I'm going to reserve some time at the end of our program tonight to spend some time praying for our mission conference that's coming up. And our mission team is going to come in and talk to us a little bit about the prep work for that conference. I want to encourage you with that. But it does mean we'd have 15 minutes less and I've been asked this week to teach on the doctrine of creation in our basic biblical Christianity series. You can do literally a year study. I think one time I actually sat in Hugh Huffaker's Sunday School class and we spent all semester on Genesis 1 through 11 and engaging and interesting each and every week. So I've got a lot of ground to cover in one evening. So if you don't find an answer for something, just ask Chris Aillers because he's teaching next and he will be more than happy to resolve that for you. But first I want to ask you all to do something for me. I'm going to ask that if you'll grab a Bible in front of you, if you have your own, there's a couple interesting things about the doctrine of creation that's a little different from some of the other things we're going to go through in this course. One of those is unlike the other doctrines where you kind of go here, here, and here in Scripture and see them, doctrine of creation is laid out very, very soundly and securely in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. And after you get past chapter 2, there's a lot of references back to creation, but the doctrine of creation is really set forth at that point. So it's consolidated in just those two chapters. I would say this, if you read the Bible front to back, it's the first doctrine that you actually encounter. The doctrine of God, God, the doctrine of creation created, God created. And so it's a very key doctrine. In fact, one of the things I want you to see as we look into some of the history of how this doctrine has been understood. But before I do that, I want to play a little Bible jeopardy with you. You're all familiar with jeopardy, everybody seeing the show where you get the answer and you have to come up with the question. Everybody familiar with jeopardy? So you're given an answer, and then you go, hey, hey, the question is this. What runs and yells and packs and goes up and down elevators, and you say, what is a middle school youth group? I want you all now to take Genesis 1 and 2, and we're just going to take 3 or 4 minutes. You may not get all the way through it, but I want you to read those chapters and ask yourselves, what are the questions? If Genesis 1 and 2 is the answer, what is the questions that are being asked? I'm going to give you all a few minutes just to read through Genesis 1 and 2. Those of you who are familiar can kind of skin through it. Those of you who are not read it at your own pace, and when we get to a stopping point, you can catch up later with the rest. I think that's going to show up real well. I made that for the big screen down below, but oh, well, for those of you just coming in, I've already given out some homework for the course. I've asked you all to read Genesis 1 and 2 briefly, look over it, look over some of the headings and some of the key points there that you remember and play Bible jeopardy where you're reading it. If that's the answer, what are the questions it's asking?
For the sake of our compressed time this evening, I'm going to start the discussion. For those of you who can multitask, that'd be most of the women in the room, you can keep on reading. For those of you who can't multitask and here, then you are welcome just to hear the conversation and look later. So, if Genesis 1 and 2 is the answer, what are some of the questions? How was the Earth made? Good. How was the Earth made? What was the order of creation? In other words, what was the order of the things that got put on it? Good. Yes, sir. Was it a literal seven days when God says, thus was the fifth day, what was meant by the word day? Good. Yes, sir. I'm sorry? How long ago? Good. How long ago? Good. How long ago? What happened in the beginning? What happened before the beginning? Right? Let me tweak that one. Who was before the beginning? Another question. Good. Okay? How could any personage, how could anything or any personage make what God did? That's a good question. St. Augustine would like you. Who wrote this? Why would God want to make man? That's a great question. Does he tell us? Yes. I did God rest, okay? Good. Those are good. One of the things I want to draw us to is the fact that for use of believer, believe it or not, your doctrine of creation impacts and influences everything else you see in Scripture. The questions you take to Genesis 1 and 2, yes, ma'am. So the question of creationism versus evolutionism, good, good. And those are all good questions that we bring to the text. I'll just say this as an interesting point. Had you been born in, let's say, 1100 A.D., the Middle Ages, first I would have had a resounding set of people say, what do we know about Satan? What do we know about angels? That's the question it answers, you see. So that we actually learn something about ourselves and how we even approach Genesis. We live in a modern world, in a world surrounded by science and industry, and we tend to take that into the text. If you were a group of ex slaves who had just come out of Egypt and were living in the desert area and getting your water and food from God, you would have had a different set of questions. You would have approached it differently. I love Augustine. You can't really see the picture, but he's holding