Romans 15:17-24 - The Preaching & Ministry of Paul, Pt. 1 (03/05/2023)

It's not too late, it's not too late, I choose not to be a sinner.

For there is none like you, I am not your slave,

I want to make it right.

Not too late, it's not too late,

I'm not your slave, Tell me when you can,

That I'm free, Never cease to bother me,

So you can, Shatter the love of your eyes,

There is truth in what you say and it's easy to believe

You are Jesus and I am you

All that I am is you I am

Jesus I am the Lord I will fill the oceans with you

I will give you everything you need I will assist you through the storm

I will give you everything you need I will do all of the work you need to see

Come on, you guys, give praise to the

King. Come to the temple, let us sing.

At the sound of your dream.

Ask Him for joy, and do it, and do it. For evermore

I'll love you, I will love you still. Nothing compares to the love of Salutation.

Nothing compares to the love of Salutation. Stand by for long, long nights.

I'm craving just one more. I can't go any which way.

I'm hungry for His goodness.

I'll wait a while. And the hour comes when

I'll die. I know where I'll be.

I'll wait a while. That was fantastic.

We're, for you guys out there in the Internet world, we've been working at getting the last component that we needed so we can be a megachurch, and now we have it, music.

It's coming, Brother Paul. The church is going to catch up with the school. You watch. You watch.

And it's all because of you guys, so keep going. No, seriously, it was wonderful.

Just a blessing. I was sitting over there on the first song. It was one of my favorite things to hear anyway, but I loved it.

Great rendition of it, too. But I was thinking, just funny thoughts that go through your mind, but I was praising the

Lord, but I was then thinking about, I guess you guys are familiar.

There's a new satellite. I think I've mentioned it maybe last time. I don't remember. The James Webb satellite that we launched in 2022.

It's the biggest outer space satellite we've ever built. I say we. I'm talking about the country, not exozero space, but the country.

We launched it, I don't know the date, around the first part of 2022, and then it flew itself to the sun, and it orbits the sun, and it has heat shields and light shields to protect it from the sun, but it looks out farther into the edges of the universe than anything we've ever had.

Well, they fired it up and started, turned it on and started trying to learn to use it, and about two months ago, they started publishing things from it.

And if you go to YouTube and you just type in a search, you know, a James Webb telescope, you'll find some amazing photographs of the universe, but things farther out than man has ever seen before.

And it's an infrared telescope, which we'll see farther because it sees the wavelengths, the infrared wavelengths will travel farther.

I don't know all the physics. I wish Brother Bill was here. He would tell us in about a half a second, but it, you know, these guys, most of them are agnostics and atheists, sadly.

It's very sad to watch them. They're so excited about this, though. This is their religion, folks. This is their

God. And here's what's kind of interesting about it. When Darwin wrote his work, it caught the church by surprise, and it took years, almost to the 1980s for the church to catch up and realize it was not science.

It was science falsely so -called, but they scrambled, and the church was in disarray, and they came up with things like the gap theory and all kinds of things to try to make the

Bible fit the new science. Well, the new science, you don't ever need to try to defend the

Bible, really. I mean, it defends itself. The gap theory was wrong and unnecessary, and what happened was by 1980, scientists who were

Christians caught up, and they finally began to be, you know, putting out information that the data that we have fits the

Bible more than it fits the evolutionary theory, which now has been changed many times because we challenged it, and they had to keep changing it.

It's like a moving target. It's kind of like global warming is now climate change, right?

So they'll change. They will not admit they're wrong. They'll just change it slightly. Well, here's what's interesting. For the first time in my lifetime now,

I see the scientific Mother Nature worshippers scrambling like the church had to.

This is amazing if you go out and look at some of it because here's what's happened. They have a theory, and I love watching these people, even though they're not saved people.

I love watching things about physics and astronomy because you will see the creation of God through their eyes and their equipment, and you can see things that God has done and understand things, and, of course, we give him the credit.

We understand why it's there and how it's there and more about it really than the scientists, but using their data is interesting sometimes because we wouldn't even see it without their telescope, and we get to see it, and we can see.

So the Big Bang Theory is their theory of creation. They will not try to, well, they do sometimes try to answer what was before that, but it's three or four pretty amazingly stupid things they've come up with to us anyway, but they really don't talk about that a lot.

They just want to talk about that it started with a point smaller than a proton with immense density, so immense that it blew up and created the entire universe from one singularity smaller than a proton.

