Thank you, all of you, for your ministry both here and in times past. You all have had a significant impact on many of the men in this room through your preaching ministry, things that have happened here over the years in seminary and in your writing, and for that we're enormously grateful and it's a great opportunity I think we all feel we want to capitalize on to pick your brains a little bit about theology and ministry and the Christian life. Okay, so I'm going to dive right in here. First question, perhaps starting with you, Dr. Swain, and then I'd love to hear from our other panelists, is in what format should you teach your church aspects of the doctrine of God, like His simplicity, impassibility, and so on? Should it be primarily in preaching exegetically? or giving systematic explanation at some other point, say preaching or Sunday school, catechesis, Bible studies, and then drawing on that systematic explanation when it comes up in preaching. So how do you help your people begin to grapple with some of the profundities here that perhaps we ourselves are still struggling to properly understand? Yeah, a few thoughts just in terms of lowest hanging fruit. I do think that if you're preaching with a text that has something related to the doctrine of simplicity, for example, so Exodus 3, the revelation of the divine name, I am who I am. It's a very natural place to discuss that. First John 1.5 example I came to earlier. I think that Catechesis is an obvious place as well, so catechetical sermons, other contexts of catechetical teaching. These things are in our confessional standards, right? And so it's a very natural way to deal with it there. But I think another context, and I think for this group especially, it's a very natural context, is as you lead in worship, as you lead in prayer, public prayer, Prayer should not be a kind of theological lecture. There's something to be said for brevity and clarity in prayer. But there, you know, God is light. A small exposition in the way we address the Lord when we identify him as light can help people just get the, not only the words of scripture, but the sense of scripture. And so those are just three thoughts. Thank you. I came out of seminary, Vantil pouring out of my mouth and ears and every pore. I was epistemologically self-conscious. There were just the ordinary little old ladies and people there and it was not a happy time really. I had been a student for 24 years. That atmosphere was the entire atmosphere of my life. Preparation for university, university, then graduate school. And I thank God for all those men, Stonehouse and Young and John Murray and Ed Clowney and Meredith Klein. I didn't take advantage of all that I was being offered. It's been wonderful to hear these two papers on the nature of God. Our preaching is often too cerebral and too academic. They're not lectures. And the mind is not the end. You do address the mind. You have to address the mind. And from the mind, you have to address the conscience. And through the conscience, you address the affections. And that's the goal. Because the great end of our Christian lives is to love God. To love Him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. And to know God is to love Him. And so the attributes of God, especially ontological attributes, non-communicative attributes, anything that humbles us. But the end is to humble us, isn't it? That's the end of all teaching. God resists the proud and he gives grace to the humble. And so these truths, they are to be familiar with you. They are to be as familiar as the doctrine of justification. that God has constituted a righteousness, that that righteousness is in the man Christ Jesus. He imputes that righteousness to all who repent and trust in him and declares then, in an act of justification, those people to be righteous. And you know that. And that's just the stuff of doxology and believing meditation and prayer. And so, too, the doctrine of God, everything that God has revealed and every question that that we are asked, and they are very practical questions. The sovereignty of God is immensely practical. There was a child that was born and lived eight hours and died, and the sister, three weeks ago, said to dad and mum, Why did God take the trouble of giving us that child if he was going to take her away in eight hours? And that's an enormous pastoral question for an eight-year-old. And you have to know God, and you have to be familiar with him, and you have to speak about God to a child with that enormous divine and moral problem facing it. familiarity and sweetness. You then take Birkhoff with you into the pulpit and read bits, you know that, you've got to talk familiarly about how grand God is. That's helpful. I'll just add one thing. I think primarily it's preaching of the word and that's one of the reasons I've been firmly convinced all my days that we should have three worship services a week, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. And the Wednesday night is, of course, a prayer meeting, but I believe you should have preaching, or at very least a Bible study. Maybe it doesn't have to be a completely formal sermon, but a Bible study, the Bible content, I remember many years ago in Dillons, I only did this once in my ministry, we went through the Westminster Confession of Faith, but otherwise I always took passages elect you continue of preaching through books and I agree with Reverend William still of Aberdeen In his amazing book to me the work of the pastor That as you preach through the Bible, you don't neglect Malachi or Genesis or Proverbs or Revelation or what? You seek your whole life to be preaching through the entire entirety of the Word of God written. And thus, as you're going through, you'll be