It's really pretty funny sitting up here and looking out there because just about everyone was singing along. Might as well have been in the choir loft, right? One more announcement. You'll notice in your bulletin, and this is so important to us as a church, you'll notice an officer nomination form. This is for our next coming term, elders and deacons. This year we need two elders. Two will step off our board. There's a mandatory rotating cycle. We need two elders and we need four deacons. And we printed and posted the qualifications from 1 Timothy 3. Those are also listed in Titus chapter 1. But I encourage you to pray. And kind of how this works is you can turn in as many of these as you want. You don't just get one card, but we ask that there only be one nomination per card. And the person that you nominate, the man that you nominate, really you need to pray about it and really believe that he is qualified according to the scripture qualifications. He needs to have been a member at Grace Presbyterian Church for two years, so he's not a newcomer, that's what the scripture says. And turn in as many as you want. You believe there's X amount of men that are qualified and you would love to nominate them, then nominate them. And when you're done with this, when you've filled it out and your signature's on it and their signature's on it, and you've got us a name and so forth, you can hand that to me, Daniel, Bob. You can hand it to any of our elders. You can drop it in the offering plate. You can hand it to one of the people. Just make sure you get it to somebody that we can accumulate these. And our nominating process will end at the end of this month so that we can begin training. But seriously, I plead with you, pray and undertake this responsibility as a church. This is so vitally important to the health of a local congregation. This morning, we're beginning a new adventure, and we're in 1 John. We're going to begin studying the epistles of John, 1, 2, and 3 John. I'd like you to turn there. I've never done this before, but you'll remember where this all began. Those of you who have been around a while, just as I became pastor, you'll remember Tom Blackwell passed away. And just before he passed away, he asked me if I would teach the book of Hebrews. So I taught through Hebrews. And when we got done with Hebrews, I noticed that the next book was James. So we taught through James and noticed the next book was 1st, then 2nd Peter. And now we're all the way into 1st John. And don't know, I guess we'll teach through sort of the bibliography in the back once we get through Revelation, you know. We'll teach through the map section, okay? But we're in 1st John this morning, 1st John. And I'd like to read the first four verses, 1 John 1 verses 1 through 4. What was from the beginning, John writes, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands concerning the word of life? And the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us. What we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us. And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. These things we write so that our joy may be made complete. Let's pray. Father, thank you, Lord, for this passage. We thank you for this book. We thank you for all that it's going to accomplish in our lives. Father, as Christians, many of us have heard many sermons, read many spiritual books. And yet, Lord, we ask that your word would do its unique work, the work that only it can do. We ask, Father, that you would not only challenge us, but God, we cry out that you would change us. We cry out, Lord, that you would not only confront us, but that you would conform us to the image of Christ. We know the one who preaches. We've not come to hear him. We pray, Father, that you would use even such a vessel as he. We all, I, desire to hear from you through your word, Father. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Martin Luther wrote concerning 1 John that he had never read a book with simpler words than this one, yet the words, he said, were inexpressible. And I agree. The author of 1, 2, and 3 John, we take the historical position, I do, that it was John, the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, the author of the Gospel of John, and the Book of Revelation. James and John were, of course, referred to by Jesus as Boanerges, which means the sons of thunder. They would have been sort of a first century kind of biker group. You understand that? I mean, they were quite, they were not, you know, when you get this picture, sort of stained glass image of John and so forth, they were ruffians. You know, at one point, a village rejects Jesus, and they're outside the village, and James and John come to Jesus and say, Jesus, listen, you stay here, we'll go burn the village down. Really. And Jesus, you know. But the interesting thing about John is that John always referred to himself as, listen to this, not the one who loved Jesus, but the one whom Jesus loved. It's one thing to love Jesus. That's wonderful. But in the mind and heart of John, it's something altogether different to know yourself and still comprehend that he has chosen to love Boanerges, the son of thunder, the one whom Jesus loved. The nature of this book is interesting. You remember last time we were