Christ Died for the Ungodly

Transcript

So if you’re visiting, welcome. We’d love to get to know you. We’d love to learn a little bit about you, see how we can serve you as a church, how we can show you the love that we so abundantly receive from our Lord Jesus. Well friends, we’re doing a four week study of Romans chapter five right now. And if you’ve been worshiping with us for some time, you’ll know that we go in between different chapters in Romans, we kind of jump around and do individual studies of specific chapters. And right now we’re right in the middle of Romans chapter five. If you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open it to Romans five so you can follow along. And if you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be one in the seat in front of you. And if you don’t have a Bible at all, not just with you, please take that Bible in the seat in front of you, home with you as a gift from us. We encourage you to read it, to be shaped by it, to be changed by it, and to grow, to love the one of whom the pages of that book speak. Friends, we’re going to study Romans chapter five, looking from verse six, on to verse 11. Can I invite you to stand for the reading of God’s Word? For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. This is the Word of the Lord, Saints. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. Did you bow your heads and pray with me? Oh great God, creator of the universe, sustainer of all life, the one who saves wretched men like me. Wretched men like me. Father, as we look to your Word, would you correct my speech as it comes out of my mouth if something doesn’t accurately reflect the beauty of your salvation? We ask that you would speak to us today, Lord, and we ask that you would be honored in your people being shaped by your Word, to glorify your Son and whose name we pray, amen. There’s a song that I love by a gentleman named Nat King Cole. And in that song, there’s this beautiful line near the end of the song, sung somewhat wistfully and quietly, and then there’s this quiet melodic refrain, and then he says it again, again, quietly and wistfully. And that line is, the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. Doesn’t this touch on something that’s so deeply ingrained in each of us? Really, probably ingrained in every single person who’s walked the face of the earth. We all desire to be loved. We all desire to have someone to love, whether that love be romantic, whether that love be the love of a friend, whether that be a child who we can love, an experienced love and affection from. It’s hardwiredness. It’s almost as if we were all created to long for someone to love, to long for someone who would love us in return. As many of us navigate the world around us, looking for love, looking to be loved, and we encounter this message of the God who loved his people so much that he would send his one and only son to die in their place, this news, this proclamation of love while beautiful and in a variety of ways very, very appealing is also kind of confusing. And for many, a little bit frustrating. At its core, it really is just a very beautiful message. God loves us and he would send his son to save us. But when people start digging deeper into the topics of God’s sovereignty and salvation, God’s election, penal substitution, imputed righteousness, justification by faith alone and so on, many people begin to get frustrated with this doctrine of salvation, this way that God shows his love to sinners. They argue over these doctrines. They push back, insisting on us needing to talk of nothing else except God’s love for sinners. They will insist that this is the whole of the gospel message. They will insist that God’s love broadly stated is the whole of Christianity. The thing is, saints, the frustration and the struggling to wrap our heads around some of these doctrines, the difficulty in seeing their importance in our understanding of how it is that God saves people. Likely has to do with the fact that God’s love. His way of loving us is very, very different from our understanding and our expectation of love. When I think that I wanna be loved and love somebody, I’m usually not picturing an enemy. I’m usually not picturing a person with whom I’m in opposition, with whom there’s conflict and I’m not thinking to myself, I want them to love me and I want to love them, but God does just that. This is shocking. It’s scandalous and it’s unbelievably incomprehensibly beautiful. This is what we get to see this morning as we continue our study of Romans five. God showing his love to sinners by sending his son to die for the ungodly. God wants to challenge our understanding of what it is to know his love, how we come to know it and how it makes us capable then of loving him. As we look into these six verses, what we’ll see here first is God’s love, second done God’s way and third for God’s purposes. So let’s take a look first at God’s love. We see all throughout the Bible this marvelous truth that God saves his people because he loves them, that he does what he needs in their lives in order to bring his people to himself. Whatever the