Well, let me pray and we'll continue. Father, even in these passages that we've read this morning, I pray that we've been challenged with a recognition that life as your people will not be free of difficulty. And indeed, if we will be a faithful people, we we will meet resistance. We will be pursued. We will be misunderstood. We will be misjudged. And being Christ in the world requires a tenacity on our part, a persevering spirit, a willingness to spend and be spent, as Paul said, to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and the service of the faith of others. And Paul told the Corinthians that Death was always at work in his life. The dying of his body, that the life of Christ would be manifest not only in him, but in the world. He said, our dying is for the sake of your life. All of these things are for your sake, so that the grace of God reaching more and more people will cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God. And I pray that you would help us to be not only aware of the fact that as your servants that we are called to suffer difficulty, but that we would understand even the nature of that difficulty and how to discern what are the difficulties associated with faithfulness and what are the difficulties that come from our own unfaithfulness. But Father, give us a persevering spirit. Give us discerning minds. Give us hearts and understanding that seek and find joy even in the journey, in the burden of persevering. We all get tired. We all get frustrated. We all grow weary. There are times when we grow depressed, when we grow even perhaps to some extent hopeless. of the circumstances that confront us in this world, perhaps even of the circumstances in our own lives and families, whatever they may be. But you have called us to endure. And in fact, it is through the faithful suffering of your people that your kingdom grows. Because it's in that way that the world sees that this is something other than what they know. This is not the way things naturally are. And the spending and being spent, the being poured out, the being crushed, is the way in which power is made perfect. Paul learned that lesson, and I pray that we will too. So meet us in this time, help each one here, build us up, Father, and again, give us greater resolve born of greater understanding, greater discernment, greater conviction. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen. Well, as I mentioned to you, I want to build on this theme of Pentecost, first of all, as we've considered even what it is to be a Christian. And as I mentioned, I think that that fundamental question is one that too many Christians fail to ask themselves. Often we can get preoccupied with learning certain doctrinal formula or conforming to a particular tradition or a denomination sense of expectations, but to really do business with this question of what is it to be a Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian in this world? What does it mean to be a Christian in this thing called the body of Christ? That question, those questions have to begin with Pentecost. They have to begin with this thing of the outpouring of the Spirit. And what we've seen is that Pentecost brought about an entirely, entirely new community, a human community. not just people following a different religion, not just people converted from one thing to another. Personally, I don't like that term conversion because in our culture it carries the idea of I used to believe this, now I believe that. I used to be an atheist, now I'm a Mormon. I used to be a Mormon, now I'm a this. I used to be a that, now I'm an evangelical or whatever it happens to be. And they're just labels for you know, owning some particular religious tradition or whatever. But what happened at Pentecost showed that God's intent was an entirely different new community of human beings who share in the life and the likeness of the resurrected Messiah. Christ's own body. The one who fills all in all has his fullness. If he's the beginning of God's new creation, the church is the evidence of that new creation. And that's why you've heard me say so many times, we are the gospel we proclaim. We embody the truth that we proclaim or our proclamation is false. And we all have to say, to some extent, who we are in our day-to-day lives doesn't perfectly accord with who we are in the Messiah. But the truth is that we embody what this gospel is that we proclaim. or we don't rightly know what that gospel is or hold it. So this new community is otherworldly. Remember Jesus' words to Pilate. Pilate said, how can you be a king? You don't look like a king. Where's your power? Where's your authority? Where's your status? You have no money. Where are these things that are the criteria of kingship that all human beings recognize? Where's your kingdom? And he says, my kingdom is not of this world. It pertains to this world, but it's of another sort. You wouldn't discern it as a kingdom any more than you would discern me as a king, because it's not what you understand kingdom, kingship to be. And that's the sense in which I say it was otherworldly. Pentecost shows us that that otherworldly community is sourced and originated in and defined by and ordered by the relationship of its members to the Spirit of God. That's what defines it. Not a body of doctrine, not tradition, not any of the things that we would think of. And we talked about this last week. What forms this community is nothing under the sun. And it doesn't mean that we don't have anything in common, but that's not what defines us. We don't say, because we're all English-speaking Americans, that's