Hello, children. Welcome to Spring Branch Academy, where we are instilling wisdom and inspiring worship by God's grace in every student to the glory of God. That's why we start with theology. We are learning about God's attributes, about God's greatness, about who he is. And you need to know this about God. Because he is holy, dwells outside of time, and dwells in time, there is a strangeness to God's ways, a both-and experience. We see this in the Incarnation. Jesus is both God and man. It's a mystery that we cannot explain, and so we believe both sides. It's not contrary to reason, it's above reason. And so we call this concurrence. Say that word, concurrence. Say it again, concurrence. Both the divine and the human concur in three things, the incarnation, inspiration of the Bible, and salvation of man. We say then about theology that much of theology is both and, not either or. Much of theology is both and, not either or. Many heresies then are an inference from a half-truth, where half of the truth is affirmed and then people draw an inference or a conclusion from it. And that would often be in error. And so heresies are often an inference from a half-truth. For example, Jesus is a man. He has to learn. Well, if he has to learn, then he doesn't know certain things. He cannot be God. Well, no, through his divine nature, he knows all things. Through his human nature, he suffers ignorance. I can't explain how the Almighty God, the Person of the Sun, can do both at the same time, but it's not a contradiction. because I'm not speaking about one nature. He has two natures united in one person. And so there is great mystery of the divine and the human when they come together under the sovereignty of God. And when push comes to shove, children, Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible is the Word of God, and salvation is of the Lord. And we give God all the credit, even though there is a truly human and a truly divine aspect of both and. In language, we're moving from the nouns to the verbs. A noun is a person, place, or thing. And a pronoun can substitute for a noun, but a verb is an action or a state of being. An action or a state of being. Action verbs come in two types. They can either have an object or not. In other words, you either do to something, you hit a ball, you eat noodles, you greet your mom, Those verbs have an object. You do something to someone. Some verbs don't. Some verbs just are lacking an object. And so an object, a verb like, oh, she bakes versus she bakes cookies. One is used without an object, one has an object. If it's used without an object, it's intransitive. If it's used with an object, it's transitive. Say those words. If it's used without an object, it's intransitive. If it's used with an object, it's transitive. So, I hope you bake some cookies and think that was a transitive activity. In scripture, the name of God is I Am, and the full name is I Am Who I Am, which speaks of God's freedom to be what he wants to be. Now that in itself might seem scary, but from the Trinity we know that God is essentially, intrinsically good. And so as a result of that, later in Exodus we find out how God uses his name for his people. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. Do you see how the I am who I am got filled out with gracious and gracious and compassionate and compassionate, have mercy, have mercy? It's like the black and white is now filled in with color. And this gives us hope because if God had to depend on us and waited around for us to earn his favor, which is impossible anyways, we would be doomed. but how good it is that God can just decide to be merciful to you and to be gracious to us in Christ. That's why his full name revealed to Moses in Exodus 34 is the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loyal love and truth, who keeps loyal love for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations. I'm going to say that again. The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and truth, who keeps loyal love for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren, to the third and fourth generations. You can see that just because God is abounding in loyal love doesn't mean he doesn't have holy anger towards our sin. But He solved that when He put His Son up on the cross and poured out His anger on Him. And even the Son poured out His anger on Himself, gave Himself for us, so that we would no longer be under the curse. I hope, children, that you have taken refuge in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. Well, there's a story Jesus told about an unforgiving servant There was a servant, there was a king once, who called his slaves, his servants, in to give an account. And one servant owed him 10,000 talents, which in our day, I think, would be something like $6 billion. And the man thought that he could just easily pay it back. I guess he said, please give me time, I'll pay it back. And in His mercy, much as we just saw in God's name, the king freely forgave him. Then that same servant found another servant who owed him $10,000 in comparison. It was a hundred coins, which was a hundred days wages then. That was a lot of money for people to owe, but pittance, little compared to what he owed the king. And when the man said the same thing that he had told the king, please be patient and I'll pay it all back, he wouldn't. And he said, pay it now. And of course, other slaves, other servants heard it, reported to the king. And the king said, I had mercy on you. And then basically, why didn't you have mercy on others? You must be sent to the torturers until you pay every cent. And so Jesus warns us, if we will not forgive our brother from the heart, we will be sent to the place of torment until every cent is paid back, until every sin is