Gamaliel's Advice to the Sanhedrin

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If you'll turn with me please, back to Acts chapter 5, Acts the fifth chapter.
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We will press forward in our studies. Acts chapter 5, in just a matter of weeks
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I will be somewhere near where these events took place. I leave next
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Sunday evening for Inverness, Scotland for a few days, and if I get a picture of Nessie, I'll make sure to send it to you all to post on the board if you'd like.
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And then from Scotland to Tel Aviv, and about 9 or 10 days in Israel.
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Never been there, and certainly looking forward to seeing some of these sites.
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I'm not looking forward to the tourist traps, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of interesting things said that I'm going to sort of go at, but I'll be honest with you, you would think that Golgotha or the tomb, which we're not exactly sure or obvious about that, those would be the big things of everything, to be honest with you.
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What I'm really looking forward to seeing is the synagogue at Capernaum.
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The synagogue at Capernaum, John chapter 6. That to me is, you know, right now,
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I mean, I may come back and go, oh, but then there was this and there was that, I don't know. But that will be very, very, very interesting.
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I will try to avoid adding too many visitation -based illustrations to the sermons as we go along, but obviously
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I will be within, you know, a quarter mile or so of the events that we will be, the location of the events that we will be looking at this evening.
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Acts chapter 5, beginning in verse 33, we already heard, but when they heard this, they were cut to the quick.
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They were enraged and intended to kill them. But a Pharisee named
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Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, respected by all the people, stood up in the council and gave orders to put the men outside for a short time.
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And he said to them, men of Israel, take care what you propose to do with these men.
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For some time ago, Theodos rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a group of about 400 men joined up with him.
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But he was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. After this man,
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Judas of Galilee rose up in the days of the census and drew away some people after him. He too perished, and all those who followed him were scattered.
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So in the present case, I say to you, stay away from these men and let them alone. For if this plan or action is of men, it will be overthrown.
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But if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them, or else you may even be found fighting against God.
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They took his advice, and after calling the apostles in, they flogged them and ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus and then released them.
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So they went on their way from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for his name.
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And every day in the temple, from house to house, they kept right on teaching and preaching
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Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah. And so here we have this interesting incident, and I can't help but speculate, probably or possibly anyways, that had the disciples come to know what
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Gamaliel had said, well, we're going to find out later on that there were many priests and leaders of the
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Jews that came to embrace the faith. We also have to struggle with the fact that historically, there was a sect that arose in this time period that was made up of scribes and Pharisees and people like that, but they did not believe the full revelation of who
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Jesus was. So there were divisions that came out of this time period as well. But it does make you wonder if possibly some of those who had been in the council were eventually converted, and hence reported to Luke, possibly many decades later, the full context of what it was that Gamaliel said at this particular point in time.
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Secular history records for us this man Gamaliel. We have some background knowledge of his relationship to the various schools of the day and things like that, you know, that there is connection with Paul, and at this time in Jerusalem, you not only had religious authority, but it was sort of hard to avoid having some attachment to political things as well.
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Even if you were a Pharisee, you still had to deal with the Sadducees that had most of the political power.
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And so we know that this is not just something that Luke makes up, that this man does exist.
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And the concepts that he lays out are certainly consistent with what you would expect from someone like Gamaliel.
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Now, what is interesting to me is that I have had this particular text presented to me a number of times by young men in white shirts, black pants, and black ties with little name badges over here that say
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Elder this, that, or the other thing. Now I hesitate to say black ties because Mormonism is changing.
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And I've now encountered a number of missionaries that were wearing
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Jerry Garcia ties, which is a clear demonstration of the fact that Mormonism is falling apart.
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In other words, it's undergoing a huge change. They never would have allowed that.
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Back when I first ran into Elders Reed and Reese in the summer of 1983, they would have been hung from the yardarm by their ties if they had worn anything like that.
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But now they're getting to do almost anything. It's getting very strange up there.
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Well, it's always been strange in Utah, but it's getting stranger in Utah. But why in the world would Mormon missionaries be talking to me about Gamaliel?
