Synoptic Gospels: 274-275

So, if you have your copy of the Harmony of the

Gospels, we're in section 276, which is Matthew 21,

Mark 11, and Luke 20. Actually, I suppose we didn't really finish off 275, yeah, yeah, yeah, and we haven't really looked at the chief priest and scribes either, but the fig tree, we'll look at weathering the fig tree and then go back to that one.

In 275, we spent most of our time simply looking at the chronological order of things and Mark and Matthew and so on and so forth, rather than the meaning of the cursing of the fig tree.

I mentioned last time, I imagine some of you recall, the fig tree argument that was thrown out and I should have brought it in,

I really should have, especially now, we have a projector here and if I would just put my cable in this thing,

I now have the ability to use my iPad to project. So, if I put the fig tree video on my iPad, we could watch it real quick, but yeah, back in 99,

I had a Muslim fellow at the end of a debate, during the audience questions, ask about the fig tree, the fig tree, and his objections were that Jesus, A, would know that it wasn't the season for figs if he was

God, and B, if he was God, he could have just made the fig tree bring forth figs, and C, God doesn't eat, so he wouldn't be hungry in the first place.

So, there's your three -fold argument based upon the fig tree against the deity of Christ. And most of us just sort of go, really?

But hey, for a quarter of the world's population, that's good enough.

That's a serious argument. First of all, in regards to the issue of the fig tree, the point is it had signs of life, lots of leaves, and the fig tree is clearly, as Jesus is going in and out of Jerusalem, a picture of Israel that has all sorts of signs of spiritual life, has all the outer accoutrements, but there's no fruit.

And so, the point was not Jesus was hungry, but he couldn't be satisfied from this fig tree.

The point was the fig tree made promises, outward promises, but did not have an inward reality, very straightforward, very simple.

So, Jesus knew what the season of figs was. It's not an issue of ignorance,

A. B, his purpose wasn't to force it to bring forth figs in the first place, so there's no reason why he would do so.

And so, the only argument, really, was that Jesus wouldn't be hungry if he was

God. But of course, as I said to the man, the point is that the Word became flesh.

The Word did not cease being the Word when he became flesh, but he truly became flesh, and Jesus ate and drank, and so on and so forth, like any true man does.

And so, the whole argument, really, is just the presupposition that Muslims have that Jesus cannot enter into, or God cannot enter into, human flesh.

Now, there is an amazement on the part, specifically, of Peter in Mark. It's just a generic, the disciples saw it and marveled, as we've seen many times.

Peter often represents all of the disciples in their statements. But, there is an amazement at the withering of the fig tree.

I don't know about you, but I'm a little amazed that anyone who had been in that boat out on the lake would be amazed that a fig tree would wither.

When you think about it, if you've already seen Jesus rebuke the winds and the waves, and you've seen people raised from the dead, fig tree?

I mean, my wife can do that to plants, and she doesn't try to. So, I mean, what's the big deal?

But, evidently, the point was that it really looked, I guess, it really looked like a robust tree, initially.

And then, the next day, it is skeletal, or something along those lines,

I would assume. Jesus' response is not, again, to provide the physiological mechanics of exactly how, by divine power, the fig tree were to be withered.

But, instead, you have a discussion that we hear a lot, especially on certain television channels between 20 and 22, at least here in the

Phoenix area. And, it seems to be, this seems to be one of the favorite texts upon which to preach and teach, primarily when you're telling folks that they need to be spending $69 into your ministry, or, you know, take the current price of the gallon of gas, multiply it by 10, and that's your seed faith gift, or something like that.

That's how you make up for, you know, the extra cost of your jet fuel on your private jet. And, that stuff's pricey.

If you want, that's expensive stuff. Anyway, the response, that's

Matthew's version. Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and never doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say this mountain be taken up and cast into the sea, it will be done.

Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith, or if you forgive men their trespasses, your

Heavenly Father will forgive you. But, if you do not forgive men their trespasses, and notice this is a, there's a, the text here has thrown 14 and 15 in here, because,

I would imagine, of Matthew's order. Because, in Matthew's, I'm sorry,

Mark's order, because in Mark's order, in Jesus' answer to them, have faith in God, truly I say to you, whoever says this mountain be taken up and cast into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes in what he says will come to pass, will be done for him, whatever

I tell you, and therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours, and whenever you stand, it continues on, and whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your

Father, also who is in Heaven, may forgive you your trespasses. So, a number of previous themes and statements, discussion of faith and prayer, forgiveness, these are all themes that have been struck before, both in Mark and Matthew, and they are not really expanded upon a whole lot in this particular text.

