This tape contains the 19th of a series of teachings on the book of Acts by the Reverend John W. Howe of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. The teaching is entitled, The Most Unlikely Fellowship, and covers the 15th chapter of Acts, verse 36, to the end of chapter 16. We have one more paragraph in Acts chapter 15. If you have a newer translation of the Bible, you probably have a little break there between verse 35 and verse 36. There's some time that goes by.

We have really completed now not only the first missionary journey, but the council which ensues from it, which follows upon it, and which deals with the question of the Gentiles' incorporation into the Christian faith. Then we read in verse 36, After some days, Paul said to Barnabas, Come, let us return and visit the brethren in every city where we proclaim the word of the Lord and see how they are. So you see the heart of a real pastor here.

We're not sure exactly how much time has gone by, but we're beginning what comes to be known as the second missionary journey. There are in fact three recorded in the book of Acts. And this second missionary journey, most scholars would date this approximately 50 A.D.

And it begins with Paul's concern to go back to the churches that they established on the first journey. To go back and basically cover the same route to strengthen the brethren, see how things are going on. Now, as it turns out, they go well beyond where they had previously been.

They break new territory and end up establishing brand new churches. but the original concern is simply to go back and visit the brethren and see how they're doing. Verse 37, and Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark or John Mark, Barnabas's nephew.

You remember that in the middle of the first journey, John Mark withdrew. He decided to go home when they were in Pamphylia. And so Paul reacts pretty negatively to this.

He says, you know, we've tried that before and he washed out, and I really don't think he should accompany us on this second journey. It says, verse 39, there arose a sharp contention. So they ended up separating from each other.

Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. You remember that's where the other journey began. That was Barnabas' own home.

They went back there again. And we don't trace the rest of their particular journey. but it started in Cyprus and we're not sure where it went from there.

We continue the story with Paul who chose Silas to go with him and departed. Now Silas was one of the ones that was sent by the Jerusalem elders to take the decision from the Jerusalem council, to take it back to Antioch and to begin to disseminate it. So Paul and Silas become a team at this point and we read a great deal about them from here on out, Paul and Silas.

Paul chose Silas, one of the Jerusalem Jews, who it was previously told to us was a prophet. I think we ought to notice this contention. We ought not to make too much of it.

It was a contention over an issue. I don't think it was genuinely a breaking of fellowship. It was a policy matter.

Paul said, I don't want to take with us somebody who we previously took and who washed out. Barnabas, Barnabas you remember, his typical spirit, son of encouragement. Barnabas is the guy who's always prepared to give somebody another chance.

Always prepared to see some good in those who other people overlook. If you stop and think about it, it's very likely that Paul would never have been led into a leadership position or perhaps even accepted at all as a Christian, were it not for Barnabas who intercedes on his behalf. As it turns out, Barnabas is right.

Barnabas is right, although we don't trace the story here. Mark goes off and eventually links up with Peter, becomes a kind of a secretary to Peter, and what we know as the Gospel of Mark is really a written down distillation of the preaching of Peter. And one of the ways you can tell that is if you were to compare very carefully the kind of thing that Peter says in the very abbreviated speeches that appear in the beginning of the book of Acts and then cross-reference that with the gospel according to Mark, you find that they're identical.

Mark's gospel is an expanded version of Peter's preaching. And he goes on eventually, we know this from Christian history, to found a tremendous church in Alexandria, Egypt. So God is not finished with Mark.

Paul may well have gotten finished with him too early. God isn't finished with him. But even that isn't the end of the story.

Probably the very last thing that Paul wrote was 2 Timothy. Some would say it may have been literally hours before Paul's death, as he was in prison in Rome, facing virtually certain martyrdom. And as 2 Timothy comes to a conclusion, chapter 4 and verse 11, he says, get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful in serving me.

Isn't that a lovely kind of footnote to the story? We don't know the details of that. We don't know how many times in what ways their paths crossed or how their hearts were knit together again after this initial kind of falling out.

At this particular juncture, though, there is a sharp contention. And the end result of it is that where you previously had one missionary team, now you've got two. So don't make overly much of it.

