And turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 17, as we looked this morning at verses 1 through 15. Acts 17, 1 through 15. And let's pray now together as we come to God's word. Our gracious God and our heavenly Father, we know how dependent upon your word we are for all the things that we need for this life and for the life to come. And so we ask now that by your spirit, you would open our eyes and soften our hearts. Would you take ears that cannot hear and make them hear? We need your word in order to live. And so we pray that you would fulfill your promise, that your word will never return to you void, but always accomplish that which you purpose for it. So work now by your word and spirit in our lives that Jesus Christ might be glorified, that we might know you better and live for your glory in this world. We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. We'll hear now Acts chapter 17, verses 1 through 15, and give careful attention because this is the word of God. Now, when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, They came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ. And some of them were persuaded, and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks, and not a few of the leading women. The Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, these men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them. And they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar and saying there is another king, Jesus. And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go. The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. And when they arrived, they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica. They received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily, to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. But when the Jews from Thessalonica learned that the word of God was proclaimed by Paul at Berea also, they came there too, agitating and stirring up the crowds. Then the brothers immediately sent Paul off on his way to the sea, but Silas and Timothy remained there. Those who conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens, and after receiving a command for Silas and Timothy to come to him as soon as possible, they departed. Well, so as this freedom from God's word, may he add his blessing to it. You may be seated. Well, again, good morning and thank you for being here this morning as we worship God and as we hear from his word. I don't think it takes too much evidence for me to say and for you to agree that we live in a time when many people are suspicious of and very critical with regard to traditional sources of authority. Just think about this question. Have you switched any news sources in the past five years because something that you may have once thought was reliable seems now, through new eyes, to be less reliable? Think about something like the New York Times, for example. It's still referred to as the newspaper of record, which means that you can look to the New York Times for an authoritative and accurate and unbiased source of information about current events in the world. But some of you, I'm guessing, probably hear simply the name New York Times and think, well, I don't believe that. That's not accurate. It's not true. I can't trust what's printed in that particular newspaper. And so, If you see the need for trustworthy authority for things like current events, do you see we have an even greater need for trustworthy authority about eternal life and about the things that we need to know about God and about ourselves, the most basic questions of human life. And so let me read a 500-year-old prayer from the time of the Reformation. It starts like this. Almighty, gracious Father, since our whole salvation depends on our true understanding of your word, grant that our hearts, freed from worldly affairs, may hear and understand your holy word with all diligence and faith. Do you see what's being said in that prayer, and do you believe it? Do you believe that your whole salvation depends on rightly understanding the Bible? Let that question sink in. Do you want to truly know God? Well, if so, you need the Bible. Do you want to be saved from the guilt of sin? If so, you need the Bible. Do you want to be reconciled to God and have eternal life? If you want those things, you need the Bible. The Bible is our rock-solid authority and our firm foundation for this life and for eternal life. This lines up, this isn't simply a prayer that someone wrote that sounds really nice, it lines up with what scripture teaches about itself. Romans 10, 17 says, faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. You need, if you wanna have faith, you need to hear the word that you are to believe. And then, 2 Timothy 3, 16, you probably have heard this before, all scripture is God-breathed. and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." And so, that prayer lines up with what the Bible says about itself. Understanding the Bible is absolutely essential for the Christian life. But if it's essential, then how do we grow in rightly understanding God's Word? Well, this passage from Acts gives us two absolutely essential and God-ordained ways to grow in understanding the Bible, and they are very simple. And if you are taking notes, this is the outline. It's four words. First two are these, faithful speaking, and the second two are these, faithful listening. If you want to grow in understanding the Bible, you need to