The Altogether Lovely One III: Seeing Scripture Christocentricly

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is our special guest, Jordan Thomas, who is the author of a mini -study for us entitled,

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Christ Our Treasure, Enjoying the Preeminence of Jesus in the Local Church.

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Thanks for being with us, Jordan. We've had Jordan for the whole morning to be able to have multiple episodes, and this is our final episode with Jordan this time.

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And we're going to be looking at some of the content from chapter four. And the chapter's title is,

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The Sanctified Bride of Christ, Treasuring Christ Together in His Word.

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So the role of the Word of God in viewing the Son of God so that we might be captivated, and then every act of obedience fueled and guided by who that captivating person is.

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We mentioned, or you mentioned a few episodes back, that in order to be a faithful shepherd of God's flock, a man does have to be fundamentally captivated with Christ.

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He has to treasure Christ to be able to pass that on so that it's not just a series of sermons he's doing because it's the next, you know, series in the line of the year, or it's because he just read a book about that, so he's going to re -preach that book, and then he's going to go to something more important or something else.

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So treasuring Christ is not one of the 25 things a church should do. It is the root system.

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It is the heart of the church, and all the other things will flow out of that with a very distinctly

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New Testament quality when we rightly apply that. Now, here's the question.

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If a pastor would have to admit, I am not leading a church to treasure

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Christ, I am not myself captivated with Christ, I have a thousand things

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I focus on, I know I ought to be that way, and I know I ought to lead a church to be that way, but I have not.

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I want to know, how do I do that? I mean, I have my 20 favorite passages on the person of Jesus, but there's so many other things to talk about, and there's so many pressing things, you know, and you get caught up in talking about what's happening right now in the news, and what does

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Jesus say about that, and so somehow I have lost that preoccupation with Christ.

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You know, I think sometimes people get bored with Jesus corporately, so to speak, because the sermons that are being preached are just repetitions of the same old cliches.

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So, we want to be men who are diving into the unfathomable depths of Christ, wading into the ocean, and not just, you know, standing on the shoreline and sticking our toe in where we've always stuck it in, and if we're to do that, how do we do it?

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And if a parent says to you, well, Jordan, I want my children to be captivated with Christ, and I know that we are completely dependent upon the

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Lord to open their eyes, but He uses our lives and our words, and so we want to be instruments in the hands of the

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Lord to pass on that Christ -treasuring quality to our children.

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And how can we move beyond the cliche phrases or the 20 popular passages about Jesus?

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And that is why I brought up chapter 4, because you talk about how the whole Word of God really is custom designed for this.

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So, just run with that if you would. Okay, yeah, I love that. The whole Word of God is custom designed for this.

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Yeah, I was thinking when you were talking about kind of that Mueller ethic, where George Mueller said his first and primary business every day is to get his own heart happy in the

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Lord. That's it. And how would he do that? What would be the fuel or the means?

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And the answer is the Bible. And I do think the

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Bible is a big book. It's very intimidating. There's passages that people who are more godly than us and smarter than us dispute the meaning of.

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And so there's all kinds of reasons that our approach to Scripture could have all these complicated aspects to it.

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And there are certainly passages that at this moment, we don't yet fully understand, or how they complement another passage that we think we understand when the first one seems like it doesn't quite square with it perfectly.

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So there's reasons that the Bible is an intimidating book. But if we step back from the detail, and we just look at the whole,

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I find it immensely helpful to begin with what Jesus had to say about it. And so he said, the day he rose from the dead, that the whole thing's about himself.

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Not just his person, that's true. But he says, was it not necessary for the

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Christ, there's his person, Luke 24, to suffer these things and enter his glory?

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That's cross, resurrection, ascension. So that's his work. So Jesus gets up from the dead, and he says, do you really want to know me?

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And he says, good news. You don't have to wait till you die and are glorified. You can know me now.

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And he proverbially hands them a Bible. And he says, this is about my person, this is about my work.

