WWUTT 1640 Q&A from the Shepherds Conference

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily study in the word of Christ for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness. Find all our videos and other ministry resources at www .utt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Meeting the Shepherds Conference Guests and Their Ministries

Thank you, Becky. Well, we are recording here at the campus of Grace Community Church in the middle of the Shepherds Conference 2022. Literally in the middle of it because we're in the book tent, for one, and secondly, because this is the second of three days.

So we're in the middle of ShepCon, and I am joined by a couple of guys from the Truth Be Known podcast. This is Eki Tepsapornchai. Tepsapornchai. Tepsapornchai, not, not, yeah, right.

Yeah, Tepsapornchai, so that last syllable, it's like chai tea, spelt and pronounced the same way. And by the way, as I was telling you, Gabe, the best thing I like about you is your wife's name. It rhymes with mine.

So Becky and Eki, and I have to say, my name Eki is like Becky without the B.

Easy way to remember the first name because I can't ever remember to get the last name, so. And then the other half of the Truth Be Known podcast is Nathaniel Jolly. Yeah, that's right.

It's good to be here with you, Gabe. There's no confusion about that last name. There's no confusion about that last name, and Nathaniel doesn't at all rhyme with Becky, so. That's right, yeah. But you live up to Jolly.

Whether I want to or not.

That's right. Now tell me a little bit about your respective churches. You're both pastors, and in totally different parts of the country, yet you have teamed up together for this great podcast that you do.

Eki, we'll start with you. Tell us where you pastor, a little bit about your church.

Yeah, so I'm in Brawley, California. That's in the southern tip of California, just 30 miles north of the border of Mexico. And it's a small farming community, Western Avenue Baptist Church. Been there for a couple, about two and a half years.

And lovely people there, very welcoming community. And they're really embracing the word of God and the teaching of the word of God. We're starting to establish more and more emphasis upon biblical counseling.

Been doing fundamentals of the faith and all that. So really sweet community in the middle of the desert, really. But yeah, Western Avenue Baptist Church in Brawley, California. If you're ever going between San Diego and Phoenix, you're gonna pass through an area called El Centro, and we're just north of there.

And then Nathaniel is from way up in the frigid north. He's the bear hunter from Alaska. Now, how did you end up, because you're not from Alaska originally. Yeah, that's right. How'd you end up in Alaska and pastoring a church there?

Yeah, thanks for that, Gabe.

The short story is COVID put a kibosh on our manmade plans to go elsewhere overseas. And so we landed in Alaska, planting a church in the great frontier in the middle of COVID, which has been exciting to say the least.

But yeah, so we're a small, a church plant. If you go to Anchorage and you fly about five hours south just before you fall into the ocean, we're right in front of the glaciers.

On the Kenai Peninsula. Now, I wasn't kidding about calling you a bear hunter because you really hunt bears, right? I've seen the spear. You wanna hunt a bear with a spear. Yeah, that's right. Not just hunt, kill the bear.

One of us is gonna die, hopefully the bear. Yeah, if you're gonna come out of that experience alive, the bear has to die, I get that. Yeah, absolutely. So do you do much hunting? I guess you really can't live in Alaska without hunting and fishing, right?

Yeah, I think if you're not a hunter or fisher before you get there, you become that when you get there, which is my case.

Gotcha. Now, what is ministry like in Alaska? Because I haven't lived in very urban areas, but there's still enough of a place where you can go out and kind of find a central hub of where people go and share the gospel.

Can you do that in a place that's as sparsely populated in Alaska? How do you get out with the gospel?

Yeah, it is very different. In a lot of ways, although we're in the U .S., we kind of get treated like another country. In fact, if you look at any map of the U .S., normally we're not on it, thanks. But yeah, we're very spread out.

And it's a very dark place spiritually. We have a lot of genuine, unreached, closed-off people groups with the natives and such. And so, yeah, we're still learning how to get creative in that process.

People are very spread out. You don't go door-to-door, that's for sure, and especially not in the winter. But it's a good place, and it needs churches, so that's why we're there.

Praise God for that. I mean, somebody has to be where the people are whether it's in the isolated, frigid north or even in a desert someplace. So praise God for getting the gospel out there. So we are here at the Shepherds Conference.