God knows what he's up to. He has an agenda for Paul and Silas, and he has an agenda for Barnabas and Mark, and that's not the end of the story. Sometimes we go separate ways over policy issues, but I don't sense here a real breaking of fellowship at the deepest level.

Now, two fascinating things happen as we start off on this second missionary journey. And I'm just going to summarize this quickly without going into a lot of detail because the scripture itself doesn't go into a lot of detail. It simply mentions it.

We read verse 3 as they're going from city to city, Derbe, Lystra, we remember these cities, Iconium, and so on. Verse 3, Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him. And he took him and of all things circumcised him.

Now stop and think what we've just been through. This tremendous debate over whether or not Gentiles had to be circumcised in order to become Jews. And Paul won the day, if you want to put it in human terms.

Paul's case was they don't need to be circumcised. And his opinion prevailed, because it wasn't his opinion, it was the opinion of the Holy Spirit. Now what does he do? Picks up Timothy and has him circumcised.

It's very interesting what's going on here. I'd like to suggest to you that this is not a compromise in any sense of the word on Paul's part to a spirit of Pharisaism. Not at all.

But rather, it's a strategy for evangelism. There is no way you can read into this that Paul is of the opinion that that will somehow make Timothy more acceptable with God. But it might make him more acceptable with some of the folks that he has to minister to.

Timothy is coming out of a mixed family. Mother, a believer, father, a Gentile pagan. and Paul wants to settle that matter because Timothy's in a never-never land.

Jews don't accept him and the Greeks don't accept him. Either way, see? So let him be clearly identified with the Jewish community in this sense but go on to a full faith in Christ which he already has anyway.

And it's a strategy for evangelism. The other thing I wanted to just notice with you is that if you drop down to verse 10 there is a change here And it's not commented on, but up to this point it's been they, they, they, they. And suddenly you hit verse 10, and immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia.

Verse 11, we made direct voyage to Samothrace and so on. And what's obviously happened is that at this point Luke joins the missionary party. No fanfare about it, but it's quite clear that when they sought to go on in response to the vision, to come over to Macedonia when they're in Troas.

That's where they picked up Luke. And from time to time now for the rest of the book of Acts the language shifts back and forth. We, they, we, they.

I'd just sum that up by saying that Paul is willing to stand on a principle as far as Barnabas and John Mark goes. He's willing to stand on a principle to the point of breaking up a team. and yet he's willing to bend to the point of almost apparent compromise when truth is not at stake and he's willing to have Timothy circumcised truth is not at stake strategy for evangelism isn't that an interesting two sides of his character well you might want to work this out on a map again as we did previously They went through Syria, through Cilicia, back into Asia Minor, Iconium, Lystra, Derby.

They went through Phrygia and Galatia. They came to Mysia, which is on the western coast of Asia Minor, modern Turkey. And at that point, they're told not to go east into Asia.

The Holy Spirit forbade them. They wanted to go on into Asia proper, and the Holy Spirit said no. In fact, very interesting language in verse 7. When they came opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus.

That's just a parenthesis for us. That's a lovely phrase. The Holy Spirit is so closely identified with the work of Jesus.

His job, if you will, is to glorify Jesus. that on this and two other occasions in the New Testament he's called the Spirit of Jesus or the Spirit of Christ. That's a kind of a theological shorthand.

Okay? He is the Spirit of Jesus as well as the Spirit of the Father as well as a person in his own right. But he is continually pointing away from himself and to the Lord Christ.

And I just remind us, just in passing, that that which purports to be of the Holy Spirit is principally tested by whether or not it brings glory to Christ. You can begin to be suspect of that which purports to be the Holy Spirit when it calls attention to itself. When it's glorifying Christ, you're on pretty strong ground.

I'm interested in the fact that here and then shortly again, the Holy Spirit does not give them positive guidance, but he gives them negative guidance. He says, don't go there. Don't go there.

My own experience has been that that's more often the case than positive direction step by step by step. And I'm interested in the kind of very fresh, almost matter-of-fact approach that the apostles have to guidance. Paul says, I think it would be a good idea to go back and visit the churches.