covering all the major points about God from different perspectives. But I just, maybe this is advertisement or pushing it a bit, but I honestly don't see how you can do that with one service a week. I don't think it's enough. I really don't. I humbly ask you to reconsider your position if you only have one service. I'll say this, and you'd never know who it was. In fact, I can't remember who it was, but I had a... That's fortunate. I had a former student, one of my many, many, I love them all, and I saw him at one of the PCA General Assemblies, and rather than just change the time of day, or rather than just leave it superficial, I said, well, what are you preaching in your evening service? He looked down. Well, I don't have an evening service. And I suppose I shouldn't have done it, but I said, well, why not? He said, it's too much work. I never said another word to him about that. And I thought the Christ of Calvary, the Christ left the glories of the Father and came down and poured out his soul for me and saved my soul and called me into the ministry. It's too much work. preach three times a week. So enough of that. You will cover who God is. And obviously I ran a catechism class all those years and catechized the children and so forth and so on. But I believe we need multiple services in a week. And God is worth our best, all he's worth, the greatest efforts of our lives. I'll add this. I would say looking back over my life, now I'm old, I'm 74, never thought I'd be this old, but it's the Lord's, the Lord's will to have left me the hardest years of my life in the sense of the most work. For the eight years, I was at First Presbyterian Church in Dillon, South Carolina, as the minister. I was ordained in Rayford, North Carolina, and had it for about two years, and finished my PhD in Edinburgh, then came back to Dillon. But I was preaching three times a week, three different books. I was covering, I don't know, I started out in the morning with Gospel of John, in the evening, 1 Samuel and Wednesday Proverbs and so forth. I've never worked as hard in my life. Now, I've worked hard all my life. When I came to the seminary a few years later, it was a great amount of work to get those lectures together, and the second year and third year easier than the first, but you're always upgrading. But never have I been under the pressure of such work Asked to prepare three sermons a week to the same crowd But thank the Lord I did it and People began getting saved. Of course, they were kind of Scottish background and hesitant reserved and hesitant to tell you anything they didn't want to admit they'd got saved because I've been a member for 30 years and When I got ready to leave, about a third of the church came by to see me in private and said they'd gotten saved. I said, well, surely you were saved. Maybe you're illuminated. No, we know whether we're saved or not. And a lot of them, it was just in the preaching of the word. Anyway, there it is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So we had several questions for Scott about resources, so maybe you'll give us entry-level, intermediate, serious, where do you turn maybe some neglected resources, older resources, newer resources, things you've written. I know you've written several volumes, some of them are on the table in here, things you've edited as well, that get at this or different aspects of the doctrine of God. Help us, put some resources in our hands. I love Herman Bovink, and I think that his section on the doctrine of God is one of the strongest sections in that four-volume work. Bovink is obviously writing early 20th century, but he has a mastery of the Reformed tradition, and beyond that, the larger tradition, but he also writes as someone who's a minister of the word. There's a warmth, there's a doxology to his treatment of the divine attributes. Um... I remember where he's, there's a section where he's riffing on a point I made earlier that the doctrine of God is really the central doctrine of all theology, and every doctrine is the doctrine of God. God the creator, God the redeemer, God the consummator. And he says, for this reason, systematic theology is actually a hymn of praise. It's all doxology. So again, for this room, probably everyone in this room owns Bavink, but I think that's a good kind of introductory resource. The things, I mean, The things that I have found helpful and I think the things that repay study for the ministry of the Word and the, you know, consistent expository preaching that has been committed here. Sources like really commentaries. So, Martin Luther's commentary on the book of Genesis, Martin Luther's commentaries on the Psalms. I almost don't want to think about doing anything with a psalm without reading what Luther does. Well, what's fascinating about Luther is, of course, Luther is, he's the great preacher of justification by faith alone, but in his commentary, one scholar has written a book on Luther's commentary on Genesis, and he says essentially the whole thing is Luther talking about God's action. There's a Christocentrism that is healthy and good, and I'm grateful for it in contemporary preaching. But in many cases, being Christ-centered means either being atonement-centered or being justification-centered. Oftentimes the focus is on the work of Christ, rarely on the person of Christ, and rarely in a sense, on the fact that Jesus is the I Am. He is Yahweh in our midst. Well, reading Luther's commentaries is a good way of correcting that. And it's interesting how he brings in these very kind of sophisticated topics, but shows their practical relevance. I mean, read Luther on Psalm 90, talking about the eternity of God and what a comfort that is to the believer. I would say the same thing for Augustine's