In one of his sermons pastor John Ortberg tells the story of an evening many years ago when he and two friends were walking along a street in Newport Beach, California. They walked past a bar where a fight had been going on inside. The fight spilled out into the street, just like in an old western. Several guys were beating up on another guy, and he was bleeding from the forehead.

Ortberg and his friends knew they had to do something, so they went over to break up the fight. I don’t know why, but the guys who were doing the fighting didn’t seem to be intimidated when Ortberg and his friends walked up and yelled, “Hey, you guys, cut that out!”

Then all of a sudden these miscreants doing the fighting looked at them with fear in their eyes. Remarkably they quit pummeling their victim and st…