The Neighbor Who Goes Home

Transcript

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[0:00] and our reading today is from Acts chapter 8, verses 26 through 48, chapter 8, 26 through 40, and you can see it's already on the screen here a little bit, so we're going to be reading that in just a minute, but before we go there, a little bit of introduction. This is another post-resurrection story from the book of the Acts of the Apostles, and it centers on the action of somebody named Philip, one of the disciples, who had just actually spent some time in Samaria, and there was preaching in Samaria, there was great acts of power in Samaria, and this was fulfilling Jesus's commandment, or actually prophecy, that they would be witnesses. In Acts chapter 1, Jesus says, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Judea and in Samaria. Judea is like Israel. Samaria, which is that area that had rejected Jesus, and all to the ends of the earth, and so all already, it's beginning to happen. Peter and John were preaching to Judea, and then Philip went up to Samaria, and actually then Peter and John joined him in Samaria, and they preached to the Samaritan villages, and now, as we'll find out, this is all kind of happening, is that Philip is going to have an encounter with a foreigner, and that foreigner is going to take the gospel

[1:24] to the much further ends of the earth, to Ethiopia, and he's going to take the gospel to the which is hundreds of miles away, and then at the end of chapter 8, or when chapter 9 begins, we have the story of Saul, who then becomes Paul, and so we have the story of the ends of the earth being fulfilled through this, one of the greatest of the apostles, really one of the greatest of the missionaries that we have ever seen, and so if you look at Acts in chapter 1, verse 8, where Jesus gives this prophecy, or this command, it's all, it's almost like a table of contents for the rest of the book of Acts, and so we're right at the cusp of where Samaria has been evangelized, and now Philip is beginning to evangelize the whole rest of the world with a chance encounter on a road of all places, a chance encounter that was directed by the Spirit, and so our reading today really is about an encounter out in the wilderness, and somebody who's willing to go where the Spirit leads them, and so when we read about Philip, we really get that Philip is in tune with what the Spirit wants to do, that Philip is moved and animated by the Spirit's promptings, and goes and does what the Spirit tells him to do, so let's look at that

[2:39] as we do our reading, and I'd like to ask you to read along with me, Acts chapter 8, starts like this, then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, this is a wilderness road, or a desert road, so he got up and went, now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury, he had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home, seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah, then the Spirit said to Philip, go over to this chariot and join it, so Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, he asked, do you understand what you are reading, he replied, how can I unless someone guides me, and he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him, now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this, like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer, like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth, this is what Victoria just read to us from Isaiah 53, in his humiliation, justice was denied him, who can describe his generation, for his life is taken away from the earth, the eunuch asked Philip, about whom may I ask you,

[4:06] does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else, then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus, as they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, look here is water, what is to prevent me from being baptized, he commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him, when they came up out of the water, the spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away, the eunuch saw him no more, and he went on his way, rejoicing, but Philip found himself as a Zotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns, until he came to Caesarea, let's pray, Heavenly Father, thank you for your word, and we ask that you would add your blessing to it, in Jesus name, Amen.

[5:28] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. as like on a soundboard or something like that. So I'm watching my chat log here. Why are noon and south the same word in the original language? Okay, and I'll keep talking.

[7:34] Guesses are okay. You can guess, and guesses are good. In fact, sometimes I find that when we guess, we bring in this other knowledge from other people, and it actually makes the text richer. I want to point out, either way, whether he goes at noon or whether he takes the south road to Gaza, there were two roads to Gaza, evidently, from Jerusalem to the south. And so Gaza, you know, you could go more along the coast. Gaza is on the coast, or you could go more through the wilderness, the desert.

[8:06] And it does say this is the wilderness road. So they're both south roads, but this would be more the wilderness road, the secluded road, maybe the road less traveled because people wouldn't go through the wilderness. The wilderness is dangerous. The wilderness is also interesting. And if you read this over and over again in Scripture, the wilderness or the desert, despite the fact that it seems empty and barren and dangerous, is a place where people are always meeting God. They're always meeting God out in the wilderness. They can hear better, it seems like. God is more, I don't know if God is more present there, but people are more attuned to God.

