03-30-24 Afternoon - Russell Stendal

Many Christians are tempted to go back to legalism instead of embracing grace. The old covenant seems appealing because it is based on what we can do, but the new covenant relies on what only God can do. Some people try to turn the new covenant into the old by treating the New Testament as law and distilling it into principles. However, the new covenant works through God changing us from the inside out. The mention of elders in the Gospels is negative, and it takes time to develop mature elders. Meetings are not essential for the work of God, as demonstrated by the growth of the church in areas where meetings were prohibited. Different types of meetings are described in the scriptures, and forcing young people to attend meetings where God is not present can push them away. The testimony of parents and spiritual leaders is crucial in inspiring young people to seek a practical relationship with God. Young people should not be segregated into separate groups, but rather encouraged to come There have been a lot of Christians that, one way or another, want to go back to the old covenant. It doesn't have to be two wives, it could be something else that would trigger their return to legalism instead of grace. And there's a lot of Christian preachers that like to live with one foot in legalism and the other foot in grace. It doesn't work. And the revelation won't be clear. Also, the Galatians, if you go back into legalism, Jesus' redemption, the whole work on the cross, everything that sets the foundation for the new covenant will not apply. Somebody wants to go back into legalism? If you break even one element of the law, you're guilty of the whole law. And no one was ever able to fulfill the law except for Jesus. The old covenant seems so enticing because it's filled with stuff that we can do. But the new covenant is full of things that only God can do. Well, how do people turn the new covenant into the old covenant? One way is treating the New Testament as if it were law, that we could somehow distill it to principles and keep by ourselves. So have you ever been there and had somebody preach the New Testament where they want to distill it into principles and values? And they're going to glean all these principles and values out of the New Testament to teach us how to live? And it all seems wonderful because these principles and values seem like they're good. But that's not the way the new covenant works. The new covenant works with God changing us from the inside out so that we have a change in nature and a change in motivation to do His will. And the New Testament is full of examples of what God was doing by the Holy Spirit. And if the Holy Spirit isn't doing the same thing with us, we won't be able to do it. Oh, so we're going to have some meetings. Well, yeah, I guess we're going to have meetings. We better have some deacons and some elders. So let's read in the New Testament how we can set in some deacons and some elders. So we can read about when Paul wrote to Timothy the Titus about setting in deacons and elders. Sometimes they're called bishops. But if God isn't doing that now with us, almost we should get the wrong people. I've watched the New Testament so many different times. I've watched the New Testament when I was a more junior person in the ministry and there were people way more senior than me doing stuff like this. And I would say they missed God about 90% of the time on who they wanted to sit. And then once you set the wrong person in as an elder, how do you get them back out without creating a worse mess? Or maybe even losing the person. And I think I'm looking really closely at how this all happened in the New Testament. In the four Gospels, all of the mentions of elders in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are 100% negative. It's all talking about Jewish elders that couldn't even recognize God Himself when He came. Not only didn't recognize Him, but acted opposite to the point where they killed Him. And yet these were the elders. Elders in the Scripture means government. In the Hebrew, the word elders, plural, is a totally different word than the word elders. It's not even related linguistically. And the elders of the people, if we're going to word it properly, had to be ordained by God, but they also had to be accepted by the people as their leaders. In order for it to all work. And the elders in the Gospels, apparently were accepted by the people because they were called the elders, but they weren't ordained by God to be elders. And in the ministry of the Book of Acts, in the beginning of the Book of Acts, they had the apostles. And then pretty quick time, they had the deacons that they commissioned to wait on the table and divvy up what was going to be sent to the widows and orphans and so on. So that the apostles could concentrate on the ministry. But there's no mention of elders in the Book of Acts. Until you're over a third of the way through the book. And the first mention of elders is when Paul came with a big offering to Jerusalem to help the Christians in Jerusalem who were going through a hard time. And these elders received it and received the offering. It doesn't say where they came from. Or how they got to be elders. It just, all of a sudden, they were there. But for about the first ten years in the church, they weren't there. Or at least not mentioned in the church. And if we look at Paul's first missionary journey with Barnabas. Barnabas being the senior apostle and Paul being the junior apostle. And their trip was mainly to Jewish congregations. And it says they appointed elders every place that they went. Well, the Jews were used to operating under elders. In their synagogues. But don't you think it's interesting that when Paul got to be the senior apostle. And went on his next journey. He didn't appoint any elders. Not even once. And then years later, after he'd been to some places