what the Church is. That just happens to facilitate us, in a sense, doing life together, but that's not the nature of what the Church is. It's the family of children who share in the life of God through union with the resurrected Messiah by the indwelling Spirit. the body in which Christ has his fullness. And so the essential bond, the essential unity that we have has nothing to do with anything under the sun. Paul, again, in Ephesians 4, prays that the Ephesians will labor to maintain their unity. Well, what unity? Well, the same confession, right? We're all Westminster people. No. Well, we're all Lutherans. No. Well, we all like this kind of preaching, no. Well, we're all Americans, no. The unity of the Spirit, one faith, one baptism into the Messiah, one Lord, one Spirit, one God and Father of us all. And if you noted, even in the readings we had today, Luke emphasizes that what was holding this community together in the things that they were facing was this oneness that they had. They come together in the spirit and they pray. And Luke records this prayer, and it doesn't mean they were all saying exactly the same words, but they were together in one heart, one mind, in one spirit, lifting up this one burden to the Lord. They were all together in that way. And Luke keeps emphasizing this throughout the book of Acts. So they were very much united But as we'll see, even as the church begins to grow, they weren't united by language, or by culture, or by dress, or by practice, or by family or social structures, but other things. One life in the Messiah. But in the very nature of the case, then, that sort of community existing in the midst of the present world cannot avoid confrontation. because there's no such community like that in the world. I asked last time, can you think about or imagine or have you ever seen a community or group of people who aren't organized around some sort of consideration or set of considerations of under-the-sun issues, shared interests, shared culture, shared background. It doesn't exist. So this sort of community in the world is going to stand out like a sore thumb, like a raisin in a sugar dish, right? And there can't help but be some sort of confrontation that comes with that and a whole new set of challenges that human beings wouldn't otherwise experience. A new set of challenges because of a new dynamic of contradistinction. And I mentioned last time that Luke, in building his narrative of the early church, oscillates back and forth between external challenges and internal challenges. The external challenges come about because of a new paradigm of human existence that has its origin, its substance, in the resurrected Messiah. If we proclaim Christ and Him crucified and raised, as I said, we embody that gospel because we are sharers in the resurrection life of the Messiah himself. We are, as it were, Christ in the world. When Jesus said to his disciples, the works that I do you will do and greater works you will do because I go to the Father, he was saying that when I leave and return to you in the Spirit, now the Spirit will form an empowered composite community that will be able to be me in the world in a way that I as one man could not. The scope and the sweep and the extent of it So it will be the same sort of works, but greater works in that through my spirit, I will have my body, I will be doing this work through my body in the world. And then he goes on to say, in this way, the spirit will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. So we are Christ in the world. At the very outset, that sort of dynamic appeared as an absurd and a baffling enigma, a mystery. This doesn't make sense. We don't get it. What's the deal with these people? We don't get it. In a very stratified world where everybody knows his place, And people are defined by where they fall in the pecking order, whether male or female or slave or free or noble or common. Everybody fits in his place in the world. Now we have a new community that are actually one in a way that we've never seen. It was a baffling thing. But it also was seen very quickly as posing a threat. Why? Because it contradicts natural human notions, patterns, and structures. whether social, political, religious, whatever. And we're going to see how this is true even in obviously for our own culture, not just at the level of politics or social practice or whatever, but even the way we do this thing called Christianity. So the new human, the human new creational community exists in a world that yet operates according to the former order. the order that Jesus condemned and put to death. And yet that already but not yet dynamic also affects the church not only in its external life but its internal life. So this is the heart or the source of this issue of the inner conflicts within the church, the inner challenges, is that even the community of the members of Christ are not yet fully conformed to him. There is still this worldliness in the church. There is still natural thinking in the church. There is still the lack of Christiformity in the church. And that lies behind the internal conflicts which we're going to consider next time. So today I wanted to look at the external challenges and as I mentioned mainly in a more general principled way. We'll have to do our own thinking and praying about what this means for us in our culture We'll talk a little bit about some of those things, but the specifics of this are things that we have to work out in our own minds and in our own practice. But what Luke shows us, and again, we're talking about the first century, and initially very much centered in