Assurance: Tests of True Faith — Paul Washer

Introduction and Reading of Scripture

A word of introduction before Paul comes. We've said a word about him the previous two nights when he's spoken, but Paul, again, is a native of Illinois and also went to school in Texas and then served in Lima, Peru as a missionary.

He's the director of HeartCry Missionary Society, which is based in the First Baptist Church of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He's married to Charo, who's Peruvian and Spanish, and has two sons and has a third child, a daughter.

God's blessed him with a daughter on the way. And so we're gonna just have Paul now come and speak to us and invite him to read scripture and pray before he speaks.

Let's open up our Bibles to 2 Corinthians chapter 13. Before we read, let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, I come before you in the name of your Son and only in his name have boldness to approach your throne.

Father, where would we go if it were not for the Lamb of God slain for the sins of men? Father, I praise you and worship you and know that it is only in him and by grace that I stand before you. Father, I pray that in this day you will illumine our hearts and our minds by the power of the Holy Spirit, that you'll teach us from your Word, that we'd be more than challenged, that we'd be changed, that you would be our great helper, that your will would be done, that you would be pleased with the endeavors that are accomplished in this place.

In Jesus' name, amen. Before we go on to read our passage, let me summarize for many of you what we've been doing thus far in the last two nights. We need to understand, first of all, that above all things, we are stewards of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Gospel Reductionism in American Evangelicalism

Now, in our day, that creates somewhat of a dilemma because the evangelical church in America has gone through something of what I would call an evangelical reductionism or a gospel reductionism. We have taken the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ and reduced it down to four spiritual laws or five things God wants you to know.

The America that I know is not gospel hardened. It's ignorant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And one of the reasons is not because of movies like The Passion, but because of preaching of conservative evangelicals.

We are not preaching the Gospel. It is amazing to me that if you go into modern day bookstores, you will find almost nothing written on the content of the theology of the Gospel or find anything written on how a person can biblically know that they have come to know Christ and Christ has come to know them.

But if you were to go back a hundred years ago, you would find that most of the books coming off of printing presses were dealing with one thing. What is the true Gospel? And how does one know that they've truly come to know Him?

So at the beginning on Friday night, I believe it was, we discussed how we have taken the Gospel and turned it into a few little questions. Do you know you're a sinner? If they say yes, would you like to go to heaven?

If they say yes, pray this little prayer. And if they do, we declare them saved. When the matter is not, do you know you're a sinner? The devil knows he's a sinner. The question is more. It is not, do you know you're a sinner?

But since you have heard the Gospel, has God so done a work in your heart that you've now come to hate the sin you once loved? And the question is not, do you want to go to heaven? Because as far as I know, most men do want to go to heaven.

The only problem is they don't want God to be there when they get there. So the question is not, do you want to go to heaven? The question is, the God that you have ignored and warred against all your life, do you now desire Him?

Desire fellowship with Him? Seek to know Him? Has He become precious to you? And again, I talked about modern day preaching that'll say something like this. You have a wonderful education, a wonderful life, a wonderful home, a wonderful family, and you just lack one little thing to make it complete and that's Jesus Christ.

That's blasphemy. Because you see, the Christian life is not Jesus coming in and making your already wonderful life more wonderful. What you need to understand is if you have not Christ, you have nothing.

All that you've accomplished is wrought. Because without Christ, there is no life. And so it's not a question of does a person want to go to heaven or do they want their best life now? The question is this, do you want God?

Do you see the beauty of His holiness and desire fellowship with Him? And then the question is not do you want to pray this little prayer and ask Jesus to come into your heart? Because Revelation 3 .20, if we follow the principles of hermeneutics that I was taught in seminary, has nothing to do with a sinner inviting Jesus into their heart.

Jesus is knocking on the door of a church. Men are called upon to repent of their sins and believe the Gospel. And yes, men can cry out in prayer to God for salvation, but going through a superstitious, magical prayer will save no one.

It is repentance and faith. Then last night, we went through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I shared with you how I was preaching a while back in Europe and I was in a Germanic seminary and I pulled a book off the shelf because it said the Gospel of Christ.

