Lecture 5.docx

It's probably fair to say, and it's not wrong to say, that when we think about becoming a Christian, coming to faith, we think about preaching Christ crucified and risen, and we call people to exercise faith in just what that white thing in the air out there signifies. It's a very nice lecture up he...

It's probably fair to say, and it's not wrong to say, that when we think about becoming a Christian, coming to faith, we think about preaching Christ crucified and risen, and we call people to exercise faith in just what that white thing in the air out there signifies. It's a very nice lecture up here with the cross against the mountains there. It's very nice. But in another social setting, the battle to receive Jesus might really be kind of on a different front. It might not be the front of moving from darkness to light in terms of, well, I had not entrusted my life, I had not committed my life to Jesus, I had not repented of my sins, and committed myself to be his disciple. In other words, the main line might not be the doctrinal line or the belief line. It might be another line. But I just want to give you a graphic example. And especially in John's setting, if this is the Roman province of Asia, that's, you know, Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world because of the temple of Artemis. You know, Ephesus was ground zero of the worship of the occult in the ancient world. There was no more hellish place ethically, religiously, relationally. There was no worse place to be in the Roman Empire just because of the blatant adulation of the powers of darkness. It was an upside down place. And that's where these churches, I think, are. And then there's also a certain amount of imperial persecution. So there's going to be lots and lots of grounds for people to revert to Cainishness, C-I-A-N, to thinking and operating like Cain, operating in polemical modes. I mean, we're even tempted to do it in our evangelical churches, to have adversative understandings about other groups and to think the worst about other denominations. And at of us grew up in churches where, you know, we were later on surprised at 10 or 12 years old to find out, you know, there are Christians that are really, really, really wrong because they don't do this thing like we do it or because they don't have the name that we have. So, you know, we know about the dynamic of ostracism and the dynamic of demonization of other people that actually may be our brothers and sisters in the faith, let alone the broader, you know, the broader world, which may well be destructive of God and good and... Did any of you read about Hobby Lobby? You know, and what's happening with Hobby Lobby? And I mean, it's going to get worse and worse. I preached at a place a week ago, Sunday, and I've known the man for years, but he came up to me and he just said, you know, I am really struggling in my life with hatred. And, you know, he's a veteran. He's not a well-schooled believer, but he's a believer, but, you know, he just ticked off the things that are happening, you know, in society and in the world and in that part of Chicagoland that, you know, it's just really sticking in his craw. And I told him, you know, you probably need to get off the internet so much and not watch, listen to the news so much and spend more time in God's work. Because, you know, you're not going to change it yourself, but if you let it eat at you, nothing good is going to come out of it. But what I'm saying is use your imagination a little bit as we're doing the, you know, numbers and parts of speech. It can be so deadening, but, you know, think about the challenge not only to, you know, believe the right doctrine, but think about the challenge to really, to be the way Jesus was in his openness to other people. I don't know anybody who's like that. I'm not like that. I struggle to be open to people like I think Christ would have been, you know, if he had the opportunities that I have. And I know in my marital dealings, I'm a selfish person, you know. I'm always having to struggle to overcome things that, you know, they shouldn't be there. And that's what, you know, that's what my wife of 39 years. How much easier it is to be unloving to people, you know, who are the blockheads in our congregations. I mean, that's how we feel. We got hard headed people, stiff neck people. And it's easy, you know, to even be hypocritical, to act smiley as a pastor, but then in staff meetings, you know, to be really ragging on people because they're idiots. And we might even say that. We got the numbers here. One, ten, six, one, two, three, nine, one, two, five, ten, nine, one, two, five, ten, eight, five, eight, nine, ten, nine, ten, nine, ten, nine, ten, ten, nine, five, ten, one, two, five, one, two, three. Daryl Burling, where are you? You see any problems with the numbers? I had to do the oak, which is the eight here, the sixth one, and the sixth one. That's fine. Anybody else have a number you want to challenge? Cross reference? Cross reference analysis. 