commentaries on the Psalms or Augustine's commentary on the Gospel of John. These are sources where you have folks who as was just said, someone who's familiar with the Lord, right? And who knows how to expound the Lord as he presents himself to us in the word. In terms of probably more advanced sources, the Dolezal book is actually a good introduction. Dolezal has also written another book on simplicity. It's primarily philosophical, but it's a solid treatment of divine simplicity. I just lost my train of thought there. I was going to recommend something else. If I think about it, I'll come back to it. Okay, good. This is for Jeff Thomas. Why would the supremely articulate Holy Spirit who breathed out the written word intercede for us with groans too deep for words? Well, the son of a gun came and he preached on that text and he's disappeared. And I'm picking up the pieces. I was praying about this session and I was saying, Lord, no hard questions now. Questions like, why is Wales the most beautiful country in the world? I'm the authority here on that. You're getting married in eight weeks' time. Tell us how beautiful your wife-to-be is. And I'm the authority on that too. Off my head, I'm going to ask Doug to answer. I believe that it's not so much the groans of the Holy Spirit, it's groaning inside of us, that we very often we're in fellowship with the Lord, we don't know exactly how to articulate some of the massive things that are within us and that are upon us. And I like what B.M. Palmer said of New Orleans, and he is paraphrasing John Calvin, that the Holy Spirit re-echoes the intercessions of Christ inside of us. And so we don't exactly know all that Christ's will is for the situations in which we're concerned that he has laid upon us, and we can articulate much of it. But they're mysterious elements. They're elements of vastness and things of heaviness. And so the blessed Holy Spirit is coming from the throne. And what Christ has planned and desiring for this situation He uses us as a conduit. And then the best we can do sometimes is the groaning and the Holy Spirit is producing the groanings. And there's nothing so articulate, if we could get into the courts of heaven, as the groanings of the blessed Holy Spirit and the humblest believer coming up to the throne, which is re-echoing what Jesus Christ wants in a given time and place. When I would ask John Murray at the end of a lecture what a certain verse meant, he would say, have you been asked to preach on that verse? I would say, no, no, I'm interested in what it means. He'd say, oh, thank you. I'll let you know on Thursday. And he would think about it, and sometimes he would write me the answer and give me other verses. And I think that's what I want to do now. So next Thursday, I'll let you know. All right then, Jeff, try this one. Not to let you off the hook, in other words. After, I don't know if this is correct, you tell me, after 50 plus years? Fifty and a half. In the same church or in gospel ministry? No, in the one church. In the same church, what's your first counsel for the young pastors here? Well, I think a mistake I made was to do a Lloyd-Jones morning and evening, and do a systematic expository preaching at both the services, and I think that was a mistake. I think, do a Lloyd-Jones in the morning, and especially to concentrate on the New Testament epistles, because that's the climax of redemptive revelation, to go through Philippians and 2 Timothy and I think that's where you start and buy the best commentaries on it then and get your Pauline theology sorted out and preach it. Lots of helps in books and online and then in the evenings do a Spurgeon and preach in the evenings on the big texts of Scripture. Look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is none else. Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die? God so loved the world, for by grace are ye saved through faith. And the Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble. He knoweth them that trust in him. You know, those texts, God has honored that preaching for several hundred years. He honored it in You know, Wesley's most famous open air sermon was on a very theological text. Jesus Christ, who of God, is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Whitefield's preaching, Spurgeon's preaching, Lloyd-Jones' preaching. Systematic expository preaching is really hard-going. It was hard going for Lloyd-Jones. He comes to Second Peter and he comes to that second chapter and he's just baffled by it. And he jumps to chapter three. He, with his mind, found that most difficult. He comes to the end of chapter two and the last two verses on homosexuality. They're not there. I was preaching through Rome. I said, oh, he's a doctor. He'll know now. He'll know what to say and how to help homosexuals and so on. It's as if those two verses weren't in Scripture. So he found it, Ergol, you're going to, twerps like ourselves are going to find it very difficult to commit ourselves for two services a week to Old Testament books, to prophetic books that are preaching in the teeth of a disinterested, bale-loving, hostile, cold congregation. That's not your congregation. It's not my congregation. So go easy on absolutizing systematic expository preaching. I went to a church a few years ago, a PCA congregation, and we were all given a sheet of paper and it had the outline of about 12 verses and he went through the 12 verses and that was it. I wasn't preaching. That was a glorified Bible study. It didn't speak to my to my heart, it didn't speak to my conscience, I wasn't motivated. If preaching is about moving people, moving them to repent of their sins, moving them to love God and love their neighbours as themselves, if it's about that, then you