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So we have a cup of coffee and we start the week together on Monday morning coffee.

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Good morning, good morning. Welcome to the Monday morning coffee podcast for the week of May 31st through June the 6th. Today is June 1, Monday, June the 1st. We are in the middle of VBS week at Westside, and I am ready to talk to you about the sermon yesterday, talk to you about daily Bible reading, all while I'm holding an amazing cup of coffee. I'm not sure exactly how this has happened, but somehow this closely guarded secret of mine that I like coffee has slipped out. And sometimes very nice people bring me coffee. And so this is coffee from Tanzania, and it is absolutely incredible. Again, I I'm not sure how people have discovered this about me, but I do like coffee a lot. And this is really, really good stuff. I have some coffee from Panama as well. So uh just really kind people being very kind to somebody who's ready to drink some coffee and talk about the Bible with you. So you know what to do. Get your Bible, get your coffee. Let's grow together.

Sermon Notes

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Yesterday in QA, in the QA lesson in the 1040, I talked about Luke chapter 9, verses 49 to 50. That's where John says, Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name. We tried to stop him because he does not follow with us. And Jesus said to him, Don't stop him, for the one who's not against you is for you. And that passage really matters. That's an important verse for us because I think I think sometimes we struggle with the difference between being faithful and being uniform. Faithfulness means we're loyal to Christ, to his teaching, we respect his authority, we teach his truth. Uniformity means everybody has to do everything exactly the same way I'm doing it. And it's easy to get those two confused. The apostles here are he's not with us, so he's got to be against us, because he isn't doing things exactly the way they're doing things. And Jesus corrects that. The issue isn't whether the man is in their circle, the issue is is he teaching the truth? Does he belong to Jesus? And that's an important reminder because Christians can differ in how we do various items in the kingdom of God. Expedience, traditions, matters of method and judgment, those can differ, and that does not make us enemies of Jesus. In fact, Romans 14 is built on that principle in that text. There are Christians who have very different feelings and different consciences and different practices in regarding to eating some meat that was commonly sold in the marketplace in the first century. And Paul does not say everybody has to do the same thing on everything. Paul does not say, you strong Christians, you know so much better about this matter, so you go over there and you fix those weak Christians. What he says is receive one another, respect your own conscience, and let's not fuss. And as I'm saying that, I want to add, that does not mean that doctrine and truth do not matter. Of course they matter. Authority matters, sin matters, the truth matters. But we also need enough humility to ask, is this a matter of the truth, or is this just the way I'm comfortable doing things? Is this a matter of respecting Bible authority, or is this just how I was brought up? It is easy to elevate personal preferences into law. And Jesus reminds the apostles, not everyone will do things exactly like you'll do things, and that's okay. They needed that reminder, and sometimes we need that reminder too. Hope that helps you as we get ready to continue to think about the word of God and its application in our lives. And that starts for us in Ephesians chapter 5. Let's think about daily Bible reading.

