The Harshness Of God- Ian Graham- A Sword, Not Peace

Why would Jesus, the prince of peace, tell his disciples he came not to bring peace but a sword in Matthew 10vv34-39?

Transcript

Lent And Rethinking God’s Posture

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We have been talking during the course of the season of Lent. And Lent is a historic season in the life of the church that was enshrined into the calendar before Nicaea in 325. There's a time of preparation and walking alongside Jesus as we journey with him towards Holy Week and the cross and ultimately the empty tomb. And I don't know about you, I don't know what your perception of God is as you come in here this morning. A.W. Tozer says that our what comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. And so what do you imagine when you imagine the face of God or the posture of God? Often this is the product of environments that we've been in for better or worse. If you have domineering theology or parents, you may have a certain posture of God. If you have permissive theology or parents, you may have a certain posture of God. I'll show my cards a little bit. My working assumption is that God is unrelenting, unbounded, infinite kindness, love, mercy, grace, blessing. That's who he is. But there are times where I'm reading the scriptures and I come across something that at least is a little bit of an abrasive to that working presupposition, where it's like, ooh, what did Jesus say? And why did he say it that way? And so this has been kind of the working premise for this series as we go through Lint is staring those passages in the face that would seem to undermine or to even push against this idea that God is infinite. Mercy, grace, goodness, blessing. And so today we want to look at one of these passages as we encounter Jesus because we want to receive the whole counsel of God's word. We don't want to just pick and choose, which is a kind of working possibility if we're reading through the Bible. We're like, oh, I don't like that part. I'm just gonna not pay attention to it. We want to approach it from a different vantage point and say, what if we looked? What if we stared it in the face? Would we see that the God of blessing, mercy, grace, beauty meets us in that place? And I think he will. So we're gonna turn to Matthew chapter 10, and I'm gonna read a passage for you, and then in my endless endeavor to impose elder geriatric millennial culture on you, I'm curious, are choose your own adventure books still a thing? Is that a thing? My kids have come across Choose Your Own Adventure Netflix, which was its own technology. But choose your own adventure books are like if you want to walk through door number one, turn to page 54. If you want to walk through door number two and see what happens, turn to page 105. And we're gonna kind of approach the teaching time a little bit that way this morning. We have some different doors we can walk through in different orders, and we'll see where they lead us. Uh you will not die, is kind of the summary. But Matthew chapter 10, beginning in verse 34. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. This is Jesus talking. Okay. I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I've come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or more mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who lose or find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. The word of the Lord. Do you see what I mean? All right. With that, as a prompt, let us uh let's see where we might go today. Uh, Craig, you want to put up those. All right, we got some doors here. Somebody, a leader will emerge. Lead us. Where are we going? Our cross to bear. Okay. Jesus says, Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. What does it mean to bear the cross with Jesus? What does it mean to find our lives by losing it? And especially we see that this instruction, this invitation is set within some wider parameters. He says, hey, if you love your parents more than you love me, that's not right. Or even for those of us who are parents, hey, if you love your kids more than you love me, what are you doing? Now, we have some difficulties that we encounter here. I often cannot disentangle how I love Jesus with how I love my, for instance, my children or my parents or my spouse. And these are the nearest neighbors, right? These are the people that even the pagans love, the people that are in their families, right? But what about Jesus' instructions to love our enemies? What about Jesus' instructions to love our neighbors as ourselves? It is a wholly good thing to love our parents. And we'll see that in other times in the scriptures, we are told to do just that. Now, your parents may have done the best they could with what they had, which is the case for most of us, right? There are things that are easy to love about our parents and easy to receive as gifts. There are other things that are more complex or harder. There are moments where that parental child relationship slides into abuse, and some of you have endured that, and for that I am deeply sorry. But it is a wholly good thing to try to love your parents and acknowledge that they did with what they had the best that they could, and to reciprocate the love, whatever measure they were able to give to you, with some measure of love. It's