[8:44] Okay, Craig says it's all Greek to me. That's not helpful, Craig. Steve says, It is that one. South, very good, Steve Lee. And then we got Caleb is writing his video production. My guess is because at noon, the sun is shining straight down and south is down on the compass because Israel is in the northern hemisphere. You guys are so smart. Ellen says, Thinking like Steve, maybe it has to do with where the sun is in the sky. You guys are so smart. Isn't this fun? So now the answer's out there. You're right. South and noon are the same word because at noon, the sun is in the south of the sky. Because Israel is in the northern hemisphere. So that'd be interesting when somebody's translating this for a people group whose origins are in the southern hemisphere. How would they do this? You know, they have their own words for south and they would have to work a little harder at this to do the translation. Okay, good. So we have some people who are thinking sort of spatially and theologically. Great. Now, the theological side of this is really important. And I've been alluding to it. A little bit already is here are, there's two or three things that you wouldn't do. This is a road that you wouldn't normally take. You wouldn't take it at noon.

[10:01] And I think noon is the correct answer because south is implied. I think the NRSV has it slightly wrong. South is implied. The only way to go from Jerusalem to Gaza is south. So south is redundant. I think noon is the correct translation because it's at noon and it's on a, it's a desert road. And in other words, the Spirit is telling Philip, go someplace where you don't expect anyone to be, whether by time because people don't travel at the hottest time of day, or whether by location because people avoid a deserted road in the middle of the wilderness unless they absolutely have to go on it. And it doesn't register Philip's questions here. He might have been saying, why is the Spirit telling me to take this road less traveled? Really, it is a road less traveled. There'd be far more traffic on the other road. Why is the Spirit telling me to go on this dangerous road, this unused road, this perilous road?

[11:04] And we'll find out why, because the Spirit has a purpose and is to meet somebody that the Spirit wants him to meet. So now the person he meets, all of a sudden he does meet a person. He meets a person. He meets a person on the road. And this person is a eunuch in the court of the Candace. Now, Candace is not a name. It's a title. Candace actually means queen. So that's the Candace is the queen of Ethiopia. And it turns out that he's a very high official because he's in charge of her treasury, so he's kind of like the finance minister. He's a very important person. He's well-read and he's also wealthy because he has a copy of the scroll of Isaiah in his own possession. And scrolls were expensive. It was expensive to make them. Usually a synagogue would have a scroll and the whole community would kind of share that scroll. But this man has one all to himself. We don't think about that because books are very cheap in our world. And so you can have a book for just a few dollars and you can have a copy of it. But they didn't have printing presses back then. Each scroll had to be painstakingly copied by hand and put on an animal skin and rolled up. And all of that was expensive. Every aspect of what I just said meant it was an expensive thing.

[12:18] But yet this man had a copy of it. Now, it says here that he's a eunuch. But that word could also mean official because a eunuch and an official were they were somebody you needed to trust. And so sometimes they were made physically into eunuchs so that they could be trusted. And there's some interesting ideas about that. But I'm going to tell you that once when I was at Bible camp, I thought, well, we're going to and I was the camp counselor for this cabin full of little boys. I think they were all like first grade. They were like teenagers or something like that, maybe younger.

[12:53] And I was reading them the story about Esther and that that book has the word eunuch in it, too. And I was reading them Esther because it's a great story and it was kind of kind of helping them fall asleep. And I just thought it's good for them to get a Bible story right before bedtime. And it reads like a really interesting story. And then it would be fun because I'd end the chapter and I say tomorrow night we'll go to the next chapter and they say, keep reading. Keep reading, because they were they wanted to know it was going to happen yet. Next, I thought this is good. But the word eunuch came up in my Bible and I decided, well, I'm just going to read this word because I don't want to filter the Bible even for these young people. And so, of course, this had to happen. A little boy said to me, Pastor Hans-Erik, what is a eunuch?

