The Heart of Church History

I will admit the past couple of days have been rather interesting. When we were

Monday night out in Magna, I get done speaking on God made them male and female.

And I walk outside, and my truck is already buried in snow. And it's just coming down like I don't know what.

And that was a fun trip back to the KOA, I will admit that.

I'll take the heat over not being able to see where in the world you're going any day. I'll turn the

AC on, I'll sweat, that's OK. But that's just weirdness. And now

I've sat there the past couple days, and oh, look, it's sunny. You look down, type a few words.

Oh, look, it's snowing. You look down, type a few words. Oh, look at that, it's raining. And I'm just, what is this?

Schizophrenic weather, man. And it's like, whee. In Phoenix, it's either sunny and hot, or oh, here comes the monsoon.

Oh, it's a dust storm. Yeah, there you go. But they last a little while. It's not like every few minutes, oh, it's something new.

That's great. My poor truck has just been slammed by all this stuff.

It's like, what are you doing to me? But anyway, it's good to be here. And what

I wanted to do this evening, some of you may know that the first class

I ever taught after I graduated in seminary at Grand Canyon back then, and was it university yet, or was it still just Grand Canyon College?

I can't remember at that point in time, was church history. And it's not like in my seminary studies there had been room for a major in that area.

But very thankfully, I had a wonderful church history professor in seminary. Now, the funny thing is

I took a church history class. I started to take a church history class in college, and I dropped it after about three meetings.

I did not like where the professor was going. I did not like the book. It was really way to my left, and I just wasn't interested in it.

And it sort of left a bad taste in my mouth. And I already recognized, because I was involved with,

Alpha Omega had been founded by then. I was involved with doing Mormon apologetics. That was the first thing we were really primarily focused on.

But I was already dealing with some Jehovah's Witnesses, and you've got to know some stuff about church history if you're going to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses, because they will make some amazing claims about church history.

But I'm so thankful that when I went to seminary, I had a church history professor who clearly loved the subject himself.

That helps a lot, and he communicated that to me. I still have the notes that I took in that class and have used them and expanded upon them for decades now since then.

And the church history class that I taught at Grand Canyon was a required class. And so I had people coming in there, and you know what it's like to take a required class.

It's sort of like, oh, here I am. And my goal, given that I was sometimes younger than the people in the class, my goal was by the end of that semester that they would love the subject of church history.

They would be very, very interested in it. And that's pretty much how it worked out.

And I'm sort of afraid that many Christians today, I was raised sort of independent fundamentalist

Baptist, and so church history was Billy Graham. That was about as far back as church history went.

There is, in the fundamentalist mindset, a disconnection from ancient history, with one exception.

Have you ever seen the little red booklet, The Trail of Blood? Anybody ever seen that? You've seen it?

I've got a couple of people. The Trail of Blood I ran into as a teenager, and that was the one attempt that we made as fundamentalists to sort of explain, you know,

Jesus did say he was going to build his church. But the reality is that, man, nobody in church history looks like us.

They didn't wear white shirts and dark ties and didn't have potlucks and didn't sing out of the

Baptist hymnal. And so they probably weren't Christians. And so where were the

Christians during all that time? And the Trail of Blood is just a horrifically bad attempt to say, well, there were

Christians. It was a narrow little line, and they hid in the mountains, and they were over here. And some of the groups that they grab onto were just so ethically heretical, non -Trinitarian,

Gnostic, and all the rest of this stuff. But they baptized believers, and so that meant that was the one true church.

And so it was sort of a new thing for me when I took church history and seminary to feel the connection.

And I can sort of describe it by something that happened when I went up. In 1993, I don't know if any of you remember, the pope came to Denver, Colorado for World Youth Day.

So you're going, 1993. What were you doing in 1993,

Andrew? I was three. OK, there you go. I need some

Geritol. Has anybody got one of those chairs?

Oh, here we go. So we went up to, you're not much older,

Wade, are you? The same as my son, yeah.

OK, all right. Anyway, so we went up to Denver.

I did two debates up there with a guy named Jerry Matatix on the subject of papacy. And so, thank you, sir.

But one day, Rich and I were sitting in a health food store called

Winchell's Donuts. And this health food makes you feel good, so it's health food.

And I happened to be looking at the newspaper, and there was a discussion, there was an article about the

Papal Treasures exhibit that was there because the pope was there. And I'm reading it, and all of a sudden

I go, Rich, we're going to go to this. And he's like, we are? And I said, yep, because I saw that they had a page from P72 on display.

Now, P72 is the earliest manuscript copy we have of 1st and 2nd

Peter and Jude. And so I'm like, all right, we're going to see this.

And so you had to get tickets and go at a certain time and stuff like that. And so we go walking, and it's one of the first things that you encounter.

It's under glass, and they've got a description of it and stuff like that. So here I am looking at this thing.

And it's from around the year 200, so it's 1 ,800 years old.

And it's amazingly legible. I'm reading it. And 2nd

Peter 1 .1, the page they had was the end of 1st Peter and the beginning of 2nd Peter. And so 2nd

Peter 1 .1 contains what's called a Granville Sharp construction. It's where we're looking for, by the grace of our

God and Savior, Jesus Christ, where God and Savior are both descriptors of the one person,

Jesus Christ, one of the places where theos, God, is used of Jesus. And so I'm looking at that, and I'm looking at the nomena sacra and stuff like that.

So I'm just absorbed in this. And people would sort of walk up, and they'd sort of look at it, and they'd read the description.

And then they'd sort of look at me, because I'm not moving. And they'd sort of look over at Rich, and they'd go, can he read that?

And Rich would go, yeah, he's reading that. Look at this, Harold. This man's reading this ancient manuscript.

People would start gathering around, and the security people are starting to do this number. And so Rich would drag me off to go look at a crown or something gold or something, and then

I'd right back again when there was a place that was open. And so it was really awesome to get a chance to see

P72 and to read it and things like that. But the thing was this.

I'm looking at this, and the author did not have the world's greatest penmanship.

When you compare P72 to Codex Sinaiticus, for example, which is about 200 years later, well, 125 years later, but done by a professional, the lines are a little bit crooked, and it's just not nearly as fancy dancy as the others.

But I'm sitting here thinking, here was a Christian who, 1 ,800 years ago, loved the word of God enough to write out his own copy.

And I couldn't help but thinking, first of all, how many of us, how much of the

Bible would you have if you had to write out your own copy of it?