But, the response is not what you would expect, in the sense of making application about the fig tree or anything else.

Instead, the response is to speak to them of the necessity of faith.

Possibly, this is due to what is going to be heading their direction. Remember, it's only a matter of literally hours at this point, historically, before these men will be scattered from following after Jesus.

They will be hiding behind locked doors, and their entire world will be coming down around their ears.

A very, very dark time is coming. There isn't a lot of discussion of it, but you really do, we will have reason to wonder.

The resurrection season is coming up, that's why you're starting to see the inevitable spate of anti -Christian religious stories in the news.

It always seems, around this time of year, that some great discovery is made that turns out to be bogus later on, but during this period of time, it's like, more evidence that Christianity is not what

Christians think that it was, and there was no resurrection, there was no crucifixion, there was no Jesus, or whatever. Some of you may have seen the story about the

Jordanian lead plates that were discovered, and how these may be the most ancient artifacts of Christianity, and all this stuff.

As soon as I read it, and I saw the picture, I went, this really smells of a fraud here.

I mean, codes, and mirror writing, and this kind of stuff.

Christianity produced literature, yeah, but not this kind of stuff until much later.

And on metal plates, there's something really stinky about this. Well, already, there's an article out by a

European scholar that hasn't even examined them, but he had enough of a picture of one that he just checked the writing, and it uses some mirror writing, like how you use a mirror and do things backwards like that, but then he checked what was there, and discovered that it was a mistrans...

It basically appeared like 50 years ago in print, in that form.

So, he's like, excuse me, but this is like a fraud? This is like, made recently?

So, I mean, it's not definitive, but it's already making everybody go, oh yeah, right, okay.

So, you know, but that kind of stuff, like I said, it's just that time of year.

It just seems to be the time of year when the mainstream media looks for all apostates and everybody else to come running in front of television cameras and microphones to explain why we shouldn't believe in this resurrection thing.

Anyway, I'm not sure how I got onto that, but it does seem to be this time of year. Oh, what

I was going to say was, those couple of hours, those hours between the crucifixion and the appearance of Christ, very dark hours.

Can you imagine what it was like to be one of the disciples at that time? And even though Jesus had tried to prepare them, it seems very clearly they just don't...

Even when, remember when Jesus tells Peter after his confession of faith, it is necessary for the

Son of Man to go to Jerusalem, be betrayed, put to death, rise a third day.

Peter's like, oh, far be that from you, Lord. They have their idea of what the Messiah is supposed to be.

The Messiah's not supposed to die. The Messiah lives forever. The Messiah leads Israel to world dominance.

They had their traditions, and it's just amazing how traditions can filter things out.

It's sort of like Jesus says, I'm going to go to Jerusalem and die, and then everything after that becomes the Charlie Brown teacher language.

How many of you don't know it? Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. That's exactly right. The Charlie Brown teacher language.

It's just, tradition just turns it into a line of sound with no meaning. And it seems to be the case because, you know, something tells me, if somebody was sitting around in the upper room or wherever it was that they were, where the doors were locked, expecting the

Roman authorities to come get them at any point, if somebody had been sitting around going, well, guys, look, we just need to be patient, wait on the

Lord here because Jesus told us this was going to happen, and he's going to rise from the dead on the third day, and so let's be watching and waiting.

I don't know. I suppose it's possible, but I just don't get the feeling that that's what was going on.

I think they were numb. You know, were there any discussions where someone went, have we been wrong all along?

Clearly, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they're downcast, they're depressed, and they're saying, we thought he was the one.

And were they sitting around going, well, there's been others before, but then they're arguing, yeah, but they didn't raise anybody from the dead.

So you can imagine that was a pretty dark time. Is this sort of, it seems to me like Jesus is not really answering the question.

And he's talking about the necessity of faith and the power of faith and things like that. Is that what this is about, seeing what's coming, encouragement to faith, knowing what they really need, which isn't really the answers to their current questions because just a few days from now their current questions are going to become irrelevant?

I don't know. But it is sort of a summary statement of much of what we have seen elsewhere in Mark and Matthew.

The idea of having faith and prayer. Of course, elsewhere there is the, it's sad to me anyways, how many people when they preach on this, preach against the idea of using the phrase according to your will, even though it appears earlier in the

Gospels. I remember years and years ago, and this was years and years ago because gas was about 49 cents a gallon.

