Love the Foreigner More

So our verse this morning is from Deuteronomy 10, 18.

Our topical series that we're going through is called More.

And today this leads us to what is more love for the sojourner, for the foreigner?

What is more justice for the sojourner, for the foreigner?

Now, what we have to do is we have to take this one verse and we have to understand its broader context.

All right, so if you know how I was talking about how if you build a theology just built on one verse, you can really run into problems.

So it's a practice that when you have one verse and you're only speaking on that, you want to know what that paragraph that it's in says.

You want to know what the context is.

Then you want to know what that paragraph is doing in the entire book that that paragraph says.

And then you want to know what is the place of that entire book throughout all the Bible.

So what we're going to do is we're going to drill down that, and I'm going to walk you through about what is it, seven different verses, and I'm going to summarize for you exactly what is going on so that we can understand particularly verse 18 and what God would demand of us.

So if you turn to Deuteronomy chapter 10, and we'll get started there in just a second.

Deuteronomy 10 · chapter mention

But Deuteronomy has classically been known by a lot of commentators and a lot of theologians as the fifth gospel.

Some people have even called it the gospel of Moses.

Now, while the material in the entire book, it kind of ranges somewhat in content and style, what we find today where Moses is talking to Israel, we really get a description of how Israel is to properly respond to the grace and mercy that God has shown them.

It was God who delivered Israel from slavery and bondage in Egypt.

Now, some earlier parts of Deuteronomy have discussed how Israel has come to know God.

And so what we get here in this section is a response of what do we do with that revelation of God?

And I would say to you, it is no accident by our elders who set this up that last week we studied Psalm 119 talking about the revelation of God.

And today we're in a section that says, Well, how do we respond to that revelation?

That's exactly what's going on in the book of Deuteronomy.

And so many of you, if you go to the section heading of this paragraph where our verse sits, you'll likely have something.

If you read the ESV, it'll say something like, circumcise your hearts.

Because you cannot literally circumcise your heart.

I don't even know how that would happen.

You would die or something.

Like that's pretty serious.

But what we're going to do, we're going to look at verses 12 through 19.

I'm going to explain what's going on so that when we get to verse 18 and we under we will understand what does it mean to love the foreigner more?

So go ahead and turn with me.

It'll already, it'll also be up there on the board.

But Deuteronomy 10, starting at verse 12, says this, and now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good.

Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it.

Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers, and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day.

Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn, for the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe.

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.

Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

So we see in verse twelve that God requires Israel first to fear him.

Now I don't want you to misunderstand this because fear, usually in an Old Testament context, does not necessarily mean what we attribute to it today.

A lot of times we think of fear as like horror or terror.

You know, you've got um King's Island doing their haunt, and they talk about fear all the time.

That's not exactly what we're talking about here in biblical terms.

When you see the fear of the Lord in the Old Testament in that context, it usually means a high level of reverence, reverence for the awesomeness of God.

It's calling you to be um submissive to him, it's calling you to subject yourself to him.

Now, this does not entirely wipe away our fear of his judgment for people outside of his covenantal promises.

It's a very serious reality.

We have to hold intention.

But this fear is not just like, oh my gosh, I'm scared of God.

It is you are submitting yourself, you are obedient to him, you have a great respect and awe for how just wonderful God is, and you understand how great he is in relationship to yourself and how weak you are.

That's what fear in this context means.

So when we read this, Moses is calling us to, hey, give your approach this with some humbleness.

Submit yourselves to the Lord.

And he's calling people to really obey God.

In verse 13, we see that those things that are glorifying God in this context, how we submit ourselves to him, how we fear him, how we walk in his ways, how we love him, how we serve him, all of these are meant for our good.

Now, this is a theme or a motif, if you want a fancy word, that runs throughout scripture.

That when we glorify God, it is always meant for our good.

Now, what does that mean?

Well, it doesn't mean a lot of people have interpreted it to mean that if I glorify and worship God, then He's gonna give me all this stuff that I want.

I'm gonna get money, I'm gonna get cars, I'm gonna get all this, or I might get the right relationship or the job that I want.

It's not what it means at all.

