Welcome to Form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, and joining me is Dr. Michael Barber,

who's one of our professors of Scripture here at the August Institute, and we're going to continue our ongoing Bible study on the Gospel of Matthew.

And you can jump into this Bible study at any time, at any point. We just ask you or invite you to grab your Bible and to join us.

We're using the Augustan Bible, which you could get at

Catholic.market. And we're going to continue on with our Bible study of the Gospel of Matthew.

We're just taking a nice easy pace and going fairly in depth because we have the leisure to do

that on this show, which is fun for us. We don't have to rush through things so much. And so

we were about halfway through chapter 10 of the things so much. And so we were about halfway through

chapter 10 of the gospel of Matthew. And so Michael, why don't you lead us off with where we left

off. Yeah. So we were talking about, you know, that passage that says, but the one who endures

to the end will be saved. But I'd just like to back up a little bit because there's an important

line I don't want to overlook. And that is, Jesus says, Behold, I'm sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.

So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

That's such an important passage, right?

Because a lot of times we want to go out and evangelize, but sometimes we can do that in a way that's not prudent. And Thomas Aquinas

talks about the importance of being prudent here. He goes, and of course, not just being

prudent, but being innocent. So you could be prudent, but if you're not innocent, if you're not,

if your heart isn't said on the Lord, if your heart is set on worldly things,

you're not going to be effective in your witness to Christ. At the same time, you could be innocent

as doves, but if you act imprudently, you could do great damage and actually lead people

into scandal and lead people astray. So both things are very important there.

Then Jesus goes on to say,

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