a heart that's on fire over the word. It's one of the symbols for him. I gave you the quote, providentially knowing that you wouldn't be able to see the slide. That was smart of me. But Augustine wrote his confessions, and in Augustine's confessions, I apparently have some more of these by the way, if people didn't get them. I'm going to drop them right there. That's okay. Only in a few weeks. But Augustine wrote his confessions, the first time ever, anybody had written an autobiographical sketch of their conversion. What I mean by that is very common today that we'd get up in church and say, let me give you my testimony. This is how I came to know Jesus. But in the ancient world, you tended to tell how someone else came to know Jesus. And they would kind of stand there. And Augustine is one of the first people to write down how he became a Christian. Interestingly enough, in his book, The Confessions, which is still in print, by the way, you can go buy it. You can go buy his book, Confessions. When he gets to the point that he is saved, he has heard the gospel and has converted. Then, by the way, I do have to share this story just because it's funny. One of my dear friends, Travis Hutchinson, took Latin with me in seminary. And he was really horrible at it. And so, what he did was he just memorized the English passage and then he memorized the Latin passage for the exam. And it was Augustine's confession. And so, he just got on there and he memorized, you know, Toley Legge, and then he memorized his English paragraph to write. And that's how he passed his final exam. Well, two weeks later, he got on the floor of Presbyterie for his exam to become a pastor. And the first question was, how did Augustine get converted? And he goes, oh, brothers, you know the Latin and it says Toley Legge, and he just starts quoting the Latin to him. They put him in charge of the Examining Committee, so just as a thought. But Augustine said, now that I've become a Christian, the first thing I have to do is go to Genesis 1. And the last half of the confession reads really weird because he starts talking about how to interpret Genesis 1. What his point is, if you don't know how to interpret Genesis 1, then you don't know how to interpret Genesis 2 or Genesis 3 or Exodus 4 or Leviticus 12, that it sets a paradigm for how you're going to understand all the scripture. One of my favorite people, Peter Lombard, who by the way is probably the most unknown, important biblical, church history figure in the world, Lombard wrote a book called The Sentences and about 1150 AD, and you've probably heard some of them, and they were the theological textbook for guys like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas. It was the standard that you read when you went to seminary in those days. One of the questions he writes is, did Adam have one less rib than Eve? And you say, well, what is that? And why would you pay money to go argue that question? But if you listen in that question, what's there? The question is, was Adam a historical figure? You see, if he was a historical figure, then he had a historical rib. And if he had historical ribs, and a historical rib was taken out, and a historical eve was created. It's a very important question. One of his other questions was, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And you think, well, that's just insanity. But the question is, are angels spiritual beings? Are they created beings? And if they're created, don't they have to have some kind of matter? And if they have matter, we can measure it. And if we can measure it, we can figure out how many can dance on the head of a pin. You see, in Lombard's questions, was this question of, is an angel equal to God, or is an angel under God somehow? Was an angel created? So Thomas Aquinas, who came up with all these proofs of God, the first mover, the first cause, necessary being, all these intelligent designers, all based on looking at creation to understand that God exists. John Calvin's motto, by the way, by the way, Calvin's motto and seal, he's holding a heart. That is John Calvin's seal, most of you probably don't know he even had a seal, but he did. All for my heart to you, Lord, properly and sincerely. I've got a dime if anybody knows where he got that. He didn't come up with that statement himself. He actually stole it. Anybody know? Huh? Augustine, call. You're richer now. But yeah, he actually pulled it out of the confessions that line. So I hope you, my heart, Lord, properly and sincerely. And Calvin also would tell you, book one of the institutes is called, The Knowledge of God, the Creator. In other words, where do you start in your systematic theology and understanding the creation? Carl Bart, I don't necessarily support him, but I use him as a modern figure to say, Carl Bart, if you don't know, is sort of the father of what we call neo-orthodoxy. Don't go become neo-orthodox, please don't walk out of here saying Jerry said to do this. But he turned theology on its head, and that's what he's known for. And you know where he did it? He did it from changing how he read Genesis 1 and 2. Even in the PCA over the last few years, there have been several arguments that deal with how we interpret Genesis 1 and 2. I say all this to say to you that throughout history, this has been the central doctrine of the church, and we have to hold to it. You really can't see any of that, can you? Wow, the best laid plans. That's why I'm a pastor and not a technician. Fortunately, it is on your handout. So let me get that and make