That's how we can sort of plot the decades now. But I had this 1972

Buick LeSabre. I don't know if any of you remember what a 1972

Buick LeSabre looked like. It was a Land Barge. It was huge.

V8 350 in it. We had driven that thing out here from Pennsylvania.

When you're the new driver in the house, you get the leftovers, whatever is there.

So I drove that thing to school starting the middle of my sophomore year. We live way away from my school.

It was a districting thing, and they were building a new school. So I had to go from north of Bell Road and about 57th

Avenue all the way down to south of Glendale on 75th Avenue to go to school.

That was a long ways. Independence High School out there is where I went.

So I had a lot of time to listen to stuff. Back then I had a C cell battery powered

Radio Shack cassette player. It sat on the seat next to me. That was how...

Yeah, I had a little thing. Yeah, that's right. You know which one it was. That was my music.

But it did have an AM FM. It even had FM radio in it, I think. It may have been one of those really fancy ones.

It had FM radio in it. So I would listen to...

When I was small, I'd try to find something on Christian radio. There were a couple of Christian radio stations back then.

I remember so clearly. I even remember what road I was on. I think it was either

Charles Capps or Peter Popoff or one of those types of guys that was on the radio.

I don't know why I had them on. It's not like I listened to those guys. It happened to be on, I guess because I turned it on and he was saying something that caught my attention.

I just remember very clearly. This was probably my junior year. Yeah, probably my junior year in high school.

Somewhere around there. This would have been 79, 80. That ranged somewhere.

And he was preaching on one of these passages. His whole point was he was talking about the poison to the power of God.

What is the poison to the power of God? If you want to poison the power of God when you pray, you say, if it be according to your will.

That was the poison to the power of God. Because if you say if it's according to your will, then you're not actuating faith or whatever terminology they were using, whoever it was, at that point in time.

And it just struck me. In these two texts, the specific phrase, according to your will, isn't found.

It is found elsewhere, but it's not found here. And that's why they'll go to these, because they'll have to deal with the will of God as if anyone in this context, any of these peasant

Jews, like the disciples, most of them were fishermen. It doesn't mean that Peter didn't have nothing, but these guys are just not the best examples of the health, wealth, gospel thing.

And they're under the rule of Rome, and there's a tremendous amount of death around them, and disease around them.

And the idea that the will of God wouldn't be first and foremost in their mind, and that somehow we had the power and ability to command

God, it just makes me sad that people can read these texts and go, well, you don't have to worry about that stuff.

Elsewhere, it's just... Now, personally,

I haven't seen too many geographical alterations on Google Maps due to people's prayers in the sense of taking up mountains and being cast into the sea.

Of course, there would have to be a purpose for taking up a mountain and casting it into the sea.

The point is that God's power is not limited, and that when we do pray for that which glorifies him, there is no shortness in his arm to accomplish his desires.

But the idea that somehow we would pray in such a way that God's will and God's purpose is not first and foremost what our desire is.

Years ago, another story, look out, a little bit later on in life, we used to have a radio program here locally.

And we had just moved into some new offices. Wow, look back at those offices now and go, wow. But we had moved into some new offices.

We were having sort of an open house, and we were doing the radio program live from our offices. And we had this guy call up, and he was absolutely serious.

He was not calling up to spoof us or anything, because this sounds like one of those, yeah, you're making this up things.

But he was absolutely serious. He was proving that faith works by telling us how he had chosen a vehicle.

If I recall correctly, it was a Pontiac Trans Am. Now back then, that was, oh yeah, that was the

Firebird, the big Firebird. Remember those? That time period, yeah, they were cool cars.

And he had found the car, this brand new Firebird, Trans Am, whatever it was, one of these sports cars.

And he had literally claimed it in the name of Jesus. He had prayed over it, and I think he did so,

I think he went into the dealership each day for seven days. If he had only gone for six days, this never would have worked.

If it was one of those dealerships that was closed on Sunday, it never would have worked, I suppose, I don't know.

But he had claimed this car, and he now had it. And this proved that I was wrong, that you could just name and claim whatever you wanted to have.

And I remember, I had never thought about doing this before. It just sort of popped into my mind, but I remember asking him, so, you believe that God has provided you with this?

Well, yes, this is God. God's power is unlimited, and I named it and claimed it in the name of Jesus. So, let me ask you something.

How much money do you have left over after your gas and insurance bills to actually help support the work of the ministry of God?

There's this silence on the phone. Because you knew, he was now completely up to his eyeballs.

He probably now had to get the small fries at McDonald's because he couldn't afford the medium or the supersize when he went to the drive -thru in his really fancy car because just the insurance was enough to kill him.