I've met Nathaniel a couple of times, and I met Eki at G3, I guess. That's right, G3's the first time, yeah. October would have been the first time. So give me kind of some highlights. The theme of ShepCon this year has been unashamed.

The illustration that's on all of the literature is Peter being crucified upside down. We understand the persecution that many pastors have been under, especially during this COVID season. We've heard stories about how James Coates was supposed to be here and could not get here because his passport was flagged thanks to certain government mandates.

He was not able to get out of Canada and be able to come here to the U .S. and enjoy ShepCon. So already that story is kind of hanging over even this understanding of being unashamed for the gospel. So that testimony is even here.

Then we know what Grace Community Church went through, where the state of California was coming up against Grace Community Church. So in light of all of that, just reflecting on the speakers that we've heard so far, we still have H .B. Charles this evening.

At the time that we're recording this, H .B. Charles hadn't spoken yet. Then we have the Friday schedule. Voti's gonna speak again on Friday morning. We've already heard Voti once, Wednesday night. Set the place on fire.

Yeah, lit this place up. We have heard from John MacArthur who gave the opening presentation. We've heard from Abner Chow. We've heard from Paul Twiss, Bill Johnson. So give me some highlights so far.

What's really stuck out for you? We'll start with Ecke and then we'll go to Nathaniel. What's stuck out for you about what we've heard in the sermons, what we've heard from the Word of God thus far?

The Gospel, Social Justice, and the Unashamed Theme

Yeah, I think the theme of unashamed has been well stated. I mean, Romans chapter one, verses 16 through 17, and that's actually where Voti Bacchum was preaching from. But I think the centrality of the gospel being re-emphasized and it sounds like such a simple concept.

It sounds too simple for a conference. And yet the temptation of most people is to stray away from that and to start going into cultural storylines, into narratives, into what has been deemed social justice.

And I know a lot of people out there, they're gonna hear this and they're gonna say, oh God, there we go again. These guys are hammering on CRT and social justice and whatnot. But the fact of the matter is the gospel today is not truly the gospel that we find in scripture.

And when I say the gospel today, there's a lot of confusion between what is truly the gospel message versus what are implications of the gospel. And social justice or how the gospel plays out in terms of justice in our society is an implication of the gospel, but it's not the message that saves itself.

And we as ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ are to be proclaimers of the gospel. We are to proclaim the kingdom of God, the work that Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross. And that has been reemphasized in a very, very great way.

Voddie Bauckham last night just set the place on fire, helping open up with a great illustration that essentially talked about how the fact that we start to love junk food more than things that are actually good for us.

And that's what's happening with the gospel. It's getting watered down, it's getting cheapened into something that people start to become addicted to rather than longing for the pure milk of the real gospel itself.

And so that to me has been the great first impression of all this. And it's a very much a needed message in our day and time because if we're going to preserve the gospel that saves, we have to go back to what the Bible says actually saves people.

And it has never changed. The Bible, the great thing about the Bible is that it has always been perfect. It comes from a perfect God and it has stood the test of time and it will never need to change in order to bring forth the true gospel.

Amen. Of course, the passage that Vody preached from last night that you mentioned Romans 1, 16 to 17, I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

And what was interesting about all that is hearing Vody preach some of the things that he shared from his own personal testimony as well as confronting the false theologies that we have coming at us in this world.

Things like, as you said, the implications of the gospel versus the actual gospel. What we're hearing from social justice, what we're hearing in critical race theory, some of it's just straight up false.

Most of it's straight up false. But then there's other things that are implications of the gospel. Caring for the poor, equality, not discriminating against anybody, especially over something as silly as the color of our skin.

These are things, this is love that should be demonstrated as a result of the gospel, but they are not themselves the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is that he died on the cross for our sins, rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven where he is seated at the right hand of God, interceding for us on our behalf.

He's gonna return again to judge the living and the dead. And all who believe in him will not perish. Our sins are forgiven. We have everlasting life, fellowship with God even now. And when Vody was talking about it, gospel came up a lot in his sermon.

That word itself was used a lot in his sermon. And there was a point where, that I'm listening to him do this. Vody's one of my all-time favorite preachers. I love Vody Bach. And I'm listening to him do this, and I'm going, you know, Vody, this is great.

