Wonders of God-01 in Creation — William MacDonald

The Wonders of God in Creation

I thought in this series we would begin with a study of the wonders of God in creation, providence and redemption. And today we would start with some of the wonders of God in creation. We won't finish this month.

We won't finish in May. We'll have to go on through eternity. But I think it's very helpful going through life, instead of just taking for granted God's marvelous creation, just be quiet and think about it a little for a while.

Sounding incredible. Now, first of all, we want to turn to the Word of God. What book in the Bible do you think speaks most about the wonders of God in creation? Anybody else? Psalm? Well, most of the verses I'm going to read today are from the book of Psalms.

You don't have to turn to them. I'm just going to read them and skip. But listen to them. The psalmist says, O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all. That's Psalm 104, verse 24.

One from Isaiah, Isaiah 6, 3. Isaiah says, The whole earth is full of his glory. And that's not an exaggeration. The whole earth is full of his glory. Psalm 91. I will praise you, O Lord, with my whole heart.

I will tell of all your marvelous works. Psalm 111, verse 2. The works of the Lord are great, studied by all who have pleasure in them. That's nice, isn't it? That's what we want to do. We want to study them.

Studied by all of those who have pleasure in them. Psalm 145, 10. And all your works shall praise you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. The works of the Lord are really marvelous beyond description.

The Human Body as God's Masterpiece

Everything that God has created is a marvel. A single cell of the human body is as marvelous in its design and complexity as the starry universe. That's not an exaggeration. Just imagine that a single cell in the human body is just as marvelous in its design and complexity and its perfect order as the starry heavens.

Spurgeon said it well. He said, in design, in size, in number, in excellence, all the works of the Lord are great. In some point of view or other, each one of the productions of His power or the deeds of His wisdom will appear to be great to the wise in heart.

Those who love their Maker delight in His handiworks. They perceive that there's more in them than appears on the surface. And therefore they bend their minds to study and understand them. I like that.

They bend their minds to study and understand them. The devout naturalist ransacks nature and hoards up each grain of its golden truth. That's lovely. The devout naturalist ransacks nature and hoards up each grain of its golden truth.

When we think of the great works of God, I think one of the best places to start, perhaps, is with the human body. National Geographic calls it the incredible machine. The incredible machine. And I love reading worldly men and how they come to the end of it all.

And they say, well, it's the despair of scientists. Many of the things that happen in the human body. The despair of scientists. A lot of devout Christians call it God's masterpiece. The human body. Exodus 4 .11 says, Who has made man's mouth, or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind?

Have not I, the Lord? The building block, of course, of the human body is what they call the DNA. Don't be alarmed if you don't know anything about it. I don't either. But all the genes in the DNA in the human body, all of the genes in my body would fit into something about the size of an ice cube.

But if you took the DNA and could unravel it and splice it together, it would extend from earth to sun and back 400 times. I know that's incredible, isn't it? So it's true. Where did you ever get such a monstrous thing?

Well, it's in a book called Wondrously Made. Grant wrote that. Carl Sagan, who was no believer, said the human cell is a regime as complex and beautiful as the realm of the galaxies and the stars. That's wonderful, you know, when unregenerate men have to admit they study the human cell and they say, well, it's just as marvelous in its complexity and order as the galaxies and the stars.

He went on to say that the amount of knowledge, of information in the human DNA, if it were written out, it would fill 100 thick volumes. That's great, isn't it? The amount of information stored in the DNA, if it were written out, it would fill 100 thick volumes.

The human body is a marvel of diversity and unity. It has billions of parts, literally. Your body has billions of parts, and yet they all work together, and they enable you to eat, and to drink, and to breathe, and to walk, and to run, and jump, and see, and hear, and remember, and think.

Things that you do quite automatically. And you don't even stop half the time to worship the Lord for all of those things. The head is general headquarters, isn't it, of this complex masterpiece. Just think of it.

Out of the head go the orders to the members of the body. And when obeyed, generally maintain a healthy functioning. Billions of people have lived and are now living, and yet it's marvelous to think that no two of them are alike.

Criminals run up against that fact, don't they? Because their fingerprints track them down. When their fingerprints match those that are found at the scene of the crime. And now, of course, we have what is known as genetic fingerprinting where chemical sequences of DNA found in a person's blood can be traced.

