I'd like to go back to the book of Hebrews to chapter twelve. And we consider this morning those first two verses wherefore seeing we also are accomplished about was so great a cloud of witnesses. Let us lay aside every weight and a sin which does so easily beset us. Let us run with patience the race that set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest you be weary and faint in your mind. You have not resisted unto blood, striving against sin. And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto sons, My son despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint, when thou art rebuked of him, for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth and scourgeth every son he receives. If he endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons, for what son is he whom the Father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement of where all are partakers, then are ye bastards and not sons. We've had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but he for our profit that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening for the present seems to be joyous but grievous. Nevertheless afterward it yielded the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them who are exercised by it. Wherefore lift up the hands that hang down and the feeble knees, and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way, but let it rather be healed. Follow peace with all men in holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. Looking diligently, lest any man fail of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness bringing up trouble you, and by it many be defiled. Let there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau, who for one morsel of food sold his birthright. For ye know how afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it with tears. Now this morning we took a look And we saw that we all entered a race and we were going to consider the race, the previous runners of the race, the cloud of witnesses. Then the preparation for the race let us lay aside every weight, the preservation in the race let us run, the discipline and self-control, the perspective of the race. looking unto Jesus, we needed to see him and to keep him in our vision. And then we needed to see him as the perfecter of the runner. He's the author, the leader, the captain, the originator, and the finisher of our faith. And then we saw the patience of the race, the patience of Christ, the example that he set before us, that we need to run as he runs, that he endured the cross. and not counting the shame. We need to endure those things that come upon us, recognizing and realizing that he's the author of this life of faith. And then lastly, we saw the prize, the race finished, when we would indeed be at his right hand, even as the Lord Jesus sat himself down at the right hand of the throne of God. In our verse Today in verse three, we read and consider him. I'll try not to spend too much time with this in order to get rid of the second part or to get to the second part of running the race and talk about in the race, why do the runners suffer? You know, what is brought to pass that the runners find such a difficult time. But I'd like, first of all, in a race to consider him. Now, it's good to have a hero. It's good to have a model. It's sad to say you ask the kids today who your heroes are. Not too many of them would tell you, Daniel or David or Goliath or, yeah, even Goliath. That's on the negative side. You got the He-man today. That's probably what the kid would tell you. Anyhow, so many of them have picked heroes of the world instead of the Word of God. But when we look at it here, he has given us a role model. Let me put it that way, okay? We have a role model in the Lord Jesus. And so he says to consider him. Now, if we spent the time considering him for a while, we would have to consider the infant Christ. You know, who was he? And when we see him born, we're told that unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior which is Christ the Lord. An angel had told Mary that she would call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins. That his name was to be called Emmanuel, God with us. So when we consider the Lord Jesus in his birth as an infant, he was God manifest in the flesh. In his incarnation, He came to reveal God to us as He became the perfect man. See, we needed a substitute for our sin. And in order to be delivered from that, I would need someone who was like me who could go through death and come out on the other side. And that is why God had to come in the form of a man, the Lord Jesus. He was God, sinless, even though he was made sin. He knew no sin. He did no sin. And neither was there any guile found in his mouth. So he could pass through death, come out on the other side. So the only way I would have a Savior is if God came, a God-man. And so he came that he might deliver me. Now consider him in his incarnation as he walked here. He went through all sorts of trials. We read of what he had. Birds of the air had nests. Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air had nests, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. When you consider him, he went through poverty, didn't he? Even though the universe was his, he owned a cattle on a thousand hills, all the riches, we often say to ourselves, how about me and how about mine? Where is my share? Where do I come in? Ah, look at the Lord Jesus. It was all his. And yet he laid it aside. So when we run the race, we need to remember that. Consider him. He took absolute poverty even though he was rich. Yet we read that, don't we? Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich. Oh, to have the riches of the grace of the Lord Jesus, what riches they are. Then when he went through this scene, you know, they accused them of being illegitimate. They said to him, they threw in his teeth, we be not born of fornication. See, they were accusing him of being an illegitimate son. And so there must have been some of that that went along. If Joseph wasn't his father, then Mary was pregnant when Joseph took her to himself to marry her. And so that history went along with him all those thirty years of growth because he never went into a public ministry. And it was then in that public ministry that they began to throw that at. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth and you see how they clashed them? So we need to see in our life as we run the things that were brought against Christ. But we need to consider him in the sense of his face. You know what we read in Isaiah fifty, fifty-two, that his visage was marred more than any man. When the Lord Jesus went to Calvary's cross and went through it, I wonder what his face looked like. Now, in that day they grew beards and they said they plucked the hairs from his cheek. Isaiah said that in chapter fifty. And so that must have been excruciating pain to go through someone just grabbing a fistful of hair and ripping it right out of the face. He must have been tormented in so many ways. You consider his face. He fixed it as a flint toward Calvary. He never varied. Consider him. You know, he had the goal in sight, didn't he? That we looked at this morning. It was a prize for him. And he valued that. Return to the right hand of the Majesty on high. We have a prize to be like Christ. And so we need to keep the end in view. Consider his head, blessed head, holy head. When the demons saw him, they had to say, What have we to do with thee, thou holy one of God? The demons had to confess his holiness as he began his ministry. The angels announced his holiness before he was born. Angels said to Mary, That holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. One time preaching on that verse down at Park of the Palms in Florida. Afterwards, a man came up to me very angry. He said, I don't like that. I said, you don't like what? He said, I don't like calling the Lord Jesus a holy thing. But that's what Scripture says. And it puts it that way. See, it's in a neutral. It's in a neuter. It isn't male or female. But what is that thing? He was he. Oh, he was to be the Savior. of the world. That holy one. She had to be holy in order to be the Savior. And we need to see that he was the holy one. Remember when he was crucified and he was nailed to the tree. And as he's nailed there and finally his life is yielded up, Father, into thy hand, I commend my spirit. And the centurion standing below that cross looked up and he said, Truly, this was a righteous man. This was the Son of God. One gospel writer says he was a righteous man, and the other one says that he said he was the Son of God. And so you see, both of them, the centurion, uttered those words. Each gospel writer seemed to remember a particular thing he said, but you put them together. He was declared righteous as the Son of God. And so we see him as the Holy One, the Holy Head from Heaven. That's what he was. Then when you consider his hands, And as you view Him, you know, we use our hands in His race, don't we? And sometimes in a race, our hands are bruised and beaten and were hurt and everything else. And yet when we view Him, they took those blessed hands and they nailed them to the tree. Eternally, those hands are marked with the marks of Calvary. And as we consider Him in the race, we need to see that His life was given to do the work of God, the Father. You see, our hands speak of what we do. And when the Lord Jesus came, he said, I'm come not to do my will, but the will of him that sent him. He fully fulfilled the will of the Father in doing the Father's will as he went to Calvary. But consider the suffering of Christ. You know, we don't like to suffer, do we don't like pain. We don't like the anguish of heart that comes. We don't like the blisters on our hands that come, or we don't like the sickness of the body that come. We don't like that. But when we view the Lord Jesus as he ran the race, running it for me and running it for you, he suffered. Now, there's the suffering of Gethsemane. Remember when he went there, he sweat as it were, great drops of blood. That's pretty hard for us to enter into that type of anguish. We do enter into anguish and anxiety is raised, but to have that anxiety where it brings out a perspiration has blood, I don't know of any man that ever entered into that. And I don't believe that he was perturbed over what Calvary might bring as to the suffering of the body and death, because he knew who he was and he knew what would happen. He knew he was going there to pay a price. He knew what the price was. But a psalmist of old could say, I was cast on thee from my mother's belly. From the time he was born, he was totally resting in the Father's first care. And he knew Calvary was the Father's will. And he was willing for the suffering. He was willing. And so when he went there, he suffered outwardly, as we've mentioned, the face, the hands, the feet. Yes, he suffered though. But he also suffered inwardly, as I mentioned in the meeting this morning. You know, that type of suffering, we do not understand what happens in it. That type of suffering is hard for us to come to. We can understand some of the, how shall I put it, the anguish that comes, but we have never been holy ones. We've never been holy ones. Not to the sense of that perfection, of holiness that is God. Not to that sense. I think to the sense of a man in which he was created, Adam was holy. But he did not have that absolute perfection of holiness, or he would have never sinned. The perfection of holiness that God has is unfailable. That's unfailable. God can never fail. And so when we see him there on Calvary's cross, in the agony and the anguish, of that inwardly suffering on the