sure that I'm with you on them here. Looking at Genesis 1 and 2, what I want to do tonight, instead of spending a lot of time talking about creation, evolution, I'll put some resources on there if we have time. We can talk about it some, but I want to talk about some of the doctrinal principles that when you read Genesis 1 and 2, you have to hold to be orthodox, to be a Christian believer. What are some of the things that you have to hold to? One of them is, I don't think all you're going to do is hurt my eyes, I don't think it's just bad operational error on the power point creation, but thank you, sir. Doctorative creation, first and foremost, why did God create the world? The bottom line is, Genesis 1 and 2 doesn't really tell us, and I know that's not satisfactory to us, but what we can say is this. When I was at Cumberland Caverns, if any of you all have done Cumberland Caverns, you go in and you kind of hang out, and they take you through a laser show and stuff, and then they have a wild trip where you go caving, spulunking, they take you through this laser show, and they shine this blue light on a rock, I don't know why it's blue, but I remember that. And they tell you that God went down by the river side and he was lonely. And so he created, man. Next time you're there, you can stand up and say, that's heresy. Let me out of this cave, because God didn't create us because he was lonely. There was no need in God by which he had to build me. That makes sense. God was perfect within himself. The Father loved the Son, the Son loved the Father, the Spirit was the love between them, but also a full person in the Trinity and the God had. God didn't need me. That's critical. Okay? Critical. So as we move into this and look, the doctrine of creation is a work of God outside of himself, outside of himself. The creation is different than God's nature. If you look at Genesis 1-1, the Hebrew word there, barah, God created, is a word that stresses the fact that God created out of nothing. The phrase you'll read sometimes in commentaries is ex nihila, out of nothing. So that God wasn't sitting in space and saw a chunk of matter float by and he grabbed it and made it into something. God spoke it into existence. He created it out of nothing. Genesis 1-2 without form and void implies that it lacked order or content. 1-3 that God said that creation happened because of God spoke it. Not because again that there was some outside thing. God created out of nothing and he created the world outside of himself. Why do I say that? Well, there's two things that we have to say you cannot believe as a Christian. One is, and this is going to sound kind of redundant, but you can't be an atheist, right? It's right there in Genesis 1-1. God created, you have to believe in God to be a Christian, okay? And I say that to you because you probably nod your head and go, well, of course. But many of us as Christians oftentimes are practicing atheists. We believe in Jesus, but we don't act like it, right? We go everywhere we can go to get help except God, because in our practice we forget or we don't operate like he's there. The Bible makes clear you cannot be an atheist. It also says you cannot be a pantheist. What do we mean by that word? Pantheist is someone who believes that God in humanity or that God is in humanity. God is in stuff. He God is some kind of spirit and he dwells within the trees and the rocks and the flowers that he is inside it all. By the way, if you want to know what the crowd under 30 thinks about that and not all of them of course, but there is a new movement in this country to say that using drugs enhances your spiritual experience, that using drugs in your meditations or in your whatever helps you know God better because the drug releases you to understand him better, okay? In that is a statement of pantheism, right? Because I hope you hear this and really I'm going to say a couple things tonight that if you hear nothing else, I hope you get this. If God is outside of creation, if he created the world outside himself, then nothing in creation can equivocally take us to God. Psychologically it might help. It might help for me to get out of my office and go into the woods, get some fresh air and be mindful, right, that this is God's creation. But all that a drug can do is give me a physical material experience, a chemical experience. It can't lead me to a God who by definition stands outside of that creation. I hope I haven't confused you there, but that my relationship with God is something that goes beyond creation because God is beyond creation. So nothing in creation can supplant that. That's why the second commandment is, don't worship me through the created order because I'm not trapped in it, I'm actually above it, okay? By the way, this is teaching, not preaching, so if you all have a question, throw your hand up. If I like you, I'll point out yet and let you ask it. So I'm just kidding, sort of. But that creation is different from God. By the way, we see this in our terms, I know you studied this last week, but if you look at the terms that we use to describe God, most of them are negative, we're mortal, he's immortal, not mortal. We're finite, he's infinite, he's not finite, okay? And if you look at those kind of things, we say, well, this is me, I'm finite, I have these limits, God's without limits, right? God doesn't have limits, I'm mutable, I can change, God's immutable, he doesn't change. So that we understand God in a large part by understanding what we're not, right? And who he is. And we