What are the possibilities of two parents producing two children that are the same? Let me read it to you. So vast are the possible combinations of DNA that the odds are infinitesimal about 70 trillion to one that the same two parents will in separate fertilizations produce an identical offspring.

I think it's marvelous. No two people's voices are the same. If I turn on the radio and I hear I hear that man singing, I go, that's really great. I mean, that's Beverly Shea. How do I know it's Beverly Shea?

His voice is distinctive, isn't it? And you do that with President Bush. Who? Only one man with a voice like his? God doesn't repeat himself. And think of the extraordinary coordination of mind and muscle that enable us to do what we do.

For instance, enable a person to run 27 miles an hour. Or enable those marathon runners to run 26 miles. Or enable a person to jump 8 feet. Marvelous when you think of it. We don't think about it. That's the trouble.

We go through life and we just don't pause to think about some of these things. Think of a man or men climbing 29 ,000 feet. Over 29 ,000 feet to the top of Mount Everest. Marvelous, isn't it? Of course, the body needs food to enable all of this to happen.

The Marvels of Sight, Hearing, Speech, and Skin

And so you sit down and you eat a peach. Pretty soon that peach becomes a part of you. It goes down, goes into your esophagus and it's put into your stomach and there the acid, just the right amount of acid, incidentally, starts to work on that peach.

There was too much of land in Humana Hospital with an ulcer. But it knows just how much acid to propel into the stomach to help to digest that. And then that peach and all the other foods you eat, pretty soon it knows where to go.

Part of it becomes hair. Part of it becomes fingernail. Part of it becomes flesh. Part goes to your blood. But how does it know in creation? It happens. You can't have design like that without a designer.

The marvel of sight. I've been thinking a lot lately about the eyes. The marvel of sight. And I could read you all kinds of statistics today about rods and all the rest. It wouldn't mean a thing to you.

Too many million of them. But sight is a marvel, isn't it? Yeah. Our eyes are kind of a combination of a camera, a 35mm camera, a movie camera, a VCR, a light meter, a Polaroid. They are a combination of all those and more besides, too.

You look out and you see and the image is what? It's a good thing, too. It's a good thing. It's very important, you know, having sight when you're driving a car and being able to distinguish between red and green, isn't it?

It's helpful. And that pilot, really, he needs to have depth perception when he's bringing that plane down on the runway. He has to estimate. And I often wonder how they do that. How he can estimate from where he is to when the wheels are going to touch the runway.

So that all of the time, all of these tremendous mathematical equations are being figured out between the eye and the brain. They are absolutely essential. And you know, I'm told that the eye actually sees things upside down and that the brain does a little twist and puts them up the way they should be.

How do you like that? That actually when you see the thing, you see it upside down but the brain comes to your help and by a neat little trick, puts them right side up. If you gaze at an object like if this were a lamp here, and I look at it and gaze at it, I can close my eyes and put my hand out and grab it.

Well, that's not great. Well, it is great. It is great if you stop to think about it. The God who made it possible for us to do that. It's really wonderful. Scientists do not understand that ability. As Long says, a complete explanation of the process of sight is the holy grail of vision research, a conundrum that continues to torment the experts.

Hearing. How do you hear? Think about it. Just hear. I know there's an awful lot that goes into that process of hearing, isn't there? Marvelous to think of sound waves coming in here. And maybe it's somebody speaking, and that sound goes into your inner ear, and your inner ear is able in some way to dispatch those sounds to the part of your brain that has to do with language.

Very important. We don't realize the value of hearing until we don't have it anymore. And then it's very, very important to us. Not only that, but that inner ear has a lot to do with balance, too. And if that inner ear isn't working right, you can become very, very dizzy.

The world goes around dizzily. It's known as vertigo. Speech. Speech comes to us almost as normally as breathing, doesn't it? How do you speak? That's a very involved process. A very involved process.

If you want to know technically how, air is expelled from the lungs. It rushes up the throat to the larynx. There the air creates sounds by vibrating a pair of vocal cords, more precisely known as vocal folds.

Muscles tighten the folds to produce high-pitched tones. Relaxed folds create deeper tones. The lips, tongue, and jaw all working together further modify the sounds into intelligible words. And men really have the boldness to say it all happened by evolution.

That's very important. Do you ever think how amazing your skin is? I never thought about my skin. It allows water to come out, but it won't allow water to go in. How come? You'd drown if it did. If it allowed water to go in, you'd probably drown.

