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Let's pray.

Father forbid that we would boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which we have been crucified

to the world and the world has been crucified to us. Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh.

Father, there is a death to be died before we die, otherwise we will die forever.

Jesus died his, he beckons us now to fall into the ground and die with him, that we may be glorified with

him and honored by the Father.

And so I pray that you would awaken a profound willingness to be dead, to sin, and alive to God.

I ask this in Jesus in Jesus in name, Amen.

I don't believe that unusual coincidences should be used as guidance for life.

It's not a mark of healthy mind if one is habitually fascinated by unusual, strange, unusual strange coincidences like the endless parallels between the death of John F Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, things like that.

Fixation on coincidences

is a mark of an imbalanced mind.

Nevertheless, we believe God rules everything, right? He rules all circumstances and all so-called coincidences

and surely it is not wrong to be amazed at some of them and to be

encouraged by them if you see God's hand in it clearly enough,

which I have in getting ready for this message.

The timing and the text for this message this weekend is one of those.

My wife reminded me on Friday that she likes to call them God Incidences, not just coincidences.

Let me give you a little background and I'll tell you what it is.

As I came to prepare this text which has been appointed for a long time, I mean, you just take the next text in John that comes, that's what you do, no matter what's coming down the pike, and then you see whether the Lord might want to adjust it and apply it in any particular way that's relevant to the church.

So the context I have in mind as I come to this message is that we're going to go next Sunday evening to the Minneapolis Convention

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