Alright, well let's, excuse me. Let's turn our attention now back to our membership covenant before we actually get into the lesson tonight. I just have a few housekeeping items. Number one, as I mentioned in the email, I'm going to spend two weeks on church discipline for reasons that I'll get to in just a moment. But just to think about the calendar for a moment, we are coming to the end of our Covenant Life Together series. And we'll be starting something new in a little bit. What that looks like is that this week I'm gonna do part one on church discipline, next week I'll do part two on church discipline, and then the last week of February, the 24th, Pastor Ken is gonna take up paragraphs four and five that deal with kind of just common wisdom issues, how we deal with member meetings, what our responsibility and covenant is to do when we leave from this place and go to another town, namely to join another church, and then, The following week will be the first week of March, so we'll have the Lord's Supper, so we won't have an evening service. And then March 10th, the first week, the first Vesper of March, what we're going to do is we're going to have our normal time of prayer at the beginning of service. But then after that, we're just going to have a Q&A. Just 30 minutes given over to Q&A. for any question that you have about the membership covenant. Maybe you have a question about giving. Maybe you have a question about Lord's Day attendance. Maybe you have a question about church discipline, membership, whatever the case may be. We know that we have not always had time at the end of these lessons to field questions, and that's something that we want to do. So any questions that you have had or any questions that are going to come up in the course of working through the membership covenant, write those down. And March 10th, unfortunately, Pastor Kim won't be here, but Pastor Jim and I will just come up, we'll sit down, kind of fireside chat without the fire. You ask any questions that you want, and we will try to answer them to the best of our ability. It'll not only be a time of Q&A, but hopefully some robust discussion as well. So that'll be March 10th, and we will have a Q&A. Secondly, There's been a lot written on church discipline, both in the past and recently, and I don't often do this. I should probably do this more often. I want to recommend a resource to you that, in my mind, for what it's worth, is the best work on church discipline, the most biblical, the most culturally sensitive, and by that I mean that the author, Jonathan Lehman, He gets the culture. He understands Americana. And it's a version, in all its many different forms, to church discipline and to church membership. And Jonathan Lehman, the author, has studied political theory. And he leverages his understanding of political theory, not only in the public square, but in the context of a local church, to explain and answer many of the thorny questions that have to do with ecclesiology, which is the study of church government. So this book is called The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love, subtitle, Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Church Discipline. It's by Jonathan Lehman. He's the editor, I think senior editor at Nine Marks. I recommend it to you. It is well written and well defended, and I think it would be of much benefit to you. I can't give you what he does, so I think it'd be advantageous for you to check it out. So with those things out of the way, what I'd like to do is I'd like to turn now to our membership covenant. We're going to look at paragraph four. I'm going to read it in your hearing, and then we'll discuss its content. So paragraph four says this. We commit to submit to the teaching and leadership of the elders in as much as it accords in good conscience with the truth of scripture, to the governing of the church according to its constitution and bylaws, to the settlement of disputes by and or among the members of the church without appeal to any outside civil court, to the Word of God. So we submit to the Word of God as our final authority, to the church's discipline upon ourselves, and lovingly assume our responsibility to participate in the discipline of other members as taught in Scripture. So as we come to our study of our membership covenant, we now get to the matter of church discipline. And because church discipline is so often misunderstood and oftentimes in the cases where perhaps it is practice, it may even be abused. I think it's incumbent upon us, and the better part of wisdom, to spend two weeks unpacking what it does mean, what it doesn't mean. Try to answer a lot of those thorny questions that we oftentimes have when it comes to it. So we're going to try to delve into Scripture and look at the purpose and place and necessity of church discipline. Now, I understand that in little tidbits and sermons and in some parts, perhaps, of past Vesper lessons, we've touched on matters of church discipline. And so some of you may be asking, are we really going to do this again? Are we really going to talk about church discipline again? Or are we obsessed with it? Well, let me give you two reasons in particular why we want to delve deeper into it. Number one is this. I think that Sometimes members, when they sign up