It's good to be back. We came here like around two Sundays ago and it's been pretty good to just hang out with family and reconnect with some good friends. And yeah, we've been tremendously blessed and been encouraged by all the love and support that we've received so far. And so yeah, my name is Alex.

We moved out to China, Beijing about almost two years ago. And so it's only been a year and 10 months, but it feels a lot longer. I'm still thinking, I'm like, did things change in Berlin? And I'm like, the only thing that really changed are just people's faces. I mean, that's not an insult or anything like that.

But I mean, people got added to the congregation. I think that's what I meant. So but yeah, it's an honor, it's a privilege to be able to come back and to share with you what God has been doing through our family during our time out in Beijing. I was kind of conflicted about how to present this information.

I was like, is it a sermon? Is it a mission report? What is it? And I'm going to give a mixture of both. And so what I'm going to share with you this morning isn't going to be like everything that's been going on in China over the past year and 10 months.

It's just a small snippet of it. If you want to know more information or if you want to just find out what else God is doing over there, feel free to ask. We'll be here until February 10th and then we'll be going back to Beijing, also known as the capital of China and the most polluted city in the world.

But anyways, just kidding. Let's look at the text this morning. I'll read it again and then we'll pray and we'll get started. Mark chapter seven verses 24 to 30. Mark chapter seven verses 24 through 30. It says, "And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon and he entered a house.

He did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

And he said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.' But she answered him, 'Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.' And he said to her, 'For this statement, you may go your way.

The demon has left your daughter.' And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone." Let's pray. Lord God, we want to continually saturate our service in prayer to you, asking for your help, asking for your presence to be here with us as we hear from your word this morning.

Lord God, none of us would be here if it wasn't for your grace to come to pursue us, to save us, to redeem us, to open the eyes of our heart, to see how sinful we are and how much we are in need of a savior. God, would you please help us this morning as we hear from your word.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So in China, we've been going through the Gospel of Mark for our Bible study. We meet weekly for this Bible study, and we just concluded the Gospel of Mark. It took 36 weeks. It was about a four-month hiatus for various reasons. But it took us a long time, but it was good.

And what I want to share with you is from this passage, and again, I'm just trying to weave in together various things, experiences that we went through to just report back to you guys how our family has been doing overseas. So we notice here in verse 24, it says, "And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon." Now, if you have to know this, Tyre and Sidon is a Gentile region, okay?

And so primarily Jesus has been doing ministry in Israel. And so for him to go out of his way to enter into this Gentile territory is sort of alarming for the disciples who are following him. They're wondering, "Why are you going to this region, this Gentile region?" And it says pretty clearly why he goes, if you read the next sentence there.

It says, "And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know." So what we could observe from this context is that he just simply wants some privacy, perhaps some rest. If you guys have read through the Gospels, you know Jesus is very busy. I taught this book a long time ago here at Berean.

And so if you know one of the key nicknames or summary phrases for the Gospel of Mark is the "Go Gospel," right? I mean, Jesus is going everywhere, doing things, teaching, performing miracles. And so there's a good chance that he left Israel for a bit in order to get some rest.

However, we know that that's not the case, right? Because we see here, it says in the next phrase, "Yet he could not be hidden." Now who can be hidden from? We look at verse 25 here. "But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet." In China, family matters a lot, right?

Community matters a lot. More so than here in America, where in America we tend to have this individual, individuality that we want to express in ourselves. But in China, family is really important. If you're not part of the family, then you're not going to get any of the benefits.

If you're not part of this certain community, you're almost like, you're almost ignored. And that's what we kind of see here with this woman, with her daughter. She cares about her daughter. This wasn't some internal illness that's causing suffering to her, to this daughter that she gave birth to and loved, right?

This is an external factor that's causing her much grief and much pain and it's moving this mother to seek after Jesus. The Jesus who is seeking to be hidden and yet she finds him. In China, again, like I said before, family is very important. Community is, family typically is the reason why a lot of people do not profess faith in Jesus Christ.

They're thinking, if I go out in faith, if I accept Jesus Christ, what happens to my family? Do I not spend time with them anymore? How will they be supported? How will my faith affect them? Will they disown me if I profess faith? And those are stark realities that do happen.