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Well, it's interesting. They understand this. They've used this as somewhat of an apologetic.
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And that is, look, Gamaliel was right here.
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This was good advice on his part. You know, he talks about all these failed messiahs and things like that.
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But the primary thing they focus in on is, so in the present case, I say to you, stay away from these men, let them alone.
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For if this plan or action is of men, it will be overthrown. If it's of God, you will not be able to overthrow them.
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And so they say, well, look, we started off as a persecuted small little group, just like the
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Christians in the Book of Acts. And look at us now. Well, when
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I was first talking to them, there might have been four to five million Mormons. There's about 16 to 17 million
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Mormons today. It's a pretty fast growth rate. And they would say, see, if we're not of God, then this already would have been overthrown.
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And if we are, then you need to sort of get with the program, shall we say, and follow
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Gamaliel's advice. Now if you're thinking with me, this is what makes you sort of sit back and go, is that really good advice?
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For example, is that what John would have said to the churches when he wrote 1
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John, when he wrote that epistle, and you have these men rising up in the church and they are teaching things like Jesus didn't actually have a physical body?
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Should you just say, well, hey, you know, let's not say anything against that. If this is of God, then we can't overthrow it.
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If it isn't, it'll be overthrown of itself. We just don't know what to say.
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Or what about the super apostles in Corinth? What about these people who are drawing men away after them and drawing disciples away and things like that?
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Should you just go, well, you know, if it lasts, then it's of God, and if it doesn't?
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You know, when you think about that, you come to the very quick realization that if you applied
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Gamaliel's advice in any number of situations, the result would be pure chaos.
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It would also mean that, well, Muhammad started off with a small group and he was persecuted for years.
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For years he was a minority prophet in Mecca. This is according to their own sources.
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And he was mocked and he was ridiculed for proclaiming there's only one true God. And the story is told once that he was prostrate in prayer and his enemies came along and they had just slaughtered a camel and they took the camel's guts, its intestines, and they strung them over him as he was prostrate in prayer.
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And his little daughter had to come along and pull the camel intestines off of him and stuff like that.
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I mean, wow, there's persecution and they started off as a minority. Now look at it today, there's billions of followers of this faith.
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That must mean, as Gamaliel said, it hasn't been overthrown, therefore
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God must have been involved with it. So when you look at this particular advice, we should immediately see that there's a problem.
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Because the examples he uses were of false messiahs who had no fulfilled prophecy and who certainly did not rise from the dead.
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Now I don't know what level of knowledge Gamaliel had of the history of Jesus.
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We're just simply not told. We don't, there's no evidence or no information that he was a part of the specific men who were specifically concerned about Jesus and involved in trying to have him destroyed.
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But you can't really take too seriously the idea that he had just been on sabbatical someplace and had just gotten back to Jerusalem and really doesn't know about these things.
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He would have had to have some knowledge and some complicity in all of this.
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And so the examples that he uses are not appropriate examples. There is no parallel between Jesus who has risen from the dead and these men who are quoting from the very scriptures that they teach regularly, pointing to the identity of Jesus.
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There's no, there's no parallel between the men that are mentioned here, which by the way, again, just in passing,
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I know, I know this isn't the most exciting part of it, but for me, it's really important is that we know who
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Theodos was, and we know who Judas of Galilee was, and we can go into the secular sources.
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We can go into Josephus and other contemporary sources, not like there's newspapers to use, but there are contemporary sources, a few anyways.
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And, you know, you'll notice that after this man, Judas of Galilee rose up in the days of the census.
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And Luke has already used a language like that in the gospel of Luke in regards to a census that was taking place.
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And so these are just more of these historical marks that are put into the text that are just, they're mentions made in passing by Luke, but given our distance and our perspective looking back, they are landmarks for us that just once again give us all that much more confidence in the reality of the nature of the text and its historical grounding.
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But these men that he makes reference to certainly did not have anywhere close to the kinds of claims that Jesus did.
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Now there have been some fascinating people that have risen since then. There have been fascinating people even in our day who have claimed messiahship that most of us don't know anything about.
