I Lay My Life Down So That I May Take It Up Again

So some of you may not know that it's customary, at least in our circles on Easter, to say, He is risen. And when someone says, He is risen, you respond with, and it feels strange. And yet, it's something we forget too easily. That our God is a risen God. He's not a God simply recorded for us in the pages of Scripture. The Bible's not just a historical account of God's will. It's the testimony of a living and risen God. Come into this world to save sinners. Go on back to heaven to prepare a place for them. And so this morning we're going to celebrate our Lord's resurrection. And if you're here this morning, that probably means that you have some interest in Jesus' resurrection. And your interest is probably along the lines of hoping to be resurrected and be reunited with him. After all, this is the Christian's hope. That when we die, And so our text this morning is John chapter 10. And in this passage, Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. And toward the end of that passage, he tells his disciples about his death and his resurrection, giving us just a few details that are helpful and I want to draw our attention to this morning. The point of our sermon is simple. It's to encourage us to live like Jesus.

describes himself in this passage. He describes himself as a good shepherd. And what I hope to be able to do is to show us what he meant by that and call us to live in that same way. After all the preparation, the best preparation for joining Jesus in the resurrection is to prepare and live the way he did before his resurrection. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from John chapter 10, verses 11 to 18. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees. And the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep. I am the good shepherd and I know my own and my own know me. Even as the father knows me and I know the father.

And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep, which are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice, and they will become one flock with one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life so that I may take it up again. No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have the authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from my Father. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, a few comments of orientation as we get into this. The majority of this passage is not dealing with the resurrection or the theology of the resurrection or the implications of the resurrection, but it deals with the foundation of the resurrection. And so Paul, or not Paul rather, but Jesus here, argues and teaches from his death, saying, if these things are true of my death, this is what precedes my resurrection. Which we should understand to be, if these things aren't true of his life, then his resurrection is weakened. Our understanding of it is weakened. And so he starts off describing himself as a good shepherd. And what he says simply about the shepherd is, a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And so this is how you judge the quality of a shepherd, okay? If we were to step out of the realm of human shepherds and think of dogs whose job is to shepherd animals, what is the one thing, really the only thing that that dog is supposed to do? Keep them together. What did you say, Daniel? Yeah, protect them. Keep them safe. And so when danger comes, what's that sheepdog supposed to do? Fight. Go and attack the wolf, the danger, whatever it is. Now what happens, or maybe a better way to ask it is, might the sheepdog die? So should the sheepdog look and say, oh, I might die or I might get hurt. That's a lion or a bear or a wolf or whatever. I think I'll run. If you were the owner of those sheep and that was your sheepdog and you saw your sheepdog run away from your sheep when the wolf was coming, What would you do with your sheepdog? You'd kill it. That's what, I mean, in our day, I suppose we're not supposed to talk about it. But that's what shepherds would do with a dog that didn't work. It is of no use. No use. Its whole job has one job. Its whole job description is protect the sheep. And that job description goes up to and encompasses you dying for them. But Jesus isn't a sheepdog. He's a shepherd. And the shepherds that we have in Scripture do this very thing.

David, who was a king, was a shepherd first. And where is it that David got the faith, the strength, the manhood to fight Goliath? He was the youngest of all of his siblings. His older brothers despised him. Where is it that he got the strength to do it? Yeah. And I think his experience as a shepherd. How did he describe himself as a shepherd? What had he done as a shepherd? Lions and bears, kill them. David was a good shepherd. Where all the nation of Israel sat there, or the armies of Israel sat there, afraid of the Philistines, afraid of Goliath, having him come down and taunt them and taunt their God every day. All of them are saying, well, how can we go up against him? What can we do? And then little David comes. He was a good shepherd. And he went and killed Goliath. And he was foreshadowing a small picture of what it means to be a good shepherd.

