Let's return to the book of John the 9th chapter, we'll make our way through the majority of the text today. John chapter 9, you might recall that we have explored the past two Sundays, the miracle of the healing of a man that was born blind. And how there was a question about why this man was blind from birth, it was not from sickness after birth, but he was born blind and it was assumed by most in that era that it was because of sin, either his own committed before birth in the womb, perhaps, or that of his parents, and that he was born blind as punishment for that sin. And Jesus in correcting them said, this man was born blind, yes, but it was that the works of God might be displayed in him not on account of his sin. And then this man who was born blind had Jesus make a paste from his very own spit and the dust and the dirty pulled from the ground and he put the paste on the man's eyes and he told him to go and to wash in the pool of salam. And so the man went and he washed in the pool and he could see. And so we return now to verse 8, how this man who now has sight is received. Listen for it is God who speaks to us. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, is this not the man who used to sit and beg? Some said it is he, others said no, but he is like him. He kept saying, I am the man. So they said to him, then how were your eyes opened? He answered. The man called Jesus, made mud and anointed my eyes and said to me, go to salam and wash. So I went and washed and received my sight. They said to him, where is he? And he said, I do not know. They brought to the Pharisees, the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was the Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, he put mud on my eyes and I washed and I see. Some of the Pharisees said this man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath. But others said, how can a man who as a sinner do such signs? And there was a division among them. So they said again to the blind man, what do you say about him since he has opened your eyes? He said he is a prophet. The Jews did not believe that he had been born blind and had received his sight until they called his parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, is this your son who you say was born blind? How then does he now see? His parents answered, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind. But how he now sees, we do not know. Nor do we know who opened his eyes as him. He is of age. He will speak for himself. His parents said these things because they feared the Jews. The Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be the Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue, therefore his parents said, he is of age, ask him. So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, give glory to God, we know that this man is a sinner and he answered, whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind now I see. They said to him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered them. I have told you already and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples? And they reviled him saying you are his disciple but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses but as for this man we do not know where he comes from. The man answered, why this is an amazing thing. You do not know where he comes from and yet he opened my eyes. You know that God does not listen to sinners but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. They answered him, you were born in utter sin and would you teach us and they cast him out. Jesus heard that they had cast him out and having found him he said, do you believe in the Son of man? He answered, and who is he, sir, that I may believe in him. Jesus said to him, you have seen him and it is he who is speaking to you. He said, Lord I believe and he worshiped him. Jesus said, for judgment I came into this world that those who do not see may see and those who see may become blind. Lord bless the reading of his word to the hearing of his people. How do we know what we know? If we don't see it and if we can't touch it, can we know that it is true and that it is real? How can we know that what we know is true? That what we have accepted is true. Moral teachings in the Bible, the moral teachings of Christ and of the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and other teachings of Jesus, even some of the parables. Many of these teachings and I notice I say many not all, but many of these teachings can be held and can be lived by unbelievers in the moral teachings of Christ. They can hold to the Ten Commandments according to the letter of the law, not the Spirit, but the letter of the law, isn't that in fact how the Pharisees and Sadducees live? They did not follow Christ. They reviled Him and yet they adhered to the letter of the law of the commandments. And there are many in today's society that would consider themselves to be Christians because in the majority of the teachings, they find themselves in compliance at least to their own satisfaction and they wouldn't inquire any further. But to their own satisfaction, they find themselves in compliance and then to the requirement of confessing that Jesus is Lord, they would confess that. But do they believe in the things which are unseen? Do they receive by faith those things which only those regenerated, reborn by the work of the Spirit of God can receive? Do they know that what they know is real? This man, after Jesus had healed him, went back to his home, it appears, because he surrounded by neighbors. It doesn't say explicitly that he went home, but it would be difficult for me to find my neighbors gathered in any one place at a particular