for church membership and they sign up to enter into covenant with the church, they don't always know what they're signing up for. How many are the times that you've signed up for a credit card online and they have that terms and conditions? And what do you do? You gotta scroll all the way down, you're supposed to read it. And then you click on it, you know, and you sign your name. No, but nobody that I know reads that, right? We don't read that, we just click it. And I think sometimes that reflux transfers over into any membership agreement that we enter into. And as we've set for members in interviews to come into church membership, oftentimes we find that people don't totally understand everything they're signing up for. And that's actually okay. We understand that. You know, not everybody has the luxury or the privilege of going to seminary and figure out all these things. Not everybody reads as widely. So we understand that. The church is for everyday people like you and me. But at the same time, it's important that we understand what we've signed up for. And it's important that we understand that something like church membership and church discipline, which are two sides of the same coin, is not something that you serve as a spectator in. It's something that you are an active participant in. It's something that you are involved in. And so it's very important that we understand what we've signed up for. Here's the second reason why we're looking at this. The best time to study church discipline is not when you're in a case of church discipline, right? It's kind of like a soldier out in the theater of war. He's like, man, I've got to practice my range shooting. You don't have time, soldier. You're in the thick of battle. You don't have time. You don't do it in the heat of battle. You learn about things like church discipline when there's peace and unity and harmony and a clear mind in the church. And that's, by God's grace, what we have right now. And so we want to work through these things in a time where we have our Bibles, we can compare, we can contrast, we can understand how this text connects to this text and how both of these texts connect to us here at Grace Covenant Church. So that's what we want to do specifically. And the fact of the matter is this, check out, even in a healthy church where they believe in church discipline, they believe in church membership, and they practice those things as biblically as they possibly can, when a case of church discipline comes, it's still incredibly difficult, isn't it? Emotions run very high, and oftentimes, and I've seen this because I've been in churches that have come to the point where they've had to put somebody out, the most difficult question that church members have to work through is, when is enough enough? That's a hard question. When do you draw the line? Because Jesus doesn't give us in Matthew 18, here's what you do in this situation of alcoholism. Here's what you do in this situation of pornography. Here's what you do in a situation where a guy's cheated on his wife. If it's three times, that's okay. Fourth time now, he doesn't do that. So guess who that responsibility falls to? It falls to us. We've got to work through that. Now you do that under the leadership of the elders who are working with the person behind closed doors and, you know, rolling up their sleeves and dealing with the grit and the mire. But at the same time, the elders don't make the final call, as we will see a little bit later. So even in a healthy church that practices church discipline and membership, these are incredibly difficult things. And what we want to do as leaders is we want to, just as Ephesians 4 says, equip you with the biblical understanding of church discipline so that when and if that time ever comes, you're ready. You know what to do. You're ready to roll your sleeves up and say, okay, let's get into this member meeting, let's work through this, let's pray, and may the Lord have mercy on everything that we deliberate on. So what I'd like to do is start this week with why our culture has such an aversion to church membership, and then, Lord willing, next week we will get into the actual text and try to flesh them out, okay? So let me start with a question, and this is interactive, so feel free to give the right answer. Is any church which professes to be a church a true church? So any church that, thank you, okay. All right. Okay, next question. Do we have enough biblical revelation in the scriptures to have metrics for discerning what a true church is? Okay, good, good. Okay, when Jesus, it's interesting, when Jesus addressed the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, remember Jesus wrote some letters to seven churches in Asia Minor in Revelation 2 and 3. When he addressed the church of Smyrna and the church of Philadelphia in his letters, He references Jews who claim to be Jews, but who are a what? Synagogue of Satan. Now that wasn't like, you know, the Orthodox, you know, Judaism Jews. These were Jews who were claiming to be, if we want to put it in our modern day terms, Messianic Jews. Jews who believed in Jesus. But their doctrine, perhaps, or maybe their doctrine and or their lifestyle had so denigrated that Jesus acts, Jesus, not Moses, not Paul, Jesus says they have become a synagogue