Have You Had A True Revelation of Jesus？ — Steve Gallagher

Jesus’ Ministry Turns Toward the Great Confession

All right, so we're going to get back on track with our series of messages through the life of Christ. And if you remember, the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth has taken a turn and the people of Israel didn't really know what to do with this guy.

They just didn't know because on the one hand, the things that he did and the things that he said left them breathless. I mean, they were amazed at his teaching and even more so at the miracles, no doubt.

But then you had, like, coming in on this other side, these hateful attacks on Jesus by the Pharisees. And people were just in a lot of confusion. They're pretty much out of it anyway and didn't know what to do.

And it all kind of came to a head at the feeding of the 5 ,000. Those of you who were here a few weeks ago when I spoke on that incident, you remember that actually it was 5 ,000 men, so it was probably, I don't know, could have been as many as 20 ,000 people.

And all these people, this multitude of people, and people had heard about healings, you know. But if you're not there and you don't know the person, let's say you knew the person all his life, he'd been blind all his life, and you saw him heal, that would be powerful, really powerful.

But as someone that you don't know, there's just a lingering doubt in the back of your mind, well, maybe he faked it or maybe he wasn't really blind, they set all this up. You know, there's always that kind of doubt.

But there was no doubt about this. I mean, and I said this, you guys remember that we're here, there's Jesus sitting up on this hillside, and to feed 10, 20 ,000 people bread and fish, it had to have taken hours for him to keep pulling that out of that basket, right?

I mean, they're watching this man, and it's like there's a bottomless pit underneath that basket, you know, and this fish and loaves are coming up, and he just keeps handing it out, handing it out. What an amazing thing.

The people were so impacted by what they witnessed with their own eyes, that they were ready to take him by force and make him king of Israel. I mean, what a tremendous opportunity this was for Jesus to really establish the church.

Really, an awesome opportunity. But he did everything wrong from that point on. You know, he starts talking about, well, you're going to have to eat my flesh and drink my blood. You couldn't think of anything more bizarre to say to people, really.

But you know what? Even though this kind of story drives seeker-sensitive preachers and their megachurches crazy, Jesus was concerned not about quantity, but about quality. He was looking for sincere people who were willing to battle their way through things they don't understand.

When things don't go the way they think they should go, he wanted a people who would fight their way through those kinds of discouragements and confusion and all of that. So what started out so hopeful, by now it seemed as though everything's falling apart.

So Jesus heads north again with his disciples to get away from the scowling Pharisees and the intrusive crowds that were always pushing in on him, wanting something from him. He decides, you know, I've got to get away with my disciples.

The reality was he knew the disciples were out of it too, pretty much. But Jesus understood that momentous events were heading their way, and these disciples needed to be prepared to face what was coming.

And the way that was going to happen is he was going to have to sit with them and spend quality time with them, instructing them and showing them what it was and what it meant to really be in relationship with Yahweh.

So they're walking along up there by Caesarea Philippi, which is, I don't know, some miles north of Bethsaida and the lake and all that. So they're walking along and Jesus asks a question. Now when Jesus asks a question, he's not looking for information, okay?

He's got a direct tie-in with all the information in the world, and it's not Google, okay? When he asks the question, he's always looking to lead the conversation where he wants it to go. So he asked them, who do people say the Son of Man is?

And he knew what people were thinking, their idle guesses and all of that. It must have grieved him to know what people were thinking. But he's leading his disciples. He's not worried about what people think.

He doesn't care about popular opinion. He's concerned about building truth into his disciples. And so they start, you know, kind of sharing the things that they've heard out there amongst the people. Some say you're John the Baptist.

Well, that came from Herod Antipas, of course. And that's a crazy thought anyway, because Jesus and John's ministries ran concurrently for a time. How could he be John? That's crazy. Others say Elijah.

Now this came from Malachi's prophecy that Elijah would appear before that great and terrible day of the Lord. And so that's, you know, where that came from. And then others say Jeremiah, and that comes from this Jewish fable legend that Jeremiah was going to show up before the Messiah came, and he had hidden the Ark of the Covenant away somewhere, and he was going to bring it out.

