we're actually going to go to
1 Thessalonians. And we're going to be in chapter
5. And really continuing on almost
could have been a two-part message other than it's a longer section
there, but we'll read 1 Thessalonians 5 verses one through 11, and
hopefully you'll understand why I picked the passage from Isaiah
here in a little bit. So 1 Thessalonians chapter five,
and we'll begin with verse one. Now brothers about times and
dates we do not need to write to you. For you know very well
that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
While people are saying peace and safety, destruction will
come on them suddenly as labor pains on a pregnant woman and
they will not escape. But you brothers are not in darkness
so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all
sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to
the night or to the darkness. So then let us not be like others
who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. For
those who sleep, sleep at night. And those who get drunk, get
drunk at night, but since we belong to the day, let us be
self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and
the hope of salvation as a helmet. For God did not appoint us to
suffer wrath, but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus
Christ. He died for us so that whether
we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore,
encourage one another and build each other up just as, in fact,
you are doing. On the way down, I listened to
a couple of Joe's messages and reminded again that unlike a
lot of places that Paul and I have been, probably a lot of you do
not have the background of fundamentalism, evangelicalism that taught dispensational
theology. And one of the hallmarks of dispensational
theology is passages like this. It's like if you wanna pack out
the church or you wanna get people to show up, you would go to a
passage like this and apart from what I think should be the focus
of the passage, there'd be a lot of curiosity drawn to certain
phrases and items that are brought here. So when we look here and it talks
about the times and dates, or literally the times and seasons,
and it talks about the day of the Lord, a lot of people in
those circles, and I think there's maybe a certain amount of that
in the world as a whole, a lot of people in those circles would
be like, okay, you know, how can we tell, right? And there'll
be things of curiosity like, I heard a pure red heifer was
born in Israel, or something that they believe purports some
sort of sign that they're looking for. So what they would do with
the passage like this is, they would say, Paul's not gonna talk,
Paul's not gonna explain those signs because they knew them
back then, but I've got some, you know, secret knowledge that
I'm gonna piece together from a bunch of different passages
from the Old Testament where I'm inserting, you know, the
rapture will happen here and this will happen there, and what
Paul is calling us to do is to be ready, not only to look for
his coming, but to read the tea leaves, as it were, of what's
happening in the world. So I know in the previous presidential
administration, there was probably more of a fever pitch for that,
although there are some who believe that our current president is
the antichrist, or maybe he's the forerunner of it. I don't
know. I've lost a lot of interest in
following their schemes there. But when Paul writes, and it
could be Paul, Silas, and Timothy talking about it and somebody
else is transcribing it for us, but I'm going to use the shorthand
of Paul here. When Paul writes here, we do
not need to write to you about times and dates and seasons. I think what he's saying is,
is I've talked to you about the fact that God is going to come
again and judge, and that no man knows the day or the hour. So with that in mind, just one
quick passage. I'm gonna turn back to Acts chapter
one. Acts chapter one, and hopefully
I have the reference here correct. And I'll back up a verse or two. So we have in the book of Acts, chapter one, verse four, on one
occasion when he was eating with them, he gave this command, do
not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my father promised.
And then verse six, when they met together, they asked him,
Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?
So what they were looking for at that time, and if you remember
from the various gospel accounts, they were looking for a physical
restoration of a physical kingdom with a descendant of David on
the throne. And a lot of those in dispensationalism
are looking for the same thing, and they will look at passages
like this as curiosities for us to prepare us for that. So
to their question and to the question of people who have that
mind where they're curious about these things and they think they
can determine exactly when, you know, on Thursday, Jesus is gonna
return or something like that, Jesus says to them, verse seven
of chapter one of Acts, it is not for you to know the times
or dates, same phrase as we have here, that the father is set
by his own authority. It's not for you to know it.
