Preservation in dark days

Now, if you have your Bible, we're going to read in the New Testament in the little book of Jude, Jude. It was in my daily reading in the last maybe two weeks ago, and I've enjoyed some of these verses in the past, and I think I've even attempted to speak on some of the verses in Jude, but having just read it again in my daily reading, I would like to share some thoughts with you. Jude and verse 1. Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ and called, mercy unto you and peace and love be multiplied.

Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. Now skip down to verse 20.

But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. Specifically, we're going to be looking at those two verses. Verse 22, and if some have compassion making a difference and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garments spotted by the flesh.

Verse 24, now unto him that is able to keep you from falling or stumbling and to present you faultless or blameless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise, I think wise is not found in most translations, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. So again, verse 20, but ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keeping yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

I want to leave you this afternoon with four activities for self-preservation in dark days. How do we remain optimistic and busy for God? Do you ever look around you and look at society and just look at the state of things and say like, how do we ever survive this environment? Well, how do we? That's really what Jude was writing about. How do we? Look how dark that section that we skipped in that little epistle.

It is so dark. How does an individual believer, let alone a collective company of believers, but how do you, an individual believer, survive? And not only survive. Like, I hope that none of us are content with survival.

It's thrival. Thrival. How do we? What about thrival in our Christian experience? Not surviving.

You're at the conference and wouldn't it be great to be able to sit in your car and grab your steering wheel and drive away from this auditorium and say, yes, with God's help we can thrive in this environment. You know, things aren't going down the tubes. It's depressing when you hear people behind a pulpit saying how the wonderful days of yesteryear, that's when it was all happening for God, and that's when there were faithful Christians, and that's when the truth was preached, and that, and well, it's sort of demoralizing for those of us who are living in 2018.

Isn't it wonderful that we're living in 2018? Just look at the statistics. I think I may have mentioned it last night in prayer sometime, but so we're in 2018. You say, oh, but the Bible, not, not in the schools anymore.

Maybe not in the schools, but there are more Bibles in more languages, in more places in the world than at any other time in the history of the human family. So are things really coming to a grinding halt when the Word of God is proliferated and is available in over 2,000 languages, and it's going into places like Iran and Iraq. If you can't get it in there with hard copies, it's going in digitally, and when you read the number of Bibles downloaded in those countries, it is staggering.

Did you know that the Little Assembly in Nazareth, they are responsible for distributing Bible material and Emmaus material in Arabic. They cannot keep up with the demand from the surrounding countries like Jordan and Iraq and Egypt. They can't keep up with the demand for Bible-based material.

So we're living in a great day, 2018, but there are things that trouble us and, and we worry about it, but look at what the Lord Jesus said in Matthew 16. Globally, universally, here's the reality. Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell, the gates of Hades, will not prevail against it.

All the powers of darkness will not conquer it, will not overpower it. God is marching forward. So we have every reason to be optimistic about our little role in 2018, in our little corner of the world.

I remember exchanging emails with a lady who's was into the occult, and and I had a lot of terrible emails from her, and I'd share the gospel with her. I think I was making some progress, and I got an email from her, and she said, if you continue to email me, I would suggest, it was very coldly worded, I, I would suggest that you take all the necessary precautions with your God to protect your home and your family. Because my master is not happy with the contact that we're having, and I got goose bumps.

Oh, I thought he's gonna get the upper hand, and I was driving to prayer meeting that night, and I got this little verse. I don't know whether you've ever heard it or not. It's in the Bible.

It's 1st John 4 and 4. Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. I said yes, the Lord is on our side. We don't need to cower in fear.

But let me just review what you already know about the environment that we're living in. The Judeo-Christian values that much of our Western society is built on seems to be under attack. Now just to clarify that, I was listening to ministry in Sarnia a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about Judeo-Christian values, and it almost seemed like the whole world is based on Judeo-Christian values and the Western world.

So I was sitting at my computer today and yesterday. That was no, Thursday morning, and I thought really, like the way we talk about the Western world and Western society, the foundations are being rocked. It sounds like it's a whole world.

