In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of looking to Jesus Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. He references 2 Corinthians 4 and 2 Timothy 3 to support his point. The speaker encourages believers to continue in their faith and to rely on the scriptures, which have the power to make them wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. He also highlights the role of Jesus as the image of God and the light of the gospel, emphasizing that unbelievers are blinded by the god of this age and cannot see this light.

Thank you for that marvelous introduction. Fred and I were talking earlier about the speaker last night, and being young, he's well able to speak rapidly. And we were both reminiscing about the times when we could speak like that. And I remember driving a dear woman crazy who was interpreting for the deaf in Upper New York, and Fred had similar experiences. And as you get older, you do get slower, and one of the things that really worries me is, will I be able to speak at all when I get as old as Fred? You had that coming. I want to read you a little something, not from my book, but I want to read this before we have prayer. This is a book review that was made of my book, and I'll tell you why I'm reading it right after that. I'm only going to read you a little bit of it. The title of it is, Toxic Wells or Emergent Theological Perversions or Biblical Principles. I refer not to water wells tainted with hazardous waste, nor to oil wells intrinsically poisoned to humans, but to Tom Wells' recent theological reflections in his book, The Priority of Jesus Christ. And then the man went on like this, and among other things, he said, chalk up my criticisms and wounds of a fellow Calvinist friend, but I consider his recent views as an inexcusable perversion of the New Testament. His latest book continues in line with the earlier antinomian co-authored New Covenant theology. And for those of you who know who my co-author is, this is why you can enjoy that for a third time against Fred. Now, the reason I read that is because I want to ask you a question. Who could resist reading that book after having read that? That review goes on ten pages like that, and it gets worse as it goes. And the brother who wrote it was not writing tongue-in-cheek. He's a good friend of mine, and I appreciate him in many areas, but he's actually sold books for me because he's given that out to a number of people. There are a number of people here who have read that entire review, and they were anxious then to read the book. And so who knows what will happen when some of these things go wrong, so to speak. Let's bow our heads again for prayer. Thank you, our Father, for the wonderful privilege that we have to gather together with fellow believers and to share Christian love and to talk of the things of Christ and other things, Lord, as we renew our acquaintance. And now, Father, we come this morning to the first of sessions in which we are to learn your Word, and we pray that you might, if it would please you, teach us, teach the man who is speaking first, and teach all of us who gather here by your Spirit. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. I want to read to you two passages of Scripture. Neither of these could be called my text, really. But the first is from 2 Corinthians 4, starting at verse 3. And then I want to read to you from 2 Timothy 3, starting at verse 15. And after I read from 2 Timothy, you may want to just leave your finger in that slot, or your notes, or whatever you have, because I will come to that first before I come to the 2 Corinthians passage. But let me read to you from 2 Corinthians 4, starting with verse 3. I'm reading, by the way, from the NIV. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ is Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And then from 2 Timothy 3, the last 3 or 4 verses, actually the sentence in the NIV starts in verse 14 of 2 Corinthians 3, so I'll start reading, or 2 Timothy 3, so I'll start reading there. But as for you, Timothy, continue in what you've 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 man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. We trust that the Lord will add his blessing to the reading of those sections of his word. Some years ago now, a friend of mine said to me, you know, he said, I think that we talk too much about Jesus Christ and too little about God. Now that was a very interesting comment, and it showed that whichever was true, that brother was certainly on the right track because the subject of the scriptures is largely God and Jesus Christ, not to the exclusion of sin and salvation, of course. So I thought about that, and that was actually the occasion of my writing the book that Fred has introduced this morning, The Priority of Jesus Christ. What are we talking about when we talk about the priority of Jesus Christ? Well, one of the things we're doing is discussing how much to say about each person of the Trinity, and of course if you put it in those terms, if you say to somebody, how much should we say about each person of the Trinity, the obvious answer is as much as possible. You know, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, we want to talk about them and hold them up and make them prominent. And so the answer, of course, is as much as possible. But if you're talking in terms of which one you're going to