what Jesus would finally do. And so a good shepherd's whole job, his whole job is to die. Not just be willing to die, not just understand that he might die or that there may be danger, but to meet the danger when it comes and to give his life for the sheep. Jesus compares these good shepherds with hired hands or false shepherds. Men who have signed up for the work, but when it comes time to do the work, are nowhere to be found. These men, when they see danger, Danger to themselves, they run. They refuse their job. And as a result, the sheep are scattered. They're destroyed. Now, oftentimes this work of the Good Shepherd, this parable, is used to describe pastors. And that is its most primary application, is that you want a pastor, you want elders, you want a church that understands this calling and who gives themselves to it. But the principles at work here are not only for...

pastors and elders. They're not the only ones who die, right? In Matthew 9, Jesus says, whoever wishes to save his life will lose it. And whoever wishes to lose his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it. For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father. and of the holy angels. And so my point in bringing this up to you is to say this work of meeting the danger is not just a pastor's work or an elder's work. It's a Christian's work. There's a cost to be counted in following Jesus. And that cost is for us to weigh out death and on the other side of it, life. Now danger may come to us in different forms. My guess is that many of us will, hardly any of us will ever have to step in front of a

wild beast to protect someone else. Now, maybe you will. Maybe your neighbor's crazy dog will get off the leash or whatever, and they'll come and cause a problem, and they'll come for your child, and your choice will be step in front of your child or have your child bitten by the dog. Has anyone had that happen? I know a story of a man where that happened. It wasn't a dog, but a bull. His neighbor's bull kept getting out. He'd go down and help him mend the fence and eventually the owner of the bull's answer to the problem of his bull continuing to get out and coming to his yard and threatening his children was, if you don't want my bull in your yard, you should build a fence around your daughter. To which the father of the daughter shot the bull and hooked it up with his tractor and drug it back up to the guy's house and left it in front of his porch. Now we look at that, I mean, if you could conceive of doing something like that,

you'd be like, well, but what happens if he comes out with a gun? And it's like, well, but my daughter was in danger. And I was unwilling, unwilling for that to continue. That farmer understood that lives were at stake. And he had certain lives that he was responsible for, and he was going to protect them. This is a good shepherd. This is a faithful Christian. And so if we want to join Jesus in his resurrection, this is the cost. And I can't tell you when or how, that cost will come to you. But I suspect that many times that cost will not come to you as dramatically as a bull showing up in your front yard or a rabid dog running down the street. But rather that the death that you sign up for will be a death that happens day by day by day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade on decade. There will be death. We will lose our lives if we want to gain our lives.

says whoever wishes to save his life will lose it. This is not a, well, maybe. And we'll see what we can do to prevent that. It's just him telling you the truth about the future. In other words, he says, if you want to live with me, you have to die. You have to die. And you have to be faithful in your death. Jesus says twice, I am the good shepherd. And the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. You remember, if you were here on a... For Good Friday, our text was Romans 5. And in the middle of our passage, it says, For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. And Paul was making the argument, you remember, that for a really, really good man, someone might be willing to die. But we are not the good men, the good women, the righteous ones. And so when Jesus says we understand ourselves as sheep in this passage,

When he says that he lays down his life for the sheep, we ought to be understanding he's laid down his life for us. And then he says this thing, it's remarkable. He says, no one has taken it away from me. No one has taken it away from me. Do you remember when they came out to arrest him? And Peter thinks, okay, it's time to join the battle. We've been dodging and ducking and now it's time. And he lops off the ear of the high priest's servant. And Jesus heals the man. And he says, Peter, don't you understand? If I wanted to defeat them like that, I could call down armies of angels from heaven and I could do it. So was Jesus arrested against his will? No. And again, when he stood before Pilate, and he wouldn't give an answer, and Pilate's perplexed by it, and he says, do you not understand who I am? I have the authority to kill you or to set you free. Jesus says to him, you'd have no authority.

to do that if it wasn't given to you. Do you ever wonder what death is like? Like what it actually feels like? How awful it would be? What would be, you know, if you're morbid, maybe you think of there's ways you'd rather die than others. One of the things that's always been peculiar to me is that Jesus' death on the cross, while it's full of agony and full of pain and full of grief and sorrow, not just in him but in all of creation, He speaks at the very end and he says, it is finished. And then the scripture says, and he breathed his last. He decided this is the end. Everything that I've come to accomplish on this earth, everything my father sent me to do, it's finished. And now I'm laying down my life. Now you and I, we don't have the ability to do it. We might look at his death and we might think he did anything but lay his own life down.

