So like I said, John chapter 4, we're going to start in verse 20. I'm just going to go ahead and read through verse 24. John 4, verses 20 through 24. So I'm just going to start with a little bit of context and background here. Jesus is speaking here with the woman at the well. It's a very well-known part of scripture for many in our audience tonight. But he's speaking with the woman at the well, and I want to take just a moment to talk about the Samaritans and what the difference is between them and the Jews and why it's important at all. This is going to give some needed context for what I'm talking about tonight. So the Samaritans were a kind of distinct cultural identity that were born out of the aftermath of the Assyrian conquest of Samaria when Assyria took over Israel during the time of the divided kingdoms. What happened was Assyria came in. They conquered Samaria, the then capital of the nation of Israel. And basically, they just deported as many Jews as they could from that area. as a way to kind of make sure a rebellion didn't come up again later. And so what they also did, they brought a bunch of Assyrian nationals in to kind of inhabit that now very recently depopulated land. It was good fertile land, good for setting up cities and communities, and a great way, like I said, to make sure there wasn't a messy rebellion in a couple of years when the Jews got tired of being oppressed. And so what happened there was the remaining Jews who were not deported, you know, the old and the weak and whoever just didn't get dragged out, mostly from the tribe of Ephraim, I believe, they intermarried with the Assyrians that came in and they created this distinct cultural identity of Samaritans. The Jews did not like the Samaritans at all. Obviously, they were the result of an intermarriage between Jews and Assyrians, a big enemy of the Jews. And so what they did, they kind of ostracized them from society. The Jews believed that the Samaritans were half-breeds of a sort. They didn't want them in their temple. They didn't want them in their towns. They didn't want anything to do with them. And in fact, what would happen was when Jews would travel from the north of Israel down into the south, into Judah, they would go completely around Samaria to avoid even dealing with the Samaritans at all. And so the entire fact that Jesus is here with a Samaritan woman is interesting to view. It means Jesus was there on purpose. He didn't happenstance come upon the Samaritan woman. And so with that context, the Samaritans, they also worshipped on a different mountain than the Jews did. Like I said, they weren't welcome with the Jews, so they had their own mountain where they worshipped. I'm probably butchering the pronunciation, but Mount Gerizim is where they had their worshipping, and that's where they fought very violently with the Jews over their mountain. Was it Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, or was it Mount Gerizim where you're supposed to worship? And so with that, I'll go ahead and start reading in verse 20. The Samaritan woman is speaking here. She says, Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not, what? We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. So, my emphasis tonight is going to be on those last couple passages, those who worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth. But does it make sense why I had that context about the Samaritans yet? My key question for this time that we have before us tonight, with this passage we have before us, is what does Jesus mean that those who worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth? For those of you who know your Old Testament, this is a big pivot. We know that God had emphasized the tabernacle and the temple for worship. He had picked the temple mount. He picked who could build the temple, that being Solomon. He had given very detailed instructions for the building of the tabernacle and the temple. And now God is saying the time comes when it doesn't matter where you're going to be worshiping. It doesn't matter which mountain. In fact, he says the time will come when you're not worshiping on either mountain. You'll be worshiping in spirit and in truth. That's who the Father is going to be searching for. So what does that mean for us? So I want to start with a bit of an emphasis on spiritual realities here. Jesus so often focused on the spiritual realities using parables and earthly story to illustrate his heavenly meanings, those spiritual realities to which humanity is often so blind. We're really good at missing those things of heaven. So just looking at some of these things that might help form a quick answer for us. The first one is that God is a spirit. We see this in our passage, God is a spirit. Jesus Christ is, of course, the physical incarnation of God, but God the Father is a spirit. And then God's kingdom is a spiritual kingdom. How many times did Jesus have to say to his disciples, my kingdom is not of this world? They're asking, Lord, will you at this time return the kingdom to Israel? And he says, no, no, no, you're focusing on the wrong thing. You're focusing horizontal. I want you focusing vertical. They're saying they're waiting. The Jews were waiting for a very real, physical kingdom to come and be established among them. They're looking for someone to come in on a white horse with a sword and destroy the Romans and throw off the shackles of oppression and bring them back to the glory days of David and Solomon. That's not what Jesus came for in