4 - Attributes of God, Lesson 3

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We are in lesson number 3, that is the

Attributes of God part 3. If you have a syllabus, if you are an enrolled student of the

Academy, if you are, you have a 80 -page syllabus that you should be taking notes with.

Some of you students like to chat in the chat room, and you haven't been doing too well in the

Facebook group of Striving for Eternity. If you've been noticing, we have some homework for you guys, and they are now being posted in the group, the

Striving for Eternity group, so that everyone can get in on the questions and answers, and see how everyone's responding.

Some of you are not doing too well, I think you've been too chatty in the chat room. Just saying.

But we welcome you. As you know, we are going through the

School of Systematic Theology. We are in book number 1.

We are calling that the Throne Room of God. We started with a section 1 being the

Doctrine of God, and in doing so, we took a look, we started looking at the attributes related to God's deity.

Last week, we looked at those attributes related to God's personality, and this week, we will look at those attributes that are related to God's morality.

Now as a reminder, we want to take a look at what attributes are. So what we have here is that attributes are something that cannot grow or change.

Attributes are what God has revealed to us, although those attributes are not the sum total of God.

So in other words, there's more to God than just what we see there. And then attributes may be ascribed to any person of the

Godhead. So any person of the Godhead can have these attributes attributed to Him.

That becomes important when we look at the lessons on the Trinity of God.

So if you're following along in your syllabus, we are on lesson 3, and we are going to look at the first of these attributes that are related to His morality.

And when we think of His morality, let's remember that this is one of the things that when we talk to atheists and they say, well,

God doesn't exist. I did this quite a bit with many of the people at the Fall for Greenville this weekend.

They would say, God doesn't exist. And yet, they rely on a morality. They rely on a right and wrong.

And so you could just ask them if they think that you're wrong for believing that God exists.

And they're usually very quick to say that they think you're wrong. Now the thing that's interesting with that is you can ask them, as I often do, if there was no

God, would we just be chemical reactions? And they're all very quick to say that we are just chemical reactions.

There's nothing more to us. And if there's nothing more to us, then how do they explain morality?

I mean, if we give it some thought, how do you explain morality as just chemical reactions?

Because if I take a can of soda pop, this is an illustration I love to use, it's from Psy, but he uses this and I like this one, if you take a can of soda pop, or I'm saying soda pop because I just came from the

South, you know, y 'all talk like that down there, but soda, soda, but you take it, you shake it up, you open the can, what happens?

Fuzz comes out, right? That's a chemical reaction. Ask a person, is that morally right or wrong?

Did that this weekend and a guy goes, what? It's not anything, it just is.

That's right. Chemical reactions just are. They're not right and they're not wrong.

So where in the world do we get right and wrong from? Well, there's only one source where right and wrong can come from,

God. So when someone's saying that they know that there's a right and a wrong in the world, then there's got to be more than just chemical reactions.

We are not purely chemical reactions, there's more than just the material world. And these attributes of morality are attributes that are passed on to us in some degree.

Now some theologians will talk, and if you study different systematic theologies, some different books out there, you'll see that most of the theologians will talk about the attributes of God in two categories.

Now we've defined them in three, but they talk in two categories. Incommunicable and communicable.

And you say, Andrew, are you just trying to show that you understand these really big words?

No, let me explain them. Actually, you use really big words when you want to impress people with yourself or you really have no idea what you're saying and you want to fool someone.

So let's use words we do understand. In other words, the attributes, incommunicable, meaning not communed to us, not given to us, things like when we speak of God, His omniscience,

His omnipresence, His omnipotence, those things are just and only to God. We saw most of them in the attributes of deity.

The communicable ones are those that are communicated to us, those that we have. Things like we looked at last week, those of personality.

Some of these that we're going to look at this week that are communicated from God to us.

And so what we have is the fact that the first one here is holiness, holiness.

Now let's take a look at this one. If you have your syllabus there, you're going to see in your syllabus that we have that defined, explained, shall we say, two different ways.