1 John 1, 6, which you've already gone over, but it states that the person hates his brother and thus walks in darkness. He's not in fellowship with God because God is light. If this person claims to have fellowship with God, then he lies and does not practice the truth. And then John 12, 35. This verse shares the phrase, does not know where he is going with the current verse. They reflect the identical Greek wording. Therefore, we can see these words on the lips of our Lord as he gives an indictment to those who do not walk in the light. We need some elevation of your prose here. Commentary interaction. Scott says, hatred distorts our perspective. We do not first misjudge people and then hate them as a result. Our view of them is already jaundiced by our hatred. So it's important to remember that sin is the source of sin. In other words, people sin because their darkness is influencing them. In this context, hatred is not just the result of an innocent, neutral assessment, but of a sinful heart. Then Lou says, this verse seems to echo a biblical tradition that is picked up elsewhere in the New Testament. John 12, 35, which is one of the cross references through 40, speaks of those who do not believe in Jesus as those who are in darkness. John then quotes Isaiah 6, 10 for this argument, which speaks about God blinding their eyes. This verse in 1 John may have picked up on that Isaiah tradition. Although that is going the long way around, if Jesus talked a lot about this and Jesus taught John, it wasn't like he needed to find it in Isaiah somewhere. Or he knew the word of God. So, final translation. The one who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness is blinding his eyes. Simply the granted insight. Hatred for others, especially other Christians, does not affect them but us. Our hatred blinds us, causing us to stumble about and thus spiritually attacks our own hearts. Any questions about that verse? Yes? About the translation for a truth throws in. Prepare to defend yourself, Micah. I'm sorry to do that to you. You translate with the sense that it would be imperfect but the verse is in the heiress. I'm just wondering, is that the best way to render it? Although it is in the heiress, it's coming across as perfect. Would there be a difference in meaning if we made it just because the darkness blinded his eyes? Well, in English, that would make it sound like there was a particular incident where his eyes were blinded and then it would raise the question, when did that happen? But I don't think we would have an answer for that, would we? I'm just confused then why he would use the heiress instead of perfect to have the ongoing continuous present action. Well, I think verbal aspect theory would observe that often if you're talking at all in a setting where it's appropriate to use not the present tense, that the heiress tense is the least marked tense. It's the most generic way of saying something. So while it can refer to a definite or a special thing that happened in the past, we know it's special and definite not primarily because it's the heiress that's being used but because the nature of that incident marks it as something unusual or special or definite or punctilious or whatever. But we can't read that into the tense, which means that when you get an heiress, there's a certain malleability to it. The context may push you in the direction of hardening it into a definite action, but as here it may put you more in the direction of saying has blinded his eyes, of going a different way semantically. He's not talking about a certain incident blinding his eyes. He's just talking about the blinding, the effect of the darkness. The darkness has blinded his eyes no particular time. And then if you think about it, well, you're born that way and then you probably have a lifetime of confirmation of contempt for other people or apathy towards other people. So the darkness blinds our eyes and if you're describing that, you say the darkness has blinded his eyes. So you don't push the heiress there to lock it into a definite past time reference. Verse 12, 5, 3, 2, 10, 5, 3, 1, 2, 9, 1, 2, 3. Any problems with that? Let's ask our authority here. And that will be Daniel Corey. Where are you Daniel? You see a problem with the numbers? That's basically what I had. I had a question about the cithatite athetone tie. I had that as a parciple but I'm not sure if that's correct. Well he parses it there as a perfect passive indicative and I see that entie ending. So that sure sounds like a primary middle passive ending. My cithatite athetone tie. So that's probably a finite verb. Okay. At first references, verse chapter 1, 9, to forgive us our sins, the same verb being used. And as to the way and X and N, forgiveness of your sins and forgiveness of sins is used. And verse 6, 11, you are sanctified but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. So your point in 2, 38 and 10, 43. Is this officis over here? Okay. So that noun officis is cognate with the verb afiemi which is the verb. You have to be careful because sometimes there's a semantic shift between parts of speech. So always remember just because you have a verb with a certain root, sometimes you move over to the noun, it shifts and you're in a different field. But in this case, you don't have that problem. So your commentary? I'm getting seasick. Question 12, 14 is John's confirmation of