That's actually the false gospel of prosperity, which leads people to the doorway of hell.

The reason why is because it doesn't call people to glorify and worship God, it calls them to make idols of money and possessions.

Right?

Are you tracking with me?

What is meant by our good when we glorify God is that we are made more in the likeness and in the image of Christ through this.

And so Christ is the one who is our true inheritance, and he is our gift from the Father.

And so our good in glorifying God is tied directly to being made more Christ-like, to be made more in the image and likeness of Christ, all by glorifying the Father.

So this is a this is a theme that runs throughout Protestant Christianity.

Really, uh it was really bumped up in the Reformation, but the first question of the Westminster shorter catechism, a catechism is a document where you would ask questions about the Christian faith, and then they would give answers, and they were scriptural answers, and they were usually used to train new Christians.

In fact, on Sunday mornings back during Reformation time, they would have preaching, they would have a whole church service, and then they have an hour of catechesis where they would instruct Christians on these matters.

But the very first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is what is the chief end or purpose of man?

And it is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

That's the answer.

You may have seen it, and I still did not check it.

I meant to check it when I first got here, and I had kids with me, so I wasn't thinking about it, and then I'm just now remembering coming into the second service, but I believe on our doors it says, His glory, our good.

It's exactly what we're driving at here.

That when we glorify God, it is meant for our good, and that goodness is meant to make us more in the likeness and image of Christ.

Verse 14 and 15, they describe God's sovereignty and control in light of all this, and how God has control over all of creation.

And in that verse, in these verses, juxtaposed to that great control over heaven, over the heaven of heavens, over all of creation, Moses tells the people that God has chosen you, his people.

God has lowered himself to the point where he has great concern for a people who were once far off, who were rebellious, who did not want to listen to him, who lied, that sounds a lot like us, we're being honest.

And the God of the entire cosmos, everything that exists, has great concern for you, his chosen people.

So that when we get to verse 16, given everything that Moses has said so far, that God requires us to glorify him and walk in his ways, that glorifying God is meant for our good, and that God has, out of his great sovereignty and control, chosen a people for himself, then we should circumcise our hearts.

We should not be stubborn.

This is what we're being called to.

Because of all these things, circumcise your heart.

Moses is really calling for true heart change.

Now we don't usually associate that kind of thing with the Old Testament.

Some of us often think that, you know, the Old Testament is just archaic and it's wooden and it has all these rules and regulations, but it doesn't speak to the believer today.

But I would I would submit to you that some of you, if I took away the verse references on those verses and I put them side by side with another passage and say Matthew, you may not be able to tell the difference.

Because they're driving at the same thing.

They're driving at a heart change.

Jesus was talking about the same thing.

Yes, he gives a little more description of what's going on to Israel because he is the Messiah.

But Moses is pointing at this all the way back in Deuteronomy.

He's pointing at a heart change that we need to have because the God of the cosmos has such a great concern for his chosen people.

Now, verse 17 introduces the reason why we as God's people are called to not be stubborn, and the reason that God is not stubborn, and it says that he is not partial.

What does that mean?

This means that God is just.

Leading up in the weeks preparing this sermon, um, a few people kind of poked me in the ribs, knowing that we were going to be talking a little bit about justice and love for the foreigner.

And one of them I think he really had in mind, like, oh man, you know, are you ready for this?

You ready to talk about this?

And I think he was like, man, maybe Ben Kelly's got some, you know, nuggets of wisdom to share with the congregation when it comes to justice and how we deal with it in our culture.

And I will confess to you that I have no other wisdom to offer you than what the scriptures teach us about justice right here.

And I would submit to you that that wisdom that we're going to pull out of here in just a second, it is fully sufficient to engage anyone in our culture on issues of justice.

You see, there's this belief in our culture right now that justice must be partial.

This means that it must not be fair.

That in order to eradicate prejudice, in order to make our world more just today, we actually need to act with partiality and prejudice towards certain groups of people.

Now, I don't know how in the world this idea is remotely sane, but the very definition, if you heard this before, the very definition of insanity is to keep doing the thing that you were doing before that you know doesn't work.

This is what's going on today.