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And so I would just say to the person who has, like you said, 20 favorite passages about Jesus, praise

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God, that may be 19 more than the average bear. So that's good.

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But if you think all the rest of the passages are about 1 ,000 other topics,

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I would say just turn the page with the same heart of prayer you had in those 20.

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And I believe the risen Jesus would agree that that next page is about him as well.

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And it's about his gospel labors. Or Graham Goldsworthy says, every single passage of Scripture bears a discernible relationship to Jesus.

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So all these old dead guys are saying things like J .C. Ryle said, the special office of the minister of Christ is to lay open

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Christ, just to set him before the people from every passage of Scripture. And so we're not force -feeding

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Jesus into any text, but we're unwilling to say that God has adequately dealt with our own heart until that passage has somehow wounded us, we see our own failure in it, and provided for us the remedy in the person and work of Christ.

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And if you keep feeding your soul—or you mentioned the ocean analogy, dipping your toe into the same part of the ocean rather than plunging in—if you will take the thimble of your life and plunge it into the ocean of Christ's fullness in Scripture, then you'll come up and invariably you'll want to lead others to plunge their souls into the ocean of Christ's fullness.

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So yes, there's more Bible than we have time for, but perhaps just taking some time to talk about how all of Scripture testifies to the person and work of Christ might whet our appetites and any who listen to the episode.

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Yeah, so if we kind of could simplify the major categories of Scripture and how we see

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Christ, Old Testament, we see these pencil sketches, or I think of them as the black and white pictures, you know, that you get out of the—you dig through grandma and grandpa's photo albums and you think, wow, that was you?

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You used to be a teenager, great grandpa was a teenager, and everybody back then looked old, and you have these...

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You see all these strange things, but even though the pictures seem strange and the grandparents are young and you never knew them as teenagers, you recognize in the picture of grandpa when he's 16, you see your grandfather's face in that, even though you know him at age 70.

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And so the Old Testament gives us... I know that's an inadequate analogy, but it gives us these spirit -driven pencil sketches of Christ.

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It gives us the black and white, somewhat fuzzy, grainy photos of the coming of this person.

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Then you get to the New Testament, and it's like a documentary on television, and you have two major parts.

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You have the actual footage, maybe, you know, you're thinking of World War I or II, and you have actual film of those men and what's happening at that time.

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And the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation, and, you know, and the Book of Acts in many ways, it's like we're seeing what the eyewitnesses saw, and they're giving it to us just the way that God the

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Father wants us to have. It's perfect for us. But then with a documentary, you don't just have these scenes that you're able to see from the eyewitnesses that took those pictures or whatever, but you have expert testimony.

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So you have Paul, or Peter, James, or John coming alongside you and saying, do you understand what you're seeing?

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Do you understand how that, now that when you turn away from that scene and you look at your marriage, turn away from the scene, look at your workplace, look at your town, do you see how that transforms everything now?

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Do you see how that's going to work its way into every part of your being? And so we have everything we need.

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And when you think of the genres of Scripture, we see Christ in law, but we see Him in narratives and historical passages.

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We see Christ in songs, and we see Christ in prayers, and we see

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Him in this strange ancient poetry. We see Him in prophecy, sermons, letters, and eyewitness accounts.

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You know, it's just so wonderfully... And I mentioned that the Bible is custom -designed to unveil

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Christ to us because it is a God -centered book, but God has revealed us, as you mentioned in Hebrews, He has revealed

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Himself to us in the person of the Son. He is the radiance of the Father's glory.

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He is the exact representation of His nature. We will not see a clearer picture of God, and there is no picture of God apart from Christ being at the heart of it.

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So when we come to Scripture, we can ransack it.

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Like Luther said with Galatians, I beat on the gates of Galatians until it yielded its treasures.

