We are going to be jumping right back into second Corinthians. We've been marching through second corinthians for a little while now, and so we're going to be in two corinthians chapter four this morning, so you can go ahead and open up there if you got your bibles. And as you're doing that, if you had someone ask you, what are you known for? How would you respond? It's like, hey, what are you personally known for? What would be your answer to that? Maybe it's your work where they know you based on the job that you do, the employment that you have, the career that you're in. Maybe they know you by that. Maybe they know you by your family and be like, oh, you're that person's parents. Or maybe on the other side, like, oh, you're that person's parents. Yikes. And they know you based on the kids that you have. They know you based on your friends, maybe where you live, the kind of house, the kind of car. Like, what would people say about you? What would you be known for? When I was in 7th grade, I was known as the duct tape wallet guy. That's really what you want to be known by when you're in 7th grade. I would make duct tape wallets at home. I would take them to school and I would sell them for $5 each. And yeah, I had about as much swag as you can imagine when I was a teenager. Right? That is what I was known for. I was known as the duct tape wallet guy for a little while. Well, when you start thinking about what are christians known for, what do you think of in your mind? Like, what is a Christian known for? What marks the life of a Christian? And as you look at what you're known for and what you're known by, and you look at what a Christian is known by, do they line up? Are the things that you're known for the same things that a Christian should be known by, or the things that a Christian are known by? Is that like seen in your life? Because really what we're going to see as we jump into chapter four this morning is what are the markers of a real Christian? Like, what's the mark of a real Christian? What marks the life and work of a follower of Jesus? And Paul's going to do that, kind of using his story. Okay, like up to this point, we know that Paul has been given a defense for the ministry that he has been having. He said, no, my apostleship is real. I am a real apostle of Jesus Christ. My message is real. The gospel I preach is real. It's the real thing. And we've seen him give this defense of the realness of the gospel and the realness of his ministry as an apostle of Jesus. That's really where he has been going recently in this letter to the Corinthians. And as we get to chapter four, it kind of turns just a little bit. And instead of just giving a defense of his ministry, he talks about the kind of ministry that he had, and he shows us what are the markers of a real Christian, what are the markers that a Christian should have. And so that's where we're going to be this morning. We've only got six verses, and so we'll be able to dive in a little bit more deeply into those six verses. And so we're just going to read it off the top, and then we'll dive back into it bit by bit. Sound good? All right. Second Corinthians, chapter four. Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart, but we have renounced disgraceful and underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel, of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants, for Jesus sake, for God. Who said, let light shine out of the darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. And that's such a rich text. I was telling a couple people this week. I was like, there's like three different messages you could preach out of here. So this is just the one that you guys are going to get. Okay, you can probably find another one somewhere else, but this is what you got this morning. And we're just going to go through this passage bit by bit, and we're going to see what marks the life of a Christian. What are some markers of the life of a Christian? We're going to start just in verse one. It says, therefore, having this ministry, by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. The first thing we see, the first marker of a Christian is that they have a ministry. They have a ministry. And I want to clarify, what do we mean by ministry? Because I think that word gets thrown around a lot. And if you're in church world, you see ministry as something churches do and have. Right? It's like here, even at Veritas, we have a kids ministry. We have a youth ministry, we have a college ministry, we have an adult ministry. We have, like, all these different kinds of ministries. And it's easy to think ministry is something the church does. It's a program that the church has. And while part of that is true, it's like we are church and we have different ministries for different people. It's like that part is true. That's not the kind of ministry that Paul is talking about here. The kind of ministry Paul is talking about is a ministry for all people, and it's this work of proclaiming the gospel. The ministry Paul is talking about is the spiritual work of proclaiming the good news of Jesus to those around us. That's what Paul means when he talks about ministry. He says, therefore, we have this ministry, this spiritual work of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, declaring the good news of what God has done in Christ. It's not something that just the church does. It's something we do as people. People have been saved, and we see this really laid out in Ephesians chapter four. You can see it in verses eleven and twelve. Paul writes in Ephesians four, he says, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up of the body of Christ. So the work of ministry is something for the saints. You guys see that in there, that the pastors, the elders, the shepherds, the teachers, they teach and equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. So that means as followers of Jesus, if