In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes that Jesus is not just a one-time Savior, but a continual Savior from sin. The speaker highlights the importance of searching one's heart to understand sin and how to bring it to Jesus. They express gratitude for Jesus being a Savior from sin and emphasize that having Jesus as the life principle is incompatible with sin. The preacher also discusses the concept of union with Jesus through baptism, stating that because Jesus is in us, he continues to save us from sin. The sermon concludes by emphasizing that sin is driven out and kept out through the continual presence of Jesus in our lives.

A wonderful statement by Andrew Murray on Jesus as a Savior from sin in a way that I myself had never before ever seen it. That has to do with our union with him through baptism, that because he's in us, he's the Savior still from sin. That we have present with us a Savior, and if we are abiding in him, it's repellent against sin. Sin is antithetical to him. The saving from sin is not an occasional event, but rather it is a blessing through Jesus to us and in us. When Jesus fills me, when Jesus is all for me, sin has no hold on me. Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not. To the degree that Jesus is in you and you in him, the Jesus who is antithetical to sin, who is the opposite of sin, who is the son of righteousness inhibits sin. It has no place. It cannot function. Its power is lost because of the presence of him who is contrary to sin. Yes, sin is driven out and kept out only through the presence of Jesus. It is Jesus himself through his giving to me and his living in me who is my salvation from sin, not just once or from this sin or from that sin, but as a continual presence against sin. We can be freed from the power of sin to the degree that we're abiding in him and he in us. See what I mean? He's a continual savior and not just a once and for all. To know more about sin, the following things are required, then they tell you how to search your heart. Let us thank God very heartily that Jesus is a savior from sin. That's his nature. The power that sin has had over us, Jesus now has. The place that sin has taken in the heart, Jesus will now take. The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. Then he prays, precious Lord, let your light stream over me. Let me understand this. Let it become clear to my soul that you yourself are my salvation, not just once and for all at the beginning, but every day and continually and moment for moment. To have you with me, in me, this keeps sin out. Because they're antithetical. They cannot cohabit. Their natures are contrary. Jesus is the opposite of sin. And to have him as your life principle cannot be at the same time compatible with sin. To have you with me, in me, this keeps sin out. Teach me to bring every sin to you. The moment that makes its appearance, bring it to the sin bearer and the one who has canceled sin by his own death. Let every sin drive me to a closer alliance with you. Then your name will truly become my salvation from sin. There's a deliverance and a salvation from sin that is not just in the inception of the spiritual life or in great moments, but continually as an entire multiple. That's what I had not seen before. That is how great a salvation God has purchased for us. And it was only out of forced circumstances that I was required to see the outwork in my own life, that progressively as I did not yield my members to unrighteousness, the power of sin and the temptation for sin subsided. And that the Jesus who is becoming larger in me through obedience and faith and relationship just has taken the thing out of me. It's not even a fact. It's not even a temptation. If it comes as a thought, it just goes as quickly. It has lost its power. Because the one who is in me is antithetical to sin. Can you see that? His very nature is as savior from sin. So if the savior from sin is in you, how can sin have any place? These things are already positionally there. It only remains for us by faith to believe them and to walk in that faith. See what I mean? Faith is the actualization in the moment-by-moment living, walking, that God says has taken place through our union with him in baptism. We might have God in our spirits, but if he has not also sanctified our souls, which is our daily struggle, our soul life, which is why I'm so much a critic of the so-called revival thing, because it seems to cultivate man's satisfaction at the soul level rather than to bring it to the death at the cross, that he might be totally the man of the spirit in all of his being. So our souls, if we give our souls over, for example, what is the soul? Will, emotion, mind. And if we give our mind and our thought to certain pervasive thoughts, we're going to find entry of the demonic kind in that realm. For example, you think you're entitled to blow up in anger, that you can once in a while ventilate yourself because you've got it coming or the pressure's too great? You do that repeatedly and you'll have a demon of that kind. And so that's the way I think it is. Because we don't live in the knowledge of the cross, because we trust our flesh more than we ought when God says that we're so wicked and so unredeemable that its only answer was crucifixion. We make room for it because we're not living in the truth and because we take liberties with the truth and allow darkness or lies or compromise. We make room for the things of darkness that ought not to be there. So, and to the degree that we have, we have lost our authority. The powers of the air can say, Jesus I know, Paul I know, but who are you? Why did they know Paul and Jesus? Because they were separated unto God, because their life