The Believing Life

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons, or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

The Goal of Biblical Preaching and the Call to Believe

We are in the Gospel of Mark in the very last passage in the Gospel of Mark, and so if you would turn with me and your Bibles to Mark chapter 16 in verse 9, and as we do, I want to frame our time today, speaking for a moment on the goal of preaching.

What is biblical preaching? Why do we preach? Why do we get up on a Sunday afternoon and preach the Bible? If you know me very well, you will know that I love the Bible, and that I love preaching the Bible.

As a matter of fact, perhaps my two favorite places would be, one, behind this pulpit, and two, in my study, preparing to be behind this pulpit. The order of my affairs in life, of my priorities in life, are God, wife, children, church, and the ministry of this church.

And so as a result of that, I love not only preaching, but reading about preaching. And it's interesting how you can ask for a definition on something, and something as simple as preaching, and find so many different definitions.

But I wanted to bring before you, just as we open up our time, three definitions of preaching, and then I'll explain why I'm doing that in a moment. But if you're familiar with the man, Dr. Al Mohler, who is the president of Southern Seminary, my family and I were there this summer, or this fall, or spring, and we were looking for Dr. Mohler.

We never found him. But one of the things that he has said in his definition of preaching is that preaching consists of these three steps, read, explain, and repeat. And how the world would be changed if every pastor, elder, in every church, in every country, would just do that, to read, explain, and repeat.

Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, he gives a second definition of preaching, one that's a little bit more feisty. He says that biblical preaching is logic on fire, the truth of God's Word, inflamed by the power of the Holy Spirit in the pulpit.

But I think one of the most helpful definitions of preaching is given by Dr. Stephen J. Lawson, a well-known expositor of Scripture. And he says, in as many words, that preaching is the act of proclaiming God's Word, and then persuading God's people to obey it.

To proclaim God's Word, fearlessly, and then to persuade God's people to take heed. Every preacher has the privileged task of expounding the Word of God, yes, of clarifying and explaining, of highlighting the literary, and the cultural, and the redemptive historical context of Scripture, to read, explain, and to repeat, amen.

But the end goal of every sermon is not to create a sermonic masterpiece that everyone can come and appreciate from the room. It's not to get the applause of people, or even to entertain people, or to draw a crowd to hear the Bible preached.

But the telos, that is the end of every sermon, is always to secure the faith and the obedience of the listener. A good sermon is a sermon that moves God's people to hear, believe, and obey His Word. The call of every preacher is to say, thus says the Lord.

Now come and believe it, and then let us go and obey it. You know I'm not lecturing on homiletics today, so why am I telling you all of this? It is because, as the preacher for the day, or maybe the preacher for the next few minutes, we'll see how my voice holds up, we have our work cut out for us.

I have my work cut out for me. And I say this because in these closing verses of Mark, what we are given as God's people, as believers, what we are compelled to, is to believe and to live in such a way that it's not only counter-cultural, contrary to all of the currents in the world in which we live, but it's in fact counter to our own fleshly inclinations.

And it's in fact altogether impossible, apart from the sovereign power of God working within.

Us.

You see, over the last year and a half, we've been studying this Gospel of Mark, and we've seen for ourselves how Mark has constructed this masterful Gospel masterpiece, this account of the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In Mark 1 .1, he set out to show us that the Lord Jesus Christ was the Son of God. That was Mark's agenda as he wrote this Gospel, that every reader would get to the end of the book and say, ah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, went with his characteristic sense of urgency.

You'll remember that we looked at it right from the beginning, how Jesus went from immediately to immediately to immediately. Immediately teaching, immediately healing, immediately proceeding to the next town.

Through his miracles, through his teaching, through the power, even his own power over the forces of nature, and even his suffering on the cross, we're left with only one conclusion. Like the Roman centurion that stood below the cross and looked up at Christ as the sky was darkened.

And as he said, it is finished. We must conclude with the author of the Gospel of Mark, Mark himself, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. But, as we reach the end of the book, then the deafening summons becomes this, believe.