He says, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's go do it. And they don't sit around having an endless prayer meeting waiting for visions and signs.

They get on with it. They believe that God can guide them through their sanctified common sense. And I know an awful lot of people who take a well-meaning desire to be led of the Spirit to the point where, you know, they really leave their common sense behind and end up, I don't know if you've ever known anybody like that.

I've known people who said the phone rings and they pray about whether or not they should answer it. I know people like that. Stand in front of their closet and pray about what they should put on that day.

There may be. There may be some spirituality in that. There may be a lot of bondage in that.

A lot of bondage in that. My experience of the Holy Spirit is not like that. Okay?

But I do find that when I'm going off, if my heart is open to the Lord God, if I'm about to make a mistake, He gives me a check in my spirit. Just don't do that. And when the Holy Spirit checks you, you better stop.

Could I just leave that as a very practical word? My experience, for what it's worth, is that the Holy Spirit more often stops me doing something than gives me a detailed game plan of what I ought to do. Having said all that, the next thing that happens is a vision calling them to Macedonia.

You really are in a frivolous mood today. A dream by night, a man of Macedonia standing beseeching him, saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us. the Macedonian call.

And when he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. Well, Macedonia is actually entering Europe. And it's the first time, the first official foray into Europe.

They go to Philippi, to what's called a leading city of Macedonia, a Roman colony, in verse 12. It's really a miniature Rome. This was Roman policy.

Wherever they had occupied territory, they would set up a city. Usually it was already the leading city before they took it over. But they would infiltrate it with Roman mores, architectural style, music, the arts, whatever, as well as government, and it became a kind of a miniature Rome.

And it's interesting to note Paul's strategy in evangelizing is always to go to the leading city of the district. And it's quite obvious why he does it. This is the place of interchange, of commerce, people coming and going, buying and selling.

You evangelize from the center of the wheel and then it reaches out along the spokes. And so typically Paul goes, and again, sanctified common sense, he goes to the leading city of the district. The vision didn't say go to Philippi.

The vision said come to Macedonia. Paul goes to Philippi. You can perceive a strategy even beyond that.

It says, verse 13, And on the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate to the riverside where we supposed there was a place of prayer. And we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together. Now why did they suppose there was a place of prayer there?

Because where there was not an officially organized synagogue, the Jews in a given area of pagan territory would gather by a riverside. This is how the synagogues got started, was they'd go down to the riverside to make use of an abundant source of water for their ritual cleansings. And so the synagogues typically formed on riverbanks.

And we have a lot of that down by the riverside. You know, it carries over even into our own hymnody. All right?

There's not a synagogue here, but they suppose that there being none, it's probable that the Jews and the proselytes to Judaism would gather on the Sabbath day by the riverside, and so they go down there. Sure enough, they find some. And one who heard us was a woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira.

Thyatira is back in Asia Minor. It's one of the churches of the Book of Revelation, one of the seven churches. Lydia is a seller of purple goods.

Thyatira was known for its various guilds, every sort of trade union, copper workers, woodworkers, dyers, garment district, and so on. In particular, it was known for a dye, a Thyatiran dye. It was called Turkey Red.

It was a deep dye made from the Madar root, and that's apparently what she was selling, a very popular dye to use in making your clothes. it also calls her a worshipper of God. She is probably a proselyte, though she may not be.

She may just be a God-fearer, as we've encountered them before. She has attached herself to the Jewish community, even though she's coming out of a Gentile background. She may have officially joined the Jewish community, or she may just be on the periphery of it, a God-fearer.

The Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul. And when she was baptized with her household, she besought us, saying, If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us.

So you can read a number of things into that story just by noticing the details of how she responds. Number one, she's clearly a woman of some means to be able to open up her house for an extended period to a group that includes at least Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke, and possibly others. She has a household.

We're not told how big it is, but she's baptized along with her household, as was typical. We've seen that before. When she makes the decision, they get baptized.

