Well, we'll dive right into it now. So we are on, like I said, week three of our time beginning to look at the Westminster Confession of Faith. So we did two weeks of background info, learning about the Westminster Assembly and all the events leading up to the drafting of the Westminster Standards. And now we are just about to get into the confession, but not quite yet. So first, we're just gonna do a couple questions by show of hands. Who here thinks that in general, our society is in a good place morally or religiously? Okay, pretty much no one. And then who here then thinks that in general, our society is in a bad place morally or religiously? Okay, there we go. Everyone agrees on that. Well, I'm just gonna read out some quick statistics about religious beliefs among American evangelicals specifically. Eight in 10 Americans, this is just Americans in general actually, eight in 10 Americans say that religion is losing influence in public life. And I think we can see a lot of evidence of that being played out. Around four in 10 Americans say they have become more spiritual over the course of their lives, but not more religious. Fewer have become more religious. It's actually less, whatever spiritual versus religious means in the minds of the average American. And then according to a 2022 survey by Ligonier and Lifeway, so we would generally trust what's coming out of these ministries, 56% of evangelicals agree that, quote, God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It's over half, 56%. 38% of evangelicals agree that religious beliefs are a matter of personal opinion and not about objective truth. 73% of evangelicals, this is over, I mean, this is almost three quarters, really, agree that, quote, Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. 43% of evangelicals affirm that Jesus was a great teacher, but was not God himself. 60% of evangelicals say that the Holy Spirit is a force, but is not a personal being. 57% say that everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature. 43% of those same evangelicals agree that God learns and he adapts to different circumstances. 65% of evangelicals agree that everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. I've got more, but I'll stop there. And I don't have stats about everything. There were a number of ethical issues that I also thought of and just didn't gather statistics on. Of course, the rampant crime of abortion among us, the ever-increasing practice of cohabitation before marriage or instead of marriage, continuance of divorce even among Christians, and the list could go on and on. But why am I bringing all this up? Why are we going in this doom and gloom, statistics-based approach here? After all, we're a post-millennial church, aren't we? Everything's getting better. Well, of course everything's getting better in the long run. But there's a reason I'm bringing this up, even though we're studying a 400-year-old document, the Westminster Confession of Faith. But remember the context of why the Westminster Assembly was called and where this confession, what did it come out of? The government, the church, and society in general were all in this immense state of turmoil. There was very little peace and unity in the British Isles. And in pursuit of a solution to this bad situation that the Brits had found themselves in, Parliament called on the ministers of the Church to speak with clarity, to provide direction and unity, and to labor together through prayer and conversation to bring Christ's people back into obedience to His Holy Word. And so the Westminster Assembly, they met together, they prayed, they examined and ordained godly ministers, and they ultimately produced the five documents that collectively we know today as the Westminster Standards. And these standards, they weren't just guidebooks to be read only by pastors and to be kept in church studies and offices collecting dust. These standards were to be sent out and circulated among all Christians. Every rank and file Christian ought to have had in the British Isles a copy of the Westminster Standards in their home right underneath the Bible. And as an introduction to these standards, the Westminster Divines, that's what they call the ministers who met there at Westminster Abbey, the Divines added a brief letter to the Christian reader, especially heads of families. And that is the introductory letter to all five of the Westminster Standards. It's just headed with, to the Christian reader, especially heads of families. And then just a little bit later, there's another one that started to be added as well that a lot of copies of the Westminster Standards today have. Also, Thomas Manton, who was one of the men there at the Westminster Assembly, a very influential Puritan minister, he also added his own introduction that ended up getting circulated a lot as well. And his is generally referred to as Mr. Thomas Manton's epistle to the reader. So this is another reason, these two documents right here that are so important, this is another reason to have a good paper, bulky paper copy of the Westminster Standards. Like the one that I've showed y'all before, I'll show you one more time, this is my copy. Not only does this have the Westminster Confession of Faith in it, it has all four other standards documents. plus all the scripture quotations listed out in full, plus the two opening epistles and some other historical related documents. And these opening letters, I just want us to look at them briefly today. They're so helpful for us to read. And it's so easy when you open up a book, because you're ready to get into the book, or maybe you're not ready to get into it at all, but you're doing it for an assignment for a class or something, and you're like, well, we're studying chapter one this week, so I gotta get to chapter one, and you skip right past the introduction, but you're robbing yourself of so much when you don't read the