Indeed, Lord, we praise you through your son Jesus Christ this morning by the power of the presence of the Holy Spirit who lives and reigns in us. I pray this morning, Father, that you would be with your servant and protect or rather perfect the words that I will preach to your people this morning. I pray it in Jesus name. Amen. And be seated. And I'll ask you to open your Bibles. to Matthew chapter 11, to Matthew chapter 11, to what I think will be some familiar verses to you. And it's really some very fundamental teaching. It's a very plain teaching. But fear not, I'll do everything I can to complicate it for you this morning. So Matthew 11 verses 16 through 24. And so Jesus said, but to what shall I liken this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to their companions and saying, we played the flute for you and you did not dance. We mourned to you, and you did not lament, for John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say he has a demon. The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. But wisdom is justified by her children. I think I'll leave it there for this morning. Father, I pray that your presence would attend us as we look into your word. We pray in Jesus name. And so here we have it. The Lord asks what really ought to have been a rhetorical question, but if you're not in on the joke, you don't know what the answer is to what shall I like in this generation. It is like children sitting in the marketplaces, playing their games, calling out the tunes, and expecting people to go along with the sentiment of their songs of joy and songs of lamentation. Now, I've always told you when we confront passages of this type, We should notice that Jesus is concerned, has communal concerns. He's talking about generational trends. We talk about generations all the time in this country, don't we? We talk about, we give names to generations. There's millennials, right? I forget what dates they are, but you know, some of you are millennials. There's other generations. There's Gen Xers. There's Gen Zers. Oh, you're a Gen Xer? Really? Oh, all right. I'm a baby boomer, and proud of it, baby. I think the baby boomers, we're the biggest generation. When we're gone, your Social Security will be in a much better place. Because it's a few people paying out for a lot of people right now. But when we're gone, it'll be a lot of people paying out for a few people or something like that. But here we are, the baby boomer generation, my father's generation, which we have a few in this place right now, we're called what? The greatest generation. because they won the World Wars or World War II. And I don't know what they called it in Jesus' time, but Jesus said they were like children. And I find that application so ready-made for today, it seems to me. They are like children. So he's concerned about generational trends. It's almost a reflex action of the American mind to assume that everything Jesus said is to be taken personal and individual. But it's really not. And I've been emphasizing this a lot lately, because it's really being pressed on me as I read through the New Testament. But Jesus speaks to groups. When he writes something through the Apostle Paul or through the Apostle John, he addresses them to churches. And that's where you'll go. If you want to hear the epistle read, you would have to go into the church. And when he uses the pronoun you, It very often is the plural form of you. All right? So it's, we often think it's individual and personalized, but very often it's communal. And certainly when he talks about generations, it is. And if I went on in the, in the reading here, he says this, woe to you, Chorazin, woe to you, Bethsaida. He speaks to whole cities. So I hope the town councils of those cities are taking notice. And I hope if he speaks to Lakeville and Middleborough, they'll sit up and take notice. Woe to you, Lakeville. Woe to you, Middleborough. And so we ask the question, to what shall I liken this generation? Generations, friends, it seems, each present a character of their own. He might have said something different of a previous generation. And Jesus, who's the ultimate social commentator, sizes up the generation into which he was born. He's not so complementary of his own generation. Good luck at the class reunion with that kind of thinking. It seems that people travel in herds, friends. Jesus talks about us as being in herds or in flocks or folds, right? You might go further. You might be able to receive from this passage that people also think with a herd mentality. We call it groupthink today. And whenever you hear the term groupthink, it's never in a good context, is it? Groupthink kind of assumes you don't have a mind of your own. And I think that's really, to a large extent, where we are today. People tend not to have a mind of their own. They tend to take the narrative of the moment, the popular narrative, and sort of run with it. It saves time. It saves a lot of the stress of actually thinking through something yourself. So groupthink becomes a very easy way to sound smart, sound informed. But generations come with their own character and some generations certainly have better thoughts, even better ideas than other generations. We may presume from the passage that being tied to the rational conclusions of any one group may be kind of an intellectual prison. It can be hard to get out of intellectual prisons. We have what they call the prison of two ideas. Have you ever heard that? You either have to do this or you have to do this. So there's no