the right assurance of genuine Christians. And we also admit the mood and sky change dramatically. And Scott says, the technique emphasizes the community of nature between the child and his parents. And Luke explains only this group are the passive Christians of what has been done for them, a condition of work with children. And she also makes a good point when she explains the perfect sense of the word forgive. And forgiveness is a complete past act stating which they now are. You see all of those page numbers in quotation marks, doesn't that just warm your heart? Final translation. I'm writing to you children because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. Okay, from the inside. The warning against false believers and the confirmation for the genuine believers both are really needed in the body of Christ. The church is filled with the ones who walk in the darkness until now and the ones who walk in the light. If we over emphasize the warning message, the genuine believers may lose their confidence and feel with some doubts on their faith based on their outer works. On the contrary, if we over emphasize the confirmation message, there may be not many chances for the false believers to realize that they are still in the darkness. In this verse, John wants to encourage the genuine believers, your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. What a wonderful message and great comfort to those who are struggling with their own sinful nature but continuously lives in the same way Christ lives. What's his name mean here? His name. Can you explain the Christ person and his authority? Okay, that's good. How do you underscore you're not talking about a symbol, you're not talking about a principle, you're not talking about an impersonal being, you're not talking about a deity that's like the deity worshiped by one fifth to one seventh of the world's population. Allah is not a being that you can have a personal relationship with. Now there are some mystical traditions in Islam where they try to compensate for that. Like maybe by getting into trances and dancing and things. But you couldn't say, if you said in the name of Allah, it would be in the authority of Allah, it wouldn't be in the personal dynamic interpersonal covenant fellowship with the one whom we can call father because it's a blasphemy to call God father in Islam. And he has no son. So one of the main ways that we're reminded in John of this reality of Jesus saying, I never knew you, or conversely, well done good and faithful servant. To have the son of God, the son of God, the son of God, the son of God, the servant of God who died for our sins, to have him someday call us servant. That would be the highest compliment we could be paid. And that's our heavenly hope to hear those words. On account of, because of this very living person, that's the sense of on account of his name. On account of this very living person. You have to strain to find ways to make God real to people. That's where love is so critical, pastorally speaking. Because a lot of times the doctrine, the penny never drops doctrinally until something happens interpersonally. It's like when my son smiled at me, something happened interpersonally and suddenly everything that I had known for decades from the Bible, suddenly it meant something different. Fatherly love meant something now. And sometimes you as pastors, you're dealing with cauterized souls that are walled off against love and it's going to be your prayers and your compassion or the prayers and compassion of people that you lead, because obviously you can't love everybody in your congregation like they need to be loved, but the people that you energize, the women that you teach and encourage and you pray for them and they trust you. And so they work for the Lord under your leadership and there can be a lot of energy in the love of your congregants and that can be the thing that conditions hurting people in your congregation suddenly to understand who Jesus is. He's God's messenger of love. He's the one in whose name on account of whose person to work our sins are forgiven. So a lot going on just in that little phrase ta anama autu. You could have said his name. You could have said God's son or Christ or you know, but there's a lot made of the name of Jesus, especially in John's writings. And there's even a book, I don't know if any of you have ever seen the book by W. Bingham Hunter, the dean at Phoenix Seminary, and we shouldn't see those as our enemies now. It's called The God Who Hears. Have you ever seen that book, The God Who Hears? It's one of the best books on prayer I know of. And it's sort of a cut down version of W. Bingham Hunter's doctoral dissertation which was on John and the upper room discourse. And a big part of that study is what does Jesus mean by prayer in my name? What did Jesus teach his disciples about himself and about his name? What does that mean? You can do a doctoral dissertation on that. But when Dr. Hunter boiled it all down, and this really is a severe boiling down, but he said prayer is God's means of giving us what he wants. Prayer is God's means of giving us what he wants. So when we pray in Jesus' name, we're putting ourselves under