introduction. Too often, even in my study and preparing for this, in all the books I have on the Westminster Confession of Faith, and almost everything I've looked up online, and in all the study classes that I've encountered, the minister or teacher or author just begins in chapter one of the Westminster Confession. But if we wanna get the most out of the confession and really understand the heart of the ministers that wrote this and the situation that's coming out of, we have to read the introductions. So whenever you open a book next, make sure you read the preface and introduction. You get a lot more out of the rest of the book if you understand where the author's coming from. So we're gonna look just briefly at a couple important elements from both of these opening letters. And just out of curiosity, has anyone here read one or both of these opening letters to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Okay, that's fine. It wasn't assigned. You don't have to do any homework to come to this class. I just didn't know how familiar we might be. Well, both the assemblies to the Christian reader, that's how it's generally referred, and Thomas Manton's Epistle to the Reader, both are very similar. They both are addressed to laymen, just to regular Christians. They're not fancy, jargon-laden things to ministers. They're to regular Christians. They're both very clear and practical. And they both bring to the reader's mind the same problem. And then after they bring up this problem, they offer the same solution. And this is important for us to understand. What's the problem? That's the first question. Well, we've talked about the political and ecclesiastical and social turmoil between England and Scotland and Ireland and Parliament and the King and the Episcopal party and the Presbyterian party and everyone. just seems to be at each other's throats. But these epistles go even deeper than that. They say that's the symptoms of what we're experiencing here in Britain right now, but what's the problem that's underneath these things? So I wanna read an excerpt here, and this is gonna give us an idea of what these divines thought the main problem was. As we cannot, but with grief of soul, limit these multitudes of errors, blasphemies, and all kinds of profaneness, which have in this last age, like a mighty deluge, overflown this nation, so among several other sins which have helped to open the floodgates of all these impieties, we cannot but esteem the disuse of family instruction, one of the greatest. That's what the divines thought was the underlying cause of everything that was going wrong in society was the disuse of family instruction. Or another way to put it is families were no longer worshiping together in their homes and reading and being shaped by and corrected by the word of God. The letter says, it looks like society is just absolutely crumbling before our eyes. Everything that our reformers built and recovered, it's just crumbling before us. We're losing it all in less than a hundred years here, 150 years. And they said, there's many things that's causing this. You can't point to only one problem, but maybe the greatest cause is that the families are no longer coming together around the dinner table in their homes and hearing what the voice of God would have for them that day. These same men, these ministers, these Westminster divines, they spent countless hours studying and discussing doctrine. They spent tons of time examining and ordaining young men for gospel ministry. They had written volumes and volumes on the Christian life. Thomas Manton's collected writings that have survived take up 25 large volumes of relatively small print. That's just one example. I mean, many of these ministers have written more than we'll read in a lifetime, some of them. They have baptized and confirmed countless children and adults. Most of them have master's degrees and some even have doctorates in a time when that was far less common than it is today. And you might think they had these fancy highfalutin answers that were just hard for the average man to reach to. But no, their answer to all these problems is very simple. At the end of the day, they say, you know how we could have prevented this societal collapse around us? Well, if families would just sit together every day and humbly look at God's Word and then diligently teach the doctrines contained therein to their children and to their servants, and if they would sing praise to God and pray to Him, then our nation would be in an entirely different state. We would be so blessed by God we wouldn't even know what to do with the blessing. We'd be overflowing with blessing. We would be a city set on a hill that all the other nations would be streaming to, to see what our great God had done among us. But alas, we've neglected this very basic, elementary means of grace, family worship. And I would submit to you that a revival of a sense of family religion, of catechizing our children in the Christian faith, of daily family worship, that's the exact same solution to our problems today. I think the Westminster Divines, Ecclesiastes, the preacher says, you know, there's nothing new under the sun. Things don't change. We're experiencing the same problems just in different iterations. They might look a little different, but the sin at the bottom is the same that they were experiencing 400 years ago. And the solution is always the same in every single age. We have to hear God's voice clearly, and then we have to obey. That's the solution, exact same solution that these Westminster divines put out. So all those statistics that I read earlier, which all of them or almost all of them were pure heresy. I mean, you can't even get around it. You can't soft pedal things like Jesus is not God or God can learn things. I mean, these are heretical teachings. You'll notice that I did not read a statistic about how many American evangelical families practice