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There is one man from, I forget how long ago it was he lived, I'm pretty sure it was in the last century, who has followers literally around the world.
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I have a friend who's sort of an expert in this guy's history and stuff and he says it's truly fascinating, but these individuals that he points us to had died and did not rise again.
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They're dealing with an empty grave and they are dealing with men who are using their own scriptures to continue.
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See they haven't been scattered. They were scattered because there was no substance to their belief that this particular individual was the messiah or anything related to the messiah, forerunner, whatever it ultimately might have been.
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And so what can we say about the validity of Gamaliel's advice?
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I think we have to be very upfront and recognize that this was not in fact sound advice.
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Of course he's in a situation where he is fighting against the truth when it says, or else you may even be found fighting against God.
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I think the whole reason for that statement is similar to what had happened with the high priest back in John chapter 11, when the high priest prophesied that Jesus was going to give his life for men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, and he did so unwillingly.
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But because he was high priest, God basically put the words in his mouth. Well I think we have a similar situation here in that he's leaving things rather ambivalent as if there's really no way to know.
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How should he have approached it? Maybe if we approach it this way. How should he have responded?
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Obviously he's one of the cooler heads, he's not one of these hot heads that wants to kill these men, but if you're convinced that Jesus wasn't who he claimed to be, then your approach would not be, ah, let's just let it go, let's see what happens type thing.
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Your approach would be, no, let's go into the scriptures and demonstrate the scriptures, say this, this, and this about the
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Messiah. We can tell that others did try to do that. You can tell from Paul's writings, you can tell from Peter's writings, that they had engaged in extensive amounts of public dialogue, argument, debate, in the synagogues and in the city streets, all across Asia Minor, with those who went to those same scriptures and sought to make argument from those scriptures, and there are people who do that to this day.
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That's what you would have expected, but that's not what you get. Instead you get an argument that maybe
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Gamaliel recognized that the only way to cool the jets of the hot heads that had, their blood was up, they wanted to murder, they wanted to kill.
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Maybe he realized this was the only way to calm them down, that a more intellectual approach or even a more scriptural approach would not work for them.
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That's a possibility, I suppose. Or maybe he just simply was not as wise as history would identify him as being, or maybe there is something in the background here, maybe he has knowledge, either of these men or of his own complicity,
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I don't know. But it is interesting that the, I think the important part from the early church's perspective was that last line, or else you may even be found fighting against God, because this is exactly what the apostles were saying.
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That's exactly what you're doing. And when you continue to hold to your traditions, even when the scriptures that those traditions are allegedly based upon point to Jesus and point to him being the
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Messiah, when you continue to hold to those traditions, even though you claim to be serving
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God, you are actually ending up fighting against God. Whatever the case may be, you will not find later apostles referring back to Gamaliel and saying, you know, as these people arise within our own movement, let's remember the wise words of Gamaliel and just let everything be, and if it grows, then that means it's from God, and if it doesn't, that means it isn't.
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That's not an appropriate understanding. You could never have derived that from reading the history of Israel.
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When you have so many, in the vast majority of instances, the true prophets of Yahweh are not in the majority.
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And there was example after example after example of people being led astray, of movements coming along that led to apostasy, that led to the perversion of the worship of God and the bringing in of idols, and the history of Israel was replete with this stuff.
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And so why would someone who has a knowledge of these things make such an argument as this?
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It was effective at this particular point in time, but it is in and of itself not wise, because God can, at times, allow judgment to come in the form of false teachers and false teaching.
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And He uses that to purify His people, He uses that to demonstrate what happens when you abandon
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His Word, when you become complacent in regards to truth. There's all sorts of examples of that, and I would say we live in a day of that.
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And so if that is the case, then we have to be, I think, wise in how we look at this and see that these were just simply the words of one of the
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Jewish leaders, this is how He got them to back off of their intentions and to put aside their anger, though not completely, because as you see, they took
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His advice after calling the apostles in, they flogged them and ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus and then released them.