was sinless, because they were in him, righteousness. And in his power, resurrection validates God. The power to bring up from the dead, which is why Israel's experience is the culminating work of God before his coming. Israel is being raised from the dead, but the Elijah who will brood over Israel and call it up into life by the prosperation of itself is the church. The church in its prophetic constituency, which is why the issue of what is prophetic is so critically important. That's why I watch with a jealous urgency anything that purports to be prophetic and is not, because it destroys the validity of that calling for the church and putting before it a false model. Okay, just earlier in that chapter in the verses five and six, and you know that he was manifested to take away our sins and in him there is no sin. So, if you're abiding in him in whom there is no sin, what place is there for sin? Whoever abides in him does not sin. Whoever sins has neither seen him nor known him, intimately known him. So, what's the key then to living in a condition in which sin will have no part according to these verses? Abiding. And what's the key to abiding? What does it mean to abide? You know that the word abide is never spoken in common English language. You think one of you ever heard anyone use that word in conversation. It's totally a spiritual term and unique to God, but think of what it means to abide. What would be a synonym? Another synonym would be dwell, and yet it says in Psalm 133, behold how good and pleasant it is for the brethren to dwell together in unity, which is something more than a conference or a Sunday service. Dwelling together is that daily relationship that is more than just surface. It's an integration of life of dwelling. It's knowing that you're not there yet, you're imperfect, you're struggling, you're afraid, and yet you don't cop out, you don't run out, you don't walk, you don't turn your back. You dwell in unity together. There God has commanded the blessing, even life forevermore. So I would say if I had my choice, rather than run to Toronto, I would run to this place where God has commanded his blessing, in the place where God's people dwell together in unity, knowing after 20 years in community life that it's not some easy, glib, or cheap thing to obtain. There's a suffering that precedes the dwelling and makes the dwelling possible, which is called the cross. Dwelling or abiding is the issue of suffering. Obedience is a suffering, particularly when it's contrary to your will. I mean, what is obedience if you want to do and like to do what you're called to do? Obedience is only a real issue of faith when it's contrary to what you desire, when your flesh does not want to, when it shrinks from. To be obedient then is to dwell. I mean, what is a submission of a wife to her husband if she's agreed? It's where she has disagreed that the issue of submission becomes the issue, or the issue in the body, and it answers the question, why then don't we abide? God has made every provision. When Jesus said, it is finished, I don't know that there's another more exhaustive or inexhaustible statement in its meaning than the last words of Jesus, it is finished. The whole redemptive work is done. My obedience unto death will now be followed by resurrection, ascension, glory, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the establishment of the church, its purposes, its history, its finality, the conclusion of the age, my coming again in glory to be king, establishing a new world. It is finished. Why then, if it is finished, aren't we seeing the daily benefit and the result of it, which if we indeed were enjoying it, we would not have to look for Toronto's? And he answers, why do I so constantly fall before temptation? If this is God's provision, to be free from sin, why do I fall before temptation? Possibly because you have never made an entire surrender of yourself to the Lord Jesus. I would have said to the lordship of Jesus. Don't think that that's a little honorific title. It's to Jesus as Lord that we have not fully surrendered. In other words, it came up in our conversation today, if there's so much as one place of veto that we have, I won't even say that we have exercised that veto, but we have reserved for ourselves a certain veto power, that if ever the issue should come up, we will, of course, never surrender a right on that issue. Like he could be Lord over everything else, where he wants me to live or kind of work he wants me to do, but when it comes to marriage, I'll determine that. Or it comes to where I'm going to live, like the precious couple that left us this morning, and I have been jokingly teasing them about, listen, why make this a summer experience? These have been the most precious days of your life. Stay on with us. Well, the winter ought, you know, the winter. And so, I mean, is that an issue? What if the Lord would require it? But are we living as unto the Lord, that it would not be an issue if he required it? We would not raise it as an objection. In other words, here's, I'm saying all that to say this. We are not obtaining the fullness and the benefit of God's great redemptive act on the cross that eventuated in resurrection and opened to us such possibilities, because we have not come to a fullness of submission and obedience to himself as Lord. You know that the first pronouncement by the angels that this day there has been born to you in the city of David, a savior, even Christ Jesus, the Lord, in the first angelic pronouncement of the event of Jesus's birth, in the same announcement is the issue of his Lordship as well as his Messiahship. And you cannot have the one without the other. We want the benefits, but we don't want the