of Satan. And so I do think that there are metrics or qualifications, or might we say marks, that the Bible gives us to determine what a true church is. Well, thankfully, our tradition has given us ways to think of it. In our day, we think about the marks of the true church, and we went through a series, and we had nine of them. The fact of the matter is, you know, Mark Dever, nine marks, they're kind of the Johnny-come-latelys. Our tradition has talked for a long time, many, many centuries about the marks of a true church, and they have whittled them down biblically to three. So I'd like to look first, number one tonight, at what our tradition, following the scriptures, have marked out the three marks of a true church. The first mark of a true church is the pure preaching of the gospel. Why is that important? Why is it important that a church not just preach the Bible, But in the Bible, preach the pure gospel. Somebody tell me. It's a really simple question. That is what makes us Christians, right? The Bible has a lot of don't do this and do that, right? What's that called? Law, right? So if I get up or Pastor Ken or Pastor Jim and we just preach, don't do this, do this, you know, here's some therapy on how to massage this into your life. Do this, do this, do this, do this. Let's pray and have a benediction. If that sermon could be preached in a synagogue, it's not distinctly what? Christian, okay? When we handle the Word of God, we must, as Paul says, accurately what? Divide the Word of God. You know what he means by that? I'll tell you what he means. You divide law from gospel. You tell me what I must do to live, and I'm going to tell you I can't do it, and then you come in and you give me the balm of Gilead by saying Christ has done it for me. And out of what Christ has done for me is going to flow gratitude that's going to bring me back to the law in its third use, And now I have a different orientation, a different attitude to the law, don't I? It's no longer that schoolmaster that beats me up and brings me to Christ. It's now God's holy condescension of his holy will for my life and being sanctified. I want to do the law. Great peace have those that love thy law and nothing shall offend them. Oh Lord, how I love your law. It is my meditation day and night. The non-believer doesn't say that, the child of God does, but it comes through the gospel. So the pure preaching of the gospel, mark number two, the pure administration of the sacraments, baptism in the Lord's Supper. Won't spend a lot of time on that. But now thirdly, the third mark of the reformers is the exercising of church discipline. Now, church discipline is impossible without what? Somebody tell me. Church membership, right? You can't be put out of the church unless you're first what? In the church. So what I want to do is I want to give you very quickly, and these are in your notes, two working definitions. One working definition for church membership and one working definition for church discipline. And remember as we work through these, church membership and church discipline are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. You can't say who's in the family, or you can't put somebody out of the family unless they're in the family, okay? So I would submit to you, this is just my cobbling together a definition for church membership. Church membership is the believer's commitment to walk faithfully with God, to identify with a local body of believers where he or she will lovingly fulfill the one another commandments of scripture, submit to the judgments of the leadership and congregation, financially support the ministries of the church willfully, cheerfully, and lovingly, and be a faithful witness to the world according to the scriptures. Just, you know, carte blanche, vanilla church membership right out of the pages of Scripture. Here's a working definition for church discipline. Church discipline is the public act of exercising the keys of the kingdom by putting out of the assembly and of the kingdom of God a person who claims to be a Christian but destroys his or her testimony by their ongoing, unrepentant lifestyle of sin. This judgment is by the whole church assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ with the power of the keys. So once again, we can't put somebody out of the church unless they've first been put in the church. Paul, and we'll deal with this more next week, actually uses the word in 1 Corinthians 5, insiders, outsiders and what does he say he says what do I have to do with judging outsiders which should be a lesson for us as we think about voice our voice in the public square but that's another conversation what do I have to do with judging outsiders I am called to judge those inside the church Paul says that okay now There are many churches today that don't practice either church membership or church discipline. There are some who practice church membership but not church discipline. That's problematic. But number two now, why do so many churches have an aversion to church discipline? I've tried to think of the best way to basically put on a platter for us the prevailing disposition of our culture that would bring to the fore why we have an aversion, and there's two ways in which I'm gonna do that. Number one, we have to understand the time