All Scripture Is Inspired By God And Profitable #1

So this morning, well, I should say also, I prayed for Bob Kaplowitz. A number of you guys probably don't know who Bob Kaplowitz is. He's a man who's 73 in our sending church down in Bloomington who has lived his whole life with cerebral palsy. And so even the fact that he's 73 and still alive with cerebral palsy means that he's outlived by decades people with this malady. And so he got COVID a few weeks ago. and after having it for about two weeks, he took a downturn health-wise, was struggling to breathe, and so they rushed him to the hospital on Tuesday. When he got to the hospital, he was not breathing. He didn't have a pulse. They were able to resuscitate him, and he is still in the hospital, and he is most likely going to pass away. His body is doing the work of dying. It's taking time. There are a number of us in our church who love him dearly.

I lived with him the year before I got married. My oldest son is named after him. His middle name's Robert. And Bob was our best man. And so our family really loves Bob. And I went down and saw him on Wednesday, and it was good to see him, though he was unconscious. And so I'd ask you to please pray for him and the men that care for him and his family. It is a very difficult situation. And Bob's loved and cared for a number of men. Clay, you lived with him, didn't you? Yeah. And so there are a number of us whose hearts have gone out to him for years and are now losing a father in the faith. And we want him to finish well, and it's a grief to us to lose him. So please do pray for us and for him. This morning we're going to be going back in our sermons to 2 Timothy chapter 3. We're going to be studying verses 10 through 17 as a chunk over the next couple of weeks.

This week we're going to be focusing on verses 10 to 12, and in these verses, Paul reminds Timothy about the lessons that he, Timothy, has learned from Paul. And so it's as if Paul is saying, hey Timothy, do you remember all these things? Remember them. Keep them in your mind. And the particular lesson that Paul is teaching Timothy, and that he draws attention to, was that no matter how difficult of a situation Paul got himself into, God was always faithful to him in delivering him from it. That's what he draws Timothy's attention to, and that's what I want our attention to be drawn to this morning as we study the word of the Lord. Would you please stand as we read from 2 Timothy 3, verses 10-11. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Now you followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, perseverance, persecutions, and sufferings, such as happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra.

What persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But evil men and imposters will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them. and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Paul starts off this section by saying, Now you followed my...

teaching and all these other attributes. And I want to start by talking about what it meant for Timothy to follow Paul. What he's getting at here and what he's reminding him of is all of the things that Timothy had observed in Paul's life. Timothy paid close attention to Paul's life and his ministry, and he learned by watching him work, by watching him minister, by listening to him preach. And then going home, or going with Paul and going, why did... Why did he do that? Why did he do that? And what was to come of it? Observation is an essential part of learning. It's an essential part of learning. I don't know that you can actually learn to do something without seeing somebody else do it first. And many, many times. We have to see it. Some of us would say, well, I learn by reading or I learn by...

or I learn by hands-on experience. We may learn in those ways, and it's good, but at some point we have to see somebody doing the stuff that we're to learn from them. I think I first realized this. I always thought of myself as a hands-on learner. I didn't like sitting and reading about things when I was in high school. I wasn't like that at all. I wanted to put it in my hands, show me how to do it, and then I'll learn how to do it. So out of high school, Many of you know I got a job working for a tree company. And so my job was to, starting out, just to drag brush and feed it through the chipper. And you've got these guys who are in their 30s and 40s and 50s climbing around up in the tops of these big trees like squirrels, cutting and removing and trimming and not hitting the house and not breaking the stuff and using ropes and chainsaws and all this hard, dangerous, complicated work. And here I was on the ground, and my job was to not have a limb fall on my head.

And to get those limbs taken over to the chipper. And so there's nobody to talk to. You know, this was in the time before ear buds and podcasts and all that stuff. All you had was ear plugs because the chipper was loud. And so you had lots of time to think and to look around. And you could either turn your brain off or you could watch. And the work that these men did was impressive to watch. And so what I did was I watched them. I watched how they climbed. I watched how they moved through the trees. I watched how they rigged the limbs down and how they avoided the house and the gutters and the sheds and the fences and the flowers and the pools and all the stuff that you couldn't drop tree limbs on. And I got an education. And I watched for years. And when I thought, oh, well, they're going to cut that limb, and this is how, you know, you watch enough, you start thinking, oh, well, I would do it like this. This is where I would tie it, and this is how I would cut it. And then they'd do something different.

