The Invitation — Merle Weaver

Now, Brother Merle Weaver comes to us from Pennsylvania. He's a dear brother and a very, very close friend of mine. He and his family were actually just traveling through on vacation. And if you were here at the Revival Conference, you remember that Brother Merle was one of the moderators here.

And when he said he was coming through on vacation, I said, well, brother, you you better get ready to preach because I want any time. And knowing I had the opportunity, I wanted him to share the word of God.

Brother Merle walks with God. There's no doubt about that and just lives in the joy of the Lord. And I appreciate him so much. So let's welcome him as he just comes and shares the word of God with us.

Well, greetings, everybody, in Jesus name. Bring Christian greetings from the church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and glad to see all those everywhere. That name, the name of Christ and live for him.

The Treasure of Grace in Earthen Vessels

And Paul said, we have this treasure in earthen vessels of the excellency. The power may be of him and not of us. And truly, this is the testimony of my life. I should not be here. I should not be able to declare the word of God in this way, but for the grace of God.

And I thank him and I I'm thankful already for the way Jesus has been being lifted up as the only explanation for any goodness in any of us. I didn't tell my wife I was going to do this, but just so you all know who my family is.

Can you all stand up back there? They they had trout, you may sit down. It traveled with me as we've this is our second weekend on the road and we'll be going yet another one. And and it had a lot of different stops and preaching places and things like that.

And so sometimes I'm never sure whether these things are really vacation or not. But I can say over here in in Twin Oaks, you have a very nice area. We're camping over there and just having a great time.

And the time is relaxing and drawing together as a family. We've come through a very busy season. Our life lasts a while and just wanted a time to draw together. So glad that when I was here in June, Lord put it on my heart that's supposed to come on back here and spend some time camping by the lake and and praying here, praying for your town.

Oswald Chambers once said, nothing's done but his first son through prayer. And this I've come to see very much as a reality in my life that we never accomplish anything, but we first do it in prayer.

I think with that in mind, we will just do that. We'll pause for a word of prayer. Before before we do that, I was down in Georgia one day at a conference. And in that conference, the Lord had so led and ordained that I had an opportunity to kind of arrange a prayer meeting in the prayer service.

And one of the brothers that was responsible for that meeting told me that that he knew my culture, knew my background. And he said, you know, nobody here is really used to praying on their knees, that that's just not the most culturally acceptable thing.

So I just humbly took that off of him. But I watched when God came down in that prayer meeting and there was pastors that were used to sitting on their chairs all the time. When God came down, they were flat on their face.

Humbling Ourselves Before God

And so Jesus said, one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. So I'm going to give each of you a chance today to do that this side of eternity. And if you're not restricted by health or some other some other thing like that, I'm going to ask you all that can to kneel right where you're at.

And we're going to bow on our knees and ask the Lord to direct us. God, our Father, you who take the nothings and the least things and bring to naught the things that are in the name of your holy son, Jesus.

We come before you this morning asking you that you would do just that this morning. You would humble any proud flesh. And in this token of bowing on our knees, we invite you to be Lord of this meeting as has already been stated.

But we put our necks down and we exalt the Christ, the living son of God. And we thank you, Father, that one day, though he is Lord of all now, it will be manifest to all men to see. And that every knee will indeed bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord today by your Holy Spirit.

We ask you to come and move among us to exalt the Christ, which is always the ministry of your spirit. And Father, I pray you would touch any hearts or lives that have not yet yielded in total, absolute, unconditional surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ.

We commit this time to you. I commit the sharing of the word to you, knowing that it in me, that is in my flesh, does not dwell one good thing, but that through Christ and his Holy Spirit, we can do all things.

And Father, I pray now you would anoint the words and being sent forth. And I pray that you would anoint the hears, that you would break every proud heart, break every high thing which exalt itself against the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that you would make good ground ready to receive the word to bear fruit unto life eternal.

We ask and commit and pray all these things in the worthy name of Jesus. Amen. In one of the important battles of the Civil War, there was there was a fort that was held, I believe, by Southern forces being advanced upon.