submission. We don't want to give up the ghost. We want to retain something for ourselves that can exercise a veto at any moment. When you guys were invited to pray, you don't pray. You're exercising your veto. Yes, I know there's an invitation to pray. I know that God's in it. I'm hearing it through a man, but I don't feel like it. I don't want it. I'm not in the mood. You know, you may not recognize that, but that's what your silence is saying. Supposing it were a commandment, and we learned that we abide in him by obeying his commandments, and he's saying, okay, time now for you to pray. But Lord, I'm not confident in my spirituality. My prayer may sound foolish. It will embarrass me in the hearing of others. I'll just choke and gurgle, and I'd rather just be silent. I would rather. I. He says, his commandment is pray. You say, I would rather. You know what you're saying? You're saying the same thing as Ailee Rizzo. I refuse to consider that. Can you see that what the issue is, what the cross is, is a death to your last subjective individualistic resistances to God, because in that area, you're going to call the shot. And therefore, you're shutting yourself out from dwelling and abiding in which he is the power against sin and the freedom and the life and the joy. And then because we're joyless, we've got to look for tomatoes and hope that there, our condition will be alleviated rather than finding our alleviation where it needs to be found at the cross in daily submission to the totality, to Jesus as Lord of all. I mean, it's so elementary. If he's not Lord of all, he's not Lord. He can't be a Lord of 99%. If there's the one thing in which he's not Lord, the whole other of the 99% is invalidated. To hold the veto power shows who in fact is still Lord, though you may agree with him in every other major area, to hold one area as unto yourself nullifies all the rest. So let me read this. So why do I constantly fall before temptation? Because you have never made an entire surrender of yourself to the Lord Jesus or his Lordship. But if you have done this and yet do not experience victory in day of the life, it is because you have not followed your act of surrender by an attitude of dependence. If we are not only to enter but to walk in the holy life, the acting faith by which the Spirit of Christ has been received to cleanse us must be followed by a resting faith in which we rely on the Lord Jesus to keep us always in the place of victory. For the life of holiness with its continuous victory over temptation, with its deep permanent consciousness of God's nearness, with its abiding peace and conquering power, no single act of consecration, however deep and thorough and blessed, is sufficient if it is not followed by an attitude of never ceasing dependence hourly and momentarily on the Lord Jesus Christ as our keeper. This dependence must be a believing dependence according to your faith shall it be unto you. We must expect to be kept. Faith is expectancy. He's in us to willing to do of his good pleasure. We believe that provision has been made. We expect to be kept. We don't expect to succumb to sin. It's our constant dependency and attitude of faith is what he's going to miss. But Jesus Christ grounded in his resurrection is itself the true and direct bridge from once to always, from himself in his time to us in our time. How does Barth see what took place in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago? An event in time but an eternal event and eternally valid and even bridges the distance between time and eternity. It's the eternal action grounded in his resurrection is itself the true and direct bridge from himself in his time to us in our time because as crucified and dead he has risen and lives. The fact of his death on the cross can never be passed. It can never cease to be his action. That's why we're told let us draw near. Hebrews 10, how does it go? In full assurance of faith, being confident, cast not away your confidence. Something has been purchased, something has been obtained of an eternally valid plan. The veil has been rent and God has made a new and living way through the blood of Jesus 2,000 years ago. That means now we can come into the holiest place of all by that blood because the veil has been read by his red side and have a place before the father in that holiest place that is unspeakably clear and rich. What are we going to make of it? How can we bring home this matter to ourselves and to other men? How can we bring ourselves and other men to this matter? Where and how do we experience and prove its efficacy? This is the real issue of the church. We're agreed with what's being said but what's the consequence? How do we internalize this? How do we demonstrate this? How do we make this a message, not just for the world but for the church that's asleep and the church that is not living in the resurrection sign, the church that does not know it has high priestly privilege in his presence because of a new and living way by the blood of Jesus, living beneath the provision that God has already obtained and living sub-standard lives, living lives that are in many ways no better and sometimes worse than people in the world. So Barth is raising the question, what are we going to make of this? How can we bring home this matter to ourselves and other men? How can we bring ourselves and other men to this matter? Where and how do we experience its efficacy, its value, its working value? There is a relative place for these questions and answers but only in the light and in strict explanation of one question which God himself has put in Jesus, which indeed he does put in eternity and therefore today. This is Barth. If you talk about eternity, you talk about today. How