As preached by Zach Thompson.
"What we attain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."
1) Treat Christ as the beloved Son of God who saves you.
2) Treasure your brother as one whom Christ died.
a) By hating sin.
b) By forgiving sin.
Matthew 17-18
Good morning Christ Fellowship!
If you have your Bibles this morning, we will be in Matthew 17-18 this morning.
Matthew 17:1–18:35
“And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. 3 And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4 And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 5 He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” 8 And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.
9 And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.” 10 And the disciples asked him, “Then why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?” 11 He answered, “Elijah does come, and he will restore all things. 12 But I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man will certainly suffer at their hands.” 13 Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.
14 And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and, kneeling before him, 15 said, “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire, and often into the water. 16 And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.” 17 And Jesus answered, “O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.” 18 And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was healed instantly. 19 Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” 20 He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
22 As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men, 23 and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.” And they were greatly distressed.
24 When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax went up to Peter and said, “Does your teacher not pay the tax?” 25 He said, “Yes.” And when he came into the house, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?” 26 And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. 27 However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”
18:1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them 3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
5 “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
7 “Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes! 8 And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.
10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. 12 What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? 13 And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 14 So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
21 Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.
23 “Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. 24 When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. 25 And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. 26 So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27 And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29 So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30 He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. 31 When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. 32 Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ 34 And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. 35 So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Let’s Pray.
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
Thomas Paine said this back during the American Revolution. His point was that if freedom is cheap, then we won’t value it. So you should expect to pay dearly for your freedom. I’m tempted to give commentary on the American Revolution, but I want us to stop here and think about this principle.
"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly." I think the principle holds true in a lot of spheres.
I have a lot of shovels. And I bought most of them. But I have one that I found. When we purchased our first home, we had to clear out the jungle that was the back yard, and we found a bunch of random stuff. One of those things that we found was a wooden handled, square shovel. Now, technically I bought it, since I bought everything on the property, but it felt like it was a free shovel.
And to this day, I still kind of think of that shovel as my trash shovel. If I have to do a task that might break a shovel or chip the edge, then guess which shovel I use. I’m far more careful with my other shovels. It’s not that much less valuable than my other shovels, but I didn’t pay anything for it, so if I break it, and I have to throw it away, then I don’t feel like I’m losing too much.
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
That shovel is a petty example. But here is what I want us to see. When we think that something isn’t worth much, we tend to treat it very differently than if we think it’s really valuable.
So I want to start by reverse engineering this principle so that we can run a diagnostic on your heart. "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."
If that’s true, then we can ask this question, what in your life do you not value highly enough? If you follow that question, then it will lead us to what we truly think about something.
If you esteem something too lightly, then you probably think that it didn’t cost anything. The way that you treat it reveals the way that you value it.
And we could ask this question about almost everything in our lives, but let’s skip straight to the point.
How do you treat Jesus? Do you take him for granted? You just assume that you always deserved what he has given you. Do you think that God is lucky to have you on his team? Of course, you would never say these things, but do you really think it deep down? Do you esteem him lightly?
Or ask this: How do you treat your brothers and sisters in Christ? Do you gossip about them? Or do you belittle them in your thoughts and think of yourself as a step above? Do you steep yourself in bitterness toward them?
If there is even a tinge of conviction to anything here, I don’t want you to run past it this morning. Don’t ignore it. We need to find that splinter and pull it out. Because this is exactly what our text addresses.
How you treat something reveals how you value it. And if I can give a spoiler here. There are two major points that I want to make today. How you treat something reveals how you value it. So treasure Christ and treasure your brother. Our text today is about value. It’s about what you treasure.
Let’s look at the first point.
Treasure Christ as the beloved Son of God who saves you.
Treasure Christ as the Son of God who saves you.
Do you treasure Christ? Do see him as valuable?
Throughout chapter 17, we see the value of Christ on display. First, we see it magnificently shown in the mount of transfiguration when the veil is pulled back, and we get a glimpse of his true glory as God’s beloved Son.
