Oh, good evening. It's good to be with you again. I'm going to start us off by reading a passage from 1 Timothy, chapter 1. 1 Timothy, chapter 1, verse 15 through 17. So I'll read this passage, and then I'll pray. then I'll tell you my method of sharing my testimony here. So 1 Timothy chapter one, verse 15 through 17. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. but I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. Let's pray. Lord God, we ask that you would Your spirit would be with us tonight to glorify your son, Jesus Christ, who did come into this world to save sinners and does, in fact, save them. He does it powerfully, irresistibly. When he sets his sights on a sinner, he catches his quarry. And we thank you for that. We give you praise for that. And I pray that you would help me tonight Lord, that in the things that I say that you would be glorified. Lord, because it's you who has saved this sinner and has brought me into the fold as we sang, and you who continue to keep and guide in your mercy, and I pray that would be an encouragement to your people here. In Jesus' name, amen. So I do not ever claim to have very much in common with the Apostle Paul, but this I do have in common with him, that I am the chief of sinners, along with him, and just as, Christ's saving of the Apostle Paul displayed his patience and his power to save sinners. The same is true for myself and for each one of us in here whom God has graciously saved. It demonstrates his his power, his patience, his grace in all of our lives for other people to see. So just as Paul saw his life as a display of Christ's patience and Christ saving power. I hope in this testimony you'll see the same thing. There's there is nothing extraordinary or halfway interesting about my life. But I hope in this you would see that Christ saves people, ordinary people, sinners, and calls them into his service by his grace and not by their talents or abilities. So I kind of want to talk about three sections. I want to give a brief overview of my life and marriage to my wife and ministry up to this point. do that kind of quickly and briefly, and then I'm gonna focus on two specific areas of life, how I was brought up and how God brought me to saving faith, and then how God brought me to a more accurate understanding of his truth and his gospel and sound doctrine. So those kind of focus on those two aspects. So I was born in Phoenix, Arizona. I was raised in a Christian home and came to Saving Faith about 16. We'll talk about that more. After I graduated from high school, I moved to Texas to go to Bible college out there. I felt a calling, a desire to be a missionary. And so I met my wife down there. She was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And she also felt a desire to be a missionary. And we both ended up at the same Bible school. So we were married in 2005. And our daughter was born in Texas about a year later. And then we moved back to Arizona, or me back to Arizona, her there for the first time, from the green of Michigan to the somewhat green of Texas to the not so green of Phoenix, Arizona. She said she felt like God was weaning her off green in that season of our life. So I worked at the Christian school that I kind of grew up in, that was part of the church that I grew up in. I worked there for a while, then I started attending seminary at Fuller Seminary. They're based in Pasadena, but they have a extension campus there in Phoenix. So I studied there. I left the Charismatic Church in about 2012. and began attending a Southern Baptist church there in Phoenix. We had two of our boys were born there in Arizona, and then we went to Japan in 2015, and I pastored a Baptist church that was mostly English speaking. There's quite a few military bases, US military bases in Japan, and this church was right next to one of those military bases and focused on reaching that the American military population. But we also did reach out to the Japanese people. We ended up just becoming a bilingual church. And we did worship in Japanese. We sang English and Japanese. And I would preach. And I had a translator who was next to me. And so I would say a sentence. And she would translate that sentence. And then we would just bounce back and forth that way. So we were in Japan for about six years. We saw some fruit in both the English-speaking community and Japanese community. A lot of you, as I've talked to you, many people have said, yeah, we've heard Japan is a difficult mission field, and it is. That is no exaggeration. It's a difficult mission field where some missionaries have gone there and labored their entire life, 20 years of laboring, sometimes more, and have seen five converts or something like that in those years of laboring. So we are thankful for those that we did see come to saving faith in Christ from the Japanese and from the American side. So our youngest son was born there in Japan in 2017. and about three months before he was born, at one of those ultrasounds, they found out that he had a heart complication. He has a deformed valve in his heart, and so my wife had to stay in the hospital those last three months. We were there the last three months of her pregnancy, and then our son David was born, and he had to stay in the hospital for months, and they finally did a surgery that fixed his heart valve. And he's doing very well, and a spunky young boy. So we ministered in Japan for six years. We returned in 2021. I