[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast, Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Well, I'd like to take just a few minutes before we get into tonight's lesson and kind of as the sheep do chewing their cud, they ruminate. And so we'd like to ruminate just a few minutes on last week's lesson.
As you recall, last week we were fortunate to have a couple of guest speakers with us.
We said that in Psalm 23 our guest speaker would be the sheep. He's speaking to us about the shepherd. And so he told us a little bit about the shepherd last week. We're going to learn a lot more, Lord willing.
But we noted that this psalm is about the shepherd. It's about his provision, his presence and his protection. And that's no less true for us today than it was for the sheep and the shepherd back then.
And then our second guest speaker was the shepherd himself.
And as you recall, we went over to John chapter 10 and allowed the shepherd to speak about his sheep.
A couple of things there we noted that we picked up on last week was the sheepfold and the significance of it to the life of a sheep and also the life of a shepherd. We also talked a little bit about the hireling who when because the sheep were not his own, because they belonged to someone else, if a predator such as a wolf we see in this picture, such as a wolf or a lion or a bear back then, would appear to do damage to the flock, the hireling would simply run.
They weren't his sheep and he did not have investment in those sheep. He didn't love them like the shepherd did, and so he simply ran.
Interestingly enough, I'd like to back up one slide and look at this sheepfold for a minute. You know, Jesus said in John 10 that he was the door to the sheepfold. And he said also in that text that the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
And I thought it interesting. We pointed out last week that the shepherd, in laying at the door, was in effect, saying, a predator will get to my sheep over my dead body.
And that was the case for a good shepherd.
I thought it ironic, as I thought about this, that it was over the body of Jesus that he allowed us to enter the sheepfold, to enter the kingdom, to be a part of his church.
And so that was kind of an ironic thing. I thought about that sheepfold issue and him being the door to it.
Well, we saw, too, that the picture of the Psalm 23 is about. It's the most perfect picture of peace, tranquility, and contentment that we could hope for in this life.
And certainly that's what Jesus brought to us.
Also, we had four preliminary statements from Psalm 23. We looked at the first being the prominence of the psalm. And we said that if we surveyed perhaps a thousand Christians, we would probably find that the vast majority of those Christians, people who knew the Bible, if you asked them what their favorite psalm was, they would turn to Psalm 23.
And that's also true for a lot of people who aren't Christians. In times of distress, in times of sorrow, in times of sadness, many, many people in this world will turn to Psalm 23 for comfort. It is certainly a prominent and significant psalm in that regard. And then there was the position of this psalm. And we talked at length about. We jumped over to Acts, chapter two, if you will, where Peter preached the first Gospel sermon. And he declared to these people that they had crucified the one who God had made both Lord and Christ. We pointed out that Jesus is both Lord and Christ. He is the Savior. He is the Christ. He is the provisioner. He is the one who brought salvation. Yes, but he's also the Lord. The Lord is the one who is in control.
The Lord is the one, Jesus Christ, to whom we, as his followers give control.
And so Psalm 22, we said, was about a Savior. It was about the provisions and what Jesus brought to us. And in Psalm 23, I'm sorry, Psalm 24, Psalm 24 is about a Lord.
And he talks about his majesty and power and strength in Psalm 24. And sandwiched between 22 and 24 is Psalm 23, which contains both kinds of wording. There are Savior words in there, and there are Lord words in there.
He restores my soul.
I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Those are comforting Savior statements.
And then he said, he leads me beside the still water. He makes Me lie down in green pastures. Those are lordship words in Psalm 23. So sandwiched between the Savior in 22 and the Lord in 24. We find a combination of both in Psalm 23.
Then there was the posture we talked about when we take just a minute and we'll consider what all Jesus has done for us in the giving of his life, the example he set, the compassion he showed when he was in his ministry here on earth, the impact he's had on the entire world.
When we think about that, surely it brings us to our knees where we need to be. We need to drop to our knees, we said, in humility and in prayer and in thanksgiving for all that Jesus, our good shepherd, has done for us in our own lives.
