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Two very well-known passages from the Acts of the Apostles form the core of our meditation this morning, and because they are well known, perhaps it will be only necessary to read a few verses to remind and refresh our memories. The first of them is the story of the riot that took place at Ephesus and is to be found in chapter nineteen of the Acts of the Apostles, and we read from verse twenty eight: And when they heard this, they were filled with wrath and cried out, saying, Great is utterness of the Ephesians. And the city was filled with confusion. And they rushed with one accord into the theater, having seized Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul's companions in travel. When Paul was minded to enter in unto the people, the disciples suffered him not. And certain also of the chief officers of Asia, being his friends, sent unto him and besought him not to adventure himself into the theater. Some therefore cried one thing and some another, for the assembly was in confusion, and the more part knew not wherefore they were come together. The second story is Paul's impassioned appeal to the elders of the assembly in myle- uh, uh, in Ephesus, addressed to them at Miletus. We shall begin to read at verse twenty six. Wherefore I testify unto you this day that I am pure from the blood of all men. For I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God. Take heed unto yourselves, therefore, and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops to feed the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. For I know that after my departing, grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Wherefore, watch. And the Lord give us good understanding of his holy word. A noticeable change comes over the book of the Acts of the Apostles as Luke ends the fifth section of his work and enters upon the final stage, the sixth part of his history. He does this, as you know, in chapter nineteen and uh verse twenty one. And whereas before, in the chapters that have preceded, Luke has concentrated our attention on Paul as he has gone hither and thither throughout the Roman Empire preaching the gospel. Now, in this final section of his work, Luke concentrates our attention on Paul, not preaching the gospel so much as defending the gospel. Of course, the distinction between preaching the gospel on the one hand and defending the gospel on the other is not an hard and fast distinction, and often the borderline is very thin, and one easily crosses from one to another. Already in the earlier sections of the work, Luke has represented Paul on times having to stand up and defend the gospel against the false accusations that were brought against it. Now, in this last section of his work, he will show us Paul mainly defending the gospel, but of course, you cannot always defend the gospel without, uh, straying into the preaching of the gospel. And Luke records that vivid and delightful scene where Paul was in the investigation before Agrippa, beginning by defending the gospel, he apparently forgot himself halfway through and began to see the, the, the king not as the judicial inquiring authority, but as a sinner needing a savior, and burst out in his impassioned way, oh king, do you believe the prophets? I know you believe, and came within an hair breadth of leading the monarch to Christ, even in that legal court. We should not therefore suppose that defense of the gospel is somehow the enemy of the preaching of the g- of the gospel. There have been some, and still are, I suppose, that tied with the excessive emphasis upon apologetics, have reasoned that, uh, defending the gospel is not a wise thing to attempt. Some see it almost as a strategy of our enemy that gets us away from our prime task of preaching the gospel. Such people will tell us that defending the gospel never leads a person to Christ. It is the preaching of the gospel that leads men and women to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus. And they borrow sometimes the words of Spurgeon, who observed that he would no more think of defending the word of God than he would of defending the lion. What you want to do, said he, is not to defend the lion, but open the cage and let the lion out, and the lion will defend itself. So with the word of God, said Spurgeon. You don't defend it, you let it out, you preach it, and it will defend itself. But that last observation is true indeed. For do see, if we do take God's word seriously, we shall find from time to time it is the word of God itself that is defending the gospel. The passage before us this morning, and in these ensuing mornings, God willing, is a brilliant example of the way the Bible itself records how to go about defending the gospel and the need to defend it. You'll see by the time that, uh, you arrive at this juncture in history, though the gospel had not been in progress for very many years, all sorts of curious notions had spread around the Roman world as to what the Christian gospel was. Many misrepresentations, many deliberate slanders mixed in with a great deal of sheer ignorance. And if those slanders had been allowed to go unanswered, there would have been a danger in many cities of the Roman Empire and amongst thoughtful people as well as among the