mean, let's just move during a pandemic, right? Or at the tail end of a pandemic. Sounds like a good idea. So we came back to the States. We decided to settle in Grand Rapids for two main reasons. One, her family is there in Grand Rapids, and she hadn't lived back in Michigan since she left after high school to go to Bible college. She'd only come back for short visits. And so to reconnect with her family there. And also, there's a Reformed Baptist church there in Grand Rapids called Grace Emanuel Reformed Baptist Church. And we wanted to go to a Reformed Baptist church We had been making this journey more and more reformed, but we had never been a part of a reformed Baptist church to see what is that like and to see a healthy church functioning with elders and such. And so we just came there and became members, and I started truck driving, got my CDL. And so we've been doing that for about the past four years. So let me focus specifically on how I came to know the Lord. I grew up, as I said, in a Christian home. Our family was very involved in a non-denominational charismatic church that we were a part of. My parents were on the worship team. So we were there a lot. And they also had a Christian school there. And I went to that Christian school from kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade. So that church and its community was a large part of my life growing up. We were there six days a week with school and with church. you know, close-knit community, went to school with the same kids, almost a group of us kind of went from kindergarten to 12th grade, and I knew these guys all through that, and so a close family. And so I learned the scripture from home, from my family, from church, from school. Part of the school curriculum was we had a monthly scripture we had to memorize. And so I'm memorizing scripture consistently monthly from kindergarten through 12th grade. I wish I could remember clearly all that scripture that I memorized, but it's in there somewhere. So that had a huge impact on me, obviously, learning all of this scripture. And so I am thankful to the Lord for that foundation, for that biblical foundation. It gave me a biblical sense of right and wrong. It instilled in me a fear of God, even though I was not yet converted. And so sometime around the age of eight or 10, I don't remember exactly, I was baptized, and I'm not sure exactly, as I said, I'm not sure exactly why. I don't know if I prayed the sinner's prayer in Sunday school or if I said something to my parents, but I was baptized around that age, although not yet converted. And I would have assented to the truth, right? I would have said, yes, I believe in Jesus. Yes, I believe I'm a sinner. But I don't think I was genuinely converted because my subsequent life showed no fruit of that conversion. So let's go to Matthew chapter 12. Matthew chapter 12, verse 33. Jesus is talking here, he says, either make a tree good and its fruit good, or make a tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. Then he's talking, I think, to the Pharisees here. You brood of vipers, how can you speak good when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. So Jesus is saying there's this connection between the nature of something, a good tree or a bad tree, and the fruit that it produces. A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit. It produces according to its nature, and then he applies that to people in verse 35. The good person, right, the regenerate person, out of the good treasure within him, out of the spirit of Christ within him, brings forth good works. The evil person, the unregenerate person, the natural person, the person still in sin, out of that evil nature brings forth evil. So I think, you know, that's a very important thing for us to understand and as we're examining our heart and life to realize that, right? I would have said at this point in my life, oh yes, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, but what my life was showing, what it was producing was not consistent with that. It was as if I was saying, I'm a good tree, I just have bad fruit. That's an oxymoron, that's a contradiction. So at this point in my life, I'm entering junior high school and my life showed bad fruit. I loved sin. I was not repentant of sin. I was a slave to all kinds of lusts. My classmates and I were so mean to each other. I don't know what happens when you enter into middle school. you know, we were just mean to one another. We made nicknames for each other to make fun of the characteristics, the funny characteristics that each one of us had. You know, if we had big ears, or if we were short, or if we were too tall, or in my case in middle school, and don't tell anyone this, if I had a high voice, my voice had not quite come down the way a middle schooler would like his voice to come down. They got him nicknamed something like Mickey Mouse. Yeah, we giggle about it, but I mean, we did not say these things to make each other giggle, right? We said these things to hurt, to kill one another on the inside. to make us look better, to make us look cool or tough or whatever it is we were trying to do. But that showed what was going on on the inside. Yet ironically, on the other hand, while doing all that, I would ironically was still very self-righteous. I often thought how much better I was than other people because I didn't do those extremely bad things. I didn't cuss, I didn't steal, I didn't fight. I