Chosen is found in the book of Proverbs, and Proverbs 11, 25 to 30. Proverbs 11, 25 to 30. We have time at the end if there'll be a reason why I've chosen this text, and we'll see. The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will also be watered himself. The people will curse him who withholds grain, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it. He who earnestly seeks good finds favor, but trouble will come to him who seeks evil. He who trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like foliage. He who troubles his own house will inherit the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart. The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and he who wins souls is wise." Well, I thought that I'd begin by doing a little, very brief overview of what we looked at last week, and then I want to look at the latter years, or latter, really, days of Robert Murray McShane, focusing on a number of themes, and then bringing it to a conclusion with some application in terms of three or four lessons I think that we can learn from our day from his life. I realize that maybe it might be helpful for some of you to see a picture of McShane. This is the most common one. I'm going to pass this around. On the other side is the man who wrote his biography. McShane died before he was 30. His very close friends, most of them lived into their 80s, but never forgot the life of their friend. This is Andrew Bonner. a photograph taken when he was much older. This one on the other hand is a drawing. Now last day we looked at the life of McShane and noted some of the characteristics of his life, his really privileged background. He grew up in a fairly well-to-do home outside of Edinburgh, had the opportunity of going to high school in Edinburgh and then to university in Edinburgh. These are privileges we might take them for granted today. High school is something that we expect everybody to go to. And university, well, I'm not sure of the percentage, but it's a fairly high percentage of people end up going to university. But these were not to be taken for granted in the period that we're looking at. Definitely university and even high school was the privilege of those who had wealth and the means to sustain, obviously, the time of study. And it is in the context of his time in university that God lays hold of his life. He came from a really a nominal Church of Scotland background, a day in which respectability was found by going to church, but the gospel was not being preached in many Church of Scotland parishes and pulpits. But it's in the context of his university days that God lays hold of his life. He does so through the death of his older brother, And the first two years of his university life are, for him, a long round of parties and card playing and dancing. And he's really not there to study. He's there to enjoy himself. And then his brother, though, becomes serious about things of God. And McShane would remember times when he was going out to a dance and he'd pass his brother's room and his brother would be on his knees praying for him and for others in the family. It didn't impact him at all at the time, but when his brother died, then God began to lay hold of his life, and he talks about how he now began to be afraid of dying himself, and God brought him to himself, and he finished his other two years of university and went on to the Divinity School at Edinburgh with a main professor of systematic theology, really the kind of key figure in the school, a man named Thomas Chalmers. who was in his own day a remarkable man of God, a man who was able to stir deeply the students who came under his tutelage, his preaching, his personal example. Horatius Bonner, who was Andrew Bonner's brother, would later say he had never met in his life as godly a man as Thomas Chalmers. And that's quite a remarkable statement to make because Horatius Bonner was moving in a circle Really remarkable individuals in so many ways. And one of the things that Chalmers impressed on McShane, and all of the men who studied under him, was the responsibility that when they were in a parish, that they were not simply responsible for the souls who actually turned up on a Sunday morning, but they were responsible for everybody within the geographical boundaries of that parish. It's a very different kind of scenario than we would know today, and it's a context in which the Church of Scotland is the state church, and going back, in fact it goes all the way back in the Middle Ages, in the time of the Roman Catholic Medieval Church in Scotland, and this will be true all over Europe, there had been staked out geographical boundaries for each local church. And so let's say this is Scotland at the time we're talking about, There would be boundaries, maybe five miles to the west and to the north and to the south and to the east, and everybody who lives within that boundary was expected to come here. During the time of the Reformation and the 1600s, the state would have used various means of persuasion to encourage people to come. If you didn't come, the minister could have recourse to fining people who didn't turn up. By the 