Lord in prayer. This morning, we will continue our biographies as we look at men of the past. And I simply remind you, it is a, in one sense could be called a means of grace. We looked at the Hebrews passage that referred to remembering those leaders who spoke the word of God to you and to imitate, to mimic their faith I believe that this is a great need for one reason, because there is a tendency in us to see men like Spurgeon, Augustine, Charles Simeon, and say, yes, God did use those men. Yes, they may have struggled, but they're different than me. I remember growing up as a kid, and no doubt you have experiences like this. There'd be an athletic family, for example, I remember one Uh, one particular boy that was older than me. He took a Mississippi Delta community college to the national championship. And I think it was a 91 92. And of course that was a talk of our town because Mississippi Delta community cause never did anything. And, uh, but it was a person I actually knew that did that. Um, his little brother was not only a star football player and soccer player and baseball player, but, uh, he ended up being a kicker, um, In fact, one of the best kickers till this previous year for Ole Miss and went on to play for the Vikings. And you see those things and you're like, well, that's great for them. You know, just because we're from the same hometown doesn't make me, it doesn't influence me. It doesn't affect me because they're athletic. And we often view believers in church history like that. They're not the athletic family, but that's the spiritual people that God really used. But when we start to study their lives, we see. that other than being greatly used by God, they were in many shapes and ways just like you and I. They struggled Um, and, and that is my hope in this is that you will see if God took his Holy spirit and worked in them, then he can work in us the same way. Uh, in the coming week weeks, I don't know if we have one more week left, three more weeks left. Either way, I'm going to do one particular person, uh, for the remainder. And that person is going to be a W pink. Now there's a number of reasons I've chosen to do A.W. Pink for the remainder of our time. One is he's as far as a biography. Not only is his biography by Ian Murray, if I was to, and I don't say this lightly, not only is that book top 10, one of my favorites, but as far as biographies, it's hands down one of the top three most encouraging biographies that I've ever read. Because in many ways, A.W. Pink's journey, so mimicked my own, and I found it highly encouraging. So if any of you ever want to, you know, maybe have time to read a biography, Ian Murray's book on A.W. Pink. But he also had a great impact on me personally. And I think many of you have similar stories, maybe not with Pink, but with a Christian who has influenced you. I remember not long after, maybe a year after I became a Christian, After God saved me, um, there were other, there were ministers that I worked with. Um, there were deacons that I worked with. In fact, one of my bosses was a deacon of our church and I'll never forget. He came down and, and he was asking me, what do you keep in mind? I only been saved for about a year. He says, what do you think about this Calvinism stuff? Of course I'd heard of it. Didn't know much about it. And he was telling me what they believe. And I was just thinking it's complete foolishness. And he said, well, there's this lady upstairs who ended up, her daughter ended up being a member of my church years down the road. It's funny how God works things out. There's a lady upstairs basically out arguing the preachers up there and everything else. And they've got things they're saying they don't really have an answer to. Take this book home and read it. See if you could come up with some things. Because he knew I liked to study. So needless to say, I took A.W. Pink's book home, The Sovereignty of God. And while it didn't convince me of the sovereignty of God, I was not a full-fledged Calvinist or whatever you want to say. That was the book in God's providence that at least halted my, and I don't want to use the word arrogance, but there was a, I just knew it wasn't right. And I just knew it was foolish. Well, I could no longer use the same arguments that I'd used before. I saw that there were texts of scripture that saw God's control over not only animals, you often think animals just doing their own things, but God determining that, to also evil spirits and even the decisions of men to a certain degree. And for the first time, I had to stop. In one sense, as far as my own life, my own journey, A.W. Pink was the man who gave me a spiritual right crawl, sock upside the head, whatever you want to call it, that caused me to take a completely different journey. And there are many others. Martin Lloyd-Jones highly encouraged people to read A.W. Pink, by the way. But as we look at A.W. Pink, I wanna explain to you the method of how I'm going to present the information. Obviously, the book by Murray goes chapter by chapter, and I'm generally gonna follow that. And there may be things we don't get to in there, it's probably really good, but I'm just gonna start with the first chapter. And my method is more of a bullet point approach. And what I mean by that is, as I go through, I don't know if you can even see this, The notes that I've made in this are