cross, of the loneliness that he felt of the suffering of being separated from his father, he knew. But they crucified him. Now the suffering of the crucifixion was bad and he died from that physically. But when Adam was separated from God in the garden, Adam didn't drop dead. God said, the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Adam did not drop dead physically, but he died spiritually. He was separated from God. In order for me to be redeemed, there had to be two deaths. There had to be the physical death because that's a result of sin as well. And there had to be that spiritual death of separation. Adam knew the spiritual death first. He knew the physical death afterwards. And so when the Lord Jesus on the cross, he died both deaths. He died physically when he cried, Father, are my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The Father turned totally from the Son. He left them alone, nailed on that cross. And then the Lord Jesus died physically when he said, Father, into thy hand, I commend my spirit. You know, this guy Theme from Texas was teaching years ago. And a lot of people started to follow him. that there was no value in the physical death of the Lord Jesus, that the value was in the spiritual death. But I want you to know something, that before ever the law was given, and after Noah came out of the ark and a sacrifice was made, the Lord made the statement that the life is in the blood and it shall make an atonement for your soul. The death of Christ on the cross, the physical death was necessary. It was through the shedding of that blood that my soul was atoned for. Make no mistake. There is a couple of things you need to do when you hear another wind blowing. You need to say to yourself, what does he say about the blood of Christ? And what does he say about the person of Christ? And if either one of them is denied, you can be sure it's a cult that's following something else other than the Word of God. How about the person of Christ and how about the blood of Christ? And so when he suffered and was crucified, he shed his blood and he died. But what about the risen Christ? What about the risen Christ? You know, so many people in their worship today, they got Christ on a cross and they carried around their neck and they do all sorts of things with it. But my Christ is not on a cross. And my Christ is not in a tomb. The tomb is empty. I don't have someone like Muhammad or Buddha. I have the Lord. He's risen. And because he is risen and glorified, I have that hope. Because he lives, he said, ye shall live also. And in our running the race, beloved, we need to consider him. We need to consider the race he ran, one of suffering. one a boy of all the glory. He veiled it in a veil of flesh. And he exalted the Father. Oh, that this life of mine and yours would exalt only the Lord Jesus. And as we ran the race, it would be for his glory and for his doing, not for ours. I'm afraid we're so prone and so quick to do things for our own glory. He's risen. Paul said that he knew no longer Christ after the flesh. See, some people still got him and worship him as the man and not the risen Lord. That's what you have in the picture of the manna in the wilderness. The Lord said he was the manna come down from heaven. In his physical being, he was what would feed those who came to him. That's why I could say, I'm the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger. He that believeth on me shall never thirst. And so in the wilderness journey, the Israelites got the manna. But when they went into the land, the manna ceased. Why? Ah, they were entering their possession. And in their possession, they gave them the old corn of the land. We have the risen, glorified the Lord Jesus. That's why Paul said he knew no longer Christ after the flesh. He was serving a risen, glorified Lord. And that's the one that we would see. See, we remember the Lord Jesus in His death, burial and resurrection, didn't we? In this morning, in the feast that we join, that love feast that speaks of a body given, a body broken, a body dying, but a body resurrected. It's broken in the love, but it's a remembrance of that body. And every time we take that love and we break it, we remember Him. Why? Because He's risen. If we only spend our time on His death, then we've limited our vision. That's why He said, Remember Me. What did He say to the church? As often as you do this. As often as you remember Me. You do it till when? Till I come. So while we did it this morning, and we look back at Calvary, We remember He's resurrected. Our prayers went to heaven. And that's where our worship went. Where He's at the right hand of the Majesty and I. So I think in our remembrance meeting, there's the looking back to the crucified Christ. And also to the risen Lord. See? And so our hearts are lifted up in joy. I've often told people, one guy took me to task for it. I said the remembrance meeting to me It's a time of sorrow, and it's a time of joy. We think about that. It's sorrow because I see my sin nailed him to the cross. But it's joy because he's living, and because he lives, I will live. And so as I keep the feast, it's till he comes. So as we consider him, he's a risen Lord. He's ascended. I need to consider him in his ascension. You know, in the ascension... What's that to me? Ah, Ephesians, Thor tells us, what is it? He ascended, but he first descended. And when he came down, and he died, that's descending into the lower parts of the earth, he was buried. But then he ascended. And when he ascended, what did he do? He led captivity captive, and he gave gifts unto men. All the Old Testament saints made perfect, now through the work of Jesus Christ, And so he gives gifts now to the church. And so in our considering him, we have all the gifts for the functioning of the church and for the running of the race. He gave me what I need. He