Activists are telling us that the way to eradicate the prejudice in our world is by turning around and acting with prejudice against those other groups.

Somehow we're going to foster justice through this false gospel, this false practice.

And what is worse is that many Christians today are embracing this lie because they have no idea what the biblical concept of justice is.

You see, justice is not merely a thing that you do, it is who God is.

Justice is part of God.

It is an act, we call this an attribute in theology.

When the Bible says that God is not partial, that he cannot change, it literally means that he cannot act against part of who he is.

If God were to do that, he would act against himself and he would not be God.

He cannot do that.

And this is why we're told God cannot be bribed.

He is completely just and will not change in this regard.

This means that if he is not partial, and if Christians are called to obey his justice and his ways, well then that would logically require us to act in the way that he is just.

To not be partial, to not be bribed, to not change in these matters.

So verse 17 suggests that because God cannot be changed in his thinking, he requires his people to follow his ways and walk in obedience to him, and this cannot change.

You don't get to decide on this.

When it's talking about God cannot be bribed, he cannot change, he's not partial, don't be stubborn.

That stubbornness towards those things is what is really gonna cause us to sin when we see exactly what it is, how God executes his justice, how he executes his love for the sojourner.

Verse 18, our verse today, it is not yet making a command for us on how we are to act, but is really a descriptive statement on the character of God.

The character of God is to execute justice and love those who are different.

The character of God is certainly not to love those who are just like him, because what would happen if God loved those who were just like him?

We would all be doomed.

We would have no hope.

Yes, God loves himself.

There's this community called the Trinity where they expressed love to each other before all of creation.

All right, these three persons of the Trinity as one God.

But if that was the extent of God's love, we we'd have no hope.

There would be no reason for me to be talking to you today.

The character of God is to love those who are far off, who are different, who are alien, who are the foreigner.

And we understand that these characteristics of justice and love are something that we ought to strive for.

And that's why Moses begins this entire section by calling us to obey God, to follow his ways.

Now, sojourner, it says sojourner in there.

We we've we've interpreted it in this series as foreigner, but it can be a difficult word, and I would suggest that it has a little more complexity than foreigner to it.

It's not a word that we commonly use in our day-to-day language, but it means somebody who is different, somebody who is alien, but particularly in this context, when you look at it, it means someone who is a temporary inhabitant or newcomer to Israel that lacks the inherited rights of Israel.

This is someone outside of God's people who lacks the rights in the covenant promises of God's people, but he is still loved by God.

That is what this sojourner is in this context.

Someone who does not yet have the promises of God's covenant, but is still loved.

That's what Moses is calling people here to do, is you need to love that person.

You need to execute justice for that person.

That's why we see Moses talking about, hey, we we have to have justice for the socially disadvantaged orphans and widows.

Because I don't know if you know anything about ancient society, but it was real hard for orphans and widows to survive.

We have to have love for those who are outside of God's covenant promises.

In verse 19, when we get there, we take the next step.

Verse 18 describes the justice and love of God, his very characteristics.

Verse 19 tells us, well, what do we do with that?

It tells us that God's people are to love the sojourner, ones who are outside of the inherited rights and promises of God, because God loves the sojourner.

God requires this of his people because we were once far off from God, but now experience that inheritance of God.

Israel was once far off from God.

And the entire history of the Old Testament is how Israel just keeps going away, and God's like, no, I've got a chosen remnant here that is a people chosen for me.

All right, that's the entire entirety of the Old Testament, summed up in two sentences.

That might be not a good exegesis, but it happens over and over again.

God requires us of us because we were once far off.

And this is not just something that happens in the Old Testament.

We see this reality with this analogy of circumcision used in the New Testament.

If you go to Ephesians 2, 11 through 13, it'll also be up on the board too.

It says, Paul writes, Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands.

Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenant, to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world, but now in Christ.

Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

Yeah, amen.

I think Ephesians 2 may be my favorite chapter in the entire Bible.

I'm just throwing that in there.

You should read it.

We see that God's command, He commands a love for the sojourner, the foreigner, the alien, because God is calling a people to himself who were once far off and had no inheritance, but are reconciled through the blood of Jesus Christ.