two or three times. Sometimes he spent two or three years in a given place. He never appointed elders personally. He sent Timothy or Titus to do it afterwards. Why would that be? Do you think it's because maybe they took ten years to develop some real elders? Which elders means mature. And it's scripts to the word mature and word perfect and perfective is the same word. So if there's anything I've learned of being a junior person in ministry. And working with a lot of over the years very well known ministers. And watching them make some really horrendous mistakes. Where I was like sitting on the front row watching this happen. But not with enough seniority to actually be able to do anything about it. Other than learn to never do anything like that myself. But I learned to not be in a hurry to appoint elders. Oh but we gotta have elders because otherwise we can't have a meeting. Well who says we even have to have meetings? For 50 years the guerrillas didn't allow meetings. Christian meetings of any sort in the areas they controlled. Just like North Korea. Wanted to totally stamp out all nations of God. Even two people saying to him in the home. They'd get a warning and if they didn't quit they'd get killed. But did going 50 years ago mean that that stopped the work? No. No it didn't. Eventually the gospel overcame all of that. Those congregations that were doing all that they're not there anymore. And all those places where they prohibited meetings and church buildings and home meetings. It's all full of believers now. And what if we couldn't have meetings? Well we started radio broadcasts. And we started dropping books and Bibles and solar powered radios on these places. And God started reaching out to people in the nation and getting them converted. And yeah the first ones that said they were Christians they all got shot. But after a while so many people got converted that they couldn't shoot them all. Maybe try to get them spread out in different places so they couldn't get together. And they just spread the Bible all over the place and finally brought down their whole system. See our idea even of meetings isn't always central to God's. The scriptures describe at least three different kinds of meetings. One is the meeting right here where one person is giving a message to a group of people. Like when Jesus gave a sermon on the mount or like when Paul preached online and somebody fell out of a third story window and had to be resurrected. But there is also a meeting about a congregation meeting in a home. A lot of references to that and to sharing. Each one what God puts on their heart to share. So that's a different kind of meeting. And then there's a third kind of meeting. And that's like the meeting that David was talking about this morning. When these two disciples were on the road so they had some trouble. They met this third person, didn't realize it was the Lord. And they had this tremendous amount of trouble between the three of them. There's spontaneous meetings that come apart. It can happen anywhere. And it doesn't have to be more than two or three people. It can be very unifying. And the more unifying the meeting the less human control. Normally. And if somebody gets it in their head that they've got the answer, they've got the model. Back in... I mean how many different models do you think there are out there of church liturgy? Or order of service? And none of that's sold out in the scriptures. And maybe the first time they did it it was fun and they did it. But maybe after repeating it for thousands of times in that same way. You come to a meeting where people felt guilty that they didn't show up. But God is no longer there. So the point is if God doesn't show up, why should we make our young people show up? Because if we do, if we force our young people to go to meetings where God isn't there. If God isn't there. They're going to get vaccinated against means. And as soon as they're able to impose their will, they may not ever come back. And lots of churches have lost their young people doing that. So here's one way to say that we're not going to make our young people go to meetings. I mean if somebody never comes to a meeting, who will have a talk with them by the time... We're not going to be invited and cracking wood to make sure every young person is in every meeting. And the key to holding the young people has been the testimony of the parents and of the spiritual leaders of the congregation. Because when the parents are in touch with the Lord, and when the leadership is in touch with the Lord, it stirs genuine questions in the hearts of the young people. And they begin to have the desire to have that same kind of a practical relationship with God. So another thing that we've done is to not segregate out young people. Not have the youth group, and the women's group, and the men's group. Not that God can't bless that in some places, but we've chosen not to do that because we want to see everyone come together and take a look. So we get involved in things where everybody gets involved. Everything from 4, 5, 6 year olds all the way up to 8 year olds, all working together on the same thing. And then there can be an impartation from the godly elders into the children and the young people. Where if you isolate them off, oh these young people are bothering us, so let's put them in a separate meeting and hire a youth pastor to entertain them. And that might seem to work for a while, but it doesn't seem to lead to a high level of commitment on the part of the young people. So we've been in churches that have lost 90-95% of the young people. And we've also now seen experience going for decades without losing a single young person to the world. Not even when they go to a foreign country to study or something in a secular university. They come back stronger in the Lord. Because they've had to depend more on Him. So it isn't us coming up with a plan or a program