Andy Stanley - The Ultimate Expression of Faithfulness
Now, I wanna talk about you for a second, even though I don't know you. One of the strangest things about you, and there are so many strange things about you. I mean, I don't know, but you just ask your closest friends, one of the strangest things about you is that while you know what's best for you, because you know yourself best, sometimes, maybe oftentimes, you ignore your own good advice, and me too, health advice, financial advice, relationship advice, marriage advice, parenting advice that you have acted against your own best interests and so here's what we all have in common. This isn't a Christian thing, this is just a thing, thing. We have all been our own worst enemies at time.
In fact, your greatest regret, which I bring up all the time, I don't know why, but your greatest regret, and this is true for all of us. Your greatest regret, when you were moving in the direction of that greatest regret, you kind of knew it was a mistake. You knew that, you know, I don't know if this is the wisest thing to do, smartest thing to do. Your mama warned you. You know, people warned you, but you're like, you know, I can figure this out. You kind of knew what you were getting into, and then you act as surprised when it all fell apart. You're like, I can't believe this is happening. And there's a part of your mind going, yeah, you can 'cause you kind of knew, I mean, and so why do we do this? It's like we can't help ourselves.
We promise ourselves over and over and never again, never again, never again and three hours later, or the next day, whatever it might be, you have broken promises you've made to yourselves, so here's the bottom line to get us started off, everybody on the same page on this happy, uplifting message, you've been unfaithful to you. And the good news it's not just you. In fact, I don't know if you're a Bible reader or not. I read the Bible every morning. This season of my life, Sandra and I are such Bible nerds because we have so much time in the morning 'cause our kids are out at the house, anyway. We love them, but they're out if the house. And so we just love reading the Bible, but here are some verses from the Bible, that regardless of what you think about the Bible, you can relate to. This is kind of a big, wide, end of the funnel all skate. And if it makes you feel any better, this is amazing.
The man who admitted this, what we're about to read, the man who admitted this about himself wrote about 10% of the Bible and about 20 something percent of the New Testament, so here's what he writes. He writes this, this is in the Bible. "I do not understand what I do". I thought somebody would say amen. Like, yeah, you don't wanna confess that. I'll say amen for you. "I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do". And it gets worse. "And if I do what I do not want to do..." I agree that there is somewhere out there, somehow there is like a good law, there's a code of conduct that's out there that's beyond me. It's not in me because if it was in me, I would obey it. It's out there somewhere that it stands over me and it calls out to me.
And then when it calls out to me and I ignore that law, then it calls me out and says, "What are you doing"? And you have that internal conversation like, "I can't believe I did that. What am I doing? What's wrong with me"? And it's like there's two of you. And then he writes this, he says, "For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot consistently carry it out". And then in English, this kind of gets all fumbled up, but here's what he writes. "For I do not do the good I wanna do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing".
Now he's dictating. Somebody's trying to write this while he is saying this. Like, whoa, slow down, slow down. And then he's walking back and forth, pacing back and forth dictating this letter and then he throws his hands up in the air and he says, "Write this down. What a wretched man I am"! And put an exclamation mark on it. They didn't have punctuation in Greek. What a wretched man I am. What a miserable, distressed person I am. I know what I'm supposed to do and I can't pull it off and I know what I need to do consistently, and I can't pull it off and I believe there's the law. In his case, he thought it was the law of God saying, here's what you should and shouldn't do and I know the law is correct and I just can't pull it off. To which, because I'm a Bible reader, I wanna say time out, because the Apostle Paul wrote this.
I wanna go, whoa, whoa, whoa, Paul, hold on, hold on. Look, Paul. You wrote the Bible. Okay, what do you mean you can't do what you ought to do? All these letters you wrote to these first century Christians that now are part of our New Testament and all of these letters, you're telling us what to do, and at the same time you're saying, "Hey, here's what you ought to do, but I can't do it". So I mean, what's going on? What do you mean? Here's how you ought to live life, and oh yeah, by the way, I keep falling short as well. There's a tension there. And then he asks a question, an important question. If you're a Christian, this is the way forward.