And if you were to just sit down now, this still would be a fantastic sermon. But I still really wish you would actually say what the gospel is. So you're using the word, but it's implied, and you're not actually saying what it is.

And then at the end, he just lit it up. Just one of the most fiery presentations of the gospel. And I'm sitting there going, see, that'll learn me. You know, how dare I doubt Vody Bach. He was definitely gonna light this place up.

But one of the illustrations that he gave at the very beginning and came back to it again at the end was the boy with the strawberry slushie, right? He got a father who feeds his son strawberry slushies.

And it has no strawberries in it whatsoever. It's just artificial flavor. And he loves the sweetness of the slushie. And one day they're walking through a strawberry patch, and the boy picks a strawberry and he eats it, and he doesn't like it because it doesn't taste like the fake strawberry slushie that he was getting.

And at the end, Vody came back to that again and said, you need to take what's fake away from him and give him what's real until the strawberry is sweet. And then he goes, and in case you didn't understand the connection, and then tied it right back into the gospel.

So staying away from all these false teachings, all the philosophies of this world that lead astray. Paul talked about that in Colossians 2. Don't be led astray by these convincing teachings. They might sound right.

You know, it might say, I heard something in the Bible about caring for the poor. So maybe that is the gospel. Don't go after these false philosophies, but continue in the true power of the gospel of Jesus Christ because it is only by faith in that that we are forgiven our sins and have everlasting life.

Yeah, I mean, you really just hit the nail on the head. And I think for me, the supremacy of the gospel has really been at the forefront of the conference. And it makes sense, and I love Vody's illustration, because we do see that.

We basically have a diet in the Western world of sugar and no meat, right? Everyone's just fed sugar, and it does what sugar would do to a real person, right? It gives you diabetes, it makes you sick, and it kills you eventually if you overconsume.

And that's what we have. And I think we hear the term gospel so much, but when you see what is being taught as the gospel, you already mentioned the critical theory, critical race theory, just all this stuff.

Basically, change your community, that's the gospel, right? Hug your neighbor, that's the gospel. Tell them that their sins aren't really their problem, that's the gospel. All the forms of these things, but none of those are the gospel, and people aren't getting saved.

And so you can change a community by doing good things in the community, but when they die, they still go to hell because they don't have the gospel, and there's only one gospel. And it's not just a one-time thing.

And I think Vody mentioned this in his talk, it's not that we just needed the gospel once. No, we still need the gospel. It changed us, and it is changing us, right, in our sanctification process. And so we never graduate from the gospel, and I think he made that point in his sermon as well, or it might have been Phil Johnson or someone else, but it's been made, right?

But we see that. I mean, just imagine if you were to change the language a little bit and say something like, well, I only need Jesus to save me, and then I'm good on my own. Well, no Christian would ever say that, but we kind of are saying that, right?

We're hearing that a lot. And so absolutely, the supremacy of the gospel, and I loved his illustration, and I know if you have kids, or if you've been around kids, or if you've done any kind of work with kids, if you hate them, you would just constantly feed them the slushie, right, and never give them a real diet, real food.

It was such a wonderful illustration, and he really did hammer the point, right? And it wasn't just in that illustration he gave that you give them a few strawberries. It was, no, you take the junk food totally away, and you only give them the real thing over and over and over and over until one day they eat the strawberry, and they say, this is really good.

This is really sweet.

And the scriptures tell us, taste and see that the Lord is good. So that's such a perfect illustration in that way. We have the best diet, the best spiritual diet that we can have, which is Christ Jesus, and we need more of Christ every day.

Once you have Christ, continue in Christ. Continue to feed upon Christ. As he said in John chapter six, that we must feed on him in order to see the kingdom of God. So let's switch from that. Let's go from that to a sermon that Paul Twist did out of Luke chapter 24, where he came up with a seven-point sermon out of four verses.

At the end of the day, no less. Yeah, that was, right. We're just about to go out and eat supper, and we're gonna listen to a seven-point sermon from Paul Twist. So it was Luke 24, verses 50 to 53, and he led them out as far as Bethany, Christ leading his disciples out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them.