come? The things that are eternal are today. Eternity subsumes the present as well as the past and as well as the future. We have been ushered in to a remarkable place and when you take eternity into your hearts, it changes the weight of everything. It's no more just a class. It's no more just a knock about life in the woods. It's no more an issue of you making a ministerial trip or writing a letter. Everything is charged with a deepened, heightened significance. Eternity is in the present moment. That itself is salvational. You know, men are on drugs and alcohol for the absence of this. There's no significance to their lives. They see their lives as lackluster and hopeless and gray because the eternal dimension is not in the daily thing. It's not in today. If it were, they would not need to give themselves an eye by some synthetic or chemical thing. So, how do we do something with it and bring it to men? This means prayer. Prayer in the name of Jesus. Prayer which we expect to be heard but without doubt or hesitation because God has loved and loves and will love the one who offers it as a lost sinner in Jesus Christ because therefore Jesus Christ has become this one and God and is therefore between today and every day. This is called like getting carried away. The answer to those questions is to come through prayer but prayer of a very effectual kind because we're assured of a God who hears it. How is that connected with the cross? How is faith and prayer that is heard as in that would give us an answer to how we're to make him known as the God of resurrection related to the cross. That God, he says, has loved us. We're confident in our prayer because we're confident in the God that has loved us and loves and will love the one who offers it, offers his son at the cross. So, in this sense, the intercession of Christ is not simply the origin at the cross but the lasting basis of righteousness and hope. It's continual turning point, the way which is always open to God and the corner from which he leads us. It is the eternal act of the crucified and risen one for us, the one truly contemporaneous divine act to us, the today. What happened then is today. It's the one act of God. It's eternal in its significance. It's a continual turning point, not just then but now. It's the way. He who was crucified is risen, and as such, he lives unto God. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever, and this temple togetherness of the Jesus Christ of Good Friday, the Jesus Christ of Easter as created by the divine verdict is the basis of life for men of all ages, and as such is the basis of the alteration of this situation. This is the foundation. This is what God gave that men should live sane lives in God. This is not a religious thing. This is God's foundation for all mankind. To live outside the resurrection is to be in a deformed state. I don't have a word for it. It's almost hideous, and that, if you understand that, you'll understand the confrontation of last summer at the camp with the speaker who was there, who was confronted on the basis of the issue of resurrection about even being the foundation of his ministry, a man of remarkable gifts and skill and eloquence, impressing and blessing many from that place and establishing a flourishing and successful work but was threatened and had put before him the issue of the resurrection, especially as a minister of the word, to continue to function out of your own human and religious ability, knowing that there has been a crucifixion and a resurrection and a life that has flown forth from that for today, which is eternal in its significance, and not to live and to move and to serve God from that life has got to be, what would you say, a slight slap in the face, a disregard for the enormous act that God has performed in the crucifixion of Jesus and the raising of him from the dead. To be satisfied with that as a doctrine and not to live from that daily and today is to do spite to the grace of God, and yet men are succeeding on that basis. In fact, I would say virtually the whole realm of successful ministries today is from that basis, and when the other basis is raised as a question or a challenge, the retaliation and the backlash and the anger, the vehemence of the opposition is severe, which to me is the very testimony that two modes of life are in collision and there's something about the depth of the flesh life. You know, because when it's flesh does not mean that it cannot be skillful or religious or knowledgeable or competent or powerful. In fact, that's the very name of the game. That's what religion is, and when religion is threatened by life, it will seek to extinguish the thing that threatens it, and when you'll understand that, you'll understand why Christ was crucified. He was a threat to an entire religious mode of being of men acting out of their own life and establishing their own righteousness by one who is offering the grace of the righteousness of God. The only thing I can think that's worse and more painful than that is for Christians who subscribe to the truth of this and yet refuse to live in its life are still moral cowards who have a greater security and confidence in living from themselves than trusting the life of God, unwilling to bring to death their own ability and rather content to function from that place than to let go of that unto death to trust the life of God made possible through his death and resurrection that he might be glorified for no flesh shall stand in his presence or boast in his glory. A reaction against that message and against that messenger that is angry, defensive, and self-justifying, which has been our recent experience, would be to me one evidence that you're not living from that