punished, which is endless because our guilt is infinite. So children, take warning. If you do not forgive what others owe to you, your father will not forgive what you owe to him. Forgiving others will not earn you, salvation. Jesus alone dying for you paid the price and gives you salvation. But if you truly have received salvation, you will forgive others because it will appear small compared to how much God in Christ has forgiven you. In math, we've been looking at some number sets The natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4. The whole numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. The integers, negative 3, negative 2, negative 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. And the rational numbers, a fraction of two integers. Today I'm going to introduce you to groupings. You're familiar with some of these. Go get a pair of socks. How many are that? Well, that's two socks. So a pair is a word that signifies two. How much is a week of days? Maybe you've not thought about that, but a week is seven. You could have a week of years, according to the Bible. How about a dozen eggs? How many eggs is that? Well, that's 12 eggs. And so, if we use the decimal system, we don't go by twos or sevens or twelves, we go by tens. And so, we count by tens, tens, hundreds, thousands. We'll learn that next week. But we could have picked twelves, sevens or twos, but we picked tens. And that's what we're used to. Someday in science, you'll learn that there's actually a big number called a mole. That is 6.022 times 10 to the 23rd, which is kind of about the size, that is like the size of our sins. Like we saw in the last parable, we have a mole of sins. In physics, there are three eras, classical, enlightenment, and modern. Each of them has a famous physicist, at least one big one. Archimedes is the classical physicist. Newton, among others, is the Enlightenment physicist, and Einstein, among others, is the modern physicist. There have been physicists in every era, but these three men stand out, and Archimedes' formula is W equals FD, work equals force times distance. Give me a lever long enough, and I'll move the world. Newton is force equals mass times acceleration, F equals MA. And so the force exerted on an object of push or pull is proportional to the mass and proportional to the acceleration. And Einstein's formula is very famous. Your parents probably know about this one. E equals mc squared. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light in a vacuum. Maybe they didn't know what C stood for or M or E, but it's a very famous formula. E equals MC squared. I want you to memorize those three and the names that go with them. They are justly famous for God used them in his providence to give us insight into his world. Well, we're gonna be looking at a man named Patrick today. And so let's talk about the British Isles. There are a lot of islands north of Europe called the British Isles, more than one. Two of the islands are exceptionally big. The smaller of the two is Ireland. The bigger of the two is actually named big. It's Great Britain, Big Britain. So the two islands are Ireland and Great Britain. But the whole group of islands are the British Isles. One little island off the coast of Scotland and off the northern coast of Great Britain is Iona, only three miles long and one mile wide, but it became the missionary base of reaching Scotland. So don't despise small things or small islands or small people. God is able to use small things and small people to do big things. Well, there were two missionary impulses as we come out of the patristic era and enter the medieval era. One of the impulses is a slave boy. He was kidnapped, a 16-year-old. went to Ireland which was utterly pagan, came back to his homeland and was sent back as a missionary, then disowned by his own church. But God used him mightily to evangelize the whole island of Ireland and we know him as Patrick. And we know his story because he tells us in the confessions. And he was very self-conscious about his lack of learning, his bad Latin, which we don't even know what he said in some places. And so the, his story begins with this, these four words, ego, patricius, peccator, rusticissimus. I, Patrick, a sinner, very rustic. Like a country bumpkin. Well, Gregory I is the opposite. He was the last Latin father and the first medieval pope. He came from a senator's family. He served in the government in the East and in the West, was a powerful man, and had a great big vision of expansion where everybody would be under the Bishop of Rome and everybody would do the same thing, unity by uniformity. I don't believe the Bible teaches that. And he is the one that sent Augustine of Canterbury to evangelize the Angles, which is those on England. And so Rome actually sent the first missionary to the barbarians that were on the southeast side of Great Britain. And it is said, though it is legendary probably, but it is said that when he saw an Angle slave boy, he said, Angali, not an angle, but an angel, as if the gospel will come to them and make them holy. Well, it may not be true, but it reminds us of how God transforms people from being like the devil to being like the angels who serve God day and night and worship him. And so may God transform you as well. Thank God. He has sent his word out into the world It may have come in odd ways in the Middle Ages and maybe didn't go very deep at times and maybe was filled with a lot of errors, but the name of Jesus continued to spread and The Word of God was spread there and whenever the name of Jesus is spoken and the Word of God is given faith saving faith is possible and And so we praise God for even the weakest evangelism and mission of God. So there you go, children. There's our lesson for today. God bless you.