Podcasts about our messiah

“Surely Yahuah Elohim will do nothing without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets.”Amos 3:7I think most Believers would agree that it is important to be prepared for what Scripture reiterates as a “great and terrible day” when it comes to the “Day of Yahuah.” It will be a great day for those prepared, but it will be a terrible day for those unprepared. Our Messiah even tells us that it's important for us to be prepared and that we should not be caught off guard at His return, by giving us parables like the wise and foolish virgins and the wedding banquet. Many people look to the New Testament writings to gain understanding about end times prophecies, without understanding that Yahuah has already revealed these things through His prophets. The majority of the whole discourse from Yahusha in Matthew 24 is literally straight from the Tanakh (Old Testament)!I constantly reiterate why it is so important that our foundation of truth and understanding should be built from the Old Testament. So for today's episode, I want to spend some time threading the harmony of Scripture by going through what the prophets spoke of in order to help us all be prepared for the return of our King. Additional links for study:The Timing of Our Messiah's Death, Burial and Resurrection & the True Sign of JonahExamples of "Not So Old" Testament TruthsEpisode 32 TranscriptContact me: stephanie@promise-perspective.comVisit my website: www.promise-perspective.com Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_promise_perspective/Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/promiseperspectiveDonate on Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/stephanie-green0611Donate on PayPal: http://paypal.me/stephaniegreentppDonate on Patreon: http://patreon.com/ThePromisePerspective Your support is greatly appreciated ❤️Support the show

Rabbi Gary continues to consider the promise of Messiah's coming again. Acts 1:9-11 records the ascension of Messiah into the heavens. As Luke records the event, he focuses attention upon what the disciples saw. In verse 9 we read the phrases, "while they were looking," and "a cloud (the Shekinah glory) took Him up away from their sight."Then in verse 10 we find the phrase, "while they were staring into the sky," followed by the word "suddenly" which means "something to pay close attention to." And then "two men dressed in white," no doubt angels, ask the disciples a rhetorical question: "Why do you stand looking straight into the sky?" They go on to say that "this Yeshua" will return "in this way in which manner you saw him going into heaven" (vs.11).With the emphasis on what the disciples saw, coupled with the phrase, "in this way in which manner" which means "in the very same way," there can be no doubt that what is meant is nothing short of a visible and bodily return of Messiah. Not only are we to expect that Messiah will return visibly and bodily, but his return will also be personal.The Lord's coming will also be in two stages or phases.The first is his coming to the clouds when the believers "in Messiah" will be "caught up" to "meet the Lord in the air" (I Thessalonians 4:17). In essence this is his coming for his own. This coming of the Lord is popularly referred to as the "rapture" of the believers. The word "rapture" derived from the Latin word for the Greek "to be caught up."The second stage or phase of Messiah's coming is his coming to the earth to establish his kingdom, fulfill his promises to Israel and reign over the nations of the earth.Our Messiah is coming again and he's coming soon. Are you ready for him when he comes? If not, you can be. Simply acknowledge your need for him. Your need for the forgiveness of your sin. And receive his atoning sacrifice for your sin, accepting him as Messiah and Savior.YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/De_YlV6tuyMSend us a text

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. Isaiah 9:6-7 ESVThe nature and character of God is revealed in the Christ of Christmas and the Cross!Be imitators of God. Ephesians 5:1 CSBWhoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. 1 John 2:6 ESVI have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. John 13:15 NLTJesus was Faithful to His Mission…Jesus modeled a determination for and showed us how to live faithfully on mission!There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. John 1:6-8 ESVJesus lived a life of Selfless Humility While they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them. Luke 2:6-7 NLTOur Messiah made an almost anonymous entrance into our me-centric world to make a point.It's a blessing to learn to make life about something bigger and than yourself. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:5-8 ESV Jesus lived a life marked by JoyLet us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God's throne. Hebrews 12:1-2 CSBThe angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Luke 2:10 ESV

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. Isaiah 9:6-7 ESVThe nature and character of God is revealed in the Christ of Christmas and the Cross!Be imitators of God. Ephesians 5:1 CSBWhoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. 1 John 2:6 ESVI have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. John 13:15 NLTJesus was Faithful to His Mission…Jesus modeled a determination for and showed us how to live faithfully on mission!There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. John 1:6-8 ESVJesus lived a life of Selfless Humility While they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them. Luke 2:6-7 NLTOur Messiah made an almost anonymous entrance into our me-centric world to make a point.It's a blessing to learn to make life about something bigger and than yourself. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:5-8 ESV Jesus lived a life marked by JoyLet us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God's throne. Hebrews 12:1-2 CSBThe angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Luke 2:10 ESV

Shalom brothers and sisters, When I say shalom today, I mean it as I wish peace for us all because peace is not what we have today. The result of the fall in the Garden of Eden is that our society undergoes cycles of violence and instability. The first cycle culminated in the first destruction of earth because all men's thoughts were evil continually. This pattern has played out over and over. Just in the last hundred years, almost exactly, we've had two world wars and a Cold War where governments attained the power to exterminate life on earth. We seem to be on the upswing of another cycle, with Israel being told to stop and make peace with demons, Russia invading Ukraine, mass shootings happening at an alarming pace, and now our former president's attempted assassination. These events are meant to wear us down, coarsen our hearts, and elicit negative reactions thus continuing the cycle. But this is not the path of believers. We have just lived through another startling historic event that we will remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. Somebody tried to assassinate a former president at a campaign rally. Three people behind the president were shot, one fatally. We learned this information through the same news that continually ramps up the very rhetoric which leads to these events. It appears we are on a hamster wheel, huh? The old adage of “you are what you eat” is true. Violence begets violence and it doesn't start with a violent act. Our Messiah taught us, or reminded us, that it starts with evil thoughts. It starts with envy, jealousy, or in many cases, poor souls believing the click-bait “if it bleeds it leads” media and internet personalities telling them repeatedly that the world is going to end. Our news diet is incredibly rich in Vitamin Fear to the point that we likely don't notice it anymore, and certainly not on the level we did with earlier tragedies. The cycle will try to complete again with those in the world. We'll learn who the shooter was, some will blame guns, others will blame rhetoric, people will try to classify the crime so it can be put on the shelf. Rinse, repeat as necessary. But we will not. We know better. We know the cycle. We know we've been commanded to be peaceful stewards of the knowledge of God and His Christ. We know that Yahweh cares for all His creation and does not want any to perish. We know He sent His Son to suffer violence so we can have the opportunity for salvation. We know, through Torah and the Messiah, how to attain peace in this life. Believe in Yeshua, follow the Torah, and be positive influences, trying to draw people to our common faith. We know this world is violent and corrupt so we choose not to participate in that evil. We choose to surround ourselves with loving brothers and sisters, related by blood, by marriage, and by the adoption we receive through the shed blood of Yeshua. My friends, stay strong in the faith in these trying times. Pray for our leaders. Pray for people to soften their hearts. And pray for the return of Yeshua.

The scriptures are about Israel, written to Israel, written for Israel and all the promises are to those of Israel, it is not to those in Christianity because they oppose with their doctrines the laws and Commandments of our heavenly Father Yahweh. Also Christianity did not exist during the times that the scriptures were written. It was all about Israel. Our Messiah was part of Israel and our Messiah was crucified on a stake for the people of Israel and for those who would be grafted into Israel. It's not about Christianity. We all started somewhere and for the most of us we started in Christianity. But we came out of Christianity when we understood the truth. And I pray this teaching blesses you and helps you. This teaching is not to attack Christianity or any other group but to bring information so that you can choose who you will follow as for me and my house we will follow Yahweh.

James Caruthers shares the scripture and insight from this weeks Haftarah 2 Kings 7:3-20 and Besorah Matthew 8:1-17.(4.28.24)Shalom and blessed 1st day of the week! HalleluYah for His mercies made new every morning! Praise Yahuah for all he provides and for His protection!Yahuah, thank you for everything! Thank you for waking us in your will and at your delight! I pray we delight you with our obedience and ability to not compromise our walk. Because of Yahusha, we stand strong. Because of Yahusha, we are lifted up! Our Messiah, our Salvation, you are in everything we see, our friend indeed! Father, we pray for the guidance you send to us in the Ruach Ha'Qodesh, and we ask for ears to hear the soft words spoken and eyes to see the path unfolding to your Kingdom! Fall fresh on us Ruach, bring us understanding of the Word of Yahuah! Ruach fall fresh on us, revealing the fruit of the Ruach we are to walk in. Yahusha, shine your light of salvation through us for all to see and protect us from evil! Let the words of our enemies be silenced and replaced with rejoicing for you, O Yahuah! Remove all guile from our mouths and belly and spring forth living waters that nourish us and those we speak with! Let our words be, "Come and taste the goodness of Yahuah," and our loving prayers for one another cover all wounds and heal all illnesses with healing balm. Father, write your name in our foreheads and upon our hearts so all can see your light shining through the dark. Father, we are weeping witnesses and calling the world to repentance for your Kingdom is at hand! Bless you, Yahuah and Yahusha, and may your name be published to all your lands, and in your names, we pray! Amein!*Download the Fiery Faith Ministries App*https://get.theapp.co/2nmm*Non-Profit Fundraisers*https://www.bonfire.com/store/fiery-faith-ministrieshttps://www.givesendgo.com/fiery_faith*Like & Subscribe*https://www.youtube.com/@fieryfaithhttps://www.instagram.com/fieryfaithministrieshttps://www.facebook.com/fieryfaithministrieshttps://www.twitter.com/FieryFaith144*Website*https://www.fieryfaithministries.com*Email*shalom@fieryfaithministries.comprayer@fieryfaithministries.com*Telegram*Fiery Faith Ministries | https://t.me/+6lf5W12zEF81MjhhWatchmen of the Wall | https://t.me/+J3iYvO1bL3JjYWIxPrayer Room | https://t.me/+vUGzK_-TXBYwNDdh*Bless this Ministry*SUBSPLASH: https://subsplash.com/u/fieryfaithministries/givePAYPAL: https://paypal.me/JamesCaruthersVENMO: https://account.venmo.com/u/JamesCaruthers791

In Matthew 22, we read a parable of a man who attended a wedding, in which when the king came in to see the guests, he saw this man who did not have on a wedding garment. He asked him, “how did you come in here without a wedding garment?”The man was speechless. Directly after, the king said to his servants, “bind him hand in foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”All because of a wedding garment!? Parables are earthly stories that convey a spiritual reality. They are meant to be understood for a discerning mind, but they will remain a mystery to those without discernment and understanding. Our Messiah is telling us something very important regarding the topic of “garments.” And that is what I want to discuss in this episode. If we are to understand this parable, surely we should have Scripture to give us an understanding of how we are to have the proper garments for the great wedding day, right?The good news is that Scripture actually does tell us exactly what these garments are supposed to look like and what it means to have our garments ready. Just as we've discussed the need to have oil in our lamps to be prepared, we must also have the proper garments as well. I don't want to be the one found without the right garments when it is time for the marriage supper of the Lamb. Yahusha ends that parable by saying, “many are called, but few are chosen.”Supplemental Documents:Episode 14 TranscriptContact me: stephanie@promise-perspective.comVisit my website: www.promise-perspective.comSupport the Show.

With the war in Israel raging and Antisemitism surging around the world we even hear from those in Christian universities and some pastors that God has replaced Israel. But how can this be? We explain each of these controversial verses used to debunk Replacement Theology piece by piece. Today more than ever we need to address these issues and provide the truth of God's calling and covenant. Our Messiah will return to the Jewish people and the nation of Israel! Help us share this important message! Become a watchman on the walls! Join us today in prayer and support! https://www.oneforisrael.org/donate/ ---- Facebook: www.facebook.com/oneforIsrael

Our Messiah's childhood - Unwrap the Ancient - Week 4 by St Stephen's Willoughby

A new MP3 sermon from La Luz Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Waiting for Our Messiah Speaker: Ron Tyson Broadcaster: La Luz Bible Church Event: Sunday - AM Date: 12/25/2023 Bible: Luke 2:21-40 Length: 32 min.

How do you oppress someone who is already free? Well, you lie to them of course! Our Messiah paid a dear price to set us free and the joy of our salvation is available today. For your own study: Luke 4:16-21 Isaiah 44:22 John 8:34-36 Luke 15:11-32 Follow us on Instagram: @meetmeinisaiah

The Way of Suffering Text: Mark 8:31-9:1Rev. John Downs Am I fragile, resilient or “antifragile” — i.e. made stronger through stress and suffering? Our Messiah came to suffer, through poverty, scorn, rejection, humiliation and a brutal death to purchase our … April 23, 2023 Read More » The post April 23, 2023 first appeared on Mercy Church.

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:14-17). Contemporary Testimony: Our World Belongs to God: The Spirit, active from the beginning, moved human beings to write the Word of God and opens our hearts to God's voice (31). We learn two fundamental things about Scripture here: where it comes from and what it is intended for. First, all Scripture is God-breathed. It originated in God's mind and was communicated from God's mouth by God's breath or Spirit. Therefore, we call it ‘the Word of God.' As the prophets often said, ‘the mouth of the Lord has spoken'. It is also true that God spoke within and to the cultures of the folks who wrote the Bible. They were not robots but maintained their unique styles. Thus, the tremendous diversity within the Bible. It's not necessary to offer an exact definition of ‘God-breathed”. It remains a bit mysterious. However, its important to understand its implication. The Bible is not like other books. The words are not dead letters on a page. The book lives, it has power to move our souls. As God says, “It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11).  Therefore, Christians encourage each other to pick up the Bible, to read it, to learn it. This is the second thing Paul underscores in our text: because Scripture is God-breathed it is useful. God's Word instructs us for salvation. Its main purpose is to teach not facts of science but facts of salvation. It unfolds the divine plan of redemption—our creation in God's image, our fall through disobedience into sin, God's continuing love for us despite our rebellion, his eternal plan to save us through his covenant of grace, culminating in Christ. Jesus came as our Saviour: died to bear our sin, was raised from death, was exalted to heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit. Our Messiah rescued us from guilt, alienation, and bondage to evil, and grants us immortality as children of God. The Old Testament points towards him, while the New Testament tells the story of his ministry on earth and his ongoing mission through his Spirit anointed community. This narrative of redemption in Jesus Christ is intended to nurture our ‘faith' in him, in order that by faith we may be saved. The usefulness of Scripture relates to both our belief and our conduct. It is useful for reforming our characters and discipling us in right living. When we hope to overcome error and grow in truth, to overcome evil and grow in holiness, we turn first to the Scriptures. Its is God-breathed. It comes with his power. If, as God's servants, we desire to be equipped for every good work, we turn to the scripture. They are the Spirit's primary tool in the renovation of our lives.

https://hebrewnationonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/May-25-FP-Podcast-5.mp3 Please join Bonnie for a look into our future as the enemy of the freewill of mankind takes aim upon the very building blocks of life, our DNA.  Shall we be afraid?  No!  Our Messiah is setting us free!  Celebrate!!  Just as the disciples went out without purse or bag or sandals and yet lacked for nothing, so shall we. Is monkeypox a cover for an adverse reaction of shingles/blistering disease/pemphigoid to the shot? Page from Pfizer's known adverse reaction doc obtained by FOIA (blistering disease, pictures): https://t.me/CovidRedPills/13652 Pandemic Treaty will launch global digital ID system: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-treaty-is-tied-to-a-global-digital-passport-and-id-system/ CA bill seeks to silence physicians re alternative medical opinion: https://aflds.org/about-us/issue-briefs/issue-brief-california-assembly-bill-2098/ Excellent article on monkeypox as an adverse reaction:  https://expose-news.com/2022/05/25/monkeypox-used-cover-up-covid-vaccines-cause-a-id-s/ Former PM of N. Zealand, H. Clark, "People are over Covid...":  https://t.me/CovidRedPills/13651 Gates admitting C shots don't work:  https://t.me/RWMaloneMD/3160 Did the Sphinx close its eyes on the day of the Blood Moon, May 15?:  https://www.brighteon.com/b0e66079-e9f7-4acb-87ac-d6afc5a4ac8e Damning investigation into the WHO: https://www.bitchute.com/video/MAHGNG4if0fr/ CEO of Moderna complaining that 30 million doses must be dumped because no one wants them:  https://t.me/VigilantFox/4579 Julie Grant, Aus. eSafety Commissioner, at WEF alleging we need a "re-calibration of free speech," twitter account was deleted for sharing this clip:  https://t.me/VigilantFox/4579 NTI wargamed monkeypox outbreak to commence May 15, 2022:  https://t.me/CovidRedPills/13559 More on monkeypox v. Vaxx adverse reaction:  https://palexander.substack.com/p/monkey-pox-do-not-uncouple-the-link?s=r Russian missile rise out of the sea, exactly what Henry Gruver saw along our eastern seaboard:  https://t.me/intelslava/29617 Nutshell of latest developments against US (first 5 min. or so):  https://youtu.be/EW1hP2dBmfs Citizens in China falling dead while driving, walking, working, crossing street:  https://t.me/covidbc/2619,  https://t.me/covidbc/2610 Deletions and additions to NHS site re threat of monekypox, to increase the scare factor?:  https://t.me/CovidRedPills/13597 Smug smile of Bill and Melinda Gates as they envision the concern of "the next one," i.e., the next pandemic:  https://t.me/CovidRedPills/13575 Ominous concept put forward that DNA manipulation makes intentional pandemics easier:  https://t.me/CovidRedPills/13561 Who is Tedros, WHO Director since 2017?  Scathing report by Dr. Peter Breggin:  https://www.redvoicemedia.com/video/2022/05/the-deliberate-destruction-of-the-united-states-to-install-a-one-world-government-dr-peter-breggin-joins-arthur-moore-video-interview/ Excellent article re ramifications of allowing WHO to rule our health:  https://www.americaoutloud.com/biden-handing-over-u-s-sovereignty-to-who/ Excellent compilation of the toll the C vaxxes are taking upon our bodies:  https://tapnewswire.com/2022/05/your-government-quietly-confirmed-the-fully-vaccinated-are-developing-acquired-immunodeficiency-syndrome-while-they-had-you-worried-about-russia-ukraine-the-cost-of-living/ Oh, boy, is this our future?  Chile bans discrimination against mutants:  https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/chile-bans-discrimination-against-mutants-and-genetically-altered-people/

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://yhebrew.com/2022/04/27/gods-pattern-count-omer-8-nisan-24-daniels-vision/ Once we understand Day Eight which represents eternity, we can make it through Day Nine which is very twisting symbolized like a basket or snake. The letter tet is nine. Day Nine of the Counting of the Omer finds Daniel standing at the Tigris River seeing a vision. Our Messiah too will come like at Day Nine in a twisted world looking to remove His Land known as Israel. Let us understand His ways in prayer and supplication. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/hadassah-lau/message

LOVE LIVE RUACH REMNANT RADIO's 3 Part PUBLIC Celebration of Our Messiah's Commands to KEEP the Seventh Day Qodesh or Set A Part, adds a deeper level of Mishpacha to what's usually just a "Sit & Listen" experience!! Prayer & Meditation Food Fellowship With a SOMBER NOTE, but not SAD, in FACT, inspire & Invigorated by the RUACH ha Qodesh as means of community evangelism spreading the AHABAH of YAH to the Community!! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/love-live/message

This series explores the 80 Messianic Prophecies from the Old Testament. In this episode we finish our study of prophecies in the book of Psalms. Passages: Psalm 110 The Royal Priest; Our Messiah!, Psalm 118:22 Rejection of the Messiah, Psalm 132: 11-12;17-18 The Horn of David and the Lamp Help us keep this content free: https://evidence4faith.org/give/ (https://evidence4faith.org/give/) Catch up on previous episodes: https://evidence4faith.org/portfolio/messianicprophecies/ (https://evidence4faith.org/portfolio/messianicprophecies/) Music Credits: https://www.pond5.com/royalty-free-music/item/116117045-funky-sax-hipster-happy-upbeat-inspirational (Stock Music) provided by EnhancedVision, from https://www.pond5.com/ (Pond5)

In these uncertain times, our Father calls us to focus on and boast in Our Messiah.