And then there was the personalization of this psalm.
This psalm is about you and God.
The word shepherd or Lord appears 11 times in this psalm.
And if I count it right, the the sheep, or you and I appear about seven times, 17 times.
So a good part of this entire psalm is about God and you.
It's about your relationship with God. My relationship with God. And as I thought about this, this personalization thing, I was reminded of a song I heard when I was first heard, when I guess when I was about, I guess, 10 or 11 years old.
And it's always been with me my whole Christian walk. And you know the song.
My God and I walk through the fields together we walk and talk as good friends should and do we clasp our hands, Our voices ring with laughter.
My God and I walk through the meadows hewn.
And that in those in that song and in that verse, I want to drop to my knees again in reality, to think about being with God and walking with God like Adam and Eve did in the garden.
What a great blessing that will be. What a blessing it will be to finally meet our face to face, our good shepherd. And we all can rejoice in that anticipation.
Well, I want to note something about this thing. This We've been talking a good bit about sheep, and we discovered last week by a show of hands that not many of us in this room were really familiar with sheep to any degree. Most of us were raised in an urban setting, and most of us not maybe most of us, but a lot of us were raised in the southeastern United States, where sheep production and sheep raising is not usually done. It's kind of rare to see in the southeastern part of the United States. We're told that primarily commercial sheep raising is done in the western states of Texas, California, Colorado and Wyoming.
So four states in our United States do most of the commercial sheep farming. Consequently, you and I know very little about sheep. So one of the things we want to do tonight is begin our study on sheep.
The reason we want to delve some deeply into the study of sheep is when we fully understand, like the original people who read this psalm for the first time, if we can gain an understanding that they had about sheep, it will help us in our understanding about the wording in this particular psalm. And that's why we want to spend a few minutes there.
We talked a little bit last week about touring the nation of the land of Israel. And if you were on a tour over there, what you would see, if you went into the rural areas outside of Jerusalem and some of the larger cities, you would see a lot of hillside, just a very hilly country.
It's very dry country. That'll come into play a little bit later.
But it's a hilly country. And as you look around the hills, you'll see trails going up and around and up to the top. And as you go on the other side of the hill, you'll see the trails going down into valleys.
And so we talked about the fact that we're going to have a number of lessons on six verses in the 23rd Psalm. And in doing so, we're going to travel along many other trails associated with. With being a sheep. And that's one of the things we'll do tonight. We'll, we'll be on some different trails and hopefully stay out of rabbit holes, but we'll, we'll do some along some trails and pick up some other information perhaps about sheep and enhance our understanding about them.
The first, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about several attributes of sheep.
There are some 11 or 12 I want to mention in our study. We'll probably not get to all of those tonight, but it'll be a starting place to learn more about sheep.
And the first thing about sheep is that sheep are herd animals.
If you can see any picture of sheep anywhere, you won't see one sheep. Usually you'll see a herd or flock of sheep because they're herding animals. They want to herd together and be together. That's the way. That's the nature of sheep. And so it's interesting that if a sheep is separated from the flock and from the shepherd, the sheep gets very nervous and agitated because it's not where it belongs. And so if they find themselves separated from the flock for a very long time, they'll probably face Death, a predator will get them. They'll fall in a ravine, get hurt.
So unless the shepherd comes and gets them. So a sheep needs to be with the flock.
So how does that relate to us, for example? Well, we're heard, we're herd people as well. If you study the Bible at any length, you'll find that the term one another appears around 250 times in the Bible.
God wants us together.
He wants us to be like sheep and be flock or herd animals. And he wants us to be together.
And he's concerned, like the elders here, like our shepherds here, about a drifting sheep, a sheep who's not with the fold, who's not in the fold, who's drifted away.
And so that's where God wants us to be.
I don't know if anybody in here has, has been separated from this flock for any length of time.
I know several people now who have been separated from the presence of this flock for a long time.
I know some that are spiritually separated from the flock and I know some that are physically separated because of long term illness or other challenges in their lives.
