Stability, Order, Foundations, Adiaphora, and a Bible-Based Trip Down Memory Lane

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. We are simply having to record once again. Today we simply have done everything we know to do. And maybe this is how we're going to have to do it in the future.

I don't know. Just don't know. We've tried multiple fixes and just nothing works. So we're just going to have to record and hope to find some way around it sometime in the future or just change the way we do things.

One of the two. I don't know. But anyway, certainly distracting to me, having gone through part of this material before and then we just call a halt to it. No, that didn't work. So we'll try to make something worthwhile out of all of this anyways, especially because next week I head for Germany.

My wife gets to go with me. And we get to do the touristy thing, but hopefully more than just the touristy thing. Hopefully a blessed time in the Lord at that particular point in time. And I'm looking forward to that opportunity.

So we won't be doing the program for a while. So we had done two hour tests earlier today and everything worked fine. So it's just starting to make me wonder just a little bit if there isn't somebody out there that's messing with stuff.

It wouldn't put it past certain people to try to do that kind of a thing. But the last program we did, and I'd be honest with you, I'd almost rather just turn this monitor off because it goes on off and I can't see what's going on and stuff.

So that's actually more distracting than anything else is. But anyways, in the last program, we talked about John Chapter 4. And I was really surprised but also encouraged when I saw some people talking about how useful that had been for them, especially elders and churches and things like that.

And so in keeping with that, I wanted to briefly raise the issue of how we as Christians can examine our lives and the lives of our churches in regards to... Well, I just remember so clearly back when I was teaching regularly in seminary, I'd have students that would tell me that in the church growth classes and things like that, is numbers.

Numbers in Bible study, numbers in church service attendance, and in giving. And I'll be honest, in my years in a particular church, the idea of evaluating the spiritual health, maturity, and growth of the congregation was never an issue.

It was never an issue. And I was told years later by some of the people that came in afterwards, that as they looked at that particular church, it was a huge church, over 20 ,000 members, the back door was bigger than the front door.

You had more people going out than you had coming in eventually. And the idea of discipleship and any type of really New Testament evaluation of spiritual maturity and health and things like that just didn't even appear.

And even with that, though, let's talk about amongst mature, reformed congregations. How do you measure spiritual health? How do you measure the work of the Spirit of God amongst a people? Are we given anything in the New Testament?

I think there are a lot of places where we are. When I think of Colossians chapter 2, I think we're given some examples here. Beginning in verse 5, Paul's writing to a church that he himself has never been to.

It's a second generation church. It has grown out of his own ministry. So he has led people to Christ who have then gone and founded these other churches. This is how it's going to have to be. No one person can do all this.

It's natural, I would think, for Paul to be especially concerned about this second generation. The people he has not been able to himself train and guide and so on and so forth. How are they doing? And so when he says in chapter 2, beginning in verse 5, Even though I am absent in body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit.

Rejoicing to see your good discipline and stability. It's order, good discipline, and your stability. Your consistency. Your immovability. Of what? Your faith in Christ. Not just like the Stoics, you are ordered and stable.

Not just like Roman legionnaires, who likewise would have good discipline and stability. This is good discipline and stability in your faith in Christ. The very thing the world is always focused at seeking to destroy.

This is what you have good discipline and stability in. So it's not the up and down, up and down, emotional high Sunday morning, slight bump Wednesday night. Try to just make it through. Probably don't make it through all the way to Sunday before you have a complete crash on Saturday.

Then try to pick it back up. It's not the up and down. It is good discipline. It is order. It is stability. It is consistency. It's non-variability of your faith in Christ. So it's a specifically Christian faith.

It's a specifically Christ ordered faith. And that's going to make perfect sense of what comes afterwards. Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus, Tan Kurion, the Lord, walk in Him. And of course, that term walk, have your everyday activity, your everyday life, what you do.

It must be in Him. Walk in the realm of Christ, in Him. He is to condition all aspects of your life. Having been firmly rooted, there's a clear connection between five and seven. Firmly rooted, now being built up in Him.

Both terms in the original language go back to the idea of stability. Stability, discipline, order, groundedness, immovability, built up in Him. So you walk in Him. You're being built up in Him. Rooted in Him.

Eucharist, Thanksgiving. And it is that then that forms the background of that tremendous section. See to it no one takes you captive to philosophy. Empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world.

Rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. In Him you have been made complete, full, lacking in nothing. Lacking in nothing. So all of these words, they point us toward this idea that we should determine growth in maturity.