Why did they do that? You're dragging the brush out to the chipper and you're feeding it. Why did he cut it like that? This is observation. This is how I learned tree work. We didn't have classes. If you wanted to learn to climb a tree, you got handed a hard hat, safety glasses, and earplugs. And that's how you learned to trim trees. And many men didn't learn that way. We had guys that would come to our company who had gone to Purdue, which does... teaches guys to be arborists. And they would come and they'd intern with us in the summer. And they were, for the most part, useless. Because they'd been taught how to run a chainsaw. And they'd been taught how to fell a tree. But what they hadn't been taught how to do was work hard for 10 hours. They hadn't learned what we had learned. Because what they had learned, they'd learned in a book and in a classroom and in a controlled environment. And what I had learned, I'd learned in your front yard or your backyard. And so it was real stakes to me. We were doing it in real time with real consequences.

And this was my education. And that is identical to Timothy's education. He's watched Paul. He didn't sit in class and learn about ministry. He didn't listen to podcasts. He didn't make it up himself. He watched Paul minister. He listened to Paul teach. And this is how he became a pastor. And so Paul says, now you followed my teaching and all of the rest. Timothy was Paul's apprentice. And I want you to know that that's how we learn. And it's lost on us today. This is not how we want to learn. We don't want to learn from other people because we think, well, I might want to do it differently. Or I might feel pressure to do it the way that they do it. And so we've given this all up. We've replaced it with YouTube and Google and Instagram. It teaches you all kinds of things, right? We all have people we follow.

And we study and we learn about how they do stuff. It's not the same. If we're going to learn how to be a Christian, we need men and women, mothers and fathers, that go before us and show us how. Some of you have had that. Some of you grew up in Christian homes. And you had someone teach you how. But many of us didn't. Or the things we were taught. We're not God's ways. One thing I want you to know about observation is you need to be able to observe everything. Everything. You don't just observe bits and pieces. You observe everything. Okay? In our training of pastors, the way I was trained, the way Timothy's being trained, the goal is to expose Timothy in school to as much ministry as we can. That's intimidating. Scary. And how often do you think, How did Daniel do that? Or how would Dave do that? It's on purpose that we put him through that. Because to simply sit and read about being a pastor or to read about ministering to people is not sufficient. You can read and read and read until your eyes fall out. And you won't have learned how to do the work. Notice the things that Paul says Timothy observed and followed. These are character traits. These are convictions. These are not methods.

or processes, my teaching. How would you describe Paul's teaching, if you were to think about it? If you say, well, the Apostle Paul, he was what kind of teacher? I would say he's fairly intense, and dangerous, and spoke the whole counsel of God. In fact, he told us as much in Acts. He said, I withheld nothing from you that I thought was profitable. He was a live wire. You've been around men like that? You go, I don't know what he's going to do. Oh, there's tension. He's not going to run away from it. You followed my teaching, my conduct, my purpose, my faith, my patience, my love, my perseverance. Timothy didn't observe his methods. He observed the man. How does he conduct himself? And years gone by when pastors were trained, they weren't only trained in the church, which we're aiming to do, but they actually just lived with the pastor. The pastor would have had a big house.

And there would have been servants and there would have been all of this stuff. And the men who trained underneath him would have just came and lived in his house. And they would have worked for him. And they would have been provided for food and shelter. And they would have just been there all the time. Now, I think one of the reasons we don't have people into our houses as much as we used to is simply because we perform when they come over. We lie to them. The arguments, the tensions, the clutter, the mess. We have to scurry all that away. But that wouldn't have been possible with the sort of observation that Timothy was conducting. He observed all of it. The closest I think we get now is living in cheap apartments with thin walls where you have some clue about what goes on in the apartment next door because the walls aren't thick enough to keep you from hearing their fussing and their fighting or whatever else is going on over there, what they're watching on TV.

And so the way Timothy observed Paul, he would have had occasion to observe the whole man. Everything he did, everything he was, everything he said. And so if we're going to learn from people, you have to be able to see the whole man. I think this is one of the biggest problems that we have with everything going online. It makes the process fast. It makes it easy. And it abridges it. It makes it short. It doesn't tell you the whole story. It does not tell you the whole story. And this is as true of men as it is for women. Women might go on Instagram and follow this mom or that woman or this influencer or whatever, but they don't tell you the whole story. And every woman at some point thinks, I could do that. It's so easy. All she does is, and she says, yeah, you can sign up and it'll just cost you a few thousand dollars to get started and then you'll be able to do it too. And what do women generally find out when they do that? You remember? It's work.