And the first way is negatively. So holiness has a negative connotation to it.

And if you're taking notes, and you should be, God is separate from all forms of uncleanness and evil.

God is separate from all uncleanness and evil. So let's take a look at Leviticus 20, verse 26.

Leviticus 20, verse 26 says, And you shall be holy to me, for I the

Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples that you should be mine.

So what you have there is that God's holiness means, in definition, that He is separate from evil.

He's separate from sin. Therefore, there is no sin within God.

That also communicates to us that not only is He separate, and in the passage that we saw there,

He commands us to be separate. Now, are we going to be perfectly separate? Are we going to be holy as God is holy?

No we're not. I know there's some that try to teach that. You know what the problem is when they teach that?

They teach that they're perfect, they're sinlessly perfect, and they're holy as God is holy, and they're prideful about it, which kind of is a sin.

I mean, to think that you're as holy as God is holy is to like totally be blind to your own sin.

I mean, how many decisions do we make every day? And we make most of those, if we're going to be honest, not thinking about God at all.

And He says that we should put Him first and foremost in every thought, word, and deed. How are we putting

Him first if we're not even, we're just putting our shoes on, we're just brushing our hair. We're not doing that to the glory of God.

So we often don't think about all the things we do. But if we're going to be honest with this, we're going to look at this, we do not act in a way where we are holy like God is holy.

But that is what He commands us to be, to be separate from sin. And we need to be totally separate from sin.

Now the issue there is also one where we have to recognize that though we are to be separate, we are also of a nature where we cannot be completely separate.

But that is the goal, that is the standard. So that's what we should be striving for. Now let's look at it positively.

Negatively is that God is separate from all forms of uncleanness and evil.

But positively, God is pure, and that's your blank there. God is pure.

Let's take a look at 1 John 1 .5. 1

John 1 .5, this is the message which we have heard from Him and declared to you that God is light and in Him no darkness is at all.

And so what you have here is the fact that not only is God separate from evil, but there is no evil inside of Him.

You see this in James when it says that God cannot tempt anybody with evil because there is no evil in Him.

This is important. You know, an interesting thing to do, we looked at Leviticus 20, and a really interesting thing to do.

A lot of people get confused. What is the purpose of Leviticus? It is a book that many struggle with in understanding its purpose.

If you want to see a book, the purpose of it, I did this once. One of the ways, if you remember in the study of the school of biblical hermeneutics, we said that you want to look for repeating themes throughout a book to know its purpose.

And when you look through Leviticus, there is a repeating theme. That God is God and not us, and that we should be holy and separate from evil as God is.

So to a degree, not a complete degree, but to a degree, we are holy as God is holy in the sense that when

God says that we should be separate from sin, alright?

So, let's look at the next one in your syllabus there. It would be letter B, and that is

Righteousness, Righteousness. Now this is an expression of His holiness, alright?

This would be one of the many, we are going to see several different expressions of God's holiness.

And this is the first one. And let me give you the definition here of righteousness for your syllabus, alright?

If you are following along in your syllabus, it is this, that God demands all moral beings to conform to His moral perfection.

God demands all moral beings to conform to His moral perfection.

In other words, what this means is, God is the one who defines what is right, not you and I.

Many of us would like to be the ones to define right and wrong.

This is something when we evangelize very often, we see this with people who want to be the ones to say they get to define right and wrong.

And they get to be the ones to say that something is, that God is unjust because, as someone had this weekend, how could

God be just if He allowed my little sister to be raped? What are you really doing when you are doing that?

Realistically what you are doing is you are setting up yourself as the standard bearer of what is right and wrong.

And God has to obey you and has to submit to you. And that is just not right.

That is not the way it works, alright? And so, we have to look at this and see that when we look at righteousness,

God is the source of righteousness. He defines right and wrong.

It is out of His moral character that defines it. Let's take a look at a passage.

This one again is in Leviticus. This is in Leviticus 11, Leviticus chapter 11.

And as we read along here, it says here that for I am the

Lord your God, now notice right there we see that God is saying that He is the source, okay, of what is righteous.