Pilate and the Jews executed. They took his life. They killed him. And it is true that they were the vehicle. But you do realize they couldn't have killed him if he didn't freely lay his life down. When they mocked him and said, you've saved others, save yourself, come down off of that cross. He could have done that if it had been his desire. There was no lack of strength or ability in him. He stayed there. He suffered and bore all the wrath of God. until it was accomplished. And then he said, it's finished. And he laid his life down. No one has taken it from me. Jesus gave himself up. Now, in our lives, this does actually teach us about the way we ought to die. We ought to die like Jesus did. Now, I'm not talking about our physical death only. I suppose, yes, I am talking about our physical death some.

But I'm talking about the sort of death that Jesus is calling us to when he says whoever wishes to save his life will lose it. I'm talking about the kind of death that he describes as the good shepherd. Enduring. One of voluntary laying down. I'm not saying you should be looking for places to die. I'm not saying you should be making things more difficult or more miserable on yourself than they are. But I am saying that the marked difference between a good shepherd and a hired hand is that when they see death coming, one of them accepts it and one of them doesn't. And you and I want to be the ones who accept it and say, this is my work today. This is your work in your home. This is your work with your children. This is your work for your employer. How often do you say, there's other things I'd like to go do. Why do I have to wipe this runny nose? Why do I have to fix what somebody else broke?

Why am I having to clean up the mess that other people made? Because that's how you're dying to yourself. That's how your sins are being purged out of you. When Paul writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians, there's a place where he says in chapter 15 about the resurrection, he says, I die daily with regard to them. Now they were a difficult bunch of people. They had incest. They had... They had lawsuits. They had all kinds of problems. And he says, I die daily. And what he meant was, I die daily in service of you. Like, you guys are killing me, man. Like, here I am teaching. Here I am, again, in labor, he says in Galatians, to see that you be formed in Christ. He's dying daily for them. Teaching them, admonishing them, encouraging them, instructing them. Seeing his life poured out.

And Paul never would have said, I had to do this against my will. In fact, he teaches us that those who are in his position, those who have the responsibility of teaching, ought to do it voluntarily and not under compulsion. That it was something that they were to do freely. And these principles are all through Scripture for us to learn. When you have the opportunity to be poured out, this is a really good time for you to be a liberal and not a conservative. Don't worry about the future. Meet the need now. Jesus says, no one has taken my life from me. I lay it down of my own initiative. Now what causes a man to lay his life down of his own initiative? Not to have it torn away from him. Not to have no other choice but to die. But of his own initiative to say, I will die. I'm convinced it's because Jesus understood the stakes of what was going on. And he was more concerned about the lives of his sheep than he was about his own.

Now it helped that he knew he'd be raised from the dead, that he'd be reunited with his Father in heaven. But when he looked out at the sheep, how many times have you seen Jesus be merciful and kind and give of himself when he's tired? You remember when he was tired and he tried to get away? He went out in the boat, and as soon as he got to the other side, all the people were there. And so he taught them, and then he fed them. You remember when he warned the... The disciples, he taught them as they were coming. He says, you should know foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Do you remember when he was walking along and the woman with the hemorrhage came up and touched his cloak and he said, I felt power go out of me. Do you remember when he came into Jerusalem and he looked over the city and he wept? I've longed to gather you together like a mother hen gathers her chicks, but you wouldn't have it. His concern was always for the sheep.

It was always for other people. And I think in our minds, at least in mine, and I don't think I'm all that different than you, we think, well, yes, with this caveat, within reason. And with that part, within reason often means unless it is really costly to me, unless it is really detrimental, unless my life is affected by it, harmed by it, taken because of it. Jesus says, I laid my life down on my own initiative. Because he loved us. And he understood that there was no help for us. It was his work. It was his only work to come and to die and to be raised. He understood that when he came into this world, his job was to die and to be raised. That was it. There was nothing more. He wasn't supposed to live a long life and be a great teacher. He didn't miss performing more miracles. And he says, my father loves me because this is what I did. I came and died.