19th century, all of that is falling apart. There is a significant wave, and has been numbers of them in the British Isles, of de-establishment, where there were those who were recognising there's something dreadfully wrong with using the arm of the state to compel belief, and likely so. But the parish system still prevailed in the Church of Scotland, so that while Robert Murray would never have dreamt of going to the state to compel people to come to church, nonetheless he still took seriously the fact that within that boundaries of the parish where he would eventually end up in St. Peter's Dundee, that there were 7,000 people, all of them were his responsibility spiritually. And while we would not agree with the parish system, we can nonetheless see something of the seriousness with which he took the care of planting a work, a gospel work, in a given geographical area. Dundee, where he eventually ended up as the minister, was a dreadful town in terms of its urban appearance. It was a booming town. It had grown from around four or five thousand people. in the mid to late 1700s to 57,000 in the 1830s. And the reason for that was the Industrial Revolution. And Scotland and England and Wales were in the throes of what is becoming the first industrialized nation of the Western world. And radical changes were taking place. In Scotland, what many of the aristocratic lords were doing where they were convinced that they needed to turn off many of the people of their lands where they had lived for eons, their families and so on, and turn their estates into huge game estates and game preserves and places where other royalty and wealthy individuals, aristocrats, could come and hunt and fish and many of the upper lower class in Scotland found themselves turfed out of their homes. A large number of them came to North America. In fact, there was a dance called America in the early 1800s that the Scottish and some of the Irish were due on the dock as they were preparing to sail for the New World. But for others, the idea of taking passage to the New World was not a possibility. and they found themselves moving into these large urban settings for jobs. And instead of the fresh air of the farm, despite its heavy labour, they found themselves closeted in these horrific conditions of 12-14 hours in factories. It's in this context that McShane will have his ministry. And we saw last day something of the seriousness with which he took that, the way in which there still exists today, all of the little notebooks that McShane would keep in which he'd write down every time he visited somebody, he'd write down their names, he'd write down, he'd give a little map on how to get to their house. Because some of these in central Dundee, it was a medieval town and the town had grown like most European towns, higgledy-piggledy. And there were back lanes and streets and it was very difficult sometimes to get around. So he'd write down little maps on how to get to places. He'd always write down in red ink the scripture verse he read to them and prayer concerns he had prayed with them. And he kept this assiduously during his time as a minister. Last day we actually read a section of his visits to a woman who was dying in 1837. And over a period of really a month, he visited her about, oh, it looks like about nine or ten times. And the way in which, as she's dying, her increasing resistance to the gospel. And you see something, though, in this of McShane's own recognition of the importance of evangelism. The other thing that marked McShane was a hunger to be like Christ. And I think really one of the reasons why God owned his ministry and the others that were in his circle was their Christ-centeredness. In John 16, Jesus says that when the Spirit comes, he will glorify me. John 16, 14. And these men, their focus, their eye was the Lord Jesus Christ. The hymn that we sang is typical of the piety or the spirituality of these men. And that's the sort of piety that the Lord honours. and the sort of focus that the Lord honors, and not surprisingly, we will see that in his ministry. By 1838 though, he was driving himself and he was single and therefore able to give himself unreservedly in one sense to the ministry, but he did so without concern for his own physical health. And by the fall of 1838, he was experiencing what we would describe today as heart palpitations or maybe a form of tachycardia. There probably wouldn't have been an arrhythmia there because that might have led to death, but he's having serious physical problems. The doctor orders him to take complete rest from the ministry And so it is, very reluctantly, in the end of 1838, he leaves Dundee and he goes back to live for a while with his parents in Edinburgh. And we have some of the letters that he wrote. Actually, there are ten letters he wrote back, pastoral letters to the congregation, which I think give you some idea of, again, the heart of the man. Here's one letter, for instance, or one portion of a letter. Ah, he's writing to his congregation, there's nothing like a calm look into the eternal world to teach us the emptiness of human praise, the simpleness of self-seeking, the