Today we continue in the Word of God in Matthew chapter 7 and verse 12. When we see how beautifully the Lord's teaching fits together. And I hope that as we have been studying the Sermon on the Mount, we will begin to see the whole line of Jesus' teaching and where it is taking us to.
Now last week we saw the generosity of God, that is how God is ever ready to pour out His blessings upon those who are willing to seek for them. We saw that the Lord Jesus said, "Ask and you will receive." We saw that He was afraid that we might not ask. And we saw that His word is always true. But we saw also that you will not know this in your own experience unless you have put His teaching to the test and found that it is true. "Ask and you will receive" — that is a promise. That is something that you can apply into your daily life and find out whether His words are true.
There are so many Christians whose faith is basically only in the head. Their faith has never percolated down, has never gone down into their hearts. And for those whose faith has gone to their hearts, it has never blossomed forth into experience. And therefore, because they don't have experience, they don't have conviction. And it is exactly to deal with this problem that the Lord Jesus, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, as we are coming to the close of it now, is saying, "Ask, and you shall receive." See that when you call upon the name of the Lord, He will answer you. He wants you to have first-hand experience of Himself so that your heart will be set on fire with the sure fire of conviction.
When I speak about the difference between being an intellectually convicted Christian and a Christian who knows from experience what God is like, I'd like to illustrate very briefly this point. We can say that almost the majority of Christians, they lack this personal direct experience of what God can do in their life. And hence, in the passage we are studying, the Lord is telling us, "I want you to know me directly. So you ask me directly and I'll answer you directly. Then you will know me directly."
When I was in London, when I was studying in London, I already had the burden to go out and evangelize. And at that time, I had a particular burden for Ireland, the people in Ireland across the sea from England. And for this reason, I went to Ireland several times to preach the gospel to the Irish people. At that time, there were not many Chinese in Ireland, so we were preaching to the Irish.
Now, most people know that most of the Irish people are Catholics. And many of them, like so many evangelicals, so many Protestant Christians, their faith is basically just in the head. And some of them didn't even have it in their head. I don't know where they had it, but they must have had it just in their tradition. But that did not prevent them from being very zealous in a very ignorant way. And so for those of us who preach the gospel there, we sometimes risk our lives because people have been greatly hurt and some have even been killed in preaching the gospel. I'm sure that if you ask them why they are so zealous for something they don't even know what they are believing in, that would be a very interesting question. Presumably it's simply a loyalty to Roman Catholicism, whatever that is. They are not even very sure what it is.
And it is this ignorant so-called faith which is one of the most dangerous things in the world. Because that so-called faith is really more an allegiance, a political allegiance sometimes, rather than a spiritual thing. And you can see in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, where they are fighting and killing each other. This kind of thing is a disgrace to the name of God.
You will notice one thing, that the deeper your faith goes, the greater is your understanding, the greater is your love. But this little kind of faith, you don't know exactly what to call it, which is really ending up merely as a political allegiance, is a very dangerous thing and very bad in the sense that it disgraces the name of the Lord. And so we need to deepen that faith both in the understanding of God's words and in this direct spiritual experience.
This is the reason why the Lord Jesus is so concerned that we get to know God in a personal way. Consider for a moment that if your faith today, the faith that you have, is not a faith that is based on a personal relation to God, which is an experiential relation with God, what sort of faith is the faith that you have? Is it intellectual? Is it political? What kind of faith is this? You will find that whether a person is a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, if that person really loves God and has a personal relation with God, we understand one another perfectly.
Now let me show you, for example, in one of these occasions when I went to evangelize in Ireland. I prayed to the Lord that He would give me someone to go with me so that the scriptural principle of going two by two could be fulfilled. And so, as I prayed about this, I invited one particular person in the church in London to go with me. And he was a very, very good Christian. He was one who really, you could say, loved the Lord in the normal sense of the words that is used today in the churches. His faith in the Word of God, his love for fellow Christians, all this was fine. So he went out with me to Ireland. And in those three weeks in Ireland, it changed his life.
So deeply was he moved by what he experienced of God's power that when we got back on the ship as we were leaving Ireland, and we stood on the ship, and he turned to me and he said, "Eric, how about we just stand here and just give thanks to God?" He said, "In these three weeks, my whole understanding of God has been utterly changed." He said, "In these three weeks, I have simply believed God in my head and maybe also in my heart very truly. But now I have seen with my eyes what God can do." He said, "Three weeks of miracles. This is incredible. It's just unbelievable." He said, "I never knew that my God was so wonderful. Every day I went to church. Every Sunday I was in church. I never knew that my God is so amazing. But now I have seen. Now I understand."