[13:43] Well, then again, I said, I don't want to filter these realities from these children, but I tried to put it in a in a kind of a in a in a thoughtful way, I guess I said, well, that's a person who's had part of their body cut off. And I told him what part of the body it was that was cut off. And children at home, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're going to have to ask your own parents about what part of the body got cut off. And the little boy said, oh, OK. And so we kept reading and we kept reading and it was time for prayers and the lights were out. And I hear this little voice.

[14:17] And he said, Pastor Hans-Erik. I said, yes, Jacob. He said, I don't ever want to be a eunuch. And I said, Jacob, don't worry, you won't ever have to be a eunuch. And I just realized these unintended consequences of giving people mental images of what happens, it could scare them. And so but that that was enough for him. And he fell he fell right asleep afterwards. But it was a scary thought for this little boy. Anyway, so this person that keep they keep calling him a eunuch, but he may not have been physically eunuch. He may just have been an official, somebody with authority. And definitely he had a lot of money. OK, now the question then, I think, is why was he on this road? Obviously, apart from the fact that the spirit wanted these two people to meet, it was important to the spirit that these two people meet as part of this great commissioning that Jesus does at the end of the gospels, but also at the beginning of the Book of Acts and Acts chapter one, verse eight. And so why was he on this road less traveled? Why was he on this deserted road at noon?

[15:26] And. I can only think, believe that that this man wanted to be alone so that he could read in peace. He didn't want to be on a busy road with all sorts of things distracting him. He wanted to go through the wilderness. It says that he's in a chariot. That word. And we're going to say there's a lot about the text that we're talking about today, but I think that's part of it. It says he was in a chariot, but that's probably incorrect because there was room for both him and Philip in this chariot. And at one point he gives orders for the chariot to stop, which means there would be somebody driving. And there's not really room in a chariot for three people. And a chariot is more kind of a vehicle of war. And so it was probably more like a wagon that he was sitting in. But chariot sounds interesting. But he was sitting in his wagon, I think is the correct way to put it. He was sitting in his wagon. His driver was driving him. And here he was reading and he wanted peace and quiet on the road so he could read and try to understand it. But yet, as we find out, as we read our text, that he found it hard to understand. In fact, he says to Philip when they meet, how can I understand this unless somebody will interpret it for me?

[16:40] And so that's a good question. Let's see. OK. And we got some notes in the chat log. So I'm going to read these real quick. Michael says, before my dad became a Christian, he was teaching a mechanical engineering course as a professor. And with English being his third language, he kept on pronouncing unique as eunuch. And that could have made a lot of trouble in the classroom. He said he didn't know why everyone was laughing under their breath until he became a Christian and read this passage. All right. Good. Yeah, because the word eunuch is not our everyday vocabulary, I hope. OK, good.

[17:20] Let's see. Keep putting things in the chat log. This is good. Let's see here. So this man wants to be alone to read, but the spirit has other plans and he says he needs someone to interpret for him, so the spirit appoints Philip to meet him to work out the Great Commission. And this is an important meeting. We'll get to this a little bit later. But now we get a question. I think it's a very interesting question. The eunuch asks, who is the prophet talking about? He had been reading Isaiah 53, right? He you know, and it says what he was reading here. Like a sheep, he was led to slaughter, like a lamb silent before his shearer.

[18:02] Was he talking about himself or was he talking about somebody else? Well, what a great lead in. And I'll put in the chat log whether you think Isaiah was talking about himself or whether he was talking about somebody else. I think it's fairly an easy answer, but I want you to just be engaged. So go ahead and put in the chat log who was he talking about, himself or somebody else? And if the somebody else, who was the somebody else? Okay, put your answer in the chat log.

[18:28] But this becomes then an opportunity for Philip to share the gospel. It starts with a question from somebody who's trying to understand something and in a divine encounter on the road. So let's see here.

