Our aim is to celebrate the sustaining grace of God for 125 years and my first question is what is that?

What is sustaining grace.

And I want to put it in a four-line poem

that I took about an hour to figure out yesterday,

and I'm going to say it over and over again because when I

take the time to put things in a rhyme that is true it just helps me helps me so you have to tolerate this.

What is sustaining grace?

Not grace to bar what is not bliss.

Nor flight from all distress but this. The grace that orders our trouble and pain and

then in the darkness is there to sustain.

Now the reason I stress this is because if we were to celebrate a grace this morning that bars us from what is not bliss and that gives not order our pain, it would be biblically false and that does not

order our pain it would be biblically false and exper'm going to give you some illustrations both from our church life and

from the Bible to show you that that is so. Our experience and the Bible teaches us that

grace does not prevent pain but orders it, arranges it, measures it out, and then in the

darkness of it sustains us.

For example, yesterday, Bob Ricker, going to borrow your story, you go to him and get it corrected

afterwards if I've missed anything.

He told us in that other room over there that God ordains that the people of the Lord from time to time take stones and make memorials out of them

so that when they look at them and children say what's that parents and others can

say that's because God did that. And then he told the story of a little less than

ten years ago their daughter was in a very serious automobile accident, so

serious that she would have died, but the car behind providentially had a doctor in it.

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