you claim the name of Jesus and you're a follower of Christ, you've been given a job to do, you've been given a work, you've been given a ministry, you've been given the spiritual task of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to those around you, as church staff, as pastors, as elders. Like, we want to help you guys. Like, we want to help you learn. What does it look like to proclaim the gospel in my life and with my words? We want to equip you. We want to give you tools. We want to train you. We want to help educate you on how you can do this job, this work, this ministry, of sharing the gospel to others better. But as individual followers of Jesus, you have a job to do. You have a work, you have a ministry. And that's what Paul is saying. That is the marker of a Christian. The mark of a Christian is someone who has this work of the ministry that has been given to them by God. The mark of a Christian is someone who has the work of the ministry by the mercy of God. Did you guys notice that? That is how we are given this ministry, by God's mercy. The mercy that saved you is the same mercy that now gives you this ministry, that when you've received this mercy of God to become a child of God, you now get to walk in this life that God has given you. You now have a ministry by the mercy of God. I think, like, just to even break this down a little bit further, I hear a lot of times when it comes to ministry, like when it comes to proclaiming the gospel, I hear a lot of stuff that's just about the individual, where it's like, oh, I don't know if I'm smart enough to share the gospel. I don't know if I have the right words. I haven't been trained to do it. I don't have the answers to the questions that I think they're going to ask. I'm just not really bold. I don't like conflict. And we start having all these excuses or reasonings why we don't do the work that has been entrusted to us. But the thing about the mercy of God is that you're working in the ministry of God, your work of proclaiming the gospel, it's not about you at all. It's not about how smart you are, it's not about how intelligent you are, not about how much you know, not about how good you can talk. It's not about any of those things. It's about the mercy of being received that has been received. It's about God's work. Our ministry, our work of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ is founded on the mercy of God, and it is continued and empowered by the mercy of God. It's not about you. And when we realize that the mercy of God is what gives us this ministry, gives us this work, it kills our pride. It makes us realize, oh, it's not about me at all. It's not about what I bring to the table, it's not about my giftings, it's not about how good I am. So it kills our pride, but also kills our excuses that when we realize this ministry, this work is about God and his mercy on us. We realize it doesn't matter how good I am, doesn't matter how much I know, it doesn't matter all these things, because it's all about the mercy of God. It's all about his working in me. This ministry, this work of proclaiming the gospel is founded on the mercy of God, and it's empowered by the mercy of God to the people who have been, who have received this mercy. So that's the ministry that Paul is talking about. That's the work that Paul is saying, if you are in Christ, if you have received this mercy from goddess, you are in this mercy now going to go out and share this gospel. He's saying, you've been given a job to do. You've been given a task to do if you are in Christ. And as Paul does this, he's now going to turn and he's going to kind of tell us, what does this job look like? Like, what does this ministry look like? How do we work this sort of ministry in our own life? And he kind of, he starts this at the end of verse one, and he says, because or therefore having this ministry by the mercy of Goddesse, we do not lose heart. And at first glance, we can read, we do not lose heart. And we can kind of read it as, oh, we don't give up. We don't lose hope, and we kind of, like, carry on in this ministry by the mercy of God. And while that's true, I don't think that's exactly what Paul is trying to say here, because with the original phrasing that gets translated, we do not lose heart. And the original phrasing, there's a lot more negative undertones than this portrays. Like, it has a lot more negative undertones in the sense of, like, it could be translated in other ways of, we do not give into evil or we do not fail morally. There's a negative connotation to it. And so really, what Paul, I think, is getting at what makes sense through the rest of this context and what he has been saying is that because or therefore we have this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not give in to evil ways, or we do not do ministry in evil ways. And he's going to talk about now, like, what are the evil ways that people have been doing ministry and how ought we to do ministry as christians? Okay? And so that's where he's going to go into, as we get into verse two is we're going to see these evil ways of ministry that Paul is talking about. He says, but we have renounced disgraceful and underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. Here we see this description of the evil ways that Paul has seen people do ministry. He's seen them using disgraceful and underhanded ways. Like this is in reference back to chapter two when we saw, like the peddlers of God's word. You remember that in chapter two where Paul is saying, hey, you guys are being convinced by these people who are just peddling God's word. They're just twisting it. They're trying to get you to just buy into what they're saying. He's saying, we refuse to do that. We've renounced that kind of ministry. The style of ministry that's underhanded and disgraceful and shameful. That's not the kind of ministry that we have, is what Paul is saying