While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God. Ecky, I wanna come back to you again.

What about this passage is teaching us to be unashamed?

The Ascension of Christ and Our Ongoing Hope

Yeah, this is reminding us of the reality of the fact that Jesus Christ is exalted. He's at the right hand of God. And we don't dwell upon this enough. In fact, we often think about the fact that Jesus allowed us to be forgiven of our sins, we have salvation, and that's it, and then we don't think much further beyond that.

And of course, Easter is coming up, the Resurrection Sunday. That's a reminder that he was resurrected as a promise to us that we too will be resurrected when Jesus Christ returns. But it goes even beyond that, because he's not simply just resurrected, but he is also exalted at the right hand of God.

And I think Paul Twiss made a great point that I'd never stopped and thought about is the fact that while Jesus was blessing him, at that point, he was brought up into heaven. He was ascended up into heaven.

And that is to remind them that Jesus Christ is returning. And this all ties back into what we've been talking about, the primacy of the gospel and making sure we've got the true gospel. Because if you have the true gospel, your hope is not in this world.

Your hope is upon the return of Jesus Christ and what happens after he returns. That is where our hope is. And a lot of these false gospels, and especially the social justice gospels, often prioritize what's happening temporally over what's gonna happen eternally.

They're putting their hope into heaven here on earth rather than heaven after Jesus Christ returns. And so the ascension theology, and this is something that I'm gonna have to spend more time really dwelling upon, because I'd never thought about it this way.

But the ascension theology is that he ascended up into heaven. He's at the right hand of God. And we know at the end of the book of Matthew, he says, all authority has been given to me in earth and in heaven, right?

So he's up at the right hand of God. He's a co-ruler, but he ascended also to become our priest. I mean, he's essentially our pastor. He's interceding for us regularly. And this is so crucial because when we live out our Christian life, we can get caught up in the legalism of the do's and the don'ts, where we just start creating checklists of what we should do and what we shouldn't do.

And if that's all we're focusing on, then that indeed becomes legalism. But if we focus first and foremost upon the glory of the gospel itself, and this is, again, once again, why Nathaniel just mentioned what was said, that we don't just, we didn't just need the gospel at one point in the future.

We continually need the gospel. We need to continue to remind ourselves of the gospel, because when we remind ourselves of the gospel and things like the fact that he is ascended, that he is interceding for us, he is at the right hand, he is providing us with his power and his will and his guidance and all that kinds of stuff, that should give us the motivation.

That should give us the extra spiritual fuel that we need to be able to endure the difficult times in this life, the trials and the tribulations. That's gonna help us get through. And then from that point, obeying the commandments of Jesus Christ is really a consequence of that.

It's the logical next step. It's similar to what Paul said in Ephesians chapter four, therefore I implore you to walk worthy of the calling by which you've been called. And that's after the first three chapters of sharing the glory of God, sharing the theology of all that God has done for us.

So yeah, the ascension helps us to focus once again on the primacy of the gospel and not being ashamed of the gospel because the gospel itself, once again, the purity of that gospel is what gives us hope in the future.

And this is not, let me just add this too, this is not just merely an academic debate. We're not merely just splitting hairs. Votie Bauckham, and just to tie it back into Votie again, he gave the example of Ibram Kendi.

Ibram Kendi is the best-selling author of the book How to Be an Antiracist that's being used in churches all over the world. And if you listen to what Ibram Kendi thinks the gospel is, it's not the true gospel.

It's focused on physical deliverance and it rejects Jesus Christ as an actual savior. In fact, I think he calls it white savior theology or something like that. So when you look at Ibram Kendi, and you might think he's just a one-off, but now Jamar Tisby is working with him, right?

And Jamar Tisby is one of the leaders of kind of this woke church movement, him and Eric Mason. So this is not just far away. And not only that, but James Cone, James Cone and black liberation theology, which came out of the 60s, a lot of people are referring back to James Cone.

And James Cone, again, would overemphasize the exodus account as really being what salvation is all about, which is physical deliverance from oppression in this world, not that we needed forgiveness of our sins and a future promise that Jesus Christ would come and bring us to heaven with him.