circumstance, whatever the struggle, whatever the blessing, the joy, he does these things. He orchestrates these things in each of our lives out of a deep love for his people. We see in 1 John chapter four verses nine and 10, in this the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him. In this love, not that, in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. John 15, 13, greater love has no one than this that someone lay down his life for his friends. Gee, I wonder who did that for us. Zefinia 3, 17, the Lord your God is in your midst of mighty one who will save, he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will quiet you by his love. He will exalt over you with loud singing, Jeremiah 31, 3, I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Deuteronomy 7, 7, 8, God speaking to his chosen people, it was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you. For you are the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers that the Lord has brought you out of with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, King of Egypt. John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life, and of course, our text. Verse 8, God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, lest we veer to the other extreme of what I was just saying, a moment ago, and feel the temptation to minimize God’s love in this conversation, and think that when we talk about doctrines like election or penal substitution, God’s love somehow exits the conversation. All throughout scripture, we see that what God does for his people and how he works in them is because of his great love for them, his faithful love. He elects those he will save because he loves them. He works in them to make them look more and more like his son because of his great faithful love, and he poured out his wrath, contrary to us as that may seem, reserved for sinners, mind you, that wrath reserved for me, and for you, onto his perfect, sinless son, because sin must be paid for, and he set out before the foundation of the world to bring his people back to himself. Why? Because they are his, and he loves them, and he would do whatever it takes to get them back. As we see on full display in our text, the love of God doesn’t depend on the loveliness of the object of his love, but it depends on him. God is love, as we’re told in 1 John 4, 16, and so he is the source of that love. He’s the one that determines or defines that love, and he’s the one who perfectly and completely loves. What Paul seems to be saying in our passage in verse seven is that this is the greatest example of human love. This is the best we can do. We may die, we won’t necessarily do it, but we may die for someone who more or less deserves it. Someone that we feel is worthy, but this isn’t how God loves. You see, God loves those who hate him, who want nothing to do with him, who rebel against him. If we are to understand the challenging doctrines of Scripture, the ones that make us struggle a bit to wrap our heads around or at least begin to wrap our heads around them, we need to hold firmly to this astounding truth. We need to grab back for it every time we’re struggling and wrestling with this doctrine, or that doctrine, or how these two things fit together, or these three things, and that is this, God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How incredible is this, Saints? How amazing is this truth? Had God not loved me, had God not pursued me, I would never know Him. He didn’t die for me when I started cleaning up. He didn’t die for me when I took a step in the right direction. He didn’t die for me when I started to get a little bit better and started to look a little bit more like the kind of person that you want to love. While I was a sinner, Christ died for me. I often remember the wonderful words of that old hymn, could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stock on earth a quill, and every man ascribed by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry, nor could the scroll contain the hold of stretched from sky to sky. How do you describe that kind of love? How do you quantify it? So what can we actually do to attain this love, to earn it, to secure His favor? Absolutely nothing. Because nothing we do could ever be enough. We’d work ourselves to death, and it still wouldn’t be sufficient, because God is perfectly holy and His standard is nothing short of complete perfection. And so this love is freely given to the undeserving, to enemies, to sinners, to the ungodly. And what we see in that is that God’s ways are very, very different from ours. That brings us to our second point. When we see God’s power, when we see God’s love displayed in this way, shown to us so colorfully, so intensely, we inevitably have to ask, is this how it had to go? Was this the only way for us to be saved? Was there some other way perhaps? Was there something else God could have done to redeem us, to save us? Our text gives us much to consider in regard to the way that God saves His people. He saves us while we were still weak. He saves us while we’re sinners, while we were His enemies, and our text answers the question, how