his will and authority. And his living work and intentions and purposes in the world. Yeah? For the Diyah before the ta'af, how do you go about deciding how to translate that? Because some translations have it for its namesake rather than because of. It seems like a pretty important proposition there. Yeah, well with the accusative, I think the baseline translation, so using Occam's razor, the most simple possibility is because of. And then there are other ways that are near synonyms in English, on account of, for the sake of. There are nuanced differences. I would, because, Diyah with the accusative I always start with because of. And I'll be surprised, if I didn't translate it in my book, because of, I was trying to be fancy for some reason. But that's the basic idea. And that's why on account of is almost a direct synonym to because of. And then for the sake of is embellishing it just a little bit. Probably not wrong, but as I was telling somebody with respect to another construction, if you really want to work on this, what you have to do is, and if you've got Gram Court or Accordance or whatever, search Diyah with the accusative in the Johanian corpus and see if you can establish a pattern as to what he tends to mean. Can you group those? Are there two or three different ways that he uses Diyah with the accusative? And once you've established a pattern, then see, okay, which one of these categories does this one fit into? That's what lexicographers do. When you use BDAG, the reason that he's got sometimes two or three classifications is because they've done that inductive work. They've looked at all the uses of that construction by a certain writer or a certain corpus. And what I have done in many, many, many settings is print up all the verses, just print them all up, then take a pair of scissors and keep the references on them. But just cut them up and then read them and remember the context and just start putting them into piles. And then when you're done, you've got two piles, you've got five piles, you've got eight piles, then describe, okay, what's the difference? Why is this Diyah with the accusative, why does it tend to go this way, but here it's going that way, right up those distinctives and you've really got the categories for your lexicon. That's why we have categories in lexicon. But you can't ever, I mean, for our purposes, a two hour class in Winterham, we're not doing high powered lexicography, but if you're a THM student or if you're doing a term paper on word meanings, you can't trust BDAG, because it's done by a human. And the more important the passage is, the more you better go through and do your own inductive work, because all lexicographers, number one, make mistakes, number two, they make decisions that the next lexicographer may not agree with. And that's one reason we get an education. So when we stand before God, we'll have something better to say, well, BDAG said. You know, that's not going to, that's going to fly, probably, with God. Bye, Micah. All right. Two thirteen. Five three, two ten, five three, nine two, five three, two ten, five one, four two. Okay, any other suggestions on the numbers? Ken Rollins. I have a tone as an article. Which one? Ton or the prepositional phrase. You got that as a pronoun, ton? Not sure it's an article. But you want it as a one. Yeah. Well, I was thinking it was an article that was functioning as a program. No, you're close. You got the right idea. Change it to one. And then what you want to do, can you move your page down just a little bit? Let me see your pen. I know, wow, that's really awesome. A fountain pen. Sometimes you have to do this. And you could call this either a four, excuse me, a three, or a two. In other words, op-ar case is a prepositional phrase that's made into a substantive. The from the beginning one. Okay. The from the beginning one. So it's an article and that prepositional phrase, you can think of it either a noun, a person, or a pronoun. An expression used in place of a noun. So if you just said one nine two and didn't do anything fancy with the squiggly, I'd just look at your translation and say okay, that's fine. I didn't know what they were doing. But if you really wanted to be fancy, you could make the squiggly. Above the nine or two put three or two. Okay, cross surfaces. Cross surfaces. Going back to one one that references back to John one one. The beginning referenced here could be referring to the beginning of time, such as in John one. And then also four four. The young men have overcome the evil one because he who is in them is greater than he who is in the world. They are identified with the greater one and thus have the confidence of victory. Commentary interaction. Stott takes the identification of him who is from the beginning to be God the father, not God the son. In contrast, Lou states that this one could be either the father or the son. She says that a conclusion is impossible and certainty is excluded. My comments would be Lou seems to regularly avoid conclusions in the name of intended ambiguity. But it's hard to imagine that John is communicating important messages to readers intended to say something intentionally vague. Lou mentions also that the