daily worship in their homes. I think there are a couple reasons why you don't see statistics about this. First, because like the Westminster Divines observed, lack of family worship isn't always as visible of a problem from the public perspective as other things like war or executing a king or just any type of absolute social immorality, a brothel opening up across the street from the church. These are very easily visible public issues. And I think, you know, family worship a lot of times, that's something that's in your home. It's not as out and loud and blaring as another country invading you. So it's not so much that family worship was always seen as a symptom that you can just point to. Ah, my nose is running. That's a symptom. Well, you don't always see the underlying cause. What's the underlying cause? Maybe you have a virus. And so one of the reasons I think we don't see the statistic is because those statistics are looking at symptoms. What we can easily see. This person doesn't believe Jesus is God. He just said it, you know. This teaching that the pastor is giving from the pulpit is totally contrary to God's word. Well, what's the underlying issue? And I think that the lack of family worship just today like it was then is the cause of so many of these doctrinal errors. And then secondly, the second reason that you don't see statistics in Pew Research or Barna Research or Ligonier Polls or whatever about the frequency of family worship is because most American Christians, believe it or not, don't even know that such a practice exists. There aren't many people here in this room that are over 25, but for anyone that is over 25, did you have family worship in your home? Elizabeth? No, John, Brittany? No, because it's just not, family worship is not a thing that happens in American homes these days. Whenever we've had people over for dinner that are kind of out of our circle, out of our main sphere of influence, and we have, we participate in family worship, and of course we invite them to participate with us. I mean, they think it's weird. It's foreign. It's a strange concept. Why would you do this? Why would you sit around the table and why would the dad read God's word? And then why would you all sing together? We only sing in the shower in my house. Why are you singing together publicly and open and loud? It's a foreign concept even among evangelicals. Now I did in my research, I didn't find anything about frequency of family worship, but I did when I was looking up just to get a glance at the state of religion in America, I did find surveys discussing how often families eat dinner together each week. And statistics varied, but generally the numbers were showing that families tend to eat half or fewer of their dinners together each week. So you can imagine if families are not eating their meals together, they're probably not prioritizing worshiping together. They're probably not finding time to do that. And many, another thing, many evangelical churches, even ostensibly conservative and reformed ones, don't believe that families should be worshiping together even in church. From my several years in seminary and being part of the Big Eva world, as Doug Wilson and some others call it, and from my time doing pulpit supply in a lot of various small churches of different denominations and talking to pastor friends throughout the country, I found that precious few churches don't segregate their congregations on Sunday morning. It's a very small amount of churches in America that don't split people up on Sunday morning based on how old they are. So once again, if families aren't eating dinner together and they're not worshiping together even at church once a week, They often have no category to understand what daily family worship would look like. So we in the American church are way behind the ball on this one. And it's very sad that the church has in many aspects lost this ancient and reformational and American practice of daily family worship. Our heritage as Americans has family worship as a key component of our founding. We were family worshipers, maybe more than any other nation at the time. Americans prioritized family worship in the 17th and 18th centuries. the Puritans, their descendants who settled America, they fully promoted and furthered this idea that the Reformers had recovered, they had been lost, of just sitting together and looking at God's Word together and letting God's Word shape how our family life is. In the Middle Ages, you see, the context that the reformers were coming out of was the Middle Ages, sometimes called the Dark Ages. The family was denigrated. Family was looked down upon as something just beneath the more elite classes of the world. Children were often not valued outside of the fact that they could be helpers on the farm or in the cottage industry, in the guild or in the shop. Sex was looked down upon as a necessary evil that hopefully you didn't have to participate in yourself, but thank the Lord someone was gonna take a bullet and, you know, continue the human race for us. And those that were regarded as the most pious Christians in the Middle Ages were the ones that remained unmarried virgins for their entire life. This type of thinking is a Gnostic evil. It's a denial that this earthly created world is good. It's looking at any part of what you can touch and see as something bad and something yucky, that this is just a place that we're in, we're trapped in for a period of time, but we really, if we want to be really holy, we need to just spend our time focused as much as we can only on the next life and deny everything as much as we can about this life that we're living right now. And I know in a lot of these issues I am preaching to the choir, but this is all so absurd. Our original mandate from God, our original creation ordinance, our command, sometimes called the dominion mandate or the culture mandate or the worship mandate, that