And yeah, a bunch of nonsense. And then they just said, or one of the prophets, which was kind of a catch-all phrase that, you know, if it isn't one of these, then it's one of the prophets is Jesus. Some kind of reincarnation theology or something.

What they didn't say, and they could have said, and Jesus certainly knew, was that many of them had already bought into what the Pharisees were saying. That the power that he was exerting to heal people and do the miracles that he did came from the devil.

Jesus understood that. And I don't know if the disciples were just trying to spare his feelings or whatever, but you know that that kind of talk was out there. And it's really not much different nowadays.

You know, people have all kinds of ideas about Jesus. Until you really give yourself to living the life that he has laid out, you don't really know. You're going to be in a lot of confusion. He says that.

You will know when you start obeying these teachings, whether I tell you, I'm telling you the truth or not. We want to know first, but that isn't the way it works. J. C. Ryle said this. It's kind of lengthy, but it's worth hearing.

He said, Let it never surprise us to find the same variety of opinions about Christ and his gospel in our times. Now in his times, he's talking, this is like 1860s, okay? So this is a long time ago. God's truth disturbs the spiritual laziness of men.

It obliges them to think. It makes them begin to talk and reason and speculate and invent theories to account for its spread in some corners and its rejection in others. Thousands in every age of the church spend their lives in this way and never come to the point of drawing near to God.

They satisfy themselves with a miserable round of gossip about this preacher's sermons or that writer's opinions. They cannot quite make up their own minds what is true and what is right. Year after year rolls on and finds them in the same state, talking, criticizing, fault finding, speculating, but never getting any further.

Hovering like the moth around religion, but never settling down like the bee to feed on its treasures. They never boldly lay hold of Christ. They never set themselves heartily to the great business of serving God.

They never take up the cross and become thorough Christians. And at last, after all their talking, they die in their sins, unprepared to meet God. Don't let that be you, dear ones. Don't let that be you.

Someone who just, I think Nate said it, I think, someone whose heart is impenetrable. You're satisfied to just talk about religion and be around it and so on, like the moth, but you never plunge in for yourself.

You know, the bottom line is, if you won't believe, the time will come when you can't believe. And that's a frightening thought here in this place, because you are bombarded with truth in this place, week after week.

And yet, there are people, I'm telling you, because I've been doing this for 37 years, there are people who sit in these meetings, powerful meetings like this, and ward off every attempt of the Holy Spirit to reach their hearts.

And when you do that, you finally get to the place where it becomes God Himself who hardens your heart. That should terrify you guys. You've got a very bad track record before you came here. Something better change, right?

Something better change while you have this opportunity. All right, so anyway, Jesus gets to where He is headed with His disciples. But who do you say that I am? Now, in one sense, this conviction that Jesus is the Son of God has been growing in the disciples' hearts since the beginning.

You know, when He was baptized, a voice came out of heaven saying, you are my beloved Son, and you I am well pleased. Man, wow, what a powerful thing. Then John the Baptist called Him the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

And he said, I saw and bore witness that this is the Son of God. Andrew came running to Peter and said, we have found the Messiah. Then Nathanael said, Rabbi, you are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel.

Then after He quieted the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the disciples exclaimed, you are certainly God's Son. And more recently, right after that incident with the 5 ,000 who were fed, Peter said, we believe and we know that you're the Holy One of God.

So this has been a mounting awareness that the disciples have had. You know, it's been one revelation after another, each one adding to what they've already been hearing. But none of these were the great confession.

We don't call any of those, this is the great confession. This one is special. It's different. Something is different about this time. Because at this point, the entire culture has now turned against Jesus.

And now to make that, you know, it's one thing when all the crowds were following after Him. I remember, you know, they've got this revival going on down in Asbury. Praise God for it. Kathy and I lived down in Pensacola for seven months at the revival going on at Brownsville back then.

And we would see, I mean, thousands of people coming through there every week, you know, clamoring to be around the exciting things that were going on, wanting to be touched by one of the pastors and wanting to get some touch from God and all this.

But then you wonder, what happened to them? Where are all these people? Where's the excitement now? You know, when everything's going the way where people are clamoring to be around Jesus, now it was easy to say, yeah, you're the Son of God.

But now that the whole culture has rejected Him and turned against Him, for Peter to make this statement now truly was a great confession. Let's look here at these verses, what Jesus said after Peter made this confession.

