Father, make yourself known to us anew. Let us come before your word and adore you by the power of the Holy Spirit who lives and reigns in us. We pray in Jesus' name. You may be seated. I'm going to ask you to open your Bibles this morning to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16. Matthew chapter 16 this morning, I'm going to teach from these words today, from this passage, one of the most essential, perhaps the most essential concept of our faith. Who is Jesus Christ? People have pondered this throughout the years. They have looked into the Bible and found the Bible wanting in details and looked other places. Back in the 90s, there was a great effort called the Jesus Seminar. Anybody remember the Jesus Seminar? Are you old enough? And it was a bunch of secular scholars who decided to disparage Jesus and look other places for for evidence of his existence and for evidence of his character and define and redefine. And they got way more oppressed than they probably should have, but that's still going on. We still have people say to us things about Christ that when they really have no knowledge of the Christ of the Bible. So we're gonna look into this today and try to reorient ourselves with the question, who do men say that I am? And so we'll begin with verse 13 this morning, the gospel of Matthew. And so Matthew writes, when Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples saying, who do men say that I, the son of man am? So they said, well, some say John the Baptist, others, Elijah. And others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets, and he said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Jesus answered and said to him, blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. Oh God, I pray. that you are revealed anew in our hearts by your father and our father. Amen. And so we see, there it is. When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi. Let's get an idea here of where that is. That's in the extreme north of Israel. That's on the border, or maybe at that time was beyond the border of Lebanon and Syria, which is above which is above Israel. It was a very pagan place at the time. And they were there, and there was a great temple there built to, well, the Canaanite god Baal, as well as other pagan gods. And so he asked his disciples, and he said, who do men say that I am? In other words, what's the scuttlebutt out there? Now that we've had our ministry, and we've walked around, and we've had multitudes follow us, and I preach lengthy sermons on a mountain, and we healed the sick, and our name went out, and we were challenged by the authorities, and I stilled the wind and the waves, and I did all these things. What are people saying about all this stuff? In other words, you have your feelers out. Who do men say that I am? I want to say a friend of mine once asked, we were in my kitchen actually, he asked me a question regarding the ultimate meaning of life. Now he kind of knew what I thought the ultimate meaning of life was, but he was testing me a bit, and he asked the question this way, which is a little strange. He said, if a man put a gun to your head and demanded that you give him your version of the ultimate purpose of life before you die, what would you say? So I'm doing that today. Where's my gun? What would you say when you put to the test? What would you say? Now, what makes this a difficult question for us is I don't think we always keep that on our mind. See, I, you know, and I've told you this, I rehearse life. I rehearse the things that are going to come up. I try to come up with answers to these kinds of things before they're asked. And so that makes it difficult, that we're suddenly put on the spot. We're much more involved with the immediate and the preferable. and the useful and the pragmatic than we are with these what seem amorphous concepts of eternity. And to be honest with you, he came, he didn't have a gun, he didn't put a gun to my head, but I felt like he did. I felt like I should have an answer for this man, and I did have an answer. The only thing, I didn't know if the answer was quick enough that I wouldn't get shot. So when things are going well, We don't think about eternity so much. We talk about death. I've always said religion is about death. If we weren't going to die, we wouldn't need religion. We would have forever to sort of work things out, but we are going to. And we don't know when. And so when things are going well, we don't generally think about these kind of things. And at the time he asked me, things were going relatively well, and I hadn't really thought about my answer. For such a question, we think more about the mundane things. What's for dinner? What do you want to do tomorrow? Not even knowing if there is a tomorrow. So what would you like to say is your last statement in this life? We may find that we're able to be caught quite off guard with such a thing. And having said all that, though, I think we ought to recognize the real possibility that when some sort of definitive tragedy happens in our lives, it will probably happen in an unexpected instant. It's usually how things happen. It'll come unannounced, much like that question came unannounced. It'll probably blindside you. I'll put you to the test today. What test? Well, the test of faith. This is a test of our knowledge of our faith. It's not just a simple matter for a pastor or a friend or anyone for that matter to know just what words to offer someone else in a tragic situation. Did you ever notice that? I'm always trying to find some way to comfort someone in a tragic situation without making it sound cliche or mundane or just run-of-the-mill. You know, I want to feel their pain before I answer them. I want to prepare my heart. And