Monday Ephesians 5

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The question as we're jumping into Ephesians 5 here is just exactly how all this material goes together. And I think I would suggest here that this first 20 verses or so, 2021 verses, I think there is a background, a theme going there of sexual impropriety, things that are wrong sexually, uh, immorality, that kind of thing. For example, look at verse 3 sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you. And probably the unfruitful works of darkness in verse 11, that may be a reference there to idolatry and the sexual immorality that was so common with all of that shameful things they do in secret, verse 12. And so after having discussion in the first section here of what's wrong, then we'll then Paul will move into what's right, where the sexual relationship fits and where it is right and pure. A couple of notes here. Covetousness in verse 3 may have to do with sexual immorality and the coveting of someone else's body. That would not be the only way that a person can covet and do what's wrong, but that may be where Paul is right there. And you may notice in verse five that the kingdom of Christ and God are one and the same. And check verse five. Not only does the Bible tell us what to do, it provides us the motivation to do it. You have no inheritance in the kingdom of God in Christ if you're not doing these things. And someone, verse six, seems to be telling the Ephesians that these sins are not so sinful. And that, of course, prompts a lot of speculation about Gnosticism. And I talked some about that last week, just uncertainty as to exactly how developed Gnosticism was in the first century, what all that encompassed and what all that means. But verse six, there's some deception happening here. And so Paul says, we can't be part of that. We'll not be part of that. Verse 11, also verse 7. And then verse 14, really difficult to be sure about that. I may get some questions about that. Paul's wording here may come out of Isaiah. It may come out of Isaiah 26, 19, and Isaiah 60 in verse 1. That may be a Christian hymn, and he's just citing a little piece of that. And the Ephesians, the readers of this, the hearers of this would get that, and they would understand that. Then Paul says about walking in the Spirit, verse 17, I'll just give you this quote about what it means to be filled with the Spirit. So much misunderstanding about that today. A person who is drunk, one scholar said, we will say, is under the influence of alcohol. So certainly a spirit-filled Christian is under the influence of the Holy Spirit. And one of my favorite writers, uh, John R. W. Stott, he says, it's a serious mistake to suppose that to be filled with the Spirit of Jesus Christ is a kind of spiritual inebriation in which we lose control of ourselves. On the contrary, self-control is the final quality named as the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, 22 and 23. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, we do not lose control, we gain it. I can't underline that enough. How often do we see, maybe on YouTube, social media, people behaving in an outrageous fashion and they claim to be getting the spirit or being filled with the spirit, being slain with the spirit? That's the very opposite of what it is to walk in the spirit, to be controlled by the spirit, to be under the spirit's influence. And then Paul, as he talks about being under the Spirit's influence, gives spirit-guided instruction about what the home should look like. And so that begins with wives, verse 22, to submit to their own husbands. Submission here is not a term in any way that means they are inferior. Submission here just means to give way to or to follow under. And please look and notice there's no appeal here to culture or to custom. The Christian home and how we do our relationships in marriage and in the home, they're not set by what society says is good and right. And what a notable, what a notable caution that is for our world today. It seems like so often so much of this is tossed out as outdated because we've listened to some podcast or because we've read some blog. No, this didn't fit the society of the time in which the Roman husband did rule like a king and like a tyrant, treated no one as if they had any value or input in the family. And today we don't want our homes to be ruled by what society says about discipline matters or about the role of the husband and the wife. The Bible is our standard. The Bible is what we follow if we're under the influence of the Spirit. So Paul never here says that a woman is inferior in any way to her husband. She just has a different role to play. Remember, submission isn't just for wives. We submit, for example, to the elders. I don't think that makes me in any way inferior to the elders. It just gives me a different role to play as I respect their leadership and follow them. Notice then that the husband is commanded to love his wife. Wives are commanded to submit and respect their husbands. It's been observed that wives naturally do the loving kind of thing. They need to be taught about the importance of respect, and that husbands are commanded to love their wives because we naturally do some leadership sorts of things leading them, but we need to do that in a loving kind of way. And the husband's love here is self-sacrificial. There is a heavy emphasis on what Christ did, how he gave up and sacrificed to provide for the church. This is servant leadership. And I'll quote Stott again. To our minds, he says, the word authority suggests power, dominion, and even oppression. We picture the authoritative husband as a domineering figure who makes all the decisions himself, issues commands and expects obedience, inhibits and suppresses his wife, and so prevents her from growing into a mature or fulfilled person. This is not at all the kind of headship which the apostle is describing, whose model is Jesus Christ. Amen and amen. What a help that is, as we read in Ephesians chapter 5 today, the reading for Monday, Ephesians 5.