third option. Politicians get all hung up on that. It's a technique, you know, it's a device. I remember when I first got out of college, I went into sales. That's what everybody did that couldn't get a job. and we took a lot of sales courses and they would tell you how to sell things and I sold all different kinds of things. I mean I sold advertising, I sold telephone systems, shoes, pots and pans, I sold all kinds of things. But they would teach you if you want to get a sale, you have to put the person in a sort of prison of two ideas. In other words, when you're presenting to the treasurer or the principal of a company which phone system to buy, right? You're presenting to him a telephone system. You don't say, to get him to close and sign on the dotted line, you don't say something like, well, are you going to buy it or not? That's not the option you give the guy. You say, do you want the black phone sets or the beige? You see what I mean? This sort of prison of two ideas, as though there's no other option. And we want to be on guard not to get caught up in that kind of thinking. Now in the Christian mindset, we have to keep paradoxes in our minds all the time, don't we? that scripture has a way of blending two realities that are both true at the same time and asking us to think our way through it and try to decide which one applies for which time and i got a couple examples for you jesus said Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Now, I know some people, that's all they know about Jesus. They don't know that that same person, that same lovely inviter into the light burdens that he's helping you carry, you know, a yoke, you need a partner and the partner carries half of the weight, right? You know how a yoke works. And they don't know that the same Jesus that says, my burden is light also says, take up your cross and follow me. So over here, you take up a yoke and the Lord is lifting the other half. And over here, you take up a cross, which is the very thing that brought him to his death. So there's the sort of, two paradoxical points that are both true. It seems to me that when we say that the Lord is sovereign, that means that he reigns over all things that transpire. Nothing happens, not a sparrow falls in the wilderness that the Lord does not know about it. And at the same time, we're compelled between one reality and the other. He beseeches us to choose him, and at the same time says, you did not choose me, but I chose you. And we have endless amounts of arguments over these things when really there's an aspect of both that are true and both have application in particular circumstances. This is why we keep coming to Bible study on Thursday evening, so I can work these things all out with you. In the political realm today, we have some dichotomies, don't we? We hear things like peace. Everybody wants peace, right? I think most everybody wants peace. but peace comes through strength. In other words, peace can only come if there's someone prepared for war. Clearly, peace is a great goal in human society. At the same time, it seems, peace has to be forced upon us from a power stronger than ourselves. And I pray may God be that power, and may the men who have the strength to enforce peace may be inspired by that same God. Let that be the mark of our generation. It's always amazed me that peace, that coveted reality, the hope of every generation of man, has become so elusive to our race. Everyone wants peace, but yet we're a war-like being, a human race. That being said, however, peace for some cannot be peace apart from peace of mind. And that's where religion and partisanship come in. Partisanship, friends, is the science of choosing either one thing or the other. It's almost a self-sentence of being imprisoned by two ideas. We say dance, you dance, right? The party says dance, you dance. The party says mourn, we all mourn. And you see that so clearly today in this generation, don't we? Now, peace for those with moral scruples, and I hope I'm speaking to the church when I say this, must consist of a whole society aiming at a common goal. We wanna see all people be made righteous and come to Christ. Peace isn't merely the absence of violence. but the absence of contending ideas or a diversity of goals. Why can't we all have the same goals? But every party asks that. They just want their goals to be the ones that everybody has. Now in my time, when you get to be my age, you go through a lot of these generations and these generational definitions, if you will. But in my time, when I was a young person, a very young person in grammar school, we had to contend with a generation who actually believed that totalitarianism was a good idea. We should all be ruled by dictatorial despots. We spoke of communism. Now I gotta tell you, I know too much about communism to talk about it in the common terms, but I'm gonna do that today, because I don't really want to make this a dissertation on communism. But when I was growing up, communism was the bad idea that men had on how to rule the world. Today it's become sort of a good idea again, because people have forgotten You know, we have people today who claim to be communists and want to be voted into high office and it looks like some of them will be. In my day that was a terrible thing. Communism is an economic theory that claims to produce peace by amputating from the human race that most destructive of vices that we call covetousness. Communism is supposed to cut off covetousness. Why? Because there's going to be a benevolent dictator at