And now it wasn't John Stott's book, it was another book. And I began to read through it to find out what the author was saying. And this is what the author said. God the Father looked down on the cross of His Son and He considered the suffering of His Son that was inflicted upon Him by the hands of Romans as payment for our sins.

That's heresy, even though most people in the pew don't recognize it as so. It's heresy. If you're saved here today, you're not saved because a group of Roman soldiers simply beat up Jesus Christ and nailed Him to a tree.

If you're saved, you're saved because on that tree, He bore the sins of God's people. And now listen very carefully. I choose my words. He was crushed by His own Father under the full force of the wrath of God that justice might be satisfied and the wrath of God appeased.

God is a just and holy God. God being just and holy and loving is also a God of wrath. His hatred burns toward evil. And that is why the psalmist says He is angry every day. In order for God to still be just and yet forgive wicked men, justice must first be satisfied.

And that was done through the cross of Calvary. For God so loved the world, He gave His only Son. I didn't get time to mention this, but I want to mention this for just a moment. The idea of wrath and the holy hatred of God and the idea of the love of God.

When you hear news of some atrocity committed against a child, do you not burn with anger? Now, do you honestly think that God is neutral towards evil? And when I speak of evil, I'm not speaking just of the Holocaust or slavery.

I'm talking about every evil, every infraction of His law makes Him angry. So these evangelists will tell you God's not an angry God. Obviously, they're not reading the Bible because He is an angry God.

He says so. He's angry every day. But what you need to understand is He is also a God of love. And how does that work? God looks down upon the evil of men and He is angered with a righteous anger and He is ready to pour forth His wrath, His judgment and His condemnation.

But the love of God restrains and holds back the justice of God. It holds it back. And that's why Scripture is saying constantly, God says, I'm all day long holding out my hands to an obstinate people, waiting and longing.

Love restrains the judgment of God. And that is a wonderful thing. And it tells us much about the glories of the love of God. But at the same time, carnal men can come to presume upon the fact that God is a God of love and not a God of judgment.

But He's both. God will, and I plead with you to understand this, God will judge the earth and He will do it in righteousness. And He will come with wrath even though today and all day long He restrains His judgment and cries out to men, Whosoever will, let him come.

But one day, the invitation that is a wide invitation to every man on the face of the earth, it will be closed and judgment will come. And so men are called upon to do what? To repent of their sins. To acknowledge their wicked ways and throw themselves upon Christ.

As I shared last night, I know a missionary who can account for the testimonies of practically freezing to death in the Andes and burning up in the jungles, fevers and sickness of being chased by terrorists, put at gunpoint several times, robbed, endangered, and all this for the cause of Christ.

And yet if you were to ask that missionary, Sir, if you died right now, where would you go? He would say heaven. But the answer would be unusual. He would say heaven and not because of any of those things, but for only one reason.

Two thousand years ago, the Son of God spilled His own blood for my soul. And so it's Christ and Christ alone. Now today, I'm going to touch on another place in which preaching has become quite superficial.

Security of the Believer and Assurance of Salvation

And it's the idea of biblical assurance. Biblical assurance to the Christian. Now, I want you to realize something, that when you combine two doctrines, you lose them both. When you try to mesh two things together, you usually end up losing them both.

Like you take muddy water and clean water and put them together and the water's not quite muddy and it's not quite clean. You've lost both things. Well, in the same way, I want to make a distinction today between what is called, and I think improperly so, but we'll just go ahead and use the terminology, what is called the doctrine of the security of the believer and the doctrine of assurance.

Many people have heard of the doctrine of security, but few people today talk about the doctrine of assurance. Now, what is that? Well, the doctrine of security is this. If a person has truly believed in Jesus Christ unto salvation, the same power and grace of God that brought them to salvation will keep them in salvation.

That God who began a good work in you will finish it. It is the doctrine of the security of the believer. But there's also another doctrine called the doctrine of assurance that is basically not mentioned much anymore and yet it was all the time a hundred years ago.

And it's this. It is true that everyone who truly believes in Jesus Christ is saved and kept saved by the power of God. That's the doctrine of security. But the doctrine of assurance is this. How do you know that you've truly believed?

How can you be assured that you have truly believed unto salvation? Yes, it is true that everyone who truly believes is saved and kept saved. But how can you be sure you've really believed? Now, this becomes very important.