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So they didn't kill them, but I can't imagine that flogging is an overly enjoyable experience either.
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And you do have to sort of wonder who did the flogging. If it weren't maybe some of the ones that had wanted to kill them in the first place, they at least got some of their rage satisfied in that fashion.
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But they took His advice. Should we take His advice? Well, I don't think that we really can.
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It was a unique historical situation. It's how God worked things out at that time, but just because, and this is what has bothered me over the years, sometimes
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Christians do not discern well the backgrounds and contexts of the
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Bible, and they will look at a story like this and say, well, the Bible presents this and it doesn't condemn
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Gamaliel as a bad person, so we must believe what he has to say. No, that's not how you handle
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Scripture. It's very, very important to take something like this, and if you're going to make it a general prescription, then you need to ask, is this consistent with how the apostles themselves, for example, dealt with false teachers or other movements and things like that?
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And we very quickly see that that was not. We need to look at the whole counsel of God, not just at small portions.
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And so, notice that we're not given any more of the specifics of the interactions between the apostles and the council.
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We're not given any words other than they commanded them, ordered them once again, just as the same language had been used in previous chapters of chapter four, ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus.
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And as I said, when we started in chapter four, if you just simply mark off that phrase, the name of Jesus, in the book of Acts, that is a worthy study in and of itself.
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It literally just becomes eventually the name, the name. And why is that significant?
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Because these are Jewish people still meeting in the temple where the
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Jewish God is sacrificed to and His name is everywhere and His name is
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Yahweh. But now they are suffering in the name of Jesus.
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But as they said, our God, the God of our fathers, there is no sense in their understanding whatsoever.
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There's nothing the apostles said where they had the idea they're worshiping a new God, a
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God that was other than the God that revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no. And so if they notice verse 41, so they went on their way from the presence of the council rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for, and then most translations will put in there
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His name, but it's literally in behalf of the name to suffer shame.
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There's no His there. So there you have the name. And for any
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Jewish person, the name was Yahweh. Have these men repudiated their own heritage?
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Have they repudiated the fathers and the prophets and Abraham and David?
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Have they repudiated these things? Have they come up with a new religion? Not at all. They've just stood before the council for teaching in the temple.
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They haven't been staying in the temple saying, this place is some pagan idolatry or something along these lines.
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They have been reasoning from the very same scriptures that are the foundation stone of everything supposedly going on in that temple.
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And so to talk about suffering shame for the name is highly significant.
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It is highly significant. You would have to come to the conclusion that the high name of God, now, as you know, if you've had some interaction with Jewish people, for example, in social media or something like that, and others have picked up on this as well, but very often they will put
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G -D or they'll use Hashem, which means the name.
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You know that you should never say Yahweh to a
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Jewish person because they never use the full name of God, that even our own
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Jehovah comes from the fact that when they put the Hebrew vowels under the consonants, back in this day, we have manuscripts of the
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Hebrew New Testament, Hebrew New Testament, Hebrew Old Testament from this day. And they are written in without what are called the vowel points that we have today.
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It is totally what's called a consonantal text. And when they did put the vowel pointing in, they specifically miss vowel pointed the name
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Yahweh. Yahweh has two syllables. They put three syllables worth of vowel points under Yahweh.
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They broke the rules. But the reason they did it is they put the vowel pointing for Adonai, my
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Lord, under Yahweh as a big red flag to tell the reader, don't say
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Yahweh. So somewhere between the time of the writing of the New Testament and the development of the vowel pointing system and the codification of it, what's called the
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Masoretic Manuscripts over the next 900 years, somewhere in that time period, the
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Jewish tradition of not pronouncing the divine name became universal. And so they will not pronounce the divine name.
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So if you if you say that name in the presence of a believing Jewish person, obviously, sadly, the vast majority of people who are
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Jewish ethnically today are not believing of anything, really. But a believing
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Jewish person, they will be highly offended by your violation of that particular taboo.
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But that had not yet happened, and everybody knew what Hashem, the name was.