But I'll just never forget this guy. And I just thought, man, somebody who's really ripe, either for cultism, he'd be ripe to go off into that, or to become the religiously burned out, like the more than a million people that left the

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society after their failed 1975 prophecy that just disappeared.

They never ended up in another church. They're just religiously abused. They've been burned out by religion in general.

And those people, they will not listen to a word you have to say. Once you start going towards the topic of God, that's it.

And there are a lot of people like that. Yes, ma 'am? The religiously abused specifically?

Yeah. It is very difficult. It is one of the most effective and efficient means of closing down any conversation whatsoever, is to, especially an authoritarian religion, where you have certain true things that were said, but they were inextricably linked together with falsehood.

So that as soon as someone hears you saying one of those true things, they automatically associate it with all the falsehood that was associated with it, and they don't want to have anything to do with you.

How to approach somebody like that? It's very, very, very difficult. The only thing you can try to do is to reason with them that the very scriptures that they now are unwilling to believe in had warned about false teachers and false prophets and people like that, and to ask, well,

I certainly understand you have come to discover that this is false. But somehow, and it's very hard to get past the emotional barriers at this point, on a rational, logical basis, there has to be a recognition that just because one thing is false doesn't mean that everything is false.

You can have all sorts of deception, but that doesn't mean the truth doesn't exist.

Just look at science. I mean, we go through cosmologies every few decades. The entire literature of cosmology from 50 years ago is irrelevant today.

Well, if they can understand that, many times they will turn toward more of a secular bent, something along those lines.

If they can recognize that, well, just because there have been false theories in the past doesn't mean that there's not a truth about the history of the world or the origin of life, whatever else it might be.

In the same way, just going, well, I was burned out because of this, therefore everything else that looks like it, tastes like it, or anything else, even smacks of it, must be untrue, is an emotional conclusion, not a logical or rational one.

But very few of them have any interest in even talking. Even talking.

Sometimes the only way to get through to them is because they still experience life the way we do, that is, there's deaths, there's tragedies, there's, you know, the big questions are still there.

They may be just going, not going to hear, not going to hear, you know, they may be doing that, but it's sometimes only in those situations where a greater emotional trauma comes along that you have any opportunity of trying to say anything to them.

But not the very effective way. Abuse people and then they will be very hardened to the gospel, there's no choice about it.

It's hard. Anyway, one other thing,

I guess, just real quickly, here in Matthew 21 and in Mark, it is interesting to me to note that right at the point where you start talking about having faith in your praying, you also have the statement in Mark of the necessity of forgiveness.

This takes us back to the previous discussion we've gone over before and that the pastor preached on not too long ago out of the

Sermon on the Mount. If you have anything against your brother, leave your offering at the altar and go deal with that first and then come back and do your worship.

In other words, Jesus does not allow for the attitude, and it's an easy attitude to slip into, well,

I'm right with God, so I don't have to worry about anybody else. That's a good, almost

American attitude. The cowboy alone out on the prairie, the loner out there.

But whenever you stand praying, forgive if you have anything against anyone so that your

Father also who is in Heaven may forgive you your trespasses. In other words, the person seeking forgiveness must first and foremost be a forgiving person.

This is a hard, I know it's been a few years since we went over that particular text, but this is a very, very, very hard thing for a lot of people to grasp hold of.

There is a strong desire in the human heart to count wrongs done and to seek revenge, yet at the same time speak about the gloriousness of God's forgiveness.

And yet, it's very, very clear in the parable that Jesus told of the man who is forgiven a huge debt, and yet he then goes out and has someone who owes him one ten -thousandth the amount of money thrown into prison.

He himself ends up being thrown into prison because the person who had forgiven him comes along and says, you were forgiven this amount and yet you can behave towards someone else like this and he's checked into prison.

The point being that when we realize the depth of forgiveness upon which we are daily dependent, then the idea of holding grudges and holding offenses and seeking revenge just simply cannot be an element of the

Christian experience. And it speaks to how little we have actually really believed in our own sinfulness and the level of forgiveness that we confess that we would hold on to these things.

So, Jesus' exhortation is, his command is, whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your

Father also, as Heaven, may forgive you your trespasses. Hypocritical prayer accomplishes nothing.

Is that not the whole point of the prayer of the publican and the

Pharisee? In Luke's version, where he has a very religious man who would have been greatly respected by the religious people of the day and they probably wouldn't have even cringed at his statement.

It certainly makes us cringe once you think about it.