Now some of us have had fathers and we've felt their love. And it's a sweet thing to have a dad that you know loves you. That he's pleased with you. However it is, he communicates it to you. Different men are different. But when you know that he loves you, I don't know if there's a better motivation or a better comfort or a better source of strength than to have your father happy with you. And Jesus said, for this reason, the father loves me. Because I lay down my life. So that I may take it again. Both the Father and the Son knew what was required. They knew what it was going to take. And they delighted to do it. In counsel before creation, they said, this is what it's going to take to redeem. To really demonstrate and show our glory. This is what it's going to take. It's going to take your life. Jesus knew that if he didn't die to save us from our sins, that the only other option was that we would die.

And then have to face the wrath of God for our own sins. He didn't want that for us. That wasn't his will. He didn't look and say, that's too much. He said, yep, I'll do it. I see this sort of thing in history when there was great sickness broken out in a village or a town. And they try to quarantine the sick people off away so it doesn't keep spreading, the plague or whatever is going on there. And then there's these pastors. in these areas. And what they do is they go and they minister to the sick as they're dying. They understand that their job is to go and to prepare those souls for death because they're about to die. Now, why might a pastor not want to do that? It's incredibly dangerous. All the sick people and all the contagion and all of the dangers over there. And the pastor says, those men's souls, those women's souls, those children's souls need to be prepared to stand before God. I'm going to them.

But what was he going to? He was going to his death. And so he would go, and he would minister, and he would die. And the next one would go, and he would minister, and he would die. And at some point, if you're like me, you sort of run the cost-benefit analysis, and you're like, well, I don't know that that's the best use of resources. If God had run that cost-benefit analysis on us, where would we be? Where would we be? So Jesus says, no one has taken my life from me. No one. I lay it down on my own initiative. Learning to live this way takes God's help because it's so contrary, so contrary to how we're naturally inclined. Paul says in Philippians 2, do nothing from selfish or empty conceit, but with humility of mind, regard one another as more important than yourselves. I think parents have a unique opportunity to learn about these things and probably especially mothers, because their whole job is to die, to bring up the next generation. I don't mean literally physically die in childbirth or work themselves until they go crazy, but I mean their life and their schedule and their priorities and their sleep and their bodies just are all ravaged by having a baby and then another and then another. And this is the battleground, women. Isn't this the battleground?

Do I want this to be what marks my life? You may say yes, and yet you say yes with fear. Because you're like, I don't know if I can do it. You know, I think the same thing. If the plague broke out and I had to be the pastor that went, I have the same thought. I don't know that I could do it. I don't know that I could walk willingly into my death and leave behind. Whether I could, whether I should, I don't know. My point in saying it to you is we all have fears. We all look at the cost and we say, I don't know.

If I can do it. But that is what it means to regard one another as more important than yourselves. It means to be poured out. It means that when you die, and the people that you've ministered to and that you've loved, your family, and hopefully those beyond your family, when they come to grieve and to mourn and to testify to your resurrection, they'll say somewhere inside of them, he died for me. She gave her life for me. And I could tell you the ways. And that's the most Christian thing can be said about you. He died for me. And so at the beginning I said, what are we going to do to live like, to prepare our hearts for the resurrection, to anticipate it? All the stuff I'm talking about, this is how we prepare. This is what will make the resurrection of Jesus sweeter to you. It'll make Easter more meaningful. When you live your lives each day, not just today, but every other day, and you say, there's a reason I'm

giving myself. I'm giving things. I can't get back. And I'll give whatever is necessary. When you do that, God loves it. In the same way that he loved his son giving his own life, he loves it when his people do the same. When his shepherds do the same. When fathers do the same and mothers do the same. Children do the same. We teach our little children these things when we're teaching them to share. This is the lesson you're teaching them when you teach them to share. Put someone else's desires and needs. Go without. There's one cookie left, but there's two kids who haven't had one. When one of your children says he can have it, it's okay. Praise God. Because they're learning in some small way this lesson that we all have to be learning our whole lives. As a parent, when you see your children do something like that, what goes on in your heart?

