September 8, 2015 Show with A. Craig Troxel on “With All Your Heart: Thinking (again) about What You Know, Love & Choose”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen.

Welcome back. This is Chris Arntzen. Thankfully, the Lord enabled us to return to the live streaming, and we thank you for your patience on Iron Sharpens Iron. Many of you know that we've been occasionally experiencing technical difficulties for reasons we can't determine yet, but God willing, those will be completely ironed out in the very near future.

Keep praying for us. But as I was saying at the very outset of the program today, I'm very excited that I have today with me on Iron Sharpens Iron, as guests for the very first time, two pastors within the same denomination.

We have Pastor Craig Troxell of Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois, on the phone with us today. Pastor Troxell is also Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and Adjunct Professor of Ministerial Studies at Mid-America Reform Seminary in Dyer, Indiana, and it's my honor and privilege, first of all, to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time, Pastor Craig Troxell.

And also we have co-hosting with me in studio here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Pastor Jody Morris, who is the pastor of Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, and it's my honor and privilege to have you for the very first time in studio or as a co-host or guest on Iron Sharpens Iron.

It's great to have you on the program today. Thank you, Chris. It's great to be here. And today we are going to be discussing, with all the heart, thinking again about what you know, love, and choose.

And before we even go into this theme, I would like each of you men to introduce our listeners to your congregations with an abbreviated description of what you do and what makes you unique over at your respective churches.

First of all, our guest, Pastor Craig Troxell, tell our listeners something about Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton.

50 years, 55 to be exact, I believe, and it is a four other churches, and so it's experienced steady, would be the better word, steady growth over the years. And I would say that the distinctive ministry given to Bethel Church would actually be simply the means of grace.

There's nothing fancy about what we do, and most people that attend our church would probably describe it as simple form. It's architectural minimalism with tan brick, and so it's kind of a unique church, even among our denominational church.

I would say that steady ministries, just being here for more than 10 years or so. I've been here eight years, and that's about it. And Pastor Jody Morris,.

Tell us something about the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church here in Carlisle.

Yes, Redeemer's located right here in Carlisle, and we've been here for 12 years now. We started as a church plant those years ago, and I came a couple of years into the church's existence and am its first pastor and continue to serve here and love the congregation and enjoy this community.

And some of the distinctives of our congregation are probably something similar to what you heard Craig say. We focus on the ministry of the Word and sacrament. Our motto on the church sign says, Worshipping God through Word and sacrament.

We're right there on the corner of York and Petersburg. If you've seen our sign, then you know where we are, and we welcome you.

Great. Well, it's great to have you on the program. And some of our listeners, just to be a little bit more clear about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, they may be totally unfamiliar with the more conservative or evangelical or Bible-based Presbyterian churches.

They may be only familiar with the very liberal mainline Protestant church down the road who may describe itself as Presbyterian. Perhaps, Pastor Craig, if you could give us just an abbreviated history lesson about what happened that brought about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as a denomination during the fundamentalist modernist controversy.

No, you just captured it well. It comes right out of that controversy, a time when mainline church members were becoming frustrated and missionaries of the gospel and were distancing themselves from those very core tenets and beliefs that Bible-believing Christians had always clung to, like the virgin birth of Christ or his bodily resurrection, things like this.

And so, in the 1930s, that's exactly what explains the birth of our denomination. The flashpoint was missions and a concern that we had missionaries that were no longer interested in the exclusive claims of Christ and things like this, and that's basically how our denomination began.

You could say it's the organization of Princeton Seminary, which for over 100 years had basically taught the same doctrine and had been teaching...

And out of that, the Westminster Theological Seminary, too, correct?

Sure. Yeah, that's also the same people that started, probably foremost among those forefathers, but he died a very, very early denomination. But it very quickly decided the case whether or not we'd be ruled by a person or heavily influenced by just one person, or if we were a true Presbyterian Church that believes in the plurality of leadership.