just absolutely crazy. I mean, I've got notes and stars and exclamation points. These are times I had to stop and say, wow, this is good. And in this, I'm just gonna, the points that I, stopped on, I'm going to put here and I'm just going to share that with you. So it's not that we're going to be jumping from one thing to another, but you know, we're going to go from his early life and we'll share a bunch of just points. And it may not be every point that Murray, but it's things that stood out to me. Okay. Um, what we're going to look at this morning, primarily one, the first chapter, but in the first chapter, there's two parts. It talks about his early life at home as a child. his conversion, and even his desire, we could say, call into the ministry, and I don't know how far we'll get through this, but I at least wanna get through his early life and his conversion. So as we begin looking at A.W. Pink, let's start looking at the man, A.W. Pink, who was he? Well, A.W. Pink was born Arthur Willington Pink, that's what the W stands for, some of you probably seen preachers, you wonder what B.B. Warfield stands for, or Charles H. Spurgeon, Haddon Spurgeon. We even have members of our church who have used these names. But A.W. Pink, and I didn't know this until I read it, it stands for A.W. Willington Pink, was born in England on April 1st, 1886. Now, he was a, especially in his ministry, he was a contemporary of Martin Lloyd Jones, and I'll discuss that relationship or lack of relationship if we get time in the coming weeks. He was the oldest of three children. However, he was born into a very blessed home. It was a Christian home where he was devoted to the Lord by his mother before he was even born. Family worship was a common practice, and so it was a very hopeful beginning. However, Murray points out that despite, Ian Murray, points out that despite Pink being raised in a Christian home, no fruit, and this is his words, no fruit was borne in him, nor his siblings. In fact, eventually all three of them would go not merely into nominal Christianity, they just went into unbelief. Now imagine that. In particular, though, A.W. Pink didn't just settle for unbelief. He went into what is called theosophy. Now, theosophy is, just to summarize, is a particular expression of the occult. I would say it's similar to many of the secret societies we find in the U.S. and England, and I'm not gonna go any further on that. But as far as an explanation, A.W. Pink had an explanation of what drew him to the occult, but also he believed this was true of others who came to these occultic beliefs. He said it started out with a curiosity. Like, this just sounds weird. There's people really talking to spirits? They're getting information that can't really be explained in any other way? And he says that it started with curiosity, may have been doubt, wanting to prove it wrong, but eventually they would see something that could not be explained in any other way. But this is, this is God, or this is a spirit talking to me. I'll give you an example. And he, Murray gives this example from another preacher. They, one of these meetings, and this was another man who had eventually become a Christian. And I think it'd be even a pastor. He talks about his meddling in these dark arts. He talked about, he went to a place and there was a medium come, okay? And this medium, I believe, was at his house. Medium had never been there before. The medium being a person that communicates with spirits we know to be evil spirits. And he says, he covered up bookshelves, and this is just one example, and he says, you know, this guy's a liar. But he says, how many books are up here on the shelf? And once he summoned a demon, he was able to tell. Sure enough, he counted. There were that many books. I think it was 49 on a particular shelf. And they would just throw questions. And there was just no way that this man, who had never been in his home, could answer these things apart from either God or some type of contact. Now for many of us, we may hear stories like this and we perhaps, and I think wrongly, but we may perhaps dismiss them as simple foolishness because we know there are fakes. There are people that do that and are just liars. Well, A.W. Pink was aware of that and he responded to that and I'll get to that in a minute. But I do want to say this as I read this, I was reminded of, even my own pre-conversion experience, and I'm not gonna go into specific stories, but I will say this. I did have a friend that was highly involved in the occult, and he would dabble into it. For a while, it was Satanism, Anton LaVey, Satanic Bible, but he would dabble in these things. He ended up being locked up for a while, hearing voices, and there were many other stories and things that I could share with you that, even when I was at his house, between Ouija boards and all this other stuff. But I'll just tell you this, if you go up to a person like that and say, oh, it's just a bunch of fake foolishness, they're not gonna listen to anything else you say. Because just like with A.W. Pink, they know there is something. Now it may not be good, but there's reality to what some of these people say happens. And this shouldn't surprise us. In Acts 16, verse 16, you remember, I can't remember if it was Peter, I think it was Paul. And you remember he met the young girl, the slave girl that was possessed