Believe that Jesus Christ is who he said he is. Believe Mark's assertion that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Believe that God sent his only Son to die on the cross so that whoever believes shall not perish but have eternal life.

The summons of Mark's Gospel is this, here is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, believe on him and so live in your belief. So what's so hard about this task then? To call you all to believe and to live believingly.

It seems pretty easy, doesn't it? That we would proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Gospel of Mark and then say.

Believe.

And yet our text shows us that our default position, every single one of us, our default position is set not to believe but to unbelief. And we're going to see this in the life of the disciples. We're going to see this in the lives of ourselves even, that we have every reason to believe.

And yet I think that many of us, if we were to take an honest assessment of who we are in our faith in the Son of God, we would say that we have a very weak faith, a faith that is lacking. So this afternoon my task is this, by God's grace and dependent on God's power, I'm standing behind this pulpit to proclaim God's Word and to compel all of us as we reflect on these last verses in the Gospel of Mark to believe.

Oh, that the Lord, what a miracle it would be if every man and woman and child in this room were to leave that back door at the end of the day believing in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. And for those of you who believe in Him already, that you would leave here believing more still, trusting Him more still, living for Him more still with the life that He has given you because of what He has revealed about Himself in this Gospel of Mark, to believe then and to live believingly.

The Textual Question of Mark 16:9-20

And so let's, I had us turn already to Mark chapter 16 and verse 9, you'll have to excuse my cough once in a while, we're going to start in verse 9, but even before we get to verse 9, there's something, a bit of an excursus that we need to take because if, who here has a King James Bible, maybe just a, or a new King James Bible?

Okay, we've got a few King James Bibles on this side of the room. So your neighbors are going to help you for a little bit. You have the advantage of not having this parentheses in your Bible, but right before verse 9 in Mark chapter 16, we see something in brackets, if you have the ESV or maybe the NIV or the NASB, one of the modern translations, and it says this, some of the earliest manuscripts do not include chapters 16 verses 9 through 20.

It begs the question, why is this note here and what are we to do with it? As I prepared this sermon, I thought I might be cutting myself off at the knees by immediately going to this. Maybe I should have just skipped over it and we could have just started at verse 9.

But I think it's important for Christians to understand why this little parenthetical note is in your text, and I think that it'll be a great help to you to understand and to have greater confidence in Scripture.

If we were to go to a King James onlyist, and if you're a King James onlyist, I don't mean to offend you, I'm just saying, if we were to go to a well-intentioned King James onlyist and ask them about this parenthesis, I have a good friend who's in this camp, he would say that this parenthesis is destructive to every Christian because it undermines their confidence in the Bible or it seeks to undermine their confidence in the Bible.

But in fact, I would say to the contrary, that when we have Bibles that include comments like this, it actually seeks to increase our confidence, to increase our assurance in the reliability of the Word of God and in our New Testaments.

And what it all boils down to is this. Why is this parenthetical comment in our Mark chapter 16? It boils down to an issue of what's called textual criticism. Our brother Lowell introduced that a moment ago.

Textual criticism, what is that? Well, there are many different kinds of textual criticism. Some of them, some textual criticism I think is a noble pursuit. A good example, for instance, if someone were to hand you the Book of Mormon and say, this is the whole Bible, and you were to go through it and you were to come across Nephi and some other different parts of the Book of Mormon, and you were to say, well this doesn't belong in the Bible, you would become a textual critic.

Because what textual criticism is, is it trying to determine what belongs in the text and what is a textual variant that should be removed for the sake of the integrity of the text. That is textual criticism.

And there are two schools of thought as it pertains to textual criticism and as it pertains to this particular passage. There are two schools. One is called the Byzantine family of texts, or the Byzantine school, and the other is called the Alexandrian family of texts.

I'm not going to go into it at great length, but I want to explain a little bit of this so that you understand why we have this parenthesis. You see, in the earliest English Bibles that were translated, the only manuscripts of the New Testament that the translator had access to were from Byzantium.

