All right, Romans chapter 16, I'm going to be reading from verse 21 down to verse 24, reading out of the NASB. "Timothy, my fellow worker, greets you, and so do Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen. I, Tertius, who write this letter, greet you in the Lord. Gaius, host to me and to the whole church, greets you.

Erastus, the city treasurer, greets you. And Quartus, the brother, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen." Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you so much, Lord God, for the rest and the time that we've had with family and friends this week. We thank you, Father God, for giving us time, Lord, to reflect upon your grace as we do every single week, but especially, Lord God, as we took time to remember, to be thankful, Lord God, not just the temporal things, Lord, that you've given us, but eternal things, especially, Lord, the hope that we have in Christ can never be shaken.

And so for that, we ask, Lord, that you would remind us again of who you are, that our lives, Lord, may be aligned to who you are and your grace. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Again, if you're visiting us for the first time, you might look at this and say, "This guy's going to preach out of this?" Right?

You'd like a bunch of names, right? Is this, is he serious? Typically, again, when we study the Bible, we go through these names or we go to genealogies and it's easy for us to just kind of skim over that because there's a bunch of names and majority of them we don't know much about.

And what can we possibly say about the people? In fact, there's quite a few things that are in there that, again, we won't even have time to really unpack all of it. Of course, Paul doesn't say it in the letter, but looking at the type of people or who that was following him, the work, it says a lot about the background information of the gospel ministry.

We saw in the first list that Paul mentioned in the earlier part of the chapter that these are people he's saying, these are first Christians, first Roman Christians that he was writing to say and greet these people. And we talked about when we were going through that list, they were most likely the first martyrs of Rome.

So all the pictures and videos and movie scenes that you've seen of Christians being dragged into the Colosseum, being torn apart by lions. I mean, the list of names that we saw in chapter 16 were probably the first group of people who experienced that. The second group of people that we're looking at is Paul saying that these are my fellow workers.

So the first is saying, say hi to them. And then now he's ending the letter saying, these people who are with me are saying hi to you. So we want to look at that list. And one of the first things that we see is that Paul and the other apostles were not alone.

They were countless number. We don't know how many, and I don't know if we can say thousands, but at least in the hundreds, people who were alongside these apostles doing work, carrying the letters, running errands, sometimes just being an encouragement to them, providing for them financially. And there was a lot of background work that was happening in order for Apostle Paul to do what God called him to do.

I want to take some time this morning, just again, not just unpacking every single person here because we don't have detailed information about every single person on this list. Some are obvious, like Timothy. And then there are some people here that we don't know anything about other than the fact that they're mentioned in this letter.

But one of the things that I want to highlight for us in this text is that how much support that Paul has. And there's so many people. There's a far greater number of people who gave their lives and sacrificed much in their lives in order for this gospel to spread.

It wasn't just Apostle Paul. In fact, majority, I would say probably 99% of the people who labor for Christ, when they died, they just died. There was no veneration. There's no books written about them, other than the fact that their names are mentioned and some of them only in this text one time.

No one knows anything about them, but they played a significant role in the spreading of the gospel. The reason why this is so important is because we have a tendency to gravitate toward the spectacular. Whenever we hear men and women who have done great things, we have a tendency to venerate them and we venerate them to the point where we begin to share their stories and testimonies and then eventually they become people that are beyond human.

I've heard stories when I was younger about Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, but Martin Luther Jr., how he was such a man of prayer and how he preached six times a day and he prayed four hours every single day. He woke up at three and he prayed and then when he was busy, he prayed even longer.

I remember as a young Christian listening to that, I said, "Wow, that's really challenging." But all at the same time, the back of my mind is like, "When did this guy ever eat? Did he ever have any relationships with people? How did he study the Bible? How did he prepare for these six sermons?" As time went by, as I got older and I started experiencing Christian life, I began to realize that that's our natural tendency.

We tend to venerate people that we honor and then eventually the stories get exaggerated and it gets to a point where they're just people that we honor from a distance, but they're not real people. The gospel has been spreading through real people like you and me. In fact, majority of the people that we venerate, if you take a real closer look at the missionaries, at the famous pastors, you will eventually find some flaw just like you do with any human being.

Typically, the people we venerate and we honor are people from distances, people in history that we can't closely examine, just things that we've highlighted in their lives. But the reality is that God uses flawed people, common, ordinary people to accomplish very spectacular things. The tension that you and I live in is that most of us eventually will get a nine to five job.