a wholly good thing to love your children. I learned to love most days by my face-to-face encounter with my children because they press against the things I cherish deeply, my own sense of self-determination and freedom. My kids will have none of it. They don't care that the time changed. They're gonna wake up at the same time. Their time is not relative to the calendars of humankind. They don't need that kind of stuff. They live on their own time. Jesus tells us that we must love him, follow him more than we love these seemingly penultimate things. Now, as a pastor, this gets complicated. Am I supposed to love the mission of Jesus so much that I spend every night outside of the house because I have to love God more than I love my kids? Again, we see all these challenges that are put, not just to me, but for many of us. I think we can summarise a few takeaways from this. First, Jesus will not stand nice and compliant with even our most cherished cultural norms. Jesus challenges the notion of a good life in every culture. In Jesus' day, Jesus is the firstborn male in a patriarchal, patrilineal society. Jesus is not just the embodiment of the blessing of the entire world to his parents. He is the embodiment of God's favor, specifically that he is a male heir born to their family. He is a mark of God's favor. And yet, throughout Jesus' life, Jesus pushes against the norms of what it means to be a first-century eldest-born Jewish male. We see another moment where Jesus is teaching in a setting, and his mother and his brothers are outside and they want to see Jesus. And they're not just asking in this culture, they're saying, hey, Jesus, come outside. That's the expectation that's carried with his position in the family. And Jesus hears their very insistent requests, and he looks around the room that he's teaching in, he says, Here are my mother and my brothers and my sisters and my family. And it seems harsh, right? Like I've got to be honest, I wouldn't love that. But what Jesus is doing is he is upending and right-siding our cultural norms and the things that we take for granted. He does this in his own culture and he does this in our culture. Sometimes we have to transpose what's going on here, but we see that same confrontation with the cultural norms of our day. Think about what qualifies as a good life for us who live in in near adjacent to Princeton. For many of you, you came here because of what that vision, what qualifies as a good life. And we could summarize it in a lot of different ways. I think we could we could break it down to a couple of things. First of all, a good life is a well-paying job that affords us a little bit of security, a little bit of, you know, leisure and play time, prestige, hopefully attached with that. We could be promoted, we would be advanced in the environment of our work. For those of us who have kids, a good life is about giving them opportunity, usually code for educational opportunities. Again, this is not necessarily the script that hopefully we are saying here at Ecclesia, but if you were just to walk around and ask people that question, you'd probably get some version of that answer. And what we see is that Jesus is taking those cultural scripts that we so easily intuit and imbibe and is confronting them with his very self. And for many of us, we need the words of Jesus to interrupt our easy accommodation to the scripts of success that are so readily available in our culture. Paul puts this into practice in Philippians chapter 3. For Paul, he was on a course in a very narrow lane, admittedly, of religious authority and expression, but he was highly esteemed in this world. Have you ever been a very big fish in a very little pond? This is Paul. He's like, I had it going. People saw me and they say, Paul, that guy, he's got it together. And this is what prompts him to write what he does in Philippians chapter 3. Again, not all of it will be immediately obvious to us why it's so remarked upon, but what Paul is saying is, I was going in one direction. I had things going for me very well. And then I met Jesus. Philippians chapter 3, verse 5. If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh or their resume or their good looks or all the other things our culture esteems, let me tell you, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, in regard to the law, a Pharisee as for zeal, persecuting the church as for righteousness, based on the law, faultless. Paul saying, Whatever you want to talk about, I had it going for me. But whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more? I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I've lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ. The righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith, I want to know Christ, yes. To know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. The words of Jesus will confront our acquiescence to our cultural norms. And again, in that confrontation, that's where the life happens, that's where things grow. But Jesus is challenging our assumptions and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not get too far down the road before we look at the first things that we have easily accommodated ourselves to. The other thing that I see is that we only love others and pen ultimate things rightly when we love God rightly. I don't