here. And he goes on to say, it's like, we do not practice cunning. We refuse to use cunning or to tamper with God's word. And he gives two really specific things, like, this is how we're not going to do ministry. This is how we've refused to do the ministry that God has given us. We refuse to do it by practicing cunning, and we refuse to do it by tampering with God's word. He said, we're not going to twist God's word. We're not going to try people, like try to coerce people. We're not going to deceive people. We're not going to be so cute and clever with our words to just try and get you to believe what we believe. He's saying, that's not how we're going to do this. That's not how we're going to do this sort of ministry that God has given us. And I think the reason why he is saying that is because he's kind of drawing back, I think maybe even to the garden of Eden, because do you know who uses deception, who uses cunning? Who uses the tampering of God's word? We see Satan do that, right? Like when you go back to Genesis chapter three, when you go back to Genesis chapter three and these first few verses of Genesis chapter three, you see the way that Satan works. And this is what we see. It says now, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made and he said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall never, you shall not eat of any tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden. Neither shall you touch it, lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Do you see the deceit that Satan uses, that he's trying to trick them? He's trying to be cute and clever with his words. He's tampering with God's actual word. He's twisting it, making it sound different than it is. Paul's saying, we refuse to do that because that's what Satan does. We refuse to do ministry in that sort of way because that's the kind of work that Satan does. He's the one who twists God's word. And we're not going to work like that. We're not going to tamper with it. We're not going to use deceit because we don't want to be the kind of messengers that Satan is. Is. So Paul's saying we refuse to proclaim in this way. We refuse to do that. Essentially what Paul is saying here is that instead of doing ministry like this, instead of using underhanded and deceitful ways, instead of tampering with God's word, we have integrity with our ministry. We have integrity with the words that we say, but we also have integrity with the life that we live. He says in verse two, it's like by the open statement of the truth, we commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. He's saying we use integrity. We just proclaim God's word. We let God's word speak. We let truth be truth. We don't add to it, we don't take away from it. We don't try to twist it, we don't distort it, but we let the truth be open, and not only open with our words and how we proclaim it, but also open with our lives. Paul saying, not only do we just proclaim the true gospel, we live a life that proclaims the true gospel, we live a life of integrity, showing you that we believe what we're saying, that we're bought in that. What we're preaching to you has really changed us. He's saying, we're going to proclaim this with integrity. We're going to proclaim it with words of integrity and with a life of integrity in church. That's the kind of church we want to be, the kind of church that proclaims the gospel with integrity. We're not going to be a church that uses underhanded ways. We're not going to be deceitful and cunning in how we proclaim the gospel. We're not going to water it down or dilute it to make it match what culture says we should believe. That's not the kind of church we are. That's not the kind of church we're going to be. We're going to be the kind of church that does ministry by opening up the truth and saying, this is what God's word says. This is the truth. We're not going to twist it, we're not going to water it down, we're not going to add to it, we're not going to tamper with it. Because when you start tampering with God's word and you start trying to add to God's word or you start trying to twist it to make it sound different, when you start thinking that, oh, I have to change the way that this sounds to make it better sounding for a non believer, to make it better news for them, then you're saying the gospel isn't enough. You're saying that the gospel isn't enough to save. You're saying that the gospel isn't good news on its own, but you need to do something to it. But church, the gospel is the best news already. There's no better news than the gospel. There's no need to tamper with it. There's no need to twist it. There's no need to be cunning with it. It's the best news that God sent Jesus to reconcile us to himself. What do you need to change? What do you need to twist? Paul's saying that's not how we're going to do ministry. We're going to just openly declare the truth of God. We're going to openly declare that with our words and we're going to openly declare it with our life so we can have a clear conscience before all and before God. He's saying, if you cut us open, this is what you're going to see, a life that has been changed by the gospel, proclaiming the gospel with integrity, saying, cut us open, we bleed gospel. Have you ever seen those, is it cake videos? You guys know what I'm talking about, where it's like, it's a cake that's shaped like a tire, and it looks like a tire, then they cut into it. You're like, oh, that's actually cake. You guys know what I'm talking? Yeah. All right, cool. In those videos, there's a lot of deceit going on because there's been a few of them where you look at it and you're like, oh, that's a watermelon. And then they start cutting into it. You're like, that's not a watermelon. That's a cake. And then you just want cake. But you see, the deception on the outside is different than what's on the inside. There's not integrity there. They're trying to