put the emphasis in, you might by that method imply to people that there was some kind of competition in the Trinity, and of course that would be a horrendous idea. Father, Son, and Spirit are not competing with one another. I've been reading something recently on the simplicity of God, and while there was a good deal of philosophical in there that was probably over my head, it brought home the fact that there could not be any competition between Father, Son, and Spirit. But in talking about these, we are touching upon the honor of each of them, and as may already have been seen in the title of the book, The Priority of Jesus Christ, I think that there is a sense in which we must say most about the Lord Jesus. Now this is not an academic question. This is a question about our own personal attitude and intensity, and it's not to satisfy curiosity. We have so many things in theology that we study almost for that reason. One of the breaths of fresh air in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is the emphasis on biblical theology. I was saying to someone this morning, up until about 1950, if you went to a seminary, you learned somebody's system. Now that's not all bad, and God has made the mind in order to make us systemize the things that we hear, and I've written plenty of system, as it were. But nevertheless, it is true that we must try to catch the emphases and say the things that the Bible is saying, and there's been more emphasis upon that in recent years. Nor is this question simply about human relationships and how God may come in on occasion. If that were the case, you've heard the little acrostic J-O-Y, and that is an excellent little acrostic. J stands for Jesus and O stands for ourselves, or, pardon me, others, and Y, see, I'm self-centered, but O stands for others and Y stands for yourself. And so if we were making that kind of measurement, obviously the Lord Jesus Christ would be at the beginning, but that is not what I'm talking about in this message. In what way does Jesus Christ come first in the persons of the Trinity? And again, this is not about changing the order, Father, Son, and Spirit, and that's one of the reasons for this horrendous review I got. I think the author of that review read the title, assumed that I was going to do some rearranging within the Trinity talking about the ontological Trinity for you fellows who use big words, but actually I am only concerned to say how does God make himself known and to make the point that we see him best in Jesus Christ. And I want to emphasize that. We see God best in Jesus Christ. Now where does God reveal himself? Well, you might almost ask the question, where doesn't he reveal himself? Because the answer would probably be the same. I mean, the answer would be 360 degrees apart. God reveals himself in everything. One of the joys of coming to a place like this, and particularly in the springtime, is to see God revealing himself in creation. And it is beautiful. It's sometimes misused. My friend Jim Bow, who is here and one of the members of our church, has a name for where a lot of people go on Sunday morning. He calls it the Green Cathedral. Can you imagine where that is? It is the golf course. And if you ask people about why they go to the golf course, they may, if they're pious like me, they may say, well, I can see the beauty and the majesty of God out there. And indeed that's true, but it does not come to grips with the question, where does God reveal himself best? He revealed himself in Moses. Moses was a powerful revelation of God, even though, of course, a sinful man like the rest of us. He revealed himself in the prophets, and he revealed himself in all of the Old Testament. That's what the Bible is about in a real sense. It is about God, and it's about Christ, and it's about sin, and it's about salvation. But all of it is a revelation of God, and that is true of the Old Testament. God also reveals himself in the lives of believers. And that, of course, is a difficult concept, but the scripture tells us that in some respects we are clothed in Jesus Christ. And it is no doubt true that there is a great change that comes into the life of the believer. In fact, theologians have sometimes discussed whether a greater change takes place when we are converted or when we go into eternity. And for myself, the answer to that question is, a greater change takes place when we are converted because we were dead. We pass from death into life, and we will express that life for the rest of eternity. But you'll notice that in talking about this, mainly, I've left out the New Testament. And in a little bit, I hope to show you why I have done that, because in the New Testament, I'm going to contend that the Lord Jesus Christ is revealing the character of God throughout the New Testament. He's in all of the New Testament, wherever you turn. And somebody says, isn't that true of the Old Testament as well? And of course it is, and that's the reason I had you turn to 2 Corinthians 3, because I want to tell you in what sense that is true of the Old Testament. And again, if you have it open, look with me at verse 15. It starts in the middle of a sentence. And Paul, writing to Timothy, says, How from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which were able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. So the Old Testament was able to make people wise for salvation. That is