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com.Good morning, welcome to Mosaic Church. My name is Jan, one of the pastors here along with Pastor Shane and Pastor Andy. If you're new or visiting, we're so glad you're here with us. I pray that you get connected. We do that officially through the connection card and the worship card if you fill out legibly. Just redeem it at the welcome center for a little gift. And then we'll also send you another gift in the mail. A couple housekeeping things. The 16th, next Sunday, we have a baptism seminar. If you have not been baptized as an adult and you'd like to know more, it's right after the service with lunch provided. And then on the 23rd, we have a membership class. We take membership seriously. Church is a family, membership is how we know that you are in the family that is Mosaic Boston. We also have a baptism today. My daughter, Melana, she's four, she's really excited about the baptism. She came up to me yesterday, I had no idea what she was talking about, she's like, "When's the next time you're going to dunk a person in the bathtub with their clothes on?" Had no idea what she was talking about. She said, "Baptism." I told her, "There's baptism tomorrow." She's like, "Yeah."So, we have baptism after the second service. We'd love to have you join us. Also, every time it snows for the first time, I give a public service announcement about how to flourish in Boston in the winter. This is important. I don't see anyone else doing this, this is important. Here's what you need, three things to flourish in Boston in the winter. Number one, you need a nice pair of waterproof boots. Necessary, very necessary, with good grip on them, very important. Number two, you need a good winter coat, preferably with a coat that has a little fuzzy trim, which keeps the wind out. That's important. Number three, you got to take your vitamin D. You got to take your vitamin D. I don't know why, I have to say this. None of the government officials who are supposed to care about our health, for the past two and a half years, no one's talking about this. Take your vitamin D. There's not enough sunshine in Boston, take your vitamin D. And take care of your immune system. God gave you an immune system. Work out, eat good food not the processed junk. Okay, that's my public service announcement.With that said, would you please pray with me over the preaching of God's holy Word? Heavenly Father, thank you for this incredible word that you have prepared for us from your servant, Paul. We thank you for his personal example of being willing to sacrifice everything, go through whatever suffering to get the message out, to get the message to your elect. I pray you use us in the same way. Make us a people who no matter what the sacrifice, no matter what the suffering, we're willing to go through it because there's nothing more important than building your kingdom, than helping people be transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of your beloved Son. And make us a people who are strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Strengthen us, strengthen us in every aspect of our life so when the time comes to sacrifice we have more to sacrifice and we can endure more suffering. We pray that you bless the preaching of the holy word, and I pray deep in our hearts, give us a true realization, the preeminence of Christ, that there's nothing greater than Christ. I pray all this in Christ's holy name. Amen.We're in 2 Corinthians 11:16-33 today. We're continuing our Prodigal Church season two series. A few more sermons left in this series. The title of the sermon today is Through Many Tribulations. The early church understood that when you get saved, you get saved to a life of following Jesus Christ, and that life includes tribulations. Acts 14:21-22, this is where that text comes from, "When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith and saying, 'Through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God.'"As we look at what's going on in the world, one of the things that I'm praying about the Lord deepening in our body is a sense of discernment, to discern what's true and to discern what's evil, what's false, what's lies. And this is what St. Paul does in this letter, in the second part of the letter, he wants to deepen a discernment in the people of God to know, to know when they are being bamboozled. When we ask the question, "What in the world is going on?" you got to ask a few timeless, helpful questions, and this comes from ancient philosophers. The questions that come from Latin, cui bono? cui bono? Who benefits? Who's responsible for a certain event in any crime investigation or in politics, in any event? There's a high probability that it's the person standing to gain the most from it. Cui bono? Who benefits?The second one is an extension of the first is, cui prodest, who profits? We know the term, "Follow the money." It was first used by Roman philosopher, Seneca the Younger in this play Madea, were Madea says to Jason, "Cui who gains by a crime committed it." And then que malo is who suffers? Used in conjunction with que bono and que prodest, you figure out who will benefit and who will suffer as a result of a certain action. And this one who suffers is crucial to discerning in particular the motivations of our leaders. Because Jesus Christ talked about leadership. He said, "Whoever wants to be the greatest among you has to be the greatest servant." Meaning whoever wants to lead the people has to be willing to suffer the most.These are questions that are helpful of discerning a person's motivations. Why does a person do what they do? Why do you do what you do? What drives you? What motivates you? I'm not talking about hypothetically, theoretically. If you're a Christian, what motivates you, not what should motivate you? What does today, what does in the season of your life, what motivates you? If you're not a Christian, what motivates you? And will it matter in five years? Will it matter in 10 years, 20, 30? Will it matter from the perspective of eternity?These are all things we're wrestling with here from 2 Corinthians, 11:16-33. Would you look at the text with me? "I repeat, let no one think me foolish. But even if you do, accept me as a fool so that I too may boast a little. What I am saying with this boastful confidence, I say not with the Lord's authority, but as a fool. Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast." By the way, Saint Paul makes a lot more sense if you imagine him as an Italian. It just makes so much more sense. "What I'm saying with this boastful confidence, I say not with the Lord's authority, but as a fool. Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast. For you gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves. For you bear if someone makes slaves of you, or devours you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that. But whatever anyone else dares to boast of, I'm speaking as a fool, I also dare to boast of that."Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one. I'm talking like a madman, with far greater laborers, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys; and danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea danger, from false brothers, in toil and hardship through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is a daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I'm not indignant? If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, He who is blessed forever, knows that I'm not lying. At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands."This is a reading of God's holy and infallible, authoritative Word. May you write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First, beware leaders who sacrificed other for self. I know it's beware of leaders, but be beware leaders sounds more ominous. Follow leaders who sacrifice self for Christ, and then emulate leaders who decrease so Christ increases. First, be aware leaders who sacrifice others for self. In the second part of the letter, Saint Paul is battling for the very soul of the Corinthian church. He's battling against false teachers. The people aren't Christians. He says earlier in the text that they're actually Satan's servants, doing everything they can to pull people away from Christ. They can't pull people away from Christ. Satan and these servants try to do everything to keep the people of God from faithfulness, which is the key to usefulness.The lesson learned in this text, they don't just apply to spiritual leaders. These lessons that we draw from the text, they apply to all leaders, anyone who you follow, anyone who you listen to, anyone who you obey, anyone who influences how you live on a day to day, who influences the decisions we make. What he's saying here is, "Beware. Beware of blind obedience to authority just because they're authority figures." And the context, this 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, "For such men are false apostles, deceitful workman, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguised himself as an angel of life. So it is no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds."See, the thing with Satan is he's in it for himself. He doesn't want to obey anyone. He doesn't want to take commands from God. Satan's servants, willing or unwilling, these same servants are in it for themselves just like Satan. What does Satan promise Eve and Adam at the very beginning? He promises them life without God. He says, "You'll be like God, meaning you can decide for yourself what's good and what's evil, what's right and what's wrong." These so-called super apostles came into the church after Paul left, and they started building a following boasting about their credentials, their worldly credentials. And St. Paul here answers those boasts. He answers those super false apostles. 2 Corinthians 11:16, "I repeat, let no one think me foolish. But even if you do, accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little."What Paul is about to do is he's about to attack the very heart of the power of the false apostles. He's going to dismantle their authority with his own "foolish boasting". Because the problem was the Corinthian church had become enamored with the idol of sophistication. The false teacher said, "Hey, Paul's not here, let's build up the church." And these people who are educated probably in Old Testament scripture, probably have even doctorates from Jerusalem, they're looking for a job and they come in, "Oh, here's some religious people. Let's make this a job. Oh, let's reach some more people. Yeah, Paul's tactics, they don't work in reaching the masses. Let's soften the gospel. Let's not talk so much about sin. We're in Corinth. Let's not talk about gender. Let's not talk about sexual boundaries. Let's not talk about marriage is one man one woman. Let's not talk about any of that. Let's just talk about that God loves you and He has a tremendous plan for your life to live any way that you want," which is coincidentally the plan of Satan. "Let's not overly focus on scripture. Let's meet people where they are. Let's present the message in a more sophisticated way where it doesn't really touch people's lives but they walk away like they got some kind of spiritual teaching."In Roman culture, they valued strength and success. So these false teachers boasted in their worldly wins, their credentials, their speaking fees, their influence, their following, their commendation and letters of recommendation. And Paul isn't about to boast in his wins, he's about to boast in his Ls, his losses. He's about to present a catalog of suffering. He uses the same rhetorical technique that his enemies used with one difference, he flips it on its head. He does the upside down of what they were doing just to show how foolish it is to say, "I've come to tell you about God, how great God is," and the whole time you're talking about how great you are.2 Corinthians 11:17, "What I'm saying with this boastful confidence, I say not as the Lord would but as a fool." Now, this is a challenging verse, and this is really important to understand the question that's raised by godless, pagan, biblical scholars. They used this verse to build a case that Paul didn't write scripture. Therefore, we don't have to listen to Paul. Which is false. And we have another apostle who knew Jesus before Paul knew Jesus, Peter in 2 Peter 3:14-18 talking about Paul. "Therefore, beloved, since you were waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patients of our Lord at salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matter. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures."What does he call the writings that Paul Graphe, he calls them scriptures. "You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the era of lawless people, lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now until the day of eternity. Amen." So this was scripture. So what does verse 17 mean when he says, "Look, I say not as the Lord would, but as a fool."? What he's revealing is this internal battle with the Holy Spirit. As he's writing, he knows that the Holy Spirit is flowing through him. He knows these words aren't his. He knows these ideas aren't his. He's just a vessel of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's writing through him. And the Holy Spirit gets to this verse and He's like, "Paul, this is what you're about to do. Write it." And Paul says, "No, Lord, I don't want to boast." And the Holy Spirit says, "Write it."And it pained Paul to do this because he didn't see an example of this kind of boasting from Jesus Christ. Yet, God tells Paul to do it. Paul wanted to imitate Christ in everything. Twice in the epistles of Corinthians he says, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ." But sometimes, to battle Satan's most effective strategies you must reveal how foolish these strategies are by employing the same technique just upside down. He doesn't want to fight them on their own terms, but he has to because God said so. Do we have an example of Jesus debating people in power? Yes, of course we do. But when it counted the most, Jesus Christ did not answer His accusers. 1 Peter 2:23, "When He was reviled, He had not reviled in return. When He suffered, He did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to Him who judges justly."Jesus didn't defend Himself when He stood before Pilate or Caiphus, unjustly accused, on purpose. Why? Because He was here to fulfill a very particular mission, and that mission was to die for the sins of the whole world. It had to be this way. Paul, and us sometimes, are forced to honestly, reasonably, fairly defend ourselves sometimes for the preservation of the truth. When this happens, we're not happy about it. Paul's so humble, he has no desire to defend himself. He's not doing it for himself, he's doing it for the benefit of the Corinthian church. He's so reluctant to boast even in suffering because he hates it. He resents it. But he must do it to expose just how foolish these false teachers are.Proverbs 26 is really helpful to discern what's going on in this text, verse four and five, "Answer not a fool according to his folly lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." So which one is it? Do I answer the fool, or do I not answer the fool? There's a lot of fools around me. Am I answering the fools? And he says, "There's two ways of dealing with a fool. First, ignore, rise above the fray, refuse to condescend to the level. But second, sometimes you got to answer the fool according to his folly. But do it better than they did." And Paul, he'd much rather talk about Jesus. However, since the false teachers waged personal attacks, he defends his integrity while simultaneously undermining their influence. And also, through this, he shepherds the church and teaches them how to develop discernment. Verse 18, "Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast. For you gladly bear with fools being wise yourselves."Now here St. Paul brings in a little sarcasm because sarcasm often is powerful. He's a big shot, super apostles. He's boasting in the worldly accomplishments. Paul had more. But they didn't know God. And they didn't know the wisdom of God. They didn't know the gospel of God. We learned earlier in the text they were preaching a different Jesus with a different spirit, with a different gospel, thinking themselves to be wise. They were fools. They present themselves as philosophers and theologians, but they didn't know God. And then Paul brings in this phrase, "being wise yourself", this biting sarcasm. Sarcasm is basically saying the opposite of what's true. What he's saying is, "Well, aren't you something? Aren't you guys so smart? I left you guys, and you are so intelligent, you are so educated that you put up with these fools. The Corinthian church thinking themselves wise were acting foolishly, and Paul publicly calls out folly when necessary."You're saying you're so smart. You put up with fools while they exploit you and they plunder you." Verse 20, "For you bear if someone makes slaves of you or devours you or takes advantage of you or puts on airs or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that." The sophists and itinerant philosophers and teachers of that day were known for taking advantage of people who were less informed, less educated. And what did they do? They had the same goal in mind as Satan does, they wanted to enslave people to man-made rules. "Here's my rules, follow them." To devour them financially, to extort, to exploit, to take advantage of them using not love but entrapment, using them not loving them. The phrase "put on airs" here is these are people who push themselves forward, lifting themselves up as they push everyone else down. "Strikes you in the face," he says. Is this just humiliation, where you strike someone in the face with verbal abuse? Or is this physical abuse?Well, there are examples in the early church that these false teachers did abuse people physically. They brought that in from their understanding in Jerusalem. St. Paul later talks about the lashes that he got. He was physical abused, to dominate to humiliate. Cultish behavior. It's all typical behavior of Satan servants. They're like leaches, suck life out of the victim. This is tyranny. That's what he's addressing here. Jesus never taught us to accept that tyranny is anything other than sin. Yes, he taught us to turn the other cheek, but turn the other cheek has nothing to do with physical abuse. Turn the other cheek has to do with being willing to forgive a person who has abused you. So if you are being physically abused, it is not our duty to remain in a position where we are physically abused. Scripture teaches against that.Paul never intended to make disciples of themselves, only disciples of Jesus. And the enemies of the gospel always seek to make disciples of themselves with the intention of enslaving. Verse 21, Paul says, "To my shame, I must say we were too weak for that." Too weak for what? He said, "We were too weak to take advantage of you." Obviously, he's saying, "We didn't take advantage of you on purpose. And these people are coming in, they take our kindness as a sign of weakness." He said, "Whatever anyone else dares to boast of, I'm speaking of as a fool. I also dare to boast of that." What he's saying is in effect, "These people took advantage of you. We could have if we wanted to. We didn't. I was too weak to enslave anyone," he was basically saying, "devour your resources and abuse you."Scripture often talks about this understanding of spiritual authority as service not domination. 1 Peter 5:1-5, "So I exhort the elders among you, the pastors, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ," the apostle Peter says, "as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed. Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not dominating over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility under one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble."Matthew 20:25-28, the words of Jesus Christ, "But Jesus called them to Him and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. "Beware leaders that sacrifice others for themselves," Jesus says. No, the true leaders, spiritual leaders, and any true leaders, these are foundational keys to leadership. You lead by service. You lead sacrifice. And this is point two, follow leaders who sacrifice self for Christ. And 2 Corinthians 11:22, "Are they Hebrews?" So Paul here now is giving us his resume. "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I."The false teachers made a big deal of their authentic Jewish background, their pedigree. They knew the Hebrew language. So they were religious, they knew the Old Testaments scriptures. Israelites. They brought in the theocratic name of God. This is Israel. And they are offspring of Abraham that they would inherit the messianic king. Paul is a disciple of Gamaliel. He's a Pharisee of Pharisees. He played the same card just better. He had the right ethnic, religious, educational background. He gives us this in Philippians 3:3-11. "For we are the circumcision, we worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless."But whatever gain I had, I counted as lost for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."He continues in 2 Corinthians 11:23, "Are they servants of Christ? I'm a better one. I'm talking like a madman," he knows this, this is nuts what he's doing, "with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, countless beatings, and often near death." You see that switch, you see what he's doing? "I am a great servant of Christ." And right here he could have talked about his greatness. He could have talked about how many people became Christians through his ministry, how many churches he planted, how many political figures he spoke truth to. He could have done all... how many miracles God's done through him? "No, because I'm a better servant of Christ, now let me tell you about how much I've sacrificed: greater labors, more imprisonments, countless beatings, and often near death."Here, this isn't hyperbolic. He's giving us a true list of his sufferings. The Apostle Paul here elaborates on how much he has sacrificed for the name of Jesus Christ and the mission of Christ. The false teachers came in, they said, "You're following that guy? The hand of God is not on that guy. Obviously, God has cursed that guy, look how much pain He's gone through. If God blesses a person, if God's hand is upon a person, they're rich, and they're healthy, and they're good looking, and they never have any suffering. They never have suffering."Saint Paul says, "No that's wrong." He didn't view suffering as a curse from God, he viewed suffering as an honor, as a blessing from the Lord. That's a gift from God. Also, Paul, he is a smart guy, and the deeper you study, the more you swim in the waters of Paul's writings, you realize just how intelligent he was and how the Holy spirit's using him. The false prophets came into the church for real profits. They didn't come to the church to help the people, they came to the church to make money. And they called Paul a hack who didn't charge a speaking fee because no one would pay even if he charged. That was the accusation. And Paul says, "You want my invoice? You want to know how much you cost me? I'll give you my invoice. I'll give it to you."I've got lots of stories about my daughter. One of my daughters, I won't say, she gave me three coupons for Christmas for 15-minute massages. It was nice. It's nice. And I've got the gong thing, the T.J. Maxx version. And I got this little spikey thing that you go put in your head and you're like, "Whoa." And then she did it for 10 minutes yesterday. She's like, "You got 35 minutes left." Which is funny to me. Imagine if she was an infant and I was like, "All right, I changed your diaper once. You got two more changes left." Do you want my invoice of what it took to get you here? That's why he finds this so ludicrous. So as you read this, you got to ask what drove St. Paul to make these sacrifices.Verse 24, "Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less one." The 40 lashes was the maximum allowed by the law of Moses, and the Jewish authorities of that day said, "Let's do 39," using the rabbinical principle of fencing the law so that even if you miscount, you don't go over 40. So 39, 40 minus one. So 195 times he was whipped. Was it just leather straps? We're not told. When Jesus was whipped, it wasn't just leather straps. It was leather straps, a little pieces of sharp bone at the inner rock to tear his flesh off. 195 times. Most likely, his whole back was covered in lacerations. 2 Corinthians 11:25, "Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and the day I was a drift at sea."The rods were the Roman form of beating. Paul was beaten both by the Jewish and Roman authorities. Though, he was a Roman citizen, he should have been legally protected from the physical beatings. But the local petty tyrants didn't always obey their own laws. And St. Paul did appeal to Caesar. He said, "What you're doing here is wrong." He did fight unwarranted tyranny. He spoke up against it. The beatings and lashings weren't just painful but meant to humiliate, to dishonor. Paul here boast on something that was extremely humiliating, but he doesn't mind doing it because he doesn't esteem the opinion of people that much, because he esteems the opinion of God infinitely more, is infinitely more precious. He continues, verse 26, "On frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, and danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, and danger from false brothers."In the Roman empire, because of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, they built tremendous roads, transportation infrastructure that sprawled all around the empire, and they had thousands of ships sailing. You could travel to most parts of the Roman empire, although accessible, the travel wasn't easy. St. Paul suffered much, especially because he had such a controversial message. Anywhere he went, he would just share the gospel. In 2 Corinthians 11:27, "In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure." Paul poured himself out in every single way imaginable on behalf of the gospel. He left nothing in his tank. He left everything on the field.2 Corinthians 11:28, "Apart from other things, there's a daily pressure on me of my anxiety for the churches." He just described a catalog, a litany of suffering that any one single predicament of these that he mentioned, any one of them would cause most modern Christians to throw up their hands and quit in despair and say, "No, no, no, no, no, this is not worth it. This whole Christian thing isn't worth it. Right, you said that all I have to do is repent all my sins and I go to eternity. I did not sign up for a life of suffering." Well, that's because the American church has been preaching a half gospel for decades. "You come to Jesus, all your sins are forgiven." Yeah, you come to Jesus, all your sins are forgiven. That's awesome. But now you're a servant of God, and God gets to tell you what to do. God gets to call you wherever God wants to call you. God gets to create a plan for you because He's God. And the only thing that you are allowed to say, dear Christians, is "Yes, sir. Yes, sir, where would you send me, Lord? How much do you want me to sacrifice, Lord? I'm all in." None of this, "No, I'm just going to live a comfortable life." And do nothing.Satan's servants has crept into the American church to make us flacid, just to do nothing for the Lord, nothing of consequence. Paul said, "Apart from all of this apart." You're like, "Yeah, I've been through some stuff." And the whole time he says, "I've had the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for the role the churches." Instead of despairing, Paul emerges victorious because he knew if God has allowed this suffering to happen in my life, He has a purpose for the suffering, to spread the gospel, to expand the kingdom of God. He suffered physically. He also suffered emotionally and spiritually. This is the concern for the church, for all the churches.Pastors know this. Spiritual leaders know this. It's a spiritual anxiety. In Philippians 4, he says, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, present your request to God." Don't be anxious about the wrong things. Do be anxious about the right things. We should be anxious about the health of our souls. We should be anxious about the health of the souls of our loved ones. We should experience the spiritual anxiety, this heartache for the souls of the people around us. And Paul did. He was concerned with both the church planting and church vibrancy, starting churches, but then growing them in healthy maturity.Verse 29, "Who is weak, and I'm not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?" I spent all week trying to figure out what he means by the word weak. He calls himself weak here, and then in verse 30, we'll get to it. He just gave us a list of stuff that any half verse would kill most any one of us. He calls himself weak. Here he says, "Who is weak? And I'm not weak." Here he's talking about empathy. He says, "When people that he led to the Lord are weak in their faith, when they're suffering, he suffers." This is called empathy. When you feel the pain of other people, this is empathy. Is it weak to experience empathy? Is it weak to experience empathy? No, it's not. It takes an incredible strength to experience empathy, to empathize with another person in their suffering. And the more people under your care, the more strength you need to empathize with every single one of them. More strength you need to bear the weight of a beloved person's suffering. When people suffered, he suffered.And the second phrase is, "Who is made to fall? And I'm not indignant." It literally reads, "Who is entrapped into sin, and I do not burn?" When people fell from the faith, when they sinned, Paul burned with indignation for their souls. I wonder as you read this list, do you have a resume or a catalog of suffering or sacrifice for the Lord? Every faithful Christian should. Like if need be, to make a list of how much you've suffered for the Lord. Because every Christian knows that because Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself for me, He calls me to sacrifice myself for Him. You should have a catalog of suffering. You will have a catalog of suffering. If you continue to faithfully follow Jesus Christ and say yes to every single one of His commandments, you will grow this list, this resume. Every Christian will. In particular, in the time that we live. We need to be wide awake and know that persecution might be around the corner for Christians. It already is in many parts of the world. We need to be ready.Three is, "Emulate leaders who decrease so Christ increases." This phrase comes from John the Baptist. John the baptized from John 3:30 says, "He must increase, I must decrease." John was losing his disciples to Jesus Christ. And one of his disciples said, "Aren't you worried that Jesus is going to have a bigger following then you? He's like, "No. I came to point everyone to Jesus Christ. I don't care about my following. I don't care about my platform. He must increase, I must decrease. 