So what Paul writes here, we don't need to write to you for
you know very well. What he's saying is you already
know this teaching and elsewhere Christ said that no one knows
except for the father, the son of man doesn't even know when
that time is gonna occur. So when we're talking about the
end of all things, When we're talking about the return of Christ,
and he says we do not need to write to you, he's already communicated
this truth. Don't engage in idle speculation
about the return of Christ. You need to know what scripture
emphasizes about the return of Christ, but don't look for, you
know, it snowed, it was 70 degrees on Friday and it snowed the next
day. That must be a sign of Christ's return. No, it's March in the
Upper Midwest. It's not a special sign. So he says, we do not need to
write to you about these times and dates. And then he says,
you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a
thief in the night. And I had read earlier from Isaiah
13, but in Isaiah 2, in Ezekiel 30, Joel 1, Amos 5, Obadiah,
Zephaniah, Zechariah, Malachi, Matthew 24, Luke 12, and I could
go on and on. There are plenty of passage of
scripture that either use this phrase of the day of the Lord
or use this term about times and seasons, or times and dates,
that are talking about the end. It's a very common theme, especially
in the prophetic Old Testament scriptures, and more than likely,
since 1 Thessalonians is probably one of the oldest books of the
New Testament, they didn't have scrolls with the gospel accounts. Maybe they
had portions of sayings from it. They were likely to be very
familiar with what is said in the Old Testament about the day
of the Lord. And here he relates it as Jesus
does in Matthew 24. If you want to turn back, you
can. Matthew 24, and make sure I have
the right. Start with verse 36, and this
illustrates what was said before, Matthew 24, 36. No one, well,
let me back up a little bit here, because I do need to give you
a little bit of context. So I want to turn back to the
beginning of the chapter. So Jesus is leaving the temple
in verse one. He says, I'm telling you about
the temple, not one stone here will be left on another. And
of course, they're curious, verse three, tell us when this will
happen. And Jesus talks about some signs of deception, and
he's talking not about the end of days, he's talking about the
destruction of the temple, but he is talking also about the
future. when all things will come to
pass. So there's quite a bit, and I'm
not gonna read all of chapter four to get to this, but he says
it in verse 34, I tell you, this generation will not pass away
until all these things have happened. And he's talking about the destruction
of the temple, and he says in verse 36, no one knows about
that, day or hour not the angels in heaven nor the son but only
the father and he says as it was in the days of noah so it
will be at the coming of the son of man so there was a near
fulfillment of the destruction of the temple but jesus was also
talking about when he would return in verse 42 keep watch because
you don't know what day your lord will come Verse 44, you
must be ready because the Son of Man will come at an hour when
you don't expect him. So they certainly had, at the
very least, the Old Testament summary that there would be a
day of judgment that would come. The belief is that 1 Thessalonians
was written before the destruction of the temple. They may not have
seen that there was a large gap of time between the destruction
of the temple and the end of all things, but Jesus and God
the Father certainly understood that. So when they're talking
here about this, they knew this very well. They knew that they
were expecting They could expect the return
of Christ to happen at any time. There was no event that needed
to happen prior to the end of all things and God's judgment
to happen. So God is going to come on a
day. There's nothing that needs to
precede it. We don't need to be waiting for
a certain event. And when he comes, he'll judge
the world, he'll deliver his people, and he will complete
setting up his kingdom. That is not a physical kingdom
on earth, although the earth will be subdued. but a kingdom
that has no end. He will cast out sin, he will
punish evil, he will renew all things. That is the hope that
we have, but there's also a negative side to that because those who
are not in Christ, those who have to stand before God in their
own sins, they will face the wrath of God. So the concern
that, and again, we're playing the game of telephone and we're
hearing half the conversation here. The concern that many believe
that Paul is addressing here is In chapter four, verses 13
and following, he was addressing their concerns. What about those
who die before the Lord returns? Are they some sort of second
class citizens? And without repeating everything
that I said the last time, essentially he says, no, we who are alive
when the Lord returns we are not going to precede them our
glory and their glory aren't going to be any different they
will be raised we will be raised with them and so we'll be with
the Lord forever. And now he turns to the second
part well when we're alive Then what, right? I don't know
exactly the nature of their question. Maybe they were concerned that
they hadn't been good enough, or maybe they were concerned,
you know, how bad are things going to be when this happens? So he's addressing that concern.