All of this came from something that small. There's a bit of common sense problems with a lot of their thoughts, don't you think?

But anyway, that's what they believe. So by their theory, the farther back in light years that you can look where you're looking at things that existed millions of light years away from their viewpoint, now we understand why they think that because God created the universe with maturity.

So what they see does look like it's millions of years. It actually looks that way because God created, well, think about this, how old was

Adam when God created him? Somebody tell me what you think. 20, 21, 30.

Yeah, right, young. How old was he really though? A nanosecond old, but he looked 30, fully mature.

That's how God created the whole universe, so it throws them off. So their data is not necessarily wrong.

Some of it, some is, but some is not. It's just how it looks because God made it that way. So he made it look like it was mature at the moment he's spoken into existence.

Why? Well, you have to do it that way because if you even look at a cellular level, a cell cannot live without all of its parts already being mature.

Every single part has to be there or it dies. A universe is the same way. You have to have all of it.

The gravity, I love to hear Dr. Carl Ball talk about stuff like this, but he will talk about how you take the farthest star from here, it affects the orbit of the earth because of gravity.

All of it affects everything else. You could not have had it created point by piece by piece and then evolve into something big because none of it could have existed that way.

Well, I mean, I guess they just don't think about that, but that's a fact.

So according to their theory, galaxies would start out as a primordial soup of, what was it, nitrogen?

We watched it last night. Was it nitrogen or I think? Who cares what it is, but it's just like nothingness and then it cools and coalesces over millions of years into stuff.

So prior to the stuff, they call it the dark ages. I think that's kind of funny because they're living in the dark ages.

But anyway, so like the dark, and then all of a sudden it had light, let there be light. Isn't that interesting? So light developed as it cooled and coalesced and now it's light and you have objects and you have four forces in physics.

If you go back to within a small, I mean, with a minus, a 10 to the minus huge number of zeros, just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, those forces don't work.

Physics doesn't work there. And then as it moves out from that, just a nanosecond later, all four forces are there and they start to have gravity, which starts to pull all the stuff together and now you have a universe.

But according to their theory, galaxies would have to be very small and like baby galaxies and then several of them come together and coalesce and make larger galleries, which takes millions of years longer to do that.

Are you following? So keep that in mind. And so all their math and all their theories revolve around that and also around dark matter, which now we know from James Webb telescope may not even exist.

But my point is, it's totally, they're going to have to come up with their own gap theory now because everything that they believed and lived their whole life living it is wrong.

And they now know it. They won't say it's wrong. That's how we need to augment it. You know, it's going to switch from global warming to climate change in their area.

But what's amazing, here's what happened. When they turned that thing on, just in a matter of days, there was this young guy,

I got a picture of him on YouTube. He looks a little bit like my son, Paul got, you know, hair down to the shoulders and just this young, young guy.

And he was the first to discover this, but he looked and he said, what's that little orange thing right there?

And they looked in and they studied it and they proved that it was, it went back so far into the beginning that it was very near the big bang within a few million years of it, rather than billions of years, within a few million years, which is really pretty close in their timeframe.

And it was huge. And then they found three more huge galaxies at the beginning of their timeline, which is impossible unless someone's spoken into existence.

Fun stuff, isn't it? Give God a hand. So the

Lord just, you know, he spoke it into existence with maturity and he threw a few things in there and made it where they wouldn't find it all at once.

And then they'll find it and then they have to, they have to change their entire theories without admitting that it's wrong, of course, but it's really interesting to watch.

So now I think they have, when I first started noticing this last week, I think it was four. I think they now have found six of these mega galaxies at the edge of the beginning of time.

They're people. Now, we all know that when they build the next one, bigger one, they're going to see farther out.

The edge is going to be farther out. And there's going to be stuff out there they never even thought of. So it's just great to watch.

I love it. Has nothing to do with the sermon, but I didn't have much time for the sermon anyway, which is fine too, because I used too much time in Sunday school.

We started late because of me. But today we're back in Romans chapter 15.

We're actually, last time we sort of did a little bit of review through the whole chapter, just because it'd been a while since we were just looking at the verses.

We kind of took a springboard out there. And then we took some time to talk about the Asbury revival and gave eight reasons why it's not real, at least as a, at least as a, you know, an awakening.

It's not an awakening. There may be individuals having revival. I mean, some of us have revival in here today that happens.