And he is using his covenant people, you and me, to extend that promise, to bring people into the fold.

You and I were once at one time far off.

We did not share in the inheritance of Christ, but through the grace and mercy of God, we have been brought into the inheritance through the work of Christ so that we may experience an eternal inheritance where we glorify God and we are made into the image of Christ.

And where we we experience glorification in the end.

There'll be no more sin, no more suffering.

Because God has done this for his people, he now commands us to go out and do it for the sojourner.

So our main idea today is that Christ is demonstrated through loving the sojourner.

Because God is just and demonstrates his love for people through showing mercy to those who are undeserving, who are far off, we are to demonstrate that great love of God in obedience to him by loving those who are different from us, who are far off, who are not like us, and they do not share these inherited promises.

We are to demonstrate God's love through gospel proclamation to those who are far off.

But we struggle with this, and I'm willing to bet every one of you is thinking, Ben, I struggle with proclaiming the gospel.

I don't do it.

You see, our story is that some of us we feign justice and love with no real impact.

What does that mean?

To feign something is to give a false impression.

If we feign justice and love for the sojourner, this means that we speak about justice and love for those who are different from us.

And we want those things for those who are different from us in our words, but we don't do anything about it.

We simply say that we love the sojourner without any real action, without any real gospel proclamation.

Oh, yeah, I care for these people who I think are not saved, who show no love for Christ, I'm not gonna do anything about it.

I care for these people who are mixed up in this world that doesn't know justice or love, I'm not gonna do anything about it.

If we give an impression of love and we only say it, it's just false, it's misleading.

As an example, I in the first few months of COVID-19, I'll spare you the details of why.

Um, well, I work, I primarily work in public schools, and the nature of my job is that if there are no students in those schools, there's no work for me, and I don't get paid.

And so, first few months of COVID-19, I got no work.

So I got to go get work.

And so I deliver pizza in the west end of Cincinnati.

And I'll tell you what, as a culture shock, you talk a boy who grew up in Lebanon with corn outside of his window, literally 10 feet away, going into the west end of Cincinnati.

Culture shock.

I was spending 40 hours a week there with people.

They knew things, I had no idea what they're talking about.

They way beyond the color of our skin, the differences were just almost insurmountable.

But I spent a lot of time there.

And I'll tell you what, and I'm gonna try to hold it together because I didn't last time, one of the most depressing times I ever have spent as a Christian was during that time, because this was also the time where riots, demonstrations, protests were happening over the murder of George Floyd.

And I had I had spent five years as a pastor in an area kind of bordering that neighborhood.

And I saw Christians from all kinds of churches I knew, and even some pastors from all kinds of churches that I knew from the area, and they'd come down for a Black Lives Matter rally, and they'd hold up signs, but you don't you never heard the gospel message in the West End.

They didn't come down there for that, and I'm furious still to this day.

Don't give me this no justice, no peace.

Give people gospel.

I don't understand, church.

Why do we do this?

But you know what I did here?

You know what I did see?

I saw social media, I saw how evangelicals don't understand justice and they hate people.

I saw condemnation, I saw a bridge burning, I saw the devil's work.

You've got to get dirty, you've got to get involved in people's lives.

Or it why are we even here?

There's no point for us to be here.

Don't.

And you know what?

I didn't say this last time.

I got to be good friends with some of the people I worked in who lived in that neighborhood.

And you know what?

They did not appreciate the rich white man coming into their neighborhood and protesting.

Not one bit.

They did not like it.

But we fool ourselves.

We feign these ideas and we think we're really doing something, but we don't have anything behind it.

And we're nothing but hypocrites if that's how we're gonna act.

Now that's one side of things.

The other side, others of us, we build walls to keep the sojourner out.

I'm gonna tell you, church, in Mason, Ohio, in the suburbs, I think this is probably where we struggle the most.

Brothers and sisters, if there's something we struggle with, we build houses that act like castles to keep the people out.

Our friends are predominantly made up of people in the church, or maybe some people that we knew in a past church.

We don't engage the sojourner, the foreigner, the alien, because we don't have to.

We only do it when we're forced to.

We pull our kids out of public institutions to protect them, and I get it.

