Final Instructions

1 Corinthians 16, ending the chapter, 13 through the end. Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love. Now I exhort you, brothers, you know the household of Stephanas, that they were the firstfruits of Achaia, and they have devoted themselves for service to the saints, that you will also be in subjection to such men and to everyone who helps in the work and labors.

And I rejoice over the coming of Stephanas and Fortunatus and Achaicus, because they have supplied what was lacking on your part, for they have refreshed my spirit and yours. Therefore, recognize such men.

The churches of Asia greet you. Aquila and Prisca greet you heartily in the Lord, with the church that is in their house. All the brothers greet you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. The greeting is in my own hand.

Paul, if anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for your word.

Thank you for, at times, the simplicity of it. Lord, where your enemies and those with deceitful tongues are unable to twist because it is so piercingly clear. And Lord, we also are thankful for the depths of its wisdom, that we can study and study and study, and not even reach nearly the depths.

Lord, such is your mind, it is beyond our comprehension. And yet you have condescended to teach us, and you have given us revelation. And much of that has happened in this letter. Lord, I pray that it would edify your church here, as it surely did all those centuries ago in Corinth.

May your people here stand strong. Lord, I pray that you would rebuke us, exhort us, encourage us this morning, that you have reminded us that we have all the tools for righteousness contained in your word.

Lord, may we obey these words. It's in your name I pray, amen. There's always final instructions. And in the case of Corinth, this is a long letter, a long epistle. There have been many problems addressed, and Paul ends it with a rapid fire series of commands.

And in many ways, these commands are shorthand for what Paul has said throughout the letter. And there have been many problems. If we go back to the beginning, we see that the church of Corinth was racked by factions.

Factions that had developed around charismatic men. Apollos, Paul himself. The sexual immorality was allowed to go under the radar in the church, so that the church could wrongheadedly show their tolerance and their love for one another by tolerating what even the pagans would not have tolerated.

And in the most passive-aggressive way, it's almost breathtaking how passive-aggressive it was, that the men would file lawsuits against each other in the public courts. You can almost hear the gossip and the sneak attacks going on to try to bring the secular Romans in to judge over the church, and Paul is incensed by it and writes to answer them.

There is a disregard for marriage. On the one hand, we have sexual immorality. On the other hand, there's this idea that we have to reach for extreme asceticism and that marriage itself is no good, and Paul has to correct them on that.

We have seen idolatry and the desire to get as close as you can without getting burned, so that you could gain cultural approval by eating the meat offered to the idols in the temples. A disregard of one another's conscience.

And if you sum up Corinthians, you have a bunch of men who have become passive, and in their passivity, become like the skittish dog. That's the one that will bite you. So in their passivity, they want to ramrod their way and run over everyone else, disregarding conscience, disregarding the commands of ecumenical counsel, disregarding the faith itself, all the way down to disregarding the resurrection of their Lord that is the whole reason they have a church in the first place.

We find uncovered women in the midst of these passive men, a vacuum becomes apparent, and women gleefully throw their cover off, prophesying, praying in public. There is disorder. There is selfishness at the Eucharist.

People come to the table of God, and they eat their fill and drink their fill, getting drunk, letting those who are poor go hungry, and go without the means of grace at the table. There is an upended hierarchy around spiritual gifts.

What is up is down, and what is down is up. Love is disregarded, while tongues are held to the highest regard. If you want to be a spiritual man, it's about the languages you know, not about the love you show for your brother.

All kinds of problems, and Paul has addressed them in a way that I believe only he could. Arguments, biting sarcasm, rhetoric, poking fun, looking to the history, the Old Testament, bringing all kinds of quotations, and here in his final greetings, we get to see what Paul thinks are the takeaways.

Because I know this as a pastor, you remember most what is said first and what is said last. So remember what Paul said first. I came to you preaching only of the cross, the foolishness of the cross, which to those who are being saved is the power of life.

And where does he end? He ends with a recapitulation. We are to love. We are to honor hierarchy. We are to be partnered in loving those who are progressing the mission while we ourselves have to act in certain ways.

Be Watchful and Stand Firm in the Faith

So there is a series of commands. If you look, I'm going to be in the first part of this sermon looking through verses 13 through 16. I think there are six things that Paul has that he wants us to do.

Now the commentators will say there's five imperatives, and that is true grammatically, but there is a sixth in here, and we're going to look at it last. The first one is to be watchful. Very simple, be watchful.