We can't bother people to get to church early on a Sunday morning for Sunday school. So getting them to write out their own copy of the scriptures, that's going to be pretty tough.

And then this is a period of persecution. Now, we don't know if there was persecution going on in this particular area at that particular time when it was copied.

We just have no way of knowing these things. But he could have been risking his life. And we know, for example, about a pair of deacons in the year 303, during the

Great Persecution, who were brought before a Roman governor and it was demanded that they were to tell them where all the copies of the scriptures were.

And eventually, basically what they said was, we will not betray our fellow believers.

Here we are. Do with us as you will. And the governor did with them as he would.

And they were executed. And you have these people down through history, where they, that's all we know about them.

We've got their names and they show up in one Roman document and they were faithful and they loved the scriptures.

And here was somebody who copied this scripture around the year 200 and loved the scriptures.

We don't know the names. And in fact, when you think about history, we only know the names of a tiny fraction of the people who have lived before us.

See, one of the problems we have as modern Americans, modern

Christians, we are accustomed to having electronic recording devices and any more, anything that happens.

The subway shooting that just took place. What happens almost like that? You've got video. You've got pictures.

You've got, everyone's got a high quality recording device instantly connected to the rest of the world in their pocket.

We lose track. I realize this being as old as I am, but you younger folks who have grown up with this kind of technology, you need to realize how absolutely outlandishly unusual that is.

When you think of, when I think of, I don't know if you saw the Facebook thing.

I am really suspicious about all these Facebook things where they ask you about your first car or something like that.

Yeah, don't the credit card companies ask you the same thing? Hmm, that's a little weird. But the question was, what was the first television news story that you remember?

And I've never had a credit card asking me that one, so I feel fairly safe. And I remember, it was in our, we lived in this rented farmhouse.

It was 105 years old. And I was about five years of age.

And it was about the Vietnam War and the Ho Chi Minh Trail going into Laos and Cambodia and the fighting that was going on there.

And it was a grainy, black and white television that I was watching and a guy named

Walter Cronkite. So a few of you know who Walter Cronkite is, but some of you are like, who's

Walter Cronkite? Walter Cronkite was like our daddy. I mean, every night you listened to him very calmly reading the news, and you trusted everything that he said.

No one trusts anything that anybody says on news any longer, but it was a different day. But that was still, there was no satellite feeds and stuff like that.

And if you did see video, it was normally the next day or days after, and it had to be flown over from Vietnam and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

This instantaneous stuff is, mankind has never, ever experienced it before.

And during World War II, you'd find out about major battles weeks after they took place, weeks after they took place.

And so we carry these expectations back into ancient history.

And we expect that you could go back to the days of Jesus and you're gonna have the

Jerusalem Post and you're gonna have reporters and they're gonna be coming to Jesus' various talks and making recordings and telling us what happened.

None of that's the case. And the vast majority of people who live in the first century we don't know who they were.

And in fact, the only, we've actually had an increase of knowledge of their names because of the cataloging of bone boxes.

You know what bone boxes are? A number of years ago, a bone box was discovered and the guy who did the

Titanic stuff came up with the theory that this was the Jesus family bone box. And this means

Jesus didn't rise from the dead. And I wrote a book about it in 17 days. It's my least read book ever, but I did hammer it pretty hard during those two weeks.

And it is fascinating because what they've done in Israel is they have cataloged all these bone boxes and they would inscribe the names.

So what the Jews would do is you die, they put you in a sepulcher, and then on the year anniversary of having put you in there, they'll open it back up again, collect your bones and put them in a box, in a family box.

And so we didn't know about that for a long time, but what that does is they would inscribe names on it.

What the Jews, the Israelis have done is we now have an entire computer database of the names from these bone boxes.

And frequently there are ways of dating about where they were from. By the way, one of the fascinating aspects of that is when you look at the occurrence of names in the

New Testament, in the Gospels, and you compare them with the computerized listing of names from that area of Israel during that time period, they're almost identical.

See, if this book, if the New Testament had been made up by someone in Rome, and that's always been a theory that people have thrown out there, how would they have known what the most popular names are in Israel?

There's just so much evidence that the New Testament itself is accurately representing the context in which it is claiming to have been written.

So for example, at the time of Jesus, if you had been walking down a street in Jerusalem and yelled out,

Mary, 40 % of the women would turn around and look at you. And if you've noticed, there are a lot of Marys in the

Gospels. Especially you look at the, trying to figure out who was at the tomb. Mary, and the other

Mary, and there's Mary over here, and Mary Magdalene's over there. And that's why they use the location names.

Mary Magdalene, that is Mary of Migdal. So that's different than Mary of Jerusalem, or Mary of Bethany, or whatever else.

That's how you figured out who was who. But anyway, so the point is that history, when we have tantalizing bits of information, very often we can't fill in a lot of the holes.

And so for example, we have, and I'm working on a book that, I've translated this, and I'm working on a book to make application.

We have a letter. And I think

Andrew and Wade will remember that for a little while, we had some voices from the past section of the bulletin at Apologia down in Phoenix.

And I provide a number of quotations from this particular document. And again, what's interesting is, you might say, well, how do we know when it was written?

Well, we don't. You look at it, and you look at how it describes what's going on in the world at that particular point in time, or the attitudes that people have, and you try to fit it into, as best you can, a period in the early church.

I'd put it around 120. So the beginning of the second century.

But we don't know. It could be earlier than that. It could be later than that. It's not even complete.

And in fact, fascinatingly enough, we only had one manuscript of it.

And it was discovered in the mid -1800s. And thankfully, about four scholars had examined the manuscript and had taken notes, handwritten notes, from the manuscript.

You know why I say thankfully? Because the Franco -Prussian War broke out, and where it was stored was shelled and destroyed.

So the manuscript's gone. But thankfully, between those four scholars, we were able to recreate the manuscript from the handwritten notes and copies they had made.

And that's the only way we know about this. And who knows how many other, when you think of all the things that can happen to a piece of paper, to a book, over the course of 2 ,000 years, not just wars and shelling, but fires and floods and bugs, especially bugs.

There's all sorts of things. It's actually astonishing that we have the number of papyri manuscripts we have of the early

New Testament. Because when you think about it, I'll frequently show pictures in my

New Testament presentations of the early manuscripts, and their edges are all gone, and there's holes in some of them.

And there's one that I show that is from the Book of Revelation, and it's chapter 13, and the number of the beast in Revelation chapter 13.