My kids go to private school too.

But we think that gives us an excuse to not go and engage the culture, to not go and see what else is out there and talk to talk to people.

Last year, the second half of last year of the school year, I worked in Mason Middle School.

And when you work in an institution like Mason Middle School and you line it up with a church-like sacred mission, I tell you, church, there's some frightening differences.

If I take the cultural backgrounds, the ethnicities, the different skin colors in Mason Middle School, and I compare it to what we see here in Sacred Mission.

If this is a representation for what Mason is, guys, we're missing it.

Now, I don't want you to hear that that's all I want to chase.

I don't want to just chase people of different skin complexions.

That's not the point.

But we have to understand there is a reality where we exist in Mason, Ohio, some of us in Westchester, but we have the nations literally brought to us.

We work in a city or we live in a city where, because of the success of one of the greatest companies in the world, people come from all over the world to live in this area.

We have one of the in in all of Ohio and in the surrounding tri-state area, we have one of the largest populations of people who practice Islam, people who practice Hinduism.

And to my knowledge, I don't know if this is true or not, but to my knowledge, this church does not have one convert from those religions in here.

Again, I don't want to say we need to go beeline for those people, and that's all we need to do.

But that's the reality of where we are.

And if we are really going to do contextual missional work, why does so much of our church look just like me?

I'll speak from experience for a moment on this.

Um, right now I I work over in um Princeton.

I work in Princeton High School, so those of you who watch the news, yeah.

Um I work in Princeton.

You guys have got it easy here.

If the schools are a reflection of the community and how that community is predisposed to religious thought, this this area is saturated with people who at least believe in the spiritual realm.

You go over to Princeton, I was I was a sub over there for a year.

It took me a year to be able to share the gospel with teachers and faculty.

Mason, it took me two weeks to where I had teachers literally coming to me with prayer requests.

One was a Roman Catholic, others really didn't have faith.

The context here is so accepting to religion in general.

You you don't have to overcome certain barriers that you have to in other parts of the city.

So, like if for an example, I I studied Christian apologetics.

I know tons of ideas about making arguments for God's existence and why people should be Christians, and it's all, yeah, I don't need to say a lot about that.

But I go over to Princeton, they're all what you would call materialists.

They don't believe at all in the spiritual realm.

Nothing.

It's all this material world.

At least here in this context, you've got people that are like, I believe in a God.

Now it's probably not the same God you believe in.

There's a barrier removed here.

Man, I'm telling you, this community is starved for the truth of the gospel, and they're gonna be more accepting than other places around the city.

I guarantee you.

The temperament for the Christian faith in this community is it's just so less hostile than other areas of the city.

And if this church exists to spread the message in Mason and Westchester, then we should have no problem building a bigger church, bringing more people to Christ.

See, if if you're if you think the goal is to, let's just get this guy in the door.

Pastor Justin's gonna, he's a good preacher, he's gonna preach a great sermon, and people are gonna be saved.

No, Sunday morning has historically and primarily been understood as building up for the saints.

This is not conversion time necessarily, it can happen.

This is time for you to be fueled by the Word of God so that you go out and do the work.

When you bring people here, the work of evangelism should already be done.

The gospel message that should have been covered long ago.

Don't make it something that has to happen just here.

Because we, I'll tell you what happens, and I've seen it happen, because I grew up in a church like this.

If it stays here in two generations, the church is dead, and that's a fact.

Actually, both the churches I grew up in are dead now.

They're gone.

I grew up in one from until the age of nine, it's it's gone.

Got another one from the time I was 10 to a teenager, it's gone.

And there are so many out there.

In fact, in seminary, they tell, I'm in seminary, by the way, I'm sorry, but all the books and the articles we read, they say, go plant churches.

Don't don't become pastors of already existing churches.

They're dead and dying.

Most of them don't know what the gospel is.

If we do not exist to bring the sojourner in, what are we doing here?

So our gospel conviction this morning is that Christ makes it possible to love the sojourner.

I apologize, I'm going a little long.

I've been ad-libbing too much.

Christ makes it possible to love the sojourner.