We should determine, we should be able to see. You think about in the modern world, in the modern quote unquote Christian world. When people ask the question, well do you see evidence of God's working brother?

What are people asking for? What is it that they think you should see as evidence of God's working? Well for a lot of folks it's signs and wonders and miracles and emotions and everything else. And like I said in the last program, there needs to be spiritual vitality in the Christian life.

But how do you measure spiritual vitality? What is spiritual vitality? I can guarantee it's not what you see on TVN. No, that's not spiritual vitality. There are all sorts of cults and isms that have that kind of spiritual vitality.

You want spiritual vitality? Show me consistent discipline over time. Consistent discipline over time. Show me that your people are consistent in their service to Christ. Are they consistent in how they're going to encounter difficulties and trials in life?

Are they consistent in how they respond to it? Or are they up and down, up and down, up and down? You got crashes over here and crashes over there. You got some good people over there but crashes. Is there consistency over time?

Good order? Are they rooted and grounded in Christ? That is the work of the Spirit. That's the work of the Spirit. And let's just sit back and realize, man, when I think about people who have lived lives of honor to Christ, who have now passed from this earth, when you think about it, they were the people that didn't have the ups and downs and ups and downs.

They were the people who were rooted and grounded and disciplined and ordered. And the waves could crash against their faith and their faith was like a rock. That's the work of the Spirit. So don't get me wrong.

When I talked about, you know, spirit and truth, a lot of people heard that to mean emotion and doctrine. Now, I'm not saying that we should be dead Stoics. There is a place for a deep, passionate love of Christ and love of His truth and all of those things.

But spirit and truth, spirit is not emotion. Spirit is that power that allows you to make application of these divine truths so that you are constantly being firmly rooted in Him and being built up in Him.

Just as a tree has to be firmly rooted. And then it can be, if it's not firmly rooted, you know, Hurricane Irma just blew through Florida. And God and His mercy didn't allow it to be as strong as everybody was predicting there was going to be anything left of Florida.

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. But what was the one thing that you heard over and over and over and over and over again? Trees down everywhere. And here in Phoenix, this happens all the time.

About a year, two years ago, I forget what it was. We had had a monsoon storm come through. And these monsoon storms can be very, very strong. I remember we had a big one hit a number of years ago. And if it had been over water, it would have had hurricane force winds.

It would have been a Cat 1 or Cat 2 hurricane force winds. Tore roof off my parents' house and did all sorts of stuff up in the North Valley, especially. It was really, really bad. Well, about two years ago, I went out after the morning after one of these storms.

And I ride, sometimes I'll take a path along the canal. And there's different paths you can take. There's a lot of really nice canals you can ride on here. And I come up out of an underpass and have to slam on the brakes because there is a huge tree just all across the trail.

And thankfully, I've got a good light. I have a lot of good lights, actually. And, you know, so I didn't go plowing into it or something. But it's very common to see these trees, which have been planted specifically to sort of, you know, beautify the trail type thing.

They weren't properly grounded. They get enough water to start growing. But man, let a decent wind come along. And what happens to them? It's not like it's not the branches get blown off. The whole tree comes over because they're not firmly rooted.

A true Christian believer is firmly rooted in the work of the Spirit's regenerating power. They haven't made a new creature in Christ. And so now they're being built up in him and established. Established.

I love that term. Established. Drilled down in the faith. That's what you're looking for. But let me ask my fellow elders, is the preaching that you give designed to do that? Do we really seek to bring the Word of God to bear in such a way that that's what it results in?

Is a an establishment in the faith? So that when the crisis hits, there's not the abandonment of the faith or the questioning of the faith. There is the application. There is this firmness. There is this confidence.

That's the beauty of the work of the Spirit. Is taking that divine truth, making application, establishing, building up, creating order, consistency in the faith. Folks, that's what we're going to need in the future because we see it all around Western culture right now.

The totalitarians are on the march. They are fascist totalitarians. And they want to absolutely control what goes on in your mind, your attitudes, your beliefs. And they'll use the power of government to try to change them.

And as we come up against this kind of stuff, what kind of faith is going to survive? It's not the kind of slapstick entertainment, slick emotionalism that is so much a part of what calls itself evangelicalism.

It's not. It's this kind of deeply biblical, Christ-centered, Spirit-born, truth-based conviction of faith. That's the only thing that's going to survive. Everything else is just going to, well, it's going to become a part of the tsunami of apostasy.