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Well, great, Luther's wrestling with the question of justification and how a man is right, but why not every

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Christian look at Luther, their brother, so to speak, and say, if that's how he dealt with Galatians, I could deal with every book of the

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Bible that way and say to God, God, it is Your delight to reveal Your Son. You've given us the

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Spirit to teach us. You've given us a perfect Word, and I will not leave You alone until I see

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Him face -to -face, and it will not seem like a waste of time when on that great day we actually see

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Him in His glory. We will realize how little we knew. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. So the old Spurgeon line of, no Christ in your sermons, or go home until you have something worth preaching.

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But many churches have used the Bible in a Christless way, and that's just symptomatic of the preachers reading

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Scripture in a Christless way. But when Paul says things like, we proclaim

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Him, we just preach Him, that's Colossians 1 .28. This is a church that he had never visited, but he writes to them of this mesmerizing view of Jesus, the

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Colossians 1 text of image of the invisible God and all the beauties of Christ being preeminent in the church and being the sacrifice that reconciles us back to the

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Father. And he says, we proclaim Him. Well, Paul, pre -conversion, was trained in the schools of Gamaliel, Pharisee of Pharisees, just as to the law, blameless.

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He knew the Bible, but he didn't know it. So when he says to the

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Colossians that example, we proclaim Him, it's not that he forgot the Bible and just said,

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Jesus, Jesus, you know, Jesus point one, Jesus point two. He's going in our order,

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Genesis to Malachi. In his order, Genesis to Chronicles. Jesus's Bible, Paul's Bible, his

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Old Testament was thematically arranged, ours is chronologically arranged. But the law, the prophets, the

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Psalms, Jesus said in Luke 24, that's the entire Old Testament, he says, is about me.

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And so when Paul says, we proclaim Him, he's not deleting all he learned about the Old Testament.

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He's actually finally knowing it. And therefore he's got an endless treasure trove.

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You said Luther beaten on the gates of Galatians, let me in, give me Christ. And then it yielded Christ.

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Well, it's the same way. We get to loot the treasure trove of these Old Testament passages. So your illustration, like you said, you know, there's some insufficiencies to it because every illustration breaks down.

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I would just say what the New Testament does with those black and white pictures of Christ in the

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Old Testament is it actually emblazons them in hypercolor. Yeah, it's high def.

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Yeah, it looked 2D, you know, and then the New Testament actually shows us, no, it's 4D.

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Like the dimensions of Christ here are as breathtaking as any portrait of Christ in the

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New Testament. And the authors of the New Testament, of course, only had the Old Testament. They were literally under construction, you know, in the

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New while they're writing. But what they're doing, like the author of Hebrews quoting the Old Testament, ad nauseum.

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As I've gone through it, I've looked up every time the author of Hebrews cites the

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Old Testament, I've gone back to that text to ask myself, could I have seen Jesus in that passage if he hadn't told me so?

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And then I started to notice, oh, all the verses between his

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Old Testament citations, I'm pretty confident are also allusions to Old Testament passages that he doesn't cite, but he just assumes you know, and he's still connecting those texts to Christ.

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And so the New Testament authors are doing that constantly. So when Paul says we preach Jesus, and he even gives the motive, because what you feed people with is what they're going to grow to become like.

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So we proclaim him, why? So that we may present every man complete, mature, full, satisfied in him.

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And he says to the Corinthians, something really similar, maybe a verse that's familiar to all those who will listen to this, they could finish it before I complete it.

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For I determined to know nothing among you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Well, just first, that's two things, not one.

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Jesus Christ, person, him crucified, gospel work, gospel labors, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, all the redeeming efforts of Jesus.

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So when Paul says, I determined to you Corinthians, that I'm not going to know anything except Christ person and Christ work.

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Again, I don't think that means he deleted his Old Testament. I mean, just keep reading, right? He's constantly pulling out of the treasure trove of the

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Old Testament, and he's looting it to pull Christ forward before the eyes of the people. One example would be when he says,

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Christ, our Passover has been sacrificed. He wrote that to the Corinthians. Well, what does that mean?