to say, they could come to know God. And further than that, he says in verse 16, All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. So if the man of God is thoroughly equipped for every good work, and he can be saved through the teachings in the Old Testament, why do we need a New Testament at all? And the answer is the answer that not only New Covenant theology gives, but many others. And that is that you need to look at the Old Testament through the lens of the revelation of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. And as a consequence, the Apostle Paul, who is talking there only about the Old Testament, probably, is nevertheless not saying that when you evangelize, all you have to do is give out Old Testaments, and when you are wanting to train people to carry on as Christians, all you have to do is give them an Old Testament. Not at all. He is saying that it is through the lens of Jesus Christ that those things are true. And the reason we know that, of course, is because Timothy was a preacher of Jesus Christ and had been commissioned to do that. And so Paul is not saying that we can be content with the Old Testament and there is nothing wrong with the Old Testament. There is everything right about it. It is the inspired Word of God. But the way to understand the Old Testament for us in this age is to read it through the lens of the New Testament, which is primarily a revelation of Jesus Christ. To put it another way, the New Testament is intended to reveal Jesus Christ as He was never revealed before. And God intends to reveal Himself, Father, Son, and Spirit, through the Lord Jesus Christ. His person, His character, His will. Through all of those things, Jesus Christ presents to us the Lord Jesus as God. And we find the revelation of God in the Lord Jesus. So, to put it another way, Jesus Christ comes first. If you are asking the question, Where can I see God best? Do you ask that question often? It is suicidal not to. I mean, that is the question. We want to know God. Those who know God are saved. And how can we best know God? We can best know God through Jesus Christ. Your present life depends upon that as a Christian. And your eternal destiny depends upon that. Coming to know the Lord Jesus Christ. As preparing this message, I thought about another related question. Distantly related. How spiritual is the United States of America? And my answer to that is, it is one of the most spiritual nations that has ever existed. It is extremely spiritual. But, when you ask the following question, Where does the typical American look for his spirituality? The answer is, he looks within himself. There are all kinds of gurus going around the nation and the world who are telling you that you have inexhaustible supplies of wonderful things inside of you, and all you need to do is to come to know yourself to be the kind of spiritual person you ought to be. And there is a sense in which that is true, but that sense is destroyed by leaving out the doctrine of the depravity of man. You and I, brothers and sisters, are sinners. And unless you come to grips with that fact, and take hold of it, and meditate upon it, and think of it in all of its abysmal depths, unless you think of our depravity, you may be spiritual. You may be able to give lectures on how to look within and find all of these marvelous things, but you will not understand God. For God reveals himself from outside, through a book that reveals to us, Jesus Christ. And that is one of the great tragedies of the day in which we live. Now I want to spend the rest of the time talking with you about how Scripture, and particularly the New Testament, makes this firstness of Jesus Christ clear. And do you understand, because I must not mislead you, I'm not talking about the relative importance of the persons of the Trinity. I'm talking about where do you have to look in order to learn the most about all the persons of the Trinity. Now, the reason that I'm talking in these terms is because Jesus Christ is the agent of God, Father, Son, and Spirit, to reveal what God is like. You know what agents are. God reveals himself through the Lord Jesus, because Christ is his agent. If you want to think about what agency is, you can think about, for instance, the corporate ladder. Most of us are familiar with that. There is a manager here, another manager over him, and so on and so on, up the corporate ladder. And those managers are the agents of the people who are above them, and particularly they're the agents of the chief executive officer or the president of the corporation. You may never meet in the corporation, probably won't ever meet the chief executive officer, if the corporation is very big. But that chief executive officer is the one through whom the direction of the company comes, and you get it from his agent. Now, when you turn to the New Testament, you find something very similar. God wants to reveal himself. How does he reveal himself? Well, he reveals himself in the character and person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I've not yet spoken exhaustively, because it is also true that God reveals himself through his Spirit, but it is also true that in revealing himself, what the Spirit is doing is letting us know more and more about the character and person of Jesus Christ in order that we will know more and more and more about all three persons of the Trinity. And so he