So that means she's the head of the household. Now, whether she's a widow lady who inherited her husband's business, or whether she got it from her father and grew up into it, we don't know the details, but she's obviously a woman of some means, the head of a business, the head of a household, a fairly large household, and she's making it in a man's world. She's making a success of her business of selling purple dye and purple goods in a man's world.

She has to be a fairly tough businesswoman. That's a rather interesting choice on God's part for the very first convert in the history of Europe. A woman's liver.

I'm interested that she wastes no time. She gets baptized. She believes and is baptized.

I just call that to your attention again. We've commented on that many times. Could have been that very day.

You know, they're by the riverside. That's the first convert, and she prevailed upon us. They go and they stay.

This becomes the base of operations, is the home of Lydia. The Lord opened her heart, and she received. Verse 16, as we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by soothsaying.

She followed Paul and us, crying, These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaimed to you the way of salvation. And she did this for many days. But Paul was annoyed and turned and said to the spirit, I charge you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.

And it came out that very hour. It does not say so, but I presume that she also was converted. I just presume that on the basis of the spiritual care that Paul and the others would certainly exercise for her.

You don't cleanse the house and then leave it empty for the evil spirit to go get seven of his buddies and come back and make the end of that woman worse than the beginning. It's also immediately apparent that her owners are infuriated over this. They don't care at all for the fact that she was demon-possessed.

They care only for the fact that she was successful at her divination and brought in money. As soon as she loses her power to foretell the future, They got no more interest in her. They're just angry at Paul for casting the spirit out of her.

So she's homeless. She's abandoned. And my assumption is that they preached the gospel.

She was converted and joined herself to the budding Christian community. It's interesting that she followed them for many days, isn't it? That Paul's immediate response was not to cast the demon out the first time she said this.

He let it go on many days. It's interesting that when the time was right, he cast it out like that. It's interesting that he did not welcome the free publicity.

Yeah? It was saying the right thing. These men are prophets of the Most High God.

But neither Jesus nor his apostles will accept the acclaim of demons. Why? because it is not offered in reverence and submission notice as you read through the gospels evil spirits consistently recognize who Jesus is long before anybody else does and they fear him are you going to cast us into the pit before our time is the kind of thing you hear them saying they know who he is and they know that he is in authority over them but they do not accept that fact gladly and Jesus silences them and casts them out and so too Paul.

But I'm interested that he didn't do it immediately. I'm a little concerned about those whose immediate response to troubled people is to try to cast spirits out of them. You do an awful lot of damage if you're moving ahead of God.

Paul clearly waited for God's timing in this situation. When the time was right it was dealt with immediately and easily. No big deal.

And as I say, my presumption is that she became part of the budding community. What an interesting combination of Lydia and this slave girl. Demon-possessed slave girl.

But that's not the end of the story. When her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas, dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. When they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, these men are Jews and they're disturbing our city.

I mean, what have they been doing all this time? But they advocate customs which it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice. That's a half-truth.

The Jews were permitted the freedom to worship their God as an exception to the rule under the Roman Empire. Everybody else was commanded to bow down and pay obeisance to Caesar and to acknowledge Caesar is Lord. The Jews were not forced to do that because the Romans had discovered that no way are you going to get the Jews to do that anyway.

Leave them alone and they'll be good, upstanding citizens and they'll pay their taxes. So they left them alone. But if Christianity is not simply a form of Judaism, if the Jews are not sanctioning it, then it is some third thing, neither Roman nor Jewish.

And so they have an element of truth in the accusation. But of course they're twisting it because it's not out of concern for the city at all. They're just angry that their source of income has been taken away.

The crowd joined in attacking them. The magistrates tore the garments off them, gave orders to beat them with many blows upon them. This is a Roman beating, not a Jewish.

The Jewish, you remember, had a limit to it. Forty stripes minus one. Some element of humanity.

the Romans would beat you until you were absolutely just a pile of jelly. And that was the case here. They inflicted many blows upon them, and then they threw them into prison, charging the jailer to keep them safely.

Having received this charge, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. Now again, it doesn't say so, but a little bit of background is probably the case. It is probable that the jailer was himself a criminal because that was the typical way that the Romans ran their prisons.