But, you know, it's marvelous. It enables you to know whether you're holding one sheet of paper or two. Or when I'm working with stamps all the time, putting stamps and envelopes in, I can tell by feeling whether it's one stamp or two.

And some of these you can do with dollar bills, too. Marvelous, isn't it? I mean, a dollar bill isn't very thick. And yet there's that sense of whether it's one or two bills there. Water. Hmm. It measures pressure.

And it discerns heat and cold, as you know today. Shaking hands. We don't think any of it. Hello there, you know. But actually, a touch like that is very important in the human life. Kissing, actually.

Don't take me to extreme. But they do say that the stimulation of our sense of touch is essential to a normal life. Your skin is the suit you wear all through life. Two square yards, six pounds, your skin is your largest organ.

I never knew that before. Your skin is your largest organ. And every square inch tingles with a thousand nerve endings. Marvelous, isn't it? Every square inch tingles with a thousand nerve endings. They contain everything that's needed to give us a sense to our environment.

Memory, Smell, and the Human Hand

Smell. Scent. The average person can distinguish 4 ,000 different odors. I think that's wonderful, too. How can the brain store what a rose smells like? I don't know. But it does. It's not just what happens here in your nose.

It's all stored in the brain. Some of you who are older have had this experience. You smell an odor, and it takes you back maybe to your youth. I remember when I was in Italy one time with an OM team, and we went into a house, and we were waiting there.

It was the home of one of the girls on the team. And we were waiting there for supper, actually. And all of a sudden I smelled this odor coming from the kitchen. Actually, I knew right away what it was.

The woman in the kitchen was cooking what we call periwinkles. They're a little shell that attaches to rocks by the ocean. And when I was a boy, we used to eat them. My mother used to pick them, and we'd eat them.

You'd take them out with a straight pin, and you eat them right out of the shell. And yet that odor had been in my mind all those years, and I had never had one of those things all those years. I'm talking about 40 or 50 years.

Yet the odor was stored there in my mind so that I remembered. I knew right away what it was. And when that platter came in with all those periwinkles, all the Americans looked at one of them and said, What's this?

Didn't bother me at all. Just let me have that little straight pin, and I'll go right to work. Marvelous, isn't it? Some people can distinguish 10 ,000 different odors. I often think of those men back in New York who are tea tasters.

That's their job. They sit around a table, and I guess the table has a Lazy Susan on it, and they just sip tea. And they can tell you what grove in China that tea comes from. That's marvelous. Of smell, don't think anything about it.

I mean, we've just always done it. Just take it for granted. But don't get too proud, because a dog can distinguish and has a sense of smell that's far superior to anything that we have. And that's why dogs are used to track down lost persons and to find criminals as well.

The nose can recognize fragrances that cannot be recognized in laboratory experiments. What a great god we have. What a great god we have. And when you say all this, you haven't even scratched the surface.

You haven't even scratched the hand. Nothing is as handy as a hand. That's where we get the word handy. Isn't that right, Fred? It's just handy, that's all. If you make a list, if you could make a list of all the things the human hand has to do, and feed it into a computer, and if you had the right software and all the rest, and you push the button and say, you know, what would best do all of these things, what do you think would come out?

The human hand, of course. I remember Charlie Van Ryn back at Emmaus. He used to come and help us with all kinds of jobs there at Emmaus. And I can remember him marveling at the human hand when he'd be putting plaster in a corner, and he'd put his finger down to smooth the plaster right into that corner.

You don't think about these things, but he thought about them. And he worshipped the Lord as he thought of the power of the human hand to do so many things like that. The hand is so important that there's a special area of the brain that's assigned to it.

Did I say the brain? I love that verse in Job 38, 36. Who has put wisdom in the mind? Or who has given understanding to the heart? That's marvelous, isn't it? The power to think. I get going and I always think of a lady down in Marietta, Georgia.

One night I was talking down there, and I was talking about the starry universe, the heavens declared the glory of God, and the firmament showeth its handiwork. And this dear southern belle came up to me at the end of the meeting.

She said, Brother MacDonald, you make my brains tired. And it makes my brains tired, too. When I think of all of these marvels of God. The average adult brain weighs about three pounds, and it enables its owner to learn, but animals can do that.

It enables its owner to think, and animals can't do that. It enables us to understand, to memorize, and to retrieve information. I think this is fascinating. All the information that we've ever known is stored up here.

