So, so I'm the son of a pastor. I don't know how many of you knew that. If you didn't, that's fine, but that's, it motivates. If you understand that about me, you probably understand a lot of the reason I do some of the things I do. My dad's retiring next year and it'll be 35 years at the same church too, which is unheard of. And I think part of what I want to talk to you about this evening

is motivated by the fact that that's happening. And who is going to fill his shoes, right? When you

have someone at a church that long, that kind of a legacy, and faithful ministry and fruit and people

who have been born and gotten married and had kids

all under the same span. It's kind of hard to replace that, right? And I don't think you can quite,

but what you can do is find someone who has internal virtue, someone who actually is faithful,

who's on the right trajectory, who loves the Lord,

who walks with him daily. And I'm realizing how hard that is to find on the local church level,

in the world right in front of you. It's not an easy thing. And so that kind of motivated me to

want to talk to you about virtue and its counterfeits, which is the title I gave to this talk this morning, Virtue and its counterfeits.

And I want to set the stage a little bit. I think right now, this is just my gut feeling,

we are in a tremendous time of opportunity, tremendous time of opportunity.

I mean, it's post-2020, It's been five years since the world went insane. And since that time, a lot of people, even in the world, have figured

out that something's wrong, that the way they were told to live their life, their hedonistic

pleasure-seeking life, is hedonistic pleasure seeking life is actually

wrong, that maybe there should be some limits. Maybe the Christian civilization we had before wasn't a

bad thing. More Bibles are being sold now than have been sold in decades. Big influencers like

Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are talking about how Christianity

is actually not such a bad thing. And maybe we should be more Christian. I mean,

you couldn't have told me this would happen five years ago. I wouldn't have believed you.

I would have said, I mean, that would be great. But yeah, right. We, we'll see. But obviously the Lord can do anything.

And I just sense we're in a time of tremendous opportunity because of that.

...