If you're not a Christian or not a Jesus follower, you should at least consider this because I know you can relate with everything I just read about, right? I mean, he's so honest. He says, "What a wretched man that I am. Who, who, who will rescue me? Who will rescue me from me"? Or let me just ask it on all of our behalf, okay? And if this isn't you, then you're so lucky, but for the rest of us mere mortals, who will rescue us from us? Who's gonna rescue me from me? Who's gonna rescue you from you? Who's gonna rescue you from that habit, from that thing, from that secret, from that thing that's not all that bad, but you really don't wanna do it anymore. You believe in self-control and you've got self-control in this area but for some reason, this is like you've become a slave to some kind of thing.
Who's gonna rescue you from that? That's what we're talking about in this series, what our world needs now. And what we've decided in this series, and I'll get back to what I just said in just a minute, what we've said in this series is what our world needs now is for Christians to act Christlike. Now, if you're not a Christian, you're like finally a Christian acknowledges you guys don't always act very Christlike. You want me to become one of you and you're not even very good at what you're supposed to do, to which I just acknowledge exactly, we're working on it. But what the world needs now is for more Jesus followers to live their life as if they're actually following Jesus and here's why. There are so many of us.
If we would just act Christlike, things would change. Things would change in our homes, things would change in our communities, things would change in our nation. But let's be realistic. You know, just to be honest, as Paul admits, this is much easier said than done, right? He tried, you've tried, but again, let's be realistic. You can't dunk like Anthony Edwards. You can't putt like Jordan Spieth. You can't dance like Bruno Mars. You can't sing like Beyonce and you're expected to live like Jesus. I mean, I can't even live up to and measure up to other people and so how in the world am I supposed to live my life like Jesus and act and react like Jesus? And according to the Apostle Paul, we can't, not consistently, anyway. So in conclusion, what a wretched man I am. What a wretched group of people you are. Who is going to rescue us from our inconsistency, our inability to live out the kinda life we wanna live and even keep our own rules?
Let's close in prayer. I mean, honestly, that's kind of how he ends it. Like at least for a second, what a wretched man I am. And then he's pacing back and forth 'cause he's dictating this, somebody's writing all this down, then he stops and he says, write this down. "Thanks be to God who delivers me". I wrote this part, from myself, because that's what he's talking about, "Through Jesus Christ our Lord". Paul says that's not the end of the story. That my inability and your inability to be what we believe we need to be and what we ought to be and what God has called us to be, our inability, that is not the end of the story. There is a way forward, to which I immediately wanna ask, and hopefully you wanna ask as well, great, that's good news.
How does that work and how do I work it? And Paul talks about this throughout his epistles. But the passage we're focused on in this series is found in a letter he wrote to a group of churches in modern day Turkey. And in this passage of scripture in what we call the Book of Galatians, it was a letter that circulated around these little house churches in Turkey, modern day Turkey. In this particular letter, he actually gives us a list of what Christlike looks like. This is what this is, a list of what Christlike looks like, but it is not, and this is where we get confused. It is not a to-do list because we have all to-tried, right? And we have all to-failed. This is different. He says, no, this isn't a to-do list because you can't do this consistently. This is a fruit list. He calls these the Fruit of the Spirit.
Now, a fruit is something that's produced through you, not by you. It's a list of things and characteristics, and honestly, they're mostly just reactions that are produced through us, but not by us. And he refers to these as, as most of you know, the Fruit of the Spirit. He says, the Spirit of God, if you're a believer, lives inside of you. And if you will allow the Spirit of God to, he will birth and he will create in you and through you the Fruit of the Spirit. So I came up with my own definition then we're gonna look at one in particular. Basically the Fruit of the Spirit is this. It's reactions, because again, most of these are reactions, reactions produced through us as a result of our submission to God's Spirit within us. It is reactions produced through us, not by us.
We run out of goodness, as we talked about last time, pretty quick, we run out of patience really quick. We run out of self-control really quick, that my ability to pull these things off is limited. And he says, yes, but there is an unlimited God who has sent his Spirit to live inside of you and if you will submit to his Spirit, he will produce these things through you. And here's how he sets it up in Galatians. Here's what he writes this. And again, he makes it so simple. He says this, he writes this, "Since we live by the Spirit," that is, since God's spirit lives in you, and again, if you've invited Jesus to be your Savior, the Holy Spirit came to live inside of you.