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Well, you got a little bit about Exodus, you know, to have an idea of what he's talking about. But then you go back and you read about the

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Passover in Exodus. You say, wait a minute. Everybody who was under the blood of that sacrifice was spared from the wrath of God and brought safely through judgment.

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And then Paul says, Christ, our Passover has been sacrificed. You can't read that non -Christocentrically ever again.

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You can't unsee what you've seen. And so on and on and on we could go with gobs of Old Testament examples that are enumerated in the

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New Testament to be explicitly about the person and work of Jesus. Yeah. And I mean, like you said, it's not as if we leave our

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Old Testament behind. We go back to the Old Testament from the New Testament clarity, and we see those passages so much more fully as it's not as if we're adding material or, you know, kind of tricking ourselves.

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It's always been there. And then we move from the Old Testament back to the New. And now these pictures of Christ, the pronoun he is suddenly ever expanding.

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And, you know, if you think of the quickest way to do your own soul good or to do the soul of the people in the church that you gather with good, to do your children good.

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If you think about how many times a pronoun in the Bible, which is referring back to the deity, how many times, you know, how many pronouns in the

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Bible refer to God? Well, so it's everywhere. It's everywhere. Okay. What if every one of them were expanded just a little today and expanded a little more and they grew and grew and grew, then every aspect of the

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Word of God and every way that it speaks to us, every way it becomes a shelter to us and a light and honey and better than gold and silver, it becomes a greater and greater and ever larger one of those because we have expanded the

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God, you know, that we're reading about because we are expanding by his grace, our understanding of his son.

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Yeah. So when I say that scripture is the nutrient of a Christ -treasuring church or that theme in chapter four of the study, that churches that treasure

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Christ are feeding on the word concerning Christ, which is what the

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Bible describes itself to be. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the testimony or word concerning Christ, that's

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Romans 10. So if you want faith that is God -pleasing and soul -saving, it has to be in accord with the testimony about Jesus, and that's what the

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Bible says the Bible is. It's the testimony concerning Christ. So you can have a very

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Bible -dominated church that is also

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Christless. A lot of lost people have read the Bible cover to cover. They might even know it better than some regenerate people.

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And you can also have, you know, a demonic theology.

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The demons believe in tremble. They may have better theology than we do. They at least know it.

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But the one thing they lack is an all -surpassing love for Jesus. So they know the doctrine, they know the verses.

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Satan quoted Bible to Jesus. So you can even say, Lord, Lord, did we not?

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And you can quote a bunch of Bible verses to Jesus, and Jesus say, but I don't know you. So you can have a very

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Bible -dominated church that's not at the same time a Christ -treasuring church, but you cannot have a church where Jesus is preeminent that is not dominated by a

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Christocentric feasting on the Bible.

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And so what I would want to say to myself and to any other churches out there, you have a banquet.

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I mean, the table is set. The buffet is spread before you. And God actually encourages us to glut our souls on Him.

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And if you're thinking, well, where's the next sermon about Jesus? Again, I say, just turn to the page before or after.

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They're all about Him. And the banquet is the richest affair. Do you want to be deeply satisfied?

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Then good news, the same resource God will use for all eternity to delight you in Himself is absolutely a glorified, no -faith needed sighting of His Son.

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But Isaiah says that this Word is never going to go away. It's not going to fade or wilt.

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I think in eternity, the Bible we use now is the one that the risen Jesus handed to His people and will have for all eternity to continue to mine the depths of God's love for us in His Son.

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Yeah. I remember reading in Rutherford, Samuel Rutherford, Scottish Puritan, who was imprisoned and who went through a great deal of suffering with loss of children, wife, mother, loss of freedom.

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He described his life as being where his mother died after a long illness where she cried out bitterly in pain through each night.

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He said his own life became bitter as he moved her in with him and his wife and his kids. And they tried to tend to her, but to watch her slowly, painfully die broke his heart.

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His children all preceded him in death from that first marriage. His wife died. He ended up remarrying, and some of them preceded him in death after having children in the second marriage.

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And then... So he describes these sorrows in his letters to church members, and he said, but I did have...