know about you, but I could twist myself into all sorts of knots thinking about do I love God more than I love my children? Like that's a place where I could be like, I don't know. I'm not sure. And just kind of endlessly kind of ruminate and go around and round on that. For most of us, we will not have some moment where this is crystallized in our lives. If you read church history, you have the stories of people like Perpetua and Felicitas. And Perpetua had recently given birth to a child, and she was condemned by the Roman authorities to die because of her faith in Jesus. And if you read the account, it's a visceral account. Perpetua's father is there, and she's saying, Your child need, or the father is saying, your child needs you. You need to recant your faith in Jesus so that you can raise and nurse your child. He's gonna die without you. And it's this like really visceral scene. And Perpetua says, I cannot renounce my faith in Jesus. I have to go the way of the witness, the way of the martyr. And she gives her life, and it's this celebrated story within the martyrdom accounts of the earliest church. But for most of us, we're not gonna have this moment where it's this way or that way. And honestly, for me, I read that and I'm not always sure what to do with it. But for most of us, our lives will be constantly challenged by the presence of how we love those both nearest to us and those who are our neighbors and, as Jesus says, our enemies. Love is not a general sentiment, it is not a vague idea, it is a person, as John says. 1 John chapter 4 says it this way Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Goes on in verse 16. God is love. And those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Verse 19, we love because he first loved us. Love is reciprocating that which God has given to us infinitely. And so when Jesus says, You have to love me more than anything, he's actually talking about a logical impossibility for us to love others and things rightly without loving God rightly. It's an ordering of events. We receive God's love, and out of the wellspring of that love, we give of ourselves. But it's only there that we have anything to give. All right, let's go to another door. Jesus wrote the Bible, he doesn't need to obey. Now, did Jesus write the Bible? Not really, right? But it fit on the box. Now, we're when we were reading this passage, did you notice some contradictions with things that you probably supposed were in the Bible? Jesus says, I didn't come to bring peace. Does he say elsewhere? Otherwise? Yeah. What is the first word that the heavens say to the gathered humankind, the farmers and the shepherds, those that were seeing this announcement of the impending birth of the Savior? What is the first word the angels proclaim? Peace. Jesus says, Blessed are the peacemakers. Jesus is like, I didn't come to bring any of that, right? We see that He calls us to love our neighbors. He calls us to love our enemies. And yet here in this passage, he's making enemies out of our nearest neighbors. He's saying, not only am I going to challenge you to love your enemies, I'm going to make people in your own household your enemies. He says, I didn't come to bring peace, but I came to bring a sword. Think about the end of Jesus' life in the garden where Jesus is arrested. The temple guard comes to apprehend Jesus. What does Peter do? He pulls out a sword. He's like, Jesus, I was listening to you in Matthew 10 when you said, I came to bring a sword. I got your sword, man. We're good. I am strapped. And Peter pulls out his sword, and in some accounts, he uses it on a servant in the temple, Malchus. And what does Jesus do? He heals the severed ear of the servant and says, Peter, this is not the way. The scriptures tell us to honor our father and mothers. Malachi 6, Malachi 4 says that he will turn the hearts of fathers to their sons. And Jesus is saying, Here, you must choose me over them. So what is Jesus doing here? First, Jesus is acknowledging that his presence is divisive. I don't think he's using divisiveness as a strategy, but he's just saying, hey, the reality of what happens when I show up is there will be a need for discernment, there will be division. Jesus, throughout his life, is right-siding assumptions about power, about comfort, about what God looks like. In Jesus' own day, we see the way that he doesn't fit into the readily culturally available categories for a Messiah. The Pharisees, he's not scrupulous enough about the law. He's not serious enough about purifying the nation so that God might act on behalf of the nation. The Sadducees, they were the aristocracy who had accommodated themselves to Roman rule. They were at the top of the pyramid, they were the purveyors of the temple. And we see that Jesus marches right into the temple and turns over their tables. The zealots, the zealots were a people wanting revolution. They hated the Romans. With good reason, the Romans crucified tens of thousands of Jewish people throughout the course of a better part of 150 years. And they see this, they see the oppression they live under. Like these Romans, we can't wait till the tables are turned. And they saw in Jesus, they saw this power, they saw something of what God was up to, and they were like, finally. And I think this is really what drove Judas to betray Jesus. Jesus