Tuesday Ephesians 6

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It is Tuesday. It is Tuesday, and today our Bible reading is the sixth chapter of Ephesians. What a powerful chapter this is, just packed with all sorts of practical information that we need to walk with the Lord. That begins with children and parents, verses 1 to 4. Many have asked, what does it mean for children to obey their parents in the Lord? I think that just describes the general sphere in which children are offering their obedience. He does not mean that kids only obey their parents if they are Christians, know that they are acting in the will of the Lord when they do this. And then notice verse 2, honor your father and mother. I need to do some preaching on this, need to do some more teaching about this. Not much is said about children honoring their parents today. Honoring is to prefer, to give deference to. In our world, we honor children, not the other way around. That's backwards according to the Holy Spirit, according to Paul in Ephesians 6. And verse 4 would significantly curb parental power. A Roman father, one scholar writes, had absolute power over his family. He could sell them as slaves. He could make them work in his fields even in chains. He could take the law into his own hands, for the law was in his own hands. He could punish as he liked. He could even inflict the death penalty on a child. Think about that. This is a big change. Christian dads, and I think Christian moms fit in Ephesians 6.4 as well. Sometimes we read a verse that says, brothers do this, and we understand that's brothers and sisters. Fathers take the lead in this, verse 4, because they're the head of the home, they're the spiritual leader there. But but the sisters need to be part of this. The wife needs to be part of this as well. And then verses 5 to 9 deal with slavery. One scholar estimates that there are 60 million slaves in the Roman Empire, maybe as much as a third. Oh, good coffee. Of the Roman, uh a third of the Roman population was in slavery. Paul's not endorsing that. Everything here is about how we serve the Lord. We do our marriage different, we do our home different, we do our work different because we are connected to the Lord. The epistle then ends with this wonderful section on spiritual warfare. And Paul talks about the sword of the spirit, the breastplate of righteousness, all the armor that we wear. Please be aware, please underline in your Bible how much how many times Paul is talking about standing, verse 11, that you may be able to stand, verse 13, withstand, stand, and then verse 14 again, stand. There's much here if we do nothing but focus on how we need to take a stand. And the heavenly places in verse 12, that's not heaven where God is, but I think it's the realm of the spiritual, the realm of the spiritual. And I think the danger here, I think it's C.S. Lewis who says the danger with demons is that we either obsess about them or we ignore them. And I think the danger here about spiritual warfare is exactly the same. Some people get all caught up in this, and there's a best-selling line of books that came out from a denominational author, and next thing you know, we're seeing a demon under every rock. My car won't start. It's demons. I got demons in my car. There's nothing here to suggest that kind of thing. But on the other hand, I think sometimes, sometimes we're too sophisticated to imagine that there are demonic forces at work, that the devil is doing anything at all, that his minions are at work to foil the gospel and to blunt the efforts of the kingdom of light. We need to take this seriously and we need to be putting on the armor so that we can fight the good fight. And there is a beautiful combination here of the grace of God in our activity and our response to grace in these verses, because we pray verse 18 at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication. So we're asking God's blessing, but that doesn't mean that we sit on our hands, that we do nothing, that we wander onto the battlefield without having made any preparation. We put on the armor, we carry the fight, even as we ask God to bless what we are doing. Love the personal notes here at the end. Tishekus once again is carrying the mail. In verse 21, you also may indicate that there is other mail in Tishekus' hands. That would probably be Colossians and Philemon. Ephesians, what a tremendous book of the Bible. So glad that we have read that. Even as we turn back to the Gospels now. Oh, Colossians and Ephesians have helped us in our walk with the Lord. The reading for Tuesday, Ephesians chapter 6. It's

