Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hello, this is Mark Rutland.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: Before we begin today's message, I have a very special and very happy announcement. Our son Travis, who is the pastor at Liberty Square Church in Cartersville, Georgia, has just launched his own podcast featuring the sermons that he preaches there and elsewhere. I'm so excited to offer this to you because I believe Travis is one of the finest preachers I hear today. My wife and I attend that church and I look forward to every single message filled with application and and anointing. He is a terrific preacher and you're gonna be blessed. The name of the podcast is very obviously the Travis Rutland Podcast and you can find it on all major platforms including Apple podcasts, Spotify and others.
Or you can listen directly through the Global Servants website, at globalservants.org/podcast.
His new episodes are going to be released every Thursday and they will be ready for you when you wake up and start your.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: I hope you'll subscribe.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Listen each week, leave a five star review and let Travis know how much his messages encourage you as they encourage me. Here I am in my late 70s and one of the finest preachers that I hear today, ever hear today, is my son. It thrills me to offer him to you through his new podcast, the Travis Rutland Podcast.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: God bless you.
All right, if you have your Bibles.
So before you start opening, let me finish the whole sentence. If you have your Bibles. Tonight I'm going to be teaching on 1 and 2 Thessalonians. So turn to Acts.
If you'll turn to Acts, chapter 17.
Acts, chapter 17. I've tried on these teachings to connect the epistles. Most of them connect to issues that are involved in the book of Acts.
So I like to give you the context.
So Acts, chapter 17. And then we'll turn to 1 Thessalonians.
Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica. Now pause a moment. Thessalonica is an ancient Greek town. It's still there.
And that is the. When it says the Thessalonians, that's, that's people who live in Thessalonica. And they came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue of the Jews And Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them and three Sabbath days, so it could be as much as five weeks, but only three Saturdays. Okay? He reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus. Now, starting with Jesus right there, Luke is quoting Paul.
He's not saying himself, whom I preach unto you is Christ. Meaning that's what Paul said, whom I preach unto you is Christ. And some of them believed and consorted with Paul and Silas and of the devout Greeks. And again pausing. Remember, Greeks is a. Is a book of Acts, Jewish euphemism for Gentiles. So they may not have all been exactly Greeks, but they were Gentiles. And a great multitude of the chief women, not a few. But the Jews which believed not moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort and gathered a company and set all the city on an uproar and assaulted the house of Jason and sought to bring them out to the people. And. And when they found them not meaning Paul and Silas, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, these are they that have turned the world upside down and are come hither also whom Jason hath received. And these all do, contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus.
And they troubled the people and the rulers of the city. And when they heard these things, and when they had taken a security of Jason, that's baal, when Jason had posted BAAL and of the others, they let them go. And the brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas by night unto Berea, who, coming thither, went into the synagogue of the Jews.
Now pause right there.
Paul now leaves, having seen these converts, having planted a church and spent three weeks with them, and it grieves him.
So we Turn now to 1 Thessalonians, and I want to begin reading at chapter 4, 1 Thessalonians 4, 13, 18.
But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not even as others which have no hope.
For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them.
I know I'm giving you a lot of explanation of words in the Scripture, but prevent is an ancient English word. We're reading from the King James Bible here. And prevent in modern English doesn't mean what it meant in the King James Bible.
In modern English it means stop, hinder. In ancient English, prevent means more what it sounds like at a etymologically, and that is pre something that goes before the event.
So prevent in ancient English means they shall not get here first.
Okay. The Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise first.
Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord wherefore comfort one another with these words. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for the letters that Paul, your servant, wrote to the church of Thessalonica. And we pray that tonight we may say, we've got mail. You've got a word for us and we believe you for it. In the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God.
Amen.
One runs a risk.
If one tells us something out of one's own life and then in some way compares it to something in Paul's life, one runs the risk that people think that somehow or another you're at the level with Paul. I'm not doing that. I want to simply tell you a story out of my ministry that reminded me of what happened with Paul and the church at Thessalonica.