perfect tense emphasizes not the struggle but the victory achieved as one that cannot be reversed. Just a slight point here, but notice how in the stock quotation you put your period after the page reference, which I think is probably more correct. Here to be perfectly correct, you need to move your period out here so that your 89 is not hanging out there. Final translation. I write to you fathers because you have known him who is from the beginning. I write to you young men because you have overcome the evil one. Granted insight, it seems that John understood that the young men would be engaged in warfare and thus gave them the promise that the victory has already been secured. Even when it feels like we've been defeated in the battle, we can rest assured that we are on the winning side of the war. Any comment? Yes? Just a question. Is he still just addressing one group of people just by different terms here? Yeah, forlorn, I guess. Tell the truth now. Could either be three stages of spiritual growth, could be the children is addressing everybody and there's two stages of spiritual growth, two classes. And there's debate on that. There are various theories and I write about that so in my commentary. So you still hold to just one general term, one group? I thought there were two groups. All under the children but then two different divisions. But I could be wrong about what I thought. Yeah, because the order of children, fathers, and young men seems to be a little different than just the progressive. It doesn't go from children to young men to fathers. Yeah, I think it's children, A, fathers, B, young men, and then he restates that with a different word for children maybe and then again fathers and again young men. But Augustine gave us the stages theory and that's always been popular. Okay, Rich has a question and then we're going to take a break after Rich's question. What does it mean to overcome or to conquer the devil in here and also in other, you know, ahead in literature? Well, I think for John it means to be abiding in Christ. And if you ask what that means then go to page 72 on the commentary and look at the diagram. You know, if our souls are being iridated by the light of God, if we are living in fellowship with God, doctrineally, ethically, relationally, you know, we're not Christ. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to fall short of God's glory. We're going to stumble in many ways. But we're making progress. We are living as subjects in God's kingdom. And if you want to speak eschatologically, we've overcome the evil one. It's a fait accompli. If we want to talk about the heat of the moment, then we need to exhort each other to abide in Christ. But if we're living in that, we're winners. We're not losers. We're not wondering. And that's where I don't like the test language because the test language takes this thing out of where it belongs. Our assurance is in God, period. You know, God has acted. God has promised. And there are certainly necessary conditions for our fellowship in God. But there is no sufficient condition for your assurance based on your side of the contribution. You can't believe well enough. You can't obey good enough. And you can't love sincerely enough. One, two, three strikes. You're out. But we don't rely, our assurance doesn't rely on our response as the sufficient condition. Necessary. Not sufficient. Our sole sufficiency is in God. Our sole sufficiency is in the finished work of Christ. And so that's why I don't like the test language. I'm not saying it's wrong or useless. But if we start approaching God with a mentality that there are some specs, there are some minimal standards, and look, I mean, how many people came to Jesus and said, I've done X, Y, and Z. And anytime you come to God with the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, you're toast. And God's promise and nothing but is better than a million people's best valiant deeds. I'd rather rest on the naked word of God. Because the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God abides forever. So, you know, just think about these things. And I like self-diagnosis. I like to consider our ways. And John is a great occasion for assessing ourselves, ethically, relationally, and doctrinally. But we've really, really got to be careful of ourselves and of our people thinking, oh, okay, here's a test. And yeah, I think I passed that test. Very, very dangerous. And on the other hand, where it's dangerous is if you're really tender-hearted, if you really begin to understand the glory of God and the vastness of His grace, and then you really start trying to look for assurance in just how well you reflect God, you know, that is a recipe for despair. So we're back to attention. We're back to attention. We're back to a religion in which we're called to assess things, but we put no confidence in the flesh. That's kind of dialectical. But that's the way it is. You know, we're dealing with God, and He's our Savior. We don't save ourselves. Now, in some theological formulations, it's much simpler just to have quid pro quo. You do your part, God does His part. Very simple. But in my view, I grew up with that kind of religion. I grew up with folk revivalist