time except in the neighborhood. And so apparently he has gone home which would be perfectly natural. And as he goes home, the people there began to recognize this man who for years has been wondering out of their neighborhood and homes to go and beg for his life livelihood. And there are some there who recognized him and said, isn't that the man who was born blind? Now we can understand their astonishment because if you have lived your life watching a man who perhaps he's in his early 20s, maybe his mid 30s or even later, and all his life, he has been moving about blind and begging and you've had pity on him. Perhaps as he went by, you would even remark, there goes old Charlie, or whoever it might be, or Joe again, as he passes by, blind. And you might pity him and say, I don't know what happened to cause him to be blind and it's not mine to ask, but isn't it just terrible that this man was born blind? And you might see that every day, perhaps even used him as an object lesson for your children. You see children, what can happen if you're sinful? You see what can happen to your own children? If you live in sin, don't sin against God or your children may be stricken like this man. We don't know what his parents did, perhaps it was his own sin. We must be obedient to the law of God, or else our children could be born cursed as this man is cursed. But now here is this man showing up back in the neighborhood and he has sight. Apparently there's even something about his countenance that has changed and this wouldn't be hard for us to see either. Have you ever seen someone after a week or two of depression or having lived in a way that affected their countenance in such a way that their face is long and drawn out and their expression is blank? Oftentimes if you do encounter someone that's blind because they've never seen their own face and they can't see what's out there, their face often has a more of an expressionless appearance. Sometimes they have a blank stare and they seem to be staring off. Not necessarily because they're sad, they just aren't aware sometimes of their surroundings and often we take our cues from those around us. We're happy when the people around us are happy. If someone walks into a room and their face is radiate and they're beaming with smile, our face will often reflect the same. That's why it's so important for Christians to be that way. Our God has saved us and made us whole and our countenance should be lifted up. This man was restored and his countenance apparently was changed such that they could recognize him but not so particularly as to remove all doubt. Perhaps it wasn't only physical. Perhaps they were prejudiced in their viewing of him because they expected him to be blind. They didn't expect him to have sight. Well I know someone that looks like you but he's blind and I know that a man born blind can't be healed so therefore you must not be that man but I'll tell you you look a lot like him but you can see. And so his first challenge is to convince those people that know him that he is the same man they have always known who once was blind but now can see. If you weren't brought up in a church, in a covenant household, baptized and raised in the faith, shown the Word of God and had your parents live the Word of God before you transparently, and encouraged to live as a man or a woman of faith. That wasn't your experience if later in life, after living a life of debauchery and of shame, God came to you and you were converted and became a believer and your life radically changed, then you most likely experienced something like this blind man. Because there were those who knew you and your patterns of behavior that you were deceitful, they knew that you were one who would work with subterfuge perhaps, they knew that you would take advantage of an opportunity, they knew that you couldn't perhaps even be trusted or that your lifestyle, perhaps you were a drunkard or perhaps you were addicted to drugs or whatever it might be, or perhaps you were just worldly. And you loved the world and the material of the world and you loved profit and you loved to gain, sometimes at the expense of others, but hey, that's the way the world is and you take it when you can get it. But then you were changed and then longer did you think that way? And then you became a servant of the most high God and they no longer knew the person they had always known before. And they said, well you look like the person I know but you're not him and in fact they speak the truth because those who are in Christ or a new creation and the old things have passed away and new things have come where your new creatures in Christ, the old man was crucified with him on the cross and the new man has been raised with him in the resurrection. No longer are we the old man now we are the new. So this blind man is living out in dramatic fashion what we know to be spiritually true, that those who were blind and spirit and have been made to see are a different and changed person, unrecognizable in many respects, to even their own family. So his neighbors seeing that this was the man asked him how his eyes were open and he tells them the story and here we're given more story, you'll notice each time he has to repeat the story he narrows it more and more and you can almost sense some impatience in this man as he has to keep telling the story over and over again. But here he tells it in some detail and we might imagine that we're not for the space limitations of the scriptures, perhaps he even filled out the story by saying things like you know I got up like I did every morning and you guys have seen me and I went out and it was crazy that morning because of