Institute This Institute is known wherever preachers gather

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and wherever they look forward to knowing more so that they can share more with those whom they serve. I'm very happy to be here and proud to be a part of this institute. I certainly would like, before getting into the message, to commend to you and those who are responsible for the choice of Dr. Wright

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Lassiter as the president of this great institution. For you have chosen a man who brings a great deal of ability as a college administrator, but you've also chosen a man who is in touch with the eternal.

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Dr. Lassiter is a preacher called by God, one who is not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I commend him to you as one who has known him for some time in numerous capacities.

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And I pray that God will bless him and bless this institution which he shall head. And I want to pledge that from our little way station in Washington, DC, beginning with this fiscal year,

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we are going to start supporting Bishop College. [APPLAUSE] It is my understanding that the purpose of the gathering of the saints of God in this place at this time

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is that they may share through lecture and prayer and petition and through the word of God from this theme, the church and the Christian college, to serve this present age.

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Age-old traditions serving an age in transition. There could be no more important theme than this which has been chosen. And in order to try to get into some

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of the romance of what is occurring in this our day and what the possibilities are, I wonder if you would look with me at the 51st chapter of Isaiah about the second verse, first and second verses,

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where we shall find these words which were uttered by the prophet. In the Smith translation it says, "Look to the rock from which you were hewn and the quarry from which you were dug." to the rock from which you were hewn and the quarry from which you were dug.

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We live in an age and in a time where people don't want to look back. They don't want to turn to their age-old traditions. We are so wrapped up in going forward that we are afraid to look back. When I was in the Army, I declare I was the only man who came from Hampton, Virginia,

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where Dr. Strassner, the venerable preacher and former president of Shaw University, still holds forth. The reason why I was the only man I ever met in the Army from Hampton, Virginia, or from anywhere other than New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, because nobody wanted to

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look back to the places where they had come from. It seemed to me that everybody wanted to be something that he or she was not. We were apparently ashamed of our humble beginnings. We weren't happy that we had mothers and fathers who hadn't achieved the way some people had.

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We didn't have washing machines and dryers and didn't have manglers. And so we were from somewhere where those things were, not from where we really came from. They seem to be afraid to look back.

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We don't want anything that's old-fashioned. Every time we turn around, somebody wants something new. Somebody said the old-fashioned wives' meals were well thought out, but the modern wives' meals are well thawed out. I tell you I'd still like to go back to that old pot of beans

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that used to be on the stove when I came home from school because it may be old and it may be looking back, but it was good. And it's still good. When have you heard somebody say backward turn backward old time in thy flight make me a child again just for the night mother come back from the Echoless shore make me a child again as

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of your door we don't want to go back we don't want mother to come back from the Echoless shore because what we want most of all is a new model everything we want must be new. People complain if they have to wear the same suits and dresses and hats for more than one season. They don't like to hold on an automobile much

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longer than it takes to pay for it. Of course that could be a pretty long time in today's economy. Everybody's looking for something new. Nobody wants anything old. But I think that we ought to be glad that we can look back to age-old traditions and look back and remember where we've come from.

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Every now and then in our churches while we are singing the anthems and the spirituals and the gospel music, we ought to sing "He's Brought Me a Mighty Long Way" because it's a great deal of truth in those words. And I fear that in this modern day,

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we are caught up in a cult of modernity where we just want to be in on what's happening and forget what's happening. And don't you know that what we used to view

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when I was a youngster in the funny papers called Flash Gordon is no longer something which is futuristic? Did you see that men are walking around in space

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and repairing things in space. And the Jetsons that our children used to look at in the comics on the TV, it's no longer something which is way out there.

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I was in a meeting just the other day and they were talking about the occupations that we're going to have for our young people in the very few short years to come.

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And one of the occupations that they were talking about is a robot specialist. That's what the Jetsons were dealing with, robots. And now we have them.

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There's a plant in North Carolina that produces cloth that from the time it is woven until the time it is shipped out, it is not touched by human hands.

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Oh, that's modern. And I would want you to know that I'm not opposed to modern things. I'm glad that Bishop College

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has a beautiful, imposing edifice like this, a place that is dedicated to the love and service of God. And as you look about this campus, you see these wonderful buildings.

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I'm glad about that. And I'm glad there's somebody in here this morning who's here because under the persuasion of modern technology and science,

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you have been stretched out on some operating table and somebody has gone into your heart, cut into your rib cage and pulled it back, held your heart in your hands and bypassed certain arteries and veins and made it possible

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for you to be out here today. I'm glad that modern science has gone that far, and I thank God that God has been so good to us as to cause us to go forward. But I tell you, we still got to look back, because we can't go forward unless we look back. Isaiah said, "Look to the rock from which you were hewn and the quarry from which you were dug."