This is what I mean — the difference between a good church-going Christian and one who knows his God. It is the difference between what Christians are in the average and what Paul says, "I know whom I have believed." That is a vast difference between these two. Are you one of those Christians who can say with Paul, "I know whom I have believed"? I'm afraid that the majority would not be able to say that with any conviction.
The things that God did were so amazing that he was just blown over, just staggered because he had never experienced such things in his life. It's so wonderful. You launch out into the deep. He went out not knowing what to expect. I simply invited him to come and serve the Lord with me. He went out with me. And how many times I've seen the expression on his face when his mouth dropped open in astonishment at the things that God could do. Such was the change as a result of these three weeks that he committed his life into the Lord's service. So that when he finished his training in engineering, he handed over his life to serve the Lord and went into training for the Lord's work.
God's power was seen from the first day we moved out to Ireland. Maybe I shared with some of you that day when we first went out and we were riding on two motorcycles, and how the brakes on my motorcycle — something went wrong with it. I had already flown off once from it on a wet day. When I touched the brakes, the whole thing seized and I nearly broke my skull. So as we were going out that day, I said to this brother, "Let's pray together that the Lord will overrule in this weather until we can get these brakes fixed." And the weather forecast was saying rain was coming down. And so we prayed.
Now not only does God answer amazingly, but the way He answered was really staggering. He lets you know that He is answering your prayer so that you can see it visibly with your eyes. And I think it was for the benefit of this brother, at least for him in particular. And so what was happening is that as we were riding out westward to Ireland from London, through the whole period the cloud followed us, level with us all the way through. Behind us was black and raining. In front was blue sky and sunshine.
Can you imagine that for 12 hours the cloud followed us directly overhead? And of course it's too far to reach Ireland in one day, so we had to break it in two stages. And the moment we arrived in Wales, at the place where we were going to spend the night — literally as we stepped in through the door, as our foot stepped on the threshold of the door, as though we had pressed the button, the rain came straight down at that very moment. And when it came down, it didn't come in the mist or the little drizzle. It came down in a shower. That was the first time my friend stood there in the doorway. His mouth dropped open.
You can imagine, after three weeks of experiencing the wonder of God, how his life was changed. So Jesus Christ says, "Ask, and you shall receive." He says it not only in the Sermon on the Mount; in John chapter 16, He says the same thing. He wants us to ask.
And verse 12 says this: "Whatsoever you would that other people should do to you, so do to them, that is the law and the prophets." You say, "What's the connection? This sentence seems to have no connection with what went on before. How can you say 'therefore'? What's the connection?" The connection is precisely this, that if you want God to answer you, if you want to hear God dealing with you and speaking to you, then this verse 12 is the connection. It's a condition.
We have always seen that God gives us a promise, but His promises are not unconditional. He doesn't just throw His promises to anybody. It doesn't mean that you can live a life that is disgraceful to God, that you can behave in a disgraceful manner and still say God will give you everything you ask for. That is no promise that God is going to make to you. His promises are wonderful, but His conditions are also to be met. And what does then verse 12 mean in one sentence? It means that God will answer those who do His will.
Unless you are prepared to do His will, then of course if you ask Him, you haven't fulfilled His condition. You don't expect He's going to answer you. If you are listening to His words, you hear His words, you do His will. So here is the importance of this verse. If we want the Lord to answer us, if we want to know God in this living way, then it is important to know what is our part that we need to do.
So let us then consider what the Lord Jesus is saying to us here. What exactly is meant by these words: "Whatever you would that other people should do to you, so do to them." Now in its negative form, we find this in Jewish teaching, and also there is a statement in Confucius that sounds similar to this. And the negative form goes: what you don't want other people to do to you, then don't do to them. That is quite easy to understand. If you don't want other people to punch you in the nose, then don't punch them in the nose. If you don't want other people to steal your things, then don't steal their things. If you don't want other people to kill you, then don't go and kill others.
This doesn't tie in too well with human philosophy in some ways. Because sometimes the idea is, "I killed him first before he killed me." Many times the attitude is, "I will kill him first before he kills me." So you say, "I don't want him to kill me, but I don't know whether he might like to kill me." So even though the negative form is a weak form, it still says something, it still fulfills the law to some extent, in the sense that of course you will not commit murder if you follow the principle.