Jerusalem and the regions right around Jerusalem, a Jewish world under Roman occupation, and yet still influenced by Greek culture, All three of those dynamics are playing together. But we see at the outset that this new fledgling community were perceived as threatening to the prevailing order. When we read in Acts 4, these Jewish rulers are saying, we cannot allow this to go on. It wasn't just because it was somehow religiously intolerable or we don't agree with these doctrines per se. It was that it was a very threat to their own sense of their identity, their place, their relationship with the people. The thinking and the practice of this community were driven by a whole new paradigm of human existence and human social order. The way the scripture treats it is that these followers, these disciples, these Christians were bound over to a different king whose kingdom is defined and ordered by a radically different set of principles perspectives, priorities, and goals. We saw in the upper room where Jesus was trying to show his disciples through his deeds as much as by his words and through this Passover meal, the meaning of his death that was coming the next day and what was going to come from that. And one of those actions was the foot washing action. And Peter said, you're the Lord, you're the King, you're the Messiah. you're not going to wash my feet. That role belongs to the lowest servant. And Jesus said, unless you receive me in this way, you have no part in me. And he said, we all know how kingdoms and lordship and power and authority work in this world. The lords of the Gentiles call themselves benefactors, but they lord it over you. It's not so in my kingdom. The servant will be the master, the master will be the servant. The greatest is the least, the least is the greatest. Even as I, the Messiah, the King, am not among you as one who has served, but as one who serves." A whole different way of thinking about lordship. So even these disciples who said, yes, you're the Messiah, yes, you're the King of Israel, yes, you're the one that the prophets have promised, yes, you're the one that we awaited. He said, you still don't know who I am because you're porting your understanding of these concepts through natural eyes. You have to rethink all of these things or you don't even understand who I am. It's not enough to attach the label of Messiah or King to me. You have to rethink those concepts with another set of eyes. And that's what the Spirit was enabling them to do. Jesus said you have to tarry in Jerusalem till the Spirit comes. Then you will be able to be witnesses of me in truth in Jerusalem Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. The Spirit was the key, not just to forming this new community, but to enlightening it and putting the message in its mouth and allowing them, enabling them to manifest it, to live it out, to proclaim it through their lives as well as through their words on site in the world. But this kingdom is unique in that sense, but it is also unique in another sense that, again, we often don't tend to think about these days. It isn't separate from its natural counterparts. Every human kingdom has its own independent status. Even if we take Western kingdoms, if we take something like the nation of Great Britain and France and America and Germany, similar in being first world Western countries, but still independent separate nations that operate separately with their own cultures, with their own languages, with their own practices, even with their own political social structures. All human kingdoms from the beginning have been separated from each other in all those sorts of ways, culturally, politically, geographically, religiously. They're individual centers of power, even if they have various alliances between them. They all stand in contradistinction to one another, often to the point of active opposition. What is the history of the world? It's the history of kingdoms in conflict. The history of the world is the history of warfare and conflict. It's never been anything different. So when people say, well, this is our land, well, whose land was it before that? Because everything is always being conquered and taken over, right? There's no such thing as who were the original possessors of this geography. Everything is constantly being conquered, and the boundaries are shifting. So the Messiah's kingdom is likewise differentiated from all other kingdoms. It is a kingdom not of this world, and in that sense, it's entirely unique. It's a one-off. It's a one-of-a-kind. It's distinct and separate from every human kingdom with respect to its nature, its defining principles, goals, mode of operation, all of those things. But where also it's different from every human kingdom is that it exists and operates within the structures, authority, and power of human kingdoms throughout the world and in every generation. And you say, well, what's the big deal with that? Well, throughout the history of the Church, there have always been tendencies and movements for the Church to retract from the world, to form its own little distinct entity and to try to remove itself from the kingdoms of this world. But what makes this kingdom of Christ unique is that it wasn't a call to leave this country and go to another country, or leave the authority of this kingdom or this nation and go come under the authority of this other nation. It was to be citizens of the kingdom of the Messiah in the context of the kingdom that you inhabit. So that dynamic, an otherworldly kingdom existing within earthly kingdoms, is the reason for the conflict that Jesus told his disciples to expect. He said in the upper room, if the world hates you, remember it hated me first. And that if, grammatically, as John records it, captures the idea of the assumption that that's the case. If and it is so that the world hates you, it finds a problem with you, it finds fault with you, then understand, recognize that it hated me first. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Of the world meaning you're defined by that. But I have chosen you out of that so that you are no longer defined in that way. That's why the world hated me. If they persecute me, they'll persecute you. If they held to my teaching, they will hold to your teaching. And when we understand this dynamic is introducing the kind of conflict that Paul talked about that Jesus said you were going to encounter, it tells us, number one, what sort of conflict we're talking about. Because we can encounter all sorts of conflict in the world, and that doesn't mean it's the conflict that Jesus is talking about. I can be a terrible employee, and feel like I'm persecuted by my employer and say, oh, it's because I'm a Christian. Jesus told me I was going to be persecuted. No, that's not what he's talking about. This is a conflict and difficulty and suffering that originates from inhabiting and manifesting our allegiance to his kingdom in the context of the kingdom that we inhabit, in our case, the United States of America. and its structures and its order and its defining principles. As Peter says, this thing of being aliens and strangers in the world, right? So this helps us to demarcate, then, the sort of conflict and suffering that arise from faithfulness to Christ, and therefore, on the other hand, distinguishes that sort of conflict and suffering from the struggles that are inherent to human existence and also those that result a person's own sin or folly or failure. What is Jesus talking about when he says, if the world hates you, remember it hated me first? He's saying that as faithful sons, you will be me in the world. And therefore, when the world opposes you, understand that it opposed me first. Remember, when we read in that passage in Acts 4, the disciples are rejoicing in this opposition that they're receiving because it's authenticating their faith. It's authenticating the truth of who they are because they're suffering as Jesus suffered. Bearing his fragrance, they're encountering that kind of opposition. So their suffering becomes authenticating. Christians share Jesus' suffering precisely because they share his life and manifest that life in the world. I give you this reference of 2 Corinthians 2. That's where Paul says, we bear the fragrance of Christ in every place. To some, it is the aroma of life unto life. To some, it is the stench of death unto death. All that comes against us is because we bear his fragrance. The suffering Paul says that I bear in the body, I rejoice in that suffering because it is the way in which Christ's own suffering, his own life, his own fullness are being filled up in me. We want to try to escape opposition. We want to fit in. We want people to like us. We want to be popular or whatever it happens to be. To the extent that we are like Christ, we will meet the same sort of dynamic of reception that he received. In some cases, it will be, as Paul says, the aroma of life unto life. In other cases, it will be the stench of death unto death. But, and hopefully I don't need to say this, but I put it in here anyway, Christians are also subject to the troubles, injustice, and suffering that are common to all people. They arise inevitably from living in a world that still groans under the curse. But they also arise from the fact that no Christian is free of sin and its consequences. A lot of our suffering is self-inflicted. And the trouble and suffering that result from personal sin can be avoided, but there's no avoiding the adversity of life under the sun. It doesn't matter how faithful we are. In fact, faithfulness will bring its own dynamic of suffering, as I've been saying. But even if we seek to avoid suffering by being unfaithful or by rounding the edges, we're still not going to avoid it. We're living in a broken world, inhabiting broken selves to some extent, failing, weakening bodies. And this is the great lie and the great deception and even the underminer of faith when people proclaim, oh, no, no, there's healing in the Atonement. God doesn't want you to ever get sick. God doesn't want you to ever have any downturns. God doesn't want anything bad in your life. your sons of the King. Everything should go wonderfully for you." Well, it didn't go wonderfully for Jesus, and it didn't go wonderfully for Paul, and it didn't go wonderfully for the early Christians. It's just absurd to think that if God is on our side, if God cares about us, that life is going to be easy. In fact, the easier life is, the worse it is for us. I think it was Thomas Brooks, the Puritan, drawing on the, you know, Saul has slain his thousands, David his tens of thousands. He said that adversity has slain her thousands, but prosperity her tens of thousands. But we have very much enculturated in our Christian doctrine in this country that faithfulness looks like life on a silk pillow. That things will go the way we want them to go. And I can say, and I know it arises in my own heart, but I can say when people beseech me for prayer through the years, it's often that God will take away what hurts. Not that God will perfect me through this. Again, look at the way Paul prayed and talked with the Corinthians and where he said, these things, this dying that I'm bearing, this