If I remember correctly, the general was Ulysses Grant. I can't remember if it was him for sure or not. But the commander in charge of that fort sent word out to the advancing army and said, what are the conditions of surrender?

And the responding reply was immediate, absolute, and unconditional surrender. Please be notified, I intend to move on your fort. And this is the way Christ comes to us this morning. Jesus said, if a man doesn't take up his cross and follow me, he cannot be my disciple.

Christ's Invitation and the Resistance to It

And this morning, I, by the grace of God, want to to lift up Christ's claim on our life. I want to I want to as I prepared for this this message, as the Lord put this message on my heart, I kept hearing this word, this word of invitation.

And so that is what I endeavor, by God's grace, to do, to invite you to something, to invite you to something very appealing, something that's absolutely changed my life. And there's an invitation here.

It's just like a wedding invitation. And you're all invited. And I hope by God's grace to paint that invitation. But before I give that invitation, I would like to deal with some of the resistance to that invitation.

And so by God's grace, we'll do that. If you have your Bibles along, I would invite you to turn with me to John three. We're going to read verses one to eight. And I want us to think and consider the scenario here.

No doubt to all of you that have been used to going to church for most of your life. Maybe you've been taught the Bible in Sunday school or Bible school or or wherever. This this may well be a common passage to you may think I know all about this passage.

John three. Sure. John three, 16, for God's love, the world that whosoever believes on him would not perish, but could have eternal life. You all know these verses, but I'd like to lift these verses up for consideration once again this morning.

You know, I hope a fresh fashion is Lord's revealed this to me. Starting at verse one, there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. The same came to Jesus by night and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God.

For no man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

So is every wand that is born of the spirit. Now, one of the degraved dangers we fall into when we've been used to hearing God's word time and time again is that we think that we understand what it means.

We think that we know what it means. And so because of that reason, we don't dig in to understand all that God might have for us. The two verses I want to really focus on this morning are verse 3 and verse 6.

But before we think about that, I'd like to paint the picture. This nightfall, wherever Jesus is staying, he's maybe turned in for the night already. I don't know, or maybe he's resting, or maybe he's done with supper for the evening, or dinner, however you say it here.

He's retiring. He's winding down. And here comes a man through the darkness. They didn't have street lights in Palestine in those days. They didn't have electric. When it got dark, it got dark. There might have been little lanterns in the window, but you could walk down the street without possibly being recognized.

And here comes this teacher of the Jews, and he knocks on the door. And he says, I want to talk to Jesus. Now, you know, if you've read the Gospels, you know what the religious leaders were doing with Jesus.

You know how comfortable they felt with his ministry. But this man was a very wise man. He did what few of the leaders did in that day, and maybe today sometimes few leaders do, is he dealt with reality.

And here was this man. He said, no man can do the miracles you are doing. No man can have the anointed life that you have, except he comes from God. It could not be possible. I know that. I'm being honest.

I would like to do what some of my contemporaries are doing. They're saying it to the devil, but I know better than that. I know no man can be living the life you're living. I know no man would have the ministry you have, except he came from God.

But there's a problem, Jesus. You don't fit our box. You don't look like what we think a godly man should look like. You don't look, you're not in the form that we would expect you to come. You're breaking our rules.

You're breaking our box. We can't have this. We don't know what to do with it. Can you help me to understand, Jesus? Now, what would we do today? What would we likely do? Jesus could have just reached his arm out and gave him a hug, and patted him, and comforted him, and helped him to come along.

But he didn't. He looked him straight in the eye. And he said, except you're born again, you can't even see this kingdom. Now, we've made a great mistake in American Christianity. Because you can go into any major city of America, most small towns, and you can see churches all over them.

You can see the steeples pointing to the sky. You can see the stained glass windows or whatever, however else they're made. And we think this is the church. This is not the church. These are buildings where hopefully the church assembles and meets.

They're church buildings, not the church. We go to church, I don't know how many times I've been in the assembly of the believers, and somebody gets up front and says, isn't it great to be in the house of God this morning?

I have one question, where were you all week? Did he not say he came to live in temples not made with hands? Now, I'm alright with calling this church in a church building, that's okay. But we've got to go a little deeper.