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And so for the the Christians to suffer shame because they were considered worthy to suffer shame in behalf of the name.
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That either has to mean that they have completely repudiated.
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The scriptures and everything else, which they're going to be quoting from the next writing, the rest of the
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New Testament, that doesn't make any sense, either completely repudiated that they've come up with a new God or there is something has happened.
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That allows them to see the name of Jesus on the same level as the name of God himself.
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And again, you go to local Bible, not hopefully not Bible college, you go to local community college, local university, and what you can be taught is all this stuff about the deity of Christ and all that comes along much, much later.
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Nobody back here believed that. I told you about the former Fuller Seminary prof,
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I never had him, he wasn't teaching when I was there, thankfully, that was a long time ago, but this fellow was doing a debate out in Scottsdale a couple of years ago defending the normalization of homosexuality and stuff like that, and at one point he had said, we need to recognize that Jesus was a first century person and we need to learn to think beyond what he thought him because he was just a man.
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And I talked to him during the break and I said, so you don't affirm Nicene Orthodoxy about the deity of Christ, he's like, do you really think the apostles thought
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Jesus was God in human flesh? And I'm like, yes, but that's what you're gonna hear, certainly in the secular university, sadly, in many theological seminaries as well.
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You're gonna hear that all that stuff is just developed in a much later time period and you don't really have to worry too much about it.
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I have a hard time seeing how Luke can write in this way and how the early church can think in this way if they do not already have a very firm understanding of who
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Jesus really was, what the resurrection demonstrated, and the relationship between suffering for the name of Jesus while remaining faithful to the reality that there is only one
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God, Yahweh. Jesus clearly becomes the way, the means by which
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Yahweh has revealed himself and that's why it is so highly significant that when we look at the entirety of the
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New Testament, we see the New Testament writers, without embarrassment and without apology, identifying the
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Father as Yahweh, when they quote from Isaiah 53, who is the one who lays our sins upon the
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Messiah? It's the Father, it's Yahweh, Yahweh does that. And yet they identify Jesus as Yahweh as well.
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And the Spirit is the Spirit of Yahweh. And so you have three persons that they distinguish from one another, sharing one divine name.
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They are not repudiating Yahweh, they are not repudiating the worship of that God.
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They are saying that that God has now done something in the incarnation and the outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit that requires us to go far beyond what any of our forebears understood.
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And that's exactly what is going on here. And so they are flogged, that must have been a very unpleasant experience, and yet they are sent away, they went out on their way from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for the name.
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Considered worthy. This is an attitude that when
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Christianity is in the majority, we lose track of. We don't understand it.
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When Christian ministers were at one point honored in cities like London, to where their names are emblazoned to this day on the cornerstones of buildings, because you don't have street signs in London.
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You'll have cornerstones of buildings, and you'll have the names engraved, or these days in signs, but they're on the corners of buildings.
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And it's amazing to walk through that very secular city now, and yet these names everywhere, if you know your history, are primarily men of God.
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And so there was a time when someone like Charles Haddon Spurgeon was greatly respected by the populace in cities such as London.
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But those days pass, and when we look at what's happening here, a very important attitude is already there amongst the believers, that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for the name.
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To suffer shame for the name. To be worthy of that. Many Christians today, many
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Christian leaders today, are very, very concerned that we need to adopt the language of the culture, we need to adopt the attitude of the culture, lest we drive people away from Jesus.
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Now don't get me wrong, there are attitudes and actions that we can take that do not in any way adorn the
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Gospel, and are just simply selfish attitudes on our own part, and we should not engage in those things.
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I'm not talking about one individual in our own city, for example, our own valley, who tries to do things just simply to offend as many people as possible.
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I'm not talking about that kind of thing. But at the same time, these men were being told, suppress the truth that has been given to you by God.
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And they said no. And so they were flogged, and they were beaten.
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And the intention was to shame them in front of the other people. We are in a situation where, and we need wisdom to be able to tell when it is and when it isn't, but we are in a situation where our society, and sadly, even other people in the church are telling us, do not testify of the truth that you know.