life. And I would say your history in death, your willingness to put aside yourself and your own confidence, your willingness to bear what we spoke about from the beginning, the foolishness of God and the weakness of God, and to come and stand before men in trembling and in fear and in weakness and in foolishness, not speaking out of your eloquence or competence but out of the life of God. I would say that it would have to show itself over an expanse of time. You might get away with it here and there and make a brave show and even speak about resurrection but not by the resurrection and impress people with the truth of it. But it's got to catch up with you. It's only a matter of time before that contradiction, it's too powerful a contradiction to go unexpressed. You begin in weakness and in trembling but because the life then can be released when it's released in his strength. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. I'm not conscious of being weak now. In fact, I'm feeling very strong and very competent and confident in what I'm saying and doing. But at the inception of the speaking, before we assembled, or at the first, it's like the cold gray dawn on Monday morning in the prayer time. Who feels like it? Who's going to open their mouths? Who's going to break the silence? Who's going to make the first prayer? That weakness, that trembling, that fear, that inadequacy. But once you yield to it, then there's the fall of his life. And that life, of course, is strength. His strength. For people who are undiscerning, they might well imagine that it is the man. But the man himself knows, as Paul knew, about the experience of trembling, weakness, and fear. You know what I would say looking back over a quarter of a century of ministry? That the greatest moments in it, like for example, the giving of the first resurrection message at Kansas City in 1977, was in the fifth day of a fast. And totally, humanly emptied. And in fact, so restricted by obedience to God, that all I could do was read from an outline on a yellow legal pad, without any interpolation or anything that I could bring to it to bring a note of excitement or raising my voice or my hands or making gestures. It was like something being cut right to the core. It was an experience of the mortification. I was not experiencing the strength. It was weakness throughout. And after it was over, it was such a silence, like a confirming testimony that it was a terrible fiasco. But within moments after I was accused of that, boom, the evidence that it was of God broke out. And there was phenomenal response unto repentance of breaking the streaks in Christ like nothing I have before nor since ever heard. It was the testimony that the Word of God, humanly weak in its sound and in its presentation, was the power of God in those who received it. So I would say in the greatest moments of God's use, that I can look back on it over a quarter of a century, invariably came out of the greatest weaknesses, times of demoralization, emptyings, no confidence in one's strength. It's a mode of life. And it may well be that you don't always have to experience the death for the life in that moment, but to the degree that there's a measure of life going forth today, you're the recipients of a whole history of death that has preceded it. See what I mean? That God can somehow, in the mystery of this, draw forth in his own will. I think there is a correspondence. Paul says, it's death that works in me, but life in you. But it's ministers who have consistently submitted to death that life can go forth in a moment when they don't feel dead, but because there is a submission to that principle. Some remarks out of A. W. Toza from the Christian Missionary Alliance Church. He was the editor of their magazine and wrote remarkable articles and books. And this is entitled, The Cross is a Radical Thing. The cross of Christ is the most revolutionary thing to appear among men. The cross of old Roman times knew no compromise. It never made concessions. It won all its arguments by killing its opponents and silencing him for good. It spared not Christ, but slew him the same as the rest. The radical message of the cross transformed Saul of Tarsus and changed him from a persecutor of Christians to a tender believer and an apostle of the faith. Its power changed bad men unto good ones. It shook off the long bondage of paganism and altered completely the whole moral mental outlook of the Western world. And this it did and continued to do as long as it was permitted to remain what it had been originally, a cross. Its power departed when it was changed from a thing of death to a thing of beauty. It's interesting in German religious history and culture, the famous poet Goethe, G-O-E-T-H-E, complained that the cross is too brutal a thing and that it should be garlanded with roses, which in fact happened in German Christianity. They took the sting out of the cross and by that one act they made Hitler inevitable. The cross is always ugly. The cross is always a scandal. The cross is always a place of death, but it's also to that degree the place of life. So its power departed when it was changed from a thing of death to a thing of beauty. When men made of it a symbol, hung it around their necks as an ornament or made its outline before their faces as a magic sign to ward off evil, then it became at best a weak emblem and at worst a positive fetish. And so is it revered by millions today who know absolutely nothing about its power. The cross affects its ends by destroying one established pattern, the victims, and creating another pattern, its own. And with perfect knowledge of all this, Christ said, if any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. So the cross