So let us first notice that there is a world of difference between the negative statements that Hillel, that is the Jewish teachers and others make, and the positive teaching of the Lord Jesus. Because not to do a thing is not the same as doing a thing. The man in sin, that is the man in the world, if he wishes to accept morality at all, he is willing to go only as far as the negative form. And that would mean to say, in everyday language, it means something like this: "I wish other people to leave me alone, so I will leave them alone." And so we say, "You leave me alone, I leave you alone, alright? Then we have an understanding with one another." That would seem to be quite a high point in the morality of the world. If I don't attack you, it's already quite a good thing. So we just leave each other alone.
So this negative form is quite a fundamental principle in the morality of worldly people. In fact, last evening, we were discussing with some brothers. I was getting some instruction on the Hong Kong way of thinking, trying to understand how people come to think in certain ways in Hong Kong. And showing the difference between them and the Malaysian Christians. We were observing that Malaysian Christians are much more outgoing, very much easier to talk with. They don't have so many obstacles, so many iron doors in front of them.
And one brother was saying he lived in an apartment in Hong Kong for two years. And he never knew the person who lived on the door across the corridor, six feet away from his own door. And I know from my own experience when I was looking for some people — not only are the steel bars there, there's a steel plate as well. And the steel plate does not even have one hole in it. So I can't even see the person I'm talking to. There's only a small gap from the floor to the bottom of the steel plate, and a small gap from the top of the steel plate to the ceiling.
The mentality seems to be, "You leave me alone, I leave you alone. We'll just talk through the steel door." I suppose because there's so much crime that people have to behave like this. In Hong Kong, I always hear those special words: "Robbery." That is one word that's in my Cantonese vocabulary. And so we find that okay, if we will accept the negative form of the teaching — you leave me alone, I leave you alone.
But when we become Christians, we cannot continue to be like this. And that is very difficult for us, if we are used to a mentality of keeping away from other people. It is a very great hindrance, very difficult, if we are accustomed in our thinking to keep people at a certain distance. So to become a Christian means such a change, because the teaching of God's word requires us to go out and do what He teaches us to do.
You see, love is always outgoing. You cannot say, "I love the guy, but I don't want to see his face." If you are truly a Christian, you have to break down the barrier. You have to break down the barrier in your own heart. And you have to break down the barrier in the other person's heart. We have to go out to other people. And that is very difficult, especially if you are brought up to stay away from people, and not to talk to them.
So if you want to fulfill the teaching of Matthew chapter 7 verse 12 that we are looking at today, the first step, which is a difficult step for many people, is to come out of one's own shell and reach out to other people. So that you find that to reach out, to come out of yourself, to open your steel doors, seems to expose you to considerable danger. And literally, the first reaction is to shrink back, and to hide behind those doors again. You find yourself secure behind those doors. But being a Christian is precisely not to feel secure in this way.
If you want to do the word of God, if you want to do God's will, you must be prepared to go out, and accept the danger of reaching out. You have to reach forward to other people. Then begin with the brothers and sisters in the church. What concerns me very much is that there are so many barriers in the church. And so we find that when we just spoke about the family fellowship, it is to break down the barriers, where you can give yourself out.
And you can see that that is a venture of faith, isn't it? That's the first step of faith, when you are willing to expose yourself to the danger of contact with other people. So when you reach out, suddenly you find the... I was reading a letter from Liverpool the other day. A very young Christian, she went to a conference in another part of England, and she tried to reach out to the other people. And she found that some people just didn't respond. And you find that that is sort of painful. You try to say hello to somebody, and somebody just sort of, "Hi." And you find, "Oh yeah, next time I'm not sticking my neck out again for this kind of reception."
I remember when I first went to England. The English people, they are so reserved, so conservative. And when I went there, I was by nature very friendly, and I went around greeting people: "Hi there!" And said hello to them, and they sort of look at you: "What's wrong with him?" Because the English people, they don't express themselves like that. Very stiff upper lip, and very straight. You have to behave in a very cold manner. They call that dignified, you see. And I have to confess that after a few months of this, I got very fed up with everything. Actually, when you understand them, they are not as cold as they appear to be. But they also have to learn to break out of these barriers.