When I was in Peru, and I was in Peru a great deal. I traveled all through the coastal region of Peru in the Spanish speaking communities. But then we began to work in the. In the forest, in the deep forest with Indians.
And the further we went, the deeper into the forest. Each trip we would go further and further. Our base of operations was a little community called Puerto Bemuras. And it was.
I used.
I used the word community loosely. It was just a cluster of huts and a dirt Runway.
And we would go there, out from there, in, in dugout canoes and go deep in the forest.
We heard about a certain village that we wanted to get to and there was a wide bend in the river. We went on the Rio Peaches and then on the Ukayale.
And when we got onto the Ukayale, deep in the forest, there's a deep bend in the river like this, so that it might take 1 hours and hours and hours by river, but it formed a peninsula, if you will.
And we could park the canoes and go across land this way to the village. And that's what we decided to do.
Vastly underestimating how dense the jungle was.
So we took majetes and parked our canoes and we went overland rather than go all the way around the bend in the river. And we arrived at this village by land, and someone went back to get the canoes and bring them around so that when we left, we could leave by the river when we got there. As we began, I had several Peruvian brothers with me. Julian Basildua, Carlos Guzman, some others. And as we began to talk with these Indians, their Spanish was limited at best, and we didn't really speak their language. But we had a guy with us who spoke both. So it was often awkward translations. We're going from Quechua to Spanish to English to Spanish to Quechua and back and forth.
It began to be clear to us that this village knew nothing about Christianity.
For an evangelist and a missionary, it's a wonderful moment when you realize. I wonder if you can sense what that means, that you're about to be given the opportunity to preach maybe the initial or at least the most serious message on Christ in that village.
So the head man of the village, the chief, called everybody together for that night.
And he just stood up and said to them in Quechua, and it's a very fascinating language. And he said, I want you to just listen to these men. I'm sitting right there where you are, and the Indian is translating into Spanish. And then Julian is translating to me, and he says, I want you to just listen to these men.
Just listen to what they have to say.
And I believe that they've been sent to us.
I want you to think for a moment what that means.
Where do you start?
So they're in a long house, the thatched roof and logs. Not pews, just logs lined up. And they're sitting on the walls are little torches to light the thing. It's an eerie thing, Indians.
And it dawned on me that they needed the most fundamental statement I could think of.
And I said, there is one God who created everything from the leaves and the birds to you.
And the stir that went through that house.
I wish you could have seen it. A buzz went through the house.
And we went from that in two or three nights. We went from that to virtually the whole village receiving Christ as savior, including the chief.
We trained them. We'd have lessons in the morning and services at night. We taught them some choruses and some things.
And then it was time to head out.
We said, we'll be back. We love you. Thank God for you. This is. We called it the church there and laid hands on a young man that the chief put forward.
And we told him that he was to pastor. We got them some Bibles. We got in our canoes and left. I'll never forget the scene. They're standing on the banks of the river, waving to us, singing. We went away. We said, we'll be back.
Right at that time, Maoist communist guerrillas in Peru went crazy. Anybody remember the Cindero Luminos? I did not cause that, whatever that was.
Anybody remember the Cindero Luminoses? The Shining Paths? They were violent, extreme, communist, but not just communist Maoist guerrillas.
And they. They became so dangerous that the brothers in Peru pleaded with me, don't come back.
Please don't come back.
From 1990 to 1992, it was two of the most violent years. I was there in 1989 and. And I preached at Chincha Alta. And that night the communists blew up the power plant. You think that little pop there scare you? Let me just say to you. The power plant blew to smithereens. The lights went out, everything.
And so that was my last time in Peru. Up to that moment, from 1990 to 1992, the brothers just pleaded with me, don't come to Peru. It was explosions and bombs and murder and it was awful.
In 1992, the government of Peru captured the leader of the Sendero Luminoses. His name was Abimael Guzman.
And it.
And it drained the power out of the Cindero Luminosos.
And so the brothers in Peru said, we think you can come back.
