Before I move into my substance this morning I want to thank you Dr. Koppinger for the invitation to come and to Don Whitney for being such a good host along with others of you.

Jim, appreciate your helping me get around and others.

And a special word of thanks to you because I just mentioned to the president in his office that I have spoken on

other seminary campuses and there are differences. And one of the differences is when you deliver your heart and it doesn't come back to you. It seems to disappear into a black hole.

And then there are others like you where it seems to both be absorbed and then rendered back in manifold ways of simple

attentiveness but also emotional and spiritual engagement and responsiveness that are so refreshing to me and I hope

our hope giving to the faculty and the administration that God's at work here.

It's not to be taken for granted that we share the values that I've been talking about.

There are schools where I could say exactly the same thing with exactly the same zeal and have nothing happen.

No sense of getting it or wanting it and I have been in seminaries where there would be mainly

empty seats in a room like this with a bigger school, there's just no spiritual engagement.

And so I don't take for granted what I see, a room that's full, an expectancy, a receptiveness,

a reflection back to me.

And so I want to praise God for what he's done here in these years.

And I don't take it for granted.

If God is really going to be supreme in our preaching, like I argued he should be two days ago.

And if we are really going to portray him in such a way that he becomes alluring to people

so that the nerve of sin is cut in their lives and they are

weaned off sin and brought to lead lives of radical risk-taking

obedience called love if we're going to preach in such a way as to make God that compelling and that alluring in people's lives,

then the question now on this third day becomes,

what sort of preachers must we be?

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