that moment. He wasn't coming to bring back the kingdom of Solomon. He was coming to establish His heavenly kingdom. And then this also points back to John 3, where I've been studying a lot at the nursing home with some of the older folks there. Just looking at John 3, looking at Jesus' discussion with Nicodemus, verses 5 through 7, Jesus says, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again. So we know that God's kingdom is spiritual, God is a spirit, and so it logically follows that those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. And so the first point here is that while people on earth endlessly bicker over where and when and how to worship God, The time has, in fact, already come when true worshipers of God are the ones who are worshiping Him in spirit and in truth. And I know I'm answering the question with the same thing that's causing the question, but I'm going to elaborate more, I promise. So, looking to break this down a little bit more, people are endlessly arguing over where and how to worship God. Anyone you ask, and probably everyone you ask, is going to have a different idea of what proper worship is, how it's carried out, where it should happen, and what limitations it has. Even among our various churches that would be classed as Protestant, you know, all of our different denominations are going to have a different idea slightly. And I would guess if I asked every person in here what worship was, I'd get a slightly different answer from everyone. The Samaritans and the Jews, similarly, had their separate places of worship. They argued violently over it. They both thought that they were right. That's what the Samaritan woman was trying to distract Jesus with. She was trying to ask him, which mountain is the correct one? You're in Jerusalem, we're over here on Mount Gerizim, which one is the correct mountain? But Jesus is emphasizing the spiritual reality over the physical reality. And before the coming of Christ, we know that God was worshipped in the tabernacle in the Old Testament. And later on, after the time of King Solomon and into the New Testament, until about AD 70, God was worshipped in the temple, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where priests oversaw sacrifices and worship according to the Mosaic Old Testament law. Had the yearly sacrifices that came in for the sins of the people, you know, your bulls and your cows and your doves, those sort of things that were sacrificed regularly. And you have other important festivals happening, a festival of booths, a couple of other festivals that have escaped my head at the moment. But there's a constant emphasis on the temple mount there. After the coming of Christ, worship of God has not been confined to a specific geographical location. The separation between Jew and Gentile geographically was made rather irrelevant, and the temple was no longer central to worship. Even in the case of our church here, worship is not confined to the four walls of the sanctuary, right? I talked about the last time I was up here, our ministries don't stop at the four walls of the building, right? They continue everywhere we go. So with the first coming of Christ, all of God's children have received equal access to him. This is a really, really cool thing about Christianity. You look at other faiths where you have to make pilgrimages to various places. Roman Catholicism emphasizes pilgrimages to the Vatican. Islam emphasizes pilgrimages, at least one in your lifetime, to Mecca. We don't have to make pilgrimages anywhere. We can choose to go check out Israel if we want to, because there's some cool history there, but there's nothing requiring us to do so. Our ability to worship God, to speak to God, to confess our sins to God, to be forgiven by those sins by God, and to grow in grace have all been almost built in to us after our indwelling by the Holy Spirit as believers. It comes with the territory of being a Christian, I could say. There's no requirement to go to a specific spot. And that's what Jesus is saying here. That's what he's getting at. There is no physical requirement to be in a specific place to be saved or to worship God. The main truth from Jesus here is that those who worship him are worshiping in spirit and in truth, not that there's an emphasis on a specific place to go. And I would say it's probably a good thing we don't have to go to the temple in Jerusalem after what Titus did to it in 80, 70, it was difficult to get to. So what does Jesus mean by spirit and truth? We've looked at the physical location not being a relevant factor in how we worship God in so much as we don't have to go to a specific spot. But what does it mean, what does Jesus mean by spirit and truth? I'm going to answer the question. I'm going to answer it in a couple of parts. Looking first at worshiping in spirit, Moses told the people in Deuteronomy 6 that they were to love God with all their heart, soul, and might. And then you'll recall in Matthew and the other Gospels, Jesus expanded upon that a bit, saying that we are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and also to love our neighbor as ourselves. Worshiping God in spirit means that our worship must be wholehearted and genuine. There must be a true, deep love and passion for God and the things of God that rings through our life, or else, honestly, we may as well not bother worshiping at all. A half-hearted worship, a lukewarm heart, and a lazy attitude regarding worship will not please or glorify God. And therefore, our