Hey, Church at Corinth, be watchful. Why do they need to be watchful? Well, if you read any of the Bible, you're going to find that very quickly what happens is the movement of God brings the attention of the enemy, and there had been a great movement.

It's easy for us to look. What we've done and what we try not to do from the pulpit is to just put our ideas on top of this letter, and we can't. This letter is incomprehensible many times if we try to look at it through a modern lens, okay?

But what we often do is we look, and we think, wow, how does this apply to us? And we forget that Corinth was a place where God was doing amazing things. He had overturned the synagogue. He had sent Paul back in.

Remember, Paul went in. There was such persecution that Paul left, and he was like, I'm not going in there, and God said, you go back in there. I have people in there, and Stephanas is one of them, and the people, the two leaders, two successive leaders of the synagogue repudiate their ancient Judaist ways and become Christians, and it turns things upside down, and so anytime there is a great movement of the Spirit, there are going to be enemies, and we are no exception.

This is where the modern thing comes on. If God starts doing things through this church, as small and as humble as we are, if God starts doing things through this church, you best believe the enemy is going to try to infiltrate, and so Paul reminds the church at Corinth.

They haven't been too good about this, and he wants to tell them, be watchful. The bad guys are coming, and sometimes they are among you, and we know from 2 Corinthians, the bad guys are among them because 2 Corinthians is not written very long after 1 Corinthians.

The bad guys are there, and they are causing division, so he tells them, be alert, be watchful. Do not be lax. Do not fall asleep. Remember this. Despite what you've been told, despite what you've read, and despite what you have absorbed through this weak need, often impotent evangelical faith of America, the Christian faith has always been this.

It has always been a life of alertness, a life of sharpness, a life of transformation. Look at how Scripture defines Christians. We are having our minds transformed so that we can conform to the image of Christ.

We are always called to be on mission. We are called to not fear. We are called to not be of the world, but not to leave the world. We're not to form communes. We are to engage with the world, taking captive their lofty arguments and subjecting them to the better argument of Christ.

See, Christianity is not a rollover and play dead faith. Christianity is the one true faith. And we know that the truth wins. Even when it looks like the truth doesn't, the truth will win. And Paul arms the people of Corinth that there is a thing, there is a truth, and they are to be watchful and to test the people who come in who would take twisted things and turn them around and confuse households.

He gives a thing for them to be watchful for, and that is his second command, stand firm in the faith. Stand firm in the faith. We can look back all through this letter, but I want to look back at 1 Corinthians 15, 1, which begins, I think, the thesis of the whole letter.

I make known to you, brothers, the gospel which I proclaimed as good news to you, which also you received, in which also you stand. Where do you stand? What are you being watchful about? You're being watchful of people who would come in and try to twist the faith.

And they don't do it in obvious ways. You're not going to have an infiltrator here that comes in and tries to convince you that Jesus is not God. That's not effective. What they will do is start with tertiary, more murky things, and eventually, through their life, pollute the cardinal doctrines that are easy, that are simple for us, but that the culture doesn't give approval to, and there's weight on one side.

The faith is always the sound teaching of the apostles, of which the gospel is the core. The gospel is not everything of the faith. That's how the teaching of the early 2000s through really 2018 led us astray.

And you will see it a lot. Gospel-centered, gospel-centered, gospel-centered. Voting's gospel-centered. Marriage is gospel-centered. Parenting's gospel-centered. Sports is gospel-centered. Taylor Swift's gospel-centered.

All of this out there, and what it misses is there's a lot more to the faith than the gospel. The gospel is the core and the heart of the faith, but there's a lot more in the faith than the gospel. There are things that we are called to do.

There are things that we are called to be. And you don't solve every problem in life by preaching the gospel to yourself. Brothers and sisters, we are not Gnostics. This is not a set of mental assumptions that we make in the faith.

The faith has demands on what we do, not only what we think, and not only what we say. A Christian is a Christian in word, in action, in attitude, in deed. And every argument, no matter how seductive, and no matter how popular it is, has to be subjected to the test of the faith.

And where we sit today is there are two. One of them Paul's gonna take direct aim at this morning, and that is the God and the lie of egalitarianism. It has to be subjected and submitted to what scripture says.

The one that we deal with, we deal with that one to be sure. But we also deal with one which is, I'll just call it constitutionalism, okay? We have our actions and our ideas restrained by a form of government.