Great. And I know that you're also adjunct professor of ministerial studies at MidAmerica Reform Seminary, which has become affectionately known as MARS. I know that he's retired now, but if you ever bump into Dr. Nelson Klosterman, say hello to him for me.

He's a good friend of.

Mine. Yeah.

And hoping to have him back on my program again in the near future. Pastor Morris, did you want to say something there?

Well, I just wanted to add, while we're talking about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a fellow pastor in our denomination shared a great thought for many people, I imagine, who wonder what we mean by Orthodox.

He said, Orthodoxy is to biblical teaching what orthodontistry is to teeth. We make things straight.

Right. That's right. In fact, that's what the word means, right? Straight.

Right. Exactly.

And yes, this is no connection to the Eastern Orthodox branches of Christendom, as many people may mistakenly think from that name as well. And we're also, during our discussion on the heart today, we are going to be promoting two conferences.

One is actually a Reformation Day celebration on Friday, October 30th at 7 p .m. at the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where our guest, Pastor Craig Troxell, will be speaking on lost treasures for our postmodern times, the Puritan theology of the heart.

And for more information, you can go to that website, RedeemerOPC, which stands for Orthodox PresbyterianChurch .org, RedeemerOPC .org. And then, on November 13th, through Saturday, November 14th, that's Friday, November 13th, through Saturday, November 14th, the Dallas-Fort Worth Reformation Conference will be held at MidCities Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas.

And that theme is also going to be on, with all your heart, thinking again about what you know, love, and choose. And that is featuring our guest today in Iron, Sharp, and Zion, A. Craig Troxell. And the website to get more information on that conference is MC, which stands for MidCities, OPC, for Orthodox Presbyterian Church, .org, MCOPC .org.

And hopefully, I will remember to repeat that a couple of times before the end of the broadcast. But first of all, obviously, I think it would be very appropriate, since we're talking about the heart today, a word that's very used, overused, and misused, if you could give us.

A definition of the heart. One way to approach it would be this way. I think the simplest way to put it is that the heart is the governing center of a person. The Bible's most loved word, most often used word, to describe who we are within, in the inner person.

But you can look at it two ways, in that the word heart in Scripture is a term that has simplicity to it. So it reflects that inner unity. But the way the word heart works in Scripture, it's also a couple different nuances.

And it's able then, as one word, to bring in the complexity of that same inner being. So it's both simple, and yet it's a complex term. And we can get into different ways of what that means, or how to explain it.

And that complexity, I think, is in three branches. And that's probably what we'll get into later. So that's how I would call it. I would call it the heart is the governing center, it's in the driver's seat, it's your heart, side to it, and a complexity.

And do you think that the words heart and mind are very often used interchangeably, and perhaps sometimes in an incorrect way? Or how would you separate the two?

Well, the way I would, I would different meanings in Scripture. I mean, most often, so when you see the word heart, it's the unity of who you are within, much in the same way the soul, or spirit, or inner man, or conscience.

But the heart, in many contexts, has a particular nuance to it. And that nuance is tilted either towards the mind, the word you just used, or the desires, or the will. Many times, one of those three aspects of what the heart is being reflected there, it's stressing that aspect of the word mind, for instance.

Many times, it's clearly what's in view in Scripture is the mind. But they're not exactly the same thing. In fact, the way, is that the mind is a portion of your heart. It's that knowing part of your heart.

And so like in Psalm 139, it ends saying, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. Well, clearly what's in view there is the mind, the cognitive part of who we are, our understanding.

But David, the psalmist there is using them almost interchangeably. So there's sometimes when it is interchangeable. And there's many times you have translations that will have the word mind, or sense, or something like that, and the word underneath it is heart.

That's what's.

Literally there in the text. And do you think that people often speak in a wrong way, Christians, modern evangelicals speak in a wrong way in their reflections upon making the mind perhaps less a desirable element of the Christian faith and presenting the gospel than the heart?

Today, you have people who perhaps overemphasize a sentimental understanding of the and view the mind as something only involved in dry, dull, lifeless intellectualism,.