The tsunami of apostasy. And that's what we're seeing. How can it be that we see people who were once quote-unquote evangelicals and now they're promoting the profaning of marriage and the profaning of God's creative decree of male and female and overthrowing Jesus' teaching authority and all the rest of that stuff.

How'd that happen? They weren't rooted. They weren't established. They had no order. They had no stability. I realize those are not the kinds of terms that are going to sell lots of books. But that is the kind of faith that is going to survive in what's coming against us.

No question about it. Let me make a second application to that. And I have no idea where you're going to have to let me know where the cameras are because, again, I haven't got nothing up there. Oh, well, it doesn't matter.

I don't know if you were displaying anything. I was going to change. Okay, that's one reason we need to get that fixed. I need to figure out what's going on there. Let me see here. Let me see if I can show this to you.

I want to make another application. One of the key areas. I'm going to use my cool little thingamabob here. I bring this issue up a lot because I encounter it a lot. Part of it is due to the fact that having opportunity to travel outside the United States, I'm seeing more and more how very often we are America-centric.

We have blinders on that come from not having gone anywhere else. And it's not that that doesn't happen in other parts of the world, but it's interesting because the United States exports so much in the way of American media and things like that.

A lot of people in other parts of the world know how we think. We just don't know how they think. I mean, when I was in New Zealand, I had so much fun. You guys down in New Zealand, I really hope you're up for early June next year.

Because we're going to try to get there if we can work with you guys. But I love my time in Wellington. And I mentioned that one of the guys down there, one of the elders of the church, knew more about the political situation in the United States than most Americans do.

And it just surprised me. What that allows is he's got the perspective from there in New Zealand, but he also has much more understanding of where we're coming from. And it does create, I think, a little more balance.

Americans tend to be imbalanced. And one of the key areas that this is going to impact is the area of foundations versus adiaphora. Foundations versus adiaphora. Now, adiaphora are those things that while they may be important, do not define the faith.

The foundational issues define the faith. And one of the greatest areas of conflict amongst Christians is how you define where those things are. In general, the more to the left you are, the fewer foundational issues there are.

The more to the right you are, the more foundational issues there are. And so you get into what I would call a fundamentalism where everything is foundational and there's no adiaphora left. So in other words, you demand unanimity of perspective on everything.

And that means you end up drawing the circle very, very tight as to who is in and who is out. So is the whiteboard working? So what we've got is in the center, you have a series of what are supposed to be concentric circles.

These are not concentric circles because of the way it works. Looks a little bit like Midway Island. I don't know how people do drawing on computers. Let's say in the center, we've got the Trinity. And we have absolutely core issues regarding, well, I would say monotheism.

Only one God, creator of all things. We have the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the person of the Holy Spirit. We have the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We have the resurrection. And now at that point, where does the gospel come in?

Because you can't get to the gospel before you've dealt with who God is. You have to have God first. We have to have the right God first. So there are relationships. There are things that maybe on a horizontal level are more foundational than others.

Before you can get to the gospel, you have to have who God is. You have to have the incarnation. And you have to have the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then you get from that to the application of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which becomes the gospel itself.

But immediately what you see here is when you start talking to Christians, and you start drawing these circles, what happens is even amongst good people, they're going to put different topics in different places.

And so, you know, I may... Let's get a nice bright color here. So here... I chose that color, didn't I? Thought I did. Hmm. Oh, well, I guess I can choose it like that. All right. Hopefully that'll stick.

Yeah, there we go. So, okay. In here, I put the Trinity and deity of Christ and the resurrection, things like that. Okay. Now, where does the gospel go? Well, immediately you know that there are some today, the mere Christianity movement says the gospel doesn't go in there.

In fact, I would say with some of the mere Christianity movement, the specifics of the gospel really, you know, especially when you're talking about justifications like that, they'd put that out here.

They'd put that, you know, out here someplace, and they would not put it in the center anywhere. And then what about issues like inerrancy, the nature of inspiration? And as I said, the more fundamentalist person is going to have three dozen of these rings.

And they're all going to be considered absolutely fundamental, absolutely foundational, so much so that your eschatological perspective is going to be non-negotiable. And where we need balance, where we need maturity is in interacting with others, thinking these things through clearly for ourselves so that this doesn't change every two weeks.

There's no way you could describe yourself in the words of Colossians 2, 5 as having stability of your faith in Christ if every two weeks this all gets jumbled up. That's not stability of faith. So we need to think these things through.