the top who's going to tell us, who's going to give us all what we need. We therefore don't need to covet anymore. That's the theory behind communism. There's only one thing wrong with it. It doesn't rightly describe the nature of the human race. The nature of the human race is not naturally cooperative, is it? We always want more. The nature of the human race is naturally competitive. And we see that in scripture. So if you're going to have this benevolent dictator who's going to give us all what we need so that we won't fight over stuff anymore, then the question remains, who gets to be the dictator? Who gets to be the one that tells us who gets what? And is he in the same boat with us or does he preside over us? Or does that force, maybe it's an oligarchy, remember that word? Maybe it's a small group of people who were ruling over everybody. And that was part and parcel of the generation, of my generation, of the baby boomers. We had communist China, we had the Soviet Union, and we had all their satellite states. And even Cuba in that time, if you remember. So communism, as it was first theorized by Marx and Engels, introduced the notion that religion is the abstract force that's a necessary sedative for the human condition. In other words, the only reason we need religion is because life is so miserable. And they actually believed that and enforced it. So this is why sometimes the condition of a generation becomes the concern of religious people, you see. This is sometimes why we need to make social commentary on the things that are happening around us. So the goal is communal atheism. And it caught on, friends. Man depending on his own resources. So presumably we would all be happy if we could just jettison faith in a supreme being if society would just give us what we want. We wouldn't need God anymore. Religion, it was said by Marx, is the opium of the people. Have you ever heard that? Religion is just a drug that we need because we're so miserably sick in our souls. So it's the opium of the people, it's the sigh of the oppressed creature, he said. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. Stop oppressing me and I won't need God anymore. I would never have had to invent him in the first place if you didn't oppress me. And that was the mock of a whole generation, friends. In other words, friend, God is the problem with human society. And make no mistake, Statism, which is a general term for communism and socialism, right? Statism, in other words, the state is in charge of everything, demands atheism. So even if you give me everything I want in life, but you extract my faith in a God who really exists, I cannot be at peace with you. Moses spoke of this very thing. He not only spoke of the necessity of making the ultimate choice. What's the ultimate choice? We sometimes think the ultimate choice is life or death, but it's not. It's God or no God. That's the ultimate choice. That goes well beyond death, right? He spoke of the religious convictions of one generation spilling over onto the next. Friends, we've got to decide what kind of generation we want to be because it's going to affect the next one. I sometimes wonder what kind of generation we're leaving to our children. I've even heard people my age say, well, I probably won't live long enough to see the destruction that this generation is bringing upon itself. But we are our brother's keepers, friends. One generation has to be concerned about the next. So Moses said this, I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life that what? Both you and your descendants may live. Choose rightly and your descendants are the beneficiary. It matters the condition of the generation that we're in. And we ought to seek to improve it so far as we can. One generation, friends, it seems, builds upon the last. So by now, you must think, you're right, Pastor, you've totally complicated a very simple set of verses. I've completely drifted away from the social commentary of Christ about the generation in which he lived, but let's take a look at it. Perhaps I have done that to some degree, but recall there have been hundreds of generations since then. There were hundreds of generations before Christ spoke of his generation, and all contained their own particular character, their own brand of hopes and dreams. I wonder what he would say about ours. In fact, I don't really have to wonder too long, do I? Let's remember also that though the meaning of the passage is simple, it's our habit to make application for the present time. We should not just explain the chapter. We should seek to apply it, make application for it, that we can understand, that we can actually utilize and benefit from. So the Lord asks this, to what shall I liken this generation? It's implied that other generations would need to be evaluated by other criteria than the present one that we're in. Hence the two schools of thought. We have history to teach us about the generations, and we have philosophy to teach us about man. So we have these two schools of thought coming in as commentary on the generations. And so we make use of them. Note the next assessment that the Lord makes, though. He says, what shall I liken this generation to? And his answer is, it is like children. It is like children. Now, you know, we have to get a New Testament concept of a few terms. One would be children, all right? And I'm gonna get to that. But just to give you an example, I'm gonna say, usually when we think of dogs, those are happy thoughts, right? Dogs, everybody loves dogs today, right? I