But even if you haven't, even if you're not a Christian, did you know that you have been made in the image of God, that there's a divine spark, there's a divine spirit within you, which is why at times we look up and say, if there's anybody out there, help me. There's just something in all of us that knows there's more to this life than this life. And so he says that since the Holy Spirit lives inside of you, he says, I love the imagery. "Let us keep in step," or maybe your English translation says, "Let us walk by or keep in step with that Spirit". In other words, since God's Spirit lives in you, you are to keep up with, keep in step with, pay attention to, let the Spirit of God inside of you animate you, influence you, and nudge you toward the Fruit of the Spirit.
And to pause when you run out of goodness, and to pause when you run out patience, and to pause when you run out of self-control, and to pause when you run out of joy, and to pause when you run out of kindness, and to say, Heavenly Father, I'm at my limit. I need you to take it from here. I can't, you can, I need you to do this through me. And that is what you as a Christian, I as a Christian, are invited to do and to experience. Then he gives us a picture of what these fruit look like. He lists them, he says this. This is what the Holy Spirit's gonna nudge you toward. The Fruit of the Spirit is love, which is kind of the banner piece that is summary of all of these. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. These are the things we run out of eventually, especially with specific people in specific environments. Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Then I love this line. This is one of my favorite lines in all of the New Testament. "Against such things". And I wish I could just spend 20 minutes on this. "There is no law". In other words, you can max these out. There's no law against these, and there's no law that can make you do these. This is the amazing thing about the Christian life and following Jesus, there's no law against these things. So for the next few minutes, I wanna unpack faithfulness. In this series we've looked at love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, today faithfulness, and we're gonna pick up gentleness, don't miss this one. Woo, anyway, so but today I just wanna talk for a few minutes about faithfulness.
Now, this one, faithfulness should be easy for us because we are so disgusted when we hear about someone who's been unfaithful, not just in a marriage, but somebody who's been unfaithful at work or a corporation or a company was unfaithful to an employee or a two group of employees and you hear the story and you're like, "I can't believe they would treat people that way, or I can't believe he treated her that way, or I can't believe she treated him that way". When you hear stories of unfaithfulness, it so immediately disgusted us that certainly we shouldn't struggle with faithfulness, or if you've been on the receiving end of unfaithfulness.
But here's the thing, and this is why we're talking about it. Like all the Fruit of the Spirit, like all the things on this not to-do list that the apostle Paul gave us, like all the rest of the Fruit of the Spirit, faithfulness is easy when it benefits us. All these things are easy when it benefits us, right? Faithfulness is easy when it benefits us, but faithfulness, because if your wife finds out, she'll kill you. Or faithfulness that, you know, because if your boss finds out he's gonna fire you, or faithfulness, because if your husband found out, he's gonna be on his way out, that is not the Fruit of the Spirit. We call that the fruit of self-preservation. And we're all really, really good at that, right?
This is different. This is, again, a characteristic that when you run out of your gas, you run out of gas, you run out of your juice, you run out of your ability, you're at your wits end, your patience is out, your kindness is out, you don't know that you can remain faithful. This is when we are invited to pause and allow and ask the Holy Spirit to kick in on our behalf to produce through us what we cannot produce on our own. So here's the question when it comes to faithfulness. What does spirit-induced or spirit-produced faithfulness look like? And the short answer is, it looks like Jesus, specifically Jesus in the gospels.
This is why I tell you all the time, follow Jesus through the gospels. Follow Jesus through the gospels. Follow Jesus through the gospels. You discover what God is like and you discover what following God looks and reacts like. Jesus in the gospels, faithful, in spite of. Reliable, regardless. Someone who made and kept his promises and that's what the Holy Spirit will walk us and nudge us toward. And here's the thing about Jesus when you follow him through the gospels. Jesus was faithful to the men and women entrusted to him. He was faithful to the men and women entrusted to him out of devotion to his Father in Heaven. This is the difference. He was not devoted and was not faithful to them on just because he thought they were worth being faithful to.
He was here to explain what God is like so he illustrated and demonstrated faithfulness when confronted with unfaithfulness because if you've read the stories, the men and women entrusted to him, especially the guys, gave Jesus very little reason to remain faithful to them. They were astonishingly, they were embarrassingly unfaithful. Remember at the end, in his final moment, right, he's arrested and what do his faithful followers do? They vanish, and then his most faithful followers, supposedly Peter, his famous one, says I don't even know the guy. I don't even know the guy. And how did Jesus respond? After the Resurrection, he gathers them all together and says, this is amazing.