was this salvation accomplished by Christ dying for the ungodly? By Him justifying us by His blood, by Jesus reconciling us to God, and by this our text tells us we are saved, we are given eternal life to be sure, but as we also see in verse 9, we are saved from the wrath of God. There’s much that can be said about this broader study of soteriology. That’s just a big word for the doctrine of salvation, the way that we understand the teaching of salvation. Some of these aspects of this doctrine are explicitly seen in our text, and others are implicitly woven throughout. But one thing we do see clearly as a throughline in these verses is the fact that the way God saves us, humanly speaking, in our understanding, and in the way that we communicate it to others, humanly speaking, God’s salvation is illogical. It’s unnatural. It’s offensive. And this isn’t just my take on it. Paul writes as much in 1 Corinthians 123. He says that the message of Christ crucified is a stumbling block, and an offense. It’s an offense to those who are religiously minded, who want to think about salvation and a relationship with God is happening at least somewhat on their terms, and it’s a stumbling block to someone who’s trying to wrap their heads around these big concepts, and then you just hear something that sounds illogical to you. It’s confusing. In his infinite wisdom, though, this is what God knew to be best. In his perfect love, this is how he chose to complete his work and fix what we broke. Notice when Jesus’ work begins on us, it’s not, again, when we start moving in his direction, while we were still weak. I like how the NIV puts it, while we were still powerless. Not just weak, powerless, unable, incapable. No strength, no ability. It’s important to understand the fact that it’s not that we get to the state of weakness because we’ve done a certain amount of things. We’ve made some mistakes. We have some bad habits and some bad patterns in our lives. Thus becoming weaker, powerless. This is who we are in our unregenerate state. We are born with indwelling sin, with a sin nature, and then out of that nature, we sin by choice. We live lives that are contrary to God’s law, His desire for us. And so, friend, unless you think otherwise, let me correct you. We are not sinners because we sin. We don’t become that by sinning. We sin because we are sinners. Because we are born with indwelling sin, total depravity is a term some of you may have heard. And that term is kind of thrown around and maybe caricatured a little bit. Total depravity doesn’t mean that you’re as bad as you can possibly. Because if that were the case, we’d all be like serial killers. And by the grace of God, that’s not the case. What total depravity means is that every aspect of who we are is impacted by the fall. Every part of us is plagued with sin and its effects. The whole of who we are, the way that we operate, even the way that we think about having a relationship with God and pursuing Him, it’s selfishly motivated. It puts me at the center of that conversation. St. Augustine calls this sad state a state of moral inability. Moral inability. As we think of the way that God saves us in light of that condition, ungodly, powerless, weak, morally unable, consider Ephesians 2. And I just want to read verses 1 through 10. This is one of those passages that every Christian just needs to bounce around in your mind as a reminder of what happened to make you a child of God. Ephesians 2 verses 1 through 10. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh in the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind, but God. Being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace, in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast, for we are His workmanship. Created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. You and I were dead. Do you know how much hope a dead person has? Do you know how much change a dead person can enact? Not a lot, but God in His mercy, in His love, in His grace saved us, and raised us from the dead, and gave us a home, and gave us a hope. This is a gift. This is not of us. This is entirely His work. And notice, even this life we’re called to in Ephesians 2, this life that we’re called to in the good works, He prepared them beforehand. He enables us to do them. You can’t do the good works He’s calling you to until He changes your heart, until He brings you back from the dead. The Bible shows us that salvation is monogistic. It’s a great word. God acting as the sole agent to save us. What we see in Ephesians 2, what we see in Romans 5, these are the people that God saves. This is the lot from which He chooses. Helpless, utterly incapable, spiritually dead enemies. In preaching and in evangelism, there’s much emphasis placed on the responsibility of a person to make a decision for Christ. There’s the call in the Bible for the unbeliever to repent of their sin, to turn from that sin and to put their trust in Jesus. Yes and amen. If you are hearing this message, God is speaking to you and He’s telling you turn from your sin, run to Him. Yes, and we plead with unbelievers to do that here every single