that if we can just make them do it, they're going to be okay. No, that won't do it. If you force young people into religiosity, I mean you can occasionally have a young person that thrives because they love the Lord and they've surrendered to the Lord and they've had a great relationship with the Lord no matter what happened in the church environment. But what tends to happen is you get a lot of rebels and then you get a few Pharisees. And as the generation moves to the next generation, the congregation, church in general, becomes weak. Until now we have congregations all over the world, particularly here in North America, where there's nobody under the age of 40 even in the service. And the older saints are dying off and these churches are closing their doors. It finally gets to the point where they can't even pay the heating bill. And it's because they haven't held on to the young people. And sometimes it's because they're going to overprotect the young people, sometimes it's because they have a mold that they want to put the young people into. But it's really essential for each person, as young of age as possible, to have their own direct relationship with the Lord. And if they're hearing from God, God is going to be saying some challenging things. God's going to be inspiring them to do things out of the ordinary. That to some it's going to seem foolhardy or ridiculous or downright dangerous. Our oldest daughter, when she was 14 years old, decided she wanted to study, finish her high school at a Christian community in Alaska. And we live in Bogota, Colombia. And her mother's reaction was, no, she's too young. But I thought, you know something, she wants to do this right now. She's so motivated. And if we hold her back until we think she's ready, she might not want to do something like that. I said to my wife, I think we should let her go. And so we did. We let a 14-year-old go to the middle of Alaska, 14 years old, as a senior in high school. Because she'd studied hired and correspondence and she'd gotten ahead. And I had told her she could have freedom for her senior year, whatever she wanted to do. And that's what she wanted to do. And that, going to Alaska, which ended up that senior year of high school and two years of college, was the making of her. If we would have tried to keep her with us in Colombia, I think we might have lost her. And the Lord sent her back and set the stage for all kinds of things that she was going to do in the future. They entered her into competition in Alaska, in debate and drama, and she ended up second in the nation in cumulative points. And then she would have been first in the nation, which she probably should have been, but they gave that to some homosexual guy in the national finals. Then she would have won a scholarship to go where she would have wanted to, and we might have lost her there, too. So she did end up going to Hollywood, which was her dream. And Hollywood wouldn't have been the right place for her. Later on, the head of the New York Film Academy, where she eventually took some training, said, You're as talented as anyone I've ever seen, he said, but don't go to Hollywood. It's totally corrupt, and it's overpriced. He said, we'll be glad to help you and train anyone you need, but go back to Colombia and make your films there, which is what she did. We haven't come out economically so far in any of these films, but we've come out spiritually. The first movie they did about some of the things that happened in our ministry with the gorillas has been seen now, it's been downloaded I think over 25 million times off of YouTube, without us making a single cent. But on these trips out into these difficult areas, like one where we got pulled over by a bunch of armed Indians that had blocked off the road and were threatening everyone, the minute they realized who I was, they took off their masks and they all wanted to have their pictures taken with me, and the chief handed me a staff of authority. Then I had to worry about what would happen if one of those pictures got loose in the newspaper to the government, because then they'd think I was the leader of the whole armed uprising. But the Lord has given us ways like this of piercing through what the devil's been doing, and coming out on top. You never know what's going to happen. For some reason the Lord's kept us safe in the middle of very dangerous circumstances, and not only us, but our children, our young people, and other people used to say, well, Les has got a special on owning, but tell all the young people, don't do what he's doing, don't tell him you're going to get killed. But now there's hundreds of people doing the same kind of thing, and God's been protecting all of them. We had a group of young people who were going to go with me out to a guerrilla camp, where the guerrillas had become open to the gospel and were receiving the Lord, and so I was going to take a group of young people out there and minister to them and give them some more literature. And we had to make sure that the young people were all 18 years old or older, because we didn't want a liability issue if something went wrong. Anyway, one young man missed the bus. He got there after we'd already taken everybody on the bus. Well, he took his box of literature and got on another bus going another direction and went out and found some guerrillas that nobody had contacted yet, and evangelized them. And the Lord took care of them. Faith comes by hearing, and the ear to hear by the Word of God. And when we start hearing personally from God, that brings us into another dimension. And if there's an atmosphere or overprotective parents or leadership that won't let young people move forward according to what they're hearing from God, it will stunt their spiritual growth or maybe even abort it. Now, it is necessary to make sure that they really are hearing the real voice of God, because there's other voices out