That's amazing to me. I think Dorothy knows Henry Peterson down south. Maybe somebody else knows him. Preacher down south. And Henry's well on in years now, and he's become senile. Somebody said to me the other day, Henry thinks that President Coolidge is in office.

And they thought it was rather funny, but I thought that's marvelous. All his memories from the era of President Coolidge are stored there in his mind. And he's just retrieving them, that's all. Isn't that amazing?

It just gave me a new appreciation of the brain. Now, I can't remember everything that's ever happened right now, but it's all there. It's all there. A perfect record of everything that's ever happened.

I think maybe I've told you before, you know about this doctor in Montreal, I forget his name, Penrose or Penwell or something like that. And he used to do experiments on the human brain, and he would work on a woman's brain, let's say, and he'd have an electrode there, and he'd touch this part of the brain, and she'd be under local anesthetic.

And he'd say, what is it now? And she said, oh, I'm in the hospital giving birth to my first baby, she said. I can smell the anesthetic. And then he changed to another, he was charting the human brain, what part of the brain, and he said, what is it now?

And she said, oh, we're sitting in the living room listening to Aida. You know. This was electrode. It was all there. All it had to do, all he had to do was stimulate it and bring it back. How do 10 or 12 watts of electricity and some chemicals pumped in by the blood produce our plans and intentions, our mental life?

Though much has been learned about the brain in recent decades, we still know only the barest outlines of its operation. Some philosophers doubt that we will ever be able to fathom how mind and body interact in this convoluted organ.

I like this. It's biology's ultimate challenge. This isn't written by a Christian. Biology's ultimate challenge. The work of the human mind and how the mind and the body interact. You say, why are you going over all of this?

To give you great thoughts of God, that's why. And I think we need that, don't you? We need to have great thoughts of God. Years ago, J .B. Phillips wrote a book called Your God is Too Small. And that's true.

And we tend to think of God as people like ourselves, you know? A person like ourselves. A wonderful, wonderful God. The brain has been called an enchanted loom. It takes the electrical signals from 252 million rods and cones in the eyes and weaves those bits of information into a tapestry portrait of what is before you.

Even scientists who are not Christians stand in awe of the human brain. And even if they refuse to acknowledge the designer, they've called it the most complex computer on earth. I'd like to read you what some scientists say in that regard.

Edmund Ballas called it the most complicated structure in the known universe. They can transplant hearts, but they'll never transplant a brain. Never transplant a brain. Dr. Michael Denton wrote a book, Evolution, A Theory in Crisis.

He says it would take an eternity for engineers to assemble an object even remotely resembling the human brain using the most sophisticated engineering techniques. I like that. I like it when men of the world have to confess that.

God makes the wrath of men depraved, and the remainder of wrath he restrains. Let me read that again. It would take an eternity for engineers to assemble an object even remotely resembling the human brain using the most sophisticated engineering techniques.

Convinces me that a computer can never duplicate the mind. Isaac Asimov, who recently died, incidentally, another evolutionist, said, In man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.

I think they're going to be judged by their words someday. You know? Men that are going to say this are going to stand before God and he's going to say, Did you say this? They're going to have to be affected by that.

Well, you'll be judged by that. Going back to Carl Sagan again, he said that the information content of the human brain would fill 20 million volumes, as many as are found in the world's largest libraries.

That's marvelous, isn't it? It's actually breathtaking. I like what some Christians have said about it. One Christian said, Our brain is the greatest concentration of chemoneurological order and complexity in the physical universe.

It's a video camera and library. This is nice. It's a video camera and library, a computer and communication system, AT &T, all in one. And the more the brain is used, the better it becomes. Remember that, young people.

The more the brain is used, the better it becomes. I believe that's true, too. A detailed picture of the human brain is slowly emerging, the origin of which seems entirely beyond comprehension from a naturalistic point of view.

In other words, it couldn't have just happened. We see remarkable purpose and interdependence within the brain. Every part works for the benefit of the whole. Such features are not totally understood.

The brain is unable fully to understand itself. That's good. You've got a brain, but you can't understand your brain. Of course you can. As always, we cannot fully understand the created, intricate details of the present day world.

One scientist estimated that our brain, on the average, processes over 10 ,000 thoughts and concepts every day. Well, I believe that. Your brain goes through that many mechanisms every day. 10 ,000. That doesn't sound too much to me.