[18:47] So what you read then is that Philip begins to explain to this man everything about Jesus from the Old Testament. Now, remember, at this point, the New Testament hadn't been written. In fact, the New Testament was still being lived and created in a sense. Right. And so Philip draws on the Old Testament and indeed, this man had a copy of a portion of the Old Testament, and he begins to share with him all these things about Jesus. Now, this reminds me very much of something we looked at two weeks ago from Luke, chapter 24, verse 27, when Jesus was on the road with two of his disciples on the way to Emmaus. And one of them's name was Cleopas. But the other one did not have a name as far as we could tell. He had a name, but we weren't told what that name was. So that's one of the mysteries of the New Testament is who is the second disciple.

[19:43] And that's what it says in Luke 24, 27. Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. That's what Jesus did. And so now Philip is doing the same thing with this Ethiopian official. He's explaining from the Old Testament who Jesus is. And that leads me to a tantalizing theory, which I can't prove, which is that Philip was the second disciple on the road to Emmaus. We don't know if that's true or not, but it kind of fits because Philip was the first hand recipient of this sort of historical lecture from Jesus on the road about how he was the fulfillment of everything in the Old Testament. And he was ready then to give that sort of give that story to somebody else when it was called for. OK.

[20:40] Let's see. Natalie says, first question mark, smiley face. I like the smiley face. That helps. Craig says he was talking about Jesus. And Caleb says, I agree with Natalie. And Pam says, I think it was both himself and Jesus. The prophets followed this path of humiliation as a foreshadowing of the life of the Messiah, Jesus. Wow. Really good. This is excellent. Yes.

[21:07] Hey, Caleb, would you put just type space and then return in the chat log? And that way Pam's response will kind of flip flip up a little higher. There we go. Then everybody can for some reason we need to pull the bottom of the chat log down. We'll work on that some other day. I like Pam. I like everyone's answer. And I like Pam's answer a lot, too, because all of the prophets is from A to Z. Right. All of the prophets from A to Z were definitely humiliated and hurt by the people who did not want to hear what they had to say. So I could definitely see Isaiah as he's writing this and probably writing it about Jesus, about this man of sorrows. He was very much identifying with what this man of sorrows was going to endure and maybe and so identified with him in some in some sort of deep ways. So you see how I wasn't just asking you a simple question, but we get this sort of richness from our community when we interact this way. Thank God for that. So then it says.

[22:05] After Philip explains all these things to him. He believes he believes and he says, well, what's to prevent me from being baptized? And in a way, I would say miraculously, they come just as they come upon some water, which is think about it. It's hard to find in the wilderness. It's hard to find. But yet there it is. And so there's sort of the miraculous spirit led things just keep happening. And so Philip baptizes the official and instantly he is.

[22:38] Carried away, sort of swept away in some mysterious way. And the man goes on his way, gets back into his wagon and he continues the journey. And now he's a follower of Jesus. He's heard really secondhand, but very close. He's heard about the life of Jesus and how the whole whole Old Testament points to Jesus and he wants to receive the spirit and he wants to be baptized. OK, so we're going to look at the significance of this in a moment. But first, there's another interactive thing. And I'm going to ask Caleb not to bring up the very last text slide. But number three, text slide.

[23:16] OK, is that the yeah, that's. I'm going to go look at it real quick. I had to get a little closer to the screen there to see, make sure it was right. It is and we'll have to put the chat log back. So I want you to look at this. I keep doing that. I want you to look at this text and in the chat log, which we're going to put back up in a second, too.

[23:45] I want you to see if you notice that anything is missing. Tell me if anything's missing, put that in the chat log. OK, this is this is interesting, important, kind of related. So I've got the chat log here. Of course, it takes nine seconds after I say it before you even hear it. And it'll take a few more seconds before you respond.

[24:10] Yes, is any Victoria said. Is anything missing from the text? And I said, yes, check and see if anything is missing from the text. Exactly. OK. Also, you can add more unique stories into the chat log, that's that's acceptable.