We only have two papyri manuscripts that contain anything of the Book of Revelation. In fact, of all the books in the

New Testament, it's the book we have the fewest manuscripts of. And interestingly enough, the two earliest manuscripts do not say 666 for the number of the beast.

They say 616. And interestingly enough, 666 and 616 are either the

Greek or Hebrew ways of spelling Caesar Nero, which is pretty much real proof of what was being discussed at that particular point in time.

But anyway, the one of them that contains that, you've got a little part. If the page was like this, you have a little part here, a little part there, a little part there.

I mean, it's pretty beat up. And frequently, people go, man, those things are really in bad shape.

And I just look at them and go, how are you gonna look in 1800 years? Better than you will, I can assure you of that.

So when you think about all the stuff that those things survived, it's amazing we have any of them at all.

But going back to this one document, we call it the

Epistle to Diognetus because we do have the name of the person to whom it is addressed.

We have no idea who wrote it. He calls himself a disciple. And the

Greek term for disciple is mathete, so sometimes that name is ascribed to him in a way.

But it's the Epistle to Diognetus. And it's fascinating. We don't have time tonight to go into all the details about it.

All this stuff is available online, by the way, free online. Most of your good

Bible programs, like Accordance, Logos, they'll all have multiple copies and versions of this kind of stuff, the

Greek and the whole nine yards. But the ninth section,

I mean, this is obviously just the way we've divided it up. The ninth section, this is a

Christian writing to a non -Christian Roman seeking to introduce him to the

Christian faith. So this is how witnessing was being done in this context. And that's what the book project

I'm working on is taking this epistle and making modern day application to what we're doing in the situations we face because we're entering into a more and more pagan context all the time.

And that's what they were doing. That's the situation they were in. And so I'm sort of excited about it. I haven't, I don't know why, but I get almost nothing done on the road.

It's very difficult to find time when you're scraping ice off your windshield or doing whatever to be doing some of the stuff you're rather doing.

But this particular section of the epistle is just amazing to me.

So let me read it to you. I tried to import into this document my own translation, but it just refused to do it.

So this is somebody else's translation, but I did just recently work on this section of it.

So then having already planned, let me back up. He starts off with this great discussion about idols and how idols in temples cannot be the true

God. And he literally talks about how you can have utensils that you use to eat food with that are made by the same people that made your idol out of the same materials.

And your fork could have been your idol or your idol could have been your fork. I mean, it really is a straightforward, straightforward, you really can't believe these gods are doing anything for you.

Could you? It's really, really well done. So he does that at the beginning. And then in the ninth section here, this is what he writes.

So then having already planned everything in his mind together with his child, speaking of the son,

Jesus, he permitted us during the former time to be carried away by undisciplined impulses as we desired, led astray by pleasures and lusts.

Not all because he took delight in our sins, but because he was patient. Not because he approved that former season of unrighteousness, but because he was creating the present season of righteousness.

In order that we who in a former time were convicted by our own deeds as unworthy of life might now by the goodness of God be made worthy.

And having clearly demonstrated our inability to enter the kingdom of God on our own might be enabled to do so by God's power.

But when our unrighteousness reached its peak and it had been made perfectly clear that its result, punishment and death, were to be expected, the time came when

God decided to reveal at last his goodness and power. Oh, the surpassing kindness and love of God.

He did not hate us or cast us off or bear malice toward us, but was patient, forbearing, being merciful.

He Himself took upon Himself our sins. Himself giving

His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy in place of the lawless, the innocent in place of the guilty, the just in place of the unjust, the incorruptible in place of the corruptible, the immortal in the place of the mortal.

For what else than the Son's righteousness was able to cover our sins? In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly, to be made righteous but in the

Son of God alone? Oh, the sweet exchange. Oh, the untraceable accomplishment.

Oh, the unexpected acts of kindness that the lawlessness of the many should be hidden away in the righteous one, and the righteousness of the one should justify the many lawless ones.

Now, looking at it, I discovered that, it updated, since I looked at it just a few minutes ago, that was my translation.

So, you listen to that, and you need to understand that it is common in our modern day if you go to take a class on Christian history anywhere in the secular context, to be told that what we as Christians believe about, for example, the deity of Christ, about the

Trinity, about the atonement, that this is all stuff that developed long after the time of Christ.

And so, for me, it is fascinating to be able to read material probably written within the first generation after the last apostles, where plainly you have

God's sovereignty, God's decree, His planning of all these things, and you clearly have a heavily

Pauline understanding of the imputed righteousness of Christ.

And you might say, well, isn't that what everybody was saying? No, we have other works from around this time period a little bit later.

Remember something. Ask yourself a question. What would your theology be like if you didn't have

Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews in your

Bible? And you only had, say, Mark as a gospel.

What would your theology be like? And you've got to remember, it took time for the

New Testament to be gathered together, because it wasn't written by one person in one place. There was no group that could control all these things.

Paul was writing, well, the New Testament writers were writing in multiple places to multiple audiences at multiple times, and so it took time to collect these things.

So, for example, the earliest manuscript we have of Paul's writings is called P46, and it's in the

Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland. And it's from around the year 200, and interestingly enough, it contains

Hebrews. That gives you some idea of at least what someone around 200 thought. It's not all of Paul's writings, by the epistles like Timothy and Titus, they're not there, but it's the major epistles.

So by 200, there has been a collection of the major epistles, but that took some work, because those epistles weren't sent to the same place.

And it is fascinating to read it. I guess I shouldn't take the time to do this, but I got to visit and see the manuscript in Ireland and Dublin a number of years ago, and for proper reasons, they were under special kind of light, because you don't want these lights, you're gonna fade it out in a very short period of time.

And even as it is, they are fading, you can tell by the pictures we've taken. But they were sort of at an angle, and the

Philippians was what we were looking at. And the light came from the top of the case, and it was hard to read.

Then all of a sudden, it hit me. I said, well, if the light's up here, it's at an angle, then where is it gonna be brightest?

Well, down here. And so I get down, oh, yeah, yeah, that, that, you know,

I finally just get down. Okay, yep, yep, that, that, that, that, that, that, that. Okay, so yeah, we're definitely here in Philippians 2, and okay, there's the participle, and sir, what are you doing?

And here's the security guy, because you know they've got cameras. And I can just imagine what was happening up in the security place when they saw me get down on my knees.

Oh, all right, Fred, the Christians are worshiping the manuscripts again. Better go down there and take care of it.