Look at 17:4-5. Peter starts talking and showing how little he understands what is happening, and God interrupts him. Did you notice that? Peter is still speaking when God starts talking. And God makes this proclamation over Jesus. Look in 17:5, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” And they were terrified.
Jesus is inherently worthy of your worship. He didn’t have to do anything to deserve your worship. In eternity past, before anything was created, Jesus was there. A person in the trinitarian Godhead. In an eternal joyful dance with the Father and the Spirit. He has always been glorious. He is the image of the invisible God, the one who will inherit all things. The fullness of God dwells in him. He has always been inherently worthy of worship.
When we behold Jesus, worship is the appropriate response. Treasuring Christ means worshiping Christ. Do you treasure him like this?
After the mount of transfiguration, Jesus shows his power as he casts out a demon that the disciples could not cast out. Did you notice what Jesus calls his disciples here? Look in 17:17, “O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” He calls them faithless. These are his disciples!
Now, if you remember, Jesus gave the disciples authority to cast out demons back in Matthew 10. They had cast out a lot of demons at this point. So they would’ve been surprised that this didn’t work. They had confidence, but their faith wasn’t in the power of Christ. In reality, they only had authority because of their relationship to Jesus. But it seems like they forgot this.
Their faith was in the wrong place. The object of your faith matters. Jesus wanted them to see that if they place their faith in the wrong thing, it is as if they don’t have any faith at all. The object of your faith matters.
What are you trusting in?
A man may believe that his armchair will fly like an airplane, but when he rides his armchair off of the cliff, he will be sorely disappointed. If he wants to fly in an airplane, then he will need to put his faith in an airplane, not in an armchair. The object of your faith matters.
And faith isn’t about some vague confidence in the universe or in yourself. It isn’t about saying secret words. Real faith is about trust in the person of Jesus Christ.
Treasuring Christ means trusting Christ.
After this, Jesus foretells that he would die and be raised on the third day, which by the way, stresses them out, because they don’t actually listen when Jesus said he would be raised.
Treasuring Christ means listening to Christ.
Then after this, Jesus shows the reality that he is the son of God who brings his own into God’s favor. He shouldn’t have to pay the temple tax, because he is the Son of the God of the temple. But, still he pays, and he doesn’t only pay for himself. He pays for Peter. This story is a tiny proclamation of the gospel where Jesus makes a way for us to be treated as God’s sons, even though we have no right to it.
Treasuring Christ means having faith that he will bring you into the worthiness that belongs to him.
Do you see how marvelous all of this is? This is a large part of our meditation this morning. Do you see the value of Jesus in these verses?
The beloved Son of God, the one who we believe in, the one who would die and be raised for us, the one who invites into his sonship. This is Jesus, and he is ours. For all who believe, he is ours.
At the Mount of Transfiguration, they got a glimpse of his glory, and it made them cower in fear and sputter nonsense. It was a fearful and wonderful thing. Do you see Jesus like this?
Fearful and wonderful? Or do you see him as commonplace?
We are not good at recognizing value when it’s run right in front of us.
In 2019, there was a 90 year old woman in France who had been slowly clearing out her house over the past few years. She knew that she would pass away soon, and she wanted to get the home ready for her children to sell after she was gone. Her children convinced her to hire an appraiser. They wanted him to walk through the house and help evaluate the value of the nicer items in the house to make it easier to do something similar to an estate sale.
As the appraiser walked through her house, something caught his eye. There, above her hotplate in the kitchen, she had a painting on the wall. It had been in the same spot for thirty years. She had planned to throw it away with all of the other worthless things that her children wouldn’t want, but the appraiser immediately knew that this wasn’t an ordinary painting.
He estimated that this “trash painting” on her wall was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And she thought it was trash.
That painting was the work of a master painter from the 13th century, and it was almost 800 years old. It was one of 15 known paintings by that painter. Later that year, the painting went to auction, and it sold for 26.8 million dollars. Even the appraiser vastly underestimated its value.