Okay guys, you're in charge. You bunch of unfaithful. And Peter, you know what, I'm gonna put you in charge of the guys who are in charge because you have been unfaithful to me, but I will not return to favor. He was faithful, not because they deserved it, but because he came to reveal the character and the faithfulness of God, our Father. Now, this is where my story intersects with this, because I grew up, I mean, I've been a Christian since I was six. I'm a preacher's kid. I know the Bible backwards and forwards. Like I said before, you know, when I sin, I can go to the verse that talks about my sin. It's terrible, okay? It's wonderful and terrible. And so many times growing up, and maybe you can relate to this, I have broken my promises to God.
The longer you are a Christian, the more promises to God you break. Have you noticed that? If you're a brand new Christian, God bless you. You gotta short. But I'm telling you, the rest of us, "God never again, God". And of course, you know, in high school and college, "God, if you'll allow no one to find out about this, I promise I will not". You know, it's those kind of doing a deal with God and bargaining with God. And I was so unfaithful to my promises to God, and God has remained so faithful to forgive and show up in my life. This is the picture of faithfulness. It's returning faithfulness for unfaithfulness. Returning faithfulness for faithfulness, that's easy. But faithfulness in the face of unfaithfulness is the ultimate expression of the faithfulness of Christ.
Now, I wanna be really clear about something. I am not suggesting, and I'm not advocating for anybody remaining in a toxic, dangerous relationship at home or at work, that's not the point. In fact, Jesus wouldn't recommend that either. If you're taking notes, just write down Matthew 10:23, Matthew 10:23, that's not the point. Here's the point. What I'm advocating for, in fact, what we're talking about in this entire series is that when we run out of what we would consider, Paul considers the Fruit of the Spirit, that we pause and we ask the Holy Spirit to empower us to be like Christ, rather than becoming like someone we don't even like, rather than returning the favor of unkindness or unfaithfulness to say, you know what?
No, that's the normal way. That's the way everybody else does it. This is my opportunity. This is my opportunity because who would remain faithful? Who would follow through? Who would be reliable? Who would keep a promise to this person or this group in light of how this person or this group treated me? And that's our moment, that's our moment to shine. That's when what Jesus said, he said, let your light shine in such a way that people see your good deeds and glorify your Father in Heaven. Being faithful when it's easy, that doesn't give God any credit. It's when we're faithful when it's difficult when no mere mortal would do what we've decided we want God to do through each of us. To respond like our Savior when someone has given you every excuse not to.
Now, it's not just me, you've seen this as well, but when you do what I do for a living as long as I've done it, maybe I've seen it more than you. I've seen this play out both ways. I've watched men and women walk through the valley of the shadow of abandonment and betrayal and show no evidence of it on the other side. You've met people who just seem so wrinkle-free, their life seems so easy and breezy and everything's just going their way and then you hear their story of the child, the family they grew up in and mom was gone or dad was gone, or, you know, somebody walked off and left them during a first marriage. You hear these extraordinary painful stories of abandonment and you're like, you're shocked because you don't see any evidence of it. They're not wearing it, they're not carrying it.
It's like they've somehow it happened and they weren't happy about it, but somehow it hasn't shaped who they are or their identity. This is the power of inviting God's Spirit into those moments to say, I can't, you can, you gotta do this through me. I do not want to become like someone I don't like. I want to be Christlike and here is my opportunity. On the other side, I've seen abandonment and betrayal define people. They wear it like a coat. It just defines everything about them. Maybe that's you and let me just be super honest, okay? If I heard your story, I would not guilt you. I wouldn't shame you. I wouldn't say what's wrong with you. If I heard your story of abandonment, betrayal, I would say, goodness gracious, my heart breaks just like your Heavenly Father's heart breaks.