even saw the TSA is bringing in support animals to make everybody happy while they're waiting in line. Have you seen this? They bring in support. That's what I need. I need an animal sniffing my leg and trying to lick my face while I'm carrying my luggage. That would make me so happy. Our culture thinks of dogs in that way. For example, in our culture, a mention of a dog is usually followed by a happy notion and a kind treatment of the subject. We think of support animals. Emotional support animals. You see that today. Dogs are supposedly good for this. Now, the concept escapes me personally, but apparently everybody else is a follower. I never strive to be a casualty of contemporary groupthink. And if I'm honest with myself, I can hardly conceive of a thing that must be cleaned up after. and have ticks pulled off it as an emotionally uplifting thing but apparently some people like this. Alright? To be honest with you, I'm actually a dog lover in the right context. The New Testament treatment of the canine world is a little different than ours. The generation was different than ours. Jesus said the dog returns to its own vomit. It's dogs who licked the blood of Ahab and Jezebel as a curse. That was the curse on them. David refers to such in the Psalm, Psalm 22, that Christ recited from the cross. He said, dogs have surrounded me. He didn't mean sweet little puppies. The congregation of the wicked has enclosed me. Even Goliath taunted David by invoking dogs. He said, what am I, a dog that you come to me with sticks? So when we look at a generation's view of certain concepts, it can be different than another generation's view. And the same goes for children. It is like children. We could say, oh, he thought the generation was innocent and pure, which Jesus sometimes refers to children in that context. But I want to point out that references to children in scripture are also described in some very unpleasant ways. And I think that's what Christ meant when he sized up his generation. Jesus didn't mean that the generation in question was good because it was like children haplessly playing in the streets. He meant, at the very least, that they were naive and unobservant, at the very least, right? And at the very worst, they were a generation of children that was unthinkably evil. I lean more toward the worst appraisal than the best appraisal in my exegesis of the passage. I think we know when he says they're like children, that's not a good thing. Did we all catch on to that? So in verse 16, he says, this generation is like children. And I think the Lord's leaning on some of the popular sayings of the time. He doesn't say that the generation is a generation of children. Did you notice that? He didn't say the generation is a generation of children. He said they are what? They're like children. In other words, they're not a serious-minded generation. They do not govern themselves by deep thought and probing questions. Rather, they're completely unserious about life and truth and morality. I think those are the aspects of childhood that the Lord is referring to here. So what are children like? There's a saying in our day, there's no fool like an old fool. So a grown-up person who acts like a child is more of a fool than the child who's just innocent and just doesn't know things yet. You know, there's a curse in Isaiah's prophecy that I'd like to bring to your attention this morning. It speaks of rampant lack and famine. Those are usually the things that happen when a prophet is talking about God cursing the land for its sins. And so Isaiah certainly speaks about that in chapter 3, but he goes on. To add to these things, he said, the Lord will take away the stock and the store And I will give children to be their princes. That's part of the curse. I will give children to be their princes. And he goes further. He said, and babes shall rule over them. The people will be oppressed. The child will be insolent to the elder. I think that's the kind of representation of the child that Jesus is referring to here. Elisha had his own ways of dealing with insolent youth culture. Do you remember this? He punished a street gang for making fun of his bald head. That's all it took was for them to come out and say, go up, you bald head. probably a reference to the fact that Elijah went up not having died, right? And apparently Elisha was bald. But the prophet wasn't willing to take that insolence from the kids. And this is what we read from 2 Kings. So Elisha turned around and looked at them and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the Lord. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the youths. Now there's a guy that knows how to discipline children. Imagine a street gang of 42 kids in that time. 42 came out against an old man. And he gave them what for? For an adult to be like a child is even a worse situation. Solomon said this, better a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king. will not be admonished anymore. In other words, he makes exception. There are wise youths. There's always a few exceptions, it seems. Solomon's son, Rehoboam, consulted with the elders as to how to rule. This is after Solomon's death, right? The elders spoke of servitude. That's how we are supposed to look at our leaders today. They are servants of the people. You hear people as they retire or as they're running for office or something, they speak of being in public service. They're here to serve us. They speak very high-mindedly of that. Well, the elders in Rehoboam's time said, we should be like