Wednesday Matthew 1

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Wednesday. It is Wednesday, and today we begin the Gospel of Matthew. Love this gospel. Incredible gospel, so well put together, just constructed seamlessly to make essential points about Jesus the Christ. And that's a good place for us to begin as we open the book of Matthew. The reading for Wednesday is Matthew chapter one. And the place for us to begin is to talk about what Matthew is doing here. We have four Gospels. Each of them is written for a specific purpose and a specific audience, and they each portray Jesus in their unique fashion to make those points. Now, that does not mean they contradict each other or that they're made up, that they're just myth. No, they're absolutely factual, absolutely correct. It's just that you emphasize different things to make different points. That's very that's so important for us to get as we think about biography. The gospels aren't really biography, they're gospel, and that's a little bit different kind of take on a person's life. For example, in a biography, you would spend more time on a person's childhood. And how much do we know about Jesus' childhood? Uh-huh. See, it's not really a biography, it's a gospel, it's a proclamation about what God is doing with this person or through this person. And Matthew's gospel is saying some things about Jesus being the promised Messiah. The key idea of fulfillment is all through this gospel. The idea that the Messianic kingdom has dawned. And the more I'm working in Matthew, and I'm actually teaching Matthew right now in our Wednesday night adult Bible class at Westside, the more I'm working in Matthew, the more I'm impressed that Matthew has sewn the threads of Gentile inclusion in the kingdom all through his gospel. So we talk about this gospel being super Jewish, and it is very, very Jewish. He's always quoting the Jewish Bible, but which is of course the Old Testament. But there's lots here about the Gentiles. And again, don't get thrown when somebody says this is written to make some kind of specific point. I'm a huge fan of Teddy Roosevelt, and I have a number big library of Teddy Roosevelt books. And so here's a book about Teddy Roosevelt, the conservationist, and it does not say anything about Teddy Roosevelt and San Juan Hill and the Rough Riders and all that, because that's not what this author is stressing. And here's another book about Teddy Roosevelt negotiating the peace treaty between Russia and Japan. He won the Nobel Prize for that. And that book doesn't say anything about Teddy Roosevelt, the conservationist or San Juan Hill. And stressing something different, it's making different points about his life. And so don't be thrown that John has some different things to say about Jesus than what Matthew has to say. Think about it. There are so many events in Jesus' life. John even says the books would fill the world. If we said everything about Jesus, I couldn't even write it all down. So Matthew chooses by the pen of inspiration, the Holy Spirit's guiding him, to say some specific things that emphasize Jesus as the Messiah. And that begins with the genealogy, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. I love that verse, Matthew 1, verse 1, because I'm always talking about, always talking about Genesis chapter 12, the promises to Abraham, and 2 Samuel 7, the promises to David, as places where the Old Testament shifts, where the flow of history is made. These promises will be fulfilled, and the rest of the Bible just demonstrates and shows God bringing those things into fulfillment. So the New Testament begins with Jesus, the fulfillment of those promises. And this is unusual for us, this genealogy, because we think a genealogy is supposed to be 100% complete data, all the times, the years, everything. But very common to skip generations in ancient genealogies. And Matthew has clearly done that to get to the number 14. There are 14s here, three of them. And I'm not sure why. Nobody is sure why. 14 is two sevens, and seven, of course, is the perfect number. Maybe that's where Matthew is. One day I'd like to sit down and talk with Matthew about that. What were you doing with the 14s here? Maybe more important than the number is that there are some women in this that don't belong in this. At least I say that. Of course they belong. The Holy Spirit put them here, but at least we wouldn't think they would show up in a genealogy. Would you mention Tamar verse 3 or Rahab or Ruth or Bathsheba? Three of those women are Gentile women. Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, of course, is not, but there was scandal about her and everything that goes with all of this. So this genealogy begins by setting forth the credentials for Jesus to be the Messiah, but it does so by noticing some very unlikely heroes and saying that Gentiles matter. Then we get the birth of Jesus, and all of this is just saying Jesus is super unique and unlike anything else or any other birth ever, ever, ever. And sometimes people get into this virgin birth thing and they want to say that's just imaginary or that's just legendary. I'm always amazed at people who want to run out that kind of thing and still say that they are Christians or that they are believers. No, they are not. And they are undermining people's faith in the gospel. It is hard to imagine how Matthew can be saying to his readers, this matters and this is important. If it's all made up, it's not made up. It's true, it's the fulfillment of Isaiah chapter 7, verse 23. Matthew makes that explicitly clear. And all of this, 18 to 25, would be surrounded by controversy. This is not going to go well for Joseph. He is engaged, and betrothal engagement is very binding in this in the first century. And now he's betrothed to a woman who is with child, and they're not married. And so that's scandalous for him. He's a just man, verse 19, which means in good conscience, he can't marry a woman he thought to be unfaithful. And of course, this isn't going to be good for Mary at all. She'll be the center of all kinds of scandal because of this. There's a couple of places later in Jesus' life where there seems to be some reference to, yeah, we know, we know about your background, Jesus. Well, of course, they don't know about his background. But how could Mary convince anyone? She knows, Joseph knows. There might be an argument that Elizabeth knows, some others know, but in the main, no one will be certain of this except Mary. And we talked about this a lot in the Bible class when I was teaching Matthew chapter one, had really good discussion about it. One person in the Bible class said, the virgin birth is important because it's God becoming man, not man becoming God. And I like that a lot. And it is, this is a very special manifestation of God on earth, and you would expect a special entrance for God into this world. And that is exactly what Jesus' entrance is. It's unlike anything that's ever happened before, it will never happen again. And that's not the first time that Jesus does the unexpected. Our reading for Wednesday, Matthew chapter 1.