worship must be a true expression of the love in our hearts for God. You'll recall in the early chapters of the book of Revelation, Jesus is speaking to one of the churches in Asia. I want to say Laodicea, I might be wrong, but he is basically condemning them because they are lukewarm in their worship. He is saying, because you are lukewarm, I like to spew you out of my mouth. We've all had that. We got like hot water in the car after a long afternoon in Walmart or something. Your water bottle is really hot. We want to just like spit it out. There is no desire to keep that water close to us. And that's what Jesus is saying to the Laodiceans. You are lukewarm. I would rather that you were cold or hot for me. Not being lukewarm, riding the fence, sitting in the middle, not being committed fully. A half-hearted worship is not something that's going to honor and glorify God. God is here for our whole hearts, our whole being, right? All of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, not half of your heart and a quarter of your mind and maybe a third of your strength on a good day if he's lucky, right? That's not what he's here for. And furthermore, we know that putting up a facade to try and fool other people doesn't do us any good either. Samuel was told by God in 1 Samuel, the man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. That's what God is concerned about when it comes to worship, when it comes to obedience, when it comes to Christianity as a whole. Works don't do anything, really, to save us. They don't do anything to keep us. That is all of grace. So, when it comes to our hearts, they have to be wholly surrendered to God, and so our worship must be wholeheartedly surrendered to God. I'm starting over myself. But worship in spirit is worship that is genuine and wholehearted. And I have Psalm 100 bookmarked here. I just wanted to kind of look at it. Worshiping in spirit should also be, I could use the word spirited, there should be a level of joy to it. We're not called to, the fruits of the spirit, they're love, joy, not love and stone-facedness. So Psalm 100 says, Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. And let's skip down to verse 4. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Be thankful unto him and bless his name. For the Lord is good. His mercy is everlasting and his truth endureth to all generations. So, our worship should be genuine and there should be a level of joy to it. There should be a level of happiness to be here to be worshiping God tonight. There should be a level of enjoyment to getting to honor and glorify God with our hearts, with our minds, with our lips as we sing or by sitting and listening to a sermon, right? And then looking down at worship in truth, right? Our worship, this is important, our worship must be characterized and supplemented by a knowledge of God revealed in his word. We must be properly informed in our worship and not running around with every wind of doctrine or every flashy hip new trend in the music or worship scene. We have to be very careful when it comes to our worship. We can't just take whatever new idea comes around that looks cool. We have to be careful to try it by the Word. We know that God has left instructions for worship. He was very, very particular about how He was worshipped in the Old Testament. There's nothing that we see in the Bible that would lead us to believe He's less particular now than He was then. We know that our God is never changing. He is immutable, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Worship with passion without applied truth will lead to a shallow emotional worship that is comparable, I could say, to a high from a drug. Once that high of emotional fervor fades away, so too does our passion for God, like the seeds in the parable of the sower that fell on shallow, stony earth and grew fast. They grew up really nice looking immediately, and then at the first bit of temptation, struggle, trial, persecution, heat from the sun, they were scorched, they withered away immediately. There was no depth to them. That's what we want to avoid in our worship. We don't want a shallow, shallow Christianity. We want it to be deep and we want it to start from the heart. Where was I? On the other hand, worship that is all knowledge and no spirit will be dry and emotionless. And that can very easily give way to a stony legalism where every aspect of worship is simply a checklist that makes us holy. We show up singing two or three songs, we pray, we listen to the Word taught because it's the checklist that makes me right with God, and not because of any real desire to worship God from our hearts. Worship in truth is worship that is not emotionless, but it is reverent, it is respectful of God, and it is controlled and led entirely by the Holy Spirit and by the revealed Word of God. So worship in truth is grounded in and focused on God. It's not led by, it's not even led by us, right? Our own human thoughts, our ideas, our plans should not be what leads worship. What leads worship should be the Word of God. Then looking to worship in the believer's heart, right? A lot of what I've just said applies most when you are, in fact, within the four walls of a church building, which is what I just said we weren't looking at exclusively tonight. So the heart of the believer is incredibly important for worship because, like I was saying earlier, worship is not confined to one specific location. Therefore, it follows that worship should be happening at all locations, specific