Philemon By Brad Verryenne (AM 30-08-2026)

If you can, if you have your barbels, you can turn to filamon. Apparently there are different ways of saying filamon, filimon, filimon, filimon. Okay, we're going to go for filamon. All right, I'm sticking with filamon. I'm getting told, I'm getting, I'm getting roasted. filimon, filimon, filimon, filimon. Okay, what do you say Adam, you know? Okay, filimon, oh my word. I'm going to try my best to go with filimon, even though I have been saying filimon my whole laugh. filimon, filimon. All right, good morning everybody. My name is Brad and I am one of the elders here at King and Saints Church. And it's just a real privilege to bring God's word to you this morning. And I trust that the Lord will speak to you through His Word as we, as a family of believers. This is the foundation right that we look to every day is the Word of God. It sits our foundation in our lives. So I would love this morning to read the whole of filimon. filimon, filimon. Okay, here we go. So it takes about three minutes. I've done it. In private, I care a few times now and it's about three minutes. It's just awesome for us to listen to this scripture. The whole, the whole, the whole chapter, as it will, or letter. It's the shortest letter in the New Testament. So there we go. Shortest letter, it was written in about 8061 to 8063 by Paul the Apostle. And he is writing to a guy called filimon. All right. And this guy is a guy that here actually we think, well, it seems quite clear from the reading which you will see shortly. It seems that Paul led this guy to the Lord. So this guy, filimon, stayed in a city called Colosse. That's from where we get the letter to the Colossians, right? So this guy, filimon, stayed in Colosse. I think scholars think that he would have gone to Paul when he lived in Ephesus for three years preaching the gospel, because the Bible says the word spreads through all the area around Ephesus, which is in modern day Turkey or so. Okay. And filimon gave his life to the Lord, was a rich Roman citizen. And he had the services of a slave as many wealthy Romans would have. Even not so wealthy Romans would have slaves. There were millions of slaves that the Romans used to have under their care or to serve them and help them around the household duties, etc. And this is what this letter is about. It's kind of like you're watching a movie as the reader of a quiet and intense situation where Paul is actually wanting to get to the Lord. And to this quiet, he's wanting to give some firm instructions to filimon about how he should receive his slave who had actually wronged him through potentially stealing from him. And how he wants Onesimus to be received back by filimon. Okay. Onesimus is the name of his slave. He wants filimon to receive him back. Even though Onesimus has cheated his boss out of some money, Paul went, Onesimus flees. And while he's fleeing for his life, basically, because a Roman slave had no rights, he could have been killed. His owner could have just said, "That's it. You've stolen from me." And as Onesimus flees, we don't know, maybe he had heard that this car, Paul, he would let his boss, he's mastered to the Lord. Maybe he had heard that he could go to him for some help. I don't know. We don't know that. But somehow, providentially, by divine intervention, Onesimus ended up finding Paul while he was actually in prison. There were four letters written by Paul when he was in prison, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, and Ephesians. There are those four letters, all written from jail. And somehow Onesimus, this ex servant of Philemon, who had fled for his life for possibly stealing something, meets Paul, Paul leads him to the Lord, and Onesimus becomes an exceptionally special man to Paul. And Paul talks about Onesimus being like his beloved, this incredible guy. And I'm sending Onesimus back to you. But anyway, Philemon doesn't know this. And he's going to get this letter from Paul, who led him to the Lord, and Paul's got some news coming for Philemon. He was clearly wronged and need of compensation, and certainly would have been embarrassed and ashamed in a sense by slave leaving him, and we see this letter. So that's it. All right. I've given you a bit of an intro, and now we watch the movie and play out in front of us as we. Can you imagine? Can you imagine this letter? I want you to note, as well, just before I read it, that Paul, this whole thing's public, man. It's like Paul wants this letter read to the whole church. He doesn't just want it between Philemon and himself. He wants the whole church to hear about what he's instructing Philemon to do, which is quite interesting. And we're going to that, and all of this, I'm going to draw out some things that have to do with the theme we own at the moment, which is dying to self. All right, dying to self. So, good. All right, here we go. Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus and Timothy are brethren. To Philemon, our beloved fellow worker and a pious sister and occupants, our fellow soldier, and the church in your house. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints. And I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. Accordingly, though, I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required. Yet for love's sake, I prefer to appeal to you. I, Paul and old man and our prisoner also for the Lord Jesus. I appeal to you for my child, the great reveal and the simmers. I mean, up to that point, Philemon would have been feeling good about himself, right? Look, he's built him up, told him some great things about him, but I'm going to appeal to you now. For my child, Anisimus, what? Whose father, I became in my imprisonment. Formerly, he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and me. I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I would have been glad to keep him with me in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel. But I prefer to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but out of your own accord. For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while that you might have him back forever. No longer a bond servant, but more than a bond servant, as a beloved brother, especially to me. But how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord? So, if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, write this with my own hand. I will repay it to say nothing of your own me, even your own self. Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord and refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I write to you knowing that you will do even more than what I say, than I say. At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you. You, Papras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, Luke, and my fellow workers. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, be with your spirit. Amen. What a letter. And there's a lot in there that has to do with dying to self. And much of that letter, I think, just we fall so far short of in our modern Christianity. Our Western Christianity just is not, we've got so much to change, so much to die to, to look like that. That is a letter that glumps into the Christianity that existed at the very beginning. beginning of the Christian faith, taking the world by storm. And I just find this just so incredible that if you look at today in the church, not just in the world, there's so much I've got this term self-sovereignty. It's where we are in charge of ourselves. We come to church, we come here on a Sunday, we maybe even go to a small group, but at the end of the day, I still want my independence. I have my independence. And don't you come into my world? Don't you come and medal with my business? It's my private affairs. But nothing in the scripture, in the New Testament, shows that type of Christianity. It's the furthest type of Christianity you can get from what we get in scripture. Because the way the gospel works is when the gospel takes root in our lives. Our independence comes tumbling down. And we become joined to the triune God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and become part of the body of Christ that the Bible says you're just a part of it. And so you lose your independence and you become interdependent. You lose your right to actually just say, this is my life and that's yours and we've got this God who's our God. And this Jesus who died for us, and we come and we worship Him. And we never the two shall meet of community life versus my relationship with God. It's like, that's the church we have in the West today. And this letter just blows that all to pieces. And we confronted with this apostolic pattern that is put in place through the Apostle Paul. And he's dealings with Philharmonne, who I've really given quite a bit of background at two. But if you look at what's really what's going on here, you've got a man with his own affairs, his own hustle, his own slave, who's left him, cheated him out of money. Like it's his own like sovereign choice or whatever, to decide what he wants to do in that case. And Paul writes this letter from about 1,000 kilometers away. Maybe he hasn't even seen and had the face to face that some of us claim we need in order for people to speak into our lives. Well, I need the bridge of relationship. I need, rather, we need to be friends before you can really speak into my life. Paul just blows it all away. He's like, listen, I'm writing a letter. And this thing of privacy of our lives, he's like, hey, just by the way, Timothy says, good day. And all the guards with me say, good day. And just greet the church in your house and greet occupants and greet. It's like this is a communal affair. Like your life isn't just lived until yourself. It's not about you and your world and your life lived out with your slave for you to do whatever you want. It's like Paul takes the initiative of stepping into his world and speaking into it in a way that demands his obedience. This is something as well, we just don't lack. It doesn't sit well. He's are the things that we go like, what the sons are all the cultish to me. The sons ringing like a cult. No, it's ringing like the New Testament. It's sounding more like the New Testament to me where you've got a man who knows what his job is as a servant of the Lord, Paul, that being Paul, knows that he's yet to build the church. He's yet to advance the gospel. He's yet to ensure that people are keeping to the plumber line of the Word of God. They're keeping to the Spirit of Christ. And so when he writes to bring reconciliation between a man who's caused great offense to his owner and actually to abolish social norms, existing social norms, that's actually from this letter. He's writing in a major, it's a major contentious