not only brings Christ's life to an end, it ends also the first life, the old life of every one of his true believers. It destroys the old pattern, the Adam pattern in the believer's life and brings it to an end. Then the God who raised Christ from the dead raises the believer and a new life begins. We must do something about the cross. And one of two things only we can do, flee it or die upon it. There's nothing in between. You can't play with it, you can't finger it, you can't partially commit some aspect of your life and keep the rest. It's a place of death. And you know what's an amazing thing? How we refuse to recognize the totality of death. You can't keep alive your virtues or your giftings or other admirable aspects about the flesh life. And there are many such things. The easy things are to give up the demerits, the bad habits, the lousy tendencies, the terrible egotism, the vanity, the fear. But to give up the virtue, that's where death becomes death. And that's what Jesus gave up as the Son of Man. So we can either flee it or die upon it. If we should be so fooled hardly as to flee, we shall by that act put away the faith of our fathers and make of Christianity something other than it is. Then we shall have left only the empty language of salvation. The power will be part with our departure from the true cross. If we are wise, we will do what Jesus did, endure the cross and despise its shame for the joy that is set before us. To do this is to submit the whole pattern of our lives to be destroyed and built again in the power of an endless life. We shall find that it is more than poetry, more than sweet hymns and elevated feelings. The cross will cut into our lives where it hurts most, sparing neither us nor our carefully cultivated reputations. It will defeat us and bring our selfish lives to an end. Only then shall we rise in fullness of life to establish a pattern of living wholly new and free and full of good works. We must do something about the cross. Merely to acknowledge it and not to commit to it or submit to it is a cruel deception, better that we had never heard of it. Someone said that the issue is like tossing a coin and you got to call heads or tails, put up or shut up, but you've got to call it before the coin hits the ground. You can't be indecisive and languish over this or you'll find yourself in a place of spiritual death. Christ chose the cross and expects his chosen ones to do the same. Remember the question of the day, are we choosing what God chooses? If anyone would come after me, he said, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whosoever wants to save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for me will save it. Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Whoever refuses to carry his cross is not a disciple of Jesus and whoever does not preach the cross is not a spokesman for the church. The church that compromises the message of the cross will perish. The cross demands a choice. The Bible does not even hint of a truce between Christ and Satan and never even suggests a compromise between them. There is no compromise between good and evil, truth and lying, light and darkness, between holiness and sin, to save the lost, the sheep and goats, between the broad road and the narrow road, salvation and condemnation, heaven and hell, Christ and Antichrist, everlasting life and everlasting death, do not mix. The cross knows no compromise. So Jesus and him crucified will be preached in his name to all nations by his chosen ones who have believed and have been clothed with power from on high. The future looks very bright for those who choose the cross rather than compromise with this perishing world. So have you chosen what God has chosen? The crucifixion of Jesus is the statement of God's choice, the statement of God's wisdom that has been validated and verified by raising the crucified one from the dead. God honored his own choice by validating that death and resurrection and he'll validate our death and resurrection when we choose it. It's voluntary. Jesus was not dragged kicking to the cross. I lay my life down and so must be also. Far better that you should know this and choose this at your age now and think that you'll be able to make a decision of this kind when you're 30 or 40 or 50 and the world and its ways and its fortunes and what you have acquired in it will make such a choice virtually impossible. Choose now. Be the sons and daughters of the resurrection, choose the cross and walk in it. Believe for the power of its life even when you're feeble, especially when you're feeble and you're going to be surprised at what you will hear coming out of your mouth. You'll know that it's not you. It's not your eloquence. If any man knew human eloquence, myself, as a secular teacher that could walk students off a cliff by my eloquence, they would follow me. But you know what the remarkable thing was? When I came back from Jerusalem saved 31 years ago and returned to the teaching profession, what a dud, what a dismal abject failure by a man who was unable to put two words together, whose face was a study. I could not even affect my facial arrangement to be pleasant. It was death daily. Going to the school was going to the cross of weakness, of foolishness, of absurdity, of the tittering and laughter and the mocking derision of the students for the weakness of the men who sat before them, now saved, who was a powerhouse as an atheist. Are you willing to suffer that for as long as God will allow you to experience it until it brings everything unto death in which you have ever had confidence? And when that death comes, then comes the life. That was true for Jesus, true for us. So let's end. So Lord, we just thank you precious God.