Byzantium was a region in the northern Mediterranean, and many of these texts can be dated back to about 500 A .D., so about 500 years or 450 years after Christ. As a side note, the texts that we would find in this Byzantine family of texts number somewhere over 5 ,000, so 5 ,000 New Testament manuscripts.

It was from this sampling of the Byzantine text family that a Catholic priest named Erasmus, maybe you've heard of him before. He was a Catholic priest, Erasmus, in the 1500s. He assembled, from a sampling of these Byzantine texts, his own Greek translation of the New Testament that he called, does anyone know it?

The acronym is TR, the Textus Receptus, or translated from the Latin, the Received Text, meaning that it was the text to be received by all. For a short time, it was the text that was received by all.

As a matter of fact, if you go back to the lovely and noble work of William Tyndale in his New Testament, and you were to open that Bible and read from it and benefit, you'd notice two things if you were a Greek and an English scholar.

As an English scholar, you might notice that this is remarkably similar to the King James Version, because much of the beautiful language of the King James Version, like your word scapegoat in the King James, that doesn't come from King James' translators, that comes from William Tyndale.

But what you would also notice is that William Tyndale's translation comes from the TR, the Textus Receptus, as does the King James Bible. If you're a fan of John Calvin's work, the Geneva Bible, from Geneva, Switzerland, came from the Textus Receptus, and many others.

For many years, the Textus Receptus and these translations went completely unquestioned, as they should. They're remarkable translations of the scriptures. If you have a King James Version, you're rich for having it.

However, in the 1800s, what began to happen is that biblical scholars started looking for other texts. One German biblical scholar by the name of Konstantin von Tischendorf, in 1844, went to the purported site of Mount Sinai, St. Catherine's Monastery, and there, as he was sifting through the monastery, he found what has become known as the Codex Sinaiticus.

So named after Mount Sinai, Codex Sinaiticus. The Codex Sinaiticus is a translation that is about 200 years older than the oldest Byzantine text. So those Byzantine texts came from 500, Codex Sinaiticus came from about 325 to 350 AD.

So just a couple hundred years after the life of Christ. In the years that followed, other discoveries were made. The Codex Vaticanus. Can anyone guess where that Codex was found? The Vaticanus? In the library of the Vatican.

There in the library of the Vatican, they found another text, another Greek manuscript, that was about the same age as the Codex Sinaiticus. And others after that, and then after that, and after that.

And I'm not here today to pick a side and to say you must accept the TR, or that you must accept the Codex Sinaiticus and the Alexandrian family of texts, but what I want to show you.

Is this.

That in fact, when we see this parenthesis in your Bible, what you should do is give thanks to God that he has preserved his Bible so well that we can trifle over some of these small details in the Bibles.

And this is why, when they discovered these new texts, rather than noting that there were some differences, and there were some differences, what was remarkable about these manuscripts is that they aligned almost perfectly.

Despite being separated, think about this, by thousands of miles and by hundreds of years in their origin, there were only minor differences, mostly grammatical differences, and only a few others like this that are bite-sized sections of text, but nothing that would undermine the major doctrines of Scripture.

Nothing that would call into question the deity of Christ, or the character of God, or the fact of the Gospel, or how we are to respond to that Gospel. The Bible that the Christians believed and preached in the 15th century, as recorded by the Byzantine texts, or the 15th century, was the same Bible that was believed on and preached in the earliest days of the Christian Church, and there were only these few small sections that were noticeably absent from the older manuscripts.

And can you guess what was absent from the Alexandrian text? Here, verse 9 through 20, Mark 16, verses 9 through 20. Now it is possible that these verses were omitted simply because they were missed somewhere along the way in the Alexandrian texts.

It's also possible that a well-intentioned scribe in the early church felt that Mark's ending in verse 8 was too abrupt. After all, if we look at verse 8, who would want a Gospel account to end with this?

And they went out and fled from the tomb, and trembling in astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The end. So it's very possible that a scribe thought, well, we have all this information from the other Gospel accounts.

Maybe we'll just include that in case someone only gets the Gospel of Mark. We don't know for certain. We won't know on this side of eternity, but what we do know, and what I want to instill in us is this, that because of little footnotes, little sections like this in our Bibles, we can have unshakable certainty and tremendous confidence in the reliability of these Bibles that are on our laps.

