[Morning Sermon] Prisoners of Hope (Zech 9:9-12)

This Palm Sunday, we're looking at Zechariah's promise of a coming King to learn of the joy that God gives to a people walking in darkness, the mercy of the King He sends to save them, and the blood of the covenant that seals His promise.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Let's pray. Father, we gather this morning as citizens of your kingdom. You have called us out of darkness. You have transferred us into the kingdom of your beloved Son, into a radiant kingdom permeated by divine light. And Lord, as citizens of your kingdom, we are reminded that there is still much darkness around us. The nations rage, the peoples plot in vain. The kings of the earth set themselves against, the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed. Lord, we take comfort in knowing that you who sit in the heavens, who does whatever pleases you, you are the sovereign mighty ruler of all who holds every rival in derision. You are the God of righteousness. You are the God of justice. You are the God who has set your king on Zion, your holy hill. You have anointed and enthroned your only Son. Lord, we look with confidence to the day when you make the nations his heritage and the ends of the earth his possession. When you in justice come to take away every rival authority, when you cleanse all the pollution, all the corruption, when you break all yours and our enemies with a rod of iron. Lord, when you establish your perfect kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Our King has triumphantly entered not just into Jerusalem, but into our hearts. We thank you for the promise that one day He will come with the new heavens and new earth. Help us to live as a people of hope. Help us to live as a people in the midst of so much corruption and so much violence, so much unrighteousness, so much sin and so much failure. Help us to be a people who point to that blessed kingdom. Help us to be a people who invite others into it. And I pray this morning that you would strengthen us in that. You would strengthen our hope, that you would give us courage, that you would give us confidence, that you would help us to be your radiant people in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation. That you would enable us to shine as bright lights, who reflect not our own light, but the light of Christ. Lord, we pray for the ministry opportunities that you have given us here, for Covenant Family Childcare, for trail life, for harvest prison ministries, for our abuse care and education team, for our men's ministries, our women's ministries, our Christian education ministries, all of these wonderful chances that you've given us to proclaim the truth in so many different ways and so many different venues. Lord, give us as a church everything we need in order to continue following you where you're leading in our community in Wilson County. We pray that you'd build your kingdom here. We pray for our people, Lord. We thank you for Aaron's successful surgery this week. And we pray that you would be with him as he recovers. We thank you for your faithfulness to the Georges, and that they could be with us today after a long time away in recovery. We thank you for your faithfulness to all of us, Lord. There is so much that we could share right now. There is so much to be prayed for, so many hurts that need to be healed, so many diseases that need to be cured, so much. We thank you, Father, that you are the God who sees and the God who hears, even when we don't know how to articulate our prayers. So I pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would draw near to each and every one of us, that you would find us in our point of need, and that you would breathe deep comfort to our souls. And as we come to the preaching of your word, we pray that you would help us by that same spirit to rejoice in the King, the merciful King, the righteous King, the King who has salvation, the one who by the blood of the covenant has come to pay the price for our sins. Help us, Lord, to take great courage in him and to know that no matter how dark our world might seem right now, no matter what kind of trial we might be walking through, he is ours and we are his. So, Lord, I pray that you would use me as a fit instrument to that and that my words would be clear and compelling and helpful. But Father, whatever is not true or good or beautiful, whatever turns us away from Jesus, let those words fall to the ground. And whatever does, speak of your grace and speak truly of your word. Fix that in all our hearts and minds, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright, so today, of course, as I mentioned before, is Palm Sunday. This is the day when we remember Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And the way we typically do that, the way a lot of churches will do that today, is we take a text from one of the Gospels, like Matthew 21 or John 12, and we would tell the story and we would articulate all that was going on. But today we're actually going to go at it a different way. See, long after the event actually happened, after Jesus got on that donkey and rode into Jerusalem, his disciples realized that what was happening there, what he was doing on that donkey, was a direct fulfillment of something that had been prophesied some six centuries before that day by a prophet named Zechariah. And so, after the event, even after the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension, when they came in the power of the Holy Spirit to write down the story, God revealed to them that this was the fulfillment of that. And so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna come at it from an opposite angle, to better understand that we have a humble yet triumphant king who brings joy into our despair. We're gonna start with the check that Zechariah the prophet wrote, and then we're gonna see how it was cached in Christ. So Zechariah 9, 9 through 12. That is what we are looking at today. And I'll invite you to rise now as I read the sermon text for us. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king is coming to you. Righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the war horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations. His rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth. As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope. Today I declare that I will restore to you double. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Father, thank you for these great and precious promises. Thank you for the King who has come and will come again. Send your Holy Spirit now, so that we might see him more clearly with the eyes of faith. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. So, in case you're not familiar, Zechariah is a book about restoration. It was written after Israel's exile from the promised land. See, God had made a promise. God promised in the book of Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible, really, that he would discipline the nation of Israel if she were to break her covenant with him. And of course, that's what happened. But in Deuteronomy, God made another promise. He said that after that discipline, there would be restoration. And so Zechariah's purpose here on the other side of the exile is to encourage the people of God to learn their lesson from God's discipline and to trust in his promise to restore them to their land, to bring back their prosperity, and to eventually re-establish his kingdom in their midst, a kingdom unlike they had ever known in their history. The kingdom would be infinitely more glorious than Israel's golden age under Solomon. Because it would be centered around an even greater king than Solomon. A son of David who would not just rule for his fourscore and ten and die, but a son of David who would reign forever and ever, not just over Israel, but over the entire earth. Our passage today, it points to the coming of that king. And we're going to consider three things it tells us about the nature of his coming and its effects on us. We'll see the people's joy, the king's mercy, and the covenant's blood. So joy, mercy, and blood. How's that for a sunny sermon outlined for you? Joy, mercy, and blood. Let's begin with joy and end with blood. The people's joy. Our passage, it begins in verse 9 with a couplet. It says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Hebrew nerds or scholars will call this synonymous parallelism, which is just like a$5 way of saying the two lines repeat the same idea. They come together to say one thing emphatically. Rejoice, right? Rejoice. Lift up your voices. Raise your hands. Put on your dancing shoes. Throw a party. Rejoice. That's where Zechariah is starting. And it's not a suggestion, right? This is not just like, hey, you guys are kind of sad right now. I think you should have a little more joy in your life. No, this is an imperative. This is a command given in the present tense based upon a future reality that we will see unfold as the prophecy goes on. But before we do that, before we get to the justification for the command, we really do need to slow down and ponder for a few minutes the atmosphere into which this command to rejoice was spoken. Because remember, God is using Zechariah to address a people who have just come back from exile after being kicked out of the promised land for their disobedience. Sure, Cyrus, King Cyrus of the Persians, had issued this decree allowing them to go home, and that's great, but it's not as though there was a lot for them to go back to. Everybody had lost somebody. Livelihoods had been completely destroyed. In a hundred and one ways, the people of Israel coming back to Jerusalem and coming back to the land had to start from square one. And even worse, they had to do it as a conquered people, living under the thumb of Cyrus and the Persians. This was Israel, right? This is the chosen people of God. This is the apple of his eye being forced to come back and live under the sway of the pagan nations. Who were they? Nobody now. Nobody. So these are dark times, these are desperate times, and God speaks into the darkness to say, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout loudly, O daughter of Jerusalem. Now he repeats a really important word in there. Did you catch it? It's the word of. No, I'm kidding. It's the word daughter. He calls them daughter. Rick is going to pay me five bucks for saying that. Don't miss the fact that he calls them daughter. Because even though Israel had been cast off for a time on account of their sin, they have not been disowned. Zion is still God's place. Jerusalem is still his city. Israel is still his people. He calls them daughter. Now the reason we're lingering over that, we're spending so much time on the first half of the first verse, is because we need to understand that God is in the business of speaking joy into despair. Each one of us, we all come into this room with varying degrees of baggage. Some of you, right now, you're navigating incredibly difficult relationships in your life. Some of you, some of us are bone-tired from wrangling feral children. Some are suffering from chronic illness. Some are broke. Some hate their jobs. Some are desperate for a spouse. Others are desperate to be rid of their spouse. So we we know, you know, intellectually, we know that we are a people of life and light, but so many of us are slogging through significant darkness right now. And the word that God speaks into the darkness, whatever it might look like for you and whatever it might look like for me, is this rejoice. Not just a little bit, but a lot of it. Rejoice. Shout out loud. And in case you're wondering whether that's like a legit thing in the Bible, it's not just here in Zechariah. It's all over the place. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the Psalms, the prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles, all over the place. 1 Thessalonians 5.16 says to rejoice always. Not some of the time, rejoice always. So that's a word that the Bible gives to us. But to be honest, if it feels like you're sitting in a dark room right now and you're reading your Bible, and all you got is a dinky little flashlight, and the batteries are dying and the light is going out, the command to rejoice is a hard word to receive, isn't it? It's like the middle of the night last night. One of our kids was really upset about their allergies, and I'm not going to tell you which one. Eyes swollen shut, nasal passages clogged, can't see, can't breathe, all of that. And like the exceptional father that I am, I very directly told this child, stop crying. Go ahead and write that down. That's my parenting advice. Stop crying. Because of, you know, immediately they did, and they went right back to sleep, didn't they? No. That is not what happened. Because when your eyes are swollen shut and everything is darkness, your father's order to stop crying is not helpful. But God is no frustrated father. He doesn't just tell his daughter to buck up and get on with it. He does not give a command without comfort. He gets down on one knee. He looks at his daughter, and I'm not saying it was a daughter or a son. Again, non-committal. I'm not calling anyone out here. But God, with his people, with his daughter, he gets down on one knee. He locks eyes with his people. He locks eyes with us. And no sooner does he call us to rejoice than he gives us a reason to shout aloud, even in the midst of our pain. And that's what we see as the passage unfolds and we get to our second heading in the King's mercy. Behold, he says in the second part of verse 9, your king is coming to you. Righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey. Why? Why should we rejoice in the midst of our darkness when everything around us is pain and we have no worldly reason to think that it's going to get better? Why should we rejoice? We should rejoice because the king is coming to us with more than just a pack of new batteries for our dinky little flashlight. The king is coming with all the light of heaven because he himself is the light and the true light of the world. This king that he's talking about here, of course, is the Messiah. He's the promised son of David who would come to conquer all of Israel's enemy and to usher in that new age, that golden age that I was talking about a little bit before. Here, Zechariah points us to three very important characteristics of that coming king. And the first is righteousness. He is righteous. He is the perfectly just king who only does what is right. See, the the problem with all of Israel's kings up to this point, ever since David, is that you could not call them righteous. Sure, some of them were good, but even the best of them fell short of that standard. And the worst of them so perverted justice in Israel that they brought down God's righteous judgment upon the entire nation. As I said this morning in Sunday school, as goes the king, so goes the people of God. And a lot of those kings, most of those kings, royally screwed it up. So this coming king is unlike every king before him. He will restore perfect justice to Israel. And in so doing, he will prevent Israel from sliding back into the state of injustice that got them booted out of the promised land. He is righteous. Second, the king has salvation, which is kind of a weird statement when you think about it, but it's a unique way of saying that this king will be endowed with victory over all of God's enemies. In other words, he will be the one who will win the victory that accomplishes salvation. And he will freely share that gift of salvation with all his people. And that victory will not be like the typical victory that you'd expect or that you'd see in the movies, where the king rides in on a mighty war horse surrounded by his royal guard. It won't be like that. Like, you know, kids, you can think of Jesus riding in on a tank, right? Or maybe piloting a B-2 bomber or something like that. No. The scene will be so much more humble than that. Which is the third thing that Zechariah tells us about the king. He will come in humility. He will not ride in on a war horse. He will ride in on a donkey. On a colt, even, the foal of a donkey. So not even a grown-up, but an adolescent, an angsty donkey with acne and a t-shirt with Luke Skywalker on it. That's the kind of donkey that the victorious king is going to ride in on. Now, when we think about humility, we think about the donkey, it's really important that we nuance our understanding of the donkey a little bit. Because Zechariah did not just pick some random animal for the king to ride in on. The donkey actually had royal significance in the Old Testament, specifically in the house of David. We see that first in Genesis 49, verses 10 through 11, where it tells us that the king of Israel will come from the line of Judah and that he will ride on a foal, the cult of a donkey. We see it in Judges 5, 10, 12, where donkeys and mules are used as the proper mount for a successful ruler in their family. 