Certainly good to have you here this evening. See this number out. We appreciate you. Being here has been a beautiful first day of the week, even with the snow that we had a little bit of this morning. Certainly couldn’t tell it by the time we got finished with our worship this morning and got out, but we are certainly grateful for your presence. Open your Bibles with me. If you will, to Genesis chapter 11, Genesis chapter 11, I want us to read the first nine verses of this chapter concerning an account that most all of us are familiar with as it relates toward the tower of Babel Genesis chapter 11, because what we’re going to see here is that Bible wasn’t all babbled, Abel, wasn’t all babble. Notice what Moses records and the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass. As they journeyed from the East that they found a plain in the land of Shiner and dwelt there. And they said one to another, go to let us make brick and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar. And they said, go to let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven. And let us make us a name lest we should be less. We be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. The Lord came down to see the city …

Is good to be back home. It’s good to see you. And to be able to be with you this morning, we had a very good trip down to Lakeland, Florida for the Florida school of preaching lectureship. That’s where I attended the school of preaching and had a very good lectureship there. Just so that some of you know, it’s not always in the seventies and eighties in Florida. Okay. I lived there for 10 years, so I can vouch for that. But there were a couple of nights where it get down, got down into the thirties. And we, we were out a couple afternoons when we had to go to the grocery store for, for some things. And those Floridians were going around with winter jackets on, I mean, overcoats. And we were there either with a light coat on or nothing at all. I mean that, I mean, no coat, no coat. Sorry about that. But anyway, it did get cool, but it, it started warming up as the week, went long, went along and did get up to about 80 a couple of days, Thursday and Friday, I think it was, but we had a very good trip down. We were ahead of the front that brought all the cold weather to you last weekend. And, but on our way down, we’d, hadn’t even thought about it until we were actually there that when we got to South Alabama on Friday or no Saturday last …

Dreary, but he had his is a good day in so many different ways. I mean, after all, if we lived a Oh a couple of hundred years ago, we’d have to deal with the cold inside the building. And so we have a nice place to come and to that’s warm and a place out of the, out of the shelter. I remember one of the trips that we made to Ukraine that, that particular Sunday morning, it was well in Ukraine. It was customary and only wear a suit even when it was a super, super cold. And so I don’t remember how cold it was, but I know that it was ice all over the outside and, and snow piled up. Great big piles of size of houses and no heat in the auditorium where we were. And so everybody was all bundled up, but it was my turn to preach and got up in the suit. Just what I’m wearing right now and preached just did whatever was necessary, but it was cold. I’ll tell you for sure. So we, we don’t have that and we can be really thankful that we don’t have to deal with those kinds of things. And there are other places in the world, I think about Costa Rica, that they have metal buildings that they meet in the summertime. And you can imagine a hot, it was, I remember one time though it rained and you couldn’t hear the speaker. …

So I can see you not look through it. It is certainly my privilege to be here this morning and to be a part of this congregation, I didn’t know what we would find over here, you know, and as far as ice and those kinds of things, basically the first mile away from our house and our subdivision and getting out toward the highway, it was, it was pretty bad. And I thought, well, I’m not sure about this, but we got through the highway and it was pretty well clear from there on out until we got into town over on this end. So anyway, it was pretty clear as most of you probably know that my work has changed. The, my work with the Bible Institute of Missouri actually ended last Wednesday with the giving of the finals. Although I did some other work on Thursday for, for them to kind of help out a little bit. But anyway, my work with them has ended and I have taken on the responsibility of being the administrative director of the online Academy of biblical studies. Brother, Ted Thrasher has been struggling with health problems for a really a couple of years. And they tried to work it out, work, maintain that, but it has not been able to be done. And so they asked me to actually, when I resigned from BIM, they got word of that. And then they ask me to go full-time with the online …

Certainly grateful for your presence this evening, as you know, our numbers were down this morning. And so we fully anticipated that they would be down again tonight. Not quite as much as I thought, maybe. So we are certainly grateful for you being here. Sister Costco was not feeling good this morning. The reasons she was not here and she’s not here again tonight, but also Keith, let me know that she received word today that her mother passed away. If she had lived till the 25th, I think you said the 25th, she would have been a hundred years old, but fortunately she was not having health issues and she just faded away. And certainly that’s one of the best ways to go if you’re going to go. But certainly remember Costco and her family and your prayers, if you would, He became a Christian, her mother<inaudible> That’s. That’s great. Yeah. Okay. That’s that’s great. Statistics show us that older individuals are less likely to obey the gospel than those who are younger. They are set in their ways. And so when you hear of someone who’s up in their seventies and their eighties or something like that, and they obey the gospel, it, it certainly, of course it always causes us joy. It should anyway. But to hear somebody that is up in age like that, that realizes that they’ve not done what they need to do and to make the proper preparations for heaven. That’s certainly …