week and every aspect of our liturgy we’re calling unbelievers to come, to give up their lives, to give up their sin, to run to Jesus. But this is not a quote-unquote decision that a spiritually dead person can make. Let me remind you what Paul says in Ephesians 2, you were dead and the trespasses and sins in which he once walked, the walking dead, dead. So how could a dead person decide to come alive? Well, something has to be done to them. John 644, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws Him. And I will raise Him up on the last day. What you say to me, Andre, but a person needs to just believe and then God responds to that faith. First Corinthians 2, 14, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are a folly to Him. And He is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Romans 3, 11, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. Scripture gives us a very different picture of the state of the unbeliever than just making a decision for Jesus. Scripture gives us a very different picture of how desirous the unbeliever is of being made right with God. I’m not saying this to harp on this aspect of soteriology or to press on the details of election or God’s effectual call, rather saints, what I’m pressing on this and why I’m making a point of this is for us to better see and understand why it’s so incredibly beautiful that while we were still weak, what hope did I have? I wanted nothing to do with God. While we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly. This doctrine is humbling. This isn’t something for Theo Bros. to argue over online. This isn’t something for congregations to butt heads over and yell each other and call each other heretic over. This is beautiful. God died for us while we hated Him and wanted nothing to do with Him and had no hope. He died for me and saved me when I was at my worst. What this also does for us is that it reminds us that this is the God who saves. It is Him who does this work. I may not be very persuasive in my evangelism, but when I believe in a sovereign God who brings dead people back to life, what that means is me, fumbling and awkward with an incomplete message can communicate truth about God to a person who’s dying and God can use that because it doesn’t depend on the eloquence of the speaker. It depends on God who saves. You see, this doctrine actually gives us so much freedom in our evangelism because guess what, Saints? When God is sovereign, evangelism is 100% effective. Now, don’t go the hyper Calvinist route like those weirdos and say that because God is sovereign, we don’t have to evangelize on the contrary. God calls us into His work to participate with Him, to pursue sinners with reckless abandon because God will save those He’s calling to Himself. Amen? Say it like you mean it. Amen. God will save sinners. God will bring the dead back to life. God will get every single one of those for whom Christ died. There’s a wonderful book by J.I. Packer called Evangelism in the Sovereignty of God. You have to have it in your personal library. You have to read about how the doctrine of election and the sovereignty of God actually frees us to be zealous evangelists, not the opposite. The beautiful thing about this to your friend is that even if you’re not a Christian and you’re hearing this, maybe thinking that you’re excused from responding to God’s call, you’re not. God is calling every single person to come to Him, to repent of their sins and to trust in Him for salvation. How does that work with Him electing those that He will save? How does that fit with the extent of the atonement? I don’t know. You don’t know either. There are going to be a lot of people who try to simplify that and explain it to you and need little theological boxes and compartmentalize all of these doctrines. But the fact is, I don’t know how these things fit together in the mind of God. Nobody can really fully explain that. But the Scriptures tell us both. You must repent of your sins and you must trust in God for salvation and you can’t do that apart from God raising you from the dead. I do know He’s still calling sinners to Himself and all those who come to Him with genuine faith are never, ever turned away. John 6.37, Jesus says, all that the Father gives to me will come to me and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. He calls sinners, those who cry out to Him, those who come to Him and He will never, ever cast them out. Christ dies for the ungodly. But He dies for His people, beloved. He didn’t die to make salvation merely a possibility, but He died for those that He would save. His death in the place of His people accomplishes their reconciliation to God. Look at the finality of these phrases in our text, justified. They are made right in God’s eyes, justified, saved, reconciled, and to reiterate it at the end, we have now received reconciliation, those whom God has called will come, those for whom Christ died will be saved. His work is effective and it was perfect. And what is this exchange that takes place on the cross? Why does Jesus have to die in my place? Is it not enough that God calls me to Himself? It opens my eyes to the reality of who He is and the reality of my sin? But the thing is, saints, God is righteous and holy and perfect. He has to respond to sin and evil. And that response is His holy wrath. Psalm 7.11 tells us that God is a righteous judge. Romans 118 says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all in Godliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Colossians 35 and 6 put to death therefore what is earthly in you. Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, evil desire and covetousness, which is idolatry on account of these, the wrath of God is coming. That wrath as Pastor Samuel wonderfully reminded us during his pastoral prayer today was poured out on Jesus who stood in our place. Tim Keller wonderfully says, God’s wrath is his judicial opposition to evil. God isn’t neutral about sin, dear friend. He doesn’t just accept you as you are and allow you to stay that way. A righteous judge who will judge rightly and perfectly will judge all sin. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be holy. This is what Paul is referring to in verse 9 when he writes about the blood of Jesus. He’s pointing his readers and us to the sacrificial system of the Old Testament where in order for sin to be atoned for something had to die. There’s much talk about the cruelty of penal substitutionary atonement. This doctrine that teaches that God the Father took the life of God the Son in order for sin to be paid for, in order for sin to be covered. But the reality is we can’t really, truly wrap our minds around a perfectly holy God who demands perfect justice. For us to be made right in his eyes, to have the righteousness required to be in relationship with him, something has to happen to us, but also something has to happen for us. And that’s something, as we see in 2 Corinthians 5, 21, is that for our sake, he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Hebrews 9, verses 26-28, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself, and just as it is appointed for man to die once and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many. This work, was it just the beginning, does something else need to happen? Hebrews 10-12, but when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. When Christ dies for the on-godly, when he washes them clean with his blood, when he justifies sinners, they are justified in that work is complete. You will never be, dear saint, more justified than the moment that you were saved. Do you believe that? Or do you think that somehow you’re becoming more pleasing in God’s sight as you walk through your Christian life? The moment that you’re saved, and God says, righteous. Not because of you mind you, but because of the righteousness of Jesus. You will never be more justified than that moment. This is amazing grace. You will become more sanctified. You will look more and more like Jesus, but justification is a once and for all. The thing that God does for us, brothers and sisters, we’re helpless, completely without hope unless another goes before us and goes in our place. And this is what Jesus did for his people. This is what we’re talking about. In order for us to have life and joy and peace, Jesus had to experience intense anguish and isolation and fear. This was God’s way. He will debate over these doctrines, the extent of God’s sovereignty and salvation, all these things, but what’s often missed in these discussions is the beauty of these doctrines. He called us while we were his enemies. He looked at lost, selfish, arrogant people and said, I want him. I want her. Why? How? Therein lies the beauty of this mystery beloved. God wonderfully said, the gospel is the good news that God and Christ paid the price of suffering so that we could have the prize of enjoying him forever. God paid the price of his son to give us the prize of himself. God’s love shown his way to accomplish his purposes. That brings us to our last point. The way that Paul ends this section that we’re studying is with the words more than that. And all of that that we just covered, how could there be more? More than all these astounding truths, Paul says, we rejoice in God. All of this, all of the gospel, our understanding of what happened to make us children of God, to give us this family and this life leads the Christian to a life of joy. Enjoying God, rejoicing in God, we find joy in the one who would do this audacious thing for us to glorify him in that very rejoicing. We glorify him in the new lives that we get to live for his glory. Beyond our joy, God also uses this reality to change the very way that we live, the very way that we love others. When a person’s been loved in this way, how can they not love in return? When we as enemies of God are loved and pursued, how can we then turn away from those around us? What can someone do to me that’s worse than the way that I’ve rebelled against God? What can someone do to me that’s worse than the ways that I’ve sinned against him, dishonored him with my life? In receiving God’s love and grace and forgiveness, we become those who freely and gladly extend it to others. Thus glorifying God, just like Jesus