The majority of us will get a nine to five job. You're not going to be movie stars. 99.9999% aren't going to be NBA stars. You're not going to win the lottery. You're not going to invent the next Facebook. You're not going to be the president of the United States or the governor.

Everybody has dreams when they're younger. And then eventually you graduate and you realize your life begins to look a lot like what your parents' life looked like when you saw them at that age. And then you kind of go through a crisis, especially as a Christian. When you begin to look like that and your life begins to emulate or start to look like what you saw, you begin to ask yourself, "Is this it?" And then in order to compensate for that, we go on missions sometimes.

We want to do great things. We want to make a mark. We want to go into ministry. And so we experience short-term missions or we experience doing this and that. But even then, it only lives for a short period. So there's a lot of people who go on mission trips, whether it's five months, a year, or even one time, they come back and they have a hard time adjusting back because they look at that life and say, "Well, that was great, but this is not." And then you live with that tension.

How do I live a spectacular life of Christ in the mundane things? A lot of college students experience that. When you graduate, your college life was so great. You were constantly meeting up with people. You're surrounded by non-Christians and in small group Bible study mentoring. You knew who your leaders were.

You knew who your followers are. You didn't have a nine-to-five job. So your life looked like a mission field on a day-to-day. It was not that hard to stay sober in that context. And all of a sudden, you graduate and you get a nine-to-five job and it begins to look very mundane.

And then you begin to ask yourself, "Is this it? Maybe God called me for missions. Maybe God called me to do this and do that." And then you live with this tension of discontent because your life now doesn't look like what you thought it would look like if you were faithful to God.

If you take a closer look at the Scripture, we tend to highlight the spectacular. Jesus walks on the water and he does spectacular things for three years. But for 30 years, he lived as a carpenter, learning, going to the temple. It says that he grew in knowledge and in favor of God, just like any other human being.

He was a carpenter. I've heard sermons, people saying, "Oh, Jesus was a carpenter." So you can imagine that every table he made was perfect because he was God. The Bible says that in every way he was just like us, except he didn't sin. So making an imperfect table doesn't make you a sinner.

So I have a feeling Jesus made imperfect tables, just like the rest of us. I had a feeling that his measurements weren't 100%. He just didn't sin. But for 30 years, he lived an average life where we don't know much about him. Nothing is written about him because no one was keeping tabs on him.

30 years, he lived a normal life, just like everybody else, paying their bills. And then even the very first miracle that he performs, he's at a wedding and he turns water into wine. He's not walking on the water. He's not talking to the storm. He doesn't raise somebody from the dead.

He just turns water into wine. He just ran out of wine and people were thirsty. And his mom says, "Hey, can you do something?" And he does it. Nothing spectacular. It's just in the context of his life. His first miracle reflected more of his first 30 years than the next three years of his life.

But we have a tendency to look at the next three years and we want to emulate that. We want to look at Apostle Paul going and planting churches, and then we want to emulate that. We want to emulate people who've given their lives and died and people wrote books about them, and then we want to emulate that.

But when our life begins to look mundane, what do we do with that? D.A. Carson wrote a book, a biography about his father, and the title of that book is called Ordinary Pastor. And the whole book is very ordinary. It's about his dad who just served the small church faithfully all his life and how much impact it made in his life, but there's nothing.

You read that book and even as I was reading the book, Ordinary Pastor, I was waiting for the punchline. It was just very ordinary. His dad sounded a lot like my dad. Came into ministry, planted churches, and for the most part experienced a lot of struggles, and then he passed away.

So my memory of my dad is just a faithful man who was faithful all his life until his deathbed and the end. God uses ordinary people in mundane situations, day after day, year after year, life after life. And that's how majority of the gospel ministry has been spreading all this time.

It wasn't one guy who picked up his cross and did spectacular things. It was a wife who was staying home, faithfully preaching the gospel to their children. It was a pastor pastoring small churches that nobody knew outside of their own small churches. It's faithful college students who are sharing the faith with their classmates.

Somebody becomes a Christian and then begins to share the gospel with mom and dad and brother and sister or a co-worker who invites people out to their churches. And so much of the gospel is being spread in that context. In fact, majority of you, if I asked you how you came to faith, you didn't see a light from the sky.