preciousness of Christ. And as he began to think about, the Lord was beginning to work in the parish. It's quite evident there were people becoming serious about the gospel and numbers slowly increasing at the church. Why would the Lord remove him? Well, he said, the main reason may be to teach me what Zechariah was taught in the vision of the golden candlestick and the two olive trees. Zechariah 4.6, not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord. That is, the temple will be rebuilt. And he says that it is not by might, nor by power, but by a spirit obtained in believing, wrestling prayer. The temple of God is to be built in our parishes. One gets again an idea of his Christ-centeredness in this portion of a letter. It comes from, this is the fifth letter he wrote to his congregation. And he's asking them questions. He expected that the wardens of the church, or the elders of the church, would read these letters out publicly. Do you cleave to Christ as a sinner? 1 Timothy 1.15. Christ came into the world to save sinners. Do you count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Him? Matthew 9.9. Do you feel the glory of His person? Revelation 1.17. Do you feel the glory of His finished work? Hebrews 9.26. Do you feel the glory of His offices? He's probably thinking here of His offices, priests, prophets and kings. 1 Corinthians 1.30. Does he shine like the sun in your soul? Malachi 4.2. Is your heart ravished with his beauty? Saint-Saëns 5.16. By 1839, he's still laid up at his parents' home and a number of Church of Scotland ministers are planning a mission to Palestine. And McShane's name was raised and what he needed really was probably complete bed rest But they suggest the possibility, why don't you go along with them and enjoy the time going to Palestine and the change of air, the change of scenery may give you the rest that you need. As I said, he probably needed the quiet and so on, but he would take this opportunity. Andrew Bonner, when he heard of McShane being chosen to go, wrote to him, The Lord's cure for you is the fragrance of Lebanon and the balmy air of thy land, O Emmanuel. What many of the Victorians would have described as the Holy Land. One of the things that impelled McShane to go, and I'm not going to develop this, but this has been very important for me personally, is McShane's premillennialism. McShane was convinced that the Lord would do a great work in His people Israel and restore them to the land. And then come and establish an earthly millennium at the end of which will be Armageddon and so on. Now, I don't personally buy all the details of that view of the end times. I do believe that Romans 11 is talking about an outpouring of the Spirit of God upon the physical people of Israel. And I do believe, and you can disagree with me, that's fine. I do believe that there will be a great turning to God of the Jewish people. I don't believe in an earthly millennium centered in Jerusalem. I think the millennial age is the church age, but be that as it may. When I first became a Christian, the context in which I became a Christian was very much one in the 1970s, in which there was a lot of discussion about prophecy. And pretty well everybody I knew was a dispensationalist, you know, Secret Rapture, you know, the Left Behind series. And I never, for about 20 years, to be honest, I didn't know what I believed about the end times in details. And it was not until the 1990s I figured, well, I'd better figure out something of what I believed and began to study it in more detail. But I knew what I didn't believe. I didn't buy the idea of some sort of Secret Rapture. and that whole perspective that is characterized of the Left Behind series. Now, McShane was not of that ilk, but he was a premillennialist. And to be honest, up until I really started to read McShane and the Bonners, who were also premillennialists, I'm not sure I had a proper I think of the word I want, esteem of that position. But then I began to realize, when I was in this, if these men, who I think very highly of, held that view, well, maybe that means you can hold that view and still be in your right mind. I won't say anything else. There is a possibility that Spurgeon, in his latter days, was a pre-religionist. And that's, I know there's an argument along those lines. I would be hesitant to affirm that because I've not looked into that. But definitely McShane and the Bonnets were. And the idea of going to Israel, the Holy Land or Palestine in McShane's thinking was just a fabulous opportunity because of what he hoped would eventually be. It did not turn out to be a rest. McShane was an inveterate, incorrigible evangelist. And if you read the diary of the journey that Andrew Bonner would eventually publish, he went with Andrew Bonner. Along the way, he was witnessing to all kinds of people and speaking in every opportunity he got to speak at a church and sometimes in synagogues. And he took them. And in fact, if you track it through, he must have been quite fluent in languages because he was speaking sometimes when he met, because they went through France. They didn't go around by the sea. They went