So I look, what are the traditional countries involved and known as a Western world, Western society, and it goes way, way, way, way back, like hundreds of years when that term came up. But we know Western society, so I looked, and I found a few sites, and I listed, I dumped all the population, the 2016 population of what we know as the Western world. And then I was super generous.

In addition to all the typical countries in Europe and Canada and the United States that are included in the Western society, I think we almost interpret our Bible sometimes from a Western world point of view. When you look at the panoramic view of the churches and revelations, it seems to be all about the Western view of our prophecy and everything. So I looked, I put all of those, the standard countries in and the 2016 populations, and I said, just to be safe, I'm going to dump all of South America's population in the entire continent of South America, and then the entire country of Africa, not traditionally known as the Western society, Western world, and it still was less than 35% of the world's population.

Less than 35%, including the continent of Africa, South America, North America, and most of Europe and the UK. We talk as if it envelops the whole globe if we're the only people that matter. But there's a tremendous population of the world that's not built on Judeo-Christian values.

But for us, this is our reality. Judeo-Christian values. And so what are we experiencing? One, the secularization of society.

And so, yes, the use of Bibles and the word God and the mention of Jesus Christ, those things are being removed from our our communities in public events. The secularization of society. And God is out on the outside.

Two, the multiplication of local belief systems. It used to be that we could come in and our little safe zone, and we're all from the UK or from Italy or the Ukraine. And we sort of knew what they believed there.

We all sort of had something in common. And it was the distant lands of Asia. Well, we couldn't relate to them at all.

But you know the demographics now have that has all changed and their local belief systems are now in our communities. Thank God for that. What a tremendous gospel opportunity.

You don't have to move to Iran to reach out to the Muslims with Jesus Christ. We have them right in our community. Praise the Lord.

The Lord is bringing the countries of the world right to our communities. Don't block it. Embrace it as an opportunity for the gospel.

That should be the Christian attitude. The multiplication of belief systems in our communities locally. What an opportunity.

Three, the infiltration and the inculcation of hedonistic values. It seeps right into us. What's my Christian life about? Oh, it's oh, it's like I want a job that I love.

I want a salary that I can thrive on and I want to pick up seashells in New Zealand. And I would love to get to Australia and Hawaii when the when the volcanoes settle down and pick up seashells. It's all about my life of leisure and pleasure.

Oh, yeah, I'll put a little bit of effort into the assembly when I'm around home, but it's see those hedonistic values. That's the world and it seeps into Peter Ramsey, too. Well, I was almost feeling guilty.

We're down to a conference in Florida last January and Joy and I, after the conference, we were walking along the seashore and she doesn't get shells, but she likes sea glass. And I say, oh, the hedonistic values. No, no, that vacation is fine.

If we're recharged in a vacation and we can go back to serve the Lord with greater vim and vigor, that's wonderful. But we need to be careful that those hedonistic values of pleasure can even come right into the local assembly. I'm not it's not pleasing me.

I don't feel good. I'm not getting goose bumps. So I'm going to go to a place where there are goose bumps given.

Hedonistic values where it's all about how I feel and then for the proliferation of platforms to broadcast beliefs. So we we don't just have a microphone now, we have a lot of platforms, we have YouTube, we we can listen to all kinds of podcasts from every pulpit in in America, from every preacher in America. Some of them good, maybe some of them otherwise.

But we are now living in an age where it's not CHM only. Some of you don't even know who CHM is? JND? I'm not going to ask for a show of hands who recognizes JND, but there are probably some here in doubt. We grew up CHM, you need to get CHM books.

Someone said I'd like to condense CHM because he's such a wordy writer. I'd like to condense it. Someone said don't touch CHM's writings, leave them just in their purity, pristine glory.

But we're living in an age and our children are growing up and people under 40 in the assemblies, they're getting most of their teaching from many different pulpits, not just from the assembly pulpit. Every day they're listening on the way to work to podcasts from other churches, other denominations. That's the reality of our age and the contamination of Christian evangelical witness.

