The American Churchman: Church Discipline and Why it Matters

And welcome once again to the American Churchmen podcast, where we encourage men to take responsibility and dominion to glorify God in the areas he's given them. We are going to talk today about church discipline, church discipline.

This is somewhat of a controversial subject in some circles. It probably shouldn't be though, because the Bible talks about it quite a bit. And we have a special guest with us today to talk about that.

Before we get to all that though, I need to mention that we do have a men's retreat coming up. And this is sponsored by TruthScript, which sponsors this podcast. So check it out. You can go to musicandmasculinity .com if you want to sign up.

We got good speakers. And I think I've talked about it before, so I don't want to beat the dead horse, but it's coming up here pretty soon, September 25th through the 28th. We look forward to seeing you there.

And of course, as always, if you want to support TruthScript, you can scroll down to the bottom of the landing page, truthscript .com, or really any page on TruthScript website. And you will find the menu that has donate.

We are a 501C3, and then publish if you would like to publish with us. We really appreciate that. We found some really good authors who some of them didn't have a place to put their great thoughts. And TruthScript has been a great place for that.

So today I'm obviously your host. Matthew Pearson is here, my co-host. And we have a special guest. We have Pastor Joey DeRuntz. He is a pastor at Master's Bible Church. And you can go to mastersbiblechurch .com if you want to hear his sermons or his writings.

And I guess you could say you're in this Portland, Oregon area, even though you're in Washington. So do people come from Oregon? Do they come across the bridge to your church, Pastor Joey?

Yes, they do. And thanks for having me on. Yeah, we're in what's called the Portland metro area. So people come from Portland and even a little south of Portland, which is no small feat because, you know, there's a Columbia River in between, and that's tend to be labeled the invisible wall.

People don't like traveling over that river, but yeah.

We're right above it. We suggest they take a bridge, probably, you know.

Yeah.

Don't try to swim it. It would be. Oh man.

It's funny.

I live on the other side of the Hudson River. I say the other side, because I grew up on the opposite side. And it's the same thing. There's like a mental barrier. And I say to people, I'm like, they made a bridge, you know, you can go across it.

It's like not that hard, but I don't know what it is about bodies of water. But anyway, it was good to be out at your church for the conference on politics. Now it seems like, I mean, it seems like it wasn't that long ago, but I guess it was now.

It was, what was that? Like six, seven months ago, something like that.

I don't know.

Yeah, it was February.

Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness. Time flies. But yeah, it was good to be out there. And you told me a little bit about your story with the church and just church discipline. Let's just say you've had experience in this area, which is why I asked you to write about it and why we're going to talk about it today.

So looking forward to that. Thank you. Before we get to that, Matthew, as always, well, most of the time.

Mostly.

Yeah.

Yeah, mostly.

I get a little distracted. I want to say busy, but oftentimes it's me being bad with time management.

Well, it's, you know, you're a seminary student. What, you know, that's.

Dude, I didn't have any classes this summer. I ain't got no excuse the past few weeks with it.

I wasn't trying to.

Well, I did just move.

So I guess there's that.

To host podcasts when I was in seminary. It's like, you're crazy. That's what it is. But we're going to talk about the beauty of God. And I don't know, that's a attribute I don't hear talked about a lot.

So I'm actually excited to hear what you have to say, Matthew.

The Beauty of God in Scripture and Theology

Yeah, yeah.

So as always, to open up our conversation about attributes, we have two verses. This time I just pulled two from the Old Testament because New Testament speaks a bit about this, but it seems like the Old Testament is a bit more explicit regarding beauty.

But the first verse that we're going to open up with is Psalm 27, four, where the psalmist writes, one thing have I desired of the Lord that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

And then our second verse is going to be Ecclesiastes chapter three, verse 11, where Solomon writes, he hath made everything beautiful in his time. Also, he has set the world in their heart so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from beginning to the end.

So when speaking of beauty, there are varying definitions that we can give. It's somewhat like, you know, a controversial term in philosophical discussions on like what beauty truly means. Bonaventure in his very short mystical work, The Journey of the Mind into God, he simply defines beauty as, literally, these are the exact words, nothing other than numerical quality or certain relations of parts with agreeable color.