issue. You don't mess with the Roman system. If you, if you, Paul, are saying that I must receive this man as my brother, when in the social system and construct, he should be my servant. You're messing with a whole of Rome. What about all the other servants? Can you imagine all the other Roman Christians you had slaves and thought that I must just treat them well? And now, Paul is abolishing that social construct. When I say abolishing it, he's wiping it out. And he's saying, I want you to receive this man as a beloved brother, like no more. Because, and actually he's going to be such a blessing to you. And basically Paul's saying, please send him back to me because I really need this guy. And he's actually become a fellow worker in the gospel. He's actually become essential to what God wants to do. And so Paul actually speaks into something so controversial, something so delicate, but he doesn't apologize for it. He actually looks for obedience. He actually looks for him to listen. He actually looks for him. He says, I'm in verse 21. Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. Wow. So he's just going, follow on. This is what's happening here. This guy, he's repented. He's a new creation. I want you to receive him back in a completely different manner to which he left you. And I basically, I want you to, he's no longer actually a slave of yours. He's actually a brother in Christ and he's called to something much greater than to come back and just give you back whatever he stole. And whatever he did stole, I'm telling you, did steal, I'm telling you, I'll give it to you. I'll pay you back what he stole. What's interesting there is Paul says this, as we read. He says, having said that, don't forget, you owe me your very life. And that's where we know that Paul was actually saying, there's your spiritual new birth, your birth in Christ came as a result of my teaching. And so because your birth came as a result of my teaching, yes, I can pay you back, but let me remind you. I can pay you back in, in, in, in, in monetary value, but I've given you something that is of eternal value. So Paul saying, I'll pay you, but I gave you eternal life, came through my words. And so if, I don't know what you would do if you were following on. I mean, I think today's church, we had to read this, you know, that's spiritual manipulation, control. Oh, the freak, what's he about? Oh, trying to get in charge of my life, telling me what to do. Now the interesting thing is this letter exists today, because phylum on did not tear it up. If phylum on had got offended, if phylum on had decided, this is not your realm of expertise, Paul. You're, you're not going to tell me what to do in my four walls of my home and how to manage my household. This is my, me and Enesimus's business. Get, stay, keep your nose out of our business. The church and business is separate. No, it's not separate. The two are actually, there's somewhere in that that there's, there's a mission. There's a mission and there is a responsibility that we have even as spiritual leaders. Yes, I'm not going to presume to come into your field and realm and tell you what to do, but around ethical matters. That's not job as a spiritual leader. I mean to get involved in matters pertaining to what would be the right thing to do in this situation. One of the guys in the church, just recently we were chatting as he prepared to leave his business. We were talking about what is ethically right when it comes to taking, not just leave that is owed to him, but there are people in the company as it's really been, it's been a very hard company to work for people to work in. And people are leaving with huge amounts of, well, they're taking luck, they're sick leave. So they might have worked in the company for 10 years and you get X amount of sick eat days right in a year. And when you add that up over 10 years, it can be as much as six weeks. So some guys are going, well, I'm going to take my six weeks because I gave- this company, my blood, sweat, and tears for 10 years, and I didn't take that sick leave. And I gave them everything and they treated me like this. So now I'm going to take my six weeks. So the guy in the church came and said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think it's wrong." Because you're not sick. That was quite easy when you think about it. Like, "Are you sick?" No. Then you go and take it. And you go, "Well, it's my right." I mean, for 10 years I've slept, blood, sweat, and tears. And you feel justified in the decision. But what are you leaving the company? What are you saying? Well, if you're going to take six days and you're not sick because you feel it's your right, you're not being a good Christian. So I said, "Well, what could you take?" I mean, we do have mental health leave and things like that. I mean, I think perhaps you could take three to five days that you claim is a mental health between the transition from one company to the next. I think that could be, and that's up for grabs. Maybe someone wants to argue about that. I don't know all the laws in Australia, but I think that's probably where you could land. Three, five days, I can't really see too much more than that. Take a bit of a gap between your transition from the company into the next. Get a bit of a breather. Yeah, get that mental space right and get in there. But you cannot take six weeks. This is a