In fact, the debate about this textual variant highlights, I think, the fact that the biggest dilemmas about the transmission of the Bible are really only regarding minor variants that are almost of no consequence whatsoever.

The variant, as I pointed out, does not call any major doctrines into question. Everything that it says is repeated elsewhere in Scripture. The question just becomes, does it belong here at the end of Mark?

And our brother Lowell pointed to it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but you can turn over to the back of your bulletin and see that little table that I've included there, that there is no book in all of human history like the Bible.

Brothers and sisters, who knew that I could preach this long from a parenthetical note.

In Mark?

There is no book in the world like the Scriptures. There is no truth to be found that is comparable to the glorious, the wonderful, the perfectly preserved Word of God. Our secular professors, you go to the university and take some literature classes, take some philosophy classes.

Our secular professors will quote Aristotle and Plato without batting an eyelash. They have less than 50 manuscripts, the closest one being a copy a thousand years after the original. You can hear a literature professor speak about Homer's Iliad.

We have 643 copies of that. You can hear the most atheistic historian talk about Julius Caesar and how he was assassinated by his best friend, Brutus, in a crowd, and he's quoted as saying, et tu, Brute?

And yet there is less than 10 copies of that historical record dating back hundreds of years afterwards. And yet, brothers and sisters, we don't have 10 manuscripts or 50 manuscripts or 643 manuscripts.

We have, at least as of 2018, 5 ,856 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The oldest fragment is from approximately 125 AD. To put that into perspective, the Apostle John died in 99 AD. That's 26 years after he died while his friends and his disciples and his students are still mulling about.

And we haven't even talked about the Old Testament. I wanted to talk about the Old Testament, but we have tens of thousands of copies of the Old Testament, some of which you can go and visit in museums that were in use by the priests when Christ was still walking on the earth.

We have a book preserved like none other. We can preach. We can believe. We can obey the Bible. And so the question becomes, do we preach Mark chapter 16? Maybe if I was feeling really sick, I would say, no, we don't, but I think the Lord is sustaining me right now, so we'll keep going.

We should, and I stand with a long list of men who believe likewise that we should read and study and preach and obey the Gospel of Mark. And this is why. For the brethren in the room who have King James Bibles, and maybe because of the textus receptus, we're going to preach from Mark 16 verses 9 to 20, because even if you were to side with the Alexandrian text family, you might be wrong.

I like what John MacArthur says, that we might find that this text belongs to Mark after.

All one day.

And after all, the Lord saw fit to include it in thousands of manuscripts over the course of the centuries, the millennia. And then number two is this, that everything that we read, for the exception of one small detail about poisoning, everything else that we read in this passage comes from, is a summary of another text in Scripture that is clearly and unequivocally taught.

And so even as we look at Mark 16 verses 9 to 20, what we can say with certainty is even if Mark didn't say this, the Bible says it elsewhere, and it's a good reminder for us to look at anyways. So brothers and sisters, we can have tremendous confidence in the Bible.

The First Imperative: Believe

And so with that excursus, hopefully I didn't cut myself off at the knees, we'll look now at verses 9 through 20. Verse 9 reads like this. Now, when he arose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.

She went and told those who had been with him as they mourned and wept, but when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. After these things, he appeared in another form to two of them as they were walking into the country, and they went back and told the rest, and they did not believe them.

Verse 14, afterward, he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.

Now I want to highlight verse 16. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. I've broken up our exposition into three, I guess we could say, commands or imperatives that we should take from this text.

Three commands or imperatives that are impossible apart from the work of God in your own life, and yet are necessary for a believing Christian life. And the first imperative, looking at verses 9 -14 and verse 16 is this, believe.

Oh, that the world needs to hear this, to believe on Jesus Christ and to be saved. How many times is the gospel preached to friends and family and neighbors and co-workers and yet this one imperative is left out.