So yeah, numerical quality, relation of parts with agreeable color. Or for him, he would say apt proportionality, something of that nature. Aquinas, likewise, and the Sumo, when he speaks about beauty, he speaks of those containing three parts, those parts being integrity, that is being complete and whole, the object which is beautiful being complete and whole in its form.

Proportion, which would just be the order and the arrangement of parts or harmony. And then clarity, that which shines forth from the object, communicating the essence of the object to our sense perception.

And while many parts of these definitions of beauty can, in some sense, be applied to God, I guess we could think of completeness of perfect harmony within God. We can think of this and God being beautiful.

Nevertheless, they're not able to fully capture his true beauty. One of these things being harmony of parts. While we would say that God is harmonious in all that he is, in many of these episodes going over the attributes of God, we speak about how all that is in God is God.

God is not made up of parts. He's not a composite being. Rather, God, all that is in God is God. So God still, nevertheless, is the very foundation of beauty and such that all that has beauty participates in him insofar as they both reflect him both naturally and supernaturally in nature and in grace, which would make this attribute a communicable attribute.

And so when I say naturally and supernaturally, something following its created end, like by nature, can be said to be beautiful. But in regard to grace, something which is still lacking in man because of the fall, we lack this original righteousness.

We have a loss of these particular gifts. So in the act of regeneration and receiving these gifts of the spirit and being justified by faith, our old man is restored. We are elevated. We are truly made to go to our true end.

We are supernaturally restored by God. And thus, in that sense, we can be said to be beautiful because God is communicating this attribute in some sense to us. So again, when we speak of beauty in scripture, the way that scripture talks about God's beauty is that it's most clearly expressed not in some proportionality according to the senses because God, by his divine nature, is invisible, but God's beauty is most clearly expressed in his majesty and his glory.

This is how Babing speaks much of it because in God, there is no physical form to look on, yet he nevertheless manifests his beauty to us through his sublime greatness. Babing states of this relaying to God that it is called glorious insofar as it elicits gratitude, praise, and honor, and it is called majesty insofar as it is bound up with his absolute dignity and demands submission from all creatures.

We see beauty in scripture itself, scripture being the very word of God, which God gives to us, elucidate the path of salvation to us. We see beauty in scripture with its integrity, wholeness, and clarity because all the parts are so harmonious with one another that even reading and hearing the scriptures, it reveals the beauty of God because the scriptures themselves are beautiful.

When putting this together, I thought of the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 1 .5, where it states of the scriptures how it contains the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God.

The full discovery of it makes the only way of man's salvation. The many other incomparable excellencies and the entire perfection thereof are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God.

So in speaking of God's beauty, we must always draw our mind to his majesty and glory, and glory is fun that we are speaking of that because actually for our final attribute we'll be going over will be glory.

So I won't expand a whole lot on God's glory because we wanna save a bit for the next time when we speak of this, but I do wanna say some words about beauty itself. In contemplating beauty, we are always be directed back to God's beauty, and in being directed back to God's beauty, we're able to contemplate him as he truly is and to be drawn to worship him.

One of the big things that I've been kind of wanting to hammer on as we go through these divine attributes is that you don't wanna just have a purely theoretical theology. You don't wanna have a purely heady knowledge of God.

You want your knowledge to translate into practice, and part of translating that knowledge into practice is not just through the good works that we do, though all these things should result in the fruit of good works.

Good works are important, necessary aspect of the Christian life, but one good work actually that we should be doing is worship of God, contemplating him in his beauty and in his full sublimeness. And so in contemplating beauty, we ought to contemplate God as he is truly glorious in and of himself.

All harmony within creation should always point us back to the harmonious creator who does and ordains all for his glory and for the good purpose of his elect children. And so when we think about beauty, always draw back to God's beauty, contemplate him in his glory and think also in his beauty, the fact that he intends good things for us and most especially be drawn near to the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ who lived a perfect life in our stead, who died the death that we deserved bearing the wrath which we deserved and nevertheless gave us his righteousness and rose for our justification.

All of this can be said to be one of the most beautiful outworkings of divine mercy, which truly is something beautiful. And so all of that would be divine beauty in a nutshell.

Okay, if I was your seminary professor, I'll give you an A for that.

Thank you, John.