come into the hearing of faithful speaking of God's word by a pastor, in the preaching of the word on a Sunday morning like this, maybe even this Sunday morning. But you also need faithful listening. You can sit in the right place and look like you're doing the right thing, but are you really faithfully listening to God's word? And so you need faithful speaking from the pulpit, and faithful listening from the congregation. And that's what we see in these verses. Acts 17 follows Paul and Silas and Timothy from Philippi to Thessalonica. They're now in Greece, these two cities, Thessalonica and Berea. And in both cities, in spite of the differences, the plot is fairly similar. Paul went to the synagogue. He preached faithfully. He was there for a time. Some believed, but there was also great opposition, so that Paul eventually had to leave. That's the plot line for both Thessalonica and Maria. Preaching, belief, opposition, fleeing. But in spite of those similar plot lines, what is different about these two? Well, the difference is in what Luke records and what Luke shows us about what happened in these places. In Thessalonica, Luke emphasizes Paul's faithful speaking of God's word. And in Berea, Luke emphasizes the people's faithful listening to what Paul spoke. And so do you see these two cities help us a lot. If you want to live the Christian life, you need faithful speaking, but also faithful listening. So here are some of the questions that we can answer based on these verses. What should you look for in a faithful sermon? How should you evaluate whether a sermon is good or not? What should you do if you are ever responsible to teach the Bible in some setting? All of us will probably be called upon at some point whether in a church or in a smaller group or with our families to teach the Bible. What should that look like? And then what does good listening look like? If we want the Word of God to bring forth its fruit like a seed that's planted and watered and in good soil, we want it to grow. We don't want to just sit there and do nothing. How does that come about? It comes about by good listening, faithful listening. So our whole salvation depends on right understanding of God's word. And there are many ways that you can grow an understanding of God's word, but God especially promises to work through these two, faithful speaking and faithful listening. So first we come to faithful speaking. And for that, we look at Paul in Thessalonica. So they arrived, Paul and Silas and Timothy arrived in Thessalonica, and they followed Paul's pattern whenever he went to a new city. They found the Jewish synagogue, and they went there. And in this case, over the course of three Sabbath days, Paul went about proclaiming God's word, teaching God's word, explaining, proving. So those are the things we see about Paul's method. And from Paul's method in Thessalonica, we can see the answer to this question. What are the absolutely essential ingredients of a sermon that faithfully proclaims the word? We don't have like we do in other places. This isn't a transcript of what Paul said. You can find that. We'll come to some of that in the rest of Acts 17 next week as Paul goes to Athens. But this just sums up Paul's method. You see what he did in Thessalonica. First it says, he reasoned with them from the scriptures. So it's essential, the first essential ingredient. for a good faithful sermon or faithful speaking of God's word is that the message of our sermon must be the message of the Bible passage. It must come out from the Bible, not be added to or read back into the Bible, something else someone wants to say. The message of the sermon is the message of the biblical passage. And so we have to remember that we have a faith that gives us actual things to believe. It's not just inspirational, not just to make you feel good. I hope you do feel good from sermons every so often, maybe every week, but that's not the main point. The main point is to reveal a message that is true from God for you and for me. Because it's true, it's subject to investigation. So you can see he reasons from the scriptures. He doesn't just say, let me just read some inspiring verses. He says, These words have a meaning. And if these words come from God, then you are to believe it. There are important things in the Bible, but they all flow from one another. You can think of them in three big categories. There's history, that is, what happened? How did God work with his people in the Old Testament? How did God work through Jesus? What are the events in Jesus' life, his life and death and resurrection? Those are the events, that's the history, that's the story. And then from the story flows doctrine. Sometimes we don't like that word. because it sounds serious and intense, but those things that happened actually mean something. And so, one of our founding fathers of this denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, J. Gresham Machen, said something like this as a paraphrase, Jesus died, that is history. Jesus died for our sins, that is doctrine. So this thing happened and the Bible tells us that, but the Bible also tells us why it happened and what it means. That is doctrine. So history and then doctrine and then life. It does make a difference when you hear these things. If the story is true, if the doctrine is true, then it makes a difference for your life. Whether that is how you live or what you believe or things you stop doing or things you start