or not. It should be happening at all times. We're told to pray without ceasing. David did not give us a time frame for when we should be praising God. We should be entering into his gates with thanksgiving and praise, and we should be praising him for the day that he has made. What is it, 7 to 8 o'clock on Wednesdays and 9-ish to 12-ish on Sundays? We don't get to just make those boundaries by ourselves for worship. So worship in the heart of the believer, the true believer, is going to be what I would call a natural occurrence. The true worship that glorifies God is not a facade put up to deceive man, nor is it, like I was saying earlier, that holy checklist that when completed leaves us all good with God. Getting up in the morning and saying a quick prayer and reading a couple chapters in the Bible does not make us holy, nor is it something that we should have to force ourselves to do. There should be within the believer a desire to learn more about God, to commune with God, and to praise God, because as our Father, we have that love for Him in our hearts. That love has come, of course, because He first loved us. First John 4, 19, we love Him because He first loved us. And so, because we love Him, there should be that desire to speak to Him, to commune with Him. Can I use the term hang out? To be with Him in this way that we can on earth. To come into His presence, like David said, to enter into His courts and His gates with thanksgiving and praise. So true love for God is something that comes naturally to the believer after salvation as a result of the pre-applied love of God. He loved us first, and thus we are enabled to love him more by his grace and his work in us. I like to say anything good that is in me comes from God, and all the bad stuff is my own fault. I think we can all apply that to ourselves. All the good stuff is him, all the bad stuff is me, and we've got to take responsibility for it, right? If there is any love for God in the heart of a person, that person's life will be characterized by that love for God. And that person's worship of God will be genuine and will not be a chore. And Jesus said to his disciples that you will know, others will know that you are my disciples by your love one for another. He did not say, by your Bible reading every day, nor did he say, by your faithfully attending church every Sunday. He didn't say, others will know you're my disciples because you argue with each other about theology every day instead of actually doing anything productive and constructive with your time. He said, it will be by your love one for another. And thus, we can conclude that our lives will be holy and entirely and fully characterized by a love for God. And then true love for God is not going to be a heavy burden. God has made it clear to us that He loves us. By way of an example, we know that our parents love us, and so when we know that our parents love us, that makes it a little bit easier to love them back, right? Makes it easier to love them back, to have that desire to honor them and to do what they say, and that's born of that love for them that we have. And that desire to make them proud will lead us to make choices that honor them, fulfilling our various responsibilities, doing our chores, right? We're going to want to make our parents proud because we love them. In the same vein, for the true believer, there's no need to force ourselves to want to honor God. While we struggle with sin, I can say myself the most probably, and while the Christian life is an active and a hard one, the true believer will have an indwelling desire to honor, love, and glorify God and to proclaim Him to all those around him. When it comes to following God, Matthew 11.30 says that His burden is light, His yoke is easy. Following Him is not a chore, right? It is hard, don't get me wrong. We take up our cross, we follow Him, but it is a difficulty, a hardship that we will willfully take up because we are taking up that cross and following us. Not necessarily dropped on us, we take it up and we follow Him. That's the command that we're given by Christ. So looking to combine the two, right, we've looked at worship in the believer's heart. We looked at worship in spirit and in truth. So by way of kind of tying them all together, I want to start with a quote from Jonathan Edwards, who said, I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth. Edwards was in the 1700s, so it can be a little hard to understand that sometimes. So I'm going to go ahead and break it down a bit. So he's saying, I should think myself in the way of my job to raise the affections, the joys, the admiration, emotions towards God of my hearers as high as I possibly can on the condition, the sole condition, that these affections are raised by nothing but truth. It reminds me of a Voddie Bauckham quote recently. He said that he will not compromise the meaning of scripture to fit in with the culture. It's the same thing. We cannot change our view of God because that makes worship easier or more palatable to other people. We can't try and make worship more palatable to unbelievers. That's not how it works. Unbelievers are going to be unbelievers whether we make worship palatable to them or not. Edwards here is recognizing that truth and only truth is what is going to be used to properly inform one's view of God for proper worship. Only truth can properly influence the emotions as well in a way that brings honor to God. The truth of God, being of infinite value, is worthy of infinite