Oh Lord, I thank you that I'm not like this guy over in the next pew. I'm this and I'm that and I'm not like the guy in the next pew.

Can you imagine if we, you know, we're having a, you know, the guys have prayer around the table up here up front.

We go around the circle and, you know, we get down about halfway down and someone starts praying and says, and I thank you

Lord that I'm not like Brother Brick. And he starts rattling off something about Brick.

And then he says, and I'm glad I'm not like Pastor Fry because I don't do this.

And, you know, what would be the result of that? You know, we'd all, you know, wouldn't you love to be the next guy in the prayer line after that happens?

You know? I'll have to admit, it never happened and I'm thankful that it hasn't.

Not suggesting that it does any time in the future if you're wanting to think about doing something like that.

But that's what the Pharisee does. And Jesus' whole point is you can have, it sort of goes back to the fig tree.

You can have all the leaves and the, you know, the phylacteries and the robes and you can have the trumpets blown as you put your money into the temple treasury.

And, you know, all this religious stuff and put ashes on your face because you're fasting.

And you've got your reward because there really isn't any reward to it. Hypocrisy in prayer and hypocrisy in asking for forgiveness when you're not extending it just doesn't work.

It is not for the followers of Jesus and we can see that just naturally.

So there's the withering of the fig tree. Real quickly here. Yes, okay. Should have enough time.

The previous section we sort of skipped over because we were talking about the cursing, withering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I didn't do the cleansing of the temple again because notice it says compare number 25 which means we did that sometime back eons ago according to the official taker of notes.

Probably about 1872 or something around that so that time frame. But we've already covered that in the discussion of that.

And there could be a number of sections like that yet. But 274, the chief priests and scribes conspire against Jesus.

Now, in itsy bitsy small print in the parallel harmony here, you have

John chapter 11 and the interesting discussion there. If I recall correctly, we covered that,

I think. It says 223, so I think we did go through, yeah, we did go through John 11 so I'm not going to cover that.

But you have here even amongst the highest officials, you have

Caiaphas. It says who was high priest that year and let me just remind you that people will sometimes point that and go, see,

John didn't really know how things were. High priests weren't elected year by year. Well, John knew that.

But what we also need to know is Jerusalem was under the control of the Romans and the

Romans realized that the high priest had a lot of political power and therefore they had usurped the legal authority and had removed

Annas as high priest and made Caiaphas the high priest. And so both were called the high priest because there certainly would have been some

Jews that said, look, the Romans can't do that. Caiaphas isn't a true high priest. But then there were others who followed after Caiaphas who were like, hey, we don't want the

Romans to kill us. And so there had been external interference in the normal means by which the high priesthood was determined.

And not only that, the high priesthood was primarily under the control of the Sadducees at this time and the

Sadducees tended to be pretty secular. A little bit like what you have in Israel today.

I mean, Israel has a hard core religious population, obviously, but that religious population is extremely small.

The large majority of Israeli citizens of Jewish extraction are secular.

They're atheists. They're not religious at all. So the

Sadducees wouldn't have been atheists, obviously, but they're much more politically and secularly minded.

And so you have this discussion amongst them of what to do about Jesus. In Mark and Luke, we have the statement,

Mark says, And the chief priests and scribes heard him and sought a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching.

Luke adds, And he was teaching daily in the temple, and the chief priests and scribes and the principal men of the people sought to destroy him, but did not find anything they could do for all the people hung upon his words.

So there is a general statement. And remember, of course, we've seen this opposition from the start.

I mean, as early as Mark chapter 2. So nine chapters have passed for Mark, many more for Luke and Matthew since the first encounters where there is this resistance.

Part of it's a natural resistance. I mean, in any religious system where you have leaders and you have a reformer that comes along and says the way the leaders are doing it is inappropriate, there's going to be some level of resistance.

But this has gone far beyond that to the point where now in John you have men who are seeking to destroy him who have seen the giving of life at his hand, the raising of the dead, the healing of the lame.

We see situations where Jesus has been teaching the people for hours.

And at the end of this time period, they're just there to tempt him. What was it like to sit around?

You know, Jesus gets in a boat and he goes off the seashore just far enough to where he can now cover more people with his voice.

And he's been teaching about the kingdom of God and telling parables and expounding the

Scriptures. And here you are and your whole job is to shadow him for the day to find reason for accusing him.

And so you hear all these words of grace and all these words of life and all this consistent teaching.