So, well, I'm reading the manuscript. Sure you are, yeah, mm -hmm, yeah.

Right, we did eventually convince them that we were reading the manuscript. But the only thing that bugged me about seeing it that one time was

I wanted to see the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, five through 11. But they had it displayed to where it was on the backside of what was facing toward me.

So, I mean, I have high -quality digital photography of that page, but still, you know,

I know that I saw the backside of that page, but, you know, that's sort of how it goes. But the point is, we have these early collections.

We have gospel collections, we have collections of Paul. But even then, it took time for all that stuff to be collected together into anything that we would call the

New Testament. So, my point is this, what would your theology look like? And so we have books like the

Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas, and they are very sub -biblical in their theology.

And you can understand why. If you didn't have Romans, you'd probably be sub -biblical in your theology too. But here,

Diognetus clearly knew about Paul's teachings. And is expressing those teachings very clearly in these words.

And this beautiful description that parallels what we have, for example, in Peter.

His own son is a ransom for us, the holy in the place of the lawless, the innocent in the place of the guilty, the just in the place of the unjust, the incorruptible in the place of the corruptible, the immortal in the place of the mortal.

I mean, wow. Oh, the unexpected acts of kindness, that the lawlessness of the many should be hidden away in the righteous one, and the righteousness of the one should justify the many lawless ones.

This is Isaiah 52, this is sound theology. It's beautiful theology.

But we don't know who wrote it. Now, I sort of automatically go, well, we'll find out someday.

And we always assume that, right? And I suppose if it's something that, once you get to heaven, is relevant, and it's not an insult to God to ask,

I suppose, maybe we will, I don't know. We've got a lot of time to be doing stuff, so I suppose, you know.

But I've never found anything in the scriptures that said, and when we get there, we're gonna get to ask every question we ever, ever,

I don't know, we sort of assume that. But the point is, here's someone, and for 1 ,700 years, no one saw these words, other than the one that he wrote it to.

Now, maybe somebody did along the way, but no one ever made any mention of it. And now we get to read them, and we get to be encouraged by them, long after they were written.

But for a long time, no knowledge. And we're still finding stuff over there.

People are still finding things in libraries, and they just found a few more of the Dead Sea Scrolls just within the past 18 months.

You'd figure that place would be picked over by now. But they found them in a bit of a cave that no one had been able to get down to before, and lo and behold, there they were.

And so the point is, was this epistle worthless for 1 ,700 years?

No. No. It had been important when it was written, even if it had been only that one person.

And yet, we don't know who wrote it, but it sure is encouraging to me. It sure is encouraging to me.

Now we do know who wrote these words. We do know who wrote these words.

There is one physician of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate,

God in man, true life in death, of Mary and of God, first passable and then impassable,

Jesus Christ our Lord. Now is that from some 4th century creedal statement?

After all the arguments had taken place? Because there were lots of arguments. We need to recognize that there were great conflicts in church history.

And you have, for example, the Council of Nicaea in 325 A .D.

Why was that council called? Well, because in the years preceding that, a man by the name of Arius, a very popular fellow, a good looking guy.

And not only that, he was a good singer. He was. He could put stuff to music.

Music is a powerful way of communicating thoughts. And Arius had decided,

Arius taught, that there was a time when the sun was not. There was a time when the sun was not.

The sun is an exalted creature, but not truly

God. And his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, said you're wrong and told him to stop teaching that.

And so he left and he went up to Caesarea and he began teaching it again. And something important had happened in 313.

Does anyone know what happened in 313? In 313 you have the peace of the church.

Between 303 and 313 is the most intense period of persecution by the

Roman Empire against the Christian church. The most intense period. There had been intense periods before, but this was empire -wide.

This was the last shot the Roman Empire took at destroying Christianity in total. And in 313 you've got a guy named

Constantine. And Constantine unifies power in the Roman Empire and he does so under the sign of the cross and claims to be a

Christian. And may well have been one. But he all of a sudden finds out that there are divisions taking place amongst the

Christians on this subject. He hears about this controversy. And so he calls for a council.

This has never happened before. Not of the whole church. And he even provides the place for it to happen.

And comes himself. Major, major implications for the rest of church history that we don't have time to get into tonight.

But the point is that at that council of about 300 bishops, all but two signed a statement that asserted that Jesus is homoousios of the same substance as the

Father. Not homoousios of a like substance. Not heteroousios of a different substance.

But truly God. And they had to use an unbiblical, homoousios does not appear in the

Bible. So why in the world use it? Because Arius could find a way to believe, to agree with anything else by just twisting what it meant.

But he couldn't agree to that. That was the only way to expose him and his teachings. And so after that time period, what people don't know, what a lot of people don't know, people figure, oh, council of Nicaea, there you go.

No more controversy. For the next 40 years, the

Arians were in charge. By political chicanery, they got the

Roman emperor and Constantine's sons and stuff like that to agree with them. And there was one particular fellow whom you may have heard of before, especially if you're around apologia.

A fellow by the name of Athanasius. Now Athanasius was not a bishop at the council of Nicaea.

But he became a bishop about a year later. And he became the bishop of Alexandria.

And when the Roman Empire starts saying, you know, we think

Nicaea was wrong. And started putting pressure upon people. Athanasius refused to give in.

And some of the most important books that you'll read from the ancient world come from Athanasius during that time against the

Arians and on the incarnation. And one of the things I love is that I can read Athanasius' works.

And he's arguing the same way in the fourth century, around 340, 345, that I would argue against Jehovah's Witnesses today using the same text of scripture.

It's the same battle going on, except it was going on a long, long time ago. And he got kicked out of his church five times during the

Arian ascendancy. Sometimes he was running out the back door of the church while 500 soldiers were running through the front door of the church.

And the story is told at once while he was hiding out amongst the monks in the deserts of Egypt along the

Nile, that he was in a boat going one direction while there were Roman soldiers going the other direction looking for him.

And he's in a monk's cowl and he's got it up over his head. And people are rowing and they're going different directions and the

Roman soldiers go, have you seen Athanasius? And Athanasius is in the back of the boat and he goes,

I'm sure he's not far. Tradition says he was a short little ugly guy, but he was powerful.

And you may have heard the phrase, Athanasius contramundum, Athanasius against the world, because everybody else gave in, even the

Bishop of Rome. He was the only one who said, nope.

And he didn't say it because Nicaea said so. He said it because the scriptures say so.