Why? If we were to dismiss this church, and especially in Alabama where I now live, if you were to dismiss church, you will find that every person on the face of the earth, in most places at least, are saved.

At least in the south of the United States. Everyone is saved. We could have gone to taverns last night and found a lot of good, saved Southern Baptists. We'll find them everywhere. So obviously some of these people are not saved.

So that's got to bring us to the question, how can a person know that they truly believe? Now, let me say one other thing, one other vicious attack, and then we will go on to building things up. And it's this.

Modern day pastoral counseling on assurance. A young person or an old person comes to the pastor, says, pastor, I just don't know if I'm saved. Which is very rare today. But someone says, I just don't know if I'm saved.

And the pastor will sometimes say, now I know you're a pastor and I know he doesn't do this. But in most churches, this is what would happen. Well, let me ask you a question, the pastor says. Was there ever a point in time in your life when you prayed and asked Jesus to come into your heart?

And the person says, well, yeah. OK, were you sincere? Well, I think so. Yes, I think I was sincere. Well, you're saved. You just need to stop listening to the devil. Or we have these evangelists, and I've heard them with my own ears.

People come forward in a meeting. They counsel them for a few minutes, get them to raise their hand. And then they tell them things like, now you need to write the date on the back of your Bible. And if the devil ever bothers you about salvation, you just open up there and show him this day when you ask Jesus to come into your heart.

That is the biggest bunch of superstition I've ever heard in my life. That with writing it on a tomato stake and putting it out in the garden somewhere so you can walk outside and look at it and prove that you're saved.

That's just... I was in London, I would say that's poppycock. I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous. Tell us what we've done. And then you look at the fact. Just look at the fact. One state convention of ours is lamenting the fact that they found out that 40 -60 of all Southern Baptists never attend church.

And so what they've decided is we just need to improve discipleship. No, we don't. Now, we do need to improve discipleship, but that's not why 40 -60 of the Southern Baptists in a particular state are not in church.

They're not in church because they were never born again. Because they were superficially led to the Lord by someone saying, who loves Jesus in a vacation Bible school? And they raised their hand and that was enough.

Or some evangelist got about 40 of them one night to walk down an aisle and then he went to the next church and bragged about how many people got saved, but when the pastor started holding meetings on Sunday, not one of them showed up.

It's our superficial evangelism. We've got to stop it. We've just got to stop it. And we have got to start teaching biblical assurance. Now, let's go to 2 Corinthians 13, verse 5. We're going to go here for just a second and then jump over into 1 John.

Examining Ourselves in the Faith

But we all know about the church in Corinth. It was famous or infamous or whatever else you want to say. I mean, these characters, many of them were not acting like Christians. Now, Paul looks at this group of people and he says, test yourselves to see if you are in the faith.

Examine yourselves, or do you not recognize this about yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you unless indeed you fail the test. Now, what Paul is doing here is he's looking at a church that was filled with a lot of people acting carnally.

Acting like lost people. And so he comes to them and he does not say what I have heard countless parents say to their teenager, who after praying a prayer when they were little becomes viciously rebellious.

And they say something like this, now, Johnny, you're saved, you need to start acting like it. Now, what Paul would say to your son is this, you made the profession of faith in your younger years. You were baptized following the Lord in obedience.

But at this moment, you're living in a way that may demonstrate that you never truly came to know Him. And what Paul is doing here to this church in Corinth, he's saying examine yourselves, test yourselves.

You are not living like Christians. If Christ dwells in you, you shall not live this way. But maybe Christ does not dwell in you because of the way you're living. And you must examine yourself. Biblical assurance.

How do you know you're saved? How can you have assurance? By examining your life according to what the Scriptures declare a Christian truly is. You go to the Word. The pastor yesterday was speaking about how the ancients used to talk about a confessional evidence, ethical evidence and social evidence, confessional evidence that you confess Christ, that you confess Him.

Now, what have we done to that? We've tore that verse totally apart. You believe in your heart and confess with your mouth. We've turned it into nothing. We've basically taken that verse in Romans 10, that says if you believe in your heart and you confess with your mouth, we've turned it into if you pray this prayer.