Have you treated Jesus like that painting? Do you treat him like he is just another piece of decor in your life? He’s just one of the things that you happen to talk about during the week. Sunday morning is just one of the events that I happen to go to every week.
Treasure Jesus. Open your eyes and see how beautiful and worthwhile he truly is. That woman who had the painting–she died just a few days after it was auctioned off. By the time she understood the value of the painting, it was too late for her to enjoy it.
Don’t delay. Don’t put off having the joyous feast that is right in front of you.
The Christian life is about seeing the value of Christ and reveling in it now, not delaying until the last possible moment. If we see the true value of Jesus, then we’ll see that he is worth everything. Like the man who found the pearl of great price and sold everything he had so that he can buy the place where the pearl was found. The value of Jesus is like a man who finds a treasure in a field and sells everything he has so that he can go and buy that field and revel in the treasure that is his.
I’ve been making comments and asking questions trying to get you to consider this question. How do you value Jesus? Do you think that the grace you have is cheap?
Think really practically with me. Do you continue to embrace the same sins over and over and presume on the grace of God? Because if you do that, then your actions are speaking louder than your words. You are viewing the grace of God as cheap. Even if you know that you’re not supposed to say it. If you give lip service to Jesus, and you don’t really treasure him with your personal time, and with the quiet moments, you get alone, do you really value Jesus?
I don’t say these things to condemn you. I don’t ask these questions to try and force you into a pool of self doubt. I want you to be honest with yourself and look at Jesus in a fresh way and love him. Turn to him, and know that at the cross, he took all of your sin on himself so that you could be with him. He loves you. And he esteems you highly, because you were bought at great cost. The relationship that you have with God was not cheap.
The eternal Son of God humbled himself and let his own creation spit in his faith, and he bore the wrath of God for you. In his death, he took your sin and shame. And in his resurrection, he defeated all of it.
Woe to the man who calls this cheap. Woe to the man who lives as if this is a bargain deal that can be tossed aside.
We are saved by grace, not by our own works. But we are saved by His work. Your relationship with God is free to you, but it was bought at great cost. So treasure the beloved son, who saves you. Because he is worth it.
Treasure your brother as one for whom Christ died.
Treasure your brother as one for whom Christ died.
This isn’t strange to the New Testament. Philippians 2. “Count others as more significant than yourselves. Romans 12, “Outdo one another in showing honor.” We could point to so many other places.
But today, we see this in chapter 18.
The chapter starts with a question. “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” That’s what the disciples ask after everything we just talked about.
Jesus has just displayed his glory and shown himself as the object of faith and promised that he would die and be raised from the dead. And their response is to wonder who is the greatest among them.
This is undisguised ambition. They wanted to know which of them was the greatest. And in response to their blind, selfish ambition, Jesus calls a child to himself. Look in 18:3, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
In the kingdom of heaven, humility is the path to greatness. True humility, not false humility. Not just acting small so that people would think of you as humble. True humility. Honesty about where we stand with God.
We’ve seen this since the beginning of Matthew. To follow Jesus is to declare spiritual bankruptcy. It means starting with humility that doesn’t regard social standing and pride and the things that we normally concern ourselves with. I think that’s why Jesus grabs a child—unconcerned with social standing and self promotion.
Jesus is calling his disciples to be more concerned with others than themselves. Treasure your brother, because Jesus treasures your brother.
And I think that in this chapter there are two big themes for how we can do this. First, we can do this:
By hating sin
Notice this. After this moment with the child, Jesus spends the rest of the chapter talking about hating sin and loving your brother. In 18:5-6, he warns them about causing one of his children to sin. It would be better for someone to tie a millstone around their neck and throw themselves into the sea.
Then, in verses 7-9, he says that sin is serious enough to cut off a limb in order to avoid hell. Then in verses 10-14, he talks about sheep. He says that God deeply values every single one of his children. He would leave 99 sheep that are safe in order to find one that isn’t safe. He doesn’t want a single sheep to perish.