There have been a lot of scandals under the big umbrella, evangelical umbrella. Scandals, televangelists, and you're almost embarrassed to tell someone I'm a Christian because they've seen it broadcast in the news. The man just recently, last week, he was all over the news, the preacher in your country who wants his third jet because the Lord really needs him to get around the world.

And if Apostle Paul was alive, he'd have three jets too. And so poor, send in the money. No gift under a million dollars is too small, too little, like send it in.

And people are seeing that every day. And then they see the politics and evangelists, evangelicals all connected and their people are actually turned off from what a real genuine Christian is. Those are the realities of our day, the contamination of Christian evangelical witness.

So yeah, we, there are a lot of things happening in 2018, the secularization of society, the multiplication of local belief systems, the infiltration of hedonistic, self-pleasuring values, the multiplication of platforms to broadcast beliefs and the contamination of Christian witness. Say it's pretty dark, Peter. It is, isn't it? It was dark when Jude wrote this epistle, really dark.

Jude, or maybe Judas, was probably approaching his senior years. Could have been AD 68, AD 69, or 70. He looked around and with the exception maybe of John, who lived maybe for another 25 or 30 years or so, his contemporaries had all been martyred.

Dark for Jude, and the forces of opposition were growing stronger. There was intense political pressure from Rome and false teachers, maybe Gnostic-like apostates, and they were wreaking havoc with their, well, it says, edamnable heresies as they infiltrated various places. And who was Jude? He wasn't always a believer.

Maybe like his brother James. He had a time in his life when he turned on Christ, grew up in the same home, probably, and he rejected Christ as the Messiah. You can read that account of the family's rejection in John chapter 7. But it seemed like sometime after the resurrection, Jude was regenerated.

By the time you get to 1 Corinthians 9 and verse 5, I think it is, Mr. McShane says it's possible his wife even traveled with him. So he's married now, and his wife may even traveled with him in his gospel efforts. But the days were dark, that's a point, and Christianity was deemed to be very vulnerable, and Jude is writing to expose not only the error, but the end of those who were swallowed up by the error.

Not just the ones who are teaching it, but the ones who were affected by the error. And he's calling the Christians to alertness and a solid, solid defense of the vital, the fundamental Christian truths and doctrines. Now when he originally sat down, he was going to write them about the exalted theme of the common salvation.

All that is ours in our risen Christ and ascended Christ. But the false teaching was accelerating and seemed to be gaining momentum. So he shifts his focus to urge them to what? Contend for the faith, the body of truth, the doctrines that had once for all been delivered to them.

Never to be changed, never to be tampered with, never to be added to. And so the middle section of this little letter that Jude writes, it's dealing with the destructive ways of the apostates and the divisions they cause. Verse 19, it seems like he's saying these cause divisions, worldly people devoid of the Spirit.

Just as an aside, am I causing division among my friends or within the assembly? Am I causing any division? Jude is going to write them of a building up, building up. What am I, a wrecker or a builder? Had a friend in Newfoundland and a young friend and he got really into demolition derby. Got old cars and he would go to demolition derby every weekend, just smashing the cars, smashing them up.

Well, sometimes we can be better. Don't ever ask me to help build your new patio or your new deck. I couldn't build anything, but I did help a friend destroy a burn, take the burn down and tear it apart.

And it was sort of fun. You could just yank off the boards. They weren't being preserved for anything and just were just pulling it down.

Wasn't, you didn't have to be very skillful, but you do have to have some expertise if you're going to build up. And Jude is writing about building up. Ye beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

So let's just look at that. You're wondering how you can survive 2018. Now some of you have already gone to sleep because you say that we can't survive, so you've you've tuned out.

No, it's a good meal and it's okay. You have a little eye out of the nap out in the car. But building, here are things that we can do.

2018, building, praying, keep yourselves and looking for mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life, building. It's a spiritual term that's frequently used in the Bible here. The building is to build up ourselves and the foundation is our most holy faith.