So when you are a Christian, the first step is that you have to reach out, if you are going to fulfill the Lord's teaching here. And so here what the Lord's teaching is: many Christians think that if I don't do anything, I can't go wrong, I can't commit any sin.
# What You Wish Men to Do to You, Do So to Them — Matthew 7:12 (Part 2)
But I want to tell you that the Lord's teaching tells you that this is wrong. When you look at the Lord's teaching concerning the judgment, the people who are judged are not the ones who committed this or that sin, but they are judged for not doing what they should have done.
So in Matthew 25, for example, in verse 14, in the parable of the talents and the pounds, what do we read here? We read that the servant who did nothing is the one who is punished. He just buried the talent committed to him in the ground. And he did nothing with it. That was his crime. The lesson is: God gives to you eternal life. God gives you spiritual life. If you don't do anything with it, that will be your crime.
In the next parable, chapter 25, verse 31 onward, we find that the sheep and the goats are separated out. Are the goats punished because they did a lot of bad things? No. They are punished because they did not do what they should have done. The Lord Jesus said, "You did not visit me. When I was hungry, you gave me nothing to eat. When I was thirsty, you gave me nothing to drink. When I was naked, you gave me nothing to wear. Depart from me, you evildoers." Surprised, isn't it? They are condemned because they did not do anything. That was their crime.
So much of the Lord's teaching emphasizes this very point to Christians and warns Christians: don't think you are safe because you did nothing. Your crime is precisely, your sin is precisely that you did nothing.
In the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man's sin was precisely that he did nothing. When Lazarus was outside his door, he gave him nothing to eat, and the poor man died. The rich man didn't go out and kill the poor man. He just did nothing. He just left him outside the gate. He left him to die there. By doing nothing, you have committed sin. When you see your brother and sister in need, by not helping him or helping her, that's your sin. When you see the church in need, either material or spiritual, and you did nothing, that was your sin. When you see the non-Christians perishing outside, and you did nothing, that was your sin.
The thing we must understand in the Lord's teaching here is that a Christian must go out and do, and if he doesn't do it, that is sin. And here you can see why the negative teaching of not doing, that itself is a teaching which is completely unacceptable to Christ. So it's precisely because you don't do anything that you can't experience God.
That is precisely the thing with this brother I was talking about. He believed in God. He believed with his head, he believed with his heart. But up to that point he didn't do anything. He was just as good as a dead Christian. But when he went out with me to Ireland, he began to do, and then he began to experience.
But when he went out with me, it was a very risky business for him to go with me. Many dangers. Well, for one thing, riding a motorcycle is very dangerous to begin with. When he asked me, "How are we going to Ireland?" I said, "On the motorcycle." He said, "What? All the way to Ireland on a motorcycle?" I said, "That's the cheapest way we can travel, isn't it?" But anyone who has ridden a motorcycle knows how many dangers there are in riding a motorcycle. I rode a motorcycle for several years, and I think I must have nearly gotten killed quite a few times during those years. But I used it because it's so cheap. You can have two people and it uses so little gas. I also told you there were dangers. In preaching the gospel in Ireland, you could be beaten up, you could get killed too, just in preaching the gospel. There is also expense. Even if the gas that is used is little for a long journey, it still will come to quite a lot of money. And we were paying for the Lord's work out of our own pocket. We were not being financed by any organization. We also had to buy food to eat during those three weeks. There will be dangers, there will be costs. But unless you are willing to go and do, you will never experience the power of God.
But when you say, "All right, we will go out and do," by what principle will we do what we need to do? Well, here the Lord Jesus says, here is the principle: you will do to others just what you would expect others to do to you. Now, this is not all that difficult to understand either. He does not say, "Do to others what they do to you." That would mean to say, if they punch you, you punch them. That is, do to others what they do to you. That would be the principle of eye for eye, tooth for tooth. No, what the Lord Jesus says is what you would desire, what you wish them to do to you, that you do to them.
Now, we have to understand this carefully. It could mean, for example, "I would like people to flatter me, so I will flatter them." "I would like people to comfort me, so I will comfort them." You say, "How can Jesus be teaching something like this?" Remember who He is speaking to. He is speaking to His disciples, people who have already been born again, who have become new persons. He is not talking to non-Christians. The Sermon on the Mount and the principles in the Sermon on the Mount are not for non-Christians. It is for those who know God, or who have committed their lives in order to know God. Only then does it mean that you have spiritual desires. What you desire is spiritual, not jewelry or presents or things like this.
