Mm

...

the coming and the future coming of the kingdom, uh, what are we talking about? We're talking about the lordship of God entering the human race and entering individual human beings' lives so that, so that the, the agendas of God become the, the purposes of your life.

And, uh, and that's what lordship is all about.

So kingdom, big theme.

You know, uh, and, and so necessary to understand.

Uh, you know, a- and, and one of the things that has gone wrong in Protestantism over and over again is the misunderstanding of the kingdom.

Would you mind closing us in prayer, Ben?

In fact, it was not uncommon for rabbis of Jesus' time to commit the entire Torah to memory.

I've sometimes heard people say, "Look, I've been in a situation where I whisper something to someone, they whisper it to someone else, and it goes through 10 or 11 people, and by the time the last person tells what was said, it's totally different from what I told the first person.

And we can't trust the Gospels for the same reason, because it was transmitted over a long period of time." That illustration is really a bad analogy, and you have to understand that the first century apostles who passed on information about Jesus were deeply concerned to get this information correct because they saw it as sacred, holy tradition.

It wasn't about what Joe was eating for dinner last Wednesday night.

Very few people are willing to die for something they don't really believe in or something even worse that they know to be a lie.

When Jesus was executed, his disciples were rightly afraid.

They scattered.

They were fearful for their own life.

I am

a cradle Methodist, like many of those who will be watching this are cradle Catholics.

My mother says my first two words were John Wesley.

I don't really believe that.

But I have never not been a Methodist.

And I've always been part of what I would call high church Methodism.

So we have plenty of liturgy, not quite as much as the Catholics, but we recite the Nicene Creed, we recite the Apostles' Creed, and we have prayers, both rote prayers like the Lord's Supper, like the Lord's Prayer.

How about now? What's your prayer like these days? Well,