need more than an acquaintance with the Bible. you need to ask for the Holy Spirit and be sensible about your preaching and learn to preach on the big texts of the scripture at least once a week. And that's the thing I regret that I didn't do. Thank you. Scott, you've mentioned both in, I think, in both lectures and again, just a moment ago, quoting Bavinck, in slightly different ways, but you've made the connection for us between theology, in this case theology proper, and doxology. Both explicitly and even in the way that you've sought to end your lectures, you've tried to get us past simply reasoning through the conundrums to see beauty and glory and our hearts to begin to be moved. Is there a connection between the downgrade that you have mentioned for us in a grasp of the riches of the classical doctrine of God and an impoverished worship life in the local church? Yeah, I mean, I think there has to be. There's a way of there's a way of preaching the gospel, and there's a way of even talking about the application of salvation and justification and sanctification and glorification, where the kind of goal of that teaching terminates on the human being, terminates on either the conscience, appeasing us of our guilt, and what happens there is that this is a little bit of a strong way of saying it, but you could preach the gospel in that way and not be aiming to convert the human being to love of God and neighbor. And so I do think that when God becomes the subject matter of our preaching, then there is a doxological answer. His glory demands a kind of response and worship that just preaching to assuage guilt, guilty consciences, it doesn't demand in the same way. Now, it can be done in a way that that is very unevangelical, where you make people feel like you've gotta do your duty, God deserves this, perhaps somehow our worship is going to enrich him, and that's blasphemous, right? Worshiping God is what we owe him, it is our duty, but the benefit accrues, of course, to us. So I do think there's a connection. It's interesting, something that Jeffrey said just a moment ago, thinking through the relationship between mind, conscience, and affection, and so forth. This is something that the classical doctrine of God actually sees as part of the analogy between God and creatures. We talked earlier about God's perfection, God's glory, God's beatitude. If perfection primarily refers to his being, glory refers to his intelligibility, his wisdom, beatitude refers to his will and his delight and his satisfaction in himself. I think in a similar way, when we expound God's perfection, when we try to seek to illumine minds to his glory, The end is that our wills will rest in God satisfied, and the kinds of creatures we are demands to express that resting and rejoicing and the full exercise of our powers in worship. And so I do think there's a very deep connection between the doctrine of God and doxology, because again, we are made to glorify and enjoy Him. Would any of our other panelists like to comment? The connection between our doctrine of God and the quality of our worship. Well, like the man with the violin that kept on the same string, I'm going to go back to the string, but I like it. And say this, I honestly believe there's a supernatural guiding somehow or other, I can't say exactly what it is, in the fact that you're preaching expositorily, and I agree thoroughly with Jeffrey, it doesn't have to be a close exegesis of always of a Romans or Ephesians or what, you can take in more difficult passages where there doesn't seem to be a lot, take a larger swath of first or second Samuel or what have you. which are preaching through the word. And one passage follows another one in your regular pulpit work, and you have people praying for you that you'll be. Helped in your study. I remember when I was left Scotland. We had a lot of relatives in Isle of Skye and other places They were very keen Christians. They particularly asked them to pray for me in my study in preparation of sermon more than in presentation of sermon because I some people for whatever reason feel uneasy before a crowd in Preaching I didn't found that from childhood Well, not easy, but not too, too hard. But what I found the most demanding was getting together a good sermon three times a week. Now, as you're doing that, I believe the Holy Spirit is guiding you. And one passage follows another passage, and sometimes, I agree with certainly Lauren Jones, had a good point. You say, well, why? Why is the next passage not so and so? Why doesn't it have so and so? And then you look at that, and that might be one out of three points or something. But as you are a servant of the word, bowed down before the Lord during the week, praying and seeking and trying to have an intelligent and Sensible sermon that people can feel and you you know, you're getting somewhere when you start repenting yourself over what you're gonna preach that Sunday or that Wednesday. I believe supernaturally God is loose through his word, and he's doing what you can't think of doing. He is penetrating the consciences. He is penetrating the very souls of his people, and sometimes even the unsaved, which will always be a good number in the congregation, will be touched. You know, in 1 Corinthians 14, Says you to preach in a known tongue Because if you're using your you're preaching in a known tongue the unbeliever that may be in the church will feel it and will fall down on his face and report that God is in you of a very truth, that God is breaking through his conscience through this exposition of the word. You don't know how, you're just saying what it said, what it meant to those people, what it would mean now and how God is in it. And the people will be worshiping, the people