But I would suggest that one area of maturity is the ability to have made decisions like this but to recognize, you know what? There might be other Christian brothers and sisters whose circles are going to be a little bit different than mine.

Not when it comes to the definitional things. And this is where some of the conflict comes up. Because, well, okay, I'll use this as an example. I know of Baptists who really struggle with my wholehearted embrace of my Presbyterian brothers as brothers in Christ.

Because for them, the objects or subjects, I guess, and the mode of baptism is maybe not in the absolutely foundational rings, but it's right next to it. And for them, you see, where you finally draw a line that says this is the end of the foundationals, beyond this is adiaphora.

It doesn't mean the next ring is unimportant. People seem to think that I think eschatology is unimportant because I don't talk about it. No, it is important. There are certain aspects of eschatology I do talk about all the time.

Eschatology is a lot wider field than millennial theories. And in fact, I would say that a lot of people spend way too much time on way too small a portion of eschatology. The toughest areas of eschatology are in regards to conditionalism and stuff like that, which almost nobody ever touches.

And I don't want to go there. I don't want to be the apologist for hell either. But that's much tougher. I'm sorry. The millennial stuff, whatever. But again, we're talking about where I draw the circles here.

But when you finally draw that line, what's outside that is still going to be important. The farther and farther out it gets, the more freedom you're going to have of disagreement. But it's right around where you've drawn that final line.

That's where you have to work through, who can I work with? Who's a fellow Christian? And who isn't? And how can I deal with disagreements that fall into the really important adiaphora? I can't deal with disagreements that are definitional.

If you don't believe in the deity of Christ's resurrection, you're not a Christian. But it's right here that I have brothers on both sides of this issue. But I have very conservative Bible-believing brothers for whom the issue of the spiritual gifts and the charismata, on the one hand, they will say, that is adiaphora.

I can't possibly define that as part of the gospel. I can't say that if you disagree with me, you're not a Christian. But it's so close to where they draw that line that they can't really have any functional relationship with someone who disagrees with them on that.

And what's worse, from my perspective, is they functionally treat someone who disagrees with them, they may say it's an adiaphora, but they treat them as if it's definitional. So if you say, yeah, that person's a Christian, but then you treat them as a non-Christian, your actions are speaking a little bit louder than your words.

Now, what does this have to do with Colossians 2? Well, obviously, if you are not rooted and grounded and have stability in your faith in Christ, you're not ready to be thinking this through. And as a result, you're going to really struggle with how you relate to individuals outside of your particular faith community.

One of the reasons that I address this is because I do get to travel and I do get to experience different faith communities. Now, is there a consistency across the vast majority of the churches that I speak in?

Of course there is. But I see a lot wider variety of expressions of the faith than most people in my position, in my fellowship. And if you were raised in a strict fundamentalist mindset, you drew those lines and the definitional core is huge and the adiaphora is very small.

And then I think as you go out there and you encounter believing Lutherans and believing Presbyterians and believing Anglicans and so on and so forth, you start realizing, Ah, I need to rethink what's definitional and what's not.

You're forced back into biblical categories. That shouldn't... Now, what happens with the emergent church is that they just get rid of all categories. That... If you go out there and you encounter these things and you go, Oh, there's these wonderful people out there.

And now you just throw everything out and well, hey, I don't care if you're a Buddhist or a Muslim or whatever, we're all just... Okay, you obviously weren't rooted and grounded in faith in Christ in the first place.

There are certain absolute non-negotiables that define everything else. But under the Lordship of Christ, under the banner of the finished work of Christ, the risen Lord and Savior, where do you draw those lines?

And how do you make application from there? And this can be... This is not only just doctrinal issues in the sense of what you believe about... Well, you've got your hyper-Calvinistic type people who will basically say, if you don't believe in particular redemption, limited atonement, then you're not really a Christian.

And then you've got people on the other side that very plainly say that if you believe in limited atonement, you're not a Christian. So you've got the extremists on both sides. And so you've got big doctrinal issues like that.

Then you've got the millennial issues. You've got the charismatic issues. And you've got all the divisions there. And then you've got the application things, not just forms of ecclesiology, regulative principle and worship, music styles, preaching, deaconesses, no deaconesses, issues along those lines, areas of Christian liberty, all sorts of differences there as I travel around the world too that illustrate how often we will...

See, these lines should be drawn on the basis of scripture and reflection exegetically. For most of us, we inherited these lines traditionally. Did we not? Did we not? We did. And so if you inherit something traditionally, then you encounter somebody whose experience is different than your own.