The Father’s Revelation and the Authority of the Church

Verse 17, blessed are you. This is the first beatitude, maybe the only one, I can't remember, but maybe this is the only personal beatitude in the Bible, I don't know. But anyway, it's definitely the first one in Matthew.

Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father, who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Now this business about binding and loosing, don't get too upset about this.

I know that some of these crazy charismatics get out there and they start binding the forces of evil over cities and loosing the power of God. How come nothing ever happens if that was really going on?

It's just a bunch of nonsense. What he's talking about here is he was going to use Peter to open the door of faith to the entire Jewish realm on the day of Pentecost, and then later at Cornelius' house he's going to open the door of faith to the Gentiles.

That's really mostly what he's talking about. He's giving Peter and the disciples authority to speak on his behalf so that people would continue to come into the faith in the days ahead. That's what it's all about.

And then he says, or it says here, then he warned the disciples that they should tell no one that he was the Christ. The reality was these disciples were not yet ready. They need to go through some stuff before they are ready to represent Almighty God to an unbelieving culture and so on.

Let me read what Dean Farrar says. When their own faith was confirmed beyond all wavering by the mighty fact of his resurrection, when their hearts had been filled with the new Shekinah of God's Holy Spirit, and their brows with final consecration had been mitered with Pentecostal flame, then, but not till then, would the hour have come for them to go forth and teach all nations that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God.

You know, America is full of people who confess that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, is the Son of God. There's millions of people in this nation who confess that. And you know, if you agree that the Bible is telling the truth about Jesus, then you are a confessing Christian yourself.

But there's, how do I say it? Just because you confess that Jesus is who he claims to be does not mean that you necessarily have saving faith. And that's what I want to get at here. What does it mean, really, to have that kind of, to make that kind of a confession?

We call it the great confession. And I want to just touch on three things about this because we have to have a three-point message, right? Isn't that required? This confession will only prove to be great in your life if it leads you into a legitimate knowledge of God.

Do I need to repeat that? This confession will only prove to be great in your life if it leads you into a legitimate knowledge of God. Now, preachers, you know, they love to say after, when they preach through this portion of Scripture, this is the most important question you will ever face.

And I'm not disputing that. There's truth to that. But like I said, it's not enough to just profess. It's not enough to just make this confession that Jesus is the Messiah. That's the beginning. But so many want to leave it there.

And there's so much more that should follow that. And if it's not following it, something's wrong. Now, in our culture, where reality is anything you think it to be, the answer would be more like, Jesus is who you want Him to be.

You know, so our culture wants Jesus to be woke. So therefore, that's the Jesus they follow. And legalistic Christians want Him to be a hard taskmaster. So therefore, that's the Jesus they follow. And lawless Christians want Him to be a soft, squishy, grace-covers-everything God.

And so that's the Jesus they follow. You know, you can make Jesus into whatever you want Him to be, but you're just in a delusion if it's not reality, right? I'm going to read a couple of portions out of this book.

This is my last book, and I will never write another book again, unless the Lord tells me to. I have to do what I'm told, but I can't imagine. Anyway, this is what it says in regards to this. Our culture is increasingly favoring the more tolerant philosophy of humanistic relativism.

People think everyone's opinions and ideas should be considered relative to differences in perception and consideration. There is no universal objective truth according to relativism. Rather, each point of view has its own truth.

You know, the problem with this is everyone can't be right. Everyone can't be right. That's crazy, because Josh has one reality, and Chad, man, I wanted to call you Todd, and I knew that wasn't right.

He has a different reality, you know, and not really. These guys both love the Lord, but you know what I mean. Out there in culture, one person believes one thing, someone else... You can't say that everyone's own personal reality is truth.

It's not truth. There is truth. Truth is reality, and you know, how can it be truth if people's ideas of it are contradicting each other? It really is what C .S. Lewis said. Jesus is either a liar, a downright fabricator, deceiver, whipping out mendacious whoppers.

My wife loves that. That came out of my book, mendacious whoppers. Or he's a lunatic. I think, didn't he say something like, thinks he's a hard-boiled egg or something, something like that, Lewis said.