religion. If you go down the aisle, if you raise your hand, and by doing so you signify that you are saying X, Y, and Z, then God has bound Himself, and He would no wise care, and it was all a crock. Because you could be very delusional, and you could be very calculating in your going down the aisle and you're raising your hand. You could be cutting a deal with God, and you don't cut deals with God. God doesn't get on His knees and beg you to jump through little hoops and say, oh, finally you did it. Okay. That's not the God of the Bible. You've got something much better, God of the Bible. You've got a real living person. And His grace really is sufficient, and nothing else is sufficient. Earlier yesterday you said that recognizing the world reads the Bible a certain way, sort of the way that Lou writes. And then what we're talking about now, do you think the church, and what we're talking about, the people in the church read 1 John as a test? In a test language? Sure, because there are books that use test in the title. I'm not saying they're all wrong, I'm just saying it's a notion that is easy to lose control of. What are the importance for pastors or teaching in order to bring out more of the nuance that it's just not something, it is a relationship, it is believing in the line, it is walking with them, that kind of thing. I mean, I've heard it being taught kind of like, okay, here's some pragmatic way that you can look at your life and have this assurance, you know, and not really go past that in what John is teaching. This is one of the coolest things about pastoring. It's like my father used to say, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And every pastor finds different ways of presenting God to people. Of preaching Christ, of urging this message on people. And we all find at times, you know, we're all, and sometimes it's quite dramatic, we find it's not formulaic. It's almost as if, as soon as you start taking somebody else's formula and crystallizing it and franchising it and applying it, the flesh in the people that we minister to, they're going to take that and distort it and screw it up. And they're going to use it for false assurance. Because you come back again, and the implication of what I just said a minute ago, the only assurance we have is only in us in the moment of God's gracious indwelling. There's no assurance in us that we can do A, B, and C, or do questionnaires, or do whatever, and then say, okay, I'm a lock. It's a wrap. I've got assurance. And you got, I mean, when you serve the Lord, you know, so often, the next thing you've got to do, it's like walking on a tightwire across the Niagara Falls. You know, you've got to preach a funeral for somebody in your church whose daughter committed suicide in her own parents' basement after her dad took early retirement because he saw his daughter struggling with drugs. And he wanted to be there for her. And they were making progress. And she was getting somewhere. And then he comes home. And she has just lacerated herself and bled herself to death. And you've got to preach that funeral. Do you have assurance of salvation? I mean, you're just asking God somehow help me not to break down. You know, God, bring me into that level that you've called me and you've equipped me to be, to be a shepherd of the flock and a gospel voice in this community. At this rest home where really I'm going to preach the gospel just because of the conditions. Not even going to be in the church. I've got an opportunity to preach to 300 people. Bikers, you know, this girl's druggy friends, and you know, a lot of church people too. That's not easy. You know, your only assurance is that God is faithful. You know, and you never get enough experience. Well, a friend of mine told me recently about preaching to 500. He was a chaplain in a city for the police. And he was on call with a deputy. And they answered a call. And a 10-year-old boy had accidentally pulled a trigger on a shotgun and shot his sister in the face. At close range. You know, and that was two decades ago. And he says he still, you know, wrestles with that. But he said that was the hardest funeral he ever had to preach. You know, there's no human, I mean, Paul said, who is adequate for these things? There's no human adequacy for what we're called to do as servants of the Lord. And knowing that, we don't want to give false assurances to our people. On the one hand, God, we're more secure in God than we could ever imagine. So, you know, we can be very sweeping about assuring people of God's faithfulness to his promises. God is very, very real. And you know, you can preach forever about the reality and the solidity of God. And go in all kinds of directions with that. But as soon as people want to start bottling that and using it to say, I've got enough, I've done enough, I know enough, then it's a big red flag. Because, you know, we know as pastors, we never have done enough. We don't know enough. We don't love enough. But then we've gone beyond the myth of self-grounded assurance. We know God holds us in his hand and he renews his sufficiency in every situation. And the fellowship of people who are being renewed by the presence of God in every