talked about the attributes of God already, I think, and weeks past. So it is true, the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies above proclaim His handy work. But we need to distinguish here between general revelation and specific revelation. What do we mean by those terms? General revelation is the revelation you can receive from creation. It's possible to go out, kick an ant hill, not fire ants, those are bad. And watch the ants scurry and scatter, collect their eggs, move base and move their home, reconstruct the house and go, that didn't happen by chance. There's God to be a God behind that, right? Or you look up in the heavens and you see the stars and you go, somebody had to do that. I love and Genesis 1, it's just an aside, he made heaven, he made earth and some stars, you know, also is out there. You can do that, but you can't know from that ant hill that you're a sinner in need of the blood of Jesus Christ to save you from your sin. You need specific revelation, you need God to reveal Himself. When I work with high school students, I always say this, I say, you can go to the mall tomorrow, and you can find just the prettiest girl ever that you just fall madly in love with. And you can follow around, you can follow when she shops at the gap and you can stand in line behind her at Baskin Robbins and you can walk out where she's at her car and you can jump on the bumper while she drives away and she pulls into her house. You can sneak under and hide and look in the window and try to climb through the window to go eat dinner with her, but that's not a relationship that's called stalking. And you shouldn't do it, right? That the only way you can have a relationship with that girl is if you walk up to her and say, hey, and she says, hey, back, or in our case with God and we'll find this out later, we're incapable of saying, hey, he has to come to us and say, hey, and we say, hey, back. A relationship has to begin with that, okay? All right, questions on this? All right, move on to the next thing here. All right, God is the created order, I'm sorry, we're over here, Dr. Crayton, Gates, Atheist, James Crayton, he has a special revelation term, page. The created order is God given and God dependent, okay? What does this mean? That the order of creation, the debate here is, did God start the world up like a clock he built a clock, he wound it up, he threw it out there, let it run, or is God intimately involved in the world? And as you read through Genesis 1, you learn quickly, God intimately involved, he builds the world and he says, I need to put man in there to have dominion. And then he comes back and he says, man needs a helper suitable for him. You see, that he's intimately involved and even as we read through the rest of Bible, one of the things you realize in the Old Testament, by the way, this is totally free, not part of the lesson, but the Old Testament proves about three or four things, it proves God is personal, that God is one and that he is active in history, okay? And you have to see that in the scriptures, that God is active in history, that he holds it and the order of creation comes from him. Why is that important? What is the implication of that? The implication of that is there can be miracles, because for you and I, we look at the world and we say, well, you know, dead people don't resurrect, all right, that's a fact, dead people don't resurrect, but God who's constantly involved in the world says, well, I kind of built it that way, but resurrection's another option for me, because I stand outside the world, I'm in control of the world, and the world is dependent upon me, and if I decide to resurrect someone, that's within my rights and choices. If I decide to part a sea, or have someone walk across one, if I decide to heal a disease, that's within my right as God, the creator, who also is the sustainer of creation, okay? And you see that, too, in the doctrine of creation, that God sustains it, all right. What does God create in the order of dependent, and that, and that, and that, okay, there we go. God created the world with potential, with potential, and I want to be cautious here, because in the English language, we think of potential as a good thing, right? We say things like, my son went to college with great potential, and he fulfilled it, but you know, that could mean, my son went to college with the intent of doing nothing, and he achieved his goal, right? I mean, great potential can mean a lot of things. Potential means that we have the ability to step in and become something. The world is created with potential, God is actually created without potential. He is perfect and full within himself. I say this, there's actually a branch of theology, it's not true, you should run away from it, called process theology that says this, that God is developing. He's expanding his own world, he's becoming who he wants to be, and we have to say, you know, my pastor said, you're not supposed to smoke things while you read the Bible. We have to say, that's just not true, right? God is the great I am, he is perfect within himself, he is fully defined, but the earth is created with potential. Examples of this? Well, you know, you're born as a baby, and you grow into adulthood, right? You develop, you grow, you mature, also, we see things like in the hall over here, or some of you may wish you were at the moment, is they're developing a musical performance, they're creating that, they're developing it, you see, it's potential, right? And we certainly have some great works