ignorant, that people would have rejected Christianity without actually ever hearing what Christianity stood for. And therefore, now at this juncture, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God, Paul broke off his ministry at Ephesus that had been so fruitful as he had positively been teaching and preaching the gospel, and determined in his heart to visit first Jerusalem and then Rome, with the intention doubtless in his heart that in both places he should defend the gospel from the slanders and the false imputations that had been thrown against it. Some of the, uh, misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the gospel were simply ludicrous. We are told by Luke that the commander in chief of the forces, the Roman forces in Jerusalem, who rescued Paul from the murderous mob that came to assassinate him in the temple. The commander, educated and powerful man though he was, had the impression that Paul was an Egyptian, leader of a terrorist gang of time past numbering some four thousand and was quite prepared to treat Paul in the appropriate manner to terrorist gang leaders who lead people in political subversion. Other misrepresentations were more sinister. It appears from Luke's defense before Festus, at the trial before Festus, that the high priests in Jerusalem had deliberately misrepresented Paul as preaching a gospel that was sinly veiled politics. In this, of course, they were doing the same thing as had happened, uh, in the city of Philippi, where the, uh, Romans had gone to their governors and complained that Paul was teaching a form of political messianism. The danger and the potency of that slander of the gospel was that it was very specious. There were current in the Roman world from time to time, Jews that had an exposition of their faith that was sheer politics. They professed to believe in the coming of a Messiah, but the Messiah, as they understood him, would be a political leader that would raise armies in the fashion of the Maccabees and lead them in military confrontation against the Roman state, thus attempting to deliver Israel from the imperialists. When Paul came to Philippi and elsewhere preaching that Jesus was the Messiah, it was so very easy for enemies of the gospel to represent the bo- gospel he preached as nothing other than a political m- uh m- m- message aimed at breaking the structures of the political system. Of course, that is a view deliberately adopted in certain parts of the world by Christendom, but it never was and never is and never will be the gospel of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. And if in parts of the world, the authorities get the impression that the Christian gospel is actually a political measure designed to overthrow the political structures of the state, then alas for the gospel. You may well expect the authorities to come down upon it like the proverbial ton of bricks. And therefore Paul was obliged in many a court and in many a legal hearing to argue the case for Christianity and to make it quite clear that Christianity was not a form of politics. Even the believers, the Jewish believers in the city of Jerusalem, were many of them under a misapprehension as to the nature of the gospel Paul preached. Paul had preached, of course, throughout the Roman Empire, that salvation is not by works, it is not by religious ceremonies, it is all together through faith. It is the gift of God. He had preached, therefore, in no uncertain terms, that circumcision is neither necessary for salvation, nor does it contribute anything to salvation, but that Jew and Gentile stand on exactly the same footing before God. All alike are sinners, there is no difference. Circumcised Jew and uncircumcised Gentile, and that Jew and Gentile must be saved, both of them on exactly the same terms, and not by works, nor by circumcision, nor religious observation, but totally through faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord. But that gospel of Paul's had been misrepresented, as rumor will do, and as enemies of the gospel will delight to do. So much so that the believers in Rome had the impression that Paul, in flagrant disregard for the Old Testament word of God, and exercising an imperious control over the conscience of Jewish believers, had demanded that Jewish believers everywhere refrain from circumcising their children, and that he demanded that Jewish believers everywhere, forthwith and immediately, forsook all those God-given precepts given in the Old Testament Jewish religion. And that, of course, was a complete misrepresentation. Paul had done no such thing. Witness the fact that he himself had, on one occasion, taken Timothy and deliberately had him circumcised so as not to offend the conscience of Jewish believers who still felt themselves bound by conscience to observe the rights of the Old Testament. Therefore, it was necessary that Paul meticulously should explain the gospel that he really preached and win the hearts of his fellow believers, the Jews of Jerusalem, and thus lead them on into the greater light of the Christian dispensation. You may say to me, of course, that defending the gospel doesn't get any converts. Well, perhaps that isn't its prime objective, but it can often help, can it not, in taking out from before the feet of people all the stumbling