In both cases, I find a sadness in those folks or their inability to be with the flock or their choice not to be with the flock. It's so important that we follow the, the song of the young people who sing we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and truly we are. And that's where we belong together.
One of the interesting things about this separation, most of you in here, probably everybody in here, knows the story of the prodigal son from Luke chapter 15.
As we look at that psalm, we know that the prodigal son went into the far country and lived righteously, spent all his money and he was reminded, he came to himself and said, my servants live better than this. I'm going to go home.
And when he got home, the scripture tells us that his father commented about celebrating his son's return.
And he referred to that son who had gone into that far country as being lost and as being dead.
My son who was lost is found. My son who is dead is now alive.
And so what we want to think about in reference to that is to not let allow ourselves to ever become the prodigal, to distance ourselves from this congregation, from your flock.
There's danger in that.
The sheep can be lost, the sheep can die. If the sheep is separated from that shepherd, he'll die because he depends on totally on a shepherd. The sheep cannot live without a shepherd. And so we too need to remember that Being that separation can be. Can lead to our being lost.
The second thing I want to notice about sheep, in addition to there being herd animals, is that sheep are a bit smelly.
Now, I don't want to criticize sheep, but a lot of animals are kind of smelly.
But a sheep in particular has a. Has. It has a particular odor. A sheep generates lanolin from its skin, and that lanolin sticks with. Inside the wool. And over time it kind of creates a. A sour odor, if you will.
And so a sheep generates kind of an offensive odor.
And particularly to some of us who've not been around sheep, it would probably be startling. Now, people who have been around sheep, it's like living in a town with a paper mill. You get used to it. So they probably do too.
But anyway, the sheep have this problem. They. They're a little offensive about their odors. Well, we ask, how does that apply to us, to our sheep? Us as being sheep? Today, Christians, particularly faithful Christians, good Christians, often find themselves offensive to those in the world. For those living in darkness, those living outside of the realm of safety, those not following Christ, we're kind of offensive to some people.
Not because we're mean people, but just because of our dedication to the Word, to the Lord and to his kingdom and his church.
That's offensive to some people.
But we should not be dismayed about that, because if we offend the people outside God's flock, if you will, we're in pretty good company.
John 15, verse 18.
Jesus said there, if the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you.
Then he said in the Sermon on the Mount, blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.
He says, rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they, the prophets who were before you.
When we're offensive in that regard, we're in pretty good company.
We're in the same situation that Jesus found himself in.
We're in the same situations that the prophet of old found themselves in.
So we need not be dismayed about that.
Now, we don't want to be offensive to anybody.
God doesn't want us to offend anybody. And so there is a remedy for our.
For our offensiveness, our offensive odor to our community, sometimes to other people outside the fold.
That deodorant, if you will, is found in Ephesians 5:2, where Paul says, walk in love. Just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
What did Paul say? The remedy for not being offensive to each other and those outside the flock is love.
He reiterates that in Ephesians 4:15, he says, continue to speak the truth in love.
So we don't want to be offensive, but we need to make sure that we speak the truth in love.
So we need to show love like our shepherd did and speak love to everyone with whom we come in contact.
That is the remedy for not being offensive, like the sheep with the bad odors.
Well, let's move along now. Sheep are docile animals.
Sheep are not aggressive at all. They're very docile.
They're easy to manipulate, move.
Sometimes they're obstinate. But generally speaking, the flock is very obedient to the shepherd, and they're pretty docile. But unlike predator animals, they're not aggressive.
They sometimes, though, engage in head butting, but that's usually on two occasions. One is when mating season occurs, and the other one is when it's playtime. And these are young sheep, as we see up here during playtime. They're butting heads, and they're just playing about it.
Most of the time when you see sheep butting head, that's what they're doing. They're just playing, and there's nothing serious going on except during mating season with the rams, probably.
In our society, when we don't get along with somebody, folks will look at us perhaps, and say, well, they're butting heads.
You've heard that expression, right?
Butting heads.