original word from God that was repeated throughout scripture and is still in effect today is that a husband and a wife would come together, would be fruitful and multiply, would fill the earth and subdue it, and take dominion over every living thing on the face of the earth for the glory of God. And that was lost in the Middle Ages. But thankfully, in the Reformation, the glory and goodness of the family was restored to its proper place. Martin Luther and his fellow reformers absolutely shocked, and the Roman Catholics at the time would say scandalized the church when they got married. It was an unreal thing to be heard that a priest would get married. And remember, all of our reformers were Roman Catholic priests. Martin Luther was a Roman Catholic priest. John Calvin was a Roman Catholic priest. that they would get married, it just sounded crazy. It was absolutely bonkers to the Roman Catholic authorities and to society at the time. But what a grace of God that they were willing to do this. They were willing to put their lives on the line, not just for romantic love, though of course they loved their wives, but to restore the family to its proper place. As one historian put it, Luther restored the family to its place at the center of the universe. And each home was to be a garden wherein the good seed of the word of God was sown in the tender soil of children's souls. And they, these children be raised in the nurture and instruction of the Lord. So these pastors started getting married. What a crazy thing. And I'm sure some of their congregations wanted to come see what in the world this looks like. Who's ever heard of a married pastor? And today we think almost the opposite, like, oh wow, that pastor's single. What's wrong with him? Also a terrible way to think, okay? Paul's clear, there's nothing wrong with being married, there's nothing wrong with being single. But these pastors. They're leaders, they're shepherds. They love the word of God. They have access to the word of God that the layman didn't have access to in the middle ages. So they begin having daily family worship in their homes. And they are the ones, Luther and Calvin and those like them, who really started to reinvigorate what it was to have a Christian home life that worships God daily. And so, they were restoring this ancient practice that had been lost for centuries. And I think that's what we, it hasn't been lost that long for us, but it's what we need to do again. We need to restore this practice that Luther rediscovered. So here's a question. What are the components of family worship? When I've said this word family worship like a hundred times, what does that mean? You can just raise your hand or say if something's on your mind, what do you think family worship is? Absolutely, reading the Bible together. That's number one. It's so important, hearing the voice of God. What else? Benjamin? Preaching? Yeah, like if daddy instructs and I talk about what God's word says and apply it to your lives, that's right. What else do we do? We look at God's word. We sing, that's right. I was gonna say, how do we respond to God's word? We sing and we? Pray, that's right. So I think that's basically, if you wanna boil it down, family worship is when we come before God as a family, we read his word, we talk about his word and apply it to our lives, we sing and we pray. And the assembly's letter to the Christian reader, after saying that the cause of much of our degradation as a society, as a whole, was the loss of family worship, says the solution is twofold. This is basically the whole of this letter. It says, here's the problem, and then the solution is twofold. So he says, first, remember this is written to heads of families. First, heads of families need to ensure that they themselves know the Lord truly and know his word. Because if you don't know the word of the Lord and you don't know Jesus Christ, how can you lead others to him? It would be the blind leading the blind. This is what Richard Baxter also says in his wonderful book, The Reformed Pastor. He says, if you wanna be a godly minister, number one priority is making sure you know the Lord. You can't lead your sheep if you don't know the Lord. You can't feed your sheep if you don't have any food yourself. So that's number one thing. And then secondly, The second solution to this problem is that parents and masters must ensure that those in their families know the Lord and his word. It's super simple. I mean, this is not a complicated metric here. Society is crumbling before us. Why is that happening? Families have stopped worshiping together. How do we fix this? Make sure the dads know the Lord and make sure they know how to teach their children. Because even if a father does know the word of God and has a true living faith in him, what if you might think, what if he's just not gifted in teaching? What if he's not a great reader? What if he's poor and doesn't have access to many books? Well, there's a solution for that as well that the divines are putting forward. They say, after the Bible, you just need to take these two catechisms and this confession of faith, and you need to walk through these with your families. Or if you run into a question and your child asks something you don't know, you need to look through and see if there's an answer. What if your child says, you know, what are the decrees of God? Maybe he heard you say that phrase at some point when reading the confession or reading the Bible. Oh, I don't know. Let me look real quick. Give daddy just a moment. Oh, there's a there's a question the catechism about it or children ask these wonderful questions like what is God? We touched on that last week. How do you answer a question like that? What is God? Oh, okay. The catechism says God's a spirit eternal and unchangeable. you go to these things. So the Westminster Divines were saying, we wanna empower families. We wanna empower fathers. We