is the agent of Jesus Christ. You deal with agents all the time. If you deal, for instance, in a local bank, you go into a local bank that has just one office. There aren't many of those left anymore. Just for curiosity, by the way, it has nothing to do with what I'm saying, but how many of you have a bank called HKSC Bank somewhere near where you are? Does that ring a bell? Well, I'm surprised it doesn't, because I've seen them over here in Pennsylvania, but that stands for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation, but they never say that. And the reason that I happen to know that is that for many years I was a collector of Hong Kong stamps. I told you this had nothing to do with what I'm preaching about. But if you go into a local bank, let's say there's a door right there at the end of this platform, and this is the area where you actually carry on your business, and what takes place is that you deal with an agent or the owner. He's sitting right behind that door, but you don't talk to him in normal circumstances. You talk to a teller, and that teller is an agent. Or again, if you go to a locally owned hardware store, you don't talk to the owner. You talk, generally speaking, unless it would be very small, to one of his agents, a salesman or somebody who is there. And that is the role which God has placed Jesus Christ in. He is his agent, the agent of all three persons of the Trinity, to reveal what he is like. And so for us, in answering the question, what is God like? The chief answer, not the only answer. As I said, there's revelation in creation, there's revelation in the Old Testament, but the chief answer is, look at Jesus Christ. Now, with that in mind, I want you to turn back to 2 Corinthians chapter 4, if you would please. 2 Corinthians chapter 4. There the Apostle Paul is talking about his ministry. In fact, he's talking about his ministry the whole book of 2 Corinthians. When I think of 2 Corinthians, I think of a book that is somewhat like the hamburgers that you see advertised. You know, the huge bun, a fairly nice piece of meat in the middle, and then more huge bun underneath. Now when you actually buy it in the store, the huge bun predominates and there isn't too much in the middle. But 2 Corinthians chapters 8 and 9, I believe, discuss the subject of the collection for which the Apostle Paul was, or that the Apostle Paul was taking up. The rest of it is pretty much about his ministry, so we're not surprised that he's talking about his ministry here. Now let me read to you again, verses 3 and 4. And even if our gospel is veiled, it's veiled to those who are perishing. The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers. And what is the effect of that? So that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. You see what the Apostle Paul is saying? There are two classes of people in the world. There are those who can see the glory of God, and there are those who cannot see the glory of God and whose faces are veiled and they just can't get the greatness of the glory of God. And you might suppose that if people were talked to enough, they would get something of it. But I've had the sad experience of having a friend who, for many years, came to our church on Sunday morning. On Sunday night, he attended the prayer meeting. On Wednesday night, he prayed in the prayer meeting and he had no more idea of what the gospel was than the man on the moon. Now, please don't take that as a reflection upon the capability of our preaching in the King's Chapel. But we never reached him, and he didn't know that he wasn't being reached. One of the saddest cases I have ever known. But there are those to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ is hidden. And why is this whole thing hidden from them? It is hidden from them, according to the Apostle Paul, because the God of this age has put a veil over their face in their sin and as a consequence, they can't see the glory of God. And if you can't see anything of the glory and the majesty and the greatness of God, how can you possibly be saved? Now, you don't have to know it exhaustively. You never will know it exhaustively. You don't have to know it comprehensively. But if you cannot see the greatness and glory of God, then you're missing something. Now, Paul says that that greatness and glory and majesty of God is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. And there, of course, we have a figure of speech which means in the person of Jesus Christ. If you look at the Lord Jesus and you do it with the eyes that the Holy Spirit has enabled, you will begin to see the greatness of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. And the preachers and the writers of the New Testament were equally servants of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit. But as we see here, they preached Jesus. Let me illustrate that from the New Testament itself. There are 30 or 31 instances of words that mean to herald used in the New Testament with a personal object. That is, the person is named that you're heralding. I'm preaching Christ or I'm heralding this person or that person. There are 30 or 31 of those. And of those, 26 of them are statements in which the Lord Jesus is the one being heralded. I'm preaching, I'm heralding. There are a number of different words, I think six different words that could be translated that way in the New Testament. But of the 30 