Good morning and welcome to our final Anchored in the Word morning reflection for the week. Hopefully you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day yesterday that if you got together with family and friends, it was just an enjoyable time and that you took time to focus on the Lord and thank him for his many blessings because he has been so very good to us. This week, we've been working our way through Luke chapter 17, and we've been talking about eschatology. We've been talking about the fact that there are things that God reveals, but he doesn't give us all the information. talked about learning from history, there's a lot that we have hopefully been introduced to, digested, and tried to apply in our lives. And so what I'd like to do is I'd like us to read the text one more time and then focus in on a few final thoughts to take into the weekend. So, Luke chapter 17, and we'll begin reading in verse 20. And when he was demanded of the Pharisees when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, Lo here, or lo there. For behold, the kingdom of God is within you. And he said unto the disciples, The days will come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall not see it. And they shall say to you, See here, or see there. Go not after them, nor follow them. For as the lightning that lightneth out of the one part under heaven shineth unto the other part under heaven, so shall also the Son of Man be in his day. But first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation. And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it also be in the days of the Son of Man. Now as we've been digging into this passage, there are two final things I would like to encourage you to do. The first thing is to ask yourself some important questions that are directly connected to the text and to the truths that we've analyzed this week. The first question, what are the questions that you're asking? What I mean by that is when you're navigating life, you're going through the circumstances of life, what are the questions that are popping into your head? I want to go a little bit deeper and ask, what are those questions saying about the assumptions that you have? assumptions you have about God, the assumptions you have about yourself, the assumptions you have about other people, the assumptions you have about the nature of the world that we live in. The questions we are asking and the assumptions that are built into those questions say something about the way we're thinking. Are we willing to accept both what God has revealed to us and also what he has left unstated? Are we willing to accept that there are some questions God doesn't address? Some questions he's not going to answer as fully as we'd want him to. Some connections he's not going to make for us. Are we willing to accept the sufficiency of scripture? Are we missing some of the most obvious things that God has given us because we are distracted by the unnecessary things? Are we so consumed with those things that are not revealed and unstated that we are missing out the things that are? We have a lot in God's Word for us that we know is easy to understand. It is very simple. It is very direct. It's very practical. Are we willing to follow through on those things? Are we learning from the history of other people? Are we heeding God's warnings? Are we learning from other people's failures so that we do not repeat them ourselves? Are we living with an anticipation of the imminent return of Christ? Those are the questions that I want us to ask ourselves as we reflect on the text that we've been dealing with this week. The second thing I want to encourage you to do is I want to encourage you to live a purposeful focus on what you have been given. Purpose to focus in on the things that are unquestionably clear in the Word of God. For instance, we know that we need to read the Bible. We know that His Word is a lamp unto our feet. and a light into our path. So, let's get into the Scriptures every day. Let's spend quality, focused time in God's Word. When we get into the Scriptures, we've got to be more than just readers of the Word, or hearers of the Word. We need to be doers of the Word. We need to humbly submit to what it's saying and allow the Scripture to shape how we think about life. We need to digest what the Scriptures say. We need to meditate on them. mull over these truths, allow these truths to really settle into our souls and to nourish our hearts. We need to be careful that we don't get preoccupied with the hypotheticals of life. It might be entertaining to discuss hypotheticals, to argue about hypotheticals, to wonder about those hypotheticals, but the fact is that's a preoccupation that can draw our attention away from what we need to focus on and what we need to do. We need to do right in the areas that are so clear. How we raise our children, how we relate to our spouse, that the supremacy of the local church in our lives, how we do our work as unto the Lord and not unto men, how we are to function as citizens in the time that we're living in today. We need to do what we know is unquestionably clear. We need to live practically with a confident anticipation that in fact the Lord Jesus is coming soon. We need to live with a confident anticipation of the imminency of his return. And lastly, we need to rejoice in his mercy, that he will absolutely deliver us from the wrath to come. As we try to strive to be faithful, waiting for the time that we will go to meet the Lord, we need to recognize with great comfort that we will not face the wrath of that time that's talked about in the scriptures, the terrible, dreadful day of the Lord, the time where God is preparing to begin his kingdom work. All right, well, those are the things that we're gonna think about this week. I hope that you have a wonderful weekend. I hope that you stay safe, stay warm, and Lord willing, we will see many of you on Sunday, and if not Sunday, hopefully you'll join us next week as we get into our Anchored in the Word studies. If this has been an encouragement to you, take a moment to share that. If you think that some of these lessons will be an encouragement to other people, share those things and look forward to hearing your feedback. Have a blessed day. Bye now.