Do you treat the children of God as if they are cheap? Do you see yourself as all valuable but you look to them and wonder if they are worthy anything? Christ loves them. Christ paid the ultimate price for those who are his.
When you speak to a brother or sister about deep things, you are not entering into a light conversation. You are handling their very soul. Do you realize this?
This is why Jesus gives the warning in a text. Woe to those who would cause one of these little ones to sin. It would be better for a great millstone to be tied around their neck and for them to be cast into the sea. Temptation must come, but woe to him by whom it comes.
This is heavy. Think about this. When you counsel a brother or a sister in Christ, you don’t deal in trifles. This is why there is the warning for teachers in James 3:1. “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” If you teach someone something and it causes them to sin, then, you will be held accountable for what you teach. And your only recourse is to repent and cast yourself on the mercy of God.
If you give someone counsel, and you tell them that it’s okay for them to sin, then you will answer to God for that.
If we treasure our brothers and sisters, then we will take sin seriously.
If you own a brand new Lamborghini, you will take it seriously if someone starts throwing rocks at it. When we value something, we protect it from what would harm it.
Sin wages war against your souls. (1 Pt 2)
I’m sure you can think of situations where it would’ve been more comfortable to just tell someone it’s okay to sin. I know I can think of these situations. It’s okay to live with your girlfriend. It’s okay that you embrace your homosexuality. It’s okay to destroy the life in your womb. It’s okay to be too free with your tongue and to gossip about your brother. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s fine.
These are the types of things we can be tempted to say to each other. And the temptation is real. But woe to the one by whom temptations come. Are you encouraging sin in your brother or sister? Give no quarter to sin. Don’t be hospitable to sin. Don’t even let it show its face on your doorstep. When sin comes to your door, punch it in the face and tell it to take a hike.
This is why our church covenant is written the way it is. I will pursue my brother’s holiness as dearly as I pursue my own.
My grandad used to tell a story about a man who was driving on an old country road. On the side of the road up ahead, he sees a man who seems to be doing a weird dance, jumping around, waving his arms, and even standing in front of the car. The driver comes to a stop because he didn’t want to run the man over. And as he pulls up, he realizes that just beyond that man, there was a collapsed bridge. And if that man had not been standing there, waving, dancing, and doing ridiculous things, then he would’ve plummeted to his death.
This is one way that we love each other and treasure each other. We warn each other.
If you saw a serial killer walk into your neighbor’s home, would you stay quiet? If you saw a man walking into a cage where a hungry lion was waiting for lunch, would you stay quiet?
“Well, I would want to make it awkward.”
Or “I don’t want to impose”
“It’s not my business.”
These are just excuses we use because we value our comfort more than we value the soul of our brother or sister.
And Jesus doesn’t leave it here.
We don’t just warn people. We confront sin. That’s what Jesus addresses in that next section in 18:15-20. He goes through the steps of confronting sin with someone. When someone sins against you, you are not called to seethe in bitterness. You are called to go to them, and to make it known. There is a place for love covering sin. That’s a real category in the Christian life. We can’t ignore that, and I don’t want to minimize that.
But when there is real and legitimate sin, it is not something that we can overlook. It’s not something we should simply pass by. Out of love for our brother and a desire to see them made right with God and to be reconciled with you, we have to go to them. Jesus outlines it very clearly. You can follow this in 18:15-20. Go to them alone, and if they hear you, then you have won a brother.
But if they don’t hear you, then go with two or three witnesses, and if they don’t hear the two or three witnesses, then bring it before the church, and if they don’t listen to the church, then put them out of the church.
After that, treat them as you would a tax collector or gentile. What does that mean? It means that we should treat them as someone who doesn’t believe. It means that we should preach the gospel to them. We should call them to repent. They’re living as an unbeliever, and they need to turn to Jesus and know him.