wasn't who Judas thought he was. And so Judas thought by betraying Jesus he would drive him to revolution. And when those soldiers that we just talked about showed up in the garden, Judas thought Jesus, now finally, he will fight. Finally, he'll be put in a corner, and he doesn't. And Judas is undone by this. But I think Judas was a zealot. And he had no category for why Jesus wouldn't rise up in revolution. There were this group of people that lived in isolation, the Essenes at Qumran. And they had just said, like, listen, we're going to wait for God to do what he's going to do, and when he does, we'll be ready. We're going to take ourselves out of the world. And Jesus is there throughout his whole ministry, smack dab in the middle of the world. For Roman culture itself, Jesus could have made easy accommodations. He could have just said, Hey, listen, Romans, Pilate, my thing is not going to impinge upon your thing. You have a wide tolerance for a lot of religions. I'm just kind of talking about another one. A little private faith, leave people alone. But to the claim that Caesar is Lord, Jesus readily acknowledged that in fact he is Lord. And when Pilate asks him what is truth, Jesus stares at him as the truth in a person. You see, Jesus could have easily allowed himself to be signed up for one project or the other, but this is not what he does. We see this in Jesus' day, we see this in our own day. Whether it be political parties, whether it be theological factions who are all trying to sign up Jesus as a mascot for their program, and Jesus will not be easily acquiesced to their claims. Leslie Nubigan says this. Because in the words of John chapter 3, when the light comes, people love darkness rather than the light. In our own day, the notion that there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved, Acts chapter 4, is narrow and exclusionary. Why can't Christians just let people be? Why do they have to impose their view of truth and the world onto others? And now again, even that imposition, if we read the New Testament well, is about invitation. It's about the power of God to heal, to mend. That's the invitation that we give. It's not that we're dominating or grabbing the levers of culture and saying, you will follow us, right? But even still, in that kind of posture towards the world, people are like, Well, just let people be. Let them live their own truth. Let them worship the way that they want to worship. The claim that Jesus is exclusive and Lord alone can be labeled colonial, it can be labeled arrogant, needlessly divisive. Why can't Christians just let people be? But the good news of Jesus, with its very specific, uncompromising story, transfigures every story. Jesus comes at a specific time and place in a specific frame. And he lives out a very specific life to invite the general, wide, whole, entire world to receive the good news. That God's face is turned towards them, that his posture is for them, that he has given himself on their behalf to pay for their sins, to redeem them from their slavery, and to heal their brokenness. Jesus is acknowledging that when he comes, there will be division. He's not saying this is my hope, my plan. But he's saying this is what will happen. This is how these things will go. All right. We got two doors left. Let's see what time we got. We could probably walk through both, and we'll see. See what the guy talking does here. Left behind, left behind. Okay, how many of you are familiar with the left behind books? How many of you, if you're honest, you would say the left behind books have formed a theology that you have just assumed is how the world will end? And you're kind of like, okay. Nobody wants to admit that. Alright, go on. Is Jesus endorsing war here? Now, there are some that would presuppose that at the end of all human history, there has to be this great climactic war that will take place specifically adjacent to Israel, but in the broader Middle East. And again, not that warfare in the Middle East could in any way be pertinent to our current situation in life. Religious liberty advocate groups in the U.S. military over the course of the past 10 days have received several complaints about commanding officers who have suggested not just the righteousness of their cause in bombing the nation of Iran, but in also suggesting that that bombing was carrying out God's will and was ushering in a battle that would dictate the terms of the end of the world. And this theology is not put forth in isolation, it is growing in popularity because of places like the Left Behind Books, because of the ubiquity with which those books have disseminated through our culture. Now, these working theories are all from a theological framework called dispensational theology. And in that outline, I gave you there's a Wikipedia article about dispensational theology that's helpful to kind of frame what it is. But in dispensational theology, essentially, if you're a good Christian, you'll be raptured before there are great trials and tribulations in the world. You'll be taken out of the world, and the world will be left to suffer and hopefully turn to God. It's a nice story, and again, this is where the left behind this whole series of books has taken this. The premise for the book is the end of the world sort of happens. All the Christians are taken away. Then