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It will drive people from Jesus, and we have to have wisdom to understand what is truly definitional to faith and what is not.
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And when we know what defines the gospel and the society or other people in the church tell us, oh, no, no, no, no, we just can't talk about that anymore, well, as the apostles say, obey you or obey
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God. That's our choice. And we choose to obey God. And so they rejoiced, and history is filled with believers who rejoiced in the midst of their persecution.
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That's not what made them right, because history is also filled with people who rejoiced at being persecuted for following falsehood.
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Simply having martyrs is not the indication of truth, and there's nothing in this text that says that it is.
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Every religion has martyrs. Every religion has people who have been willing to die for an untruth, and it makes me concerned at times when
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I hear a Christian apologetic that instead of sticking with biblical revelation tries to develop other ways around that and tries to say, well, you know, no one would ever die for a falsehood.
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And I'm like, wow, haven't done much reading in all of history at all, have you?
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There have been, there are people dying for falsehoods this day all around this world. That is a sad reality.
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It's that empty tomb and who Jesus was that matters. And so there is everything good in recognizing
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Christians should rejoice when they are considered worthy to suffer shame for the name of the one who was prophesied by the prophets for centuries beforehand, the only one that could have fulfilled those prophecies, who rose from the dead, see at the right hand of the father, is coming again, is building his church.
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That's different than suffering martyrdom for some guy that doesn't have that pedigree, that empty tomb and everything else.
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So keep that in mind. And every day in the temple and from house to house, they kept right on teaching and preaching
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Jesus as the Messiah, as the Messiah.
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The very thing that would continue to bring opprobrium and reproach upon the
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Jewish leaders, you killed the Messiah, the one we've been looking for. They continued to do it because they had been commanded to do it.
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They had direct command from God. And when we have direct command from God and we need to make sure that that's what we have, then we must be obedient to that no matter what the cost or what the context in which we find ourselves.
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And so they didn't stop. They didn't take a vacay, or as they say over in Europe, they didn't go on holiday to let the wounds heal.
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They continued straight on every day in the temple and from house to house, because they didn't have their own buildings.
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There they are. And this situation is going to continue for just a little while longer.
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And it must have been wonderful. It must have been exciting. The fact is,
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God had a timetable on it. And it wasn't his purpose to build his kingdom in Jerusalem out of only
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Jews. And so you get the people that you're going to need converted, but there are storm clouds on the horizon and they're not coming without God's knowledge.
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They're coming at God's decree. And these who are in close fellowship and experiencing the joy of being in that early church are soon going to be experiencing imprisonment, persecution, stoning, and being driven from their homes, being driven from their families.
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They are going to become the first missionaries, because as they go, they preach.
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As they go, they teach. And the church begins to spread out, which was, as we will see,
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God's intention in all of that. And so in the next chapter, we will see sort of the beginnings of this.
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We'll start off with the establishment of the diaconate, the deacons. And we'll see a guy named
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Stephen pop up in that context. Well, you know what's coming.
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You know what's coming. This book of Acts, we should not try to fit ourselves into every single picture, but what it does give to us, if we look at it rightly, if we see the development of the church over time, if we see how
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God's purposes are being fulfilled, we will gain tremendous insights into how we should live in this present evil age.
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Let's pray together. Our gracious heavenly Father, we do thank you for the example of the disciples, and we thank you that there have been many who've gone before us who have been considered worthy of suffering for the name.
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And Lord, in the back of our minds, we cannot help but think. Were the day to come that we would be called upon to suffer for the name, what would we be willing to do?
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How much would we be willing to give up? It's not just our physical possessions, but Lord, so often it is separation from loved ones.
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How much do we desire to be counted worthy, as the disciples were, to suffer for the name?
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Help us to think about these things, to recognize that if you call us to that, you, by your spirit, will give us the strength.
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But that we, likewise, need to consider, well, how attached we are to our comfort in the things of this world, in comparison to a desire to be counted worthy in that way.
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May we consider these things, may you make us better servants of yours, we pray in Christ's name. Amen.