blocks on the road that will eventually lead them to faith in the Lord Jesus. And there, defending the gospel has an exceedingly practical and spiritual task to perform. Recently, as some of you know, the dear missionaries in Africa decided my education was not yet complete and that something should be done about it, and they graciously invited me to visit Kenya and Nairobi. I arrived, therefore, on one day in the, to the mission station at Niankundi to see the great work that the missionaries there have done, and found there an American girl, daughter of a surgeon, which surgeon had been a friend of one of the Christian missionary surgeons in the hospitals at Niankundi. I discovered that the woman was not a believer, but that the Christian women on the station had been and were doing a marvelous job in their evangelistic Bible studies with that young lady, so that when I arrived, the young lady was teetering on the very edge of salvation. The marvelous job they had done. But there was a stumbling. The dear girl had been brought up in her university to believe that, uh, evolution is the only possible explanation for the origin and development of our universe, and therefore to believe the Christian gospel seemed to her like committing absolute, deliberate, uh, intellectual curry curry. It was a simple matter to sit down by her side and to point out that what her university teachers, not being good scientists, had never told her, that there are many atheist scientists, scientists that don't even believe in God, that nevertheless hold the opinion that evolution is unscientific, unproved, and unprovable, riddled through with all kinds of absurdities. And this young lady coming to hear what she ought to have been told at her university if they were good scientists, that there is another side to the scientific question. Hearing it, found the obstacle removed, and in a few hours had invited the Blessed Lord into her life. I was myself, as you know, in Soviet Russia recently. There I was invited by a headmistress into a state school run by the government. Her request was that I should talk to her pupils throughout the whole school on the topic of Christianity. She asked in particular that I would deal with the historicity of Christianity. What would you have done? Well, say I would have taken the opportunity to preach the gospel, my dear good sir, from John three sixteen. Well, in the end, I did my best to get that in as well. But I had to remember that those children-like generation of Russians have been brought up to believe that Christianity is nothing but a legend, a myth invented in the third and fourth centuries AD. And therefore, they dismiss the whole thing as mere fairy story and never get within miles of treating it seriously. It was an amazing pleasure and privilege to stand in that state-run school and argue the case for the historical evidence of Christianity. What would you do if in your area a newspaper printed an article to the effect that the Bible has been copied out so many times that you can't possibly accept as valid and true what it says? Would you not spring to its defense? What if, uh, other people, for their own reasons, represented you as a nasty little sect who employ the methods of brainwashing, a veritable threat to the teenagers, something like the Moonies. Wouldn't you rise up and defend your gospel from such slanders? For if you don't, there's many a respectable parent that will never investigate what actually you stand for, but will see to it to their very best that their teenagers never come within shouting distance of you. The defense, therefore, of the gospel is an exceedingly important and practical thing, and goes hand in hand as a partner with the positive preaching of the gospel. You will observe what importance Luke attaches to this matter of the defense of the gospel, that he devotes no less than one third of the whole of his work, the Acts of the Apostles, to recording Paul's defense of the gospel, first of all in Jerusalem, and then in Rome. There are five major movements of thought in this final section of his work. First, there is the story of his journey from Ephesus to Jerusalem. Then there is the defense of the gospel that Paul conducted in Jerusalem itself, first before the Christian believers, and then before the Jerusalem mob as he stood on the stairs of the castle. And finally, his defense of his position before the Sanhedrin summoned to meet by the Roman commander of the army. The third great movement changes scene to Caesarea, where Paul is called upon to defend the gospel before the Roman governor Felix. Fourth great section of his, uh, uh, great movement of this section again is laid in Caesarea, as Paul defends the gospel once more, first of all in the court held by the Roman governor Festus, and then explains the gospel before the judicial hearing before King Agrippa. And then finally there is the story of another journey. Now this time from Ephesus to Jerusalem, but from Jerusalem, uh, from Caesarea to Rome, where Paul settled down for two years, waiting for that tremendous opportunity of his life when he should go in before the highest authority in the whole of the Roman Empire and have the privilege of defending the gospel in those exalted circles. Oh, what a man he was. He has to lament