It was beautiful, that's why.

Oh, there we go.

That's what I was aiming for.

Yes.

Pastor Joe, you have any thoughts as you heard Matthews describe that attribute that you would like to add to the beauty of God?

Well, I would say, I think it's awesome that you did that. That's not often discussed. I think it's important to remember that beauty, like you said, is a moral category. So we like to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it's not, it's actually a moral category.

You said it's communicable. And I think that should translate into everything that we do. So every time we're working on something, I think it's especially pertinent for us as men because we tend to just go for, does it work?

Does it function? But the question that we should be doing being image bearers of God and especially renewed in Christ is, not only does it work, but is it beautiful? And you'll notice like even in architecture that we used to have in this country versus the architecture today that's very communistic and bland and drab, they're stealing away the beauty, which means they're stealing away part of our humanity.

And you can see it's ultimately an attack on God.

That's a good thought.

Yeah, definitely.

Something else about beauty as well is that I said something in some of the definitions about sense perception. And oftentimes when we think of sense perception, obviously that includes like sight, smell, touch, all those things.

But most of the time when we think of beauty, we oftentimes, for the most part, think of the eyes or the ears. But there's many other aspects of beauty because you can have a beautiful architecture or a beautiful sounding piece, but if it lacks truth, it lacks a fundamental like component of beauty.

And when I was going through what Aquinas was sort of saying about one of the parts of beauty, which is clarity that was shines forth from the object, communicating the essence, part of included in that is truth.

So you can have something which may sound beautiful, look beautiful, but it doesn't have this component of truth or it has a fatal flaw and the other direction. And so that's why, when we might speak of church architecture, we want beautiful churches.

I would say I'm all for that. But at the end of the day, you can have a church which is aesthetically beautiful and may have this like beautiful song and singing, but if it lacks truth to it, what good is that?

I mean, think of like these gorgeous PCUSA churches, which have beautiful buildings and may have a gorgeous choir, but has a patrix preaching that Christ didn't truly rise from the dead. And that was a metaphor for being your true self and coming out of the closet to reveal yourself as they them.

So there's all these components of beauty. And the most incredible thing about God is God fills all those categories. The only category which he doesn't really like fully fill is the idea of like sight, because we can't fully see who God is with the physical eyes, but Christ himself and taking on flesh, he made God visible to us.

Even if we can't see him, even if we can't depict him as he was, that's the reformed Presbyterian in me coming out. We still have this idea that God assumes all things to redeem all things. And God assumed beauty to make all things truly beautiful in his sight.

Yeah.

You know, I was thinking about when you said that, I'm really glad you mentioned it, the fact that you can go into a beautiful church. And I know you wanted to say Eastern Orthodox, but you just said PCUSA.

I don't really find them very pretty though. I think they're too gaudy.

Oh no.

All right, well, shots fired. But you go into one of these churches that is high liturgical and there's young guys. I don't know to what extent, but there's been stories on young guys want to go to these churches and they're looking for tradition.

And I think beauty is part of that, but it's like, you know, okay, so what about truth, right? Like where does truth factor into this? What are your convictions? And I keep thinking about this and I don't know exactly how it connects, but Satan presents himself as an angel of light.

And I'm speaking on counterfeit virtues at a conference next week. And it hit me when you were talking, I was like, oh my goodness. Okay, so that's like, I don't know if that's gonna go into the category of counterfeit virtue, but maybe it will because you can, I mean, isn't that like the corruption of even like pornographic content, right?

If there's sort of like a twisted marred image there, it's like taking beauty and then twisting it all and trying to appeal. It's the angel of light thing. It's, I don't know exactly how to articulate that.

I'm gonna have to think about it, but you know, just like there's other attributes of God, I guess that you can, Satan can try to steal and corrupt and counterfeit. Beauty seems like it's one he can do too.

So I don't know.

I was thinking about that same passage too, because you know, you take, you start harmonizing scripture together to form a theology of it. It's fascinating in Philippians 3, when we think of enemies of the cross of Christ, Paul describes them as those who set their mind on earthly things.

And like that's setting the bar pretty low for an enemy of the cross of Christ to what we tend to think. And then speaking of beauty, you know, scripture presents how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.