2 Corinthians 11:30, Paul says, "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness." Paul knew that when he is weakest Christ is strongest. When he is weakest, he can't but trust in the strength of Jesus Christ. He knew he couldn't do a thing for the Lord without the Lord's power. 2 Corinthians 3:5, "Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God. Our power comes from God."This verse I have to deal with just a little bit, because I've been wrestling all week, "What in the world does he mean by showing my weakness?" In particular, in the context, the guy got beaten how many lashes? 195. Three times beaten by rods, shipwrecked a night and a day in sea, cold, exposure. So how are you not dead, bro? That's my question. That's my question. How did you get out of this thing alive? That's my question. Obviously God. Obviously God. Obviously God. But scripture nowhere doesn't say, "Hey, hey, Christians, be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might and never do anything in your life to get stronger. Remain weak. Hey, Christians, remain weak spiritually, remain weak physically, remain weak financially, remain weak, remain weak, remain... " Do you see that in the Bible? That's nowhere in the Bible. So what does he mean by weakness?Well, it's a spectrum, right? The weakness and strength is a spectrum, and every single person, they're in a different range on the spectrum. If you lift, which you should, every Christian should be as strong as you possibly can in health wise, immune system, it's good for you. You should lift. And when you have an off day in the gym, like that off day is different for different people. I've lifted with people and they're like, Yeah, I feel really sluggish today. I've been sick for like four weeks, and I barely got out of bed." And then they put on four plates on each side, the big ones.The weakness is different for people. And the stronger you are, the stronger your weakness is. And, and this is important because in the context, what is Paul doing here? What did we start off with? He's engaging. He's doing battle with the false teachers, the servants of Satan. He's going to war with them, and he clearly wins. After this argument, he gets clear that he won. So he's using his weakness as a way to overcome his enemies. This is really important. It's really important because I do believe that there's an attack on the church today. The attack is coming from everywhere, and it's on all humans, but it's on the church in particular. The attack comes through a lie through the narrative that Christians should be weak by definition. "Oh, you're a Christian, you should be weak in every aspect of life." We should be weak physically, financially, socially, relationally, intellectually, educationally, spiritually. Weak, Christians should be weak.Should Christians be weak?No.No. Is it okay for a Christian to be weak? Yes, it's okay. Sometimes it's children, it's baby Christians. Sometimes you're sick. Yes. This is why we, the stronger, are called to help the weaker. The stronger you are, the more you can help those who are weaker. But if you are weak and you have the ability to get stronger, should you get stronger? Of course. Right, this is as clear as day. I don't even know why I have to say this.Also, don't judge a person's strength from your starting line, judge a person's strength from their starting line. You're like, "Oh, I don't know what your starting line is." Then get to know the person. But we are to grow stronger. And by the way, this attack to make people and people in the church weak, the attack is specifically targeting men. I don't know if you noticed this. Satan specifically targets men, and he specifically targets Christian men. The Christian men should be weak because Christian men don't do anything for the kingdom. What is weakness? Weakness is a lack of strength to protect yourself. That's all weakness is, it's a lack of strength. Is that what Paul means in 2 Corinthians 11:30 when he says, "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness."? I don't think so.What's he mean by weakness? How is he weak after just giving us a catalog of suffering that would kill any of us? Is it weakness to suffer so much? No, of course not. Well, this is what the world and the false prophets, this is what they would all say, that it's we weakness that you allowed yourself to suffer so much. That's what the world says. It's weakness that you put yourself in a position to be hurt. That's what the world says. Well, the world doesn't understand what true love is. Isn't it true strength to sacrifice yourself, to be willing to suffer for the one you love? Yeah. Choosing the way of suffering for the one you love, yeah. This is the way of the cross. This is choosing the way of the cross and walking in it daily. It takes the greatest amount of strength that today I'm going to deny myself. I'm not going to do what I want. I'm going to do what's best for my beloved.Was Paul weak? No, he wasn't weak, he was meek. And there's a difference. He had the strength to choose to put himself in a vulnerable situation for the sake of others. It's not just a catalog of suffering but of sacrificed, and he sacrificed a lot. Just like Jesus Christ. Jesus standing before Pilate, was Jesus weak? No, He's not. He was meek. At that moment, He could have killed Pilate. He chose not to. "I could kill you, but I'm going to die for you instead." That's true power. In that case, He chose to lay aside His strength to take on the bigger enemy. By the way, this is how Paul started the whole argument, 2 Corinthians 10:1, he started the whole argument challenging the false teachers, he say, "I, Paul, myself entreat to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ, I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I'm away." He said, "I am entreating you by the meekness of Jesus Christ." Not the weakness of Jesus Christ. Weakness is having no strength, meekness is focusing your strength.It's why Christians like from the outside Jesus did look weak. Many Christians from the outside, you do look weak. We look weak. But it's not weakness, it's strength under control. That's what meekness is. One of my favorite verses in all of scripture is Numbers 12:3, where it says, "Moses was very meek, more than all people who are in the face of the earth." Moses was very meek. I find that interesting because it's kind of parallel with what Paul is doing here. Who wrote the Book of Numbers? It was Moses. Moses was the most meek person. As he's writing, he's like, "Holy Spirit, you sure? He's like, "Yeah, yeah, write that."Moses also killed a guy with his bare hands and buried the corpse in a desert. Was he weak? No, of course he wasn't weak. Weak people can't be meek by definition. If you have no strength to keep in check, then you can't even be meek. Meekness assumes strength. My message is we need more meek Christians and fewer weak Christians. So if you have the ability to get stronger, get stronger in every single aspect of your life, in particular men. Women, you guys are crushing it. Keep growing in strength. Keep growing in the Lord. Keep getting stronger. Men, you need to be leading the charge and growing in strength, because it is our job to provide and to protect and to build so when the time comes we're ready to sacrifice self to protect. And the more you have to give, the greater sacrifice you could make.We're called to sacrifice self for others. Is it weakness to risk pain to self because you love one another? No, it's the greatest power. It's the greatest strength. That's why self-denial is a superpower. This is my message, I just pray that all of us gets stronger in every aspect of life. It starts with being stronger in the Lord and the strength of His might. But I've noticed that when people are strong in the Lord, every other aspect of their life just gets stronger. The closer you are to the Lord, the more filled to Spirit you are. Correlation causation, I'm not sure. Everything, you just get stronger relationally, stronger marriages, stronger parenting, stronger children, stronger finances, just stronger all around, stronger mental health, stronger physically. Because you understand when you work for the Lord, full tell all the time. You have to figure out how to get your energy up and to work as hard as you can, and so when persecution comes, you are hard to kill, just like St. Paul was. You can't kill the guy. And obviously, protected by the power of the Spirit, and then we're invincible until the day the Lord calls us home.2 Corinthians 11:31, "The God and the Father of the Lord Jesus, He who is blessed forever, knows that I'm not lying." St. Paul here as he's finishing the chapter brings in an oath. He preempts the story that he's about to tell, and he brings in an oath to make sure that his detractors are listening. And then he starts his story. "At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me." So Paul concludes this catalog of suffering by describing one particularly humiliating experience in his life. He was a young, accomplished scholar under Gamaliel, a rising star in the religious world of the Roman Empire. He was a genius, and he was zealous, willing to do anything and everything for his God. So he took letters of recommendation and he's on the road to Damascus to go persecute Christians, to arrest them, and ultimately to execute them. And then on the way, Jesus Christ meets him on the road to Damascus, the resurrected Christ, and blinds him with His light. Paul gets saved.Now this hunter of Christians becomes hunted by his own colleagues. The dissident has to be eliminated. St. Paul here talks about the time when he was in Damascus and he knew that his colleagues were here to kill him, and that he, by the help of Christians, he's lowered in a fish basket like a child to escape his former colleagues. In the next chapter, he's going to recount how he was lifted to the third heaven. He got to experience spiritually... Very few people have ever experienced. Before he recounts how he was lifted to the heavens, he recounts how he was lowered in a fish basket, like the lowest of the low in the middle of the night, just weak and vulnerable. And 2 Corinthians 11:33, "But I was let down on the basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands." Paul headed toward Damascus a Pharisee, and he leaves a humbled Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ.He embraces his suffering for Christ. "This is my weakness," he says. "My weakness is that I love Jesus Christ so much that I'm willing to experience whatever suffering the Lord appoints for me. That's my weakness." His weakness was his love for God, which is actually his strength. And that's why it's upside down.Is this your weakness, dear Christian, a love for God that overcomes everything? Or do you have a weakness for an idol instead? Well, then, you won't be effective. We're called to be like Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, Isaiah 53, "He is the suffering servant." Our Messiah, the king of kings comes to die in a cross for our sins. He's humiliated, scorched, beaten, bruised, bleeding on the cross to procure our salvation. The only thing you have to do is be justified. Yes, it's true, it's true, it's true. Repent of your sins and follow Jesus Christ. Repent, follow Jesus. Repent, believe. Repent, believe. Repent of your sins. But just know that if God has appointed you a salvation, He has also appointed you to make sacrifices for Him, for His kingdom. And all we who faithfully follow Jesus Christ in this life, we will suffer. That's a promise. Or wants to lead a holy life will suffer.We shouldn't seek suffering, but we also shouldn't be surprised when we do suffer. And we must resolve today to remain unflinchingly faithful in the faith of any adversity. I'll close with the words of Jesus Christ, Luke 9:23. "And He said to all, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when He comes in His glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels." Amen. Let's pray.Heavenly Father, we thank you for Jesus Christ. You called Him to live a life of holiness. You called Him to take on the ultimate enemies of Satan, sin, and death. And Jesus Christ, you wrestled in Gethsemane, and you cried out, "If there's any other way, let this cup of suffering pass from me." And there was no other way, and Jesus, you went to the cross, and you bore the wrath of God that we deserve for our sin. You bore our deaths and you took on the hell of Satan and demons. And did that so we would not have to. But then you also call us a life of following you, of taking up our cross daily, a cross of self-denial, of saying no to self, saying yes to your plan, saying yes to service and sacrifice. I pray that you strengthen us in that Holy Spirit. Empower us like you've never empowered us before, and use us to spark a revival in this region of the nation and beyond. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com. Good morning, welcome to Mosaic Church. My name is Jan, one of the pastors here along with Pastor Shane and Pastor Andy. If you're new or visiting, we're so glad you're here with us. I pray that you get connected. We do that officially through the connection card and the worship card if you fill out legibly. Just redeem it at the welcome center for a little gift. And then we'll also send you another gift in the mail. A couple housekeeping things. The 16th, next Sunday, we have a baptism seminar. If you have not been baptized as an adult and you'd like to know more, it's right after the service with lunch provided. And then on the 23rd, we have a membership class. We take membership seriously. Church is a family, membership is how we know that you are in the family that is Mosaic Boston. We also have a baptism today. My daughter, Melana, she's four, she's really excited about the baptism. She came up to me yesterday, I had no idea what she was talking about, she's like, "When's the next time you're going to dunk a person in the bathtub with their clothes on?" Had no idea what she was talking about. She said, "Baptism." I told her, "There's baptism tomorrow." She's like, "Yeah." So, we have baptism after the second service. We'd love to have you join us. Also, every time it snows for the first time, I give a public service announcement about how to flourish in Boston in the winter. This is important. I don't see anyone else doing this, this is important. Here's what you need, three things to flourish in Boston in the winter. Number one, you need a nice pair of waterproof boots. Necessary, very necessary, with good grip on them, very important. Number two, you need a good winter coat, preferably with a coat that has a little fuzzy trim, which keeps the wind out. That's important. Number three, you got to take your vitamin D. You got to take your vitamin D. I don't know why, I have to say this. None of the government officials who are supposed to care about our health, for the past two and a half years, no one's talking about this. Take your vitamin D. There's not enough sunshine in Boston, take your vitamin D. And take care of your immune system. God gave you an immune system. Work out, eat good food not the processed junk. Okay, that's my public service announcement. With that said, would you please pray with me over the preaching of God's holy Word? Heavenly Father, thank you for this incredible word that you have prepared for us from your servant, Paul. We thank you for his personal example of being willing to sacrifice everything, go through whatever suffering to get the message out, to get the message to your elect. I pray you use us in the same way. Make us a people who no matter what the sacrifice, no matter what the suffering, we're willing to go through it because there's nothing more important than building your kingdom, than helping people be transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of your beloved Son. And make us a people who are strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Strengthen us, strengthen us in every aspect of our life so when the time comes to sacrifice we have more to sacrifice and we can endure more suffering. We pray that you bless the preaching of the holy word, and I pray deep in our hearts, give us a true realization, the preeminence of Christ, that there's nothing greater than Christ. I pray all this in Christ's holy name. Amen. We're in 2 Corinthians 11:16-33 today. We're continuing our Prodigal Church season two series. A few more sermons left in this series. The title of the sermon today is Through Many Tribulations. The early church understood that when you get saved, you get saved to a life of following Jesus Christ, and that life includes tribulations. Acts 14:21-22, this is where that text comes from, "When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith and saying, 'Through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God.'" As we look at what's going on in the world, one of the things that I'm praying about the Lord deepening in our body is a sense of discernment, to discern what's true and to discern what's evil, what's false, what's lies. And this is what St. Paul does in this letter, in the second part of the letter, he wants to deepen a discernment in the people of God to know, to know when they are being bamboozled. When we ask the question, "What in the world is going on?" you got to ask a few timeless, helpful questions, and this comes from ancient philosophers. The questions that come from Latin, cui bono? cui bono? Who benefits? Who's responsible for a certain event in any crime investigation or in politics, in any event? There's a high probability that it's the person standing to gain the most from it. Cui bono? Who benefits? The second one is an extension of the first is, cui prodest, who profits? We know the term, "Follow the money." It was first used by Roman philosopher, Seneca the Younger in this play Madea, were Madea says to Jason, "Cui who gains by a crime committed it." And then que malo is who suffers? Used in conjunction with que bono and que prodest, you figure out who will benefit and who will suffer as a result of a certain action. And this one who suffers is crucial to discerning in particular the motivations of our leaders. Because Jesus Christ talked about leadership. He said, "Whoever wants to be the greatest among you has to be the greatest servant." Meaning whoever wants to lead the people has to be willing to suffer the most. These are questions that are helpful of discerning a person's motivations. Why does a person do what they do? Why do you do what you do? What drives you? What motivates you? I'm not talking about hypothetically, theoretically. If you're a Christian, what motivates you, not what should motivate you? What does today, what does in the season of your life, what motivates you? If you're not a Christian, what motivates you? And will it matter in five years? Will it matter in 10 years, 20, 30? Will it matter from the perspective of eternity? These are all things we're wrestling with here from 2 Corinthians, 11:16-33. Would you look at the text with me? "I repeat, let no one think me foolish. But even if you do, accept me as a fool so that I too may boast a little. What I am saying with this boastful confidence, I say not with the Lord's authority, but as a fool. Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast." By the way, Saint Paul makes a lot more sense if you imagine him as an Italian. It just makes so much more sense. "What I'm saying with this boastful confidence, I say not with the Lord's authority, but as a fool. Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast. For you gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves. For you bear if someone makes slaves of you, or devours you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that. But whatever anyone else dares to boast of, I'm speaking as a fool, I also dare to boast of that. "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one. I'm talking like a madman, with far greater laborers, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys; and danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea danger, from false brothers, in toil and hardship through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is a daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I'm not indignant? If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, He who is blessed forever, knows that I'm not lying. At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands." This is a reading of God's holy and infallible, authoritative Word. May you write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First, beware leaders who sacrificed other for self. I know it's beware of leaders, but be beware leaders sounds more ominous. Follow leaders who sacrifice self for Christ, and then emulate leaders who decrease so Christ increases. First, be aware leaders who sacrifice others for self. In the second part of the letter, Saint Paul is battling for the very soul of the Corinthian church. He's battling against false teachers. The people aren't Christians. He says earlier in the text that they're actually Satan's servants, doing everything they can to pull people away from Christ. They can't pull people away from Christ. Satan and these servants try to do everything to keep the people of God from faithfulness, which is the key to usefulness. The lesson learned in this text, they don't just apply to spiritual leaders. These lessons that we draw from the text, they apply to all leaders, anyone who you follow, anyone who you listen to, anyone who you obey, anyone who influences how you live on a day to day, who influences the decisions we make. What he's saying here is, "Beware. Beware of blind obedience to authority just because they're authority figures." And the context, this 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, "For such men are false apostles, deceitful workman, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguised himself as an angel of life. So it is no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds." See, the thing with Satan is he's in it for himself. He doesn't want to obey anyone. He doesn't want to take commands from God. Satan's servants, willing or unwilling, these same servants are in it for themselves just like Satan. What does Satan promise Eve and Adam at the very beginning? He promises them life without God. He says, "You'll be like God, meaning you can decide for yourself what's good and what's evil, what's right and what's wrong." These so-called super apostles came into the church after Paul left, and they started building a following boasting about their credentials, their worldly credentials. And St. Paul here answers those boasts. He answers those super false apostles. 2 Corinthians 11:16, "I repeat, let no one think me foolish. But even if you do, accept me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little." What Paul is about to do is he's about to attack the very heart of the power of the false apostles. He's going to dismantle their authority with his own "foolish boasting". Because the problem was the Corinthian church had become enamored with the idol of sophistication. The false teacher said, "Hey, Paul's not here, let's build up the church." And these people who are educated probably in Old Testament scripture, probably have even doctorates from Jerusalem, they're looking for a job and they come in, "Oh, here's some religious people. Let's make this a job. Oh, let's reach some more people. Yeah, Paul's tactics, they don't work in reaching the masses. Let's soften the gospel. Let's not talk so much about sin. We're in Corinth. Let's not talk about gender. Let's not talk about sexual boundaries. Let's not talk about marriage is one man one woman. Let's not talk about any of that. Let's just talk about that God loves you and He has a tremendous plan for your life to live any way that you want," which is coincidentally the plan of Satan. "Let's not overly focus on scripture. Let's meet people where they are. Let's present the message in a more sophisticated way where it doesn't really touch people's lives but they walk away like they got some kind of spiritual teaching." In Roman culture, they valued strength and success. So these false teachers boasted in their worldly wins, their credentials, their speaking fees, their influence, their following, their commendation and letters of recommendation. And Paul isn't about to boast in his wins, he's about to boast in his Ls, his losses. He's about to present a catalog of suffering. He uses the same rhetorical technique that his enemies used with one difference, he flips it on its head. He does the upside down of what they were doing just to show how foolish it is to say, "I've come to tell you about God, how great God is," and the whole time you're talking about how great you are. 2 Corinthians 11:17, "What I'm saying with this boastful confidence, I say not as the Lord would but as a fool." Now, this is a challenging verse, and this is really important to understand the question that's raised by godless, pagan, biblical scholars. They used this verse to build a case that Paul didn't write scripture. Therefore, we don't have to listen to Paul. Which is false. And we have another apostle who knew Jesus before Paul knew Jesus, Peter in 2 Peter 3:14-18 talking about Paul. "Therefore, beloved, since you were waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patients of our Lord at salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matter. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures." What does he call the writings that Paul Graphe, he calls them scriptures. "You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the era of lawless people, lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now until the day of eternity. Amen." So this was scripture. So what does verse 17 mean when he says, "Look, I say not as the Lord would, but as a fool."? What he's revealing is this internal battle with the Holy Spirit. As he's writing, he knows that the Holy Spirit is flowing through him. He knows these words aren't his. He knows these ideas aren't his. He's just a vessel of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's writing through him. And the Holy Spirit gets to this verse and He's like, "Paul, this is what you're about to do. Write it." And Paul says, "No, Lord, I don't want to boast." And the Holy Spirit says, "Write it." And it pained Paul to do this because he didn't see an example of this kind of boasting from Jesus Christ. Yet, God tells Paul to do it. Paul wanted to imitate Christ in everything. Twice in the epistles of Corinthians he says, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ." But sometimes, to battle Satan's most effective strategies you must reveal how foolish these strategies are by employing the same technique just upside down. He doesn't want to fight them on their own terms, but he has to because God said so. Do we have an example of Jesus debating people in power? Yes, of course we do. But when it counted the most, Jesus Christ did not answer His accusers. 