in his second letter to Timothy, at my first defense, no one stood with me. I wonder why not. Where were the believers? Where were his teammates? When this extraordinary privilege was granted to their colleague Paul to go in, albeit at the danger of his life, and not so much preach the gospel, but defend the gospel and the honor of Jesus Christ, his Lord, before his imperial majesty, Nero himself. It's not given to all of us to be a Paul, but when he records in his letter to the Philippians, I am set for the defense and confirmation of the gospel, that is a joy that is given to us, to many of us at least, in our different ways. I think of a young Malay convert, the only one in her family that knows the Savior. Upon her shoulders too come the responsibilities of defending the gospel, not only by her word, but by her behavior in her pagan family. And what an honor. Suppose you are the only Christian in your missionary village. Suppose you are overwhelmed with the vast numbers of sheer unbelief around you. Oh, what an honor it is that you stand not only to preach the gospel, but you yourself, as the messenger of the gospel, scrutinized by a million pairs of eyes, are there God's defense of the gospel before an unbelieving world. Paul's defense of the gospel, in the sense of demolishing the accusations that had been brought against it, must occupy us tomorrow, and we leave it for today. Today we concentrate on the story of his journey from Ephesus to Jerusalem, and in particular on the two major events that there happened. I suppose the biggest story of all upon the journey is the story of his impassioned plea to the elders of the church at Ephesus, which he delivered to them as he passed by my leaders to defend the flock of God. Not now defense in the sense, as I say, of arguing against all the slanders that had been brought against it. Now, in the sense, defending the gospel, the church, in the sense of protecting it against the dangers that came onto it from without and from with. And as we read Luke's record of Paul's impassioned appeal to those elders of the church to guard and defend and protect that church, we doubtless feel within our hearts that Luke has his eye on us as well. We too are called upon to defend the flock of God in this particular sense. Only here, of course, there can sometimes creep in a danger. The defense of the church, like many other Christian ministry, is not without its subtle temptations and its dangers. All the history of the Christian church is studded with marvelously glorious examples of men and women that have stood and given their very lives for the protection of God's people and for the purity of his church. But then, on the other hand, the story of Christianity is littered with examples of men and women that have meant well in protecting of the church, but as they set about protecting the church and defending the truth, dark motives. Unregenerate urges somehow welled up in their hearts, and they defended the truth with methods and passions that were not truly Christian. Sometimes it can happen, can it not? When we observe the methods and the behavior of men and women who profess to be protecting the truth, the methods they use appear to contradict the very values that they are supposed to be protecting, and raise the possibility that though the motives that swell within their breast, as far as they know, are genuine motives desiring to protect the truth and the church, they could be self-deceived, and the motives be somewhat different, if the truth were known. It is no accident, therefore, surely, that before Luke records Paul's plea to the elders of the church at, uh, Ephesus to protect the flock of God, he first treats us to a detailed description of certain other people who rose up to defend their particular faith, namely the citizens of Ephesus. For just before Paul was due to leave the city, there broke out a tremendous commotion in the city of Ephesus. Listen to them. Practically the whole of the citizenry gathered now stampeding into the theatre, and for the space of two hours crying out, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! You say, whatever are they doing? Well, ladies and gentlemen, they're protecting the truth, as they saw it. We mustn't criticize him unduly, may we? For it is very natural and instinctive in all of us that if something that we hold dear is attacked, we shall spring to its defense. We would scarcely be sincere, would we? We certainly would not be worthy if what we hold to be dearer than life itself is attacked and we didn't spring to its defense. It is understandable, therefore, that when the citizens of Ephesus felt that their faith was being attacked, they should rise in its defense, and hence the riot that took place in the city of Ephesus. We would not, cannot criticize them for defending, for wanting to, to defend what they held to be true. We are presumably at liberty to ponder and indeed to criticize the methods that they use. Just listen to them. They're shouting for two hours on end, for nobody can get a word in edgeways. If Paul had ventured into that theatre at that moment, like a pack of wild animals, they would have torn him limb from joint. May- must we not ask, what was this truth that was driving them to its defense with these methods? What was their