together we kind of reviewed 1st and 2nd Peter. We talked about the fact that 2nd Peter is what we call a Catholic epistle. A Catholic epistle was an epistle or a book, a document written to the church at large. Catholic means universal. The book is not written to a specific church facing a specific problem, but it was written by Peter, 2 Peter was, to be cyclical, a cyclical epistle, to be copied and distributed amongst all the churches, to be read by all Christians because the content, the subject matter, is pertinent to all believers at all times. We also have what we call specific or particular epistles. For instance, the book of 1 Corinthians is written to a particular church facing particular issues. And so Paul writes this particular epistle to a particular church with particular issues in which he addresses with his epistle. 1 and 2 Thessalonians are particular epistles. False teachers had come in and taught him certain things, and Paul is writing to the Thessalonian believers, correcting those errors. When we come to 1 John, it's neither a Catholic epistle, because it's not written to every church at large, but it's also not a particular epistle being written to a particular church with a particular issue. It's unique. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John are being written by John not to a single church, but to a group of churches. A group of churches that are not only associated geographically, but are associated in terms of the problem or the threat that they're facing. He's writing to a group of churches in what is, at that time, referred to as Asia Minor. Today it would be modern day Turkey. This is not the first time John will or has written to the churches in Asia Minor. The book of Revelation is written to and addressed to what? The churches of Asia Minor. John becomes particularly associated with one of those churches, the church of Ephesus, where he may well have been the pastor there in Ephesus. So John is writing to not a particular church. This is also not a cyclical letter. In fact, some of what he's saying or the issues he's addressing may not have been understood by other believers at this time and so forth. But he is writing to more than one church. A church that is united geographically and a church that is also united by a common and serious, very serious threat. What is the threat? The threat, and the background to 1 John, is a heresy that was really beginning to gain some momentum during the twilight years of the apostles' lives called Gnosticism. By the second and third century, Gnosticism was full-blown and there were tens of thousands of adherents. Tens of thousands of adherents. John is confronting Gnosticism in this letter and if you don't understand Gnosticism, you really can't understand the epistles. Some of you have never heard of Gnosticism. It was a great danger to the early church and had gained an incredible amount of support. 1 John is written by the apostle to both defend Orthodox Christianity and to expose and refute Gnosticism. Tim Gross is teaching Sunday school and he just began the book of Colossians. The book of Colossians is written by Paul to the church at Colossae. in the face of Gnosticism, the Gnostic influence in that church. Gnosticism was a serious, serious threat to Christianity. Some of you may have heard or remembered the name Irenaeus around 100 AD. Irenaeus wrote a massive five-volume work, massive five-volume work titled Against Heresies. all of it aimed at refuting and exposing Gnosticism. Some of you may recall the name Hippolytus, 200 AD, massive work titled The Refutation of All Heresies Addressed Towards the Gnostic Threat of Christianity. You see, the early church was not only facing the danger of Gnosticism imposing itself upon Orthodox Christianity, But even more than that, Gnosticism was claiming to be genuine Christianity. And that what they were proclaiming was, in fact, an illumined reality that called for departure from what we understand to be orthodoxy and adherence to what they were espousing. Serious threat. Serious threat. John is fighting Gnosticism in the first century. That's the nature of this book. Irenaeus was fighting Gnosticism in the second century and so forth. But just so we bring this down to some current terms, I'm going to suggest to you that Gnosticism hasn't gone anywhere. It's well-rooted and well-represented right in our own society. In fact, I might suggest to you that it is more problematic and more popular today than it was in the first and second centuries. Every one of us, if you have a television and you watch it occasionally, have seen Christian documentaries that basically are just pure Gnosticism and you didn't know it. Ron Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code is simply a novel expression of first century, second century Gnosticism. That's all that it is. Gnosticism is really the backbone of the New Age movement. Gnosticism is all over the place. If you turn on your television set and you're not very discerning and you're not very critical, much of what you'll hear espoused as Christianity from some of the major televangelists is basically Gnosticism. It's all over the place. Gnosticism is going through, you might call, a modern renaissance. And it is a prevailing philosophy in its particular nuanced forms. Up until a few decades ago, all we knew about Gnosticism was to be known by reading the writings of Irenaeus and Hippolytus and so forth, others like that. But in 1945, something interesting took place. An Arab peasant in Upper Egypt in a place called Nag Hammadi discovered an entire library cache, these giant earthen vases filled with Gnostic literature. 