Thursday Matthew 2

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It's Thursday. It is Thursday, and today we're reading Matthew chapter 2. Matthew 2 is the reading for Thursday. This is all about the wise men, isn't it? And there has been all kinds of crazy ideas that have grown up, a lot of speculation, a lot of filling in the blanks. Who are these guys? What are their names? That, of course, is not supported in Scripture. Maybe the thing to note here is that astrology in the Bible is bad. The last time we met astrologers was in the book of Daniel, and they are Daniel's enemies. So you want to talk about unexpected people showing up at the birth of Jesus. It doesn't get much more unexpected than pagan astrologers. That's what they are. And I didn't think they would come to worship Jesus, and they do. And they do, which again emphasizes Matthew's interest in Gentiles. People who are not of the covenant recognize the Messiah. And I think the emphasis in the first 12 verses here is that the people who know the Bible aren't interested in pursuing Jesus. Look there at verse 5. They understand the prophecy. How come those guys, scribes here, not the copiers of the Bible, these are the men who study the Bible, teach the Bible? How come they don't go to Bethlehem and look for Jesus? We will see in Matthew's gospel that consistently the religious authorities, the people who know the most about the Bible and who claim to be the most religious, they miss Jesus entirely, utterly, utterly with, and in fact finally end up opposing him so much so that they see to it that he is murdered. So there's this great contrast in those who have scriptural knowledge but are not eager to worship Jesus, and those who really don't know a lot, and yet they are interested in Jesus. And that flight to Egypt in verse 13, I think that's setting up maybe a little Moses parallel between Jesus and Moses. We think of Moses as being the deliverer of Israel, the one who brought them out of Egypt. And of course, he certainly was, but he's also a great prophet. And Jesus, of course, is prophet, priest, and king. And Matthew seems to be paralleling that a little bit there. And especially then in verse 15, we get this idea of out of Egypt I've called my son. And I talked about this in my Bible class a little bit. I'll say this on the podcast. This is the kind of bonus content that you get. There is a real sense in Matthew in which Matthew wants to say, Jesus is the true servant of God, the true Israel of God. Israel was supposed to be God's servant. They were supposed to serve his purposes, especially to bring light to the world, and they just utterly failed. And there certainly are passages that talk about Israel being God's son, Exodus chapter 4. Israel was in Egypt. They were in the Red Sea. They were in the wilderness and they were hungry there. And what Matthew will say is that Jesus is God's son. And so he was in Egypt. He was baptized. And then Jesus is in the wilderness. And Jesus, when he is tempted, we'll see this in Matthew 4. He's quoting right out of Deuteronomy. He's using the text where Moses is preaching to the Israelite people. And so Matthew is clearly working the idea that Jesus is the Messiah, that he is the fulfillment of Genesis 12, he's the Davidic Messiah, he's the fulfillment of 2 Samuel 7, but he is also the true servant. Israel was supposed to be God's servant. Jesus now takes that role, Isaiah 42, 1. And while Israel failed as the servant of God, Jesus will not. Keep your eye on that theme as we work along in Matthew's gospel here. There is the quotation then in verses 17 and 18. By the way, Matthew is the only one that quotes Jeremiah. And that quotation is a little odd. A voice was heard in Ramah, verse 18, weeping in loud lamentation. What are we doing there? What is this quotation all about? Well, it refers to the deportation of the Jews in 586, and that as the Babylonians marched them off in chains, they would march by the graveside of Rachel. She was buried in Ramah, and she would weep for them as they went away. However, this is set in Jeremiah 31, verse 15, and that text is actually a text that is full of hope, because it is saying that even though they're weeping today, God has a plan to bring the exiles back, so God will comfort them. So Matthew uses that to say, despite the tears of the mothers in Bethlehem, there is hope because the Messiah has escaped. And so then we conclude the chapter, we conclude our reading today with the death of Herod, verse 19. When he died, he made some changes in his will. Antipas was given Galilea and Perea. Herod Philip, that's not the Philip who loses his wife. Herod Philip got Icharia Trachonidas, and Archelaus got Judea, Samaria, and Edumeah. Archelaus ruled very poorly. He doesn't make much of an appearance in scripture, banished by AD6. And the chapter closes then, verse 23, with the discussion of living in Nazareth, which would which would cause Jesus to be ridiculed. Nazareth was a despised place. Calling Christians Nazarene was sort of a slur, kind of like kind of like calling somebody a redneck. This is a backwoods, backwater kind of place. And Isaiah 53 says Jesus would be ridiculed. And part of that is he will be a Nazarene. Can any good thing come from Nazareth? The reading for Thursday, Matthew chapter 2.