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He said, it was like I had a garden full of beautiful flowers. So British garden, full of flowers.

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And this winter blast came and destroyed every one of them, every aspect of happiness in my life, except one.

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I was still able to tell people about Christ. And then he said,

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Christ came to the garden and clipped the one rose left and walked off with it. And he was... Because he was put into prison and not even allowed to do that.

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And then he writes from prison. And if people tell you, you ought to read Rutherford's letters. Don't start, if it's the first time you're reading them, with letter one.

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Start with the letters in Aberdeen where he's under house arrest. Because from that point forward,

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Rutherford described it as being, he said, I was at the ABCs of Christianity.

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I thought I knew Christ, but what I've learned of Christ since I came to prison, he said, if you'd have told me how much you could learn of Christ on this earth still before heaven, he said,

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I would have told you you were a madman. But now he said, I feel like I live in the suburbs. I'm peeking over a wall.

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And it's like, I can see him in his glory, in the word and in Christ drawing near to him so much so that he was afraid he might make two

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Jesuses. There's Jesus, and then there's... He didn't want to make an idol of the extraordinary joy he was experiencing as Christ drew near to his needy believer.

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But Rutherford said this, if you are cold, get into the sunlight.

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So think about it. It's hard to imagine being cold in Mississippi and in Memphis right now.

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But if Teddy could postpone this to February, maybe we could feel cold. No one gets warmer by going to the thermostat and looking at it and looking, looking, you know, just keep looking, guys.

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The thermostat tells me the temperature of the house. But if I want to get warmer, I need to go in to get into the sunshine or, you know, to get near to the fire.

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It's good at times to look and see, I'm cold. But the cure is not to despair of self and just fall into a puddle, but to turn all my focus away from hoping in me and go straight into the sunlight.

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Another illustration Rutherford used that illustrates the same thing is, he said, we are dry spiritually.

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But he said, we're like people who live near a well, a fountain of water, and we complain dryly of our dryness.

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And he said, what we ought to do is go drink. You know, so of all people, the believer in Christ, why not, if you are broken hearted over your own dryness, why not turn from self and the false cisterns, you know, the containers that promise to hold us life giving water, and they don't?

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Why not turn from that in repentance and in faith, grab hold of Christ again and say, you're the fountain.

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If I'm dry, surely coming to you would be best. And I want to do that from Genesis chapter one to Revelation 22.

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Yeah. No, I love the Rutherford illustrations, and it makes me think of several, but one that I think you initially shared with me, but I've heard and forget where I've read, but he would describe the burden of his own preaching as in preparation, illustrated as having walked, you know, hundreds, thousands of miles to an ocean, see its beauty, see its glory, see its waves, feel the wind, watch the sunset, see the birds, scoop his hands down into the water, illustratively, and then walk back a thousand miles to his congregation, hold his little hands up and say, while everything's already dripped out, can't you see, can't you see the ocean?

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Can't you see the glory? Can't you see the beauty? And then his conclusion is it struck him something like this.

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It hit me. Unless you go to the ocean for yourself, you'll never be amazed.

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And scripture is that ocean. But one of my concerns is that we hear these kinds of illustrations too individualistically.

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I think one of the best ways to warm a cold heart is to see the beauty of Christ refracted through a people, other redeemed saints.

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So yes, you have a Bible and God has promised two addresses where he'll meet you in prayer, in his word.

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If you go with a humble and contrite spirit, he'll meet you there. But there's a third address, and please live there. It's not just prayer in his word, it's with his people.

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Because all of the breathtaking visions of Christ in the

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New Testament, I want to say all, maybe I'm being too exhaustive here, but almost all, if not all, are actually given by God to congregations.

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13 letters of the New Testament were not written to you or me. They were written to local churches. So all the blessings contained of Christ in those letters,

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I take to mean I can't have them if I want them in a solitary way by myself.