However, it was very important for me, especially in talking to a guy in our Bible study, he's a non-believer, because he was expressing these concerns to me. He was just saying, "Alex, I don't know. I have a family. I'm not married yet, but if I become a Christian, I feel like that's going to be a hurdle to everything." I think for me, the thing that I had to share with him is that though you are entering the family of God, though you are alone making this decision, it's really important for you to recognize that you're not just leaving a family and going off by yourself into an island.

It's important for you to recognize that you are coming out of a family and entering into a new family. And I think that for me is something that kind of brings out in verse 25 here, just how important family is, how important community is, how much the woman who loved her daughter so much that she was willing to go out of her bounds to seek after this man named Jesus Christ to heal her daughter from this unclean spirit.

Now again, family is so important. Family is always a reminder for us as well. Joe, I mean, the pollution over there is kind of like a running topic. We always talk about it. There's like an app that you can get on your phone to find out what is the air quality level for the day.

And it gives you a seven day prediction too, so you can like space out your misery. You're like, "Oh, there's a brief reprieve. Oh, Wednesday, okay, we're going to do something that day. But oh, Thursday, oof." And I think being single, it would have been a lot easier to handle that, but it's hard with your family being there.

It's hard to see, you know, like obviously we're here now and like we're going out every day. I'm not that kind of person. I get tired a lot. I get tired of being out. But I see my son, I see, you know, Hadden, I see Ryle, and they're just, well, not Ryle, but at least Hadden is enjoying life, just running around and, you know, just doing, just enjoying the outdoors.

So when we go back, right, when we go back, my family serves me, serves me as a reminder that, yeah, there's a sacrifice that had to be made, right? There had to be a sacrifice to be made in order for us to be out there, to participate in his work, to participate in his kingdom.

And so in understanding how important family is, it became a great witnessing tool to a lot of people that we've met. There's people who look at us and like, we're trying to get to America. You know, we're trying to get to America so our family will have a better life, but you're coming to China and you're settling down with your family.

Like why? And I'm like, yeah, you're right. Yeah, America would be a lot easier. America would be a lot better. Yeah, I see your point. And ultimately it just becomes a great witnessing tool, right? It's a great witnessing tool for them to see like, I'm not coming to China because I want to experience culture.

I'm not coming to China because I love the food. I'm coming to China because people need to hear about the love of Jesus Christ in the gospel, right? People need to know that there is sin that needs to be forgiven. And the only way to be forgiven of that sin is in Jesus Christ.

And so there's people that I've met recently. There's connections that I made with people that I made 10 years ago when I first lived out in Beijing. And the ability to be able to share with them in light of bringing my family along has only really strengthened the witness of the gospel to them.

And so that's my first observation is just how important family is and how much this woman loves this little daughter to the point where she wants to get this unclean spirit out of her and is willing to seek out this man, Jesus Christ. Now in verse 26 we see that Mark gives us a description about this mother.

Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. The reason why Mark adds this detail for us is because he wants to communicate to us that one, she's a woman, clearly, right? And if we know anything from the culture back then, women were considered second class citizens. They had no rights, right?

They were treated like property, okay? On top of that, Mark knows that she's a Gentile. And in the eyes of the Jews, Gentiles were also viewed as second class citizens, right? So we're talking about second class of second class, right? Almost like the bottom of the totem pole here.

But it gets even worse. Mark notes that she is a Syrophoenician, which means she's from the nation of Syria. And if you just kind of go over through the Old Testament and kind of go over the conquests, you'll see that Syria has popped up oftentimes as an enemy of Israel.

Okay, so you got the bottom of the bottom of the bottom. This woman really has no right, no relationship to come and approach Jesus for help. Oftentimes when you're out in China, you come across people that you really don't gel with, right? They have personality quirks, they have cultural quirks.

Yeah, a little different quirks that kind of like rub you the wrong way. Sometimes they like to get up close and personal to you and you're just kind of like, "Hey man, I need my personal space." The smells, yes, the smells there that can be very unique and wake you up in the morning.