Paul spoke of the foundation being Christ, 1 Corinthians 3 verse 11. He talks about it and in Colossians 2, he talks about it rooted and built up in him, established in the faith. And Peter wrote about the building process.

He says, and besides this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness. Talking about a building process. Faith is the foundation.

Love is a capstone. And the, Paul says, the greatest of all the the graces is love. Building.

A dear child of God, you'll never be able to stand at the judgment seat of Christ and say, Lord, I would have been a much better believer if it hadn't been for the assembly that I was in. You know, I really wanted to be a thriving Christian. I went to that Garneville conference and they talked about thrival.

I wondered if it was even a word. But Lord, you know what our assembly was like. And, like we got such little teaching and it was not only skimpy, but it was dubious.

Like, Lord, so I'm up here now and you know what? Jude says we are personally responsible for building up ourselves. I can't point the fingers. They will have to answer for how well they taught the scriptures.

But personally, I am responsible for building up myself. We are responsible for our self-development, for our growth in Christian character. The present participle for building indicates it's a lifelong task.

Now, I'm looking at some people. Is there anybody here? You can just, you're not supposed to put your hand up really high, but is there anybody here over 80? 80 and over. Just go like this.

Oh, you're shy. Some of you must be over 80. Well, that's, that's, you know what? You can't relax.

It's a lifelong, the, the, the structure of that sentence is it's you have to keep building right until you're dying breath, building up yourselves. You can't reach up and say, finally, I've got the old age pensions. Talking to somebody today and they, they're getting some pension now from Canada, too, and they've lived here most of their life.

And whoa, it's wonderful. But you can't, I'll tell, say it to that Christian. I won't tell you whether it's a male or a female, but they can't sit on a plateau and say, well, I can relax.

I've reached this stage in life and I can just slack off on the building process. No, it, the thought is a lifelong task. Building takes initiative, motivation, discipline, and humility.

The blueprint for our building project. Well, in Acts 20, when Paul was talking to the elders, he then, he commended them to grace, he said, and the word of his grace, which is able to build up, the word, same word, build up, same word, build up the word of his grace. Acts 20 and 32.

The importance of the word of God in our lives. One has said that constant meditation on the word of God and a disciplined application of it to our behavior will prove its effectiveness to build up. Others will probably notice it before we notice it ourselves.

That's what the word of God does. If we're saturating ourselves with the word of God, it is building. Romans 10 verse 17.

We talk about it in the gospel. Faith comes by hearing the word. Ephesians 5 verse 26.

Paul speaks of the washing of the word, of the water by the word. So the word is very, very critical. The Lord Jesus said in John 17, when he was speaking to his father in heaven, he said, sanctify them through thy truth.

And then what did he say? Thy word is truth. And James talks about it. He said, whoever looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.

The word of God is absolutely essential in my life. If I'm going to be built up in these dark, difficult, trying days, the word of God is essential to building up ourselves. Peter writes about it, the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby.

And John writes about the word. Whoever keeps his word in him truly has seen the, I think the thought is the mature love of God. So let me ask you before I move on to the next point.

How are you doing reading your Bible? Now I have my Bible on my device. I have a lot of different devices. And I enjoy reading.

Sometimes the font is easier to read on my device. But you know, there's something that our devices can't keep. Do you ever enjoy a verse in a very difficult point in your life? And when you open your Bible, you say, whoa, there's a couple of stains in that page.

Oh, yeah, I remember. I sort of lost it when I was reading those verses. You see, when a teardrop falls from our eyes on our devices, we just wipe them off now.

How is, how are you doing building yourself up in the word? Building yourself up. Why should you read? To develop your relationship with God, an absolute must. To deepen your devotion to Christ, you can't do it without the word of God.

To determine God's will in your life, you must be reading the word of God. To defend yourself from attacks in 2018, you must be enjoying and immersing yourself in the word of God. To devote yourself to serving others and strengthening others.

It's one thing to say, how are you doing today? Hang in there, bud. But if that's as much as we can offer a Christian in trouble, isn't it nice and the conversation opens up into the scriptures? And then we can actually nourish them and feed someone that's going through a difficult time. So if I'm going to devote myself to serving and strengthening others, I have to be building myself up in the word of God.