of a demon. And you remember what happened. It says, and I've got the verses, we were going to a place of prayer. We were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination. It doesn't say she claimed to have the spirit. This was a religious huckster. And it says she had a spirit of divination. and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling. Now, I'm not going to get into how can that be? Do demons know the future? Are they just really smart? Not going to get into all that. But I will tell you this. It is a reality that you and I as Christians cannot deny. You remember even in the Old Testament, God gave certain prohibitions about going to mediums. and we at the very least as Christians, for the sake of our children, and even for the sake of just encouraging each other, we need to be aware, at least offer explanations that this is a reality and not simply be dismissive. But back to A.W. Pink, Pink was no mere spectator of these things, but he was eventually offered, because they saw his abilities as a speaker, as an influencer, he was offered a high position. very high rank in this group and he says and I don't really know what this means he says that he was a medium okay I don't know if that means that was just a title that he had and he witnessed these things or if he was actually the recipient of demonic influence I don't know but anyway As a side note, before we keep looking at Pink, I do want to say this because that raises a lot of questions in people's minds. There's a missionary who most of us know, and he's on our board, and I believe we even supported him, who's written a book on the subject of, and I forget the name of the book, but anyway, he deals with a lot of demonology. But it's a very balanced book that you don't just, Satan isn't behind everything. And yet he is behind many things. I think of Pastor Thomas last Sunday. He says, you ever notice this on Sundays and times when we're trying to go hear the gospel that things happen. I don't deny that. And we shouldn't deny that that is when Satan is working. Okay. But anyway, this individual wrote this book. I actually corresponded with him, shared with him some of my experiences and what made him study this issue so intensely as we went to the mission field. And as he went to the mission field, there were things, kind of like with Pink, you can't explain, okay? He had never been taught, how do I deal with this? How do I deal with that? And it set him on this journey. So if any of you are interested in that, I can share that with you. But let's move on looking at Pink. During this same time, okay, he's going to these media meetings. He's been invited at this point to be one of the main speakers at an annual meeting, okay? These were famous, very popular people gonna be there. But it was during this time, listen to what his father did. During this time, his father allowed him to stay in the house. Now, some of you may say, I wouldn't do that, whatever. His father did. And he would greet A.W. Pink when he came through the door every night en route to his room. He would meet him with a passage of scripture, something about his soul, something about the gospel. And from what I get, A.W. Pink didn't take his father as attacking him. He knew his father. He knew his father's heart. His father wasn't doing it to badger him, but he was showing his love towards his child. And it was that that eventually would bring him to faith I want to read to you Pink's own words about his conversion. Because keep in mind, his father was steadily praying for him, he was steady speaking scripture to him. Anyway, he comes in and he decided he was fatigued and would take a bath to relax. This is A.W. Pink. But during this process, all he could see mentally in his mind was there is a way that seemeth right. Again, he returned to work on his speech, speaking about his speech for this meeting. He said, and all his mind brought forth was Proverbs 14, 12. Pink told us he could no longer reject the God of the Bible and began to cry unto the Lord in prayer, convicted by the Holy Spirit and his power to bring a soul to see his lost condition and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as his savior. His early training, talking about his father training him, his early training taught him about our Lord. But now, like Paul of old, was the appointment with a holy sovereign God. For almost three days, he did not leave his room to join the family, but his father and mother prayed. And in late afternoon on the third day, A.W. Pink made his appearance and his father said, praise God, my son has been delivered. That's encouraging. Pink wasn't merely an unbeliever. Pink couldn't say, well, my parents were hypocrites. And even if he did all these things, his father continued to pray and preach to him and eventually was brought to faith. And you could imagine as a parent, perhaps some of you have a wayward child, you know that in your deepest of hearts, that is your greatest desire for them. And I share this because who knows what you could experience in the future, not only with your children, but your grandchildren. And you see them going off into these, not just unbelief, but all these different beliefs. This gives us hope that no matter how far they go, God can take those words that we have implanted in them and bring them back. They're never too far gone. And I've got to