there's people that are left behind, and they have to figure out what happened. And there's chaos and brokenness that ensues everywhere. Now, dispensational theology, one of the things that we apply when we're talking about the sort of fidelity of a theological system, is did the earliest Christians think this was a viable reading of the scriptures? Has this been something that has been handed down throughout the generations of people faithful to Jesus? Or, as with many things that have come up, especially during the advent of modernity, is this a relatively recent invention? Well, in the 1800s, 1820s, in Scotland, great things come from Scotland, there was a revival taking place. The Holy Spirit was moving. And during the course of that revival, a teenage girl had a vision of this kind of pre-tribulation rapture, that all the faithful Christians who were present in the world would be taken out of the world before this great time of travail, these great seasons of hardship would be undergone by the earth. Now, the surmisings and the visions of a young girl do not often make a worldwide theological movement. But there was a man there present at this revival named John Darby. And John Darby's listening to the vision of this young teenage girl, and he's like, this sounds exactly right. And John Darby is one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren movement, and he began to disseminate his own views on this idea of the rapture and this great battle that would take place before the end of the world. Now, again, Scotland, kind of isolated, right? Like a little bit off the beaten path. There's no reason that this would become a worldwide phenomenon except John Darby then traveled to America to promote his views. And there, while in America, he met a man named D.L. Moody.

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D.

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L. Moody was the founder of an institution called Moody Bible Institute. Any Moody grads in here? We've had a few throughout our day, yeah, yeah. There was a parallel movement that was happening in Dallas at a school now known as Dallas Theological Seminary, where these views that were previously kind of sporadic and far-flung began to be institutionalized. And novels began to be written. There was a Bible called the Schofield Reference Bible that was the first Bible to put headings at the top of different sections of scripture. Do you have headings in your Bible, your paper Bible?

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Right?

Modern Offense At Exclusive Claims

Debunking Dispensationalism And Rapture Lore

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And one of the headings that Schofield used was The Rapture. So if you're just reading the Bible and you have no sense of like where that came from, you're just like, well, there it is right there. Of course. Of course, it is in the Bible. You translate that into the extrapolation of the 20th century. You have uh Timothy LaHaye and Jenkins writing their left behind books. But the summary of all this kind of weird, almost conspiracy theory sounding is that nobody believed dispensational theology for the first 1800 years of the life of the church. Nobody believed that there was this grand battle that was to take place. There were certainly expressions like in the Crusades where you have these moments, these glimpses, but nobody believed this. It's a relatively modern, ingenious, but an innovation. And so when Jesus comes to say, I didn't come to bring peace, I came to bring a sword, we don't have to say that now, okay, now in Revelation 19, the slaughtered lamb, the lamb who was slain before the foundations of the earth, the lamb who was slain for the redemptions of all people, now becomes slaughterer, we see something quite different going on there. And so, to some degree, left behind can be. Left behind. Alright, let's do the last one. The sword. I didn't come to bring peace, I came to bring a sword. When we see throughout the scriptures, New Testament specifically, the image of a sword, we have places like Hebrews 6. Indeed, the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart, and before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and are laid bare to the eyes of the one whom we must render an account. When Jesus talks about the sword that he brings, he's not talking about the sword of a conqueror. He's not talking about the sword of a bloodthirsty God who needs to slaughter his enemies in order to show them how powerful he is, how right he is. And we need to rebuke that kind of image of God. And we, as the people of God, have to bear witness that we live in America. We are in the midst of this war. I don't always know the implications of this. I don't know how all the geopolitical implications are wrapped up in this, but I do know that it will cost dearly. It has cost the lives of 153 schoolgirls in Iran. It will cost the lives of servicemen in America and servicemen in Iran. We are the people of peace. And when we encounter this text, we don't have to easily accommodate ourselves to the narratives of our world. We have to say, Lord, what are you up to? And how do we be people and ambassadors of peace in the midst of this? But when I see this in Hebrews chapter 6, the kind of sword that Jesus comes to wield is not the sword of a conqueror, but the sword of a surgeon. Separating joint from marrow, laying bare so that things can be revealed and healed. This sounds like the hands of a healer. This sounds like the hands of a doctor. Throughout the New Testament, when we see the image of the sword, it is closely connected to the image of truth and the image of judgment. And again, we have our perceptions of judgment. We think we know that judgment is always bad, that judgment is always not in our favor, but that's not what we see in the New Testament. What we see instead is John chapter 3. Look at what John says about the judgment of God. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment. That the light has come into the world, and people love darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do do what is true come to the light so that it may be clearly seen, their deeds have been done in God. So John says, this is the diagnosis. When the light comes, when it shines in the darkness of our world, we revert to clinging and clutching to our darkness. But John chapter 1 tells us the light shines into the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And when Jesus brings the sword, yes, he brings judgment, but he's judging the lies and distortions and half-truths that so easily abide as truth in our world. He's dividing joint from marrow. He's dividing us and saying to us, look, yes, you have loved brokenness, you have loved darkness, you have dwelled in shame, but here I am to take that cancerous mass out of you and to say there is healing, there is wholeness, there is fullness. The sword that Jesus wields is not the sword of a conquering hero, it is the sword of a surgeon. And he comes to mend and to make all things new. This is what God is up to. And yes, that will often feel like judgment. That will often feel like bitter medicine. But when we take it, when we entrust ourselves to him through repentance and confession and entrusting ourselves, we find that we join with him in his mission to heal and repair all things. I want to invite the worship team forward. This is a tough passage. And for us as a people, we have to allow Jesus to confront us with his person. To stare these words that seem harsh or bristly or tense in the face, and to see the invitation that is implied within them. Traditionally, Lent is a season of confession, of purging, of allowing God to heal. And as we read God's words here today, as we hear his story, I just want to invite you to allow him first to start with you. To find that he is a careful and gentle and skilled surgeon. To acknowledge that he sees every part of you. That Hebrews 6 passage is so revealing, that all is laid bare, that can feel so exposing and so vulnerable. And yet, in the gaze and in the hands of our God, that is the safest place to be. And to see that when we see him for who he is, we can't help but love him more than we love all of these penultimate things or all of these secondary things. And we can't help but love others rightly. That he came to bring a sword that would slay the lies and distortions of shame and the accuser. And that ultimately these distortions and half-truths and the wiles of darkness will be put to death. We pray, calm, Holy Spirit. God, we proclaim your blood, Lord. It's interesting when the king, the rider on the white horse, rides into the battle scene at supposedly Megiddo or Armageddon in Revelation 19. The rider on the white horse is already stained with blood before the battle begins. And we see then that this is the blood of Revelation 4 and 5, the lamb that was slaughtered. The Passover lamb that invites the world to a new Exodus, to a new promised land, a new creation, Lord. Riding in with your sword to silence the lies of both systems and principalities and the lies that so easily take up dwelling in our hearts. So, Lord, it's those places that I want to speak to here this morning, God. God, would your sword like a scalpel break through this room? God, would you tell us the truth about who we are? Prized, beloved, worth giving of your son for. For God so loved the world, he gave his only son. And then when in the midst of the reception of that gift, Lord, there was a reciprocation of us unburdening ourselves of confession, of repentance, of giving ourselves over to you. So, God, we proclaim freedom here in this place, Lord Jesus. We ask for your spirit to blow through this room, God. Lord, that we would disentangle the ways that we have easily identified ourselves with our sins, with our brokenness, with the lies of the accuser, Lord. And that we would hear your word of truth resounding in this room, God. And that in view of who you are and what you've done, we couldn't help but take up our cross and follow you and go to the places of brokenness, go to the frontiers where you yourself are waiting. The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Lord Jesus, help us to join you where you are. Healing and mending the world. God, we ask these things in the name of the one who gave himself for us all. In the power of your blood, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Equosia, I'm going to invite you to stand and just in that posture of allowing the Lord to minister to you by the power of his living word, active. Let's respond in worship before we come to the table here this morning.