convince you. They're distorting what is on the inside to get you to think that it's something else. And Paul is saying, that's not how you do ministry. That's not how christians do ministry. That's not how christians proclaim the gospel. That's not how we as a church. That's not how we're going to proclaim the gospel. That's not how we're going to do ministry, but we're going to do it with integrity, opening up the word of truth and letting the word of truth do the work, letting the gospel of Jesus be the best news without us tampering it or messing with it. Paul saying, this is the kind of ministry that we had, one full of integrity both in word and life. But there's another way that Paul says that they did this ministry. Jump down to verse five. It says, for what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake. Paul is saying, we do this ministry. We do this work as a servant to those around us, as a servant of those we're proclaiming to. At this point, Paul has already established that he's a prisoner for Christ, right? You remember back in chapter two where he's saying we're being led in triumphal procession by Christ, right. And what he was saying is there is that we are being led by a prisoner of Christ, and so we're servants of God, prisoners of Christ. But now he's also saying, the way that plays out in our life is as a servant of others, that the ministry that we have of proclaiming the truth of the gospel, done out of service to those around us for the sake of Jesus Christ, is that how you live your life, as a servant of God who serves others? Is that a defining factor of the ministry and gospel proclamation that you have that you see yourself as a servant first and foremost to Christ, but then out of that servanthood, you then go and serve others in your community. You then go and serve your coworkers or employees. You then go and serve your neighbor. You then go and serve your family. Like, do you see yourself as a servant of others? And I think that even sometimes when we do see ourselves as a servant of others, we stop short with it where it's like, sure, let me bring a meal, let me mow a lawn, let me shovel a driveway. Yet we stop short of where real service keeps going, because real service, as Paul shares it here, is proclaiming the gospel. It's proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord. And so if your view of service stops at doing kind things for others but doesn't get to gospel proclamation, you're stopping short. You're stepping short and seeing yourself as a servant to them, because a real servant, they know what the person really needs and they give it to them. So, yeah, they might need their lawnmower, they might need their driveway shoveled, but what they really need is they need to hear the good news of the gospel. What they really need to hear is that Jesus died for them. What they really need to hear is that they were separated from God, but God, being rich in mercy, sent Jesus to reconcile them to him. When we see ourselves as a servant of others, we do acts of service to them, but we also proclaim the gospel. Is something like that missing from your life? Have you just gotten so caught up in thinking that serving is just about doing kind things for people that you have neglected to share the gospel? Because real service, real ministry, it's done with integrity of word, integrity of life, but it's also done in service for others. Seeing yourself as a servant to them for the sake and for the glory of Jesus Christ, that's what we see is the marker of a Christian. That's the kind of life and work that Paul is pointing to and saying, this is what it looks like. You wanna know what the life and work of a Christian looks like? Someone who boldly proclaims the gospel with integrity as a servant to others. That's the mark of a christian church. Does that mark your life? Are you quick to proclaim the gospel? Are you quick to share the good news of Jesus and with your word, with your living? Do you do it with integrity? Do you do it as a servant to others? I mean, maybe for some of us this morning, we just need to, like, confess that we don't proclaim it all that we're completely missing that mark of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Do you have that mark? Someone who has the ministry of God or the ministry of the gospel given to them by the mercy of Goddesse? Does that mark your life? And as we finish this passage, we see that we can't just have this mark in our life physically, but it has to come from who we are. It has to come from who we are as a person. It has to come from what has happened to us. And that's really where Paul is going to get as we finish. This is not just the physical mark of a Christian, but the mark of a heart of a Christian, the mark of the heart of a Christian. Let's read verses three through six. It says, and even if our gospel is veiled, if it is veiled to those who are perishing, in their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel, of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. We're going to pause there, because what Paul is saying is like, hey, there's two kinds of people in this world, people who can see the light of the gospel and those who can't. And in this, one of the things that people were saying against Paul is that, hey, if you're legit, if your ministry is real, if you have the real good news, why aren't people believing it? Why aren't they following? Why aren't they listening? Why aren't they turning their life to this good news? And Paul is saying, this is like, the reason they're not is because their hearts have been blinded, their minds have been blinded to the gospel. They have a veil over their mind. And the reality is, if you have a veil over your mind, if you cannot see the light, the gospel, if it's veiled to you, verse three is really clear that you're perishing. You're perishing. You're destined for eternal separation from