They took the hardest of the hardened criminals and put him in charge of the others. They figured he had already known how to make it in that society and they gave him some privileges. He had access to his family.

He usually had a house connected to or just a little bit removed from the prison. He had a higher standard of living, obviously, than the typical prisoner, and some freedom to come and go as he saw fit. But the prisoners were under his control on pain of death to him.

They get free, you're dead. Okay? So he's got a certain vested interest in keeping things in order.

And about midnight, Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns to God. and the prisoners, the other prisoners are listening to them and well they might can you imagine the scene these men come in with their backs just a mass of quivering jelly in stocks in the innermost prison the prison inside the prison and what are they doing? singing praising God they're not even saying oh God we know that you can deliver us if you care to they're not even saying that they're just praising him were there ever prisoners like this?

Suddenly there's a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison are shaken and immediately all the doors are opened and everyone's fetters are unfastened, not just Paul and Silas, but everybody else. We don't know how many that is, how many other prisoners. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were opened, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself for the reasons we've just seen.

Supposing that the prisoners had escaped. Better suicide at his own hand than what the Romans are going to do to him. All right?

You get the picture. But Paul cried with a loud voice, Do not harm yourself, for we're all here. Now, why they're all still there?

Whether the others are terrified, whether they're absolutely amazed, unable to move, I mean I'm not sure I would move you know if you're suddenly set free by what is obviously a supernatural happenstance in the midst of the very presence of God I'm not sure I would leave at that point he says don't harm yourself we're here the jailer calls for lights rushes in trembling with fear he falls down before Paul and Silas and brought them out and said men what must I do to be saved one of the all time great Questions. I frankly don't know what he meant by that. I'm not sure that he was asking it in the full theological sense of the question.

What must I do to be saved from the wrath of the God who has just opened the prison? That may be what he was asking. What must I do to be saved from the wrath of the Romans?

Or possibly, he really was asking the question, what must I do to be saved from the whole fabric, the network of wrong relationships and goals and values in which I find myself caught. How do I get what you've got? Whatever he was asking, Paul's answer drove to the very heart of the matter.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. You and your whole household as well. And there we have it yet again.

The whole household is included. It's not automatic. It's not magic.

We've already seen that the members of the household have certainly the need to own this faith in their own right. But it says just one more time that the head of the household, the parents in particular, have the privilege and responsibility to bring up their little ones and to include them in the promises of God as we take him seriously. Paul drives right to the heart of the matter.

That is not the only thing he said. It says that they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. That's just a one-sentence summary.

All right, but they expounded the word. Now, can you imagine what these men have been through already this day? It's the middle of the night.

They've been beaten nearly to the point of death. They have escaped a supernatural deliverance from the innermost prison. Now there's the opportunity to be free and do they say we'll talk about it in the morning no they preach the word of God to them that moment and he's baptized he took them into his house that same hour of the night washed their wounds and he was baptized at once with his family does the picture begin to register to become a Christian is to repent, is to put your faith in Christ, is to be baptized with water, is to receive the Holy Spirit in His power, and you can't separate those things from each other.

Now, you may experience them in any variety of patterns, but a biblical point of view is that those four things are all one and the same and you can't separate them. And it happens at once. no two years later we get around to it it's all part of the package then he brought them up into his house and set food before them and he rejoiced with all his household that he had believed in God very quickly let's move on when it was day the magistrates sent the police saying let those men go there was no just charge against them they found that out after having beaten them the jailer reported the words to Paul saying the magistrates have sent to let you go.

Now therefore come out and go in peace. But Paul said to them, they have beaten us publicly, uncondemned men who are Roman citizens and have thrown us into prison. Now do they cast us out secretly?

No. Let them come themselves and take us out. Paul is not primarily interested in his own status. He is consistently interested in the implications for the gospel, in the legitimacy of the cause.

As a Roman citizen, he has been mistreated. If he were merely a Jew, the Romans could do that to him by their law. Remember how the Sermon on the Mount goes.

The Romans have the right to insist that a Jew carry their bags for them. If he compels you to go a mile, you go too, says Jesus. has the right to compel them to do things for them.