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But if I do want them, yes, go look at the Jesus spoken of in those letters, often quoting the

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Old Testament. Go look at him, the repository of Christ in all of scripture. But do that in a context of Christ -treasuring people like the ones that originally received those letters.

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And so if you want to see to live as Christ and die as Cain, or if you want to see,

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I've been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but he lives in me. Or if you want to see, he's the image of the invisible

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God, or I could go on. Every verse I'm quoting is in a letter written to a congregation.

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So in the Rutherford illustrations, I'm a hearty yes. And one thing

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I love about the prison example is it had almost nothing to do with his ministry to other people.

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God was feeding his soul, and through him in those letters, no doubt feeding ours.

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But it reminds me of the powerful ministry that God will give to any person who will embed their life in his word, fix their eyes on Jesus, and seek to serve others.

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You can't outgive God. If you want to grow in your faith, give him away. Give Jesus away to others and watch

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God constantly feed you. But you can't give him if you don't have him. You can't export what you don't possess. Point in case, here's a powerful ministry of a non -preachy person.

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Powerful ministry. The world is absolutely to this day shaped by this ministry. This is 2

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Timothy chapter 3. A grandmother, Lois, and a mother, Eunice, are teaching a little toddler, probably,

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Timothy, their grandson and son. Lois and Eunice's grandson's son is Timothy.

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And Paul says, from them, from your childhood, you learn the way of salvation through faith in Jesus from the sacred writings.

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That's the Old Testament. And so Paul's saying, look, all you moms and grandmothers, all you people who think you don't have a powerful public ministry, maybe you're in prison in Aberdeen, and so you think you don't have a powerful ministry, just soak your soul in the scriptures, keep your eye on Christ, and just pour him into others.

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And I, for one, am pretty thankful that God raised up a

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Timothy who went on to pastor the church at Ephesus, and Paul wrote to him these precious things we now have about Jesus.

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So, in sum, this Bible that Lois and Eunice, this

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Bible that Rutherford and so many others have delved into, and every time they plunge deep, they come out with a greater apprehension of Jesus, has manifested into hundreds and thousands of churches being fed the fullness of Jesus from his word.

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And we sit here today as beneficiaries of God's great work through many who've come before us, and we hope as one little blip on the radar to be serving others who come after us to behold the wonder of Christ from his word, which is what it's all about.

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Yeah, so let's bring this to a close with the question, you know, what can a person do, a pastor, but maybe not a pastor, maybe a

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Sunday school teacher, maybe a person who has no leadership responsibilities in the church, those aren't the gifts that the

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Lord has given that person. You know, why not, by the grace of God, make it your determination to do all that lies within your ability in your words and in your choices together with the believers that you're connected with in your church to promote in a sweet, not a kind of critical way, but in an enticing way, to promote an ongoing, ever -growing preoccupation with Christ.

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So if you are happily part of a body that the pastor is already doing that, and all the elders, the other leaders are doing that, be supportive, you know, encourage them, plead at the throne of mercy for them.

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If you have a church where there's an earnest pastor, but he has not yet seen that, and he's still very busy doing the best he can, but not seeing this gap, you know, there are so many great books on Christ that you can give as a gift, maybe to encourage, can speak in a humble way, can challenge them, you know, um, but that your own life might be such a living sermon to others around you when you gather with them, that pursuing

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Christ together is the great treasure, and Mrs. So -and -so,

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Mr. So -and -so, every time we see them, it's like their whole life is the lesson.

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Yeah. Well, there's so many, you know, unseen by man, certainly seen by God, powerful, ministries that any faithful Christian can engage in in their congregation.

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I'm just thinking of examples that are very prisoner to the moment in my own life, where my 18 -year -old son told me yesterday of an older man in our church who sent him a wonderful text message early in the morning yesterday about gospel promises that belong to him and that are his right now, and how he's praying those specific verses and promises for my son.

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What a powerful dent in my son's soul that came from just a faithful brother in our church that's trying to help a teenage boy see

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Christ. Or I'm thinking of three young girls, I mean, single -digit age, like eight, nine, maybe one of them is 10, but in the, say, seven - to 10 -year -old range, who are being walked through portraits of God's love for us in the cross, specific at the cross.