doing that you weren't doing before. But do you see sometimes in the wider world, sometimes maybe even in this church, we focus so much on the life part. Like we want good, helpful things we can take and apply. And that's good. That's not bad. We should do those things. There should be real life applications. You should have a change in your life and your marriage, your family and your workplace from what you hear from God's Word. But that life is absolutely dependent upon the story and on the doctrine. You can't have the last one without the first two. So we need to reason from the scriptures just like Paul did in Thessalonica. So what does reasoning from the scriptures look like? Well, it looks like these two words that you can see at the beginning of verse three. Reasoning from the scriptures looks like this. Paul explained and proved. That's what it means. To reason from the scriptures means to explain and to prove. Now, the word for explain, you probably know what explain means. You tell someone about something, right? The word means to open up. Paul opened up from the Scriptures this truth. Now, here's a word I try not to use very often, but you've probably heard a pastor talk about unpacking a passage. And I don't use it because I know the feeling, because I have sat where you are sitting, I know the feeling when someone says, let's unpack this passage. You think, oh, no, it's going to get really, really tedious. The pastor, when he unpacks the passage, always brings a lot of baggage. There's always a lot to take out. But unpack is actually a pretty good translation for this word, explain. And it means two different things. It means sometimes taking something hard to understand and making it clear. Taking something that is complex and showing this is how you can clearly understand this thing from the Bible. But sometimes it means taking something that seems easy and showing that there's more there than meets the eye. There's more there than you might have considered before. So think about this. If you go to a museum, Imagine, you know, a classical museum with big steps leading up. If you walk up those marble steps or whatever they're made out of, and you get to the door and you try to open the door and it's locked, what do you need? Well, you need someone from the museum to open the door. That's essential, right? And so that's the first thing, making something available that you didn't see before, opening up the doors to the truth of God's word. But there are some museums, when you get inside, there's more there than what you might be able to see. You can look at all the paintings or whatever is displayed in the museum. But sometimes it helps to have someone who can interpret those things to you, who can say, yeah, this is a really nice painting. You might really like the way it looks. Do you see the artist's technique for how he painted this painting? painting, or do you see this artifact from history? This might seem like just any other sword, but do you know who used this sword and where it was used? That is the other type of explaining, to open it up, to make something more vivid and more concrete and real to you, and we need that in a good, faithful sermon. We need the word of God to be opened up. It's there, and so much that's there is clear, and you can understand it, and you can believe it. All the things that are essential for salvation are absolutely clear from the Bible. But not everything in the Bible is equally clear. And so we need good, faithful ministry of God's word. And so Paul explained the scriptures, but he also proved from the scriptures. So the word for proving means to set alongside. So imagine Paul reading an Old Testament promise about the Messiah, maybe Isaiah 53 or one of the other servant songs of Isaiah, one of those famous passages that talks about the servant of the Lord who was to come and suffer for his people. So imagine Paul reading that and then saying, and let me tell you now about Jesus. He is one who came. This is what he said about himself. This is who he said he was. This is what he did. He died on the cross. He suffered. And so Paul says, let's bring these two together. Let's prove to you this truth. Here's what the Old Testament promises. He wouldn't have called it the Old Testament, but here's what these scriptures promise about the Messiah. And here's Jesus. And Jesus is the only one who fulfills all of these promises. And so let's set these two together alongside one another. And the result is you should believe in Jesus. That's what it means to prove. But what was Paul's point in doing these things and explaining and improving? It wasn't just to get anything out of the Bible. It wasn't just to say, I want to teach you some important things that you can apply to your life. They're generally true. And you should believe them. They're really good for living a good life. That is not bad, but that wasn't Paul's goal. There are people who, this is summing up Charles Spurgeon, he said, it's not a sermon until it gets to Jesus. It can be good and true things from the Bible, but it's not a sermon until it gets to Jesus. You can hear true things in a synagogue. We are in a synagogue. We're in a messianic synagogue. So this does not apply to them. But you can go to a Jewish synagogue and you can hear them say true things. They can read something we also accept as the word of God and they can explain it. It can be generally true, but it's not the same. college I took a class