How do we need to live? What do we need to do, Paul and
Silas and Timothy, in light of this anytime potential return
of Christ? is, I believe, addressing that
concern. And he uses some illustrations
here that I think a lot of times people rush through because they
wanna talk about some other things here. But I think it's important
for us to just spend a minute or two talking about these analogies
that are here. If you notice, in the illustrations
that Paul uses, he spends a lot of time comparing darkness and
light, being drunk, and unfortunately our translation doesn't recognize
this, and being sober. A lot of times in our translation,
let's see, how do we translate it here? Self-controlled. And we do know
that, I mean, the opposite of of drunkenness, soberness can
be used in a way to talk about self-control. But before we talk
about it as a figure, let's talk about it literally. In our day
and age, I mean, we have lights on inside here, and we have the
ability to put up surveillance cameras and have motion detection
and everything else, but in their day, when it got dark, it got
dark, and you couldn't afford to burn candles all night long,
so when would somebody, if they were gonna come and steal something
from you, or inflict harm on your person, when were they likely
to do it? Well, in the dark. That's when
a thief would come to try to steal something from you. And
what could you do to be prepared? Well, it depended on your situation. Many people in those days and
in that area would live in towns and you would have a guard or
guards to watch the city walls. And you would hope that you had
hired not, I'm gonna really date myself, Otis and Barney Fife
to be your guards, right? The town drunk. And the guy who
had to keep his bullet in his pocket because he couldn't be
trusted to have it loaded because he was more likely to shoot himself
in the foot than he was to shoot a criminal. So a thief, if you're
not prepared and it gets dark, you're going to be in trouble.
And Paul says here, When the Lord comes, it's like that, it's
like being prepared for that. If you're not ready, there's
nothing that's gonna prevent that thief from coming in, taking
everything you have, and leaving. So he uses that analogy, like
a thief in the night. Another comment or thing that
he says here, he says, well, people are saying peace and safety,
that destruction will come on them suddenly and they will not
escape. And there is a tendency in this
world if the stock market is up and the price of certain goods
that we need are down, and the political party that we have
in office is our side, and people are leaving us alone, there's
a tendency for people to say peace and safety. And I realize
there are people who have other agenda items as well. But what
Paul is talking about here is this tendency for people to say
peace, peace, and the prophets said this as well, when there
is no peace. People who don't have peace with
God, I think, is behind this saying, saying, hey, I have these
physical needs met. I don't need to worry about where
I stand with God. To them, he's saying, God is
going to come like a thief in the night. For believers, They
should be ready. Not that they have to earn their
salvation or do something as a preparation. If you're in Christ,
you're prepared enough. But what he's saying is it won't
be something that you loathe. A thief coming in the middle
of the night, stealing your stuff, that's something that you do
not want to have happen. And then he brings in another
figure, and I've been told that men have a tendency to talk about
labor pains, and they've never experienced it, and they have
no right to do it. I guess under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit, Paul is, I guess, authorized to do it,
so I'm not gonna give any stories about something I've never experienced,
but I've been told that when a woman is pregnant, sure we
know, I mean if a woman is nine months pregnant, it shouldn't
be a shock. But especially, I've heard, the
first time, it's a sudden thing. There's nothing you can do. The
water breaks, the labor contractions happen, and somebody's gonna
be doing something soon, right? There's no going back, there's
no escape. And I think that's the idea that
Paul has here. It's not like she can just ignore
the problem and it's gonna go away. And that's why he uses
that term, there's no escape. If you aren't prepared, there
are no lights, there's no camera. There's nothing protecting you.
The guards are Otis and Barney. You're in trouble. You're going
to be stolen from. In the same way, if you haven't
made preparations and you're off somewhere and you have no
one to help, there's no escape. When the baby's going to come,
it's going to come. Those are the illustrations that
he wants to use behind all of this. And like I said, in reality,
only unbelievers are going to be disturbed by the fact of the
Lord's return. It's just more of a concern about
the attitude that we have. We were talking earlier about
a triathlon. You don't plan the triathlon
in your ninth month of your pregnancy if you're a woman. That would
be a foolish thing to do. Thirdly, wanna just talk here
about the opposite. So having set the stage here,
Paul is talking about the end of all things. He's talking about
the fact that it's something to be prepared for, that it's
imminent. But he says to them, he's writing
to believers in Christ, and by extension, he's talking to those
of us here who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, verse four,
but you are not in darkness. so that this day should surprise
you like a thief. You are all sons of the light
and sons of the day. So everyone else apart from Christ
is in darkness. Everyone else is like my mythical
town with Barney and Otis there and there's no lights. The thieves
are gonna come in and be able to steal The woman is not going to be
prepared and is going to have to suffer the anguish of labor
pains with no assistance. But we are not that. If we're
believers in Christ, we are not in darkness. We are not unprepared. we are, verse nine, not appointed
to suffer wrath. And this must have been a concern
for them because this is at least the second, if not the third
time that this was brought up. In chapter one, verse 10, Paul says, to wait for a son
from heaven who he raised from the dead, Jesus who rescues us
from the coming wrath. And in chapter, where we're at
right now, in chapter five, verse nine. Verse nine, God did not
appoint us to suffer wrath. Well, why would that be a concern?