was a well-behaved kid, so I must be okay. I didn't understand Jesus' words in Matthew chapter 15. Let's go over there, Matthew chapter 15, verse 19. Matthew chapter 15, verse 19. So as Jesus is talking. His disciples are being criticized because they didn't wash their hands before they ate. They were not following these ceremonial rules. And so Jesus here, he really exposes what the ceremonial clean and unclean, what God's intention of teaching the Israelites through that is. It wasn't that sin is something outside of you that defiles you like germs coming upon you, but it's the heart that is actually defiled. And from that heart, so our nature, our very nature, is defiled by sin, right? We inherit this sinful nature from Adam. So we come into this world, bad trees, right? Our nature is bad. And so from that nature flows out our sins, our evil thoughts, our hatefulness against others, our immorality, our theft, how we slander other people. So I didn't understand this. I didn't understand that I'm a defiled sinner. I thought I just had a few bad things, a few bad habits. I didn't understand that I deserved hell. But from the age of about 13 to 16, God began to convict me of my sin and my lost condition. So during that, that's a long period of time, about three years, I would, come under conviction of sin, I would realize, man, you know, I'm not really a Christian. I'm not really in a right relationship with God. So this happened at various times. And my initial reaction to this conviction of sin, to this guilt and this I'm deserving of hell was, OK, well, I'm going to I'm going to read my Bible more. I will become a better person. I'll become a better Christian. And so I would read more, read the Bible more, try to resolve to be better, resolve to stop doing these things. But the reality was, if I could get rid of all the consequences, if I could get rid of all the restraints, the moral restraints, I would have chosen to have my sin over God, right? Really think about what was going on in my heart and my mind at that time. If somehow I could have waved a magic wand and make getting in trouble at school or disappointing my parents or getting in trouble with the law, if I could just wave that and all that would go away, I would have said, I would have freely just said, I want my sin, not God. That was my desire. That was my love at that time. I would have just plunged with pleasure into my sins. But one thing, one benefit of being brought up in a Christian home and in a church that taught me basics of doctrine, I knew there was a God. I knew there was a future judgment. I knew there was a heaven. I knew there was a hell. And I knew this was true and my conscience told me that I deserved hell. And so let me encourage you, parents, to lay this biblical foundation in your children, to teach them the Word of God, to teach them a biblical worldview, to teach them a moral structure so that their conscience will bother them, so that they'll know there's right and there's wrong, there is an eternity. As we talked about this morning in the sermon, help them, give them that telescope of faith so that they may see that there's a future, there's a heaven, there's a hell, there's a hell to be shunned, there's a heaven to enter, and that Christ is the only way to enter that heaven. And so maybe you young people, If you've grown up in this similar situation, you've grown up in a Christian home, you've grown up in a church, you've learned these things. But I would ask you, what is your greatest desire? If you as a young person could get rid of all the moral restraints, could get rid of all the consequences, what does your heart say, this is what I really want? Is it sin or is it Christ? Is it your way or is it God's way? You're not saved by improving your moral condition, you're not saved by being a good person, but you must realize that you have a sinful nature. As I was sitting there and thinking, kind of stepping back a minute, why is it that we do this as Christians? Why do we share a testimony? Because, as the scripture readings we heard before I came up here, there is a real thing called salvation. Conversion is a real thing. We come into this world as those dead bones that we read about in Ezekiel. We come in spiritually dead. Christianity is different than other religions. You don't just become Christian because you're born into a Christian family. You have to go through this supernatural event that we call the new birth, being born again, or being saved, whatever you want to call it. The Spirit of God convicts you that you are a sinner, convicts you that the only way to escape the punishment that you rightly deserve is through Jesus Christ and you do not come to that experience in your own power. You don't do it to yourself. God does it to you by his Holy Spirit working through his word and his truth to bring you to understand things about yourself, and to understand who Christ is and what he has done for you. It is a real, real thing. Conversion is a real thing that you know, right? A dead man doesn't come back to life and say, I have no idea what happened. You know, he doesn't think he's still in that condition. He knows something has happened. Dry bones don't just come together accidentally. They come together by the work of God, and it's obviously a thing that you can know and others can also observe that this has happened to you. You've gone from death to life. So, let's go back to... So, age 13 to 