So how would we understand this? What is it that we desire? If my desire is spiritual, what do I desire from other people? I don't desire an ice cream. So I buy you an ice cream, and you owe me one ice cream later — no. The spiritual man desires spiritual things. What do I desire? I desire that people will love me in a spiritual way. So I will love them. I desire that if I have unwittingly offended against you, that you will forgive me. I desire that if I were in financial trouble, or in physical trouble, or in spiritual trouble, that you will stand by me as my brother and my sister.
But notice that this is a spiritual desire. I have no guarantee that what I do for you, you will do for me. Here it is not asking for any guarantee. But it is doing this as a spiritual ideal. That is what I hope that you will do for me, that I will do for you, even if you will never do for me what I hope you will do. But you can see that the Lord Jesus is setting before us a wonderful spiritual ideal.
But there is also the other principle in here. What you don't do to others, how can you expect that God will move others to do for you? For example, if you see your brother and sister in spiritual needs, and you don't go to help that person — one day when you are in spiritual needs, or in material needs, you think you have a right to expect God will move someone else to help you? This means simply this: if today in your generosity, you are helping brothers and sisters, for example, in their financial needs — one day, when you are in financial needs, you can be certain that God will never let you down. You will have the absolute certainty that God will come and rescue you financially because you rescued others financially. And on that day, you will say, "Lord, how wonderful You are. You never fail. I experience now for myself what You do for me."
But if today, you are not helping your brother and sister, then one day when you are in trouble, what rights have you got to ask for help from the Lord? You have no right. And God, you will find, will simply not come to your help. It's time for you to learn that as you did not do to others, so it will not be done to you. That then will be the principle again, which we saw at the beginning of Matthew chapter 7, which said, "With what measure you measure out to other people, it will be measured by God to you."
So to give to a brother and sister in need today is costly. It costs you from your pocket. Sure it does. And don't say to yourself, "Oh, I will never be in financial trouble. You see, my job is very steady." One day you may have no job at all. You'll be in big trouble. And don't say to yourself, "I've got $10,000 in the bank. I'm quite all right." Even in my relatively short lifetime, I have seen many fortunes disappear. I have seen the rich become poor, and beg for food even on the streets. But that will never happen to a child of God, if he lived as a child of God. As David says in his Psalms, "I have seen the lions hungry, and the young lions go hungry, but I have never seen the righteous go hungry." I testify it's absolutely true — God never lets you down. Ask and you shall receive, provided that today those who are in need, you are doing for them as you would have them to do for you.
Now in conclusion, notice also this: that by fulfilling this teaching of the Lord Jesus, you become Christ-like. Notice that He does for us the thing that He comes to our help when we are in need. Notice in the scriptural teaching that when we were still His enemies, He loved us. Because He wants us to love Him. There is nothing shameful to desire to be loved. It would be very strange if a person says, "I don't care if anybody loves me or not." If a husband says, "I don't care if my wife loves me," or a wife says, "I don't care if my husband loves me" — you think, what is so righteous and good about that?
We saw precisely this, that Christ does for us what He would have us do for Him. That is, He wants us to love Him and He loves us first. We would wish that our enemies would not hate us anymore, that they would love us. But if you sit there to wait for that day, it will never come. So we take the initiative, we love them first. If he slaps me across the face, it's because he hates me. If I slap him back, we will just make the hatred worse. I want him to love me, that he won't be my enemy anymore. What shall I do? I have to take the initiative, I love him first. So when he slaps me, instead of slapping him back and making the fight even worse, I turn the other cheek, as a proof that I want to love him, as evidence that I don't want to fight him, as evidence that we want to be friends.
So this shows what the Lord Jesus is saying, that we must be as Christians positive: we take the initiative, we go out and reach out to the others. And so in the same way, the Lord Jesus loves us when we were still His enemies. Because He desires that we should become His friends. If you are not a Christian today, you need to understand: Jesus loved you before you ever loved Him. When I think about it today, that when I was a non-Christian, I ridiculed the church, I opposed the Christians, and even then, Jesus had already loved me.
And so you can see that by fulfilling this teaching here in verse 12, we become Christ-like. We behave just as Jesus behaved. And when we behave like He does, we can be sure that when we ask from the Lord whatever we desire, He will answer it. And whatever we desire as a Christ-like person will of course be spiritual. Just like those wonderful words in the psalm: "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." So much does He love you, that as you live in such a life that glorifies Him, He looks at the desire of your heart. Maybe you haven't even asked for it. But He knows that in your heart you want it. Maybe you dare not ask for it. He gives it to you.