Or he's who he claims to be. Now, if you believe he was who he claims to be, that should have a radical, complete overthrowing of your life. Jesus is headed for the cross, and he knows that the day is coming that he's going to have to hand over to his disciples this movement.

He understands that, and so it's just absolutely vital that they get the truth inside them. You know, people make that profession, and I've actually heard preachers say, just say it and you are saved.

Yeah, yikes is right. Just say it. Just say Jesus is Lord and you're saved. You'll be with the Lord in heaven forever. No, that's not true. That is a lie. When you make that confession, it should be leading you into a real knowledge of God.

Revelation from the Father Must Precede Genuine Faith

All right, number two, this confession will only prove to be great in your life if it is preceded by a great revelation. Verse 17, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

I don't know if you noticed when you were reading through this passage, the word confession is not even in here. Did you notice that? How many of you noticed that? What? This is the great confession. How many of you knew this was the great confession?

You guys need to read your Bibles. Well, the word confess is not even in here, but the word that is in here is reveal. And reveal is usually translated as revelation. Revelation is the word apocalypto, which literally means to take a cover off of something.

There's something there that's been there all along, but it's been covered, and apocalyptic means you take the cover off of it. That's what it means. So here's what happens. Jesus and the Father are of one mind, right?

So Jesus asks a question, and the Father supplies the answer to Peter. That day really was a very powerful spiritual experience up there in Caesarea Philippi. You know, I was thinking about it when we were singing, and man, God bless you guys.

You were totally entered in, and it's powerful worship, right? Powerful worship. And I was thinking of the Holy Spirit, how He comes sometimes so powerfully, powerfully like that. I don't know if you've ever experienced Him come into you and powerfully affect you inside like that with some revelation truth.

There is nothing like it. And that's what happened to these disciples that day. Peter said it, but it came powerfully upon them. This is the Son of the living God, and it changed their lives, and they would never be the same again.

If you've seen Jesus of Nazareth, there's this one part in the movie where Matthew, and I think it's Peter talking, and Peter said something about going back to his wife, and Matthew said, no, you'll never go back.

We will never be the same again, and neither will the whole world. That's not a biblical statement, but man, that's right on. I mean, that is exactly what happened. Jesus told him, flesh and blood did not reveal this to you.

In other words, what Peter learned about the Lord did not come through sitting in Sunday school, you know, in whatever little village, I guess Bethsaida is where he grew up. It didn't come through listening to sermons from some Pharisee there, you know, on Sabbath, and it certainly didn't come through one of the rabbinical schools.

He didn't go to one of the rabbinical schools. He was just a dumb regular guy fisherman, but even at this point, you know, at this early stage of his spiritual life, he was light years ahead of the Pharisees because he was humble enough to receive.

The Pharisees packed full of a bunch of head knowledge that half of it was wrong, but so full of themselves and full of pride and unteachable, couldn't be told anything. They will get nothing from Jesus because they won't receive from Jesus.

It's all got to line up with their boxed religion that they got all figured out, and I'm telling you that is very true today in the church. We got our own version of boxed religion. And when the Lord wants to do something special and something new, Pharisees can't handle it.

I just saw a text about, I won't name the man, I'll just say that he's just a mocker under the guise of religion, who's basically said that the worship leaders at this revival down in Asbury are all queers, his words.

The worship is led by a bunch of queers, that's what he said. But every time God is doing something, this same man who wants to be the Bible answer man or something, he's just a hard-hearted Pharisee.

What does that got to do with what I'm talking about? I don't know. You know, let me just talk about the church system for a minute, and before I do, before I go on in this rant, let me just preface it by saying there are many, many godly people in America.

There are many godly pastors in America. But there is a system, and the system has been established through seminaries, because that is where you go if you want to be a preacher, you go to seminary or to a Bible college.

And the problem is, for the most part, I'm not saying always, but for the part, what has happened is the seminaries and Bible colleges have built this training for their students all around academic learning, academic knowledge, book learning.

And they treat the Bible like it's a textbook. This is a textbook to them. And the whole idea is you learn all as much as you can about, you know, the Greek grammar, the Hebrew grammar, all about biblical times and all that.

Listen, I want the Bible school and I want the Bible college both. And I love that kind of information. I love to just dig deep into the Word of God. But let me tell you something, those kids that are going into these schools, what they need is a powerful encounter with Jesus Christ.