And Jesus, what happens, what gets us in trouble is then we see the organization. We have the committees, we have whatever else, maybe we have a mission board. The setting I come from, the background, it was a very strong church structure.

Hierarchical, so many steps down. You had your bishops and your ministers and your deacons, and you had conferences come together, and they made decisions, and they were binding upon all the churches.

In fact, the one setting I was part of, they owned the buildings. And they had the power, and we, this is the church. No, it is not the church. It is organization, it is order. It is things that may be great utility to the church, if held under its feet, but it's a terrible master.

And Nicodemus could understand all of this. He was in the flesh, he had not been born of the Spirit, but he couldn't understand Jesus. And Jesus was saying, my kingdom is not of this world. You can't just look at it and say, here's a church.

The Spiritual Kingdom Versus Religious Organization

I would venture to guess this morning, I know there's some here this morning that have been born of the Spirit. I hope many of you have been born of the Spirit. But I would venture to guess it's very likely there's people here today that have never been born of the Spirit.

They may have been church members for many years. They may be just fresh church members. They may think that by getting baptized, by joining the church role, whatever it is, that now they're part of the kingdom.

But Jesus said, it's not an order you can see with your eyes. That is not the way my kingdom functions. If it was, we would all be apostates, because the Roman Catholic Church, which claims to be the only true church, because they hold the succession, they have the order.

And they say, we have authority, we can write it the way we want it, we can say it the way we want it, and you better listen. But Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world. And none of us today, I don't think, are part of the Roman Catholic Church.

I make no apologies. It's an apostate system. It's walked away from Jesus. It's under another Lord. I'm not saying there's no believers there. But by and large, there's another Lord. There's homage given to another organization that holds power.

And we know better than that. The Reformation has come along and said the just should live by faith. We know it's not, somebody said this morning, about what you do. You're not going to earn salvation.

We got that far, praise God. But, have we been enlightened to see that Jesus' kingdom is a spiritual kingdom? It is not of this world, else would my servants fight. Now, let's just dissect that thing a little bit.

Jesus is saying, if my kingdom was of this world, we would all organize and we would get our guns, and we would go against the opposition. This is what we would do, and this is, by the way, what the Roman Catholic Church did during much of the Dark Ages.

They ruled over kingdoms. They held power. They said, if you don't listen to us, we will mow you down. But, today we know, here we live in America. A foundational principle of America is the freedom of religion.

And we thank God for that. We thank God that we can practice our faith and walk our faith before Him in freedom to believe. And we believe that it should be voluntary. You should be part of the Church by choice and things like that.

And I thank God for that. Those are great things that have come down to us. Things that a thousand years ago, men would have died for, had they even expressed the belief, and we take it for granted. And that's all good.

But, we still run in danger, because our family is part of the Church, and we expect the children to be part of the Church, and one generation follows another, and this is the Church. And we have our nice order, we have all our things.

It looks great. And I'm not against any of that. Our children ought to be part of the Church. That's great. But Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world. Nicodemus, here's what you don't understand.

That which is of the flesh is flesh, and that which is of the Spirit is Spirit. Marvel not that I said to you, you must be born again, except you be born in the Spirit, you'll never even see this. It is altogether possible for somebody to be raised in the Church, from little on up, and think they understand the Church, and never have, with their eyes, been enlightened to understand the spiritual kingdom.

This morning, I would never be here, had this not happened to me. I was raised in a setting that would have shunned you all. That said, they're not us. This is our box, they don't fit our box. And this is sin, this is sin against the body.

This is sin against Christ Himself. But we didn't know that, we were the Church, we were it. And in the same way as any other setting might do, we knew what the Church looked like. We were it, you joined it, you were part of it, and it functioned this way, it had the minutes, it had procedures, this is how you do this, and this all gets decided this way.

It was all slotted, so nice and comfortable. One problem, God wasn't in charge. I mean, it all started so good. It started with men that had a vision for their families. It started with men who didn't want to go after the world.

And they saw their surroundings, they saw the setting they were in, drifting out to sea. And they said, we don't want that, we want something better for our families. That was all good. But is it altogether possible to have a good heart, and to walk in the flesh, to execute it?