gave you what you need. He gave you something for me. And he gave me something for you. I can't glorify myself because of gifts, because he gave it to me for you. It's not mine. It was given of him, but it was given for you. People often call a man who ministers the word a minister. That's all right. That's really what it ought to be. You know what a minister is? There's a servant, isn't there? I'm serving you today. I'm your servant. And so when we see it in that aspect, oh, in the ascension, he gave gifts unto men. He gave gifts to the church. But I need to consider Him as I run the race in His return. You know, our eyes are fixed on the glory and fixed on Christ as we run the race. He's the goal. Christ-likeness, as I said this morning. And as we run, we want to run to be like Him. But now, my race might be ended today. Could be ended in death or could be ended as the first day of the rest of my life. an eternal life that is never going to end. See, he could take us to that place today. So as I run the race, it's with that blessed hope that I see him and I'm like him today. So I need to consider Christ, his return as I run the race. Then I need to consider the unchanging Christ. That as he is at the right hand of the majesty on high today as my intercessor, He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. Never change it. Oh, that's helped to me. Because as I'm running the race, I can say, hey, Lord, all these promises you made to me are, amen. You're going to keep every one of them. Sufficient unto today is the evil thereof. I don't have to worry about tomorrow or the next lap at a race. All I've got to be concerned with is the one now. And that He will give me that strength. He said, be strong in the Lord. and in the power of his might. He says the battle's not to the strong, nor the race to the swift. I don't even have to be strong or swift as I run the race. All he wants me to be is faithful. Consider him. Consider him. Consider the mind of Christ. The mind of humility. The mind that humbles himself. That's what he'd like us, humble runners. Consider the meekness of Christ. Meekness is not weakness. Meekness is control strength. See, that's what it is. It's control strength. When you look at the Lord Jesus, he said, Learn of me for I'm meek and lowly in heart and can add rest to your soul. What power Christ had and yet what control he had as he walked here. Consider him We need to do that now in the race. They crucified Him. But He's glorified as well. Now you need to comfort yourselves. When the righteous run the race, there are negative things going to happen. We often run cross-country races and when we do, it's through all sorts of territory. And so He says here, now as you run, comfort yourself lest you be weary and you lose heart. You faint in the way. That's what he's saying. That you faint in the way. You need to do that. Comfort yourself. How do I comfort myself? Well, by considering him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be weary and faint in your mind. The word contradiction of sinners is a word that means gain saying, talking about him and against him. So many times in the race that we run for Christ, How many times we're hindered because of what other saints might say. We've got that tender heart that gets hurt so easily. So we need to consider him. Now he speaks of something that comes. He says here in verse five, You've not forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto sons. My son despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him. So as sons, now as we run the race, of necessity, we're going to have to know that there are negative times coming as we run the race. There are negative times coming. But the Lord says here, I chasten every son I let love, and I rebuke him. And so chastening is for son. Now if I get chastening in my life, I can rejoice. It's an evidence that I belong to him. A little kid, when he gets paddled for doing wrong, he don't think that's too good, does he? He thinks that's punishment. But when the Lord allows chastening to come in our life, it's not for punishment. It's for teaching us in the way that He loves us. Now all chastening, some chastening does come because of sin, but all chastening does not come because of sin. Some are afflicted with affliction, not because of sin. is because the Lord might be glorified. For instance, here's the man, the blind man in John chapter nine. And they said to him, Lord, why is this man born blind? Was he blind because of his sin or because of his parents? Now he was born blind. So they're intimating that there might have been some sin even before he was here. Maybe that God might have known he was going to commit, and so he made him blind for it or whatever reason. That's the only reason they could see that man was born blind. But the Lord said, no, not for either one. It was that God would be glorified. Now, imagine, I want you to think about this for a minute. That man was blind, so that God could be glorified. Now, as far as that man was blind, blindness was concerned, that was a hurt to him. He couldn't see where he goes. There's a blind man I visit. He lives alone. Now, That's a struggle in our mind as well, isn't it? How a blind man can live alone. But he lives alone. And he has a very narrow kitchen. He knows where everything is, where the cupboards are. Even then he does it by feel. I've seen him, his kitchen isn't perhaps more than that wide that you can walk in. And he reaches up to those cupboards and he follows them along like that one at a time, counting them until he gets to the cupboard he wants. He reaches for feeling on the counter for the radio and he turns the radio on. He hears the telephone ring and he reaches over there looking for a telephone. He goes into the front room. He said, well, that's bigger and I have a harder job in the front room. But he's