Sometimes we can butt heads with our members here, our brothers and sisters, and sometimes we can butt heads with those outside of this flock, and we want to avoid that.
We tend to want to get along with others. I think Scripture is clear about that.
So rather than just continuing the conflict, if we do have conflict with a brother or sister or someone outside, in the neighborhood, at work, wherever we might be, at the ballpark, instead of just continuing that behavior, God gives us some docile behaviors to adopt in living with each other and all the others around us.
That information is found in Galatians 5.
That's a good place to look. We see there, identified for us are fruits of the Holy Spirit.
And these are things that need to generate from our heart, exemplifying the Holy Spirit and showing goodness to other people.
And these things, as Christians, live within each of us because that Spirit dwells within us. These things are love, joy, peace, long suffering or patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.
Romans 12 Paul warns us there about gentleness and being docile toward other people and not aggressive.
Sometimes if we're not careful, we can use Scripture in a hurtful way to some people. And the last thing we want to do is do harm to people and do harm to their faith.
But Paul wants us to be careful about that.
He says, do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly.
And this do not be wise in your own estimation.
And never repay evil for evil to anyone.
He says, respect what is right in the sight of all people, if possible, so far as it depends on you. Be at peace with all people, never take your own revenge, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. And then he goes on to talk about, if your enemy's hungry, feed him. If he's naked, clothing, if he's sick, visit him. And so we have within us God's Holy Spirit.
And emanating from us should be those things that, that were mentioned to us in Romans 12.
I'm sorry. Galatians 5.
Love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness.
And so those are the. Those are the things that keep us from butting heads with other people, if we have those characteristics in our lives.
And may each of us look at Galatians 5 in terms of our own lives.
I don't know about you if you look there, but from time to time I look there and I can. I can see some areas where I need to improve, and you may as well. And I encourage us, as God's sheep, to take a look at those.
But remember that last statement in Romans 12 that Paul made. He says, be not overcome evil, but overcome evil with good. And certainly those characteristics are good that we mentioned.
We need to remember that the enemies out there, back then it was the lion or the bear or the wolf.
But we know that the enemy out there for us is Satan, who prowls about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
We need to remember that our shepherd can defeat him, and that we can participate with our shepherd by allowing the fruits of the Spirit to be made manifest in our own lives.
And I hope we'll all try to do that.
The next thing we want to consider about a sheep is that a sheep is defenseless.
The sheep don't have a defense system.
They don't have fangs, they don't have claws, they don't have sharp horns, unless you're a ram, it might be sharp.
But a deer or an elk certainly have sharp, long horns. So if a predator attacks a sheep, they are helpless without a shepherd to defend them.
They only have two things they can do.
One is cry out or bleat in fear.
The other thing is they can run.
Although if you've ever seen a sheep run, not very fast, they can outrun none of the predators who frequently track them down.
This is just a picture of what a sheep does when a predator attacks.
He runs. That's about it.
That's all he can do. And if the shepherd does not intervene, the sheep does not escape.
So that's where it is.
So how does that idea impact us as sheep in the Lord's flock today?
We need to recognize that we as sheep are weak and frequently defenseless as well.
Even the strongest Christians we can think of struggle with weakness from time to time and spiritual challenges in their lives.
I know probably most of us have seen that, but I'm reminded of what Paul the Apostle said, Paul very apostle, who was who faced Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus.
His wording in Romans chapter seven strikes at the heart of this matter. The weakness of a man, a weakness of a woman. As far as trying to do what's right, Paul says there in Romans 7, beginning at verse 18.
He says, the things I want to do, I don't do them.
But the things I don't want to do, those are the things I do.
And he calls himself wretched.
He was really torn up because he could not live like he wanted to live.
Sometimes we as sheep get into the same situation, don't we?
We don't live like we know we should live, or we don't live like we want to live.
We don't do the things we really need and want to do.
And sometimes we do those things we know we should not do.
Nobody is immune to those situations, and so we need to guard against those.
We never need to be overconfident in our ability to resist sin.
First Corinthians 10:12.