don't want you to have to be relying on only once a week hearing a priest who, at this time, we might not even know what type of doctrine he's teaching. We want you to have the Word of God in your homes, and then when you get into confusing parts about the Word of God, or your children are asking questions, we want you also to have this confession of faith and these catechisms, which is to say, boil down easily systematized grouping of all the doctrines taught in Scripture. So these were not tools just for the high-learned, pious ministers with all these degrees. These were written primarily for families to read and study and be instructed and teach their children. See, they knew that the problem was massive and touching every area of society, but they knew that it had to begin at, the solution had to begin at the root. The family is the foundation, is the building block of everything else in the world. It's the building block of the church. It's the building block of the government. Without family, you don't have anything. It's been said before, I think, So goes the family, goes society, and so goes the father, goes the family. So we have to go to the heads of the families first and get them squared away with the Lord. And then we'll trust that will permeate to their children. And then by the time those children are raised up, you won't just have one man who's learned the word of God. You might have six or seven or eight godly young men and women who can then go influence society for the good of the kingdom. Now, the original introductory epistle that the assembly wrote, that was addressed, like I said, to the Christian reader, especially heads of families. We're talking a lot about the role of the father here. Every husband and father is responsible for the spiritual state of his family. That's why, for instance, a man cannot be an elder in the church if he has children who turn away from the faith. And that is a requirement that if you want to be a pastor and elder, your children have to be believers. The man is responsible. But we cannot forget the role of mothers here either. I cannot forget the role of mothers. While it's in many ways virtually impossible to out-influence a father, even if the father's not present, even if you never meet your father, the influence of his absence is gonna do more things than anyone can possibly imagine or exactly quantify. It's impossible to out-influence a father, but a mother's influence and responsibility in the home is massive. as well, it's huge. It's often godly mothers who are responsible for the faithfulness and knowledge of their children in a major way. We can, I'm sure, recall many stories, maybe people you know, maybe yourself, or people we've heard about from church history whose lives were shaped and impacted crucially by the mother's faith. Think about from the Bible, Timothy. Who does Paul say that Timothy learned the true and living faith from infancy from? It was his mother and his grandmother. His father wasn't a believer. This was a man that was drawn up into apostolic ministry, who was a pastor, who was a faithful minister of God's word. And he had that from childhood, but not from his dad. It was from his mom. Think of other famous church history heroes, Augustine. who was saved, as far as we can tell, by God answering his mother's prayers for years and years and years that her son would turn back to the faith. He had wandered far. He had loved the world. He had loved profane things, and his mother was praying and praying and praying for years, and God answered her prayers and brought Augustine back to the faith, or John and Charles Wesley who point to their mother Susanna as why they turned out to be ministers of the gospel. This is super interesting because their dad was a pastor. They said, well, primarily it was the influence of the mother on our lives. Someone still living today, it's not only dead people, someone that I really look up to and admire and who has done an enormous amount of work on family worship specifically is Joel Beeky. Joel said he one time, he's an older man now, his parents are with the Lord, But he said he overheard when he was younger, a younger adult, someone asked his dad, how did your children all turn out so well? They're all following the Lord. They're all devoted to his kingdom. And his dad, who was a pastor as well, his dad's answer was the prayers of their mother. The prayers of their mother. What an impact a mother can make. Thomas Manton in his epistle to the reader says this, and I think he's actually quoting Richard Baxter here. He says he's quoting someone else, but he doesn't mention who. He's talking about the requirement of instructing your children in the faith. He says, especially women should be careful of this duty because as they are most about their children and have early and frequent opportunities to instruct them, so this is the principal service they can do to God in this world. being restrained from more public work. And doubtless many an excellent magistrate hath been sent into the commonwealth, and many an excellent pastor into the church, and many a precious saint to heaven through the happy preparations of a holy education, perhaps by a woman that thought herself useless and unserviceable to the church. He says, even women who maybe they don't see how they could have a public role in anything, and maybe they don't see how they could influence anything outside of their little home. The saints that they are preparing for glory, the magistrates they are preparing to rule the kingdom well, the pastors that they are preparing to shepherd God's flock. That is an enormous thing that women have a role in doing. So don't make the big mistake of thinking that women have nothing to offer the church. simply by virtue of the time they spend with their children, they're often the primary teachers of God's word and Christian doctrine to the next generation. So fathers and