some uses in which we're talking about a person, I'm heralding this person, I'm preaching that person, God is the object three times. Jesus Christ is the object 26 times. And Moses, I think, is the object once. And that just about exhausts the group. So what were the writers of the New Testament doing? Well, they were writing to us about Jesus Christ. Was that because there was a competition between the Father and Son and they wanted to get in on the right side? No, of course not. They were doing that because they recognized the priority of Jesus Christ as the agent for our understanding what God is like. Let's look at verse 6 of 2 Corinthians 4 for a moment. The Apostle Paul goes on to explain why he talks about the Lord Jesus Christ. And he says, For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Now you see, he couldn't put it more plainer there. It's an illustration the Apostle Paul is using. He's talking about creation, the first creation, not the new creation. But the first creation, he says, you remember how God did that? God did it by saying, Let there be light. And what happened when God said, Let there be light? Well, Paul tells us so we don't have to conjecture. God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And now Paul says, The light of the knowledge of the glory of God is seen in the face, that is, in the person of Jesus Christ. So you'll understand how tremendously important it is for us to major on Jesus Christ, not in our theological thoughts. There we will want to wander to Father, Son, and Spirit and a hundred other things, but to major upon Jesus Christ when we want to see men and women come to the Lord Jesus and to be saved. Because it can't happen without the revelation of what God is like. And that revelation is given in the face, the person of Jesus Christ. It's wonderfully illustrated in various places in the Bible, but one of the places I like is Matthew Chapter 8. We won't turn there, you know the story. The centurion's servant was dying. The centurion, of course, was a Roman man, and as a consequence he was not Jewish. He may have been a God-fearer, that's certainly possible. A God-fearer, you remember, was a person who attended the synagogue and took in a good deal of knowledge about God, and some came to love God and to serve him, but they didn't go through the rituals that would make a man a Jew. At least that's the general idea of God-fearers that's accepted today. But it is perfectly clear that when he came to Jesus and said, My servant is ill, sick, and afflicted, and on the verge of dying, when he came to Jesus, it was the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that he saw. And the reason we know that is because of the way he talked about the Lord Jesus. Remember, he gave an illustration as to what Jesus was like. He said, All you have to do is speak the word. Then he said, I'm a man under authority. I know what those who are under authority do. I say to this man, Go, and he goes. Of course, in the Roman army, I expect that that was true 100 times out of 100. And he said, If I say to this man, Come, he comes. And if I say to this man, Do this, and he does it. And then he says, That's just like you. So you don't have to come to my house to heal my son. It can be done here. Now, Jesus goes on to discuss the extent of this man's faith. He discusses it not with a man, I take it, but with the people around who listened. And he said to them, In all of Israel, I've never found faith. Meaning, in this case, faith in God. I've never found faith like the faith in this man. And then he took that incident and expanded it and brought an eschatological or closing in time truth out of it. And he said, There will be many who have been invited to this great feast that will be the end of time. And there will be many from the Gentiles and foreign lands who will come and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the sons of the kingdom. That is to say, those who were unbelieving Israelites would be cast out where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And you see what has happened here is that the man has seen Jesus Christ. And he's listened to him. And as a consequence, if he already had faith in Yahweh, that faith was greatly increased so that Jesus said, That's the most faith I've ever seen in anybody. In John chapter 14, you remember that Philip came to the Lord Jesus and said, Lord, show us the Father and we'll be satisfied. Or it suffices us, as the King James Version says. I use the NIV, I have nothing against the King James, but it is less and less modern English. And so I have a hard time saying suffice us. All of you who use the King James all the time, it just rolls off your tongue beautifully. But I had to work on that a little bit. But Philip said to the Lord Jesus, Just show us the Father and it will be enough for us. Now, you know, that's one of the most remarkable statements in itself. What Jesus is going to say is more remarkable than that. But that's one of the most remarkable statements in itself in the New Testament. Because would you come up to me and say, Tom, just show me the Father? Would you come up to me and say, Tom, show me the backside of the moon? Well, all of us know that I couldn't do that. It would be absolutely helpless to do anything like that. But these men who had walked with the Lord Jesus Christ for these several years had the audacity and the faith