16, I'm being convicted of sin at different points and different times, but thinking, oh, I can just I'll just do better, I'll be a better person, and my conscience bothering me will go away. Until the summer of 1999, my youth group went to a youth conference in Colorado Springs. And so during this conference, I was again brought under this conviction of sin. I knew that I was a sinner. I knew that I deserved hell. I knew that I could not save myself or improve myself. I knew that Jesus Christ was the only way to be forgiven of my sin, the only way to be reconciled with God. And it was at this time that I confessed my sinfulness to God and asked Jesus Christ to save me and to forgive me. Now there was a lot of emotion at this conference, as there often is at charismatic conferences. If you have any experience with that, you know what I'm talking about. But there was a real and lasting change, right? This wasn't just a emotional thing that came over me, and then two months later, nevermind, that didn't happen. A flash in the pan, which I learned that phrase comes from a musket, when the powder in the, Little bowl goes off, but the whole thing doesn't fire. But anyways, flash in the pan, right? But nothing. That's not what this was. There was a real and lasting change inside of me that I trust was the work of the Holy Spirit. One of the most profound changes was with sin, my relationship with sin. No, I didn't suddenly stop sinning. But now the sin that I once loved, I now hated. The sin, as I said, that I wished, at one time I wished that I could be free to practice the sin without any consequences, without the threat of hell hanging over me. Now I wished to be freed from that sin. God, I don't want this anymore. I don't want to live in this anymore. I don't want to continue in this pattern anymore. And the God that I once wished to be freed from, I now wish to love and to serve. Praise God for his saving power. Praise God for bringing the truth of the scripture into my life through faithful parents and a church family. Praise God for his spirit that continued to convict me over and over. I love, I don't know who wrote the poem, but someone wrote a poem called The Hound of Heaven. Picturing God as the, I know they do hound hunting out here. You know, this hound pursuing his quarry. chasing after his quarry until it is caught. And the Spirit of God does that to sinners. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, to pursue them with His grace and saving power until He catches them and makes them His own. So I thank God for all of these things that God used to bring about that conversion, that salvation, and that change in my heart. And so again, I hope, like with Paul, you see God's infinite power and patience with a sinner. And so again, so often, if you've grown up in church, some of the young people here maybe, You think, man, you know, I don't have a... a great testimony. Sometimes you hear people that God has mightily saved out of horrible situations. I was a drug addict, a murderer, all these things, and God saved me. And people are like, wow, that's a great testimony. But every single sinner that God saves is a dead sinner. Every one of those bones we read about in Ezekiel is a dead bone. I don't think one bone is saying, well, I'm more dead than you are. They're dead. And so same with us, right? If you are without Christ, you are a dead sinner. You're spiritually dead. And Christ, if he brings you into his fold, you know, from a mile away, from 10 miles away, from 100 miles away, it's still the same miraculous power that saves you and brings you back and brings you into that fold. And so, If you are a sinner without Christ, then you are a dead sinner. But Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. And so I would urge you to realize your sin, to confess your sin, to turn from your sin. Ask God to give you a new heart, to turn your heart from loving sin and self to loving Christ, loving His grace, loving God, loving His commands, to delight in His commands, to trusting in Christ alone for your salvation. So that's kind of how I came to saving faith. Then in the next, the third part of my testimony, I want to talk about how I came to understand good, solid doctrine more accurately. For this, let's go to Acts chapter 18. Acts chapter 18. Acts chapter 18, verse 26. This is talking about Apollos, right? Apollos was a Jewish preacher who came to Ephesus after Paul had left there. And we find him preaching the things of God in verse 25. I'll just read verse 25. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. So Apollos knows the bare bones of the gospel. He's speaking about Jesus accurately. but not comprehensively accurately, right? So he's a gifted speaker, he's preaching Jesus even though he only knows the baptism of John and he finds Priscilla and Aquila there in Ephesus and it says that they, Verse 26, he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. Some translations say adequately, more fully. So Apollos has this basic understanding, but there's a lot of gaps here. There's a lot of things that Apollos doesn't fully understand. And so Priscilla and Aquila disciple him, we might say, train him, teach him further, more fully sound doctrine. So, as I said about my upbringing, I was brought up in a charismatic church, a church that was influenced by what is called the Word of Faith doctrine, Word of Faith movement. If you've ever been watching TBN, which I don't