bit of a strange, it's not strange, right? But this is a realm that God's called us to walk in as a church family. A church family, we're not just a preaching center. This is not just a teaching center. This is a family of God where Jesus is the head of and then He's put gifts in place. And those gifts have to undergo a take authority. They have to actually command you at times what to do. And when I say, "You, I am me too." I'm under the word just as much as you are. And the sooner we come under that understanding, as Phalamon had to, the sooner God can get on with advancing his church, advancing the kingdom. But the more we fight for our independence, the more we limit the spurred of God from breaking out into the world, into our lives. Amen? But you have to die to yourself for that. We have to die to self and recognize that we are not just, we are not the masters of our destiny. We are not as independent as we, as the devil sells us out to be friends. God has not just come to save you for you. He's come to save you for a people. He's come to save you to bring you into a people of God. He's coming back for a people who are reading themselves for him, who are being joined together to become a dwelling place in which he lives by his parties, coming to fetch a people who are correctly ordered in their waiting for him. There is order in the household of God. They are recognizing spiritual authority within the house, ultimately his authority, that he places gifts in place to point the church forward to take ground for him. Amen? And so Paul writes things like this. He says, "I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required. Yet for love's sake, I prefer to appeal to you." Wow, and ultimately that's gotta be our heart as leaders, and I speak as one who's also not just a leader, but somebody under leadership. So today, there's just so much that we just wanna keep up away and off the table when it comes to church leadership speaking into our lives. And God would just say to us today, are we gonna tear up the letters that come to us of instruction through leaders? Or are we gonna read it and let even the community here? Well, when I say we don't have to let the entire church, but on those matters, those personal matters. I mean, this one was pretty personal. I mean, we all get to read this letter. And we can so easily block the flow of God's grace to our lives and to the church, the more private we become. God's calling us to surrender that privacy friends. And again, I'm not calling for public pronouncements of everybody's Sunday every week type of thing, but are we bringing our small groups? Are we bringing others into the corrections that the Lord is bringing to our lives, even possibly through somebody else? Are we bringing it? Because that's really what the Lord is looking for from us. And how is apostate towards leadership? What is it really like in our hearts? Is there a yieldedness to what leadership are saying in and over my life? This is a delicate subject that I'm tackling today. But there's a thing, in verse 17, Paul calls Falamon a partner. Is that wonderful? He calls him a partner. And that's what we call to be like a partner in the gospel. That when a leader comes to you, we assume partnership. I assume that you want to go in the same direction as me. And that our partnership is based on Jesus. It's based on who Jesus is to us both. And so I assume that if I'm bringing something to you or you're bringing something to me that you've heard God or that you are coming to me with something that will benefit the kingdom, that will benefit Christ being formed in my life. Now I'm gonna drop a seriously exciting bit of information if you didn't know this. What happened to Onissimus? This is ridiculous. This is so exciting. I mean, okay, so imagine what we know is, 'cause there's four letters written together, Colossians, Philippians, Ephesians, and Falamon. And at the end of Colossians, we see Paul saying, Philharmon gets mentioned. Sorry, Onissimus gets mentioned that he's carrying the letters. So Onissimus probably rocked up at the door of Falamon, Philharmon with the letter, which is interesting. We know because we have the letter, as I said, that Falamon didn't tear it up. So what we know is that he followed through with the instruction, right? Because the letter ended up getting preserved and passed around too ever needed to get passed around by. So clearly that happened, but listen to this. Around 50 years after Paul wrote this letter in about '81, '10, the prominent church father Ignatius of Antioch was arrested and marched to Rome to be executed. On his way, he wrote a famous letter, letter to the Ephesians, which I read quickly this morning. Very fairly short letter, amazing. It's actually been preserved. You can read this letter from 110 AD from a church father to the church in Ephesus. And guess who Ignatius of Antioch mentions? In the opening chapters of the letter, Ignatius repeatedly praises the bishop of Ephesus, who is leading the primary church in the region. The bishop's name, Oh, Nassimus. The bishop's name is Oh Nassimus. And Ignatius explicitly calls him a man of inexpressible love and praises his leadership. He says, he basically says, you're lucky to have a bishop like him. He says, you're fortunate. Oh, you've been blessed, you've finally blessed. Do you have a bishop like Oh Nassimus? Church tradition