John 12:16-19 (He Shall Have Dominion)

The Bible’s Macro Story and the Need to Read in Context

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you. Perhaps there's not a single person in this room, especially if you're over the age of 10, where you've not heard the phrase, we don't want to miss the forest for the trees.

And when we say that, we're saying, we're not talking about being in an actual forest, we're talking about we're so focused on the micro details of matter that we're going to miss the macro picture of what's going on.

We're so focused on the small things that we're going to forget the larger things. For instance, you're at a parade and you see one person's costume, and you're so fixated on that one person's costume.

Someone asks you, where'd you go today? I saw that person's costume. Well, there's a big parade that's happening all around you. You missed it. These are so focused on it. Well, I think that's what we have happened to us a lot of times when we read the Bible.

We get so lost in the details of what's going on in the micro that we miss the macro. And because we miss the macro, we don't understand what's going on in the whole biblical narrative. For instance, we get lost in the genealogies of Genesis.

Admit it. You get lost in the clothing details of the high priest in Exodus. We get lost in the sacrifices of Leviticus. We get lost in the census material of numbers. I mean, Bible reading plans have died a death in the census material of numbers and the law giving in Deuteronomy.

Now, these are important chapters and sections. It's not my aim here to to show you what those are, but they contribute to the macro picture of what God is doing in his Bible. And if we get lost and miss that in the weeds of the matter, then we will miss the story that God is telling us.

We can't get stuck on a word when a word is connected to a sentence. We can't get stuck to a sentence when a sentence is connected to a paragraph or a paragraph and it's connected to a book and a book.

It's connected to the Bible. We have to always be reading the Bible through these two different lenses, the micro lens and the macro lens. We have to see what the passage means in its context and in its larger, broader, redemptive context so that we can have a unified, holistic understanding of the narrative of redemption that God is telling from creation to consummation.

We need to zoom out like a helicopter pilot zooms out on the forest and he can see the entire thing without turning his neck. On the same way, we need to read the Bible that way and see the larger themes that are going on in the scriptures.

And there's all kinds if we zoom out, if we take the the opportunity and we do the work to do that, there's all kinds of themes in the Bible that we could talk about. For instance, that an easy one is the glory of God.

For God's glory, he created a world and because of his glory, he installed that world with human beings who were to live for his glory. And what do they do about five hours later? Maybe they're not living for his glory anymore.

They're living for themselves. Now, God could have destroyed that whole thing, but he didn't. For his own glory, he pursues them in covenant relationship with them. For his glory, he rescues them at the Tower of Babel.

He rescues his people. If he rescues his people and puts them on an ark for his glory, he calls Abraham out for his glory. He raises up people after people in succession until you get to Jesus Christ before his glory died on the cross for you and I so that we could live again to the glory of God.

Whether you eat, whether you drink, do all to the glory of God. The whole Bible, when you get to revelation and you see the glorious end where we live in the presence of the glory of God forever, perfectly glorifying him, the whole Bible is a story of the glory of God.

It's a theme that runs from the beginning to the end. There's another one, the presence of God. God had perfect presence in his triumph community before the earth and the world and the stars and time and space were created.

God was not lonely when he made us. And let's talk about what kind of decision making God would have if he was lonely and made us. People who rebel, who whine, who complain, who gripe, who shake our fist at God and who say there is no God.

He wasn't lonely. He had perfect fellowship with Christ and with the Holy Spirit for all of eternity. Why did he make us? So he could share his presence. His perfect presence. He made a garden as a microcosm of the cosmos, and he put humans in there to share his presence with them.

That was grace. He didn't have to do that. And then with that grace, we perverted it. We turned our back on him. We chose a serpent over God. So God withdrew his presence. But God wasn't finished. The story of the Bible is God pursuing human beings so that he can live in their presence once again.

The tabernacle, for instance, God says, I will dwell among you. The temple, I will dwell among you, a sinful people. He gave them the law to keep them in his presence. He gave them the sacrifices to restore them to fellowship.

He is a God who is pursuing sinful man so that sinful man can enjoy the beauty of God's presence. Think about Jesus Christ. He came and dwelt among us. He shared his presence with us. He died for us on the cross so that his presence actually for three days was stuck in a tomb.