been blind for five years and he's living that way. He's an old man, eighty-five years old. He's perhaps was a black man. He's lighter skinned. He's a dear soul, and when I went to first visit him, he had known church, but he didn't know Christ. And so I began to bring John three-sixteen to him. And I said to him one day, as he began to understand it, and finally to accept the fact that Christ did die for him, that his love was an expression of God toward Harry enough that he loved him, he would save his soul. And I could say to him, Harry, you know, one day, The blindness will be removed and you'll see with these eyes only new eyes in a spiritual body. But Harry, you've got something today that a lot of people do not have. You see with spiritual eyes. It's the spiritual eyes of the soul that see Christ crucified. It's the spiritual eyes of the soul that see a Redeemer who loved me and gave himself for me. You see, we need to grasp that when affliction comes, we mean to ask God sometimes the purpose of it and the ways of it, but chastening is for son. Now, when Lazarus died, remember they sent to the Lord and they said, Lord, one, that you love is sick. And the Lord waited yet a couple of days, didn't he? Till Lazarus died. And when Lazarus died, he said, this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God. That's why. Was that God might be glorified. And look how God was glorified when he went and rolled away to stone. And he said, Lazarus, come forth in resurrection, in power. They saw resurrection in Christ in the power of the words of Jesus Christ. How God was glorified. But you know, chastening, because it's for sons in the race, he said, Now don't despise it. Despise not thou, the chastening of the Lord. To despise it means to count it lightly. or to brush it off, to not count God in it. That's basically what it comes to. To not count Him in the despising. You can take it lightly. You can faint under it. You can endure it in a passive sense. Just say, well, I can take it and it'll pass after a while. Or you can be exercised by it. You can allow it. to work in your heart. Those things come to us and we can allow that benefit in our life. Now in Second Chronicles, sixteen, twelve, when Asa was sick and we read of him, Asa was diseased in his feet. He sought not the Lord but physician. He despised the chastening of the Lord. Never went to the Lord about it. Now don't go away and say, and Ray said, we don't have to go to the physicians, we have to go to the Lord. I'm not saying that. I am saying we have to go to the Lord first. We need to go to the doctors as well because it is through the doctors that he allows the healing process today. You see, in James chapter five, when he speaks there of if any man's sick, let him call the elders. and let him pray over him, or anoint him with oil and pray over him. In that day, that's what he wanted him to do, that there wasn't a doctor around every corner, and so many times an elder might have something to help the oil for a massage or something like that, because the anointing there does not mean a holy anointing. There's two words for anointing. One is qiru. And that's the holy anointing. And the other is a leaf food. And that is the anointing that's used of a gymnast. It's used of the anointing of a dead body. And that's the word that James used. So he's really saying, when you come, pray over them and do what you can do to make them comfortable. See, there's no value of the oil, but there's value in prayer. There's value to the oil if it's rubbed in. When I was a kid, my mother used to give us that goose grief rub. And you know that's what that word is? You know the first part of that word, lipas, that means to rub in. And the word is a lifu. And so that first part of that word is to rub. That's what they did to the gymnast in that day. A lot of people have taken that in the literal sense. I have known a man who grew who should have known better. And he got to the place in his life where he thought he could go around anointing people. They went to the hospital one time. There was a man there with cancer. I'd been in to visit him. Somebody asked me to come and I talked to him. He was yellow. It had already gotten to his liver and you could see it. And he anointed him with oil. And a few ladies that are real enthused over this sort of sort of thing went around saying, Oh, brother so-and-so anointed him with oil and he's going to be healed. Well, he died two weeks later. Does that make God a liar? No, it either has to mean something else or somebody's wrong here. But God does have healing. I don't tell people, I believe in faith healing, all right, but I don't believe in faith healers. So chastening does come to sons, and to take it wrongly is to take it as Asa did. Someone has said that under the rod is the place where corruption is manifest and our graces are shining. Isn't that true? You get down, you get sick in the bed and it shows your sin inside. You begin to see what kind of nature you have. But you know if you've been a person of God that's gone after God in your lifetime, that's where His graces are manifest because out of the heart begins to be that call for God. And the pillow that's a rock in a hard place becomes an altar where it turns to worship. And so he's saying here that I think that we need to be like David to have a right response. Remember when David was leaving Jerusalem because of his son Absalom and Shemi eyes walking alongside the road and David and his mighty men are going there and Shemi eyes picking up the dirt and he's throwing at David and he's cursing him. Havishai comes over and he says, Let me go take that dead dog's head off. Did David say, Go ahead? No. He said, Leave him be. What have I to do with thee, you sons of Zeru? I leave him to be. The Lord has told him to curse. Imagine that. The king, who he was, even though he