holds that the same Oh Nassimus holds according to Roman Waterology. At the same Oh Nassimus was stolen to death. And basically, but anyway, that's how he died. But he succeeded as the overseer. He succeeded Timothy as the overseer of the church in Ephesus. So we know Timothy was put in charge in Ephesus and Oh Nassimus basically took over from him. Is that insane? Now, this is not necessarily true. This is what they think. It's highly likely that many historians believe that Bishop Oh Nassimus was the person who spearheaded the collection of Paul's writings. All right, because Paul's letters were scattered all over the place and they were gathered in Ephesus. So if he was the bishop of Ephesus, and he would have maybe gathered those latest together and actually. preserved them. This guy ended up being used in an incredible way. Is that amazing? And I kind of want to end round about you out in that when we open our lives up to apostolic instruction, when we open our lives up to leadership instruction, when we open our lives up and don't live privately and when we die to self and go, "You know what? My life is, excuse the pun, an open book." When we say, "Yeah, it's my life." When we seek to bring each other in to our private worlds and not kind of build our own kingdoms, man, mighty things can take place. Major things can take place. I was thinking about my own life and walk and it's, I haven't shared this with you as a church and possibly I don't want to come across as if I'm bouncing because I feel like I kind of just, it's so amazing. It's so amazing. In 24 years of leading Oxygen Life Church, I've called, man, I've got my, well, I'm still on the, on an eldership group back in Oxygen Life. I'll sit back in. It's got 36 people part of it at the moment. Men, that is 36 men. There's one guy here, I called him out from being a builder. I said, "You know, we're coming to work for the Lord." Another guy, medical rep, another guy, a woodworker. I said, "Come and work full-time for God." Another guy was a top programmer in the country, called him out for half his salary. He came. Another guy was in the medical industry, called him out, came and working for us now in the church. It passed. Another guy was a school teacher, called him out, came and worked as a school teacher. These are guys I've called personally and asked into positions that they're currently in. Some of them for now 15 years. Another guy, over here, also in the medical industry. Another guy, yeah, in a marketplace business dude. Another guy was in the dairy industry. Another one guy we've just called out in the last six weeks when I was in South Africa. He's a chartered accountant. Just received an incredible pay rise. He said, "We need you to come and take over one of our congregation." He's left it for half of what he was getting paid. Another guy was a marketing manager dude and then those guys are currently serving with me. All of them, on a particular day, either via a phone call or via sitting over coffee, I was able to talk to these men. All of them, who were in business saying, "Come and work with me." And to be honest, I mean everyone that I've asked is actually come, which is insane. Another guy, Cliff, who was in Oatson, one of our towns, he was a dental technician, earning a big salary. Called him out of that. He's been in elder for the last 23 years, but he was building his own practice for a number of years. It was just taking off and I said, " Cliff, there's a call of God in your life, come." He's been serving the Lord full-time now for 24 years. My point is, was sharing those few stories. Is that if those guys did not position their life in a manner that was not saying, "Stay in your business, I'll stay in mind," but there's this posture towards me that kind of, and my friends remind me that I'm like Paul every single day. Like in that, I'm not like him at all. I read this meme this week. My friends remind me that I'm like Paul every single day, and then they said, "Yes, that I'm nothing like him." Something like that. This is meme. Anyway, that didn't come out right. My friends, it's like I'm not anything like Paul. I'm not for one moment presuming, assuming to be like Paul. Paul is like on a next level, like we all Jesus take me home, you know? But the thing is, these men have positioned their lives in a way that if I'm giving them instructions or calling them into things, they're going, "Yes." And when we lose that independence friends, we've now seen 19 churches planted just from our church alone, 19. Some of them have become oxygen. Some of them are not oxygen. They become other things. 