there. And so how can we make sure we're really hearing the voice of God and that it's really going to foment true faith in God? It takes commitment to the Lord in order to be able to discern the true voice of God. Because unless we're committed to God, He won't fully deal with our hearts. And unless He deals with our heart, our discernment will be off. So it boils down to the level of commitment. And the interesting thing is, the younger the child, the more likely they are to totally trust God. That's why Jesus said, unless you come as a little child, you can't come. You have to enter the kingdom as a little child. Little children go with their heart. And as we move forward in the kingdom, and as the heart of God comes forth more and more in us, our mind will start coming up with all kinds of reasons of why what God's putting in our heart isn't for us. The vision that God's putting in our heart, as we embrace it, our mind will say, no, that's too expensive. We'll never have the money to do that. It's too dangerous. It's too time-consuming. It's this or it's that. There will be a constant bombardment in our mind. The devil has a lot of capabilities in terms of being able to bombard our minds. But if our heart is set on God, and if God puts His heart in us, the devil can't mess with that. We can reach a place in our Christian walk where the devil doesn't have access to our heart. But we're always going to have thoughts bombarding our mind. Jesus struggled in Gethsemane when He was making the decision whether or not to go to the cross. There were thoughts there, you know something, is there an easier way? Could this be done some other way? And His disciples slept through the whole thing. Probably the most critical time in human history of where Jesus needed somebody to be backing Him up in prayer. And they slept through the whole thing. If He would have decided not to go to the cross, it would have been an absolute disaster, not only for the disciples, but for the rest of us too. And so when God puts things in our heart that don't seem feasible to our mind, and if we go with our heart instead of with our mind, He'll see us through and there'll be a tremendous victory. We can embrace what God's saying, go forward with it, as long as our heart is right with God. If there's something wrong with our heart, if we've got some other goal or some other desire or we're doing something that we know that God doesn't like, then there's no guarantee that we'll be able to zero in on the voice of God exclusively. And there are people that hear a little bit from God and then they hear a little bit from some other voice. And Scripture says that people like that are unstable in all their ways. James says they're like getting tossed around by every wind of doctrine. If you've ever, you know, been at sea in a sailboat, the wind can be coming from one way and then it can switch to another way. You can have waves coming from all different ways and the biggest conglomeration of water, you know, going every which way and pounding the boat. Confusion. Oswald Chambers said you can't reason your way out of spiritual confusion. You can only obey your way out of it. And so if you're spiritually confused and if you can zero it down to take a step of something you know for sure is what God wants you to do. And you start doing that, you'll eventually exit the confusion. But you're probably going to have to go against some of the ideas that are coming through your mind. Especially ideas saying it's too dangerous, it's too expensive, it's too time consuming and so on. And when we go through these experiences and come out on top because we can see that it was God all the way through. And normally when you're going to do something for the Lord and the devil's putting up a smokescreen, by the time you get to the real dangerous part, you've already seen the hand of the Lord enough to where you just keep going and you know He's going to carry you through. Columbia has been notoriously violent and we've had all kinds of people trying to control the roads and kidnapping people, extorting people, shooting people. Columbia has been notoriously violent and we've had all kinds of people trying to control the roads and kidnapping people, extorting people, shooting people. And so I went through a time, you know, where you know that God wanted us to go out into some of these areas and do stuff. And then so I would, you know, be praying like crazy and then kind of sense a lull in the circumstances and then make a run for it. But after a while, the Lord showed me something that I hadn't thought of. And that is that those violent people out there, no matter if they were common delinquents or if they were armed guerrillas or if they were paramilitary forces or corrupt law enforcement people, whoever they might be, the Lord showed me they were way more afraid of me than I was of them. And really it wasn't even afraid of me, they were afraid of the Lord getting a hold of them. So I'd send words to these guys that I wanted to meet with them and then I'd go out there and they'd disappear, they'd hide. So the only way to meet with them is you had to kind of go out there in the middle of their place and create enough of an incident enough to where they would have to show up. So then it was me egging them on instead of the other way around. And I began to feel the real authority that's there in Christ. And again, you don't want to go out and do stuff that's stupid, but in the midst of being prudent, one Christmas Eve I wanted to go up in the mountains and meet with a very notorious guerrilla commander. And I'd have to go through some police roadblocks, some army roadblocks, some right-wing paramilitary roadblocks, and then there was a no-man's land full of cow and delinquents who were just awful. And so I decided I'm going to go out there the night of Christmas Eve, figuring that everybody would be doing something else. And so to