The Romans have the right to execute judgment on Jews prior to a proper trial, but not on a fellow Roman citizen. And so Paul uses the credentials which are his before the law for the sake of the gospel. Let them come themselves and take us out.

The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens, so they came and apologized to them. And they took them out and asked them to leave the city. Please leave.

And they did. Just as we've seen in a couple of sessions earlier, when they finished up their first missionary journey, they went from city to city, town to town, strengthened the brethren, and left, believing that Jesus Christ is able to take care of His church. Now, I want us, in leaving this chapter, just to stop for a moment.

we considered the extraordinary fellowship back in Antioch a few weeks ago that God would make one body out of such a diverse group of people as we found in Antioch consider this fellowship Lydia Gentile Asia Minor Thyatira God-fearer perhaps perhaps a proselyte successful business woman making it in a man's world and a demon-possessed slave girl and a hardened ex-criminal. And God says, guess what? You're to fall in love with each other.

You are to be my body more in love with each other than you have ever been with any other human being. People who, in the normal course of things, would never ever cross each other's path. I mean, there's no way they would have anything to do with each other.

And God says, you are now members of my body, and you're going to have to learn how to relate to each other in that new relationship. And perhaps there were others that are unmentioned. Almost certainly others were converted down by the riverside.

we run into them when Paul writes to the Philippians 12 years later the book of Philippians is addressed to some of those Iodia and Syntyche and some of the others what an extraordinary fellowship I would offer that to you as the most unlikely fellowship and may I say that there is no choice left to us as to whom we will love in the body of Christ the last person, humanly speaking, that you would ever have anything to do with. God picked that person just for your sake. And you for that person to irritate the stink out of you.

Literally. Whoever it is in the body of Christ who drives you absolutely up a wall is God's great gift to you. It rubs, what does it do?

It rubs the rough edges off of us to have to come into contact constantly with the people who irritate us. Why do they irritate us? Not only or even primarily because of something wrong in them, but because of something wrong in us.

Right? I mean, isn't it interesting that people who don't irritate anybody else irritate us, right? And they begin to rub on us and rub on us and rub on us.

Some of you may have heard this example. It's a true example. I was in Harry Strong's house one night.

and I heard this strange grinding sound down in the basement. And I said, what in the world is that? And Harry said, oh, that's our rock polisher.

Well, he had gotten a present for his kids, and you go out and you pick up an ordinary field stone and throw it into this thing with a bunch of other ordinary field stones, and you add some water, and it grinds and it grinds and it grinds and it grinds. Over the period of a couple of weeks, it goes from an ordinary field stone to a beautiful, rounded, smooth, polished, semi-precious stone. I said, that is a picture of the body of Christ.

That's what God does. He takes you and me with all of our awkwardness and ugliness and He throws us together and pours in a little bit of living water and starts the grinding. And I said to Harry, I said, how do you know how long to leave him in there?

And here's his answer. He said, when I can see my face reflected in him. How about that?

when Jesus Christ can see His face reflected in you and me without distortion, then the grinding's done. Until then, there may be a little more grinding that needs to take place. This is the story of Philippi.

Next time you read the book of Philippians, read it against that backdrop. The book of Philippians is written for two purposes, one of which is to thank them for being more responsive to Paul's request to support the work financially, primarily back in Jerusalem but elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean world. They're more responsive to that request than any other church that Paul's in contact with.

The principal reason for the book of Philippians is to thank them for their love to him and to the church worldwide. The second reason, which you don't come to until nearly the end of the book, is that two gals, I've already mentioned their names, Iodia and Syntyche, have a problem. We don't know what it was.

Paul writes a letter, and nearly 2,000 years later we're still reading it, publicly calling upon them to get their act together. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine the bishop writing a letter to us here at Toro and say, Mary and Sue, I exhort you to come to love each other, and I call on the rest of the community to help them do it.

That's what's going on. That's how important our oneness is to the Lord Jesus. The grinding hasn't quite finished.

And we need each other to wear off those rough edges until Jesus Christ's face is reflected without distortion in each one of us living stones. Amen? Amen.