If you follow what I'm saying. Yeah, no, you're right on it. And that's a very important thing you're presenting. And the way that we have to see that in Scripture is that the heart and the minds are always friends, not seen as having competing interests.

In fact, there are some that would say that—in fact, one of them, Hans Walter Wulf, who wrote Anthropology of the Old Testament, he wrote that in by far the greatest number of intellectuals in the Old Testament, it has the rational functions and view.

So if we're going to say that the heart does one thing in Scripture, it thinks. And so this is the word that's used to bring in meditating, insights, all those sorts of things. In the Bible, you do not want to pit the mind against the heart when, in fact, the heart comprehends the mind.

But there are those times when you find both of them, in the same sentence, like, say, the Great Commandment, where Christ is asked, you know, what's the Great Commandment? In Matthew 22, 37 and following, he says, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, cases like that.

Well, your singer is simply redundancy, which Scripture loves to do, one with the other. But that should not put us off. In my research—and this is not really that controversial of a statement—among biblical scholars, and especially, the heart thinks.

And what's interesting is it spikes in its use, especially in wisdom literature. So this word heart appears over 200 times in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, for instance. That's where you see its most common use.

What are these books about? And so, in fact, it's interesting that, you know, in Scripture, like, it says he has an understanding heart or a listening heart, but sometimes it's not translated that way.

It's like he's a man of wisdom. Well, literally, it's a man of heart. And so, it's very helpful to help us to appreciate that the whole idea of heart, apology in the Bible, that area of your heart, the mind, rather, is a part of your heart.

Where you meditate, reflect, etc., etc. I'm very intrigued by the topic, theme, or title of your Reformation Day celebration on Friday, October 30th, scheduled to be held at the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Lost Treasures for Our Postmodern Time, the Puritan Theology of the Heart.

If you could, before we even go into some other definitions that I want to ask you to describe, if you could give us a breakdown of that very intriguing title.

I maintain, and I should maybe say this, this is a book I'm writing, actually done, it's basically Puritan theology, which also happens to be what modern biblical scholarship is saying about the heart, that the heart is these three areas, the mind, the desires, and the will.

And the Puritans understood this, they worked with this, and you see it in places like John Owen and the book The Mortification of Sin, which is a tremendously insightful work. But you see it in other works as well, and you don't see them, you just see them using it, and assume you call the desires of the heart what they call the affection.

So, they were very, very concerned that particular part of the heart, what is it that we love, what do we want, and the desires of the heart. But as you probably know, they're very strong on the will, and that you can't, and then if the Puritans emphasize anything, it was very, very dense, appealing to all three of these things are assumed in their writing, and they weave in and out of these categories.

So that's where that, I'm not saying anything new for these conferences, just simply going back and realizing that our Puritan forefathers, especially at their best, were articulating in very precise, very descriptive, helpful ways, really drilling down into who are we within.

And that's why when you read them, so oftentimes you feel like you're underneath an x-ray machine, or under a microscope, and you're being taken apart, as it were, and then put back together. That's because they understood this.

So, Craig, what you're saying so far,.

If I understand you, is that while the heart and mind are not contrasted, but coordinated in Scripture, they're not at war with one another, but one is the expression of the other, perhaps, at least a portion of the expression of the heart, the mind is.

Additionally, there's this will that is an expression of the heart, and desires that are an expression of the heart. You mentioned something about a grid. Is this what you're getting at, as a portion of this grid you described, the heart as mind, desires, and will?

Yes. So I think when you come across.

The word mind in Scripture, you're thinking it's a portion of the heart. And this is often the case in our modern translation that the word understanding, sometimes the word... And how about faith, believe, with the heart?

That those, well, these particular words are oftentimes the translation of the actual word heart. So let me give you an example, like Proverbs 632 in the ESV, he who commits adultery lacks sense, he who does it destroys himself.

The word sense is not there, it's actually the word heart. And this often appears in the Proverbs, and the reason it's translated that way is because for a lot of modern day readers, we wouldn't lack sense, it's very obvious that this is a person who's not thinking carefully.