Some people process a much greater number. You think of the human brain, you think of memory. Toscanini was reputedly able to study a symphony score and file it away in his memory perfectly to the last note.

You hear a musical score and you think, then he could reproduce it. Robert Dick Wilson, a very eminent Christian scholar, was proficient in 45 different languages. Incredible! He was. He was proficient in 45 ancient, ancient eastern languages.

I'm not talking about German and French. A group of Jewish memory experts memorized the 12 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud. 12 volumes. I had an aunt in Scotland, I told you about her before. She knew all the psalms by memory, including Psalm 119 in Gaelic, not in English.

And we had a preacher among the assembly years ago named August van Rijn and he began having eye trouble and the doctor told him, you're going to lose your sight. You're going to become blind. So he said, well if I am, I'm going to.

And he memorized the New Testament. I've heard him quote the 119th Psalm and followed it as he quoted it. I've heard him do that. A marvel of the human mind. You know what determines whether you can do it?

Whether you want to. Whether you want to do it or not. The trouble is we're mentally lazy and we don't want to do it. Memory. I think of heredity. To me this is absolutely fascinating. We all know that children often times look like, here's a boy, now he looks like his mother and a few minutes later you look and see, oh I can see his father in him too, you know.

Heredity, Emotion, and the Circulatory System

To me that's marvelous. And not only the physical appearance, but the gait. I've seen people walking and actually he just walks like his father. But to me that isn't even as wonderful. That's wonderful enough.

Don't let me underrate it. But that isn't as wonderful as the fact that poetic ability can be passed down through the genes. How can that be? Are you sure? I'm sure. One of the hymn writers that we use all the time in our hymn books, you look and you'll see his name is J .G. Deck.

Wrote a lot of hymns. Well his great granddaughter is Lucy Deck Shaw. She's probably one of the leading Christian poetesses in the United States today. She inherited it. That ability. I've already mentioned August van Rijn.

In addition to being a good preacher he was a good painter too. And he was a lineal descendant of Rembrandt. Whose real name, whose full name was Rembrandt van Rijn. And August van Rijn was descended from him and it came down through the genes, the ability to paint.

Well I think that's marvelous. Marvelous that I could look like a parent but it's more marvelous that I would have those abilities passed down to me. Emotions. Fear. Sorrow. And so forth. It's wonderful how in times of crisis the body knows to pump additional adrenaline in, isn't it?

How does the body know? I don't know. The circulatory system. I mean you could spend a lifetime becoming a specialist on any one of these subjects. I'm going over in one minute. Think of that heart pumping blood.

Beating four weeks after conception and continuing sometimes till 104th, 5th year. Without having to go in for lubrication. Like my Chevy does. Pumps 100 ,000 times a day. It's marvelous, isn't it? It's a good thing you don't have to think about it.

You wouldn't be listening to what I was saying. You'd be sure to breathe. Get enough breath to keep my heart going. You wouldn't hear a thing I was saying. Just to keep your life preserved. From beneath the breastbone this fist-sized masterpiece sounds its beat more than 2 .5 billion times in a 75 year lifetime.

It drives five quarts of blood in a minute to every cell in the body, constantly cleansing and nourishing with its ebb and flow. Pumps 10 or 12 quarts of blood that in turn distributes oxygen, carries away waste, regulates the body temperature.

Too much for me. I just can't take it all in but I can worship the one who designed it all. I'll tell you that. The wonders of reproduction, conception, and the miracle of birth are extraordinary. We start off about the size of the dot over an eye in your Bible.

Reproduction, Birth, and the Soul

Look in your Bible or any piece of printed matter that you have and see the dot over the eye and that's you as you began. Nothing to be too proud about, huh? Hey, I want to tell you something. In that dot, in that dot was programmed everything you're going to be.

The shape of your chin, the color of your eyes, the color of your hair, your bone structure. It was all programmed in that little dot. That makes me worship. That makes me a worshiper. Everything. As the fertilized egg develops, cells assume different form.

This is marvelous. The fertilized egg develops and pretty soon there are cells going out to different parts of the body and this cell says, oh, I'm going to be a kidney. And it goes right to where the kidney is supposed to be.

How does it know where to go? It's a good thing my kidney doesn't grow up here. It doesn't. Another cell says, oh, I'm going to be a lung. And it goes right to where the lung is going to be. And those cells move out through the body to just the right place to form the kind of person you and I are today.