Aren't you just filled with joy to see their love? Same is true with our Father in heaven. When he sees his people doing little things that are right, little, seemingly insignificant, it's a cookie. He loves it. He loves it. Because those little things testify to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Sort of the final point I want to make about all of this is where Jesus says, I have other sheep which are not of this fold. I must bring them also and they will hear my voice and they will become one flock with one shepherd. This work of dying, which is our testimony that we believe in the resurrection, it extends to people that we don't know. It extends to people outside of our family. It extends to people outside of our church. You and I, the church, we're the continuation of this work. When Jesus says, I must bring them also, We should think to ourselves, how's he going to do that? And pretty quickly after we ask that question, we ought to think, he's going to use us. He's going to use us. It'll be through the ministry of his bride, the church. It'll be through you and me. At the Easter egg hunt yesterday, I was sitting with a sweet woman who lives just up the street. She was a grandma, and she had kids running around. I don't know where they were, but she was by herself, so I just went and sat down with her. We probably talked for...

Half hour. And she's lived in this area since 1968. And we talked about her husband passing away 10 years ago suddenly. We talked about her children being in another state far away, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, all where they're not able to travel and she's not able to travel as much. It's very hard for her. And as I was talking with her, I walked up and said, so where are your grandkids at? She said, oh, there's three of them over there. Then one of them ran up. Now, this is just an older white lady. And she said, you know, these three kids come up. And they were not white. They were Hispanic. And it became clear that, like, these weren't her real grandkids, you know. And so we got to talking about it because they were very sweet. They were respectful. And I said, you know, what's the deal? She says, oh, well, the year after my husband passed away, the Lord sent this family to come live next door to me.

The mother, this family, none of these kids were born yet. But they came, and she's taken them all in. They're her grandkids, and she's their grandma. And she loves them. She really, really does love them. It's very clear that this is what her life is for, is for these kids. If she can't be near her own grandchildren, God's given her other grandchildren to care for. And she loves doing it. And she talked to me about how her husband and her, how they would minister. They've lived in this area for over 50 years. I was asking her about the big house up there on 10th Street and what the road next to 10th Street that's not 10th Street but used to be 10th Street was and just how it all worked. Because she used to live here when this was out of town. And she said, yeah, my husband and I, we were founding members up at Chapel Rock Church over at...

girl's school in 21st. We've been there since 1970. And she said, my husband and I, we just would minister to the kids in the neighborhood around us. And my husband, he'd tell the kids, if you ever need to talk, you can just come on over and talk, especially if the fire pit's going. Just come over and you can talk to me. We're here for you. And I believe her because here she is with these grandkids that aren't her grandkids but are her grandkids. I have other sheep which are not of this fold, which are not from my family, which are not a part of this church.

And Jesus says, I must bring them also. And the way he's going to do it is through things like, through the lives of lives like this woman. Now, one of the other things I talked to her about was I said, you know, it's very difficult in our day and age for people to even have a concept of doing what you're doing. We don't talk to our neighbors. I was telling her about our church and I said, you know, the vast majority of the people in our church are not from Indianapolis in the sense that we didn't grow up here. We don't have, oh, I went to high school with them and we've been here for 20 years and we're just all very young. And I said, it's hard for us to know how to engage with the people around us because that culture that she had, that open door policy, that was her description. Our door was always open. All the neighborhood kids knew it. Come on over. And I joked with her and I says, yeah, I know. It used to be that if you were in the neighborhood, you would just swing by somebody's house. But now,

You're supposed to text first. There's only one person in our church, I think, that regularly will just show up. Or used to just show up because he was in the area. Unannounced. Yeah, it's John Klug. No, no, it's Luis. Luis just come knocking. I remember one time Vanessa was telling me, it was some morning, I don't know why you were, but she sees you walking around, looking in the windows to see if we're up. She's like, what is he doing? Why is he here? I'm like, I don't know why Luis is here. That's your dad, Dad. That's right. Yeah, he might have been there for breakfast. But you understand that we can laugh and we can hear these stories and we can go, that is really sweet. And we can be very attracted to it. And yet there's a sense in which that is a death.