1 Samuel 9 and 10, it is in the losing and finding of donkeys that Saul becomes king. 2 Samuel 16, 17, 19, again, donkeys and mules are a sign of royalty or of connection to the royal family. So the donkey is not a sign of weakness. The donkey is a sign of royalty. It is the sign of a king who could ride in on a war horse if he wanted to, but he deliberately chooses not to. Because his purpose is not to destroy, but to show mercy. Wants to. And he will not come to make war with his people, he will come to make peace with his people, and through them to make peace with all the nations of all the earth. That's what he says in verse 10. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the war horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations. His rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth. So what have we seen so far here? God invites his people to rejoice, even amid their suffering, and he bases that invitation in the promise of a righteous king who will come in humble power to mercifully save his people and even to make us instruments of peace. Like I mentioned just a few minutes ago, we all come to this room with differing amounts and kinds of baggage. And some of us, if we're honest, know that a lot of that is on us. We've made bad choices. We've said things that we can't take back. We've mistreated the people that we're supposed to love. We know so much of it is on us. But others of us are suffering because of the sins of others. We've been mistreated. We've been slandered. We've been abused. And for some of us, maybe it's most of us, it's some combination of the two. And the hope that Zechariah holds out here is the promise of a perfectly just king who will fix both sides of the equation. A perfectly just king who will put everything right, not just by doling out punishment, but by showing mercy. He will not fight fire with fire. He will not combat sin with sin. He will not conquer bodies so much as he will conquer hearts. He will slay the enmity within in order to establish peace without. Why? Because our king is known by mercy. If you're suffering because of your own sin, then you need to know that this coming king is the kind of king who will bring you into his inner courtroom and make you to kneel before him, not because he's going to chop your head off, but because he wants to lift your head. That he will deal with all his enemies and all your enemies in his own time and according to his perfect wisdom. So rejoice, Zechariah says, rejoice that God will send such a king. And when that king comes, he will bring you a peace that surpasses all understanding. Now you might have the question, why would that king do this for me? There are a lot of different ways that we could answer that question. But the fundamental one is this God will do it because he made a promise. And that brings us to our third and final heading, the covenant's blood. Joy, mercy, blood. So far, Zechariah has described the nature of the king's coming and its worldwide effects. And in verse 11, he comes at it from another angle in terms of his people's deliverance. And the thing to notice here is why he says he'll do this. Why? He says it's because of the blood of his covenant with them. Covenant's kind of a churchy word. We use it all the time. We name our childcare after it. We just throw it around. And the most basic definition of a covenant is an agreement between two parties, kind of like a treaty or a legal contract, but with more of an intimate relational kind of vibe to it. And we see covenantal arrangements all over the Bible, starting even in the beginning, in the garden. Hosea 6.7 refers to a covenant that God made with Adam in the garden. We know the story. God gives him the stipulation. He says, you can eat all of this stuff, but don't eat from that one tree. And what do Adam and Eve do? They eat from the one tree. They break the covenant. And because Adam was our covenant head, the federal representative of all humanity, Romans 5 says that the death sentence he received for himself extends to all of us. We all descending from Adam by ordinary generation are dead in our sins and trespasses. But did God leave us there? No. God did something about it. Out of his mere good pleasure, out of his sheer mercy and grace, God cut a new covenant with his creatures, a covenant of grace in which we are saved not by our own obedience, but by the obedience of another. And we see this covenant of grace administered in a number of ways throughout the Bible. To name just a few. This one covenant of grace moving and developing and growing in different administrations throughout Scripture. And these covenants I just mentioned share something very important in common. They were all ratified with blood. When God made a covenant with Abraham, he had to cut a bunch of animals and lay them over against each other. It's super weird. Why would he do that? He did that because in the ancient world, when you'd make a covenant, the two you would hack up a bunch of animals and lay them side by side. And the two parties would walk through the midst of the animals as a visible token, as a pledge that says, if I break this covenant, let me be like one of these animals. Let my blood be on my head. So that's the blood that ratifies the covenant, but you also have blood in the maintenance of a covenant. The old covenant with Moses, all the bloody sacrifices that are going on in the temple, in the tabernacle. Through