So we went back and I preached on some of the Spanish churches, the Peruvian churches on the coast. But I wanted to get back to that village. I kept saying, when can we go? When can we go?
Finally we went back to that village. And the closer we got to it, I didn't get excited. I began to dread it because I knew that they were going to say, you lied to us.
You said you would come back and you didn't come.
And we don't believe in your God, and we don't. We're not following Jesus.
And I, I began to create all these scenarios in my mind.
When we got there, there was this huge crowd.
Huge.
I said to the chief, who are all these people? This was like three or four size, the number of people in that village.
I said, who are all these people? And he was vague. I could tell he didn't want to answer me.
So finally we sat down, Julian and Carlos and I sat down with the interpreter and the chief. And I said, now, chief, I want to know who are all These people, why are they here?
And he said, well, you didn't come back.
And I thought he was going to climb my case.
He said, you didn't come back. And I understood that with the gorillas and everything, but you didn't come back, and we weren't sure what to do.
So we just looked in the Bible that you gave us, and it seemed to us that what we should do is go to the other villages around us and tell them.
So he said, we've planted three other churches, and those people are all here. And I said, why didn't you tell me? He said, I thought you'd be mad at me.
He said, I didn't have permission to plant those churches.
So when I read 1 and 2 Thessalonians, I can almost feel what Paul felt. Three weeks he was with them, three Saturdays, and then he had to leave. There's all this violence and there's riot, and his life is threatened. And he goes to Berea, and then he goes to Athens. But from Thessalonica to Berea to Athens, he's thinking about the Thessalonians.
The Thessalonians. He's thinking about them. What about them? Are they okay? Did their faith hold? Is everything okay?
So the minute he reaches Athens, he sends Silas back with a letter to the church at Thessalonia, at Thessalonica, and then immediately follows it with another one.
There is no substantial gap in time between 1 and 2 Thessalonians.
So it's like you tell your teenager as they leave the house, drive safely.
And as they back the car down the driveway, you run out there and tap on the window. They say what? He says, drive safely.
You can almost feel that in 1 and 2 Thessalonians.
The whole concept of the letter is a loving, gracious letter checking up on you. I want you to know how you are.
He praises them for the good report that he gets from Silas. He says, I just want to thank you for your faithfulness and suffering, that you've been partners in hope.
He urges them to continue to grow in the grace of God.
But he seems to sense, somehow or another, a message got to him, that one of the things they were concerned about was the issue of death.
Now, that's not impossible for us to grasp. We are also concerned with it. But you must remember that many of the people in the church at Thessalonica are not Jews.
Remember, it says there was a few Jews who believed, but the rest were pagans. They were Greeks.
So what is all this Greek mythology about life and death and after death and Elysian Fields and all of that, they said, yes, but what is, what does the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, what does that tell us about death?
And so Paul writes this core part of one Thessalonians is about death and it is powerful.
So in the first place, he says it has been misquoted and misapplied.
People's tend to say, Christians at the death of a loved one do not sorrow. That is not true.
That's not what Paul says and it's not what he meant.
He says we don't sorrow like people with no hope.
Look, the most beloved Christian person in your life passes away.
You. It's okay for you to have grief.
We believe in the resurrection. We know Christ is coming back. We know we'll see them again. We know all that. But right now, now they've stepped through to the other side. Right now I don't see them. Right now I miss them. Right now I sorrow. Right now I grieve.
Jesus sanctified our grief with his own tears. At the graveside of Lazarus, knowing that the resurrection was not waiting thousands of years, he said, I am the resurrection. He knows he's going to walk out in that cemetery and raise Lazarus from the dead. But. But right that moment, he's with people that are grieving. He's touched by their emotions. He's touched by the death of his friend. And Jesus weeps.
So our grief is sanctified by the grief of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, but our sorrow is alleviated by the promise and the hope of the resurrection.
Now then he begins to deal with the issue of the resurrection of the dead and the rapture of the church.
So there are all of these complicated, complex arguments over exactly what's going to happen, when is this going to happen, is that going to happen? And then this, and then that has to happen. And there are whole denominations that split up over it.