For I am the Lord your God, you shall therefore consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy for I am holy.

See the purpose clause, we should be holy because God is holy, neither shall you defile yourselves with any creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So when you look at this passage you see that God is saying, showing that He is the source of that which is holy, that He is the source of what is righteous, okay?

He is its source. So that is the fact that we, to the extent that we are righteous is in this extent that we conform to God's moral perfection.

We can do that at different levels here on earth, but a day is coming, oh sweet that day will be, when we conform completely to the moral perfection of God.

I cannot wait for that day to be done with this body of sin, to be able to have that complete moral perfection that God has.

And so righteousness is to the absolute right that we see in God. When it refers to God it is talking about His absolute righteousness.

He is the source of righteousness. You know one of the things that I do when we look through these attributes of God, I'm going to plug this a little bit later, and those of you who are students are going to get an email from us this week that's going to contain some of these, all of these attributes with the verses that you can look them up, and I'm going to tell you why we're going to do that.

When I think of these expressions of God's holiness and like His righteousness and the ones we're going to look at next, you know there's times maybe you experience it where you just, you don't know how to pray real well, you know things are going on in life and it's just hard.

And what we see a lot of times is that we struggle. And sometimes it's good to just pray to God about God.

And so in my prayer list, which I keep on my phone, I actually have all of these attributes.

These attributes are there and I pray through them. So in my prayer list,

I have things like God's omniscience. And when I pray for God's omniscience, I'm praying things like,

Lord you know the thoughts of my heart, both the good and the bad. Nothing escapes you.

You know that Lord we're so arrogant that we think we know so much when we don't. And I pray through each of these different attributes.

And so what we're going to provide for you who are students, we're going to provide for you a list of all these attributes so that you have them there readily available for you.

Alright? And that way you can look at them and look back to them and it'll be something that hopefully you would be able to enjoy when you're doing your prayer time and maybe develop a prayer list that's fixated and focused on God's attributes.

And not having all of our prayers so focused on us because that's often a problem when so much of our attention, our thoughts, are on us.

And we need to look to Christ, look to God. And a good way to focus our thoughts on that is to pray through the attributes of God.

I pray that way each day. That's one of the ways I pray through that and I keep adding to that list.

Let's look at the next one real quick and that's His justice. This is another expression of God's holiness is

His justice. And if you look there, justice I have defined in your syllabus is that God judges perfectly or you can say justly or impartially or correctly but I choose to say perfectly.

God judges perfectly non -conformity to His moral perfections.

So He judges in a perfect way. There's nothing inaccurate about the way

He judges. And many people think, you know, God will judge my heart and that's a good thing. No.

That's a bad thing. God will judge our heart. And because He's just,

He's going to judge our heart perfectly. Now this passage that I want to look at is a passage that I memorize for when

I witness to people. Because people say, God knows my heart. God will judge me well.

Well, let's look at how God will judge. Psalm 711. I guess I like it because I can remember, you know, 711.

If you know that store, maybe you have a 711 by you. God is a just judge and God is angry with the wicked every day.

This tells us something about God. Alright? God is a just judge but it is because He is a just judge that He is angry with the wicked every day.

In other words, God's justice is the very reason why

He will judge perfectly and that we as wicked people are in serious trouble.

Alright? There's not going to be partiality with God and His justice. Alright? And that leads into the next expression of His holiness which is

His goodness. His goodness. Defined here, you see in your syllabus there,

God is perfectly moral or perfectly pure.

Either way, doing what is right and good.

So, everything that God does is morally right.

It's morally pure. He is a good

God. Let's take a look at a passage that says that. In Psalm 119, that longest

Psalm in the Scriptures, we see there that it says,

You are good and do good.

Teach me your statutes. In other words, we should be learning from God what's good because God is good.

He's the definition of good. We know good because we know God. We know what

God is, a good is, when we know God. You can't have goodness without God.

So when, you know, people argue that there can't be God because there's evil in the world and how could a good

God who's all powerful allow evil? The answer to that is you cannot have goodness without God.