across the English Channel, through France, and then over land, and then over to North Africa. And he speaks to, now he may have been doing a lot of this in one or two languages, but it seems to me reading the account, he was speaking at times in French to French Jews he met. One time he spoke in Latin to a Roman Catholic priest he met traveling from Dijon to Lyon. Italian, German, Yiddish, and even Romanian. And I'm not sure if he knew all those languages or that's simply all the people he met and he conversed with them in French and English and maybe French and English and German, it's not clear. But the long and the short of it is it wasn't a rest. And that's why McShane should have stayed in Edinburgh if he'd wanted that physical rest. Instead, he's fabulous opportunity going through Europe, witnessing, and especially the Jewish people. One of the long-term impacts of the mission would be when they come back, they come through Hungary, and they have a number of opportunities to preach in Hungary. And two men are converted, Alfred Edesheim, through this mission. Edesheim is the man who wrote probably the most important life of Jesus in the 19th century. And Adolf Safir, who again would have a remarkable ministry in the Church of Scotland. These are Hungarian Jews who are converted through his preaching. And they would come over to Scotland to study for the Church of Scotland ministry. Not only was he not resting, but there was also challenges along the way. He was nearly robbed in Poland. They encountered the plague in Palestine and Egypt. And the two senior ministers they went with, there were four of them altogether, they never even got there. The trip was so arduous. They never got there. On the way back from Egypt, he would fall ill and be at death's door in Smyrna near Turkey. But I'll get to that in a minute. One of the funny things was when Bonner, when McShane is travelling, one of the things weighing on his mind is the congregation in Dundee. One time, one occasion, he's at Capernaum. And he's looking over Capernaum, which is pretty well ruined. And he writes a letter that day to his congregation. And he says this, if you tread the glorious gospel of the grace of God under your feet, your souls will perish. I feared Dundee will one day be a howling wilderness like Capernaum. Ah, what my flock from thee might learn, this is now praying, how days of grace will flee. how all unoffered Christ's spurns shall mourn at last like thee." And so, instead of the rest, and not only with the activity, but it's also weighing on his mind, he's far from his people, and all that God would come and visit them. It's disturbing. If McShane were to come back to Dundee today, he'd see that his almost prophecy had come true. St. Peter's was up until very recently closed up. And the church attendance in the British Isles, the lowest part, the lowest percentage is in the Scottish lowland, in that area from Glasgow to Edinburgh, south to the English border. It's hard to believe that only about three to four percent of people in that area go to church. Let's go to church. It doesn't mean to go to an evangelical church. And how God can take away the lamp from congregations that aren't faithful. As I said, on the way home in July of 1839, he fell dangerously ill. He's lying in Smyrna. And he's thinking that instead of ever getting home, he's going to go to glory from this place. Earnest prayer was for my dear flock. Bonner would note that when he was together with him, that McShane was regularly crying out to the Lord to pour out His Spirit upon his congregation. Their pastor, Bonner would say, was at the gate of death, in utter helplessness. But the Lord had done this on very purpose, for He meant to show he needed not the help of any. And while he's away, Obviously, somebody's going to be filming his place. And they had a 24-year-old Church of Scotland student, a man named William Burns, who would become in his own lifetime a very well-known missionary to China. And it was under his ministry month. McShane is lying near death in Smyrna. But in the same month as Burns is preaching, in that congregation, God brings revival. The truth of the Gospel, Bonner would later write in his Life of McShane, pierced the hearts of many in an overwhelming manner. We read of people in the corrugation weeping uncontrollably. Some people actually even falling to the ground because they were so overwhelmed by a sense of sin. Midnight for weeks, sometimes lasting late into the night. The whole town of Dundee was moved. And the fear of God began to fall upon many who had not given any interest in the things of God. The change back in November takes him that long, you know, when he retreats in Smyrna and then to travel back. When he gets back, I'm not sure if he had heard of what was taking place before he got back to Britain. But he was absolutely overwhelmed by what he saw. Unforgettable scene. Tears. Concern for being in Christ. And his whole ministry for the last four years of his life was quite different in some respects. Before it had been heart slogging, the sowing, the sowing in tears, but now the weeping. McShane on one occasion