servants to the people. And they said, speak good words to them and they will be your servant. Now that seems to be a good and reasonable philosophy, and it's wise, and it was spouted off by the elders. But Rehoboam wasn't content with that, so he went to the young men that he had grown up with, it says in the scripture, and they said, say to the people, where your father put a heavy yoke on you, I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I'll chastise you with scourges. Anyone ever read Lord of the Flies? Anyone ever read Lord of the Flies? It's when a bunch of kids, British kids, get stranded on an island and decide to set up a government. And it becomes one of the cruelest totalitarian gang violence cultures you could conceive of. So I think when Jesus says they are like children, He's not complimenting his generation. He goes on, he says, we played the flute for you and you did not dance. We mourned for you and you did not lament. Now I'm quite certain that we each have some concept of what is popularly called a brat, right? Now, brat is a term that used to mean just one thing, but it means a few things now. Some people talk about brats, oh, you brat, oh, you're acting bratty, you know, you playfully little defiant thing. But when I grew up, brat was just one thing. It was a child who demanded his own way. That's what a brat was. It's always amazed me how parents, and even Christian parents, would put up with a self-willed persistent child who simply will not be disciplined. I'm a true believer that genuine biblical discipline does work. It's very simple. The rod applied at a young age is the antidote to the social epidemic of brattiness. The proverb is very descriptive about this. It says the man who spares the rod hates his son. And he who loves him disciplines him promptly. So you see, discipline is a hard thing. It's a harsh thing. If you go to Hebrews chapter 11, it talks about the Lord's discipline and how blessed we are to receive it. In other words, it's even a mark of our legitimacy before God. And he who has not been disciplined is illegitimate and not a son, it says. So discipline can be hard. Discipline can even have a harsh sense to it, but it's done in love. And there you have those two competing ideas again, working together. I remember the first time I came across this teaching as a young Christian, I heard a Southern preacher who very colorfully taught this to me in a sermon. I had one child at the time, and I heard the Southern preacher say, the Bible says, the man that spareth the rod hateth his son. My daddy loved me. And I've used it ever since. So if you can't see that our current generation is in need of a spanking, Just as John the Baptist and Elijah before him gave a loving spanking to their respective generations, I don't think we're paying attention. I rather like the teaching of Solomon that takes the concept further. We read, blows that hurt cleanse away evil, as do stripes the inner depths of the heart. So God himself spoke to David after his most egregious sin through the prophet Nathan. He spoke of the loving discipline of the Lord and he said, when your days are fulfilled and you rest with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you who will come from your own body and I will establish his kingdom. God has every intention of establishing the son of David as a great king. And then he said this, I will be his father and he shall be my son. If he commits iniquity, I will chase in him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men. But at the same time, that will be the mark of my mercy upon him. So there comes a time If we're fortunate and blessed of God, that God himself will intervene to straighten out a wayward generation and install a righteous kingdom in its place. It's a painful transition, but it's good and necessary for the propagation of our race. Every now and then God just has to come in and discipline a generation and chasten it. It's my view that we live in the age of the brat. And a well-oriented Christian should be offended by the way the brats of our day are placated and indulged. They got all the way to college, friends, with no wisdom. And guess what? It's not their fault. But once you become an adult, it's your responsibility. They're of age now. And it's their responsibility. We're seeing things change, though, in our times as we speak. The bratty kids are being restrained, and their naive parents and teachers are reaping what they sowed. And so Jesus gives us the quintessential behavior of the brats of the world. They expect their demands to be requited. We played the flute for you, and you did not dance. Get the message. You don't lead us. We lead you. They cry and throw tantrums when we refuse to dance to their tunes. When they get older, they protest in public. Those are just tantrums, friends. They say we are happy, therefore the world must be happy with us. They say we are unhappy. They truly expect that the whole world should lament with them. We lamented and you did not mourn. And then the final aspect of the childish generation is that whatever you give them, you cannot make them happy. Whatever you give a child who has learned that he's in charge, you cannot make him happy. He is demanding and it's all he knows. They're determined to be sad and arrogant and accusatory and unfulfilled by the impossible expectations they put on the rest of us. The next two verses say, John came neither eating or drinking, and they say he has a demon. The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, look, a