You cannot have evil without God. That's not an argument for atheism.

It's an argument against atheism. Because once you admit there's evil in the world, evil is the absence of good.

And what defines good is God. So you can't have evil without God and you can't have goodness without God.

So when people praise their own goodness, they are relying on God who is the author of goodness.

Let's look at another one. Now this one, how can I put this? Some people refuse to believe that this one even exists.

We all know, and we're going to look at this later, so we'll get there. We all know that God is love.

And we know that one. Many people will recite that and talk about that, but there's something else.

And that is this one right here. Let's look at this. God is wrath. God is a

God of wrath. He's a very wrathful God. Let's define this first in your syllabus.

God will give retribution or punishment. Retribution or punishment.

Or retributionary punishment, if you want to get both words. Because that's what really you could say. God will give retributionary punishment for any offense or crime.

Let's look at a passage here. And it is Ephesians 22. Ephesians 22, verses 22 -24.

You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child.

If you afflict them in any way and they cry at all to me,

I will surely hear their cry. And my wrath will become hot.

And I will kill you with the sword. Your wives shall be widows and your children fatherless.

Gee, did I hear those words right? I mean, that almost sounded like God wasn't loving.

God is very loving. That's why He's wrathful. What's that?

You think that I said that wrong? Let me say it again. Maybe you just need to think through it a little bit more.

God is very loving. That is why He is wrathful.

He is a wrathful God because He loves. He is a wrathful

God because He judges and will give retributionary punishment to crimes.

I'm always amazed when people say, God is love. He wouldn't send anybody to hell.

If God is love and He won't send anybody to hell, first off, that God doesn't exist.

But if that's what you believe, the only question I would ask is, does

Hitler deserve to go to hell? I'm amazed how many people think he should. Many people think that Hitler deserves retributionary punishment for the crimes that he committed.

The problem we have is we don't see our crimes. We're not better than Hitler.

Maybe in a human comparison, but human comparisons aren't the comparison.

God is the comparison. We all fall short. Moving on, we have the fact that we saw that God is holy.

God is holy and we see His holiness. We saw that, as you remember, we saw this expressed in four different ways.

First, His righteousness. Then we saw His justice. His goodness.

Lastly, we saw His wrath. When we saw those things, we saw those were different ways of understanding the attribute or expressions of His holiness.

Let's move on to the next attribute, the major attribute. We're going to see several expressions here, but it is truth.

It is truth. When we look at truth, we see here, in your syllabus, letter

B, that truth is defined, God's knowledge declaring and representing eternally to conform to reality.

That's what truth is. Truth is what's real. Truth is not what we want it to be.

In other words, we cannot say it's true because we wish it to be. It's true because it is true.

In other words, gravity. Let's use that as an example. I just always love to use that as an example. It's a great example.

Gravity is something that, when we see gravity, it is reality.

If I really, honestly, I just don't believe in gravity. I can't see it.

I can't feel it. I can't taste it. I can't hear it. None of my senses work with it.

Gravity must not be real. I go off the tallest building in the world or any tall building and I walk off that building and immediately

I float, don't I? No, I don't because my belief doesn't make it real.

Reality is that gravity exists. My belief had nothing to do with it.

God is reality and my belief makes no difference to it. So when people say

I struggle with a God that would send people to hell. I cannot believe in hell.

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what you and I believe. I don't like hell either. But that's reality and we must deal in reality.

We have to stop dealing in fantasy land. So let's take a look at some of the ways that we can express different attributes of God that express that truth.

Let's look at the first one here. Veracity. If we look at veracity there, you'll see that defined in your syllabus and that is defined that God does not waver on truth.

That's your blank there. Does not waver on truth. Let's look at numbers 23.

Numbers 23 and what you see in numbers 23 is that it says here

God is not a man that he should lie nor the son of man that he should repent.

Has he said he will not do so or has he spoken and will not make good?

So when you look at this passage you see here that God does not waver on truth.