50 volumes of Gnostic literature in Upper Egypt, Nag Hammadi scrolls. Sort of like the Gnostic version of the Dead Sea Scroll Discovery along the Dead Sea. And these Gnostic manuscripts have been translated and they became very popular. And you hear people talk about things like the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Mary, or the Apocryphon of John. All these are basically books, texts, that were discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, Gnostic writings that have been translated that now, even today, in bestsellers and in television shows and in major motion pictures are claiming to shed new light on who Jesus really is. Right? That's John's fight. Elaine Pagels, who was is a PhD for Harvard and a professor of religion at Princeton in 1979, wrote the Gnostic Gospels. She wrote a book, a response to the discovery and her research on it. And basically what Elaine Pagels, and this was a bestseller, what she basically says is that Gnostics are the enlightened Christians. And if you're not Gnostic, you're not enlightened. And she portrays the early church fathers who were fighting Gnosticism as a bunch of, see if this sounds familiar, a bunch of guys trying to cover up a conspiracy. Sound familiar? And so, you know, John and Peter, they knew the truth and 1 John and Paul's letter, they're all just trying to schmooze you and I and trying to keep the truth from being revealed and that's what she's saying. What did Gnosticism, what did it espouse? What did it say? What could you discover in those 50 plus volumes? Well, Gnosticism celebrates God as both the divine mother and the divine father. Gnosticism shows a very real human Jesus who had a very real human relationship with Mary Magdalene. Gnosticism suggests that The resurrection of Jesus is best understood, let's say, symbolically. Gnosticism says that true self-knowledge, knowledge of oneself, is the route to union with God. Does this sound familiar, folks? You can find a lot of people who claim to be Christians who have big major motion, big major television. That's what they're saying. It's just Gnosticism under a different name. Gnosticism is sort of this hodgepodge of ancient belief systems that all sort of merged together. And because it merged together, it brought a populace with it. It was successful. Gnosticism really was sort of the ancient Greek knowledge, Lagos, all of that, Zoroastrianism, Platonic, Plato's philosophy, Oriental mysticism, nuances of Christianity, all sort of thrown into a big hodgepodge blender. That's Gnosticism. And it multiplied in the ancient world under many names. the Barbenianites, the Marcionites, the Cyrenthians, the Incrites, the Justinians, the Marcosians, the Nicolaitans, the Scythians, the Valencians, all kinds of evidences of Gnostic leadership all over that part of the world. What were its basic tenets? This is important. First of all, and I'll give you the first two at the same time, what they said was, they said, the flesh is bad, material is bad, and the spirit is good. Everything that's flesh is evil. Everything that is spirit is good. Now, there's a real problem with this if you're a Bible-believing Christian, because Genesis 1-2 tell us that God made the material world and declared that it was what? Where it really gets rowdy, this idea of all that is material being evil, all that is spirit being good, has to do with the person of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus, the Christ, the Spirit, became man, became flesh, became the miracle of the incarnation. And what the Gnostics basically said was that, yes, there was the Christ, but he really wasn't flesh, he really wasn't man. They used the word docetism. It's the Greek word doceto, means to appear. He only, Christ, only appeared to be a man. When you saw him, it was just sort of an, it was the Christ, but it was an apparition. Jesus really couldn't be flesh. big stuff. The Christ really couldn't be the Son of God. You see, the idea of sonship celebrates Christ, the eternal God, becoming flesh, being begotten into time and space and being incarnated into this world. He just appeared that way. If you've still got your Bible open to 1 John, look at chapter 2 just for a minute. You'll notice what John is saying. 