about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It's a really interesting class and one of the guest speakers for that class was a Jewish rabbi and he came and was an amazing teacher. He knew the Old Testament scriptures backwards and forwards. He knew the situation in the Middle East backwards and forwards, and he was really engaging and interesting and easy to listen to. But it wasn't a sermon because he doesn't believe in Jesus, and he did not see Jesus as the fulfillment of all that's promised in the Old Testament. And sometimes we can think, well, if I get something really good and concrete and practical out of a sermon, that's a good sermon. But if it's not about Jesus, it's not a sermon. Because sermons aren't, shouldn't be things that you could say with no problem in a Jewish non-messianic synagogue. A sermon's not like a TED Talk. TED Talks are not as popular as they once were a few years ago, but you can still find really, really good, entertaining, informative, and interesting TED Talks on YouTube. And usually, they're really good things. You can come away from that, and you know something new. But that's not what a sermon is. A sermon isn't a sermon until it gets to Jesus. And that's Paul's goal. Paul's goal is to show from the scriptures these two things. You can see it in this passage. First, that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead. And then second, that the Christ is Jesus. So he says from the Old Testament, it's necessary for the one who's the Messiah to come and to suffer and to rise from the dead. And then second, and this Jesus, the one who I proclaim to you, is that Messiah. That's what we proclaim. That's our message. Our message is Jesus Christ who came to suffer in your place and in my place. The one who died on the cross and rose again from the dead and is ascended into heaven. We proclaim Jesus Christ, and that is our only message. He is the only one who we have news for you about because he is the topic of the Bible. He is the subject of all of the scriptures. This is what Jesus did. Paul is simply doing what Jesus did. After the resurrection, when Jesus met his disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they didn't recognize him, they thought that Jesus was dead and still lying in the grave, Jesus came alongside them. And here's what it says. This is Luke 24, 27. He hears their story of how they thought Jesus was the one who was promised, but it seems like it's back to the drawing board. And here's what he does to show them the truth. Luke 24, 27, This is what Jesus does. This is what Paul does in Thessalonica. This is what we do every Sunday. The scriptures are about Jesus. Our message, every faithful sermon, should bring you to Jesus. And if it doesn't do that, it might be good true, inspiring things, but it's not a Christian sermon. That's why this is the pattern that Paul sets, and it's the pattern that remains true for a biblical sermon today. And do you see what happens? Some people are persuaded. Notice how this is worded. If you like grammar, and not many people do, but if you like grammar, this is a passive verb. It doesn't say, Paul persuaded them. It says, they were persuaded. That means they were persuaded by what Paul said through the work of God in his word and by his spirit to believe that these things are true. Now, a really interesting thing we don't have a lot of time to go into is that these few verses from Thessalonica, just a matter of weeks later, Paul wrote to this church the letter to Thessalonians, the first letter to the Thessalonians. It's not that much time has elapsed between these events and the writing of that letter which you have in your Bibles. And here's what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5, to these same believers, the ones who are persuaded, He says he rejoices because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. And so even though everything went south for Paul in Thessalonica with regard to the crowds and having to flee, the word of God came with power. with the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. That's what a biblical sermon should do. It should come, not simply with words, but with the power that only comes from God, the Holy Spirit. And this is what turns the world upside down. This is why every time there's been a reformation, every time there's been a revival in the church, it's come through faithful preaching of the word. So if you want to see revival and reformation, you should pray for faithful preaching of the Word. This turns the world upside down. Actually, it's turning the world right-side up. Everything is already upside down, and God's Word turns it right-side up. Faithful speaking of God's Word comes with God's authority because it aims to convey the message of the passage, the message of the words that he has spoken. Sometimes sermons, this is not to, you know, slam anybody. Sometimes pastors use the Bible as a diving board rather than as the pool. They use the word of God like the diving board they bounce off of to get to where they really want to go and what message they really want to say. And it could be true, it could be good and useful and helpful, but it's not a biblical message. We try to do the opposite. We use, you know, things going on in the world, illustrations, sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're really serious, to bounce off of those and get to where we really want to go. And that is to swim around in the