So wonderful to walk with God. You know, I sometimes have desired something in my heart, but I dare not say it to the Lord. I said, maybe it's not so spiritual to desire this. But yet, so much does God love us. He puts me to shame. Time and again I have experienced that He gave me the thing that I desired in my heart. And I said, "Lord, You're really looking through my heart. I didn't even ask for it, but You knew it was in my heart." Oh, God is so good to us. But of course, when we love the Lord, it is not in order that we can get something, I mean in the material sense.
But through fulfilling this teaching, we become Christ-like. And God loves the Christ-like people. This means also living in Christ-likeness in everyday living. And this means that doing to others what I would that they do to me will transform our whole way of thinking.
Take for example this. You are feeling depressed. What would you like people to do to you when you are feeling depressed? You say, "Of course, to cheer me up." What does the Lord say? If that's what you want, then when you are depressed, you go out and cheer somebody else up. Try it and see what happens. Instead of saying to yourself, "I feel depressed, I feel depressed," the whole day long. Instead, what do you do? You go out and say, "OK, I feel depressed. I wish somebody would cheer me up." So now I'm going out to cheer somebody else up. And you cheer somebody else up, and amazing — what happened to your depression? It disappeared. It's so wonderful, because you turned away from yourself. A basic problem of depression is people who are always depressed are people always thinking about themselves.
Or try another thing. You are in financial difficulty. And you say, what would you wish that if you were in financial difficulty, what would you wish somebody will do for you? You say, "Of course, you give me some financial help." Okay, you go and do that. You say, "What? I don't even have enough for myself, I'm going to do something for somebody else? I've got so little right now." Okay, you try it and see. You say, "I've got very little. Let's see, who has needs in this place?" You go and help that person. You say, "I'm committing suicide. I already don't have enough, and you say I go and help the other person. What do you think I'm trying to do?" You will be amazed what God will do for you. You may have only ten dollars. You take your five dollars out of the ten, and say, "Who is in need? I give the five dollars to him." And now you're in more trouble — you've only got five dollars left. Not at all. You're going to see what God will do for you.
Now I would not dare to tell you to do such ridiculous things if I did not know my God. I preach because I know my God. You honor Him, He will honor you. You will see His glory. I have tried it, I know. And the more you give, the more you get. You dare to try it? That is the courage of faith. If you dare not try it, of course, because you haven't got faith, you say, "I got $10, I give away $5? No, no, no." But walk with God. Here the Lord said, "Do to others what you wish they would do for you." You wish them to help you, you help the others. That's the way to do it. This is the challenge of faith: you step out in faith.
Is it dangerous? Oh, it's dangerous. I mean, you reduce your actual holdings to half. That is very dangerous. And if you do not trust in the living God, you would never dare to take that step. But if you want to see what God can do, you take a step of faith. If Jesus were not true, He would not ask you to do such ridiculous things. His word never fails.
So as a church, we need to learn this, and as individuals, we need to learn this. Is your money your security, or is God your security? Of course, if money is your security, you feel more secure if you have more. That's clear. But if God is your security, you don't look at how much you've got in the bank.
As a church, we need to learn this too. That's why last night, I spoke to some of the brothers and sisters in the church. Up to now, many times, our church has had financial difficulty. Sort of just managed to survive. I say, "OK, now we venture forth in faith. From now on, the church will give one-tenth of its income into the Lord's work." Hey, you say we barely survive, but we're going to give one-tenth as well? I say, now we give one-tenth, and the Lord willing, in the next few months, we'll give two-tenths, three-tenths. Finally, we come to the time when we can give nine-tenths of the church income to the Lord's work to help brothers and sisters. That's what we want to aim for. We want to see how God is real. I want the whole church to see that God is real. I want you to see as a church that the more the church gives, the more God will bless it.
And now you can see, we will become Christ-like because we will be doing what Christ does, not waiting for others to start something first, but doing, venturing out in faith. So we will become, as individual Christians, people who show forth the glory of God in our life. And also as a church to show forth the glory of God. That is our mission in the world. That's what God has called us to do. That is why our calling is called the high calling: to show forth God's glory in the world, to be the light of the world. And we will be so if we fulfill the Lord's teaching here. Let us be quiet before God.