The scriptures say so. And I have pointed my Roman Catholic friends more than once to the example of Athanasius, that early

Protestant, because the entire church, the organized church said, you're wrong. And he said, nope, scripture says you're wrong.

And that's all there is to it. And he was proven correct. But what you probably know is that even then, once Arianism collapsed in upon itself, political movements do that.

The next questions were, okay, if Jesus is fully God, then what is the relationship between the divine and the human and Jesus?

And so you've got the two Gregories and Basil, the Cappadocian fathers, and you have a lot of discussion concerning what's called the hypostatic union, the relationship of the divine and human

Christ. And this is taking place in the 400s. And so what

I read to you sounds like it came from that time period, but it didn't. Those are the words of Ignatius of Antioch.

Ignatius of Antioch. Now, Ignatius was the Bishop of Antioch, which we know from the

New Testament. And somewhere around 107, 108 AD, 107, over 200 years before Nicaea.

Two centuries before Nicaea. Ignatius is being taken to Rome to be executed as an elderly man.

And he writes epistles to various local churches and one to a particular individual named

Polycarp as he's going to Rome. Now there are a bunch of other epistles that are fakes.

There is a lot of discussion that must be had about all the stuff that was...

If you wanted your book to be read, and remember back then it had to be hand copied, it was always good to have someone's name on it that was bigger than you.

So there are various pseudo -Ignatian epistles out there running around. But there are seven genuine epistles.

And in those genuine epistles, you have some of the most astonishing statements concerning the glory and majesty of Christ.

Let me read to you again, realizing this is 200 years before Nicaea. This is literally within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade of the death of John.

All right, so this is early, early, early, early. I'll read it again. There is one physician of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate,

God in man, true life in death, of Mary and of God, first passable and then impassable,

Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, that would function just fine in the discussions of the hypostatic union hundreds of years down the road.

And yet here it is, in the earliest periods of church history.

That was written in his epistle to the church at Ephesus. Also in that same epistle are these words.

You are stones of a temple, which were beforehand prepared for a building of God the

Father, being raised to the heights through the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, and using as a rope, the

Holy Spirit. Now, that's not normal terminology that we wouldn't think of it as a, you know, the

Father, Son, the Spirit working together as a machine to build the church.

But it actually fits pretty well with what Paul says in regards to the building of the church and all of us being members and so on and so forth.

But do you see what's going on there? You've got God the Father, you've got Jesus Christ, and you have the

Holy Spirit all in one sentence. And again, what you're gonna be taught going to any secular university and sadly, most religious universities, is that all that kind of stuff, that comes after Nicaea, all the

Trinitarian stuff, you know, that's way, way down the road. And here it is in the earliest writings that we have in Ignatius's epistle to the

Ephesians. I would recommend the reading of Ignatius to you. It doesn't take you very long to read through all of them.

And you will see he has a very high view of the church, a very high view of the bishop. In fact, what you'll discover, it's fascinating, is by this point in time in the east where he is, each church has one bishop.

The bishop is already elevated above the elders, the presbyters.

But when he writes the church at Rome, he does not address a bishop at Rome.

He addresses the whole church. Because historically, Rome didn't have a singular bishop until about 140

AD. So much for Peter, successors, papacies, and all the rest of that kind of stuff. So it is fascinating to see that.

So there's another, so we have one person, Ignatius, we know who he was, we know about when he dies, how he dies.

We know he was a bishop of the church. And we've got the epistle to Diognetus. We don't have a clue who wrote it. And yet both provide us important insights into what was going on in the early church.

So there are so many. Sometimes we have a name. Very often we have no names at all.

One of the most amazing pieces of literature from the early church that I am aware of comes from someone we do know, addressed to a few people that we do know, but it's about a bunch of people we don't know and won't know until glory itself.

In the middle of the third century, so around 250, you have a very wealthy, powerful

Roman citizen converted to Christ by the name of Cyprian.

And the history of where Cyprian was, Cyprian is in Carthage. And most people, the only things they've ever heard of about Carthage was about the wars between Rome and Carthage, and Hannibal and his elephants, and all the rest of that stuff.

And Carthage was a worthy opponent of the city of Rome for quite some time, but had eventually succumbed to the power of Rome and was now a provincial, a province of Rome.

There in North Africa, in fact, it is, I think, important for us to remember that North Africa, the entire shore, the

Mediterranean there in the north and the south, was a Christian place until the

Muslim conquest of it in between 625, 725, that time frame.

We look at it today as a backwards area of poverty and things like that, but it was a thriving center of commerce, and it was a

Christian area. In fact, Augustine of Hippo, which is also in North Africa, Augustine, at the beginning of the fifth century, so around 400, had a conflict, a major conflict, with a rival group.

In the early church, the idea of divisions was considered to be absolutely scandalous, that there would be any divisions, that the early church would look at us having three different churches on the corner of a street, and they would have no way of understanding it.

The first major schism, well, all the early major schisms were the result of the church struggling to deal with persecution.

What would happen after persecution? Persecution comes, and then it ebbs and flows, and when it goes away, what do you do with the people who gave in?

They wanna come back to church, they wanna be part of the fellowship, but they may have given in, they may have sacrificed, they may have given the pinch of incense on the altar, or they may have betrayed somebody else, or they may have given up the scriptures.

There were different ways in which you could fall, and the church struggled mightily as to how to deal with that situation, and that resulted in schisms.

It wasn't theology about eschatology, or the gospel, or anything else, it was how do you deal with those who have lapsed under persecution?

And one such division was called the Donatist controversy in North Africa. And the only reason

I'm mentioning this is that Augustine would represent what was called the Catholic, katahalos, according to the whole, not

Roman Catholic, they wouldn't have even understood what that meant, but the Catholic community, and then there was a group called the

Donatists, and they would build churches, and they would whitewash them white, they'd be all white, you could always tell a

Donatist church because they would always be white, and this was meant to symbolize purity, because they had separated from the others who were compromised because they claimed that they had, can't go into all the details here, but that a bishop had been ordained inappropriately, he was not a proper bishop because he had given in under persecution, and so there's this division that takes place, and the whole reason to give you all this backstory is that at one point

Augustine says that in his day there was a meeting, so what we would call a convocation, a conclave, a convention of Donatist bishops in North Africa, and they had 700 bishops in that meeting just for the

Donatists. Now that meant that was big, and that was what

North Africa was all about, and it had been for quite some time, and would be up until the

Muslim conquest of those lands, and so back to Cyprian, Cyprian is in Carthage in North Africa, about 150 years before Augustine, and as I said, he was a well -to -do man, highly placed in Roman society, and so as an older individual, he is converted to faith in Christ, and it is not long before he is asked to be bishop, which might make you go, and partly because he was using his wealth to help so many people, he was willing to give of his substance to help the

Christian people, he was unselfish, and so you become fairly well -known, and you get a lot of friends in situations like that.