real motivation? Who was this utterness that they were protecting? We do well to ask, for very often the basic values and ideals that people protect and believe in will control and color the methods they use in its protection. Then who was Artemis? Great is Artemis of the Ephesians, and who was she? The origins of the worship of Artemis are lost, of course, in the of ancient history. But by the time Paul had come to Ephesus, Artemis was a mixture of various elements. She was, in the first place, looked upon as a virgin goddess whose primary task was the protection of the young of animals. And therefore she was supposed to slay anybody that would injure nature and the animals of the wild. She was, curiously enough, regarded as a goddess who was a huntress. And you say, how can you reconcile her role as a protector of the animal world with her role as the patron deity of hunters? But then, if you have observed the ways of true hunters, true hunters are concerned, and never more these days, uh, uh, never more than in these days, with the protection of the wild animal, aren't they? We've had a lot of fuss, rightly so, about the excessive hunting of the elephant, and all sorts of members of all kinds of green parties urge us to stand up for the protection of nature. True hunting has to be carried on, therefore, to manage the stocks, but true hunting is concerned for the animals. Artemis was not only the virgin goddess who protected the animal, the young of animal life, she was also, as her many-breasted image indicates, she was also the protector of women in childbirth. And if you ponder those things a moment, you will see the fascination that Artemis had for the people of the ancient world. Who of us even hasn't felt the wonder and the mystery of nature, as we observed the young of animals being born, the wonders of the mystery of creation, the marvels of a little babe in its mother's arms. What a marvelous and magnificent thing is nature. And you couldn't contemplate it, could you, if you were really human, without feeling your heart instinctively go out that you would want to protect these wonders of nature. And rightly so. We Christians surely should be, uh, willing and ready and eager genuinely to protect the nature that God has given. But Artemis was more than that. In Artemis, the ancient pagans had deified nature. They set up nature as their goddess. And when men and women deify nature, then eventually you may expect trouble. For when they come to defend nature, their ideal, the danger is that they will use nature's methods, raw nature's methods. You go and try even an old patient cow when she has her calf and appear to threaten the cow, and you'll see what the cow will do. You better not threaten a lioness with her cub, for if you do, nature will rise to protect its offspring and tear you limb from joint. Hence the fury, the blind fury of the mob at Ephesus, baying like wild animals. They felt their Artemis was, uh, endangered, and they behaved with raw instinct and would have destroyed their enemy if they could have got hold of him. There was another element in the defense of Artemis that eventually got submerged in the riot, and that is the religion of Artemis was very profitable when it came to the tourist trade. The temple at Art- of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the world. They had massive thousands of tourists coming, and people like the silversmiths were making a pot of money from the little shrines and knickknacks that they sold in the tourist shops to all the pilgrims that came. Demetrius at one stage admits it, but of course he hurries to explain it's not the money he's really interested in. It is the fact that, uh, the truth of his religion is at stake. But the unholy mixture of money and instinctive raw nature. Show what really lay at the heart of this particular defense of the faith. It would be a lovely thing, wouldn't it, to be able to say that whenever Christian people have arisen to defend the faith, as they have a duty to do. They have always defended the faith with absolute pure motives, and always with unwaveringly Christian methods. It is not so, my brothers. And assembly history itself has been littered by sad battles and warfares that ostensibly have claimed to be standing for the truth and have left God's people maimed and broken and sometimes indeed insane. Insane. How shall we go about protecting and defending the church? In chapter twenty, Luke brings us, before us, Paul and his address to the elders. From that address, so well known to us all, I want to choose this morning the values that Paul was protecting, and to try to show that the methods he used were consistent always with those values. His speech to the elders, as we know, is in three parts. Central to the speech is his appeal to the elders to watch and protect the church of God, the flock of God, from enemies from without, the grievous wolves, and from perverse men within. But that central appeal is flanked on both sides by Paul's lengthy statement of his own practice and therefore his own. An exhortation is always more palatable, is it not, to those who receive it, if it be sandwiched by a good dose of practical example of the man who does the exhortation. In his preliminary work, therefore, to the elders, Paul shows himself an absolutely