keep moving here. Now, I want to share another event during this time period that brings a smile, at least to my face. I find it kind of humorous. Think about this for a minute. Now, remember, he's still got this appointment to be the speaker, right? What do you think he's going to do at this point? You think he's going to write a nice letter and say, you know, I've become a Christian. Sorry, I can't come speak at your nice little meeting that you're having. What would you do? Think about this for a minute. Because I'm going to make a point about this in just a moment. Because I believe God gives us opportunities similar to this. Well, A.W. Pink, he kept the appointment. His name was listed as a speaker. He made his way on up there. He takes, and I'm guessing the podium. I don't know if there was a podium. However, his message had changed. Keep in mind, this was an important annual meeting, very important people. And his message wasn't about spiritualism or theosophy. He talked about God and his son, Jesus Christ. He talked about how the only hope for lost sinners was in God's son, Jesus Christ. They began to say, he's going mad. He's crazy. Or what did they say about Paul? You're beside yourself. But he preached to them the gospel. And it's interesting that he did this alone. You think, well, did anybody in that large crowd come and say, you know what? I've been struggling over this. Thank you, brother. I'm on your side. No, absolutely no one out of this crowd came and supported him either then or afterwards. And this would be a common trait that he was willing to do many times throughout his life, would be the only one believing what he believed, standing alone. I want to stop here and consider something. Actually, this past week, I had a discussion with an OPC, Orthodox Presbyterian brother, he's a minister, and he found out I was from Jackson, and he, of course, he wanted to talk about RTS and all this, and I told him we'd lived in the RTS apartments, both of our pastors had been affiliated with RTS, went to, you know, and he was very excited to hear that. And while I was telling this, he shared a story with me. He said, when I was going there, he said, most of the ministers were PCA. And you had these PCUSA, which is the liberal branch, especially so now. It was, I guess you could say, more of a mixed bag back then. He said, but the PCUSA would never call RTS or never get us PCA ministers because they believe in inerrancy of scripture, virgin birth, you know, so on and so forth, and the gospel. And he said, but I could always get my foot in the door because they would ask me, are you PCA? And he said, Oh no. And he said, and they'd say, Oh, well, good. You can come preach. You know, he said, they never asked me what I was or what I believed. And he says, I never told him differently. He said, I got to go into these places and preach the gospel. And he said, I use that. And is that not what A.W. Pink did? He didn't call and say, oh, well, I guess it would be disrespectful to do that. No, he said, I have a calling of God to preach the gospel. I'm not lying. I'm just going to go up there and do do preach the gospel. I know I had own story. You've probably heard me share this. I received a phone call one day. I believe I'd been at work most of the day. I get this phone call from a guy that I know, very ungodly man. But I'd made, I knew his family, made friends with him in the sense of an acquaintance. And he calls me, he got my phone number, and he said, I need you to come do last rites on my mother-in-law. And I remember just kind of being shocked, and I asked him, I said, last rites? And I said, what is, I knew what, I'm like, what do you mean by that? Like, why are you calling me? And he says, what do you mean, what do I mean by that? You're the preacher, you're supposed to know what last rites are. And then it occurred to me, this, he had grown up Catholic. That's just the thing that he knew. And he wasn't really, he just assumed, I guess, all preachers, everything's just the same. Last rites is not a Catholic thing, it's an everybody thing. Well, you know what, I didn't correct him. I didn't stop and say, you know what? No, you need to call a Catholic priest. I saw this as an opportunity from God. And I got to go over to his mother-in-law's and You know, they're expecting me to do whatever's called last rites. And I'll be honest with you, I'd never witnessed last rites. I just know about it. And I wasn't going to do last rites, but I did have them stand. We held hands in a circle. I did stand over her. But what I did during this time is I simply preached the gospel. I prayed for God's mercy on her body. And then by praying for God's mercy on her body, I mentioned God's mercy and how he has mercy through his son, Jesus Christ, and how we experience that mercy and how good God is and how good his son is. So I mentioned all this to say that you, like A.W. Pink, may have an opportunity very similar one day, and instead of just saying, well, I need to inform of this, maybe the best thing to do is don't inform them of anything. If they ask you to do it, You know, perhaps it may be in great wisdom. Jesus talked about how the men of this world are often wiser than we are. He talked about being wise as serpents. There's times we need to use those opportunities for the preaching of the gospel. I think of Paul's words, and some of you