[24:37] Caleb's typing, I don't know what's going on. We're going to see in a second. OK. All right, I should have had more filler for this section. Go ahead and look at it. Go ahead and look at it. Is anything missing? Look at it again.

[24:55] Can I give you a hint now? Look at the numbers of the verses. Do you see anything missing? OK. That was that was like the biggest hint. If anyone had gotten it before that, they would definitely deserve a candy.

[25:17] OK, Caleb wrote, it never says what happened to the eunuch. That's true, except that he just went on his way. The eunuch's response to Philip disappearing. Zach Nesbitt, 37. Yay, Zach. Very good. We don't notice these things. We just kind of keep reading. Zach noticed that verse 37 is missing. Lila says what Philip says. Good. That's true. Actually, there are both a part of the text missing and a part of the narrative is missing. The action goes a lot faster here at the end. OK.

[25:52] I thought somebody else had added something. There we go. Oh, Zach is a numbers guy. That's true. That's what Craig says. Zach is a numbers guy. OK. So the word is out. So the answer is that verse 37 is missing. Go ahead and put it back up, Caleb.

[26:11] Let's see. So it. It says we have verse 34, verse 35. Philip began to speak verse 36 as they were going along the road. And he says, here's some water. What does it prevent me from being baptized? So that's verse 36. And the very next verse is verse 38. Now, Caleb, I'm going to ask you to drop that one and put the fourth one on. And if you had a Bible in front of you, you would have a text note, whether it's NIV or NRSV.

[26:37] It would tell you that there was a reason for why it went from verse 36 to verse 38. Where is verse 37? And shouldn't that make you a little bit suspicious? Why is your Bible missing a verse? Well, actually, there are many other places in the Bible. We could give you a list of them where certain verses have been dropped or pulled out because they've been deemed not reliable by translators. And this is not a bad thing. This is actually a good thing. It means that people are paying a lot of attention to the manuscripts that we have. But here are the text notes that we have from the NRSV. The NRSV would have a text note here which says other ancient authorities. The authorities add all or most of verse 37. There it is. And Philip said, if you believe with all your heart, you may get baptized, that is. And he replied, I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. So that would be in the bottom margin. And there would be a letter, kind of a text, not a footnote, but a text note. There's different kinds of notes. One is a cross reference note. One is, you know, another one is a study note if you have a study Bible. But this is a text note. It's a note from the translator of the Bible. That tells you why they chose a certain

[27:44] word or why something is missing or so on. The NIV has this note. Some late manuscripts write baptized. So they would start at the beginning. What is to keep me from being baptized? Philip said, and this would be all of verse 37 then, if you believe with all your heart, you may. And the eunuch answered, I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. Now, so what's the reason? OK. Why is verse 37 missing? We can go back to the chat log now if you want.

[28:16] Let's see. Good eyes to see small numbers. Good, Craig. Yes. So here's why. And it's exactly because of the reasons that the text note gave us, is that the earliest translations that we have been able to unearth and find later in time do not have this verse. Now you can kind of think about then why is there a number? Well, the reason is because the most reliable man manuscripts they had at the time when verse numbers were added to the Bible, this was still in there. And so it got its own verse. Later, they found earlier manuscripts that didn't have this phrase. And so they said, we can't renumber them. We can't renumber the verses because that would mess up everybody else's reference books. So we just have to sort of start printing Bibles with verse 37 missing. Now, there's nothing in verse 37 as it's missing. That's wrong theologically, right? All it says is if you want to be baptized, you may. And the eunuch says, I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. There's nothing wrong with that. What we think happened is that that little inner exchange in verse 37 was probably some kind of baptismal formula that people would be sort of told and then say right as they were baptized. And so somebody, a scribe writing at some point said,