That's the one -on -one thing with God that could be happening, but it's not a great awakening. And we gave eight reasons why last time, if you miss that, go listen to it out on our archives.

So, and we reviewed chapter 15 all the way through verse 16.

And that picks us up to where we're starting out is Romans 15, 17.

Let's pray and we'll get into it. Lord, thank you for the services so far.

It's been so great. So wonderful to have your presence here with us. And thank you for giving us peace and letting us be out of the world and just be here with you and with each other for a few moments and bless your word as you always do in Jesus name.

Amen. Romans 15, 17. I have therefore, wherever I may glory through Christ, Jesus, Jesus Christ, the apostle

Paul says under the inspiration of God in those things, which pertain to God, Paul starts talking about his preaching a little bit here.

And he says, you know, if, if I look at my ministry, if I look at my preaching,

Paul says, I have to stick to the things that I can see the glory of Jesus Christ in.

And that's what I want to preach. I don't want to, I don't want to bring worldly stuff in there to raise a crowd.

I don't want to keep people awake by telling funny stories and, and poems. And I just going to preach the word of God or the power of the

Holy spirit. That's all I'm going to do. He said, I, there are others that speak with flowery language and Paul said, but I don't.

And so he says, I have, therefore, wherever I may glory through Jesus Christ and those things, which pertain to God for,

I will not dare to speak of any of those things, which Christ has not wrought in me. So Paul can say, as the world goes,

I'm one of the most educated men alive. I can argue with any of the scientists in his day.

I can argue with the philosophers of his day. I can go to Greece and I can, I can argue with the Greeks. And he said, you know, that's great.

I've got that. God gave me all that stuff before he ever even saved me. I studied the feet of Gamaliel.

I'm one of the best theologians in the world. He can say, and he said, but the truth is

I'm not dare going to speak about that stuff when I speak. And when

I preach, I'm only going to talk about the things that Christ has done in my life.

That's all that matters at this point. The other stuff he counted as done, it says in places in the scripture.

All that counts with me now that I'm saved is what Jesus has done in my life and is doing in my life.

So I don't dare speak of any of those things. Isn't that something? Which Christ has not wrought in me.

So the stuff that he had in his life, that Jesus isn't presently working in his life.

He doesn't even talk about that stuff anymore. All right. Now what

Christ is working in Paul to do, it's to make the Gentiles obedient by word and deed.

Now, what does he mean by that? First of all, he wants to preach the word in such a way with such zeal and doesn't have to be flowery language.

Katie or Dave Huber one sent me a thing of Billy Sunday preaching, texted it to me. That's all.

Cause I talked about it last week. There's actually a video of him. Ask Dave when he gets back, he can get it to you, but it's amazing.

It's exactly what I said it was. And he was an amazing fiery preacher. He would make a point he'd run across and slide.

He was a professional baseball player who was a drunk and then he got saved. So he would slide across like he's sliding into base with his microphone, make a point about Jesus.

So you can do that. There are preachers that do that, but Paul didn't. Paul would just hold the sides of the pulpit and talk about the

Bible under the power of the Holy ghost. And that's, that's all he wanted to do and he had things in his life he could call upon if he wanted to impress people with his education, but he didn't do that either.

So what he did want is he wanted to make Gentiles be obedient.

Now what's interesting about that word is if you look it up, I wish

I had, in fact, somebody do it for me. Everybody out there has got a phone. Look that up, but that word for obedience and the

Greek day fever, you're always doing it anyway. You probably already got it. I think it's going to be pistis or peace duo or something like that.

Just let me know in a minute. I'm looking at Romans 15, 18, the word obedient. It's actually the

Greek word for faith. I'm pretty sure. I should have looked it up and I just, it may not be what, because there are words that mean obedience.

Which one is it? It doesn't really matter in the context it's talking about being obedient to the faith. Just be interesting to know.

So let me know when you find it. Anyway, he wants the Gentiles to become obedient to the

Lord by, by word and by deed are the two things, the tools

Paul is going to use to accomplish this. Now by word, we know what that means is he's going to give them this, not a bunch of human stories.

And I mean, illustrations are okay. Yes. Did you find it? No, I mean the

Greek word. What is the word? Actual word is what? Okay.

So I was, I was wrong. It's actually means obedient. So most places, many places, when you see the word obedient, it's in, in the

King James, it's actually is the root, which means faith. So it actually, what it means is obeying what

Christ says to do. The gospel obeying the gospel is what it means. It means that here too. It's just sort of a synonym.