1 Peter 2:23, "When He was reviled, He had not reviled in return. When He suffered, He did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to Him who judges justly." Jesus didn't defend Himself when He stood before Pilate or Caiphus, unjustly accused, on purpose. Why? Because He was here to fulfill a very particular mission, and that mission was to die for the sins of the whole world. It had to be this way. Paul, and us sometimes, are forced to honestly, reasonably, fairly defend ourselves sometimes for the preservation of the truth. When this happens, we're not happy about it. Paul's so humble, he has no desire to defend himself. He's not doing it for himself, he's doing it for the benefit of the Corinthian church. He's so reluctant to boast even in suffering because he hates it. He resents it. But he must do it to expose just how foolish these false teachers are. Proverbs 26 is really helpful to discern what's going on in this text, verse four and five, "Answer not a fool according to his folly lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." So which one is it? Do I answer the fool, or do I not answer the fool? There's a lot of fools around me. Am I answering the fools? And he says, "There's two ways of dealing with a fool. First, ignore, rise above the fray, refuse to condescend to the level. But second, sometimes you got to answer the fool according to his folly. But do it better than they did." And Paul, he'd much rather talk about Jesus. However, since the false teachers waged personal attacks, he defends his integrity while simultaneously undermining their influence. And also, through this, he shepherds the church and teaches them how to develop discernment. Verse 18, "Since many boast according to the flesh, I too will boast. For you gladly bear with fools being wise yourselves." Now here St. Paul brings in a little sarcasm because sarcasm often is powerful. He's a big shot, super apostles. He's boasting in the worldly accomplishments. Paul had more. But they didn't know God. And they didn't know the wisdom of God. They didn't know the gospel of God. We learned earlier in the text they were preaching a different Jesus with a different spirit, with a different gospel, thinking themselves to be wise. They were fools. They present themselves as philosophers and theologians, but they didn't know God. And then Paul brings in this phrase, "being wise yourself", this biting sarcasm. Sarcasm is basically saying the opposite of what's true. What he's saying is, "Well, aren't you something? Aren't you guys so smart? I left you guys, and you are so intelligent, you are so educated that you put up with these fools. The Corinthian church thinking themselves wise were acting foolishly, and Paul publicly calls out folly when necessary. "You're saying you're so smart. You put up with fools while they exploit you and they plunder you." Verse 20, "For you bear if someone makes slaves of you or devours you or takes advantage of you or puts on airs or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that." The sophists and itinerant philosophers and teachers of that day were known for taking advantage of people who were less informed, less educated. And what did they do? They had the same goal in mind as Satan does, they wanted to enslave people to man-made rules. "Here's my rules, follow them." To devour them financially, to extort, to exploit, to take advantage of them using not love but entrapment, using them not loving them. The phrase "put on airs" here is these are people who push themselves forward, lifting themselves up as they push everyone else down. "Strikes you in the face," he says. Is this just humiliation, where you strike someone in the face with verbal abuse? Or is this physical abuse? Well, there are examples in the early church that these false teachers did abuse people physically. They brought that in from their understanding in Jerusalem. St. Paul later talks about the lashes that he got. He was physical abused, to dominate to humiliate. Cultish behavior. It's all typical behavior of Satan servants. They're like leaches, suck life out of the victim. This is tyranny. That's what he's addressing here. Jesus never taught us to accept that tyranny is anything other than sin. Yes, he taught us to turn the other cheek, but turn the other cheek has nothing to do with physical abuse. Turn the other cheek has to do with being willing to forgive a person who has abused you. So if you are being physically abused, it is not our duty to remain in a position where we are physically abused. Scripture teaches against that. Paul never intended to make disciples of themselves, only disciples of Jesus. And the enemies of the gospel always seek to make disciples of themselves with the intention of enslaving. Verse 21, Paul says, "To my shame, I must say we were too weak for that." Too weak for what? He said, "We were too weak to take advantage of you." Obviously, he's saying, "We didn't take advantage of you on purpose. And these people are coming in, they take our kindness as a sign of weakness." He said, "Whatever anyone else dares to boast of, I'm speaking of as a fool. I also dare to boast of that." What he's saying is in effect, "These people took advantage of you. We could have if we wanted to. We didn't. I was too weak to enslave anyone," he was basically saying, "devour your resources and abuse you." Scripture often talks about this understanding of spiritual authority as service not domination. 1 Peter 5:1-5, "So I exhort the elders among you, the pastors, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ," the apostle Peter says, "as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed. Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not dominating over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility under one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." Matthew 20:25-28, the words of Jesus Christ, "But Jesus called them to Him and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. "Beware leaders that sacrifice others for themselves," Jesus says. No, the true leaders, spiritual leaders, and any true leaders, these are foundational keys to leadership. You lead by service. You lead sacrifice. And this is point two, follow leaders who sacrifice self for Christ. And 2 Corinthians 11:22, "Are they Hebrews?" So Paul here now is giving us his resume. "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they offspring of Abraham? So am I." The false teachers made a big deal of their authentic Jewish background, their pedigree. They knew the Hebrew language. So they were religious, they knew the Old Testaments scriptures. Israelites. They brought in the theocratic name of God. This is Israel. And they are offspring of Abraham that they would inherit the messianic king. Paul is a disciple of Gamaliel. He's a Pharisee of Pharisees. He played the same card just better. He had the right ethnic, religious, educational background. He gives us this in Philippians 3:3-11. "For we are the circumcision, we worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. "But whatever gain I had, I counted as lost for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." He continues in 2 Corinthians 11:23, "Are they servants of Christ? I'm a better one. I'm talking like a madman," he knows this, this is nuts what he's doing, "with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, countless beatings, and often near death." You see that switch, you see what he's doing? "I am a great servant of Christ." And right here he could have talked about his greatness. He could have talked about how many people became Christians through his ministry, how many churches he planted, how many political figures he spoke truth to. He could have done all... how many miracles God's done through him? "No, because I'm a better servant of Christ, now let me tell you about how much I've sacrificed: greater labors, more imprisonments, countless beatings, and often near death." Here, this isn't hyperbolic. He's giving us a true list of his sufferings. The Apostle Paul here elaborates on how much he has sacrificed for the name of Jesus Christ and the mission of Christ. The false teachers came in, they said, "You're following that guy? The hand of God is not on that guy. Obviously, God has cursed that guy, look how much pain He's gone through. If God blesses a person, if God's hand is upon a person, they're rich, and they're healthy, and they're good looking, and they never have any suffering. They never have suffering." Saint Paul says, "No that's wrong." He didn't view suffering as a curse from God, he viewed suffering as an honor, as a blessing from the Lord. That's a gift from God. Also, Paul, he is a smart guy, and the deeper you study, the more you swim in the waters of Paul's writings, you realize just how intelligent he was and how the Holy spirit's using him. The false prophets came into the church for real profits. They didn't come to the church to help the people, they came to the church to make money. And they called Paul a hack who didn't charge a speaking fee because no one would pay even if he charged. That was the accusation. And Paul says, "You want my invoice? You want to know how much you cost me? I'll give you my invoice. I'll give it to you." I've got lots of stories about my daughter. One of my daughters, I won't say, she gave me three coupons for Christmas for 15-minute massages. It was nice. It's nice. And I've got the gong thing, the T.J. Maxx version. And I got this little spikey thing that you go put in your head and you're like, "Whoa." And then she did it for 10 minutes yesterday. She's like, "You got 35 minutes left." Which is funny to me. Imagine if she was an infant and I was like, "All right, I changed your diaper once. You got two more changes left." Do you want my invoice of what it took to get you here? That's why he finds this so ludicrous. So as you read this, you got to ask what drove St. Paul to make these sacrifices. Verse 24, "Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less one." The 40 lashes was the maximum allowed by the law of Moses, and the Jewish authorities of that day said, "Let's do 39," using the rabbinical principle of fencing the law so that even if you miscount, you don't go over 40. So 39, 40 minus one. So 195 times he was whipped. Was it just leather straps? We're not told. When Jesus was whipped, it wasn't just leather straps. It was leather straps, a little pieces of sharp bone at the inner rock to tear his flesh off. 195 times. Most likely, his whole back was covered in lacerations. 2 Corinthians 11:25, "Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and the day I was a drift at sea." The rods were the Roman form of beating. Paul was beaten both by the Jewish and Roman authorities. Though, he was a Roman citizen, he should have been legally protected from the physical beatings. But the local petty tyrants didn't always obey their own laws. And St. Paul did appeal to Caesar. He said, "What you're doing here is wrong." He did fight unwarranted tyranny. He spoke up against it. The beatings and lashings weren't just painful but meant to humiliate, to dishonor. Paul here boast on something that was extremely humiliating, but he doesn't mind doing it because he doesn't esteem the opinion of people that much, because he esteems the opinion of God infinitely more, is infinitely more precious. He continues, verse 26, "On frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, and danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, and danger from false brothers." In the Roman empire, because of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, they built tremendous roads, transportation infrastructure that sprawled all around the empire, and they had thousands of ships sailing. You could travel to most parts of the Roman empire, although accessible, the travel wasn't easy. St. Paul suffered much, especially because he had such a controversial message. Anywhere he went, he would just share the gospel. In 2 Corinthians 11:27, "In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure." Paul poured himself out in every single way imaginable on behalf of the gospel. He left nothing in his tank. He left everything on the field. 2 Corinthians 11:28, "Apart from other things, there's a daily pressure on me of my anxiety for the churches." He just described a catalog, a litany of suffering that any one single predicament of these that he mentioned, any one of them would cause most modern Christians to throw up their hands and quit in despair and say, "No, no, no, no, no, this is not worth it. This whole Christian thing isn't worth it. Right, you said that all I have to do is repent all my sins and I go to eternity. I did not sign up for a life of suffering." Well, that's because the American church has been preaching a half gospel for decades. "You come to Jesus, all your sins are forgiven." Yeah, you come to Jesus, all your sins are forgiven. That's awesome. But now you're a servant of God, and God gets to tell you what to do. God gets to call you wherever God wants to call you. God gets to create a plan for you because He's God. And the only thing that you are allowed to say, dear Christians, is "Yes, sir. Yes, sir, where would you send me, Lord? How much do you want me to sacrifice, Lord? I'm all in." None of this, "No, I'm just going to live a comfortable life." And do nothing. Satan's servants has crept into the American church to make us flacid, just to do nothing for the Lord, nothing of consequence. Paul said, "Apart from all of this apart." You're like, "Yeah, I've been through some stuff." And the whole time he says, "I've had the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for the role the churches." Instead of despairing, Paul emerges victorious because he knew if God has allowed this suffering to happen in my life, He has a purpose for the suffering, to spread the gospel, to expand the kingdom of God. He suffered physically. He also suffered emotionally and spiritually. This is the concern for the church, for all the churches. Pastors know this. Spiritual leaders know this. It's a spiritual anxiety. In Philippians 4, he says, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, present your request to God." Don't be anxious about the wrong things. Do be anxious about the right things. We should be anxious about the health of our souls. We should be anxious about the health of the souls of our loved ones. We should experience the spiritual anxiety, this heartache for the souls of the people around us. And Paul did. He was concerned with both the church planting and church vibrancy, starting churches, but then growing them in healthy maturity. Verse 29, "Who is weak, and I'm not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?" I spent all week trying to figure out what he means by the word weak. He calls himself weak here, and then in verse 30, we'll get to it. He just gave us a list of stuff that any half verse would kill most any one of us. He calls himself weak. Here he says, "Who is weak? And I'm not weak." Here he's talking about empathy. He says, "When people that he led to the Lord are weak in their faith, when they're suffering, he suffers." This is called empathy. When you feel the pain of other people, this is empathy. Is it weak to experience empathy? Is it weak to experience empathy? No, it's not. It takes an incredible strength to experience empathy, to empathize with another person in their suffering. And the more people under your care, the more strength you need to empathize with every single one of them. More strength you need to bear the weight of a beloved person's suffering. When people suffered, he suffered. And the second phrase is, "Who is made to fall? And I'm not indignant." It literally reads, "Who is entrapped into sin, and I do not burn?" When people fell from the faith, when they sinned, Paul burned with indignation for their souls. I wonder as you read this list, do you have a resume or a catalog of suffering or sacrifice for the Lord? Every faithful Christian should. Like if need be, to make a list of how much you've suffered for the Lord. Because every Christian knows that because Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself for me, He calls me to sacrifice myself for Him. You should have a catalog of suffering. You will have a catalog of suffering. If you continue to faithfully follow Jesus Christ and say yes to every single one of His commandments, you will grow this list, this resume. Every Christian will. In particular, in the time that we live. We need to be wide awake and know that persecution might be around the corner for Christians. It already is in many parts of the world. We need to be ready. Three is, "Emulate leaders who decrease so Christ increases." This phrase comes from John the Baptist. John the baptized from John 3:30 says, "He must increase, I must decrease." John was losing his disciples to Jesus Christ. And one of his disciples said, "Aren't you worried that Jesus is going to have a bigger following then you? He's like, "No. I came to point everyone to Jesus Christ. I don't care about my following. I don't care about my platform. He must increase, I must decrease. 2 Corinthians 11:30, Paul says, "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness." Paul knew that when he is weakest Christ is strongest. When he is weakest, he can't but trust in the strength of Jesus Christ. He knew he couldn't do a thing for the Lord without the Lord's power. 2 Corinthians 3:5, "Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God. Our power comes from God." This verse I have to deal with just a little bit, because I've been wrestling all week, "What in the world does he mean by showing my weakness?" In particular, in the context, the guy got beaten how many lashes? 195. Three times beaten by rods, shipwrecked a night and a day in sea, cold, exposure. So how are you not dead, bro? That's my question. That's my question. How did you get out of this thing alive? That's my question. Obviously God. Obviously God. Obviously God. But scripture nowhere doesn't say, "Hey, hey, Christians, be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might and never do anything in your life to get stronger. Remain weak. Hey, Christians, remain weak spiritually, remain weak physically, remain weak financially, remain weak, remain weak, remain... " Do you see that in the Bible? That's nowhere in the Bible. So what does he mean by weakness? Well, it's a spectrum, right? The weakness and strength is a spectrum, and every single person, they're in a different range on the spectrum. If you lift, which you should, every Christian should be as strong as you possibly can in health wise, immune system, it's good for you. You should lift. And when you have an off day in the gym, like that off day is different for different people. I've lifted with people and they're like, Yeah, I feel really sluggish today. I've been sick for like four weeks, and I barely got out of bed." And then they put on four plates on each side, the big ones. The weakness is different for people. And the stronger you are, the stronger your weakness is. And, and this is important because in the context, what is Paul doing here? What did we start off with? He's engaging. He's doing battle with the false teachers, the servants of Satan. He's going to war with them, and he clearly wins. After this argument, he gets clear that he won. So he's using his weakness as a way to overcome his enemies. This is really important. It's really important because I do believe that there's an attack on the church today. The attack is coming from everywhere, and it's on all humans, but it's on the church in particular. The attack comes through a lie through the narrative that Christians should be weak by definition. "Oh, you're a Christian, you should be weak in every aspect of life." We should be weak physically, financially, socially, relationally, intellectually, educationally, spiritually. Weak, Christians should be weak. Should Christians be weak? No. No. Is it okay for a Christian to be weak? Yes, it's okay. Sometimes it's children, it's baby Christians. Sometimes you're sick. Yes. This is why we, the stronger, are called to help the weaker. The stronger you are, the more you can help those who are weaker. But if you are weak and you have the ability to get stronger, should you get stronger? Of course. Right, this is as clear as day. I don't even know why I have to say this. Also, don't judge a person's strength from your starting line, judge a person's strength from their starting line. You're like, "Oh, I don't know what your starting line is." Then get to know the person. But we are to grow stronger. And by the way, this attack to make people and people in the church weak, the attack is specifically targeting men. I don't know if you noticed this. Satan specifically targets men, and he specifically targets Christian men. The Christian men should be weak because Christian men don't do anything for the kingdom. What is weakness? Weakness is a lack of strength to protect yourself. That's all weakness is, it's a lack of strength. Is that what Paul means in 2 Corinthians 11:30 when he says, "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness."? I don't think so. What's he mean by weakness? How is he weak after just giving us a catalog of suffering that would kill any of us? Is it weakness to suffer so much? No, of course not. Well, this is what the world and the false prophets, this is what they would all say, that it's we weakness that you allowed yourself to suffer so much. That's what the world says. It's weakness that you put yourself in a position to be hurt. That's what the world says. Well, the world doesn't understand what true love is. Isn't it true strength to sacrifice yourself, to be willing to suffer for the one you love? Yeah. Choosing the way of suffering for the one you love, yeah. This is the way of the cross. This is choosing the way of the cross and walking in it daily. It takes the greatest amount of strength that today I'm going to deny myself. I'm not going to do what I want. I'm going to do what's best for my beloved. Was Paul weak? No, he wasn't weak, he was meek. And there's a difference. He had the strength to choose to put himself in a vulnerable situation for the sake of others. It's not just a catalog of suffering but of sacrificed, and he sacrificed a lot. Just like Jesus Christ. Jesus standing before Pilate, was Jesus weak? No, He's not. He was meek. At that moment, He could have killed Pilate. He chose not to. "I could kill you, but I'm going to die for you instead." That's true power. In that case, He chose to lay aside His strength to take on the bigger enemy. By the way, this is how Paul started the whole argument, 2 Corinthians 10:1, he started the whole argument challenging the false teachers, he say, "I, Paul, myself entreat to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ, I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I'm away." He said, "I am entreating you by the meekness of Jesus Christ." Not the weakness of Jesus Christ. Weakness is having no strength, meekness is focusing your strength. It's why Christians like from the outside Jesus did look weak. Many Christians from the outside, you do look weak. We look weak. But it's not weakness, it's strength under control. That's what meekness is. One of my favorite verses in all of scripture is Numbers 12:3, where it says, "Moses was very meek, more than all people who are in the face of the earth." Moses was very meek. I find that interesting because it's kind of parallel with what Paul is doing here. Who wrote the Book of Numbers? It was Moses. Moses was the most meek person. As he's writing, he's like, "Holy Spirit, you sure? He's like, "Yeah, yeah, write that." Moses also killed a guy with his bare hands and buried the corpse in a desert. Was he weak? No, of course he wasn't weak. Weak people can't be meek by definition. If you have no strength to keep in check, then you can't even be meek. Meekness assumes strength. My message is we need more meek Christians and fewer weak Christians. So if you have the ability to get stronger, get stronger in every single aspect of your life, in particular men. Women, you guys are crushing it. Keep growing in strength. Keep growing in the Lord. Keep getting stronger. Men, you need to be leading the charge and growing in strength, because it is our job to provide and to protect and to build so when the time comes we're ready to sacrifice self to protect. And the more you have to give, the greater sacrifice you could make. We're called to sacrifice self for others. Is it weakness to risk pain to self because you love one another? No, it's the greatest power. It's the greatest strength. That's why self-denial is a superpower. This is my message, I just pray that all of us gets stronger in every aspect of life. It starts with being stronger in the Lord and the strength of His might. But I've noticed that when people are strong in the Lord, every other aspect of their life just gets stronger. The closer you are to the Lord, the more filled to Spirit you are. Correlation causation, I'm not sure. Everything, you just get stronger relationally, stronger marriages, stronger parenting, stronger children, stronger finances, just stronger all around, stronger mental health, stronger physically. Because you understand when you work for the Lord, full tell all the time. You have to figure out how to get your energy up and to work as hard as you can, and so when persecution comes, you are hard to kill, just like St. Paul was. You can't kill the guy. And obviously, protected by the power of the Spirit, and then we're invincible until the day the Lord calls us home. 2 Corinthians 11:31, "The God and the Father of the Lord Jesus, He who is blessed forever, knows that I'm not lying." St. Paul here as he's finishing the chapter brings in an oath. He preempts the story that he's about to tell, and he brings in an oath to make sure that his detractors are listening. And then he starts his story. "At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas was guarding the city of Damascus in order to seize me." So Paul concludes this catalog of suffering by describing one particularly humiliating experience in his life. He was a young, accomplished scholar under Gamaliel, a rising star in the religious world of the Roman Empire. He was a genius, and he was zealous, willing to do anything and everything for his God. So he took letters of recommendation and he's on the road to Damascus to go persecute Christians, to arrest them, and ultimately to execute them. And then on the way, Jesus Christ meets him on the road to Damascus, the resurrected Christ, and blinds him with His light. Paul gets saved. Now this hunter of Christians becomes hunted by his own colleagues. The dissident has to be eliminated. St. Paul here talks about the time when he was in Damascus and he knew that his colleagues were here to kill him, and that he, by the help of Christians, he's lowered in a fish basket like a child to escape his former colleagues. In the next chapter, he's going to recount how he was lifted to the third heaven. He got to experience spiritually... Very few people have ever experienced. Before he recounts how he was lifted to the heavens, he recounts how he was lowered in a fish basket, like the lowest of the low in the middle of the night, just weak and vulnerable. And 2 Corinthians 11:33, "But I was let down on the basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands." Paul headed toward Damascus a Pharisee, and he leaves a humbled Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. He embraces his suffering for Christ. "This is my weakness," he says. "My weakness is that I love Jesus Christ so much that I'm willing to experience whatever suffering the Lord appoints for me. That's my weakness." His weakness was his love for God, which is actually his strength. And that's why it's upside down. Is this your weakness, dear Christian, a love for God that overcomes everything? Or do you have a weakness for an idol instead? Well, then, you won't be effective. We're called to be like Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, Isaiah 53, "He is the suffering servant." Our Messiah, the king of kings comes to die in a cross for our sins. He's humiliated, scorched, beaten, bruised, bleeding on the cross to procure our salvation. The only thing you have to do is be justified. Yes, it's true, it's true, it's true. Repent of your sins and follow Jesus Christ. Repent, follow Jesus. Repent, believe. Repent, believe. Repent of your sins. But just know that if God has appointed you a salvation, He has also appointed you to make sacrifices for Him, for His kingdom. And all we who faithfully follow Jesus Christ in this life, we will suffer. That's a promise. Or wants to lead a holy life will suffer. We shouldn't seek suffering, but we also shouldn't be surprised when we do suffer. And we must resolve today to remain unflinchingly faithful in the faith of any adversity. I'll close with the words of Jesus Christ, Luke 9:23. "And He said to all, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when He comes in His glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels." Amen. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for Jesus Christ. You called Him to live a life of holiness. You called Him to take on the ultimate enemies of Satan, sin, and death. And Jesus Christ, you wrestled in Gethsemane, and you cried out, "If there's any other way, let this cup of suffering pass from me." And there was no other way, and Jesus, you went to the cross, and you bore the wrath of God that we deserve for our sin. You bore our deaths and you took on the hell of Satan and demons. And did that so we would not have to. But then you also call us a life of following you, of taking up our cross daily, a cross of self-denial, of saying no to self, saying yes to your plan, saying yes to service and sacrifice. I pray that you strengthen us in that Holy Spirit. Empower us like you've never empowered us before, and use us to spark a revival in this region of the nation and beyond. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