[29:40] oh, maybe that's what happened between Philip and this official. They did this sort of call and response, sort of preparation for baptism. And the thing that maybe you're kind of wondering to yourself is why would people back then, and this would be about 200, 300 A.D., why would people change the Bible? Isn't that like we would never do that? That's kind of a risky thing. The answer is sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they made mistakes. Sometimes they added things that they thought belonged there. Sometimes they injected some ideas of their own. In this case, there's nothing wrong theologically with it. But since there's nothing wrong theologically with it and it's not in the earliest manuscript, it's not like it was taken out early and added. It was it's not like it was taken out of the earliest manuscript. It was it was just never in them is the idea. And so our Bible translators, they go through this list. And even though they get something really nice like this, verse 37, they'll say, you know, it doesn't really belong, but I'm going to explain to you why it's not in your Bible and I'm going to even document it by putting a note at the bottom. And as I said, this shouldn't take away our confidence in our scriptures.

[30:58] It should actually increase our confidence in our scriptures that people have studied this so much. They've they've compared manuscripts. And if it's not in all the earliest manuscripts and it suddenly appears in a manuscript. And is in all manuscripts subsequent to that. Logically, it's a pretty good bet that that was an addition by a scribe. And thus we can make a note of it. But we decide that it's it doesn't really belong in scripture. OK, so.

[31:29] That's that was a sort of a side path, but I think when we and nobody noticed, but I thought somebody might notice, so I thought we needed to explain it. And so. There are other places in the Bible where a few things got added and your text notes will always tell you about them if they're significant and and almost in in almost no case whatsoever that I can think of. Do any of those additions radically alter the theological meaning or import of what's being said in that text? And so these things by themselves are not they're not very harmful. But for the sake of sort of for of thoroughness, our translators have these references that keep. The back of all these things. I spent enough time on that.

[32:12] I want to let you know that we don't know the name of this official who went down, who we assume he made it back to Ethiopia. He continued to serve under the Candace and he was the minister of finance. And in Ethiopia now there is a tradition that the Ethiopian church, which is called the Ethiopian Coptic Church, they do in their tradition, they trace the beginning of their church to this man. They say our church was started by this man. And thus that church has become or is now one of the oldest existing churches because it extended hundreds of miles away. And this is just, you know, a year or two after Jesus died and was raised again. And so this this the founding of the church in Ethiopia could could make it quite old. Now, is that true? It's probably partly true. The Coptic Church is a very old church and there's other strands that kind of is some of us lost in antiquity, but there's other strands that kind of indicate that it has a very old origin and just as a bonbon here for you, if you're interested. There is also a tradition that this church somehow acquired the Ark of the Covenant, that it was never destroyed or if it was lost or melted down by an invading army. But that somehow the Ethiopian Coptic

[33:39] Church ended up with the Ark of the Covenant and they're keeping it in a church in a town called Aksum. But for some reason, they're unwilling to show it to anybody. And so this cannot be confirmed. There's no actual proof. I think they would have to kind of show it to us if if we really wanted to believe it. But that that Ethiopian Coptic Church has a rich tradition. There's over 30 million followers of that church is a vibrant church.

[34:06] So now I'm going to ask us to take a look at the big picture of all this text we've gone in a few separate directions, but the text called for it today. What do we want to make of all of this? And I think it's this is that the spirit has moved two people in this text. One, the spirit moved him to read and to inquire and to take the road less traveled so he could have the time and the space to really devote to what he wanted to learn. And the other, he was led to meet him in a chance encounter on the road out in the wilderness, where God is able to speak to people in ways that they can't hear in other places. And instead of Philip needing to go to Ethiopia, he meets an important person from there who then goes back and uses his influence to spread the gospel. So Philip is keeping the Great Commission without even having to travel. He had traveled to Samaria and then come south to Jerusalem again. But he doesn't have to travel all the way to Ethiopia because God and the spirit had ordained that that he would create a missionary on the spot just to be able to go to the north of Jerusalem, who would then go and found, we believe, this church.