And you think on the face of it, they're not gonna be very beautiful, especially in that time period. I mean, they're traveling, but it's the truth. It's the content. It's the function of what those feet are doing that brings about the beauty.

And it's like a second Corinthians 4 kind of thing, right? Not looking at the things that are seen, but the things that are not seen.

It's almost platonic. It's like there's, I guess form, but there's like, God is invisible and he's the source of all the beauty. And he's the most beautiful thing in the universe. So everything else has to flow from the beauty that he has in his character.

If it's beautiful, it's because it reflects the beauty of the one who made it. And I don't know, there's like a search for the ultimate beauty.

I don't know.

That was like deep and philosophical, wasn't it?

I don't know.

Or maybe it was just dumb, but I appreciate you delving into that more. That's such a hard topic, cause it's not as cut and dry, but aesthetics is so integral to our Christian theology because it comes from God.

So beauty, sounds, all of that. We do have a few questions on that, and then we'll get into the church discipline stuff. Let me see if I can find them now, cause they're now back. Someone made a point about God's invisibility and now I cannot find it.

Where did it go? All right, I lost it somehow. They were asking how, I think you kind of answered this already, Matthew. I think, oh, here it is. Is this it? Cosmic Trees and says, if beauty isn't visible since God is visible, what is beauty?

Is it the correspondence of form to function or simply something pleasing or desirable? I think you kind of already touched on that, right?

Well, I mean, I spoke about how there are those, when I was defining beauty in the beginning, how that kind of related primarily to creatures because part of it involves sense perception. And so we can't fully understand divine beauty, but I mean, I know that Aquinas in the Summa, when he speaks about beauty, he actually attributes it to the Trinity as well.

And like part of the, let me go back to the definitions. Like one of the definitions was clarity that was shines forth from the object, communicating the essence of the object to the senses. Like obviously there's no way to fully communicate to the senses, but one of the examples he gave is like how the father and beginning Christ in this communication of the divine essence in eternity, there is a sense in which the son, because he is the image of the invisible God, how he has that clarity shining forth.

He has the imprint of the father in him. So it's more difficult to speak of beauty when we speak about God. And I myself hesitate to do so because I don't wanna like use the wrong categories when speaking about God and accidentally like commit a grave error or whatever, but all that to say like there is a way you can intuitively know that which is beautiful in creation and from that, you can know that the invisible God who is transcendent somehow matches this in some way or the other in a way which we cannot fully comprehend, but you know, if this stems from God, God is beautiful in one way or the other.

And how are we able to do that? Like, how are you not able to have the exact words to say? I mean, maybe if you read like a bunch of scholastics all day and you go on Discord with your buddies and you talk about it and your AI translating stuff.

And I know some guys that do that, but like, of course you can maybe do that, but the normal person knows what beauty is because this is something which is given to us by God. It's written in the heart.

We have this natural knowledge which God has imbued us with and you're able to recognize it.

Yeah, like a sunrise or something is like something about God, right?

Yeah, and God's creation reveals him in the same way that an artist's painting or song or whatever it is reveals the artist.

Right, right.

Yeah, all right, well, go ahead.

The two most helpful things that I've read having to do with God's beauty, one of them is the Charnock attributes of God. He has a great quote in there where he says, power is God's hand or arm, omniscience, his eye, mercy, his bowels, eternity, his duration, but holiness is his beauty.

And then he expands on that. And then Jonathan Edwards has a treatise on beauty. And one of the things that he brings up in there that I found really helpful is how beauty compounds. So like if we went back to like brought up the church, like having a beautiful old PCA church, but you've got a lesbian in there preaching, that strips some of the beauty, but beauty compounds.

Like you can see someone that has beautiful eyes and you go, wow, they have beautiful eyes. And then they have a facial structure and a beautiful nose and they have the symmetry. And then those compounding aspects make something more beautiful.

Like having an old church with a faithful pastor and a loving congregation.

It's compounding the beauty. For her Bible college, she's reading through Charnock right now. I'm very jealous.

It sounds like maybe you're saying also that there's a detail to it. Like it's not like it's a frackle. Well, frackles are beautiful, but like, so like AI, you've seen these AI images of people or videos now.