But if they put lacks heart, our modern idea would be to say he lacks emotion or something like that. But that's a too superficial of understanding of the word heart. Understanding, consider, sense, mind, these are oftentimes in our modern translations, actually a translation of the word heart, where either the Hebrew word lev, levav, or the Greek word kardia, is underneath there, and you don't see it.

So we might think that kind of a person.

Lacks conviction or commitment or a will to do what he should, and what we should actually be.

Seeing there is the way it's translated. Right, and this is the problem, is that because of the way we use heart, and the way that Chris was talking about earlier, is we think of it as emotional or something like that.

It's interesting that there's this little sequence, this conversation, and in all places, The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum. I don't know if this is in the movie or not, but with a Tim Woodman and Scarecrow conversation, and Tim Woodman says, not the best things in the world, and Scarecrow says, have you any?

And Woodman says, no, my head is quite empty, but once I had brains and a heart also, so having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart. And see, that's the way I think a lot of evangelicals today think of the mind.

They think of the mind as simply the brain, as opposed to the heart. They say, well, I'd almost always rather have a heart. And well, in the Bible, they're the same thing, or at least it takes in.

The mind. Yeah, and in times, there has been at different periods of Church history, as you know, and even today, an anti-intellectualism that somehow this bad villain of the mind is going to somehow interfere with the wonderful loving heart in its relationship with God and with.

Others. Times when there's been too much confidence put in the mind, other times when it's hard to feel like, you know, we should have nothing to do with it whatsoever. Something like a hard heart is known, and it's true that you can't do an end around the mind and think you're going to come out with a better heart.

In the Bible, that just doesn't make sense. Now, it's also interesting,.

And I don't want to go on too far of a sidetrack here to talk just briefly about the Puritans themselves, but it is interesting that you are titling your conference at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Lost Treasures for our Postmodern Time, The Puritan Theology of the Heart.

Many people view the Puritans as heartless, and that they would be the furthest place to, or the last place to look for any kind of information on the heart. If you could give us some caricature-busting information, perhaps, on the Puritans.

Well, the best thing to do would.

Just simply read some of their devotional literature, and to read what they say about marriage and love between a husband and wife, to see what they say about prayer, and to read, for instance, to pick up Valley of Vision, printed by the Banner of Truth, which encompasses you, and to see...

And the letters they wrote to their wives. Oh, yes, I mean, there's so much there. You know, when somebody says something like that, I think probably our strategy should be, somebody who wants to put down the Puritans and say, well, what have you read?

Right. You know, just simply ask them, what have you read, by, let's say, John Owen, or, you know, we could pick anybody, but I think that it'd be helpful if we just start introducing our people to primary sources, and read, you know, the Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, or to read on the Holy Spirit.

These men talk so much about the Holy Spirit. It's on every page, and as is the heart, when you start opening up what they have to say, of them called the cardiographer. It's all about the heart. So this is a great concern of theirs, and yes, they were concerned about theology, but when they wrote polemical theology, it was to protect what was more precious to them, and that was the, this is John Owen, communion with God, or mortification of sin, or on temptation.

And it's very clear, when you read those works, that you're sitting underneath the tutelage, and not somebody who's interested in just.

Whittling away with their knives. Yeah, well, the Puritans, when I began to be taught what they actually taught, and believed, and lived for, really destroyed mythology for me in a good way, and they have become a very valuable part of my Christian growth.

And it's amazing that the Puritans, no matter how many hundreds of years ago they may have written their works, how timely and timeless some of the, many of the things that they address, they could be describing the present-day church, and the dilemma that the church is in today, perhaps with some antiquated wording here and there, but the actual messages themselves really hit home in an amazing way.

And we have a couple of other definitions that I'd like you to go through. First of all, we hear a lot about the word sin, especially those of us who are in more conservative, Calvinistic, or even fundamental churches.