those sacrifices, God was providing the blood of another so that the people would not have to spill their own blood when they broke the covenant. And so, coming back to our passage, what is God saying here through Zechariah and verse 11? He's saying that he will not forget that covenant. He will not turn his back on the covenant he made with his people, on the promise that he sealed and maintained with blood. He will not forsake his blood-bought people. He will set them free from the waterless pit. That is, he will bring those back who are still suffering in exile. He's going to save everyone. He's going to return the prisoners of hope to their stronghold and restore everything that they had lost twofold. Now, prisoners of hope. On the one hand, they're prisoners of a foreign power. On the other hand, they are imprisoned in hope. Not because they're filled with optimism, not because they choose every morning to get up and look at the sunny side of things. No, but because it's because they know that even in spite of their present circumstances, they belong to God. How can they know that? Because they are his blood-bought people. And because God is good, because God is faithful, because God is true to his word and true to his promise, he cannot forsake his promise. He cannot forsake his covenant with his people without denying himself. And if I could put just a finer point on that, for God to give up on his promise, God would have to stop being God. It's impossible. He won't do it. He can't do it. And so what do we have here in Zechariah 9? We have a God who commands his people to rejoice, not in their present misery, but in the irrevocable promise that he will send a just and merciful king to save them. They are the heirs of the covenant. They are his sons, they are his daughters. He will not fail them, he will not forsake them. He will keep the oath that he has made to his people, bound in the blood of his covenant with them. This is the promise that Zechariah delivered to Israel. And it's the promise that the people of God held on to for five centuries. Until one day, one day the people of God gathered in the surrounding precincts around Jerusalem for the Passover. One day, they happened to see this man whom they called the son of David. Humble, mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey. And as he makes his way toward Jerusalem, they shout, Hosanna. Hosanna to the son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. They saw it. The king was coming, they saw it, the prophecy was being fulfilled. They could see God making good on his promise. But what they couldn't see, at least not yet, was just what God meant when he based all of this on the blood of the covenant. They did not know that the gift of salvation that the king had come to provide could only be secured through the shedding of his own blood on a cross. See, when God first ratified the covenant with Abraham, he did something really strange, at least strange by the covenant-making standards of his day. When it came time for that covenant ratification ceremony and for the parties of the covenant to pass through the pieces, Abraham didn't do it. Not because he didn't want to, but because God had put him to sleep. He entered into the pledge to take the consequences of covenant disobedience upon himself. He would absorb the curse so that we could get the blessing. Our blood would be on his head. And so all that blood that was spilled in the tabernacle in the temple, all that blood to maintain the covenant relationship between God and his people, all the bulls and all the goats that were sacrificed day after day after day after day, it was all pointing forward to the one sacrifice to end all sacrifices. It was all driving forward toward the cross where the King of Glory would shed his own blood to pay the price for our failure to fulfill the demands of the covenant. And so today, when we we we remember what it was like to rejoice in the coming of the king, but we have this whole holy week ahead of us. And as we walk through it, we remember that there is no crown without the cross, that the road to heaven runs straight through Calvary. We will have Easter, no doubt about that, but not before we have Good Friday. If you've put your faith in Jesus and you're walking through darkness right now, remember that Scripture right here calls you a prisoner of hope. Your suffering is real. Don't pretend it's not. That's not what a good Christian does. What a good Christian does is acknowledge us that the suffering is real and bring it to the Lord in lament. And as we do that, God does not leave us in our pain. God provides us the peace that surpasses all understanding. He helps us to rejoice even in the midst of our trials because we know where they're leading us. Now, if you've not put your faith in Christ, then you need to know that the king who came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday will come again. But this time he will not come in humility. He'll come in strength. And when he comes in strength, he will fully and finally deliver his people from all his and all their enemies. See, that's the part of Zechariah 9 that we didn't cover today. If we kept reading, we would. The script flips. And the king takes Judah into his hand like a war bow. And then he knocks Ephraim on the string like an arrow. And he lets it loose throughout the nations. Now, this isn't a call for us to holy war. Don't take that application. This is a prophecy of the spiritual battle that the church engages in as the word goes forth and Jesus uses his word and spirit to tear down enemy strongholds and individual