exactly recommend, for any length of time, you know, you'll see teachers on there like Benny Hinn or Kenneth Copeland, faith healers, sometimes people know them as faith healers, but there's kind of a whole teaching that goes along with that. It's called Word of Faith teaching. And so my church was very influenced by this, even though I would say many of the fundamentals of the faith were right and correct. They believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. They believe in the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, and they would believe in salvation by faith through Christ alone. All of those things, yet, We were more enthusiastic about healing and miracles and what you would know as the prosperity gospel, that kind of stuff. So that's what I believed. That's what I thought was, hey, this is Christianity. This is what I was brought up with. I was very much into it. My appendix ruptured when I was a senior in high school, and I didn't realize exactly what was going on. I just knew I had pain. And I was like, you know, I'm going to get my pastors to pray for me, my church to pray for me, and I'm going to be healed. I don't need to go to the doctor. So I went about seven days with this ruptured appendix. And finally, my mom said, no, we're going to the hospital right now. And so I had surgery. And I was kind of like, wow, man, why didn't I get healed? Why didn't God heal me? And that would come into play later as I thought about, is this really what the Bible teaches, right? I needed to come out of that. And God used, it was a long process. It wasn't like just I woke up one morning and said, this is heresy. I'm going to follow biblical Christianity. It was a long process. It was a process to understand the errors that I was being taught. It was a process to come to better doctrine, more sound doctrine. And so I just want to share three things, three things that God used to help bring me out of bad theology and bring me into a more biblical understanding of biblical historic Christianity. And so the first thing that God used to help bring me out of that was hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpreting the Bible. Second Timothy, chapter 2, verse 15, Paul says that we are to be workmen, study to show yourself approved, a workman not ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth, rightly handling scripture. There's a right way to handle scripture and there's a wrong way, right? And learning to rightly interpret scripture, I mean, obviously that should be the obvious number one, right? Learning to correctly interpret and apply the scriptures. So the right understanding, right understanding Interpretation and application of scripture, if it is accompanied by the blessing of the Holy Spirit, brings understanding. The unfolding of your word brings light. It brings true conviction of sin. It fosters true faith, true growth, true maturity. Bad doctrine produces immaturity. And that's really what I began to see in the charismatic slash word of faith movement, where you're running from one spectacular thing to the next supernatural thing, to the next teaching, to the next revival, to the whatever, you're running from thing to thing to thing, and you're not grounding yourself in biblical truth. sound biblical truth that fosters Christian maturity. As we talked about this morning in Psalm 73, how a Christian deals with life when it is painful and confusing and doesn't seem to match up with what the Bible says. In the prosperity gospel, there is no theology of suffering. You shouldn't be suffering. If you just had enough faith, you wouldn't be suffering. But true biblical doctrine brings you to maturity. It gives you, as I talked about before, it gives you traction to stand in the Christian life. As life in a fallen world hits you, you're able to trust God, to believe Him, to keep walking in faith and obedience. Good doctrine produces peace and assurance in Christ. And so I'm thankful to the Lord for leading me to good books that helped me to understand how to better interpret scripture, good professors that modeled that, good examples of that, and the pulpit. When we came out of the Charismatic Church and we started going to a Southern Baptist church, the pastor there was an expositional preacher, kind of like John MacArthur. I mean, we started in Ephesians, started in verse one, and he would preach through a book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and that was so helpful to understand scripture in its proper context. So hermeneutics was so crucial in coming to a biblical historic understanding of Christianity. The second thing that God used was church history, oddly enough. As I started in seminary, one of the first groups of classes that I took was church history. And as I surveyed the church of the past, the ancient church, the medieval church, the Reformation, Great Awakening, I realized that the teachings that were so important in the church I grew up in, in Charismatic Christianity, things that were so important, speaking in tongues, gifts of the Spirit, supernatural things, There were nowhere to be found in church history. The historical Christian church, you know, Martin Luther didn't care if you spoke in tongues or didn't speak in tongues. What he contended for was the gospel. And then other people in church history, it's like why, if this is so important, if this is supposed to be the main thing and the center stage, why don't I see the