It's altogether possible to have right desires, but to do wrong things, to get to those ends. And the end is not justified by the end. The journey is very important to the Lord, of how we get there. And these men organized this all up, in my understanding, right from the get-go, with tools of the flesh.

They made a list of rules. You do it this way, you don't do it that way, you do it this way, you don't do it that way. And they boxed it, and slotted it, and it all looked right. One problem, I happen to know, there was people, part of that, that had never been born in the Spirit.

And there was vice, and immorality, and sin going on behind closed doors. And we are it, we are not it. This was Jesus' message to Nicodemus. That's what I want to bring to light in this passage. Jesus said in verse 3, except the man, you know, here in the, I guess you call this all the Bible Belt, kind of maybe working towards the West Side.

Everybody, this gets to be a cliché, born again, born again, all these things. I've stopped using those words so freely. Because everybody is born again these days, it seems. Ask somebody, have you been born from above?

Have you been born of the Spirit? Do you have this overcoming, life-giving grace of Jesus in your life? And maybe it all starts sounding a little different. We all think, we sign a little card, we join the prayer, whatever we did, we walked the aisle, we raised our hand, depending on your persuasion or way of doing things, and now we're born again.

That makes somebody about as saved as my dog. It's not about a decision, it's about a relationship. What we want to talk this morning about is the difference between the natural and the spiritual. That's what we want to talk about.

And we can do all these things in the natural. There was a great preacher, I don't remember which one it was, but one day at night he had a vision. He saw the devil down on the corner preaching the Gospel.

He thought, why is the devil preaching the Gospel? That's strange. He walked up to him. What are you doing preaching the Gospel? He said, because I know there's nothing that hinders the Gospel and helps my kingdom more than unanointed preaching.

And this man was shocked. And he went back and he sought the Lord to be filled with his Spirit every time he opened his mouth to declare the words of life. And it's possible to preach the Gospel. It's possible to teach Sunday school.

It's possible to lead worship. It's possible to build a church. It's possible to be a pastor and do it all in the flesh. That is altogether possible. You can do that with the natural mind. There are people who've gone through Bible school and through seminary who have never been born from above.

They understood. One day I had, sitting on my porch in front of our house, a man who could teach Sunday school. He could walk circles around people. He had incredible theology. His doctor was basically correct.

But he had one problem. He was a drug addict. Nothing against drug addicts, except he wasn't born again. He was serving something else than Jesus. He had no power of the Spirit in his life and his family.

It was all saying, Oh, we think he's a Christian. I said, How can you? Where's the fruit? I don't think he thought he was a Christian when he really stopped all the noise. And stopped all the, got everything quiet and asked the hard questions.

When he got on us like Nicodemus. I think he knew. You know, when tragedy, near tragedy strikes and all our life flashes before our life in an instant, that moment we know the answer that got drowned out in all the noise.

This is why, because Spirit is reality. Sometimes we think Spirit is like ether or air. It's just abstract. This is not true. Did not the eternal Spirit speak into being the world in six days? The natural is subject to the spiritual.

It is by faith that we connect to that greater reality. And this is what we want to look at. How these two relate side by side. Atheism has denied in this country, you go to a national park and you go to any government institution thing.

Atheism has taken over our education systems and things like that. And since so many hundred million years ago and all these things, it's just all evolved. It denies the spiritual reality. It says it must have happened by natural.

And if it's happened by natural, this is how long it took. And they may be right. I don't know how right they are or not. I haven't invested a lot of time. They may be right. If it happened naturally, that may be right.

But it didn't. And this is what has happened. We've denied, we've tried to prove everything by science. Not realizing that subsequent to all these laws of nature, subsequent and right alongside, it is altogether possible there is a whole other world that is not seen, which we know exists, number one by the Bible.

But you don't need to convince the voodoo doctor in Haiti by the Bible that there's a spiritual world. He knows that already. You don't need to convince the rising generation who's involved in Wicca and all this other stuff.