God, completely under his wrath. Paul's saying, it's not my ministry that is to blame. It's the work of Satan that is at work. And the way we see Satan work here is, I think, oftentimes we think that when Satan is at work, that he's just trying to get us to live these really immoral lives. He's trying to get us to get addicted to porn or drugs, break up our marriages, trying to get us to do all these things, to just ruin our lives morally. Well, it's like I think he'll take that. I think scripture is a little more clear on what he's really trying to do, that his main priority is blinding the minds of unbelievers to the light of the gospel, that he's blinding the minds of unbelievers to the light of the gospel. Does he do that through those big moral failures? Sure. But I think he's a little more subtle in how he does it sometimes where it might not be these big, overarching sins, but maybe it's more. So it's like maybe he's just using work to distract you from seeing the beauty of the gospel. Maybe he's using relationships to blind your eyes to the glory and the light of the gospel in Jesus Christ. He's using your family, he's using entertainment, he's using your cell phone to just blind you to the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Paul just gotten done saying. He's like, this is the ministry that we have, but there's opposition to our ministry. And it's the ministry that the. What's opposed to this ministry is the work of Satan, keeping people blind from seeing the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It doesn't change the fact that the gospel is real. It doesn't change the fact that the glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus. But Satan's just blinding the eyes of people to it, keeping them from seeing the beauty and splendor and majesty of Christ. I think the sobering reality is that maybe even for many of you in here this morning, that's you. Maybe it's your loved one, your coworker, your friend, where they've heard the gospel over and over and over again. Maybe they've heard it a hundred times over. They've heard the good news, but Satan has just had their mind blinded and veiled to it, that they hear it, but they don't see it. They don't see the light of the beauty of the gospel. If that's you this morning, my prayer is that God would wake you up from that, that he would graciously open up your eyes to see the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus, that you'd see Jesus as the only way to be made right with God, that you wouldn't just hear it, but that you'd see it. And so how do we see it? How do we see the light of the gospel of Jesus? How do we see? How can our eyes be open to it? How can the veil be removed? Look at verse five and six, it says, for what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servant for Jesus sake, for God or because of God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, saying, you want to know where real spiritual sight comes from? It doesn't come from you, doesn't come from even what you know, doesn't come from what you've even just heard. But it has to start with an act of God. I love the phrasing that Paul uses here in verse six because it brings you back to creation. It says, we proclaim this. We have this ministry of proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord because of what God did. And what does he refer to what God did as creation? Speaking light when you go back to Genesis one, you see what Paul is referring to here in Genesis one, two, it says, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. See, Paul is making a connection back to Genesis here. He's saying, you want to know how you can really see Jesus, how your heart can truly see the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ? It's because of God. It's his work. And not just his work. It is his word of speaking light into the darkness of your soul that just in the beginning, as God said, let there be light out of the darkness of nothingness. And he's created everything. He looks at sinners separate from him, whose heart and mind are darkened to the light of the gospel. And he goes into the darkness of their soul, and he says, let there be light. And from that, new creation is born, new life is born, real life is born, life that sees Jesus for who he is, life that sees Jesus as the glory of God, life that sees the truth of the gospel. It's created from the very same God that said, let there be light in the darkness of nothing said, let there be light in your soul. If you're a Christian, that is the best news you could ever hear, that God saw fit to speak light into the darkness of your heart so that you could truly see the glorious face of God through Jesus Christ. It's all a work in an act of God. That's the heart of. That is the marking of a heart of a Christian, a heart that has seen the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus, a heart that has beheld. Jesus said, you're the most beautiful thing on earth. You're the most glorious thing I could ever behold. You're the best thing I could ever live for. That's real salvation. Real salvation isn't just knowing what the gospel says. Real salvation isn't going to church. Real salvation isn't doing all these things that you can control. Real salvation is when God opens up your heart to see the light of the gospel in the face of Jesus Christ. That's salvation. That is life. That is the heart of a Christian. Is that your heart this morning? Like, can you confidently say that you have seen the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ? That you're not looking for that glory. You're not looking for that light anywhere else because you've seen it. You're not trying to find it in yourself. You're not trying to find it in a work. You're not trying to find it in a relationship. Because you have found the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ, because God has graciously given you the eyes