This week we're starting our advent series in Matthew's Gospel: ‘God with Us' and our Senior Pastor, Sam Williamson, is preaching on Matthew 1:1-17 - ‘Our Messiah?'

Advent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing)Label: Lifeway WorshipNumber of Tracks:1Total Time:00:04:11From the Album: Hymns, Prayers, and InvitationsFormats: Christian AC, ChristmasAvailable Date & Time:  November 5th, 2021Impact Date: November 25th, 2021Official Music Video:Web Site: www.rickleejames.com PURCHASE ALBUM Downloadable Charts, Multi-Tracks, and More available from LIFEWAYWORSHIP.COM for Advent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing) click HERE Endorsements: “A perfect and needed addition to any Christmas playlist this year. Rick Lee James bringing home the Advent Message.”-CCM Magazine (Link to story)“I love Advent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing), which gives newness to the phrases of Isaiah. Watching, waiting, and longing is what we do now, and these songs help us do that in confidence. I anticipate that this album will be received as a great gift by many who will find their faith nourished and awakened by it.”– Walter Brueggemann (Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary)"I've watched Rick grow as an artist and songwriter for many years. Congratulations brother on an excellent independent release."-Paul Baloche (Dove Award Winning Songwriter)"Rick Lee James is a poet and singer. You will not only enjoy listening, you'll be drawn into the source – Jesus."-Mike Harland (Director of Lifeway Worship Resources)For Booking Inquiries  CLICK HEREor contact Voices In My Head ProductionsBy Phone: (937) 206-1146By Email: RICK@RICKLEEJAMES.COM  Management General Office Hours:Monday – 10AM – 5PMTuesday – 10AM – 5PMWednesday – 10AM – 5PMThursday – 10AM – 5PMFriday – 10AM – 5PMRick Lee James BioRick Lee James is an acclaimed singer/songwriter, worship leader, author, speaker and podcast host. His recordings include Basement Psalms Live and Hymns, Prayers & Invitations. James' 2018 hit, “Advent Hymn,” remained at #1 on Christian Radio Weekly's “CRW Adds Chart” for seven consecutive weeks. The song has been played on over 1100 radio stations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. James' book, Out of the Depths: A Songwriter's Journey Through The Psalms, has been used as a textbook for the National Praise & Worship Institute at Trevecca Nazarene University. He has also been a contributor to Worship Leader magazine, Holiness Today, The Table and Worshiplife.com. His podcast, “Voices In My Head,” has featured such leading singer/songwriters as Andrew Peterson, Sara Groves, Jason Gray, Michael Card and Paul Baloche.For further information, visit rickleejames.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. For booking inquiries, email Voices In My Head Productions or call 937-206-1146. Song LyricsAdvent Hymn (Watching, Waiting, Longing)Verse 1Heaven sent a child to save us, light for all to seeHelpless baby, mighty savior, holy mystery.Unto us a son is given, born in BethlehemLamb of God the light of nations, God in flesh becameChorusWatching, waiting, longing for the dayWhen His people would glorify the Name above all namesVerse 2For the joy that lay before Him, chose our agonyJesus bore the wrath of Calvary, washing sinners clean.Our Messiah, Christ our brother, word of God in fleshLoosed the chains that held us captive, broke the bonds of deathChorusWatching, waiting, longing for the dayWhen His people would glorify the Name above all namesVerse 3So we wait with expectation for His Advent here.Bride of Christ, His word proclaimed for all  the world to hear.He will come in clouds descending at the trumpet soundIn the light of Christ our Savior every knee will bow.Final ChorusBorn in an manger, dying on a treeRising Easter morning to set His people freeWatching, waiting, longing for the dayWhen all nations will glorify the Name above all namesWords and Music by Rick Lee James and Ted Rastatter  © Copyright 2011, Assigned 2015 McKinney Music, Inc. (BMI)/Broadman Press (SESAC) (both admin. by LifeWay Worship c/o Music Services, www.musicservices.org). All rights reserved. CCLI #6152291 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rickleejames.substack.com/subscribe