Well, the reason it was a concern for them and sometimes it's a
concern for us is circumstances are such that we can look at
the misery or the problems or the circumstances that we see
in the world and say, did I miss it? Am I being punished for how
I've acted. I mean, I'm not saying that you
can sow, as they say, wild oats and expect rice to come up. There
is certainly a cause and effect when it comes to immediate actions. If I'm not watching what I'm
doing with a hammer and I hit my thumb, it's going to hurt.
But I think sometimes people can be predisposed to think God
is paying me back, right? I'm under God's wrath, and if
God was gonna return right now, he's going to get me for the
things that I haven't done right. Paul doesn't put it this way,
and I think there's a very good comfort that he's gonna bring
up here in a minute. But he said, you're not of darkness. I'm writing to you who are believers.
You've professed, and I believe possessed faith in the Lord Jesus
Christ, and because of that, you aren't in darkness. You are
in the light. You belong to the day. You're
not those who are getting drunk at night, right? non-preparedness
things. Because if you want to be as
little prepared for events, get drunk before you need to do something
that requires you to think clearly. But he says, spiritually speaking,
you're not of the dark. You're not of the drunk. You're not of the night, but
you're of the light, you're of the day, you're of the sober
or self-controlled. And the reason isn't because
of something in you. The reason is because God did
not appoint you to wrath. But, as he says here, to receive
salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. That's a comforting thought to
me is I don't have to look at how much I measure up because
if I'm honest and I use the standard that God uses, I fall far short
of that standard. But the reality for believers
is we're not of the darkness but of the light. We're not appointed
to wrath. but we're appointed to salvation,
and verse 10 says, he died for us so that, and I'm skipping
a phrase and I'll come back to it later, we may live together
with him. The whole point of salvation
isn't just a get out of jail free card, but it's life with
Christ. That's our hope. God has not
only rescued us from the wrath of God that is rightly deserved
by each one of us by our own sin, and by our association,
our federal head, Adam Sinning, as well, but both by nature,
by appointment of a representative, and by our own actions, we deserve
the wrath of God. And here we read that those of
us who've trusted in Christ that God is caused to be born again,
what he says of us is not only are we not appointed to suffer
wrath, but we are to receive salvation, and that's because
Christ died so that we can live together with him. Every blessing of the gospel,
present and future, life in and with Christ, the indwelling of
the Holy Spirit, justification by faith, adoption into the family
of God, conformity to Christ, and preservation from the wrath
of God, the hope of glory, all that comes to us because of what
Christ did on our behalf. This is actually one of the most
explicit statements, I think, in the scripture. about the substitutionary
atonement, the fact that he died for us. It's also the reason
I don't believe in Arminianism, because if he died for us, we're
all going to heaven, right? If he died for everyone, everyone
is going to heaven. But he died for his people. He died for us so that whether Awake or asleep, we may live
together with him. So what is the response of the
believer to be in light of these things? Well, if you look back
at verse six, he says, let us not be like others who are asleep,
but let us be alert or awake. And it says self-controlled or
sober. So what he says first of all
is, if you have been rescued from the wrath of God, if you're
in the light, why live like everybody else? Live in light of that new
reality. And you would say, and I know
I say the thing to myself is, it's not possible. I stumble
at this all the time, and that's true, but Paul is not saying
this apart from the Holy Spirit. Paul is not saying work this
up in your flesh. What he's saying to you and to
me and to every believer here is that if we live as those who
are awake, not as those who are asleep, if we live as if we're
in the light, then we will experience things differently to the extent
that God enables us to do that. We're called to do that. Ephesians
5.8 says, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the
Lord. And then he says, live as children
of light. I have lots of bad habits. If
you want to know more of them, you can ask Paula. But one of
the things, and maybe some of you sympathize with me. I'm not
looking for sympathy. I'm just using it as illustration.