And sometimes something isn't quite right. And it's like, you know, it's twisted or off somehow because, and then you focus on the detail and you find out, oh, like it's missing some of the things that would, you know, convey human attributes.

There's like wrinkles missing, or it's like, it's almost, it's too impersonal. It's like the Soviet architecture that you talked about before. You know, I think of a drum tracks like that a little bit too.

Like, so it was the music that has, like it's too perfect almost, but it's not actually perfect. It's just stripped the humanity out of it. So it doesn't have the human element that is detailed that makes it beauty.

And yeah, such a deep topic, but we do need to talk about church discipline. You know, it's really beautiful churches that have discipline. So how do you like that transition? So we already have questions coming in.

I'm going to hold off on those. And if you keep asking questions, I will highlight them and come back to them, but we're going to give the floor to Pastor Joey. He wrote two articles for TruthScript. If you want to find those, go to truthscript .com.

One of them is, I think, on the front page right now, actually. So you can check that out. It is the church that loves enough to confront the necessity of corrective discipline. And he really just makes the argument for why church discipline is mandated by Christ.

It's a non-negotiable. In order to love, you do have to have truth. Without truth, you don't really have love. And he goes through some of the process of this. So without just reading the article, Pastor Joey, maybe walk us through what church discipline is.

Maybe just also summarize why is it controversial? Because it is in scripture, but people seem to have problems with it.

Summarize that, okay. Well, I think as with anything, we want to start with why are we here? What's the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever, right? In our salvation, in everything that we do, it should be with an eye towards glorifying and enjoying God.

Which means if he's spoken on it, then we want to know that what he's spoken and we want to prayerfully and joyfully submit to what he's spoken. And he's given us two different kinds of discipline. If we summarize it up, as I listed in the article, formative discipline, which is your day in, day out, Bible reading, prayer, preaching of the word, fellowship with the saints, means of grace, and then corrective discipline for when we stray.

And we see in scripture that this is what God does to his children that he loves. I like the way the King James puts it. If you're without discipline, then you are not sons, but bastards. I think that the harshness of that language to our ears, I think is sometimes helpful to put things in a proper perspective.

Scripture is replete with talking about not only how the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, but fathers do that with children. Years ago, I was reading this really tiny little book by Arthur Hildersham.

It's called Dealing with Sin in Our Children. It's an old Puritan book. And he brings up the objection that people have on corporal punishment, on spanking your kids when there's rebellion. And he says, objection.

And I was thinking, this is weird because I didn't think that was an issue like 400 years ago. I thought that was just a modern issue. But when you read through church history, you find it's always been an issue.

The objection was, how can I find it in my heart to beat so sweet a child? And his response was, the Holy Spirit says you lie, and then starts listing scripture. And I think we've lost that, especially with the attack on the family.

We've lost that because churches are built up of families, of seeing that discipline is actually a good thing, starting with self-discipline. And it's coming from a God who is love. And he's telling us this is loving.

And I think when we refuse that, we need to recognize that's a rebellion against authority issue. That's not really like a doctrinal disagreement. We're refusing to submit to the clear teaching that God's given us in his word.

And then we're not loving people. You know, you think of when somebody's in sin, and you know, like, when they're stuck in this sin and they're in habitual sin, they're showing that they're not a Christian, and they're on the path to hell.

And for us to just see that and do nothing, and then call it love, is a wicked twisting of God's word and a reproach upon his name.

So there's a lot of directions we can go here. I wanna actually give the first question to you, Matthew. I know you were thinking about questions about church discipline. Do you have anything you wanna ask at this point?

Nothing.

Actually, no, I lied. Something which I was thinking of, which you just said regarding, you know, habitual sin is I think there also needs to be, you know, this sort of distinction between those who are caught up in a state of sin and seeking to mortify that sin versus those who are unrepentant of their sin.

Because in studying repentance, when we think about what repentance truly is, it's like a turning away from sin towards Christ. And then there's also God's mercy at play, the fact that God is patient with us despite sin.

And there's like a few categories of people. There are some who turn from sin and do not make a practice of it. You know, as John says in 1 John, not to make a practice of sinning. But then there are also those who continuously fall back in certain sins, but try their best not to.