It's a lot of work. And how many women did you watch? Riza used to do this stuff. How many women did you watch spend the money and then just fail? Most of them. Because they couldn't observe all of it. It turns out it actually requires real skills, and you don't just get to make fun videos that are easy to make and take five minutes. It's a lot of stinking work. But they don't show you that part. Men like to watch other stuff online. Maybe you like watching hunting or fishing. These are things I like to watch. Boy, you'd think that you'd go out and catch a fish every time you go fishing.

go out and kill an animal every time you take a gun into the woods. It's not like that in reality. They don't show us the whole picture. They don't show us the whole story. There's lots that ends up on the cutting room floor. And that's the stuff we need. We need to know the stuff that's on the cutting room floor. We need to know the stuff that they don't want to show us. And so when you see what Paul says, you follow my teaching and conduct, purpose, faith, love, patience, love, perseverance, we say, yeah, those are the things that belong in the video. Those are the things you'd expect Timothy to see from Paul. Those are the good things. But that's not where Paul's list stops. In fact, it goes on and it goes to the things that you would not want to show anybody. The persecutions and the sufferings. Timothy observed those as well. And those are the things that Paul takes time to elaborate on. And he says, you know, teaching, love, faith, conduct, patience, all that. Persecutions and suffering. And you remember.

over there and over here and over there. At those places, you remember what happened at those places? Those are the things you need to remember. Those are the things you need to pay attention to. Those are the most valuable lessons. And yet they're the lessons none of us want to teach. And they're the lessons that none of us want to learn. And so the persecutions and the sufferings, they get cut out of Christian life. The people that we follow don't show us, as a principle, they don't show us that part. And so being, you know, the guys online that make these videos that you watch and that you observe and that you follow, they've learned that there's a market for this. And so they'll show you the behind the scenes. Oh, behind the scenes, they're going to show me the rest of it. And even then, it's not the whole story. But they know that there's all this stuff that they don't teach us. And it is the stuff, actually, that we're the most interested in because it's the most helpful to us. What can you really learn from somebody if you don't know them?

If you don't see all of their life, if you don't see the good and the bad, I'm convinced that this is why parents have such influence over their children and shaping them. Parents are often afraid that everybody else is going to shape their children. And sometimes I think, honestly, parents use it as an excuse to pawn off the things they learned from their parents. They learned that from society. They learned that from their friends. They learned that from music. No, I think they learned it from you. Much of it I think they learn from you. Because they, like no one else, they have the ability to observe you all the time. All the time. I can count on one hand how many times I've seen a nasty fight in the church building between a husband and a wife. I mean, sometimes you can see that it's like there's a problem. But I know that at home you guys fight with your spouses. But we put on a good, you know, we get it all together when we come to church.

We just show the parts we want to show. We don't show the sufferings and the persecutions and the puffy cheeks. But our kids, they get to see it, don't they? They get to follow us. And they learn everything we've got to teach them. And that's for the good and for the bad some, right? They learn some good things because they get to see everything. They don't just see what we would like them to see. They see all of it. That is how we learn. That's how we learn from people. You have to spend time with them. You have to see how they work and what they do when trouble comes, when they face adversity, when they face hardship. Now, why don't we show that to other people? Why don't you fight when your guests come over? Well, that would not be hospitable, and it's true. But there's more than that to why you don't fight when they come over. We have this commitment to privacy and this commitment to isolation and hiding that Paul and Timothy never would have known.

They didn't have thick walls in their day and age. They just didn't exist. And so Paul takes his persecutions and his sufferings, and he says, these are the things you need to learn from. These are the most important lessons for you, young Timothy. And this, I think, is where we differ from Paul. These aren't the lessons we want to teach others. We simply would like our sufferings to go away, to be minimized, to be hidden, so that no one has to see them. And we tell ourselves that it would be better for them not to see them. There's nothing they can do about it. It would just be an unnecessary burden for them. But this isn't how Paul sees it. Paul does the exact opposite. In 2 Corinthians 11, he says, If I have to boast, I will boast in what pertains to my weakness. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed forever, knows that I am not lying. In Damascus, the Ethnarch, under Aretas the king, was guarding the city of the Damascenes in order to seize me.