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Theologians have a way of saying these things. They call what happens when people forget God apostasy. They call it idolatry. They call it the retributive dogma. They call it all kinds of things, but what they mean is that when man forgets God, he's in trouble. [Audience shouts]

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Man forgets how to call upon God and to sing the praises to God. It was said, "If you don't do it, the rocks will crash. If you don't do it, the praise will come from the hills." Somebody's going to praise God.

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But I tell you that the history of this world is that men don't want to look back. They don't want to know God in the way that God wants himself to be known by them. Isaiah told the children of Israel, "If you would go forward, you've got to look back." If you would find a new place in God's world, you've got to know where you've come from

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If you're going to understand how God will be a blessing to you You got to see where you made your mistakes and you've got to change So that God can make this present world Come with me if you will and see

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that the church is made to save and to serve this present age and that those of us who work together with God can do just that when we look back. Come first and see that when we look back to the rock from which we were hewn and the quarry

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from which we were dug that we get a sense of accountability. a sense of accountability. I know that Dr. Lassiter has brought that statement here to Bishop College. I know he has because it's a part of the educational management jargon throughout the world and has been. What it means is that you've got to be responsible for what you are and for what you do.

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The only way Bishop College is going to be what Dr. Lassiter and God want it to be is that all of us accept some for being sure enough God men and God women who do what God tells us to do and we should do it with pleasure and with cheerfulness. Children of Israel were

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poised in Isaiah's vision about to go back to their homeland and there they were moaning their state saying oh look what has happened to us we've been taken down to a Babylonian captivity. We've been whipped on, we have been lured, we have been made less than men. We have turned into something that we were not before we went down there.

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What can we do? Oh, woe is us. Isaiah says to those children in his prophecy, and he says to you and to me, "Look to the rock from which we were hewn and the quarry from which we were dug, remember that you are Abraham's children. Sarah was your mother. You have a royal lineage. You were put here by God and he told you how to live and what to do.

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If you want to be what God wants you to be, you've got to look back to him and do what he would have you do. We've got to be accountable for what we are. And don't you know in this In this modern day, with all of our knowledge, we have turned away from the concept of accountability. Few preachers want to talk about sin.

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[crowd shouting] Few missionaries want to pray against it. The deacons want to rub it around and push it off, but nobody wants to be accountable for what's happening in this world.

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I used to be a social worker in Cleveland, Ohio, And I remember in dealing with our young people and in studying, I understood that sometimes children become what they are.

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They grow up and forget where they've come from. They leave behind the concepts which have been given to them at mother's knee because they learned other things at other joints,

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it seems. And I remember that we used to excuse the moral and ethical behavior of our young people by saying, oh, he has an electra--

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she has an electra complex. Well, he has an Oedipus complex. There's something wrong in the home. There's something wrong in the school.

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There's something that the other institutions of society didn't do. Very rarely did we then, or do we now say, what's wrong with that person who has violated the law?

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What's wrong with that person who is not ethically sound? Is that that person has sinned. (crowd shouting) Bible talks about sin tells us the story of two boys.

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They were brothers. And one made a more acceptable offering to God than the other. And that other brother got mad and killed him. Now, if that had happened this year,

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we would have taken him to the psychiatrist. We would have had it studied by some analyst. And we would have put his case record up on the computer and tried to find out what we could know about it.

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But the Bible put it very simply. The Bible said that boy sinned. He violated his relationship with God and with man. And every time you do that, you sin.

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And every time you do it, you are accountable for what you do. We've got to look to the rock from which we were hewn and the quarry from which we were dug.

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Come next and see that there's a second thing that we know, and that is when we look to the rock from which we were hewn and the quarry from which we were dug, we get a sense of power for times of stress.

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Isaiah, in his visionary presentation to the children of God, said, listen here, you're complaining, you are screaming and hollering,

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you are kicking and you are caring now because things are not going the way you wanted them to go. But you don't understand, you're Abraham's children. God gave you power.

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God gave you stability to do what he wants you to do. Hold on to his hand. Heard you one day when you were down in Babylon, flying down by the waters of Babylon.

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There we sat down. "Ye, we wept when we remembered Jerusalem." Somebody's required of us to capture those who took us captive, required us to sing a song.

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How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land, you say? But the answer to that question is that the children of God can sing the Lord's song in the midst of stress and strain because God will put a song in your heart. [crowd shouting]

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Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and you'll find that you have power, unknown power. You see, what bothers white America today about Jesse Jackson is not only that he's black, and that he's articulate, and that he says things that nobody else is going to say. What bothers white America about Jesse Jackson is that he's tied in with something that they can

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never control. When the church of the living God gets behind the ethical and moral concepts that God wants us to hold on to. You watch out!

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You step back. Watch out because there's gonna be some backlash. And it's not gonna be just white backlash. It's gonna be the backlash that comes from knowing

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that strength and power always come from God. (audience cheering) You see, in this modern day, I want to tell you that you can still believe

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that God moves in a mysterious way. His wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps on the sea and rides upon the storm, and he still does.