was being turned away from his throne, he allowed one of his subjects to curse because he said God has told him to curse. And so he let him go. And Shemi-I kept up that aggravation of walking along the way and throwing a dust and cursing the king. Oh, shimmy, I got his desserts, didn't he? Ah, he got it later through Solomon. God took care of that. He knew what he deserved, but David didn't do it. David said, let him curse. I think that's the right attitude. You know, that would be terrific in our lives if we could do that, wouldn't it? When men seem to go against us in such strong ways and they lift their hands and we get hurt in the way, If we could be like David with the right response, taking it from God, and yet David crying at the same time, remember in the thirty-nine psalm, he said, Remove thy stroke from me, for I am consumed. That's the prayer of a man under that, and yet he allowed God to do it. We need to continue in the path, see, in the race that we run, even though this is there. He wants us to do something. And if we faint under what He allows us, and we turn and we begin to complain against God, listen to what He says in verse nine. He said, Furthermore, we've had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection to the father of spirit and live? Notice those two words, and live. What do they mean? They can't mean eternal life because He's writing to sons, isn't it? So it has to be physical life. In other words, if you rebel so much against God's hand of direction in your life, you rebel against Him, He can take your physical life. And that will be the chastening for that sin. And so if you want to walk here for a while, You need to be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live, and to have life abundantly as well. I said, No, chastening for the present seems to be joyous. In verse eleven, but afterward it yieldeth a peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who are exercised by it. Now, when chastening comes, we need to have an exercised heart. May not be exercised at the first. First thing it hits us. We may be troubled by it. Or if we've been walking with the Lord, first thing it comes into your mind, well, what are you saying, Lord? How are you speaking? He says in a trial, if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who give it to all men liberally and abrade us not. So you want to know why the trial? He said, ask God. Ask God. He said, only ask in faith. So we need to bear up under it. He said, it yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Now, you know, some people, when sickness comes and afterwards they say, weren't you afraid of dying? Didn't you wonder how much time you got? And people have said this to me and I said, oh, in some way, maybe. Some way, but I knew when the pain subsided enough for me to think before I passed out, I could say, Lord, if this is what you want, I'm ready for it. To take me home or to teach me here through more lessons for me. You know, I can see times in my life when affliction came when I wasn't ready for that. But I think through the race as we run and God brings us along the way. He wants us to draw us near sometimes to himself. Some of us are so busy that we hardly look up too much until we lay down. And so sometimes along the way he says, come aside and rest a while. God loves us enough to do what is right for us. So in running the race, you need to continue in the path. You continue in that path the way you have in verse fourteen here. Follow peace with all men and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. Follow peace. Now, the word follow here means pursue. That's what it means. It means to run after. Follow peace. Now, if you might take it in the wrong way, looking at the Lord Jesus, I want you to get a clear thought here. Did the Lord Jesus have peace with all men while he was here? He didn't. Did he? Oh, boy, those Pharisees, they wanted to rub him out, taking up stones to stone him and everything else. He didn't have peace with all men. But did he pursue peace? Oh, yes, he did. Yes, he did. He pursued peace. First time he came in his first advent, he came to seek and to save, that was his loss. He didn't come to condemn the world, but through him that through him the world might be saved. And so the first time he put up with a lot of things to affect peace, didn't he? So God is saying to us, in the race, in the race, run after peace, pursue it. That's what we need to do. And holiness, that holy life that he teaches us how to live, he wants us to walk in that way. Because he said, without it shall no man see the Lord. See, there is a judicial declaration of holiness that he gave us. That he said, he justified us and he sanctified us. We are washed and justified and sanctified. Judicially he declared that sanctification. But practically he wants us to walk in it. That's where so many times we fail. He said, purifying the flesh and the spirit. See? Our flesh can be unholy. But he said, also the Spirit. So I need to do more than just looking at my action. I need to go for the heart that gives the thought that the action responds to. I need to be holy within. And that's what he teaches us. Be holy even as I am holy. We're not going to have that kind of holiness without a heart that's really touched by Him. So now as we've looked, what have we seen? And why do we run the race and the righteous suffer? He said, Consider Him. Comfort yourself. Chastening belongs to sons. Don't despise chastening. Chastening has its reward. Continue in the past. Continue in the past. Now, I'd like to say to you, you know, we always have a problem. with chastening and with affliction. That's adversity. But adversity is the balance to prosperity. Can you see that? Might be kind of tough to see, but if you think about it, what if I took away adversity and it's all prosperity and everything that we have