They know there's something else. There's power they're tapping into. There's all kinds of Eastern mystic thought things going on. There's power. Even, I'm sorry, I hope I don't offend anybody, but yes, I hope I do.

I hope you go get in the Word and find out all this meditation and yoga and hypnosis. There's tying into power that's going on. Are we asking questions or are we swallowing it blindly? Are we going down with the ship or are we getting on the lifeboat?

You're going to see this. This isn't just for that dark room downtown where you've got to pay so much to go in anymore. This is becoming part of our medical institutions. They're using this stuff. Did you know there's hospitals today that instead of anesthesia are using hypnosis?

What are we doing? I hope we're not. Where I come from, this is really rampant. I come from a people that naturally maybe suspicion the big institutions. And so they run like amazing to these quack doctors.

And anything that works, the end justifies the means. And it has brought a whole generation captive. And then they start getting depressed. I wonder why. They start having all kinds of nightmares and all this junk that starts going on.

When you open yourself up to this other world that you can't see, it does have results. It affects us. And so then to fix it, we start popping pills. We start pushing drugs, trying to deaden and control and drown this stuff.

When what we ought to do is get real, like Nicodemus did and ask the hard questions. What about this other world that exists? Well, I don't want to focus this morning on the power of the enemy or lies.

It's not in my heart at all. It's just a reference. But atheism says it doesn't exist. It denies spirituality at all. But in the 1600s, we came along with a little improvement on that. A little improvement in quotes, of course.

And it was something called deism. And deism said, there is a God that ought to be reverenced and worshipped, but he does not interfere, influence or change the affairs of men. Kind of like a big giant clock wound up and left go.

That's how this whole universe works. Yes, there's a God. We should worship him. But again, denying spiritual reality and saying, yes, it exists somewhere, but it has little to no impact on our world.

Then the 18 along came the agnostics. And they said, yes, sure, there may be a God, but there's no way you can know. There might be one, but there's no way I can know. I'll tell you why they didn't know.

It's because they never met him. This isn't about history, friends. This isn't about something happened 2000 years ago that we should give a mental assent to. I believe that Jesus died, was buried and rose again.

That's great. The devils also believe in tremble. But he is risen. And he lives. And he is alive today. And he will meet you in person. How can he do that? Because there is spirit. There is flesh and there is spirit.

And if you will encounter the living risen spirit of the risen Christ, it will change you. Okay, we move on to the 1800s and 1900s. Along came liberalism and modernism. And they said that, yes, Jesus actually did exist.

We're getting a little closer here. I just say we're getting more dangerous. They said he was a good man. Good set of ethics. We can all pattern our life on him. Great man to follow. But he was a man.

And he was only a man. He did not die. He was not died dead and rose again. They again deny the power. Deny. And you know what? I don't care whether you're an atheist, an agnostic or a liberalist. You're just as lost if you haven't met Jesus.

It doesn't make any difference to me. In fact, I think I'd rather have you be an atheist. Because at least then, you're not mixed up in this gray muddle. And denying, saying there is a Jesus, but denying his blood and his power.

And this is not about theology. I'm not here talking about how redemption works. Or how the blood works and all those things. That would be great to do. I'd be glad to do that. But I'm talking about spiritual reality.

And if we deny this spiritual reality, we deny Christ. And he said those that deny him will deny us. So, he will deny them. We'll take it just a little step further. Now it's going to smarten a little, friends.

A Form of Godliness Without Spiritual Power

It comes home to us. It's so easy to point out there, those atheists, they're really bad. And those deists and those agnostics, those modern liberalists. We're conservative. We believe the Bible. And we can dump it.

But what about this thing of denying the power? Okay, all across Christianity, most conservative, even in the most conservative and orthodox settings, either by doctrine or life, they deny the spiritual power and reality.

Let's turn to 1 Timothy 3 .5. I'm sorry. I meant 2 Timothy 3 .5. I wrote it down wrong. 2 Timothy 3 .5. I don't care whether it's Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, non-denominational, inter-denominational.

It doesn't make any difference to me. But if we have a form of godliness and deny the power thereof, what does Paul say we should do with folks like that? Turn away. Isn't that kind of harsh, Paul? What are you saying, Paul?