But when he burst out of that tomb, he shared the Holy Spirit with you and I so that now we live in the presence of God today. If you're a Christian, you have the presence of God living with inside of you.

At the end of the scriptures, we no longer have types and shadows. We no longer have this moment that we're in right now. We are in the face to face relationship with Christ and his presence for all of eternity.

That's the benefit of heaven. The benefit of heaven is not that you no longer have back aches, although that is a benefit. The benefit of heaven is that you no longer have to pay your mortgage. Okay, that's a benefit.

The benefit of heaven is you're face to face with the living God through the Lord Christ. It's about his presence. Well, there's another theme that we hardly ever talk about in the church because the church of Jesus Christ for the last 100 years, 200 years even, you can go back, has adopted an attitude of defeat.

The church of Christ has been happy to say that we are the ones who lose, that we are the ones who fail, that Christ has to come and rescue us out of the mess because the church won't have any impact on the world, or if it does, very little.

The theme I want to talk about today is a theme that's in the Bible, but it's a theme that's rarely ever talked about. It's called dominion. That God will have dominion. In eternity, God had dominion, unchallenged and unrivaled with Christ and the Holy Spirit.

He created a world, not because he was needy. He created a world. Think about how much dominion God has. He so perfectly had dominion in his trinity that he made a world just so that he could have dominion of that.

God gets so much glory from what he does. We just have to zoom out and look at it. He placed the sun, if you notice the language of Genesis 1, says he placed the sun in the sky and told the sun to rule over the day.

He placed the moon in the sky at night and said, I want you to rule over the night, the moon and the stars. He placed Adam and Eve in the garden and said, I want you to rule over the earth. God has created a world that magnifies his dominion and he's installed vice regents.

He's installed us to magnify his dominion and extend his dominion to the ends of the earth. Think about the very first thing that he commissions us to do. It says that God made a garden. It doesn't say that God made the whole world a garden, right?

He made a garden and he put man into the garden and he said, be fruitful, multiply and spread out to the ends of the earth, rule over and subdue it. So God is saying just how he took the world and made it out of chaos, he put them in a garden and said, go conquer the chaos.

Go subdue the dusty parts. Fill the garden so full of people that you have to extend its boundaries. I grew up in North Carolina, which has very different cities than we have here. There, Charlotte is the county.

The whole county is subsumed by Charlotte because Charlotte, as it grew in population, decided we're just going to take more land. Here in New England, we just pack it tighter. It's different. God is saying, fill the garden so full that you have to spread it out and spread it out to the whole world becomes a garden to the glory of God that magnifies his dominion.

But we fell. Every story that we look at in the Bible has this creation, this fall and eventually redemption. We fell. Instead of God's dominion, what did we do? We became enslaved to the serpent so that we gave up the right to rule and we gave it over to him so that he would enslave us, so that he would rule over us, so that he would have dominion over us, so that we no longer would be vice regents of the Lord, that we would be under his auspices and under his territory.

So deeply infected by sin, we couldn't even possibly imagine building anything for God. But only thing that people cared about at that time was themselves. It says that they multiplied, but it wasn't God's glory, it was sin.

They multiplied sin over the face of the earth so that God had to destroy the world. And that is the story from Genesis chapter 3 to Matthew chapter 1 of a people who are in rebellion against a God who is going to have dominion because they're enslaved to the serpent.

But Jesus Christ came to redeem it. When Jesus was born. It says in Isaiah that the government will be on his shoulders. He's coming to bring dominion back to the world. He came to reestablish the dominion of God, to empower human beings once again to spread the dominion of God, just like God designed it in the garden.

This is something I really want us to get a hold of for a second. Everything that God calls good in the garden, He doesn't throw it away. When God says that it's good for man to be fruitful and multiply, He's not saying that, okay, in the modern world, when we're worried about overpopulation, that we can have one kid or 1 .5 kids and two dogs.

He said, no, it's a good thing to be fruitful and multiply. I still think it's a good thing because God said it. When God says for us to rule over the world, I think that's a good thing. And I think that through Jesus Christ, everything that was broken, everything that was lost, everything that was spoiled under sin is going to be redeemed, even human dominion.