Feast of Tabernacles is over and they're sheep everywhere and I heard of some guy that was claiming to be the light and some Pharisees were up who knows how he filled out the story with those he knew best. And after he finishes telling the story of how Jesus put the mud on his eyes and how he went and he was healed when he washed the mud away, they said we have to go to the local synagogue and see the Pharisees about this. Were they turning him over to the law because this was a religious violation, no. We would expect the officials in our day to make commentary as well. The Pharisees were the officials of the day. When you watch a news broadcast tonight and something happens internationally, if the president has it spoken to it they'll even say that. There's no comment from the White House because we expect a comment from those in authority. We expect them to speak to the issue, to speak to the day. The Pharisees were to speak to this issue. Something amazing had happened, a man born blind was made to see. We need to go and get some comment from the Pharisees on this. You don't just say well what a day and keep going about your business. So they took the man to the Pharisees on this Sabbath day and the Pharisees asked him again how he had received his sight. So he said to them, he put mud on my eyes and I washed it and I see. You see this narrowing of the story because the Pharisees are now asking him to repeat it. Have you ever had anyone do that to you? You tell them a story, you tell them an account and they don't want to believe it. So they keep making you repeat it over and over again, looking for an inconsistency, looking for some sort of a mistake, looking for a miscue, some handle they can get their hands on to sort of twist it or turn it or make it not work. They keep looking for a loophole that you didn't say this or you did say that. They can't take the plain wording of your language. They look for something else. So they ask him again and he says, and you can almost sense his eyes sort of narrowing as he looks at them and he goes, he put mud on my eyes, I washed it and I see. That's it. The Pharisees detect here a problem. You see they're not so concerned with what as much as how. Jesus had healed this man on the Sabbath. And so they find three, at least three Sabbath violations here, healing of any sort according to Phariseeical law, except to immediately save a life is forbidden. What this means is that if someone is choking or dying or bleeding, you can stop the bleeding, you can help them not to be choked, but you can't help them improve any. So you can't bandage it, you can just keep them from bleeding to death on the Sabbath. You can't treat for improvement only to save life. This man was born blind and his blindness was not killing him. It could await it until the next day, according to them. But Jesus chose intentionally to heal on the Sabbath, remember how it started. The disciples in Jesus are walking and suddenly Jesus stops and picks this man out to show forth the glory of God. He was always needling the Pharisees on the Sabbath issue because He's Lord of the Sabbath. And so He used this as a way to cause them to have to make a decision about how they would interpret this miracle. This man was born blind. Why couldn't it wait a day? Why did it have to be the Sabbath? Because it served God's purposes for Christ to heal on the Sabbath. The second of the violations on the Sabbath is that Jesus was working, not just the healing, but needing was forbidding, needing not as in I need something, but needing like a doe. And when Jesus took dirt and mixed it with spit, and He made it into clay, He was needing. Mixing a liquid with flour is making doe, while so was mixing his spit with the dust. It sounds ridiculous, but a man was not even permitted to carry a handkerchief from upstairs to downstairs on the Sabbath because that's work. Now guys, I know what you're thinking. This is good news. It's also Phariseism. Needing was forbidding and making clay was required him to need, and so therefore it was forbidden. There would be none of that on the Sabbath day. The law prohibited anointing the eyes on the Sabbath as well as a quote from one of the fair circle books as to fasting's spittle, that is, spittle from the day of fasting. It is not lawful to put it as much as upon the eyelids. Well, perhaps now we know why Jesus chose the specific means He did in the healing of this man. Placing not only was He needing in making the clay, but placing His own spittle upon the eyelids for healing was forbidden according to Sabbath law. The Pharisees, more interested in how Jesus did it than what He did. They don't rejoice with the man that He can see. They aren't celebrating His sight. They're only interested in, now let's get this straight. He did this on the Sabbath. Can you imagine appearing and saying, I've been healed miraculously and their first question is now, did this happen before 7 o'clock or after 7 o'clock? How strange a legalistic mind works that find a security in the keeping of a law rather than in Christ Jesus. But the Pharisees were split because of the nature of the miracle. The way the man gave the testimony, we find that the Jews or the Pharisees were split on this because one found Him in violation of the law and another said, but a man who sins can't do this sort of a miracle. A man who sins can't do that. And so whenever truth interjects itself in any life situation, a chasm will begin to emerge between those who believe and those who don't believe, whether it is in your workplace or in your family, we're told that there will be Father, I get Son, and Mother, against daughter, whether it's in your