And I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and so escaped his hands. Now, if you know that story, you know that Paul was not saying, where's the basket? Paul didn't want out. The people pleaded with him and pushed him and finally convinced him to get in the basket and to get away because they were wanting to kill him. If I have to boast, I'll boast in my weaknesses. And what he means in that text was that he was afraid to die. He was afraid of suffering. These were his weaknesses. In Hebrews 10 it says, Remember the former days when after being enlightened you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a public spectacle. Your sufferings were made a public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated. Again, you have public exposure of their weaknesses, of their troubles, of their hardships. And again, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4,

This is sort of a pulling the curtain back and him saying, I'll tell you what I really think. Here's a section where I'll just tell you what I really think. For I think God has exhibited us apostles, last of all, as men condemned to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are prudent in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are distinguished, but we are without honor. And you see him setting up the conflict here and saying, what is it that we boast in? What is it that we talk about? Me, it's my weakness. It's my foolishness. You, it's your strength and it's your prudence and it's your honor. But with me, we're just idiots. And I think God's done this to us. To this present hour, we are both hungry and thirsty and are poorly clothed and are roughly treated and are homeless and we toil working with our hands.

When we're reviled, we bless. When we're persecuted, we endure. When we're slandered, we try to conciliate. We have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now. These are not the words of a man who has a very high view of himself. He understands his sufferings and his persecutions. And he doesn't hide them. In this last passage, he says, I think God has on purpose exposed our weaknesses and our sorrows in a way that he hasn't with other people. And he's exposed us to the whole rest of the world. He's made our sufferings known. And that's because our sufferings and our persecutions aren't supposed to be hidden. As much as we may not like it, others are following us. Just like your children follow you at home. Just like you followed your children when you were at home. Others are following us. They're watching us. They're learning from us. As much as you think you don't have anything good to teach them, and you don't want anyone looking on you and your weakness, they are.

We are. It can't be hidden. In our passage in 2 Timothy, Paul mentions three cities. Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. And if you go back into Acts, you can read about what happened in those cities. What happened in Antioch? Well, he and the disciples went in, and they go into the synagogue, and they're preaching. And he preaches a sermon, and his sermon's pointed. And some of the people rejoiced. And some of the people gnashed their teeth, the Jews especially. And more people wanted to hear Paul. But the Jews were angry at him. And so it says in Acts 13, 50 and 51, But the Jews incited the devout women of prominence and the leading men of the city and instigated a persecution against Paul and Barnabas and drove them out of their district. But they shook off the dust of their feet in protest against them. And they went to Iconium. And so Paul says, we were in Antioch. And there was a persecution. They were set out to want to kill them. So they fled and they go to Iconium. What happens at Iconium?

Same thing, he preaches, it causes division. They plot to stone them, and so they flee Iconium. And then where do they go? They go to Lystra. And what happens in Lystra? The Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and having won over the crowds, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead. These are the particular things that he calls to Timothy's mind, and he says, you remember that, you remember my sufferings, you remember how they thought I was dead. It was this building conflict from city to city, and they're following him. And eventually they catch up with him at Lystra, and they think they've killed him. This is Paul's resume. This is what he emphasizes. If you were Paul, is that what you would talk about? It's not naturally what I would talk about. If I was going to talk about Antioch and Iconium and Lystra, I would talk about the Gentiles who rejoiced.

And I would talk about the great power and the effect of my preaching and that there was some opposition. But God's word was doing all of this wonderful work and his power was being demonstrated. Just like every missionary letter we get. They don't tell us about the hard stuff. They don't tell us about the pain. They don't tell us about the sorrows. They tell us about all the good stuff. I'll tell you, I love the men in our presbytery because there's a time in our presbytery meetings where every church and every church plant has to give a report and say how things are going in their church. And we're a small group, you know.

Nine, ten churches, whatever. And it's sweet because the men stand up and they tell you, they give you the straight dope. And sometimes they cry because it's been hard for them. Or there's been sorrows. And they'll tell you the good things too. But they're not unwilling to tell you the hard things. The painful things. The sorrows and griefs that they've had to deal with in their ministries. Their sufferings and their persecutions. Just like Paul. Maybe a better way to describe this. is that Paul's sufferings and his persecutions were the context of his teaching and his conduct and his purpose and his faith and his patience and love and perseverance. He didn't teach in a comfortable setting. He taught in a hostile setting. So do you want anyone following your teaching and conduct and the rest in the context of your suffering? I don't know that any of us do. I think if we're honest, we would say, I want to suffer by myself.