Eventually, and we will prove this in just a moment, the entire world we blanketed with the glory of God, the entire world will be under the Lord's dominion. And as 1 Corinthians 15 says, you can check it out later and read it.

We have a lot of things to get through today. God will hand, or Jesus will hand back a completed kingdom to God. Like a master builder, Jesus will not build a half-built house. He won't build a shanty they can barely stand up.

And when the winds blow and the rain comes down, it'll fall over Jesus. He says he's building the temple one stone by stone. You and I are stones in that end-time temple in 2 Peter. He will build it until it's complete.

And when it's complete, he'll hand it over to the Father. Christ will redeem dominion. Now, today I want us to just give a brief introduction to the theology of dominion. So that we can understand and see what Jesus is doing in John chapter 12.

And then I want us to look at John chapter 12 and see what all Christ is doing. Because when he rides into the city of Jerusalem, he's not just proclaiming to be the king of Jerusalem, he's proclaiming to be the king of the cosmos, and we need to understand that.

He's not just riding on a donkey to create some waves in Jerusalem. He is riding in as king, fulfilling prophecy that says he will own the entire world. And we'll look at that as well. Now, I do want to be up front.

What I'm telling you today is a very tough sell in the modern world. What I'm telling you today is things that you probably won't hear very often in church. Because the world looks bleak right now. The economy is down.

Our country is going through hard times. Nuclear weapons exist and there's crazy people who have them. Bad people are still doing bad things. The media just keeps lying and telling us over and over and over how awful things are.

You and I have been indoctrinated to think that the world is as bad as it possibly could be. I'm here to tell you that it's not. I'm here to tell you that Christ is winning. I'm here to tell you that the church is actually gaining victory.

I'm here to tell you that you can actually have a positive outlook on the world. You can hold your head high. You can walk out of here with a song in your heart because God's kingdom is winning, even though that narrative isn't popular.

And I don't know why it isn't. I don't know why we enjoy, as Christians, living in the doldrums. The world is so bad. God is good. These things don't cross over. It doesn't make any sense. I want to read you something, just to give us perspective.

Now, this is history, so this isn't the Bible, but I want to read this to you so that you'll see sort of a picture of what's been happening over the last 2 ,000 years. We miss it. We miss the forest for the trees.

I want to read this to you. 2 ,000 years ago, Jesus began the church with just 12 men in John chapter 1. Along the way, that group was expanded to 70 by the midpoint of his ministry. That became a few hundred by the resurrection.

Then at Pentecost, another 3 ,000 souls were added in a single day, bringing the early church to about 4 ,000 people in its first 50 days. Then after 40 years of missionary work in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the larger auspices of the Roman Empire, around 50 churches had been planted in various cities like Philippi, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth, and others.

By the time the church had grown from about 4 ,000 in Acts 2 to around the end of the book of Acts, 30 ,000 people are said to have been Christians at that time, from 12 ,000 to 30 ,000. By the year 200 AD, there were roughly 200 ,000 Christians in the Roman Empire.

By the year 250 AD, there were a little more than a million. By the year 380 AD, just 350 years after Jesus resurrected from the dead, a religion that began as 12 people in an obscure part of the Roman Empire overthrew the Roman pantheon and became the official religion of Rome.

This undoubtedly unleashed a massive period of new conversion, some even claiming that the church by the year 400 AD was composed of 10 to 15 million believers from 12. After Rome was sacked by the Gothic tribes, numbers became more difficult for historians to track, but from what we know, Christians did not punch their time cards and sit down on their laurels.

They kept working. They kept building. They kept extending the dominion of Christ. We know that by 600 AD, Christianity had spread to most of Western Europe. By 1000 AD, it had reached all of Europe. By the 1400s, while the Catholic Church was surely corrupted and in need of reformation, world travel became a thing, a newfound possibility where Christian explorers were taking their Christian faith to new lands and sharing the gospel with new people.

In this era, the gospel was brought to South America, Latin America, various places in Asia and Africa, and the gospel began digging small but very healthy roots. By the 1500s and 1600s, the reformation of the church finally came, correcting massive theological errors that had crept in which were stifling her from sharing the gospel.

Once those errors and heresies were corrected, men began translating the Bible into the language of the common man, and when those translation projects got underway, normal people started learning the Bible and telling everybody that they know who he is.