breaking down of my own life in this world is for your sake. I'm being poured out as a drink offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith. I'm being, in a sense, ground to powder so that you can find life and grow in the Messiah. And we just say, God, it hurts. Take it away. Pray for me that God will make everything better in my life. And we don't get how this whole dynamic works, but God is never going to deliver us from the travail of this life. Each one of us is heading towards the grave. That's the great disease, right? So this notion of healing in the Atonement, well, ultimately there is. There's healing of our spirits now, although not yet completed, and there will one day be healing of our bodies. But in this life, God doesn't say everything's going to be easy for you. As I mentioned in Luke's account, as he deals with the early years of the church, he oscillates back and forth between this thing of external pressures and adversity that comes against this Christian community, and then the internal pressures that threaten to blow it up. The external things press against it. The internal things want to cause it to blow up and explode. And we're going to deal more with the external things next time. But as far as this time, just kind of a quick summary of the way Luke builds his account, and we saw this even in chapter 4, he begins with the believers' conflict with the Jewish authorities and people, which is to be expected because the church had an Israelite composition and locale. It was situated within that very narrow Israelite, Jerusalem, Judea, Jewish world. So, of course, the first point of conflict was going to be within the structures of the Jewish world that they inhabited. It reached a first kind of climax with Stephen stoning. And out of that, most of the disciples, there were thousands of them in and around Jerusalem, but when Stephen was stoned and now things are really heating up, the Christian community as a whole began to disperse. And that's when you see them going out into Samaria. Shortly after that, in chapter 9, you have Saul, the great persecutor of the church, being transformed through his encounter with Jesus and becoming, as the great Pharisee of the nation of Israel, the apostle to the Gentiles. Now we see the beginning, in Mass, of the Gentile mission. You have Peter in chapter 10 going into Cornelius' house. a Roman centurion, and he goes back even among the Christians and they're saying, what are you doing going into a Gentile's house? See, they're still thinking very much in Jewish terms. It's a Jewish church. What are you doing going into a Gentile's house? And Peter says, well, you know, the Spirit gave me this vision of a sheet let down out of heaven filled with all these unclean animals. And the Spirit said, arise, Peter, kill and eat. And he said, no, Lord, nothing unclean will ever pass through my lips. I'll never let myself become defiled by anything unclean. Well, that was pointing to this thing of going into a Gentile house, right? You're going to be made unclean, ceremonially unclean. And the Spirit said, what I have made clean, do not call unclean. And this repeats itself. Finally, Peter gets the message and then this vision ends and then the servants from Cornelius come and say, hey, there's this guy Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile who wants you to come to his house. And Peter goes there and proclaims the gospel and they start to speak in tongues, and he sees this manifestation of the Spirit being poured out on them, and he has them baptized, and he goes back, and there are all the churches incensed with him that he would do this with Gentiles. And he says, the Spirit was poured out on them just like us from the beginning. The Spirit was binding them together with us. How could I withhold water baptism from them? And it says, and then the light bulb went off, and they began to rejoice and said, so it is true. God is also gathering in the Gentiles. See, this was the beginning of a whole transforming of the way things were going to work. So now the good news is going out just as Jesus had pledged. It was Jewish opposition that was instrumental in the Gentile mission. Even in their unbelief, they were still the instrument of the blessing of God going out to the families of the earth. And the effect was a Messianic community that was increasingly diverse, not just populated with Gentiles, but people of different tribes and tongues and nations, communities, traditions. Disciples drawn from throughout the vast and very diverse Graeco-Roman world, far more diverse than the country we inhabit, And we have a relatively diverse country compared with a place like Japan that's very homogeneous. But the Graeco-Roman world was so diverse. So many languages, so many cultures, so many different types of people. And now that's what you see happening in the church. Well, that has its own effects then in terms of external pressures. and from the external side again, because that's what I'm concerned with today, these believers are becoming more visible to the provincial authorities under Roman rule. It wasn't so visible to Rome when it was just in Jerusalem and Judea, but now it's becoming more of an issue. And as I've said so many times, the early Christian community was viewed as a sect of Judaism. It was viewed as a sect of Judaism. Well, why does that matter? Well, for one thing, Rome had afforded the Jews exemption from having to offer the sacrifices that they required of all the people throughout their empire. Because these Jews were just troublesome. They were willing to die rather than offer