And if I'm going to declare the word of God with power, talking to a friend at a cafeteria, school or college, I need to have the word of God right there on my tip of my tongue. How are you doing reading your Bible? Well, you say, I read it a couple of times this week. Really? A couple of times? That's all, is that all you ate as well? You just had a couple of pieces of toast this week and that's about it? You couldn't survive physically just a couple of times a week.

You can't survive. I cannot survive spiritually. I am deceiving myself.

If I think that I'm getting along pretty normal Christian living and if I'm only opening my Bible two or three times a week, my Bible is an absolute must. Now, there are times when we might be deprived of our Bibles. The Garneville Gospel Hall may become a warehouse down the road and you might be in captivity and you may not be allowed to have your Bible.

Those are different circumstances, but today we do have our Bibles. And if we're not into our Bibles every day, now, I know conference is a busy weekend, so we'll make an exception for that. But generally speaking, if I'm not into my Bible every day, I am not doing well as a Christian.

Building up yourselves. Then it says praying. Praying.

Six distinct words used for prayer, at least six in the New Testament. This one here probably is the most common, referring to our regular ongoing communion with the Lord as we make a request to him. Praying.

How is your prayer life? You're praying, actual communications, or just going over little ditties. I've had my share of experiences of saying my little ditties and consoling myself and thinking, well, you said your prayers today, Peter. How is your prayer life? I probably told it here before, but there was a Canadian soldier just outside Kabul in Afghanistan, young Baptist man, and he emailed me and he said, Peter, I pray for you every Wednesday.

He was a leader of a platoon in a tent, never knowing when there was going to be a bomb go off. And I thought, I was sort of insulted at first. I thought the likes of him praying for me once a week.

Like Wednesday? I mean, why is if he's a good friend, why isn't he doing every day? And then I thought, thank the Lord that he's even praying for me on Wednesday. And then I thought, here is a young Christian man who takes his prayer life seriously, you know, as well as I do, you can't pray for all the unsaved people, you know, and all the people who are away from the Lord and all your family and all your own life and everything else and all the assembly issues. If you spent, you've covered those bases every day before you went to work, you would soon get fired for showing up late.

So he said, I'm going to pray methodically, and I'm going to pray for the likes of Peter on Wednesday. And I was humbled to think that someone in harm's way in Afghanistan was praying for me and PEI. Do you take your prayer life seriously? Mr. Goff mentioned about prayers and praying real prayers.

We'll be saved from multiplying words in his presence, verbose, wordy, and from vain repetition if we get real with our God and pray real prayers. Just as an aside, this just was brought to my attention in the last year, and I thought, I wonder how many other people are stumbling because of this. So if this is not a part of the text, I'm going off script now.

And they said I can edit it later if we want to delete it. But you know, a couple of young brothers came up to me and they said, you know the big thing that everybody makes about the theme at the breaking of bread, the theme, the theme, the theme? He said, so often I get to the breaking of bread and that theme idea has been drilled into me and I am enjoying a completely different thought and I've been appreciating it all week and I've shed tears about it and I get there and I say, oh, but it's not a, doesn't fit the theme this morning. And so I, here's what I say about themes.

Human beings are able to create themes with very little ingenuity. Somebody gives out a song about the Lamb of God, the next person can get up and pray about the Lamb of God and another brother can find a hymn that fits the Lamb of God. It can, the theme can be contrived.

But dear brother, if you've been enjoying something in the depths of your soul all week about the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, you just get up at appropriate time and thank the Lord Jesus Christ and don't get so hung up about this theme idea. It's wonderful when the Spirit of God produces the theme, but I know that Peter Ramsey's heart is cagey and conniving enough that I can get up at a conference and I can pray in accordance with the theme of the meeting, which may not have been what I was enjoying on Saturday, praying in the Holy Spirit. And then it says keeping, keeping, two sides of the coin, verse one, we are kept for Jesus Christ, to whom are called beloved God, the Father, and kept.