of art, and things of that nature, that we say that about, that they were potential and they came into being. The world was created that way. We're going to find out one of the reasons is because of who man is. Man was put in the earth, had dominion over it, and to create in it. We're running out of time, and I want to make sure I get to this statement, yes, ma'am, that's right, that's right, that's right. And after the statement for those who are listening on the tape, was God created man with the potential to create or destroy, and certainly the fall of man, which we're going to discuss in a few weeks, has huge impact on that. But I want to throw this out to you. The end of the Bible, God doesn't return us to a garden, right? God drops down in the middle the new city, the new Jerusalem, so that God not only redeems man, but he redeems man's greatest creation, which isn't ice cream, but the city. That was a joke. God creates the city, and God redeems that too, so that we find ourselves in the new Jerusalem, the new city. And I say that to you to say that we were put on earth for that purpose, okay? And it's really key because to go back to our three viewpoints, if you're an atheist, your view is, use up the world as fast as you can, because there's nothing else after this. If you're a pantheist, it's, don't interfere with the world because it's part of you, right? Don't cut that down because you're connected to it. By the way, if you want to know how to have fun with these people, your pastor didn't tell you this, but one way is to ask atheists why you don't put handicapped spots. At the back of the parking lot. Think about that. And to ask pantheists why we obliterated smallpox and shouldn't we bring it back? It was a living virus. But see the Christian can step into both of those scenarios and say, no, no, no, no, God put us here as man. Why? Well, to have dominion. Now sometimes we cross the line of dominion into the line of manipulation. Sometimes we might abuse that power, and that's part of sin. But we were put here to say, you know, it is okay to stomp out smallpox, and it is okay to take these other things and to fix them. I, for one, am really thankful that we had dominion over eye sockets and eyeballs and created laser surgery. I'm very happy about that. I think that was a good use of mankind's dominion. You might disagree. So, all right, let me move into the three types of creatures that are in creation. Three types of creatures in creation. The first one is the spiritual creatures, and there's two kinds of these. There are angels, and there are demons. And I'm really so I'm trying to move through so we have time for the missions group. There are Bible verses and things for this. But trust me, if you want to know, you can ask me later. So, but angels and demons, we don't know when and how Satan fell. There is a passage there in Isaiah that you can look at that indicates that he fell because he disobeyed God. But we don't know, and we don't know why anyone would follow him, right? We don't know why other angels would follow him and become demons. I'm giving you my best speculation, but I'm telling you now, putting on my speculating hat, not my authoritative pastor hat, that he was an archangel, and so he had warriors under him, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of armies, and it looks like it's kind of broken down and kind of military ranks, and that when he fell, his legion fell, okay. And I get this also from Revelation, if you want to know where I'm getting it from, because when God decides Satan's done, God doesn't go and stomp out Satan. He sins Satan's equal, the archangel Michael. You see, God's not going to be bothered with Satan. He's going to send an equal to deal with that, and that's where I'm getting that. But again, that's somewhat speculation. But we do know Satan exists, and Genesis is very clear why it doesn't satisfy our curiosity. It does tell us here's the problem, right? He exists, but angels exist also. By the way, just a point of note, there's really nothing in scriptures, a couple of misconceptions about angels I just want to hit. First of all, angels are not cute babies that float around with Bible verses. If you ever go to a life way bookstore, that's the picture. You know, they're just kind of little happy little babies. All the angels in scripture are really terrifying. I mean, they're not things you want to get excited about. I think it's one of Satan's greatest champions in American culture. He's convinced this angels are weak when they're not. I also don't see in scripture guardian angels specifically, like one on one. I think to use football terms, it's a little more zone coverage. But that's what I see in the scriptures. When we don't become angels, angels are separate from us, okay? They're a different type of creature as well. So, by the way, is anybody know why the angel carries a pitch fort? It was a fun story. In the middle ages, there was this German barbarian king that married this princess over in the east, over in the Byzantine empire, over there, around Constantinople. And she came over her entourage and she did this horrendous thing. And all of the king's people noticed she ate with a fork. Why would God give you hands if you were supposed to eat with forks? And so, they started drawing pictures of her with forks. And pictures of Satan with forks. And over time, Satan got a bigger fork. So, there you go. Number two, material creation. There's two types of material creations, animate and animate. These are your rocks, your