You can also write in your syllabus there James 1 17 James 1 17 is another one that God does not, there's no shadow of changing in God.

I have in your syllabus that we don't have it on the screen so sorry about that, but Titus 1 2 God cannot lie.

God cannot lie. So we have that God the veracity of God that is an element of his truth.

His veracity is that he does not waver which is really encouraging if you think about it.

If God's not wavering it means that truth isn't going to change in other words truth is universal it's absolute oh by the way if this world was created from chaos from some big explosion there wouldn't be veracity.

Things would be changing like they do in science all the time. You know these scientists that say this is true and then later science disproves it that's not veracity reality reality is veracity truth is veracity it deals with what's real scientists are dealing with a realm where they deal with philosophy and they use it and call it science and guess what that wavers and changes every time they have a new scientific discovery they used to think there was this thing ethos that was existed and Einstein proved there was no ethos and you don't hear talk of it anymore.

Scientists go no we'll just pretend like that didn't exist veracity is very important because it means there's no wavering

God does not waver on truth. Next let's look at his faithfulness his faithfulness if you look in your definition

God fulfills his promises God fulfills his promises.

He is steadfast in his affections and his alliances he's faithful and it's good that we have a faithful God let's look at a passage of scripture for that and that is

Hebrews chapter 10 Hebrews chapter 10 let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering he who promised is faithful he is faithful that's a beautiful thing to see that God is faithful he will fulfill those promises he made oh by the way even those promises he made to Israel just saying for those of you who understand that if you don't we're going to look at that when we get to the end times and we give away what

I believe some people are going to get online and say I'm a heretic and those of you are going to go why is he a heretic well

I guess if God is faithful and makes a promise I believe he's going to carry it through and that's really the argument that he makes in Romans 9 10 11 when he's talking about Israel if God is faithful to Israel he's not going to just put them on the shelf and be done with them

God's going to be faithful to Israel and our salvation is based in that same faithfulness if God is not faithful to Israel how can we trust that he'd be faithful to us alright let's look at the next category the first category we saw was

God's holiness we saw that expressed in his righteousness his justice his goodness and his wrath then we saw

God's truth as a second main category so his holiness and then his truth and in truth we saw

God's veracity and his faithfulness so we saw his holiness we saw his truth and now we see the one everyone knows his love his love and we're just trying to see there if you were getting seasick hope you didn't get vertigo there but we wanted to have a little bit of fun

God is love and everybody knows that verse so many people quote it, it's one of the most quoted verses by non -believers 1

John 4 8 he who does not love does not know

God for God is love oh isn't isn't that sweet God is love in other words

God is going to give me everything I want no that's not the definition of love

I'm sorry that's the problem the reason the world uses this verse to try to argue against Christians that are sharing the gospel is because they want to say it's not loving and God is a

God of love and therefore if we're going to love we must never say anything that hurts people's feelings that's not the definition of love ok so let's look at what is,

I mean love if you look in your syllabus there this is that which moves

God to give of himself that's what love is is giving of yourself to others ok it's not this fluffy love that someone said in the chat room it's not this fluffy love that people go well

I just want God to love me the way I am no we are to love

God the way he is not the other way around we're not God and so what we have when we see that is we see that people wrongly define love to be something they want it to be you need an example your best life now

I mean really this is my best life now no not if I'm a Christian if I'm a

Christian this is not my best life now this is the worst that life will ever be the only people that this is your best life now for unbelievers this is as good as it gets after that yeah remember that God is a

God of wrath as well as love so what we end up seeing is because we see this love is him giving of himself this is him giving of himself and so it has to properly be defined any of you parents out there watching

I know some of you I see some of you that are watching that are parents

I know how do I see you because don't you know I have cameras in your homes too

I watch you all the time when you're falling asleep you know I see you with your head back snoring away because you think

I'm not watching I'm watching you Joe Conkle you're sleeping wake up Joe but what we have is we have the fact that when we define love as a parent sometimes it means doing some pretty hard things my son's not watching so I'm going to tell a little story get myself in trouble if he watches later my son is writing his essay for college and he chose to write it on the things he learned from what he learned from watching me not things