They don't need a bunch of book learning so much as they need to know how and learn how to walk with God and how to love the people who God sends to them and how to hear his voice, how to walk with him and obey him.

That's what they need. They should be coming out of Bible college or seminary on fire for God, walking in humility and love. That is what a graduate from a seminary should be like. But I'm sorry to say that 99 of the time, and I'm probably not exaggerating, they come out packed full with a bunch of knowledge, head knowledge.

Our seminaries by and large are led by unspiritual men who probably don't even know the Lord. Now, I do have good news for you. And I arranged this before this Asbury thing broke out. This is really interesting.

There is a professor there at Asbury. His name is John Oswald. I can't pronounce his name. Oswald. He's a professor of Old Testament theology, and our next special meetings, which will be held in July, he is going to be our speaker.

Yay! And he is a godly man. He really is a godly man, and you're going to be blessed, those of you who are still here then. You're going to be blessed by this man because he walks with the Lord, and yet he operates in a seminary in that academic setting, but he does it in the right way.

And he's not the only one. There have been others. Grant Osborne is another man. He just recently passed, but there have been other seminarians like that who really do walk with the Lord. So I'm just trying to balance it out a little bit, okay?

They're not all a bunch of frauds, just most of them. Listen, I've been to Bible school. I thank God for it because I learned a lot of things. It broadened my understanding, all that stuff. But what I learned about overcoming habitual sexual sin came through revelation from God.

And what I learned about Jesus Christ came through revelation of God. And what I learned about having a life in God came through revelation. It didn't come through, not Bible school, it didn't come from all the years I've been studying and stuff.

It came through the Lord. Now you can learn good things from sermons and books, and listen, here I've got to balance things out a little bit because we use books, right? What makes us different? I don't know.

See if I can't win you over here. I would like to think that, well, I can tell you for a fact that the books that I've written came from revelation, knowledge. I think most of you probably know this. Do they know the story about sexual idolatry?

Is that in any of our stuff? I can't remember. Do you know about that? Sexual idolatry? Let's see if I can say it real quick. 1987, we were in California. That's where we're from. And I went up to a cabin on the coast and fasted and prayed for five days, seeking the Lord.

And when I came back home, I was going to work on this book that I felt the Lord was laying it on my heart to write, At the Altar of Sexual Idolatry. And I was writing things that were way beyond my spiritual understanding at that time.

Trust me, I didn't know what I was talking about. But I'm telling you, I was typing, and it literally was like automatic handwriting. It really was. It was like a flood, and I could hardly type fast enough to keep up with what was coming at me.

Now, you guys who have read this book, does it seem like there's some truth in there? And I can't tell you how many men have told me through the years, it's like you followed me around and you were reading my mind.

Well, part of it is because I did live it myself, and I did come out of it myself. But it came to me through revelation, knowledge from the Lord. So, you know, you want a book, and there are many books out there that, other books, not by me, I'm just saying other books out there that have come that way.

And there's many godly pastors out there preaching out of revelation. You know, they're just there, it's the Lord anointing on them. But you still have to, the Lord has to speak to your heart. Or what, if it doesn't come that way, if it isn't, doesn't come into your heart, it just ends up being stuck up here in your head.

And it makes you, you know, more knowledgeable, and that's all it makes you, head knowledge. The Apostle Paul prayed that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him.

And that is my prayer for you guys. That is my prayer. That is what you need in this place, arguably more than anything else, because that will precede repentance. It's when you come into a revelation of Jesus Christ, when you see what He's really like, and that becomes real to you, don't worry, you will repent of your sin.

Preachers make a big deal about, you know, confessing. But you guys did that before you came here, right? You were confessing Jesus Christ before you came to this place, and it wasn't enough to keep you out of sin.

Something was missing. You needed a confession that was from revelation, from the Lord. All right, number three, this confession will only prove to be great in your life if it leads to godly living. I guess that is how you can tell if there's any reality to it, any strength to it.

Confession Must Produce Godly Living

There's a false belief system in America that much learning makes you godly. That like, learn, learn, learn, learn, you know, listen to Christian radio all the time, and read a bunch of books, and the more you read and understand, the godlier you somehow become.