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In this modern day, I tell you, you must look back and remember the words that we used to sing a long time ago about strength and power that comes from God. When we used to sing, I have seen the lightning flashing.

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I have heard the thunders roll. I felt sin's breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus telling me still to fight on. He promised never to leave, never to leave me alone.

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He will give that stability, that strength, that power. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug. But come finally with me and see,

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not only will you have a sense of accountability and a sense of power and stability when you look to the rock, you will have a sense of destiny. A sense of destiny.

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Isaiah made it clear, as Jesus did later, that if you are Abraham's children, you got to act like Abraham's children. You got to believe like Abraham's children. You've got to live like Abraham's child.

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And the Deuteronomy promise will come true. Don't you see? If we do what we know we ought to do, God will sure enough do what he's always done.

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We are a covenant people. God made a covenant and a promise a long time ago, and he has not broken his promise. Not yet.

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And I don't believe that he will. And he promised that obedience means blessing. Obedience means blessing. Now, a lot of us, and some of us are in the church,

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We don't have a true sense of destiny. There are some of us who are so wrapped up in and weighted down by the world that our destiny, our concept of destiny is walked by the world.

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There are some of us who are like the legend I saw on the wall in the den of a home of a friend of mine I said I was sitting one day alone all lonesome and sad and blue and Suddenly a voice came to me saying cheer up brother

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Things could be worse and so I cheered up and surely enough things got worse Some of us who have this This attitude that life is just that

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then there's some of us who have a a conceptual analysis of what life is and what destiny shall become, which is shaped in the philosophy found in the soliloquy of Macbeth. Tomorrow, tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

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and all our yesterdays have but lighted fools the way to dust and death. Out, out, brief candle, life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is hurt no more. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

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There are those of us who sing praise God from whom all blessings flow and yet we don't really deep down believe that life is anything more than a shadow, a poor player strutting upon a stage and that there will be nothing to come out of it. We believe that there's an idiocy about life. We believe there's a fatalism about life. We believe that there is nothing

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that shall come that will save us and wrap us up for God. And then there are those who And then there are those who feel that even this book here, this Bible, has no relevance for our times. It's just a book that was written one day and that it doesn't have any real sense of direction for us. They say under the scrutiny of modern science we have gone into Wellhausen and all the rest of those,

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and we've read Tillich and Beaumont, some of the more modern ones that I don't know too much about, we know that under this scrutiny,

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this Bible just won't stand up. And therefore, it doesn't have any real sense of destiny to it. To those who are fatalistic, I weep for you.

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To those who see no sense of destiny in life, I cry for you. And for those who cannot understand that God still moves in history, as well as in his word, as well as in us, as Dr. Wright was saying this morning, I cry copious tears for

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you. For the deeper you get into this word and the more you understand about how God love and how he is going to be in a posture of holding us accountable and granting us power all at the same time. When we look all around us and see these modern conveniences and changes, these new things

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that seemed to drop like madonna came out of the head of zoops almost magically. The only thing I can say as one who believes from the depths of his heart is that when all of the knowledge and wisdom, when all of the concepts are laid side by side, I have to still come back and read where it said, "What is man?"

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What in man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him, for thou hast made him just a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory. Now I have to come back and say, "God, why are you so good to me? Why have you been so steadfast with me?

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Why have you given me what you've given me?" And when I see that, I say that my destiny is not in man, it is not in myself, it is not in things, it is not in today, it is not in yesterday,

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it's not in tomorrow, but it is in God. (audience cheering) Oh, some of us need to catch glimpse and sound of this truth, that when we look to the rock

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from which we were hewn and the quarry from which we were dug, we'll find that we are somebody. In God's sight, then, the great challenge of this present age is for us to walk together,

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to work together, to learn together, and to serve together. I thank God that this institute brings us together so that we can share these great truths

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that the God of the endless ages spoke back in the years gone by. And then when he told through Isaiah his children to look back, what he was saying was, I'm back there,

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and I'm with you now, and I'll be with you always. [APPLAUSE] (audience applauding) [applause]

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[MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (piano music)

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[MUSIC PLAYING] (piano music) [ Music ] You may build great cathedrals, grand and tall.

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You may build skyscrapers large and small. You may conquer all the failures of the past. But only what you do for Christ will last. This is my verse.

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Though your songs and prayers are often praised by men, They've no meaning unless you've been born again. So sinner, heed these words. Please don't let this harvest pass.

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For only what you do for Christ will last. Remember only what you do for Christ will last. ♪ Believe ♪ ♪ Remember only what you do ♪

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♪ For Christ will bless ♪ ♪ Only what you do ♪ ♪ For him ♪ ♪ Will be counted in thee ♪

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♪ In only what you do ♪ ♪ For Christ we will ask ♪ (audience applauds) [Applause]

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