sacrifices that they saw as idolatrous, even as the Caesar cult was beginning to emerge and sacrifices to Caesar. And so I think it was Augustus that struck a deal with the Jews, and he said, I will allow you to pray and sacrifice only to your own God as long as you pray and intercede for me and my empire. But I won't require you to offer the sacrifices that are required of the rest of the people of my empire as the way in which they show solidarity with Rome. Well, what's the problem? Well, these Christians are viewed as a sect of Judaism, and so they are themselves being now partakers in that exemption. And it was a very fragile and delicate thing. So it creates its own kind of confusion and additional pressures on the Jewish community as well, and the Christian community. Let me just read a little bit. This is N.T. Wright talking about the situation. He says the biggest and most obvious problem facing these new Jesus believers in the Greco-Roman world was the stark demand posed directly in 1 Thessalonians that they turn from idols to serve the living God. The point is that idols were everywhere and worshipping them was compulsory. The situation was totally unlike, say, churchgoing in the modern Western world, where people choose to attend public worship or not, and except for some small traditional communities, nobody takes much notice. In Paul's world, there was no escape. From the small, portable household gods to the massive temples, not least, in many of Paul's cities, temples to Caesar or Rome, the gods were everywhere. From daily acknowledgment of the divinities assumed to lie behind the carved statues to weekly, monthly, annual processions, festivals, sacrifices, everyone joined in, and anyone who suddenly opted out would be noticed and remarked upon. It was assumed throughout the ancient world that if anything bad happened to a city, such as famine, fire, food plague, whatever, the gods were angry. What would most enrage them was neglect. The gods wanted to be served. They were capricious and jealous. Anyone who failed to perform the regular duties and to take part in the regular festivals was therefore assumed to be a danger to the city and the community. You're going to draw the God's ire down around our neck. Like someone visibly flouting health and safety regulations at a time of deadly pandemic, anyone who ignored the gods was assumed to be not just irresponsible, but a dangerous social liability. But the twist is that the Jews were exempt from all this. Jewish communities, a significant body in most cities in the Roman world, had been given explicit permission to abstain from worshiping the gods. The reasons were pragmatic. Rome had discovered that Jewish people believed that their god was the only god. Nobody believed that in the ancient world. They would rather die than worship any other so-called god, so Rome struck a deal. You pray to your own god, but for Rome, its empire and its emperor. Non-Jews might not like this arrangement. They might still blame the Jews if bad things happened. And he says we get hints of this throughout the Book of Acts. But he says, this is why it was vital for Paul's, the converts, the people who had come to faith in the Messiah, to understand and be able to articulate the reasons for their own new and startling abstention from worshiping habits of a lifetime, and to stand firm under social and perhaps physical pressure. To follow the crucified and risen Jesus was not to belong to some hitherto unimagined new religion. It was to lay claim to being the true heirs of Israel's ancestor Abraham. They were Jews in the true sense, right? It was to profess a new form of Jewish monotheism, the one God of Israel having now revealed himself in a fresh way, as the God who sent his Son and then sent the Spirit of the Son. To be a Jesus follower was therefore to claim a new version of the standard Jewish exemption clause and to do so in full awareness that this was bound to be risky and unpopular, both with the Jewish community and with the wider civic, not least Roman, society. That was just one dynamic of what the early church was facing in terms of its own life in the world that it inhabited. Something very foreign to us. And as we're going to see, this was even at the heart of the issues of the demands on Gentiles that Galatians deals with. But the point is that you had Conflicts arising when you had a community that was now operating according to an entirely new human paradigm, but one that didn't make sense, one that people couldn't understand, one that they saw as threatening. At bottom, the simplest way to put it is that these Christians were obligated to manifest truth in a world defined by lies. Not just political lies, not just moral lies, but lies of human existence. Lies of what it is, you know, lies as they take on a religious quality or a spiritual quality. The Christians were called to, in a sense, speak truth to power. Not just political power, but all power. And all human power is grounded in idolatry. the devotion to that which is not God. All human power derives from and in a sense draws on and swims in the sea of this thing called idolatry. Whether it's religious power, personal power, spousal power, relational power, social power, it's all grounded in a way of being human that is idolatrous. And the early Christians had to discern the truth and speak the truth, not just with their words, but with their lives. And when we reduce the gospel down to, let me give you a formula so you can go to heaven, we're setting all of that aside. In effect, we're telling people that the answer is to be rescued from the world and go