Sin is brought up quite frequently, and in the most pulpits of modern evangelicalism, especially those within televangelism and so on, you hardly ever hear it at all. But if you could go through a definition of sin for us.

In 1951, I started to see how it's not just that we have these three areas of the heart, these three aspects of the heart, and then the vocabulary God's given to us. And as we're talking about the mind, what's interesting to me is the most popular word for sin in the Bible, it's usually translated sin, no surprise there, but it means literally to fall short or to miss the mark.

And what that means is you fail to measure up to the standard. You know what the standard is. Talk about mistakes and errors of that standard, you miss it. And that can be done both actively and passively.

The most popular word in the Bible means exactly that, to miss the mark, to fall short. We know we're supposed to tell the truth, so lying, lust, and anger, all these things, or all the things that we, quote, forget, unquote, to do, bespeak our sin.

But then the second nuance to that, and this is very important, think of the mind in particular. It means that I know what I have to be thinking as well. And one of the things that Christ does in the Sermon on the Mount is he totally exposes that person who thinks that they're sinless because they, I'm not a murderer because I've never killed anybody.

I'm not adulterer because I did not sleep with somebody. He goes right through the moral law and exposes all that and basically says, you have an anger problem with your brother, guess what, you've committed, you struggle with lust, you struggle with hypocrisy or avarice, worldliness or anxiety or self-righteousness or judging.

All these things begin by incubating in the mind. And so what it tells us is that falling short of sin is not just in my actions or in my speech, but it's also my mind. Or if I am, you know, simmering in my anger, if I am completely lost in anxiety because I continue to nurture that, and then we're not even talking yet about false doctrine or unhealthy doctrine, those can be sins as well.

And so this is really helpful to understand that the sin of my mind is one peculiar expression.

Yeah, we think of that as very often as an unimportant thing. We think of it as really not sin at all. Some people will even categorize, the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, will categorize homosexuality as not being sin unless it's acted upon.

But that's completely off the mark, isn't it? Isn't that a very dangerous way of thinking about sin?

Yeah, sin is too often, but some stir them out, being very concerned about it and being comfortable afterwards, I do not know. It's very unsettling when you read and you see the ways in which you are by the law of God and the way in which Christ is a prophet, you know, we never realized.

But no, that internal thing that's happening within, that's all open to him. And he's showing us again and again that maybe you didn't act upon this, you wanted to, that's because I stopped you. But it begins right here.

Here's the seed of it, in this anger or in this lust, whatever it might be.

And the biblical view of reality and all the world we live in, it says that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. It's very easy for us to be deeply concerned about our outward appearance and not pay so much attention to our heart.

And there in the Sermon on the Mount, it seems to me that one of Jesus's points of emphasis is that this is about what God sees. This is about what he's paying attention to. And it seems like what you might be getting at here is that if the mind is about what you know, and to sin is to fall, and then to sin is to fall short of what you know, and that's where God is paying, that is what God is paying attention to.

Right.

We have to go to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Craig Troxell, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. That's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

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And again, the email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Pastor Craig Troxell and Pastor Jody Morris.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Zarnes. And if you just joined us, our guest today is Pastor Craig Troxell. And he is going to be speaking at two different conferences that we are promoting today. One is going to be held Friday, October 30th at 7 p .m. at Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the theme, Lost Treasures for our Postmodern Time, the Puritan's Theology of the Heart.

For more details on that, you can go to the Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church website, which is redeemeropc .org. And then after that, not long after that, Friday, November 13th through Saturday, November 14th, the Dallas-Fort Worth Reformation Conference at MidCities Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas, also features Pastor Craig Troxell on a similar theme, With All Your Heart, Thinking Again About What You Know, Love, and Choose.

And for more information about that conference, go to the MidCities Orthodox Presbyterian Church website, which is mc, for MidCities, opc, for Orthodox Presbyterian Church, dot org. mcopc .org. And we encourage you all, if you live in those areas or if you have time to get to those areas, to get there for those events, and obviously let your family, friends, and loved ones who you know who do live in those areas to be there, if at all possible.