so, what I usually say to someone in a difficult situation or someone who has lost a loved one, I say to them, this is why we have our faith. We have our faith because the big questions of life already answered. We have our faith because we're told that God would never leave us or forsake us, and we have faith in that promise of God, and our faith gets us through the difficult times. I want to say, you know, we went to Danny Cross's banquet the other night and Danny was there and he was in really good spirits. And Danny's gone through some really momentous things in his life only recently. And it was such a blessing to see that he is such a stalwart man of faith. And he blessed us and we all thanked him for that. But just what words to give to someone when they fall into that kind of a situation. Friends, if life went on forever, if death was not always lurking about to disquiet us or disturb our plans, we're always thinking about it subtly. You know that? Death's always on the back burner. Someone leaves the house, drive safely. You know what I mean? And we pray a prayer of God's speed. You know, after Bible study, Lord, take care of us on our way home. I mean, something can happen on the way home. We're driving home in the dark. You know, things happen. So it's always sort of there lurking in the background. But if life went on forever, if death was not always lurking in the background about to disquiet us or disturb our plans and our current contentment, faith would not be so urgent a thing to cultivate in ourselves, would it? I remember I fell from a building I was building in 2013. One day I was just happily out there working. It was just me and James on the job in those days. And the next thing I was on the ground wondering if I was going to make it. In an instant, it just happened. Such things are always lurking about. And I don't want us to go through life paranoid. I don't believe in going through life fearfully. But such things are always out there. And faith, though, faith rightly built upon truth. Faith has to be built upon truth. It provides more than enough power to find peace in the moment. Faith can do that. I've seen it in myself. I've seen it in other people. I've seen it in my family members in difficult times. And I saw it in Danny Crose the other day when he embraced me as a brother in the joy of the Lord after great Grief and disappointment came into his life. But friends, faith is only so good as the object of our faith. So we have to have some idea of the characteristics, of the nature, of the thing that we put our faith in. And our faith is in Jesus Christ. It behooves us, strengthens our faith, strengthens our walk with God, comforts us in our view of eternity, because we know who he is and the power he has to keep his promises, and he's made promises. So the essence of the question becomes not merely, do you believe in Jesus? People say, I believe in Jesus all the time. Really, the real question is, what do you believe about Jesus? You see, when that culture mentioned Jesus, they were quite confused. They were like, well, he's obviously special. He's obviously well-known. He's a Jew. He's one of us. It seems like he's very wise. He talks a good game. Maybe he's like Moses. Maybe he's like Jeremiah or Elijah or John the Baptist or one of these wise, powerful men of the past. Or is he different than them? And so if you're a Christian, this is your moment to decide how you answer the ultimate question in the ultimate moment of your life. And please know that though faith is the gift of God to the believer, That affords us the luxury of rejoicing in the moments of our lives. It is also the gift of God who offers us a place of peace with regard to the reality of ultimate circumstances. Friends, the man on the street would rather not think about eternity. It's a difficult subject. People don't want to face it. Things are good. They're pretty comfortable right now. I like things the way they are. Don't get me off thinking about the future. When we speak of death in our culture, we're often unaware of the reality of death. You gone to any funerals lately? People say things like, well, at least his sufferings come to an end. Maybe, maybe not. Right? Oh, at least he's in a better place. Maybe, maybe not. I have to tell you that such things are more often based on a desire for some sort of immediate comfort. It comforts us immediately to say he's in a better place, his suffering has ended, his suffering might have just begun. And Jesus talks about that a lot. The man that is asking, what do men say about me, may not know that aspect of his teaching. There are two destinations. You get to go to one or you get to go to the other. And your knowledge of who he is is part and parcel of where you're going. Friends, we comfort ourselves with these delusions about the afterlife. The idea that ignorance is bliss may be true, friends. Ignorance is bliss may be true. Just let me be blissfully ignorant until I die. And then let me deal with eternity. So ignorance is bliss, friends, and then you die. Right? And according to the words of Christ, when you die, the truth of ultimate realities becomes the only thing ponderable. We don't think about anything else. Death may or may not wipe, death, may or may not wipe out the suffering, but it undoubtedly wipes out the ignorance. You suddenly become very wise about eternity once you're on the other side. We suddenly appropriate what Dante called, you know Dante, the great medieval Italian poet, he wrote a trilogy about eternity, about heaven, and purgatory, and hell. And hell, the inferno, became his great work. And he talked about, he sort of engineered a fiction of Virgil, the Latin poet, coming to him and taking him on a trip through the