I don't want to drag them down. I don't want expectations on me. I can't handle the responsibilities. The pressure, the weight, the intensity is too much. If I could just be alone while I suffer and come back when I feel better. This is not God's way. You have your best lessons to teach in the midst of your suffering, not in the absence of them. And so if you feel overwhelmed and you feel worn out and you feel like it's too much and you're ready to pull your hair out, you're ready to quit, now's the time. There are those who are watching you. I learned this lesson early in ministry when we planted this church. I think it was probably in the first six months. And I didn't like it. And I learned it during a prayer. There was a young couple that was at the church who were visiting and were friends of ours. And they didn't end up sticking around. The drive was too far for them. But anyway, the husband was praying at small group one day. And we had older kids. We had two kids. I don't know if they had any yet or not. But he prayed.

That we would be a good example for them. That they would learn from us. Lord, help us to learn from Dave and Vanessa. Don't do that. My teaching, yes, but my parenting, at that point, and all I learned was that they were watching. And that I couldn't get away from their eye. That to be a pastor, but not just to be a pastor, to be in a church, to be in this church, is to be known. People are going to watch. They're going to see. And if they love you, they're going to speak about the things they see. They're going to watch how you treat your spouse. They're going to watch how you treat your kids. They're going to watch what you do at small group. They're going to watch if you're here on time or if you're late or if you stick around or if you help or if you don't. They're just watching. They're just watching. We're just watching. There's no privacy. You think, well, it shouldn't be that way in the church. There should be anonymity. We should be able to come and go and freely move about without all of this scrutiny.

That may be the world's desire, but that ought not to be the church's desire. We shouldn't be afraid of being known. And so Paul takes his sufferings, and he takes his persecutions, and he shines a big light on them, and he says, you remember, it got so bad that they thought I was dead. And you can imagine being Paul, thinking of his father in the faith, almost dead, not a pleasant memory. And I think for many of us, that's where the story would stop, and we'd say, and that was awful and terrible, and we learned how to avoid that. That won't happen again. But Paul adds on to this simple little explanation, out of all of them, the Lord rescued me. And there's no more comforting words than that. Out of them all, the Lord rescued me. This is the point of this whole passage that we're studying. Out of them all, the Lord rescued me. He got into terribly uncomfortable, terribly dangerous circumstances. And out of all of them, the Lord rescued me.

And it's a bit ironic, if you think about it, that Paul's writing this. Because this is his last letter. He's about to die. He's in Roman prison while he's writing this. And he's very shortly after he pens this letter, killed, actually, for his faith. And he says with joy, out of all of them, the Lord delivered me. And he understood that the deliverance that the Lord provided was sometimes through a basket, and sometimes through leaving in the dark. And finally, He was delivered through death. No matter what circumstance Paul found himself in, no matter how hard, no matter how difficult, he trusted that God would deliver him, would attend to him, and would care for him. And we need that. You and I, we need that. So should you seek out suffering? Nope. Nope. Nowhere in the Bible does it tell you you need to seek out suffering. You're being unfaithful if you're not suffering. There are times that we don't suffer.

or in the ways that Paul is suffering. Paul never sought out suffering. I mean, he suffered quite a bit, but did Paul ever say, you know what, Barnabas, John, I think life's gotten a little too comfortable. We don't have any open wounds from being beaten or shipwrecked. Why don't we go get ourselves in trouble? Let's go preach. They didn't seek out suffering, nor should we. And so the goal is not for you to seek out suffering. The goal is that when it comes, Will you have learned the lesson from Paul that he's teaching here? Which is that the Lord will deliver you out of it. And that his ways of deliverance are good ways. And so Paul summarizes this by saying, what we all recognize but didn't want, just implicitly, he says explicitly, all those who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. Will suffer. Will have hardships. And so the question in our minds is not if, but when. And how bad.

and for how long, and what will you do when it comes? That's really the question. It's not just like, oh, no, when's the roof going to fall down? He says it's going to happen. It will happen. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 4, I think God's exhibited us on purpose. And the reason is that Christians are able to suffer well in a way that no one else in the world is. Now, when I say that Christians suffer well, I don't mean that they handle it well. And I don't mean that it's easy for them or it's somehow less of a burden to them. I don't mean that. What I mean is they're able to persevere in faith in the midst of great sorrow and suffering and loss in the way that unbelievers simply are incapable of. They wish they could, but they can't. And so have you ever felt like you're the dregs of all things? Hard as it can be.