Let him who thinks he stands take heed, lest he fall.
Our weakness is just like the weakness of a sheep.
It should lead us to total dependence on our shepherd, Jesus Christ.
And the Hebrew writer said this explicitly in Hebrews 12.
He was talking about running the race with patience.
And he said, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, that's where we need to look.
If we want to be not caught up in not doing what we need to do and doing the things we don't need to do, look to Jesus.
Our weakness leads to dependence Upon Jesus, of course, in Psalms 34, verse 17, notice what the psalmist says here. The righteous cry, the righteous cry out, and the Lord hears and rescues them from all their troubles.
Well, that to me is a promise.
If our Christian life is not as we think it should be, if we think it's got some weaknesses in says that the Lord hears, rescues.
And so we need to reach out, we need to cry out, and we need to pray and ask the Father to help us through those difficulties.
Everyone here needs the grace of God and we need his strength every day.
But you know, wait just a minute. Unlike a sheep, unlike a sheep in the field, we do have a defense system.
Let's look at it for just a minute.
There's the sheep all armored up.
So you know where we're going with this discussion. The whole armor of God.
I want to ask your indulgence about these pictures because they're designed not to be frivolous, but.
But to help us keep things in our mind about learning about sheep.
Well, this sheep right here from Ephesians chapter six, we have armor just like this sheep does. This silly sheep in the picture up here, Paul says in Ephesians 6, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might, put on the full armor of God so that you'll be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.
And we're talking about being able to resist overcoming our weakness.
Stand firm. Therefore, having belted your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, having strapped on your feet, the preparation of the gospel of peace, in addition to all this, taking up the shield of faith with which you'll be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
And so here we are out in the field of life.
Our shepherd has equipped us to deal with our spiritual weaknesses and guard against the flaming arrows of Satan. As the text indicated, we have salvation.
We have the word of God.
We have the shield of faith, and we have the preparation of the gospel. We have his word.
So God has given us everything that we need to stand against the evil one as sheep in the kingdom of God today.
So we need to remember that in spite of the weaknesses, we feel from time to time, the inadequacies, if you will, from time to time of being able to resist Satan or overcome problems in our own lives, we need to remember that God has not left us defenseless like a typical sheep.
We have armor and like this one in the picture, we have what we need for protection.
We want to continue to study about sheep a little bit.
One of the things that we need to talk about is that sheep, like some of us, me included, are intellectually challenged.
I don't blame these sheep. I don't blame that sheep for that. That happens. We have raccoons that do that and other little creatures that do that.
But this is. Sheep's got a problem here.
He stuck his head where he shouldn't have, and he's in trouble.
It wasn't a very smart move in retrospect. It's difficult to drink and eat in that circumstance.
So that is not very intelligent, what that sheep did. So they lack some intelligence.
Sheep don't learn very well.
They know a couple of things.
They know if they're hungry or not, and they know if they're thirsty or not, and they know if the shepherd calls them.
And so they have limited intelligence, if you will. Most of the things a sheep knows is through instincts. For example, one of the things we'll talk about is the sheep has an instinct to drink only from still water, from calm waters.
He's frightened of rushing waters because instinct tells him that if I fall in, my wool is going to get wet and I'm going to be dragged down and I'm going to drown. Well, the sheep doesn't go through that process, that mental process, but through instinct. He knows to stay away from rushing waters. But, you know, most. Most animals can. Not most animals, but some animals can be trained. A dog can be trained to sit or fetch.
A horse can be trained to trot a certain way or run a certain way. Different gaits for a horse and a sheep doesn't have that.
And unfortunately, we, like sheep, are sometimes intellectually challenged.
Now, that's a statement that is difficult to accept, particularly in a crowd like this. In this congregation, we have, I don't know how many engineers in this congregation, smart men who can design and repair things that are necessary to go the moon.
We have people in here with advanced degrees, professors, all sorts of smart people.
But we are human beings. And as human beings, there are areas where we are intellectually challenged.