passion. Synonyms there, joy, celebration, admiration, and love. Because we know that God is holy, we know that He is perfect, He is just and loving, we should have that desire to worship Him. And having a proper view of God and a proper view of ourselves is going to facilitate or better facilitate that worship of him. So spirit and truth and worship are going to complement each other rather than being at odds. They complement together. You can marry the truths together. A proper knowledge of the truth of God is going to motivate us to truly worship him and a true worship of God will A true worship of God is informed by a proper knowledge of Him. Those who do not worship God properly, of course, are behaving dangerously. We know that God was, like I said earlier, very particular about worship, and He remains particular about worship. He has left examples and orders for worship in the Bible for us to follow, and those who will change how we worship just because they feel like it, or because they think that they know better than God how God should be worshipped, because they would prefer to worship God in a way that's easier for them. They're putting themselves above God. They're telling God, I know better than you, so I'm going to do what I want to do, and you can just kind of deal with it. And that's really not a smart thing to say to God. Nowhere in Scripture, and to back that up, how many of you are familiar with Numbers, the account of Aaron's sons offering strange fire to God? Bad idea. But what they did, Aaron's sons were consecrated to the priesthood. And when they were consecrated, God spoke with Moses and Aaron. And he says, I have some non-negotiables from my priests. The people are going to do their thing, but I have some non-negotiables for my priests. These non-negotiables are that I will be honored and revered by the priests and that I will be honored and revered by the people, right? The people are going to be shown by your life to honor and revere me. You are going to take your job before me so seriously that when others around you see you, they are going to want to honor and revere you more because of how you're acting. Aaron's sons ignored that. They tried to offer a sacrifice in a wrong way. I don't know a lot of the details about it. I don't know if they did it on the wrong day or they did it the wrong order, but whatever it is, they did it wrong enough that God declared it strange fire. And when they offered that sacrifice or attempted to offer it, he immediately struck them down. And Aaron was a little bit distraught at that, but what are you going to do? God will be honored by his priests. so that he will be honored by his people. So God is very, very, very particular about how he is worshipped. He knows exactly the best way that he is gonna be worshipped. He knows what he wants and why he wants it and when he wants it, the exact way he wants it. And for any of us to try and claim that we know better is the height of human pride. And that's something that I think should be very strongly condemned. I think that would go without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyways. That should be very strongly condemned. That's not something that we should be ever listening to, entertaining at all. Nowhere in Scripture do we find an endorsement of a shallow, emotion-driven service, nor on the other hand do we find any praise of any dry legalism. There is a balance to the worship of God, and again, the key to that balance is a proper view of God and a proper view of oneself. Looking towards an application, that means I'm almost done actually, we can see by this passage that while worship is important, no physical location matters more than any other for true worship, as true worship is in the heart of the believer. Similarly, salvation does not come by any work done in the heart of the believer on the part of the believer. That work in the heart is accomplished entirely by God, His will, His work. There's nothing a building is going to do one way or the other to interfere with or cause you to be saved when it comes to that spiritual work in your life. Now there can be physical distractions in various buildings, that's why we avoid certain buildings, but if I'm in this building as opposed to being in Walmart, that's not going to have a bearing on whether or not God decides to save me, right? If I pray out to God and I can ask him to save me from my sin, being here does not matter any more than being at Walmart would matter for that. Nor does being at any other church, if that prayer is made in sincerity, nor does any other building happen to manage that, right? So we're not more holy because we go here, but nor is anyone more holy because they go to another church down the road. Where was I? Salvation comes by the will and work of God in the heart and life of a person, right? We know our soul is, right? Grace alone, faith alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone, right? And no work, including going to church or being baptized, makes you a believer and automatically good with God. So, like I was saying. Was that me? That was probably me. I was standing differently. So like I was saying, there is no specific building that's going to change your salvation status. There is no specific work you can do that will change your salvation status, apart from crying out to God, knowing exactly how few works you can actually do to save yourself. And then looking specifically to the believer, I've been at the nursing home doing that Bible