People are told that Jesus Christ died for their sins, that they are sinners and they are in need of God's mercy and grace. But who will tell them, believe, oh, to believe. We must all believe. Believer, you need to believe.

Unbeliever, even more, you need to believe. And this is where we see it. In verses 9 and 10, we see that this recounting of the resurrection of Christ. We see Mary Magdalene, whom Christ had cast out seven demons.

We find that account in Luke's gospel and how she told those. These are the 11 disciples who were mourning and weeping. Verse 11 says, and when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe.

In this short section, what we see is something that I've already asserted, that the default position, dear friends, of all of us is a position of unbelief. That we are like, I was talking about my Invisalign braces, the reason why I need to wear my Invisalign braces is because if I don't, my teeth just move back to where they were.

And in the same way, if we are not always reflecting on Jesus Christ and the gospel and the need to believe that gospel, just like teeth without braces, they move back to their old place. They drift back to their own home.

And in this short section, we see it clearly in three different accounts of the disbelieving disciples of Jesus. First in verse 11, where Mary Magdalene tells the remaining 11 disciples who were told with grief, with bitter grief, they mourned and wept, and yet they would not believe her.

Some might say, is this novel? Is this unique to Mark's gospel? It is not. In Luke chapter 24 and verses 10 to 12, we see exactly this. This is an accurate statement. It says, now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, but what?

But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. Second in verses 12 and 13, it says, after these things, he appeared in another form to two of them. This is certainly, without a doubt, a reference to the two men that were walking on the road to Emmaus.

Luke also speaks of this account in Luke 24 and verses 13 to 35. And as they were walking on that road to Emmaus, we might remember that our Lord said to these two men, he said, O foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets.

Have spoken.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he had interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

And later on, when they did believe, they said to themselves, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened the scriptures to us? But the disciples would not believe their account either.

And so in the third account, in verse 14, Christ appeared directly to his disciples. Is this a novel account? Again, if this was an account that was borrowed from a scribe, the scribe borrowed it from Luke's gospel because in Luke 24, it says this, in verse 36, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, peace be to you.

And a few verses later, it says, while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, have you anything to eat? They were still disbelieving even when Christ appeared. The disposition of the human heart defaults to unbelief.

And notice with me that Christ's chief concern in this whole passage is not that his disciples would have sound doctrine, as wonderful and as good as sound doctrine is. You know that I value sound doctrine.

His chief concern is not that his disciples even would be obeying his teaching, walking in his teaching, but what is his chief concern? What is it that he calls out and what is the word that repeatedly appears in this first section of the passage?

Do they believe? Oh, do they believe? And dear friend, I ask you, I put the question to you, children in the room, do you believe? Do you believe the gospel that Jesus Christ is the son of God who went to the cross to die for sinners?

Many of us in this room, brothers and sisters, we know that our faith is not what it ought to be, what it must be. I think that we could relate to the man who cried out to Christ in Mark's gospel, in Mark chapter 9 verse 24, who cried out as his demon possessed son was writhing, I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.

Many of us believe and yet we need the Lord's help with our unbelief. Many of us have a weak and a fragile faith and this adversely affects us in almost every area of our lives. It's interesting that Christ's own disciples were told that they mourned and wept, that they were miserable.

There are many of us that go through this life depressed, mourning, and weeping, why?

Why?

Because we do not believe as we need to believe, because we do not trust in the promises of God, in the promises of His word. How many of us would be lifted out of the doldrums if on maybe a bad day when you're having a rotten time at work or your kids, you're overcome with the stresses of school or the difficulties of a relationship, and if the Lord were just to show you for a moment the future that every Christian has in Christ for all of eternity, and yet we are short-sighted and we focus on our problems and we live in our misery because we do not believe.

There are many of you, maybe not many, some of you in this room, you're not a Christian. You don't claim to be a Christian. Christ means almost nothing to you, and the command of God's word is this, to believe that one day Christ is going to come to you and question you on your hardness of heart and on your unbelief, and what does Christ want for you but to hear, to see the gospel and to believe?