will be praising, some will be weeping. Different things happen. You don't orchestrate, say, well, this passage should bring tears, this passage should bring joy. You don't know that, but you're faithful, and God is working. So be preaching three times a week, faithfully. It's very hard work. It's the hardest work of your years, but it's the glory of God is let loose, and people begin praising him. That's it. We were about 30 students at Grady Reading in 64, and the faculty took us out for a meal and sat amongst us. They were scattered. We were all around tables together, Van Tilden, Edward J. Young, and John Murray. And they got up one by one and they gave us exhortations about the future. John Murray got up and said, try to specialize in some subject that you find interesting. Read about it. Read as deeply, as widely, as often as you can, you may find in 20 years' time a new controversy emerges in the church. And because of the studies you've done and the work you've done, you're able to give great assistance to the church at this time. Now, I've been traveling for three weeks around the South mainly, and I was in Texas in a conference of a thousand people in Denton, the fellowship conference, and a brother got up and he spoke on the fatherhood of God. I used to say, we all used to say that the Holy Spirit was the neglected person in the Trinity. I think God the Father is the neglected person in the Trinity. And oh, it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It moved me to think the verses that he quoted and drew our attention to by our Savior and the apostles. I thought, oh, I should have specialized in the fatherhood of God. I won't say who texted this, who submitted this question, but if you want to know, ask Terry Johnson. He can let you know who sent this in. Why do Hodge and Warfield depart from the classical doctrine of impassibility? Did anyone notice? What are the ramifications? And there was a couple of other questions around the theme of how did we get here from there? How did we find ourselves at a place where in what seems like the main artery of contemporary evangelical and reformed or Calvinistic books and writing and teaching, a doctrine of God that is quite unlike the doctrine of the Reformed Orthodox and the Reformers and the Fathers. How did that happen? And we're only just now beginning to call an alarm bell, sound an alarm bell. I don't know. That's the short answer. It is interesting when you read Warfield on the Trinity, Hodge on the Trinity, on the Divine Attributes as well, you read Bovink, the differences are clear. And Bovink sees the differences too. Look at his footnotes. I do think it has something to do with, again, some massive changes in philosophy and theology in the 18th and 19th centuries. You have to understand at the Reformation, while there are, on the one hand, massive changes going on related to articulating the authority of Scripture, regarding doctrine of justification, regarding ministry of the church and the means of grace. In other areas, there's little to no change. I mean, Luther explicitly says in the small called articles that when it comes to the doctrines of majesty, and by that he means doctrine of God, doctrine of person of Christ, he says there's no dispute between us and Rome. Well, that has a kind of institutional play out. So when the Protestant reformers start founding institutions to train pastors and then eventually universities and so forth, While on the one hand, there are kind of changes in the curriculum and to the places given to study the Hebrew Bible, study the Greek New Testament, things like this, there are certainly different approaches to pastoral training. In other areas, they take things from kind of even medieval theology and medieval schooling, really the doctrine of God, and there are Not many changes at all. And they don't think that there need to be changes. Well, you get to the 18th and 19th centuries, and the rise of rationalism, massive changes in the university system, and then you get to the 19th century with the University of Berlin being kind of the model university in the world, considered the kind of premier research university. Hodge wants to go to Germany so he can learn there. What's happened is, It's not just that philosophy and metaphysics and theology have changed, but the way these things are taught have fundamentally changed. And we're talking about this over at lunch. When a minister, or a prospective minister, ministerial candidate comes to school to be trained, he doesn't know that he's being taught a different way about the doctrine of God than, classically, you know, his forebears would have been taught. And that's true whether he is self-consciously revisionist or self-consciously conservative. And so I think one way I sometimes say it is 19th century, a lot of bad historiography was produced. You think of kind of Harnack and ritual and so forth. The irony is that a lot of not only kind of, again, liberal theologians, but also conservative theologians, they all relied on the same bad historiography. They just had different ways of responding to it. And so there is a kind of, there's a common sense, There's something in the water where everyone kind of feels like, yes, Greek philosophy probably did corrupt Christian theology somewhere along the way, and someone like Isaac Dorner or Friedrich Schleiermacher has their program for what we need to do about that when it comes to the doctrine of God. And you're not gonna hear a Hodge and a Warfield suggesting the same kind of radical program, but there may be an assumption that but they are right that something went wrong, and we haven't been fully Protestant, and frankly, that rhetoric is very common today. Let's be consistently Protestant in