I've taught him directly but things he learned from watching me other than being totally humbled and just amazed at what he wrote and just totally blown away one of the things that really hit me was he said he learned these things from watching what

I do and he learned that sometimes we have to make hard decisions he learned from things that I had to correct him on that he didn't enjoy at the time but he learned from that I hated having to correct him at times and yet it was necessary God's love requires his justice so these three interplay his holiness, his justice and his love these three his holiness, his truth and his love these three interplay you can't take one without the other his justice, his truth and his love work together they're all attributes of God and you can't separate any one of them so let's take a real quick look at the ones that we think of we think of God's love, the first expression of it we think of is his grace we think of his grace which is defined as God's love expressed in giving to man what is not deserved giving to man what is not deserved

Titus 2 11 -14 for the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men oops, if it appeared to all men teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts we should live soberly righteously and godly in this present age looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great

God and Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people zealous for good works okay really it was only verse 11 but the rest of it was just so great

I couldn't help myself that's so great isn't it? that is an expression of God's grace giving us what we do not deserve and many of you who know me well know me personally you know what

I'm going to say here what happens when you ask me how are you? you know what most people do? they lie you know, how are you?

and they go, oh fine you're not fine and you know it what are you doing? you're lying about it be honest so what do

I say? better than I deserve because I received God's grace people all the time say better than you deserve you don't deserve the best no,

I violated God's law and I deserve his wrath and judgment but he gave me grace and he gave me one other and that's the next one mercy he gave me grace and mercy and it's more than I deserve let's look at mercy if you look at it defined in your syllabus there mercy is another expression it's

God's love expressed in the withholding of that which is deserved now he's withholding so what you have is grace is giving us what we do not deserve and mercy is the flip side of the coin withholding what we do deserve so God's mercy is that he withholds the punishment owed to us that he gave it to Christ his grace is that he gives to us the righteousness of Christ that we don't deserve and you can see that in 2

Corinthians 5 21 we don't have time to look there but we'll look at Ephesians 2, 4 and 5 but God who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, see how they interplay the mercy is an expression of his love even when we were dead in trespasses made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved that's a great passage isn't it that's a great verse and so let's see what we have the last expression that we have of his love is his long suffering, let's look at the definition there in your syllabus

God's love expressed in the patient bearing of stubborn wills of mankind let's look at a passage before we describe that more 2

Peter 3, 9 the Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some count slackness but long suffering toward us not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance, this means that God when we look at this passage is long suffering, he is longer suffering than any of us

I mean some of you may think you know what I'm really long suffering with my children or someone at work or someone you just have to get along with and it's like oh

I put up with a whole lot you don't know how much I put up with okay yeah my wife can say that she does put up with a lot right here look at it a total amount it's inconceivable how much she has to put up with but God has to put up with an infinite amount more than anything that we have to put up with with anyone else

God's love is expressed in his patient bearing with our stubborn wills and we can be stubborn can't we very willful sometimes and God is still patient with us even when we are acting that way alright this is just an encouragement to my heart in my prayer time

I thank God so much for his long suffering because you know what God could rightly have taken our life the very second that we disobeyed him which is about the second we came out of the womb and went

I want milk and I want it now I do a pretty good baby cry lots of practice right isn't that true

God if God did not choose to come to earth and die as a man he would have been absolutely right and absolutely just in sentencing every single one of us to eternity in a lake of fire he would have been absolutely just because that's what we deserve but that's not what he did that's the beauty of it

God chose to be long suffering with us as an expression of his love to patiently bear with us for a very long time so what we see then is those three things we saw

God's holiness we saw God's truth and we saw

God's love and those are the three main categories and we saw them expressed in different attributes that define

God and if you look in your syllabus if you have your syllabus there pull out your syllabus now class is over you're just getting to it yeah and now would actually be a good time for some of you students