“SO THEIR KING GOES ON BEFORE THEM” Micah 2.13 Our Messiah, the one who goes before us is the one who opens the way. He is going before you to break up obstacles and open a way to a new day of destiny. When we know we are being led out by the one who breaks through, we know we are in safe hands and can walk confidently into our God given purpose

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com.Usually about this time of the year, we do this every year, where we focus on the DNA of Mosaic. The reason why we do this is because every single organization has mission leak or mission creep, where they forget why we exist. So we remind ourselves of why we exist and we communicate that with the three words, love Jesus simple. This is our DNA. Why do we use the word DNA? DNA is the information within every single organism that gives identity, that dictates function, how we are going to function, and it dictates the activity of this organism. I use the word organism because church is an organism. It's not just an organization. Church is alive. Jesus Christ says that the church is His body. It's alive. It's an organism. And the church is His bride. It's alive. It's an organism. And that's why we use the word DNA. The DNA is the blueprint, it's the recipe, the code for who we are.Last week we talked about love is the motive for everything that we do, because love was the motive for everything Jesus did. Jesus Christ loved God and loved people by primarily loving the church. So we do the same. And today we're talking about Christ as Christ is the center of everything that we are. He is our identity, and He as we proclaim Him, His word, that we proclaim Christ crucified, that is the power of God onto salvation. St. Paul said, "The power of God is in the gospel for anyone who believes." The reason why we do this series is to remind ourselves of the mission of God. CS Lewis says, "There exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence." So we must strive very hard, by the grace of the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.At the center is Jesus Christ. He's the center of everything we do. He's the main point of everything we do. He's the main point of the Christian life, of the Christian faith. And this is our message that your happiness, your eternal happiness, the eternal happiness of every single person wholly depends on Jesus Christ, what you do with His life, death, burial, and resurrection. If you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, you are saved by grace through faith, saved meaning you need to be saved. By grace is a gift from God, and it happens when you believe that Jesus Christ didn't just die, He died for your sins. When you believe that Jesus didn't just come to show us the way to God, that He is the only way to God. It sounds outrageous, I know, and it always has. But when the message is proclaimed, people do get saved. So that's why we do this on a weekly basis.Our text for today is 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. I didn't bookmark it, so let's see if Pastor Jan knows his Bible. Oh yeah, right there, 1 Corinthians 1:18, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.' Where's the one who is wise? Where's the scribe? Where's the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and weakness of God is stronger than men. Consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you are wise according to worldly standards; not many were powerful; not many were of noble birth. But God shows what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'"And I, when I come to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and fear and much trembling. And my speech, my message were not implausible words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." This is the reading of God's holy and infallible, authoritative Word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts.Why do we preach Jesus Christ crucified? That's why. I can just say amen and pray. That's why. The scripture says, "For each Christ crucified, that's all we do." Did St. Paul write to the church in Corinth? Did he tell them any other things other than Christ crucified? Yeah, of course, he did. But the central message that impacts everything else is that Jesus Christ died on a cross for our sins. Three points to frame up of our time. First, the cross is folly. The cross is power. And the cross is wisdom. St. Paul starts with where everyone knows the first time you hear the message. The secret to the universe, the secret to reality, the secret to understand yourself, the people around you, the secret to understand all the world history is the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sin. The fact that when you hear that, the first time you ever hear, the natural reaction is: "It's folly. It's foolish to believe. You believe this? You gather on a Sunday to proclaim it? You believe this?"Yes, it sounds folly. That's the point. In verse 18, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. But to those who are being saved, it is the power of God." On the one hand, yes, it's folly, but it's also power. Let's start with it's folly. St. Paul in this text, he talks about two groups of people, the Jews, and he talks about the Greeks. The Jews he's talking about, religious Jews, that grew up with the mosaic law, the 10 commandments that God gave through Moses. They believed that they were religious. They believed that they could save themselves through their own efforts. And then the group, the Greeks on the other hand were too sophisticated. The Jews are too religious for Jesus. The Greeks are too sophisticated.So we start with the Jews. For the Jews, the cross was a scandal, scandalous to say that God became man. It was scandalous to say that God's Messiah was crucified. That's like saying God sends a king who then loses, He's crucified. It was an impediment to them, first of all, because in law of Moses, there's a Bible verse in Deuteronomy that says, "Cursed is anybody who hangs on the tree." So when St. Paul comes in, when the disciples come in, they say, "Our Messiah died on a cross." They looked at text, and like, "You're saying our Messiah was cursed? That's blasphemous." On top of that, they hated even the idea of crucifixion because so many of their countrymen died through persecution. The Romans would come in, and anytime there was an insurrection, they would take all of the people, hundreds and thousands of them, and on the way into the city put up cross after cross after cross and execute people. So for Jews to hear that your Messiah was executed through crucifixion, they had the same visceral, emotional antagonism to it as telling a 20th-century that your Messiah died in a concentration camp. The same visceral reaction.Besides the cross, telling Jews that the Son of God died was ludicrous. They had a high view of the divine transcendent God. They had a very inflexible commitment to monotheism, that God is one. It was in their Shema. It was blasphemous to say that there's a second person, there's trinity, there's God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, but it's one God, three persons. That was blasphemous to them. So they had theological, intellectual, emotional opposition to it. And we see it all culminating in St. Paul. Paul before he became Paul, he was Saul. He studied under Gamaliel. He's the greatest theologian, probably theological mind to have existed probably second to Jesus Christ.What did Paul do in his early ministry? Well, he thought that he was doing God's work by persecuting Christians. When he heard about Christian, when he heard about Jesus Christ dying on the cross, that this is the Messiah, he had such a visceral reaction that he wasn't just motivated to speak out against it. It wasn't just about him not liking the message. He would actually physically hunt down Christians, persecuting them to the point of terrorizing them and then killing them. And that ministry started with him watching the death, the stoning, physical stones were thrown at the first martyr, Stephen, and Paul was there. He hated that message. And what changed his mind was when he met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus.So for the Jews, the religious people, they had a visceral reaction against this truth. And for the Greeks, they just felt too sophisticated to believe that their hope, their eternal happiness, eternal life hinges on what they do to a carpenter who then became an itinerant rabbi who died in Judea on a Roman cross and that crucifixion had anything to do with God. Because there was a stigma attached to crucifixion. The elite Greeks and the Romans were embarrassed that this was even a part of their society. The scholars who study the writings of the Greco-Roman literature at that time, they point out the fact it's rarely ever mentioned. It's like the French never talking about the guillotine.This is in us. They would rewrite their own history. They didn't want it to be part of what they did as a society. Crucifixion was regarded as the worst form of death. It was worse than dying in an arena where animals, beasts were released from trap doors. They weren't fed for days and released to tear Christians limb from limb. Dying in an arena eaten by animals was considered more noble and honorable than being crucified. Being crucified was worse than even being burned to death. Crucifixion was that brutal, and any person that was crucified left a legacy as being the worst kind of criminal scum. That's why the early churches was ridiculed, mocked for worshiping. And they said, "An evil man. Your God is a criminal. Your God was crucified. How can you believe this?"Archeologists excavated the quarters of the Imperial pages in the Palatine Hill in Rome. It dates back to the third century, so the 200s. In it, they found this carving on a wall, and it's a picture of a little boy who's got his hand raised as if he's worshiping someone on a cross. It was a body on a cross. And instead of a head, they put a head of a donkey. And underneath it said, "Alexamenos worships his God." Little boys were mocking a Christian little boy who worshiped Jesus Christ dying on the cross. It was blasphemous for them to believe this is true. And you can Google it, Alexamenos worships his God, to see the depiction.Not many people worship someone who's been executed with an electric chair. No one puts little electric chairs around their necklace or a needle for lethal injection. No one hangs a noose around their neck as a little symbol of something great. No one does it with a guillotine. Yet we do as Christians. We wear little crosses to remind ourselves that our savior died on a cross, experienced excruciating pain. We had to come up with a word to describe just how bad crucifixion was. We worship a Savior who died the death of the most heinous, monstrous criminal. And on top of all of this, for the Greeks and the Romans to tell them, "It wasn't some political statesman like Cesar who died for your sins. And it wasn't some philosopher like Socrates who died for your sins. It was just some obscure carpenter, amateur rabbi." And here come the Christians proclaiming what? Proclaiming the secret to human life is found in some rabble-rousing rabbi from a distant Judea, telling people that the meaning of life is found in the life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension of Jesus Christ.And as we do so, that was crazy then, it's just as crazy now. It's always been crazy to get up and to tell someone, "Hey, unless you believe in Jesus Christ that He died on the cross for your sins, you're going to spend eternity in hell, apart from God." that's always nuts. It's always crazy to say that. But that's what the early church did in the beginning. And that's what we continue to do. And by the way, here's the other challenge of doing that. The moment you say that, that very moment, what else are you saying? What else am I saying when I say Jesus Christ is the only way to go? What am I saying? I'm saying there's no other way. I'm saying there's no other way. So what I'm saying is every other way is wrong, every other way is a lie. Jesus Christ is the only way. Right, that doesn't feel good. That sounds so intolerant.If there was another way, then Jesus Christ would not have had to die on a cross. It was the only way. That's what it took. There's no other way. So yes, I'm standing up here, and I am saying that everything else is wrong. Islam is wrong. Buddhism is wrong. Atheism is wrong. Secular is wrong. It's all wrong. And you saying Jesus Christ is one of them, that's wrong too. When our world hears that, they say, "That's folly. That's folly." But for us, we love this message. Yes, it's naturally repugnant. Yes, it's naturally faintly ridiculous. But it's also wonderful to us. What makes us think it's so wonderful? How could anyone think this is wonderful? How could anyone give their life to this message? Give their life for this message? Give their time, talent, treasure to invest resources in the propagation of this message? It's so improbable, so unsophisticated. It's so offensive to our culture or taste. It's foolish.But it's got power. And that's why we do what we do. This is the only thing that can really save us. And this is the second point, that the cross is power. 1 Corinthians 1:22-25, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." So the Jews would say, "Hey, we want more evidence. We want more signs. We want signs like Moses. Moses did the signs as he led the people of God out of Egypt, out of captivity. We're looking for the same political Messiah, and we want signs to go along with it.For the Greeks, they want sophia or wisdom. Their civilization astounded the world with its progress. Their advances caused many to abandon belief in traditional God. We want something that polished. The Jews said, "We want something religious." These guys said, "We want something really, really polished." St. Paul comes in and he says, "The greatest sign that God could give is that God the Son, Son of God, Son of man died on the cross for our sins, and He came back from the dead." For the Jews, a crucified Messiah was an oxymoron, like a married bachelor. For the Greek, it wasn't so much more irreverent, it was just ridiculous. But St. Paul says, "There's another piece, there's another element. It's not just this message. It's not just information. This information, when God the Holy Spirit takes it and applies it to your heart, when the God of grace gives a man, a woman by the Spirit of God a brand new heart, summons that heart to Himself, what was first thought as foolish is recognized as the deepest wisdom. Initially thought as weak and silly, it's nothing less than the actual power of God.This is where the power is. The power source is the proclamation that Jesus Christ died for your sins. Karl Barth in the 20th century was probably one of the most influential theologians. At the end of his life, he was giving a lecture in the '70s in Princeton, theological lecture. At the end, he was doing a Q&A, and one person asked him, "Hey, Dr. Barth, you have read tens of thousands of theological tomes. You've written hundreds of theological tomes. If you could synthesize the greatest, the greatest truth that you discovered, the greatest nugget of gold to share with us from your vast experience, what would it be? And he said, "That's easy. Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so." That's it. That's our message.Jesus loves us so much that He was willing to die on the cross for our sins. And when you realize, when it goes from, oh, Jesus did that thing to He died for my sins, my particular sin, when God reveals the darkness of your sin to you, the cross becomes life and life when you realize that nothing short of the death of the Son of God would be adequate to atone for our sins. And this is what we do every single week that I stand up here and I just remind you how evil you are, that you don't understand yourself, you don't understand the world, you don't understand anything. You don't understand parenting. You don't understand that they are born as little evil, cute little baby. They're evil. You're evil. You don't understand marriage unless you understand it's two evil people getting married. You don't understand the economy unless you understand it's evil people. Politics, it's all evil people. It's all evil. You don't understand any of them unless you understand that we're all evil. And it took Jesus Christ dying on the cross for our sin.Every single person, there's two realities to you, to every single person. The first one is who you are on paper. The first one is whom you project yourself to be to the world. It's what you have achieved. It's what you look like. It's your LinkedIn, it's your social media. That's one part of you. And then there's the real part of you, the daily life part of you, the no one's in your car when you're on Storrow Drive part of you. My wife tells me, "Don't forget that our back windows are tinted, but the front ones are not. So when you drive, Pastor Jan, you just need to remember that people are going to see you." I'm like, "I know, I want them to see me. I want them to hear my horn when I'm discipling them to be a better driver. I want to do that."So there's two parts of it. There's the you part when you interview for a job and they're asking you, "Hey, what's your greatest weakness." "Is I work too hard. I work too hard. I care too much. I can't stop working. That's me. That's my greatest weakness. I'm going to put in 100 hours a week on this job. Tremendous." And the real part of you is one month into your job. That's The real part of you when you work 10, maybe 15 hours a week. Maybe. So your company knows that you're online, you get the little Mouse Jiggler so when you stop working it just says, "You're online. You're online." That's the real part of you. The real part of you is... Your roommates, ask them the real part of you. Your spouse. Yeah, I know the real part. That's every single one of us. And deep inside we know that for all of our moral goodness showboating, for all of our virtue signaling on our bumper stickers and our yard signs, deep inside, when no one's looking, there is so much evil right in there. We just don't have the power, most of us, to sin in the way that we really would want to sin.If you were a trillionaire, and you can do whatever you want, would you live a holy life for God? There's sin in our hearts, every single one of us. We're all moral failures, inveterate sinners, no more able to rid ourselves of our pride, selfish impurity, sexual sin, hypocrisy, dishonesty, envy and different-stored God. And that's really what it boils down to. God created you. He has power over you. And if you are indifferent toward Him as if God doesn't exist, you are living your life as a huge middle finger to God. I don't care. That's the greatest level of sin that there is. You created me. You have total claim over me. You have a moral code for me that I don't even know what it is.And then we also have standards for ourselves that we break. We have standards for other people that we ourselves break. And as soon as we realize the true weight of our sin, that we sin against the holy God, we deserved what Jesus Christ went through. He went through hell. We deserved that, but He was willing to take it. We see the holiness of God, the justice of God, and the love of God all coinciding at the cross. When you hear, and when you understand that this terrible death, it was horrifying, and it was horrifying for Jesus. It was terrible because it had to be terrible. Only such suffering, such a sinless victim that God, man, He alone could pay the terrible debt that we owe God. And when you realize that Jesus did that for me, He died on the cross for my sin and my sins, that Jesus Christ is the only one that stands between me and the judgment of God that I deserve, when you see that, now the terrible cross becomes the most precious message that you've ever heard. It's wonderful. It's powerful.Scripture says, "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who is hung upon a tree.' Jesus Christ was cursed. Deserved blessing, was cursed because we deserved that curse. He was doing it for us so that He could extend blessing to us. We're like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. For the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. Why did Jesus do this? Because He loves us. He loves us. That's the only reason why He did it. 1 John, 3:16, "By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers."He died for us when we were His enemies, when we were His sinners. He did that because He loves us, so that He can forgive us. Jesus Christ loves you. We are not to take that for granted. Jesus Christ the God of the universe whom we've rebelled against, turned our back on Him, He loves us. 1 John 4:9-10, "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. And this is love not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." On the one hand, God loves you, but that doesn't make sense unless you understand that God hates you. It's true. A lot of us, we've just taken the message of Christianity, "Jesus loves you," put that as a bumper sticker. Your buddy, Jesus? Yeah, yeah, you're cool. Look up the word propitiation. It means He absorbed the wrath of God. Meaning God has a wrath against you. God hates you. In your sin, apart from Christ, God hates you.When people say things like, "Every single one of us, we're a child of God." No, we're not. We're creatures of God. But if you reject Jesus Christ, you're not a child of God. You're still in your sins. So for love of God to make sense, you need to understand what it took for God to not hate you anymore. And it took Him pouring out His hatred, His wrath,... on Christ for your sins. We receive the love of God when we believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins.Here's what the early Christian father, Tertullian, described this. This is how he described the place of the cross, the heart of the early Christians. He says, "Every forward step and movement, every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, and all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead sign of a cross just as a reminder that the cross is the center of everything we do. The cross is power. And also, the cross is wisdom." St. Paul uses this word 17 times in the 1 Corinthians, wisdom. In the first three chapters, 16 times. In all of his other letters, he uses the word wisdom only 11 times. So this is crucial to him. It's the Greek word, sophia. I remember I loved that word so much in seminary. I named my first daughter after wisdom, Sophia, Lord give us wisdom. If anyone lacks wisdom, God gives us sophia. So anytime I say Sophia, just a reminder that I need more wisdom from God.I went on a roll in seminary, and then we had our second kid. I was still in seminary, cage stage, where everything's about seminary. And then I had my second kid, my second daughter. I liked the ESV's Bible version so much I named my second daughter ESV, Elizabeth Seraphin Vezikov. I was going to keep doing that with all my other kids. My wife was like, "That's enough. That's enough. We're not going to play that game." But he talks about wisdom here as this is how you understand the world, that you do not truly understand reality unless you understand that Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins. And that's why he does this analysis of it doesn't matter how wise you are in the world. It doesn't matter if you have a PhD from Harvard. It doesn't matter if you're a president of Harvard. Doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter you're noble birth. None of that matters when it comes to knowing the greatest truth at the center of the universe is that Jesus Christ is Lord, Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.If you don't know that, if you don't believe the greatest truth at the heart of the universe, you're wrong. If you don't know that this is true, you're wrong about the most important fact. Therefore, no matter how wise you are from an earthly perspective, you're a fool. If you don't believe that Jesus is Lord, if you don't submit to Him, you're going to die. You're going to stand before Him, and all of your eternity you're going to be saying, "I was a fool. I was wrong about the greatest truth." That's why he talks about wisdom. And that's why in 1 Corinthians 1:25-2:5, he goes on and he's like, "Consider your calling, bros. Not many of you were wise, not many by worldly standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." And what he says, "What makes the difference, what made you a Christian, it's not your education. It's not your bank account. What made you a Christian, what made you a Christian is that God chose to save you so that no one boasts.And that's why he goes on, "God chose... " That's verse 28. He starts at 27, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not to bring to nothing things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, and sanctification, redemption. So that as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'" So if you are a Christian and I ask you, "Why are you a Christian? Why are you a Christian?" and if you say anything along the lines that begins with I, if you say anything where it's like, "I believed. I studied. I read. I chose Jesus," then I don't know if you're a Christian. Because it wasn't you at all. The answer is, "Jesus saved me. Jesus chose to save me."Christians need a robust understanding of election and predestination. But what makes the difference between an unbeliever and a believer? What makes the difference between someone who's dead in their sins and someone who is alive to God? What makes the difference? What role did you play to decide that you are going to be born? Nothing. No one asked you. No one gave you a vote. You weren't interviewed. Nothing. Same goes with becoming a Christian. You become a Christian, the only reason you're a Christian: God saved you. The only reason I'm a Christian. God saved me. And I can't believe God saved me. If you know me, I have a hard time following Jesus as it is. But if I wasn't a Christian, if I know the Holy Spirit, I would be one bad guy. I'd be a terrible dude. I'd be a gangster or a legal gangster. That's working for the IRS and stealing money from people legally because taxation is theft. I'd do one or the other.But God saved me. That's it. This is what he's saying, he's like, "You heard the message that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins. Jesus was crucified for you. You Heard it, but what makes the difference between one person hearing another person hearing is God chose you. God by the power of the Holy Spirit saved you. You need to understand, you played zero role in that. If you're like, "Well, how do I know if I'm elect?" Choose yourself. That's how I say. Choose Jesus, and then you're elect. But you only chose Jesus because Jesus chose you. That's how it works. So that there's 0% of your work in being saved because Jesus saves.You know who we are? We're the degenerate, reprobate sinners. We should have been left in our sins. I got one Bible verse, one very special Bible verse the Lord laid on my heart today. At the next Mosaic members meeting, this is the next... 2020, my t-shirt idea was, "2020, skubula happened." If you don't know what skubula is, look it up. My idea for 2021 is from 1 Corinthians 4:11-13. Let me read the text. "To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless. We labor working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted; we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become and are still like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things." I want a t-shirt that says, "Mosaic Boston, scum of the earth." That's what I want. Or if we ever rebranded the church, I want to be scumoftheearthchurch.com. That's what I want. This is tremendous. What's your message to the world? You're all scum. We're the worst scum of the earth.Jesus Christ died for us. The Son of God died for us? What? To make us children of God. I can't believe it. And by the way, this message is what transformed the world. St. Paul was writing to Christians who lived under tyranny. Not only was it illegal to be a Christian, but they were persecuted for their faith, made a show in arenas where tens and hundreds of thousands would gather to watch Christians getting eaten by lions and crucified upside down, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, if you're not a Christian, you have to answer the question of how did Christianity, despite the odds, how did it grow from one Jewish guy, kind of a rabbi, kind of a carpenter? He had 11 guys and then St. Paul gets saved. And then with them in 100 years is 25,000 Christians in the Roman Empire. And then when that generation of eyewitnesses died, it became even more powerful so that by the time Constantine comes to power in 310, we go from 25,000 Christians in the year 100 to 20 million Christians by 310 A.D. In 200 years, it grew by 40% per decade, the greatest movement in the history of the world. How did that happen?It happened with people proclaiming the message: Christ crucified. Just to give you a perspective, it was illegal to be a Christian. They didn't have church buildings. They didn't have any institutional resources. So how in the world did that happen? They proclaimed the one message that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we are to submit to Him. We haven't submitted to Him. We deserve damnation, but Jesus Christ is also savior. And then once you're saved, you've got to bring everything, every part of your life in submission to Jesus Christ. And startled the message, Jesus is Lord. And they got that from Deuteronomy 6:14 where it says, "Hear all Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord you got with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength."The Lord is one. Yahweh is Lord. Jesus shows up and says, "I'm Yahweh. I am Lord. I'm king over everything." God is one, and the task of our lives is to bring every aspect of our lives under the reign of Jesus Christ, every aspect of our life, from our finances to our work, to our domestic life, to sexuality. Everything we bring under the reign of Jesus Christ. And the reason why we focus on Jesus in particular is because that's how the New Testament explains how we are to do ministry. God the Father puts Jesus in a position of preeminence, and the Holy Spirit blesses the church when the church focuses on Jesus Christ. Why? Because of the role he played in redemption, but also the role that God the Father gives Jesus as sitting at the right hand of God the Father.Psalm 110:1 says, "The Lord says to my Lord," so God the Father speaks to God the Son, "'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.'" And Paul even suggested the actual function of the Lordship was given by the Father to the Son, it's passed to Jesus. Ephesians 1:20-23, "He," God the Father, "raised Him," Jesus, "from the dead and seated Him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in His age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under His feet and gave Him as a head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all."So Jesus is in the position of preeminence, and that's why we focus on Jesus. That's why we talk about Jesus all the time. If you ever move away, and you're looking for a church, this is the secret sauce of finding if it's a good biblical church. When the pastor gets up there and preaches a sermon, he's got to say the name of Jesus at least 50 times. That's just from my professional experience. It's got to be at least 50 times. You just talk about Jesus. If you don't talk about Jesus, huge red flag, huge red flag. And if you change the name of Jesus, if it's like Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints, no, don't change the name, it's just Jesus Christ. You talk about Jesus Christ because the Bible tells us to talk about Jesus Christ. And when we talk about Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit takes that message. It is power, and it is wisdom. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him. Our identity, our destiny as a church must be inextricably linked to Jesus Christ. He's the only way into a relationship with God.A lot of churches talk about God in general, some nebulous idea, so that you can think God is whomever you want, that God demands whatever you think he demands. But when we say Jesus Christ, this is a historical figure who lived in a particular time, particular place, human body. He really lived. He really taught. He really died. Historical fact. We're not talking about spiritually or this is metaphor for something. He literally died for our sin, and He literally rose from the dead. So when we talk about Jesus, we're talking about what's at the heart of scripture. Jesus Christ is the door. He's the connection to God the Father.George Adam Smith, 19th-century biblical scholar, but wanted to see the holy land. He meets a shepherd in the holy land, and the shepherd was very hospitable. They spent the day together. And at the end of the day, the shepherd said, "Hey, do you want to see the fold where I keep the sheep?" And he goes into an enclosure with four walls, and there's an opening in one of the walls. The sheep all came in, and the shepherds said, "This is where they go at night." And then George Adam Smith asked, "Hey, where's the door? Where's the gate." And the shepherd says this: "When the light has gone and all the sheep are inside, I lie at that open space and no sheep ever goes out but across my body, and no wolf comes in unless he crosses my body. I am the door."Jesus Christ is the only way into a relationship with God, and He's the door because He laid down His life for His own sheep. Apart from Jesus Christ, we are nothing. Apart from Jesus Christ, we have no message as a church. Apart from Jesus Christ, we have no mission as a church. We take all of our talking points from Jesus Christ. I pray that we never become like the Church of Laodicea, which a lot of the churches in Boston, historically, they became the church in Laodicea. Church of Laodicea, Jesus Christ is standing outside the door knocking. A lot of people use that verse in Revelation 3 to say, "Oh, Jesus is standing at the door of your heart, and He's knocking." No, Jesus doesn't stand at doors, and He doesn't knock. He breaks the door down and regenerates people. That's how Jesus saves people.But he's talking about Jesus not in terms of one particular soul. He's talking about Jesus Christ is standing outside of a church. It's the Church of Laodicea. How did Jesus get outside the church? They forgot to let Him in. Jesus is standing outside the door knocking. They forgot to let Jesus in. So the question we're going to ask is, for myself, is Jesus Christ the Lord of my life? For my family, is Jesus Christ the Lord of my family? Is Jesus Christ the Lord of my community group? Do you talk about Jesus in your community group? Is Jesus Christ at the center of my conversations with other Christians, or do we talk about the Red Sox finally going to turn things around, or the Pyths, they really got a squad this year? Or are we're going to talk about politics?What really brings things into perspective is when someone dies, someone close to you dies. I had a family member that passed away this week. And we had a gathering with my family yesterday, completely different. Just the reminder of how close we are to death. You know what we talked about? We talked about Jesus. We hugged each other. We cried. We told each other how much we love each other. We focused on what matters. Every single one of us needs to live every day like that, that this day could be my last. Because there will come a day that will be I last, and we have no idea when that day comes. Imagine if we lived like that, that every time you saw an unbelieving friend, you want to tell them about Jesus. This is the only hope you have. This is the only way to God. This is the only way for your sins to be forgiven.And with Christians, why aren't we talking about Christ all the time? It could be our last day. The greatest example I see this is in Elijah. I'll do this, and I'll close with a quote from John Stott. Elijah in 2 Kings, the day before he gets taken up to heaven, it's his last day on earth, you know what he does? He wakes what's up, and he preaches the gospel in Bethel, preaches about God, preaches in Jericho, preaches in Jordan. What you realize is he's just living a normal life. It's just what he did every day. He just shared with people about God over and over and over. He followed the normal schedule. He so followed God as shepherd. Didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary on his last day alive, and he goes to heaven in glory. He's lived his day every day like it was his last.Imagine if we did. Imagine if we as a church had that kind of urgency. There's people around us who are dying, who are going to die and spend eternity either with God in heaven or apart from God in hell. It all depends on what they do with this message. I can't save them with the message, but I can proclaim the message and then let the Holy Spirit do what the Holy Spirit will do. Jesus Christ is our touchstone. He's our defining center. He's our founder. And therefore, he has preeminence in our life as a people, our life as a church.Oh, here's the last thing I wanted to say before John Stott. The gospel is something so simple that every child can understand it. And the gospel is the wisdom of God, that once you start to plumb the depth... It's like the message, "Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior or Christ crucified," and you read it and like, "Oh, tremendous." But then it's like you take the message and you pull it out. It's like an accordion. And you see it's like level after level after level after level. And then you see it's dimensions. You're not just talking about one dimension or secondary, you're talking about multiple dimensions of the gospel as it applies to every aspect of your life. That's why we focus on the gospel.Okay, John Stott, end of his life. If you want more theology on the cross, the greatest work written on this and the most accessible is written by John Stott. It's called The Cross of Christ. It's probably one of the greatest books of the 20th century. It's a modern classic. In the preface to the masterpiece, this is what he writes: "I try to show that the cross transforms everything. It gives us a new worshiping relationship to God, a new and balanced understanding of ourselves, a new incentive to give ourselves a mission, a new love of our enemies, and a new courage to face the perplexities of suffering. In daring to write a book about the cross, there is, of course, a great danger of presumption. This is partly because what actually happened when God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ is a mystery whose depths we will spend eternity plumbing. And partly because it would be most unseemly to feign a cool detachment. For willy-nilly, we are involved. Our sins put Him there."So, far from offering us flattery, the cross undermines our self-righteousness. We can stand before only with a bowed head and a broken spirit. And there we remain until the Lord Jesus speaks to our hearts His word of pardon and acceptance, and we, gripped by His love and brimful of thanksgiving, go out into the world to live our lives in His service." Let's pray.Lord Jesus, we thank you that you are the head of the church. Jesus, we thank you that you died on the cross for our sins. Jesus, we thank you for this message, and we thank you for the power that you bring by the power of the Spirit when this message is proclaimed, when this message is understood and when this message is believed. I pray for every single one of us. Make us a people who love the message of the cross and love the way of the cross and live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And Lord, I pray that you continue to save many people in this city, in this region. And use us in the process as we proclaim your gospel and pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Most people, even if not Christian, have an idea about life-after-death. Christians are hopeful, however, for life after life-after-death. --Our Messiah-the one to whom we are joined inseparably-has already gone on before us, the -firstfruits- of the harvest underway. --He has already been given many rewards for his faithfulness. In other words, Christ has been rewarded for his faithfulness, and those rewards are given to us in Scripture to know and cherish Christ as our treasure. --What are the rewards He has received--