situation, that's the church. And we're trying to shepherd people into that fellowship of high-risk living. We're not self-satisfied, self-sufficient religious people who are smug in our own whatever, status. We're people who realize it's a desperate world and life is short and we're clinging to the Lord because we know he has us. And, you know, we don't lose sleep over it. We don't lose sleep over it because we know God's sufficient. But it doesn't make abiding in him an easy thing at all. Which is why I always tell people the question you'll deal with the most in the course of ten years of pastoral work is assurance. And there's a lot of other things you have to do, instructional things and liturgical things and counseling things and all that. But at least in my experience the thing that it keeps coming back to over and over in people's lives is assurance of salvation. And it's a spiral staircase. People keep going back through their zones of need because they're the same people. And it may be one set of questions in their Neonistos stage, their young man stage, and then they get older, they're still the same person, they're still fighting analogous battles. They need new assurance now. You know, you go through seasons of life. You fought a lot of battles and, you know, the Lord has delivered you but now you got new battles. I know in our culture there are a few people who maybe roughly in my generation, they're not as good as they are now. Roughly in my demographic, you know, in a culture where the boomers are now aging, I'm a boomer, we're having to come to grips with the mortality of our parents. You know, I had an analogous to a career change. The reason I left Trinity was my mother's situation. You know, we moved back to St. Louis because my mother and stepfather hoped to die in their house and I'm living 500 feet down the road. And I do the same thing at Covenant Seminary I did at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. You know, that was a major crisis decision in our lives because we had what I thought was my ministry into retirement in Chicago. But I'm writing a comment here in the pastorals and 1 Timothy 5.8 says, the person who doesn't take care of his own family is worse than an infidel. So one little verse ruined my life. I mean, that's how it feels. You're going along and you're in some equilibrium and all of a sudden some nagging verse comes along and you think, I've got to change my whole game plan here. Have you ever moved when you were 57 years old? I mean, who wants that? But, you know, God likes to keep us off balance. In fact, a lot of times if it weren't for that, we'd run ourselves into hell real fast. You know, if he didn't keep changing things on us and giving us opportunity to rethink and recommit. And then just the novelty of new situations where you really can't control things anymore. You're just at everybody else's mercy. That's a great place to be in God's economy. At the mercy of everything and not really being able to manipulate circumstances and people. Because, you know, it's a new situation. So am I speaking to your cue? Yeah, thank you. It's a delicate issue, you know, giving assurance without peddling myths. Because people do want it simple and they want it quick and they want it painless. And you've got to keep them from painting you into a corner. I'll close with this. I'll tell you how brutal it could get. And I'm not going to pass judgment on this. I've never decided what I think about this. You know, I just was, you serve the Lord, sometimes you just do things. It's really somebody else's responsibility. But I was taking over a church for somebody who had had a family tragedy. And I mean it was major. And he wasn't in a position to minister for some weeks. So he and his family were leaving for the funerals of the deceased family members who died in a tragedy. And he said, I don't know when I'll be back. You know, you take the services, do this, you know, take this wedding, blah, blah, blah. He said, but there's just one thing. He said, if so and so comes to you, then he named a person who I knew in the church. And this person asks you, if I commit suicide, will I go to heaven? I don't care what you think. I want you to tell him, you know, I'm not sure. He said, don't you give him permission to kill himself. And then he rode off into the sunset. Now I just prayed that that guy wouldn't come to me. And he didn't. And he didn't. But isn't that the pastorate? Isn't that what pastoring is like sometimes? And I mean I know what I think theologically. But it would be easy. You know, that guy had an idea of what false assurance would be. And I think this guy would agree with me theologically. But what he told me would not be, you know, his theological answer. It was a pastoral strategy to keep this man from abusing a truth about the Word of God. So, you know, you're getting into one of the greatest, I mean, they talk about the seals and the delta team and all this. That's what every pastor is doing. You know, rescue the perishing, care for the dying. You know, you're like the people in the helicopters at night going around LA and, you know, getting let down on cables to pluck people out of whatever. That's what you're doing.