may know where this is. I think it's second Corinthians where he said a door of ministry or a door has been opened for us to minister the gospel that providentially something that view that you'd have no opportunity God to Paul just opened it up and many of you may have that opportunity not to a group of people but maybe just the ear of someone at work so sometimes giving too much information is not a wise thing preach the gospel all right before we move on to The next point, his early ministry, and I'm trying to keep up with their time here. We've got about 15 minutes. Murray points out that A.W. Pink was aware that not everyone who claims to receive revelation from demons or, you know, whatever, he recognized there's some hucksters out there. There's some tricksters out there. However, He pointed out that many of these revelations that people received were merely demons impersonating the departed. You'll often hear people say, I was on my Ouija board and, man, my grandma, or in my dreams, I saw my grandma and she talked to me and these things. I don't necessarily doubt everyone that says those things. I don't know. Some people could be making it up, of course. But he points out that many of these are demons impersonating the departed. We know that when a person dies, they're consigned immediately to be absent from the bodies, to be present with the Lord, a believer. Others are put in hell. The only ones that can communicate that's not a human or an animal. Think about all of God's creation. All that's left is demons. Good angels are not gonna distract us by silly things. God communicates through his word. He's not gonna do those other things. These are no doubt demons impersonating the departed. And this is interesting because as you study not only our culture and the occult and these different things, but even false religions. You know Paul called them doctrines of what? What did Paul call these false doctrines of what? demons, devils. Paul wasn't just pretending and playing just, you know, they're bad, I'm just going to call them doctrines of devils. No, these are doctrines that devils have come up with that are sneaky, that appear to be true. And they've inspired these things. That's why when you study church history, you see a lot of these religions, the people, the man who they use to come up with some of these things, and I'll give you a couple examples. They mentioned they met with an angel. I don't think they're lying. Islam, Muhammad, when he received revelation, the prophet received revelation, he claims it was from an angel, and he even says that he almost went and threw himself off a building because he sensed there was an evil, something evil about that angel, but the angel kept saying, no, I'm not evil, I'm good. I believe he's possibly telling the truth. I have no reason to doubt it. There was an angel possibly giving him these things. I mean, look at the influence it's had. I don't think just some man sat down and came up with the wisdom to control so many people and cause so much destruction. That's a doctrine of the devil. Joseph Smith claimed to have, I believe it was an angel, and he looked in the hat and received all this revelation. Perhaps he really did. I believe he was a liar in many ways. But as far as him claiming to have an angel and receiving this, I have no reason to doubt that he did. I'm not saying he necessarily did. I may be wrong on that. But the practical point of this is there are supernatural beings surrounded us with supernatural abilities. And all throughout the Bible, we are forbidden to seek communication with them. But I must say this, you hear this and you think, oh, that's all scary. Perhaps you think that. But if you ever noticed, that's not the response we should have. We should be careful. But did you notice the response of the demons when they ran across Christ, our Lord? Are you here? Oh, I know who you are. Thou son of God, are you here to torment us before the time they feared him? James says that the demons believe, not only believe in God, they tremble before him. So don't hear anything I'm saying and say, oh, this is, this is all scary. We've got to live in fear. No, they tremble before the one who watches over us. Okay. And just as a side note before we go on to our next point, Brother Rex Sumrad, he let me borrow a little, let's call it a book, I guess he printed it off, it's not much to it, if any of you want to read it. It's a book, and when he gave it to me, he said, don't read it at night. And I was like, is it really that scary? But it's about a Puritan minister who went into a certain town, and I think it might have been in the U.S., it'd come over from England, I don't remember, anyway, but there was a demon, ghost, that apparently caused all kinds of trouble in his house. It would just make noise, bang stuff, throws, and it would just try to trouble him, and he would say things to it, going about his business, reminded of its future, going about his business, and eventually left. But it's interesting, this story, we can just throw this to the past, but I believe it. And the question has often been, why do demons not exhibit their self to you and I in the same way? And some people say they do it different in different cultures. They used whatever the theology of the people. Ours is naturalism. There's no supernatural. They just stay away from that, showing themselves. It