I want to go to Scripture and talk about that in just a minute. Particularly that's true with regard to our relationship with our shepherd, particularly in relationship to spiritual matters in our lives.
Jeremiah 10, verse 23.
Jeremiah says, Lord, I know that the way of a man is not in himself.
He says, it's not within man that walks to direct his own steps.
Jeremiah the prophet says, we, like sheep, don't know exactly the right ways to go.
We lack discernment sometimes in our lives.
I'm not going to ask you to show your hands if you're one of the people who has always made the right decision about everything.
If you're like me, you could probably go through a list, a long list of decisions maybe you've made in the past that you wish you not had.
Even though we're reasonably intelligent people, we don't always make the right decision because God did not make us that way. To know everything we should do, to know every path we should take. And that's why he gave us a shepherd and gave us the good shepherd.
So we simply don't always know the right path to take.
So how do we go about making the best choices in life?
That's the question.
First Corinthians 2, verse 14.
Paul says, There a natural person, that's us. I guess a natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for their foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
So the ordinary things in life kind of go over the heads of most some of us. We don't discern what's going on, and therefore we cannot make a proper decision about our next step forward or which path we need to take.
We just don't know.
You know, I'm thinking about the Israelites.
They're kind of like us in a lot of ways.
The Israelites were difficult sheep to train.
They weren't very trainable. How many times do you suppose, as we read the history of the Israelites, did that nation see the manna, the miracles of God, the water he brought forth, the delivery from, from Pharaoh, all the miracles that God performed in their presence.
And how many times did they turn back to idols?
I don't know that number.
But that's a lot of what the Old Testament is about.
Israel falling away into idolatry and sin, God bringing them back, restoring them, maybe with a judge or a prophet, and them going right back into that.
So we have to be aware that sometimes, maybe like the Israelites, we're not very trainable either. And we need to be careful about the things that we've learned, lest we let them slip.
So that's why we need to do what a sheep does.
And that's ruminate, chew the cur, take the things that we have in us, that we have absorbed, think about those things, consider those things, let them guide us along life's way in Proverbs 3, verses 5 through 7.
This is one of the keys to our trainability, if you will, in our not getting like this sheep caught up in an intellectually challenged position spiritually.
Proverbs 3, verses 5 through 7. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.
In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight or he will make your paths easy.
What are we talking about?
As God's sheep, we need to learn to trust God.
Yes, we believe in God. We have faith that God can do all things.
Trust says, I know God, you can do all things, but I'm trusting you to see me and put me in the right direction and asking God to lead us in the right ways, because we don't always know.
We're going to talk about that a little bit more probably next week.
Well, we'll move along and I'll leave you with this one. We'll just briefly touch on it, talk more about it next week, probably. But a sheep is visually impaired.
We're told that, that a sheep can only see about 15ft in front of it.
That's why predators can attack them easily. They can't see them out there. They can get to a sheep before the sheep season.
And so a sheep is visually impaired.
Jesus said in John chapter, In John chapter 10 that we studied last week and we read that they hear his voice, the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd.
And that is significant when you think about the fact that sheep cannot see very well. For example, as I mentioned earlier, the land of Israel is very dry. And so there's a minimum of watering holes for the shepherds to take the sheep.
And so you might be in a watering hole and there might be five or six shepherds there with their flocks. And so they're all drinking water and getting cooled off and mingling around with each other. So they're all mixed up.
Well, the shepherd might decide sheep has time to go, so he may walk away from the flock. Of course, they're busy drinking water and grazing and whatnot. Just a water hole.
But he calls to them.
It could be a whistle, it could be a funny sound, it could be a word. But they hear his voice and they come running.
Not all the sheep, only his sheep. The rest of them stay put till their shepherd calls them. And then those sheep leave, and then the other shepherd leaves, and then he calls his and they leave.
That's why Jesus said, they hear my voice.
And so we hear his voice.
He speaks to us through His Word and we come to him.
And may we always come back to our Shepherd.
I heard the second bell, so we are dismissed. Thank you for being here.