Obviously, from our perspective, we might stand back and go, there's stuff in the New Testament about don't lay your hands upon a new convert, and there's something about having some experience and being somewhat seasoned.

I know when I was at Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, by the time

I became an elder, one of the things that had been said was, well, we could have done this earlier, but there's something in the term elder that means that there's some experience.

This is not just some kid off the street. You've got some experience now, and so there you go.

Of course, now I'm the elderly elder at Apologia.

I'm 16 plus years older than the next guy on the list, which is why

Luke likes to say that I'm a church history professor, which I am, and it's because I was there, and that's how

I know all these guys, and it's really not that bad, but when you're as young as Luke, old guys all seem much older than we are.

Anyway, so Cyprian becomes bishop of Carthage right as a major period of persecution sweeps across the empire, and Christians are being arrested, and rounded up, and one of the issues that the church faced is there would be

Christians who would seek persecution. They would seek to be persecuted, and most of the bishops had said no.

If you read what Jesus said, he's like in Matthew chapter 24.

What did they do? Why weren't there any Christians? Why was it that Christians didn't die in the

Roman siege of Jerusalem? Because they had read what Jesus said, and Jesus said, when you see the armies surrounding

Jerusalem, get out of Dodge. Get to the hills. Get out of there.

Don't even go back to get your coat, boogie, and you may be sitting there going, but Hal Lindsey said that's still in the future.

Well, okay, that's another issue, but they had, and so many of the bishops had said no.

The scripture says when you see persecution coming, flee. Find a place where you're not being persecuted.

Save your wife, and your family, and your kids, and so on and so forth, but there were others that considered that to be an act of cowardice, and so early on when persecution hits

Carthage, Cyprian leaves the city and seeks to continue to function as bishop by epistle from a place of hiding, and does so for a while, but it's just not working.

It's just not working, and so he comes back, and in 254, he is arrested, and he is beheaded there in Carthage.

A Roman soldier, you know, lean over. You become a martyr, and so anyone willing to die for their faith, you might want to at least seriously consider what they have to say, even if you have to eventually compare what they have to say by scripture, and say they were deceived or something like that.

There have been martyrs in every kind of religion on the face of the earth. Just because you're a martyr doesn't make you right, but during that period of persecution,

Cyprian wrote a letter, and it was a letter sent to the

Christians who were imprisoned in the mines, M -I -N -E -S, the mines.

What the Romans would do is they would take you, and if you would not curse

Christ, then you might just be executed, or hey, we've got some slaves to work here, and so we will put them in the mines, which you think being in mines is dangerous today.

Try it in North Africa in 250, okay? There is no oxygen, and there is nothing like that.

It's not a question of if you're gonna die, it's just a question of when you're gonna die. So it's a death sentence, but the

Romans get minerals and gold and stuff like that out of it in the process, and so there were a number of Christians imprisoned in the mines, just waiting for their death, and Cyprian wrote a letter to them, and I wanna read you a portion of what he said to them.

But that, being first severely beaten with clubs and ill -used, you have begun by sufferings of that kind, the glorious firstlings of your confession, for our salvation is not a matter to be execrated by us, for a

Christian body is not very greatly terrified at clubs, seeing all its hope is in the wood.

The servant of Christ acknowledges the sacrament of his salvation, redeemed by wood to life eternal, the cross, of course.

He is advanced by wood to the crown, but what wonder if, as golden and silver vessels, you have been committed to the mine that is the home of gold and silver, except that now the nature of the mines has changed, and the places which previously had been accustomed to yield gold and silver have begun to receive them.

Moreover, they have put fetters on your feet and have bound your blessed limbs, and the temples of God with disgraceful chains, as if the spirit also could be bound with the body, or your gold could be stained by the contact of iron.

To men who are dedicated to God and attesting their faith with religious courage, such things are ornaments, not chains, nor they bind the feet of the

Christians for infamy, but glorify them for a crown. Oh, feet blessedly bound, which are loosed not by the smith, but by the

Lord. Oh, feet blessedly bound, which are guided to paradise in the way of salvation.

Oh, feet bound for the present time in the world that they may be always free with the

Lord. Oh, feet lingering for a while among the fetters and crossbars, but to run quickly to Christ on a glorious road.

Let cruelty, either envious or malignant, hold you here in its bonds and chains as long as it will.

From this earth and from these sufferings, you shall speedily come to the kingdom of heaven. The body is not cherished in the mines with couch and cushions, but it is cherished with the refreshment and solace of Christ.

The frame, wearied with labors, lies prostrate on the ground, but it is no penalty to lie down with Christ.

Your limbs, unbathed, are foul and disfigured with filth and dirt, but within they are spiritually cleansed, although without, the flesh is defiled.

There the bread is scarce, but man liveth not by bread alone, but by the Word of God.

Shivering, you want clothing, but he who puts on Christ is both abundantly clothed and adorned.

The hair of your half -shorn beard seems repulsive, but since Christ is the head of the man, anything whatever must needs become that head, which is illustrious on account of Christ's name.

All that deformity, detestable and foul to Gentiles, with what splendor shall it be recompensed?

This temporal and brief suffering, how shall it be exchanged for the reward of a bright and eternal honor when according to the word of the blessed

Apostle, the Lord shall change the body of our humiliation that it may be fashioned like to the body of His brightness?

And that was just a portion of the letter. It was much longer. But to listen to the ability to take the most grievous persecutions of the world, the beating with clubs, and to realize, well, the club's made of wood.

And the cross was made of wood. The means of our redemption. And then to think of the gold and the silver they're taking out for the

Romans, but in reality, they are the true gold and silver going into the mines.

And the binding of the feet in stocks, which cannot possibly keep them from running to Christ in glory.

It's just, it's an astonishing thing because this is, I suppose in a sense, when you think about it, if Cyprian had not sealed his testimony with his own blood, one might say, well, it's easy for you to say.

But he did. He was willing to go to these places. He was willing to do whatever he needed to do.