works better for them here by doing that. And anyway, we're not gonna get into all that, but that's A.W. Pink's beginning. So if, and just one more practical part of that, we may receive people in this church who come to Christ, they may come from prison. They may come from a satanic background, whatever. Well, guess what? Not only can God save them, we think, well, if God saves them, he barely saved them. We'll make them sit in the back corner back there, but they could be a pastor, a preacher, greatly used of God, like A.W. Pink is. this hopeful for any of us despite our past. Secondly, I said we'd look at his early life conversion and if we had the time begin looking at his first ministry. We got about 10 minutes so I do want to do that. Not long after he's converted many people saw in Pink a natural teaching ability a natural ability perhaps to be used of God in the ministry. However, there was a huge problem for him that stood in between him and usefulness in the ministry. He wanted to learn the word of God by going to a seminary or an institution. And the problem was this, in England, the influence of liberalism denying, for example, the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth, all those things, miracles, It had such an influence that he didn't want to look to England to learn. Rather, his thoughts began looking toward the U.S. and eventually he's going to come here. This is where we mostly know him from. He took the advice of those over him and went to Moody Bible College in Chicago, which was a conservative institution. He said he didn't want to go stay in England. He quoted first Corinthians 15 33 evil communication, corrupt good morals. You know, his, his point was simply this, there may be some good things they teach me. There may be some good man at that college. There may be some good truth in this class or that class. He said, but if all I'm dealing with all day is just foolishness and error, he said, it's going to affect me. And he said, I'm not going there. And I think that's wise. I remember when I was young and, um, I had a, desire to not to enter the ministry, but to train for ministry. One of my, our head pastor, and by the way, he wasn't SBC, we were BMA, a lot of similarities, sometimes too many similarities, but he knew that SBC, as far as their institution, he was an older gentleman, and sometimes, and I say this halfway joke, and sometimes with the older ministers, as we age, we get out of what's the end thing. I'm starting to get there right now. I talk about debates that's going on. Actually, that was 20 years ago. Nobody's really debating that anymore. Well, he was like that. He was kind of stuck back in the 80s, I guess, where Southern was a liberal institution, SBC, all their seminaries had just gone to the hog pen or whatever. But anyway, I told him that I had driven to Mid-America in Memphis and talked to them. I'm not going to get into all that, but I was really interested in going. But he told me that what I needed to consider was going to Southeastern Baptist College down in Laurel, which in God's providence I would eventually go to. And his reason was this. He said, all of these, no, I don't think this was complete, right? He's like, all of these modern SBC seminaries. He may not have used the word all, but most. He said, you know, there's so many of them denying essential truths of scripture. And he said, if you're gonna train, he said, you can't be fighting and filtering through that all day. He said, you can learn things. He said, I would really encourage you to go somewhere where the assumption on everything you learn is that there's not only a God, but he's given us scripture, that there are miracles and that Jesus, the son of God really, and I appreciated that. I mean, it was very wise. He says, especially being so young, he said, you don't need to be wrestling every day with liberal teachers and all that. And many ways I see in Pink, he had come to that, he saw that. And so he moves to the US, he goes to Moody Bible Institute, and he was only there for six weeks. And he decided he was, and these are the words of Murray, he was wasting his time. And he went immediately into the pastoring. As we'll see later, although God allowed this, and although God would use this for his glory, just like with our decisions, it was not a very wise decision. And in fact, as you look at his life, if you were to see what would happen, you would almost tell him, you probably need to stay here and train, okay? You're young. You may know some of the word, you may even have gifts, but you need to cook a little bit, as they say. But he moved to Colorado and took his first pastoring. And from reading the descriptions that Murray And even Pink gives of the culture there. It was a very religious culture, kind of like, and I'm going to compare it to our Southern culture, where, you know, you want to be good. He's a good man. He's a hard worker. He's a, you know, there's all these, you know, it's just common that you want to be all these things. And so what Pink started to do as he started to have a certain emphasis, and we see this with his life, depending on where he's lived, who he's pastoring, he would emphasize the truth that would balance the error at the time. The very first week he was there, he had to preach the funeral of a man he really didn't know, but was very popular in the community. There