It's so easy to... And sure, they may confess the faith and the whole nine yards. But it doesn't follow because of our traditions that we really want to extend ourselves to them in fellowship or things like that because they're different.

They've done something different than what we've done. And so these lines, so vitally important. We function... Look, we all have them. Isn't it better if we think them through than just simply inheriting them?

You know, embracing them in an unthinking manner? And for me, there has been great peace in coming to recognize that there are believers that are going to look differently than me. The issue is, who is Jesus to you?

How do you have peace with God? If you confess with me those core issues, then we are one in Him. And you do not have to look like me. You do not have to act like me. You don't even... And this is where I lose some of my Calvinist friends.

You don't even have to worship like me. There are going to be differences. But what unites us is greater than the adiaphora, the things that are on the outside. And the judgmentalism that we express on doctrinal things, I don't know.

Where do you think we are more judgmental? Doctrinal things or practical application things? I think sometimes we blur the line there. I think it's easier to look down our noses at people because of what they do or something like that than necessarily what they believe.

But you see both of it. You see it all. You see it all. But to have a biblical set of parameters as to what's definitional, what's adiaphora, what's important adiaphora, things we should argue about and debate about, but what does not enter into that realm of being absolutely definitional, that's key.

And hey, you can disagree with me. People seem to think, you're just so mean to Christians. No, I'm not actually. I'm really not. I don't think... By the way, I don't think I'm mean to William Lane Craig.

I disagree with him, but I accurately represent him. And for me, if I accurately represent you and I say, you're a Christian. Look, William Lane Craig's got some really... I mean, there are some Christological issues and there are a lot of people that would just throw him right out of the kingdom.

And there are people who say, I should. And then there are other people who are like, you're so mean. You can't win for trying, I suppose. But when I taught systematic theology at a Southern Baptist seminary, I would tell the students, you don't have to agree with me.

I just demand that you be consistent. You don't have to agree with me. I just demand that you be consistent, that you seek for consistency. And so you can disagree with me in my being friendly and embracing my Presbyterian brothers and debating them on baptism or debating Doug Wilson on...

Well, he doesn't call himself a federal visionist anymore, but debating him when he was a federal visionist or doing the debate book we just did on textual critical issues. And I can express strong concern about, for example, the ecclesiastical text stuff.

It doesn't mean I don't believe that the ecclesiastical text guys are going to heaven. I can honestly say, I think, brother, that what you're saying and what you're doing, what you're leading people into is absolutely destructive of Christian apologetics.

It doesn't mean I'm thinking you're going to hell. I don't know why people think that I do think that. We can have disagreements about that kind of stuff. We've had disagreements about the areas of Christian liberty and freedom.

And there are people, you know, alcohol. Oh, man. There's a traditional area. I just go, look, exegetically, you're never to be drunk. Drunkenness is a sin. But the only reason you'd have to be talking about that is that drinking isn't.

Okay? It's sort of like the weird thing in the Quran where at one point the Quran says, don't come drunk. And then later on, ah, don't drink. Well, they had to come with the doctrine of abrogation. We don't have a doctrine of abrogation in that sense.

So you try to get in that area. Oh, people just explode rather than go, well, you know. And by the way, it's primarily in the United States. It's primarily in the United States. You go outside the U .S., you go over to Europe, whether it's England or Germany or wherever.

There are some other places, but it's primarily an export from the U .S., really, really is. And some people cannot have a meaningful discussion of that subject for anything. You can't talk about the passages that describe wine as a gift from God.

You can't talk about Paul, what he said to Timothy. And you end up with arguments about fermentation and grape juice and stuff like that. You can't even go there. Can't even talk about it. Was it what?

Oh. I just figure you were saying it died, computer froze, there's smoke coming out of the monitors, whatever. You know, I mean, something like that would happen. We need to look, you know, the simple thing to do here, we need two little lights, a green one over here and a red one over there.

And you can switch them. And we're talking simple stuff here. We don't have to put them on the cameras. Just put them on the windowsill. And then you can just flip over and I'll see it. And we could do Christmas lights.

I like Christmas lights. There's another area that I can illustrate. Christmas. There are some people in my tradition, death on Christmas. I've already had a little Mannheim steamroller going. It's only September.

Just the way I am. What? Late for it? Shh. Man, you're revealing stuff today. Yeah, I've already had a little Mannheim going. But was it only last summer that we had the beer and tattoos thing? Was that just last summer?