That's not at all what that text is teaching. The text is teaching this, that if you believe with all your heart, part of the evidence is that you will be a confessional person. You will identify yourself publicly with Jesus Christ.

It's not if you repeat these words you'll be saved. Let me give you an idea. We're in Rome and we're all carpenters, let's say, and we're in Rome and we're out there building and it's lunchtime and we're all taking a break.

And all of a sudden we hear a drum. Boom, boom, boom. And we happen to be confessing Christians, most of us. We hear boom, boom. We become very afraid because we look on the horizon and here come a group of soldiers carrying an altar.

And that altar is an altar to Caesar. And it has a fire on it and it has a little bit of incense. And they stop right in front of all us craftsmen and they want to determine our loyalty. And the only thing that we have to do is go up there, take a little bit of incense, throw it on the fire and confess Caesar is Lord.

Now comes the test of whether or not you've truly been born again. Because some people who confess Him will walk up and grab the incense and throw it in the fire and say, Caesar is Lord and deny Christ.

And some will go up, grab the incense, throw it in the fire. No, they will just stand there and say, Jesus Christ is Lord. And they will die. And then another will come up and say, no, Jesus Christ is Lord.

And they will die. And then another one will come. You see how we've taken a verse and reduced it down to nothing? Well, I repeated the prayer. How many people out there right now are not trusting in Jesus Christ?

They're trusting in a decision. It is wrong to say hour of decision. Because I meet so many people who are not trusting in Christ, but they're trusting in a decision they made at one time in their life.

So how do we know? Well, it's a confessional test. If you'll confess Christ as a standard of life. But we know that confession is not enough. Because John MacArthur said one time, he said, you know what your confession of faith is worth?

Absolutely zero. Because Jesus said, on that day, many will call me Lord, Lord. It's not just confession, but it's also ethical. Bearing fruit. Bearing fruit. Jesus said, you will know Christians by their fruit.

As soon as someone says that, I always see someone in the congregation, and they're just thinking, they're going, judge not, lest ye be judged. And I always go, and twist not Scripture, lest ye be like Satan.

Because that's exactly what you're doing. The only verse most people ever memorize. And that out of context. Judge not, lest ye be judged means, don't be a Pharisee who with hatred, jealousy, and religious animosity in your heart, you criticize everyone in hopes of tearing them down so you can step on their broken bodies and achieve a greater renown than your religion.

Because the same Jesus who said, judge not, lest ye be judged says, you will know them by their fruit. You will know them by their fruit. And Paul the Apostle said, test yourself. Do you know what's sad?

In many churches, if a pastor, a sincere godly pastor, saw a teenager or an adult that had been baptized and confessed Christ in the church, but had now gone wayward and was living in rebellion and walking in darkness.

If that pastor went to that young person and said, I fear for your soul, you may not be saved. Come, let us talk together. Let us examine ourselves in light of Scripture. I want to help you. He'd be called on the carpet.

Maybe put out of the church. Isn't that sad? Because a religious lie is dangerous. And it encrusts the heart. And we have a religious lie in believing, well, every one of us is saved. We all prayed that prayer.

Now, we don't live like it, but how do you know that you've truly believed in Jesus Christ? Paul says here, test yourselves. Examine yourselves. Kind of a Hebrew parallelism, even though he's writing in Greek.

The idea, a Jew will say something, and in order to emphasize, he'll repeat it again a little bit differently in order to give added emphasis. That's what Paul's doing here. He's saying, examine yourselves.

Test yourselves. Now, test yourselves in light of what? Paul also told the church in Corinth, you judge yourselves by yourselves, and that's not wise. So if we're going to test ourselves to see if we truly are Christian, we shouldn't compare ourselves to other people who call themselves Christians.

Why? Many call themselves Christians who are not Christians, so it's not wise to compare ourselves to them. And then, there are other Christians who are truly Christian, but are giving exceedingly great public gifts, or have made great progress in sanctification, and we shouldn't compare ourselves to them because we might come under false condemnation.

To what should we compare ourselves? How should we examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith? Well, fortunately, God's thought of that. Go to 1 John 5. 1 John 5, verse 13. In John, his Gospel, chapter 20, verse 31, he tells us why he wrote his Gospel.