hearts. But when Jesus comes again, that invisible spiritual battle will become a visible physical reality. On that day, Revelation tells us that the king will come, not mounted on a donkey. He will be mounted on a white war horse. A sword will be coming from his mouth, his robe will be dipped in blood, the one who allowed himself to be conquered will come to conquer. And only then will all the sad things come untrue, and a new heavens and new earth descend in which there is no more pain, there is no more violence, there is no more sickness because there is no more sin in the world. And the question that Zechariah presses upon us, the question that God Himself, by way of the Holy Spirit, presses upon us right now, is who will we be when he comes again? How will we receive him? Will we rejoice greatly? Will we shout aloud? Will we make like the people outside Bethany on Palm Sunday, waving palms in the air, laying cloaks on the ground, singing out our hosannas? I hope so. Because Philippians 2 tells us that on that day, when Jesus returns in glory, every knee will bow. In heaven above, on earth below, even the water underneath the earth. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God his Father. Some of us will do that out of joy. Welcome, Jesus. Some of us will do it out of compulsion because we will finally see the truth that we have spent our entire lives denying. And the only way, the only way to make sure that you're in that first category is to lay down your arms and to run to the king for mercy. The king has promised to embrace anyone who comes. Why? Because our king is known by mercy. And he will in no way cast out whoever comes to him. So if you have not yet come to him, Psalm 2 ends, kiss the son lest he be angry and you perish in the way. Our king is known by mercy. Our king says, come. So even as he comes and we look to his coming, you come first. So that that final day will be a day of joy and not mourning. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you do not offer a command without comfort, that you do not call us to rejoice without giving us a reason to rejoice. And so, Father, help us, wherever we might be suffering, wherever we might be walking through trial, whatever the darkness might look like, help us, Lord, to rejoice even in the pit, knowing that Jesus is with us, that he has not forsaken us, and one day he will come again in glory to make all things right. Father, if there are any in this room or listening to us online who have not yet come to you by grace through faith, who have not yet bowed their knee to the King of heaven, I pray that by the power of the Holy Spirit you would conquer their hearts, that you would draw them to yourself, and they would find in you the thing that they have long been longing for all their lives. That they would join us as subjects and citizens of your radiant heavenly kingdom. We thank you, Father, that you, by your grace, have brought us here. There was nothing we could do to earn it. But you sent our King, righteous and having salvation, in the humility of death, to rescue us and bring us to life. Thank you for that incomparable gift, we pray. In Jesus' name. Amen. We have five now. I forgot we have five. We didn't work it out beforehand, so they're gonna arm wrestle or something to figure out who does what. This, you know, our great hope when we think about the triumphal entry of Christ, it tunes our hearts, tunes our minds toward the fact that Christ will come again. He entered in humility, but he will enter again in victory. And on that day we will sit at the table with him. We will feast and we will rejoice in every sense of the word. This table Jesus gave to us as a foretaste of that rejoicing. So again, if you're walking in darkness right now, if you are suffering, if you're going through trial, if you're if you're just holding on by a thread, trying to remember that the king who entered once will enter again for you, these are the means that he gives you to strengthen to be strengthened in that fight. So come forward and receive and be reminded that your king is real, that he does support you, he does defend you, he does deliver you. And even though your life might not look like that right now, it is true nonetheless. And it will be infinitely and gloriously true when he comes again. But if that's not your story, if you know because you have in your unrepentant sin, you are not welcome at his table. Don't come to his table. Now that sounds harsh, but the good news is the only prerequisite for coming to the table is knowing your need of Christ. So if you want to sit at the table with Jesus, we don't have a checklist. We don't have any hoops you need to run through. The one hoop is submit yourself by grace through faith to the King of heaven. Trust in him for your salvation. That's how you get to come to this table. And if you don't know what that looks like, if you haven't done that, if you want to think that through, talk that through, please come see any one of us because we would love to do that with you. But when it comes to this table, wait. Say yes to Jesus. Bow your knee to the King before you sit at his table. I'm gonna pray one more time. We're gonna ask the Lord to bless this meal, and I'll invite you forward to receive the elements. After everybody's been served, we'll partake together. Father, thank you for this meal. We so desperately need to be strengthened and encouraged and reminded that the King who came once will come again to bring to completion that good work which He started in us. We long for that day. Help us now to long for it all the more. In Jesus' name. Amen.