in which we live, and here's how I wanna do this, okay? I wanna give you a thumbnail sketch of how different ages have thought about God and truth and authority and the objectivity of truth, okay? We're gonna look at antiquity, the Enlightenment modern era, and post-modernism in like three minutes, okay? So, we're gonna represent those ages with a question. How does antiquity, okay, Moses, the New Testament, you know, long time ago, how did they think about the God question and authority and truth and stuff like that? Their question was this. What has God said? What has God said? Now notice the presuppositions and assumptions of that question. Number one, who do they assume is? God. Yeah, he's there. He's a working part of the definition. Secondly, they assume that God has spoke. The question is not, is God there? The question is not, has God spoken, the question is, what has God said? In other words, in the minds of antiquity, God has spoken in nature and in special revelation, and now it's our job to roll up our sleeves, interpret the passages of special revelation, examine natural revelation, and see what God has said. That's antiquity's question and its presuppositions. Then the Enlightenment modernism era comes around, right? And in a nutshell, Enlightenment is the era that basically said, let us break free from the shackles of institutionalized religion and let man think for himself, okay? You think of a person like Rene Descartes and his famous quip, cogito ergo sum, which basically means, I believe, therefore I am, or I think, therefore I exist. What does he start with? I, okay? What is the question that enlightenment modernism question asks? Has God said? So notice the shift in the presuppositions. God is still there, still believe he's there, but it's not a matter of what has he said, it's a matter of has he really said? There is an injection of what? Skepticism. Because now the question is, well, I know that God, you know, these men claim that God said things through them, but all these miracles and supernatural intrusion from the other into the now, I don't know if I could buy that. In fact, Thomas Jefferson said, you know, by the way, deism is a product of enlightenment era thinking. And what is deism? Deism is God creates the world and then he says sayonara, he leaves. And so God is no longer involved in the affairs of man. And so the idea that there would be a resurrection, which is a supernatural intrusion of the divine, or there would be a miracle, or a virgin birth, those are all ideas that involve God still being involved in the affairs of man. So deism said, nah, we don't believe that. We're gonna go ahead and think for ourselves. And Thomas Jefferson actually put together a Bible, it's called the Jeffersonian Bible, where he cut out all the miracles in the Bible and just had the moral teaching. It was a great compendium of Mosaic law. Do this, don't do that. And that's actually how he would evangelize the Native Americans. Okay, so has God really said? Now, the third era is postmodern thinking. And I'll get to, I'll explain postmodern a little bit, but they basically ask this question. Who cares? Okay? It's not what has God said, not has God said, but who cares? Now, why is that? I'm gonna tell you why. Number one, postmodernism, and I'm giving you a quick and dirty explanation, okay? If there's any philosophers among us, you can argue with me later, that's fine. But here's just a quick and dirty compendium of what postmodernism. Postmodernism says truth is relative, truth is subjective, and I am the authority. And this is how this happened. The egg that Rene Descartes laid was hatched by postmodernism. Watch this. Rene Descartes says, I think therefore I am. Rene Descartes was deeply troubled by the religious wars of his time where everybody, all the countries were going to war and shedding blood over who was right. Roman Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, everybody was fine. He said, I've got to go into France in a quiet, cold, dark room somewhere, and I've just got to rethink everything. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to doubt everything that I've previously believed and understood, and I'm going to start with what I do know, and then I'm going to build up from that ground and figure out my worldview. What did he come up with? I think, therefore, I am. Now, what did he do? Here's what he did. Whereas antiquity said, there is an authority structure, listen, outside of me, objective, that stands in judgment over me, such that I must submit to it, God and his law and his revelation. We'll call that a macro authority, an authority that is over me, okay? Here's what Rene Descartes did, and he didn't totally intend to do this, but he took that macro authority And he turned it on its head and turned the authority into a what? A micro authority. So now the individual is the authority. The individual is the one who determines what is and what is not. Now as much as you may be frustrated by all the shenanigans that are going on in culture today, redefinition of marriage, redefinition of sex, redefinition of pretty much everything. On the other hand, you shouldn't be surprised at all. In a world that says, I start with me, I start with my definition of authority, my definition of love, my definition of