So nobody's gonna shame you or criticize you, but your Heavenly Father, he's gonna kneel down. Remember, if you were here a few weeks ago when Joel preached and he's gonna write in the sand, and then he's gonna run off all the people who condemn you. He's gonna invite you into a different way of life because unnatural or supernatural faithfulness in response to unfaithfulness, that's how somebody emerges with what will always be a painful memory, but not a debilitating identity. This is part of the invitation to follow Jesus. It's doing for others precisely what they don't deserve you to do for them, like your Father in Heaven. But there's another angle when it comes to faithfulness, sort of turning things the other way. There's another, I guess, facet of Holy Spirit-empowered faithfulness that's equally as unnatural that will require maybe even more from you.
Here's why I say that. You're the guilty party. You've been unfaithful. Maybe at work that you know what they expect, you're not doing it, nobody knows, who cares. Maybe in your marriage you've been unfaithful, maybe in a previous marriage you were unfaithful, maybe with a fiance, maybe with a friend, I don't know. You've been unfaithful and here's what you've done. I get it, you've excused it, it's not a big deal, it is above me, you got a story, it's really their fault anyway, you know, you've rationalized it and you've done what we all try to do with our past. You've buried it, or you've tried to, but it's a really shallow grave. And for the next 10 minutes, I'm brushing the dirt off.
And here's the problem. If you're a Christian, okay, this is so important. So if you're not a Christian, I don't have any right to tell you what to do and please don't hear me saying I'm some sort of authority, you gotta do what I say, no, no, no, no. If you're not a Christian, you don't embrace our worldview, just pick and choose any of this that's helpful and apply it and come back next week for more. But if you're a Christian, if you're a Jesus follower, or you claim to be, when you bury and don't own, when you hide and conceal and don't confess and reveal, do you know that you are resisting the Holy Spirit that lives inside of you? When those memories ding your conscience and you do nothing, you're actually actively resisting Christ in you who wants to liberate you, who wants you to own, acknowledge, and take responsibility for the truth, and in doing so, will ultimately set you free.
And you can take off this coat that you don't even know you're wearing, but the people around you know something's up. They don't know what, but they know something's up. And to say yes to the God who's whispering to you, confess, come clean, acknowledge. Not confess to God, he knows and God is fine. The only thing that makes God unfine about your sin is that it's eroding your confidence in him and possibly eroding other relationships you're not even aware of because when we carry things that we don't confess, when we try to keep things in the dark, they don't get weaker, they get stronger and they crawl out into all of our other most important relationships, to confess to the person or the people affected by your unfaithfulness, and until you do, until you do, you'll never ultimately be at peace with you or others because secrets leak. Or summarize it this way, faithfulness, acknowledges unfaithfulness.
Faithfulness, Holy Spirit produced, induced faithfulness, acknowledges unfaithfulness. That's what faithfulness does. It takes full responsibility for its actions and its reactions. Faithfulness makes things right by bringing those secrets. I'm not trying to be cute, faithfulness makes things right by bringing those secrets into the light. And yet, yeah, there's oftentimes a consequence when you do that. But can I just push a little bit? You're already paying a price for keeping it a secret. You're already paying a price for the fact that nobody knows and nobody's ever gonna find out, that's just yours to carry. Even though there are people out there somewhere whose lives would be better and who would be set free if you were to acknowledge your unfaithfulness. Most of us are familiar with the name Zacchaeus.
If you grew up in church, you know a little song about that. I'm not gonna sing it. We can't even say some of those words anymore, but anyway, Zacchaeus was a short little man and a short little man was he, anyway, almost sang the song. So Zacchaeus was a tax farmer in the first century, which meant he was very, very wealthy and he made his money off of really robbing other citizens in his village and in his area. And Zacchaeus was a tax farmer, which meant he had other tax collectors working for him and he was an Israelite. He was a person of supposed faith, a Judean or a Galilean. And if you know the story, Jesus comes through his village, he's heard Jesus is coming. He does not wanna mix with the crowd. It is not safe for him. He probably has security and he can't see over the people in front of him so he climbs up a tree. Jesus passes by, Jesus stops.
If you know the story, he looks up in the tree and this made the crowd so upset, "Zacchaeus," he said, "I want you to come down and take me to lunch at your house". And everybody in the crowd is like, of all the people in our village, in our town, he is the most unworthy for you to have lunch with. That is not fair. He gets one-on-one time with this famous rabbi. The rest of us just have to watch him walk by. You know the story. Most of us know that part of the story. And then Jesus goes and has lunch with Zacchaeus. That's the part most of us know. The aftermath isn't as well known and the aftermath is incredible. And I kind of think, I'm guessing, that Jesus set this up for us so we would discover something that maybe we won't discover any other way.