This kicked off the greatest and most explosive 400 years of expansion in the history of the church. This is what caused Puritanism to overtake England, to migrate to New England and America. It was the catalyst for thousands upon thousands of missionaries and missionary organizations being sent all over the world.

From the reformation of the church until the year 1910, the global population of Christianity exploded to more than 600 million Christians, from 12 to 600 million in less than 1900 years. To put that in perspective, when Jesus rose from the dead, there were 4 million Jews on earth.

By 1910, before World War II, there were 11 million Jews on earth, which is a 175 increase, which is nothing to balk at. But the church, in that exact same time frame, did not increase by hundreds of percentage points, did not increase by thousands of percentage points, she increased by just a hair shy of 5 billion percent from the first day until 1910.

It's as almost as if God wanted us to have dominion, to take over the whole world even. And history is the story of how all this is happening. It's truly astonishing to consider. Since 1910, 400 years, most explosive era of church growth.

Since 1910, the last 100 years of human history have seen an even faster growth than at any other time in human history. That means that those 400 years being the fastest, the last 100 years are now the fastest, meaning that we're increasing in the speed by which we reach the nations.

We've grown from 600 million to 2 .4 billion, quadrupling in size, so that now every country on earth is reported to have at least one Christian. Did you know that? Every country on earth. Mongolia was one of the last.

God sovereignly changed their dictatorship and now Christians have come in. Every country on earth now has at least one church. And perhaps the most ironic thing about all of this is while Satan cannot stop the expanse of his church, he can convince all of us that it's not happening.

He can convince all of us that we're defeated. This looks like a blowout victory. This looks like the enemy is already making plans to throw in the towel. Why? A Christian in every country. A church in every country.

You only need two or three gathered in his name, there you are, there's a church. And what I know about Christianity? It's like leaven. You get a little bit in the bread, the whole bread becomes leavened.

You get one church in one country, 100 years from now there'll be 50. We saw it. We saw it. Now I'm not here to tell you that the devil is not still fighting. He is. He's still fighting. Just like the Falcons were still fighting when the Patriots came back from their 28 -3 victory.

They didn't give up. The enemy's not giving up either, but he's losing ground. Every generation the enemy's losing ground. Every generation the enemy's kingdom is growing smaller and Jesus' kingdom is growing bigger.

And when Jesus said, when John said, he must increase and I must decrease, we've seen that play out in the church. The church has increased. As Satan's kingdom has decreased. Every generation so that Satan, every single year, can see that his demise and his doom grows nearer than when Jesus first was raised.

I don't want us to be negative Nancy Christians. I don't want us to be sarcastic Sallies either. Christ is clearly advancing. The gates of hell are falling down. Sometimes it happens slower than what we like.

Sometimes it happens like grass growing. You come back, you gotta mow again, but you try to stand there and look at it, it doesn't seem that eventful. I don't want us to be the kind of Christians, because I've talked to Christians for the last decade, who say that the world is getting worse and worse and worse.

The church is not really having an effect. The church is dying. That may be true in America. 10 ,000 Christians a day are coming to faith in China. 3 million people a year are coming to faith in Christ all over the world.

And if the church would wake up, that number would explode. The reason that the church continues to grow is because God designed it that way. Let us not believe that that was accidental for 20 centuries, and now all of a sudden, now God's lost the ability to figure out how to make his kingdom grow.

Yeah, he did that for 1900 years, he did that for the 20th century, but now, now things are really bad. Nero was lighting Christians on fire to light up his gardens. Hitler was last generation, and that's the generation that the church quadrupled in size.

Do we really believe? Do we really believe that God is not sovereign over these things, that he can't continue to do what he said he's going to do all throughout the Bible? God's dominion is by design.

That's the theme that we're going to be unpacking today. We're going to be looking at how Jesus came into the city of Jerusalem and he reclaimed the throne of Adam and how he began a kingdom that will never end, that will never be shaken, that will never fall, that will only increase and will never decrease.

Now I'm not talking about year to year, I'm talking about century to century. There's ebbs and flows, but it's going up. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to develop that from the Old Testament, then we're going to look at John chapter 12 and we're going to see how Jesus gives us three very practical ways that he is going to build his kingdom so that it never ends.