to see it. That is the heart of a Christian. That's what marks the heart of a Christian. Does that mark yours? Because out of that heart, out of the heart that has seen the light of the gospel, then start sharing the light of the gospel. Like, that is the kind of heart that has received the mercy of God that Paul talks about in verse one saying, if you have received mercy, you've been given this ministry. We have this ministry by the mercy of God. And the mercy of God is that we can see the glory of God in the face of Christ. If that has happened in our hearts, then we have been given a ministry to proclaim the gospel to others with our life and with our words. That's where these two things meet. That when you've seen the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus, you proclaim the light of the glory of God in Jesus. That's how I want you to remember that when you see the light of the gospel, you boldly proclaim the light of the gospel. When you have seen the light of the gospel, you boldly proclaim the light of the gospel. That's the mark of a Christian. That's the mark of the life and the work of a follower of Jesus, that they have had a heart that has been open to the light of the gospel, that can really see it, and then they go out and they proclaim it. Have you guys ever seen those videos of people putting on color blindness correction glasses for the first time. If you want to weep at some point this afternoon, just go google that. It's beautiful. Like, you see these 60 year old men, like, those are my favorite ones, where these 60 year old men who have never seen color the way that it should be, and most of the time, they're grumpy, which makes a lot of sense, too. You got these 60 old, grumpy old men, never truly seen the world the way God made it. Then they get gifted these glasses, and they put them on, and they just start weeping. Like they're just so amazed by the world around them. They're so amazed by the color of the grass, the sky. They're amazed by what they can see in the world around them. They can finally see the world for what it is. Because that's what happens in the heart of someone who has seen Jesus correctly, that their eyes have been opened to see the light of the gospel, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And it completely changes everything. They see Jesus for who he really is, and out of that, they go proclaim Jesus as the light of the gospel to those that they meet. Guys and I want to be a church full of people like that. I want to be a church full of people like that. Full of people that are so overwhelmed that they have seen the light of the gospel, that God has spoken light into their darkened soul, that they can't help but share the hope of the gospel with others, that the light that would shine in our heart to reveal the glorious light of Jesus Christ would shine through our life to the world around us. We'd see neighbors of our people, coworkers of our people, bosses of our people, family of our people, having the veil removed from their eyes. Because through the ministry that God has given us by his mercy, he has now opened their heart to the light of the gospel. I want to be a church full of people who do that. Amen. So, as we do that, a couple things I want you to do this morning. First, if you're listening this morning and you're hearing this and you're thinking, I think I might be blind, I just want you to beg God to speak light into your dark heart this morning. Just beg God to say, I want to see Jesus for who he really is. I want to really see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ. If you haven't seen that, just ask that you would beg God humbly to truly see the light of the gospel in Jesus. If you have seen that I want you to proclaim this week. Maybe even just write down someone's name right now. The person you're thinking of, who. They have a heart that is darkened to the light of the gospel and blinded to it. Just write their name down real quick and look for ways that you can proclaim with your life and with your words. The glorious light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And the lesson we're going to do it right now is we're going to spend time praying. So if you don't think you have seen the beauty of Jesus as the light of the gospel, I just want you to pray that God would open your heart to see that. That he'd lift up the veil, that he would give you spiritual sight this morning. For the rest of you, I want you to take that name that you wrote down. And I want you to pray that for them that God would speak light into their darkened heart so that they can truly see Jesus, the greatest thing they could ever behold. And that he would change their life forever. So we're going to give you just a couple seconds to do that now. 30 seconds to a minute to just pray that. Pray that God would speak light into darkened hearts, whether it's yours or the people that you love. And hope that he would. So take some time and do that now. God, thank you for Jesus. God, thank you that you sent him to be the image of your glory. So that we could know you. So that we could behold you. God, thank you for speaking light into my darkened heart. God, may I never get tired of that. May I never grow accustomed that you did a miraculous work of speaking light into my darkened soul. God, may we be people who live out of the light of the gospel. Be people who live as though you have shown us the glory of. Shown us your glory through the light of Jesus. God, that we would proclaim that good news to all people as their servants, done with integrity. So that you would speak light into their hearts as well. God, as we do that, may we proclaim your glory. Proclaim your grace. Proclaim the mercy that you have shown us. It's by that mercy that we are ministers of you. So, God, now may we respond and worship to you because you're worthy of it and you're deserving of it. It's in Jesus name. Amen.