was lots of people there and he heard people talk about him as, and this wasn't his words, but like he was the second coming. He was just the greatest guy in the world. But the things they were naming were really things, well, those are good things, but those are not spiritual things. This is nothing about his love for God or his heart for the church. And he begins seeing these things. So he begins focusing on the need. The emphasis at this time was for him, one must be born again. And this teaches us something. As we will see with AWP, many times we have to take individuals as individuals. We can't have one approach in one culture. I'm not saying we don't just preach the word, please. I'm hoping most of you understand what I mean by this. but he would often emphasize certain things with certain congregations he wouldn't, didn't have to emphasize with others. Does that make sense? As he preached to him, this was a culture embedded in good old boy, good man, good, you know, he's a good, you know, this, and he goes to church, he takes care of his family. He got into all of that. And he saw that there was just this, you know, that doesn't mean they're born again. There are certain things about a person, those things can be true. And as I thought about this, there's a passage of scripture and I was trying to see if I put it down here. If you want to write it down, you can, I don't have it pulled up, but it's Jude and I believe it's verse 22 or 23. And he talks about, and since we've got three minutes, I am gonna pull up the passage, I'm gonna read it to you, that we must have wisdom in how we not only minister to churches, as Pink was doing, but even as we witness to people, there are gonna be people that one approach may really be bad, it may be negative, it may be disrespectful. Think about Christ, our Lord. He didn't take the same approach with all people. with the Pharisees who were proud. He used some strong language, you serpents. And he didn't go around calling everybody a serpent, okay? They needed that. They needed that strong because of who they were, because of their response to him. You remember the first example that comes to my mind, the lady caught in adultery. Jesus didn't deny what she did was wrong. He went on and remember he told her, go unless you, you know, something worse, send up more or less something worse comes upon you. But there was a mercy in that. He looked at those other men and you remember he told them whoever, you know, has no sin, let him cast the first stone. And he was very merciful to her. He didn't call her a snake and hit her over the head with a stick at that point. And sometimes we may need that. But depending on a person's response many times to the truth, we have to adjust what we emphasize and what we don't emphasize. And that's what Pink is doing here. But in Jude 22, Jude 1, 22, he says, and have mercy on those who doubt, people who are doubting you. Could you imagine going to a person who's doubting, whether it's God's love to them, God's truth, and saying, well, it's God's word, you better believe, just John the Baptist, you know, fire and brimstone of that person. John the Baptist did that with the right people, okay? But he says here, you're gonna have mercy on those who doubt. There's a gentleness that we're to have. In verse 23, yet save others by snatching them out of the fire. There's a time where gentleness is not what we are called to do. It is not the Christ-like thing to do. There's a time we need a spiritual slap across the face. I heard a story of, and this had been a Reformed Baptist minister in California, he heard him and his wife, they kind of split. She called the church and said, we're not gonna be coming back. He started doing his own thing. And his friend found out about it. And I think he lived in Northern California. He called him and said, man, I heard what's going on, and I'm about to come down there and I'm gonna punch you in the face. Now, would he have really done it? The guy said he probably really would have done it. I'm not saying that's the godly thing to do, but there's an element where there's a time when we love someone, We say some, maybe some too strong things. Maybe we do. But our heart is saying, this is serious. I'm gonna jerk you out of this. And Jude says, save others by snatching them out of the fires. He says, to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garnet stained by the flesh. So you ever hear somebody say, I just, I am what I am and I just go to this place and say this and this. Well, that's not wise. And it's certainly not Christ-like. We must assess the people like Pink did, not only that we minister to, not only the culture, but even individuals. And this even gets into parenting. I had one kid you could say certain stuff to, and we thought he was bad. And then we had number two, you could beat the living daylights off of him. And there was different, and Shanna had to teach me this. Mine was, they're gonna do, and I'll swing the belt, and we're gonna take care of business. But I found, do that, but I had to approach him differently. I didn't like it. He was too much like me in many ways, and we would butt heads. But I say all this just to simply emphasize, when we're dealing with people, especially God's people, We have to be, we have to pray. Seek wisdom. That's what Pink did. But anyway, our time is up. Let's pray.