prodigious worker, a man of lion-hearted courage. I have not shrunk, says he, whether it is before the tremendous burden of toil in preaching and praying and visitation and counseling and, uh, exhorting the congregations and visiting the individuals. I have not shrunk from those prodigious labors. I have not shrunk before the daunting prospect of having to declare the whole counsel of God, however unpopular it might be. I have warned people that they must repent. I have reminded them of the eternal judgment. I have called upon them to believe. I have not shunned to declare the whole counsel of God. But as we survey that ancient man Paul and watch his extreme labors, what do we make of him? What would the values that drove him? What were the true motives? Was he empire building? Was this some vast ego trip? Was he, in the words of the Savior, compassing land and sea simply to make proselytes to himself? What are the real motives and values that drove his prodigious labors. And he tells us, the Holy Spirit is witnessing to me in every place, he says, that bonds and imprisonment await me, but I count not my life dear to me, that I might finish the course and achieve the ministry that the Lord Jesus has given to me to preach the gospel of the grace of God. There you have the secret of his motivations, there his values, and first of all, the gospel of the grace of God, all that superlative grace. How it shines out in the writings of the epistle, I, of the apostle, I needn't remind you. For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. But how it showed forth in the methods he employed to preach that gospel, lifting his hands to the elders at Ephesus, pointing out the hard skin. As he, brethren, I've left you an example. I didn't covet anybody's silver. I didn't covet their, their raiment, their clothes. I didn't covet your money. We're a long way now from Demetrius the silversmith, aren't we? Defending the truth in Corinth, because under the counter, his bank balance was getting low because of the preaching of the gospel, and he needed to restore his industry of making trinkets to sell to the tourists. Left you an example, he says, of so working like I have worked, working to pay my own expenses and the expenses of my team, that you should so work and help the poor, and remember the words of the Lord Jesus. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Oh yes, I've not forgotten that Paul elsewhere lays it down, that they who preach the gospel shall live of the gospel, of course. It is an ordinance of the Lord that it shall be so. And Paul, anyway, wasn't talking to missionaries, he was talking to elders of a church. But when we have said that, we should remember how easy it is for us teachers, and perhaps also for elders, as far as I know, for I'm not one. All the grace of God. It was this, wasn't it, that led our blessed Lord to cleanse the temple, as we spoke about yesterday. How enraged he was when he saw men making money out of religion and turning the temple of God in a place where the Sadducee high priest might reap a good fortune. For the blessed Lord had come to announce God's marvelous gift. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Woman, said he to the Samaritan, if only you knew the gift of God, that he it is that speaketh with you, you would have asked of him, and he would have given you living water. This is what drove Paul, the magnificence of the free gift of God. How could he fluff that gospel by giving the impression that the gospel had to be bought from the Christian preacher. And not only the grace of God in the gospel, but the grace of Christ in appointing him to be a preacher of the gospel. Oh, Paul never forgot it. I don't care, he says to the Ephesian elders, I know what the Holy Spirit is saying, that bombs and imprisonment await me. So be it that death itself awaits me. What do I care? What is life's value compared with this? That I should complete my ministry that the Lord Jesus has given to me and stand before him one day and say, Lord, I've done what you gave me to do, and receive the smile of him whose smile will be all our heaven. All the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and love that is in Christ Jesus, says Paul. For I befall the persecutor, I ravaged the church of God, I put my fist in the fair face of Jesus of Nazareth, and he not only saved me by his grace, but pardoning me, he dared to trust me and put me into the ministry from the very least of all the saints. He never forgot it. Manful, truthful, faithful standing for the truth, but with a memory that always reminded him that he once had been a rebel himself and stood where he stood simply by the grace of God. What were his values that mo- motivated him in his prodigious labours? A sense of the grace of God. A sense, as we so often say, of the value of a soul. I witness to you I'm free from the blood of all men. There was no dilly-dallying, preaching just to please his congregation. Before him, as he stood looking at men and women, were the awful realities. They rise to be princes and princesses of God, or descend into the subhumanities of the lake of fire. I didn't shirk, says he, to preach the need of repentance, the need of personal faith and conviction in the Lord Jesus, the solid, real, and true evaluation of