Bible, to know it, to be saturated with God's word. That's what the aim of a biblical sermon should be. And that is because God's word has authority. And this should make pastors very humble. I hope you know, I very much am aware that pastors do have authority, but it's only authority to declare God's word. And it's only authority for me to then get out of the way so that you can hear the word of God. And so pastors should be very humble about themselves, but rightly authoritative about the message that they declare. This is the truth of God. It's for your salvation. As for your growth and grace, these things are absolutely necessary, and they cause conflict. They did so in Thessalonica. You can see the Jewish synagogue leaders became very jealous and bitter, and they dragged whoever they could find, even though they couldn't find the actual perpetrators of the supposed crime, they dragged people before the magistrates. Because these men, Paul and Silas and Timothy, proclaim another king, Jesus. And they say, well, look, if you need any proof, they declare that Jesus is the king. Can you be a Roman city and have people like this who are going to rise up against Caesar? But is that what the gospel does? The gospel is eventually going to conquer everything. Jesus is eventually going to be the one whose kingdom remains forever. But for right now, that kingdom grows in the midst of this world. It doesn't seek to topple down political structures. That's not its goal. The goal is a spiritual goal, that those who are lost might be found by Jesus. That's what the Word does. It shakes the world, not by toppling down earthly governments, but by toppling down spiritual darkness and bringing people to freedom who are lost and chained in sin. And so Paul and the other apostles didn't have plans for world domination. is, on the one hand, too big. Think about how small this church was at the time. It's not that many people. There are more and more who believe, but it's not this world-dominating force. That, on the one hand, is ridiculous. It's too small for it to be a real conspiracy against the Roman emperor. But at the other In another way, it's also too small an idea. Because Jesus is king over all. And one day everyone will recognize Jesus as the king. But that day has not come yet. And it comes more and more through the preaching of the word. And that is what we mean by faithful speaking. You need faithful speaking of the word in order to grow in grace and to know the truth. It's essential for your and my salvation. But you also, in addition to faithful speaking, need faithful listening. So Thessalonica shows us that the word is the content of a faithful message, but the church, not yet been established, but the believers in Berea show us that the word is the standard for faithful hearing. So you should hear this from me again and again. You only have to believe what the Bible teaches. If I say something the Bible doesn't teach, you have no responsibility to believe it. But if it is what the Bible teaches, then you should believe because it comes with God's authority. Berea is about 60 miles away from Thessalonica. And Paul again goes to the Jewish synagogue. but we see something different about those who are at this synagogue compared to those who are in Thessalonica. The ESV says they are more noble than those in Thessalonica, and that is a very common English translation, but it's a little bit vague. Instead of saying more noble, a better way to translate it is to say that these Jewish people in the synagogue in Berea showed the virtues of someone who's a well-bred, well-trained, well-educated person. They were more open-minded, and they were more receptive to what Paul had to say, and they were better disposed of the message. They didn't immediately shut down and say, I don't believe that. They were open to what was said. A way you can apply this is to think, I heard this from a Christian leader from the past who said, a mature Christian is easily edified. So if you go somewhere, maybe you come here and you think, well, that sermon's kind of a dud. Sometimes that happens. Hopefully it's not happening right now, but sometimes it does happen. Or you can go somewhere else and think, you know, this sermon is okay. Can you get something good and true and profitable from that? A mature Christian is easily edified. That's one way to be like the believers in Berea. to be open-minded, to be receptive, to be looking for the truth as it comes to you in a jar of clay. We see next that they did this, they received the word with eagerness. In other words, they didn't write it off right away. They were willing to hear. They were willing to have Paul proclaim this way to understand all the Old Testament scriptures in Jesus. They received it without prejudging what the message would contain. And maybe most importantly, after that, after they heard Paul, they didn't just take his word for it. They, it says, examined the scriptures daily. Now think about this. We sometimes easily jump to our own day And we examine the scriptures daily by taking down probably one of the many copies of the Bible we have in our houses or going onto our phones with our probably multiple Bible apps with access to any translation you could want. Or we go on our computer and we can type in any reference and find that in both Greek And every English translation and probably any non-English translation that we might need, that's what we think of when we think of