Most people, even if not Christian, have an idea about life-after-death. Christians are hopeful, however, for life after life-after-death. --Our Messiah-the one to whom we are joined inseparably-has already gone on before us, the -firstfruits- of the harvest underway. --He has already been given many rewards for his faithfulness. In other words, Christ has been rewarded for his faithfulness, and those rewards are given to us in Scripture to know and cherish Christ as our treasure. --What are the rewards He has received-

Welcome to our GOOD FRIDAY Service! The crucifixion and resurrection place JESUS Christ in a class by Himself. It is what makes Him identifiable as the One True Saviour of all! - Messiah! Other religions can compete with Christianity on many things - e.g. holy book, large following, religious traditions, morality, and contribution to human society, etc. But only in Christianity had in its climax the humiliation of its God as its true glorification. Our Messiah defeated death by dying on the cross. And only the Christian can say: “Our FOUNDER rose from the dead!” - END of conversation. And that Resurrection power is our living hope! That is where we are assured adn secured of our FREEDOM!

The Way - Jesus is Our Messiah; Prophet, Priest, & King. What Does that Mean for Our Lives? Scripture: - Numbers 21:4-9 - John 3:14-21

 Watch/Listen here using the Embedded Subsplash Playerdiv.sap-embed-player{position:relative;width:100%;height:0;padding-top:56.25%;}div.sap-embed-player>iframe{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;}Central Baptist Church of Ponca City, OKDATE: Sunday AM, March 14 2021SERMON BY: Dr. John WaterlooSERMON TITLE: The Greatest Parade: Let’s Honor our KINGSERMON THEME: If Jesus is Our Messiah, Then OBEY!SERMON SERIES: The Gospel by MarkSERMON VERSES: Mark 11:1-11* The disciples obeyed... and fetched a colt that didn’t belong to them.* Our biggest sins: the lack of forbearance and forgiveness. Mark 11:1   And when they came nigh to Jerusalem, unto Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount of Olives, he sendeth forth two of his disciples, 2 And saith unto them, Go your way into the village over against you: and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat; loose him, and bring him. 3 And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither. 4 And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door without in a place where two ways met; and they loose him. 5 And certain of them that stood there said unto them, What do ye, loosing the colt? 6 And they said unto them even as Jesus had commanded: and they let them go. 7 And they brought the colt to Jesus, and cast their garments on him; and he sat upon him. 8 And many spread their garments in the way: and others cut down branches off the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9 And they that went before, and they that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: 10 Blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest. 11 And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.— — —Watch/Listen here using our Subsplash WebShare Playerhttps://subspla.sh/b43rd2cListen here on Archive.orghttps://archive.org/download/031421-am-facedbook-stream/031421AM-FacedbookStream.mp3

He is OUR Messiah, Jesus Christ. He. Is. All.

Our Messiah, priest and king.

Daily Devotion - Psalm 27:14 - Spiritual Courage⁠⁠I think you’ll agree with me when I say finding spiritual courage in times of fear isn’t easy. Yes, fear is a powerful foe. It prevents me from living in faith and causes anxiety. I experience a loss of control and find myself alone.⁠⁠The coronavirus pandemic is an excellent example of how fear engulfs people’s mindset. This unfortunate virus outbreak created a social environment filled with uncertainty and full of unrealistic behaviors. The reason for society’s fearful response is its threat to human life.⁠⁠In fact, many governments across the globe took drastic measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19. They imposed strict rules and jailed people for violation of those ordinances. Those well-intentioned efforts are fear-driven.⁠⁠This widespread sickness is but one illustration of how fear penetrates the mind and soul of individuals. Many other life circumstances stir up unwanted feelings based on self-centered fears.⁠⁠So what’s the solution to fear?⁠⁠Christ’s courage.⁠⁠Here’s something we both can agree on; Jesus gives an inner-strength unlike any known to humanity. The result of abiding in Christ is spiritual courage that evaporates fear. We discover a Christian confidence to live in peace.⁠⁠When Judas betrayed Christ Jesus and turned Him over for His execution (Mark 14:43-46) the world bear witness to an exceptional display of fearlessness. Our Messiah showed spiritual courage more powerful than any known to humanity. In fact, He took on every torturous act man inflicted with grace.⁠⁠The key that unlocks Christ’s courage is praying from the heart. Prayer opens up the door to God’s ear. When I pray with a humble spirit, then Christ takes my hand and strengthens my soul. In return, the Holy Spirit takes away the fear and replaces it with courage.⁠⁠How do you overcome fear?⁠⁠Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord! Psalm 27:14 ESVRead the full devotion at https://devotableapp.com/daily-devotion-psalm-27-14-spiritual-courage/

The people of Israel exiled, broken, and awaiting a savior found hope in the coming of Emmanuel- a mighty king who would protect them from their enemies. They held on to a promise from Isaiah that a son from the line of Jesse would stand as a signal to all the nations that God was fighting for them. They anticipated a light coming that would dispel the darkness and gloom and open up a way to heaven. From the One who gave the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, would come a savior born to the world to bring the law of freedom and grace. This is the hope, the grace, the God, the Savior, and the promise of God's immanent presence with us that we sing about with this hymn. But now, our hope has come. The sign Isaiah wrote about has become a reality. The light has broken through the darkness. Our Messiah has arrived. Not on a chariot, or clothed in battle armor, but in the form of a child - naked, dependent, and human. As moms this is a life form that we are well acquainted with. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that life on earth for the saviour of the world began just like the lives of our little ones, but it is true. This was Emmanuel, “God with us,” human in every sense of the word. He needed to be fed, clothed, and loved just like our little ones. He needed to play outside and help around the house, study the Torah and listen to his parents. He needed to learn manners, and ‘the way things worked.” He needed a mom and a dad to learn from. As we find ourselves in these winter months trapped by the cold, and darkness of the early sunsets, may we be reminded of the light that has come into the world. He shows us the way to heaven. As we sing “O Come O Come Immanuel,” may we feel less alone in knowing that a righteous king has indeed come to save us (yes You). May we look at our little ones as a reminder of God's presence with us, and may we never lose sight of his ever present love and intentionality towards our human hearts. O come O come Immanuel, may we be ever aware of your presence with us this year and may it change us moment by moment to be more like you.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation about the protest, NBA boycott, police, fear, VERBS, and faith. Remember before you listen to... FREE YOUR MIND! Scripture References: Deuteronomy 28:64-68 - Curses on The Children of Israel because of their disobedience; Psalm 83 - Israel's enemies take crafty counsel against them; John 18:36 - Our Messiah said His Kingdom was not of THIS world; Rev 1:14-15 Describes Yahawashi (Jesus); John 17:14-19 - Be in the world but not of the world; 1 Samuel 8 - Israel wants to be like the other nations and have a King; Deuteronomy 30 - Tells Israel how to get out of captivity; Ezekiel 37 - Can these dry bones live?; Ezekiel 36:19 - The scattering on Biblical Israelites, Deuteronomy 32:8-9 - He gave the nations to the sons of God in a territory, but He chose Israel as HIS people; Exodus 12:12 - Other gods mentioned; Psalm 82 - God judges amongst the gods; John 10:34 - Yahawashi (Jesus) said don't you know you are gods; 2 Corinthians 4:18 - Don't fix your eyes on what is seen, Deuteronomy 28; Jeremiah 17:4 - You shall lose your heritage; Romans 8:18-19 - The glory will be revealed: 1 Maccabees 1:11- Other things you should explore: Olmecs, Ancient Hebrew writings in Ohio and other places in the US, Pyramids in North and South America

AS A SERVANT Jesus. Our Messiah, our Saviour, our Lord, our Master, our Shepherd. He is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, and the Son of God. Jesus is so much greater than any one of us no matter who we are or what we do. Yet if we had been in that upper room in the evening when Jesus and his disciples had the Passover meal and the last supper, this great man would have washed our feet too. What a humbling experience that must have been to the disciples who were there – especially as they had been arguing about who was going to be the greatest in the kingdom. Now, here was their Lord washing their feet like a servant when they were the ones who should have been washing his feet. The answer to their argument about who was to be the greatest in the kingdom was Jesus. He would be the greatest in the kingdom. Yet he came to them as a servant, as an example to all who want to be great. He came to serve and we should serve each other too. Jesus said, "Now that I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you… Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them." So just as Jesus came as a servant, let us become servants to each other. Robert Prins [Auckland - Pakuranga - (NZ)]

He is OUR Messiah, Jesus Christ. He. Is. All.