So listen to Dr. Mark. Now, I'm not telling you that you shouldn't have your opinions about the resurrection of the church, the rapture of the church, and the resurrection of the dead.
What I am telling you is that you may almost certainly have some of it wrong, but it won't change anything.
You understand? You can get a lot of things about the second coming of Christ completely wrong and still take part in the second coming of Christ.
You say, well, this has to happen first. But listen to Dr. Mark. When the last trumpet sounds and you cast off gravity and receive your glorified body and rise to meet him in the Air. I promise you, if it didn't happen in the order you taught or thought, you will not argue.
Nobody's going to say, well, I'm not going.
The man of Perdition never appeared.
You'll rise and you'll like it.
Let me tell you something else.
Not only will no one refuse to go, no one will gloat with anybody else.
When you look across the expanse of the sky and you see a guy you argued with about the Rapture at the coffee shop, you will not say, nonny, nonnie, boo, boo.
So I remember some years ago, somebody asked Pat Robertson, was he a pre millennial or a post millennial? He said, I'm a trans millennial. They said, what does that mean? He said. He said, however God does it, it's going to work out fine. Anything? He said, any way God does it, I'm fine.
But what Paul says to us is, this is the hope. How are the details of it work?
People who die ahead of us, we're not going into heaven ahead of them. We do not prevent them.
They will rise first.
And when we see them, then we will rise.
This is the great hope of the resurrection of the dead and the rapture of the church.
Think of the joy. I don't know why we don't preach this more, Joey. I don't know.
It seems like we used to preach it more than we do.
The wonderful moment of reunion in the sky.
That moment when you look as the saints of God begin to rise and you rise and you recognize people that you haven't seen. My great grandfather.
I'm going to see him.
Who was the finest Christian witness of my childhood? My grandparents. My grandfathers were both alcoholics. My parents were, late in life, Christians, so I was not surrounded. But my great grandfather was a Christian, a serious Christian. If there was a little revival in that little town of Randolph, Texas, at the Presbyterian Church, he'd tuck his Bible under his arm and go. My great grandmother wouldn't go.
His children wouldn't go. My parents wouldn't go. He'd walk off to revival at the Presbyterian Church, if the Methodist Church had one. He'd tuck his Bible under his own.
He was a great big blacksmith in East Texas. And I was in his blacksmith shop one day and I said, pepe, are you a Methodist?
He said, yes, I'm a Methodist, Mark.
I said, well, you don't seem like the other Methodists. I said, mammy.
I called my great grandparents Mammy and Pappy. I said, mammy's a Methodist, but she doesn't Go with you to the revivals? My parents are Methodists. They don't go. So I said, you're a Methodist, but are you a different kind of Methodist? And he laughed and he picked me up over his head like that, and he said, I'm a second chapter of Acts. Methodist.
I didn't know what he meant until I was 28.
I had no clue. Can you understand how wonderful it'll be when we see people like that as we rise to meet him, that great reunion in the air?
Then there is the sense of not only meeting in the air, there is that sense, as Paul describes it, of being together with him and with each other forever.
Yes, the separation, the immediate sense of separation in death is painful and grievous to us. And we sorrow, but not without hope.
But there will be a foreverness to our reunion that will make. We will not even remember the time of separation, that separation in the last 10 years or 20 years, or 30 years. My separation from my great grandfather is going to turn out to be something like 70 years.
That seems like a long time.
But 70 years compared to eternity, you cannot remember 70 years in the midst of eternity, the foreverness of our reunion with him and together.
Now, what about that day when Jesus comes? Turn to 1 Thessalonians, chapter 5, and we'll read 1 through 11.
But of the times and seasons, brethren, you have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. And when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, not us, them as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness that that day should overtake you as a thief. You are all the children of light and the children of the day. We are not of the night, nor of darkness.
Therefore let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night. They that are drunken, are drunken in the night. But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love. For in helmet the hope of salvation. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him.