told us to do in Matthew 516, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. What a wonderful life that we get to live as those who’ve been brought back from the dead and given a second chance, who’ve been raised to life. Beloved, have you ever considered the fact that God wants you to enjoy him? God wants you to live a life that reflects that joy, not just to kind of like trudge through life, just waiting for him to take you home, but to actually enjoy the life that he’s given you, to show that joy on your face and in your speech and in the way that you interact with the world around you. Have you ever considered the fact that God wants you to enjoy him personally? His gifts, yes, but also just to rejoice in the fact that you are his and that nothing can take you away from him, that you’ll get to worship him and be with him forever, all because of what he’s done for you. Have you ever considered that your joy in the Lord and your joyful walk of faith, whatever the present circumstance in which you find yourself, might be the very thing that God uses to draw people to himself through you? Consider 1 Peter 315. In your heart’s honor, Christ the Lord is holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Being prepared to explain to people why you have hope in the midst of pain and suffering and loss, when everything seems hopeless around you, why you’re joyful, what a gift it is to belong to him and to know that our lives are forever secure in his hands, what a gift to know that despite all I’ve done to waste my life, he can redeem it and still be glorified in me. Who is this God who saves people like you and like me? How beautiful is he? When he looked at us, did we have something to offer that others around us didn’t? No. It happened while we were weak and sinners and enemies. And saving me, did God just kind of decide to meet me halfway? No. His blood justifies us. It’s his work completely. Do we have to wait to see how this all plays out? What the end will actually look like? No. The work is done. It’s finished. Justified, reconciled, saved. And if you’re here today and all this talk about theology and the ins and outs of the doctrine of salvation or making your head spin, I just want you to walk away with one truth. Christ died for the ungodly. I plead with you, friend, if you don’t know Jesus as Lord and Savior, ask Him to open your eyes, ask Him to save you. You’re surrounded by people who’ve been where you are and who would love to talk to you about the one who saved them, talk to somebody, ask for help, ask for prayer. We say along with the Apostle Paul who wrote these following words in 2 Corinthians 5-20, we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Earlier this week, our music ministry, Deacon Carly, shared a wonderful song with me. And in closing, I wanted to read the lyrics of this song. It really well describes how we came to be the people of God and what He looked at when He called us to Himself. I am one of those at the table not invited. And to all here at the feast, it’s very plain. I cannot hide an etiquette or conversation, but Christ Himself sent word to me and so I came. I’m one of those who was dead and fully buried, and I still bear every stigma of decay. There is no way I can hide just what I’ve been through because when Jesus called that came fresh from the grave, I am one of those who was a leper and contagious, the deformities and scars I have today. Yet while I was vile with sickness, Jesus loved me, and He healed, restored and through and through remade. I am one of those who was doomed to death in prison, and have done more evil things than I could say. Jesus broke inside and there unlocked my shackles, and to set me free He died and took my place. I am one of those who was hard to love and ugly. Self-righteous critical religion was my stain, so I ran to Christ to wash and be discovered. Jesus came to me and covered up my shame. Though the world may number me among the foolish, I think Jesus Christ is all I need to know. Jesus suffered and paid blood to buy the lowest of the low. Hallelujah. Amen. That’s me. Yes. I am one of those. This is every single one of us. Dear brothers and sisters, this is us. What right do I have to be in this family? What right do I have to have an eternal hope? What right do I have to be forgiven? How amazing that He would look at me in that state and say mine. Would you pray with me? If other words fail me, as I try to express my gratitude and my joy for the fact that you would look at sinners like me, and send your Son to purchase and redeem me. Lord, you abound and grace and kindness and mercy and love. And so as we think about the way that we came to be your people, Father, would you give us a joy that is contagious so that as we move through the lives that you have given us, people might come to know the God who we love and who loves us. We want to live lives that reflect what you have done for us and that put on display the beauty of the one who saved us. But we need your help to that end. So we ask you, Lord, help us. Be with us and make Jesus known through us. And His name we pray. And for His glory, amen.