You didn't see a spectacular debate or some miracle. Just a friend of yours became a Christian and shared the gospel with you or invited you to a church. Maybe aunt asked you to come to VBS. There's a couple people at our church who became a Christian because their aunt paid them to go to church.

That was their testimony. When they were little kids, they gave them like 10 bucks every time they came to church. So they came. That was their allowance. And they started attending VBS and they heard the gospel and they became Christian. I'll tell you who they are later. I say all of this as a setup for what we're looking at because there's two things that I want you to look at just as an overview of the list of these men.

Number one, God used average, ordinary men and women who are faithful to spread the gospel. That's the first point. Paul says in verse 21, "Timothy, my fellow worker, greets you." Just as the disciples, when you looked at their character and their background, did it make sense? Why would God choose them?

What credentials did they have? How were they going to spread this gospel that God's been preparing for thousands of years and that they put it in the hands of just fishermen who are not trained? In fact, they just failed miserably, their biggest test. And yet God gives them the responsibility that the whole world will hear the gospel through these men, at least initially.

Just as the disciples didn't make sense, the disciples that they discipled didn't make a whole lot of sense. Timothy, Timothy was a man that Paul picks up in one of his missionary journeys in the city of Lystra. He wasn't any spectacular Jew like Paul. Paul was a man who may have been sitting in the Sanhedrin already, but Timothy was not.

Timothy came from a home where his father may have been a Gentile and his mother was a Jew, and so he wasn't even circumcised. So he wasn't even a faithful Jew. In fact, Timothy didn't get converted because of Paul's great preaching. Paul says his grandmother Lois first became a Christian and then his mother Eunice became a Christian and they shared the gospel with him.

So basically he became a Christian from his home. His grandmother and his mother, and we don't know where the father is. They think that he died when he was young. So he was probably raised in a single family home, meaning they were financially struggling and they weren't able to practice their Jewish faith.

And in that very mundane, average context, Timothy came to faith and then Paul picks him up and begins to follow him. And the age gap between Paul and Timothy was maybe about 25 to 30 years. So it wasn't like he was able to be productive right away. He was a young guy that Paul actually had to nurture and take care of when he was young.

He gets circumcised, he begins to follow Paul, and then we look at what was it about Timothy that Paul saw and said, "You know what? We're going to make sure that we see potential in this man so that he can grow up and be powerful to succeed him when he passes away." In fact, when we look at Timothy, we see exactly the opposite.

Paul says in 1 Timothy 4.12 that he was young. "Let no one look down on your youthfulness." And he challenges him by speech, by conduct, love, faith, and purity. Show yourself example of those who believe. The reason why he says that is because he was so young that the message that Paul was saying, "Go fight against these false teachers.

Command them to stop them to teach these doctrines." And he was concerned that they were going to just nullify him because of his age. It was a very Asian culture. So they'll listen to the older people, but the younger people say, "You're too young. How old are you?" "26." "What could you possibly know?" He says, "Don't let them look down on your youthfulness, but set an example.

They may question your age, but make sure that they don't question your character." So he was a young man. And maybe that was related to the fact, this concern that Paul had in 2 Timothy 1.7 about his timidity. "For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline." He wasn't just taking these characters out of the blue.

He's concerned about Timothy's timidity. Maybe because he was young. Maybe he saw Paul as an apostle performing miracles and how well connected he was, Roman citizen. And maybe Timothy was intimidated by that. A lot of these men who are leaders in these churches already were prominent people, rich people.

And this young pastor coming in there trying to fight for the right doctrine, and he says, "Don't be timid. Your authority doesn't come from your age or your personality. It comes from the Word of God." That's why Paul says repeatedly over and over in 2 Timothy, to stay faithful to the Word because that's where your authority comes from, whether they listen or don't listen.

1 Timothy 5.23, he was sickly. "No longer drink water exclusively, but use a little wine." Again, little wine. Don't forget that. Little wine. Everybody say, "Well, Timothy drank, Jesus drank a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailment." It's because Paul, again, he was a sickly man.

He said, "You know, use some of that for medicinal purposes." So when you add all of this up, you can see why we might humanly look at that and say, "Wow, Timothy doesn't seem like the right person to choose." I mean, imagine the context that Paul was in. He's being beaten up, thrown into prison.

It's the first century. Every synagogue that he goes to, majority of them are hostile. So you need a man who is committed, maybe a big guy because they're physically attacking them. Maybe a guy who's just muscular, you know, Samson type of a guy who's going to destroy the whole city if you mess with him.