Many of us are young, and probably some of the sufferings that we'll face we haven't met yet. Some of us have met great sufferings. And if you have, it's no indication of God's displeasure with you. In fact, it's probably a manifestation of his grace and his kindness that sustains you through it. Where would you be without him? How would you handle it? So will you learn the lesson? Will we learn the lesson? So that when suffering comes to us, we have a way of processing it. A way of attacking it. A way of enduring it. These are the things that Paul's driving at with Timothy. Timothy, it's coming. It's coming. It will come. I don't know when or how. And for you here today, I don't know when or how. But I do know that it will come. And I do know that we ought to be preparing our hearts and asking God to give us grace and to give us strength to bear up under the burdens and the sorrows of living in this world. That we might teach the truth in our sufferings.

Suffering and persecution marked the Apostle Paul's life. And yet we all look up to him for and admire him for his godliness. And we think, I could never be like that. And I say, well, you may not face the sufferings that he faced. But there are men who suffer and who teach and who do well. And the men around them see it and they observe it. When I went down to see Bob Kaplowitz, I was with Lucas Weeks. who's a pastor in the church in Bloomington, is one of my best friends, stood up in my wedding. We lived together at Bob's house. And so we're sitting in the room with Bob and we're talking about Bob and laughing and remembering fun things, times with Bob. And one of the things that occurred to both of us was Bob, who's had cerebral palsy his whole life, three quarters of a century, and he slowly lost his fine motor skills and then lost his gross motor skills and then...

Eventually lost his ability to eat and has been on a feeding tube for the last, I think, four or five years. I'm not sure exactly. Because he lost the control of his ability to chew and swallow and breathe. He was getting food in his lungs, and so they gave him a feeding tube. He's just lost all of his ability to function. And the thing that stood out to us both was that never once did he complain. Neither one of us could remember a time when Bob complained. And he suffered greatly. He'd get pneumonia. He used to travel all over the world. He loved opera. He's been to every great opera house in the world. And eventually he got to where he can't go and do anything. He can't even enjoy food anymore. We get COVID and we're like, I can't taste and smell. And I'm like, yeah, what about for the rest of your life? And you can't even chew. And he never complains. And it's not because he can't talk. It's because he has lessons to teach us.

In the midst of his suffering. And that's been the ministry of Bob Kaplowitz. To me and to Clay and to all the men who lived with him. He taught us how to suffer. He showed us. And we loved him for it. And still do. With greater suffering, I would say, than anyone in this room. To know and watch that his whole life he was just going to lose his abilities. And to have joy in the face of it. Now Bob's not the Apostle Paul. He's just a Jew. ethnic, Jew, Christian now, right? He could do this because God gave him grace to do it. He can give you grace to do it. I'll end by telling you one other thing about Bob. If you want to know what his life was like, he wrote an autobiography, Mr. Man with Cerebral Palsy, one finger at a time, years ago, with help, and it was updated a few years ago.

And it's called Don't Ignore My Mind. I just bought a couple copies of it. You can get it on Amazon. It's the kind of book that you'll pick up and you won't put it down until you're done reading it. It's short. It'll only take you a few hours to read it. I commend it to you. It's the story of his suffering and coming to faith and joy. He was never able to marry. He wanted to marry. I remember when I lived with him and he was like, do you think I could ask her out on a date? And I was like, I don't think you should ask her out on a date, pup. He was never able to marry, never able to drive, had to be taken care of.

His whole life as he lost his control of his body. And he taught. His life was a lesson in godliness. And he loves God. And you can too. And so he's the kind of man you want to follow after. Suffering will come into your life. And it won't be there for a short period of time. It may be or it may not be. But sometimes we have suffering that attends on us until we leave this earth. Until the deliverance we receive is death. That's been Bob's story. And I told Lucas, I said, you know what I'm happy for? I've always thought of the passage in Scripture where it says in Philippians that there will come a time when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord, right? And I thought, you know, some of us are going to willingly be glad to do that without all the encumbrances of sin. And some people are going to be forced to their knees in their rebellion and they're going to be made to do it. But Bob's going to get to do it.

He's never been able to do it. Not for decades has he been able to get down on his knees and worship his God. And he's going to be able to. And that's his deliverance. And so don't despise the suffering and the sorrow that God brings into your life. And when you see those who are suffering around you, don't run away from them. Learn from them. Encourage them. Strengthen them. Let's pray.