And before we went to the break, we were discussing sin, Pastor Troxell, if you could get into a little bit more depth, iniquity and transgression.

Right, there's scripture uses, and a good example would be, again, in Psalm 51, where David immediately is confessed into the mind. The second word he uses is the word for iniquity. And the word iniquity correlates well with desire.

The word iniquity means to pervert or to twist. So it means to take something that originally was straight, and then it twisted like wrought iron, something that you work, or it means to make it crooked.

But it can also take on the nuance of when we corrupt something, something that was clean, and now we make it corrupt and impure. And we can talk about that when we talk about desires. The third word is for rebellion.

And so it takes on that idea of that anytime that I owe submission to someone, but I resist them, this is the Bible's word for political revolution, to completely throw off authority. But it's the idea that I'm kind of brazenly defying the one who's in charge of me or over me.

And so you can see how that really works well with the will, and the person's will resistant to God. But we'll see in a little bit, if we talk about this, that there's also a flip side to this. There's a time when our will is supposed to be strong, when it could be weak, or enslaved, and cave, or afraid.

Those categories come into play there as well. But those are those three words that are used there. There are other words very similar to them, but I see them falling out in these three groups that really help to bring out what sin is.

And there are times when you might sit under somebody's instruction, like I was in college with a liberal professor, and all he would say about sin is, it's falling short. I thought, well, that's not so.

Nobody's perfect. Government leaders said that, you know, I'm not perfect. Well, I think somebody that in your heart, you're perverted, and that you lodge impurities, or that you're rebellious. Well, now you're really starting to.

Get into the... Right. It's just like the commonly used phrase, I'm only human, which is a way to excuse yourself of anything that you do that may be hurtful, especially to others, and, well, I'm only human.

Right. Transgression to rebel, that's where it's definitely connected with the will of knowing exactly what you're doing, and then defying.

God and what you know he teaches and commands, correct? Passive. Nobody can argue I'm just passive and everything. Well, as it turns out, that's a problem. Right. It's more than just what we think, or that I have a stray thought every now and then.

I actually commit myself, and whether I do that in my mind, whether I do it in my language, or in my actions, that our heart is committed to a certain agenda, and we pursue those things.

Now, how do the three offices of the Lord come into play here?

It does not exclusively... Trying to understand the work of Christ, and to see that those, and as a priest, think of the ministry of Christ, is that Christ ministers to his people through his Word. He would say the Word of God is not just active, it's being actively applied to us through the preaching of the Word, but in a particular way by the Spirit.

It was the ministry that Christ told his disciples that, though they would be disappointed and saddened that he would go away, that something marvelous was about to happen in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who takes the teachings of Christ.

And the fact of the matter is, we not only need to have recreated minds where God, by his Spirit, grants to us a saving knowledge of Christ, but we need our minds renewed. And in fact, Romans 12 opens up this very way, in that not to be conformed to this world, but to be renewed in the mind of the heart, and to be transformed by God's Word in our mind.

And so we need God to retool us in the same way that a car, or a musical instrument, or machinery has to be retooled, or retuned, or reminded. And this is teaching us more and more our thinking about our life, and our world is completely different from what it used to be, because he's literally at work in our minds, in our thinking, how we understand things, because he's stamping us into his mold, and not allowing us to be completely shaped by this world.

And this is very helpful. Constantly undergo this process of being sharpened, and honed, and reoriented by God's in your thoughts, and your goals, and all these ways. It's a way that God is training us, and helping us.

And then, even beyond this, is taking place. And this is particularly helpful in an age that's telling us we really can't know anything, living in a post-modern time, confidence, the things that we believe are true.

And it's striking to me, where you have these promises in Scripture, where, as I write these things, to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know. I think it's amazing, the Scripture says this, that you may know.

I'm certain, or we know, we may be certain, you know, that God works all things for a good. So again and again, what you have is this kind of bolstering of the mind, telling us that, look, you have, you believe in a God that you cannot see, and you are not wrong in doing so.