wait for the timing, there was a little hotel outside of town that we'd use from time to time. So I went out there and stayed there waiting for the timing to be right so that this gang of cow and delinquents wouldn't get me. Well, it turned out there was another guy in the hotel. He had his mother and he had some of his relatives, and he was also celebrating Christmas Eve. And so there was a big TV there and a video player, so I put our movie on, Mamontania. And the guy was deeply intrigued with it. And then the end of the movie, he burst into tears. He was the leader of the group of delinquents that I was trying to avoid. And the Lord got a hold of him. So it's hard to explain, but once you get into being led step by step by the Lord, it just keeps going. It goes and goes and goes and goes. Unless you start doing things that are displeasing to the Lord, in which He can lift His hand. And if that ever happens, you just have this awful feeling come over you, and the peace of God leaves. And then the solution is to find out what it is that the Lord doesn't like and get it straightened out. But our life has been, ever since my oldest daughter was born, and she's 41, that was kind of a market that the Lord put in our life, where He showed me that it is possible to live in victory. And yeah, you know, there's been a few times the Lord has had to show us something, or we've had to learn something the hard way. But basically, those 41 years have been continuous victory, just on a continuous roll. And sometimes there's a lot of meetings, and sometimes there isn't. Sometimes there's a lot of Bible study, and sometimes there isn't. Sometimes things go one way, and then the Lord makes a change, and it goes another direction. Jesus' method of evangelism was different than what our modern conception of evangelism is. In other words, Jesus didn't give altar calls. Jesus didn't ask people to raise their hands when everybody's heads are bad and every eye was closed. Jesus never had somebody repeat a sinner's prayer after Him. And He never told His disciples to do any of that when He sent them out. He sent them out, and He said, if they receive you, they receive Me, and if they receive Me, they receive My Father who sent Me. And He put it really clear when He said, Anyone who receives even this little child in My name, receives Me. And anyone who receives Me, receives My Father who sent Me. And we had that happen as little kids. We were little kids when we went to the mission field. And the people didn't trust our parents, but they didn't mind us little kids. And so we'd be running around out in these dangerous areas, and we're on our way right into the people's hearts, and people would receive us. The Lord would get His foot in the door, and next thing they'd receive our parents too. Most of these difficult people got evangelized, whether they were guerrillas, whether they were mafia people, or death squads, or corrupt law enforcement. But change came when they received us. And everybody knew what we stand for, everybody knows, because we're on the radio, because there's all these books out, and movies, and the Lord's just given us a way that the average person knows what we stand for. And so, when we show up in one of these areas, they either receive us or they don't. And if they receive us, God starts working in their lives. It's that simple. It isn't a religious thing at all. And we haven't really felt compelled to start a bunch of meetings. Although when we get there, and there are people that are doing meetings, and we see that we can come alongside them and be of some benefit or some blessing, that's what we do. But we haven't tried making our own meetings, except for just a few times before we wanted to preach messages for the radio and have a clean audience. But we've let other people be the ones to do the meetings, and we've let the Lord be the one to do the meetings, because He's the one that can congregate people in somebody's home. He's the one that can bring people together by the side of the road. I don't know how many times I've been driving down the road, and some police captain or detainee or army officer will stop me, and then he realizes who I am, and he says, you know, are you in a hurry? Would you mind giving a message to my man? I'll form him here under the trees, you know. No, I'd be delighted to, and we've got a case of Bibles here we can pass out to him. And so, those are very effective times. Sometimes way more effective than stuff we could try and line up in advance. And so we just flow with what the Lord... Sometimes things get lined up way in advance, and sometimes they don't. And sometimes we're back in the middle of nowhere, with some of the most feared and dangerous people you can imagine, and they receive us. So there aren't any... Jesus put it like this. In the book of Revelation, he said that he's the one that has the key of David. And that when he opens, no one can close. And when he closes, no one can open. And that's what we want. We don't want to be going through doors that he doesn't want us to go through. I've been through a few open doors that turned out it wasn't God, it was the enemy that opened. And boy, can that get ugly and waste an awful lot of time. So we want to be going through the doors that Jesus opens for us, and we want him to know that we trust him to close the doors if it isn't the right door for us to be going through, or the right time. And so we're moving through these areas, and there's all kinds of things erupting every which direction, but the Lord's got his hand on us. Not too long ago, I thought I was going to take a hundred Bibles over to a friend of mine who had rounded up a hundred pastors, and none of them had a Bible. But we couldn't get there. Everything we tried, we couldn't get there, and we ended up somewhere else. And we ended up into a church of a couple hundred believers, where only the pastor had a Bible. So