This love for those who are different from us, who are alien alien to us, it will not come without the work of Christ.

This is why our culture cannot get these things straight.

It doesn't understand justice, it doesn't understand love because it doesn't have Christ.

And there will never be those things without Christ.

It's because of Christ that we have been brought into the kingdom of God and we share in this inheritance.

It is only because of the indwelling spirit within us that we can hope to love others that God calls us to love.

We have been brought into this inheritance that we would do the work God calls us to do, which means we love the sojourner and we demonstrate this love by sharing the gospel message of Christ.

Without this conviction being lived out in our lives, then we cannot even hope to be obedient to God.

You can't be obedient to God.

This is what's demanded of us.

This is what Paul's talking about.

We read those verses in 2 or Ephesians 2.

He goes on to say, you've been created for good works.

You've been, yes, you've been saved by grace through faith.

You who were once far off have been called into this glorious inheritance because you were created for good works.

You were created to push out the kingdom of God, not draw back, not build walls, not to hide in your houses, and to push out.

Why are you afraid?

Why are we afraid?

I'm afraid too.

I don't want you to think I'm some awesome dude or anything like that.

Thanks goodness for Jesus, because he's the one who gives us the power to do this.

And without him, without coming to the realization that we need his power in our lives to do that, we'll never do it.

So, our gospel vision.

I want to give you some very practical things that you can do.

I'm not necessarily the best at giving these practical applications, but I'm gonna try.

So the first one is Christ is why we love.

If you want to see the sojourner loved, if you want to see justice for God's people, then you must seek the things and these things in Christ and seek to obey God.

If not, if you're not doing this, you need to have a serious reflection time, conversation with yourself.

Why do I not want to do this?

Why am I not doing this?

Because this is this is serious because the the proclamation of the gospel, the the way that we talk to people about it, whether or not we're doing it, really tells us, man, are you if you're in the kingdom or not?

Now, I'm not saying you all need to go out and be street evangelists, but man, there are there are some people in your lives that you should be able to have gospel proclamation.

Even if it's your kids, if it's your coworkers, something's gotta be there.

Point two that helps with this is that we are called to a corporate love.

You do not do this alone.

I don't take street evangelists very seriously, especially if they're on their own.

Now, if they're a group, I would definitely take that more seriously because they've probably got good accountability for what they're saying.

But the guy on the street corner waving a sign and ringing a bell, that's kind of weird to me.

I talked about how the point is not to bring people here to hear the gospel, but for us to be speaking out there, you do this with a community.

You have a group of people you meet with every week in our mission groups.

And if you do not see new faces, unconverted faces in your mission group from time to time, you need to be asking yourself, and maybe this is a conversation to have this week, why?

Because that's the whole purpose of those groups is to bring more people into the church so that they can hear the gospel proclaimed, so that you can proclaim it as a group together.

Moses was speaking to all of Israel.

You as a nation, you are to be a witness of me to all the other nations.

You're not alone in this.

Don't feel like you have to go out there and conquer the world on your own.

You may play a small part, but it's an important part, and you do it with your brothers and sisters.

And lastly, the kingdom must expand.

We talk about justice and love, and a lot of times it conjures up these ideas of we need to be doing good things for people, we need to pass out food, and we need to be doing acts of love.

And yes, I would agree we do.

But the kingdom doesn't necessarily expand that way.

The kingdom expands through change of heart.

And if you don't have the gospel at the top of your list when you're doing those things, why are you doing them?

Because we just sound like the world out there.

Be nice.

It's not what we're called to.

We're called to bring a people into the fold who are reconciled through the blood of Jesus Christ.

And this is what this is what Jesus commands us to do when he gives us his commission.

He says, go.

Make disciples, baptize them.

Teach them everything I have taught you.

He doesn't say just go do a good work of service.

That's not a bad thing.

And I don't want you to come away thinking Ben doesn't want us to do works of service.

That's not what I'm saying.

Your primary responsibility in the commission of Christ is to spread that gospel message.

So I hope you've been convicted a little bit.

I hope that the Lord has spoken to you through his word that we can use what is expected of us here to see how we are called to love those outside of our little circle and to bring more into the fold of God.