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What does God say to you of His divine love? And taking those little elementary school -aged girls through those looks at Jesus, one little bite -sized look at a time,

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I think they've now had in the 20s or 30s worth of numbers of meetings just looking at God's love in the cross of Christ.

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What a powerful, powerful ministry. I could go on where I've seen college students take teenagers under their wing and try to show them, as just a believer one step ahead of them on the journey toward Christ, how they now can begin to treasure

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Him and His word. So you can have a massive impact for the kingdom of Christ in one little local church.

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And I actually think the Bible substantiates that the best way to reach the entire world for Christ is to be a faithful,

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Christ -treasuring, accountable member, or whatever your church calls it, of a church that loves and treasures

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Jesus. And you mentioned, even if you hope that your pastor might do that a little better or a little deeper or a little more, well,

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I'm sure my people think that about me. And so instead of running off to another church that does it better, pray for me, encourage me.

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You mentioned, give me books. Yeah, I'll take that. Give me some good books. But instead of just running away, the book of Acts says, it's

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Paul to the elders of the church at Ephesus. He says about that congregation,

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Jesus purchased her, quote, with His own blood. He's not talking about the individuals.

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He's talking about that congregation. There's something in writing to them, the church at Ephesus, Paul wrote, husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave

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Himself for her. There's some aspect of the redeeming work of Jesus for true

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Jesus -treasuring churches. And instead of just running away from her, abandoning her, saying, let me go find another one that's doing a little better, what if we just embed our life in her and humbly, faithfully consistently pray for her, love her?

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Do like some of these examples I said, disciple the teenage boy or the single digit age girls or pour into a

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Sunday school class or pray for your pastor, as you mentioned, give him a good book and just continue to try to stimulate her enjoying

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Colossians 1 .18, the preeminence of Jesus, which that verse says is enjoyed in the context of a church like Colossae.

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Oh, what good God could do in this generation if more Jesus -loving believers would give themselves to local churches where Jesus is prized and preached, yes, imperfectly, and try to just contaminate the whole church with portraits of Christ from all of Scripture.

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Oh, that is a powerful ministry. Yes, unseen by man, certainly seen by the eye of God.

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Yeah, certainly. Jordan, thank you so much for coming down and spending the morning with us and for the work you put into the book,

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Christ Our Treasure. It's a mini -study where we look at enjoying the preeminence of Jesus in the local church.

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So again, the emphasis is doing that together with other believers. And in the show notes, you can find where you can look at that and see if that's something that you feel that the

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Lord would have you study. Taking those great realities and then making our choices on them so that everything in the church is guided by that, whether it's the sermons or the songs or the baby showers.

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I always think that other than our gathered worship, my favorite meetings that our church has is one that they're the type

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I'm not ever invited to. I have to kind of sneak and peek in the back, and it's our ladies' baby showers.

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And the ladies get together and they sing some hymns at the church. They get together.

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You maybe have 50 of the women, depending on who's having the baby, how well they're known. Usually, pretty much every female member of the church shows up to support the young mom, and they sing, pray, and then someone speaks, and they speak of Christ.

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And it's not that we have a church constitution because we don't actually have a church constitution, but 24 years later, we intend to get that done.

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But it's that they are convinced that the sweetest way to use that time is not to talk about Christ -centeredness as a concept, but to look at Christ Himself.

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Yeah, same. The baby showers at Grace Church, I'm still trying to figure out a way I can weasel in to those because I've heard the same thing.

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The prayers that are prayed, there's an ever -growing list of scripted prayers that show up at these environments, these baby showers, and they're praying them over the family, the mother, the baby, the church, their influence in the world.

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Yeah, I continue to hear remarkable things, but I think what you're saying is that's symptomatic of a church where Jesus is preeminent, flooding into every tributary of all of the life of the whole church, may it be.