I can welcome you there are some new students to the academy some new people that are enrolled so you can grab a syllabus if you're a student and you would be able to follow along in your syllabus but in your syllabus there on the next page is the thought questions for lesson three

I want to encourage each of you to go onto Facebook into our

Facebook group that we have in the Facebook group you're going to see that we're going to post the questions for this week well actually we'll post the ones from last week because we're a week behind but we're going to post both last lesson and this lesson this week get you guys thinking we really want to encourage all of you even if somebody else gave the answer that you wanted to say put your answer in there you may get credit for it what's that?

you mean the teacher is going to be grading us? hey you never know I give pop quizzes get rewards for getting quizzes right may give a pop test sometime maybe get extra credit for class participation which is on Facebook in the group so let us know your answers and if you have a question about it we can be able to communicate with all of us just not one at a time but all of us then can interrelate and it'll be a lot of fun that way if you have any questions about things that you do want to get answers to you can contact us whenever you want at academy at striving4eternity .org

academy at striving4eternity .org and we ask you to go onto the page enroll as a student you'll see the way that it is it costs $50 a year you get two syllabuses the syllabus for this class is 80 pages long of notes you'll also get about 5 10 minutes after the show those who are students get to call into a special number get to do a

Q &A if they have any questions from the show or sometimes it's just a great time of fellowship that often happens after all the questions are answered we start talking other topics we just have a time of fellowship and so we can do that you get that as a student if you really want to save some money with it get your church involved because it saves us the shipping cost to ship it to your church so get a whole bunch of people to join together in your church there's some churches that watch this in their church building and then they do the discussion time afterwards so it's an idea for you if you have questions on that you can contact us at academy at striving4eternity .org

also want to let you know this week if you are in New Jersey specifically

Montclair New Jersey October 20th is the Change Collegian Network Fundraising Dinner you do have to register for that there will be a thing on our

Facebook page that for the Striving4Eternity group that will have the information if it's not up there now

I'm sure it will be up there by tonight that will let you know how you can register for that they need to get a head count if you didn't register go anyway get the information go anyway

I do know we got as an encouragement if you don't know him you definitely want to come out just to see him but Brother Robert Gray is going to be coming out just because of the fact that he heard that they would be honoring

Striving4Eternity for all the work that we've done with Change Collegian Network and so I will be receiving that honor

I guess or whatever they're going to do on behalf of Striving4Eternity so really want to encourage you to come out and see how they lie about me just kidding

I'm sure they will if they say anything nice but you know actually speaking of encouraging let's talk about who our

Brother of Encouragement is our Brother of Encouragement this week is someone who I got to know very well this weekend

I knew him before from some outreaches I've done but this week

I really got to know him and if you're on Facebook you can go out to our Facebook page and from the page you can tag him he's tagged probably by now already and it is

Brother Ed Lease he is the one that put together a lot of the work for the Fall for Greenville Outreach this weekend which was a great event it was a great time well organized just they took

I mean $20 we had I think it was 3 meals a place to stay teaching outreach tracks

I mean greatest $20 ever spent you know it was it really was good and Ed is a he is a brother who is a stay home dad he is homeschooling his children which seems kind of weird for many people but you know that's where he feels he's called and he's got several children he really can use the encouragement just like stay home moms need that encouragement you know not too many people think of encouraging a stay home dad and some people kind of look at it funny and that's even more of a reason to encourage him and yet he has his team

I think they're called the sidewalk saints that go out down there in Greenville each weekend and they're faithfully proclaiming the gospel and he's training them and they just got he's in a church that's just a wonderful church just some great people in a church that's really revitalizing and they're just doing a great thing and I want to encourage you to encourage him you can go out to our

Facebook page and do that today to encourage him and it's encouraging to let him know and to tag him so that others see the things because there may be some things that you know about him personally that would encourage others to encourage him and so we thank you for coming out this week we can't wait to see you next week next week we will be discussing a great topic some people have already been hinting to it if you've been seeing on Facebook did a great a great photo of it but we're going to be talking about the names of God in lesson 4 the names of God what is