If someone is in open rebellion against God, can you honestly call it loving if you ignore that? Do you think it’s loving to let that man continue to drive toward the cliff because you don’t want to break some misguided sense of propriety? I don’t want to wave my arms like that, he’ll think that I’m crazy.
Hating sin means lovingly confronting each other when someone sins against you.
Do you know what is usually the reality behind this situation? We want to hold onto our bitterness. We don’t want to forgive.
And that’s the next way to treasure your brother.
Treasure your brother as one for whom Christ died.
By forgiving sin
Next, Peter asks a question. And this question is worth noting. Look in verse 21. “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Now, Peter probably thought that he was being generous here. The standard answer among the Pharisees at the time was that you should forgive a man up to three times, and if he sins against you a fourth time, then you were under no obligation to forgive him.
But what does Jesus say? Look in 18:22, “Jesus said to him, “ I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
Now the point of this is not to say that after 77 times, then it’s open season. His point is that we are given forgiveness without limitation, and we are called to offer forgiveness without limitation. It is not our place to withhold forgiveness, because we are not ultimately the one who has been sinned against. And because we have been forgiven so much more.
And Jesus makes this abundantly clear with the parable of the unforgiving servant. In this story, the servant is forgiven an unimaginable sum–10,000 talents. And then he leaves, and he goes and throws someone into jail because of a comparatively small amount of money.
Let me give you a point of reference here. 10,000 talents is roughly equivalent to $1 billion in today’s money. Actually, it’s more than $1 billion, but let’s round down for the sake of a nice round number.
One billion. You probably hear that number a lot, but honestly, it’s a number that is really difficult to understand. When you hear it, most of us don’t understand how big it is.
If you made $100,000 a year, then it would take you 10,000 years to accumulate $1 billion. This man owed 10,000 years worth of debt. That means that if someone worked from the day they were born to the day they died, and they lived to be 100 years old, then this would take 100 lifetimes to pay back this debt. It is an unimaginable amount of money.
On the other hand, the man who owed the servant, owed him 100 denarii. One denarii was one day’s wages for an average laborer at the time. That means that this was roughly 100 days wages. This man was forgiven 100 lifetimes of wages, then he turned around and condemned someone for owing him 100 days of wages.
This is the point– If we don’t forgive our brothers and sisters, when they sin against us, then how can we call ourselves Christian? How can we claim that we have been forgiven of every sin against the father when we would hold any sin against our brothers and sisters?
Saying it in this way makes it sound easy.
But I know that’s not the case. Sin hurts. The reason people don’t want to forgive when they are sinned against is because sin hurts horribly.
When someone punches you in the face, your first impulse isn’t to give them a hug.
But when you forgive someone, it doesn’t mean that you ignore the pain. It means that you absorb it. You cover. You cast it aside.
When someone sins against you, and you say, “Ah, it’s no big deal.” That’s not forgiveness. That’s ignoring the problem.
Recognize it. Yes, that hurt me. I think that you sinned against me. But I forgive you, because Christ has forgiven me.
Forgiveness is a promise. I will not hold this against you.
This isn’t easy, and we don’t need to act like it is. Quite honestly, this is one of the things that Jesus meant when he said, take up your cross and follow me. Lay down your bitterness. Lay down your hatred. Lay down your fear. And come to Jesus, and rest in him.
There may be people in your life who have sinned against you in ways that would make the rest of us shudder.
But the question is here before you. Will you be like the unforgiving servant? Or will you forgive?
In that point of decision, Christian, remember this. You have been forgiven so much more.
This is exactly what we are doing when we take the Lord supper every week. We are remembering Jesus, his great worthiness, and his finished work, and we revel in his victory together. As Christians, this is where we live. We hate sin together. And we forgive sin together. And we do this because we Treasure Christ together.
And we rejoice knowing that when we believe in him, we become united with Christ, and all those things that are true of him become true of us. Forget your social standing. Forget your reputation. Forget everything that you would call great about yourself, and turn to Jesus, and find everlasting life and peace.
Let’s pray.