19. How does that happen? So it may just surrender their independent living. When they give themselves, as someone gave himself to Paul, when he received that letter, "I'm sure there's a lot of things, Paul. You could have come in face to face. Why did you write that on a letter? Could you not have just come in person?" Like, could we not just talk a little bit about this? There's like, "You not giving me any chance to negotiate, Paul. This is like a bit of a situation. He owes me money. And you're like being pretty manipulative, and you're being pretty controlling, and you're living with nowhere to go, and I don't like this." You know, maybe, maybe being a man, following on head all those thoughts. And I wouldn't put it past anybody, including myself, to have those thoughts. But what do we do with those thoughts? You know, when we bring them subject to Christ, and we say, let your kingdom come. Let your will be done. Let your, and we recognize spiritual authority, and we recognize something bigger of what God could be wanting to do when we see that, and we release our sovereignty, our self-s sovereignty. God is able to preserve the scriptural canon potentially. He's able to do exceedingly above all we can ask, think, or imagine. He's able to bond churches. There's no way, I cannot do that. It's because men have yielded their self-s sovereignty and gone, yeah, and got friends. God wants to launch out to King and Saint's Church. He wants to send us out in the future. There's men and women that have come through the very foundations of this church that are going to come through in the years to come, that we're going to see a proliferation of what God is doing amongst us, but it will not happen if we do not surrender a self-s sovereignty. It will not happen. It will happen only when we begin to yield, and when we begin to let the walls come down, and when we begin to be enissimuses, oh sorry, filaments, filaments, who can release their enissimuses. And so, yes, we speak into various things as leaders. We call to. We call to. Don't want to maybe marry the waters a bit. We call to speaking into sexual sexual immorality. We call to speak into these things, and we will. We call to speak into our marketplace dealings that at times maybe may need something to be said. We call to speak into marriages. We call to speak into our relationships with this conflict between one another. We call, and when I say sexual immorality, I'm not just talking about two people seeming together, pornography. We call to ask the questions, how is it going with your sexual purity in the privacy of, well, now as it can be anywhere with that phone, you can just you and your device. We call to ask those questions. The two interviews I've done just a week, both guys, the one guy at 10 years old, his brother asked him to come into the lounge, and his brother was, he knew nothing about that side of things, and he brother showed him a 16, and he was disgusted, but he was intrigued. And from that day, from that day, 30 years later, he was stuck in porn. It went from once a month, trying to get magazines back in those days, to full-blown every day when every possibly could for 20 years, totally addicted, but four years ago, God set him free. But for 30 years, he kept it a secret. He kept his love private. He says, "Bread, the big thing." And that's what I'm with guys over all the years with pornography. It's secrecy. It's privacy. It's like my walls. And you know, that's the extreme. There's other things. It's just, that's like, that's like, "Oh, yeah, well, I'm not doing that." Now, well, interestingly, even this week, I've asked another man that I'm about to ask into another full-time role for his full salary. Not for him to give it to me. He needs to display it for me to see, because if I'm going to call him onto leadership, I need to see how he's spending his finance. So we can potentially cut away, and we've only got X amount, but how can I do that? we try to make this work, you're going to submit that all to me. Are we ready? Are we ready for what God's got for us? Because it's wonderful. When you see the hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of people, you begin to see them changed for God's glory. You just say, Lord, I surrender, take down the walls. He has my laugh, Lord Jesus. And he has my laugh, leaders. King and saints, elders, he has my laugh. We begin to just submit our lives. And by God's grace, hopefully we will be servant-hearted leaders, we will be, hopefully we'll be carrying his heart of God towards you. We will be the greatest servants of all. And the Bible says, I'm going to show such mercy. So, the leaders have to be held to that account, yes, of representing God well, but it's not for us to just withhold, because we see all the things they're not. It's for us to be the filaments. I mean, I wonder if I could have the team up. I'm going to end with that on that night of just us thinking, where must this end today? And I think it modifies, we're doing the series on dying to self. And it needs to end with us to saying, Lord, I want to trust you and and the leaders and yield my self-sauranty to you and walk in a great measure of yieldedness to church leadership. And I know what I'm talking about. It's super sensitive, man. It's like, what? Really? Yeah. And what am I saying? I don't know. It's up to you. It's up to you. What are you holding private? It's up to you to when the occasion presents us up to you that you remember this teaching and don't tear up the letter. When the occasion comes that a leader's got to say, Hey, this thing is what the Lord requires of you. That you don't don't tear it up. That we get some counsel together and we walk through it. But this is a key. I'm so excited about this message knowing it's going to be so hard, but thinking about an isthmus and thinking about what I've seen and what we're seeing in 412 is because of this. We are seeing a proliferation of churches, but you will not see it if you don't do this. So this is so key. I'm so excited about it. Even now, I know for us it's like, this is a dagger. Man, come on, Brad, this is how you're serious. Yes. dying to live. dying to live.