dogs, your cattle. By the way, if you were listening to this as an Israeli coming out of Egypt, you would have picked up on the fact that God made animals to be domesticated. And animals not to be domesticated. And you would have been thankful that he gave you animals that could be domesticated in farm animals and used for those purposes, see? In our modern world where all meat comes and wrap packages, we don't think that way. But for them, they would have been like, oh, that's cool, that's good. But those animals are, they differ because, I'm sorry, let me back up one minute, yeah, let me not back up. Those animals are separate from us because there's no moral category for them. Y'all have probably heard me use this illustration before. I'll use it again quickly. If you come over to my house and eat dinner with me, and halfway through dinner, I used to have this like 70 pound Alaskan Malamute. That Malamute came and just jumped on your leg. We took you to the hospital and got it bandaged up. You'd be pretty upset. If the next week I said, come on back to my house seriously, won't happen again. Put the dog up. And I'm feeding you about halfway through dinner. I get down on all fours and I bite your leg. Which one's more disturbing, right? And why? Because we'd all say it, the dog's doing what the dog does. But I know better. I have a moral category of not biting people, right? Which makes me different. And I'm the third category, the human being. And the human being is created as a combination, both spiritual and material. And this is the doctrine of creation. We're a little lower than the angels now in the fall and our fallen state. But the Bible says, we'll be higher than the angels in eternity because God is going to restore us. And I say that because the doctrine of creation says that man is the center point of creation. And there's lots of ways to understand the image of God that God places his image in man. Lots of ways of saying that. Let me just give three quickly. That we're called to have dominion over the earth. We've talked about that. That we're called to be creative. We're called to be creative as well, after our likeness. And then we're called to be relational. Let us make man an hour image. You don't see squirrels out there tonight taking Bible doctrine classes. Are collecting nuts and discussing the meaning of life, right? We're built differently. We're built to pursue God. That's why we're here. That's why we invite others to come here. Because we know that it's not that they're not pursuing God. It's that they're lost. And they can be found. Finally, lots of other issues. Let me end with just this statement and turn it over to our missions department. Building a theological fence. I get asked all the time as a pastor, what do we do about creation and science? And can I be a Christian evolutionist? I have to believe in a 24-hour day. How do I understand the things in Genesis 1 and 2 and modern science and archeology and all these things that come about? Let me say to you that I think it's probably smarter to say, instead of that one's right, that one's right. By the way, the PCA has a paper, it's in your reference sheet, where they went through all the views and then they kind of say, here's the ones you can believe and be in the PCA. And if you're really interested, you can go pursue that paper. It is well written. It is well written. It came out of a committee, can you believe that? But let me give you this that I think is good. If you think about it as a theological fence and all the sheep that are eating inside the fence or orthodox sheep, some of them might be poking their head out and eating some grasses on the other side, but we'll just ignore that. But here's the fence. On one side, you have the fence that your doctrine of creation has to believe, has to believe that God is not part of creation. We talked about that. Number two, you have to believe that creation was made good. You'll be shocked how many people think the world was made imperfect. But the Bible says the world was made good sin entering the world nested up. You see, and you'll be amazed how many scientists believe, well, whatever we got is what we got from the beginning. But the Bible says we had something different and sin changed it. You have to believe that. Number two, and I say this for a number of reasons, but you have to believe Adam and Eve were historic figures. If for no other reason, Jesus thought they were. And he quotes them as such in the New Testament. He refers to Adam as a historic man. So you get into all kinds of interpretation problems with Adam with some sort of symbol. Then Jesus said, you should be like a symbol. So we can't do that. Adam and Eve were historic people. There was a historic fall. And then finally, there is a spiritual reality, right? And I think as Americans, oftentimes we forget that. We lived in what you'd call closed system, where we deal with the physical and we forget. There is a spiritual warfare all around us. I love the opening of Revelation when John says, I heard behind me and I turned and I saw. What did he see? He saw that while he was just kind of hanging out, there's a spiritual war going on. And we can't forget that. That's why we seek our scripture. So I can answer maybe one question before I have to hand it over while Sandy and her crew are coming up. I don't know if anybody has one or not. That case, Mike, is all you? You want this? Talk about covering some ground, brother. You went after it, thank you for that. All right, exciting time in the church, guys.