I mean, somebody who's not timid, maybe a bit older, maybe who had better connection. That would have been the wiser choice. Timothy was just an average person, just like majority of human beings, majority of us. In fact, Paul goes on to say in 1 Corinthians 16, "If Timothy comes, see that he is with you without cause to be afraid." Again, he's concerned that Timothy is going to be timid.

"For he's doing the Lord's work as I also am. So let no one despise him, but send him on his way in peace so that he may come to me, for I expect him with the brethren." I mean, he sounds really like a father. I mean, he really sounds like a father concerned about his son.

He's going to come and, you know, I'm going to appoint him to continue to do my work, but don't give him any cause for him to be afraid. No, to protect him, right? He's not this mighty warrior coming into town who's going to set things straight. He said, "He's coming in.

He's timid. He's sickly. He's young. Can you provide for him? Can you make sure that he's not afraid because he's among you?" All of these reasons are reasons that humanly we would look at and say, "Maybe he shouldn't have been. Maybe he shouldn't have been that guy." But one thing that Paul says repeatedly about Timothy, despite all of that, was his faithfulness.

First Corinthians 4.17, "For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord. And he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church." He says, despite all of that, despite all the other descriptions of Timothy, he says he is faithful.

If one thing that I know that Timothy is going to do is he's going to do what I did, he's going to teach you what I taught you, he's not going to pervert the gospel. He's going to be faithful. Paul says again, a more detailed description in Philippians 2.19-23, "I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be cheered by news of you, for I have no one like him, who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare.

They all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, but you know Timothy, proven worth, how as a son with a father he has served with me in the gospel. I hope therefore to send him just as soon as I see how it will go with me." The only quality that Paul describes of Timothy is that he cares for you as I cared for you.

He doesn't talk about his great ordership, he doesn't talk about his great knowledge or his charismatic gift. The only reason why he commends him is, "I have nobody like him because nobody loves you like I love you." I mean, think about if you had a child and you're looking for babysitters, if the mother can't watch the child, the next best person is probably maybe grandma, usually.

And the reason why is not because the children love grandma, they may or may not. It's not because she's so funny. It's not because she's covered in chocolate, you know, and that's why the kids love her. It's because usually, and I'm not saying that this is true in every family, but usually the next best person that's going to love that child like a mother is probably grandma.

Don't get offended, it may be grandfather in some situations, but I'm just generally speaking. Because you love your child and so you want somebody else who's going to love that child as much as you love that child. And so the greatest quality, and it'd be great if grandma can juggle and she can make balloon toys and make the best cakes, all that is great, but the greatest quality would be that that person who's going to watch your child is going to love that child like you love that child.

And that's how Paul describes Timothy. Because Paul loved the Philippians. He said, "I have one person I can commend to you." Not because he is a great warrior, not because he knows the Bible better than anybody else. He loves you like I love you. He was faithful. See, God typically, God typically will use people who will be an extension of his heart, not simply his mouth.

You can have a great mouth, you can have great gift, but if you don't love the church, that great mouth can do great damage in the church if you're not careful. Not only Timothy, but you look at Lucius. We don't know a whole lot about Lucius. There's two options.

Lucius might be the Lucius of Cyrene that's mentioned in the Church of Antioch. Many people believe that it was Lucius Luke the physician. The reason why is because Apostle Paul oftentimes calls Lucius Lucas in other parts of the scripture, and Lucas is just another way of saying Lucius. Now, we don't know that for sure, but we know for a fact that Luke the physician was a companion of Apostle Paul.

It mentions that in Colossians 4.14. In fact, 2 Timothy 4.9-11, when Apostle Paul was sitting in prison, and he says, "All these people have abandoned me," and then in verse 11, it says, "Only Luke is with me." So we know for a fact that Luke was one of his close companions who was doing work in the background.

In fact, Luke was the one who pens the book of Acts. And at the end of chapter 16 and chapter 21, Paul begins to say, "We," instead of Apostle Paul and Peter. He says, "We did this and we did that," because Luke was with them in their journey. Now, the reason why I highlight this was Luke was a physician.

Now, that'd be a great person to have, right? If you're doing mission work and being bitten by scorpions, and you break your leg or sprain your leg or you have some flu or whatever it is that you have, it's great to have a physician with them. You may think, again, when we think of apostles, I mean, these are guys who are raising people from the dead.