[35:14] And what I want to say to us today is that we really do have the same opportunity, right? There are people in our neighborhood who are from other parts of the world who may someday go back to their part of the world. Now, I want to do one last thing in the chat log, and this this won't take you long. But I want you to put a number, just a number. Could be five, could be 20, could be a range of number one to five, you know, five to ten, ten to 20. I want you to put a number, a number of people you work with who are your neighbors, who you meet in some other context like clubs or sports, some number of people who are from another country, they have to be from another country and they might eventually move home to that country. So I could think of a neighbor that we had who was from China. We have a neighbor from India. We have a neighbor from Russia. I'm just talking about in my own sort of apartment complex right now. We have another neighbor from India, right? We have we have a neighbor from China. OK, we have another. There's a second neighbor from China. And some of them, I do think they might eventually go back. They're not all they've not have not all naturalized. So put in the chat log a number,

[36:24] the number of people that you know who are from another country. You interact with that work anywhere else, clubs, things like that. Put that number in the chat log. OK. And these numbers are going to be higher here in places like Silicon Valley. And New York City. These numbers are going to be lower in places like the church I served long ago, a church in northwest Iowa, which was all farm country. There were people from other countries there, but really not as many. Really not as many. So we live in a particular place. God has maybe ordained that we would live in a place like this where there are a lot of people from other countries who might eventually move home.

[37:03] So that's Zach wrote 250. He really is a numbers guy. My word. I believe it. I believe it. Pam says six. Let's keep those numbers coming in. I think if I were to put my number, if you count my kids and their schoolmates and their and their parents, I would put my number between ten and 20. So I'm going to type that in here. Michael Lou says at least 50. I'm going to type ten to 20 in the chat log. There we go. Craig says lots from other countries. Not sure. Not sure how many will move back, though. He says five to ten.

[37:41] Michael says 50 at least. Thanks, Silicon Valley Tech Company. No doubt. Yeah. OK. All right. I'm going to wait a few more seconds. So now here's the thing. Is this this opportunity that Philip has to share the gospel with somebody who's on his way home? So he happened to be right then on his way home. That spread the gospel hundreds of miles away. And it was the spirit's work. And so I really think that we have that same opportunity. We don't need I mean, we definitely need missionaries. We need missionaries to travel to other countries. But the mission field is right next door to your house. You can build a relationship with somebody right next to you. It begins maybe with a question. What do you believe? How do I understand all this? And then beginning it would be wouldn't be quite the same conversation. But you could say then beginning at the beginning, you could explain to them how Jesus is the answer to the problems of life. And that's those is a relational thing, definitely. But it starts with relationships and it starts. It only needs to start next door. And someday maybe those people will move home and they they may be important people. Everybody is important, but they may be people who are influential,

[38:52] who have influence over other people in their home country. And thus the gospel will spread. Natalie says five to ten half our fellowship at San Jose State. Good. OK. So. Now that you put your number down and if you haven't even typed a number, you don't have to now, it's OK, but if you want to go ahead of that number.

[39:17] In your head, even if it's just in your head, even if it's just one, I want you to visualize that person or those people and ask yourself, which of those people. Am I going to see soon? Which of those people might the spirit be directing me to develop a deeper relationship with somehow? Which of those people is going to be receptive and ask the spirit this. Which of those people is going to be receptive to hearing about Jesus? And so we live and we live in the spirit. We're guided by the spirit. And I trust if we do that enough, the spirit will take us to that next person. And that person may or may not move home anytime soon, but they might and they might take that message with them. And I think we want to be prepared before that happens. We want to have those. Relationships working and in place. So that's that's the sermon. It's not as sort of it's a different kind of sermon today. Thank you, everybody, for participating in the chat log. I really appreciate that. I think it's kind of fun to do it this way. But let's let's pray. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you again for your word. Thank you that you put people in our lives. And and Lord, may the spirit prompt us to reach out to people who need to hear the gospel.

[40:32] And we ask all this in Jesus name.