And I just ask you, and I'm not gonna wax long on that because we'll be here three and a half days if I do. Here's what I have to tell you. We have to submit all of our philosophies and ideas to the timeless truth of scripture.

And sometimes that leads us to differing opinions. And that's not what Paul's talking about here. He is talking about being watchful about people who would come in and who would mess with the basics of the faith.

If someone tells you that a baby in the mother's womb is a clump of cells, they are twisting the faith. That is something that it does not take a seminary student to understand that's wrong. People who say that you should affirm so-called homosexual marriage, this is not a difficult thing for us to discern in scripture.

Someone who is trying to tell you that it's okay to shack up with their girlfriend, this is not someone who is making a good faith argument. This is easy for us. And Christians cannot disagree on those things, no matter how much we want to.

The church down the street who preaches that fornication is okay or that it's our fault that people are gay, that is a church that has adopted a false teaching and they have to be called out for it. They are not our partners as long as they stay in their sin.

And if they repent, guess what? They are our partners and we're with them. Stand firm in the faith. It's not easy. Did you know that? Being alert is not easy. It's much easier to fall asleep. It's much easier to say, ah, that's their business, it's not my business.

It's much easier to just drift through life. And friends, I'm gonna tell you, if you drift through life, you are drifting straight into sin. You don't drift into holiness. It's against our nature to be holy.

It is in our nature to be lazy. It's in our nature to shirk our responsibility. It's in our nature to grab for pleasure and comfort as much as we can. Standing firm in the faith is going to make you enemies.

That's not fun, is it? If you have enemies in your life, you're going to remember, you're going to think on them, and you're going to understand. That makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't it? It's a hard thing knowing that there are someone out there that hates you.

That is a thing that, as Christians, we're going to have to steel ourself to. And I'm going to tell you, many of us have not had that because we've not done anything for the kingdom. They don't care if we preach the gospel in here.

They do care when you go into their turf and you start tackling their ideas and submitting them to scripture. That's always been the way it is. They don't care what you do in here. It's when you go out there that you're going to gain enemies.

And that's what Paul is relentlessly doing, is he not? He's always going out there. Do not move. Standing firm in the faith means that we have settled convictions that we're not going to argue about. You know what they are.

You know the cardinal faith. You know what the convictions are. Do not be deceived. Do not be tossed around. Do not listen to those faulty arguments. Do not put your God to the test. He has made things so clear in scripture that four and five-year-olds can understand them.

You know what those things are. Don't listen to the deceitful, twisted arguments. And here is my great danger this morning. Act like men. There's many places that this has come from. It's one of the ways that I think Paul makes fun of the Corinthian church because this is a common expression in the Roman Empire, but it's also used to make fun of the Israelites back in 1 Samuel when the Philistines, the ark is coming and they hear a bunch of hoopla in the camp and the Philistines are going, men, we have to act like men.

Gird up your swords so that we would not be the slaves of the Hebrews. And what happens is the Philistines wipe the Israelites out and they take the ark because the Israelites took God for granted. They were not acting like men.

They thought they didn't have to do anything. They thought they could wave the box around and take over their enemies. Joshua told his men to be courageous, to be mighty, to go in because God had given them a prize.

And the Romans say it often. And the reason Paul is saying this is because quite explicitly, the church at Corinth is not acting like men. And many of the problems of the letter would be solved if they did.

In fact, I would argue that all of the problems in the Corinthian church would have been solved if the men had acted like men. It's crucial. It's very crucial. And everything is against us. And friends, let me give you a brief illustration.

I actually thought of it this morning. There's a commercial. You see lots of commercials. They're horrible, right? You remember back in the day, there was like good commercials, even like Doublemint Gum had catchy jingles and stuff.

You know this because Hot Pockets still uses the same one today, right? Hot Pockets. Everybody knows that. Now our commercials are terrible, but I want to remind you of one that took the world by storm several years ago.

And I think it's indicative of where we are. Maybe the greatest orator of the modern American age is a man named Paul Harvey. And you guys all know what I'm talking about now, don't you? Because you remember the commercial.

It was a Ram commercial where Paul Harvey was recorded over extolling the virtues of a farmer. And the reason that people loved it is why? Is it because people love farmers? No, listen, nobody even knows what farmers do.

Okay, the reason people love the commercial was because it was unbridled masculinity. That's what Paul Harvey talked about. Because being a farmer, and Paul Harvey's imagination of it was about working a thankless job with your hands for hours a day and then going and taking care of your family, of doing the hard thing.

