Well, thank you so much for coming. I really, I love doing these. We probably, at the NCFIC, we probably do five, ten, or fifteen of these every year in different places around the country, and they're small like this, and it really is a blessing. We can have time to talk. We're going to allocate time to sing.

We're going to allocate time to pray together as a group and there'll be of course a lot of preaching as well and I pray that God really uses it in all of our lives to send us back home to continue the work that God has given to us. And these gatherings Always have one theme and that is that scripture is sufficient for everything and we want to we want to just continue To declare that you know They're just massive riptides running throughout the church today and through our culture and you know the greatest danger to a pastor in the local church is that if he would drift from the truth drift along with this culture and really our only weapon against these tides is handling the word of truth rightly and rightly ordering our congregations and rightly ordering the families in our congregations. That's really what we want to just continue to do in engaging the battle that we are involved in. We're also attacked ourselves as well. Every pastor knows that.

But I just pray that this is a time where we can really draw our hearts together, get to know each other and who knows how God might use one another as the years might pass. I'd like you to open up your Bibles to John chapter 17 which when you find verse 17 in John 17, you find what really is the heart of this gathering here. And I just want to speak of it briefly, so to set the stage for what we pray will be communicated as we spend our time together. John 17, 17 reads, and this is this marvelous prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ praying to his father, sanctify them by your truth, your word is truth. And there are three things I want us to get our eyes focused on here.

First, sanctify them. Second, by your truth. And then third, your word is truth. And these first two words Sanctify them that the Lord Jesus Christ prays to his father that he would perform this function toward his people is to make them holy. Hagiaoson is the word that Jesus uses.

And it tells us almost everything about our lives as ministers and that is that God has called us to a consecrated life a set-apart life not for common use and This happens over a long time horizon of sanctification. Of course we should clearly distinguish sanctification from justification. Justification happens in a moment. Sanctification is a lifetime of the work of God in our lives and the idea that Jesus is praying about is really drawn from the Old Testament where you find God setting aside objects for his use, priests for his use, animals for his use, various things like that, but it's a call to be fully consecrated to the work of the ministry and to be separated from the world. This is what it means to be sanctified.

And it consists as Albert Barnes says of becoming more like God and less attached to the world in his getting the ascendancy over evil thoughts and passions and impure desires. And in his becoming more and more weaned from earthly objects and attached to those things which are unseen and eternal. And so how does it happen? Well it's very clearly stated here the instrument of our sanctification is God using his truth. Sanctify them in the truth.

And the language there that Jesus is using means that there is this sphere of the truth it's a sphere it's like this bubble within which sanctification takes place and it's the sphere of the truth and it's really the only place that sanctification can really take place and and this is why you know the Apostle Paul warned the Colossian church when he said beware lest any spoil you through philosophy or vain deceit after the tradition of men after the rudiments of the world and not after Christ. And then he prays, your word is truth. And he's of course speaking of the entire testimony of the word of God from Genesis to Revelation. And we subject ourselves to his words. It's the words that are the formational powers that God uses to sanctify us.

We need the words. The words are so important to us. We hang on to the words because Your word is truth, and it's really just another way of saying that scripture is sufficient and It is alone sufficient and It is alone the instrument of our sanctification now in every generation It's critical that we cleave to the words of God that define everything and You know tomorrow I I plan to give some kind of historical review of how this has been necessary as a result of hundreds of movements that have arisen throughout the centuries which use replacement language language that leads the church into worldliness and sometimes apostasy the words matter the words that we use matter and today you know we're embroiled really in a battle over words as as the church always has been and always will be we shouldn't be surprised to be in a battle over words but but today you know this day over the last couple of years, issues regarding social justice and evangelical spokespersons for same-sex attraction, they're using words. And they're actually rejecting the words of the Bible and it really matters. The words that we use to describe anything really, really matters and you know The terminology of the secular psychologists and psychiatrists in our shepherding is not helpful, but the words of the Bible are helpful.

Using the words of Marxist revolutionaries to try to describe how oppressed minorities should be treated. Using that language, using the language of the LGBTQ movements are always the wrong direction. It really matters what language we use. And you know there's a new term being widely used in evangelicalism, SSA, referring to same sex attraction. And this is not biblical terminology.

This is misleading terminology. This is conscious dulling kind of terminology and it really, it submerges the true seriousness of the nature of that sin and making people think that every sin is exactly alike. And, you know, I just, I think we should profoundly object to and resist the whole language of SSA and the things that surround it. This is new language. This is new.

Let's recognize that. And it should take our breath away to begin to use new language. But here is the goodness and the wisdom of God. He's given us words to cleave to. And those are the words that are the means of our sanctification and so we need to cleave to the words and you know you you men who are leading congregations are really the men of words And it's it's really up to a generation of pastors To speak the words of Scripture You know it's one thing to use the term SSA to describe someone's affection It's entirely a different thing to use the word sodomy or the word vile passions or the words against nature.

These are the words that we should be using. Alternative terminologies are always defiling to the church and we're in the midst of a great great war over that well The whole proposition of Christianity really is that we don't define things God defines things God defines us. We don't define God. We don't define the church. We don't define our families.

We don't define anything. God defines us. He created us. And it's so critical that we understand that. But The problem with all of us is that we want to drift from the words.

We want our words. We want our ways. This is always the great downfall that we see in people's lives in our churches. You know, I was memorizing a section of Proverbs 3 with some of my grandchildren about two weeks ago. And my two and a half year old granddaughter was saying the words wrong.

It was Proverbs 3, 1. My son, do not forget my law, But let your heart keep my commands." That's the right way to say it. But she couldn't say it right and she kept saying, Let my heart keep my commands. And I had to work really hard to get her to quit saying, Let my heart keep my commands. Well that's what all of us want to do right and that really forms The focus of what our work is all about that we want to wean our hearts from ourselves and our own commands and to cleave to the to the commands of God Christians don't self-define We say oh how I love thy law we say to the law and to the testimony.

We say, like what Jesus said, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So we're gathered here to celebrate all that and to preach about it and to pray about it as we're together. Other.