Wherefore comfort yourselves together and edify one another, even as also you do so. He makes these three great points about the magnificent moment of Christ's return.
It will be sudden.
It will be sudden.
We waste in theological and Christian circles, we waste we way too much time trying to figure out when the day will come.
All we need to know is A, it will come and B, he's not going to notify you.
It seems to me that modern evangelicals long for something to freak out about.
They don't want that calm peace and that tranquil hope and faith, that eternal viewpoint. Looking for something that I believe we are, we are anxiety addicted.
I mean, I'll just show.
Does anybody remember? Do you even remember Y2K?
Do you remember Christians born again, Bible believing, spirit filled Christians freaked out, they lost their minds.
I was at, I was in the ministry. I was at Mount Parenthood and people went crazy. Oh, the banks are going to fail, the airplanes are going to fall out of the sky, people going crazy, spirit filled Christians buying gold, burying it in the backyard, stockpiling green beans and getting shotguns.
I mean, I have some questions here.
Were you really going to shoot anybody for those beans?
Did, did it not occur to anybody to like, I don't know, share the beans?
It was crazy to me how people.
So then.
Anybody remember this? My purpose tonight, to embarrass everybody. Here we go.
Anybody remember this?
88 reasons Jesus is coming in 1988. That nincompoop sold hundreds of thousands of copies. People bought. They went nuts.
I was at the Mount Perron Church of God in 1988. A woman that. This is what discourages you about the ministry. You say to yourself, have you not even been here?
Have you not heard one word we've said?
I saw her Sunday morning. She said, well, I'm keeping the kids home on Tuesday.
I said, why?
She said, Dr. Mark, Jesus is coming on Tuesday.
Jesus is coming. I don't want the kids to be at school when Jesus comes.
I said, he knows where they go to school.
Jesus can find your kids.
I mean, that's silly. That's silliness.
So Jesus didn't come in 1988, did he?
What do you think that nincompoop did?
He wrote another one.
89 Reasons Jesus is Coming in 1989. Now, not everybody that bought the first one bought another one, but I'm telling you, a lot of people did.
And if you bought both of those books, I don't want to know.
The point is Jesus is coming.
I promise you, however he does it, you're going to like it.
And the suddenness of it is not to terrify us, though it will be terror to some, it is to say it could happen. Before I finish this message.
When I was at Emory University, I played on the softball team for the seminary.
And we were playing PI Kappa Alpha one day, and it was hot and we were losing.
I was playing second base. The shortstop, who was an atrocious liberal. I don't know if he even believed in God.
And he called a timeout. And he came over to me at second base. I said, what is it? He said, I know you're always talking about the Rapture, and I don't believe in it. But he said, if. If it is real, this would be a really good moment, wouldn't it?
That's a great hope.
In the worst moment of your life, the sky could split open.
God roll the clouds up like a dirty tablecloth, and you cast off gravity and rise to meet him in the air.
That great good in the morning is coming.
It will be sudden, and we will rise to meet him in the air, but we will not rise first. Those who have dead, who are died in Christ, they will rise before us, and then we'll meet him in the air. What a will. Wonderful rapture. What a wonderful reunion.
Then he says, this is because we are the children of light.
We're not of the darkness.
Remember that passage.
Light came into the world and the darkness could not overwhelm it, comprehended it not so if the darkness cannot overwhelm the author of light, and we are the children of light, the darkness of this present age has no lasting hold on us.
We have to be in the darkness. We have to live here. We live here. That precious lady that you were talking about that dealt with all the agony and pain and fear and anxiety in Ukraine in the middle of a war, she's in that, but she's not of that.
We're the children of light.
Then he says, knowing that, then we must be ready.
So he writes this tender letter to this church with whom he spent three weeks.
And he says, what's the most important thing I can tell you?
The most important thing I can tell you is Jesus is coming back.
Be ready for it.
But if you die before he comes, worry he's going to raise you from the dead and you'll rise to meet him in the air, and you'll be together, and we'll all be together.
Can you feel what he's saying?