study every week the last couple months. You all have heard about that just a little bit. We've been looking through the book of John kind of expositorily, and this is actually the passage I preached to them today. Looking back at John 3, right at the very end, John the Baptist is speaking about how he must decrease and Christ must increase. Sorry, I got that mixed up. And that's what I took to the older folks last week, is that we must continually be decreasing and Christ must be increasing. And here we see an opportunity to really apply that, really get kind of down into it and show how this message is actually applicable in the actual daily life of the believer. Something that I think is pretty important for a sermon. If you're going to sit here 20, 25 minutes, you may as well know what you're going to do afterwards as a result of it, right? So our worship of God is something that ought to be flowing from us, informed by our knowledge of God, something as natural as drinking water or breathing. It needs to be spirit and truth, not one or the other. It needs to be a worship that is entirely grounded and focused on God as revealed through his word, facilitated and supplemented by a proper knowledge of God and a proper knowledge of ourselves. It should happen all the time. all the time, every place, not just a church, not just in one specific building, and there's also no skipping church, just because of it, right? Just because I'm saying that worship can happen everywhere and that a specific building is irrelevant does not mean we get to skip and forsake the assembling of ourselves together. We have that command in Hebrews, you're not allowed to skip church, even if pastor's on vacation, right? And also, it should be genuine, wholehearted, no facades, no faking it, right? There are many times, of course, we come to church. I can say it myself, right? I have come to church and not been in the mood to immediately start singing as soon as the piano started. I think most of us can say the same thing. Sometimes we have a headache. It's been a really long day. I'm really tired. Or maybe I just had a really long argument with the family the entire way in from 29 Palms, and I really just don't feel like I'm in the right mindset for worship. That is, sadly, a little bit irrelevant, because our worship is not focused on our own feelings, our own circumstances. Our worship is focused on that view of God. This is that He is holy, He is just, He is immortal, invisible, the only wise potentate. He is the omnipresent, omnipotent Lord of all creation, and He deserves to be worshiped whether we happen to feel like it today or not. We cannot decide that our feelings matter more than God's facts, right? And then looking once more to the unbeliever, I'm sure there's one here tonight at least, or at least one listening. If you know in your heart that you aren't a believer and that your worship of God is simply a checklist created by your parents, your church, your vague family, which is something you happen to do, maybe you got it from your grandparents. I know a lot of folks raised Catholic, just kind of stay Catholic just because that's where they always were. Let me be the one to sell you, by the authority of God's word tonight, your works aren't enough. Your church isn't enough. Your baptism isn't enough. Your good works aren't enough. I've been emphasizing good works a lot in my messages at the Old Folks Home, right? Isaiah 64, 6, all of our righteousness, all our good works are as filthy rags compared to the holiness and goodness of God. Our good works aren't enough to save us, no matter how many good works you do. I saw a quote recently, couldn't tell you exactly who it was from, but the holiest saint could spend their entire life doing nothing but good works, and that's still not enough to get to heaven. We can put it a little more personal. I could spend my entire life doing nothing but good works. Still not enough to get me to heaven. The good works don't do it. Ephesians 2, 8 and 9. For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast. The only thing that is sufficient to save you is the saving work of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who lived a sinless life and was crucified by sinful men, to be the payment for our sins." And this is the kicker. Every sin that we commit, whether it offends another human or not, every sin, no matter how big or small we think it is, offends that holy, righteous, perfect God that I was just saying we need to worship constantly no matter how we feel. That God who is holy and terrible and awe-inspiring is offended personally by every little sin we commit. And that is a terrible thing to consider when we consider the punishment for sin, the just punishment for sin for those who are outside of Christ. Any who is outside of Christ will perish. I mean, there's not much to say after that, right? There is no ifs, ands, or buts. The one who is outside of Christ will perish. If you were outside of Christ today, and you were to die before you got home tonight, you would find yourself catapulted into a very painful, tormented eternity. And I don't say this to try and scare you straight, all right? It's not like a school program out of prison, all right? We're not going to scare you straight. I'm saying this to warn you. Because I do not want to hear one day that I should've been warning people about the very real reality that is hell, and I chose not to because it was inconvenient or uncomfortable to talk about. Hell is uncomfortable