So ascension theology, Paul twist, just another aspect of the glorious gospel that we need to spend more time really meditating upon, reaching upon, encouraging people with so that people have the proper motivation to do what the word of God calls us to do.

And when you've got pastors out there that are making some of the things that you just talked about into the gospel, like they're making reconciliation the gospel, or they're making caring for the poor into the gospel, or they're making the, you know, looking at the disparities and seeing injustice because somebody's being treated unequally or something like that.

When they make that into the gospel, that's actually being ashamed of the gospel. It's saying the true gospel of Christ is not enough to save us. We have to have an environment that makes us more easy to save, right?

Like let's change the environment. If we change the environment, we can change the man, which incidentally, this was something that Martin Lloyd-Jones confronted all those number of years ago that the great Lloyd-Jones was preaching.

And he said that it is a tragic fallacy to believe that in order to change the man, all you have to do is change his environment. What makes that such a tragic fallacy is because it was in paradise that man fell.

We lived in perfect paradise, which we will never make this world into, Adam and Eve living in paradise, and yet all that they had, even the very presence of God himself, and it wasn't enough, and they had to have that one thing God said that they weren't to have.

Even obeying God's law wasn't enough for them. They still had to have that one thing. So we see these false doctrines come in that try to replace the gospel. The gospel isn't good enough. It has to be these other things.

And when you start putting all the focus on that, you're actually ashamed of the gospel, that the gospel is not enough to save. We have to be saved by other means. Bringing that back to the scripture that Paul Twisted preached from, from Luke 24.

So, Eki, you had mentioned that understanding the ascension of Christ, that he's at the Father's right hand, that he's interceding for us even now. He's our priest. And you had pointed out verse 51, while he blessed them, Jesus, while he was blessing the disciples, while he was doing that, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.

So we see, that was, yeah, you said that Paul Twist kind of brought that out and I hadn't noticed that before. It's like he's praying upon them, he's giving them a blessing, and he's being lifted up out of their midst while he's still blessing them.

And he's continuing to do that as he's seated at the right hand of the Father.

Yeah, you know, as I consider that verse, there are a few things that really struck me that I think I haven't really given a lot of attention to. I mean, first you have his disciples watching him being ascended, right?

And the verse in 52 says that, and they, after worshiping him, so they're worshiping him as he's ascending. And I think there's a reality in which where we hear the true gospel for the first time and the Lord saves us.

We're worshiping him and we're excited. But here's something that struck me after in the next verse in 53, it says, and then they were continually in the temple praising God. And I think one of, we're talking about these false gospels, one of the things that you never see is a continuation of praising God.

It is always a man-centered, legalistic work. You mentioned kind of the reparation type, the reconciliation type thing, reparations, right? It's never, we're never really reconciled under these false gospels.

And so, you know, if you're a certain skin color, you always have to pay the person that's a different skin color. And there's no worship in God. It's a pure legalism, right? But when we think about Paul Twiss' talk and why the ascension matters, which by the way, I mean, I think I've only ever in my life preached one sermon on the ascension.

And so maybe we need to start focusing on that a bit more. I mean, he mentions that, right? But it's a good point. Because when you start considering the fact that the very Lord who saved us, who came, who suffered, who died on the cross, who saved us is now still in a very active role.

I mean, he's interceding for us right now. I mean, as we're doing this podcast, he's interceding for us. And in the verse here, it says that after they witnessed, after they witnessed his ascension, he's gone.

They continually were praising him. And so you still see a focus on the gospel, on the person and work of Christ. And so if there's anything out there that doesn't continually demand a focus on the person and work of Christ himself, it's probably because it's a false gospel.

Let me stay on that for a moment, not to assume anything. So just like with last night with Vody, don't just assume the gospel, put it out there. So we're talking about intercession, Christ interceding for us before the Father.

What does that mean? We're using the term, we're saying it, but what does it mean that Christ is interceding for us? Hecky?

Well, yeah, and let me add to that when we talk about ascension theology, because it's gonna tie into the question you're asking. This is not just a hobby horse that we're creating just because Paul Twiss mentioned it.

The most quoted Old Testament verse in all the New Testament is Psalm 110, verse one. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. And it's in verse four where it says, the Lord has sworn and will not change his mind that you are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

That's a significant, significant promise. And so to say that he is interceding for us, first, we recognize that Satan is an accuser of the brethren. Revelation says that. He's an accuser of the brethren.