was preaching out in an open meadow just outside Dundee and there was a large crowd of people around him. It began to pour rain, a heavy downpour. One person moved. Sort of typical thing to do. And again, one of the things when you look back at these periods of time, it's very important to recognize that these are not your kind of church growth scenes that we sometimes see in North America, where you have a mega church and all kinds of people going to the church for a host of reasons. Machaim was very reticent to take confession of faith as a sign, necessarily, of conversion. He would say the gospel is a holy-making gospel. Dear friends, you can have awakenings, enlightenings, experiences, but if you want holiness, you'll never see the Lord. A real desire to complete holiness is the truest mark of being born again. Jesus is a holy saviour. He covers the soul with his white raiment, then he makes the soul glorious within. He first restores the lost image of God, then he fills the soul with pure heavenly holiness. Unregenerate men cannot bear this. In other words, there is an equal passion. Remember, we spent a considerable amount of time looking at the holiness movement. You have the same emphasis here, but it's rooted in a biblical context. It has a biblical foundation. Machaim was not looking for some sort of second experience, which gave you freedom from sin in thought, word or deed. What he is looking for is genuine conversion, is marked by a panting after a holy life. As his ministry drew towards its close, he became increasingly sent conscious. He didn't know it was drawing to a close. That's one of the things, by the way, when you read the past, we know the way the stories end, but they didn't. This is, we don't. As he streets towards a close, you find again and again in his writings a great sense of the brevity of time. I do not expect to live long, he could write. Changes are coming. Every eye before me will soon be dim in death. There's no believing, no repenting. In the last year of his ministry at St. Peter's, he did a number of things. And there is, in his preaching, an all maternally separated God in Christ. Met Andrew Bonner, and Bonner told him he had preached on hell that Sunday. He preached with tears. At the same time, unremitting labour. There's no sense of exchange. Well, the Lord is doing a great work. He's bringing revival. I'll sit back and put my feet up, and the Lord will do it all. There's no place in this world for God's people to kick back and put their feet up. In some senses, I think, There's a lack of balance here. There does need to be, obviously, that time taken for recreation. On the other hand, certainly, despite the fact that he is a strong Calvinist, no sense of a hyper-Calvinist view that we don't need to do the work as God works in us and through us. On Tuesday, he took a wedding service and spoke to a group of children at the end of it on the passage in the Gospel of John Good Shepherd. It was the last time he was in public. There had been type of fever in the parish. Most likely he contracted it on one of his visits. I should say at this point in time, the idea of arms was a foreign contact with those who were ill. Doctors up until the mid-part of the 19th century, sometimes go from autopsies to delivery of babies, any form of washing their hands or wearing gloves. The mortality rate was significant among women and children, when they would realize, hey, you need to wear gloves to wash your hands, the mortality rate dropped. It's very clear. We have very good statistics of the mortality rate in this period. The drop is quite significant. So Paul, I think at this point, he's become so conscious of coming into contact with somebody who has a disease that will transmit it to you through germs. Even if he did, I suspect that he probably wouldn't have... well, it might have shaped him a little, but there's still the need in his mind of reaching those for help. He was in a fever, a very high fever, for a week, and died on March 21st, Tuesday, March 21st. Even when he was in a delirium, a heart disease in a delirium, those who were with him wrote down things. He said, even then, it's very interesting to hear, you can sense where the heart is. And at one point he cried out, and he's actually not very in a fever. You must be awakened in time, or you'll be awakened and never allowed to use it. He said that, he's very sick. Well then, at one point he prayed, he heard him pray, this parish, or this people, this whole place. He died on Saturday, March 25th, 1843. When we look at Susan Bonner next week, we'll look at the impact that had on Bonner and his friends. Bonner never forgot it. He was absolutely stupefied when he heard that McShane was dead. And he always remembered that day for the next 50 years. March the 25th, he always remembered the day. It was also the day that his own father had died. There was a double reason for doing it. I'd like to do a few lessons, rather, about McShane's life. First of all, at the heart of his ministry was a Reformation understanding of conversion and salvation and renewal. Three key things. Men and women are ruined by the fall. Secondly, what