various levels of hell. And he writes about it. It's called a divine comedy, but I don't think you'll find a lot to laugh about in it. And so they come to the gate of hell, and it says, abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Dante says people in hell on the very first level the people that lived a pretty good life are way up here and they still Have a great suffering that happens to them. Why because they have They have what he called the foresight of the damned They came into the presence of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the judge. He judged them for their sin. He condemned them to hell. They went to this relatively nice area of hell. Remember, this is a fiction. This is in Bible. But their punishment was they looked in the face of God and realized they would never see that face again. And that was their punishment. So we come to realize in an instant that all the day-to-day concerns, the troubles we endure, the moments we celebrate, the failures and successes we had, were mostly just distractions for what is most important in life. Jesus, in this passage, is putting forth the answer to the question that we must all face in the ultimate moment of our lives. Who do you say that I am? It's the question that most urgently pleads for an informed answer. You don't want to get this one wrong. It's not multiple choice. Well, I'm going to check Elijah. I'm going to check John the Baptist. It's not a multiple choice, and it is the question that is best rehearsed before the gun's put to your head. And having been challenged in this way, I've tried since to make myself ready for such an occurrence. You know, I've often told you that life needs rehearsal. If you're going to speak to people with regard to ultimate concerns, which is the essence of the gospel and religion in general, it behooves us to have some sort of plan in mind, right, with regard to how we would like the conversation to go before we get there, before we get to some of that Before we get to some of that, however, I'd probably tell you how I answered. I should probably tell you how I answered. I said something to the effect that I have a God who was sovereign over circumstances. So this circumstance with you standing there with the gun to my head, putting me to the test, took me by surprise, but it didn't take God by surprise. Even the present circumstances of my personal physical jeopardy is in the hand of God. I would say to the gun wielder, something similar to what Jesus said to his executioners, to Pontius Pilate, when Pilate said to him, do you not know that I have the power to crucify you and power to release you? You know, that seemed like a cogent statement at the time. It seemed like a true statement, but it was totally contrary to Jesus' doctrine. And so what did Jesus say? He said, you could have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above. That might be a good answer. And so in the ultimate moment of his life, the man Jesus gave the ultimate answer. What? God is sovereign. Which means nothing other than the reality that God himself is the ultimate orchestrator of our circumstances. He determines the course we follow. He determines the outcome. And though our circumstances often take us by surprise, our faith is always there to remind us that God is never taken by surprise. As my old friend Gwen Kimball used to say, God is not at his wit's end. So it seems to me that this is quite a longer answer than the circumstances will admit when you're standing there at gunpoint, you think? It seems to me that the attention spans of 21st century gunmen is rather shorter than 1st century Roman governors. Now I don't know if Pontius Pilate had ADD or not. I don't know that the cure for it, a lack of Ritalin notwithstanding, came all too late for him. It should have come with Jesus' answer. His revelation should have come with Jesus' answer, but it did not. It came to him as surely as it will come to all of us at the ultimate moment of our lives, though. Pontius Pilate knows more about answering that question than you and I will ever know. Assuming he didn't come to Christ sometime later in his life, which we have no record of, it seems to me a more, a more succinct answer, a sort of a bumper sticker answer. The kind we like in our day can be devised with a little more probing inquiry into our faith and the prospect of our last moment being this present moment. So Jesus gives us the answer. Jesus' question is posed differently than my friend's imaginary gunman, though. An informed belief, an authoritative answer to the question of the identity of Jesus Christ is available to us. In fact, the apostle Peter hits on it in a way so precise that the Savior offers the apostle his commendation. And so Peter's answer to the question becomes really his best moment in the annals of the gospel. This is really Peter's best moment. And he'll suffer another disappointing moment very shortly after this happens. So in verse 16, we read, Simon Peter answered and said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And that was his answer. That's the ultimate answer. Before we ponder this wonderful conclusion, however, let's consider some of the rest of the story as we're given it. From the beginning of the chapter, we find the Lord and the disciples confronted with probing questions from other sources. The Pharisees and the Sadducees are always lurking about to ask questions like this. Who are you? Where do you get your authority from? Where is your power from? They've sought out the Lord due to his growing reputation that he's some sort of powerful prophet. He's gone about preaching, friends. He's gone about healing. We know that the blind see, the deaf hear, right? The lame