And even when the crop doesn't come, you keep going because the nation depends on it. And it showed grizzly men with leathery faces that were sun damaged, with grizzled up hands. It showed people putting on their leather gloves, driving their truck around, the old trucks out in the dust bowl.

And what it makes men do is think, man, we've lost something, haven't we? I think of that when I read Steinbeck and I think of Tom Joad going across the dust bowl trying to make a better life for his family to go to a promised land, which was California.

And that shows you how far we've fallen, right? And this idea of masculinity blooms and it's just under the service. And our culture and our society tries to do every single thing to push it down. Did you guys know that our rampant scourge of pornography, not only in the culture, but in the church, is an exact symptom of not listening to what Paul says here.

Act like men. You cannot be acting less like a man when you give in to the lust of looking at women on the internet often being ravaged by other men. It's like looking around as a lion at hyenas taking your meal.

It's crazy. It ravages through the church, not because we have men, it ravages through the church because our men don't act like men. If you act like men, is there gonna be lawsuits in the public square?

No, you're going to go to that man and you're gonna say, brother, you sinned against me. And if you don't fix it, I'm gonna punch you in the face. That's what men do. That's why we don't take silly, passive-aggressive conflicts onto social media and badger each other.

We call each other like men and we have it out. And I'm thankful. I have men in my life who have been faithful to repeatedly do that. Call me out and say, hey, let's have a conversation. This one's gonna be tough.

You know what it does? It builds trust every time, every single time. The enemy would lie to you and tell you that it's gonna take something from you, but it's not. It's going to make everything better.

You can see my danger on this. Our church, the church has provided nothing of late on this command. How can you act like men? I'm gonna tell you where you're never gonna find it out by reading mainstream evangelical publications because they don't know anything about it.

Because what they do is they act like masculinity in the church is androgynous. Because men and women should be doing the exact same things to be godly. Do you don't believe me? Let me tell you what they say.

The definition of masculinity is always this. And if you say something that's even one degree different from this, you will have the hounds of war on you from the evangelical elite. And it is this, masculinity is a man who, he has a quiet time every day.

He loves God's word. He prays. He attends church regularly. He is a servant leader. Every single one of those things apply just as much to women as they do to men. So that's not masculinity. And girls, if that's what you're looking for, you're gonna be sorely disappointed because masculinity is going to scare you.

It's going to anger you. And the reason it's gonna anger you is because you have a curse too. And the curse was that he will rule over you but you will desire his spot. And our culture says, you go girl, the job of the man is to make his wife happy.

Happy wife, happy life. That is straight from the lips of the servant, the serpent. Do you understand me? Men, men, your happiness and your joy is not about the way your wife feels. Your happiness and joy is about your zeal and your faithfulness to the Lord.

And he's called you to do things. What do you have to do? Well, you have to do distinctly masculine things. You have to be full of courage. How can you be full of courage if there's not danger? Can you courageously play Nintendo?

No, you cannot. To be displaying courage, you have to go into a fight. You're going to have to say something that somebody doesn't like. Or you're going to have to do something that somebody doesn't like.

You have to have strength. You have to have leadership. Men have to be dangerous protectors of the home. And you know what women don't think they like? Danger, right? It makes you nervous. I know it does.

One of my most feminine traits is that I'm too afraid of my kids getting hurt and it's shameful. And I try, I have the thoughts and I try to take them captive because I remember being able to roam with a BB gun shooting everything on the hillside when I was like eight years old.

And I didn't hurt anybody. I hurt a lot of squirrels and a lot of birds and a lot of everything else that happened to get in my way. We have to get rid of the things that cloy at our masculinity, that take away.

Men have to be protectors of their home. That's not just a thing you say, that's a thing you do. And listen, that doesn't mean, it doesn't mean less than this, but it does mean more. It doesn't mean less than being the physical protection of your home from invaders.

It also means that you protect the home from false ideas that come in through this big fiber optic pipeline into your house. And it comes everywhere. It's on your streaming service. It's on the internet.

It's on Spotify. It is everywhere. And that doesn't mean that you have to go form a convent somewhere or a monastery. What it does mean is you have to monitor and think through what is coming into your house and you have to protect.