It's all there, you know? And yet, when I think about moving out to China, we moved out to China not because we want to reach out to people that we like, right? We want to reach out to people that really come out of our comfort zone, right? One example that I want to share with you guys is when we first moved to our first apartment, I know some people on our team wanted to go visit an English corner.

An English corner is just like a gathering of people where they just practice spoken English. Typically, there's like a presentation by a foreigner and then they kind of like break off into groups and do like this little, this small group discussion and stuff like that. So I said, "Okay, I found out this English corner, we're going to go there." First night, first Monday night that we're there, we go to this English corner and I go in there with the intention to be just hidden and not be seen, but they play an icebreaker game and I was too loud and I got too much attention.

So people started noticing me. So I'm like, "All right, sweet." And obviously during the discussion time, there was this older guy coming up to me and he's just, you know, his English is pretty good. And he's just like, "We're just talking." And he's asking me questions and I'm like, and he's like, "Oh, so what do you do?" And I'm like, "Oh," I can't tell him I was a P or a pastor.

I'm like, "Yeah, I'm an English teacher." "Oh really? Okay, what school do you go to?" I'm like, "Oh, you know, I teach over there somewhere in the corner." He's like, "Oh, okay." You know, because I don't know the exact address. So it's just kind of like we're kind of asking each other questions and I'm like, "Man, you're a really nice guy, man." I'm like, and we're meeting at a church and so I was like, "Hey, so are you a Christian?" He's like, "Oh, no, I'm not." And I'm like, "Oh, okay." And so he turns around and asked me, "Are you a Christian?" And I was like pretty close to saying like, "I'm a pastor," but you know, I ended up just changing my mind.

So I said, "Yeah, I'm a Christian." He's like, "Oh, okay, that's cool." The next day we exchanged phone numbers. So not to like sound all freaky, but he calls me and he's like, "Hey, what's up, man?" And he's like, "Oh, like, I just want to like, I just want to call you and say thank you for being so open and honest with me." I'm like, "Yeah, sure." You know, he's like, "Yeah, I want to be open and honest with you because oftentimes when I tell people what I actually do for a living, they want to like hide away from me, you know, don't want to be my friend." And I'm like, "I think I know where this is going." And he's like, "Yeah, you know, I work for the government, you know." And I'm just like, "My first English corner.

No." I'm like, "God, why?" I'm just reaching out to people outside my comfort zone. You really moved me out of the comfort zone." And so basically for the next year, I avoided that English corner. I was, he would call me periodically just to check in on me and stuff like that.

As a, I think as a friend. Would run into me, would run into him at other English corners, you know. And he was self-taught. And his English was actually pretty good. And I'm like, "Wow, you actually taught yourself." And he's just going to his English corners, practicing English. About I would say five or six weeks ago, somewhere in mid-December, he actually came to our English corner for the first time.

He didn't know it existed. I was very purposeful about that. And there was this great fear in me because of this information that I know. And he was just out of my comfort zone. Like it's odd. It's weird. But I got a lot of encouragement from other people who live there.

And they're saying, "You know what, man? You shouldn't be afraid of this. Why don't you just go up to him and just share?" And I'm like, "Are you crazy?" But when I sat down and started thinking about it, what was there to be afraid? What was I to be afraid of?

You know? He's just a guy trying to learn English who happens to work for the government. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Is there any way that I could be in danger by sharing with him? No. God brings… See, when we think about evangelism, sometimes we think about, "Oh, I want to evangelize to people that I'm comfortable with.

People that are in my circle of influence. My friends, my family." That's great. I think we should do that. But one of the things that, as I'm learning out there, is that, yeah, God will bring people into your life that is just outside of your comfort zone. And you have to go out and reach out to them.

To be that gospel witness to that person. And so that's what this woman represents here. She is the lowest of the lows when it comes to society and their totem pole. When it comes to level of priority, she's at the bottom of it. And yet, she chooses to pursue Christ.

That man, I'm praying one of these days when I go back. I will give him a call. And I'll say, "Hey, I got some free time now. Yeah, I was dodging you for a year, okay? But let's grab some tea. And let's talk." Yeah, I really got used to tea when I'm out there.