After lunch Zacchaeus comes out and there are people around, I mean these villages are not very large and people know Jesus is in there so they're keeping their distance, but they wanna see him again. And Zacchaeus comes out and he says the following, he says, "Here and now I give half my possessions to the poor". Half. "And if I have cheated anybody," and the crowd kind of murmurs, like if, really? But here's the thing, in Zacchaeus' mind what he was doing was absolutely legal. It was absolutely legal. But if you're on the other side of that kind of legality, you feel like you've been cheated and taken advantage of. So what he's saying is this, if I discover that what I've done legally has hurt other people unnecessarily, if I've cheated anybody out of anything, I'm gonna pay back, the law says two times. I'm gonna pay back four times that amount.
And Jesus doesn't say, oh, Zacchaeus you don't have to do that. That's between you and God. Just ask forgiveness and move on. Jesus said to him, this is amazing, today, today. Not until today. Regardless of how many times Zacchaeus has gone to the temple, regardless of how many sacrifices he's made for his sin, regardless of how many prayers that he's prayed, he says, "Today, salvation has come to this household". Zacchaeus brought his unfaithfulness into the light and then he began to make things right. Jesus makes this incredible statement in the Sermon on the Mount and I'll wrap up. He says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God". The opposite is true as well. Those who have not cleansed their heart and owned their stuff will have a difficult time recognizing the work of God, the presence of God, or the activity of God, even in their own life. But blessed are the pure.
So Jesus was saying, "Zacchaeus, today salvation has come to this house because you have been faithful, you have seen clearly, and you have acted on that thing that dinged your conscience. You are making things right and now you stand in right relationship with your Heavenly Father". So, I hate to ask a question like this. Have you been unfaithful? And is there somebody out there somewhere who assumes, and I know this is a little harsh, that you'll never have the courage and you'll never have the personal security to own what you've done. Is there somebody out there somewhere whose life would be instantly better just to know you're owning it? Somebody who would say, now I know what's been going on and now I understand because I knew something was up. Or dropping back to the first part of the message, is there a relationship or an environment where you're justifying, currently justifying unfaithfulness because of how you've been treated? Understandable, everybody does that.
And your Heavenly Father who loves you says, come on, come on, I came because there's better since, come on, he says, since you live by the Spirit, since God's Spirit lives inside of you, keep in step, keep up, keep in step, keep up, pause, submit, take a step toward freedom and take a big giant step away from for what I wanna do I do not do, but what I hate I do. You don't have to live this way. This is what Paul said. Here's what he discovered. Here's what some people around you have discovered. Jesus came to rescue you from that if you will submit. So when tempted to be like to people you don't even like instead of like your Father in Heaven, when you run out of juice, you run out of patience, you run out of self-control, you've run out, you've run out of goodness, you've run out of kindness.
This is as far as I can go. This is as far as my strength can take me. When tempted to unfaithfulness, even in the small things, that's your cue. That's when you say or pray out loud, you say, Holy Spirit, I need you. Holy Spirit, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out. You're sitting in the driveway about to go in, I'm out. You hear the car pull up, I'm out. You hear the somebody coming up the stairs, I'm out. You pull up in front of the school and here she comes, here he comes and here comes the excuses and I'm out. Holy Spirit, I need you, I can't. You can. Do this for me, through me. Do this for me, through me. In fact, I would like for all of us, if you're comfortable, to read this out loud together.
This is an invitation. This is what it means to position your heart and your mind to walk in the Spirit. Let's read this out loud. Ready? "Holy Spirit, I need you. I can't, you can, do this for me, through me". One more time, all together, ready? "Holy Spirit, I need you. I can't, you can, do this for me, through me". What our world needs now is faithfulness. Less cover up. More owning up. Less just like, and more Christ-like. What our world needs now is for Christians to keep in step with the Spirit of God, to walk in the Spirit, to keep in step with those nudges and those promptings of the Holy Spirit. That when he dings our conscience, we act instead of cover up and bury. And what your world needs now, what your family needs now, what your company needs now, what your group of friendships need now, what your world needs now is for you to lead the way. And we'll pick it up right there next time in part eight of what our world needs now.