You get older. You wake up in the middle of
the night. Got to go to the bathroom, right? Now, the sane thing to
do is to turn on lights, right? Especially if you're somewhere
where it's not your home, right? You're staying in a hotel, right? You should turn on lights. What's
the last thing I wanna do? Turn on the light, right? And
then if you have a dog, you would think, if I bought a dog, I'd
buy a white dog. We used to have a white dog.
So you wouldn't trip over the thing in the middle, or put her
in her kennel at night. So you wouldn't trip over her
in the middle of the night. and I won't go ad nauseum into this,
but you can kind of see is, if you have a light switch available
to you, and I predict I'm gonna hear this a little bit more,
if you have a light switch available to you, turn it on. And that's
what Paul is saying here, is like, why live like you can't
afford electricity or you don't have it? Why live like you don't
have Christ when you can live in the light? Live in the light
of the gospel. Make sure that that is impacting
your decisions from day to day. Make sure that's encouraging
you when you're discouraged. Make sure that you're not just
going, yeah, I believe that gospel stuff, but this is different.
No, everything in our lives at one point or another intersects
with the truth of the gospel, it's just that we fail to see
it. Paul goes on to say, since we belong to the day, be sober,
And then he says something interesting, and it's similar to Ephesians
6, but it's not the same. He says, So we already have this Situation of, I would say, a
defensive situation, right? So if somebody's gonna come in
and break into your house, you're worried maybe about loss of property,
but you're also worried about harm to yourself. And Paul's
taking this in a spiritual sense, and he's using a figure they
would know from the soldiers of the day, and he talks about
a breastplate, a piece of body armor, pre-Kevlar body armor
that they would wear on their chest, and then he talks about
wearing a helmet. Now, maybe it might be going
a little bit far to spiritualize it, but I think it does fit. So he's talking about the three
themes that often are together, faith, love, and hope. And it's interesting, he uses
faith and hope to talk about what protects your heart. When
we're confronted in life with anxiety and fears, and oftentimes
for very real reason, maybe a loss of a job, a loss of a loved one,
What is it that's gonna bring us through that? Well, we hope
that we're gonna have somebody there to help us, and later on
it talks about encouraging one another, and certainly you want
others there, but our faith in Christ, the faith that's been
given to us, the love of Christ that's been shed abroad in our
heart, that is the best protection against attacks that impact our
emotion. Some of us by nature are less
emotional than others, but I'll say to you as somebody who counts
himself in that less emotional part, God can bring it on you
suddenly and take you into a place that you didn't think you would
ever go as somebody who had it all together or something like
that. But whether you're prone to emotional
distress or not, Our protection belonging to the
day and belonging to the light is a sober application of the
truths of faith and love as a way to resist the attacks of the
evil one against our emotion. Maybe that's not the only application,
but it's one that I thought of as I went through this. And it's
not a matter of doing something new. I'm not saying, well, just
forget about all this. But when you're in trouble, that's
when you should do it. You and I should be in the practice
of thinking about, yeah, I know I feel or think a certain way,
but what's the reality? What do I have that no one can
take away from me? And for those of us who are in
Christ, no matter how far, how bad things go, as Martin Luther
wrote it better than I sang it, a mighty fortress is our God.