But that's something that, at least for me, one thing I kept on learning is that, yeah, God will bring people into your life that will challenge you to go out of your comfort zone. Now, this woman has been identified as a Gentile, as a Syrophoenician by birth. And it says, Mark notes, that she begged Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter.

I mean, wouldn't you? If you had kids, right? And you were presented in this scenario where there's a demon possessed, you're a demon possessed child. And Jesus is the only answer. Wouldn't you beg? There'll be no jokes, no qualms. It's just like, I have a single purpose in coming to you, Jesus.

Save my daughter. And yet Jesus answers back to her in verse 27. And he said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." What? Jesus, like, I just asked you to cast this demon out of my daughter.

Right? Like, what are you getting at here? Is this a yes or a no? Why are you telling me this proverb about, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs"? What this proverb is trying to explain to the woman is that the promises of the Messiah, the blessings that are to come from God, is to go through Israel first, and then to the Gentiles.

So it's in a way where Jesus is trying to inform her, "Your time is not here yet." Okay? "Your time is not here yet for me to bless you with." And sometimes we're looking at this and you're like, "Man, Jesus, that's messed up. Why would you do that?" Well, as we see later on in the text, and we can see later, you can see multiple times throughout the Gospels, and this is like my third point here.

Jesus is focused on making faith the priority. Right? Jesus wasn't just going to heal the daughter and then the mother's just going to leave. Right? Jesus is more concerned about the faith of this Syrophoenician woman. Right? It's one thing to just get everything handed to you. It's another thing to actually struggle with something and then to receive it.

Right? Faith is the priority. Often times with the people that we are just connected with and we try to encourage, that seems to be the main piece of advice that I'm always passing off. Where is your faith? Where is your faith? There is one individual that I could think of and yeah, she's in her mid-30s, she's in the middle of a career change, she's single and so with Chinese New Year coming up, she's going to get pressured.

What are you doing with your life? And she was going on and on and on. This is like multiple times where I've talked to her about this. And in the end, it was just like, it comes down to faith. Where is your faith in all this? Is Jesus still your Lord and Savior?

Is your salvation precious enough to be able to withstand all of these pressures? Yeah, Jesus could answer all of those requests really fast. Find you a job? Fine. Give you a husband? Fine. You know? But is that what Jesus is about? Is that why you profess faith in the first place?

And she's just like, no. And I'm like, exactly. You got to remember what your faith is based upon. You made this decision to believe not because Jesus is going to give you a husband and a career and a family. You chose to profess faith in Jesus because He redeemed your soul.

Your sins have been forgiven. You no longer live for the world, but you live for Christ. That's what Jesus is trying to get at here with this Syrophoenician woman. Not to say no to her and be like, yeah, you know, I'm on my break right now. So you need to take a back seat.

Oh, Jesus' love is so much deeper than that. He wants her to profess faith, to profess faith in a way that will make this exchange, this conversation that Jesus is having so much more memorable. Life changing, in fact. Now we see in verse 28 here, after making this statement, this woman understands what Jesus is saying, but instead of taking it as a no and just turning around and just walking away, she says, but she answered him, yes, Lord, you're right.

Israel is supposed to get the blessing first. Yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. Jesus replies back to her saying, for this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left her daughter. And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.

So what just took place there, right? I think the main takeaway from these two verses here is that this Syrophoenician woman persisted in her faith. She did not allow Jesus, did not allow this proverb to prevent her from asking Jesus again, you need to help me. Yes, I know I'm a Gentile.

Yes, I know I'm a Syrophoenician. I'm not supposed to be here. But please, even the dogs take the crumbs off the children's table. And this is just an expression of tremendous, tremendous humility on her part to be able to say that, to stay there and to persist. Persistent faith.

Over the last year and 10 months, this is probably an area where it has really just became really clear that I need to pursue and to really work on. Obviously, being in a nation where counterfeits happen and the temptation to just compromise is there left and right, I realized that as for me and for our family, there is a need for us to remain holy in our living, to be spirit-filled in our interaction with others, and to persist in that, to pursue that persistent faith.

And what this woman expresses here, just the humility to come before Jesus and continually ask Him, is something that really stood out to me. Turn with me to 2 Peter 1. 2 Peter 1. And again, this is something that was really, it really got my attention. I was meditating on it for a while.