Friday Matthew 3

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It's Friday. It is Friday. Great week, of course, with all the things going on with vacation Bible school. Lots of good things to look forward to in the summer. And it is a Friday. We are reading Matthew the third chapter. And this is a short chapter, and it puts on stage one of the most important characters in the New Testament. And that's John the Baptist. Sometimes he's a little overlooked. The New Testament makes an effort to make certain that we know John the Baptist is not the Messiah. And I wonder sometimes if that kind of turning the volume down on John the Baptist results in us missing him. But remember, every gospel says something about John the Baptist. There's not a lot that you can say, oh, this is in all four Gospels. The birth stories of Jesus, not in Mark and John. Talk about Herod, Jesus at the temple at age 12. Lots of things appear in one gospel, maybe even in two gospels. John the Baptist appears in all four Gospels. He is super important. He is the forerunner, verse 3, prophetic announcement of John the Baptist and his work. And his message is we need to repent. We need to turn back to God, a radical change, a turnaround, because the kingdom of God is near. Kingdom is coming. Prepare the way of the Lord, make his way straight. Roads back then, I'll share this with you from a scholar. In ancient Palestine, roads were simply tracks on the hard-baked earth, apart from an occasional highway built for the purpose of some king. Josephus, for example, tells us that Solomon built causeways of black basalt stone to Jerusalem in order to facilitate access for pilgrims to come see Jerusalem. These roads were built by the king's command and they were kept in order as the king required for journeys that he wanted to make. So the local inhabitants would be ordered to prepare the king's highway for him. That is how John sees his mission. Good for us to think about roads as they were in Bible times, not like the superhighways that we're able to drive on today. And John is wearing prophetic clothes, verse 4. He looks like Elijah, 2 Kings 1. This is a very conscious choice on his part. He is identifying with the prophets of the Old Testament, and he is preaching a prophetic message. How many of the Old Testament prophets, you could basically sum up what they say in one word, you need to repent. Repent, repent, repent. And one writer has noted that during the intertestamental period, there had been some thinking developing among Jews that the patriarchs were so faithful and so righteous that they had enough merit for all Jews to be saved. If you're just connected with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you're in, you're good. Look at verse 9. John says the nation is under judgment. This being a Jew is not going to help you. Your genealogy is not the key. Then Jesus comes and is baptized. Verses 13 to 17. Only Matthew here has John, verse 14, saying, Hey, I can't be doing this. Oh, no, no way at all. I think John recognizes Jesus as the Messiah and knows that Jesus doesn't need to repent. So why does Jesus, why does Jesus make John do this? Why does Jesus demand baptism? Why does Jesus say it's necessary to fulfill all righteousness? I think what that is pointing to is that Jesus has to obey, fulfill every command. If God wants everybody to be baptized, Jesus doesn't want to say, well, you know, I'm exempt from that. I'm the Messiah. I don't do that. No, Jesus' whole mission here is to be perfectly obedient to God to the nth degree. So of course he will be baptized. He must do God's will, all righteousness. I think Jesus is just humbly identifying with the work of God. God is moving, God is doing something, Jesus naturally says, I'm part of that. Of course, he's the reason for that. And he wants to be obedient. He is always obedient. I talked about that last Sunday. Jesus is the last word in obedience. If God says people need to be baptized, Jesus will be baptized. And then we get this amazing and wonderful manifestation of the Trinity. God the Father speaks, and the dove descends. And we get this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased, which is a combination of Isaiah 42.1 and Psalm 2.7, which makes Jesus the King, Psalm 2, but it also makes Jesus the servant, Isaiah 42. Jesus is the servant king. What a wonderful reading today. And it's great to be in a gospel again. I hope you're enjoying Matthew as much as I am. The reading for Friday, Matthew chapter 3. That's the podcast for the week. Thank you for listening. Hope the podcast is helping you stay in your daily Bible reading, understand it better, walk with the Lord, and apply and put into play in your life the things that we talk about on Sunday. Tell somebody about the podcast. It will encourage them to read the Word of God and to walk with the Lord. It is my privilege. It is my joy to open God's Word with you and talk about these things over a good cup of coffee. I'm Mark Roberts, and I want to go to heaven, and I want you to come too. I'll see you on Monday with a cup of coffee.

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Thanks for listening to the Westside Church of Christ podcast, Monday Morning Coffee with Mark. For more information about Westside, you can connect with us through our website, justChristians.com, and our Facebook page. Our music is from Upbeat. Whereators can get free music. Please share our podcast with others, and we look forward to seeing you again with a cup of coffee, of course, on next Monday.