we need is the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ to restore us in favor with God by the Spirit. We live in a very, I think, a very challenging day, because evangelicalism, which I think has maintained fairly solid continuity since the Reformation, in terms of its theological emphasis, in the last 25 years has undergone more changes than in 400 years. Worship, methodology of vandalism, outreach, understanding of what we're about, and when we are involved in the life of the Church. The changes that have come upon us are enormous. And in fact, I'm more amongst them than maybe... I'm not by any means to recognize that this is not coming from somebody who is a pessimist by nature. By nature, I'm an optimist. And sometimes naively so. But I'm more and more convinced that evangelicalism has fallen apart, that the center of evangelicalism has been lost. Evangelicals have historically agreed on a core of theological perspectives. They've differed on a number of things. They've differed on aspects of worship. They've differed on relationships to the state. They've differed on whether or not you can read prayers. They've differed on aspects of what to sing, elements of that. But in the last 25 years, all of us have gone to the wind. And one of the things that I think is occupying me in my own thought currently is this movement known as the emerging church of the emerging church. And it's like everything we've learned as adults is being propped up a little bit. And we live in a very challenging day. And that's why I keep looking back and seeing, here was a movement that God owned, God left, and there's a theological-spiritual continuity with the previous century, and the previous century, and the previous century. There's a continuity between the Reformation and M'Cheyne. If you took M'Cheyne and stuck it in Calvin and Geneva, he'd be able to preach acceptance. Or if you took him and stuck him in John's mental pulpit in Northampton, he wouldn't be able to preach acceptably. Or in the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Or in Andrew Fuller's church. Or, come on, if you multiply the examples. But you could do that with some of the leading figures of our time. If you took them back to Calvinist Geneva, Well, Calhoun can have such. It's a magic space in the Carthage where Calhoun's person would rest. Edward wouldn't allow him into the office somewhere. It's virtually impossible. And you need to take the long look. And the reason why I think a lot of these things are acceptable, the radical changes that are taking place, is because people have no real class. Increasingly, people don't read. They're not reading about the shame, or the martyrs, or the Spurgeon, or the Puritans, or the Reformation. And then the great contact we have had, for most of the church folk, is this, the hymn. And the hymn is being sung. I mean, there are congregations. It's horrible. I sometimes hate congregations because there's not one named son that hasn't been written in the last 20 years. I'm not of the persuasion that nothing good has been written in the last 20 years. I think that's tactically wrong. But my concern is this is the main contact most people today have with the evangelical class, the hymn. And they're losing it. And thus, the reason why there is not a massive outcry about, hey, there's something wrong with the dress code is because, well, people have no idea about where evangelical Muslims stood. And that's why I think it's very important to see that God owns the same truth in the Chained Ministry that He owned in the Puritans, that He owned in the 18th Century Awakening, and that He owned in the Reformers. And Ruth Sinner's ruling in his mind's eye, he has no will to be saved. On the other hand, though, human responsibility. You'll only have yourself to blame, you can say, if you awaken hell. On the other hand, only God can save sinners. The only power that can bring a child to the station and make him a son of God is God himself. Dear friends, the power is not in creatures. It is not in the power of man. It's not in the power of human ministry. God alone can do it. This is a humbling doctrine. There is no difference between us and the children of wrath. Some of us were more wicked than them, if God said so himself. If there are any here who think they've been chosen for their betterment, you've heard corruptly mistaken. Secondly, a very important lesson I think from this line is that the salvation that the Lord Jesus brings to us is vast and complete. The priest could write this, Remember Jesus for us and all our righteousness before our Holy God. Jesus in us is all that stands in an ungodly world. He justifies sinners throughout the world, and sacrifices those that have no holiness, and let Jesus bear your whole weight. And it's no wonder the Lord blessed this ministry. It becomes a way to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, and give what the heart of God the Father longs to see done. Remember, He loves to be the only supporter of your soul. There's nothing that you can possibly need if you apply His will. And then thirdly, very important I think, is the deep sense of