historic church focused on these things? Because that's not supposed to be the focus. It's supposed to be Christ and sound doctrine. So I discovered a rich history of deep biblical doctrine. The faith, once for all, entrusted to the saints, running through time, being proclaimed, defended against error, expounded and clarified, and passed on to the next generation. Studying church history helps us to better understand and judge our own present situation. I mean, studying history in general, not just church history, but studying history in general helps us to do that. You know, we kind of think we're the brightest, right? No one else in history has ever faced the problems that we face. Well, not really. History repeats itself. And so we have good examples in the past of how should we handle these things, how should we face these situations. Often looking to the past gives us our bearing in the present. And then third, lastly, something else that God used to help me to come to a better biblical historic understanding of the Christian faith were faithful teachers from the past and from the present. God has gifted teachers of scripture in the past and in the present. He's given them understanding, wisdom, the ability to articulate biblical wisdom for the good of his people. Of course, these men are not infallible. They're not prophets. So we have to be careful students of Scripture as we listen to any human teacher. But again, there's a long line of people from the past and even in the present that God has gifted to communicate his word and sound doctrine, and they can be very helpful, starting with your own local pastor, right? You don't have to run to the latest, greatest internet preacher to be helped, but even your local pastor, faithfully teaching God's word. But I remember probably the first reformed teacher I was exposed to was R.C. Sproul. or however you pronounce his name. Some people say sprawl, sprule. But his radio program, right? Renewing your mind. Even as a charismatic, I remember hearing his radio program, and same with my wife. She'd say, I don't understand a word he's saying, but man, it's good. But being exposed to good sound teaching, And, you know, there's others. We look to the past, preachers like Luther and John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield, many people whose writings or sermons were so helpful and so great. So I would commend these three things to you, especially if you're a young person, a young Christian, and you want to grow in your faith and in your understanding and being grounded in good, solid, biblical, historic Christianity. I commend these three things, right? Learn how to rightly study and interpret and apply the scriptures. That's number one, obviously. But number two, become familiar with church history. You don't have to go get a PhD in church history, but reading, there's many simple books that kind of outline major events in church history, and you begin to see things that Christians in the past have faced, challenges, how they overcame those things, how they clarified false teaching from right teaching, And those things carry on. And we see that in our creeds, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, our 1689 Baptist Confession, all these things help us. And then look for faithful teachers from the past and the present. And if you say, and again, caution, don't just go on the internet and say, oh, this person has five million views, they must be a good preacher. Not necessarily. So if you need help, if you need, You know, who are some good teachers to listen to that are helpful? Come to your elders, ask them. Ask them, who have you been helped by? What kind of preaching or teaching or books or sermons have you found helpful? And I'm sure they'll probably have a list of, you know, 250 books and sermons that you can read and listen to. But I thank God for those things. I thank God for these simple things that God used in not my wisdom, not my discernment, because I was very much deceived by all of these things, all this bad teaching, until God brought helped me to come, and so again, the example of Apollos and Priscilla and Aquila. Thank God for people like Priscilla and Aquila who are mature in the faith, well-grounded in the faith, and can take these Apolloses and say, you know, that was good, what you said about Jesus is good, but come over here and learn God's ways more adequately, more accurately. So let's close in prayer. Lord God, I give you thanks and praise, oh God, for saving my soul. Lord, if you would have left me in my sins, if you would have left me in self-deception, in wickedness, in love of sin, I would be dead. And Lord, as we think of even the great hymns of how you've invited us to your banquet, invited us and brought us into salvation, and we wonder at your grace and glory towards us. Lord, we give you the praise and pray, oh God, that you would continue the work. We thank you that the work that you've begun in us, you will continue, you will carry it on to completion. And so I pray that your people would be encouraged tonight, you're saving power in their life. And again, if there are any Lord who don't know you, that you would chase them down, that you would be the hound of heaven, bring them, humble them in the dust, that they would admit their sin and that they would put their faith in Christ and to give you glory and honor for their salvation, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.