He's accusing us day and night. And part of the security of our salvation is not just merely the perfect work of Jesus Christ on the cross, so that's certainly important, but it's also his ongoing ministry as our great high priest, interceding every time Satan brings those accusations.

But also in interceding, we see the work, for instance, in the Apostle Paul, right? I mean, Jesus Christ intercedes for Paul, blinds him on the road to Damascus, right? Jesus Christ gives us guidance, wisdom through his word.

Colossians 3 .16 says, let the word of Christ dwell richly within you. So he's interceding for us, and he's working also through his Holy Spirit. That's part of John chapters 14, 15, and 16, where Jesus is about to go away, but he's preparing them for the Great Commission.

And one of his emphases through those three chapters is that I'm going to send you a helper. He's going to help you. He's gonna bring to mind everything that I've taught you, and he's gonna give you more.

He's gonna take of mine what belongs to me, and he's gonna give it to you so that you may be encouraged, so that you may be able to proclaim the truth and to be witnesses. So the power that we have, we know that we've been given the Holy Spirit, but we've also been given the guidance of Jesus Christ, who's interceding for us, providing guidance as our intercessor.

Just as we as pastors should be praying for our flock, Jesus Christ is constantly praying for us, protecting us from Satan, but also guiding us to do God's will. Yeah, and I think, you know, just to add to that, we talk about Christ interceding for us, and I think back to one of the questions that so many people always have, what's the will of God for me, right?

And this ties into Christ interceding for us. Well, the Bible explicitly tells us, it actually uses the terms, this is the will of God for you, that you be sanctified, right? You go to 1 Peter, be holy as he is holy, and it is because of the ascended Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit in us that we have the power to be holy, to live out holy lives, and as we're obedient to Christ, we're being sanctified, and we have Christ interceding for us, and power in the Holy Spirit.

So it's actually quite a big deal, right, to say it that way, that Christ is ascended, and that he's interceding for us at the right hand of the Father. And so, like you said, it's not just an academic, an academic exercise to talk about these things.

I mean, that should change your life. You know, we love it when people pray for us, but do you know, if Jesus Christ is praying for you, those prayers will be answered, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, the verse you mentioned was 1 Thessalonians 4 .3. This is the will of God, your sanctification. And then we have it come up again later on in 5, let's see, I think it's 18. Give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

So yeah, God's will for us is that we would be sanctified, we're grown in holiness, that we would rejoice in all circumstances, which, by the way, when we were talking a moment ago about the social gospel or racial reconciliation or that this group of people owes me, my difficult circumstance is somebody else's fault.

What you'll never hear in those sermons is James 1 .2. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let your steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Even in the difficulties and the trials that we go through, Christ is working in those things to sanctify us, to make us more holy, to draw us to himself, and all of that is part of that work of intercession that he is doing for us before the Father.

I mean, it's very wild to think about. My name is being mentioned by my Savior before the Father in heaven. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, praise the Lord.

1 Peter 1 .6, yeah. I was just also thinking of 1 Peter 1 .6, and this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials so that the proof of your faith being more precious than gold, which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in the praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

So he makes that comparison to precious metals, and anyone who's worked with metals knows that you put it under extreme heat and the impurities rise to the top. And so Peter is making that illustration to show that trials are an act of God in order to make us more pure in our faith so that we would, the end of all this would result in the praise and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Just as Romans 8 .28 and 29 says, all things come together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. But then verse 29 says, you've been predestined to be conformed into the image of his Son, and that comes as a result of trials.

And when you think about just how much that's been twisted today, where we cry about injustices and we make people out to be victims, and I'm not saying that there aren't real victims in the world, there are, but there is always victory in Christ no matter how you've been victimized.

But that part has been lost, and really the victim, the victimization part often gets emphasized. Yeah, you know, I just, Paul is such a great example of someone who filters everything that happens in his life through the gospel.

You know, I went to 2 Corinthians where he talks about some of his difficulties, right? And I think A few. Just a few, right? I mean, he said, five times he received 39 lashes. We could just stop right there.