That's a thought there, kept for or by Jesus Christ. That's God's side, but we're kept, that's one side of the coin. But what is our responsibility? It's right here in this verse.

Remember, we're not, when we get to the judgment seat of Christ, we have full responsibility for our own personal development, no matter what the assembly was like. It may have been in tatters, torn and tattered, may have been, may have been shattered by division. But that will be no excuse for Peter Ramsey.

I am responsible for building up myself and for praying in the Holy Spirit and then keeping, keeping, keep ourselves in the conscious enjoyment of God's love. So, dear child of God, guard the sanctuary of your heart, the inner haven of your affections and desires, the fountain from which flows our attitudes. We are responsible for our own hearts.

Keep yourselves in the love of God, building up yourselves, praying in the Holy Spirit. And now the main clause, it's not keep on loving God. It's not our love for Him.

The thought is His love for us. Keep on enjoying it. Similar to John chapter 15, verse 9, as the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you.

Continue ye in my love. Keep ourselves in the sphere within which the love of God is able to bless us. See, the prodigal's father in Luke 15, he never stopped loving the son.

The love was constant on the father's side, but what happened? He made choices that moved him out of the sphere of his father's love. And we can do that. Maybe there's a chill in your life right now, and you don't, you're not appreciating the sunbeams or the radiance of his love.

Go back. Were there some little choices that we made that moved us into the the cold shadows? We are to keep ourselves, keep ourselves in the love of God. I've told this story about my mother.

We used to go to the beach quite a bit, and she would put the towel out long before people were concerned about skin cancer, melanoma, and all those kind of things, and sunscreen. What in the world is that greasy stuff you're putting over you? And she would get the towel positioned. Just, I'd see her yet, flapping the old towel, getting the sand off it, get it all positioned.

Oh, the sun is right there now. And she would, she would be back there bathing, getting every ray of sunshine she could get. She'd fall asleep.

She'd wake up. Where's the sun now? She'd get up and she'd shake the towel and she'd position herself. Do you know what she was doing? She was keeping herself in the place where she could enjoy the sunbeams.

And as a child of God, we need to keep correcting ourselves, getting back where we can soak up the sunbeams of his love and appreciate it. Keep adjusting, and by moving out of the sphere where I'm appreciating his love, retrace our steps, remove our hindrances, restore communion, renew a right spirit. And on it goes.

Keep yourselves in the love of God. Have you been making some choices lately? And a little chill has come into your Christian experience. Shake the towel off, and reposition yourself, and enjoy once again.

Keep yourselves in the love of God. And the final one is, looking, looking, or the thought is eagerly waiting with anticipation. This is a final participle that modifies the main clause, keeping yourselves in the love of God.

Looking, looking. Titus 2 is very similar. Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

We know we have eternal life. We are experiencing its immediate benefits, but we do know that there is more to come, more to come, much, much more. So let's conclude and ask ourselves, how are we doing in the personal development project? Building up and praying, and keeping ourselves in the love of God, and looking.

And verse 24 says, beautiful doxology, benediction, says, now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, from stumbling, to present you faultless, blameless, before the presence of his glory, with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory, and majesty, dominion, and power, both now and ever, or before all time, and now, and forevermore. Amen. May the Lord encourage us to take our Christian life seriously.

And yes, maybe tomorrow the Lord spares me, I'll speak a little bit about when difficulties come into an assembly, but right now we know this. There can be choppy waters, not just out there in the world, but right in our midst. But personally, we are responsible for our own growth and development.

And when we get to the judgment seat of Christ, we are going to see the one who loved us and gave himself for us. How did you do, Peter, in building up yourself in the word of God? How did you do in the prayer department? How did you do about keeping yourselves in the love of God? And as far as looking for my return and my future, how did you do, Peter? Were you distracted? Were you looking horizontally and not spending enough time vertically? Were you looking, looking, looking? May the Lord encourage our hearts this afternoon at the Garnabilla Conference to take personal responsibility for our preservation in what is a very dark day.