But 2 Peter 1, verses 3-8, when it comes to faith and persisting in it, 2 Peter 1, verses 3-8, I'll just read it really quick. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us by His precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. I was meditating on this because for me, it was, I understood, okay, my faith matters a lot while living in China.

It makes me stand out. Opportunities come left and right. And so, verse 5, it says, "For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith." Supplement your faith, make every effort. I'm like, "Whew, that's a lot of doing. Where do I get virtue? What about knowledge? Okay, knowledge, read books, got it.

Self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love. That is a tall task. Make every effort to supplement your faith. And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, "How do I do this?" But if you just go back to verse 3, if you just go back to verse 3, it simply states, "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness." All things pertaining to life and godliness has already been granted to His people.

My son loves to eat. Haddon, you know, he loves to eat. He knows anything in the fridge that's not red, because he doesn't like spicy food, he can eat. And so there's some mornings he just goes, like, "I'm tired, Jen's tired," and he just goes to the fridge and finds something to eat.

One time he found French toast and he just busts out the fridge and sat down, popped open Tupperware, and just started eating French toast. To our shock. Now Haddon knows. My son knows. Anything in the house that he wants to eat, yeah, it's his. He can eat it. It's been granted to him to eat.

But there are certain snacks, certain foods that he cannot reach. One because physically he's just short and he can't reach that high, or it's locked behind a door, probably on purpose why it's locked. And so what does he do? Does he make every effort to try to open that door and try to open the lock?

No. He just asks. He comes to me, he comes to Jen, and says, "Can you open the door so I can get some snacks?" When I think about this passage and the need for persistent faith and all these things that we are called to make every effort to supplement our faith with, it's already been granted to us.

So how do we apply that then? We just have to ask. Come before God. Ask Him for help. To pray a genuine prayer saying, "God, I can't do this on my own. Please supplement my faith so I can live for You. So that it will keep me," as verse 8 says, "to keep me from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." Persistent faith.

You know, being in China, you're tempted to always cut corners. Yeah, it's hard. One of the hardest things about being a Christian and working in a company is just ethics. Everyone else does it. How come we can't do it? If we don't do it that way, then our business will sink.

There was one time I exchanged some money and I got back Rem and B and just one of them, one of the bills was fake. It was funny because I didn't know it was a fake so I gave it to a taxi driver and he looked at me and he started feeling it and he's like, "No, give me a different one." He saw I had another $100, 100 kuai, so I, you know, I, okay, busted.

All right, here you go. Here's the other 100 kuai. So I take the fake bill with me and you know, I'm not, it's not to make it all dramatic, but yeah, the temptation to do something with that bill was great. Find another taxi driver, find another storekeeper, pass off that bill.

Keep that corrupted cycle of counterfeit going. You know, I was asking around to my friends, Christian friends, "Hey, what do I do with this? Do I take it to the bank?" And I say, "You take it to the bank. They'll just take it away from you." I'm like, "They're not going to give me back the 100 kuai?" He's like, "Nope." "What?

Man, I know 100 kuai is not that much. It's like $20 in the US, but man, 100 kuai could go a long way in China." And then one other guy suggested, "Why don't you just go to an ATM? Just put the fake bill in. If they process it, then fine.

Take out a real one." And I'm just sitting there and I'm like, "Is that right? Are those really my only options?" Of course, the other option is just to throw it away. And so I was in this room talking to my coworkers and they're all Christian. You know, they're all Christian.

And they're all looking at me like, "What are you going to do?" I'm like, "Oh." In the end, one of the coworkers was the financial person, the finance office. And I said, "Here." I gave it to her. This is what they do in America, okay? This is what I told her.

I said, "They put the fake bills on the wall and they put fake on it." And it just became a way to westernize the office. Just put it on there. And I just remember, she came up to me and she was like, "Wow, I can't believe you just did that." I'm like, "Why?" She said, "Most people I know would just try to get rid of that bill and try to get some sort of value from it." And for me, at that moment, it just kind of hit me.