He wrote the Gospel so that everyone who reads the Gospel might be saved. That they would know that Jesus is the Christ. That's why he wrote his Gospel. And now, John also tells us why he wrote this epistle.

He says, what are these things? 1 John. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. The purpose of 1 John, and all through Southern Baptist history, 1 John was the main tool of godly pastors to help people come to a biblical understanding of salvation, to know whether or not they were genuinely saved, or they had a false faith.

Now, there's a few things I want to look at here. First of all, he's writing to people who have confessed faith in Christ. And he's saying, I'm writing to you who believe. You've confessed Christ as Lord and Savior.

I'm writing these things so that by listening to what I tell you, you'll be able to know whether you truly believe or not. Now, let me say something here that's very important. There is kind of an independent fundamentalist idea out there, and it's wrong, that if you doubt your salvation, you're lost.

I have heard that so many times. If you doubt your salvation, you're lost. No, that's not biblical. It's not historical. It's not Baptist. And furthermore, it's not evangelical as you study the evangelical community since the Reformation.

A true believer can go through times of doubt. A true believer can struggle with assurance. One of the things that we pray for and study Scripture about and cry out for grace is that we might have assurance.

The sound conviction, the solid foundational assurance that truly we've come to believe. So if you doubt your salvation sometimes, don't think that's a sign of lostness necessarily, because all true believers can go through that.

Especially sometimes. I don't have time to teach on this aspect, but sometimes in discipline, God will pull away assurance from a true believer so that they may fear and seek Him. Okay? What you need to be afraid of is not if sometimes you doubt your salvation.

What you need to be afraid of is if you live like the world, act like the world, talk like the world, have the same desires the world has, and you never doubt your salvation. That's when you ought to be afraid.

The First Test: Walking in the Light

Now, John gives us a series of tests from 1 John on. Now, we don't have time to go through all of them, and some of them are repetitive. But I want to go through some of the major tests that John gives us in order that we may examine our lives in light of them and come to a biblical assurance of salvation.

The first test is found in 1 John 1, verse 5. This is the message, We have heard from Him and announced to you that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Now, you have to understand this before we get to the test.

It says God is light. Now, what does that mean? Well, you know, the common interpretation, and a correct one I believe, John writes in a way that what he says sometimes can have multiple interpretations.

He does it so often, I think he does it on purpose. But it does mean God is light, God is holy, there's no shadow in Him, there's no unholiness, He's not immoral. God is absolute pure. Now, but in the context of 1 John, I think he's saying something a bit more than that.

You see, false teachers, the roots of Gnosticism, which was one of the greatest enemies of the early church, seems to have come into this church. And one of the main doctrines that they had was God is esoteric, dark.

You can't really know who He is. And you can't really know His will. But John comes back and says God is light. And I believe that what John is saying here is this, God is not esoteric, He's not hidden, He's not dark, but what God is, is this, God is a God of revelation, He's a God of light, God has revealed to us who He is and He's revealed to us His will.

He has told us who He is and He has shown us what He desires or what His will is. He's not a dark God. He's a known God. We know who He is and we know what He wants. We know His will. He's revealed it to us.

Not only through Old Testament Scripture and the Law and the Decalogue, but once and for all in the greatest way, through His Son. Now, you're going to go on now and see why this is important. Here's the first test of a true believer.

If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.

Now, modern day interpretation has put a twist on this. It's amazing. It's why it's good to read books older than a hundred years. I'm amazed that in modern interpretation, specifically among Baptists, not so much among Southern Baptists, but among other Baptists, it's this idea that what John is talking about is not whether you're a Christian or not, but whether you're a Christian who has fellowship with God or a Christian who doesn't have fellowship with God.

And that is not what this is teaching at all. Not at all. And history backs me up on this. The main thrust of interpretation here, when John says, if we say we have fellowship with Him, what the person is saying?

If we say we're a Christian. If we say we're truly a Christian. Born again. Child of God. That's the thrust of the whole epistle. And that's the majority interpretation of our greatest historical interpreters throughout history.