Their shadows would fall on people and then they would be raised. I mean, that's how much power that they had. So you would think, like, what do they need a physician for? I mean, because we have a tendency to look at the spectacular things that they have done, and we think that, "Oh, I'm sick.

I'm going to heal myself today. Oh, I need money. I'm going to go fishing and take some gold out." Why is he making tents? Why is this guy making tents? Why does he even need a physician? Because we look at the spectacular things and say, "Oh, we think that that was the normal occurrence of everyday life of the Apostle Paul." But even Apostle Paul, he had to make money.

He had a physician who was working with him. He says, "Tertius," he was a stenographer, he says it later on in this passage, and he says, "I, Tertius, write this with my own hands." He writes this because it was a common practice at that time, and you can understand why.

When you type, everybody's penmanship looks the same. We rarely write notes, so we don't know what people's penmanship looks like. Some of you have great penmanship. Some of you look like you wrote it with your left foot. You can't understand a word that you've put on paper. You can understand why, if you're writing a letter that needs to be read and to be spread, that there needs to be clarity, that you want the person with the best penmanship writing this.

You can see why they would use a stenographer. Think about the context of this. God didn't just imprint this on a stone tablet and say, "Here." That's part of the reason why so many non-Christians argue against the inerrancy of the scriptures. "Oh, it was written by a man. It was written by a man.

It was handed down from men. Stenographers just dictated these things, and all of these things are true." What they miss is that consistently, and not just in the New Testament, Old Testament, God used very mundane means. I'm going to get to that later on, why this is important. But God used very mundane means, ordinary people, through ordinary methods, to print down an extraordinary scripture that we were going to have, that we were going to preach out for thousands of years until he comes.

We're going to be studying and dissecting every word that is written, and it was simply written through a man sitting in prison and stenographer just dictating it, and then a common person just taking it over there and handing it to people. That's how the Word of God came to us, very ordinary means.

Not only did he use ordinary people, God used, number two, seemingly difficult situations, things that we would think would nullify God's work, God used seemingly difficult circumstances to produce great fruit. Sometimes we have an idea of what God's ministry looks like, and when things begin to go astray, when we don't see the response or maybe we see opposition, automatically we think that God's not working.

Typically when we say in the mission field, "God opened doors," we mean that finance was provided, easy way to get in. People are, "Hey, can you come and please preach to us?" And you've got a group of people waiting for us to go and do the work. Typically when we say the doors opened, we mean that every obstacle has been taken care of so we can kind of go there and preach and come back.

That's not what it meant in the New Testament, and that's not what God means when he says the doors opened. Doors opened simply means God told you to do it. That's all it means. There might be opposition, there might be physical hardship, there might be financial problems, but when the doors open, it just means God said to go.

Jason, that he mentions here, is from Thessalonica. Now in Acts 17, 2-9, Apostle Paul, by the time he gets to Thessalonica, he is beaten, imprisoned, stoned, and he comes to Thessalonica basically to get away from persecution and preach the gospel. And then some of the greatest persecution happens in this city.

In fact, it was so great, he actually has to pack up his bag and leave. He never does that. You know, remember Lystra? He gets stoned, they drag him out, they think he's dead. When he reawakens, he just walks right back in. That's Apostle Paul. So you can imagine how intense the persecution was in Thessalonica, that Apostle Paul felt the need to pack up his bag and then go down to Berea.

He ran out to Berea. So the scripture says he was only there for a short period of time, maybe three weeks. No more than a couple of months. And that's why he writes 1 Thessalonians, because he's concerned that he left in a hurry and that Satan was going to come and teach false doctrines and the persecutors were going to squash this church.

And then he gets this great news that the short amount of time that they had the gospel, it was flourishing. Well, Jason was the chief target of this persecution at this city. That he took off. It says in Acts, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but Acts 17, 2-9, Jason invites Apostle Paul and his companions into his home because he becomes a believer.

And then they get angry at Jason. This guy is supporting these men. So they begin to beat him and his family. And as a result of that, I think Apostle Paul ended up leaving in order to protect Jason. Jason was from Thessalonica, a city that he was only there for a short period of time.

And all of a sudden, this city that was being beaten up and Paul had to leave became the model church. Not only Jason, but Sopater was from Berea. Berea was a city that they ran to because of persecution. And then Sopater becomes a Christian in that city. Gaius, Erastus, and Quartus was from Corinth.