family, whether it's in the workplace or in the church. Wherever truth is brought in, a chasm will result and the truth is emphasized, the wider that gulf becomes between those who do believe and those who do not. The Pharisees as religious and steeped in study as they were, as devout as they were never missing a Sabbath, tithing and giving offerings publicly and in view of course, praying in public, thanking God that they're not like the rest of these poor folks around them, but that He has blessed them, esteemed by the community, and here we have belief and unbelief. And so a chasm, a rupture emerges in the body of the Pharisees. How do they seek to resolve it? They turn to this man, and they simply look at him and go, well it was you that He healed so what do you say? Who is this man? They turn to a man with no training at all. What was his theological training? He had been blind all of his life, how many books has he read, how many scrolls has he went through? And how many prophecies? How many folks have sat down and said, you know, I have a real ministry to the blind and I want to read Isaiah to you and make sure that you understand, sure he probably heard in the temple, but I am almost positive it would have to be by happenstance, being the right place at the right time. After all, he was blind because of sin in most people's views. To qualify Jesus, the Pharisees are looking to this man to discount the miracle. They want him to say something that would discredit the work of Christ. And they will take it as gospel truth, quote, unquote, if this man says anything that discounts the miracle or the work of Jesus, how desperate are they to find some way to condemn Jesus? This man, we see his testimony evolving too, don't we? The neighbor said, who was it that did this and he goes, this man they called Jesus, where is he? Because I don't know, I don't know where he is. This man called Jesus. But now, as the Pharisees continue to press him and it's a shame that we don't have the entire court proceedings here, but as they continue to press him and as they continue to talk among themselves and as he continues to think about this miracle, we find his testimony sharpening. He goes from this man that they call Jesus to, well, he is a prophet. And so the Pharisees get just the opposite of what they're looking for. Now they find more conviction in this man who was born blind. He now feels sure that Jesus, whatever else he might be, he must be a prophet. The Pharisees' debate and persecution have not worked to dissuade the man. They've sharpened his testimony and made it even more clear. And the man, even though he ought to fear these Jews as his parents did, finds that he now speaks from conviction, Jeremiah, chapter 20, verse 9. If I say I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, there is in my heart as it were, a burning fire shut up in my bones and I am weary with holding it in and I cannot. What is our testimony like? Are we like a people who have been pressed by this world that desperately wants to discredit in this count Jesus? And our testimony is growing sharper and clearer as we testify to Christ or we like his parents. To when they come before the Jews, state what they know and that is that this is their son, not only is it their son but they do know that he was born blind but beyond that, they have nothing else to say. He will have to speak for himself because in verse 22 they feared the Jews because it was common knowledge, apparently, that the Jews had agreed that if anyone was to confess that Jesus is the Christ, he would be thrown out of the Son of God, excommunicated for claiming to be a follower of Christ. How can we know that what we know is real? We live in a day where this is quite challenging, for we have been trained to think other than this way, other than biblically. If we are to ever know anything about God, we have to first accept that there is much that we do not know. If we are to ever know anything about God, we have to take first the position of this blind man rather than that of the Pharisees and of his parents. Their positions were that they asserted first what they know. Then they said what they did not know. The Pharisees said, we'll tell you what we know, this man is a sinner. And we know that we follow Moses and we don't even know where this man is from. We don't know anything about it. This parent said, well we know that this is our son and we know he was born blind but we don't know how he got his sight. The man said, I don't know if he's a sinner. And I don't know how he did what he does. But one thing I do know and that God does not listen to sinners and that God listened to this man and this man did what nobody else can do. He gave sight to a man born blind and therefore he must be a prophet. So we find that the miracle of Christ in the lives of the Pharisees and of his parents was a stumbling block of offense, something to get over but in the life of this man he observed, he learned, he heard the miracle and not only he but those that heard his testimony. And he said, you know, I don't know everything but I do know that if a man can give sight to the blind then he's a man from God. And we would say, I don't know everything about God. I can't know everything about God but one thing I do know if a man is raised from the dead and he walks in as 500 people see him in bare testimony to him and if he can't find his body and there is no one that has been able to discount the scriptures in all of their history. If all of this is true then this man must be from God and what he said must be true. First we have to accept like the blind man that there's much we do not know. Last week Sunday night