to talk about. How bad must it be to be there, right? We don't like talking about it, it's kind of scary, it's kind of sad, right? It is sad. It is sad to hear that our soul has been catapulted into eternity without Christ. But how much worse would that make us want to talk about it to them? How much worse would that make us want to say to the unbeliever, you are going to hell if you do not repent. And that is not something we say to scare them straight. Again, we say it out of love. Because it is, how much more loving can we get than to try and show someone the way to eternal paradise? And on the flip side, how much must we hate someone to deliberately not tell them about eternity that they can have in Christ? So to the unbeliever, today is the day of salvation. Now is the accepted time to come to Christ and to see him for who he truly is. We know from God's Word that He will not turn away any who seeks Him. He will not cast out anyone who comes to Him. Anyone who comes earnestly to Christ, seeking Him with their whole heart, will not be cast out. They're not going to be kicked away. They're not going to be thrown out. God will accept any who come to Him during the time that He is accepting salvation now. So I can confidently say to the unbeliever to come to Christ today because his yoke is easy, his burden is light, he's not going to reject any who come to him. And then I do have just some closing thoughts that kind of appeared after I had finished with this whole fire and brimstone part. But John 3 has just been staying in my head a lot. That's what happens when you preach it for like a month straight. But looking at he must increase and I must decrease, this is kind of a continuation of that. That's how I treated it when I was preparing this lesson. It was a continuation of that last lesson, especially for the folks at the nursing home. Because in a way, this is a continuation, because a proper view of God, knowing that he is holy and just, that he is worthy of being worshiped, and this proper stance of having him increase in our lives and having us decrease in our own lives, will motivate true believers to worship him in a way that brings him honor and glory. We're going to want to worship him. We're going to wind up worshiping him properly if we have that proper view of him and the proper view of his word. And then one last thing to leave with you all is that our ultimate goal is to exalt Christ in every part of our lives for His glory and our eternal good. We are bought with a price. Our lives are not our own. We don't get to say, my body, my choice. We don't get to say, I'm the boss of me. We don't get to talk about bodily autonomy because we belong to Christ. We remain on earth only to fulfill the will of God. And how much ought we to be fulfilling his will in our worship of him, if not anything else? We talk about fulfilling his will for our lives, right? I've talked about that a lot. I'm looking at careers, I'm looking at college. Gotta fulfill his will for me. How much more, if I'm going to seek his will earnestly in where I go to school for a year or five years, how much more should I seek to honor him in how I worship him? Because worship, that worship, if all things go according to plan, that's going to be happening my entire life. I should be worshiping Him my entire life, and then for all eternity. So we should probably figure out how to do it right, right? Or else there's going to be a problem at the pearly gates. He's the one in charge. He knows what works best. I talked about this earlier. He knows what he wants from his people. What he wants, how he wants it, where he wants it, why he wants it. To ignore his word and to seek to worship him in a way that pleases us, to ignore what he says, or worse, to just take it and It's the opposite of elevate, his word, to lower it in ourselves, to put ourselves up on that pedestal of being the one in charge of how we worship God. I mean, that draws my mind to the story of Lucifer, right? I will be like the most high. It's nothing less than idolatry and pride, putting ourselves up as the king of this specific part. We don't get to talk about, let's see here, how does the song go? King of my life, I crown thee now, thine shall the glory be. Lest I forget thy thorn crowned brow, lead me to Calvary, right? If we're crowning him king of our lives, that doesn't mean we get to promote ourselves to like vice king. We don't get to be prime chairman, sorry, prime minister. We don't get to be chairman of this or secretary of that department. We don't get to head up anything. We are the last person who should honestly be in charge of our own lives because we're, as humans know, we are really, really good at messing everything up. We're really good at not doing things the right way, right? So, we must decrease, He must increase, and we who worship God must, must worship Him in spirit, wholehearted, genuine, from the heart in a way that is designed to honor and glorify Him above all others, and in truth, truth that is grounded in His Word, Truth that is designed for his honor and his glory. Truth that says, I don't know what I'm doing. By comparison, I don't know what I'm talking about. I shouldn't be the one in charge because I'm not the omnipotent, omniscient creator. And when we have that proper view of ourselves as being rather incompetent and that proper view of God as being the only competent one in this entire universe, it'll motivate us to truly worship him the way that will honor and glorify him. That's right.