our doctrine of God. Well, I must say to be consistently Protestant in our doctrine of God is to be consistently Catholic, small c in our doctrine of God, because if you understand confessional Protestantism, they said, no, this is what we believe as well. So, I think there are a number of explanations, and I can't give a full diagnosis of it, but these are the threads I see. Jeff, are there common ways you have seen that you could warn us about that gospel ministers quench the Spirit? Perhaps you'd start by telling us what it means to quench the Spirit and go from there. The Holy Spirit is a person. He loves, He longs for us, the James verse, the better modern translations of it, He yearns over us. He can be grieved. He can be quenched. Anything that dishonours The one he glorifies quenches him. Anything that ignores someone he loves so much quenches the spirit. Everything that goes against what he is doing in your lives, in sanctifying you and making you like the one he loves most. Any resistance to that and loving the things of the flesh. That grieves him too. A barren familiarity with holy things grieves him. Reliance on anything except Jesus Christ and his finished work, even the regularity of our devotional lives. You know the story of the man who hadn't missed a time of prayer for 40 years. And one morning, his alarm didn't go off and he was sleeping and sleeping. And he saw the devil in a dream who came to him and said, hey, you're missing your time of prayer, time to get up, wake up. And he said to the devil, what are you doing? What are you doing waking me up? Why do you want me to pray? The devil said, oh, well, I was an angel of light, and I appeared before the Lord, and I know what it's like. And no, no, it can't be that. You can't want anything good from me. And you're wanting me to pray. And he woke up in a cold sweat and lay back on the bed. The devil wants me to pray. And then he thought of the way he looked at his devotional life and his times of prayer. He thought how he had exalted himself in his regularity that he hadn't missed, that really he was launching into eternity. His confidence as he faced God was not primarily the Lord Christ. but it was his self-mastery and his personal devotions. And he had to repent over that and he had to think much about it. And he came to this conclusion, if you'll hear me. God loves our sins when they're mixed with repentance more than he loves our virtues when they're mixed with pride. It's a very solemn thing. It's a very solemn thing. What grieves the spirit, you say? Our devotional life, our orthodox preaching, our free grace, doctrines. These things, unless they are humbly dealt with, and we grieve over our failure to be the men of God and the spokesman for God that we should be. These things, let alone money and women and greed and ego and self-pity and all the things that we are obviously aware that these things grieve him too. Thank you. Dr. Kelly, I think this will be our last question, two questions really. Number one, when is volume three coming? David, that depends on how hard you pray. Let me give let me give a self-serving excuse which is uh worse than nothing my The volume three is beyond the blessed holy spirit and other matters and I've moved my books from charlotte about a year and a half ago Thousands of them in their pack and storage facility. I've just finished the help of the Lord, the Lord's people, sending money. It's not all paid for, but enough to get the building up, to spread the books out, and we've got next to get raised some to put the shelves up, and then I'm gonna spread out the books and get the third volume written if, you know, if the Lord helps me and the rest of it, so I've I've done a lot of chapters in books and I'm revising sermons on Deuteronomy day by day, but I hope to get on that by the month of May. And I imagine it would take about a year and a half, and it may. I've planned with the editors to do four volumes. I don't know if I'll live that long when I walk and look at myself in the mirror. I don't always enjoy what I see. You know, the signs of time are sinking, but the dawn of heaven breaks. So you all pray for me, and I hope in about two years from May or a year and a half from May, it'll be ready. Good, and we look forward to that very much. Okay, one questioner asks, and this is a reflection of things he said he's hearing from many others, quote, I'm losing my elders due to age or moving or passing, and I don't know or it's hard to know where to find new ones. How do we raise up a new generation of elders and churchmen that know and will maybe fight for the gospel and the Reformed faith? Have we lost a generation of godly men? That's a very serious question, and particularly when you're not in a larger church, it faces you. When I was younger, much younger, I spent a fair amount of time with young men one of whom is here, and as it were, poured my life into them. And so they've carried on after I've been gone from Dillon a long time, they've carried on what I believed, what I was zealous for, and have been able to do it and have been elders a long time. At the age I am now, I don't know how much more I'll be able to do, but I am willing to spend time with people, to share in their life, let them come to my house, share in my life, and that's one of the ways that you train people to be elders that will assimilate the responses of a Christian family, a believing family, and that does take some time, and then they'll be some of your best elders. That's kind of a, it's not a, Easy thing to do, but it's, quote, ontological. It's how you do it. Thank you. I'm going to ask Dr. Terry Johnson if you would close our time in prayer. Before we do that, I think we owe these men an expression of gratitude.