It's just too much, isn't it? As the fertilized egg develops, cells assume different forms. Heart, liver, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, and all the other parts of the body. Get this sentence. Experts agree that how they do this is one of the most baffling questions of science.

I love it. I love it. How those cells know where to go in the body and what they're going to be, science has no explanation for that. But we do, don't we? Before long, the groups of cells are gathering into layers, then into sheets and tubes, sliding into the proper places at the proper time, forming an eye exactly where the eye should be.

The pancreas, where the pancreas belongs. The order of appearance is precise. It's a good thing they didn't ask my advice. Because when I said about the kidney, I reached back here, and I don't even know if that's where my kidney is, or where one of them is.

I'm glad they didn't ask my advice. They knew where to go. The order of appearance is precise, with structures like veins and nerves appearing just in time. That's another marvelous thing. Not only where they went, but the veins and other things appeared just in time to support those new organs.

And this is in the development of the baby in the womb. In four weeks, the progeny of the first cell has shaped a tiny, beating heart. In only three months, they're summoning reflex responses from the developing brain.

Scientists agree that the appearance of life in the womb cannot be completely explained, even by all our scientific knowledge. Biologists have identified the sequence of reproductive events, yet they know merely what happens.

They don't know how or why. You'd think of a humble scientist, wouldn't you? They'd be glad to bow on the knee and acknowledge God as the creator and sustainer of the universe. And then, the relation between the mental and the physical.

You know, medicine now is realizing there's a very close the Bible has known it all along psychosomatic medicine. There's a very close connection between your mind and your spiritual condition, and your body.

Worry too much, you can get ulcers. I went to a doctor once with some crazy thing, I don't know what it was, and I said, could tension cause this? And he said, Mr. Tension can cause anything. Tension?

It's not even tension, it's just mental. It's not your body. The body knows. The body knows and reacts to it. Worry causes ulcers. People who are aggressive, achievement oriented, and impatient are more prone to heart attacks than other people who are more relaxed.

Sin often brings on sickness and death. We know that today. And then you think of the complicated mechanisms of the human body against disease. That's marvelous, too. Why when you called the doctor, why did he tell you to take two aspirins and call me in the morning?

Because he knows that most things are better by the morning. It's just a medical secret, that's all. He knows that most things are better by the morning. Why? Because God has built a system into our bodies that have a marvelous way of fighting fever, viruses, and infections.

They do it very efficiently. Think of how the body sends out warning signals when all is not well. Fever and inflammation and pain and bleeding are examples. They're not only red flags, but they're part of the process of bringing the body back to normal.

I think this is important. How does the body know in a transplant operation that it's not one of its own organs? You know? And wants to reject it because it's not its own. I have a friend, and he had to have a kidney transplant lately, and his daughter gave one of her kidneys, but his body rejected it.

So she's with one kidney, and he's waiting to get another one. And then there's a whole realm of the spirit and the soul, too. It leaves science completely outside. The spirit and the soul. That which enables me to fellowship with God.

And you know, the fact that there's an intelligence quite apart from the human brain. Did you know that you have an intelligence apart from the human brain? Well, you two found that. Well, supposing I should die today and go to be with the Lord.

Am I conscious? Of course. I'm enjoying the presence of the Lord. How come? You don't have your body. You don't have your brain. You don't need it. You get that vividly in the story of the rich man in Hades.

He was conscious. He had intelligence. Wished that someone would go and tell his brother, so that they wouldn't come to this place of torment, didn't he? His body was in the grave, dear friend. When the believer dies, he goes to be with the Lord.

He's still conscious. Perfect consciousness. Well, I've known that in visiting people who were dying. I think I've told you before. I remember just about this time, I went to Chicago, visited a dear lady, Mrs. Nisbet, who was dying.

She was in a coma when I visited her. She had a ruptured aneurysm or something. I said to her, Mrs. Nisbet, it's Bill. No answer. Just came to say hello. No answer. How would it be if we prayed? Hmm. There was a response the minute spiritual things were mentioned.

Now, please don't ask any scientist to ever delve into that and find the why and wherefore of that. The way God has made us is all. Well, what a wonderful God we have, huh? I hope we go away from here just a little more grateful for him, and instead of taking things for granted, our health, and our memory, and our eyesight, and all of the other things, just lift our hearts in thanks to the Lord for the wonderful way he has made us.

I believe John has a closing hymn for us.