1 John chapter 2, notice verse 22 and following. Notice what John says, who is the liar but the one that denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son That Christ is the Son does not have the Father. The one who confesses the Son has the Father. As for you, let that abide in you which you have heard from the beginning. If what you have heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father. That's the argument that's being made there. That Christ did become flesh, that He did become the Son of God and was the Son of God and so forth. Look at, here's real clear, look at chapter four, 1 John chapter four for a minute. Verse two, by this you know the Spirit of God, that every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the what? Is from? Look at chapter two, or 2 John rather, the next epistle, 2 John, look at verse seven. Second John, there's only one chapter, verse seven. For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist. This is the argument that's being maintained by John. Jesus isn't some spiritual apparition that only appeared to be human flesh. God became man. God became man. And this is critical to Christianity. On the other hand, not only did Gnosticism diminish the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ as a person, but as all cults do, they also expanded the nature and character of man. Remember John the Baptist's message? He said, and he must, and so the cults always do this, God must decrease and we must increase. Not only did they diminish the personal work of Christ, of course, they elevated themselves. And how did they do this? They elevated themselves by saying, well, within each of us, each of us are an emanation of God. And that because we are all emanations of God, each of us within our soul have the divine spark. And man's problem is not sin. Man's problem is that he doesn't realize he's divine. Does this sound familiar? Man just simply needs to discover his godhood. Man's problem is that he is ignorant of who he really is. And if he self-actualizes himself, he'll discover that Christ, Christ is simply an example of a man who discovers or rediscovers that he's God. And you need to follow in his footsteps. Man is just a big old sad ball of repressed divinity. And of course, the Gnostic Jesus came into this world to open our awareness to our own divinity. And of course, how does that awareness take place? It takes place through gnosis, which is the Greek word for knowledge, secret knowledge. Once you get the knowledge, you discover your deity. Christ was just a man who, by his own enlightenment, achieved Christhood. He won his Christhood by his own quest. And the message of Gnosticism is anybody can achieve Christhood. That's the message. It's all over the airwaves, folks. It's all over the airwaves. It's a major, major message in our culture. John Lennon? The only true Christians, quote, were Gnostics, who reached the Christ within themselves, end quote from Mr. Lennon. There's a third point I want to make, and that is Gnostics denied the God of Scripture. They said the God of Scripture was a lesser God. The Gnostics God, the supreme God in Gnosticism, is what they call the supreme principle. He can't be persona because persona has a twinge of flesh, material. And so if material is evil and spirit is good, then the supreme God must just be purely spiritual. And to be purely spiritual, he has to be nothing more than a principle. And that this principle is manifested in perfect light. Perfect light. And that this perfect light is called the Pleroma. And this perfect God in light, now think about this folks, it's everywhere, this perfect God of light begins to spin off and emanate lesser deities. And as every lesser deity and every lesser emanation spins off, it becomes slightly less light and a little more darkness. And so, with every emanation, there is a lessening of light and an increase of darkness, and it just keeps spinning around until, eventually, somewhere down here, Yahweh, the God of Scripture, spun off of the supreme principle. And because He was down here, not perfect light, but slightly darkened, He was able, in His less than perfect condition, the God of Scripture, mind you, He was able, in His less than perfect condition, to create the material world. Some of you have seen the word, it's a modern word, or at least it's resurfaced, the word Aeon, A-E-O-N. That was the name they referred to these emanations, Aeons. Jehovah, Yahweh, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus, according to Gnosticism, is just an Aeon of the supreme principle. Can you imagine such a thing? To me, it is the blasphemy of all blasphemies. 1 John chapter 1, notice verse 5, what does John say? What is he declaring? He said, this is the message that we have heard from him and announced to you that God is what? And in him there is no at all. That's what he's fighting. That's what he's fighting. Fourth characteristic of Gnosticism is secret knowledge. The mysteries of the higher realm. And of course, the secret knowledge all comes in sort of these bizarre ways, revelations and perceptions and dreams and visions and channelings and all that kind of stuff. Nothing you can, it's all ethereal, very ethereal stuff. Superior knowledge. The Illuminati. The illumined ones. They even refer to Paul's. You remember Paul said, I got caught up to the third heavens and saw things that I can't see. That was in the Gnostic mind. There was Paul having his own illumined experience, his own Gnostic experience. Secret knowledge. Secret knowledge. I don't know if you've ever tried to defend Christianity or share the gospel with somebody who places more emphasis on their own experience than they do on the scriptures, but it's a dead end. You know, as soon as the Word of God is relegated to something equal to or less than, it's all over. I mean, what else do we stand on? What else do we declare if the Word of God isn't held