Was it? 2016. Okay, yeah, yeah. Look, it's been, I've had a busy year. It's hard to remember what stuff was. We talked about it then. We talked about the drinking thing. And oh, there are people just all over about that.

The tattoo thing. People all over about that. Look, everybody knows. I've got ink. It's not a secret. See, I've got some right there. Actually, that's not ink. That's a sprained ligament in the thumb.

And please don't ask me how I did it, because I don't know. That's the worst thing about getting old is you break things or sprain things and you don't even remember how I did it. That's a pain. But the new KT tape seems to be helping.

Anyways, that's not, so that's not, I was talking about it up there. Anyway, I've got ink. Some people think that's just the most horrible thing on the planet. You try to talk about it. You try to actually sit down and say, well, can we discuss?

No. That's tradition. That's tradition. Where does it fall in all this? Where's all this coming from? Where's the application? You got to have, you got to have rooting not in tradition, but in scripture.

Without that, man, I've seen some of the, some of the worst behavior I've seen of Christians toward other Christians was because they did not have these circles drawn in light of God's word, but instead they created these circles based on tradition and forced them on God's word.

And then their treatment of others as a result, I wouldn't want to have to answer before God for it. Wouldn't want to. Wouldn't want to. So, just some thoughts. Have you not, everywhere I look in scripture, when it gets down to how you evaluate, the issue is stability, discipline, consistency, rootedness, built up.

It's not this type of thing. It's, well, it's not this type of thing. It's this type of thing, built up, growing, but on a consistent basis. That's the kind of faith that's going to survive when the real pressure comes upon us.

When you have to start counting the cost. That's what's going to survive. Now, totally changing subjects. Well, not totally. I was digging through a box. I was digging through a box and I found this yesterday.

It is a New American Standard New Testament in Psalms. Unfortunately, it is far too small for me to read anymore. I can see the epistle of Paul to the Romans, but that's the title. I used to love these things.

I used to love, you know, I actually, for since the creation of, so I can actually still read some of it. And then you've put on your old man glasses and yeah, okay. Yeah, I can still, I mean, I wouldn't want to read this for a long period of time.

It'd give me a headache. But anyway, I looked at the front and there's my horrible signature. Presented James White on the 15th day of August 1981 at Glorietta. Glorietta, New Mexico. The Southern Baptist Conference Center.

It's no longer the Southern Baptist Conference Center, but it's still there. When you drive by, you can still see it. I'd love to go in there and see it because I did, I went there twice and they were both really amazing times.

And then it says, by and then I've written in slash with Kelly. So I showed this to my wife last night and reminded her she was with me in the bookstore there at Glorietta. And that was a, that was a special time.

That was 1981. So this was, I think it said August 15th. Yeah, August of, August 1981. By December of 1981, we were engaged and we were married the next summer. And so it really brought back a lot of memories.

And it made me start thinking and so I went through my library and just how important the Bible has been to me throughout my life. I mentioned to you all not, I was not raised in the Reformed tradition.

So there are some of you who aren't going to like this Bible, but that's okay. I can live with that if you can live with me. Problem is you may not be able to, but this is my first Bible. Look familiar?

Yes, it does have pictures in it. There were, there are little stickers that I got. Presented to James R. White. This is in my mother's handwriting. By mother and daddy, December 17, 1969, your seventh birthday.

I remember my seventh birthday very, very clearly. So this was my first, it's got the 23rd Psalm. Oh yeah, oh yeah. David and Goliath. Yeah, remember David and Goliath? There you go. There's David and Goliath.

That's the song, that's the song, the picture, David and Goliath. I'm pretty certain. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. The rainbow over the ark. I remember all these things. There weren't too many pictures, but there's a sermon on the mount.

I won't show you that so you don't get upset. Weren't too many in the minor prophets. There weren't too many pictures in there, but that was my, that was my first Bible. The binding has seen better days, but that was, what did you say?

That's 1969. So yeah. The next one, my first real leather Bible. It's right here. And yes, they're both, they're both King James. And again, my mom's beautiful handwriting. My handwriting was never as good as hers.

And December 17th, 1972. So three years later, your 10th birthday. So for your 10th birthday, you get the real, the real thing with cross references. This is the grown up Bible, you know, the grown up Bible.

And it's, it's King James. It's a world King James translation. Well, got into my teen years and especially after somewhere in my, the middle of my sophomore year, really, really got serious again. I mean, I had been serious a number of times in my schooling, things like that, but there was a dry period around the eighth and ninth grade, I'd say.