ZECHARIAH 12-13:Several times I have noted Zechariah and other prophets who use the figure of shepherding a flock— picturing God’s people. In chapter 11, there were puzzling verses where Zechariah evidently performed an outward demonstration involving two staffs. Other prophets did such demonstrations. In this one, evidently Zechariah stood in for the Messiah. The two staffs were named Favor and Union. Our Messiah, Jesus, came to restore us to God’s favor and give us unity as God’s people— no matter from what race. The 30 pieces of silver is spoken of with irony: “this magnificent sum at which they valued me.” Remember this shepherd picture! ISAIAH 64:Yesterday in chapter 63, we heard the people of Israel ask a whole series of questions about the Lord, like: Is. 63:11b NLT “Where is the one who brought Israel through the sea, with Moses as their shepherd? And here is another verse: Is. 63:15 NLT LORD, look down from heaven;look from your holy, glorious home, and see us.Where is the passion and the mightyou used to show on our behalf?Where are your mercy and compassion now? The chapter ended with deep pathos: Is. 63:18 NLT How briefly your holy people possessed your holy place,and now our enemies have destroyed it.19 Sometimes it seems as though we never belonged to you,as though we had never been known as your people. However, don’t forget how the chapter started, with the Lord wearing blood-stained robes from trampling out the grapes (yes, ‘grapes of wrath’)— the nations who oppressed his people. This is a picture of the grape harvest that we saw so recently in Revelation 14. Note that in Isaiah the Lord does the trampling alone. And so we see also in Revelation, the final battle is won by the Lord acting alone. REVELATION 18: The part that puzzles me most in chapter 17 is this: Rev. 17:8 GNT That beast was once alive, but lives no longer; it is about to come up from the abyss and will go off to be destroyed. The people living on earth whose names have not been written before the creation of the world in the book of the living, will all be amazed as they look at the beast. It was once alive; now it no longer lives, but it will reappear. While that is confusing, the important thing is clear: Satan is the sponsor of the beast. GNT Translation note:Zech. 12:10 [NLT “Then I will pour out a spirit of grace and prayer on the family of David and on the people of Jerusalem. They will look on me whom they have pierced and mourn for him as for an only son. They will grieve bitterly for him as for a firstborn son who has died.//GNT “I will fill the descendants of David and the other people of Jerusalem with the spirit of mercy and the spirit of prayer. They will look at the one whom they stabbed to death, and they will mourn for him like those who mourn for an only child. They will mourn bitterly, like those who have lost their first-born son.][The Masoretic Text says ‘me’, but then the undergoer changes to ‘him’ in the next phrase. This unexpected shift in undergoers caused some textual variants, as scribes tried to reconcile the grammatical difficulty. See the note in the NET at Lumina.Bible.org. The NLT translation is more faithful in showing the difficulty. The GNT followed textual variants in order to make the grammar sound right.]====Rev. 18:18 and cried out as they saw the smoke from the flames that consumed her: [They said,] “There never has been another city like this great city!”

ZECHARIAH 12-13: Several times I have noted Zechariah and other prophets who use the figure of shepherding a flock— picturing God’s people. In chapter 11, there were puzzling verses where Zechariah evidently performed an outward demonstration involving two staffs. Other prophets did such demonstrations. In this one, evidently Zechariah stood in for the Messiah. The two staffs were named Favor and Union. Our Messiah, Jesus, came to restore us to God’s favor and give us unity as God’s people— no matter from what race. The 30 pieces of silver is spoken of with irony: “this magnificent sum at which they valued me.” Remember this shepherd picture! ISAIAH 64: Yesterday in chapter 63, we heard the people of Israel ask a whole series of questions about the Lord, like: Is. 63:11b NLT “Where is the one who brought Israel through the sea, with Moses as their shepherd? And here is another verse: Is. 63:15 NLT LORD, look down from heaven; look from your holy, glorious home, and see us. Where is the passion and the might you used to show on our behalf? Where are your mercy and compassion now? The chapter ended with deep pathos: Is. 63:18 NLT How briefly your holy people possessed your holy place, and now our enemies have destroyed it. 19 Sometimes it seems as though we never belonged to you, as though we had never been known as your people. However, don’t forget how the chapter started, with the Lord wearing blood-stained robes from trampling out the grapes (yes, ‘grapes of wrath’)— the nations who oppressed his people. This is a picture of the grape harvest that we saw so recently in Revelation 14. Note that in Isaiah the Lord does the trampling alone. And so we see also in Revelation, the final battle is won by the Lord acting alone. REVELATION 18:The part that puzzles me most in chapter 17 is this: 8 GNT That beast was once alive, but lives no longer; it is about to come up from the abyss and will go off to be destroyed. The people living on earth whose names have not been written before the creation of the world in the book of the living, will all be amazed as they look at the beast. It was once alive; now it no longer lives, but it will reappear. While that is confusing, the important thing is clear: Satan is the sponsor of the beast. GNT Translation note: Zech. 12:10 [NLT “Then I will pour out a spirit of grace and prayer on the family of David and on the people of Jerusalem. They will look on me whom they have pierced and mourn for him as for an only son. They will grieve bitterly for him as for a firstborn son who has died.//GNT “I will fill the descendants of David and the other people of Jerusalem with the spirit of mercy and the spirit of prayer. They will look at the one whom they stabbed to death, and they will mourn for him like those who mourn for an only child. They will mourn bitterly, like those who have lost their first-born son.] [The Masoretic Text says ‘me’, but then the undergoer changes to ‘him’ in the next phrase. This unexpected shift in undergoers caused some textual variants, as scribes tried to reconcile the grammatical difficulty. See the note in the NET at Lumina.Bible.org. The NLT translation is more faithful in showing the difficulty. The GNT followed textual variants in order to make the grammar sound right.] ==== Rev. 18:18 and cried out as they saw the smoke from the flames that consumed her: [They said,] “There never has been another city like this great city!”

Sermon Series: While We Wait: Advent for the AnxiousSermon Title: Love, Light & the End of AnxietyScripture Reading: Psalm 89:1-4; John 1:1-14, 3:16-21; Romans 8:35-39 Jesus came to deliver us in a way that nobody expected. Our Messiah was born to die for our sins and shine the light of God’s love for the world. And so, in the Church we say, “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.” While we wait on him to deliver us once and for all, we’re called to believe that his love is greater than all of our doubts, fears, and anxieties. In Love, Light & the End of Anxiety (4 of 4), Pastor David encourages us to experience God’s love in the darkness. Worship Resources:sermon video (mp4)sermon slidesDecember 22 bulletin

Roger Owen preaches from Luke 1 and 2 about the birth of the Messiah. Our Messiah is Jesus! The Messiah is a gift to us! We need to take the gift - accept it - unwrap it - use it! Our Messiah gives us Joy, Faithfulness, Forgiveness! He is our Peacemaker! Take those gifts - revel in them - AND THEN PASS THEM ON TO OTHERS!

In Isaiah 9:6, the third royal title for the Messiah is Everlasting Father. The Messiah would be the perfect and and endless father that our hearts long for. Jesus embodied the protection, care, leadership and unconditional love of a true father. Scripture gives us three promises of our everlasting father, Jesus. Our Messiah promises to love and accept us unconditionally. He promises to discipline us for our ultimate good, and He promises to hold us fast, forever. Ultimately, Jesus Christ's death on a cross and resurrection are proof that He keeps His promises.

Today, Pastor Phil Schaefer brings a Christmas message about "Handel's and Our Messiah", and you can find the full sermon notes in the resources below. We hope this message encourages you and helps you know Jesus in a more real way. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to catch our sermons every week, or listen to them on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Just as the names of God in scripture speak to His character, the prophetic names in Isaiah 9:6 foretell the character of the coming Messiah. Our Messiah, Christ Jesus, is El Gibbor, which translates to "Mighty God." The name means strong, wise, hero God. In today's culture mankind is the hero. The message is to trust and rely on ourselves to survive life's challenges. In contrast, we believe that God sent his son, the Messiah, to be our superhero. There are truths from scripture that help us to trust in El Gibbor - Mighty God - and not ourselves. First, Jesus' might is at work IN us. Second, Jesus' might is at work FOR us. Third, Jesus' might is at work THROUGH us. Ultimately, the sacrifice of His own life illustrated El Gibbor's true display of might!

Just as the names of God in scripture speak to His character, the prophetic names in Isaiah 9:6 foretell the character of the coming Messiah. Our Messiah, Christ Jesus, is El Gibbor, which translates to "Mighty God." The name means strong, wise,...

Our Messiah warned us, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Readers might think this implies that the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is somehow defective or inferior, but Messiah Yeshua is probably saying the opposite.

Our Messiah sometimes calls us to follow Him into seasons of struggle, weakness, and hardship.

Our Messiah sometimes calls us to follow Him into seasons of struggle, weakness, and hardship.

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 3: The Law of God and the Period of Birth & Re-Birth

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 8: Which Jesus do I serve? You are in God's Army

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 7: The Letter of the Law of God and the Scribes, RNA Translation and Transcription

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 6: Jesus, I AM DNA ... Building Blocks of Your Letters, Words, Amino Acids & Proteins

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 5: What is Your Color & Point of View? What is Gods Lens and Filter for You?

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 1: Is There a Pattern or Intelligent Design in Creation?

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 4: A Game of Chance ? DNA the Building Blocks of your House

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 2: The Word of God and the Architecture of Man

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 1: Is There a Pattern or Intelligent Design in Creation?

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 8: Which Jesus do I serve? You are in God's Army

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 7: The Letter of the Law of God and the Scribes, RNA Translation and Transcription

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 6: Jesus, I AM DNA ... Building Blocks of Your Letters, Words, Amino Acids & Proteins

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 5: What is Your Color & Point of View? What is Gods Lens and Filter for You?

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 4: A Game of Chance ? DNA the Building Blocks of your House

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 3: The Law of God and the Period of Birth & Re-Birth

The Bible speaks more of the times today and the world we live in. God gave us his word and He anticipates the events that were, that are and are still yet to come. The Bible has been translated into every language, the integrity of God's design and authenticity of who He is, declare history before it happens. Would you use a compass or roadmap to find your way home if you are lost?Modern science, archaeology and history provide fresh insight into the universe and the nature of matter. The Word of God contains the plan of eternal redemption through faith, hope and love in Jesus, Our Messiah.God is the only Superpower in the Universe. He is the architect, the scientist, the mathematician, the author and creator of all things. He is the greatest artist and His fingerprint is on every single one of you. You were fearfully and wonderfully made from your embryo, in your mother's womb. This series will look at the beauty and integrity of God's design in your own DNA. You were made in the image and likeness of God. Come take this exciting journey to discover your calling and plan for your life. The Holy Spirit is our teacher and Jesus is the only way, the only truth... God's truth is the only thing that is forever settled in all the heavens. Man's opinion changes and we live in an age of relative truth for every individual. Are we under the Law of God or do we live in the Grace of God? Does our behaviour matter and are we accountable for our actions?Learn what the whole counsel of God says about you and from beginning to end of your life, God has a more excellent way and plan for youSession 2: The Word of God and the Architecture of Man

"In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your Name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done On Earth as it is in heaven. Gives us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen Matthew 6:9-13 NKJVIs God Hearing My PrayersHere’s something we both can agree on; praying strengthens our bond with God. Yet, we wonder if He is listening to our prayer.It’s easy to doubt prayer.You’re not alone.Rightful PrayingIn the Gospels of Matthew (Matthew 6:9-13) and Luke (Luke 11:2-4), Jesus answered the Disciples question on how to pray. It’s known as the Lord’s Prayer and is Christ’s blueprint for praying from the heart.Our Messiah unveils God’s approved method of praying and shows us the essential ingredients in constructing a useful prayer.Jesus model prayer starts with acknowledging God and giving glory to Him. This allows us to humble ourselves to God, and pray from the heart.Next, it shows us our responsibility to God by following His will. Then it highlights the way to ask the Father for spiritual gifts. And then Christ places forgiveness as a necessity.The final part of the prayer heightens God’s power to lead us away from temptation and protect us from evil. This provides us the strength to live in a wicked world.As shown above, Christ is precise on how to pray.How do you pray from the heart?

ZECHARIAH 12-13:Several times I have noted Zechariah and other prophets who use the figure of shepherding a flock— picturing God’s people. In chapter 11, there were puzzling verses where Zechariah evidently performed an outward demonstration involving two staffs. Other prophets did such demonstrations. In this one, evidently Zechariah stood in for the Messiah. The two staffs were named Favor and Union. Our Messiah, Jesus, came to restore us to God’s favor and give us unity as God’s people— no matter from what race. The 30 pieces of silver is spoken of with irony: “this magnificent sum at which they valued me.” Remember this shepherd picture! ISAIAH 64:Yesterday in chapter 63, we heard the people of Israel ask a whole series of questions about the Lord, like: Is. 63:11b NLT “Where is the one who brought Israel through the sea, with Moses as their shepherd? And here is another verse: Is. 63:15 NLT LORD, look down from heaven;look from your holy, glorious home, and see us.Where is the passion and the mightyou used to show on our behalf?Where are your mercy and compassion now? The chapter ended with deep pathos: Is. 63:18 NLT How briefly your holy people possessed your holy place,and now our enemies have destroyed it.19 Sometimes it seems as though we never belonged to you,as though we had never been known as your people. However, don’t forget how the chapter started, with the Lord wearing blood-stained robes from trampling out the grapes (yes, ‘grapes of wrath’)— the nations who oppressed his people. This is a picture of the grape harvest that we saw so recently in Revelation 14. Note that in Isaiah the Lord does the trampling alone. And so we see also in Revelation, the final battle is won by the Lord acting alone. REVELATION 18:The part that puzzles me most in chapter 17 is this: 8 GNT That beast was once alive, but lives no longer; it is about to come up from the abyss and will go off to be destroyed. The people living on earth whose names have not been written before the creation of the world in the book of the living, will all be amazed as they look at the beast. It was once alive; now it no longer lives, but it will reappear. While that is confusing, the important thing is clear: Satan is the sponsor of the beast. GNT Translation note:Zech. 12:10 [NLT “Then I will pour out a spirit of grace and prayer on the family of David and on the people of Jerusalem. They will look on me whom they have pierced and mourn for him as for an only son. They will grieve bitterly for him as for a firstborn son who has died.//GNT “I will fill the descendants of David and the other people of Jerusalem with the spirit of mercy and the spirit of prayer. They will look at the one whom they stabbed to death, and they will mourn for him like those who mourn for an only child. They will mourn bitterly, like those who have lost their first-born son.][The Masoretic Text says ‘me’, but then the undergoer changes to ‘him’ in the next phrase. This unexpected shift in undergoers caused some textual variants, as scribes tried to reconcile the grammatical difficulty. See the note in the NET at Lumina.Bible.org. The NLT translation is more faithful in showing the difficulty. The GNT followed textual variants in order to make the grammar sound right.] ====Rev. 18:18 and cried out as they saw the smoke from the flames that consumed her: [They said,] “There never has been another city like this great city!”

Our Messiah was both Jesus ("God save us”) and Emmanuel (“God with us”)

Our Messiah kept the guidelines and instructions known as the Torah and He taught his followers to keep it also. In this audio I give many Scripture verses confirming this.

Our Messiah of Ten Thousand Names - Presented on Magna Mater Palm Sunday @ the  Goddess Temple of Orange County. Within Judeo-Christian tradition, Palm Sunday traditionally commemorates the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. The gospels record the arrival of Jesus riding into the city on a donkey, while the crowds spread their cloaks and palm branches on the street to honor him as their long-awaited Messiah and King.  But long before the new religion of Christianity arose, The Great Mother was celebrated in the ancient world at this season of spring by carrying in procession the branches of palms, pines and other trees.   Herstory records a Creatrix and Messiah –“She of Ten Thousand Names”—far, far older than the deities of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other more recent religions. So today I humbly take on the role of contemporary bard and prophetess to reclaim the Herstory, of the long-awaited return of the Great She, Goddess, our female Messiah of Ten Thousand Names, and we will together vision the prophecies attached to that coming, because that is the Goddess way How might life be different with the Divine Feminine or Goddess birthed at the center of the world, particularly for women and our like-minded brothers, without the domination of Patriachary's clenched fists? 

Our Messiah, our God, demands nothing less than everything, 100 percent, complete devotion. Our Messiah does not ride in on a donkey, humble and holy, and ask for occasional fidelity. Our Messiah does not hang on a cross to his death to engender sporadic respect. Our Messiah, the Son of God asks that we leave behind our selves, our selfishness and egotism and reorient our lives toward God. Completely. Wholly.

Our Messiah, our God, demands nothing less than everything, 100 percent, complete devotion. Our Messiah does not ride in on a donkey, humble and holy, and ask for occasional fidelity. Our Messiah does not hang on a cross to his death to engender sporadic respect. Our Messiah, the Son of God asks that we leave behind our selves, our selfishness and egotism and reorient our lives toward God. Completely. Wholly.