So with that, turn with me to John chapter 12, 16 through 19. We're going to read the text together, then we're going to pray, and we're going to dive into this topic. John 12. These things his disciples did not understand at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of him and that they had done these things to him.

So the people who were with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify about him. For this reason also, the people went and they met him because they had heard that he had performed this sign.

So the Pharisees said to one another, You see, you're not doing any good. Look, the whole world is going after him and how right they were. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you so much that you're a sovereign king and a powerful king and a mighty king and that you can accomplish whatever you set forth to accomplish.

Lord, as we began with anecdotes and historical stories, Lord, I pray that as we get into the meat of the text of the Old Testament and new, that we would see that this is a dominion by design. That we would see that it's baked into the fabric of creation, that you will reign as the waters cover the seas, from the river to the ends of the earth.

You will have dominion. Lord, let us abandon our pessimism. Lord, let us abandon that really negative form of pre-millennialism which says that everything is going to come crashing down. Lord, I pray that we would just forget the titles, forget the millennial positions, forget all the different phrases and that we would just look at what Scripture says today and that we would have hope and have faith that your kingdom will continue until the ends of the earth and that you have made us through Christ a part of it.

It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. We're going to be developing a theology of dominion. So I'm going to go fast through these verses. So if you have a pen, you can jot them down, you can look at them later.

Some of them are more conclusive than others. I'll try to let you know which ones those are. Some of them are more supplemental. I'll try to let you know which ones those are. But I'm going to build a case that God is going to own the entire earth, that he's going to fill it full of believers before he returns.

So let's go. What a great way to start. Let's go. When we're talking about dominion, you've got to be a little amped. All right, Genesis 1 -28. God created a world that he intended on us to fill. So if we believe what God says, then we believe that God intended for humanity to fill the earth.

Sin happened. Redemption happened. The plan still is there. God intended us to fill the earth. I believe he's going to have us do it. That is a theological basis. Genesis 1 -28. If he said it, he's going to accomplish it.

If he said we're going to fill the earth, I believe he's going to accomplish it. The second one, Genesis 12, 1 -3. When humans sin, God enters into covenant with them. And one covenant that he enters into is with Abram.

And this covenant is incredibly important for us understanding God's intention for the earth. Because you can say, okay, God originally intended for humans to have dominion, but they sinned. He scrapped that plan.

God doesn't scrap his plans, by the way. Everything will become complete. But let's just say he scraps that plan, and now he's on to a new plan. And that plan is worse than the first plan, because instead of us having the whole world, we end with a nosedive into the middle of the ocean.

It's a tough sell. I'm going to prove it wrong. Genesis 12, 1 -3. Now check this out. In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. That's a lot of families. In Abraham, all the families of the earth will be blessed.

He's not talking about all the families of Canaan, all the families of Palestine, or even all the families of Egypt when they had a 400-year stint there. All the families of the earth will be blessed by and in and through Abraham.

He's going to be a great nation with a great name. A great name in that day was something that had renown. They would actually post up statues of you so that your name would show that you have dominion.

So for us, we put a white picket fence around our house. They would put statues of the king around their empire to show our king reigns here. God is telling Abraham that he's going to have a great name.

The root of that word means a multiplied name. A name that actually covers all the families of the earth. All the families of the earth. It says in you this is going to happen. So I want you to understand this.

This is not in Abraham this is going to happen. It's that word in you or that phrase in you means sort of from out of you is going to happen. Paul picks this up in Galatians 3 and he says that if you're a Christian, you're a child of Abraham because Jesus is the true seed of Abraham.

And it's through Jesus that the whole world is going to be blessed. It's through Jesus that this promise in Genesis 12 is going to happen. That all the families of the earth are going to be blessed through Christ.

We're children of Abraham today. God didn't say, okay, Jesus came, scrap Abraham's covenant. We're a part of it. The whole world hasn't been blessed yet, has it? Every family on earth hasn't been blessed yet, has it?

So God has still work to do before the end will come. The end won't come until all the families of the earth are blessed because God doesn't renege on his promises like we do. I believe God said it and he meant it.