And he gave the final testimony, a good testimony before men in how he died.

But the fact that he was able to see past the surface level nature of the persecution, to realize, to see everything in the light of Christ, and to encourage these

Christians in their suffering to glorify

Christ and to see not only their glorious future, but the fact that even in the midst of their degradation, their hunger, their shivering in the cold, that they were living a life even now that the world could not begin to understand.

There are a number of works in this time period that begin to delve down to this level of an understanding of what it means to be a persecuted

Christian in this world. Because as I said, from Paul, so the 50s, and really earlier than that in Jerusalem, to 313, you had persecution in the

Roman Empire. Wasn't consistent. It wasn't always the same. It was in one area, it's another area. And even after that, you're gonna start seeing the persecution of Christians based upon the establishment of a external

Christianity that doesn't necessarily have a change of the heart. That's later history.

The point is in all of these things, we don't know, we know some of the,

I think two, maybe three names attached to this letter of Cyprian of some of the people who were bringing the letter down and were associated in that particular area.

But we don't know who those Christians were in those mines. And I can guarantee you when they died, they were not put into a tomb.

There is no stone. They were probably just left in the mines, thrown into a corner someplace.

Their bodies never identified. Their loved ones never told. And their names do not come down to us in any fashion to where we can go, thanks be to God for Dionysus.

Thanks be to God for this person. But it does not matter because the only one who needs to remember will never forget.

Their reward is absolutely certain. And nobody in those mines needs to for a second to have to think about, wow, people in 2022 won't know who

I was. Never crossed their mind. It won't be relevant because they were a part of Christ's body and they are amongst the martyrs that are singing praises to this very day in that glorious vision given to us in the book of Revelation of the worship that is ongoing every moment before the altar.

So many of those who've gone before us, we have no idea who they were. We don't have names, but we know they were there.

We know they were there because the Roman state was so afraid of them. And the

Roman state was afraid because they were the people of the land. They were the slaves and the servants and the world didn't record their names, but Christ did and their lives were lived for His honor and glory.

And the fact of the matter is the people who persecuted them should be the ones most concerned about the fact that their names will be wiped from all of history.

They may have thought at the time that they were the ones with the power, but time changes perspectives.

We do know some of their names and their names are ignoble. Their names are to be known in infamy, not in fame.

And so church history can be abused.

It can be ignored. It can be exalted. It can be twisted. But the reality is if we accept the biblical teaching that Christ has been building

His church for 2000 years, obviously we can learn things from it.

It doesn't mean that we have to repeat the mistakes of those who've gone before us. It doesn't even mean that we may be able to, in every situation, figure out what the mistake was or what the proper course was.

It's so easy to second guess. So easy to second guess. One thing for sure for me, teaching church history,

I have learned that I need to really think about being gracious toward those who came before me because I don't know everything they were experiencing.

I don't know everything that they knew or didn't know. And I'm gonna need grace when the generations after me look at me.

And you see, in certain eschatologies, no one ever thinks of that because they figure we are always the last generation, right?

That's how I was raised. That's how I was raised. I was never raised to think about how history would look at me.

There wasn't gonna be any history after me. I mean, when I was a young man, I was seriously like, Lord, could

I at least get married first before the rapture happens? I'd like to have kids and I'd like to get married.

Not even thinking down to the point where getting out of a chair makes you make strange noises no matter how hard you try.

You just don't think about things like that. And I wish I had been taught to think about those things.

But my dad wasn't taught that. He was taught differently as well. So there you go. But as a church historian now,

I do think, goodness, if I will need grace from those in the future, then

I need to extend it now. I need to extend it now. So it's real easy. I'm not saying you cover over the things that happened.

There are things in Cyprian theology I'd go, hmm. But at the same time, if I had only been a

Christian as long as Cyprian was a Christian, just a matter of years, and I didn't have all the commentaries, and I didn't have the

Calvins, and I didn't have the Spurgeons, and I didn't have the Warfields, and I didn't have the Hodges, how much of a mess would

I be being converted later in my life as being probably a

Roman attorney? I'm an attorney. How can God save anybody like that, right?

Any attorneys here? Hate to flat out there, but. So I invite you to the study of church history.

But don't, let me close with this. I'll tell you a personal story. In 2017, we had the opportunity of doing a tour in Germany the month before the 500th anniversary.

So we were over there in September of 2017. And I'm so glad we got to go.

And it wasn't my first time. I've spoken in Wittenberg numerous times. I had been to the

Castle Church in Wittenberg. I had gone jogging all around Wittenberg, which in the morning is really great because there's nobody there.

It's really, really neat. Same thing with London. I don't know why that is. If you want to get out and see London, see it before sunrise.

There's nobody there. It's just they roll up the sidewalks and there's nobody there. But we got to go and visit all sorts of places, even places

I hadn't seen before. And the first night that I was with my group,

I was the leader of the group. The first night that I was there, the people that put this cruise on, had a cruise, this tour, because they do cruises too, had just had a huge, major evangelical group.

I think they had four buses. We had one. They had four buses. Okay, that's a big group. And the names, if I gave you the names, it would be all the people you'd see at the

Shepherd's Conference and Ligonier and all the big ones, big names, big, big, big names.

And so the first night, we're in Berlin. We're going to be starting the tour from Berlin. And I got up and I gave a presentation.

And one of the things I said was, now I'm perfectly well aware of the fact that most of the men that were going to be studying their lives, seeing where they were born, seeing where they ministered, most of them would never have extended to me the hand of fellowship, and some of them would have had me executed.

And it got as quiet in the room as it just got now. And after the presentation, the people who put the tour on called me over.

They're friends of mine. They called me over and they said, no one has ever said that before on one of our tours.

And we're talking major church historians, big names. If I mentioned three of them, you'd go, because,

I mean, they're the biggest names. Just figure, go through the big names and that's who we're talking about. I said, well, wait a minute, but that's a fact.

I mean, you know, Zwingli drowned Anabaptist from the bridge in Zurich, and Luther eventually gave in to the use of capital punishment against Anabaptists.

And Calvin had numerous Anabaptists kicked out of Geneva. And so what do you mean, that they don't ever talk about that?

No, they don't. I said, if you don't talk about that, then you're giving a caricature of church history.

You're not talking about what church history actually was. And they're like, it's the way it's always been.

And I think it was a little bit tough for some of the people in my group, the level of honesty, because if you've never seen it,

I highly recommend to you the four minute and 50 second video on YouTube.