we explored the how what we can know about God and how we come to know Him and Job 117 we read that night. When you find out the deep things of God can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven. What can you do? It's deeper than shield. What can you know? To recognize the fine-ightness of our own mind and the infinite majesty of God. How pompous to believe that we could search out and know all about God. There's us to receive revelation, not to figure out what God has not revealed in your hymn books, hymn 24, you don't have to turn to that. There's a hymn there. The title is Vast the Emensity Mirror of Majesty, this one verse, Vast the Emensity Mirror of Majesty, Galaxies spread in a curtain of light. Your eternity rises in mystery where there where no eye can see infinite light. What a value we have of the teaching given to us and our hymns, the support of the theology of the scriptures put to music. If we would simply sing them and know them, our theology would be so far corrected. Christians cannot know God exhaustively, but they can know God truly. We can't know everything about God, but we can know that what God reveals to us is true. We can know that if we choose to believe. We don't have to imagine we have revelation, verse 34. They answered him, you were born in utter sin, and would you teach us and they cast him out. The last defense of the unconverted is the refusal to listen. Having been unable to disqualify or discredit the testimony, the teaching of this blind man, the man that was blind and now sees, having been unable in all of their experience and all of their alertness and all of their practice and in the testimonies they gathered, they couldn't discredit him so they refused to listen to him and they silenced him by casting him out. They will not adjust to the truth that has been revealed. So instead, they accuse him, they refuse to listen, they turn their backs to him, and then they cast him out. While I was living in New Jersey, I have a relative who is lost to homosexuality. I wrote to him every couple of weeks for some months. I just sent a card, it was not confrontational, I wasn't saying we've got to talk about your practices, trying to establish some sort of a rapport connection. I never put a return address on the envelope, and so I sent the letters frequently, never heard anything back. Finally, I put a return address on one to see what would happen and two weeks later I received a stamped return to sender. He would not listen, he would not receive. He turned his back, and as far as I know, remains in that circumstance today. There is a movie that is now out, expelled, I don't know if it will be in this area or not. So I think Ben Stein, correct me if I'm wrong in the name, expelled is a movie about how modern academia refuses to even allow the voice of those who would claim that there is an intelligent creator, not a Christian God, but that the universe was created by intelligent design. Ben Stein is a Jew himself, so he's not professing Christ, just that there would be intelligent design. Professors lose their tenure, or they are intimidated into being quiet and keeping and towing the company line, anything, anything that conflicts with the worldview of those who perceive that they have authority and power is a threat to them because it threatens their own creation of their own reality in their mind. We acknowledge it, unbelievers will reject Christian testimony, we know that. We know that unbelievers will even martyr Christians, and they have done that throughout history to silence them, but it surprises us when there is one that we call a brother or a sister that stubbornly resist God's word and God's will. The Pharisees were supposed to be the keepers of God's word, the teachers of His people, and yet here they are foremost in resisting the truth of God's word and God's will. They first listened to the man in a process of discovery, they wanted to pull to peel back the hysteria as they saw it and discovered the truth. We can find this mirrored in 19th century rationalism because it rejected all that was supernatural. That includes the miracles. We know that some of our founding fathers were what are called deists, that is, they believed in a clockmaker God, and that is a God that set things into motion and then step back and let them run on their own. They held only to first calls, not second calls. First calls are the common laws of nature, that is gravity. If I knock my cup over, the water spills to the ground as you witnessed in the past. That is, that when I speak, my voice goes out according to certain pattern, when you make a recipe, the ingredients act and behave in a certain way according to the rules, according to the law. Second calls is when God chooses to act over and above, not in violation of, but over and above, first calls is. And those who were rationalists refused to believe in secondary calls. They believed science, in fact, would ultimately explain all that was supernatural. Moses, they said, didn't cross the red sea by parting it, and Stati simply crossed the red sea, which was nothing but a river about ankle deep. John, and John 6, Jesus didn't actually walk on the water, and Stati was standing on the shoreline just along the water's edge, but because of the terrible weather, it would have certainly appeared as he walked along that he was walking on the water. The 5,000 that were fed by Jesus. It wasn't that the food was multiplied, but because the people that were there were so inspired by the generosity of this little boy, they were willing to share their food with those who didn't have it. And likewise, we don't have to believe that God created the world in