Yeah, living that holy life. Yeah, it was just a hundred Rem and Be. And still though, to persist, to make those decisions to live a holy life matters in the witness of the gospel. And so this Syrophoenician woman, Jesus was able to draw out from her that important commodity of faith.

Right? Now, I'm going to... I know I'm probably going to end really early. But I just want to share with you guys that it's been a tremendous joy so far to serve overseas. Yeah, I know you see our blog posts and you might see our Facebook and like, "Oh man, airpocalypse.

Oh man, it's over 500." And all this other stuff. But to be honest with you, and if you talk to me privately, I'll say the same exact thing. There's so much joy in serving the Lord overseas. To see lives transformed. I mean, I wasn't able to talk about it this morning, but other people that we sovereignly brought into our lives and the changes that have taken place.

There's just so much joy. I'm glad that I'm in China. And though there are going to be potential obstacles coming along the way, right? We know the housing market is going up. We know the education costs will come. A lot of it financially based. But I don't know if I would trade anything.

Use those as reasons to come back. There's just a lot of joy in being able to be a participant in His work overseas. And I think the greatest reason why there's so much joy, and I'm excited to go back, February 10th. That's when we're going back. It's a little bittersweet, but more sweet than bitter.

Because we get to go back and be able to participate in His work. Second Corinthians 5.14, it says, "For the love of Christ controls us." That's not the full sentence there, but that's the part I want us to focus on as we slowly come to a conclusion here. For the love of Christ controls us.

I'm not going overseas because of some desire to be Chinese. Like, I'm Korean. Like, I'm Asian enough, okay? You know? I'm not going over to China just to raise my family, to have them have different cultures in their lives. That's going to be one. He's going to have an identity crisis when he's a teenager.

Am I Korean? Am I Japanese? Am I American? I'm living in China. What's going on here? You know? Just for the record, he said he's Korean, but I'm trying to correct him on that, okay? Second Corinthians 5.14 is the reason. This love that Christ has shown me, has shown to our family, is what is compelling us to keep running the race, right?

To keep sharing the gospel, to keep discipling others, you know, to continue to share the good news of Jesus Christ, believer or non-believer, because it's worth it, right? To understand this love, the quality of that love that Jesus has for his people is tremendous. It is a great motivation and it's a great reminder of the joy that we have in knowing that we are his.

And there will be nothing that will tear us away from that. And so there's a lot of joy going back, and going back to restart the work that we started. And as we kind of conclude, there's just one question that I want to leave us with. Because I know some of you guys in this room, yeah, missions, yeah, going overseas, it's a thought.

Some of you guys maybe have wrestled with it longer than others. Maybe some of you guys came to a quick conclusion that, "That's just not for me." I used to be like that too, you know, when I thought about overseas work. It's just not for me. And then I just remember this one question unraveled all of those barriers, completely unraveled it.

And this is what my friend told me. He said, "Why not?" I'm like, "What? What did you say?" He's like, "Why not? Why not go? Why not participate?" I was like, I was deeply challenged by that question. And that's the same question that I want to leave with you guys too.

When it comes to going overseas, why not? I'm not saying you have to go like what our family did, you know, but I'm saying, why not? If you want to be a goer, then go. If you want to be a sender, then send. But find a way to participate in the work overseas.

Everything I've shared so far this morning, I think everything that I have yet to share, if you guys want to come up and talk, all of it really is an answered prayer to everything. I know you guys prayed for us, and I'm so grateful. And I want to use this morning to be able to edify you guys and say, these are answered prayers.

So let's keep praying. Let's have people in this room start thinking about why not. And let's see where God will take us so that the gospel can continue forward to the nations. And so with that, we'll pray and we'll close. Heavenly Father, we thank you again for this morning and as we just looked at those observations from the text and as we understand, Lord God, the priority of faith, the importance of persistent faith, help us, Lord God, for all of us here in this room, to really seek to apply, to seek you out.

I know, Lord God, that there's a lot of distractions, a lot of priorities that are constantly fighting for our attention, seeking to displace you as our top priority. So God, would today be a day in which we are reminded how important it is to place our faith in you and not ourselves, to place our faith in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and not in any other blessings or gifts that you have blessed us with, but to pursue you, Lord God, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And so God, we thank you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.