supreme? Which, of course, was Van Til's argument. He suggested that if you can't begin with what he called propositional apologetics, presuppositional, if you can't begin with the presupposition that this is truth, then you have no argument. The Gnostics blew that all out of the water. And of course, what happens when you have two spiritual people and one of them claims to have received illumination? What happens to their moorings towards one another? I'm superior and you're inferior. You get the gist? Because you know the truth. You're an enlightened one. You are Illuminati. And you'll notice throughout John's epistle, he talks about them running ahead of the body and all that kind of stuff. They actually began to look with such disdain on the unillumined that there was actually hatred in their hearts towards these people. Amazing. Amazing. They separated from the church. They started their own congregations. They started their own movements. Remember 2 John 2 19? Look at 1 John, look at chapter 2 verse 19 just for a minute. This is a familiar verse to us. Verse 19 says, John says, they went out from us. Why? Because they were never really of us. For if they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out from us so that it would be shown that they were not of us. There were these people, they were claiming superiority, they were starting their own movements, they were trying to draw people away. It was divisive, it was painful for the apostles' heart. That's all I know. Sixthly and finally, in terms of their characteristics, you know what? If the body is evil, and the spirit is good, and your spirit's been illumined. Now what can you do with your body? You know what they said? Anything you want. And so they were extremely moral. I'm an illumined one. My mind and my spirit is in the heavenlies, but it's okay, let your body live in the gutter. That's what they did. And of course, John is fighting. trying to defend the fact that true Christianity is body, soul, and spirit. It's transformative. Verse 4 of chapter 2, the one who says, I have come to know him and yet does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. Despite all the stuff you claim to have gathered and all the knowledge you claim to have grasped, you're living in absolute abject immorality. You're living an antinomian life, no law. You pretend as if God had no morality to him at all. In verse five, but whoever keeps the word in him, the love of God has truly been perfected. This we know that we are in him. John is arguing just the opposite. You can't know that your soul's right unless your body is in response of obedience to him. Folks, we've got a few more minutes, but I just want us to go back to the first few verses of chapter 1 and just make a point, and then we'll pick this up next week. The first three verses of chapter 1 are one gigantic sentence that's really, really difficult. In fact, verse 2 is actually what we call a parenthesis. If you look, if your Bible's like mine, you look at the end of verse 1, you see a dash there? And then you look at the end of verse two, you'll see another dash there. Those two dashes are parenthetical. Here's a parenthetical statement in the middle of verse one and verse three. But if you place it all together, what you have is you have a big, long, complicated sentence that has one main verb. And the main verb is in verse three, and it is translated in my Bible, proclaim. And so everything John is saying in verses one through three centers around the idea of him proclaiming to his audience. That is the heartbeat of the first three verses. And what is it that John is proclaiming? Well, you can look at verse one, we are proclaiming what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes and what we have touched with our hands. He says something like that again in verse two, that we are proclaiming what we have seen and we testify and we proclaim. And then in verse three, we have seen and heard, we proclaim this to you. And the big issue is this, what is John saying to these Christians? Listen, he's saying this, the Gnostics have all these visions and dreams and incantations, all these mystical experiences, blah, blah, blah, you know. And that's what they're proclaiming to you. That's not what we're proclaiming to you. We're proclaiming to you a Jesus Christ that we saw, that we touched, that we talked with, that we walked with. We are witnesses of, and here's the key word, Christ in flesh. This whole issue is Christ became man and we beheld him. God became tactile. We could touch him. We ate with him. We saw him. We smelled him. We heard him. God became tactile. This is not some ethereal thing. Orthodox Christianity isn't about secret knowledge that's mystical. We're proclaiming to you that God became man and we walked with him. We encountered God. in flesh. How important is that? Think how critical the incarnation is to Christianity. Without the incarnation, there is no virgin birth. There is no words and works. There are no miracles. There is no death. There is no resurrection. There is no ascension. There is no second coming. I mean, the Gnostics just strike through the heart of Orthodox Christianity with the denial of Christ as man and flesh. John says, listen, I'm telling you, We touched him, we