truth, and I will be the final arbiter on what it is. It doesn't surprise me whatsoever that somebody says, though I was born a woman, I am a man. Though I was born a man, I am a woman. I actually saw an article the other day of a man who took his parents to court and sued them because they did not ask him for rights for him to be born. Like, it's sad. Like, I don't even laugh. Like, it's just sad. It's true. It's real. Because people believe, taking Descartes to the, you know, thousandth level, I am the authority, okay? Now, so postmodernism. has convened with a number of other factors to create a perfect storm that has caused people to have an aversion to church discipline. So I want you to take this shifting of the macro level to the micro level, and I want you to bring that into the room of the church. Bring it into the church and then take it into the other room of church discipline. What does church discipline say? There is an authority over you, Jesus, and Jesus has bequeathed that authority to the church with the power of the keys in his name, with His power to make judgments on whether you are a true believer or not. And we'll talk more about how that fleshes itself out, but for now, let's just examine the idea. How is a micro-authority level post-modern millennial going to respond to that? How dare you tell me that I can't be a part of the church? How dare you define my narrative, my story, my being for me. I determine that. Life is a choose your own adventure book, and I'm the one turning the pages, not you. So that just gives you a taste of the culture and why there's such an aversion. So postmodernism is one reason, but let me give you a second reason for why there's such an aversion to church discipline. It's what I'm just gonna call pragmatism. Now, long and the short of it, I think Godfrey did a good job of this in our study of church history. He made a connection between the revivalism of the 17th and 18th century to the church growth movement in the 20th and 21st century. What does, at bottom, what does the church growth movement want to do? If I could give you an analogy, it would be like this. In a church growth seeker-sensitive model, If there are 100 seats in the church, and 99 of them are filled, and a believer walks in and an unbeliever walks in, they're faced with the decision, to whom do I give the seat? And what is their answer? The unbeliever, why? Because church is for the unbeliever. Church is not for the believer, church is for the unbeliever. Where did that come from? It came from revivalism, which went outside the walls of the church, noble idea, to evangelize, once again, noble idea, but without the theology and the underpinnings of church, of authority, of accountability, of church discipline, of church membership, then they'd leave the town, say, oh, you're saved, you're a Christian, sayonara, no exhortation to get into a church, no exhortation to be a disciple, no exhortation to anything, so now they're left in the middle of the ocean, so to speak, trying to figure out what to do with this new Christianity. They stripped all of the gospel from the seedbed of the church. And as I always say, Cyprian says, he who has God for his father will have the church for his what? For his mother. The church is our mother. Mother Kirk. We love the church. And when you divorce the church from the activity of the gospel, you're going to have things and models like the church movement, church growth, seeker sensitive model that does what? Church is for the unbeliever and here's what we're gonna do. We are going to boil down our ministries to the absolute essentials of Christianity and only preach that. Okay? So, we're only going to teach the essentials. Anything that is debatable, anything that is controversial, we're just going to leave that out. Okay? So, what you do is you attract people with cotton candy, and whatever you attract people with is what you're going to keep them in with. Right? Okay? So, you attract people with cotton candy, you've got to keep giving them cotton candy. On the other hand, if you give them law and gospel, meat and milk, okay, they're going to learn to savor it and learn to enjoy it and learn to digest it. And so this essentialism, this evangelical essentialism has created a pragmatism that makes churchgoers free agents. They're free agents that, once again, approach church, and I'll get to this in a moment, with a consumer mentality. Church is a salad bar, and I'll talk more about this in a minute. And then, thirdly, we have cultural baggage regarding love, and this manifests itself in a number of different ways, okay? Individualism. Individualism, as I've already said, which is what postmodernism promotes, has left us detached. which sent us searching for a love that makes us feel complete. And we want churches to do the same. We want the churches to make us feel complete, but it's not on God's terms, it's on our terms. We want to feel complete in the way that we feel like we should be complete. And then here's the other one, consumerism. Consumerism. I have friends that I graduated seminary with that are in different churches, and they tell me about their experiences. And I hear of experiences in churches where the majority of the people in those churches are millennials. I mean, it's just bursting at the