examining the scriptures daily. But for the people in Berea, they did this in the synagogue. The synagogue was the only place where they had a copy of the scriptures. But they went there. And they studied and examined these things with care and intensity. They said, here's what this messenger said. Here is this new teaching he brought. Let's compare it to what the scriptures say and see if these things are true. Do you do that? I hope that you do that. Anything I say should bow in submission to what the scriptures say. And anything any pastor says should bail in submission to what the scriptures say. And so those in Berea were Bible readers. They read God's word. They were Bible meditators. They tossed these things around in their brains. They thought about them. They chewed them. They tried to digest them. And they were Bible believers. There's a difference between being a Bible believer and being a sermon believer or being a pastor or Christian leader believer. You should be first and foremost, a Bible believer. That is the standard. And it's the only standard. God's word is self-authenticating. Do you know what that means? It means God's word speaks for itself. And so we don't have to do a whole lot of introduction. Sinclair Ferguson, who's a famous Presbyterian pastor from Scotland, but for a long time served a church in South Carolina. I heard someone who served as an intern or an associate pastor with him, that when they did a scripture reading, they would often do these long, elaborate introductions to say, just so you know, what you're hearing now is God's word. Sinclair Ferguson after the service, gently because he's always very kind and gentle, said, you know, you don't have to do that. Just start reading because God's Word will do its own work. God's Word speaks for itself. It doesn't need a lot of intro, a lot of explanation. It has power because it's God's Word and the Holy Spirit works with that Word. So sometimes you might hear a scripture reading before when you do our Old Testament reading and think, well, how is this Relevant to the sermon and it's not we're reading through Isaiah. It's not planned to be relevant to the sermon necessarily But you might see connections and even if it's completely unrelated to what the sermon is about It's still God's Word and should be received and you should know it will do its work in you as it's applied by the Spirit and so you need to be Bereans and and have scripture as our authority, because do you see what the result is? In Thessalonica, some were persuaded, but in Berea, it says, many of them therefore believed. Do you see? That therefore is actually really important. As a result of the fact that they examined the scriptures daily to see if these things were so, many of them believed. And so, do you want to believe? Do you want to grow? in your understanding of the gospel? Do you wanna grow in grace? Do you want to grow in faith? Do you want your children to believe? Do you want the lost to believe? Well, you need the Bible. You need to be examining the scriptures daily. That's how God promises to work, and so it's a result. Many, therefore, because of these things, believed. You can see, even in Berea, where there was a great response and a great example of faithful listening, Paul, again, has to flee because the same agitators who made life miserable in Thessalonica have now heard that there's great fruit happening for the gospel in Berea, and they come, and Paul has to flee, this time by sea. But as the mission continues, as the story of Acts unfolds, I hope you see in these verses that when you put together proper preaching or faithful speaking with proper hearing or faithful listening, you get belief, you get faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. So let me ask you again, do you really believe that prayer from the Reformation that your whole salvation depends upon rightly understanding God's word? Well, if you believe it, then you should put it into practice by faithful speaking and faithful listening to not just the life application, which is good and important, and hopefully there's been some in this particular sermon, but to the story, the history of what God has done in Christ, to the doctrine of what that means for you, and then putting that into practice in your life. And again, it is all about Jesus. So the Word that comes to us in Scripture, the Word of God that you have a copy of in your own Bible, finds its ultimate meaning in the one who is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. The law came through Moses, but grace and truth comes to you and to me through Jesus Christ. Will you put your faith and trust in him? Will you hear him faithfully spoken about in good, solid, biblical preaching? And then will you faithfully listen? You might receive his renewing grace week in and week out. That is the way to believe, to come to life, to know eternal life, is knowing Jesus Christ whom God has sent. Will you join me now as we close in prayer Our gracious God, would you take your word and plant it in us? Our whole salvation depends upon rightly understanding your word, and we know how often we feel like we don't understand that word. So would you send us your spirit and apply this word to our hearts? May we search the scriptures daily to see if these things are true, because your word is our final authority. So would your word bear its fruit in our lives and in our families and in this church we pray, in Jesus' name, amen.