Look up James White Fritz Erbe, Fritz Erbe, E -R -B -E.

It's less than five minutes long. And it was a video that we recorded at the

Wartburg Castle. The Wartburg Castle is where Luther hid from the empire after the

Diet of Worms, when he said, hier steh ich, ich kann nicht anders, Gott helf mir. Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me.

And remember his protector, Frederick, had him kidnapped and ran him off to the

Wartburg Castle to keep him from being killed. And that's where he translated the New Testament into German. Well, we were visiting the

Wartburg Castle, but I had found out about the story of Fritz Erbe. Fritz Erbe was an

Anabaptist who read Luther's New Testament, became convinced that baptism was for believers, and therefore wouldn't baptize his children.

So he was arrested by the Lutherans. This is after, Luther's still alive, but this is like about 15 years later.

And so now this area is Lutheran, but you still have to baptize your babies.

And so he's imprisoned. And so he starts preaching out of the window of his cell and converting people.

And so they drag him up the hill and they throw him into a dungeon in the Wartburg Castle. Now this is, if you think of those large round spires in the ancient castles, this was the smaller one in the back.

But you can, if you go up the outside stairwell, there's this little door and you go in and there is a hole, not nearly as big as this little section right here.

It's about half of it, about half of the size of that, of where the stairs are right there.

And what they do is they tie you up and they lower you through that hole into the bottom of that spire.

And you can see that there are no doors in there. There are no windows and there are no doors. The only light is that small square, about 40 feet above your head.

And they put Fritz Erba in there. And initially what they would do is Lutheran ministers would come and they would sit at that hole and they would preach down to Fritz Erba to try to convert him.

Now think with me for just a second. How many of us are so convinced of our view of baptism that we would even let ourselves get lowered down there, let alone stay for any length of time at all?

You know how long Fritz Erba was down there? Seven years before he died in that hole, never let out.

And Luther knew he was there and felt it was appropriate because that's what sacralism is about.

They think they found his body, I think in 2006, 2016, they found his skeleton outside the walls, they think.

We did a video about Fritz Erba and what happened there. And some of the people in my group, there was one dear lady in our group was like,

I don't care about studying anything more about Martin Luther. If he could know that he was there and not lift a finger,

I can't be a Christian. And I said to her, I said, better be careful. You adopt that standard and there weren't any

Christians for a long, long time. And she eventually came to me by the end and said, okay,

I get it, it's tough, it's hard to learn these things because that's not what we've been told.

And that's the problem. That's the problem. We don't get told. We don't get told the whole story.

And so I invite you to church history. And by the way, the point that I made at the end of the video that is very, very important is that someday

Fritz Erba will be together with his persecutors in perfect redemption and worship of Christ together.

That's the thing to remember. That's the thing to remember. So look it up, it's on YouTube.

Like I said, it's less than five minutes long. And it was an amazing opportunity to get to do something like that.

So church history, there are warts and there are problems and there's glories.

And you look around the church today and go, yep, sort of the same thing now, right? There are warts and there are problems and then there's glorious things going on.

So we're a part of it. We're a part of it. So I wasn't trying to just not tell you,

Wade, but how in the world do you describe what I just did? How can I summarize it? It's just like, we're just gonna wander around talking about people we know and don't know in church history and make application.

That's sort of how it works. So thank you for being here. Did you wanna just close a prayer or did you wanna?

Sure. Everybody's like, we want out of here.

Yes, sir. Really?

Mormon, could you define that for me? Mormon, I've never. What's a Mormon missionary? They were half right.

First, there's a chapter in my book, Is the Mormon My Brother? Specifically on this subject, on the subject of what's called theosis.

What they may be referring to, my gut feeling is they probably have never read anything themselves. They heard a professor somewhere saying something that was repeating it.

None of the early church fathers believed that God was once a man living on another planet and we could become gods. That's just absurdity.

What some people in the East believed and continue to believe to this day is a doctrine called theosis.

So in Eastern Orthodox theology, even Athanasius believed and said that God became man so that men could become

God. That is, as Peter says, we inherit the divine nature.

Doesn't mean we cease being men. If you read Athanasius, he in no way, shape or form is saying that our nature is changed from being humans into the same being of God.

What he is saying is what we would call sanctification and glorification in the perfection of our humanity and as glorification would involve an ever closer relationship to God.

Some people would even say that Jonathan Edwards went so far as to go a little bit too far into our union with God and eventually an almost absorption into God.

But the early church fathers did not do that. They did not believe that men were of the same species as God.

They had not believed that God was once a man who would become a god. And so all the categories that are necessary for the

Mormon belief to be true are simply not there. The only thing that is there is the idea that in redemption,

God not only brings us back to where Adam was, but what relationship could

Adam have had with God if sin had not entered into the situation? Would there not be an ever growing closeness between the creature and the creator?

But that never changes the reality that Adam came into existence at a point in time.

In Mormonism, if you're familiar with the theology, the earlier Mormon teachers and who knows where the current

Mormons are on this, but the earlier Mormon teachers believed that before you become a spirit child, you were an intelligence.

And that all intelligences are eternal. So God's intelligence, your intelligence were equal with God in that way.

All of that kind of stuff, completely absent from any of the church fathers, totally. So it's easy to take some poor 19 -year -old kid and give him a quote who has no earthly idea what the early church was teaching about monotheism and everything else and confuse him with something like that.

But it's been going on for a while. What was that?

Sounded like a woodpecker. All right, well thank you very, very much for having me.

I hope that was of interest to you. And I'll close with, let's close with a word of prayer.

Father, once again, we thank you for the freedom that we have had to be able to gather together and to consider these things.

May we truly be thankful for the freedoms that we have, these opportunities. We have all had enough to eat today and we've had enough fuel to be able to get here.

Lord, help us truly be thankful for all of these things. You are the source of all of these and they are blessings from your hand.

Help us to realize that we stand in a very long line of those who have sought to serve

Jesus Christ and that most of those who came before us never had anything close to what we have had.

And they've, most of those were challenged in many ways to be unfaithful to you.

They experienced persecution and difficulty. May we be thankful for all that you've given to us and yet Lord, if you call us to face difficult times, may we be a people who stand with all those who've gone before us and recognize that our calling is to follow

Christ wherever he leads. And so thank you for this time. Thank you for this church. Bless the continuing ministry here and for all these things in Christ's name, amen.