seams. There's millennials everywhere. I mean, tatted arms here and there and, you know, skinny jeans and beard oil. It's just all there, okay? And on the one hand, you think, great, right? Like, praise the Lord that millennials are in church. That's great. But what's wrong with that picture? What's wrong with that picture? Right? When Jesus describes the church in heaven, does it look like a bunch of millennials exclusively? No. And we as a church, we don't do this perfectly, but we are, our goal is to try to be as inclusive as we possibly can with the demographic of our church. We want people from every type of life every demographic, every skin color, every socioeconomic place in life to be represented. In other words, we don't see older people as baggage. We see older people as the carriers of wisdom in the church that we want to learn from. We see younger people not as baggage, but we see younger people as people that need to be discipled and from whom we can learn things with. When we get younger people and older people, black people and white people, rich people and poor people, middle class people all together. And then we think about what kind of songs are we going to have? Well, whatever songs we're going to have, it's going to be songs that are going to be appropriate for everyone. Everyone. Okay? So we don't do the 24-7 chorus, same thing, over and over and over again because the millennials love that. And we don't just do the hoary-headed hymns because the old people like that. We try to strike a ground. Why? Because the church is made of many different people. And the old people need to learn from the young people, and the young people need to learn from the old people, and vice versa. Okay? The church is, as I tried to show this morning, a multicolored robe of God's grace. And so this idea of consumerism does this. Give me a church my way right away. I want my church to be like a boutique clothing store in New York where I can go and get a tailor-made suit. Where I can go to a home group, listen, and I look around and everybody's like me. People have the same interests as me. People have the same jobs as me. Everybody's the same. And guess what happens? Everything's easy then. Everything's easy. And the moment in a consumeristic mentality that things get tough, see you later, sorry, this is too much for me, because I have commitment phobia too. It reminds me of a friend I used to have Bible study with. We would always ask him, hey, Joaquin, you gonna be there next week? Oh man, I'm gonna be at Bible study next week, that's right, but don't count on me. That's the attitude of the culture today. Like, I'm committed, but don't count on me. In fact, they don't want to commit. Commitment phobia permeates throughout our culture in a number of different ways. Shacking up is one example, right? If I can live with my girlfriend or my boyfriend, and I can get the sex, and she can make my food, and she can wash my clothes, why would I marry her? I mean, you know, if I'm getting the milk, why would I buy the cow, right? How else does commitment phobia express itself? Prolonged adolescence. We have 35-year-old men living in the basement of their parents' homes playing first-person shooter games, okay? Maybe they have a job. If they do, it's part-time, but probably not. Mom and dad are paying for their bills because they're enabling them. Okay? But they're failing to launch because they're afraid of what? Commitment. And we bring that same commitment phobia into the church, and we're like, oh, you want me to commit to loving you guys? Well, I'm not gonna do that. I'll read all the verses in the Bible that says to do those things, but I'll do it in my way and in my time and according to my definitions. Okay, we're redefining love, we're redefining commitment, and we are approaching church with consumerism. Skepticism, I've already mentioned that. So let me ask a question. When this perfect storm comes together, it redefines love. It redefines love. And one of the things that Jonathan Lehman is doing in his book is he's approaching church membership and church discipline through the lens of love. It's called the surprising offense of God's love. I mean, that's basically what he's getting at. He's trying to show that love is not what we think it is. And in fact, our culture has so redefined love that it's hard for us to hear God's love through the scriptures. So let me try to just demonstrate that with a clear example, okay? Listen to me very carefully and answer this question correctly, okay? Is God's love for humanity conditional? For humanity. Is God's love for humanity, for human beings, is it conditional? Okay, what is the condition? Repentance and faith. What do you often hear when people define love? Well, the kind of love that I exude and the kind of love that I want to be surrounded by is unconditional, accepting love. Is that the love that God offers? God's love is conditional on repentance and faith. Now, once you come in to a saving relationship with God, He's holding you, and even He's the one that brought you in, right? We're reformed, we believe all those things, okay? But God's love at that point is unconditional, it has been since eternity past, we just realize it when we believe in Jesus, okay? But coming into faith, coming into the kingdom, and