If you know anything about Corinth, Apostle Paul entered into that city in fear and trembling, in the midst of all this persecution, being chased. By the time he gets to Corinth, you can tell Apostle Paul was tired and weak. He was tired because he was human, just like any of us.

In Acts 18, 9-10, it says, "And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, 'Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you. And no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in the city.'" Jesus himself has to speak to Paul to encourage him because he was so tired and worn out.

In 1 Corinthians 2, 1-3, Paul describes himself. "When I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling." It was in this city where Erastus, Gaius, Portus, they come to faith and actually join Paul's ministry to preach the gospel.

In this city that we would have often say, "You know, Paul didn't come in his power. He wasn't himself. He wasn't that same guy who entered into Lystra, stoned and picked himself back up, went back and preached the gospel. I'm ready to die for Jesus." By the time he comes to Corinth, he comes in weakness.

And he himself says, "I came knowing nothing. I'm just going to preach Christ and I don't know nothing." Maybe in the beginning of his ministry, he may have thought to himself, maybe, if he was like any other human being, "Maybe God chose me because I was a Pharisee among Pharisees.

God needed me. My Roman citizenship is going to come in handy. All this education that I got from Gamaliel. Maybe that's the reason why he chose me." But by the time he comes to Corinth, all of that is beaten out of him. He's weak, he's trembling. The same thing that he was concerned about Timothy, Paul describes about himself entering into this city.

And he says, "I came to know nothing but Jesus Christ." It may sound foolish to you, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God. It is in his weakness that God showed himself in this city. Now the reason why this is so important is because majority of us live in this tension between, "I want to be great for the kingdom of God.

I want to spread the gospel. I want to do these things for God." And then we look at men, testimonies of people. We hear sermons, read books, and we get intimidated. It's like, "Oh, maybe that's not for me. What place do I have in the kingdom of God?" There's a story about this man who's wrestling to connect with God, maybe living with that same tension that most of us live in, praying to God, "God, only if I can see you." And one day, a huge flood comes into town, and he happened to live in that flood zone, and everybody was escaping, and his car wouldn't start.

So he began to pray, "Maybe this is it. Maybe finally I'm going to be able to meet you. Lord, if you would just show yourself to me and save me from this disaster, I will serve you." And so he prays and prays and prays, and then he has this vision that God's going to answer his prayer.

The next thing you know, you have a pickup truck that comes, "Hey, dude, what are you doing here? Get in the truck." And he's like, "No, no, no. I prayed to God. I prayed to God that he would show himself to me, so I don't think that's you." So he takes off.

Next thing, the water rises, and the boat comes, and he says, "Hey, what are you doing here? Good thing that I came by and I saw you." He says, "No, no, no. I prayed to God that he would answer my prayers, and I don't think this is it." And so the boat takes off.

And finally, it gets to a point where not even the boat can get in. The helicopter, the rescue crew comes, and through speakers, "Hey, get on this ladder. Come up." And he's on his last leg on the rooftop, and this is the last thing that can come and rescue him.

He says, "No, no, no. I'm a bad believer in God. My God will rescue me." And then so the helicopter takes off. And then the flood comes, and then he dies. The end. He goes to heaven, and he begins to cry out to God, "God, I prayed that you would show yourself to me and rescue me, and it seemed like you were telling me that you were going to come, but what happened?" So God answers him, "I send you a pickup truck, I send you a boat, and I send you a helicopter.

What more were you looking for?" You may have heard that story before, because I've told it before. But the point of that story is so relevant for majority of our Christian lives, because we're always looking for something spectacular. And I want to ask you, and we need to be careful, that desire for something spectacular, is that to glorify God or to glorify you?

Is that to magnify His name, or you want some of that glory when He is magnified, like the disciples? We have a tendency that we want to glorify God, but we want to be glorified with Him. So we're looking for the spectacular. We look at the testimonies. We read books and say, "Why not me?

Why can't God use me to do this?" When the majority of what God desires is mundane, without name. And when we die, no one's going to write about us, no one's going to praise us. There's not going to be a big church behind your name, or a book that you wrote, or thousands of people coming to your funeral.

You're just going to be faithfully doing your job, and in the midst of that, your faithfulness, God is going to be glorified. He ends this section by saying, "Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all." And it is always, every letter ends with that, "Grace be with you, grace be with you," because it is only by His grace that we can persevere.