that's where we left the hundred Bibles. Then we went back later and did a conference where all these pastors didn't have a Bible. And by the time we got there to the conference, something like 500 pastors were at the conference. We helped them build a building about this size. It's a lot cheaper down there. If you really put the chairs in there, you could fit about 500 or 600 people in there. And the last meeting we had, which was in December, the women all sit on one side and the men all sit on the other side, and only invited pastors and elders. And there were about 500 or 600 people inside the building and another couple hundred people outside. So none of them want to help. They want to knock out the back wall and make the place 50% bigger. Venue is to that place. And so it goes. The real Holy Spirit is contagious. Very contagious. And when things get going wrong and wrong spirits get in there and wrong attitudes, and it starts going against the Holy Spirit, you can get to the point where God may withdraw. But when things get going right, it gets real contagious. And it goes all over the place. And that's what's happening in Venezuela right now. But it was preceded by the Venezuelan pastors and Christians being greatly humbled. Because for a few years it was all they could do to keep from starving to death. It was all the pastors could do to, you know, if somebody in their family, in their church had enough food for two or three meals a day, would they be willing to share with people who didn't have any food? And the pastors spent most of their time just making sure that their congregations didn't physically starve to death. And they didn't have Bibles. And if they did, they would write the scriptures on the blackboard and people would copy them in notebooks until the situation got so bad you couldn't get a sheet of paper in the whole country for years. Couldn't buy a notebook, couldn't get any writing paper, nothing. So then they'd write the verses on the blackboard and the people would memorize them. And so they trained pastors memorizing scripture with nobody having any Bibles. And those pastors are sincere. And they know a lot of scripture by heart. And they greatly treasure it when they finally get a Bible. And the Lord has multiplied them like rabbits all over the place. Like David said, you know, a couple of years ago, the government did a census of the Christians and there was 9,400,000 Christians. Well, the last, now two years, the last census is 15,000,000 and some Christians. And in that lapse, the Christians have gone up by almost 6,000,000. And we've only been able to put in 200,000 more Bibles during that time. So, I mean, you can see how scarce Bibles still are there. It would take another two and a half million Bibles just to get one Bible per Christian family. And by our standards, that's a pretty dire situation. But if you're going by history, the Christian church for the first 1,500 years or so of Christianity, it was impossible for anyone to have a personal Bible. When it was handwritten, you know, if a congregation had one or two books of the Bible, it was a big deal. And even after Bibles started being printed, it was so expensive that only the very, very wealthy could afford a Bible, a printed Bible. And most people still didn't know how to read. It wasn't until the Great Awakening with the Wesley brothers and the Sunday schools starting in the mid-1700s that it was feasible for an average Christian to have their own Bible. And that was less than 300 years ago. But the history of Christianity before there were printed Bibles and enough literacy for people, an average person to be able to read one, is full of all kinds of serious error that actually led right into the Dark Ages for hundreds of years and didn't come out until the scriptures were translated into many languages and printed. And now in this day and age, we've got a flood of Bible translations, many of which aren't very accurate. So in church history, the first hundred years, there were a lot of spurious, apocryphal books written claiming to be scripture that weren't scripture. And now we've got a whole bunch of Bible translations out there claiming to be accurate. Many of them aren't all that accurate. But I'll close with this. Where do you think we are prophetically? Every day that goes by, we're closer to the Lord coming back. But exactly when is He going to come back? Our friend who wrote his book, that he thought he had the word to tell when Jesus was coming back. And his final book was, he put the final victory at the year 2001. We're now at 2024. So he was at least 23 years off and counting. So I'm not going to try and set a date for Jesus to come back. I'm just saying that the world out there doesn't look to me like it's sustainable. And even the non-Christians have figured out it's not sustainable. And I don't know to what point it can get out there before God intervenes. But we may not be that far away. Maybe we have another 5 or 10 years. I don't know. But I don't think it's going to be 50 or 100, the way things are going. I mean, we're literally at a time when Jesus could come back anytime. And when He does, what's He going to find us doing? Who is He going to find on the cutting edge of walking by faith? Trusting God and going forward with what He wants. Who is going to be using their talents? That will be the subject of the next message. What are we going to do with our talents? How many people have them buried? How many people are making investments into eternity that's actually going to bear good fruit forever? And once the last trumpet sounds, that's it. We don't have any possibility to make any further investments. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for this time together. We ask that each and every one of us will become more and more aware of the time we're living in and the possibilities to be effective for Your kingdom now. In Jesus' name, Amen.