living in the light of eternity. We sang last day about Him. When this time in the world is done, you want to turn to Him. 789. But I know that there was more to be said with it. Not exactly. There was a stand in itself. Let me read a quick reading. When this passing world is done, When a sun so radiant is done, when I stand with Christ on my hand looking more like history, then Lord shall I fully know not so then how much I owe. But then I find it interesting that this distance is so tough. When I hear the wicked call on the rocks and hills and falls, when I see them start and shrink from the fiery belly of grief, then Lord shall I fully know not so then how much I owe. When I stand before the throne, rest in beauty, not my own, says the Greek, when I see thee as thou art lovely with one's sinning heart, and then, Lord, shall I fully know, not till then, how much I owe to thee. And then, after these, the final stanza there, stanza four, is this one. Chosen not for good in thee, wakened up from rapture to thee, hidden in the Saviour's eye. Father Spirit, thank you for teaching me, Lord, on earth to show, by my love, how much I love you. It's great because he's thinking about eternity, and then he's done at the end, brings it right back to living in time. Teach me, Lord, on earth to show, by my love, how much I love you. Let me stop here. I'm going to start with water. I'm hoping that you have some of the water to start next week. It's a very good thing for taking a moment of question. I would really recommend these for life and shame. This is the British version, probably quite a banner. It's 190 pages. It's just a remarkable account of the Kingdom of God that we all need to be familiar with. And then, the other thing that Michael and I would say is his device for reading the Scriptures. This is published by Banner Truth, this is an older version, where he provides the entire Bible for the year. So you read the New Testament twice, the Old Testament once, the Proverbs and Psalms, I think twice in the course of the year. And it's an excellent format for reading the Scripture. Let me ask if there are any questions before I close. Yes, the intensity of the two men, both with St. Paul's Lady, both died before they were thirty. The passion to see men who had been saved brought up a future of darkness. The difference is there's no evidence of a shame to be suffered from a melancholy or depression that is definitely a problem in brainless, compositional nature. I don't see any evidence of that as a shame. But there is a great seriousness in both of their lives that I think is important. You say he was 26 when he came back from Israel? Is that correct? Yeah, he was born in 1813, so he comes back from Israel in 1839. So yeah, he was 26 years old. What, age 26 and how old was he when he started? He started his ministry, he was a pastor for 8 years. But he started ministry when he was 21. Is that correct? His past four years, and his first past four, which is the last two years, would be a year, about a year, a year and a half in Women of Man. His induction in Gandhi, when he's about twenty-three, 22, 23. He was 30, 20 when he was already born out. Before I went to Israel, how long had he been in Israel? He was in the crypt about a year. Give or take a couple of months. Right. He was 30, 20 when he was already born out, meaning in rest. Yeah. And looking back from a God's point of view, there are these men in God's wars almost like 50 years, 60 years of spiritual maturity in them. And they're in about 10 years. You see them in Brainerd, you see them in Joseph of Arms, you see them in Giannulli. It is very unnerving to read Giannulli's writings. I don't want to read them. I can't believe that the insight has gone to the love of the young Christian. So I think the Lord does love to use these individuals as leaders. McCain's death had an enormous impact upon the Congress and upon many in that period. This is Jim Huckabee in 1956. There were so many men and women who went to the mission when they heard of Jim Huckabee's martyrdom. One last question before we close. Kierkegaard put a great emphasis on the work as being the reality of which God and religion, God, who is in the house, and everything else. Now, this exchange tool, as that principle states, which he said, would that ever enter that reality? I'm sorry, I didn't catch the first part. But the emphasis, in light of the fact that God's faith is imposed, the fact that there is a spiritual value to work has the reality that God is free in all places. Oh, yeah, I know what you're saying. It's shameless to cite that. Freeman Leninism, the preacher. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's Freeman Leninism, because he is, I believe, the reality that workers and preachers are drawn to as freemen. I'm not happy with what you're saying. Just demonstrate, emphasize and preach it, that we need to work for Him, wholeheartedly, because of who He is. Okay, next we'll get everyone to look at Ed's bar, and then I'm already behind in the schedule, so I might spend two weeks on a race car, but we'll see. I want to spend some time on it again. Let's set a closing word.