He's the one who protects us, and that is where our faith and
love and hope should be. But he also talks about this
helmet, And the helmet that we're to
put on here is the hope of salvation. And he's not talking about a
hope so here. You could say the certainty of
salvation. So on the one hand, we're talking
about emotions and sometimes emotions are difficult to deal
with. On this hand, if we're talking
about the head and we're talking about the thinking element, here,
the certainty of salvation in Christ. will help us through
a lot of things. Well, it may not pay the bills,
as it were, and there are practical matters for us to consider, but
when it comes to not allowing ourselves to devolve into some
sort of self-pity about our situation, some fear about wrath, some fear
about loss that's there, what Paul says here is that we are
to put on this helmet, which is the hope or the certainty
of salvation. One to conserve our heart, that
is the breastplate of faith and love, and then the other to conserve
our head. All these things are produced
in us by God. It's not something we can muster
up, but if you belong to him, he can produce it in you and
pray that God would help you be reminded to do that. Well, another responsibility
of believers here, an important thing for all of us to remember,
is found in verse 11, and that's to encourage one another, and
build each other up just as in fact you are doing. And if you
remember back in verse 18 of chapter four, he says to encourage
one another with these words. One of the main reasons for believers
to meet together, not only on Sunday mornings, but also at
other times, is so that they can have this mutual fellowship
in the gospel. When you're talking to somebody,
And when I talk to people who I know are unbelievers, it's
hard for me. I mean, I can talk to them about
the hope in Christ, but if they're saying, hey, give me something
that'll cheer me up, it's like. I don't, I mean, you don't have
Christ, I don't know that I have a lot to cheer you up. I mean,
I'll do my best, and I'm not as crass as that, or I try not
to be when I talk to him. But when I'm talking to somebody
that I know has faith in Christ, when I talk to Eric this morning,
and forgive me, Eric, for bringing you up now, but I know in your
situation, I can encourage Eric that in this situation with his
family and with a father who loves the Lord Jesus Christ,
I can be an encouragement. Can I say the doctors can heal
him or things will turn around? No, that's not a hope that I
can offer to him. I don't have a medical background.
I don't have a miracle drug or anything like that, but I can
talk to him about this hope in Christ. I can tell him, don't
fear. I can be an encouragement to
him and in the trials that their family is, they can be an encouragement
to me. Not that I need it, per se, because
of what they're going through, but a lot of times when we see
the reaction of believers in times of trials and we see their
hope in Christ, it's an encouragement back to us. Encourage one another
continually and habitually and As one commentator said, when
Paul repeats something, he usually adds something here, and he says,
build each other up. We need building up. We need
building up in Christ. We need to be focused on the
right things. And sometimes I might not be
the right person to talk to you, but another believer will be
able to say the same thing or better than I was planning to
you. And that's why we need each other
as a as a body to remind ourselves of the hope that we have in Christ. We're not appointed to wrath,
but to salvation through Christ and Christ died for us that we
may live together with him. That's a great hope. That's a great encouragement
for those who could receive it and who have received it by the
grace of God. But sometimes we forget, and
I purposefully skipped a phrase in verse 10 because I think it's
important to bring up here because in verse 10, Paul writes, he
died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, Now many
commentators try to get around these words because they don't
like the implication because a lot of times a moralistic religion
will try to turn even these words of comfort into kind of a noose
to hang around people's necks to give them something to do. But Paul very purposefully uses
the same words here, I believe, under the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit that he uses elsewhere. in chapter five. Now, there is
a word that is used in verse 13 of chapter four of falling
asleep that talks about dying in a euphemistic way. But there's
a word that's used in here, those who are asleep, is a different
Greek word in chapter five in the earlier part of the chapter.
So what I get from that is there are those believers who fall
asleep, fall prey to the flesh as it were, forget for a time
where their focus should be. And I believe what Paul is doing
here is saying, yes, it's important for us to be awake and aware
and prepared and sober and everything else, but your salvation doesn't
depend on that. Because I don't know about you,
there are days where if they said my salvation depended on
me being at a certain level of awakeness, I would be in trouble,
both physically and spiritually. But I believe what Paul is saying
here is whether or not at a particular point in time we are awake where
we should be, living in the light where we should be, or we're
asleep forgetting being like the people of the world, forgetting
the benefits that we have in Christ, whether you are awake
or asleep, He died for us so that we can live with him. Our salvation doesn't hinge on
our own vigilance. It hinges on the work of Christ. Our vigilance may wax and wane,
but Christ's sacrifice will not fail to deliver the believer
from wrath, even believers who have fallen asleep at their post.
What a great hope we have in Christ. What a great gospel truth
Paul has here. And rather than getting caught
in the sordid, you know, discussion about, you know, does this mean
Christ is coming on Thursday or next week Tuesday or ten years
from now, instead of being caught in that, This, to me anyway,
has been a great encouragement for a passage of scripture to
make sure that I'm being reminded, and I'm reminding my brothers
and sisters in Christ, that our only hope is in Christ. We need
to keep continually and forever looking to him. I almost said,
Eric, can you come up? And if he could, he would. But
we're going to, if you can take your hymnals.