walk, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. Friends, in other words, People are saying many things with regard to just who this prophet might be. And so there's all this scuttlebutt throughout the society of who he is. Who do men say that I am? In the case with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they're asking for some sort of miraculous signs, as we've seen recently, the likes of which would put him in a class of itinerant prophets of old, like Moses and Samuel and Elijah. I would say to you first that the two parties of the Pharisees and Sadducees have different goals. They're both trying to disparage Jesus, but for different reasons. Their doctrine could not be more partisan and divided, much like the political parties of our day. The Pharisees are the conservatives. They've studied the deep things of God from the ancient texts. They are the renowned scholars of their day. Paul the Apostle was one of them. You might remember another famous Pharisee who came to Jesus, a great teacher. His name was Nicodemus. And he said, he asked Jesus who he was, and Jesus responded this way. He said, unless the man is born again, he can't see the kingdom of God. And what did the great teacher say? What did the great Pharisee, the learned scholar of the day say? He asked, can a man return again to his mother's womb and be born a second time? And what did Jesus say to him? You're the teacher of Israel, and you don't know these things? Friends, the teachers didn't know. The teachers needed to learn the very basic conclusions of the scriptures. So that's the Pharisees, the Sadducees of the liberals of the day. They believe that the Bible has something good to teach so long as we can separate the useful and the practical from the imaginary and the miraculous. These guys had no use for claims of miracles. They do not believe in an afterlife at all. They do not believe in the existence of angels or demons or heaven or hell. In other words, friends, the Pharisees take the Bible literally with regard to divine things and the Sadducees do not. But they were both politically oriented. The Pharisees are looking for a man of God to lead their nation out of Roman hegemony. The Pharisees are looking for a man of God to lead their nation out of Roman control, but the Sadducees are just looking for a man to lead them out of Roman control. The Pharisees study prophecy, the Sadducees study politics, friends. The Pharisees are looking for the prophesied Messiah who's descended from David and wields the power of Elijah to call down fire from heaven upon his enemies. And the Sadducees are looking for a man of state to lead them to power and prominence in their time. And they're not unwilling to believe that Herod might be the Messiah, or one of his offspring might be the Messiah. So all of this to say, friends, that in that time, in the very moment that Jesus poses his question to these men, They come up with theories and conjectures regarding the identity of him. And these conjectures are swarming about the countryside. It's the same today. Some see him as a potential conqueror. Some see him as a potential king. Others only know that they were sick or blind or lame and now they're well. And to add even more intrigue to the moment, we're apprised by Matthew that Jesus poses the question in the region of Caesarea Philippi. That's a place in northern Palestine, as I've noted, that is known for its varied forms of pagan worship. The Temple of Baal is there. The Canaanite god is there. It was built by none other than Herod the Great. He's the same one who built the great aqueduct of the city, the great wall of Jerusalem, and even the great temple. He's the great builder of that time. Caesarea Philippi was the center of that time, of the Canaanite god Baal, the Greek god Pan, and Caesar Augustus. They actually worshiped their Caesars as God and put up shrines to them. That's where Jesus decided to pose this question. So it should not be unexpected that the Lord might wonder as to how much of the local lore has rubbed off on those closest to him. And I wonder that. How much of local lore has rubbed off on us? How much of our culture? How much of the indefinite conclusions about Christ have rubbed off on us? They're as much a product of their spiritually confused culture as most people of our culture are in our time. And so it's not only the most crucial question, but it is, for reasons we've noted, the most appropriate question. The initial answer is given. And so we read, some say John the Baptist. Some say Elijah, others Jeremiah. Friends, that's where we are today. People are guessing about who Jesus is, about what he's like, about what he did or might do. In other words, the populace is confused. Our nation's confused. A lot of people in the pews today are confused about the identity of Jesus Christ. And so I have a question for us today. How much of the local lore regarding the identity of Jesus Christ is rubbed off on us? What populist beliefs regarding Jesus lurk about in our brains? I had a conversation recently with an old friend. It was a political conversation. Now, I have to make a disclaimer here at this point in the message. They say don't talk religion and politics. So you've got to try not to do that, you understand? But I have to say, if I don't talk religion and politics, I would be the most silent person in all the world. I don't really have a great interest in a lot of other things. I don't follow sports closely. I'm kind of a fair weather fan, although I have to admit the weather's getting pretty good, isn't it? So I might have to go back to that. But I don't follow popular music. Karen and I, once in a while, we sit down, we watch the news, you turn it on, and they're showing you who won all the awards at all the