What is the work that God wants us to do? John 6 .29 says this, Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in Him whom He has sent. Our brother read Romans 10 verses 2 to 4, and he spoke to Israel's issue with the same thing of believing, that they had a zeal for God.

Oh, how many of us have a zeal for God? We want to have a zeal for God, but they had a zeal for God that was not in accord with.

Wisdom.

I might need your prayers, friends. A zeal of God not according to knowledge. He says this, for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness, to whom, Romans 10 .4, to everyone who believes. This is one of the reasons why I love the story of the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther, that as Martin Luther was reading the Bible and discovered in Romans 1 that one is justified, not through the works of the law, but through believing, through faith, that the righteous shall live by faith.

I was recently watching a documentary with Noah. Tim Challies has a documentary called Epic. It is epic. It's excellent. It's great for kids. He tells the story of Martin Luther going to Rome and ascending, I believe it's called the Strata Sancta, on his knees, going up the steps on his knees to earn indulgences and finding that that did not do anything, how he would go and confess in the monastery for hours and hours and hours.

And he would leave with some levity of conscience, but for a moment until he realized that he had forgotten one sin or that he had sinned once and he would have to wait until tomorrow again to confess.

And then as he read Romans 1, that the just shall live by faith and what that became of him, there are so many people in the world, many of our Catholic friends, many others who think that God will justify them because of their works, that he will justify them because of their church attendance and their Bible reading or their participation in the sacraments.

No, but that the just shall live by faith, by believing in the only Son of God. I love what Martin Luther said about this faith. He said, faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times.

The confidence in God's grace and knowledge of it makes all men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all his creatures. And this is the work of the Holy Ghost in faith. There are some of you who think that faith is folly, that it is folly to believe in a crucified Christ.

I was recently looking at something that was speaking to the very first depiction of Christ on the cross. What do you think it was? Some might think that it was in a cathedral somewhere of Christ on a cross painted in a beautiful mural on the ceiling or in some stained glass window, but the oldest living depiction of Christ on the cross was a carving of a donkey on the cross and a caption that says here is so and so, a Roman man, here is so and so worshiping his God, a stick figure worshiping a donkey on the cross.

Many think that believing on Christ is folly like that, to worship a crucified Christ. But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1 .22, for Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but what but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles, but to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Well, friends, that we would have a greater sense of God's love for us in Christ, that in Christ there is no condemnation, that in Christ we have eternal peace with the Father, that in Christ we are just by faith, and that we would read Mark's gospel again.

And the gospel accounts again and again, and the epistles, and the Old Testament, and this trustworthy Bible that God has given us, and dear friends, that we would believe, that we would cry out to the Lord, Lord, help, I believe, help my unbelief.

The Second Imperative: Proclaim the Gospel to All Creation

The second that we find here, the second command or imperative is this in verse 15, and he said to them, go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. I'll read verse 16 again, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe is condemned.

Again, is this novel to Mark's gospel? We find the parallel account in Matthew chapter 18, verses 18 through 20, the great commission that all authority on heaven and earth has been given to the Son, and what does he say then?

Therefore, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and behold, I am with you to the end of the age. In this verse 15, he says, go into all the world and proclaim the gospel.

What does it mean to proclaim? It comes from the Greek word keruso, which means to be a herald. Picture a herald, a messenger sent from a king to proclaim an edict from the king's throne. The role of that messenger is not to dress up the message.

The role of that messenger is not to be ashamed of the message, but to go and to proclaim it faithfully. As you've heard me say before, our job is not to make the gospel palatable to people. It's not to dress it up or to dress it down.

It's like to be a faithful mailman. You get a letter in the envelope, in your satchel, you walk, you take it to the recipient. What is the message that every Christian has been given but this, to herald the gospel of Jesus Christ?

Because many of us are weak in our faith, we are weak in our speech. You see how one builds on the other. We're commanded to believe, and because we believe, therefore, we speak. He says in verse 15 at the end, to the whole creation.

What does that mean? There's an interesting story about St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic monk. I'm not commending this to you. It is an interesting story, though. There's a record. If you go onto my computer, you can find all the records of all my sermons.