heard him, we saw him. He was manifest to us. John is proclaiming God in flesh. And you'll notice he says that we are witnesses, witnesses of what we saw and heard and touched. And so witnesses firsthand, not secondhand, firsthand. Now the scripture says that God has revealed himself in many ways. If you're just cursory, look at the Old Testament. You know, God reveals himself in creation. What does the Bible say? That the heavens declare the glory of God revealed himself to men. God spoke to women. God spoke to kings, shepherds, priests, slaves, farmers. God spoke through prophets. God spoke through appearances that we call theophanies. God spoke in audible voices from heaven. God spoke to human beings through dreams. He spoke to human beings through visions. He spoke in times past. by inspiring men to write his word. There are historical books, poetic books, Psalms, oracles, laws, covenants, prophecies. We have tablets of stone. We got Balaam's ass. We got handwriting on a wall. Angels sent from heaven. All kinds of revelations. But there has never been and there will never be a revelation like the incarnation of Jesus Christ. God spoke most clearly, most audibly, most perfectly and fulfilled revelation of God and the God-man who they saw and heard and touched and walked with and all of that. That's what John is saying, I'm declaring. That's what I'm declaring. And of course, all this is being set against the backdrop of Gnosticism's complete dismissal of this most important truth. What's the purpose of the book? There is a purpose. Notice verse three. We proclaim this to you. Why? So that you too may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. What's the point? John wants us to have fellowship. Fellowship with him. Fellowship with the Father. Fellowship with his son, Jesus Christ. I hadn't been a Christian very long where somehow it came to my mind that what fellowship basically equated to was sort of like a nasty old basement, warm Kool-Aid and stale cookies, right? That's what fellowship is. And what John is saying is, listen, fellowship isn't about what you do. Fellowship is about with whom you do it. Fellowship, the Greek word is koinonia. You know what it really means? It means commonness. Commonness. Commonness around what? Commonness around believing the truth. Holding these things that John is defending. Do you believe Jesus Christ is God and come in flesh? Do you believe that? If you believe that, as I do, you and I, we have fellowship. Yes? Do you believe that the father sent his son into the world? Yes, as I do. Then we have fellowship, and you have fellowship with one another, and John says even more importantly, you have fellowship with the father. Somebody that doesn't believe that, I have no fellowship. I have no fellowship. You don't have fellowship, I hope. We have no communists. This is the line. This is the line in the sand that cannot be erased. This is irrevocable. It's either on this side or this side. That's what John is saying. You deny Christ as the Son of God? You deny Christ as God come in flesh? You deny these sort of basic tenets? Then we have no fellowship. You can claim to be a Gnostic Christian and claim we are at odds. You are the enemy. What does John call him? He doesn't call them Christians. He calls them anti-Christ. Now we live in this pluralistic society which says, you know what, as Christians, as spiritual men and women, our main priority is to get along with everybody. John says, no, no, we have no fellowship, but if you uphold and believe and adhere to the truth, we have fellowship with one another. And he sings, verse four, I write that your joy may be made complete. Folks, if you're a Christian, Isn't it amazing what our commonness does? Some of the sweetest things and people in the world and experiences in the world have been wrought in the fellowship of believing the truth about Christ. Yesterday Deb and I traveled over to Johnson City, Tennessee, a dear lady who we have known for years is dying there. And we went to spend some time yesterday morning and the night before with her husband and her son. And just even driving over there thinking about the fellowship we have had with this precious, precious couple. They've been so dear and selfless. And even with her dying there, she wants to talk about Christ and the church and the gospel and all of that kind of stuff, fellowship. Years ago, just to tell you what kind of person and what fellowship does, years ago, it was a really weird series of events. Somebody in New York City got tapes when I was preaching in Florida and started copying them and giving them to their friends and all that kind of stuff. And unbeknownst to me, years later, they called me and said, there's a whole big group of us who would like to ask you to come up here and preach for us. And they did. They rented a church, or not a church, a theater in downtown. And I was really leery. This is New York City. I've never met any of these people. They know me from tapes. And it's like, do I really do this? And so I went there and it actually turned out great. But you know what? When I got there, this dear old couple had driven from South Florida to New York City to make sure I knew somebody there. And she's dying. But we have fellowship. Let's pray together.