mothers both have to take upon themselves the task of instructing the children in the faith. You know, we get together and we've talked as a congregation and me and John and David as elders, and I'm sure we've all thought, oh, the world is such a mess. How do we fix this? We know our role in God's kingdom isn't just to sit and pray all day and to study God's word all day. What are some concrete steps we can take to beat back those gates of hell that we have a promise will not prevail against our assaults? What are we gonna do? I think the number one thing we can do is to teach our children to know and love and obey the Lord Jesus Christ. My previous pastor, Andy Davis, said that a major element of his job that he was convicted about as a pastor was to prepare his people for eternity. I think that we parents should have the same attitude. Prepare our children for eternity. Of course, it's our job to prepare our children for life here and now, but we should be preparing them for life here and now in light of eternity. We should be teaching them things like how to build a house or how to ride a bike, how to repair a car, how to cook a meal. But all that has to be shaped by the light of eternal truths. It's not that we focus on heaven and we're so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good. In fact, we should be so heavenly minded that we should be far more earthly good than anyone else who's not anticipating about the glories of Jesus Christ. It should influence everything and redeem every aspect of our lives. And we should, we have to restore this idea that God is calling us to obedience and to faith through every area of our life. And that it's our role as fathers and mothers to teach our children how to do all that they do for the glory of God and for the advance of his kingdom. So for the sake of our own souls and for our souls of our children, and for the sake of our society and our nation and our world, I think this is the answer that the Westminster Divines gave us, and it's the exact same answer we need today. We have to restore the practice of biblical family worship. All right, that's pretty much the lecture. What questions do we have? Benjamin, you have a question? Absolutely, we ought to, that's right. What else? Any questions at all? Or James, I'm confused. I think you went off the rails on this one. Any type of... pushback or comment? Yes. I'll make a comment. I just think of when this was, uh, Westminster Assembly was in the 1640s. That's right. And I so often think of that period of time as kind of a high watermark in Western civilization. Um, the, the, the height of the Reformation, kind of the high watermark because after that time, uh, things began to more visibly fall apart and go downhill. And it's just interesting to hear those men saying in the 1640s, talking about the mess they were in. Exactly. Yeah, it's just it's, I don't know, maybe almost surprising, but yeah, but but not because they weren't comparing their world Well, maybe they were comparing to how it was a hundred years before. I don't know. They were probably comparing it to what they felt like it should be. Yes. Yes. But it sounds like that with family worship, it sounds like they were saying, hey, 50 or 60 years ago, this was more of a regular practice. Yes. It does sound like they're really saying that. I think so. But the decline doesn't become visible in English society nearly as much until the late 1600s and early 1700s in terms of being publicly visible to clients. Right. A departure from orthodoxy becomes greater. Charles I has not even been, or Charles II has not even been executed yet when the Westminster Assembly is working on this. He gets executed partway through their task. It is interesting, I've thought the same thing, you know, that we look back to this time as a wonderful time, and they thought there was a lot of bad stuff going on. I mean, remember, one third of the ministers that met at Westminster had spent significant time in jail. One third. Think about like a Reform Denomination Day. Think about, say we took like the OPC, How many of their pastors have been put in jail for being faithful to God's word? Probably a single digit number, if I had to guess, but a third of these ministers. And I think it was Doug Wilson once, he was talking about, someone was challenging him on post-millennialism, and they said, well, Christ promises that we'll suffer. And he said, you're right, but we're gonna conquer through our suffering. And I think that's what we see the Puritans doing here. They suffered, but they conquered by their suffering. Look at the legacy they've given to us today. I can't remember who it was, maybe Justin Martyr, I don't recall, said, you know, the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church, you know? So as one generation is being persecuted, you don't know when the fruit's gonna come. You know, you might plant a fruit tree, and you might have to wait 30 years to get your first fruit off of it. And I just wonder, maybe even, are we going to, in our lifetime, perhaps see a revival that was planted? in these Puritans works. I don't know, you know, but you're right. It is interesting to think that they, they had, and the Puritans were all post-millennial too. They had this immense optimism to where the future was going, to what God was doing in his kingdom. But also they had a real, our society is kind of doom and gloom. Look at how far we've departed from what God would call us to. And so I don't think you have to pick one or the other. You don't have to just be the, Everything's bright and rosy, nor do you have to be, you know, the white polished brass on a sinking ship type. You've got to be realistic, trusting God's promises and also being realistic with where they are in fulfillment in the world. But that is an interesting comment. I thought that too when I was preparing. Anything else? All right. Okay, let's take some prayer requests.