It's okay. I should have looked it up, but thanks for looking it up. So he wants to use the word and deed in order to get the

Gentiles to see the truth. Okay. So we know what the word is, right? He's, this is his main tool. It's the word of God, the water of the word.

Now deed means his own life. So I don't think we have enough preachers today in America that can walk a walk.

That is so powerful. Like, like Criswell did when he was alive, like Rocky Freeman did when he was alive, like Otis did when he was alive.

You can't just preach the word. You gotta be living it. The Holy spirit won't give you any power in your teaching or preaching.

If you're not living it and walking with God, the main thing is just walking. It's not so much, see, I'm not talking about trying to just live a perfect life all the time and have a list of things

I'm going to do to look to be spiritual. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a real walk with Jesus where you're walking with him.

You're talking with him. You're, you're letting him talk to you a lot and you're talking to him and you're walking with him and you don't want to do anything he's not doing with you, right?

Or through you. That kind of walk. That's the deeds Paul's talking about that he has to have along with the teaching of the word or else it doesn't accomplish as much.

Now I think the word will accomplish something no matter what, who's preaching it, which I think that's a great thing because today, if you didn't have that working,

America would be in big trouble. They wouldn't be hearing nothing. So you can have a false teacher, read scripture and God can use it to save people, which

I don't like it that God does it that way, but he does. I would rather say kind of like the apostles did,

Hey Jesus, he's over there preaching and, but he's not preaching in, in, in your name. So should we go stop him?

He said, no, if he's not against us, he's for us. Let him go. Interesting. But anyway,

Paul wanted his life to, to match what he preached the best he could live the best he could.

We know he had trouble like we do. He said, I do the thing I don't want to do. He said, I don't do the thing

I want to do. So he also had something in his life that he asked

God three times removed. And God said, no, you don't get to keep that one because that one is going to bring you back to me.

When you confess it, whatever it is you're doing, every time you do it, you're going to have to confess to me and that'll spend time together and we'll hug each other.

And then you go and sin no more, but you may do it again because I'm not taking it away. Whatever it was.

Now you think about that. Everybody in this room has something like that. It could be in any area.

Read Roman 21 could be any of those 21 sins and there's more listed throughout scripture. How many sins are there listed?

Who knows? That'd be a great study for, I think brother John should do that one. Look, look that up for next time. I'm going to list all the sins.

It might be infinite though. So don't try that. But anyway, you get what he means here by word and deed, right?

Now look at verse 19, through mighty signs and wonders by the power of the spirit of God.

So not only is he going to preach the word and try to walk with Jesus during the week when he's not preaching

God by the Holy spirit, the spirit of God is going to put power on Paul's life.

Now he'll have additional power than you and I can have preaching because he's an apostle and we're not.

So there were apostolic sign gifts that he had, so that in fact,

God used that to authenticate Paul's message because not a Jew in the world would have believed Paul if he couldn't do signs because the

Jew requires a sign. So he had to be able, I mean, the little boy that fell out when he preached a long time, he fell out and died.

He went late on him and the boy revived, came back to life. We can't do that, John. But we do have power from the

Holy spirit if we have the deeds going and the word going. So that we still have.

Now Paul had some extra here. He had mighty signs and wonders and we have signs and wonders too through the power of the spirit of God.

But we understand that God is sovereign and he does those things when he chooses to do them. He does not do it every

Sunday just because we want to have rah -rah going on, right? He just does not come down on a place. And that's where Asbury was wrong.

And they claim they've had five revivals in the life of their school. No other school claims that. So why did God favor them?

See, so maybe they're sort of causing that to happen, manipulating a little bit, maybe just a thought.

So, oh, is it 13 now? It depends on which one you read. Yeah. So it depends on which article you read, maybe as many as 13.

That's a weird number, but anyway, so, you know, the word mighty is the key to the apostolic side of it.

Signs and wonders still happen all around us. I think it's a wonderful sign and wonder that this telescope discovered things that can't happen according to their theory.

Their theory just got shot. You know, that's what theories are for, right? You shoot them down. And once they're shot down, you should not say, well, we just need to add to it.

Now you need to just like start over. So they're going to be sharpening those pencils.

All right. So, so here he says he's got the power of the Holy spirit. Now, any preacher or teacher today needs that it doesn't have to appear in mighty signs and wonders.