Aren't you being kind of unloving? Look, he's not saying we're not supposed to love people like that. He's saying don't link arms with them. Don't say we're one and the same. Have your eyes enlightened that you can see this spiritual kingdom and say, he's my brother, he's my brother.

I'm not sure about him. And I know he denies the power. In love, maybe we'll confront that person. Maybe we'll pray for him. I think we better pray for him first. But we're not to be linking arms and saying, we're all just one happy family.

Now today, it's even the Protestants and the Roman Catholics and we're all together. And after a while, it's the Muslims and the Hindus too, right away. And they're all different faiths and saying, God, it's not true.

It's not about religion. It's not about man's religion. It's about Jesus Christ. And I don't mind if one day I'm so politically incorrect that they want to throw me in jail because I'm a hate monger. I don't mind that.

That doesn't bother me at all. What bothers me is if somebody denies my Jesus. If somebody says, we're all different paths to the same God, then Jesus didn't need to come. It's just about history. It's about the evolution of religion and how it all shaped up.

Yeah, Jesus was a good person to follow. It's not about a living, risen person that's alive today that I have to relate to. If when we pray, the only person that's changed is ourselves, and what I mean by that is we're encouraged by some prayers, but they don't have valor and they don't change life, then we need to start asking questions.

1 Corinthians 2, 4 and 5, Paul said to the Corinthian church, he said, I'm going to read those verses. He said, In my speech and preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in a demonstration of the Spirit and power.

Now, I don't know what that looks like, and I don't think Paul had just the greatest polished sermon, but I do think when Paul preached conviction fell. I do think when Paul preached, is this okay, people got healed?

He didn't focus on healing. Paul never preached healing. I don't see anywhere in any of Paul's epistles that that was his gospel. He preached Christ, and some of these things happen, and that's how it ought to be today when somebody starts focusing on all these other things.

What happens? It eclipses Christ. We must preach Christ, but when we preach Christ, let's make sure it's Him, not the doctrine of Christ, not a teaching about Christ, but Christ. And there is a difference.

It's possible to teach about Christ. It's possible to have a historical reference. We can even get a little emotional and paint the crucifixion. I'm not against looking at the suffering of Christ. That's great, but we can do all that and never have the Spirit.

We must preach Him and Him crucified, and then what's the result? He said that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God. I'm going to ask you a question this morning. Does your faith stand in your wisdom or in the power of God?

Let's be real. We'll come back to that a little more later on. John 8, 29, Jesus said, I do always those things that please the Father. So we want to see what pleases the Father. One of the things we can do is look at Jesus' life.

Christ's Authority, Power, and Living Words

Let me ask you, is what made Jesus popular in His day, was it His theology and His great teaching? Is that what it was? Did the religious greats in His day come to Him and say, Wow, you got it stacked?

No. Do you know who came to Him? The people who didn't know anything. In fact, what did the religious leaders say? This cursed people which doesn't know the law will come after Him. Now, I'm glad for Jesus.

Jesus was the source of all true theology, if you will. But that wasn't what marked Him. What marked Him? He was a friend of sinners and He had power. He touched people's lives. He changed them. He healed people.

He ministered to people. He ministered wisdom. And even Peter would say, Who else can we go? You have the words of eternal life. This was a fisherman. That's like a garbage collector in our society. Somebody, you know, well, he couldn't find a better job, right?

This was not somebody in a five-star Hilton. This was not an airline pilot. Saying these words. This was the bottom row. But he said, I can't go anywhere else. You have the words of eternal life. And what a beautiful declaration.

Because Jesus' words were alive. They were spirit. Okay? They were spoken, I suppose, in the language of the day. I think it was Greek. They were spoken. Those words were spoken. But it was not the words alone.

It was the spirit with them. He had authority. That's why the people would say, This fellow does not teach like everybody else we know teaches. With so many words and it sounds so great. But his words hit the mark.

It penetrated. That's why Paul would say, Jesus, the words of God are alive and powerful. And sharper than any two-edged sword. Piercing the divider, dividing the sunder of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and the discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.