Because it's putting something into your life, a priority into your life that you don't necessarily benefit from. Not here and not now. If all you think about is yourself. If you only think like, what am I going to get out of this transaction? What's it going to cost me versus what am I going to get from it? Well, of course you want to text first. And you want them to say, no, we're busy. But Jesus tells us, I have other sheep which are not of this fold. I must bring them in also. They'll hear my voice. through us, and they will become one flock with one shepherd. We should want that when we die and leave this world, that there would be people that come to our funeral because they heard God's voice from us. We really should. And I'm afraid that it's lost on the younger generation. And what I want to say to those who are young, and I'd say young is my age and down, us millennials, and whatever else you are younger than me, whatever you're called. I don't know, actually.

Gen Z, I don't know, something. Put your phones down and die for other people. Give yourself to them. Give yourself to them. It's so much work. And I'm not saying you shouldn't have boundaries or you can never say no. But I don't think that's our problem. I don't know if there's very many people in this room who have a problem being like protecting their own schedules. I think we're good at that. And so I think we need a nudge in the other direction, which is give a little. Give a lot. Where will I get the strength to do it? Where will I get the energy? Where will I get the money? Where will I get the time? Where will I get the patience? Ask God to give it to you. Ask God to give it to you. You realize that if he loves what you're doing, he will provide you with what you need to do it. Now you may be like, well, I don't have enough access to be able to do it, but that's okay. You don't need access. The reasons that we would do all of this, die in these ways to the people in our homes and in our families and in our communities.

It's because we believe in the resurrection. Because we look forward to a time when we're going to go stand with Jesus. And don't you want to be able to say, I followed you and I did what you did. I did it. To the best of my ability, with all the strength you provide and every resource you gave me, I did it. I died. As Paul was ending his life and he was about to be put to death in the Roman prison, he didn't have a life full of regrets. He had a life full of... Joy. He wasn't afraid to die. It wasn't a miserable thought to him because he says, I get to go be with Jesus now. I get to go be with him. I've been serving him all these years. I've been being poured out as a drink offering. I'm here dying and I'm dying willingly. And now I get to enter into the joy of my master. I get to stand in the full shine of his love. And I won't have any more sin to muck it up.

I think too often in America we say, well, that's too hard. It's too long. We may be willing to help other people or minister to them or care for them in a short term. Even if it's a lot of work, it's like we'll do it in the short term. But at some point we're like, yeah, they're going to have to figure that out themselves. Like, I can't now. You can't be expected to keep loving them. Sure you can. That's what I'm here to tell you. Sure you can. Whether they're your children or your spouse. Are your co-workers, are your neighbors, are your parents, are your siblings? Sure you can. How many times do I have to forgive them? Just one more time. Jesus says 70 times 7, and that's just another way of saying, just one more time. And the next time you ask the question, just one more time. Just one more time, you know. And it shouldn't be a surprise to us that Satan would come and try to steal away this sort of joy, this sort of contentment, this sort of hope.

We shouldn't be surprised that he would tell us, you'll get that sort of joy and that contentment and that peace and that happiness through preserving your life. But Jesus says the exact opposite. He who loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it. So as you think about the resurrection, as you praise God for his kindness, prepare your hearts and your lives and your minds to pour out. Encourage those in your house when they're being poured out that their work's not in vain and that even if nobody else sees it, God does see it. The truth is a lot of this work, it's not seen by the masses. It's not the sort of thing that goes on social media. But it's the sort of thing that God loves. And he delights in. And he watches your real life, not what you put up for everyone else to look at. So you have an audience of one, and you want him to be pleased with you. And if he's the only one that sees it, know that he's the only one who can reward it anyway. So die. And you'll have joy. Give your life up.

Think, is this all my life's supposed to become? Yes, it is. It really is. And God will be glorified in it. And you'll be surprised the joy he'll give you in it. The joy of a mother with her newborn, the joy of parents at their child's wedding, the joy of grandchildren being born. That's the real life. That's the real life. Our society doesn't think that's the real life, but that's the real life. That's what we should be giving our lives for, teaching others the same. Let's pray.