Do not fall into the same trap as the sin of Adam. What Adam should have done is as soon as he saw that serpent slither in and open his mouth, he should have chopped his head off. You know that's what he was there to do because Christ came to crush the head of the serpent.

Adam should have crushed it. That was his failure to all of our doom. Isn't that the gospel? We're doomed. Until the second Adam came and he redeemed it all. And he did it not through passivism. He did it through crushing the head of the serpent by taking all of his plans and not only thwarting them but the turning them to his plan.

That's what 1 Corinthians 15 was all about. That's what he's done. Don't minimize it. Don't lose it. Don't turn it into some kind of ethereal ideology. It's really happened. Men and women hear this. You have to trust me and you have to mostly trust scripture.

Wives think that they want to have their say and run the home and this will cause carnage in your marriage. Men, you have to lead your home with authority. You have authority in your home. Your authority is not to do whatever your wife says.

That's not authority. That's her authority. You have to be godly. You have to seek the Holy Spirit. You have to be a man of good courage and good conscience and then you have to do what is right in your home.

It's your job. It's your job in the marriage bed. It's your job in the raising of children. It's your job in the discipleship and education. It's your job that you would put all of the tools into sanctifying your wife, sanctifying your extended family, bringing in the raw materials that give her hands the ability to turn those into something great, which she does.

Your job. Church, we will fail and we might as well stop today if we refuse to act like men. And I think that many of us are making great strides. I am a raging feminist compared to our forefathers. You have to recognize this in yourself.

You do. They would laugh at me and they would call me all kinds of names because of how feminist I am. You have to know this. Do you guys know how far out on the crazy patriarchy I am in modern America?

And I'm nowhere near what our fathers were. Nowhere close. They would take me in a room and they would re-educate me and they would see my ideas as being foreign. Are we better now in the church or then?

We have to answer. Is Corinth better than us or are we better than them? And let's look at large. It has become popular for us to make fun of Corinth. And the modern church has nothing on Corinth for holiness.

They're better than us in almost every conceivable way. And I want you to tell you what Paul was telling his men to do. Think about it. Think about what was happening. Were they being upbraided for false tongues and false prophecies?

Is that what Paul says? No, they were giving true prophecies. And they were speaking in true tongues in Corinth. And Paul tells the men to shut the women up. Can you imagine today a woman who gives a prophecy from the Holy Spirit that's true?

And Paul tells them, nope, you cannot say that out loud. What kind of man does it take to stomp that out? I submit that we have no one who would do that today. No one. And I can't be some kind of LARPing do-gooder.

I wouldn't do it either. I think I would be taken back. I would be knocked on my rear end and think, wow, the Holy Spirit's moving here. But the Holy Spirit cannot move in contradiction to what God said.

He can give women true prophecies. And you know what they're supposed to do with that? Tell their husband. And we need pastors and elders and church officers. And even more than that, we need husbands.

Who tell their wife, if you have a question, you need to ask me. That's not a Josh question. That's a me question. And you know what? Husbands, if you tell them wrong, your wife is going to be more sanctified from following your bad advice than she will be if she goes over you and asks me and I give her great advice.

Because she has contradicted the word of God. And I would rather, wives, I would rather you follow your husband into ruin here than to follow me. Because Christ will give you the reward in eternity. Men, that's what it means to act like men.

You have responsibility for what's going on. But with responsibility must come authority. And you have it. Men, we have to cultivate friendships with manly men who are going to challenge us. We have to strive to win.

Men, it's not a bad thing to want to win. We have to want to win. Paul uses metaphors all the time of the soldier and the farmer and the athlete. And over and over, what's the goal of being a soldier?

Do you want to be a soldier to be a lovable loser? No, you want to be a soldier to kill the enemy and win. You don't want to be an athlete to just play the game. You want to win. You know what's fun about playing sports?

Winning. That's the fun part. Winning is fun. Losing is not fun. And if you decide that losing is fun, you are not acting in a masculine way. That doesn't mean you have to be a hothead in a sore sport.

But you shouldn't like losing. Losing should make you want to get better. Such it is in the Christian life. If you're losing in the Christian life, is that fun for you? Is it fun being enslaved to sin?

Is it fun being a little girly man all the time and wondering what your wife is thinking about you all the time? Is that a lot of fun? Of course it's not fun. Be a man. Try to win. Get better. Is your marriage struggling?

Get better. Are you enslaved to sexual immorality? Stop it. Go find help and hate it. Hate the sin as the enemy that it is. I knew it was going to happen. I'm sorry. There we go. Moving on. Be strong.