I know I can't get back to you.
I know there was that riot. And I know the brothers made me flee. And I know I went to Berea and then I went to Athens. But you're on my mind. You're on my heart.
And though I can't return to you personally right now. Christ will return.
Though I can't be with you in the flesh. We will be together eternally.
I think that something kind of sad has happened in American culture and it's an odd thing. I'm going to bring this to a conclusion and it is this.
American young people never see.
How can I say this? I don't want to shock you.
American young people never see the saints of their families die.
We have pushed death out of the house.
Our beloved grandparents die in nursing homes. They don't die in the back bedroom.
They don't die with people gathered around them. They don't. Young. American young people have no.
They have no experiential reality of death.
Listen to what I'm trying to say to you.
Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.
And I think about how in the west, in the American West, Grandpa who loved God and served God and preached God and lived for God finally dying and his family gathered around his bed and sang hymns.
Somebody held his hand and watched Grandpa pass over to the other side.
It took the fear out of it. It's okay.
Grandpa's gone ahead of us, but we'll see him again.
I just feel in Paul's letter to the church at Thessalonica he's saying separation and death are not the end of anything.
I don't.
I'm old now and I don't go back to the jungle.
I don't go back to the deep forest in Peru.
You know what I believe with all my heart?
I believe the children and grandchildren of those first converts at that little village deep in the fore are still living for God.
I believe we'll meet. I believe we'll see each other. I think we'll know each other. I think somehow or another all of our cultural and linguistic and racial and national frontiers will be melted away and will rise to medium in the air and we'll all be together forever.
And there's just nothing really scary about that.
Well, When I was 22 years old, nearly 22, I was appointed to my first church.
A 22 year old boy should not be given a driver's license, let alone a church.
I had. I'd never preached a funeral.
I had only been to one wedding and I was in shock at that one.
I had never taken a course in pastoral care. I'd never done any counseling. I had preached eight, nine times. I had been a youth pastor and an associate pastor at an inner city church in a rough area in Atlanta. And the bishop in his Infinite wisdom appointed me to a country church, and I'm telling you, I was at sea.
There was one old man in that church, and I think he just said, somebody's going to have to adopt this idiot.
And he just put his arm around me. He just loved me. We were the odd couple. I'm telling you, we were the odd couple. He was in his late 80s. I was in my early 20s.
There was a cultural and historical gap between us, and I don't know how to explain it. We just fell in love with each other. I spent time with him. I'd go to his store.
He stayed healthy and worked to within about three weeks of his death.
Then he got very, very sick. And it became terminal in a matter of weeks. From health to terminal.
But like so many guys who are really strong, he couldn't seem to let go.
He just couldn't seem. His body just couldn't seem to die. He was so tough.
And so it was draining the family.
So one night I said to them all, I said, look, Charlie, I'll stay here.
You all go home, and I'll be here all night. I'll stay all night with Charlie, and you all go on home and get some rest. If anything happens, I'll have the night nurse call you.
And they said, okay, Pastor, we'll do that.
So I sat there all through the night with Charlie totally in a coma. Hadn't said a word, anything for weeks. Tubes down his nose, in his throat, everything. Laying there totally still. Middle of the night, all of a sudden, Charlie sat bolt upright in the bed. Just nearly scared the liver out of me. Just sat up in the bed and looked at the blank wall of a hospital room. And he lifted his hands with all those wires and tubes, lifted his hands, and he said, oh, beautiful.
And he was dead when he hit the pillow.
And I'm telling you, I realized Charlie had seen through to the other side.
How could we ever be afraid when, like Charlie, if we could just peek through the veil and say, oh, beautiful, let's pray.
Heavenly Father, I thank you so for the witness and life and Ministry of St. Paul. And I thank you, God, for his deep concern and care for the life and death issues of people that he had only known three weeks.
And, Lord, I thank you that he not only wrote to them, he wrote to us.
We've got mail.
And the message says, dear children of Light, fear nothing.
Be back soon.
Amen.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr.markrutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his note materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