glutton and a wine-bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. So they give him one thing, they don't like it. They give him the opposite thing, they still don't like it. I not only see contemporary society in these verses, I see Christian society to some extent. We've bred a culture of particular expectation. Man, we can fight over some of the simplest things. There's still stories of people splitting up churches over the color of the carpet, and they're not exaggerating. Can we ever be at peace with the things the Lord has sent us? The things that people choose to walk out of church over? has been reduced to some of the most trivial things, the most arrogant of expectations, the most accusatory of their leaders. John the Baptist came to them as an ascetic warrior, a hermit who lived outside of society, preaching a message of repentance, calling all people to examine themselves and then be washed in the river as a symbol of their turnaround and their confession. And he was accused of being possessed by a demon. Must have been quite a sight to see John come out the way he must have looked to them. It's amazing he actually had such a following. Didn't last that long. And on the other hand, Jesus came as a man of the people. He mixed in with folks from all walks of life. He came celebrating life. He came drinking and eating and taking fellowship with sinners of all distinctions, the complete opposite of John. And they called him a glutton. He ate, so they called him a glutton. He drank, so they called him a drunk. They called him a man of appetites and worldly desires. That's the generation he's talking about. It reminds me of a child in the high chair. He has food on his face. His bowl is spilled over. He's rejected what you've given him to eat. The mother puts a pacifier in his mouth. He throws it across the room. There's simply no pleasing him. That's the generation Jesus is apprising in this passage. He's not old enough or rational enough or expressive enough to even explain what he wants. And when he's finally able to speak, he's too selfish even to consider why he's unable to be pleased. I think we're in a generation that doesn't even know what it wants. So when it finally gets what someone thinks it wants, it'll reject that too. So here's a lesson, friends. Giving a child what he wants is not a strategy for promoting happiness in that child. I'll tell you a good biblical strategy for promoting happiness in a child. Tell him what he should want. Why should he lead the way? Tell him what he should want. It's a far more effective method of teaching. Jesus sums up his whole generation this way. No matter what they get, they'll be angry, accusatory, and dissatisfied. And so what does he say? But wisdom is justified by her children. Perhaps you've heard this saying. You ever heard this? Truth is the daughter of time and not of authority. Have you ever heard that? Truth is the daughter of time and not of authority. It's, of course, untrue. Truth is the daughter of authority. But it's not unuseful, because time will reveal to us who really held the wise position. That's why I say to Christians, hold on to our teaching. Hold on to our faith. We will be shown triumphant in the end. We are the children of wisdom. We are the children of truth. By the way, it was Francis Bacon that said that he was a Puritan. God is the great authority and therefore the author of all truth. Truth is ultimately what? Whatever God says it is. However, what the philosopher is speaking about is that truth is proved over time, and the so-called children of wisdom will be shown to be the same as the children of truth. Wisdom is truth in action, friends. It's truth put to the test. And those who live by it will be shown to have been wise after all. It may take some time, friends. But those who followed Christ will be seen as stable and faithful and reliable, when the others will not. So take care what things you deem as foolish. The proverb says, do not be wise in your own eyes. The apostle wrote to the churches of this very thing, speaking of wisdom and foolishness. And he writes this, and I'll close with this passage. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. The message of the cross is the same for those who are perishing and those who are not, right? The message of the cross is the same for everyone. But it's foolishness to those who are perishing. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Then he asks these rhetorical questions. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? In other words, those who were supposed to be wise, those who were supposed to be our examples and our teachers, where are they? Where is their example? Where is all this great wisdom? For since in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom, I always believed that that word wisdom there should have been in quotations. Since the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. If Paul hadn't said it, I would have never referred to the gospel as foolish. But he's saying it. in a facetious sense. For Jews request a sign, we've seen that so far in the Gospel of Matthew. Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified. Friends, there's a third option after all. We preach Christ crucified to the Jews' stumbling block, to the Greeks' foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Father, we ask you, apply these teachings to our hearts, and may we be changed, and may our generation reap the benefit of the example of a godly church. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.