And at the end of the day, you're asking questions to try to trip him up, to try to go back to these men and say,

I think I've got something here. I think maybe he said this and maybe if we told the governor he said this in light of what happened here.

That's what you're doing. And it really illustrates the twistedness of false religion.

And we need to recognize there are secularists like Sam Harris running around.

Oh, clear illustration. I saw a bumper sticker sometime,

I think it was this week. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. It was this week. I was way out in the

East Valley and I was getting on the 202 and I looked over at the vehicle over here while we were waiting to get on the 202 and it said, atheism cures all religious terrorism.

That was the bumper sticker. Atheism cures all religious terrorism. Now, I felt like catchy after rolling my window down and saying, so what was

Stalin's problem? But anyways, I didn't decide not to. Didn't really figure that was the appropriate context for that kind of conversation.

Maybe someday somebody will put two and two together and talk to that person. But anyway, there are people like Sam Harris and others who are today and say, look, religion is dangerous.

Look at the underwear bomber and 9 -11 and what's the consistent thing in all of this?

But religion. And so we need to grow past this. Religion is about the infancy of the race.

It's about when we were too stupid to understand atmospheric conditions that cause thunder and lightning.

So we needed to have gods in heaven who were banging on anvils and throwing lightning bolts at human beings and once in a while they nailed them and that obviously meant that that guy was a really bad guy and the gods had gotten him.

But now we know that guy was just stupid standing out in the middle of a lightning storm and we know about electron flow and the differences between positive and negative forces.

And so now we don't need a god anymore and so we just need to grow past all of this stuff. And that's a large voice in our society today.

And they would look at us, they would say, well, you know, I'm not overly concerned that you're going to blow me up. But still, your religious beliefs are not good for our society.

And of course, I would want to engage them on specific issues along those lines, but that's the kind of mindset.

And you know what? There's lots of biblical evidence that as Christopher Hitchens almost got it right.

He almost got it right. The subtitle of his book,

God is Not Great, was how religion poisons everything. He almost got that right.

It should have been how false religion poisons almost everything. Because he closes the door on any possibility that in the presence of the false, there might be the true.

He just does the baby bathwater issue and just throws it all out.

But there is no question, and we should not even argue, for the general goodness of general religion.

That's amazing how many times I hear Christians arguing for the general goodness of general religion.

What? There is no neutrality toward the claims of Christ, and so a religion that denies the centrality of Christ is by nature not something that is good or right or anything else.

Now in our society, that is allowed to be practiced, but it doesn't mean that we have to go, oh isn't that wonderful because we're all just religious people.

And see, we're being marginalized, we're being pushed over so that it creates a tension and a camaraderie in fact.

Because when you see religious people as a whole being attacked, then we start to lose the distinctions in our mind because it's hard to keep them clear.

And it just becomes, well all us religious people will get together and defend our rights. And people go, well if you're going to do that, then you need to give up your distinctives.

Which means you have to give up believing there really is such a thing as revealed truth. Which means we should just go ahead and give in to the other side anyways.

But it's maintaining the balance that is very, very difficult. People fall off on both sides. They fall off on the side of, well let's just not worry about this gospel stuff.

So you've got the ecumenical movement and now you've got the religious pluralism movement and inclusivism and all that kind of stuff.

But then you've got the whacked out Fred Phelps's of the world that fall off on the other side.

And it's a challenge and it's difficult to stay in the middle.

I was at a doctor's office a couple days ago and they had me do this board thing where you have to stand on this board and one way you stand on it it goes this way and the other way it stands this way.

Man, trying to stay balanced on this thing is you're using, I mean you've really got to concentrate and use muscles you normally don't ever use.

I mean you get off it after three minutes you're like ah. But it's really, really good for you.

But it's trying to remain balanced and it takes a lot of concentration, a lot of effort, far more than sometimes we're really willing to invest in it.

But here's a great example of how false religion poisons almost everything.

Because even though these people have the truth right in front of them, they possess the Holy Scriptures.

Yet if there is not a heartfelt and a true heart change, they are seeking a way to destroy him.

Because they feared him. Why? Because he was cutting into their support base.

He was cutting into their power base. And these folks are going to show up in section 276, which is where we need to be the next time, oh great keeper of the notes.

Section 276. So we're out of time. Let's close the word of prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

We would ask that as we go about our tasks this week, as we go about our lives, our callings, that you would give us opportunity to bear witness to the world around us of the truth of Jesus Christ.

That we would do so with clarity of thought. And Lord, that you would bless our efforts to your honor and glory.

with us as we go now into worship. May we hear your word with clarity. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.