off to a different place. not to sanctify the world, not to understand that this is God's world that he would have to operate according to a different set of principles. So I want us to think about what it might look like. What in we in our culture, and even in our individual lives, what are these external pressures that we face? Some of them are common to all of us. To be Christians in America, with the social, political, civil ills that we face. Some of them have to do with our own workplaces or our family situations, things that are external to us. What does it look like for us to speak truth to power? Even as it pertains to the way that we think about authority and power within Christianity. ethics, morality, politics, economics. I mentioned last time, and I'll wrap up, but I mentioned last time just as one example, it's a common thing, a very easy thing in America to say, oh, we're Christians, we're evangelicals, we stand with Israel. Anything Israel does is good because they're the people of God. Well, is that what it is to speak truth to power? And I'm not saying, you know, despise the Jewish people. I'm not saying that. But what does it look like to really speak truth to power? Is it all right for them to commit genocide against the people of Gaza? How do we know? How do we address that? What about what's happening in Ukraine? What about what's happening? You see what I'm saying? These are large issues that don't just have simple answers. And what does it mean to bring the mind of Christ to the one who is the truth to speak truth to power, even as it pertains again to issues of family relationships or workplace or whatever it may be. When Paul said those who will live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, it's the idea of being pursued, being opposed, being withstood. What does that look like? Why does that happen? What is Paul getting at? That's some of what I want us to think about. What does it mean to be people of truth in a world that runs on lies at all levels? What does it mean to be a people of truth in a world that runs on lies? The lies of the idols. That which is not God. That which is not God. even Christian notions that, as Paul says, are actually raised up against the knowledge of God, the strongholds in our own minds. Well, I'm going to leave it at that. And as we prepare to take the table, and I'll pray first, but for our meditation, I picked this song because It was actually born out of a time of great difficulty and hardship, suffering in the life of Kristen Getty and her husband. And it was out of that that they composed this song. But it speaks very much to the struggles that we have, takes us back even to Psalm 27. What we read, David's own burden, his own longing, his own confidence before God. So I'd like for us to listen to this and I gave you the words if you want to follow along as our preparation for meditation for the table. But let me close first in prayer and then we'll listen to that. Father, I pray that you will help us to come to grips with the things I've spoken of today. I know sometimes when Things are left in the realm of generalities and principles, general observations. It's easy for us to feel frustrated and unfulfilled and be saying, but wait a minute, you didn't answer this question, or you didn't answer that, or what about this, or what about that? And I pray that you will help us in that regard. There are no simple one-size-fit-all answers to the challenges that we face. And each believer, as a part of each believing community in the nation or the world or the people group that he inhabits, is going to face unique challenges in a certain sense. There are some things that are common, but the look of things and the exact circumstances vary from person to person. And so my prayer is that you would make us wise people, that you will make us discerning people, that you will make us people who walk in the truth, people who walk in the light of the truth, people who, as Paul said, are like stars that shine as lights in the midst of a wicked and a perverse generation. those who conduct ourselves as sons and daughters in the Son, those who truly bear the fragrance of Christ, not our own fragrance, not our own agenda, not our own notions, not our own traditions, whether religious or otherwise, but those who are truly being conformed to and growing up in Christ, bearing His fragrance. Father, we ask that the things that come against us from the world because of our faith would be things that come against Jesus himself. When Paul was confronted on the Damascus road, Jesus didn't say, why are you persecuting my people? Although that's what Paul had been doing. He said, why are you persecuting me? And the saints were being pressed and pursued and persecuted because they were Christ in the world. And there's nothing more glorious that we could hear that when we are suffering at the hands of an unbelieving world, that you would say, why are they persecuting me? I pray that it would be so for us. And Father, as we now come to even the observing of the table, remind us again of what this table represents. That we have no life in ourselves, that Christ is our life. He's true food, He's true drink. And when we partake in Him, and we do so rightly in truth, it's because we are members of Him. Christ is our life, and therefore our faithfulness is bearing the truth of His life in every place, in every circumstance, at all times. Give us grace, discernment, discipline to be such people. and bless us even in this unity that we have and that we celebrate around the table, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.