six literal days. What he did was he simply gave it a push and set things in motion. And so in six figurative days, things went according to natural order. Pharisees were willing to acknowledge that the man could see and that he could not, but they needed to separate it from Jesus. They won't deny his experience, but they will divorce it from Christ. That's more like the existentialism of the 18 and 1900s of which we are very much in the throes of today. Many of our most cherished hymns are existentialist hymns. Existentialism coming from Kierkegaard, who was Danish and Nietzsche, who was German. It was revolved against all objective truth. Truth was subjective, and reality was focused on the individual. Human experience rather than universal truth was the order of the day. There wasn't a truth that was for all. It was my own personal truth that was true for me. How do I know that we are still part of this today? We still love the song. First of all, secondly, you've probably heard the saying, what's true for you is not true for me. That's an existentialist truth. An existentialist can't see the forest for the trees. Everything is the individual, and it first starts with themselves as the individual. My need, my desire, my purpose. They have lots of rules, usually for other people, but they will not abide by their own rule themselves because they are dictated subjectively and they are relativistic, and when the need of the day presses them, they'll do whatever they want for that day. What's true for you is not for me. I suppose recently in the news, as we've all celebrated that Hillary Clinton was not shot by a sniper, we know that it's seen that she certainly believes that she was under sniper fire, so it's true for her that there were snipers and Kosovo shooting at the first lady, even though the video that we see shows that she's walking not only with a smile, but very slowly, and casually off the runway. Is it true or is it not? Well, she seems to think that it is, and such as existentialism create your own truth. If you believe it enough, then it must be true. We decide on our own what to accept and what to reject in existentialism. Human life is subjective. Every individual must decide what their own standards will be. What their own rules will be. What their own conduct will be. Forget the commandment of honor your father and your mother, which is not simply opening the door or saying yes, ma'am, no ma'am, and sending a car or mother and father's day. It is keeping true to the doctrines, the traditions, and the faith which has been passed on to you. That's honoring your mother and your father. But in existentialism, we can't have that because every individual has to decide on their own what is true and what is not true. So religion and ultimately faith is not a process or product of evidence, but it's a feeling. Your faith is not based on truth, it's based on a feeling, based on what you think about it. It's not testimony, that's important. It's not the objective truth as it's being read or preached in God's word. It's your own choice to believe that's important. Not necessarily what you choose to believe, but the choice to believe is what's important. That's what religion is, and so religious experience trumps revelation. That's existentialism. So little interest in the word today, and so great of an interest in the arts because arts are experienced, and the word is revealed. Religion is felt today, it's felt, it's not necessarily understood. But Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I will show you the truth, and the truth will set you free. Paul said, I testify of their zeal, but it's not according to knowledge. Even in the church, we build ministries oftentimes off of existentialism. We have what's called vision trips. Two-week mission trips, which I've been on, and I do commend them, and they do a lot of good. But the people will come back in the testimony as you know. I am so much more committed now, and now I really understand it because I have seen myself in comparison to something else. Why couldn't you be convicted because of God's mandate and command from scriptures? Why did it take the experience of going somewhere to be convicted and convinced? What commanded? Doesn't that not bring enough conviction and convincing? Do we have to go and find out for ourselves, existentially, to believe that it's true, and to believe that I need to be obedient to the Great Commission, to believe that I can be instrumental in the relieving of suffering and the help and the speaking of God's Word? One of the great hymns that we have is built off of John 1, 4. Open him was life, and that life was the light of men, this verse from that hymn. O splendor of God's glory, bright from light eternal, bringing light. O light of light, light's living spring, true day, all days illuminating. Jesus said, He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. O splendor of God's glory, bright from light eternal, bringing light, light of light, light's living spring, true day, true day, all days illuminating. Have you been made to see the cause of the illuminating power of the Spirit of God in your life? Do you wander about in the field of religion, clinging to this experience and that treasured memory and this family tradition and this beloved place and those friendships and these practices and habits, the familiar taste and smell and sound that give you a sense of security in your life? Or do you truly serve the living God? Are you convicted and convinced by the scriptures and that is sufficient or are they only valid when you experience something that moves you to be obedient? How is it that you live out your Christian life?