And even then, you know, you need to be a bit harsher with, you know, with some people over others. There are some who are genuinely trying, but they're just still struggling. And, you know, you have to have a degree of harshness, but you're able to discern, like, no, there is true repentance here.

Others, you feel almost as if, are you really trying at all? So I guess like something that would be good food for thought when thinking of church discipline is if somebody's in a state of continuous sin is discerning whether they're truly repentant or not.

Because, you know, like you think of someone parenting a child being like, if you were really sorry, you wouldn't keep doing that. And, you know, sometimes if we're like caught in a state of sin, we may like, you know, repent to God and God's like, if you're sorry, you'd stop doing that.

But I guess as a pastor, you know, you have to sort of try to discern how do you tell whether someone's repentance is genuine or not? And I think that part of it is, are you putting proper guardrails in to guard your heart from certain sins and things like that, et cetera, et cetera.

But I don't know, I'm just, it's not really a question, but it's more like kind of me going off on like a field of being like, how do you discern true repentance in men? Because like part of the way you do, you have to sort of be able to do that because you as an office bearer in the church have access to the keys of the kingdom and to believers, the door is open and to unbelievers, the door is shut.

And like you were saying, those who make a practice of sinning, they practice lawlessness and they demonstrate that they're not a brother. So I guess part of that is contemplating how we discern true repentance from false repentance.

I think that's the question behind it. What's the distinction. And when does the mechanism of church discipline then come to bear on this?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's a challenge. I'm a sinner too. I've failed, I've failed, you know, even in like steps going through church discipline and aspects of it, because on the face of it, when you just read through Matthew 18, you're like, oh, that's simple.

There's four steps. Boom, done.

Yeah, yeah.

But how much time in between each step? How many times do you repeat the same step with the same person? And learning that, you know, no two church discipline situations are the same, because different circumstances, even though it might be the same sin in two different people, it's different circumstances, different responses.

And so each one is a case by case basis, working patiently with the person. Like one of the things I brought up in the article is what you're looking for is visible unrepentant sin. So it has to be sin and it has to be visible.

It can't just be like, hey, you know, I can see by the way you looked at me that you've got this sin in your heart. No, it doesn't work like that. And then repentance is that mechanism. Do we keep going or do we back up?

And there are certain times when, yeah, you do see somebody, especially like if it's some kind of what today we call addiction. And there is a brokenness and it looks genuine. And then they fall back into it.

One of the things that you're looking for is growth, teachableness. Are they continuing to submit? Where are they going when they do sin? Are they running away or are they running back to the Lord? And are they running back to his people for help?

And are they taking the things that they're learning and applying them? It's not gonna be perfect, but they're growing a little bit, a little bit. I like how you brought up dealing with children because it's similar, right?

You deal with your kids and it's like, sometimes it's the same thing multiple times a day, every day. And then the Lord's growing you in that moment too, showing you how you do the same thing in different areas.

And it's humbling and drives you to prayer with your child. But I think teachableness, that growth, are they growing? We've all heard the illustration, sanctification should look like a healthy stock market.

There's ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs, but the trend is up. And I think that's what we're looking for there also. And you're just patiently walking with people, understanding different people are at different levels of maturity.

And the goal is restoration. The goal is to present every man complete in Christ. And so we don't wanna be quick and willy nilly, just excited, oh, wow, I get to practice Matthew 18. That shouldn't be an attitude that we have.

Because our desire, again, is to present every man complete in Christ. And so that means we're gonna labor, we're gonna be patient with certain people when we do see that repentance. And the more you've practiced it, the more you can start to see when there is a really hard heart and someone just doesn't want any of it and they don't care and they're gonna do what they're gonna do.

Yeah, I think one part of it as well, forgive the noise in the background, it's the dryer. I think one other part of it as well, I thought of the Heidelberg Catechism, question 85 and speaking of church discipline.

One of the things it speaks of is, not only not giving up errors or the errors or wickedness and these things like that, but if they do not heed also their admonition. So I think that part of seeing healthy repentance in somebody is if church discipline does begin to become like enacted, that there's like a healthy reception of it, that this is for your good and there's cooperation with that.

And I think that oftentimes, like not cooperating shows obviously no repentance. So I think that's a big one too, is if that stuff does start to happen, there's a openness being like, this is medicine for my soul that I need.