great song awards and movie awards. And we look at each other, do you know this person? We don't follow that, but we do follow certain things. We follow our religion. and we follow the politics of our nation. We like to know about the things that will really affect us. So we were talking politics. There's nothing else that intrigues me more than religion and politics. I don't really have any hobbies. I don't ski, I don't play tennis or golf, even though my property backs up to a golf course and I live in a town that has four golf courses. I still don't golf. So please understand that religion and politics are all that I really care to talk about. Thus my political conversation with an old friend while at a gathering at his house, and without going into the specifics, I won't bore you with that of the conversation at the time, let me just say that my current political bent earned me the honor of having my Christianity come into question. How can you be a Christian and believe those things? Now why did my Christianity come into question? Because of my politics. because my friend made assumptions about the person and the mission of Christ that were false assumptions. And he assumed that my conclusions about real life events was offensive to God. Has that ever happened to you? He assumed that Jesus would frown upon my politics. You see, most people who blithely throw around the name of Jesus make all sorts of ignorant assumptions about him. Have you noticed that? What are some of the assumptions people have? Well, first, they assume he's nice. I'm here to tell you. We have some evidence that he's been nice in certain situations, but in most situations, I don't think you'd call him nice. In fact, I got fearful for a while preaching for Matthew because he's showing us a distinctly not nice, polite Jesus. And I didn't want us to get the idea because Jesus is good, but goodness isn't always colloquial niceness. So they were assuming, I guess they thought my politics was a little harsh based on theirs. So how could Jesus be like that? Jesus isn't harsh. Jesus is nice. They assume he's polite. They assume a Jesus that is non-confrontative. He would just back away. Jesus would never talk religion and politics. He's too polite for that. They assume Jesus is open-minded. Can you ever imagine an open-minded God? God's open-minded about things. He's open to suggestion. How could God ever communicate prophecy to the prophets if the fulfillment of the prophecy was still up in the air? He was still discussing it. My friend assumed that the current bent towards socialism in our country was one that Jesus would embrace. People think that all the time. You know, Jesus just didn't talk about these things really very openly. Jesus never said socialism. The word wasn't even a word in that time. He used the, so this guy used the meaningless coded term social justice that you hear a lot about today. This is worse than actual socialism because it takes from the haves and gives to the have-nots. So the popular answer to the Lord's question would go something like this, because of the whole socialism movement. Who do men say that I am? The answer would go something like this. Well, some say you are Gandhi, and some Marx, and some Bernie Sanders, and some Robin Hood. you know, take from the poor, take from the rich and give to the poor. The local lore sneaks in a false attribute of the Savior by assuming some sort of egalitarian message. But let me help you out with this kind of thing. It's really very simple. I could just note, and I did at the time, that the Lord said something very peculiar concerning private property. You know, social is all about private property. Jesus said, thou shalt not steal." In other words, private property is sanctified before God. What's yours is yours, and what's his is his, and you can't take it, and you can't even want it, because you can't covet it. Jesus was a big defender of private property, which if nothing else denotes a special sanctified status of private property. But we can actually go further with our study of who he is. I would blast the social justice Messiah out of the water by simply quoting from the real Messiah who said, for to everyone who has, more will be given. And he will have abundance, but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. And both Matthew and Mark quote Jesus as saying that. Some take for granted that Jesus would never make a personal moral judgment regarding a person's beliefs, because that's just wrong to do. Some would carelessly assume that God desires to be seen as the father of all people. But Jesus once said to a group of his detractors, he said, if God were your father, you would love me. And then he went on to straighten out the confusion. He said, you have a father. Your father is the devil and the desires of your father you want to do. No, Jesus, God is not trying to be the father of all people. Jesus would always seek a peaceful solution to any problem and would never say a divisive word to anyone. That's the Jesus that the detractors see today. But the real Jesus said different things than that. He said, do not think I came to bring peace. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man's enemies will be those of his own household. Now that's when you get to the place where the detractor of Jesus, the one who's assumed all these nice guy traits, is probably thinking, that's not the Jesus I know. And I would give a hearty amen to that. So I would warn you not to believe that he's open-minded with regard to the concepts of God and his son. Jesus is not open-minded about who he is. You don't get to offer an opinion. And he said this, therefore whoever confesses me before men, him I also will confess before my father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, him I will also deny before my father who is in heaven. So it seems to me that it is of the utmost important to Jesus that we find out who he really is. You see, most people who throw around the name of Jesus do him a distinct disservice. And when you actually come upon him in his own teaching regarding his own attributes, you come to confront the real Messiah. You don't want to meet him on that day. That's not the time you want to come face to face with Jesus. You want to meet him before Judgment Day. And he will come again to judge the living and the dead. That's one of the basic tenets of our religion. You may find a Messiah that is not pleased with having you use presumed, mistaken attributions to bolster your political views and to disparage the faith of those who actually know him. It seems to me that the real Jesus would not be at all pleased with having his name thrown around to win an argument about the small questions by spokesmen who could not answer the big question. Perhaps that's why he gave them this instruction. He commanded his disciples that they should tell no one that he was Jesus the Christ. Did that ever confuse you? You would think he'd want everyone to know he's Jesus the Christ. He does want everyone to know he's Jesus the Christ, but he doesn't want them to know in some nominal way. way where they recognize him but deny his power. Always learning, never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. And of course, our conversation had to go all the way to the other moral end of the political spectrum, and we arrived at the place where my political leanings that were not okay with Jesus would be well received by Hitler. Hitler makes his way into a lot of conversations today. I don't know if you've noticed that. and we're the generation that actually know who he was and what he did, and people seem to have forgotten. My beliefs were not wrong to this man, they were actually evil. I pleaded with my friend to leave Jesus and Hitler out of the conversation, not because I was offended with having my, at the time, 30 years of confessional Christianity and my 24 years of committed ministry denounced, but because I'll not be party to distracting from the true identity of Jesus, and I'll not be party to causing another man to blaspheme. Friends, blasphemy is something we don't concern ourselves with much today, but God is still offended by blasphemy. Blasphemy is a sin of speech. When you say something about God, or use his name blithely, or ask him to curse things, To speak badly or errantly about the nature of God and his son is the very definition of blasphemy, friends. Blasphemy is an old, outdated concern in our society. But God has not changed his mind about it at all. The Pharisees did not have Hitler to throw around when they accused Christ. So what did they do? They went all the way to Satan. And so when Jesus cast a demon out of a man who really existed, right, and was accused by the Pharisees who really existed, they said of him that he was a follower of Satan who really exists. And they said, this fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of demons. So they didn't have Hitler to throw around, but they went all the way to Satan with saying who Jesus was. And little did my friend know, so did he. I can't say which thing Jesus took greater exception to, being aligned with the devil or being referred to as this fellow. Both things detract from the person of Christ. And so where does all this leave us? Verse 17 says, Jesus answered and said to them, blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. So we know one thing for certain, and that is that Peter rightly answered the question as to the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. We know it is right because the Son of God said it was only by revelation of God that Peter could know this in the first place. Never think you'll stumble upon eternal truths accidentally. That's not how it works. You cannot know them by accident. They are knowable to us in our natural state. Or rather, they are unknowable to us in our natural state. For the carnal man knows not the things of God, nor can he know them. We cannot learn them from intensive study. I've known a lot of scholars who never stumbled upon the truth of who Jesus really is. Truth is only known to us by revelation. It's from the top down. And the Bibles you hold in your hands are the only written source of truth with regard to the nature of Christ, to the attributes of God, to His mission on the earth, and the offer of everlasting life to those who come to know Him. And how do we know this? How do we know we can only know the truth by revelation of God? We can only know the truth When we become born again, as Jesus said to Nicodemus, we can only see the Kingdom of God after we've been born again. We know this because the Word of God tells us this. And so Luke writes, these are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you. That's Jesus speaking. that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms concerning me. And he opened their understanding. He opened their understanding that they might comprehend the scriptures. We don't simply stumble upon the truth. Flesh and blood has not revealed it to us, but my father who was in heaven. So if you know this, then all your prayers have been answered. Blessed are you, for flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but your Father who is in heaven revealed to you the identity of our Savior and Messiah, Jesus Christ. Amen. Father, we ask in Jesus' name that you make the tenets of your Word known to us, and known to us in a special, saving way by the power of your life-giving Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.