coming into the church is conditional on repentance and faith, and guess what? That repentance and faith continues in the church, which means that staying in the church is conditional upon faith. Now that's offensive to our modern sensibilities because we have a culture that at bottom has turned love into an idol. They have turned love into an idol that serves them and has redefined love into something that never imposes judgments, conditions, or binding attachments, okay? All right, so those are. the cultural reasons why we have an aversion to love. And I'm gonna stop there. It's a good place to stop. Next week we'll start at the foundation of church discipline. We have time for about, I don't know, a few questions. Does anybody have any questions? Like, I want a love that's unconditional and uncritical. And as you were saying, I'm like, that's not like Satan. Like, legit. Like, oh yeah, just whatever you want. I have no requirements. I have no... whatever you want. But I find, like, with talking with people at work, for example, their view of what Christianity is, is so just... out of whack, that when I try to talk to them, they think I'm insane. Like, they're like, there's no way that's what the Bible says. Like, you know, judgment and what being a real Christian is that it's sometimes it's kind of weird. It's kind of hard to like approach them because they don't want to hear it. Like I talked to one person and he was like, oh yeah, it's just believe in Jesus and that's all you need. And it's like, well, it's not necessarily that, you know what I mean? So trying to foster that relationship is kind of difficult when they, when their, their mind is so. Yeah. I mean, what you're describing is a common garden variety, everyday experience of evangelism. I mean, that's, you know, if they hated Jesus, they're gonna hate you. I would say as much as you can, open the Bible to them and actually show them. You know, like I was saying this morning, what has surprised me so often in talking with people, Christian and non-Christian, is how ignorant they are of what the Bible actually says. I mean, they actually think it's in the Bible, God helps those who help. I mean, the Bible says, like, you know, what's that guy, Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof? As the good book says, God helps those who help themselves. Moses doesn't say that, or Isaiah. Isaiah doesn't say, nobody says that. Well, it's a good idea anyway. That's how people think, right? So I think to the degree that we can actually open the Bible and say, like, if you really want to know what the Bible says, here's what it says, and find a Bible that says, or find a verse that says the exact opposite of what they just say. So, all right, yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you the short answer and then we can talk more about this afterwards. It's a really good question. The short answer is you go for the presuppositions, okay? And what you do is you try to show them and say, okay, you believe X, okay? First off, let's see if X is something you actually do in your own life. And if you do a little digging, you will find out that they don't actually carry that out in their own life. And so you show them to be what we call internally inconsistent, okay? Now, is that gonna solve the problem? No, because their hearts are hard and they're gonna do whatever they want. There comes a point in your argumentation when you need to realize that their minds are dark, and as Isaiah says in Isaiah 8, 20, to the law and to the testimony, if they will not listen to this, it's because they have no dawn in their heart, which means they have no regeneration. So you've got to, and you know, welcome to life. This is, you know, whether it's in your, you know, your classroom, or it's at the bus stop, or whatever the case may be, this is what you're going to encounter in your life. And I have found in my personal experience, you can throw evidences at them all you want, and they're always going to come up with something. What you do is you go the nuclear option, you go for their presupposition, it's kind of like, You know, when you're in a ship battle, a ship versus another ship, you can shoot, you know, cannonballs over their ship. You know, they're going to adjust and they're going to be okay. But if you shoot a torpedo into the bottom of their ship, what's going to happen? It's going to sink. That's what presuppositions are. You go for their presuppositions and you torpedo their whole argument. That's the short answer. I'll give you the longer answer afterwards, okay? All right, let's pray and thank you. Tomorrow or next week, we will look at the biblical foundations of church discipline. Please try to make it. It's very important what we're gonna talk about, and it's very incumbent upon all of us as a congregation that we be equipped to be able to think through these things biblically. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for your grace and your mercy to us. We pray now that as we step into a new week, that you would give us fresh grace, Father, that your mercies, as Jeremiah says, would be new every morning, and that we would thrive on them for your honor, your glory, and our good. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen. You are dismissed. Have a wonderful.