But we still have more verses to go so we get in there, right? I believe that the world at one point in the future is going to be so filled with believers in Christ that every family on earth will be blessed.

I'm going to take that as what it says. I believe that Islam is going to fall. I believe that atheism is going to be eliminated on the face of the earth. I believe that secularism, leftism, abortion, woke, LGBTQ politics and everything that we see right now is going to bow the knee to Jesus at some point because Jesus Christ will reign.

I believe when Jesus said, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, that he wasn't joking. That he actually intended his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. Do you know that in heaven there are no rivals?

In heaven there's no dissension. In heaven there's no people who say, well, you know, God, I don't really believe in you. Well, if his kingdom is going to come on earth just like it is in heaven, it's going to be amazing.

It's going to be believers all over the place. You get in a car accident and they get out and they say, oh, it's okay, brother, I forgive you. No more of this Boston stuff where people are just like, I'm going to sue you.

That's going to be gone. The question is, are we going to believe what the Bible says? Are we going to believe what the news says? Are we going to believe what CNN and Fox and OAN and Daily Wire? Are we going to believe all the negativity that they're feeding us?

It's poisoning us. Are we going to believe the word? Are we going to have courage, even if it conflicts with our worldview? Are we going to believe that? This is predicted not just in the covenant of Abraham, it's predicted in the book of Numbers.

That's the book where our Bible reading plans end. There's some really good stuff in there. After the people have just been in 400 years of Egyptian slavery, after God brings them out with a mighty hand, after he brings them to the mountain of God and the mountain shakes and it quakes and God's presence comes down and fills the tabernacle with his glory and the people hit the deck and they say, we can't bear the holiness of God.

So they saw it. They saw the 10 plagues. They saw God deliver them. They saw the Egyptians' dead bodies on the soil. They saw it. And what did they do? They grumbled against God. God was so displeased with their lack of faith that he threatens to destroy them and make a nation out of Moses.

And Moses said, more of the Egyptians will hear about it and they'll say that you wooed your people out here into the wilderness, that you couldn't bring them into the promised land and because you don't have power to do what you say you're going to do, they're going to mock you and they're going to shame you.

And how often do we as Christians act like that today? God's given us the world and yet we have so little faith. Well, God's going to return at any moment because of COVID or the mark of the beast. We can explain those things and we're going to have an eschatology talk afterwards in here and you can come talk and I'll tell you what I think those things mean.

But they're not meant to scare us. They're not meant to terrify us. They're not meant to depress us. They are meant to be the holistic picture of God taking back authority and rule over the earth. This is what God says to his wayward people.

I have pardoned them according to your word. But indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with my glory. All the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord. Numbers 14, 20 through 21. What I want us to see here is that this passage should hit really close to home for us because when we fail to believe the promises of God, we're just like Israel, we grumble.

Grumbling is caused by not believing what God has said. God didn't promise us one country to take over like he did for Israel. He promised us the whole earth would be taken over by the spirit-indwelled Christ-led church.

And if we don't believe that, we will grumble. We'll grumble about our government. How often are we guilty of that, right? We'll grumble about elections. We'll grumble about how strong the enemy is, that pitiful, lying, wounded snake who will be his head crushed in the end.

We murmur about the state of the country. We murmur about everything under the sun. When we're supposed to have joy, we're on the winning team. When we do those sorts of things, is it any wonder that a theology of a rapture that comes and rescues us out of the pain and takes us to a comfy, cozy place in heaven has proliferated in the church?

Because we're escapists. We want to avoid the pain of trying to see Jesus' kingdom extended on earth and believe His promises, and we want to just say, well, that'll never happen because everything's so bad and stuff.

I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but if we have a positive view of what God has promised, won't it affect our behavior? Won't it affect the way we live? There's records in the history of the church where men were marched to the stake and burned to death singing hymns to Christ.

God grew His kingdom through that. Dietrich Bonhoeffer killed on one of the last weeks of the Nazi concentration camp's existence, and he was singing hymns. Paul singing hymns in prison. The disciples saying, we've been counted worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ.

Who are we? We're the most comfortable people that have ever lived on the face of the earth. We're the richest people that have ever lived on the face of the earth. If you're poor in this room, you're richer than the kings of Egypt.