It just needs to be God's presence in your life when you're teaching and preaching. And listen, you can tell when a person doesn't have it, you can just tell they can get up there and they can be all over the platform, but you're going, okay, it's not really,

I'm not really growing here. So Paul talks about this in his own life.

And he needed this to be able to bring Gentiles to Christ in a world that didn't even believe God would save a Gentile.

So through mighty signs and wonders by the power of the spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and roundabout unto,

I listen, I could say that at home.

I can't say it here. Illyricum, Illyricum, sorry about that.

It's so funny how your mind, when you're saying it to yourself, it's easy, but Illyricum, probably not pronouncing it right, but I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

Now in a minute, it's going to, I don't know if we get to today, but he's going to talk about wanting to take a trip to Spain.

And if you look at the old world that they knew, the Roman world, it was the far corner.

It was the far, you know, as far West as you could go in the world, they didn't think anything existed beyond that. So his plan was to span the entire world preaching the gospel.

Isn't that amazing? There's no biblical evidence that he made it to Spain. As far as I know, it just says he wanted to, but we do have some evidence that he actually made it that far.

It's not inspired evidence, but it's history. We'll see that later maybe. So, so he, uh, he went from Jerusalem all the way beyond Greece.

That's easier to say than and he fully preached the gospel of Christ.

So we see the continued theme that we've seen so many times in the book of Romans about the importance of two things, the word of God and the

Holy spirit. So notice that Paul says, if I'm going to take the gospel to the

Gentiles and be effective, I got to have the word, right? And now he says,

I must have the power of the Holy spirit. Got to have both or none of it works. Okay.

John Calvin taught that all humans sense that there is a

God. We have a conscience that God put in us and we know there's a God. Romans one teaches it so beautifully.

John Calvin taught that we all create our own gods to worship. However, so a human senses, there's a

God. And then we begin to create him in the image we want him to be so that we're okay. Worshiping him.

That is what every human does. Now listen to what Calvin says though. What we do is we, and this is

Calvin, we refashion our sense of deity to fit our own interests and design.

Well, obviously the scientists who are worshiping mother nature are going to have to refashion God because that's their

God. That is idolatry. What they're doing is they're worshiping the universe. Now here's the very sad, but one of the men on one of the films

I watched about it, even on the, towards the end of it, it's going to say, Hey, the whole theory is wrong.

He was talking about the theory and he said, well, when you look at the universe and he had the whole universe and about the size of a football all in one picture and you had these little nodule looking things and those are the galaxies, millions of them you could see in this picture.

He called him a real funny word, like little nods or something. I don't know what he called it. I forgot.

It was a funny word. It wasn't a scientific word. These little blimps or something like that. And he said, so we see all these little blimps.

And what we know is that these blimps came from earlier, smaller blimps and created these blimps, which created the stars and the planets and then humans and everything that is.

So his God is blimps. You like that? That's what he worships. Well, he's going to have to redraw the blimps, but he's still going to create his own

God. So Calvin said, this is what people do is they design a deity in order to fit their own interest and desires.

That is Calvin said, unless through the spirit and the scripture, our view of God's, our view of God is corrected and clarified.

So all of us have a concept of God when we're born into this world, from stuff we hear from parents, grandparents, and everybody in the world, school and everything in the world.

And then when we get saved and we start reading this book right here, our view of God changes drastically.

He's not the God who loves everybody that everybody wants to talk about today. He's a God who loves his own with a special, powerful love from the beginning of before time began.

So many things we can talk about that are so different than what we grew up believing. And Calvin so beautifully put it, that we will always create

Jesus into the image we want him to be, unless we are informed by two things, the spirit and the scripture.

But it's the same two things we've been teaching about for many years in this church. Two things, the water and the spirit, or no man is saved without that.

So that's the first thing we see here is that Paul had both. He wanted to preach the word.

He also wanted his life to be as good as he could be as a human being, as a Christian.

And then he wanted the power of the spirit. Those two things are required. Otherwise people end up with a perverted view of the very

God you're trying to preach about. Second thing is Paul did not build his churches on the work of others.

Now I can name a few groups who do. I remember when we started, we were part of the seven people that started this church in 1980, but it was in Mahia.

It's a long, ridiculous story about how it ended up here, but all that was God's plan too. But from a human viewpoint, it just sounds ridiculous.

But, we started out with seven people and it began to grow.