Be strong. Being strong is only possible in one way for the Christian, and that is to be strong in the power of the Holy Spirit. Listen to him. Be guided by him. And you know what the Holy Spirit gives you in strength?

He gives you endurance. He gives you effectiveness. And he gives you aggression. Go do it. And then he gives this thing. And always in scripture, what we do in our modern age, it was we say, oh, all those four things, those sound like one thing, and then he's going to qualify it over here.

Here's the qualification, right? Do everything that you do in love. Friends, that is because we don't know what love means today. This is not a qualifier. This is how you do the whole thing. It's not like, well, do these things, but love too.

No, you can't be strong. You can't act like men. You can't stand firm, and you can't be alert if you do not love. Everything that you do is done in love. That means that you got to love God. You have to love his law.

You have to love his grace. And then out of that, loving God, loving his law, loving his grace, out of that, you begin to love others. And this is not some leftist fantasy of I love the person starving in Ethiopia as much as I love my cousin.

That's not the way it works. This works in circles. Christians have always known this. Always. It's called the Ordo Amoris. We know this. Who do you love first? Your wife. And guess what? You love her the most.

I love Kelsey more than any other human being on this earth. But there's other human beings that I love more than all the other human beings on the earth. Okay? So you love your wife. Then you love your children.

Then you love all the rest of your family. You love your friends, and then you love the church, and then you love your close neighbors. And if you have any love left after that, you start loving some other people.

Okay? How can you love the person in Kenya? How? Other than just saying it. Doesn't that sound like telling the poor, be fed? I love you. You don't love them. You're not doing anything. Because love is action, right?

Love is following the commands of God. Love is bringing God's grace to bear on people. So do everything that you do in love. That means be alert in love. Stand in the faith in love. Act like men in love.

Be strong in love. And then we have to do this thing. We have to be in subjection to men like Stephanas. Who is Stephanas? Stephanas is core group at Corinth. He's a pillar of the church. He was one of the first baptized.

And what that means is he was blessed because Paul came in preaching the gospel and Stephanas hears it. And he has his life turned around because he repents and he follows the living God. And because he's first, he becomes a pillar of the church.

And what he is doing is we can see what Stephanas is doing. He's standing in the faith. He's delivering a letter to Paul about Corinth. And then he's bringing it back. And do you know what bad people do to messengers?

They don't like them, do they? But Stephanas, I can imagine, he runs this letter to Paul and then he comes back and he reads this letter to the church. And how many people in the church at Corinth do you think enjoyed hearing this?

Think about what you've heard the last few months. But Stephanas loved the people enough that he would give it to them. This is not ushy-gushy butterfly love. This is I'm afraid for you people and I want you to follow Christ.

And so I'm gonna tell you what he says. He is a pillar of the church. He is taking on personal expense for the church. He's traveling in an age where it's not fun to travel. And he's delivering a message that was not fun to deliver.

How many of us would do it? And Paul was refreshed, was he not? The apostle was refreshed in spirit. And he also says another thing. He says, you guys didn't come, but Stephanas and Fortunatus did, and Achaicus, and they refreshed my soul, but they also refreshed your soul.

And how did they refresh their own soul? Because this letter was coming. Because Paul cared about the church at Corinth. You should be in subjection to men like that. You should follow them. You should imitate them.

You should listen to them. Men who are pillars of the church in Corinth all the way to CBC, you should watch them and you should listen to them. We have some very fine church officers here. Two of them I know better than anybody.

I've lived with them my whole life. One of them is one of my very best friends. And then there's Corey. These are men full of the Holy Spirit. Watch them. Watch what they do. Be subjected to them. Listen to what they say.

They're not gonna make you, but you should listen to their counsel. It's wise. It is godly. Then there's a reminder out of that section. I told you, Kelsey, this is gonna be like 80 of it. We are not alone.

The churches of Asia send you greetings. And then we know Priscilla and Aquila, right? Here he says Aquila and Prisca. They have a church in their house and they send hearty greetings. All the brothers send you greetings.

This is the church at Corinth. People know what's going on, but all the churches around have been praying for them and send them greetings. God has his people everywhere. We have to understand that we are at a time of war in America.

And what that means is that it is safe and funny to attack other Christians. And the reason why is because you know in your gut that if you attack the leftist, they'll try to take your job. They'll try to kill you.