But that just isn't true. All that knowledge, all that does is make you more culpable. That's what it does. It makes you more culpable. Knowledge of spiritual things without a life in God behind it is meaningless.

You just become an empty suit. There's no substance inside. You know, to the New Testament believers, to learn about spiritual things meant nothing if it didn't translate into a greater intimacy with the Lord, a very real consecration of one's life, a deeper love for God and others.

To confess Christ must mean that we are sincerely and earnestly seeking to emulate his life. He said you will know them by their fruit, right? You'll know them by what's coming out of them, what their life looks like.

Now, I have long believed that most of the men who come into this residential program came into Christianity through osmosis. I'm not saying everybody, okay? Maybe you didn't, but I'm saying it's my opinion, for what it's worth, that most did.

Osmosis is a subtle, often unconscious assimilation of information. That's what the word means. And in this book, you got to buy it sometime, I talk about this whole subject, and I began by talking about immersion learning, which is how you learn a language or learn a culture.

All right, so let me just read a little passage here. In other words, the best way to understand the Chinese people would be to live in China for an extended period of time. A person will learn far more about the country that way than simply by reading books about it.

This principle also holds true when entering the Christian community. A newcomer to Christianity quickly learns the ins and outs of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. This comes about by being immersed in the Christian culture.

While there are some definite benefits to this natural learning process, there are also inherent dangers when it comes to the things of God. I fear that multitudes have joined the American church, have become thoroughly acquainted with her ways, but have never really been converted to Christ.

This is especially true of children raised in Christian homes. Are you guys understanding what I'm saying there? You aren't a Christian just because you've learned how to obey the unwritten list of do's and don'ts in the evangelical community.

That doesn't mean you're really a Christian. You're a Christian if the Holy Spirit has revealed Jesus Christ to you and you have submitted to his lordship. All right, I'm going to wrap things up, only because you've been such a poor audience today.

The Church Built on Revelation and Christ’s Triumph

Jesus said, upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. The rock, of course, is this revelation of who Jesus is. Upon this revelation that must come to every single person, not just that Peter had it or the disciples had it, but it must come to every single person.

Now, if you would have been a bystander and you heard this whole conversation happen with Jesus, you might have thought that he was in some kind of grandiose delusion, you know. He has been thoroughly discredited and treated with disdain by the religious experts of his day.

The crowds who had followed him have now turned away in disgust at some of the things he has said. All he has to show for all his efforts is this ragtag little group of manual laborers, and even one of them is going to soon prove to be a traitor.

He has faced nothing but rejection in his past, and all he has to look forward to is a horrible death on a Roman cross. Yet, the Lord, that day, as he was there with his disciples, he could look off into the future, the decades, the centuries, on down into the future before his return, and he could see millions of people from every nation, every tribe, every people group on this earth, millions of people over the centuries would come into the faith, and all of this would happen in the midst of a world that lies in the power of the evil one.

It would be done in the face of hell's forces, and it would be done in spite of the lack of interest by the multitudes. Jesus can look and see that this little band of men would be the formation, the beginning of something that would grow and become a mighty force on this earth over time.

Yeah, it didn't look like much, but that day the church was founded. That was the day the church, the ecclesia, the called out ones, that was the day it was founded, really, and there was nothing hell could do to stop God's mighty plan of redemption from unfolding.

Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. And Lord, I just want to close in prayer by acknowledging that. Skip, why don't you guys come on back up? I think we should sing one more song to finish up. We're finishing a little bit early.

Prayer for Revelation, Repentance, and Transformation

Lord, we can teach, we can preach here, we can do our best to share the things that you have revealed to us, but it is totally dependent upon you, Holy Spirit, to come into hearts and open those hearts and reveal Jesus Christ for who He actually is to people.

You must do it, Lord, and you do do it in this place. We heard it the other night, all these men confessing you and what you had done in their lives, and this is only the beginning for them. They have many years ahead.

They have many trials and struggles in the Christian life and many wonderful times and many difficult times ahead. It will all be used by you, Lord, to mold them into something more and more like yourself.

And Lord, I just want to say before all of these folks here today that you are who you claim to be. I know that without a doubt, 50 some years since I first came to know you, and I know without a doubt more today than ever before, that everything you say is true.