It is only by His grace that we can continue. Now I want to summarize this sermon, this passage, with this. Remember when we were studying through Leviticus, in chapters 26, was it 25? We were talking about the blessings and curses. Remember we were studying through that? And then we looked at all the blessings and all the cursing, if you don't follow Christ.

And you looked at the list of the blessings, and all of them were just mundane things that God originated to begin with. He says, "If you follow my teachings and you obey me," He said, "rain will come in season." Rain will come in season. That's His blessing? There's no gold dust coming from the sky?

He said, "No, rain will come in season," because that's what He intended to begin with. When sin came, it not only did it corrupt man, it corrupted creation. So He said, "When you obey and do what I tell you, God's going to restore what He intended to begin with.

The natural order of things are going to be restored." He says, "Your enemies won't attack." There was no enemy before the sin. He said, "When you obey," He said, "there is going to be no enemy. You're going to live in peace. There's going to be wild animals that you're going to be able to live side by side with.

You don't have to lock your doors. When you plant seeds, it's going to bear fruit like it's supposed to do, and you're going to live long." Every single one of that was exactly what it was before the fall. There was nothing spectacular about it. He doesn't say gold dust.

He doesn't say mansions. He just says, "In season, it's going to rain. You're not going to have enemies. When you work, you're going to bear fruit exactly as God intended." Why is this so significant? Because the point of redemption is to restore what was lost. Husbands acting like husbands, wife acting like wives, children acting like children submitted to their parents.

Society, community, grandparents, work, rest, all of that is to be redeemed in His name. So the point of the gospel and reception of the gospel is to become faithful to what God intended in our life to begin with. God didn't call all of us to go out to the mission field, I mean, across the sea, and the majority of us won't.

Some people will say, "You know, this is not enough. I want to do this." God places His heart, "And I want to go do this." Majority of us, God has called us to be faithful where we're at. And God will be glorified. God will be glorified. And you and I will do our part.

You ever wonder, in John chapter 20, 28 through 29, Thomas sees the resurrected Christ and he couldn't believe it and says, "Lord, let me put my hands in your scars." And then when he finally recognizes that this is the resurrected Lord, Thomas, the doubting Thomas is the first one who goes down to his knees and says, "My Lord and my God." It's a first direct confession of Jesus' deity from the disciple, "My Lord, my God." But Jesus doesn't hear that and say, "Great, you're the first one." He actually rebukes him in the next passage, verse 29.

Jesus said to him, "Because you have seen me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see and yet believe." I didn't understand that for years. Of course our faith would be stronger if we saw Jesus resurrected. And it would only make sense that Thomas actually put his fingers in his scars and that's what caused him to open his eyes.

What did Jesus mean? "Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe." You believe because you saw. "Blessed are those who do not see." It took me years to figure out what Jesus was saying. God put his imprint of himself, it says in Romans chapter one, all over his existing creation.

But the rebellion of man refused to see that, refuses to see God in it. It is man's arrogance to think that even this earth and there's enough oxygen in this world and the money that you have, somehow we did it. And all God needs to do is just remove himself from this earth and we suffocate.

We die, we burn, we can't live. I mean, it's man's arrogance to think like, "It just happened." How did it just happen? You don't come out of your house and see a dent in the side of your car and say, "It just happened." You'd be foolish. Everybody would think you're foolish to say, "It just happened." But we look at the complexity of the universe and we say, "It just happened." And somehow that's very, very smart.

Years of education has taught us it just happened. A fool says in his heart, "There is no God." The miracle is happening every single day that we live. You and I don't have that power. I can tell you I'm going to be somewhere tomorrow. I don't have the power.

Something could happen. I can get sick. There might be a traffic accident. I may just change my heart. I don't have that kind of control. And yet God created the universe to sustain our life and every part of his creation declares his glory but sinful man. If you require the spectacular to give God the glory, you will always be dependent upon the spectacular.

But if you see the spectacular in the mundane, you will see God. Let's take some time to pray. Welcome our welcome worship team to lead us in worship. Let's take some time to come and above everything else to connect with our living God. If we've been living our lives with blindfolds, looking for something to happen to us or a circumstance to change and not recognizing the gift that God has given us in our daily lives and as a result of that maybe we haven't been so faithful.

Let's take some time to come before the Lord and really connect with God and to thank him for the mundane things that God is doing in our lives. Let's pray.