We would go door to door and witness. Three times a week, we all went door to door, knocked on doors and witnessed to people.

And it went from seven to 220 in one year in a town that only had 6 ,000 people. We were the second largest church in town in one year.

And then the founding pastor starts getting legalistic, preaching about how long a man's hair needs to be and whether women can wear their pants or not and stuff like that.

And he ran them all off down to about 30 and then down to about 18. And then he got called into evangelism because he didn't want to pastor a church that small.

So I got stuck with it. Not really, not really. Another pastor, Brother Phillips took over and ran the original one off, thank

God. Ran him off, told him don't come back. And then Brother Abraham, who we've been praying for lately, he was here for two years.

And so I was associate pastor to three different pastors. And then the church called,

God had already called me to preach, but the church called me to be the pastor after that. But the thing, the thing about it is that during that time when we were out knocking on doors and bringing,

Charlotte and I, a lot of the people that came were me and her that went to found them and we loved them.

We'd go, you know, they just total strangers, invite us into their home. We'd show them scripture. Some of them get saved and come to church.

Some of them get baptized, sit there and we just loved them. And then he runs them off. Now I can't tell you the hurt we went through.

I can't describe. I don't even like thinking about it, but it was horrifying.

But God used that to show us that we were practically in a cult group, practically.

So praise the Lord for bringing us out of it. But, but the thing is, what we didn't like was we would go to all that work of win them to Christ, humanly speaking, win them to Christ, bring them in, disciple them, get them started.

And all of a sudden a Mormon would knock on their door and pull them over into their church. Now they didn't go visit them and find them.

They just stole them from our flock. And then a Jehovah's witness would grab one of them. And, and so I've noticed all through my life,

Pentecostals and Charismatics will do it worse than anybody. Like they will come in here. If we've got a new, new

Christian class with brand new believers in it, and we're trying to get them disciple, get them ready before we get them ready.

They'll grab them, pull them over and get them in a tongue speaking church. They didn't go out and win them to Christ. They didn't do the work to find them and witness to them and love them and all that.

They come get them later. That that's just kind of true of cult groups. They like to proselyte is what that's called.

And so Paul said, I didn't build my work on the work of other men. I went out and went where God sent me.

No other man had preached there and, and God led me to the right people to witness to some of them got saved and I discipled them.

Then I went to another city. And so that's how Paul did his work. He says, yay.

So I have strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named already lest I would build on another man's foundation, but as it is written to whom he was not spoken of, they shall see.

And they that have not heard shall understand. He's talking about the Gentiles, right? For which cause also

I have been much hindered from coming to you, but now having no more placed in these parts and having a great desire, these many years to come into you, talking about to the

Roman church to visit them. Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you for I trust to see you in my journey and to be brought on my way to Spain by you.

If first I'd be somewhat filled with your company. So Paul did not take. So Paul wouldn't preach where other people had preached.

He didn't want to build on their foundations. He went out and found new people in the witness to him and discipled them.

And it is interesting. We're out of time for this morning, but he mentioned Spain. He wants to go by Rome and have

Rome sent, you know, send him to Spain and we'll talk about whether or not that happened last time.

But there's a lot of interesting information in this, this last part of Roman chapter 15 about Paul himself and his ministry and how amazing it is.

There's not a whole lot of major doctrinal points, which are the things I like to find because then when we find those, we'll go all the whole

Bible and study it and come back. But this one we'll walk through pretty quickly. We just got a little bit of a late start this morning, but so we'll definitely we'll finish the chapter next

Sunday, the Lord willing. All right, so let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, thank you so much for the folks working hard on the music they presented today.

And, and, uh, part of our praise and worship of you and Thanksgiving and all the emotions and thoughts it brings of, of you,

Lord, thank you for how you put the thought in my mind as the atheist believe that the created everything from dust, including people.

And I'm sitting there watching these people sing and thinking, well, isn't that something that rocks and dirt made them be able to sing and praise

God like that. And I'm thinking how ridiculous can they be, but they're blinded. And Lord, we pray you'd move among some of these great scientists in the world and, and call some of them to your son,

Jesus, that they might be saved. And Lord, we there'll be even better scientists at that point. And we pray

Lord that you would go with us into our time of fellowship. Now our meal that you would bless it, our conversation.

And that as we go out this week, you would help us to be what you want us to be salt and light.

We ask it in Jesus name. Amen. You are dismissed. We'll see you in a few moments for lunch.