John is saying, if we say we're a Christian, but walk in darkness, we lie when we say we're a Christian. He says in verse 7, but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

And the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. Now, I want you to see the connection here. If you're out of fellowship, the blood of Jesus doesn't cleanse you from your sin. That right there is evidence to tell you that when He says, if we say we have fellowship, we're saying, if we say we're Christians.

Now, the first test is this. A true Christian will walk in the light. Now, what does that mean to walk in the light? Remember our definition prior? God is light. It means He has revealed to us who He is and He has revealed to us His will.

What John is saying is this. If we say we are a Christian, and yet we walk in a way that contradicts what God has revealed about Himself and what He has revealed about His will, we lie when we say we're a Christian.

But a true Christian will walk in a way that conforms to the character God has revealed about Himself and will walk in a way that is conformed to the will or law of God. Now, let's look at the word walk for a minute.

The Greek word peripateo. Pateo means to walk. Peripateo means to kind of walk around. And what John is talking about is not if you walk in the light in church buildings. He's saying in every manner of your life, every manner of your life conforms to what God has told us about Himself and what God has revealed about His will through His law and teaching.

Now, here's something very important about the word walk. It's present tense. It's talking about a habitual style of life and not a moment in time. Now, why is that important? I'm going to tell you. When I say that the first evidence that you're a true believer is that you walk in the light, you're probably sitting there and go, well, you know, I do, but I don't perfectly.

And sometimes I sin and I can walk out of the light and well, I get convicted about it and I get convicted of the Holy Spirit and I have to repent and so am I lost because I don't walk in the light perfectly.

That's where it's so wonderful to understand what John's saying. John is saying that the true Christian is not saying the true Christian will be perfect, but he's saying as a style of life, when you look at the true Christian, his whole gamut of life, his style of life over a period of time, when you look at him and observe his life, you will see the characteristic of his life is that he is truly seeking, truly walking, living, conformed to what God has revealed about his character and conformed to what God has revealed about his law.

Now, let me give you an example. Let's say I follow, let's say that I just want to destroy this church and I want to really get the pastor kicked out. Okay? And I've got to choose between two tools. A snapshot camera and a video camera.

I'm going to choose the snapshot camera. Why? Because here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to follow him around everywhere. And then one day, it's going to happen. He's going to get mad. Something's going to happen.

He's going to kick a dog. He's going to lose his temper. He's going to be selfish. Something is going to happen. And I'm going to wait for that moment and the moment he does it, click! And I'm going to blow it up and I'm going to put it up here on the wall.

And I'm going to say, look at this man. He can't be your pastor. He's a sinner. He's a vile man. Look at that face! Right? But see, what I'm doing, I'm not giving you an accurate description of his life.

I have taken a snapshot picture of a moment of weakness, a moment when he gives in to the flesh, a moment when he sins. But that is not an accurate picture. An accurate picture would be to follow him around with a camera 24 hours a day for about five years.

Now, if someone followed you around, and I don't care, and I'm going to be real smart-alecky right now, I don't really care about your heart or what you feel or your emotions or how you sing hymns or how much you come to church.

My only question is this. If someone followed you around 24 hours a day for a year with a video camera, would they see a person whose style of life was that of? And not what they said with their mouth.

I mean, look at their life and you could say after looking at that for a year, you could say, you know, the style of that person's life, the trend of their life, you can see that they're a person who honestly seeks to walk in a way that is conformed to the character of God.

And they honestly seek to walk in a way that conforms to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. Because if they can't see that, you need to be afraid. There is this absolutely absurd idea that a person can actually be saved and not be changed.

And not continue to change. And yet, all the promises of the New Covenant in the Old Testament, especially Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and all the promises of Paul the Apostle is that He who began a good work in every believer will finish it.

And that there is no such thing as a continuously carnal Christian. That's the invention of a seminary out west and praise God, it wasn't Southern Baptist. One man started a doctrine, the carnal Christian, and it has literally destroyed the doctrine of assurance.

The idea that a person can live in continuous carnality without discipline, without repentance, without God working in their life for years and years and years, not grow, not care about the things of God, but bless God, they're saved is an absolute lie.

It's a lie. Because He who began a good work in you will finish it. I use this illustration. Someone asked me about it last night. Let's say I showed up here late and I'm dressed like this. This is about as good as I get.