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Let's pray together.

Father, there are people in this text that have itching ears. That's not a good thing.

They are heaping up teachers for themselves who will scratch, itches that they should not have, and are led away by various passions.

And so I ask that as I preach you would replace that

Carnal itch with a holy desire

a holy desire that welcomes the truth and does not walk away from it. And I pray that we would be given eyes to see the glory of Christ in this text and the glory of our hope and the wonder of the ministry and the centrality of the preached word.

And I pray this now in Jesus' powerful name.

Amen.

It has always struck me a strange that my heroes, most of them, people like the Puritans and especially

Jonathan Edwards, almost never referred to themselves and their personal experiences in their preaching.

You can read a hundred Puritan sermons and hardly know anything about the preachers.

And surely if we preachers are going to err, that's the side to err on. Instead of excessive talking about ourselves, we should

be talking about God, Because they knew that the power of preaching lay not in the experiences of the preacher,

but in the God-breathed word. of the preacher,

God-breathed word, the word of God.

And yet, how happy we are when God puts it in the heart of the Apostle Paul to lift the

curtain on his life and experience with God and his sufferings and in this case his dying.

And in this case his dying.

So in verses 6 to 8 that's what we have. We have Paul's experience and I'm thankful. As I would expect, his experience is not the main point of the

text. It's a subordinate argument for the the

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