and whatever else it took to turn to the Lord Jesus and say, Just show us the Father and we'll be satisfied. And there is not another human being in all the universe to whom they could have said that in that day with anything like that kind of power. And so the Lord Jesus Christ said, Philip, have I been with you so long that you don't know me? In other words, he was saying, when you see me, you see the Father. When you talk to me, you talk to the Father. Now, it doesn't mean to mix up the person of the Trinity, but to say that the thing that we need to know about God is his person and his character and his goals and aims and intentions as far as he has revealed them. And Jesus was saying that if Philip was paying close attention, he would have found all of that in Jesus Christ. Think of the audacity of saying that. Somebody read to me something that's in the book, N.T. Wright's book, Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright is quoting this from Jacob Noysner, who is a Jewish man. And I don't know, I didn't read it in context, someone else read it to me, but I found N.T. Wright, though I do not agree with him on some things, a tremendous promoter of thought. Charles Spurgeon said about F.W. Robertson, that Robertson's doctrinal vagaries are well-known, but he's a great thinker himself and a great promoter of thought in others, and certainly that is true of N.T. Wright. You can hardly read him without your mind just going off here. But anyway, he was quoting Jacob Noysner. And Jacob Noysner, who is a man who has evidently been engaged in some of these talks between Jews and Christians, put his finger on the truth, though he hardly recognized it, I take it, when he made a statement to the effect, that it is not the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ that is offensive to us Jews or shouldn't be. It's his person. He makes the most fantastic claims for himself. And I think that's exactly right. You come to the Lord Jesus Christ, or you don't come to the Lord Jesus Christ, but if you come, it is because he has made some claim for himself, which subsequently he would prove in your life to be true, but just then you took it by faith, as God gave you faith. It's not the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ that is so terribly remarkable. Much of it is said in the Old Testament. But it is the person of Jesus Christ that stands out in the Scriptures. And so Jesus says to Philip, Haven't you known me, Philip? And that was his answer to the plea, Show us the Father. There is, my friends, no competition between Father, Son, and Spirit. But the Son, Jesus Christ, displays their common character. And God said, Hear him. Let me set the scene for that. I'm done, really. I've said almost all that I want to say. But you remember in the Mount of Transfiguration, the Lord Jesus took Peter, James, and John up into the top of the mountain. And Peter, who didn't know what to say, always had something to say. And he wanted to parcel out the honor of the occasion to the three that were there, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. And he said, Let me make three tabernacles, one for you and one for Elijah. And suddenly he was overshadowed by a cloud. And out of the cloud came the word, This is my beloved Son. Hear him. And you know the most remarkable thing about that statement? Jesus didn't say anything after that. Certainly nothing of consequence that we have recorded for us. Because the statement was not about what they needed to do next. The statement was about how they must live and what they must do forever. If you're here today and you are a believer in Jesus Christ, I would urge you to think about the priority of Jesus Christ, not in every respect, by any means, but as the agent for the revelation of God. In the whole New Testament, I didn't get a chance to get into this, but the whole New Testament is the voice of the Lord Jesus through his agents to bring home to us what God is like. If you're a believer, read it, study it, meditate on it, pray over it. And if you're not a believer, I would say to you today that you may want to be a believer, you may think you want to be a believer, but eternal life is wrapped up in knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ as his chief revelation. And so I would suggest to you, as I heard John MacArthur suggested to a psychiatrist who wanted to learn about Jesus, he said, go home, get out the Gospel of John and read it over and over and over and over again until you know who Jesus Christ was. And I'm glad to report that man was converted. And so John MacArthur started to take him into the book of Romans. He said, I've read that too. And Christ took hold of him. God took hold of him. And we will pray that God will take hold of you if you will earnestly seek to learn about Christ. Let's pray together right now. We thank you, our Father, that you've sent your Son to be the Savior of the world. And we were part of that world. And you saved us. And in saving us, you taught us about yourself. For all of eternity, we will enjoy that knowledge. But right now at least, Father, we get that knowledge by looking at the Lord Jesus, by the work of the Spirit of God giving us eyes. Do that for any who may be here without Christ today. And for those of us who know and love and serve him, give us a better look. Take the remaining cataracts away. We ask in his name. Amen. Amen.