the human soul and its eternal destiny. What were the values to be protected then? We come to the very heart of the matter, of the matter. Beseech you, says he, to watch the flock of God in which he has made you overseers, the flock which God has bought with the blood of his own dear, darling son. Let us for a few seconds fall back once more and consider this staggering story. Here is no goddess Artemis, the proud pride and joy of exhibitions in the tourist center attached to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus was a showcase with the image that fell down from the sky. To know that brought the tourists flocking in their thousands. Hey, what a, what a, what a curious old mistress is nature if you deify her. What tricks she'll play upon you. The old image that fell down from the sky was nothing other than an old burnt out meteorite, some of the debris of the universe that nature was scrapping and had no further use for it. And here were these four unfortunate Ephesians bowing down and paying their hard-earned drachmi to have a look at this bit of wastage from the universe. And they yell their heads off like wild animals, standing for this truth, if you please. Ah, we protect a different system of values, not of a God that was so weak he fell down from heaven, but all the wonder, the transcendent Lord, Father and Son, deliberately coming down from heaven to Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and across. Here was no Artemis, nature goddess, that if you were seen to attack her, would rise up in sheer instinct and tear you limb from joint with her claws. Or listen to the story as you face Calvary again. This is the true God. Who when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not, but himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. When we attacked him as his enemies and kicked his shins and crowned his head with thorns. This is God. He loved us while we were yet enemies, and the shepherd died to save the sheep. Must I defend the gospel like that? How shall I do it? You slaves, says Peter, you suffer unjustly, but for Christ's sake, wouldn't you bear it? That you might bear the better witness to your masters, to the gospel of Jesus Christ, who himself bore your sins in his body on the tree. You converted women, says Peter, and your husbands are brutes, and they now treat you. You know all about their other affairs, but since you've become a Christian, things have got very much worse, haven't they? How shall you witness to these heavenly values, to him who, for your sake and your husband's sake, endured the cross? Find it in your heart, if you can, to accept the suffering and bear patiently with the erring husband who knows by your testimony of patient suffering, you might even lead them to the safer. Bought with the blood of his own. We're a long way from the worship of Artemis and the making of silver shrines, but we were not redeemed with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. What are the values we have to protect then? Wolves from the outside coming in, as Peter and Jude and John would tell us, denying the very Lord that bought them. Denying the virgin birth, denying the deity of the Lord Jesus, denying his bodily resurrection, denying the inspiration and integrity of his word. Oh, what wolves they are. They empty Christianity of its true value and its real treasure. Wolves. Wolves that come in and turn the very grace of God into excuse for worldliness and licentious living, emptying salvation itself of its genuine value. Guard the church. Guard it from perverse men from the inside who will develop all their funny little theories and then demand that you follow them because their theory is the truth. And when you watch their methods, it becomes doubtful whether it's the truth they're standing for. In fact, they're indulging in a form of embezzlement. They're taking the disciples bought with the blood of God's darling son and taking them to themselves, so the church belonged to them. And what resource have we? I commend you to God and the word of his grace, able to build you up all that lovely treasure. God forbid that we should lose our nerve in this modern age and give people the impression that the word of God is some bitter pill that couldn't be expected to attract our young people unless it be liberally coated with the sugar of entertainment. All this word of God, able to build us up and to give us an inheritance among them that are sanctified. Oh, I say we're a long way from Artemis who fell down from heaven, so weak she was, that bit of old meteorite. We talk about a word of God and the risen Savior, able to give us an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for us. The Lord use his word so again to amaze our hearts with the vast wealth and treasure that we have in Christ, that we in our day shall spring to the defense of the gospel and of the church wherever those values are attacked. Shall we pray? They said, Lord Jesus Christ, who when we stood in danger of the wolf and the lion came as a good shepherd and did lay down thy life for us. We can never repay thee, but we pray now thy grace, that the value of thy person and of thy work shall so fill our hearts that we may spring and grasp every opportunity that comes our way, helped by thy spirit to defend thy name.